The Prayer at the Center

THIS CHAPTER MAKES ONE claim, and the whole book leans on it. In the garden called Gethsemane, Jesus asked His Father to let the cup pass from Him. The cup did not pass, and Scripture says plainly that He was heard. Hold those two facts together and you have the truth this chapter exists to hand you: when God refuses a request, He has not rejected the one who asked. I intend to spend these pages earning that sentence, because I know what it costs to believe it at a bedside.

Start in the garden itself. Gethsemane means oil press, and the night makes sure we do not miss the name. It lay on the lower slope of the Mount of Olives, across a narrow valley from the city wall, a working grove where olives were crushed under stone until they gave up the oil hidden inside them. Jesus went there after the Passover supper because He always went there; John tells us Judas knew where to bring the soldiers because the place was a habit of His. It was night, it was spring, and the Passover moon hung full over the valley. Eight disciples sat down near the entrance. Three went farther in with Him and fell asleep. He went farther still, alone.

Matthew records what happened next in one sentence I have never been able to read quickly. "He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, `O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will'" (Matthew 26:39 NKJV). Look at it before familiarity softens it. The Son of God asked for something. He asked with His face in the dirt, the posture of a man past all performance. He asked that the cup might pass. The cup did not pass. Within the hour the torches were coming through the trees, and by nine the next morning the nails were in.

Judged by visible results, that prayer failed. Here is the purest prayer ever prayed, offered by the only sinless man, in the deepest anguish, at the most important hour in the history of the world, and the thing asked for was withheld. Every excuse we reach for when a prayer goes ungranted burns away in this garden. There was no weak faith to blame, no hidden sin, no failure of persistence, no selfish asking. If prayer were justified only by getting what it asks, the church would have buried this scene out of embarrassment. The opposite happened. The gospel writers wrote it down in detail, and for two thousand years the church has read it aloud at the very hinge where the redemption of the world turns. Whatever prayer is, this is prayer. Any teaching about answered prayer that cannot stand among these olive trees does not deserve your trust.

I did not learn this in a library. Earlier in this book I told you about a man who had been a father to me, and the week he came to the edge of his life. I have to bring you back into that week now, because it is where Gethsemane stopped being a story on a page and became a room I had stood in. He died in a week thick with prayer. Everyone we knew was praying: my family across time zones, friends, whole congregations of brothers and sisters in Christ, people fasting, people who had never once met the man they were praying for. Messages arrived daily assuring us that heaven was being stormed. He grew worse, and then he died. Despite all those prayers, I felt the pain and the disappointment of a prayer that God seemingly does not answer.

Many years as a clergyman had given me better words for that ache and not one ounce less of it. That same week I had to stand before a congregation and open the Scriptures, because grief does not reschedule the Lord's Day. I told them the truth. I told them we had prayed, all of us, and that I was in pain, and that the pain included the feeling every believer knows and few will say aloud in church: it seemed that God had not answered.

Then I told them the other thing, the small hard thing that kept me standing. Do not forget: never even once did Christ teach us to pray that ours will be done. Search the Gospels from end to end for a prayer in which Jesus instructs us to ask that our own will be carried out. You will come back empty-handed. He taught us to pray "Your will be done" (Matthew 6:10), and He teaches us to pray it even when we do not understand what that will is doing. When His own hour came, He prayed it Himself, face down, meaning it. All that week I had been praying, in effect, mine be done. Heaven had answered the prayer Jesus taught instead of the one I had invented. It took me years to stop resenting that and to begin to be glad of it.

I had been warned about this long before. When I was young I heard a preacher ask a shocking question from the pulpit: would you keep praying to Jesus if your prayers were never answered the way you believed they should be? I was young then, and soaked in the theology of prosperity, and I answered him in my heart: why would I keep following a god who cannot answer my prayers? You may want to curse me for that sentence. I set it down because many people carry the same question, hidden where the congregation cannot see it. We construct in our hearts a Messiah whose name is Jesus and who is very different from the Jesus the four Gospels preach. It is almost a digital construction: we keep the positive Jesus we want and delete the negative parts we do not. The cleansed lepers, the fed crowds, the calmed storm, the daughter raised from her bed, all of it kept. The road to Jerusalem, deleted. We would like to skip the part about following Him there. We would rather tell Him, in effect, go ahead and die on the cross Yourself for our sins, and we will come back to You after You rise from the dead.

