The Cross and Suffering

Extract

In giving us the way in which we should serve God, our blessed Lord laid down a principle that the disciple is not above the master and that presumably no one should be surprised if they found that a way of life good enough for the Son of God was good enough for them, and so he effectually put a stop to any complaint on our part. The highest way of life is the way of the Master; there is none higher. By such a standing only are we to judge our own lives. We talk of the success and of the failure of our life or of the lives of others; we are accustomed to speak of one life as happy, of another as full of tragedy.

The supreme ideal of Christian life was the Master’s; would the people of his own time have said that his life was a failure or a success as they stood on Calvary? Why !—a failure, of course. Even those in sympathy lost all hope. We have women coming to anoint the dead body with no thought whatever of the risen life.