Luke 22.39-46
Pray Like the God-Man
(Luke 22.39-46)
Today’s text picks up directly after Jesus’s last supper with his disciples. They leave the upper room together, and they head toward the Mount of Olives, which was (according to Luke) Jesus’s custom when he wanted to get away from the city.
(Apparently during this time Judas slipped out to let the religious authorities know where Jesus would be next, so they could come arrest them. So Jesus and the disciples would have a bit of a head start—a few minutes, or an hour, before he would be arrested.)
What we see in the text is very simple: Jesus goes up to the mountain to pray with his disciples before his arrest.
But even though the text is simple, it has been a source of discussion and confusion for Christians for millenia.
Let’s read the text together, then I’ll explain how we’re going to try and tackle it this morning.
Luke 22.39-46:
39 And he came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples followed him. 40 And when he came to the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” 41 And he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, 42 saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” 43 And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. 44 And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. 45 And when he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow, 46 and he said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation.”
So we’re going to tackle this text in two stages, because there are two things Luke does here simultaneously.
We’re going to start by looking at this text through a theological lens, to see what this text shows us about Jesus Christ himself.
And once we’ve seen that, we’re going to look at what this text shows us about how Jesus relates to his Father in prayer. And we’re going to end there because I think that’s the main thing Luke is trying to show us.
The Dual Nature of Christ
Luke has spent a significant amount of time in his gospel helping us see that this man Jesus is in fact God—he is the Son of God, the Messiah whom God had promised to send to save his people.
The problem is, in this text we see Jesus saying things, if we’re not careful, could make us doubt that assertion.
In this text, we see him so weak that an angel actually comes and strengthens him. We see him in agony, and afraid.
This is not the kind of emotion we ascribe to God. God is all-powerful, all-knowing; he doesn’t get afraid. He’s never in agony. He’s never weak.
Similarly, when he prays, he says to the Father (v. 42),
“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.”
We’ll come back to that request in a minute, but just think about the first thing he says: “Father, if you are willing...”
“IF you are willing”?
So he doesn’t know? Or is he just so desperate to get out of it that he asks anyway?
In this text, we see Jesus acting in ways that, frankly, don’t seem very Godlike at all. In fact, many people throughout history have actually used this story to try to deny his divinity.
Luke was a smart guy. We see his keen intelligence on display all over this gospel. And he would have known that including this text would make his assertions that Jesus is divine slightly harder to swallow.
But he chose to include it anyway.
So we know that he has a good reason for it.
And the main reason he (and Matthew and Mark) include this story, no matter how much controversy it may cause, is to show us that even though Christ is totally and completely, 100% divine, he is also totally and completely, 100% human.
This is called the doctrine of the incarnation.
A few weeks ago we talked about the Trinity—the truth that there is one God, who has eternally existed in three persons—God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
The doctrine of the incarnation says that God the Son took on both a human nature and a human form. He was born of a virgin, lived, died and was raised, and ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he is today.
So let’s talk for a minute about what that means. (Fair warning: this is super confusing, but it’s monumentally important.)
Any time we see the man Jesus Christ in the Bible, we see both his divine and his human natures, fully and completely active.
Everything we can say about God, we can say about Jesus Christ. He is all-powerful. He is omnipresent. He is eternal.
And by the same token, everything we can say about humanity, we can say about Jesus Christ. He gets tired. He gets hungry. He’s afraid. He doesn’t know things. He is exactly like us in every respect (except that he never sinned).
Both of those natures are always at play, together, any time we see the man Jesus Christ in the Bible.
Now a lot of people won’t have a problem with that…until you start getting into the details of what that means.
Orthodoxy would insist that Jesus Christ was born as a man, all the while maintaining every one of his divine attributes.
While Jesus Christ was on this earth, he remained all-powerful. He remained all-knowing. And this will blow our minds: he even remained omnipresent.
Athanasius said, “[The Son of God] was not hedged in by his body, nor did his presence in the body prevent his being present elsewhere as well. When he moved his body, he did not cease also to direct the universe by his mind and might.”
Now one objection people will bring up here is Paul’s letter to the Philippians, where we see Paul saying that Christ,
though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men (Philippians 2.6-7).
They’ll take that verse and conclude that Jesus Christ gave up some of his divine attributes when he became a man. I myself had said that in the past.
But that’s not what Paul says. He says that he didn’t count equality with God a thing to be grasped: he did not consider himself “too divine” to take on the role of a servant, who would suffer for his people. He gave up his rights, not his nature or essence or divinity or attributes.
