The passage: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I would not dare approach this most awful utterance ever shaped by human breath, if I did not feel that, holding both germ and blossom of final devotion, it holds the deepest practical lesson the heart has to learn. The Lord, the Revealer, hides nothing that can be revealed, and does not warn off the foot that treads in naked humility on the ground of his terrible conflict with Evil, when the smoke of battle rose between him and his Father and, for one terrible moment before he broke the bonds of life and went weary and triumphant to his Father’s arms, hid God from his Son’s eyes. He lets us meditate the one thought that slew him at last, when he fled to the Father to know that he loved him: Satan had come once more with a last temptation, to tell him that though he had done his part, God had forgotten his; that though he had lived by the word of God’s mouth, that mouth had nothing more to say to him; that though he had refused to tempt God, God had left him to be tempted beyond bearing; that though he had worshipped none other, God did not care. The Lord hides nothing of his sacred sufferings, for truth is light and would be light in men’s minds. Let us draw near and kiss those feet that bear for ever the scars of our victory; in them we clasp the safety of our suffering, sinning brotherhood.
We should approach the sufferings of our Lord with the holiest fear, and not think they were less because he was more. The more delicate the nature, the more alive to all that is lovely, true and right, the more it feels the antagonism of pain and the inroad of death on life, that breach in the harmony of things whose sound is torture. He felt more than man could feel, and was worn out sooner. His sufferings were awful when they began to invade the region about the will, when the struggle to keep consciously trusting God sank into darkness, and the Will of The Man put forth its last effort in that cry after the vanishing Father: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Never before had he been unable to see God beside him. Yet never was God nearer, for never was Jesus more divine. He could not see or feel him near, and still it is “My God” he cries.
So the Will of Jesus, just when his faith seems about to yield, finally triumphs. With no feeling to support it and no beatific vision to absorb it, it stands naked and tortured in his soul as he stood scourged before Pilate, and, pure and simple and surrounded by fire, declares for God. The sacrifice ascends in the cry My God. It came not out of happiness, peace, hope or even suffering; it was a cry in desolation, but out of Faith, the last voice of Truth, speaking when it can only cry. The horror of that moment is unfathomable; it was blackness of darkness. Yet he would believe and hold fast: God was his God still. In the cry came the Victory, and all was soon over. Of the peace that followed, the peace of a perfect soul, large as the universe, pure as light, ardent as life, victorious for God and his brethren, he alone can know the breadth and length and depth and height.
Without this last trial, the Master’s temptations would not have filled the human cup; there would be a region we must pass through where we might call on our Captain-Brother and find no voice or hearing; he would have avoided the fatal spot! The desert temptations came to a young, strong man with his road before him and God around him, and drew their force from the exuberance of his conscious faith. “Dare and do, for God is with you,” said the devil. “I know it, and therefore I will wait,” returned the king of his brothers. Now, after three years of divine action, with his course run, his frame tortured until the ruling brain falls whirling down the gulf of fainting, and friends fled, the enemy comes again: “Despair and die, for God is not with you. Death, not Life, is your refuge. He never was with you. He was the God of Abraham, and Abraham is dead. Whom do you make yourself?” “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” the Master cries. For God was his God still, though he had forsaken him: forsaken his vision that his faith might glow out triumphant; forsaken himself? no; come nearer than ever, even as (with a deeper import) the Lord withdrew from his friends’ bodily eyes to dwell in their profoundest being.
I do not think our Lord’s deepest trial was in the garden, when he prayed that the cup might pass and then that the Father’s will be done. For that will was then present with him, and he lived and acted in it. Now the foreseen horror has come; he drinks the dread cup and the Will has vanished from his eyes. Were it visible in his suffering, his will could bow with tearful gladness under its grandeur. But now his will is left alone to drink the cup of The Will in torture. In the sickness of this agony it rises perfect at last, unsupported, a naked consciousness of misery hung in the waste darkness of the universe, and declares for God in defiance of pain, death, apathy, self, negation and the blackness around it, calling aloud on the vanished God.
