The words are a paradox. Strange, that at such a moment, when there
rose up before Christ all the vision of the shame and the suffering,
the pain and the death, and the mysterious sense of abandonment, which
was worse than them all, He should seem to stretch out His hands to
bring the Cross nearer to Himself, and that His soul should fill with
triumph!
There is a double aspect under which our Lord regarded His sufferings.
On the one hand we mark in Him an unmistakable shrinking from the
Cross, the innocent shrinking of His manhood expressed in such words as
'I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it
be accomplished'; and in such incidents as the agony in Gethsemane. And
yet, side by side with that, not overcome by it, but not overcoming it,
there is the opposite feeling, the reaching out almost with eagerness
to bring the Cross nearer to Himself. These two lie close by each other
in His heart. Like the pellucid waters of the Rhine and the turbid
stream of the Moselle, that flow side by side over a long space,
neither of them blending discernibly with the other, so the shrinking
and the desire were contemporaneous in Christ's mind. Here we have the
triumphant anticipation rising to the surface, and conquering for a
time the shrinking.
Why did Christ think of His Cross as a glorifying? The New Testament
generally represents it as the very lowest point of His degradation;
John's Gospel always represents it as the very highest point of His
glory. And the two things are both true; just as the zenith of our sky
is the nadir of the sky for those on the other side of the world. The
same fact which in one aspect sounds the very lowest depth of Christ's
humiliation, in another aspect is the very highest culminating point of
His glory.
How did the Cross glorify Christ? In two ways. It was the revelation of
His heart; it was the throne of His sovereign power.
It was the revelation of His heart. All his life long He had been
trying to tell the world how much He loved it. His love had been, as it
were, filtered by drops through His words, through His deeds, through
His whole demeanour and bearing; but in His death it comes in a flood,
and pours itself upon the world. All His life long he had been
revealing His heart, through the narrow rifts of His deeds, like some
slender lancet windows; but in His death all the barriers are thrown
down, and the brightness blazes out upon men. All through His life He
had been trying to communicate His love to the world, and the fragrance
came from the box of ointment exceeding precious, but when the box was
broken the house was filled with the odour.
For Him to be known was to be glorified. So pure and perfect was He,
that revelation of His character and glorification of Himself were one
and the same thing. Because His Cross reveals to the world for all
time, and for eternity, too, a love which shrinks from no sacrifice, a
love which is capable of the most entire abandonment, a love which is
diffused over the whole surface of humanity and through all the ages, a
love which comes laden with the richest and the highest gifts, even the
turning of selfish and sinful hearts into its own pure and perfect
likeness, therefore does He say, in contemplation of that Cross which
was to reveal Him for what He was to the world, and to bring His love
to every one of us, 'Now is the Son of Man glorified.'
We can fancy a mother, for instance, in the anticipation of shame, and
ignominy, and suffering, and sorrow, and death which she encounters for
the sake of some prodigal child, forgetting all the ignominy, and the
shame, and the suffering, and the sorrow, and the death, because all
these are absorbed in the one thought: 'If I bear them, my poor,
wandering, rebellious child will know at last how much I loved him.' So
Christ yearns to impart the knowledge of Himself to us, because by that
knowledge we may be won to His love and service; and hence when He
looks forward to the agony, and contumely, and sorrow of the close,
every other thought is swallowed up in this one: 'They will be the
means by which the whole world will find out how deep my heart of love
to it was.' Therefore does He triumph and say, 'Now is the Son of Man
glorified.'
Still further, He regards His Cross as the means of His glorifying,
because it is His throne of saving power. The paradoxical words of our
text rest upon His profound conviction that in His death He was about
to put forth a mightier and diviner power than ever He had manifested
in His life. They are the same in effect and in tone as the great
words: 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Now I want
you to ask yourselves one question: In what sense is Christ's Cross
Christ's glorifying, unless His Cross bears an altogether different
relation to His life from what the death of a great teacher or
benefactor ordinarily bears to his? It is impossible that Christ could
have spoken such words as these of my text if He had simply thought of
His death as a Plato or a John Howard might have thought of his, as
being the close of his activity for the welfare of his fellows. Unless
Christ's death has in it some substantive value, unless it is something
more than the mere termination of His work for the world, I see not how
the words before us can be interpreted. If His death is His glorifying,
it must be because in that death something is done which was not
completed by the life, however fair; by the words, however wise and
tender; by the works of power, however restorative and healing. Here is
something more than these present. What more? This more, that His Cross
is the 'propitiation for the sins of the whole world.' He is glorified
therein, not as a Socrates might be glorified by his calm and noble
death; not because nothing in His life became Him better than the
leaving of it; not because the page that tells the story of His passion
is turned to by us as the tenderest and most sacred in the world's
records; but because in that death He wrestled with and overcame our
foes, and because, like the Jewish hero of old, dying, He pulled down
the house which our tyrants had built, and overwhelmed them in its
ruins. 'Now is the Son of Man glorified.'
