(i) Death is an experience natural to man.
(ii) Sin has added to this natural experience a peculiar agony, a
"sting."
(iii) This "sting" is an experience of utter isolation at some moment in
the process of death, the feeling that one is being violently rent away
from one's clinging hold of existence.
(iv) This "sting" is due to the disorder sin has introduced into the
constitution of the world and of man.
(v) In virtue of this, death has become the "sign" in the "natural"
world of what sin is in the spiritual.
(vi) Our Blessed Lord so utterly identified Himself with our experience,
with the internal as well as with the external consequences of our sin,
as to undergo this most terrible result of man's transgression.
(vii) And He felt the full agony of it as realising, what none but the
Sinless One could realise, the horror of sin as separation from God.
In a word, the Cry represents the culmination of our Lord's sufferings, a
real experience of His human consciousness.
The experience was "objective," as all states of consciousness are. Our
sensations are as objective as "material things." It was, as we have
just said, real: inasmuch as the only definition of reality is that which
is included in personal experience.
Thus understood, this fourth word teaches us at least two valuable
lessons.
1. It discloses to us the Mind of Christ, which is to be our own mind,
in its outlook upon human sin. We, if "the same mind" is to be in us
"which was also in Christ Jesus," must hate sin, and our sins, not
because of any results or penalties external to sin, but because sin
separates us from God, our true life. The worst punishment of sin, is
sin itself. Into depths which make us tremble as we strive to gaze into
them, Christ our Lord descended to deliver us from that deadly thing
which is destroying our life. That appalling Cry burst from His lips,
that we might learn to fear and dread sin worse than any pang of physical
pain.
2. This Word, again, discloses the Mind of Christ, true Man, in its
relation to God. He possessed fullest self-consciousness both as God and
as Man. Thus He Himself alone knew, in their absolute fulness, the joy
and the strength which come from the communion of man with God. That joy
and that strength, in the measure in which we can attain to their
realisation, are to be the goal of all our striving. Thus this Word has
for us more than a merely negative teaching. Not only are we to shrink
from that which destroys union with God. We must seek far more earnestly
to make that union a greater and a deeper reality. This end we can
achieve by making our prayers more deliberate acts of conscious communion
with that Person Who is not merely above us, but in us, and in Whom "we
live, and move, and have our being." We must all make the confession
that we have not yet nearly realised all that prayer might be to us, if
only we were more energetic, more strenuous, more utterly in earnest, in
our attempts to pray. It is by prayer that we are to attain to our
complete manhood, to "win our souls," to become our true selves.
For what are men better than sheep or goats,
Which nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer,
Both for themselves, and those that call them friend?
For so the whole round world is, every way,
Bound with gold chains about the feet of God.
VI
THE FIFTH WORD
"I thirst."--JOHN XIX. 28.
This is the only utterance of our Blessed Lord in which He gave
expression to His physical sufferings. Not least of these was that
intolerable thirst which is the invariable result of all serious wounds,
as those know well who have ever visited patients in a hospital after
they have undergone a surgical operation. In this case it must have been
aggravated beyond endurance by exposure to the burning heat of an Eastern
sun. This word, then, spoken under such circumstances, discloses the
Mind of the Son of God, perfect Man, in regard to physical pain.
1. Notice then, in the first place, the majestic calm of this word. It
was spoken in intensest agony, yet with deliberation, exhibiting the
restraint of the sovereign and victorious will of the Sufferer. "After
these things, knowing that all things had now been accomplished, He saith
[not 'cried'], I thirst." We cannot be wrong in reading this marvellous
word in the light of that strange passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
where the writer tells us that Christ, "although He was Son, yet learnt
He obedience by the things which He suffered." How are we to reconcile
this with the moral perfection of our Lord's humanity? We can only do
so, by applying the Aristotelian distinction between the potential and
the actual. The obedience of the Son of God, existing as it did in all
possible perfection from the first moment of His human consciousness, yet
existed, prior to His complete identification of Himself with all our
human experience, as a potentiality. It became actual, in the same way
as our obedience can alone become actual, as a result of that experience,
and, above all, in consequence of those sufferings which were part of
that experience. In this sense He "learnt obedience," where we too must
learn it, in God's school of pain.
Therein lies the answer, as complete an answer as we can at present
receive, to the problem of pain. While that problem is, beyond doubt,
the most perplexing of all the questions which confront us, the real
difficulty lies, not in the existence of pain in God's world, but in the
apparent absence, in so many instances, of any discernible purpose in
pain. In itself, pain does not, or at least should not, conflict with
the highest moral conception which we can form of the character of God.
