The rest of the world came to know it as The Last Supper. The disciples called it dinner on Thursday night. Two thousand years ago, they had wrapped up a meal with their Rabbi and stepped out into the night for a walk down to a garden in the valley below Jerusalem. The city set on a hill, everything surrounding Jerusalem was a valley by definition. The full moon would have lit their way, but they weren’t walking an unfamiliar path or visiting an unfamiliar garden. The disciples had been here many times with Jesus (as recently as the day prior), probably pestering Him with questions about His parables as they sauntered between rows of olive trees.
Gethsemane is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew words gat (meaning press) and shemen (meaning oil); thus, Oil Press. The name hints at the kinds of fruits this garden yielded; it further foreshadowed the excruciating intensity of Jesus’ final prayer before His arrest.
In less than 24 hours, the Messiah would be dead. But in this moment, He still had work to do. Most of the disciples were left by themselves as Jesus pressed further into the garden’s shadows with Peter, James, and John. It’s here that the gospels note a shift in Jesus’ demeanor; the sorrow that He was about to undergo was overwhelming. But unlike with their mountaintop vision of His transfiguration, even the elite three were not allowed to venture further. As they likely saw Him do every night for the last three years, Jesus left them to speak with His Father. It was just a Thursday night.
The prophet Joel focused much of his attention on the Day of the Lord. It’s an awful day of judgment for some, a day of redemption for others. In chapter 3, the captives of Israel have finally converged on their homeland. The nations that once enslaved them are assembled in a valley to face their Maker. God begins iterating through a laundry list of crimes they’ve committed. They took the land as spoil for themselves, selling off children for booze and sex. Gold and silver that once adorned the tabernacle of God now sit in the temples of idols. God sees this as a personal attack. And for that, He responds swiftly. Step one is to restore Israel back to their land. Then the children of these belligerents will end up as slaves themselves.
God wants to speak directly to the armies and mighty men of these offending countries. He’s going to bring His own mighty men to the fight. But the people aren’t ready for war; they think they’re in a time of peace. It’s evident because God tells them to beat their harvesting implements into weapons, an inversion of Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3.
Speaking of farm tools, Joel continues his soliloquy with a directive to begin a harvest. It’s time to gather because the winepress is overflowing and the grain is ripe. But this is a yield of wickedness grown by the surrounding nations. But God just told the people to convert their pruning hooks and plowshares into spears and swords. There’s no power they have in the face of the chaos they’ve created. It’s not for them to collect their iniquities. God will.
When God gathered the nations together for their judgment in this chapter, He brought them to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Which is strange, because King Jehoshaphat isn’t mentioned anywhere else except in the stories of the Chronicles and Kings. It’s all one Hebrew pun, of course. Jehoshaphat means Yahweh will judge. God called the nations to the Valley of God’s Judgment…to judge them. This is also called the Valley of Decision later in this chapter.
But what of the Valley of Jehoshaphat? Historically and traditionally, the name has been tied to the Kidron Valley, a channel that separates Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. This valley transcends the Malachi-Matthew line and figures prominently in the Gospels. How? There’s a famous garden in this valley.
Gethsemane.
Let’s reread Joel 3 now, shall we? The nations are gathered into the Valley of Judgment where God will confront them with their wrongdoings. He’s commanded that all their iniquities be gathered together, but He just instructed them to destroy their gardening tools. How can they harvest anything, let alone their sins? But then a Man walks into the Valley. He enters the Garden. He drops to His knees in anguish, pressed so hard that He begins sweating blood. The sins of humanity were brought to this place and now they rest on His shoulders. It’s almost too much to bear. He desperately wants this burden to be removed but even more desperately He must fulfill the will of the Father. An hour later, He leaves the Valley surrounded by a squadron of soldiers. With Him depart the sins of the world. This isn’t judgment anymore. It’s blessing. The Man took on the guilt of a planet and set it free.
The world would be turned upside down in the next 72 hours. In less than two months from this moment, in the first breaths of the book of Acts, Peter would proclaim that Joel’s prophecy of the promise of the Spirit had been fulfilled. That evening in Gethsemane was the hinge on which all of creation had been longing to turn. It was the culmination of centuries of prophetic hope. But ask Bartholomew or Thomas or Andrew what they thought in the moment, and none of them would have pointed to Joel’s foretelling of the Day of the Lord. None of them knew what was about to happen or all that it would entail. To the disciples, it was just a Thursday night.