'And they were in the way going up to Jerusalem; and Jesus went before
them: and they were amazed; and as they followed they were afraid.'
--Mark x. 32.
We learn from John's Gospel that the resurrection of Lazarus
precipitated the determination of the Jewish authorities to put Christ
to death; and that immediately thereafter there was held the council
at which, by the advice of Caiaphas, the formal decision was come to.
Thereupon our Lord withdrew Himself into the wilderness which
stretches south and east of Jerusalem; and remained there for an
unknown period, preparing Himself for the Cross. Then, full of calm
resolve, He came forth to die. This is the crisis in our Lord's
history to which my text refers. The graphic narrative of this
Evangelist sets before us the little company on the steep rocky
mountain road that leads up from Jericho to Jerusalem; our Lord, far
in advance of His followers, with a fixed purpose stamped upon His
face, and something of haste in His stride, and that in His whole
demeanour which shed a strange astonishment and awe over the group of
silent and uncomprehending disciples.
That picture has not attracted the attention that it deserves. I think
if we ponder it with sympathetic imagination helping us, we may get
from it some very great lessons and glimpses of our Lord's inmost
heart in the prospect of His Cross. And I desire simply to set forth
two or three of the aspects of Christ's character which these words
seem to me to suggest.
I. We have here, then, first, what, for want of a better name, I would
call the heroic Christ.
I use the word to express simply strength of will brought to bear in
the resistance to antagonism; and although that is a side of the
Lord's character which is not often made prominent, it is there, and
ought to have its due importance.
We speak of Him, and delight to think of Him, as the embodiment of all
loving, gracious, gentle virtues, but Jesus Christ as the ideal man
unites in Himself what men are in the habit, somewhat superciliously,
of calling the masculine virtues, as well as those which they somewhat
contemptuously designate the feminine. I doubt very much whether that
is a correct distinction. I think that the heroism of endurance, at
all events, is far more an attribute of a woman than of a man. But be
that as it may, we are to look to Jesus Christ as presenting before us
the very type of all which men call heroism in the sense that I have
explained, of an iron will, incapable of deflection by any antagonism,
and which coerces the whole nature to obedience to its behests.
There is nothing to be done in life without such a will. 'To be weak
is to be miserable, doing or suffering.' And our Master has set us the
example of this; that unless there run through a man's life, like the
iron framework on the top of the spire of Antwerp Cathedral, on which
graceful fancies are strung in stone, the rigid bar of an iron purpose
that nothing can bend, the life will be nought and the man will be a
failure. Christ is the pattern of heroic endurance, and reads to us
the lesson to resist and persist, whatever stands between us and our
goal.
So here, the Cross before Him flung out no repelling influence towards
Him, but rather drew Him to itself. There is no reason that I can find
for believing the modern theory of the rationalists' school that our
Lord, in the course of His mission, altered His plan, or gradually had
dawning upon His mind the conviction that to carry out His purposes He
must be a martyr. That seems to me to be an entire misreading of the
Gospel narrative which sets before us much rather this, that from the
beginning of our Lord's public career there stood unmistakably before
Him the Cross as the goal. He entertained no illusions as to His
reception. He did not come to do certain work, and, finding that He
could not do it, accepted the martyr's _rôle_; but He came for the
twofold purpose of serving by His life, and of redeeming by His death.
'He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His
life a ransom for the many.' And this purpose stood clear before Him,
drawing Him to itself all through His career.
But, further, Christ's character teaches us what is the highest form
of such strength and tenacity, viz., gentleness. There is no need to
be brusque, obstinate, angular, self-absorbed, harsh, because we are
fixed and determined in our course. These things are the caricatures
and the diminutions, not the true forms nor the increase, of strength.
The most tenacious steel is the most flexible, and he that has the
most fixed and definite resolve may be the man that has his heart most
open to all human sympathies, and is strong with the almightiness of
gentleness, and not with the less close-knit strength of roughness and
of hardness. Christ, because He is perfect love, is perfect power, and
His will is fixed because it is love that fixes it. So let us take the
lesson that the highest type of strength is strength in meekness, and
that the Master who, I was going to say, kept His strength of will
under, but I more correctly say, manifested His strength of will
through, His gentleness, is the pattern for us.
II. Then again, we see here not only the heroic, but what I may call
the self-sacrificing Christ.
