IN JESUS’ LIFE ALSO it was an upward and a downward course as between opposite poles.
At one time He avoids and shuns His disciples, that He might be alone all night in the mount in prayer. At another time solitude becomes so oppressive to Him, that He seeks repose in their company.
This by itself is an experience which is common to us all. When business has exacted too much from you, and your nerves are all unstrung, the presence of your most intimate friend becomes at length a burden, and you long for the moment that you can escape to your own room. On the other hand, when you were alone, and anxiety overcame you, and sudden fear struck you at the heart, your first impulse was to call for some one to come to you, or, when this was not possible, to escape from the loneliness, and to seek relaxation and diversion from your fears in the company of others.
This only affects us strangely when we learn of similar phenomena in the life of our Savior.
Worshipful reverence ever inclines to imagine Jesus as altogether superior to this change of emotions.
“When the heathen rage and the peoples imagine a vain thing, and the princes and kings of the earth set themselves against the Lord and against His Anointed”, then, as it reads in the Second Psalm, in the repose of His Majesty, God the Lord looks down, and with Divine satire scorns, and laughs at, this anger of Satan and his satellites.
And with something closely akin to this you would think, that your Savior should have faced the powers of curse and death.
As out of the whirlwind the Lord said to Job about the horse (39:22) that “he mocketh at fear”, as you read of heroes in battle, that with utter contempt of death, they rush in upon the fire of the enemy, thus you could wish, that with Divine heroism your Savior would have triumphed over Gethsemane and Gabbatha and Golgotha and over the darkness of the grave.
If, however, you esteem the heroism of the soldier bathing himself in blood too unholy, than to look for it in the struggle of your Savior, at least you might have expected in Him the heroic faith of the martyr, a dying for God’s sake with a psalm of praise upon His lips.
In the wilderness, at the temptation, Jesus comes up to this high-strung expectation. There He treads the winepress alone without a word of complaint on His lips. There He triumphs over Satan in three gripping stages, and when finally Satan departs from Him, it is the departure of the wounded tiger that slinks away before the majesty of the Lion.
But it is not so on Golgotha, it is especially not so in Gethsemane.
The “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me”, even as the cry: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”, shows nothing of the courage of the hero as the dominant note of His temper of mind and heart. And when you see your Savior in Gethsemane almost succumb, so that it required an angel from heaven to strengthen Him, and the wish almost steals upon you, that this painful scene had not occurred; you do not understand the prayer that “this cup might pass”, even though there follows: “Not my will, but thy will be done”; and when at length your Savior returns to His disciples with the complaint: “Could ye not watch with me one hour?” (Matt. 26:40) you can scarcely realize, however clearly it is stated, that your Savior uttered this complaint in all seriousness, and that He had truly need of the comforting presence of his disciples.
They who do not honor in Jesus “the Lamb of God”, but the “martyr”, at Gethsemane, become painfully confused.
With Stephen there was no momentary suggestion of succumbency. With him the face shone as with angel-brightness. And without so much as one word of complaint, he receives the rough-hewn stones, that are hurled at him, with a bearing in which nothing shows itself save courage of faith.
Viewed in the light of the martyr, Stephen is the greater of the two, and the image of the dying Jesus is swathed in dark shadows.
YOU can give your suffering and dying Savior no place in the light of the martyr except as you do violence to the character of His passion and death.
By what power has Stephen, and, after him, every other martyr triumphed? Is it not by the power which Jesus poured out into their soul? The martyr suffers and dies with Jesus back of him, with Jesus by the side of him, with the whole soul resting in Jesus’ dying, knowing that Golgotha together with Gethsemane, now and forever, have broken the teeth of Satan.
The Cross of Golgotha alone explains the pyre and the stake, for at the stake it is not the martyr, but Jesus, who in the martyr, triumphs.
The martyr does not stand before the wall, but goes in through the breach, which Jesus, He alone, and He for all, has beaten in through that wall.
They follow after Him, and see with the eye of faith, how He made all enemies tremble before Him and flee.
How then with the martyr compare your Savior Himself?
Him, Who stood alone in the face of the still unbroken power of curse and death; Him, for Whom, when He appeared, no stone of the wall had yet been dislodged, and Who alone, and forsaken of all, had to beat the breach therein.
Him, Who had no Savior back of Him, to cover Him with his shield, but Who was Himself the Savior, and Who with His own hand had to raise the shield, that was to cover all.
Him, Who far from being able, like every martyr, to look back to the Cross of Golgotha, Himself had to mount that Cross, in order to bear on it the sin of the world.
