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V.
WHO WAS CONCEIVED
BY THE HOLY
GHOST,
BORN OF THE VIRGIN
MARY,
SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS
PILATE, WAS CRUCIFIED, DEAD
AND
BURIED.
Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood. He
also Himself in like manner-partook of the same; that through
death He might bring to nought him that had the power of
death, that is, the devil.
HEB. ii. 14.
But
when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth His
Son, born of a woman, born under the law.
GAL.
iv. 4.
And the
Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and
we beheld His glory, glory as of the only-begotten from the
Father), full of grace and truth.
JOHN
i. 14.
[He]
emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being
made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as
a man. He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto
death, yea, the death of the cross.
PHIL.
ii. 7,8.
We
behold Him Who hath been made a little lower than
the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death
crowned with glory and honour, that by the grace of God He
should taste death for every one.
HEB. ii. 9.
THE summary confession of our faith in Jesus
Christ, whereby we acknowledge Him to be
the fulfiller of all the divine promises to mankind,
the only Son of God, our Lord, is followed in
the Creeds by a more particular record of His
work. This falls into two parts. The first
describes the work of His earthly Life : the second
His work in the world of spirits, crowned by that
coming to Judgment which is the union of the two.
In this lecture I propose to speak of that
which the Creed teaches as to Christ's work on
earth, reserving for the next the consideration of
its issues in the world beyond the grave. The
two subjects are indeed inseparable: they are
opposite sides of the same realities. Yet to
our apprehension they appear as cause and
effect. Jesus Christ, St Paul writes, became
obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross;
wherefore also God highly exalted Him. And
again it is written we see Him Who hath been
made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus,
because of the suffering of death, crowned with
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V.
Phil. ii. 8 f.
Hebr. ii. 9.
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60
Danger of religious realism.
V.
John i. 3 f.
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glory and honour . So He in His humanity
—Jesus—accomplished the true destiny of man,
and accomplished through suffering the destiny
of man fallen.
We do well therefore to consider by itself
Christ's earthly life, to use whatever helps we can
gain to give distinctness to events of a distant
age and circumstances widely different from our
own. But at the same time there is a danger in
this popular realism. We must not rest in the
surface, nor let the form obscure the idea. We
must take earnest heed lest that which appeals to
the senses or to the imagination usurp the place
of the spiritual truth. If under one aspect
Christ's earthly life was a life of humiliation, we
must remember that even in this He manifested
His glory to those who had eyes to see, that
the cloud which veiled it came from man's weak-
ness and man's unbelief, that never for one
moment did He cease to be the Son of God,
the Word, through Whom all things were made,
and in Whom all things were life.
Bearing then this central Truth in mind we
go on to confess that we believe in Jesus Christ...
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the
Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was
crucified, dead and buried.
In the earliest Creeds this article was much
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Each element in the Creed significant.
61
less full. It was not till the seventh century that
every element was combined in the form of words
which we habitually repeat. For so it is in the
order of Providence that we learn by slow ex-
perience what points in the one truth require to
be emphasised, what details are fruitful for the
guidance and support of life. But as the
record now stands in a bold outline, which we fill
up instinctively from the Gospels, we feel at once
what a solemn picture it gives us of a human life,
of a human life freely offered for men: 'Conceived,
born, suffered, crucified, dead, buried.' Each word
marks a crisis in the sacrifice, and helps us to
apprehend its completeness. God by the
working of the Holy Spirit united Himself with
man. The Word became flesh , and took to Himself
under the conditions of human birth our nature
and our lot: so Christ was 'conceived' and 'born.'
For Christ that lot of man can be briefly summed
up in the phrase 'He suffered,' suffered from first
to last, even while He grew in favour with God
and man, as seeing the disharmony between ' His
Father' and 'His brethren.' He suffered
and He endured the cross, the uttermost shame of
suffering, being made an outcast from His own
people who were by calling the people of God:
'He was crucified.' In that most terrible
form He bore the last issue of sin, though He
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V.
Gal. iii. 13.
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62
The lesson of Christ’s humanity.
V.
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knew no sin : 'He died.' And he received
the last tribute of love from friends who had ceased
to hope : 'He was buried.' Step by step we
follow the history, and as we reverently ponder it we
learn to look to Christ as the One Divine centre
of humanity as created : to look to Him as the Re-
deemer and Restorer of man fallen: we learn to medi-
tate on the Incarnation in itself; and on the sorrows
by which it was actually encompassed. We
learn something of the lesson of Christ's humanity,
something of the lesson of Christ's sufferings.
