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Page 32
It is commonly taught that the Lord's Prayer is a form that was
suggested by Jesus to His disciples, but that it could not have been a
prayer which He Himself used with them, because of its plea for
forgiveness. It is true that it is introduced in our Gospels as provided
by the Master for His followers, "When _ye_ pray, say." But millions of
Christians instinctively associate it with Jesus' own utterances to the
Father. And may they not be correct? "Forgive us _our_ debts," is a
social confession of sin, in which our Lord may well have joined, just
as He underwent John's baptism of repentance, though Himself sinless, in
order to fulfil all righteousness. He regarded Himself as indebted; His
work, His teaching, His suffering, His death, were not to Him a gift
which He was at liberty to make or to withhold. In the "must" so often
on His lips we cannot miss the sense of social obligation. He was (to
borrow suggestive lines of Shelley's)
a nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of the earth.
They came home to His conscience, and He could not shake them off. They
were so many claims on Him; He felt He owed the world a life, and He
was ready to pay the debt to the last drop of His blood. "The Son of man
_must_ suffer and be killed." To the end He cast about for some less
awful way of meeting His obligations. "My Father, if it be possible, let
this cup pass away from Me." But when no other alternative seemed
conscientiously possible to Him, He went to Golgotha with a sense of
moral satisfaction. "_Ought_ not the Christ to have suffered these
things?" Without any disturbing consciousness of having personally added
to the world's evil, with no plea for pardon for His own sins on His
lips but only for those of others, His conscience was burdened with the
injustice and disloyalties, the brutalities and failures, of the family
of God, in which He was a Son, and He bore His brothers' sins on His
spirit, and gave Himself to the utmost to end them.
A third disclosure of the cross is the incomparable sympathy of the
Victim. How shall we account for His recoil from the thought of dying,
for His shrinking from this death as from something which sickened Him,
for the darkness and anguish of His soul in Gethsemane at the prospect,
and for the abysmal sense of forsakenness on the cross? His
sensitiveness of heart made Him feel the pain and shame of other men, a
pain and shame they were frequently too stolid and obtuse to feel. He
could not see able-bodied and willing workmen standing idle in the
marketplace because no man had hired them, without sharing their
discouragement and bitterness, nor prodigals making fools of themselves
without feeling the disgrace of their unfilial folly. His parables are
so vivid because He has Himself lived in the experiences of others.
"_Cor cordium_" is the inscription placed upon Shelley's grave; and it
is infinitely more appropriate for the Man of Nazareth. In His sensitive
sympathy we are aware of
Desperate tides of the whole great world's anguish
Forc'd through the channels of a single heart.
We cannot account for His recoil from the cross, save as we remember His
sense of kinship with those who were reddening their hands with the
blood of the Representative of their God. If we have ever stood beside a
devoted wife in the hour when her husband is disgraced, or been in a
home where sons and daughters are overwhelmed with a mother's shame, we
have some faint idea of how Jesus felt the guilt of His relatives when
they slew Him. He was the conscience of His less conscientious brethren:
"the reproaches of them that reproached Thee, fell on Me." He realized,
as they did not, the enormity of what they were doing. The utter and
hideous ungodlikeness of the world was expressed for Him in those who
would have none of Him, and cried: "Away with Him! Crucify, crucify
Him." His keenness of conscience and His acute sympathy brought to His
lips the final cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" The
sinless Sufferer on the cross, in His oneness with His brethren, felt
their wrongdoing His own; acknowledged in His forsakenness that God
could have nothing to do with it, for it was anti-God; confessed that it
inevitably separated from Him and He felt Himself in such kinship and
sympathy with sinning men that He was actually away from God. "That was
hell," said old Rabbi Duncan, "and He tasted it."
But our minds revolt. We do not believe that God deserted His Son; on
the contrary we are certain that He was never closer to Him. Shall we
question the correctness of Jesus' personal experience, and call Him
mistaken? We seem compelled either to do violence to His authority in
the life of the spirit with God, or to our conviction of God's
character. Perhaps there is another alternative. A century ago the
physicist, Thomas Young, discovered the principle of the interference of
light. Under certain conditions light added to light produces darkness;
the light waves interfere with and neutralize each other. Is there not
something analogous to this in the sphere of the spirit? Is not every
new unveiling of God accompanied by unsettlements and seeming darkenings
of the soul, temporary obscurations of the Divine Face? In all our
advances in religious knowledge are we not liable to undergo
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