A CHAPTER XV. The Prevision of the Cross. "He set His face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem." "The long self-sacrifice of life.” TENNYSON. N attempt has been made to show that our Lord was one manner of man at the outset of His ministry, and another towards its close. According to this theory, His early years were steeped in the sunshine; later on He became a bent and sombre man, the old joy crushed out of His heart by a desire for self-immolation. But to those who accept the gospel histories, nothing can be clearer than that the Cross with its dark shadow lies upon them from the very beginning. The shadow of that Cross is over His cradle, and even in the tranquil years of His childhood and youth it is not absent. An old legend describes Him as working out His own cross in the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. The gospel is like one of those great tragedies where in the earlier scenes a suspicion is infused of the darkness that deepens around the close. The Cross is always present from the very first, although more fully unveiled as time proceeds. The life of Jesus was a perpetual going forth to the Cross. Else how explain the words which He used at the very beginning of His ministry, to say nothing of the apparent shrinking at Cana? What else can be made of the words, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will build it up," and His saying to Nicodemus, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up?" He said this at the very beginning of His career as Messiah, well knowing, even when things around Him seemed to foretell a different issue, what the end would be. He tells the happy company that gathered around Matthew's table that a day was coming when a shadow should be thrown over their joy by the taking away of Himself the Bridegroom. And as the close comes nearer, He is still clear and certain in His prediction of the same thing. He knows it as truly in the heyday of His popularity as He knows it when friends forsake Him and enemies are fiercest. He takes His disciples aside and tells them what was to be. He knows not merely the general fact of His death, but its place, its circumstances, and its instruments. He is to die in Jerusalem, for it cannot be that a prophet should perish otherwhere. He is to suffer many things at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes. He is to be betrayed to His death by one of His own apostles. He knows the time; not when Jewish hatred seeks to destroy Him, but at the Passover, that He our Passover may die then, and that then He may institute that feast which is to fill up the long space between the old rite and the perfect banquet of His gathered children above. He knows the implement of His death; it is a Cross on which He is to be lifted up. This prevision taken by itself involves much. To all men, death is near, to some, obviously very near; but yet, when we begin to conjecture whose turn it will be first, what feverish doubt, what baffled conjecture! How different from the unwavering assurance and superhuman quietness of such words as these, "He shall be delivered to the Gentiles, and shall be mocked and spitefully entreated, and spitted on; and they shall scourge Him and put Him to death"! Again, how was it that He in the very start of His ministry, and not without much temporary encouragement, should be so sure of the issue? Had He lived to encounter the chills and reverses of life, and especially such as come to a reformer, we might in some measure have understood it; but the sworn apostle of a new great cause does not begin his work in a spirit like that. In his young hopefulness, he says: "They are tired of what is old, We will give it voices new; And, generally, it is only after a long and heartbreaking experience that a man makes up his mind that his work is to be a failure, and that his aim is to be defeated; but Jesus Christ knew that from the very first. There is in Him none of that pathetic confidence of a young reformer, on which we look as on the white plumes and unspotted braveries of an army in march for a field of blood. Again, a reformer, when he saw that the end of all his labor was to be death, might accept that death as a necessary incident in his He might say, "My life is the price career. which I have to pay for uttering the truth, and it so much concerns the world that the truth. should be uttered that I am willing to pay that price rather than be silent. In order that my work may be done, I am ready to give up my life." Jesus Christ came into the world to bear witness for the truth, but He did not give His life as a price for the witness-bearing of the truth. If He had pleased, He might have borne the most ample testimony to truth, and delivered His message in its full integrity, and yet kept His life. But He gave His life not because the surrender of His life was the penalty of doing His mission, but because it was the great part of His mission,—the great work which He came to accomplish, the centre of His work for the world, and the indispensable condition of attaining the object for which He came. For Jesus Christ not only foresaw His own death, He foresaw it as attended with immense moral and spiritual consequences. His visage was to be marred more than any man's, and His form more than the sons of men; every face was to be turned away from His; but all that was to be in order that grief might turn to Him at last, and that He might bear the heavy load of human |