Third section the judgment upon the church itself second picture of judgment

Tarry ye here, and watch with Me—Intimation of the deepest agony. Bengel: In magnis tentationibus juvat solitudo, sed tamen ut in propinquo sint amici.

Matthew 26:39. And He went a little farther.—Μικρόν belongs to προελθών, a little distance. Luke gives here the vivid and dramatic statements of the spiritual excitement of the Lord,—of the bloody or blood-like sweat which poured from Him,—of His being strengthened by an angel. See Com. on Luke 22:41-44.

If it be possible.—Not as opposing the notion of an unbending decree; but in living harmony with the Father’s government and perfect submission. Luke: εἰ βούλει. The πάντα δυνατά in Mark is no contradiction.

This cup.—The suffering is a cup filled with a bitter potion. See above, Matthew 20:22. Meyer (after de Wette): “This suffering and dying now before Me.” The signification of the cup is the same as the signification of the suffering of His soul. But the modern interpretation, of an anguish in the presence of death which extorted a prayer for its removal, is in opposition to all the earlier declarations of Christ, and especially to the institution of the Supper, and the high-priestly prayer, John 17. On this farther on.

But as Thou.—As Thou wilt, let it be. See Mark. Not My will, but Thine be done. “The feeling of profound emotion speaks in broken language.” Meyer. [This passage figures very prominently in the Monothelite controversy as one of the principal proofs that Christ had two wills, a human and a divine, as He had two natures. It should not be overlooked, however, that the contrast is not as between His human and His divine will, but as between His will (as the God-Man in the state of humiliation and intense agony) and the will of His heavenly Father.—P. S.]

Matthew 26:40. And findeth them sleeping.—“The sleeping of the disciples, and of these three favorite disciples, under these circumstances, and with so unconquerable a drowsiness, is psychologically mysterious, even after Luke’s explanation, ἀπὸ τῆς λύπης ( Matthew 22:45); but the certainly genuine words of Jesus, Matthew 26:40; Matthew 26:45, constrain us to regard the circumstance as historically true.” Meyer. We must connect with this the equally mysterious sleeping of the same three men during the transfiguration; and this will confirm the supposition, that higher spiritual influences and transactions almost overpowered the feeble flesh. Yet the Lord expressly declares that the disciples were morally responsible for being in such a condition. An analogous influence we see under preaching. Sermons stimulate some, and send others to sleep, according to their several dispositions and preparation. The simple law, that extraordinary tension raises the highly developed spiritual life, while it stupefies the less developed, finds here its strongest illustration in the most absolute contrast of spiritual watchfulness and sleep.

He saith unto Peter.—He had promised most was in the greatest danger; and probably he was psychical respects the strongest.—So then, ο ὕτως,—with displeasure: with allusion to his great promises.—Not one hour.—Incidental intimation of the duration of our Lord’s first conflict.

Matthew 26:41. That ye enter not into temptation; εἰσέλθητε.—That the situation in which they would soon be placed, might not be a cause of offence to them, through lack of their own preparation. The simple test, which comes from God alone, becomes πειρασμός, an assault dangerous to the soul, partly through the accession of tempting influences from without (“the devil, the world”), and partly through a blameable internal bias (“our own flesh and blood”). The Lord’s words were fully explained when the band soon afterward came upon them.

The spirit indeed is willing.—A general declaration; but, like the passage, Romans 7:22; Romans 7:25, qualified and particularized by its relation to the disciples, and the progress of the Christian life. In the unconverted the willingness of the πνεῦμα is not yet unbound; in mature Christians the σάρξ is purified and governed by the spiritual principle. But, even in the first case, the willingness of the spirit is faintly expressed in indefinite desires; and in the last case, the opposition of the flesh is not absolutely suppressed and abolished until the consummation. The proper conflict between the πνεῦμα, the higher principle of life, and the old ungodly nature, falls into the domain of the Christian discipleship, the life that is being matured. The πνεῦμα is here the human spiritual life, awakened by the Holy Spirit. It is not only willing, but πρόθυμον, ready and willing. The σάρξ which opposes is not simply the sensual nature, but the sensuous nature disordered by the ψυχή. The Scripture presents the σάρξ—that Isaiah, the natural life in its inclinations and impulses,—in three stages: 1. As innocent σάρξ ( Genesis 2); 2as sinful σάρξ ( Genesis 6.); 3. as sanctified σάρξ ( John 6). But the sinful σάρξ is even in the regenerate excited to a diseased contradiction; it is not merely weak, but ἀσθενής as the πνεῦμα is πρόθυμον. Hence, above all things, watchfulness is needed. Calovius: σάρξ is here the homo animalis; πνεῖμα the homo spiritualis. This is too dogmatical. [Stier, Alford, and Nast take flesh here in its original sense as a constituent part of human nature, which in itself is not sinful, but has an inherent weakness, which the soul, standing between the spirit and the flesh, must overcome by deriving strength from the spirit through watching and prayer. They also maintain that Christ Himself is included in this declaration, with the difference that He gave as high and pre-eminent an example of its truth, as the disciples afforded a low and ignoble one: Hebrews, in the willingness of the spirit, yielding Himself to the Father’s will to suffer and die, but weighed down by the weakness of the flesh; they, having professed, and really having, a willing spirit to suffer with Him, but, even in the one hour’s watching, overcome by the burden of drowsiness. Observe, it is here πνεῦμα, the higher spiritual being, and not ψυχή, the human soul, the seat of the affections and passions, as in Matthew 26:38 and John 12:27.—P. S.]

