THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS
By what they said, I perceived that he had been a great warrior, and
had fought with and slain him that had the power of death (Hebrews
2:14), but not without great danger to himself, which made me love
him the more--"Pilgrims Progress", Part I
The subject before us is one of the greatest difficulty. Why Jesus
chose the cross has exercised the thought of the Christian world
ever since he did so. He told his disciples beforehand of what lay
before him, of what he was choosing, but it was long before they
realized that he meant any such thing. The cross was to them a
strange idea, and for a long time they did not seriously face the
matter. Once the cross was an accomplished fact, Christians could
not, and did not wish to, avoid thinking out what had meant so much
to their Master; but it has mostly been with a sense of facing a
mystery that in some measure eluded them, with a feeling that there
is more beyond, something always to be attained hereafter.
A very significant passage in St. Mark (10:32) gives us a glimpse of
a moment on Jesus' last journey to Jerusalem. It is a sentence which
one could hardly imagine being included in the Gospel, if it did not
represent some actual memory, and a memory of significance. It runs
something like this: "And they were in the way, going up to
Jerusalem, and Jesus was moving on before them; and they began to
wonder; and as they followed they began to be afraid." He is moving
to Jerusalem with a purpose. They do not understand it. He is
wrapped in thought; and, as happens when a man's mind is working
strongly, his pace quickens, and they find themselves at a distance
behind him. And then something comes over them--a sense that there
is something in the situation which they do not understand, a
strangeness in the mind. They realize, in fact, that they are not as
near Jesus as they had supposed. And, as they follow, the wonder
deepens into fear.
Anyone who will really try to grapple with this problem of the cross
will find very soon the same thing. The first thing that we need to
learn, if our criticism of Jesus is to be sound, is that we are not
at all so near him as we have imagined. He eludes us, goes far out
beyond what we grasp or conceive; and I think the education of the
Christian man or woman begins anew, when we realize how little we
know about Jesus. The discovery of our ignorance is the beginning of
knowledge. Plato long ago said that wonder is the mother of
philosophy, and he was right. John Donne, the English poet, went
farther, and said: "All divinity is love or wonder." When a man then
begins to wonder about Jesus Christ in earnest, Jesus comes to be
for him a new figure. Historical criticism has done this for us; it
has brought us to such a point that the story of these earliest
disciples repeats itself more closely in the experience of their
followers of these days than in any century since the first. We
begin along with them on the friendly, critical, human plane, and
with them we follow him into experiences and realizations that we
never expected. It may be summed up in the familiar words of the
English hymn,
Oh happy band of pilgrims,
If onward ye will tread
With Jesus as your fellow,
To Jesus as your head.
These men begin with him, more or less on a footing of equality; or,
at least, the inequality is very lightly marked. Afterwards it is
emphasized; and they realize it with wonder and with fear, and at
last with joy and gratitude.
We may begin by trying steadily to bring our minds to some keener
sense of what it was that he chose. To say, in the familiar words,
that he chose the cross, may through the very familiarity of the
language lead us away from what we have to discover. We have, as we
agreed, to ask ourselves what was his experience. What, then, did
his choice involve? It meant, of course, physical pain. There are
natures to whom this is of little account, but the sensitive and
sentient type, as we often observe, dreads pain. He, with open eyes,
chose physical pain, heightened to torture, not escaping any of the
suffering which anticipation gives--that physical horror of death,
that instinctive fear of annihilation, which nature suggests of
itself. He took the course of action that would most severely test
his disciples; one at least revolted, and we have to ask what it
meant to Jesus to live with Judas, to watch his face, to recognize
his influence in the little group--yes, and to try to win him again
and to be repelled. "He learnt by the things that he suffered" that
Judas would betray him; but the hour and place and method were not
so evident, and when they were at last revealed--what did it mean to
be kissed by Judas? Do we feel what he felt in the so-called
trials--or was he dull and numbed by the catastrophe? How did he
bear the beating of triumphant hatred upon a forsaken spirit? How
did the horrible cry, "Crucify him! crucify him!" break on his
ears--on his mind? When "the Lord turned and looked upon Peter"
(Luke 22:61), what did it mean? How did he know that Peter was
there, and what led him to turn at that moment? Was there in the
Passion no element of uneasiness again about the eleven on whom he
had concentrated his hopes and his influence--the eleven of whom it
is recorded, that "they all forsook him, and fled" (Mark 14:50)? No
hint of dread that his work might indeed be undone? What pain must
that have involved? What is the value of the Agony in the Garden, of
the cry, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani" (Mark 15:34)? When we have
answered, each for himself, these questions, and others like them
that will suggest themselves--answered them by the most earnest
efforts of which our natures are capable--and remembered at the end
how far our natures fall short of his, and told ourselves that our
answers are insufficient--then let us recall, once more, that he
chose all this.
