The garden is very beautiful.

 And Jesus has come to partake

of  the beauty,

of the quiet grass,

and the strong, but gentle olive trees.

 

 He has come to pray

amidst the greenery and serenity

of the garden of Gethsemane, 

enhanced enchantingly, in the moonlight.

 

It is a time of portent,

a night of decision, a moment for choosing.

 

This drama of freedom

that he’s been directing,

is entering its’ denouement,

its’ final vital phase.

He knows

what he chooses

to do now will be crucial.

Fulfilment and catastrophe

lie waiting in the wings.

 

He could either lead the movement to triumph,

or ruin everything he’s been trying to accomplish.

 

Destiny is heavy in the air

as he ponders his choices.

The hopes of a nation

depend on how he will respond.

Yet the options he is confronted with are so painful.

 

So he has come

to this place of solitude

to contemplate his next move in peace.  

 

Here and now, in the night air,

his own words come back to haunt him.

 

He had said,

‘Compassion must prevail!’,

‘Love and Justice above all!’.

‘Over above, and,

if necessary, over and against,

all other political and economic considerations!’

 

And,

they had applauded his words to start with,

congratulated him

for his altruism and enthusiasm.

.

But when his ideals began to clash with their reality

rattling their cages, and stepping on their toes,

he had seen the faces turn away,

with dark looks, and even darker hearts,

and the murmuring had begun.

 

Each faction has its own complaint.

Often quite different from that of another.

Yet each of the factions agrees that

the movement advocated by Jesus,

is at odds with their own vested interests.  

 

‘We might have been with you’, they say,

‘if only you could have left well alone’.

 

The Consul, the King, and the Sanhedrin,

all contest the plausibility

of compassion as policy.

To say 

‘the rich should share their wealth with the poor’ 

   is ‘tantamount to revolution!’

To ask

‘everybody to love everybody, even their enemies’,

‘amounts to an act of treason!’

On the one hand,

the Saducees have their doubts about him;

Because they believe in the status quo, and

he threatens to overthrow the status quo.

‘He’d make our slaves masters and our masters slaves!’

On the other hand,

the Zealots have their doubts about him;

Because he wants to overthrow the status quo,

       nonviolently, and, they believe that, nothing less than

violent change can overthrow the status quo.

‘The only bit of ground the meek will inherit is a grave!’

 

As for the Pharisees, they believe that all this talk

about compassion has gone too far.

‘Charity is needed alright;

but, it should start at home,

and it should stay at home’.

It is unpatriotic for a Jew to suggest,

that charity should include the Samaritans!

. As for the Essenes, they have never heard of,

let alone seen, a ‘good’ Samaritan.

‘The only good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan.’

And any Jew who says otherwise

is a bloody traitor to his own race!

 

Even if they agree on nothing else at all,

the Consul, the King, and the Sanhedrin,

the Sadducees and the Zealots,

the Pharisees and Essenes, all agree

that Jesus,

and his message about love and justice,

is ‘nothing but a pain in the bum of the body politic’.

Jesus knows this,

and is distressed by the growing opposition

from all quarters of society..

Alone in the garden,

he feels the pressure of advocating

an increasingly unpalatable

and unpopular cause;

  he bears the pain of misunderstanding,

and the loneliness of isolation

that comes with rejection .

 

But he feels he can not relent.

There is no scope, nor reason, for apology.

 

‘God is compassionate,’

he cries from the depths of his beleagured soul, ‘We must be as compassionate as God is.’

He mocks the empty posturing of the orthodox Jews.

And points to a heretical Samaritan

as a model of compassion.  

He denounces empty rhetoric

and demands profound transformation

of the entire political economy.

 

He calls for a revolution

of love and justice

in which the roles

of the powerful

and the powerless

are turned completely upside down:

  ‘The first will be last,

and the last will be first.’ 

‘And the least among you

will be the greatest of all.’  

 

He begs for immediate action –

right here and right now.

‘If not here, where? If not now, when?’ ‘Today is the day of salvation.’

 

He does not hesitate,

waiting for someone else to act;

he heeds his own advice and acts, decisively, himself.

 

He takes direct action against the temple,

the financial clearing house of the kingdom,

the symbol of corruption.and exploitation.

‘This temple was meant to be a place of prayer!’

he screams,

as he scuttles the tables of the money changers.

‘But you,

you have made it into a den of robbers!’

 

Still, Jesus isn’t satisfied with challenging

the established structures of the current regime.

He wants to ‘pour the new wine’

of his alternative movement,

into the ‘new wineskins’

of intentional communities.

So he creates a network of anarchistic communities

in which his ideals can be realised, bit by bit.

 

To start with he teaches them

two startingly new political and economic ideas:

‘servant leadership’ and ‘common purse.’

The one,

a radical way of working things out with each other –

by forgoing self-important protocol,

and faciltating group-decisions..

 

The other,

a radical way of sharing things with each other –

by giving as much as is wanted,

and taking as much as is needed.

 

Jesus hopes these ideas

will be the seeds of inspiration

which, when planted, will be able to grow, and

change the whole of the society, from the ground up.

 

So he sends his disciples

out into the surrounding villages,

to sow these amazing seeds of transformation,

and to water them, and weed them and nurture them.

 

As the harvest

of political and economic change begins to ripen

it inevtably starts to threaten the status quo.

 

And Jesus soon finds

that he is officially designated

‘ a threat to society’, ‘ a matter of state security’ .

