They have whittled Him down to the scope of their terrors. They have offered me His figure, bowed upon a hill, put blisters on His feet...or have sent Him to a funeral to sob at Lazarus' corpse.
At the scene in the Garden, He finds tired folk sleeping. His complaint is the complaint of Little Men. In similar predicament, they would long for companionship.
And then the Cross!...
Was it a thing of wood, to tilt with the weight of a sallow body? Did He walk toward it with a halting in His knees, His lip perspiring, a sickening curdle in His stomach as He felt His robes jerked from Him? Yet those would have been the Little men's reactions.
I behold my Lord stepping with calm, majestic stride up to that meeting with His destiny.
He wore His nakedness with dignity.
I see mighty muscles swelling down His arms--arms that might have felled in contest any soldier wearing Ceasar's breastplates.
I discern Him noting a frightened baby's cry among those awestruck watchers, a cry mother-hushed as the soldiers were handed the spikes of High Priest's lecheries.
I see my Lord laying Himself down gracefully, as He had been gracious in all other acts of life. It was the body of a marcher on hard roads that balanced itself for nailing on that crude particulum..
The Roman soldier did not have to yank out his arm to straighten it and pin it with his knee. My Lord stretched out His own arm, of a fearless self-volition. He might have studied the soldier's face with interest as the servitor of Ceasar knit himself to do the hellish hammering.
There was one long breath that conquered Pain!
The Roman soldiers strained beneath the Cross, to get it from the ground and keep its burden balanced.
That was the first instant of my Lord's Ascension. Doubtless He pitied them, going to such child's play to prove that men were mortal.