He chose the cross and all that it meant. Our next step should be to
study anew his own references to what he intends by it, to what he
expects to be its results and its outcome. First of all, then, he
clearly means that the Kingdom of Heaven is something different from
anything that man has yet seen. The Kingdom of Heaven is, I
understand, a Hebrew way of saying the Kingdom of God--very much as
men to-day speak of Providence, to avoid undue familiarity with the
term God, so the Jews would say Heaven. There were many who used the
phrase in one or other form; but it is always bad criticism to give
to the words of genius the value or the connotation they would have
in the lips of ordinary people. To a great mind words are charged
with a fullness of meaning that little people do not reach. The
attempt has been made to recapture more of his thoughts by learning
the value given to some of the terms he uses as they appear in the
literature of the day, and of course it has been helpful. But we
have to remember always that the words as used by him come with a
new volume of significance derived from his whole personality.
Everything turns on the connotation which he gives to the term
God--that is central and pivotal. What this new Kingdom of God is,
or will be, he does not attempt fully to explain or analyse. In the
parables, the treasure-finder and the pearl merchant achieve a great
enrichment of life; so much they know at once; but what do they do
with it? How do they look at it? What does it mean to them? He does
not tell us. We only see that they are moving on a new plane, seeing
life from a new angle, living in a fuller sense. What the new life
means in its fullness, we know only when we gain the deeper
knowledge of God.
He suggests that this new knowledge comes to a man from God
himself--flesh and blood do not reveal it (Matt. 16:17). "Unto you
it is given," he says on another occasion, "to know the mystery of
the Kingdom of Heaven" (Mark 4:11), and he adds that there are those
who see and do not see; they are outside it; they have not the
alphabet, we might say, that will open the book (cf. Rev. 5:3). He
makes it clear at every point in the story of the Kingdom of God
that there is more beyond; and he means it. It is to be a new
beginning, an initiation, leading on to what we shall see but do not
yet guess, though he gives us hints. We shall not easily fathom the
depth of his idea of the new life, but along with it we have to
study the width and boldness of his purpose. This new life is not
for a few--for "the elect," in our careless phrase. He looks to a
universal scope for what he is doing. It will reach far outside the
bounds of Judaism. "They shall come from the east and from the west,
and from the north and from the south, and shall sit down in the
Kingdom of God" (Luke 13:29). "Wheresoever this gospel shall be
preached throughout the whole world," he says (Mark 14:9). "My words
shall not pass away" (Luke 21:33). All time and all existence come
under his survey and are included in his plan. The range is
enormous. And this was a Galilean peasant! As we gradually realize
what he has in mind, must we not feel that we have not grasped
anything like the full grandeur of his thought?
He makes it plain, in the second place, that it will be a matter for
followers, for workers, for men who will watch and wait and
dare--men with the same abandonment as himself. He calls for men to
come after him, to come behind him (Mark 1:17, 10:21; Luke 9:59). He
emphasizes that they must think out the terms on which he enlists
them. He does not disguise the drawbacks of his service. He calls
his followers, and a very personal and individual call it is. He
calls a man from the lake shore, from the nets, from the custom
house.
In the third place, he clearly announces an intention to achieve
something in itself of import by his death. There are those who
would have us believe that his mind was obsessed with the fixed idea
of his own speedy return on the clouds, and that he hurried on to
death to precipitate this and the new age it was to bring.
