Advent 2024 : 9

 

If you think God does not experience fear, you have not understood Gethsemane. Jesus, having a good idea of what the power coalitions of Jerusalem will do to him, is terrified. Ah, people tell me, but that is the human part of Jesus. But there is no human part of Jesus, that exists separate from some God part. As the Creed of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria says, of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ,

‘we believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;
God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world;
Perfect God, and Perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting;
Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood.
Who although he be God and Man: yet he is not two, but one Christ;
One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God;
One altogether, not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person.
For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man: so God and Man is one Christ.’

Jesus is indivisibly, inseparably God and human. The divine Substance of Jesus and his human Substance, though distinct, are in perfect unity. In his humanity, Jesus offers back to God the life – including the fear – that was God’s own (as we pray at the offertory, ‘of your own do we give to you’).

Centuries before Jesus, we find another man hiding in a garden, Gideon, who is afraid of what Midianite raiders might do, should he fall into their hands. The angel of the Lord – a manifestation of God’s word – appears to him and addresses him as ‘mighty warrior.’ God’s word, of course, is creative: God is calling into being one who will fight those of whom he is, quite reasonably, afraid. The army that gathers to Gideon is too large, and God goes about dispersing it home. Gideon remains afraid, and so God instructs him to sneak into the camp of the very soldiers he fears – a ‘freeze’ act of hiding in plain sight – where he overhears their dismay. T the right moment, light is released, and noise resounds, and the enemy camp is thrown into confusion, turning in on itself. You can read in more detail in Judges 6 & 7.

There are fascinating parallels between the story of Gideon and the Passion narrative that begins with Jesus – and his apprentices – hiding from his enemies in the Garden, where he might hope to remain undiscovered. This is, clearly, his will; and yet he submits to the Father’s wisdom, to the Father’s experience in choosing the right response to threat in any given scenario: flight, fight, freeze, or fawn. And the Father’s wisdom is that this is the moment to fight – which, in God’s mastery is non-violent. So, when soldiers arrive to arrest Jesus, he steps out into the open. The eye-witness John records that the soldiers fall over, as if dead, twice. But Jesus’ apprentices respond in a variety of ways: Peter fights, clumsily, cutting off a man’s ear; most flee the scene (eleven men is too large an army); Peter and another then creep into the very camp of the enemy.

It is not the will of the Father that the Son should die on the cross; nor is it the will of God that anyone should perish. It is the will of God, from before the creation of the world, that, at just the right time, God would become human – and this would transform death from enemy to friend, that cuts us off not from God but from the affliction of sin, for in Christ all human experience is reconciled to God.

It is the will of the Father that the Son should face this particular threat moment in fight, which suggests that he has gathered just the right coalition of the powerless.