But this is not all. Many people will agree with the estimate of Jesus, when they understand it, in regard to most of these cla.s.ses; perhaps they would urge that in the main it is substantially the same teaching as John the Baptist"s, though it implies, as we shall see, a more difficult problem in getting rid of sin. Jesus goes further. He holds up to men standards of conduct which transcend anything yet put before mankind. "Be ye therefore perfect," he says, "even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48).
When we recall what Jesus teaches of G.o.d, when we begin to try to give to "G.o.d" the content he intended, we realize with amazement what he is saying. He is holding up to men for their ideal of conduct the standard of G.o.d"s holiness, of G.o.d"s love and tenderness. Everything that Jesus tells us of G.o.d--all that he has to say of the wonderful and incredible love of G.o.d and of G.o.d"s activity on behalf of his children--he now incorporates in the ideal of conduct to which men are called. John"s conceptions of righteousness grow beggarly. Here is a royal magnificence of active love, of energetic sympathy, tenderness, and self-giving, asked of us, who find it hard enough to keep the simplest commandments from our youth up (Mark 10:20). We are to love our enemies, to win them, to make peace, to be pure--and all on the scale of G.o.d. And that this may not seem mere talk in the air, there is the character and personality of Jesus, embodying all he asks of us--bringing out new wonders of G.o.d"s goodness, the ugliness and evil of sin, and the positive and redemptive beauty of righteousness.
The problem of sin and forgiveness becomes more difficult, as we think of the positive ideals which we have not begun to try to reach. Let us sum up what it involves.
Jesus brings out the utter bankruptcy to which sin reduces men. They become "full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (Matt. 23:28), so depraved that they are like bad trees, unproductive of any but bad fruit (rotten, in the Greek, Matt. 7:17); the very light in them is darkness, and how great darkness (Matt. 6:23). They are cut off from the real world, as we saw, and lose the faculties they have abused--the talent is taken away (Matt. 25:28); "from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath" (Matt. 25:29). The nature is changed as memory is changed, and the "overflow of the heart" in speech and act bears witness to it. The faculty of choice is weakened; the interval in which inhibition--to use our modern term--is possible, grows shorter. The instincts are perverted and the whole being is disorganized. In a word, all that Jesus connotes by "the Kingdom of G.o.d" is "taken from them" (Matt. 21:43), and nothing left but "outer darkness" (Matt. 22:13). The vision of G.o.d is not for the impure (Matt. 5:8). Meanwhile sin is not a sterile thing, it is a leaven (Matt. 16:6). If our modern medical language may be applied--and Jesus used the a.n.a.logy of medicine in this very case (Mark 2:17)--sin is septic. In the first place, all sin is anti-social--an invasion "ipso facto" of the rights of others. The man who sins either takes away what is another"s--a man"s goods, a widow"s house, or a woman"s purity--or he fails to give to others what is their due, be it, in the obvious field, the aid the Good Samaritan rendered to the wounded and robbed man by the roadside (Luke 10:33), or, in the higher sphere, truth, sympathy, help in the maintenance of principle, or in the achievement of progress and development (cf. Matt. 25:43). Sin is the repudiation of the concepts of law, duty, and service, in a word, of the love on G.o.d"s scale which G.o.d calls men to exercise. And its fruits are, above all, its dissemination. Injustice, a historian has said, always repays itself with frightful compound interest. If a man starts to debauch society, his example is quickly followed; and it comes to hatred.
What, we asked, did Jesus mean by "lost"? This, above all, that sin cuts a man adrift from G.o.d. In the parable of the Prodigal Son this is brought out (Luke 15:11-32). There the youth took from his father all he could get, and then deliberately turned his back on him forever; he went into a far country, out of his reach, outside his influence, and beyond the range of his ideas, and he devoted his father"s gifts to precisely what would sadden and trouble his father most. And then came bankruptcy, final and hopeless. There was no father available in the far country; he had to live without him, and it came to a life that was not even human--a life of solitude, a life of beasts. Jesus draws it, as he does most things, in picture form, using parable. Paul puts the same in directer language; sin reduces men to a position where they are "alienated from the life of G.o.d" (Eph. 4:18; Col. 1:21), "without G.o.d in the world" (Eph. 2:12), "enemies of G.o.d" (Rom. 5:10; Col. 1:21); but he does not say more than Jesus implies. Paul"s final expression, "G.o.d gave them up"
(thrice in Rom. 1:24, 26, 28), answers to the Judge"s word, in Jesus" picture, "Depart from me" (Matt. 25:41).
