July 25, 2018
“Couldn’t you wait with me for one hour?” After watching Sight and Sound’s theatrical production of “Jesus,” this question haunts me tonight. Their portrayal of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane pleading with his Father to allow “this cup to pass from me,” accompanied by the devilish taunts of the Evil One trying to wear him down and avoid the cross culminated in his anguished howl, “NO!!!”
When St. Paul catalogues the armor God gives us in our fight against evil, he doesn’t follow it up with a pep talk and a command to “Charge!” Instead, he says we need to be ”praying always.” In our politicized world, we sometimes imagine that the battlefield is in the educational, political, or media world. If we just get enough votes for our side; if we could only get rid of Common Core; if we could get rid of all the fake news out there, we could turn this world around. We go around pointing fingers, fixing blame, but never fixing the problems.
Paul took his cue from Jesus himself, who fought his hardest battle, not on the cross, but in the garden. Think about that. We steel ourselves for the crosses in our lives, but fail to recognize the dangers that lurk in pleasant gardens. Our first parents reasoned with the Serpent; Jesus wrestled with him. The contest was bitter and bloody, but Jesus won.
Too often, our version of prayer takes after that old Gospel song where “he walks with me and he talks with me” as we stroll blithely along a flower-strewn path of shallow platitudes. The garden Jesus would have us enter is a crater-strewn no-man’s-land of brutal and deadly hand-to-hand, kill-or-be-killed combat.
I must confess my prayers have too often been more of the Pollyanna type, which I suspect is why the results are so often pathetic. We cannot know the joy of triumph if we’ve never enjoined the fight. So with Jesus’ disciples, I beg, “Lord, teach me to pray!”
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