We hear much discussion about prayer and its possibilities,--what we can pray for and what G.o.d can do in return, and what is the true answer to prayer. But what a silence comes over all such questionings when one notices that this prayer of Jesus uttered thus {157} in this most solemn hour was not, in the sense of these discussions, answered by his G.o.d. It was the moment of the supreme agony of Christ. The falseness of friends, the blindness of his people, the malice of their leaders,--all these things seem more than he can bear. "Let this cup pa.s.s from me," he prays, and, behold, his prayer is not accepted, and what he asks is denied, and the cup is to be drunk. And yet in a far deeper sense his, prayer is answered. "Thy will be done," he prays,--not in spite of me, or over me, but through me. Make me, my Father, the instrument of thy will; and so praying he rises with absolute composure and kingly authority, and goes out with his prayer answered to do that will.
What should we pray for? Why, we should pray for what we most deeply want. There is no sincerity in praying for things which are fict.i.tious or abstract or mere theological blessings. Open to G.o.d the realities of your heart and seek the blessings which you sincerely desire. But in all prayers desire most to know the will of G.o.d toward you, and to do it. Prayer is not offered to deflect G.o.d"s will to yours, but to adjust your will to His. When a ship"s captain is setting out on a {158} voyage he first of all adjusts his compa.s.ses, corrects their divergence, and counteracts the influences which draw the needle from the pole. Well, that is prayer. It is the adjustment of the compa.s.s of the soul, it is its restoration from deflection, it is the pointing of it to the will of G.o.d. And the soul which thus sails forth into the sea of life finds itself--not indeed freed from all storms of the spirit, but at least sure of its direction through them all.
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LXIV
AN IMPOSSIBLE NEUTRALITY
_John_ xviii. 28-38.
(Pa.s.sION DAY--FRIDAY)
The story of Friday in this last week of Jesus begins with this meeting with the Roman governor, and certainly few persons in history would be more surprised than Pilate at the judgment of the world concerning him.
If Pilate felt sure of anything it was that he did not commit himself in the case of Jesus. He undertook to be absolutely neutral. See how nicely he poises his judgment. On the one hand he says: "I find no fault in him," and then on the other hand he says: "Take him away and crucify him;" First he washes his hands to show that he is innocent of the blood of this just person, and then he delivers Jesus to the Jews to take him away. It was a fine balancing of a judicial mind, and I suppose he withdrew from the judgment hall saying to himself: "Whatever may happen in this case, at least I am not responsible." But what does history think {160} of this judicial Pilate? It holds him to be a responsible agent in the death of Jesus. He was attempting a neutrality which was impossible. The great wind was blowing across the threshing floor of the nation, and the people were separated into two distinct heaps, and must be counted forever as chaff or as wheat. He that was not with Christ was against him, and Pilate"s place, even in spite of himself, was determined as among those who brought Jesus to his cross that afternoon.
I was once talking with a cultivated gentleman who volunteered to tell me his att.i.tude toward religion. He wished me to understand that he was in sympathy with the purposes and the administration of worship.
He desired that it should prevail. He welcomed its usefulness in the university. But as for himself it appeared better that he should hold a position of neutrality. His responsibility seemed to him better met by standing neither for religion nor against it, but in a perfectly judicial frame of mind. He did not take account, however, of the fact that this neutrality was impossible; that it was just what Pilate attempted, and just wherein he failed. If he {161} was not to be counted among those who would by their presence encourage worship, then he must be counted among those who by their absence hinder its effect.
On one side or other in these great issues of life every man"s weight is to be thrown, and the Pilates of to-day--as of that earlier time--in their impossible neutrality are often the most insidious, although most unconscious opponents of a generous cause.
And so to-day on this most solemn anniversary of religious history, while it is, as the pa.s.sage says of this interview with Pilate, "yet early," let us set before ourselves, the issue just as it is now and just as it was then. This morning demands of any honest-minded man an answer to the question: "On which side do I propose to stand?" It is not a demand for absoluteness of conviction or unwavering loyalty, but it is a summons to recognize that Jesus Christ died on this day largely at the hands of intellectual dilettanteism and indifferentism,--the peculiar and besetting sin of the cultivated and academic life. On which side, then, do I propose to stand; with the cultivated neutral and his skillful {162} questioning: What is truth? or with the prisoner who in this early morning says: "Every one who is of the truth heareth my voice;" with Pilate in his neutrality or with Jesus on his cross?
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LXV
THE FINISHED LIFE
_John_ xix. 30.
(Pa.s.sION WEEK--SAt.u.r.dAY)
The last word of Jesus as he gives up his spirit is: "It is finished."
But was it what could be called a finished life? Was it not, on the contrary, a terribly unfinished life, prematurely cut short, without any visible effect of his work, and with everything left to live for?
