FIFTEEN

THE CUP

The Greeks and Romans have left us many stories of leaders and heroes as they faced death, and without exception these people were calm and dispassionate in their final hours. Think of Socrates, who was condemned to drink hemlock as a means of execution. The story of his demise has him surrounded by his followers, coolly tossing off ironic one-liners. By contrast, in Jewish literature such as in 1 and 2 Maccabees, you’ll see that when Jews wrote accounts of the deaths of major figures and heroes they did not make them cool and removed like the Greeks; rather, they are shown as hot-blooded and fearless, and they praise God as they are being sliced to pieces by their persecutors. Nothing in either of these traditions—indeed nothing in ancient literature—resembles the portrayal that Mark gives us of Jesus’s final hours as he faced his death. Mark records:

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took Peter, James, and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.” Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. “Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

(Mark 14:32–36)

Here Jesus, just before his execution, opens his heart to his disciples, opens his heart to God, opens his heart to the readers of Mark’s Gospel, and lays bare his struggles, his agony, his fears about facing death. He turns to God and pleads, “Is there a way this cup can be taken from me? Is there any way I can be let off the hook? Is there any way I can get out of this mission?” Up to this point Jesus has been completely in control. Nothing seems to have surprised him so far. Jesus always knows what’s going on: Nothing seems to jar him. But all of a sudden we read that “he began to be deeply distressed.” The Greek word translated “deeply distressed” actually means “astonished.” Think back on the Gospel of Mark up to this point. Jesus has been totally unflappable. But here, suddenly, something he sees, something he realizes, something he experiences, stuns the eternal Son of God.

Jesus is also, according to the text, “troubled.” The Greek verb here means “to be overcome with horror.” Imagine you’re walking down a street, you turn a corner, and there in front of you is someone you love, mutilated in a terrible car accident. What do you feel? Nausea. Your horror is like a physical cloud rising up to choke you. That emotion is what Jesus is experiencing. He says so: “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”

Jesus’s struggle is not only unique in ancient accounts of the death of prominent figures, but it is also almost unique in church history. That’s strange, isn’t it? We have many true accounts of Christian men and women being killed for their faith—thrown to wild animals, cut to pieces, burned at the stake. It appears that many of them faced their deaths more calmly than Jesus did. Take Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, an early Christian leader. Near the end of his life, he was taken before a magistrate and told that he would be burned at the stake. The magistrate said, in effect, “I will give you one more chance: You can reject Christianity, you can recant, and avoid execution.” Some witnesses wrote down Polycarp’s reply: “The fire you threaten burns but an hour and is quenched after a little. . . . You do not know the fire of the coming judgment. . . . But why do you delay? Come, do what you will.”61

Or take Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, who were burned at the stake for their faith in Oxford, England, in 1555. They were tied side by side, and when the fire was lit at their feet, Latimer said: “Be of good comfort Master Ridley, and play the man: we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”62

Why is it that many of Jesus’s followers have died “better” than Jesus? Of course, he must have been facing something that Polycarp, Ridley, and Latimer were not facing, something that none of the other martyrs were facing.

Something happened in the garden—Jesus saw, felt, sensed something—and it shocked the unshockable Son of God. What was it? He was facing something beyond physical torment, even beyond physical death—something so much worse that these were like flea bites by comparison. He was smothered by a mere whiff of what he would go through on the cross. Didn’t he know he was going to die? Yes, but we’re not talking about information here. Of course he knew that; he had told the disciples so repeatedly. But now he is beginning to taste what he will experience on the cross, and it goes far beyond physical torture and death. What is this terrible thing? It’s at the very heart of Jesus’s prayer here. He says, “Take this cup from me.”

Remember that in the Hebrew Scriptures, “the cup” is a metaphor for the wrath of God on human evil. It’s an image of divine justice poured out on injustice. For example, in Ezekiel 23:32–34, we read, “You will drink . . . a cup large and deep; . . . the cup of ruin and desolation, . . . and tear your breasts.” Similarly, in Isaiah 51:22, God speaks of “the cup that made you stagger; . . . the goblet of my wrath.” All his life, because of Jesus’s eternal dance with his Father and the Spirit, whenever he turned to the Father, the Spirit flooded him with love. What happened visibly and audibly at Jesus’s baptism and at his transfiguration happened invisibly, inaudibly, every time he prayed. But in the garden of Gethsemane, he turns to the Father and all he can see before him is wrath, the abyss, the chasm, the nothingness of the cup. God is the source of all love, all life, all light, all coherence. Therefore exclusion from God is exclusion from the source of all light, all love, all coherence. Jesus began to experience the spiritual, cosmic, infinite disintegration that would happen when he became separated from his Father on the cross. Jesus began to experience merely a foretaste of that, and he staggered.

