(with Matthew 27:46)
I. What an argument of fleshly reasoning might be wrought out of the fact that through all history nothing is commoner than for the soul of man to be intensely suffering and praying agonizingly without relief, without answer, all day and all night lifting anxious eyes to the heavens, and God and heaven in apparent indifference! Think of your observing silence towards a son or a daughter when overwhelmed with distress, and of your maintaining silence, not through one midnight, but years of midnights. And yet the lesson comes down from heaven to us, "Whatsoever ye would that others should do to you, do ye even so to them." We are compelled to answer, "O Heaven, do to us as we would desire to do to you if we were up there and you were down here."
II. The cry of the race is the cry of Jesus, and the cry of Jesus is the cry of the race. It is the cry of the best men. Only in the best of the best does the soul sufficiently recover itself to become at all aware of its situation. A few tender men in each generation, men of pure desire and loftiest aspiration, attain to the Divine distress. In the Lord Jesus the Divine-human distress reached its height, and in Him we see that the distress is a condition of the Divine-human victory.
III. If in extremity the cry of Christ was as if unheeded, shall we despair when left to suffer on and pray on without deliverance for an answer? What did Christ say? "Into Thy hands I commend My spirit." There is the example for us. I give myself up to Him that begat me. What then? The last breath of the material form. What then? Resurrection in a higher form: humanity through its wildest, blackest night, fresh from the hands of God, in the new morning of immortal hope.
IV. As soon as any member of our race perceives that the world-form of his nature is his humiliation, and the soul within him begins to suffer, because God is so far from his consciousness these are the best evidences that we can have that his soul is advancing in regeneration and being rapidly prepared for uniting with God. God's nearness makes him feel that the world-form of his nature is too dark, too painful, a house for him to inherit. He is on the eve therefore of exchanging houses, his earthly house for the new house which is from heaven.
J. Pulsford, Our Deathless Hope,p. 92.
I. There are feelings and instincts in human nature the very antiquity of which is a proof of their universal reality. Foremost among such instincts is the aching sense of severance between man and the Infinite Being outside and above himself. Long before the Hebrew Psalmist, Indians, and Egyptians, and savage races beyond the pale of even primitive civilisation had been, with varying accents, uttering the same lament; and Greek tragedians, and Roman Stoics, and mediaeval monks and mystics, and all the voices of modern poets and philosophers have been echoing incessantly, with however strange a dissonance, the eternal cry of humanity, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
II. It is upon this universal sense of severance that the spiritual life of Christianity depends. You may never have dreamed of saying to yourself, "My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God;" but you are athirst for finite objects, with a thirst which upon analysis will turn out to be infinite, both in quality and kind, and which therefore nothing short of an infinite object can ever satisfy. (1) Take, for instance, your desire for communion with the natural world. You desire infinite possession of, and infinite communion with, the grandeur, and the beauty, and the wonder of the world; and failing, you feel bitterly that it is your prison, and not your home. (2) It is the same with your human relations. Man will not be satisfied with family, or friendship, or acquaintance. Fresh vistas of humanity are ever opening before him, and each new friend becomes a new point of departure for the extension of his influence to a wider circle still. His motive may vary, but the instinct remains the same, and is simply the instinct to wider, deeper, more intense communion with his fellow-men. And yet, as before, its very unrest is but the measure of its failure. We are more severed from humanity than ever we were from external nature, and if the world is our prison, our fellow-men are our gaolers. (3) And so in our loneliness we look within and try to find refuge in an ideal world, but only to find schism and severance in the recesses of our inmost being. We are farther off from our ideals than even from nature and mankind.
III. All this is a fact, and a fact as universal as human experience; and Christianity, beyond other creeds, has faced and interpreted the fact. Nature, and society, and the thoughts of our hearts were created by a Person, and created for Himself; and our feelings of separation from the world and its inhabitants, and even from the inner vision of our own ideal self, are but symptoms of alienation from the Person in whom they exist.
IV. Because God is a Person, He cannot be contented with the abstract allegiance of one part of our nature. He claims our being in its wholeness, and says, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." This command is, on the face of it, a paradox. But obey, give God your love, and the paradox will pass into a truism, for you will find that you possess Him in whom all things lovely have their being.
J. R. Illingworth, Sermons Preached in a College Chapel,p. 77.
References: Psalms 22:1. Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 106; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. x., p. 149; T. Birkett Dover, A Lent Manual,p. 128. Psalms 22:7. Ibid.,p. 145; Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 105.Psalms 22:8. Ibid., Sermons,vol. xxx., No. 1767. Psalms 22:9; Psalms 22:10. J. Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year: Christmas to Epiphany,p. 139. Psalms 22:11. H. P. Liddon, Old Testament Outlines,p. 104.Psalms 22:13. J. Baines, Sermons,p. 60. Psalms 22:14. Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 103.Psalms 22:15. Preacher's Monthly,vol. vii., p. 378. Psalms 22:20. H. J. Wilmot Buxton, The Children's Bread,p. 26.Psalms 22:22; Psalms 22:23. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xiv., No. 799.