If ever you feel disposed in this manner to turn away from the afflicted, you will do well to check yourself with the question, " Am I not, in fact, behaving as the Jews did when they turned away from our Saviour ?" " He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief," and, therefore, " they hid as it were their faces from Him." Surely if we hide our face, peevishly or contemptuously, from any one of His afflicted and poor people ; if we are impatient and displeased with everything, except what encourages our mirth or what helps us in our day's work ; we have every reason to think that we too should have hidden our faces from our Saviour, had we known Him in the flesh : we should have been impatient and displeased at being called on to look off our business or our diversion towards a person so lowly and little esteemed, so very full of infirmities and sufferings. The history of our Lord's life and death is full of instances of this sort of temper ; but none perhaps so remarkable as in the case of the two thieves who were crucified by His side. Even in the very agony of their own death, and that the most painful and shameful of deaths, both of them at first, and one as it would seem to the end, could find it in their hearts to revile our Lord for His sufferings. " If Thou be Christ," they tauntingly said, " save Thyself and us." They cast in His teeth the same reproach as the haughty Roman soldiers and self-satisfied
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Pharisees did : " He saved others, Himself He cannot save." Those dying and blaspheming malefactors were the very type of the world's proud and cruel nature, rejecting and disdaining all fellowship with the poor and afflicted, and refusing to be saved by sufiferings, even the sufferings of Jesus Christ.
If I question if there is more than one heresy that is bad enough to keep a man out of the kingdom of heaven — that is, the heresy of trying to be in heaven to-day, at the same time that the world is full of men who by their sins and burdens and distresses are already in hell to-day .^
II.
Christ a Man of Sorrows. i. The Occasion of His Sorrow.
1. His own life was sorrowful. — He was away from home ; from His Father's presence. He was a stranger — and made continually to feel it — in a strange land. From His childhood He was full of thoughts which He could not utter ; because, if uttered, they were not understood.
He was a lonely man. Those who loved Him knew Him not. They were constantly misreading His intentions, thwarting His purposes, and suggesting a line of action which was not His own. While they were faithful to Him, they could not understand Him. It was a constant struggle for Him to convey spiritual thoughts to the carnal, and heavenly ideas to the earthly-minded. At last they deserted Him ; all forsook Him and fled.
2. His care for others made Him sorrowful. — Christ's first acquaintance with sorrow was by sympathy. To sympathise is simply this, to feel with those who suffer. It is the instinct of a kindly heart. It is the obedience to that law of Christian duty which bids us "rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep," It is the rising, the almost spontaneous rising, of the emotion of pity in the bosom. You do not bid the feeling come. It comes. That is passive know-
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ledge of misery. When we have thrilled over the anguish that we see, there is a sense in which we are acquainted with grief. In this knowledge, our Eedeemer's heart was rich. We will take but two cases which belong to oi.r present purpose, the case of poverty, and the case of corporeal maladies. It was a most distinguishing feature of the life of Jesus, the com- passion which He felt for the degraded, neglected, unbefriended poor. And He sympathised with bodily anguish. He was walking almost all His life through the wards of a vast hospital. The hospital was the world ; the sick, the dying, and the mad were lying on their beds, on both sides of Him. At evening "they brought unto Him many that were sick"; and, it is written again and again, " He was moved with compassion."
It was the love which Christ had for the world that made Him sad while doing His work in the world ; and the infinitude of His love is what explains the unutterableness of His pain ; for the world in which Christ fulfilled His mission was a suffering world. Now a man who is without love can be in the midst of suffering and not suffer. A loveless spirit grieves over its own pain, but has no sense of another's pain, and no feeling of being burdened by another's pain. Love has this peculiar property, that it makes the person whom we love one with us, so that his experience becomes a part of our own life, his pain becomes painful to us, his burdens make us tired. The mother feels her child's pain as keenly as though it were her own pain, perhaps more so. In its Divine relations this is all expressed in those familiar words of Scripture, " In all their afflictions He was afflicted." He was not simply sorry for their suffering. He felt their suffering as His suffering, which is what we mean by sympathy. Sympathy is the form which love takes in a suffering world.