Bruce R. McConkie - Mortal Messiah - Volume 4
As he went into Gethsemane, it was with a total awareness of what lay ahead. "Jesus knew that the awful hour of His deepest humiliation had arrived—that from this moment till the utterance of that great cry with which He expired, nothing remained for Him on earth but the torture of physical pain and the poignancy of mental anguish. All that the human frame can tolerate of suffering was to be heaped upon His shrinking body; every misery that cruel and crushing insult can inflict was to weigh heavy on His soul; and in this torment of body and agony of soul even the high and radiant serenity of His divine spirit was to suffer a short but terrible eclipse. Pain in its acutest sting, shame in its most overwhelming brutality, all the burden of the sin and mystery of man's existence in its apostasy and fall—this was what He must now face in all its most inexplicable accumulation." (Farrar, pp. 622-23.)
There is no language known to mortals that can tell what agony and suffering was his while in the Garden. Of it Farrar says: "A grief beyond utterance, a struggle beyond endurance, a horror of great darkness, a giddiness and stupefaction of soul overmastered Him, as with the sinking swoon of an anticipated death. . . . How dreadful was that paroxysm of prayer and suffering through which He passed." (Farrar, p. 624.)
And as to the prayer in the Garden—repeating, as it did, his divine promise made in the councils of eternity when he was chosen for the labors and sufferings of this very hour; the divine prayer in which he said, "Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever" (Moses 4:2)—as to the prayer in the Garden, "That prayer in all its infinite reverence and awe was heard; that strong crying and those tears were not rejected. We may not intrude too closely into this scene. It is shrouded in a halo and a mystery into which no footstep may penetrate. We, as we contemplate it, are like those disciples—our senses are confused, our perceptions are not clear. We can but enter into their amazement and sore distress. Half waking, half oppressed with an irresistible weight of troubled slumber, they only felt that they were dim witnesses of an unutterable agony, far deeper than anything which they could fathom, as it far transcended all that, even in our purest moments, we can pretend to understand. The place seems haunted by presences of good and evil, struggling in mighty but silent contest for the eternal victory. They see Him, before whom the demons had fled in howling terror, lying on His face upon the ground. They hear that voice wailing in murmurs of broken agony, which had commanded the wind and the sea, and they obeyed Him. The great drops of anguish which fall from Him in the deathful struggle, look to them like heavy gouts of blood." (Farrar, p. 624.) And so they were.
And as he came out of the Garden, delivering himself voluntarily into the hands of wicked men, the victory had been won. There remained yet the shame and the pain of his arrest, his trials, and his cross. But all these were overshadowed by the agonies and sufferings in Gethsemane. It was on the cross that he "suffered death in the flesh," even as many have suffered agonizing deaths, but it was in Gethsemane that "he suffered the pain of all men, that all men might repent and come unto him." (D&C 18:11.)
And as he came out of the Garden, delivering himself voluntarily into the hands of wicked men, the victory had been won. There remained yet the shame and the pain of his arrest, his trials, and his cross. But all these were overshadowed by the agonies and sufferings in Gethsemane. It was on the cross that he "suffered death in the flesh," even as many have suffered agonizing deaths, but it was in Gethsemane that "he suffered the pain of all men, that all men might repent and come unto him." (D&C 18:11.)
The first Adam brought death, both temporal and spiritual, into the world and was cast out of the first Eden. The second Adam (Paul says he is the Lord from heaven) brought life—spiritual life, eternal life—into the world when he bore the sins of all men on that awesome night in a second Eden. Let God be praised that Adam fell; let Gods and angels rejoice that the Messiah came in the meridian of time to ransom men from the effects of the fall! In part the ransom was paid on a cross—having particular reference to the immortality that passes upon all men because Jesus rose from the dead. But primarily the ransom was paid in a garden—for there eternal life was won for the obedient—in the Garden of the Oil Press, where Judas now stands, strengthened by the arm of flesh, ready to betray the Atoning One.
View and download the Gethsemane Section Commentary HERE
View and download the Gethsemane Section Commentary HERE
