The Cross and Offences
Matt. v. 10-12, 44.
viii. 20.
x. 16-25, 32,
3539-
xi. 29, 30.
xiii, 21.
xvi. 24.
xix. 29.
xx. 22, 23.
xxi. 28-46.
xxiv. 9.
Matt. v. 29, 30.
xi. 6.
xiii. 21, 41.
xvi. 23.
xvii. 27.
xviii.
xxiv. 10.
xxvi. 31.
Mark iv. 17-
viii. 3L 34> 3§-
ix. 12, 13, 31.
x. 21, 28-31,
33, 34-
xiii. 9, 12, 13.
xv. 34.
Mark iv. 17.
vi. 3.
ix. 33*50.
xiii. 1-23.
xiv. 27, 38.
Luke vi. 22, 23.
ix. 22-27, 31,
44, 57-62.
xii. 4, II, 12.
xiii. 24.
xiv. 25-35.
xvii. 25.
xxi. 12, 16-19.
xxiv. 17, 26.
Luke vii. 23.
viii. 13.
xvii. 1-4.
THE CROSS AND OFFENCES T present we are engaged in ascertaining the
ii mind of our Lord as to the path which leads from unrighteousness to righteousness, and we have found the ascent thus far to consist of three steps: the first repentance; the second best expressed in His characteristic phrase “Come unto Me”; and the third best expressed in the equally characteristic word, “Follow Me.” But this third step is almost invariably associated in our Lord’s teaching with a reference to the Cross; and with this conception we must now occupy ourselves.
In evangelical preaching it is common to beseech sinners to be reconciled to God; and for doing so with overflowing affection and urgency there is high authority. But it is not impossible to carry this to excess, and to plead and press to a degree unworthy of the dignity of the Gospel. The Saviour Himself did not press any to follow Him unconditionally. On the contrary, He held some at arm’s length; and some who pressed their fellowship upon Him He sent about their business. To one enthusiast He THE ETHIC OF JESUS
said, “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.” To a lukewarm heart, who asked, before following Him, to be allowed to go and say farewell to his friends, He answered, “No man, having put his hand to the plough and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of heaven.” But the harshest case of this kind was that of one who asked to be permitted first to go and bury his father; to whom Jesus made reply, “Let the dead bury their dead.” The suggestion has been made that what was asked in this case was not time to go and bury a father already dead — which would only have occupied a few hours — but permission to wait till the father died and was buried. This would have been practically putting off Christ till the Greek Kalends. And, if the interpretation could be depended upon, it would certainly take off the edge of Christ’s rebuke. The more obvious sense of the words is, however, in all probability the correct one; and the explanation of its harshness will be found only when we have settled upon an explanation of a tendency to an extreme use of hyperbole in which He frequently indulged.
He did not, then, wish to be followed merely because of an impulse of enthusiasm, nor did He press any unduly. On the contrary, He called upon all to sit down and count the cost, employing ludicrous images to depict what the consequences might be if they came after Him without doing so.
The figure cut by a man who, without calculation, begins to build a house but is not able to finish it, or by a general who with five thousand men goes to meet an enemy who comes against him with fifty thousand, is not more unenviable than may be that of the man who, under a sudden impulse towards religion, begins to follow Christ without sufficient reflection. Jesus never said that it is easy to be a Christian: He called men to follow Him; but He warned them that, if they did so, they would have to face a variety of hardships; and the name in His mouth for all these put together was the Cross.
So accustomed are we to the use of this term that the originality and the pathos of it in the mouth of Jesus may escape notice. As far as I am aware, it originated with Him; and it is interesting to consider out of what experience it arose. It is quite possible that, when very young, He may have witnessed the act of crucifixion, this punishment being common in Palestine. He may, as a boy, have followed the noisy crowd and watched the miserable victims on the way to execution. His sensitive soul would take in all the horror of this most ghastly of all punishments; but one trait of cruelty and scorn appears especially to have stung His imagination. This was the fact that from the place of detention to the place of execution the condemned man had, amid the laughter and jeers of the multitude, to carry on his own back the apparatus of his doom — an
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indignity which, as far as I remember, is without a parallel. This burned in the memory of Jesus; and, when He required a name for all that can be imagined of shame and suffering, He said, “Let him take up his cross and follow Me.”
