“And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly: and His sweat was, as it were,
great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”
Luke 22:44.
OUR Lord, after having eaten the Passover, and celebrated the supper with His disciples, went with
them to the Mount of Olives, and entered the Garden of Gethsemane. What induced Him to select that
place to be the scene of His terrible agony? Why there, in preference to anywhere else would He be arrested
by His enemies? May we not conceive that as in a garden, Adam’s self-indulgence ruined us, so
in another garden the agonies of the Second Adam should restore us? Gethsemane supplies the medicine
for the ills which followed upon the forbidden fruit of Eden! No flowers which bloomed upon the banks
of the four-fold river were ever so precious to our race as the bitter herbs which grew hard by the black
and sullen stream of Kidron. May not our Lord also have thought of David, when on that memorable
occasion he fled out of the city from his rebellions son, and it is written, “The king also, himself, passed
over the Brook Kidron,” and he and his people went up barefoot and bareheaded, weeping as they went?
Behold, the Greater David leaves the Temple to become desolate, and forsakes the city which had rejected
His admonitions, and with a sorrowful heart He crosses the foul brook to find in solitude a solace
for His woes. Our Lord Jesus, moreover, meant us to see that our sin changed everything about Him into
sorrow; it turned His riches into poverty, His peace into travail, His Glory into shame, and so the place
of His peaceful retirement, where, in hallowed devotion He had been nearest Heaven in communion
with God, our sin transformed into the focus of His sorrow, the center of His woe! Where He had enjoyed
most, there He must be called to suffer most!
