(1) Preachers have often spoken unwisely, of the offices of Christ, as if the office were the great matter, and not the person who holds it ; but the teaching of experience is that offices of the higher sort cannot be discharged at all unless a man have some native bent towards the business. A king will never be made such by his coronation, unless he have within him instincts of authority and of order. A priest can never be made by any form of human education ; he must possess the priestly nature, the greatly daring and loving heart, which takes the concerns of man on to itself, and pleads in regard to them in the very face of God. And Jesus, Prophet, Priest, King, was born such. He could not be content within Himself, but must go out to find the sorrows, burdens, perplexities of men, which never seemed to Him alien or remote. As the world is made some one must suffer under these, and He claimed that as His part. All sickness and darkness and evil in the land were drawn together at His advent, and He treated them as no intrusion but as belonging to the ministry on which He had been sent. For His chosen business was to bear the inflictions which have come upon the world of men, acknowledging them as righteous, and thus to bring hope and pardon to the hopeless.
(2) Too much attention has been paid to the physical sufferings of Christ. Especially has the phrase " sheddino- of blood " been too literally considered. We need not be afraid of
^ F. R. Swan, The Death of Jesus Christ, p. 15. 2 J. Ruskin, The Art of England, § 12.
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the word '* blood," if only we think of what it symbolises. But, thoughtlessly to use the term is not helpful to the soul. It is a word having very sacred meanings, and should be uttered with great reverence and feeling. The more we dwell upon the terrible bodily agony of Christ, the less wonderful does the Cross become. Because by obscuring the spirit of the Cross, we bring the death of Jesus too near the level of other martyrs, who suffered the keenest of torture and the most horrible forms of death.
We have not to exalt Christ's death by trying to show that He suffered more bodily agony than any other martyr. That may be so, or it may not be so. On one side we can compare Him with others who suffered, but on the other side there is no comparison whatever. It was God, as man, who gave Himself. It was man's Head and representative who poured out His soul unto death. It was not a death not foreshadowed, but a sacrifice that God in humanity was preparing to give. The world waited for One who could atone for all, speak for all, live for all. Moses could not, nor David, nor Isaiah, nor Hosea, nor any good man ; they had much of God in them, but needed redemption all the same.
I know of no theory, says Maclaren, which redeems the story of Gethsemane and Calvary from the charge of being the history of a man whose courage collapsed when it came to be tested, except that which sees in the agony beneath the olives, in the bloody sweat, in the awful and pathetic words with which He appealed to His friends : " My soul is compassed about with sorrows even unto death," an element far more mysterious and awful than the mere shrinking of humanity from death. Surely, surely, the Lord and the Master, in the strength of whose name feeble women and tremulous virgins and little children have gone to the pyre and the scaffold and the lions, as to a feast, did not exhibit all that agitation and tremor and shrinking, only because He was afraid of the death that belongs to all men. Ask your- selves how reverence for Jesus Christ will survive in the face of the story of His last hours, unless, as we listen to Him crying, " My God ! My God ! Why hast thou forsaken me ? " we hear the cry of Him who before His shearers was dumb, but opened His mouth at last in that mysterious complaint in which filial
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obedience and utter desolation are so strangely blended because " the Lord hath made to light on Him the iniquity of us all ? "
IT What a burdened conscience ! It must have been the most burdened conscience in the world. Yet this man was perfectly sinless. How can we account for the anomaly ? How can we reconcile the burden with the blamelessness ? Easily ; nothing can explain the burden hut the blamelessness. Do you know what sinlessness is ? It is perfect unselfishness. And do you know what perfect unselfishness is ? It is the breaking of the partition between my life and other lives. You have a large room, beautifully furnished, and a little anteroom, separated by a wall, and badly furnished. You break down the wall and make them one room ; and you have lost the prestige of your furniture. The large room has taken in the little one with all its im- perfections ; it has borne its sins. If it were to become conscious, it would be aware of blemishes within it not its own. So was it with the Divine man. He broke the middle wall of partition between His room and your room. He destroyed the barrier between the large and the small apartment ; He made of twain one. He allowed your mean furniture to blend with His costly adornments. He felt your life to be a part of His life. He was mesmerised by love. He looked at His brother's temptations, and said, " They did it unto Me." He bore in His own body the pain of other bodies. It was not the sense of pity ; it was the sense of identity — the identity of love. It was His unselfishness that gave Him a universal conscience — " the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." ^