As was his custom, Luke says (verse 39), and the phrase deserves a pause before the agony begins. The Mount of Olives was familiar ground, a place Jesus had come to pray before. Luke has just heard Jesus tell these men that they have stayed with him in his trials (Luke 22:28), and now they follow him to the mountain. Whatever happens here happens in a place shaped by habit, ordinary prayer becoming the site of the hardest prayer he will ever pray.
He tells the disciples 40"Pray that you may not enter into temptation," and withdraws about a stone's throw, near enough to be close and far enough to be alone. What follows is prayer stripped of pretense, and its core is a single request: 42"Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me." The cup is no general figure for death. The prophets used it for the wrath of God against sin (Psalm 75:8; Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15-17). He asks, if there is any way, to be spared bearing that weight. In the same breath he yields: your will be done and not mine. The request is real, and so is the surrender. Jesus says plainly what he would like, and then he yields it.
Luke chooses the word agony, a word at home in the athletic contest, the tension before a struggle that will consume everything. 44"his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground." The prayer cost Jesus something the body registered as trauma. Some early manuscripts omit verses 43 and 44, and the picture of his distress is consistent with the rest of the scene. Into the agony an angel appears from heaven, strengthening him (verse 43), help sent to strengthen the one who had agreed to drink the cup and not to remove it.
Meanwhile he comes to the disciples and finds them 45"sleeping for sorrow." Luke's explanation, for sorrow, suggests that grief had exhausted them, the way grief can make a person want only to close their eyes. Jesus' question carries disappointment anyway: 46"Why are you sleeping?" He repeats the instruction he gave them before his own agony, because the temptation ahead, betrayal, denial, scattering, has not gone away because they were too tired to keep watch.
Hebrews remembers these days as a time when Jesus offered up prayers with loud cries and tears (Hebrews 5:7). The same pairing of Jesus at prayer and the disciples heavy with sleep appeared at the Transfiguration (Luke 9:32). This scene is the clearest window the Gospel gives into what obedience cost Jesus. It cost him real inner resistance, honestly named and honestly surrendered at every step. His surrender is the sentence of someone who felt the full weight of what he was about to carry and carried it.
Bring your own dread to the Father this week exactly as it is, and then say the second half of the prayer.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a Son who did not pretend the cup was easy and who still surrendered his will to yours. When our own agony feels too great to name, teach us to bring it to you as it is. Where we have slept through the watch we were asked to keep, wake us gently and set us again to pray that we may not enter into temptation. In Jesus' name, amen.