In a captivating new video by Dallas Jenkins and Rabbi Jason Sobel, the two discussed the historical and biblical context of the Garden of Gethsemane.
“We are sitting in what could be—or is very near—the exact spot of the Garden of Gethsemane,” Jenkins says, taking in the sacred atmosphere. “One of the most intense passages of Scripture in the entire Bible. Does this ever get old for you?”
“It’s breathtaking,” replies Sobel.
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“It’s my first time. But it’s overwhelming,” says Jenkins.
For Jenkins, what makes this place so meaningful isn’t just what happened there—but why it happened. “It’s not about the actions that took place here,” he says. “It’s about the heart of what took place here. Jesus was experiencing heartbreak. This is where the most emotional moment that we’ve ever seen captured in the Bible took place.”
Jenkins then draws a connection many miss: the significance of the Mount of Olives, and more specifically, the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed in agony. “One thing that didn’t really make sense until I was here in Israel this week was the importance and the relevance and the metaphor of the fact that this is the Mount of Olives.”
“He is called the Messiah,” Sobel points out. “Messiah means the ‘Anointed One.’ Anointed with what? Anointed with olive oil. To be set apart as the king of Israel…”
He continues: “To be set apart as the king of Israel, you had to be anointed with the holy olive oil—as well as to be a priest. The priests were anointed with oil before they stepped into their service in the temple.”
/**/But the most striking revelation is the meaning of Gethsemane itself. “The Garden of Gethsemane actually means the place of the olive press. This is the place where they would press and crush the olives, and the oil here would be used in the temple,” says Sobel. “So here He is as the Messiah, the priest, in the place where the oil is being produced—and He’s about to be crushed for the weight of sin.”
Jenkins recalls visiting an olive press the day before. “It was a multi-step process, but it was all about crushing. And so Jesus is surrounded by olives and is being crushed.”
To produce the purest oil, olives must be crushed three times. “This correlates to the three times Jesus asked His disciples to carry with Him in prayer,” Sobel explains. “Each time more is being squeezed out of Him. Each time He’s feeling more of the weight of the burden of sin that He is going to bear—until the third crushing, the final crushing, where actually blood begins to come out from within.”
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“It’s not an accident that they wrote in this Gospel account that He was sweating and bleeding,” Jenkins adds. “That is a picture of what it looks like essentially when olives are turned into oil.”
There’s one more layer to this biblical mystery: light. “They used olive oil as well for olive lamps—bringing light to the world. And that’s what Jesus was willing to go through—to become,” says Jenkins.
“The olive is valuable, but the oil is only produced through the crushing,” Sobel says.
In the very place where Jesus was crushed under the weight of the world’s sin, light began to break through. Gethsemane wasn’t just the setting for His suffering—it was the press that produced the oil of our salvation. The crushing wasn’t the end of the story. It was the beginning of redemption.
Abby Trivett is content development editor for Charisma Media.
