2. Man is, by his very nature, capable of sharing in, becoming a
partaker of, the Divine life.
The earliest known form of sacrifice is the killing of the sacred animal
of the tribe, the animal which was held to be the representative of the
tribal god, followed by the sacred tribal meal upon the victim. There,
in this earliest _totem_ rite, we have already implicit the two great
ideas of sacrifice, the communion of man with God by actual participation
in the Divine life (the feast on the sacrifice), and that this communion
is rendered possible by the death of the sacred victim.
These ideas were very largely obscured in ancient times by the conception
of sacrifice as a gift, a tribute, or a propitiation. But these ideas,
though they bulk largely in modern minds unacquainted with the recent
researches of specialists in comparative religion, were, in fact, of
later growth. They are accretions which, by a very natural and
intelligible process, have overlain the oldest and really fundamental
ideas which lie at the root and origin of sacrifice.
These two ideas were, however, present all through, in what we might
perhaps call (without committing ourselves to any psychological theories)
the racial subconsciousness. They were always there, ready to be evoked
by the appropriate stimulus, whenever applied. They constituted the real
essence and meaning of the ancient mysteries, which from 800 B.C.
downwards formed so important a part of the real religion of the ancient
world, and which have left their mark on the language of St. Paul and
other early Christian teachers. These mysteries, roughly and broadly
speaking, were of the nature of a religious reformation. They
represented the discarding of the propitiatory idea in favour of the
original meaning of sacrifice as communion.
These earliest notions of sacrifice really underlay the sacrifices of the
Old Testament, especially in the case of the peace offerings. But, in
these, we become conscious of a third element, the conviction that sin is
a barrier to the Divine Communion. When the worshipper, in the
sin-offering, laid his hands upon the head of the victim, he was, by a
significant action, repudiating his sin, and presenting the spotlessness
of the victim as his own, his own in will and intention henceforth. The
blood was sprinkled upon the altar as the symbol of the life offered to
and accepted by God; it was sprinkled upon the worshipper as the sign of
the communication to him of that pure Divine life, by virtue of his
participation in which man can alone approach God.
All this can be summed up in one word, "symbolism." All the value of
ancient sacrifices, including those of the Old Testament, lay wholly in
the moral and spiritual truths which, in a series of outward and
significant actions, they stood for and symbolised. To attach objective
value to that which was external in the Old Testament sacrifices, or even
to the outward accompaniments of the Supreme Sacrifice, the Death of
Jesus Christ upon the Cross, is to be guilty of a relapse from the
Christian, or even the prophetic spirit, into the late and debased pagan
idea of sacrifice, from which the ancient mysteries of the Eastern and
Greek world were a reaction. Certainly, the outward sufferings of our
Lord should sometimes form the subject of our thoughts as a motive, and
one of the strongest motives, to penitence and love. But to lay such
stress on these as to exalt them into the real meaning of the sacrifice
of Christ, as constituting its value as a sacrifice, to regard them as in
some way changing the Mind of God towards us, is contrary to the whole
spirit of the New Testament. What the real teaching of the gospels is in
the matter, is made plain by two significant facts.
(i) While it is quite clear that the inspired writers regard the Death
of Christ, and the Christian life, as being, each of them, in a real
sense, a sacrifice, direct sacrificial language is applied sparingly to
the former, but without stint or hesitation to the latter. This is a
point which has been strikingly brought out by Professor Loftus in his
recent work on _The Ethics of the Atonement_.
(ii) While devoting a large portion of their narrative to the account of
the Death of Christ, they exercised a very great and marked reserve as
regards the physical details of the Crucifixion. In this respect the
gospels are in harmony with the earliest Christian representations, as
distinguished from the repulsive realism in which the medieval artists
revelled.
To ask, then, in what sense the Death of Christ was a sacrifice, is to
ask how far that Death realised the moral and spiritual truths which
underlay the ancient institution of sacrifice, and to which all
sacrifices ultimately pointed.
1. The first of these ideas, as we have seen, is that death is necessary
to the fulness of life, that life can only be won by the surrender of
life. That ancient conception constitutes the fundamental teaching of
Christ: "He that willeth to save his life, shall lose it, and he who
willeth to lose his life . . . shall save it unto life eternal." And of
that great truth, which is nothing less than the formative principle of
the Christian life, the Cross was the supreme expression "Herein have we
come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us, and we
ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."
