Matthew 26:31-46

Chapter 89

Prayer

Almighty God, thou who hast shown men great and sore trouble wilt revive them again, and their joy shall be greater than their sorrow as where sin abounded, grace did much more abound, so where death abounds, there shall be overflowing life, so much so, that the death shall not be spoken of but as a shadow upon an infinite firmament. Thou dost love us in Christ Jesus the Priest: he has bought us with his blood, and today we stand at his cross, full of gratitude, our lips eloquent with psalms of adoration and thankfulness, and our whole heart going out after thee in solemn and loving desire. Thou art the same, and thy years fail not: with our growing weakness thou art to us growingly strong, and if our eyes fail, thou dost increase the light according to their failure, so that in our soul there is the shining of everlasting day.

We know these things by our hearts, and can tell them only in feeble and unworthy words: there is no speech for thy goodness of the same pattern and scope whereby we can set it forth to our own hearing and our own vision. The dream is within, the vision is in the heart: we see with our love and hear with the inner ear, and when men ask us for words of publication, behold there is no speech upon our tongue: we can but burn within and feel thy speechless presence. Thou art good to us with both hands: the right hand of the Lord is full of power, his left hand is under us as a security and protection, thine eyes are lighted with love, the opening of thy mouth is as the dropping of honey upon our life, and all round about us, nearer than the living air, is thy presence, a great light, an eternal comfort, a sure and steadfast hope.

We have come to praise thee upon the harp of many strings, upon the organ, yea with trumpets and voices of the heart and soul. We would call upon all things that have breath to praise the Lord, we would demand, in addition to our solitary utterance of praise, the choral service of the universe, for thou hast done great things for us whereof we are glad. Thou dost come into the orchard of our life and do wonderful things. Thou dost sometimes blight the blossom and take away the little bud, so that the hope of the heart is chilled and slain. Sometimes thou dost come in the autumn, and with thine own hand pluck the ripe fruit and hide it in the Heavens. It is all thine, the tender little color, and the luscious fruit, the whole tree, root and branch is thine: it is not ours. So do we say when the blossom goes and the fruit is plucked, "The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord." One dieth in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet; another dieth in the bitterness of his soul and shall see pleasure no more. Thou dost cut down with mighty strength the life too frail for such power to strike it, and thou dost gather to thyself other lives like shocks of corn fully ripe. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Thou dost smite the mighty man in his eminence, thou dost cut down the cedar and call upon the fir tree to howl because the king of the forest is overthrown, and thou dost take away our father and mother, our wife and child, those that go back to our earliest years and make the foundations of our little history. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away blessed be the name of the Lord. He is the living One, and in him alone is immortality, and if thou dost take away, thou wilt well keep: none shall be able to pluck our loved ones out of the Father's hand. Comfort all that mourn herein, and let their mourning and weeping be but for one night, and their joy for all the next day-eternal.

Let thy blessing come upon us according to the pain of our life and the need which we feel growing into a deep poverty and crying to thee in feebleness. Let our weakness be a plea, let our blindness be the reason of our prayer, find in our necessity the occasion for the exercise of thy grace. Pity us wherein we are little and weak and poor, blind and not able to see afar off, and according to the need of our life order thou the multiplication of thy comfort. Give us an insight, we humbly pray thee, into the inner mysteries, the holy depths of divine truth. May we see the realities of things, may ours be no surface looking, but a penetration into the soul and meaning of things as they exist and relate to the infinite.

The Lord comfort us with choice consolation, the Lord inspire us with new thought and inflame us with new light: the Lord work in us godly discontent with all present attainments and opportunities give us to cry for larger growth and nobler attainments and services.

Be with all for whom we ought to pray. Thou knowest why the seat is vacant, thou knowest where the father of the family is, or the eldest son, or the wanderer, or the prodigal that will not come to church. Thou knowest where the sinners congregate and the scorners sit. They are not here today, they do not wish to be here, they hate thy house, and they make use of thy name for unholy purposes yet is thy mercy greater than their sin, thy grace overarches their life as does the great Heaven the little earth. O Lord, continue thy mercy, keep back thy judgments, let the prayers of thy people, like a great wind, keep back the storm-cloud of thine anger.

