I INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS

The object with which we meet here can be expressed in a Pauline phrase of three words, it is “to learn Christ.”

But, in those three words, there is contained, in the manner of St. Paul, a wealth of meaning. To learn Christ is clearly an affair of the intellect, in the first place. It quite certainly, in this sense, does not mean merely to accumulate information regarding the words and acts of our Lord. St. Paul himself is singularly sparing of allusions to the history of Christ, if we exclude from that His Death, Burial, and Resurrection. The phrase, in fact, describes that kind of knowledge to which a detailed study of the Saviour’s Life is related as means to an end, the knowledge, namely, of Christ’s character, of His Mind and Will. Such knowledge is not to be acquired in one hour or in three. It is, it ought to be, the life-long object of a Christian man to gain it in an ever-increasing measure of fulness and accuracy. But the last words of the Lord, the seven sayings from His Cross, constitute a special and in some measure unique disclosure of His Mind and Will. And, therefore, to meditate upon them, as we are now proposing to do, will be to advance one stage further, and a distinct stage, in the process of “learning Christ.”

1. But we do well to remind ourselves, at the very outset, that our aim is not merely intellectual, but also practical. There is no real gain arising from the knowledge of Christ’s Mind and Will, save so far as that knowledge enables us to make that Mind and Will our own mind and our own will. That is the very meaning of Christian discipleship. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”

2. The end thus set before us is one capable of attainment by all. The individual, indeed, cannot hope to realise that end completely by himself. The embodiment of Christ’s Mind and Will is the supreme task and the final achievement of the whole Body of Christ. The purpose of the long development of the Church on earth is, that “we should all (not each) arrive at a perfect man, at the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ.” The whole Church, the Body in its completeness, is meant to reflect back in the eyes of the Father, the moral glory of the Son of man. Each individual has been called into membership in the Body, in order that he might reflect some one of the scattered rays of that glory; might embody in himself one aspect of the infinite perfection of the Son of man. So would each of us truly “come to himself,” realise all that he is capable of becoming.

That progress of the Body of Christ towards its goal is described by St. Paul as being a growth of the Christ Himself. He is “at all points in all men being fulfilled.” There is a true and important sense in which the Incarnation is as yet incomplete, in which the life-history of the Church is its growing completeness. Our individual task is the realisation in ourselves of that part of the Christ life which we, individually, have been created to embody.

3. It will be useful to sum up the Character, the Mind and Will of Christ, in a single phrase. Consider how He impressed His contemporaries. What was it which they saw in Him, who knew Him best, and had been united to Him by close ties of comradeship and discipleship? In one word, what they saw was Sonship. “We beheld His glory, as of an Only-Begotten from a Father.” The Mind and Will of Christ are the perfect realisation of the Divine Sonship in our humanity.

But what is the meaning of God’s Fatherhood and man’s sonship? The ultimate truth of the relationship, the truth which underlies all such conceptions as care, love, obedience, is community of nature. Our human nature is really akin to the Divine. We are sons of God because our spiritual life is of one piece with His as derived from it. Baptism introduces no new element into our nature. By sacramental union with the Only Begotten, the Ground and Archetype of all sonship, it enables us to realise that which is in us, to actually become that which, potentially, we are. It gives us “power to become children of God,” to attain the meaning of our manhood, to regain our true selves.

4. Baptism gives power, all sacraments give power, but in such wise that that power is useless, even, in a sense, non-existent, till we make it ours by deliberate exertion, by co-operation of mind and heart and will with the Divine in us.

The end of our living, to become truly and completely the sons of God, is to be attained by the joint action of two factors

(1) The Spirit of Christ conforming our minds and wills more and more to the likeness of Christ.

(2) The co-operation of our whole personality with the work of the indwelling Spirit.

Our meditations this morning on the Seven Words in which Christ made some partial disclosure of His Mind and Will, will form some part of that co-operation, one little stage in the accomplishment of our life-long task.

II THE FIRST WORD

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” ST. LUKE
XXII.

1. Here we are watching the behaviour of the Son of God, the Ideal and Ground of Divine Sonship in humanity.

Is this supreme example of forgiveness an example to us? Is it not something unnatural to humanity as we know it?