References to such a coming are indeed found in the Gospels as we
have them, but we are bound to ask whence they come, and to inquire
how far they represent exactly what he said; and then, if he is
correctly reported, to make sure that we know exactly what he means.
Those who hold this view fail to relate the texts they emphasize
with others of a deeper significance, and they ignore the grandeur
and penetration and depth of the man whom they make out such a
dreamer. He never suggests himself that his death is to force the
hand of God.
He himself is to be the doer and achiever of something. We have been
apt to think of him as a great teacher, a teacher of charm and
insight, or as the great example of idealism, "who saw life steadily
and saw it whole." He lived, some hold, the rounded and well-poised
life, the rhythmic life. No, that was Sophocles. He is greater. Here
is one who penetrates far deeper into things. His treatment of the
psychology of sin itself shows how much more than an example was
needed. Here, as in the other chapters, but here above all we have
to remember the clearness of his insight, his swiftness of
penetration, his instinct for fact and reality. He means to do, to
achieve, something. It is no martyr's death that he incurs. His
death is a step to a purpose. "I have a baptism to be baptised
with," he says (Luke 12:50). "The Son of Man," he said, "is come to
seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10).
In discussing in the previous chapter what he meant by the term
"lost," our conclusion was that for Jesus sin was far more awful,
far more serious, than we commonly realize. We saw also that so
profound and true a psychology of sin must imply a view of
redemption at least as profound, a promise of a force more than
equal to the power of sin--that "violence of habit" of which St.
Augustine speaks. If the Son of Man is to save the lost, and if the
lost are in danger so real, it follows that he must think of a
thoroughly effective salvation, and that its achievement will be no
light or easy task. "To give one's life as a ransom for many," says
a modern teacher, "is of no avail, if the ransom is insufficient."
What, then, and how much, does he mean by "to save," and how does he
propose to do it? When the soul of man or woman has gone wrong in
any of the ways discussed by Jesus--in hardness or anger, in
impurity, in the refusal to treat God and his facts seriously--when
the consequences that Jesus recognized have followed--what can be
done to bring that soul back into effective relation with the God
whom it has discarded and abandoned? That is the problem that Jesus
had to face, and most of us have not thought enough about it.
First of all, how far does Jesus understand salvation to take a man?
The ancient creed of the Church includes the article of belief in
"the forgiveness of sins." There are those who lightly assume that
this means, chiefly or solely, the remission of punishment for evil
acts. This raises problems enough of itself. The whole doctrine of
"Karma", vital to Buddhism and Hinduism, is, if I understand it
aright, a strong and clear warning to us that the remission of
punishment is no easy matter. Not only Eastern thinkers, but Western
also, insist that there is no avoidance of the consequences of
action. Luther himself, using a phrase half borrowed from a Latin
poet, says that forgiveness is "a knot worthy of a God's
aid"--"nodus Deo vindice dignus".[31] But in any case escape from
the consequences of sin, when once we look on sin with the eyes of
Jesus, is of relatively small importance. There are two aspects of
the matter far more significant.
We have seen how Jesus regards sin as at once the cause and
consequence of a degeneration of the moral nature, and as a
repudiation of God. Two questions arise: Is it possible to recover
lost moral quality and faculty? Is it possible for those
incapacitated by sin to regain, or to enjoy, relation with God?
When we think, with Jesus, of sin first and foremost in connexion
with God, and take the trouble to try to give his meaning to his
words, forgiveness takes on a new meaning. We have to "think like
God," he says (Mark 8:33); and perhaps God is in his thoughts
neither so legal nor so biological as we are; perhaps he does not
think first of edicts or of biological and psychological laws. God,
according to Jesus, thinks first of his child, though of course not
oblivious of his own commands and laws. Forgiveness, Jesus teaches
or suggests, is primarily a question between Father and son, and he
tries to lead us to believe how ready the Father is to settle that
question. Once it is settled, we find, in fact, Father and son
setting to work to mend the past. The evil seed has been sown and
the sad crop must be reaped, the man who sowed it has to reap
it--that much we all see. But Jesus hints to us that God himself
loves to come in and help his reconciled son with the reaping; many
hands make light work, especially when they are such hands. And even
when the crop is evil in the lives of others, the most horrible
outcome of sin, God is still in the field. The prodigal, when he
returns, is met with a welcome, and is gradually put in possession
of what he has lost--the robe, the shoes, the ring; and it all comes
from his being at one with his Father again (Luke 15:22ff.). The Son
of Man, historically, has again and again found the lost--the lost
gifts, the lost faculties, the lost charms and graces--and given
them back to the man whom he had also found and brought home to God.
