Holy Thursday ~ The Agony In The Garden

And being in anguish, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. ~ Luke 22:44

(Hematohidrosis ~ the condition of sweating blood, in which capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture, causing them to exude blood, occurring under extreme physical or emotional stress.)

I've always thought of The Agony In The Garden in terms of being just as heartbreaking (if not more so) as all the physical suffering that was still to come for Jesus. That awful dread of the unknown horrors that would soon arrive coupled with the knowledge of some of the burden that He was about to take on.

I read in a prayer book once that the great weight upon Jesus that night in the garden was the knowledge that He would soon bear the terrible trauma of taking on the guilt of sin for all mankind. Under the heavy burden of our sins, Jesus would for the first time ever, and for the one and only time ever, experience a separation from His Father.

That had to be an agony too great to bear. More ominous than any physical pain that was to come, there must have been for Him the enormous fear of that poverty of the soul.

Jesus had a unique and intimate relationship with God, a relationship that He was about to lose, a relationship that He was about to Sacrifice so that we could share this same unique and intimate relationship with God.

And He went a little farther, and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, "O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me: nevertheless not as I Will, but as Thou Will." ~ Matthew 26:39