Matthew 26:42. Again the second time.—No pleonasm. The ἐκ δευτέρου defines the ἀπελθών; the πάλιν defines the προσηύξατο in a significant manner. In the second supplication, the resignation and self-sacrifice comes more prominently forward.

Matthew 26:44. The third time.—Apart from the textual uncertainty, this presents no difliculty. It is in harmony with life, and especially spiritual life, that intense and decisive conflicts develop themselves in a succession of Acts, with intermissions of pause. The rhythm here assumes a threefold rise and fall, according to the nature of the spirit and of spiritual conflict, as in the conflict of the Apostle Paul, 2 Corinthians 12:8. Luke does not record this threefold repetition literally; but he describes it in the growing intensity of the struggle, the bloody sweat, and the word of the strengthening angel.

Matthew 26:45. Sleep on now, and take your rest.—1. Chrysostom, Grotius, Winer, and others: “Jesus needed no longer the co-operation of His disciples, and gives them rest.” But, on the other hand, we read: “The hour is come.” 2. H. Stephanus, Heumann, [also Greswell and Robinson], and others, make it a question: Sleep ye still? but this is opposed by τὸ λοιπόν 3. Grulich (on the Irony of Christ, p74): Sleep and take your rest for the time to come, that Isaiah, in future, when ye shall have more security. But this would not be τὸ λοιπόν. 4. Euthymius Zigab, [Calvin], and Beza, call it “rebuking irony.” [Also Chrysostom.] Meyer: “The common objection against the ironical view, that it is not in harmony with the present feeling of Jesus, is psychologically arbitrary. The profoundest grief of soul, especially when associated with such clearness of spirit, has its own irony. And what an apathy had Jesus here to encounter!” But if the essential principle of irony is security and perfect composure of spirit, we recognize here the sacred irony which does not speak in contempt of weakness, but in the triumphant consciousness that the fight was already won. Another token Isaiah, that it passes over at once into the most solemn language. See the divine irony in Psalm 2Meanwhile, we must be careful not to overlook the symbolical element in the saying. The disciples had slept in the body, because they slept in the spirit And, because they had not watched, there was a necessity now that they should outwardly watch while they slept on in spirit, until they were awakened by the cock-crowing, the Redeemer’s death, and the resurrection morning.

The hour is at hand.—The great hour of decision. Comp. Luke 22:53.

Shall be betrayed into the hands of sinners.—Grotius: The Romans. Meyer: The Sanhedrin. De Wette, better: The Romans and the Jews. For that the betrayal was twofold, Jesus had before declared.

Matthew 26:46. Arise, let us go hence.—“Remark the haste which is expressed in ἐγείρεσθε, ἄγωμεν, ἰδού.” Meyer.

The Relation or the Three Evangelists to John.—The silence of John upon the conflict in Gethsemane has been explained in various ways. According to Olshausen and others, he took for granted an acquaintance with the synoptical narratives. I have explained the omission of this event, as well as of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, from the peculiar composition and aim of the fourth Gospel, with reference to the three already existing.^[FN67] So also Meyer. John has something analogous to the agony of Gethsemane in the spiritual conflict of Jesus in the temple, John 12:27, though the two are of course not to be identified.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1.The perfect fidelity of Jesus to the law is seen in His not going over the Mount of Olives to Bethany. It was necessary for every one to spend that night in Jerusalem. His calmness is seen in the fact of His going to His accustomed place of prayer ( Luke 22:39), although knowing that Judas was acquainted with the place. The time for hiding Himself was past; for throughout the whole land there was no longer freedom for His steps. But no more did Jesus go prematurely to meet danger, which He would have done had He celebrated the Passover a day earlier than usual. “Just at the commencement of His public teaching ( Matthew 4), He retired, before His extremest agony, into silence; that there He might in prayer await and overcome in His inmost spirit the fiercest assaults of Satan ( John 14:30), before He entered upon His external mortal passion.” Gerlach.

