Can Your Anxiety Be a Holy Thing?

Carl Heinrich Bloch (1834-1890), “The Agony in the Garden”
Carl Heinrich Bloch (1834-1890), “The Agony in the Garden” (photo: Public Domain)

Many years ago, when our kids were little tykes, my wife Jackie shared her anxiety about the health of one our kids with a small group of us. One of our friends, a hard-core Calvinist, remarked, “Maybe you should just trust God more.”

How could anyone disagree with an admonition to trust God more fully? But as a husband, I found his comment vile, oozing with spiritual arrogance. I thought about it for months and came to realize how unbiblical his statement was.

Yes, Scripture tells us not to worry about anything, to cast our cares upon our Savior. Among the first words by Pope St. John Paul II to the Church – and repeated again and again over the decades – were “Do not be afraid”.

But can anxiety actually be divine? Many Christians would say no, but a deeper reading of Scripture suggests otherwise, and Holy Week is a very good time to consider this—as demonstrated in Christ’s passion on that evening of Holy Thursday.

It comes from a verse that’s easy to pass over but rich in significance. Luke reports that when Jesus stole away from the disciples to spend time with His Father, something curious happened:

And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood, falling down to the ground. (Luke 22:44)

Luke, a physician, may be referring here to a very rare phenomenon in which blood can actually be excreted along with sweat from the pores of the human body at times of extreme anxiety. Called hematidrosis, it was observed and described in early medical texts as early as Aristotle, and later by Leonardo da Vinci.

Did Jesus experience extreme anxiety? Could He have?

What could have been the source of this deep anxiety?

Many would say that it was in anticipation of the physical pain He would experience at His torturous death the following day. This is understandable, considering that although Jesus was God incarnate, He was also fully man with a real human body. That pain would affect His body as it would any of ours. This topic was the subject of a sermon the great Jonathan Edwards preached in 1739 entitled “Christ’s Agony”. But Edwards questions this explanation, for many martyrs have suffered as Christ did without experiencing the same phenomenon.

We might also say that it came from bearing the weight of all the world’s sins within His body and soul. I think this gets at it more correctly.

But perhaps Christ’s profound agony and anxiety was rooted in a deeper suffering, one much more intense. As St. Ambrose explains nicely in his Exposition of the Christian Faith (Book II, No. 56):

As being man, therefore, He doubts; … God could not have been distressed or have died in respect of His being God. [But]…as being man, therefore, He speaks, bearing with Him my terrors, for when we are in the midst of dangers we think ourselves abandoned by God. As man, therefore, He is distressed…

And here, He was distressed beyond what most humans could ever experience, as shown by the hematidrosis. He was distressed not because He didn’t know the Scriptures well enough—in fact, He was quoting the first line of Psalm 22. Rather, His distress was the consequence of the grand mystery that God was fully human in Christ. We find all the hope we will ever need in this fact.

As humans we are anxious, and we can experience great torment. There is no sin in simply experiencing anxiety. Rather, our sin is found in deliberately persisting in the anxiety, submitting to it as our destiny, rather than allowing God to bring us out of it by his loving and sovereign care.

Even Mary and Joseph naturally suffered great anxiety at the three-day long loss of their sweet Son as he stayed behind to confound the Jewish leaders in the Temple. The Scripture tells us so. Would my friend have told them that they just needed to trust God more? The obvious answer demonstrates the insensitivity and theological error of his comment to my wife in the distress of her motherly heart.

This is just one of the boundless comforts we can take from Christ’s Passion on Holy Thursday.