THE CROSS
The human life in which succeeding generations have found their picture
of God ended in a bloody tragedy. It was a catastrophe which all but
wrecked the loyalty of Jesus' little group of followers; it was an event
which proved a stumbling block in their endeavor to win their countrymen
to their Lord, and which seemed folly to the great mass of outsiders in
the Roman world. It was a most baffling circumstance for them to explain
either to themselves or to others; but, as they lived on under the
control of their Lord's Spirit, this tragedy came gradually to be for
them the most richly significant occurrence in His entire history; and
ever since the cross has been the distinctive symbol of the Christian
faith. It had a variety of meanings for the men of the New Testament;
and it has had many more for their followers in subsequent centuries. We
are not limited to viewing it through the eyes of others, nor to
interpreting it with their thoughts. We are enriched as we try to share
their experiences of its power and light; but we must go to Calvary for
ourselves, and look at the Crucified with the eyes of our own hearts,
and ask ourselves of what that cross convinces us.
Its first and most obvious disclosure is the unchristlikeness, and that
means for us the ungodlikeness, of our world. We study the chief actors
in this event, and conclude that had we known personally Caiaphas, Annas
and Pilate, and even Herod and Judas Iscariot, we should have found them
very like men we meet every day, very like ourselves, with a great deal
in them to interest, admire and attract. And behind them we scan a crowd
of inconspicuous and unnamed persons whose collective feelings and
opinions and consciences were quite as responsible for this occurrence,
as were the men whose names are linked with it; and they impress us as
surprisingly like the public of our own day. It was by no means the
lowest elements in the society of that age who took Jesus to the cross;
they were among the most devout and conscientious and thoughtful people
of their time. Nor was it the worst elements in them which impelled
them to class Him as an undesirable, of whom their world ought to be
rid; their loyalties and convictions were involved in that judgment.
They acted in accord with what was considered the most enlightened and
earnest public opinion. We can think of no more high-minded person in
Jerusalem than young Saul of Tarsus, the student of Gamaliel; and we
know how cordially he approved the course the leaders of Israel had
taken in putting Jesus out of the way.
The cross is the point where God and His children, even the best of
them, clash. At Calvary we see the rocky coast-line of men's thoughts
and feelings against which the incoming tide of God's mind and heart
broke; and we hear the moaning of the resisted waves. The crucifixion is
the exposure of the motives and impulses, the aspirations and
traditions, of human society. Its ungodlikeness is made plain. We get
our definition of sin from Calvary; sin is any unlikeness to the Spirit
of Christ, revealed supremely in that act of self-sacrifice. The
lifeless form of the Son of God on the tree is the striking evidence of
the antagonism between the children of men and their Father. Jesus
completely represented Him, and this broken body on the gibbet was the
inevitable result. Golgotha convinces us of the ruinous forces that live
in and dominate our world; it faces us with the suicidal elements in
men's spirits that drive them to murder the Christlike in themselves; it
tears the veil from each hostile thought and feeling that enacts this
tragedy and exposes the God-murdering character of our sin. Sin is
deicidal. When that Life of light is extinguished, we find a world about
us and within us so dark that its darkness can be felt. The fateful
reality of the battle between love and selfishness, knowledge and
ignorance, between God and whatever thwarts His purpose, is made plain
to us in that pierced and blood-stained Figure on the cross. In the
sense of being the victim of the ungodlike forces in human life, Jesus
bore sin in His own body on the tree.
A second and equally clear disclosure is that of a marvellous
conscience. What takes Jesus Christ to that tragic death? It is
perfectly evident that He need not have come up to Jerusalem and
hazarded this issue; He came of His own accord; and we can think of
dozens of reasons that might have induced Him to remain in Galilee,
going about quietly and accomplishing all manner of good. Why did He
give up the opportunities of a life that was so incalculably
serviceable, and apparently court death? Jesus was always conscientious
in what He did; He felt Himself bound to the lives about Him by the
firmest cords of obligation, and whatever He attempted He deemed He owed
men. If there was a Zacchæus whose honesty and generosity had given way
under the faulty system of revenue-collecting then in vogue, Jesus
considered Himself involved in his moral ruin and obliged to do what He
could to restore him: "I _must_ abide at thy house." If there were sick
folk, their diseases were to Him, in part at least, morally wrong,
devil-caused (to use His First Century way of explaining what we ascribe
to inherited weakness or to blameworthy conditions); and demoniacal
control over lives in God's world was something for which He felt
Himself socially accountable: "_Ought_ not this woman, whom Satan hath
bound, to have been loosed?" If the Church of His day was unable to
reach large sections of the population with its appeal, if it succeeded
very imperfectly in making children of the Most High out of those whom
it did reach, if with its narrowness and bigotry it made of its converts
"children of hell," as Jesus Himself put it, if it exaggerated trifles
and laid too little stress on justice, mercy and fidelity, He, as a
member of that Church, was chargeable with its failures, and must strive
to put a new conscience into God's people: "I _must_ preach the good
tidings of the Kingdom of God." Ibsen, the dramatist, wrote to his
German translator, Ludwig Passarge, "In every new poem or play I have
aimed at my own spiritual emancipation and purification--for a man
shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he
belongs." Jesus felt implicated in all that was not as it should be
among the children of men, and cleared Himself from complicity with it
by setting Himself resolutely to change it. He considered that the human
brotherhood in its sinfulness exacted nothing less of Him.
