What is the meaning of Jesus' pryaer in the garden?

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Andrea Mantegna's Agony in the Garden, circa 1...
Andrea Mantegna's Agony in the Garden, circa 1460, depicts Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
What was the nature of Jesus’ temptation in the Garden that made Him say, “Let this cup pass from Me–that’s My desire”? That was a perfectly holy desire. Any other desire would have been an unholy and godless desire. Why? Because a holy man can never have any wish or desire or purpose to experience a sense of divine desolation. It was not within our Lord Jesus’ holy humanity to ever desire to be in a position where He would cry out, “My God, I am forsaken by You. Why?”1

John Maclaurin, in his sermon “God’s Chief Mercy,” looked at our Lord’s prayer from the perspective of His relationship to His elect for whom He came into the world to drink that cup of His Father’s wrath:

When we read, therefore, the Redeemer’s expression in his agony,—If it was possible the cup should pass from him,—we are not to understand it as if there was any appearance of impossibility in its passing from him, absolutely considered; it was very possible, and very easy, that it should wholly pass from him. The meaning seems to be, if it was possible it might pass from him without passing to us, which he had a still greater aversion to, than to drinking of it himself.2

1. Sinclair Ferguson “Why the God-Man?” from the 2011 Ligonier Ministries National Conference (at the 53:33 mark).

2. An excerpt from John Maclaurin’s sermon “God’s Chief Mercy,” in The Works of the Rev. John MacLaurin (Glasgow: Printed for William Collins, 1830) p. 463

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