What Does Jesus Mean by “Not My Will, But Yours Be Done”?

Maximus the Confessor on Christ's duplex will

When Jesus prayed, “not my will, but yours be done” (Matt 26:39), he declared himself to be united in willing redemption with the Father. He did so because he always did his Father’s will (e.g., John 5:19).

Yet since Jesus is both God and man, we may wonder how he willed the will of the Father. At least two possible errors can result when trying to answer this question. We could say that Christ’s human will, apart from his divine will, is in question here. But this fails to take into account the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in the one Lord Jesus Christ.

A second error unites the divine will in Christ with the human, so that the former controls the choices of the man Jesus Christ. But as Gregory of Nazianzus has said, “What the Word does not assume, he does not heal,” meaning Christ must have a genuine human will for it to be redeemed along with the whole Christ.

That leaves us with not a lot of wiggle room to find language that rightly describes the Gethsemane Prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ. However, we are not without a guide. For Maximus the Confessor attempted this feat in his sixth opusculum in which he claimed that Christ shows us his natural human will at rest in the will of God for our sake.

With some minor criticism, I follow the train of Maximus’s thought to demonstrate a pattern of theological reasoning from Scripture that avoids Christological error, clarifies the meaning of the text, and leads us into a deeper worship of Christ.

Does Christ Refer to a Gnomic Will?

Christ as the new Adam redeemed lost humanity. And at Gethsemane, we might say that while Adam said no to God’s will, Christ said yes. Benedict XVI explains, “What Adam wanted was to be like God, that is, to be completely free. But the person who withdraws into himself is not divine, is not completely free; he is freed by emerging from himself, it is in the ‘yes’ that he becomes free; and this is the drama of Gethsemane: not my will but yours.”

Maximus too emphasizes this yes of Christ. By doing so, he places the Gethsemane Prayer in the context of redemption, as the one Lord Jesus Christ hands over his will to the Father. Yet in so doing, Maximus denied a gnomic will in Christ, a will that deliberated and vacillated as it chose the good. Christ instead naturally desired the good for the human will of Christ had been deified through the hypostatic union.

Why did Maximus take this approach? Apparently, Severan theologians affirmed that Christ had one gnomic will, and this gnomic will explained the unity of Christ (Disputations with Pyrrhus, §76). More specifically, Maximus argues that the gnomic will is not a substance but rather “an act of willing in a particular way, in relation to some real or assumed good” (§85).

The gnomic will is not a substance but a quality, a mode of willing rather than a discrete faculty of will. It is “a mode of employment [of the will], and not a principle of nature” (§87). Since Christ is the God-man, he did not need to deliberate or vacillate between choosing good and evil; Maximus thus believes he does not employ his will gnomically for he always naturally desired good.

In this narrow sense, the gnomic will belongs hypostatically, not to the natural will. Christ, according to Maximus, does not have such a mode of willing, since Christ subsisted divinely (§87). The Severan theologians not only misunderstood the gnomic will, believing it to be something that could show the unity of Christ, but they also affirmed something in Christ that belongs to sinful humanity, those who, due to the postlapsarian gnomie, do not naturally desire the good.

Theologically, we might nod along, but we also suspect that the formulation sounds a little too perfect. After all, if Jesus did not have a gnomic will, in what sense could he redeem our gnomic will?

Maximus probably thinks he protects himself from this charge since he has not called the gnomic will a substance but only a hypostatic mode of willing a real or assumed good. Christ has a different mode of willing because he subsists divinely.

In speaking this way, however, we risk abstracting what the Bible holds together: namely, that the one Lord Jesus Christ acts always as the Eternal Word from the Father who made flesh his very own. But since Jesus said, “not my will, but yours be done,” we find ourselves bound to speak of a divine will and a human will.

And so we need to pursue this line of thought further to ask, “Just what will was Jesus talking about?”

What Will or Wills Did Jesus Talk about?

If Christ is the hypostatic union of two natures (divine and human), then it follows that he must have two wills. No ancient Christian would associate the faculty of will with hypostasis or person but only with one’s nature. For example, in arguments about the unity of will between Father and Son, the church fathers insisted that the unity of will evinces the unity of the one essence. Maximus explains, “if the will be one, then, according to the teachings of the Fathers, the essence is one” (Pyrrhus §108).

Applied to Christology, we cannot simply say Christ has one natural will, a mixture of human and divine, for at least two reasons: (1) because that would imply that the Godhead itself became human, but only the Son did; (2) because the union of the two natures occurred hypostatically or personally. Christ is the only hypostasis because he assumed flesh enhypostatically. The one Lord Jesus Christ is the eternal Word from the Father and the One who was made flesh. There is only one subject, one person, one Hypostasis—the Word of God the Father. Hence, the union of two natures requires a union of two wills.

So we must avoid the two errors I mentioned previously, which have their origin, whether fairly or not, in Severus and Nestorius. The former emphasized the one gnomic will in Christ, while the latter divided the wills to ensure that the Godhead did not receive human qualities into it. Maximus for his part would emphasize that Christ is two natures hypostatically, although he would not necessarily be against the Cyrilline “from two natures” or the Leonine “in two natures” formulas.

