The Physical Effect of Gethsemane

The grief of the Garden affected Jesus both in soul and body. His soul was ‘exceeding sorrowful, and His bodily sweat was like ’ great drops of blood falling to the ground.’ There is indicated in the statement at once a mental and a physical influence. The inner and the outer life were equally depressed by the overwhelming weight of His sufferings. Then, as we have seen, there intervened some thing. A great strength descended on His spirit. He received a message from His Father which sent His heart up like the lark. From that moment He was mentally lifted up for ever. But His body did not rise simultaneously with His spirit. When the body and the spirit are depressed together through the presence of a grief, it does not follow that the removal of the grief will raise them together. We have experience of the contrary. When we are relieved from the grinding at any mill, one part of us is taken and the other left. The part taken — taken up into joy, is the spirit; the body remains a while on the ground. How often our health breaks down after the time of crisis is happily past! This could not be if the body had shared simultaneously in the rise of the spirit. It is a law of human nature that the physical man shall continue to bear the suffering of the Garden after the inward man has been set free.

In the case of Jesus there was an additional reason why the elevation of His spirit did not at once affect the outward frame. The joy which came to Him in the Garden was a purely spiritual joy. It was not justified by any change in the environment. It was a peace that passed understanding. Nothing had happened to account for it; nothing followed to vindicate it. The Garden remained where it was; its outward cause of grief remained where it was; the cup of physical death, so far as it could be measured by the eye, was as full as ever. It was only from the soul that a weight had really been lifted. The joy of the Garden could exert upon the body only a negative influence. In the absence of a physical change all that it could do was to retard the advance of weakness, to delay somewhat the collapse of the outward form.

From the moment of leaving the Garden everything conspired to hasten this collapse. Jesus was subjected to a series of physical strains involving successive marchings, prolonged wakefulness, sustained attention of eye and ear. After the cold night-vigil of Gethsemane He is led through the streets at midnight to the hall of judgment. With unseemly, with illegal haste, the events that should have occupied days are crowded into hours. With hardly an interval between He is brought before a succession of tribunals. I omitted to detail these in the previous chapter because I wanted to direct attention rather to the settled attitude of Christ’s mind than to the shifting nature of His fortunes. But when we speak of the physical in Jesus these fatiguing experiences, coming as they do after the depression of the Garden, have a deep significance in explaining the collapse that was to come. The process must have been one of extreme outward exhaustion. First He is examined before Annas; then He stands before the bar of Caiaphas; then He is placed at the judgment-seat of Pilate; then He is sent to Herod; lastly, for final sentence, He is sent back to Pilate again. Then follows the condemnation to be crucified. Instantly He becomes the target for disrespect — legal and popular; for death by the cross was itself a badge of disgrace. Pilate scourges Him; the multitude insult and mock and buffet Him. Then He is brought forth to the streets again, and the procession begins to move toward the final scene. They ascend the Dolorous Way leading their august Captive to His destined doom; and that Captive Himself, in accordance with the custom on such occasions, carries His own cross.

Suddenly something happens — something which we can only see through a veil. The narrative only reveals it dimly; but it has been vividly painted by the pencil of Albrecht Diirer. Jesus faints under His burden. He can go no farther; His physical strength is at last exhausted and He sinks beneath the weight of His cross. It is transferred from Him to a commonplace man who has come out from the country districts and has joined the procession through curiosity. It is to my mind at once the most human and the most Divinely helpful incident in the whole life of Jesus. It constitutes a distinct feature in the great gallery, and it bears to the heart a message which has not been given by any other phase of the Portrait. Let us ponder for a little the depth of its revelation.

There is something peculiarly sad in a physical collapse. We see, for example, a medical student who has brilliantly passed all his examinations but one — the concluding one for which he has not yet stood. He is about to enter upon this final trial. He has full confidence of success, and there opens before him the prospect of a golden life in the service of man. Suddenly his health breaks down; physical faintness overtakes him; he sinks by the wayside. At the very moment of planting his foot upon the threshold his foot slips and he is laid aside from work. Just within sight of the promised land, he is forbidden to enter in, and the commonplace Joshua gets the niche he was designed to fill.

