Church Fathers Commentary Matthew 26:36-38

"Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto his disciples, Sit ye here, while I go yonder and pray. And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and sore troubled. Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: abide ye here, and watch with me." — Matthew 26:36-38 (ASV)

Remigius of Auxerre: The Evangelist had said a little above that when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. To point out the part of the mount to which they were going, he now adds, Then Jesus came with them to a garden called Gethsemane.

Rabanus Maurus: Luke says, To the mount of Olives (Luke 22:39), and John, Went forth over the brook Cedron, where was a garden (John 18:1). This is the same as Gethsemane, a place at the foot of the Mount of Olives where He prayed, in which there is a garden and where a church has now been built.ⁱ

St. Jerome: Gethsemane is interpreted as "the rich valley." There He told His disciples to sit for a little while and wait for His return while He prayed alone for everyone.

Origen of Alexandria: For it was not fitting that He should be seized in the place where He had sat and eaten the Passover with His disciples. He also had to pray first and choose a place that was pure for prayer.

St. John Chrysostom: He says, Sit here, while I go and pray yonder, because the disciples were inseparable from Christ. It was His practice, however, to pray apart from them, thereby teaching us to seek quiet and solitude for our prayers.¹

St. John of Damascus: But since prayer is the lifting of the mind to God, or the asking of fitting things from God, how did the Lord pray? His mind did not need to be lifted to God, having been hypostatically united to God the Word from the beginning. Nor could He need to ask for fitting things, for the one Christ is both God and man.

Instead, by providing a pattern in Himself, He taught us to ask of God and to lift our minds to Him. Just as He took on our passions so that by triumphing over them Himself He might also give us victory over them, so now He prays. He does this to open for us the way to lift ourselves to God, to fulfill all righteousness for us, to reconcile His Father to us, to honor Him as the First Cause, and to show that He is not opposed to God.²

Rabanus Maurus: When the Lord prayed on the mountain, He taught us to make supplication for heavenly things; when He prays in the garden, He teaches us to pursue humility in our prayer. And beautifully, as He draws near to His Passion, He prays in the "valley of fatness," showing that it was through the valley of humility and the richness of charity that He took upon Himself death for our sakes.

The practical instruction we can also learn from this is that we should not allow our hearts to dry up from the richness of charity.

Remigius of Auxerre: He had accepted the disciples' faith and the devotion of their will, but He foresaw that they would be troubled and scattered. Therefore, He told them to sit still in their places, for sitting is for one who is at ease, whereas they would be grievously troubled for having denied Him.

It then describes how He went forward: And taking with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and very heavy. These were the same disciples to whom He had shown His glory on the mountain.

St. Hilary of Poitiers: Heretics interpret the words, He began to be sorrowful and very heavy, to mean that the fear of death assailed the Son of God. They allege that He was not begotten from eternity, nor did He exist in the Father's infinite substance, but was instead produced out of nothing by the Creator of all things. From this, they conclude that He was liable to the anguish of grief and the fear of death. And He who can fear death can also die; and He who can die, though He will exist after death, is still not eternal through Him who begot Him in past time.

If these heretics had the faith to receive the Gospels, they would know that the Word was in the beginning God, and from the beginning with God, and that the eternity of the One who begets and the One who is begotten is one and the same.

But if taking on flesh, with its natural weakness, infected the power of that incorruptible substance—making it subject to pain and the fear of death—then it would also become liable to corruption. In that case, its immortality would be changed into fear, and what is in it would be capable of eventually ceasing to exist.

But God exists forever, without measure of time, and as He is, He continues to be eternally. Nothing in God, then, can die, nor can God have any fear that originates from within Himself.

St. Jerome: But we say that the passible man was taken by the Son of God in such a way that His deity remained impassible. Indeed, the Son of God suffered—not by imputation but actually—all that Scripture testifies. He suffered in respect to that part of Him which could suffer, namely, in respect to the human substance He had taken upon Himself.³

St. Hilary of Poitiers: I suppose that some people offer no other cause for His fear than His passion and death. I ask those who think this: does it stand to reason that He should have feared to die, when He is the one who banished all fear of death from the Apostles and exhorted them to the glory of martyrdom?⁴

How can we suppose Him to have felt pain and grief in the sacrament of death, when He rewards with life those who die for Him? What pangs of death could He fear, since He came to death by the free choice of His own power? And if His Passion was to bring Him honor, how could the fear of His Passion make Him sorrowful?

