Every reader of the Old Testament knows that its central, ruling idea of
God is not Fatherhood, but Kingship: "The Lord reigneth." Even in the
Psalms, in which the religious aspiration and worship of the ages before
Christ find their finest and noblest expression, never once is God
addressed as Father. But when we turn to the Gospels, how great is the
contrast! Though not even a single psalmist dare look up and say,
"Father," in St. Matthew's Gospel alone the name is used of God more
than forty times. Fatherhood now is no longer one attribute among many;
it is the central, determining idea in whose revealing light all other
names of God--Creator, Sovereign, Judge--must be read and interpreted.
And the God of Jesus Christ is the Father, not of one race only, but of
mankind; not of mankind only, but of men.


II


It was indeed a great and wonderful gospel which Christ proclaimed--so
great and wonderful that all our poor words tremble and sink down under
the weight of the truth they vainly seek to express. By what means has
Christ put us into possession of such a truth? How have we come to the
full assurance of faith concerning the Divine Fatherhood? In two ways:
by His teaching and by His life; by what He said and by what He did. And
once more a paragraph must perforce do, as best it can, the work of an
essay.

To the ear and heart of Christ all nature spoke of the love and care of
God. "Behold the birds of the heaven," He said; "they sow not, neither
do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth
them. Are not ye of much more value than they?" And again He said,
"Consider the lilies of the field"--not the pale, delicate blossom we
know so well, but "the scarlet martagon" which "decks herself in red and
gold to meet the step of summer"--"Consider the lilies of the field, how
they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you that
even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these. But
if God doth so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and
to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye
of little faith?" Or, He bade men look into their own hearts and learn.
"God's possible is taught by His world's loving;" from what is best
within ourselves we may learn what God Himself is like. Once Christ
spoke to shepherds: "What man of you, having a hundred sheep, and having
lost one of them"--how the faces in the little crowd would light up, and
their ears drink in the gracious argument! You care for your sheep, but
how much better is a man than a sheep? If you would do so much for them,
will God do less for you? And once the word went deeper still, as He
spoke to fathers: "What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask
him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish
will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good
gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in
heaven give good things to them that ask Him?" Why, Christ asks, why do
you not let your own hearts teach you? If love will not let you mock
your child, think you, will God be less good than you yourselves are?

But more even than by His words did Christ by His life reveal to us the
Father. "He that hath seen Me," He said to Philip, "hath seen the
Father." In what He was and did, in His life and in His death, we read
what God is. We follow Him from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from Nazareth to
Gennesaret, from Gennesaret to Jerusalem, to the Upper Room, to
Gethsemane, and to Calvary, and at every step of the way He says to us,
"He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." We are with Him at the
marriage feast at Cana of Galilee, and in the midst of the mourners by
the city gate at Nain; we see Him as He takes the little children into
His arms and lays His hands upon them and blesses them; we hear His word
to her that was a sinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee; we stand
with John and with Mary under the shadow of the Cross; and still, always
and everywhere, He is saying to us, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father; if ye had known Me ye should have known my Father also." Within
the sweep of this great word the whole life of Jesus lies; there is
nothing that He said or did that does not more fully declare Him whom no
man hath seen at any time. To read "that sweet story of old" is to put
our hand on the heart of God; it is to know the Father.


III


"Yes," says some one, "it is a beautiful creed--if only one could
believe it." Christ took the birds and the flowers for His text, and
preached of the love of God for man, but is that the only sermon the
birds and flowers preach to us? Does not "nature, red in tooth and claw
with ravine," shriek against our creed? And when we turn to human life
the tragedy deepens. Why, if Love be law, is the world so full of pain?
Why do the innocent suffer? Why are our hearts made to sicken every day
when we take up our morning paper? Why does not God end the haunting
horror of our social ills? They are old-world questions which no man can
answer. Yet will I not give up my faith, and I will tell you why. "I
cannot see," Huxley once wrote to Charles Kingsley, "one shadow or
tittle of evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomena of
the universe, stands to us in the relation of a Father--loves us, and
cares for us as Christianity asserts." And, perhaps, if I looked for
evidence only where Huxley looked, I should say the same; but I have
seen Jesus, and that has made all the difference. It is He, and He
alone, who has made me sure of God. He felt, as I have never felt, the
horrid jangle and discord of this world's life; sin and suffering tore
His soul as no soul of man was ever torn; He both saw suffering
innocence and Himself suffered being innocent, and yet to the end He
knew that love was through all and over all, and died with the name
"Father" upon His lips. And, therefore, though the griefs and graves of
men must often make me dumb, I will still dare to believe with Jesus
that God is good and "Love creation's final law."

