The Cross He Could Not Stop Preaching

“but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.”

— Philippians 2:7-8, ASV

A Whole Day on His Knees

At one of the Sialkot Conventions, the European visitors slept in the dormitory of the mission boarding school, a long, narrow building crowded with beds. Pengwern Jones found that his bed had been placed between Hyde’s and Dr. Griswold’s. He also noticed that Hyde’s bed was never slept in. Hyde spent his nights in the prayer room.

One morning, soon after dawn, Hyde rushed into the dormitory, went down on his knees beside his bed, and began to pray. Jones went to have an early breakfast, came back, and found him still praying. He went out to the prayer meeting and the morning service and came back at eleven. Hyde was still on his knees. Jones went to lunch, returned at half past twelve, lay down on his cot to rest, and watched him. The dormitory was noisy all day. People came in and out between the services, talking, looking for things, and resting. Jones went to the afternoon service, then to tea, then to the five o’clock meeting, coming back each time. At six o’clock Hyde was still kneeling. He had been there all day.

Jones decided to wait. If Hyde rose, he would ask him how he could pray all day amid such noise. Half an hour later Hyde looked up and smiled. Jones sat on his bed and asked him the secret. He offered to fetch him a cup of tea. Hyde refused the tea and asked only for a glass of water. Then he said, “Let me tell you what a vision I had — a new vision of Christ!”

Lower and Lower

Jones wrote down what Hyde said that evening as best he could remember it. He confessed that he could not do it justice. His account falls into three stages. It is a meditation on the verse at the head of this chapter, Paul’s great hymn about the self-emptying of Christ.

First, Hyde spoke of what it cost Christ to become a man. Jones had never seen it this way. Christ left his glory to live in a sinful world, and breathed its air every day. No wonder, Hyde said, that he often escaped from the crowds to the mountains, as though for a breath of the fresh air of heaven. Hyde described the holy Son of God living surrounded by sin until Jones felt that “even the Incarnation was an Infinite Sacrifice, even if the Death on Calvary had never taken place.” Then Hyde stopped, and said quietly, “and He took this place — became man — for me.”

After a while he went on. Second, Christ became a slave. He washed his disciples’ feet, which was the work of a slave. He did not merely act like a servant. He, the King of kings, whom the hosts of heaven worshipped, “became a bond-servant, a slave.” Paul’s word in Philippians 2:7 means exactly that. Hyde wept as he spoke, and Jones wept with him.

Then Hyde said something that shocked Jones so much that he hesitated, years later, to write it down. “I saw more,” Hyde said. “I saw that my Jesus became a dog.”

“My Jesus Became a Dog”

It is a startling phrase, and it needs careful reading. Hyde explained what he meant. He had been thinking about the Syrophoenician woman who begged Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus answered her, “it is not meet to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs,” and she replied, “Yea, Lord; even the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7:27-28, ASV). Jesus used the contemptuous word of his day for Gentiles, and the woman accepted it. But Christ died for the Gentiles, for the “dogs.” It must be, Hyde reasoned, that to save them he took the dog’s place.

“At first,” he told Jones, “this was too awful to think of.” But when he thought of Christ’s life, he saw how much of it resembled the life of the pariah dogs that roamed every Indian town. Those dogs had no home. Christ said, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the heaven have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20, ASV). Those dogs were constantly kicked and beaten. Christ was driven away, mocked, struck, and at last killed. “And that is what I have been doing,” Hyde said, “worshipping Him and praising Him for this.”

Hyde was not saying that Christ became less than human, or that he ceased to be God. He was reaching, in the language of the Indian streets, for a way to express how low Christ stooped. His Punjabi listeners knew exactly what it meant to be treated like a dog. Many of the village Christians he served had been treated that way all their lives by their higher-caste neighbours. Psalm 22, which Christ quoted on the cross, says, “For dogs have compassed me” (Psalm 22:16, ASV). Hyde saw the Saviour not only surrounded by dogs but numbered among the despised. It was his way of saying what Paul says in Philippians: Christ “humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.”