So he was born in the likeness of men, all the while maintaining every one of his divine attributes.
Now I know this can sound like a whole lot of useless conjecture here, and I know that not everyone agrees on this subject. But if you take the dual nature of Christ away, you lose a massive number of things which are fundamental to our faith.
For example, what happens if the Son, in his divine nature, dies? The author of the letter to the Hebrews says that the Son “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1.3). The universe exists because the Son is constantly upholding it by his word, and he has always done this.
So what happens on the cross, if the Son dies in his divine nature, and can no longer speak the universe into being? The universe ceases to exist.
What happens on the cross if one person of the Trinity is separated from the other two? If the Trinity is broken, God is not God, because God is the Trinity.
But at the same time, what happens if it’s just a man, just a human nature, who dies at the cross? If the Son of God doesn’t die on the cross, we are not saved, because only God himself can absorb all of his wrath against the sin of his people.
You can see why it’s complicated. The doctrine of the incarnation, I think, the single most paradoxical truth in all of Christian theology.
Most of the time, when we talk about biblical truths that are hard to understand, we use the catch-all phrase “mystery.” A lot of the time, that’s a cop-out. A lot of theology isn’t mystery, it’s just hard to understand.
This is one of those truths that are truly mysterious.
Our minds cannot conceive of how Jesus Christ died a very real, human death in the place of sinful human beings…and how, at the same time, he kept upholding the universe by the word of his power. How he could die a very real death on the cross and still be God.
But he did. And the gospel makes no sense if he didn’t. Only a man could take the place of men; and only God could absorb the wrath of God against sin.
Both things must be true if the gospel is to make sense. The dual nature of Christ is our assurance that our salvation was actually accomplished by Jesus Christ on the cross.
Now if you’re confused right now, that’s fine. The church spent the first four hundred years of its existence struggling over questions like this, and we still struggle with it. So you’re doing fine.
The main thing you need to remember is that in Jesus Christ, we find both God and man. Two natures, in one person.
…But sometimes, the biblical authors will choose to accentuate one nature more than the other.
At the transfiguration in chapter 9, for example, Jesus’s humanity is sort of peeled back for a moment, to reveal the glory of his divine nature behind it. Almost everything Luke has written since chapter 19, when Jesus begins manifesting his authority as King over the religious establishment in Israel, speaks to the glory of his divinity.
In this passage, Luke is doing the opposite. He is showing us a clearer picture of the human nature of Christ. It’s not that his divinity isn’t at work at this moment, but rather that Luke wants us to see his humanity a little more sharply. Christ is absolutely sovereign, absolutely in control, and absolutely aware of everything that is going to happen to him, and why it will happen…
But at the same time, he’s a man, so he’s afraid to go through with it. Because it will be a suffering unlike anything any human being has ever experienced.
Human beings have physically suffered worse than Jesus did at the cross—no question. No matter how horrific his death was, many people have had it even worse (including several of his own disciples).
But no human being has ever absorbed the wrath of God against the sin of all of God’s children.
That’s what Jesus meant when he asked the Father to remove this cup from him. The cup is a frequent image used in the Old Testament to describe the wrath of God.
Jesus knew that he was the only one who could drink the cup of God’s wrath, because he is the only one who is both God and man. And as the Son of God, this was his plan all along, the plan he had formed before creating the world.
But at the same time, as a man, he was afraid. He was heartbroken over the losses and the disappointments he had already suffered, and he was tormented at the thought of what awaited him.
So the question—and, I think, the bigger point Luke is trying to make here—is, when he finds himself in this situation, what does he do?
The answer is so simple that many of us wouldn’t naturally think of it.
He prays.
Christ’s Prayer
Remember what we saw last week.
The disciples give Jesus disappointment after disappointment following his institution of the Lord’s Supper. And we can see that he’s still feeling the heaviness of their failures in the garden. When they get there, Jesus tells them (v. 40): “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” And at the end of the text (v. 46), just before his arrest, he returns to find them sleeping, and repeats his exhortation.
It’s interesting that this same story is told in both Matthew’s and Mark’s gospel, and in those gospels, we see Jesus returning to the disciples three times to find them sleeping, and he scolds them for not being able to stay awake and pray with him.
But while Luke mentions that Jesus finds them sleeping, he only mentions it briefly, because he wants us to focus on something different. He wants to help us focus on Jesus’s relationship to his Father in prayer.
So what does Luke show us? How does Jesus pray here?
