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Garden of Gethsemane: Easter Reflection


Welcome to the Garden. 
A place of beauty and tranquillity. A place of new life, where plants rise from the soil and trees bud each spring with blossoms that promise fruit to come.


Yet the Easter Garden of Gethsemane was not a place of hope or possibility. 


Gethsemane was a place of betrayal, a place of sorrow, a place that, on that night, seemed entirely without hope.


Mark 14 37-38 NIVUK “Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. 
‘Simon,’ he said to Peter, ‘are you asleep? 
Couldn’t you keep watch for one hour? 
Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. 
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’” 


As Jesus prays that the cup of sorrow might be taken from him, crying out, “not my will but yours be done,” those he has brought for support have fallen asleep, exhausted from the pressures of the day. They fail to pray. They fail to stand with him in his deepest moment of vulnerability.


Jesus does not desire the cup of suffering set before him. Yet if he must drink it, if he must walk the road to the cross, he longs for the presence of his friends beside him. Though he alone would bear the sins of the world, he did not need to be lonely in his suffering.


Today, our sisters and brothers in the Middle East are again drinking from a cup of suffering. Many believers have left the region, seeking safety in more stable parts of the world. Yet others, our sisters and brothers in Christ, choose sacrificially to remain. They stay in the midst of war. They drink from a cup they know too well, a cup that our Ukrainian families have also been drinking for more than four years.



Like Christ in the Garden, they ask of us one thing: 
Stand with us. Watch and pray.

At EBF, we long to see every Baptist in Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East united in Christ. For that vision to become reality, we must learn to keep watch over one another, pray for one another, and remind one another that by the grace of God and through the cross of Christ, 
“we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (Romans 8:37)


Have a joyful Easter. But as you celebrate, continue to pray, to give, and to remain faithful in your concern for every life affected by suffering today.





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