“He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His
mouth; He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before
her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth.”—Isaiah liii.
7.
St. Peter makes it almost a description of a Christian, that he
loves Him whom he has not seen; speaking of Christ, he says, “whom
having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see Him not, yet
believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” Again he
speaks of “tasting that the Lord is gracious[1].” Unless we have a true
love of Christ, we are not His true disciples; and we cannot love Him
unless we have heartfelt gratitude to Him; and we cannot duly feel
gratitude, unless we feel keenly what He suffered for us. I say it
seems to us impossible, under the circumstances of the case, that any
one can have attained to the love of Christ, who feels no distress, no
misery, at the thought of His bitter pains, find no self-reproach at
having through his own sins had a share in causing them.
I know quite well, and wish you, my brethren, never to forget, that
feeling is not enough; that it is not enough merely to feel and nothing
more; that to feel grief for Christ's sufferings, and yet not to go on
to obey Him, is not true love, but a mockery. True love both feels
right, and acts right; but at the same time as warm feelings without
religious conduct are a kind of hypocrisy, so, on the other hand, right
conduct, when unattended with deep feelings, is at best a very
imperfect sort of religion. And at this time of year[2] especially are
we called upon to raise our hearts to Christ, and to have keen feelings
and piercing thoughts of sorrow and shame, of compunction and of
gratitude, of love and tender affection and horror and anguish, at the
review of those awful sufferings whereby our salvation has been
purchased.
Let us pray God to give us all graces; and while, in the
first place, we pray that He would make us holy, really holy, let us
also pray Him to give us the beauty of holiness, which consists
in tender and eager affection towards our Lord and Saviour: which is,
in the case of the Christian, what beauty of person is to the outward
man, so that through God's mercy our souls may have, not strength and
health only, but a sort of bloom and comeliness; and that as we grow
older in body, we may, year by year, grow more youthful in spirit.
You will ask, how are we to learn to feel pain and anguish at the
thought of Christ's sufferings? I answer, by thinking of them,
that is, by dwelling on the thought. This, through God's mercy,
is in the power of every one. No one who will but solemnly think over
the history of those sufferings, as drawn out for us in the Gospels,
but will gradually gain, through God's grace, a sense of them, will in
a measure realize them, will in a measure be as if he saw them, will
feel towards them as being not merely a tale written in a book, but as
a true history, as a series of events which took place. It is indeed a
great mercy that this duty which I speak of, though so high, is
notwithstanding so level with the powers of all classes of persons,
learned and unlearned, if they wish to perform it. Any one can think of
Christ's sufferings, if he will; and knows well what to think about.
“It is not in heaven that thou shouldst say, Who shall go up for us to
heaven and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it
beyond the sea that thou shouldst say, Who shall go over the sea for
us? . . . but the word is very nigh unto thee;” very nigh, for it is in
the four Gospels, which, at this day at least, are open to all men. All
men may read or hear the Gospels, and in knowing them, they will know
all that is necessary to be known in order to feel aright; they will
know all that any one knows, all that has been told us, all that the
greatest saints have ever had to make them full of love and sacred
fear.
Now, then, let me make one or two reflections by way of stirring up
your hearts and making you mourn over Christ's sufferings, as you are
called to do at this season.
1. First, as to these sufferings you will observe that our Lord is
called a lamb in the text; that is, He was as defenceless, and as
innocent, as a lamb is. Since then Scripture compares Him to this
inoffensive and unprotected animal, we may without presumption or
irreverence take the image as a means of conveying to our minds those
feelings which our Lord's sufferings should excite in us. I mean,
consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which sometimes
meet us of cruelties exercised on brute animals. Does it not sometimes
make us shudder to hear tell of them, or to read them in some chance
publication which we take up? At one time it is the wanton deed of
barbarous and angry owners who ill-treat their cattle, or beasts of
burden; and at another, it is the cold-blooded and calculating act of
men of science, who make experiments on brute animals, perhaps merely
from a sort of curiosity. I do not like to go into particulars, for
many reasons; but one of those instances which we read of as happening
in this day, and which seems more shocking than the rest, is, when the
poor dumb victim is fastened against a wall, pierced, gashed, and so
left to linger out its life. Now do you not see that I have a reason
for saying this, and am not using these distressing words for nothing?
