Matthew 26:36-40

“The Sacred Heart of Jesus ”

Dr. Derek W. H. Thomas

Now turn with me, if you would, to the Gospel of Matthew, and chapter 26, and we’re going to read from verse 36 through to the end of verse 46. Matthew 26, and beginning at verse 36.

While you’re looking for that passage, let me explain. Ligon is in Atlanta; he had a last minute call to attend a meeting dealing with matters of General Assembly, and was summoned this morning. To speak this evening, I agreed only on condition that I didn’t have to look at bodily fluids in Leviticus! And rather, because this is Easter week and many of our members are away on Spring Break, I thought it would be appropriate perhaps, this Wednesday evening, to anticipate what would have been the Thursday afternoon of the last week of Jesus’ life on earth, and this incident which is recorded, in fact, in all four of the Gospels: namely, the Garden of Gethsemane.

Hear, then, God’s word as we find it at verse 36 of Matthew 26. Before we read the passage together, let’s pray.

Our Father in heaven, again now we humble ourselves before You. We acknowledge that this is Your word; this is holy ground indeed upon which we tread, and we ask for the help and the illumination of Your Spirit, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

“Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and distressed. Then He said to them, ‘My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me.’ And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as Thou wilt.’ And He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, ‘So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? Keep watching and praying, that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ He went away again a second time and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, Thy will be done.’ And again He came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. And He left them again, and went away and prayed a third time, saying the same thing once more. Then He came to the disciples, and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Behold, the hour is at hand and the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners. Arise, let us be going; behold, the one who betrays Me is at hand!”

Amen. And may God add his blessing to the reading of His holy and inerrant word.

In many ways this is the very heart of Jesus that we see disclosed before us here. Something like a veil is cast, I think, over this time of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is, in some ways, holy ground. Calvary is the pinnacle, but this, here, is within sight of Calvary; and now I think our Lord, in a way perhaps that has not been so until now, in His human mind, in His human consciousness, the reality of His willingness to become the Suffering Servant of the Lord, to be the Messiah, the seed of the woman that would crush the head of Satan...He sees now the full reality and consequence of that act.

Before Him inexorably lies betrayal and a mockery of a trial, and certain death and crucifixion. And Luke and Matthew and Mark and John, as they write their respective Gospel, take note of the importance of Gethsemane: the hour of Jesus’ struggle; the hour of a prayer that is far more intense and consequential than perhaps any other prayer that we’ve heard from the lips of Jesus thus far.

We’re told in one of the Gospels that at the end of this struggle in Gethsemane an angel comes and ministers to Him; and that too, I think, signals something of the momentousness of the event that is being described before us, as though His heavenly Father knew now the need of His Son to receive that extraordinary comfort that comes from this angel...or was it an archangel? Was it Gabriel or Michael?

Well, there are many issues that could detain us over a short period of time that we have together this evening, but I want us to think of four aspects of our Lord’s consciousness in the Garden, the first of which is His sorrow.

I. The sorrow of Jesus.

He began to be “exceeding sorrowful”, at the end there of verse 37, He began to be sorrowful and troubled, or grieved and distressed in some of your versions. It’s unusual language concerning our Lord Jesus Christ. Rarely are we given in the Gospels an insight into the humanity of Jesus, the emotional life of our blessed Lord. The words that are employed here are very strong words, expressive of deep emotions.

It’s interesting that the Gospel writer here describes this event in these words, that “He began to be sorrowful and troubled”, and that the reason for this is, as He goes on to explain to Peter and to James and John, the two sons of Zebedee, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death....” And what is interesting about that is that He’s not saying here that it is death itself that’s troubling Him. It’s not a description of the cause of His trouble, but the extent of His trouble: He is troubled to the point of death, and not because of death. Jesus is about to be exposed to the one thing that really causes Him to be afraid, and that is the experience and the consciousness of being separated from His heavenly Father.

There is a line, I think, from here to Calvary; a road that leads into the abyss and into the darkness. We see its beginnings here, but we do not see the end of this road, because it leads into the mists in which Jesus will cry on the cross of Calvary when the unmitigated wrath of His heavenly Father will descend upon Him—not for any sins of His own or for any transgressions which He had committed; not that He’s receiving the just rewards of His iniquities, but He stands...or rather, He is nailed to the cross as our representative, and as our sin-bearer, and as the last Adam in the place of those for whom He has come to bring salvation and redemption and reconciliation. In order for our sins to be forgiven, God must take those sins and nail them to the cross.

