GETHSEMANE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 83, 8 April 1933, Page 13 (Supplement)

GETHSEMANE

ON MAIN STREET. (H.G.G.) Passion Week is upon us more. We shall do well to take our Bibles into the “secret place” of prayer and read through the events so graphically portrayed. Not by accident did the Evangelists devote fully a third of their records to this final week with its epochal denouncement. We shall find that each day, with the exception of Wednesday, is •clearly filled with portentous happenings and teaching. That one day’s activities are unrecorded. We should do well on that day to give our minds to the fiftythird of Isaiah. But in a book of sermons just to hand from Hodder and Stoughton, the late Arthur Hird suggests that we must go back some distance to secure the right perspective. He reminds us that St. Luke sees the shadow of the Cross before the other Evangelists—but not before Jesus did. Before Jesus sent out the 70 on their missionary enterprise. “He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem.” We •call this entry into the Holy City the Triumphal Entry! It was the most tragic ride in history. It was the Gethsemane of the Main Street and Sunlight. Gethsemane of the Garden, bitter though it was to the drawing of blood, was amid the silence of nature and beneath the quiet benediction of the stars. This entry into Jerusalem, sweating drops of bloud with a smile on His face, was a harder task. It must have been one of the most tragic moments for Jesus throughout the whole of that eventful life, when He sat in the midst of the swaying crowd of pilgrims frenzied with religious fanaticism —infinitely worse than when He faced them as they clamoured for His death. Then, at least, they had not the songs of Zion on their lips. .... Jesus know Jerusalem in such a way that He had to set His fa«ce to enter it. Tho life and work of Jesus was an accomplishment of a purpose, not a brilliant and courageous improvisation amid unexpected conditions, a splendid manipulation of life’s surprises. A Christ cannot bo crucified by accident. A surprised God cannot be a Saviour. He who knew what, was in man, for good and evil, did not blunder into Jerusalem, fie went there, not because of misplaced and. ill-judged confidence in men, but because of His love of man. He set His face; called on all that was within Him, rallied even His final resources within Himself and in God for the final act of His incarnate life. .... The gong to Jerusalem was not a romantic, heroic miscalculation of a man, but the result of a deep foreknowledge of God. He went because He knew God, not because He was ignorant of man. It was not a bid for the favour of man which miscarried, but a fulfilling of the grace of God. When He steadfastly set His fa‘ec to go to Jerusalem, His disciples then, and through all the ages, fall back in silence behind that set face, and walk in a fear more searchingiy blessed and more to be desired than all the .joys of earth. Our questionings and our little reasonings are stilled as we walk in the strong, compelling, soulsubduing wake of the saving God — not behind a deluded, over-confident man mistaking the strength and enmity of His foes. Wo walk with a •Saviour, not with a bad strategist; with one strong to die. not weakly hoping for a thin life of continued b re a thing. Jesus knew what He was doing, not in the low sense of cleverly calculating events amid earth’s successive circumstance, but aware body and soul of the high necessities and rich cost of Eternal love. He set His face to go to Jerusalem though He saw the Cross standing at the end of the way. He set His will, not for a sudden glorious hour, but for a long campaign, with the cost exacted in casual drops and slow dragging minutes, in the steady pressure and drain of dread know! .Igo and | ostponed agony. He knew that direct pressure of life which comes from certain but dallying death, no fore-shortening, no hurrying-on, the grim weight of the added minutes, hours, days, and. knowledge all the time that there is no escape. lie knew when life had to be faced, and lie walked —He set His face to go to Jerusalem. So it must be with His followers—not passive suffering but active acceptance of suffering and effort. ‘Our Jerusalem is always on a hill.’ We have to climb even when all within us calls for rest. It seems as though in these last passes of life all ease and help is, and must of necessity be, ■withdrawn; we have to strip and fight with naked hands and unclothed spirit the stark call of life to life. Even so, God in His metcy and amazing faith in us offers us no weak aids, no drugging wine to turn the edge of pain. ‘God, who is not ashamed to be called our God,’ calls us to resist the weakness of our blood, even unto blood. Thanks be to God, who hath matched us with this hour; One fight more—the last and the best.

These amazing resources, this treasure of hidden strength, is only revealed when the lightning cleaves and splits the rock. Then we call on our natural and inherent resources; upon the divine power that is our natural heritage. Then the way of escape is revealed to those who cannot take any cheap acquittal. We arc brought, through when we cannot run away. We set our face and then we see the light of His countenance and find peace. Wo are apt to work out a wrong balancesheet for Christ’s Jerusalem —and our own. We think of His setting His face to go to Jerusalem too much in terms of tragedy, pain, loss, and death. Let us match this use of a verb with another: “Who for the joy that was set before Him. endured the Cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”