Surely, if some sympathetic friend of Jesus had been telling of his death, one of the first things he would be tempted to say would be this: "What a fearful pity it was that he died so soon! What a loss it was to us all that he left his life unfinished. Think what might have happened if he could only have lived to sixty and had had thirty years for his ministry instead of three!" And yet, as Jesus said, it was a finished life; for completeness in life is not a thing of quant.i.ty, but of quality. What seems to be a fragment may be in reality the most perfect thing on earth. You stand in {164} some museum before a Greek statue, imperfect, mutilated, a fragment of what it was meant to be.
And yet, as you look at it, you say: "Here is perfect art. It is absolutely right; the ideal which modern art may imitate, but which it never hopes to attain." Or, what again shall we say of those young men of our civil war, dying at twenty-five at the head of their troops, pouring out all the promise of their life in one splendid instant? Did they then die prematurely? Was not their life a finished life? What more could they ever have done with it? Why do we write their names on our monuments so that our young men may read of these heroes, except that they may say to us that life may be completed, if one will, even at twenty? All of life that is worth living is sometimes offered to a man not in a lifetime, but in a day.
And that is what any man must set before him as the test and the plan of his own life. You cannot say to yourself: "I will live until I am seventy, I will accomplish certain things, and will attain a certain position;" for the greatest and oldest of men when they look back on their lives see in them only a fragment of what they once dreamed that they {165} might do or be. But you can design your life, not according to quant.i.tative completeness, but according to qualitative completeness. It may be long or short, but in either case it may be of the right stuff. It may be carved out of pure marble with an artist"s hand, and then, whether the whole of it remains to be a thing of beauty or whether it is broken off, like a fragment of its full design, it is a finished life. You give back your life to G.o.d who gave it, perhaps in ripe old age, perhaps, as your Master did, at thirty-three, and you say: "I have accomplished, not what I should like to have done, but what Thou hast given me to do. I have done my best. It is finished.
Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."
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LXVI
ATTAINING TO THE RESURRECTION
_Philippians_ iii. 11.
(MONDAY AFTER EASTER)
This is certainly a very extraordinary saying of St. Paul--that he hopes to attain unto the resurrection from the dead. We are so apt to think of the resurrection as a remote truth, to be realized in some distant future, when some day we shall die and live again, that the very idea of attaining to such a resurrection now is not easy to grasp.
But here we have a resurrection which can be attained any day. "I have not already attained," says St. Paul, "but I press on." It is possible, that is to say, for a man to-day, who seems perfectly healthy, to be dying or dead, and for a man to rise from the dead to-day and attain to the resurrection.
And thus the fundamental question of the Easter season is not: "Do I believe that people when they die shall rise again from the dead?" but it is "Have I risen from the dead {167} myself?" "Am I alive to-day, with any touch of the eternal life?" Mr. Ruskin describes a grim Scythian custom where, when the king died, he was set on his throne at the head of his table, and his va.s.sals, instead of mourning for him, bowed before his corpse and feasted in his presence. That same ghastly scene is sometimes repeated now, and young men think they are sitting at a feast, when they are really sitting at a funeral, and believe themselves to be, as they say, "seeing life," when they are in reality looking upon the death of all that is true and fair. And on the other hand the most beautiful thing which is permitted for any one to see is the resurrection of a human soul from the dead, its deliverance from shame and sin, its pa.s.sing from death into life. As the father of the prodigal said of his boy, he was dead and is alive again, and in that coming to his true self he attains, as surely as he ever can in any future world, unto the resurrection from the dead.
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LXVII
SIMON OF CYRENE
_Luke_ xxiii. 20-26.
This Simon, the Cyrenian, was just a plain man, coming into town on his own business, and meeting at the gate this turbulent group surging out toward the place of crucifixion, with the malefactor in their midst.
Suddenly Simon finds himself turned about in his own journey, swept back by the crowd with the cross of another man on his shoulder, and the humiliation forced upon him which there seemed no reason for him to bear.
How often that happens in many a life! You are going your own way, carrying your own load, and suddenly you are called on to take up some one else"s burden,--a strange cross, a home responsibility, a business duty; and you find yourself turned square round in the road you meant to go. Your plan of life is interrupted by no fault of your own, and you are summoned to bear an undeserved and unexpected cross.
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And yet, how certain it is that this man of Cyrene came to look back on this interruption of his journey as the one thing he would not have missed? When others were remembering the wonderful career of Jesus, how often he must have said: "Yes, but I once had the unapproached privilege of bearing his cross for him. On one golden morning of my life I was permitted to share his suffering. I was called from all my own hopes and plans to take up this burden of another, and I did not let it drop. It seemed a grievous burden, but it has become my crowning joy. I did not know then, but I know now, that my day of humiliation was my day of highest blessedness.
"I think of the Cyrenian Who crossed the city-gate, When forth the stream was pouring That bore thy cruel fate.
"I ponder what within him The thoughts that woke that day As his unchosen burden He bore that unsought way.
"Yet, tempted he as we are!
O Lord, was thy cross mine?
Am I, like Simon, bearing A burden that is thine?
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"Thou must have looked on Simon; Turn, Lord, and look on me Till I shall see and follow And bear thy cross for Thee." [1]