Address given at Templederry on Sunday 13th April 2014, Easter 6 - Palm Sunday, after reading Matthew's Passion Gospel
Wow, that
was a long reading (Matthew 26:14- 27:66)! It is surely good for us to hear the whole story
of Christ’s Passion from beginning to end at least once a year, to better
appreciate the enormity of those events. But I also feel sure you’ll be glad
to know that I’m not going to preach a long sermon too!
Instead I ask you to reflect with me for a moment on Jesus’s
prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane
‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup
pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’
Jesus is distressed and agitated. He is certain that what he
is doing is the will of God, his loving Father. He knows what is likely to
happen next – his execution as a dangerous agitator, perhaps even the agonising
death of crucifixion.
And he does not want to die – he is a man in the full strength
and vigour of his early 30s, he loves life, he loves his friends, and he loves
his ministry to those who need healing and forgiveness. So he prays to his
loving Father for himself, that his death may be averted - ‘let this
cup pass from me’.
But that is only half his prayer. Even more important for
Jesus than his own distress at the prospect of death is that his loving
Father’s will should be done. So he finishes his prayer with ‘yet not what I want, but what you want’.
This prayer of Jesus should be a model for our own prayers
for our selves, I think. When I desperately wish for something, it is right and
proper for me to pray to God for it. If I cannot ask God for it, who can I ask?
But I must never forget how much more important it is for God’s will to be
done, than for my wish to be granted. So I should always finish a prayer for
myself with Jesus’s words, ‘yet not what I
want, but what you want’.
In the end, like Jesus, we must trust that our loving Father
knows what is best for us.
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