Chapter 4
But though this be our starting-point, it is no more than a starting-point. If Jesus was only a brave man, paying with His life the penalty of His bravery in the streets of Jerusalem, it is wasting words to call Him "the Saviour of the world." If His death were only a martyrdom, then, though we may honour Him as we honour Socrates, and many another name in the long roll of "the noble army of martyrs," yet He can no more be our Redeemer than can any one of them. But it was not so that Christ thought of His death. The martyr dies because he must; Christ died because He would. The strong hands of violent men snatch away the martyr's life from him; but no man had power to take away Christ's life from Him: "I lay it down of Myself," He said. The Son of Man _gave_ His life. He was not dragged as an unwilling victim to the sacrifice and bound upon the altar. He was both Priest and Victim; as the apostle puts it, "He gave Himself up." True, the element of necessity was there--"the Son of Man _must_ be lifted up"; but it was the "must" of His own love, not of another's constraint. Not Roman nails or Roman thongs held Him to the Cross, but His own loving will. It is important to emphasize this fact of the _voluntariness_ of our Lord's death, because at once it sets the Cross in a clearer light. It changes martyrdom into sacrifice; and Christ's death, instead of being merely a fate which He suffered, becomes now, as Principal Fairbairn says, a work which He achieved--_the_ work which He came into the world to do: "The Son of Man came ... to give His life."[20]
III
Again, Christ taught us that His death was _the crowning revelation of the love of God for man._ And it is well to remind ourselves of our need of such a revelation. We speak sometimes as though the love of God was a self-evident truth altogether independent of the facts of New Testament history. "God is love"--of course, we say; this at least we are sure of, whatever becomes of the history. But this jaunty assurance will not bear looking into. The truth is that, apart from Christ, we have no certainty of the love of God. A man may cry aloud in our ears, "God is love, God is love"; but if he have no more to say than that, the most emphatic reiteration will avail us nothing. But if he can say, "God is love, and He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son"; if, that is to say, he can point us to the Divine love made manifest in life, then he is proclaiming a gospel indeed. But let us not deceive ourselves and imagine that we can have Christ's gospel apart from Christ.
Now, according to the teaching of the Gospels, all Christ's life--all He was and said and did--is a revelation of the love of God. But the crown of the revelation was given in His death. It is the Cross which was, in a special and peculiar sense, as Christ Himself declared,[21] the glory both of the Father and the Son. And the apostles, with a unanimity which can only be explained as the result of His own teaching, always associate God's love with Christ's death in a way in which they never associate God's love with Christ's life. "God," says St. Paul, "commendeth His own love toward us, in that ... Christ died for us."
Christ's death, then, we say, establishes the love of God. But how does this come to pass? How does the death of one prove the love of another? If--to use a very simple illustration--I am in danger of drowning, and another man, at the cost of his own life, saves mine, his act undoubtedly proves his own love; but how does it prove anything concerning God's love? If the apostle had said, "_Christ_ commendeth His own love towards us, in that He died for us," we could have understood him; but how, I ask again, does Christ's death prove _God's_ love? The question is answerable, as indeed the whole of the New Testament is intelligible, only on the assumption of the Trinitarian doctrine of Christ. If Christ were indeed the Son of God, standing to God in such a relation that what He did was likewise the doing of God the Father, we can understand the apostle's meaning. On any other hypothesis his language is a riddle of which the key has been lost. A further question still remains to be answered. I said just now that if St. Paul had written, "_Christ_ commendeth His own love towards us, in that He died for us," we could have understood Him. But here, also, something is implicit which requires to be made explicit. How does Christ in His death prove His love for us? Obviously, only in one way: by bearing responsibilities which must otherwise have fallen upon us. There must be, as Dr. Denney rightly argues, some rational relation between our necessities and what Christ has done before we can speak of His act as a proof of His love. If, to borrow the same writer's illustration, a man lose his own life in saving me from drowning, this is love to the uttermost; but if, when I was in no peril, he had thrown himself into the water and got drowned "to prove his love for me," the deed and its explanation would be alike unintelligible. We must take care when we speak of the death of Christ that we do not make it equally meaningless. How Christ Himself thought of it as related to the necessities of sinful men, the next and last division of this chapter will, I hope, make plain.
