With the Damascus traveller he will be saying, “When I could not see for the glory of that light.”  May we each with face open, uncovered, all prejudice and self-seeking torn away, behold the glory of Jesus, even though for the sake of our eyes it come as a reflected glory.  Then we shall become, as were Moses and Stephen, unconscious reflectors of that glory.  And the crowd on the road shall find Jesus in us and want Him.  Then, too, we ourselves shall be changing from glory to glory, by the inner touch of Jesus’ Spirit, as we continue gazing.

Gethsemane:  The Strange, Lone Struggle

The Pathway In.

Great events always send messengers ahead.  There is a movement in the spirit currents.  A sort of tremor of expectancy affects the finer currents of air.  The more sensitively organized one is, that is to say, the more the spirit part of a man dominates body and mind, the more conscious will he be of the something coming.

Jesus was keenly conscious ahead of the coming of Calvary.  Apart from the actual knowledge, there was a painful thrill of expectancy, intensifying as the event came nearer.  The cross cast long, dark shadows ahead.  The darkest is Gethsemane.  It would be, for it was nearest.  But there were other shadows before that of the olive grove.  Jesus plainly reveals in His behavior, in His appearance, that He felt keenly, into the very fibre, so sensitively woven, of His being, that the experience of the cross would be a terrific one for Him.  It was deliberately chosen by Him, and the time of its coming chosen in the full knowledge that it would be an awful ordeal.  It would establish the earth’s record for suffering, never approached before or since.

As He turns His face for the last time away from Galilee, and to Judea, it is with the calmness of strong deliberation.  Yet the intenseness of the inner spirit, in its look ahead, is shown in His face, His demeanor.  As He comes to a certain Samaritan village on the road south, the usual invitation to stop for rest and a bit of refreshment is withheld out of respect to His evident purpose.  It is clear to these villagers that His face is set to go to Jerusalem.  In Luke’s striking language, “His face was going to Jerusalem.” What going to Jerusalem meant to Him had no meaning to them.  They saw only that face, and were so caught by the strong, stern determination plainly written there that they felt impelled not to offer the usual hospitality.

They were Samaritans, it is true, a half-breed race, hated by Jews, and hating them, but invariably they had been friendly to Jesus.  That must have been a marked face that held back these homely country people from pressing their small attentions upon Jesus.  They are keener to read the meaning of that face than are these disciples who are more familiar with the sight of it.  The impress already made upon the inner spirit by the great event toward which Jesus had determinedly set Himself was even thus early marked in His face.