Matthew Henry John Bartlett

In his second lecture on following Jesus [streaming video], Wright says:

I was talking with somebody earlier today about the tsunami and all of that, and I have to say, the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane is as close as we get in the New Testament, I think, to understandinging – if we can understand – what on earth is going on with the strange purposes of God in the world. Because you know we are taught as Christians to pray for things, we are taught to pray in faith, we are taught to pray in the name of Jesus and again and again in Scripture – not least in John’s Gospel – we’re told that what we ask for in faith we will receive, if we really believe it. And the strange thing is that in the Garden of Gethsemane the incarnate son of God said to his father, “Please isn’t there another way?” and the answer was “No.” And if you can understand what is going on there, good luck to you because I can’t. It’s deep and it’s dark and it’s mysterious and it’s divine. And it tells us something about the darkness which is at the heart of the cosmos, and about the fact that God did not come into the world to give us a theory about why it would be so, so that we could sit back in our philosophers’ armchairs and think, “O, that’s alright then.” Because it isn’t alright then! The world is still full of pain and sorrow and anguish, and evil, radical evil. And the message of the gospel is not that God has given us a theory by which we can understand it. But God has given us himself in the person of his son to be plunged down in the middle of it. To drown under the waters of evil. He says in the garden, “This is your hour;” the power of darkness. He knew he was going into the middle of that darkness.
   Many Jews of Jesus’ day had talked about a time of great suffering which would come upon Israel. They talked about it as a period of great testing, great tribulation, great trial and torture and sorrow. Some of them saw it as happening to lots of Jewish people, some just a few. Jesus believed that it was coming, and that he had to go out front and take it on himself, solo. What did he say in the garden? He said to his friends, “Watch and pray so that you may not enter into the testing.” Many translations of the Bible call that ‘enter into temptation’, as though Jesus was just saying, “say your prayers lest Satan tempt you to do some trivial sin or other.” No, Jesus is seeing the tidal wave of evil rushing towards him. The tidal wave called the testing, the tribulation, which so many of the prophets and other Jewish writers had spoken about. And Jesus realises that this is going to engulf all of them. And he realises that the only way for them to avoid that is for him to go and stand with his arms outstretched and take it, draw it onto himself, so that the others may escape.