And after they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him,and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him.S. Matt. XXVII, 31.
And after they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him,and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him.S. Matt. XXVII, 31.
Forgive, O Lord, we beseech thee, the sins of thy people: that we, who are not able to do anything of ourselves, that can be pleasing to thee, may be assisted in the way of salvation by the prayers of the Mother of thy Son. Who.Having partaken of thy heavenly table, we humbly beseech thy clemency, O Lord, our God, that we who honour the Assumption of the Mother of God, may, by her intercession, be delivered from all evils. Through.
OLD CATHOLIC.
he way of the Cross is indeed a Sorrowful Way. We have meditated upon it so often that we are familiar with all the details of our Lord's action as He follows it from the Judgment Seat of Pilate to the Place of a Skull. I wonder if we enough pause to look with our Lord at the crowds that line the way, or at those who follow Him out of the city. It is not a mere matter of curiosity that we should do so, or an exercise of the devout imagination; the reason why we should examine carefully the faces of those men who attend our Lord on the way to His death is that somewhere in that crowd we shall see our own faces: it is a mirror of sinful humanity that we look into there. All the seven deadly sins are there incarnate.
It is extremely important that we should get this sort of personal reaction from the Passion because we are so prone to be satisfied with generalities, to confess that we are miserable sinners, and let it go at that! But to stop there is to stop short of any possibility of improvement, because we can only hope to improve when we understand our lives in detail, when we face them as concrete examples of certain sins.
There was pride there. It was expressed by both Roman and Jewish officialism which looked with scorn on this obscure fanatic who claimed to be a king! Pilate had satisfied himself of His harmlessness by a very cursory examination. This Galilean Prophet with His handful of followers, peasants and women, who had deserted Him at the first sign of danger, was hardly worth troubling about. The only ground for any action at all was the fear that the Jewish leaders might be disagreeable. Those Jewish leaders took a rather more serious view of the situation because they knew that through the purity of His teaching and His obvious power to perform miracles, a power but just now once more strikingly demonstrated in the raising of Lazarus, He had a powerful hold on the people. They, these Jewish leaders, declined a serious examination of the claims of such a man in their pride of place and knowledge of the Scriptures. They were concerned to sweep Him aside as a possible leader in a popular outbreak, not as one whose claim to the Messiahship needed a moment's examination.
This intellectual pride is one of the very greatest sins to which humanity is tempted. It goes very deep in its destructive force because it is a sin, preeminently, of the spiritual nature, of that in us which is akin to God, His very image. It is, you will remember, the sin on which our Lord centres His chief denunciation. And common as it has always been, it has never been so common as it is to-day. Pilate and the chief priests are duplicated in every community in the thousands who reject Christianity without any adequate examination as incredible in view of what they actually hold, or as inconvenient in view of what they desire to practice. We have only to read very superficially in the current literature of the day, we have only to examine the teaching in colleges, to be completely convinced of the vast extent of the revolt against the Christian Religion. This revolt is for the most part a revolt without adequate examination. It assumes that the Christian Religion is contrary to science, or to something else that is established as true. It looks at Christianity superficially through the eyes of those who reject it and are ignorant of it. The fact is that Christianity cannot be understood in any complete sense of the word by those who do not practice it. Its "evidence" is no doubt of great force; of sufficient force to lead men to experiment; but the actual comprehension of Christ as the Saviour of man is an experience. The operation of the Holy Spirit in life is necessarily proved, and only completely proved, by the action of the Spirit Himself.
