CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, GOOD-FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 1916.
“Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.”—Heb. xii. 4.
“Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.”—Heb. xii. 4.
“Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” That is the manner in which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews applies the Cross of Christ as an example and an inspiration to Christians. He is exhorting them to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us,” and to “run with patience the race that is set before us,” “looking unto Jesus the Author and Perfecter of our Faith, who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross.” It is an aspect of our Saviour’s Cross which it is most important to realize if its significance for ourselves is to be duly appreciated. What was it that brought our Lord to the Cross? Of course, the ultimate cause was that the will of God required that sacrifice to be made for the expiation of human sin. “Him,” saidSt. Peter, “being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” But God’s counsel and will were worked out by human agencies; and it is of infinite interest to consider what were the motives which led men like the leaders of the Jewish nation to commit the awful crime of putting to death the Son of God, manifested in perfect human nature. The simple explanation is that He “resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” Our Lord strove against sin, and sinners could not endure His antagonism; and the opposition between the two was so intense that one or other of the two antagonists had to be overpowered. That is the substance of the story of our Lord’s life as told by the Evangelists. Our Lord came proclaiming that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand—a Kingdom with higher claims and severer judgments than the Jews could tolerate. It claimed a spiritual perfection instead of a legal one, an obedience of the heart instead of a mere compliance in external acts; it penetrated into the secrets of the conscience;and our Lord further declared that He Himself was the Judge by Whom these claims would be enforced. The Jewish rulers felt that this amounted to superseding themselves and their authority, and they treated our Lord as a usurper who must be suppressed. The tremendous denunciation of the Scribes and Pharisees: “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” was an act of open and righteous hostility to the authorities who had rejected His mission and spurned His claims. They felt that He or they must be overthrown, and they used the Roman Government to destroy Him.
It thus appears that our Lord’s crucifixion was the culminating struggle in the never-ceasing battle between right and wrong, righteousness and sin, in which the history of mankind consists. Our Lord appeared as the representative of absolute righteousness, and He was put to death because men could not endure that righteousness. In His rejection by the Jews and His crucifixion by the Roman Governor, the highest official representatives of human righteousness at that time and place combined to condemn themselves. Butthey could not have consummated that sacrifice without the consent and even co-operation of our Lord Himself. He had power, if He had chosen to exert it, to destroy them and assert His Divine supremacy. “Thinkest thou,” He said, “that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall presently give Me more than twelve legions of angels? But how, then, shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” Instead of destroying His enemies, He submitted to be put to death Himself. He allowed the unrighteousness of human nature to break in full force upon His own head; He Himself became its victim, and a victim of such infinite greatness as to constitute an expiation for all the sin of mankind. Sin and evil can only be avenged by an adequate exhibition and endurance of their consequences. But that endurance and that manifestation were afforded, in the highest conceivable form, in the destruction, so far as men could effect it, of perfect goodness and holiness. That was what our Lord’s submission to the Cross involved. When that expiation had been made to God and God’s righteousness, our Lord assumedHis full authority as a Saviour and a Judge, and, by His Resurrection and Ascension, established the Kingdom of Heaven in all its grace and power. Henceforth men have lived under that dispensation of love as well as of justice, and the Cross has been held aloft among them as the means and the assurance of forgiveness and of grace.
No human being can imitate our Lord in that supreme act of self-surrender to His Father’s will, by which He abandoned all His right and power to avenge Himself on His enemies, and became the supreme victim, and therefore atonement, for human sin. But it is possible for men to follow Him in the course of action which brought Him to that awful decision and agony. “He resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” So far as we strive against sin and evil, whatever the consequences to ourselves, we are following Him to the foot of the Cross. It is not the mere endurance of suffering, the mere surrender of life in itself, which renders us followers of our Lord in His sacrifice: men have endured much and sacrificed much for more or less selfish reasons, for ambition or formilitary glory and power. But the essence of our Lord’s sacrifice was that it was made in the cause of righteousness and truth only. “To this end was I born,” He said, “and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” We are following Him so far as in all our words and acts we are bearing witness unto the truth. That witness may at any time involve suffering and death. God has so constituted mankind that few great causes have ever been finally won without the voluntary sacrifice of life. That sacrifice may sometimes be made, like that of our Lord and of the martyrs, by the voluntary endurance of the cruel penalties inflicted by the enemies of the truth; or it may be endured in obedience to the claim of lawful authorities that we should take up arms and offer our lives, in defence of some righteous cause. Men may act in our Lord’s spirit if they submit to wrong in their own persons, rather than avenge themselves. But the authorities who, as St. Paul says, are the ministers of God, are bound to protect those committed to their charge, and for that purpose have a right to callupon those under them to use the sword at their command to defend the right. In so using the sword at the command of their rulers, at whatever cost to themselves, they also are acting in Christ’s spirit, because they are upholding righteousness and asserting the truth in the manner required by their duty. To all forms of organized sin the witness of the Jewish sacrifices holds good. “Without shedding of blood is no remission.” That, so long as the present dispensation lasts, is the unalterable law of God’s Will and Word. Soldiers, therefore, who are obeying a lawful command in defence of the right, are offering their lives in the spirit in which Christ endured the Cross, and may claim the comfort of being fellows with Him in the “holy war” of right against wrong.
But if the Cross of Christ is to be the centre of our lives, we must strive to live in all things, and not only in such great crises as those of war and the battlefield, in the spirit which brought our Lord to His Cross—the spirit of absolute obedience in all things to the righteous will of God. What the Spirit of the Cross requires of us is the absolute surrender of our ownwills to the will of God, and the constant endeavour to bear witness to that will, and to promote it in every part of our lives. It is not the mere meditation on the sufferings of the Cross which will bring us into harmony with it. The Apostles do not dwell much on them, profoundly as they must have been moved by them. What they dwell on is the spirit which moved our Saviour to accept them and to bear them. That spirit is to be discerned throughout His life, as well as in His agony in the garden and in His sayings on the Cross. It is embodied in His gracious words: “Whoever shall do the will of My Father which is in Heaven, the same is My brother and sister and mother.” The Cross is the highest and final expression of His devotion and His Father’s will; but we can follow that spirit in every duty, however humble. If the National Mission is to fulfil its object, it must impress that spirit of supreme devotion to the will of God, as revealed in Christ, upon the nation as a whole, and the Cross must become the symbol of our national, no less than of our individual, life.