There is some difficulty about the chronology of this period with
which I need not trouble you. It is enough to note that the incident
with which we are concerned occurred during that last journey of our
Lord's towards Jerusalem and Calvary, which occupies so much of this
Gospel of Luke. At what point in that fateful journey it occurred
may be left undetermined. Nor need I enter upon the question as to
whether the specification of time in our text, 'to-day, and to-morrow,
and the third day,' is intended to be taken literally, as some
commentators suppose, in which case it would be brought extremely
near the goal of the journey; or whether, as seems more probable from
the context, it is to be taken as a kind of proverbial expression for
a definite but short period. That the latter is the proper
interpretation seems to be largely confirmed by the fact that there
is a slight variation in the application of the designation of time
in the two verses of our text, 'the third day' in the former verse
being regarded as the period of the perfecting, whilst in the latter
verse it is regarded as part of the period of the progress towards
the perfecting. Such variation in the application is more congruous
with the idea that we have here to deal with a kind of proverbial
expression for a limited and short period. Our Lord is saying in
effect, 'My time is not to be settled by Herod. It is definite, and
it is short. It is needless for him to trouble himself; for in three
days it will be all over. It is useless for him to trouble himself,
or for you Pharisees to plot, for until the appointed days are past
it will not be over, whatever you and he may do.' The course He had
yet to run was plain before Him in this last journey, every step of
which was taken with the Cross full in view.
Now the worst part of death is the anticipation of death; and it
became Him who bore death for every man to drink to its dregs that
cup of trembling which the fear of it puts to all human lips. We
rightly regard it as a cruel aggravation of a criminal's doom if he
is carried along a level, straight road with his gibbet in view at
the end of the march. But so it was that Jesus Christ travelled
through life.
My text comes at a comparatively late period of His history. A few
months or weeks at the most intervened between Him and the end. But
the consciousness which is here so calmly expressed was not of
recent origin. We know that from the period of His transfiguration
He began to give His death a very prominent place in His teaching,
but it had been present with Him long before He thus laid emphasis
upon it in His communications with His disciples. For, if we accept
John's Gospel as historical, we shall have to throw back His first
public references to the end to the very beginning of His career.
The cleansing of the Temple, at the very outset of His course, was
vindicated by Him by the profound words, 'Destroy this Temple, and
in three days I will raise it up.' During the same early visit to
the capital city He said to Nicodemus, 'As Moses lifted up the
serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted
up.' So Christ's career was not like that of many a man who has
begun, full of sanguine hope as a possible reformer and benefactor
of his fellows, and by slow degrees has awakened to the
consciousness that reformers and benefactors need to be martyrs ere
their ideals can be realised. There was no disillusioning in
Christ's experience. From the commencement He knew that He came, not
only to minister, but also 'to give His life a ransom for the many.'
And it was _not_ a mother's eye, as a reverent modern painter
has profoundly, and yet erroneously, shown us in his great work in
our own city gallery--it was not a mother's eye that first saw the
shadow of the Cross fall on her unconscious Son, but it was Himself
that all through His earthly pilgrimage knew Himself to be the Lamb
appointed for the sacrifice. This Isaac toiled up the hill, bearing
the wood and the knife, and knew where and who was the Offering.
Brethren, I do not think that we sufficiently realise the importance
of that element in our conceptions of the life of Jesus Christ. What
a pathos it gives to it all! What a beauty it gives to His
gentleness, to His ready interest in others, to His sympathy for all
sorrow, and tenderness with all sin! How wonderfully it deepens the
significance, the loveliness, and the pathos of the fact that 'the
Son of Man came eating and drinking,' remembering everybody but
Himself, and ready to enter into all the cares and the sorrows of
other hearts, if we think that all the while there stood, grim and
certain, before Him that Calvary with its Cross! Thus, through all
His path, He knew to what He was journeying.
