Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Pray with me. Guide us, O God, by your word and spirit, so that in your light we may see light, in your truth find wisdom, and in your will discover peace. Add your blessing to the reading, the hearing, and the preaching of your word, and grant us all the grace to trust and obey you and all God's people said. Amen. I love that our church has a lot of babies, and those babies are with us in the service. I know sometimes astute parents feel like their kid is the loudest. But for the most part, I think y'all do a good job of making sure you're trying to be respectful of the folks around you and take the time to address whatever particular noises need addressing in the moment, whether disciplining a kid who should know better or merely addressing the cries of a baby who doesn't yet know better. For those of you kids with a baby brother or sister, what are some main reasons why they cry? It's okay, you can talk now. Yeah, what's up? It helps your nervous system, yeah. Tell your mom. Okay, okay. What are some of the reasons those babies cry and help our nervous system? Hungry, yes. They want mama. Or dada. Yeah. Maybe they're hungry. Maybe a dirty diaper. Yes. If you could pull all of that together, the reason babies cry is because they're not perfectly comfortable. And babies don't like not being perfectly comfortable, and so they cry. And if someone doesn't respond to their cries very quickly, what do they do? They cry more. and louder, and louder, and sometimes work themselves into a frenzy until they get someone to fix whatever's making them uncomfortable. Now, you would hope that over time, as babies grow up into adults, they've learned that just because you're uncomfortable doesn't mean you get to throw a hissy fit until you get your way. And some grown-ups do grow up and learn to be uncomfortable and still do what they need to do without reverting to acting like infants. But other grown-ups never seem to learn how to, well, grow up. Sure, most of them may not flop around on the ground and kick their hands and feet and scream like a baby, but they'll throw grown-up versions of excuses for why they're doing that. Instead of lashing out because they want a bottle, well, they'll be extra critical of everyone and everything and say it was because they were hangry. Tricky. Instead of whining and crying because they didn't go to bed on time and need a nap, well, they'll check out or, in their self-imposed exasperation, demand some me-time because they had a long day or are in a busy season. And instead of fussing because they have a dirty diaper and, well, once you get to a certain age, maybe. and obsessing over one or two parts of their body until they're comfortable, grown-up babies look for and amazingly find all sorts of body parts to complain about to explain away their lack of faithfulness in the midst of discomfort. And so you see, it really doesn't matter what size or age you are, and it doesn't really matter whether you call it like it is or make grown-up excuses. If you throw fits when you experience discomfort and demand everyone around you adjust to you, well, then you're acting more like an immature baby than a mature adult who has learned to be faithful while uncomfortable. A baby wants what he wants right now, and if he can't have it, he'll throw a fit until he gets it. But a grown-up recognizes that there are times when you have to wait to get what you want, and even though you might be really uncomfortable while waiting, you pray for strength and walk by faith because you want what God wants more than what you want in that moment. In our gospel story today, we heard the beginnings of a perfect example of what it looks like for someone to face extreme discomfort like a grown-up. Knowing that not just discomfort and inconvenience awaited him, but the greatest suffering anyone would ever experience was about to be his experience, like a truly maturing man of God, Jesus prays and says that he wants to do what his father wants him to do, even though it's gonna cost him everything. Last week we mentioned that we were going to be spending this season of Lent not necessarily contemplating our own sin, but our own sin in relation to Jesus' perfect faithfulness, particularly during that last night and day of his earthly ministry. And that's what we're gonna spend our time this morning contemplating. How Jesus, in knowing that he was about to face the greatest suffering anyone would ever endure through loud cries and great tears, expresses his perfect desire to go through that suffering to save the world. I think most of the time people come to this text, the emphasis is on Jesus's hesitation and prayer to avoid suffering. But when we do that, I think we actually miss the point almost entirely. It's not that God the Son wanted to do one thing and God the Father wanted Him to do something totally different. It's that the Son of God in His sinless flesh beginning to feel the weight of the mission praise that He would press on because His will is His Father's will. We often think of submission as all or nothing. Someone is either immediately, fully, and joyfully on board with everything the plan entails, no matter how difficult, or someone isn't being submissive at all. If that's the case, well then we have a break in the Godhead here. But if there's a kind of submission that both acknowledges the extreme cost of what's being asked, and the desire to avoid that cost while at the same time acknowledging an even greater desire to go through with the call to action despite the cost. Well then we not only don't destroy the unity of the Trinity, we can see what it looks