Gloria Crucis Part 7

Home life is the real test of a person's Christianity. There the barriers with which society elsewhere hedges round and cramps the free expression of our individuality, no longer exist. We are at liberty to be ourselves. What sort of use do we make of it? What manner of self do we disclose? Would our best friends recognise that self to be the person whom they admire? If we are to be Christians at all, we must begin by being Christians at home.

At home, and beyond the limits of home, one great Christian virtue stands out as the supreme law of social behaviour--that is, for a disciple--the virtue of consideration for others.

In the midst of torturing physical pain, in the extreme form of that experience, of which the slightest degree makes us fretful, irritable, self-absorbed, our Lord calmly provides for the future of His mother and the disciple whom He loved.

What is required of us is not high-flown sentiment, but the practical proof of consideration, that we have really learnt the first lesson of the Christ-life, to put others, not self, in the first place. The proof, the test, is our willingness to put ourselves to inconvenience, to go without things, for the sake of others. If in such a little matter as so ordering our Sunday meals as to give our servants rest, as far as may be, and opportunity for worship, our practical, home Christianity breaks down, then we must not shirk the plain truth, there is in us _nothing_ of the Spirit of Him Who spoke the Third Word. On the other hand, the readiness with which we do yield up our comforts is a proof--nothing short of that--a proof of the indwelling of G.o.d in us. "In this we know that He abideth in us, from the Spirit"--the Spirit of the Christ--"which He hath given to us."

2. We notice, in the second place, that Christ's proof of friendship is the a.s.signment of a task, the giving of some work to do for Him. "Behold thy mother." We are His friends, as He Himself has told us. "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave is one who knows not what his master is doing; but you I have called friends." St. John had forsaken his Friend:

a torchlight and a noise, The sudden Roman faces, violent hands, And fear of what the Jews might do,

had been too much for the disciple's courage and the friend's devotion.

And it is written, I forsook and fled: That was my trial, and it ended thus.

But St. John had returned. There he is, in his true place, beside his Master and Friend.

We too have forsaken, sometimes denied, the same Master and Friend. We too with true repentance have returned, and are struggling to take up the old allegiance. What is the proof, where is the a.s.surance for which we long more, perhaps, than for anything else in the world, that our repentance has been accepted, that we are once more in the number of those whom He calls His friends?

There is one decisive test. Upon all His friends He lays some task. If we have anything to do for Jesus Christ, then we may a.s.sure our hearts.

Our desertion has been forgiven. He has spoken to us the words of peace, "Behold thy mother, thy brother, thy son." For, let us not forget, all work for others, for the bodies, the minds, the souls of our brethren in the family of G.o.d, is capable of being raised from the level of professional drudgery, and of becoming the direct service of Jesus Christ.

To work for Christ is the real foretaste of heaven, far removed from the sensuous imagery of some modern hymns. "Be thou ruler," there is the supreme reward, "over ten cities."

If we are doing any work for Christ, i.e. for others for Christ's sake, and as part of our service to Him, willingly and cheerfully, then we have the final and convincing proof that we are indeed forgiven, that the offer of renewed allegiance has been accepted, that we have been restored to His Friendship.

V THE FOURTH WORD

"Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani."--ST. MATT. XXVII. 46; ST. MARK XV. 34.

There are three peculiar and distinguishing features of this fourth word which our Saviour uttered from His Cross.

1. It is the only one of the Seven which finds a place in the earliest record of our Lord's life, contained in the matter common to St. Matthew and St. Mark.

2. It is the only one which has been preserved to us in the original Aramaic, in the very syllables which were formed by the lips of Christ.

3. It is the only one which He is said to have "shouted" ([Greek text]), under the extremity of some overpowering emotion.

In fact, we are here at the very heart of the Pa.s.sion. In this dread cry I see something of the height of the Divine love, something of the depths of my own sin.

The meaning of this dread "cry" is not perhaps so difficult to understand as some have thought. It is to be found in the entire reality of that human nature which the Son of G.o.d a.s.sumed--not merely a human body, but a human consciousness like our own; in the thoroughness with which He identified Himself with every phase of our experience, the knowledge of personal sin alone excepted.