II. Then again, secondly, let me ask you to note here our Lord's own
estimate of the place which His death holds in relation to His whole
work.
Notice that remarkable variation in the expression in our text. 'The
third day I shall be _perfected_.... It cannot be that a
prophet _perish_ out of Jerusalem.' Then, somehow or other, the
'perishing' is 'perfecting.' There may be a doubt as to the precise
rendering of the word translated by 'perfecting'; but it seems to me
that the only meaning congruous with the context is that which is
suggested by the translation of our Authorised Version, and that our
Lord does not mean to say 'on the third day I shall complete My work
of casting out devils and curing diseases,' but that He masses the
whole of His work into two great portions--the one of which
includes all His works and ministrations of miracles and of mercy;
and the other of which contains one unique and transcendent fact,
which outweighs and towers above all these others, and is the
perfecting of His work, and the culmination of His obedience,
service, and sacrifice.
Now, of course, I need not remind you that the 'perfecting' thus
spoken of is not a perfecting of moral character or of individual
nature, but that it is the same perfecting which the Epistle to the
Hebrews speaks about when it says, 'Being made perfect, He became
the Author of eternal salvation to all them which obey Him.' That is
to say, it is His perfecting in regard to office, function, work for
the world, and not the completion or elevation of His individual
character. And this 'perfecting' is effected in His 'perishing.'
Now I want to know in what conceivable sense the death of Jesus Christ
can be the culmination and crown of His work, without which it would
be a torso, an incomplete fragment, a partial fulfilment of the
Father's design, and of His own mission, unless it be that that death
was, as I take it the New Testament with one voice in all its parts
declares it to be, a sacrifice for the sins of the world. I know of
no construing of the fact of the death on the Cross which can do
justice to the plain words of my text, except the old-fashioned
belief that therein He made atonement for sin, and thereby, as the
Lamb of God, bore away the sins of the world.
Other great lives may be crowned by fair deaths, which henceforward
become seals of faithful witness, and appeals to the sentiments of
the heart, but there is no sense that I know of in which from
Christ's death there can flow a mightier energy than from such a
life, unless in the sense that the death is a sacrifice.
Now I know there has been harm done by the very desire to exalt
Christ's great sacrifice on the Cross; when it has been so separated
from His life as that the life has not been regarded as a sacrifice,
nor the death as obedience. Rather the sacrificial element runs
through His whole career, and began when He became flesh and
tabernacled amongst us; but yet as being the apex of it all, without
which it were all-imperfect, and in a special sense redeeming men
from the power of death, that Cross is set forth by His own word.
For Him to 'perish' was to 'be perfected.' As the ancient prophet
long before had said, 'When His soul shall make an offering for
sin,' then, paradoxical as it may seem, the dead Man shall 'see,'
and 'shall see His seed.' Or, as He Himself said, 'If a corn of
wheat fall into the ground it abideth alone, but if it die it
bringeth forth much fruit.'
I do not want to insist upon any theories of Atonement. I do want to
insist that Christ's own estimate of the significance and purpose
and issue of His death shall not be slurred over, but that,
recognising that He Himself regarded it as the perfecting of His
work, we ask ourselves very earnestly how such a conception can be
explained if we strike out of our Christianity the thought of the
sacrifice for the sins of the world. Unless we take Paul's gospel,
'How that He died for our sins according to the Scriptures,' I for
one do not believe that we shall ever get Paul's results, 'Old
things are passed away; all things are become new.' If you strike
the Cross off the dome of the temple, the fires on its altars will
soon go out. A Christianity which has to say much about the life of
Jesus, and knows not what to say about the death of Christ, will be
a Christianity that will neither have much constraining power in our
lives, nor be able to breathe a benediction of peace over our
deaths. If we desire to be perfected in character, we must have
faith in that sacrificial death which was the perfecting of Christ's
work.
III. And so, lastly, notice our Lord's resolved surrender to the
discerned Cross.
