Luke 22:42

‘Saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, nevertheless what I want, but your will be done.” '

Jesus then addressed His ‘Father'. Writing to Gentiles Luke does not use the Aramaic ‘Abba' used by Mark, but only the Greek ‘pater'. But note that He begins by subjecting His prayer to the will of the Father. The fact that He is speaking to His Father does not lessen the importance of His Father's will. It rather enhances it. We too are permitted to approach Him as ‘Our Father in Heaven. But with us also this does not lessen our responsibility to do His will. It rather underlines it.

‘Remove this cup from me.' Here Jesus had in mind the cup of the Lord's ‘anger', the cup of the righteous wrath (or antipathy) of God against sin, the cup of which He had to drink to the full. Others had drunk of such a cup before, but in the past such a cup had always been taken out of the hand of His people by God, once He felt that they had drunk enough (Isaiah 51:22). And Jesus clearly hoped that this might also be possible for Him. But while the awfulness of what lay before Him made Him shrink from it, He immediately made His request conditional on the Father's will. For while He shrank from what was in the cup, He would not shrink from the will of God, even if that involved, as it did, the drinking of that cup to the full.

This prayer reminds us again that Jesus had come as one who was truly human, for His words make clear the battle raging within Him. As One Who was holy, and uniquely separated to, and aware of, His Father, and to Whom sin was abhorrent, and to Whom death was a contradiction to all that He was as the Lord of life, He saw before Him the cup of suffering, and forsakenness, and death and His whole being cried out against it. For it not only contained within it for Him an intensity of suffering such as no other man could ever have known, (for they have been involved in sin and death all their lives), but also the personal experience of the antipathy of God (wrath) against sin. This last especially must have torn at the very depths of His righteous and obedient heart.

For these ideas as connected with drinking from a cup see Psalms 11:6; Psalms 75:8; Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15; Jeremiah 25:17; Jeremiah 25:28; Lamentations 4:21; Ezekiel 23:31; Habakkuk 2:16 see also Revelation 14:10; Revelation 16:19; Revelation 18:6; Psalms 75:8 expresses it most vividly, ‘For in the hand of YHWH there is a cup, and the wine is red; it is full of mixture, and He pours out of the same.' It was the mixture of His terrible judgments on sin, ‘the wine of the wrath of God poured unmixed into the cup of His anger' (Revelation 14:10) and Jesus would have to drink it to the last drop. A similar cup had been the portion of Jerusalem in the midst of the passages about the coming Servant of the Lord. It was a cup which they would truly drink again around thirty or so years later (Isaiah 51:17).

If we support here the shorter text, and the probability is that we should, while not necessarily doubting that the longer text is based on a valid tradition (or even on a Lucan revision), then this prayer is central in the chiasmus. This is what the agony on the Mount of Olives was all about. We can compare here the words in Hebrews 5:7, ‘Who in the days of His flesh offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears to Him Who was able to save Him out of death, and was heard for His godly fear'. He shrank from the cup of the antipathy of God against sin, but in the end was willing to drink it to the full. No wonder that He would later feel forsaken. But how then was His prayer heard? By the sustenance given to Him in His manhood to carry it through. For in His godly fear He was strengthened and sustained.

‘Nevertheless not my will, but yours be done.' Even in His extremity Jesus was concerned more than all else in the will of the Father being done. Jesus was here perfectly exemplifying the prayer that He had taught to His disciples (Matthew 6:10; see also Matthew 26:42). Whatever it involved it was God's will that was to be the final arbiter. And it was through this obedience that He would prove Himself to be a sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world (Hebrews 10:5). He went, not under the compulsion of another, not even of His Father, but as a willing and voluntary sacrifice. The question had been asked long before, “But where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” And the answer had been given, “God will Himself provide the lamb for a burnt offering” (see Genesis 22:7). And now here He was as the Father's provision.