Before the Resurrection

Jesus’ last hours

When I think of the hours leading up to Jesus’ arrest, my mind goes instantly to Gethsemane, where He poured out His heart in agony before His Father. Then it moves to the upper room, where He taught the disciples to remember His sacrifice through breaking bread and drinking wine, warned them about the difficult days ahead, predicted Peter’s denials, and sent Judas away to betray Him. That last meal strikes me as a solemn time, a time of foreboding and anxiety.

This is how I tend to look at Jesus now: Human. Weighed down as He faces painful trials.

In contrast, as a new believer my understanding of Christ strongly emphasized His deity. He was God. Of course He could handle anything life threw at Him. He was above it all. He had compassion for others, but nothing could really hurt Him.

Lately God has been impressing on me my need for a more accurate view of our Lord Jesus Christ. I don’t think it’s possible for any of us to completely grasp how He could be fully human and fully God—always and at the same time. But chapters 13 through 17 of the book of John help me to understand this mystery a little bit better. Here are some of my reflections on that passage.

Jesus was “sorrowful and troubled” in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36-46). He was serious and solemn in the upper room during the Last Supper. But even though He knew what was going to happen, even though He was “troubled in spirit” at the thought of His betrayal, He experienced and displayed the supernatural nature of God the Son at the same time. That nature included being filled with love, peace, and joy; and having power, glory, and intimate fellowship with His Father.

Love, peace, and joy

God is love (1 John 4:8). The triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is love. Even in His human body, Jesus was a member of the Trinity. The toughest challenges He faced could not weaken the love that they shared.

During and after the Last Supper, He confirmed His Father’s love for Him and His love for His Father. Because of the strength and the depth and the intensity of that love, Jesus continued to love His disciples even as His most difficult time approached.

He “showed them the full extent of his love” by washing their dirty, crusty, stinking feet and by laying down His life for them. He urged them to remain in His love. It would always be there for them. No matter what He or they went through. We can’t remain in something that comes and goes.

I don’t often think of Him this way, but Jesus had peace and joy in His last hours on this planet. He gave His peace to His disciples, a peace beyond anything the world could provide, a peace powerful enough to still their troubled hearts and calm their greatest fears. How could He give them something if He didn’t have it Himself?

In the same way, Jesus prayed for them to have the full measure of His joy. He could give great joy to His disciples because it was with Him and in Him even at this time when He knew that He would soon undergo the physical pain of crucifixion and the spiritual pain of bearing the sins of the world.

Power, glory, and fellowship

Even in His apparent weakness, Jesus had great power. He “knew that God had put all things under His power.” He declared that the devil had no hold on Him. He had the peace of knowing that all that was happening was happening by His choice. He knew that the result of His seeming defeat would be the demonstration of His victory over evil.

Did Jesus still have the glory of the Godhead during His life on earth? Many commentators agree with the footnote on Philippians 2:7 in the 1985 NIV Bible, which says that Jesus laid aside His glory during His incarnation. That’s why He prayed that the Father would give Him the glory He had before the world began.

Jesus obviously didn’t appear in all the glory that Isaiah and Ezekiel saw in their visions. And yet He said that glory had come to Him through His disciples, and He had given them the glory that God gave Him. It sounds like some part of that glory was still His in the upper room, during His arrest and trials, and at the cross. Was it a glimpse of His glory that caused the soldiers sent to arrest Him to draw back and fall to the ground in John 18:6?

Jesus knew that the Father was always with Him. Not just at His side, but totally one with Him in perfect fellowship. The Father was in the Son and the Son was in the Father. He knew that even when the disciples deserted Him, He wouldn’t be alone because the Father was always with Him.

(Somehow this changed temporarily when Jesus became sin for our sakes and God forsook Him. It would take more than one blog post to explore this concept fully, and I don’t believe any of us can understand it in all its depth. But we know that sin separates us from God and that Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” in Matthew 27:46.)

Before and after Easter

Jesus was human. He could be hungry and thirsty and tired and lonely. He felt the pain and anguish of knowing what lay ahead of Him. He hurt when He was rejected or betrayed.

But He was also God. Even in times of hunger and thirst and fatigue and loneliness and pain and rejection and betrayal, even during the days and hours before and on the cross, even in the Garden of Gethsemane crying out in anguish, He still had the the supernatural nature of God. He was God in the flesh.

Easter is a time of celebrating the greatest event that ever occurred—the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. But even during the events leading up to the resurrection, Jesus was filled with the same love, peace, joy, and power that He would have after that momentous event. He maintained some of His glory, and most of that time He had intimate, unbroken fellowship with God the Father.

I have a hard time grasping that.

My limited mind wants to separate His two natures, to imagine that at one moment He’s agonizing over His trials without any sense of joy or peace (fully human), and at the next moment the joy and peace return (fully God). As if His two natures alternate, rather than existing together. But that’s not how it works.

So maybe there’s hope for me. Maybe I can be more like Jesus and always know His love and joy and peace, even as I’m going through times of distress. Maybe I don’t have to overcome or deny my natural human emotions, as I tend to think I do, before I can truly experience the effects of His supernatural nature in me. Maybe I can do both at the same time.

That’s happened before, beginning with my first depressive episode. My mood was dangerously low. Knowing God’s presence and love brought it up a little higher, but it was still far from normal. Yet somehow I felt the joy of the Spirit inside. Depression and joy at the same time.

Lately it’s been tougher. It seems like I’m either weighed down by the pain of this world or walking in His peace and joy. So my prayer for myself and for my readers is to be more like Jesus in this respect. To have God’s supernatural power within enabling us to be both “troubled in spirit” and filled with joy and peace. At the same time.