Jesus’s Sense of Time on Good Friday
Thinking alongside Ecclesiastes in Gethsemane
“Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane” by anonymous (ca. 1480 CE), originally presented as a diptych with “Mocking of Christ.” Courtesy Colmar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Matthew 26:39 records that, on the night before his crucifixion, Jesus prays in Gethsemane: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I will, but what you will.” Christians have long grappled with the fear and sorrow expressed in this statement. Jesus’s humanity is perhaps never more clearly on display (alongside the word “father,” the version in Mark 14 even includes the intimate word “Abba,” a term of endearment akin to English “Papa” or “Daddy”). Yet beneath the emotion of this moment lies another, less-explored dimension: Jesus’s sense of time—of what can be altered, what must unfold, and how human experience intersects with divine will.
Such questions were not new. By the third century BCE, centuries before Jesus was born, Jews had in Ecclesiastes already wrestled with God’s ordered yet inscrutable temporal framework for humankind. Events were understood to occur at their appointed moments, beyond human ability to predict, control, or fully comprehend them. This sentiment is famously captured in Ecclesiastes 3:1 (and the Byrds song): “For everything there is a season.”
Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane suggests he sees time in a similar way. He expresses the belief that his death is unfolding as part of a divine plan—at an “appointed hour” (Matthew 26:45) that cannot be avoided or hastened. His words reveal a complex layering of temporal experience. There is the immediacy of suffering, as he confronts the anguish of looming death. There is a sense of contingency, as he voices the possibility that the outcome might yet be altered: “let this cup pass from me.” There is also submission to an overarching order: “not what I will, but what you will.” Finally, the scene gestures toward a larger, eschatological horizon, in which the event of Jesus’s death is understood as part of a larger divine purpose.
A recent study by Moritz F. Adam finds that Ecclesiastes—and other late texts like Daniel and Jubilees—reflects a broader intellectual shift in the Hellenistic period and Second Temple Judaism, when time came to be understood not merely as a sequence of events but as an abstract, ordered, and total framework. In many cases, that structure is made accessible to human understanding through revelation, visions, law, or history. Ecclesiastes, however, takes a different approach. It affirms that life unfolds within a divinely established order, yet insists that this order ultimately evades human understanding.
To be sure, earlier biblical traditions had already discussed time as ordered by God, whether in the structured sequence of creation or in covenantal and liturgical life. Yet Ecclesiastes treats time itself as an object of reflection. It insists that attempts to understand God’s work in time are futile, and not where human energy is best spent.
Through retranslation of the Hebrew term hevel, Adam argues that the core message of Ecclesiastes is not that life is meaningless, but that all things are transitory. The text challenges the idea that life follows predictable patterns of reward and punishment: Sometimes good people suffer and those acting wrongly prosper. Divine justice does not always map onto human expectation. All achievements, possessions, and human efforts eventually fade. The proper response, Ecclesiastes suggests, is attunement and acceptance rather than trying to decipher the workings of God in time. Ethics in Ecclesiastes is not about mastering time, but about living well within its limits.
Time, as expressed by Jesus in Gethsemane, was experienced as both immediate and constrained, both open and fixed. Ecclesiastes emphasizes that all life is fleeting and subject to death. Jesus’s impending crucifixion places him squarely within this condition. His anguish is existential, reflecting human confrontation with finitude. Through his encounter with death, Jesus shares in the temporal limitations Ecclesiastes describes.
Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.
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