“Can you help me?” It’s a vulnerable question. It exposes our need, confesses weakness, and risks rejection. It’s painful to ask for help only to be dismissed, misunderstood, or ignored. Likewise, being asked for help can expose one’s own insufficiencies, requiring sacrifice of time, comfort, and resources, threatening our selfishness and our idols.

Yet “Can you help me?” is unavoidable. We were created for dependence. In Eden, God declared, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him” (Gen 2:18). Needing help is not a flaw — it’s part of God’s design. If that was true before sin entered the world, how much more so after the fall? Refusing to seek help is rejecting God’s design. Moreover, as Christians, we are obligated to help the weak (see 1 Thess 5:14; Acts 20:35; Rom 15:1). Helping — even when it is costly and hard — is not optional. To refuse to be a helper is to refuse to follow Christ.

Where can we turn when we need help — or when we are called to give it? We turn to Jesus, who not only needed help but also gives it perfectly.

Maundy Thursday, a Day Crucial in the Significance of Holy Week

What is Maundy Thursday, or Holy Thursday? The day marks a significant part of Holy Week. Maundy Thursday begins the Paschal Triduum, the three days that follow, of Jesus’ passion, crucifixion, death, burial, and resurrection. On Maundy Thursday, Christians remember Jesus at the Last Supper, where, with his disciples, he predicted his betrayal and arrest. And Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, where these events occurred.

This day is a significant one for Holy Week, the week of Easter. Days before his victory over death, we find Jesus in weakness. Here, Jesus shows us what it means to need help.

Jesus, A Weak Man Who Needed Help

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus shows us what it means to need help. He was a weak man facing a significant crisis, emotionally and physically overwhelmed, seeking help from a sympathetic witness.

Jesus was a weak man. Jesus told his snoozing disciples, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matt 26:41). Jesus distinguished “between man’s physical weakness and the noble desires of his will,” D.A. Carson writes in a commentary on Matthew. We all know this experience — we desire to do a good thing, and our body fails us.

Jesus’ anecdote is, “Stay awake and pray that, so that you don’t enter into temptation” — the very thing he does. He perseveres in prayer because his flesh is weak and will fail unless he receives divine help, which he does. “Then an angel from heaven appeared to him, strengthening him” (Luke 22:43). You can’t strengthen what isn’t weak. Despite being God in the flesh, Jesus needed help to persevere to the end.

Jesus faced a significant crisis. “This cup” was God’s wrath against sin. “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many,” Matthew 20:28 tells us. By paying the price for sin, crucified under God’s wrath, Christ would ransom people for God. Jesus faced the greatest crisis imaginable, and he faced it in full human weakness, not as an unmoved Stoic, not as an unshaken superhero.

Jesus was emotionally and physically overwhelmed. Jesus was visibly depressed and anxious — “he began to be sorrowful and troubled” — Matthew 26:37. He even described himself as “deeply grieved to the point of death.” With “a sorrow so deep it almost kills,” Carson writes.

We read in Luke that Jesus’ anguish provoked a severe panic attack. “Being in anguish … his sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44). As the Indian Journal of Dermatology has defined it, hematidrosis occurs when “severe mental anxiety activates the sympathetic nervous system to invoke the stress-fight or flight reaction” so severely that the “capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture, causing them to exude blood.”

Charles Spurgeon, in The Gospel of the Kingdom, writes, “The tension upon his whole frame became so great that his life seemed oozing away through every pore of his body; and he was so weak and faint, through the terrible strain, that he might well fear that his human nature would sink under the awful trial, and that he would die before his time.”

Jesus sought help. Just as the first Adam needed a helper in Eden, the last Adam sought a helper in Gethsemane. Jesus took his closest three friends with him and “let them in on his depression,” as Douglas Sean O’Donnell writes in his book on Matthew. What does he want from them? To “remain here and stay awake” (Matt 26:38). “To give him the support of knowing that sympathetic friends were close by … so that he may go to them when the craving for sympathy becomes uppermost,” John A. Broadus wrote. Sadly, these friends, who only moments earlier swore they would never deny him, could not stay awake for an hour with Jesus. Nevertheless, he did not face agony alone.

Jesus’ primary purpose in the garden was seeking the help of his Father through prayer. “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me,” Jesus prayed. But, he adds, “Yet not as I will, but as you will.” If the Father will not help by removing the cup, then he must help his Son do his will.

Where Jesus’ friends failed, his Father came through. He would not allow his Son to be alone. So, he sent a personal, embodied, messenger to be with him — “An angel from heaven appeared to him, strengthening him,” Luke 22:43 says. This help enabled him to arise by faith and persevere to the grave.

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