The garden of Gethsemane is one of the most sacred and solemn scenes in the entire Bible.
SINCLAIR FERGUSON
It’s a moment when our world stops turning. A change so abrupt, so pronounced, that it shocks our very soul.
Here’s why it slams us so fast and hard: While we look at Jesus in the pages of the unfolding Gospels—allowing ourselves to walk closely alongside Him through those three exciting years of ministry—words like authoritative, assured, and fearless truly describe Him. He’s unfailingly steady and controlled.
But there comes a moment, as we follow Him into “a place called Gethsemane,”1 when all is radically changed. Suddenly we encounter a Savior we’re unfamiliar with. What we observe is foreign and frightening.
Jesus “began to be greatly distressed and troubled,” Mark’s Gospel tells us.2 “He began to be gripped by a shuddering terror and to be in anguish,” one translation renders it. Other versions use the words horror, deep alarm, dismay.
This is a consuming, crushing agony for Him, utterly unlike anything we’ve previously observed.
Remember those days in Galilee? We saw His extended hand offering one tender touch after another as He healed sickness and forgave sin. We saw His strong arms outstretched with power as He cast out demons and raised the dead. We saw Him striding serenely on the surface of a wave-tossed sea on a stormy night. We saw Him seated tranquilly in a little fishing boat in shallow, sun-sparkled water beside a shoreline packed with listening crowds astounded and delighted by His incomparable teaching.
On a grassy hillside, we saw genuine gratitude on His upraised face as He gazed into the heavens and blessed a few loaves and fishes; we caught His smile of compassion as He handed out the fragments to feed thousands. In awe we watched Him on a rocky, cloud-wrapped summit as His face and form were wondrously transfigured in supernatural light.
Then here in Jerusalem, in the crowded temple courts, our eyes were wide in amazement as He stood up to the religious establishment and confronted their hypocrisy without the slightest qualm of intimidation, even to the point of fashioning a whip and chasing out their moneychangers.
Consistently He has been bold, He has been brave, He has been calm.
The sorrow in this moment is so pronounced, He actually draws near to dying.
It’s true we’ve also seen Him tearful and disquieted; when He came to Bethany after His friend Lazarus died, He loudly groaned, and at the tomb He openly wept. But that was far different from the sheer torment we see overtaking Him now, under these twisting, moonlit branches of Gethsemane’s olive grove.
Jesus turns to Peter and James and John and tells them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” Even to death! This is no hype; He means it. The sorrow in our Savior’s soul at this moment is so powerful and pronounced that He actually draws near to dying in His human experience—even now, several hours before the coming torture of the cross.
After urging these three disciples to be watchful, Jesus steps a short distance beyond … and staggers to the stony ground.3 So horrific is the burden upon Him that He cannot even remain in an upright position.
We are seeing Jesus more vulnerable and more human than we’ve ever known. And we can’t escape one question:
Why?
Why this shuddering terror, this staggering distress?
Even this very night there was no prior indication of such anguish. Earlier this evening, with solemn dignity, He inaugurated the Lord’s Supper with His disciples and led them in singing a hymn. It’s true that in the upper room He “was troubled in his spirit”4 as He foretold His betrayal, and that He informed the disciples they would “all fall away”—yet in almost the same breath He confidently reminded them, “But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”5
It’s not as if Jesus is surprised by death’s approach. He long ago determined to bear God’s judgment for sin as our substitute, and for months He has discussed His death repeatedly with His disciples.
Nor is He avoiding or postponing the hour of sacrifice for which He came to this earth. Quite the opposite. When it was no secret to anyone that Jerusalem was a hotbed of hostility against Him, He was out in front of His disciples, leading them here without a trace of reluctance—so that “they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.”6 The fear and anxiety belonged to His followers, not to Jesus.
So nothing has prepared us for Gethsemane, for this abrupt horror, this deep distress.
And we wonder: Why now? Why now?
Here’s why: In this garden, our Savior is beginning to confront as never before the ultimate and deepest agony of Calvary—an agony that will go infinitely beyond any physical aspects of His suffering, as we’ll see in this book.
For Jesus, the way to the cross will bring incomparable and unprecedented suffering of wrath and abandonment. His downward journey into those unspeakable depths begins to tumble steeply in this garden called Gethsemane.
And as we follow into the garden to observe Him, we have to remember we’re in the deep end of the pool theologically. What transpires here is so far beyond our depth, and I find a verse from an old hymn particularly relevant:
Oh help me understand it,
help me to take it in —
what it meant to Thee, the Holy One,
to bear away my sin.7
We need divine assistance to “take it in,” to absorb deeply what bearing away our sin meant to Jesus, the Holy One. That’s what we’re after—what it meant to Him.
Step closer with me under the shadow of the trees … let’s watch and listen.
As Jesus lies prostrate on the ground, we overhear Him praying: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”8
He’s making this plea repeatedly. With His face to the ground, we can see sweat on His temples. He lifts His head, and His expression reveals an agony so intense that His sweat is “like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”9
His words tell us why: “Remove this cup,” Jesus pleads again. In this moment, there’s no doubt what is dominating His heart and mind.
