Not This Man.

Waiapu Church Gazette, Volume 36, Issue 1, 1 April 1945, Page 1

Not This Man.

(A Good Friday .Reflection by P.G. : '.. m the "Church Times") "■-'.. For those of us who are just very ordinary people the counsel that we should think much upon the cross of Christ is not entirely without its dangers. If we consider the drama of Good Friday it is so easy to applaud the hero, and easier still, and rather satisfactory, to hiss ...from,,- the stage- the fantastic crowd of ecclesiastics,,, politicians, Quislings and cowards who make their undignified and brief appearances. We cease to feel quite so dissatisfied with ourselves -when we are reminded how Peter denied the Lord he loved rather than face the sniggers of a slave; how it was with a kiss that Judas. planned 1 to betray his Master; how Pilate, who. might have saved the Saviour, saved his own skin instead, and thought with, water to wash his hands of the whole sad business. And then there is the crowning-infamy that they all condemned Him to be worthy of death, and we only wish we had been there, so that at- least one vote could have been cast for Him, and m His most bitter Passion He could have known that Were by His side.. With the Crowd. But would we have been? Even in* matters of 'taste few of us find it easy to part company with the majority, and most of us shrink -from the thought of being mistaken for tile sort of people who appear to find mono-

tonous. pleasure m ploughing a loTiely furrow. Had we been m Jerusalem ~ on that first Maundy Thursday we hope that we should have stood by Jesus, but .most of us have to confess . that we have no experience of what it must feel like to support someone whom statesmen condemn, whom re-> ligious leaders denounce, who soldiers ridicule and the crowd 'deserts. We might indeed have spoken for Him had we been there, but we have uncomfortable memories of times when we did have a chance of standing for. what we felt was right and yet somehow we let the chance, go by. The disciples who had left all and followed Jesus, and who had continued to do so ;long after others walked ho . more with Him, could hardly have finally forsaken Him simply because the future looked so black. „ They must have come to feel that there, was some truth m the fierce criticisms which had been brought against their Master. After all, they>niay have argued, He was only a country carpenter, an unlettered person, and it stood to reason that the experts m the city would know much more than He. ■:'.. Either law and order should be safeguarded (m which case Pilate and such men as Cajaphas could hardly : be expected to tolerate a rival king to Caesar), or else pagan Rome, : the self-appointed^ guardian of order and ». of law, should" be driven from the borders of the Holy Land, a proposition which demanded a policy* more vigorous and practical than the one

outlined m., such a charter a,s that spoken on the Mount. - Perhaps a passionate belief that He_^ was right -would have given them courage to protest when the cry was raised "Away with Him"; but such a belief belonged to earlier days and it was theirs no longer. . At 'one tiirie others had said! that He was beside Himself — and how foolish they had. thought them; but how it certainly looked as ii those others had not been so greatly mistaken. lif Tit was m scjrrie such way as this that the disciples argued, then the more a man considers the situation m which they found themselves and compare it with his own attitude m situations, not altogether unlike, the more he comes to doubt whether, had he been m Jerusalem that day, one voice would have been raised m strong dissent against the common verdict, and that voice his own. ':■ '.- God's Offensive By the cross of Christ, sjtumbling block though it may be to some and foolishness to others, does not show us God m His moment of defeat but God m His hour of victory. We may speak of the cross as an offence, but .it is really God's offensive— not God broken by the sin of the world but God caught m the very act of showing how that sin can alone be broken. For what Easter does is to disclose God's judgment on Good Friday and that whole way of life which led to it, and what is named the Via Dolorosa is m truth the road to victory.

It is victory following warfare, but war after a pattern very different "frjoni what "the, world understands J?y" t^at 'dread :term; It *wasH?ar with 'the sickening accompaniments of wounds and death, yet war m which the only wounds and the "only death were those of the Victor.. It was not " because Christ did npt take sin seriously that the tactics employed m His warfare were so strange: it was because, as master strategist, he knew that so, and only so, could the defeat of sin be finally accomplished. Nor does He seem to have thought that He must be a lonely pioneer of a type of warfare which would find no imitators: for with the, challenging courage of the true captain of salvation, He dared to call-others to take up the cross follow Him. Each Man His: Cross This call must have, been either largely meaningless when it was made or else to have involved something other than an insistence on the importance, of crucifixion m itself , for • it was made before any such violent death seemed to be threatening Jesus. St. Luke probably gives the passage its true interpretation when he links it together. with our Lord's advice to count the cost before embarking upon such undertakings as building towers or making wars; and its position mv St. Matthew's Gospel indicates that soon -afterwards Jesus , was heard comparing Himself with someone who had piped to people who "would not dance, which may mean that the Christ who came to rescue sinners might have saved them with His music instead of with His wounds. What Jesus asserts is that His disciples must be ready to renounce all and follow Him. If this following should involve even crucifixion, still the disciple must not waver m his course. . . It is not the consequences arising from a determination to follow Jesus which are significant, for they are no more than the price attached to a decision: what is significant is the decision itself and the persistence with which it is observed. Thus the proof m suffering, any more than it is to be found m the absence or presence of length of days, or m whether or no the lines are fallen m pleasant places, and one has a goodly heritage riches or poverty, healtti or sickness may be temptations or ; aids against temptation, but there is no clue, to God's favour to be found m any of these things. ; The Itobleni of Suffering In time of war it is peculiarly easy to slip into the way of thinking of suffering as either punishment or as something which is necessarily linked with "the one, true, pure, immortal sacrifice." The distressing results of such ideas are found, on the one

hand, m the agonised question, "Why should my son have been killed when so many other men escaped?" and, on the other hand^' 4*i? the dangerous heresy which sees m that death "upon a lonely hill" simply the sacrifice of a Redeemer who goes "the self-same way" as those who die upon the battlefield. - ■ -■'■• Jesus made it perfectly clear that the killing of eighteen people by the f all of a tower at' Siloam carried with it no indication either of their moral worth or worthlessness, but why they died and others did not die He never even attempted to explain. If we believe that it was through Christ all things were made, then, though so much of the evidence seems to proclaim the contrary, we know that finally all is yrell; but if We feel it necessary to understand just why one man suffers and another goes free, then we are m danger of forgetting that not even the secrets of human hearts are yet disclosed, and that it is unlikely that the secrets of the heart of God will be revealed more hurriedly. As we think of Jesus setting steadily, forth on that last journey to Jerusalem, we realise that this is no new departure m His- policy, but jtist the closing stages of an adventure m complete obedience to the Father's will which had been begun long years before. And as we think of His passion and His death we begin to pray that we, too, may keep troth, not only when stars are . shining, but when all have ceased to shine; not only when resolute loyalty to Him seems reasonable, but when there seems no reason m it; not. only when we know ourselves to be under God's guidance, but when it seems that even He has forgotten us. It is no wonder that the war of nations feels such a nightmare, for perhaps it is just a phantom war, and the real war is the one which Jesus fought — a war which draws no weapons from any human armoury, and which began long before 1939 or 1914, and may well continue while the world lasts. In this war, too, there are conscript soldiers as well as gay adventurers freely enlisting, for the men of Cyrene have become a great company, compelled to bear the Saviour's cross, arid yet so bearing it that they lighten the burden which hangs upon Him and help Him to save the world.