The cup - Rev Allister Lane
READING: MATTHEW 26-36-46
Sermon on Good Friday
Jesus’ ministry starts with temptation, and here at the end is temptation.
We shouldn’t underestimate the desperation Jesus experiences here in the garden. Jesus
began to be grieved and agitated
The Gospel writers don’t often try to describe Jesus’ emotions. Here they tell us that Jesus was facing terrors he had up till then not known.
What caused his grief and agitation? It is ‘the cup’.
he threw himself on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me’ (v39)
What ‘cup’ is this?
It’s not the cup he had shared in the company of his disciples earlier that evening in the Last Supper. It’s the cup the prophets spoke of – the cup of God’s wrath.
you will drink the cup of his fury and you will stagger (Isaiah 54)
‘The cup’ represents death.
Jesus knew he would die. He alludes to it many times (much to the denial of the disciples). But the cup before him signals a certain KIND of death... the wrath and judgement of God. The cup represents divine justice that evil deserves.
God’s judgment is against all evil that (impudently) interrupts our connection with our Creator; the communion we were created to enjoy. Like our planet needs the sun.
To enjoy the full and uninterrupted company of God, evil must be judged for what it is and removed.
We might recoil from the idea of judgement. We will deliberately reject characterising God as ‘judgemental’ (when this has been misrepresented and mis-used). But can we reject the importance of ‘divine judgment’ completely? Aren’t there human experiences we want to be judged and excluded?
War
Hunger
Violence
Homelessness
Racism
Exploitation
Child Abuse
I find it hard to imagine enjoying the fullness of all God promises with any of those experiences not rightly dealt with.
So why does the cup of wrath and judgement terrify Jesus?
Jesus comes to pray to his Father, as he so often did. And on this night in the Garden, he finds the way to the Father is blocked.NT Wright says:
He was a man, as we might say, in melt-down mode. He had looked into the darkness and seen the grinning faces of all the demons in the world looking back at him.
In his Commentary on Mark, Bill Lane (no relation!) says:
the dreadful sorrow and anxiety out of which the prayer for the passing of the cup springs is…not a shrinking before the prospect of physical suffering, it’s rather horror for the one who lived wholly for the father, and came to be with the Father before an interlude prior to his betrayal – and Hell (rather than Heaven) opened before him to his spiritual consciousness.
On the cross Jesus cries out
my God my God why have you forsaken me?
But the experience of separation from the Father starts here in the garden. The interrupting barricade of sin that violates God’s intention for divine human relationship is here being experienced by Jesus who has (for all eternity) experienced direct divine relationship with the Father.
The separation is not because God is not loving, it’s because God loves us so much and is angry at the sin that blocks the relationship God desires.
If this is how Jesus felt at the foretaste of this separation, what must it have ACTUALLY felt like at that hour on the cross? Jesus’ experience of the anticipated separation from God makes his voluntary act of sacrificial love for us on the cross all the more radical.
Jesus makes it clear in John’s Gospel:
I lay my life down for my sheep; no one takes it away from me (John 10)
He sees the cup before him, faces the temptation to walk away, but voluntarily chooses to do God’s will, and fulfil his mission.
Do you see how the temptation Jesus resists to walk away, further reveals the intense love he chooses to share with us? And (as Timothy Keller says) he swallows the spiritual nuclear warhead for those who had fallen asleep at the moment of his greatest temptation.
They of course represent... us.
We can imagine God the Father says:
Here is the cup of judgement on sin, that spells separation.
And here are the ones who need saving.
Either they perish or you perish.
Do you love them enough to do this?
We can’t copy Jesus, but our hearts can be changed - when we look upon the love he proves for us. This is why we come back again to the Easter story, to take it in again; the love that is shown for us, the extent that Jesus chooses to suffer for our rescue.
God made him who knew no sin to become sin
Jesus takes what is ours (sinfulness and separation) and gives to us what is his (righteousness).
So when God looks at us God sees glorious goodness of his own Son. This is what satisfies our longings. We try to be successful (by working hard in our job), and try to be liked (by improving our looks to have someone else notice us), and even try to be good (by living moral lives).
THIS is what we need! God loves us, and in God we can rest in the love of Jesus.
And when we encounter our own suffering, isolation and death – when we come to our own ‘Gethsemane’ – we will find the Lord has gone before us, he has cleared the way to the fullness of the love of God.
So let us fix our eyes on Jesus and on his love shown on wood and nails., as he disqualifies evil and transforms us by grace.
Amen.