O Wedding-guest, this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea: So lonely "twas, that G.o.d himself Scarce seemed there to be.
So Jesus handles the problem of sin, but that is only half the story, for there remains the problem of Redemption. The treatment of sin is far profounder and truer than John the Baptist or any other teacher has achieved; and it implies that Jesus will handle Redemption in a way no less profound and effective. If he does not, then he had better not have preached a gospel. If, in dealing with sin, he touches reality at every point, we may expect him in the matter of Redemption to reach the very centre of life.[30] How else can he, with his serious view of sin, say to a man, "Thy sins are forgiven thee"? (Mark 2:5). But it is quite clear from our records that, while Jesus laid bare in this relentless way the ugliness and hopelessness of sin, he did not despair: his tone is always one of hope and confidence. The strong man armed may find a stronger man come upon him and take from him the panoply in which he trusted (Luke 11:21, 22). There is a great gulf that cannot be crossed (Luke 16:26)--yes, but if the experience of Christendom tells us anything, it tells us that Jesus crossed it himself, and did the impossible.
"The great matter is that Jesus believed G.o.d was willing to take the human soul, and make it new and young and clean again." But the human soul did not believe it, till Jesus convinced it, and won it, by action of his own. "The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost"; and he did not come in vain.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS
By what they said, I perceived that he had been a great warrior, and had fought with and slain him that had the power of death (Hebrews 2:14), but not without great danger to himself, which made me love him the more--"Pilgrims Progress", Part I
The subject before us is one of the greatest difficulty. Why Jesus chose the cross has exercised the thought of the Christian world ever since he did so. He told his disciples beforehand of what lay before him, of what he was choosing, but it was long before they realized that he meant any such thing. The cross was to them a strange idea, and for a long time they did not seriously face the matter. Once the cross was an accomplished fact, Christians could not, and did not wish to, avoid thinking out what had meant so much to their Master; but it has mostly been with a sense of facing a mystery that in some measure eluded them, with a feeling that there is more beyond, something always to be attained hereafter.
A very significant pa.s.sage in St. Mark (10:32) gives us a glimpse of a moment on Jesus" last journey to Jerusalem. It is a sentence which one could hardly imagine being included in the Gospel, if it did not represent some actual memory, and a memory of significance. It runs something like this: "And they were in the way, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was moving on before them; and they began to wonder; and as they followed they began to be afraid." He is moving to Jerusalem with a purpose. They do not understand it. He is wrapped in thought; and, as happens when a man"s mind is working strongly, his pace quickens, and they find themselves at a distance behind him. And then something comes over them--a sense that there is something in the situation which they do not understand, a strangeness in the mind. They realize, in fact, that they are not as near Jesus as they had supposed. And, as they follow, the wonder deepens into fear.
Anyone who will really try to grapple with this problem of the cross will find very soon the same thing. The first thing that we need to learn, if our criticism of Jesus is to be sound, is that we are not at all so near him as we have imagined. He eludes us, goes far out beyond what we grasp or conceive; and I think the education of the Christian man or woman begins anew, when we realize how little we know about Jesus. The discovery of our ignorance is the beginning of knowledge. Plato long ago said that wonder is the mother of philosophy, and he was right. John Donne, the English poet, went farther, and said: "All divinity is love or wonder." When a man then begins to wonder about Jesus Christ in earnest, Jesus comes to be for him a new figure. Historical criticism has done this for us; it has brought us to such a point that the story of these earliest disciples repeats itself more closely in the experience of their followers of these days than in any century since the first. We begin along with them on the friendly, critical, human plane, and with them we follow him into experiences and realizations that we never expected. It may be summed up in the familiar words of the English hymn,
Oh happy band of pilgrims, If onward ye will tread With Jesus as your fellow, To Jesus as your head.
