Thoughts from Morning Prayer:
It started perhaps with this scripture study from President Jeffery R. Holland, where he pointed out just one word “if” and suddenly made the whole interaction between Christ and those that mocked him, very personal. Jesus was still being questioned as to his divinity, as to his ability, by (ultimately) the adversary, who from the beginning of his ministry had prodded him with the same questioning “if”. “If thou be the Son of God… ”
This has caused me to reflect more deeply about the character of Jesus Christ in being able to complete the atonement. The question that I should be asking myself is: so what? Why does any of this matter?
Today is Good Friday, and I have also be contemplating the irony of that statement, the day in which the greatest evil had ever been combined and orchestrated to put a quick and decisive end the greatest force of love and good the world has ever known, and we call this Good Friday?
Then a video from another source pointed out, just last evening that as latter-day saints we tend to focus on Christ suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, while ignoring or downplaying the events leading up to Christ’s crucifixion. The speakers in the video then went on to demonstrate how prophets and even Christ himself, point more to His crucifixion as evidence of His Atonement, the nail marks in his hands, than to the Garden. And this has gotten me thinking then of the significance of it all.
Three hours were spent in a Garden, praying. Less than 24 hours later He is crucified. It wasn’t one or the other, it was both, and perhaps it never stopped: from Gethsemane to Golgotha. Maybe this is why the adversary was so hell-bent on trying to stop what Christ was doing internally within himself for the span of a one entire, sleepless day. It makes sense that Jesus, who throughout his entire ministry would find quiet sanctuary to pray, begins the greatest act of all history with a three hour prayer. Did he expect that the suffering would begin in the Garden? Where prayer had been a source of strength and preparation in the past, a key step in opening all of his life’s works. Now, it had already begun. This prayer was different because it introduced him to the suffering that he would endure with great drops of blood.
That he continued in prayer for three hours, while taking periodical breaks to check in with his disciples, makes a great deal of sense to me. Prayer is exhausting work! Atonement must have been the greatest test of character, endurance, and determination. And it took him three hours on his knees to begin the one act that would change everything in human history.
So it seems to me that what Christ experienced in the Garden didn’t end when he got off his knees. That excruciating internal turmoil of soul he carried out of the Garden, throughout the night of betrayal and rejection, into the morning of condemnation, followed by a day of judgment, mocking, scorning, derision, flagging and ultimately crucifixion. While all these external forces would surely crush the strongest of human character, the most optimistic of all happy souls: Christ, who simultaneously is bearing intense internal anxiety and anguish of soul, also drinks the external cup that everyone around him is determined to force upon Him. How could this be a good day? A good Friday?
Because Christ did bear it all, inside and out, within himself and everything that any mortal force could place upon him from abroad, Jesus’s character shines through this darkest of all episodes and holds steady until the act is completed upon the cross. Greater love was never demonstrated. Greater love was never executed to complete the task it was sent to do. Jesus Christ, the man who was the embodiment of the love of God, did the ultimate good in bearing for us what we could not bear on our own. This great act of mercy was completed on Good Friday. The world was saved on Good Friday through Jesus Christ!
This is the Love of God.