The suffering, also, was ended. Darkness had had its night of sore trial, and now the day was at hand. Trial and suffering do end. It is sometimes hard to believe it, but the end is already appointed from the beginning. It was so with the Saviour of the world; and at length the hour is come, and He raises His bruised and bleeding head for the last time, and cries in token of His triumph, "It is finished!"
But is there not also here a suggestion of something more? Up to that concluding hour it was always possible for Him to draw back. "I lay down My life for the sheep," He had said; "no man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself." His was, in the very highest and widest sense of the word, a voluntary offering, a voluntary humiliation, a voluntary death. Up to the very last, therefore, He could have stepped down from the cross, going no further toward the dark abyss. But the moment came when this would be no longer possible; when, even for Him, the sacrifice would be irrevocable--when the possibility "to save Himself" was ended, and when He became for ever "the Lamb that was slain," bearing the marks of His wounds in His eternal body. When that moment passed, He might well say, "It is finished."
Is there not something that should answer to this in the lives of many of His disciples? Is there not a point for us, also, at which we may pass over the line of uncertainty or reserve in our offering, saying for ever--it is finished? Is there not an appointed Calvary somewhere, at which we can settle the questions that have been so long unsettled, and, in the strength of God, at last declare that, as for controversy of any kind with Him, "it is finished"? Is there not at this very same cross of our dying Saviour a place where doubt and shame may perish together--crucified with Him, and finished for ever?
This would be, indeed, a blessed conformity to His death.
V.
"I thirst."
This is the first of the three words of Christ which relate specially to His own inner experiences, and which I have placed together for the purpose of this paper.
"I thirst." They gave Him vinegar to drink--or, probably, in a moment of pity the soldiers brought Him the sour wine which they had provided for themselves. He seems to have partaken of it, although He had refused the mixture that had been before offered Him merely to deaden His pain. To bear that pain was the lofty duty set before Him, and so He would not turn aside from it one hair's breadth.
But He humbled Himself to receive what was necessary from the very hands that had been crucifying Him. He, who could have so easily commanded a whole multitude of the heavenly host to appear for His succour, and to whose precious lips, parched in death, the princes of the eternal Kingdom would have so gladly hastened with a draught from celestial springs, condescended to ask the help of those who mocked Him, and to take the support He so sadly needed from His triumphant persecutors.
Oh, you who are proud by nature, who are reserved by nature, who are sensitive in spirit, who feel every wrong done to you like a knife entering your breast, and who, when you forgive an injury, find it difficult to forget, and harder still to humble yourselves in any way to those who, you feel, have wronged you--here for you is a lesson, here for you is an example, a precious example, of the condescension of Love. Yes. to love those who seem to be against you, to love those in whom there always appears to you to be some difference of spirit or incompatibility of temperament, will mean, if you are made conformable unto your Master's death, that you will be able to receive at their hands services, kindnesses, pity, advice, which your own poor, fallen nature would, without divine grace, have scorned and spurned.