Thy Will be Done

March 21, 2021

The night has come at long last—the betrayal of Jesus. Following the Last Supper, Judas flees to the pharisees, guiding a mob to the Mount of Olives where Jesus habitually goes. Knowing this is happening, Jesus goes to the place he knows Judas will lead them. Once there, he instructs his disciples to pray, and goes himself a little ways off. 

There are a number of ways we can talk about how Jesus’s ministry leads up to this moment, but I want to focus our attention on one. Throughout Jesus’s ministry, he has stood in support of the marginalized, over against the religious elites. The elites deride him for this, probably for two reasons, one religious, the other human. Religiously, the marginalized people are uncouth and unclean. They are sinners, unrighteous. From a human perspective, they are uncouth and unclean. They smell. They’re dirty. 

I think we understand this, and perhaps experience this every time we interact with marginalized people. We go to their houses and see the broken windows, doors that won’t shut properly, holes in the walls, trash in the yard. We hesitate to sit on their couches, lest the stench latch onto our clothes. We don’t want to be around them, because they smell like cigarette smoke and alcohol. We recoil at their broken smile, dirty hands, unwashed clothes.

But not so with Jesus. Jesus has a way through the religious impasse, and refuses to be deterred by the human one. I image that, perhaps much like us, he didn’t always feel that way. I imagine that at some points he wanted to fit in with the elites, to ingratiate himself with them, to be accepted by them, even if only for a moment. I imagine that he thought about it, sighed, and walked over to the old widow and helped walk her to her house. I imagine that, in a thousand small ways, he decided to let go of any pride and longings for grandeur, in favor of caring for those abandoned and oppressed by the elites, recognizing that by helping them he would become like them, but that this was the work God would have him do. God’s will be done, not Jesus’s. 

The stakes are low there; they aren’t on that fateful Thursday night. The stakes are his life—if he chooses one path, he gains his life and forfeits his soul. If the other, he loses his life and gains his soul. It’s an impossible choice—his will or God’s will—but by Thursday night it’s basically already been made. It was made the first time he decided to put God’s will over his own, the first time he decided that it didn’t matter how he felt, he was going to do what God wanted. Time after time, Jesus decides to follow God’s will, so that when the chips were down and the stakes were high, he was already trained and ready to do what God called him to. He didn’t want to—sweat drops of blood and anguish hardly characterize joyful desire—but he did it anyway, because what he wanted more than anything, more than his own desires, more than his own life, was to do the will of God. “Not my will, but thy will be done.” And he goes to greet his friend.

—John Coffey