But while thus, on the one hand, we use Christ's doctrine of God to our
comfort, let us take care lest, on the other hand, we abuse it to our
hurt and undoing. There has scarcely ever been a time when the Church
has not suffered through "disproportioned thoughts" of God. To-day our
peril is lest, in emphasizing the Divine Fatherhood, we ignore the
Divine Sovereignty, and make of God a weak, indulgent Eli, without
either purpose or power to chastise His wilful and disobedient children.
"God is good; God is love; why then should we fear? Will He not deal
tenderly with us and with all men, forgiving us even unto seventy times
seven?" The argument is true--and it is false. As an assurance to the
penitent and to the broken in heart, it is true, blessedly true; in any
other sense it is false as hell. He whom Christ called, and taught us to
call "Father," He also called "Holy Father" and "Righteous Father." Have
we forgotten Peter's warning--we do not need to ask at whose lips he
learned it--"If ye call on Him as Father ... pass the time of your
sojourning in fear." This is no contradiction of the doctrine of
Fatherhood; strictly speaking, it is not even a modification of it;
rather is it an essential part of any true and complete statement of it.
Peter does not mean God is a Father, and He is also to be feared; that
is to miss the whole point of his words; what he means is, God is a
Father, and, therefore, He is to be feared; the fear follows necessarily
on the true idea of Fatherhood. Ah, brethren, if we understood Peter and
Peter's Lord aright, we should be not the less, but the more anxious
about our sins, because we have learnt to call God "Father." "Evil," it
has been well said, "is a more terrible thing to the family than to the
state."[12] Acts which the law takes no cognizance of a father dare not,
and cannot, pass by; what the magistrate may dismiss with light censure
he must search out to its depths. The judgment of a father--there is no
judgment like that. And if it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands
of the living God, for him who all his life through has set himself
against the Divine law and love, it is a still more fearful thing
because those hands are the hands of a Father.

But this is not the note on which to close a sermon on the Fatherhood of
God. Let us go back to a chapter from which, though I have only once
quoted its words, we have never been far away--the fifteenth of St.
Luke, with its three-fold revelation of the seeking love of God. The
parables of the chapter are companion pictures, and should be studied
together in the light of the circumstances which were their common
origin. "The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, This man
receiveth sinners and eateth with them." These parables are Christ's
answer. Mark how He justifies Himself. He might have pleaded the need of
those whom the Pharisees and scribes had left alone in their
wretchedness and sin, but of this He says nothing; His thoughts are all
of the need of God. The central thought in each parable is not what man
loses by his sin, but what God loses. As the shepherd misses his lost
sheep, and the woman her lost coin, and the father his lost son, so,
Christ says, we are all missed by God until, with our heart's love, we
satisfy the hunger of His. The genius of a prose poet shall tell us the
rest. We have all read of Lachlan Campbell and his daughter Flora, how
she went into the far country, and what brought her home again. "It iss
weary to be in London"--this was Flora's story as she told it to Marget
Howe when she was back again in the glen--"it iss weary to be in London
and no one to speak a kind word to you, and I will be looking at the
crowd that is always passing, and I will not see one kent face, and when
I looked in at the lighted windows the people were all sitting round the
table, but there was no place for me. Millions and millions of people,
and not one to say 'Flora,' and not one sore heart if I died that
night." Then one night she crept into a church as the people were
singing. "The sermon wass on the Prodigal Son, but there is only one
word I remember. 'You are not forgotten or cast off,' the preacher said:
'you are missed.' Sometimes he will say, 'If you had a plant, and you
had taken great care of it, and it was stolen, would you not miss it?'
And I will be thinking of my geraniums, and saying 'Yes' in my heart.
And then he will go on, 'If a shepherd wass counting his sheep, and
there wass one short, does he not go out to the hill to seek for it?'
and I will see my father coming back with that lamb that lost its
mother. My heart wass melting within me, but he will still be pleading,
'If a father had a child, and she left her home and lost herself in the
wicked city, she will still be remembered in the old house, and her
chair will be there,' and I will be seeing my father all alone with the
Bible before him, and the dogs will lay their heads on his knee, but
there iss no Flora. So I slipped out into the darkness and cried,
'Father,' but I could not go back, and I knew not what to do. But this
wass ever in my ear, 'missed,'"--and this was the word that brought her
back to home and God.[13]

*       *       *       *       *




CONCERNING HIMSELF


"Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was
Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is
no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable."

