Alone (Mark 14:33-46) Observation and Interpretation

Strength comes from having encouragement and support from others when we face horrible difficulties. Sometimes the very worst thing that can happen to us is that we are alone. And this is exactly what was true for our Lord as he walked across the streets of Jerusalem on His way to the garden of Gethsemane when He announces to His men that they are all going to desert Him and that He is going to be left alone.

As we work our way through this passage I find it interesting that Mark has deliberately set up this narrative in such a way that though he never mentions the word, you simply have to read it to understand that Jesus was feeling the greatest burden of all time and space and eternity, He was feeling alone and His aloneness will increase.

We will see twice in His passion that Jesus was alone: once in Gethsemane and once on Calvary. We see the Son of God in terrible personal anguish, in horrible physical pain and in an overwhelming spiritual struggle- we see him alone, because no one could share this terrible pain and anguish with Him- Not even His Father. Mark’s to the persecuted Roman readers he wrote to is this: Jesus had to bear our sin alone!

There was no one to stand with Him. This is a great comfort to those suffering in Rome and it is a sobering insight for us. What is most significant is that it was through the process of aloneness that Jesus learned to do what we must learn to do- that is, He learned to obey. He learned to go where He didn’t want to go because that is where the Father wanted Him to go. That is a terrible lesson to learn. For Jesus, our sin was an overwhelming burden- so much that in order to prepare for the task at hand, He prayed.

So we begin in Mark 14:33 where we read that they came to the garden of Gethsemane. It was a small garden like enclosure among many such ones that were on the Mount of Olives. There would have been a place where there would have been an olive press where they would take the olives and press them and generate the olive oil that they would use. This was a place where Jesus often went, a place well known to His disciples. this was not an unusual thing in His life.

What is most interesting is the way Mark punctuates his letter with three specific times of prayer in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now you know the Lord prayed many more times than just three in His ministry but there are only three mentioned in the Gospel of Mark. They come at strategic hingepoints in His Gospel and there is therefore a very clear message that comes through and that is that Jesus prayed in order to have fellowship with His Father in order to face the task to which He was called! For example, Jesus prayed to maintain his Fellowship with God in the beginning of His ministry- a very simple statement in Mark 1:35

Mark 1:35 Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.

So Christ prayed at the beginning of His ministry. It was a time of darkness, before dawn when all was quiet and still. He came to a place of solitude- Jesus was alone. This came at a time if we read the context , when the crowd was seeking to find Him because He was a miracle worker and they wanted Him to do His miracles for them. They wanted to give Him a great and wonderful position because they wanted to use Him, and He knew this was exactly what the Father did not want to mark His life.

(As an aside, I would out here that the very things the crowd wanted to force upon Jesus were some to the same things Satan had tempted Him wih in the wilderness before His public ministry began. They are also some of the perogatives the Antichrist will come to embrace in the end times. Satan had been given the leave to bestow worldly power, and in the end, a false messiah will gladly assume the power Christ refused.)

The crowd wanted to draw Him away from His true purpose. He knew His disciples would be attracted to this crowd, in fact, they went out searching for Him. Peter came to him and said “what are you doing here- everybody is seeking you!”. But our Lord wanted to establish His disciples, to teach them the TRUE reason He had for coming and it was not to focus on temporal miracles, but on eternal power and reality.

When we come to Mark 6, we come to the middle of our Lord’s ministry. We come to a very strategic of time in the development of His message and the training of His disciples. We see Him pray again- and once again He is praying to maintain fellowship with His Father. It is very interesting in Mark 6:46 that after bidding this crowd farewell He departed to the mountain to pray.

Mark 6:45 Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd.

46 After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray.

47 When evening came, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he was alone on land.

48 He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. About the fourth watch of the night he went out to them, walking on the lake.

This is the day that there were 5000 men plus women and children that Jesus fed. So this was now evening- he stayed there until the fourth watch of the night which would have been very much into the early morning hours. Once again we see Him in darkness and solitude.

He took advantage of a time when others were not around.

That darkness should not be missed- perhaps it sends a message that in moments of grave concern in our Lord’s life, He sought His Father when others would not interfere and He could be alone. This crowd, of course expected Him to become King- they too were attracted to His miracles but He prayed because just as He wanted to establish His disciples now He wants to develop His disciples and just as He didn’t want them to think of Him as just a miracle worker, now He does not want them to think of Him as the King who has come to establish political power. That is what this crowd wanted him to do. He wanted them focused on what He was teaching them. This was the most critical time of training for His disciples and so He goes and prays. Just as He prayed to maintain His fellowship with His Father, so He does here in the middle of His ministry.

And so he does now in Gethsemane at the end of His ministry. We have seen him pray early in the morning, we have seen Him pray in the evening and into the night. Now we come to the middle of the night,the end of His ministry, after midnight- they have walked across Jerusalem streets into the full and total darkness. This time He has people with Him, but we will see that He has never been more alone than with the three who he takes with Him.

