Now it is impossible to suppose that Christ had no reference to the promises made through Jeremiah, and, through them, to the scene at Sinai. His Apostles, at least, so understood His words, " the new covenant in my blood." The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews calls Him the new Moses, mediating a better covenant, founded on better promises. The cross was in His view, though none of His disciples saw it, in the Upper Room. But He saw that His blood was to be the sacrificial blood in which the " new covenant " was to be sealed, confirmed, ratified. He was inaugurating a " new people," and was to lead them forth out of the Egypt of sin and alienation into the Promised Land of holiness and the fellowship of God. He was to be the leader of a new emigration from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light and love. The bonds broken under the old covenant were to be reknit under the new covenant. The cup is the pledge, the symbol, of that new bond. And every time we drink the cup we are renewing the covenant which God has offered to all men in and through Christ.
T| When the Greeks and the Trojans called a truce pending the single combat between Menelaos and Paris, they ratified it by a sacrifice.
ST. MATTHEW xxvi. 28 427
He spake, and the throats of the lambs with pitiless blade
he severed, And laid them low on the earth all quivering and gasping For lack of vital breath; for the blade their strength had
stolen. And anon from the mixing-bowl they drew the wine in
goblets, And poured it forth and prayed to the gods that live for
ever. And thus said one and another among the Achaeans and
Trojans : "Whiche'er of us, breaking the oaths, may do harm unto the
others, Their brains on the ground be scattered e'en as this wine is
outpoured — Theirs and their sons' — and their wives be a prize unto
others."
The custom was universal. The heathen observed it, and so did Israel. Thus it is written : " Gather my saints together unto me ; those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice." *
2. Christ's death was the consummation of His infinite sacri- fice, the further reach of His redeeming Love. When He had yielded His life in steadfast devotion to the Father's honour and patient travail for the souls of men, what more was possible ? " Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." The cross is our Lord's divinest glory; "for this," says Clement of Alexandria, "is the greatest and kingliest work of God — to save mankind."
His death was not an isolated event. It did not stand alone. It was the consummation of His life, the crown of His ministry, the completion of His redemption. When the New Testament speaks of His death, it means not simply His crucifixion on Calvary, but all that led up to that supreme crisis — His steadfast obedience to the Father's will, which continued all the days of His flesh and found its ultimate expression when, with the cross before Him, He said, " Not my will, but thine, be done," and so freely gave Himself into the hands of wicked men to be mocked
1 D. Smith, The Feast of the Covenant, 41.
428 THE BLOOD OF THE COVENANT
and tortured and slain. His entire life was sacrificial — a truth which St. Paul expresses when he says, " Being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross."
TJ Here is a fundamental truth, essential to a just appreciation of our Lord's redeeming work ; and in these moving lines the poet has perceived what theologians have too often missed ;
Very dear the Cross of shame Where He took the sinner's blame, And the tomb wherein the Saviour lay, Until the third day came ; Yet He bore the self-same load, And He went the same high road, When the carpenter of Nazareth Made common things for God.
A life of loving and constant obedience — this is God's require- ment. This it is that we have failed to render ; and His doing on our behalf what we have failed to do is our Blessed Lord's Atone- ment for the sin of the world.1
III.
The Kemission Secured by the Sealed Covenant.
1. "Shed for many unto remission of sins." Remission literally means " to throw back, or throw away," and the term is used simply because, when God forgives our sins, He is contem- plated as throwing them away, tossing them clear off, outside of all subsequent thought or concern in regard to them. There is another expression used in Scripture for the same thought, which is also figurative. " Repent and turn," says Peter, " that your sins may be blotted out." They are contemplated in that expression as having been written down in some book of God's remembrance, as it were, and God in forgiving them is figuratively represented as blotting out that writing. And blotting out with the ancients was a little more complete than it is, usually, with us. When we write something down with ink, and blot it out, there still remain some marks to indicate that once there was writing there. If