t eagerly ministered to, untouched by any woe, and at last
passing away by a painless decease, we should find it much harder to
respond to His appeal or even to understand His work. Nothing so quickly
rivets our attention and stirs our sympathy as physical pain. We feel
disposed to listen to the demands of one who is suffering, and if we
have a lurking suspicion that we are somehow responsible for that
suffering and are benefited by it, then we are softened by a mingled
pity, admiration, and shame, which is one of the fittest attitudes a
human spirit can assume.

Besides, it is through the visible suffering we can read the willingness
of Christ's self-surrender. It was always more difficult for Him to
suffer than for us. We have no option: He might have rescued Himself at
any moment. We, in suffering, have but to subdue our disposition to
murmur and our sense of pain: He had to subdue what was much more
obstinate--His consciousness that He might if He pleased abjure the life
that involved pain. The strain upon His love for us was not once for all
over when He became man. He Himself intimates, and His power of working
miracles proves, that at each point of His career He might have saved
Himself from suffering, but would not.

When we ask ourselves what we are to make of these sufferings of Christ,
we naturally seek aid from the Evangelist and ask what he made of them.
But on reading his narrative we are surprised to find so little comment
or reflection interrupting the simple relation of facts. At first sight
the narrative seems to flow uninterruptedly on, and to resemble the
story which might be told of the closing scenes of an ordinary life
terminating tragically. The references to Old Testament prophecy alone
give us the clue to John's thoughts about the significance of this
death. These references show us that he considered that in this public
execution, conducted wholly by Roman soldiers, who could not read a word
of Hebrew and did not know the name of the God of the Jews, there was
being fulfilled the purpose of God towards which all previous history
had been tending. That purpose of God in the history of man was
accomplished when Jesus breathed His last upon the cross. The cry "It is
finished" was not the mere gasp of a worn-out life; it was not the cry
of satisfaction with which a career of pain and sorrow is terminated: it
was the deliberate utterance of a clear consciousness on the part of
God's appointed Reve