which He gives to their accusation is, " Can a woman forget her Bucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb ? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." Thus, in God's relationship with His people, all is made to hinge upon this one word " forget." " Blot me not out of the book of thy remembrance," exclaims man to God ; " Blot me not out of the book of thy remembrance " is the mysterious and pathetic appeal of God to man 1 Now this longing to be remembered, so Divine and so human, is found with cumulative force and intensity in " the man Christ Jesus," and is inseparably associated with the institution of the Lord's Supper. He instituted it so as to make it supremely difficult for His followers to forget Him.1
2. What is it that we are to remember ? It is " the Lord's death " — His death, not His life, though that was lustrous with a holiness without the shadow of a stain ; His death, not His teaching, though that embodied the fulness of a wisdom that was Divine; His death, not His miracles, though His course was a march of mercy, and in His track of blessing the world rejoiced and was glad. His death ! His body, not glorious but broken ; His blood, not coursing through the veins of a conqueror, but shed, poured out for man. On the summit of the Mount of Transfiguration, when the hidden Divinity broke for a while through its disguise of flesh, and Moses and Elias, those federal elders of the former time, came down in conference, and the awe- stricken disciples feared the baptism of the cloud, they "spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem." His death ! Still His death ! Grandest and most consecrating memory for both earth and Heaven.
See Him set forth before your eyes, That precious bleeding Sacrifice! His offer'd benefits embrace, And freely now be saved by grace.
^[ " Ye do proclaim the Lord's death" — That is the central message. The mortal is the vital here. It is not, He was born, was made Man, lived, wrought, taught, blessed the poor sinful world by the touch of His feet, and the look of His fair countenance, and the words such as man never spoke before. It is that He died. It is that Gethsemane and Golgotha were that for which, above all things, He came. " He gave his life
1 D. Davies.
326 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
a ransom for many." "He poured out his soul unto death." He was "lifted up from the earth." He "endured the cross." "That he might sanctify his people with hia own blood, he suffered, without the gate." " Without shedding of blood was no remission " ; " He loosed us from our sins in his own blood." He came "again from the dead, in the blood of the everlasting covenant." " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain ! " 1
3. " To proclaim the Lord's death " is not merely to announce our belief that Jesus Christ died upon the Cross some eighteen hundred years ago. That, an infidel might do ; or, at least, a man who denies the inspiration and authority of Holy Scripture, and puts the sacred narrative on a level with other books, might do. That, certainly, a sinful man might do ; or a mere worldling, a man totally careless about living a life of faith in the Son of God. All these persons might accept and credit the fact of the Saviour's dying, and might be willing to proclaim their accept- ance ; and some of them would probably avow their persuasion that the Being who hung upon the Cross was no ordinary person, but the Prince of glory, the Lord of life, the incarnate Son of God Himself. And yet such confession as this would not be Christian confession. It would not be what the Apostle here means by showing the Lord's death. No ! [The Apostle means
f by this expression thejprpclaiming of that death as an event, as a
\ factTupon whlch~aii our hopes of access~tojGod and all our hopes of
\ life,^fialvation,^njjQjLMe^se^ness depend ; and the proclaiming p?
\ itTTToo, as aching that was done for ourselves. Then do we fully
j showlh^XortTs- death, when by word, and by significant action,
/ and by the whole course and tenor of our life, we announce our
( confident persuasion, that that dying upon the Cross was a dying ^ for us.
4. We are not to understand the Apostle as limiting the remembrance rigidly to the actual Passion. The form of the memorial is fitted to recall the life of our Lord as well as His death. It is His body and blood we are invited by the symbols to remember. By them we are brought into the presence of an actual living Person. Our religion is not a theory ; it is not a speculation, a system of philosophy putting us in possession of a true scheme of the universe and guiding us
1 H. 0. G. Moule, Thoughts for the Sundays of the Year, 172.
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 327
to a sound code of morals; it is, above all, a personal matter. We are saved by being brought into right personal relations. And in this Sacrament we are reminded of this and are helped to recognize Christ as an actual living Person, who by His body and blood, by His actual humanity, saved us. The body and \ blood of Christ remind us that His humanity was as substantial / as our own, and His life as real. He redeemed us by the actual I y human life He led and by the death He died, by His use of the / body and soul we make other uses of. And we are saved by remembering Him and by assimilating the spirit of His life and] death.