'And it came to pass, when the time was come that He
should be received up, He stedfastly set His face to
go to Jerusalem.'--LUKE ix. 51.
There are some difficulties, with which I need not trouble you here,
as to bringing the section of this Gospel to which these words are
the introduction, into its proper chronological place in relation to
the narratives; but, putting these on one side for the present,
there seems no doubt that the Evangelist's intention here is to
represent the beginning of our Lord's last journey from Galilee to
Jerusalem--a journey which was protracted and devious, and the
narrative of which in this Gospel, as you will perceive, occupies a
very large portion of its whole contents.
The picture that is given in my text is that of a clear knowledge of
what waited Him, of a steadfast resolve to accomplish the purpose of
the divine love, and that resolve not without such a shrinking of
some part of His nature that He had 'to _set_ His face to go to
Jerusalem.'
The words come into parallelism very strikingly with a great
prophecy of the Messiah in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, where we
read, 'The Lord God will help me, therefore shall I not be
confounded'--or, as the words have been rendered, 'shall not suffer
myself to be overcome by mockery'--'therefore have I set my face
like a flint.' In the words both of the Prophet and of the
Evangelist there is the same idea of a resolved will, as the result
of a conscious effort directed to prevent circumstances which tended
to draw Him back, from producing their effect. The graphic narrative
of the Evangelist Mark adds one more striking point to that picture
of high resolve. He tells us, speaking of what appears to be the
final epoch in this long journey to the Cross, '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.' What a picture
that is, Christ striding along the steep mountain path far in
advance--impelled by that same longing which sighs so wonderfully
in His words, 'How am I straitened till it be accomplished,'--with
solemn determination in the gentle face, and His feet making haste to
run in the way of the Father's commandments! And lagging behind, the
little group, awed into almost stupor, and shrinking in
uncomprehending terror from that light of unconquerable resolve and
more than mortal heroism that blazed in His eyes!
If we fix, then, on this picture, and as we are warranted in doing,
regard it as giving us a glimpse of the very heart of Christ, I
think it may well suggest to us considerations that may tend to make
more real to us that sacrifice that He made, more deep to us that
love by which He was impelled, and may perhaps tend to make our love
more true and our resolve more fixed. 'He set His face to go to
Jerusalem.'
I. First, then, we may take, I think, from these words, the thought
of the perfect clearness with which all through Christ's life He
foresaw the inevitable and purposed end.
Here, indeed, the Evangelist leaps over the suffering of the Cross,
and thinks only of the time when He shall be lifted up upon the
throne; but in that calm and certain prevision which, in His
manhood, the Divine Son of God did exercise concerning His own
earthly life, between Him and the glory there ever stood the black
shadow thrown by Calvary. When He spoke of being 'lifted up,' He
ever meant by that pregnant and comprehensive word, at once man's
elevation of Him on the accursed tree, and the Father's elevation of
Him upon the throne at His right hand! The future was, if I may so
say, in His eye so foreshortened that the two things ran into one,
and the ambiguous expression did truly connote the one undivided act
of prescient consciousness in which He at once recognised the Cross
and the throne. And so, when the time was come that He should be
received up, He 'steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem.'
Now, there is another thing to be noticed. That vision of the
certain end which here fills His mind and impels His conduct, was by
no means new with Him. Modern unbelieving commentators and critics
upon the Gospels have tried their best to represent Christ's life
as, at a certain point in it, being modified by His recognition of
the fact that His mission was a failure, and that there was nothing
left for Him but martyrdom! I believe that that is as untrue to the
facts of the Gospel story upon any interpretation of them, as it is
repulsive to the instincts of devout hearts; and without troubling
you with thoughts about it I need only refer to two words of His.
When was it that He said, 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I
will build it up'? When was it that He said, 'As Moses lifted up the
serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted
up'? The one saying was uttered at the very beginning of His public
work, and the other in His conversation with Nicodemus. On the
testimony of these two sayings, if there were none else, I think
there is no option but to believe that from the first there stood
clear before Him the necessity and the certainty of the Cross, and
that it was no discovery made at a certain point of His course.