The whole thought, of seeing the martyr in Jesus, is as false as can ever be imagined.
Jesus is not the martyr, but He makes the martyr, and it is by His power won on Golgotha, that He makes the martyr to triumph.
And see here the contrast: The martyr separates himself from humanity, in order to turn himself toward God as an offering upon His altar, but Jesus faces curse and death in closest and most intimate union with our human nature.
The martyr, in the courage of faith, overcomes, by breaking the tie with his human nature. His mother, his wife, his child, he cuts them all away from his heart. Jesus on the other hand can not be our Savior, except as He takes everything that is human down with Himself into the depth of curse and death.
The martyr dies for Jesus, but Jesus dies, to bear the sin of the world. He cannot, He may not leave behind Him at the entrance of Gethsemane anything that pertains to man. He must take it with Him. From Gethsemane He must carry it by way of Gabbatha, to Golgotha. He can not let our human nature, and, in adherence to that nature, our sin, slip away from Him for one moment, except as He ceases to be our Savior.
Jesus is bound, if we may reverently so express ourselves, to fallen humanity, and He must take the sinner, with whose life His own life is intertwined, along with Himself the whole distance of the long way of sorrows.
If in His passion and death Jesus had so lifted Himself up to God, as to have lost us, we would have been lost. And then only could He be our Redeemer, our Avenger, our Saviour, when through curse and death He kept His hold on us, carried us with Him and so bare our sin.
And this He did, not in thought, not in imagination, but in reality.
Here was not the Word as word, but the Word as it had become flesh.
The mystery lay not in His adoption of our image, nor of our world of thought, but in taking upon Himself our human nature.
By that human nature, which He took upon Himself, He embraced us in our sin.
And therefore both curse and death had to be suffered in that human nature, and in all the depth of that human nature.
The martyr cuts himself loose from his human nature, but both suffering, and dying, Jesus had to sink away in that human nature.
And so light dawns, especially upon Gethsemane.
You would have preferred, that at the entrance of the garden Jesus would have laid everything human aside, and would have shone forth in His heroic Majesty as Son of God. But what had to happen, was just the opposite. As He entered the garden He drew that human nature more closely than ever to Himself, and, if we may so express ourselves, He allowed His Deity, His Divine nature, His eternal Sonship to hide as far as possible behind that human nature. In the end it had to come to “a feeling Himself utterly forsaken of God,” that thereby the union with our human nature, with our guilt and our sin might be made perfect.
And therefore He dies, not as the martyr, and not as the hero, who lifts himself above the human, but as “the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world”.
As the Lamb; of the hero, of the martyr the very opposite.
Sunken away, and sinking away yet deeper than ever in our human nature, He engages in combat with the naked curse and undiminished death, and casts Himself into the arms of that utter destruction wherewith Satan assaults that human nature.
Like as Satan assaults the doomed in eternal death, so he assaulted Jesus, not as Son of God, but as Son of man. Stronger yet. The power of curse and death, which otherwise Satan distributes among thousands of the lost, he drew down as in one bundle, centrally, upon Jesus, under which he endeavored to crush Him.
And against this Jesus neither could nor was permitted to fight otherwise than through the middle link of His human nature. That human nature could not for one moment be lost. That human nature must remain in between. The human must come out in its own full self-revelation. And this is it: “Father, that this cup might pass!”
And therefore an angel must come and strengthen Him.
Like as the finest human feeling would feel it, so must Jesus feel it. All that of anxious fear and terror can arise in human nature, must go through His heart. Nothing of the human could, or may, be spared Him. No drop of the cup of human suffering may be left untasted by Him.
And during this soul-consuming combat no one was permitted to be near. Even His three most intimate disciples He must leave at a distance. That wine-press He must tread alone. In three dreadful wave-beats that deathly agony must go over His heart.
But after each wave-beat there was a sacred pause.
And in that pause the human feeling in Jesus thirsted for human sympathy. He went back to His three faithful friends. They would be a strength to Him.
And when in so awful a moment, when the conflict between heaven and earth, between God and Satan, for all ages was going on to the finish, He had to learn, that even His three most faithful friends perceived nothing of all this, felt no concern whatsoever about this, that they had not even remained awake, but had lost themselves in sleep, confess, do you not feel something of what this must have been to your Savior?
And then, do you not understand, better now, perhaps, than at first reading, that pathetic sadness of soul, which expresses itself in the brief saying: Could even you not watch with me one hour?
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