The way from Pilate’s judgment seat to Calvary has been called the Via Dolorosa—the way of pain. If by that is meant that it was a way whose every step might well evoke our tears, whose simple record should renew and deepen our sorrow, the name is appropriate enough. But if the name be used to express the mind of Jesus, if it be His sorrow we have in view, its insight is at fault, and its use bestows no honor on Jesus. It is due to the Romish taint which has infected our thinking and fastened our eyes on the physical sufferings of the cross, forgetful of what the reticence of the Gospels and the triumph of the Epistles might have taught us—the radiant victory of the spirit over the flesh.
Jesus has been called the Man of Sorrows—outside the New Testament. The nearest approach in the Gospels to that name (which may mislead us if we are not careful) is the mention of the ignorant and mistaken conception that He was the prophet Jeremiah, a misconception Jesus at once brushes aside. The truth is that, in most of its aspects, Jesus lived a singularly joyous life. The most careless reader cannot escape feeling the calm and serenity of His words, and the perfect peace which pervades His life.
“Contentment” may express the high attainment of Paul, but it is too mean a word to apply to the life of Jesus; He had abounding joys. The silence that dwells among the lonely hills, the shadows on the Lake of Galilee, the array of the lilies, the glory of the grass of the field spoke to Him with a voice which no poet’s ear ever heard. His delights were with the sons of men.
When we think of His incarnation, a shadow falls on our spirits as its humiliation forces itself upon us, but we forget the eager will behind it, which made its narrow limits a constant joy. His youth in Nazareth…was a time of the leaping pulse and eager desire. His poverty—of which we, in our ignorance of an Eastern life, and our gluttony for ignoble comfort, have made too much—gave Him an unburdened life. “A man’s life,” He said, “consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth…Take no thought for the morrow.” Ah! when we understand the sources of joy, when we penetrate the secret of Jesus, we realize that, despite His loneliness and separateness in His higher experiences, despite the burden of men’s sins and sorrows, and despite the last awful hour on the cross, no human heart ever thrilled with a joy to match that of Jesus.
When we regard Him closely as He passes up to Calvary, we find that from the depths of His joy a stream is flowing which cannot be quenched. Then we understand why He could say to His disciples, as He stood on the threshold of the agony of Gethsemane, and felt the very shadow of the cross: “These things have I spoken unto you that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”
Look at Jesus now as He walks the way to Calvary! The night—that searching and disciplining night for all who remained awake through its eventful hours—had passed away. Its festal joy and discerning love had found relief in the high priest’s prayer after the supper. Its sleepless envy and craven fear have issued in the pitiless deeds of the courtyard and judgment seat.
Now the morning has ushered in the great day. Simon bears His cross, and now He is going forward to the last deed of all. A high elation is on His spirit, and a rush and surge of joyous feeling over mastering pain and quenching sorrow, swells in His heart. The wail of the women of Jerusalem breaks on His ear. He stops and turns, because He will not have them misunderstand Him, and give a false accompaniment to His crowning act. He chides them for their tears. The joys of sense have been taken from Him; of all the joys that man can take away, He has been bereaved. But He has the joys of the Spirit. He has His deep delight in spiritual things. And it was that inner, spiritual, eternal joy, welling up out of His victorious spirit, which made the way to Calvary an uplifting triumph.
Let us think about this joy of Jesus on the way to Calvary. Let us, under God’s spirit, be guided into its knowledge and possession for so must we enter into His joy and so that our joy may be full.
The first source of Christ’s joy lay in His sinlessness. The great depth of the Old Testament Scripture is the judgment of God. His laws and ordinances are the marvel of the mind and heart. But the great depth of the New Testament is the sinlessness of Jesus. For all these centuries men have been plumbing it with the sounding lead of their speculation, and they have failed to fathom it. His words and deeds have been examined, tested, compared, and their spotless moral beauty has been made the more clear. “Which man convinceth Me of sin?” is the unanswered challenge of Christ. Today He stands unique; the one moral phenomenon, the one virgin life lived among men. When we contemplate the sinlessness of Jesus, it is as if we were looking up into the deep fathomless blue of heaven.