O Lord, hear us, O Lord, help us, O Lord, forgive us wash us in the atoning blood, cleanse us by the power of thy Holy Spirit, and make our life richer, greater, grander in all holy aspiration and beneficent uses, day by day, till the sun set, and we pass on to other climes. Amen.

Mat 26:31-46

31. Then saith Jesus unto them, All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written ( Zec 13:7 ), I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad.

32. But after I am risen (unheeded words!) again, I will go before you into Galilee.

33. Peter answered and said unto him, Though all men shall be offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended.

34. Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.

35. Peter said unto him, Though I should die with thee (so Thomas had said, Joh 11:16 ), yet will I not deny thee. Likewise also said all the disciples.

36. Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane (oil press), and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder.

37. And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy (weighed down).

38. Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.

39. And he went a little farther (about a stone's cast), and fell on his face, and prayed, saying O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.

40. And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?

41. Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing (ready and eager), but the flesh is weak.

42. He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.

43. And he came and found them asleep again: for their eyes were heavy.

44. And he left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words.

45. Then cometh he to his disciples, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.

46. Rise, let us be going (not to flight but to danger): behold, be is at band that doth betray me.

The Culminating Sorrow

"Smitten," but Shepherd still. Strokes do not change character. The Shepherd was not deposed from his tender function; he was scourged, smitten, oppressed, and grievously tormented, but he was still a Shepherd. "Scattered abroad," but still the sheep of the flock. Understand that circumstances do not make or unmake you. You are not Christians because you are comfortable, you are not sheep of the flock because you are enfolded upon the high mountains and preserved from the ravening beast Sometimes the flock is scattered, sometimes the shepherd is smitten; but the shepherd is still the shepherd, the flock is still the flock, and the tender relation between the two is undisturbed and indestructible.

If I were a Christian only on my good behaviour, woe is me. If I belong to the flock only because of the day's calm, or the richness of the pasture, and because of the plentifulness of all I need, then is my Christianity no faith at all: it is a thing of circumstances, it is subject to climatic changes: any number of accidents may come down upon it and utterly alter its quality and its vital relations. I stand in Christ, I am redeemed with blood; the work is done; where sin abounds, grace doth much more abound. The church was just as much a church when she was in dens and in caves of the earth, destitute, tormented, afflicted, as when she roofed herself in and painted the roof with gay colours and lighted up the house with rare lights. Let us more and more understand that our election and standing are of God, and are not tossed about, varied and rendered uncertain, by the tumultuous accidents of time or by the sharp variations of a necessary and profitable discipline.

Jesus Christ stood always upon the written word. When the devil first tempted him, he answered, "It is written." Now when the devil has returned to him with the whole host of hell embattled against his trembling life, he begins to quote the Scriptures once more. What could we do without the writing? We need something to refer to, to stand upon, to quote the positive and real word. When our mouth is filled with that, we feel as if we were equipped for battle. You must not have your Scriptures to extemporize when you need them suddenly: the Bible must be old, venerable, dwelling in your heart, ruling all your thinking, and must be quoted as a familiar expression, and not as a rare and curious saying with which the tongue is unacquainted, and to which it takes but unskilfully as to a tune not heard before. "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly" then, in the fight in the wilderness, you will be master, and in the night of smiting and scattering you will be able to speak of Resurrection and Reunion. Do not let us live in accidents, in transient circumstances and in variable and uncertain relations. We have a written word in which we may hide ourselves, we have a testimony cut up into sentences, so concise that a child can quote them, and written with so plain and keen a finger, that if they be quoted with the earnestness of the heart, the very tempter himself will reel under the shock of their quotation.

It is the Shepherd that is calm, though he is going to be "smitten." the rod is lifted up that will fall heavily upon him, and whilst he yet sees it uplifted in the air, he says to the flock, "But after I am risen again I will go before you into Galilee." This is not something unexpected or unforeseen: an ancient prophecy is about to be fulfilled, but after it is fulfilled in what we may term its harsher aspects and meanings, there will come the broad morning of Resurrection, and the infinite joy of renewed, continued, and endless communion.

