Prayer Helps Us See Past Our Pain

On the night Jesus was betrayed, but before the soldiers came to arrest Him, He prayed in anguish to His Father in a garden of olive trees. He was very aware of what was ahead— humiliation, abandonment, torture, and death. The gravity of the moment was reflected in the brutal honesty of His prayer: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me” (Mark 14:36). Jesus did not want to suffer. He did not want to die. This was Jesus at His most human, His most vulnerable.

The scene echoes one from much earlier in the Bible. In another garden, another man faced a similar decision between following God’s will or His own. Rather than surrendering himself to the love of God, Adam, like every person since, rejected the will of God to declare, “My will be done!” His disobedience, which represents our own, unleashed sin, evil, and death into creation.

Jesus, whom Scripture calls the second Adam, inverted the first Adam’s rebellion. While honestly confessing His desire to not follow His Father’s plan to the cross, Jesus nonetheless surrendered Himself to God. He chose to abandon His preference and ventured everything on the goodness, love, and power of His heavenly Father. “Not my will, but yours be done.”

The agony Jesus expressed in the garden fulfilled what Isaiah had prophesied about the Messiah centuries earlier. “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). But this picture of Jesus in Gethsemane is incomplete. It captures only part of what Jesus saw that night amid the olive trees.

According to the author of Hebrews, intermingled with Jesus’ sorrow over His looming death, there was also a vision of the victory beyond. Scripture says that Jesus accepted the cross and its shame, “for the joy that was set before him” (Heb. 12:2). Somehow, in communion with the Father that night, Jesus was able to face the agony of His execution because He could see what was on the other side of the cross. He saw the empty tomb. He saw His ascension to the Father. He saw Himself enthroned over creation with all power and authority. And He saw every knee in heaven and earth bowing and every tongue confessing that He was King (Phil. 2:10–11).

In the garden we find a central paradox of the Christian faith—that by surrendering Himself to the darkness of the world Jesus overcame it. And like Him, sometimes we may cry out to God in prayer to “remove this cup from me,” but rather than changing our circumstances sometimes He gives us eyes to see beyond them. Through prayer He shows us the coming dawn that will overwhelm our present darkness. And this joy that is set before us is all we need to rise and take the next step forward.

(Read more in Hebrews 12:1-2; Philippians 2:5-11)