About the Author
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THE CHOICE...
No one can sing lyrics in a worId like this unless he has learned
“the song of the Lamb,” the song that is learned through suffering, through taking the cross to one’s heart, putting strings to it and making it into a harp.
But before we can sing that song we must pause and go deeper and try to sound the depths of that cross which Jesus has chosen.
Jesus would choose
the people who were
rejecting him. There
was no other way, for
Jerusalem and the hill
called Calvary lay
between him and the
Easter-morning
Victory.
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9
THE COST TO GOD
W hen we look at life, it seems to speak two great contradictory words. Nature seems to spell hard, unbending, unforgiving, iron law. On the other hand, religion offers to us forgiveness, restoration, a new chance. Look up through nature to God, and you come to the conclusion that God is Law. Look up through Christ to God, and you come to the conclusion that God is Love. Can these two be reconciled, or must we make our choice between them?
There is no doubt that there are these two sets of facts. The one set of facts has been built up by India into the law of Karma.
Reduced to its simplest form, and to its central meaning, the law of Karma means that we reap what we sow. This law insists that this is a moral universe, with moral consequences, that some way, somehow, somewhere you will find again the results of your doing. Inevitably, invariably, irretrievably you meet again what you do. If this is the essence of the law, I can accept it wholeheartedly. This does not mean that by accepting Karma, one has to accept the doctrine of the transmigration of soul, which is a corollary built up around Karma to 130
explain the inequalities of life. Of transmigration, I see no sufficient proof. Of Karma, I am confronted everywhere with the strongest evidence.
You may be free to choose a deed, but you are not free to choose the consequences of that deed. It registers itself in result in our moral natures. It may not be seen to result in outward punishment, but it will inevitably produce deterioration, even where evidence of outward results is lacking. This law is colorblind. If the white man, the black man, the brown man or the yellow man breaks it, it breaks him. It is religion blind. This law does not ask whether you are a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or agnostic; break it and it will break you.
The fact is that we do not break this law, we break ourselves upon it.
When we break it, it throws us back a quivering, bleeding, blighted thing. This applies to groups, to nations, to races as well as to individuals. There is a national Karma, as well as an individual Karma. On a small scale and on a large scale the universe sides with good and against evil.
“The sins which you do in two and two,
You must answer one by one.”
This makes our universe seem very hard and unforgiving, and yet it burns into our minds the fact that this is a universe of law, and not a universe of whim, fancy and notion. We know what to expect. The discipline of our universe is very strict, but it is dependable. I prefer to have a dependable universe rather than one upon which we could not depend as to which side it would take.
We need not to insist on this further, for the history of mankind is the history of the working out of this law. “All things betray thee, 131
who betrays me,” said Francis Thompson in “The Hound of Heaven,”
and so he simply put into a single sentence what is written in the constitution of things.
Nevertheless, this is not the whole truth about the matter. There is another side, which is seldom looked at in discussing Karma. It is not true that we alone reap what we sow. The results of our deeds are passed on to others, whether for good or for ill. There is such a thing as the law of transference of Karma. Other people reap what we sow.
A father in a home sins, and he would probably give anything if he could take all the results on himself, but he cannot. His wife, his children, his friends, and all who live within the circle of love to him feel the result of his doing. Every life is bound up with every other life. There are no isolations, there are no insulations. If I raise my life, everyone else feels the upward pull of it, but if I let my life sag, everyone else feels the sag of it.
If the law of the transference of Karma is true, and I think it is just as deeply rooted a fact as the law of Karma, then it opens up the way for us to think in terms of the vicarious. Thinking of the vicarious transference of “Karma” makes it possible to think in terms of a cross. If there were One who could stand at the center of life and who, by the universality and depth of his love, could gather up into his own heart the sins and sufferings of men, he could transfer to them the results of his own Karma. In that case, men would eat the fruit, not of what they sowed, but of what he sowed. There is at least the possibility of thinking in these terms. We shall explore that possibility.
Before we go into the ideas underlying the cross of Christ, let us look at one or two presuppositions. Rightly or wrongly, as Christians we rightly believe and look on Jesus as the human life of God. Jesus is that part of God which we have been able to see, the uncovering of 132
THE COST TO GOD
the Divine. Jesus is the Divine speaking to us in a language we can understand, a human language, showing us his character where our characters are made, namely, in a human environment. We do not see how else God could show himself except in just this way. If that be true, then what fell on Jesus, fell on God, what he bore, God bore; his cross was God’s cross. Subsequently, this outward cross that was lifted up in history, is a sign of that inward cross, that lies upon the heart of God. We who are bounded by
our senses could not see this
inward cross upon God’s heart,
We cannot
unless, and until it was lifted up
separate God
before our senses. The Italian
and Christ,
painter was crudely right, then,
making one
when he pictured the nails driven
hard and
into the hands of Jesus, as going
unbending and
through the wood and into the
the other
hands of the Father at the back.
tender and
These conception echoes the
forgiving.
statement of Paul when he says,
“God was in Christ reconciling
the world unto himself.”
We cannot separate God and Christ, making one hard and unbending and the other tender and forgiving. A little girl said, “I hate God, but I love Jesus, for God was going to destroy the world, but Jesus wouldn’t let him.” She expressed in a child’s outburst, what has been built up into theological systems. But the New Testament unfolds to us the Christ-like God. When Jesus says, “He that has seen me has seen the Father,” he means, among other things, that “he that has seen me on the cross has seen the Father on the cross.” The cross, then, is God’s heartbreak.
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That heartbreak is inevitable in a world like this. In a human home where love meets sin in the loved one, at the junction of that love and that sin, a cross of pain is set up. A pure love suffers when it comes into contact with sin in the loved one, and the purer the love the more poignant the pain. When the pure and holy love of God comes into contact with sin in us, his loved ones, then at the junction of that sin and that love a cross is set up. It is inevitable. It is inherent in the nature of things. There is no mechanical transference, but there is a vital acceptance on the part of love. For love cannot be love and remain apart and aloof. If it be love, it will insinuate itself into the sins and sorrows of others and make them its own.
“I do not want to cast my sins on Jesus,” said a Swedish lady who had turned Buddhist. “It is degrading to ask another to take your sins.”
“I agree,” I replied, “but while you would not cast your sins on Jesus, and ask him to bear them, you cannot help his taking them, whether you ask it or not. Since Jesus is Love, he is bound to take them without your asking.” Love cannot be love and refuse the burdens of love. In a world like this, God cannot refuse the cross and remain a God of love.
If, therefore, in the midst of our pain and suffering we cry out in protest that God has made a world in which sin and suffering are possible, let us remember, that if it costs us a great deal to live in a world like this, it costs God more to make one like this. To make one like this meant that he had to live in it as Love. That meant his own cross. God could have made one in which there was no possibility of sin and suffering; but had he done so; he would not have made us as free moral beings, capable of choice. He could have made us puppets, not persons; machines, not men. God chose, on the contrary, to make the great adventure, and to create 134
moral beings capable of good and of evil. Love could not have done less. A human parent creates a child upon whom he can lavish his love, though in doing so he runs a very great risk of bringing into the world a child who might go astray and break his heart, yet the parent assumes that risk, for love cannot do less. God, the Divine Parent, takes the same risk in creating us, for in the end it may break his heart.
It did. The cross is the sign of it. At creation, God assumed a responsibility, and at the cross he acknowledges and discharges that responsibility. He would take on himself all that falls on us, and more!
Only on that basis could he create. But on that basis he did create.
And it must be that God has something so wonderful in mind in the re-creation, that he took the risk of the creation. That ultimate plan and goal is veiled from us, “We know not what we shall be,” but now we see the cross. That holds us. If the revelation of what we see in the cross is true, then we can trust what lies back of it. If the Heart that is back of the universe is like this gentle, strong Heart that broke upon the cross, then God can have my heart, and that without reservation.
But the objection is raised: If God suffers, God is unhappy; if he is unhappy, he is imperfect; if he is imperfect, he isn’t God. This objection is based on a fallacy. What is the law of happiness in this universe? It is this: the really happy are those who deliberately take on themselves pain for the sake of others; and the unhappy are those who center on themselves, and refuse to do anything for others at cost to themselves. They become bored and annoyed. The God who would sit apart from the tragedy and pain and misery of the world would be a God, self-centered, therefore unhappy. But the God who would know the joy of a cross, would be a God who would know the deepest joy of this universe, the joy of saving others at cost to oneself. The God who would have the highest thing in the world, namely, love, absent from his nature, would be a God who would be 135
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
imperfect, and therefore not God. The psalmist asks: “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?”
And Browning adds, “He that made love, shall he not love?” And we might add, “He that put the impulse to sacrifice self in the heart of the highest of men, shall he not sacrifice himself ?” If there isn’t a God like that in the universe, there ought to be one!
If the law of Karma is written within the constitution of things, this law of love is written there as well. If the hillsides are scarred by the roaring torrents, nature
sets to work to fill those
scarred ravines with flowers
The God who would
to hide the scars. If a bone is
have the highest
broken, the whole body
thing in the world,
rushes with materials for the
namely, love,
healing of that break. If a
absent from his
wound is infected, millions
nature, would be a
of cells will sacrifice
God who would be
themselves in the battle to
imperfect, and
throw off the infection.
therefore not God.
When ants cross a stream,
some will make a bridge of
the dead bodies of their
companions, so that the rest can walk across in safety. The blossoms die that the fruit may come.
In South America, I was given some stones taken from the bed of a certain river, which when cut into cross sections, had a clearly defined cross in the center. There was also given to me in that land, a section of a huge grapevine, which had a perfect cross in its heart.
The cross is in all life, it is sleeping in the stone, comes to clearer life in the vine, is clearer still in the animal, shines more fully in man, and 136
comes to its fruition and perfection in the cross of Christ. And that cross is the revelation of God. In the beautiful lines of E. M.
Plunkett:
I see his blood upon the rose,
And in the stars the glory of his eyes.
His body gleams amid the eternal snows,
His tears drop from the skies.
All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, His cross is every tree.
Someone has said that “life is sensitivity.” At the lowest life we find sensitivity at a very low ebb. There is none in the stone. But it is found in the plant, for Professor Bose by his experiments has proved that plant life is capable of responding to affection and hate, and suffers as it dies. But the suffering is small. It is more pronounced in the animal, but not highly developed, for the animal may have a narrow range of affection. It is clearer and fuller in humans; the higher in the scale of character one goes, the more sensitivity we manifest, the wider our range of affection, and hence the greater capacity for suffering. When one comes to the highest life of all, namely, God, we would expect that this sensitivity would be manifested in its perfection. The cross says that it is. The cross is God sensitive to human sin and sorrow, so sensitive that it becomes his very own. Goethe said, “If I were God, this world of sin and suffering would break my heart.” Of course, it would. It did!
Jesus manifests this sensitivity supremely. Everything that hurts 137
man hurts him. As Joseph Parker said, “Jesus was never off the cross,”
never off the cross because man was ever in sin and suffering. Hutton says that F. D. Maurice felt “a sort of self-reproachful complicity, in every sinful tendency of his age.” Mencius wrote that the emperor who first dammed the rivers of China said, “I feel personally responsible for every man who drowns in China.” The emperor who was called “the Agricultural Emperor” of China said that he felt
“personally responsible for every man who starves in China.” Jesus goes deeper, and by the breadth of his love, shows that he feels every man’s sin and suffering as his very own. Every man’s sin is his sin, every man’s pain is his pain. This is the meaning of his “bearing our sins in his own body upon the tree.” Jesus bore them not mechanically but vitally. They were not laid on him, as they of old laid their sins upon the scapegoat, but he took them as a mother would take the sin of a wayward son into her own heart, and would suffer the shame and penalty with him.
Doctor Coffin tells of a British sergeant on the Somme, who said that throughout the long months the two battle lines kept up their continuous exchange of shells, he could not get away from the feeling that Christ was out there, between the lines, and that the shots passed through his body. On a tablet in the chapel of the Peking Union Medical College, in memory of Doctor Hall, who died of plague infection, while attending to his patients, is written what a Chinese patient said of him: “He took my sickness into his own heart.” When the gospel says that Jesus “himself took our infirmities,” it means far more than the healing of the infirmities of those around him. He
“took” them; they became his very own, every pain his pain. Just as when you touch the sensitive nerve anywhere in the human body, the shock of the contact is felt in the brain, so Jesus as the Head of a sinning, suffering race, feels the ache of it all in his own being.
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It was said of a sage in India, that he saw some men beating a water-buffalo, and lo, so sympathetic was he to the poor beast, that the marks of their sticks appeared upon his own back. We see in Christ’s wounds, our wounds, in his lashed and bleeding back, the outer sign of the inward lashings of our own guilty consciences, in his rejection, the rejection of our own guilty selves, in his cry of dereliction on the cross, our own cry. He was:
The Nerve o’er which did creep
The else unfelt oppressions of the earth.1
A Swami was baptized at our Ashram and became an ardent disciple. He was a lion of a man. He was talking to a group of Hindu lawyers when one of them made a disparaging remark about Jesus’
birth, saying with sinister suggestion, that Jesus had been born out of wedlock and, therefore, in sin. The Swami, infuriated, took off his shoe and with it struck the lawyer several blows across the shoulders.
The Swami went away in hot indignation, feeling that he had been righteous in defending his Lord. But that night, as he lay thinking about the matter, Christ came to him, and as he stood there without a word, he quietly removed the robe from his shoulder, and there the Swami saw the marks of his own shoe upon the shoulder of his Lord.
He saw that his Lord had received upon his own shoulder, the blows he had laid on one of his enemies.
When the Jewish leaders delivered Jesus over to the Romans, the soldiers felt that their opportunity to vent their contempt and hate upon the Jewish race had come. Here was their Jewish “king,” they would show what they thought of the Jews, by showing contempt and 1 Percy Bysshe Shelly, Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation (John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824).
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scorn for their “king.” They probably had no personal hate against Jesus, but did so for the Jews! So, they vented scorn on their “king.”
They dressed him in royal robes, pressed a mock scepter in the form of a reed into his hand, put a crown of thorns upon his head, and bowed the knee before him, crying, “Hail, king of the Jews.” All this contempt was intended for the Jews, and yet Jesus took what was intended for his crucifiers as his very own and bore it, for them!
It was said of Chaitaniya, the great Bengali devotee, that he was once very cold, so cold that life seemed to be passing away. His frightened disciples wrapped him in all the blankets they could find, but he seemed to be dying of cold in spite of it all. One of the disciples, feeling that there must be some other reason for his master’s coldness, began to look around to see if he could find the cause. He found a “chamar,” an outcaste man huddled up in the corner, shivering with the cold. “This chamar,” said the disciple to himself,
“must be the reason why the master is cold.” So, he ran off and got blankets and put them on the chamar, and as the poor man began to warm back into life again, Chaitaniya began to grow warm also. This may be only beautiful legend, but it is a glorious fact in Christ.
“Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” Jesus is cold in the chilled bodies of the poor, he is lonely in the outcaste, is hurt in the guilt of the sinner, and Jesus is part and parcel of every life. What a choice Jesus made when he became the Son of man! The choice meant that he chose all that concerned the sons of man. Sin and suffering concern them chiefly. Christ took them too.
The words of Eugene Debs have in them some echo of the cross:
“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all human beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one whit better than the meanest of the earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am 140
THE COST TO GOD
of it, while there is a criminal class, I am of it, while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
A government official in India told me how he became a changed man. Everyone could see that he was a changed man, and the story of that change was of interest chiefly because of the wonderful result.
He said that he took his first step into immorality when he went to Europe to study. He had left behind him a pure, innocent, trusting wife, the soul of honor. When he came back from Europe instead of turning from his
unfaithfulness, he continued
his double life. The purity and
Jesus is cold in the
trust of his wife stabbed him
chilled bodies of
like a knife, until the time
the poor, he is
came when he could hold the
lonely in the
guilty secret no longer. He
outcaste, is hurt in
determined to tell his wife, but
the guilt of the
he was inwardly afraid she
sinner, and Jesus is
would probably leave him, or
part and parcel of
wither him with her anger. But
every life.
one day he decided to face it,
so he called her into the room,
shut the door, and began to
unfold the whole wretched story. As the meaning of what he was saying dawned upon her, she turned as pale as death, staggered against the wall, and leaned there with the tears trickling down her cheeks. As he stood watching he saw his sin crucifying his wife, her pure love was being tortured on the cross of his sin. “That moment,” he said, “I saw the meaning of the cross of Christ. I saw from her lesser cross, the meaning of the greater cross. And when she said through her tears that she would not leave me, but would help me back to a new life, I felt the offer of a new beginning in the cross of Christ, and from that 141
moment I was a new man.” Suffering love had redeemed him. It is the only way of redemption.
