The agony in Gethsemane MAT 26:39

Jesus takes Peter and the other two disciples into the olive grove and tells them his soul is sorrowful to the point of death. He then withdraws a short distance, falls on his face, and prays three times that the cup pass from him, each time submitting to the Father's will instead of his own. Each time he returns he finds the three asleep, and he wakes them for the last time as the torches of the arresting party arrive.

The prayer shows real human distress at the suffering ahead, since Jesus openly asks that the cup pass from him. But each of the three prayers ends the same way, with him choosing the Father's will over his own, so the passage holds both the honesty of his dread and his settled obedience together. Readers differ on which side to emphasize, but the text presents them side by side rather than one replacing the other.

Luke, who was a physician, describes the sweat falling like drops of blood, a comparison used to convey the extremity of Jesus's anguish in the garden. Some readers take this as pointing to a real physical condition in which intense stress produces blood-tinged sweat, while others read it simply as a vivid image of extreme distress. The text itself gives the detail as a likeness rather than spelling out which reading is intended.

Each time Jesus returns from praying he finds Peter and the other two asleep, even though he had wanted them near him in his distress. The passage does not explain why, it simply repeats the pattern three times, which highlights the gap between his solitary struggle and their inability to stay alert. The final time he wakes them is no longer about prayer but about the arrival of the torches, which moves the scene straight into the arrest.