91Èȱ¬

It’s dark and cold here by the river. In the distance I can hear the dull murmur of the traffic in its steady stream into the heart of London. Beyond the adjacent playing fields, I can see the orange glow of the street lights. I walk out here across the marshes often and sometimes fall into conversations with others who appreciate this lost river on the city’s edge.

I remember one summer day, I stood on this bridge over the river with an elderly Asian man and he pointed out the fish he could see in the river. ‘It’s just like home’ he declared delightedly.  It’s a place full of references to transition, movement and migration.

This river in east London may seem an unlikely parallel to the Gethsemane of Christ’s Passion, the olive grove where he went to pray after the Last Supper on the night that the religious authorities arrested him. But they share several characteristics. Most importantly, they're both places on the edge of the city. Such edgelands are betwixt and between, neither countryside proper nor the city, and as such they're used in multiple ways, as places of both threat and opportunity.

We know Gethsemane was a place of work; John’s Gospel refers to an olive grove and the name Gethsemane is from the Greek for olive press. None of the gospels mention Gethsemane as a garden; that convention emerged later. It was a place where people met to talk; we are told that Jesus had often visited with his disciples. Some used it for rest and quiet. After the Last Supper, Jesus had come to pray and his disciples fell asleep.

Similarly, this part of the River Lea is a workplace for some. On the bank opposite, there are huge warehouses where trucks are loaded up. But it is also a place of rest and retreat. I’ve been here walking in the morning and seen someone pack up their tent and sleeping bag after a night out in the undergrowth beside the quiet movement of the river. You often come across fishermen down on the water’s edge. These are men with tired faces and East European accents; perhaps builders catching a rare few hours of peace at the weekend before returning to their long hours of work.

Gethsemane and the events of the night before Christ was crucified are arguably the most compelling episode of Holy Week. After more than 2000 years, they still speak powerfully to both believer and non believer alike; the playwright David Hare used the name for his play in 2008 exploring the betrayal of ideals in the Labour party.

Gethsemane takes up fewer than twenty verses in Mark’s Gospel, even less in those of Luke and Matthew. But the brevity of the passage belies the complexity and significance of what happened in the olive grove; every word counts in these verses and they encompass some of the most important teachings of Christ’s life.  Most famously, Gethsemane was the setting for Christ’s betrayal by Judas Iscariot. Even before Iscariot betrayed Christ with a kiss, Jesus had experienced another form of betrayal. He told his disciples ‘my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death’ and he asked them to ‘stay here and keep watch’. But they fell asleep; three times Jesus returned to his disciples to ask them to stay awake with him, and each time they let him down.

One of these betrayals is infamous: Iscariot betrayed Jesus to his enemy, the chief priests, for thirty pieces of silver. But the sleeping disciples is perhaps a more common form of betrayal; it reflects the many small ways in which we can feel let down by those we are closest to. There is no doubting Jesus’ disappointment but his response was gentle: ‘the spirit is willing but the body is weak’.

As Jesus was led away from Gethsemane by the high priest’s servants, Mark’s Gospel concludes that ‘everyone deserted him and fled,’ and for final emphasis he adds a verse with a vivid image: one young man following Jesus was wearing nothing but a white cloth, when he was seized by the high priests’ men, he fled naked.  The recurring theme through that night is abandonment. Jesus knew worse was to come; he had predicted a few hours earlier that his closest disciple, Peter would disown him three times before the cock crowed at dawn.

Leaving the bridge, I’m heading down to the water’s edge. It is almost pitch black and it’s easy to stumble in the undergrowth and the slippery mud underfoot from this wet spring. I can just catch the sound of the water gliding down to the Thames between the muddy banks of this estuary. A coot occasionally cries out its uncanny call as the wind rustles in the bare branches.

Adjacent to major roads east, this kind of edgeland is often derelict, scattered with litter, and dangerous. In the past, the marshes were infamous for highway men, including the notorious Dick Turpin, who preyed on travellers. On such urban outskirts, normal conventions of behaviour are transgressed and give way to the illegal, illicit and the criminal. Such places often carry associations with untimely death: there have been murders, suicides here, and historically, the city might bury plague victims in such wastelands.

Betrayal, abandonment and loneliness: these are the themes of Gethsemane and they are such essential elements of the human condition that it gives this passage of Jesus’ life a significance which transcends creed or religion. The abandonment is all the more painful because it comes at Christ’s moment of desperate need. Through much of the Gospels, Christ comes across as a powerful man, an eloquent speaker, someone of natural authority and presence. But in this sentence, Christ is expressing a terrified vulnerability; he's bewildered and full of anguish, talking of a sorrow which breaks the heart and which seems unbearable – hence his reference to death. This is Christ at his most human. It is akin to the agony described by the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins:

‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.’

