Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. The three synoptists give this prayer in slightly varying terms; "but the figure of the cup is common to all the three; "it was indelibly impressed on tradition.
This cup, which Jesus entreats God to cause to pass from before ( παρά) his lips, is the symbol of that terrible punishment, the dreadful and mournful picture of which is traced before him at this moment by a skillful painter with extraordinary vividness.
The painter is the same who in the wilderness, using a like illusion, passed before his view the magical scene -f the glories belonging to the Messianic kingdom" (Godet). If thou be willing. He looked on in this supreme hour, just before "the Passion" really began, to the Crucifixion and all the horrors which preceded it and accompanied it—to the treason of Judas; the denial of Peter; the desertion of the apostles; the cruel, relentless enmity of the priests and rulers; the heartless abandonment of the people; the insults; the scourging: and then the shameful and agonizing lingering death which was to close the Passion; and, more dreadful than all, the reason why he was here in Gethsemane; why he was to drink this dreadful cup of suffering; the memory of all the sin of man!
To drink this cup of a suffering, measureless, inconceivable, the Redeemer for a moment shrank back, and asked the Father if the cross was the only means of gaining the glorious end in view—the saving the souls of unnumbered millions.
Could not God in his unlimited power find another way of reconciliation? And yet beneath this awful agony, the intensity of which we are utterly incapable of grasping—beneath it there lay the intensest desire that his Father's wish and will should be done.
That wish and will were in reality his own. The prayer was made and answered. It was not the Father's will that the cup should pass away, and the Son's will was entirely the same; it was answered by the gift of strength—strength from heaven being given to enable the Son to drink the cup of agony to its dregs.
How this strength was given St. Luke relates in the next verse.