The laying down of life, self-sacrifice, of which the Cross is the
highest manifestation, alone brings life, alone is fruitful. "Except a
grain of corn fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone: but if it
die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
Selfishness, whether as self-assertion or self-seeking, is essentially
barren and unproductive, both in regard to the lives of others and our
own lives. Only so far as we are, in some real sense, laying down our
lives for others, denying (not that which belongs to us, but) ourselves,
for their sake, can we hope to influence other persons for good, to be
the cause of moral fruitfulness, of spiritual life in them. And for
ourselves, we only win the fulness of our own lives, so far as we lose
them in the lives of others, so far as we identify ourselves with their
joys, sufferings, interests, pursuits, well-being; for our lives are
real, and rich, and full exactly in proportion to the extent to which
they include the lives of others.
And the Death of Christ ceases to be an unintelligible mystery, when it
is regarded as the consummation of His Life of self-sacrifice. "Christ
also pleased not Himself." "He went about doing good." And at last, in
the fulfilment of a mission received of the Father for the good of men,
His brethren, He crowned the Life, in which self-pleasing was not, by His
Death, the necessary result, as we have seen, of His carrying out that
mission in a world of sinful men. For Himself, that Death was, so He
willed, the portal to the glory of the Resurrection. And the fruits of
His uttermost self-sacrifice are still, after all these centuries, being
gathered in, as in innumerable souls brought back from the darkness of
sin into the light of the Divine Life, "He sees of the travail of His
soul, and is satisfied."
2. But what answers, in the Death of Christ, to that in regard to which
the death of the victim served but as a means to an end, the sacred meal
of communion? The sacrificial principle has been laid down by the writer
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "without shedding of blood, there is no
remission." Blood to the modern mind speaks of death, and usually of a
violent and painful death. To the ancient mind, heathen or Israelite,
blood stood for and symbolised life. "The Blood makes atonement by the
Life that is in it." Man can only be made at one with God, can only have
"remission of sins"--the barrier which sin interposes to communion with
God can only be removed, he can only be restored to that Divine
fellowship for which he was made--by actual reception into himself of the
Divine life, of the life of Him Who, being God, became man, in order to
impart His own Divine Life to our humanity which He assumed. And
Christ's Life only then became available for men, capable of being
imparted to each man, when it had passed through Death to Resurrection.
If the grain die--only if it die first--"it bringeth forth much fruit."
"If I go not away, the Comforter, the Paraclete, will not come unto you."
Only by virtue of that "going away" of Christ, which includes His Death,
Resurrection, and Ascension, could the Spirit which indwells His
glorified manhood, come to impart the life of Christ to the members of
the Body of Christ. Pentecost is the final consummation of man's
atonement and redemption.
We may still more briefly summarise these two fundamental principles
which constitute the sacrificial aspect of the Death of Christ.
1. Christ died, not that we should be excused from offering, but that we
might be enabled to offer the one acceptable sacrifice to God, that is,
the sacrifice of ourselves in that service of God which is the service of
our fellow-men.
2. Christ died, in order that we might receive His Divine Life into
ourselves, through the indwelling Spirit of Christ bestowed by the
Ascended Lord.
Thus the Death of Christ is not merely a sacrifice, one out of many, or
(as has been so mistakenly taught) simply the last of a series. It is
rather the one sacrifice which alone realises the ideas of which all
other so-called sacrifices were but the faint adumbrations. As the one
true sacrifice it stands at the end of an age-long spiritual evolution.
In the physical evolution, the first protoplasmic cell was not man,
though it pointed forward to man, and implied man. So the _totem_ feast
and the old Jewish rites, were not truly and genuinely sacrifices, though
both pointed forward to and implied the realisation of sacrifice in the
Death of Christ. That Death was the fulfilment of the universal human
aspiration, the assurance of the truth of that ancient dream of mankind,
that man was capable of being, and might attain to be "partaker of the
Divine nature."
And this whole teaching of ancient ritual as fulfilled and accomplished
on the Cross of Jesus Christ, is summed up for us in our Christian
Eucharist where on the one hand we, in union with the sacrifice of
Christ, "offer and present ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a
reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice "to God; and, on the other hand,
by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of man, become
partakers of Him Who, in the words of St. Athanasius, "was made man, that
we might be made God," became partaker of our human nature, in order that
we might realise the end of our manhood, by being made partakers of His
Divine Life.