Thus, the confusion of minds was great and deep. And the people were then led by their religious leaders – the chief priests, scribes and Pharisees, who were considered the bearers of the indisputable truth, whom the people were accustomed to follow and without reflection accepted on faith everything that they heard from them. The minds and hearts of the Jews were tormented, doubled, not knowing what to believe. On the one hand, they saw the greatest miracle-worker, Who commands the waves of the sea, raises the dead, fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread, Who heals the sick.

On the other hand, we have heard the spiteful, hateful accusations of the Lord Jesus by the chief priests that He blasphemes and violates the law of Moses. And so, while the Lord Jesus Christ was in power and glory, the majority of the people followed Him, but when He was arrested, beaten, condemned to death, when they saw Him lose all His power, then a herd feeling flared up in their hearts, similar to that which guides animals that pounce on the weak and defeated and tear them to death with the whole pack.

In the same way, people immediately lose respect and love even for the most worthy and honorable person if he is subjected to ridicule and humiliation. This is what was in the hearts of the people who went to Golgotha for Jesus – they succumbed to the wild herd feeling: Oh, You are beaten, You are defeated! They beat Thee, so we will persecute Thee, we will curse Thee, and we will cry out to Thee with the chief priests and scribes: "Save thyself. If you are the Son of God..." (Matt. 27:40).

This is what happened, this is what great power the leaders of the people of Israel had over this people, who completely succumbed to what these leaders wanted and demanded, who succumbed even to the demand for execution, even to the terrible cry: "His blood be on us and on our children." That is the only explanation I can give you. And so, an indescribable horror took place: the Lord was nailed to the cross, the Lord endured the most cruel, the most terrible of all the plagues that human malice could invent.

The Lord endured these terrible torments for six hours. Six hours later, He gave up His spirit with a cry that the world must never forget: "It is finished!" Why did Christ die so soon? We know that the crucified were often tortured for three, even up to six days, before they died. Why? Because He was sick. Not only because He was torn to pieces by scourging, He could not bear His cross.

On a cold night in the Garden of Gethsemane, and later at the high priests and in the courtyard of the praetorium, he caught a cold and was ill. We even know what He was sick with, but I will not talk about it. Believe this, He was sick. Of course, the ninth hour came, and darkness fell on all the earth. The sun darkened and hid its rays. The veil in the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

The people, who had recently demanded His execution, dispersed from Golgotha, bowing their heads low and beating their breasts. Let us also go, lowering our heads, let us also remember that for our sins, as for the sins of all mankind, the Savior endured these terrible torments and sufferings. Let us go, lowering our heads and beating our breasts! March 25, 1951 A WORD ON PASSION.

ELEVENTH When our Lord and God Jesus Christ ascended Mount Tabor to manifest His Divine glory there, then He took with Him three beloved disciples – Peter, James and John, and before them He was transfigured, and showed His glory to them. The hour of His terrible and indescribable sufferings came, and again He took with Him the same three disciples – Peter, James and John – to the Garden of Gethsemane, departed with them from the rest of the disciples, commanded them to watch and pray, and He Himself departed from them to cast a stone and began His agonizing last prayer to God.

If this time the Lord considered it necessary to take the three disciples so that they would again be witnesses of Him, then it means that what they had to see, hear and witness was extraordinarily important, no less great than His Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. Thus, let us understand that the spiritual agony that our Lord Jesus Christ experienced, praying to His Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, was the greatest and at the same time the most difficult and terrible of the events of His life.

Do not think, do not think, that it was only on the cross, in indescribable suffering, that the Lord endured His terrible torment. Know that His torment, even more terrible than His suffering on the cross, began here in the Garden of Gethsemane by the light of the moon. Oh, how He suffered! Oh, how He was tormented! Oh, how He cried out to His Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, "My Father! If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt" (Matt. 26:33).

Impudent people may think: what cowardice! Why did He ask the Father to carry the cup of suffering past Him, if He came into the world for these sufferings? Impudent people even say that the Lord did not experience any suffering on the cross. In the early days of Christianity, there were heretics, Docetists, who taught that the body of Jesus was not genuine, but a phantom body (

dokeu – to seem; hence the name of the Docetists). Of course, when they taught so impiously, they were convinced that the Lord Jesus Christ did not endure any sufferings, for He did not have an authentic and true human body, and we know, we are deeply convinced that He was a true man, as well as a true God. We know that in His body He endured indescribable sufferings and terrible torments on the cross. We know that.

But not everyone delves into what the Lord experienced in His heart. Not everyone knows why His prayer to God the Father was so painful. Not everyone knows why bloody sweat dripped from His face. And I must explain this to you. When does bloody sweat drip from the face of man? When do people pray with bloody tears? This is not a metaphor – this is the reality that one cries bloody tears, that sweat is a bloody droplet.

This happens when human torments reach such a terrible intensity that no other torments can be compared with them. Thus, from the very fact that bloody sweat dripped from the face of the Saviour, we learn how terrible, how tremendous were His spiritual sufferings before His bodily sufferings. Why were they so terrible? Why did Christ our God suffer so much in foreknowledge of His sufferings on the cross?