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There is a very great spiritual importance in the fact that Jesus sleeps. In this sleep of Jesus, A VERY GREAT MISTAKE INTO WHICH WE ARE APT TO FALL IS CORRECTED OR PREVENTED; the mistake, I mean, of silently assuming that Christ, being Divine, takes nothing as we do, and is really not under our human conditions far enough to suffer exhaustions of nature by work or by feeling, by hunger, the want of sleep, dejections or recoils of wounded sensibility. Able to do even miracles — to heal the sick, or cure the blind, or raise the dead, or still the sea — we fall into the impression that His works really cost Him nothing, and that while His lot appears to be outwardly dejected, He has, in fact, an easy time of it. Exactly contrary to this, He feels it, even when virtue goes out only from the hem of His garment. And when He gives the word of healing, it is a draft, we know not how great, upon His powers. In the same way every sympathy requires all expenditure of strength proportioned to the measure of that sympathy. Every sort of tension, or attention, every argument, teaching, restraint of patience, concern of charity, is a putting forth with cost to Him, as it is to us. Notice also more particularly THE CONDITIONS OR BESTOWMENTS OF THE SLEEP OF JESUS AND ESPECIALLY THEIR CORRESPONDENCE WITH HIS REDEMPTIVE UNDERTAKING. Saying nothing of infants, who in a certain proper sense are called innocent, there have been two examples of full-grown innocent sleep in our world: that of Adam in the garden, and that of Christ the second Adam, whose nights overtook Him with no place where to bestow Himself. And the sleep of both, different as far as possible in the manner, is yet more exactly appropriate, in each, to his peculiar work and office. One is laid to sleep in a paradise of beauty, lulled by the music of birds and running brooks, shaded and sheltered by the over-hanging trees, shortly to wake and look upon a kindred nature standing by, offered him to be the partner and second life of his life. The other, as pure and spotless as he, and ripe, as he is not, in the unassailable righteousness of character, tears Himself away from clamorous multitudes that crowd upon Him suing piteously for His care, and drops, even out of miracle itself, on the hard plank deck, or bottom, of a fisherman's boat, and there, in lightning and thunder and tempest, sheeted as it were in the general wrath of the waters and the air, He sleeps — only to wake at the supplicating touch of fear and distress. One is the sleep of the world's Father; the other that of the world's Redeemer. One has never known as yet the way of sin, the other has come into the tainted blood and ruin of it, to bear and suffer under it, and drink the cup it mixes; so to still the storm and be a reconciling peace. Both sleep in character. Were the question raised which of the two will be crucified, we should have no doubt. Visibly, the toil-worn Jesus, He that takes the storm, curtained in it as by the curse — He is the Redeemer. His sleep agrees with His manger birth, His poverty, His agony, His cross; and what is more, as the cross that is maddening in His enemies is the retributive disorder of God's just penalty following their sin, so the fury of that night shadows it all the more fitly, that what He encounters in it is the wrathful cast of Providence.

(Dr. Bushnell.)

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KJV: And the same day, when the even was come, he saith unto them, Let us pass over unto the other side.

WEB: On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let's go over to the other side."