Then jesus withdrew from them, knelt, and prayed... in his anguish, he prayed earnestly.

Luke 22.39-46

My guess is many of you have seen this famous depiction of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, shortly before his arrest. Done by German artist Heinrich Hoffman in 1890, the original now hangs in NYC’s Riverside Church.

When I was a little guy, my mother apparently got a deal on three gold-framed prints of this picture. One, she gave to my uncle, my dad’s brother, then a ministerial student. One, she gave to her Sunday School class, where it hung for more than 40 years. And one that hung in my room, as I grew up through a mostly pleasant childhood and mildly anxious adolescence.

I don’t recall paying close attention to it, but Jesus was there near me praying in Gethsemane all those years. Perhaps, it began my journey of connecting Jesus, prayer, and my life.

How Hoffman or any artist depicts a subject I guess is on a continuum between projection of the artist’s imagination and a portrayal of reality. Hoffman shows mainly Jesus’ majesty, which we affirm. What he misses is Jesus’ agony, which Luke depicts, agony, bits of which we too meet along our ways.

About prayer, minister-writer Frederick Buechner says in his WISHFUL THINKING: "We all pray whether we think of it as praying or not. The odd silence we fall into when something very beautiful is happening, or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h! that sometimes floats out of us as out of a 4th of July crowd when the skyrocket bursts over the water.

"The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy.

"Whatever words or sounds we use for sighing with over our own lives. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to ourselves but to something even more familiar than ourselves and even more strange than the world…. According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it."

As said earlier, Hoffman picks up on Jesus' majesty in Gethsemane. Luke picks up on his agony. Majesty joyful, thankful moments intertwine with the agony up-for-grabs, scary moments in all our lives. Take a moment to consider where the joy points and the agony points crisscross in your life, just now.

According to Luke, struggling Jesus found strength when he prayed. Whatever else prayer may or may not change, it’s said, praying changes the one who prays. And though Hoffman’s picture has blessed my life, Luke’s Jesus helps hold me together and strengthens me, when I am scared, which I often am more than I like to admit to you or myself.

Back to Buechner: "Just keep praying…even with your most half-cocked, halting prayer, the God you call upon will finally come, and even if he doesn’t bring the answer you want, he will bring himself. And maybe at the secret heart of all our prayers that is what we are really praying for." (pp. 85-87)

…That presence sometimes feels like an absence, but is a kind of presence too; it attests even when we feel very alone, we are not.