JOHN DUNCAN, _Colloquia
Peripatetica_.

*       *       *       *       *




III

CONCERNING HIMSELF

"_Who say ye that I am_?"--MATT. xvi. 15.


I


This was our Lord's question to His first disciples; and this, by the
mouth of Simon Peter, was their answer: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of
the living God." And in all ages this has been the answer of the Holy
Catholic Church throughout all the world. In the days of New Testament
Christianity no other answer was known or heard. The Church of the
apostles had its controversies, as we know, controversies in which the
very life of the Church was at stake. Division crept in even among the
apostles themselves. But concerning Christ they spoke with one voice,
they proclaimed one faith. The early centuries of the Christian era were
centuries of keen discussion concerning the Person of our Lord; but the
discussions sprang for the most part from the difficulty of rightly
defining the true relations of the Divine and the human in the one
Person, rather than from the denial of His Divinity; and, as Mr.
Gladstone once pointed out, since the fourth century the Christian
conception of Christ has remained practically unchanged. Amid the fierce
and almost ceaseless controversies which have divided and sometimes
desolated Christendom, and which, alas! still continue to divide it, the
Church's testimony concerning Christ has never wavered. The Greek
Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the various Protestant Churches,
Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists,
Christian men and women out of every tribe and tongue and people and
nation,--all unite to confess the glory of Christ in the words of the
ancient Creed: "I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten
Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light
of Light, Very God of very God."

This, beyond all doubt, has been and is the Christian way of thinking
about Christ. But now the question arises, Was this Christ's way of
thinking about Himself? Did He Himself claim to be one with God? or, is
it only we, His adoring disciples, who have crowned Him with glory and
honour, and given Him a name that is above every name? To those of us
who have been familiar with the New Testament ever since we could read,
the question may appear so simple as to be almost superfluous.
Half-a-dozen texts leap to our lips in a moment by way of answer. Did He
not claim to be the Messiah in whom Old Testament history and prophecy
found their fulfilment and consummation? Did He not call Himself the Son
of God, saying, "The Father hath given all judgment unto the Son; that all
may honour the Son, even as they honour the Father"? Did He not declare,
"I and My Father are one"? and again, "All things have been delivered
unto Me of My Father: and no one knoweth the Son, save the Father;
neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
Son willeth to reveal Him"? And when one of the Twelve bowed down before
Him, saying, "My Lord and my God," did He not accept the homage as
though it were His by right? What further need, then, have we of
witnesses? Is it not manifest that the explanation of all that has been
claimed for Christ, from the days of the apostles until now, is to be
found in what Christ claimed for Himself?

This is true; nevertheless it may be well to remind ourselves that
Christ Himself did not thrust the evidence on His disciples in quite
this wholesale, summary fashion. It is an easy thing for us to scour the
New Testament for "proof-texts," and then, when they are heaped together
at our feet like a load of bricks, to begin to build our theological
systems. But Peter and Thomas and the other disciples could not do this.
The revelation which we possess in its completeness was given to them
little by little as they were able to receive it. And the moment we
begin to study the life of Jesus, not in isolated texts, but as day by
day it passed before the eyes of the Twelve, we cannot fail to observe
the remarkable reserve which, during the greater part of His ministry,
He exercised concerning Himself. When first His disciples heard His call
and followed Him, He was to them but a humble peasant teacher, who had
flung about their lives a wondrous spell which they could no more
explain than they could resist. Indeed, there is good reason to believe,
as Dr. Dale has pointed out,[14] that the full discovery of Christ's
Divinity only came to the apostles after His Resurrection from the dead.
At first, and for long, Christ was content to leave them with their
poor, imperfect thoughts. He never sought to carry their reason by
storm; rather He set Himself to win them--mind, heart, and will--by slow
siege. He lived before them and with them, saying little directly about
Himself, and yet always revealing Himself, day by day training them,
often perhaps unconsciously to themselves, "to trust Him with the sort
of trust which can be legitimately given to God only."[15] And when at
last the truth was clear, and they knew that it was the incarnate Son of
God who had companied with them, their faith was the result not of this
or that high claim which He had made for Himself, but rather of "the
sum-total of all His words and works, the united and accumulated
impression of all He was and did" upon their sincere and receptive
souls.[16]