But purposeless pain, if such really occur anywhere in the universe, is
hard indeed to reconcile with the revelation of the Highest as Infinite
and Eternal Love. The real answer to the problem lies in our gradually
dawning perception of the high purposes which pain subserves.
It is well, then, to remind ourselves of the teaching of natural science
in regard to the function of pain in the animal world. There, at least,
it has originated, and has survived, only because of its actual use to
the possessors of that nervous system which makes pain possible. It
serves as a danger signal of such inestimable value that no race of
animals, of any high degree of organisation, which could be incapable of
suffering pain, could for any length of time continue to survive. Pain
here, at any rate, so far from being purposeless, owes its existence to
the purpose which it subserves.
Ascending higher in the scale of being we see, as has been recently
pointed out, that the progress of human civilisation has been very
largely due to the successful efforts of man to resist and to remove
pain. The most successful and progressive races of mankind are those
which inhabit regions of the world where the conditions of life are
neither so severe as to paralyse all exertion, or even to preclude its
possibility, nor so favourable that men can avoid the pain of hunger or
of cold without strenuous and unremitting effort. The stimulus of pain
has been the means of perfecting the animal nature of man, and the secret
of those victories which he has won over the inclement or dangerous
forces of the material world, and which we call, in their totality, human
civilisation.
And thus we come in sight of a great law, "perfection through suffering."
And the revelation of the Cross is the exhibition to us of this law
acting in the higher reaches of man's existence, in the moral and
spiritual regions of his life. As the animal has gained its victories in
the past, so the spiritual is advancing towards the final triumph of man,
along the same path, of healthy reaction stimulated and necessitated by
pain.
For wherein lies the triumph of the spiritual nature, save in its
complete and sovereign control over all the other elements in our complex
being? The spiritual man is not the man who has starved his physical or
intellectual being; but the man whose whole nature, harmoniously
developed in the whole range of its varied gifts and powers and
faculties, is altogether brought under the mastery of that which is
highest in him, that spirit in which he is akin to God, the wearer of the
Divine Image. The saintliest, loftiest characters of men and women have
been the fruits of this discipline.
We see the final demonstration of the purpose of pain in Him Who "learnt
obedience by the things which He suffered." This one word which tells of
physical suffering, tells also, as we have already seen, of the victory
gained over it by His human Spirit. It was by the reaction of that
Spirit under sharpest bodily pain, that the moral perfection of the Son
of man ceased to be potential, and became actual. So it is with us, so
at least it may be in ever-increasing measure, when pain is accepted and
met in the way in which Christ accepted and met His pain, not in the
spirit of useless and wild rebellion against the laws of the universe,
nor in that of a blind, fatalistic, and unintelligent fatalism, which
calls itself resignation. We may, hence, learn to look beyond and behind
pain to that great law of perfection through suffering which takes
effect, as it were, spontaneously in lower forms of life; but which, in
the realm of the moral and the spiritual, demands the co-operation of the
human mind and will.
2. We may see also, in the fifth word, the revelation of the attitude of
the Son of God towards His own body. That attitude, and hence the only
genuinely and characteristically Christian attitude, may be best
described as the mean between the pampering of the body, and its savage
neglect in the interests of a _false_ asceticism.
As at first He put aside "the slumberous potion bland" and willed "to
feel all, that He might pity all," so, now His task is over, He craves,
and accepts, alleviation of His bodily pain. It is a wonderful
illustration of the true, the Christian way of regarding the body. The
human body is essentially a good and holy thing. Those sins which we
call "bodily," like all sins, have their origin in the rebellious will.
They are only distinguished from other sins, because in them the will
uses the body, and in other sins other God-given endowments of our
nature, in opposition to the eternal goodness which is the Will of God.
We cannot too often remember, that "good" and "evil" are terms applicable
to the will alone.
That splendid gift of the body has been given to us, in order that in it,
and through it, we might "glorify God"; that is, do His Will, the only
thing utterly worth doing. _Therefore_, we have to keep our bodies
"fit," fit in all ways for their high and holy purpose. There is the
law, the standard of all Christian self-discipline. Think of the glory
of the prospect which it holds out to us, of the development and destiny
of the body. Think of the care which we should bestow upon it, of the
awful reverence with which we should regard this (in the Divine
intention) splendid and perfect instrument for the fulfilment of the Will
of God. For what reverence can be too great for that which the Eternal
God chose as the tabernacle in which He should dwell among men, as the
instrument by which He should do the Father's Will on earth?
Of all the religions of the world it is the religion of Jesus Christ
alone which bids us "glorify God" in the body, that is, do His Will in
and by that glorious instrument which He has created and redeemed for His
service.
