significance of Jesus remains. It is given in what we may call His consciousness of His relation to God. To Jesus, God was the Father, and He Him- self was the Son. It does not matter that God is a universal Father, and that all men are or are called to be His sons ; Jesus recognizes this, and insists upon it, but He claims Sonship in a peculiar sense for Himself. He never speaks of Himself as a child of God, but as the Son, siinjdiciter. In speaking of God and Himself He uses 6 irarrip and 6 uiis in a way ^\ Inch implies that there could no more bo a plural on the one side than on the other : .see es}). Mt IP"'-, Mk 13^-. It is natural to suppose that in the account of Jesus' baptism (Mt 3" ||) the heavenly voice which pronounces Him Son of God, in words borrowed from Ps 2, means the term there to be taken in the Messianic ' official ' sense ; it is the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, as the accompanying narrative of the Temptation proves, which is expressed in 6 vios fiov. What the relation may have been in His mind between this (which defines His calling by relation to OT hopes) and the Divine Sonship exhibited in Mt 11-', we may not be able to tell. It has been argued by some that the official Messianic Sonship, the calling to be God's King in Israel, widened and deepened in the mind of Jesus Himself into the consciousness of a unique relation to God, which found its most adequate expression in the language of Mt 11-'; by others, that only such a consciousness as is dis- closed in Mt 11-' enables us to understand how Jesus could ever have regarded Himself as the Messiah. The Messianic categories have been con- sidered above ; what we have here to do is to look at the less sj^ecifically Jewish way in which Jesus here reveals His absolute significance for religion. ' All things have been delivered to me by my Father : and no one knoweth the Son, save the Father ; neither knoweth any one the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him ' (see Authority of Christ, vol. i. p. 149). Here Jesus claims in the most explicit terms to have had the whole task of revealing God to men — the whole task of saving men, so far as that depends ujion their coming to know God — com- mitted to Him.* It is a task to which He is equal, and for which no other has any competence at all. Everything connected with it has been entrusted to Him, and to Him alone ; there is not a man upon the earth who can know the Father except by becoming a debtor to Jesus. There is no such thing as preaching Christ unless we preach this : He is the mediator for all men of the knoAV- ledge of God as Father ; that is, of that knowledge of God on which eternal life depends. This is the loftiest, the most universal, and the most gracious form in which the absolute significance of Jesus can be expressed: the loftiest, because it declares Him unequivocally to be the /jLovoyevTjs, having His being in a relation to God constituted by perfect mutual understanding, and belonging to Him alone ; the most universal, because tlie relation of Father and Son, while it can only be symbolic of the reality, uses a symbolism based on nature, not on history, and is therefore intelligible to all men, and not only (like Messiah) to one race ; and the most gracious, for it suggests directly not only mutual understanding but mutual love, the love which unites the Father and the Son in the work of enlightening and redeeming men (cf. Mt IP*'-). It is not necessary, however, to dwell on this : the point is that in this central jiassage Jesus empha- sizes His absolute significance in the two main directions in which it can be understood : He is to God what no other is, and He can therefore do for
* It is fanciful, on account of Txpiicdrt, to suppose that Jesus is here contrasting His Txpahcin;, which has its starting-point in the Father, with the ' traditions' of the elders.
398
PREACHXIG CHRIST
PREACHING CHRIST
man Avhat no other can do. He is the only-begotten Son, and the only ^Mediator betAveen God and man. In preaching Christ in this sense, we have mnch more to go upon than this single utterance. The truth which it conveys, indeed, is not so much a truth revealed by Christ, as the truth which is embodied in Him ; in order to ajipreciate it, it is necessary to have the experience of coming through Him to the Father, and of recognizing the Father in the Son. The interest of the Fourth Gospel consists to a large extent in this — that it is an expansion and illustration of these Avords. Jesus is presented there as the Word made flesh — the principle of revelation embodied in a human life ; it is His work, so to speak, to enlighten every man, and apart from His work men remain in darkness. ' No man hath seen God at any time : the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared — or interpreted (i^-nyv- aaro) — him'(Jn V^) ; 'He that hath seen me hath seen the Father' (14^); 'I am the way and the truth and the life : no one cometli to the Father but through me' (14^). This is the key to the peculiar passages in the Gospel in which Jesus says (yd} eifu -without any expressed predicate (4-® ? 8-*- '■* 13^^) : we are meant to think of Him as the great decisive Personality, who stands in a place which is His alone, and by relation to whom all men finally stand or fall. It may be that the expres- sion given to this in the Fourth Gospel owes something to the writer as well as to Jesus ; but what tlie writer expresses is at least the impression made on him by Jesus, and, as ]Mt 11-' and Mk IS'^^ show, the impression is one '^^■hicll answers exactly to Jesus' consciousness of Himself. The words quoted above from Jn. only do justice to Jesus' sense of what He was in relation to God and man, and it is not possible to preach Ciirist in any adequate sense if we ignore or deny the ti-uth they convey. To do so would be to reject both Avhat Jesus said and what He was in the experience of those who first believed on Him.