No excuse.

These men did not nod and sleep ignorant of Christ’s need of them.  With that tender confidence with which a truly great and colossal man sometimes honors his friends, He had said, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.”  He had warned them with the words, “Watch and pray lest ye enter into temptation,” and yet they slept!

“Our own affairs.”

It must have been a keen disappointment to Jesus to find His most trusted friends so indifferent to His needs.  Is there anything in life sadder than the discovery that our own affairs are really only our own affairs?  We had thought that they were our friends’, as well as our own.  We had supposed that our griefs were theirs also, but when Grethsemane comes into our lives, and we writhe and twist among the gnarled and knotted roots, when we turn with blanched, tear-sprinkled faces to our chosen James and trusted Peter and beloved John to gasp in their ears the story of our agony, we hear only the heavy breathing of sound sleepers.

Cold, harsh fact.

If there is a sharper pang than this, man’s heart has not found it.  We are by nature social beings.  We crave fellowship and love and sympathy, and it is so hard for us to realize that our choicest friends are really “asleep” to our heart cries and heart interests.  The cold, harsh fact can be believed but slowly.  Even the Lord seemed to find it hard to convince His own heart that the John who had leaned at supper upon His breast, was resting while his Master was sweating blood.  He prayed awhile and then, as if to see whether it was indeed true that no one watched to help Him, “He came and found them sleeping.”  Sad, cruel disappointment, and yet is it so rare that any one of us has not felt its sadness and cruelty?

An angel.

But while men forgot the Nazarene and His troubles, Grod did not forget.  The Father was not negligent nor careless.  “There appeared an angel unto him from heaven strengthening him.”  The night was not too dark for the angel to find Jesus, and the night of our troubles is never too thick and black for the angels to find us.  The paths of “the Garden” may be grown up in weeds, the rough, scabeous limbs of the trees may hang close to the ground, the driving clouds may hide the moon and stars, but some celestial messenger will search us out and find us.

In many forms.

God has many angels, and they come in many forms.  Sometimes the solitary sufferer sees only a tiny flower, but love is in the flower, and he knows he is not utterly forgotten.  It may be only an hand clasp, but warmth and sympathy are in it, and behold it is straightway “an angel strengthening him.”  Perchance it is a letter with a foreign postmark, but in it is nectar and ambrosia for a drooping spirit.  Or the angel may come enveloped in a text of Scripture or flying on the wings of the music of some old hymn, such as: