Jesus Took our Every Agony

“Who in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that He feared;” (Hebrew 5:7)

This Scripture is about Jesus when He was in the Garden of Gethsemane.  The author writes the time there when Jesus. It’s simply known as the Agony. At that time, He was in human flesh, but all God in His spirit. He knew what He would be facing. There was absolutely no mistake that it would be painful and tortuous. Some Bible students believe He was being tempted not to go to the cross. I don’t know if that’s the case. It could have been a temptation, but the Bible doesn’t say so. I believe that it was an agonizing to think of the fact that He would take death. He had the promise that He would defeat it. I don’t think He doubted it. It may be something like what we feel about death. We don’t fear it, but its unknown factor makes it scary, even if we know we’ll be with Jesus in His glory on the other side.

What Jesus was tormented about was so intense that He felt like He would die right then and there. “Then He said to them, My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Wait here and watch with Me.” (Matthew 26:38) He was in great agony as He prayed to the Father asking Him to take this fate away if He willed, but He prayed for the Father’s will to be done and not His own. “And He was withdrawn from them about a stone's throw. And He kneeled down and prayed, saying, Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me. Yet not My will, but Yours be done.” (Luke 22:41-42) This Scripture seems to say that He didn’t want to go to the cross. But being God, He did want to first obey and do the Father’s will and second complete His mission and redeem man. But knowing what faced Him, He was asking if it were possible to be obedient, do the Father’s will, complete His mission and redeem man another way, to “remove this cup” or in other words change this fate. 

The agony was so fierce that His sweat was blood. This was only reported by Luke, a physician who would have noticed that detail. “And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly. And His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” (Luke 22:44) There is a medical condition called hematidrosis, or hematohidrosis, which is a very rare that causes blood to ooze or cause one to sweat blood from the skin when there is no cut nor injury. Only a few cases of hematidrosis have been confirmed in medical studies in the 20th century. From webmd.com we have this quote: “Tiny blood vessels in the skin break open. The blood inside them may get squeezed out through sweat glands, or there might be unusual little pockets within the structure of your skin. These could collect the blood and let it leak into follicles (where the hair grows) or on to the skin's surface.” Wikipedia states that this occurs “under conditions of extreme physical or emotional stress” or “acute fear and extreme stress” which causes hemorrhage of the vessels that supply the sweat glands. This has been documented in some awaiting execution, a soldier before a battle that was documented by Leonardo da Vinci, a case during the London Blitz and a case of a sailor in a sea storm.

So, Jesus could have very well, facing death for us could have caused him to sweat blood. He knew and trusted the Father not to leave Him in death but to deliver Him. In the last phrase, “was heard in that He feared” doesn’t mean He was heard because He was afraid, but that He reverenced the Father. 

To apply it to our lives, few of us will ever know this kind of stress, but we face difficulties and challenges in our lives that are insurmountable when we feel we have come to our end. When we focus on the Lord’s agony and the Father’s will that Jesus suffered for us, it gives us hope that Jesus went through that agony for us. We can worship Jesus and the Father because it was His will to put our agony on Jesus. We can rest on this and know the Lord will bring us through anything. And like Jesus who went in victory to hell and arose from the dead, we can go through anything knowing that there is a victory at the other end of our affliction, because it’s the Father’s will for us. “But the God of all grace, He calling us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little, He will perfect, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.” (1Peter 5:10)

Altogether, the brief descriptions given in the Gospels of the agony of Jesus doesn’t come close to conveying His suffering which is more than any normal man could have withstood. I’ve read where no one could have survived the flogging Jesus received at the hands of the Romans, but Jesus did and lived until the price for redemption was paid in full and He declared it finished. “Then when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, It is finished! And He bowed His head and gave up the spirit.” (John 19:30)