Human love desires to give its most precious treasures to its object
and is then most blessed: divine love cannot come short of human in this
most characteristic of its manifestations. Surely the copy is not to
surpass the original, nor the mirror to flash more brightly than the sun
which, at the brightest, it but reflects. In such a matter we can but
stammer when we try to find words. As our text warns us, we are trying
to utter the unutterable when we seek to speak of God's giving up for
us; but however such a thought may seem to be forbidden by other aspects
of the divine nature, it seems to be involved in the great truth that
'God is love.' Since He is, His blessedness too, must be in imparting,
and in parting with what He gives. A humble worshipper in Jewish times
loved enough to say that he would not offer unto God an offering that
cost him nothing, and that loving height of self-surrender was at the
highest, but a lowly imitation of the love to which it looked up. When
Paul in the Epistle to the Romans says, 'He that spared not His own Son
but delivered Him up for us all,' he is obviously alluding to, and all
but quoting, the divine words to Abraham, 'Seeing thou hast not withheld
thy son, thine only son, from Me,' and the allusion permits us to
parallel what God did when He sent His Son with what Abraham did when,
with wrung heart, but with submission, he bound and laid Isaac on the
altar and stretched forth his hand with the knife in it to slay him.
Such a representation contradicts the vulgar conceptions of a
passionless, self-sufficing, icy deity, but reflection on the facts of
our own experience and on the blessed secrets of our own love, leads us
to believe that some shadow of loss passed across the infinite and
eternal completeness of the divine nature when 'God sent forth His Son
made of a woman.' And may we not go further and say that when Jesus on
the Cross cried from out of the darkness of eclipse, 'My God! My God!
Why hast Thou forsaken me?' there was something in the heavens
corresponding to the darkness that covered the earth and something in
the Father's heart that answered the Son's. But our text warns us that
such matters are not for our handling in speech, and are best dealt
with, not as matters of possibly erring speculation, but as materials
for lowly thanks unto God for His unspeakable gift.
But whatever may be true about the love of the Father who sent, there
can be no doubt about the love of the Son who came. No man helps his
fellows in suffering but at the cost of his own suffering. Sympathy
means _fellow-feeling_, and the one indispensable condition of all
rescue work of any sort is that the rescuer must bear on his own
shoulders the sins or sorrows that he is able to bear away. Heartless
help is no help. It does not matter whether he who 'stands and says, "Be
ye clothed and fed,"' gives or does not give 'the things necessary,' he
will be but a 'miserable comforter' if he has not in heart and feeling
entered into the sorrows and pains which he seeks to alleviate. We need
not dwell on the familiar truths concerning Him who was a 'man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief.' All through His life He was in
contact with evil, and for Him the contact was like that of a naked hand
pressed upon hot iron. The sins and woes of the world made His path
through it like that of bare feet on sharp flints. If He had never died
it would still have been true that 'He was wounded for our
transgressions and bruised for our iniquities.' On the Cross He
completed the libation which had continued throughout His life and
'poured out His soul unto death' as He had been pouring it out all
through His life. We have no measure by which we can estimate the
inevitable sufferings in such a world as ours of such a spirit as
Christ's. We may know something of the solitude of uncongenial society;
of the pain of seeing miseries that we cannot comfort, of the horrors of
dwelling amidst impurities that we cannot cleanse, and of longings to
escape from them all to some nest in the wilderness, but all these are
but the feeblest shadows of the incarnate sorrows whose name among men
was Jesus. Nothing is more pathetic than the way in which our Lord kept
all these sorrows close locked within His own heart, so that scarcely
ever did they come to light. Once He did permit a glimpse into that
hidden chamber when He said, 'O faithless generation, how long shall I
be with you, how long shall I suffer you?' But for the most part His
sorrow was unspoken because it was 'unspeakable.' Once beneath the
quivering olives in the moonlight of Gethsemane, He made a pitiful
appeal for the little help which three drowsy men could give Him, when
He cried, 'My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Tarry ye
here and watch with Me,' but for the most part the silence at which His
judges 'marvelled greatly,' and raged as much as they marvelled, was
unbroken, and as 'a sheep before her shearers is dumb,' so 'He opened
not His mouth.' The sacrifice of His death was, for the most part,
silent like the sacrifice of His life. Should it not call forth from us
floods of praise and thanks to God for His unspeakable gift?