The Helpless Christ

"If thou be the Son of God, come down from the Cross" (Matthew 27:40)

YOU will recognize at once the similarity that unites these words with the words spoken to our Lord at the temptation in the wilderness: "If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread." And the unmistakable implication of the very form of the speech is, "if you do not come down from the Cross, you are not the Son of God." For why should the Son of God be afflicted with the pangs of hunger, and why, still more, should He endure all the horrors of the Cross?

You will observe the source from which the word comes in the first instance.  It was the devil who first said, "If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread." You may affirm with absolute certainty that the word here proceeds from the same source.  The devil can speak through the lips of men, even of priests and rulers.  If we are to trust this record, we must believe that he can speak through the lips, for the time being, of an Apostle.  When our Lord first announced plainly to His disciples the necessity for the Cross, we read that Simon Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, "That be far from Thee, Lord; this shall never be unto Thee," Then He rebuked Peter, saying, "Get thee behind me, Satan." I read farther on still that the devil entered into Judas.  So it would seem that a man who is in the company of Jesus needs to beware lest he become a channel of diabolical sentiments and a medium of temptation to others.  There is nothing more certain than that anti-Christian sentiments can be uttered from Christian pulpits, and that the same sentiments may prevail in a community that is called Christian.  It has happened before now that a Church has been the abode of bitterness, envy, and malice, and all uncharitableness, and has breathed these forth from its pulpit.  And they are all devilish, and not one of them is of God.  We all need to watch our hearts and our lips lest such spirit possess us and such words escape from us.

Not only is there a similarity between the words of the text and the words of the temptation in the wilderness, but no one can look on the scene described in these verses round about my text without feeling how truly diabolical it is.  It is an awful revelation of the lengths to which religious jealousy and bigotry will lead men; nay, rather to what depths of hideous malignity and depravity of hate and cruelty.

There is something positively fiendish in the glee with which these men mock the sufferings of the silent Christ upon the cross.  Even if our Lord had been as bad as they tried to believe and as they affirmed, their conduct would have still been shocking and revolting.  To exult in the sufferings even of the very worst, and to mock and taunt in his sufferings, is so entirely removed from the Christian spirit that it may be truthfully termed devilish.  The murderous spite and malice of the chief priests and scribes and elders who mock the suffering Christ on the Cross are a startling revelation of the depths of wickedness into which men can sink. I have not, however, to preach about that.  I have rather to call your attention to the sentiment and substance of the taunts which they flung in the face of the august and holy Sufferer.  "If He be the Son of' God, He will come down.  If He be the King of Israel, let Him come down and we will believe.  If He saved others, He can surely save Himself." And because He does none of these, because He does not escape from the hands into which their treachery and false swearing have placed Him, He is not what He professed to be. If God does not deliver Him now it can only be that He has no delight in Him.  That is the sentiment uttered in wicked, malignant spite about the cross of Calvary.

The question is whether the same sentiment is not held by people who are not the enemies of Christ - whether indeed, if one had searched the mind and heart of the disciples and Apostles of the Lord he would not have found it lurking there.  I think he would.  It was surely the thought expressed in Simon Peter's remonstrance.  It could never be that the Christ, the Son of the living God, as be had just confessed Him, should submit to suffering and be allowed to Suffer.  And everybody who reads the gospel narrative can see that the fact of the suffering and the death of our Lord bewildered the Apostles and dealt a shattering blow at their faith and confidence in their Master.  One of the theories explanatory of the treachery of Judas is that he believed that his Master would by miraculous power deliver Himself from the clutches of His enemies .. that He allowed Himself to be taken and mocked and scourged without resistance was a bewildering and an insoluble mystery to the Apostles.

Apart from the anger and the brutal malice, it might almost be said that they caught the spirit of the murderers of their Master.  Why should He submit?  Why should He allow the triumph of His foes?  Why, by some striking and dramatic act, did He not vindicate Himself?  Was not the fact that He did not do so a proof that He was not what they had thought Him, that He was no more divine than the rest of men?  The language of the two men on the walk to Emmaus seems to bear that out.  Their faith is all in the past tense: "We trusted that it had been He who should have redeemed Israel," and the implication of that word is that they trusted no longer.  The Son of Man came back from the grave and found no faith on the earth.  His sufferings and death had been the suffering and the death of the faith of His friends.

Now one wonders whether we have got beyond the sentiment!

Are we not pained and puzzled when righteous people are made to suffer, when good people are stricken down with misfortune or affliction?  Are we not continually oppressed by what we call the mystery of it?  Why does not God hear prayer?  Why does He not deliver from pain?  Why does He not spare some precious life?  Why does the Titanic go down? etc.

Have we not some sort of theory that it pays to be righteous, that the way of obedience to the will of God means a pleasant path; and when the contrary happens, does not your faith weaken and sometimes reel under the strain?  And are there not people who set about explaining the mystery?  Either they say there is no God, or He would never allow people to suffer as they do.  Or else under other circumstances we say these people are not good; they only seem to be.  We fall back on the ancient philosophy of Job's friends, and say that when a man suffers there must be some secret wrong in his life.

