Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Luke 22; John 18

Evangelical Questions: The Garden or the Cross? by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Gethsemane and the crucifixion. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Before we get started I want to remind you about the FAIR conference (August 2-4) and tell you about another one of the talks that will be happening. Derek Westra will be speaking on the portrayal of Latter-day Saints in television. Derek works for the church and leads a team that makes sure people around the world have access to information about the church presented in a way their culture can understand. And they do a fair amount of monitoring how the church and its members are portrayed in order to understand what information needs to be available as a corrective when things go wrong. His talk should be fascinating. He is speaking on Wednesday morning Aug 2. You can buy tickets to attend in person in Provo, Utah, or you can watch through streaming for free – we just ask that you go to the FAIR website and sign up for that. Today we’re going to talk about what is, in my opinion, one of the strangest things that sometimes divides Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints and that is talking about Gethsemane and the Cross. Traditionally Evangelicals place more importance on the cross – it’s where the actual physical death happens. And Latter-day Saints have placed more importance on Gethsemane because it is where the Savior suffered emotionally and psychologically for our sins. All of this is leading us into a discussion on atonement theories, but that’s not until next week. It also sort of veers into a discussion we’ve had a couple of times here about, “Don’t you worship a different Jesus?” But this week we want to look at how these 2 different ideas about Gethsemane and the Cross developed and what exactly is going on. And before I even get very far I must refer you to two resources that help. One is Elder Holland’s 2022 talk called, “Lifted Up Upon the Cross,” and the other is the FAIR article titled The Garden and The Cross. Both are very helpful and will add to this discussion. Use of symbols As usual around here we start with some history. Elder Holland mentions in his talk, and you can read about this in lots of other places, that the cross was not immediately a symbol for the early Christians. And it’s not because they didn’t use symbols. They used a lot of symbols, in part because a huge percentage of the population was illiterate, but also because at various times in the first 4 centuries of Christianity, it was illegal to be a Christian so they sometimes had to speak in a kind of code. Some of those early symbols would mean something to us today like the dove, the good shepherd, and the lamb, others wouldn’t immediately speak to us. For example, early Christians used the peacock as a symbol of the death and resurrection of Christ. Why a peacock? The