Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples followed Him. When He came to the place, He told them, “Pray that you will not enter into temptation.” And He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, where He knelt down and prayed, “Father, if You are willing, take this cup from Me. Yet not My will, but Yours be done.” Then an angel from heaven appeared to Him and strengthened Him. And in His anguish, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground. When Jesus rose from prayer and returned to the disciples, He found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. “Why are you sleeping?” He asked. “Get up and pray so that you will not enter into temptation.”
Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” And he looked around, and there by his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. So he ate and drank and lay down again. A second time the angel of the LORD returned and touched him, saying, “Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you.” So he got up and ate and drank. And strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God.
“I know that You can do all things and that no plan of Yours can be thwarted.
Significance
The connection this file is titled for is the weaker of the two it contains. Job 42:2 — "I know that You can do all things and that no plan of Yours can be thwarted" — is Job's surrender at the end of the whirlwind speeches, and it stands at a real distance from Gethsemane. Jesus does not say that God's plan cannot be thwarted; he asks that the cup be removed and then submits: "Yet not My will, but Yours be done." The two utterances are both acts of submission to divine sovereignty, but Job's is a conclusion drawn after God has spoken, and Jesus' is a petition offered while heaven is silent. There is no shared vocabulary and no argument running between them. Treat Job 42:2 as a thematic touchstone for the doctrine of submission, not as a source Luke is drawing on.
Found via
Beale & Carson (eds.), Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (2007)
Reference Type
Echo
Connection Method(s)
Analogy + Contrast
The live parallel in this file is 1 Kings 19:5-8, and it is genuinely close. Elijah, having fled for his life, collapses under a broom tree and prays that he might die; he sleeps from exhaustion; an angel touches him and strengthens him with food; and strengthened, he walks forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God. Luke's Gethsemane account reproduces the whole sequence in the same order and in an unusually compressed space: the withdrawal to a place apart, the prayer at the limit of endurance, the angel from heaven who appears and strengthens him (Luke 22:43), and the resumption of a journey that will not be turned aside. Luke is the only evangelist who records the strengthening angel, and he is also the evangelist who has already framed Jesus' entire journey to Jerusalem in Elijah-Elisha terms (Luke 9:51). The correspondence is deliberate.
The method is Analogy carrying a hard Contrast, and the Contrast is where the passage preaches. Elijah wanted to die and was not permitted to; Jesus did not want to die and went anyway. Elijah's angel came to keep a despairing prophet alive for the road ahead; Jesus' angel came to keep a resolute Son upright while he consented to the cup. Elijah slept because he was finished; the disciples slept "exhausted from sorrow" while their Lord prayed alone, so that the strengthening Jesus received he received without a single human companion awake beside him. And where Elijah at Horeb heard God's voice and was sent back to work, Jesus at Gethsemane heard nothing and obeyed anyway — the obedience of faith at its purest.
This is what makes Gethsemane something other than an example to imitate. If the passage were only "submit as Jesus submitted," it would leave every reader under the broom tree. What it actually shows is a Savior who took the cup no one else could drink, whose sweat fell like blood so that the wrath in that cup would never reach those he prayed for. The disciples slept through it and were kept anyway. The desirability here is the Man himself: one who, offered the chance to be spared, wanted the Father's will and our rescue more than his own relief.
