Jaw-dropping Jewels about Jesus
Rarely does Jesus, God the Son, do exactly what we expect of Him. It seems odd that He so frequently surprises us, given that He never changes. Hebrews 13:8 makes this absolute statement: “Jesus the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” Still, though He is blessedly consistent in His goodness, Jesus does unforeseen things. Even when He does what is expected, He does not always do it in the way that we anticipate. Let us join with Jesus on a jaw-dropping journey. (I will be using this opening paragraph for each of the brief messages in this series. The following material will change daily.)
The intense prayers of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane are in blessed contrast to the lethargy of His disciples: “And He cometh, and findeth them sleeping, and saith unto Peter, ‘Simon, sleepest thou? Couldest not thou watch one hour? Watch ye and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. The spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak’” (Mark 14:37-38). Jesus speaks directly to Peter, who was to become a key leader in the early Church, but the others were sleeping, too, and are included in Jesus’ questions. We should not read into this passage that Jesus needed the prayers of others: He did not need them, did not receive them, but still persevered perfectly to complete His salvific mission. No, it was the disciples who needed to be praying. First, by sleeping, they were missing a unique opportunity to pray for Jesus, an opportunity that they would never have again (and one that we will never have). Second, they needed to be praying for themselves. They wanted to do the right thing (“the spirit truly is ready”), but they were not preparing to do that right thing (“the flesh is weak”). I would like to think that if I had been in the Garden I would have stayed awake and prayed, but my personal Puritan sense of doom tells me that I would have failed also – and probably would have been the first to nod off. We all must heed the words of Ephesians 5:14: “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”