We began this chapter by the insistence upon the fact of the Law of Karma, the hard, unbending, unforgiving, iron law. But we have seen that this law is not the whole truth. There is the fact of the transference of Karma. If God is Law, he is also Love. Both are there.
Their reconciliation is the problem.
We feel that if God is Love, there ought to be forgiveness. Does not God ask us to forgive those who sin against us? Shall he do less than he requires of us? We cannot feel that he will. But we also feel that if there is forgiveness, there can be no cheap forgiveness. Our moral natures would revolt against it, we could not take it. How can law be saved and love be manifested at one and the same time? When two young men were guilty of immorality in the ashram of Mahatma Gandhi, it broke his heart. He had preached purity to India and yet impurity had invaded his own ashram. Out of sheer sorrow of spirit, Gandhi began to fast. For six days he fasted. When after this ordeal those boys stood before Gandhi, and begged to be forgiven and restored to fellowship, could he do it? Yes, he could offer them forgiveness now, for it would no longer be a cheap forgiveness. It had the stain of the blood of his own suffering upon it. If Gandhi as the head of the institution had offered them forgiveness on the basis of that authority, it would have been cheap and easy, and meaningless, as lacking moral quality. If God offers us forgiveness on the basis of the divine omnipotence, then I am sure that we cannot take it. It lacks moral quality. It is cheap. But if he offers us forgiveness on the basis, not of the divine omnipotence, but of the divine self-sacrifice; if God offers it in a nail-pierced hand, then our moral sense will let us take it.
If after the committing of the sin the fellowship is to be restored between the boys and Gandhi, then the latter must take the initiative.
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The boys could not say, “Now let us be friends.” Their sin stood between them. How could that sin be removed and the fellowship restored? Gandhi had to take the initiative. He had to restore it from his side, by taking the sin on his own heart and letting it break it.
When we sin, we cannot get to God, God must come to us. He must restore the fellowship from his side. He must take it on his own heart and must come to us wearing in his own heart our sin and shame and sorrow. The cross is the price that God must pay to get to us in spite of our sins.
The cross, then, is the reconciling place between Karma and forgiveness, between Law and Love. The one upstanding beam of the cross represents the law of Karma, how straight and unbending it stands! The other beam, the wide stretching one, represents the love of God reaching out arms to save and heal. These two, the Law and the Love coming together, make the cross. And the cross makes them one.
In a temple of Peking, one sees the statue of Buddha reciting to us the law of Karma. At the rear, back to back with Buddha, is the Goddess of Mercy. The Chinese felt that they should both be there, but the nearest they could get them was back to back. In the cross they melt into glorious harmony.
Oman says that, first, we must pass through the sense that God and his kingdom are small and oppressed, to the sense that they are triumphant and universal. Second, that we must pass through the sense that God’s rule is not even beneficent, to the discovery that it is love. Third, that we must pass through the sense that God’s rule is not even just, to the discovery that it is atoning. In the cross, we discover that God’s rule is both just and atoning. But I do not see any other place in which we are able to make that discovery.
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Here is a son dismissed from college because of drunkenness and immorality. The father could take one of four attitudes: First, “I forgive you—it’s all right.” Second, “I turn you out, and have nothing more to do with you.” Third, “I forgive you, but I will send you away.” Fourth, “I will take the boy back into my home, suffer with him and forgive him.” That last would be atonement. If God is like that which we see in Christ, we know which way he will take. There was no other way for God to take and remain the kind of God he is. He being what he is, and we being what we are, the cross was inevitable.
All this means, as has been pointed out, that “God does not become loving as a result of human effort to satisfy him. He does not cease to be loving through man’s blunder, and sin and failure. That means that grace, and not justice, is the deepest fact about God, and grace is love, spontaneous, uncalculating, going the whole way through, never letting go, never losing patience, and suffering, as one must suffer, when the person who is loved goes wrong.”
In the two parables of Jesus, the parable of the pounds and the parable of the talents, there sounds the voice of nature, inexorable, taking away from him that does not use the talent or the pound, to give to those who have much. It is a rigid, unbending, unforgiving demand, that we faithfully develop what we have, or else it will be taken away from us. This is the hard school of selection, the survival of those who are spiritually fit, and who develop their talents. This is the onward march of nature, the upward urge to higher life, but relentless to those who will not relate themselves to that urge.
After giving these parables, the account then says, “When he had thus spoken, he went on before, going up to Jerusalem.” At the head of this “upward” procession, is One, who having “thus spoken” these relentless words in the parable and in nature, goes “on before,” the 144
THE COST TO GOD
goal and guide of this upward movement, giving in himself the key to its understanding. But more than that, he “goes on before” to a sacrificial self-giving at Jerusalem. At the head of the “upward”
procession of life, is a thorn-crowned Man, the revelation of what man is to be, and of what God is. The universe finds its consummation in sacrificial love, in a cross. The last word is not to be the inexorable word of the parable that knows no forgiveness, but the last word is seen in the Man
himself, and what we see is
unquenchable love. The cross
finishes the sentence of the
The crown of life
parable, and its last word is
is humanity, the
“LOVE.”
crown of
The crown of life is humanity,
humanity is
the crown of humanity is Christ,
Christ, the
the crown of Christ is the cross.
crown of Christ
As we view the whole of the sweep
is the cross.
of nature and of man, we might
sum it up in the words of a
thoughtful man: “We come then to the inescapable conclusion that progress is growth in love.” But we would have never known what love is unless he had “first loved us.” The cross is the high peak of that love.
If the law is true that “the extent of the elevation in the scale of existence of an animal or rational being can be infallibly measured by the degree to which sacrificial love for others controls that being,”
then we feel that we are right in pitching on Christ as the most elevated in the scale of existence; we feel, further, that we are right in bowing the knee at the cross as the highest revelation of that 145
sacrificial love, and that, further still, we are right in taking this as the key that unlocks the mystery of God, and that through a cross we see a God whom we can respect and trust and love. Rufus Jones was right when he said that “Today the most significant aspect which we find for our time in the cross of Christ is its identification with and its revelation of the suffering love of God as Father.”
A missionary was interpreting the cross to an audience. A Muslim interrupted, saying: “You don’t know what you are doing. You are blaspheming and degrading God when you say that God suffers.” The missionary did not answer. A Hindu did: “No,” he said, “if we are to believe in any God at all, we must believe in the kind of God that Jesus shows.” The Hindu was right. If we cannot believe in this kind of a God, we cannot believe in any kind of a God at all. It is a Christ-like God or nothing. But if we can believe in this kind of a God, then, there is put within our hands a key, a key to the universe and to our own sufferings.
In one of our Round Table Conferences, a sociologist said very thoughtfully, “I believe that the fundamental tendencies of the universe are in Jesus Christ.” If this be true, and I believe that it is, then, the central fundamental tendency of the universe is love, and the cross is its illustration and consummation. As Sir Oliver Lodge says:
“As we rise in the scale of existence, we find ourselves actually choosing pain and trouble, rather than comfort and ease. The highest kind of pain is voluntary, it is suffered for a cause, or for the sake of others.”
At the head of the procession of life, then, is a thorn-crowned Man, his pains healing our pains, his wounds answering our wounds, his love taking our sin.
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SUFFERING AS A RESULT
OF WRONG
MORAL CHOICE
I n our study we have remarked that suffering comes from within as the result of our own choices, and from without as a result of our connection with environment, which is made up of physical realities and human relationships. We have centered upon the latter, as presenting the most baffling problems, but we cannot overlook the fact that much of our suffering comes from our own wrong wills. Suffering as the result of sin, while easy to be understood, is hardest to be borne. It breaks our inner spirit.
Evil has invaded the whole of the human personality. The evil of the mind is error, the evil of the emotion is suffering, the evil of the will is sin. As the center of the personality is the will, so the center of the problem of evil is sin. Sin is an ugly word, and the modern mind doesn’t like it and revolts against it. But it cannot escape its consequences. As Carlyle says, “Sin is, has been, and ever will be the parent of misery.”
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A very modern person remarked to the writer, with a good deal of satisfaction, that they had gotten “rid of the old-fashioned hell of fire and brimstone.” I replied that while to many this may be so, nevertheless, the modern man had found that he was still in the hell of broken law, and that this “new hell” was probably as bad as the old, or worse!
Some months ago, I woke up from a hideous dream in which I had been guilty of an ugly sin. The sense of guilt was terrible, and there was cold perspiration breaking out all over me. But the relief to find that it was only a dream, was too wonderful for words. But sometimes we awaken to find that the sense of guilt upon us, is not a dream, —would that it was! —but it is a stark, stabbing reality.
There is a passage in Kierkegaard’s Entweider-Oder, in which the seduced, broken-hearted woman writes to the seducer: John, I do not say, ‘My’ John, because I now see, you never were. I am heavily punished for ever letting such an idea be my joy. Yet, yet, mine you are, my seducer, my deceiver, my enemy, my murderer, the spring of my calamity, the grave of my joy, the abyss of my misery. I call you mine, and I am thine-- thy curse forever. Oh, do not think I will put a dagger into you and slay you. But flee where you will, I am yours to the earth’s ends, yours.
Love a hundred others, but I am yours. I am yours in your last hour. I am yours, yours, yours, your curse.
While this cancer of sin is eating, eating at the vitals of our happiness, there is no use talking of victory over suffering. Until this fact of guilt can be lifted from the soul, and restoration of fellowship with God become a reality, the soul withers and pines within one. For 148
many anxious minutes a little boy, child of one of our missionaries, was lost from his mother in a London crowd. The distracted mother found him at last, leaning up against the leg of a policeman, sobbing as if his heart would break. That night the younger brother, Bobbie, was crying over some trifle, and the little fellow who had been lost that day came up to his mother and said, “Bobbie is crying over that, but wait till he has some real trouble.” To be lost, lost from God, to have a sense of estrangement and orphanage of spirit, is real trouble.
A party of people, so the story runs, were standing on the seashore recounting their sorrows and their losses. One told of a ship that had gone down with all on board; another told of a mound on a foreign shore, the grave of a loved one; each one thought his sorrow was the greatest. But at last one spoke up and said with a sigh, “Mine is the greatest loss of all, for a believing heart has gone from me.”
They all agreed that this was the profoundest sorrow of all. For many, that believing heart has been buried in the grave of some sin. Said an earnest member of one of our Round Table Conferences, “I do not believe in any religion. Life is misery and the grave is the goal.” Loss of faith, and life being misery, seemed to be connected. They are connected.
Mary stood at the tomb, weeping, and when she was asked, “Why weepest thou?” she replied, “They have taken away my Lord.” That is the only real cause for weeping. When Jesus is gone, then life turns to ashes. At that hour the soul truly weeps.
This, then, is the supreme pain, the pain of broken fellowship with God. How can it be mended? Has the gospel any healing word here for this kind of sorrow? It has! Its very purpose and genius are found at this place. It may be only a coincidence, and yet it truly represents their spirit, that the last words of each of the four Gospels 149
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
put together are these: “Written” (John), “world” (Matthew),
“recover” (Mark), “God” (Luke). The Gospels have been written that the world might recover God. It is the story, not merely of man’s search for God, but of God’s search for man.
A girl wandered away from her home, was lost in the life of a great city and ended in a house of shame. Her brokenhearted mother heard of what had happened and left her home to seek her daughter.
She took some pictures of herself with her and left one in each of the houses of prostitution. The girl came in one day, glanced carelessly at the picture on the mantelpiece,
came nearer, turned pale, it
was the picture of her own
The Gospels have
mother, and on it were written
been written that
the words, “Come home,” and
the world might
signed, “Mother.” She fled out
recover God. It is
of the place and back to her
the story, not merely
mother’s arms.
of man’s search for
If the life of Jesus means
God, but of God’s
anything, it means that he is
search for man.
the photograph of God set
down amid erring, sinning
children, and across the whole
is written, “Come home.” That is all. But that is enough. And that is the meaning of the incarnation. It is just God saying to his children,
“Come home.” There is a bosom upon which prodigals can weep out their sin and shame, and there find restoration and healing, whether they be prodigals who have wasted lives in evil, or prodigals who have wasted opportunities for good. The gospel offers the Gospel of the Second Chance, the Gospel of a New Beginning. In a shop window was the sign, “No piece of crockery broken beyond repair.” Over the 150
SUFFERING AS A RESULT...
whole of the gospel is written, “No life broken beyond repair.”
The last word that John Mark leaves in his Gospel is the word,
“recover.” It was his word. He needed recovery. He left a linen sheet behind him, when he fled at the arrest of Jesus in the garden; he left a controversy behind him, when he turned back at Pamphylia, but in the end, he left a Gospel.
Matthew, when he became
a publican, was the man who
had sold his national ideals for
If the life of Jesus
Roman money, and yet in the
means anything, it
end he left the account of the
means that he is
Sermon on the Mount, the
the photograph of
highest ideals ever handed to
God set down amid
man.
erring, sinning
children, and
John was the man of bad
across the whole is
temper, the son of thunder,
written, “Come
and yet he leaves behind him
home.” That is all.
the Gospel of love, and a life
that illustrated that Gospel of
love.
Luke was the man of perhaps no outstanding sin, just the cultured humanist, but with life unlighted, then Christ touches that dull humanism into a flame of love and passion for man.
All four of these writers put together say that their Gospels were written that the world might recover God, and they themselves illustrate the recovery.
But most of us who are called Christian are not burdened with the sense of guilt of overt acts so much as with the sense of heaviness 151
at our inadequacy, our failure to be living and fruitful and contagious.
It is not so much the sense of evil done, as of good not done. If it is evil, it is more inward, the evil of the disposition, of the spirit, the evil of pride and envy and jealousy and inward uncleanness of thought, and of love of money and of self. We wear the continual pain of not being inwardly clean. Oft times the cry of the seventh chapter of Romans is our cry, “For that which I do I know not: for not what I would, that do I practice; but what I hate, that I do. . . For I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin, which is in my members. Oh wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Here was the pain of not being good, good in the depths of one’s being. What is the root of the failure of this evidently very religious, but badly defeated man?
In the sixth chapter of Romans, the writer is exulting in the vision of a complete spiritual victory in Christ. He speaks of having “died to sin,” of having “our old man crucified with Christ,” “sin shall no longer have dominion over you,” “being made free from sin,” this is a very triumphant note; but it fades out into the note of despair and gloom in the seventh chapter. What is the reason? It seems to be this.
In the sixth chapter “Christ,” or the pronoun for Christ, is used nineteen times. The emphasis is on Christ, on what was done by him as an act in history. But it is objective, outside of one, in history, not within. The victory of the sixth chapter is the victory of a vision, not an actuality, it was in Christ, but not in experience. Then, after this marvelous vision, ensues the miserable failure of the seventh. In this chapter the word “sin,” or its pronoun, is used nineteen times. Here the man seems to be fighting out the battle with sin alone, without moral and spiritual reinforcement. The Holy Spirit is not mentioned 152
in this chapter. This is important. It is a lone battle and a bad defeat.
Then comes the eighth chapter with its note of triumphant victory, the victory of experience. It was not merely in Christ; it was in the man himself. In this chapter “Holy Spirit,” or its pronoun, is used nineteen times. It is only a coincidence perhaps that these are used the same number of times, but it represents an emphasis. The eighth chapter is consistently victorious, because the man there has not merely something beautiful in Christ, but that beautiful and victorious thing has been actualized in him, as he has laid hold of the resources of the Spirit. “Laid hold of the resources of the Spirit?” That is not quite accurate, because this depicts our laying hold of something, when the fact is that the coming of the Spirit is something laying hold of us, and laying hold of us at our deepest depths.
