Forgive Our Fearful Lack of Trust!

The Disciples in the Garden

Mark 14:48 "Am I leading a rebellion," said Jesus, "that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? ⁴⁹ Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest me. But the Scriptures must be fulfilled." ⁵⁰ Then everyone deserted him and fled. ⁵¹ A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, ⁵² he fled naked, leaving his garment behind.

The disciples had been in the Garden of Gethsemane with Jesus. They fell asleep when he had asked them to pray. They ran away when Jesus was arrested by the temple guard.

There is something striking in the simple fact that the disciples all got together again. They had to have been embarrassed. As they sat in the Upper Room on Sunday gawking at each other, they must have felt ashamed. Only two nights earlier it was if someone had thrown a pot of scalding water on a bunch of cats. Bam! Off they scampered. They didn’t stop until they had ducked into every available hole in Jerusalem.

Have you ever wondered what the disciples did that weekend? I have. Did they walk the streets or hide at home? Did they stay in groups or hide alone? When people asked them what happened did they stammer: “Uh … well … you see.” What were they thinking after they ran? “We had to run! They would have killed us all!” “I don’t understand what happened.” “I let him down.” “He should have warned us!”

Where were they when the sky turned black? Were they near the temple when the curtain ripped or near the cemetery when the graves opened? Did any of them dare to sneak back up the hillside and stand at the edge of the crowd to stare at the three silhouettes on the hill?

No one knows. Those hours are left to speculation. Any guilt, any fear, any doubts are all unrecorded.

What we do know is that they had made vows of faithfulness. “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” (Mt 26:35) “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.” (Mt 26:33) “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.” (Lk 22:33) If ever words came back to haunt people, these were the words. Had it only been a few hours earlier that they had spoken them, in that warm, safe upper room in a house in Jerusalem? And now Jesus’ disciples were running in every direction, while the Man they had promised to stand beside was bound and led away to judgment and death.

The sad fact about courage is that, all too often, we feel it most when we need it the least and feel it the least when we so desperately need it the most. Before the catastrophe in Gethsemane, the disciples had known what they were supposed to do when the time came. Stand with Christ! Stand up, stand up for Jesus! Never leave Him. Never forsake Him! But in that dark and shadowy garden, surrounded by soldiers, torches, swords and clubs, the safe suppertime courage of the disciples quickly melted away.

Why did their courage flee? Trust was abandoned. Faith was gone. Confidence had eroded. Jesus had once walked across water to rescue them. He had once rebuked a storm that had frightened them. But now these few soldiers were too much for them. They were terrified. They ran.

Doom doesn’t threaten us too often. And yet, like the disciples on that sad Thursday night, we find ourselves tempted to run away from wherever it is that our Lord wants us to stand. And, to our sorrow and shame, we run away for the same reason. That is when we must pray “forgive our fearful lack of trust.”

Jesus had foreseen it. Again and again during His time with the disciples, He had rebuked them for their weak faith. When they despaired as storms threatened them at sea, He asked them where their trust in Him had gone. When some insurmountable trouble would come up — a huge crowd and no food to feed them, a disease they could not heal – He would wonder why they had lost their faith in Him. Finally He had sighed, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Lk 18:8)

And when Jesus wouldn’t lift a finger to stop the temple guards from arresting Him, all the air went out of the balloon for the disciples. What was Jesus doing? Why wouldn’t He fight? Why didn’t He summon those 12 legions of angels to defend Himself? The disciples didn’t know. They didn’t understand. They were scared. They lost all their hope that Jesus would make things turn out right in the end. And with their faith in Him shattered, they ran in fear.

It is the same lack of trust that so often results in our abandonment of our Lord. Like the disciples, we find courage is easier to come up with when we don’t really need it. What grand and successful struggles against temptation we can weave in our dreams and imaginations! Satan may cajole and charm us, the sinful world may sing its siren song, but we know that we will stand fast. We won’t give in. We will fight the good fight of faith — we will!

And yet we know, when push comes to shove, all our resolve can fail. It’s easy here, in church, to make the promises of everlasting loyalty to Christ. It is easy during our nighttime prayers in the solitude of our bedrooms to pledge undying devotion to our Savior and our King. But get out from behind these walls; get out of your house, be forced to deal with that world of sin and temptation and see what happens!

Plus our fears are so much less than those of the disciples. They abandoned Jesus to save their lives. The stakes are never that high for us, are they? We abandon His commands so that we won’t be laughed at or thought of less highly, or so that we won’t miss out on something enjoyable. We know what his commandments say and the price of loyalty to Him, but we fail Him. We choose comfort over His commands, our lusts over His love, fear over faithfulness to Him.

