At peace with God, Jesus found Himself at peace with the universe. The
idea of Nature, that formidable screen erected between ourselves and
God, destroying hope and quenching prayer, did not exist for Him.
Nature--that was the Will of His Father. He submitted to it with
confidence and joy, whereas we submit to it with desperate resignation.
He did not feel Himself to be an orphan or an exile in the world; He
conducted Himself in it with ease and in security, not as a slave, but
as a son in the house which the Father filled with His presence. It is
the Father that directs all things; He makes His sun to shine upon the
evil and the good; He watches over the sparrows; He clothes the lilies
of the field; He gives life and food, the body and raiment; He notices
the work we have to do, the trials we must bear. He never leaves us to
ourselves. His spirit vivifies and fortifies our own. He is at the
origin of our life and at the end. We are ever in the Father's hands.
The outlook of Jesus, it is true, is not our own. He shared the
outlook of His race and time.... But His filial piety did not depend
upon His knowledge of the universe. The amount of culture does not
count in this order of feelings. Irreligion was not less easy or less
frequent then than now, and if His outlook on the universe was
narrower, it must not be imagined that it was less full of scandalous
fatalities, of moral difficulties, of rude shocks to piety and faith.
The world of the apocalypses, which was the world in which Jesus had to
live and act, was not less full of mysteries and terrors than our own.
His filial piety alone gave Him the means and strength by which to
overcome them. The duty of man, He considered, was to change his heart
rather than to change the order of things, _i.e._ the will of God.
There is no trace of sorcery or magic or the appetite for miracles in
the prayer He taught to His disciples. At bottom it amounts to this:
"Our Father, let Thy will be done!" His heart-obedience was composed
half of childlike confidence, half of heroic renunciation. In face of
His trials He submitted without weakness and without complaint, and in
face of death He breathed the prayer of faith, the only one that still
remains to us: "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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