Matthew 26:36-46
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
May 31, 2026
In preaching on today’s scripture, I have not lost my chronological bearings and think it’s Holy Week again. It’s just that in His Gethsemane vulnerability Jesus vividly revealed how spectacular He is.
There in that Garden Jesus knew full well the horror that awaited Him in His suffering the penalty for all the evil of the human race. Anticipating crucifixion and, worse still, God-forsakenness, Jesus openly shared with His disciples His dread, anguish and grief. His coming clean with them about His inner turmoil highlights His spectacular love.
Though Jesus had a close, unhindered and perfect relationship with God the Father, one from which He gained the deepest comfort and inner fortification, Jesus owned up to His need for human companionship and was not ashamed to ask His disciples for support. With forthright frankness, He asked that, as fearful foreboding deprived Him of sleep, they’d “stay awake” with Him as He prayed. How He wanted them there for Him: attentive, available, and praying as well!
Jesus was 100% divine and 100% human. Now God forms in every human soul a nature such that everyone is both vertically dependent on the divine Being and horizontally dependent on other human beings. God Himself noted that fact when, looking at the first human being, prior to Adam’s fall into sin and thus prior to Adam’s knowing any separation from God, God admitted He was not enough for Adam. God said, “It is not good that man should be alone.” So God made another human for Adam that the two might become partners who help each another.
Sadly for Jesus, His partners and helpers – that is, His disciples –were next to no support to Him that dark night. For Jesus, as for all of us, it was part of His human emotional make-up to be disturbed and distraught when those on whom He depended proved unreliable.
Likewise, it was part of His human physical make-up to be agitated – with muscle tension, racing heartbeat and shots of adrenaline pulsing through His veins – when threatened with dire imminent harm as He was that night. It’s no wonder He felt “deeply grieved even to death”! His distress was a natural reaction to what was coming. But, while awful in the enduring of it, it wasn’t bad spiritually or morally. It would have been any human’s emotional reality in such danger. All that is to say that feelings in themselves are neither righteous or unrighteous. Only how we handle them is.
In touch with His emotions, Jesus was open, honest, humble and vulnerable enough to ask His friends to help Him handle His feelings. Jesus was, in other words, up front about His natural human response. He no doubt had to resist the temptation to fight off His enemies, which He could have, or to flee the horror awaiting Him, which He could have. All He tried to get from His disciples that night was a comforting sense that they were with Him in His struggles. Jesus was not too proud to admit He wanted their companionship and encouragement, as He in prayer steeled Himself to move forward in God’s terrifying plan that dark night.
Jesus was vulnerable at Gethsemane. Should not we then, who mean to follow His example, give up posing and pretending; strive to be as open and vulnerable; and ask people to support us in our struggles?
In Jesus we have a perfect model of vulnerability.
And in His perfect vulnerability, Jesus was perfectly spectacular.
Though one part of Him wanted no part of Golgotha and another wanted to avoid going there unless He were, if possible, spared the worst of its horror, Jesus was brave enough to face the reality that all that suffering was a necessity of love, the only option if He wanted to save humanity and honor God the Father; and Jesus was good enough to defer His lower wants to His higher wants and to act in line with His authentic deepest self, which was Someone who was of one mind and heart with the Father. Jesus was being true to Himself when He prayed to the Father, “Not what I want but what You want!” and “Your will be done!” and thereby resolved with unqualified determination to follow God’s plan to a T, even the T that was the cross of Calvary.
Jesus was spectacular in His tenacious obedience to the Father. He was also spectacular in His gracious forbearance of His faithless disciples. O what He put up with from them without losing His loving devotion to them! He already knew that, despite their earnest protests to the contrary, they’d soon desert him. And, though He’d hoped they might rise to the occasion in the relative safety of the Gethsemane garden and watch over Him while he prayed, it soon became obvious they couldn’t keep to their word and stay awake for even an hour. Yet, Jesus cut His unfaithful friends some slack as broken sinners not yet remade right. With gentle acceptance and likely a sigh, He noted their frailty, lamenting, “The spirit is indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He gave no sharp criticism but just let go of expecting as much of them. Before His next round of prayer, He only urged them to try to stay awake to pray, not that He, but that they “may not come to the time of trial”. By His third round of prayer, He’d given up on asking anything of His sleepy heads and just let them doze until His hour was at hand and, at His arrest, they had to get up and be going.
In His vulnerability, Jesus was not just spectacular in His tenacious obedience and in His gracious forbearance, He was also spectacular in His generous benevolence. He, the only completely innocent human who’s ever lived, took on the guilt of all the sinners who have ever lived and took on to Himself the punishment they deserved. He, who’d eternally dwelt in the paradise of heaven, bore the entire crushing weight of sin and evil. He, who could have called it off, willingly submitted to the necessities of love and gave up His life to give life to those who had by their own fault forfeited any right to life.
Jesus was spectacular in His obedience to His Father, spectacular in His forbearance to His followers and spectacular in His benevolence to all of us. We can’t be as spectacular as He, but we can return thanks for how He loved us as we follow His example and, in our own vulnerability, pass on the light and life of His love.
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