The Mental Effect of Gethsemane

As the stream begins to find that its course is coming into contact with the great world, I must be careful to avoid side issues. I must remember that I am not writing of the world but of the stream. On the banks of the stream there will stand immediately the representatives of nearly all ranks and conditions of men. The Jew and the Gentile will be there; the priesthood and the empire will be there; the soldier and the civilian will be there. Peter and John will be there to represent the apostles. The female gate keepers of the judgment-hall will be there to represent the slave. Barabbas will be there to represent the man of revolution. The malefactor of the cross will be there to speak for the criminal classes. Humanity is indeed powerfully represented on the banks of that stream! Yet most of the figures must on this occasion be ignored. My subject is the stream itself, and I am unwilling to divert attention from it by considering the forms of men and women whom it passes on its way.

In the previous chapter I pointed out that something occurred in Gethsemane to inspire Jesus with mental, as distinguished from physical, strength; the spirit became willing even while the flesh remained weak. Re serving our consideration of the bodily element, we will here confine ourselves to the invigorating influence on the mind of Jesus of that message which He received from His Father. We have seen that the change from depression to confidence displayed itself in the moment of His rejoining the disciples. But it was no evanescent impulse. From the instant it came to Him in the Garden it never left Him; the spirit of fear was permanently dead; the spirit of cloudless confidence abode with Him till the earthly close.

Now, here is one of the most remarkable features of the Portrait of Jesus. Let us stand for a little in the great gallery and mark the contrast between His aspect and His surroundings. The outward sun, the sun of His fortunes, is very low. Never has the environment looked so dark. There is but a step between Him and death, and that step is inevitable. One by one the trophies which had greeted the morning of His mission have faded. The hosannahs are hushed; the palm-leaves are withered; the friends of summer days have made their flight in the winter. He is standing before human tribunals — mocked, reviled, buffeted. The multitude who yesterday had spread their garments for His feet, the crowd who a few hours ago had cried, ‘Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord! ’ are now shouting with equal lustiness, * Away with him; let him be crucified! ‘He is betrayed by one of His innermost circle; He is deserted by all the others of that circle. Literally at this moment He is standing alone — unsupported by one human friend. Truly the environment of the picture is very dark!

But now comes the strange thing. In this hour of darkness the eye of Jesus gleams with an unwonted majesty. Majesty had not been its characteristic; in the days of His power He had been more the lamb than the lion. But in His day of weakness the lion appears. Every step of that day is a step of royalty, every word the word of a king. His assertions of power seem to grow in extent and vehemence in proportion as the shades of the prison-house close over Him. It is an experience to which I can adduce no individual parallel. I know nothing like it in the lives of men; I know only one thing like it in the lives of nations — the experience of that Jewish race from which His human nature came — the experience of that race whose loudest claims to empire were uttered amid the chains of her captivities!

The briefest examination of the facts reveals this paradox in the life of Jesus. On the night of His arrest He is hurried before a meeting of the Sanhedrin on a charge of blasphemy. He is asked what He has to say to the charge;

He utters no response; He refuses to plead. Why? Is it because the forms of law have not been complied with? It is true they have not been complied with; the Sanhedrin could not legally try a capital charge by night. But Jesus cared too little about legal forms to be influenced by such a consideration. Why, then, in answer to the reiterated questions of Caiaphas, does He remain persistently silent? Not because He is being illegally tried, but because, from His point of view, these men had no right, on this charge, to be His judges at all. I connect His silence with words He had lately uttered, ‘Henceforth I shall not talk much with you, for the prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in me’ He would have said that a man should be tried by his peers — those who have something in common with him. What did these men know of the region where He dwelt — the house of the Father? Nothing; they had never been there. And having never been there, what right had they to judge as to His

1 Cf. Acts ii. 23, ‘Him ye have crucified by lawless hands.’ truth when He described the courts of heaven and the mansions of His Father’s house! The silence of Jesus was a silence of majesty. He claimed to have direct communion with His Father; and He declined to have His know ledge tested by those who had only received God’s message through a sighing of the wind. He demanded to be tried by His peers I

And in point of fact it is only when Caiaphas evokes a higher tribunal that Jesus at last breaks silence. When the High Priest says, 1 1 adjure thee by the living God! ’ he summons Jesus by another than any earthly authority. And then in answer to the bar, not of earth, but of heaven, Jesus makes that claim which constitutes the most startling event of history, ‘From this time forth ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the power of God!’

