Commentary - Luke 22:39-46

Bird's-eye view

In the quiet darkness of an olive grove, immediately following the institution of the New Covenant meal and just prior to His arrest, the Lord Jesus Christ enters into the final spiritual battle before the cross. This passage in Luke's Gospel gives us a profound and awful glimpse into the true humanity of the Son of God as He confronts the full weight of what is to come. This is not a moment of doubt, but rather a moment of profound agony and perfect submission. Jesus, the last Adam, faces a temptation in a garden that far exceeds the one the first Adam faced. He is not tempted with a piece of fruit, but with the full cup of God's wrath against the sin of the world. His prayer reveals the inner turmoil of His soul, the shrinking of His human nature from the horror of being made sin for us. Yet, in this crucible of prayer, He resolves to do the Father's will, not His own. The disciples, in stark contrast, fail their first test, succumbing to sleep when they were commanded to pray. Their failure underscores our own weakness and highlights the glorious truth that our salvation depends entirely on the one who watched, prayed, and obeyed perfectly in our place.

This scene is the hinge upon which the history of the world turns. It is the great transaction where the Son, in His humanity, willingly embraces the cross. The appearance of the angel, the bloody sweat, the sleeping disciples all serve to magnify the solitary and sufficient work of Christ. He is not a stoic philosopher calmly meeting his fate; He is the Son of God in anguish, wrestling in prayer and winning the decisive victory that makes our salvation possible. The battle for our souls was won here, in the dirt of Gethsemane, before the first nail was ever driven.

Outline

Context In Luke

This passage is situated at a critical juncture in Luke's narrative. Jesus has just concluded the Last Supper (Luke 22:14-20), where He established the sacrament of the New Covenant in His blood. He has predicted Peter's denial (Luke 22:31-34) and warned the disciples of the coming conflict (Luke 22:35-38). The Gethsemane scene, therefore, is the immediate prelude to the passion narrative proper: the betrayal, arrest, trials, and crucifixion. It is the moment where Jesus, having taught and prepared His disciples, now turns to face His Father alone to prepare Himself for the ordeal. Luke's account, with its unique details like the strengthening angel and the bloody sweat, emphasizes both the intensity of Jesus' suffering and the reality of His humanity. This prayer is the final, personal "yes" to the Father's plan, setting the stage for the climactic events that will accomplish the world's redemption.

Key Issues

The High Priestly Ordeal

What we are witnessing in Gethsemane is nothing less than the High Priest preparing to become the sacrifice. Under the Old Covenant, the high priest had to perform numerous rituals to consecrate himself before entering the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. Here, our great High Priest, Jesus, consecrates Himself through prayer. But His ordeal is infinitely greater. He is not preparing to offer the blood of bulls and goats; He is preparing to offer His own. The agony He experiences is the full, unshielded foretaste of what it means to be the sin-bearer. The "cup" is the concentrated wrath of a holy God against all the filth and rebellion of humanity, from Adam onward. And this cup is being presented to the only truly pure and sinless man who ever lived. His whole being, every holy fiber of His human nature, recoils from the prospect of being made sin (2 Cor 5:21), of being identified with our rebellion, of experiencing the divine dereliction that sin deserves. His prayer is not a request to evade His mission, but rather the honest cry of a true man facing an unimaginable horror, a cry that culminates in the most resolute obedience: "not My will, but Yours be done."

Verse by Verse Commentary

39 And He came out and went as was His custom to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples also followed Him.

The movement is deliberate. Having established the covenant meal, Jesus leads His men to a familiar place of prayer. This was not a random choice; it was "His custom." In times of peace and now in the hour of crisis, Jesus' habit was to seek His Father in prayer. This is a practical lesson in spiritual discipline. The strength to face the ultimate trial is not mustered in the moment of crisis, but is cultivated through a lifetime of habitual communion with God. The disciples followed Him, as they had for years, but they were about to discover the vast gulf between their spiritual state and His.

40 Now when He arrived at the place, He said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

Jesus' first concern is for His men. He knows the trial that is about to break upon them. The temptation here is not the ordinary allurements to sin, but the specific, overwhelming trial of seeing their Messiah arrested, humiliated, and executed. The temptation would be to despair, to deny Him, to abandon all hope. Jesus knows that the only defense against such an onslaught is prayer. He is essentially telling them, "The enemy is coming for you. Get your spiritual weapons ready now." Their subsequent failure is a direct result of their failure to heed this command.

41 And He withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and began to pray,

He separates Himself for the most intense part of the battle. There are some transactions that must occur between the Father and the Son alone. The distance, "a stone's throw," is close enough for them to see and hear something of His agony, but far enough for Him to be in true solitude. His posture is one of humility and submission. He knelt down. This is the posture of a servant before his master, a son before his father. The King of the universe kneels in the dirt to plead with His Father.

