Maundy Thursday - A Kingdom Of Love, Not Grabbing Power - Brian Zahnd

The Garden of Gethsemane: Jesus Chooses His Path - Jeff Wiersma

The time in the garden reminds us that Jesus chose his path, and that we can choose our own as well.

[Jesus and his disciples] came to an area called Gethsemane. Jesus told them, “Sit here while I pray. “ He took Peter, James, and John with him and began to be filled with horror and great dread. And he said to them, “My soul is crushed by sorrow to the point of death!”


In the first hours of Good Friday, Jesus knew what would happen if he followed God’s will that day; violent arrest, cruel torture, public humiliation, and brutal execution. For obvious reasons, this troubled him greatly.

But from our standpoint in history, this can seem strange to us - thinking of Jesus as having fears and doubts, as asking for a way out, as needing human compassion - because we know how this story ends. But try to put yourself in Jesus’ shoes that night and imagine facing what he was facing.

In the garden, Jesus prayed in anguish and asked for a way out. He prayed like a man who knew he would be hurt by his friend’s abandoning him and the betrayals of Judas, Peter, and his own countrymen who would hand him over to the Romans to be killed. Jesus agonized like a man who would feel the excruciating pain of being whipped, made to carry his own cross after being whipped, and then being crucified on that cross. He prayed as a man who knew that if he would follow God’s will, there would be indescribable suffering.

In the garden, Jesus was unmistakably human. When he says to his disciples, “The spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh is weak,” you get the feeling that he was saying it as much about himself as he was saying about them.

And yet, Jesus followed through as a human who decided to follow God’s will and give love sacrificially. The time in the garden reminds us that Jesus chose his path, and that we can choose our own as well.

We can follow the path that our competitive culture lays out - living in a way that looks out for number one, striving for comfort without regard for its effect on others, ignoring the outcast, condemning the poor, treading on the orphan and window and migrant, and seeing people’s value only in terms of what they can do for us.

Or … we can follow Jesus’ example and say to God, “Not my will, but yours be done."

The Last Supper: A Whole New Kind Of Kingdom - Jeff Wiersma

Jesus loved to teach in parables. At this Passover supper, he was trying to teach his disciples that the new kingdom God was launching was not concerned with taking or maintaining power.

When Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table, he said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” He did the same with the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is ... my blood, poured out for you.”

When Jesus broke the bread and passed the cup with his disciples to celebrate Passover, he gave them a tangible symbol of his impending death. Jesus identified himself as the sacrificial lamb from the Hebrew story of Passover and deliverance from slavery in Egypt, an analogy that was unmistakable to these Jewish men who were his followers.

Can you imagine the disciple’s confusion? Jesus had told them that he was the Messiah; the promised one sent from God, the one whose arrival their people have been waiting centuries for. They believed that the Messiah would forcefully lead them out of the oppression of Empire and establish a new kingdom of Israel. The disciples were expecting the Messiah to be like the Moses of the Passover story, not the lamb that was slaughtered. Yet Jesus is speaking of himself as the sacrifice!

It can be difficult from our perspective 2,000 years later to remember that the disciples had no way of knowing that Easter would follow Jesus’ execution. After all, every lamb which they had seen serve as the Passover sacrifice did not miraculously come back to life.

But the Messiah being a suffering servant and not a violent conqueror is what Jesus’ life was all about. At this Passover supper, he was trying to teach his disciples that the new kingdom God was launching was not concerned with taking or maintaining power. Jesus’ mission as the Messiah wasn’t about giving those carrying out oppression a taste of their own medicine. The Messiah's work was not playing the same game as, nor turning the tables on, those doing harm - because violence and oppression dehumanize both the perpetrator and the victim.

Rather, Jesus’ mission was about setting an entirely new table where, by grace, all are rehumanized and free from the cycles of oppression, violence, and hate. Jesus is saying that sacrificial acts of love are the way that God’s kingdom works to reaffirm the basic, inherent dignity of all.

I’m sure that all of us have seen instances when a small act of kindness and giving has set amazing transformations into motion. Jesus understood this quite well. Throughout his life, Jesus transformed ordinary loaves of bread into something extraordinary; moments of radical, unqualified love for whoever needed love at that time, regardless of and in intentional subversion of the oppressive social order of that time.

At the last supper, Jesus transformed an ordinary meal into the launch of God’s extraordinary kingdom of love and grace.