Reading a Catholic priest’s sermon here, I ran across this interesting point.  Both aspects of the atonement, in the garden and on the cross, took place outside the walls of Jerusalem.  That is, symbolically, outside the domain of order and civilization, and in the domain of chaos and disorder.  In other words, in both, Christ put himself in Satan’s power.  The sermoner doesn’t realize, of course, that Gethsemane was part of the atonement, but that makes his argument all the stronger.

There may be another insight from modern thought, from the concept of the local optimum.  The idea is that progress isn’t like a smoothly ascending slope where every bit of upward movement takes you closer to the peak.  The terrain of human action  may be more like a spread of broken ground.  There is a peak, but it is surrounded by ridges and hills.  The traveler can reach a high point which is much lower than the peak, but from which there is no way to go higher up.  Progress, in that case, means going back down.

Jerusalem was a little island of order and civilization in the waste and the wilderness, but it wasn’t very much of one.  Christ had to leave it, back down to the beginning, to make real progress.