Part 5 (1/2)

Our Father is the great public Spirit of the universe, the most responsible and responsive Being in existence. The needs of all are claims on His service, their sins are burdens of guilt on His conscience, their joys and woes enlist His sympathy. He has His life in the lives of His children. The Spirit is G.o.d's Life in men, G.o.d living in them. To possess His will to serve, His sense of obligation, His interest and compa.s.sion, is to have the Holy Spirit dwelling and regnant in us. It was so that the Father's Spirit possessed Jesus and made His abode in Him; and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son in the Christian community.

And what a difference it makes whether we feel that the responsibilities our consciences force us to a.s.sume, the sympathies in which our hearts go out, the interests we are impelled to take, the resolves and longings and purposes within us, are just our own, or are G.o.d's inspirations! If they are simply ours, who knows what will come of them? If they are His, we can yield to them a.s.sured that it is G.o.d who worketh in us to will and to do of His good pleasure.

Our faith in G.o.d as Self-imparting by His Spirit makes possible our confident expectation that He can and will incarnate Himself socially in the whole family of His children, as once He was incarnate in Jesus.

Christians who devote themselves to fas.h.i.+oning social relations after the mind of Christ, and inspiring their brethren with His faith and purpose, are conscious that through them the Spirit of G.o.d is entering more and more into His world, revealing the Father in the new community of love, which is being born. Sir Edward Burne-Jones once wrote: ”That was an awful word of Ruskin's, that artists paint G.o.d for the world.

There's a lump of greasy pigment at the end of Michael Angelo's hog-bristle brush, and by the time it has been laid on the stucco, there is something there, that all men with eyes recognize as Divine. Think what it means: it is the power of bringing G.o.d into the world--making G.o.d manifest!” Men and women who are molding homes and industries, towns and nations, so that they embody love, and influencing for righteousness the least and lowest of the children of men, are putting before a whole world's eyes the Divine, are helping build the habitation of G.o.d in the Spirit. Through them G.o.d imparts Himself to mankind.

G.o.d over all--the Father to whom we look up with utter trust, and from whom moment by moment we take our lives in obedient devotion; G.o.d through all--through Jesus supremely, and through every child who opens his life to Him with the willingness of Jesus; G.o.d in all--the directing, empowering, sanctifying Spirit, producing in us characters like Christ's, employing and equipping us for the work of His Kingdom, and revealing Himself in a community more and more controlled by love: this is our Christian thought of the Divine--”one G.o.d and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

CHAPTER V

THE CROSS

The human life in which succeeding generations have found their picture of G.o.d ended in a b.l.o.o.d.y tragedy. It was a catastrophe which all but wrecked the loyalty of Jesus' little group of followers; it was an event which proved a stumbling block in their endeavor to win their countrymen to their Lord, and which seemed folly to the great ma.s.s of outsiders in the Roman world. It was a most baffling circ.u.mstance for them to explain either to themselves or to others; but, as they lived on under the control of their Lord's Spirit, this tragedy came gradually to be for them the most richly significant occurrence in His entire history; and ever since the cross has been the distinctive symbol of the Christian faith. It had a variety of meanings for the men of the New Testament; and it has had many more for their followers in subsequent centuries. We are not limited to viewing it through the eyes of others, nor to interpreting it with their thoughts. We are enriched as we try to share their experiences of its power and light; but we must go to Calvary for ourselves, and look at the Crucified with the eyes of our own hearts, and ask ourselves of what that cross convinces us.

Its first and most obvious disclosure is the unchristlikeness, and that means for us the unG.o.dlikeness, 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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 unG.o.dlikeness 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d-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 G.o.d 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 unG.o.dlike 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 accomplis.h.i.+ng 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 Zacchaeus 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 G.o.d'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 h.e.l.l,” 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 G.o.d's people: ”I _must_ preach the good tidings of the Kingdom of G.o.d.” Ibsen, the dramatist, wrote to his German translator, Ludwig Pa.s.sarge, ”In every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritual emanc.i.p.ation 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.

It is commonly taught that the Lord's Prayer is a form that was suggested by Jesus to His disciples, but that it could not have been a prayer which He Himself used with them, because of its plea for forgiveness. It is true that it is introduced in our Gospels as provided by the Master for His followers, ”When _ye_ pray, say.” But millions of Christians instinctively a.s.sociate it with Jesus' own utterances to the Father. And may they not be correct? ”Forgive us _our_ debts,” is a social confession of sin, in which our Lord may well have joined, just as He underwent John's baptism of repentance, though Himself sinless, in order to fulfil all righteousness. He regarded Himself as indebted; His work, His teaching, His suffering, His death, were not to Him a gift which He was at liberty to make or to withhold. In the ”must” so often on His lips we cannot miss the sense of social obligation. He was (to borrow suggestive lines of Sh.e.l.ley's)

a nerve o'er which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of the earth.

They came home to His conscience, and He could not shake them off. They were so many claims on Him; He felt He owed the world a life, and He was ready to pay the debt to the last drop of His blood. ”The Son of man _must_ suffer and be killed.” To the end He cast about for some less awful way of meeting His obligations. ”My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pa.s.s away from Me.” But when no other alternative seemed conscientiously possible to Him, He went to Golgotha with a sense of moral satisfaction. ”_Ought_ not the Christ to have suffered these things?” Without any disturbing consciousness of having personally added to the world's evil, with no plea for pardon for His own sins on His lips but only for those of others, His conscience was burdened with the injustice and disloyalties, the brutalities and failures, of the family of G.o.d, in which He was a Son, and He bore His brothers' sins on His spirit, and gave Himself to the utmost to end them.

