Dear Friends,

One of my favorite scriptures is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.  To me this is one of the places in the Bible where the human and divine come together.  Obviously we live in the tension between these two aspects of our time.  As the Apostle Paul said, “We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”  This is totally different from the idea of a human being having a spiritual experience.  The difference is if we are simply human then when we die we die!  If we are spiritual beings then when we die we return to our spiritual form.  This is the battle of Good Friday and Easter.  The last enemy Jesus defeated was death.  With His death on the cross, Jesus set us free to embrace our eternal divinity.  We do not have to be afraid of death ending life in any eternal sense.  The gift of Easter is now ours.

Let’s return to the Garden of Gethsemane and its role in this discussion.  Jesus tied to convince God that being alive, being human was more important than dying.  This is the major issue of this lifetime.  Is this all there is?  Do I hang onto this life at all costs?  Jesus was not just concerned about the torture He was about to encounter, although no one really likes the prospect of such acts.  Jesus was also dealing with whether He was a human being having a spiritual experience or a spiritual being having a human experience with torture and death being a part of His humanness.  Is it any wonder Jesus sweated blood over this?  The agony of deciding whether we are spiritual or human is something we struggle with as we look at our own death.

Jesus looked at all of the possibilities with God in the darkness.  Notice it was night.  Also pay attention to none of the disciples being awake to pray with Him.  There comes a time in each of our lives when we are alone to face our death.  It is often a very dark subject.  In addition, don’t waste time with the disciples who couldn’t stay awake.  They were doing the best they could.  Don’t waste time in your life either saying why couldn’t so and so be awake to life enough to give me my answer  for my death question.  Thank God they don’t because now God is the only source of the answer that we will find.  It is too easy to let someone else answer for us.  We have to sweat our own blood facing this question so we can realize we don’t have the answer either.  Only by going into the darkness of facing our own deaths can we ever become aware of the meaning of the words from Jesus, “Not my will be done, but Yours!  God help my unbelief.”

Death is the ultimate surrender.  We give up the only life we know, the human one, to hope for the only life God knows, the spiritual one which just happens to also include this brief human time.  Without the Garden of Gethsemane how could Jesus say on the cross, “Into Your Hands I commit my spirit?”  Moving from our will to God’s Will is moving from what we know to what God Knows.  So much of life is limited by what we know.  So much more of life is opened to us when we enter God’s Wisdom Realm.  This is the one that moves us from Good Friday to Easter.  The one that moves us from being human to being divine.  The one that opens our spirit to this life not being and en all be all, but just a part of a much greater spiritual journey.

I invite you to ponder such thoughts in your own Garden of Gethsemane.  Jesus is waiting for you.

Peace,

Gary