Christ’s Heaviness in the Garden

Uch is the dolefulness and gloom of a heavy soul, yea, a soul exceeding heavy even unto death, that I could imagine the pangs of dissolution to be lighter. In our latest hour joy may light up the heart, and the sunshine of heaven within may bear up the soul when all without is dark. But when the iron entereth into a man’s soul, he is unmanned indeed. -In the cheerlessness of such exhausted spirits the mind is confounded; well can I understand the saying that is written, “I am a worm and no man,” of one that is a prey to such melancholy. Oh, that cup! When there is not a promise that can give you comfort, when everything in the world looks dark, when your very mercies affright you, and rise like hideous spectres and portents of evil before your view, when you are like the brethren of Benjamin as they opened the sacks and found the money, but instead of being comforted thereby said, “What is this that God hath done unto us?” when everything looks black, and you seem, through some morbid sensitiveness into which you have fallen, to distort every object and every circumstance into a dismal caricature, let me say to you, that for us poor sinful men this is a cup more horrible than any which inquisitors could mix, I can imagine Anne Askew on the rack, braving it out, like the bold woman she was, facing all her accusers, and saying — “I am not she that lyst My anchor to let fall;

For euery dryzzling myst
My ship’s substantiall,”

but I cannot think of a man in the soul-sickness of such depression of spirits as I am referring to, finding in thought or song a palliative for his woe. When God touches the very secret of a man’s soul, and his spirit gives way, he cannot bear up very long; and this seems to have been the cup which the Saviour had to drink just then, from which He prayed to be delivered, and concerning which He was heard.

Consider for a moment what He had to depress His soul. Everything was draped in gloom, and overcast with darkness that might be felt. There was the past. Putting it as I think He would look at it, His life had been unsuccessful. He could say with Isaiah, “Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.” And how poor was that little success He did have! There were His twelve disciples; one of them He knew to be on the way to betray Him; eight of them were asleep at the entrance to the garden, and three asleep within the garden! He knew that they would all forsake Him, and one of them would deny Him with oaths and curses! What was there to comfort Him? When a man’s spirit sinks he wants a cheerful companion; he wants — somebody to talk to him. Was not this felt by the Saviour? Did not He go three times to His disciples? He knew they were but men; but then a man can comfort a man in such a time as that. The sight of a friendly face may cheer one’s own countenance, and enliven one’s heart. But He had to shake them from their slumbers, and then they stared at Him with unmeaning gaze. Did He not return back again to prayer because there was no eye to pity, and none that could help? He found no relief. Half a word sometimes, or even a smile, even though it be only from a child, will help you when you are sad and prostrate. But Christ could not get even that. He had to rebuke them almost bitterly. Is not there a tone of irony about His remonstrance? “Sleep on now and take your rest.” He was not angry, but He did feel it. When a man is low-spirited, he feels more keenly and acutely than at other times; and although the splendid charity of our Lord made that excuse — “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” yet it did cut Him to the heart, and He had an anguish of soul like that which Joseph felt when he was sold into Egypt by his brethren.

You will see, then, that both the past and the present were sufficient to depress Him to the greatest degree. But there was the future; and as He looked forward to that, devoted as His heart was, and unfaltering as was the courage of His soul (for it were sacrilege and slander, methinks, to impute even a thought of flinching to Him), yet His human heart quailed: He seemed to think — *“Oh! how shall I bear it?” The mind started back from the shame, and the body started back from the pain, and the soul: and body both started back from the thought of death, and of death in such an ignominious way :- —

‘* He proved them all — the doubt, the strife,
The faint, perplexing dread;
The mists that hang o’er parting life
All gathered round His head:
That He who gave man’s breath might know
The very depths of human woe.”

