The Sweat of Blood

Immediately following the story of Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan, we hear the story of his temptation in the wilderness. This period of trial, analogous to the forty year wandering of the Children of Israel in the Sinai Peninsula, is a preparation for the public inauguration of Jesus’ ministry. The temptation story concludes: “The devil left him, and suddenly the angels ministered to him.”

The ministration of angels does not, however, signal an end to his trial. After John’s arrest Jesus starts his public ministry of preaching, teaching and healing, stories in which demonic powers are commonly mentioned. In what is generally regarded as a summary statement of Jesus’ ministry, we hear this summary of a single day’s work: “And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.”

The gospels themselves do not sort out, at least to our satisfaction, the relationship between demonic possession, sin, and illness. The story of the man born blind in John’s gospel certainly raises a caution about any straight and logical connection between sin and disease. And Jesus’ own commitment to those, who in virtue of their illness, were regarded as ritually unclean, gives a telling example of how we ought to regard the sick, as persons deserving our care and not our blame.

Still, though in admittedly strange language, the stories about Jesus are stories about conflict, about his rebuking the powers that bind and imprison people, the powers that leave people excluded, ignored, or the object of public ridicule. It isn’t entirely alien to modern thought, to acknowledge we find ourselves, both from within and without, caught up in patterns of thought and behavior, both personal and social, by which we feel caught. Simply, we ask, “Why did I DO that?” “What was I thinking when I SAID that?” And there is always the larger question about the social and environmental ills of which we are, in part, guilty, but not by open and conscious intention. We have not decided to increase global temperatures, and what role did we have in deciding whether the United States would invade Iraq. Our destruction isn’t a simple matter of choice; it is something into which we are drawn and caught. At this level, I think it makes good sense to consider the rigor of Jesus’ conflict. He did not save us by being nice. He saved us by breaking the chains that bind us.

In a sense, Jesus, because he is incarnate, because he takes our human flesh from the womb of his mother, is in the conflict which we know to be our own lives. He is one of us. He feels what it is to be pulled and torn, his empathies go out to all our sufferings and doubts as if each is his own. He who knew no sin could nonetheless feel the full weight of it. The mystery here needs to be seen from two directions. On the one hand he is what we are, and receives his humanity from his human mother. Yet he is the Son of the Father, and therefore, in being united to us, gives us something we cannot have on our own. He confers his own life. This divine life enters each and every conflict.

In his desert temptations, he acknowledges that he is to live “from every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Toward the end of the story, he says, “Worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.” His total self-dedication to the Father, which is his eternal vocation, is felt with all human anguish. His conflicts were real. One of his most significant struggles, the one to which I want to focus special attention, though with very few words, is his struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Following the Last Supper in which he again predicted his betrayal and death, Jesus went out to pray, “as was his custom,” St. Luke says. In this time of prayer, seeing a real truth of his impending passion, his humanity not only runs in his veins, but falls from his body upon the ground. St. Luke says, “and he prayed the more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling on the ground. (Lk. 22:43) Here we see it for the first time—his body and blood—which is at the same time our body and blood. He has entered into all of human history. He is in agony.

Of course the great temptation is to leave. “Father let this cup pass from me.” But then he lives only from the words that come from the mouth of the Father, “not my will, but your will be done.” Jesus’ life was a sustained conflict felt with full human emotion. But to every single suffering, to every hurt, to every disease, to every torment of mind or soul, he brings the balm of a divine grace, and he acts as the great Physician.