Of this joy of sinlessness you and I know nothing. The one fact, common to us all, is that we have sinned. But by our bitter experience we can faintly conceive what the lack of may be. We have come to the hour of rest with the burden and shame of sin weighing down our hearts. We have awakened in the morning with the gnawing of remorse. We have felt the hot blush at the recollection of iniquities. We know how yet, at times, impulses of rebellion riot within us. And at all these times our joy is quenched. But when we have known ourselves purged from our iniquities, when we have cast out some lurking sin, when we have overcome and have put some temptation under our feet, then we have known the ministry of angels, and we have stood on the margin of Christ’s joy.
But how meanly do these experiences image Christ’s joy in His unspotted righteousness! Think of a conscience which had no accusing voice; of a spirit which had no burden of personal guilt; of a heart that never hungered after shameful wrong. Think of a soul that lived in the unclouded sunshine of the presence of God—so that no tears of shame for sin ever stained His cheek, and no broken, penitent prayer was ever on His lips. Now try to conceive the deep joy of a sinlessness like that. The happy, laughing innocence of a sunny child, compared to it, is but a world of shadows broken by light. As He goes to His cross, the sense of a life of sinlessness makes sunshine in His heart. As He goes upward to Calvary, the consciousness of a past of which He could say, “I do always those things that please Him,” and of a present whose difficult obedience He was fulfilling, is throbbing within Him, and He will not have even woman’s tears misinterpret the rapture of His spirit. “Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness; therefore, God, Thy God, hath anointed Thee with the oil of gladness above Thy fellows.”
Another source of Christ’s joy lay in His service and sacrifice. The idea of the joy of service, and of service which reaches to sacrifice, is commonly known. Yet how few of us believe it in our heart of hearts. The whole course of the conduct of men declares that it is when a man sits in state while other men serve him, when he receives abundant adulation, then his joy is full. Experience will not teach us the folly of it. The plainest evidence will not change this fleshly faith. Yet the truth is this—that it is in the hour of consecration to holy service, in the days of heroic self-denial, in the doing of the deed in which life itself is laid down, we experience that joy to which all others are but as poppies spread.
The soldiers who made the wild charge, and galloped into the jaws of death, had a deep joy in their obedience, such as they never know in the shelter of the bivouac. The man who has climbed the steep of a lonely sacrifice has an exquisite joy no words can express. There is one relationship in life which, as all of you can understand, calls supremely for service and sacrifice. That is motherhood. No one can compute the cost of the days and nights of waiting and watching, and the years of sacrifice a mother gives. But who will compute her joy in it all?
And when Jesus will tell His disciples how their service and sacrifice, wrought out in sorrow, will yield them joy, He has no higher image than the mother’s joy in her sacrifice for her child. “A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow, because her hour is come, but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more her anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.” Has not your own experience brought this home to you? When you have accepted the burdens of your home; when you have gone down to the help of the needy, the sick, the poor, and the dying; when you made that sacrifice that left its mark on your life, you found a wellspring of joy, which has been a solace for almost every sorrow.
Think, then, what must have been Christ’s joy in His holy service, in His great sacrifice. The joys of heaven did not so dilate His heart as the joy of the hour of His leaving them behind. The singing of the angels was only the sign of the joy of His spirit. And in every hour of His consecration, in every deed by which He made the children glad, or wiped away the tears of those who mourned, or healed the sick who were brought to Him, in every step forward towards His goal, He entered into His deep delight in spiritual things. And so, if you can realize it, this joy in His service and sacrifice was consummated on the way to Calvary.
In one way the day of the cross is the darkest, saddest, most tragic in the world’s history. Yet it was the day of Christ’s highest joy. As He goes up the way of weeping—spent, forsaken, marked for death—these women of Jerusalem lamented Him. He turned and looked upon them, and the triumph-song broke from His lips, “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me….” For He was going to the deed which crowned His life, He was accomplishing the purpose of His heart, He was on the threshold of His highest service and sacrifice, and His joy was almost full.
Ah, brethren, if you have ever felt the deep joy of making some poor wasted heart glad, if you have known the leaping of the spirit when some abandoned life has been saved from shame, if you have known the thrill when you have led some child to Christ, you can begin to realize what must have been the spiritual delight of the Son of God in that day when He died to set His people free.