Complete transparency (v. 43-44)
The first thing we see here is complete transparency on the part of Jesus, not only in what he prays, but in how he prays.
V. 43:
43 And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. 44 And being in agony he prayed more earnestly…
Christians in our church tradition have a very hard time with this kind of transparency.
I grew up in a church tradition where, when people prayed together, they all prayed at the same time, with everyone speaking over each other. Now, I have to say, I’m not crazy about that—how can you say “Amen” to someone’s prayer if you have no idea what they’re praying? I like the way we do it, with one person praying at a time, so everyone can hear what’s being said and agree to pray for the same things.
But one very unfortunate side effect of this kind of prayer is that it gives people a chance to show off.
We’ll hear other people praying these well-constructed, beautiful prayers. We’ll find snippets of Scripture thrown in there to remind us they’re rooted in the Word; we’ll hear them form their phrases in such a wonderful way that someone like myself, for whom French is a second language, or someone who’s just not very comfortable speaking aloud in public, can feel really intimidated.
It can give the impression that our prayers need to be well-constructed and well-thought-out in order to be legitimate; like God’s going to turn his nose up at very simple, very honest prayers—when of course that is absolutely untrue.
We had someone in one of our discipleship groups a while back who had never prayed before, and who started her first prayer in the group by saying, “Uh…hi, God.”
That’s fantastic. So often we forget that when we pray, we’re not giving an oral exam; we’re speaking to an actual person. And we forget that this person to whom we’re praying is a Father who loves us and who just wants us to speak to him.
Have you ever heard really small kids trying to talk? You can barely understand them. They respect no rules of grammar; their vocabulary is horrendous; there’s no thought that goes into how they’re saying what they’re saying.
But no parent of a small child is going to listen to that and go, “No, come on—do that again. Use a verb this time.” Of course not—we’re just happy they’re talking.
Jesus’s prayer here is profoundly simple—it’s not much more articulate than, “Father, HELP ME.” So we shouldn’t be afraid of this kind of transparent simplicity.
Another risk we have is getting the impression that prayer must be solemn, and calm, and devoid of emotion—as if being emotional in prayer is somehow going to make God uncomfortable.
We see in Jesus a state of intense agony here, and he makes no attempt to hide that fact.
Matthew says in his gospel that Jesus was “sorrowful and troubled”, and Jesus says to his disciples, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26.37-38).
He’s in agony, and he shows it.
He prays earnestly. He works himself into a sweat. And he prays with such emotion that (if we believe v. 43-44) the blood vessels under his skin burst and he bleeds.
Can you imagine if someone prayed like this in a Baptist church? People would lose their minds if someone prayed like this, say, in a community group.
But Jesus does it—he prays like a Charismatic! (And I don’t mean that as an insult.) He is totally transparent, he's very emotional, and he doesn’t try to hide it.
Now obviously this doesn’t mean we should work ourselves up into a frenzy so we can say we are being “authentic.” But if we feel something, we shouldn’t be afraid to show it.
Why are we so afraid of showing emotion when we pray? And I’m not talking about just heavy negative emotions like we see here; I’m talking about joy as well as sadness. Look at the Psalms. Look at how David danced when he celebrated the Lord.
There is a certain solemnity which is appropriate in some contexts. But I don’t think that solemnity is always appropriate when we’re praying. We’re speaking to the God of the universe, and we’re speaking to him of truths which are more massive, and more overwhelming, than anything else we could possibly say. Is it really appropriate to thank God for the gift of his Son, or to ask him to put his infinite power to work in the delivrance of his people…and to do it like we’re reading the Terms and Conditions from iTunes?
Of course not. Jesus hides nothing, he puts on zero airs when he prays. He is totally transparent before his Father, and before his disciples.
Total Honesty (v. 42a)
The second thing we see is that, in addition to being emotionally and verbally transparent, he is honest about what he wants.
Knowing everything the Bible tells us about the divine nature of Christ, and his eternal relationship with his Father, what he says in the beginning of v. 42 seems completely crazy to me:
“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.”
It sounds crazy because he knows this is the plan! He’s been talking about this plan for a while now; he just finished giving his disciples a picture of this plan at the Last Supper. This request—“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me”—is, honestly, completely unnecessary.
But he says it anyway.
So why does he say it? I don’t think it’s because he actually thinks God’s going to say, “Okay, fine—go live your life.”
Remember Christ’s dual natures—he is divine, so he knows what’s going to happen, and why.
But he’s also human, so he doesn’t want to suffer like this.
