The Cost of Drowsiness
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
I am going to do something a little dangerous this morning. I am going to defend the disciples who kept falling asleep.
Praise God we’re a small church in the middle of nowhere or it might be the next big church scandal. Hopefully you all trust me enough to bear with me as I explain my defense of the disciples.
Every time we come to the Garden of Gethsemane, and every time we read that the disciples fell asleep, while Jesus was praying, the natural response is a collective eye roll.
How could they?
Jesus himself asked them to stay awake. He was right there. He told them, in plain language, that his soul was “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” Yet, it’s like their eyes were superglued shut.
Not once. Not twice. Three times he came back, three times he found them sleeping, and by the third time he had, essentially given up trying to wake them. We read this and think, of all the moments to fall asleep. Of all the times to fail. What were they thinking?
But here’s my defense of the disciples, and I want you to receive it carefully, because it cuts in two directions at once. They fell asleep for the same reasons we fall asleep. They were tired. They were grieved. The hour was late.
Their bodies were doing exactly what human bodies do when pushed past their limits, and offered a soft patch of ground in a quiet garden.
Luke, the physician, tends to notice these things. He adds a detail that Matthew and Mark leave out, he tells us the disciples were sleeping “because of sorrow.”
Grief, it turns out, is exhausting in a way that is almost impossible to explain unless you have been through it. It does not keep you sharp and alert. It exhausts you and puts you to sleep.
So yes, they failed. But they failed in a very human way. Which is precisely why this passage is in the Bible. Not so we can feel superior to Peter and James and John. But so we can recognize ourselves in them.
Because, the hard question this morning, is not “How could they fall asleep?”
Rather, It’s “What did their drowsiness cost?”
Which leads to a very personal question, “What is my drowsiness costing me, right now?”
If you have your Bibles and want to follow along we’re going to be in Matthew 26:36–46, and let the text teach us on its own terms, as it speaks into our own experience of spiritual sleepiness.
We need to start with the setting in the Garden.
The Setting in the Garden
The Setting in the Garden
(Matthew 26:36–38)
Matthew 26 begins with Jesus and his disciples arriving at a place called Gethsemane, which means “oil press” in Aramaic. It was an olive grove on the western slope of the Mount of Olives, just across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem.
Jesus had been there many times before, in fact John 18:2 tells us that Judas knew where to find him because, Jesus often met there with His disciples. It was a place of retreat, of prayer, of regular communion with the Father.
On this particular night however, the atmosphere changed dramatically. Judas has already left the table. The bread and the cup have been shared. Jesus washed their feet, and told the disciples exactly what is coming.
By the time they reach Gethsemane, every one of them has been awake for 12 or more hours, fed a full meal, and were subjected to a level of theological and emotional intensity that would exhaust anyone.
Jesus takes Peter, James, and John, His inner three, the ones who were present at the Transfiguration, the ones He trusted with the most intimate moments of His ministry.
Here He brings them further into the garden. Then He says something that should stop us in our tracks, every time we read it.
38 Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
Notice what Jesus asks for. He doesn’t ask them to pray for him, though He could have. He doesn’t ask them to stand guard, though that would soon become relevant. He asks them to keep watch with Him.
The preposition matters, not “for me,” as though they are sentinels. But “with me.” He’s asking for company. He is asking for presence. He is, in the most profound sense, asking them not to leave him alone in the dark.
This is Jesus in the full reality of His humanity, and it should stop us cold. The One, through whom all things were made, is asking three overly exhausted fishermen to please stay awake.
Look at His prayer and the pattern.
The Prayer and the Pattern
The Prayer and the Pattern
(Matthew 26:39–44)
Jesus goes a little further and falls with his face to the ground, the posture of someone, before God, bearing an unbearable weight, and he prays:
39 “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
We could spend an entire series just on this prayer. There is a lifetime of theology in those two sentences. But for our purposes this morning, I want to draw your attention to what happens immediately after Jesus prays it. He returns to the disciples. And he finds them sleeping.
40 Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter.
One hour. That is all he asked. Sixty minutes. Most of us can hold our attention through a Netflix episode that is considerably longer than that, especially if snacks involved. The disciples couldn’t hold attention, with the Lord, for one hour.
Now, before we judge them too harshly, we should honestly ask ourselves, how often we manage it. How often does our prayer time last sixty focused, and genuinely present minutes?
How often does our attention wander long before an hour is up? We get pulled away by a notification, a stray thought or, the completely reasonable awareness, that the ceiling is very interesting?
