The Hour of Priesthood—Continued

The point I am considering is one of artistic contrast. In the delineation of the great gallery the last hours of the Son of Man are described in a twofold aspect; the flesh is weak, but the spirit is willing. I am trying to illustrate this twofold attitude, am seeking to show how the persistent aim of those who depict Christ’s death is to poise His mental strength over against His physical weakness. At the very moment when the body is prostrated, racked with pain and exhausted by fatigue, the soul of Jesus is represented in an upright posture, manifesting an active interest in things around, and exercising a regal and legislative influence in the midst of the closing scene. We have been considering one of these legislative acts — the admission of the malefactor into the kingdom of God. We are now to witness another of a different kind. The case of the malefactor was an act of jurisdiction in the sphere of the criminal; we are now to see an exercise of authority in the sphere of the household. The altar and the hearth are once more to be united, and this time they are to be joined by a reunion with His own domestic circle — the circle of His Nazareth home.

It is strange and beautiful to see the two extreme points of life thus joined. Calvary and Nazareth were very far apart, and much had intervened to separate the aspirations of the one from the hopes of the other. Yet here they met side by side. Shortly after the malefactor’s prayer there stood before the cross a group of five. Four of them were women, and two of these women belonged to the family of Jesus — His mother and her sister. The fifth of the group was a man, but a man who was yet to develop a truly feminine soul; it was the disciple whom Jesus specially loved — John, son of Zebedee. As they stood below the cross, the eye of Jesus rested successively on two of them — the mother and the beloved disciple; and He committed to that disciple the greatest trust that has ever been reposed in any human being — the charge of His earthly parent, ‘Woman, behold thy son; son, behold thy mother! ’

There is something grand in this home touch amid the storm. There are mountains whose summits are white with the snows of winter and yet at whose base there reposes a wealth of summer flowers. Some such picture is here. The head of Jesus is crowned with thorns; but His heart reposes in the memories of home. The songs of Galilee ring in His ear above the tumult of Jerusalem; and He turns aside from His pain to bless the old cottage of Nazareth. The physical suffering is superseded by an act of impersonal communion. Jesus on the cross communes with the home life of coming ages. He sanctifies for all time to come the ties of the family, and puts an eternal imprimatur upon the affections of the heart.

It is curious that in the closing of St. John’s

Gospel there should thus ring out the refrain of its opening pages. It begins with a domestic scene — the marriage feast of Cana, where the mother is seen standing beside her son. It closes with a scene in which the mother and son again stand side by side, and in a different shape the miracle is again performed of glorifying the commonplace — of turning the water into wine.

I am inclined to recognise another refrain of this Gospel’s opening in the words which Jesus next breathes on the cross, ‘I thirst! ‘They express the only personal want to which He there gives utterance. I have no doubt they express a real personal want. I have no doubt that here, as at the well of Samaria, He asked water because He wanted it. But I think that here He had the well of Samaria behind Him as a background of memory. There, in His hour of need, man had ministered to Him; and the ministration had been sweet. Now there had come to Him an hour of need deeper still; would He not give man again a chance to minister! Real as the craving was, I think this was the motive for expressing it. I believe that but for this motive He would never have told His want. He could have kept it within His heart; He had deeper wants than this within His heart, unseen, unheard, hid from the common gaze. If this is spoken out, it is not for His own sake but for the sake of Man. He wants His brother to offer Him the cup of cold water. He wants to receive in that cup a counterpart of the communion in the wilderness of Bethsaida. That was a gift from the hand of Jesus to the multitude; was there to be no gift from the hand of the multitude to Jesus! Was not the time come when the Son of Man should be, not the giver, but the receiver! I believe it was this thought which dictated to Jesus the one expression of physical want on the cross. The outward thirst was real; but He had an inner thirst which was deeper — the desire for human sympathy. The satisfaction of the outer thirst by the hand of Man would allay the inner craving. It would prove the existence of compassion — a word which literally means participation in the suffering of another. Therefore it was that Jesus asked the outward draught.

And when He received it from a purely secular hand, I doubt not He received it as an act of communion. The man who gave it was to Him a representative man. He stood for the secular ages to come. He stood for those whose charity would be better than their creed, whose pity would be larger than their faith. He represented those who in future ages would help humanity without knowing that they were helping Him. That is why Jesus did not refuse the draught. It meant to Him more than it said. It implied, not a cup, but an ocean — not the outpouring of a little wine, but the pouring forth of a world’s heart!

