Bedtime is literally my favourite time of day. As soon as I wake up, I’m basically counting the hours til I can go back to bed. I love being in my bed, cuddling my dogs on my bed, reading and drinking tea in my bed, and of course sleeping. So when I read in the gospel of Mark that Jesus kind of loses it at at Peter, James and John for falling asleep it makes me go all hot and cold at the same time. In the garden of Gethsemane – which, okay, means it’s at a stressful time and Jesus is clearly feeling a bit wobbly – but the disciples conk out (its really late by this time) and Jesus wakes them up with “Are you asleep? Couldn’t you keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.” (Mark 14:37-38).
They fall asleep again “because their eyes were heavy. They did not know what to say to him.” (v40). I feel that sense of shame. Like your dad just caught you doing the thing that you swore blind you were not doing.
But then they fall asleep again and Jesus says “Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough!” (v41).
Now I get the disciples. It’s late. Past 9.30pm I am pretty much done. Also, the same scene in the gospel of Luke says that they were “exhausted from sorrow” (Luke 22:45). I get it. If you are expending a lot of emotional energy you can feel like you’ve been run over by a freight train. But Jesus has a real thing about it. And the link between sleeping/resting and falling into temptation makes me nervous. How does resting make them fall into temptation?
Is my favourite thing, biblically speaking, giving in to (and reveling in) a sin of laziness?
This is where context is key and it shines a light on what was happening at the time, as well as on what we should be focusing our effort on today.
Jesus is definitely in anguished. Mark says that Jesus was deeply distressed and troubled. He quotes Jesus as saying “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” (v33-34).
This is the final chapter. He is about to face arrest, brutality, pain and an intensely excruciating death. He is fully human and he is scared. As he prays he even asks God the Father to take it away from him (v36) but surrenders to the Father’s will.
In this state of distress, he asks Peter, James and John to “Stay here and keep watch.”
What are they watching for? The soldiers? Actually, something completely different.
In the previous chapter in Mark, Jesus had been teaching about the readiness for the Father’s return. “Therefore keep watch because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back—whether in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn. If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping.” (Mark 13:35)
However, while it is linked, it is not wholly used in the same way here. Here it is more like the vigil God’s people were to keep at the Passover: “Because the Lord kept vigil that night to bring them out of Egypt, on this night all the Israelites are to keep vigil to honor the Lord for the generations to come.” (Ex. 12:42) As one commentator says, Jesus is asking them to “bear with him in prayer as he pours out his anguish to his Father.” (Grant R. Osborne, Matthew, p979).
So was Jesus condemning rest when it was late and the disciples were tired? No. They had one job, basically, in this specific context. Jesus asked them to stay awake and be watchful, in sense of keeping vigil for something momentous. But there are also those overtones from the previous chapter that ring echoes through here. If they cannot even keep vigil at their Lord’s behest, how are they to live lives of watchfulness, ready for God’s return?
So, I think in application for us, there are three things to consider. First, our rest is important to God. The sabbath was for our rest because on the seventh day, the Lord rested. There are also repeated messages about deep rest for us by abiding in God. For example, in Matthew 11:28-30, Jesus says in him we will find rest for our souls. In Psalm 23, God makes us lie down in green pastures and refreshes our souls.
Second, when Jesus says “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation” there is the immediate sense of keeping the command he had given them. In Matthew 26:31, Jesus had foreseen that all the disciples would fail their first test: “This very night you will all fall away on account of me.” He does not want the failure in the small things (a vigil while he prays), to grow into repeated failure in all things.
When Jesus says “…so that you will not fall into temptation”, there is also the ongoing and broader spiritual vigilance echoed. We do not know when the owner of the house will return. We must live lives of preparedness for God’s return. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t rest. It means that we live vigilant lives. What does that mean? It means trying not to be spiritually lazy. It means being hungry to abide in Christ and persevering in him when there are so many reasons not to – reasons largely linked to our own comfort and convenience. It is easier not to go to church but do literally anything else. It is easy to not pray or read our Bibles and keep scrolling. It is easy to not talk about Jesus because people might make fun of us. It is easy to not care for our Christian brothers and sisters because someone else will probably do it.
We remain vigilant by remaining in Christ. Because when we are in Christ, it means we are continuing to be shaped and sculpted by him and those effects play out in our lives.
The “doing literally anything else” part of the equation is the temptation we can fall in to. We must live our lives watching and praying. That means lives of preparedness and readiness for his return.
How different would your life look if you lived today (and every day) as if Jesus was coming back tomorrow?