When modern psychology tells us that out of the subconscious rise the really powerful instincts and forces that control life and destiny, we begin to see the necessity of religion holding this inner fortress of the subconscious, if it is going to hold life at all. The area of the work of the Holy Spirit is chiefly in the subconscious. Here the Spirit takes hold of the very depths of life and cleanses it in a bath of his own pure life. Now, we do good, because we are good, good in the very depths of our nature because these depths are held by the Supreme Good. By an entire self-surrender, we have let Christ into the center of our being; now, with him holding the sources, life becomes spontaneous, natural, unstrained, victorious.
A large part of Christendom is looking at the victory in Christ depicted in the sixth chapter, it is alluring, inviting. But the tragedy of seeing life as victory and living it as a victim, is the spiritual history of the majority. Theirs is the liturgy of defeat. And they call it Christianity. But it is not fair to call it Christianity until we, by a complete self-surrender and a bold appropriating faith, have moved 153
on into the eighth chapter and have laid hold of the resources found there, and know by experience the meaning of the words, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death.” This is Christianity, for this is the Spirit of Christ operative at the deepest depth, the depth of the subconscious.
One of our greatest Indian Christians, Principal Rudra, underwent a deep conversion of spirit when he got hold of the words, “I am the resurrection and the life.” And well he might, for these words hold within them two things that meet two of our greatest needs: “I am the resurrection,” the coming of new life to defeated, dull spirits; and “I am the life,” the power that sustains the new life continually after finding that resurrection. Life and life sustained! These are presages of victory. Someone has said that
“Religion appeals to two instinctive cravings, light on the mystery of life and power for the mastery of life.” If this be so, then the gospel meets these two cravings, for it comes as light, and it comes as life.
In this eighth chapter of victory there is the ringing verse: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.” The writer connects up this inward reinforcement by the Spirit, with the power to lay hold of “all things,” calamities, troubles, disappointments; things good, bad, and indifferent, and make them work together for good. The things themselves may not be good, but when they go through our consecrated purposes, they come out. Just as two cogwheels work together to move machinery, so the consecrated will makes even evil work for the furtherance of its purposes.
But these two things; reinforcement within by the Spirit, and the laying hold on our environment and making it work together for good, belong together. They cannot be separated. We cannot lay hold of our environment and make it work together for good, unless we 154
have been laid hold of at the depths by the Spirit. When the Spirit lays hold of us within, then all things within us work together for good, for everything is then controlled by the Divine Will.
Coordinated within, we conquer without.
Heal me at the heart and let the world come on!
155
11
THE ATTITUDE OF
SOCIETY MUST BE
VICARIOUS
T here is a possible danger in the attitude which we have been advocating. The danger is that the attitude may be taken and given a fatal twist, in the direction of social and economic reaction. The social and economic reactionary may take hold of this attitude and preach it, in lieu of doing something to remove the causes of suffering, which bear upon the individual from wrong social and economic systems.
While many of the sufferings that come upon us are not preventable, nevertheless the most of our sufferings are from wrong human systems, and since they are made by man, they can be unmade by man. It must be borne in mind that while evil can be in the individual will, it can also be in the collective will; it can be in the person; it can also be in the system. There are evil systems as well as evil persons.
The gospel would be a very partial message, if it taught the individual how to use his sufferings for higher ends, but left untouched the systems that cause the individual suffering. A part of 156
THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIETY ...
an intelligence test is to give the subject the task of bailing out water from a tank, while water is still running into it from a faucet. It depicts a very low level of intelligence for the subject to proceed to bail, without first turning off the water. Any tackling of the problem of suffering that does not go to the sources of that suffering, as they are found in evil systems, is lacking in spiritual intelligence. Judged by that simple test much of our Christian work could scarcely pass the intelligence test. We try to bail out suffering from individual lives and leave in full operation systems, which are the direct and positive cause of that individual suffering.
Shall we rescue individual
slaves, or shall we strike at the
slave system? Shall we pick up
There is no real
individual drunkards and leave
choice between
the liquor traffic to continue
an individual
to manufacture drunkards?
gospel and a
Shall we rescue the wounded
social gospel. If it is
in war, or shall we strike at the
to be a whole
war system? Shall we pick up
gospel, it must
the wounded by Jericho’s road,
include both.
or send someone out to get
the thieves? The obvious
answer to all these questions is
that we should do both. There is no real choice between an individual gospel and a social gospel. If it is to be a whole gospel, it must include both. But most of us are too small to include both. We alternate between a social or an individual emphasis, and do not hold them in a living blend. The power of the Japanese Christian leader, Kagawa, lies in the fact that he has blended these emphases in a living way. He believes that the individual may experience a personal 157
transformation, and that society must undergo that same transformation, before the kingdom of God is an actuality. It is not true, as claimed by many, that all we have to do is to regenerate the individual, and the regenerated individual will necessarily apply the gospel to the social order. The fact is that this does not usually work, unless the content of the social application is put into the teaching concerning individual regeneration.
In our Ashram in India we give the outcaste man who does the cleaning of the latrines a holiday one day a week, and we volunteer to take his place and do his work. It is not easy for the brown Brahmans or the white Brahmans to do this, for it means becoming outcastes in the eyes of the Hindu community. But very few have refused to volunteer. One Brahman convert did fail to volunteer, and when I asked him when he was going to do so he drew a long breath and said,
“Well, I’m converted, but I’m not converted that far.” There were limitations upon his conversion! But aren’t there limitations upon most conversions? Many are emotionally converted, but the conversion does not extend to the will. Many are converted in their wills, as far as those wills apply to the individual life, but the will is not converted to the extent of its being applied to the sum total of human relationships.
This teaching concerning the Christian attitude toward suffering must be converted, as far as the insistence upon changing suffering, producing systems. It is good to tell the African-American that he has produced in the “Negro” spirituals the most triumphant religious music the world has ever seen, because he has set his difficulties to music; but to leave the matter there, and not give ourselves to the doing away with those difficulties, is to make religion an opiate. It is well to say that a triumphant invalid made the factory work lighter as the laborers thought of her morning and evening smile (see, p. 173), 158
THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIETY ...
but that does not really touch the heart of the problem. Religion must see not merely that the beginning and the close of the day is lighted by the smile of a triumphant soul, but that the conditions and terms under which these men work during the day, are such that the men themselves, can smile, as they face their tasks, for they know they are not being exploited, but are an honorable part of an honorable partnership in the task of production. Religion to be really effective must go on from the invalid’s chair where it teaches the helpless to be helpful, and must stand in the
center of our factories and there
produce justice. Unless it does, it is
Religion that
not really facing the problem of
does not go to
human suffering. It is putting
the sources of
people to sleep in regard to central
suffering and
issues by raising side issues. When
cure things
one has gone off into irrelevancies
there, is up in
the Chinese say, “He’s gone up into
the horns of a
the horns of a cow.” Religion that
cow.
does not go to the sources of
suffering and cure things there, is
up in the horns of a cow. It has
twisted itself up into dead ends out of relationship to things, far away from the heart beat of human problems.
I once saw a high-caste woman gain merit by drawing water from a well, and fill the water jar of an outcaste woman. The latter had to stand off at a distance until the operation was over, and the high-caste woman had departed; only then could she come and get her jar. The high-caste woman went away with the glow of having done a good deed upon her, but that glow was an opiate. It blinded her to the deep injustice of the whole situation. It allowed her conscientiously to 159
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
tolerate the inhumanities of caste, by doing a good deed to an outcaste woman. Religion must not merely fill the water jars of the outcaste whether they be industrial or social outcastes, it must open the wells of human privileges equally to all. It must not merely alleviate but it must eliminate wrong. Justice, not charity, is the demand.
But the gospel of Christ would go further than justice. It would insist that we must take the attitude toward suffering that God takes.
God’s attitude is not merely that of justice; he goes further and is vicarious. God opens to us the
possibility of using pain, but
But the gospel of
he does not sit down and leave
Christ would go
it at that. He is at work,
further than
vicariously at work, to remove
justice. It would
the roots of human suffering.
insist that we must
And society must do the same.
take the attitude
As the contacts of God
toward suffering
with human society are
that God takes.
vicarious, so the contacts of
society with the individual
must also be vicarious. The
suffering of the individual must be looked on and felt as the suffering of the whole. The failure and sin of any one, must be looked on and felt as the failure and sin of the whole. The hunger of any one, must be felt as a biting hunger by everyone. The spirit of the atonement must work its way into all human relationships.
The lack of that spirit is destroying human society. The Chinese have a saying, “It’s not on my body,” meaning that they are not responsible. A foreign lady saw an irate mother-in-law dragging her young daughter-in-law to the brink of the river to throw her in. She 160
appealed to the watching crowd to save the girl, but they turned to her in surprise and said, “It’s not on my body.” It is this lack of the sense of corporate responsibility, that is laying its destroying hand upon China. I was in a city, the streets of which were unspeakably filthy. A Chinese gentleman told me that an encyclopedia reported that this city was the dirtiest city in the world. I turned to this Chinese friend and said to him, “I don’t understand this; these shops and stores are beautifully clean, Chinese gentlemen in them are dressed in silk, but these narrow streets are unspeakably dirty.”
“It is easy to understand,” he replied, “for the shops and stores belong to these men, but the streets don’t belong to anybody.” So, they all wallowed in corporate filth, because of a lack of corporate responsibility. To say, “It is not on my body,” turned out to mean that the results of it were on everybody’s body.
The Brahman of India has said concerning the outcaste in his filth and ignorance and degradation, “It’s not on my body,” as he raised himself in holy aloofness, only to find that when he wanted self-government and freedom for himself, he couldn’t get it because the outcaste hung about the body of society like a corpse. If we do not take the attitude of vicarious suffering toward the weaker members of human society, then we will have to take the fact of suffering in ourselves without its being vicarious. It comes back upon us as suffering, unlighted and deadly.
In 1887 Delyonov, as minister of education in Russia and as the representative of the ruling classes, announced that “the children of coachmen, servants, cooks, laundresses, small shopkeepers, and such like people should not be encouraged to rise above the sphere in which they were born.” The ruling classes said that the education and uplift of the masses were not their responsibility. “It’s not on my body,” they said, only to find that in the course of a few swift years, 161
the children of those “coachmen, servants, cooks, laundresses, small shopkeepers, and such like people” were standing on the prostate body of that fallen ruling class. Those who would not accept the hurt of society as their own hurt, had to accept the heel of society upon their necks in a more deadly hurt.
An employer of the West, in callous disregard of the human element in industry, greedily put in every improvement in machinery that promised to increase his dividends and overcome his competitors, even if it did throw millions out of employment. “It’s not on my body,” he said, as he eliminated men and put in machines, only to find that there was no one to buy his piled-up goods, so his structure came down upon him in a crash. It was and is on his body, disastrously so.
The white man of America has gathered his garments around him as he moved to the outskirts of the cities, in careless disregard of what happened to the African-Americans, as they festered in tenements, and wallowed in social degradation and ostracism. “It’s not on my body,” he said, only to find that the very degradation of the African-American had degraded the American people in the eyes of the rest of the world. “There is only one way to keep a man down in the gutter, and that is to stay down with him,” said Booker T.
Washington. In the degrading of that person, we degrade ourselves.
The only way to lift yourself, is to lift everyone in sight. In the lifting of others, you yourself grow tall. The white man who says that the condition of the African-American “isn’t on my body,” will find in the end, that the very degradation of the African-American creates the opportunity for men to manipulate them in their ignorance, to use them for political purposes, and thereby pull down the sum total of society. If it isn’t on our body vicariously, it will be there as unproductive suffering.
“It’s to our interest that China and Japan should not unite,” said a 162
THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIETY ...
European military officer to me one day. “Their unity is not on my body,” he said, only to find that this lack of unity was paralyzing the trade of his nation in the East, and was making the whole situation so tense that larger and larger armaments had to be piled up on the backs of his groaning nation, creating the possibility of an outbreak there, that would involve many nations, including his own, in a common ruin.
Jesus proclaimed a new kind of order in human society in which every human being would feel himself a part of every other person, in which the suffering of any
would be the suffering of all,
in which love should be the
Jesus proclaimed a
motivating and sensitizing
new kind of order in
element back of it all. Paul
human society in
visualized a new brotherhood,
which every
a “body” in which when one
human being
member suffered, all members
would feel himself
would suffer with it. Just as in
a part of every
a human body, when one part
other person...
suffers a hurt, the white blood
cells from all parts of the body
are rushed with their healing
and their help, so the health of the whole body of society should be at the disposal of the weakest to heal and to lift.
Jesus represents that new society in himself. Every man’s pain and sin were on his body. He felt it all so deeply, that it broke that body on a cross. But that broken body becomes the life of a race. “This is my body which was broken for you,” he says as he offers to us his body, which is the outer symbol of a life that felt all, and healed all. Into his body have gone all the suffering and sin and pain of a race, and he 163
transmutes it all and gives it back as the health of the race.
We must not, therefore, twist this glorious possibility of the use of suffering into a religious but really deadly indifference to the suffering of the individual. A wealthy farmer prayed in his family circle that his unfortunate neighbor might not starve. When they arose from their knees, his little girl said to him, “Daddy, you needn’t have bothered God with that, for you can quite easily keep them from starving.” She was right. Society must not allow religiosity to be in lieu of righteousness. And if it is to be really Christian, it must not stop at righteousness; it must go on to atonement, and make every man’s hurt its own hurt, and every man’s sin its own sin. And it must remove the causes no matter the cost to itself. It must do this or abdicate as Christian.
164
COMFORT OR CHARACTER?
After Jesus had been with his disciples for nearly three years, during which time they had watched him and had caught his ideas and his spirit, he turned to them and said, “Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.”
Through the words that he had been speaking unto them they were being cleansed as individuals, and yet more, for he was cleansing their total conception of life. He was cleansing their universe itself.
Jesus cleansed their idea of God. Many old ideas had been lingering as an incubus, but now before them and with them and in them was the one loving, Heavenly Father of all humanity. He cleansed their conception of humanity, so that no longer were there any high and low, any white or black, any base or noble born, but just one humanity, a human family with God as Father and all men and women as brothers and sisters. Jesus cleansed life: it was no longer something to be escaped; it was good, and they were to have more of it. He cleansed the physical; it was no longer the enemy of the spiritual, but by its dedication to spiritual ends it could become the agent of the spiritual, therefore in itself, spiritual and sacred. Jesus cleansed this world, it was no longer something to be hastened 165
through, but it was to be the scene of the kingdom of God on earth.
He cleansed the home, cutting from it all polygamy, all concubinage, and founding it upon the equal worth of one man and one woman in a life-partnership until death parted them. Jesus cleansed religion: it was no longer a set of magic superstitions, but a means of laying hold of divine resources for victorious moral living. He cleansed greatness: it was no longer to be seen in wealth and in power over the lives of men, but the greatest among them was to be the servant of all, and the servant of all was to be the greatest among them. Jesus cleansed power; it was no longer to be seen as military might, it was the power to overcome evil with good, hate by love, and the world by a cross of suffering for the world.
Jesus cleansed suffering! It was no longer a sign of our being caught in the wheel of existence, as Buddha suggests; no longer the result of our evil deeds of a previous birth, as our Hindu friends tell us; no longer the sign of the displeasure of God, as many of all ages and of all religions have suggested; no longer something to be stoically and doggedly borne. It is more than that. Suffering is the gift of God.
Only the gospel dares say that, for it is only the gospel that dares say that God too suffers. Moreover, it dares say that this suffering in God is not marginal and accidental, but inherent in the very nature of God as love. It says it because the cross lights up the nature of God.
It says it because, as Von Hugel wrote, “Suffering is the purest form of activity, perhaps the only pure form of activity;” and we cannot deny to God that purest form of activity. It says it because it means something, yes, everything, to know that though living in this kind of a world is costing us pain, it is costing God more. But the gospel says all this, because it does not just say it and then leave it there, but shows a way out by its offer of the possibility of the use of pain. The 166
COMFORT OR CHARACTER?
gospel is the most pessimistic of outlooks on life, for it looks at life through a cross, but it is the most optimistic because it believes that that very cross in him and in us can be, and is, redemptive.