IV
_"The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many;" "This is My blood of the covenant which is shed for many unto remission of sins."_ These are the two great texts which reveal to us the mind of Christ concerning the significance of His death. There has been much discussion of their meaning into which it is impossible here to enter. But whatever questions modern scholarship may raise, there can be little doubt as to the sense in which Christ's words were understood by the first disciples. "His own self," said Peter, "bare our sins in His body upon the tree." "Herein is love," said John, "not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." He "loved me," said Paul, "and gave Himself for me." It is open, doubtless, to question the legitimacy of these apostolic deductions, and to fall back upon Matthew Arnold's _Aberglaube;_ but who, it has been well said, "are most likely to have correctly apprehended the significance which Jesus attached to His death, men like John and Peter and Paul, or an equal number of scholars in our time, however discerning and candid, who undertake to reconstruct the thoughts of Jesus, and to disentangle them from the supposed subjective reflections of His disciples? Where is the subjectivity likely to be the greatest--in the interpretations of the eye and ear witness, or in the reconstructions of the moderns?"[22]
Christ gave His life "a ransom for many." The truth cannot be put too simply: "God forgives our sins because Christ died for them;" "in that death of Christ our condemnation came upon Him, that for us there might be condemnation no more;" "the forfeiting of His free life has freed our forfeited lives."[23]
"Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned He stood; Sealed my pardon with His blood; Alleluia! what a Saviour!"
If this is true, the New Testament has a meaning, and, what is more, we sinful men have a gospel. If it is not true, it is difficult to know why the New Testament was written, and still more difficult to know what we must do to be saved. It does not help to point us to the parable of the Prodigal Son, and tell us that there is a story of salvation without an atonement. The whole gospel cannot be put into a parable, not even into such a parable as this. Besides, if the argument proves anything, it proves too much. The parable is not only a story of salvation without an atonement, it is a story of salvation without Christ; and if no more is needed than what is given here, Christ Himself is no part of His own gospel, forgiveness can be had with no reference to Him. But it is not so the redeemed have learned Christ; it is not thus they have received forgiveness. They _know_ that it is "in Him" they have their redemption, through His blood; and apart from Him there is no salvation and no gospel.
It is time to bring our reasonings to an end. We are under the shadow of the Cross; let us worship and adore. When Christ died on the tree nineteen hundred years ago, there were some that mocked, and some that watched and yet saw nothing--nothing but a miserable criminal's miserable end; a few there were that wept, and one there was who cried, with lips already white with death, "Jesus, remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom." And still does that Cross divide men. Where is our place, and with whom are we? Not, I think, with them that mock; for these to-day are a broken and discredited few. We choose rather the centurion's cry, "Certainly this was a righteous man." But is this all we have to say? He who gave His life-blood for us, shall He have no more than this--the little penny-pieces of our respect? If we owe Him aught we owe Him all; and if we give Him aught let us give Him all--not our thanks but our souls. "He loved _me_, and gave Himself up for _me_"-- there is the secret of the Cross which no man knows save he who cannot speak of it without the personal pronouns. Until then we are but as blind watchers that look and see not. "Jesus, remember me"--this is the word that becomes us best. Let us cry unto Him now, and He who heard the robber's prayer on the Cross will hear and save us.
* * * * *
CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
"Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, And lighten with celestial fire; Thou the Anointing Spirit art, Who dost Thy sevenfold gifts impart. Thy blessed unction from above Is comfort, life, and fire of love: Enable with perpetual light The dullness of our blinded sight; Anoint and cheer our soiled face With the abundance of Thy grace; Keep far our foes; give peace at home; Where Thou art guide no ill can come; Teach us to know the Father, Son, And Thee of Both, to be but One: That, through the ages all along, This, this may be our endless song, 'Praise to Thy eternal merit, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!'" Amen! BISHOP JOHN COSIN.
* * * * *
V
CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
_"I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth."_--JOHN xiv. 16.
_"It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send Him unto you."_--JOHN xvi. 7.
It was the night in which He was betrayed. Jesus and His disciples were spending their last hours together before His death. For Him the morrow could bring with it no surprise. He knew that His hour was come--the hour to which all other hours of His past had pointed; and He was ready. Before He left that Upper Room, He lifted up His eyes to heaven and said, "Father, the hour is come; glorify Thy Son." But to the disciples that night was a night of darkness, and terror, and confusion. They remembered how He had told them He must die; they knew the bloodhounds in Jerusalem were on His track; they could see the shadow's black edge creeping nearer and nearer; and yet they could do nothing; they could not even persuade Him that anything needed to be done. Nay, it almost seemed as if He were taking part with His enemies against them. "It is expedient for you," He said, "that I go away"--veiling in His pity the horror of His going. "Expedient" for them? How could He speak like that? Was He not everything to them? If He went away, what was to befall them? They would be as sheep in the midst of wolves, as orphans in an unkindly world. Is it any wonder that sorrow filled their hearts?
