“It is clear that this knowledge of his death must have somehow been withdrawn from him before he prayed in Gethsemane. He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father’s will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it would not. That is both a logical and psychological impossibility. You see what this involves? Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope – of suspense, anxiety- were at the last moment looser upon him – the supposed possibility that, after all, he might, he just conceivably might, be spared from the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had hern spared; he too at the last moment, he also against all apparent possibility. But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps he would not have been very man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be man.”
