In the Garden

When I was in high school, I had the opportunity to visit the Holy Land with my family. We were fortunate to spend time in Jerusalem, at the Sea of Galilee, the Mount of Olives, and many other places described in scripture. All in all, we spent nearly two weeks traipsing around various biblical sites. For a high schooler just starting to think seriously about faith, it was an incredibly formative experience. 

One of the things that quickly became clear was that even though it is a spiritually charged experience to visit the sites of Jesus’s life, it’s often difficult to find any quiet time for prayer there since these sites are often crawling with tourists. But for whatever reason, the day that we visited the Garden of Gethsemane was different. The atmosphere was quiet, almost hushed, as people moved around, thinking, praying, meditating. It was deeply contemplative to walk between the ancient olive trees, some of which have given shade in that garden for nearly a thousand years. 

I don’t remember how long we spent there, but I remember how it felt. To imagine Jesus sitting nearby in prayer before his arrest was utterly overwhelming. Though the gospels only describe one of Jesus’s visits to Gethsemane on the night before what we now call Good Friday, Luke implies that Jesus often visited that area. I imagined him there on happier days, laughing with his friends, relaxing, picnicking. This place of peace, I thought, had become, for Jesus, a place of most grievous fear and pain. 

The trees in the Garden of Gethsemane are cracked and gnarled; they seem to reflect the stress that Jesus experienced in those moments before his arrest. Mark writes that in Gethsemane Jesus began to be ‘distressed and agitated,’ saying that his ‘soul is deeply grieved.’ Luke describes his anguish, as well as his prayer ‘that this cup might pass from me.’ Matthew says that his ‘soul was overwhelmed with sorrow, to the point of death.’ On that last night before his arrest and torture, would Jesus have noticed those trees? The bent and aged branches in that garden produce olives, which in turn are crushed to produce oil. The parallelism is horrifying and yet clear. On the day we call Good Friday, Jesus was crushed, and our faith teaches us that, impossibly, out of his violent death came new and abundant life. 

What do we make of this brutal, paradoxical teaching? In his beautiful, haunting book Cross Shattered Christ, Stanley Hauerwas emphasizes the mystery of Good Friday. If, as our faith teaches, Jesus is God, then his death upsets all of our neat assumptions about what is occurring on the cross. Jesus’s death draws humanity “into the life of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To be so made part of God’s love strips us of all our presumed certainties.” Jesus’s death turns the world upside down and inside out; in Jesus, God dies in torment alongside the godforsaken of the world. Suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds. 

Jesus’s story does not provide trite glorification of state violence, in which we can say that good ultimately comes out of evil. Nor does it glorify suffering for its own sake. Good Friday tells us something much richer and deeper; it is on Good Friday that we see God standing in eternal solidarity with the poor and suffering of the world. On Good Friday, the central mystery of our faith emerges, which is that in his death Jesus is reconciling the whole world to God. The scandal of the cross is that God’s glory is revealed not in power, but in weakness. 

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Have you ever experienced a space that once brought comfort becoming a place of grief or transformation?