Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage, I told him that I wasn’t sure what else Jesus could be asking in His prayer, and we moved on to chat about other topics.
We never returned to the subject; my pastor, sadly, passed away not too long after our conversation. But his question stayed at the back of my mind over the years. Despite my initial skepticism, gradually over the years I noted a set of texts that seemed to press for a different reading of Jesus’s prayer at Gethsemane. I wrote a few years back for First Things of my doubts that Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane should be taken as a request to avoid the Cross. Well, ‘tis again the season, Maundy Thursday approaches, and I added a few tweaks to the argument in the intervening years.
I first discuss why I don’t think the Bible teaches that Jesus prayed, or would have prayed, to avoid the Cross. I then consider what Jesus did ask of the Father in Gethsemane if He did not in fact ask the Father to avoid the Cross. Finally, I note pastoral implications of this alternative reading of what Jesus asked at Gethsemane.
Rather than praying to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane, I suggest Jesus instead asked the Father that the judgment He faced on the Cross not last eternally; that is, Jesus’s prayer to the Father at Gethsemane was a prayer for resurrection. This was a request that it pleased the Father to grant; that is, on this reading the Father said “yes” to Jesus’s prayer at Gethsemane. Further, the faith that Jesus demonstrates in His prayers at Gethsemane provides His people with a consummate example of faith for us to emulate, particularly when we face our own suffering and most particularly when we face our own deaths.
Jesus stated expressly that He would not ask the Father to avoid the cross
A few days before the Cross, John quotes Jesus expressly denying that He would ask the Father to avoid the Cross. “Now My Soul has become troubled; and what shall I say, ‘Father save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour” (John 12:27). As at Gethsemane in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus reports in John that His soul is “troubled” (cf. Matt 26:38). Despite that, Jesus says He would not ask the Father to “save me from this hour.”
Even closer in time to the Cross, John again has Jesus expressing His willingness to drink the cup that is the Cross: After Peter strikes and wounds the high priest’s slave, Jesus says to Peter, “the cup which the Father has given Me, shall I not drink it?” (John 18.11)
To be sure, even the casual reader recognizes that John’s Gospel differs in tone and focus from the Synoptic Gospels. Nonetheless, Jesus’s statements in John that He would not ask the Father to avoid the Cross are direct and clear. At the very least they invite the reader to ask whether Jesus’s prayers recorded in the Synoptic Gospels can be read consistently with what John reports.
Jesus responds, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” to Peter’s wish that Jesus avoid the cross
In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, when Jesus tells His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem to suffer, die, and be resurrected, Peter takes Jesus aside and chastises Him. Peter’s comment recorded in Matthew is even more pointed in the Greek: Peter wishes “mercy” on Jesus (Matt 16.22). In response to this wish of mercy, Jesus gives Peter a bracing rebuke: “Get behind Me, Satan” (Matt 16:23).
Jesus’s response to Peter raises a problem for the traditional reading of Gethsemane; in effect, the traditional reading would place Peter’s words and desire for mercy in Jesus’s mouth at Gethsemane.
The thing is, Jesus does not merely dismiss Peter’s wish as understandable (if misguided) sentimentalism or good intentions. Jesus rejects Peter’s wish as Satanic. Jesus’s bracing rebuke of Peter leaves no room for the type of special pleading that styles Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane as reflecting an understandably human crisis of faith given the imminency of the Cross. While Jesus was, and is, fully human as well as fully God, and was “tempted in all things as we are,” yet Jesus lived “without sin” (Heb 4:15). Jesus would not— could not—effectively have prayed the same thing Peter desired for Him and which Jesus flatly dismissed as Satanic.
There often is a follow up defense of the traditional view that posits that Jesus did not in fact ask the Father to avoid the Cross in Gethsemane because Jesus gave the Father an out by adding “yet not as I will, but as You will” at the end of His prayer (Matt 26.39, cf., vv. 42, 44). However, this attempt to patch up the traditional view doesn’t work linguistically. If I say to my father, “Please don’t make me do ‘X,’ but if you insist that I do ‘X’ I will submit to you and do ‘X,’” it remains obvious that I am asking him that I be allowed to avoid doing ‘X.’ That I might also tell my father I would submit to his decision if he declines my request does not change the fact that my request is one asking him to allow me to avoid doing ‘X.’ If my father insists that I do ‘X’ it means my father answers “no” to my request. The traditional view requires, at least at the point of Jesus’s request in Gethsemane, that Jesus’s desires for Himself are at odds with those of the Father.
The traditional reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane has Jesus asking the Father to allow Him to avoid the Cross, with the Father answering “No” to Jesus’s request.
Hebrews 5:7 and Matthew 26:53 suggest the Father answered Jesus’s prayer in the affirmative
In Hebrews 5:7, the author writes regarding Jesus that “In the day of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety.” The reference to prayers offered “to the One able to save [Jesus] from death” appears most particularly to be a reference to Jesus at Gethsemane. And, indeed, at Gethsemane Jesus asks the Father “to save Him from death.” Yet the author of Hebrews has the Father saying “yes” to Jesus’s request rather than “no.”
