| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 15 |
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In one of St. Paul’s epistles is a benediction, which in the Revised Version reads, “The Lord directs your hearts – into the patience of Christ.” This is a benediction which all of us would like to bow our heads low to receive. In Christ’s own life, patience, like all virtues, had its perfection. And his was not a sheltered life, without such trials of patience as we must endure, but one exposed to all that made it hard for him to live sweetly. He met enmities, antagonism, and un-congenialities at every step. Besides, his nature was one that was sensitive to all rudeness and pain, so that he suffered in his contracts with life far more than we do.
Yet his patience was perfect. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” He pressed upon them the gifts of love, but they rejected them. Yet he never failed in his loving, never grew impatient, never wearied in his offers of blessing, and never withdrew his gracious gifts. He stood with his hands out-stretched towards his own until they nailed those hands back on the cross, and even then he let drop out of them, from their very wounds, the gifts of redemption for the world.
His patience appears also in his dealings with his own disciples. They were very ignorant and learned their lessons very slowly. They tried him at every point by their want of faith, their lack of spirituality, and their weak, faltering friendship. But he never wearied in his love for them nor in his teaching.
His patience is seen; too, in his treatment of the people who pressed about him wherever he went, with their clamors for healing. We have only to think what a motley mass an oriental crowd is, at its best, and then remember that it was the very wreckage of misery and wretchedness that came to him, if we would get a thought of the wearisome-ness of moving day after day among these poor sufferers as Jesus did. Yet he never showed the slightest impatience with any of them, however loathsome or repulsive, but gave out freely and lovingly of the richest and best of his own precious life to heal and comfort them, even the vilest and most repulsive of them.
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