Asleep

Asleep

By 

Mike Hamilton

Other than the cross, the Garden of Gethsemane is one of the most pivotal stories in Jesus' story.  And we all know His disciples were asleep.  In fact, Jesus finds them asleep three times during His moments in the garden.  So there they were, power hungry Peter who always fails, and James and John, the two who asked Jesus to let them sit at his right and left hand in Heaven, asleep.  Three of the most highly trained Biblical scholars of all time on the edge of the most incredible event in history and they are asleep.  I find it interesting that Jesus invited these three men into the Garden with Him.  All three of them offering something to us, 2000 years later…and they did it all while sleeping.  

If we look at Peter, John and James we have a picture of three people who spent three years with Jesus and up until His death, they all three had their own agenda.  We are a people who love to appear as though we have a spiritual mind but honestly few of us want to suffer and most of us want to sleep the rest of our lives to avoid any contact with it.  Jesus came to them once and woke them up, came a second time and left and came back a third time and woke them up again.  Each time Jesus went into the garden He entered suffering and each time He came back out He finds His friends asleep, each person living a different reality than Jesus.  

Peter was very clear about his agenda earlier in their time together when Jesus said "I am going to the Cross" and Peter "rebuked Him".  Peter wanted a crown, a Kingdom setup here where he could be a "co-king" with Jesus.  James and John were very clear about their own agenda as well when they asked if they could be at the right and left of Jesus in Heaven.  When Jesus spoke to Peter (after His resurrection) He made it clear that Peter would be lead away and die while suffering.  This is His invitation to all of us, die for others and to suffer...but sadly we are all asleep like the disciples.  We love comfort, we love to choose our own agenda and live that out, we love to be in control of our own hearts and lives, we love to control those close to us….what we do poorly is to be awake enough to want to enter into the reality of suffering with someone we love much less into our own.  

Cancer.  That wakes people up.  Car crashes.  Death of a child.  Financial ruin.  Divorce.  The list is as long as it is deep.  People who come into my office often ask for me to make things better, to make things easier, to relieve pain.  It is natural for a human to seek to sleep and find comfort rather than to enter into their own suffering.  In fact most people don't even want to be around those they care about when they are going through painful things in their lives.  But I'm not sure helping us find relief is what God is calling us all towards.  He promises us Rest and I have seen many people in my office who choose to enter into the suffering of their past or present stories and find radical change and life altering Rest.  People who wake up and walk into their own garden to sit with a cup of suffering in front of them, this is where we will all find Rest, Life, Joy, Freedom, Grace, Mercy, Transformation, Redemption.  Jesus sits in front of the most painful moment of His life which will lead Him to the most Rest after He submits to it.  

My job as a counselor isn't to bring relief…we do that on our own.  The most stressful moment in Jesus' life and his disciples are crashed.  They entered into relief, Jesus into suffering.  The looked away from the suffering, didn't pray, avoided it all, were in denial about what was happening around them.  Clients come in the same way and my job is to help them wake up.  My job is to help them see what has always been true, what they have been running from and to enter into the reality that has always been there.  I have to be encouraging, loving, gentle, but always mindful that relief should never be my goal.  To sit with someone who is hurting and hurt with them, to sit with someone who is full of fear and be safe for them, to become a place where a wounded, shredded person who has been in the garden their whole life can show up and have a person love them there…that is my job.  To the degree that they enter their stories as you see the disciples begin to do AFTER they were asleep in the garden, is the degree of Rest, Life, Joy, Freedom, Grace, Mercy, Transformation and Redemption they will experience in their current lives.  

If your life takes a hard turn remember it is natural (in a fallen sense) to scramble to find relief, to want to ignore it, to make it go away.  But always keep in mind that there is a deeper invitation for you and if you will enter, you will wake up and if you wake up you will never be the same again.  Those who do this, those who take this path often report that it is lonely, that they are surrounded by sleeping people in their families, their churches, their marriages, their jobs….but once on that path it is undeniably a place of Life.