As noted above, if saving Jesus from death refers to the Cross, then the traditional reading of Gethsemane has the Father answering “no” to Jesus’s prayer there. On the other hand, if saving Jesus from death refers to resurrecting Jesus from the dead—Jesus drinks of the cup and then the cup passes—then the Father did indeed answer Jesus’s prayer with a resounding “yes.”
So, too in Matthew 26 itself, Jesus suggests that the Father would spare Him from the Cross if Jesus were actually to have asked it. At His arrest, in response to Peter (again) seeking to protect Jesus from the Cross, Jesus says, “[D]o you think that I cannot appeal to My Father, and He will at once put at My disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” (v. 53)
The implication here is that if Jesus had in fact asked the Father to avoid the Cross in Gethsemane, the Father would have granted Jesus’s request, sparing Him from the Cross. Jesus and the Father always agreed on Jesus going to the Cross, Jesus never sought to avoid it, and the Father never forced Jesus to the Cross against Jesus’s will.
This also is the upshot of Jesus’s observation in the Gospel of John that His crucifixion results from His own—Jesus’s own—initiative: “For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again” (John 10:17–18). At no point does the Father force Jesus to go to the Cross in the face of Jesus’s desire to avoid it. Jesus never shrinks from the cross; He is always willing lay down His life for those He loves, and He does so on His own initiative.
If Jesus prayed to avoid the Cross, then Paul prays a more self-sacrificing prayer than Jesus
Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “I could wish [“pray” in Greek] that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh” (Rom 9:3). If Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross in His prayer at Gethsemane, then it would seem that Paul’s willingness to sacrifice for his lost brethren is greater than Jesus’s willingness to do the same. I suggest that the more likely scenario is that Paul understands his prayer merely to reflect the same love that Christ showed for His people, a love that resulted in Jesus’s willingness to sacrifice for their salvation.
Revisiting Jesus’s Prayer at Gethsemane
Even conceding the extrinsic evidence adduced above, what of the text of Jesus’s actual prayer in Gethsemane? Doesn’t Jesus ask the Father to pass on the Cross? I suggest that Jesus’s prayer at Gethsemane, rather than being a request to avoid the cup entirely, is instead a request that the Father’s judgment would pass sequentially or temporally. That is, Jesus willingly drinks the cup, but asks the Father that the cup passes away after He tastes it. Jesus asks that He not drink the cup eternally but rather that the Father resurrect Him. This is the request that the Father then grants.
The second and third prayers that Jesus prayed in Gethsemane seem to indicate this claim explicitly: “He went away again a second time and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if [or “since”] this cannot pass away unless I drink it, Your will be done.” Note the language Jesus uses, the cup can pass away, but only if Jesus drinks it. The “passing away” and the “drinking” are not antitheses in Jesus’s prayer, rather they are sequentially or temporally related. That is, Jesus requests that the cup pass away after He drinks it.
Rather than pitting “drinking” against “not drinking,” the antithesis in Jesus’s request is the cup passing away versus the cup not passing away after Jesus drinks of it. The cup not passing away would mean that Jesus would drink of the cup of the Father’s wrath eternally; Jesus would be eternally separated, eternally cursed, of the Father (Gal 3:13, cf. 2 Thes 1:9).
Jesus’s prayer, then, is not that He would not drink of the Father’s wrath at all, but that He would not drink of the Father’s wrath eternally. That is, Jesus would drink of the cup of God’s wrath, but the cup would pass away after He drinks; Jesus prays for resurrection (cf. Heb 2:9).
The language of Jesus’s first prayer is consistent with this reading as well. Jesus asks that the cup “pass from me” (parerchomai apo egō, Matt 26:39). While the phrase can mean “to avoid,” it does not seem as though it has to be taken only in the sense of “to avoid” entirely. It can mean to pass sequentially or temporally after an elapse of time. If, for example, I am traveling and I’m on the cusp of entering College Station, Texas and I see the city and say, “let College Station pass from me,” my wish is not a wish to drive around College Station avoiding it entirely. Rather, my wish reflects my desire to get through the city without stopping. I need to pass through College Station, but I don’t want to be stuck there.
This, then, is the force of Jesus’s statement in His prayers, “Thy will be done.” Jesus is willing to drink the cup of the Father’s judgment eternally if that is the Father’s will. Jesus is the obedient Son willing to lay down His life for His sheep if necessary. Jesus asks, however, that He not have to drink the cup of the Father’s judgment eternally. Per Hebrews 5:7, Jesus prays, “with loud crying and tears” to the One who is “able to save him from [eternal] death,” and the Father answers “yes” to Jesus’ prayer not to be separated eternally from Him.
A Passing Comment on Matthew 27:46’s “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me”
Jesus’s cry on the Cross, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me” is not directly related to Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane. Yet the spirit in which Jesus’s statement on the Cross is often preached is of one weave with the traditional reading of Gethsemane that Jesus there asked the Father to forgo the Cross.
