“They are the pledge and seal
Of Christ’s unswerving faith,
Given to his Sire, our souls to heal,
Although it cost his death.
“They, to his Church of old,
To each true Jewish heart,
In gospel graces manifold,
Communion blest impart.”
In Gethsemane, the sins and the needs of humanity so pressed upon the burdened soul of Jesus, that his very life was forced out, as it were, from his aching, breaking heart, in his boundless sympathy with his loved ones, and in his infinite longings for their union with God, through their union with himself, in the covenant of blood he was consummating in their behalf.[613] “And being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”[614]
Because of his God-ward purpose of bringing men into a loving covenant with God, Jesus gave of his blood in the covenant-rite of circumcision. Because of his man-ward sympathy with the needs and the trials of those whom he had come to save, and because of the crushing burden of their death-bringing sins, Jesus gave of his blood in an agony of intercessory suffering. Therefore it is, that the Litany cry of the ages goes up to him in fulness of meaning: “By the mystery of thy holy incarnation; by thy holy nativity and circumcision; ... by thine agony and bloody sweat, ... Good Lord, deliver us.”