The Hour of Priesthood

We have in the course of these volumes seen Jesus in two aspects — that of the prophet and that of the king. Galilee has revealed Him as the prophet; Jerusalem, spite of His approaching death-shadows, has revealed Him as the king. We are now to see Him in His third aspect — that of the priest. The distinctive hour of His priesthood has now struck. I would place its striking precisely at that moment when He dropped His outward cross. That was the beginning of His absolute passiveness. Hitherto His service of man has been active; He has been the helper and the healer. But now the surrender of His life is to take a new form. Instead of ministering with the hand, He is to yield Himself into the hands of others. The last trace of active power was the carrying of His cross up the steep of Golgotha. But now the cross has fallen to the ground; His strength is feeble; His steps are tottering; there is nothing left for Him but to die. He has been the prophet; He has been the king; He is now to be the priest surrendering the passive victim; and the passive victim is to be His own soul.

But let us remember that when the cross dropped from the shoulder it did not drop from the heart. We must never forget that the effect of Gethsemane’s message upon the soul of Jesus was a permanent effect. It never deserted Him. It struck a light which remained in His sky even at His darkest hour. We shall go wrong, in my opinion, if we imagine that the Cross of Calvary was at any time to Jesus a starless night. There was dense darkness over the earth; but the vision of Jesus went beyond the earth. The Gethsemane message — the message which told of an accepted world, of a pardoned humanity, of a fear dispelled — never ceased ringing in His ear. It rose above the taunts, above the revilings, above the earthquake, above the rending of rocks. It made His last voice a note of triumph, but it gave strength also to His previous voices. Strength, did I say! I should have said, regalness. Nowhere is Jesus more regal than in His parting hour. Nowhere, as St. John says, does He seem more uplifted than in His passion. Nowhere is He more glorified than in His cross. And the reason is that He has been glorified previous to the cross — glorified by a message from His Father which has made His heart strong and given to His inner eye a mountain view.

There is a remarkable passage in a letter written by one of Christ’s disciples, nay, by one who was with Him in the Garden; and it expresses the view at which we have here arrived. This disciple says that Jesus was ‘put to death in the flesh but quickened in the spirit.’ I understand this to mean, not merely that the spirit of Jesus was quickened after death, but that it was exempt from the weakness incidental to the outward frame in the process of crucifixion; the spirit remained willing even while the flesh was weak. From the very outset of this scene the attitude of Jesus is one of mental strength. He refuses to partake of a narcotic which is offered Him to dull the coming pain. Why? Did He deem that there was any advantage in physical pain? No; the whole aim of His outward ministry had been to relieve it. But He will not purchase immunity from physical pain by immunity from thought. The offered drink would have blunted consciousness. It is from consciousness, and not from its absence, that Jesus expects a dulling of physical pain. Two things may relieve outward suffering — an anaesthetic, or a joy. Jesus rejected the anaesthetic because He already possessed the joy. He had received in the Garden a message from His Father which was to Him more powerful than any narcotic — which lifted the burden of His pain, not by a suspension of vital energy, but by an enlargement of mental comfort.

Do you doubt that this message of the

Garden was the golden thread which encircled His cross, in other words, that before coming to Calvary He had been already ‘crowned with glory and honour for the suffering of death ‘? Here is the proof: in the very moment when He lay down upon that cross, in the initial moment of physical pain and outward laceration, Jesus breathed a prayer that the Father would ratify His Gethsemane message; He said, ‘Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.’ In that physically dread moment, the first thing in the consciousness of Jesus was not the impression of the nails but the impression of the Garden promise. His prayer was virtually this: ‘Father, fulfil to me Thy promised joy! Ratify to me the message of the Garden! Thou hast seen me trembling in the Garden lest this culminating deed of sin should chill Thy heart for ever. And Thou hast answered that trembling, O my Father! Thou hast sent me a message of strength; Thou hast told me that my flower of sacrifice will outweigh the world’s thorn. Fulfil this joy, my Father! Accept the thorn, yea, the crown of thorns, for the sake of the roses I bring! Forgive those who have raised this cross! ’