For Maximus, Severan doctrine should be rejected not only because it arises out of a strange use of the gnomic will but primarily because it mixes the two natures of Christ. Put into the context of the Gethsemane Prayer, when Jesus says, “Not my will, but yours,” he reveals a dyothelite (two-willed) existence. Likewise, we must reject Nestorianism because it implies that the human nature of Christ can will independently of the hypostasis, but that is absurd. Natures do not act; persons do in or through natures.

Hence, the one Christ acts in and through his divine and human natures. The phrase “not my will, but yours” cannot refer to wills acting independently of the one Christ. It must refer to the one Lord Jesus Christ acting in and through his nature(s).

So how can we affirm the Lord’s prayer while avoiding the Scylla of Nestorianism and the Charybdis of Severianism (monophysitism)? I would point to the exegesis of Maximus in his sixth opusculum, even if Paul Blowers and I wonder if Maximus did somewhat overstate his argument about the gnomic will (“Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus on Gnomic Will (γνώμη) in Christ,” 2012).

The Savior Who for Our Salvation Willed Redemption

Maximus denies any form of resistance of will between the Son and Father in Matthew 26:39. The Lord did not vacillate and waver in his will to redeem us (i.e., he had no gnomic will). Rather, the statement “not my will, but yours be done” shows a perfect harmony and concurrence of will with the Father because his will “has been completely deified” (Opus. 6, 64A).

But as Maximus says, we need to speak not of the will per se but the subject who wills. He asks whether the subject was a man like us (with a gnomic will) or the man in his role as Savior (with a deified natural will due to the hypostatic union; 65C). Rhetorically, Maximus obviously means the latter. And if so, we cannot attribute wavering doubts to Jesus (i.e., he is not like us with a gnomic will).

Instead, Christ shows us in Gethsemane a perfect concurrence of his two wills (theleseis) and energies (energeiai) in respect of his two natures.

Maximus admits that someone might say the Eternally Begotten Son may have a different will from the Father. Here, one would attribute a contradiction of wills in God, but “the Father and the Son always share a common will” (68B). So an absurdity would result because God would negate his own desire for redemption. Unless one wants to say that Christ merely says “not my will, but yours” to show the unity of the divine will. In which case, despite the verbal “not my will,” the meaning of the statement would simply be to show the unity of God’s will in salvation. Or, as Maximus points out, the phrase “not my will” could imply that the one will of God would not desire the salvation of man, an impossible claim since God by nature desires our salvation.

All that said, Christ is the divine man. And so while the above resolution perhaps could be smoothed out to work logically, it does not represent how the Bible speaks of Jesus Christ.

So Maximus argues that Christ speaks in accordance with both natures in ways that respect their natural integrity. In his own words:

“Now if even the thought of such reasoning is repugnant, then clearly the negation here—Not what I will—absolutely precludes opposition and instead demonstrates harmony between the human will of the Savior and the divine will shared by him and his Father, given that the Logos assumed our nature in its entirety and deified his human will in the assumption. It follows, then, that having become like us for our sake, he was calling on his God and Father in a human manner (ἀνθρωποπρεπῶς) when he said, Let not what I will, but what you will prevail, inasmuch as, being God by nature, he also in his humanity has, as his human volition, the fulfillment of the will of the Father. This is why, considering both of the natures from which, in which, and of which his person was, he is acknowledged as able both to will and to effect our salvation. As God, he approved that salvation along with the Father and the Holy Spirit; as man, he became for the sake of that salvation obedient to his Father unto death, even death on a cross (Phil 2:8). He accomplished this great feat of the economy of salvation for our sake through the mystery of his incarnation.” (68C–D; trans. Paul Blowers, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ).

Here, we see the elegance and beauty of Maximus’s solution. As we consider Christ’s two natures, “from which, in which, and of which his person was, he is acknowledged as able both to will and to effect our salvation.” He does so by speaking in an accommodating or human manner in the garden (ἀνθρωποπρεπῶς). Yet as he does so, we see him doing in action what Paul described in Philippians 2:8: becoming obedient to the point of death for our salvation. In other words, the one Christ wills in, from, and as two natures that he is hypostatically.

Why? “He accomplished this great feat of the economy of salvation for our sake through the mystery of his incarnation.”

Here we also see the freedom of Christ in choosing yes in obedience to God. Benedict XVI explains:

“St Maximus tells us that, and we know that this is true, Adam (and we ourselves are Adam) thought that the ‘no’ was the peak of freedom. He thought that only a person who can say ‘no’ is truly free; that if he is truly to achieve his freedom, man must say ‘no’ to God; only in this way he believed he could at last be himself, that he had reached the heights of freedom. This tendency also carried within it the human nature of Christ, but went beyond it, for Jesus saw that it was not the ‘no’ that was the height of freedom. The height of freedom is the ‘yes’, in conformity with God’s will. It is only in the ‘yes’ that man truly becomes himself; only in the great openness of the ‘yes’, in the unification of his will with the divine, that man becomes immensely open, becomes ‘divine’.”

Originally published at Ad Fontes.