It will occur to some readers that it was connected with the anticipation of His own death. The Gospels represent Him as foreseeing and predicting not only the fatal issue of the opposition He encountered, but likewise the manner of the same; and it is possible that the designation of the sufferings of His followers by the name of the cross may both confirm these predictions and carry them back to an earlier period of His ministry than the point at which the Synoptists report Him as beginning to refer to this subject. He may have meant that they were to be sharers in His sufferings, although I do not remember that He ever referred to the trials they were to endure as His cross. If we were satisfied that this was His meaning, we could hardly look upon it as a chance that, on the way to Calvary, when He turned out to be too weak to bear the heavy burden of His own cross, a passer-by was seized upon, by the soldiers — no doubt to the intense amusement and uproarious delight of the crowd — to carry the cross in His stead. We should, in that case, be almost driven to regard this as a symbolical incident; as, indeed, the victim of the soldier’s joke appears himself to have found it; because in the narrative he is referred to as “the father of Alexander and Rufus” — these being in all probability well-known Christian brethren — and it is very natural to suppose that the bearing of the visible cross by Simon led, in the providence of God, to his taking up the invisible one.*
Whether or not Jesus was thinking of His own sufferings when He first employed this name for the sufferings of His people, at all events the cross is, in its essence, the same to them as it was to Him; and it is by ascertaining what it was to Him that we ascertain what it is intended to be to all.
To Him it was two things — first, the last step of submission to His Father’s will and, secondly, the last act of opposition to Him on the part of men. That which distinguished the man Christ Jesus from
* “When I was an object of much contempt and derision in the University, I strolled forth one day, buffeted and afflicted, with my little Greek Testament in my hand. I prayed earnestly to my God that He would comfort me with some cordial from His Word, and that, on opening the book, I might find some text which should sustain me. It was not for direction I was looking, for I am no friend to such superstitions as the sortes VirgilianGB, but only for support. The first text which caught my eye was this: ‘ They found a man of Cyrene, Simon byname; him they compelled to bear His cross.’ You know, Simon is the same as Simeon. What a word of instruction was here, what a blessed hint for my encouragement! To have the cross laid upon me, that I might bear it after Jesus — what a privilege! It was enough. Now I could leap and sing for joy as one whom Jesus was honouring with a participation of His sufferings” — Bishop Moule’s Charles Simeon, p. 72.
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all the other children of men was, that at every step He perfectly fulfilled the will of God., But God’s will was not to Him, any more than to the other sons of Adam, easy of fulfilment. It led Him in a way that was very strait and that, as He advanced, became dark and intricate, till He cried out that He whose will He had ever followed had forsaken Him. In Gethsemane He groaned amidst His tears, “Not My will, but Thine be done,” and the next and last step was the cross. Such was the cross from one point of view. From another it was the last act of human opposition. Jesus was the brotherbest of all the sons of men, and Fie went about continually doing good. He might have been the lord and master, but He made Himself the servant of all. From which it follows, that, if there were reason in human conduct, He ought to have been the most popular and best-beloved of the species. But there is a strange twist in the human mind, which makes it often hostile to its best benefactors; and so He was despised and rejected; and they hated Him without a cause. Month after month this grew worse and worse, and the climax was the cross.
Now, what the cross was to Him, such also is it to those who follow Him. First, it is the pain involved in doing the will of God. “Whoso doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven, the same is My mother and sister and brother.” This is the path for all disciples; but for them, being what they are, it cannot be an easy one; because their thoughts are not God’s thoughts nor their ways His ways. Accordingly, they have to give up their own thoughts, ways and wills. But what are a man’s thoughts, ways and will but himself? So that he has to give up himself. Thus exactly did Jesus read the case, when He said, “Let him deny himself”; and, because the occasions for such self-sacrifice are occurring every hour, he added “daily.” “Let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” On the other hand, it is for them also a general name for the opposition of the world. If Christians are like their Master, they will be benefactors of their species, and in many different forms and tones He charges them to be so. It might be expected to follow that they would be popular with the public, to whose welfare they are prepared to sacrifice their own ease and substance. But Jesus did not expect this: on the contrary, He told them, “Ye shall be hated of all men.” The same perversity which made Him the mark for the hostility of those for whom He was ready to die would operate to similar effects, in their experience. “The disciple,” said He, “is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple to be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the Master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of His household?”
