And taking with [him] Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and deeply depressed.
Jesus leaves the upper room for the garden. He takes three men aside there and lets them see His soul break under what lies ahead — which raises two questions: what weighed on Him, and why did He want them near?
Matthew's second word for Jesus' distress is not the ordinary word for grief. One writer traces where it likely comes from.
The word ademonein is a deeply moving word. On one likely derivation it means the homeless feeling of someone away from his own country and friends... In the Gospels this word carries a unique intensity of meaning: "Look and see if there is any sorrow like My sorrow."
The distress was not fear of physical pain. One writer names what really weighed on Him — and notes how calmly He said it.
He began to be sorrowful and troubled. He felt as a man what He had to go through. It was not mere pain or suffering. The power of death weighed on His spirit — weighed on it as man, yet with a weight no man could fathom. Yet with what calm simplicity He tells it out!
One writer lists what Jesus already saw waiting for Him.
Think what lay before Him. All that God or man could put into the cup of woe, He was about to drink, and He foresaw it... How He felt everything — the betrayal of Judas — the coming denial of Peter — the forsaking of all the disciples... the bearing of sin — the forsaking of God — wrath, judgment, and death as the end of His pathway here.
One writer sets the garden beside the cross and marks three places where they part.
In Gethsemane, He was anticipating the cross; at Calvary, He was actually enduring it. In Gethsemane, "there appeared an angel to him from heaven strengthening him"; at Calvary, He was forsaken of all. There was no angelic ministry there. In Gethsemane He addresses God as "Father," and so enjoys the full communion of that relationship. But at Calvary He cries, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
The same writer asks why the agony was so deep, if nothing new lay ahead.
From these verses it is clear that something lay ahead which the blessed Lord had never met before. A "cup" was being filled for Him which He had not yet drunk. If He had been a sin-bearer all His life, why this intense agony at the thought of coming into contact with sin and enduring the wrath of God because of sin?
Jesus does not pick Peter, James and John at random. He had already taken these three apart once before, on the mountain where His glory shone out.
He goes apart to pray, but He takes three of His disciples with Him. In this solemn moment they are to watch with Him. They were the same three who were with Him at the transfiguration. They were to see His glory in the kingdom, and His sufferings... Jesus was not yet drinking the cup, but it was before His eyes.
That He wanted these men near Him marks the garden off from what followed. The request itself is evidence of how the two scenes differ.
Beyond all others He underwent the pressure of death on His soul beforehand, as the power of Satan — feeling it perfectly, and all the more deeply because He took it from His Father's hand and not from the enemy's... When the cross came, there was no such call to disciples to watch with Him. He was alone — utterly alone, alone by the very nature of the case — for us, that is, for our sins, with no one, human or angelic, anywhere near Him.
What the three did with that privilege is a mirror held up to every reader.
These three He had taken with Him to the mount of transfiguration, and they went to sleep in the presence of His glory. Now He takes them into the garden, and they go to sleep in the presence of His sorrow. Such is man. Such is human nature. Such are you and I. We can be alike indifferent to the glory and the sorrow of Christ.
- Words — "troubled" translates a rare word for the desolation of someone far from home and friends. Matthew reaches for language strong enough for a sorrow with no parallel.
- Weight — What bore down on Him was not pain but the power of death, felt as a man, "with a weight no man could fathom."
- Witnesses — He chose the three who saw His glory on the mountain to watch His sorrow in the garden. The same eyes were meant to hold both.
- Watching — He asked for company here. At the cross He asked for no one, because there He would be alone for our sins.
- Weakness — They slept in the presence of His glory, then slept again in the presence of His sorrow. That is the honest measure of what we are — and of a sorrow He alone could bear.
Then he says to them, My soul is very sorrowful even unto death; remain here and watch with me.
In the garden of Gethsemane, hours before His arrest, the Lord tells three of His closest friends what is happening inside Him. He asks them to stay awake with Him. Two questions follow. What sorrow could crush a perfect Man like this? And why did He want company in it?
The words are not a figure of speech. Scripture speaks of the Lord's body, soul and spirit in the same language it uses of us. This verse is one of the places where it names His soul.
It speaks of His body, Matthew 26:12; Luke 23:52; John 20:12; Hebrews 10:5. It speaks of His soul, Matthew 26:38; Mark 14:34; John 12:27; Acts 2:27, 31... All these speak of Him as Man — the Son having become Man. Scripture says the same of us: in the make-up of our manhood we have spirit, soul and body (1 Thessalonians 5:23). It uses the same words of Him as it uses of us.