Another demonstration of the same pride is seen in the refusal, without adequate examination, to accept the Catholic Religion, and the picking and choosing among articles of belief and sacraments and practices as to what we will use or observe. Men do not like this or that, and they therefore decline it. The whole attitude is one of self-will and pride. Whatsoever comes to us with a great weight of Christian experience back of it certainly deserves careful consideration; it demands of us that we treat it as other than a matter of taste. Pride is the commonest of sins and the most dangerous for it attacks the very heart of the spiritual life. It runs, to be sure, through a broad range of experience and not all manifestations of pride are mortal sin; but all manifestations of it are subtle and insidious and capable of expansion to an indefinite degree. For there is no difference in nature between the spiritual attitude of the person who says, "I do not see any sense in that and will not do it," when the matter in question may be the Church's rule of fasting, and that of the man who before Pilate's Judgment Seat cried out, "We have no king but Caesar."
It was in fact because they found their own power and place threatened that the Jewish authorities were so determined on our Lord's death. Their sin from this point of view was the sin of covetousness. This sin reaches its highest point when it is greed for power over other men's lives and destinies, when it is ready to sacrifice the lives of others in order to gain or maintain its ends. In this broad sense it is the most socially destructive of sins. The wars of the world for these many years have been wars for commercial supremacy. The world is being continually exploited by commercial enterprises which will stop at nothing to gain their ends. Some day a history of the last two hundred years will be written which will tell the story of the commercial expansion of the world we call civilised, and it will be the most horrible book that has ever been written. It will contain the story of the Spanish colonisation of America. It will contain the history of the slave trade. It will contain the history of the Belgian Congo, and of the rubber industry in South America. It will contain the history of the American Indian and of the opium trade of India--and of many like things.
But while we shudder at the world-torturing ways of the pursuit of wealth, of the world-wide seeking of money and power, we need not forget that the sin of covetousness is as common as any sin can be. It is so common and so subtle that it is almost impossible to know how far one is a victim of it. It is deliberately taught to us as children under the guise of thrift, which if it be a virtue is certainly one that the saints have overlooked. We are constantly called on to strike a balance between what are the proper needs of life and what is an improper concentration of attention upon ourselves. Waste of money, like waste of any other energy, is a sin; but it is a very nice question as to what is waste. I think it a pretty safe rule to give expenditure the benefit of the doubt when it is for others, and to deny it when it is for self.
However, I imagine that those who are conscientiously trying to conduct their lives as the children of God will have little difficulty in this matter. The real trouble is not in the matter of expenditure but in the matter of gain. The ethics of business are very far from being the ethics of the Gospel, and we are often frankly told by those engaged in business that it cannot be successfully conducted on the basis of the ethics of the Gospel, That it is not so conducted is sufficiently obvious from a cursory scanning of the advertising columns of any newspaper or magazine. The ideal of the business world is success. Naturally, one cannot carry on an unsuccessful business, but need it be success by all means and to all extents? Are there no limits to the methods by which business is to be pushed, except legal limits? If there is no room for Christian ethics in the business world there can be but one end; competitive business will lead the civilisation that it controls to inevitable disaster. Our Lord said: "Take heed and beware of covetousness; for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth." And He went on to speak a parable which has come to be known as the Parable of the Rich Fool. The "practical man" may be as angered as he likes by this teaching, but in his soul he knows that our Lord was right. When such things are pointed out from the pulpit the "practical man" says: "What would become of the Church were it not for the rich and the successful?" I think that the answer is that in that case the Church would no more represent the rich and would have a fair chance of once more representing Jesus Christ.
It may seem at the first sight that of the mortal sins lust was not represented here upon the Sorrowful Way; but that, I think is but a superficial analysis of the nature of lust, thinking only of some manifestations of it. There is however one sin that has its roots deep in lust which psychologists tell us is one of its commonest manifestations, and that is cruelty. Lust is not always, but commonly, cruel; and the desire to inflict pain on others is a very common form of its expression. There are sights we have seen or incidents we have read of, it may be a boy torturing an animal or another child, it may be a shouting mass of men about a prize-ring, it may be soldiers sacking a town,--when the action seems so senseless that we are at a loss to account for it; but the account of it lies in the mystery of our sensual nature, in the ultimate animal that we are. The savage joy that is being expressed by the participants in such scenes is ultimately a sensual joy. These men who delighted in the torture of our Lord were sensualists; and there are few of us who if we will watch our selves closely will not find traces of the animal showing itself from time to time. Of this crowd about the Cross relatively few could have known anything about the case of our Lord; but they were fascinated by the spectacle of a man's torture. If the executions of criminals were public to-day there would undoubtedly be huge crowds to gaze upon them.