2. The Agony of the Saviour in Gethsemane.—The final form of an anxious presentiment which had pervaded His whole public life, and which constantly came out more and more distinctly into utterance: Luke 12:50; Mark 8:12; John 12There is nothing improbable, though something mysterious and wonderful, in the record that Christ’s agony followed the high festival of His soul in the sacerdotal prayer ( John 17). A similar transition in feeling often appears: 1. From joy to sorrow in the entry with palm-branches in Luke, in the temple, John 12, in Gethsemane; 2. from sorrow to joy at the departure from Galilee, at the dismissal of Judas from the company of disciples, John 13, after the cry, “My God, My God,” on the cross. All this shows the elasticity and absolute depth and vigor of His inner life. We distinguish three great conflicts and triumphs in the passion: 1. The victory over the temptation of the kingdom of darkness in His Spirit, at the institution of the holy Supper ( John 13:31); 2. the victory over temptation in His soul, in Gethsemane; 3. the victory over temptation in His bodily life, on the cross. These three great crises, indeed, are not to be separated abstractly, as if in the one case His spirit only was tried, in the other, His soul, etc. But the assault made the life of the spirit the medium of trial in the one case, in the other, the life of the soul; and the victory which preceded became an advantage in the conflict which followed. And this serves to show the real import of the specific suffering of the soul of our Lord. It is in its nature one of the deepest mysteries of the evangelic history; but it receives some light from the position of the soul-conflict between the spirit-conflict and the conflict of bodily distress, from its relation to the temptation in the wilderness, and by definite declarations of Christ Himself. Interpretations:—1. Origen, De martyrio, c29: Christ desired a yet deeper suffering; an ascetically strained view.^[FN68] Contra Celsum: He would have averted the destruction of Jerusalem. So Ambrose, Basil, Jerome2. He suffered the wrath of God in our stead and our behalf. Melanchthon: Jacuit filius Dei prostratus coram æterno Patre, sentiens tram adversus tua et mea peccata. So Rambach, “the cup of wrath.” 3. Assaults of hell. Knapp: “The last and most terrible attacks of the kingdom of darkness, in which the prince of death sought to wrest from Him the victory.” 4. Ebrard: “His trembling in Gethsemane was not dread of His sufferings, but was part of His passion itself; it was not a transcendental and external assumption of a foreign guilt, but a concrete experience of the full and concentrated power of the world’s sin.” 5. Olshausen: Actual abandonment on the part of God; the human ψυχή of Jesus alone was in conflict here, while the fulness of the divine life had withdrawn6. Rationalists like Thiess and Paulus refer it to physical illness and exhaustion,^[FN69] to which Schuster adds the distress of abandonment by friends.^[FN70] 7. De Wette: Fear of death (“a moral weakness!”). 8. Meyer: Horror and shudder in confronting the terror of such cruel sufferings and death. So most modern interpreters. Neander proves against Strauss that a change of feeling in the life of the Saviour is by no means improbable. But we cannot admit a change of thought, least of all a change of the fundamental thoughts of His life. A supplication for the turning away of the suffering of death, even as a conditional and resigned request, is not to be imagined after so many foreannouncements of His passion, after the institution of the Supper, and His continuance in the scene of danger at Gethsemane. This would be to make Jesus directly contradict Himself. The agony in Gethsemane was not dread of the agony on Calvary, but it was a specific agony of itself; therefore He prays, according to Mark, that, if it were possible, the hour of this suffering might pass,—similarly as in John.

