NOTES for Mar 14:32-52
After the Passover meal Jesus went with His disciples to the village of Gethsemane. There He asked the disciples to wait while He prayed. Jesus often withdrew for prayer, but now He took the disciples closest to Him, Peter, James, and John, to support Him. On the Mount of Transfiguration they had witnessed the divine glory of the Teacher (Mark 9:3-8). This time the Savior's human nature is revealed to them in its fullness; for the first time the Teacher stands before them as One who needs ordinary human support. But they were unable to give it: drowsiness overcame them.
Jesus knew what awaited Him. His hour was drawing near, and everything human in Him rose up against it. Falling to His knees, He prayed that, if possible, this hour might pass from Him. The heaviness of the struggle the Savior experienced between human feelings and the divine will remains a mystery forever. "Yet not what I want, but what You want," Jesus was able to say. Returning to the three disciples, He finds them sleeping and says: "Watch and pray, that you may not fall into temptation: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Going away from the disciples, He prayed again, saying the same words, until love for the Father strengthened Him.
The Gospel then tells how one of the twelve betrayed the Teacher with a kiss, how Jesus, with the words "but let the Scriptures be fulfilled," gave Himself into the hands of the soldiers who had come to arrest Him, and how all the disciples fled in complete confusion. Yet in a special way Christ's words, spoken also to us, reach us: "Watch and pray, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Only by watching and praying will we be able, overcoming all our fears of the future and of what we do not understand, to say together with Christ to our Heavenly Father: "Yet not what I want, but what You want."