THE CRUCIFIXION
And they crucified him.
S. Matt. XXVII, 35.
In as much as we have no confidence because of our many sins, do thou, O Virgin Mother of God, beseech him who was born of thee; for a Mother's supplication availeth much to gain the benignity of the Master. Despise not the prayers of sinners, O all-august, for merciful and mighty to save is he, who vouchsafed to suffer for us.
BYZANTINE.
e have followed the Way of Sorrows to the very end and now stand on Calvary watching by the Cross, waiting for the death of the Son of God. The mystery of iniquity is consummated here where man in open rebellion against his God crucifies the Incarnate Son. Here is fulfilled the saying: "He came unto His own and His own received Him not." All that man can do to prove his own degredation he has done. In the person of Pilate he has condemned to death a man whom he knows to be innocent. The representative of human justice has denied justice for the sake of his own personal ends. In the person of Herod he has permitted the insult and abuse of One of whom he knows no ill, and has displayed toward Him wanton and brutal cruelty. In the person of the Jewish authorities he has rejected the Messenger of the God whom he recognises as his God, and will not listen to the voice of prophecy because he finds his personal ends countered by the fulfilment of the promises of the religion whose subject he professes to be. In the person of the disciples he shows himself too cowardly and self-regarding to stand by his innocent Master and to throw in his lot with Him. In the person of the people he shows himself cruel, hardened, indifferent to suffering and to justice, ready to be made the tool of unscrupulous politicians, unstable and ignorant. As we look on, we succeed in retaining any shred of respect for humanity only through the contemplation of the exceptions--of S. John and the little group of women who are faithful to the end: above all in the sight of blessed Mary standing by the Cross of her Son.
It is the will of God that our Lord should follow the human lot to the very depth of its possible sufferings. There are no doubt many sufferings of humanity that our Lord does not share, they are those which spring out of personal sin. He in Whom was no sin could not suffer those things which spring from one's own wrong doing. That is one broad distinction between the burdens of the crosses on Calvary, a distinction which the penitent thief caught easily when he said to his reviling fellow-criminal, "Dost thou not fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss." And in as much as a great part of what we suffer is plainly just, the pain we bear is intensified by the knowledge that what we are is the outcome of what we have been. But our Lord, while He does not suffer as the result of His own sin, does suffer as the result of sin in that He wills to bear the result of men's sin by putting Himself at their mercy. He bears the burden of sin to the uttermost, looking down from the Cross at the faces of these men whose salvation He is making possible if in the days to come they will associate themselves with Him. One wonders how many of those who saw Him crucified came, before they died, to accept Him as the Saviour and their God. There must have been many wonderful first Communions in the early Church when those who had rejected Jesus in His humility came to receive Him glorified.
But as we look at this scene of the dying we feel that the powers of evil are working their uttermost, they are driving their slaves to incredible sins. One feels the tremendous power that evil is as one looks at these human beings who are body and soul wholly under its dominion. The Power of Darkness appears utterly in control of the world of humanity; but we know that this moment in which its triumph seems most complete is in fact the moment in which its defeat is at hand. The victory that is being won is the victory of the Vanquished: and the moment when the victory of evil seems assured by the dying of Jesus, is in fact the moment when the chains of the slaves of sin are broken, and men who will to be free are henceforth free indeed. From that moment a new freedom is within the reach of men, the freedom which comes to them through their participation in the redemption wrought for them by God. Presently S. John will announce the great message of freedom to the Church, a message that he will tell in his own wonderful simplicity, a simplicity which almost deceives us as to its unfathomable depth of love and mystery: "For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.... We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not: but He that was begotten of God keepeth him, and the evil one toucheth him not. And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one. And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life."
This is what the dying of Jesus achieved for us, that we should be free as men had never been free, and that we should be strong as men had never been strong.
On their crosses the thieves agonise in the realisation of the sin that has brought them there; but our Lord, Who is free from sin, looks out on the scene before Him in a wonderful detachment from His personal suffering. Being without sin our Lord is without egotism, and never treats life from that purely personal standpoint that we are constantly tempted to adopt. Our own needs, our own interests, occupy the foreground and determine the judgment; and we are rarely able to see in dealing with the concrete case that our own interests are ultimately indentical with the interests of the whole Body. The lesson that if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, that we are partners in joy and sorrow alike, is almost impossible of assimilation by the radical individualists that we are. Our theories break down before the test of actuality. But our Lord was not an individualist. He, in His relations with men, is the Head of the Body; and He admits no division of interests between His members. He therefore can think of the needs of others while He Himself is undergoing the last torture of death. He can impartially judge the separate cases of His members; He can attend to the spiritual welfare of a needy soul; He can think of His own death as an act of sacrifice willed by God, and not as a matter concerning Himself alone; and in doing these things He teaches us a much-needed lesson of the handling of life.
