The Cup That Could Not Pass

We spent this week on Things Unseen reflecting on some of the big moments in the life of our Lord Jesus, and you’ll remember that the Apostle John says at the end of his gospel that if everything Jesus did, everything that happened was written down, then “I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). I think he must have had a smile on his face when he wrote that. It’s a nice way of saying just how great and glorious the Lord Jesus really is.

John himself doesn’t record all the big moments in Jesus’s life that the other Gospel writers do, probably because he knew they had already recorded them. But as John Calvin says so well, the other Gospels show us Christ’s body—they tell the story—while John shows us His soul. And that’s one reason we love John’s gospel so much. But all that said, there are actually one or two moments in our Lord’s life that John doesn’t specifically record, in which the other Gospel writers really show us Christ’s soul. One of them is surely in Matthew 11:28–30, where Jesus invites His hearers to come to Him and shows them His soul. “I am meek and lowly in heart,” He says. And another is that while John tells us in John 12:27 and 13:21 that Jesus was deeply troubled in His spirit as the dark shadow of His passion loomed ever nearer, John doesn’t mention our Lord’s experience in the garden of Gethsemane.

But the garden of Gethsemane was certainly a big moment for Jesus, a very big moment. He’d just celebrated the Passover meal with the disciples and instituted the Lord’s Supper. He’d left the cup of blessing on the table in the upper room. He’d passed round that final cup of the Passover meal, the cup of blessing, but it looks as though He didn’t drink it Himself. Now, for Him, the last cup to drink was the one that His father was pressing into His hands in Gethsemane, the cup of the divine judgment curse.

“Let this cup pass from Me,” He prayed. I think we perhaps rush on too quickly at this point to the words that follow, “Nevertheless, not My will, but Your will be done,” and we don’t linger long enough on the words “not my will.” These words, “Let this cup pass from Me,” were actually an expression of Jesus’s will. This was His will. In other words, Jesus didn’t want to drink the contents of the cup.

I think we can go even further. Our holy Jesus, in our humanity, couldn’t want to drink the contents of that cup, for this was the cup that the prophets had spoken about, the cup that when drunk, led to alienation—a sense of God-forsakenness because of sin. This cup, they wrote, this was the cup that was in the Lord’s hand, the cup of divine judgment. It was, they said, a cup of desolation, a cup that would contain such judgment that it would undo those who drank it, utterly desolating them, making them stagger like drunk men who have been overwhelmed by what they have been drinking. Our holy Savior, Jesus, did not actively desire to experience the outer darkness of a sense of God-forsakenness, the experience He actually had on the cross. He’d lived forever in the presence of God. He couldn’t desire that, and that’s what makes the last part of our Lord’s prayer so overwhelming: “Nevertheless, not My will, but Your will be done.”

The words of the Gospel writers actually confirm the agony of Jesus’s experience. This is why on a night when Simon Peter was cold enough to have come out of the shadows to warm his hands at a fire in the courtyard, great bloody globules pressed their way out of Jesus’s body. In fact, Mark employs language that one of the greatest of the nineteenth-century New Testament scholars described in this way. I quote him: “It describes the confused, restless, half-distracted state caused by physical confusion or mental derangement.” I’m reminded of the words of the hymn, “There Were Ninety and Nine That Safely Lay,” that describes the Good Shepherd seeking and finding His lost sheep in these words:

But none of the ransomed ever knew
How deep were the waters crossed;
Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed thro’
Ere He found His sheep that was lost.

We don’t know fully, do we? I feel sure we never will. We’ll never plumb the depths of what that meant for our Savior. We will surely be in awe of it and in awe of Him and His love for us throughout all eternity. How could He love us so much? And yet He did, and He still does.