And then, remember that we are not to think of Him as, like many an
earthly hero and martyr, regarding a violent and bloody death as
being the very probable result of faithful boldness, but to believe
that He, looking on from the beginning to that end, regarded it
always as being laid upon Him by a certain divine necessity, into
which necessity He entered with the full submission and acquiescence
of His own will, and from the beginning knew that Calvary was the
work for which He had come, and that His love would fail of its
expression, and the divine purpose would fail of its realisation,
and His whole mission would fail of all its meaning, unless He died
for men. The martyr looks to the scaffold and says, 'It stands in my
way, and I must either be untrue to conscience or I must go there,
and so I will go.' Christ said, 'The Cross is in My path, and on it
and from it I shall exercise the influence, to exercise which I have
come into the world, and there I shall _do_ the thing which I
came forth from the Father to do.' He thought of His death not as
the end of His work, but as the centre-point of it; not as the
termination of His activity, but as its climax, to which all the
rest was subordinated, and without which all the rest was nought. He
does not die, and so seal a faithful life by an heroic death,--but
dies, so bearing and bearing away man's sin. He regarded from the
beginning 'the glory that should follow,' and the suffering through
which He had to wade to reach it, in one and the same act of
prescience, and said, 'Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is
written of Me.'
And I think, dear friends, if we carried with us more distinctly
than we do that one simple thought, that in all the human joys, in
all the apparently self-forgetting tenderness, of that Lord who had
a heart for every sorrow and an ear for every complaint, and a hand
open as day and full of melting charity for every need--that in
every moment of that life, in the boyhood, in the dawning manhood,
in the maturity of His growing human powers--there was always
present one black shadow, towards which He ever went straight with
the consent of His will and with the clearest eye, we should
understand something more of how His life as well as His death was a
sacrifice for us sinful men!
We honour and love men who crush down their own sorrows in order to
help their fellows. We wonder with almost reverence when we see some
martyr, in sight of the faggots, pause to do a kindness to some
weeping heart in the crowd, or to speak a cheering word. We admire
the leisure and calm of spirit which he displays. But all these
pale, and the very comparison may become an insult, before that
heart which ever discerned Calvary, and never let the sight hinder
one deed of kindness, nor silence one gracious word, nor check one
throb of sympathy.
II. Still further, the words before us lead to a second
consideration, which I have just suggested in my last sentence--Our
Lord's perfect willingness for the sacrifice which He saw before
Him.
We have here brought into the narrowest compass, and most clearly
set forth, the great standing puzzle of all thought, which can only
be solved by action. On the one side there is the distinctest
knowledge of a divine purpose that _will_ be executed; on the
other side there is the distinctest consciousness that at each step
towards the execution of it He is constrained by no foreign and
imposed necessity, but is going to the Cross by His own will. 'The
Son of Man must be lifted up.' 'It _became_ Him to make the
Captain of salvation perfect through sufferings.' 'It _behoved_
Him to be made in all points like His brethren.' The Eternal Will of
the Father, the purpose purposed before the foundation of the world,
the solemn prophecies from the beginning of time, constituted the
necessity, and involved the certainty, of His death on the Cross.
But are we, therefore, to think that Jesus Christ was led along the
path that ended there, by a force which overbore and paralysed His
human will? Was not His life, and especially His death,
_obedience_? Was there not, therefore, in Him, as in us all,
the human will that could cheerfully submit; and must there not,
then, have been, at each step towards the certain end, a fresh act
of submission and acceptance of the will of the Father that had sent
Him?
'Clear knowledge of the end as divinely appointed and certain'; yes,
one might say, and if so, there could have been no voluntariness in
treading the path that leads to it. 'Voluntariness in treading the
path that leads to it, and if so, there could have been no divine
ordination of the end.' Not so! When human thought comes, if I may
so say, full butt against a stark, staring contradiction like that,
it is no proof that either of the propositions is false. It is only
like the sign-boards that the iceman puts upon the thin ice,
'dangerous!' a warning that that is not a place for us to tread. We
have to keep a firm hold of what is certified to us, on either side,
by its appropriate evidence, and leave the reconciliation, if it can
ever be given to finite beings, to a higher wisdom, and, perchance,
to another world!
But that is a digression from my more immediate purpose, which is
simply to bring before our minds, as clearly as I can, that perfect,
continuous, ever-repeated willingness, expressing itself in a chain
of constant acts that touch one upon the other, which Christ
manifested to embrace the Cross, and to accomplish what was at once
the purpose of the Father's will and the purpose of His own.
And it may be worth while, just for a moment, to touch lightly upon
some of the many points which bring out so clearly in these Gospel
narratives the wholly and purely voluntary character of Christ's
death.
Take, for instance, the very journey which I am speaking of now. Christ
went up to Jerusalem, says my text. What did He go there for? He went,
as you will see, if you look at the previous circumstance,--He went in
order, if I might use such a word, to precipitate the collision, and to
make His Crucifixion certain. He was under the ban of the Sanhedrim;
but perfectly safe as long as He had stopped up among the hills of
Galilee. He was as unsafe when He went up to Jerusalem as John Huss
when he went to the Council of Constance with the Emperor's safe-conduct
in his belt; or as a condemned heretic would have been in the old days,
if he had gone and stood in that little dingy square outside the palace
of the Inquisition at Rome, and there, below the obelisk, preached his
heresies! Christ had been condemned in the council of the nation; but
there were plenty of hiding-places among the Galilean hills, and the
frontier was close at hand, and it needed a long arm to reach from
Jerusalem all the way across Samaria to the far north. Knowing that,
He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem, and, if I might use
the expression, went straight into the lion's mouth. Why? Because He
chose to die.
And, then, take another circumstance. If you will look carefully at
the Scripture narrative, you will find that from about this point in
His life onwards there comes a distinct change in one very important
respect. Before this He shunned publicity; after this He courted it.
Before this, when He spoke in veiled words of His sufferings, He
said to His disciples, 'Tell no man till the Son of man be risen
from the dead.' Hereafter though there are frequent prophecies of
His sufferings, there is no repetition of that prohibition. He goes
up to Jerusalem, and His triumphal entry adds fuel to the fire. His
language at the last moment appeals to the publicity of His final
visit to that city--'Was I not daily with you in the Temple and ye
laid no hands upon Me?' Everything that He could do He does to draw
attention to Himself--everything, that is to say, within the limits
of the divine decorum, which was ever observed in His life, of whom
it was written long, long ago, 'He shall not strive, nor cry, nor
cause His voice to be heard in the streets.' There is, then, a most
unmistakable change to be felt by any who will carefully read the
narratives in their bearing upon this one point--a resolve to draw
the eyes of the enemy upon Himself.
And to the same purpose, did you ever notice how calmly, with full
self-consciousness, distinctly understanding what He is doing,
distinctly knowing to what it will lead, He makes His words ever
heavier and heavier, and more and more sharply pointed with
denunciations, as the last loving wrestle between Himself and the
scribes and Pharisees draws near to its bloody close? Instead of
softening He hardens His tones--if I dare use the word, where all is
the result of love--at any rate He keeps no terms; but as the danger
increases His words become plainer and sterner, and approach as near
as ever _His_ words could do to bitterness and rebuke. It was
then, whilst passionate hate was raging round Him, and eager eyes
were gleaming revenge, that He poured out His sevenfold woes upon
the 'hypocrites,' the 'blind guides,' the 'fools,' the 'whited
sepulchres,' the 'serpents,' the 'generation of vipers,' whom He
sees filling up the measure of their fathers in shedding His
righteous blood.
And again, the question recurs--Why? And again, besides other
reasons, which I have not time to touch upon here, the answer, as it
seems to me, must unmistakably be, Because He willed to die, and He
willed to die because He loved us.
The same lesson is taught, too, by that remarkable incident
preserved for us by the Gospel of John, of the strange power which
accompanied His avowal of Himself to the rude soldiers who had come
to seize Him, and which struck them to the ground in terror and
impotence. One flash comes forth to tell of the sleeping lightning
that He will not use, and then having revealed the might that could
have delivered Him from their puny arms, He returns to His attitude
of self-surrender for our sakes, with those wonderful words which
tell how He gave up Himself that we might be free, 'If ye seek Me,
let these go their way.' The scene is a parable of the whole work of
Jesus; it reveals His power to have shaken off every hand laid upon
Him, His voluntary submission to His else impotent murderers, and
the love which moved Him to the surrender.