Such was the essence of the cross, and such is
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its essence in all generations. As for its forms, these were, according to the testimony of Christ, to be very various. One form in which He saw it impending was the disruption of families — “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth, but a sword; for I am come to set a man at variance with his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” To one who revered the family as Jesus did, such a prospect must have been an appalling one; but He perceived that the path to the regeneration of the world passed this way, and He made up His mind for the inevitable. Then, as the scope of the movement inaugurated by Him widened, it would come into collision with the powers of the State; and He foresaw and foretold, what actually came to pass, that prosecutions would rage, in which the faithful would have to stand before kings and councils; and many would suffer punishment, some even being crucified as He was to be Himself.
The reason why the religion of Jesus was thus to come into collision with existing institutions lay in its propagandist genius.* In its very nature it is a light which must shine; and it is the will of its Author that it should do so. To no follower of His, therefore, could He spare the exertion of
* “Hostility to the world was not required of the votaries of ancient faiths.” — Strong, Christian Ethics, p. 131. * bearing testimony on behalf of his religion, though in multitudes of cases this must be one of the severest of crosses. “Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him will I confess before My Father which is in heaven, but whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I deny before My Father which is in
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heaven.” Jesus did not, like Mohammed, call upon those who followed Him to draw the sword and conquer the world; but He called on them to do that which is more perilous — to conquer the world without a sword. The Christianization of the world was imposed by Jesus as a task on all His followers; and what a task it is! It involves the redressing of ancient wrongs, the uprooting of evil customs, the overthrow of obnoxious institutions. And none of these things can be done without exciting opposition; for the abuses to be reformed are supported by public opinion and in many cases by the law of the land; men have their interests vested in them, and assuredly will not yield without a struggle. The deeper any disciple’s sympathy with the aims of the Saviour, the heavier is his cross; because the sight of a perishing world will torture him, the aspects of abounding iniquity will distress him, the slow progress of goodness will madden him, the failure of his own attempts to do good will haunt him; and he will often be driven in desperation to cast his burden on the Lord in prayer.
But, although Christ never concealed the cross,
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He did not doubt that it was wise to carry it; because the compensation would be far beyond the sacrifice. Not infrequently have self-denial and self-sacrifice been spoken of as if they were good in themselves, apart from any ulterior advantage. But there is no such affectation in the words of Christ. Pain is pain; it is the natural instinct of man to avoid it; and it is folly to incur it, when this can be helped, unless thereby a proportionate good is to be obtained — or rather a pleasure excelling the pain, a gain in excess of the outlay. To this principle of common sense Jesus was absolutely loyal.