No lesson is to-day more needed because we are more and more being influenced to treat life as a private matter. I have spoken of this before and need not elaborate it now; but I do want to insist, at whatever risk of repetition, that a Christian must, if his religion mean anything at all, look on the interests of the Body, not as a separate group of interests to which he is privileged or obligated to contribute such help as seems to him from time to time appropriate, but as in fact his own primary interests because his true significance in the world is gained through his membership in the Body. His life is hid with Christ in God and his conversation is in heaven. The life that he now lives in the flesh he lives by the faith of the Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself for him. To assert separate interests is to break the essential relation of his life. He is nothing apart from the Body but a dry and withered branch fit for the burning. No doubt our egotism rebels against this view of life, but it is certain that it is the view of the Christian Religion. If we would realise the ideals of the Religion we must act as those who are in constant relations with the other members of the Body and whose life gets its significance through those relations.
There is no more outstanding lesson of our Lord's life than this. It is true from whichever angle you look at it. If you think of our Lord as a divine Person it is at once evident how much of His meaning is included in His relations to the other Persons of the Blessed Trinity. He claims no independent will; it is the will of the Father that He has come to do. He claims no original work: it is the work that the Father has given Him to do that He is straightened until He accomplish. He has no individual possession, but all things that the Father has are His. Considered as God, our Lord is One Person in the one divine nature, no Unitarian interpretation of Him is possible. On the other hand, if you look at Him as Incarnate, as having identified Himself with humanity, He is in that respect made one with His brethren. He has made their interests His, and as their new Head is opening for them the gate of the future. He is inviting them into union with Himself, that in the status of His "brethren" and "friends" they may be also the true children of the heavenly Father. There is no hint anywhere that these things may be accomplished apart from Him, in individual isolation: indeed, if they could be so accomplished the Incarnation would be meaningless. He is the Way and no one cometh to the Father but by Him. He is the Truth, and no one knows the Father but he to whom the Son reveals Him. He is the Life, and no one spiritually lives except through His self-impartation. "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life. He that eateth me, even he shall live by me." In this outlook from the Cross which we recognise in our Blessed Lord when, forgetting His own sufferings in His appreciation of the needs of others, we see Him still fulfilling His ministry of mercy and of sympathy, we are certain that His eyes would rest upon one group which could not fail to pierce His heart with its pathos and tragedy. Our Lord's love is not a general, impersonal love of humanity; it is always love of a person. He no doubt felt a special love for this thief who appealed to Him from the cross by His side. In the whole course of His life our Lord had shown His oneness with us in that He loved special people in a special way. He loved Lazarus and his sisters, He loved S. John. Above all others He loved His Blessed Mother. And now looking down from the Cross He sees that the disciple whom He loved was succeeded in leading His mother into the very shadow of the Cross. How S. Mary had made her way there we do not know: only love knows how it triumphs over its obstacles and comes forth victorious. There is Blessed Mary, looking up into the face so scarred and bleeding, and there is the Son, looking down through the blinding blood into the face of the mother. This is the supreme human tragedy of Calvary. We can only stand and watch the exchange of love.
And then comes the word--the word, by the way, which when it was spoken years ago in Cana of Galilee, men have interpreted as a harsh and rebuking word, with how much truth this scene tells--then comes the word: "Woman, behold thy son." In His love He gives her that which He had so much loved, the friendship of S. John. He brings together those who had so supremely loved Him in an association which would support them both in the trial of their loss. "Woman, behold thy son; behold thy mother." Bitter as was their sorrow in this hour, we know that they were marvellously comforted by this power of love which is able to transcend suffering and death. We know, because we know how utterly our Lord is one with us, that it was much to Him to look on the face that bent over Him in the Manger in Bethlehem. We know, because we know the perfect woman that was Mary, that there was deep joy as well as deep agony in being able to stand there at the last beneath the Cross.