Since, then, we read that the Lord was sorrowful, let us discover the causes of His agony. He had forewarned them all that they would be offended, and Peter that he would deny his Lord three times. And taking him, James, and John, He began to be sorrowful. Therefore, He was not sorrowful until He took them with Him; all His fear began after He had taken them. His agony, then, was not for Himself, but for those whom He had taken.⁵

St. Jerome: The Lord, therefore, was not sorrowful from a fear of suffering—for this was the very reason He had come, and He had rebuked Peter for his fearfulness.ⁱ Instead, He sorrowed for the wretched Judas, for the offense of the rest of the Apostles, for the rejection and condemnation of the Jewish nation, and for the overthrow of unhappy Jerusalem.

St. John of Damascus: Alternatively, all things that have not yet been brought into existence by their Maker have a natural desire for existence and naturally shun non-existence. God the Word, then, having been made Man, had this desire. Through it, He desired food, drink, and sleep, by which life is supported, and He naturally used them. On the contrary, He shunned the things that are destructive to life. Therefore, during the time of His Passion, which He endured voluntarily, He had a natural fear and sorrow for death. For there is a natural fear with which the soul shrinks from separation from the body, because of the close sympathy implanted from the beginning by the Maker of all things.⁶

St. Jerome: Our Lord therefore sorrowed to prove the reality of the humanity He had taken upon Himself. However, so that this passion would not hold sway in His mind, He began to be sorrowful through "pro-passion"ⁱ; for it is one thing to be sorrowful, and another to be very sorrowful.

Remigius of Auxerre: This passage overthrows the Manichaeans, who said that He took an unreal body, and also those who said that He did not have a real soul but that His divinity was in place of a soul.ⁱ

St. Augustine of Hippo: We have the narratives of the Evangelists, from which we know that Christ was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, seized by the Jews, scourged, crucified, put to death, and buried in a tomb. All of this cannot be supposed to have taken place without a body, and not even the most irrational person would say these things should be understood figuratively, since they are told by men who wrote what they remembered happening.⁷

These narratives, then, are witnesses that He had a body, just as those emotions which cannot exist without a mind—and which we read about in the accounts of the same Evangelists, that Jesus wondered, was angry, and was sorrowful—prove that He had a mind.

Since these things are related in the Gospels, they are surely not false. Just as He became Man when He willed, so likewise when He willed, He took these passions into His human soul for the sake of confirming the divine plan. We, indeed, have these passions because of the weakness of our human nature; not so the Lord Jesus, whose weakness was one of power.⁸

St. John of Damascus: Therefore, the passions of our nature were in Christ both naturally and supernaturally. By nature, because He allowed His flesh to suffer the things incidental to it; beyond nature, because in Him, these natural emotions did not precede His will. For in Christ, nothing happened by compulsion; everything was voluntary. By His will He hungered, by His will He feared, or was sorrowful. Here His sorrow is declared: Then he said to them, My soul is sorrowful, even to death.⁹

St. Ambrose of Milan: He is sorrowful, yet it is not His divine Self that is sorrowful, but His soul. It is not His Wisdom, not His divine Substance, but His soul, for He took upon Himself my soul and my body.¹⁰

St. Jerome: He is sorrowful not because of death, but "unto death"—that is, until He has set the Apostles free by His Passion. Let those who imagine Jesus to have taken an irrational soul explain how it is that He is sorrowful in this way, knowing both the season of His sorrow and how long it must endure. For although brute animals feel sorrow, they know neither its causes nor its duration.

Origen of Alexandria: Alternatively, when He says, My soul is sorrowful, even to death, it is as if to say, "Sorrow has begun in me, but it will not endure forever—only until the hour of death. When I die for sin, I will also die to all sorrow, of which only the beginnings are in me."

When He says, Stay here, and watch with me, it is as if to say, "I told the others, who are weaker, to sit over there, removing them from this struggle. But I have brought you here, as you are stronger, so that you may labor with me in watching and prayer. But you must stay here, so that every person may remain in their own rank and station, since all grace, however great, has a superior."

St. Jerome: Or, the sleep He wanted them to forego was not bodily rest—for which there was no time at this critical moment—but mental torpor, the sleep of unbelief.

1. Hom. lxxxiii
2. de Fid. Orth., iii, 24
3. Hieron. non. occ
4. de Trin., x, 10
5. loc.
6. Fid. Orth., iii, 23
7. Lib. 83 Quaest. Q80
8. City of God, book xiv, ch. 9
9. Fid. Orth., iii, 20
10. Luc. 23, 43