From a previous post: This was also a telling time among those who knew Jesus more personally. The most difficult to understand in this group was Judas Iscariot. We know the divine plan required Jesus to be crucified, but it is a wrenching thing to think that one of His special witnesses who sat at His feet, heard Him pray, watched Him heal, and felt His touch could betray Him and all that for thirty pieces of silver. Never in the history of the world has so little money purchased so much infamy. We are not the ones to judge Judas’s fate, but Jesus said of His betrayer, “Good [were it] for that man if he had not been born.”7 continuing. . .
Of course others among the believers had their difficult moments as well. Following the Last Supper, Jesus left Peter, James and John to wait while He ventured into the Garden of Gethsemane alone. When He fell on his face in prayer, “sorrowful . . . even unto death,”8 the record says, His sweat came as great drops of blood 9 as He plead with the Father to let this crushing, brutal cup pass from Him. But, of course, it could not pass. Returning from such and anguished prayer, He found His three chief disciples asleep, prompting him to ask, “Could ye not watch with me one hour?”10 So it happens two more times, until on His third return He says compassionately, “Sleep on now, and take your rest,” though there would be no rest for Him.
Later, after Jesus’s arrest and appearance at trial, Peter, accused of knowing Jesus and being one of his, denies that accusation not once but three times. We don’t know all that was going on here, nor do we know of protective counsel that the Savior may have given His Apostles privately, 12 but we do know Jesus was aware that even these precious ones would not stand with Him in the end and He had warned Peter accordingly.13 Then, with the crowing of the cock,” The Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord. . . . and Peter went out and wept bitterly.”14
Thus, of divine necessity, the supporting circle around Jesus gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller, giving significance to Matthew’s words: “All the disciples [left] him, and fled.”15 Peter stayed near enough to be recognized and confronted. John stood at the foot of the cross with Jesus’s mother. Especially and always the blessed women in the Savior’s life stayed as close to Him as they could. But essentially His lonely journey back to His Father continued without comfort or companionship.~Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, To My Friends,(Salt Lake City, Deseret Book) 409-411 Dwarsligger® edition
Now I speak very carefully, even reverently, of what may have been the most difficult moment in all of this solitary journey to the Atonement. . . . ( continued with None Were With Him III.)
