To Christ’s dismay, the disciples fell sound asleep and left him alone to pray in his final hours. Can you do better?
From the west bank of the Kidron Valley, in the slopes fanning forth from Jerusalem’s great yellow eastern walls, the Mount of Olives rolls lazily upward, toward Heaven. At the bottom of the rocky gray mountain lies a small olive orchard.
The orchard probably was bigger in Biblical times. And in it, in those days, sat an ancient stone olive press, an appurtenance of life that, like the silver-green olive trees themselves, seemed always to have been there. For generations, people had carried their olives in hand-woven sacks and reed baskets to this hillside place whose name, Gethsemane, itself derives from the Aramaic word for olive press.
Here, beneath a pitted stone wheel, the olives would be rolled into a black mash by a donkey’s steady plodding — until they gave up, in burbles and drops, the redolent oil that stoked Palestine’s day-to-day domestic life. Indeed, the olive tree, whose fruit and oil then served as a staple in cooking, medicine, and religious ritual, today remains for the Jewish people an enduring symbol of life and joy.
Though the press no longer stands in the area known as the Garden, it was certainly there the night Jesus died. And one imagines it pressing on, perhaps crushing out valuable oil even as Peter slept and Jesus prayed. To be sure, the pretty tranquility of the grounds that night belied the drama that soon would play out within those rambling stone walls.
Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” (26 Matthew: 36)
Earlier that night, they had celebrated a Passover supper as the Law required. And while they ate, He took some wine, gave thanks, and shared it. He’d done the same with the bread, even telling them to do thus always, in his name. A week of purification and prayer had preceded the celebration, requiring the preparation of special foods and the slaughter of sacrificial lambs. Even as they sat here in the Garden, the smell of burning flesh hung over Jerusalem.
Now, having supped on the unleavened bread, drunk the wine, eaten the roasted meat, and tasted the bitter herbs in remembrance, they were ready to roll out their mats and draw their cloaks 
around them. It was common for Jesus to come here to pray in the Garden…
When he arrived at the place he said to them, “Pray that you may not undergo the test.” After withdrawing about a stone’s throw from them and kneeling, he prayed. (22 Luke: 40-41)
He moved to a corner of the Garden, leaving Peter, James, and John nearby — closer than the others. A great sorrow swept over him. His heart, as He had told them earlier, was growing heavier with the hour. It would be a great comfort knowing his friends were here with Him, praying just a short distance away.
But it was not to be.
When he returned to his disciples he found them asleep. He said to Peter, “So you could not keep watch with me for one hour? Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (26 Matthew: 40-41)
The night had grown cold. His thick woolen cloak offered little comfort as He knelt again in the trampled grass, head touching an expansive, smooth stone. Concentration came with difficulty. He asked to be spared, if that were possible. But as Jesus murmured in prayer, He found himself yearning once more for the comfort of human connection. He tried to shake off the need to have someone praying with him close by, but it did no good. Purposefully, he lifted his head and arose from his knees. As He strode back to the three, his cloak pulled about him, four deep-blue tassels bobbed from the hem of his coat. For a second time, He found them sleeping. So acute was their guilt, they didn’t even know how to respond. Turning away in disappointment and resignation, He returned alone to the discrete space to pray.
[And to strengthen him an angel from heaven appeared to him. He was in such agony and prayed so fervently that his sweat became like droops of blood falling on the ground.] When he rose from prayer and returned to his disciples, he found them sleeping from grief. He said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not undergo the test.” (22 Luke: 43-46)
Only six days before they had passed this way under starkly different circumstances. Over the old Roman road they had come, their reed sandals rasping softly as they walked, the mule’s hooves 
clicking with every step upon the large, quarried squares of stone that paved the Empire’s roads. Stretching northeast toward Jericho, this same thoroughfare also took travelers south, into Jerusalem by way of the ridge of this very Mountain of Olives.