This is the Faith of the Son of God: God withdrew, as it were, so that the Son’s perfect Will might go forth to find the Father’s Will.
Is it possible that even then he thought of the lost sheep who could not believe God was their Father, and cried for them the word they might say, knowing for them that God means Father and more, and knowing now as never before the fearfulness of being without God and without hope? I dare not answer.
But what has this Alpine apex of faith to do with creatures who call themselves Christians, creeping in the valleys, hardly aware of the mountains above except to stumble over the pebbles washed down by glacier streams? I will tell you. We remain creeping Christians because we look at ourselves and not at Christ, gazing at the marks of our own soiled feet instead of up at the snows of purity where Christ’s soul climbed. Each of us, putting his foot in the Master’s footprint and so defacing it, turns to see how far his neighbour’s matches what he still calls the Master’s, though it is only his own. Or, having committed a petty fault, such as only a petty creature could, we mourn the defilement to ourselves and the shame before friends, children or servants, instead of hurrying to confess and make amends to our fellow and then, forgetting our paltry self and its disgrace, lifting our eyes to the glory that alone will quicken the true man in us and kill the peddling creature we wrongly call our self. The true self is that which can look Jesus in the face and say My Lord.
When the inward sun shines and the wind of thought stirs glad feelings among the flowers of fancy, it is easy to look up and say My God. It is easy, when outward failure has braced the mental nerves to fresh effort, to turn to God and trust him, since honest exertion gives an ability as well as a right to trust. It is easy in pain, short of certain bounds, to hope in God for deliverance or pray for strength. But what is to be done when all feeling is gone, when a man does not know whether he believes or loves, when art, poetry and religion are nothing to him, so swallowed up is he in pain, depression, disappointment or temptation? It seems to him then that God does not care for him, and certainly he does not care for God. If still humble, he thinks he is so bad that God cannot care for him, and believes for the time that God loves us only because and while we love him, rather than always, because he is our God and we live only by his love. Or he does not believe in a God at all, which is better.
So long as we have nothing to do with God except in the sunshine of the mind, when we feel him near, we are poor creatures, willed upon, not willing: flowering reeds, perhaps, pleasant to behold, but blown by the wind; not bad, but poor.
And how do we generally act then? Do we sit mourning the loss of our feelings, or make frantic efforts to rouse them? Or, ten times worse, relapse into temporary atheism and yield to the temptation? Or, being heartless, stay careless, conscious only of evil thoughts and low feelings but too lazy to rouse ourselves against them? We know we must be rid of them some day, but meantime, never mind; we do not feel them bad, or anything else good; we are asleep and know it, and cannot be troubled to wake.
God does not, by instant gift of his Spirit, make us always feel right, desire good and aspire after him. So either he will not or he cannot. If he will not, it must be because it would not be well. If he cannot, he would not if he could; else a better condition than God’s is conceivable to God’s own mind, one in which he could save his creatures better than he can. The truth is this: he wants to make us in his own image, choosing the good and refusing the evil. How could he do that if he were always moving us from within, as he does at divine intervals, towards holiness? God gives us room to be; he “stands away from us” that we may act from ourselves and exercise the pure will for good. I do not mean that we can do anything of ourselves without God. If we choose the right at last, it is all God’s doing, and only the more his for being ours, in a far more marvellous way than if he had kept us so full of holy impulses that we never had to choose. For to this point he has been educating and leading us, that we may choose him and his will and so be tenfold more his children, of his own best making, in the freedom of a will found our own first in its loving sacrifice to him, than in the most ecstatic worship flowing from divine impulse without this willing sacrifice. God made our individuality as well as, and a greater marvel than, our dependence: made our apartness from himself, that freedom might bind us dearer to him with a new and inscrutable marvel of love. The Godhead is still the making root of our individuality, and the freer the man, the stronger his bond to the one who made his freedom. He made our wills and is striving to make them free, for only in the perfection of our individuality and the freedom of our wills can we be altogether his children. This is full of mystery, but can we not see enough in it to be very glad and peaceful?
