3
3
Obloquies, most hateful of all wind of words: there is a tradition that Annas and Caiaphas brought a charge against our Lord about His nativity. A coarse word refers to His “holy” birth and a cruel word to the massacre of the Innocents. One who has lived a lifetime in the East sees in such a tradition the hallmark of truth. But He had more to bear. It is impossible that His mother was sheltered from this cutting wind. For her, obloquy was the thrust of the sword. What must it have been to her Son to see that sword pierce through her own soul also?
There is no painful road on which He has not walked; He is always farther on that road than we have gone: “They laid to my charge things that I knew not.” Our roughest storm appears a zephyr when we think of the hurricanes that beat upon Him. Even the grief of seeing the staff whereon we leaned snap under sudden strain (and the splinter always pierces our hand), even the shock of finding one whom we had thought flint turn into a man of straw, and the twist of pain which wrings out the cry “It was not an enemy: then I could have borne it. But it was thou!”—even that poignant grief He knew to the uttermost. “Ah, but the treason of friends, their shiftiness, their suspicion, their doubt, their withdrawal—therein lies real suffering. Those who have never felt that have felt nothing, have never suffered even a scratch,” wrote the discredited Didon. The Sinless One walked that road.
Consider Him who endured. The word has a tranquilizing power. The endurance which “remains under,” which does not try to slip from under or to float over and so escape from the trial—that is what we see when we consider our Lord, so marred, more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men, and yet eternal Lover of men, eternal Conqueror.
But if we are to “remain under” and triumph in our lesser trials, so that in the end we shall sing “O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength,” we must make fortitude a settled habit, as another of Buchan’s noble stories puts it. Nothing less will take us far enough. If “the devastating vice of self-pity” come toward us, walking delicately like Agag, we must hew him in pieces. We shall never know fortitude unless we hate the fondling sin, most devastating of the sins of Christians because most easily disguised under a different name. Few fathom his treacheries. There can be no compromise with him:
Arise, I say,
Let him come delicately as he may,
Regard him not; but slay.
Away with him.