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."
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