THE CRUCIFIXION
And they crucified him.
S. Matt. XXVII, 35.
In as much as we have no confidence because of our many sins,
do thou, O Virgin Mother of God, beseech him who was born of
thee; for a Mother's supplication availeth much to gain the
benignity of the Master. Despise not the prayers of sinners,
O all-august, for merciful and mighty to save is he, who
vouchsafed to suffer for us.
BYZANTINE.
We have followed the Way of Sorrows to the very end and now stand on
Calvary watching by the Cross, waiting for the death of the Son of God.
The mystery of iniquity is consummated here where man in open rebellion
against his God crucifies the Incarnate Son. Here is fulfilled the
saying: "He came unto His own and His own received Him not." All that
man can do to prove his own degredation he has done. In the person of
Pilate he has condemned to death a man whom he knows to be innocent. The
representative of human justice has denied justice for the sake of his
own personal ends. In the person of Herod he has permitted the insult
and abuse of One of whom he knows no ill, and has displayed toward Him
wanton and brutal cruelty. In the person of the Jewish authorities he
has rejected the Messenger of the God whom he recognises as his God, and
will not listen to the voice of prophecy because he finds his personal
ends countered by the fulfilment of the promises of the religion whose
subject he professes to be. In the person of the disciples he shows
himself too cowardly and self-regarding to stand by his innocent Master
and to throw in his lot with Him. In the person of the people he shows
himself cruel, hardened, indifferent to suffering and to justice, ready
to be made the tool of unscrupulous politicians, unstable and ignorant.
As we look on, we succeed in retaining any shred of respect for
humanity only through the contemplation of the exceptions--of S. John
and the little group of women who are faithful to the end: above all in
the sight of blessed Mary standing by the Cross of her Son.
It is the will of God that our Lord should follow the human lot to the
very depth of its possible sufferings. There are no doubt many
sufferings of humanity that our Lord does not share, they are those
which spring out of personal sin. He in Whom was no sin could not suffer
those things which spring from one's own wrong doing. That is one broad
distinction between the burdens of the crosses on Calvary, a distinction
which the penitent thief caught easily when he said to his reviling
fellow-criminal, "Dost thou not fear God, seeing thou art in the same
condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our
deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss." And in as much as a great
part of what we suffer is plainly just, the pain we bear is intensified
by the knowledge that what we are is the outcome of what we have been.
But our Lord, while He does not suffer as the result of His own sin,
does suffer as the result of sin in that He wills to bear the result of
men's sin by putting Himself at their mercy. He bears the burden of sin
to the uttermost, looking down from the Cross at the faces of these men
whose salvation He is making possible if in the days to come they will
associate themselves with Him. One wonders how many of those who saw Him
crucified came, before they died, to accept Him as the Saviour and their
God. There must have been many wonderful first Communions in the early
Church when those who had rejected Jesus in His humility came to receive
Him glorified.
But as we look at this scene of the dying we feel that the powers of
evil are working their uttermost, they are driving their slaves to
incredible sins. One feels the tremendous power that evil is as one
looks at these human beings who are body and soul wholly under its
dominion. The Power of Darkness appears utterly in control of the world
of humanity; but we know that this moment in which its triumph seems
most complete is in fact the moment in which its defeat is at hand. The
victory that is being won is the victory of the Vanquished: and the
moment when the victory of evil seems assured by the dying of Jesus, is
in fact the moment when the chains of the slaves of sin are broken, and
men who will to be free are henceforth free indeed. From that moment a
new freedom is within the reach of men, the freedom which comes to them
through their participation in the redemption wrought for them by God.
Presently S. John will announce the great message of freedom to the
Church, a message that he will tell in his own wonderful simplicity, a
simplicity which almost deceives us as to its unfathomable depth of love
and mystery: "For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and
this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.... We
know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not: but He that was begotten
of God keepeth him, and the evil one toucheth him not. And we know that
we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one. And we know
that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we
may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His
Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life."
This is what the dying of Jesus achieved for us, that we should be free
as men had never been free, and that we should be strong as men had
never been strong.
