Then He said to them, “My soul is consumed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with Me.”
38. My soul is sorrowful. He communicates to them his sorrow, in order to arouse them to sympathy; not that he was unacquainted with their weakness, but in order that they might afterwards be more ashamed of their carelessness. This phrase expresses a deadly wound of grief; as if he had said, that he fainted, or was half-dead, with sorrow.
And he went a little further,.... Luke says, Luk 22:41, "about a stone's cast", about fifty or sixty feet from the place where they were, and fell on his face, and prayed; partly to show his great reverence of God, the sword of whose justice was awaked against him, the terrors of whose law were set in array before him, and whose wrath was pouring...
Verse 38. My soul is exceeding sorrowful. His human nature-his soul- -was much and deeply affected and pressed down. Even unto death. This denotes extreme sorrow and agony. The sufferings of death are the greatest of which we have any knowledge; they are the most feared and dreaded by man; and those sufferings are, therefore, put for extreme and indescribable anguish.