We must recall, from a former address, the distinction which we then drew between the animal in us, with its self-assertive instincts, and the Divine in us, that which constitutes us not animal merely, but human, of which the very essence is the self-sacrifice of perfect love. Christ came to reveal God in our manhood. And I need this revelation, just because the animal in me has won so many victories in the past over the Divine, because in me the spiritual fire habitually burns so low and dim.

It is a very different thing to say that forgiveness of all serious injury is a hard thing. It is hard, but not impossible. That which makes it to be possible is the serious intention of discipleship, co-operating with the indwelling Spirit of Christ transforming us into His likeness.

To assert, on the other hand, that forgiveness of serious wrong is impossible, is to ignore the fact that He Who uttered these wonderful words is the true self of me, and of every man who breathes. He Who hung on the Cross, and spoke these seven words, is the Son of man, the Representative to all ages, to all varieties of human character, of true humanity.

2. Christ-like forgiveness is no weak thing, but the strongest thing in the world.

Yet, for its true effect to be produced, its true character must be recognised. No suspicion of cowardice or impotence must cleave to it. The man who being obviously able to resent an injury, and not lacking in the capacity of resentment, yet for Christ’s sake forgives, exercises on earth no inconsiderable share of the moral power of Christ. God now, as of old, “has made choice of the weak things of the world,” those things which the world accounts weak, “to confound the strong.” “The meek” still “inherit the earth.”

We are dealing, all through, with the injury which is personal, with the resentment which is the reaction of the individual against unprovoked wrong. Personal resentment we are bidden to relentlessly crush out “to turn the other cheek” is the command of Christ. But the Christian man will recognise that the interests of the social order are not to be disregarded. These interests, and those of the offender himself, will sometimes demand that the wrong, even if it primarily affects ourselves, shall not go unpunished. Again, no one can be in the full sense a Christian, that is, a fully developed man, or a man on the way to the full development of his nature, who is without the capacity of moral indignation, in whom no flame is kindled by the oppression of the weak.

What the Christian moral law does demand of us, is the complete suppression of the merely personal anger which sometimes burns so fiercely in us when we receive unmerited insult or injury. That kind of anger belongs to “the flesh,” is part of the defensive equipment of the animal nature. Before we can in any sense be Christ-like, the spirit must win many hard-won victories over its ancient foe.

To say “I will forgive, but I can never forget,” is only to conceal from ourselves the defeat of the spiritual man, the Christ in us.

3. But carefully note the reason appended to the prayer: “they know not what they do.” That is true, with every variety of degrees and shades of truth, of every sinner. It was true, clearly, of the soldiers then performing their duty: it was less true, but still in a real sense it was true, of the Pharisees, of the High Priests, of the Roman judge. It is true, but to a far less degree, even of us, that when we sin, we “know not what we do.”

Sins are, in the language of St. Paul, works of darkness. That is the element in which alone they can exist. Sin is a huge deception. The very condition of its existence is the concealment of its true character. All this is summed up in that experience which we call “temptation.” We are so familiar with sin, the atmosphere we breathe is so infected with it, we have given way so many times in the past, that it needs the objective revelation of the Cross to bring home to us the real horror and malignity of sin. It has been finely said, “Sin first drugs its victims before it consumes them.” We, too, or some of us, have known the strange petrifying, hardening effect of sin on the conscience.

Great, then, is our need that we should pray that the revelation of the Cross may more and more come home to us; great our need to pray for an ever fuller measure of that Spirit of Christ, Whose first work it is “to convince the world of sin,” to make men realise its true character and its inevitable issue.

III THE SECOND WORD

“Verily I say unto thee, To-day thou shall be with Me in Paradise.”
ST. LUKE XXII.

