Sometimes I think of Jesus in Gethsemane with the disciples falling asleep around him and I get so sad because he would have been so scared and they let him down. How do you all feel about it?

millennialgospel:

I think it’s one of the moments in the gospels where Jesus is the most vulnerable and powerless. Like, he’s terrified. He’s literally interceding with God one last time to spare him from the horrors to come even though he knows he has to go through with it. He knows there’s no way out, at least in most interpretations. And he asks his closest friends to stay awake with him and watch for the man who is coming to betray him and the men who are coming to humiliate, torture, and kill him. And they fall asleep multiple times. Brutal. Of course they’re reconciled to Jesus after the resurrection; Jesus forgives the disciples and cooks breakfast with them and laughs with them and teaches them but man. Gethsemane was not a shining moment for Jesus’ friends.

If I was going to preach on this text I would say it highlights how we all fall asleep on God a lot. We aren’t capable or being what God needs/wants us to be all the times, and sometimes we don’t even try to be. And seeing that played out through the incarnation, where Divinity experiences the limitations, pangs, and fears of flesh makes meaningful relationships with individual humans is sobering. It’s also one of the many moments in the gospels where we see Jesus praying and I think prayer is something a lot of Christians don’t understand or have trouble doing, so it reminds us that prayer is always a good thing. God is with us even in the Gethsemanes of our lives, when the sun wont be rising for a long, bloody night yet. 

-S