It is one of the lessons we learn from the study of sin that what we had thought was the essence of the sin was in fact but one of the manifestations of it, and that we have to carry our study far before we arrive at the ideal, Know thyself. It is always dangerous to assume that we know when we have not been at the pains to look at a subject on all sides. Our sensual nature needs a very careful discipline, and the mere freedom from certain forms of the sin of lust is not the equivalent of that purity which is the medium of the Vision of God.
It is the sin of gluttony which is the least obvious in the Way of the Cross. There are no doubt plenty of gluttons there, but that is not what we are trying to find; we are trying to see how each sin contributed to this final act in the drama of our Lord's life, how each sin contributed to put men in opposition to our Lord. It is not the actual sin of gluttony that we shall find in operation here but certain inevitable effects of it, What is the effect of gluttony on the soul of man? Absorption in the pursuit of the pleasures that spring from material things; the indulgence of the appetite, and the natural result of such indulgence which is to render the soul insensitive to the spiritual. The man whose motto is, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," puts himself out of touch with the spiritual realities of life. He is materialistic, whatever may be his philosophy. He wants immediate results from life. When he is confronted with our Lord, when he is told that our Lord makes demands upon life for self-restraint and self-discipline, that He demands that the appetites be curbed rather than indulged, he declines allegiance. One can have no doubt that in our Lord's time as to-day indifference to His teaching and failure even to take in what the Gospel means or how it can be a possible rule of life is largely due to the dull spiritual state, outcome of the indulgence of the appetite for meat and drink. Men whose brains are clogged by over eating, and whose faculties are in a deadened state through the use of alcohol, cannot well understand the Gospel of God.
There is abundant evidence of anger all along the Way of the Cross. The constant thwarting of the purpose of the Jewish authorities by our Lord, His unsparing criticism of them before the people, had stirred them to fury. If our Lord had seemed to them to threaten their "place and nation" we can understand that they would show toward Him intense hostility. Their attitude toward the people whose religious interests they were supposed to have in charge was one of utter contempt: "This people which knoweth not the Law is cursed." Our Lord's attitude was the opposite of all this. It was not, to be sure, as to-day it is represented to be an appeal to the people. He was not bidding for popular support, but he showed unbounded sympathy with the people; He cast His teaching in a form that would appeal to them and draw them to him. He made a popular appeal in that He showed Himself understanding of the popular mind and without social prejudice of any sort. This setting aside of the arrogant authorities of Israel roused them to implacable wrath. They felt that our Lord was setting Himself to undermine their authority, and as they felt that their authority was "of God" their indignation translated itself into terms of zeal for God.
This anger that manages to wear a cloak of virtue is peculiarly dangerous to the soul. When we are just ordinarily mad over some offence committed against us it is no doubt a sin; but it is not a sin of the same malignity as when we feel that we can go any lengths because we are not angry on our own behalf, then our anger almost becomes an act of religion in our eyes. We have become the defenders of a cause. No doubt there is such a thing as "righteous indignation," but it is not a virtue that we are compelled to practice, and we would do well to leave it alone as much as possible lest our indignation exceed our righteousness, and we indentify our personal interests with the cause of God.