For what was this but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord? He was
gashed with the scourge, pierced through hands and feet, and so
fastened to the Cross, and there left, and that as a spectacle. Now
what is it moves our very hearts, and sickens us so much at cruelty
shown to poor brutes? I suppose this first, that they have done no
harm; next, that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the
cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which makes their
sufferings so especially touching. For instance, if they were dangerous
animals, take the case of wild beasts at large, able not only to defend
themselves, but even to attack us; much as we might dislike to hear of
their wounds and agony, yet our feelings would be of a very different
kind; but there is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting
those who never have harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who
are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor
defence, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of
it. Now this was just our Saviour's case: He had laid aside His glory,
He had (as it were) disbanded His legions of Angels, He came on earth
without arms, except the arms of truth, meekness, and righteousness,
and committed Himself to the world in perfect innocence and
sinlessness, and in utter helplessness, as the Lamb of God. In the
words of St. Peter, “Who did no sin, neither was guile found in His
mouth; who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered,
He threatened not; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth
righteously[3].” Think then, my brethren, of your feelings at cruelty
practised upon brute animals, and you will gain one sort of feeling
which the history of Christ's Cross and Passion ought to excite within
you. And let me add, this is in all cases one good use to which you may
turn any accounts you read of wanton and unfeeling acts shown towards
the inferior animals, let them remind you, as a picture, of Christ's
sufferings. He who is higher than the Angels, deigned to humble Himself
even to the state of the brute creation, as the Psalm says, “I am a
worm, and no man; a very scorn of men, and the outcast of the
people[4].”
2. Take another example, and you will see the same thing still more
strikingly. How overpowered should we be, nay not at the sight only,
but at the very hearing of cruelties shown to a little child, and why
so? for the same two reasons, because it was so innocent, and because
it was so unable to defend itself. I do not like to go into the details
of such cruelty, they would be so heart-rending. What if wicked men
took and crucified a young child? What if they deliberately seized its
poor little frame, and stretched out its arms, nailed them to a cross
bar of wood, drove a stake through its two feet, and fastened them to a
beam, and so left it to die? It is almost too shocking to say; perhaps,
you will actually say it is too shocking, and ought not to be
said. O, my brethren, you feel the horror of this, and yet you can bear
to read of Christ's sufferings without horror; for what is that little
child's agony to His? and which deserved it more? which is the more
innocent? which the holier? was He not gentler, sweeter, meeker, more
tender, more loving, than any little child? Why are you shocked at the
one, why are you not shocked at the other?
Or take another instance, not so shocking in its circumstances, yet
introducing us to another distinction, in which Christ's passion
exceeds that of any innocent sufferers, such as I have supposed. When
Joseph was sent by his father to his brethren on a message of love,
they, when they saw him, said, “Behold, this dreamer cometh; come now,
therefore, and let us slay him[5].” They did not kill him, however, but
they put him in a pit in spite of the anguish of his soul, and sold him
as a slave to the Ishmaelites, and he was taken down into a foreign
country, where he had no friends. Now this was most cruel and most
cowardly in the sons of Jacob; and what is so especially shocking in it
is, that Joseph was not only innocent and defenceless, their younger
brother whom they ought to have protected, but besides that, he was so
confiding and loving, that he need not have come to them, that he would
not at all have been in their power, except for his desire to do
them service. Now, whom does this history remind us of but of Him
concerning whom the Master of the vineyard said, on sending Him to the
husbandmen, “They will reverence My Son[6]?” “But when the husbandmen
saw the Son, they said among themselves, This is the Heir, come, let us
kill Him, and let us seize on His inheritance. And they caught Him, and
cast Him out of the vineyard, and slew Him.” Here, then, is an
additional circumstance of cruelty to affect us in Christ's history,
such as is suggested in Joseph's, but which no instance of a brute
animal's or of a child's sufferings can have; our Lord was not only
guiltless and defenceless, but He had come among His persecutors in
love.
3. And now, instead of taking the case of the young, innocent, and
confiding, let us take another instance which will present to us our
Lord's passion under another aspect. Let us suppose that some aged and
venerable person whom we have known as long as we could recollect any
thing, and loved and reverenced, suppose such a one, who had often done
us kindnesses, who had taught us, who had given us good advice, who had
encouraged us, smiled on us, comforted us in trouble, whom we knew to
be very good and religious, very holy, full of wisdom, full of heaven,
with grey hairs and awful countenance, waiting for Almighty God's
summons to leave this world for a better place; suppose, I say, such a
one whom we have ourselves known, and whose memory is dear to us,
rudely seized by fierce men, stripped naked in public, insulted, driven
about here and there, made a laughing-stock, struck, spit on, dressed
up in other clothes in ridicule, then severely scourged on the back,
then laden with some heavy load till he could carry it no longer,
pulled and dragged about, and at last exposed with all his wounds to
the gaze of a rude multitude who came and jeered him, what would be our
feelings? Let us in our mind think of this person or that, and consider
how we should be overwhelmed and pierced through and through by such a
hideous occurrence.
