The Fickleness of Friends.
I. "Then all the disciples forsook Him and fled." The cruelty of all this it would be hard to exaggerate. For three years and upwards their Divine Master had been building up their faith and binding them to Himself by a thousand heavenly arts. They had witnessed His miracles; they had heard His discourses; they had experienced His favours; they had been made the objects of His priceless love. Behold, the end is at last approaching the end of life. The extremity of suffering and the severest brunt of the conflict with the unseen world is even now at hand. He has washed their feet; He has made them partakers of His body and of His blood; He has prepared them for danger: more than that, He has made them privy to His own mysterious need of support and consolation, even of their human sympathy; He has exposed to them His secret sense of loneliness and desertion: "What, could ye not watch with Me onehour?" I have no wish to exaggerate the faithlessness of the eleven Apostles, or to detract from the severity of their trial. Our wisdom is rather to behold in their conduct an image of what would assuredly have been our own, had we been there. We are spectators, not judges; and we should be silent and sorrowful, if we would profit by what we are permitted to see of the transactions of the last night in the earthly life of the Son of Man.
II. A lesson of patience towards one another. A lesson of kindness and forbearance and long-suffering towards those whom we call our friends. This is the teaching of the incident we are now considering. We claim so much; any token of wavering constancy, any want of faithfulness to ourselves in our hour of need how prone we are to revenge it with coldness, and rebuke, and indignant displeasure! It is often the sign of a warm and faithful spirit which cannot brook in another what it especially would shrink from being guilty of itself. But, however we may explain it however palliate the offence an offence it is, and an offence against the Spirit of Him whom we serve, and whose holy name is called upon us. Let us be more patient, more long-suffering and less ready to take offence and rail against the world and its ways; remembering that thou hast bound no one on the earth's surface to thee nor canst bind as Christ bound the eleven, who, when they beheld Him apprehended in the garden, at once forsook Him and fled.
J. W. Burgon, Ninety-one Short Sermons,No. 38.
References: Matthew 26:30-34. Expositor,3rd series, vol. ii., p. 132.Matthew 26:31; Matthew 26:32. Homiletic Magazine,vol. xiv., p. 242.Matthew 26:31-46. Parker, Inner Life of Christ,vol. iii., p. 215.