The One who asked that the cup of rejection might be removed from his lips does not summon his disciples to a life of moral rigor alone. He is not appealing for them courageously to transform their torment into understanding. Nor does he speak out of dread for his own imminent and supremely unjust death. He is pleading that his Kingdom might come by some other means than the cruciform suffering that his disciples will surely encounter because of their faithfulness to him and his gospel. As with the silent but firm answer that Jesus receives in Gethsemane, so with the equally clear though implied answer to Sunday’s hard query: There is no other way than the Cross.

Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

if you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron entered into our souls - and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His peace.

Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.

Grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.