You will observe here a repetition of that same regal bearing which we beheld in the Garden agony. The bodily attitude of Jesus on the cross is a prostrate attitude. But at this very moment His soul is standing upright. He is never more majestic than in His prayer, ‘Father, forgive them; they know not what they do — they have not realised that they are attempting to destroy absolute purity.’ It is the most unique exhibition of conscious moral dignity which the world has ever seen; and it is the more unique on this account, that it is entirely apart from egotism; it is used entirely in the service of others. The priesthood of Jesus on the cross never for an instant lost sight of His kinghood on the throne.

As I stand in the great gallery I am deeply impressed with the artistic effort to portray the crown of Jesus in the midst of His cross. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why that sensuous age makes so little of the physical sufferings of Jesus? Modern preachers have painted in ghastly colours the outward agonies of Calvary. But the first narrators of the scene are dominated by the determination to tell only how the kinghood conquered the pain. I shall illustrate the point presently; meantime I am simply asking its artistic cause. And that cause is not far to seek. There can be no expiation in mere physical pain. Legal penalty there may be, but not expiation. Expiation demands an act of will. However complete be the surrender, it must be a conscious surrender, a voluntary surrender. The expiating work of Jesus, whether in life or in death, is not the fact that He lay passive in the hand of the Father; it is His determination to lie passive. In life and in death alike the source of expiation is not the impotence, but the regal strength, of Jesus — the fact that He could say, ‘No man taketh my life from me; I lay it down of myself; I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again.’

That is the reason why in the great gallery so little prominence is given to the physical pain of Jesus. It is designed that even on the cross He should verify His words to Pilate, ‘I am a king.’ Accordingly, the attitude of Jesus on the cross is not that of an abject victim. We listen in vain for any expression of physical suffering. No groan escapes Him; no cry of anguish reaches our ear; as a sheep dumb before its shearers He opens not His mouth. We feel as if His personal life were already buried, as if the wants of His body were forgotten in the wants of love. Where His silence is broken it is never to utter a complaint; it is always to express an ^/personal interest. It would seem as if the print of the nails had impressed upon His human organism not His own pains but the pains of others. Explain it as you will, these hours of Calvary are to Him not a season of individual weeping but a season of universal communion. Solitary as He personally was, His cross was the focus of humanity. Round it there gathered the representatives of every class — the slave, the

1 Unless St. John xix. 28 be counted as such.

peasant, the priest, the scribe, the soldier, the malefactor, the disciple, the woman. And to the eye of the narrator, these are the subjects of the coming empire — the future servants in whose midst and in whose interest the lonely and prostrate Sufferer legislates as a king.

What other thought than this is in the mind of the evangelist when he records that above the cross of Jesus there was placarded an inscription written in Greek and Latin and Aramaic: * This is Jesus the King of the Jews ‘! I am aware that Pilate wrote it in mockery, or at least, in cynicism. But what he said in jest the evangelist received in earnest and posterity has realised as fact. Aramaic, Greek, Latin — the language of the people, the language of the cultured, the language of the military — that Passion Week Jesus had heard them all. He had heard the hosannas of the Jewish rabble; He had received the mission of the cultured Greeks; He had listened to the voice of the Roman soldiers. And the evangelist felt, nay, Jesus felt, that these three representative voices would be raised for the Christ of the future.

In the coming age His gospel would influence all the three — the men who toil, the men who study, the men who fight; it would support the first, it would illuminate the second, it would soften the third. This has been the actual course of Christianity. It has secured the rights of the masses; it has trimmed the lamp of the student; it has mitigated the horrors of war. Is there in the mind of the narrator some prophetic foresight of this last point when he tells us that Christ’s garment was parted among the soldiers? It was the custom at such times; but to the eye of His followers Christ’s contact invested every old custom with a new significance. Did not the new significance of this distribution lie in the belief that the Roman soldier was unconsciously being clothed upon by a new spirit, and being invested with a garment whose power of creating inward warmth would be learned by him in after years?

