Lord, uphold me that I may uplift Thee.
Jesus said: Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not
my will, but yours be done [Lk. 22:42].
Perhaps it’s only depressives like me that ever dream
counter-nightmares. Sometimes I dream that certain things have never happened.
In my dream, I can still visit my parents, sit with them, and get their view
of people and events, their counsel about what to do and think. Or I find that
nobody was ever put to death by crucifixion, taking days to die on his cross
unless scourged so that he had lost too much blood. Then I wake up, and realise
that of course it really was so: human beings did and do indeed inflict such
unspeakable cruelties on one another, and God so to speak ‘allows’ it. Behind
such dreams is of course both the knowledge that cruelty and death, even
so-called natural death, ought not to be, and my sometimes overwhelming sense
that the whole experiment, making people with freedom while knowing that they
would go wrong, was not worthwhile, for me or anyone. In other words, if
all-powerful, not all-loving; if all-loving, not all-powerful, God. What is
the remedy for this dark vision? There is only one, to know that GOD so loved
the world, that He came to our rescue in person [II Cor. 5:19]. He the
Creator took the responsibility, let Himself be accused, tried, convicted and
executed by angry sinners, sinners who were angry with Him. He gave to save us
from sin and death [Jn. 3:16], not an angel, disembodied, rational
and perfect, nor an irrational animal, without imagination or anticipation,
but Himself, and Himself made man, a Man, warm, witty, thinking, feeling,
creative and physical. This Man was fully alive, felt love, joy and gladness,
grief, pain and fear, and was ‘by God’s grace’ representative of us even to
the point of ‘tasting death for everyman’ [Heb. 2:9]. Jesus had to
die, not because God was angry, but because He is love [I Jn. 4:16].
As great a theologian as John Stott has said that the Lord cannot have
been afraid of the Cross itself, for that would make Him a coward. He was
afraid, Stott thinks, only of the separation from His Father, as He was ‘made
to be sin for us’ [II Cor. 5:21]. I think that a mistake. Surely He
was afraid of the whole experience? Male theologians have never any of them
been a not-so-young woman, thousands of miles from home, going into labour with
her first child. One knew it would come to this, as Our Lord knew how He,
member with slave status of a subject people, would be executed; one accepted that
this was the only way of getting a baby; one embraced it; but still when it
came to it, one wished that there was some other less costly way. Isn’t Jesus
saying, with His prayer, that as an embodied person He would prefer not to go
through it? If He had desired such pain and sorrow, He would have been, not the
only truly normal human being that He was, but a pervert who was not just
willing, but wanted, to suffer. The temptations in the wilderness, the Devil’s
subsequent attempts to divert Him, this the penultimate attempt, would have
been unreal. He would not have been making real human choices, as we must. He
would not have ‘learned obedience by the things which He suffered and
experienced’ [Heb. 5:8]. He would not have been ‘tempted’ and tested
just as we are [Heb. 4:15]. He would not have consciously chosen to
endure the Cross for the sake of the ‘joy which was set before Him’ [Heb. 12:2].
We too feel fear and shrink from pain and sorrow. We shrink from what is, and
from what we imagine may be. We too must go through pain and sorrow, not
because it is holier and more Christian to find some way of suffering every
day, but as part of the cost of obedience. Our God is a God Who suffers, not
just for us, but with us. He understands at first hand what we are going
through. Perhaps we long for marriage, but it is incompatible with our
vocation; or we long for a particular person whom we may not have; or duties at
home keep us from what we long to do; or we long for a loved person to repent,
and he does not; or we suffer civil disabilities, public contempt and
disgrace, the betrayal of trusted friends, harsh and unjust punishment, even
the felt absence of our heavenly father, once so near. All these things, or
something analogous, our Jesus went through for us, and goes through with us.
At the same time, the core of the black horror for Him must have been
that when He was made sin for us His Father now looked on Him with such horror
that He no longer looked at Him at all. The heart of God was broken in two. To
think of this as like someone who had always lived in the sunshine being
dropped to the bottom of a black oubliette, to die there alone, is a weak
comparison only. We who never, as sinners used to, even often preferring, the semi-darkness,
pray quite whole-heartedly, ‘Turn not thou thy face from us, O Lord’, can never
fully enter into His experience of the total absence of His Father. He had
lived in the sunshine of His Father’s love from all eternity. We never do drink
His cup, in the sense of the wrath of God [Jer. 25:15] poured out on
the wholly sinless [I Pet. 2:22]. We are as sinners much more
centred on our ease and pleasure, comfort and fulfilment, the avoidance of
pain and grief, and much less on our standing with our Creator, than Jesus ever
was. Our priorities are often the reverse of His. Unreconstructed, don’t we
think that the very worst thing that can happen to a human being is to die a hideously
painful and premature unjust physical death? We ask what we think of God much
more often than we ask what He thinks of us. Our love for Him is frequently a
form of thinly-disguised cupboard-love, or not much more. We learn but slowly
and painfully that He is not our butler, that His love is not a soft thing [
I used to believe that we may not think of Jesus as suffering with us in
the ordinary pains and sorrows, the death of parents who were always there,
even the great irrevocable losses like blindness, loss of spouse or child,
broken hopes which will never be mended in this world. I believe now that we
may indeed think of Him as suffering with us, and ourselves as suffering with
Him, even when our pain is not suffered for Him. We should ‘count it all joy’ [Jas.
1:2]. In the light of His Cross, we too may presume to pray, ‘Father’,
and to speak plainly and honestly to Him of our anger, pain and sorrow, knowing
that the hard and bitter things all come to us, not out of His anger, but out
of His love [Jn. 15:1-2]. The bottommost reality in the universe is
personal, relational, loving and good.
No more than the agony having been the last word in Jesus’ life is it
the last word in ours. The sensual, life-loving Victorian poet who wrote, ‘Thou
hast conquered, O pale Galilaean/The world is grown gray with thy breath’, had
it all wrong. It is not wrong to be happy in Christ, it is not wrong to have
something for ourselves. Joy is what He promises us, the joy which is His [Jn
15:11]. In the Resurrection, because of Him, we shall have bodies as
glorious as His [Phil.3:21], a life many times as rich in colour
and beauty as anything we can imagine [I Cor. 2:9].
ANGEL’S SONG
I know not, I,
What the men together say,
How lovers, lovers die
And youth passes away.
Cannot understand
Love that mortal bears
To native, native land,
All lands are theirs;
Why at grave they grieve
For one voice and face,
And not, and not receive
Another in its place.
I above the cone
Of the circling night
Flying, never have known
Less or greater light.
Sorrow it is they call
This cup whence my lip
(Woe’s me!) never in all
My endless days can sip.
[C.S. Lewis Poems]