I am afraid that some of us do but meanly live from day to day in this Christian life. In one sense that is right that is, so far as the supply of immediate and peculiar necessity is concerned; but as to its depth, serenity, solidity, and irrevocableness, it is not something buttressed up every day by some new act of masonry: it lies deeper than the granite at the heart of all things. Be peaceful, be quiet, be filled with the peace of God. The climate changes, but the sun is the same, and is daily relighted by the same hand.

Peter answered and said unto him, "Though all men shall be offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended." When men boast, such exaggeration is itself fall. If he had ended there, he would have ended as a fallen man. There is a time when even to speak is a vulgarity: there is a time when to contradict is black blasphemy: there are times when men ought at least to think in quietness, and to nurse their resolutions in the secrecy of unuttered prayer. Some virtues are vices that is to say, their exaggeration becomes vicious. So there were men who prayed so much that they never prayed at all. They lost the spirit of prayer, they did not know its meaning; it became an exercise in speech, in the utterance of language and involved sentences oft repeated, until the exercise became purely mechanical, and so the prayerful words were prayerless speeches, and God neither heard nor answered.

So there is a fast that becomes feasting, and there is a steadfastness that becomes bravado. Let us take care lest we exaggerate our virtues into vices.

Jesus Christ performed what we may call in some sense the last of his miracles. It was in sweet and tender harmony with the grand music of the occasion. Said he, "Verily I say unto thee, Peter, that this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice." It was a mental miracle, an instance of that prescience of Christ which gave him his infinite superiority above all other teachers. We have seen how often he read the heart, and gave language to the unuttered thought, and brought the fire of shame to the cheek of men who supposed that their heart-thoughts were unread and unknown. Here Christ repeats the mental miracle of foretelling the mental condition of his senior disciple, and his moral lapse within a given period of time. How emphatic he makes it; there is music in the word "thrice," it is a rhetorical word; all happily balanced rhetorical sentences have in them three members: so there is to be here an emphasis of completeness, harmony, and undeniableness of reality. Thrice. The bad man "walks," "stands," "sits" so it must ever be. Vice must take its little rhetorical curriculum, and finish its bad career according to the ancient and unchangeable rule. When Peter denied once, he might have recalled almost his breath, and denied that he had denied; but this boasting shall be humiliated, there shall be left no doubt or hesitancy on the part of Peter himself, that the denial was threefold, complete in its way infinite.

So verily it has been in the history of the whole world. We are not left in doubt as to our sin. It is thrice-sin, fold on fold, and to deny it is to aggravate it. There are no once-done sins, "Thou shalt deny me thrice."

Peter said unto him, "Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee." It was honest ignorance: it was the worst kind of ignorance, the ignorance of one's own heart. Until we know what our heart really is, we can have no conception of what Christ proposes to do. Young, strong, prosperous, flourishing, with the colour of health upon our cheeks, and with the energy of health in our step and our mien, we cannot understand Christ's great speech to the heart. He must reduce us, humble us, grind us to powder, fill us with shame, drive us out to weep bitterly, and in that infinite rain of penitence he may say something to us that will lead us to God. Meanwhile he let the boastful man have the last word: to chide such ignorance was to waste energy and time. He allowed the disciples to have the last word. On other occasions he had the last word, but was this a time for chaffering, was this a season for the adjustment of relations, or for the assertion of supremacies? He allows the boaster to have the last word, thai; having his own word ringing in his ear, he may the more accurately and vividly remember it when the stroke falls and his tortuous lips utter the speech of denial.

"Then cometh Jesus with them into a place called Gethsemane," up to that time a local name. Just as the bread we have spoken about was ordinary, and suddenly became "body;" and the wine, the common red wine mixed with water, which suddenly under a touch and a look became "blood," so this place called Gethsemane can never hence on through all the ages change its name. It was an olive-yard, and in it was the olive press. The olive was the emblem of peace. Under that great solemn passover moon there bent down One in infinite agony who is our Olive, our Peace. Let us repeat these words to the soul, till they become tender by gracious familiarity, "He is our Peace: he hath made both one."

Then saith he unto them, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." That is the time for a man to answer the question whether he has a soul. That is not a question for intellectual debate or metaphysical inquiry, or for the sharp exchange of skilfully chosen words. When such debate goes on, the soul may well have retired into some secret place to cry over the degradation to which it has been subjected by the superficial inquiry. There is a time when no other words will express a man's consciousness and experience but... "my soul." Speak to a man in those educational hours and a great pain goes through him like a dart of fire. Then dare you ask him if man has a soul? There are bodily troubles and there are troubles of the heart, and are there not griefs which are peculiarly agonies of the soul? For every blood-drop we are implicated in the fierce endurance and trial. Let not those come into this sanctuary who have no great woes, but into it there will come an innumerable and reverent host of hearts that have known the bitterness of sorrow and the grief of death. Do not suppose that the soul's existence is to be proved by words. There will one day come into your life a pain which nothing but the soul could feel. Once felt it can never be forgotten. Wasted are those hours which we spend with men whose souls have never been tried. It is an exchange of words, a bantering of foolish sentences, one against the other. Let men meet who understand one another by the masonry of a common grief, and they will tell those who are outside how true it is, not only that man has a soul, but is one.

This is not a complaining voice. We have never heard the Master complain. He has stated his circumstances, he has told those who would follow him, without sufficiently counting the cost, that he had not where to lay his head, but he announced the circumstance with a cheerfulness of a divine content. Now he brings into his speech a tone we have never heard before. "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." Had he been doing wrong? No. Had he changed his course? No. Was he proposing to the world some new and forbidden line of liberty and delight? No. But the purpose of his own heart is ripening, and the divine decree is coming to the utterance of its last syllable, and the prophecy which has been the poetry and the light of the world is now about to pass into stern and solemn history, and in that transition this agony is felt.

Yet how human he is. "Tarry ye here," said he, "and watch with me." There are times when even a little child would be a defence for a strong man! There are hours of fear in which, could we but feel a child's little touch, we should be men again! There is a loneliness which the soul cannot survive; it must fall before it like a victim, though, being true in itself, and gracious in its purpose, it will rise again, and the great multitude shall gather around it to maintain with it and through it eternal fellowship.

He would have with him the very men who were going to flee away from him. He could only build with such materials laid to his hand. It was rotten material sometimes we put out our hand to a yielding sod, thinking that perhaps it will not altogether give way till we get higher up through its uncertain help. These men were about to flee away from him, but he would just have them remain to give him such little comfort as was in the power of man to give under circumstances so tragic. You have been under the weight of long dark cold nights of loneliness, when a child's little silvery laugh would have made you heroic as an army of soldiers. In such nights you have felt the need and the value of a little human sympathy. Oh the touch of a friend's hand, the look of a loving eye, the utterance of a voice of trust and loyalty these would have been right eloquent in certain periods of intolerable silence!

"He went a little further and fell on his face." There are weights that crush men down so! They do not then ask what is the proper attitude in prayer you will be told, you will be put into it, there is a force that will attitudinize you without any study on your part, a mighty terror force that will dash you on your face! In such circumstances ask a man as to the legitimacy and utility of prayer! Such are the circumstances for the answering of such questions. In one case you will discover whether man has a soul, in the other case you will discover whether it is any good to pray. The question is answered from within; the reply does not come as the answer to the long, connected, and subtle argument, but within you breathes the suppliant that will not be silenced, in your soul is the intercessor that will pray. Do not discuss these questions about the soul and prayer in cold blood and in cold words. Leave such great inquiries to be answered by the tragedies of your personal experience.

"And he went a little further and fell on his face and prayed." This is the Lord's prayer! O my Father" why that is the prayer he taught us long ago just the same! What said he when we asked him, "Lord, teach us how to pray?" Said he, "Our Father." Now, when he has to pray himself, what says he? "O my Father." It is the same Jesus: He is the same yesterday, today, for ever. What, was God a Father still? When the Shepherd was being "smitten," when the flock was being "scattered," when the night was getting colder, deeper, darker, when in the wind was the breath of pursuing hell, was God still Father? By this standard let us try ourselves. If the great Ruler of the universe come to us in sunshine only, mighty, grand, majestic, royal, we have lived the wrong way: we should have lived up into tenderness and filial trust and gracious expectation, and the deep happy assurance that how dark soever be the clouds, they are the dust of our Father's feet.

Now he is shut up and alone with God. There are times when we must keep our dearest companions at a little distance. There are seasons when a man must be as if he were the only man in God's universe, and as though face-to-face speech with the Father could alone determine and overrule the crisis of agony. We pray a certain kind of prayer in the great congregation, a necessary and beautiful prayer, the expression of common praises and common wants. But there is another kind of prayer which none but God may hear. If it be heard by our mother even it will be spoiled. If we could know that the friendliest ear were overhearing it and catching the words before they got to God's ear, we should feel as if the life-stream had been diverted and had changed its course and gone on a wrong career.

What are your troubles are they but transient aches and pains, small ailments for which the handiest doctor has an immediate remedy? Then you cannot follow into this great darkness of the passover-night. But is there bitterness of soul on any account whatsoever, real feeling in the innermost chambers, so to say, of the soul? then the Lord's prayer is written here for our use according to the measure of our necessity. He will have the great harmony established; the great harmony of the universe takes all its utterance and expression from the divine will. The moment you have two wills in the universe, you break up its harmony: there can be in a harmonic universe but one will, and that is God's; our will must fall into it, become part of it, and must express it in such phrase and accent as our circumstances enable us to realise.

Jesus Christ will now dispense with miracles: he could have performed a miracle by prayer, but he will not. This shall not be done by spears and swords and angelic hosts: it shall be a question of will. So the miracles might well have ended there, and have all sunk in the majestic cry, "Thy will be done." There is no further prayer: that is the all-inclusive and all-culminating desire and petition. Yet the angels will come. We read elsewhere that an angel came and comforted him. Surely we have heard of that angel before where did we hear the rustling of those wings before? In the wilderness! "Then the devil leaveth him, and behold, angels came and ministered unto him." And here in Gethsemane, a bleaker wilderness, a drearier desert, when his soul was afire with an infinite agony, and when out of his skin there dropped as it were great drops of blood, behold an angel came and strengthened him!

The universe is one: who could live in a universe that was nothing but what he could see? What, the universe no bigger than my sight, my power of vision and capacity of intaking and realization? It were a mockery, not a universe. When you tell me the air is full of angels and the great blue heaven is an infinite church, and that all things live, that God is over all, blessed for ever you satisfy something that is in me, you answer an unuttered prayer!

Selected Notes

"Here, then, we have two subjects of contemplation distinctly marked out for us. 1. The irreparable Past. 2. The available Future. The words of Christ are not like the words of other men: his sentences do not end with the occasion which called them forth; every sentence of Christ's is a deep principle of human life, and it is so with these sentences: 'Sleep on now' that is a principle; 'Rise up, and let us be going' that is another principle. The principle contained in 'Sleep on now' is this, that the past is irreparable, and after a certain moment waking will do no good. You may improve the future, the past is gone beyond recovery. As to all that is gone by, so far as the hope of altering it goes, you may sleep on and take your rest; there is no power in earth or heaven that can undo what has once been done." (Robertson.) "Here seems to be a contradiction: he bids them rest, and yet by-and-by he says, 'Arise, let us go hence.' Some answer that he speaks by way of upbraiding and not of permitting; but Mark makes it plain, that after this speech, staying awhile, he stirred them up again, saying, 'Let us go hence.' For having bidden them sleep, he says, as after some interim granted, It sufficeth, and then the hour cometh, etc." (Augustine.) "Even as water may be pierced with a weapon, and so likewise the fire and the air, yet they cannot be said to be wounded; so the body of Christ might be beaten, hanged up, and crucified, yet these passions in his body did lose the nature of passions, and the virtue of his body, without the sense of pain, received the violence of pain raging against him. The Lord's body indeed had been sensible of pain if our body had been of the same nature to go upon the water, and not to make impression with our footsteps, and to go through doors that were shut. But seeing this nature is proper only to the Lord's body, why is the flesh conceived by the Holy Ghost judged by the nature of a common body? He had a body indeed to suffer, but he had no nature to grieve." (Hilary.)