It is commonly taught that the Lord's Prayer is a form that was
suggested by Jesus to His disciples, but that it could not have been a
prayer which He Himself used with them, because of its plea for
forgiveness. It is true that it is introduced in our Gospels as provided
by the Master for His followers, "When _ye_ pray, say." But millions of
Christians instinctively associate it with Jesus' own utterances to the
Father. And may they not be correct? "Forgive us _our_ debts," is a
social confession of sin, in which our Lord may well have joined, just
as He underwent John's baptism of repentance, though Himself sinless, in
order to fulfil all righteousness. He regarded Himself as indebted; His
work, His teaching, His suffering, His death, were not to Him a gift
which He was at liberty to make or to withhold. In the "must" so often
on His lips we cannot miss the sense of social obligation. He was (to
borrow suggestive lines of Shelley's)
a nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of the earth.
They came home to His conscience, and He could not shake them off. They
were so many claims on Him; He felt He owed the world a life, and He
was ready to pay the debt to the last drop of His blood. "The Son of man
_must_ suffer and be killed." To the end He cast about for some less
awful way of meeting His obligations. "My Father, if it be possible, let
this cup pass away from Me." But when no other alternative seemed
conscientiously possible to Him, He went to Golgotha with a sense of
moral satisfaction. "_Ought_ not the Christ to have suffered these
things?" Without any disturbing consciousness of having personally added
to the world's evil, with no plea for pardon for His own sins on His
lips but only for those of others, His conscience was burdened with the
injustice and disloyalties, the brutalities and failures, of the family
of God, in which He was a Son, and He bore His brothers' sins on His
spirit, and gave Himself to the utmost to end them.
A third disclosure of the cross is the incomparable sympathy of the
Victim. How shall we account for His recoil from the thought of dying,
for His shrinking from this death as from something which sickened Him,
for the darkness and anguish of His soul in Gethsemane at the prospect,
and for the abysmal sense of forsakenness on the cross? His
sensitiveness of heart made Him feel the pain and shame of other men, a
pain and shame they were frequently too stolid and obtuse to feel. He
could not see able-bodied and willing workmen standing idle in the
marketplace because no man had hired them, without sharing their
discouragement and bitterness, nor prodigals making fools of themselves
without feeling the disgrace of their unfilial folly. His parables are
so vivid because He has Himself lived in the experiences of others.
"_Cor cordium_" is the inscription placed upon Shelley's grave; and it
is infinitely more appropriate for the Man of Nazareth. In His sensitive
sympathy we are aware of
Desperate tides of the whole great world's anguish
Forc'd through the channels of a single heart.
We cannot account for His recoil from the cross, save as we remember His
sense of kinship with those who were reddening their hands with the
blood of the Representative of their God. If we have ever stood beside a
devoted wife in the hour when her husband is disgraced, or been in a
home where sons and daughters are overwhelmed with a mother's shame, we
have some faint idea of how Jesus felt the guilt of His relatives when
they slew Him. He was the conscience of His less conscientious brethren:
"the reproaches of them that reproached Thee, fell on Me." He realized,
as they did not, the enormity of what they were doing. The utter and
hideous ungodlikeness of the world was expressed for Him in those who
would have none of Him, and cried: "Away with Him! Crucify, crucify
Him." His keenness of conscience and His acute sympathy brought to His
lips the final cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" The
sinless Sufferer on the cross, in His oneness with His brethren, felt
their wrongdoing His own; acknowledged in His forsakenness that God
could have nothing to do with it, for it was anti-God; confessed that it
inevitably separated from Him and He felt Himself in such kinship and
sympathy with sinning men that He was actually away from God. "That was
hell," said old Rabbi Duncan, "and He tasted it."