These men begin with him, more or less on a footing of equality; or, at least, the inequality is very lightly marked. Afterwards it is emphasized; and they realize it with wonder and with fear, and at last with joy and grat.i.tude.
We may begin by trying steadily to bring our minds to some keener sense of what it was that he chose. To say, in the familiar words, that he chose the cross, may through the very familiarity of the language lead us away from what we have to discover. We have, as we agreed, to ask ourselves what was his experience. What, then, did his choice involve? It meant, of course, physical pain. There are natures to whom this is of little account, but the sensitive and sentient type, as we often observe, dreads pain. He, with open eyes, chose physical pain, heightened to torture, not escaping any of the suffering which antic.i.p.ation gives--that physical horror of death, that instinctive fear of annihilation, which nature suggests of itself. He took the course of action that would most severely test his disciples; one at least revolted, and we have to ask what it meant to Jesus to live with Judas, to watch his face, to recognize his influence in the little group--yes, and to try to win him again and to be repelled. "He learnt by the things that he suffered" that Judas would betray him; but the hour and place and method were not so evident, and when they were at last revealed--what did it mean to be kissed by Judas? Do we feel what he felt in the so-called trials--or was he dull and numbed by the catastrophe? How did he bear the beating of triumphant hatred upon a forsaken spirit? How did the horrible cry, "Crucify him! crucify him!" break on his ears--on his mind? When "the Lord turned and looked upon Peter"
(Luke 22:61), what did it mean? How did he know that Peter was there, and what led him to turn at that moment? Was there in the Pa.s.sion no element of uneasiness again about the eleven on whom he had concentrated his hopes and his influence--the eleven of whom it is recorded, that "they all forsook him, and fled" (Mark 14:50)? No hint of dread that his work might indeed be undone? What pain must that have involved? What is the value of the Agony in the Garden, of the cry, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani" (Mark 15:34)? When we have answered, each for himself, these questions, and others like them that will suggest themselves--answered them by the most earnest efforts of which our natures are capable--and remembered at the end how far our natures fall short of his, and told ourselves that our answers are insufficient--then let us recall, once more, that he chose all this.
He chose the cross and all that it meant. Our next step should be to study anew his own references to what he intends by it, to what he expects to be its results and its outcome. First of all, then, he clearly means that the Kingdom of Heaven is something different from anything that man has yet seen. The Kingdom of Heaven is, I understand, a Hebrew way of saying the Kingdom of G.o.d--very much as men to-day speak of Providence, to avoid undue familiarity with the term G.o.d, so the Jews would say Heaven. There were many who used the phrase in one or other form; but it is always bad criticism to give to the words of genius the value or the connotation they would have in the lips of ordinary people. To a great mind words are charged with a fullness of meaning that little people do not reach. The attempt has been made to recapture more of his thoughts by learning the value given to some of the terms he uses as they appear in the literature of the day, and of course it has been helpful. But we have to remember always that the words as used by him come with a new volume of significance derived from his whole personality.
Everything turns on the connotation which he gives to the term G.o.d--that is central and pivotal. What this new Kingdom of G.o.d is, or will be, he does not attempt fully to explain or a.n.a.lyse. In the parables, the treasure-finder and the pearl merchant achieve a great enrichment of life; so much they know at once; but what do they do with it? How do they look at it? What does it mean to them? He does not tell us. We only see that they are moving on a new plane, seeing life from a new angle, living in a fuller sense. What the new life means in its fullness, we know only when we gain the deeper knowledge of G.o.d.