Jones never forgot that evening. “I remember nothing of dinner that night,” he wrote. “My impression is that we both sat on that bed for hours speaking of Christ … I shall never forget the vision I had of the love of Christ going lower and lower, suffering more and more and all for me.”

A Sermon on the Cross

At another convention Hyde gave an address to the European visitors, most of them missionaries, on the Cross. Jones called it “one of the most inspiring messages I ever heard.”

Hyde began by saying that from whatever side we look at Christ on the cross, we see wounds. From above we see the marks of the crown of thorns, and from behind, the furrows of the scourging. He went on to show that in the crucified Christ there is sufficiency for every need. Jones felt, as he listened, that he had enough “for time and for eternity.” But the climax came when Hyde spoke of Christ’s cry, “It is finished” (John 19:30, ASV).

To the disciples, Hyde said, it seemed that Jesus had failed. To his enemies it seemed they had finally overcome him. To all appearances the struggle was over and his life had ended in tragedy. And at that moment he cried out in triumph. “It is finished” was not a groan of defeat but a shout of victory, raised in the darkest hour.

Then Hyde applied it. United to Christ, he said, we too can shout in triumph when everything points to despair. Our work may seem to have failed and the enemy to have won. All our friends may blame us and our colleagues pity us. Even then we can take our stand with Christ on the cross and shout, “Victory, Victory, Victory!” “This,” Hyde said, “is real Victory: to shout triumphantly though all around is dense darkness.”

Jones said that from that day he never despaired about his work. Whenever he felt discouraged, he seemed to hear Hyde’s voice shouting “Victory,” and it took him straight to Calvary. Among the listeners was the Hon. M. Waldegrave, son of the English evangelical peer Lord Radstock. Waldegrave told Jones afterwards that he usually went to his tent after each meeting to write the message down for his wife, “but Mr. Hyde’s message just delivered seems so sacred and appealing that I dare not try to write it.”

When Jones talked with Hyde afterwards, Hyde told him that for a whole year he had been “fascinated by the Cross.” “I cannot speak on any other subject now,” he said. Paul had written the same thing: “For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2, ASV).

Silence Instead of a Sermon

Paterson remembered an evening at Sialkot that shows Hyde’s devotion to the cross in a different way. The committee had decided not to announce the names of speakers, so that people would attend to the message rather than the messenger. But word had got out that Hyde was to speak, and the hall was full and expectant. A close friend of Hyde’s was in the chair that evening. The subject of Christ’s sufferings was heavy on his heart, and when he was asked what psalm should be sung, he suggested Psalm 22. To his surprise, the song leader announced that they would sing Psalm 22 “at Mr. Hyde’s request.” The two men had not spoken about it.

Hyde sat on the platform behind the pulpit, deep in prayer. When he did not move, the chairman read from Zechariah 13, where the prophet asks, “What are these wounds between thine arms?” and the answer comes, “Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends” (Zechariah 13:6, ASV). He spoke about the loneliness of Christ in his sufferings. Then, during another hymn, he laid his hand on Hyde’s shoulder and said, “If God has a message for you to give, will you give it now?” Hyde did not move. The convention’s chairman, the Rev. John Forman, leaned over to ask whether Hyde was going to speak, and was told that he had been asked. When the singing stopped, the chairman asked whether he might give two messages that God had laid on his own heart, and did so. The meeting went on to its close, and Hyde slipped away to the prayer room without saying a word.

Later Paterson asked him about it. Hyde said he had been full of a subject, “The Glory of Christ’s Kingdom.” But when the chairman laid a hand on his shoulder, the gesture seemed to press him down. The words “If God has a message” made him doubt whether God wanted him to speak just then. So he waited in prayer, and received no clear leading to speak. He kept silent. Paterson thought it took both a man closely in touch with his Father and a man who cared more for God’s approval than for other people’s to keep silent in front of a crowd that had come to hear him.

