THE SACRING OF PAIN
‘The whole creation … travaileth in pain.’
It is held that pain came in with sin; and will go out with sin. This, however, is to be taken with certain reservations.
I. The relationship between sin and suffering is a general one.—We are deterred by the language of our Lord Himself from tracing the links between particular sufferings and individual sins.
II. The fact of pre-Adamite death being revealed, revealed also is pre-Adamite decay; and it is hard to accept this fact without considering that it includes the presence of physical pain: hence we appear forced to hold, that pain was in the world before sin; and consequently that it became a natural consequence of man sharing in the mortality which was before and around him, that he should also share in the pain physically inseparable from mortality.
III. Vicarious pain.—A shallow divinity has attacked the doctrine of the Cross, on the ground that it is an exhibition of injustice. If it be, then all terrestrial life is a wider exhibition of injustice, for it starts from vicarious pain, and is sustained by it. Wherever we turn, we encounter the working of this great law of sacrifice. The Cross, instead of colliding with the natural order, is but the culmination of the vicarious suffering of which the world is full. If, then, we cannot live this life save through the loss, the pain, of others, it is at least in harmony with this fact that we cannot attain to the next save by the same means.
IV. Whatever Jesus Christ touched or utilised, He consecrated.—He has consecrated life by accepting it. He has consecrated death by dying. He has consecrated tears by shedding them. He has consecrated burdens by bearing them. And pain, too, has been consecrated, for He has felt it—felt it in its extremest forms; and none may think their own has not been embraced within the compass of His. The sufferers of earth’s suffering family have something of sacredness about them. If in nothing else, they have fellowship with the Man of Sorrows through theirs; the pinched face of want, the drawn face of physical anguish, the furrowed face of care, have something of a halo round them; and an angel’s eye may see the nimbus though we may not.
—Bishop A. Pearson.
Illustration
‘Pain is a worker, pleasure an idler, in God’s universe. As one has said: “The pleasures of each generation evaporate in air; it is their pains that increase the spiritual momentum of the world.” ’