THE SIXTH WORD FROM THE CROSS[1]
Like the Fifth, the Sixth Word from the Cross is, in the Greek,
literally a single word; and it has been often affirmed to be the
greatest single word ever uttered. It may be said to comprehend in
itself the salvation of the world; and thousands of human souls, in the
agony of conviction or in the crisis of death, have laid hold of it as
the drowning sailor grasps the life-buoy.
Sometimes it has been interpreted as merely the last sign of ebbing
life: as if the meaning were, It is all over; this long agony of pain
and weakness is done at last. But the dying words of Jesus were not
spoken in this tone. The Fifth Word, we are expressly told, was
uttered with a loud voice; so was the Seventh; and, although this is
not expressly stated about the Sixth, the likelihood is that, in this
respect, it resembled the other two. It was not a cry of defeat, but
of victory.
Both the suffering of our Lord and His work were finishing together;
and it is natural to suppose that He was referring to both. Suffering
and work are the two sides of every life, the one predominating in some
cases and the other in others. In the experience of Jesus both were
prominent: He had both a great work to accomplish and He suffered
greatly in the process of achieving it. But now both have been brought
to a successful close; and this is what the Sixth Word expresses. It
is, therefore, first, the Worker's Cry of Achievement; and, secondly,
the Sufferer's Cry of Relief.
I.
Christ, when on earth, had a great work on hand, which was now finished.
This dying word carries us back to the first word from His lips which
has been preserved to us: "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's
business?" Even at twelve years of age He already knew that there was
a business entrusted to Him by His Father in heaven, about which His
thoughts had to be occupied. We cannot perhaps say that then already
He comprehended it in its whole extent. It was to grow upon Him with
the development of His manhood. In lonely meditations in the fields
and pastures of Nazareth it seized and inspired His mind. As He
cultivated the life of prayer, it became more and more His settled
purpose. The more He became acquainted with human nature, and with the
character and the needs of His own age, the more clearly did it rise
before Him. As He heard and read the Scriptures of the Old Testament,
He saw it hinted and foreshadowed in type and symbol, in rite and
institution, in law and prophets. There He found the programme of His
life sketched out beforehand; and perhaps one of His uppermost
thoughts, when He said, "It is finished," was that all which had been
foretold about Him in the ancient Scriptures had been fulfilled.
After His public life commenced, the sense of being charged with a task
which He had to fulfil was one of the master-thoughts of His life. It
was written on His very face and bodily gait. He never had the easy,
indeterminate air of one who does not know what He means to do in the
world. "I have a baptism," He would say, "to be baptized with, and how
am I straitened till it be accomplished." In a rapt moment, at the
well of Sychar, after His interview with the Samaritan woman, when His
disciples proffered Him food, He put it away from Him, saying, "I have
meat to eat that ye know not of," and He added, "My meat is to do the
will of Him that sent Me and to finish His work." On His last journey
to Jerusalem, as He went on in front of His disciples, they were amazed
and, as they followed, they were afraid. His purpose possessed Him; He
was wholly in it, body, soul and spirit. He bestowed on it every scrap
of power He possessed, and every moment of His time. Looking back now
from the close of life, He has not to regret that any talent has been
either abused or left unused. All have been husbanded for the one
purpose and all lavished on the work.
What was this work of Christ? In what terms shall we express it? At
all events it was a greater work than any other son of man has ever
attempted. Men have attempted much, and some of them have given
themselves to their chosen enterprises with extraordinary devotion and
tenacity. The conqueror has devoted himself to his scheme of subduing
the world; the patriot to the liberation of his country; the
philosopher to the enlargement of the realm of knowledge; the inventor
has rummaged with tireless industry among the secrets of nature; and
the discoverer has risked his life in opening up untrodden continents
and died with his face to his task. But none ever undertook a task
worthy to be compared with that which engrossed the mind of Jesus.
It was a work for God with men, and it was a work for men with God.
The thought that it was a work for God, with which God had charged Him,
was often in Christ's mouth, and this consciousness was one of the
chief sources of His inspiration. "I must work the work of Him that
sent Me while it is day," He would say; or, "Therefore doth my Father
love Me, because I do always those things which please Him." And, at
the close of His life-work, He said, in words closely related to those
of our text, "I have glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the
work which Thou gavest Me to do." This was His task, to glorify God on
the earth--to make known the Father to the children of men.
But just as obviously was it a work for men with God. This was stamped
on all His words and on the entire tenor of His life. He was bringing
men back to God, and He had to remove the obstacles which stood in the
way. He had to roll away the stone from the sepulchre in which
humanity was entombed and call the dead to come forth. He had to press
His weight against the huge iron gates of human guilt and doom and
force them open. He had done so; and, as He said, "It is finished," He
was at the same time saying to all mankind, "Behold, I have set before
you an open door, and no man can shut it."
