Perhaps you know parts of the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It is really a tragic story. King Arthur unites a divided Britain, and attracts to himself the bravest knights in the land. And along the way, he marries a beautiful bride, Guinevere. But tragically, she falls for one of Arthur’s knights, Lancelot, and betrays her husband.

One of Arthur’s enemies, Mordred, discovers Lancelot and Guinevere. Lancelot flees, but Guinevere is placed on trial, with the possible punishment of death for her adultery and treason. Mordred delights in the dilemma of the king having to do justice on his own bride. He shouts:

“Arthur! What a magnificent dilemma!
Let her die, your life is over;
Let her live, your life’s a fraud.
Which will it be, Arthur?
Do you kill the queen or kill the law?”

Arthur is destroyed by the choice. Guinevere walks to the stake, where the executioner stands with a lit torch, and asks the king if he should light the stake. Arthur crumples to the ground in tears, crying, “I can’t! I can’t! I can’t let her die!”

Mordred cackles: “Well, you’re human after all, aren’t you, Arthur? Human and helpless.”

And so in that story, the scene ends in tragedy, in defeat, in despair. But where that story ends, the Greatest Story of all picks up. Because the greatest story of all is also the story of justice and love needing to be reconciled. Only, in the greatest story, the King is God Himself, the unfaithful bride is us, and the accusing Mordred is Satan. But in this story, God found a way to keep justice and to rescue His bride.

There is probably no other Scripture which makes this clear to us, like the account of Jesus in Gethsemane.

Why Gethsemane? Why did God include this event in the life of Christ, and make sure it was recorded for us? To put it another way, what do we lose, if we remove the account of Gethsemane from the Bible? What if we go from the Last Supper, straight to the betrayal and arrest of Jesus? What would we not understand?

I believe if we remove Gethsemane from the Bible, we would not understand what Calvary meant for Jesus. Without Gethsemane, we do not understand what it meant for Jesus, in His own experience, to become a sin-bearer on the cross.

We can read the crucifixion account and see what happened to Jesus: how He was treated. But we cannot understand from that account alone what was going on in the heart and experience of Jesus.

But here is where we learn what it meant internally, spiritually, within the Triune God. I would go so far as to say, you will not understand the meaning of the cross, if you do not understand what happens in Gethsemane.

We could call this account: The Burden of Calvary. Here we are going to learn what the burden of Calvary was, and what it was going to take. We are going to understand what the Gospel really is. We’re going to be reminded of how we should feel about the Gospel, and how we should respond to the Gospel.

We can divide this account up into two simple phases: Jesus predicted His abandonment, and Jesus previewed His abandonment.

I. Jesus Predicted His Abandonment

27 Then Jesus said to them, “All of you will be made to stumble because of Me this night, for it is written: ‘I will strike the Shepherd, And the sheep will be scattered.’ 28 “But after I have been raised, I will go before you to Galilee.” 29 Peter said to Him, “Even if all are made to stumble, yet I will not be.” 30 Jesus said to him, “Assuredly, I say to you that today, even this night, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny Me three times.” 31 But he spoke more vehemently, “If I have to die with You, I will not deny You!” And they all said likewise. 32 Then they came to a place which was named Gethsemane; and He said to His disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” (Mar 14:27-32)

As Jesus and the eleven apostles, accompanied by an unnamed young man, leave the Upper Room and head for Gethsemane, Jesus knows something that the disciples do not yet know. He knows that He will face the burden of Calvary entirely alone. He knows that when it is time to be the sin-bearer, no one will stand with Him; no one will defend Him; no one will rescue Him; no one will own Him and speak for Him.

In fact, Jesus knows that not only will Judas betray him, and Peter deny him, and the other 10 forsake him, he knows every other strand of human society will forsake him. His physical family is in Jerusalem, but none of his half-brothers or sisters come to His rescue. The Jewish leaders are supposed to be the shepherds and protectors – they will be His accusers and murderers. The nation of Israel, that had hailed Him with loud Hosannas on Palm Sunday, have now changed their mind, since they know how radical He is, and they will abandon Him and join in the calls for crucifixion. Herod, the ruler of Galilee, where Jesus has lived will abandon Him. Pilate, who is supposed to be the upholder of justice and fairness for every man will abandon Him. He will bear the burden of Calvary entirely alone.