He suggests that this new knowledge comes to a man from G.o.d himself--flesh and blood do not reveal it (Matt. 16:17). "Unto you it is given," he says on another occasion, "to know the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven" (Mark 4:11), and he adds that there are those who see and do not see; they are outside it; they have not the alphabet, we might say, that will open the book (cf. Rev. 5:3). He makes it clear at every point in the story of the Kingdom of G.o.d that there is more beyond; and he means it. It is to be a new beginning, an initiation, leading on to what we shall see but do not yet guess, though he gives us hints. We shall not easily fathom the depth of his idea of the new life, but along with it we have to study the width and boldness of his purpose. This new life is not for a few--for "the elect," in our careless phrase. He looks to a universal scope for what he is doing. It will reach far outside the bounds of Judaism. "They shall come from the east and from the west, and from the north and from the south, and shall sit down in the Kingdom of G.o.d" (Luke 13:29). "Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world," he says (Mark 14:9). "My words shall not pa.s.s away" (Luke 21:33). All time and all existence come under his survey and are included in his plan. The range is enormous. And this was a Galilean peasant! As we gradually realize what he has in mind, must we not feel that we have not grasped anything like the full grandeur of his thought?
He makes it plain, in the second place, that it will be a matter for followers, for workers, for men who will watch and wait and dare--men with the same abandonment as himself. He calls for men to come after him, to come behind him (Mark 1:17, 10:21; Luke 9:59). He emphasizes that they must think out the terms on which he enlists them. He does not disguise the drawbacks of his service. He calls his followers, and a very personal and individual call it is. He calls a man from the lake sh.o.r.e, from the nets, from the custom house.
In the third place, he clearly announces an intention to achieve something in itself of import by his death. There are those who would have us believe that his mind was obsessed with the fixed idea of his own speedy return on the clouds, and that he hurried on to death to precipitate this and the new age it was to bring.
References to such a coming are indeed found in the Gospels as we have them, but we are bound to ask whence they come, and to inquire how far they represent exactly what he said; and then, if he is correctly reported, to make sure that we know exactly what he means.
Those who hold this view fail to relate the texts they emphasize with others of a deeper significance, and they ignore the grandeur and penetration and depth of the man whom they make out such a dreamer. He never suggests himself that his death is to force the hand of G.o.d.
He himself is to be the doer and achiever of something. We have been apt to think of him as a great teacher, a teacher of charm and insight, or as the great example of idealism, "who saw life steadily and saw it whole." He lived, some hold, the rounded and well-poised life, the rhythmic life. No, that was Sophocles. He is greater. Here is one who penetrates far deeper into things. His treatment of the psychology of sin itself shows how much more than an example was needed. Here, as in the other chapters, but here above all we have to remember the clearness of his insight, his swiftness of penetration, his instinct for fact and reality. He means to do, to achieve, something. It is no martyr"s death that he incurs. His death is a step to a purpose. "I have a baptism to be baptised with," he says (Luke 12:50). "The Son of Man," he said, "is come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10).
In discussing in the previous chapter what he meant by the term "lost," our conclusion was that for Jesus sin was far more awful, far more serious, than we commonly realize. We saw also that so profound and true a psychology of sin must imply a view of redemption at least as profound, a promise of a force more than equal to the power of sin--that "violence of habit" of which St.
Augustine speaks. If the Son of Man is to save the lost, and if the lost are in danger so real, it follows that he must think of a thoroughly effective salvation, and that its achievement will be no light or easy task. "To give one"s life as a ransom for many," says a modern teacher, "is of no avail, if the ransom is insufficient."
What, then, and how much, does he mean by "to save," and how does he propose to do it? When the soul of man or woman has gone wrong in any of the ways discussed by Jesus--in hardness or anger, in impurity, in the refusal to treat G.o.d and his facts seriously--when the consequences that Jesus recognized have followed--what can be done to bring that soul back into effective relation with the G.o.d whom it has discarded and abandoned? That is the problem that Jesus had to face, and most of us have not thought enough about it.
First of all, how far does Jesus understand salvation to take a man?
The ancient creed of the Church includes the article of belief in "the forgiveness of sins." There are those who lightly a.s.sume that this means, chiefly or solely, the remission of punishment for evil acts. This raises problems enough of itself. The whole doctrine of "Karma", vital to Buddhism and Hinduism, is, if I understand it aright, a strong and clear warning to us that the remission of punishment is no easy matter. Not only Eastern thinkers, but Western also, insist that there is no avoidance of the consequences of action. Luther himself, using a phrase half borrowed from a Latin poet, says that forgiveness is "a knot worthy of a G.o.d"s aid"--"nodus Deo vindice dignus".[31] But in any case escape from the consequences of sin, when once we look on sin with the eyes of Jesus, is of relatively small importance. There are two aspects of the matter far more significant.
We have seen how Jesus regards sin as at once the cause and consequence of a degeneration of the moral nature, and as a repudiation of G.o.d. Two questions arise: Is it possible to recover lost moral quality and faculty? Is it possible for those incapacitated by sin to regain, or to enjoy, relation with G.o.d?
When we think, with Jesus, of sin first and foremost in connexion with G.o.d, and take the trouble to try to give his meaning to his words, forgiveness takes on a new meaning. We have to "think like G.o.d," he says (Mark 8:33); and perhaps G.o.d is in his thoughts neither so legal nor so biological as we are; perhaps he does not think first of edicts or of biological and psychological laws. G.o.d, according to Jesus, thinks first of his child, though of course not oblivious of his own commands and laws. Forgiveness, Jesus teaches or suggests, is primarily a question between Father and son, and he tries to lead us to believe how ready the Father is to settle that question. Once it is settled, we find, in fact, Father and son setting to work to mend the past. The evil seed has been sown and the sad crop must be reaped, the man who sowed it has to reap it--that much we all see. But Jesus hints to us that G.o.d himself loves to come in and help his reconciled son with the reaping; many hands make light work, especially when they are such hands. And even when the crop is evil in the lives of others, the most horrible outcome of sin, G.o.d is still in the field. The prodigal, when he returns, is met with a welcome, and is gradually put in possession of what he has lost--the robe, the shoes, the ring; and it all comes from his being at one with his Father again (Luke 15:22ff.). The Son of Man, historically, has again and again found the lost--the lost gifts, the lost faculties, the lost charms and graces--and given them back to the man whom he had also found and brought home to G.o.d.
Let us once more try to get our thoughts Theocentric as Jesus" are, and our problems become simpler, or at least fewer. G.o.d"s generosity in forgiveness, G.o.d"s love, he emphasizes again and again. Will a man take Jesus at his word, and commit himself to G.o.d? That is the question. Once he will venture on this step, what pictures Jesus draws us of what happens! The son is home again; the bankruptcy, the hideous solitude, the life among animals, b.e.s.t.i.a.l, dirty and empty, and haunted with memories--all those things are past, when once the Father"s arms are round his neck, and his kiss on his cheek. He is no more "alienated from the life of G.o.d" (Eph. 4:18; Col. 1:21), "without G.o.d in the world" (Eph. 2:12), an "enemy of G.o.d" (Rom.
5:10); he was lost and is found, and the Father himself, Jesus says, cries: "Let us be merry" ("Euphranthomen"). If we hesitate about it, Jesus calls us once more to "think like G.o.d," and tells us other stories, with incredible joy in them--"joy in the presence of the angels of G.o.d over one sinner that repenteth." We must go back to his central conception of G.o.d, if we are to realize what he means by salvation. St. Augustine (Conf., viii. 3) brings out the value of these parables, by reminding us how much more we care for a thing that has been ours, when we have lost it and found it again. The shepherd has a new link with his sheep lost and found again, a new story of it, a shared experience; it is more his than ever. And Jesus implies that when a man is saved, he is G.o.d"s again, and more G.o.d"s own than ever before; and G.o.d is glad at heart. As for the man; a new power comes into his heart, and a new joy; and with G.o.d"s help, in a new spirit of sunshine, he sets about mending the past in a new spirit and with a new motive--for love"s sake now. If the fruit of the past is to be seen, as it constantly is, in the lives of others, he throws himself with the more energy into G.o.d"s work, and when the Good Shepherd goes seeking the lost, he goes with him.
Christian history bears witness, in every year of it, to what salvation means, in Jesus" sense. Punishment, consequences, crippled resources--no, he does not ask to escape them now; all as G.o.d pleases; these are not the things that matter. Life is all to be boundless love and grat.i.tude and trust; and by and by the new man wakes up to find sin taken away, its consequences undone, the lost faculties restored, and life a fuller and richer thing than ever it was before.