like for a human being to grow in maturity and learn obedience without sinning in the process. And we can learn to appreciate when others are striving to do the same. Now perhaps I'm making this harder than it has to be, but I confess I haven't wrestled with a text like this in a really long time, because on the surface, at least with how I had been used to reading, it does seem to fly in the face of much of what Jesus has been saying his entire ministry. Less than an hour ago, in real time, Jesus told his disciples about his impending death. I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me. He was numbered with the transgressors, for what is written about me has its fulfillment. At least three times before this, Jesus explicitly told his disciples that he must go to the cross, die, and then rise again. And what's more, he called his own chief disciples satanic for trying to prevent him from doing it. Jesus has made it clear that the only reason anyone can do anything to him is because he allows it, And he's expressed that he and his father are completely and totally united in their mission. And yet here, in the face of it all, coming together, just like he said it had to, Jesus appears to flinch. Luke says that on that last night, Jesus came out from the upper room and in verse 39, as was his custom, went to the Mount of Olives. This is the same place that Jesus has been coming to for at least the last five nights, and most likely on and off for the last few years. After his triumphal entry, subsequent conflict with the religious leaders, and prophetic promise to destroy them and their temple, Luke says that Jesus warned his disciples not to get caught up in the impending sorrow. Watch yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap. Stay awake at all times, praying so that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place and stand before the Son of Man. And every day Jesus was teaching in the temple, but at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet. So again, here, when after the last supper and a few glasses of wine, when Jesus and the disciples go out to the same place to do the same thing and hear the same words from Jesus, perhaps those of you who sleepwalk through the same Lord's Day service every Sunday can understand a bit why these guys nodded off. What is for the disciples just another night of Jesus yet again telling them to consider their faithfulness as a matter of life and death is for Jesus anything but another night. Luke says that Jesus withdrew from them and then gives the first of at least three details that foreshadow the depths of what's going on. Luke says that Jesus withdrew about a stone's throw, prayed that His Father would remove this cup, and then after being strengthened by an angel, being in agony, Jesus prays even more earnestly, so much that sweat, like drops of blood, are falling to the ground. All three details, a stone's throw, this cup, and sweat falling on the ground should all fill the careful listener's mind with the imagery of covenant curses upon lawbreakers for high-handed defiance. The stone's throw imagery is probably not something we think of, but for anyone who had witnessed a death by stoning, Well then it's probably not too difficult to imagine how far Jesus was from His disciples. Only high-handed, defiant, unrepentant sinners were to be put to death. And even then, the amount of proof required so much that death was rarely met. But if and when it was, the experience was meant to strike fear into the hearts of the people so that they would not allow whatever that sin was to even begin to creep into their own minds. And yet here we've got not a sinner being a stone's throw away from these witnesses, but the sinless Son of God, isolated, separated, alone, and yet close enough to experience the death reserved only for rebels. Luke then says that Jesus, being a stone's throw away, kneels down and prays, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Now I know this is where it's most common to assume that Jesus is praying to avoid the cross altogether, but I'm becoming less and less convinced that's the case. For starters, Jesus doesn't ask here or anywhere else, Father, if it be your wish, let me avoid death. In fact, Jesus has explicitly been saying the opposite. And even just a few days prior to this, when he explains the necessity of his impending death, he says, even though the thought troubles him, that it is the whole point of his mission and wouldn't ask to be spared from it. Now my soul has become troubled, and what am I going to say? Father, save me from this hour? No, for this purpose I came to this hour. What's more, if Jesus thought his suffering was going to be merely physical death, even a brutal martyrdom, his posture would have been less courageous than countless saints before and since. Old and New Testament believers have actually welcomed death because in leaving the miseries of this life, they knew a life of bliss awaited them. While in jail and facing the possibility of execution, the Apostle Paul famously wrote, it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. My desire is to depart and be with Christ for that is far better, but to remain in the flesh is necessary for your account. Ignatius of Antioch around the turn of the century wrote a letter to the Roman church urging them not to prevent his martyrdom. Let fire and the cross, let the crowds of wild beasts, let tearings, breakings, and dislocations of bones, let cutting off of limbs, let shatterings of the whole body, and let all the dreadful torments of the devil come upon me, that I might attain Christ. and polycarp of Smyrna just a few decades