He asks God to remove this cup from him because, as a human being on the verge of unimaginable suffering, he wants that cup removed. He doesn’t want to suffer. He doesn’t want to go through what he’s about to go through. He doesn’t want to be falsely accused, and tortured, and killed.
And here’s what’s beautiful: he’s not afraid to say what he wants.
He’s not afraid to show his Father that he's feeling things like a human. He’s not afraid to show his disciples that he is afraid. He’s not afraid to say that there’s a part of him which really doesn’t want to do this.
He’s honest with his Father, no matter how undignified it sounds.
Some of us—particularly those of us who have grown up in churches of a more Reformed bent—have a hard time praying like this. We have been raised in a long tradition of very rich prayers, of prayers which are so full of gospel truth that they inspire us.
Read the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Read any number of collections of prayers from the Puritans. These are such wonderful tools because they take what we know is true of the Bible, and use those things as fuel for prayer.
This is one of the reasons why we speak so much about knowing our Bible well: we want to know what God has promised in his Word, so we can ask him to fulfill those promises for us.
But there is a flip-side to that coin…
Some of us are so afraid of praying “wrongly” that we don’t dare pray honestly.
We’ll recite promises we’ve memorized, but we forget that God knows perfectly well that we don’t always want those things.
Now, if we’re honest, this is just a fundamentally dumb way to approach God. Can I tell you a secret? If you want something, you might as well go ahead and tell him. It’s not as if he doesn’t already know it. We’re not fooling him.
But in addition to just being kind of dumb, neglecting to be honest in prayer betrays some misunderstandings we have about who God is.
We sometimes speak to God the way an abused child speaks to his abusive father. The kid knows exactly what to say to keep Daddy happy, so that Daddy doesn’t hurt him. But nothing the kid says is actually sincere. He has no relationship with his father other than that of fist to face.
Now of course I’m not saying we all feel that way about God (though some of us may). But we have somehow bought into the idea that anything other than “the right kind of prayer” is somehow displeasing to our Father.
A Father who loves his children will not be displeased with them for being honest with him. He will listen, and he will nod, and he’ll say, “I understand.”
And only then will he look us in the eyes and say, “But what do you know is true?” And then he’ll point us back to his promises. He’ll point us back to what he’s told us, and what we know. He’ll point us back to the prayers we’ve memorized, to remind us of what they say. And he’ll help us pray them sincerely.
Jesus isn’t afraid of displeasing the Father with his honesty. He isn’t afraid of saying what he’s feeling, of expressing what he wants in his humanity. He is honest with his Father.
Trust in the Father’s Good Will (v. 42b)
And then, after being honest with his Father, he turns to what he knows is true.
He makes a conscious call-back to what he had already taught the disciples in the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6.9-13), which begins, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done.”
After being honest with his Father, he recalls his trust in the Father’s good will, and says,
“Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
This is the part of the prayer that Calvinists love. We love talking about God’s sovereignty, and we love giving God the prerogative of doing his will in our lives.
That’s a good thing. That’s how the Bible teaches us to think.
But I’d like to press on that just a bit, if I could.
We often use this phrase as an easy out. Someone asks us to pray for God to heal them, so we do…but we don’t really think God will actually do it, so we say “If it’s your will” at the end of our prayer, so that we won’t be too disappointed if God doesn’t actually do it. It’s a convenient way out of a tricky situation.
That is not what’s happening here. And that is never how we should pray this.
Think of everything we’ve seen today—all the humanity we see on display here in Christ’s prayer to his Father. He knows perfectly well what’s waiting for him. He knows perfectly well what his Father’s will is; he’s been talking about it for weeks.
So imagine, from a human perspective, how terrifying it must have been to pray this last.
It’s easy for us to pray, “Not my will, but yours, be done,” when we’re living in relative ease and comfort.
But this week alone, I received news of a friend—a father of two teenagers—in the hospital with advanced cancer; a 31-year-old friend, newly married, who learned that she has a very aggressive form of breast cancer and will have to go through chemo and a mastectomy in the coming months; and another friend, one of my best friends from high school, 37 years old, who was out on a date with his wife—after dinner, she passed out, and died on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. They have two little girls.
Do you think it’s easy for them to pray, “Not my will, but yours, be done”?
It’s a scary thing to pray that God would do his will when we know that his will is probably different from ours, and we feel that all of our happiness depends on our will being done.
And the only way that we will be able to pray this sincerely is if we have such a deep and real relationship with God that we honestly know his will is better.