Are there not many of us to-day who would do well to seek the same goal
by the same path? We have listened, perhaps, to other men's arguments
concerning the Divinity of our Lord, conscious the while how little they
were doing for us. Let us listen to Christ Himself. Let us put ourselves
to school with Him, as these first disciples did, and suffer Him to make
His own impression upon us. And if ours be sincere and receptive souls
as were theirs, from us also He shall win the adoring cry, "My Lord and
my God." Let us note, then, some of the many ways in which Christ bears
witness concerning Himself. In a very true sense all His sayings are
"self-portraitures." Be the subject of His teaching what it may, He
cannot speak of it without, in some measure at least, revealing His
thoughts concerning Himself; and it is this indirect testimony whose
significance I wish now carefully to consider.


II


Observe, in the first place, how Christ speaks of God and of His own
relation to Him. He called Himself, as we have already noted, "the Son
of God." Now, there is a sense in which all men are the sons of God, for
it is to God that all men owe their life. And there is, further, as the
New Testament has taught us, another and deeper sense in which men who
are not may "become" the sons of God, through faith in Christ. But
Christ's consciousness of Sonship is distinct from both of these, and
cannot be explained in terms of either. He is not "_a_ son of God"--one
among many---He is "_the_ son of God," standing to God in a relationship
which is His alone. Hence we find--and we shall do well to mark the
marvellous accuracy and self-consistency of the Gospels in this
matter--that while Jesus sometimes speaks of "_the_ Father," and
sometimes of "_My_ Father," and sometimes, again, in addressing His
disciples, of "_your_ Father," never does He link Himself with them so
as to call God "_our_ Father." Nowhere does the distinction, always
present to the mind of Christ, find more striking expression than in
that touching scene in the garden in which the Risen Lord bids Mary go
unto His brethren and say unto them, "I ascend unto My Father and your
Father, and My God and your God."

This sense of separateness is emphasized when we turn to the prayers of
Christ. And in this connection it is worthy of note that though Christ
has much to say concerning the duty and blessedness of prayer, and
Himself spent much time in prayer, yet never, so far as we know, did He
ask for the prayers of others. "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to
have you, that he might sift you as wheat: but I made supplication for
thee, that thy faith fail not." So did Jesus pray for His disciples; but
we never read that they prayed for Him, or that He asked for Himself a
place in their prayers. How significant the silence is we learn when we
turn to the Epistles of St. Paul and to the experience of the saints.
"Brethren, pray for us"--this is the token in almost every Epistle. In
the long, lone fight of life even the apostle's heart would have failed
him had not the prayers of unknown friends upheld him as with unseen
hands. There is no stronger instinct of the Christian heart than the
plea for remembrance at the throne of God. "Pray for me, will you?" we
cry, when man's best aid seems as a rope too short to help, yet long
enough to mock imprisoned miners in their living tomb. But the cry which
is so often ours was never Christ's.

It has further been remarked that, intimate as was Christ's intercourse
with His disciples, He never joined in prayer with them.[17] He prayed
in their presence, He prayed for them, but never with them. "It came to
pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of
His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also
taught his disciples. And He said unto them, When ye pray, say----."
Then follows what we call "The Lord's Prayer." But, properly speaking,
this was not the Lord's prayer; it was the disciples' prayer: "When _ye_
pray, say------." And when we read the prayer again, we see why it could
not be His. How could He who knew no sin pray, saying, "Forgive us our
sins"? The true "Lord's Prayer" is to be found in the seventeenth
chapter of St. John's Gospel. And throughout that prayer the holy
Suppliant has nothing to confess, nothing to regret. He knows that the
end is nigh, but there are no shadows in His retrospect; of all that is
done there is nothing He could wish undone or done otherwise. "I
glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which Thou
hast given Me to do." It is so when He comes to die. Among the Seven
Words from the Cross we are struck by one significant omission: the
dying Sufferer utters a cry of physical weakness--"I thirst"--but He
makes no acknowledgement of sin; He prays for the forgiveness of
others--"Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do"--He asks
none for Himself. The great Augustine died with the penitential Psalms
hung round his bed. Fifty or sixty times, it is said, did sweet St.
Catharine of Siena cry upon her deathbed, _Peccavi, Domine miserere
mei_, "Lord, I have sinned: have mercy on me." But in all the prayers of
Jesus, whether in life or in death, He has no pardon to ask, no sins to
confess.

