John 18:1 Commentary and Bible Study

Now Christ goes to his humiliation. What lies before him is the Garden of Gethsemane and then Calvary? We take just a look at the Christian’s deliverer.‘When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his disciples over the brook,’ given to us in the King James Version as the brook Cedron, but we know it better as the brook Kidron. He proceeds at the conclusion of his prayer out of the city through the east gate, leaving the city wall, and there is the Kidron brook which ran only in times of flood and rain, otherwise a dry brook, and he proceeds towards the Mount of Olives. He goes to that garden, the Garden of Gethsemane. There is all kind of speculation about what lay there. The Garden of Gethsemane – the term means a press, an olive press. There were some constructions there and an olive press, probably a house. It is possible, but it is pure speculation, that the owner of the house of this particular garden was a disciple of Christ, and that is why they went there, but nobody knows. And there perhaps there was room for all the disciples to sleep or perhaps they slept in the open. John passes over the events of the Garden of Gethsemane. He does not so much as mention them, because they are in the other Gospels and this is the last Gospel. John knows that everyone knows about the Garden of Gethsemane and that foretaste of terrible suffering that Christ bore there and that his disciples slept. Here, of course, in the garden, the main purpose of John’s record is surely to show that Christ went voluntarily to Calvary, and the record of the sufferings in Gethsemane are really not entirely relevant to that theme which John moves swiftly into, and all through this eighteenth chapter you have evidences of the voluntary nature of Christ’s self-sacrifice, presentation of Himself. Even in this first verse the very entry into the Garden of Gethsemane: why, he knew all things, he knew perfectly well that Judas would assume he would be there that night, as on the previous night and the one before that; he knew this would be the place of his arrest. Well then, he could have gone somewhere else and that would have completely thwarted Judas. But no, he had spent this sequence of nights there so that Judas would know where to come; he would know where to bring the authorities who wanted to take him quietly by night because of his popularity with the crowds. So, even that first verse is an indication of Christ’s voluntary presentation of himself to humiliation and arrest in apparent weakness.