The gospel is the only way of life that dares take hold of the nettle of life, dares grasp it firmly where that nettle is sharpest, and then opens its hand and shows flowers there—the very Rose of Sharon itself. I once listened to a row of blind children as they stood and sang, “Our God is a God of love.” How dared those blind children sing that? They
couldn’t if the gospel had
not the cross as its
foundation and that cross
Jesus cleansed
as the revelation of the
suffering! It was no
nature of God.
longer ... the result of
The gospel is the only
our evil deeds of a
faith that dares say to its
previous birth, as our
followers, “Behold, I send
Hindu friends tell us; ...
you forth as sheep in the
no longer something
midst of wolves,” you will
to be stoically and
have as much chance of
doggedly borne ...
escaping pain from men
Suffering is the gift of
and from nature as sheep
God.
have in the midst of
wolves. It could say that
because it was also going to say, “I saw the Lamb upon the throne;”
and his being on the throne is a pledge that we too somehow, some way, some time, shall pass out of the midst of the wolves of men and of nature, to victory over both.
Think of the audacity of the account that tells us that the Master rode into his triumph on an ass! Rode into triumph, on the symbol of 167
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
the deepest humiliation! But that is exactly what he did. To men of that day, humility, meekness, love, self-sacrifice, and a cross were asinine. But Jesus rode on the back of them into his triumph. Men are just now awakening to the fact that these are the fundamental foundations of the universe, that everything else is weakness, so that the kingdom of Jesus is “the kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world.” His kingdom is written in the very nature and constitution of things.
Someone has said that “there is a serene Providence that rules the fate of nations, that takes no account of disaster, conquers alike by what is called defeat and
what is called victory, that
thrusts aside enemy and
The gospel is the most
obstruction, crushes
pessimistic of outlooks
everything immoral as
on life, for it looks at
inhuman, and secures the
life through a cross,
ultimate triumph of the
but it is the most
best, by the suppression
optimistic because it
of everything that resists
believes that that
the moral laws of the
very cross in him and
universe.” There is a ring
in us can be, and is,
of truth in these words
redemptive.
except where they say “a
serene Providence.” There
is hardly at the head of
the universe “a serene Providence” unaffected by the pain and struggle of it all. Rather we think of a serene Love that provided for itself, in making a world like this, its own cross.
Portions of Hungary were given over in the Peace Treaty of Versailles to other countries, the dismemberment of a land. There are 168
maps up everywhere with these portions in black, and a crown of thorns upon them. When God, in creating, looked upon the world, he must have seen portions shaded with the darkness of suffering and sin. He must also have seen the crown of thorns upon it all, and that crown was his own. But that crown of thorns is dearer to the heart of the world than all the tinseled crowns of golden might. The book of Revelation speaks of those who wore “crowns as it were”; they were not real crowns, they were only “as it were,” but this crown of thorns is the symbol of the deepest reality of the universe, and some day we shall crown Him Lord of all with that. That crown of thorns is the pledge and the promise that the shaded portions shall be redeemed, That all the rages of the ages
Shall be canceled.
We feel, therefore, that we have a solid foundation for our joy. We see that the universe which in the beginning appeared not even to be just, now turns out to be atoning. We see that the universe had to be hard. But it is not “a vale of tears”; rather, it is “a vale of character making”; and character cannot be made except in the strain and stress and struggle. We cannot cry out and say, “Why have you made me thus?” for God hasn’t “made” us yet, he is only in the process. If that process seems without purpose, let us remember that if the cross reveals God, there must be a glorious purpose behind it all, for he is willing to pay the supreme price to bring it to pass. I once saw some rug weavers of North India patiently sit week after week and month after month, making one rug. As I stood and gazed at the rug, I felt the futility of sitting there so long, for the rug seemed to be full of blotches and blurs and knots. But I was looking at the wrong side of the rug. When I came around to the weaver’s side, I saw the pattern 169
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
that was unfolding-and how beautiful it was! It was worth the patience. We now see the wrong side of God’s purposes, and they seem without pattern as he weaves through the ages. But one day we shall stand and see things as he sees them, and then we will gasp at the wonder of the plan that unfolds. Now we see the blotches and the blurs and the knots, but we also see the cross. That holds us steady.
God means well, and he means to make us well.
Jesus said to his disciples, “Let not your heart be troubled,” not because they were to be protected from all troubles, but because they were “to believe in God.”
Faith in God and his
redemptive purposes will
Faith in God and his
not save you from the
redemptive purposes
troubles, but will save you
will not save you from
through them, for the
the troubles, but will
troubles themselves can be
save you through
made into the agents of
them, for the troubles
redemption. If this be so,
themselves can be
then “even if the world
made into the agents
falls to wreck, the man of
of redemption.
faith will be undismayed
under its ruins.” For the
fact is that if the worst
comes to the worst, we can get along without the world, for we have our own inner worlds. Someone rushed into Mr. Emerson’s presence one day and said in a dismayed tone, “Mr. Emerson, they tell me that the world is coming to an end.”
“Never mind,” replied Emerson, “we can get along without it.”
The man who is not dependent on anything in heaven or earth, except his right relationship with God, is safe. Holding that intact, 170
everything else will swing back. As Jesus hung on his cross, they tore from him everything, everything except the two words, “My God.” He held to them; nothing could tear them from his lips or from his heart; and, holding on to them, he swings back again and out of that one phrase rescued from the ruins, builds an eternal kingdom. When Stephen Colonna was driven out of Rome in the 12th century and all his palaces and strongholds destroyed, he was later found on the road and, when recognized, was taunted with these words, “Where are your strongholds now?” To which Stephen Colonna quietly replied,
“Here,” grasping his heart. That strong-hold intact, everything else can be taken up into one’s purposes and life rebuilt out of its ruins.
God seldom uses any person unless he puts that individual through the testing of pain. Jesus begins his ministry with a wilderness experience, but it ends with an Easter morning. Our lesser ministries too need the testing of suffering. When I was called to the ministry, I had money to go to college to study, but it was all swept away by calamity, as the support of the family thrown on me, and the way to fulfill that call to the mission was blocked. I was called, and the way was immediately blocked! But that year spent behind barricades was one of the very best. Knowing poverty by experience, it fitted me to understand the poverty of India. Take out that year, and life’s music would be thin, lacking the rich note of suffering. The Malayalee people of South India have a proverb which says, “He who is born in the fire will not fade in the sun.” If God, therefore, lets us be born in the fire of adversity and difficulty, depend on it, he is only making sure that we will not fade in the sun of smaller difficulties incident to human living.
I worked for years on notes in a New Testament, hoping that they would be the basis of a book. When, one day, that New Testament was stolen, it seemed that my work of years had crashed. To begin 171
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
over again to make new notes, was a heart-breaking task! But I had to do it, and now I find that it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I had to go to the whole New Testament afresh. Had the notes I had accumulated for years been on the wide margins, I should have read them, but now I was compelled to find something new. And I did! My New Testament is richer, and so am I, for having lost the old notes. God never takes a thing from our hands without putting something better in its place.
I am convinced, therefore, that “there is a budding morrow in every midnight.” Or, as Clement of Alexandria put it, “Christ has turned all our sunsets to sunrises.”
We have, therefore, often to be like
the night bird singing in the night
God never
of the coming dawn when there is
takes a thing
nothing but darkness around us. But
from our hands
we sing of the Dawn, because we
without putting
have the Dawn. Christ is our Dawn.
something
When the disciples of Jesus were
better in its
on the mount “there came a cloud
place.
and overshadowed them, and they
feared as they entered into the
cloud.” But a voice spoke out of
that cloud saying, “This is my beloved Son, you must hear him.” And they lifted up their eyes and saw no man save Jesus only. That cloud had cleared their vision! Before it came, they were divided in their allegiance, wanting to hold Moses and Elias and Jesus on an equal footing. But after the cloud had passed, Jesus filled their horizon.
When clouds come upon our spirits, we must listen, for God will speak. That Voice will speak in that hour, as it cannot at any other time, for the cloud shuts out all things else and shuts us in with God.
172
We have been dividing our allegiance with other things, good things perhaps—were not Moses and Elias both good men? But we have been tolerating things that cut into our central allegiance and divide Jesus’ supremacy. Then the cloud comes down and we fear as we enter the cloud. A rich and cultured lady stood by the graveside of her only child, desolate and wrapped in a cloud of loneliness and sorrow as dark as night. But as she stood by that graveside the voice of God quietly spoke to her. She went from that graveside, to give herself to the care of children of unmarried mothers. She is one of the happiest women in the world now, for in that dark hour the voice of God let her see that she had been dividing her central allegiance with personal interests, and when she lifted up her tear-dimmed eyes she saw no man save Jesus only. Then, she blessed the cloud that cleared her vision.
A very able and gracious lady was stricken with arthritis. Her work in various fields of activity was ended. She lay a helpless invalid, and in great pain for many years. But to say that her work was ended is not quite true. It assumed a higher form. She had them carry her to the window where the factory men went by, going to and from the factory. As they went to their toil each morning, they were greeted with her friendly smile, and at eventide when the day’s work was done, there was the same friendly smile. Many a man’s toil was lightened by the picture of that beautiful face with its smile— in spite of. For years that face lighted their gloom. When she died, four factories closed down to let the men attend the funeral of the woman who had let them see into the heart of beauty, through the door of pain and who had let them see God through calamity.
No wonder that another sufferer with arthritis, a woman stricken in the very heyday of life and made an invalid for the balance of her days, could tell her pastor, “I would not exchange the wonder and 173
glory of this fellowship with Christ which I have learned through my suffering. This suffering has brought me life.” The cloud had cleared her vision.
Two missionaries lost their only daughter from leprosy. “This is the outcome of our service to India,” they might have said in their bitterness of grief. But they did not. They came back to India determined to do something for lepers who are suffering as their daughter suffered. They established the Purulia Leper Asylum, which has grown into one of the largest and best facility for the care of persons with leprosy in the world. That daughter did not die in vain, for by her death she opened a home for thousands of her fellow sufferers. The cloud that came over that home in the death of the daughter, cleared the vision of the parents and let them see a human need, which they would not have seen had it not touched them directly.
A friend of mine, an Indian of lovely character and keenness of spirit, told me that he was a proud, aloof Brahmin even after he became a Christian. He felt himself better than others because of his birth. He had no interest in others; he was interested in the fact of his own superiority. Then, one day in a crowded motor bus, he and others were suddenly thrown over an embankment as the bus overturned. He and the rest were in a common calamity. As he crawled out of the wreckage something happened within him, for he saw in a flash, that he was bound up with every other human life and shared their common woes. He came out of that wreck a brother to every man and has lived it since. A Brahmin perished that day and a brother was born. “But,” he said with a smile, “it took a wreck to remake me.” A cloud of calamity came over them all, and out of that cloud the Voice spoke. Ever afterward, Jesus filled his horizon.
174
A lady in India who lived as an invalid, walking with crutches because of a spinal affliction, fell down the steps one day, breaking one crutch as she fell, and losing the other on the way. She lay at the bottom of the steps and called for help. But it was noon and the servants were all away. Finally, when no help was forthcoming, with a prayer, she drew herself by the banister, got to her feet after a great struggle, began to walk, and has been walking ever since, without the crutches! The best thing that ever happened to her was that fall, though for the moment it seemed calamity on calamity. But out of the cloud came the Voice that said, “Rise up and walk.”
I once ran out of a burning building, the house of one of the saints of the earth. My losses were small, hers were great, almost everything, in fact. As I looked back into the building, out of which we had rescued a few things from the lower floor, I saw a motto against the wall in the hallway with the words, “Rest in the Lord.” The flames had formed for a moment, a framework of fire around the words. That motto was the last thing I saw in the burning building; then it too perished in the flames. Perished in the flames? It and the fact that it represented were the only things we really rescued. As we walked away from the ruin, I told the saintly lady that the last thing I saw in the house was the motto with its fiery frame, saying, “Rest in the Lord.” She turned to me with a smile that was nothing less than heavenly and said, “That is what I am doing.” The house had gone into ashes, but out of it all a smile had been rescued, that told of a heart at rest, and the possession of that smile and that heart, was worth more than all the possessions that perished that day. She said that she was resting in the Lord. She was, but that sounds very passive. I saw something more; she was snatching out of the heart of that calamity a victory of spirit, that made me feel that flames that burn up one’s possessions are not a loss, if they could light up a face 175
like that. “Now I begin to be a disciple,” said Ignatius, as he went joyfully to Rome to be torn to pieces for the name of the Lord Jesus.
“Now I begin to live,” said the smile on that lady’s face, as her home went to ashes.
176
THE LAST WORD:
With Life or With Death?
As Jesus was going to heed the call of a distracted father to come and heal his little daughter, he was interrupted by a woman in deep need. He stopped to respond to her touch of faith, but the incident took time, and word came from the house of Jairus saying that the daughter had died and there was no need to trouble the Master any further. One can see the trembling lips of the father as the dread news fell on his ears. But the account says, “Jesus, not heeding the word spoken, said to the ruler of the synagogue, ‘Fear not, only believe.’”
“Jesus, not heeding the word spoken!” But the word spoken was a fact. It was a firsthand fact, straight out of the death chamber. Yet Jesus refused to heed a fact. Why? Well, he was listening to another, and a higher set of facts. This higher set of facts was that spiritual kingdom which Jesus felt was the supreme and ultimate reality. This higher kingdom of spiritual reality was pressing upon, modifying, breaking into and transforming the lower kingdom of physical fact.
177
Jesus felt that the last word was with that higher kingdom. The lower set of facts said, “The child is dead;” the higher set said, “The child can live.” Jesus refused to listen to the word spoken by Death because he was listening to the word spoken by Life.
We live in a scientific age. Science turns away from tradition, from untested hypothesis, to the facts. It is great gain to religion to live in an age that demands facts. This demand for the facts clears away superstitions, makes for reality, and forces religion to stand with its feet upon the ground, and verify itself in the realm of proved reality.
This is gain. But while there are gains, there are losses too. We begin to heed the facts so thoroughly that we become a part of them, we cannot rise above them. We become of such a piece with them that we come under their tyranny.
We come to that frame of mind that is non-expectant of anything beyond the physical facts and laws around those facts. The spirit of expectancy, an expectancy that reaches beyond the immediate physical facts, which is so inherent in living religion, fades out. There is little or no sense of miracle, either physical or spiritual. We become so naturalized to our environment, that our religion becomes a naturalism. It is regular, but dull and calculable. There are no surprises in it and no surprises come out of it. We listen to the word spoken; the word spoken by physical facts.
Every man needs reconversion at forty years of age on general principles! Because at forty, we settle down, begin to lose that sense of spiritual expectancy, begin to take on “protective resemblance” to the environment, and play for safety. I once heard an Anglican bishop say, that the period of the greatest number of spiritual casualties is between forty and fifty, and not between twenty and thirty, as one would expect. Why? Well, if “heaven lies about us in our infancy,” the 178
THE LAST WORD ...
world lies about us in our middle age. We come under its standards, fit into its facts, and are slowly de-Christianized.
Jesus entrusted us with the most astounding task ever given to a set of human beings. The task was nothing less than the replacing of the whole present world order, founded as it is on greed, exploitation, and unbrotherliness, with a new order founded on love, sharing, and brotherhood. That new order is the kingdom of God on earth.
Obviously, to think of
replacing the whole
present world order in
Jesus entrusted us with
every single component,
the most astounding
economic, social,
task ever given to a set
political, is a breathtaking
of human beings. The
task. It is breathtaking,
task was nothing less
when we remember that
than the replacing of
it includes particularly,
the whole present world
the inner motives and
order, founded as it is
instincts, the very texture
on greed, exploitation,
of spirit, and the
and unbrotherliness,
minutest inner outlook.
with a new order
The program of the
founded on love,
coming of the kingdom
sharing, and
of God on earth makes
brotherhood.
the program of
Communism seem simple
and conservative.
Communism deals largely with redistribution in the realm of the economic; the kingdom of God deals with the sum total of life both without and within. If this be true, then, obviously, the central characteristic of a Christian must be daring faith. She cannot fit into 179
things as they are, for she feels that things as they are constitute something less and something other than Christ’s kingdom, and to her the supreme reality is that higher set of facts. Jesus made the
“kingdom of God” and “life” synonymous. Jesus speaks of entering into “the kingdom of God” and entering into “life” as the same thing.
