Matthew 26:36

“Then Jesus went with the disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.'”

The time had come.   Jesus “began to be sorrowful and troubled.”  He went on, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.  Stay here and keep watch with me.”  If I read Jesus’ words correctly he feared that the excruciating pain of his soul might take his life before he can offer it as a deliberate sacrifice for sin – becoming God’s sacrificial lamb.

We read on.  “Going further, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.  Yet not as I will, but as you will.'”

The battle is joined.  Jesus, the spotless Lamb of God must, I repeat must, take on to or into himself all the sins of mankind, all the putrid evil of all mankind.  Just the thought brought Jesus to the ground where he cried out these words that reveals the cost of our salvation, “Yet not as I will but as you will.”  This is the only way I can explain this crucial moment, the moment when Jesus clarified his crisis.

Do I hear him say that the thought of taking on himself the sins of the world was so abhorrent that, even though he knew that he had to, just the thought of that happening almost killed him there in the Garden?  My mind goes blank. I am astounded that Jesus, knowing that he was the Paschal Lamb that had to bear the sins of the world now, in the jaws of the dilemma, his will and the will of his Farther in tension, bears his heart – he does not want to do it!  But that is the very reason he came to earth, taking on human flesh.

Anyone who claims that it is easy to let God dominate his or her life cannot be telling the whole truth. The effects of obedience are peace and joy, that we know but we also know that the breaking of the will do the will of the Father in heaven is what hurts, really hurts, because it means the death of the self-will.

Jesus did not go through this so that we would not have to but to show us the way of breaking before God – its pain and its reward.