Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Mark 14:34
And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch.
34. My soul is exceeding sorrowful ] Here again we have a remarkable word. We met with it before (ch. Mar 6:26), where “Herod is said to have been “ exceeding sorry ” at the request for the Baptist’s head; St Luke also uses the word (Luk 18:23-24) to describe how the rich young ruler was “ very sorrowful,” when he was bidden to sacrifice his wealth. It points here to a depth of anguish and sorrow, and we may believe that he, who at the first temptation had left the Saviour “ for a season ” (Luk 4:13), had now returned, and whereas before he had brought “to bear against the Lord all things pleasant and flattering, if so he might by aid of these entice or seduce Him from His obedience, so now he thought with other engines to overcome His constancy, and tried Him with all painful things, as before with all pleasurable, hoping to terrify, if it might be, from His allegiance to the truth, Him whom manifestly He could not allure.” Trench’s Studies, pp. 55, 56, and above, Mar 1:12.
and watch ] “ with Me ” adds St Matthew (Mat 26:38). Perfect man, “of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting,” He yearned, in this awful hour, for human sympathy. It is almost the only personal request He is ever recorded to have made. It was but “a cup of cold water” that He craved. But it was denied Him! Very Man, He leaned upon the men He loved, and they failed Him! He trod the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with him (Isa 63:3).
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
And saith unto them,…. The above three disciples;
my soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: he was surrounded with sorrow, and it pressed him so hard, and close, on every side, that he was just ready to die with it:
tarry ye here, and watch: in Matthew it is added, “with me”:
[See comments on Mt 26:38].
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
1) “And saith unto them,” (kai legei autois) “And He confided to them,” to Peter, James, and John, with inner-circle affection, confidence, and trust, each of whom was later to recount the event.
2) “My soul is exceeding sorrowful,” (perilupos estin he pouche mou) “My soul is (exists) in a deeply grieved state or condition,” as His “soul” began, at this time, to be made, formed, or fashioned as an “offering for sin,” Isa 53:10. Surely Satan who “departed from Him for a season,” in His temptation on the mount, had now returned in glee, Luk 4:13.
3) “Unto death:- (heos thanatou) “As to death,” relating to my death, as it should continue to be, as He poured out His soul unto death,” Isa 53:12; Isa 50:6-7; Rom 3:25; Mat 27:46.
4) “Tarry ye here, and watch.” (meinate hode kai gregoreite) “You all remain here and watch,” in closeness with me, near me, Mat 26:38.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
soul. Greek. psuche. See App-110. IV
unto = even to. Greek. heos.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
My soul: Isa 53:3, Isa 53:4, Isa 53:12, Lam 1:12, Joh 12:27
and watch: Mar 14:37, Mar 14:38, Mar 13:35-37, Eph 6:18, Eph 6:19, 1Pe 4:7, 1Pe 5:8
Reciprocal: Job 6:4 – drinketh up Job 16:16 – on my eyelids Psa 18:4 – sorrows Psa 22:14 – heart Psa 42:5 – Why art thou cast down Psa 55:4 – My Psa 61:2 – my heart Psa 69:14 – out of Psa 71:20 – which Psa 88:3 – soul Psa 102:1 – overwhelmed Psa 109:16 – slay Psa 119:143 – Trouble Pro 12:25 – Heaviness Pro 14:10 – heart Pro 18:14 – but Mat 26:37 – sorrowful Luk 6:12 – that Heb 5:7 – in that he feared
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
IN GETHSEMANE
And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane. My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch.
Mar 14:32; Mar 14:34
A mere intellectual solution of the mystery of this Divine sorrow over human guilt and woe is impossible. There are depths here which such lines can never fathom, which human insight can never penetrate. The sacred wonder has commanded the sympathetic, heart-broken gaze of all the ages; and they have each been arrested, moved, renewed, cleansed by the great mystery of the suffering of the Christa suffering which characterised His whole earthly life, but was gathered up, concentrated, intensified in this one last experience.
I. Our Lords longing for human sympathy.Christ took with Him the favoured three who had been with Him on the Mount of Glorification; but it was not that, as then, they might witness to the future Church concerning these scenes of deep, mysterious agony, but that they might be nigh at hand, as human helpers, if, indeed, any human help were possible. He felt the need of some soothing presence, supporting sympathy, and human comfort and cheer. Tarry ye here, and watch with Me! What a deep and touching pathos there is in such a human cry, and in such a desire to clasp the hand of loving friends in this last extremity of human sorrow! His pure humanity is thus made manifest. In all our affliction He is afflicted. He suffers as we suffer. He is tried as we are tried. He hath borne our griefsthe very same griefsand carried our sorrows. He is our brother in tribulation, and in all the woe of crushed and bruised and bleeding hearts!