‘From this time forth.’ It is as if He had said: * I proclaim from this date the beginning of a new epoch — a humanitarian epoch. The symbols of Divine power have hitherto been animal symbols Judea has had her lion and

Rome her eagle — the types of physical power. But from this night I proclaim the advent of a new symbol — the symbol of human sacrifice. Hitherto the sacrificial life has been the despised life; the cross has been a mark of obloquy. From this night onward it will be a mark of glory. The test of power will henceforth be the strength of sacrifice, and men will measure nearness to God by nearness to me.

What is this statement of Jesus? It is the prophecy, nay, the inauguration, of a new priesthood. I have called His Cross the fourth scene of the communion. The first was the Passover, where He communed with bygone days. The second was the Last Supper, where He held converse with His present disciples. The third was the Garden, where He stretched out His arms to the existing world of sin. The advance to the Cross was the beginning of a fourth communion, in which He was to draw to Himself the future ages. It had its fitting commencement in the vision of a true priesthood. He was now in the presence of a false priesthood. Caiaphas was the foil that suggested by contrast the advent of a purer ministry. There lay the sting to Caiaphas. A man, a man of the secular caste, a man without priestly orders, a man who was only ordained after the pattern of Melchizedek, declared that he would take the place of the existing clerical power! He would raise the tottering temple of Jerusalem on a new basis — the basis of his own broken body! The High Priest rent his clothes and shouted, * Blasphemy! what further need have we for witnesses, now that we have heard his blasphemy! ‘The subservient Council responded, ‘He is worthy of death.’

The Sanhedrin gave the verdict; but they could not give the sentence. They had no power to inflict death; that belonged to Rome. Accordingly, the scene changes. Jesus is led from the Sanhedrin to the Praetorium — from the High Priest, Caiaphas, to the Procurator, Pontius Pilate. In passing from Caiaphas to Pilate He has passed from the hands of the priesthood into the hands of the empire. It is a new atmosphere, and the old charge cannot breathe in it. The accusation which served Caiaphas will have no weight with Pilate. The Sanhedrin must transform the war-cry, ‘Blasphemy against God! ’ into * Treason against Caesar! ‘Accordingly, there is no talk here about the religious danger of the Jewish state. In the presence of Pilate the Sanhedrin are only solicitous for the Roman state. They charge Jesus, not with that for which they had condemned Him, but with something whose gravity Pilate might be expected to appreciate — the forbidding to pay tribute. What prevents Pilate from appreciating the gravity of the charge? It is the seeming impotence of the defendant. He looks at the meek and somewhat worn countenance of the prisoner at his bar, and, in what I take to be an accent of sarcasm, he says, ‘Art thou the king of the Jews?’ It is this accent of sarcasm which to my mind explains the strange question put by Jesus in reply. He inquires whether Pilate had asked this of his own accord or been directed to ask it

In other words, I understand Him to mean, 1 Do you ask in order to obtain evidence, or is it a mere soliloquy of personal amusement?’

Then came the answer of Jesus to the question of Pilate, and it must have astonished him still more: ‘Thou sayest it; I am a king. I am of royal blood; I was born to be a king; I came into the world to be a king. Yet my kingdom is not temporal; it uses no carnal weapons; it employs no physical force. Nay, it is a kingdom of sacrifice — of obedience to truth; I am come to be a martyr to the truth.’

It seems to me that these words of Jesus must have caught Pilate. There is something Roman about them. That a king should be a martyr, in other words, that a sovereign should be the servant of his country, was an idea deeply woven in the constitution of the Roman state. Caesar himself was ideally only the head of a republic and therefore in the literal sense its chief minister. That an empire should exist for the sake of a truth was also Roman; Rome herself had professed to live for an idea — the

VOL. II. S idea of law or justice. Pilate must have felt respect for one whose eye could thus commune with the future and recognise the permanent element in the history of nations. I think, too, when Jesus said, ‘Thou wouldst have no power over me except it were given thee of God, Pilate must have felt a Roman pride. Did not Rome wish to base her authority upon the will of heaven! Was it not her joy and her glory to proclaim the Divinity of her mission! Had not her poets sought to trace her origin to the fountain of Divine power! All this may have impressed Pilate. Some thing impressed him. He made strenuous efforts to save the prisoner. He asserted his belief in the innocence of Jesus. He washed his hands of His condemnation. He offered, in accordance with a custom of the Feast, to make Him the pardoned prisoner of that year. Four times he repeated the offer; four times was he borne down by the clamour of the crowd demanding the privilege for another man. The Roman and the Jew contended a while for the body of Jesus — the Roman for His life, the

