"In all our afflictions He was Himself afflicted." Another area of experience in which we may see just how this was true of our Lord Jesus as He went to the Cross is that of loneliness.
Our Lord knew loneliness - the most appalling loneliness - as few men have known it; not the loneliness of isolation merely, but the loneliness of total abandonment. The masses repudiated Him; His closest friends deserted, disowned or betrayed Him; the leaders of His people thrust Him out as an unclean thing … flung Him out on to the dunghill of the world. Reviled, His was the most dreadful of all human solitudes - the solitude of universal abandonment.
To have people abandon us in rejection is to reduce us to nothing. You have only to think about it a little to realise that we come to know our worth only in the eyes and the voice of another. If there is no-one to affirm us, we do not know who we are; self-confidence drains away, so that we feel lost in a sea of confusion about ourselves. Total disinterest, written in the countenance of those from whom we look for affirmation, leaves us feeling thrust into outer darkness.
Complete isolation on top of total rejection can bring you to the very edge of insanity. Into that hell, the hell which is the lot of all who are denied the sustenance of affirming relationships, Christ descended. He ended His journey bereft even of the felt companionship of God.
It is somehow symbolic that our last sight of Him is on a gallows on a lonely knoll, silhouetted against an empty sky in which the sun is sinking down. It is a gaunt picture of the total isolation into which He had moved.
There were in addition two other component elements in His loneliness we should note. One was the loneliness of leadership and the other the loneliness of love - both of them becoming intensest of all at the Cross. (Jesus lived the Cross a long time before He died on it.)
True teaching demands, not simply that you tell a truth, but that you communicate it, and that is very much more difficult. For none of us hear by the simple hearing of our ears. What we make of what we hear depends on what there is in us that rushes up to welcome or repel it. We hear, not only with our ears and brains, but by the memories we store, the values we approve, the dreams we dream, and the passions that rule us. All these and more give a substance of their own to what we hear.
"John is coming to town." Statement. If I owe John a debt I cannot pay I will hear the news one way; if John is a favourite brother just back from a war I will hear it quite another way. We may not understand the speaker's words to mean anything like the thing he intended.
A good teacher knows this, and knows therefore that you must prepare a mind before it is ready to receive and grasp a truth. And the waiting, the holding back, can be a lonely business, for your own life (if you are the teacher) will be guided all the while by the truth which as yet you cannot share, so your actions are misunderstood and your motives misconstrued.
Your only way to avoid this is to blurt out your reasons at a time and in a way that may spoil for ever your disciples' capacity to appreciate them.
Says Canon Max Warren, "To know, and to know the joy of knowing, and to withhold that knowledge except it be come by rightly, this is the pain of the teacher - the Cross in education." That pain Jesus knew most poignantly: He had literally to die in the knowledge that His reasons for doing so were not understood … by anyone. Not at the time. "I have many things to say to you, but you are not able now to bear them now," He had said. And the next day He died with them all still unsaid, in the faith that only after His death, and by reason of it, the truth would dawn.
No leader ever felt as Jesus did the crippling frustration of commanding a company blind to the purpose of a campaign He was to give His life for, so they had no heart to fight it with Him. It was to be for them He did it; the shepherd was about to lay down His life for the sheep. Could they not understand at all why He must suffer for them? Was His sacrifice then to be meaningless, sterile? Was all the pain of God for a lost race, soon to be poured through the single channel of His bursting heart, to have no fruit, no yield at all, anywhere in the world?
Jesus was fronted with the temptation to total dismay, as though the precious truth for which He had lived and for which He now must die were all a vain foolishness. That was a loneliness that was acute.
His was a loneliness, too, that is peculiar to love; for loving can be a lonely business.
People often speak as though the chief impulse in love is simply to give, to bestow. It is not. Just as deep is the need to receive, to be given to, to experience a returning flow of trust and affection. Truly to love a person is to want their love in return.
If this be true, and if there was in Jesus the purest spirit of love to men, then their growing antipathy must have been to Him a growing grief. He could not find escape from it into indifference. He could not shrug His shoulders and say, "Then I wash my hands of them." Being a true brother to men He desired the response of brotherliness from them. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how oft would I have gathered you … but you would not, you would not." It was a grief to Him.
To receive back contempt instead of acceptance, scorn instead of openness, is death to the spirit. It was death to His.
And the more so since it is in the nature of true love that you greatly desire, not only the loved one's good, but also that they should desire it with you. The severest test of love comes therefore when, for the real benefit of one you love, you have to do something that turns them against you. When love is crying out for fellowship, it is a sort of living death to have to do, for love's sake, what you know will alienate. The more intense and pure love is, the more fierce is the temptation to keep friendship at the cost of truth.