Now, where lies the pain of this position? In this, that the student continues to bear in his mind the burden he has dropped from his hand. He is still doing in the spirit the work he is prevented from achieving in the flesh. Lying on his bed of weakness, he can no longer entertain the prospect of carrying on his shoulders the cross of humanity; but the sense of this inability is made more bitter by the fact that he has never ceased to carry it in his heart, and that, if he only had the physical power, the yoke to him would be easy and the burden light.

Now, excluding the bitterness, this is the position of the human soul of Jesus at the stage where we have arrived. Do not be afraid of the earthly analogy; the doctrine of Incarnation justifies all analogies. Jesus has been sweeping all difficulties before Him. He has stood the ordeal of what I may reverently call successive examinations. He has passed the examination by Annas, by Caiaphas, by Herod, by Pilate. He has but one more to undergo — the examination by the crowd who stand to witness His progress up the Dolorous Way! As He passes before them bearing His physical burden, His outward strength succumbs. The cross drops from His weary frame. He is unable to complete the outward task; a commonplace man has to finish it for Him. And all the rest of that journey up that Dolorous Way Jesus has to bear His burden only in the spirit. The cross of humanity is still carried in His heart; but it is there alone. He has been constrained to give up external work. His labours for humanity live, for the time, only in His sympathy. He performs them merely in His heart, in His wish, in His will. The spirit alone is ready, the flesh is weak.

Have you weighed the comfort which this incident must bring to every follower of Christ? Jesus is recognised as the typical bearer of the cross of humanity, as having never paused in that work of cross-bearing. And yet, mechanically speaking, He did pause; He became for a time an invalid; He had to pass the outward burden into the hands of another. The outward work was still imputed to Him; but why? Because He was still doing it in the spirit. Up that Dolorous Way He carried the cross only in His mind; but that mental carrying was counted to Him for an outward deed. There is the comfort to a follower of Jesus! When a man is laid aside from the world, prostrated on a bed of sickness, disabled from doing any work with the hand, he can appeal to his Master’s experience in vindication of his own. He can plead that he is still doing the work in his heart, and that every act performed in his heart will be counted to him as equivalent to an act done outside. He may claim, in fellowship with Jesus, that even in his hour of inaction he has been bearing his cross up the Dolorous Way.

I have said that without this incident we should not elsewhere in the Portrait meet with precisely the same suggestion. I read lately in a book written by one of the most distinguished of living clergymen, an extraordinary statement. He said that Christ was subject to every form of human vicissitude except, perhaps, sickness. It was the exception that startled me; it seemed to impoverish, rather than enrich, the Portrait. I set myself to inquire in the great gallery whether there was not some trace of this unobserved feature. And I was truly glad when I found it here — on the road up to Golgotha. The weariness at the well would not make a complete humanity if it were not supplemented by a weariness on the sick-bed. We cannot afford to part with this incident in the life of Jesus.

I have said that when Jesus dropped His outward cross it fell into the hands of a commonplace man. He is called Simon of Cyrene. Cyrene was situated in North Africa, and it contained a Jewish colony. I do not think, however, that Simon was a Jewish colonist. I think he must have belonged to the slave population. I cannot imagine that a free man would have been made the victim of such an indignity as to be forced to bear the cross of one on his way to crucifixion. The narrative distinctly points out that it was no voluntary act on his part: ’ him they compelled to bear His cross.’ There was not present at that moment a single man who would have accepted the burden with his will — probably not one that would have accepted it for hire. Jesus in His hour of sickness could find neither a hand to nurse for affection nor a hand to nurse for reward; the care He received was all the result of compulsion.

We will say, then, that Simon was an African slave. If he had the blood of North Africa in his veins, his person in the eyes of the Jew

VOL. II. T was associated with slavery. He came from a hated race — the race of Ham. He came from the race that, according to Jewish tradition, had received the solemn curse of the patriarch Noah, that had been doomed to the place of a servant of servants. He belonged to a fraternal branch of that people which Israel had been bidden to exterminate, to expel, to root out of the land — that people from whose captives taken in war she had constituted her first ownership of a community of slaves. Doubtless such a thought was in the mind of the Jew when he compelled Simon of Cyrene to bear the cross of Jesus.

