Lk. evidently regarded as His rapturous utterance. It is not with resignation, but with Divine exultant gladness, that Jesus accepts the Father's will as revealed in the results of His work. The Spirit is not connected with revelation either here or any- where else in tlie life of Jesus, but only with the overpowering, joyful emotion of the hour. And the connexion of the Spirit and of joy is one of the most striking characteristics of the NT all through (see Lk 1"'-, Eo 14", Gal 5", Ac 13=^-, 1 Th 1"). No authority can be claimed for the v.l. in Lk 11=, according to which, instead of ' Thy kingdom come,' or ' Hallowed be thy name,' we sliould read, ' Thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us.' Yet it is in keeping with St. Luke's interest in the Spirit that this reading is found here and not in Mt.'s version of the prayer (see Plummer's St. Luke, p. 295 n.). It is another proof of this interest that in Lk 11" ■a-psC/j.a. dyiop replaces the 'good things' of Mt 7": for St. Luke, all 'good things' which Christians could ask from the Father were summed up in the Spirit. This is a clear case of later experience interpreting the words of Jesus and giving the sense of them in its own terms. Per- haps if another than Jesus had been in question, we might have read that the jiassionate words of 12^"'- broke from His lips when He was ' hlled with holy spirit'; but to the Evangelist Jesus is always 'full of the Holy Spirit,' ami no sucli points stand in relief in His career. (Id. liy I'li.nigli, Lk. omits any mention of tlie Spirit in rimm-xinn witli Ps 110 (2d">f-), though both .Mt. and Mk. seem to emphasize it, and in 21'^ he replaces the express promise of the Spirit, which he has already used in 12'=, by a more general promise of an irresistible power of speech such as he ascribes in Ac 6'" to a man full of the Holy Siiirit. There is no reference to the Holy Spirit in 2.3*'. The last light the Evangelist thro^vs on it is in 24", where the Risen Saviour describes it as ' the promise of my Father,' and as 'power from on high.' The last word, therefore, brings us back to the lirst. The fundamental idea to be associated with the Spirit is that of Divine power : how the Divine power is to be further characterized, what it is ethically, and to what issues or in what temper it works, we can see only in the life of Jesus. He is the key to the interpre- tation of a term which of itself is indehnite indeed. 8. From the life of Jesus, as covered by the Apostolic testimony (Ac !="■), we now turn to the chapters of Mt. and Lk. which tell the story of His birth. If Mk. i, tlic earliest form of the Evangelic traditiim, il is naiuial hi say (whatever the Evangelists i.wn (hi iioln-y may lie) that the Divine sonshiji of Jesus «as <nigiiially connected with His baptism. It was there He received the Holy Spirit and heard the heavenly voice which said, 'Thou art my Son.' It would be all the more natural for Christians to say this who read in their Gospel of Luke (3==), with Codex BczcE, ' Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.' But as soon as reflexion woke, it would be apparent that Jesus could not suddenly, at the age of thirty or thereabouts, begin to be what He had in no sense been, or been destined and prepared for, before. This is the conviction which — not to speak of lii^toiical evidence— sustains the stories of the l.irlh ..f Chri-L He imisl always have been what ( Ini lian- .■\ cnlually Knew Him in their o-\vn experiiiicc 1" !"■ : llu must always have been Son of Gotl. it it is the Spirit which makes Him Son, then behind the baptism with the Spirit must lie a birth in which the Spirit is equally important : not only the equipment of this personality, but its origiiiation, must be traced (liicctly to God. And it is the origination of the personality of Jesus with which both Mt. and Lk. are concerned. Neither of them betrays any idea
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HOLY SPIRIT
HOLY SPIRIT
that the Son of God jire-existed, and that they are only narrating the mode in which He came from another order of being into this ; and, difficult as it may be to understand how a companion and friend of St. Paul could ignore such an idea, we must abide by the facts as they are before us. No act of man, but only the [lOwer of God, lies behind and explains the existence of Jesus Christ in the world. In Jit. the story is told simply and briefly : Mary was found with child ck -irvev/xaTos aylov (V^- ^'). It is this which makes the Child to be Immaiuicl, 'God with us.' In Luke, though the setting is much more elaborate, the place and significance of the Spirit in the story are the same. The angel of the Annunciation says to Mary (I^) : irveviia aYtov eweXfvacTai (irl a4, Kai 8u'vo(iw rnj/io-Tou eiri- (7Ktd(T€L aoc 8tb Kai to ycfi/to/j.evoi' iiytov KK-qd-qacrai, ■ulos itov. It is in virtue of this mode of origination that the future child is avio;". Son of God. It is important to notice here the parallelism of nvcvim dfiov and Siva)iis i-^icrov. The two expressions are precisely equivalent. In the life and work of Jesus, the Di^nne power can reveal itself ethically (as the Gospel story shows in detail), but in the origination of His personality there is no room for anything to appear but bare power. The action of the Sjririt is to be conceived not as sexual but as creative. This marks the truth as well as the purity of the NT. In the OT, where the gender of nn can be determined, the feminine instances are to the masculine as more than two to one ; but in the NT this is irrelevant, irvediia is of no gender. Few ^^^ll be persuaded by 0. Holtzmann (Leben Jesu a,nd War Jesas Ekstafikcr? p. 41 ) that the Gospel accord- ing to the Hebrews, in which Jesus is introduced as speaking of the Holy Spirit as His mother, represents anything more primitive or original on that account. To call the Spirit either ' mother ' or ' father ' is equally inept and im-Christian : the Spirit is the power of the Highest, to which the presence of the Son of God in the world is due. In other words, the Divine Sonship of Jesus does not date from His baptism, as that of Christians ; it is not with Him as with us an aftair of re-birth, but of birth simply ; it is native and original, with roots as deep as His being ; He is not only niis 0(ov, but iiovoyevqi.