Do you think that we are going too far when we see in S. Mary not simply the mother of our Lord, but when we also see in her a certain representative character? Does she not represent us in one way and S. John represent us in another, in this supreme exchange of love? Do we not feel that in S. John we have been recommended to the love and care of Mary who is our mother? Do we not feel that in S. John the mother has been committed to our love and care? Surely, because we are members of her Son we have a special relation to S. Mary, and a special claim upon her, if it be permitted to express it in that way. It is no empty form of words when we call her mother, no exaltation of sentimentalism. The title represents a very real relation of love. It brings home to us that the love of Mary is as near infinite as the love of a creature can be, and that like the love of her Son it is an unselfish love. She is necessarily interested in all the members of the Body, and their cares and joys and sorrows she is glad to make her own. She is very close to us in her love and sympathy; she is very ready to help us with her prayers. We never go to her for succour but she hears us. "Behold thy son," her divine Son said to her on the Cross in His agony, and all who are members of that Son are her sons too. Her place in heaven above all creatures, most highly favoured as she is, is a place to which our prayers penetrate, and never penetrate unheard. For that other Son, through whose merits she is what she is, whose Face she ever beholds as the Face alike of her Redeemer and her Child, is ever ready to hear her intercessions for us because they come to Him with the power and the insight that perfect purity and perfect sympathy alone can give. So for us there is intense personal consolation in this word: "Behold thy mother."
But there is another side to this committal. It is mutual: "Behold thy son." If we can see ourselves in S. John, committed to the Blessed Mother, we can also see ourselves in S. John to whom the blessed mother is committed. "Behold thy mother." There is a sense in which the blessed mother is committed to us; to-day she is our care. We see the fulfillment of this trust in the love and reverence wherewith Christendom from the beginning has surrounded S. Mary. It has accepted the charge with a passionate devotion. The growth of devotion to her is recorded in the vast literature of Mariology which comes to us from all parts and all eras of the Catholic Church. The details of the expression of this devotion have been wrought out through the centuries with loving care, and the result is that wherever there is a Catholic conception of religion, either in East or West, there is a grateful response to our Lord's trust of His Blessed mother to His Church in the person of S. John.
We feel, do we not? that it is one of the great privileges of our spiritual life that we have found a personal part in this trust, that it is permitted us to preserve and hand on this reverence for Blessed Mary, and in so doing to gain personal contact with her as a spiritual power in the Kingdom of God. It means much to us that we can have the love and sympathy which are blended with her intercession, that we can associate our prayers with hers in the time of our need. Much as we value the sympathy and prayers of our friends here, we cannot but feel that in Mary we have a friend whose helpfulness is stimulated by a great love and directed by deep spiritual insight into the reality of our needs. We turn therefore to her with the certainty of her co-operation.
Our Lord on the Cross had now fulfilled His mission in the care of individual persons, had prayed for His tormentors, had forgiven the penitent thief, and had commended those who were the special objects of His love to one another, and could now turn His thoughts away from earth to the love of the Father. His last words are intimate words to Him. They express the agony that tears His soul as the Face of the Father is for a moment hidden, and the peace of an accomplished work as He surrenders Himself into the hands of the Father that sent Him. He who had been our example all His life, showing us how to meet life, is our example in death, showing us how to meet death.
But just wherein does the dying of Christ become an example for us? This final surrender to the Father of a will that had never been separate from the Father,--what can we derive from all that? There are many lines of approach and application. I can only touch on one or two:--
"I have glorified Thee on the earth," our Lord said in the last wonderful prayer, "I have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do." And here on the Cross He repeats, "It is finished." When we think of this we are impressed with the steadiness with which our Lord pursued His purpose, with the way He concentrated His whole life upon His work. He declined to be drawn aside by anything irrelevant to it. People came to Him with all sorts of requests, from the request that He will settle a disputed inheritance to the request that He will become their king; and He puts them all aside as having no pertinence to His mission. It is interesting to go through the Gospel and note just what are the details of this winnowing process; mark what our Lord accepts as relevant to His mission and what not. He is never too occupied or tired to attend to what belongs to His work. An ill old woman or idiot child is important to Him and He attends to them; but He declines the sort of work that will involve Him and His mission in controversy and politics. He is not a reformer of society but a reformer of men. He knows that only by the reformation of men can society be reformed.