In this identification more was involved than we commonly think. Sin cannot be in a world of which the const.i.tution is the expression of the Mind of G.o.d, without introducing therein a fatal element of discord, confusion, and pain. To all consequences of sin the Saviour necessarily submitted Himself, by the mere fact of His entry into a world which sin had disordered. In respect of the external consequences, this is abundantly clear. We have seen, and it is, in fact, obvious, that His sufferings and Death were the result of the actual sins of men. But there were, it is important to remember, internal sufferings attributable to the same cause. We are at once reminded of His tears over the doomed city, doomed by the persistent refusal to recognise the Divine voice. But we are here on still deeper ground. The true explanation of the fourth word is to be found in that great principle which St. Paul has laid down in a familiar, but little understood, sentence: "the sting of death is sin."

The simplest and most obvious meaning of these words is that, whatever be the physiological meaning and necessity of human death, its peculiar horror and dread, that which makes death to be what it is for us, is to be found in sin, in the separation of man from G.o.d.

Now that horror consists, ultimately, in the fact that death is the a.n.a.logue, or, in New Testament language, the "sign," of what sin is--separation. If sin is, essentially, the violent and unnatural separation of man, by his own act, from his spiritual environment, death is clearly the separation--and, _as our sins have made it_, the violent and unnatural separation of man from all that has. .h.i.therto been his world. It may be, that the final, extremest pang of death is the supreme moment of agony, when we feel that we are being made to let go our hold on reality, are slipping back into what, in our consciousness of it, must appear like nothingness, the mere blank negation of being. Here, then, we have the explanation of this awful cry. He Who came "for our salvation" into a world disordered by sin, willed so to identify Himself with our experience, as to realise death, not as it might have been, but as man had made it, the very sign and symbol of man's sin, of his separation from G.o.d. That moment of extreme mental anguish wrung from His lips the Cry, not of "dereliction," but of faith triumphing even in the moment when He "tasted death" as sin's most bitter fruit, "_My_ G.o.d, why didst Thou forsake Me?"

What this view involves is briefly

(i) Death is an experience natural to man.

(ii) Sin has added to this natural experience a peculiar agony, a "sting."

(iii) This "sting" is an experience of utter isolation at some moment in the process of death, the feeling that one is being violently rent away from one's clinging hold of existence.

(iv) This "sting" is due to the disorder sin has introduced into the const.i.tution of the world and of man.

(v) In virtue of this, death has become the "sign" in the "natural"

world of what sin is in the spiritual.

(vi) Our Blessed Lord so utterly identified Himself with our experience, with the internal as well as with the external consequences of our sin, as to undergo this most terrible result of man's transgression.

(vii) And He felt the full agony of it as realising, what none but the Sinless One could realise, the horror of sin as separation from G.o.d.

In a word, the Cry represents the culmination of our Lord's sufferings, a real experience of His human consciousness.

The experience was "objective," as all states of consciousness are. Our sensations are as objective as "material things." It was, as we have just said, real: inasmuch as the only definition of reality is that which is included in personal experience.

Thus understood, this fourth word teaches us at least two valuable lessons.

1. It discloses to us the Mind of Christ, which is to be our own mind, in its outlook upon human sin. We, if "the same mind" is to be in us "which was also in Christ Jesus," must hate sin, and our sins, not because of any results or penalties external to sin, but because sin separates us from G.o.d, our true life. The worst punishment of sin, is sin itself. Into depths which make us tremble as we strive to gaze into them, Christ our Lord descended to deliver us from that deadly thing which is destroying our life. That appalling Cry burst from His lips, that we might learn to fear and dread sin worse than any pang of physical pain.