To him the kingdom of God was life, real life, the only real life. That to him, was the supreme word spoken, so that any word spoken on a lower level was not ultimate or final. Therefore, when the word spoken on the lower level was death, Jesus refused to heed it. He knew that the last word was with Life. We have been insisting in these pages that in dealing with the three tragic facts of sin, suffering, and death there must be no subterfuges, no dodging, no mental running away from reality; there must be a stark realism in dealing with them. But, having insisted on this, we are now in a position to say that, while these three things are real, they are relatively unreal. They are intruders. They are not rooted in the ultimate facts of the universe.
The ultimately real is not sin but goodness, not suffering but health and joy, not death but life. Sin, suffering, and death are negatives; goodness, joy, and life are positives. The first three are a trinity of denials, the last three are a trinity of affirmations. The future, then, lies with affirmations, no matter what the present word spoken may say. We believe that sin, suffering, and death will be banished from the universe, with the ultimate triumph of the kingdom of God.
Now, from these premises it would seem that if the facts of sin, suffering, and death are not ultimately real, then the way to get rid of them is simply to deny that they exist, change your mind and they are gone. This is to slip into an easy fallacy. It is a denial of the very breath and atmosphere of the New Testament. Look into the face of Jesus as he goes toward Jerusalem to enter into the final struggle with these three grim facts, and see if you can discover there, that he is merely trying to get men to change their minds. No, he knew that 180
THE LAST WORD ...
these facts were rooted deeper than the mind, they had taken hold of the very instincts of our nature, had become part of us, and their hold could not be broken lightly. It would mean the ultimate price.
Sin could not be banished unless he took it on himself and became sin; suffering could not be done away with unless he took it all into his own heart and let it break it; death could not be wiped out unless he himself died. Died and arose! The whole thing must be met fairly and squarely and without subterfuge, met and conquered. In the cross, he met them all, there are signs about the cross of a cosmic struggle; and in the resurrection he
conquered them all. There
are signs of a cosmic victory
The ultimately real is
about this Easter morning.
not sin but goodness,
The account does not say
not suffering but
that Jesus did not believe the
health and joy, not
word spoken about the death
death but life. Sin,
of the child. He simply did
suffering, and death
not heed it. The spoken word
are negatives;
was a fact as far as it went,
goodness, joy, and
but it wasn’t the last word.
life are positives.
The last word lay with Life.
When we face these three
facts, sin, suffering, and
death, we do not deny them as facts: we deny them as ultimate facts, and we face them, since he faced them, and conquer them, since he conquered them.
We do not mentally deal with sorrow; we actively deal with it. We take it up and make it subserve and serve the higher realities. We take captivity captive. Professor James says that “this active dealing with sorrow puts a new dimension to life.” It does! When the way is 181
blocked in every direction, there is always this possibility of a movement in the direction of the upward. When the “outlook” isn’t good, we can always try the “up look.” When one has learned this secret, he is no longer bound by the tyranny of the word spoken on this level of the lower; he hears that higher word spoken, takes hold of it as the sinking Peter took hold of the hand of Jesus, and walks upon the raging seas of circumstance and suffering into which men sink and succumb.
Let us look at the four things which men and women fear most: criticism, material insecurity, old age, death.
First, criticism. We fear criticism because it strikes at our self-love. According to the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, criticism wounds our ego, and since this strikes at the citadel, we resent it.
What is the Christian way to meet criticism? It would seem to be this.
First, ask the question, is this criticism true? If it is true, then I will correct the thing criticized. I am a better man because of this correction, and therefore because of this criticism. My critics, therefore, become the unpaid watchmen of my soul. It is important that we take this attitude, for the way of meeting life which we are advocating is liable to a twist at this point. We are liable to think that, since we can use injustice toward us, every painful criticism that comes upon us is necessarily an injustice. It may be that the criticism is very just and very much needed. But suppose the criticism is unjust and untrue, are we meekly to bear it? No, we are to take it up into the plan of our lives and use it. Jesus was crucified on misquotations and twisted meanings. He did not merely bear them; he took them all up into his purpose and through these lies spelled out the truth of God.
Those misquotations sent him to a cross, but the world now reads through that cross, the truth about God and life. Someone has said that “thinking is just a rearranging of our prejudices.” To be a 182
THE LAST WORD ...
Christian is to rearrange our unjust criticisms, and to turn them back to the world as an entirely different message.
Before a large audience, a questioner accused the lecturer of being a liar. This happened in a land where “to lose face” is the supreme loss. The lecturer had lost “face” before that great crowd. But only for a moment. He regained “face,” and more, by smiling, by showing no resentment, and by dealing with the question at issue patiently and fairly. The incident seemingly passed by. But that night, one of the members of that audience could not sleep. The patience and good humor with which the lecturer had dealt with the matter haunted him.
He had his own quarrel with
another, and a wrong was
rankling in his own heart. For
hours he tossed on his bed,
To be a Christian is
until at four o’clock in the
to rearrange our
morning, after a desperate
unjust criticisms,
struggle, he went to the home
and to turn them
of his enemy, aroused him,
back to the world
talked over the whole matter,
as an entirely
asked forgiveness, received it
different message.
and gave it. As he went home,
day was dawning, in more
ways than one! He stood up in
the church that morning and asked those whom he had sinned against with his tongue to forgive him. The response was immediate and contagious. Others began to feel the contagion of penitence and good will. Thirty-four quarrels were settled that morning. The whole spirit of the church was changed. The whole thing turned on the axis of the inner spirit by which he met it. Just as the lily lays hold of the muck and slime and takes it up into its own life, transforms it, transfigures it 183
and presents it to the world as the symbol of purity, so we can lay hold of unjust criticism, born out of the muck and mire of men’s prejudices and passions, and turn it into the white truth of God. It is said that “truth can be flashed out in a single blow,” true, and it can also be flashed out in a single blow received, flashed out by an attitude of spirit that reveals more of truth and beauty in a moment than all the arguments of the ages. “What is truth?” asked Pilate, expecting an answer in argument and definition, but the world sees it in the spirit of the Man standing before him. The truth was being flashed out at every blow that Jesus received.
So, whether criticism be true or untrue, we can use it and make it the servant of our higher purposes.
Second, material insecurity. There are two ways that we try to meet material insecurity. One is by laying up as much as possible and thus hoping to provide defenses in this way. This method has obvious disadvantages because it brings anxiety and often corrosion of spirit in the accumulation, and, besides, we find, as in the present crash of stock market, that securities aren’t secure. The second way, is to renounce the material entirely, to look on it as a bondage, and to extricate oneself from it by complete renunciation. In this way, we try to get rid of the difficulties of the material by washing our hands of it entirely. In each case, there seems to be a bondage: one is a bondage to riches, the other is a bondage to poverty. In either case there is no freedom. You are only free as you are free to use poverty or plenty.
The man who is free to use plenty only, is bound by that very plenty; the man who is free to use poverty only, is bound by that very poverty.
They are both bound. But the man who, like Paul, has “learned both to abound and to be in want,” is free. Gandhi, after all, is in bondage to his poverty. He is troubled in conscience at having to contradict his principles by using motor cars, telegraphs, steamships, and mill owners 184
to support his enterprises. The mill owners, on the other hand, are bound by their mills, and the necessity of living on a certain economic level, because the moment they are deprived of the things that money can procure, they are in misery. You are free if you can take poverty, if it comes, and use its limitations as ladders to climb the steeps of God; and you are free if you can take plenty, if it comes, and use it in the purposes of the kingdom of God.
Once while waiting for a train in India, I asked an Indian gentleman if he were going on the train that was due shortly. He replied that he was not, for there were only third-class carriages on it.
I told him that I was going on it. “Oh, yes,” he replied, “you can go on it, for you are a religious man. If you go first class, it doesn’t exalt you, and if you go third class, it doesn’t degrade you. You are lifted above these distinctions, but I have to keep them up!” If I had given way to my impulse, I should have danced on the platform! First class doesn’t exalt, third class doesn’t degrade; pleasure doesn’t turn our heads, nor pain break our hearts; plenty doesn’t entangle our spirits and poverty, doesn’t break them, for we see in them all, an opportunity to use them for the central purposes of our life, which are deeper than any of these things. Poverty and plenty are our life events; the kingdom of God is our life.
Third, the fear of old age. It is a serious thing to see our physical frame begin to wither and decay. We may stave it off by subterfuges that science offers in the way of face-lifting and beauty paraphernalia. But it is a losing battle, and in the end, we know that we shall be defeated.
This is serious, serious if our life is bound up with our appearances.
But suppose it is not? Then, we can look on approaching age with a smile, or, better still, with positive joy. Each period of life offers an opportunity to make a contribution impossible at any other period. In youth, we offered our ardency to God and to man; in approaching 185
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
age, we shall offer our poise, our experience, our sympathy, qualities which it was impossible to offer at any other age. To grow old, not only gracefully, but gratefully, is the Christian’s privilege. For the Christian is not to bear old age, but to use it. Is there anything more utterly beautiful than a face, now grown old, but chiseled into tenderness and sympathy and experience? In forgetting about one’s appearance and entering on something deeper, appearances come back, for there is nothing more beautiful in heaven or in earth, than a face that bears the marks of
love and purity. “Oh, you
with heaven in your face, give
You are free if you
me a penny,” cried a beggar as
can take poverty, if it
he saw the saintly missionary
comes, and use its
William Pennefather go past.
limitations as ladders
When I first went to
to climb the steeps of
India, it was not easy to get
God; and you are
acclimatized, so I came down
free if you can take
with fever several times. It
plenty, if it comes,
was almost worth having
and use it in the
fever to have the privilege of
purposes of the
the visits of an aged Indian
kingdom of God.
saint called “Caroline Mama.”
Her face was always suffused
with a radiance, and when she
arose from her knees after praying by my bedside, she would invariably lean over and leave a kiss upon my fevered brow. As she made her way out of the room, I felt that I had entertained an angel, not unawares, but knowingly. Now, had she been young, she would have timidly inquired at the veranda how I was and would have gone away, but old age has the privilege of going into inner sanctuaries and 186
leaving its kiss where it is most needed. Yes, old age has the privilege of walking into the sanctuaries of the souls of other people, that youth knows nothing about. Old age has its freedoms as well as youth.
So, whenever I look into the mirror, and see my hair getting gray, I never feel anything but joy. I shall love it when it is white! For each year of life has been finer than the last, and why should it not be till the end, the end, which is but a fresh beginning?
Among the five hundred gods in one of the temples at Peking, is Marco Polo. The Chinese deified their first visitor from the West. But they made him different from all the others. The Chinese who had been deified, sat in calm poise as though the centuries were looking through their eyes. But Marco was standing, the only one of the five hundred standing, his whole attitude eager, his eyes fierce and glaring, and his face drawn. That was how the poised East looked upon the possessive West. I think I admire more, the generosity of the Chinese in giving Marco a place among the gods, than I do the deification of this restlessness. We of the West, have deified it for so long, and have hoped for so much from it, and have found so little from it, that we do not find ourselves bending the knees before the altar of restlessness as once we did. Another figure of that pantheon interested me more than did Marco Polo, and it left a better taste in my mouth. It was the figure of a man who had been so fine in life, that when he came to old age, his face cracked in the middle, from the forehead down, and he was in the act of pulling off this wrinkled mask, which had behind it the face of youth. He was really young through his goodness, so the outer mask was being stripped away to show his essential self. I loved this old, young man, and saluted him in my heart, for he represented what I felt that the Christian should be, a person who is by the inner renewal of his/her spirit, growing perpetually young.
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CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
A very gracious Indian lady was entertaining some foreign visitors in that graceful and beautiful way, so characteristic of the Indian woman. One of the visitors was so impressed with her poise, her dignity, and sweetness that she said in leaving, “You are so beautiful.”
The Indian lady replied, very quietly, “Why shouldn’t I be? I’m seventy-two years of age.” She had caught the secret!
Fourth, the fear of death. The chief sufferings of life come from death. We fear death both for ourselves and for those whom we love. We know in a way that it will come to us all, but when it does come, it comes as a surprise and leaves us stunned. I say, “leaves us stunned,” but that isn’t quite
true, for some have learned
the secret we have been talking
The Christian
about in this book and it
should be, a
leaves them singing. Almost all
person who is by
the early Christians had caught
the inner renewal
this note of victory over
of his/her spirit,
death. I have just come from
growing
the Catacombs of Rome,
perpetually young.
where two hundred thousand
of the early Christians were
buried, many of them martyrs.
There are many inscriptions on the walls, written by these early Christians, but as far as I can remember there is not a lamentation among them. There is nothing there of the later paganism that filled our graveyards with lamentations about separations and absences.
Those Christians believed that Christ had conquered everything, including death, so that there is a solemn joy running through the whole thing. The tone of the inscriptions reminds me of the inscription which the Lees of Calcutta put on the monument set up in 188
memory of their six children, who were all buried in a landslide one dreadful night on the slopes of the Himalayas at Darjeeling, “Thanks be unto God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
To the Lees and to the early Christians, it was the resurrection of Jesus that gave the whole thing meaning.
The gospel raises the questions that perplex and tear the heart of man in the only way they could be adequately raised, namely, within life itself. Others raised them as philosophies; Jesus raised them as facts. As his twisted body hung on the cross it seemed to turn into a vast question mark against the sky line, and as from his lips comes the cry, “My God, why?” it seems that all the anguish and pain of the ages is gathered up in that bitter cry. There is not a single problem that perplexes and wrings our hearts that is not gathered up in that anguished question. How far can hate go? Why does the universe tolerate injustice? Why are the good seemingly deserted in their hour of anguish? Will the universe back good men? These and many other questions are voiced in that tragic prayer.
What is the answer? The answer must be given in the very place where the questions are raised, namely, in life itself. If the question is raised in connection with matter, the answer, to be an adequate one, must be given in connection with matter. The question was a fact; the answer must be a fact. God did answer, and answer adequately and in the very place where the questions were raised. The cross raises the questions and the resurrection answers them. It answers the fact of injustice and pain with a bigger fact in the victory! It would not have been a complete answer if Jesus had been raised only spiritually, for the questions were raised as physical and spiritual facts, and only a victory that was a victory in both of these realms would suffice. Jesus’
189
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
resurrection was a victory, a complete and decisive victory, in both of these realms and did, therefore, suffice. God’s last word is not the cross, but the resurrection. But that last word is not a spoken word, but a living word, a fact, the most stupendous fact in human history.
We know now how things are coming out. God shall speak the last word in human affairs, and that last word will be “Victory.” Jesus let life speak its cruelest word, so
that the gentlest and purest
Heart that ever beat was stilled
God’s last word is
in death, and then he quietly
not the cross, but
rose from the dead, came forth
the resurrection. But
from the tomb with the most
that last word is not
tremendous words ever
a spoken word, but
uttered upon his lips: “I am
a living word, a
the resurrection and the life.”
fact, the most
It is this that gives the whole
stupendous fact in
thing significance, for it sets
human history.
the sorrows of life to music
and makes the ultimate note to
be joy.
Don’t tell me that Osiris and other pagan gods had their resurrections, and that the whole thing is taken from the analogy of the coming of the spring from the dead winter. Suppose these stories were current about the resurrections of pagan deities, does that cut the roots of the resurrection of Jesus? No; his roots go too deep to be cut, for they ramify within the very structure of our moral and spiritual universe. Which of the pagan deities backed his resurrection by a life that had sounded the clearest, the deepest, and the most harmonious moral and spiritual notes of the universe? Which of them backed up his victory over death by his victory over life? To 190
THE LAST WORD ...
believe in a pagan deity rising above death we must see him rising in sinless grandeur above life. Jesus alone backs his victory over death by his victory over life.
