When I read casually through the blogosphere, I find that fewer and fewer people believe the kinds of things that Dr. MacLeod is saying below. I think we are poorer for it.

It is clear from all the accounts that Jesus’ experience of turmoil and anguish was both real and profound. His sorrow was as great as a man could bear, his fear convulsive, his astonishment [very near] paralyzing. He came within a [hair] of break-down. He faced the will of God as raw holiness… in its most acute form: and it terrified him. Long ago, at his baptism, he had publicly embraced the Messianic role, identifying himself totally with his people. In the temptations in the desert he had already faced some of the implications of his position, as the Enemy quickly unleashed three massive assaults. But the full implications of being the Servant and the Ransom dawned on him only gradually, as he reflected on the Scriptures, observed sin at work and communed with his Father. In [the Garden of] Gethsemane the whole, terrible truth strikes home. The hour of reckoning has come. Now is the last moment to escape. Beyond it there can be no turning back.

When Moses saw the glory of God on Mount Sinai, so terrifying was the sight that he trembled with fear. But that was God in covenant: God in grace. What Christ saw in Gethsemane was God with the sword raised. The sight was unbearable. In a few short hours, he would stand before that God answering for the sin of the world: indeed, identified with the sin of the world. He became, as Luther said, ‘the greatest sinner that ever was’. Consequently, to quote Luther again, ‘No one ever feared death so much as this man.’  He feared it because for him it was no “sleep”, but the wages of sin: death with the sting; death unmodified and unmitigated; death as involving all that sin deserved. He, alone, would face it without a… ‘covering’, providing by his very dying the only covering for the world, but doing so as a holocaust, totally exposed to God’s [hatred] of sin. And he would face death without God, … deprived of the one solace and the one resource which had always been there.

The wonder of the love of Christ for his people is not that for their sake he faced death without fear, but that for their sake he faced it, terrified. Terrified by what he knew, and terrified by what he did not know, he took damnation lovingly.  (Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ, pgs. 174-5)