The Jesus of the four Gospels walked that road on purpose. It is an easy, almost trivial thing to follow a leader who promises you a great victory. These followers were promised the exact opposite, that their Master would suffer and die in Jerusalem, and Mark remembers that those who followed Him up that road were amazed and afraid. A life spent behind Him, He was warning them, would be a woeful thing before it was a glorious one. For them, going to Jerusalem was always going up, up to the hill where the temple stood and God was said to dwell. To go up to where God is, you have to embrace His will even when His will is suffering and death, and you have to go up behind Him, not ahead of Him and not without Him. Two of His own, on that very road, asked instead for the best seats in the kingdom, one throne at His right hand and one at His left. He answered them with a question about a garden they could not yet see: "You do not know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" (Mark 10:38).

In the prophets, the cup in the hand of the LORD is a fearful thing, a cup of fury drained to the dregs (Isaiah 51:17; Psalm 75:8). In the Old Testament that cup means suffering and punishment, and usually it is poured from God's own hand. Jesus knew exactly what the word held when He reached for it. The Messiah we construct passes cups to other people and never drinks one. He would have said something soothing among the trees and slept as soundly as the three did. The Messiah who actually came walked in among the olives knowing what was in the cup, and asked His Father, the way a son asks, whether there was any other way.

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LUKE WAS A PHYSICIAN, and it is the physician who kept the details of the body. Here is the summit of the night, whole:

And He was withdrawn from them about a stone's throw, and He knelt down and prayed, saying, "Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done." Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. (Luke 22:41-44)

Every line teaches. A stone's throw: near enough that the three drowsy friends could have heard the sound of Him, far enough that He was alone with His Father. He knelt down, this Man who had stood to still storms. He named His desire without dressing it up: take this cup away from Me. And the yielding stands in the same breath as the asking, whole beside it, neither one canceling the other. I was told all my life that a man must choose between asking honestly and submitting fully, and in this one sentence Jesus does both at once. Mark adds that He opened with Abba, the word a small child uses for his father (Mark 14:36), so that the most dreadful prayer in Scripture begins with the tenderest address in it.

Then comes the strangest verse in the passage. An angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. Heaven moved that night. The cup stayed where it was, and strength came to carry it. I have watched God do exactly this in hospital rooms and at gravesides. The very thing prayed against still lands with its full weight, and beside it, out of nowhere the room can explain, comes a strength that holds a person upright through what should have flattened them. A family stands when standing makes no sense. A widow keeps her feet at the grave, and her composure is a miracle nobody thought to pray for. Anyone keeping score by outcomes alone walks right past the angel.

And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Notice the order: the agony deepened, and the praying deepened with it, until the sweat fell from Him like drops of blood, a body wrung like the olives that gave the place its name. Here is the doctrine, plainly stated: anguish in prayer is not a lack of faith. I grew up assuming a truly trusting heart would be serene, and Gethsema-ne ended that assumption for me. Worry is a different thing. Worry comes from the lack of trust in the Lord, the suspicion that God does not take our prayers seriously or that He will not answer us at all.

Worry takes back the sovereignty of life we surrendered to Him. The same Scriptures that warn us away from worry show us the psalmist praying in distress and Jesus praying in agony, and the two do not contradict, though the difference is not an easy one to see. We can pray fervently, even in anguish, while having complete trust in the Lord. Jesus did, in the same hour and the same body, and by doing so He made room in prayer for every believer who has ever knelt down more frightened than composed.

Was He heard? Scripture does not leave us to guess. The letter to the Hebrews looked back at that night and recorded a verdict I would never have dared to write myself:

who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. (Hebrews 5:7-8)

He was heard. Set that sentence beside this one: the cup did not pass. Both stand on the same page of Scripture, and we must keep both, because letting go of either unravels the gospel. So what did the hearing look like? The verse lets the answer slip out almost in passing. He prayed to Him who was able to save Him from death, and the Father did save Him from death. The saving ran through the cross, through the burial, through the sealed and guarded stone, and came out at dawn on the first day of the week.

The answer was the Resurrection, on the far side of the worst that could happen. The Father heard the Son on Thursday night and answered on Sunday morning, and the answer was so much larger than the passing of one cup that the church has never once wished the first prayer had been granted as spoken. Even the road between the asking and the answer was doing something a rescue could never have done: though He was a Son, Hebrews says, He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.

