Our Master: Thoughts For Salvationists About Their Lord Part 6

V.

But the disciples' strange failure did not call forth one word of bitterness from our Lord's lips. A gentle reproach was certainly implied in the words, "Could ye not watch with Me one hour?" but no shade of personal displeasure expressed itself, much as the occasion might seem to warrant it. No! Jesus knew the failures begotten of human weakness, as well as the horror of human sin. And so He made allowances, and was as patient with those who left Him, as He was tender to those who were steadfast. He loved them both.

Go thou, and do likewise. In your home; in your family circle; in your Corps; in your office; in your work, be it what it may; when men fail and forsake your Lord; even if all disappoint and desert you, _you must love them still_. Be faithful with them; but, above all, be steadfast in your own purpose, and devote all your zeal and strength to finish the work that G.o.d has given you to do. In short, go forward without them; but let your words, and thoughts, and prayers for them be like your Master's.

And Jesus utters no word of complaint about this failure. The silence all through that great anguish is indeed very wonderful. Abandoned by man, He abandoned Himself all the more earnestly to His work for men without a murmur. And abandoned by G.o.d--as for a little time it seemed--He all the more completely abandoned Himself to G.o.d. To have fellowship with Him, you and I will have to walk the same path, and mind the same rule.

When friends, or followers, or comrades trample upon the solemn covenants made alike to us and to G.o.d, and forsake, and leave us to finish our work and tread our winepress alone, let there be no moaning because of the pain it inflicts. When those upon whom we had a right--right by reason of natural law, or right by reason of the obligations and precious vows of friendship, or right on the ground of spiritual indebtedness--when those, I say, upon whom we had a right to depend fail us, let there be no complaining of their treatment because it is painful to us. Let there be no filling of the earth with laments and wailings, no accusing of our accusers, no reviling of those who revile us. Let us be silent in the patience of Jesus and in the strength of His love, and let His way of meeting the loneliness of desertion be our way--let us pray.

But all the same, that sleep, that failure to respond to the personal claim of Jesus, was a sure forerunner of the cowardly flight, and the deadly denial which followed it. The seeds of Peter's lies and curses were sown in the selfishness and slumber of the garden; they came to maturity in the kitchen of the judgment hall. Poor Peter! How many hours of bitter self-reproach would you have been spared, had you but held out during that one brief hour of your watch in Gethsemane! How differently we could have regarded your poor wobbling nature! How differently, too, your Lord's great trial would have come to Him! How different might have been the history of mankind!

VI.

The method of love which Jesus adopted towards the forsakers received the sanction of success, _for they all came back_. In spite of their shame and their fears, they returned to their allegiance, with, I think, much more than their old faith and love. Judas was the only exception, and even he sought a place of repentance, and, but for his horrid league with the jealous and cruel religionists, would, I think, have found one.

You see the lesson? If you go on with your work for G.o.d, and finish it, paying no heed to those who, having put their hand to the plough, look back; and if, in spite of your sorrow, you will struggle steadily forward in the face of the coldness and carelessness of those between whom and you there was once the tenderest love, G.o.d will not only carry you through your appointed labour for the world, but He will restore many of those others to their allegiance to Him and His.

Will they ever be quite the same? Will they not have lost something? Yes, they will indeed have lost; but, if they come back, in reality they will gain more. The new union will be more divine than the former one. They will not merely

. . . rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things;

but the beauty, and excellence, and glory of love, the exceeding profitableness of enduring grace, and the sweet aroma of faithfulness, will be the more clearly manifest to the sons of men by reason of the weakness and breakableness of the human vessel.

Let us, then, press forward, without one backward glance, until we finish our work. Let us thank G.o.d for those who are faithful; let us love and pray for those who fail, expecting to see them restored, healed, and purified.

VII.

Windows in Calvary.

"_And they crucified Him . . . And sitting down they watched Him there_."--MATT, xxvii. 35, 36.