This time in darkness, alone in solitude, He needs them to stand with Him, but He knows they are not going to stand with Him. He knows they will desert Him. He knows there is no human hope- He has already said this, settled and defined it. They are about to prove they cannot even pray with Him, let alone stand with Him.

But- He is praying to maintain His fellowship with His Father. But this time he discovers that He is going to be UTTERLY ALONE. This is what He is going to discover and to realize in the depth of His being. His concern here is not with physical death- that is not the problem. His concern here is that the fellowship that He had always had with His Father is going to be broken. He is going to be ALONE.

He is not going to experience just physical death- for you must understand that the penalty for sin is not just physical death- that is only the expression, the symptom, the ultimate impact that sin has upon us. The ultimate penalty for sin is SPIRITUAL death- total, utter, absolute separation from the father, and if Jesus is going to take our place,and drink our cup, He must not only take our place physically- He must take our place spiritually. In some way that we can never grasp, the infinite fellowship of eternal Father and Son will be broken! For He will die and He will for a period of time on that cross be separated from His Father.

It is for this reason that Jesus prays with such great anguish.

Mark 14:33 He took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled.

Here we are going to see three ways in which this anguish expresses itself: First, a personal anguish. Why did he take these three disciples with Him? It’s not just that they were part of the inner circle. It’s not just because these three would have perhaps the greatest ministry, at least the ones we know the most about. It was because of the kind of men they were, and what they had yet to learn.

Peter- that self confident, brash, arrogant, cocky man who just said He would never fall, and now He can’t even stay awake. James and John- those ambitious, self seeking men. Remember them? They brought their mother around in order to negotiate a deal with Jesus. There is evidence that their mother, Salome was Jesus’s aunt. They were calling in the chips, playing their cards- what we want is Right and Left. “Can you drink my cup?” “Yes, we can!”- They forgot their Old Testament at that point- they thought that cup meant a place of position, power and recognition and honor and influence and all these kinds of things. This is not what that cup meant. The cup of the Old Testament is the cup of the terrible, terrible wrath of God poured out. They did not understand that.

For a man to sweat drops of blood- would this not have been as anguishing and painful as anything you can think of? It is amazing that even in His most painful moments in all of His life, he continues to develop His disciples, to teach them and help them learn what it meant to follow Him.

But they would fail, and they were going to leave Him alone.

Jesus prayed with great personal anguish because these friends were going to fail Him. They could not even pray for themselves. They could not even be alert.

He also prays with great physical anguish. Doctor Luke gives us a particular insight in his narrative of this event in Luke

Luke 22:44 And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

Something happened in His physical system, some kind of terrible stress that was so great, there was such a terrible breakdown that His very blood flowed through the pores of His body.

Never think of Calvary as Jesus stepping into a little telephone booth and coming out with a big S on His chest like Superman. Calvary was HELL for Jesus Christ. And He was alone.

He prayed in verses 33-34 with great total anguish- everything about Him- Mark tells us that He began to be very distressed and troubled- it showed up- they see it right in front of them- Here is a man who is moving into an unbelievable sense of alarm- He is in the grip of some sort of shouting horror, marked by an extreme anxiety from which He cannot escape.

Then our Lord is vulnerable. This is the Son of God who created the universe and who holds it together speaking in verse 34 - “My soul is deeply grieved to the of death!” The center of His very essence, His deepest being felt like death itself- being crushed, destroyed and shattered. And He faces it ALONE.

I believe this is when the full impact of the Father’s will hit Him. He came to the father as He had always come to the Father for fellowship, help and strength in times of deepest need.

He withdrew a little beyond them. Luke tells us

Luke 22:41 He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed,

Mark 14:36 “Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

I believe Jesus is being struck here with the horror of Spiritual death. Nobody wants to be crucified, but he could bear physical death if the Father was with Him. Never in his experience either as Son of God or Son of Man had He been separated from the Father- never a moment. For us, we are amazed to be IN the presence of God- not even in Jesus’s busiest moment had He EVER been separated from the presence of God. Take the moist precious person in the world to you and take the fear of separation and you begin to enter in to what this means. When He comes to heaven for help he finds the yawning mouth of Hell awaiting Him, and here is the reality that He would be cut off from the Father- that is what spiritual death IS- ultimate death, the ultimate separation from God- this is why we need salvation! We do not want to spend eternity in a permanent state and condition of alienation and aloneness and darkness and fear- This is why Jesus took it on- if you want a picture of Hell, here it is!

He had to die both physically and spiritually and His infinite fellowship with the father had to be broken- He made Him to be sin for us , He who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in HIM.

Yet He prays for deliverance from this horror. We must be impressed here with the humanity of our Lord! It is never more clear than it is here. I believe it was clear in the manger and of course the cross, but here we have the full view of His emotions- in this passage we see right into His very soul- we see Him praying exactly the way we pray!

Have we not often come to God with the same request? “Father- what you can do is not the issue- I know what you can do- the issue is what is your will?” Did we not come this same way?