So Jesus wants to prepare His disciples. He tells them that their forsaking Him will be a fulfilment of prophecy, and He quotes Zechariah 13:7: “Strike the Shepherd, And the sheep will be scattered; Then I will turn My hand against the little ones.”

And then, to encourage them, He says in 28 “But after I have been raised, I will go before you to Galilee.”

I see His grace here. Jesus promises a reunion. Their failure will not mean He will forsake them. They are not ready for the chaos of the next few hours, and they still don’t understand what it all means. But He gives them a little seed that will germinate later: I will meet you eleven in Galilee.

And that’s what happens. The apostolic group is broken up, and some go here and there, but they are only regathered as the eleven on a mountain in Galilee,

But they can’t see that yet. They think they know themselves, but they do not. Their self-evaluation is flawed. They know what they wish they were, but they do not realise what they actually are. Peter protests that his commitment is single-minded and willing to go all the way. Peter carries in him the danger for every person who is full of zeal: a blindness to his own heart. And Jesus warns him that he will deny Him, not once, not twice, but three times. Peter contradicts the Lord. He is calling Jesus wrong! He is not lying to Jesus, but he is self-deceived.

Beware of thinking you know your own heart because of how sincerely and vehemently you feel something. Where Peter actually was could only be discovered with a trial.

Proverbs 16:18 Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall.

We know these men were proud because when it came time to pray, they slept. Jesus, completely humble, fully aware of the spiritual realities ahead, is going to pray till His sweat turns to blood. The disciples are spiritually immature, they are going to give in to their flesh, and so the prophecy will come true, Peter will deny, and they will all forsake Him.

And I’m amazed that the Lord is so gentle with these men. He is not resentful. There is no tone of bitterness or contempt in His voice. He simply knows where they actually are, and wants to prepare them for it, so that they are not overcome with grief, and succumb to what Judas did to himself.

Even here, Jesus is calm, kingly, kind, embracing His abandonment as part of His path. He has poured his life into these men! He has shown them so much! He has given them more reasons to trust Him to the death than anyone else. But He knows, and graciously predicts His abandonment so as to prepare them.

But now as they reach the Garden of Gethsemane, we see a radical change come over Jesus.

II. Jesus Previews His Own Abandonment

32 Then they came to a place which was named Gethsemane; and He said to His disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” 33 And He took Peter, James, and John with Him, and He began to be troubled and deeply distressed.

They arrive at Gethsemane which was a fairly small enclosed Garden, some have calculated not more than seventy steps square, a place with some fruit trees, shrubs, probably a privately-owned, quiet resting place which had been made available to Jesus whenever He and His disciples were in Jerusalem. At the entrance, Jesus leaves eight of the eleven remaining apostles, and takes with Him Peter, James, and John. These, His inner three, the ones that He took with Him up on the Mount of Transfiguration; the ones He took with Him for the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter. He wants His closest friends with Him, because something is beginning to open up to Him. Something is beginning to be revealed to Him, and He needs His deepest supporters.

Jesus is starting to see something, starting to preview something, and the effect upon Him is a Jesus we have not met before in the Gospels. Verse 33 says He began to be troubled and deeply distressed. The word for troubled in the original means a kind of alarm. It speaks of astonished terror. A kind of shocked horror has come into the soul of Jesus. Deeply distressed, a severe heaviness of soul, a powerful, overwhelming stress is visibly disturbing Jesus. This is not a Jesus we have seen before. This is not a Jesus that Peter, James, and John had ever seen before.

34 Then He said to them, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch.”

He tells them His state. Within, he is experiencing overwhelming sorrow. The word here means a kind of grief that encompasses you and swallows you up. Jesus is experiencing a kind of black pit of awful grief that is threatening to kill him before His sacrificial death. He asks them to stay and watch in prayer.

What is Jesus seeing that is doing this to Him? What is Jesus previewing?

Jesus is previewing what it will mean to drink the cup of God’s anger on the cross. Jesus is beginning to smell the contents of that cup. Flashes of the vision of God the Father treating Him as the sin-bearer are coming to His consciousness, and they are like arrows through His heart. He is previewing the meaning and the experience of being a substitute for sinners, and internally, it seems to be more than He can bear.