What came upon Him in the garden was more than pain, and He said so plainly.
He takes Peter, James and John, who had also been with Him on the mountain where His glory appeared; and there everything that lay before the blessed One came upon His spirit. He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed. He felt as man what He had to go through. It was not mere pain or suffering: the power of death weighed on His spirit. It weighed on Him as man, yet with a weight no man could measure. Yet He says it with such calm simplicity! We ought to know it, though it may be beyond our knowledge... His need was there, and He told it to hearts that should have felt it and kept earnest watch, taken up with Him.
The agony here is anticipation, not the thing itself. One writer draws the line between the garden and the cross by three sharp contrasts.
What was the difference between Christ in Gethsemane and Christ at Calvary, if He were a sin-bearer all His life? There was a real difference! And it is because He was not a sin-bearer all His life... In Gethsemane, He was anticipating the cross! at Calvary, He was actually enduring it. In Gethsemane, "there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him"; at Calvary, everyone forsook Him. No angel came to strengthen Him there. In Gethsemane He calls God "Father," and so enjoys the full communion of that relationship; but at Calvary, He cries, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
This was not calm. And where the sorrow came from made it deeper.
The garden shows us not holy calm in the full knowledge of all that awaited Him and His disciples, but anguish to the very limit, and death felt in all its horror as before God... More than anyone else, He went through the pressure of death on His soul before it came — death as the power of Satan. He felt it perfectly, and He felt it more deeply because He took it from His Father's hand and not from the enemy's. When the cross came, there was no such call to disciples to watch with Him. He was alone — utterly alone, alone in the very nature of it, and alone for us, that is, for our sins — with no one, human or angel, near Him in any way at all.
Notice the exact shape of what He asks for.
He is God over all, yet still and thoroughly a man. Yet, as another has said, He never asked them to pray for Him; but says, "Remain here, and watch with me."... When He asked His disciples to watch with Him, He knew the world was against Him. He turned to those He had been with most, that they should be with Him. But He received nothing... They were asleep, deceived; asleep in the presence of the glory of the kingdom on the mount, asleep in the garden!
The disciples slept through what He asked. A reader today can answer Him as they did not.
A stone's throw away are the sleeping disciples. But, beloved reader, let us not sleep as others do. Let us watch with Him one hour even now. Let the privacy of our own hearts be the Gethsemane of our souls... There let us look with holy horror at the dreadful cup, full of our sins and God's wrath, which He would drain so soon on Calvary's cross.
- Soul. Scripture uses the same human words of Him as of us — body, soul, spirit. A real Man suffered here.
- Weight. Pain and dying were not what crushed Him. It was the power of death pressing on His spirit, with a weight no one else can measure.
- Anticipation. In the garden He is facing the cup; at the cross He drinks it. In the garden He still says "Father," and an angel strengthens Him. He is not yet forsaken.
- Alone. In the garden He asked for company. At the cross He asked for none: He made atonement alone, with no one beside Him.
- Watch. He did not ask for prayer for Himself. He asked for people near Him — and they slept. We can still answer what He asked that night.
And going forward a little he fell upon his face, praying and saying, My Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me; but not as *I* will, but as *thou* [wilt].
Hours before the cross, in the garden of Gethsemane, the Lord Jesus falls to the ground and asks His Father to take the cup away. Three questions press in here: what was in that cup, why did He draw back from it, and what kind of will did He lay down?
Everything turns on one phrase: "this cup." One writer weighs what was in it, and what refusing it would have cost us.
He looked into the cup and measured its contents. It was all God's judgment against sin. If He drank it, God must forsake Him and cast Him off on the cross. It was not only the physical suffering and sorrow that man could give Him when they nailed Him to the tree. It was the unavoidable sense that God and He must part company. So as He looked at that cup, He said, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done." He knew that if He did not drink that cup of judgment upon the cross, you and I would have to drink it in eternity.
The shrinking is not a flaw in Him. It is proof of what He is.
The Lord held the place of the perfect Son of Man. He could not forget what rested on His bearing that name — even the question of guilt. But how was it possible, if He were perfect, for Him to think it an unimportant thing for God to hide His face from Him? He would not have been perfect if He had not shrunk from this one thing alone. He did not shrink from the temptation in the wilderness; God led Him into it. But there was in this what was anguish to His soul in the very measure in which He was perfect.
