Matthew 26:39

‘And he went forward a little, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” '

Then He moved on further and, falling on His face He prayed. His attitude of prayer emphasises the desperateness of the situation. He had never as far as they knew prayed in this attitude before. ‘My Father.' It is a prayer from Son to Father, from the One Who is alone known of the Father, to the Father Whom He knows so well (Matthew 11:25). It is the intimacy of the Godhead. ‘If it be possible.' In His mind the question is still open. He is aware from the Old Testament prophecies of the depth of suffering ahead. The only question is, is it necessary? ‘Let this cup pass from Me.' The cup is a regular Old Testament symbol for suffering and reception of wrath. In Isaiah 51:17; Isaiah 51:22; Jeremiah 25:15; Revelation 14:10 it is the cup of the Lord's anger, the cup of the righteous wrath of God against sin, and it is the one that He is being called on to drink to the full. But in the past such a cup had been taken out of the hand of His people once God had felt that they had drunk enough (Isaiah 51:22) and Jesus possibly hoped that this might now be possible for Him. ‘Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.' But only if it was within the will of His Father. He had no hesitation about doing His Father's will. All He wanted to be sure of was, that what He was about to endure really was His Father's will. For a full hour He prayed, and had still not reached certainty. What He was to face was not, He knew, an anguish to be entered into lightly. And the agony in His soul continued unrelenting.

The point here is not that Jesus was afraid to die, even by the terrible torture of crucifixion. The cup that He was being called on to drink went much deeper than that. It had to do the antithesis between holiness (total set apartness to God) and sin (being totally apart from and cut off from God). It had to do with experiencing everything that was the very opposite of what He was, experiencing what was contrary to His whole Being. He was to be ‘made sin for us, He Who knew no sin' (2 Corinthians 5:21). He was the One to Whom the very thought of sin was totally abhorrent, and He was to be drenched in the filth of mankind. His very soul revolted at the idea. But if necessary He was willing to see it through.