The worst feature of tempermental flare-ups is the testimony they bear to our lack of discipline. When we excuse ourselves or others on the ground that action is "temperamental" we are in fact no more than restating the fact that there is sore need of discipline; and there is no more ground for excusing one variety of temperament for its lack of discipline than an other. In fact, the more inclined a temperament is to certain sins, the more necessity there is for the appropriate sort of training. People without self-control, who are constantly losing their temper, are public nuisances and ought to be suppressed. There is the worst kind of arrogance in the assumption that I do not have to control myself and can speak and act as I like. No one, whatever his position, has the right to ignore the feelings of others; and the more the position is one of authority, exempting him from a certain kind of criticism, the more is he bound to criticise himself and examine himself as to this particular sin.
There are sins under this caption which do not contain much malice but are disturbing to life, and they are especially disturbing to one's spiritual life. There are peevish, complaining people, who do not seem to mean much harm, but keep themselves in a state of dissatisfaction which renders their spiritual growth impossible. They grow old without any of the grace and beauty of character which should mark a Christian old age. One knows old people who have been in intimate contact with the Church and the sacraments for many years but do not show any signs of having reached our Lord through them. They are dissatisfied and complaining and critical and generally disagreeable so that the task of those who take care of them is rendered very disheartening. What is the trouble? Has there never been any true spiritual discipline, but only a certain superficial conformity to a spiritual rule? When old age comes the will is weakened and the sense of self-respect undermined, with the result that what the person has all along been in reality, now comes to the surface and is, perhaps for the first time, visible to every one.
Envy is closely related to pride on the one hand and to covetousness on the other. It begins in the perception of another's superiority, and carries its victim through the feeling of hurt pride at the contrast with himself to desire for that which is not his own. The envious person covets the qualities of possessions of another, while vividly denying that they are in fact superior to his own, except, it may be, in certain apparent and not very valuable aspects. The contrast between the superior and the inferior has one of two results: either the inferior is stirred to admiration, or he is stirred to a greater or less degree of envy.
It was thus that contact with our Lordrevealedthe reality of men. It was a very true judgment to associate with him. His apostles were simple men who never thought of putting themselves in comparison with Him: the more they knew Him the more wonderful He seemed to them. We feel all through the Gospel story what an overwhelming impression His personality made upon men. There is no criticism raised on His character from any point of view. His enemies fell back on the accusation of blasphemy growing out of His claims, an accusation that would be true, if the claims were not true. What we really discover in those who oppose Him is envy, envy of the influence He exercises over others, envy stirred by His obvious superiority to themselves.
Envy is one of the sins of which we are least conscious. When people affirm that they envy others this or that: their leisure, their beauty, or what not, they clearly do not envy them at all, but are mildly covetous of the things that they see others possess. Where envy does show its presence and where we do not recognise its nature, is in that horrible inclination to depreciate others which is visible in certain characters. They seem never to hear another mentioned but they try to think of something which limits the praise bestowed upon him, or altogether counteracts it. It seems to be an instinctive hostility to superiority as involving an implied criticism of one's own inferiority. It is that curious love of the worst that lies at the root of gossip.
And what about the last of the deadly sins, the sin of sloth? One is almost tempted to say that it is at once the least obvious and the most destructive of all the deadly sins. That would no doubt be somewhat of an exaggeration, but it would not be very far off the truth. It is spiritual sloth that prevents us from considering as we should the spiritual problems that are presented to us, and therefore prevents us from gaining their promise. It is the quality in humanity that blocks the consideration of the new on the ground that we already know and can gain nothing by further exertion. The Jewish religious leaders declined the intellectual and spiritual effort of considering our Lord's claims; they just set them aside unconsidered. And is not that just what we are constantly doing, and what constitutes the most pressing danger of the spiritual life? We will not consider the future as the field of constantly new opportunity and therefore new stages of growth. We do not want to make the effort that is implied in that attitude.
