GETHSEMANE – THE PRESS
“He took Peter, James, and John along with Him, and He began to be deeply distressed and troubled. ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death’, He said to them. ‘Stay here and keep watch.’” (Mark 14:33, 34, NIV).
Gethsemane was an olive grove outside Jerusalem where olives were cultivated. The Greek word, gethsemane, meant “olive press” which symbolised the crushing weight of sin that Jesus bore on the cross. It was also symbolic of the weight of the human burdens which the Jewish people carried and the economic leash which tied the poor to the wealthy of Israel. The masses waited eagerly for Messiah to come, a Branch from the stump of the olive tree, to release them from their burdens.
Olives had great economic and religious significance for Israel. They were more than food. Olive oil had many uses, including in religious rituals. Olives underwent a laborious process to extract the precious oil. Firstly, an animal-drawn millstone was rolled over the olives to crack them open. The cracked olives were then gathered into bags and stacked beneath an enormous stone column which pressed the olives and forced the oil to drip into a pit at the base of the “gethsemane”, from where it was collected.
This process also had deep spiritual significance for Jesus in His agonising hours in the garden. As the oil was pressed from the olives by the weight of the stone column, so the world’s sin, pressed into His body, made the blood run from the pores of His skin.
Every year, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a bull and two goats were chosen for the sacrifice. The High Priest would sacrifice the bull on the altar and sprinkle the blood on the Mercy Seat in the Holy of Holies to purge the tabernacle/temple from defilement caused by the misdeeds of the priests and their families. One of the goats was chosen by lot and sacrificed as a sin offering for the people. The High Priest would again enter the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the goat’s blood on the Mercy Seat.
The second goat, called the Azazel or scapegoat, was chosen to carry the sins of the people away into the wilderness. The High Priest would lay his hand on the goat’s head and press the sins of the people onto the goat as he confessed them over the animal which was driven away into an uninhabited land to bear away the people’s sins for another year. In Isaiah 53, the prophet saw this event in the spirit and wrote, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
As the oil was pressed from the olive, as the sins of Israel were pressed upon the goat, so Jesus bore the weight of the world’s sin in His own body, for us.