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Page 31
Its first and most obvious disclosure is the unchristlikeness, and that
means for us the ungodlikeness, of our world. We study the chief actors
in this event, and conclude that had we known personally Caiaphas, Annas
and Pilate, and even Herod and Judas Iscariot, we should have found them
very like men we meet every day, very like ourselves, with a great deal
in them to interest, admire and attract. And behind them we scan a crowd
of inconspicuous and unnamed persons whose collective feelings and
opinions and consciences were quite as responsible for this occurrence,
as were the men whose names are linked with it; and they impress us as
surprisingly like the public of our own day. It was by no means the
lowest elements in the society of that age who took Jesus to the cross;
they were among the most devout and conscientious and thoughtful people
of their time. Nor was it the worst elements in them which impelled
them to class Him as an undesirable, of whom their world ought to be
rid; their loyalties and convictions were involved in that judgment.
They acted in accord with what was considered the most enlightened and
earnest public opinion. We can think of no more high-minded person in
Jerusalem than young Saul of Tarsus, the student of Gamaliel; and we
know how cordially he approved the course the leaders of Israel had
taken in putting Jesus out of the way.
The cross is the point where God and His children, even the best of
them, clash. At Calvary we see the rocky coast-line of men's thoughts
and feelings against which the incoming tide of God's mind and heart
broke; and we hear the moaning of the resisted waves. The crucifixion is
the exposure of the motives and impulses, the aspirations and
traditions, of human society. Its ungodlikeness is made plain. We get
our definition of sin from Calvary; sin is any unlikeness to the Spirit
of Christ, revealed supremely in that act of self-sacrifice. The
lifeless form of the Son of God on the tree is the striking evidence of
the antagonism between the children of men and their Father. Jesus
completely represented Him, and this broken body on the gibbet was the
inevitable result. Golgotha convinces us of the ruinous forces that live
in and dominate our world; it faces us with the suicidal elements in
men's spirits that drive them to murder the Christlike in themselves; it
tears the veil from each hostile thought and feeling that enacts this
tragedy and exposes the God-murdering character of our sin. Sin is
deicidal. When that Life of light is extinguished, we find a world about
us and within us so dark that its darkness can be felt. The fateful
reality of the battle between love and selfishness, knowledge and
ignorance, between God and whatever thwarts His purpose, is made plain
to us in that pierced and blood-stained Figure on the cross. In the
sense of being the victim of the ungodlike forces in human life, Jesus
bore sin in His own body on the tree.
A second and equally clear disclosure is that of a marvellous
conscience. What takes Jesus Christ to that tragic death? It is
perfectly evident that He need not have come up to Jerusalem and
hazarded this issue; He came of His own accord; and we can think of
dozens of reasons that might have induced Him to remain in Galilee,
going about quietly and accomplishing all manner of good. Why did He
give up the opportunities of a life that was so incalculably
serviceable, and apparently court death? Jesus was always conscientious
in what He did; He felt Himself bound to the lives about Him by the
firmest cords of obligation, and whatever He attempted He deemed He owed
men. If there was a Zacch�us whose honesty and generosity had given way
under the faulty system of revenue-collecting then in vogue, Jesus
considered Himself involved in his moral ruin and obliged to do what He
could to restore him: "I _must_ abide at thy house." If there were sick
folk, their diseases were to Him, in part at least, morally wrong,
devil-caused (to use His First Century way of explaining what we ascribe
to inherited weakness or to blameworthy conditions); and demoniacal
control over lives in God's world was something for which He felt
Himself socially accountable: "_Ought_ not this woman, whom Satan hath
bound, to have been loosed?" If the Church of His day was unable to
reach large sections of the population with its appeal, if it succeeded
very imperfectly in making children of the Most High out of those whom
it did reach, if with its narrowness and bigotry it made of its converts
"children of hell," as Jesus Himself put it, if it exaggerated trifles
and laid too little stress on justice, mercy and fidelity, He, as a
member of that Church, was chargeable with its failures, and must strive
to put a new conscience into God's people: "I _must_ preach the good
tidings of the Kingdom of God." Ibsen, the dramatist, wrote to his
German translator, Ludwig Passarge, "In every new poem or play I have
aimed at my own spiritual emancipation and purification--for a man
shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he
belongs." Jesus felt implicated in all that was not as it should be
among the children of men, and cleared Himself from complicity with it
by setting Himself resolutely to change it. He considered that the human
brotherhood in its sinfulness exacted nothing less of Him.
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