NOTES for Mat 26:38

Entering the garden of Gethsemane, Christ asks very little of the disciples: sympathy, some easing of His ultimate pre-death loneliness. He, who warned us of the need to be ready to bear the cross, does not force it on us at all, since He has already taken the main weight upon Himself. But precisely for this reason He has the right to ask us not even for help, since we have nothing with which to help Him, but for a small yet real compassion. After all, even a drop wears away a stone, and a little mouse can help pull out a huge turnip.

But the disciples dozed off from exhaustion and distress. This is the kind of small thing we understand so well and would easily forgive in ourselves. And as a result the Teacher was left in hopeless darkness. Three times the disciples fell asleep, and one of them was Peter, for whom the threefold drowsiness became a prelude to the threefold denial. Already in Gethsemane he had an opportunity to understand that he should not overestimate his strength at that time. But then he did not yet understand this.

And after all, the Lord does not often demand anything excessive from us; usually what He asks is within our strength. But we ourselves allow the circumstances that have fallen on us, which we ourselves call "excusable," to weaken us. And so we refuse to help Him resist the evil of the world.

Without question, He can manage without us. But will it be easy for us to stand before Him if we did not want to do even the smallest thing He asked of us?

Today's reading, which describes the events in the Garden of Gethsemane, continues the theme of betrayal and falling away, though from a different and somewhat unexpected perspective. It begins with Jesus warning His disciples that this very night they will all fall away from Him (vv. 31–32). It is hardly surprising that the Teacher's words provoke an impassioned and resolute protest from the disciples, Peter foremost among them, accompanied by vows of faithfulness to the end (vv. 33–35). Yet the events of that night proved Jesus' words true. There were sleeping disciples (vv. 40, 45), and they all fled (v. 56).

At first glance, it might seem that the apostles promise to remain faithful to Jesus in the heat of the moment, during an emotional surge when the impossible seems possible. Yet this supposition is hardly well founded: most of the apostles were grown, mature men. They certainly understood very well what was happening and what they were committing themselves to. Apparently, however, they did not expect everything to end so quickly and so catastrophically. It is quite possible that Jesus' disciples were genuinely ready to die with Him, but they probably thought this meant dying in battle—that this very night would at last see the beginning of the messianic war everyone in Judea, including the apostles, was then awaiting. Peter's attempt is evidence of this: he reaches for his sword in the hope that the time has come, and that, as in the days of the Maccabees, all that is needed is to strike the first blow, which will signal and summon a general uprising (v. 51). But Jesus' own response (vv. 52–54) was so unexpected that the apostles were at a loss: what were they to do now? If there was to be no uprising, no messianic war, what did the Teacher want? A senseless death, theirs and His own? The apostles were utterly unprepared for such a turn of events.

In essence, the same problem that had led Judas to betrayal manifested itself here in a different form: the disciples' own ideas about the Teacher had obscured Him from their spiritual sight. It is hard to say with certainty exactly how the disciples pictured the coming of the Kingdom. One thing is clear: what happened that night did not fit their ideas at all. They did not, of course, become traitors like Judas, but neither could they trust the Teacher completely enough to remain with Him even when, to their minds, He began to act in an utterly absurd and senseless way. They wanted to be faithful to the Teacher and were ready to do so, but to a Teacher who would meet their ideas and expectations, not to the One He actually was. When it turned out that their Teacher was not what they had expected Him to be, they were bewildered. They did not know how to relate to such a Teacher. And at the critical moment, this bewilderment let them down.

Yet despite the gravity of the situation, we cannot really speak of betrayal in this case. Betrayal is a fully deliberate step, the consequence of a choice a person has made. Here there had been neither reflection nor choice, for in the brief moments of the arrest the apostles could hardly have had time to make sense of all that was happening in their hearts. It was an ordinary spontaneous reaction, completely uncontrolled, and most likely the apostles only began to understand what had happened that night after a considerable time had passed. Nevertheless, the disciples' unpreparedness played its part: at the critical moment, the Teacher was left alone.

The Son of Man dies not only bodily. His voluntary sufferings include a break with the people closest to Him: with His disciples. Remember, He called those who hear and do His word His brothers, sisters, and mother? And now the hour comes when this family of His leaves Him. Against the background of general confusion and fear, when all "left Him and fled," it is still more painful to read Peter's assurances of faithfulness, the drowsiness of the three closest disciples, and Judas' betrayal. We too, believers and unbelievers, belong to the number of the Lord Jesus' near or distant disciples, to His large family. Some are His brothers according to the flesh, since by becoming man He became kin to each of us; others, having acknowledged Jesus' Father as their own Father, are His according to the spirit. In some incomprehensible way, our own manifestations of unfaithfulness, drowsiness, and betrayal are added to those that took place on that terrible night.

Loneliness - for many, this is the most frightening word in the world. Jesus too passes through loneliness, and at the most terrible and tragic moment of His life. The evangelist describes, one after another, a series of betrayals: the disappointed Judas proves capable of selling the Teacher for money; Peter and the other disciples make empty promises to remain with Him to the end, and then cannot support Him in Gethsemane; soon Peter again shows complete lack of understanding of what is happening when he tries to defend Jesus with a sword; then comes the flight of the disciples, then the betrayal of Jesus by the former listeners to His preaching, and finally His rejection by the leaders of His people.

In this chain of events, everyone who had any connection to Jesus turns away from Him. He remains alone - without friends, without followers, without legions of angels, without the shining glory of the Father. He walks the human path.