Now take the one measurement that matters. There has never been a love like the Father's love for the Son. Heaven itself tore open to declare it: this is My beloved Son (Matthew 3:17). If the removal of suffering measured divine love, then the Beloved should have suffered least of any man who ever lived. Instead He suffered the worst, at the center of history, infinitely loved and fully heard the entire time. Every believer runs a silent calculation at a bedside, the one that whispers: the prayer was refused, so I must be loved less. I ran it myself the week he lay dying, and I suspect you have run it too. Gethsemane takes the pencil out of our hands. Different outcome does not equal different love.

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SOONER OR LATER EVERY one of us kneels in this garden with a cup of our own that has not moved, and the only question left is what kind of surrender we will make. I have preached it this way for years. We can surrender in one of three ways: the fistful surrender, the fateful surrender, or the faithful surrender.

The first is the fistful surrender: throwing our fist at the face of God, in protest, in rebellion, challenging God's authority. Understand that this surrender still believes. No one shakes a fist at a heaven he considers empty. But belief has curdled into accusation. This surrender yields to God's power while indicting His character. I have met it in others across a kitchen table, and I have met it in my own chest in the sleepless hours. It says some version of the same thing: You could have healed and You chose otherwise, so I will obey You the way a prisoner obeys, and You will get nothing warm from me again.

Let me be careful here. The Psalms are full of protest, and God has never been afraid of an honest, angry prayer shouted at Him by someone still waiting for His reply. The fist is a different act. It has stopped waiting. It hands God its verdict and closes the case, and a person can live for decades inside that surrender, attending, serving, giving, singing, with the case closed the whole time.

The second is the fateful surrender: surrendering to fate, the way people give up who do not know God. It wears better clothes than the fist. It looks like peace. It shrugs and says whatever will be, will be, and the people in the waiting room mistake its stillness for faith. Underneath the calm is despair with good manners. The fatalist has stopped asking altogether, because he believes no one in particular holds the outcome, so no one in particular can be asked. In the short run this costs less than Geth-semane. A blind machine cannot break your heart. It cannot love you either, and some part of the fatalist knows it, which is why the calm goes all the way down and warms nothing on the way.

The third is the faithful surrender: the surrender Jesus made, on the way of Calvary, carrying the cross with joy, trusting the Father and going forward. Watch what it keeps, because it keeps almost everything. It keeps the asking, take this cup away from Me, at full strength and with tears. It keeps the anguish; we have seen the sweat. Above all it keeps the Father: Abba stands at the front of the prayer and Yours be done stands at the end of it, so the whole storm blows inside the relationship. What it hands over is the outcome, and only the outcome. Then it stands up. That may be my favorite detail in the entire account.

Jesus rose from prayer, woke His friends, and walked toward the torches, out in front, a Man who had already finished His surrendering. Of the three, this is the only surrender that can still walk forward. A man of faith is a soldier in a battle. He surrenders his life to his Commander and moves under orders without knowing how the battle will end, trusting that the One who gives the orders is working all of it for the good of those who love Him. The centurion at Capernaum, whom Jesus praised above all Israel for his faith, described himself in exactly those terms: a man under authority.

I wish I could tell you that I made the faithful surrender the week we lost the one we loved. The truth is that I made all three surrenders inside seven days, sometimes all three inside an hour. There were prayers of mine that week with a fist folded inside them. There were hours when I went as limp as any fatalist and mouthed whatever happens, happens at the ceiling of a hospital corridor. And there were hours, given from outside and never once manufactured by me, when the third surrender was simply present, like the angel, strengthening. On the day of the funeral I stood where a clergyman stands and said the old words over the one we had prayed for, and I meant them. I still count that as a quiet miracle. No one surrenders faithfully once and for all. Matthew tells us Jesus went back a second time and a third, praying the same words. So do we.

The garden gives one more gift, and it has taken me the longest to receive. The men who fell asleep under those trees believed, for two days, that they had witnessed the catastrophe of their lives: the great prayer denied, the Master bound and taken, three years of asking destroyed in a single night. Then came Sunday morning. They spent the rest of their lives re-reading that night, and the night kept changing as they read, until the worst thing that had ever happened to them stood at the center of the best news the world has ever heard. Gethsemane teaches us to re-read our own histories the same way, from the far side of them.

I have begun, slowly and with much stumbling, to re-read the week he died, and the room I could hardly bear to remember has started showing me things I was too busy grieving to see at the time. There are moments now when I catch a glimpse of what was actually happening in that room and wonder whether the prayer we all prayed was answered after all, in a shape none of us were watching for. Some answers arrive wearing the face of the very thing we feared, and it can take years, and plenty of Sunday's light, before we turn and recognize one.