were
needed; either without the other would have been incomplete. Many a
British soldier has died as brave a death as Jesus, but none have ever
lived the life of Jesus. The life and death together were a perfect
self-offering, the offering of the unit to the whole, the individual to
the race, the Son to the Father, and therefore the greatest
manifestation of the innermost of God that has ever been made to the
world. It makes the sacrifice unreal to speak of it as though Jesus
knew the end from the beginning and foresaw every stage in the
programme before He came to it. He did not; He shrank from the
shameful end just as we should have done, and prayed to God to save Him
from it. An immense amount of pious nonsense has been spoken and
written about our Lord's agony in Gethsemane. We have been told that
in this dreadful hour the sorrow of Jesus bore no relation to his
physical death, but was caused by His mysterious self-identification
with all the sins of mankind, past, present, and to come. To add to
the horror God the Father turned His face away from Him, treating Him
as though He were indeed the embodiment of all the guilt of mankind,
the scapegoat driven into the wilderness. I have never been able to
read this kind of thing without an inner protest against the unreality
of it; it precludes the possibility of understanding Jesus or entering
sympathetically into an experience in which to a greater or less degree
every noble soul has sooner or later to share with Him. The only way
to explain Gethsemane is to approach it from the purely human point of
view, as we have already done with the causes which led up to the
crucifixion. Let us try to put ourselves in the sufferer's place, a
perfectly legitimate and right thing to do. How would any of us have
felt in the circumstances of Jesus? Suppose that you had laboured
consistently and whole-heartedly, in season and out of season, to get
men to realise their divine sonship and live the life that is life
indeed. Suppose you had seen your hopes perish one by one, and that
materialism, selfishness, and hypocrisy seemed to have become all the
stronger for your protest. Suppose you saw evil gathering head against
you, that you found yourself left utterly alone, and that even God
seemed to be silent in this hour of tragic failure. Here are your
enemies triumphant at the gate, thirsting for your blood. Beyond that
gate, betrayal, torture, and public shame are waiting