Gethsemane - 3
“And he taketh with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly amazed, and sore troubled… . And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground … And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down on the ground.” Mark 11:33, 35; Luke 22:44 (RV).
In my life I’ve heard more than a few sermons and read more than a few books on the Gethsemane experience. Frankly, I found all of them empty. None of them seemed to exude a real understanding of Jesus’s emotional trauma and what really happened in the Garden. I found that when Mark says, “And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground,” the word “fell” is in the imperfect tense which means that He fell over and over again. Thereafter the sermons appeared even more wanting. Then an event in my life gave me greater insight to “fell.”
Years ago, on one particular weekend I began to sense a deep anxiety about my brother. I really didn’t have any reason for it because he said that he was going to go water skiing with some friends. As the time passed, I grew increasingly agitated on the inside about him. I started calling him, but every time I was left to leaving a message on his phone machine. By Sunday, my inner anxiety grew into outright alarm, an inarticulate sense of dominating terror.
Monday came and went and Tuesday came I did not hear from him. In my mind I tried to dismiss any thought of something having gone wrong because most of the time he wouldn’t return calls right away. It was nothing out of the ordinary that he didn’t call me back.
On Wednesday, I received a call at my office from his workplace and they asked if I had seen him. He had missed work for two days. Instantly I knew by the Spirit that it was suicide. In the natural, I had no hint that he would commit suicide. Even as I am writing this post I cannot point to a single thing that would have given me or the family a hint that he had considered killing himself. But I had a soul consciousness that he was gone.
Immediately I sped over to his apartment.
When I entered the apartment I collapsed on the floor. I could scarcely breathe; the trauma was so overwhelming. The terror of the thing hit so deep I couldn’t control it and I felt like I was experiencing my own death. I fell to the floor. I picked myself up only to fall again as the waves of terror and emotion billowed over and through me. I fell and I got up over and over again. Each time I did so, I got weaker and the trauma seemed even stronger. Finally, I could no longer get up. I laid on the ground and my hyperventilating caused my hands to curl in. When the police came they found me in a fetal position, exhausted, whimpering in sweat-soaked clothes. They had to carry me to a squad car where I was able to regain the strength to walk about an hour or two later.
“Greatly amazed” relates to being completely terrorized by something that has not been perceived before. In the Garden, Jesus became terrorized by the soul consciousness of becoming sin for mankind. He would become separated from the Father and become corruptible so that sinful man could become incorruptible. (Irenaeus). Mark shows us the dramatic picture of Jesus falling over and over again as the billows of this terror washed over Him. Even when an angel appeared to strengthen Him He became in greater agony. The stress became so great that His capillaries began to burst underneath His skin and He began to sweat His own blood.
We have not done justice to what He experienced in the Garden.