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‘He saved others; Himself He cannot save.’
Mat_27:42
I. Apparent failure of the Master.—Judged by the ordinary standards of the world, and according to the capacity of the men who saw the Crucifixion, the Passion of our Lord must have seemed, and did seem, to mark our Lord’s work upon earth as a total failure. To all, even to the disciples who forsook Him and fled, He was one of the things that henceforth must be only a pathetic memory. Only in the light of His Resurrection did the weakness of the Cross become the uttermost sign of the power of God.
II. Apparent failure of the disciples.—And we also, who are beginning to be disciples of the Master, have to bear the experience of what looks like failure. I am not sure that any man bears the yoke of Jesus Christ without coming into contact with the piercing and stinging thought that his life is more or less of a failure. It is not only that noble sense of failure which comes when we fail in our aspiration after some higher power of life than we as yet possess. It is in lower regions. It is when our aspiration, our Christian life, our Christian hope, and our Christian desire have to strike upon the rocks of circumstance. It is when we come out from our vision and our hope of God, and have to pass the deadening and the stinging experience of average standards, and worldly surroundings, and atmospheres. If these thoughts have found their home in any one here, is it not upon the Cross that our Lord comes nearest to us? Do you see why He died, why He failed? He failed and died because He could not be anything except His Father’s Son, He could not, it was not in Him to think of anything else than His true thought for God and man. Therefore He seemed to fail before the idea of men who knew nothing of His ideal, nor His reserve. But, therefore, because for Him the world was well lost, because our Lord failed to triumph according to the standards of His time, therefore it is that we can trust Him to-day. ‘I, if I be lifted up,’ He said, ‘will draw all men unto Me.’ For ourselves we know that there is no failure in the world except one—the failure of character.
III. The true test.—So, then, now in our best moments we can see that it makes more difference to the world that a man shall be good, and shall be true, than that he should do big things, and loom large. It is better, and it is more effective, and more lasting, that a man shall just set himself to be true, to be true to his Lord, to be true to his Lord’s voice in his own conscience. That is the thing that will tell.
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The Rev. H. P. Cronshaw.