A Word in Season: In the Garden (Matthew 26:36–39)

Gethsemane and the Beginning of Christ’s Suffering

Gethsemane is one of the places to which we must go if we are to understand anything of the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ on our behalf. As our Lord goes into the garden, he is already being betrayed by Judas.

The last supper has been eaten and drunk. The other disciples are still with him, but when Judas arrives with the mob, they also will desert him. As he moves into the garden, most of them are left behind and Peter and James and John go with him, and it's then, says Matthew in chapter 26 from verse 37, that he began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed.

He expresses that to these three men. My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death, and now we begin to understand something of what is taking place, and he asks them to stay and watch with him, and yet he goes himself a little further, where he falls on his face under this great weight of sorrow and suffering.

The Weight of Sin and the Cup of Judgment

The Creator is now pressed to the dust of his own creation, having taken flesh and blood in all the frailty of humanity, he is crushed to the earth as he begins to feel the weight of the sins of his people.

He is crying out to God at this time, O my Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. The cup he is about to drink is the cup of the judgments of God against sin. Now he has no sin in himself, he is spotless, a lamb of God without blemish, but as the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he is now feeling the weight of the sins of his people upon his own shoulders, and a looming sense of the judgments of God against him.

He will not suffer the horrors of judgment and forsakenness, the anger of God against sin on his own account, no, his beloved Father is going to put to his account all the sins of all his people and deal with him accordingly.

And while the son has lived for this moment, nevertheless the awful sense of what it will now mean to be cut off from his Father and his God, presses down upon his soul, and in an agony he cries out, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.

There is about to be, on the judicial level, a breach between father and son. The father is going to make his son a substitute for sinners, he is going to deal with him as if he were they, and they were he.

He is going to pour out his holy wrath against sin upon this substitute. And Christ can barely bear the thought, and so he cries out, as if to say, is there any other way that this can be accomplished?

Christ’s Submission and the Work Given by the Father

There's a very human reaction as he faces the agonies of the cross, and yet there is also a wonderful submission, nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will. Here is the son submitting himself to the father.

Here is Messiah who is embracing the work that God has given him to do. Here is the servant who will suffer, and he suffers for our sake. It is for us that he feels these things. It is for us that he bows the knee to his heavenly Father.

It is for us that he embraces all that is involved in the horrors of the cross, the blackness and the darkness of judgment, the forsakenness that he will undergo in order that we may not experience what he will experience for us.

It is not a mere absorption of sin, it is the punishment of God against it that will fall upon him. He will suffer the very essence of hell in order that we might never go there. The stripes will fall upon him.

The strokes of God's wrath will land upon his shoulders in order that they might not land upon ours. And it is in Gethsemane that he makes that decision. It is in Gethsemane that he binds himself to go to the very end.

The Cross, the Resolve of Gethsemane, and Our Adoration

When on the cross they taunt him and say, come down, in Gethsemane he decided to stay, to do to the very end what he had come to do, and to suffer and to die in the place of sinners like us. And that is why we remember and adore him.