“I can actually use the words of myself which Jesus used, ‘I and my Father are one,’” said Colonel Olcott, one of the founders of Theosophy, to Carlyle. “Yes,” came back the crushing rejoinder, “but Jesus got the world to believe him.” Jesus got the world to believe in his resurrection because they saw something more than his resurrection. They saw
“the resurrection and the
life,” and those two, strike
The miracle of Jesus’
exactly the same notes and
moral personality, as
melt into harmony.
he rises in sinless
When the chief priests
grandeur above both
and the Pharisees came to
saint and sinner, is the
Pilate after the death of
central miracle. All the
Jesus, they said, “Sir, we
lesser miracles
remember that that
become credible in
deceiver said, while he was
the light of that central
yet alive, after three days I
miracle.
will rise again. Command
therefore that the
sepulcher be made sure
until the third day, lest haply his disciples come and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: and the last error will be worse than the first.” “The last error,” to them the whole of Jesus’ life and teaching was an error, he erred or did not fit into their system. Because he did not conform to their pettiness, from their standpoint, it was all an error. But from Jesus’ standpoint, their whole spirit and outlook was an error. The ages have been with him! From 191
the standpoint that whatever departs from an established order or system is an error, then the resurrection is an error. Dead men don’t rise! The fundamental mistake lies, however, in the assumption that the last and only word lies with the natural order. But did God exhaust his possibilities when he made the natural order? The ease with which things are done in the natural order makes us feel that there are untold possibilities yet unexhausted in God. “This last error” is a departure from the natural order, but it is a departure upward. It is not a recession, a throw-back, but a throw-upward, an evolution hastened. All better acting is an “error” to ordinary standards, but it is an error upward. The resurrection is an error, but it is an error from one standard, namely, the finality of the natural order, to a fitting into the true standard, namely, that of a free and untrammeled God. In that sense it is not error but higher truth. Call it “miracle” if you will. I do not object; for there are at least four great stark miracles or departures in the history of the natural order: (1) The creation of the spirit of man, here was a departure so amazing that it cannot be called anything less than miracle.
(2) The virgin birth of Jesus-a new beginning on a higher level in humanity.
(3) The resurrection of Jesus, the victory over all lesser life, including death.
(4) The regeneration of an individual man, the bringing up of man into a higher state of being, conforming him to the image of this Higher Man, or, to be accurate, this Higher-than-Man.
These are four stark miracles that usher in new beginnings, beginnings upward. Every single one of them is worthy of the Divine and is what we would expect if there is a good and redemptive God in the universe. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, he ought to have 192
done so! The whole thing would come out wrong if he did not!
For, mind you, the greatest miracle of all is not any of these four: the greatest miracle is just Jesus. The miracle of his moral personality, as he rises in sinless grandeur above both saint and sinner, is the central miracle. All the lesser miracles become credible in the light of that central miracle.
The account says that “Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulcher,” saint and sinner sit looking to see what will happen to that sepulcher. If it remains sealed, and there is no victory over death, then humanity sits looking at it, but knows that its hopes are sealed with Him. The crucial hour of human history has come, will goodness and love and life be snuffed out by the forces of evil and hate and death? The answer is, “No! The Lord is risen!” And the ages answer, “He is risen indeed!”
A church-school superintendent and his wife had just lost their child, an only child, and the next Sunday was Easter Sunday. The superintendent went through his duties as usual, but not as usual, for there was a note of triumph and victory about it all. As the pupils walked home that day one boy said very suddenly to his mother,
“They really believe it, don’t they?”
“Believe what?” asked the mother.
“Why, the resurrection, and all that.”
“Of course; we all believe it.”
“Yes,” said the boy, very thoughtfully,
“but not that way; they really believe it.”
The little fellow saw that the superintendent and his wife were taking hold of the tragedy of death and were transforming it into a triumph of life.
193
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
So, when death threatens us and ours, we can say, like the bird that sits upon the twig when the storm threatens to shake it from its branch, “Shake me off; I still have wings.” Nothing now can ultimately make us afraid, for we have victory over the ultimate enemy, death.
The pain of the bursting of the petals says that the flowers are coming, and the pains of death tell us that the life within us is blooming forth into immortality.
There will be many who will miss in this volume the note of comfort which a loving God gives to his children. I have purposely left it out until this last moment. For if, in dealing with sorrow, the note of comfort is struck as
the predominating note, it
has a tendency to weaken the
There is no real
fiber of our spiritual
comfort that does not
natures. God is looked on as
come as a byproduct
the huge Wiper of Eyes. He
of spiritual victory
thus becomes more
within. Nor can
grandmotherly than good.
character come from
And we, his hurt children,
spiritual coddling.
look on religion more as a
comfort-giving power than a
character-making power. In
that case we miss both the comfort and the character. For there is no real comfort that does not come as a byproduct of spiritual victory within. Nor can character come from spiritual coddling.
“Comfort” comes from two words, con “with,” and fortis
“strength,” and literally means, “strengthened by being with.”
Comfort, then, in the New Testament sense, means strength by the companionship of a God who suffers with us. This is a virile comfort.
It has iron in it. And that iron is a tonic.
194
But there is an exquisite sense of comfort from the fact of the presence of a Father who knows and understands and shares all.
I saw a worm, painfully and slow,
But driven by an inward goad,
Assay to cross a dusty road,
Where roaring motors rush and go.
He was destined to be crushed;
His painful end would be the dust.
And how he fared
No one cared.
Am I a worm amid the dust?
Of seeming endless, countless years?
And am I destined to be crushed
Beneath the roll of whirling spheres?
And am I striving for a goal
That I shall never see?
Yearning e’er to be the soul
That I shall never be?
And how I fare
Does no one care?
Something tells me ’tis not so.
Within my heart there is a glow
That makes me smile at fears
Of rolling crashing spheres.
This inner glow is joyous love,
Not for an absent God above;
For here within my heart
195
Of my very life a part,
My Heavenly Father dwells.
This wondrous fact is what impels
To purer, higher living;
And day by day is giving
The assurance I am not dust,
Nor need I fear I shall be crushed.
And this I know, I shall arrive,
For this dust ‘mid which I strive
Once stained the Galilean’s feet.
And though brute force crushed him complete, Till in the dust his bleeding form
Lay like a common, broken worm,
Yet from this very dust did he arise;
And was exalted to the highest skies.
I follow him-possess his life.
Naught do I fear, then, in the strife.
The worlds of matter and evil mind
Strive to break me, my soul to grind-
Let them do their worst or best,
Twill not disturb this inner rest.
I care not what these worlds contrive
For this I know I shall arrive
My Father cares.
Our pilgrimage into the study of the meaning of suffering is over.
I trust that we have shown that the gospel of Jesus fulfills, and more than fulfills, the demand of a thoughtful man, when he said that religion “must be able to show that goodness is victorious vitality, and that badness is defeated vitality, that sin is denial, and virtue the fulfillment of the promise inherent in the purposes of man.” We have 196
THE LAST WORD ...
endeavored to show that the same sorrows come upon all, including the Christian, but while they break the spirit of some, they make the spirit of those who have learned his secret. Raphael and the veriest dauber use the same pigments and colors, but one transforms them into a mess and the other into a message. All this pain seems to be necessary if character is the end, for a bird cannot fly except in a resisting medium, and we
cannot rise except we rise
upon something defeated.
We have
We would therefore teach
endeavored to show
our souls what one father
that the same
said he would teach his
sorrows come upon
daughter: “And inasmuch as
all, including the
none of us can escape pain,
Christian, but while
I will teach her that
they break the spirit
Christian wisdom which
of some, they make
elevates us above all
the spirit of those who
suffering and gives a beauty
have learned his
to even grief itself.” I trust
secret.
that we have also got hold
of the fact that all this grief
and sorrow is not useless:
“That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shriveled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.”
We have seen that God too, is very deeply involved in all of this, and that his pain subserves our gain. When we see him toiling up a 197
steeper Calvary than ours with the cross upon his back, we know that that cross is intimately and inseparably connected with our redemption.
I trust that we have also learned that God cannot use one unless he knows the wisdom and sympathy won out of pain: Ah! Must-Designer Infinite!
Ah, Must thou char the wood ere thou canst limn With It?1
Yes, it seems as though he must; and when we are being charred in the fires of suffering, we must know that the Infinite Designer is getting us ready to be the instrument of his purpose.
It was said of Jesus that “He took bread, and when he had blessed, he broke it, and gave” it, “took,” “blessed,” “broke,” “gave.”
That is the order; and if the “breaking” comes before the “giving,” we must not wince when we are being broken, for he sees men’s needs, and wants to multiply us by the breaking to feed them.
But there is to be no mere passive resignation —-we are to reach out with joy and take hold of whatever comes to turn it for a testimony. The Christian, then, is to be the most incorrigibly happy man on earth, for he has joy “in spite of.” His happiness is not dependent on happenings, it is often in spite of happenings. Billy Bray was one of God’s troubadours, and he named one of his feet “Glory”
and the other “Hallelujah,” so that when he walked one of them said
“Glory” and the other “Hallelujah.” It was a sure instinct for him to 1 Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven, (1893). Limn is a verb that means to represent or portray. It is most often used to describe the art of drawing or painting a portrait. Must you burn the wood before you can paint on it?
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THE LAST WORD ...
name his feet and not the roads, for some of the roads might lead to gardens and some might lead into gloom, but with him the feet still sounded their message, no matter what the road.
Thank God, this way works! It faces all the facts, dodges nothing, uses everything, and shows itself as victorious vitality. A woman went to many shrines in India to find deliverance from the tempests of her spirit. At one of these shrines,
a thousand miles from her
home, she met a Christian
woman who told her of the
We are to reach
way through Christ. It seemed
out with joy and
incredible, and the woman said
take hold of
so, “You don’t know me.
whatever comes
Everyone is afraid of my fury.
to turn it for a
I have laid a curse upon my
testimony. The
family in a fit of anger. How
Christian, then, is
can that curse be lifted, and
to be the most
this tempest within me stilled?
incorrigibly happy
No, it won’t work.”
man on earth, for
he has joy “in spite
“Try it,” said the woman,
of.”
persisting, for she herself was
a joyous illustration of how it
did work. The woman went
away shaking her head. But a week later in the same pilgrimage place, she came towering through the crowd, and when she saw the woman, she caught her up in her arms and said in a tumult of words: “It works! It works! I tried it. Someone slapped me in the face today and I didn’t even want to slap back. Something within me has changed. It works!”
The women stood face to face, sisters of the Great Secret. As 199
they looked into each other’s eyes, they knew that they had touched the very center of life, had Life itself, and nothing hereafter could make them afraid. It works!
The Stoic bears, the Epicurean seeks to enjoy, the Buddhist and the Hindu stand apart, disillusioned, the Muslim submits, but only the Christian exults!
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It is easy to offer cheap advice to those in sorrow. This pamphlet1 is not intended as advice. It is rather sharing with you a philosophy of life which I have used for many years. After trying it out under every conceivable circumstance at home and abroad, I find that it works. I literally don’t know what it is to have a blue hour or a discouraged one, I haven’t had any for years. Is it because I’ve had no sorrow? I think that I have had the ordinary run of human pain and frustration. If I have found a way to wear it with a smile, and to use it and make it contribute, I would hasten to say that is it is not my way. I learned it from Another. You too can learn it.
I would point out seven “Don’ts,” and then seven constructive suggestions. The seven “Don’ts” are hedges we shall put in along the pathway of sorrow to keep us from wandering into bypaths of futility and frustration. Many get caught in these bypaths with dead ends, and 1 Jones wrote Christ and Human Suffering in 1933. In 1944, he was asked to write a pamphlet on this same topic. Here we reproduce it its entirety. E. Stanley Jones, When Sorrow Comes, (Nashville, TN: The Upper Room Ministries, 1944).
201
never get anywhere. They uselessly mull over their frustrations and sorrows. Others walk the path of sorrow, refusing tempting bypaths, and then go on to increased usefulness and power.
1. Don’t think your case unique.
It can be matched many times over. Sorrow is bound to hit you in some form or other in a world of this kind. Take death, for example.
Suppose there were not death. The world would be overcrowded in a few generations. One generation passes away and makes room for another. Death is then not a unique phenomenon, it happens to everybody sometime. But when it occurs within the circle of our love it comes as a surprise. It should not. It is something we all must meet in the normal course of human living.
Take other kinds of sorrow – loss of health, business failure, unhappy home life, the lack of a home, or a life without a partner.
These may come from our inhumanity toward each other and partly from the fact that we are living in an imperfect world. We are “the unfinished masters of an unfinished world.” With unfinished people in an unfinished world we are bound to have troubles and sorrows.
They are bound to come. The question is not their coming, the question is what they do to us when they come. They can make us, or break us. And whether they make us or break us depends upon our inner attitudes.
2. Don’t give yourself to self-pity.
The temptation will be to feel sorry for yourself. Don’t do that.
That will lead straight to introversion, and that will cause the sorrow to fester. If a wound is free from self-pity it will probably heal quickly, 202
WHEN SORROW COMES
but a wound infested with self-pity becomes an infected wound; and an infected wound takes a long time to heal. Keep the virus of self-pity from your wounds. If you allow yourself to pity yourself you will soon be bidding for the pity of others, and if you allow that you’ll be in a descending spiral of defeat. A self-pitying self is a pitiable self.
Don’t allow yourself to slip into that.
3. Don’t give yourself to excessive grief.
Many do it, thinking they are thereby showing their love for a departed one. It is a mistake. If the departed loved one could see you, he or she would see how excessive
grief causes deterioration of the
personality and can ruin your health.
A self-pitying
To see you deteriorate, would that
self is a
please the loved one? To see you
pitiable self.
continuing to love them and loving
Don’t allow
them so much that it would make them
yourself to slip
happy to see you radiant and
into that.
victorious—that would be to show real
love.
4. Don’t retail your sorrows.
It may be well to talk over your troubles with an understanding friend, to get a trouble up and out is often helpful to relieve the pain.
But don’t syndicate your sorrows. Don’t share them with everybody you meet. They will thereby grow. A friend tells of a boyhood friend who had a sore thumb, and whenever he met anyone he would unwind the big bandage and show the sore thumb. That sore thumb filled his horizon and everybody else’s. Every time one of thought 203
him, he thought of a sore thumb sticking up. When people think of you they must not think of sorrow they must think of a person mastering that sorrow. Remember the definition of a bore: “A person who talks about his arthritis when you want to talk about yours.”
5. Don’t resign yourself to sorrow and feel it will continue.
The probabilities are that unless you keep your sorrow artificially alive it will not continue. Time is a great healer. I have tested this out.
Something has hurt me. I feel it deeply. I say to myself: “By tomorrow at this time the pain will automatically be less, it may even be gone.” It usually is. The further you are removed from a thing, the less it impacts you for weal or woe.
6. Don’t fight against a trouble directly.
To fight against it directly will concentrate your attention on it, and it is a law of the mind that whatever gets your attention gets you.
Call your attention away from your sorrow by getting into constructive work for others. That will push the sorrow to the edges.
The clenched-fist method of dealing with sorrow fails, for it makes you tense; and when you are tense, the healing, peace-giving power of God cannot get through to you. That power can only come to you through relaxed receptivity.
7. Don’t complain.
If you do, your mind will look around for reasons to justify that complaint. If it cannot find reasons it will manufacture them and that will exaggerate the woes and the illnesses, and in so doing will 204
increase them. The more you complain about things, the more things you will have to complain about.
I am sorry that I have to start you off with “Don’ts,” but they are the dangers signals set up along the road to victory. We turn now to see how we can walk that road. We will work out seven steps to victory.
1. If suffering has come to you, see whether or not you yourself are the cause of it.
You may not be but then again you may be. It may be that the universe is kicking back in suffering and frustrations because of (1) your own transgressions; and (2) your wrong attitudes toward life. If there are transgressions in your life causing physical, mental, or spiritual disruption, surrender them and lay them at the feet of Christ. You may not be able to overcome them, but you can consent and Christ will do the overcoming. You supply the willingness—He supplies the power. The cause of your suffering and frustration may be in your wrong reactions to life. They may not be classified as transgressions, but they do disrupt the peace and rhythm and health of your life. For instance, I know a person who is suffering from asthma. Whenever he gets into a tight place where he cannot deal with the current situation, he has an asthma attack. The attack lets him down gently. It puts a “pillow” under him so he can fall gently, and save his self-respect. The subconscious mind is saying: “If you were only well you could meet this difficulty, but you are not well and therefore you cannot be expected to meet it—see, you have asthma.”
The man is unconscious of the fact that his fear and retreatism is a wrong reaction to life, and that it lays the foundation for physical disruptions, in this instance asthma.