But what is all this to the suffering of the holy Jesus, which we
bear to read of as a matter of course! Only think of Him, when in His
wounded state, and without garment on. He had to creep up the ladder,
as He could, which led Him up the cross high enough for His murderers
to nail Him to it, and consider who it was that was in that
misery. Or again, view Him dying, hour after hour bleeding to death;
and how? in peace? no; with His arms stretched out, and His face
exposed to view, and any one who pleased coming and staring at Him,
mocking Him, and watching the gradual ebbing of His strength, and the
approach of death. These are some of the appalling details which the
Gospels contain, and surely they were not recorded for nothing, but
that we might dwell on them.
Do you think that those who saw these things had much heart for
eating or drinking or enjoying themselves? On the contrary, we are told
that even “the people who came together to that sight, smote their
breasts and returned[7].” If these were the feelings of the people,
what were St. John's feelings, or St. Mary Magdalene's, or St. Mary's,
our Lord's blessed mother? Do we desire to be of this company? do we
desire, according to His own promise, to be rather blessed than the
womb that bare Him, and the paps that He sucked? do we desire to be as
His brother, and sister, and mother[8]? Then, surely, ought we to have
some portion of that mother's sorrow! When He was on the cross and she
stood by, then, according to Simeon's prophecy, “a sword pierced
through her soul[9].” What is the use of our keeping the memory of His
cross and passion, unless we lament and are in sorrow with her? I can
understand people who do not keep Good Friday at all; they are indeed
very ungrateful, but I know what they mean; I understand them. But I do
not understand at all, I do not at all see what men mean who do profess
to keep it, yet do not sorrow, or at least try to sorrow. Such a spirit
of grief and lamentation is expressly mentioned in Scripture as a
characteristic of those who turn to Christ. If then we do not
sorrow, have we turned to Him? “I will pour upon the house of
David,” says the merciful Saviour Himself, before He came on earth,
speaking of what was to come, “upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the
spirit of grace and of supplications; and they shall look upon Me whom
they have pierced, and they shall mourn, for Him, as one
mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for Him, as one
that is in bitterness for his first-born[10].”
One thing I will add:—if there be persons here present who are
conscious to themselves that they do not feel the grief which this
season should cause them, who feel now as they do at other times, let
them consider with themselves whether perhaps this defect does not
arise from their having neglected to come to church, whether during
this season or at other times, as often as they might. Our feelings are
not in our own power; God alone can rule our feelings; God alone can
make us sorrow, when we would but cannot sorrow; but will He, if
we have not diligently sought Him according to our opportunities in
this house of grace? I speak of those who might come to prayers more
frequently, and do not. I know well that many cannot come. I speak of
those who can, if they will. Even if they come as often as they are
able, I know well they will not be satisfied with their own
feelings; they will be conscious even then that they ought to grieve
more than they do; of course none of us feels the great event of this
day as he ought, and therefore we all ought to be dissatisfied
with ourselves. However, if this is not our own fault, we need not be
out of heart, for God will mercifully lead us forward in His own time;
but if it arises from our not coming to prayers here as often as we
might, then our coldness and deadness are our own fault, and I
beg you all to consider that that fault is not a slight one. It is said
in the Book of Revelation, “Behold He cometh with clouds; and every eye
shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him: and all kindreds of the
earth shall wail because of Him[11].” We, my brethren, every one of us,
shall one day rise from our graves, and see Jesus Christ; we shall see
Him who hung on the cross, we shall see His wounds, we shall see the
marks in His hands, and in His feet, and in His side. Do we wish to be
of those, then, who wail and lament, or of those who rejoice? If we
would not lament at the sight of Him then, we must lament at the
thought of Him now. Let us prepare to meet our God; let us come into
His Presence whenever we can; let us try to fancy as if we saw the
Cross and Him upon it; let us draw near to it; let us beg Him to look
on us as He did on the penitent thief, and let us say to Him, “Lord
remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom[12].”
Let this be added to the prayer, my brethren, with which you are
about to leave this church. After I have given the blessing, you will
say to yourselves a short prayer. Well; fancy you see Jesus Christ on
the cross, and say to Him with the penitent thief, “Lord, remember me
when Thou comest in Thy kingdom;” that is, “Remember me, Lord, in
mercy, remember not my sins, but Thine own cross; remember Thine own
sufferings, remember that Thou sufferedst for me, a sinner; remember in
the last day that I, during my lifetime, felt Thy sufferings, that I
suffered on my cross by Thy side. Remember me then, and make me
remember Thee now.”
[1] 1 Pet. i. 8; ii. 3.
[2] Passion-tide.
[3] 1 Pet. ii. 22, 23.
[4] Ps. xxii. 6.
[5] Gen. xxxvii. 19, 20.
[6] Matt. xxi. 37-39.
[7] Luke xxiii. 48.
[8] Matt. xii. 46, &c.
[9] Luke ii. 85.
[10] Zech. xii. 10.
[11] Rev. i. 7.
[12] Luke xxiii. 42.