The cup did not pass. God's righteousness cannot bend — not even when His own Son asks.
If God could ever have set aside the smallest part of His righteousness, He would have done it then, when His own beloved Son asked Him. But that was impossible. It would be easier to abandon the law of gravity than for God to move a hair's breadth from His righteousness.
"Not as I will" only means something if there was a real will to lay down. And wanting to avoid the cross was right in Him.
He knew well that He would face the agony of being forsaken by God as He bore the judgment of the cross. So He pleads with His Father, "if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will." As a true Man He had a will of His own, a will that was in every respect perfectly right. It was right that He should desire to avoid the dreadful suffering of the cross. Yet He asks for the Father's will, not His own. How this adds to the blessedness of His great sacrifice!
He took the cup from the Father's hand, not from His enemies. And what He does in the garden is not what He does at the cross.
Man and Satan brought about His death, but He knew how to separate what was theirs from the cup He took out of the Father's hand — the cup filled with the judgment of God. Because He was perfect He shrank from that cup, and in subjection He drank it. His request that the cup might pass from Him was perfection. At the cross what marks Him is a perfect calmness under judgment that no human heart can understand. It is an unbroken calmness in a darkness no human eye could see through. There is no agonising there, no weeping. All is fullest submission and perfect subjection, bowing beneath the awful load, bearing it in His own body on the tree.
One thing here we can copy; one thing we can never share.
He accepted the cup of wrath and judgment and emptied it on the cross, so that for us not a drop of judgment remained. Here the Lord was in total solitude: He alone could drink that cup. But in dependence and obedience He is our perfect example in Gethsemane. He faced a test beyond words, and He overcame it through His dependence and obedience. The disciples stand in sharp contrast: they slept in the garden, and all of them failed badly.
- The cup — not nails and mockery, but God's judgment against sin — and the parting from God it would cost Him.
- The shrinking — His drawing back measures His perfection; only a holy Person could feel what being forsaken meant.
- The refusal — the cup could not pass, because God will not move a hair's breadth from His righteousness.
- The surrender — He had a real human will. Wanting to avoid the cross was right, and He laid that will down for the Father's.
- The result — He alone drank it, so for us not a drop of judgment remained. Copy His dependence, not His suffering.
And he comes to the disciples and finds them sleeping, and says to Peter, Thus ye have not been able to watch one hour with me?
Jesus comes back from prayer and finds the disciples asleep. His short question to Peter exposes both His loneliness in that hour and the weakness of the flesh in the men who loved Him most.
Everything here turns on one contrast. He pours out His soul before God, and the men closest to Him sleep through it.
When He comes to the disciples He finds them sleeping. Think of it! The Master praying, and the servants sleeping. The Master is in agony before God. He is showing perfect human dependence, in that moment of sorrow beyond compare, while the servant sleeps. Such is human nature. Peter slept in the presence of the Lord's glory, on the Mount of Transfiguration. Now he is sleeping in the presence of His sorrow.
He did not ask them to share His suffering. He asked them to stay near Him while He suffered.
Later, at the cross, the disciples could have no part at all in the sufferings of the Lord Jesus. But here He expects some fellowship from them in watching with Him — and He finds them sleeping. When the need is most urgent, our hearts can still be dull and unfeeling. We are not concerned to enter into the Lord's thoughts. Is one hour too long to spend in sympathy with His sorrow?
Matthew records that the Lord spoke to one man, though the others slept too.
He addressed His rebuke, gentle beyond words, to Peter, the one who boasted the loudest. "Watch and pray (for themselves, not for Him) that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." This happened three times. Three times the Saviour went apart and prayed, and three times He came back and found the disciples asleep. In the presence of such a fact, who among us dare boast of anything? How feeble is the devotion of even the truest-hearted believer!
There is no resentment in the question. The same words that expose the failure also make room for it.
With what touching grace He points out the strange inconsistency: "Peter, could you not watch with Me one hour?" Where was the strength that was going through everything just now? Yet with what grace He warns, with what grace He excuses: "Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."
Darby traces that freedom back to where the Lord had just been.
Now, having been through this agony, He comes back to His disciples and speaks to them in the gentlest way. What gentleness of grace! Now He is thinking only of them. Where is the cup? He had gone through it all with the Father, and therefore His heart is ready in service. Suppose we, in our small measure, carried all our trials and little troubles to God, and went through the whole of it with Him. Then our hearts would be free and happy to turn round and care for others.