And as Jesus will bear in His own soul the unmitigated wrath of a holy, righteous God, His own Father in heaven, the reflex of the holiness of God against sin as He experiences that unmitigated wrath, He will cry out, “My God! My God! Why have You forsaken Me?” He doesn’t cry, “My Father! My Father!” You notice, here in the Garden it is “My Father” in verse 39; again in verse 42, “My Father!” But on the cross it will be, “My God! My God!” as though the consciousness of His own native Sonship with His Father has been obliterated on the cross, so that all that He is conscious of on the cross is being the sin-bearer, and no longer even reassured of His Father’s love and compassion and care. And I think something of the reality of that road now that leads into the abyss of Calvary, begins to dawn on the human consciousness of Jesus here in the Garden of Gethsemane, and it causes Him to tremble, and He is exceedingly sorrowful and troubled.

Here is a picture, my friends, of Jesus...not so much ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ here...but Jesus in a way that we do not see Him, perhaps, elsewhere in the Gospels. And then, on His face on the ground; and then crying out to His heavenly Father, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.” There’s a battle of wills here. Oh, I won’t go into the history...it’s long and complicated—the Monothelite¹ heresy of the seventh century, condemned by the Sixth Lateran Council—Jesus has two wills, not just one will. He has two natures, human and divine, and each nature has a requisite will and center of consciousness. He is both God and man, and here in His role and capacity as the Servant, here you see the two wills—“not My will, but Thy will”...not My human will, but divine will, and He wants the human will and the divine will to conform together!

Now, at the risk of saying something banal in the context of something that is so profound, it says to us this evening something of enormous pastoral significance: that it is not wrong in and of itself to struggle with the will of God. It is not wrong in and of itself to come before God and to say, ‘Father, if it is possible, if it be Your will, let there be some other road down which I can go.’ I say that because it is sometimes represented as being of a higher plane of spirituality if you can pray a prayer that does not contain the words ‘if it be Your will.’ And actually, nothing could be further from the truth, because all prayer must be in accordance with the will of God.

And here is the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and He is saying ‘if it be possible...’

Now, notice also something else here, as we examine something of the sorrow of our Lord. How did our Lord deal with that sorrow? And isn’t it expressive that He gathers to Himself His friends and companions and engages in a season of prayer? Isn’t it expressive of the value of prayer, that even our Lord Jesus Christ in His most excruciating hour found that the alleviation and the way through the difficulty that He was now experiencing was by bringing it to His heavenly Father in prayer?

“Have you trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?

You should never be discouraged; Take it to the Lord in prayer.”

And that was as true for the Servant of the Lord, Jesus, as it is for you and for me.

It would be so very easy, I think, to portray some other route for Jesus to follow here; but instead, He has this extraordinary recourse: to gather up His resolve, and to gather up His emotions, and to work through all of the consequences of that to which He had agreed as the Servant of the Lord in fulfilling terms of the covenant of redemption; that He comes now before His Father and, as it were, casts everything—a naked soul—before His Father in heaven. And as He does so, and as more and more the consciousness of what lay before Him dawns upon His mind and heart, you see something of the emotional response to that in terms of the sorrow and trouble that was so very evident and manifest that all of the Gospel writers record it.

My friends, at the very least this evening, you find yourselves at your wits’ end; you find yourselves weak and broken vessels, knowing not which way to turn, except that there be before you a road down which you would prefer not to go. Then, my friends, here is Jesus who, as our pioneer, has blazoned a trail through the most arduous and difficult of pathways, experiencing sorrow the like of which you and I have never experienced...never experienced. ‘And we do not have an high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling, with the very feeling of our infirmities.’

Well, in the first place, then, we see something of the sorrow of Jesus.

II. The submission of Jesus.

In the second place, we see something of the submission of Jesus. There is a decided resolve in the consciousness of the Lord’s Servant here as He battles through this forbidding will that lies before Him and comes to this conclusion: “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, Thy will be done.” Thy will be done, because Jesus had come to do that which Adam had failed to do. He’d come to provide obedience; He’d come to fulfill the covenant of works; He had come to do that which you and I had failed to do and will ever fail to do; He has come to walk down a pathway that you and I can never walk down. He’s come to give His life as a ransom in the place of sinners. He’s come to be the sin-bearer. He’s come in order that the covenant curse of God might fall upon Him, the just for the unjust, to bring us unto God.

And what you see here is the resolve of the Servant of the Lord: “I come to do Thy will, O God; yea, Thy law is within My heart.” And here, in the very Garden of Gethsemane, you see, as it were, the steeling—the steeling—the soul of Jesus is steeled for the resolve and determination to do whatever it is that His heavenly Father asks of Him.

Was there ever a Savior as great as this one? Was there ever an obedience as full as this? Was there ever a resolve greater than this resolve? “Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?”