205
Go over your life to see whether you are taking attitudes which are themselves causing disruption and suffering. An intelligent, sympathetic friend may be able to help you get pried loose from wrong attitudes.
2. But your difficulties may not come from your own transgressions and wrong reactions – they may come entirely unmerited.
Jesus made it plain that suffering may not be a sign of sin. He said that the people upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell (the accidents of nature), and the people whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices (the wrong actions of man), were not sinners above the rest.
He made room for unmerited suffering. Did He leave it there? Oh, no. He said that unmerited suffering need not merely be borne; it can be used. Determine, then, to make your sorrows make you—and others. Here is a positive, active way of dealing with sorrow. You neither escape it, nor merely muddle through it—you use it. Professor James says that
“this positive, active way of dealing with sorrow gives a new dimension to life.” When life is blocked and frustrated by suffering, there is always a way out, for life has a new dimension. What is this new dimension to life?
It is nothing less that the power to take suffering up into the purpose of your life and transmute it into character and achievement.
This is no mere philosophy of life. It is the very essence of the Christian faith – its workable way to life. The idea that the Christian faith offers escape from suffering is completely foreign to that faith. It is true that the Christian way makes you live more in accord with the nature of reality, and therefore you are saved from self-inflicted pain and frustration which comes from barking your shins against the 206
WHEN SORROW COMES
system of things. But while the Christian way saves you from the results of the follies of wrong living, it exposes you to other suffering of a different nature. Society demands conformity. If you fall beneath its standards it will punish you. If you rise above its standards it will persecute you. Society demands an average conformity. But the Christian is a departure upward—she is different. Therefore she is hit because of that difference—she is looked on askance. She is often persecuted. That causes suffering.
There is another cause of the Christian’s suffering. Her contract with Christ sensitizes her—she begins to care, and to care on an ever-widening scale. She enters
into the sufferings of others
and literally makes them her
own.
Society demands
In addition to these two
conformity. If you
avenues of suffering, the
fall beneath its
Christian shares with the rest
standards it will
of humanity the ills incident
punish you. If you
to life in a world of this
rise above its
kind—death of loved ones,
standards it will
loss of health, loss of
persecute you.
friendships, disappointments
in love, the nonfulfillment of
ambitions, the frustrations
that come from living in an unfinished world. In an unfinished world we are bound to meet up with things that balk us, and if we let them they will break us. That is the point—“if we let them.” Our reactions to these things largely determine the result. Not what happens to you, but what you do with it after it does happen, determines the result.
207
The same thing happens to two people, one it makes bitter, the other it makes better. Our inner attitude determines the result.
I have just been in a city where the memory of a man lingers like a beautiful aroma, penetrating everything. That man was Dr. James
“Lovely” MacGiffert, a blind mathematician. He taught for many years in a technical college, but in teaching he really taught the science of living. Whenever the alumni asked about their Alma Mater, the first person they asked about was their blind friend and teacher. Dr.
MacGiffert taught mathematics, but he made men. One of them had given up all desire for an education and was almost illiterate when a grown man. This blind master of life so inspired and awakened him that he himself is now a professor. The word “Lovely” was affectionately added to his name by his friend, for everything to this blind man was “Lovely,” He was always using that word, so they added it to his name. Blindness befell him, and the loveliness of his inner spirit made him and his surroundings “Lovely.” That is mastery.
A professor gave a tetanus injection to his little son who had run into a barbed wire. Tragically, the son died in his arms. That might have embittered the couple, but instead it brought them to a decision to dedicate their lives to underprivileged children. That dedication was the branch, which, thrown into the bitter waters of Marah, sweetened them. It was the spirit with which this calamity was met that turned it from a calamity into a consecration.
A famous surgeon and his son were operating on a patient when the father slumped down beside the operating table with a heart attack. The son saw at a glance that nothing could be done for his father, so without a moment’s interruption took over from his father and carried on the operation to a successful outcome, and then did what he could for the dead. That son was never so great as when amid the interruption of death, he carried on more faithful service to the 208
living. He had not time for useless, fruitless grief. His best service to his felled father was to carry on where his father left off.
A doctor was attending to the birth of a child when news was brought to him that his wife was dying and that he must get to her at once if he were to see her alive. However, he could not leave the critical situation in which he was, and carried on until the child was safely brought into the world, and then returned home to find that his wife had died. But I am quite sure that his wife would have had him do the very thing that he did, and was deeply proud of him for carrying on.
In both these instances the dedication to something outside of themselves made these men carry over across the spasms of grief into usefulness. Here is another illustration. David Livingstone buries his wife in Africa, and then goes out to find a balm for his broken heart in serving the downtrodden of that land. That is mastery.
There is a saying, “When Fate throws a dagger at you, there are two ways to catch it: either by the blade or by the handle.” Fate is bound to throw a dagger at you, no one will be spared. Whether we grasp it by the blade and let it cut us to the quick, or whether we grasp it by the handle and make it an instrument of defense depends on the inner spirit. Our reaction determines the result.
When life threw a cross at Jesus, He took hold of that worst thing that could happen to Him and made it into the best thing that could happen to the world. The cross was sin, pure, unadulterated sin and He turned it into the healing of sin. It was hate, and He turned it into a revelation of love. It was life speaking its darkest, cruelest word, and Jesus turned it into God speaking His most redemptive word. Jesus did not bear the cross, Jesus used it! A religion with a cross at its center doesn’t offer mere comfort, a drying of tears, it offers a moral 209
and spiritual mastery that turn sorrow into song and a Calvary into an Easter morning.
3. Remember God is doing with His sorrows exactly what He is asking you to do with yours.
Since God is love, the burdens of love must fall on Him. It is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the pains and sorrows and sins of its loved one. Love takes it on itself and makes what falls on the loved one its own. If this be true, then God is suffering in our suffering, is hurt in our hurts, and wounded in our sins.
And what does God do with His sorrows? He uses them. He makes them redemptive. The cross tells us that. I can worship and love and follow the God of the Nail-pierced Hands. For Jesus is not asking me to do something He is not doing. He shows me how to turn the worst into the best, and to make my very calamities serve. If God redeems the world through a cross, then I can make my sorrows redemptive to myself and others.
4. “Take what you have and make something out of it.”
That is the summed-up philosophy of the life of Dr. George Washington Carver, a saint and a scientist, who took slavery, poverty, frustration, and made out of them one of the greatest contribution ever given to American life. Don’t cry for what you haven’t; take what you have and make it into something else. Joseph took a wrong done to him by his brothers and turned it into the feeding of Egypt and the very brothers who had sold him into slavery. He might have eaten out his heart, chewing on his resentments. He turned a wrong into a glorious right. I know a girl who in spite of a facial deformity has 210
WHEN SORROW COMES
turned her life into one of the most beautiful lives I know. She determined to live in spite of! She is one of the finest youth workers in this country.
There is a famous statue in Mexico by Jesus Garcia, entitled “In Spite Of.” The sculptor lost his right hand in the midst of the work on the statue. He determined that he would finish it. He learned to carve with his left hand and finished it, and the carving is better, perhaps, than that he would have done with his right hand. For the quality of life had gone into the
statue. So they called the statue, “In
Spite Of.” When you cannot live “on
When you
account of,” you can always live “in
cannot live
spite of.” When the WWII started
“on account
someone said to me: “How can you
of,” you can
ever be happy again? You tried hard
always live “in
to head off this war, and all your
spite of.”
efforts have crashed.” My reply, “If I
cannot be happy ‘on account of,’ I can
always be happy ‘in spite of.’” That possibility is always open.
Take what you have, and make something out of it. If the thing you have is a sorrow, offer it to God and make out of it a song. If it is an irritation, then do what the oyster does when it gets an irritating grain of sand in its shell, it throws a pearl around it. Make your irritations into iridescences.
5. If you are going to do this, then learn to draw on the resources of God, learn how to pray.
Perhaps you are so blinded by sorrow that you cannot go on alone. True, but you are not alone, you and God can work this out 211
together. Go aside and in the quietness let down the barriers, let go of the tensions, let the healing of God go through every fiber of your hurt soul. God invades you, God heals you, God lifts you up and God give you wings. God makes you into a victorious spirit. Provided and this is the point, provided you surrender your sorrow, your frustration into His healing hands. Don’t hold on to your sorrow. If you hold it, it will fester within you. Let God have it, forever! Now your pain is “a pain which God is allowed to guide.” It is a God-guided pain. A God-guided pain in no longer a mere pain, it is a pain like the pain of childbirth, it is bringing forth something beautiful and significant. It is a fruitful pain. Your very pain, then, becomes a paean.
6. But what if God does not answer my prayers?
What if my prayers are of no avail and my loved one is not restored to health? How can I use the pain of an unanswered prayer?
Perhaps you will have to live on a “but if not.” You remember the Hebrew young men about to be cast into a fiery furnace said: “The God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning furnace and from your power. But if not, know that we will not bow down the golden image.” Note the words, “but if not.” Our allegiance to God is not based on this or that answer to prayer, it is based on an allegiance and confidence that can stand the shock of unanswered prayer. For the soul knows that if God doesn’t answer this prayer, God is doing so in order to answer a larger prayer, according to a larger plan and purpose. You must not base your faith on a particular answer to a particular prayer for a particular thing. Your faith must rest on confidence in the character of God, your heavenly Father as seen in Jesus Christ. God did not save Him from a cross, but through that cross Jesus saved a world. Suppose His confidence in God had 212
depended upon whether God would or would not save Him and take Him down from the cross? How barren that smaller prayer would have been! How beautiful the larger purpose working through that denial has been! The world has been saved through Jesus not being saved.
You pray that your loved one may be saved from this illness, and you trust he or she will be—“but if not”? Then you go straight on, unbroken in faith and confidence. You pray that your son in war may be spared and brought back to you, and it is right to pray that prayer.
“But if not?” If he is not spared? Then you will have to go steadily on, unbroken in confidence. You will have to live on “but if not.”
Your faith rests not upon this, that, or the other happening, but on something unchanging—the character of God. That always remains.
Trust “in spite of,” when you cannot trust “on account of.”
7. Thank God for your sorrow, even though you cannot understand it now.
When Jesus was about to give the cup to His disciples, the account says, “Having thanked God for it He gave it to them.” Into that cup had been poured the wine, the wine with a history. The experiences of the summer, the clouds and the sunshine, the pruning and the cultivating had all gone into the making of that wine. That wine was the symbol of His life. Into the cup of His life which Jesus was pressing to their lips had gone the experiences of the past, the silent years at Nazareth, the struggle in the wilderness, the long nights of prayer and now there was going into it the loneliness of Gethsemane and the rejection and torture of the Cross. Jesus thanked God for all of it, the joys and the sorrow, the triumphs and the bloody sweat—all of it went into the enriching of the cup of His life which He was 213
putting to their lips. The thanking God for it turned the whole thing from a tragedy to a triumph. For it meant that Jesus would use it all.
Into the cup of your life is going all the gladness and beauty, all the pain and disappointments, all the Gethsemane hours and the torturing moments of the cross, it is all going into the enriching of the cup of your life, the cup which you will put to the lips of others.
Then thank God for that cup. It is richer for suffering, for suffering triumphed over. The thanks turn it all from a cruel hurt to you to a constructive healing of others through your tragedy.
Mrs. Lee, a missionary in India, lost all of her six children on one night during the monsoon rains when the whole hillside in Darjeeling slipped away and buried them all. She stood up one day in a meeting and said, “I thank God for every sorrow that has come to me.” And she meant it! For when their family home was broken apart by the death of their children, they set up a larger home, a home in which, for forty years they had over 300 children living with them. That is moral mastery!
Or take a subtler sorrow—the sorry of having to go through life without a life partner. That sorrow is often the deeper because it is not one that can easily be shared. It is often worn alone in the inner secret of the heart. To have a child and then to lose it is a real sorrow, but not to have had a child at all, that sorrow may be deeper. There are women, many of whom the finest characters in our civilization, who go through life with childless arms and ache to hold a child.
Motherhood is denied them. That sorrow can turn them into querulous, bitter, unlovely characters. Or the creative maternal instinct can be sublimated, can be turned into creative art, music, and human sympathy. It can turn the person into a creator of monuments, of constructive good will, or new born souls, or new born hopes in dead souls. In that case the maternal instinct become creative on 214
another level. It is not frustrated, but fulfilled. Then the person can be radiant with usefulness intensified. Some of the greatest contributions to humanity have been made by those, who while unmarried, have married themselves to human need. I sincerely salute that army of brave souls who go on with heads and hearts up and make this world a better place to live in though they themselves are denied parenthood. They save others, themselves they cannot save.
And the bravest of those brave souls are those who thank God for the opportunity of not saving themselves that others might be saved.
You, too, can thank God for your sorrow; not perhaps for the sorrow itself, but for what God is going to do to you and through you because of that sorrow. God is going to help you, not merely to bear it, but to use, it.
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COMMENTARY
W henever I think of my childhood and my parents, I think of their intimate association and loyalty to the Mar Thoma Church in India; going to the Maramon Convention in the late nineteen-forties with my father to listen to Dr.
E. Stanley Jones, the author of this book, is part of that pleasant recollection. In 1960, I had the good fortune to attend Dr. Jones’
seminars at Waltair, in Andhra Pradesh, in a small group of less than fifty people. I was a student at that time of the Andhra University. At Maramon, I heard him at a great distance, but at Waltair I heard him at very close quarters like a professor giving an intimate tutorial, and I vividly remember him saying that when he was seventy years old he asked God confidently for ten more years to do God’s mission, and he was grateful for the life and experience that he had in his journey of life with Christ; he was 76 at that time and lived fruitfully for another thirteen years and died in his beloved India in 1973. Then in 2015, I came across a memoir of him by his granddaughter, Dr. Anne Mathews-Younes, and I was able to publish it as a four part series in the Internet Journal, ‘Diaspora FOCUS’. Therefore, I was greatly surprised, but very grateful when Dr. Anne Mathews-Younes asked 216
me to write a commentary for the new edition of ‘Christ and Human Suffering’, which was initially published in 1933, five years before I was born.
I recount the above experiences as a fitting introduction for my admiration for this ‘Missionary Extraordinary’ who understood India as no other missionary could and contributed much to establishing the ‘Christian Ashram Movement’, and providing the spiritual strength and guidance during the freedom struggle as a dear friend of Gandhiji and other national leaders. The book was written when the world was just about recovering from the aftermath of the First World War and was plunging itself into a great economic depression; and India was going through the birth-pangs of the freedom struggle, Nazism was beginning to emerge in Germany and Fascism in Italy.
Human sufferings and misery of all kind not only at the level of the individual but also at the communal, national and global level were so depressing and no one could see a way out of this mess. This book was an answer to find a way out using Christ as a guide and a way, the way of Christ. Evil and suffering that existed from within the individual and without at the time of writing this book in the 20th century is still with us in different sizes and shapes and hence this book is a useful guide in addressing these issues, in the way of Christ.
However, the author realised that it would be a risky expedition as he wrote in the introduction to the first edition: “But to write on such a subject is to walk on holy ground, hallowed by the tears and blood-stained footsteps of many wearied one. To bungle here would be serious. To raise hopes in a suffering heart that could not be fulfilled would only add pain to pain. I hesitated. But objection after objection seemed to be swept away, and I came to my final condition and took my stand there, refusing to go on unless I could be assured at this point: I cannot write this book as theory. It must be a working way to 217
live.” In the final chapter of this book, we read an amazing testimony from a woman who overcame her sufferings and problems by following the way of Christ and shouted: “It works! It works!” Yes, indeed the human experience of sufferings and joy of overcoming suffering by following the way of Christ is so clearly expressed in thirteen chapters of this book, and it works!
As a skilled physician of the soul, the diagnostic expertise of the author is exemplary and the remedy is equally impressive for the conditions that he witnessed in 1933. The problems that we are facing today are equally depressing such as poverty, mass migration, fear of nuclear war, trade wars, religious intolerance, gender bias, racial intolerance, violence of all kinds, suicides and suicide-bombers, global warming and related ecological issues. His prescriptions are still valid for the problems that we are facing in our world today. We are advised to follow St. Paul’s advice: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ”(Gal. 6: 2). Therefore, we should appreciate and remain grateful to the publishers for reprinting this very valuable book.
