XXIX.

THE LAST UTTERANCES OF CHRIST.

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost." JOHN XIX. 30.

THERE are seven dying sentences of our Lord's recorded in the Gospels; one recorded conjointly by St. Matthew and St. Mark, three recorded by St. Luke, and three by St. John. That recorded by the first two Evangelists is, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Those preserved by St. Luke only are,

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Verily I say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise"; "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"; and, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." The three recorded by St. John are these, I thirst"; "Behold thy mother; behold thy son"; and lastly, "It is finished." And these seven group themselves into two divisions: we perceive that some of them are the utterances of personal feeling, and others are the utterances of sympathy for others.

These are, therefore, the two divisions of our subject to-day, First. The natural exclamations of the Man. Secondly. The utterances of the Saviour.

The first of those which we class under the exclamations of the Man, referring to His personal feelings, is, "I thirst"; in answer to which they gave Him vinegar to drink. Now, upon first reading this, we are often tempted to suppose, from the unnatural character of the draught, that an insult was intended; and therefore we rank this among the taunts and fearful sufferings which He endured at His crucifixion. But as we become acquainted with Oriental history, we discover that this vinegar was the common drink of the Roman army, their wine, and therefore was the most likely to

be at hand when in the company of soldiers, as He then was. Let it be borne in mind that a draught was twice offered to Him; once it was accepted, once it was refused. That which was refused was the medicated potion, wine mingled with myrrh, the intention of which was to deaden pain, and therefore when it was presented to the Saviour it was rejected. And the reason commonly assigned for that seems to be the true one; the Son of Man would not meet death in a state of stupefaction, He chose to meet His God awake.

There are two modes in which pain may be struggled with, through the flesh, and through the spirit; the one is the office of the physician, the other that of the Christian. The physician's care is at once to deaden pain either by insensibility or specifics; the Christian's object is to deaden pain by patience. We dispute not the value of the physician's remedies, in their way they are permissible and valuable; but yet let it be observed that in these there is nothing moral; they may take away the venom of the serpent's sting, but they do not give the courage to plant the foot upon the serpent's head, and to bear the pain without flinching. Therefore the Redeemer refused, because it was not through the flesh, but through the Spirit, that He would conquer; to have accepted the anodyne would have been to escape from suffering, but not to conquer it. But the vinegar or sour wine was accepted as a refreshing draught, for it would seem that He did not look upon the value of the suffering as consisting in this, that He should make it as exquisite as possible, but rather that He should not suffer one drop of the cup of agony which His Father had put into His hand to trickle down the side untasted. Neither would He make to Himself one drop more of suffering than His Father had given.

There are books on the value of pain; they tell us that if of two kinds of food the one is pleasant and the other nauseous, we are to choose the nauseous one. Let a lesson on this subject be learnt from the Divine example of our Master.

To suffer pain for others without flinching, that is our Master's example; but pain for the mere sake of pain, that is not Christian; to accept poverty in order to do good for others, that is our Saviour's principle; but to become poor for the sake and the merit of being poor, is but selfishness after all. Our Lord refused the anodyne that would have made the cup untasted which His Father had put into His hand to drink, but He would not taste one drop more than His Father gave Him. Yet He did not refuse the natural solace which His Father's hand had placed before Him.

There are some who urge most erroneously the doctrine of discipline and self-denial. If of two ways one is disagreeable, they will choose it, just because it is disagreeable; because food is pleasant and needful, they will fast. There is in this a great mistake. To deny self for the sake of duty is right, to sacrifice life and interests rather than principle is right; but self-denial for the mere sake of self-denial, torture for torture's sake, is neither good nor Christ-like. Remember, He drank the cooling beverage in the very moment of the Sacrifice; the value of which did not consist in its Deing made as intensely painful as possible, but in His not flinching from the pain, when Love and Duty said Endure.

His second exclamation was, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" We will not dive into the deep mysteries of that expression, we will not pretend to be wiser than what is written, endeavoring to comprehend where the Human is mingled with the Divine, we will take the matter simply as it stands. It is plain from this expression that the Son of God felt as if He had been deserted by His Father. We know that He was not deserted by Him, or else God had denied Himself, after saying, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.' And they who maintain that this was real desertion, attribute that to the Lord of Love which can alone belong to Judas, - the desertion of innocence, therefore we conclude that it arose from the infirmities of our Master's innocent human

nature. It was the darkening of His human soul, not the hiding of God's countenance. He was worn, faint, and exhausted; His body was hanging from four, lacerated wounds; and more than that, there was much to perplex the Redeemer's human feelings, for He was suffering there, the innocent for the guilty. For once God's law seemed reversed; and then came the human cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

And now, brethren, observe in this, that it arose apparently from the connection of the Redeemer's death with sin. When the death-struggle of the flesh begins, and we first become aware of the frailty of our Humanity, then the controversy of God with the soul is felt to be real by reason of our consciousness of sin ; then is felt, as it were, the immense gulf that separates between the pure and the impure. In the case of the Son of Man this was, of course, impossible; consciousness of sin He had none, for He had no sin; but there was a connection, so to speak, between the death of Christ and sin, for the Apostle says, "In that He died, He died unto sin once." "He died unto sin"; there was a connection between His death and sin, though it was not His own sin, but the sin of the whole world. In that moment of the apparent victory of evil, the Redeemer's spirit, as it would appear, felt a darkness similar to ours when sin has hidden our consciousness of God. When death is merely natural, we can feel that the hand of God is there; but when man interferes, and the hand of God is invisible, and that of man is alone seen, then all seems dark and uncertain. The despondency of the Redeemer was not supernatural, but most natural darkness. The words He used were not His own, but David's words; and this proclaims that suffering such as He was then bearing had been borne before Him, the difference was in degree, not in kind. The idea of piety struggling with, and victorious over evil, had been exhibited on earth before. The idea was imperfectly exhibited in the sufferings of Israel regarded as typical of Christ. In Christ alone is

it perfectly presented. So also that wondrous chapter, the fifty-third of Isaiah, justly describing both, belongs in its entireness to Christ: He therefore adopted these words as His own.

The last personal ejaculation of our Redeemer was, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." We take this in connection with the preceding; for if we do not, the two will be unintelligible, but taking them together, it becomes plain that the darkness of the Redeemer's mind was but momentary. For a moment the Redeemer felt alone and deserted, and then, in the midst of it, He cried out, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." In that moment He realized His inseparable union with the Father.

And now I would observe, if I may do it without being misunderstood, that the Redeemer speaks as if not knowing where He was going," Into Thy hands," that is sufficient. It is as well to look at these things as simply as possible. Do not confuse the mind with attempting to draw the distinction between the human and the Divine. He speaks here as if His human soul, like ours, entered into the dark unknown, not seeing what was to be in the Hereafter: and this is Faith, or, if it were not so, there arises an idea from which we shrink, as if He were speaking words He did not feel. We know nothing of the world beyond, we are like children; even revelation has told us almost nothing concerning this, and an inspired Apostle says, “We know not yet what we shall be." Then rises Faith, and dares to say, "My Father, I know nothing, but, be where I may, still I am with Thee." "Into Thy hands I commend my spirit." Therefore, and only therefore, do we dare to die.

We pass on, secondly, to the consideration of those utterances which our Master spake as the Saviour of the world. The first is," Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." From this expression we infer two things; first, that sin needs forgiveness; and secondly, that forgiveness can be granted.

Sin needs forgiveness, or the Redeemer would not