On Thursday I spoke at JPC’s evangelism week; some of you were there. I mentioned the distinction between objective knowledge and subjective knowledge.
Objective knowledge, of course, is that knowledge which comes from proof we have received. I know that Loanne loves me because we were married on April 28th, 2003. I have a certificate to prove it, which I can pull out any time I want. That’s objective knowledge.
But by itself, it’s not complete.
Subjective knowledge is that knowledge which comes from experience. I know that Loanne loves me because I’ve lived with her, as her husband, for sixteen years, and I have seen her love for me on display in a million practical ways every day of that time.
Jesus, in this phrase, displays his own subjective knowledge of who the Father is. He knows what the Father’s will is, and he knows the Father’s will is good.
Why?
Because he has been with the Father since forever. He has enjoyed communion with the Father and the Spirit for all eternity. He knows the Father’s character as intimately as he knows himself.
And in his humanity, he has seen and experienced the Father’s goodness at work for him. He has seen the fruit of the ministry the Father sent him to accomplish. He has seen the faithfulness of his Father preserving him from danger and temptation. He has experienced the goodness of his Father in answering his prayers to heal others, to resurrect the dead.
He trusts in his Father because he knows his Father. So no matter how afraid he is, he can sincerely pray that God not spare him this suffering. Because he knows him.
This is not an easy out for those prayers we don’t really want to pray. This isn’t a way to protect ourselves from disappointment just in case God doesn’t answer our prayers.
“Not my will, but yours, be done” is our way of placing our lives back in the Father’s hands, even though we feel our lives will completely fall apart if he doesn’t give us what we pray for.
And in those desperate moments, we will not be able to pray it with any degree of sincerity if we haven’t invested in our relationship with God to such an extent that we have experienced his love and goodness to us.
We won’t be able to pray this with any kind of sincerity if we don’t desire God more than whatever it is we’re praying for.
And that is ultimately what drives Jesus to pray this. He wants to be spared. He wants to escape suffering. Absolutely.
But he wants his Father more.
Conclusion
When they arrived at this place on the mountain, Jesus told his disciples (v. 40), “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” And in v. 46, he says the same thing again.
He insists on it, because that’s what he’s been doing. In this moment, although it’s not explicit in the text, I think that Jesus was under the most severe temptation of his life—at best, a temptation to despair, and at worst, a temptation to escape.
But he prays in order to escape temptation, and he tells the disciples to pray as he is praying.
And no wonder—Jesus’s prayer here is exactly what we need.
So if I could summarize what his prayer teaches us in this passage, I would say two things.
First of all: Pray what you’ve got.
Prayer can be really intimidating for a lot of people, for a very simple reason: we don’t know what to say. We’re afraid of doing it wrong, or we just can’t think of anything, or we’re afraid of saying the same thing to God we’ve already said a million times (like he’ll get bored with us or something), or because, frankly, we’re so angry we’re afraid of offending him.
Jesus’s prayer should do away with all of that.
In his humanity, Christ is completely transparent before the Father. He doesn’t hesitate to show great emotion, and to be vulnerable before his Father.
And he’s honest with the Father about what he wants. He doesn’t pull any punches, or try to pray something presentable.
The hardest part of praying is getting started, opening up that dialogue.
So pray what you’ve got.
Don’t worry about boring God, or not being eloquent, or even making theological mistakes. Say whatever you have, say whatever you feel, say whatever you need. No matter how frivolous or embarrassing or incorrect.
Pray what you’ve got.
The second thing is this: After praying what you’ve got, go to the Bible for more.
Along with his honesty, Jesus reminds himself of what is true. He reminds himself of the Father’s goodness and love to him, and he places himself back in the Father’s hands, trusting him that his will is good.
If we only pray what we’ve got, necessarily all of our prayers are going to be incredibly self-centered. We’re going to tell him what we need, what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling. And he wants to hear that. But he also wants us to know what he knows, what he has promised, what he has done.
So no matter how much or how little you have to pray, always go to the Bible for more. Use the Bible as fuel for prayer. Don’t be afraid to actually pray the Bible back to God.
Pray what you’ve got, and go back to the Bible for more.
Brothers and sisters, learn from Jesus here, and pray like Jesus prayed. And when you do, remember, and marvel at, the glory of our Lord, who while maintaining every attribute of his divinity, took on our humanity. Let us remember that he knows what it’s like to suffer—what it’s like to have to pray like this.
And let us run to him for comfort and rescue, knowing he is still praying for us today.