There is only one incident of these hours on the cross which might be thought to militate against my view that the soul of Jesus remained erect amid the stooping of the body. I allude to the words which He uttered in soliloquy, * My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me! ‘They have been thought to indicate that, for an instant at least, the spirit of Jesus was overclouded by His sufferings, and that the waves of a momentary despair swept across His soul. From my point of view such a conclusion is, of course, impossible. I regard Christ’s mental anguish as having been conquered in Gethsemane. Even in Gethsemane He did not fear that the Father would forsake Him, but that the Father would forsake the world. Waiving, however, any opinion of mine in this matter, look at the record itself! Do you think it likely that, almost immediately after an expression of the most cloudless confidence, almost immediately after the triumphant declaration to the malefactor, ‘To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,’ Jesus should have been overmastered by despair, should have sunk into the deepest despondency, should have felt Himself abandoned by that Father in whose service He had lived and for whose glory alone He had laboured? Paradise was open to His eyes a little while before. Could Jesus doubt His own vision? Could He feel uncertain about that of which a few moments ago He was sure? The very statement refutes itself, nullifies itself! We must look elsewhere for an explanation of the words, * My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me! ’

Nor, do I think, need we look far for a very different explanation of them. We have to bear in mind first of all that the words are not an original utterance of Jesus; they are a quotation from the opening of the twenty-second Psalm. The question therefore narrows itself to this, Why did Jesus on this occasion quote this Psalm? Now observe, He was not the only one who was quoting it. It was being referred to all round either by word or deed. The soldiers were dividing His raiment amongst them; what Jew could fail to read in that action those words of that twenty-second Psalm, ‘They parted my garment amongst them, and on my vesture they cast lots’! The priests were mocking Him as they passed by; and their mockery was all expressed in the words of that twenty-second Psalm, ‘He trusted in God that He would deliver him; let Him deliver him if He delighted in him! ‘In other words, they said: * Here is a man evidently forsaken by God! If he were not forsaken by God, would he have this cross? If God were on his side, would He allow him to be buffeted, scourged, crucified? No; he would be clothed in purple and fine linen, and would fare sumptuously every day. He would be rich; he would be strong; he would be joyful; he would be crowned with laurels. Let this man come down from the cross, and we shall believe in him! Let him show us his prosperity, and we shall confess that God is with him! Mean time, we know by his fallen fortunes that he is forsaken of heaven.’

Now, when everybody was quoting the Psalm, Jesus quoted it too. It was no mere imitation that made Him follow the stream. He remembered in this Psalm something which those others repeating it had forgotten. They were quoting it as His cry of despair. He remembered that it was really a psalm of hope. He uttered the first line aloud, but He said the rest in His heart. To my mind, it was the concluding part of the Psalm that dominated the soul of Jesus. Read that concluding part. Read the portion extending from the twenty-second verse to the end. Is that the utterance of a man who thinks him self forsaken? On the contrary, it is the greatest blast of triumph ever blown! The message of these verses is an assertion that the appearance of forsakenness was a delusion. It reversed the notes with which the song had opened; it turned the funeral march into a bridal strain. And it was this closing strain of which Jesus was thinking when He uttered the opening words. He heard the end from the beginning. The final paean of glory rang in His ear though He began with the minor and mournful prelude; and while His lips were saying, ‘Why hast Thou forsaken me!’ His heart was anticipating the words, ‘In the midst of the congregation will I praise Thee!’

The truth is, Christ’s expiation was His acquiescence — His power to see something beyond the pain. Why do we not take the dying malefactor as an expiation for the sins of the world? His physical sufferings were of the same kind as those of Jesus. His cross was side by side — erected on the same spot, raised at the same moment; why do we magnify the crucified Jesus and merely pity the crucified penitent? You say, ‘Jesus was Divine.’ Yes; but that is a magnifying of His crown — not of His cross. The cross belongs to the human side. We want to know what makes the cross of the Man Christ Jesus what the cross of the penitent is not — an expiation for the sins of the world. ‘It was because Jesus had more pain,’ you say. Strange as it may seem, I think the reason is exactly the reverse. If I should not be misunderstood, I would say that Jesus had less physical pain, and that in this lies His power of expiation. The gift He renders to the Father is sweet in proportion as it is voluntary; it is not the agony, but the acquiescence, that expiates the sin of the world. Even the Jewish prophet had predicted this of the Holy Child of God, whoever he might be, and when ever he might come, ‘When Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hands, If ‘it pleased the Lord to bruise Him,’ what pleased Him was not the bruises but the unconquerable joy. It was the persistence of love through loss, of peace through pain, of trust through trial, of courage through contumely, of devotion through death. The tribute dearest to the Father from the Cross of Calvary was not the prostration of a body but the surrender of a will.

