Christ the Consoler

To the still wrestlings of the lonely heart

He doth impart
The virtue of His midnight agony,

When none was nigh, Save God and one good angel, to assuage

The tempest’s rage.

KEBLE

Our Fellow-Sufferer yet retains
A fellow-feeling of our pains,
And still remembers in the skies
His tears, His agonies, and cries.

In every pang that rends the heart
The Man of Sorrows had a part;
He sympathizes with our grief,
And to the sufferer sends relief.

With boldness therefore at the throne
Let us make all our sorrows known,
And ask the aids of heavenly power
To help us in the evil hour.

MICHAEL BRUCE

WE have approached our most blessed Lord beside His Cross and His grave. We have adored Him as our self-sacrificing, suffering, God Incarnate. We have deliberately remembered that for Him supremely, as for every bearer of great pain, * to have suffered abides for ever.’ What He has gone through, what He has undergone, that tremendous ’ cup ’ which He consented, after agony, to drink to the dregs — it is all part of His being, to-day and everlastingly.

Holy Scripture tells us great things about the results of that suffering, for us and our salvation. It makes it as clear as the noon that the Cross was endured because of our sins, and that our sins, because of the Cross, find, when we yield to God, a willing and wonderful pardon and oblivion, impossible otherwise. That atoning work, that ’ peace through the Col. i. 20 blood of the cross,’ who shall speak worthily pf its glory? Shall our narrow thoughts dare to limit the gladness and the largeness of that mercy, the fulness of the stream of life and love poured down the channel which was cleft once for all in the Rock of Ages?

But just now we are thinking not of the redeeming virtue of the crucified Lord. Rather, we are looking on Him as wonderfully fitted, by the ’ unknown ’ sufferings of His sacrifice, to be CHRISTUS CONSOLATOR. We have thought about His heart, broken for our sakes, only that we may get into the living depths of the truth that He now is able, indeed able, ’ to bind up the brokenixi, j hearted.’

To get thus at Him we have together

climbed the steps of some subordinate

reasons for hope and cheer, advancing all

the while towards the sanctuary of peace

at the top. And here, on the quiet summit,

we find, as we have seen already, not a

truth merely but a Person. Strong in His

personal love and willingness, rich with His

unspeakably personal experience, He is

Heb. iv. able to ’ be touched with the feeling of

15 our infirmities ’ and our wounds. He is

Heb. vii. akje to savep to uttermost,’ from all

their wearinesses and their heavy loads, those who will let Him have His way. He is able, with personal methods of His own, to transfigure sorrows into joys. Consider HIM. Let it sink always deeper into your torn and tired spirit that such a Person exists, that this Person exists — living, loving, accessible. He is c the Man at the Gate ’ whom readers of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress ’ will remember. c Here is a poor burthened sinner,’ said the Pilgrim; ‘I would know, Sir, if you are willing to let me in.” Here,’ let us say, ’ are stricken and broken hearts; we have heard, Sir, that your heart was once broken, and has stood open ever since, and that its great rift is turned into a gate by which men go in and find peace. We would know if you are willing to let us in.’

* I am willing with all my heart,’ said the Man; and with that He opened the gate.

Nothing is more characteristic of this Man than that He should welcome troubled people to come as close to Him as possible. He exists to be intimately approachable. ( Come unto me, all ye Matt. xi. that labour and are heavy laden.’ This 28 is an invitation as inclusive as it is pressing. It is often, and most rightly, read as a call to the sin-burthened soul to come, not to c tarry till ’tis better,’ but to come at once into contact with Him who suffered so much on purpose that the man might at once find all forgiven, and begin at once to see the secret how to tread the forgiven evils underfoot. But the Lord does not limit His call so. He who bore our sins tasted our sorrows, and is willing to deal with them also: c I am willing with all my heart,’ saith He. It is His function, His metier, if I may dare to use the word. It is His commission; so he says Himself; His Father has expressly given it Him isa. to do; ‘He hath sent me to bind up the ixi. i brokenhearted.’ And He who sent Him has qualified Him for the work — how? By making Him the great Expert. He Heb. ii. ’ made the Captain of our salvation perfect ’ for His function ’ through sufferings.’ Shall I try to divine, heart-wounded friend, how He will do it in your case? I can at best but guess, at least as to the order and detail. For He is so perfect a sympathizer, so large of insight and experience, that He has His special touch and way with every individual. But we may be fairly sure that somewhere into His personal treatment of you something of these following elements will enter.