A Letter About Psalm 22

Psalm 22 seems to have been especially dear to Hyde, and we have a rare piece of his own writing about it. In a letter to his sister Mary he wrote a set of notes on the psalm, verse by verse. McGaw printed them in 1923. He added the text of the psalm and slightly rearranged the notes, but he insisted that “the notes are from the hand of dear John himself.”

The psalm begins with the cry Jesus uttered on the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1, ASV). Hyde saw David “praying in some deep and terrible trial,” an agony “so real and awful as to reveal to David Christ’s prayer.” He described the opening cry as “the cry, the voice of the sufferings of hell, but by a person with the praise of heaven in his heart.” And he noticed how quickly the psalm turns from forsakenness to worship: “But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel” (Psalm 22:3, ASV).

On the verse “But I am a worm, and no man; A reproach of men, and despised of the people” (Psalm 22:6, ASV), Hyde wrote that the speaker is “taking the sinner’s place and enduring what came to him on the Cross of Calvary. The sinner’s place and reproach, yet himself without sin.” On the verses about trust from birth, he noticed that there is “no cry for mercy — just help which is his by right — the sinless Christ. Yet in his greatest sufferings, ‘There is none to help.’”

His longest note is on a line from verse 17: “I may count all my bones. They look and stare upon me” (Psalm 22:17, ASV). Hyde saw in the first half a picture of Christ worn thin: “How this tells of three years — yes, a lifetime, but especially of three years of sorrow over our, my, sin, of prayer and fasting and watching, sometimes whole nights; and then days and nights of work — teaching, healing, preaching, and of grief as he saw sin and its hold and havoc.” And on the second half: “How this tells of a human soul, sensitive and shrinking from the gaze of men. This tells of the indignities heaped upon him which only the most refined and holy can feel in all their power!”

Finally, on the psalm’s great turn, “Yea, from the horns of the wild-oxen thou hast answered me” (Psalm 22:21, ASV), Hyde wrote: “Here again is a cry for help unheard, yet in faith heard. Thou hast ‘answered me.’” The rest of the psalm, he noted, reveals “the glory that shall follow.”

McGaw, reading these notes, said something that anyone who has read this far will understand. “It has seemed to me that in no other writings have I seen such a likeness of the dear brother himself. I have said, ‘John Hyde has here unconsciously given us a portrait of John Hyde.’” The man who prayed whole nights, grew thin with grief over sin, shrank from people’s gaze, and cried for help “unheard, yet in faith heard”, and who would die with a shout of victory, was describing his Lord. In the process, without meaning to, he described what his Lord had made of him.

“Dead and Buried”

McGaw’s informant (almost certainly Paterson) preserved one of Hyde’s sayings that sums up what the cross meant for his daily life. “When we keep near to Jesus,” Hyde used to say, “it is he who draws souls to himself through us, but he must be lifted up in our lives; that is, we must be crucified with him.” It is “self,” he said, that comes between us and him. So self must be dealt with as Christ was dealt with: “crucified, dead and buried with Christ.” And he added a sentence that his friends never forgot: if self is not buried, “the stench of the old man will frighten souls away.” But if those three steps downward are taken, then the new man will be “revived, raised, and seated,” the corresponding steps upward.

This is the language of Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20, ASV), and, “far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Galatians 6:14, ASV). For Hyde, the cross was not only the place where his sins were forgiven. It was the pattern of the life he was called to live, lower and lower, and always, in the end, lifted up.

For Reflection

Hyde’s friends remembered many things about his prayers: their length, their intensity, their tears. But what they remembered most about his preaching was that he could not stop talking about the cross. “I cannot speak on any other subject now.”

That is the right order. The prayer came from the cross, not the other way round. A man who has seen Christ go “lower and lower … all for me” will pray, and weep, and give away his blankets, not in order to earn anything but because he has seen what he has been given. If our own prayer is thin, the remedy may not be more effort at praying. It may be more time at the foot of the cross, looking, until we too can say, “and He took this place — for me.”