The Prayer in Gethsemane

Jesus taught his friends the Lord’s Prayer on a mountain.¹ On his last night, in a garden, we hear him pray one line of it himself. I think that night is the best commentary on the third petition there is.

The same four words

Matthew tells it this way. Jesus goes a little farther than his friends, falls on his face and prays. He comes back, finds them asleep, and goes away a second time. Then he prays: “My Father, if this cup can’t pass away from me unless I drink it, your desire be done.”²

The English hides something here that the Greek shows. The last words in Greek are γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, genēthētō to thelēma sou, “your will be done.” They are the same four words, letter for letter, as the third petition of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:10.³ The World English Bible, which this site quotes, happens to translate them “Let your will be done” in the prayer and “your desire be done” in the garden. A reader of the Greek hears the prayer again.

Whatever else Gethsemane is, it is the Lord’s Prayer being prayed for real.

First, the cup

We usually say this line quickly. It can sound like the last thing people say when nothing else has worked, a sigh with a religious word in it. “Well, thy will be done.” The garden will not let us hear it that way, because Jesus does not begin with it.

His first prayer is this: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass away from me; nevertheless, not what I desire, but what you desire.”⁴ He asks for what he wants. He does not want to suffer, and he does not pretend to. He says so to his Father, lying on the ground.

Then something moves. The first prayer says “if it is possible.” The second says “if this cup can’t pass away.” Nothing about the cup has changed in between. What has changed is the one who prays. And then he goes away a third time, Matthew says, “saying the same words.”⁵ The surrender is not done once. It is done again, while his friends sleep.

Abba

Mark tells the same scene with one word Matthew does not keep. Jesus prays: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Please remove this cup from me. However, not what I desire, but what you desire.”⁶

Mark writes in Greek, but here he keeps the Aramaic word and sets the Greek beside it: Αββα ὁ πατήρ, abba ho patēr. In all four Gospels this is the only place where we hear Abba from Jesus’s own lips. Paul keeps it twice in his letters, and that is all.⁷

The word does not come from a good day in Galilee. Mark gives it to us from the worst hour, when Jesus is afraid. Abba is not the word of people who are never afraid. It is the word for the hour when we are.

Trust, not resignation

This is why I do not hear “your will be done” as resignation. Resignation stops asking. Jesus asks first, and asks hard, and only after the struggle puts himself into his Father’s hands. In Gethsemane your will be done is where prayer arrives when it has been honest all the way through. It is trust, and trust that has cost something.

Tertullian saw Gethsemane behind this petition in one of the oldest commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer we have. The words, he wrote, give us “a timely warning that may help us to endure.” And then: “He Himself was the will and power of the Father, and yet to show the endurance that became Him, He delivered Himself to the Father’s will.”⁸

We are not asked to do something Jesus did not do. He went first. And he did not skip the first prayer to get to the second. Some of us have learned to hurry past let this cup pass, as if asking to be spared were a lack of faith. It is not. It is the first half of what Jesus said.

Not everything is God’s will

There is one more thing I want to say gently. Your will be done is not the claim that everything happening that night was good. While Jesus is still speaking, Judas arrives “with a great multitude with swords and clubs.”⁹ Before the next day is over there will be a whip, mockery and a cross.¹⁰ None of that is called holy in the Gospels, and I would not call it holy either.

I do not believe that everything that happens is God’s will. I do not believe the war in Ukraine is God’s will. We pray thy will be done on earth because so much on earth is not yet his will. Evil is real resistance, and God works within it and against it.

Many Christians hold this differently, and with good reasons. For them, nothing finally falls outside God’s hands, and that is a deep comfort. Within weeks of that night Peter would preach that Jesus was “delivered up by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God.”¹¹ The church has turned this question over for centuries, and I will not pretend to settle it in a short note.

What the garden shows is simpler, and harder. Jesus does not let the evil coming toward him decide who he is. He gives himself, ahead of time, to the Father. Then he says to his friends: “Arise, let’s be going.”¹² The prayer did not take the cup away. It gave him the strength to walk toward it.

In Words Given, Day Thirty-five stays with Abba and Day Thirty-six with your will be done, in Holy Week.

This note was written with an AI model’s help, the same way as the book. Its sources are checked, and I stand behind what it says.

Footnotes

1. Matthew 5:1; the prayer is in Matthew 6:9–13. ↩

2. Matthew 26:42. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. ↩

3. Matthew 26:42 and 6:10, in Michael W. Holmes, ed., The SBL Greek New Testament (Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, 2010), github.com/Faithlife/SBLGNT. In the garden, in Matthew 26:39 and 26:42, Jesus addresses God as Πάτερ μου, pater mou, “my Father,” where the prayer he taught begins “Our Father.” ↩

4. Matthew 26:39. ↩

5. Matthew 26:44. ↩

6. Mark 14:36. ↩

7. Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6. A search of the SBLGNT text and apparatus of the four Gospels, Acts, Romans and Galatians finds Abba only in these three verses. ↩

8. Tertullian, On Prayer 4.5, trans. Alexander Souter, Tertullian’s Treatises Concerning Prayer, Concerning Baptism (London: SPCK, 1919), tertullian.org. ↩

9. Matthew 26:47. ↩

10. Matthew 27:26–31. ↩

11. Acts 2:23. ↩

12. Matthew 26:46. ↩