And this helps us to understand why the last scene of all is a blaze of mental triumph. It is a blaze made all the more remarkable by the fact that the physical surroundings are depicted at the lowest. The great gallery is all in gloom. Dense darkness has come on; the frame of the Portrait is utterly hid. Even artificial lights cannot be procured, for there is a trembling of the earth before which

VOL. II. X they could not stand. Yet it is at this moment, of all moments, that the eye of Jesus gleams out with resplendent brightness. It is from the dark room, from the ray less environment, that the Face of Jesus shines. It shines with an unborrowed glory, a glory all its own. Nothing assists it; everything resists it; but it shines, and we see it and are glad.

There was an old belief that in its hour of death the swan sang. In His moment of death Jesus uttered a strain of triumph. When the great darkness had lasted three hours, the radiance in the soul of Jesus found expression, and He cried with a loud voice: ‘It is finished; Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit! ‘With that song on His lips, He died. It was not the moment when men expected Him to die. They were surprised. The mere physical cross did not account for it. It can only be accounted for by the supposition that some great emotion had ruptured His heart. But what was that emotion? It was not despair. It was not the sense of being forsaken by His Father.

It was not the rupture which we popularly call a broken heart When we speak of a broken heart we mean a heart broken by grief. But, if it were good English, it would be perfectly good physiology to speak of a heart broken by joy. No doubt the physical heart of Jesus had been weakened by a long train of burdens, and there was wanted only one final strain to snap its cords asunder. But that final strain was to come not from the flesh but from the spirit — not from a burden of care but from a weight of glory. The last chord of the harp was snapped by a stroke of ecstasy; it was a rupture through rapture!

And what was the cause of that gleam which shot across the dying hour of Jesus? It was the sense of a completed development, * It is finished! ‘Remember, no claimant for the office of Messiah could prove his claim till he had reached the setting sun; it was only at evening time there could be perfect light. The required surrender to the Father must be from dawn to dark. It was not enough that the claimant should go up to Mount Moriah ’ early in the morning ‘; the morning sacrifice must be endorsed by the noon, the midday, and the twilight; only in the last rays of twilight could the aspirant say, * It is finished! ‘None had ever reached that terminus before. They had all fainted; they had all grown weary. Many had made high resolves in the dawn; none had sustained them through the day. Some had sunk at morning; some had withered at midday; some had fainted in the afternoon. But now, at last, there befell a wonder. One hurrtan soul arrived at the evening of the sacrificial day! He arrived alone; He was the first to discover the new country — the reconciled heart of the Father. Yet, solitary as He was, He knew that He was the pioneer of millions. He was footsore, but His foot was on the land. There was no possibility of any more sea. He had reached the furthest limit of the path of sacrifice. He had realised the dream of the temple; He had realised the dream on the banks of Jordan. He had kept till evening the promise He had made to the blood-red morning sun. He had finished that work of love which in the days of childhood He had projected for His Father.

T ET me bring Thee a wreath, O Jesus! -* — ‘Let me bring it now and here — to the spot which the world calls Thy grave! There are many wreaths of pity on that spot; but it is not a wreath of pity that / would like to bring. Not a cypress, but a laurel, would I lay on the steps of Calvary. Often have I looked at my brother’s grave and said, ‘How unfinished is the work of life! ‘But when I gaze on Thy tomb I have the opposite feeling; I say, ‘This Life was rounded, perfected! ‘They tell me that the path of glory leads but to the grave; but Thy path to the grave led to glory. There is a garden in the place where they laid Thee; it will always be there. When I see Thy dying, the beauty will ever predominate over the gloom. Therefore I will bring no cypress to Thy cross. Tears are out of place there; pity is unseemly there; worship alone can reign there. Thy crown glitters in the dust; Thy Face shines in the gloom; Thy kingdom comes in the cloud; Thy sceptre waves in the pierced hand. Thou art powerful in Thy prostration; Thou hast dominion in Thy dying; Thou art conqueror in Thy final cry. The wreath I bring to Calvary shall be a wreath of glory!