Matthew 26:36, commentary and pictures

Jesus came with His disciples to the garden of Gethsemane and told them to sit and wait while He went farther apart to pray, taking only Peter, James and John deeper with Him. It was His accustomed quiet retreat for prayer at the foot of the Mount of Olives, a secluded wooded place, reached that night under a full Passover moon after the supper as a strange and deepening sadness came upon Him. There the sins of the whole world were laid upon Him, and facing separation from His Father He fell prostrate three times pleading for the cup to pass yet submitting to the Father's will, with bloody sweat falling to the ground under Satan's assault while heaven watched. He asked the disciples to watch and pray with Him, but they slept and left Him to wrestle alone, losing the strength they would have needed for the trial before them. The sinless Son was treated as a sinner that guilty sinners might be treated as righteous and healed, and His going apart to pray in agony remains the pattern of earnest prayer and self-sacrifice for strength in coming trial.

Place and Moment

Jesus comes with His disciples to the place called Gethsemane and tells them to sit and wait while He goes farther apart to pray, taking only Peter, James, and John deeper into the garden. He leaves the larger company to sit and rest while He goes apart, asking them to tarry and watch, then going farther to fall on His face and pray for the cup to pass yet not His will but the Father's. His leaving them to pray nearby is an example of His prayers in their behalf, that their faith should not fail but increase.

Gethsemane is His accustomed retreat for meditation and prayer, where He often went after eating the Passover supper to brace His spirit for trial and duty by fervent prayer. He had frequently spent the entire night there while the disciples, after a short time of watching and prayer, slept undisturbed at a little distance until He awoke them in the morning to go forth and labor anew, so His withdrawing to pray drew no remark and did not surprise them. On this night, as He approached it, His heart was filled with sorrow unlike any He had felt on earlier visits, because He was about to bear humanity's guilt and be numbered with transgressors.

The place is a secluded, quiet, dark wooded garden of dense foliage and trees with a low rustic stone wall, lying at the foot of the Mount of Olives, valued for solitude and communion with the Father. It is night under a broad, full Passover moon shining from a cloudless sky, while the city of pilgrims' tents lies hushed in silence. After eating the Passover supper He walks slowly with the disciples, earnestly conversing with and instructing them, but as He nears the garden He becomes strangely silent and utterly sad as never before.

A strange sadness deepens as He goes on so the disciples dare not question Him about the cause, though they anxiously watch His countenance and look for His usual place of retirement that He might rest. His form sways as if about to fall, every step is taken with labored effort, He groans aloud under the pressure of a terrible burden, and twice His companions support Him or He would have fallen to the earth. Before the agony He spends His last hours with the disciples speaking words of comfort and assurance, and they join in a hymn of praise, with sorrow and fear but without loud outcries or abandonment to grief, as He enters the path to Calvary.

His final prayer with the disciples comes just before He enters Gethsemane, where He falls to the ground in agony because the sins of the whole world rest upon Him, having had neither food nor drink since the supper. This suffering follows immediately after His prayer and precedes His betrayal by Judas with a kiss, His forsaking by all the disciples who flee, and His trial, and the verse belongs to that scene of agony before betrayal and crucifixion. On the way there He gives the disciples lessons including the vine as the symbol of the union of His church with Himself and His Father. When He later passes the garden He pauses so they will remember those lessons and how, when He was in agony and needed their sympathy and comfort during His humiliation, they reproached and forsook Him.

The garden is made holy and set apart by His presence in human nature and by His prayers and tears, consecrated by His agony as He bore the sins of the world as part of the work by which people are reconciled to God. It stands as the place of obedience set against the disobedience of Eden where eating the forbidden tree broke the law of God in selfish disobedience. Gethsemane stands alongside Calvary as the setting of His great sacrifice, the place of the conflict of the garden before the shame of the cross and His victory over death and the tomb.

Suffering and Prayer

As He approached the center of the garden the burden of the sins of the whole world weighed upon His soul. He was filled with sorrow because He was about to bear humanity's guilt and be numbered with transgressors. He faced the bitter cup of bearing that sin and the separation from His Father that it would bring. He became poor for guilty people so that they might become rich through His poverty, and His agony shows the cost of sin and the need to hate sin and rely on Him for strength and salvation.

In that setting the destiny of the lost world hung in the balance on whether He would accept the suffering required to stand as humanity's surety. He saw that transgressors must perish if left to themselves, saw the power of sin and the woes of a doomed world, and decided to save man at any cost to Himself. He became the propitiation for a race that willed to sin. He sought solitude to pray before the great trial that led to the judgment hall and the cross. There He asked that the cup pass if possible yet submitted to the Father's will, falling prostrate three times in prayer.

The mysterious cup trembled in His hand. Feeling His Father's presence withdrawn filled Him with terrible amazement and shuddering dread, and He was sorrowful with a bitterness exceeding the last great struggle with death. Overmastering agony wrenched from His lips the bitter cry for deliverance, that the cup if possible might pass from Him. His anguish brought bloody sweat forced from His pores that fell in drops and moistened the ground. Thrice the same prayer for deliverance was wrung from His lips.

