Christ as a sufferer

A look at the sufferings of Christ - and those who belong to Christ.

James Stalker

I.

Work is but one half of life; suffering is the other. There is a hemisphere of the world in the sunshine of work, but there is another in the shadow of suffering.

Not, indeed, that in any life these states alternate with anything like the same regularity with which the earth rolls out of darkness into light, and back again from light into darkness. Nothing is more mysterious than the proportions in which the two elements are distributed in different lots. Some enjoy the exhilaration of successful exertion nearly all their days, and know little or nothing of illness, bereavement or defeat. Others appear to be marked out by suffering for its own. All through life they are “acquainted with grief;” they are scarcely ever out of mourning, because ever and anon death is knocking at their door to claim their dearest; their own health is precarious; and, whatever dreams of high and sustained achievement may visit them, they know, as soon as the excitement subsides, that they have not physical strength to carry out their vision.

If you are a child of fortune, scarcely ever knowing a day’s ill health and delighting in your work, whose results you see day by day waxing greater and more imposing behind you, go and stand by the bedside of an invalid laid down with incurable disease. There you may recognize a mind more capable than your own, a heart as fit as yours for love and enjoyment; but an invisible chain is wound round the limbs and holds them fast; and, though the martyrdom may last for ten or twenty years, that figure will never rise with its own strength from where it lies.

What does your philosophy make of such a sight? Yet it is only an extreme instance of what is occurring in a thousand forms. The children of sorrow are numerous, and no man knows how soon his own life of work may be changed into a life of suffering. Any moment a bolt may break from the blue and alter everything. A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand may wax and spread till it drapes the sky in blackness from horizon to horizon. And, even if no such awful calamity come, time brings to all their own share of suffering.

There is no flock, however watched and tended,
      But one dead lamb is there;
There is no household, howsoe’er defended,
      But has one vacant chair.

Suffering, then, is not an element of life that can be ignored. If we need one to show us how to work, not less do we need one to teach us how to suffer. And here, again, the Son of man does not fail us. Whilst He is the great Captain of work, calling out the young and the energetic to dare and to achieve, He is also the sufferer’s Friend, round whom are gathered the weak, the disappointed and the agonized. When on the cross He cried, “It is finished,” He was referring not only to the work of His life successfully accomplished, but also to the cup of suffering drunk out to the last drop.

II.

1. Jesus suffered from what may be called the ordinary privations of humanity. He was born in a stable and laid in a manger, thus at the very outset of His career stepping into the dark hemisphere of suffering. We know little of the social condition in which He was brought up: we cannot tell whether or not in Mary’s home He dwelt much in the shadow of want and misfortune. But at a later stage, we know from Himself, “foxes had holes and the birds of the air had nests, but the Son of man had not where to lay His head.” It is not often that one of the children of men is reduced so low as thus to have to envy the beast its lair and the bird its nest.

As a rule the end of human life, when the habitation in which the soul has tabernacled is broken up, is attended with more or less of suffering; but the physical suffering which He endured at the last was extreme. We need only recall the bloody sweat of Gethsemane; the scourging, when His body, bent over a short post, was beaten with all the force of cruel soldiers; the thrusting of the crown of thorns on His head; the complicated tortures of crucifixion. We may not be able to assert that none ever suffered so much physical agony as He, but this is at least probable; for the exquisiteness of His physical organism in all likelihood made Him much more sensitive than others to pain.

2. He suffered keenly from the pain of anticipating coming evil. When great sorrow or pain comes on suddenly, there is sometimes a kind of bewilderment in it which acts as an anodyne, and it may be over before the sufferer thoroughly realizes it. But to know that one is in the grasp of a disease which in, say, six months will develop into intolerable agony before carrying one away, fills the mind with a horror of anticipation which is worse than even the reality when it comes. Jesus foreknew His sufferings and foretold them to His disciples; and these communications grew more and more vivid and minute month by month, as if they were taking ever stronger hold of His imagination. This horror of anticipation culminated in Gethsemane; for it was the dread of what was coming which there produced in His mind such a tumult of amazement and agony that the sweat fell like great blood-drops from His face.

3. He suffered from the sense of being the cause of suffering to others. To persons of an unselfish disposition the keenest pang inflicted by their own weakness or misfortunes may sometimes be to see those whom they would like to make happy rendered miserable through connection with themselves. To the child Jesus how gruesome must have been the story of the babes of Bethlehem, whom the sword of Herod smote when it was seeking for Him! Or, if His mother spared Him this recital, He must at least have learned how she and Joseph had to flee with Him to Egypt to escape the jealousy of Herod.

