In college when I was working on term papers, I sometimes stayed up all night — and would be overcome by loneliness about 3 a.m. when it seemed no one else in the world was awake.
I remember those nights whenever I read the Gospel scene about the disciples falling asleep after Jesus had expressly begged them to stay awake.
That night he suffered so much emotional pain — as he foresaw the brutal and gruesome death that awaited him — that we are told he began sweating blood.
Worse yet, he went through this grueling experience in the valley of darkness all alone.
Sometimes it seems that solitude is the true test of faith. When times are good and we’re surrounded by friends, we have a sense of security. It’s like being a toddler who plays happily in the yard under the watchful eye of his mother.
But when that security is ripped away, then what? In the garden, Jesus, all alone, throws himself face down on the ground and begs the Father, “Let this chalice pass from me.”
This is the petition of the patient who learns her cancer is terminal, the scream of the mother whose child has died in an accident, the plea of the soldier heading into bloody battle.
We might conclude Jesus’ poignant prayer wasn’t answered — since he drank deeply from the chalice of suffering the next day — until we remember the final words of his petition: “Not my will but thy will be done.”
For Jesus, “Thy will be done” meant accepting humiliation, beating and crucifixion, while for us it could be cancer, stroke, disability — or the deaths of people we hold most dear.
When everything is torn away and we are left gasping, face down in the garden, we may cry out like Esther in the Old Testament: “Come and help me because I am alone and I have only you, O Lord.”
I imagine her prayer echoing in the heart of a parent sitting all night by a child’s hospital bed. I hear it in my own heart when I awaken to a strangely empty house each morning.
As Gerald Vann writes in “The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God,” when faced with trials that seem too great to bear, we must remember “we are not asked to accept them light-heartedly and we may pray to be delivered from them.”
And when we feel alone in the valley of darkness, we must recall the psalmist’s words, “I fear no evil, for thou art with me.”
In the garden, Jesus was painfully aware that the cross and the tomb came next — and Judas would betray him, Peter would deny him, the crowds would demand his blood and his disciples would flee.
Still, the lesson of the garden is that when we feel most alone, God is still there.
“My soul is sorrowful even unto death,” Jesus said — but still he graciously surrendered to his father’s will. Really, when we are lying face down in our own garden, can we do any less?
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