In this Word we see the Son of God revealed as human son, and human
friend, all the more truly and genuinely human in both relations, because
in each and every relation of life, Divine.
1. The first lesson in the Divine Life for us to learn here is the
simple, almost vulgarly commonplace one, yet so greatly needing to be
learnt, that "charity," which is but a synonym of the Divine Life,
"begins at home."
Home life is the real test of a person's Christianity. There the
barriers with which society elsewhere hedges round and cramps the free
expression of our individuality, no longer exist. We are at liberty to
be ourselves. What sort of use do we make of it? What manner of self do
we disclose? Would our best friends recognise that self to be the person
whom they admire? If we are to be Christians at all, we must begin by
being Christians at home.
At home, and beyond the limits of home, one great Christian virtue stands
out as the supreme law of social behaviour--that is, for a disciple--the
virtue of consideration for others.
In the midst of torturing physical pain, in the extreme form of that
experience, of which the slightest degree makes us fretful, irritable,
self-absorbed, our Lord calmly provides for the future of His mother and
the disciple whom He loved.
What is required of us is not high-flown sentiment, but the practical
proof of consideration, that we have really learnt the first lesson of
the Christ-life, to put others, not self, in the first place. The proof,
the test, is our willingness to put ourselves to inconvenience, to go
without things, for the sake of others. If in such a little matter as so
ordering our Sunday meals as to give our servants rest, as far as may be,
and opportunity for worship, our practical, home Christianity breaks
down, then we must not shirk the plain truth, there is in us _nothing_ of
the Spirit of Him Who spoke the Third Word. On the other hand, the
readiness with which we do yield up our comforts is a proof--nothing
short of that--a proof of the indwelling of God in us. "In this we know
that He abideth in us, from the Spirit"--the Spirit of the Christ--"which
He hath given to us."
2. We notice, in the second place, that Christ's proof of friendship is
the assignment of a task, the giving of some work to do for Him. "Behold
thy mother." We are His friends, as He Himself has told us. "No longer
do I call you slaves, for the slave is one who knows not what his master
is doing; but you I have called friends." St. John had forsaken his
Friend:
a torchlight and a noise,
The sudden Roman faces, violent hands,
And fear of what the Jews might do,
had been too much for the disciple's courage and the friend's devotion.
And it is written, I forsook and fled:
That was my trial, and it ended thus.
But St. John had returned. There he is, in his true place, beside his
Master and Friend.
We too have forsaken, sometimes denied, the same Master and Friend. We
too with true repentance have returned, and are struggling to take up the
old allegiance. What is the proof, where is the assurance for which we
long more, perhaps, than for anything else in the world, that our
repentance has been accepted, that we are once more in the number of
those whom He calls His friends?
There is one decisive test. Upon all His friends He lays some task. If
we have anything to do for Jesus Christ, then we may assure our hearts.
Our desertion has been forgiven. He has spoken to us the words of peace,
"Behold thy mother, thy brother, thy son." For, let us not forget, all
work for others, for the bodies, the minds, the souls of our brethren in
the family of God, is capable of being raised from the level of
professional drudgery, and of becoming the direct service of Jesus
Christ.
To work for Christ is the real foretaste of heaven, far removed from the
sensuous imagery of some modern hymns. "Be thou ruler," there is the
supreme reward, "over ten cities."
If we are doing any work for Christ, i.e. for others for Christ's sake,
and as part of our service to Him, willingly and cheerfully, then we have
the final and convincing proof that we are indeed forgiven, that the
offer of renewed allegiance has been accepted, that we have been restored
to His Friendship.
V
THE FOURTH WORD
"Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani."--ST. MATT. XXVII. 46; ST. MARK XV. 34.
There are three peculiar and distinguishing features of this fourth word
which our Saviour uttered from His Cross.
1. It is the only one of the Seven which finds a place in the earliest
record of our Lord's life, contained in the matter common to St. Matthew
and St. Mark.
2. It is the only one which has been preserved to us in the original
Aramaic, in the very syllables which were formed by the lips of Christ.
3. It is the only one which He is said to have "shouted" ([Greek text]),
under the extremity of some overpowering emotion.
In fact, we are here at the very heart of the Passion. In this dread cry
I see something of the height of the Divine love, something of the depths
of my own sin.
The meaning of this dread "cry" is not perhaps so difficult to understand
as some have thought. It is to be found in the entire reality of that
human nature which the Son of God assumed--not merely a human body, but a
human consciousness like our own; in the thoroughness with which He
identified Himself with every phase of our experience, the knowledge of
personal sin alone excepted.
In this identification more was involved than we commonly think. Sin
cannot be in a world of which the constitution is the expression of the
Mind of God, without introducing therein a fatal element of discord,
confusion, and pain. To all consequences of sin the Saviour necessarily
submitted Himself, by the mere fact of His entry into a world which sin
had disordered. In respect of the external consequences, this is
abundantly clear. We have seen, and it is, in fact, obvious, that His
sufferings and Death were the result of the actual sins of men. But
there were, it is important to remember, internal sufferings attributable
to the same cause. We are at once reminded of His tears over the doomed
city, doomed by the persistent refusal to recognise the Divine voice. But
we are here on still deeper ground. The true explanation of the fourth
word is to be found in that great principle which St. Paul has laid down
in a familiar, but little understood, sentence: "the sting of death is
sin."
The simplest and most obvious meaning of these words is that, whatever be
the physiological meaning and necessity of human death, its peculiar
horror and dread, that which makes death to be what it is for us, is to
be found in sin, in the separation of man from God.
Now that horror consists, ultimately, in the fact that death is the
analogue, or, in New Testament language, the "sign," of what sin
is--separation. If sin is, essentially, the violent and unnatural
separation of man, by his own act, from his spiritual environment, death
is clearly the separation--and, _as our sins have made it_, the violent
and unnatural separation of man from all that has hitherto been his
world. It may be, that the final, extremest pang of death is the supreme
moment of agony, when we feel that we are being made to let go our hold
on reality, are slipping back into what, in our consciousness of it, must
appear like nothingness, the mere blank negation of being. Here, then,
we have the explanation of this awful cry. He Who came "for our
salvation" into a world disordered by sin, willed so to identify Himself
with our experience, as to realise death, not as it might have been, but
as man had made it, the very sign and symbol of man's sin, of his
separation from God. That moment of extreme mental anguish wrung from
His lips the Cry, not of "dereliction," but of faith triumphing even in
the moment when He "tasted death" as sin's most bitter fruit, "_My_ God,
why didst Thou forsake Me?"