I want you to remember who this is. We have not seen a Jesus like this in Mark. We have seen Jesus talk to disease, and it disappears. He speaks, and deformity corrects itself. He tells demons, lords of darkness to go, and they go in terror. He walks into a room, takes a dead girl’s hand, and death leaves the room. He takes bread and fish, and creates them in His hands to feed thousands. He stands in a boat and tells waves and wind to be quiet and they obey like well-trained dogs. He answers the greatest religious intellectuals of His day with words that leave them confounded, humiliated and speechless. Authority, power, dominion, are with him everywhere He goes and in everything He touches. He is kingly, lordly, the unchallenged, unquestionable Prince of Peace. But here, He is dazzled, weakened, distressed. And look at the next verse:

35 He went a little farther, and fell on the ground, and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass from Him.

He goes beyond the three, leaving them to pray alone, and the weight of His trial brings him physically to the ground. This King, for whom demons, deformity, disease, and death could be waved away with a word, is physically staggering under the weight. He is so burdened, he crumples down to the ground. He can not even remain physically upright, so deep is the horror of what is coming.

What was in that cup? What is coming in that hour that He wished it would pass from Him? Please remember that Jesus was not surprised at the thought of His coming crucifixion. He had been calmly predicting that for months. He had told His disciples that He came to give His life a ransom for many. His sacrificial death had been His mission from the beginning. But what had mercifully been withheld from the human consciousness of Jesus was what it would mean to become the object of the Father’s displeasure.

Jesus Christ: fully God and truly human: two natures that did not mix or mingle or dilute or change the other, but existed truly and perfectly in union in one Person. In His humanity, Jesus had not during His earthly sojourn experienced anything except unbroken fellowship and delight from His Father. Being fully God, Jesus knew of His own revulsion for sin. Jesus hated sin with holy hatred, and we cannot possibly imagine what grace could have allowed God to live among sinners for thirty-three years without destroying them all. He had perfect hatred for sin, a moral revulsion at all evil.

But God had apparently kept from Jesus’ human consciousness the full weight of what Calvary would mean. And here it begins to break upon Him, and He sees and knows the horror of what is coming. He will stand alone, suspended between Heaven and Earth, as the hurricane of God’s fury and holy hatred of sin comes crashing down upon Him and Him alone. Not only will He lose fellowship with the Father, the Father will treat Jesus as the Substitute for all sinners and all sin.

Just take one sinner, one Hitler, one Stalin, and ask what should be done to Him. But now take all people, and all sin, and the full debt to God’s glory, and pour it on one soul. Jesus is going to experience an intensity of anger, displeasure, wrath, fury, and hatred that is more violent than any attack any man has known.

Every teacher tries to find illustrations to shed light on something we don’t fully understand. But there really are few illustrations that can help us to know what was going on between Father and Son on the cross. I think the closest we can come is when God prophetically put words into the mouths of some of the Old Testament characters. We read Psalm 22 this morning. I think some of the words of Job have Messianic implications.

12 I was at ease, but He has shattered me; He also has taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces; He has set me up for His target,
13 His archers surround me. He pierces my heart and does not pity; He pours out my gall on the ground.
14 He breaks me with wound upon wound; He runs at me like a warrior.
(Job 16:12-14)

4 For the arrows of the Almighty are within me; My spirit drinks in their poison; The terrors of God are arrayed against me. (Job 6:4)

The hymn writer put it this way:

“Tell me, ye who see Him groaning, was there ever grief like His?
Friends through fear His cause disowning, Foes insulting His distress
Many hands were raised to wound Him, none would interpose to save,
But the deepest stroke that pierced Him, was the stroke that Justice gave.”

Jesus prays that if it be possible, this hour could pass from Him. Verse 36 tells us the content of His prayer, which He would repeat three times.

36 And He said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for You. Take this cup away from Me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what You will.”

‘Abba’ – this was a term of intimacy used for close, personal relationships between children and their father. God has not yet forsaken Jesus. And He appeals to His Father. He knows God can do anything that is possible. Therefore if it is possible, Jesus asks for the cup to be taken away. Was Jesus asking to be excused from His mission? No.