Sometimes, indeed, His appeal was, in the first place, to the heart: He simply intimated, in speaking of the cross which those who followed Him would have to bear, that it was to be borne for His sake, as if no more required to be said. Sometimes He points to His own example, as in the words already quoted, “The servant is not above his master; it is enough that the servant be as his master.” And sometimes He appealed to the example of the prophets, assuring His followers that, the more they sacrificed in the cause, the higher would they be advanced in the company of the heroes: “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake; rejoice and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” But the appeal was oftener to the head than to the heart. The intellectual appeal occurs in many forms; but the following is the most characteristic: “For, who¬ soever shall save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake, the same shall save it.” He admits that to take up the cross is equivalent to the losing of one’s life; and this may mean of course that it will involve sudden and violent death: as much as this it has meant in innumerable cases. But life may be said to be lost when that is lost which makes it pleasant and enjoyable. And it is pleasant to follow one’s own will and wishes; it is pleasant to sail with the tide, to have no scruples about the aims which the majority are following, and to be burdened with no principles which the majority disapprove. Sin is pleasant, casting over existence a many-coloured glare of excitement and allowing free play to the strongest passions. All this is lost by following Christ. On the contrary, by refusing to follow Him life is saved. The tears of repentance and the reproaches of conscience are saved; the scorn of the world and the charge of strictness and singularity are saved; anxiety and exertion for the salvation of others are saved, the world being left to go its own way and to be happy or miserable, virtuous or vicious, as it can or will. All this Jesus conceded; and yet He held that he who saves his life in this way loses it, and he who loses it saves it. Does this mean that, although he saves it in this
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world, he will lose it in the world to come, and that if he loses it in this world, he will save it in the world to come? Certainly it includes this — the words have just been quoted, “Great is your reward in heaven” — and this is no small part of Christ’s thought. But it is not the whole of it. He meant that, even in this world, those who save their life by refusing to follow Him lose it, and those who lose it for His sake save it. This is proved by the remarkable words in Luke xviii. 29, 30: “Verily I say unto you, there is no man that hath left house or parents or brethren or wife or children for the kingdom of God’s sake who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting” — a saying the full scope of which is not easily put into words. But it at least means this: that the happiness sacrificed is a mean one and the happiness gained a noble one; or, happiness is lost, but blessedness is won.
Such truths lie very near the centre of the teaching of Jesus. Yet we cannot forget that the history of the Church for fifteen hundred years has* been darkened by a misapprehension of this class of sayings; for it is on such sayings of our Lord that the institution of monasticism is founded, which has flourished for so many centuries and is still absorbing the lives and energies of multitudes of men and women in both the Eastern and the Western Churches. And, while not withholding from many who have sacrificed their lives on this altar a measure of admiration for their self-control, their moral courage and their services to the suffering and the ignorant, we cannot but look upon the system as a terrible delusion, which warns us how even the best teaching in the world may be distorted into error.
The prime mistake of monasticism is, that it makes self-denial an end in itself, whereas Jesus made it only a means to an end. Its three vows of chastity,
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poverty and obedience dishonour things that are great gifts of God and crush sentiments with which God is well pleased. It withdraws from the service of the world multitudes who are needed to elevate its ordinary life and discharge its necessary work, consigning them to a solitude which, it is to be feared, is often the reverse of what it is intended to be. It gives to officials a power over their fellows which no mere man should possess, and breaks down in the rank and file that power of personal choice which is the very mainspring of the moral life. In a book on the Ethical Teaching of Jesus, to which reference was made on an earlier page* — the book of a thorough materialist, writing for the Socialist masses of Germany — the teaching of Jesus on this subject is, without hesitation or discussion, identified with the teaching of the Church; and this is the worst feature of the whole case — that Jesus is made responsible for sentiments which are utterly at variance with His own; and thereby multitudes of
* Rau, Die Ethik Jesu.
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human souls are repelled from Him as a teacher whom they cannot trust.
There is another side of the teaching of our Lord on this subject with which is connected a word that is almost as much a vox signata in His vocabulary as the word Cross itself. This is the word Offence or Offences. In ordinary parlance “offence” means insult or displeasure; but, in the mouth of Jesus, its meaning is a technical one: it signifies temptation. To offend anyone is to draw him away from discipleship and make him a backslider. The original is “scandal”; and the Greek word * meant literally the upright stick in a trap, to which the bait was attached, and which, when touched, caused the trap to close over the animal. Offences are traps to entice and betray unwary disciples; they are stumbling-blocks laid in the path that leads to Christ and heaven, in order to make those who would follow Christ lose their way. But the point to be specially noted is, that the objects designated by the word “offences” in the mouth of Christ are precisely the same as those included under the term “cross.” The cross, in Christ’s vocabulary, is a comprehensive term for everything that makes it difficult to obey the call to follow Him, and the word “offences” covers the same class of objects: the
* crKavbaXov for aKav8dlr]0pov. difference being this, that these difficulties are called by the one name when anyone is suffering from them, but by the other when anyone is causing others to suffer from them.