Somehow so, if we read the Gospels aright, does Jesus conceive of Salvation. To achieve this for men is his purpose; and in order to do it, as we said before, his first step is to induce men to re-think G.o.d. Something must be done to touch the heart and to move the will of men, effectively; and he must do it.
With this purpose in his mind--let us weigh our words here, and reflect again upon the clearness of his insight into life and character, into moral laws, the laws of human thought and feeling, upon his profound intelligence and grasp of what moves and is real, his knowledge (a strong word to use, but we may use it) of G.o.d--with this purpose in his mind, thought out and understood, he deliberately and quietly goes to Jerusalem. He "steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51). "I must walk," he said, "to-day and to-morrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem" (Luke 13:33). To Jerusalem he goes.
We may admit that with his view of the psychology of sin, he must have a serious view of redemption. But why should that involve the cross? That is our problem. But while we try to solve it, we must also remember that behind a great choice there are always more reasons than we can a.n.a.lyse. A man makes one of the great choices in life. What has influenced him? Ten to one, if you ask him, he does not know. Nothing else, he will say, seemed feasible; the thing was borne in on me, it came to me: reasons? He cannot tabulate reasons; the thing, he says, was so clear that I was a long way past reasons.
And yet he was right; he had reasons enough. What parent ever a.n.a.lysed reasons for loving his children, or would tabulate them for you? Jesus does not explain his reasons. We find, I think, that we are apt to have far more reasons for doing what we know is wrong, than we have for doing what we know is right. We do not want reasons for doing what is right; we know it is right, and there is an end of it. Once again, Jesus, with his clear eye for the real, sees what he must do. The salvation of the lost means the cross for himself. But why? we ask again. We must look a little closer if we are to understand him. We shall not easily understand him in all his thoughts, but part of our education comes from the endeavour to follow him here, to "be with him," in the phrase with which we began.
First of all we may put his love of men. He never lost the individual in the ma.s.s, never lost sight of the human being who needed G.o.d. The teacher who put the law of kindness in the great phrase, "Go with him twain" (Matt. 5:41), was not likely to limit himself in meeting men"s needs. He was bound to do more than we should expect, when he saw people whom he could help; and it is that spirit of abounding generosity that shows a man what to do (Luke 6:38). Everywhere, every day, he met the call that quickened thought and shaped purpose.
He walked down a street; and the scene of misery or of sin came upon him with pressure; he could not pa.s.s by, as we do, and fail to note what we do not wish to think of. He knows a pressure upon his spirit for the man, the child, the woman--for the one who sins, the one who suffers, the other who dies. They must be got in touch with G.o.d. He sits with his disciples at a meal--the men whom he loved--he watches them, he listens to them. Peter, James, John, one after the other, becomes a call to him. They need redemption; they need far more than they dream; they need G.o.d. That pressure is there night and day--it becomes intercession, and that grows into inspiration. Our prayers suffer, some one has said, for our want of our identification with the world"s sin and misery. He was identified with the world"s sin and misery, and they followed him into his prayer. It becomes with him an imperative necessity to effect man"s reconciliation with G.o.d.
All his experience of man, his love of man, call him that way.
The second great momentum comes from the love of G.o.d, and his faith in G.o.d. Here, again, we must emphasize for ourselves his criticism of Peter: "You think like a man and not like G.o.d" (Mark 8:33). We do not see G.o.d, as Jesus did. He must make plain to men, as it never was made plain before, the love of G.o.d. He must secure that it is for every man the greatest reality in the world, the one great flaming fact that burns itself living into every man"s consciousness. He sees that for this G.o.d calls him to the cross, so much so that when he prays in the garden that the cup may pa.s.s, his thoughts range back to "Thy will" (Matt. 26:42). It is G.o.d"s Will.
Even if he does not himself see all involved, still G.o.d knows the reason; G.o.d will manage; G.o.d wishes it. "Have faith in G.o.d," he used to say (Mark 11:22). This faith which he has in G.o.d is one of the things that take him to the cross.
