Matthew 26:45

Matthew 26:45

Too Late.

In these words our Lord means: "It is too late. The opportunity is lost and gone. The time for watching and praying is over; you have let it escape you. You may as well sleep now. Alas! there is now nothing to be done; you must now enter, as you may, into temptation." If this be the true account of the words as first spoken, we shall readily think of ways in which they come home to us.

I. They have a direct bearing upon the whole subject of temptation. Christ, who loves us, bids us watch and pray, lest we enter into temptation. This, beforehand. The traitor was not yet in sight with his band and his weapons. The high priest's servants, who were to be the human tempters, were themselves sleeping unconscious. This is the time for watching and praying before the temptation comes. Mark that well. It is the moral of the whole. Remember there is a prayer which comes too late; there is a prayer which even contradicts itself in the asking; there is a prayer which asks to be kept safe under the temptation which we are going in quest of.

II. "Sleep on now, and take your rest." The words have a meaning also as respects opportunity. God gives us all a multitude of opportunities, and with respect to all He says to us, "Watch and pray;" "Occupy till I come." We will not, we never see, never feel the sacred aspect of these things. Each opportunity as it is towards God, is also, as towards man, a possibility of selfishness. There is not a relation in which we stand one to another, which may not be taken as a selfishness and refused as an opportunity. One by one, these are withdrawn. He who once said, "Watch and pray," says at last, "Sleep on now, and take your rest."

III. This saying, which is so true and so solemn as to the several opportunities which God here gives us, is not less so in its bearing upon that total sum of all opportunities which is the life. When Christ at last comes, and finds us still sleeping; then He is compelled to say else He could be trifled with, else He were not the Judge, He were not the Faithful One and the True He is compelled to say, "Sleep on now, and take your rest." The time is gone by. "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."

C. J. Vaughan, Lessons of the Cross and Passion,p. 1.