To bear the cross is an honour, but to give offence is a crime. In the eyes of Jesus this was a sin of unspeakable horror, as may be inferred from these words in which He spoke of it: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
The discourse in which Jesus expressed His full mind on the subject of offences is not so well known as it deserves to be; and many who read it do not perceive how far down the chapter the subject is carried: it is supposed that He has finished with this topic and passed on to others, when in reality He is still pursuing the same train of thought. It is reported in the eighteenth chapter of St. Matthew; and it is worthy of notice that, while deliyering it, Jesus was in an extraordinary attitude: He had a child all the time standing at His knee. This was one of His disciples; for then, as now, not a few of His most affectionate and loyal followers were children. Embracing him, then, with His knees, touching him with His fingers, hanging over him with an air of protection — “as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings” — He deprecated the
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attempts of the ruthless and heartless to offend such — that is, to pluck them out of His hands and withdraw them from His discipleship. In this situation, the flow of His thoughts took a wide sweep, but the following were His principal ideas.
First, in order to bring out the diabolical nature of offences, He contrasts those who indulge in them with all that is heavenly. Thus, the angels are protectors of those who follow Christ: “In heaven their angels do always behold the face of My Father which is in heaven”: that is to say, they occupy the front rank, and stand nearest the divine presence. It is not by the humblest but the highest angels that the interests of the little ones among Christ’s followers are guarded. But this conduct on the part of angels is only an imitation of that of the Lord of angels: “Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish”: it may be the will of those who offend them, but it is the sheer opposite of the will of God. If this is true of the Father, it is no less true of the Son; “for the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Probably these words were spoken by Jesus also on other occasions, but there is an obvious propriety in their occurrence here *; because there could be nothing in more absolute contradiction with the whole aim and drift of the life of Christ than the conduct of those who offend
* Reading, however, doubtful.
His followers — that is, endeavour to turn them back from the way of salvation.
There are two forms which offences may assume. First, the blow may be delivered in the region of the intellect by the arguments of an enemy, who confuses the mind of the disciple, shaking his confidence in the Saviour or instilling false views in place of the pure truth as it is in Jesus. Again and again did Jesus warn His followers against such false prophets. They would come, He said, “in sheep’s clothing” — that is, with captivating words and elegance of manners, with lofty professions of sincerity and airs of impartiality — “but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” It is often taken for granted that the dissemination of religious opinions is free, of whatever nature these may be; but to assume this is to confuse freedom towards men with freedom towards God. As regards men, all have the right to the free expression of opinion; but, as regards God, there is no responsibility more grave; and the publication of opinions by which faith is shaken or morality undermined, if the motive be one of levity or vanity or self-interest, is one of the gravest of crimes. If the motive be a conscientious one, still the injury may be grave, and the case may be too intricate for human decision; but God will judge it.*
* Herrmann ( Etliik, p. 70) shows how, by the sophistries of what he calls Eudaemonistic Ethics, the pain of an awakened conscience may be dulled, and so the soul turned aside from
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The other form of offence is one less difficult to judge; for it is the rude and reckless attempt to stifle religion in the birth by laughter and scorn, or by any of the many other concrete forms of persecution. So malignant and diabolical is such conduct, that it might be supposed to be rare in the world, or confined to heathen and barbarous states of society. But to suppose so is to be very ignorant of human nature and of the actual world in which we live; the fact being that few begin to walk in the narrow way without a deliberate attempt being made by some emissary of the Tempter to turn them back.* *
So formidable were the words of Jesus on this subject that they struck a responsive chord in one sensitive heart in His audience. The Apostle John interrupted the discourse with the remark, “Master, we saw one casting out devils in Thy name, and we forbade him, because he followeth not with us.”
seeking that refuge to which it is being driven by its despair. This author is very clear and firm on the contrast between Philosophical and Christian Ethics at the critical point — where, in Christian experience, pessimism passes into optimism.
* For an instance of this, the subsequent effects of which were tragic, see the story, in Dr. John Paton’s Autobiography, of the convert Mungaw, whom the missionary took with him to Australia, as a specimen of the work of the mission, but whom some white men there got hold of, in the missionary’s absence, and initiated so well into their own sins, that he became not only a backslider, but a maniac, causing endless trouble when he returned to the Islands.
To the unstudious reader it may appear that this was an irrelevant remark; but there had shot across the mind of the sensitive apostle a fear lest, in this case, they had quenched the zeal of one who might be reckoned among, the little ones to whom Jesus had so feelingly referred. And it is noteworthy that Jesus did not good-naturedly calm the disciple’s apprehensions, but, on the contrary, gave him to understand that these were justified, and cautioned him against the repetition of his mistake. Thus it would appear that even disciples, or even apostles, may offend, an excessive zeal for that company of Christ’s followers to which they themselves belong leading them to disown other followers of the same Master who may belong to a different company, or an undue importance attached to order and decorum betraying them into harshness towards a beginner who has a little outrun discretion, but who has begun earnestly to bear witness to the same Lord.
Having thus made the Twelve aware that even they were not out of danger, He followed up the impression with a still more interior and subtle caution. Even when nothing positive is done to cause a brother ‘to stumble, the law of love may be transgressed by merely keeping at a distance from one who has fallen. When anyone who has made a profession draws back or by some glaring act of inconsistency brings dishonour on the cause, the temptation is strong to leave him alone; indeed,
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it may be a reproach to have anything to do with him. Many a backslider has been made to feel this, and the coldness of his former associates has driven him farther away. But Jesus will not have it. He supposes an extreme case — one in which the fall of a backslider has been a wrong inflicted on yourself. Even in such circumstances you must not forsake him, but go and tell him his fault, first between you and him alone; then, if this fail, in the presence of witnesses; you must leave no stone unturned to regain the erring brother. For it is the soul — the priceless soul — that is at stake; and to contribute to the loss of it, even by neglect, is at the opposite extreme from the spirit and the mission of Jesus.
Our Lord, however, did not conclude His reflections on this dark subject without turning out its sunny side, reminding His hearers that, in many ways, they might do the reverse of offending His little ones, and that anything done to protect these from offence, to cheer them under discourage¬ ment, and to send them on their way rejoicing would be acceptable in the eyes of Heaven. Such was the thought He expressed in language of inimitable loveliness, when He thus brought the discourse on offences to a close: “Whosoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones a cup of cold water only, in the name of a disciple, he shall in no wise lose his reward.’* Thus have we concluded the portion of outsubject, under the title of Virtue, which is the most characteristic in the teaching of Jesus. The earlier portion, under the title of the Highest Good, sets forth the supreme aim of the Christian life; and the portion still to come, under the title of Duty, will describe the several steps in the path; but this one deals with the internal force by which the steps are to be taken and the end finally secured.
As we look back on the teaching of J esus under this head, we perceive that its peculiarity consists in deriving this strength from Himself. More and more He puts Himself into the centre; and it is by connection with Him that the end is to be achieved. Under a variety of forms He calls upon those who would accept His guidance to attach themselves to Himself — to turn away from other masters, to come to Him, to follow Him. And not only were they thus instructed to find their salvation by allowing themselves to be drawn closer and closer to His person, as long as He was there with them; but, when He left them, they were to watch for His reappearing. Watchfulness was one of the keynotes of His instruction; and it meant the preoccupation of the mind with His person. The great event of the future was to be their meeting with Him again; and, as His return might take place at any moment — at midnight, or at cock-THE ETHIC OF JESUS
crowing, or in the morning — they must not sleep, as do others, but watch and be sober.
All this was very simple, when He was there before their eyes, or when they still might expect Him to return to the earth in their own generation. But the teaching of Jesus was for all generations, and in every generation His disciples must be able to translate the essence of it into forms suitable to their altered circumstances. Connection with His person, preoccupation with His image, and the anticipation of future union with Him will always be the essentials of Christian experience; and in these is generated the virtue on which the moral victory depends.