dergo

Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of the creature?

And may it not have been God's coming closer than ever to the Son of His
love, or rather the Son's coming closer to the Father, as He entirely
shared and expressed God's own sympathy and conscience, and was made
perfect by the things which He suffered, that wrought in His sinless
soul the awful blackness of the feeling of abandonment?

In the sense of suffering sin's force, of conscientiously accepting its
burden, of sensitively sympathizing with the guilty, Jesus bore sin in
His own body on the tree.

And, as we stand facing the Crucified, we cannot escape a sense of
personal connection with that tragedy. The solidarity of the human
family in all its generations has been brought home to us in countless
ways by modern teachers; we are members one of another, and as we scan
the cross this is a family catastrophe in which the actors are our
kinsmen, and the blood of the Victim stains us as sharers of our
brothers' crime. And, further, as we look into the motives of Christ's
murderers--devout Pharisee and conservative Sadducee, Roman politician
and false friend, bawling rabble and undiscriminating soldiery, the host
of indifferent or approving faces of the public behind them--they seem
strangely familiar to us. They have been, they are still, alive by turns
in us. The harmless spark of electricity that greets the touch of one's
hand on a metal knob on a winter's day is one with the bolt of lightning
that wrecks a giant oak. The selfish impulse, the narrow prejudice, the
ignorant suspicion, the callous indifference, the self-satisfied
respectability, which frequently dominate us and determine our
decisions, are one with that cruel combination of motives which drove
the nails in the hands and feet of the Son of God. Still further, the
suffering of Jesus never seems to an acute conscience something that
happened once, but is over now. The Figure that hung and bled on the
tree centuries ago becomes indissolubly joined in our thought with every
life today that is the victim of similar misunderstanding and neglect,
injustice and brutality; and, while our sense of social responsibility
charges us with complicity in all the wrong and woe of our brethren,
that haunting Form on Calvary hangs before our eyes, and

Makes me feel it was my sin,
As though no other sin there were,
That was to Him who bears the world
A load that He could scarcely be