_"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"_--ST MATTHEW xxvii. 46.
I do not know that I should dare to approach this, of all utterances
into which human breath has ever been moulded, most awful in import,
did I not feel that, containing both germ and blossom of the final
devotion, it contains therefore the deepest practical lesson the human
heart has to learn. The Lord, the Revealer, hides nothing that can be
revealed, and will not warn away the foot that treads in naked humility
even upon the ground of that terrible conflict between him and Evil,
when the smoke of the battle that was fought not only with garments
rolled in blood but with burning and fuel of fire, rose up between him
and his Father, and for the one terrible moment ere he broke the bonds
of life, and walked weary and triumphant into his arms, hid God from
the eyes of his Son. He will give us even to meditate the one thought
that slew him at last, when he could bear no more, and fled to the
Father to know that he loved him, and was well-pleased with him. For
Satan had come at length yet again, to urge him with his last
temptation; to tell him that although he had done his part, God had
forgotten his; that although he had lived by the word of his mouth,
that mouth had no word more to speak to him; that although he had
refused to tempt him, God had left him to be tempted more than he could
bear; that although he had worshipped none other, for that worship God
did not care. The Lord hides not his sacred sufferings, for truth is
light, and would be light in the minds of men. The Holy Child, the Son
of the Father, has nothing to conceal, but all the Godhead to reveal.
Let us then put off our shoes, and draw near, and bow the head, and
kiss those feet that bear for ever the scars of our victory. In those
feet we clasp the safety of our suffering, our sinning brotherhood.
It is with the holiest fear that we should approach the terrible fact
of the sufferings of our Lord. Let no one think that those were less
because he was more. The more delicate the nature, the more alive to
all that is lovely and true, lawful and right, the more does it feel
the antagonism of pain, the inroad of death upon life; the more
dreadful is that breach of the harmony of things whose sound is
torture. He felt more than man could feel, because he had a larger
feeling. He was even therefore worn out sooner than another man would
have been. These sufferings were awful indeed when they began to invade
the region about the will; when the struggle to keep consciously
trusting in God began to sink in darkness; when the Will of The Man put
forth its last determined effort in that cry after the vanishing vision
of the Father: _My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?_ Never had
it been so with him before. Never before had he been unable to see God
beside him. Yet never was God nearer him than now. For never was Jesus
more divine. He could not see, could not feel him near; and yet it is
"_My_ God" that he cries.
Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when his faith seems about
to yield, is finally triumphant. It has no _feeling_ now to support it,
no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in his soul and
tortured, as he stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple
and surrounded by fire, it declares for God. The sacrifice ascends in
the cry, _My God_. The cry comes not out of happiness, out of peace,
out of hope. Not even out of suffering comes that cry. It was a cry
_in_ desolation, but it came out of Faith. It is the last voice of
Truth, speaking when it can but cry. The divine horror of that moment
is unfathomable by human soul. It was blackness of darkness. And yet he
would believe. Yet he would hold fast. God was his God yet. _My God_--
and in the cry came forth the Victory, and all was over soon. Of the
peace that followed that cry, the peace of a perfect soul, large as the
universe, pure as light, ardent as life, victorious for God and his
brethren, he himself alone can ever know the breadth and length, and
depth and height.
Without this last trial of all, the temptations of our Master had not
been so full as the human cup could hold; there would have been one
region through which we had to pass wherein we might call aloud upon
our Captain-Brother, and there would be no voice or hearing: he had
avoided the fatal spot! The temptations of the desert came to the
young, strong man with his road before him and the presence of his God
around him; nay, gathered their very force from the exuberance of his
conscious faith. "Dare and do, for God is with thee," said the devil.
"I know it, and therefore I will wait," returned the king of his
brothers. And now, after three years of divine action, when his course
is run, when the old age of finished work is come, when the whole frame
is tortured until the regnant brain falls whirling down the blue gulf
of fainting, and the giving up of the ghost is at hand, when the
friends have forsaken him and fled, comes the voice of the enemy again
at his ear: "Despair and die, for God is not with thee. All is in vain.
Death, not Life, is thy refuge. Make haste to Hades, where thy torture
will be over. Thou hast deceived thyself. He never was with thee. He
was the God of Abraham. Abraham is dead. Whom makest thou thyself?" "My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" the Master cries. For God was
his God still, although he had forsaken him--forsaken _his vision_ that
his faith might glow out triumphant; forsaken _himself_? no; come
nearer to him than ever; come nearer, even as--but with a yet deeper,
more awful pregnancy of import--even as the Lord himself withdrew from
the bodily eyes of his friends, that he might dwell in their
profoundest being.
