It affords us, also, a new revelation of God, showing Him in the glory of His grace. We can understand charity and self- denying beneficence meeting the results of evil in this world — the poverty, misery, and suffering it has caused — with their bounty and all the services and forms of self-sacrifice possible to them; but here is philanthropy on the Son of Man's part going so far as to deal with the evil itself and all its demerit and guiltiness, its relations to the moral order of the universe, and to the claims and glory of God. For Divine love to relate itself to human need and suffering, and to multiply its offices
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of charity in relieving them is a great thing ; but for Divine love to clothe itself with the shame and guilt of the sufferers and make their cause its own is another and an infinitely greater thing. For God's Son to come into the midst of suffering men that He might share their ills and sorrows, and provide them with comforts and abatements, would reveal a beautiful compassion and beneficence. But for Him to descend from His Divine throne, step into the sinner's place, and suffer Himself to be numbered with the transgressors, bearing their burden and blame — this is grace beyond all we can conceive of grace.
5. But what is it that makes it so hard for Him to have to take the sinner's place ? It is that the sinner is an outcast from God. Sin has broken the communion. And now He who was spoken of as the beloved Son has to bear the Father's displeasure and feel the unutterable pain of separation. No wonder He prayed, " Father, glorify thou me with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." For that glory was to be loved by the Father : " For thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world." The Father loves Him still and will glorify Him again. But now He feels that He is about to be separated. One with the sinner in his sin, He must feel that He is separate from the Father in His holiness. The Agony in the Garden is the cry on the cross — " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " It casts its dark shadow before. If He accepts the Cup now He will go through it all, even though when the moment comes that cry may yet be wrung from Him.
Imagine the evil of the world being felt by Him as a mighty burden, and that feeling gathering and deepening until over His frail humanity it rolled like a flood, — -the sense of the world's sin cleaving to Him, the sense of the world's woe rousing Him to compassion till its mighty mass seemed to be tearing Him from God, and the awful cry came at last, " Why hast thou forsaken me ? " Add to this the mystery of His Divinity — the Divine capacity of sorrow within the human form — and who can tell what suffering His soul knew ? Who can tell the horror of darkness and the shuddering agony of
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pity that thrilled Him as the cry burst forth, " 0 my Father, let this cup pass from me " ?
^ To bear the weight of sin, and by it to feel cut off from the communion with God which is Life Eternal — this is the one thing absolutely unbearable. We sinners know it, if ever we have felt what men call remorse for our own sin, or for its consequences, which we would give worlds to undo — if ever we know what it is to struggle with all our might against the bondage of conscious sinfulness, and to struggle in vain. The sense that sin has gained an absolute mastery over us, and that in the darkness of its bondage God's face of love is hidden from us for ever, and the unwilling terrors of His wrath let loose upon our unsheltered heads — which of us would not count light in comparison the very keenest agony of body and soul? You remember how St. Paul cries out under it, "0 wretched man that I am ! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" But this sense of our own sin is but a faint shadow of the burden on our Lord's spirit of bearing, in the mysterious power of Atonement, the sins of the whole world — "made" (as St. Paul boldly expresses it) "sin for us," entering even into the spiritual darkness which cries out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " ^
Into the woods my Master went.
Clean forspent, forspent;
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little grey leaves were kind to Him,
When into the woods He came.
Out of the woods my Master went,
And He was well content;
Out of the woods my Master came,
Content with death and shame.
When death and shame would woo Him last,
From under the trees they drew Him last ;
'Twas on a tree they slew Him — last