He Died So We Could
What Gethsemane means for the hard seasons nobody talks about in church
This Easter season felt a little different for me.
It’s easy to sing about God being good when life is good. But what do you do with that when you’re in a hard season? When the job hasn’t come through, the marriage is struggling, the diagnosis is scary, and “God is in a good mood” feels like something people say from a stage, not something you can actually hold onto?
I’ve been sitting with that question. And this Lenten season, on a three-day spiritual work retreat, I think I found something that cracked it open for me.
I’m a Protestant who works for a Catholic foundation, which has given me a depth of faith I haven’t experienced before. This year that meant spending three days at a work retreat sitting with Jesus’ suffering. Yay, fun, right?
As a Protestant with a huge prosperity gospel/charismatic/God is in a good mood background, the thought of spending a week looking at a pained image of Jesus on the cross is almost jarring. “No, he’s not on the cross. The tomb is empty. He died, so we don’t have to!”
Until one of the speakers at this retreat flipped that on its head. “What if he died so we could?” he asked.
I rewatched The Chosen, as one does over Easter, and I kept coming back to Jesus in Gethsemane. We live in a fairly graphic world. We watch movies of people being tortured, dying brutally. It’s horrible, right? It was the same in the Bible. The idea of torture, beatings, Roman cruelty wasn’t new by the time Jesus went to the cross. Terrifying, of course. But to the extent that Jesus sweat blood? I feel like it had to have been more than that.
When he said, “Take this cup from me,” I don’t think he meant the cup of Roman torture. More and more, I’m taken by the idea that he meant my suffering. Our suffering. Our distance from God. I think he felt our sadness. Our sin. Our mistakes. Our choices. Everything that depresses, disgusts, disillusions. I think he felt our disease, our pain. Peter’s denial. Judas’ betrayal. His mother’s pain. The world’s rejection. You and me, and all the ways we would fail. He felt every time we do what we know we shouldn’t.
You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes in your final moments? I think that dark night in Gethsemane and everything leading up to the cross, was all of time’s dark night of the soul, placed on his shoulders at once.
By the end of the retreat, Jesus on the cross brought me comfort not indignation. 30 years into my Christian walk, I’ve come to realize the “God is always in a good mood” theology isn’t just incomplete, it’s actually costing us people. There are women sitting in your church right now who are suffering and being handed a smile and a worship song. And they’re leaving. Not because they lost their faith, because nobody in the building would acknowledge their pain.
Yes, he died so we didn’t have to. But also, he died so we could, knowing he’s already been there. He’s already felt the pain of our rejection and the shame that keeps us separated. He is well acquainted with every excuse we use to keep our walls up and our distance from him. He’s already felt it all. He already knows it all.
Jesus didn't perform “God is in a good mood” from a safe distance. He went into the worst of it first. Which means the church that follows him has no business doing otherwise.
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet he did not sin.” Hebrews 4:15
“If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9
Meaning you don’t have to clean yourself up to come back to God. He already knows. He knows your ADHD brain that can’t pray more than 30 seconds at a time. He knows the exhaustion of trying to have faith when everything feels like it’s going wrong. He knows how it hurts to be rejected by those who are supposed to love you. He knows the wrestle you have with your past, the consequences of old addictions, the images you can’t get out of your brain, the pain you can’t leave behind. He already knows. He was already punished for it.
He can’t be recrucified.
So whatever season you’re in right now: the one that makes it hard to sing the songs, hard to raise your hands, hard to believe he’s in a good mood, you don’t have to perform your way back to him. You don’t have to have it together first. And if the church hurt you by performing at you while you were drowning, that's not Jesus. This is Jesus. In the garden. Already inside it.
He already went there. He already knows. He already paid.
That’s not a reason to stay stuck. That’s the reason you can move. And if he is who he says he is, he’ll respond.
The tomb is empty. And he’s not far off watching you figure it out alone. He’s already been inside the exact thing you’re carrying.
That’s what Easter changed for me this year.
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