later before being burned at the stake at 86, prayed, Lord God Almighty, Father of your beloved and blessed son, Jesus Christ, I bless you because you have counted me worthy of this day and hour so that I might receive a portion among the martyrs. So if all Jesus was facing was the sting of physical death, then his trepidation seems to be greater than that of men and women who faced similar ends. I don't think Jesus is praying to merely avoid death, even death by crucifixion. His language of remove this cup gives us some insight that there is more going on than your typical martyrdom. Listen to the way some Old Testament writers speak about a certain cup and see if you can pick up perhaps more likely what's happening. To the tune of do not destroy in Psalm 75, the psalmist sings, for in the hand of the Lord there is a cup with foaming wine well mixed and he pours out from it and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to its dregs. A couple of chapters before our Old Testament lesson. In Isaiah, the Lord calls to His people, Wake yourself! Wake yourself! Stand up, O Jerusalem! You have drunk from the hand of the Lord the cup of His wrath, who have drunk it to the dregs, the bowl, the cup of staggering. After His people fail to heed the call to wake up, another prophet, Jeremiah, records what God says is about to happen next, and not only to Israel, Thus the Lord, the God of Israel, said to me, take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. They shall drink and stagger and be crazed because of the sword that I'm sending among them. Drink, be drunk, and vomit. Fall and rise no more. If they refuse to accept the cup from your hand to drink, well then you shall say to them, thus says the Lord of armies, you must drink. You shall not go unpunished, for I am summoning a sword against all the inhabitants of the earth, declares the Lord of Armies." And then after his initial judgments, don't bring his people to faith and repentance. In Ezekiel 23, God again uses the imagery of a cup to describe the justice He would pour out on rebels. Because you have played the whore with the nations and defiled yourself with their idols. You have gone the way of your sister. Therefore, I will give her cup into your hand, says the Lord God. You shall drink your sister's cup that is deep and large. You should be laughed at and held in derision, for it contains much wine. You will be filled with drunkenness and sorrow, a cup of horror and desolation, the cup of your sister Samaria. You shall drink it and drain it out and gnaw its shards and tear your breasts. For I have spoken, declares the Lord God. Therefore, thus says the Lord, because you have forgotten me and cast me behind your back, you yourself must bear the consequences of your lewdness and whoring. Now I realize that's a lot, but I wanted you to hear the repetition so that you could hear what Jesus was referring to when he asked that the cup would be removed from him. Jesus' prayer that God would remove this cup from him is not a prayer to avoid mere physical death, but a plain reference to the cup of God's wrath, which has been filled up with foaming wine because of his people's high-handed insistence on rejecting him and brutalizing one another. So Jesus isn't simply asking not to die. He knows that his death hasn't just been impending for three years or even 33 years, but ever since that first sin for 4,000 years, history has been progressing toward this very night. What seems to be giving Jesus pause isn't merely His physically dying. Rather, as the sins of the world begin to bear down upon His shoulders, it's the thought of drinking the cup of the wrath of God down to the very bottom of the cup that has Jesus praying so desperately. And yet, just as I don't think Jesus is praying to avoid death altogether, I actually don't think he's praying to avoid the cup of wrath. Remember, the will of God the Father and God the Son are completely united. Jesus knows that he's come to drink the cup, and he knows that he's going to drink the cup of wrath for sin at his crucifixion. Remember his rebuke to the disciples when they asked Jesus if they could sit at his right and left hand in the kingdom? He tells them and their mommy that they don't know what they're asking, and then he asks a peculiar question. Are you able to drink the cup that I'm going to drink? He tells them that to sit at his right and left hand is for those whom it has been prepared by his father, obviously referring to the two men who would die on either side of him. And so Jesus has been planning and intending not just to die, but also to drink the cup of wrath as had been the plan from the beginning. And so this prayer isn't a prayer to avoid the very cup that he came to drink. To further prove that point, in just a few minutes when Peter unsheathes his sword and cuts off the right ear of the servant of the high priest, Jesus rebukes Peter. Put your sword into its sheath. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me? Notice Jesus says to Peter that the Father has already given him the cup, the cup which Jesus says he's going to drink and will not ask not to drink. So if Jesus isn't asking to avoid mere death and he's not even asking to avoid drinking the cup of God's wrath at all, well then what's he asking? Well, the answer's in the prayer. He's asking that once he has drank from the cup, which he has always intended to drink from, and which he has and will be given, that the Father would remove the cup from him. In short, I think Jesus is not asking to avoid death or asking not to take on the wrath of God for sin, but He's asking that after He's entered into death and all the horrors thereof for sin, that His Father would remove the cup and raise Him from the dead. He's praying that his father would look upon his obedience and declare, well done my son, my beloved son, with you I am well pleased. Now arise and receive your well-deserved glory, the nations of the earth which you have purchased with your own blood. Isn't that what the writer to the Hebrews said is happening in our epistle reading? In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverence. This obviously can't be referring to the instance of death. After all, we know that Jesus died, and He died willingly. No one took His life from Him, but He laid it down of His own volition. And so rather than seeing that final night as a night of Jesus praying to avoid death, we must rather see it as his prayer that having willingly taken the cup and drunk of it, that his father would then remove the cup and not abandon his soul to death, but raise him up just like they planned together all along. Jesus is praying that the cup would be taken away and that he would be raised from the dead. But he's also praying that even if it be his father's desire for him to drink the cup of unending death, to remove the curse upon the entire creation since the very first sin. He's willing to do so. And I think the third and final reference to covenant curse is in Luke's retelling of that last night helps bring that interpretation home. Like Elisha was comforted by an angel when he was on the brink of death, so too Jesus, which Luke has been portraying as the greater Elisha, receives comfort from his own angel in verse 33 before entering back into agonizing prayer. While Jesus has continually affirmed that his father hears and answers prayers, Jesus is still increasingly burdened by the weight pressing down on him so much that in verse 44, Luke records, and being in agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the earth. This is just one of three times in the Bible when the word sweat is used. The first is a bit of a deep cut from Ezekiel 44 when the priests are given instructions about what they're supposed to wear while ministering to the Lord in His house. They shall enter my sanctuary and they shall approach my table to minister to me and they shall keep my charge. When they enter the gates of the inner court, they shall wear linen garments. They shall have nothing of wool on them while they minister at the gates of the inner court and within. They shall have linen turbans on their heads and linen undergarments around their waists. They shall not bind themselves with anything that causes sweat. Now by itself, that reference to sweat is pretty opaque. But when you combine it with the first and only other reference to sweat in the entire Bible, the significance starts to take shape. Anyone have any guesses to the first and only other sweat reference? Grownups can speak now, or kids, yeah? That's all right, a lot of them don't either, anyone? The curse in Genesis. And to the man God said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life, thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. You are dust, and to dust you will return. And so connecting Luke 22, Ezekiel 44, and Genesis 3, then, like a stone's throw and the cup, sweat is evidence of the curse into which the first Adam plunged the entire world when he chose to pray essentially the opposite of Jesus's prayer. Not your will, Father, but mine. And so in Ezekiel, if a priest was to enter back into the sanctuary, which was decorated like a garden, he couldn't bring the curse of sweat with him. And now here in another garden sanctuary, Jesus, the last Adam and great High Priest, is going to work to redeem the entire sweat-cursed world. And with the weight of sin and death and all the covenant curses of God driving Him into the dust, He prays to His Father, My will is that Thy will be done. And then rising from that prayer, this perfectly mature man of God comes to the disciples who he has asked to be praying with him, and he finds them asleep. Why are you sleeping? Rise and pray so that you may not enter temptation. And even while he was speaking, there came the crowd, and the man called Judas was leading them. Can you feel the faithfulness of Jesus that night? All alone, except with His Father. Can you see and hear his willingness to not only endure the limitations and weaknesses that were inherent in the Son of God taking on flesh, but the willingness of the triune God to plan and accomplish the redemption of the world from first to last, even though it cost everything. is not as though in eternity past, God, the angry at sin father, demanded God, the eventually to be abused son, to hesitantly take on the beatings you deserve upon himself so that the father wouldn't be mad anymore. The entire Godhead was on the same page from first to last. The father so loved the world that he sent his son. The son so loved his father and the world that he willingly sacrificed everything to save it. And ever since the father answered his son's prayer in the affirmative, the spirit of God has been accomplishing that redemption they had been planning forever. The salvation of the world. which includes your salvation, has been the plan all along. And our Lord Jesus, the Savior of the world, in the midst of the greatest suffering anyone has ever known, not only accomplished that salvation, but shows us what it looks like to faithfully endure so that we too might grow up and enjoy that salvation that he's bought for us. Having contemplated such faithfulness, such devotion, are you really going to insist on remaining so drunk on your own desires that you're going to choose faithless sleep over