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Behold, the
hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his
own, and shall leave me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the father is
with me – John 16:32
That is now the aspect of our Lord’s
sorrows, the element of our Lord’s Passion, which is most often dealt with
and thought about; but it is a very real one, and one that I think deserves
to be far more considered than we are in the habit of doing. Attention has
been too exclusively directed to the physical sufferings of your Lord’s
Passion, and to the mysterious element in His mental passion which made it
unique and atoning.
We have too much forgotten the
sorrows which pressed upon Him as upon us, the same in kind, only infinitely
deeper in degree, and hence we have lost some of the sense of reality of our
Lord’s sufferings of these sorrows. I do not know that any is more sharp
than the solitude in which He lived and yet more awful solitude in which He
died.
Jesus Christ was the loneliest man
that ever lived. A little ignorant love and a little outward companionship
He had; and soothing and strengthening it was to be surrounded by the
affection even of such ignorant friends as the disciples. But there was not
a single human being who fully understood or believed Him. There were none
who sympathized with His aims, none who could receive His confidences, His
thoughts were unshared, His words unintelligible, His life’s purpose
shrouded in mystery. “He came to His own and His
own received Him not” John 1:11. “His soul was as a star, and
dwelt apart.” And so He traveled on, bearing a great burden of love
which none would accept; the loneliest soul that ever wore human flesh.
All great spirits are solitary; the
men that lead the world have to go before the world, and to go by
themselves. Starlings fly in flocks, the eagle soars singly. And so the
pages of the biographies, teachers and religious reformers, and thinkers and
path breakers generally, tell us of the pains of uncomprehended aims, of the
misery of living apart from one’s kind, of the agony of hungering for
sympathy, for comprehension, for acceptance of a truth which dooms it
possessors to isolation.
But all that men have experienced in
that kind is as nothing as compared with the blackness of darkness which the
loneliness of Jesus Christ assumed as it settled down upon Him. Let me
remind you what it was that condemned Him to this absolute loneliness. It
was the very purity and sinlessness of His nature which necessarily made Him
separate from sinners.
He saw eternal things as no other
eye saw them, and His vision of land, where others saw only clouds, parted Him
from them. He read men as no other eye read them. He saw not only the
clock-face, but the springs. He looked upon the flesh and behind the
spirit, its inmost essence, its destiny and end. Before His human eye there
stood plainly manifested the pale kingdoms of the dead and all that vision
separated Him from men.
The children on the street used to
point at Dante as he passed, saying, “There goes the man that has seen
hell,” and to shrink from him as if he carried his own atmosphere in which
others could not breathe. But the equal vision which Christ had of all
things, of all men, of all worlds, made His life and absolute solitude; and
when He spake that He knew, and testified what He had seen, no man received
His testimony. Hence came a deeper loneliness.
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