It was the hour of nameless woe, of an excitement and commotion of soul,^[FN71] in which He would not appear before His disciples, in which He could not appear before His enemies1. It was then first a specific conflict of soul (“My soul is surrounded by sorrow,” περί λυπος): He was assaulted by the severest experience of woe and distressing anxiety. And this disposes of the opinions of those who make the suffering either predominantly pneumatic, or predominantly corporeal2. It was a counterpart to the temptation in the wilderness. See Luke 4:13. Christ was tempted in the wilderness by the pseudo-messianic and carnal hopes and desires of His people, in connection with the vanities of the world. But in Gethsemane He was tempted by the pseudo-messianic, carnal grief and disappointment of His people, and the whole misery of the world, which culminated in the fearful treachery of Judas, and revealed itself in a milder form in the sleeping of the disciples for sorrow. The whole tempting power of the desperation of humanity pressed hard upon Jesus: that was His λυπεῖσθαι. And in His own internal defence He stood alone, invigorated by no sympathy and help of mortals: that was His ἀδημονεῖν.—Comp. Isaiah 63:3. In this temptation through the despair of humanity lay indeed the strength of the fiercest assault of hellish powers upon His lonely soul. It was also the judgment of God upon humanity which Jesus experienced in His soul; not God’s judgment upon Himself, but a judgment upon humanity, which He received into His own soul, in order to change it into redemption. Of the former—the despair of the world—Judas’ treachery was the concentrated and terrific expression: it was the demoniac fruit of his demoniac grief, an act of mad contempt of salvation and of self. Hence the Lord again alludes here to the traitor ( Matthew 26:46). The great double-betrayal of His people and of the whole world committed against His life, was the extreme suffering of the Saviour, the fulfilment of Joseph’s type, sold with fearful anguish on his part by his brothers ( Genesis 42:21). Thus the agony of Jesus’ soul in the garden was related to the despairing sorrow of the world, as the victory in the wilderness was related to the enticing and disguised pleasures of this world.

3. Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.—Opposed to the Monothelite heresy. This preserves the truth and truly human character of His conflict, without disparaging His constant accordance in all things with the will of the Father. Contrast and suspense do not amount to contradiction. Difference is not discord. See the decrees of the Council of Constantinople, a. d680.

4. Christ, in His threefold supplication in Gethsemane, perfected the doctrine of prayer, and sanctified the prayers of sinners. His petition rises from the full expression of His woe to the full expression of submission to the Father’s will. And His being heard consisted in this, that in the Father’s strength He drank the cup, and enjoyed the perfect security of victory before the sharpest conflict took place.

5. It was not the treachery of Judas in its external aspect, but that treachery as the expression of the disciples’ and the world’s sorrow and disappointment and of their despair of Christ’s honor and victory, that constituted the temptation which the Saviour here suffered. But He had overcome this temptation already, when the external and actual betrayal came upon Him.

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

I. The Two Sections.—The passage from the Supper to Gethsemane; or, spiritual invigoration experienced in the way of duty: a. The appointment of spiritual strengthening; b. how it is experienced by Christ and by His disciples.—The warning voice of their Master scarcely heard amidst the expressions of the disciples’ self-confidence.—Divine and human care in provision against assaults at hand: 1. Christ is careful, and therefore free from care; 2. His disciples were careless, and therefore burdened with care and anxiety.—Christ in His work of redemption overcame the unfaithfulness of His disciples: 1. Their unbelief in its presumption; 2. their unbelief in its despondency.—The sudden and decisive turning-point: 1. Of destiny; 2. of feeling; 3. of the issue.—The watchman and the sleepers: 1. God and men; 2. Christ and the disciples; 3. the spirit and the earthly cares.

II. The Way to the Mount of Olives.—The fore-announcement of the Lord, and the unbelief of the disciples.—The spirit of Christ and the spirit of Scripture of one accord in their judgment upon the weakness of believers.—The promise of seeing them again in Galilee, bound up with the prediction of their coming fall: 1. A testimony of His supreme hope above His sorrows; 2. of His continued faithfulness to the disciples in their wavering.—The assurances of Peter.—His self-complacent boasts the token of his deep fall.—Mark his presumptuous and boasted superiority: 1. To his enemies: 2. to the other disciples; 3. to the warning word of his Master.—Strong professions, miserable apostacy.^[FN72]—The last unholy contention of the disciples.—The measure of our false self-estimation the measure of our humiliation in life.—Night and the offence.—The strength of fidelity which can look beyond and overlook the offence of weakness, and turn it to salvation.—The offence of weakness (Peter), and the offence of wickedness (Judas).