We judge of any power by the results which it effects. We gain some knowledge of the power of steam by its capacity to drive a huge mass of steel and wood weighing twenty thousand tons through the water at the rate of twenty knots an hour. There we have some standard by which we can gauge the force which sends our earth round the sun at twenty-five miles a second, or that which propels a whole solar system through space. But we may apply the same method, of estimation by results, to the powers of the moral and spiritual worlds. Judged thus, it was indeed a stupendous power which was exerted by Christ from the Cross. For what result can be more amazing than the reversal, at the last, of the character slowly built up by the habits of a lifetime? It is, of course, useless to speculate on the antecedents of the robber (not “thief”) who turned to our Lord with the words, “Jesus, remember me when Thou shalt come into Thy kingdom.” We know only what is implied by the word “robber” or “brigand,” and the fact that he had joined, with his fellow-sufferer, in the mockery of our Lord. But the words thus addressed by him to Christ, in their context, represent the most wonderful “phenomenon” of human life, a genuine and thorough-going conversion. And the power which wrought that stupendous result was the patience and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. The weak things had, as so often since, confounded the strong. In His matchless forbearance, in the prayer for His executioners, the royalty of Christ our Lord was disclosed, and the “title” over His head was vindicated.

1. First then, we learn from the Second Word the Mind and Will of God towards penitence. There is no interposing of delay. Forgiveness is instantaneous. No pause intervenes between the prayer for pardon, and the pardon itself. But, that instant response was to genuine “change of mind,” not to the repentance which is merely regret for the past, still less to a cowardly shrinking from a deserved punishment, but to a definite act of the man’s will, repudiating sin, and ranging himself on God’s side. The rejection of sin, the identifying of self with God’s attitude towards it, that, we have seen, is alone, in the New Testament sense of the word, repentance.

2. The penitence of the robber, on analysis, discloses the three familiar elements

(a) Contrition is obviously implied in the whole action.

(b) Confession “we receive the due rewards of the things which we wrought.”

(c) Amendment in the separation of himself from those with whom he had hitherto joined in reviling Christ.

Now it is worth noting, that our Catechism bids us examine ourselves not about our sins, but about our repentance; “whether they truly repent.” We are meant to ask ourselves

(a) Is our contrition real? And here, for our comfort, we remember that God accepts as contrition the sincere desire to be contrite.

(b) Have we made such a painstaking self-examination as to ensure our making a good confession? “If we confess our sins” (separate, detailed sins, not our sinfulness in general terms), “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.”

Have we used “sacramental” confession, according to the teaching of the Prayer Book, that is, when our conscience told us that we needed it?

(c) Is our resolution of amendment a clear and honest one? What sins are there, some of whose results we are able to modify or in part reverse (false impressions, untruths, acts or words of unkindness)? God is generous in forgiveness. Surely we are bound to be generous in our amendment. There is a sense in which the results of sin abide beyond possibility of recall. Yet I believe that the instinct which bids us “make up for” a hurt inflicted on a beloved person, is a Divine instinct in our nature, and one which we are to carry into the region of our relation to God.

3. We notice another important truth as regards the Divine forgiveness. It has nothing to do with the removal of punishment, the release from penalty or consequence of sin. The forgiveness of the robber was immediate and complete. But he had still to hang in agony, and there awaited him the frightful pain of the crurifragium, the breaking of the legs by beating with clubs.

The sooner we learn the two great truths about the punishment of sin, the better.

(a) Punishment is inevitable. It is a necessary result of the constitution of the physical and moral universe, of the working, in both regions, of those laws which are the expression of the Divine Mind.

(b) Punishment is remedial. Many Christian theologians have fallen far below Plato’s conception of God, as One Who can only punish men with a view of making them better.

Think of one of the punishments of repented sin, the haunting memories of past evil. In this case, both principles are very clearly discernible. Each recollection may be made the means of a renewed act of rejection of sin, and thus become an opportunity for the deepening of repentance.

And what disclosure does this second word contain of the Mind and Will of God in us, as manifested not towards, but by ourselves? Our lesson is the prompt recognition and welcome of any, even the slightest signs of amendment. It may be our duty to punish. It is always our duty to keep alive, or to kindle, the hope in an offender of becoming better. In that hope, alone, lies the possibility of moral amendment. There is the golden rule, laid down by St. Paul for all who have to exercise discipline over others, in words which ring ever in our ears “lest they be discouraged.”

IV THE THIRD WORD

“Lady, behold thy son.”
“Behold thy mother.”

ST. JOHN XI, 27.

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. XXVI; ST. MARK X.

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?”

What this view involves is briefly

(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 XI.

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 XI.

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 XXII.

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.

IX 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. V.

“I delivered unto you, among the first things, that . . . He was
buried.” I COR. X, 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.