The Soul-Passion of Christ
Canon Liddon. Matthew 26:36-39 Then comes Jesus with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to the disciples, Sit you here, while I go and pray yonder. What is the explanation we are to give of this passage in our Lord's life? One explanation which has been offered is that Gethsemane witnessed a last and more desperate assault of the evil One; but for this the Bible gives no clear warrant. Certainly, the evil One, after his great defeat on the mountain of the Temptation, is said to have departed from our Lord " for a season," aa expression which seems to imply that he afterwards returned; but, so far as the text of Scripture can guide us, he returned to assail not the Workman hut the work. What took place in Gethsemane is totally unlike the scene in the Temptation. At the Temptation, our Lord is throughout calm, firm, majestic. He repels each successive assault of the tempter with a word of power. The prince of this world came, and had nothing in Him, But in Gethsemane He is overcome by that, whatever it was, which pressed on Him. lie is meek, prostrate, unnerved, dependent (as it seems) on the sympathy and nearness of those whom He had taught and led. There He resists and vanquishes with tranquil strength a personal opponent; here He sinks as if in fear and bewilderment to the very earth, as though a prey to some inward sense of desolation and collapse. His own words, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful," point to some great mental trouble; and if He was suffering from a mental trouble, what, may we dare to ask, was its provoking cause? I. WAS IT NOT, FIRST OF ALL, AN APPREHENSION, DISTINCT, VIVID, AND OVERPOWERING, OF WHAT WAS PRESENTLY COMING? In Gethsemane, by an act of His will, our Lord opened upon His human soul a full view and apprehension of the impending sufferings of His passion and death; and the apprehension was itself an agony. The whole scene, the succession of scenes, passed before His mental eye; and as He gazes on it, a heart sickness — outcome and proof of His true Humanity — seizes on Him, and He shrinks back in dread from this dark and complex vision of pain. II. HE WAS, SO TO SPEAK, MENTALLY ROBING HIMSELF FOR THE GREAT SACRIFICE — laying upon His sinless soul the sins of a guilty world. To us, indeed, the burden of sin is as natural as the clothes we wear; but to Him the touch of that which we take so easily was an agony, even in its lightest form; and when we think of the accumulated guilt of all the ages clinging around and most intimately present to Him, can we wonder that His bodily nature gave way, that His Passion seemed to have been upon Him before its time, and that "His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground." (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder. WEB: Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to his disciples, "Sit here, while I go there and pray."