These are the two main lessons of this section of
our Greed which we must seek to master.
The lesson of Christ's humanity. Christ was
not only truly man, with body, soul, and spirit, in
each of which He suffered, by hunger and weari-
ness and pain, by grief and anger, by desolation :
He was also and is perfectly man, and He was
and is representatively man.
It is not necessary now to dwell on the first
of these statements that Christ was truly man.
This is written plainly in the whole record of
His work. But the two latter thoughts require
some explanation; for we must grasp them firmly
if we are to understand the power and the promises
of the Gospel.
Christ was and is perfectly man. For us
humanity is broken up into fragments by sex,
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Christ perfectly man.
63
by race, by time, by circumstance. From the
beginning its endowments were not unequally
divided between man and woman, whose differences
are essential to the true idea of the whole. And
we can see that countless nations and ages have
not yet exhausted the manifold capacities of man-
hood and womanhood under the varied disciplines
and inspirations of life. Again and again even in
our own experience some new flash of courage
or wisdom or patience or tenderness goes to
brighten the picture of man's completed and real
self. But in Christ there are no broken
or imperfect lights. In Him everything which
is shewn to us of right and good and lovely in the
history of the whole world is gathered up once for
all. Nothing limits His humanity, but the limits
proper to humanity itself. Whatever there
is in man of strength, of justice, of wisdom:
whatever there is in woman of sensibility, of
purity, of insight, is in Christ without the con-
ditions which hinder among us the development
of contrasted virtues in one person. Christ
belongs peculiarly to no one people, to no one
time. And conversely, if there be aught that is
noble in the achievements or in the aspirations of
any people or of any time, it finds a place in His
sympathy and strength from His example.
This truth is at present of vital importance.
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V.
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64
Christ representatively man.
V.
1 Cor. xv.
45.
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There are those even among ourselves who look only
on the sterner side of the Lord's nature, and then
transfer to His Virgin Mother, or to Saints, all the
attributes of compassion and mercy which attract
sin-stricken souls. There are those again
who lose themselves in the contemplation of these
softer traits, and in a selfish and fatal indolence
forget the stirring claims, the awful Majesty of the
King and the Judge. And yet more than
this. We are all tempted to look to Christ as He
has been recognised in some other circumstances
than our own, to perpetuate and to make absolute
a type which has been once hallowed: forgetting
that He is revealing Himself to us now, shewing
to us under the actual conditions of our present
life fresh gifts and energies and hopes of our
common nature which He has wholly consecrated,
and that the test of our faith is that we dis-
cern Him as He shews Himself not to others
but to us.
Christ, I repeat, was and is perfectly man: He
was and is also representatively man. Seeing
that He unites in Himself all that is truly manly
and truly womanly, undisguised by the accidental
forms which belong to some one country or to some
one period, everyone can therefore find in Him for
his own work union with the eternal. He is,
in the language of St Paul, 'the last Adam,' 'a
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Christ's manhood the consecration of all life.
65
life giving spirit. ' For Him, consciously or un-
consciously, all men were looking: to Him all
history tended: in Him a higher life had its
beginning and its pledge. Ye shall see ,
He said Himself in answer to the first confession
of faith, the heaven opened and the angels of God
ascending and descending upon the Son of man .
And for us the promise has found accomplishment.
In Him we are enabled to perceive that the broken
unity of earth and heaven has been restored; in
Him we are enabled to recognise that the earlier
intercourse between the seen and the unseen
worlds has been brought to an absolute fulfilment.
Christ the Son of man has bestowed on the race
the gifts which belonged to Him as the Son of God .
Thus Christ is representatively man; and it is
by fellowship with His human nature, by taking
it to ourselves as He offers it, by striving, as we
may, to win that which in the end we shall receive
freely from His love, that we all can obtain
life. This is what He speaks of as ' eating
the flesh of the Son of man, and drinking His
blood ,' making our own, appropriating, using, the
virtue of His humanity as He lived for us, the virtue
of His humanity as He died for us. In our-
selves we are weak, frail, doomed to death. But
there is a power of eternal being within our reach,
which is sufficient for every man and fitted for
W. H.
F. 5
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V.
John i. 51
John vi.
53.
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66
The lesson of Christ's sufferings.
V.
John i. 29.
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each man. Whatever be our capacities and en-
dowments, due, as the case may be, to our birth,
our years, our position, our country, they may be
all consecrated through Him Who lived perfectly,
Who lived representatively, the life of which we
each live a little fragment. Whatever may be
our failures, our negligences, our ignorances, they
may be all done away in Him, Who bore the sin
of the world, and took it away by bearing it.