On their crosses the thieves agonise in the realisation of the sin that
has brought them there; but our Lord, Who is free from sin, looks out on
the scene before Him in a wonderful detachment from His personal
suffering. Being without sin our Lord is without egotism, and never
treats life from that purely personal standpoint that we are constantly
tempted to adopt. Our own needs, our own interests, occupy the
foreground and determine the judgment; and we are rarely able to see in
dealing with the concrete case that our own interests are ultimately
indentical with the interests of the whole Body. The lesson that if one
member suffer, all the members suffer with it, that we are partners in
joy and sorrow alike, is almost impossible of assimilation by the
radical individualists that we are. Our theories break down before the
test of actuality. But our Lord was not an individualist. He, in His
relations with men, is the Head of the Body; and He admits no division
of interests between His members. He therefore can think of the needs of
others while He Himself is undergoing the last torture of death. He can
impartially judge the separate cases of His members; He can attend to
the spiritual welfare of a needy soul; He can think of His own death as
an act of sacrifice willed by God, and not as a matter concerning
Himself alone; and in doing these things He teaches us a much-needed
lesson of the handling of life.
No lesson is to-day more needed because we are more and more being
influenced to treat life as a private matter. I have spoken of this
before and need not elaborate it now; but I do want to insist, at
whatever risk of repetition, that a Christian must, if his religion mean
anything at all, look on the interests of the Body, not as a separate
group of interests to which he is privileged or obligated to contribute
such help as seems to him from time to time appropriate, but as in fact
his own primary interests because his true significance in the world is
gained through his membership in the Body. His life is hid with Christ
in God and his conversation is in heaven. The life that he now lives in
the flesh he lives by the faith of the Son of God, who loved him and
gave Himself for him. To assert separate interests is to break the
essential relation of his life. He is nothing apart from the Body but a
dry and withered branch fit for the burning. No doubt our egotism rebels
against this view of life, but it is certain that it is the view of the
Christian Religion. If we would realise the ideals of the Religion we
must act as those who are in constant relations with the other members
of the Body and whose life gets its significance through those
relations.
There is no more outstanding lesson of our Lord's life than this. It is
true from whichever angle you look at it. If you think of our Lord as a
divine Person it is at once evident how much of His meaning is included
in His relations to the other Persons of the Blessed Trinity. He claims
no independent will; it is the will of the Father that He has come to
do. He claims no original work: it is the work that the Father has given
Him to do that He is straightened until He accomplish. He has no
individual possession, but all things that the Father has are His.
Considered as God, our Lord is One Person in the one divine nature, no
Unitarian interpretation of Him is possible. On the other hand, if you
look at Him as Incarnate, as having identified Himself with humanity, He
is in that respect made one with His brethren. He has made their
interests His, and as their new Head is opening for them the gate of the
future. He is inviting them into union with Himself, that in the status
of His "brethren" and "friends" they may be also the true children of
the heavenly Father. There is no hint anywhere that these things may be
accomplished apart from Him, in individual isolation: indeed, if they
could be so accomplished the Incarnation would be meaningless. He is the
Way and no one cometh to the Father but by Him. He is the Truth, and no
one knows the Father but he to whom the Son reveals Him. He is the Life,
and no one spiritually lives except through His self-impartation. "He
that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life. He that
eateth me, even he shall live by me." In this outlook from the Cross
which we recognise in our Blessed Lord when, forgetting His own
sufferings in His appreciation of the needs of others, we see Him still
fulfilling His ministry of mercy and of sympathy, we are certain that
His eyes would rest upon one group which could not fail to pierce His
heart with its pathos and tragedy. Our Lord's love is not a general,
impersonal love of humanity; it is always love of a person. He no doubt
felt a special love for this thief who appealed to Him from the cross by
His side. In the whole course of His life our Lord had shown His oneness
with us in that He loved special people in a special way. He loved
Lazarus and his sisters, He loved S. John. Above all others He loved His
Blessed Mother. And now looking down from the Cross He sees that the
disciple whom He loved was succeeded in leading His mother into the very
shadow of the Cross. How S. Mary had made her way there we do not know:
only love knows how it triumphs over its obstacles and comes forth
victorious. There is Blessed Mary, looking up into the face so scarred
and bleeding, and there is the Son, looking down through the blinding
blood into the face of the mother. This is the supreme human tragedy of
Calvary. We can only stand and watch the exchange of love.