faithful suffering? Now, none of us is this mature. let alone as mature as we ought to be. We all look and act like babies sometimes, but as those who desire to grow up into maturity, let us not so shrink back from discomfort that we get less and less mature. Stop hiding behind mere inconvenience or fear, let alone very real suffering for your own sin or for the sins of others as to why you can't be faithful. Stop making excuses for why you can't get a job and work very hard. Why you can't obey, why you can't suffer, why you can't submit, why you can't, can't, can't. God himself says that by grace, through faith, you can. And he's not a liar. Beloved, for God's sake and your own, stop denying the love of the Father, the work of the Son, and the power of the Spirit for you and in you. Look no further than the person and work of Christ, who in the face of the greatest suffering anyone would ever face, prays, not my will, Father, but yours, be done. How could we pray anything but that? Just because submission doesn't feel great in the moment doesn't mean you're not pleasing God with your submission. There is a faithful submission that both acknowledges the extreme cost of what's being asked and the desire to avoid that cost while at the same time acknowledging an even greater desire to go through with the call of action despite the cost. If you're wondering what it looks like to grow in maturity and learn obedience while suffering without sinning, look no further than Jesus and hear the exhortation of Paul for you behind mine. With your eyes fixed on Jesus, looking to him and his willingness to give up his entire life while his little ones sleep, Get up, even before the sun has risen. Work hard all day, even after it's been a long day. Continue faithfully serving the people the Lord has placed in your life, and keep doing so even after the sun goes down. With your eyes fixed on Jesus and His willingness to pour out His own blood and sweat and tears in order to roll back the curse, go and do likewise. even when you're scared and tired and hungry and lonely. Always, but particularly during this Lenten season, let us all contemplate and stir up in one another the love and faithfulness of God to us as seen in our faithful Savior's willingness to offer up His entire life as a sacrifice and drawing on His strength in your weakness. Let us for the joy set before Him be willing to pick up our own crosses daily for our sake the sake of other sinners God has put in our lives and to his glory in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we have heard wonderful things out of your word. We praise you for revealing Christ by promise and shadow in the Old Testament and for revealing him as the fulfillment of all these things in the new. Give us your spirit so that we might understand these words and the fullness of your truth as you have revealed it to us in the person and work of Jesus, who with you and the Holy Spirit be all honor and glory now and forever. Amen. Homily is from Hebrews chapter two, verses nine through 12. Hear God's word. we see Him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting that He, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, I will tell of your name to my brothers. In the midst of the congregation, I will sing your praise. This is the word of the Lord. In our sermon text, we spent a lot of time talking about how the cup in Luke 22 was the cup of covenant curses for sin. We saw how Jesus drained that cup to its bitter dregs, not just for sinners, but to redeem the curse of the world. And we heard that the father heard his son's prayer to remove the cup by raising Jesus from the dead and has seated him in the heavenlies and crowned him with glory and honor. At communion, we often point out that everyone who has been baptized into Christ shares in his life, death, resurrection, and current reign. We tell you things like you have been crucified with Christ. In Christ, you have died to sin. In Christ, you have been justified and raised from the dead. And in Christ, you are right now seated with him in the heavenlies. All those things are true. All of you who have been baptized into Christ, young and old, little babies and big babies, have been baptized into a death like His and by His Spirit have been raised to life so that you might walk according to His Spirit and not the flesh. As you behold your Savior's love and tasting the cup of sin and death for you, you can now rejoice that in Christ you no longer have to drink the cup of God's wrath. But you can now, right now, seated around his table, drink the cup of blessing that we bless. having drank from this cup of blessing that was poured out for you from a place of great sorrow. Now with thankful hearts rejoice in the calling to which you've been called and submit to God's will for your life unto death, even in the face of your own suffering for his glory and the life of the world. Amen. Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the same night that he was betrayed, took bread. Let us give thanks for the bread. We do not presume to come to your table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your many and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table, but you are the same Lord whose character is to have mercy. Thank you, gracious Lord, that our sinful bodies are made clean by Christ's body and our souls washed through his most precious blood so that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us. Amen. And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, take, eat. This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. These are the gifts of God for the people of God. Receive them as such.