I venture to regard the incident as giving us a little glimpse of what I may call the shrinking Christ.
Do we not see here a trace of something that we all know? May not part of the reason for Christ's haste have been. that desire which we all have, when some inevitable grief or pain lies before us, to get it over soon, and to abbreviate the moments that lie between us and it? Was there not something of that feeling in our Lord's sensitive nature when He said, for instance, I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened until it be accomplished'? I am come to send fire upon the earth, and O I how I wish that it were already kindled!' Was there not something of the same feeling, which we cannot call impatient, but which we may call shrinking from the Cross, and therefore seeking to draw the Cross nearer, and have done with it, in the words which He addressed to the betrayer, That thou doest, do quickly,' as if He were making a last appeal to the man's humanity, and in effect saying to him, If you have a heart at all, shorten these painful hours, and let us have it over'?
And may we not see, in that swift advance in front of the lagging disciples, some trace of the same feeling which we recognise to be so truly human?
Christ did shrink from His Cross. Let us never forges that He recoiled from it, with the simple, instinctive, human shrinking from pain and death which is a matter of the physical nervous system, and has nothing to do with the will at all. If there had been no shrinking from it there had been no fixed will. If there had been no natural instinctive drawing back of the physical nature and its connections from the prospect of pain and death, there had been none of the heroism of which I am speaking. Though it does not become us to dogmatise about matters of which we know so little, I think we may fairly say that that shrinking never rose up into the regions of Christ's will; never became a desire; never became a purpose. Howsoever the ship might be tossed by the waves, the will always kept its level equilibrium. Howsoever the physical nature might incline to this side or to that, the will always kept parallel with the great underlying divine will, the Father's purpose which He had come to effect. There was shrinking which was instinctive and human, but it never disturbed the fixed purpose to die. It had so much power over Him as to make Him march a little faster to the Cross, but it never made Him turn from it. And so He stands before us as the Conqueror in a real conflict, as having yielded Himself up by a real surrender, as having overcome a real difficulty,' for the joy that was set before Him, having endured the Cross, despising the shame.'