Jew for His death — till the former was at length overborne by the cry, ‘Not this man, but Barabbas! ’

The multitude that shouted for Barabbas was the same multitude which at the beginning of the week had shouted for Jesus. Whence this fickleness? Had they changed their minds? No; they had at the beginning mistaken Jesus for Barabbas. Barabbas was a leader of sedition; they had thought Jesus a leader of sedition too. It was this that had made them strew His path with palm-leaves, and spread their garments in His way. It was this that had made them cry, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ It was this that had evoked their hymn of praise, Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord! ‘Jesus had accepted their tribute, knowing that His power was higher than they dreamed of; but, so far as their consciousness extended, it was only a tribute to Barabbas. They were seeking a leader of sedition in Jesus or another; when they failed to find one in Jesus, they turned to another. They saw in Barabbas what they had thought to find in Jesus — a revolutionary man, a lawless man, a man who might lead his countrymen to a kingdom of flesh and blood. Jesus was above their expectations; He wanted things too high for them. Barabbas was on a level with their imaginings; he wanted only purple and fine linen and sumptuous faring every day; therefore the roar for Barabbas drowned the murmur for Jesus!

And Pilate yielded to their clamour; he gave up the Christ to die. Looking back through the years, what shall be our estimate of the comparative guilt of Pilate and Caiaphas? to which shall we assign the greater blame? Christendom both ancient and modern has been prone to give the foremost place in wickedness to Caiaphas — to look upon Pilate with a more lenient eye. In that feeling I cannot concur. So far as the condemning of Jesus is concerned, I think Pilate much the worse of the two. Caiaphas really believed that Jesus would hurt him — and, from a selfish point of view, he was right in his belief; Pilate had nothing to fear from Jesus, and he did fear nothing. The claim of Jesus before the tribunal of Caiaphas menaced the Jewish state; the claim of Jesus before the tribunal of Pilate did not menace the Roman state. To Caiaphas the attitude of Jesus was a serious matter vitally affecting the national faith. To Pilate the attitude of Jesus was the subject for a jest. Each of these men was condemning Jesus on his own separate charge — Caiaphas for blasphemy, Pilate for treason. Both men were to some extent false; but they were not equally false. Caiaphas was false to this extent, that he only pretended to believe in the treason; but he had this much truth, that he really believed in the blasphemy. Pilate, on the other hand, believed in neither charge; he was convinced that both were baseless. Yet Pilate condemned Jesus. He yielded to a popular clamour — yielded for the sake of his own interest. He was there to administer public law; he gave a verdict from motives of private advantage. He was there to represent Roman justice; what he did represent was the lowest form of humanity in any land — the class who sell their conscience in truckling for popular favour. The more Pilate was influenced by the presence of Jesus, the darker is the aspect in which his deed appears, for there is no sin equal to a sin against light. There is no moral miracle of Christ which surpasses in range of power the fact that in the hour of His humiliation He could influence a man so sordid as Pilate!

T ORD, help me to see Thy power in the -* — ’ day when men arraign Thee! We still place Thee at the bar of our judgment-seat; we still accuse Thee before our Pilate and our Caiaphas. We point to what we call the weak spots in Thy government. Teach me Thy strength in these spots! Let me learn the majesty of Thy power in the paths where men despise Thee! Let me hear Thy songs in the night; let me see Thy bow in the cloud When Thy cause seems trampled down and when I seem crushed along with Thee, let Thy words reach my ear, * I am a king ‘! They can only reach my ear by reaching my heart. I shall know Thy strength by my strength. I shall know Thy strength by ray unaccountable peace, by my inexplicable calm. I shall know it ’ by the gleam and glitter of the golden chain I wear’ — the gleam and glitter that have come from the furnace of fire. I shall know it by the Pisgah heights that greet the declining sun, by the streams that surprise me in the desert, by the gates which open to me in the enclosing wall. I shall know it by the proof of the promise, ‘As thy days, so shall thy strength be! ’