James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
Mark 14:32
IN GETHSEMANE
‘And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane.… My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch.’
A mere intellectual solution of the mystery of this Divine sorrow over human guilt and woe is impossible. There are depths here which such lines can never fathom, which human insight can never penetrate. The sacred wonder has commanded the sympathetic, heart-broken gaze of all the ages; and they have each been arrested, moved, renewed, cleansed by the great mystery of the suffering of the Christ—a suffering which characterised His whole earthly life, but was gathered up, concentrated, intensified in this one last experience.
I. Our Lord’s longing for human sympathy.—Christ took with Him the favoured three who had been with Him on the Mount of Glorification; but it was not that, as then, they might witness to the future Church concerning these scenes of deep, mysterious agony, but that they might be nigh at hand, as human helpers, if, indeed, any human help were possible. He felt the need of some soothing presence, supporting sympathy, and human comfort and cheer. ‘Tarry ye here, and watch with Me!” What a deep and touching pathos there is in such a human cry, and in such a desire to clasp the hand of loving friends in this last extremity of human sorrow! His pure humanity is thus made manifest. In all our affliction He is afflicted. He suffers as we suffer. He is tried as we are tried. He hath borne our griefs—the very same griefs—and carried our sorrows. He is our brother in tribulation, and in all the woe of crushed and bruised and bleeding hearts!
II. The sacredness of human sorrow and Divine communion.—‘He saith to His disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray.’ There is a close connection between the inner and the outward life, but all the deeper experiences of the inner are necessarily secret. There are things which those closest to us can neither share nor even know. The Saviour met His foes with lion-hearted courage. He never felt a tremor of the heart amid their maddest rage. He never crouched or bent before purpled iniquity, or brutal lawlessness, or priestly hate. His was the nobleness and dignity of triumphant innocence amid the scornful villainy of those who pronounced false sentences, which the future was sure to reverse. But the secret of His matchless silence and imperturbable repose is here. Gethsemane was needful to nerve and invigorate the moral nature. He paid His tribute to human weakness, to human dependence, to human suffering there, that He might be the hero and play the noble part in presence of His enemies. He brought heaven to His aid by prayer and fellowship there, that His strength might be equal to the strain put upon it when He met the onset of the foe. It is a natural necessity; it is a human condition of triumph. The fullness of life and its noblest ongoings and victories depend upon secret prayers and secret discipline. He said, even to those on whose sympathy He most depended, ‘Sit ye here, while I shall pray.’
III. The overwhelming depth and fullness of the Redeemer’s sorrow.—The character of this overwhelming sorrow is what we must here mainly contemplate. It is a revelation of the innermost—the spiritual elements of the Atonement for sin. We should be involved in nameless perplexity about the possible meaning of His own words of hope and comfort if we supposed that it was merely death, or even premature and cruel death on the Cross, which was here so greatly troubling Him. No! this was not shrinking from death. The experience was unique, and it was intensely and exclusively spiritual. He was here agonised and overborne by His contact with the sin of the people. This was the bearing in His own spirit of the consequences of the sin of the world. He was suffering, though guiltless, because He was ‘reckoned with the transgressors,’ and must suffer the results of sin which was not His own. He was bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows—the griefs and sorrows born of sin. There is nothing more marvellous and heart-moving than the Divine protest against human sin which is made and expressed in the fact that the Divine Christ was involved in the experience of its deepest and bitterest woe.
Illustration
‘There was nothing to correspond to this intense shrinking in the stoning of St. Stephen; nothing in St. Paul’s bright anticipation of a death which he knew must be that of martyrdom; nor in the unshrinking courage of St. Polycarp; nor in the last hours of a thousand others who have laid down their lives for the Master’s cause. No, to hint even that it was physical pain which drew from His lips that exceeding bitter cry is to degrade Him below the level of the Christian martyr.… The Agony finds its explanation alone in the one great cardinal truth of the Christian faith; that He made His soul an offering for sin, that God laid upon Him the iniquity of us all; that He gathered up as it were the sins of the whole world, and then, as though He were Himself the sinner, by an inexplicable mystery which we shall never fathom, but before which we must bow the head in awe, “was made a curse for us,” “was wounded for our transgressions.” ’