Hebrews 5:7

‘Who in the days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and having been (‘was’) heard for his godly fear.’

And yet He was also a human being, subject to all the trials of a human being. While in the flesh He feared death, and because of it He prayed and appealed to God, strongly and with tears, seeking the help of the One Who could save Him from death, and was heard for His godly fear (or ‘reverent submission’). For an angel came and strengthened Him (Luke 22:43). It was a reminder that He was not alone. The aim of these words is to demonstrate that He was truly a man among men, and that His trust was in God. He did not need to offer sacrifices for Himself, but He did need the means of prayer and supplication. The one would have been to admit to sin, and was unnecessary for One Who was without sin, the other was to admit to humanness, and was very necessary. It may well be that this example was as much for us as for Him, that we might learn the folly of standing alone without full reliance on God.

It is salutary that after the angel strengthened Him His suffering went even deeper, but the moment of crisis had passed. He was now ready to face it alone.

‘The days of His flesh’ may be intended to indicate His whole life’s ministry. He constantly prayed, and He constantly faced the threat of death almost from the beginning (Mark 2:20; Mark 3:6; Mark 8:31; Mark 9:33; John 5:18; John 7:1; John 7:44; John 8:40; John 8:59; John 10:31; John 11:50). But it is generally agreed that it most fits Jesus’ suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and that that is especially in mind here with the remainder as a shadow behind it.

In the Garden he prayed earnestly with tears that the cup that He had to face might pass from Him. It was not so much death that He feared, but all that was involved in His own particular death. And yet He was also fearful of death itself, for it would be the very extinguishing of all that He was. It is impossible for us to begin to conceive what dying must have meant to One Who was the source of life itself, Who throbbed with life, Who knew life in its fullest sense. Death was thus foreign to His very nature, to all that He was, as it could never be to us. It was so alien that in His manhood He feared it. And on top of that it was a death for sin, not His own but the sin of the whole world. He was to die for the sins of men, and Himself take the full impact of God’s aversion to sin. No wonder He recoiled from it.

But He was constantly delivered from death during His ministry, and His prayer in Gethsemane was specifically subject to the will of God and was in the last analysis a prayer for strength to face what God willed. And in this His prayer was successful. He was heard for His godly fear, because of His reverent submission, and sustained through what lay ahead. He went into death, and through it, and emerged again as the Lord of life. He had been saved from death. Death had lost its sting.