Baptists tend to name their churches geographically.
So we are Belle Vue Baptist Church because we happen to be located on Belle Vue Avenue. There are a few Baptist churches named after people. I know of a Thomas Helwys Baptist Church in Nottingham, named after one of the co-founders of the Baptist movement and there is a Carey Baptist Church, named after William Carey, the first BMS missionary, who went to India.
I know of a church in Cardiff called ‘Calvary Baptist Church,’ named after the placed where Jesus was crucified. There are others apparently named Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and more. I wonder why they chose that name? I wonder how that name shapes the church?
I share all this, because earlier this week I came across, as you do when you use google, various churches in America called Gethsemane Episcopal Church.’ Anglicans usually tend to go for names of Saints – St. Mary, St. Martin, St. John’s.
I wonder what it means to be named Gethsemane? I wonder what it might mean we renamed ourselves ‘Gethsemane Baptist Church’?
Often our focus on Maundy Thursday is on the Last Supper, but tonight I want to look at what happened later that night, when Jesus and his disciples go the Garden of Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives, just east of Jerusalem, to pray. This was normal. The gospel of Luke says that while Jesus was in Jerusalem, at the end of every day, he would leave the city and go to the Mount of Olives.
Jesus comes to pray. There is perhaps an extra heaviness about tonight. The meal they have just shared will have heightened the mood. Most of the disciples sit down, and Jesus goes further into Gethsemane with his three closest disciples – Peter, James and John. He asks them to stay awake and pray. He himself goes even deeper into the garden and there he prays. As he prays, we get to eavesdrop onto his conversation with the one he calls ‘Father.’
At no point until now has Jesus shrunk from his mission.
In the wilderness, tempted by Satan, he prevails.
On the road to Caesarea Philippi challenged by Peter to avoid death, he says, ‘Get behind me Satan!’
He resolutely journeys towards Jerusalem.
He says three times on the way that he will suffer and die at the hands of the chief priests and elders.
On arrival he enters the city with a declaration of his messiahship. In the temple, he makes no attempt to temper his words or message.
At the Passover meal, he predicts he will be betrayed,
he predicts he will be abandoned.
He understands that his mission will end in death, and makes no bid to avoid it.
But here in Gethsemane, as the darkness creeps in and the shadows lengthens, Jesus is overwhelmed with grief, with sorrow, with distress, with anguish.
Jesus does not go skipping to the cross. There is no joy or serenity in this moment. Jesus doesn’t go all zen, into a state of contemplative detachment. He appears to succumbs to human terror.
There are two ways we might read what is happening here.
We perhaps read his praying in Gethsemane as Jesus’ most human moment in all the gospels. Like any person, Jesus finally appears to fear death, at least, the kind of death he knows he will probably face. He is overwhelmed by what is to come. We think to ourselves, Jesus is just like us.
The second way to read Jesus’ praying in Gethsemane, is not as the fear of his death, but as Jesus at war with the forces of evil.* Here is the beginning of his passion. These are the first rounds of the key battle for the salvation of the world. What we will read as Jesus’ trial before the Jewish and Roman authorities, seen in the high priest Caiaphas and the governor Pontius Pilate, is also Jesus’ trial before the Powers of darkness. Here in the garden they seek to tempt him once again to choose a different path. Jesus battles to accept the will of God. His words ‘not my will, but yours be done’ are joined by his rising from the ground like a boxer rising from the mat.
Gethsemane mirrors in some ways the temptations in the wilderness that followed Jesus’ baptism at the beginning of his mission. In the wilderness Satan tempted Jesus with the option of leading a crusade – the messianic king at the front of an army overcoming all opponents. Here in Gethsemane, the temptation perhaps again is the same.
What does it mean to be present at Gethsemane? What might it mean to be a community that joins Jesus in Gethsemane? It is not be like the disciples, those who should be in Jesus’ corner, are founding wanting, they are found asleep, inert to the struggle of Jesus, inert to deepening darkness. To be a Gethsemane church is to stay awake in the darkness of history, and to refuse to compromise the way of the cross. It is to pray with Jesus, ‘not what I want, but what you want,’ ready to accept what ever that means. Ched Myers writes that the ‘world is Gethsemane’** and so perhaps to take Gethsemane as our name is to acknowledge – to be alert to, to be awake to – the horror and the hope.
To be a Gethsemane people is to resist the temptation that we can sleep through life.
To be a Gethsemane people is to be awake to the horrors of the world, and to join Jesus in contending for the world’s salvation.
To be a Gethsemane people is to be awake with hope that the darkness can and is and will be overcome, to join Jesus in taking up our cross, because the cross is the hope of the world.
To be a Gethsemane people is face that there is a battle going on out there in the world, and in here, in the heart of every person.
It is a battle for the will of God – every time we pray ‘your kingdom come, your will be done’ we are praying with Jesus in Gethsemane.
To be a Gethsemane people is to follow Jesus through the shadows of betrayal, denial, separation, anguish, treachery, hypocrisy, humiliation to the cross.
We know the phrase ‘a matter of life and death’, a Gethsemane people, a Good Friday people, an Easter people, come to see that the gospel is always a ‘matter of death and then life.’
Let us keep awake with Jesus. Amen.
* Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion (Eerdmans, 2015)
** Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Orbis, 1988)
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