There is no scene like this in all history. It concerns our Lord’s doing and dying, which is His suffering.
That’s why we use the expression in describing Lent, the time before Easter, as being Christ’s ‘Passion’. A less-used meaning for this word, but one more closer to the original meaning is, ‘to suffer’. Passion is a word we know usually as referring to a strong emotional response. One must be clear what is meant here by ‘Passion’. And so Luke presents us with three parts showing that the fulfilment is happening now. And because it is a conflict, with the two forces locked in struggle, “anguish” indicates that “supreme concentration of powers” which our Lord draws together in the face of this crisis event.ĭon’t think that Jesus is afraid of dying this is His concern for victory as the decisive battle approaches for the fate of the world.Įarlier in this Gospel, in chapter 12, Luke quotes Jesus when He states, “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it’s completed!” (v49f.) Our Lord is most anxious to get all this over with though not before everything is fulfilled which is meant to happen. Was Jesus really so helpless? Is that what Luke writes, as though Jesus were some passive person, awaiting the inevitable end? Quite the opposite! Here we find inner tension and anxiety, true, but this comes out of a conflict. Perhaps they saw this as saying that Jesus was too human, just as they would have had difficulty with the words in the verse before describing Jesus as being strengthened by an angel. So unique is this word, and so terrible is the pain it describes in our Lord, some of the early scribes copying the manuscripts felt it didn’t belong. Luke reaches a point in describing Christ’s ‘Passion’ where no previous word or description will quite fit. The word translated in Luke 22:44 as “anguish” is not found anywhere else in the Bible.
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