3. Finally, we may remind ourselves, very briefly, that we, in our own
day, may share the blessedness of the Roman soldier who relieved the
sufferings of Christ. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of
these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me."
As Christians, we _must_ have _some_ ministry to fulfil towards the
suffering members of Christ's Body. In the parable of the sheep and the
goats, the eternal destiny of men is shown to depend, in the last resort,
upon the manner in which they have performed, or failed to perform, this
ministry. The complexities of modern life call for careful thought in
regard to the manner in which we are to fulfil this duty, but they cannot
relieve us of it. Somewhere or other in our lives we must be diligently
relieving the necessities of others, ministering to their needs of body,
mind, or spirit. Else--there is no shirking this conclusion--we are
simply failing in the most characteristic of all Christian virtues; we
are far removed from the Mind of Him Who "went about doing good"; we are
on the way to hear that final condemnation, "Because ye did it not to the
least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me."
VII
THE SIXTH WORD
"It is accomplished."--ST. JOHN XIX. 30.
1. What had been accomplished? In the first place, that work which
Christ had come into the world to do. All that work may be resumed in a
single word, "sacrifice." The Son of God had come for this one purpose,
to offer a sacrifice. Here is room for serious misunderstanding. The
blood, the pain, the death, were not the sacrifice. Nothing visible was
the sacrifice, least of all the physical surroundings of its culminating
act. There is only one thing which can rightly be called sacrifice--or,
to put it otherwise, one sacrifice which alone has any worth, alone can
win any acceptance in the sight of God--and that is, the obedience of the
human will, the will of man brought into perfect union with that Divine
Will which is its own highest moral ideal.
The perfect obedience of the human will of Christ to the Divine Will,
could only be realised--such were the circumstances under which the
mission received of the Father was to be fulfilled by Him for the good of
man--by His faithfulness unto death. "He became obedient unto death,"
because in such a world perfect faithfulness must lead to death. But the
death of Christ was no isolated fact, standing out solitary and alone
from the rest of His ministry. It was not merely of one piece with, but
the natural and fitting close of the whole. The death of uttermost
obedience was the crown and consummation of the obedient life. On the
Cross, He was carrying His life's work to its triumphant close. His
Death was, itself, His victory.
This victorious aspect of the Passion is that on which St. John chiefly
dwells. The "glorification" of the Son of man, His "lifting up," was the
whole series of events extending from the Passion to the Ascension. So
the first Christians loved to think of the Cross, not as the instrument
of unutterable pain, but as the symbol of their Master's triumph. It is
this feeling, this apprehension of the Johannine teaching on the Passion,
which accounts for the late appearance of the crucifix. Even when, at
last, the actual sufferings of the Saviour are depicted, we are still far
removed from medieval realism. There are no nails--the Saviour is
outstretched on the Cross by the moral power of His own will, steadfast
and victorious in its obedience. The Sacred Face is not convulsed with
agony, but is turned, with calm and benignant aspect, towards men whom He
blesses. The earliest representations of the Passion, as we have noticed
before, are far nearer to the spirit of the gospels, that of St. John
above all, than those of the Middle Ages.
2. But the ministry itself was but the consummation of the age-long work
now "accomplished." Throughout the whole course of man's history, in the
entire spiritual evolution, whose first steps and rude beginnings we
trace in the burial mounds of prehistoric races, He Whose lips now
uttered that great "It is accomplished" had been the light of men, never
amid thick clouds of error and cruelty and superstition wholly
extinguished. In every approach of man to God however dimly conceived
of, the Word, the Eternal Son, had been offering Himself in sacrifice to
the Father.
So here, in the perfect act of the moral obedience of a human will, is
that to which all sacrifices not only pointed forward but, all the time,
meant, and aimed at, and symbolised, as men so slowly and so painfully
groped after, felt their way to God, "if haply they might find Him."
"It is accomplished"--the true meaning of sacrifice, of all religion,
heathen and Jewish, is attained and laid bare.
Thousands of years of human development reach their climax, find their
issue and their explanation in these words.
3. In its teaching, this sixth word ascends to the heights, to the
mysterious and ineffable relationships of the Godhead--which are the
inner reality and meaning of all morality and religion--and it descends
to the depths, to the lowliest details of the most commonplace life.
All work, for the Christian, is raised to the level, to the dignity of
sacrifice. Once and for all we must rid ourselves of that idea which has
wrought so much mischief, that sacrifice necessarily connotes pain, loss,
death. Essentially our sacrifice is what essentially Christ's sacrifice
was, the joyous dedication of the will to God, the Source and Light of
all our being.
