"And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them sleeping, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?" (Matt. 26:40)
There is always that danger in religion,--the danger of regarding God as a servant, rather than as One utterly to be served. Of course, we do not put it to ourselves in those terms; we speak of a God of love and comfort, and we sing praises to His adequacy to our need, all of which, in its own way, is right. But we must not stop there.
There is a stranger and more astonishing thought, which sounds blasphemous perhaps to those who have not been gripped and overwhelmed by it, or who have not fully apprehended that what we see in Jesus that God is, and that is the thought of God's need of us, of God's infinite desire for our companionship. In this word of Jesus,--spoken from out of the midst of the most solemn experience of His life, when more than at any other time He was close to the heart of His Father and God's suffering became His,--I hear an infinite desire for human companionship. "Could ye not watch with me?" We need Jesus, but Jesus quite desperately needs us, and that is what we do not realize when we protest our allegiance to Him.
