Why did Jesus ask the apostles to stay awake?

Answer 1

A:In Mark chapter 14, Jesus went to pray in the Garden of Gethsemene, taking with him the disciples Peter, James and John. Leaving them to watch, Jesus went forward a little to pray. Jesus returned after one hour and found the disciples asleep, rebuking them for not being able to stay awake one hour. This occurred three times before the betrayal and arrest at precisely midnight.

There was no good reason for Jesus to expect the disciples to remain awake or to rebuke them for being unable to do so, but there was a literary reason for this. Mark's author divided the last twenty four hours in the life of Jesus into eight periods of just three hours each, so he needed this as a way of marking off time, to measure the three hours in the garden. We can see this in a fuller summary of the period from the start of the Last Supper:

• "When it was evening", or approximately 6 pm, Jesus and the disciples began the Last Supper.
• The duration of the Passover meal was three hours and it concluded with the singing of a hymn. So at the end of his segment Mark noted, "And when they had sung a hymn they went out to the Mount of Olives". It was about 9 p.m.
• Jesus and the disciples went to the Garden of Gethsemane, where his closest disciples, Peter, James and John, were not able to remain awake. "Could you not watch one hour?" Jesus asked. The process was repeated two more times. The disciples could not watch one, two or three hours. It was now midnight.
• The act of betrayal, the darkest deed in human history occurred at the stroke of midnight.
• Jesus was led away for a trial before the Sanhedrin. This governing body then judged him, on the basis of his messianic claim, to be worthy of death. It was 3:00 a.m.
• The watch of the night between 3 am and 6 am was called cockcrow. Mark now inserted his account of Peter's threefold denial of Jesus, once each hour until the cock crowed, marking the end of that phase of the night. That makes it 6 a.m.
• "As soon as it was morning", which would be 6 o'clock, Jesus was led by the chief priests, scribes and elders to Pontius Pilate for judgement.
• "It was the third hour", or 9 o'clock "when they crucified him".
• When "the sixth hour had come" (12 noon), as if on cue, darkness covered the whole earth for three hours, a counterpoint to the midnight betrayal.
• At the end of the three hours, at 3 p.m., Jesus said "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
• Jesus was buried in the final period from 3 to 6 p.m., before the sun went down and the Sabbath began.

This passage was copied more or less faithfully by the authors of Matthew and Luke, without consciously following the chronology of Mark.