God Was In Christ: An Advent Reading Of Luke 22

 Day 22 Luke Chapter 22

“And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground. When He rose from prayer, He came to the disciples and found them sleeping from sorrow, and said to them, ‘Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not enter into temptation’” {vv.44-46 NASB}.

This verse touches me. It really makes me ponder the humanness of Jesus. He was fully God, but He was also fully man. You cannot ignore Jesus’ humanity or you will never fully grasp the depths of Gethsemane or your own humanity when you are faced with choices like that of Jesus. Jesus could have gone His own way and followed His own will. But thankfully, He chose to follow hard after God and to fulfill the will of the Father. Our salvation was on the cusp as He cried out in anguished prayer, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done” {v. 42 NAS}. He obeyed the Father—sealing our salvation. The curse that came on Adam in the garden to toil by the sweat of his brow is broken by the Redeemer of the world in a garden by the blood-sweat from His brow.

In His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt – indeed, the one upon whom all human guilt ultimately falls and the one who does not turn it away but bears it humbly and in eternal love… As the human being who has entered reality, Jesus becomes guilty. But because His historical existence, His incarnation, has its sole basis in God’s love for human beings, it is the love of God that makes Jesus become guilty. Out of selfless love for human beings, Jesus leaves His state as the one without sin and enters into the guilt of human beings. He takes it upon Himself.[1]

Each of us will face our own Gethsemane or many of them perhaps. Though we do not bear the salvation of the world on our shoulders, we each must choose in the hard places who we will follow…our fleshly desires or the will of the Father.

Advent is about Jesus’ birth in a manger, that Holy crèche on that Holy night, but will we make room for Him? Not just as our Savior but also our Lord in the hard places—the hard choices—in this fallen world.

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[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is In The Manger (Westminster: John Knox Press., 2010), 34.