The Road That Gets You There

Now I have to tell you something about the road to all of that, because if I leave it out I will have sent you toward the throne by the wrong path, and the wrong path is the oldest error in the story.

The road does not go around the garden. It goes through it.

You remember what happened in the garden the night before the cross. He fell on the ground and prayed — not serenely, not composed, but with His face in the dirt and His sweat falling like blood. Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. He did not want it. He was not pretending when He said that. He was a man on the ground in the dark, begging for another way, because He could see in full what the next hours held.

And then: Not what I will, but what You will.

That is the road. Not the kneeling alone — that would only be suffering. The surrender in the kneeling. The not my will spoken by a person who meant it, in a garden where no one but the angels heard it, for the joy set before Him that was you, brought home. He drank the cup He begged to have taken, and the cross was the result, and the empty tomb was the answer, and the throne was the destination the whole road had been moving toward from the beginning.

And the road He walked is the road He is making His co-heirs walk. Not around the garden. Through it.

Paul will not let you separate the glory from the suffering. He writes them in the same breath: co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory. He joins them with an if that is not a threat but a description. The path to the throne runs through Gethsemane because the King who occupies that throne got there by Gethsemane, and He is forming His children in His own shape.

This is why the charge the old sons of the council were given — defend the weak, maintain the rights of the poor, rescue the needy — was always going to cost the one who carried it faithfully. The fallen ones would not pay the cost. They ruled from above, at no expense to themselves, and their costless rule became cruelty. The Son of God ruled from below, at infinite expense, and His costly rule became the cross that splits history in two.

And the children of light being prepared for the empty thrones are being prepared the same way. Not by studying the council. By doing, now, in the small and ordinary territory they have been given, what the council refused to do: defending the weak when it costs them, telling the truth when a lie would be cheaper, loving the unlovely at real expense, carrying the suffering of those around them without dropping it when it gets heavy. Every one of those small acts is training. Not for a distant future. For the regency already underway — already, now, in the kitchen, on the road, at the table — being practiced by people who do not know yet how much they are being formed.

You will not feel cosmic while you do it. The Son of God in the garden did not feel triumphant. He felt afraid, and He did it anyway, because the love was stronger than the fear.

That is the road. Walk it humbly, and the throne will arrive as gift at the end of it. You cannot strive toward the throne. You can only receive it. But the receiving happens to the ones who have been shaped, on the road, into the kind of being who can be trusted with it — and that shaping looks like a garden, not a coronation.

The proud sons fell because they would not stoop. The children of dust rise because they have learned, slowly, in the ordinary daylight, what it is to kneel.