Our lack of trust leads to foolish fear and falling. We don’t think Jesus is leading us to a safe and good place. Instead of trusting that our Good Shepherd knows where He is leading us, we fear that He has taken a wrong turn. We fear that He is leading us into some place we don’t want to be. It looks like it may be dark there. It looks like it may not be pleasant. It looks as if He doesn’t know what He’s doing.

And so we run from Him, driven by foolish fears that often hardly merit a shiver! Our trust in Him melts away, and with it dissolves all our resolve to be His true and obedient followers. When our faith and trust in Him grow weak, we abandon Jesus as surely as the disciples did.

That is why every Christian, every day, needs to pray these words: “Father, increase our faith!” When our trust in our Savior is at its lowest ebb that is when our prayers must rise to their highest pitch and fervor. God forbid that we should run away from Him because our faith has grown weak! He has certainly done nothing to deserve such lack of confidence from us.

That is why we study the stories in the Bible, so we might see again and again how true it is that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Ro 8:28) Let us read again and again the examples of how faith in God’s guidance has never been a mistake. Moses and the Israelites trapped between the Egyptian army and the raging Red Sea, little David in the valley with giant Goliath, the children of Israel mounting an offensive of walking and trumpeting against the insurmountable walls of Jericho, Samson sightless, shorn and sapped of strength chained to the pillars of the Philistine temple. All of them, every reason to be afraid. Yet every reason to have their fears banished by the calming voice of the Lord. God spoke through Moses to the Israelites at the Red Sea crossing: “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today.” (Ex 14:13). The soothing voice of the Savior as He walked through the tumultuous Sea of Galilee telling His disciples, “It is I; don’t be afraid.” (Jn 6:20) God has never let down anyone who has faith in Him: “The one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” (Ro 9:33)

That is why we remain constant in His Word and faithful to the sacraments through which He increases our faith and decreases our fears. Are you afraid that sometimes God may lead you to a dark and bad place and leave you in the lurch? Remember your baptism – the day He claimed you through the washing of water with the Word and told the world, “I have cleansed Him; He is mine. I will never leave Him or forsake Him.” Do you fear that Jesus may not always have your best interests at heart as He leads you on a sometimes confusing and frightening path? Then come to His table. As you eat that bread and drink that wine, remember the dark road He traveled alone so that He could purchase your forgiveness with the sacrifice of His body and His blood.

The Christian life is not a cakewalk. God has made it abundantly clear that troubles will plague us if we follow His guidance. We walk in danger all the way, as the hymn puts it. But it was His wisdom that mapped out the route of our salvation through a path that was filled with pain and fear. He will never lead us into any place where his Son has not already been. He will never direct us somewhere where Christ has not already conquered. Jesus assures us, “Take heart! I have overcome the world.” (Jn 16:33)

No one knows what the disciples did from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon of Holy Week. But we do know one thing. They came back. Slowly. One by one. Peter, James, Andrew. They came out of hiding. Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas. Out of the shadows. Matthew, James, Thaddeus, Simon. They had been on the run but turned around and came back. One by one they appeared in the same upper room.

From all sections of the city they appeared. Too convicted to go home, yet too confused to go on. They came back. Something in the words spoken by their Master pulled them back together.

It certainly was an awkward position to be in. Caught on the uneven ground between failure and forgiveness. Suspended somewhere between “I can’t believe I did it” and “I’ll never do it again.” Too ashamed to ask for forgiveness, yet too loyal to give up. Too guilty to be counted in, but too faithful to be counted out. For the original disciples there were only two options – surrender or suicide.

We’ve all been there. We have all witnessed our own sandcastle promises swept away by the pounding waves of panic and insecurity. We have all seen our words of promise and obedience ripped into ribbons by the chainsaw of fear and fright. We’ve all done the very things we swore we’d never do.

The very fact that we, like the disciples come back says nothing about us. It says everything about our Master. It says something that those who know Jesus best cannot stand to be in His disfavor. It says something about Jesus that those who do exactly what they promised they wouldn’t can still find forgiveness in Him.

Don’t miss the promise unveiled in this account. For those of you who, like the disciples, have turned and ran when you should have stood and fought, this passage is pregnant with hope. Come out of the shadows. Be done with your hiding. Repent for your guilt and shame. Your Master will always welcome you back. Forgive you. Love you.

However, I won’t end this sermon asking you for great and eloquent promises of lifelong faithfulness. Such pride went before the disciples’ downfall in the Garden of Gethsemane. No, we will end with the fervent prayer that, for our Savior’s sake, our heavenly Father might increase our faith and, with it, our courage. “Lord God, when we face our crises in our Gethsemanes, make us stand firm. Amen.”