2. This Word, again, discloses the Mind of Christ, true Man, in its relation to G.o.d. He possessed fullest self-consciousness both as G.o.d and as Man. Thus He Himself alone knew, in their absolute fulness, the joy and the strength which come from the communion of man with G.o.d. That joy and that strength, in the measure in which we can attain to their realisation, are to be the goal of all our striving. Thus this Word has for us more than a merely negative teaching. Not only are we to shrink from that which destroys union with G.o.d. We must seek far more earnestly to make that union a greater and a deeper reality. This end we can achieve by making our prayers more deliberate acts of conscious communion with that Person Who is not merely above us, but in us, and in Whom "we live, and move, and have our being." We must all make the confession that we have not yet nearly realised all that prayer might be to us, if only we were more energetic, more strenuous, more utterly in earnest, in our attempts to pray. It is by prayer that we are to attain to our complete manhood, to "win our souls," to become our true selves.

For what are men better than sheep or goats, Which nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing G.o.d, they lift not hands of prayer, Both for themselves, and those that call them friend?

For so the whole round world is, every way, Bound with gold chains about the feet of G.o.d.

VI THE FIFTH WORD

"I thirst."--JOHN XIX. 28.

This is the only utterance of our Blessed Lord in which He gave expression to His physical sufferings. Not least of these was that intolerable thirst which is the invariable result of all serious wounds, as those know well who have ever visited patients in a hospital after they have undergone a surgical operation. In this case it must have been aggravated beyond endurance by exposure to the burning heat of an Eastern sun. This word, then, spoken under such circ.u.mstances, discloses the Mind of the Son of G.o.d, perfect Man, in regard to physical pain.

1. Notice then, in the first place, the majestic calm of this word. It was spoken in intensest agony, yet with deliberation, exhibiting the restraint of the sovereign and victorious will of the Sufferer. "After these things, knowing that all things had now been accomplished, He saith [not 'cried'], I thirst." We cannot be wrong in reading this marvellous word in the light of that strange pa.s.sage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the writer tells us that Christ, "although He was Son, yet learnt He obedience by the things which He suffered." How are we to reconcile this with the moral perfection of our Lord's humanity? We can only do so, by applying the Aristotelian distinction between the potential and the actual. The obedience of the Son of G.o.d, existing as it did in all possible perfection from the first moment of His human consciousness, yet existed, prior to His complete identification of Himself with all our human experience, as a potentiality. It became actual, in the same way as our obedience can alone become actual, as a result of that experience, and, above all, in consequence of those sufferings which were part of that experience. In this sense He "learnt obedience," where we too must learn it, in G.o.d's school of pain.

Therein lies the answer, as complete an answer as we can at present receive, to the problem of pain. While that problem is, beyond doubt, the most perplexing of all the questions which confront us, the real difficulty lies, not in the existence of pain in G.o.d's world, but in the apparent absence, in so many instances, of any discernible purpose in pain. In itself, pain does not, or at least should not, conflict with the highest moral conception which we can form of the character of G.o.d.

But purposeless pain, if such really occur anywhere in the universe, is hard indeed to reconcile with the revelation of the Highest as Infinite and Eternal Love. The real answer to the problem lies in our gradually dawning perception of the high purposes which pain subserves.

It is well, then, to remind ourselves of the teaching of natural science in regard to the function of pain in the animal world. There, at least, it has originated, and has survived, only because of its actual use to the possessors of that nervous system which makes pain possible. It serves as a danger signal of such inestimable value that no race of animals, of any high degree of organisation, which could be incapable of suffering pain, could for any length of time continue to survive. Pain here, at any rate, so far from being purposeless, owes its existence to the purpose which it subserves.

Ascending higher in the scale of being we see, as has been recently pointed out, that the progress of human civilisation has been very largely due to the successful efforts of man to resist and to remove pain. The most successful and progressive races of mankind are those which inhabit regions of the world where the conditions of life are neither so severe as to paralyse all exertion, or even to preclude its possibility, nor so favourable that men can avoid the pain of hunger or of cold without strenuous and unremitting effort. The stimulus of pain has been the means of perfecting the animal nature of man, and the secret of those victories which he has won over the inclement or dangerous forces of the material world, and which we call, in their totality, human civilisation.