 

Jesus knows only too well what that means.

 

It isn’t a surprise. He’s been expecting it.

But it is still a shock when it happens.

He shudders as he thinks about it.

The chill shadows of consequence

fall across his troubled heart.

Jesus knows

that any ‘threat to society’

will be eliminated

with swift and lethal efficiency.

So as a ‘matter of state security’

it is only a matter of time

before the Consul, the King and the Sanhedrin,

get together, probably with the help

of the Sadducees and of the Pharisees,

  to plot his arrest and execution.

 

The Essenes, no doubt, will stay out of it.

As, indeed, they stay out of everything.

 

The Zealots, his only hope of support,

will probably stay out of it as well.

 

Not because the Zealots are disgusted

with everyone and everything like the Essenes.

But because they are dissappointed with him,

and his persistant refusal to take up arms,

in the service of the revolution.

 

So, it is just a matter of time, 

before the soldiers will be sent for him.

And nobody will stand beside him;

no one will stand in their way.

The garden is very beautiful.

. Especially in the evening.

But, as Jesus kneels in prayer,

it is not the beauty of the garden

which he beholds.

 

   It is as if his dream of the world,

as a cup overflowing with life,

has become a nightmare.

 

So when he takes the cup into his hands,

and he puts it to his lips,

  the cup, that is still overflowing

with life for others

has only death in it for him.

 

Others might drink deeply of its draughts,

of laughter and smiles.

But not Jesus; it tastes, bitterly,

of screams and tears to him.

Jesus has known all along that,

sooner or later, it would come to this.

 

But now that the time has come for him

to drink of the cup of suffering,

he flinches, instinctively.

 

He is no masochist.

Suffering holds no romance for him.

  He doesn’t relish the prospect of pain

any more than any other man or woman.

 

Soon the soldiers will come for him

With their warrant and their weapons.

. They will bind him.

And take him away with them.

They will beat him.

Strip him naked in public.

Just to humiliate him.

Then they will beat him some more.

Scourge him with whips.

Just for the hell of it.

And mock him in his moment of torment.

 

Then they will drag him to Golgotha,

the dreaded Hill of the Skull.

Where they will make an example of him,

by crucifying him on a cross.

It will not be quick painless execution.

But a slow painful death.

He will be used by the state

as an object lesson in agony,

To discourage even the bravest soul

from following in his footsteps

in the future.

 

   So he prays, he cries, he pleads:

‘If it is possible,

let this cup pass from me.’

 

But, deep in his heart, he knows.

Knows that suffering is used to discourage dissent,

freedom of assembly,

and freedom of action.

Knows that if he doesn’t have the courage to suffer

that, for him,

there can be no freedom.

Knows that the willingness to endure suffering,

always has been,

and always will be,

the essence of freedom.

 

And, he knows, that the only way he can be free,

to be true to his vision of love and justice, is to suffer!

 

Has he not said so himself ?

When he had taught the multitudes about

the relationship between salvation, grace and suffering?

 

Salvation, he had said,

is the redemptive experience

of the wonderful goodness of God.

 

And, on many occassions, he had said, that

people can discover salvation for themselves,

  If they extend the same grace to one another,

as God, in his goodness, extends towards them.

 

If they excorcise the demonic impulse,

to do evil for good;

renounce the human reaction,

to do evil for evil, and good for good;

and embrace the divine response,

to do good for evil.

 

And, he had said – had he really said it ? –

that to do good for evil,

depends on the willingness to suffer evil,

without wanting to do any evil in return.

Salvation is eminantly – immanently – possible.

But there is no salvation without grace,

and no grace without suffering.

And now, for Jesus, the time has come

to practice what he has preached!

 

Jesus remembers

the power that voluntary suffering

can have in bringing about great change.

Dying for a cause doesn’t make it right.

But a manifesto written in the blood of its devotees

is not lightly discounted, nor easily disregarded.

  A movement which has proved worth dying for

may lay claim to be considered worth living for.

.

If his martyrdom lights a beacon for compassion

then his crucifixion will not be in vain..  

 

 Jesus recognises

that his own voluntary suffering

could have unique power, peculiar to him.

 

People know him,

know his convictions, his character, his innocence.

 

  His demise might light an inextinguishable fire

that scorches the earth of its unrighteousness.

 

His agony

might break people’s hearts,

and, in the process,

break down their barriers

of apathy, insensitvity and hypocrisy.

 

His anguish

might bring the sound of crying

to the ears of those

who, otherwise, would not hear,

and bring insight, through tears,

to the eyes of those

who, otherwise, would not see.

 

His pain

might invoke sympathy

from the heart of humanity.

 

His pathos

might convert the soul

of the whole of his world.

 

His death,

need not be the end;

but might be a birth,

the beginning of a new age!

 

So, finally, Jesus prays,

‘Not my will, but yours be done’.

 

He rises from the place

where he has been praying.

He bears no weapon,

save his agenda for love and justice.

And, when the soldiers come,

to take him away,

Jesus steps forward,

with arms outstretched,

in welcome,

to embrace the very men,

who will nail his hands and his feet to the cross.

 

This is an except from my book Christi-Anarchy which Wipf & Stock has recently re-published in the US and is now available worldwide along with Not Religion But Love, A Divine Society, Learnings, Bearings and People Of Compassion. Check out The Dave Andrews Legacy Series