John 12:27,28

THE SANCTIFICATION OF SORROW

‘Now is My soul troubled: and what shall I say? Father, save Me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify Thy Name.’

John 12:27

Joy and sorrow are the warp and woof of human life. No life is wholly free either from the one or from the other. They are intimately bound together, but in no life was the juxtaposition of joy and sorrow more striking than in the life of our Divine Lord. The transition from the hosannas and rejoicings of the admiring crowd to the deep agony of the Passion, and then the new birth of joy and triumph on the morning of Easter Day—all this teaches an impressive lesson for human hearts. It was at the moment of His exaltation that He shed His tears over the devoted city of His race. It was the voices which cried, ‘Blessed be He that cometh in the Name of the Lord, Hosanna,’ which should soon cry, ‘Crucify Him, crucify Him!’

I. There are two ways of regarding the sorrows of life.—To one whose view of life is only worldly, the sorrow which occurs in it can seem only as a drawback, a misfortune, a diminution of life’s true purpose; but in the Christian view sorrow is the occasion of setting forth the glory of God. ‘Father, glorify Thy Name.’ For, first of all, the sorrow or the suffering which comes to us is the Will of God. Suffering is a mark not of His anger but of His love, and as the Saviour of the world is made perfect through suffering, so by our sufferings, if we do but bear them aright, we are fellow-sufferers with Him. We fill up what is lacking, as St. Paul says, in His sufferings, and there is no sorrow and no suffering which is not sanctified to the children of earth, if only that small prayer be theirs—‘Father, not my will, but Thine be done.’

II. Again, there are lessons in sorrow which cannot be learned anywhere else.—It is sorrow more than joy that seems to open the gate of heaven. It is in the school of suffering, though we be but in the lowest forms of that school, that we learn lessons of patience and of the discipline of the soul, and of the insight into Divine things. It is there that those of us who have suffered—and who has not?—there that we have seemed to know something of the infinite depth of the Divine compassion. Yes; and there is in sorrow the lesson which it is hard to learn elsewhere—the lesson of sympathy. By our own sorrows and sufferings we can feel not only for, but with, those of others. It is only too easy in this world to pass by on the other side when men are in trouble. Of this I am quite sure—that it is at the foot of the Cross alone that that lesson is learned.

III. There is one sorrow, the greatest of all, which needs its explanation from the life of Jesus Christ.—I would not make light of it. Every year as we grow older the vacant spaces in the circle of those whom we have loved seem to grow more numerous and more pitiful, and, if this world be all, the pitifulness of them remains insoluble; but the Christian who knows that this life, truly regarded, is a discipline, a preparation for a higher life hereafter, feels the blessing that lies beyond the pain. Each departed friend, says a great German thinker, is a magnet that attracts us to the next world. And as the years pass, and those whom we have known rise one after another from our side and lift the veil and pass out into the darkness, it comes to be that we seem to have more friends over there than here. Our heart is more and more where our friends are—in heaven; and for us, too, when the time comes, the transition may—will—in the mercy of the most Merciful, be but a step. So it is that the sanctification of sorrow does indeed glorify God’s holy Name.

—Bishop Welldon.

Illustration

‘To say, as some do, that the only cause of our Lord’s trouble was the prospect of His own painful death on the Cross, is a very unsatisfactory explanation. At this rate it might justly be said that many a martyr has shown more calmness and courage than the Son of God. Such a conclusion is, to say the least, most revolting. Yet this is the conclusion to which men are driven if they adopt the modern notion that Christ’s death was only a great example of self-sacrifice. Nothing can ever explain our Lord’s trouble of soul, both here and in Gethsemane, except the old doctrine, that He felt the burden of man’s sin pressing Him down. It was the mighty weight of a world’s guilt imputed to Him and meeting on His head, which made Him groan and agonise, and cry, “Now is my soul troubled.” ’