God’s Word for You
Mark 14:33-34 distressed and troubled
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, January 20, 2024
33 He took Peter and James and John with him, and began to be very distressed and troubled. 34 He said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow, to the point of death. Stay here, and keep watch.”
The word Jesus uses in verse 33, “distressed,” is the same word the angel would later use when he said to the women at the empty tomb: “Do not be distressed!” (Mark 16:6). But Jesus was distressed, troubled, and overwhelmed with sorrow. The penalty for sin had come into the world, and now Christ, the Son of God, was facing it himself.
When he had asked Adam, “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” (Genesis 3:11), he was also asking, “Have you brought death into my creation, for you to suffer, and for me to suffer as well?” Now in the Garden, Jesus sought out the company of friends to comfort him. Job did this in his suffering, when three friends came “to sympathize with him and comfort him” (Job 2:11). Abraham grieved for his wife Sarah by going and sitting with his friends the Hittites (Genesis 23:2-3). The daughter of Jephthah went out to roam the hills with her friends when she learned that she would never marry (Judges 11:37-38). And Jesus, too, sought out the companionship of his friends. He had taken Peter, James, and John to see him raise a little girl from the dead (Mark 5:37). He had taken the same three with him when he was transfigured in all his glory (Mark 9:2), and now he permits them to watch as he himself suffers the agony of the burden of mankind’s sin. The devil’s foot was on his neck. The grave that asks and asks and is never satisfied (Proverbs 30:15-16) was now asking for him.
Jesus tells us that his soul was overwhelmed with sorrow. Here was his humiliation scraping the bottom. He had been setting aside his powers as God. Even his weak human strength was giving in. He was grieving. He was in trouble. He had nowhere to look, nowhere to turn to except to his Father. He wanted to pray.
Prayer means being able to speak to the Father; it is not easy to pray when you are hounded with questions, interrupted by people who demand a moment of your attention, or all of it. He needed to be separate and apart for a moment; for an hour. The trip to Gethsemane had borne fruit. Nobody else was here tonight. His disciples, eleven of them, were here. Eight were back at the gate. Three were here just a short distance away. He asked them to keep watch. He wanted to be told if anyone was approaching, whether it might be one of the other disciples, or some other friends, or perhaps enemies, which is really what he was anticipating. Soon they would come for him and arrest him, and the final hurried hours of agony would begin. In the Creed we transition without interruption from “born of the Virgin Mary” right to “Suffered under Pontius Pilate.” The transition for Jesus was about to happen.
For a human being, the burden of sorrow and grief is overwhelming. We are often not ourselves when under such pain. Luther says: “Even though the godly believe in God, yet the weakness of nature is so great that they cannot endure great sorrow and grief” (LW 8:14). Here Christ our Lord is so overcome by such grief that he admits, “I could die of this sadness, just of the grief alone.”
Some people wonder about this. Isn’t he going to rise from the dead afterward? Didn’t he know this? Shouldn’t he, couldn’t he, why didn’t he, just accept this death and not be so sad and overcome by it? They treat the cross as if it was an ordeal like an hour in the dentist’s chair. They forget that his human soul had been taken up into the eternal Spirit of the Son of God. The two spirits—that of the man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity—were then and are now forever one and the same Spirit. Peter says, thinking of Psalm 90:4, that “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years” (2 Peter 3:8). Jesus was about to spend a day of suffering at the hands of his enemies, followed by hours of excruciating punishment and pain on the cross, and only then, death. His perception of time is not something for us to grasp, but he would suffer an eternity in hell, separated from his Father’s love, with only pain, while that day on earth ticked slowly past. “The punishment that brought us peace was upon him” (Isaiah 53:5). Therefore Jesus said, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow, to the point of death.” Luther called these profound and inexplicable words “the greatest words in all of Scripture.”
The hardest part about death is the fear of death and everything surrounding it. By the grace of God, Christ tasted death for everyone (Hebrews 2:9). But first, and before all, he prayed. Let us not forget to do the same.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.