See: Luke 22:35-38, 51-53 & 22:39-46
You know in the Gospel of John, Jesus never actually asks God to 'take the cup' of His impending sacrifice away from Him. He insists that He will NOT ask God to take the cup away. It is an interesting shift from the other Gospels.
In John, Jesus comes off as someone fully aware of all that will happen to Him, and ultimately as one who is in control of everything that is going on around Him. Jesus is rather triumphant throughout, even when facing suffering and death. Not so in the synoptics. There Jesus comes off as very human, as someone halting and internally conflicted. This is especially true of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus seems like a person who is conflicted about what is going on and what He is about to do. The passages listed above include an interesting part of the story of Jesus' arrest. At first Jesus tells his disciples to bring swords with them to the Garden of Gethsemane. It sounds as if Jesus is, finally, going to acquiesce to the desires of His disciples and the Jewish people, and start a genuine military uprising. Then, when Peter cuts off the ear of one of the arresters, Jesus cries 'enough of this', and stops the action, and gives Himself over to certain suffering and death.
I feel like Jesus is not someone who has full knowledge of all that was going on around Him. I have no doubt that Jesus felt like He was the messiah, but I think He was never fully aware of what this exactly meant. He comes off as someone struggling with His self-identity as Christ. It is like He's thinking, "okay, I'm called to be the savior, but what does it mean to be savior?" The temptations in the desert (Luke 4), indicate to me that He had come to see military and political salvation as a terrible temptation. Rather, He went with the Isaiah vision of the Suffering Servant, and made this central part of His 'messianic theology', ie, what He came to believe it meant to be Messiah.
But the temptation to political solutions for the world's problems was a real one, and it seemed to hound Him all the way to the end. These strange passages, which seem so out of place to many Christians, betray an uncertainty within Jesus. It is as if at the end He wavered in His conviction, and entertained political messianic thoughts. When He saw the results of Peter's awkward attack, He snaps back. He stops the whole thing for in that moment He finds his conviction once again: salvation comes through faith in God alone, and political and military uprisings will do more than continue the sickness of the world, rather than cure it.
Many Christians have a problem with this reconstruction because it indicates that Jesus isn't fully aware of His divinity. But I think this is likely true. Jesus throughout His ministry comes off as someone who is thinking, growing, maturing, and coming to a deeper self-awareness as time goes by. Besides, the whole point of Jesus is that God experiences the full range of human suffering and sin. We are supposed to be unable to really turn to God any more and say, 'well you don't know what its like', for God's suffering as a human matches or exceeds our own. And the worst part of human suffering is uncertainty and unknowing. It is the confusion and lack of clarity that suffering causes that truly oppresses us. Nietzsche was right when he said that a man can take any 'how' if you give him a 'why'. The real pain of human existence is suffering without a why, is suffering with a sense of meaninglessness. So if Jesus avoids this pain, then can we truly retain the sense that in Jesus man's plight is brought into the very heart of God, and therefore overcome.
Jesus is, in my view, God incarnate, fully God and fully man. But how this works is a mystery to anyone. It is no more mysterious if Jesus knew He was God than if He did not. Either way, we cannot really fully fathom what the Incarnation is all about (though I think we should try.) In the end the real miracle of the incarnation is what happened on the cross when Jesus, God incarnate, turns to Father, equally God, and says "why have you forsaken me?" In that moment the whole of human life, every aspect and every suffering is brought into the heart of divinity. We cannot blame God for the suffering of the world, for to do this would be to blame the victim. Some deny Jesus is divine in this moment. I say this is a supreme mistake, as I've argued before. Look here and you will see your ultimate unity with God. Here is oneness with the divine. But it only makes sense if the halting, human Jesus we see in the Gospels was what He appeared to be, while also being fully, but invisibly, God.
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