II. The sacredness of human sorrow and Divine communion.He saith to His disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray. There is a close connection between the inner and the outward life, but all the deeper experiences of the inner are necessarily secret. There are things which those closest to us can neither share nor even know. The Saviour met His foes with lion-hearted courage. He never felt a tremor of the heart amid their maddest rage. He never crouched or bent before purpled iniquity, or brutal lawlessness, or priestly hate. His was the nobleness and dignity of triumphant innocence amid the scornful villainy of those who pronounced false sentences, which the future was sure to reverse. But the secret of His matchless silence and imperturbable repose is here. Gethsemane was needful to nerve and invigorate the moral nature. He paid His tribute to human weakness, to human dependence, to human suffering there, that He might be the hero and play the noble part in presence of His enemies. He brought heaven to His aid by prayer and fellowship there, that His strength might be equal to the strain put upon it when He met the onset of the foe. It is a natural necessity; it is a human condition of triumph. The fullness of life and its noblest ongoings and victories depend upon secret prayers and secret discipline. He said, even to those on whose sympathy He most depended, Sit ye here, while I shall pray.
III. The overwhelming depth and fullness of the Redeemers sorrow.The character of this overwhelming sorrow is what we must here mainly contemplate. It is a revelation of the innermostthe spiritual elements of the Atonement for sin. We should be involved in nameless perplexity about the possible meaning of His own words of hope and comfort if we supposed that it was merely death, or even premature and cruel death on the Cross, which was here so greatly troubling Him. No! this was not shrinking from death. The experience was unique, and it was intensely and exclusively spiritual. He was here agonised and overborne by His contact with the sin of the people. This was the bearing in His own spirit of the consequences of the sin of the world. He was suffering, though guiltless, because He was reckoned with the transgressors, and must suffer the results of sin which was not His own. He was bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrowsthe griefs and sorrows born of sin. There is nothing more marvellous and heart-moving than the Divine protest against human sin which is made and expressed in the fact that the Divine Christ was involved in the experience of its deepest and bitterest woe.
Illustration
There was nothing to correspond to this intense shrinking in the stoning of St. Stephen; nothing in St. Pauls bright anticipation of a death which he knew must be that of martyrdom; nor in the unshrinking courage of St. Polycarp; nor in the last hours of a thousand others who have laid down their lives for the Masters cause. No, to hint even that it was physical pain which drew from His lips that exceeding bitter cry is to degrade Him below the level of the Christian martyr. The Agony finds its explanation alone in the one great cardinal truth of the Christian faith; that He made His soul an offering for sin, that God laid upon Him the iniquity of us all; that He gathered up as it were the sins of the whole world, and then, as though He were Himself the sinner, by an inexplicable mystery which we shall never fathom, but before which we must bow the head in awe, was made a curse for us, was wounded for our transgressions.
Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary
4
Exceeding sorrowful unto death is a highly-colored figure of speech, meaning he felt sad enough to die. Wishing for still more privacy he left them here.
Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary
CHAPTER 14:34-42 (Mar 14:34-42)
THE AGONY
“And He saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death: abide ye here, and watch. And He went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass away from Him. And He said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto Thee: remove this cup from Me: howbeit not what I will, but what Thou wilt. And He cometh, and findeth them sleeping, and saith unto Peter, Simon, sleepest thou? couldest thou not watch one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. And again He went away, and prayed, saying the same words. And again He came, and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy; and they wist not what to answer Him. And He cometh the third time, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: it is enough; the hour is come; behold, the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Arise, let us be going: behold, he that betrayeth Me is at hand.” Mar 14:34-42 (R.V.)
SKEPTICS and believers have both remarked that St. John, the only Evangelist who was said to have been present, gives no account of the Agony.
It is urged by the former, that the serene composure of the discourse in his Gospel leaves no room for subsequent mental conflict and recoil from suffering, which are inconsistent besides with his conception of a Divine man, too exalted to be the subject of such emotions.
But do not the others know of composure which bore to speak of His Body as broken bread, and seeing in the cup the likeness of His Blood shed, gave it to be the food of His Church for ever?
Was the resignation less serene which spoke of the smiting of the Shepherd, and yet of His leading back the flock to Galilee? If the narrative was rejected as inconsistent with the calmness of Jesus in the fourth Gospel, it should equally have repelled the authors of the other three.