Pa.s.sing words spoken in times of deep emotion often reveal human character more vividly than a lifetime of talk under ordinary circ.u.mstances. Conduct which at other times is of the most trifling significance, reveals in the hour of fiery trial, the very inwards of the soul, even making manifest that which has been hidden, perhaps, for a generation. Thus, while watching a man with the opportunity and the temptation to deceive or oppress those who are in his power, you may see into the very thoughts of his heart; you may learn what he really is. Or you may measure the depths of a mother's love in observing her when, after violating every principle she has valued and lived for, her prodigal boy comes to ask her to take him in once more.

In the same way, words spoken by the dying are often like windows suddenly uncovered, through which one may catch a glimpse of the ruling pa.s.sion of life, in the light of which their life-witness and life-labour alike look different. It is this fact which often gives the dying hour of the meanest, importance as well as solemnity. The veriest trifler that ever trifled through this vale of tears has, in that last solemn hour something to teach of the secrets of mortality.

And this revelation of the real facts of human experience is of the highest value to the world. It is one of G.o.d's witnesses to truth, _that truth will out_. Sooner or later, selfishness and sin will _appear_ in their naked deformity, to horrify those who behold them; and in the end, justice and truth and love are certain to be made manifest in their natural beauty, to convince and to charm and to attract their beholders.

It is not only one of the uses of trial to bring this about, but it is one of the means by which G.o.d converts to His own high purposes, the miseries and sorrows the Devil has brought in. The one burns the martyrs; the other brings out of that cruel and frightful wrong the glorious testimony which is the very seed of His Church. The one casts us into fiery dispensations of suffering and loss; the other takes these moments of human anguish and desolation, and makes of them open windows through which a doubting or scoffing world may see what love can do. Thus He makes us to triumph In the midst of our foes, while working in us a likeness to Himself, the All-patient and All-perfect G.o.d.

Nor is it the good and true alone who are thus made object-lessons to others, and to themselves, by these ordeals of pain. By them, many a bad man also is forced to appear bad to himself. Many a hypocrite, anxious about the opinions and the traditions of men, is at last stripped of his lies to see himself the wretched fraud he really is. Many a heart-backslider, whose religion has long ceased to be anything but a memory, awakes to the shame of it and to the danger; and often, thank G.o.d, awakes in time.

Now, the words of the dying Christ on His cross are, in the same way, a true and wonderful revelation of His character and His spirit. As it is only by the light of the sun that we see the sun, so it is by Jesus that Jesus is best revealed. Never one spake like He spake; and yet in this respect, so real was His humanity, He spake like us all--He spake out what was in Him. _The Truth_ must, above all, and before all, make manifest what is true of Himself.

To whom, then, did our Lord speak on the tree, and what spake He? What special thoughts and beauties of His soul do His words reveal?

Jesus, so far as His words have been recorded for us, spoke from the cross to Mary His mother, to one of the thieves who was crucified with Him, to G.o.d His Father, and to Himself.

I.

_His Words to Mary_.

"_When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple standing by, whom He loved, He saith unto His mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith He to the disciple, Behold thy mother_!"

The position of Mary in those last hours was peculiarly grievous. She had lived to see the breaking down of every hope that a mother's heart could cherish for her son. Standing there amidst that mob of relentless enemies, and watching Jesus, forsaken by G.o.d and man in His mortal agony, her present sorrow, great as it was, was crowned by the memory of the holy and happy antic.i.p.ations of His birth, and the maiden exultations of her soul when the angels foretold that her Son should be the Saviour of His people and their King. How cruelly different the reality had turned out! How far, how very far away, would seem to her the quiet days in Nazareth, the rapture of her Son's first innocent embraces, and the evening communions with Him as He grew in years! What tender memories the sight of those dear bleeding feet, those outstretched, wounded hands, would recall to that mother's heart! Yes, Mary on Calvary is to me a world-picture of desolate, withering, and helpless grief--of pain increased by love, and of love intensified by pain!

