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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
“Hematidrosis”: it is a thing, a real thing, though extremely rare. Blood or its color is excreted out of the skin (for example, after capillaries rupture around sweat glands) when a person is facing highly stressful events such as death (The Free Dictionary). The term “hematidrosis” is a combination of the Greek words for “blood” and “sweat”. Cases of hematidrosis were known before Jesus’s time (Lenski, ad loc Luke 22:44, p.1077; Marshall, ad loc Luke 22:44, p.832, citing Aristotle HA 3:19), and cases have been known after Jesus’s time, as well, but Jesus’s case of hematidrosis may be the one that is best known (WebMD). Jesus’s case comes in what one commentator calls “one of the most intense moments of the passion” (Just, ad loc Luke 22:39-46, p.861), which we heard about tonight as we continued hearing St. Luke’s Divinely‑inspired account of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. And, tonight we reflect on what may be considered the “second” of St. Luke’s unique contributions to the whole picture of our Lord’s suffering and death for us, namely, his reporting “The Strengthening Angel and the Bloody Sweat”.
Both “The Strengthening Angel and the Bloody Sweat” come on the Mount of Olives after Jesus withdrew from His disciples about a stone’s throw and knelt down and prayed His Father, if the Father was willing, to remove the cup of suffering from Jesus, asking not that Jesus’s will but the Father’s will be done (Luke 22:39-42). Listen again to Luke chapter 22, verses 43 and 44.
43 And there appeared to [Jesus] an angel from heaven, strengthening Him. 44 And being in agony He prayed more earnestly; and His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. (ESV)
Down through the ages, some manuscripts of St. Luke’s account have lacked those verses, perhaps because, as one scholar of the Bible’s text puts it, “some felt that the account of Jesus overwhelmed with human weakness was incompatible with his sharing the divine omnipotence of the Father” (Metzger, ad loc Lk 22:43-44, p.177). For better reasons taken as genuine, these verses certainly can make us appreciate more what our Savior suffered for us. As Jesus wrestled with submitting His will to the Father’s will, an angel from heaven appeared to Him (if not seen by the nearby sleeping disciples, then later reported to them), and, as the means of the Father, the angel was strengthening Jesus, Who, perhaps so strengthened, while being in agony (the only time that particular Greek word is used in the whole New Testament), prayed more earnestly, and exhibited the agony in the form of sweat that either compared to or was great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
How much do you and I wrestle with or “agonize” over submitting our will to God’s will? Would we come close to a case of hematidrosis or not even break a sweat? When our redeemed nature catches our sinful nature about to commit a sin of thought, word, or deed, is there much of a struggle, or does the redeemed nature just give in to the sinful nature? Or, have certain sins become so habitual for us that we have desensitized ourselves to the fact that what we think, say, and do is even wrong? To be sure, we all, even those of us who repent and believe, remain sinful by nature. And, without that repentance and faith, we would suffer not only death here in time but also torment in hell for eternity. But, thanks be to God, what we sang in the Psalm (Psalm 32, antiphon: v.5) and is familiar from Divine Service, Setting Three, is true: when we confess our transgressions to the Lord, then He forgives the iniquity of our sin. The Lord forgives all our sin, whatever our sin might be, for the sake of such things as Jesus’s agony and bloody sweat.
In the Litany that we will pray in song again tonight, our asking the Good Lord to help us on the basis of His agony and bloody sweat is called an “obsecration”; similar is the Opening Hymn’s asking our Savior to hear our penitential cry “By [His] agony of prayer” (Lutheran Service Book 419:3). Of course, Jesus’s agony and bloody sweat alone do us very little good, but together with His whole life and death as God in human flesh they do us the greatest good! And, although “we cannot plumb its depths” (Arndt, ad loc Luke 22:44, 447), we wonder in amazement at His Passion, and we wonder in amazement at the mystery of His Incarnation for us, that, as true God and true man personally united in Jesus, He had not one will but two wills: one Divine and one human. His agony on the Mount of Olives encompassed Him spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically (Just, ad loc Luke 22:44, p.855), as He faced the “full horror of the curse and the wrath that were impending” on account of our sins placed upon Him (Lenski, ad loc Luke 22:44, p.1076). He was not necessarily afraid of dying, but He was concerned for victory in the decisive battle on which depended the future of the world (Stauffer, TDNT, 1:140). Ultimately Jesus’s Divine will perfectly directed His human will, and, as one of us, He died on the cross for us, in our place.
Jesus’s bloody sweat perhaps anticipated His baptism by blood, as it were (Brun, cited by Marshall, ad loc Luke 22:44, p.832; confer Stauffer, TDNT, 1:140, referring to Luke 12:49). And, certainly we can think of our being washed with water and the Word in Holy Baptism, one of God’s ways of giving us His grace for the sake of Jesus’s whole life and death for us. For, it is by Holy Baptism that we are buried with Christ Jesus into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we, too, might walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4). And, as Jesus sweat became like great drops of blood, we certainly can think of our receiving bread and wine that in the Sacrament of the Altar are Christ’s Body and Blood, given and shed for us, for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.
As with Jesus, so with us: our path to that eternal, resurrected life is through the cross (Just, ad loc Luke 22:39-46, p.862), but we do not go that way alone. Before the events of tonight’s Reading, angels had ministered to Jesus after His temptation by the devil in the wilderness (Matthew 4:11; Mark 1:13). Long before that, the prophet Elijah prayed and was strengthened by a messenger from God, probably the Pre‑incarnate Christ Himself (1 Kings 19:4-8), and also Daniel prayed and was strengthened by an angel (Daniel 10:15‑19). As they and Jesus prayed and were strengthened, so also we pray and are strengthened. In the Office Hymn, we sang of our walking with angels all the way (LSB 716:4), and, in the Closing Hymn, we will pray for God’s angel guards to defend us (LSB 877:1). We can be sure that they do!
Some of us may know the musical group “Blood, Sweat, and Tears”, which reportedly got its name from Johnny Cash’s 19-63 American‑working‑man album of the same name (BandNameExplained), though where Cash got the name even the internet is not saying. Winston Churchill had previously used the “blood, sweat, and tears” phrase, as had Theodore Roosevelt earlier and others before him (Wikipedia). In addition to the blood and sweat of the hematidrosis, there may also have been some tears from Jesus on the Mount of Olives (see Hebrews 5:7, for example, but compare Stauffer, TDNT, 1:140), but the focus for us tonight has been “The Strengthening Angel and the Bloody Sweat”. Both are an important part of what St. Luke uniquely reports our Lord Jesus Christ, out of His great love for us, experienced and did for us, for our salvation from our sins. So, I can conclude as tonight’s Psalm concluded: “Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +