I think that Christ endured the pains of hell in that very delightful place. Therefore He hated it and called it Gehenna. For when He prayed in the garden, He was in Gehenna and hell. Perhaps the tree of the knowledge of good and evil also stood there. To that valley, then, the Savior had to go and sweat blood, and this sweat testifies abundantly that He tasted death, which is hell. Therefore He does not call it a rich valley; He does the opposite and, like Jeremiah, calls it Gehenna or a valley of slaughter.
Thus Christ, our Lord and Deliverer, was in hell itself for
us all; for He truly felt death and hell in His body. But what He did or felt
after leaving the body we, of course, do not know. But in life and body He
truly tasted hell.
I do not think that His suffering on the cross was so great
as this suffering in the garden, because nature could not have endured it. And
the fact that He was able to bear such a struggle—a struggle that drew the
blood from His body—was truly something great. Luke says: “His sweat became
like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground” (22:44). It was not
only water; it was pure blood dripping from His body upon the ground.
Source: Martin Luther, Luther’s
Works, Vol. 7: Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 38-44, ed. Jaroslav Jan
Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 7 (Saint Louis:
Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 302