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?

Think about it, if one of you had to take upon himself the sins of a hundred people around you, and give an account for them before God, what horror you would be filled with, how you would be weighed down by the sins of others, for which you must answer to God. Do you not know that the Lord Jesus Christ took upon Himself the sins of the whole world, of all mankind? Have you never heard the words of the great prophet Isaiah: "He was wounded for our sins, and bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we were healed" (Isaiah 53:5).

Have you not read what is written in the first Epistle of the Apostle Peter: "He Himself bore our sins in His Body on the tree, that we, having been delivered from sins, might live for righteousness: by His stripes you were healed" (1 Peter 2:24). Thus, already in the Garden of Gethsemane, He languished and was tormented under the terrible weight of the sins of the whole world. He was oppressed unspeakably, unbearably oppressed by the sins of the world, which He took upon Himself, for which He had to become a sacrifice to God's justice before God, for only He and no one else could atone for the sins of the whole world.

That is why the bloody sweat dripped from His forehead, that is why He was so tormented, praying to His Father: "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me..." (Matt. 26:39). And immediately He spoke differently: "Both are not as I will, but as Thou wilt." He gave Himself over entirely to the will of God, and His sins crushed Him, tormented Him, tormented Him, tormented Him, and He fell exhausted under the weight of these sins.

The great saint Blessed Augustine says: "Nowhere does the greatness and holiness of Jesus strike me so much as here. I would not know the greatness of His blessings, if He had not revealed to me what they cost Him." We would not know the full greatness of Christ's sacrifice if we did not know what He experienced in the terrible hour of His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.

And His disciples slept... What does it mean that they were asleep? Why did they sleep? A simple explanation is that they were very tired from the midnight journey through the Kidron Stream, found themselves in weakness and, as the Gospel of Luke says, were overwhelmed with sorrow – they slept from sorrow. But let us think whether there were not other, higher, mysterious reasons for their sleeping, whether it was not arranged by God. It is very likely that it was.

Perhaps it was God's will that they only catch a glimpse of Jesus' suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane. Probably, all the terrible, bottomless depth of Jesus' prayer should be hidden from the eyes of the world. Probably so... Still, they were needed as witnesses, even if they were very incomplete, of the Gethsemane sufferings of Jesus' soul. They slept, but when they awoke three times at the word of Jesus, they, of course, did not immediately fall asleep again, and in the bright light of the full moon they saw Jesus praying, heard the terrible words of His prayer.

For if it were not so, how would the Evangelist have known about what was in the Garden of Gethsemane, how would he have written what we read, how would he have known about the drops of bloody sweat that dripped from His forehead, how would they have known the words of His prayer? They were needed as witnesses: on Mount Tabor they were witnesses of His Divine glory, in the Garden of Gethsemane they were witnesses of the entire abyss of His soul's sufferings before He ascended the cross.