SWEATING BLOOD IN THE GARDEN
When we look at the accounts of Jesus’ passion and death we see that what the gospel writers highlight is not Jesus’ physical suffering but his emotional anguish. Indeed, in the gospels, his physical sufferings are almost underplayed.
What’s emphasized instead is that Jesus was alone, abandoned, betrayed, morally lonely, hung out to dry, unanimity-minus- one.
What Jesus suffers is the emotional agony that sometimes comes on us as the price of love. The blood he was sweating was the blood of emotional crucifixion, the price of being faithful in love.
To be faithful requires that sometimes we have to enter a great loneliness: the loneliness of moral integrity, the loneliness of fidelity, the loneliness of duty, the loneliness of renouncing an overpowering desire, the loneliness of losing life so that we might find it in a higher way.
Jesus didn’t find it easy and neither do we. What love and fidelity ask will sometimes drive us to our knees in anguish and, like Jesus in Gethsemane, we will find ourselves begging God for a means to still have our own way in this, to have our cake and eat it too, to find some way around fidelity, vow, promise, and duty.
This is a lover’s anguish because the part in us that’s agonizing and resisting is that part of the heart that stewards intimacy, romance, and embrace. The lover in us is having to let go of some very precious things; it’s having to die to something for the sake of something else, and that’s emotionally crucifying.
The account of Jesus sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane is, among other things, a powerful mystical image that tells us it’s not enough simply to be sincere and follow the heart’s desires. Sometimes love and fidelity demand that, like Jesus, in anguish and tears, we say to God: “Much as I desperately want this, I can’t have it! Not my will, but yours, be done!”
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