I began the 4th season of Chosen last night, one of our treasured Lenten activities. During one of the scenes, the father Zebedee, father of James and John, was soliciting his new olive oil to the priests in order to make ends meet for the disciples. Their competitor was the magnificent oil from the gardens of Gethsemane. The olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane would soon become a dear and precious place for Jesus and his disciples—a place to retreat, a place to pray, a place to unburden their soul.
“Garden of the Soul,” another name given to the olive grove near the Temple Mount, was a place Christ often visited with his disciples. Jesus was in this olive grove the night he was arrested. This book is about the “soul” level experience, a third dimension of our humanness. We often forget, avoid, or disregard the quintessential existence of our soul. The phrase and scripture, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul,” is there in black and white. We will return to the garden, where Jesus revealed the heaviness in his soul—the garden he returned to before his arrest. He bared the heaviness of his soul to the angels, to Satan, to the three closest to him, and to His Father above. And HE PRAYED.
This is where we will sit for several days: in the garden. Take some time to review the story; it’s in all four gospels: Matthew 26:36-56, Mark 14:32-50, Luke 22:39-53, and John 18:1-12. Let’s see what lessons we learn in this very special olive grove.
Social Connection.
Jesus went to his usual place of quiet retreat and prayer the night before he was arrested. Luke, the man of great detail, tells us in Luke 22: 39, “He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples followed him.” This was a place they came often together. He took his closet allies , his friends with him to bare his soul, more specifically he took three of his closest even deeper into the garden, James, John and Peter. He asked them to watch and pray.
Do you have friends that are so close to you that you would call them to sit with you as you bare your soul and cry out and unload your burdens? If not, you need these friends. You need to find them. You need to cultivate these relationships. Lifestyle Medicine, “a medical specialty that uses therapeutic lifestyle interventions as a primary modality to treat chronic conditions” (1) encompasses six pillars of health to help with healing the body of chronic disease. Their fifth pillar of health is social connections.
l learned about these six pillars of health just recently, and this one surprised me. We will talk about the others throughout this book. Each pillar is important for healing from chronic disease. For me personally, this is a hard one. Being an only child, solitude and isolation are easy, providing the comfort I need to unwind. But maybe the lesson here is that when times are unbearable, as they were the night before Jesus was arrested, and he cried out to the Lord to “take this cup away” in the garden, that is when we need those closest to us to be near.
Strengthening and maintaining relationships, whether with family members, friends, or a spouse, is essential for physical and mental health. These relationships bring meaning and purpose to life. We are not meant to live in isolation, and Jesus gave us this example in his ministry.
1. References