III. The disappointment of Jesus.

There’s a third element here also. Not only the sorrow of Jesus and the submission, or obedience, of Jesus, but we also see here something of the disappointment of Jesus.

He has disappointment with Peter and James and John, and even the other disciples. Where He obeys, His disciples fail to obey. What you see is their weakness. You would say to yourself, if only you had been in the Garden of Gethsemane, if only you had been underneath those olive trees, if only you had been there as the moon shone down on Passover and granted those soft blue lights, you would have remained awake! Your prayer vigil would have been something to write home about!

And, ah, my friends, isn’t it so that the disciples are merely a reflection of the weakness of our own hearts? How many times you and I have resolved to give ourselves away to Jesus, to consecrate ourselves on the altar of God, to read His word more, or pray more, or attend church services more and in a better frame of mind, and we’ve kept it up for perhaps a week or two, or a month; and then our history, our lives, are but a string of broken promises. And were it not for the obedience of Jesus, we would be altogether lost; and Jesus is expressing here, yes, something of His disappointment.

But isn’t it tender? Isn’t it extraordinarily tender? It’s difficult to know how to read this text in public, when He comes to the disciples in verse 40: “So, could you not watch with Me one hour?” Do you read it with a stern, accusing voice: “So, could you not watch with Me one hour?” Or was it not rather the soft and mellifluous, yes, and forgiving voice of our Lord Jesus Christ: “So, could you not watch with Me one hour?” And everything that we know about Jesus as He deals with His disciples...something in contradistinction to the way in which He often deals with those who are not His disciples...is the way again and again, and again, there is that note of sympathy and note of understanding, and note of compassion, because He deals with us always in grace, and always in love. And so at last in verse 45, He says, “Sleep and take your rest.” Sleep on now...understanding the heaviness of their eyes in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Perhaps we are all too conscious, you and I, that we have disappointed our Lord. The promises that we made on the first of January, and now it’s only March and many of them have already long since been broken and forgotten, and recorded perhaps only in a diary or a journal somewhere. And we read them and we feel that guilt. And isn’t it something that is expressive here of the very gospel itself, that there is forgiveness with Him? That He may be feared? That in Jesus is all compassion; in Jesus is all compassion.

IV. The resolve of Jesus.

And there’s a fourth thing in the consciousness of our Lord here. Not only do we see His sorrow, and we see His submission; and not only do we see His disappointment, etched as that is in notes of grace and forgiveness; but we see also, I think, something at last of His resolve. Of His resolve. Do you see the last verse of our section this evening, in verse 46? He says to the disciples (and this is in all of the narratives, in all of the gospels), “Rise, let us be going. See, My betrayer is at hand.” And it’s often been pointed out that the verb that Jesus employs there...and especially interesting when that occurs in John 14, at the end of John 14 this verse occurs...and you know that there are three more chapters before they actually arise and go. And commentators on the Gospel of John have often wondered what was the meaning of this expression, “Rise, let us go”, when there are three more chapters of discourse.

And now here, the same word employed again in the Garden: “Rise, let us be going.” And the word is often employed in the context of military battle...and it’s as though Jesus is saying, ‘My time has come now. The time of battle is at hand now. The time for sleeping is now over, and the time for engagement with the enemy (in terms first of all of Judas, but behind Judas the archenemy of souls, Satan himself), and Jesus is going forth to meet His enemy, just as in the wilderness temptations at the very beginning of the Gospels, the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness so that He will face Satan at God’s terms—at God’s terms, not Satan’s terms.

Do you see what’s being alluded to here? It’s just a little glimpse, but here is the Conqueror. Here is the victorious Christ. Here is the knight in shining armor come to rescue a damsel which is in distress: His church. Here He comes marching forth from the Garden of Gethsemane to meet His enemy on the plains of battle as a conquering hero, as the Servant of God, as the Lord of glory—hinting to His disciples as He does so that they, too, will be caught up in this battle; that just as the Master suffered, so must His children also.

Don’t be surprised then, my friends, if you find yourself tonight in the midst of a battle, a spiritual battle against an enemy so foul and so wicked that even though he knows his doom is certain, he still vents his rage against you and me.

But we are in Christ—this One. We are in union with Him. We have died in Him, and risen in Him, and ascended in Him; and now we sit in heavenly places in Him. So take His word tonight. Take it, and may it be a source of encouragement, of resolve, of sweet and tender compassion, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Let’s pray.

Our Father, we thank You now for this Your holy word, and we ask once again: write it upon our hearts for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Please stand, receive the Lord’s benediction.

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.

1. http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc/encyc03/htm/ii.3.5.htm

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