^ This is a grief which strikes deeply and keenly into the soul, in proportion to its own elevation and purity. Such souls care not for the opposition and for the obloquy of the stranger, or the worldly, or of those from whom nothing better can be expected. But the real keen and piercing grief of noble minds is when they feel that the familiar friend in whom they trusted has turned against them, that the leader and companion on whom they leaned, as on a part of themselves, has given way. This is, indeed, agony. Of all the dreadful experiences of human life is not this one of the darkest, the moment when the truth may have first flashed upon us that some steadfast character on whom we relied has broken in our hand ; that in some fine spirit whom we deeply admired has been disclosed a yawning cavern of sin and wickedness ? Such was His feeling when He saw that Judas could no more be trusted ; when He saw that Peter and James and John, instead of watching round Him, had sunk into a deep slumber — " What, could ye not watch with me one hour ? "
(3) This want of understanding of even His own disciples drove Him into a solitude that at such a time and to such a
E. L. Hull.
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nature must have been very hard to bear. Notice the words, " He went a little further." Do you not already feel the awful loneliness conveyed by these words : the sense of separation, the sense of solitude ? Jesus is approaching the solemn climax of His life, and as He draws near to it the solitude deepens. He has long since left the home of His mother and His brethren, and will see it no more. He has but recently left the sacred home of Bethany, that haven of peace where He has often rested, and where the hands of Mary have anointed Him against His burial. He has even now left the chamber of the Paschal supper, and the seal of finality has been put upon His earthly ministry in the drinking of the cup when He said to His disciples, " Remember me." He has just left eight of His disciples at the outer gate of Gethsemane, saying, " Stay ye here while I go and pray yonder." A few moments later, and He parts from Peter and James and John, saying, " Tarry ye here and watch with me," and He went a little further. It was but a stone's throw, says St. Luke, and yet an infinite gulf now lay between Him and them.
^ This loneliness of life in its common forms we all know something about. We know, for instance, that the parting of friends is one of the commonest experiences of life. People come into our lives for a time ; they seem inseparable from us, and then by force of circumstances or by some slowly widening difference of temper or opinion, or by one of those many social forms of separation of which life is full, they slowly drift out of our touch and our life. " We must part, as all human creatures have parted," wrote Dean Swift to Alexander Pope, and there is no sadder sentence than that in human biography. It strikes upon the ear like a knell.^
^ But no boldness of thought and no heroism of conduct will ever be possible to us until we have learned to stand alone and to go " a little further." You remember that the favourite lines of General Gordon, which he often quoted in those splendid lonely days at Khartoum, were the lines taken from Browning's " Paracelsus " —
I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive ! what time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send His hail Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow. In some time, His good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird.
» W. J. Dawson.
422 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
4. But there is a greater sorrow here. In some way, mysterious but most assured, He had to make the guilt of the sin of mankind His own. He had to take the sinner's place — his place as a sinner — and accept the burden of his sinfulness. His agony becomes intelligible only when we accept His own explanation of all His suffering and woe, that He had come to give His life a ransom for many, and to shed His blood for the remission of their sins. In other words. He had come to make the sins of others His own, and to suffer and die as if He had committed them, and as if the guilt and the penalty of them were His.
How Jesus could assume and have this personal relation to sins not His own is the real mystery here. It must ever be, like much else in His Divine human being, largely beyond our finite thought. It goes so far to explain it that He was the Son of Man, and that in this unique character He could be for men what no other could possibly be. As the God-man He was related to humanity, to its burden and its destiny, as no other could be. He was its head and representative. As such He could, while sinless Himself, make the sin, the agony, and the conflict of our fallen race His own. The suffering and the death which this involved He as the second Adam underwent, not for His own sake, but for the sake of humanity, that all might issue in salvation. Thus far the Incarnation throws light upon Gethsemane and Calvary. It did not merely add another to the number of our race, but it gave a new Divine centre or head to it, and one in whose personal history the agony and conflict of humanity because of sin might be endured and brought to the victory of redemption.