August 15

Jesus saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.

If any one still insist that it seems irreverence, if not blasphemy, to speak of a suffering God, or to ascribe in any way pain or unhappiness to the Ever- Blessed, then, let me add, it may in some measure meet his difficulty to reflect, that all moral suffering contains or carries with it what may be called an element of compensation, in virtue of which it is transmuted into a deeper joy. . . . And if this be so, then surely what we must find in Christ as the God-man is, not a being who stript or emptied Himself of His essential divinity in order to share in the weakness and suffering of humanity, but a manifestation of God in all the plenitude of the Divine Nature; and the whole life of the Man of Sorrows —His earthly lowliness and meanness, His mortal weakness, grief and sorrow, His loneliness and forsakenness, His drinking of the cup of suffering to the very dregs, yea, in His very crucifixion and death—must be to us the disclosure of an ineffable joy triumphing over sorrow, of a divine bliss in sacrifice which is the last, highest revelation of the nature of God.

JOHN CAIRD

OUR SUFFERING GOD