A third disclosure of the cross is the incomparable sympathy of the Victim. How shall we account for His recoil from the thought of dying, for His shrinking from this death as from something which sickened Him, for the darkness and anguish of His soul in Gethsemane at the prospect, and for the abysmal sense of forsakenness on the cross? His sensitiveness of heart made Him feel the pain and shame of other men, a pain and shame they were frequently too stolid and obtuse to feel. He could not see able-bodied and willing workmen standing idle in the marketplace because no man had hired them, without sharing their discouragement and bitterness, nor prodigals making fools of themselves without feeling the disgrace of their unfilial folly. His parables are so vivid because He has Himself lived in the experiences of others.

”_Cor cordium_” is the inscription placed upon Sh.e.l.ley's grave; and it is infinitely more appropriate for the Man of Nazareth. In His sensitive sympathy we are aware of

Desperate tides of the whole great world's anguish Forc'd through the channels of a single heart.

We cannot account for His recoil from the cross, save as we remember His sense of kins.h.i.+p with those who were reddening their hands with the blood of the Representative of their G.o.d. If we have ever stood beside a devoted wife in the hour when her husband is disgraced, or been in a home where sons and daughters are overwhelmed with a mother's shame, we have some faint idea of how Jesus felt the guilt of His relatives when they slew Him. He was the conscience of His less conscientious brethren: ”the reproaches of them that reproached Thee, fell on Me.” He realized, as they did not, the enormity of what they were doing. The utter and hideous unG.o.dlikeness of the world was expressed for Him in those who would have none of Him, and cried: ”Away with Him! Crucify, crucify Him.” His keenness of conscience and His acute sympathy brought to His lips the final cry, ”My G.o.d, My G.o.d, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” The sinless Sufferer on the cross, in His oneness with His brethren, felt their wrongdoing His own; acknowledged in His forsakenness that G.o.d could have nothing to do with it, for it was anti-G.o.d; confessed that it inevitably separated from Him and He felt Himself in such kins.h.i.+p and sympathy with sinning men that He was actually away from G.o.d. ”That was h.e.l.l,” said old Rabbi Duncan, ”and He tasted it.”

But our minds revolt. We do not believe that G.o.d deserted His Son; on the contrary we are certain that He was never closer to Him. Shall we question the correctness of Jesus' personal experience, and call Him mistaken? We seem compelled either to do violence to His authority in the life of the spirit with G.o.d, or to our conviction of G.o.d's character. Perhaps there is another alternative. A century ago the physicist, Thomas Young, discovered the principle of the interference of light. Under certain conditions light added to light produces darkness; the light waves interfere with and neutralize each other. Is there not something a.n.a.logous to this in the sphere of the spirit? Is not every new unveiling of G.o.d accompanied by unsettlements and seeming darkenings of the soul, temporary obscurations of the Divine Face? In all our advances in religious knowledge are we not liable to undergo

Fallings from us, vanis.h.i.+ngs, Blank misgivings of the creature?

And may it not have been G.o.d's coming closer than ever to the Son of His love, or rather the Son's coming closer to the Father, as He entirely shared and expressed G.o.d's own sympathy and conscience, and was made perfect by the things which He suffered, that wrought in His sinless soul the awful blackness of the feeling of abandonment?

In the sense of suffering sin's force, of conscientiously accepting its burden, of sensitively sympathizing with the guilty, Jesus bore sin in His own body on the tree.

And, as we stand facing the Crucified, we cannot escape a sense of personal connection with that tragedy. The solidarity of the human family in all its generations has been brought home to us in countless ways by modern teachers; we are members one of another, and as we scan the cross this is a family catastrophe in which the actors are our kinsmen, and the blood of the Victim stains us as sharers of our brothers' crime. And, further, as we look into the motives of Christ's murderers--devout Pharisee and conservative Sadducee, Roman politician and false friend, bawling rabble and undiscriminating soldiery, the host of indifferent or approving faces of the public behind them--they seem strangely familiar to us. They have been, they are still, alive by turns in us. The harmless spark of electricity that greets the touch of one's hand on a metal k.n.o.b on a winter's day is one with the bolt of lightning that wrecks a giant oak. The selfish impulse, the narrow prejudice, the ignorant suspicion, the callous indifference, the self-satisfied respectability, which frequently dominate us and determine our decisions, are one with that cruel combination of motives which drove the nails in the hands and feet of the Son of G.o.d. Still further, the suffering of Jesus never seems to an acute conscience something that happened once, but is over now. The Figure that hung and bled on the tree centuries ago becomes indissolubly joined in our thought with every life today that is the victim of similar misunderstanding and neglect, injustice and brutality; and, while our sense of social responsibility charges us with complicity in all the wrong and woe of our brethren, that haunting Form on Calvary hangs before our eyes, and

Makes me feel it was my sin, As though no other sin there were, That was to Him who bears the world A load that He could scarcely bear.