The daily round, the common task,
Will furnish all we need to ask.
All work is sacred, or may be so, if we will. For all work has been
consecrated for evermore by the perfect obedience, that is, the perfect
sacrifice of the Son of man, the Head of our race. There is no task
which any Christian, anywhere, can be called upon to do, which cannot be
made part of that joyous service, that glad sacrifice, which, in union
with that of Jesus Christ our Lord, we, one with Him in sacramental
union, "offer and present" to the Father.
VIII
THE SEVENTH WORD
"Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." ST. LUKE XXIII. 46.
The consummation of sacrifice, the union of the human will with the
Divine, leads to the perfect rest in God.
1. We have tried to deal with the Seven Words as constituting a
revelation of the Divine Sonship of humanity. From this point of view it
is significant that the first and the last begin, like the Lord's Prayer,
with a direct address to the Father.
The service of the Christian man is that of a son in his father's house,
of a free man, not of a slave. The Fatherhood of God is the very key-
note of the Christian view of life and of death. In both alike we are
the objects of the Father's individual care and love; in both we bear the
supreme dignity of "the sons of the Most High."
That dignity belongs inalienably to our human nature as such. Baptism
conveys no gift alien and extraneous to our manhood. Rather, that union
with the Only Begotten Son is not an addition to, but the restoration of
our nature by Him in Whose Image it was created. United thus to the
Eternal Son, we are placed in a position to realise the possibilities of
our being, to become that which we are constituted capable of becoming.
That is the true answer to the question, how can we be made children of
God by Baptism?
And through work, and prayer, and suffering, we are to grow into, and
perfectly realise, our Divine sonship.
2. These dying words of the Son of God breathe no spirit of mere passive
resignation. That is the spirit of the Oriental fatalist, not of the son
conscious of his sonship, of his heirship. Even the Lord's Death was not
the yielding to inexorable necessity, to the inevitable working of the
laws of nature. It was, if anything in His Life was, the deliberate act
of His conscious Will. "I commend," rather, "I commit My Spirit." "I
lay down My life . . . therefore the Father loveth Me."
Submission to the Will of God is not necessarily a Christian virtue at
all. What is Christian is the glad recognition of what manner of will
the Divine Will is, how altogether "good, perfect, and acceptable," how
infinitely righteous, and holy, and loving; the doing of that glorious
Will with mind, and heart, and will, and body; the praying with all
sincerity and intention that that Will, which is the happiness and joy
and life of all creatures, may increasingly "be done, as in heaven, so on
earth"; the free and glad surrender, in life and death, to that Will
which is the perfection and consummation of our manhood.
3. Such an attitude of our whole being, which is what is meant by being
a Christian, can only be ours by virtue of the Spirit of the Son of God
dwelling and working within us, and moulding us into His perfect
Likeness. In Him alone we can come to our sonship, to that which is from
the first, potentially, our own. "Ye are all sons of God, through faith,
in Christ Jesus; for as many of you as were baptised into Christ did put
on Christ." Work and suffering, life and death, can only be borne, and
lived, and endured by us in the spirit of sonship, so far as we are
actually "in Christ."
Let us pray that the Mind and Will of the Son of God, disclosed to us in
these Seven Words, may be ours in ever-increasing measure. They can be
ours, if we are in Him, and He in us.
The foundation fact of the Christian life, that which alone makes it
possible, is our union, through sacraments and faith, with Christ; our
actual sharing in His Life, imparted by His Spirit to the members of His
Body. We are meant to be ever drawing upon the infinite moral resources
of that Life by repeated acts of faith. For, as with all other gifts of
God, so it is with this, His supreme gift; we only know it as ours--it
is, in a real sense, only truly our own--in proportion as we are using
it.
X
ADDRESS ON EASTER EVE
"We were buried, therefore, with Him through baptism into death; that
like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so
we also should walk in newness of life."--ROM. VI. 4.
"I delivered unto you, among the first things, that . . . He was
buried."--I COR. XV. 3, 4.
St. Paul lays extraordinary and, at first sight, inexplicable stress, on
the fact of our Lord's Burial. It is certainly strange that, in the
second of these two texts, he mentions it as constituting, along with the
Death of Jesus Christ for our sins, and His Resurrection on the third day
according to the Scriptures, the foundation truths of the apostolic
gospel, as being one of those "first things" of the Christian religion
which, as he had "received," so had he "delivered" to the Corinthians.