We are thus brought to the fact upon which of recent years so much
emphasis has been justly laid, namely, that nowhere throughout the
Gospels does Christ betray any consciousness of sin. "Which of you," He
said, "convicteth Me of sin?" And no man was able, nor is any man now
able, to answer Him a word. But the all-important fact is not so much
that they could not convict Him of sin; _He could not convict Himself._
Yet it could not be that He was self-deceived. "He knew what was in
man;" He read the hearts of others till, like the Samaritan woman, they
felt as though He knew all things that ever they had done. Was it
possible, then, that He did not know Himself? Not only so, but the law
by which He judged Himself was not theirs, but His. And what that was,
how high, how searching, how different from the low, conventional
standards which satisfied them, we who have read His words and His
judgments know full well. Nevertheless, He knew nothing against Himself;
as no man could condemn Him neither could He condemn Himself. Looking up
to heaven, He could say, "I do always the things that are pleasing to
Him."[18] This is not the language of sinful men; it is not the language
of even the best and holiest of men. Christ is as separate from "saints"
as He is from "sinners." The greatest of Hebrew prophets cries, "Woe is
me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in
the midst of a people of unclean lips." The greatest of Christian
apostles laments, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of
the body of this death?" Even the holy John confesses, "If we say that
we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." It is
one of the commonplaces of Christian experience that the holier men
become the more intense and poignant becomes the sense of personal
shortcoming. "We have done those things which we ought not to have done;
we have left undone those things which we ought to have done:" among all
the sons of men there is none, who truly knows himself, who dare be
silent when the great confession is made--none save the Son of Man; for
He, it has well been said, was _not_ the one thing which we all are; He
was _not_ a sinner.

This consciousness of separateness runs through all that the evangelists
have told us concerning Christ. When _e.g._ He is preaching He never
associates Himself, as other preachers do, with His hearers; He never
assumes, as other preachers must, that His words are applicable to
Himself equally with them. We exhort; He commands. We say, like the
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Let us go on unto perfection"; He
says, "Ye shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." We
speak as sinful men to sinful men, standing by their side; He speaks as
from a height, as one who has already attained and is already made
perfect. Or, the contrast may be pointed in another way. We all know
what it is to be haunted by misgivings as to the wisdom of some course
which, under certain trying circumstances, we have taken. We had some
difficult task to perform--to withstand (let us say) a fellow-Christian
to his face, as Paul withstood Peter at Antioch; and we did the
unpleasant duty as best we knew how, honestly striving not only to speak
the truth but to speak it in love. And yet when all was over we could
not get rid of the fear that we had not been as firm or as kindly as we
should have been, that, if only something had been which was not, our
brother might have been won. There is a verse in Paul's second letter to
the Church at Corinth which illustrates exactly this familiar kind of
internal conflict. Referring to the former letter which he had sent to
the Corinthians, and in which he had sharply rebuked them for their
wrong-doing, he says, "Though I made you sorry with my epistle, I do not
regret it, though I did regret"--a simple, human touch we can all
understand. Yes; but when did Jesus hesitate and, as it were, go back
upon Himself after this fashion? He passed judgment upon men and their
ways with the utmost freedom and confidence; some, such as the
Pharisees, He condemned with a severity which almost startles us;
towards others, such as she "that was a sinner," He was all love and
tenderness. Yet never does He speak as one who fears lest either in His
tenderness or His severity He has gone too far. His path is always
clear; He enters upon it without doubt; He looks back upon it without
misgiving.