Only in an act that declares for the Truth, for God, in spite of impulse or weakness, does the will spring into absolute freedom and true life.
See, then, what lies within our reach whenever we are lapt in the folds of night. The highest condition of the human will is attainable. I do not say the highest condition of the Human Being, which surely lies in the Beatific Vision, the sight of God; but the highest condition of the Human Will, as distinct, not separated, from God, is when, not seeing God or seeming to grasp him at all, it yet holds him fast. It cannot continue so, for the man would die not finding God; but with the will thus asserting itself he has passed from death into life, and the vision is near. Then first, free in asserting its freedom, the individual will is one with the Will of God; the child is restored to the father; the brotherhood of the race rises from the dust; and our Lord’s prayer is answered, “I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” Let us then arise in God-born strength whenever we feel the darkness closing, or find it closed around us, and say, “I am of the Light and not of the Darkness.”
Troubled soul, you are not bound to feel, but you are bound to arise. God loves you whether you feel or not. You cannot love when you will, but you are bound to fight the hatred in you to the last. Do not try to feel good when you are not good, but cry to Him who is good. He does not change because you change. He has an especial tenderness for you because you are in the dark, and his heart is glad when you arise and say, “I will go to my Father.” For he sees you through all the gloom through which you cannot see him. Will his will. Say to him: “My God, I am very dull and low and hard; but you are wise and high and tender, and you are my God. I am your child. Forsake me not.” Then fold the arms of your faith and wait quietly until light goes up in your darkness. Fold the arms of your Faith, but not of your Action: think of something you ought to do, and do it, if it be only sweeping a room, preparing a meal, or visiting a friend. Heed not your feelings: do your work.
As God lives by his own will, and we in him, so he has given us power to will in ourselves. How much better we should fare if, finding our heads bowed away from the good and no inclination to seek the source of our life, we still willed upwards toward God, rousing the life he has given us from his own heart to call on him who can fill the emptiest heart, rouse the deadest conscience, quicken the dullest feeling and strengthen the feeblest will!
Then, if ever the time should come, as perhaps it must for each of us, when all sense of well-being has vanished, the earth is a sterile promontory and the heavens a dull and pestilent congregation of vapours, neither man nor woman delights us, God himself is but a name and Jesus an old story, and a Death far worse than “that phantom of grisly bone” grips our hearts and, having slain love, hope and faith, forces existence on us only in agony, then, even then, we shall be able to cry out with our Lord, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Nor shall we die then, I think, without taking up his last words as well: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
The Hands of the Father
The passage: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Neither St Matthew nor St Mark records any words of our Lord after the Eloi. With St Luke they tell of a loud cry and the giving up of the ghost; St Luke alone puts between them “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” and he omits the Eloi. St John records neither, nor the loud cry; only that after the vinegar Jesus said “It is finished,” bowed his head and gave up the ghost.
Will the Lord ever tell us why he cried so? Relief at the touch of death? Victory? Gladness that he had endured to the end? Or did the Father look on him in answer to his My God, and the blessedness make him cry aloud because he could not smile? Or was it the last wrench of pain before repose? Perhaps all in one. No books or words of thinking men could express as much as lay unspoken in that cry. Now he had made his Father Lord not by the might of making and loving alone, but by right of devotion and deed of love. Now inward sonship and glad sacrifice should be born in men’s hearts, for the divine obedience was perfected by suffering. He had been among his brethren what he would have them be, doing for them what he would have them do for God and each other. God was henceforth inside and beneath them as well as around and above, suffering with and for them, giving them all he had, his very life-being, what he best loved and best was. And the mighty story ends with a cry.
So the cry meant It is finished and Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. Every highest human act gives back to God what he first gave us: “You gave me this; here is your gift; I send my spirit home.” Every act of worship holds up to God what he has made us: “Look, Lord, feel with me in this bounty of yours, my being. I am your child and can thank you only by lifting up the overflow of your life and crying, It is yours; it is mine. I am yours, and therefore I am mine.” The vast operations of the spiritual and physical worlds alike are a turning again to the source.
