What’s your worst fear? A fear of public failure, unemployment, or heights? The fear that you’ll never find the right spouse or enjoy good health? The fear of being trapped, abandoned, or forgotten?
These are real fears, born out of legitimate concerns. Yet left unchecked, they metastasize into obsessions. The step between prudence and paranoia is short and steep. Prudence wears a seat belt. Paranoia avoids cars. Prudence washes with soap. Paranoia avoids human contact. Prudence saves for old age. Paranoia hoards even trash. Prudence prepares and plans. Paranoia panics. Prudence calculates the risk and takes the plunge. Paranoia never enters the water.
How many people spend life on the edge of the pool, consulting caution, ignoring faith, and never taking the plunge? Happy to experience life vicariously through others. Preferring to take no risk. For fear of the worst, they never enjoy life at its best.
- Jesus was not immune to fear, and He did more than speak about fear. He faced it.
The decisive acts of the gospel drama are played out on two stages — Gethsemane’s garden and Golgotha’s cross. Friday’s cross witnessed the severest suffering. Thursday’s garden staged the profoundest fear. It was here, amid the olive trees, that Jesus
fell to the ground. He prayed that, if it were possible, the awful hour awaiting Him might pass Him by. ‘Abba, Father,’ He cried out, ‘everything is possible for You. Please take this cup of suffering away from Me. Yet I want Your will to be done, not Mine’. — Mark 14:35–36 NLT
A reader once called me both on the phone and on the carpet because of what I wrote on this passage. He didn’t appreciate the way I described Christ as having “eyes wide with a stupor of fear.”1 I told him he needed to take his complaint to a higher level. Gospel-writer Mark is the one who paints the picture of Jesus as pale faced and trembling.
Horror... came over Him. — Mark 14:33 NEB
The word horror is “used of a man who is rendered helpless, disoriented, who is agitated and anguished by the threat of some approaching event.”2
Matthew agreed. He described Jesus as depressed and confused (Matt. 26:373); sorrowful and troubled (RSV); anguish[ed] and dismay[ed] (NEB).
We’ve never seen Christ like this. Not in the Galilean storm, at the demoniac’s necropolis, or on the edge of the Nazarene cliff.
We’ve never heard such screams from His voice or seen His eyes this wide. And never, ever, have we read a sentence like this:
He sank into a pit of suffocating darkness. — Mark 14:33 The Message
This is a weighty moment. God has become flesh, and Flesh is feeling fear full bore. Why? Of what was Jesus afraid?
It had something to do with a cup.
Take away this cup of suffering. — Luke 22:42 NCV
Cup, in biblical terminology, was more than a drinking utensil. Cup equaled God’s anger, judgment, and punishment. When God took pity on apostate Jerusalem, He said,
See, I have taken out of your hand the cup that made you stagger... the goblet of my wrath. — Isaiah 51:22
Through Jeremiah, God declared that all nations would drink of the cup of His disgust:
Take from My hand this cup filled to the brim with My anger, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink from it. — Jeremiah 25:15 NLT
According to John, those who dismiss God
must drink the wine of God’s anger. It has been poured full strength into God’s cup of wrath. And they will be tormented with fire and burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and the Lamb. — Revelation 14:10 NLT
