None Was Equal to the Weight but God
St. John Henry Newman
FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 2020
He had, my dear brethren, to bear the weight of sin; He had to
bear your sins; He had to bear the sins of the whole world. Sin is an easy
thing to us; we think little of it; we do not understand how the Creator can
think much of it; we cannot bring our imagination to believe that it deserves
retribution, and, when even in this world punishments follow upon it, we
explain them away or turn our minds from them.
But consider what sin is in itself; it is rebellion against
God; it is a traitor’s act who aims at the overthrow and death of His
sovereign; it is that, if I may use a strong expression, which, could the
Divine Governor of the world cease to be, would be sufficient to bring it
about.
Sin is the mortal enemy of the All-holy, so that He and it
cannot be together; and as the All-holy drives it from His presence into the
outer darkness, so, if God could be less than God, it is sin that would have
power to make Him less. And here observe, my brethren, that when once Almighty
Love, by taking flesh, entered this created system, and submitted Himself to
its laws, then forthwith this antagonist of good and truth, taking advantage of
the opportunity, flew at that flesh which He had taken, and fixed on it, and
was its death.
The envy of the Pharisees, the treachery of Judas, and the
madness of the people, were but the instrument or the expression of the enmity
which sin felt towards Eternal Purity as soon as, in infinite mercy towards
men, He put Himself within its reach. Sin could not touch His Divine Majesty; but
it could assail Him in that way in which He allowed Himself to be assailed,
that is, through the medium of His humanity. And in the issue, in the death of
God incarnate, you are but taught, my brethren, what sin is in itself, and what
it was which then was falling, in its hour and in its strength, upon His human
nature, when He allowed that nature to be so filled with horror and dismay at
the very anticipation.
There, then, in that most awful hour, knelt the Saviour of the
world, putting off the defences of His divinity, dismissing His reluctant
Angels, who in myriads were ready at His call, and opening His arms, baring His
breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of His foe – of a foe whose breath
was a pestilence, and whose embrace was an agony. There He knelt, motionless
and still, while the vile and horrible fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped
in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His
heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of
His mind, and spread over Him a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to
be that which He never could be, and which His foe would fain have made Him.
Oh, the horror, when He looked, and did not know Himself, and
felt as a foul and loathsome sinner, from His vivid perception of that mass of
corruption which poured over His head and ran down even to the skirts of His
garments! Oh, the distraction, when He found His eyes, and hands, and feet, and
lips, and heart, as if the members of the Evil One, and not of God!
*
Are these the hands of the Immaculate Lamb of God, once
innocent, but now red with ten thousand barbarous deeds of blood? Are these His
lips, not uttering prayer, and praise, and holy blessings, but as if defiled
with oaths, and blasphemies, and doctrines of devils? Or His eyes, profaned as
they are by all the evil visions and idolatrous fascinations for which men have
abandoned their adorable Creator? And His ears, they ring with sounds of
revelry and of strife; and His heart is frozen with avarice, and cruelty, and
unbelief; and His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed
since the fall, in all regions of the earth, with the pride of the old giants,
and the lusts of the five cities, and the obduracy of Egypt, and the ambition
of Babel, and the unthankfulness and scorn of Israel.
Oh, who does not know the misery of a haunting thought which
comes again and again, in spite of rejection, to annoy, if it cannot seduce? Or
of some odious and sickening imagination, in no sense one’s own, but forced
upon the mind from without? Or of evil knowledge, gained with or without a
man’s fault, but which he would give a great price to be rid of at once and for
ever? And adversaries such as these gather around Thee, Blessed Lord, in millions
now; they come in troops more numerous than the locust or the palmerworm, or
the plagues of hail, and flies, and frogs, which were sent against Pharaoh.
Of the living and of the dead and of the as yet unborn, of the
lost and of the saved, of Thy people and of strangers, of sinners and of
saints, all sins are there. Thy dearest are there, Thy saints and Thy chosen
are upon Thee; Thy three Apostles, Peter, James, and John; but not as
comforters, but as accusers, like the friends of Job, “sprinkling dust towards
heaven,” and heaping curses on Thy head. All are there but one; one only is not
there, one only; for she who had no part in sin, she only could console Thee,
and therefore she is not nigh.
She will be near Thee on the Cross, she is separated from Thee
in the garden. She has been Thy companion and Thy confidant through Thy life,
she interchanged with Thee the pure thoughts and holy meditations of thirty
years; but her virgin ear may not take in, nor may her immaculate heart
conceive, what now is in vision before Thee.
None was equal to the weight but God; sometimes before Thy
saints Thou hast brought the image of a single sin, as it appears in the light
of Thy countenance, or of venial sins, not mortal; and they have told us that
the sight did all but kill them, nay, would have killed them, had it not been
instantly withdrawn.
The Mother of God, for all her sanctity, nay by reason of it,
could not have borne even one brood of that innumerable progeny of Satan which
now compasses Thee about. It is the long history of a world, and God alone can
bear the load of it. Hopes blighted, vows broken, lights quenched, warnings
scorned, opportunities lost; the innocent betrayed, the young hardened, the
penitent relapsing, the just overcome, the aged failing; the sophistry of
misbelief, the wilfulness of passion, the obduracy of pride, the tyranny of
habit, the canker of remorse, the wasting fever of care, the anguish of shame,
the pining of disappointment, the sickness of despair; such cruel, such
pitiable spectacles, such heartrending, revolting, detestable, maddening
scenes; nay, the haggard faces, the convulsed lips, the flushed cheek, the dark
brow of the willing slaves of evil, they are all before Him now; they are upon
Him and in Him.
They are with Him instead of that ineffable peace which has
inhabited His soul since the moment of His conception. They are upon Him, they
are all but His own; He cries to His Father as if He were the criminal, not the
victim; His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance,
He is making confession, He is exercising contrition, with a reality and a
virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for
He is the One Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, the real Penitent, all
but the real sinner. . . .
He has not yet exhausted that full chalice, from which at
first His natural infirmity shrank. The seizure and the arraignment, and the
buffeting, and the prison, and the trial, and the mocking, and the passing to
and fro, and the scourging, and the crown of thorns, and the slow march to
Calvary, and the crucifixion, these are all to come. A night and a day, hour
after hour, is slowly to run out before the end comes, and the satisfaction is
completed.
And then, when the appointed moment arrived, and He gave the
word, as His passion had begun with His soul, with the soul did it end. He did
not die of bodily exhaustion, or of bodily pain; at His will His tormented
Heart broke, and He commended His Spirit to the Father.
– from Discourse 16