The source of Christ’s joy, I suggest, was His deep delight in the spiritual attainments of men. I venture to call this joy in the holiness and sanctification of men the highest of all, because it is the most spiritual and the most enduring. It is the joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner that repenteth. All great and Godlike souls have found this supreme joy in the spiritual well-being of others. It is Moses who prays that his name shall be blotted out of God’s Book, rather than that His people Israel shall be cast away. It is Jonathan, that most captivating saint of the Old Testament, who can find his noblest joy in strengthening David’s hand in God. It is Paul—great Paul—who cries: “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved…I could wish myself accursed from Christ, for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” The man among us who has his deepest delight in the spiritual attainment of men, has pierced the secret of Jesus, will find a tireless energy in His service, can catch the throb of the holy passion in the words of Christ: “These things have I spoken unto you that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy may be full,” and can understand the elation of His spirit as He goes onward to His cross.
There is an incident in the life of Jesus that shows Him to us discriminating between the different joys that are possible to believing men. When the disciples returned from their tour in Galilee, they came to Him with joy, exclaiming that even the devils were subject to them. And Christ rejoiced with them. Yet, because He knew the subtle danger of all such sensational spiritual work, He said: “Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Then we read: “In that hour Jesus Himself rejoiced in spirit, and said: I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” There is thus the joy in the triumph of spiritual work, and the joy in the assurance of the mercy of God, and the joy in the knowledge of the spiritual attainments of men. This joy is highest of all.
This was the joy that made the bright days of His life. The pity of it is that He passed so many wintry days—that so often He would have blessed men, but they would not. When the rich young ruler went away sorrowful, he left a still more sorrowful heart behind him. When Christ beheld the city that did not know the day of its visitation, He wept. When Judas went out, and it was night, and shut the door of mercy upon himself, he shadowed Christ’s longing heart.
But Jesus had hours of joy. When Andrew and John sought Him, and sat all night at His feet; when Matthew left his custom-box to follow Him; when Zaccheus’ long-bound heart burst within him Jesus entered into His joy. When the woman of Samaria drank of the water of life, He had meat to eat that the world knew not of. When the woman who was a sinner came behind and kissed His feet, and wiped them with her hair, Simon’s bread lay untasted on the table. And when Mary’s oil was poured upon Him, His joy was full—for He saw within a woman’s soul the beauty of His own grace reflected. He saw the will of God done on earth as it is done in heaven.
And now, as He sees the beams which shall make His cross, as He is fulfilling the eternal sacrifice, as He is within a few hours of the moment when He shall cry, “It is finished,” and then go home, His joy is greater than human heart can conceive. What word could have been more suitable on His lips to these compassionate daughters of Jerusalem, what word is to be spoken yet to men among us who dwell overmuch on the sorrows of the way, but “Weep not for Me”? The joy in the spiritual well-being of men still throbs in the human heart that beats on the throne of God.
He still “sees of the travail of His soul” and is satisfied. Not only when He saw Peter’s impulsive soul chastened into steadfast strength; not only when He saw John’s fiery heart glowing with love; not only when He saw Thomas’s doubting spirit strengthened in faith; but today when He sees our faces turned towards Him, when He sees us laying aside all malice, and all guile, and all hypocrisies, and envies and evil speaking; when He sees us overcoming by faith. This is “the joy set before Him,” for which He endured the cross and despised the shame, the joy which shall be fulfilled, “when all the ransomed Church of God is saved to sin no more.”
He ennobles all the pure joys of earth. But He continually tells us that these are not the highest possible to the spirit of a man. He tells us that these are the joys which may be taken away. The highest joy—the joy He would have remain in you—is this deep delight in spiritual things which throbbed in His heart on the way to Calvary.
Into that joy we enter as He entered. We cannot have the joy of sinlessness. But we can possess that joy which, for guilty, sin-stained men, corresponds to it—the joy of pardon, of peace with God, of complete surrender to His will. We can have the joy of service and sacrifice. The world around us is stretching out its withered hands to be healed, its empty hearts to be filled. And we can have that purest, holiest joy, into which no subtle selfishness enters, in the spiritual well-being of men.
These made the joy of the way to Calvary. As we enter into this joy of Jesus we shall find it quenching all desire for base and degrading pleasures, fitting us for our solemn hours of trial, satisfying our spirits in the years when all other delights may pall, and preparing us for that hour of awakening in His presence. It is a blessing which maketh rich and addeth no sorrow, an earnest of the pleasures which are at God’s right hand for evermore.
Written by W. M. Clow