“Then,
after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.” Some translations
say a psalm instead of a hymn. They do this because what is called the ‘Great
Hallel’ is sung at the Passover Seder and includes Psalm 136. The refrain from
this psalm comes from the prophet Hosea who has the Lord saying “I will betroth
you to me forever. Yes, I will betroth you to me. In righteousness and justice.
In loving kindness and mercy. And his mercy endures forever.” The refrain is
sung throughout the psalm praising God for all his mighty deeds of deliverance.
This sets the tone, the atmosphere for what follows. “Then after singing a hymn,
they went out to the Mount of Olives.” The Mount of Olives – Gethsemane, the
place where Jesus’ passion begins. The passion that was just anticipated
ritually in the words and gestures of Jesus at the supper with his disciples.
Gethsemane
is the place, the entryway into a whole new dimension to the meaning of the
word ‘God’. Who Jesus is and what he begins to undergo in Gethsemane,
demolishes all human ideas and concepts of God. Whatever ideas of God we have
must now pass through the lens of what Jesus now undergoes. Gethsemane stands
at the heart of the Christian picture of who God is and who we are meant to be
as images of God; as bearers of God’s likeness. And at the heart of Gethsemane
stands the most unforgettable, poignant prayer ever uttered. A prayer that
demonstrates what love really means; the loving exchange between Father and
Son: “Abba, father, you have the power to do all things. Take this cup away
from me. But let it be as you would have it, not as I.” Let’s be clear here.
This is not about a conflict of wills. It is about love; self-donating,
self-surrendering love. This is the full, honest interchange of love in which
the eternal Word of God opens his human heart; lays before the Father the true
condition of his perfectly God-reflecting humanity; a humanity that is now
caught up in the work of lovingly bearing all the world’s pain and sorrow. God’s
human heart is laid bare! Wide open for all to see. No human being, in whatever
condition they find themselves in, can now ever say to God: “You don’t know
what it’s like.” What Jesus’ prayer manifests in requesting the cup of
suffering to pass him by is the natural human reaction to all the dark forces
of corruption and death. It shows that as Jesus went to the cross, he was not
doing it out of a distorted death-wish or a kind of crazy suicide mission. He
continued to resist death with every fiber of his being. His very prayer to be
rescued from it displays not a resistance to the Father’s will, but a
resistance to all the forces of evil which result in death.
And
so, I have a question for all of us - How big is your god? Is your god big enough to come and take on
all the forces of evil and death by dying under their weight and power? There’s
a hymn by David Mansell with a verse that begins with ‘Jesus is Lord! Yet from
his throne eternal, in flesh he came to die in shame on Calvary’s tree.’ I want
to take exception to the word ‘yet’ in this verse. It should be ‘so’. Jesus is
Lord, and so, and therefore, he came into the world, came to his own people,
came to the place of fear and horror and shame and evil and darkness and death.
He came out of love, love for the Father, love for the world, love for you and
me, brothers and sisters. This is what Mark’s Gethsemane account is telling us.
This is what his whole gospel has been telling us. But it’s all here, in
Gethsemane, in a nutshell.
The
love exchange between Father and Son reaches out to this day. Today. The today
of your life and my life. There are three insertions in today’s Eucharistic
prayer which are unique to Holy Thursday and spell out what we are doing here
today. The most sacred day on which our
Lord Jesus Christ was handed over for our sake./the day on which he handed over
the mysteries of his Body and Blood./On the day before he was to suffer for our
salvation and the salvation of all, That is today, he took bread in his holy
and venerable hands. When Jesus told his disciples to “do this in
remembrance of me”, he meant his actions to be repeatable. And so, it has been
throughout the centuries since then. Repeatable and yet always unique. To say
that Jesus entrusted this Supper to the Church “as a banquet of his love”,
which our opening prayer said, reveals the on-going, perennial nearness of that
love as a real presence. And so, every celebration of the Eucharist is
pristine. It is never a repeat performance but a re-presentation of the
premiere. This makes what we do here to be both a tremendous consolation and at
the same time an on-going challenge in the today of our own lives.
What’s
at stake here in what we are doing is not the repetition of a pious ritual. It
is the totality of Christ’s life and death given to us as food to be consumed
at this altar table. And given to us as an example to be imitated, as he tells
us to “Go and do likewise.” The love with which Jesus loves his Father is the
same love with which he loves us. And it is the same love with which we are
called to love one another. The great Amen of the Eucharistic liturgy is where
we publicly profess our identity as other Christs, even as Christ’s presence
in the Eucharist makes us so.
Let
Saint Augustine have the last word. “If, therefore, you want to understand the
body of Christ, listen to the apostle telling the faithful, ‘but you are the
body of Christ and its members.’ So if you are the body of Christ and its
members, it is your own mystery that has been placed on the Lord’s table; what
you are receiving is your own mystery. You say Amen to what you are. You hear ‘the body of Christ,’ and you reply,
‘Amen!’ Be a member of the body of Christ in order to make that Amen true.”
The
mystery of faith. The mystery of love. “Love one another as I have loved you.”