Awake in Gethsemane

When Jesus, on the night of his arrest, stole off to Gethsemane to pray—to speak his pain and sorrow to God—he charged his disciples to stay awake and pray with him. They could not. Luke, in his gospel, writes they fell asleep from the weight of their own sorrow (22:45). Dietrich Bonhoeffer returns often to this image in his writing, and in his new book Awake in Gethsemane: Bonhoeffer and the Witness of Christian Lament, Tim Judson makes it the center of his passionate plea for the recovery of lament. We too have fallen asleep to the suffering of the world, though Christ still weeps and prays and calls us to join him.

The opening three chapters of Judson’s book develop, in close conversation with Bonhoeffer, a theology, ethics, and liturgy of lament. Although Judson is deeply and insightfully engaged with interpretive questions about Bonhoeffer throughout the book—about the meaning of religionlessness, for example, or the nature of Bonhoeffer’s commitment to nonviolence—this is not a work of exegesis. Judson’s goal is a constructive “lamentology.” He argues first that Christian lament is necessarily Christological: it is Christ who laments on our behalf, and we lament rightly only with and through him. Because it is thus Christological, lament is also necessarily communal: I do not lament by myself for myself, but with and for the whole church and the whole world. “Lament requires others,” Judson says (28). These commitments to the Christological and therefore communal character of lament undergird everything else in the book. It is because true Christian lament is grounded in unity with Christ’s lament that it can become an act of solidarity and resistance in the face of suffering, not a despairing withdrawal from the world.

Such lament is ineluctably practical, taking concrete shape in the lives and practices of Christian communities. Judson’s discussions of the ethics and liturgy of lament (chapters 2 and 3) are the heart of the book, and for me the book’s crucial contribution. Judson does, in the book’s conclusion, offer some actionable advice about how to incorporate lament into, say, the lectionary cycle or the baptismal liturgy, but these central chapters are not a how-to manual. His concern is more basic than that. Lament, he writes, is fundamental to the Christian community’s way of being in the world—“a basis for discerning the church’s responsibility” (57) and an essential dissonance in the polyphony of Christian speech (77–83). The practice of lament constitutes a kind of “liturgical training” (93) that attunes us to and enmeshes us in the suffering of the world. It would be a mistake to try to offer an ethics of lament, explaining from some other point of view when and what and how to lament properly; rather, joining Christ in his lament is what gives rise to a properly Christian way of being. “The Christian life is a Gethsemanian life until Christ’s return,” Judson notes (70).

In his final chapters, Judson turns toward a few lingering constructive questions. He deals first (in chapter 4) with the relation of lament to theodicy, opposing tidy philosophical answers to the problem of evil in favor of a pained silence kept with others. A practice of lament makes it possible to accompany people even through despondency and despair. Next, in chapter 5, he insists that lament be understood as a form of active engagement, a pathway to penitence, even a form of Christological resistance (117), rather than as a passive letting-be. According to Judson, without this emphasis lament becomes its own dispenser of cheap grace.

Thus, Judson lays out a bracing and persuasive vision of the church as a community who, with Christ, laments for the world, and in joining the world’s lament seeks to name and resist all sources of suffering (even and perhaps especially when we find that we ourselves are the sources of the world’s suffering). Although I occasionally felt that Judson’s expositions of Bonhoeffer distracted from his constructive goal, he has made it abundantly clear that Bonhoeffer deserves to be a central conversation partner for those of us who want to recover a more robust practice of lament for Christian churches. And for those of us who did not yet know we needed to recover lament, Judson reminds us to wake up and pray.

Brian Hamilton is an associate professor of religion at Florida Southern College.

Brian Hamilton

Date Of Review:

February 28, 2024