I do not think it was our Lord's deepest trial when in the garden he
prayed that the cup might pass from him, and prayed yet again that the
will of the Father might be done. For that will was then present with
him. He was living and acting in that will. But now the foreseen horror
has come. He is drinking the dread cup, and the Will has vanished from
his eyes. Were that Will visible in his suffering, his will could bow
with tearful gladness under the shelter of its grandeur. But now his
will is left alone to drink the cup of The Will in torture. In the
sickness of this agony, the Will of Jesus arises perfect at last; and
of itself, unsupported now, declares--a naked consciousness of misery
hung in the waste darkness of the universe--declares for God, in
defiance of pain, of death, of apathy, of self, of negation, of the
blackness within and around it; calls aloud upon the vanished God.
This is the Faith of the Son of God. God withdrew, as it were, that the
perfect Will of the Son might arise and go forth to find the Will of
the Father.
Is it possible that even then he thought of the lost sheep who could
not believe that God was their Father; and for them, too, in all their
loss and blindness and unlove, cried, saying the word they might say,
knowing for them that _God_ means _Father_ and more, and knowing now,
as he had never known till now, what a fearful thing it is to be
without God and without hope? I dare not answer the question I put.
But wherein or what can this Alpine apex of faith have to do with the
creatures who call themselves Christians, creeping about in the
valleys, hardly knowing that there are mountains above them, save that
they take offence at and stumble over the pebbles washed across their
path by the glacier streams? I will tell you. We are and remain such
creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ;
because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of
our own defiled garments, instead of up at the snows of purity, whither
the soul of Christ clomb. Each, putting his foot in the footprint of
the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his
neighbour's footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the
Master's, although it is but his own. Or, having committed a petty
fault, I mean a fault such as only a petty creature could commit, we
mourn over the defilement to ourselves, and the shame of it before our
friends, children, or servants, instead of hastening to make the due
confession and amends to our fellow, and then, forgetting our paltry
self with its well-earned disgrace, lift up our eyes to the glory which
alone will quicken the true man in us, and kill the peddling creature
we so wrongly call our _self_. The true self is that which can look
Jesus in the face, and say _My Lord_.
When the inward sun is shining, and the wind of thought, blowing where
it lists amid the flowers and leaves of fancy and imagination, rouses
glad forms and feelings, it is easy to look upwards, and say _My God_.
It is easy when the frosts of external failure have braced the mental
nerves to healthy endurance and fresh effort after labour, it is easy
then to turn to God and trust in him, in whom all honest exertion gives
an ability as well as a right to trust. It is easy in pain, so long as
it does not pass certain undefinable bounds, to hope in God for
deliverance, or pray for strength to endure. But what is to be done
when all feeling is gone? when a man does not know whether he believes
or not, whether he loves or not? when art, poetry, religion are nothing
to him, so swallowed up is he in pain, or mental depression, or
disappointment, or temptation, or he knows not what? It seems to him
then that God does not care for him, and certainly he does not care for
God. If he is still humble, he thinks that he is so bad that God cannot
care for him. And he then believes for the time that God loves us only
because and when and while we love him; instead of believing that God
loves us always because he is our God, and that we live only by his
love. Or he does not believe in a God at all, which is better.
So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with him, save
in the sunshine of the mind when we feel him near us, we are poor
creatures, willed upon, not willing; reeds, flowering reeds, it may be,
and pleasant to behold, but only reeds blown about of the wind; not
bad, but poor creatures.
And how in such a condition do we generally act? Do we not sit mourning
over the loss of our feelings? or worse, make frantic efforts to rouse
them? or, ten times worse, relapse into a state of temporary atheism,
and yield to the pressing temptation? or, being heartless, consent to
remain careless, conscious of evil thoughts and low feelings alone, but
too lazy, too content to rouse ourselves against them? We know we must
get rid of them some day, but meantime--never mind; we do not _feel_
them bad, we do not feel anything else good; we are asleep and we know
it, and we cannot be troubled to wake. No impulse comes to arouse us,
and so we remain as we are.
God does not, by the instant gift of his Spirit, make us always feel
right, desire good, love purity, aspire after him and his will.