What is this cup? It is clearly a reference to the wrath of God for your sins and mine.
If we knew the Scriptures as Jesus does—Scriptures that no doubt have been much on His mind in these hours—we couldn’t escape this reference. Isaiah 51:17 shows us this cup in God’s extended hand—it’s “the cup of his wrath,” and for those who drink from it, it’s “the cup of staggering.” This cup contains the full vehemence and fierceness of God’s holy wrath poured out against all sin, and we discover in Scripture that it’s intended for all of sinful humanity to drink. It’s your cup … and mine.
In the vivid imagery of the Old Testament, this cup is filled with “fire and sulfur and a scorching wind”10 like some volcanic firestorm, like all the fury of the Mount St. Helens eruption concentrated within a coffee mug. No wonder Scripture says that tasting from this cup causes the drinker to “stagger and be crazed.”11 No wonder that when Jesus stares into this detestable vessel, He stumbles to the ground.
That’s why there’s shuddering terror and deep distress for Him at this moment. In the crucible of human weakness He’s brought face to face with the abhorrent reality of bearing our iniquity and becoming the object of God’s full and furious wrath.
Opening before Him, Jesus found hell rather than heaven.
What Jesus recoils from here is not an anticipation of the physical pain associated with crucifixion. Rather it’s a pain infinitely greater—the agony of being abandoned by His Father.
As one Bible commentator notes, Jesus entered the garden “to be with the Father for an interlude before his betrayal, but found Hell rather than Heaven open before him.”12 Knowing the hour for His death is fast approaching, Jesus has come here in need as never before of His Father’s comfort and strength. Instead, hell—utter separation from God—is thrust in His face.
We hear Him cry out: Father—is there an alternative? Is there any way to avoid this? If there’s a way this could pass from me, would you please provide that alternative?
Silence. We can see it in His face—Jesus receives no answer to this desperate entreaty.
A second time, then again a third, He pleads for an alternative to that horror of abandonment by His Father. If such an alternative existed, the Father would most surely provide it. But the obedient Son’s plea to His loving Father is met with silence. Why?
Listen to this verse for the very first time: For God so loved the world … that He’s silent at this moment when His Son appeals for an alternative.
This is what bearing our sin means to Him—utter distress of soul as He confronts total abandonment and absolute wrath from His Father on the cross, a distress and an abandonment and a rejection we cannot begin to grasp.
In this, our Savior’s darkest hour … do you recognize His love for you?
Listen again to the precious and powerful words we hear Him repeat to His Father:
“Yet not what I will, but what You will.”
“Yet not what I will, but what You will.”
“Yet not what I will, but what You will.”
Jesus is saying, “Father, I willingly drink this cup by Your command—I’ll drink it all.”
And He will. He’ll drink all of it, leaving not a drop.
He’ll leave nothing in that cup for us to drink.
Not only will He leave nothing in that cup of wrath for us to drink … but today you and I find ourselves with another cup in our hands. It’s the cup of salvation. From this precious new cup we find ourselves drinking and drinking—drinking consistently, drinking endlessly, drinking eternally … for the cup of salvation is always full and overflowing.
We can drink from this cup only because Jesus spoke those words about the other cup: “Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
I will drink it all.
As we watch Jesus pray in agony in Gethsemane, He has every right to turn His tearful eyes toward you and me and shout, “This is your cup. You’re responsible for this. It’s your sin! You drink it.” This cup should rightfully be thrust into my hand and yours.
Instead, Jesus freely takes it Himself … so that from the cross He can look down at you and me, whisper our names, and say, “I drain this cup for you—for you who have lived in defiance of Me, who have hated Me, who have opposed Me. I drink it all … for you.”
This is what our sin makes necessary. This is what is required by your pride and my pride, by your selfishness and my selfishness, by your disobedience and my disobedience. Behold Him … behold His suffering … and recognize His love.
Jesus my Savior, thank You for saying
to Your Father in Gethsemane,
“Not My will, but Your will be done.”
Thank You that when there was no other alternative—
even after You so desperately pleaded for one—
You rose from Gethsemane’s ground and stepped forward
to the cross in obedience to Your heavenly Father,
even unto death. For if You had not done this,
I would have been lost forever to sin and death and hell.
Instead, because You drank the cup of God’s wrath,
I can drink forever from the cup of salvation.
O Jesus, how can I thank You enough?
1. Mark 14:32
2. Mark 14:33
3. Mark 14:34–35
4. John 13:21
5. Mark 14:27–28 (NIV)
6. Mark 10:32
7. Katherine A. M. Kelly, “Give Me a Sight, O Savior.”
8. Mark 14:36
9. Luke 22:44
10. Psalm 11:6
11. Jeremiah 25:16
12. William Lane, Commentary on the Gospel of Mark (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 516.