TO SEE A TEAR trickle down the face of another, because of what you suffer, especially when that other one is a stranger to you, does not remove, but mitigates your sorrow.
And as He suffered, your Savior was susceptible of that mitigation.
His complaint to Peter: “Could ye not watch with me one hour?” shows this. Not in His Divine nature, but as man, Jesus has struggled through His grievous suffering and His bitter death, and hence also under that suffering has longed for human comforting.
By itself the weeping of those women of Jerusalem was something lovely to Jesus. Together with Simon of Cyrene, who carried His cross, these women are the only friendly appearance in this awful drama.
Everything and every one was against Jesus. Judas betrays Him. The three faithful sleep when mortal anguish consumes His soul. Peter denies Him. All His disciples flee. The Sanhedrin is fanatically passionate. Herod disdainfully superior. The chief watch callous, fond of mocking. Pilate philosophically base. The rabble outside the house of judgment yells shrilly and cruelly against Him. On Golgotha it becomes one blasphemous taunt of demoniac hatred.
You are ashamed of our human race, that in all this drama it can act so treacherously, so shamefully fanatical, so wildly passionate, and can look upon suffering with such demoniac scorn.
But just because the entire spectacle of Jesus’ suffering and dying is darkened by so black a shadow, these tiny sparklings of human commiseration are precious to you.
Simon, who carried the cross for Jesus, when He fainted under its weight, and was no more able to support it. And those women, who began to weep when they saw His pitiful plight.
Too much significance should not be attached to the weeping of those women. If, instead of running along from the back streets, those same women had stood on the square before the house of judgment at Gabbatha, they would most probably have joined the rabble in their cry: “Crucify Him, crucify Him!”
A mob moves to and fro as the impulse of the moment drives it. And therefore on Gabbatha it was one great cry for Jesus’ blood. And here outside the gate it was one lamentation, that this holy interesting man had to die.
Such a feeling of commiseration on the part of a crowd never goes deep. There is more nervous emotion in it than heart. When one starts crying, the others cry too. It is the immediate sight of suffering that arrests attention. It is the tragic that affects. A wild bandit who is on the way to the scaffold, arouses curiosity to see how he is executed. But the very appearance of Jesus carried the impression of high nobility. He who, especially at that moment, looked upon Him, must have been strangely moved by the holy expression of His face. And Jesus was only thirty-three years old. And then to be led out not merely to the place of punishment, but to death, and to the hardest death, the death of the cross, the death of curse and shame. That made the contrast so strong. And that contrast took hold of the feeling of those women. The eyes became moist. First with one, then with more. Finally it attracted every one’s attention. Till Jesus also saw it, and heard what they lamented.
An utterance of human feeling for the Son of man in the throes of death.
And as these women run ahead, and press in upon Him, Jesus breaks His course to Golgotha, and stands still; turns Himself to those women, and addresses them.
Not to thank them. Far less to rouse their emotions yet the more. No word comes across His lips that hints at His own sorrow.
Jesus rather rejects their commiseration, saying: “Weep not for me.”
Jesus stops those emotional tears of superficial sorrow, because there speaks no seriousness in them, no understanding of the condition, no faint idea of the reality. What did those weeping women sense of the fact, that here the Lamb of God was being led to the slaughter, and that in this holy drama before their eyes the suit between God and Satan, the suit between eternal corruption and heavenly glory for all God’s elect was being decided.
Human feeling also has its relative value, but only relative. What makes it holy is the seriousness of life, the study of the past and future. And of that seriousness of life there was no evidence here.
See how Jesus calls these women away from indulging their emotions to the stern seriousness of their own future, saying: “Ye, daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.”
Those children probably stood by and ran about among them. Such women running out from the back streets are in the habit of taking their children with them. There may have been among them women with their suckling on the arm. There may have been among them those who were pregnant, who still carried their little one under the heart.
At least, so, in holy seriousness, and with eyes deeply expressive of a more than human commiseration, Jesus went on to say: “For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck” (Luke 23:29).
Jesus has in mind the wrath of God, that is to break loose upon guilty Jerusalem. And the terrible times, such as had once already been experienced, when Jerusalem had fallen before the armies of Babylon, and when “the fathers had eaten their sons and the sons their fathers” (Ezek. 5:10).
But presently, after Golgotha, it would be still more dreadful. A bloody extermination such as no city has almost ever known. Days so horrible, that every soul in terror would seek death, and say: “O, Mountains, fall on us, and, ye hills, Cover us” (Luke 23: 30).
