Jesus struggles this week – and he struggles on his own.
His disciples by this point in the week aren’t much use. They fall asleep.
Jesus says exasperated “couldn’t you stay awake?” We all nod off. I’ve had to
go to sunny Crawley for meetings with the District Chair yesterday and then
back again for another one today. Yesterday driving home I felt my eyelids
starting to droop- so I pulled over in the Ashdown Forest on the A22 and had
half an hour’s doze. This afternoon I visited a Supernumerary and woke him up
from his sleep! We nod off and miss important stuff sometimes – I have Match of
the Day on on a Saturday night. I rarely see any matches!!! Jesus bids his
friends to stay awake and keep watch to respond to the world. Eugene
Peterson, in The Message, paraphrases a verse in Matthew 26 this way: "He
plunged into a sinkhole of dreadful agony." Suffering terrible sorrow and
anxiety, he wants the disciples to keep watch. There was no requirement of
courage at this point. He did not ask them to defend him or do anything heroic.
He merely asked them to wait, to stand and keep vigil with him. They’d all said
“we will die with you!” Moments later they are asleep.
I read a writing of John Wesley at 71- my sight
is considerably better now, and my nerves firmer, than they were (30 years
ago)..The grand cause is, the good pleasure of God, who doeth whatsoever
pleaseth Him.
The chief means are:
1. My
constantly rising at four, for about fifty years.
2. My
generally preaching at five in the morning, one of the healthiest exercises in
the world. 3. My never traveling less, by sea or land, than four thousand five
hundred miles in a year. All his preachers today are lazy compared to that
agenda. Jesus simply wants some support in the darkness and finds none. The
disciples are shattered – I think we would have been, but this story says to us
rest when it is going well, you need your energy to respond to the hard times.
We are asleep spiritually when we doze away and don’t respond when we need to
respond.
We need to have something to say about the
events in Belgium today, we need to be awake and alert to what is happening in
our own country with benefit cuts, we need to be a church that is awake to the
needs of people who we work with every day. We must not doze off and hope when
we wake up the problem will have gone away. This story challenges me to respond
with energy – – a constant
challenge. We can sleep, we can ignore, but that isn’t the Christian call and
the message of this week. I remember the lady who used to nod
off and snore through the Sisterhood at Kinsbourne Green Methodist Church where
I was lay worker from 1991 to 1994 – and the day she woke up with a start,
looked at me and said “Good God, are you still speaking?”!!!
This bit of Matthew’s Gospel is an intimate
portrait of an honest and frightened Jesus who submits on his own forsaken to
the will of God, and of us who aren’t up to staying with him, dozy, exhausted
people who cannot stay the course. One Maundy Thursday in a previous
appointment I asked a congregation to sit for an hour in silence after a Maundy
Thursday supper to watch and pray and listen for God. No one lasted the hour. One of them only lasted
three and a half minutes!
So as Holy Week proceeds, we ask for
forgiveness. We ask Jesus to forgive us that we are not there. We are too
tired. We ask Jesus to forgive us for leaving him to struggle alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment