November 10

The Man of Sorrows

Then He said to them, “My soul is consumed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with Me.” — Matt 26:38 BSB

We should often sit with our Lord in Gethsemane and meditate on His suffering. We will never fully understand the depths of His anguish, but we should still study it. Some aspects of His suffering can be reverently mentioned. Ahead of Him lay betrayal, arrest, a humiliating trial, and then death on the cross. These physical sufferings alone were terrible to endure. Another part of His suffering came from the betrayal and abandonment by those close to Him. He would face Judas’s traitorous kiss, Peter’s denial, the desertion of the other disciples, and rejection by the people He came to save. All of this weighed heavily on Him in Gethsemane.

But the deepest anguish of Gethsemane was that Jesus was bearing the burden of our sins. What this truly meant for Him, we can never fully understand. We know only what is dimly revealed in the Scriptures, which speak of His sacrificial death. "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" — "The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all" — "He bore our sins in His own body on the tree" — "He redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us." We know that Christ’s death was unlike any other death, even if others had endured the same physical pain. Somehow, though He was innocent and without sin, He died for our sins. The mystery is beyond our understanding, but the fact remains that we must remember this as we watch with our Lord in Gethsemane.