Other illustrations of the same sort I must leave untouched at
present, and only remind you of the remarkable peculiarity of the
language in which all the Evangelists describe the supreme moment
when Christ passed from His sufferings. 'When He had cried with a
loud voice, He yielded up the ghost,'--He sent away the spirit--'He
breathed out' (His spirit), 'He gave up the ghost.' In simple truth,
He 'committed His spirit' into the Father's hand. And I believe that
it is an accurate and fair comment to say, that that is no mere
euphemism for death, but carries with it the thought that He was
_active_ in that moment; that the nails and the spear and the
Cross did not kill Christ, but that Christ _willed_ to die! And
though it is true on the one side, as far as men's hatred and
purpose are concerned. 'Whom with wicked hands ye have crucified and
slain'; on the other side, as far as the deepest verity of the fact
is concerned, it is still more true, 'I have power to lay it down,
and I have power to take it again.'
But at all events, whatever you may think of such an exposition as
that, the great principle which my text illustrates for us at an
earlier stage is, at least, irrefragably established--that our dear
Lord, when He died, died, because He _willed_ to do so. He was
man and therefore He _could_ die; but He was not man in such
fashion as that He _must_ die. In His bodily frame was the
possibility, not the necessity, of death. And that being so, the
very fact of His death is the most signal proof that He is Lord of
death as well as of life. He dies not because He must, He dies not
because of faintness and pain and wounds. These and they who
inflicted them had no power at all over Him. He chooses to die; and
He wills it because He wills to fulfil the eternal purpose of divine
love, which is His purpose, and to bring life to the world. His hour
of weakness was His hour of strength. They lifted Him on a cross,
and it became a throne. In the moment when death seemed to conquer
Him, He was really using it that He might abolish it. When He gave
tip the ghost, He showed Himself Lord of death as marvellously and
as gloriously as when He burst its bands and rose from the grave;
for this grisly shadow, too, was His servant, and He says to him,
'Come, and he cometh; do this, and he doeth it.' 'Thou didst
overcome the sharpness of death' when Thou didst willingly bow Thy
head to it, and didst die not because Thou _must_, but because
Thou _wouldest_.
III. Still further, let me remind you how, in the language of this
verse, there is also taught us that there was in Christ a natural
human shrinking from the Cross.
The steadfast and resolved will held its own, overcoming the natural
human reluctance. 'He _set_ His face.' People are afraid to
talk--and the instinct, the reverent instinct, is right, however we
may differ from the application of it--people are afraid to talk, as
if there was any shrinking in Christ from the Cross. I believe there
was. Was the agony in Gethsemane a reality or a shadow, when He
said, 'O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass?' What did
that prayer mean, if there was not something in His nature that
recoiled from the agony and mysterious horror of these awful hours?
Let us take heed lest in our reverence we destroy the very notion on
which our hope rests--that of Christ as suffering. For that one word
involves all that I say--Did Christ _suffer_ or did He not? If
He suffered, then human nature shrank from it. The two ideas are
correlative, you cannot part them--suffering and reluctance, a
perfectly innocent, natural, inevitable, human instinct, inseparable
from corporeity, that makes men recoil from pain. 'He endured the
Cross,' says the Book--if there was not reluctance what was there to
'endure'? 'Despising the shame'--if there was not something from
which He shrank, what was there to 'despise'? 'He _set_ His
face'--if there was not something in Him that hung back, what need
was there for the hardening of the countenance? If Christ has
suffered, then His flesh and blood quivered beforehand with the
pangs and shrank from these, and He would have been spared the cup.
Such instinctive recoil is not evil, it is not rebellion, it is not
unwillingness to submit to the Father's will. His whole being clave
to that, and never swerved from it for one moment. But still,
because the path was darkened by mysterious blackness, and led to a
Cross, therefore He, even He, who did always the things that pleased
the Father, and ever delighted to do His will, needed to '_set_
His face' to go up to the mountain of sacrifice.