So we pass from the lesson of Christ's
humanity to the lesson of Christ's sufferings. We
believe that the Incarnation would have been
necessary for the fulfilment of man's destiny
even if he had perfectly followed the divine law.
The Passion was necessary for the redemption of
man fallen. This is a fact to be thought
over. The presence of evil amongst us and in us,
in its manifold forms of suffering and selfishness
and loss and crime, is a reality which no ingenuity
can hide or dissemble. Revelation did not cause
this terrible affliction, but it shews that it does
not belong to the essence of creation or to
the essence of man. It shews therefore that
it is remediable: that it can be removed from
man without destroying his true nature, nay
rather that his true nature is vindicated by the
removal. The idea of Christ's sufferings,
the idea of redemption, presupposes the idea of a
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Victory through suffering.
67
Fall. Such an idea is, I will venture to say, a
necessary condition of human hope. No view of
life can be so inexpressibly sad as that which
denies the Fall. If evil belongs to man as man
there appears to be no prospect of relief here or
hereafter. Sin, as old poets say, will have an
endless progeny of sins. Misery will be as the
shadow which we cast when the sun is brightest.
There can be nothing in us to drive out that
which is part of ourselves. Strict retribution is
the only teaching of that invariable sequence
which we call law. But the confession of our
belief in Christ's sufferings takes us into a new
sphere. We embrace effectual forgiveness as the
revelation of the Gospel. Christ took to Himself
and bore to the grave the uttermost burden of
sinful humanity, and. Himself sinless and vic-
torious over death, offers to men fellowship in the
fruits of His conquest. How His life and
death avails with the Father for us is a question
which we have no power to answer. It is enough
for us to acknowledge the supreme triumph of
divine love from first to last, one will of one God
reconciling the world to Himself in Jesus Christ,
His only Son, our Lord.
But while the lesson of Christ's sufferings is
thus, from first to last a lesson of conquering love, we
must not forget that He did conquer from first to
5—2
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V.
2 Cor. v.
19.
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68
The discipline of sons.
V.
Heb. v. 8.
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last by suffering. He offers us in the whole history
from Bethlehem to Calvary a measure of our
need, a measure of sin. Our imagination is
too feeble to realise all that that history suggests,
but our hearts cannot but be moved by it.
Those long years of silent waiting, those long
nights of secret prayer, shew us, as we have the
will to see, what present human life is, something
infinitely deeper and more solemn than impetuous
efforts of hasty enthusiasm or bold conflicts in the
sight of men. We must win and bring the
perfect offering of ourselves before we can rightly
do God's work. There is that within us which
must be overcome before we can safely encounter
foes without. Communion with God in the Risen
Christ must be maintained by continuous effort if
we are to do our work as men.
All this calls for sacrifice, for sacrifice of
will, of pleasure, of ease, which finds its motive
and its support in Christ's sufferings. It is
impossible for us to look to these and suppose
that we who bear His name shall not be made
partakers of His temptations: unnatural to wish
that we who claim the privilege of sons may not
be fashioned in obedience, as He was, by a
Father's discipline.
We tremble perhaps as we use the words,
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The victory.
69
conscious of our besetting weakness, but can the
teaching of our Creed mean less? Is it as an
idle form that we trace day by day the outline of
Christ's work on earth which brings before us as
nothing else can do—if we will but in calm
waiting allow it to have its effect—the glory of
life and the solemnity of life, the double lesson
on which we have dwelt, the lesson of Christ's
humanity, the lesson of Christ's sufferings: the
lesson of His humanity, by which we learn the
brotherhood of men, whereby all in due measure
through sorrow and effort, through failure and
success, contribute to the fulfilment of the idea of
creation : the lesson of His sufferings, by which we
learn the true nature and inevitable consequences
of sin, whereby the glorious light and glad hymn
of the Nativity were followed by the great dark-
ness and bitter cry of the Passion ?
God grant that we may learn ever more and
more—learn for life—these lessons which our Creed
teaches us, the lesson of Christ's humanity, Who
was truly, perfectly, representatively man: the
lesson of Christ's sufferings, Who was a propitia-
tion not for our own sins only but for the whole
world.
As yet, indeed, man's destiny is not visibly
fulfilled: the fruits of Christ's victory are not
completely gathered: we see not yet all things put
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V.
John xxi.
22.
1 John ii.
2.
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70
The victory.
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under Him, but we do see—and in this vision lies.
the assurance of every hope—we do see Him Who
hath been made a little lower than the angels, even
Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned
with glory and honour.
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