3. How the death of Christ upon the Cross is an atonement for the sins of the whole world is a complete mystery to us ; but that it is so we know from revelation. All sin, upon repentance, is made as though it had never been by virtue of this sacrifice ; it is cancelled, done away with. " Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow ; though they be red like crimson, they shall be- as wool." What an astonishing result! What a miracle of power and mercy ! Here is accomplished all that man has yearned for, and so inefiectually striven after — the compensa- tion, the atonement for sin. His wish is accomplished, though he cannot understand how. The atonement, when it has come, is a mystery ; but he knows that it is made, that something has been done in heaven by which sin has been cancelled. He knows that there has been a great reconciliation, a great restoration. He does not see this, but he apprehends it by faith.
The various aspects of this mysterious atoning sacrifice emerge in constant succession throughout this Gospel, even before the narrative of the Passion begins. To Nathanael, in those earliest days of all, is whispered the mysterious prophecy of a new Bethel vision. The Person of the Son of Man is to be a fresh medium of access, a new ladder of communication between earth and an opened heaven. To Nicodemus the Son of Man is revealed as the antitype of Moses' brazen serpent, lifted up for the saving of those who will look to Him. Meanwhile a still more mysterious utterance has been given to those scandalized by His fierce cleansing of the Temple courts, an utterance which not even the most intimate understood till long afterwards. But St. John is » B. Waddell, Behold the Lamb of God, 134.
92 THE LAMB OF GOD
determined that his readers shall understand it, there, in its place, and shall know that thus early the Master was conscious of that supreme trial through which His body had to pass, and of His own inner power to transform death into victory. " Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."
The same thought again underlies His clear consciousness of the murderous intention of the Jews, recorded in the earlier contests from the fifth chapter to the eighth, and is concentrated in the teaching of the sixth chapter and the tenth.
The sacrificial language of the Fourth Gospel is matched, as we might expect, by that of the First Epistle, here as elsewhere fulfilling the function of an inspired commentary on the writer's earlier work. Thus, in the first chapter, it is declared that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin those who in communion with Him are walking in the light. In the second, " Jesus Christ the righteous" is set forth as at once Advocate and Propitiation concerning the sins, not merely of a limited circle of privileged ones, but " of the whole world." Later on in the same chapter, and again in those that follow it, we are told of a mutual indwelling, wherein the believer attains to that mystic union with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is the ultimate end of all sacrifice — that true and only eternal Life ; so that we are prepared for the clear teaching of the final chapter, where, in the uncom- promising language of the beloved disciple, it is proclaimed that " He that hath the Son hath the life ; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life."
^ I have felt that to understand the Passion one must be one's self, as it were, God infinite, and able to comprehend the love and the agony of an infinite nature. This sight, of all I look upon, alone has power to arrest my heart. It seems foreign to the order in which I am at present moving, yet it is friendly, familiar to some inner instinct, as if it were native to a kingdom in which I had once moved.^
4. There are, however, certain principles which we can hardly mistake, if we listen either to the voice of Scripture, or to the voice of the Church, or to the voice of our own moral reason — voices which speak in true concord more frequently than is sometimes supposed.
* Dora Greenwell.
ST. JOHN I. 29 93
(1) The first principle which is thus guaranteed to us is that the Death of Christ was not only efficacious by way of example, or because of its influence on the minds of those who think of it, but objectively, in itself, and in relation to the law of righteous- ness. It is quite true that it is the supremest example of self- sacrifice that the world has witnessed, quite true that the message of the Cross has had power to convince of sin and to lead men to holiness, solely from the pathetic pleading of the love of which it tells. But it is impossible to reconcile the words of Scripture with a theory which goes no farther than this, or to understand the moral necessity for the awful victory of the Cross, if nothing more than this be true.
(2) On the other hand, the word " punishment " is not used in the New Testament of the Death of Christ. His Atonement is never there described as a punishment of the innocent instead of the guilty, though it has been so described by careless readers of Scripture. That is a conception which is repugnant to all our notions of justice, and it is foreign to the teaching of the Gospels. Punishment can be justly inflicted only on the offender himself. Certainly it does not follow that only the guilty suffer in consequence of their sin. Every day's experience con^dnces us of the contrary. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children ; " the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." But that is not to say that the Almighty punishes the children for what was no fault of theirs ; it is rather to say that we are all linked together by bonds so close in one great brotherhood that, " if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it." It may be said that this makes no difference as to the pain entailed upon the innocent ; but surely it makes a wide difference in our conception of the justice of the Supreme Orderer of men's lives, whether we regard Him as the immediate Author of that pain, or whether we look on it as an inevitable consequence of the unity of mankind and of the warfare against good inspired by the wayward wills of men. To ask that it should be otherwise is to ask that man should not be man, should have been created other than he is. The innocent is not punished instead of the guilty ; and so it is not said in the New Testament that Christ was punished instead of man. It is said that He suffered because of man, for the sake of man