The more difficult and prolonged any task is, the greater is the
satisfaction of finishing it. Everyone knows what it is, after
accomplishing anything on which a great deal of labour has been
bestowed or the accomplishment of which has been delayed, to be able to
say, "There; it is finished at last." In the more signal efforts of
human genius and energy there is a satisfaction of final achievement
which warms even spectators with sympathy at the distance of hundreds
of years. What must it be to the poet, after equipping himself by the
labours of a lifetime with the stores of knowledge and the skill in the
use of language requisite for the composition of a "Divine Comedy" or a
"Paradise Lost," and after wearing himself lean for many years at his
task, to be able at last, when the final line has been penned, to write
Finis at the bottom of his performance? What must it have been to
Columbus, after he had worn his life out in seeking the patronage
necessary for his undertaking and endured the perils of voyaging in
stormy seas and among mutinous mariners, to see at last the sunlight on
the peak of Darien which informed him that his dream was true and his
lifework accomplished? When we read how William Wilberforce, the
champion of Slave Emancipation, heard on his deathbed, a few hours
before he breathed his last, that the British Legislature had agreed to
the expenditure necessary to secure the object to which he had
sacrificed his life, what heart can refuse its tribute of sympathetic
joy, as it thinks of him expiring with the shouts of emancipated
millions in his ears? These are feeble suggestions of the triumph with
which Christ saw, fallen behind Him, His accomplished task, as He
cried, "It is finished."
II.
If Jesus had during life a vast work on hand which He was able on the
cross to say He had finished, He was in quite as exceptional a degree a
sufferer; yet on the cross He was able to say that His suffering also
was finished.
Suffering is the reverse side of work. It is the shadow that
accompanies achievement, as his shadow follows a man. It is due to the
resistance offered to the worker by the medium in which he toils.
The life of Jesus was one of great suffering, because He had to do His
work in an extremely resistant medium. His purpose was so beneficent,
and His passion for the good of the world so obvious, that it might
have been expected that He would meet with nothing but encouragement
and furtherance. He was so religious that all the religious forces
might have been expected to second His efforts; He was so patriotic
that it would have been natural if His native country had welcomed Him
with open arms; He was so philanthropic that He ought to have been the
idol of the multitude. But at every step He met with opposition.
Everything that was influential in His age and country turned against
Him. Obstruction became more and more persistent and cruel, till at
length on Calvary it reached its climax, when all the powers of earth
and hell were combined with the one purpose of crushing Him and
thrusting Him out of existence. And they succeeded.
But the mystery of suffering is very insufficiently explained when it
is defined as the reaction of the work on the worker. While a man's
work is what he does with the force of his will, suffering is what is
done to him against his will. It may be done by the will of opponents
and enemies. But this is never the whole explanation. Above this
will, which may be thoroughly evil, there is a will which is good and
means us good by our suffering.
Suffering is the will of God. It is His chief instrument for
fashioning His creatures according to His own plan. While by our work
we ought to be seeking to make a bit of the world such as He would have
it to be, by our suffering He is seeking to make us such as He would
have us to be. He blocks up our pathway by it on this side and on
that, in order that we may be kept in the path which He has appointed.
He prunes our desires and ambitions; He humbles us and makes us meek
and acquiescent. By our work we help to make a well-ordered world, but
by our suffering He makes a sanctified man; and in His eyes this is by
far the greater triumph.
Perhaps this is the most difficult half of life to manage. While it is
by no means easy to accomplish the work of life, it is harder still to
bear suffering and to benefit by it. Have you ever seen a man to whom
nature had given great talents and grace great virtues, so that the
possibilities of his life seemed unbounded, while he had imagination
enough to expatiate over them: a man who might have been a missionary,
opening up dark countries to civilisation and the gospel; or a
statesman, swaying a parliament with his eloquence and shaping the
destinies of millions by his wisdom; or a thinker, wrestling with the
problems of the age, sowing the seeds of light, and raising for himself
an imperishable monument: but who was laid hold of by some remorseless
disease or suddenly crushed by some accident; so that all at once his
schemes were upset and his life narrowed to petty anxieties about his
health and shifts to avoid the evil day, which could not, however, be
long postponed? And did it not seem to you, as you watched him, to be
far harder for him to accept this destiny with a good grace and with
cheerful submission than it would have been to accomplish the career of
enterprise and achievement which once seemed to lie before him? To do
nothing is often more difficult than to do the greatest things, and to
submit requires more faith than to achieve.
The life of Christ was hemmed and crushed in on every hand. Evil men
were the proximate cause of this; but He acknowledged behind them the
will of God. He had to accept a career of shame instead of glory, of
brief and limited activity instead of far-travelling beneficence, of
premature and violent death instead of world-wide and everlasting
empire. But He never murmured; however bitter any sacrifice might be
on other grounds, He made it sweet to Himself by reflecting that it was
the will of His Father. When the worst came to the worst, and He was
forced to cry, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me," He was
swift to add, "Nevertheless not My will, but Thine, be done." And thus
on step after step of the ladder His thoughts were brought into perfect
accord with His Father's, and His will with His Father's will.
At last on the cross the cup out of which He had drunk so often was put
into His hands for the last time. The draught was large, black and
bitter as never before. But He did not flinch. He drank it up. As He
did so, the last segment of the circle of His own perfection completed
itself; and, while, flinging the cup away after having exhausted the
last drop, He cried, "It is finished," the echo came back from heaven
from those who saw with wonder and adoration the perfect round of His
completed character, "It is finished."
Though these two sides of the life of Christ are separable in thought,
it is evident that they constitute together but one life.[2] The work
He did involved the suffering which He bore and lent to it meaning and
dignity. On the other hand, the suffering perfected the Worker and
thus conferred greatness on His work. In His crowning task of atoning
for the sin of the world it was as a sufferer that He accomplished the
will of God. And now both are finished; and henceforward the world has
a new possession: it has had other perfect things; but never before and
never since has it had a perfect life.
[1] "It is finished."
[2] Sometimes they are expressed by saying that life is both a Mission
and a Discipline.