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Sweating Blood - March 28, 2007

Sweating Blood

Luke 22

Sixth Sunday in Lent

March 28, 2007

Rev. Dave R. Garwick

Again, “An angel from heaven appeared to Him and strengthened Him. And being in anguish, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.”

His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. We have all heard people way something like, “Man, that thing was so hard I was practically sweating blood on that one!” When people say that they are using a figure of speech to sort of exaggerate how hard something was. But I have never seen someone literally sweat blood.

That is why most people think that this passage about Jesus sweating blood is just a figure of speech. After all, even though the other three Gospels also talk about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, they themselves do not talk about Jesus sweating blood.

The Gospel of Luke, however, is the only one that was written by a physician. Let me introduce you to a medical term; hematohidrosis. It is also called hematidrosis. Or sometimes the medical literature refers to “bleeding diathesis”. This is the very real medical condition where a person literally does actually sweat blood. When the physician Luke writes that Jesus’ sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground he meant it literally. Jesus WAS sweating blood.

A Dr. Frederick Zugibe who was the Chief Medical Examiner of Rockland County, New York, described hematohidrosis this way: “Around the sweat glands, there are multiple blood vessels in a net-like form.” Under the pressure of great stress the vessels constrict. Then as the anxiety passes “the blood vessels dilate to the point of rupture. The blood goes into the sweat glands.” As the sweat glands are producing a lot of sweat, it pushes the blood to the surface – coming out as droplets of blood mixed with sweat.”

Now, I am not telling you this to nauseate you. I tell you this to show what kind of choice Jesus was actually making the night of His arrest. This was NOT EASY for Him. Throughout theses Lenten services we have been reflecting on different choices which Jesus made on the way to the Cross – choices He did not HAVE to make, choices He could very well have passed up, choices which cost Him dearly which were necessary to save us.

But it is tempting for us to think that these choices were not that big a deal for Him since, after all, He was God himself. Sort of like grown-up’s getting shots at the doctor’s office. We are told that a thousand years to us is no more than a day to God. So, maybe His physical and mental pain was also just that insignificant.

But God saw to it that a medical doctor would write one of the Gospels. And because of that, we can know for sure what this choice meant for Jesus.

That is why it is important to know Jesus actually experienced a medical condition called hematohidrosis. Since Jesus IS god, I have no doubt that He could indeed have somehow chosen to totally block the pain and the pressure of what He was going through. As a matter of fact, there are mystics today who can do that themselves.

For that matter, there are alcoholics and other drug abusers, and even some of us with clinical depression who have all kinds of ways of deadening the personal pain which we have trouble facing. I hear people all the time say that they do not fear death so much as dying. When someone we love is dying and everyone around her is ready to let go, the one thing that we all ask is that “she be kept comfortable”. The next greatest bioethical crisis we are about to face as a culture, as a church, as individuals is the issue of euthanasia. The temptation will be for people to kill themselves or kill others in a painless way before they die in a painFUL way.

Obviously, God grants every one of us the capability to make that choice, just as He grants every soul the capability to walk away from Him. But Jesus chose to feel the pain to such an extent that the very blood vessels around His sweat glands actually ruptured into the sweat glands themselves so that He literally did sweat blood.

But He did not choose to face this pain in order to make himself more emotionally healthy. He chose to do what was so excruciatingly painful to Himself in order to literally absorb the pain that all OUR sins have produced, in order to pay the price that our sins have cost the Father.

But do you recall what that medical examiner said about when the person actually sweats the blood? After the prolonged extreme emotional pressure, it is when the anxiety begins to pass that the blood vessels now dilate to the point of rupture. Then it was that an angel appeared to Jesus to strengthen Him. THAT is when His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground: after two things – first, the pain which our sins caused, followed then by the angelic mercy of His Father.

That is why the apostle Paul would later write that, “God IS faithful; He will not let you be [test] beyond what you can bear. But when you are [tested], He will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it,” (1 Cor 10:13).

Amen. May it be so.