TROUBLE COOLS and in the end deadens all sympathizing love. When trouble overcomes and overwhelms us, the impression readily gains ground, that other people’s troubles are less severe; that our sorrow is far more bitter than theirs; and that while it is the behest of love that other people should take an interest in the things we suffer, it is more than can be expected of us that we should add to our trouble by sharing theirs.
When our own trouble reaches a certain height, it seems to discharge us from duty, of sharing the trouble of others.
This does not apply to all trouble.
When in a shipwreck you saw all your treasures and goods sink away in the depths, while the other man saw his wife and child drown before his eyes, how could you be so inhuman, when saved together with him, as to complain to him about your lost gold and silver, and not sympathize with him in his loss of wife and child?
No, this dulling of compassionate love only shows itself when your trouble makes, as it were, the waters to rise to the lips, and the other man’s trouble is scarcely comparable with yours.
Sometimes this seems different. As when your trouble and that of the other man is alike in kind and character. When two men are carried away from the battle-field, and each is to have a leg amputated, they both will be strongly inclined to sympathize with each other. But here appearance deceives, for such sharing in the trouble of one another merely means that in the trouble of the one, the other justifies himself for being obsessed with his own.
When you eliminate such exceptions, and watch a sufferer who has to endure great suffering, and in whose company others suffer, you will see the egoism of sorrow sanctify itself, and you will notice in everything, that sometimes even at the cost of aggravating the pains of others, the sufferer will ask compassion for himself.
And when the difference is very striking, so that the trouble of one is really harder and more tragic than that of the other, lack of like compassion frequently makes him who bears the greater affliction feel offended and indignant, when every one else, the lesser sufferer included, is not almost exclusively interested in his trouble, and does not offer him commiseration and sympathy.
But now see your Savior.
See Him, upon whose lips has been placed with such perfect right the word from Lamentations: “All ye that pass by, behold and see, if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”
Nowhere and at no time has the weight of sorrow and woe pressed heavier on any human heart, than upon His, when He had to drink to the dregs, the cup that could not pass.
Not because bodily torture was the most painful, for through every age monstrous cruelty has known how to torture man to death in far more horrible ways than was done to Jesus on Golgotha.
But man is not mere body. Suffering affects body and soul, and because the soul hides more deeply within us, torture of soul can far exceed all torture of body.
And deep suffering of soul increases in proportion as the soul is more finely strung, and the suffering more overwhelming.
The church has ever confessed, therefore, that no suffering of any child of man, was ever equal to the suffering of your Savior; to the suffering of Him, Whose inner life exceeds in tenderness all of ours, and Who in that delicate sensitive life of the soul bore and endured, not a measure of God’s dreadful wrath, but its fulness. All the wrath of the Almighty against all our guilty race.
To deem that because of our sorrow the suffering of Christ in our perception can be relegated to the background, has always seemed to the soul that believed a sacreligious thought.
His has been the holiest, the most dreadful, the utmost limit of human suffering. Suffering to which every believing sufferer has looked up, that he might feel his own suffering less keenly.
And yet, sinking away under the wrath of God, neither on the way to Golgotha, nor when dying on the wood of shame, did your Savior allow commiseration with the sorrow of others, to cool for one moment.
For Mary it was dreadful, as mother, to stand by the Cross, and to see her wonder child succumb and die in His mortal sorrows.
Here was the sword that was to pierce through her soul.
A pain of soul, such as no other mother has suffered for her child.
But yet what was her sorrow compared with the suffering of Christ Himself?
Nevertheless Jesus can find commiseration in His heart for the sorrow of His mother.
He looks at her, He thinks of her, and from His lips there flows in the: “Mother, behold thy son” a word of precious comforting.
On the cross alongside of Jesus’ cross hangs a former malefactor struggling with death.
That man had fallen deeply, but by Jesus’ greatness had been regained. Could he come down from the cross with Jesus, how he would fall upon his knees, and speak for Him throughout the land, and supplicate that he might be His disciple.
But he feels death already in his veins. He is about to die. And now his soul is consumed with the anxious inquiry: Is there still a chance of eternal salvation for me?
And Jesus limns that suffering of soul, and with the deepest commiseration of His heart, He relieves the sufferer from anxiety, saying unto him: “This day shalt thou be with me in paradise.”
Then there were those soldiers, will-less, thoughtless instruments of Pilate’s unrighteous sentence.
Rough men, who themselves had nothing against Jesus. Agents, who did as they were told. But who, even so, incurred the terrible guilt of having put hands upon the Holy One of God.
How dreadful would once their regret be, that eternal regret in the place of misery.
And Jesus fathoms that dreadfulness in their eternal future, and commiseraton with a distress, which they themselves do not yet guess, wakes in His sensitive heart.
And Jesus prays for those miserable accomplices of injustice: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
And do not say, that this exalted feeling of Jesus only awoke, when death had withdrawn Him already more than half way from life.
For already on the way to Golgotha you find with your Savior this altogether selfsame commiseration of compassionate love.
There were women on the way who from out the gate, accompanied Jesus on the sad journey to Golgotha.
Women of the people, such as were seen at every execution. Curious by nature. Highly emotional. Seeking excitement in just such an execution where everything of a striking and thrilling character affects outward feeling.
Women, whose eyes readily glistened with a tear, and who yet took pleasure through their tears to witness the dying of a man on the cross.
The benefit and the judgment of what superficially floats upon sentiment.
Tears in which spake nothing but an operation of nature without depth, without an holier fellow-feeling.
But though you may not attach much significance to the weeping of those women on the way to Golgotha, it yet reconciles you to human nature, that Jesus’ suffering is not merely mocked, and scorned, and devilishly ridiculed, but that among that yelling, turbulent rabble there are also those, who, be it offensively superficial, yet feel some compassion for Jesus’ suffering, and because of Him have a tear in their eye.
And does Jesus thank those women for that weeping in His behalf, and does He utter so much as one word by way of soliciting pity from others?
Nothing, nothing of this.
On the contrary Jesus rather rejects those tears, shed for His suffering’s sake, and says to those women: Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, for presently, ye thoughtless women of Jerusalem, your own suffering shall be appalling.
Thus what fascinates you in Jesus’ suffering is the greatness of a love, which, while it triumphed over His own nameless agonies, was still able most strongly to arouse compassion for the sorrows of others.
Here is more than the human, here shines forth something of the golden glow of Divine love in the human spoken word, and looking into that love of your Savior, you worship in Him your Lord and your God.
And yet, something of that selfsame love, an after-glow of which since Golgotha has held the world enthralled, has also been seen in a few saints of our race.
There have been sufferers, both men and women, who, in fellowship with Golgotha bearing their own bitter afflictions in their own troubled heart, have at length overcome the egoism of their sorrow.
Not entirely, not always, not in full. They remained sinners.
But so, that in their bitter grief they have known moments in which, forgetting their own troubles, from the root of faith within, they have felt the stirrings of pity for others in distress, even for those who had wronged them.
But they made no boast of it.
No, they thanked their God for it, and freely confessed, that it was the Man of sorrows, Who had wrought that work of love in them.
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