And then comes the word--the word, by the way, which when it was spoken
years ago in Cana of Galilee, men have interpreted as a harsh and
rebuking word, with how much truth this scene tells--then comes the
word: "Woman, behold thy son." In His love He gives her that which He
had so much loved, the friendship of S. John. He brings together those
who had so supremely loved Him in an association which would support
them both in the trial of their loss. "Woman, behold thy son; behold thy
mother." Bitter as was their sorrow in this hour, we know that they were
marvellously comforted by this power of love which is able to transcend
suffering and death. We know, because we know how utterly our Lord is
one with us, that it was much to Him to look on the face that bent over
Him in the Manger in Bethlehem. We know, because we know the perfect
woman that was Mary, that there was deep joy as well as deep agony in
being able to stand there at the last beneath the Cross.
Do you think that we are going too far when we see in S. Mary not simply
the mother of our Lord, but when we also see in her a certain
representative character? Does she not represent us in one way and S.
John represent us in another, in this supreme exchange of love? Do we
not feel that in S. John we have been recommended to the love and care
of Mary who is our mother? Do we not feel that in S. John the mother has
been committed to our love and care? Surely, because we are members of
her Son we have a special relation to S. Mary, and a special claim upon
her, if it be permitted to express it in that way. It is no empty form
of words when we call her mother, no exaltation of sentimentalism. The
title represents a very real relation of love. It brings home to us that
the love of Mary is as near infinite as the love of a creature can be,
and that like the love of her Son it is an unselfish love. She is
necessarily interested in all the members of the Body, and their cares
and joys and sorrows she is glad to make her own. She is very close to
us in her love and sympathy; she is very ready to help us with her
prayers. We never go to her for succour but she hears us. "Behold thy
son," her divine Son said to her on the Cross in His agony, and all who
are members of that Son are her sons too. Her place in heaven above all
creatures, most highly favoured as she is, is a place to which our
prayers penetrate, and never penetrate unheard. For that other Son,
through whose merits she is what she is, whose Face she ever beholds as
the Face alike of her Redeemer and her Child, is ever ready to hear her
intercessions for us because they come to Him with the power and the
insight that perfect purity and perfect sympathy alone can give. So for
us there is intense personal consolation in this word: "Behold
thy mother."
But there is another side to this committal. It is mutual: "Behold thy
son." If we can see ourselves in S. John, committed to the Blessed
Mother, we can also see ourselves in S. John to whom the blessed mother
is committed. "Behold thy mother." There is a sense in which the blessed
mother is committed to us; to-day she is our care. We see the
fulfillment of this trust in the love and reverence wherewith
Christendom from the beginning has surrounded S. Mary. It has accepted
the charge with a passionate devotion. The growth of devotion to her is
recorded in the vast literature of Mariology which comes to us from all
parts and all eras of the Catholic Church. The details of the expression
of this devotion have been wrought out through the centuries with
loving care, and the result is that wherever there is a Catholic
conception of religion, either in East or West, there is a grateful
response to our Lord's trust of His Blessed mother to His Church in the
person of S. John.
We feel, do we not? that it is one of the great privileges of our
spiritual life that we have found a personal part in this trust, that it
is permitted us to preserve and hand on this reverence for Blessed Mary,
and in so doing to gain personal contact with her as a spiritual power
in the Kingdom of God. It means much to us that we can have the love and
sympathy which are blended with her intercession, that we can associate
our prayers with hers in the time of our need. Much as we value the
sympathy and prayers of our friends here, we cannot but feel that in
Mary we have a friend whose helpfulness is stimulated by a great love
and directed by deep spiritual insight into the reality of our needs. We
turn therefore to her with the certainty of her co-operation.
Our Lord on the Cross had now fulfilled His mission in the care of
individual persons, had prayed for His tormentors, had forgiven the
penitent thief, and had commended those who were the special objects of
His love to one another, and could now turn His thoughts away from earth
to the love of the Father. His last words are intimate words to Him.
They express the agony that tears His soul as the Face of the Father is
for a moment hidden, and the peace of an accomplished work as He
surrenders Himself into the hands of the Father that sent Him. He who
had been our example all His life, showing us how to meet life, is our
example in death, showing us how to meet death.
But just wherein does the dying of Christ become an example for us? This
final surrender to the Father of a will that had never been separate
from the Father,--what can we derive from all that? There are many lines
of approach and application. I can only touch on one or two:--
"I have glorified Thee on the earth," our Lord said in the last
wonderful prayer, "I have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do."