Had we not a saying in our boyish games which expressed the belief in which we had been trained, that cheats never prosper? And yet they often did prosper.  Were we not brought up in the belief that righteousness was sure to succeed and that honesty was the best policy?  And yet events occasionally went to show that righteousness sometimes failed, and honesty occasionally got people into disastrous trouble.  Was not the teaching wrong?  Should it not have been that cheating, however it might succeed, is a despicable and loathsome business, which is branded with God's displeasure, and which degrades and ruins the soul?  And that honesty and righteousness are eternally noble and beautiful - so noble and beautiful and producing such inward peace that they are worth any amount of suffering? I would not pretend for a moment that there is not a deep mystery here, nor would I pretend that I can solve it.  But at least let it be affirmed that the Bible nowhere teaches that righteousness shall not suffer.  Religion is nowhere in the Bible a vast insurance society in which, if a man pays premiums of offerings and beliefs, he shall find shelter from the sufferings that ordinary humanity endures.  Nowhere is God represented as bribing men into His service by rewards of material prosperity and immunity from pain and adversity.  Certainly our Lord never made such an offer to men.  And most certainly His apostles had no such reward.  Their service to Him, their hottest fidelity to Him, from a worldly point of view, was the worst policy.  It brought them hardship, suffering, misfortune, and persecution which they might otherwise have escaped.  And their teaching was, "Through much tribulation" - not through ease and comfort - the Kingdom of God must be entered.

Why, surely the problem of the suffering of goodness that vexes many minds is concentrated and accentuated in the case of our Lord.  You may think for a moment of the solemn scene in the Garden of Gethsemane.  What would you say of one in an agony of soul too deep for utterance crying to be delivered, and no deliverance coming, of all the horror and shame of the cross intensified by the malignant mocking of coarse and brutal men, until the Sufferer cries, "My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" If you had been present with your belief in the doctrine of a God of tender mercy who hears prayer and who delivers the needy when he crieth, would you not have been blinded by the mystery?  Have you not, in the experience of our Lord, precisely those things which today make men doubt and even deny God?  Is it not the spirit expressed here, "If thou be the Son of God, come down from the Cross"?

But is not the real fact here, after all, that because He is the Son of God He cannot come down from the cross, He cannot save Himself?  He never does; He never uses His Divine powers for His own ends, to succor or to defend Himself.  Fidelity to God will never, until the world is redeemed, mean escapement from suffering.  It will never mean a smooth path. There is no doubt whatever that men suffer for their sins, and that is the bitterness of suffering.  There is also no doubt that they suffer for righteousness' sake; and if we were more righteous and faithful we might suffer still more, but in that suffering there should be no bitterness, but only joy.  That at least is the teaching as well as the example of our Lord.

The Son of God cannot come down from the Cross.  And no one will question today that it was a greater thing to endure the cross than to come down from it; a far greater thing to pray for the forgiveness of His enemies than to smite them with destruction. Suppose He had come down from the Cross.  Suppose that miracle had happened.  Would it have served any great or permanent purpose?  Would the men who taunted Him really have believed on Him?  Would they not rather have set afoot some new scheme for entangling and killing Him?  And would not the greatest lesson of the Cross, not to speak of its deepest work, have been lost to humanity?  Is it not true that the purpose of God could never have been fulfilled apart from the sufferings of the Cross, and may not the parallel hold good in your case and mine?

Further it is clear that the Cross is the way to the overwhelming triumph of the Son of God.  It was the way, and the only way, to the conquest of sin and death - the two grand foes of men.  It proves that there is a soul of man that cannot be killed or even touched by the most fiendish malice.  It conquers where it seems to be defeated.  "Fear not," our Lord had said, "them that kill the body but cannot kill the soul." The soul triumphs where the body is defeated.

Moreover, the Cross of our Lord is a standing example of the fact that evil and injustice perpetually overreach themselves.  They are the very worst weapons that can be used.  Even if your cause be right you have no right to use them.  You give even wrong a new lease of life if you treat it with violence and injustice.

Make even a wicked man a martyr and you inevitably advance his cause.  Let Protestantism in this country or any other turn an intolerant and persecuting hand on Romanism, and that which was intended to crush and destroy will renew and strengthen.  And that is much more true where the persecuted man or cause is right and not wrong.  The wrong done recoils sooner or later on the head of the wrong doer. And on the other hand it cannot be questioned that men have conquered by endurance, and have won their victories through sufferings.

The men who have been made true sons of God through their union with Christ and likeness to Him have refused to come down from the Cross, to be bribed or threatened from the path of suffering, or to put an end to their suffering by recanting their faith or denying their conviction; and they have been the people who have ever won the greatest victories for the truth; while those who, to avoid suffering, have betrayed the truth, have ever been its greatest foes.  It is not the man who can strike back a hard, retaliating blow, but the man who can endure and forgive, who has rendered the greatest service to the cause of God.

I do not doubt for a moment from my reading of the history of the Christian Church that the cause of our Lord has been advanced by suffering far more than by any other means.  "Be of good cheer" said one of the Oxford martyrs to his companion as they were burning at the stake. "Be of good cheer, brother Ridley, we shall this day light such a candle in England as by the grace of God shall never be put out." It is true of many of the servants of Christ in their measure, as of their Master, for the sufferings of death they have been crowned with glory and honor.  It is even so expressed by the pen of St. Paul, "If we suffer with Him we shall also reign with Him." What is the last word?  I speak to people who have found trouble, whose feet are on a thorny way; and our whole natural impulse is to avoid trouble of every sort and to rebel when it befalls us to talk about the "hard lines" and the nuisance, especially when other people's faults and follies impose a burden upon us.  Here is the counsel of the natural man and of the worldly spirit: "Come down from the Cross if YOU can." Whatever You do, steer clear of trouble.  Avoid the burden, Put it on somebody else - on people who deserve it if you can, but on anybody; you take the easiest possible path.  Take care of yourself.

The New Testament says, deny yourself; take up Your Cross, be willing to be crucified with Christ. Suffering is not purposeless, and the Cross of the Christian will no more be in vain than the Cross of the Lord.  Strange as the mystery may seem, it is true still that the way of ease and self protection is the way of barrenness and death, and the way of the Cross is the way of redemption and of life everlasting.  "He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it, and shall keep it unto life eternal."

That is the word of Christ, and is a part of the eternal truth that endureth for ever.