This contrast between Christ and all other men, as it presented itself
to His own consciousness, may be illustrated almost indefinitely. His
forerunners the prophets were the servants of God; He is His Son. All
other men are weary and in need of rest; He has rest and can give it.
All others are lost; He is not lost, He is the shepherd sent to seek the
lost. All others are sick; He is not sick, He is the physician sent to
heal the sick. All others will one day stand at the bar of God; but He
will be on the throne to be their Judge. All others are sinners--this is
the great, final distinction into which all others run up--He is the
Saviour. When at the Last Supper He said, "This is My blood of the
covenant which is shed for many unto remission of sins"; and again, when
He said, "The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many," He
set Himself over against all others, the one sinless sacrifice for a
sinful world.

There is in Edinburgh a Unitarian church which bears carved on its front
these words of St. Paul. "There is one God, and one mediator between God
and man, the man Christ Jesus." I say nothing as to the fitness of any
of Paul's words for such a place--perhaps we can imagine what he would
have said; I pass over any questions of interpretation that might very
justly be raised; I have only one question to ask: Why was the quotation
not finished? Paul only put a comma where they have put a full stop; the
next words are: _"Who gave Himself a ransom for all."_ But how could He
do that if He was only "the _man_ Christ Jesus"?

"No man can save his brother's soul,
Nor pay his brother's debt,"

and how could He, how dare He, think of His life as the ransom for our
forfeited lives, if He were only one like unto ourselves? There is but
one explanation which does really explain all that Christ thought and
taught concerning Himself; it is that given by the first disciples and
re-echoed by every succeeding generation of Christians--

"THOU ART THE KING OF GLORY, O CHRIST.
THOU ART THE EVERLASTING SON OF THE FATHER."

*       *       *       *       *




CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH


"While there is life in thee, in this death alone place thy
trust, confide in nothing else besides; to this death commit
thyself altogether; with this shelter thy whole self; with
this death array thyself from head to foot. And if the Lord
thy God will judge thee, say, Lord, between Thy judgment and
me I cast the death of our Lord Jesus Christ; no otherwise can
I contend with Thee. And if He say to thee, Thou art a sinner,
say, Lord, I stretch forth the death of our Lord Jesus Christ
between my sins and Thee. If He say, Thou art worthy of
condemnation, say, Lord, I set the death of our Lord Jesus
Christ between my evil deserts and Thee, and His merits I
offer for those merits which I ought to have, but have not of
my own. If He say that He is wroth with thee, say, Lord, I
lift up the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between Thy wrath
and me."--ANSELM.

*       *       *       *       *




IV

CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH

_"The Son of Man came ... to give His life a ransom for
many."_--MARK X. 45.


The death of Jesus Christ has always held the foremost place in the
thought and teaching of the Church. When St. Paul writes to the
Corinthians, "I delivered unto you first of all that which also I
received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures," he is the spokesman of every Christian preacher and
teacher, of the missionary of the twentieth century no less than of the
first. It is with some surprise, therefore, we discover when we turn to
the teaching of Jesus Himself, that He had so little to say concerning a
subject of which His disciples have said so much. It is true that the
Gospels, without exception, relate the story of Christ's death with a
fullness and detail which, in any other biography, would be judged
absurdly out of proportion. But this, it is said, reveals the mind of
the evangelists rather than the mind of Christ. And those who love that
false comparison between the Gospels and the Epistles of which so much
is heard to-day, have not been slow to seize upon this apparent
discrepancy as another example of the way in which the Church has
misunderstood and misinterpreted the simple message of the Galilean
Prophet.

