Even Jesus knew what it was like to have a troubled heart
Fr David Howell• May 25, 2025
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (John 14:27)
In Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus offers us his own peace in our troubled hearts. But his heart was troubled too in the previous chapters: peace did not come to him effortlessly.
Earlier he had wrestled with the self-sacrifice he was called to make: “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name” (12:27-28).
He had shifted his inner monologue into a dialogue with his Father and he had remembered his purpose: this took his heart from being troubled to peace.
When troubled, we too are called to do the same: to recall what our purpose is – to become holy and share our faith, not to fix things ourselves, nor to worry – and to turn our internal chatter into heartfelt prayer.
Again, at the Last Supper, “he was troubled in spirit” at the thought of being betrayed (13:21). So he spoke out, not to his Father this time, but to his friends: he “testified, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me’” (13:21).
And then he even identified Judas to John: “It is he to whom I shall give this morsel when I have dipped it” (13:26). We need to verbalise our troubles to trusted friends, as Jesus did, revealing his greatest pain to the “disciple whom he loved”, John.
Only after his ascent into heaven was Jesus’s “peace” free from attack; he said to his disciples: “If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father,” (14:28) where peace is unchallenged.
But despite the sufferings he faced on earth, his peace was never completely lost, even if his heart was troubled. We too can find a deeper peace amid our trials if we follow Jesus’s example and receive his own peace into our hearts through the sacraments.
Let’s ask Mary our Mother, Queen of Peace, to keep us in dialogue with our Father and with our friends, as her Son was.
Photo: MAY 10: Frederik Mayet as Jesus Christ performs on stage during the Oberammergau passionplay 2010 final dress rehearsal on May 10, 2010 in Oberammergau, Germany. (Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images)
Fr David Howell is an assistant priest at St Bede’s in Clapham Park. His previous studies include canon law in Rome, Classics at Oxford and a licence in Patristics at the Augustinianum Institute in Rome. He is a regular contributor to the Catholic Herald; his other articles can be accessed here.