But our minds revolt. We do not believe that God deserted His Son; on
the contrary we are certain that He was never closer to Him. Shall we
question the correctness of Jesus' personal experience, and call Him
mistaken? We seem compelled either to do violence to His authority in
the life of the spirit with God, or to our conviction of God's
character. Perhaps there is another alternative. A century ago the
physicist, Thomas Young, discovered the principle of the interference of
light. Under certain conditions light added to light produces darkness;
the light waves interfere with and neutralize each other. Is there not
something analogous to this in the sphere of the spirit? Is not every
new unveiling of God accompanied by unsettlements and seeming darkenings
of the soul, temporary obscurations of the Divine Face? In all our
advances in religious knowledge are we not liable to undergo
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of the creature?
And may it not have been God's coming closer than ever to the Son of His
love, or rather the Son's coming closer to the Father, as He entirely
shared and expressed God's own sympathy and conscience, and was made
perfect by the things which He suffered, that wrought in His sinless
soul the awful blackness of the feeling of abandonment?
In the sense of suffering sin's force, of conscientiously accepting its
burden, of sensitively sympathizing with the guilty, Jesus bore sin in
His own body on the tree.
And, as we stand facing the Crucified, we cannot escape a sense of
personal connection with that tragedy. The solidarity of the human
family in all its generations has been brought home to us in countless
ways by modern teachers; we are members one of another, and as we scan
the cross this is a family catastrophe in which the actors are our
kinsmen, and the blood of the Victim stains us as sharers of our
brothers' crime. And, further, as we look into the motives of Christ's
murderers--devout Pharisee and conservative Sadducee, Roman politician
and false friend, bawling rabble and undiscriminating soldiery, the host
of indifferent or approving faces of the public behind them--they seem
strangely familiar to us. They have been, they are still, alive by turns
in us. The harmless spark of electricity that greets the touch of one's
hand on a metal knob on a winter's day is one with the bolt of lightning
that wrecks a giant oak. The selfish impulse, the narrow prejudice, the
ignorant suspicion, the callous indifference, the self-satisfied
respectability, which frequently dominate us and determine our
decisions, are one with that cruel combination of motives which drove
the nails in the hands and feet of the Son of God. Still further, the
suffering of Jesus never seems to an acute conscience something that
happened once, but is over now. The Figure that hung and bled on the
tree centuries ago becomes indissolubly joined in our thought with every
life today that is the victim of similar misunderstanding and neglect,
injustice and brutality; and, while our sense of social responsibility
charges us with complicity in all the wrong and woe of our brethren,
that haunting Form on Calvary hangs before our eyes, and
Makes me feel it was my sin,
As though no other sin there were,
That was to Him who bears the world
A load that He could scarcely bear.
We may say to ourselves that this is fanciful, that we were not the
Sanhedrin who condemned Jesus, nor the Roman procurator who ordered His
execution, nor the scoffing soldiers who carried out his command; but
the conscience which the cross itself creates charges us with
participation in the murder of the Son of God. That cross becomes an
inescapable fact in our moral world, an element in our outlook upon
duty, a factor tingeing life with tragic somberness. It forces upon us
the conviction that it is all too possible for us to reenact Golgotha,
and by doing or failing to do, directly or indirectly, for one of the
least of Christ's brethren to crucify Him afresh, and put Him to an open
shame.
But if the cross seems to color life somberly, it also gilds it with
glory. As we follow Christ, we discover more and more clearly that all
which we possess of greatest worth has come to us, and keeps coming to
us, through Him. What he endured centuries ago on that hill without the
city wall is a wellspring of inspiration flowing up in the purest and
finest motives in the life of today. There is a direct line of ancestry
from the best principles in the lives of nations, and of men and women
about us, running back to Calvary. Day after day we find ourselves and
the whole world made different because of that tragic occurrence of the
past, shamed out of the motives that caused it, and lifted into the life
of the Crucified. A recent dramatist makes the centurion, in the
darkness at the foot of the cross, say to Mary: "I tell you, woman, this
dead Son of yours, disfigured, shamed, spat upon, has built a Kingdom
this day that can never die. The living glory of Him rules it. The earth
is _His_ and He made it. He and His brothers have been molding and
making it through the long ages; they are the only ones who ever really
did possess it: not the proud; not the idle; not the vaunting empires of
the world. Something has happened up here on this hill today to shake
all our kingdoms of blood and fear to the dust. The earth is His, the
earth is theirs, and they made it. The meek, the terrible meek, the
fierce agonizing meek, are about to enter into their inheritance."
