by Walter Wangerin
“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.”
Luke 22:42
Night. There is a cold light falling from the indifferent stars—a light like the finest of snows, pale on the ground, pale on the hair and shoulders of a sad band of men moving outside the city.
They pause by a grove of black trees. Four men separate themselves and enter the trees.
Listen! One man is groaning. His breath comes in quick pants, compulsively. Listen: “Oh. Oh. Oh, God. Oh.” He goes alone, now, deeper among the trees—while the other three arrange themselves on the ground, their backs against the tree trunks. These three begin to nod. Soon, they sleep.
The woods are pale and silent.
That one man, totally alone, is swaying back and forth as if dizzy, his face in his hands. Suddenly he crumples to the ground. “Abba! Abba!” The sound is strangled in his throat. His fingers dig dirt like the roots of the trees. His chin and his beard grind against the earth.
“Abba, Father, I don’t want to do this. Please! You can do anything; then take this cup away from me—”
The man’s voice is hoarse, a kind of guttural barking. But then he sucks air and howls at the top of his lungs, “Hell is in that cup! Death and damnation are in that cup! My Father, my Father, it will tear me away from you! No, I don’t want to do this! No! Sin is in that cup—and if I drink it you won’t look at me, you will loathe me, I will hate myself! I don’t want to drink it! Abba, Abba, take the cup away from me–”
The man twists his body underneath the trees, then holds himself in a tense, unnatural posture, his face upward, his eyes shut, his breathing sharp through his teeth. He grimaces, as if smiling, then whispers almost inaudibly, whispers as soft as the leaves: “Nevertheless . . . not what I want . . . what you want . . . do.”
“Lord,” the disciples had asked in an earlier, easier time, “teach us to pray.” And Jesus had answered by teaching them certain words: “When you pray,” he said, “say …”
The prayer he spoke then we call The Lord’s.
But Jesus teaches the same thing twice. And the second lesson is not words only; deeds make up the prayer as well, and passion and experience—the whole person dramatically involved.
—Jesus cries his deepest and desperate desire: that the hour, by the power of his Father, pass away from him. This is the living substance of the sixth petition: Save us from the time of trial —Jesus pleads three times, “Remove this cup from me,” the plea of the seventh petition: Deliver us from evil. —But under every request of his own, he places an attitude of faithful obedience to his Father, saying, “Yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.” Here is the third petition, which prepares us properly for any answer God may give all other petitions: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. —Implicit, hereafter, in his entering into “the hour” of trial after all is his personal conviction that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” Jesus, now more than ever in his ministry, is the living embodiment of the second petition, Thy kingdom come. Right now, his acceptance of the Father’s will is the coming of that kingdom here!
—And he begins both prayers the same. But whereas the first might have seemed a formal address to “Our Father,” this latter cry is a howl, a spontaneous, needful plea: “Abba, Father!”
Here is a child who cannot survive apart from this relationship.
By crying “Abba!” he hurls himself at the holy parent: he runs like a child; like a child he begs attention; but also like a perfect child he trusts his daddy to do right and well.
When Jesus teaches us to pray, he does not teach plain recitation. Rather, he calls us to a way of being. He makes of prayer a doing. And by his own extreme example, he shows that prayer is the active relationship between ourselves, dear little children, and the dear Father, Abba.