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Luke 22:39–46
“[Jesus] withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, saying, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done’” (vv. 41–42).
After the Last Supper, today’s passage tells us, Jesus went out to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples came with Him (Luke 22:39). Seeing that His hour of trial was at hand, He exhorted them to pray that they would not fall into temptation (v. 40). He understood that the pressure to disavow Him would be great and that they would need spiritual strength from God through prayer.
Jesus then withdrew from the disciples to pray on His own, and Luke’s record of this intercession helps us understand some profound truths about our Lord’s person and work. First, the intensity of the praying wherein Jesus asks for the cup to pass from Him and sweats profusely indicates that He was facing something much worse than mere physical pain and death (vv. 41–44). The association of God’s cup with His wrath in the Old Testament (e.g., Ps. 75:8) indicates that Jesus labored so intensely in prayer because He knew that His calling was to bear the wrath of God against the sins of His people on the cross. John Calvin comments that “Jesus had no horror at death, therefore, simply as a passage out of the world, but because he had before his eyes the dreadful tribunal of God, and the Judge himself armed with inconceivable vengeance; and because our sins, the load of which was laid upon him, pressed him down with their enormous weight.”
Second, because of the calling of Jesus to bear the wrath of God, we must not understand His request to have the cup pass from Him as a sign that He was ever truly unwilling to complete His mission. Remember that God the Son came to live as a man, and as a man He had enjoyed perfect communion with the Father and was Himself perfectly righteous (Luke 2:41–49; 3:21–22; 1 Peter 2:22–24). He was, as a man, about to bear a punishment that He Himself did not deserve because He was sinless and He was, as a man, to experience God’s forsakenness (Mark 15:34). A just man in a right relationship with God would certainly not want to see that relationship suffer in any way, for that would be at odds with the very purpose for which we were created. It would have been impious and wrong for Jesus not to desire another way to finish His mission.
Third, Jesus’ prayer reflects His possessing a human will and a divine will. His divine will is one with His Father’s will (John 10:30), so His asking for another way while still submitting to the crucifixion was an exercise of His human will’s remaining properly aligned with the divine will.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
Jesus’ experience in the garden on the Mount of Olives just before His arrest helps us understand the high price that our Lord had to pay for our redemption. It is easy to take His work for us for granted and to forget that He paid the highest price that anyone could ever pay, and He did this willingly for the sake of our salvation. Let us think on the high cost of our redemption, that we may never view His work lightly.
For further study
- Lamentations 4:21–22
- Ezekiel 23:28–35
- Mark 14:32–42
- 1 Corinthians 6:20
The bible in a year
- Ezekiel 7–9
- Hebrews 10