And so, brethren, there blend, in that last act of our Lord's—for His
death was His act—in strange fashion, the two contradictory ideas of
glory and shame; like some sky, all full of dark thunderclouds, and yet
between them the brightest blue and the blazing sunshine. In the Cross,
Death crowns Him the Prince of Life, and His Cross is His throne. All
His life long He was the Light of the World, but the very noontide hour
of His glory was that hour when the shadow of eclipse lay over all the
land, and He hung on the Cross dying in the dark. At His 'eventide it
was light.' 'He endured the Cross, despising the shame'; and lo! the
shame flashed up into the very brightness of glory, and the ignominy
and the suffering became the jewels of His crown. 'Now is the Son of
Man glorified.'
II. Now let us turn for a moment to the second of the threefold
glorifications that are set forth here: God glorified in the Son of
Man.
The mystery deepens as we advance. That God should be glorified in a
man is not strange, but that He should be so glorified in the eminent
and special fashion which Jesus contemplates here, is strange; and
stranger still when we think that the act in which He was to be
glorified was the death of an innocent Man. If God, in any special and
eminent manner, is glorified in the Cross of Jesus Christ, that
implies, as it seems to me, two things at all events—many more which I
have not time to touch upon, but two things very plainly. One is that
'God was in Christ,' in some singular and eminent manner. If all His
life was a continual manifestation of the divine character, if Christ's
words were the divine wisdom, if Christ's compassion was the divine
pity, if Christ's lowliness was the divine gentleness, if His whole
human life and nature were the brightest and clearest manifestation to
the world of what God is, we can understand that the Cross was the
highest point of the revelation of the divine nature to the world, and
so was the glorifying of God in Him. But if we take any lower view of
the relation between God and Christ, I know not how we can acquit these
words of our Master of the charge of being a world too wide for the
facts of the case.
The words involve, as it seems to me, not only that idea of a close,
unique union and indwelling of God in Christ, but they involve also
this other: that these sufferings bore no relation to the deserts of
the person who endured them. If Christ, with His pure and perfect
character—the innocency and nobleness of which all that read the
Gospels admit—if Christ suffered so; if the highest virtue that was
ever seen in this world brought no better wages than shame and spitting
and the Cross; if Christ's life and Christ's death are simply a typical
example of the world's treatment of its greatest benefactors; then, if
they have any bearing at all on the character of God, they cast a
shadow rather than a light upon the divine government, and become not
the least formidable of the difficulties and knots that will have to be
untied hereafter before it shall be clear that God did everything well.
But if we can say, 'He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows';
if we can say, 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself'; if
we can say, that His death was the death of Him whom God had appointed
to live and die for us, and 'to bear our sins in His own body on the
tree,' then, though deep mysteries come with the thought, still we can
see that, in a very unique manner, God is glorified and exalted in His
death.
For if the dying Christ be the Son of God dying for us, then the Cross
glorifies God, because it teaches us that the glory of the divine
character is the divine love. Of wisdom, or of power, or of any of the
more 'majestic' attributes of the divine nature, that weak Man, hanging
dying on the Cross, was a strange embodiment; but if the very heart of
the divine brightness be the pure white fire of love; if there be
nothing diviner in God than His giving of Himself to His creatures; if
the highest glory of the divine nature be to pity and to bestow, then
the Cross upon which Christ died towers above all other revelations as
the most awful, the most sacred, the most tender, the most complete,
the most heart-touching, the most soul-subduing manifestation of the
divine nature; and stars and worlds, and angels and mighty creatures,
and things in the heights and things in the depths, to each of which
have been entrusted some broken syllables of the divine character to
make known to the world, dwindle and fade before the brightness, the
lambent, gentle brightness that beams out from the Cross of Christ,
which proclaims—God is love, is pity, is pardon.
And is it not so—is it not so? Is not the thought that has flowed from
Christ's Cross through Christendom of what our Father in Heaven is, the
highest and the most blessed that the world has ever had? Has it not
scattered doubts that lay like mountains of ice upon man's heart? Has
it not swept the heavens clear of clouds that wrapped it in darkness?
Has it not delivered men from the dreams of gods angry, gods
capricious, gods vengeful, gods indifferent, gods simply mighty and
vast and awful and unspeakable? Has it not taught us that love is God,
and God is love; and so brought to the whole world the true Gospel, the
Gospel of the grace of God? In that Cross the Father is glorified.