The book was organised under thirteen chapters, these chapters overlap and intertwine with one other; it has an overall organic unity.
The following is to invite you to enjoy a memorable experience. The first chapter explains various confusing religious and secular ideas about suffering and God’s presence or absence in protecting people from such sufferings. The idea that calamity would always only strike the wicked and the righteous would always be saved is questioned.
The Christian solution to suffering is not based on such a favourable selective and preferential action of God. If that would be the case then such a protected Christian is nothing but a ‘cosmic pet’, a spoiled child.
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The second chapter deals with the question: “Are Christians spared from suffering?” To find a Christian solution to suffering nine areas of trials and tribulations are identified in Luke’s Gospel and discussed at length (Lu. 21: 8-19). The author sums it by saying,
“Christ being what he is, and the Christian being what he should be, he is bound to know suffering as the result of following that Christ”.
Various ideas of dealing with human suffering in various religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and other philosophies are dealt in the third chapter.
Jesus’ way of meeting suffering is described through the Gospels in the fourth chapter. Jesus accepts the facts of human suffering, but it is not punishment handed out by God. Jesus’ method of meeting pain and injustice is to transform them into something on to a higher plane for the glory of God. “Jesus would turn the world’s supreme tragedy into world’s supreme testimony”, as he did at the cross and at the resurrection. Jesus showed us how to shine by self-sacrifice. Many examples from the Gospels are described here to describe how ‘life became luminous as it faced its direst tragedy.’ “The cross becomes a throne! The end––a new beginning!”
How early Christians dealt with their suffering in the Christian way is described in the fifth chapter. To these early Christians
‘opposition became opportunities,’ suffering became songs. They drank ‘the new wine of the kingdom.’ “They did not bear suffering, or try to escape it––they used it.” God refused to heal the infirmity of Paul, but Paul was able to testify that God’s grace is sufficient for him.
“This refusal to heal is in the interest of a higher good, and then we can accept the refusal as being as much the gift of God as healing.”
This chapter ends with the note: “The Christian is not spared the pain and sorrows and sickness that come upon other people, but he is 219
given an inner set of the spirit by which he rises above the calamities by the very fury of the calamities themselves.”
Chapter Six describes how the Christian way is working in various life situations. The author gives vivid examples of how various people turned their problems to opportunities and gave amazing testimonies of people who transformed their ‘Calvaries into Easter mornings.’
The author concludes this chapter with the statement: “Christianity is the only religion that throws nothing away––including frustration and pain and suffering. . . . Jesus redeems not only human souls but also fragments that remain when life goes to pieces under the blows of suffering and sorrow and frustration.”
Chapter Seven shows us how the Christian way leads us to victory over suffering. The faith of Jesus is like the water Lily or Lotus plant that lays hold of the muck and filth of the pond and transforms itself into beautiful flowers. However, some Christian teachings direct us towards heaven for ending suffering. But heaven should be here and now following the will of God. “Prayer should take us out of the dark corners and help us to turn our infirmities into ladders that reach to heaven here and now.” The author says, “The Christian has sufficient resources to meet life no matter how hard the game of life is played against him.” In this chapter we see the description of a
‘New Testament face’ which is a face where ‘lines have turned to light, where grief has learnt to smile through its tears, and where, in spite of everything, there is a sense of victory.’ Jesus’ way does three things: It offers victory over sin, victory over self, and victory over suffering.
The eighth chapter is a detailed study of the two periods of Jesus’
life when he was deeply tempted to face the sorrow and sin of the world in some other way than the way of the cross. The first period was coloured by the three temptations immediately after his baptism during his fasting and praying for forty days. Then the second 220
occasion arose from a very brief incident of some Greeks asking Philip for his mediation for them to have a meeting with Jesus in his
‘mid-career’. The response of Jesus was simply: “Now my heart is troubled and what shall I say? ‘Father save me from this hour’? No it was for the very reason that I came to this hour. Father glorify thy name” (Jn. 12:27). This incidence has great importance according to the author, but it is totally down played by the Gospel writers and theologians through the ages. But if Jesus took the way of the Greeks and followed an Athenian way of life, history would have been totally different. “The Greeks were asking him to love his life and save it, and thus save others; they were asking him to bless without bleeding.” But Jesus knew that he should obey the will of his Father and take the way of the cross to save the world. It is a great challenge in a man’s life when he has the courage to say no to shortcuts and no to all easy ways, to all compromises and temptation, to go to accept the way of the cross. It is about overcoming evil with good and hate by love, by the way of the cross. “There was no other way, for Jerusalem and the hill called Calvary lay between him and the Easter morning victory.”
This chapter illustrates and gives an amazing theological insight on this ‘Greek route’, which I have never come across anywhere else and it is worth pondering on this.
The cost that God paid through Christ for the salvation of humanity is explained in the ninth Chapter and a detailed comparison is made here with the Hindu philosophy of the law of ‘Karma’. The cross is the reconciling place between Karma and forgiveness. In Christ we see that God is love. Love is the basis of all redemptive action of God. “Love cannot be love and refuse the burdens of love.
In a world like this God cannot refuse the cross and remain a God of Love.” The law and love come together in the cross. At creation God assumed a responsibility and in Jesus on the cross God acknowledges 221
and discharges that responsibility. The author concludes: “The crown of life is man, the crown of man is Christ, and the crown of Christ is the cross.”
The main thesis detailed in Chapter Ten is how sufferings result from wrong moral choices. Suffering comes from within as a result of our own wrong moral choices and from without as a result of interactions with the environment. However, much of our sufferings come from our own wrong moral choices. “When he lays hold of us within, then all things within us work together for good, for everything then is controlled by the Divine Will. Co-ordinated within, we conquer without.” St. Paul says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).
Chapter Eleven deals with the attitude and involvement of society to suffering. Suffering arises from the actions of the individual and from the collective action of society. Therefore, tackling the problem of suffering should deal with the individual and the system that operates it. Therefore, transformation should affect both the individual and the society for the kingdom of God to become a reality. The suffering of the individual must be looked on and felt as the failure of the whole society. A Christian must work to remove the causes of suffering without considering its cost.
The cleansing ministry of Jesus for character formation is described in Chapter Twelve. Jesus cleansed their ideas of God; he reoriented the concept of man; he cleansed life; he cleansed religion; he redefined power; he cleansed suffering and taught vicarious suffering is a gift of God. He emphasised that ‘suffering in God is not marginal and accidental, but inherent in the very nature of God as love.’ The author says, “God never takes a thing from our hands 222
without putting something better in its place,” He quotes Clements of Alexandria: “Christ has turned all our sunsets to sunrises.”
‘The last word’ in the final chapter of this book is about the kingdom of God. The task given to us by Jesus is to accept God’s kingdom here on the earth, which he created in the very beginning and declared ‘very good’. Now Jesus is asking us to replace the whole present world-order with a new world-order founded on love, sharing and brotherhood. This is God’s mission, Missio Dei, inaugurated by Jesus and entrusted to the Church. The Christian hope emerging from this is that sin, suffering, and death will be banished from the universe with the ultimate triumph of the kingdom of God. The last part of this chapter deals with four things which people fear most: criticism, material insecurity, old age and death.
Suffering is part and parcel of life. Therefore, the book is about living with individual sufferings––innocent, self-inflicted and inflicted by other agencies; it is about dealing with personal suffering and having empathy and compassion in the suffering of others by growing with Jesus Christ in overcoming them. The style of writing is informal and interactive. The reader engages with illustrations of how other believers followed the way of Christ. These amazing illustrations come from the author’s life-long work as a missionary in China and India, from theology, psychology, and above all from real experiences with suffering and tribulations, Jones believed in what we read in Johns’ Gospel: “I have said you these things, so in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (Jn. 16: 33). I have dealt with pain and suffering all of my professional life––yet gained more profound understanding of it from this book. It is a good companion for everyone and particularly for those who are involved in the ministry of healing. Let us leave the last word to the Indian woman who was asked to follow 223
the way of Christ; she followed Christ’s way and shouted: “It works! It works! I tried it. Someone slapped me in the face today and I didn’t even want to slap back. Something within me has changed, it works!”
Yes, indeed this book works!
DR. ZAC VARGHESE, FRCPATH
Emeritus Professor,
Royal Free Campus, UCL,
London, UK
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A Portrait of E. Stanley Jones by Shivraj Mahendra (Asbury Theological Seminary, 2017)
ESTANLEY JONES (1884-1973) was described by a distinguished Bishop as the “greatest missionary since Saint Paul.” This missionary/evangelist spent seventy years traveling throughout the world in the ministry of Jesus Christ. Jones wrote and spoke for the general public and there is little doubt that his words brought hope and refreshment to multitudes all over the world. As a well-known, engaging, and powerful evangelist, Jones delivered tens of thousands of sermons and lectures. He typically traveled fifty weeks a year, often speaking two to six times a day.
Jones worked to revolutionize the whole theory and practice of missions to third world nations by disentangling Christianity from Western political and cultural imperialism. He established hundreds of Christian Ashrams throughout the world, many of which still meet today. E. Stanley Jones was a crusader for Christian unity, a nonstop 225
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
witness for Christ, and a spokesman for peace, racial brotherhood, and social justice. He foresaw where the great issues would be and spoke to them long before they were recognized… often at great unpopularity and even antagonism and derision to himself. Many consider Jones a prophet and his honors – and he did receive them – were all laid at the feet of Jesus Christ. Jones would readily admit that his quite ordinary life became extraordinary only because he fully surrendered his life to Jesus Christ!
Jones’ writing and preaching did not require people to leave their intellect at the door; his presentation of Jesus engaged both the intellect and touched humanity’s desire to experience the living Christ in their lives. When Jones wrote or talked about Jesus, it was as if he knew Jesus personally and could reach out and touch him. Jones described himself as an evangelist… the bearer of the Good News of Jesus Christ. The countless illustrations found in his books and sermons speak to a cross section of humanity and demonstrate, in a multitude of ways, the transformative impact of Jesus Christ on human existence. Few readers or listeners could miss identifying with one story or another – virtually all would find stories that touched their lives. All were offered hope that they, too, could experience the transformation available through self-surrender and conversion.
In presenting Jesus as the redeemer of all of life Jones used his wide ranging study of the non-Christian religions, medicine, psychology, philosophy, science, history, and literature to make the case that the touch of Christ is upon all creation — that the totality of life was created by Christ and for Christ. We were all created to live upon Christ’s Way. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount lays out both the principles and the Way.
Jones wrote twenty-seven books. More than 3.5 million copies of his books have been sold and they have been translated into 30 languages.
All proceeds from his books have gone into Christian projects. He gave all of his money away! Now more than 45 years after his death — his books and sermons (many written in the 1930s and 40s) are not out of date and with few exceptions are entirely relevant to today’s world.
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According to his son in law, United Methodist Bishop James K.
Mathews, “the most salient and spiritually significant characteristics of Stanley Jones were the spiritually transparency, clarity and persuasiveness of his personal witness for Christ. For thirty five years I knew him intimately and had occasion to observe him closely for prolonged periods.
He rang true! Once when I asked a Hindu how he was, he replied, ‘As you see me.’ So it was with Brother Stanley, as he was called. He was as you saw him.”
Even after a severe stroke at the age of 88 robbed him of his speech, Jones managed to dictate his last book, The Divine Yes. He died in India on January 25, 1973.
Jones’ monumental accomplishments in life emerged from the quality of his character cultivated through his intimacy with Jesus Christ. As he lived in Christ, he reflected Christ. That experience is to us when we invite Christ to live in us!
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ABOUT
THE E. STANLEY JONES FOUNDATION
Our Mission
The E. Stanley Jones Foundation (ESJF) exists to reach today’s generations with the life-transforming message of Jesus Christ, and to equip effective Christian evangelism by making available to all, the relevant, rich works of Dr. E. Stanley Jones, whose Christ-centered preaching, teaching, and prolific writings continue to enlighten and bless millions of people worldwide.
Partner with Us
E. Stanley Jones addresses cultural, social, and personal issues in our society and lives today and offers Jesus as “The Way” for a meaningful and abundant life. Please partner with us to tell people about a new type of humanity which lives the principles of Jesus and promises hope with a future. There are many ways you can give such as stock, investment income, gifts from your IRA, including mandatory distributions, outright cash and more. Your gift can be designated for general purposes or one of the following opportunities: m Adopt a Jones book to be updated and published m Fund production of a book video for small group study m Underwrite the creation of a children’s book m Fund a teaching guide for a Jones book m Fund the production of a quality documentary about the life and ministry of E. Stanley Jones Email [email protected] or call 240-328-5115 for more information about these gift ideas.
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THE E. STANLEY JONES FOUNDATION
The E. Stanley Jones Foundation is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.
The United States Internal Revenue Service Code permits the amount that US residents donate, which exceeds the fair market value of the goods or material(s) a donor receives from the Foundation, to be tax-deductible.
Two Ways to Give and Partner with Us
Give online at www.estanleyjonesfoundation/donate or send your gift to:
E. Stanley Jones Foundation
10804 Fox Hunt Lane
Potomac, MD 20854
Our Phone: 240.328.5115
Thank you for helping people discover Christ.
Your generosity is appreciated.
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BOOKS BY E. STANLEY JONES
The following book list is in chronological order according to the date each was written by Jones.
The Christ of the Indian Road
Christ at the Round Table
The Christ of Every Road
The Christ of the Mount
Christ and Human Suffering
Christ’s Alternative to Communism
Victorious Living
The Choice Before Us
Along the Indian Road
Is the Kingdom of God Realism?
Abundant Living
How to Pray
The Christ of the American Road
The Way
Mahatma Gandhi
The Way to Power and Poise
How to be a Transformed Person
Growing Spiritually
Mastery
Christian Maturity
Conversion
In Christ
The Word Became Flesh
Victory Through Surrender
A Song of Ascents
The Reconstruction of the Church
The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person The Divine Yes
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All publications are available for purchase at: www.estanleyjonesfoundation.com
www.amazon.com
www.cokesbury.com
Proceeds from the sale of books and materials remain in the E.
Stanley Jones Foundation to continue the ministry and fulfill the mission of the Foundation.
Volume pricing for books is available by contacting the E. Stanley Jones Foundation.
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CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
BY THE E. STANLEY JONES
FOUNDATION
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RECENT PUBLICATIONS
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CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
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RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The E. Stanley Jones Quotes Perpetual Calendar Calendar only available through the E. Stanley Jones Foundation bookstore 235
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The New Testament Poster
Jones and the Artist
Jones traveled globally with this picture for years and often displayed it when he spoke. According to E. Stanley Jones God revealed himself first through his creation, then through the Bible, and finally through the perfect revelation of his son, Jesus. The full message of God can only be conveyed in the Person of Jesus. In Christ, God gave us a Person, not a word. Jones concluded that Christianity was unique for it was God’s search for man and God came to us in a Person.
Christianity is the divine Word became Flesh—and that makes all the difference in the world.
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RECENT PUBLICATIONS
This picture was created by a Korean artist, (a refugee from North Korea) for Jones. The uniqueness of the picture is that the whole of the New Testament is written from corner to corner beginning with the Gospel of Matthew and ending up with the book of Revelation.
It is all written in minute letters by hand in English. There are 185,000
words in the picture—about a thousand words on a line.
The picture took the artist two years to create and the words are so minute that most people cannot read them with the naked eye.
Note that the artist hasn’t imposed the figureof Jesus on the words, but he has inked the words light or dark to bring out the form and figure of Jesus. So that out of the words arise the Word. In talking about the picture, Jones said, “These words take us beyond the words to the Word—the Word made Flesh. Out of the Gospels arises the Gospel. Jesus was the Gospel. He didn’t come to bring the Gospel. He was the Gospel. The Gospel lies in His person. He himself is the Good News. This painting illustrates that the Gospel lies in the Person of Jesus.”
There are twenty-seven little figures (angels) around the edges of the picture. The little angels represent the twenty-seven books of the New Testament all looking at Jesus. The whole of the Christian Gospel then is converging in this Person.
A lithograph of this incredible New Testament Poster is available on the E. Stanley Jones Foundation website in the bookstore.
www.estanleyjones.com
The year 2025 marks the 100th Anniversary that the Methodist Publishing House has had at least one Jones book in print and circulation.
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