Jesus is asking, Father, is there no other way to do this? If we can achieve this redemption without this, if we can achieve this salvation without me bearing your fury, let it be so. The Gospel of Luke tells us that His prayer was so intense, that His sweat was mixed with blood, which is in fact a medical condition that exists.

Three times, Jesus is going to ask the Father, if by any chance, the omnipotent God, who can do all things, can reconcile man to God through some other means. And what answer does Jesus receive from His Father? Silence. Or if we may, the equivalent of the silence, “It is not possible. There is no other way.”

And right there, wondering sinners should stop and understand the meaning of Gospel grace. God the Father was not willing to say yes to His own Son’s pleas for another way. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. God did not love mankind more than His Son, but God loved His glory and His plan for the salvation of sinners more than unbroken fellowship with His Son.

And the Son, look at His words: “Nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will.”

The Son submits to the Father. The Son loved us so much that He was willing to embrace that there was no other way.

Did Jesus have more than one will? Jesus had more than one desire, as we can see, He wrestled with the desire to not break fellowship with the Father. But what did the will of Jesus choose? His will was one with the Father’s will. However, He submits His will to the Father. I don’t believe you will find in all of human history, a more courageous, heroic act. Here is majestic bravery, worthy of our deepest admiration. Jesus, who feels our weaknesses, and has felt the deepest struggle, embraces the hardest and most horrific path – to be a wrath-bearer for the world.

10 Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. (Isa 53:10)

As Jesus wrestled through this, He returned three times, and each time, what did He find? He found three disciples, fatigued by grief, but deceived by their pride, sleeping, instead of praying.

37 Then He came and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “Simon, are you sleeping? Could you not watch one hour? 38 “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

He knows they are willing to not forsake him or deny him, but they are weak.

Gal 5:17 For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.

Who knows what they might have done differently, had they given themselves to prayer? How might they have responded? How might Peter have done differently? But the Scripture would be fulfilled.

39 Again He went away and prayed, and spoke the same words. 40 And when He returned, He found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy; and they did not know what to answer Him. 41 Then He came the third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? It is enough! The hour has come; behold, the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners. 42 “Rise, let us be going. See, My betrayer is at hand (Mar 14:32-42)

As I look at these sleeping disciples, what a picture it is of how insensitive and dull we become to the great anguish that our Saviour went through on the cross. We look at these men and shake our heads at how they slept through His anguish at Gethsemane, but isn’t that a picture of modern believers, too? When we take grace for granted. When we forget the cross. When we are unmoved by the spiritual realities of the cross, and find ourselves minimising sin, giving ourselves excuses to sin. We start believing a Gospel of easy-believism, where Jesus suffers for us, and we go on our merry way, indifferent, asleep to what our sin cost Him. We take the Lord’s Supper for granted, or even skip it. We do not feel the weight of our sin or of the holiness of God.

Lam 1:12 “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold and see If there is any sorrow like my sorrow, Which has been brought on me, Which the LORD has inflicted In the day of His fierce anger.

To be unlike Peter, James and John, is to see our Saviour’s anguish, and repent of dullness and casualness and ingratitude. It is to admire and love and be grateful to our Saviour. It is to recover a tenderness of conscience and regain an awe of the Cross.

A person gripped by Calvary love does not lightly sin.

No one grows by feeling sorry for Christ. No one develops out of sympathy for God. Rather, we should see the willingness of Father and Son to do what needed to be done. We should be staggered by a love and a plan that would sever them temporarily for the sake of redemption. We should see this in light of God’s desire to display His glory.

Jesus returns a third time. I find it significant that Jesus was tempted by Satan three times, and overcame, so in this case, He faces His most severe trial, and prays, and overcame. His prayer did not change the Father’s plan, but His prayer steeled and strengthened Him. He was going to go all the way, and we have to believe His prayer in Gethsemane was a major part of how He did it.

King Arthur’s dilemma was how to rescue his unfaithful bride without destroying justice. God had the same situation – an unfaithful bride, needing to be rescued from the flames of Hell, without destroying justice. But God did it – by the Son taking our place, experiencing God’s justice, setting us free.

Rising up from Gethsemane, our Saviour faced betrayal, arrest, false accusations, condemnation, abuse and physical agony. But more, He faced the wrath of God. He drank the Cup, drained it fully, and could say on the cross, “It is finished”. This was the burden of Calvary.