This extreme importance attached by St. Paul to the Burial of Christ, can
only be explained by the mysticism of the great apostle. To him the
outward facts, however wonderful and striking in themselves, are of value
only as "signs," as representing great moral and spiritual realities. To
him, as to every man who thinks soberly and steadily, the internal is
"real" in a sense in which the external is not: thought has a reality
denied to "things."
The real meaning of Christ's Burial is the mystical meaning, that meaning
which was brought home to the minds of the early Christians by the
picturesque and symbolic ritual of baptism. The man who had, by faith,
accepted Christ as his Lord and Master, was baptised into His Death; that
is, in Him he died to the old life. His submergence beneath the
baptismal waters, the very likeness of the Burial, was the assurance and
the sealing of that death. As truly as the man who is dead and buried is
cut off for ever from the life of this world, so was the baptised
separated, once and for all, from the old heathen life with all its
associations. As clearly did his emergence from those waters show forth
his actual participation in the Lord's Resurrection. He had not merely
left the old life behind, he had from that moment entered upon the new
life, the "life of God"; that is, the life which henceforth had God for
its foundation, its centre, and its goal; the life of moral health and
sanity; the life which was to be, in all its relations, open and clear
and undismayed; the life "in the Light."
1. The first thought, then, of Easter Eve must surely be one of profound
sorrow and humiliation. We ought to be bowed to the very earth with self-
abasement by the thought that we have been, so many times in the past,
untrue to our baptism.
Soldiers of Christ, we have denied our Lord. More, ours has been the
guilt, not of Peter only, but of Judas. Too often we have betrayed Him
for the veriest pittance of this world's good.
We have missed the glory of the Risen Life. All the magnificent language
of the Epistle to the Ephesians, the quickening with Christ, the raising
together with Him from the dead, the enthronement in Him in the heavenly
places--all this was written of Christians in this life. All this might
have been true of us, and is not; for, worse than Esau, we have bartered
away an incomparably more magnificent heritage.
What remains for us to do on this Easter Eve but, with truest penitence,
with utter loathing of self, and utter longing for Him Who is our true
self, to cast ourselves at the Feet of Christ?
2. But the second thought of Easter Eve is one of boundless hope. But
remember, hope can only begin at the Feet of Christ. For Christian hope
has evermore its beginning and its ground in humility. We only find
safety, comfort, joy, encouragement, as we lie, prostrate in penitence,
before our Redeemer. It is clear, is it not, what we mean by all this?
We are, simply and naturally, to kneel before our Lord, and acknowledge
to Him all our untruth, all our disloyalty, all the manifold failures of
our service. And the very fact that we can do this sincerely and
honestly, is the earnest of all good things to come in us. If only we
can make this genuine and heartfelt confession, there is no degree of
moral recovery beyond our reach.
For on Easter Eve we try to realise once more that greatest of Christian
truths, the _power_ of Christ's Resurrection. The power which was
manifested in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the power
which is universally present in nature and in mind, which is the reality
behind all forces of nature, which all forces reveal. It has been finely
said, that "the opening of a rose-bud and the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ are facts of the same order, for they are equally manifestations
of the one force which is the motive power of all phenomena."
We see that power in the glories of the opening spring; we are conscious
of it in ourselves, in every good resolve, every upward aspiration. There
comes to us the inspiring thought, that the physical and the moral
Resurrection alike, in nature, in ourselves, in Jesus Christ, are
different manifestations of one and the same power. Was the Resurrection
of the Lord a mighty fact, the greatest of all the facts of history, a
transcendent and astonishing miracle? The power which wrought it is in
me; the same wondrous fact, the same stupendous miracle, if I will, may
be accomplished in me.
That was the very meaning of my Christian calling--that "as Christ was
raised from the dead by the glory of the Father," so I, by the self-same
power, might be raised from the death of sin, and enabled "to walk in
newness of life." The Death, the Burial, and the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ are not merely historical facts, external to me: they are meant to
be spiritual facts in my own experience, in the experience of all
Christians. And spiritual facts are beyond measure greater in value and
meaning and influence than those historical facts which happened in space
and time, in order to serve as signs and symbols of the inward and
eternal realities.
So let us come to our Easter Communion, not only in the spirit of
penitence, but in the spirit of undying and unconquerable hope. There is
no limit to that which the power of God, symbolised, embodied externally,
in the Resurrection, may effect within us, in the region of our moral and
spiritual life. Or rather, there is no limit to the exercise of the
Divine power, save that which we ourselves impose upon it, by our failure
to correspond with it. Now as ever it is true, true of the work of God's
grace upon our souls, as of the healing power of Christ over the bodies
of men, that "according to our faith" it shall be done to us.
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH