God In The Garden Of Man

[dave c]

HEALING SHELTER MINISTRIES #131aaj Re-Written 20JUN09

Save Me Today—Part Sixty Two: God In The Garden Of Man

by rev dave c

On the night before He was to be crucified Jesus led His three closest disciples to a small garden to seek His Father: Matthew 26:36 Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, "Sit here while I go over there and pray." 37 He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. 38 Then he said to them, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me." 39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." 40 Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. "Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?" he asked Peter. 41 "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak." 42 He went away a second time and prayed, "My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done." 43 When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. 44 So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing (NIV).

When read with a heart that is sympathetic to what the perfect and sinless Son of Man knew was to be the horror of the coming hours, and as we read the above verses with the eyes of our understanding wide open, we are privy to an amazing, if brief, glimpse into the very real humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. While it was to be tested by the devil for 40 days that Christ was led into the wilderness after His baptism, the battle He waged in the Garden of Gethsemane was with His temporal flesh. In a very different garden countless years before, it was Eve who failed her time of testing by the serpent, and it was Adam who, through willful disobedience, lost the battle with his flesh.

"My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me." What an incredible confession from the Lord of the Universe, and what an incredible invitation to His inner circle of friends. The rest of these passages have greater meaning if we understand that when Jesus refers to His “soul being overwhelmed” He is specifically referring to His sentient flesh; that is, the realm of His body-senses-mind (as especially suggested by the phrase, “...to the point of death”). We are then told that Jesus went some distance from His companions and asked His Father if there was some other way to complete the work of His first advent. That said, He immediately confessed His decision of commitment to the surrender of His will to that of the Father—not just once or twice, but three times. That is significant.

Unfortunately, the NIV translates Matthew 23:41 as, “The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.” While the Greek word for “body” is soma (#4983), the word used here is sarx (#4561), meaning flesh, or fleshly; i.e., (as related to this instance) symbolically pertaining to human nature with its passions and frailties. This mistranslation changes the meaning in a not so subtle fashion and it is one more example of how contemporary versions of the Bible can shift what Scripture actually says in order to conform, reflect, and to propagate the western model of “the dichotomous self” both within and without the Church. The concept that humanity is comprised of two parts springs from the wells of classical dualism and pagan religion, and it began to invade the Christian Church during the 2nd Century through the Gnostic mystery cults. With the work of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century, the door was established that directly opened into the 14th Century Italian Renaissance as a reawakening of Greek art and thought (with man as the focus; i.e., Humanism); and it led spiritually to the unholy marriage of the Western Church with Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian philosophies (as foundational to the the Age of Enlightenment and the rejection of things spiritual from the 18th Century to the present).

If memory serves me correctly, it was no less a figure than Irenaeus of Lyons (as the great champion of orthodox Christianity during the last half of the Second Century) who regarded Christ’s statement, “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”, as one of the strongest Biblical evidences that humanity is trichotomous (three-part). He reasoned that if the spirit of a man (as the God source for ethics, morality, etc.) was at one extreme and his flesh (the worldly body with its lusts and desires) was at the other, then there must be something between them to arbitrate and make decisions. He concluded that this is the realm of the rational mind—and so, man is not a soul contained within a body, rather we are a coadunation of spirit/mind/body.

I would offer that the first occasion of Christ’s prayer to “remove the cup...but the Father’s will be done”, was the commitment of the Lord’s spirit, the second prayer was the submission of His mind to the humiliation before Him, and the third prayer was the final surrender of His flesh to the excruciating experience to be faced throughout the day to follow. Regarding the passionate intensity of those prayers we read in Luke 22:41-44: He [Jesus] withdrew about a stone's throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground (NIV). May we embrace the exhortation of the Writer of Hebrews: ...let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood (He 12:1-4; NIV). Amen.