A priest once told me that for all of us, there is a passage in the Gospel which resonates most powerfully; one episode which seems to speak directly to our life experience. Mercifully, for most of us the events of Holy Week – trial and unjust conviction, whipping, mockery, crucifixion – are not things we are likely to directly experience ourselves, but many can recognise the agony of that sorrow felt by Jesus in Gethsemane at that bleak point in the early hours of the morning.

It’s cold down here by the river.  Part of the sorrow was fear. Jesus was familiar with the torture, humiliation and brutal deaths meted out to enemies of the religious authorities and Romans. He prayed that God would rescue him: But he moves swiftly on in a sequence of sentences which compress huge significance. He shifts from the terror and a desperate desire to escape, right through to acceptance, ‘Yet not what I will but what you will.’

Christ transforms aversion to suffering into acceptance. It’s a transition which can mark months, years, even a lifetime in many people’s experience. Here, it is summarized in two sentences, but it sets the stage for everything that follows. In that acceptance, he finds the courage and strength to face the hours that lie ahead of his trial and death.

This language of submission to the will of God can be seen as a form of fatalism, but that would be to lose a vital insight. The greatest wisdom lies in distinguishing between the suffering we have to accept – death for example – and the suffering we must challenge and reject such as abuse. It is wisdom to grasp the nature of that acceptance, relinquishing the panicky desire to escape, and in its stead, find the narrow rocky path which leads to transformation: a humbling of the spirit and a heart which expands and reaches out to share in the distress and suffering of others. The poet John Donne captures the paradox in his sonnet as he calls upon God to ‘batter my heart’:

 ‘That I may rise and stand, o’er throw me and bend
 Your force to break blow burn and make me new.’

In this chilly dark, I remember how in summer, the neighbouring poplar trees shed their seed, and the drifts of white spread across the ground like a light snow; along the river, the path twists through weeds six foot tall, and there’s a sweet scent.

This is the promise of Gethsemane, that we can be made new. But at this stage of the Passion it is a promise of blind faith, there is nothing in this night spent in the olive grove to give Christ hope, and no suggestion that he understood why it was God’s will he die an ignominious death on a cross.  Even his closest disciples had struggled to understand his teaching and were failing to remain steadfast. He must have asked himself, how much of his teaching would be remembered, how much would be distorted and corrupted? Within a few hours, he had yet even more reason to reflect on this. As the high priests’ men came to arrest Jesus with clubs and swords, one of Jesus’ followers cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant. This was not to be a violent rebellion, Jesus reminded him. ‘Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.’ How many of Christ’s followers down the ages would abide by or even remember his words?

Fear, failure and loneliness: these are elements which make up what St John of the Cross describes as the ‘dark night of the soul’. All too often, the temptation is to numb the intensity of these moments of pain – with alcohol, drugs, distraction. The beer cans crunched up in the undergrowth. Gethsemane was on the edge of the desert, just beyond the olive groves; could Jesus have slipped away into the night, and what would we have known of him if he had?    Christ didn’t deny his pain. He recognised it, named it and then we are told he withdrew from his disciples a short way to pray, and significantly to my mind, we are told ‘he fell with his face to the ground’ a detail which appears in several gospels.

Tonight, I am not going to fall to the ground, but I find a bench and I sit for a while, listening to the patter of rain on the sparse leaves, a long way from the deserts of first century Palestine. I think about the ground and how it holds us steady; a physical reality of earth and rock but also used as a metaphor – grounded – to describe the steadfastness of a person in the face of the overwhelming moments of suffering we all encounter at some point in the course of our lives. All we can do is have the courage to hold steady and have faith that the agony will pass, and seek to glimpse, like Donne, that it will ‘make us new’.

On my way to this edgeland, I’ve walked across the sports fields of Hackney Marshes. It’s one of London’s biggest open spaces. Beneath my feet in this ground lies the rubble of London’s Blitz: the hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed in five years of bombing in the Second World War, shovelled off the streets and trucked out here, representing millions of terrified lives and thousands of dead. Across the sea, their counterpart must be buried in Germany, Russia and across Europe. Now, on weekend mornings, this stark expanse of football pitches is speckled with the brightly coloured shirts of dozens of different teams.  Across this ground, the wind brings the sound of the shouts, occasional cheers and referee’s whistle, and one glimpses those everyday possibilities of resurrection.