There the most fearful strain ever brought upon a human being was permitted to come upon Him because He was bearing the sins of the whole world. There He gave an example of absolute submission in surrendering His own will to the will of God, though His will was capable of asserting itself and He could have refused humiliation. He had laid off His royal robe and kingly crown and clothed His divinity with humanity to live a sinless life on behalf of humanity and to make an atonement. Satan encircled His humanity with a horror of great darkness never before experienced, tempting Him to think God had forsaken Him. The hour of Satan's apparent triumph had come, and the storm of wrath was about to beat upon Him.

Satan pressed upon Him His rejection by His own people, betrayal by a disciple, denial by a zealous follower, and forsaking by all, while the sins of men weighed heavily and the sense of God's wrath crushed His life. His coming to Gethsemane was the entering into a fight of impurity against purity, of the prince of light against the prince of darkness. It was the setting of Satan's superhuman assaults upon Him before His abuse, trial, and death, with satanic agencies striving to divorce Him from God. Priests and rulers hunted Him from place to place and misrepresented His mission, and the enemy pressed darkness upon His soul, but He would not yield.

Heaven and the unfallen worlds watched the closing conflict over the plan of salvation with intense interest. Angels watched at every step with amazement at Satan's devices. Heaven could no longer endure the sight but sent a messenger of consolation to the prostrate Son fainting and dying under the accumulated guilt of the world, though God gave the angels no command to rescue Him or interrupt what was happening. His human nature longed for sympathy and yearned for words of relief from those He had blessed and comforted. He craved to know they were praying for Him and for themselves and understood the terrible temptation to let the guilty race bear its own guilt while He stood innocent.

His need for loving companionship shows the desire for love and sympathy to be God-given and implanted in the heart by God. His tears and anguish as Gethsemane and the place of crucifixion lay before Him on the approach to Jerusalem were not caused by fear of physical suffering or foreboding about His own anguish. He knew a great darkness would soon overshadow Him there and that He would make His soul an offering for sin, but His grief was not for Himself. He was sorrowful over Jerusalem's doomed people, whose blindness, impenitence, and rejection of the Redeemer who came to bless, save, heal, and offer love would bring destruction. His agony in Gethsemane beneath the crushing weight of the sins of the whole world is included among the scenes of His life shown at the final judgment.

Disciples Watching and Sleeping

James, John, and Peter were among His closest disciples and the chief witnesses after His death, the three permitted to witness the agony in the garden. James was with Him there in Gethsemane on the night of His agony, and that presence placed him among Christ's closest disciples and witnesses. When James later faced imprisonment and execution he understood more fully what Jesus had meant about drinking His cup and sharing His baptism and suffering.

He told them to sit, to tarry, to stay and watch with Him, and warned them repeatedly to watch and pray lest they enter temptation. They fell asleep in stupor and sorrow, unheeding because they knew not the necessity of watchfulness and earnest prayer to withstand the temptations of Satan. They did not watch with Him through that hour of trial but let sleep overcome them and left their suffering Master to wrestle with the powers of darkness alone. In that trial His human nature longed for sympathy and yearned for words of relief from those He had blessed, craving to know they were praying for Him and for themselves and understood the temptation to let the guilty race bear its own guilt while He stood innocent.

As they waited they heard the agony of prayer coming from His pale and quivering lips. His agonizing prayer and tears were offered to the Father for the people for whom He would give His life, pleading with God and kept through temptation while accepting poverty and humility to build up a people. Their drowsiness left them with only a dim sense of the angel's presence, and they did not hear His voice and lost the power and glory of the scene. Their sleep cost them the spiritual evidence that would have strengthened their souls for the terrible scenes before them, and kept them from receiving the divine light and strength for coming trials that comes through prayerful communion with God.

Watching and praying would have helped them understand His sorrow and remember His predictions of His suffering, death, and resurrection, and keep hope and faith through the trial. It would have prepared them to endure scorn and mockery and to see that He came not to establish an earthly kingdom but to bring a kingdom of love, peace, and purity into hearts and prepare them for heaven. Peter later returned to the place where he had seen Jesus prostrate in prayer, remembered that he had slept through the agony, and was moved to repentance and humility. That experience prepared him to pity the tempted, sympathize with the weak and erring, warn the presumptuous, and strengthen his brethren.

He knew the severe trial awaiting them through His betrayal, agony, death, condemnation, humiliation, and rejection by the crowd. His concern was for their grief and danger of unbelief, not for Himself, and though He knew each disciple's weakness He met them with sympathy rather than harshness, sympathizing with and excusing their weakness. He prepared His faithful followers beforehand so the defection of others would not overwhelm them or carry away their faith when He was condemned and rejected. His leaving them to pray nearby was an example of His prayers in their behalf, that their faith should not fail but increase, showing His earnest and untiring labor to reach both the most lowly and those in higher positions, using every means possible to gain admission to hearts that should have been open to receive Him.

Salvation Accomplished

His suffering in the garden, together with His suffering in the wilderness and at Calvary, was endured to show the way through hardship and to bring the divine help people need to be saved. It belonged to the self-denying, self-sacrificing path He walked to save people, and the agony He experienced there was for humanity. The struggle for eternal life therefore calls for conflict, self-denial, and sacrifice after His example.