Presently there occurred an incident which establishes beyond all controversy the regal character of the scene depicted in the gallery.

In the very act of crucifixion, in the very moment of physical prostration, Jesus received a tribute of homage equal to anything which had marked the days of His power. It came from the lips of a malefactor who was being crucified along with Him. In the last hour of a bad life this dying criminal raised his eyes in prayer to his Fellow-Sufferer and cried, ‘Lord, remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom! ‘He received more than he asked. He asked to obtain salvation in the far future; Jesus offered it then and there, ‘Verily I say unto thee, “to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”’!

The incident is commonly used by preachers to exemplify the possibility of an extraordinary exercise of Divine mercy. That this man should gain in a moment what a Peter secured only after long and violent struggle seems a thing that can be accounted for by nothing else than a miraculous stretch of pardon. And yet, to think so is a great mistake. The miraculous thing is not the pardon, but the ripeness, of the malefactor. There are flowers

VOL. II. U in the American prairies that spring up in a single night. When they do spring up, they are entitled to all the benefits of a flower; it is no miracle that they drink the sunshine. The whole wonder lies in their quick springing, in the acceleration of their development. So is it with this malefactor. The marvel is the ripeness of his faith. You say he received a quicker reward than Peter. He deserved it. He displayed exactly that kind of faith which Peter in the Garden had failed to reach — faith in Christ’s power on the cross. His spiritual life was born on Calvary; he was the first leaf of that winter tree. He came to Jesus in His human poverty. He came to Him when, to the eye of sense, He was a dying man. He came to Him when He had been divested of every robe which meant royalty, denuded of every badge which declared Him to be a king. And yet, in that hour he perceived His royalty. He detected the gold beneath the dust; he recognised the kingdom through the cloud. In the absence of all visible glory, in the presence of all that suggested humiliation, this man discerned a regal majesty, a power to which in death a human soul might pray. And Jesus discerned in him the presage of His coming kingdom — the first-fruits of a great communion in which the voices of a responsive multitude should break the solitude of the Son of Man.

I have always felt that this malefactor on the cross is the extreme antithesis to the portrait of Judas. They both teach the same moral — that a man can only be converted from within; but Judas teaches it by his failure, the malefactor by his success. Judas had from the beginning every outward advantage. He saw the Master in His physical glory; he lived in a sanctified environment. But there was no response from the inner man, and therefore all the environment went for nothing. The malefactor, on the other hand, had no outward advantages. His had been an environment of evil. He had lived in a debased atmosphere; he had only seen Jesus at the last hour. Yet there was in him something which was independent of environment and which bad surroundings could not kill. There was an inner life which unconsciously waited and thirsted; and, when the well of water appeared, the thirsting soul recognised its need and ran forth spontaneously to meet the coming joy.

T THANK Thee, O Lord, that it was in •*- Thine hour of sacrifice the world received Thy garment. I thank Thee that it was at Thy cross Thy robes were parted among men. It is Thy moment of humiliation that has reclothed humanity. There was a garment of Thine on the Mount of Transfiguration; but that has not been parted among us. I am glad that was not the garment chosen. It suited Thee, but it would not suit us. It was too white, too glistening, for our toilsome day. We want something that will stand the tear and wear of life, something fitted for work that soils the outer hand. And we have found it in this second garment of Thine — the garment given at Thy cross. Ever let me touch the hem of that garment, O Lord! With that robe upon me I can do all work and receive no stain. With that robe upon me I can touch impurity and still be pure. With that robe upon me I can touch things soiled with moth and rust; and the moth will not corrupt and the” rust will not corrode. The saints in heaven may walk in white before Thee; but the garment for me is the garment of Thy cross!