Gethsemane

I often reflect on the Atonement Jesus made for us, and enjoy digging through articles, books and scriptures for more information about it. I really didn't know much about what had happened when He prayed in Gethsemane. I knew He had asked the eight Apostles to wait near the entrance, and took Peter, James and John further into the garden with Him. Admonishing them to watch and pray, He advanced a "stone's throw" beyond them, and knelt and prayed. In the record He prayed three times, twice returning to wake the Apostles, and asking them to pray with Him. The third time He told them to sleep on-until the traitor, Judas, arrived to betray Him.
I knew there must be more that happened, but how could I discover what it was? The records of Mathew, Mark, and Luke are second hand because Matthew never went beyond the entrance, and Mark and Luke had not yet been called as Apostles. John who did go into the garden, but says nothing at all about anything that happened until Judas arrived. I determined to dig in the scriptures for references, prophecies, or types that pointed to Gethsemane, and try to infer from them what happened.
I find that taking the scriptures literally gives me ideas to sketch and to paint that taking them metaphorically didn't even hint at. It became a process of finding new questions I wanted answers to. The following are some of the questions, and some of the answers I came up with.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

"A Great Calm" 
26 inches by 54.5 inches, Oil on Panel
I tried to imagine the hectic efforts: rowing to  turn the boat into the wind,  scooping up buckets of water to bail out the water that filled it to the rails, and fighting the lines to pull down the sails that would have threatened to pull the bow under in a "great wind storm".  I think the crew members and disciples would have been so busy with their tasks that few of them would have seen Jesus command the wind and waves.  I tried to capture their surprise when suddenly-there was "A Great Calm".
 The ship is patterned after one displayed on Google that purportedly sunk at or near the time of Christ, and the shape of the landscape in the background is also from Google looking toward Capernaum.
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