And not only to these His first disciples, but to many of His followers in later days, this word of Jesus has proved a hard saying. If only, we think, He were with us as He was with Peter and James and John; if only we could hear Him teach in our streets, or in our church, as once He taught in the streets of Jerusalem and the synagogue at Nazareth; if only He could enter our homes, as once He entered the home at Bethany, how easy it would be to believe! But, now He is no longer here, the air is filled with doubting voices, and faith is very hard.
So sometimes we speak. But, have we noticed, this is never the language of the New Testament. To begin with, it is not the language of Christ. There is an unmistakable emphasis in His words: "Because I have spoken these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is expedient for you that I go away." When Paul was a prisoner in Rome, he wrote to the Philippians, saying, "I am in a strait betwixt the two, having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better; yet to abide in the flesh is more needful for your sake." That is how a good man, in the prospect of death, naturally feels towards those who are in any way dependent on him. But Christ's language is the very opposite of this; He says, not that it is needful to abide, but that it is expedient to depart. And in every reference to Christ by the apostles after His Ascension, the same note is struck. It is hardly too much to say, as one writer does, "that no apostle, no New Testament writer, ever _remembered_ Christ."[24] They thought of Him as belonging, not to the past, but to the present; He was the object, not of memory, but of faith. Never do they wish Him back in their midst; never do they mourn for Him as for a friend whom they have lost. On the contrary, they felt that Christ was with them now in a sense in which He had never been. There is no hint that any even of the Twelve would have gone back to the old days had it been possible. They had lost, but they had also gained, and their gain was greater than their loss. "Even though we have known Christ after the flesh," they also would have said, "yet now we know Him so no more." Read over again St. Luke's account of our Lord's Ascension: "He led them out until they were over against Bethany; and He lifted up His hands and blessed them. And it came to pass, while He blessed them, He parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and were continually in the temple, blessing God." Christ had gone from them a second time, no more to return as before He had returned from the tomb; yet now it is not despair but joy which fills their hearts: "They returned to Jerusalem with great joy." When in the Upper Room, Christ had said, "It is expedient for you that I go away," sorrow had filled their hearts; but, now that He is gone, their sorrow is turned into joy. How shall we explain this strange reversal?
I
It is to be explained in part, of course, by the Resurrection of Christ from the dead, but mainly--and this is the fact with which just now we are concerned--by the gift of the Holy Spirit whom Christ had promised to His disciples to abide with them for ever. But now, what do we mean when we speak of the gift of the Holy Spirit? What is the Holy Spirit, and what is it that He does for us? Many of us, I think, must have felt how extremely unreal, and therefore unsatisfying, the discussions of this great subject often are. The doctrine somehow fails to find a place among the proved realities of our Christian experience. It remains, so to speak, outside of us, a foreign substance which life has not assimilated. And hence it has come to pass that there is no small danger to-day lest New Testament phrases about being filled with the Spirit, baptized with the Spirit, and so forth, become the mere jargon of a school which wholly fails to interpret the mind of Christ. Doubtless there are faults on both sides, the faults of neglect and the faults of false emphasis, and for both the true remedy is a more careful study of the teaching of Jesus.
What, then, is the Holy Spirit, and what is it He does for us? "I will pray the Father," Christ said, "and He shall give you another Comforter," or "another Paraclete." The word translated "Comforter," which occurs so often in this discourse of our Lord, is found nowhere else in the New Testament except in the First Epistle of St. John, where it is rendered "Advocate"; "If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous." And this, without doubt, is a more faithful rendering of the word which Christ used than the more familiar "Comforter." An advocate is one who is called to our side to be our friend and helper, more especially to plead our cause in a court of justice; and this also is the meaning of the word "Paraclete." Perhaps, however, the word "Comforter" may be retained without loss, if only we remember to give it its full and original meaning. To "comfort" is not primarily and originally to console, but to strengthen, to _fort_ify; and the "Comforter" whom Christ promised to His disciples was not only one who should soothe them in their sorrows, but should stand by them in all their conflicts, their unfailing friend and helper.
