Books by NZ Christian Writers

The Map That Preached: The Prophetic Geography of Jesus’ Ministry

by Tom Hartley

From Chapter Four — “The City That Couldn’t See”

Before the skull, there is a garden. And before the cross, there is a press.

When Jesus left the upper room on the last night, He did not wander. He crossed the Kidron and climbed a little way up the western slope of the Mount of Olives — the same mountain He had wept from on Palm Sunday — to a walled grove He had come to many times before. Judas knew it well, “for Jesus ofttimes resorted thither with his disciples” (John 18:2). And the grove had a name. Matthew and Mark both write it down: Gethsemane.

The name is not decoration. Gethsemane is Aramaic — gat shemanim — and it means the oil press. Gat is a press; shemen is oil. This was the place on the Mount of Olives where the olives of the mountain were brought to be crushed. And the crushing was not gentle. The ripe olives were first broken open under a great rolling stone. Then the pulp was packed into baskets, the baskets were stacked beneath a heavy wooden beam, and onto the beam went the weights — stone after stone after stone — until the pressure grew so great that the oil could no longer stay hidden inside the fruit. It bled out. And the last oil, the deepest oil, came only under the heaviest stones.

Now stand in that grove and watch what happens. “And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). The Anointed One had come to the oil press. And the weights went on — the weight of the coming cross, the weight of a Father’s turned face, the weight of the sin of every man who had ever lived and ever would — stone upon stone upon stone, until what was inside Him came out through His skin. He was being pressed. And under the pressing, He poured out.

And do not miss what His own title means as He kneels here. Messiah — Christ — means the Anointed One, the one marked with oil. And the Anointed One knelt down in the place where the anointing oil is made, and let Himself be pressed. The King who was anointed with oil became the olive in the press. He was crushed to become the very thing that heals, and lights, and crowns.

He was pressed in a garden so that oil — mercy, healing, light — could run down at last over a world that had none of its own.