i. He will apply to your aching and bleeding spirit the great anodyne of the thought that He knows, as the Sufferer-in-chief alone can know, all about it. He will not say to you, as He touches your spirit with His, that He has passed through infinitely more pain, and that therefore you must not overestimate yours. He is a Consoler too skilful, because too wholly loving, for such ruthless sorts of comfort. In our human experiences, those who have borne great sorrows greatly are often just the tenderest — I had almost said the humblest — consolers of, let us say, the cries and tears of a little girl. They have known sorrow so large that it has filled their whole large sky. And it is when sorrow seems to fill the sphere, and we cannot look round its edge, that it presses hard as death. Well, the little girl’s trouble seems to her to fill all her little sky; is it not so with the children’s passionate griefs? And this the deep elder heart knows, and talks to the child about the happiness so sure to come soon from beyond, as if a child were speaking, yet with the tender power of the man’s own greater suffering, rightly borne. Such, multiplied by infinity, is the way in which the Lord Jesus Christ, eternally perfect as a sympathizer, perfect through His own sufferings, will lay Himself beside your trouble. He will not underweigh one grain of it. He will see more in it than even you do. He will reverence it. And He will give you time, in His great gentleness, to take home to your very centre the consolation of having close beside you a God and Lord who is your Companion in the experience of tears, of bewilderment, of blinding darkness, of the awful sense of desolation, and who now, PS. xxi. while Himself ’ most blessed for ever,’ has 6 that experience for ever woven into His

being.

ii. Another element of the consolations of our Fellow-Sufferer will come from the side of His greatness. Not the greatness which awes and terrifies; not at all. I mean the greatness of Him who, having borne and transcended the * unknown ’ sorrows, can bid you trust Him when He tells you that for you, as for Him, the light will yet overwhelm the darkness, the sorrow shall be turned into joy. He has the right to be believed, without elaborate explanations. For He stands where He can see above all clouds — His own clouds first, and then yours. Scripture assures us that He Himself, * in the days of His flesh,’ overcame by reliance without sight. He, the Christ, * walked by faith, not sight.’ He was ’ the Heb. leader and perfecter of faith,’ 1 in other xii- 2 words, the supreme Believer. ‘For the joy that was set before Him,’ a joy not present, not visible, but believed in, ‘He endured the Cross.’ Now, crowned with that joy, but also with the eternal fact that He wore the thorns, He asks you to take His word for it that the like transfiguration, worked out by Him, is to come to you. He asks you, in your turn,

‘To trace the rainbow through the rain, And feel the promise is not vain That morn shall tearless be.’

* What I do thou knowest not now, joha but thou shalt know hereafter.’ He gives iii. 7 you that prospect on the word of Himself, supreme believing Sufferer, Lover of your soul, Master of your life.

iii. As he accustoms you to His companionship, and draws more and more out of you your heart’s communicating power, He will let you feel the vivid solace of ’ conversation ’ with Him. As in our earthly intercourse, so in this walking — and talking

1 The word ’ our ’ before ’ faith ’ is absent in the Greek.

—with God Incarnate, it is not only through information and explanation that we get our troubles calmed. Calm comes through the healing freedom of intercourse, through speaking all out to a trusted soul, nobler than our own. We noticed on a previous page how John the Baptist’s disciples Matt. got an anodyne to their woe by going and xiv. 12 telling Jesus. Laid upon His heart, the trouble was already partly drawn away from theirs. Tell the great Sufferer all about your suffering. Let Him hear the inmost and the worst of it, the wreck of your home, the paralysis of your hopes, the harsh daily anxieties that only make sorrow more crude and heavy, the mysteries and riddles about your beloved ones gone. He knows everything; but He wants you to tell Him. He sees the unmeasured joy yet to come which will explain why He saw it worth while to let the dreadful antecedent blow fall on you. But He knows that you do not see it. And He wants you to use Him mean time as the receptacle for your burthen, entrusted with all the mystery, and so with the worst of the pang.

iv. Lastly, to take one final suggestion out of the innumerable methods of His love,

He will bind up the broken heart by teaching the sorrower, in His own way, to see the sorrow from a new point of view. In Nature, it is possible for new effects of light, altered angles of vision, to transform a frowning cliff, or a cloud-laden threatening sky, into the semblance of a ladder built from earth to heaven.

The Lord Jesus Christ can so give you a new perspective, can so shed the light of His presence, and of the prospects of His coming glory, over your trouble, that, while it is by no means melted away, it yet shall be transfigured. You shall see its hidden virtues shining out already, as you realize, perhaps on a sudden, how it, and it alone, is qualifying you for a nobler service of others and a new sort of glorification of God. And you shall see it also in its relation to the eternal peace and joy — the rocky ladder to the Father’s house, the crosswise hammer that is beating out the crown.