Two Gardens

Have you ever noticed the way some things in scripture are like bookends?  Those types of things really stand out to me and I like to investigate them to see if they really do have a purpose beyond the telling of a story. 

Today I was thinking about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and when I think like this I am usually out walking and asking God to direct my thoughts, to teach me from the scriptures I am pondering.   The passage in question, from the Gospel of Mark, tells of Jesus being agonized and in prayer, to the Father over His impending torture and crucifixion.  Luke’s gospel adds insight in letting us know that the prospect of the coming events were so hard for Jesus to take in that his sweat was with drops of blood.   In no uncertain terms, the bible lets us know that what lay before Jesus was horrific.  He was soul sick. 
His friends were there to watch with Him, but they were sleepy, worn out with sorrow as Luke says.  Emotionally spent, they slept.  But Jesus prayed dropping to the ground; He begged His Father to change the course, to change the future, to rescue Him.  That is not all He prayed though.  He also prayed “Not my will, but Yours.”    Three times we are told He prayed and asked God to remove what was ahead.  Three times He begged the Father to rescue Him and three times He also prayed for the Father to have His way.

The answer that He got from His Father was that there was to be no rescue; the course and the future would stay the same.  The answer was no. The plan was to go forward and an angel was sent to strengthen Him in order that He could continue on and so He did.

There was another garden scene, eons before, where others of God’s children lived.  A lovely place with all anyone could want and need, to include friendship with God.  These two, living in the garden,  were challenged about following God; it was so easy something must be missing. They were challenged about God’s integrity, about His love for them.  Did He really give them all they could want?  Perhaps there was more, and perhaps it was easily acquired.  Without the least bit of struggle or thought, without prayer or discussion with the God Who put them there in the garden,  the two responded to the call of God on their lives by saying “Not your will, but mine.”   You were not for us, You don’t love us, You have kept something back. “Not your will, but ours.”   And so the long trek to decay began, the fracture of love, of intimacy; the destruction of purpose and being all began in a garden.   My will, not yours. 

But see how the undoing of Jesus, is the undoing of the curse. Observe how the soul deep sorrow of Jesus is the unraveling of the soul condemning guilt of all.   His choice to do the will of God, not His own will, began the rollback of decay, the fracture began to heal, and intimacy could now be mended.  In the garden where destruction came all seemed lost, so lost the two were kicked out forever, until in another garden recovery took  the shape of the Savior’s bowed head and the words, “Not My will, but Thine.”