III. Gethsemane.—The Mount of Olives and the Oil-Press (Gethsemane), symbols of the production and maturity of the Christian life: 1. The mount is a figure of the Church, in which the spiritual life grows; 2. the oil-press is a figure of suffering, through which the spiritual life is purged or set free.—The three great things of eternal significance connected with the Mount of Olives: 1. The palm-entry into Jerusalem; 2. Gethsemane; 3. the ascension.—Gethsemane the turning-point between the old and the new Paradise.—The reserve and the familiarity of Jesus in His agony.—The concealment of the agony: 1. It is altogether hidden from the world; 2. the greater number of His disciples see only the signs of this suffering; 3. the confidential ones only see it in amazement and trembling; 4. only God views Him stretched out, as a worm in the dust.—The soul of Jesus oppressed by the distress of all, and bereft of the help of all.—Or, the soul of the agonized treader of the wine-press ( Isaiah 63:3); alone in His suffering, over whom all the billows roll ( Psalm 22:21; Isaiah 54:11); resigned entirely to God, and hidden in Him ( Psalm 27:5).—How Christ in the garden overcame the sorrow of all the world: 1. Human sorrow, in its vain imaginations and despair; 2. devilish sorrow, in its betrayal and mockery.—The conflict in the wilderness, and the conflict in the garden.—The three great conflicts of Jesus: at the Supper, in Gethsemane, and on Calvary.—Gethsemane and Calvary.—The horror of Jesus in prospect of the kiss of Judas.—The Judas-kiss evermore the bitterest cup of the Lord and of His Church.—The world gave Him toil; His disciples gave Him trouble.—The suffering of Christ the suffering of priestly sympathy with the misery of the world: 1. He feels its perfect woe; hence His suffering2. He experiences the whole power of sin in this woe; hence the dread assault and conflict3. He begins to expiate its whole guilt in this woe: hence His persevering prayer.—Even in the agony of His soul He is the Christ: 1. The prophetic Revealer of all the depths of man’s misery; 2. the high-priestly Expiator of them; 3. the kingly Deliverer from them.—The severest suffering is but a cup: 1. Rigorously measured; 2. surrounded and adorned by the cup; 3. prepared, presented and blessed by the Father.—Christ in the apparent annihilation of the work of His life: the seeming invalidation of His mission; the seeming dissolution of His company; the seeming succumbing of His disciples under grief, despondency, and self-reprobation; the seeming contempt of His love.—His faithful heart the dove with the olive-branch high above the floods.—Christ in His great conflict of prayer: teaches us to pray; makes our prayer acceptable; and becomes its Mediator.—Prayer is most acceptable in its absolute submission to the will of God.—The disciples as the outposts and watchmen of the Church.—The sleep of the disciples; or, the death-like collapse which follows over-strained self-confidence.—The two divisions of the disciples: a watch-company toward the world, and a watch-company around the Lord.—The Lord’s request to His disciples a token of infinite humility.—The three words of the Lord to the disciples: 1. Watch with Me; 2. watch for yourselves; 3. sleep on now (whether waking or sleeping, ye will sleep till the awakening of My resurrection).—Watch and pray, because of: 1. Temptation; 2. weakness.—The three witnesses of His transfiguration and His humiliation (of the glorious beams and the bloody sweat).—The divine majesty with which the Lord comes out of His human sorrow.—The strength and solidity which the soul acquires from communion with Christ in all the conflicts of life and death.

Selections from other Homiletical Commentators

I. The Way to the Mount of Olives.—Starke:—From Cramer: He is a true friend who warns of danger; but flesh and blood is too secure, and will not take warning, 1 Thessalonians 5:3.—How easily may even the best men lapse into sin! James 3:2.—Osiander: The cross and tribulation a great offence to the weak.—Professions: not to promise good is unbelief; to promise without earnest will is hypocrisy; to promise in reliance upon our own strength is presumption.—Hedinger: Good-will must guard carefully against arrogance.—Trust none less than thine own heart, Jeremiah 17:9.—Canstein: Nothing is so hidden from us as our own hearts.—We never come to know thoroughly our own weakness and unsteadiness.—The imagination which we have formed concerning ourselves prevents our seeing what we are and what we are not.—Hard work it is to wean a man away from his false imaginations about himself.—To contradict the voice of truth is the sum of shame.

Lisco:—The Searcher of hearts.—Peter trusts more the strength of his feeling than the word of Jesus.

Gerlach:—The Lord quotes the language of Scripture oftener in His sufferings than in any other circumstances. So in the temptation in the wilderness, Matthew 4:1-11.