Therefore either he will not, or he cannot. If he will not, it must be
because it would not be well to do so. If he cannot, then he would not
if he could; else a better condition than God's is conceivable to the
mind of God--a condition in which he could save the creatures whom he
has made, better than he can save them. The truth is this: He wants to
make us in his own image, _choosing the good_, _refusing_ the evil. How
should he effect this if he were _always_ moving us from within, as he
does at divine intervals, towards the beauty of holiness? God gives us
room _to be_; does not oppress us with his will; "stands away from us,"
that we may act from ourselves, that we may exercise the pure will for
good. Do not, therefore, imagine me to mean that we can do anything of
ourselves without God. If we choose the right at last, it is all God's
doing, and only the more his that it is ours, only in a far more
marvellous way his than if he had kept us filled with all holy impulses
precluding the need of choice. For up to this very point, for this very
point, he has been educating us, leading us, pushing us, driving us,
enticing us, that we may choose him and his will, and so be tenfold
more his children, of his own best making, in the freedom of the will
found our own first in its loving sacrifice to him, for which in his
grand fatherhood he has been thus working from the foundations of the
earth, than we could be in the most ecstatic worship flowing from the
divinest impulse, without this _willing_ sacrifice. For God made our
individuality as well as, and a greater marvel than, our dependence;
made our _apartness_ from himself, that freedom should bind us divinely
dearer to himself, with a new and inscrutable marvel of love; for the
Godhead is still at the root, is the making root of our individuality,
and the freer the man, the stronger the bond that binds him to him who
made his freedom. He made our wills, and is striving to make them free;
for only in the perfection of our individuality and the freedom of our
wills call we be altogether his children. This is full of mystery, but
can we not see enough in it to make us very glad and very peaceful?
Not in any other act than one which, in spite of impulse or of
weakness, declares for the Truth, for God, does the will spring into
absolute freedom, into true life.
See, then, what lies within our reach every time that we are thus lapt
in the folds of night. The highest condition of the human will is in
sight, is attainable. I say not the highest condition of the Human
Being; that surely lies in the Beatific Vision, in the sight of God.
But the highest condition of the Human Will, as distinct, not as
separated from God, is when, not seeing God, not seeming to itself to
grasp him at all, it yet holds him fast. It cannot continue in this
condition, for, not finding, not seeing God, the man would die; but the
will thus asserting itself, the man has passed from death into life,
and the vision is nigh at hand. Then first, thus free, in thus
asserting its freedom, is the individual will one with the Will of God;
the child is finally restored to the father; the childhood and the
fatherhood meet in one; the brotherhood of the race arises from the
dust; and the prayer of our Lord is answered, "I in them and thou in
me, that they may be made perfect in one." Let us then arise in
God-born strength every time that we feel the darkness closing, or
Become aware that it has closed around us, and say, "I am of the Light
and not of the Darkness."
Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel, but thou art bound to arise.
God loves thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when
thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last.
Try not to feel good when thou art not good, but cry to Him who is
good. He changes not because thou changest. Nay, he has an especial
tenderness of love towards thee for that thou art in the dark and hast
no light, and his heart is glad when thou dost arise and say, "I will
go to my Father." For he sees thee through all the gloom through which
thou canst not see him. Will thou his will. Say to him: "My God, I am
very dull and low and hard; but thou art wise and high and tender, and
thou art my God. I am thy child. Forsake me not." Then fold the arms of
thy faith, and wait in quietness until light goes up in thy darkness.
Fold the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee
of something that thou oughtest to do, and go and do it, if it be but
the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a
friend. Heed not thy feelings: Do thy work.
As God lives by his own will, and we live in him, so has he given to us
power to will in ourselves. How much better should we not fare if,
finding that we are standing with our heads bowed away from the good,
finding that we have no feeble inclination to seek the source of our
life, we should yet _will_ upwards toward God, rousing that essence of
life in us, which he has given us from his own heart, to call again
upon him who is our Life, who can fill the emptiest heart, rouse the
deadest conscience, quicken the dullest feeling, and strengthen the
feeblest will!
Then, if ever the time should come, as perhaps it must come to each of
us, when all consciousness of well-being shall have vanished, when the
earth shall be but a sterile promontory, and the heavens a dull and
pestilent congregation of vapours, when man nor woman shall delight us
more, nay, when God himself shall be but a name, and Jesus an old
story, then, even then, when a Death far worse than "that phantom of
grisly bone" is griping at our hearts, and having slain love, hope,
faith, forces existence upon us only in agony, then, even then, we
shall be able to cry out with our Lord, "My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" Nor shall we die then, I think, without being able to
take up his last words as well, and say, "_Father, into thy hands I
commend my spirit._"