The Wrath of Love

Here you may say, “I don’t like the idea of the wrath of God. I want a God of love.”

The problem is that if you want a loving God, you have to have an angry God. Please think about it. Loving people can get angry, not in spite of their love but because of it. In fact, the more closely and deeply you love people in your life, the angrier you can get. Have you noticed that? When you see people who are harmed or abused, you get mad. If you see people abusing themselves, you get mad at them, out of love. Your senses of love and justice are activated together, not in opposition to each other. If you see people destroying themselves or destroying other people and you don’t get mad, it’s because you don’t care. You’re too absorbed in yourself, too cynical, too hard. The more loving you are, the more ferociously angry you will be at whatever harms your beloved. And the greater the harm, the more resolute your opposition will be.

When we think of God’s wrath, we usually think of God’s justice, and that is right. Those who care about justice get angry when they see justice being trampled upon, and we should expect a perfectly just God to do the same. But we don’t ponder how much his anger is also a function of his love and goodness. The Bible tells us that God loves everything he has made. That’s one of the reasons he’s angry at what’s going on in his creation; he is angry at anything or anyone that is destroying the people and world he loves. His capacity for love is so much greater than ours—and the cumulative extent of evil in the world is so vast—that the word wrath doesn’t really do justice to how God rightly feels when he looks at the world. So it makes no sense to say, “I don’t want a wrathful God, I want a loving God.” If God is loving and good, he must be angry at evil—angry enough to do something about it.

Consider this also: If you don’t believe in a God of wrath, you have no idea of your value. Here’s what I mean. A god without wrath has no need to go to the cross and suffer incredible agony and die in order to save you. Picture on the left a god who pays nothing in order to love you, and picture on the right the God of the Bible, who, because he’s angry at evil, must go to the cross, absorb the debt, pay the ransom, and suffer immense torment. How do you know how much the “free love” god loves you or how valuable you are to him? Well, his love is just a concept. You don’t know at all. This god pays no price in order to love you. How valuable are you to the God of the Bible? Valuable enough that he would go to these depths for you.

A correspondence between C. S. Lewis and a man named Malcolm has been collected in a book called Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. In one letter Malcolm said that he was uncomfortable with the idea that God gets angry. He found it more helpful to think of God’s power and justice like a live electrical wire. He said, “The live wire doesn’t feel angry with us, but if we blunder against it we get a shock.” Lewis replied: “My dear Malcolm: What do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? You have shut us up all in despair, for the angry can forgive, but electricity can’t. . . . Turn God’s wrath into mere enlightened disapproval and you turn his love into mere humanitarianism. The ‘consuming fire’ and the ‘perfect beauty’ both vanish. We have, instead, a judicious headmistress or a conscientious magistrate. It comes of being high-minded. . . . Liberalizing and civilizing analogies can only lead us astray.”63 Your conception of God’s love—and of your value in his sight—will only be as big as your understanding of his wrath.

The Obedience of Love

When the circumstances of life are giving you the desires of your heart, you’re content. Suffering happens, we might say, when there’s a gap between the desires of your heart and the circumstances of your life, and the bigger the gap, the greater the suffering. What do you do when that gap gets too wide? One response is to change the circumstances—to get off the path that’s taking you into suffering. Of course, sometimes this is the right response; our present circumstances may really have to change. There may be a very unhealthy relationship that needs to be ended or put on a different course, or a medical condition that needs to be treated aggressively. We should not accept all circumstances with passive fatalism.

Many people have a pattern, however, of dealing with almost any suffering by getting out of town, breaking promises, pulling out of relationships. They invariably try to go someplace where their desires are satisfied, because they consider their desires all-important, which makes their circumstances negotiable. They are willing to do practically anything to avoid suffering. The problem is that life circumstances rarely oblige. Try that new set of circumstances and in six months you’ll need another set.