There is no doubt much to be learned from the study of our Lord's method of the limits of the social and political activity of His Church. It has constantly fallen a victim to the temptation to undertake the reform of the world by some other means than the conversion of it. It has shown itself quite willing to be made "a judge and divider." It has not always declined the invitation it has received to assume the purple. "Your business is to reform this miserable world which so sadly and so obviously needs you," men say to it; "You are not living up to your principles and you are neglecting your duty by not supporting this great movement for the betterment of the race," others say. Still others urge, "You are losing great masses of men through your inexplicable failure to adopt their cause." And the Church in the whole course of its history has constantly yielded to this temptation, and has not seen until too late that in so doing it was making itself the tool or the cat's-paw of one interest or another whose sole interest in religion was the possibility of exploiting the influence of the Church. In the stupid hope of forwarding its spiritual interests the Church has entangled itself with the responsibilities of temporal power; it has made itself the backer of "the divine right of kings"; and it has found itself bound hand and foot in the character of a national or state Church; and with a curious incapacity to learn anything from experience is now enthusiastically cheering for democracy! Poor Church, whose leaders are so constantly misleaders.
It is all due to the hoary temptation to try to get to one's end by some sort of a short cut: "All these things will I give you if you will fall down and worship me." Our Lord knew that Satan could not really give Him the ends He was seeking; but His followers are constantly confident that he can, and are therefore his constant and ready tools for this or that party or interest. They sell themselves to monarchy or democracy, to capital or labour, with the same guileless innocence of what is happening to them, with the same simple-minded incapacity to learn anything from the lessons of the past. There are no short cuts to spiritual ends, and those ends can never be accomplished by secular means. The interests of the Kingdom of God can never be forwarded by alliance with the powers of this world; the interests of particular persons or parties in the Church may be--but that is quite another thing.
The lesson is one that is not without application to the individual life. There again the tendency to mind something other than one's own business is almost ineradicable. We have before us the work of building our spiritual house, of finishing the work that the Father has given us to do, of carrying to a successful conclusion the work of our sanctification. In view of the experience of nearly two thousand years of Christianity and of our own personal experience, that would seem a sufficiently difficult and obligatory work to occupy the undivided energies of a life-time. But we are accustomed to treat this primary business of life quite as though it were a parergon, a thing to play with in our unoccupied hours, the fad of a collector rather than the supreme interest of an immortal being. That spiritual results are no oftener achieved than they are can occasion no surprise when one understands the sort of spirit wherewith they are approached. If the average man adopted toward his business the attitude he adopts toward his religion he would be bankrupt within a week,--and he knows it. You know that the attention you are paying to religion and the sort of energy and sacrifice you are putting into it are insufficient to secure any sort of a result worth having. Spiritually speaking, your life is an example of misdirected and dissipated energy. There is no spiritual result because there is no continuous and energetic effort in a spiritual direction. You are not like a master-builder planning and erecting a house. You are like a child playing with a box of blocks who begins to build a house with them and, when it is half built, is attracted by something else and runs after that--not even waiting to put the blocks back into the box!
Life, no doubt, this modern city life into which we are plunged, is terribly distracting. Concentration upon a single aim is hard to attain. So we plead in our excuse, but the excuse is a false one and we know it. We know it because we know many people who have achieved the sort of concentration and simplicity of aim that we complain of as so difficult. They to be sure have other ends than those we claim to be ours, but that would not seem to be important. By far the greater part of the male population of this city is intensely concentrated in money making. I do not believe that I have overheard during the last year two men talking in a car or on the street who were not talking about money. There is a good enough example of the possibility of concentrating on a single end under the conditions of our life. There are other people, you know some of them, whose lives are devoted in the most thorough manner to the pursuit of pleasure. They find no difficulty in such concentration, and they afford an even better example of what we are discussing than the money-makers. The money-maker says, "I have to live and my family has to live, and we cannot live unless I devote myself to business. It is all very well to talk about spiritual interests, but those are the plain common sense facts. A man who spends all his time on religion will find it pretty difficult to live in New York." Very well, that seems unanswerable. But go back to the men and women whose sole interest is amusement--how do they live? In some way they seem to have so succeeded in subordinating business to pleasure that they get what they want, and they somehow escape starvation!
