Jesus’ Humility & Power
For the next three Sundays, in our series Toward the Cross, we’re entering the most powerful and trying moments in Jesus’ story: Gethsemane, The Triumphal Entry (Palm Sunday) and the Cross and Resurrection (Easter, of course).
These moments also speak so deeply to our hearts as believers and to our human condition:
Watch Last Sunday’s Sermon, “Defiant - He Challenges Me” from our series Toward the Cross
For example, as Jesus kneels in Gethsemane, He prays three times to His Father…
The First Prayer:
“‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.’ And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will’” Matthew 26:38-39.
Jesus’ first prayer is a plea - “Father…let this pass from Me.”
Now scholars debate if:
1)Jesus is asking God specifically about sidestepping the Cross. Though we should note that Jesus directly engages the Cross the whole of His ministry, including refusing Satan’s offer to inherit all the kingdoms of the world in the wilderness and rebuking Peter’s exhortation that the Cross will never happen to Him (both which offer the kingdom without a cross, a cross-less Christ).
Jesus is so adamant about the cross at the cost of everything else in His ministry, why abandon it now? And why here this moment that is so clearly leading Toward the Cross? Perhaps He’s just in anguish and it’s the guttural cry of the human-side of Jesus…?
Or
2)Is this the moment, in what many theologians believe, when Jesus embodied, in-took, the sins of our world?
When all the rebellion, idolatry, abuse and offense came upon Jesus as if He had done heinous things Himself, before His Father? (See Hebrews 5:7-9).
If the latter, then Jesus is for the first time in full, inhabiting the corruption of humanity not as a smear on his cloak but under His skin.
Have you ever been blamed unfairly for something? It’s terrible!
Can you imagine being blamed unfairly for everything humanity has ever done against God and others?
Wow.
For the first time, Jesus tasted the displeasure of His Father.
He was human sin.
Can you imagine how that weighed on Him?
How that changed His experience of His Father?
How that affected His experience of His own soul?
But something shifts in the Second & Third Prayer, Jesus goes on:
“Again, for the second time, he went away and prayed, ‘My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.’…He went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words again”
Matthew 26:42, 44.
There is unique nuance in that second and third prayer.
Do you see it?
Even in the middle of great trial, Jesus’ prayer turns from “take this away” (which is a totally legitimate prayer)…
Into, “and, Father, if you don’t take this away, if I have to drink this cup that is now before me, Your will be done.”
And, here, it seems that Jesus is speaking of the latter view above, the second sense, that He is wrestling not just with choosing the cross, but with the cup of God’s wrath against human sin, against our sin and all of the suffering therein (see Jer. 25:15-16, Isaiah 51:17, 22, Psalm 75:8, Obadiah 1:16, Ezekiel 23:31-33)
In the face of this cup, Jesus utters possibly the most profound words a human being can:
“My Father…Your will be done.”
One of the most difficult things, in the midst of authentic pain and suffering, is to lay down the power of one’s own will, to prefer and commit one self to the desire and will of the Father.
And Jesus isn’t just another human being…
In the middle of being God the Son, He became Man the Sinner…
And willingly bent the unbending will of our humanity back into relationship with His Dad.
Theologians will say Jesus didn’t just die for us, He suffered and died as us.
Even our sin is now seen through the lens of Jesus’ obedience to His Father.
And to finish this obedience, Jesus was obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
“He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” Phillippians 2:6-11.
In this one act of His will, Jesus carries our sin and suffering Toward the Cross and through!
And, in doing so, He carries us through, too (Isaiah 53:5).
Let’s come together in humble awe this Sunday as we prayerfully study the humility and power of Jesus who took on our sin and suffering Toward the Cross, so we, with Him, could be made new!
See you Sunday,
Pastor Dave