None of us have such cause for depression as the Saviour had. We have not His load to carry; and we have a helper to help us whom He had not, for God who forsook Him will never forsake us. Our soul may be cast down within us, but we can never have such great reason for it, nor can we ever know it to so great an extent as our dear Redeemer did. I wish I could picture to you that lonely Man, friendless like a stag at bay, with the dogs compassing him round about, and the assembly of the wicked enclosing him; foreseeing every incident of His passion, even to the piercing of His hands and His feet, the parting of His garments, and the lots cast upon His vesture, and anticipating that last death-sweat without a drop of water to cool His lips! I can but conceive that His soul must have felt within itself a solemn trembling, such as might well make .Him say, “I am exceeding sorrowful even unto death.”

“Advancing a little further, I want you to think of the agony. There is no wrestling where there is only one individual. To this agony, therefore, there must have been two parties. Were there not, however, mystically speaking, two parties in Christ?) What do I see in this King of Sharon but, as it were, two armies? There was the stern resolve to do all, and to accomplish the work which He had undertaken; and there was the mental weakness and depression which seemed to say to Him, “You cannot é you will never accomplish it.” “Our fathers trusted in Thee, and Thou didst deliver them. They cried unto Thee and were delivered; they trusted in Thee and were not confounded”; “but I am a worm and no man, a reproach of men, and despised of the people”; so that the two thoughts come into conflict — the shrinking of the soul, and yet the determination of His invincible will to go on with it, and to work it out. He was in an agony in that struggle between the overwhelming fear of His mind and the noble eagerness of His spirit. I think, too, that Satan afflicted Him; that the powers of darkness were permitted to use their utmost craft in order to drive the Saviour to absolute despair.

One expression used to depict it I will handle very delicately; a word that, in its rougher sense, means, and has been applied to, persons out of their mind and bereft for a while of reason. The term used concerning the Saviour in Gethsemane can only be interpreted by a word equivalent to our “distracted.” He was like one bewildered with an overwhelming weight of anxiety and terror. But His divine nature awakened up His spiritual faculties and His mental energy to display their full power. His faith resisted the temptation to unbelief. The heavenly goodness that was within Him so mightily contended with the Satanic suggestions and insinuations which were thrown in His way that it came to awrestling. I should like you to catch the idea of wrestling, as though you saw two men trying to throw one another, struggling together till the muscles stand out and the veins start like whip-cord on their brows. That were a fearful spectacle when two men in desperate wrath thus close in with each other. But the Saviour was thus wrestling with the powers of darkness, and He grappled with such terrible earnestness in the fray that He sweat, as it were, great drops of blood : — “The powers of hell united prest, And squeezed His heart, and bruised His breast,

What dreadful conflicts raged within, When sweat and blood forced through His skin!”

Observe the way in which Christ conducted the agony. It was by prayer. He turned to His Father three times with the self-same words. It is an index of distraction when you repeat yourself. Three times with the self-same words He approached His God — “My Father, let this cup pass from Me.” Prayer is the great cure-all for depression of spirit. “When my spirit is overwhelmed within me, I will look to the rock that is higher than I.” There will be a breaking up altogether, and a bursting of spirit, unless you pull up the sluices of supplication, and let the soul flow out in secret communion with God. If we would state our griefs to God they would not fret and fume within, and wear out our patience as they are sometimes wont to do. In connection with the agony and the prayer there seems to have been a bloody sweat. It has been thought by some that the passage only means that the sweat was like drops of blood; but then the word “like” is used in Scripture to signify not merely resemblance but the identical thing itself. We believe that the Saviour did sweat, from ‘His entire person, great drops of blood falling down to the ground. Such an occurrence is very rare indeed among men. It has happened some few times. Books of surgery record -a few instances, but I believe that the persons who under some horrifying grief experience such a sudor never recover; they have always died. Our Saviour’s anguish had this peculiarity about it, that though He sweat as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground, so copiously as if in a crimson shower, yet He survived. His blood must needs be shed by the hands of others, and His soul poured out unto death in another form. Remembering the doom of sinful man — that he should eat his bread in the sweat of his face, we see the penalty of sin exacted in awful measure of Him who stood surety for sinners. With the perspirings on his face, and huge drops on his brow, man toils for the bread that perishes; but bread is only the staff of life: when Christ toiled for life itself to give it to men He sweat, not the common perspiration of the outward form, but the blood which flows from the very heart itself.