There, I fancy, is the explanation--they get what they want. In a broad way we all get what we want. We accomplish in some degree at least the ends which we make the supreme ends of life. We are back therefore where we started: What are our supreme ends? Are they in fact spiritual? Have we mastered the technique of the Christian life sufficiently to be single-eyed and pure-hearted in our pursuit of life's ends? Are we devoted to the aim of manifesting the glory of God and finishing the work that He has given us to do?
This, once more, was the secret of our Lord's life, and it is the secret of all those who have at all succeeded in imitating Him. They have followed Him with singleness of purpose. They have felt life to be before all else a vocation to manifest the will of God and to finish a given work. That was the attitude of our Blessed Mother; she began on that note: "Behold the hand-maid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." It was the Gospel that she preached: "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it." Her whole life was a response--the response of love to love.
That no doubt, goes to the heart of the spiritual problem. If we are to accomplish anything at all in the way of spiritual development, if we are to conduct life in simplicity toward spiritual ends, it will only be when the source of life's energy is found in love. He who does not love has no compelling motive toward God and no abiding principle to control life. If we conceive the Christian life as a task that is forced upon us, and which in some way we are bound to fulfil, we may be sure that the way in which we shall fulfil it will be weak and halting. We may be as conscientious as you please, but we shall not be able to concentrate on a work which is merely a work of duty and not the embodiment of a great love. Our primary activity should be devout meditation and study of our Lord's life, with prayer for guidance and help, till something of the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, till we feel our hearts burn within us and our spirits glow and we become able to offer ourselves, soul and body, a living sacrifice unto Him.
MARY: I cried: "Maudeleyn, help now! My Son hath loved full well thee; Pray Him that I may die, That I not forgotten be! Seest thou, Maudeleyn, now My Son is hanged on a tree, Yet alive am I and thou,-- And thou, thou prayest not for me!" MAUDELEYN said: "I know no red, Care hath smitten my heart sore. I stand, I see my Lord nigh dead; And thy weeping grieveth me more. Come with me; I will thee lead Into the Temple here before For thou hast now i-wept full yore." MARY: "I ask thee, Maudeleyn, where is that place,-- In plain or valley or in hill? Where I may hide in any case That no sorrow come me till. For He that all my joy was, Now death with Him will do its will; For me no better solace is Than just to weep, to weep my fill." The Maudeleyn comforted me tho. To lead me hence, she said, was best: But care had smitten my heart so That I might never have no rest. "Sister, wherever that I go The woe of Him is in my breast, While my Sone hangeth so His pains are in mine own heart fast. Should I let Him hangen there Let my Son alone then be? Maudeleyn, think, unkind I were If He should hang and I should flee." I bade them go where was their will, This Maudeleyn and everyone, And by myself remain I will For I will flee for no man.
From St. Bernard's "Lamentation On Christ's Passion."
Engl. version, 13th Cent., by Richard Maydestone.
| MARY: | I cried: "Maudeleyn, help now! |
| My Son hath loved full well thee; | |
| Pray Him that I may die, | |
| That I not forgotten be! | |
| Seest thou, Maudeleyn, now | |
| My Son is hanged on a tree, | |
| Yet alive am I and thou,-- | |
| And thou, thou prayest not for me!" | |
| MAUDELEYN | said: "I know no red, |
| Care hath smitten my heart sore. | |
| I stand, I see my Lord nigh dead; | |
| And thy weeping grieveth me more. | |
| Come with me; I will thee lead | |
| Into the Temple here before | |
| For thou hast now i-wept full yore." | |
| MARY: | "I ask thee, Maudeleyn, where is that place,-- |
| In plain or valley or in hill? | |
| Where I may hide in any case | |
| That no sorrow come me till. | |
| For He that all my joy was, | |
| Now death with Him will do its will; | |
| For me no better solace is | |
| Than just to weep, to weep my fill." | |
| The Maudeleyn comforted me tho. | |
| To lead me hence, she said, was best: | |
| But care had smitten my heart so | |
| That I might never have no rest. | |
| "Sister, wherever that I go | |
| The woe of Him is in my breast, | |
| While my Sone hangeth so | |
| His pains are in mine own heart fast. | |
| Should I let Him hangen there | |
| Let my Son alone then be? | |
| Maudeleyn, think, unkind I were | |
| If He should hang and I should flee." | |
| I bade them go where was their will, | |
| This Maudeleyn and everyone, | |
| And by myself remain I will | |
| For I will flee for no man. |