Let us once more try to get our thoughts Theocentric as Jesus' are,
and our problems become simpler, or at least fewer. God's generosity
in forgiveness, God's love, he emphasizes again and again. Will a
man take Jesus at his word, and commit himself to God? That is the
question. Once he will venture on this step, what pictures Jesus
draws us of what happens! The son is home again; the bankruptcy, the
hideous solitude, the life among animals, bestial, dirty and empty,
and haunted with memories--all those things are past, when once the
Father's arms are round his neck, and his kiss on his cheek. He is
no more "alienated from the life of God" (Eph. 4:18; Col. 1:21),
"without God in the world" (Eph. 2:12), an "enemy of God" (Rom.
5:10); he was lost and is found, and the Father himself, Jesus says,
cries: "Let us be merry" ("Euphranthomen"). If we hesitate about it,
Jesus calls us once more to "think like God," and tells us other
stories, with incredible joy in them--"joy in the presence of the
angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." We must go back to
his central conception of God, if we are to realize what he means by
salvation. St. Augustine (Conf., viii. 3) brings out the value of
these parables, by reminding us how much more we care for a thing
that has been ours, when we have lost it and found it again. The
shepherd has a new link with his sheep lost and found again, a new
story of it, a shared experience; it is more his than ever. And
Jesus implies that when a man is saved, he is God's again, and more
God's own than ever before; and God is glad at heart. As for the
man; a new power comes into his heart, and a new joy; and with God's
help, in a new spirit of sunshine, he sets about mending the past in
a new spirit and with a new motive--for love's sake now. If the
fruit of the past is to be seen, as it constantly is, in the lives
of others, he throws himself with the more energy into God's work,
and when the Good Shepherd goes seeking the lost, he goes with him.
Christian history bears witness, in every year of it, to what
salvation means, in Jesus' sense. Punishment, consequences, crippled
resources--no, he does not ask to escape them now; all as God
pleases; these are not the things that matter. Life is all to be
boundless love and gratitude and trust; and by and by the new man
wakes up to find sin taken away, its consequences undone, the lost
faculties restored, and life a fuller and richer thing than ever it
was before.
Somehow so, if we read the Gospels aright, does Jesus conceive of
Salvation. To achieve this for men is his purpose; and in order to
do it, as we said before, his first step is to induce men to
re-think God. Something must be done to touch the heart and to move
the will of men, effectively; and he must do it.
With this purpose in his mind--let us weigh our words here, and
reflect again upon the clearness of his insight into life and
character, into moral laws, the laws of human thought and feeling,
upon his profound intelligence and grasp of what moves and is real,
his knowledge (a strong word to use, but we may use it) of God--with
this purpose in his mind, thought out and understood, he
deliberately and quietly goes to Jerusalem. He "steadfastly set his
face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51). "I must walk," he said,
"to-day and to-morrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a
prophet perish out of Jerusalem" (Luke 13:33). To Jerusalem he goes.
We may admit that with his view of the psychology of sin, he must
have a serious view of redemption. But why should that involve the
cross? That is our problem. But while we try to solve it, we must
also remember that behind a great choice there are always more
reasons than we can analyse. A man makes one of the great choices in
life. What has influenced him? Ten to one, if you ask him, he does
not know. Nothing else, he will say, seemed feasible; the thing was
borne in on me, it came to me: reasons? He cannot tabulate reasons;
the thing, he says, was so clear that I was a long way past reasons.
