'That thou doest, do quickly.' It may be doubtful, and some of you
perhaps may not be disposed to follow me in my remark, but to my ear
that sounds just like the utterance of that instinctive dislike of
suspense and of the long hanging over us of the sword by a hair, which
we all know so well. Better to suffer than to wait for suffering. The
loudest thunder-crash is not so awe-inspiring as the dread silence of
nature when the sky is black before the peal rolls through the clouds.
Many a martyr has prayed for a swift ending of his troubles. Many a
sorrowing heart, that has been sitting cowering under the anticipation
of coming evils, has wished that the string could be pulled, as it
were, and they could all come down in one cold flood, and be done with,
rather than trickle drop by drop. They tell us that the bravest
soldiers dislike the five minutes when they stand in rank before the
first shot is fired. And with all reverence I venture to think that He
who knew all our weaknesses in so far as weakness was not sin, is here
letting us see how He, too, desired that the evil which was coming
might come quickly, and that the painful tension of expectation might
be as brief as possible. That may be doubtful; I do not dwell upon it,
but I suggest it for your consideration.
IV. And then I pass on to the last of the tones that I hear in these
utterances—the voice of the willing Sacrifice for the sins of the
world.
'That thou doest, do quickly.' There is nothing more obvious throughout
the whole of the latter portion of the Gospel narrative than the way in
which, increasingly towards its close, Jesus seemed to hasten to the
Cross. You remember His own sayings: 'I have a baptism to be baptized
with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished. I am come to
cast fire on the earth; would it were already kindled!' You remember
with what a strange air—I was going to use an inappropriate word, and
say, of alacrity; but, at all events, of fixed resolve—He journeyed
from Galilee, in that last solemn march to Jerusalem, and how the
disciples followed, astonished at the unwonted look of decision and
absorption that was printed upon His countenance. If we consider His
doings in that last week in Jerusalem, how he courted publicity, how He
avoided no encounter with His official enemies, how He sharpened His
tones, not exactly so as to provoke, but certainly so as by no means to
conciliate, we shall see, I think, in it all, His consciousness that
the hour had come, and His absolute readiness and willingness to be
offered for the world's sin. He stretches out His hands, as it were, to
draw the Cross nearer to Himself, not with any share in the weakness of
a fanatical aspiration after martyrdom, but under a far deeper and more
wonderful impulse.
Why was Christ so willing, so eager, if I may use the word, that His
death should be accomplished? Two reasons, which at the bottom are one,
answer the question. He thus hastened to His Cross because He would
obey the Father's will, and because He loved the whole world—you and me
and all our fellows. We were each in His heart. It was because He
wanted to save thee that He said to Judas, 'Do it quickly, that the
world's salvation and that man's salvation may be accomplished.' These
were the cords that bound Him to the altar. Let us never forget that
Judas with his treachery, and rulers with their hostility, and Pilate
with his authority, and the soldiers with their nails, and centurions
with their lances, and the grim figure of Death itself with its shaft,
would have been all equally powerless against Christ if it had not been
his loving will to die on the Cross for each of us.
Therefore, brethren, as we hear this voice, let us discern in it the
tones which warn us of the danger of yielding to inclination and
stifling His rebukes, till He abandons us for the moment in despair;
let us hear in it the pathetic voice of a Brother, who knows all our
weaknesses and has felt our emotions; let us hear the voice of
Sovereign Authority which uses its enemies for its purposes, and is
never loftier than when it is most lowly, whose Cross is His throne of
glory, whose exaltation is His deepest humiliation, and let us hear a
love which, discerning each of us through all the ages and the crowds,
went willingly to the Cross because He willed that He should be our
Saviour.
And seeing that time is short, and the future precarious, and delay may
darken into loss and rejection, let us take these words as spoken to us
in another sense, and hear in them the warning that 'to-day, if we will
hear His voice, we harden not our hearts,' and when He says to us, in
regard to repentance and faith, and Christian consecration and service,
'That thou doest, do quickly,' let us answer, 'I made haste and delayed
not, but made haste to keep Thy commandments.'