Did Jesus pray to be spared the cross, or refuse to ask to be saved from that hour?

The passages describe two different occasions, John 12:27 spoken in public some days before the arrest and the Gethsemane prayer on the night of it, and in both Jesus shows the same two things: real human dread of what lay ahead, and a settled will to do his Father’s will.

In John, Jesus says “Now is my soul troubled” and asks himself what he should say. Whether the next words are read as a prayer that he at once sets aside, as the KJV punctuates them, or as a question, ‘shall I say, Father, save me from this hour?’, as Barnes and many modern versions take them, he immediately answers that “for this cause came I unto this hour” and prays “Father, glorify thy name” (John 12:28). In Gethsemane he does the same: he asks that the cup might pass only “if it be possible”, and at once adds “nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39). In neither place does he ask to be spared against the Father’s will. John knows of the cup too: at the arrest Jesus says, “the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” (John 18:11).

So the first three Gospels show the struggle and the surrender, and John shows the resolve, and in 12:27 the same struggle. Calvin describes John 12:27 as a prayer for deliverance that Jesus corrects at once, ‘that he may entirely acquiesce in the will of his Father’; Hebrews 5:7 speaks of the same prayers, offered “with strong crying and tears”.