ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, Who, of Thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent Thy Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon Him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of His great humility; mercifully grant that we may both follow the example of His patience, and also be made partakers of His resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

OUR FATHER, &c.

Fifteenth Sunday.

READ:

PSALM 1Xxxviii. and HEB. ix. 23 to HEB. X. 10.

FOURTH WORD FROM THE CROSS-No. 2. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"-MATT. xxvii. 46.

IT

would be wrong to dogmatise regarding the awful words in which the cry of anguish was uttered on the cross. We can only express the meaning which they bear to ourselves.

Now when we ask, "What was it which gave to our Lord this terrible sense of separation from the Father?" there are two answers which suggest themselves, as expressing what we may believe constituted, at least, some of the elements in His cup of suffering. These are The agony of his soul as in contact with sin, and The agony of His soul as in contact with death.

"Surely," said Isaiah, "He hath borne our sins and carried our sorrows. . . The Lord hath made to meet upon Him the iniquity of us all." We must take these words as simply telling us that our sins-not the punishment of them, as it is often said— fell upon Jesus as His own burden. Remember that He was not a mere individual, among individual and separate men, but that He was the second Adam, the

representative Head of our humanity; and that He was this not in an artificial or merely "legal" sense, but as one who was born our brother, and united to us by ties closer than bind father to child. What the root is to the tree, or what the head is to the body, Christ was to our humanity; so that He was affected by what we are as by a sensitive nerve of life. He stood before God identified with our humanity, and clothed in it. Remember, also, that this identity with man was combined with identity with God. He had perfect sympathy with the mind of the Father. And now conceive, however faintly, what it was when He became at the Crucifixion, not in a "legal" sense, but in the most real manner, the object against which, and the instrument by which, the hatred of the world to God became expressed.

For never was the real nature of that sin so expressed as when men rose in one storm of enmity against Christ, Who had been ever revealing the Divine will, and said, "Away with Him; give us Barabbas rather than He." And this rejection, with its mockery and scorn, were but as waves on the surface of a deep sea. On that cross He fathomed not the sin of the Jews only who crucified Him, but the sin of man in his alienation from God. In proportion to His own perfect holiness and sympathy with God, so must He have shuddered at the foul tide that was rising on every side. As during these hours of silence, His spirit, burdened with the sense of human sin, sank lower and lower, apprehending its loathsomeness; as His consciousness of its horror increased upon Him, till it seemed as if it would absorb Him; can we not

FOURTH WORD FROM THE CROSS-No. 2.

101

feel the force of that cry, and how, when the blackest depths had been reached, and when the waves seemed about to close over Him-between Him and His God-His whole being, as if in one agonized effort, bounded upward, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" There never was suffering like this, not merely in degree, but in kind. "See if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow!" There never was suffering which from its nature could have been so pleasing to God, for it confessed what the sin of the world really is. It was a cry from humanity full of woe, but woe that was in absolute response to the holy and perfect will of God. It was the kind of suffering which only a holy Being could endure. It was right suffering, for it was such as the holy and loving One ought to have endured when in contact with evil in those He loved.

Not only was there the consciousness of evil, but we can trace another element of suffering in the consciousness of approaching death. We do not now speak of the natural horror with which death affects us all, but which the brave man meets, and which the holy martyrs have met, with calm and sometimes with triumph. Death had for Jesus a significance it could have for no one else. From the beginning of the world it had been recognised as the witness to man's alienation from God. It had been identified with sin in the whole sacrificial system of the Law. Death may seem a light thing to a soldier who throws himself against the hedge of steel. It is little more than a horrible necessity, "a debt that must be paid to nature," for the hardened and unbelieving. It is no

more death, but a falling asleep in Jesus, for the Christian who rests in Him who hath robbed death of its sting. But for Jesus death was the very seal of His identification with sinful humanity. When He accepted it, it was the voluntary acceptance by Him of the responsibilities which fell on the humanity into which He had entered. He alone was able to recognise what death is in full consciousness. He alone really "tasted death." "He poured out," as if by an act of will, "his soul unto death."

Can we not then understand with a new force the cry uttered a few moments before He died? Is it too much to suppose that in those moments His human body, which suffered hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, was then affecting Him with the sense of coming dissolution, and that the consciousness of the swooning away of the natural powers, and of the deepening shadows, was for Him as for us all? And when He, Whose life had ever been in the bosom of the Father, felt, in that hour, death-the very seal of man's alienation-asserting its loathsome power upon Himself; as it dimmed consciousness and closed God out from His apprehension; as this brand of evil was pressing in and in upon the sources of His life; can we not understand how, ere all gave way, He should have cried in agony, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" By that very cry He reached back again to the Father who was ever near Him?