All during the journey’s final leg, Jerusalem had stretched grandly above them, the newly rebuilt temple rising over the city wall. Moving steadily upward, they at last reached the city gates. The disciples were excited. This, they believed, would prove a triumphal entry. But Jesus intended make a point of humility, riding astride an ass, a symbol of peace and a fulfillment of Scripture. Inside, a modest crowd of commoners familiar with Christ’s teaching greeted them, waving palms in homage.
Their plaintive cry still rang in his ears: “Hosannah!”
And now, even as he stood in the Garden, looking fondly over men no doubt devoted to Him, Jesus may have felt a small swell of disappointment: Yet again, they had fallen asleep. As He roused them a third time, a glow of lamps and torches converging caught his eye.
“Get up, let us go,” he said then. “Look, my betrayer is at hand.” (26 Matthew, verse 46)
Prepared to the extent that he could be, Christ stood waiting for his betrayer’s kiss. There was some arguing. Peter raised his sword. But the Apostles were no match for the contingent that had come to take Him. Jesus was arrested, bound, and with a rough shove herded into a grim procession.
Winding through the darkened stone archways of the city, the priests and soldiers made their way toward the lavish home of Caiaphas, a high priest of Jerusalem. Once there, a council of elders, chief priests, and scribes was hastily convened to conduct an inquiry. Caiaphas himself evinced a chilling presence. Atop his ordinary priestly vestments was the rich blue robe of his station. Tiny golden bells and pomegranates danced from the hem of his robe. A short, brightly embroidered cloak offset a large square purse that hung directly over his heart. The purse, made of gold, held twelve inlaid precious stones. On his head, Caiaphas wore a large, conical white turban draped in high priests’ blue.
One might say Caiaphas was the perfect man for the job. His family was not particularly popular among the Jewish people, among neither their peers nor the lower classes. The silver paid to Judas, moreover, had come from the pocket of this priest. Further, some historians maintain that Caiaphas would not have been a high priest at all had he not purchased the job outright from the Romans.
That night the council, at the instigation of Caiaphas, resolved to turn Jesus over to Caesar’s provincial authorities. And so, from Pilate’s manse to Herod’s palace he was jostled, the Romans 
bemusedly seeking to fob elsewhere the political liability that Jesus posed. And no matter where Jesus plodded, ridicule and abuse came at Him from all sides.
Before long, He was back in Pilate’s hands. The crowd outside grew frenzied. That Jesus’ demise would serve the purposes of Rome — who needed an upstart Messiah rallying the Jewish people? — and those within the priesthood, like Caiaphas, who colluded with Rome, made the drama’s conclusion inevitable.
By mid-morning of the following day, a sentence was rendered. The long walk to Golgotha began.
Even after the crucifixion, a motley crowd stood by, hurling gibes at the cross. On the ground below Jesus’ feet, the linen saq, or undergarment in which He had been dressed — the same linen cloth he’d worn while washing the disciples’ feet — was ripped and divided by the soldiers. His seamless, handcrafted woolen cloak, however, the modern financial and practical equivalent of both a name-brand suit and overcoat, was deemed too valuable to dismember.
Instead, the soldiers knelt below the cross, the small metal rings and little bronze scales of their armor jingling like handfuls of coins, and carved round diagrams, geometrically intersected, in the dust. There, beneath the cross, they threw crudely hewn dice for Jesus’ only possession of monetary value.
They also took his tunic, but the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top down. So they said to one another, “Let’s not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it will be,” in order that the passage of scripture might be fulfilled [that says]:
“They divided my garments among them,
and for my vesture they cast lots.”
This is what the soldiers did. (19 John 23-25)
And then came one last pronouncement from above: “It is finished.” Three of the four evangelists — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — tell us a centurion standing guard beneath the cross was converted on the spot. Not all of Christ’s believers, though, would find faith that easily. Even the disciples initially had difficulty comprehending the magnitude of it all.
Not surprisingly, then, many people of faith continue to struggle with the mystery even today. But even amid the struggle, Jesus remains constant:
…. I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see my glory that You gave me, because You loved me before the foundation of the world. ….the world also does not know You, but I know You, and they know that You sent me. I made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.” (17 John 24-26)
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