And yet he was right; he had reasons enough. What parent ever
analysed reasons for loving his children, or would tabulate them for
you? Jesus does not explain his reasons. We find, I think, that we
are apt to have far more reasons for doing what we know is wrong,
than we have for doing what we know is right. We do not want reasons
for doing what is right; we know it is right, and there is an end of
it. Once again, Jesus, with his clear eye for the real, sees what he
must do. The salvation of the lost means the cross for himself. But
why? we ask again. We must look a little closer if we are to
understand him. We shall not easily understand him in all his
thoughts, but part of our education comes from the endeavour to
follow him here, to "be with him," in the phrase with which we
began.
First of all we may put his love of men. He never lost the
individual in the mass, never lost sight of the human being who
needed God. The teacher who put the law of kindness in the great
phrase, "Go with him twain" (Matt. 5:41), was not likely to limit
himself in meeting men's needs. He was bound to do more than we
should expect, when he saw people whom he could help; and it is that
spirit of abounding generosity that shows a man what to do (Luke
6:38). Everywhere, every day, he met the call that quickened
thought and shaped purpose.
He walked down a street; and the scene of misery or of sin came upon
him with pressure; he could not pass by, as we do, and fail to note
what we do not wish to think of. He knows a pressure upon his spirit
for the man, the child, the woman--for the one who sins, the one who
suffers, the other who dies. They must be got in touch with God. He
sits with his disciples at a meal--the men whom he loved--he watches
them, he listens to them. Peter, James, John, one after the other,
becomes a call to him. They need redemption; they need far more than
they dream; they need God. That pressure is there night and day--it
becomes intercession, and that grows into inspiration. Our prayers
suffer, some one has said, for our want of our identification with
the world's sin and misery. He was identified with the world's sin
and misery, and they followed him into his prayer. It becomes with
him an imperative necessity to effect man's reconciliation with God.
All his experience of man, his love of man, call him that way.
The second great momentum comes from the love of God, and his faith
in God. Here, again, we must emphasize for ourselves his criticism
of Peter: "You think like a man and not like God" (Mark 8:33). We do
not see God, as Jesus did. He must make plain to men, as it never
was made plain before, the love of God. He must secure that it is
for every man the greatest reality in the world, the one great
flaming fact that burns itself living into every man's
consciousness. He sees that for this God calls him to the cross, so
much so that when he prays in the garden that the cup may pass, his
thoughts range back to "Thy will" (Matt. 26:42). It is God's Will.
Even if he does not himself see all involved, still God knows the
reason; God will manage; God wishes it. "Have faith in God," he used
to say (Mark 11:22). This faith which he has in God is one of the
things that take him to the cross.
In the third place, we must not forget his sense of his own peculiar
relation to God. If it is safe to rely on St. Mark's chronological
date here, he does not speak of this until Peter has called him the
Messiah. He accepts the title (Mark 8:29). He also uses the
description, Son of Man, with its suggestions from the past. He
forgives sins. He speaks throughout the Gospels as one apart, as one
distinct from us, closely as he is identified with us--and all this
from a son of fact, who is not insane, who is not a quack, whose
eyes are wide open for the real; whose instinct for the ultimate
truth is so keen; who lives face to face with God. What does it
mean? This, for one thing, that most of us have not given attention
enough to this matter. I have confined myself in these chapters to
the Synoptic Gospels, with only two or three references to the
Fourth Gospel, and on the evidence of the Synoptic Gospels, taken by
themselves, it is clear that he means a great deal more than we have
cared to examine. He is the great interpreter of God, and it is
borne in upon him that only by the cross can he interpret God, make
God real to us, and bring us to the very heart of God. That is his
purpose.
The cross is the outcome of his deepest mind, of his prayer life. It
is more like him than anything else he ever did. It has in it more
of him. Whoever he was, whoever he is, whatever our Christology, one
fact stands out. It was his love of men and women and his faith in
God that took him there.
Was he justified? was he right? or was it a delusion?
First of all, let us go back to a historic event. The resurrection
is, to a historian, not very clear in its details. But is it the
detail or the central fact that matters? Take away the resurrection,
however it happened, whatever it was, and the history of the Church
is unintelligible. We live in a rational world--a world, that is,
where, however much remains as yet unexplained, everything has a
promise of being lucid, everything has reason in it. Great results
have great causes. We have to find, somewhere or other, between the
crucifixion and the first preaching of the disciples in Jerusalem,
something that entirely changed the character of that group of men.
