One of the results of my focus on the Agony-Trial-Crucifixion-Resurrection is a growing appreciation (connection, respect, awe, thankfulness, etc.) of the humanity of Jesus Christ.  As one of my pastors said a couple of weeks ago, consider the type of man Jesus must have been to command the respect of professional fishermen.

I confess that I often mentally compartmentalize (i.e. intellectualize) God’s acts of mercy and grace toward mankind.   I get caught up in the great truths about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for instance, as the Maker and Sustainer of all creation (Col. 1:15-17) that I do not think enough about Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.  I err, I think, by unconsciously attributing more weight to Jesus’s divinity when I consider the events leading up to the cross.

All that to say, that I am learning “again for the first time” about what it cost the Son of Man to pay my sin-penalty.  The “manliness” required for Jesus to courageously endure suffering and death astounds me and stands in stark contrast to my own manliness.   What was the source of His resolve?

We learned from Cyril that Jesus was a unique kind of human being.  What, though, enabled Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, to go to the cross?   Did the agony in the Garden hint that the Son of Man acquiesced (“accept something reluctantly but without protest”) to the will of the Father, suggesting He had second thoughts?  What difference does any of this make (i.e. what are the implications) for those who become children of God through faith in Christ?

Maximus The Confessor (580 – 662), gives us insight as he considered Jesus’s words in Gethsemane.   Dr. Wilken writes:

“For earlier writers, the words of Jesus’ petition, “Father, if thou are willing, let this cup pass from me” (which seemed to imply that the Christ could act in opposition to the will of the Father), were understood as hypothetical.  Maximus, however, asks whether the second part of Christ’s prayer, “Not what I will, but let your will prevail,” makes sense if the words “let this cup pass from me” were not spoken in earnest.   At the same time he notes that the most significant feature of the account is that Christ did drink the cup.  What Christ says is, “Not what I will,” but “Let your will prevail.”  Do the words of Jesus, asks Maximus, express “shrinking back” from what lay before him, that is, refusal to drink the cup? or do they represent a supreme act of courage and assent?  For Maximus, Jesus’s words express neither resistance nor fear but “perfect agreement and consent.”  As a man, acting in freedom, Christ submitted to the will of God by conforming his human will wholly to God’s will, and in this way demonstrated “the supreme agreement of his human will to the divine will which is at the same time his own will as well as that of the Father.”  …   Christ’s humanity, then is most evident in the garden:  “If the Word made flesh does not himself naturally as a human being and accomplish things in accordance with his human nature, how can he willingly undergo hunger and thirst, labor and weariness, sleep and everything else common to man?  For the Word does not simply will and accomplish these things in accordance with the transcendent and infinite nature he shares with the Father and Holy Spirit…. For if it is only as God that he wills these things, and not as himself being a human being, then either the body has become divine by nature, or the Word has changed its nature and become flesh by abandoning its own divinity, or the flesh is not at all in itself endowed with a rational soul, but in itself completely lifeless and irrational.”   Note that Maximus uses almost uses the same formulation about Christ’s will as Cyril did about the Resurrection.  Cyril had said, “If he conquered as God, to us it is nothing,” and Maximus says, “If it is only as God he wills these things,” then his flesh is “lifeless and irrational.”  In short, if Christ does not have a human will he cannot be fully human.  …”  The Word himself shows clearly that he has a human will just as by nature he has a divine will.  For when he became man for our sake, he pleaded to be spared from death, saying, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me’ (Matt. 26:39).  In his way he displayed the weakness of his own flesh.  Those who saw him recognized that his flesh was not imaginary, but in fact he was a genuine human being.”   Of course Maximus does not suggest that Christ’s human will could have been set in opposition to the will of the Father.  Yet he gives full weight to both parts of the petition, the request that the cup be removed and the decision to drink the cup and act in accord with the will of the Father.  So fully did Christ’s will conform to the divine will that his will can be said to be godlike:  “It is clear that his human will is wholly deified, in that it is in harmony with the divine will, for it is always moved and formed by it.  His human will is in perfect conformity with the will of his father when as a man he says, “Let not my will but thine be done.”   In Maximus’s hands Christ’s act of will became a decisive moment in the history of salvation.  It had long been affirmed, following the Scriptures (God “wills all men to be saved” [1 Tim. 2:4]), that the eternal Son of God, in concert with the Father and the Holy Spirit, had willed the salvation of humankind.  But Maximus now discerns that at the moment of his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ the man willed the salvation of the world.  He cites the word from 1 Timothy to highlight the distinction between the divine will from eternity (which was, of course, also the will of the divine Son) and Christ’s human will in action during his passion.  The words “not my will, let yours prevail” were said “in a human fashion” by Christ to his God and Father.  This leads Maximus to the triumphant affirmation that Christ by his obedience as man “willed and carried out our salvation.”   It is often said that the divine plan of salvation depended on Mary’s free assent to the word of the angel.  The work of salvation is a work of God, but it could not be carried out without the cooperation of human beings.  After Mary heard the word of the angels she said, “Let it be to me according to your word.”  This fiat, this “let it be done,” made possible the Incarnation of the eternal Son in the womb of the Virgin.  Maximus proposes that there is another fiat in the gospels, another “let it be done,” the agony of the man Christ, in which Christ, by accepting his suffering and death, wills the salvation of mankind,  Just as the plan of salvation required Mary’s “yes,” so it also needed Christ’s “yes,” for it was only through Christ’s passion and death that the world’s salvation could be accomplished.   The acceptance of the cup of suffering was Christ’s free act.  That salvation which the eternal Son had willed “in union with the Father and the Holy Spirit,” Christ now wills as a man, and in this way shows himself to be a new kind of human being.  The human will is not less human but more human because it is in harmony with the divine will.  Like Cyril, Maximus wishes to say that Christ showed us a “wholly new way of being human.”  ….  [Early Christian Thought, pp. 128-131]

As I type and re-read this material, I am again caught up in wonder and worship of Jesus Christ who went willingly to the cross as a man (fully human) to accomplish that which he willed before “the Word became flesh” (fully divine).  He not only “shows himself to be a new kind of human being,” but shows us a “wholly new way of being human, … not less human but more human because it is in harmony with the divine will.”   This makes me long more to make His will my will because anything else is to be less human.

“Lord, make me willing to be willing to do your will.”

————————-