We cannot account for His recoil from the cross, save as we remember His sense of kinship with those who were reddening their hands with the blood of the Representative of their God.  If we have ever stood beside a devoted wife in the hour when her husband is disgraced, or been in a home where sons and daughters are overwhelmed with a mother’s shame, we have some faint idea of how Jesus felt the guilt of His relatives when they slew Him.  He was the conscience of His less conscientious brethren:  “the reproaches of them that reproached Thee, fell on Me.”  He realized, as they did not, the enormity of what they were doing.  The utter and hideous ungodlikeness of the world was expressed for Him in those who would have none of Him, and cried:  “Away with Him!  Crucify, crucify Him.”  His keenness of conscience and His acute sympathy brought to His lips the final cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” The sinless Sufferer on the cross, in His oneness with His brethren, felt their wrongdoing His own; acknowledged in His forsakenness that God could have nothing to do with it, for it was anti-God; confessed that it inevitably separated from Him and He felt Himself in such kinship and sympathy with sinning men that He was actually away from God.  “That was hell,” said old Rabbi Duncan, “and He tasted it.”

But our minds revolt.  We do not believe that God deserted His Son; on the contrary we are certain that He was never closer to Him.  Shall we question the correctness of Jesus’ personal experience, and call Him mistaken?  We seem compelled either to do violence to His authority in the life of the spirit with God, or to our conviction of God’s character.  Perhaps there is another alternative.  A century ago the physicist, Thomas Young, discovered the principle of the interference of light.  Under certain conditions light added to light produces darkness; the light waves interfere with and neutralize each other.  Is there not something analogous to this in the sphere of the spirit?  Is not every new unveiling of God accompanied by unsettlements and seeming darkenings of the soul, temporary obscurations of the Divine Face?  In all our advances in religious knowledge are we not liable to undergo

  Fallings from us, vanishings,
  Blank misgivings of the creature?

And may it not have been God’s coming closer than ever to the Son of His love, or rather the Son’s coming closer to the Father, as He entirely shared and expressed God’s own sympathy and conscience, and was made perfect by the things which He suffered, that wrought in His sinless soul the awful blackness of the feeling of abandonment?

In the sense of suffering sin’s force, of conscientiously accepting its burden, of sensitively sympathizing with the guilty, Jesus bore sin in His own body on the tree.