We may grant that emotion, agitation, is inconsistent with unbelieving conceptions of the Christ of the fourth Gospel. But this only proves how false those conceptions are. For the emotion, the agitation, is already there. At the grave of Lazarus the word which tells that when He groaned in spirit He was troubled, describes one’s distress in the presence of some palpable opposing force (Joh 11:34). There was, however, a much closer approach to His emotion in the garden, when the Greek world first approached Him. Then He contrasted its pursuit of self-culture with His own doctrine of self-sacrifice, declaring that even a grain of wheat must either die or abide by itself alone. To Jesus that doctrine was no smooth, easily announced theory, and so He adds, “Now is My soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save Me from this hour. But for this cause came I unto this hour:” (Joh 12:27).
Such is the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, by no means that of its modern analysts. Nor is enough said, when we remind them that the Speaker of these words was capable of suffering; we must add that profound agitation at the last was inevitable, for One so resolute in coming to this hour, yet so keenly sensitive of its dread.
The truth is that the silence of St. John is quite in his manner. It is so that he passes by the Sacraments, as being familiar to his readers, already instructed in the gospel story. But he gives previous discourses in which the same doctrine is expressed which was embodied in each Sacrament, — the declaration that Nicodemus must be born of water, and that the Jews must eat His flesh and drink His blood. It is thus that instead of the agony, he records that earlier agitation. And this threefold recurrence of the same expedient is almost incredible except by design. St. John was therefore not forgetful of Gethsemane.
A coarser infidelity has much to say about the shrinking of our Lord from death. Such weakness is pronounced unworthy, and the bearing of multitudes of brave men and even of Christian martyrs, unmoved in the flames, is contrasted with the strong crying and tears of Jesus.
It would suffice to answer that Jesus also failed not when the trial came, but before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession, and won upon the cross the adoration of a fellow-sufferer and the confession of a Roman soldier. It is more than enough to answer that His story, so far from relaxing the nerve of human fortitude, has made those who love Him stronger to endure tortures than were emperors and inquisitors to invent them. What men call His weakness has inspired ages with fortitude. Moreover, the censure which such critics, much at ease, pronounce on Jesus expecting crucifixion, arises entirely from the magnificent and unique standard by which they try Him; for who is so hard-hearted as to think less of the valor of the martyrs because it was bought by many a lonely and intense conflict with the flesh?
For us, we accept the standard; we deny that Jesus in the garden came short of absolute perfection; but we call attention to the fact that much is conceded to us, when a criticism is ruthlessly applied to our Lord which would excite indignation and contempt if brought to bear on the silent sufferings of any hero or martyr but Himself.
Perfection is exactly what complicates the problem here.
Conscious of our own weakness, we not only justify but enjoin upon ourselves every means of attaining as much nobility as we may. We “steel ourselves to bear,” and therefore we are led to expect the same of Jesus. We aim at some measure of what, in its lowest stage, is callous insensibility. Now that word is negative; it asserts the absence of paralysis of a faculty, not its fullness and activity. Thus we attain victory by a double process; in part by resolutely turning our mind away, and only in part by its ascendancy over appreciated distress. We administer anodynes to the soul. But Jesus, when He had tasted thereof, would not drink. The horrors which were closing around Him were perfectly apprehended, that they might perfectly be overcome.
Thus suffering, He became an example for gentle womanhood, and tender childhood, as well as man boastful of his stoicism. Moreover, He introduced into the world a new type of virtue, much softer and more emotional than that of the sages. The stoic, to whom pain is no evil, and the Indian laughing and singing at the stake, are partly actors and partly perversions of humanity. But the good Shepherd is also, for His gentleness, a lamb. And it is His influence which has opened our eyes to see a charm unknown before, in the sensibility of our sister and wife and child. Therefore, since the perfection of manhood means neither the ignoring of pain nor the denying of it, but the union of absolute recognition with absolute mastery of its fearfulness, Jesus, on the approach of agony and shame, and who shall say what besides, yields Himself beforehand to the full contemplation of His lot. He does so, while neither excited by the trial, nor driven to bay by the scoffs of His murderers, but in solitude, in the dark, with stealthy footsteps approaching through the gloom.
And ever since, all who went farthest down into the dread Valley, and on whom the shadow of death lay heaviest, found there the footsteps of its Conqueror. It must be added that we cannot measure the keenness of the sensibility thus exposed to torture. A physical organization and a spiritual nature fresh from the creative hand, undegraded by the transmitted heritage of ages of artificial, diseased and sinful habit, unblunted by one deviation from natural ways, undrugged by one excess, was surely capable of a range of feeling as vast in anguish as in delight.
