Christ's Lonely Path

We might even succeed in working ourselves up to the point almost of tearfulness about this loneliness of Christ. How pathetic, how pitiful, this lonely Via Dolorosa of the Man of Sorrows! One has become uncomfortably aware of such an attitude in some of our hymns. We are so plainly being asked to pity Christ.

I read these words recently in a religious book : “In all the pathos of the Gospel story there is nothing so infinitely touching as the ever-increasing loneliness of Christ.” Pathos! Touching! I do not like those words.

I set against them the noble protest of F. W. Robertson, in that famous sermon on “The Loneliness of Christ” to which my own thought owes so much: “There is a feeble sentimental way in which we view the Cross.

We turn to the Cross, the agony and the loneliness, to touch soft feelings, to arouse compassion. You degrade that loneliness by your compassion. Compassion! Compassion for Him!

Reverence, if you will, but no pity, please!” The danger is, of course, that when we pity Christ in His loneliness we merely project into Him something of our own disordered feelings.

Our pity for Him, if we are not careful, is simply a disguised self-pity. It is ourselves for whom we are crying dolefully. Down in the subtle subconscious places of the mind we have presumed to see in this tremendous Christ a companion in distress with ourselves. We have even hugged the thought that we have never been properly understood, never properly appreciated as we deserved, never even had justice, never have been given by the cold world the friendship and understanding for which we hunger.

We have been passed by, ignored, and have found ourselves often unaccountably disliked. The pathos of it, the pitifulness of it to ourselves. And here is Christ suffering the same thing. We will weep for Him, too.

He joins us in the great class of the unappreciated. Men and women, is that too harsh? Is it unworthy sarcasm? I know and you know the insidious subtlety of self-pity, the way in which it indulges itself almost without our knowing it.

And I know that whatever the sublime personality of Christ was meant for, it was not meant for pity. If you pity Christ you have not seen Him; what is standing in the way of your seeing Him except your own clouded self-projecting mind?