And here on the Cross He repeats, "It is finished." When we think of
this we are impressed with the steadiness with which our Lord pursued
His purpose, with the way He concentrated His whole life upon His work.
He declined to be drawn aside by anything irrelevant to it. People came
to Him with all sorts of requests, from the request that He will settle
a disputed inheritance to the request that He will become their king;
and He puts them all aside as having no pertinence to His mission. It is
interesting to go through the Gospel and note just what are the details
of this winnowing process; mark what our Lord accepts as relevant to His
mission and what not. He is never too occupied or tired to attend to
what belongs to His work. An ill old woman or idiot child is important
to Him and He attends to them; but He declines the sort of work that
will involve Him and His mission in controversy and politics. He is not
a reformer of society but a reformer of men. He knows that only by the
reformation of men can society be reformed.
There is no doubt much to be learned from the study of our Lord's method
of the limits of the social and political activity of His Church. It has
constantly fallen a victim to the temptation to undertake the reform of
the world by some other means than the conversion of it. It has shown
itself quite willing to be made "a judge and divider." It has not always
declined the invitation it has received to assume the purple. "Your
business is to reform this miserable world which so sadly and so
obviously needs you," men say to it; "You are not living up to your
principles and you are neglecting your duty by not supporting this great
movement for the betterment of the race," others say. Still others urge,
"You are losing great masses of men through your inexplicable failure to
adopt their cause." And the Church in the whole course of its history
has constantly yielded to this temptation, and has not seen until too
late that in so doing it was making itself the tool or the cat's-paw of
one interest or another whose sole interest in religion was the
possibility of exploiting the influence of the Church. In the stupid
hope of forwarding its spiritual interests the Church has entangled
itself with the responsibilities of temporal power; it has made itself
the backer of "the divine right of kings"; and it has found itself bound
hand and foot in the character of a national or state Church; and with a
curious incapacity to learn anything from experience is now
enthusiastically cheering for democracy! Poor Church, whose leaders are
so constantly misleaders.
It is all due to the hoary temptation to try to get to one's end by some
sort of a short cut: "All these things will I give you if you will fall
down and worship me." Our Lord knew that Satan could not really give Him
the ends He was seeking; but His followers are constantly confident that
he can, and are therefore his constant and ready tools for this or that
party or interest. They sell themselves to monarchy or democracy, to
capital or labour, with the same guileless innocence of what is
happening to them, with the same simple-minded incapacity to learn
anything from the lessons of the past. There are no short cuts to
spiritual ends, and those ends can never be accomplished by secular
means. The interests of the Kingdom of God can never be forwarded by
alliance with the powers of this world; the interests of particular
persons or parties in the Church may be--but that is quite
another thing.
The lesson is one that is not without application to the individual
life. There again the tendency to mind something other than one's own
business is almost ineradicable. We have before us the work of building
our spiritual house, of finishing the work that the Father has given us
to do, of carrying to a successful conclusion the work of our
sanctification. In view of the experience of nearly two thousand years
of Christianity and of our own personal experience, that would seem a
sufficiently difficult and obligatory work to occupy the undivided
energies of a life-time. But we are accustomed to treat this primary
business of life quite as though it were a parergon, a thing to play
with in our unoccupied hours, the fad of a collector rather than the
supreme interest of an immortal being. That spiritual results are no
oftener achieved than they are can occasion no surprise when one
understands the sort of spirit wherewith they are approached. If the
average man adopted toward his business the attitude he adopts toward
his religion he would be bankrupt within a week,--and he knows it. You
know that the attention you are paying to religion and the sort of
energy and sacrifice you are putting into it are insufficient to secure
any sort of a result worth having. Spiritually speaking, your life is an
example of misdirected and dissipated energy. There is no spiritual
result because there is no continuous and energetic effort in a
spiritual direction. You are not like a master-builder planning and
erecting a house. You are like a child playing with a box of blocks who
begins to build a house with them and, when it is half built, is
attracted by something else and runs after that--not even waiting to put
the blocks back into the box!
Life, no doubt, this modern city life into which we are plunged, is
terribly distracting. Concentration upon a single aim is hard to attain.