Darby traces the whole fall back to what was missing in the garden.
Peter fails, not from self-will, not from willing to sin, but through the weakness of the flesh. In Christ there was no possible moral weakness, because He always walked in the place of weakness in communion with His Father. Peter fails, though only the shadow of temptation comes to him. All Peter's fall began by a lack of dependence, and by neglecting prayer. Our watching must lead us to pray. It is not enough to be ready to pray when temptation comes. We must be walking with God, and so meet temptation in the power of communion and prayer already there. Suppose a believer has no continual prayer, and no constant sense of his own complete weakness. Then the more he loves Christ, and the more he wants to serve Him, the more surely that very good-will will lead him into the place where he dishonours Christ!
One writer turns the words on our own times of remembering Him.
He wants your worship, your fellowship in His sufferings. "Could you not watch with Me one hour?" the Lord said to Peter in Gethsemane. Shall we grow tired of being together to think of Him? There is silence, and a chance for deep thought on the holy theme of the Lord's Supper. Shall we then grow restless, and wish someone would speak, or sing, or pray?
- One hour. He asked for no part in His suffering, only for company in it — and one hour proved too much for the men who loved Him best.
- One contrast. The Master prayed while the servants slept. Peter had slept once in the presence of His glory, and now slept in the presence of His sorrow.
- One man addressed. The loudest boaster gets the question, and his own fall answers it.
- One cause. The fall began in the garden, not in the hour of testing — dependence dropped, prayer neglected, before the test ever came.
- One tone. He warns and excuses in the same breath. He had carried the whole weight to His Father first, so He came back free to care for them.
Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation the spirit indeed [is] ready, but the flesh weak.
In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asked His disciples to stay awake with Him while He prayed, and came back to find them sleeping. His answer is a warning, a reason and an excuse in one breath — and it raises the question of what it means to "enter into temptation."
The word "watch" has more than one sense in Scripture. One writer marks off the sense that belongs here:
Watching may mean looking for the Lord's return, but it may have other meanings. When our Lord said to sleeping Peter, "Watch and pray," He was not calling Peter to watch for His coming from heaven. No, He called him to be vigilant at that moment of agonized wrestling in prayer.
The two verbs belong together. One writer points to Nehemiah, who prayed to God and set a guard against his enemies day and night:
He combined dependence on God, in whom alone he knew his strength and defence to be, with unceasing vigilance against the "roaring lion." These are the two invisible weapons which God puts into the hands of His people in the presence of the enemy — weapons which are enough to defeat his most powerful assaults.
Notice what the Lord tells them to pray against. He does not say "pray that you may not sin."
In Gethsemane, notice that the Lord says, Watch and pray lest you enter, not into sin, but into temptation. Christ was perfect through it all, but Peter fell to cursing and swearing, and denied his Lord. It was not a question of Peter's integrity, for he loved the Lord, but he did not know himself. He had to go through this process. Yet before he had ever failed, Christ had prayed for him.
Peter shows what "entering" looks like in practice — a series of steps nobody told him to take:
What brought him into the judgment hall? Why did he "enter into temptation" like this? — this was entering into temptation. He had not been told to do so. In verse 58, Peter followed Christ "at a distance," and "went in and sat with the guards to see the end." He "entered into temptation." There he was at that moment — flesh unjudged and trusted in — prayer and watchfulness missing — a moral distance between him and Christ — temptation entered upon, and unholy company sought.
The line about the willing spirit and weak flesh sounds like a sigh over human frailty. One writer says it is not sympathy at all:
"The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak," is not a sympathetic comment about them. It is given as a reason for watching and prayer, and to mark how necessary they are. Do not rely on the readiness of your spirit, for the flesh in which you walk is weak; therefore watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.
The same sentence that exposes them also shields them:
See how He speaks in grace to Peter: "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." Oh, I know you love Me. Your hearts are all right, but it is this poor weakness. What perfect grace! He counted on their hearts in one sense when the temptation was coming. When they had failed completely, He thought of the danger to them.
The warning widens out into a rule for ordinary life:
To Him it was now the path of obedience; but whatever was not that was temptation. So it is with everything: all we meet with is an occasion of temptation or of obedience. Only there did it come out, at the point where everything reached its crisis with man.
