Fresh Look at Matthew: Matthew 26, fourth take

“Cup” is a metaphor in the New Testament for suffering.  I am reading The Insanity of God and am about half-way through.  It is about those who drink that cup.  Not the suffering of being ill.  I am not fully convinced that illness was the kind of suffering Jesus and the apostles were talking about.  That is not to belittle suffering of that kind; the gospel has an answer for that kind of suffering, too.  However, I am pretty sure that suffering is referring to persecution, something I know nothing about.

Jesus prayed that the cup would pass from him.  This has perplexed the church for years, yet I think we miss the point and also trivialize the cross  It was not that Jesus thought he could get out of it.  As fully human, who would want to go through the cross? And as fully deity, he is going to be separated from God and become a sin offering (not sin; he couldn’t become sin), an unimaginable experience for God.  We see the subordination of the will of Jesus on earth to the Father; we see the desire that there was some other remedy for the brokenness of humankind and for reconciliation with God.  We also see that it is all right to pray for deliverance from the inevitable. 

Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man more than anything else.  That is pure identification with the only reference to it in the Old Testament, in Daniel 7:13.  “I was watching in the night visions, And behold, One like the Son of Man, Coming with the clouds of heaven! He came to the Ancient of Days, And they brought Him near before Him.”  Of course, this is not the only place where “son of man” appears; the angels often call the prophets that.  But here it is “the” Son of Man. We conclude that Jesus is referring to Daniel, but I think there is more.   

There is full identification with mankind, and to be a son means to be an heir.  He is going to be heir of all that mankind was supposed to be heir to.  He will have the dominion and power over the earth that the human race was supposed to have (I can’t end two sentences in a row with a preposition!). This is not to diminish Jesus’ place in the Godhead, but there is a mystery in Scripture, one of the biggest, I think, of how the incarnation of Jesus shifted the universe and even “taught” God something.  That sounds like heresy and I wouldn’t want to take that any further, except that Hebrews says “He learned obedience by the things which he suffered.”  In fact, in the fuller context, this brings us back to Matthew 26:

who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, ⁸ though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. ⁹ And having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him, ¹⁰ called by God as High Priest “according to the order of Melchizedek,” ¹¹ of whom we have much to say, and hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.

Thus the enigma:  “having been perfected” or completed is referring to the perfect Son of God, who we would expect would already be perfected.  Something altered in the universe due to the incarnation. 

I conclude, lest anyone think me a heretic who is trying to start a new cult, with this:  We are determined to be certain about everything in the Scriptures when we should probably have more humility about our ability to think God’s thoughts and understand the God of the universe.  I get extremely uncomfortable when preachers claim to know things that are not really knowable.