Further, Christ said God "shall give you _another_ Comforter." That is to say, Christ Himself was a Comforter, and all that He had been to His disciples the Holy Spirit should be also. And, if we examine the three chapters of this Gospel which contain this great discourse of our Lord, we shall find this idea taken up, and repeated, and developed in passage after passage. The Holy Spirit was to come in Christ's name, as Christ's representative and interpreter. "He shall not speak from Himself," Christ said; "He shall bear witness of Me. He shall glorify Me; for He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you." In the presence of the Spirit Christ Himself would be present: "I will not leave you desolate," He said; "I come unto you;" "I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice." And, for the sake of such a presence, a presence which was to be not for a little while but for ever, it was best for His friends that He should leave them.[25]
It is in these words, I believe, that we have the key to the New Testament doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ; He is sent by Christ; He comes to continue the work of Christ. He is, as one writer has it, Christ's _alter ego_, or, as it was said long ago, Christ's "Vicar," or substitute, on the earth.[26] When, therefore, we speak of the presence of the Spirit, what we mean, or what we ought to mean, is the spiritual presence of Christ. In the Holy Spirit Christ Himself is present, wherever, as He said, two or three are gathered together in His name. In the Holy Spirit, given to be with us for ever, He makes good to His disciples the great word of His promise, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." This is the fact continually to be kept in mind--the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ; for, if this be forgotten, then, as all experience shows, either the doctrine is wholly ignored, or it is made the subject of that vague, unreal way of speaking, which, alas! is so often the bane of spiritual truth.
At the same time, what has been said must not be interpreted so as to suggest that the Holy Spirit is merely an impersonal influence. On the contrary, the words of our Lord quoted above distinctly imply what we call "personality," and a personality separate from His own. If all that Jesus really meant to teach was that He would manifest His own invisible presence to His disciples by spiritual influences, we can only conclude that His words have been tampered with; as they stand, it is impossible that this should exhaust their meaning. To teach, to bear witness, to guide, to bring to remembrance, to declare the things that are to come,--these are the acts, not of a Power, but of a Person; and all these things, Christ said, the Holy Spirit should do. Indeed, it is not easy to see how language could have been framed to set forth the idea of a Divine Person, separate alike from the Father and the Son, more explicitly than we find it in these chapters.[27]
II
We turn now to the second part of our question: What is it that the Holy Spirit does for us? Christ's teaching on the work of the Spirit may be gathered up under two heads: (1) His work in the Church; (2) His work in the world.
(1) When we speak of the Spirit's work in the Church, it must be understood that the reference is to no particular ecclesiastical organization, but to the people of Christ generally, "the men and women in whom the spiritual work of Christ is going forward." And among these the Holy Spirit works in two ways.
(_a_) He is the Spirit of truth, the Divine Remembrancer: "He shall guide you into all the truth;" "He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you;" "He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you." It is not, it will be observed, all truth, but all the truth of Christ, with which the Spirit deals--the truth concerning Him, and the truth which He taught. Nor is it a new revelation which the Spirit gives, but rather a more perfect understanding of that which has been already given in Christ. Here, then, is the test by which to try all that claims the authority of spiritual truth. Does it "glorify" Christ? Does it lead us into a fuller knowledge of Him "in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden"? "Whosoever goeth onward," says St. John, in a remarkable passage, for which English readers are indebted to the Revised Version, "and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God." In other words, no true progress is possible except as we abide in Christ. If He be ignored and left behind, though we still keep the name and boast ourselves "progressives," we have lost the reality. On the other hand, every new discovery, every movement in the life of men, every intellectual and spiritual awakening which serves to make manifest the glory of Christ as Creator, or Revealer, or Redeemer, is a fresh fulfilment of His promise concerning the guiding Spirit of truth. Perhaps our best commentary is the history of the Church. In the New Testament itself we have the first-fruits of the Spirit's work. There we may see, in Gospels and Epistles, how the Spirit took of the things of Christ and showed them unto His disciples. And all through the varied history of the Church's long past, that same Divine Remembrancer has been at work, calling us through the lips of an Augustine, a Luther, or a Wesley, into the fullness of the inheritance of truth which is ours in Christ Jesus.