Self-confidence is the opposite of the watching the Lord asks for:
This was the flesh, ready to face everything. The flesh even when warned is always self-confident… "Watch and pray," that was what Jesus did. If Peter had listened, he would have been on his guard against the temptation, and in dependence on God, and he would not have entered into it. He slept in the presence of temptation, as he had slept in the presence of the glory.
And the safeguard is not a stock of spiritual strength but the admission that there is none:
It is not any power given by the Spirit of God that keeps, even though He is the Spirit of power. It is not energy in this or that which keeps, but dependence. It is the sense of weakness that watches and prays, and so has the power of Christ resting on us. His strength made perfect in weakness.
- Watch — here it means alertness in the moment of danger, not looking for the Lord's return.
- Pray — watchfulness and dependence are the two weapons God hands His people against the enemy.
- Temptation, not sin — pray to stay out of the testing place. Peter walked into the courtyard nobody sent him to.
- Weakness — weak flesh is the reason to watch, not an excuse afterwards. He warns and excuses in one sentence.
- Dependence — everything you meet is either obedience or temptation. Only the sense of your own weakness keeps you on the right side.
Again going away a second time he prayed saying, My Father, if this cannot pass [from me] unless I drink it, thy will be done.
This is the Lord's second prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. The first asked that the cup might pass. This one accepts that it cannot. Two questions follow: what was in that cup, and why could it not be taken away?
Commentators are agreed that the cup was not the arrest, the trial, or even physical death, but the judgment of God against sin, which He would bear on the cross.
This is the cup of sufferings. This is the cup of the wrath of God which the Lord was aware of here in Gethsemane. He knew that He would have to be made sin... Could One who was pure desire to be made sin? Do we understand His anguish, do we look at Him with adoring hearts? And then He says in verse 42: "My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done." Here we see the Lord in His perfect purity. Even so, He makes His own will one with the will of His Father.
Between the first prayer and this one, the Lord went back to His disciples and found them asleep.
He rises and comes back to His disciples. He finds them not watching but asleep. He wakes them with a reproof, and yet with a tender apology for their weakness. Then He goes back to say what He has said before, but with less pleading: "My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done."
It would be easy to read the request to be spared as a weakness that submission then corrected. Writers here insist the opposite: had He not felt the cup fully, His submission would have meant nothing.
He should feel it fully, and He did. Otherwise His submission would not have been perfect. But His obedience and submission were perfect... It was a holy desire to shrink from such a judgment, and from being made sin, even while bearing it before God. Yet with it went perfect submission and obedience to His Father, whatever His will was. And He brings it to His Father, where it ought to be brought. He was equally perfect in desiring not to drink it and in obediently submitting to drink it, if it was His Father's will.
The verse turns on one word: cannot. Why could the cup not pass? One writer points to what hung on it.
But if we were to be saved, if God was to be glorified in Him who had undertaken our cause, the cup must not pass away from Him. And His submission is complete.
Could God not have set His standard aside, just once, for such a Son?
If God could ever have set aside the smallest fraction of His righteousness, He would have done it then, at the asking of His own beloved Son. But that was impossible. You would sooner see the sun drop out of the centre of our system and leave us all in darkness and confusion.
His enemies were closing in, and Satan was at work. Yet in this prayer the Lord names neither. He speaks to His Father alone, and one writer shows what that means for us in our own troubles.
The Lord therefore takes the cup, but He takes it from His Father's hand. It was His will that He should drink it. He commits Himself entirely to His Father. So He does not take it from the hand of His enemies, nor from the hand of Satan, though they were the instruments... This is how we escape from second causes and from the temptations of the enemy: by seeking only the will of God, who directs all things.
He had settled the whole matter with His Father. Then He turned to His sleeping disciples and told them how to face their own hour.
He went through the depth of His misery in His spirit with God. It was all fully out with God. For that reason He could turn with perfect peace and say to others, "Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation."... Everything that meets us is either a temptation or an occasion of obedience. It was to Him an occasion of perfect obedience.
- The cup — not death alone, but the wrath of God against sin; the pure One would be made sin.
- The cannot — the cup could not pass. Our salvation and God's glory both hung on His drinking it, and righteousness would not bend, even for His beloved Son.
- The change — the second prayer says what the first said, but with less pleading; the request has become acceptance.
- The hand — He takes the cup from His Father, not from His enemies or from Satan, and so escapes every second cause. We may do the same with our trials.
- The result — everything we meet is either a temptation or an occasion of obedience; for Him it was perfect obedience, and the same choice meets us daily.