And Jesus in His great agony--the Man of Sorrows come at last to the winepress that His heart might be broken in treading it alone; come to the hour of His travail; come to the supreme agony of the sin-offering; face to face with the wrath of the Judge, blackness and tempest and anguish blotting out for the moment even the face of the Father--forsaken at last --FORSAKEN--Jesus, in this depth of midnight darkness sees her standing by the cross. Bless Him, Oh, ye that weep and mourn in this vale of tears!

Bless Him for ever! His eyes are eyes for the sorrowful. _He sees them_. He has tears to shed with them. He is touched with the same feelings and moved by the same griefs. He sees Mary, and speaks to her, and in a word gives her to John, and John to her, for mutual care and love. It was as though He said, "Mother, you bare Me; you watched and suffered for Me, and in this redeeming agony of My love, I remember your anguish, and I take you for ever under My care, and I name you Mine."

Surely, there never was sorrow like unto His sorrow, and yet in its darkest crisis He has eyes and heart for this one other's sorrow. Far from Him, as the east from the west, is any of that selfish thought and selfish seclusion which grief and pain so often work in the unsanctified heart, aye, and in the best of us. What a lesson of practical love it is! What a message--especially to those who are called to suffer with Him for the souls of men--comes streaming from those words spoken to Mary. The burden of the people's needs, the care of the Church, the awful responsibility of ministering to souls--these things, sacred as they may be, cannot excuse us in neglecting the hungry hearts of our own flesh and blood, or in forgetting the claims of those of our own household.

Dear friend and comrade, in _your_ sorrow, in your sore trial of faith, in _your_ Calvary, take to your heart this revelation of the heart of the Son of Man, and be careful of the solitary and heart-bleeding ones near you, no matter how humble and how unworthy they may seem.

II.

_His Words to the Thief_.

"_And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To-day shall thou be with Me in Paradise_."

The crucifixion of the two robbers with Jesus was a sort of topstone of obloquy and disgrace contrived by His murderers with the double object of further humiliating Him in the eyes of the people, and of adding poignancy to His own agony. The vulgarity and shamefulness of it were the last touch of their contempt, and the last stroke of His humiliation. There was a kind of devilish ingenuity in this circ.u.mstantial way of branding Him as a malefactor. And yet in the presence of this extremity of human wickedness and cruelty, Jesus found an opportunity of working a wondrous work of G.o.d; a work which reveals Him as the Saviour, strong to save, both by His infinite mercy and by His infinite confidence in the efficacy of His own sacrifice.

"_To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise_." Eyes and heart for the _sorrowful_ He had, as we see; and now ears, and hope nigh at hand, for the _sinful_. No word of resentment; no sense of distance or separation between the spotlessness and perfection of His character and this poor lonely convict--but a strange and wonderful nearness, now and to come. "_With Me_," He says--"_With Me in Paradise_." Ah! this is the secret of much in the life of the Son of G.o.d--this intimate, constant, conscious nearness to sinners and to sin! He had sounded the depth of evil, and, knowing it, He pitied, with an infinite compa.s.sion, its victims; He got as near as He could to them in their misery, and died to save them from it.

That heart-nearness to the thief had nothing to do with the nearness of the crosses. Every one knows what a gulf may be between people who are very near together--father and son--husband and wife! No, it was the nearness of a heart deliberately trained to seek it; a heart delighting in mercy, and deliberately surrendering all other delights for it; hungering and thirsting for the love of the lost and ruined.

The hart panteth after the waters, The dying for life that departs, The Lord in His glory for sinners For the love of rebellious hearts.

And so He is quite ready, at once, to share His heaven with this poor defiled creature, the first trophy of the cross. Again--what a lesson of love!--how different, all this, from the common inclination to shrink away from contact and intercourse with the vile! Oh, shame, that there can ever have been such a shrinking in our poor guilty hearts! The servant is not above his Lord. He came to sinners. Let us go to them with Him!

III.

_His Words to the Father_.