Christ the Sufferer

0 Life! without thy chequered scene Of right and wrong, of weal and woe, Success and failure, could a ground For magnanimity be found, For faith, ‘mid ruined hopes serene? Or whence could virtue flow?

WORDSWORTH

Christ the Sufferer
‘THE TRAVAIL OF HIS SOUL’

The gloomy Garden, blood-bedewed, The midnight scene of shame and scorn, The scourge, the wreath of rending thorn,

The tortures of the dreadful Rood;

These were the billows of Thy death, The storm-tost surface; but the cry, Thy spirit’s woe, Sabackthani,

Rose from the ocean underneath.

Man has no line that sea to sound,

The abyss of night — whose gulfs within Now lies entombed our weight of sin,

Forgotten, never to be found.

H. D.

WE have walked together, my reader and I, up a series of steps. We have thought of various things which, now to the mind, now to the tried heart wounded with its * war-sorrow,’ may bring relief, reassurance, hope. Here, in this chapter, we reach the top of the steps, and approach a sanctuary built aloft and apart. We have considered reasons and truths, given us sometimes from within our human experience, sometimes from beyond it. We now approach and consider a Person. We draw near to the Name of all names, the Lord Jesus Christ. We come to receive on our troubled hearts the impression of what He is, what He has endured and known, what He can say and do, c to bind up the broken-hearted.’

On a previous page we recollected the wide difference, in the science of the human soul, between the amateur and the expert in sorrow. We are coming now to the greatest Expert of all. For a little while we will concentrate our souls on the experience which constitutes Him the Expert. Will it be lost time for you, 0 friend, to turn deliberately for the moment from your griefs to His? I hope that it will only help us to come afterwards to your griefs with an anodyne which is nowhere found but in the sanctuary, and with the Person, before us now.

This sanctuary is altogether of its own kind. Here is no structure of pillared porticos and gilded roofs. We see a hill, gray with rock, green with the grasses of the spring. On its summit stands a Roman cross, hideous instrument of a death agonizing, and also shameful, to the uttermost; the wood is red with recent blood. In the steep scarp of the little hill is a cave, whose mouth is carved to indicate a rich man’s sepulchre. The orifice has for its door a large millstone (such is the shape), rolling in a hewn groove, and rolled now to the side, leaving the death-chamber open. By the opening stands ‘one like unto the Son of Man’ and Son of God. He was lately dead, the lacerated victim of that cross above Him. His, not many hours ago, was the corpse, rolled round and round with grave-cloths, laid in the tomb beside Him. Now He is alive for ever more. He holds the keys of death, and Rev. i of the hidden world. Yet more, He holds l8* the keys of the human heart, and can open it, and no man shall shut it. He can enter it, and make His chosen and beloved home within it, passing in through the very breach which agony has wrought, and carrying in a wonderful healing with Him.

We need not hesitate to approach this Risen Christ. He is the most accessible of all beings. When He left that cavern — now long ago in history, but this event is always present — His very first act was to John lay Himself out to heal a desolate woman’s IX~l8 broken heart, and to fill her with the immense joy of Himself, her Lord, given back to her again. Let us draw very near to Him, my friend and me together.

And first, being thus near, let us adore Him. Such is He that without ’ reverence and godly fear ‘He cannot be understood. Only, we remember what godly fear is. It is not a shrinking apprehension; it is love upon its knees.

We adore Him then, getting down low at His feet. For this recent Victim, thia occupant so lately of a grave, is no less a being than eternal God made Man. The faith which we call Christian, from the very first days of its entrance into the world, (I say what is historically certain,) has had this for its living heart — the wonder, the glory, the beauty, of a self-sacrificing, suffering God made Man. It was God the Son of God who not only looked down but, for our sakes, came down — to the cradle, the workshop, the homeless wandering, the agony, the crucifixion. To save men He became Man. But never for a moment was He not God. Lord Jesus Christ, Friend, Brother, Sacrifice, Thou art also always our Maker, our eternal Master; we worship Thee.