What had brought Simon there? Curiosity — tinged, no doubt, with a little complacency. Coming out from the country he had met and followed the procession — that procession which accompanied to the place of death one reported to be a lineal descendant of the royal house

1 The condemnation to be ‘a servant of servants’ (Genesis ix. 25) is really intended for all Ham’s posterity; it is specially associated with the name of Canaan merely because Canaan represents the Hebrew branch; the meaning is ’ keep Ham’s posterity away from our shores! ’ of David. I can imagine, I say, that some complacency mingled with his curiosity. I can conceive him thus communing with him self: ‘So this is what it has come to at last! Pride has indeed got a fall! The line of David crushed our line; where is it now! Here is the last of the series — a man broken, shattered, reviled, led to a malefactor’s doom! The rose of Jesse has withered; the glory of Solomon has faded; the light of the royal line is going out in gloom! Truly the wrongs of the Canaanite have been at length avenged!’ Such, in more direct language, must have been the sentiment of the African slave as he stood, spectator of the scene. Suddenly the spectator is made an actor! A ring gathers round him. Jesus has dropped His cross through exhaustion; here is a strong, able-bodied man who can supply the vacant place! Within a few seconds Simon finds himself where Jesus stood. Reluctant, struggling, protesting, he is dragged into the arena; and the burden which has fallen from the Son of Man is laid upon him

What does this mean? I do not ask what does it mean for Simon, but what does it mean for the world J I have said that the final scene in the life of Jesus embraces the many phases of His communion with future ages. We have seen in His meeting with Caiaphas and Pilate His communion with the future life of nations. What is involved in His meeting with Simon of Cyrene? It is the inauguration of something very distinct and novel. Simon is ‘’compelled to bear His cross.’ It is the initiation of a great fact — that henceforth the bearing of that cross will be inevitable to all. The fate of Simon is not merely historical; it is typical. It tells you and me that no man can escape the cross of Jesus. We may or may not commune with Jesus Himself, but we have no alternative as to communing with His cross. The choice is not between taking the cross of Christ or leaving it; we must take it. The choice is, shall we be compelled to bear it or Spelled to bear it; shall it be thrust upon us by law or shall it be appropriated by love? Christ has brought man so near to man that my brother cannot suffer without his suffering affecting me. I cannot escape the cross of humanity, for there has been woven a network round all men which makes it imperative they should rejoice or suffer together. One question alone awaits me — shall I let my brother’s cross come to me, or shall I go to meet my brother’s cross? Shall I be compelled or shall I be Spelled to bear it? Shall I take it through sympathy or shall I take it like Simon of Cyrene? That is the choice, that is the alternative; other course lies before no man. Communion with the cross there must be, but there are two roads which lead to it; which shall be mine?

T HAVE chosen, O Lord; I shall take love’s way. I shall not be like Simon of Cyrene — an unwilling burden-bearer; my service shall be free. Still Thou art passing up the Dolorous Way carrying the burden of Thy cross! Still Thou comest, footsore and weary, bearing Thy great weight — the weight of humanity! Thou hast borne it from the gates of the Garden all down the stream of Time; Thou hast carried it from the first hour of Calvary to the last hour of to-day! Shall I let Thee bear it any longer alone I have seen the multitude forsake Thee. I have seen Thy disciples flee — the men of the mountain and the men of the plain together. I have seen Simon of Cyrene compelled to do with his hand a service which his heart revolted from. I cannot bear this neglect of Thee, O Lord! Give me a fragment of Thy cross! Let me help Thee with Thy burden up the Dolorous Way! Let me lend one touch to the lifting of the mighty load! Let me lessen by one added hand the weight of Thy labour! Let me lighten, even by one helping arm, the heaviness of the pressure on Thy heart! I would never have it said of me that I was compelled to bear Thy cross!