There is much in this aspect in the words of my text which I cannot
touch upon now; but two or three points I may briefly notice.
Note then, I was going to say, the superb heroism of His calm
indifference to threats and dangers. He will go hence, and relieve
the tyrant's dominions of His presence; but He is careful to make it
plain that His going has no connection with the futile threatenings
by which they have sought to terrify Him. 'Nevertheless'--although I
do not care at all for them or for him--'nevertheless I must journey
to-day and tomorrow! But that is not because I fear death, but
because I am going to My death; for the prophet must die in
Jerusalem.' We are so accustomed to think of the 'gentle Jesus, meek
and mild' that we forget the 'strong Son of God.' If we were talking
about a man merely, we should point to this calm, dignified answer
as being an instance of heroism, but we do not feel that that word
fits Him. There are too many vulgar associations connected with it,
to be adapted to the gentleness of His fixed purpose that blenched
not, nor faltered, whatsoever came in the way.
Light is far more powerful than lightning. Meekness may be, and in
Him was, wedded to a will like a bar of iron, and a heart that knew
not how to fear. If ever there was an iron hand in a velvet glove it
was the hand of Christ. And although the perspective of virtues
which Christianity has introduced, and which Christ exhibited in His
life, gives prominence to the meek and the gentle, let us not forget
that it also enjoins the cultivation of the 'wrestling thews that
throw the world.' 'Quit you like men; be strong; let all your deeds
be done in charity.'
Then note, too, the solemn law that ruled His life. 'I _must_
walk.' That is a very familiar expression upon His lips. From that
early day when He said, 'Wist ye not that I _must_ be about My
Father's business,' to that last when He said, 'The Son of Man
_must_ be lifted up,' there crops out, ever and anon, in the
occasional glimpses that He allows us to have of His inmost spirit,
this reference of all His actions to a necessity that was laid upon
Him, and to which He ever consciously conformed. That necessity
determined what He calls so frequently 'My time; My hour'; and
influenced the trifles, as they are called, as well as the great
crises, of His career. It was the Father's will which made the Son's
_must_. Hence His unbroken communion and untroubled calm.
If we want to live near God, and if we want to have lives of peace
amidst convulsions, we, too, must yield ourselves to that all
encompassing sovereign necessity, which, like the great laws of the
universe, shapes the planets and the suns in their courses and their
stations; and holds together two grains of dust, or two motes that
dance in the sunshine. To gravitation there is nothing great and
nothing small. God's _must_ covers all the ground of our lives,
and should ever be responded to by our 'I will.'
And that brings me to the last point, and that is, our Lord's glad
acceptance of the necessity and surrender of the Cross. What was it
that made Him willing to take that 'must' as the law of His life?
First, a Son's obedience; second, a Brother's love. There was no
point in Christ's career, from the moment when in the desert He put
away the temptation to win the kingdoms of the world by other than
the God-appointed means, down to the last moment when on His dying
ears there fell another form of the same temptation in the taunt,
'Let Him come down from the cross, and we will believe on Him'; when
He could not, if He had chosen to abandon His mission, have saved
Himself. No compulsion, no outward hand impelling Him, drove Him
along that course which ended on Calvary; but only that He would
save others, and therefore 'Himself He cannot save.'
True, there were natural human shrinkings, just as the weight and
impetus of some tremendous billow buffeting the bows of the ship
makes it quiver; but this never affected the firm hand on the
rudder, and never deflected the vessel from its course. Christ's
'soul was troubled,' but His will was fixed, and it was fixed by His
love to us. Like one of the men who in after ages died for His dear
sake, He may be conceived as refusing to be bound to the stake by
any bands, willing to stand there and be destroyed because He wills.
Nothing fastened Him to the Cross but His resolve to save the world,
in which world was included each of us sitting listening and
standing speaking, now. Oh, brethren! shall not we, moved by such
love, with like cheerfulness of surrender, give ourselves to Him who
gave Himself for us?