We have not only to consider the fixed will which this incident
reveals, but to remember the purpose on which it was fixed, and that
He was hastening to His Cross. The very fact of our Lord's going back
to Jerusalem, with that decree of the Sanhedrim still in force, was
tantamount to His surrender of Himself to death. It was as if, in the
old days, some excommunicated man with the decree of the Inquisition
pronounced against him had gone into Rome and planted himself in the
front of the piazza before the buildings of the Holy Office, and
lifted up his testimony there. So Christ, knowing that this council
has been held, that this decree stands, goes back, investing of set
purpose His return with all the publicity that He can bring to bear
upon it. For this once He seems to determine that He will 'cause His
voice to be heard in the streets'; He makes as much of a demonstration
as the circumstances will allow, and so acts in a manner opposite to
all the rest of His life. Why? Because He had determined to bring the
controversy to an end. Why? Was He flinging away His life in mere
despair? Was He sinfully neglecting precautions? Was the same
fanaticism of martyrdom which has often told upon men, acting upon
Him? Were these His reasons? No, but He recognised that now that
'hour' of which He spoke so much had come, and of His own loving will
offered Himself as our Sacrifice.
It is all-important to keep in view that Christ's death was His own
voluntary act. Whatever external forces were brought to bear in the
accomplishment of it, He died because He chose to die. The 'cords'
which bound this sacrifice to the horns of the altar were cords woven
by Himself.
So I point to the incident of my text, as linking in along with the
whole series of incidents marking the last days of our Lord's life, in
order to stamp upon His death unmistakably this signature, that it was
His own act. Therefore the publicity that was given to His entry;
therefore His appearance in the Temple; therefore the increased
sharpness and unmistakableness of His denunciations of the ruling
classes, the Pharisees and the scribes. Therefore the whole history of
the Passion, all culminating in leaving this one conviction, that He
had 'power to lay down His life,' that neither Caiaphas nor Annas, nor
Judas, nor the band, nor priests, nor the Council, nor Pilate, nor
Herod, nor soldiers, nor nails, nor cross, nor all together, killed
Jesus, but that Jesus died because He would. The self-sacrifice of the
Lord was not the flinging away of the life that He ought to have
preserved, nor carelessness, nor the fanaticism of a martyr, nor the
enthusiasm of a hero and a champion, but it was the voluntary death of
Him who of His own will became in His death the 'oblation and
satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.' Love to us, and
obedience to the Father whose will He made His own, were the cords
that bound Christ to the Cross on which He died. His sacrifice was
voluntary; witness this fact that when He saw the Cross at hand He
strode before His followers to reach that, the goal of His mission.
III. I venture to regard the incident as giving us a little glimpse of
what I may call the shrinking Christ.
Do we not see here a trace of something that we all know? May not part
of the reason for Christ's haste have been that desire which we all
have, when some inevitable grief or pain lies before us, to get it
over soon, and to abbreviate the moments that lie between us and it?
Was there not something of that feeling in our Lord's sensitive nature
when He said, for instance, 'I have a baptism to be baptized with, and
how am I straitened until it be accomplished'? 'I am come to send fire
upon the earth, and O! how I wish that it were already kindled!' Was
there not something of the same feeling, which we cannot call
impatient, but which we may call shrinking from the Cross, and
therefore seeking to draw the Cross nearer, and have done with it, in
the words which He addressed to the betrayer, 'That thou doest, do
quickly,' as if He were making a last appeal to the man's humanity,
and in effect saying to him, 'If you have a heart at all, shorten
these painful hours, and let us have it over'?
And may we not see, in that swift advance in front of the lagging
disciples, some trace of the same feeling which we recognise to be so
truly human?
Christ _did_ shrink from His Cross. Let us never forget that He
recoiled from it, with the simple, instinctive, human shrinking from
pain and death which is a matter of the physical nervous system, and
has nothing to do with the will at all. If there had been no shrinking
from it there had been no fixed will. If there had been no natural
instinctive drawing back of the physical nature and its connections
from the prospect of pain and death, there had been none of the
heroism of which I am speaking. Though it does not become us to
dogmatise about matters of which we know so little, I think we may
fairly say that that shrinking never rose up into the regions of
Christ's will; never became a desire; never became a purpose.
Howsoever the ship might be tossed by the waves, the will always kept
its level equilibrium. Howsoever the physical nature might incline to
this side or to that, the will always kept parallel with the great
underlying divine will, the Father's purpose which He had come to
effect. There was shrinking which was instinctive and human, but it
never disturbed the fixed purpose to die. It had so much power over
Him as to make Him march a little faster to the Cross, but it never
made Him turn from it. And so He stands before us as the Conqueror in
a real conflict, as having yielded Himself up by a real surrender, as
having overcome a real difficulty, 'for the joy that was set before
Him, having endured the Cross, despising the shame.'