Christian devotional and pastoral tradition has consistently returned to the Gethsemane prayer as a model for how honest resistance to suffering and submission to God's purpose can coexist within a single prayer rather than one canceling the other, a reading that has made the passage a common pastoral resource for people praying through grief, illness or fear rather than only a text studied for its Christological content.
The prayer's repeated structure, Jesus withdrawing to pray three times while the disciples fail three times to stay awake, has also been read as a deliberate narrative counterpoint, the disciples' failure of watchfulness set directly against Jesus's persistence in prayer under far greater distress than the sleepiness that defeats them.
In Roman Catholic devotion, Gethsemane forms one of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary, meditated on specifically for the theme of submission to God's will amid suffering, and the scene is a standard subject of Good Friday and Holy Week liturgy and preaching across many Christian traditions. Its closing note of resolve, moving from prayer directly into confronting arrest without further hesitation, has also been read as marking the narrative hinge at which the Passion narrative shifts from anticipation into action.