Take This Cup From Me

Jesus, the Master Teacher, taught His disciples a new way to pray.

But He did more than teach them to break away from the forms into which they had fallen. He painted a portrait of God as a Father with the words “Our Father.” How the disciples must have grappled to grasp the panorama unfolding before them! Elohim is our Father! And we are His adored children! The disciples had forgotten the Father’s love. It had been buried beneath the minutia of human-made requirements for centuries.

Jesus came to change that, and in Love’s ultimate gift, a blood-soaked cross was raised and thrust into the soil, and the Lamb of God was sacrificed for all.

But before He went to Calvary, Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane—a place the disciples recognized as one of His favorite places to pray.

On this night, however, there seemed to be a desperation, a raw urgency in Jesus’ need to pray. Suffering immeasurable agony, their Master asked them to pray. And they did—until they fell asleep. They never noticed His blood dripping onto the ground where He lay stretched out in agony. As He writhed in pain, a new prayer was wrung from His heart: “Father, . . . please take this cup of suffering away from me” (Luke 22:42, NLT).

In that one agonized sentence, Jesus revealed how to pray from a place of desperation and pain. We are so familiar with the gentle rhythm of the Lord’s Prayer.

We teach it to our children. We give it melody and sing it in worship. We cling to it when walking through the valley, and we rejoice that one day, His kingdom, power, and glory will last forever! But in the Gethsemane prayer, Jesus shows us how to pray when life has crushed us. In asking for the cup of suffering to be removed, the honesty of Jesus’ cry teaches us that we can be just as honest. We can safely come before Him in brokenhearted, openhearted pain and pray our imperfect, impertinent, inappropriate prayers to the One we call Father. Without the Gethsemane prayer, there would have been no victory cry of “He is risen!” on Resurrection Sunday. When we are broken by pain, let us pray like Jesus and trust ourselves to the love of our Father. Authenticity can form the bridge between our brokenness and surrender.

Lean into Him today. He is only a heartbeat away.

Karen Pearson