It behoved Him to be made in all things like unto His brethren.' And observe that the all things' here, concerning which our Lord's likeness to mankind is predicated, are not the ordinary properties of human nature, but emphatically and specifically man's sorrows.
That will appear, I think, if you notice that my text is regarded as being a consequence of our Lord's incarnation for the help of His fellows. He laid not hold upon angels, but He laid hold upon the seed of Abraham.' Wherefore, in all things it behoved Him to be made like unto His brethren.'
Now, if the likeness here be the possession of true manhood, then my text is mere tautology, and it would simply be saying, He became a man, wherefore it behoved Him to become a man.' The same conclusion is, I think, fairly to be deduced from the last words of our chapter, where the fact of His suffering being t0mpted, is stated as His preparation to help, and as His qualification as a merciful and faithful High Priest. That is to say, the' all things' of which our Lord became partaker like us His brethren, are here the whole mass --in all its variety of pressure and diversity of nauseousness and bitterness--the whole mass of human sorrow which has ever made men's hearts bleed and men's eyes weep. Christ, in His single manhood, says the writer, gathered unto Himself every form of pain, of misery, of weariness, of burden, which can weigh upon and wear out a human spirit; and no single ingredient that ever made any man's cup distasteful was left out, in that dreadful draught which He emptied to the dregs ere He passed the chalice to our lips, saying, Drink ye all of it.'
This is the great lesson and blessed thought of our text that no suffering soul, no harassed heart, no lonely life, has ever been able to say, Ah! I have to bear this by myself, for Jesus Christ never knew anything like this.' All the pain and sorrow of adverse circumstances, that try some of us, He knows who had not where to lay His head'; who was a poor man all His days, to whom the women had to minister of their charity, and who depended upon others for His sustenance in life, and for cerements, and a grave in death. The sorrows that belong to a physical frame overwrought and crushed by excessive toil; the sorrows of weakness, of sickness, the pains of death--He understands them all. The sorrows that come from our relations to our fellows, whether they be the hopeless, quiet tears that fall for ever upon broken affections and lost loves, or whether they be the bitter griefs that come from unrequited affections and unappreciated aims, and benefits flung back, and hearts tortured by ingratitude--He knows them all. And the loftier and less selfish, more impersonal, griefs that make so large a portion of the weight and heaviness of the noblest spirits, they all cast their shadows across His pure soul, and the shadow was the deeper and the darker because of the very purity of the soul on which it fell. Purity is ever sad in the presence of foulness; and love is ever sorrowful when bowed with the burden of another's sorrow; and both these sources of pain and grief, which diffuse their bitterness through the lives of the best men, weighed in all their gravity upon Him who felt the world's sorrow and the world's sin as a personal grief because His soul was perfectly unselfish, perfectly pure, perfectly united to God, and therefore perfectly clear-sighted. All the miseries of all men forced themselves into and filled Christ's heart.
Dear brother! you and I have but a drop given to us; He drank the whole cup. Our natures are not capable of sorrow as varied, as deep, as poignant as the sorrow of Jesus Christ; but for each of us surely the assurance comes with some subtle power of consolation and strength,' In all their afflictions He was afflicted'; and none of us can ever meet a sorrow with whose face Christ was not familiar, and which He Himself has not conquered for us.
