Catholic Commentary
The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (Part 2)
44He left them again, went away, and prayed a third time, saying the same words.45Then he came to his disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.46Arise, let’s be going. Behold, he who betrays me is at hand.”
Matthew 26:44–46 depicts Jesus praying a third time in Gethsemane with identical words before awakening his sleeping disciples and announcing that his betrayal is imminent. Jesus then commands them to rise and accompany him toward his arrest, moving willingly toward his Passion with calm resolve rather than fear or resistance.
Jesus prayed the same prayer three times not in desperation but in absolute confirmation—then rose and walked toward his arrest with the calm of a priest advancing to sacrifice.
Matthew 26:44 — The Third Prayer Matthew's detail that Jesus "prayed a third time, saying the same words" is charged with both narrative and theological significance. In Jewish and biblical tradition, threefold repetition signals completeness and earnestness: Abraham interceded repeatedly for Sodom (Gen 18), the psalmists cried out persistently to God, and Jesus himself taught his disciples to pray persistently (Luke 18:1–8). The third prayer confirms that Jesus' submission to the Father is not resignation born of exhaustion but a fully deliberate, thrice-confirmed act of the will. Luke's Gospel (22:43–44) adds the detail of the angel strengthening him and the sweat like drops of blood (hematidrosis), signs of an agony so profound it reaches the very capillaries of his humanity. Yet Matthew's emphasis on the same words is equally telling: Jesus does not alter his prayer, does not bargain, does not retreat from the petition "not as I will, but as you will" (v. 39). Repetition here is not vain (contrast Mt 6:7); it is the perseverance of perfect faith.
Matthew 26:45 — "Are you still sleeping?" The question addressed to the disciples carries an edge of gentle reproach and sorrowful irony. Three times he prayed; three times they slept. The symmetry is deliberate and haunting. The Greek loipon ("still" or "from now on") can be read as a question or as a resigned, almost elegiac statement: "So — you sleep and rest now." Many Fathers and commentators prefer the interrogative, reading it as one final summons from the darkness of their failure. But the second half of the verse pivots dramatically. "Behold, the hour is at hand" (hē hōra ēngiken) — this is the theological center of the passage. Throughout Matthew and John, "the hour" is not merely a clock-time but a salvific event long-prepared in divine Providence: the hour toward which all of Jesus' ministry has been oriented (cf. Jn 12:23, 27; 17:1). The phrase "the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners" recalls the three Passion predictions (Mt 16:21; 17:22–23; 20:18–19) now about to be fulfilled to the letter. The title "Son of Man" is crucial: it is simultaneously the glorious figure of Daniel 7:13–14 who receives all dominion and the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 — in this moment, both converge. He is not passively overtaken by sinners; he is knowingly, sovereignly handed over.
Matthew 26:46 — "Arise, Let's Be Going" The command egeiresthe, agōmen — "Rise, let us go" — is one of the most electrifying moments in all the Gospels. Jesus does not flee. He moves toward Judas and the arresting party. The same verb egeirō (to rise, to be raised) will resonate throughout the Passion and Resurrection narratives; even here, the Resurrection is embedded in the grammar of the Passion. This is not the language of a victim but of a high priest purposefully advancing to sacrifice. Chrysostom marveled at this: "He who could have escaped by a thousand means, went forward of His own accord." The announcement "he who betrays me is at hand" is spoken without bitterness or panic — it is nearly liturgical in its calm. In John's account (18:4–8), Jesus steps forward and speaks his own identity ("I am he") with such authority that the soldiers fall to the ground. Matthew's "Arise, let's be going" is the willed beginning of that same movement.
Catholic tradition reads these verses through the lens of Christ's two natures and one divine Person — the mystery defined at the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) and explored with penetrating depth by the Third Council of Constantinople (681 AD), which affirmed two wills in Christ. The Agony in the Garden is, for Catholic theology, the supreme demonstration of this: a human will that truly shudders, truly suffers, and yet freely, obediently aligns itself with the divine will. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the Son of God…could in his human knowledge have a real experience of suffering" (CCC 472) and that his human will "did not resist or oppose but rather submitted to his divine and all-powerful will" (CCC 475, citing the Third Council of Constantinople). This is not stoicism; it is sacrificial love operating through a fully human psychology.
St. Thomas Aquinas (ST III, q. 18, a. 5–6) elaborates that Christ's sensory appetite recoiled from suffering — as it naturally should — while his rational will, perfectly ordered to the Father, embraced it. There is no contradiction here, only the integrity of true humanity in union with divine love.
The threefold prayer also invites a Trinitarian reading. Pope Benedict XVI in Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week writes that in Gethsemane "the human will of Jesus is inserted into the Father's will…this is the fundamental act of prayer." For Catholics, this passage grounds the entire theology of intercessory and contemplative prayer: true prayer is always a movement toward conformity with God's will, not an attempt to overcome it.
Finally, "the hour" — hē hōra — is a term of Paschal theology. The Catechism (CCC 729) identifies it as the hour of Jesus' glorification through his Passion, directly connecting Gethsemane to the Paschal Mystery that the Church re-presents in every celebration of the Eucharist.
In a culture saturated with the avoidance of suffering — through distraction, medication of existential discomfort, and the cult of frictionless ease — the third prayer of Gethsemane offers a radically counter-cultural word. Jesus does not pray once, get no answer, and give up. He returns. He asks again. He submits again. For a contemporary Catholic, this passage is a model for the dark night of unanswered prayer: the willingness to bring the same petition a third time, and to find — not the removal of the cup, but the strengthening to carry it.
Practically, verse 46 speaks directly to the paralysis of dread. Many Catholics face moments — a diagnosis, a broken relationship, an unavoidable confrontation — where they know what must be done but cannot make themselves move. "Arise, let's be going" is Jesus' own word spoken from within the worst moment of his human life. He did not wait for the fear to pass. He rose before it did. The spiritual application is concrete: when the hour of your particular cross arrives, the prayer of Gethsemane is not meant to remove it but to make you capable of rising and walking toward it with him.