WHEN we read any one in every of the Gospel Passions, we bring to that reading all our other times of reading, hearing, or singing them. Bible scholars mostly agree that they were the earliest parts of the Gospels to be compiled, and that their content (though not the ultimate form given to them by the Evangelists) became fixed and familiar among the many first Christians at an early stage in the event of the New Testament.
Good Friday may appear to be a time to place passion before scholarship, but, in reality, the 2 strengthen one another. To get essentially the most out of Good Friday, as we enter into the Lord’s Passion, we have to be passionate ourselves — about every tiny scrap of knowledge, every jot, every tittle. Something tiny but recent has just jumped out at me. Not having noticed it before, I had obviously not considered it before, either.
It is natural, when reading the Gospels devotionally, to merge the main points right into a single continuous story. The first Christians gave serious thought to merging the 4 Gospels right into a single book. It is nice that they didn’t. So, here is my recent commentary, with apologies to any reader who noticed it years ago: of the 4 Gospels, only John says that each the scene for the betrayal, and the scene for the resurrection, was a garden.
Mark, followed by Matthew, refers to a spot called Gethsemane, on, or near, or more than likely on the foot of, the Mount of Olives. Even today, the Mediterranean gives some idea of the way it might need looked. In a dry landscape, olive trees are marvellously green. Oil from their fruit clinches their miraculous status. Surely, most gardens near Jerusalem would have included olive trees and vines.
Mark and Matthew don’t confer with Gethsemane as a garden. For them, it’s a place of refuge and struggle. There, shockingly vulnerable, Jesus wrestles together with his Father’s will and his own feelings about what’s to return. Luke calls it neither Gethsemane nor a garden. For him it is solely, “the place” on the Mount of Olives where Jesus went every evening at the moment (21.37).
So, John’s insistence that it’s a garden stands out. Saying that Jesus led his disciples to it “across the brook Kidron” fixes its location more precisely. Christians soon connected the place by the Mount of Olives (Luke), called Gethsemane (“oil press”: Mark, Matthew), with John’s garden. The name was probably as self-explanatory as “Mile End”, “Mill Street”, or “Brookfield” could be to us. The mountain’s foot was the perfect place to collect and press the olive harvest.
Connecting Gethsemane with the garden is a guess, but an excellent guess. Next, John takes us beyond guesswork into the realm of cosmic meaning. His Gospel began by recalling Genesis (“In the start”). Important things occur to human beings in gardens, in line with the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. John evokes that primordial starting by explicitly locating Jesus’s betrayal, and burial, in gardens. He also makes a garden the place where Mary Magdalene is the primary to witness Jesus’s resurrection.
John has one final thing to say about gardens as places where cosmic meaning is disclosed. It is one other one in every of those details that look so easy, but mean a lot. While Peter is sneaking about, hoping to see what is going on, a relative of the person whose ear Peter had cut off asks him: “Did I not see you within the garden with him?” (18.26).
In the garden of Eden, the person and the girl each transgressed by doing something that God had commanded them to not do. If God saw that as a betrayal, he didn’t say so. A price needed to be paid for the disobedience (Genesis 3.15-19); but God was still their protector, because he was first their creator. It is as if, by the acting of making humankind in the primary place, God has made himself eternally accountable for our well-being.
Like the person and the girl in Eden, Peter has a likelihood to live as much as the perfect that he was meant to be. Unlike them, he had even promised to accomplish that (John 13.36-38). But he failed, denying that either Jesus or the garden were anything to do with him. In a garden, he’s about to find that failure just isn’t the top of the story.
