When Christ Jesus entered the Garden of Gethsemane, he was accompanied by Peter, James, and John, three of his most trusted and loved disciples. But at a certain point he left them, and the Gospel of Matthew records that he himself "went a little further." Matt. 26:39; And so he did, for he traversed the infinite distance between the mortal and the divine, wherein he reached the highest point of earthly experience, that is, self-surrender or willingness to bring human will into absolute submission to the divine purposes. The disciples could not, at this time, have followed him, although later each of them undoubtedly had his own experience in subduing the mortal element in order that he might realize the spiritual.
The name Gethsemane has an awesome, majestic, lonely connotation for popular thought, and the common tendency is to turn away from any path which might lead toward the experience connected with it. The word itself has the original meaning of "an oil press," a machine in which olive berries are gently but firmly pressed in order to obtain the oil so valuable to the commerce of both the ancient and modern day. Regarded in the light of this definition, the familiar name assumes wider dimensions and fresher meaning.
Gethsemane impels one to yield up long-cherished desires and to submit to the divine will—whereupon all that is rich and precious in consciousness comes forth to hallow existence and glorify its purposes. This may begin as a disciplinary process, against which all that is personal and mortal in thought rebels, for human sense is prone to cling to false estimates of happiness, reluctant to yield them up, and resistant to any experience that challenges deeply entrenched ambitions or habits.