Commending his spirit at the close of his life only summed up what our Lord had done all his life. He had offered himself all the years, and so had lived the divine life. Every morning when he went out before day, every evening when he lingered on the night-lapt mountain after his friends had gone, he offered himself to his Father in loving words, high thoughts and speechless feelings; and between times he did the same in deed, toward his fellows, in loving word, helping thought and healing action. The way to worship God while daylight lasts is to work; the only “divine service” is helping our fellows.
I do not offer this commending of our spirits as a duty, which would turn our highest privilege into a burden. I want to show it is the simplest, blessedest thing in the human world.
The Human Being may say: “Am I going to sleep, to be helpless and thoughtless, perhaps weak of will and scant of conscience in my dreams? Father, into your hands I commend my spirit; I give myself back to you; refresh me, make me over again. Am I going into the day’s turmoil, with its temptations to be less honourable, faithful, kind or diligent than the Ideal Man would have me? Father, into your hands. Am I about to do a good deed? Of all times then, Father, into your hands, lest the enemy have me now. Am I about to do a hard duty, refusing a friend’s request or urging a neighbour’s conscience? Father, into your hands. Am I in pain, with illness shutting out the glad visions of a healthy brain and bringing troubled, untrue ones? Take my spirit, Lord, and see that it has no more to bear than it can bear. Am I going to die? You know from your Son’s cry how terrible that is, and if it does not come to me as terribly as to him, think how poor I am to bear it beside him. I do not know what the struggle means, for of the thousands who pass through it daily not one enlightens his neighbour left behind; but shall I not long with agony for one breath of your air, and not receive it? Shall I not be torn asunder with dying? I will question no more: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. It is your business, not mine. You will know every shade of my suffering and care for me with your perfect fatherhood, which makes my sonship and wraps it round. As a child I could bear great pain with my father’s arm about me; how much nearer to my soul can your hands come, with a comfort I have never imagined, for how shall my imagination overtake your swift heart? I care not for the pain so long as my spirit is strong, and into your hands I commend that spirit. If your love, which is better than life, receives it, surely your tenderness will make it great.”
So may the Human Being speak to himself.
Think, brothers and sisters: we walk in the air of an eternal fatherhood. Every uplifting of the heart is a looking up to The Father, and graciousness and truth are around, above, beneath and in us. When we are least worthy, most tempted, hardest and unkindest, let us still commend our spirits into his hands; where else dare we send them? How an earthly father would love a child who crept into his room with an angry, troubled face and sat at his feet, saying, “I feel so naughty, papa, and I want to get good”! Would he say, “Go away, be good, and then come to me”? Shall we think God would send us away if we came so, or be displeased we came, even angry as Jonah? If we, being evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, will God not give us his Spirit when we ask? Will no heavenly dew fall cool on the hot anger, no raindrop on the dry selfishness, no sunlight on the cloudy hopelessness? Bread at least will be given, not a stone; water, not vinegar mingled with gall.
Nor is there anything we can ask for ourselves that we may not ask for another. We may commend any brother or sister to the common fatherhood, and there will be moments when, filled with the Lord’s spirit, nothing will ease our hearts of their love but commending all our brothers and sisters to the one Father. We shall never know the rest in the Father’s hands, the rest of the Holy Sepulchre, which the Lord knew when the agony of death was over and he entered the regions where there is only life, and so all that is not music is silence (for all noise comes of the conflict of Life and Death), until the fatherhood is revealed to us in the love of the brothers. He cannot be our father except as he is theirs, and if we do not see him as their father we cannot know him as ours. We shall never know him aright until we rejoice for our race that he is the Father. If we do not love our brother whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen? To rest at last even in those hands into which the Lord commended his spirit, we must already have learned to love our neighbour as ourselves.