n who can no longer use the apparatus of the living, and
congratulating themselves on the profit they make by his death. How
furious have old men sometimes been made by any betrayal of eagerness on
the part of their heirs! Even to calculate on a man's death and make
arrangements for filling his place is justly esteemed indecorous and
unfeeling. To ask a sick man for anything he has been accustomed to use,
and must use again if he recovers health, is an act which only an
indelicate nature could be guilty of. It was a cruel addition, then, to
our Lord's suffering to see these men heartlessly dividing among them
all He had to leave. It forced on His mind the consciousness of their
utter indifference to His feelings. His clothes were of some little
value to them: He Himself of no value. Nothing could have made Him feel
more separated from the world of the living--from their hopes, their
ways, their life--as if already He were dead and buried.

This distribution of His clothes was also calculated to make Him
intensely sensible of the reality and finality of death. Jesus knew He
was to rise again; but let us not forget that Jesus was human, liable to
the same natural fears, and moved by the same circumstances as
ourselves. He knew He was to rise again; but how much easier had it been
to believe in that future life had all the world been expecting Him to
rise! But here were men showing that they very well knew He would never
again need these clothes of His.

A comparison of this narrative with the other Gospels brings out that
the words "I thirst" must have been uttered immediately after the
fearful cry "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" For when the
soldier was mercifully pressing the sponge steeped in vinegar to His
parched lips, some of the bystanders called out, "Let be: let us see
whether Elias will come to save Him," referring to the words of Jesus,
which they had not rightly understood. And this expression of bodily
suffering is proof that the severity of the spiritual struggle was over.
So long as that deep darkness covered His spirit He was unconscious of
His body; but with the agonised cry to His Father the darkness had
passed away; the very uttering of His desolation had disburdened His
spirit, and at once the body asserts itself. As in the wilderness at the
opening of His career He had been for many days so agitated and absorbed
in mind that He did not once think of food, but no sooner was the
spiritual