What is Your Gethsamane?

I don’t pose this question to be sacriligious by any means. Christians normally think of Gethsemane as the garden where Jesus agonized and prayed over the death He would soon be facing. However, our word “gethsemane” means olive press in Aramaic, the language Jesus would have used. This equipment was extremely important to those living in Palestine during Jesus’ day because olive oil was such an important commodity for their daily life: oil for lamps, oil for cooking, oil used in lotions and preservatives. The pictures and text below explains how the process unfolds.

The gethsamane is a large stone column (or several, as illustrated in the first picture) that is lowered onto the cracked olives. The enormous weight forces the oil from the olives and it oozes from the platform holding the fruit into basins which collect the oil.

Using this term as a symbol in our lives, a gethsemane is any heavy burden we find ourselves dealing with in life. A list of gethsemanes in the 21^st century could include  job stress, career loss, disintegration of family, dealing with a dreaded disease, or grief over death of a loved one, all of which merely scratch the surface of possibilities.

Keeping this analogy in mind, think of life moving along in an untroubled fashion corresponding to the olives laid out on the “pressing pan.” Then along comes an enormous burden, much too heavy to lift or manipulate by ourselves--our gethsemane. Now comes the question regarding the result. Will luscious olive oil ooze from under this gethsemane or will the result be a sack full of pits and dried up skins?  

For a child of God, the deciding factor is allowing Jesus Christ to come alongside us as we go through the squeezing process by our personal gethsemane. In fact, He tells us in Matthew 11:29 “Come to Me, you who are burdened, and I will give you rest.” We don’t need to go through any gethsemane alone.

The end result of this painful process is an actual prize. For an oil exporter, it is the delicious oil ready for sale. For we who belong to Christ, it is the spiritual growth we gain after having traveled through the difficulty. For Jesus, it was finishing the task He came to earth to accomplish—paying the sin-debt for mankind and making salvation available to all who reach out to Him. .

In all cases, looking at it from the “it is finished” side, the gain was well worth the pain.