Then the weeping ceased, and Jesus continued His weary journey to the Place of a skull.
There was this glorious moment.
In the midst of His mortal anguish, Jesus forgetting Himself and His woe, that with all His soul, and with all the human pity that stirred the life of His soul, He might have part in the terrible punishment that awaited Jerusalem.
But no one understood Him.
That Jerusalem might once again be sacked was possible. But what had that future desolation to do with this sentenced One, Who was being led out to the place of punishment?
Jerusalem, yea, even the women of Jerusalem, who were always more tenderly emotional, did not understand nor comprehend, that Jerusalem existed for the sake of God, and that by introducing before the exile its idolatry into the temple of God, it had angered the Almighty so terribly, and therefore had then been so mortally afflicted.
Still less did Jerusalem understand what now, on Golgotha, was about to take place, when the city that God had chosen, would do the daring act of nailing God’s own dear Son, the promise of the fathers, the Messiah of Israel as a blasphemer to the Cross.
Those women saw it before their eyes, and yet they saw nothing of it. All the significance of what they there saw before them, escaped them. It was an abyss covered with flowers, across which they trod. And they did not feel, that they themselves took part in the murder, even while they wept for Jesus; for if they, with all Jerusalem’s women, had stood true, and in Jesus had recognized God’s Anointed, with their husbands and sons they would have fallen at His feet, and would have worshiped Him as their Lord and their God.
They stood there weeping, but it was in their unbelief. They themselves were casting out the Anointed of God. They disregarded Him, because they did not know Him. And with their unbelieving mind and hardened heart, they could not know Him.
They think that Caiaphas and Pilate are the cruel ones, and they the pitiful and the tenderhearted women. And this they are not. They themselves are the accomplices. Those women are from the rabble classes of Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem rejects its King and Savior, and rushes out from the city-gate, that yonder on Golgotha it might look upon His cross.
And for your Savior this is another aggravation of woe.
Him they go to crucify, and dying in the most bitter anguish of God-forsakenness He shall succumb, but that shall not be the end of it.
His cross shall have a sequel.
Before the year of the crucifixion is over and another half a century is past, comes the year of the destruction of Jerusalem, and then the viols of God’s holy wrath shall be poured out upon the sin-city, that it shall become one outcry of mortal agony in all Jerusalem’s streets.
That must needs be. That could not be averted.
The Cross must needs be there, to save the world; but the Cross is not possible, save as it must be bitterly avenged upon the sin-city, that dared to plant it. For had they not, defying God, said in the market-square: “His blood come upon us and upon our children!”
And it would come upon them, and upon their children. And Jesus sees those mothers standing there, whose children would then be men of thirty, forty years old, and would suffer awful tortures and great slaughter. All the walls of Jerusalem sown as it were with crosses, and on each cross a cursing Jew, who hung there dying, as mock-likeness of that one cross, on which Jerusalem had crucified her King.
On the way to the cross Jesus foresees all this. Those women that weep for Him, make the shuddering scenes of that awful judgment loom up before His spirit.
Jesus feels that although He is not the cause, He is at least the middle link by which that awful suffering shall come upon Jerusalem.
And must not this aggravate His own suffering, Who had so touchingly declared: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate!” (Matt. 23: 37).
And now, in the Passion-weeks once more, do not people do even as these women did?
They follow Jesus step by step on His dark way of suffering. It may not be by stations, and with each station a scene from Jesus passion painted upon wood. But even then with stations in the imagination. And so they pass again through all the sufferings of the Savior, till Easter comes, and the sound of wailing is turned into the jubilation of redemption.
But what avails it, when this goes no further than following Jesus’ suffering with the eye of weak emotionalism, while the eye of the soul does not perceive in Him the Anointed of God, and sensitive men and sensitive women do not come to conversion, and do not die with Christ on the cross, that when Jesus rises they may rise with Him?
Worse yet, how often has the suffering of Jesus moistened sensitive eyes, which presently have crucified the Son of God afresh by their apostacy in sin!
And what is all such feeling without faith other, and what is it better, than the weeping of those women outside Jerusalem? Weeping for Jesus, and actually adding gall to the suffering of the Savior, by the judgment which they are bringing down upon themselves.
And therefore do not do as those women did, but rather direct the eye to a Simon of Cyrene, of whom it is not recorded that he wept, but, that he carried the cross of Jesus.
He carried it ahead of Jesus. Do you carry it following after your Savior?
You know that the Man of sorrows said to His disciples: “He that taketh not his cross, and carrieth it, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:38).
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