In the third place, we must not forget his sense of his own peculiar relation to G.o.d. If it is safe to rely on St. Mark"s chronological date here, he does not speak of this until Peter has called him the Messiah. He accepts the t.i.tle (Mark 8:29). He also uses the description, Son of Man, with its suggestions from the past. He forgives sins. He speaks throughout the Gospels as one apart, as one distinct from us, closely as he is identified with us--and all this from a son of fact, who is not insane, who is not a quack, whose eyes are wide open for the real; whose instinct for the ultimate truth is so keen; who lives face to face with G.o.d. What does it mean? This, for one thing, that most of us have not given attention enough to this matter. I have confined myself in these chapters to the Synoptic Gospels, with only two or three references to the Fourth Gospel, and on the evidence of the Synoptic Gospels, taken by themselves, it is clear that he means a great deal more than we have cared to examine. He is the great interpreter of G.o.d, and it is borne in upon him that only by the cross can he interpret G.o.d, make G.o.d real to us, and bring us to the very heart of G.o.d. That is his purpose.
The cross is the outcome of his deepest mind, of his prayer life. It is more like him than anything else he ever did. It has in it more of him. Whoever he was, whoever he is, whatever our Christology, one fact stands out. It was his love of men and women and his faith in G.o.d that took him there.
Was he justified? was he right? or was it a delusion?
First of all, let us go back to a historic event. The resurrection is, to a historian, not very clear in its details. But is it the detail or the central fact that matters? Take away the resurrection, however it happened, whatever it was, and the history of the Church is unintelligible. We live in a rational world--a world, that is, where, however much remains as yet unexplained, everything has a promise of being lucid, everything has reason in it. Great results have great causes. We have to find, somewhere or other, between the crucifixion and the first preaching of the disciples in Jerusalem, something that entirely changed the character of that group of men.
Something happened, so tremendous and so vital, that it changed not only the character of the movement and the men--but with them the whole history of the world. The evidence for the resurrection is not so much what we read in the Gospels as what we find in the rest of the New Testament--the new life of the disciples. They are a new group. When it came to the cross, his cross, they ran away. A few weeks later we find them rejoicing to be beaten, imprisoned and put to death (Acts 5:41). What had happened? What we have to explain is a new life--a new life of prayer and joy and power, a new indifference to physical death, in a new relation to G.o.d. That is one outcome of the cross and of what followed; and as historians we have to explain it. We have also to explain how the disciples came to conceive of another Galilean--a carpenter whom they might have seen sawing and sweating in his shop, with whom they tramped the roads of Palestine, whom they saw done to death in ignominy and derision--sitting at the right hand of G.o.d. Taken by itself, we might call such a belief mere folly; but too much goes with it for so easy an explanation. The cross was not the end. As Mr. Neville Talbot has recently pointed out in his book, "The Mind of the Disciples", if the story stopped with the cross, G.o.d remains unexplained, and the story ends in unrelieved tragedy. But it does not end in tragedy; it ends--if we can use the word as yet--in joy and faith and victory; and these--how should we have seen them but for the cross? They are bound up with his choice of the cross and his triumph over it all. Death is not what it was--"the last line of all," as Horace says. Life and immortality have been brought to light (2 Tim. 1:10). "The Lamb of G.o.d taketh away the sin of the world." So we read at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, and the historical critic may tell us that he does not think that John the Baptist said it. None the less, it is a wonderful summary of what Jesus has done, especially wonderful if we think of it being written fifty or sixty years after the crucifixion. For, as we survey the centuries, we find that the Lamb of G.o.d has taken away the sin of the world--to a degree that no one can imagine who has not studied the ancient world. Those who know the heathen world intimately will know best the difference he has made. All this new life, this new joy, this new victory over death and sin is attached to the living and victorious Son of G.o.d. The task of Paul and the others is, as Dr. Cairns says, "re-thinking everything in the terms of the resurrection." It is the new factor in the problem of G.o.d, so to speak--the new factor which alters everything that relates to G.o.d.
That is saying a great deal, but when we look at Christian history, is it saying too much?