Something happened, so tremendous and so vital, that it changed not
only the character of the movement and the men--but with them the
whole history of the world. The evidence for the resurrection is not
so much what we read in the Gospels as what we find in the rest of
the New Testament--the new life of the disciples. They are a new
group. When it came to the cross, his cross, they ran away. A few
weeks later we find them rejoicing to be beaten, imprisoned and put
to death (Acts 5:41). What had happened? What we have to explain is
a new life--a new life of prayer and joy and power, a new
indifference to physical death, in a new relation to God. That is
one outcome of the cross and of what followed; and as historians we
have to explain it. We have also to explain how the disciples came
to conceive of another Galilean--a carpenter whom they might have
seen sawing and sweating in his shop, with whom they tramped the
roads of Palestine, whom they saw done to death in ignominy and
derision--sitting at the right hand of God. Taken by itself, we
might call such a belief mere folly; but too much goes with it for
so easy an explanation. The cross was not the end. As Mr. Neville
Talbot has recently pointed out in his book, "The Mind of the
Disciples", if the story stopped with the cross, God remains
unexplained, and the story ends in unrelieved tragedy. But it does
not end in tragedy; it ends--if we can use the word as yet--in joy
and faith and victory; and these--how should we have seen them but
for the cross? They are bound up with his choice of the cross and
his triumph over it all. Death is not what it was--"the last line of
all," as Horace says. Life and immortality have been brought to
light (2 Tim. 1:10). "The Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the
world." So we read at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, and the
historical critic may tell us that he does not think that John the
Baptist said it. None the less, it is a wonderful summary of what
Jesus has done, especially wonderful if we think of it being written
fifty or sixty years after the crucifixion. For, as we survey the
centuries, we find that the Lamb of God has taken away the sin of
the world--to a degree that no one can imagine who has not studied
the ancient world. Those who know the heathen world intimately will
know best the difference he has made. All this new life, this new
joy, this new victory over death and sin is attached to the living
and victorious Son of God. The task of Paul and the others is, as
Dr. Cairns says, "re-thinking everything in the terms of the
resurrection." It is the new factor in the problem of God, so to
speak--the new factor which alters everything that relates to God.
That is saying a great deal, but when we look at Christian history,
is it saying too much?
But still our first question is unanswered; why should it have been
the cross? One thinker of our day has suggested that, after all,
suffering is a language intelligible to the very simplest, while its
meaning is not exhausted by the deepest. The problem of pain is
always with us. And he chose pain. He never said that pain is a good
thing; he cured it. But he chose it. The ancient world stumbled on
that very thing. God and a Godlike man, their philosophers said, are
not susceptible to pain, to suffering. That was an axiom, very
little challenged. Then if Jesus suffered, he was not God; if he was
God, he did not suffer. The Church denied that, just as the Church
to-day rejects another hasty antithesis about pain, that comes from
New England. He chose pain, and he knew what he was choosing. Then
let us be in no hurry about refusing it, but let us look into it. He
chose it--that is the greatest fact known to us about pain.
Again, the death of Christ reveals sin in its real significance, in
its true perspective, outside the realm of accident and among the
deepest things of God, "sub specie aeternitatia". Men count
themselves very decent people; so thought the priests and the
Pharisees, and they were. There is nothing about them that one
cannot find in most religious communities and in all governing
classes: the sense of the value of themselves, their preconceptions
and their judgements--a strong feeling of the importance of the work
they have to do, along with a certain reluctance to face strange
facts, and some indifference as to what happens to other people if
the accepted theory of the Cause or the State require them to
suffer. There is nothing about Pilate and Herod, and the Pharisees
and the priests, that is very different from ourselves. But how it
looks in front of the cross! We begin to see how it looks in the
sight of God, and that alters everything; it upsets all our
standards, and teaches us a new self-criticism.