And now, if you will take along with that the other thought that I
suggested at the beginning of these remarks, and remember that this
shrinking must have been as continuous as the vision, and that this
overcoming of it must have been as persistent and permanent as the
resolve, I think we get a point of view from which to regard that
life of Christ's--full of pathos, full of tender appeals to our
hearts and to our thankfulness.
All along that consecrated road He walked, and each step represented
a separate act of will, and each separate act of will represented a
triumph over the reluctance of flesh and blood. As we may say, every
time that He planted His foot on the flinty path the blood flowed.
Every step was a pain like that of a man enduring the ordeal and
walking on burning iron or sharp steel.
The old taunt of His enemies, as they stood beneath His Cross, might
have been yielded to--'If Thou be the Son of God, come down and we
will believe.' I ask why did not He? I know that, to those who think
less loftily of Christ than we who believe Him to be the Son of God,
the words sound absurd--but I for one believe that the only thing
that kept Him there, the only answer to that question is--Because He
loved me with an everlasting love, and died to redeem me. Because of
that love, He came to earth; because of that love, He tabernacled
among us; because of that love, He gazed all His life long on the
Cross of shame; because of that love, He trod unfaltering, with
eager haste and solemn resolve, the rough and painful road; because
of that love, He listened not to the voice that at the beginning
tempted Him to win the world for Himself by an easier path; because
of that love, He listened not--though He could have done so--to the
voices that at the end taunted Him with their proffered allegiance
if He would come down from the Cross; because of that love, He gave
up His spirit. And through all the weariness and contumely and pain,
that love held His will fixed to its purpose, and bore Him over
every hindrance that barred His path. Many waters quench it not.
_That_ love is stronger than death; mightier than all opposing
powers; deep and great beyond all thought or thankfulness. It
silences all praise. It beggars all recompense. To believe it is
life. To feel it is heaven.
But one more remark I would make on this whole subject. We are far
too much accustomed to think of our Saviour as presenting only the
gentle graces of human nature. He presents those that belong to the
strong side of our nature just as much. In Him are all power, manly
energy, resolved consecration; everything which men call heroism is
there. 'He steadfastly set His face.' And everything which men call
tenderest love, most dewy pity, most marvellous and transcendent
patience, is all there too. The type of manhood and the type of
womanhood are both and equally in Jesus Christ; and He is _the_
Man, whole, entire, perfect, with all power breathed forth in all
gentleness, with all gentleness made steadfast and mighty by His
strength. 'And he said unto me, Behold the lion of the tribe of
Judah. And I beheld, and lo, a lamb!'--the blended symbols of kingly
might, and lowly meekness, power in love, and love in power. The
supremest act of resolved consecration and heroic self-immolation
that ever was done upon earth--an act which we degrade by
paralleling it with any other--was done at the bidding of love that
pitied us. As we look up at that Cross we know not whether is more
wonderfully set forth the pitying love of Christ's most tender
heart, or the majestic energy of Christ's resolved will. The blended
rays pour out, dear brethren, and reach to each of us. Do not look
to that great sacrifice with idle wonder. Bend upon it no eye of
mere curiosity. Beware of theorising merely about what it reveals
and what it does. Turn not away from it carelessly as a twice-told
tale. But look, believing that all that divine and human love pours
out its treasure upon you, that all that firmness of resolved
consecration and willing surrender to the death of the Cross was for
you. Look, believing that you had then, and have now, a place in His
heart, and in His sacrifice. Look, remembering that it was because
He would save you, that Himself He could not save,
And as, from afar, we look on that great sight, let His love melt
our hearts to an answering fervour, and His fixed will give us, too,
strength to delight in obedience, to set our faces like a flint. Let
the power of His sacrifice, and the influence of His example which
that sacrifice commends to our loving copy, and the grace of His
Spirit whom He, since that sacrifice, pours upon men, so mould us
that we, too, like Him, may 'quit us like men, be strong,' and all
our strength and 'all our deeds' be wielded and 'done in charity.'