Nor is this all of which that cross convinces us. We find ourselves
giving that crucified Man our supreme adoration; He is for us that
which we cannot but worship. Instinctively and irresistibly we yield Him
our highest reverence, trust and devotion. As we think out what is
involved in the impression He makes upon us, we come to our conception
of His deity; and through Him we discover ourselves in touch with the
Highest there is in the universe, with the Most High. Calvary becomes,
for those who look trustingly at the Crucified, a window through which
we see into the life of the Lord of heaven and earth. Jesus' sin-bearing
is for us a revelation of the eternal sin-bearing of the God and Father
of us all. Behind the cross of wood outside the gate of Jerusalem we
catch sight of a vast, age-enduring cross in the heart of the Eternal,
forced on Him generation after generation by His children's unlikeness
to their Father--forced, but borne by Him, in conscientious devotion to
them, as willingly as Jesus went to Golgotha. If at Calvary we find the
rocky coast-line of human thought and feeling opposing the inflow of
God, the incoming waters break into the silver spray of speech, and
their one word is Love.
In this revelation of our Father is the assurance of our forgiveness.
Such a God is not one who may or may not be gracious, as He wills; it is
"His property always to have mercy." He would not be just in His own
eyes, were He unmerciful; He is just to forgive us our sins and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Like His Son, He owes us Himself;
and His forgiveness is freely ours in the measure that we are able to
receive it, that is, in the measure in which we have forgiven others.
Jesus at Calvary proves Himself both our Substitute and our Exemplar. He
who finds and opens a trail to a mountain-top encounters and removes
obstacles, which none of those who come after him need to meet; he makes
the path _for them_. When the sinless Jesus found Himself socially
involved with His brethren in the low valley of the world's sinfulness,
and looked off to the summit of His Father's perfectness, He felt a
separation between the whole world and God; and He gave Himself to end
it. We shall never know the uncertainties that shrouded Him and the
temptations He faced, from the experience in the wilderness at the
outset to the anguish of His spirit in Gethsemane and the consciousness
of dereliction on the cross. The "if it be possible" of His prayer
suggests the alternative routes He sought to find, before He resigned
Himself to opening the path by His blood. Since His death there is "a
new and living way" for those who know Him, which stretches from the
lowest point of their abasement to the very peak of God's holiness. Up
that way they can pass by repentance and trust, and down it the mercy of
God hastens to meet and lead them. They are forever delivered from the
sense of exclusion from God; the way lies open. But he who knows a path
must himself walk it, if he would reach its goal; and no one is profited
by Christ's sacrifice who does not give himself in a like sacrificial
service; only so does he ever reach fellowship with the Father.
The cross convinces us that we must love one another in the family of
God as our Father in Christ has loved us; and it further pledges us
God's gift of Himself, that is His Holy Spirit, to fulfil this debt of
love. It speaks to us of One who offers nothing less than Himself, and
nothing less will do, to be the Conscience of our consciences, the
Heart of our hearts, the Life of our lives. We are lifted by the cross
into a great redemptive fellowship, a society of redeemers--the
redeeming Father, the redeeming Son and a whole company inspired by the
redeeming Spirit. We fill up on our part as individuals and as Christian
social groups--churches, nations, families--that which is lacking in the
sufferings of Christ for His Kingdom's sake. The more Christian our
human society becomes, the more it will manifest the vicarious
conscience of its Lord, and feel burdened with the guilt of every
wrong-doer, and bound to make its law-courts and prisons, its public
opinion and international policies and all its social contacts,
redemptive. Through every touch of life with life, in trade, in
government, in friendship, in the family, men will feel self-giving love
akin to, because fathered by, the love of God commended to the world
when Christ died for sinners.
While in a sense men will become all of them redeemers one of another,
behind them all will ever lie the unique sacrifice of Jesus. The
singularity of that sacrifice lies not in the act but in the Actor:
"_He_ is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also
for the whole world." Every member of the redeemed society, however much
he may owe to the sacrificial service of his brethren, will feel himself
personally indebted to Christ, who loved him and gave Himself up for
him. As the Originator of the redemptive fellowship, the Creator of the
new conscience, the Captain of our salvation who opened up the way
through His death into the holiest of all, we give to Jesus and to no
other the title, "The Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the
world."