The initial problem with this common rendition of Jesus’s cry on the Cross is that Jesus does not simply cry out at the abandonment by the Father on the Cross, Jesus asks “why” the Father forsakes Him on the Cross. Yet numerous earlier texts throughout the Gospels tell us that Jesus knew exactly what would happen on the Cross, and Jesus embraced that purpose as His vocation (Matt 16:21; 22:23; John 3:14; et al.).
In contrast, a well-known alternative reading of Jesus’s statement is that with those words Jesus directs His disciples to Psalm 22. This Psalm, however, is not a psalm of despair and abandonment. It is a psalm of trust and vindication. While David mouths the question, “My God, my God why have You forsaken me,” David immediately answers his own question with the response that God has not in fact abandoned him. As David continues the psalm it crescendos to a conclusion in which God not only vindicates David, the psalm vindicates God’s righteousness and faithfulness as well. Jesus encourages His disciples by directing them to this Psalm on the cross. It is worth quoting at length given that the bulk of the Psalm answers the lament in the first verse:
In You our fathers trusted;
They trusted and You delivered them.
To You they cried out and were delivered;
In You they trusted and were not disappointed.
. . .
Yet You are He who brought me forth from the womb;
You made me trust when upon my mother’s breasts.
Upon You I was cast from birth;
You have been my God from my mother’s womb.
…
But You, O Lord, be not far off;
O You my help, hasten to my assistance.
Deliver my soul from the sword,
My only life from the power of the dog.
Save me from the lion’s mouth;
From the horns of the wild oxen You answer me.
…
For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted;
Nor has He hidden His face from him;
But when he cried to Him for help, He heard.
…
All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord,
And all the families of the nations will worship before You.
For the kingdom is the Lord’s
And He rules over the nations.
All the prosperous of the earth will eat and worship,
All those who go down to the dust will bow before Him,
Even he who cannot keep his soul alive.
Posterity will serve Him;
It will be told of the Lord to the coming generation.
They will come and will declare His righteousness
To a people who will be born, that He has performed it.
(Psalm 22:4–5, 9–10, 20–21, 24, 27–31, emphasis added).
Gethsemane Exemplifies the Faith of Jesus Christ as He Faces the Cross
Pastors routinely preach that Jesus asking the Father to avoid the Cross in Gethsemane exemplifies Jesus’s humanity. The purpose for doing so is laudable, that is, to underscore the Christian’s identification with Jesus Christ as a person who is fully human as well as fully divine.
Yet while laudable in intention, the view has Jesus shrinking from the Cross in Gethsemane. While I have no doubt that many of us would indeed shrink from just such a fate that Jesus faced, that would not be a response of faith and trust, either for Jesus or for us.
The alternative reading of Gethsemane presented above instead underscores the faith of Jesus Christ in the face of imminent suffering and death. In going to the Cross Jesus nonetheless trusted that the Father would bring His suffering to an end rather than abandon Him to judgment eternally (Acts 2:27, 31).
Consistent with this, the apostles repeatedly point to Jesus as an example for Christians to emulate when facing our own suffering and death. Peter, for example, writes “to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing” (1 Peter 4:13) and “since Christ has suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same purpose” (1 Peter 4:2).
Peter concludes his encouragement for Christians in the face of their own suffering with the comment that “those also who suffer according to the will of God shall entrust their souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right” (1 Peter 4:19).
In the alternative reading of Gethsemane presented above, Jesus exemplifies one who “entrusts” His soul “to a faithful Creator.” Jesus’s prayer for resurrection is a prayer of faith and trust. When faced with our own suffering and death, Gethsemane provides Christians with the very model of faith and trust. Gethsemane does not teach that Jesus shrinks from His suffering and death. Rather, Jesus’s prayer at Gethsemane invites us to follow His example of faith and trust. Indeed, Jesus had far more on the line than we do in our own deaths given that He would taste death and judgment for all of us on the Cross. Jesus leads His people at every point.
Our own deaths remind us that our fate is ultimately out of our control; we are entirely in the hands of God. This is not a reason to worry or despair, however, because God can save us while we cannot save ourselves. Confidence that our God is a “faithful Creator” invites us to entrust our souls to God and to face our suffering and death with faith and trust, just as Jesus faced His own suffering and death, even—or especially—at Gethsemane. Jesus at Gethsemane becomes the consummate example of this faith and trust rather than an example of the all-too-human inclination to shrink from suffering and death. This reading of Gethsemane invites us to fix “our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross” (Heb 12:2).
James R. Rogers is Associate Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University and Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty. He holds a J.D. and a Ph.D., and teaches and publishes at the intersection of law, politics, and mathematical modeling. He has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science; the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization; Public Choice; and in numerous other scholarly journals. He edited and contributed to the book Institutional Games and the Supreme Court and served as editor of the Journal of Theoretical Politics from 2006 through 2013. Rogers also chairs Theopolis’ s Civitas Group, and is a contributor and co-editor (with Peter Leithart) of Civitas’ s forthcoming volume, Hell Shall Not Prevail: Essays in Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism.