pub J.M. Dent, 1913
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THE Transfiguration, we have said, marks in Jesus the climax of the "illuminated" life; the full flowering of the separated spiritual consciousness. It marks the achievement in Him, under conditions completely human, of a Transcendent Life, so unique and so clearly exhibited as to call forth Peter's great confession that here was no "prophet" but a new creation — Divine Humanity, the "son" of the Living God.
But the Mystic Way is no steady unhindered progress, no merely joyful and unchecked appropriation of more abundant life. Wherever it is developed in connection with human nature, the limits and oppositions of human nature will make themselves felt. Already the first sign of that great reaction, that bitter period of suffering and apparent failure which is experienced by every soul in its growth towards Reality, had shown itself within this pattern life. The declaration of that "Kingdom" not found "here" nor "there," but nesting in the very heart of extistence, its triumphant establishment for the inner circle of initiates, the "Children of the Bridegroom," living upon high levels of joy and breathing the very atmosphere of God — this steady growth of power had nearly reached its term. There ensued a period of transition, of quick alternations between the exultant consciousness of Reality and the depressed consciousness of coming failure; that swinging pendulum of the unstable, growing self, moving to new levels, which the Christian mystics often call "the Game of Love."
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It is certain that psycho-physical conditions have their part in this process, significant though it be for the heroic education of the soul. The exhaustion of an organism whose powers of reception, of attention, of response have been strained to the uttermost counts far something in the confusion, the impotence, the loss of vision which now affects the adolescent spirit. So closely are spiritual and psychological necessities here plaited together, that it is impossible to separate them with a sure hand: nor is it necessary to do so, since that which we are watching is a creative process, wherein the whole stuff of human nature is involved — not the sublimation of some rare and secret element, but the entincturing of humanity with reality, the transmuting of "salt, sulphur and mercury" into alchemic gold. "Accessit ergo homo ad illas omnes passiones, quae in illo nihil valerent, nisi esset homo. Sed si ille non esset homo, non liberaretur homo." (1)
The great ecstacy of the Transfiguration seems itself to have been experienced between two onsets of gloom, moments of bitter disillusion in respect of the "faithless and sinful age," (2) in which the inevitable necessity of suffering, even of death, was clearly foreseen as never before by Jesus: not as an accident, but as an implicit of the new life. Now for the first time He told His followers that "the Son of Man must endure much suffering."(3) Life pressing forward on new paths was bound, as He now saw it, to encounter obstacles which would call forth all that it possessed of heroic courage. Thus alone could it justify its inherent divinity. Nor was that dreadful revelation for Him alone; but for all others who would follow in this Way. The depressed certitude of His own
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approaching passion — though it may not have been experienced in the detail which tradition suggests — was linked with the knowledge that this way of suffering and endurance was the: "strait and narrow way" that led to all real life. The Kingdom must be taken by violence; by all that is best, strongest, most heroic in the nature of man; by a romantic and self-giving courage. "For whoever is bent on securing his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the Good News, will secure it." (4) This is no call to a meticulous sanctity; but to the quixotic knight-errantry of the Cross. "In the religious and moral order which is identical for Jesus with the Supreme Will," says Reville, "to wish to save at any price one's earthly life, from prudence or selfish fear, is to lose the true life, tghat which realises itself in duty and self-sacrifice. To give this inferior life in order to live the superior life of complete surrender to a great and holy cause, this is indeed to live; it is to thrust oneself into that Eternal Life of which the present is but the point of departure and the opening scene." (5)
"We still see in the Synoptics' account of Peter's reception of the prophecy of the Passion — "Master, God forbid ! this shall not be your lot " — a reflection of the disagreeable impression which this new and startling doctrine produced on those "children of the Bridegroom" who had looked for a participation in joy rather than grief. The stern, uncompromising reply of Jesus, "Your thoughts are not God's thoughts, but men's," (6) suddenly shows Him aware now of the deeply tragic under-notes of life: aware too of His own lonely and supreme position, lifted to a vast height above the comfort-loving crowd and perceiving with a new and terrible lucidity the place of suffering in the cosmic plan. That this perception should have taken within His mind the form of a self-identification with
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the "Suffering Servant" — that "Saviour of Israel" ,who helps others by himself enduring all — of whom Isaiah sang, does not affect the psychological aspect of the situation. It was in fact inevitable, since the self-consciousness of Jesus expressed itself as naturally in Hebrew forms as the self-consciousness of His followers expressed itself in the symbolism of the Cross. "The Son of Mwn must suffer," says Jesus. " Gloriari in tribulatione non est grave amanti," says the author af the " Imitation " of Christ.(7) That is the inward conviction of the travailling spirit of Life : a conviction which the total history of the mystics has but confirmed.
Selfless endurance of pain and failure, the destruction of one's old universe. the brave treading of "deep, gloomy and miserable paths" (8) — all this is as essential to the growth of man's " top storey," as the joyous consciousness of the Presence of God. The breaking down of the state in which that consciousness had been a dominant facter is a psychological necessitv, if a new and higher state is to be attained. Living along the path which He was opening to humanity, His every outward act a pure and sincere expression of inward growth, Jesus went, in Rutherford's vivid phrase, "with the storm and wind on His face": amenable to the natural human law of development through stress. "He learned obedience by the things which He suffered," says the author of Hebrews(9) writing at a time before the primitive vision of life and growth had been exchanged for the orthodox cult of a ready-made perfection. Moreover, outward events soon began to corroborate the inward conviction that suffering was the gateway of the "Kingdom"; that apparent life must be lost, if real life were ever to be gained. The enthusiasm of the people, fed by the " miracles " of healing, had reached its highest point, and now began to decline. The opposition of the correct and tidy-minded
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Pharisees increased. Apparent failure was plainly now His lot — the "Kingdom " was not to be of this world. Every thing went wrong: a state of things familiar to the mystics, for whom, when the Dark Night of the Soul draws near, inward exhaustion and chaos — and perhaps the slackened will and attention that go with them — often precipitate external trials and griefs. (10)
But where many of the greatest mystics have shown natural dread of the trials confronting them — inclined to cry with Suso, "Oh, Lord, Thy tournaments last a very long time!" (11) — Jesus seems to run almost eagerly to His fate. The surrender for which they fought, sometimes through years of anguish, is already His. The instinct for self-donation rules Him: it needs but opportunity for expression. Once the necessary course of life is clear to Him, He goes deliberately to the encounter of danger and persecution. With an ever clearer premonition of the result, He abandoned the wandering missionary life amongst the country towns af Galilee, and set His face towards Jerusalem: plainly warning His disciples that those who followed now did so at their personal risk; and adopted a course which must separate them from family and friends. They were come to the parting of the ways. Life was going forward to new and difficult levels, and those who would go with it must go in full consciousness of danger, inviting not shirking the opposition of the sensual world. This is the idea which is paraphrased by the Synoptics as the "bearing of one's own cross" (12): a metaphor which has become charged for us with a deeply pathetic significance, but was in its origin exactly equivalent to the homely English proverb about putting a rope round one's own neck" — -a plain invitation to loyalty and courage.
All through the record of this journey, and of the days spent in teaching in Jerusalem, we find a sharp alternation of tragic foresight with the assured spiritual strength, the
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healing power, the outflowing radiance of the developed illuminated mind. So strong, so perfectly established, is that consciousness, so complete are its adjustments to the outer world, that only in some great crisis can it be dispossessed. The state of confusion, impotence, and fatigue, so often observed in contemplatives as the shadow of the Dark Night draws near, is absent. Clear and growing knowledge of approaching death does nothing to impair the brilliant intellect which can dispute with Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes; (13) the sense of direct contact with Reality, and of a spiritual force within the human self, which declares that "whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer believing, ye shall receive"; (14) the calm and regnant will that can control the jealous bickerings and selfish fears of the apostles, already vaguely uneasy lest they have risked too much for a kingdom which is so clearly "not of this world."(15)
The "triumphal entry" into Jerusalem is the act of a personality living at such high romantic levels of self-devotion, that the Via Dolorosa has become for it the Highway of the King. That strange glamorous dream in which Jesus lived, which held and expressed for Him the secret of His unique significance for the race, went with Him still. It pervaded His consciousness, coloured His every reading of events. For such a consciousness, death and victory are merged in one and apparent failure is seen, in one great blazing vision of Reality, as the instrument of an unmeasured success. Hence in its general outlines the great "Parousia" discourse,(16) placed by all three Synoptics — though with many obvious additions and variations of detail — in the interval between the entry into Jerusalem and the Passion, is a psychological probability. It is a pictorial expression conceived in the terms of Hebrew prophecy, of the paradoxical conviction
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felt by a mind which knows itself to be at "the beginning of sorrows," that though these things indeed must come to pass, though struggle, torment and loss must be faced by the individual, yet these do but form a period of trial and preparation. The Son of Man, the forward-marching spirit of humanity, must be victorious. The "Kingdom" so real and deeply known is bound to triumph. It shall "come in glory," overflowing the barriers of life; and all in the end must be well. Oppressed yet exalted by a consciousness of the huge significance of the events now felt to be imminent, His surface intellect projected the shadow of those events against a universal and historical background: and thus provided the general fluid outline of that "apocalyptic" picture — that "Second Coming" — which the desire, the imagination and the experience of succeeding generations elaborated and defined.
Over and over again the story of the days imrnediately preceding the Passion reveals to us the mental states of Jesus : the steady oncoming of the spiritual night, the rapid growth in Him of the mystic state of pain. Even in the one great public act of that period, the access of prophetic indignation called the "Cleansing of the Temple " — so opposed in its violence and suddenness to the general tendency of His ethics — we seem to detect a certam human element of instability, suggesting that there was present an abnormal inclination to abrupt and passionate action. Such an impulse is characteristic of a consciousness which has entered on the transitional state; and in wnich the old combinations, adjustments and restraints are breaking down. Strange tendencies may then assert themselves, self-expression may take new and startling forms. Elsewhere, in the steadily-growing sense of danger, in the bitter disillusion caused by the coldness of His reception in Jerusalern, the national centre of all racial and religious hope — in the knowledge of weakness, self-interest and disloyalty within the ranks of the apostles themselves, the dull, hopeless resistance, the
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horrible lack of elasticity displayed by things unreal yet established, their apathetic demeanour towards that new and splendid life of freedom which He knew and lived. yet seemed unable to communicate — there are present all those elements of suffering and destitution which are felt as peculiar distresses by souls in the Dark Night.
Perhaps few things bring home more clearly to us the loneliness and depression af that state, in which the spirit growing to the Transcendent rnust break one by one with all its earthIy hopes, than the little scene at Bethany, in the house of Simon the Leper.(17) A nameless woman,(18) more deeply perceptive than those about Him, and aware even in this unfavourable moment of some newness of life, of a unique and powerful personality, in the Teacher from Galilee, came to Him as He sat with His friends at supper, and poured upon His head the contents of a jar of very precious ointment: thus silently proclaiming her recognition of Him as the "anointed" Messiah. The vulgar irritation of the apostles at the "waste" involved in this beautiful and significant act — those very apostles from whom had come Peter's confession and who had seen the Transfiguration ecstacy — gives us the measure of the disharmony, the utter want of comprehension, the creeping conviction of failure, now existing amongst them. Romantic enthusiasm has been transformed into prudence and "common sense": perhaps the worst form of degeneration with which any leader of men has to contend. Through their unworthy and unloving criticisms strikes the solemn and tragic comment of Jesus on this, probably the greatest spontaneous acknowledgment of Messiahship which He received — "She hath done what she could. She is come aforehand to anoint rny body to the burying." They are the loneliest words in literature. Removing their speaker by a vast distance from the common prudent
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life of men, from all human ideals and hopes, they bear within themselves the whole mystery of the Cross, the "King reigning from the Tree."
There is little need to consider in detail the difficult and confused narrative of the concrete events through which that mystery was developed: since here our only concern is with interior experience. But in three places at least, that experience breaks through; expressing itself by means of outward actions so strange, so unlike those adventures with which human imagination tends to credit its religious heroes, that they bear within themselves the evidence of their authenticity. I mean the Last Supper, the Agony of Gethsemane, and the final scene upon the Cross.
The scene of the Last Supper has been the subject of much destructive criticism in recent years. Loisy, especially(19), has dwelt upon the contradictions in the received accounts: and particularly upon the irreducible opposition between the sacramental "words of institution," with their clear reference to approaching death, and that Messianic expectation of an immediate Second Coming which is implicit in the declaration made by Jesus in giving the first chalice: "I will not drink from henceforth of the fruit of the vine, until the Kingdom of God shall come." (20) But in the three profound and highly important articles on Loisy's great work, L'abate Loisy e il problema dei Vangeli Sinottici, which appeared in 1909 in Il Rinnovamento over the signature "H," it is pointed out that the very great length of the Paschal meal, with its numerous blessings of separate cups, and elaborate rites, allows time for even greater changes of mood than is implied in this alternation between consciousness of an immediate tragic parting — which might well inspire one last great effort to impart the elusive secret of new life — and the eschatological hope of a swift return in glory which was bound up with the Messianic self-consciousness
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of Jesus. Moreover, such a flux and reflux of the rnystical and Messianic readings of life is one of His most strongly marked characteristics.
What, then, did the words and acts in which the Eucharist originated mean for those who heard them; before the genius of St. Paul had "received of the Lord" their secret, and found in them the Mysterium Fidei, the mystical focus of th.e Christian life? We shall never know: yet that they were felt by the earliest Christians to be of unique significance is plain from the careful report of all three Synoptics. This much is clear: the essence of the rite, as it now appears in the gospels, is a drama of utmost self-donation, a sacramental imparting, a sharing, of Life.(21) The new life, the more abundant vitality, which Jesus knew Himself to possess, in virtue of which He dwelt in the Spiritual Kingdom, and with which He had struggled as the true Messiah or Liberator to infect other men, is here presented under the most solemn symbolic forms, as the "secret" of that Kingdom. It is, as Clement and Augustine afterwards called it, "the food of the full-grown": a divine sustenance which is given in the Here-and-Now, and yet is a foretaste of that "Messiannc banquet" in which man's spirit, wholly lifted up into the Eternal Order, shall at last have full fruition of the Divine Life. Though the Eucharist was almost certainly understood by the tirst generation of Christians in the eschatological sense alone, as the earnest of a transflgured life to come, the Synoptic writers — reading history in the light of experience — are probably far
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nearer than modern critics will allow to the true meaning which the rite of the Last Supper bore for Jesus Himself. That "meaning" may well have been paradoxical, poetic, suggestive, rather than dogmatically exact; the sudden intuition of a great prophetic mind, an ardent and selfgiving heart. It has proved itself eternally fertile, inexhaustibly true, in the experience of growing souls.
In these few simple words, in the commonplace actions which accompanied them — actions which were a part of the normal ritual ot the Paschal meal — two orders of Reality were suddenly knit up into a union never to be broken again. The material and impermanent stuff of things was propounded as the actual "body" of immortal Spirit. To the obvious dependence of our physical life upon food was fastened the dependence of all spiritual life upon such Spirit absorbed and appropriated; upon "grace.'' (22) More, the fundamental kinship of humanity with that Divine Spirit — body and soul alike outbirths and expressions of the All — this mystery was for once exhibited in its perfection. Hoc est corpus meurn. There are no limits to the life that has become merged in the Divine Life. It is "made one with nature," like the poet's soul : a veritable bridge between two worlds.
Finally, Divine Fecundity, the actually creative quality of this new transcendent life upspringing in humanity, its concrete and practical donation and reception, was here dramatised and insisted upon. An outward, unforgettable sign of the communication of an "extra dower of vitality," operated not by any vicarious sacrifice, nor by the acceptance of any system of ethics, but by direct communication from Person to person, was set up under the shadow of approaching separation: left as a heritage which, rightly understood, should go before life in her new ascents as a pillar of cloud and of fire.
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This was the last constructive act of the ministry of Jesus. The high emotional stress under which it was performed, the high passionate act of faith which it demanded — sealing as it did to an eternal success a work about to be destroyed before the eyes of men — is vividly reflected in the reaction which follows so quickly upon it; the agony in the garden of Gethsemane. In that disconcerting episode, so far fram the myths with which a reverent imagination clothes the figure of its incarnate God, we see the Dark Night of the Soul fully established, and reigning in a consciousness of unequalled sensibility and power. Here we have the report of a soul's adventures in the hour of its most dreadful conflict; recognised and reported by other souls following this same way to transcendence, as necessary and determining factors in its growth. This new life, this new relation to Reality, with its all-round heightening of tension, endowed those who received it with a new capacity for pain as well as joy.(23) Hence the sufferings of the great mystic must and do necessarily exceed the sufferings af other men: a fact which gives us the measure of the anguish which was possible to the uniquely vital personality of Jesus.
All such mystics have found in the scene of Gethsemane, with its desperate struggle towards an acceptance of failure, a total self-surrender to the Divine Will, a picture of their own sufferings in that "dark ecstacy," that "pain of God," which obliterates their triumphant vision of a world and a life illuminated by Goodness, Truth and Beauty, and offers to self-forgetful heroism the hardest of all possible tests. By this path the growing spirit sweeps life up and outwards into the darkness: whilst the lower nature struggles vainly to turn again on its own tracks — is sorrowful unto death, for indeed this is its death; begs
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that the cup may pass, so terrible is the wine within it;
"the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." (24) The anguish of this trial for the active spirit af the great mystic, full of "industrious and courageous love," lies in the fact that here oonsciousness is brought to a point where it can do nothing : total surrender is demanded of it, an acceptance of its own helplessness. No wonder that the old theologians spoke of souls whom the elan vital had pushed on to this terrible path to transcendence, as being "led by supernatural ways." It is a "ghostly travail," says Hilton,(25) an " extraordinary solitude," says Teresa: (26) the final sorting-house of spirit, a testing and purgation of the whole character as it is centred in the energising will.
" What," says Reville of the scene in Gethsernane , "was that Cup of Bitterness at the approach of which He trembled? It was not merely death, it was above all the crumbling away of all that He had loved, all that He had believed, all that He had undertaken, radiant of heart, in the name of the heavenly Father. It was as if reality had suddenly replied to that intoxicating dream with a peal of diabolic laughter." (27) It is this, not merely Calvary, not merely the exalted destiny of the Suffering Servant, which Jesus accepts. It is this terrible destitution, this ironic failure that He conquers by the great act of self-surrender, "not my will but Thine be done " — Thy unexpected will which chooses to destroy all that it has been my vocation to upbuild.
Over and over again the Christian mystics — always with astonishment and dread — have found themselves led to this position; have fallen from the splendours of illumination to the horrors of Gethsemane, and discovered in the
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self-naughting which they believed to be a joy, a torture almost beyond their powers of endurance. "It is impossible," says St. Teresa, "to describe the sufferings of the soul in this state."(28) "In this upper school," said his Heavenly Visitor to Suso, "they teach the science of Perfect Self-Abandonment; that is to say, a man is here taught to renounce himself so utterly that in all those circumstances in which God is manifested, either by Hirnself or in His creatures, the man applies himself only to remaining calm and unmoved, renouncing so far as is possible all human frailty." (29) By this alone, says William Law, is the true Kingdom of God opened in the soul.(30) It is the final disestablishment and "naughting" of the separate will, however pure and holy; its surrender to the great, dark, incomprehensible movements of the All — the necessary crisis which prepares that identification with the All, that self-mergence in the mighty rhythms of Reality which we call the Unitive Life.
Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse
tenersi dentro alla divina voglia,
per ch'una fansi nostre voglie stesse.(31)
All the great Christian mystics are sure that a final destitution, a self-surrender which sacrifices all personal consciousness of God, all hope, all joy, is a necessary part of the path on which life must grow to its goal: and here of course they are but following their Master from the agony of Gethsemane to the Eloi of the Cross. "These men," says Tauler of those in whom the "new birth" has taken place, " have a most consuming thirst for suffering. They desire it rnay come to them in the most ignominious and painful manner in which it can be borne. They thirst for the Cross. . . . The holy martyrs have attained to this inheritance by their great love. They think they are only just beginning life: they feel like men who are beginning
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to grow." " We must be born again," he says in another place, "through the Cross into the true nobility. . . . In the truest death of all created things, the sweetest and most natural life lies hidden." (32)
This solemn submission to the Universal Will, this carrying out into action of the fiat voluntas tua, is the real "atonement," the real return to the Divine Order made sooner or later by every evolving spirit. Once that spirit has reached a certain stage of growth, to this it is inevitably impelled. "The love of God," says Angela of Foligno of the souls in which that supernal instinct is engendered, "is never idle; for it constrains us to follow in the way of the Cross; and the sign of the working of true love is, that it suggesteth unto the soul the way of the cross." (33) That way, with its misery and injustice, its human mortifications, its falls and struggles, its helplessness, is, said a Kempis finely, " the king's high road": the royal pathway to reality. "In the Cross doth all consist, and all lieth in our dying thereon; and there is none other way to life and very inward peace but the Way of the Holy Cross and daily dying. . . . Walk where thou wilt, seek whatsoever thou wilt; and thou shalt find no higher way above, nor surer way below than the Way of Holy Cross. . . . Turn to the heights, turn to the deeps, turn within, turn without: everywhere thou shalt find the Cross." (34) This, which sounds like the expression of creed, is really the report of experience cast into a credal form: the experience af a mind which finds evervwhere in the universe intimations of the method of Life-that process of losing to find, of difficult transcendence through effort and failure, the total submission of the separated individual life to the dark purposes of the spiritual sphere, which is the form under which transition to a new order is most often apprehended by human consciousness.
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It has been usual to quote the great cry from the Cross, "My God, my God ! why hast thou forsaken me ? " as conclusive evidence that the awful and complete spiritual destitution — the withdrawal of all sense of divine reality — experienced by many great Christians as the culminating trial of the Dark Night, was experienced in its most unrelieved and agonising form by Jesus Himself: with the implication that He died a prey to all the horrors of that state of consciousness which the rrystics call the "loss of God" and sometimes the "Crucifixion and Entombment" of the soul. "The divine excess," says St. John of the Cross of this most terrible experienoe, " so breaks and bruises the soul, swallowing it up in profound darkness that the soul, at the sight of its own wretchedness, seems to perish and waste away by a cruel spiritual death . . . for it must lie buried in the grave of a gloorny death that it may attain to the spiritual resurrectian for which it hopes. David describes this kind of pain and suffering — though it really baflles description — when he says, "The sorrows of death have compassed me. . . . In rny tribulation I have called upon our Lord and have cried to my God." But the greatest affliction of the sorrowful soul in this state is the though that God has abandoned it, of which it has no doubt; that He has cast it away into darkness as an abominable thing." (35)
But, as several critics have pointed out,(36) this terrible conclusion has only been arrived at by tearing the words reported to us from their natural context. That report states that those who " stood afar off " at the hour af the Crucifixian heard Jesus "cry with a loud voice, Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?"(37) the opening phrase of that twenty-second psalm which seemed to Judeo-Christian imagination like an inspired prophecy of the Passion. But if this phrase did really come to the lips of Jesus in His
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agony, it came not as an isolated cry of utter despair, but charged with the meaning of the whole poem from which it is taken. That poem, necessarily familiar to Him from childhood, may well have surged up into a consciousness which was steeped, as many indications prove, in Hebrew poetry. Remembered in such an hour, it would seem a vivid and veritable expression of the great spiritual process then being wrought in Him — the actual Passover, the passage through darkness to light. Its presence here at least suggests to us that the outward crucifixion was early felt or known to coincicle with some infinitely more significant interior event: that Paul, when he "gloried in the Cross," saw beyond the external sacrifice on Calvary into the very heart of life. It suggests that Jesus passed upon the Cross through a mighty spiritual crisis: that here His human nature touched the deeps of desolation, tasted to the full the horrors of the Dark Night, and emerged with a renewed and exalted consciousness of Reality, a joyful vision of the invincible purposes of Life. The "state of pain" came to an end: perhaps in an access of utter misery which gave to the cry of Eloi a momentary and terrible reality. But in His death and surrender He took possession as never before of the great heritage always intuitively known by Him. Spirit, triumphing over the matter which dogs and limits it, cut a sudden path to freedom, gave itself back into the hands of the Divine Life. At this hour, says the Triple Tradition; the veil of the Temple was rent in twain — poetic language, yet exact : for here we are admitted as it were into the holy of holies of Creation, assist at the drarna of surrender and its result, the consummation of union, the outbirth of undying life.
This profound interior process the twenty-second psalm presents to us, as it may well have presented it to Him who is said to have taken its phrases on His lips. The movement and the travail of ascending life are in it: in its recital of sufferings endured, its accent of unflinching
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trust in an hour of darkness, itssuperb and triumphant close — the clear vision of a germinal life, a "seed that shall serve Him" springing from the deeps of torment and death.
All they that see me laugh me to scorn:
They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, Commit thyself unto the Lord; let him deliver him : Let him deliver him, seeing he delighteth in him.
But thou art he that took me out of the womb :
Thou didst make me trust when I was upon my mother's breasts.
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The assemblv of evil-doers have inclosed me;
they pierced my hands and my feet.
I may tell all my bones;
They look and stare upon me:
They part my garments among thern,
And upon my vesture do they cast lots.
But be not thou far off, O Lord:
O thou my succour, haste thee to help me.
......................................................
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto the Lord:
And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.
For the Kingdom is the Lord's :
And He is the ruler over the nations.
.......................................................
A seed shall serve him ;
It shall be told of the Lord unto the next generation. They shall come and shall declare his righteousness
Unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done it." (38)
Life out of death and anguish — a triumphant divine life, immortal, contagious — this is the theme of that poem which the Synoptists associate with Jesus' death. Whether its introduction is indeed based upon actual words spoken by Him, or is a part of their generally artistic method of presentation, we cannot tell. In either case the cry from the Cross becomes no isolated cry of unendurable despair: but the first phrase in the great song of the ascending soul. It is the victorious announcement of a divine-human life seen clearly through the mists of bodily torment by the
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transfigured consciousness of Jesus: the sowing of a seed, the seed of divine humanity, to be raised in incorruption to a people that shall be born. It marks the veritable establishment of the Kingdom of reality: the "new way" made clear, emerging from human ruin and darkness in the hour of physical death.
"Mors et vita, duello conflixere mirando:
Dux vitae mortuus, regnat vivus."