But it is sometimes necessary. For love which is not rooted in the truth of things is not love at all. It has become mere indulgence.
Here surely is the deepest grief in our Lord's loneliness. Here we come near to the heart of it, and begin to glimpse the grandeur of His love's integrity. As you see the mesh of human hate tighten around Him till He is imprisoned in it and done to death in it, remember that all that hatred was provoked by the truth which for love's sake He had to speak. The temptation - and no man can guess the strength of that temptation till his love is as pure as Christ's - was to say, "I must at all costs keep their hearts open to me, or I shall achieve nothing."
But that temptation He resisted. And in doing so He brought on the deepest loneliness of all - the loneliness of doing, out of love and for the truth, that which closed their hearts against Him.
The attitude that says, "I would never do anything to upset him," is not love; it is a cowardly betrayal of truth and integrity. The Lord does upset us; He disturbs us to the very roots of our being, because He loves us better than we know. If we think that there is in His love a severity that is hard on us, ponder how much greater is the severity He imposes on Himself. Ask what He denies Himself to be true to us, so as not to betray His Father's purpose of love for us.
That is a winepress He treads alone. He found the strength to tread it only because He could say, "Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me." This death He suffered that we might live.
Love that will suffer that death for us is to be trusted … and obeyed.
Now we move on to two further experiences the Lord passed through that compounded with His loneliness to carry Him to the limits of human endurance - the loss of strength that beset Him and the raging thirst He endured on the Cross.
The crippling loneliness we have tried to understand beset Him when circumstances had rendered Him desperately weak. All His strength, the strength of a young carpenter used to working and carrying wood, drained away from Him. He staggered and fell under the weight of the Cross, too exhausted to carry it. He was 'bowed down to the dust, His belly cleaving to the earth.' All the common rights of man were taken away from Him, bread and water and human companionship. He experienced the dreadful isolation of the accursed. The 'ends of the world' were come upon Him. He was alone in catastrophe.
And He bore the curse of this intolerable isolation precisely when He had no strength to bear it.
In the midst of it He thirsted; out of parched lips He cried, "I thirst." It was a thirst both physical and mental.
At the Last Supper He had said He would not drink again of the fruit of the vine until He drank it new in the Kingdom of God. Hours later, He refused the bitter drugged wine offered to those about to be crucified.
A flogging, the crown of thorns, the tearing wounds in hands and feet, the bloody sweat of Gethsemane merging into the bloody sweat of Golgotha, all combined to chain Him down to a fierce thirst under the midday sun. The offer of that drugged drink must have been a blinding temptation - to buy oblivion. Samuel Johnson once commented, when he suffered a severe and painful illness, "Pain hath a marvellous capacity to concentrate attention upon itself." Klaas Schilder, the Dutch theologian to whose trilogy of studies on the Passion of our Lord is a classic, and to which I gladly acknowledge a debt, comments,
Never did Christ have His attention fastened upon the body so closely, upon the tortured body so presently, as He did at this time. Alas, the body can be so agonisingly big at times. It can cover the soul, it can darken the clouds, it can stand in the way of God …
Never, in defiance of all the pressures His human body and His human soul exerted upon Him to sin, did the danger of an end to the obedience He had so steadfastly given to the Father threaten as overwhelmingly as it did now. He is tempted to put the needs of the body above every other need; but if He yields, the obedience of three and thirty years will be all undone. His work for God, built steadily by the laying of stone upon stone of obedience, will collapse.
His entire life is in danger of drowning in a single cup of myrrh …
In this moment Satan incites Him, lures him into temptation, to lay this one last stone crookedly, to give it a smart rap of repressed resentment. But that is not the way it took place.
(Klaas Schilder, The Trilogy, 'Christ Crucified' Paideia, p. 99 ƒƒ)
Jesus had told a parable of a rich man in hell, begging for a drop of water to moisten his tongue. Now the Lord is Himself in hell.
He acknowledges the kindly act, but when His taste recognises the drug, He refuses it. The soldiers would have felt easier hammering the nails into a drugged man. But with nerves fully sensitive to the pain they are forced to inflict upon Him, Christ gives them no trouble.
Among those addicted to drugs, especially to the amphetamines and alcohol, there are many whose basic, dynamic position ('where they're at' deep within) is one of fixated exhaustion, emptiness of spirit and thirst. Christ knows the blinding force of the temptation they know to buy oblivion. If anyone reading this suffers from an addiction to drugs or drink, they will know that if the spirit of this Man can somehow be communicated to them, there is hope that the addiction will be broken.