Think of the child in desperate prayer crying out to God because of an alcoholic Father, or because the family is breaking up? Do we not see the anguished mate, the parent who does not want a divorce? Do we not see frightened parents pleading for the life of their child? The overwhelmed business person who has done everything possible and is now facing bankruptcy? Has He not become just like us?

He says,” Daddy, Abba”- to this day in Israel Abba is the affectionate term a child uses to relate to his or her father. here Jesus is , as a child. No one else had ever prayed like this before- in Palestine in His day this would have been considered utterly disrespectful to be so familiar with God. But Jesus came to make God familiar to us! But He had to do it ALONE.

He knows this cup is coming. If you want to see the cup, you can see it sipped by the nation of Israel when the Assyrians or Babylonians came. and you can see them scattered and stripped of everything they had, carried away in chains. this was the cup of the wrath of God’s judgment on idolatry, human pride and arrogance. But what you see here in our Lord’s case is not a sip- He will drain the cup of wrath for every sin for all of time! He willingly it all!

Never had there been a time of potential disagreement between the Father and the Son. But there is no sin here, because Jesus, though He has the potential to want not to do this thing, if the Father wants Him to do it, He spells it out- “I will do it!”

What was the cup that Jesus drank? why'd he ask God to take it away

What kind of poison did it hold? what price did He have to pay?

He drank it all and He felt it all- he bore for us all of it's blame

Yet man might never understand just what the cup contained!

If you could feel the hell of every war that was ever waged

The starkness and the sting of death that causes the heathen to rage

If you felt the despair of every slave straining against His chains

Throughout all of history multiplied you might know what the cup contained!

If you could know the horror of every innocent that's ever died

If you could know the damage of every abomination that's tried

If you knew the heart of adulterers- their guilt and all of their shame

Perhaps you could start to comprehend just what the cup contained!

If you could know the deceit of every thief and murderers’ crimes

Or the loneliness of separation from one you'd loved for all time

If you felt the hurt of all the world could you understand so much pain?

Yet Jesus willingly drank the cup though he knew what the cup contained!

The defilement of every woman who has given her body away

The disgrace of every traitor and the hurt of the one betrayed

Yet he drank it all and he felt it all- from eternity it was ordained

God's wrath toward the iniquity of our race was in the cup contained!

This was the cup that Jesus drank and why he asked God to take it away

This was the poison that it held , and the price that He had to pay

He drank it all and He felt it all- he bore for us all of it's blame

Yet man will fail to comprehend just what the cup contained!

7-8-87

Anthony Foster (from a song)

It is never a problem to ask God, if possible, to change the will you sense is there. Never a problem to ask God to do something different than what He is planning. But to act on the desire is where disobedience comes in. In His humanity , the horror of all he faces has fallen upon Him.

But we know Jesus submitted to God’s will. In Hebrews 5 we have a latter day commentary ,on this event.

Heb. 5:7 ¶ During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.

He was heard because the Father said “NO. I will not remove the cup”, but also because the Father said “YES- there will never be a total , eternal break- you will be restored. The resurrection will come. You must become sin and I cannot ABIDE sin there is no other way!” So in that moment when all of the sin of the world is placed upon Jesus, God will turn His back. But when that is over, they will be face to face again!

And that is why Jesus had to do it alone.

Notice what the text goes on to say

Heb. 5:8 Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered

Heb. 5:9 and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him

I thought at one in my life I knew what obedience was. It’s doing what God wants me to do, right?. I suppose it is when God wants me to do something entirely agreeable to me, like marry a woman like Earnie That’s fine.When God wants to give me an opportunity like I have coming to this church and serving you, that’s fine. No problem!

You know that is a form of obedience, but its no OBEDIENCE.

Obedience is doing what you don’t want to do when God wants you to.

Obedience is staying married when you’d rather be divorced.

Obedience is staying with a company you really want to quit and leave.

Obedience is going to an adult child and confessing sin when you’d rather save face.

Obedience is leaving all that is familiar` around you and going to a place God has called you without knowing what will happen.

Sooner or later, what I have learned, is that the bottom line of obedience is some form of death. It is the death of an opportunity we hoped and worked for and planned for, but which we will not realize even though we did what God wanted us to do- The death of a dream we have longed and sacrificed for, The death of a loved one we prayed for , interceded for, pleaded for, but which we cannot prevent. This is dying daily. To continue to trust God and do what He wants- that is obedience.

Sometimes we have to do this alone. Sometimes others shouldn’t or needn’t know what we are going through. Some things we are not free to talk about with others. You face those same kinds of situations- we will never be alone because the Father and Son will never leave or forsake us- he was alone, so we will never , ever be ALONE.

Phil. 2:5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

:6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

:7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

:8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!

:9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,

:10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

:11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

:12 ¶ Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed — not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence — continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,

:13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.

We have a savior who was tested in every way like as we are- even in having to do what Hew would have chosen not to do so He could learn to obey so He can teach us to obey.

Whatever you face, you never have to face it ALONE, because Jesus did. Come to trust Him in ways you never thought possible!