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Page 33
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of the creature?
And may it not have been God's coming closer than ever to the Son of His
love, or rather the Son's coming closer to the Father, as He entirely
shared and expressed God's own sympathy and conscience, and was made
perfect by the things which He suffered, that wrought in His sinless
soul the awful blackness of the feeling of abandonment?
In the sense of suffering sin's force, of conscientiously accepting its
burden, of sensitively sympathizing with the guilty, Jesus bore sin in
His own body on the tree.
And, as we stand facing the Crucified, we cannot escape a sense of
personal connection with that tragedy. The solidarity of the human
family in all its generations has been brought home to us in countless
ways by modern teachers; we are members one of another, and as we scan
the cross this is a family catastrophe in which the actors are our
kinsmen, and the blood of the Victim stains us as sharers of our
brothers' crime. And, further, as we look into the motives of Christ's
murderers--devout Pharisee and conservative Sadducee, Roman politician
and false friend, bawling rabble and undiscriminating soldiery, the host
of indifferent or approving faces of the public behind them--they seem
strangely familiar to us. They have been, they are still, alive by turns
in us. The harmless spark of electricity that greets the touch of one's
hand on a metal knob on a winter's day is one with the bolt of lightning
that wrecks a giant oak. The selfish impulse, the narrow prejudice, the
ignorant suspicion, the callous indifference, the self-satisfied
respectability, which frequently dominate us and determine our
decisions, are one with that cruel combination of motives which drove
the nails in the hands and feet of the Son of God. Still further, the
suffering of Jesus never seems to an acute conscience something that
happened once, but is over now. The Figure that hung and bled on the
tree centuries ago becomes indissolubly joined in our thought with every
life today that is the victim of similar misunderstanding and neglect,
injustice and brutality; and, while our sense of social responsibility
charges us with complicity in all the wrong and woe of our brethren,
that haunting Form on Calvary hangs before our eyes, and
Makes me feel it was my sin,
As though no other sin there were,
That was to Him who bears the world
A load that He could scarcely bear.
We may say to ourselves that this is fanciful, that we were not the
Sanhedrin who condemned Jesus, nor the Roman procurator who ordered His
execution, nor the scoffing soldiers who carried out his command; but
the conscience which the cross itself creates charges us with
participation in the murder of the Son of God. That cross becomes an
inescapable fact in our moral world, an element in our outlook upon
duty, a factor tingeing life with tragic somberness. It forces upon us
the conviction that it is all too possible for us to reenact Golgotha,
and by doing or failing to do, directly or indirectly, for one of the
least of Christ's brethren to crucify Him afresh, and put Him to an open
shame.
But if the cross seems to color life somberly, it also gilds it with
glory. As we follow Christ, we discover more and more clearly that all
which we possess of greatest worth has come to us, and keeps coming to
us, through Him. What he endured centuries ago on that hill without the
city wall is a wellspring of inspiration flowing up in the purest and
finest motives in the life of today. There is a direct line of ancestry
from the best principles in the lives of nations, and of men and women
about us, running back to Calvary. Day after day we find ourselves and
the whole world made different because of that tragic occurrence of the
past, shamed out of the motives that caused it, and lifted into the life
of the Crucified. A recent dramatist makes the centurion, in the
darkness at the foot of the cross, say to Mary: "I tell you, woman, this
dead Son of yours, disfigured, shamed, spat upon, has built a Kingdom
this day that can never die. The living glory of Him rules it. The earth
is _His_ and He made it. He and His brothers have been molding and
making it through the long ages; they are the only ones who ever really
did possess it: not the proud; not the idle; not the vaunting empires of
the world. Something has happened up here on this hill today to shake
all our kingdoms of blood and fear to the dust. The earth is His, the
earth is theirs, and they made it. The meek, the terrible meek, the
fierce agonizing meek, are about to enter into their inheritance."
Nor is this all of which that cross convinces us. We find ourselves
giving that crucified Man our supreme adoration; He is for us that
which we cannot but worship. Instinctively and irresistibly we yield Him
our highest reverence, trust and devotion. As we think out what is
involved in the impression He makes upon us, we come to our conception
of His deity; and through Him we discover ourselves in touch with the
Highest there is in the universe, with the Most High. Calvary becomes,
for those who look trustingly at the Crucified, a window through which
we see into the life of the Lord of heaven and earth. Jesus' sin-bearing
is for us a revelation of the eternal sin-bearing of the God and Father
of us all. Behind the cross of wood outside the gate of Jerusalem we
catch sight of a vast, age-enduring cross in the heart of the Eternal,
forced on Him generation after generation by His children's unlikeness
to their Father--forced, but borne by Him, in conscientious devotion to
them, as willingly as Jesus went to Golgotha. If at Calvary we find the
rocky coast-line of human thought and feeling opposing the inflow of
God, the incoming waters break into the silver spray of speech, and
their one word is Love.
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