Jesus then gives one of the most psychologically insightful commands in all of Scripture.
41 Stay awake and pray, so that you won’t enter into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
There it is, as my wife would say, the diagnosis. The spirit is willing, there is something in these men that genuinely wants to be present, wants to honor Jesus, wants to stay awake.
It’s not that the disciples didn’t care. They cared deeply. Peter had just declared, hours earlier, that he would go to prison and to death with Jesus. And he meant it. His spirit was willing. But the flesh was weak.
The flesh, in this context, IS NOT the body, the physical self. Jesus is talking about what makes up our character, our integrity, our desires, He’s talking about the soul. He says, the flesh doesn’t always cooperate with what the spirit desires.
The weakness of the flesh isn’t an excuse. Jesus says, “watch and pray” precisely because, the weakness of the flesh IS NOT inevitable. It’s manageable, through disciplined prayer, staying connected to God.
The disciples’ failure in the garden was not that they were human, it was that they tried to sustain spiritual presence with fleshly willpower alone. Without prayer, willpower alone is never enough.
Jesus prays a second time,
42 Again, a second time, he went away and prayed, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.”
He returns again,
43 And he came again and found them sleeping, because they could not keep their eyes open.
Matthew almost sympathetically adds that “they could not keep their eyes open.”
Then a third time,
44 After leaving them, he went away again and prayed a third time, saying the same thing once more. 45 Then he came to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting?
Three times he prayed. Three times he returned. Three times he found them in the same condition. This is not incidental. The repetition in the text is the text pointing out the disciples were not momentarily inattentive.
They were structurally, repeatedly, fundamentally unable to hold the watch they had been asked to hold. This is what the pattern of spiritual drowsiness looks like, not one dramatic failure, but a repeated, habitual inability to stay present.
Now I want to talk about cost. Because Jesus does not simply note that the disciples have failed to watch. The text immediately shows us what their absence cost.
The Cost of Sleeping in the Garden
The Cost of Sleeping in the Garden
(Matthew 26:45–46)
In verse 45, something shifts. Jesus returns to the disciples for the last time and the tone has changed entirely:
45 Then he came to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? See, the time is near. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.
Jesus asks a rhetorical question, “Are you still sleeping and resting?” In the Greek, it carries the quality of resigned amazement. It’s like us saying “I can’t believe you fell asleep, again!”
It’s not rage, not contempt. It’s more like heartbreak with a raised eyebrow. Which, if you have ever been in ministry, is a very familiar combination. Their sleep cost them dearly.
While they were sleeping, Judas had finalized the betrayal. The chief priests had assembled their servants. The crowd with swords and clubs were already on the way.
The arrest, the trials, the abandonment, all of it was already in motion. And the disciples slept through the prologue to all of it. Now, I want to be careful here, because this is where the text can be misread and I don’t want you to misunderstand me.
The disciples’ sleep did not cause the crucifixion. Jesus went to the cross because that was the Father’s will, because it was the purpose for which He was sent. God’s redemptive plan was not derailed by three tired men in an olive grove. No amount of wakeful prayer from the disciples would have changed that.
But, here’s the point I want you to grasp. Their sleep cost them personally and spiritually. They were not watchfully present for the most important hour of Jesus’ life. They weren’t awake when He needed them most.
They didn’t get the experience of having held the watch, of having stayed in the dark with Him, of having been faithful in the one hour He asked of them. And that absence shaped them both personally and spiritually. Peter’s triple denial a few hours later doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Something had already been lost in the garden.
There’s an important principle for us here. You see, spiritual sleepiness doesn’t just leave us unchanged. It leaves us more vulnerable.
When we consistently fail to stay awake, to pray, to attend to God, to remain present, especially in the difficult hours, we don’t just simply miss out on good experiences.
We arrive at our moments in darkness less prepared, less grounded, less anchored than we would have been had we stayed awake.
Peter was a brave man. He genuinely intended to die for Jesus. But brave intentions with an empty prayer life, only carry you so far. When the servant girl looked at Peter in the firelight and said, “You also were with that Galilean,” Peter needed reserves he hadn’t built.
He needed oil he hadn’t stored. And so he denied. Three times. Matching, in a terrible symmetry, the three times he had fallen asleep. I’m not picking on the disciples here, I’m showing what this says about our own drowsiness.
Gethsemane Teaches Us About Our Own Drowsiness
Gethsemane Teaches Us About Our Own Drowsiness
It may seem like I didn’t defend the disciples much. That’s because the defense is also an indictment. The defense is that they were human, their failure is understandable, maybe even expected. But their failure had real consequences.
So, what does the garden of Gethsemane say to us about the places in our own lives where we have been sleeping?
Drowsiness is often grief in disguise.
First, drowsiness is often grief in disguise.
Luke tells us the disciples slept “because of sorrow.” I think this is one of the most compassionate details in all four Gospels. They weren’t lazy, they weren’t indifferent. They were grieving, and grief put them to sleep.
If we’re in a season where prayer has become difficult, where Scripture feels flat, where church attendance feels like a heavy obligatio,n rather than a living gift, then we need to ask ourselves if we’re tired in the way that grief makes us tired.
Suffering, loss, chronic stress, sustained uncertainty, these are forms of grief, and they’re exhausting. God meets that exhaustion with compassion, not condemnation. Jesus did not disown the disciples for sleeping in the garden. He woke them up. He gave them another chance, three times. And when they still fell asleep He went to the cross for them anyway.
Watchfulness requires the partnership of prayer.
Watchfulness must be paired with prayer.
“Watch and pray,” Jesus says. Not “watch.” Not “pray.” Both, together, as a single compound discipline. Yet we tend to separate them. We think we can stay spiritually alert through self-discipline, through sheer determination, through the force of our own good intentions.
And we can, for a while. But the flesh is weak. There will come an hour, and probably many hours, when willpower runs out. The disciples’ error was not that they were tired. It was that they tried to stay awake by fleshly willpower alone.
Paul says it plainly in
26 In the same way the Spirit also helps us in our weakness, because we do not know what to pray for as we should, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with inexpressible groanings.
The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We don’t sustain watchfulness through gritted teeth. We sustain it through ongoing, honest, and even sometimes desperate prayer. Because, the hour will come eventually.
The hour will come eventually.
Verse 45 says: “Look, the hour has come.” It always does. There is always a Judas making his way through the darkness. There’s always a moment of testing, a crisis of faith, a conversation where everything depends on what we do in the next sixty seconds.
We don’t get to choose when those hours arrive. We only get to choose, in all the days before them, whether we’ve been prayerfully keeping watch.
The garden isn’t a cautionary tale about a single night two thousand years ago. It’s a mirror for every life that has sleepwalked through ordinary days and eventually blindsided by an extraordinary one.
Conclusion: Rise, Let Us Go
However, we can take some comfort from the words in verse 46. because They may be among the most under-preached words in the Passion narrative. After the question, “Are you still sleeping?,” and after the announcement, “The hour has come,” Jesus says this,
“Rise! Let us go!”
Rise. Let us go. Not, “Stay there and think about what you’ve done.” Not, “I’ll handle this alone, since you clearly can’t be trusted.”
Jesus says, “Rise. Let us go.” Together. He woke them up, and then He invited them to walk with Him into the very thing He pleaded the Father remove. That’s the grace in the story!
Don’t miss it. The disciples failed the watch. Jesus didn’t dismiss them. He woke them up and brought them along.
Yes, they scattered when the arrest happened. Yes, Peter denied him three times before the rooster crowed. But they came back!!
They were in the upper room on Resurrection Sunday. They were at the sea of Galilee when Jesus cooked breakfast on the shore. They were in Jerusalem when the Spirit fell upon them at Pentecost. Failed watchers became the foundation of the church.
Peter, who fell asleep three times, Peter who denied Him three times, that Peter became the rock Jesus built His church on.
Because Jesus, in His grace, doesn’t wait until we’re fully awake before He calls us to follow Him. He calls us while we can’t keep our eyes open. He calls us out of our sleep, onto the road. Then He walks with us, and the walking is what wakes us up.
The cost of drowsiness is real. We’ve seen it in this text. Missed presence. Squandered preparation. A vulnerability to temptation that we didn’t have to carry.
These are genuine losses, and this sermon would be dishonest if it minimized them. But the cost is not the last word. The last word belongs to the One who, after finding the disciples sleeping three times, still said “Rise,” still said “Let us go.” And still went to the cross for the very men who COULD NOT stay awake for an hour.
That is the Gospel the Garden of Gethsemane contains. It’s not that we are hopeless sleepers, who deserve what we get. Rather IT IS that grace is stronger than our drowsiness, and the call to wake up is itself an act of mercy and grace.
Those words Jesus spoke in the dark weren’t just for the disciples. He speaks those words to us today. So, hear those words Jesus speaks to us one last time this morning.
Rise! Let us go!
Because, the hour is always later than we think. But, the grace, is always greater than we fear.