But, in the first place, as I will show in a moment, the contrast
between the Gospels and Epistles in this matter is by no means so
sharply defined as is often supposed. And further, granting that there
is a contrast--that what in the Gospels is only a hint or suggestion,
becomes in the Epistles a definite and formal statement--it is one which
admits of a simple and immediate explanation. Christ--this was Dr.
Dale's way of putting it--did not come to preach the gospel; He came
that there might be a gospel to preach. This must not be pressed so far
as to imply that it is only the death and not also the life of Christ
that has any significance for us to-day; but if that death had any
significance in it at all, if it was anything more to Him than death is
to us, if it stood in any sort of relation to us men and our salvation,
manifestly the teaching which should make this plain would more
fittingly follow than precede the death. And they at least who accept
Christ's words, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot
bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall
guide you into all truth"--they, I say, who accept these words can find
no difficulty in believing that part of the revelation which it was the
good pleasure of the Father to give to us in His Son, came through the
lips of men who spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Moreover,
when we turn to the Gospels we see at once that the interpretation of
Christ's death was just one of those things which the disciples as yet
were unable to bear. The point is so important that it is worth while
dwelling upon it for a moment. So far were the Twelve from being able to
understand their Lord's death, that they would not even believe that He
was going to die. "Be it far from Thee, Lord," cried Peter, when Christ
first distinctly foretold His approaching end; "this shall never be unto
Thee." When, at another time, He said unto His disciples, "Let these
words sink into your ears; for the Son of Man shall be delivered up into
the hands of men," St. Luke adds, "But they understood not this saying."
And again, after another and similar prophecy, the evangelist writes
with significant reiteration, "They understood none of these things; and
this saying was hid from them, and they perceived not the things that
were said." So was it all through those last months of our Lord's life.
His thoughts were not their thoughts, neither were His ways their ways.
They followed Him as He pressed along the highway, His face steadfastly
set to go up to Jerusalem, but they could not understand Him. Why, if as
He had said, death waited Him there, did He go to seek it? Think what
utter powerlessness to enter even a little way into His thoughts is
revealed in a scene like this: Two of His disciples, James and John,
came to Him to ask Him that they might sit, one on His right hand, and
one on His left hand, in His glory. Jesus said unto them, "Ye know not
what ye ask. Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink? or to be
baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" And they said unto
Him, "We are able." What could Jesus do with ignorance like
this--ignorance that knew not its own ignorance? He could be "sorry for
their childishness"; but how could He show them the mystery of His
Passion? What could He do but wait until the Cross, and the empty grave,
and the gift of Pentecost had done their revealing and enlightening
work?

At the same time, as I have already pointed out, it is altogether a
mistake to suppose that Christ has left us on this subject wholly to the
guidance of others. From the very beginning of His ministry the end was
before Him, and as it drew nearer He spoke of it continually. At first
He was content to refer to it in language purposely vague and
mysterious. Just as a mother who knows herself smitten with a sickness
which is unto death, will sometimes try by shadowed hints to prepare her
children for what is coming, while yet she veils its naked horror from
their eyes, so did Jesus with His disciples. "Can the sons of the
bride-chamber fast," He asked once, "while the bridegroom is with them?
... But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from
them, and then will they fast in that day." But from the time of Peter's
great confession at Caesarea Philippi all reserve was laid aside, and
Christ told His disciples plainly of the things which were to come to
pass: "From that time began Jesus to show unto His disciples, how that
He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and
chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised
up." And if we will turn to any one of the first three Gospels, we shall
find, as Dr. Denney says, that that which "characterized the last months
of our Lord's life was a deliberate and thrice-repeated attempt to teach
His disciples something about His death."[19] Let me try, very briefly,
to set forth some of the things which He said.


I


First of all, then, _Christ died as a faithful witness to the truth._
Like the prophets and the Baptist before Him, whose work and whose end
were so often in His thoughts, He preached righteousness to an
unrighteous world, and paid with His life the penalty of His daring.
That is the very lowest view which can be taken of His death. No
Unitarian, no unbeliever, will deny that Jesus died as a good man,
choosing rather the shame of the Cross than the deeper shame of treason
to the truth. And thus far Christ is an example to all who follow Him.
In one sense His cross-bearing was all His own, a mystery of suffering
and death into which no man can enter. But in another sense, as St.
Peter tells us, He has left us by His sufferings an example that we
should follow His steps. It is surely a significant fact that the words
which immediately follow Christ's first distinct declaration of His
death are these, "If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself,
and take up his cross and follow Me." His death was the supreme
illustration of a law which binds us, the servants, even as it bound
Him, the Master. In the path of every true man there stands the cross
which he must bear, or be true no more. Let no one grow impatient and
say this is no more than the fringe of Christ's thoughts about His
death; even the fringe is part of the robe, and if, as the words I have
quoted seem clearly to indicate, Christ thought of His death as in any
sense at all a pattern for us, let us not miss this, the first and
simplest lesson of the Cross.

