MORE STILL than in the Gospels, the Messiah has portrayed the soul-perplexing nature of His suffering, in Psalm and Prophecy.
The Psalmist not merely guessed; the Prophet not merely conjectured.
No, the Spirit Himself complained and groaned from the presentiment and foreknowledge of the unpreventable suffering, which was not merely coming, but was already in part endured. Have you never read in Isaiah 65, how it held good already before the incarnation: “In all their afflictions He was afflicted”? and have you never heard the holy apostle Peter declare to the Church, that it was “The Spirit of Christ Himself Who did signify and testified beforehand the suffering, that was to come upon Christ!”? (I, i, ii.)
With us it is so often a smarting of the wound in our heart afresh by the after-weeping in our soul of painful remembrances. But with the Immanuel it was positive foreknowledge; a knowing beforehand; up to the minutest particulars; a seeing in advance; a living through beforehand of what was coming; and no less a meanwhile being afflicted with the afflictions of His people upon earth, His Israel, which already now, as “servant of the Lord” bore the dark shadow of His suffering, and, be it at a great distance, exhibited the form of His suffering.
For this reason the superficial soul remains content with what the Evangelists have observed of the suffering of the Lord; but the more serious soul listens to Jesus Himself when in Prophecy and Psalm He utters the deep tones of complaint from His violently stirred emotion.
The Evangelists narrate, that Jesus on the cross has cried: “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani”, but only the Psalmody in Psalm 22 makes you understand the world of dreadfulness, that lies behind these deep notes of complaint.
So from Gethsemane, according to the Evangelists, you catch a supplicating tone, in which the Lord Jesus gave vent to His unspeakable feeling of deep forsakeness, when He said to Peter: “Could ye not watch with me one hour, my soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death!”, … . but yet the key to the passion mystery of this deep heart-brokenness not the Evangelist again, but the Psalmist offers you.
Just listen! In that Psalm Jesus complains from a still deeper depth of soul, and calls His soul itself “my lonely one”, the altogether “forsaken one” within.
Also in Psalm 25:16 this tremendous sufferer complains: “Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me, for I am desolate and afflicted!” So in Psalm 35:17 (Dutch version), it reads: “Lord, rescue my soul from their destructions, my lonely one from the young lions.” But from still deeper depth goes up the cry of the Man of sorrows in Psalm 22:20: “Deliver my lonely one from the violence of the dog.”
By that “lonely one” Jesus means “His own soul”.
He himself is that “lonely one”, that “forsaken one”, that one Who is thrown back upon Himself, and the to Himself abandoned One of spirit.
And only he who has overheard this “my lonely one from the violence of the dog” in its crying depth, will understand the Lama Sabachthani in the opening words of that selfsame psalm of lamentation: “O, God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me, me, the lonely One!”
Forsakenness casts an indescribable anguish upon the soul.
That lies in our human nature.
See it in young children, how afraid they sometimes are to be alone; they can not stand it; and if in their fear you were to leave them alone too long, they would become terror-stricken.
Especially when trouble and sorrow steal upon you, and unholy powers press toward you, this need of company makes itself so strongly felt.
When at midnight suddenly a heavy thunder storm breaks loose, involuntarily every one gets up and dresses himself and seeks the other. Gathered in company together we prefer to live through that menacing rumbling of the elements of nature.
He who wakes from a startling dream, is not content, until there is some one with him, who speaks the word of reassurance.
This comes from the entirely true, instinctive sense, that all these dreadful powers are too overwhelming for a soul to endure in loneliness; they do not come upon us as individuals alone, but upon all of us together, and therefore should be borne by all in company.
But when suffering overtakes us in more cruelly personal ways, it deprives us of that consoling quiet, which the reassuring and comforting presence of others brings; and leaves us to struggle and toil forsaken and alone.
And in this forsakenness the anxious strain of bitterest homesickness adds itself to the suffering, which we already bear. It brings unspeakable sadness of heart, and it cries, but with tears, which no one wipes away. It comes up into our throat with stifling effect. We become perplexed of soul, till we can not longer endure it. And, then, that bitter knowledge, that whether we groan or call, nothing avails.
This your Savior underwent. He more deeply than any one. He alone, in all His depth of bitterness and mortal perplexity.
He was not merely “lonely”; but His soul was “His lonely one”.
Not merely because no one was with Him and no one supported Him, but more still because no one understood or comprehended Him.
Gloriously, it is true, have the Apostles later on jubilated in the atonement of our sins through the Blood of the Cross; but when Jesus struggled in Gethsemane or groaned on the cross, what, I pray you, has a Peter understood of the bearing of a wrath of God?
Sometimes also something of that sorrowful loneliness overtakes us; when in our environment there is no note that gives echo to the cries of our heart; when every complaint, which as a raven we let out from the ark of our soul, flies abroad and hovers upon the waters of life around us, but presently returns to us, having found no spot for the hollow of its foot.
Then we thirst for sympathy, and it is not there. We beg for a friendly word from the heart, and we meet nothing but coldness all around us. Brass walls on every side. Endless hollownesses and emptinesses everywhere. No word that does us good. No note that offers us the love of sympathy. Of our bitter suffering there is no understanding, no perception, no feeling!
Yet, however deep at such times, our soul goes under and threatens to be stifled in its mortal perplexity, a child of God never goes through such loneliness as Jesus once went through.
As often as we partake of the holy sacrament, the church in her liturgies assures her children in these heart-touching terms, that: “He was forsaken of God, that we should never be forsaken!”
This comforting message of the Holy Sacrament keeps singing in our ears, when we sit down in loneliness, and the hunger after sympathy wrings our heart.
In our forsakenness we always have our Savior, Whose “lonely One” was once unspeakably forsaken for our sakes.
But in this loneliness there was no help for Him.
For our sakes by the curse everything was denied Him.
When overborne with loneliness and anguish of soul, all there was for Him, was the “violence of the dog”, i. e. of man, who shamelessly depraved, still dared to bark and to bay at the Holy One of God.
Taunting Him, when alone with His “lonely one” in sorrow of soul, those brute-like people added unspeakably to the suffering of your Savior.
← 33. I am Poured Out like Water · Contents · 35. They that Passed By Reviled Him →