The skeptic supposes that a torrent of emotion swept our Savior off His feet. The only narratives he can go upon give quite the opposite impression. He is seen to fathom all that depth of misery, He allows the voice of nature to utter all the bitter earnestness of its reluctance, yet He never loses self-control, nor wavers in loyalty to His Father, nor renounces His submission to the Father’s will. Nothing in the scene is more astonishing than its combination of emotion with self-government. Time after time He pauses, gently and lovingly admonishes others, and calmly returns to His intense and anxious vigil.
Thus He has won the only perfect victory. With a nature so responsive to emotion He has not refused to feel, nor abstracted His soul from suffering, nor silenced the flesh by such an effort as when we shut our ears against a discord. Jesus sees all, confesses that He would fain escape, but resigns Himself to God.
In the face of all asceticisms, as of all stoicisms, Gethsemane is the eternal protest that every part of human nature is entitled to be heard, provided that the spirit retains the arbitration over all.
Hitherto nothing has been assumed which a reasonable skeptic can deny. Nor should such a reader fail to observe the astonishing revelation of character in the narrative, its gentle pathos, its intensity beyond what commonly belongs to gentleness, its affection, its mastery over the disciples, its filial submission. Even the rich imaginative way of thinking which invented the parables and sacrament, is in the word “this cup.”
But if the story of Gethsemane can be vindicated from such a point of view, what shall be said when it is viewed as the Church regards it? Both testaments declare that the sufferings of the Messiah were supernatural. In the Old Testament it was pleasing to the Father to bruise Him. The terrible cry of Jesus to a God who had forsaken Him is conclusive evidence from the New Testament. And if we ask what such a cry may mean, we find that He is a curse for us, and made to be sin for us, Who knew no sin.
If the older theology drew incredible conclusions from such words, that is no reason why we should ignore them. It is incredible that God was angry with His Son, or that in any sense the Omniscient One confused the Savior with the sinful world. It is incredible that Jesus ever endured estrangement as of lost souls from the One Whom in Gethsemane He called Abba Father, and in the hour of utter darkness, My God, and into whose Fatherly hands He committed His Spirit. Yet it is clear that He is being treated otherwise than a sinless Being, as such, ought to expect. His natural stand-place is exchanged for ours. And as our exceeding misery, and the bitter curse of all our sin fell on Him, Who bore it away by bearing it, our pollution surely affected His purity as keenly as our stripes tried His sensibility. He shuddered as well as agonized. The deep waters in which He sank were defiled as well as cold. Only this can explain the agony and bloody sweat. And as we, for whom He endured it, think of this, we can only be silent and adore.
Once more, Jesus returns to His disciples, but no longer to look for sympathy, or to bid them watch and pray. The time for such warnings is now past: the crisis, “the hour” is come, and His speech is sad and solemn. “Sleep on now and take your rest, it is enough.” Had the sentence stopped there, none would ever have proposed to treat it as a question, “Do ye now sleep on and take your rest?” It would plainly have meant, “Since ye refuse My counsel and will none on My reproof, I strive no further to arouse the torpid will, the inert conscience, the inadequate affection. Your resistance prevails against My warning.”
But critics fail to reconcile this with what follows, “Arise, let us be going.” They fail through supposing that words of intense emotion must be interpreted like a syllogism or a lawyer’s parchment.
“For My part, sleep on; but your sleep is now to be rudely broken: take your rest so far as respect for your Master would have kept you watchful; but the traitor is at hand to break such repose, let him not find you ignobly slumbering. Arise, he is at hand that doth betray Me.'”
This is not sarcasm, which taunts and wounds. But there is a lofty and profound irony in the contrast between their attitude and their circumstances, their sleep and the eagerness of the traitor.
And so they lost the most noble opportunity ever given to mortals, not through blank indifference nor unbelief, but by allowing the flesh to overcome the spirit. And thus do multitudes lose heaven, sleeping until the golden hours are gone, and He who said, “Sleep on now,” says, “He that is unrighteous, let him be unrighteous still.”
Remembering that defilement was far more urgent than pain in our Savior’s agony, how sad is the meaning of the words, “the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners,” and even of “the sinners,” the representatives of all the evil from which He had kept Himself unspotted.
The one perfect flower of humanity is thrown by treachery into the polluted and polluting grasp of wickedness in its many forms; the traitor delivers Him to hirelings; the hirelings to hypocrites; the hypocrites to an unjust and skeptical pagan judge; the judge to his brutal soldiery; who expose him to all that malice can wreak upon the most sensitive organization, or ingratitude upon the most tender heart.
At every stage an outrage. Every outrage an appeal to the indignation of Him who held them in the hollow of His hand. Surely it may well be said, Consider Him who endured such contradiction; and endured it from sinners against Himself.