But His thirst was spiritual also.
Thirst, dryness, aridity, dehydration - all these words express different levels of a common experience.
As the human body cannot function without water, so the human personality cannot function without relationship. Water and relationship are the solvents of the nutriments of life, physical and personal. Dissolved in water or carried by water, solids enter the hungry body and are distributed in it. Dissolved in relationships or carried by relationships, qualities of an abundant person enter a hungry one so as to strengthen every part of his spirit.
What water is to the body, Christ is to the whole personal being of man.
He claims, in all simplicity, to be the Water of Life - the fountain of personal vitality. The River of Life which flows from God through His Person brings abundant life to all who drink at this stream from the hills of God.
The unaided human personality can offer at best a partial and a temporary flow of good spirits to others. Stress in their life will reduce its flow to a trickle, or dry it up like a river bed. At death it runs out into the desert and disappears.
Those who have lost well-being as persons because all graciousness to them has dried up cannot help feeling, if this experience has been fixated, a constant low-spiritedness. The flow of good spirits in them is weak, a trickle at best. If demands are made on them which further deplete the supply, they express themselves quite accurately when they say, "I can't go on - I just can't go on." The water of life is exhausted; the trees growing on the banks bear neither leaf nor fruit.
Only the deliberate identification with them of the Son of God, entering into every form of mental cruelty by which personal well-being is squeezed out to the last drop, can convince them of the love of God. Confronted with God in this form, their own form, the nature of which is to be in pain, they are able to trust again, and open their heart to love.
Christ, the water of life, endures the unendurable thirst. He enters, on behalf of His people, into the experience of hell 'where the flame is not quenched'.
He descended to the lowest depths - past weakness, past pain, past raging thirst, past terror and dread - into total dereliction, where all sense of God was lost. The pit opened beneath Him, and He must cast Himself upon the God Who for Him in that hour was no longer there, but could only be remembered.
He suffered so, so that (to use Paul's phrase) 'He might fill all things' … so that there may be left no corner in all the universe of pain and anguish where that pain and anguish do not themselves contain Him. He was plunged into suffering so that suffering itself might be a vehicle that brings Him to us. He harrowed hell, so we could say with the psalmist: "If I make my bed in hell, Thou art there."
This is the king we are invited to receive … a King who has tasted death for every man, in all its forms, whether of the body or of the mind … a King who has been overwhelmed among us many days, sitting where we sit - and by His resurrection has blazed the trail for all of us back to the light and life of resurrection where the face of God for ever shines upon us.
A TESTIMONY
I end with a university student's testimony. It affects me emotionally every time I go back to it; but I do so because in this girl's experience is the path of healing it is my earnest desire many may be able to tread with her.
Life had treated her with unrelenting cruelty from her infancy onward (the details do not matter) and the misery of her life seemed to reach an unendurable peak when she was rejected by her fiancee within a week of the day on which they were due to be married.
On the verge of mental breakdown, she went into the chapel of the university college where she was a student, and standing before the image of the crucified Christ, she poured forth a stream of vilification against the God she believed cared nothing for her and was callously indifferent to her suffering. She was angrier than she had ever remembered being. In imagination she joined the crowd who vilified Him and the soldiers who drove the nails into His hands and feet and the soldier who pierced Him.
"Now you know." she cried, meaning, "Now you know what it is like to live in the world you created."
But as she glared at the Crucifix, it gradually dawned on her that He had there experienced every agony of soul she herself was feeling. It seemed to her as though He replied through His pain, "Yes. now I know. Why else should I have come?"
Suddenly she realised that they shared the same dereliction together, and she felt bound to Him in shared pain. He was no longer the enemy who cared nothing for her, but the one Friend who suffered with her. She realised then what it meant that He had been raised from the dead, and she yielded herself in love and faith to the One Companion Who could lead her on and up and out of her misery. She would later write, "I rely upon this living Christ who met me in my hell. I rely on Him totally. I adore Him." *
"In all their affliction, He was Himself afflicted, and the angel of His Presence saved them. In His love and in His pity, He redeemed them. He lifted them up and carried them all the days … and He became their Saviour."
"Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, and by His stripes we are healed" - both those who sin, and those who are sinned against.
* Taken from Dr. Frank Lake's book, 'Clinical Theology' 1966 p. 820 published and copyright by Darton Longman & Todd,.
This material is copyright; it may not be quoted, published or reproduced without the author's permission, nor preached without acknowledgment!
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