See how his life is a failure, as men judge failure. The crowds which once followed Him to the Mount and about the seashore forsake Him. His very Apostles disappoint Him. They quarrel even about Its sacramental table. They sleep in the garden. One betrays Him for a little money. They flee when He is judged. What has become of the happy dream of a whole world following Him into the millenium? Gone, all of it. He is led out to die, billeted with a farcical title, spit at, derided,—a failure.
“Men and women”, He says to us, “see what life really is, even for the Most Perfect One. I know. I understand. The rose color has faded into the light of common day. Romance has proven but the gateway to an humdrum domesticity. The children you rejoiced in have grown up and forgotten you, more than you had deemed possible. Leaping ambition has become confined into the limitations of a tiny, useful, but monotonous niche in life. Friends you trusted have proved false or have grown fond of others and left you. Pain and sickness have broken your body. Over you come slowly the hurts of declining life. Your hope, too, for the world, your dream of industrial justice, of international love, of the ending of war, of the coming of the Kingdom—all seem to you thwarted at length by the incurable stupidity of man. You are tired, my child. You will not confess it to the world. You put a brave face on things. You seek to smile and hide the pain. Yes, my child, but I know.
“Well I know Thy trouble, O My servant true. Thou art very weary. I was weary too. But that toil shall make thee Someday all Mine own; And the end of sorrow Shall be near My Throne.”
He did not die in your place. He died and lives that you, remembering it and touching Him, may have courage, now that your turn has come to face things as they are, to live, suffer, die like a real man, a real woman. His hand is always near you. Fight on, comrades. “In this world”, He assures us, “ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”
It is because of this that the Holy Communion is and always must be the main service of Christendom,—that great, warm, pulsing, life-giving service which alone of all forms of worship Christ prescribed for us. Of its nature I shall say more in the last chapter. Just here let us recall it as the great comradeship of sacrificers. In it we offer Jesus to God, lifting up on high that bread and wine that He said He would use wherein to meet us. You possibly remember those old words which we say, trying to put into human language that lifting up of the Perfect Sacrifice to Him: “Wherefore we, Thy humble servants, do celebrate and make, here before Thy Divine Majesty, with these Thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto Thee, the memorial Thy Son hath commanded us to make, having in remembrance His blessed passion and precious death.” And then we venture to add our own imperfect beings to that Perfect Jesus, and we say to God, “Here we offer and present unto Thee ourselves, our souls and bodies.” We join our struggling, failing, striving lives to His life that He may give us understanding strength.
Every Lord's day, at millions of altars, men thus lift Him up, saying “We offer Him, the Perfect One, and ourselves, so imperfect, with Him.” All back through the centuries also the great ones of the earth have done the same, saying “Look on Him and help us to be like Him. So shall we not fail, so shall we not be crushed by life, so shall we live indeed.” In the Communion He gave the saints what He gives us,—Himself, His Presence, the touch of Him,—so that they, rising in His strength, went out and faced life and death, unafraid.