As His life drew near its close, this sense that connection with Himself might be fatal to His friends forced itself more and more upon His notice. When He was arrested, He tried to protect the Twelve from His own fate, pleading with His captors, “Let these go their way.” But He foresaw too clearly that the world which hated Him would hate them also, and, as He said, that the time would come when whosoever killed them would think that he was doing God service. He had to see the sword piercing the heart of His mother when she gazed up at Him dying a death more shameful in that age than death on the gallows is in ours.

4. The element of shame was all through a large ingredient in His cup of suffering. To a sensitive mind there is nothing more intolerable; it is far harder to bear than bodily pain. But it assailed Jesus in nearly every form, pursuing Him all through His life. He was railed at for the humbleness of His birth. The high-born priests and the educated rabbis sneered at the carpenter’s son who had never learned, and the wealthy Pharisees derided Him.

He was again and again called a madman. Evidently this was what Pilate took Him for; and, when He appeared before Herod, the gay monarch and his men of war “set Him at nought.” The Roman soldiers adopted an attitude of savage banter towards Him all through His trial and crucifixion, treating Him as boys torment one who is weak in the mind.

They spat in His face; they blindfolded Him, and then, smiting Him, asked, “Prophesy who struck thee!” They made Him a mocking, with the cast-off coat of a soldier for a mantle, a reed for a sceptre, and the thorns for a crown. Under such indignities had His godlike mind to burn. He heard Barabbas preferred to Himself by the voice of His fellow-countrymen, and He was crucified between thieves, as if He were the worst of the worst. A hail of mockery kept falling on Him in His dying hours. The passers-by made faces of derision at Him, adding with their lips the vilest insults; and even the thieves who were crucified with Him cast contempt in His teeth. Thus had He who was conscious of irresistible strength to submit to be treated as the weakest of weaklings, and He who was the Wisdom of the Highest to submit to be used as if He were less than a man.

5. But to Jesus it was more painful still, being the Holy One of God, to be regarded and treated as the chief of sinners. To one who loves God and goodness there can be nothing so odious as to be suspected of hypocrisy and to know that he is believed to be perpetrating crimes at the opposite extreme from his public profession. Yet this was what Jesus was accused of. He was believed to be in collusion with the powers of evil and to cast out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. He to whom the name of God was as ointment poured forth was called a blasphemer and a Sabbath-breaker.

His very best acts were misconstrued; and for going to seek the lost where alone they could be found He had to submit to be called a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. In claiming to be the Messiah He was thought by the majority of all classes to be an unscrupulous pretender; the authorities, both ecclesiastical and secular, decided so in solemn court. Even His own disciples at last forsook Him; one of them betrayed Him; and the foremost of them all cursed and swore that he did not know Him. Possibly there was not a single human being, when He died, who believed that He was what He claimed to be.

6. If to the holy soul of Jesus it was painful to be believed to be guilty of sins which He had not committed, it must have been still more painful to feel that He was being thrust into sin itself. This attempt was often made. Satan tried it in the wilderness, and, although only this one temptation of his is detailed, he no doubt often returned to the attack. Wicked men tried it: they resorted to every device to cause Him to lose His temper and speak unadvisedly with His lips: “They began to urge Him vehemently, and to provoke Him to speak of many things, laying wait for Him and seeking to catch something out of His mouth.”

Even friends, who did not understand the plan of His life, endeavored to divert Him from the course prescribed to Him by the will of God—so much so that He had once to turn on one of them, as if he were temptation personified, with “Get thee behind Me, Satan.” Nothing could prove more clearly than such a saying, so unlike Him who uttered it, how keenly He felt the point of temptation, and what horror awoke in Him at the danger of transgressing by a hairsbreadth the will of God.

7. While the proximity of sin awoke such loathing in His holy soul, and the touch of it was to Him like the touch of fire on delicate flesh, He was brought into the closest contact with it, and hence arose His deepest suffering. It pressed its loathsome presence on Him from a hundred quarters.

He who could not bear to look on it saw it in its worst forms close to His very eyes. His own presence in the world brought it out; for goodness stirs up the evil lying at the bottom of wicked hearts. The sacredness of the Person with whom they had to do intensified the virulence of Pharisees and Sadducees, and the crimes of Pilate and Judas. What a sea of all the evil passions in human nature He was gazing over when, as He hung on the cross, His eye fell on the upturned faces of the multitude!

It was as if all the sin of the race were rushing upon Him, and Jesus felt as if it were all His own. In a large family of evildoers, where the father and mother are drunkards, the sons jail-birds and the daughters steeped in shame, there may be one, a daughter, pure, sensible, sensitive, living in the home of sin like a lily among thorns. And she makes all the sin of the family her own. The others do not mind it; the shame of their sin is nothing to them; it is the talk of the town, but they do not care. Only in her heart their crimes and disgrace meet like a sheaf of spears, piercing and mangling.

