3IO THE FATHER'S PITY
side ; it puts its arms around you, so to speak, and in quivering tones says : " My brother, my sister, my child, this misfortune touches us both, for you are bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. Because you suffer I must suffer. In the name of our common humanity, in the name of God, let us try to help each other." That is pity. That is the pity of God ; for that is the pity of love. What is the meaning of Gethsemane and the cross but this, that the Son of God by virtue of His identification with us in His humanity entered sympathetically into the sin and suffering of the world ? Not that He shared our sin by actual transgression, for He knew no sin ; but as a father shares the sin and shame and suffering of his child, so the Lord Jesus shared our sin and shame and suffering. " Himself bare our sins in his own body on the tree." " He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities." He who knew no sin " was made sin for us." How otherwise could He have made atonement for us? And what is the teaching of the parable of the Prodigal Son in this regard ? How did the father pity his wandering boy ? He yearned for him when he was away in the far country ; he knew well what it all meant — the degradation, the undying stain, the suffering. And for every pang in the heart of the son there was an answering pang in the heart of the father. And how did the pity express itself ? While the son was yet a great way off the father saw him, and had compassion on him, and ran to meet him. Ah ! pity does not think of its dignity. The pity of some people could never get beyond a walk ; it is too often on stilts. The father's pity made hiui run ; he ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And that is the pity of God; that is how it is unfolded in the story of redemption.
^ A chord which has been once set in unison with another vibrates (they say) when its fellow is sharply struck. God has set His heart through human suffering into perpetual concord with human hearts. Strike them, and the heart of God quivers for fellowship. If this is compassion, it is so in a more literal sense than when we use the word as a mere synonym for pity. It is sympathy, in the Greek and New Testament sense ; it is, as our ver- sion has it, being " touched " with the same feeling. It is the remem- brance of His own human past which stirs within the soul of Christ, when, now, from His high seat, He sees what mortal men endure.^
» J. O. Dykes.
PSALM cm. 13, 14 311
5. The Psalmist says that man's weakness makes a sure appeal to the Father's heart. " For he knoweth our frame ; he remembereth that we are dust." Dust is a synonym for frailty. While the mountains stand fast for generations, the dust into which they are slowly worn has no abiding place. The winds toss it, carrying its unresisting particles whithersoever they will. And the stuff out of which we are fashioned is just as unstable and never at one stay. Our lives are of slenderer fibre than unspun silk, brittle as threads of fine-drawn glass, breath-break- able as the texture that holds together only in a vacuum. The Psalmist goes on to speak of death, reminding us that man is like a flower of the field which, untended by human care, unscreened by human device, unwarmed by human art, shrivels at the first sign of change and the first moan of desert wind, and dies neglected and forlorn. Through the entire round of his days he is ever matching and measuring his puny capacities against the strong. Death, which draws the curtain over his cold, inert, baffled clay, is but the last phase in that ever-recurring spectacle of impotence. And yet man draws the Almighty God down to his help ; and, marvellous to say, man draws God by reason, of his very frailty. Of the sum of that human life over which He bends I am but a thousand-millionth part, and yet " the Lord thinketh upon me," who " am poor and needy " — thinketh of me the more closely for that very reason.
^ In his essay on " The Sublime and Beautiful," Burke points out the fact that we always associate physical smallness with the idea of beauty, and he supports his rule by reminding us that in every known language terms of endearment are diminutives. Is not the reason for this common note in the taste and speech of mankind that the hearts of the strong and the chivah'ous are captured by the very weakness which solicits defence ? When we are called upon to play the part of providence to the helpless we experience a mysterious satisfaction which influences our [esthetic judgment, and the helpless grow beavitiful in our eyes. And does not this peculiarity in human nature give us the clue to a mystery in the heart of God ? When He made man He put Divine qualities into a slender framework, filled up with delicate clay, because to such beings the deepest secret of His tenderness could be spoken.^