20. The Soul-Anguish of Christ
“A Place Called Gethsemane”
The Soul-Anguish of Christ
“THEN SAITH HE UNTO THEM, MY SOUL IS
EXCEEDING SORROWFUL, EVEN UNTO DEATH” (Matthew 26:38).EIGHT GNARLED and ancient olive trees still mark the place where this mysterious incident in the life of our Lord was enacted. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that these very trees were silent witnesses of the anguish of the Son of God.
When F. W. Krummacher came to speak of this sacred mystery of our Savior’s passion, he said he felt as if at this garden gate there stood a cherub, who, if not with flaming sword, yet with repelling gesture refused admittance, and emphatically repeated our Lord’s injunction to remain outside. We stand on holy ground indeed, yet as the record is written for our instruction, we may reverently study it.
Only a few minutes before entering the garden, Jesus had offered His high-priestly prayer (John 17). But what striking contrast there is between those two prayers. How can the serenity of the one and the agonizing of the other be explained? The first prayer was intercessory, this was personal, the prelude to Calvary. Before entering the garden He had partaken of the Last Supper with His disciples, and they had joined in singing the Hallel (Psalms 115–118). The hearts of the disciples were heavy with foreboding. The heart of Jesus was weighed down with the anticipation of the cross.
He took with Him His three dearly loved intimates, that they might share with Him the midnight vigil. Alas, His sentinels slept at their post. Luke tells us that they were “sleeping for sorrow.” We should be charitable in our judgment of them, however, for their Lord did not judge them harshly. “The spirit indeed is willing,” He said, “but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). He commended their willingness of spirit while marveling at the weakness of the flesh in such an hour of crisis. We must remember that it was long past the retiring hour of these erstwhile fishermen, and the past few days had held tremendous emotional stress for them.
The place of His prayer was named most appropriately—Gethsemane, the oil press. Did not our Savior under the pressure of a great agony yield here precious oil that has been the balm of many a wounded soul? The garden was well-known to the traitor who had already departed on his last dastardly errand. Leaving His disciples, Jesus penetrated a little farther into the garden. “He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast” (Luke 22:41). The word “withdrew” means literally “tore himself away,” evidence of what it cost Him to leave His disciples and fight the dread battle alone. He “began to be sorrowful and very heavy” (Matthew 26:37).
The Poignancy of His Sufferings
At least six statements, each presenting a different facet of our Savior’s suffering in the garden, are preserved for us in the gospel records. The strongest words in the Greek language are used to describe His anguish. Although we do not presume to understand more than a fraction of their deep import, they demand our reverent examination.
He became “exceeding sorrowful” (Matthew 26:38), or pressed upon. He had always been a “man of sorrows,” but now He enters on sorrow so intense that everything He had suffered in the past seemed as tiny ripples when compared with the curling billows that now engulfed Him.
He “began to be sore amazed” (Mark 14:33), utterly surprised, stunned with astonishment. “Our Lord’s first feeling was one of terrified surprise,” wrote H. B. Swete. “Long as He had forseen the Passion, when it came closely into view, its terrors exceeded His anticipations. His human soul received a new experience, and the last lesson of obedience began with a sensation of inconceivable awe.” As He saw the ingredients of the terrible cup that was being mixed for Him, He was dazed and overwhelmed.
He “began to be … very heavy” (Mark 14:33), sore troubled, in consternation. Lightfoot suggests that this word points to a confused, restless, half-distracted state. Another commentator suggests that the root idea is being “away from home,” or “beside oneself.” And was He not in a very real sense away from home? And did that fact not make His sufferings the more poignant?
He was “exceeding sorrowful, even UNTO DEATH” (Matthew 26:38). The word used here indicates “an unfathomable depth of anguish and sorrow.” The devil, who had left the Lord for a season after the encounter in the wilderness (Luke 4:13), had now returned, and endeavored to terrify Him with “all painful things, as before with all pleasurable,” in the hope of turning Him aside from His allegiance to God and truth. Since he could not allure Him, he would terrify Him.
The significance of the words “unto death” might be that the weight of sorrow and agony was so great that He feared His physical frame might collapse before He reached the cross. In order that this might not take place, God sent an angel to infuse fresh strength (Luke 22:43).
He was “in an agony” (Luke 22:44), or conflict, as the same word is rendered in Colossians 2:1. “And … he prayed more earnestly.” The Hebrews epistle tells us that He prayed “with strong crying and tears” (Hebrews 5:7). As the powers of darkness closed in on Him, and the imminence of the cross pressed upon Him, He found Himself in a conflict the like of which He had never before experienced.