The one innocent member of the family bears the guilt of all the rest. Even their cruelty to herself she hides, as if all the shame of it were her own. Such a position did Christ hold in the human family. He entered it voluntarily, becoming bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh; He identified Himself with it; He was the sensitive centre of the whole. He gathered into His heart the shame and guilt of all the sin He saw. The perpetrators did not feel it, but He felt it. It crushed Him; it broke His heart; and He died under the weight of the sin of others, which He had made His own.

Thus we try to bring home to our thoughts the mystery of Gethsemane and the awful cry of Golgotha, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” But it is still a mystery. Who can draw near to that figure prostrate beneath the olive trees in the garden, or listen to that voice sounding from the cross, without feeling that there is a sorrow there whose depths we cannot fathom? We draw as near as we may, but something calls to us, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” Only we know that it was sin which was crushing Him. “He was made sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”

III.

The Results of the sufferings of Christ are the principal theme of the Gospel; but only a few words on the subject can be said here.

1. The Epistle to the Hebrews says that “the Author of our salvation was made perfect through suffering;” and, again, that “He learned obedience through the things which He suffered.”

These are mysterious statements. Was He imperfect that He needed to be made perfect, or disobedient that He required to learn obedience? They cannot surely mean that the smallest iota was ever wanting to complete His character in either sense. No, but simply because He was a man, with a human history and a human development, He had to ascend a stair, so to speak, of obedience and perfection, and, although every step was surmounted at its own precise time, and He emerged upon it perfect, yet every new step required a new effort and, when surmounted, brought Him to a higher stage of perfection and into a wider circle of obedience. We see the progress of this effort with great clearness in Gethsemane, where in the first access of suffering He says, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me;” but at the last is able to say in deep tranquility, “O My Father, if this cup may not pass away from Me except I drink it, Thy will be done.”

This was the perfection He attained through suffering. It was complete comprehension of the will of God and absolute harmony with it. This is our perfection too; and suffering is the great means of bringing it about. Many of us would never have thought much of God’s will unless we had first felt it as a violent contradiction of our own. We wondered at it, and rebelled against it; but, when we learned, after Jesus, to say, “Not my will, but Thine, be done,” we found that this is the secret of life, and the peace which passeth all understanding came into our souls. Or at least we have seen the process in others.

I daresay to some of us the most priceless of all memories is that of one of the sons or daughters of affliction made beautiful by submission to the will of God. There had perhaps been a struggle once; but it was over; and God’s will was accepted, not only with submission, but with a holy joy which glorified the whole being. And, as we have watched the pure and patient face on the pillow, we have felt that here was one who by surrender had won the victory, and we have confessed that our own life, with all its storm and stress of activity, might be far less valuable to either God or man than this one lying bound and motionless: They also serve who only stand and wait.

2. St. Paul, in one of the most confidential passages of his writings, tells of a lesson which he learned from suffering. “Blessed be God,” he says, “the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.” He was glad that he had suffered, because he had learned thereby how to deal with sufferers. How like his big heart was the sentiment! And it is profoundly true. Suffering gives the power to comfort. Indeed, there is no other way of acquiring the art.

To one in deep trouble there is all the difference in the world between the words of the heart-whole, who have never themselves been in the fire, and the tender grasp and sympathetic tones of those who have personally suffered. Those, therefore, who are in the furnace of bereavement or pain may take to themselves the inspiring suggestion, Perhaps this is my apprenticeship to the sacred office of the comforter. Jesus thus acquired the art; and the tried and tempted of every generation come to Him with a confidence which is born of the knowledge of how He personally explored all the recesses of this kind of experience. “We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”

3. The results of the sufferings of Christ enter still more deeply into His work as the Saviour. He foresaw them Himself and spoke often about them. “Except a corn of wheat,” He said, “fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but, if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit;” “I if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me;” “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

When He died, His cause seemed to be lost. Not a single adherent was left clinging to it. But, when this eclipse was over and He came forth from the grave, His adherents awoke to discover that they possessed in Him a hundred times more than they had before been aware of; and the new glory in which He shone was that of the suffering Saviour.

In every age His sufferings attract to Him the hearts of men; for they prove the boundless extent of His love, His absolute unselfishness, and His loyalty to truth and principle even unto death. Thus they have power with men.

But they have also power with God. “He is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” Because He died we need not die. God has put into His hands the forgiveness of sins to be bestowed as a free gift on all who receive Him. Because He humbled Himself God hath highly exalted Him. He is seated now at the right hand of power, a Prince and a Saviour, and He carries at His girdle the keys of hell and of death.

Copyright © AGUAS VIVAS | CHILE 2007