March Month of the Passion

The softness has gone from the air, which no longer smells of earth. Indeed some of the sharpness of January is back again; but it is back no more as a binding force—rather as a breath, a movement, a release. The gale sweeps the sky along with it over the fields—the clouds race their shadows over the young grass, and over the last barrenness of the winter ploughings. The spring ploughs are now at work, tearing up the earth’s back, and already the first flowers are a-bloom, while the willow-catkins in the hedge have reached a yellow ripeness. They are like splashes of sunshine in the hedge, beside the white moony patches of the first wild cherry. In spite of the Lenten austerity and cold of the earth and air, there is throughout the country-side a sense of released warmth; the flying, tattered blue of the sky has lost its winter paleness, the sunshine already has a spring heat in it, the shadows have in them a depth of passional violet—they are no longer cold and grey and dead, but living, like the sun.

This is the month of the Spring Equinox, when great things happen in the heavens, when in the ancient world worshippers were conscious of some terrific event in the lives of the gods. It was the month when the sun’s brightness triumphed over the winter, when the curse of the sterile earth was removed, and life and birth and joy and fruitfulness came back into the fields. The old astrologer-astronomers read the doings of more than the material heavens in the slow Procession of the Equinoxes. When Taurus was the dominant sign, then it was the bull-headed God who triumphed over his enemies—Marduk, the bull of heaven, vanquished Tiamtu, the dragon of the great deep, and in Assyria winged bulls were among the gods, with mild human faces. Then, when after five hundred years the sign changed, and Aries was ruler of the Spring Equinox, came the reign of the ram-headed gods, of Jupiter Ammon and the gods of Egypt. The Spring saviour became a ram—a lamb ... “the sign of the Son of Man shall be in the heavens.”...

But in none of these early conceptions of a triumphant god overthrowing the powers of darkness was the victory won without blood. Tammuz, Adonis, Baldur, Osiris, Orpheus—all were slain—all bowed whether finally or temporarily, to the powers of the underworld and of darkness. Till at last pagan religion reached its height, its final climax in preparation for the Gospel—in the idea of the victim whose death brought life into the world.

It was not only in Judea that the conception of the Suffering Servant prepared men’s minds for the coming of Christ. Long before the time of Christ men had begun to rationalise the processes of suffering. They no longer fought the cruelties of their environment—the evil and pain of life—as beasts or as children. Both will and understanding were striving to take their share in the conflict. Philosophers built up systems on the idea of pain; and the popular religions dealt with it symbolically in their sacrificial rites; the mystery religions made it the centre of their arcana.

All looked forward, however dimly, to a deliverance from suffering. The stoics sought to overcome it through enduring it, the epicureans through ignoring it; the popular religions fell back on the idea of propitiation—on the conciliation of an anthropomorphic god who might be appeased into sparing; the mystery religions saw as in a glass darkly the God himself becoming the deliverer from the evils of the human process in which he too had a share.

Then the New Birth took place, and suffering was redeemed together with all other human processes. The Incarnation means the taking up into the god-head of the complete manhood, a manhood of which suffering is an inevitable condition. By taking our flesh, Christ redeemed the entire process of the world, which sin had made blind and futile. He gave the world’s sorrows a place in the kingdom of heaven—grief, pain, struggle and death were given their place in the eternal mind of God. The fumbling processes of nature became supernatural—they were born again.

Natural suffering, whether in man or beast, may be compared to the sacrifices of the old dispensation—“which could never make the comers thereunto perfect.” The Law stands for nature unredeemed as Grace stands for nature redeemed and becomes the Kingdom of God. Instead of the old sacrifices in which the unwilling and unknowing victim was offered by forces outside itself, to which at best it could only submit in the spirit of fear and meekness, came the new sacrifice of the Victim who is also the Priest, who of free will, full knowledge and true love offers up himself, a Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.

The only deliverance from suffering is through sacrifice—through offering. Once a man accepts pain no longer in the spirit of rebellion or of blind endurance, or even of mere negative resignation, but in the spirit of co-operation, he is free. He becomes as it were the collaborator of God in the processes of the world—his will and understanding are restored to their pre-Adamic integrity.

One of the graces of Calvary is this grace of offering. As perfect man, Christ offered all human suffering to God, with a perfect will and a perfect understanding, so that now by virtue of the Cross, mankind too becomes priest as well as victim. He too can offer what he endures—whether the endurance be sought, as in the case of the saints and ascetics, or merely suffered in the inevitable common way of life. On Calvary, suffering was redeemed from the bondage of the law, of nature and the old Covenant, and was made a part of the supernatural order, a thing of grace. It is the old symbolical antithesis between the Esau and Jacob, Sinai and Jerusalem, Adam and Christ—the Evangelical message of the changed heart—the mystical doctrine of the New Birth. Suffering has its place in the New Covenant in the Kingdom of God, and as it was before a law of natural development, becomes now a law of spiritual growth. The unwilling victim of blind and cruel processes is now the priest of an all-wise, all-loving God, offering pain and grief in union with Calvary in one tremendous sacrifice—till at last sorrow becomes the world’s eucharist, its sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.