Matthew 26:38

38. My soul is exceeding sorrowful Jesus then had a purely human soul. The doctrine of the Monophysites, that he had only a human body, of which God was the only soul, is not true. That human soul, Luke informs us, in his childhood increased in wisdom and in favour with God and man. Hence our Lord was complete man. His mind, as human, was subject to limitations. Beyond its human circle were innumerable things it did not know; though, doubtless, his mind was so divinely illuminated as not to be liable to positive involuntary falsity or mistake.

Exceeding sorrowful Our Saviour here speaks not of fear, that is, of the approaching cross, but of sorrow. A supernatural woe overwhelms and all but sinks him before the cross arrives. “He trod the winepress of the wrath of God.”

Sorrowful even unto death Not sorrowful in anticipation of death; but a sorrow, not his own, pressed so heavily and so damply upon him, that it would drown and quench the spark of life but for the divine aid impregnating and strengthening his human person. What sorrow was this? Doubtless the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 53:4) furnishes the true answer: “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” We do not here find any warrant for the supposition that God, the Father Almighty, poured the thunderbolts of personal anger on his suffering Son. But as Christ suffered as a substitute for a sinful world, so he did voluntarily, by his own sad consent, encounter all the woe that could be inflicted by hell and earth, (the natural executioners of absolute justice under the government of God,) and thus with his infinite dignity do honour to the law of eternal justice.

And in view of this, having done homage to justice in his own person, he is entitled to bestow paradise and confer righteousness on all who obediently accept him as their substitute and Redeemer.

Tarry… watch They were to watch, yet at a reverent distance. The Saviour, as if powers other than human were haunting his soul, yearns to be in reach of human sympathy.