Heubner:—This prediction of the Lord shows His supreme peace and victory over self.—The suffering Messiah was a riddle to them.—Christ is the only bond of His people: take Him away, and all is dissolved.—He would give them all a proof of His unlimited knowledge of men’s hearts: that was of importance for their whole life.—The over-hasty, the presumptuous, and the self-confident, are those whom God suffers to fall.—There is a great difference between arrogance of flesh and alacrity of spirit.—The honest humility with which the disciples relate their own faults.—Warning to us all not to take offence at the Lord in anything.

II. Gethsemane:—Starke:—The transfiguration upon the high mountain; the humiliation in the deep valley.—It is not wise for every one to reveal everywhere and indiscriminately his heart and all its impulses, Genesis 22:5; for there are weak people, who cannot bear the strong.—Osiander: We can disburden ourselves most confidently in the ears of out God when we have no one, or but few, near us.—Canstein: Christ enters upon His passion with prayer; He carries it on and ends it with prayer; and so teaches us that our own sufferings cannot be overcome and made to subserve our salvation without much prayer.—The three Apostles called in Galatians 2:9 pillars: Peter, the first who opened to Jews and Gentiles the door of the kingdom of heaven; James, the first martyr; John, the longest liver, to whom the most glorious revelations were vouchsafed.—The trials of Abraham, Paul, Luther (great saints, great trials).—Canstein: The faithful God ministers trials according to the measure of the ability of those who are to bear them ( 1 Corinthians 10:13).—When it is time to fight and to pray, we ought not to sleep.—God lets His weak children for a long time see others in the conflict, before they themselves are exposed to the contest.—The cup of Christ’s suffering has consecrated the cup of our cross.—Trust not to men, Psalm 118:7.—Our best security against temptation is to watch and pray.—The daily contest of the spirit with the flesh absolutely necessary, Galatians 5:17.—Thy will be done.—We may pray for mitigation.—When Jesus is suffering in His members, our eyes are, alas! commonly full of sleep.—Perseverance in prayer without fainting, Luke 18:1.—A faithful father warns his children of danger.—He who feels safe in the time of danger may easily be ruined; he who is cautious and self-distrustful will escape.—When one hour of trial is passed, we must prepare for another.—When we in God’s strength have overcome the first assaults and terrors of death, all is more and more tolerable, until the cross itself is gloriously triumphed over.—Jesus our Forerunner.—Christ went freely and joyfully to meet His passion, for an example to us, Philippians 2:5.

Lisco:— Hebrews 5:7. The threefold prayer reminds us of the threefold victory over Satan, when he tempted Jesus, Matthew 4:1.

Gerlach:—From Luther: “We men, born and bound in sin, have an impure, hard, and leprous skin, which does not soon feel. But, because Christ’s body, His flesh and blood, is fresh, and pure, and sound, without sin, while ours are full of sin, we feel the terror of death in a far less degree from what He felt it.” The disciples should watch with Him, and they should pray; but with Him they could not pray; in His mediatorial conflict no man could stand by and help Him.—He desired the fellowship of these as the first-fruits of the men who were to be redeemed by Him.—In this severe agony of the passion, the divine will ever more and more penetrates and exalts the human.

Heubner:—It was a garden, as in Genesis 3—Not all the disciples were fitted to be witnesses of this profound and mysterious humiliation of our Lord.—Rambach: It is not expedient that the child of God should reveal to every one the depths of his heart.—It is the highest grace to be companion of the most secret sorrows of Jesus.—Jesus is the source of consolation and encouragement for all burdened and heavy-laden souls.—The greater the anguish, the greater the joy.—Rieger: And He went to a little distance. So the high-priest went into the Holiest.—The Son of God bows down to the uttermost before His Father, to make us acceptable.—O that we better learned the lesson to bow down before God!—Jacob’s wrestling in the night, Hosea 12:4-5.—Sleepiness and inconsiderateness among Christians, monitors of fall.—Christ awakens out of sleep.—The second petition takes for granted an answer of God, that His will was fixed on this (as indeed did the first); hence the more direct expression of resignation.—In prayer we do not depend upon many and beautifully arranged words; the heart is the gr[illegible] thing (as in the prayers of Moses, David, Daniel, and Christ).—The Holy One falls absolutely into the power of the unholy.—Is at hand: the betrayal, now brought to its consummation, troubled the soul of Jesus afresh.—There is a difference between the mere expectation, albeit certain, and the fulfilled reality.—Kapff: Jesus suffering in Gethsemane: 1. Its depth; 2. its cause; 3. its fruit.