"You think like man, and not like God," said Jesus (Mark 8:33). The
cross reveals God most sympathetically. We see God in the light of
the fullest and profoundest and tenderest revelation that the world
has had. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" that is the
cry of Jesus on the cross. I have sometimes thought there never was
an utterance that reveals more amazingly the distance between
feeling and fact. That was how he felt--worn out, betrayed, spat
upon, rejected. We feel that God was more there than ever. As has
been said, if it is not God, it is nothing. "God," says Paul, "was
in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor. 5:19). He
chose the cross; and in choosing it, Christians have always felt, he
revealed God; and that is the centre of the great act of Redemption.
But there is a condition antecedent to understanding the cross. We
have, as we agreed, to ask ourselves, what is the experience which
led him to think as he did? In the simpler language of the Gospels,
quite plain and easy to understand, the call to follow comes
first--the call to deeper association with Jesus Christ in his love
for men. Do not our consciences tell us that, if we really loved
people as Jesus does, if we understood them as sympathetically and
cared as much for them, the cross would be far more intelligible to
us? But if, in plain fact, we do not see why we should bear the
cross for others, why we should deny and obliterate self on this
scale for the salvation of men--how, I ask, to people of such a mind
should Jesus be intelligible? It is not to be expected. In no other
sphere would one dream of it. When a man avows that he does not care
for art or poetry, who would wish to show him poem or picture? How
should a person, who does not care for men, understand the cross?
Deeper association, then, with Jesus in his love of men, in his
agony, in his trust in God--that is the key to all. As we agreed at
the very beginning, we have to know him before we can understand
him.
It all depends in the long run on one thing; and that we find in the
verse with which we started: "And as they followed, they began to be
afraid." But they followed. We can understand their fear. It comes
to a man in this way. If Jesus crucified means anything like what
the Church has said, and has believed; if God is in that man of
Nazareth reconciling the world to Himself; if there is real meaning
in the Incarnation at all; if all this language represents fact;
"then," he may say, "I am wholly at a loss about everything else." A
man builds up a world of thought for himself--we all do--a scheme of
things; and to a man with a thought-out view of the world, it may
come with an enormous shock to realize this incredible idea, this
incredible truth, of God in Christ. Those who have dwelt most on it,
and value it most, may be most apt to understand what I mean by
calling it incredible. Think of it. It takes your breath away. If
that is true, does not the whole plan of my life fall to pieces--my
whole scheme of things for the world, my whole body of intellectual
conceptions? And the man to whom this happens may well say he is
afraid. He is afraid, because it is so strange; because, when you
realize it, it takes you into a new world; you cannot grasp it. A
man whose instinct is for truth may hesitate--will hesitate about a
conception like this. "Is it possible," he will ask himself, "that I
am deluded?" And another thought rises up again and again, "Where
will it take me?" We can understand a man being afraid in that way.
I do not think we have much right _not_ to be afraid. If it is the
incarnation of God, what right have we not to be afraid? Then, of
course, a man will say that to follow Christ involves too much in
the way of sacrifice. He is afraid on lower grounds, afraid of his
family, afraid for his career; he hesitates. To that man the thing
will be unintelligible. The experience of St. Augustine, revealed in
his "Confessions", is illuminative here. He had intellectual
difficulties in his approach to the Christian position, but the rate
of progress became materially quicker when he realized that the
moral difficulties came first, that a practical step had to be
taken. So with us--to decide the issue, how far are we prepared to
go with Jesus? Have we realized the experience behind his thought?
The rule which we laid down at the beginning holds. How far are we
prepared to go in sharing that experience? That will measure our
right to understand him. Once again, in the plainest language, are
we prepared to follow, as the disciples followed, afraid as they
were?
Where is he going? Where is he taking them? They wonder; they do not
know; they are uneasy. But when all is said, the figure on the road
ahead of them, waiting for them now and looking round, is the Jesus
who loves them and whom they love.
And one can imagine the feeling rising in the mind of one and
another of them: "I don't know where he is going, or where he is
taking us, but I must be with him." There we reach again what the
whole story began with--he chose twelve that they might "be with
him." To understand him, we, too, must be with him. What takes men
there? After all, it is, in the familiar phrase, the love of Jesus.
If one loves the leader, it is easier to follow him. But, whether
you understand him or whether you don't, if you love him you are
glad that he chose the cross, and you are glad that you are one of
his people.