KJV Matthew 26:39: “And He went a little farther.”
NASB Matthew 26:39: “And He went a little beyond them.”
The Garden of Gethsemane will forever contain mysteries that are not only beyond our understanding but also beyond our vocabularies. Imaginative intrusion into this holy and sacred time between Father and Son is unwarranted. Yet, we can meditate on what has been revealed, wonder, and worship.
Notice then the progression as we move through the verses in Matthew 26:37-39. We are told that “He began to be sorrowful and very heavy” (v 37).
His sorrow was genuine and is characterized here as a man carrying a heavy burden. The manhood of Christ was very real and genuine. He was possessed of all the capability for sorrow, emotion, and grief. In fact, He was more capable than any other man. He never knew the hardening effect of sin. His sorrow was never assuaged by thoughts of revenge or the steeling of emotions people know who take refuge in bitterness and hatred toward the enemy. Here was the most tender heart that ever moved on this globe; here was the most sensitive heart that ever lived.
The Lord Jesus suffered as a Man; He suffered as He moved amongst men, beholding all the carnage caused by sin. How He must have grieved over lives that were not enjoying all that His Father was. And He suffered from men. Ultimately, as these verses will indicate, He suffered for men. As He approached the cross and the interruption of the joy of fellowship with His God, He felt that sorrow as an immense load He had to bear.
But then, in the next verse, we read, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.”
The sorrow increased now to an “exceeding” sorrow. The expression could be translated as sorrow surrounding or enveloping Him. Wherever He looked, there was sorrow. But what of the expression, “even unto death”? The only way I can understand this is that the sorrow was so great that it would have taken the life of a natural man. (Today, the diagnosis is known as Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy.) But He was not a natural man and was not liable to death from sorrow, however great it might be.
The next verse adds, “He went a little farther.”
Though in context, it refers to a physical length or a geographic distance, it also carries spiritual truth for us to consider. The sorrows and sufferings mentioned in the previous verses were in anticipation of the cross. He did not stop with the Garden but went farther to Golgotha. He did not stop with sorrow but went into death. He went a little farther — the entire distance needed to redeem. He plumbed the depths of suffering and sorrow — the entirety of what sin had treasured up in the presence of God. We can all worship that He “went a little farther.”
Consider:
Only Matthew gives us this progression, as seen in verses 37-39. Look at how each of the Garden scenes, as presented by the four writers of the Gospels, are unique in some manner.