But still our first question is unanswered; why should it have been the cross? One thinker of our day has suggested that, after all, suffering is a language intelligible to the very simplest, while its meaning is not exhausted by the deepest. The problem of pain is always with us. And he chose pain. He never said that pain is a good thing; he cured it. But he chose it. The ancient world stumbled on that very thing. G.o.d and a G.o.dlike man, their philosophers said, are not susceptible to pain, to suffering. That was an axiom, very little challenged. Then if Jesus suffered, he was not G.o.d; if he was G.o.d, he did not suffer. The Church denied that, just as the Church to-day rejects another hasty ant.i.thesis about pain, that comes from New England. He chose pain, and he knew what he was choosing. Then let us be in no hurry about refusing it, but let us look into it. He chose it--that is the greatest fact known to us about pain.
Again, the death of Christ reveals sin in its real significance, in its true perspective, outside the realm of accident and among the deepest things of G.o.d, "sub specie aeternitatia". Men count themselves very decent people; so thought the priests and the Pharisees, and they were. There is nothing about them that one cannot find in most religious communities and in all governing cla.s.ses: the sense of the value of themselves, their preconceptions and their judgements--a strong feeling of the importance of the work they have to do, along with a certain reluctance to face strange facts, and some indifference as to what happens to other people if the accepted theory of the Cause or the State require them to suffer. There is nothing about Pilate and Herod, and the Pharisees and the priests, that is very different from ourselves. But how it looks in front of the cross! We begin to see how it looks in the sight of G.o.d, and that alters everything; it upsets all our standards, and teaches us a new self-criticism.
"You think like man, and not like G.o.d," said Jesus (Mark 8:33). The cross reveals G.o.d most sympathetically. We see G.o.d in the light of the fullest and profoundest and tenderest revelation that the world has had. "My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?" that is the cry of Jesus on the cross. I have sometimes thought there never was an utterance that reveals more amazingly the distance between feeling and fact. That was how he felt--worn out, betrayed, spat upon, rejected. We feel that G.o.d was more there than ever. As has been said, if it is not G.o.d, it is nothing. "G.o.d," says Paul, "was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor. 5:19). He chose the cross; and in choosing it, Christians have always felt, he revealed G.o.d; and that is the centre of the great act of Redemption.
But there is a condition antecedent to understanding the cross. We have, as we agreed, to ask ourselves, what is the experience which led him to think as he did? In the simpler language of the Gospels, quite plain and easy to understand, the call to follow comes first--the call to deeper a.s.sociation with Jesus Christ in his love for men. Do not our consciences tell us that, if we really loved people as Jesus does, if we understood them as sympathetically and cared as much for them, the cross would be far more intelligible to us? But if, in plain fact, we do not see why we should bear the cross for others, why we should deny and obliterate self on this scale for the salvation of men--how, I ask, to people of such a mind should Jesus be intelligible? It is not to be expected. In no other sphere would one dream of it. When a man avows that he does not care for art or poetry, who would wish to show him poem or picture? How should a person, who does not care for men, understand the cross?
Deeper a.s.sociation, then, with Jesus in his love of men, in his agony, in his trust in G.o.d--that is the key to all. As we agreed at the very beginning, we have to know him before we can understand him.
It all depends in the long run on one thing; and that we find in the verse with which we started: "And as they followed, they began to be afraid." But they followed. We can understand their fear. It comes to a man in this way. If Jesus crucified means anything like what the Church has said, and has believed; if G.o.d is in that man of Nazareth reconciling the world to Himself; if there is real meaning in the Incarnation at all; if all this language represents fact; "then," he may say, "I am wholly at a loss about everything else." A man builds up a world of thought for himself--we all do--a scheme of things; and to a man with a thought-out view of the world, it may come with an enormous shock to realize this incredible idea, this incredible truth, of G.o.d in Christ. Those who have dwelt most on it, and value it most, may be most apt to understand what I mean by calling it incredible. Think of it. It takes your breath away. If that is true, does not the whole plan of my life fall to pieces--my whole scheme of things for the world, my whole body of intellectual conceptions? And the man to whom this happens may well say he is afraid. He is afraid, because it is so strange; because, when you realize it, it takes you into a new world; you cannot grasp it. A man whose instinct is for truth may hesitate--will hesitate about a conception like this. "Is it possible," he will ask himself, "that I am deluded?" And another thought rises up again and again, "Where will it take me?" We can understand a man being afraid in that way.