RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.
§ 125.
AGONY OF JESUS IN THE GARDEN.
According to the synoptical narratives, Jesus, immediately after the conclusion of the meal and the singing of the Hallel, it being his habit during this feast time to spend the night out of Jerusalem ([Matt. xxi. 17]; [Luke xxii. 39]), went to the Mount of Olives, into a garden χωρίον (in John, κῆπος) called Gethsemane ([Matt. xxvi. 30], [36] parall.). John, who gives the additional particular that the garden lay over the brook Kedron, does not represent him as departing thither until after a long series of valedictory discourses ([xiv.]–[xvii.]), of which we shall hereafter have to speak again. While John makes the arrest of Jesus follow immediately on the arrival of Jesus in the garden, the synoptists insert between the two that scene which is usually designated the agony of Jesus.
Their accounts of this scene are not in unison. According to Matthew and Mark, Jesus takes with him his three most confidential disciples, Peter and the sons of Zebedee, leaving the rest behind, is seized with tearfulness and trembling, tells the three disciples that he is sorrowful even unto death, and admonishing them to remain wakeful in the mean time, removes to a distance from them also, that he may offer a prayer for himself, in which, with his face bent to the earth, he entreats that the cup of suffering may pass from him, but still resigns all to the will of his Father. When he returns to the disciples, he finds them sleeping, again admonishes them to watchfulness, then removes from them a second time, and repeats the former prayer, after which he once more finds his disciples asleep. For the third time he retires to repeat the prayer, and returning, for the third time finds the disciples sleeping, but now awakes them, in order to meet the coming betrayer. Of the number three, which thus doubly figures in the narrative of the two first Evangelists, Luke says nothing; according to him, Jesus retires from all the disciples, after admonishing them to watch, for the distance of about a stone’s cast, and prays kneeling, once only, but nearly in the same words as in the other gospels, then returns to the disciples and awakes them, because Judas is approaching with the multitude. But, on the other hand, Luke in his single scene of prayer, has two circumstances which are foreign to the other narrators, namely, that while Jesus was yet praying, and immediately before the most violent mental struggle, an angel appeared to strengthen him, and that during the agony ἀγωνία which ensued, the sweat of Jesus was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground. [[636]]
From the earliest times this scene in Gethsemane has been a stumbling-block, because Jesus therein appears to betray a weakness and fear of death which might be considered unworthy of him. Celsus and Julian, doubtless having in their minds the great examples of a dying Socrates and other heathen sages, expressed contempt for the fear of death exhibited by Jesus;[1] Vanini boldly extolled his own demeanour in the face of execution as superior to that of Jesus;[2] and in the Evangelium Nicodemi, Satan concludes from this scene that Christ is a mere man.[3] The supposition resorted to in this apocryphal book, that the trouble of Jesus was only assumed in order to encourage the devil to enter into a contest with him,[4] is but a confession of inability to reconcile a real truth of that kind with the ideal of Jesus. Hence appeal has been made to the distinction between the two natures in Christ; the sorrowfulness and the prayer for the removal of the cup having been ascribed to the human nature, the resignation to the will of the Father, to the divine.[5] As however, in the first place, this appeared to introduce an inadmissible division in the nature of Jesus; and in the second place, even a fear experienced by his human nature in the prospect of approaching bodily sufferings appeared unworthy of him: his consternation was represented as being of a spiritual and sympathetic character—as arising from the wickedness of Judas, the danger which threatened his disciples, and the fate which was impending over his nation.[6] The effort to free the sorrow of Jesus from all reference to physical suffering, or to his own person, attained its highest pitch in the ecclesiastical tenet, that Jesus by substitution was burthened with the guilt of all mankind, and vicariously endured the wrath of God against that guilt.[7] Some have even supposed that the devil himself wrestled with Jesus.[8]
But such a cause for the trouble of Jesus is not found in the text; on the contrary, here as elsewhere ([Matt. xx. 22 f.] parall.), the cup ποτήριον for the removal of which Jesus prays, must be understood of his own bodily sufferings and death. Moreover, the above ecclesiastical opinion is founded on an unscriptural conception of the vicarious office of Jesus. It is true that even in the conception of the synoptists, the suffering of Jesus is a vicarious one for the sins of many; but the substitution consists, according to them, not in [[637]]Jesus having immediately borne these sins and the punishment due to mankind on account of them, but in a personal suffering being laid upon him on account of those sins, and in order to remove their punishment. Thus, as on the cross, it was not directly the sins of the world, and the anger of God in relation to them, which afflicted him, but the wounds which he received, and his whole lamentable situation, wherein he was indeed placed for the sins of mankind: so, according to the idea of the Evangelists, in Gethsemane also, it was not immediately the feeling of the misery of humanity which occasioned his dismay, but the presentiment of his own suffering, which, however, was encountered in the stead of mankind.
From the untenable ecclesiastical view of the agony of Jesus, a descent has in more modern times been made to coarse materialism, by reducing what it was thought hopeless to justify ethically, as a mental condition, to a purely physical one, and supposing that Jesus was attacked by some malady in Gethsemane;[9] an opinion which Paulus, with a severity which he should only have more industriously applied to his own explanations, pronounces to be altogether unseemly and opposed to the text, though he does not regard as improbable Heumann’s hypothesis, that in addition to his inward sorrow, Jesus had contracted a cold in the clayey ground traversed by the Kedron.[10] On the other hand, the scene has been depicted in the colours of modern sentimentalism, and the feelings of friendship, the pain of separation, the thoughts of parting, have been assigned as the causes which so lacerated the mind of Jesus:[11] or a confused blending of all the different kinds of sorrow, selfish and sympathetic, sensual and spiritual, has been presupposed.[12] Paulus explains εἰ δυνατόν ἐστι, παρελθέτω τὸ ποτήριον (if it be possible, let this cup pass from me) as the expression of a purely moral anxiety on the part of Jesus, as to whether it were the will of God that he should give himself up to the attack immediately at hand, or whether it were not more accordant with the Divine pleasure, that he should yet escape from this danger: thus converting into a mere inquiry of God, what is obviously the most urgent prayer.
While Olshausen falls back on the ecclesiastical theory, and authoritatively declares that the supposition of external corporeal suffering having called forth the anguish of Jesus, ought to be banished as one which would annihilate the essential characteristics of his mission; others have more correctly acknowledged that in that anguish the passionate wish to be delivered from the terrible sufferings in prospect, the horror of sensitive nature in the face of annihilation, are certainly apparent.[13] With justice also it is remarked, in opposition to the reproach which has been cast on Jesus, that the speedy conquest over rebellious nature removes every appearance of sinfulness;[14] that, moreover, the shrinking of physical nature at the prospect of annihilation belongs to the essential conditions of life;[15] nay, that the purer the human nature in an individual, the more susceptible is it in relation to suffering and annihilation;[16] that the conquest over suffering intensely appreciated is greater than a stoical or even a Socratic insensibility.[17] [[638]]