But now, we look with reverent love upon His presence. Behold His hands, His feet, and the great scar of the lance in His sacred side. And are there no traces of the pitiless thorns of the crown upon his immortal brow? He has passed through the fire of utmost physical pain, this Lord of our salvation. We need not accumulate details. But let us not forget the facts of these six hours of incalculable anguish, endured in the publicity of a circle of spectators railing and insulting. And let us recollect, most gravely, what all experience testifies, that physical sensibilities are always more alert and intense in proportion to physical refinement. And the physique of the Christ of God — immaculate, absolute in every development of faculty and sensation — what was the distress unspeakable inflicted upon It in the house of the High Priest, under the horrible lead-laden scourge of Pilate, and on the * accursed tree ‘? He has been through it all, this gracious Being, standing close to us beside His garden-grave. True, it is past. Thanks be to God, it is past. I do not think I am alone in the feeling, when Good Friday is with us, and we have attended, perhaps, the Service of the Three Hours, that the striking at last of three o’clock brings with it a strong sense of bodily relief. ‘Now doth the Lord in peace recline.’ It is all over for Him. The sacred Body has endured, over come, and sunk into the rest of death. Soon the cool grave will be ready, and the white linens will be wound about the limbs, and the spices will sweeten the air of the sepulchre, and He will lie long at rest. It is past. Yes, but do you remember that pregnant French saying: Souffrir passe; avoir souffert demeure eternellement:

‘Suffering passes; to have suffered abides for ever ‘? The being which has once descended into the fiery bath of uttermost pain can never be the same again. Somehow it always keeps the scar.

But we are not yet at the end, by any means, of our contemplation of this adorable Sufferer. The tribulations of His holy body were unspeakable. I do not think it is too much to say, remembering the sacred sensibilities of that Humanity, that they were deeper, more intense and intimate, more searching in the secret consciousness, than what any other sufferer has ever known. Yet, after all, they were the surface of the Passion, not its depths. The Bible refers again and again, alike in the prophecies and in the history, to the mighty sorrows of the soul undergone by our Lord isa. mi. Christ. * He poured out His soul unto “• I2 death’; ‘He shall see of the travail of Matt. His soul ‘; ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful, xxvi. 38 even unto death.’ It is remarkable that the nearest approach He made to sinking and giving way under the mystery of an infinite burthen was not when every nerve and bone were on the rack of the cruci-Luke fixion, but when He knelt in the silent xxii- 44 olive-garden, and the sweat of blood, forced by the mind from the body, dropped upon the grass. Then, when the next day had worn to its terrible afternoon, one cry of immeasurable distress, and only one, was heard from the Cross. And it spoke not of a physical horror almost intolerable; nothing is clearer than that He bore that, when it came, with a firmness for which heroism is a feeble word. No, the overmastering, bewildering, blinding woe was of the spirit: * My God, my God, why Matt hast Thou forsaken me? ’ xxvi. 46

In the ancient English ‘Golden Litany’ one suffrage runs: 4 For Thy torments that were unknown?

Out of the vast and mysterious shadow which covered Jerusalem for three whole hours after midday, that cry, loud and long, broke from the unknown sufferings. Did it not indicate, as I suggested just now, that the tortures of the unsinning body of the Lord were indeed as the mighty billows, but that the woe of His soul was as the abysmal depths of the central ocean, underneath all waves, an unsounded night of waters?

And He, upon the Cross, encountered both sorts of suffering together. Great pain is a great trial when a man is ever so well off in respect of mental peace. Great mental misery is terrible when the physical health is ever so sound, and not an ache troubles joint or limb. But the two forms of ill, coming together, are indeed formidable to man. And the Man of men endured them both, in their awful maximum, at once.

Avoir souffert demeure eternellement. We

five humble thanks that our Redeemer’s ama sabacbthani, once uttered, is gone and done. It is even so. But to have had that cry forced from His soul under that black eclipse — this lasts, and will last for ever, even in the coming Heaven. His redeemed will never forget it. They will sing eternally, in the music of a life tuned Rev v to the glory of the will of God, that He is 9, 12 worthy who was slain, and slain with such a death. And He will never forget it. It is part of His being, for ever, to have suffered, and to have suffered so; the supreme Expert in the lore of grief.

Once, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, I was listening to the magnificent chanting of “the Nicene Creed. The setting — I know not now who was the composer — reiterated and lingered over that one clause, ‘He suffered* * He suffered, He suffered ‘; it was as if the singers could not get themselves away from the possessing word. They were but preluding the song of Heaven. The Lord — whom we shall worship, and rejoice in, and serve, for ever — He is for ever He who suffered, and suffered so that to have suffered abides in Him in power through all the endless age.