Matthew 26 - Monday 9th September

Today’s reading is Matthew 26

Tom writes:

As emotional roller-coasters go, this is a Big One. There’s the room-filling ecstasy of fragrant worship and the untellable exhilaration of unveiling the new covenant. But then heart-stabbing betrayal, soul-crushing isolation and the sourest swill of being let down by your best friend. Never can we think of Jesus as a detached, emotionless God. He knows what it is to be human. In particular it is the description of Gethsemane that I struggle to get my head around.  The level of emotion that Jesus displays and the enormity of the situation is a little too much for my task-centred brain to process.  I tend to just look at the end result and experience a fleeting moment of sadness over the fact that my beloved saviour was roughed up by some upstarts.  But taking this passage on its own for a moment forces me to dwell a little in this agonising garden.  And as I sit here I feel myself starting to well up at Jesus’ declaration “my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”.  Why would Jesus let himself feel such sorrow over the world?  How does he not run from such deep emotion as this?  And how - having embraced such emotion - could he then still drink from the cup for our sakes? 

I’m completely floored by the emotional health of our God.  That he could care so deeply about our sin that it would nearly kill him and yet he could still get up from that prayer and let sin kill him.  This is an emotional God whom we serve and yet in his emotion he never swerves from doing utterly faithful things. I’m desperate to better ride the emotional roller-coaster of life. I want Jesus to help me embrace the ups and downs, finding intimacy with him in both the highs and the lows. And I also want Jesus to help me stay strapped into the Father’s will, no matter how I feel. Still choosing every time to drink the cup the Father puts before me.

Question for reflection

Jesus’ sorrow was, in part, for you. And his drinking of the cup was also for you. What emotions does that stir in you?