There are few more impressive scenes in the history of the Christian
pulpit than that in which Robertson of Brighton, preaching the Assize
Sermon at Lewes, turned as he closed to the judges, and counsel, and
jury, and bade them remember, by "the trial hour of Christ," by "the
Cross of the Son of God," the sacred claims of truth: "The first lesson
of the Christian life is this, Be true; and the second this, Be true;
and the third this, Be true."


II


But though this be our starting-point, it is no more than a starting-point.
If Jesus was only a brave man, paying with His life the penalty
of His bravery in the streets of Jerusalem, it is wasting words to call
Him "the Saviour of the world." If His death were only a martyrdom,
then, though we may honour Him as we honour Socrates, and many another
name in the long roll of "the noble army of martyrs," yet He can no more
be our Redeemer than can any one of them. But it was not so that Christ
thought of His death. The martyr dies because he must; Christ died
because He would. The strong hands of violent men snatch away the
martyr's life from him; but no man had power to take away Christ's life
from Him: "I lay it down of Myself," He said. The Son of Man _gave_ His
life. He was not dragged as an unwilling victim to the sacrifice and
bound upon the altar. He was both Priest and Victim; as the apostle puts
it, "He gave Himself up." True, the element of necessity was there--"the
Son of Man _must_ be lifted up"; but it was the "must" of His own love,
not of another's constraint. Not Roman nails or Roman thongs held Him to
the Cross, but His own loving will. It is important to emphasize this
fact of the _voluntariness_ of our Lord's death, because at once it sets
the Cross in a clearer light. It changes martyrdom into sacrifice; and
Christ's death, instead of being merely a fate which He suffered,
becomes now, as Principal Fairbairn says, a work which He
achieved--_the_ work which He came into the world to do: "The Son of Man
came ... to give His life."[20]


III


Again, Christ taught us that His death was _the crowning revelation of
the love of God for man._ And it is well to remind ourselves of our need
of such a revelation. We speak sometimes as though the love of God was a
self-evident truth altogether independent of the facts of New Testament
history. "God is love"--of course, we say; this at least we are sure of,
whatever becomes of the history. But this jaunty assurance will not bear
looking into. The truth is that, apart from Christ, we have no certainty
of the love of God. A man may cry aloud in our ears, "God is love, God
is love"; but if he have no more to say than that, the most emphatic
reiteration will avail us nothing. But if he can say, "God is love, and
He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son"; if, that is
to say, he can point us to the Divine love made manifest in life, then
he is proclaiming a gospel indeed. But let us not deceive ourselves and
imagine that we can have Christ's gospel apart from Christ.

Now, according to the teaching of the Gospels, all Christ's life--all He
was and said and did--is a revelation of the love of God. But the crown
of the revelation was given in His death. It is the Cross which was, in
a special and peculiar sense, as Christ Himself declared,[21] the glory
both of the Father and the Son. And the apostles, with a unanimity which
can only be explained as the result of His own teaching, always
associate God's love with Christ's death in a way in which they never
associate God's love with Christ's life. "God," says St. Paul,
"commendeth His own love toward us, in that ... Christ died for us."

Christ's death, then, we say, establishes the love of God. But how does
this come to pass? How does the death of one prove the love of another?
If--to use a very simple illustration--I am in danger of drowning, and
another man, at the cost of his own life, saves mine, his act
undoubtedly proves his own love; but how does it prove anything
concerning God's love? If the apostle had said, "_Christ_ commendeth His
own love towards us, in that He died for us," we could have understood
him; but how, I ask again, does Christ's death prove _God's_ love? The
question is answerable, as indeed the whole of the New Testament is
intelligible, only on the assumption of the Trinitarian doctrine of
Christ. If Christ were indeed the Son of God, standing to God in such a
relation that what He did was likewise the doing of God the Father, we
can understand the apostle's meaning. On any other hypothesis his
language is a riddle of which the key has been lost. A further question
still remains to be answered. I said just now that if St. Paul had
written, "_Christ_ commendeth His own love towards us, in that He died
for us," we could have understood Him. But here, also, something is
implicit which requires to be made explicit. How does Christ in His
death prove His love for us? Obviously, only in one way: by bearing
responsibilities which must otherwise have fallen upon us. There must
be, as Dr. Denney rightly argues, some rational relation between our