attempt to move the body from the one
intolerable posture caused pains to shoot along the quivering nerves.
Bodily suffering clouds the brain and distorts the images formed on the
mirror of the mind. Even the face of God, reflected there, may be
turned to a shape of terror by the fumes of physical trouble.

The horror of mortal suffering may have been greater to Jesus than to
other men, because of the fineness and sensitiveness of His physical
organization. His body had never been coarsened with sin, and
therefore death was utterly alien to it. The stream of physical life,
which is one of the precious gifts of God, had poured through His frame
in abundant and sunny tides. But now it was being withdrawn, and the
counterflow had set in. The unity of a perfect nature was being
violently torn asunder; and He felt Himself drifting away from the
living world, which to Him had been so full of God's presence and
goodness, into the pale, cold regions of inanity.[2] He did not belong
to death; yet He was falling into death's grasp. No angel came to
rescue Him; God interposed with no miracle to arrest the issue; He was
abandoned to His fate.

There was more, however, it is easy to see, in the agony which prompted
this cry than the merely physical. If in Gethsemane we have the effort
of the will of Jesus, as it raised itself into unity with the will of
the Father, we here see the effort of His mind as, amidst the confusion
and contradictions of the cross, it finally rose into unity with the
mind of God. This intellectual character of His pain is indicated by
the word "Why." It is always painful when the creature has to say Why
to the Creator. We believe that He is Sovereign of the world and Guide
of our destiny, and that He urges forward the course of things in the
reins of infinite wisdom and love. But, while this is the habitual and
healthy sense of the human mind, especially when it is truly religious,
there are crises, both in the great and in the little world, when faith
fails. The world is out of joint; everything appears to have gone
wrong; the reins seem to have slipped out of the hands of God and the
chariot to be plunging forward uncontrolled; the course of things seems
no more to be presided over by reason, but by a blind, if not a cruel
fate. It is then that the poor human mind cries out Why. The entire
book of Job is such a cry. Jeremiah cried Why to God in terms of
startling boldness. In mortal pain,