He sweat “as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). It was a cold night, but as He prayed in agony, the course of nature was reversed. The blood, instead of rushing to the aid of His overburdened and breaking heart, forced its way out through the pores to fall in great drops to the ground. We stand in awe and magnify this evidence of His matchless love.
There will always be mystery in the agony of Gethsemane, because the mystery of the hypostatic union is involved. There is no parallel between His sufferings and those of the martyrs who were often exultant as they approached the hour of martyrdom. But there was no vicarious element in their sufferings. They suffered and died after He had removed the guilt and exhausted the penalty of their sins. For them there was no hiding of the Father’s face in prospect.
Sweet Eden was the arbor of delight,
Yet in its honey-flowers our poison blew;
Sad Gethsemane, the bower of baleful night,
Where Christ a health of poison for us drew,
Yet all our honey in that poison grew;
So we, from sweetest flower, could suck our bane,
And Christ, from bitter venom could again
Extract life out of death, and pleasure out of pain.GILES FLETCHER
The Ingredients of the Cup
There were at least three.
The renewed attack of Satan. “This is your hour, and the power of darkness,” He said to the chief priests (Luke 22:53). Foiled in every previous attempt to deflect the Lord from the way of the cross, the massed powers of darkness launched a terrific blitzkrieg during the next hours in one final attempt to overthrow Him. This was no mock battle, but a struggle to the death of Light with darkness.
The anticipated assumption of guilt of a world of men. “The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” spoke Isaiah prophetically of the Messiah. Nothing less than penal suffering for our sin can explain this unparalleled agony. “I believe that this view is the only reasonable solution of our Lord’s agony,” wrote Bishop J. C. Ryle. “The experience in the Garden is a knot which nothing can untie but the old doctrine of our sin being imputed to Christ, and Christ being made sin and a curse of us.” He drank a cup of wrath without mercy, that we might drink a cup of mercy without wrath. The agony was not the fear of death but the deep sense of God’s wrath against sin that He was to bear. His pure and holy nature shrank, not from death as death, but from death as a curse for the world’s sin.
The anticipated averting of His Father’s face. Before many hours He would be asking, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). It was bad enough that He should be in an alien country, about to be betrayed by His friend, deserted by His followers, denied by one of His intimates—and this was not hidden from His knowledge—but to be forsaken by God because He was being “made … to be sin for us!” (2 Corinthians 5:21). This was an utterly new and bewildering experience, the anticipation of which produced the blood-letting agony.
Death and the curse were in our cup,
O Christ ‘twas full for Thee;
But Thou hast drunk the last dark drop,
‘Tis empty now for me.
That bitter cup, love drank it up
Now blessing’s draught for me.ANNE ROSS COUSIN
The Prayer in Gethsemane
Expositors differ in their interpretation of the verse “Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared” (Hebrews 5:7), or “for his godly fear” (RSV). In considering our Lord’s petition that the cup might not pass from Him, it is certain that He was not seeking some alternative to what He knew to be His Father’s plan for Him. Had He not insisted on the necessity of His being uplifted on a cross? Is He now trying to escape it? Unthinkable!
Since every prayer our Lord uttered was answered (John 11:22), this prayer must have been answered too. His reverence for His Father and His devotion to His will made it impossible that His prayers should be unanswered.
It has been suggested that a fourth ingredient in “the cup” may have been not the future cross, but the possibility of death in Gethsemane before He reached Golgotha. This suggestion is based on Christ’s statement “My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death” (Mark 14:33–34). If that was indeed the case, His prayer was answered by His Father sending and angel to strengthen Him, and in the serenity with which he met the mob (Luke 22:43). His strength was renewed, and He went forward to accomplish our redemption, and finally to dismiss His spirit by an act of His will. It is true that “Christ is King in the realm of sorrow, peerless in His pain, supreme in His distress.”
‘Thy will be done.’ No greater words than these
Can pass from human lips, than these which rent
Their way through agony and blood and sweat,
And broke the silence of Gethsemane,
To save the world from sin.STUDDART KENNEDY
Oh, my Saviour crucified,
Near Thy cross would I abide;
There to look with steadfast eye
On Thy dying agony.
Jesus, bruised and put to shame,
Tells me all Jehovah’s name;
“God is love,” I surely know
By my Saviour’s depths of woe.
In His spotless soul’s distress,
I perceive my guiltiness;
Oh how vile my low estate,
Since my ransom was so great!
Dwelling on Mount Calvary,
Contrite shall my spirit be;
Rest and holiness shall find,
Fashioned like my Saviour’s mind.ROBERT C. CHAPMAN