The sinless Son was treated as a sinner that sinful human beings might be treated as innocent, wounded for transgressions and bruised for iniquities, with the chastisement of peace upon Him bringing healing by His stripes. Bowed under the sins of the whole world, He was made sin and treated as a sinner so sinners might be treated as righteous, with justice fully satisfied and the extreme penalty of the law falling without abatement upon the divine-human Substitute. He laid off His royal robe and kingly crown and clothed His divinity with humanity to live a sinless life on behalf of humanity and to make atonement, for He came to suffer humiliation and death. God spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for all, demanding from the Mediator the whole debt for transgression and requiring full atonement.

The agonies He suffered there, with His later humiliation and crucifixion, demonstrate that God's justice deals fully with sin and that His law is unchangeable. His suffering as humanity's Surety was not permission to continue breaking the law but evidence that God upholds its authority. He endured agony as the sins of the whole world were laid upon Him and made His soul an offering for sin, suffering shameful death for the salvation of guilty people. He became poor for their sake so that they might become rich through His poverty.

He bore that burden of sin and threatened separation from His Father as humanity's Redeemer, facing the bitter cup with bloody sweat that moistened the ground. His agony shows the cost of sin and the need to hate sin and rely on Christ for strength and salvation. His suffering made it possible for humanity to grasp divinity and, through divine power, overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of testimony.

Because He suffered in Gethsemane He is touched with the feeling of infirmities, tempted in all points like men and made perfect through suffering to succor the tempted. Though ever touched with human woe and ever seeking by word and deed to relieve suffering, there He appeared as a bruised reed. There He took not the nature of angels but the seed of Abraham, and was made like His brethren in all things, suffering being tempted, that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest to make reconciliation for sins and help them that are tempted. So the tried soul can spread anxieties before Him and find deliverance when tempted, strength when weak, light when ignorant, healing for broken hearts, and divine help nearest in the moment of greatest discouragement.

The garden was consecrated by His agony as He bore the sins of the world as part of the work by which people are reconciled to God. Remembering this scene during the ordinances brings the disciples' thoughts to His suffering and the reconciliation He obtained. The sacrament calls believers to recall the whole painful history of His humiliation, betrayal, garden agony, and suffering as He gave Himself for the sinful world.

Gethsemane was His last terrible trial, passed through so that sinners might not perish but have eternal life. It reveals the love of God in laying down His life for others and requires believers to lay down their lives for the brethren. They are to work in harmony rather than at cross-purposes, cultivating brotherly love and tenderness of heart and repenting of dissension and strife. That agony, together with His cry of forsakenness on the cross, shows how deep and intense were the sufferings of the Son for the sins of the world. Yet in the midst of those sufferings He spoke peace to the penitent thief who asked for a place in His kingdom, and that answer, heard by the armies of Satan, sounded the death-knell of Satan's lingering hope to obtain victory over Christ or over those who believe in Him.

Example and Final Application

Going apart to pray at Gethsemane as agony and trial approached shows the need for prayerful communion with God to receive divine light and strength for coming trials. Even those who most need divine instruction fail to receive it when they do not place themselves in communion with heaven through watchful meditation and prayer, for the sleeping disciples did not hear His voice and had only a dim sense of the presence of angels, losing the power and glory of the scene and the spiritual evidence that would have strengthened their souls for the terrible scenes before them. Those facing spiritual conflict should wrestle with God in prayer for strength and for power to make God known through words and actions.

His prayer there is an example of earnest devotion and self-sacrifice, for He often spent the entire night in agonizing prayer even on damp ground, and His life of prayer and good works is a pattern to imitate rather than seeking pleasure. His soul agony teaches self-sacrifice, patience under affliction, solemn consecration to God, and preparation for holy work. His withdrawing with the disciples to the solitude of Olivet calls those attending council meetings to seek solitude with Him rather than rely on busy activity.

The setting represents the self-sacrifice and suffering that should shape missionary work, and those who care for the sick are to minister in the spirit of His sacrifice at Gethsemane and Calvary, pointing people to His power to save both soul and body. His suffering in the garden teaches the meaning of self-denial, which included not only leaving heaven, enduring condemnation, and dying, but also bearing the sins of the world, and His example rebukes indifference and love of ease. The garden was a place of deep agony for Him, and His suffering there was a central part of the story His followers told about His life, with His humble endurance of suffering and His pity for those who persecuted Him also central themes in their preaching about Christ.

His agony in the garden where He poured out His soul is a pattern for God's people in the final time of trouble, who will cry earnestly and agonize day and night for deliverance. They will face a decree threatening their lives and death unless they disregard the fourth-commandment Sabbath and honor the first day, yet they will remain faithful to the Lord's Sabbath. Their anguish cannot compare with His as He bore the weight of human sin. The events surrounding His suffering, betrayal, trial, and crucifixion show how doubt and bitterness can open human hearts to a satanic spirit that stirs wrath and hatred, as Satan stirred those feelings to turn people against Christ, a pattern that also explains how religious opposition and hostility can grow among people who claim to serve God.