42 saying, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me, yet not My will, but Yours be done.”

This is one of the most profound and mysterious verses in all of Scripture. Jesus addresses God as "Father," an expression of intimate trust even in this dark hour. The "cup" is a common Old Testament metaphor for an assigned destiny, and specifically for the wrath of God (Ps 75:8; Isa 51:17). Jesus is looking at the full horror of the cross, the horror of bearing the sin of the world and absorbing the full force of divine justice. His true and sinless human nature shrinks from this. The request, "if You are willing, remove this cup," is not a moment of wavering purpose. It is an honest expression of His human will. But it is immediately and perfectly subordinated to the divine will. The second clause is the key: "yet not My will, but Yours be done." This is the prayer of the Last Adam, reversing the sin of the first Adam. In a garden, the first Adam said, "My will, not Yours, be done." In a garden, the Last Adam says, "Not My will, but Yours be done." And in that prayer, our salvation was secured.

43 Now an angel from heaven appeared to Him, strengthening Him.

Luke, the physician, is careful to include this detail. In His moment of extreme human weakness and agony, the Father does not remove the cup, but He does provide supernatural aid. An angel is sent to minister to the Son. This does not diminish Christ's glory; it highlights the depth of His condescension and the reality of His human frailty. He who commands legions of angels now receives strength from one. This is a beautiful picture of the Father's tender care for the Son even as He holds Him to the terrible task. God provides the grace necessary for the trial He appoints.

44 And being in agony He was praying very fervently, and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.

The angelic ministry did not remove the agony, but rather strengthened Him to endure it. The word "agony" is the Greek agonia, a word for intense struggle, like an athlete wrestling in a contest. He prayed "fervently," with intense, focused strain. The result was a physical manifestation of His spiritual torment. His sweat became like great drops of blood. This rare medical phenomenon, known as hematidrosis, can occur under extreme emotional stress. The capillaries in the sweat glands rupture, mingling blood with perspiration. This is not a metaphor. This is a physiological description of the sheer horror Jesus was facing. The weight of our sin was literally crushing the life out of Him, and the pressure was so immense it forced blood through His pores.

45 And when He rose from prayer, He came to the disciples and found them sleeping from sorrow,

Having won the battle in prayer, Jesus rises. His resolve is now fixed. He returns to His disciples, the very ones He had commanded to pray, and finds them asleep. Luke gives the reason: they were sleeping "from sorrow." This is a psychologically astute observation. Deep grief and emotional distress can be utterly exhausting, leading to a kind of narcoleptic stupor. Their sorrow was real, but it was a sorrow that led to abdication, not to prayer. While Jesus wrestled with the fate of the world, His closest friends could not even keep their eyes open. Their failure is our failure. In the face of trial, our flesh is weak, and our natural response is to shut down rather than pray through.

46 and said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Rise up and pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

His question is not one of mere curiosity. It is a gentle but firm rebuke. "Why, after I have just warned you, are you failing at the one task I gave you?" He repeats His earlier command, "Rise up and pray." The temptation has not passed; it is, in fact, at the door. Judas and the soldiers are moments away. Even now, at the last second, prayer is the only recourse. Their need to pray has not been nullified by their failure to pray; it has been intensified. It is a word of grace, giving them another chance to do what they should have been doing all along. It is a permanent word to the church: the remedy for past prayerlessness is present prayer.

Application

The scene in Gethsemane is a deep well of application for every believer. First, it teaches us the true nature of prayer. Prayer is not a polite religious exercise; it is a place of wrestling, of honest struggle, and of ultimate submission. We are invited to pour out our hearts to God, to express our fears and our desires, but always to bend our will to His perfect and sovereign will. The goal of prayer is not to get God to do what we want, but to align our hearts to want what He wants.

Second, it confronts us with the sheer ugliness of our sin. We must never read this passage without remembering that it was our sin that constituted the "cup" of wrath. The agony of the Son of God is the true measure of the holiness of God and the filthiness of our rebellion. To treat sin lightly is to trivialize the bloody sweat of Gethsemane. This reality should produce in us a profound hatred for our own sin and an overwhelming gratitude for the Savior who was willing to drink that cup for us.

Finally, the failure of the disciples is a mirror for our own weakness. How often has the Lord called us to watch and pray, only to find us sleeping? We are prone to sorrow, prone to exhaustion, prone to spiritual laziness. Our hope is not in our ability to stay awake, but in the fact that Jesus stayed awake for us. He prayed when we slept. He obeyed when we failed. Our salvation rests on His solitary, agonizing, and victorious struggle in the garden. Therefore, we should rise from our own spiritual slumber, and with gratitude for His victory, take up His command to pray, knowing that the same Father who strengthened Him in His trial will also strengthen us in ours.