One theory, and one theory only, as it seems to me, of the meaning
of Christ's death, is possible if these words of my text ever
dropped from Christ's lips, or if He ever instituted the rite to
which they refer; He must have believed that His death was a
sacrifice, without which the sins of the world were not forgiven;
and by which forgiveness came to us all.
And I do not think that we rightly conceive the relation between the
sacrifices of barbarous heathen tribes, or the sacrifices appointed
in Israel, and the great sacrifice on the Cross, if we say that our
Lord's death is only figuratively accommodated to these in order to
meet lower or grosser conceptions, but rather, I take it, that the
accommodation is the other way. In all nations beyond the limits of
Israel the sacrifices of living victims spoke not only of surrender
and dependence, but likewise of the consciousness of demerit and
evil on the part of the offerers, and were at once a confession of
sin, a prayer for pardon, and a propitiation of an offended God. And
I believe that the sacrifices in Israel were intended and adapted
not only to meet the deep-felt want of human nature, common to them
as to all other tribes, but also were intended and adapted to point
onwards to Him in whose death a real want of mankind was met, in
whose death a real sacrifice was offered, in whose death an angry
God was not indeed propitiated, but in whose death the loving Father
of our souls Himself provided the Lamb for the offering, without
which, for reasons deeper than we can wholly fathom, it was
impossible that sin should be remitted.
I insist upon no theory of an Atonement. I believe there is no
Gospel, worth calling so, worth the preaching, worth your believing,
or that will ever move the world or purify society, except the
Gospel which begins with the fact of an Atonement, and points to the
Cross as the altar on which the Sacrifice for the sins of the world,
without whose death pardon is impossible, has died for us all.
Oh! dear friends, do not let yourselves be confused by the
difficulties that beset all human and incomplete statements of the
philosophy of the death of Christ; but getting away from these,
cleave you to the fact that your sins were laid upon Christ, and
that He has died for us all; that His death is a sacrifice; His body
broken for us; and for the remission of our sins, His blood freely
shed. Thus, and only thus, will you come to the understanding either
of the sweetness of His love or of the power of His example; then,
and only then, shall we know why it was that He elected to be
remembered, out of all the moments of His life, by that one when He
hung in weakness upon the Cross, and out of the darkness came the
cry, 'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'
III. And now, again, let me remind you that this cup speaks likewise
of a life infused.
'The blood is the life,' says the physiology of the Hebrews. The
blood is the life, and when men drink of that cup they symbolise the
fact that Christ's own life and spirit are imparted to them that
love Him. 'Except ye eat the flesh, and drink the blood of the Son
of Man, ye have no life in you.' The very heart of Christ's gift to
us is the gift of His own very life to be the life of our lives. In
deep, mystical reality He Himself passes into our being, and the
'law of the spirit of life makes us free from the law of sin and
death,' so that we may say: 'He that is joined to the Lord is one
spirit,' and the humble believing soul may rejoice in this: 'I live,
yet not I, but Christ liveth in Me.' This is, in one aspect, the
very deepest meaning of this Communion rite. As physicians sometimes
tried to restore life to an almost dead man by the transfusion into
his shrunken veins of the fresh warm blood from a young and healthy
subject, so into our fevered life, into our corrupted blood, there
is poured the full tide of the pure and perfect life of Jesus Christ
Himself, and we live, not by our own power, nor for our own will,
nor in obedience to our own caprices, but by Him and in Him, and
with Him and for Him. This is the heart of Christianity, the
possession within us of the life, the immortal life of Him that died
for us.
My brother have you that great gift in your heart? Be sure of this,
that unless the life of Christ is in you by faith, ye are dead,
'dead in trespasses and in sins'; dead, and sure to rot away and
disintegrate into corruption. The cup of blessing which we drink
speaks to us of the transfusion into our spirits of the Spirit of
Jesus Christ.