So we plead in our excuse, but the excuse is a false one and we know it.
We know it because we know many people who have achieved the sort of
concentration and simplicity of aim that we complain of as so difficult.
They to be sure have other ends than those we claim to be ours, but that
would not seem to be important. By far the greater part of the male
population of this city is intensely concentrated in money making. I do
not believe that I have overheard during the last year two men talking
in a car or on the street who were not talking about money. There is a
good enough example of the possibility of concentrating on a single end
under the conditions of our life. There are other people, you know some
of them, whose lives are devoted in the most thorough manner to the
pursuit of pleasure. They find no difficulty in such concentration, and
they afford an even better example of what we are discussing than the
money-makers. The money-maker says, "I have to live and my family has to
live, and we cannot live unless I devote myself to business. It is all
very well to talk about spiritual interests, but those are the plain
common sense facts. A man who spends all his time on religion will find
it pretty difficult to live in New York." Very well, that seems
unanswerable. But go back to the men and women whose sole interest is
amusement--how do they live? In some way they seem to have so succeeded
in subordinating business to pleasure that they get what they want, and
they somehow escape starvation!
There, I fancy, is the explanation--they get what they want. In a broad
way we all get what we want. We accomplish in some degree at least the
ends which we make the supreme ends of life. We are back therefore where
we started: What are our supreme ends? Are they in fact spiritual? Have
we mastered the technique of the Christian life sufficiently to be
single-eyed and pure-hearted in our pursuit of life's ends? Are we
devoted to the aim of manifesting the glory of God and finishing the
work that He has given us to do?
This, once more, was the secret of our Lord's life, and it is the secret
of all those who have at all succeeded in imitating Him. They have
followed Him with singleness of purpose. They have felt life to be
before all else a vocation to manifest the will of God and to finish a
given work. That was the attitude of our Blessed Mother; she began on
that note: "Behold the hand-maid of the Lord; be it unto me according to
thy word." It was the Gospel that she preached: "Whatsoever he saith
unto you, do it." Her whole life was a response--the response of love
to love.
That no doubt, goes to the heart of the spiritual problem. If we are to
accomplish anything at all in the way of spiritual development, if we
are to conduct life in simplicity toward spiritual ends, it will only be
when the source of life's energy is found in love. He who does not love
has no compelling motive toward God and no abiding principle to control
life. If we conceive the Christian life as a task that is forced upon
us, and which in some way we are bound to fulfil, we may be sure that
the way in which we shall fulfil it will be weak and halting. We may be
as conscientious as you please, but we shall not be able to concentrate
on a work which is merely a work of duty and not the embodiment of a
great love. Our primary activity should be devout meditation and study
of our Lord's life, with prayer for guidance and help, till something
of the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, till we feel our hearts
burn within us and our spirits glow and we become able to offer
ourselves, soul and body, a living sacrifice unto Him.
MARY: I cried: "Maudeleyn, help now!
My Son hath loved full well thee;
Pray Him that I may die,
That I not forgotten be!
Seest thou, Maudeleyn, now
My Son is hanged on a tree,
Yet alive am I and thou,--
And thou, thou prayest not for me!"
MAUDELEYN said: "I know no red,
Care hath smitten my heart sore.
I stand, I see my Lord nigh dead;
And thy weeping grieveth me more.
Come with me; I will thee lead
Into the Temple here before
For thou hast now i-wept full yore."
MARY: "I ask thee, Maudeleyn, where is that place,--
In plain or valley or in hill?
Where I may hide in any case
That no sorrow come me till.
For He that all my joy was,
Now death with Him will do its will;
For me no better solace is
Than just to weep, to weep my fill."
The Maudeleyn comforted me tho.
To lead me hence, she said, was best:
But care had smitten my heart so
That I might never have no rest.
"Sister, wherever that I go
The woe of Him is in my breast,
While my Sone hangeth so
His pains are in mine own heart fast.
Should I let Him hangen there
Let my Son alone then be?
Maudeleyn, think, unkind I were
If He should hang and I should flee."
* * * * *
I bade them go where was their will,
This Maudeleyn and everyone,
And by myself remain I will
For I will flee for no man.
From St. Bernard's "Lamentation On Christ's Passion."
Engl. version, 13th Cent., by Richard Maydestone.
PART TWO