November 5

Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is cotne, that ye shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave Ale alone; and vet I am not alone, because the Father is with Ale. — JoHN xvi. 32.

November 5 THAT is not the aspect ot our Lord’s sorrows, the element of our Lord’s Passion, which is most often dealt with and thought about; but it is a very real one, and one that I think deserves to be far more considered than we are in the habit of doing. Attention has been too exclusively directed to the physical sufferings of our Lord’s Passion, and to the mysterious element in His mental passion which made it unique and atoning. We have too much forgotten the sorrows which pressed upon Him as upon us, the same in kind, only infinitely deeper in degree, and hence we have lost some of the sense of reality of our Lord’s sufferings of these sorrows. I do not know that any is more sharp than the solitude in which He lived and yet more awful solitude in which Pie died. Jesus Christ was the loneliest man that ever lived. A little ignorant love and a little outward companionship Pie had; and soothing and strengthening it was to be surrounded by the affection even of such ignorant friends as the disciples. But there was not a single human being who fully understood or believed Him. There were none who sympathised with His aims, none who could receive His confidences. His thoughts were unshared, His words unintelligible, Plis life’s purpose shrouded in mystery. “He came to His own, and His own received Plim not.” “His soul was as a star, and dwelt apart.” And so He travelled on, bearing a great burden of love which none would accept; the loneliest soul that ever wore human flesh.

All great spirits are solitary; the men that lead the world have to go before the world, and to go by themselves. Starlings fly in flocks, the eagle soars singly. And so the pages of the biographies, teachers and religious reformers, and thinkers and path-breakers generally, tell us of the pains of uncomprehended aims, of the misery of living apart from one’s kind, of the agony of hungering for sympathy, for comprehension, for acceptance of a truth which dooms its possessors to isolation. But all that men have experienced in that kind is as nothing as compared with the blackness of darkness which the loneliness of Jesus Christ assumed as it settled down upon Plim.

Let me remind you what it was thfit condemned Plim to this absolute loneliness. It was the very purity and sinlessness of His nature which necessarily made Him separate from sinners. Pie saw eternal things as no other e.-e saw them, and His vision of land, where others saw only cloud, parted Him from them.

He read men as no other eye read them: He saw not only the clock-face, but the springs. He looked upon the flesh and behind the spirit, its inmost essence, its destiny and end. Before His human eye there stood pl.i.’nly ntanifested the pale kingdoms of the dead, and all that vision separated Him from men. The children on the street used to point at Dante as he yiassed, saying, “There goes the man that has seen hell,” and to shrink from him as if he carried his own atmosphere in which others could not breathe. But the equal vision which Christ had of all things, of all men, of all worlds, made His life an aljsolute solitude; and when He spake that He knew, and testified what He had seen, no man received His testimony. Hence came a deeper loneliness.