The Eightfold Path of Buddhism doesn’t advocate that response, and neither did the ancient Stoics; they say that always avoiding suffering has no virtue or integrity at all. To say, “When there’s a gap between your desires and your circumstances, change the circumstances” violates the teachings of these and other currents of religious thought. Instead, they say, what you do need to do is suppress your desires. Get on top of them and become cool, detached, and dispassionate. Then you can keep your promises and stay on the path. The circumstances are fated, while the desires are just an illusion. That’s the reason Socrates wasn’t panicking at the end of his life. He didn’t care to keep on living. He had succeeded in detaching himself.

Of course, there are times when we need to suppress our desires, because they’re so often destructive. But to eliminate all desire is to eliminate our ability to love; and God made us to love.

When you look at Jesus here in the Garden of Gethsemane, he appears to be taking the first approach. He’s certainly not taking the way of detachment; he’s pouring his heart out. He’s undone. And he’s honestly and desperately asking God to change the circumstances, praying “that if possible the hour might pass from him.” He cries out, “Abba, Father . . . everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me.” He’s contending with the Father, asking him for a way out, asking for another way to rescue us without having to go personally under the flaming sword.

But look closely: He’s actually not taking his circumstances into his own hands. In the end, he’s obeying—relinquishing control over his circumstances and submitting his desires to the will of the Father. He says to God, “Yet not what I will, but what you will.” He is wrestling but obeying in love.

It would still be possible, at this eleventh hour, for Jesus to abort his mission and leave us to perish. But he doesn’t consider that as an option. He’s begging the Father to carry out the mission some other way, but he doesn’t ask him to abandon it altogether. Why? Because as horrible as the cup is, he knows that his immediate desire (to be spared) must bow before his ultimate one (to spare us).

Often what seem to be our deepest desires are really just our loudest desires. Do you know how, especially when you are in intense pain or great temptation, you just can’t think straight? You turn on the people who love you. You make shockingly self-destructive decisions. You say and do things that you know are not only hurtful but actually undermine the people and values you love most.

But at one of the supreme moments of personal pain in the history of the world, Jesus doesn’t do that. He says, “Yet not what I will, but what you will.” He’s not even saying to God, “I think you’re wrong, but I’m going to let you win this one.” No; he’s saying, “I trust you no matter what I’m feeling right now. I know that your desires are ultimately my desires. Do what we both know must be done.”

And in so doing Jesus is absolutely obedient to the will of God. Yet not what I will, but what you will. Jesus is subordinating his loudest desires to his deepest desires by putting them in the Father’s hands. As if to say, “If the circumstances of life do not satisfy the present desires of my heart, I’m not going to suppress those desires, but I’m not going to surrender to them, either. I know that they will only be satisfied, eventually, in the Father. I will trust and obey him, put myself in his hands, and go forward.”

Jesus doesn’t deny his emotions, and he doesn’t avoid the suffering. He loves into the suffering. In the midst of his suffering, he obeys for the love of the Father—and for the love of us.

And when you see that, instead of perpetually denying your desires or changing your circumstances, you’ll be able to trust the Father in your suffering. You will be able to trust that because Jesus took the cup, your deepest desires and your actual circumstances are going to keep converging until they unite forever on the day of the eternal feast.

In a great sermon, “Christ’s Agony,” Jonathan Edwards put it like this:

[In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus] had then a near view of that furnace of wrath, into which he was to be cast; he was brought to the mouth of the furnace that he might look into it, and stand and view its raging flames, and see the glowings of its heat, that he might know where he was going and what he was about to suffer. . . . There are two things that render Christ’s love wonderful: 1. That he should be willing to endure sufferings that were so great; and 2. That he should be willing to endure them to make atonement for wickedness that was so great. But in order to its being properly said, Christ of his own act and choice endured sufferings that were so great . . . [it was] necessary that he should have an extraordinary sense how great these sufferings were to be, before he endured them. This was given in his agony.64

That love—whose obedience is wide and long and high and deep enough to dissolve a mountain of rightful wrath—is the love you’ve been looking for all your life. No family love, no friend love, no mother love, no spousal love, no romantic love—nothing could possibly satisfy you like that. All those other kinds of loves will let you down; this one never will.