Our sloth binds us hand and foot and delivers us to the enemy. There are no doubt some who cry out: "But I am not at all slothful; I am busy from morning to night; of whatever else I may be guilty, it is not of sloth!" My friend, busy people are quite often the most slothful people that there are. They are busy dodging their rightful duties and the opportunities that God offers them, all day long. Have you never discovered that when you had something that you ought to do and do not want to do, that the easiest method by which you can still your conscience is to make yourself terribly busy about something else, and then to tell yourself that the reason why you have not done what you know that you ought to have done is that really you have not had time? Do you not know that being busy is one of the most effective screens that you can put between your conscience and your obligation? Do you not know that tens of thousands of men and women to-day are putting the screens of good works, of social service of some sort, between their souls and the worship of God and the practice of the sacraments? Beware lest while you wear yourself out with activity your besetting sin be found to be sloth!
And shall we find there on the Way of Sorrow the virtues that are the opposite of the Seven Sins? Perhaps, if we had time to look, or had sufficient knowledge of the crowd that lines the way. There are certain women over there wailing and lamenting; perhaps they could help us. In any case we know that there is one woman who has succeeded in keeping near whose love of Jesus is so intense that it will enable her to overcome all obstacles and be near Him to the very last. Jesus as He staggers along the way and falls at length under the intolerable weight of the Cross is the embodiment of all virtues and of all spiritual accomplishment, and his blessed Mother through His grace has been kept pure from all sin. She will show the perfection of purely human accomplishment. She is the best that humanity in union with the Incarnate Son has brought forth. We have seen--we have caught glimpses of her life through what the Scriptures tell us of her--how completely she has responded to grace in all the actions of her life. Not much do the Scriptures say, but what they do say is like the opening of windows through which we catch passing aspects of her life which we feel are perfectly characteristic and revealing.
And we have seen there, or we may see, may we not? the virtues which are the work of the Holy Spirit enabling us to overcome the deadly sins. We have seen the humility with which, without thought of self, she answered God's call to be the Mother of His Son. We have seen the liberality with which she places her whole life at God's disposal, withholding nothing from the divine service. Purity undefiled had been God's gift to her from the first moment of her existence. Hers too was that meekness which willingly accepted all that the appointment of God brought her, showing in her acceptance no withholding of the will, no trace of self-assertion. Hers was the great virtue of temperance, the power of self-restraint and self-discipline, which suppressed all movements of nature that would be contrary to God's will. There too was the love of the brother and of the neighbour which is the contrary of envy; and there was the eagerness in fulfilling the will of God which is the opposite of sloth.
We have then two spotless examples,--how shall we not be stirred to follow them! There is Jesus manifesting the qualities of His sinless life, of the life of God's election, of humanity as God wills it to be, and as it ultimately will be when it gives itself to His will; and Mary in whom we see the work of God's grace perfectly accomplished by virtue of her perfect response to the love of her Sen. We look at these two lives and we see what is possible for us. We do not say, we cannot say, these things are too wonderful and great for me. We can only say, through the grace of God which is given me, "I can do all things." It is not my inevitable destiny that I should abide a sinner. I have the choice of being a sinner or a saint.
MARY: Ever I cried full piteously:"Lordings, what have ye i-brought?It is my Son I love so much:For God's sake bury Him nought."They would not stop though that I swooned,Till that He in the grave were brought.Rich clothes they around him wound:And ever mercy I them besought.They said there was no better wayBut take and bury him full snel.They looked on my cousin JohnFor sorrow both a-down we fell--By Him we fell that was My Child.His sweet mouth well full oft I kissed.John saw I was in point to spill,That nigh mine heart did come to break.He held his sorrow in his heart stillAnd mildly then to me did speak:"Mary, if it be thy willGo we hence; the Maudeleyn eke."He led me to a chamber thenWhere my Son was used to be,--John and the Maudeleyn also;For nothing would they from me flee.I looked about me everywhere:I could nowhere my Sonè see.We sat us down in sorrow and woeAnd 'gan to weep all three.From St. Bernard's Lamentation on Christ's Passion.Engl. version, probably 13th Cent, by Richard Maydestone.
And they crucified him.S. Matt. XXVII, 35.
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.