THE SON OF MAN A VICTIM

Mark ix. 31, x. 33, xiv. 21, 41 (Matt. xvii. 22, xxvi. 2, 24, 45; Luke ix. 44, xxii. 28; Mark viii. 31 s Matt. xvii. 12; Luke ix. 22).

It was not necessary that an angel from heaven should have- taught men that a Sinless man, if he should appear in an unideally conditioned world, must necessarily suffer. Plato in a very familiar passage says, "The righteous man, being thought unrighteous, will be scourged, racked, bound; will have his eyes put out; and finally, having endured all sorts of evil, will be impaled" (Rep. ii. 361). It was inevitable that where moral standards have been perverted, the good should be thought evil and the evil good. The good man, according to Plato, suffers not because he was known to be good, but because he was thought to be bad. The perfect man measured by perverted standards must needs appear wicked and be awarded the judgment of the wicked.

When William Carey awoke to the real nature and genius of the gospel as a message of world-wide power and application, and proposed missionary enterprise among the heathen at the Northamptonshire Association, Mr. John Ryland vehemently called him "a most miserable enthusiast." Probably the great body of the membership of the Association concurred in this judgment. When John Wesley and George Whitefield began their fervid evangelistic work, pleading with their audiences for immediate decision for Christ, the representatives of an easygoing ecclesiasticism, moving in traditional grooves, denounced them in all manner of severe and derogatory terms. No thoughtful or observant reformer with ideals above those of his generation will expect a cordial welcome and an earnest co-operation from the corrupt age he is aiming to bring to a sense of better things. The face of a sinless man in a sinful community is a challenge to the forces of evil which they will not be slow to take up. By His very coming into the world the Son of Man places Himself across the path of sin. Will sin fail to fight for its life? Does the wild beast at bay give up meekly to the hunter who is seeking its life? Does the stream across whose path the dam has been built fail to rise in its accumulated volume and weight in a determined struggle to sweep the barrier or overleap it in its irresistible march towards the ocean? "The Son of Man must suffer at the hands of sinful men." The sin that is in them must needs arise to sting and wound and "bruise his heel."

But the suffering of the Son of Man took certain forms, which, characteristic as they may be, are not at first sight congruous with His mission.

1. Betrayal.

First of all, He was "betrayed." It is interesting to note how much is said of the betrayal of Jesus. The expectation of it weighed heavily upon His mind, so that He foreshadowed it to His followers. Judas, who perpetrated the act, was indelibly marked with the stamp of its dark shame. His former companions could not, after the act, think of him apart from the blot on his record, nor speak of him without adding the descriptive "which was to betray him." Even in the preliminary enumeration of the disciples his last infamous deed must be linked with his name — "Judas, who also betrayed him." When in the course of the narrative of the last days the arrest is reached, it is with special circumstantiality that the betrayal is placed before the eye of the reader. The scene in the garden, the approach of the officers with the mob armed with sticks and staves under the leadership of Judas, the sign of the kiss — all these details are given with more than ordinary care and fullness.

Why this special emphasis on the darkest hour of Jesus' life? Evidently because it had impressed all observers with the enormity of its offence. A betrayal is in the nature of the case an especially grave wrong. It is falsehood to a trust. An enemy may oppose and fight; and he may do so in an open and honourable way. A friend must first betray before he can fight. He cannot fight honourably until he has openly ceased to be a friend. But the traitor persists in appearing a friend when at heart he has become an enemy. Betrayal can only take place under the cover of friendship; therefore its best emblem is the wolf clothed in the skin of the lamb, whose object is to devour and destroy what it appears to befriend. Its perpetrator uses the most sacred of relationships as ground of the vilest and most hateful of offences.

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was not surprised to see among his assassins the dark eyes of the "lean Cassius," or of the "envious Casca"; but when he perceived the genial face of his noble friend Brutus in the group, he quite gave way; "ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms, quite vanquished him." Thus it has come to pass that Judas has borne the stigma of dishonour, the mark of Cain, on his name and reputation through the Christian centuries.

Men will almost forgive the foul immoralities and brutal cruelties of a Herod, of a Nero, a Caligula, or an Alexander Borgia; but they will not condone the treachery of a Benedict Arnold or a Judas Iscariot. Nothing in the whole range of human passions serves as a better means of stirring indignation and calling upon itself the execration of the healthy man than the sin of treason. Therefore in literature nothing is more apt to arouse profounder hatred than this sin; and in the criminal code nothing is placed above it as a crime, and punished with a severer penalty than "high treason." In the tragedy of Macbeth it was not so much the heartlessness of the cold-blooded murder that pierced the conscience-stricken king and broke him down, as that the crime was committed under the cover of friendly hospitality. In an open war much severer cruelty might have been displayed; but the betrayal of the holiest of trusts, of friendship, led to the incurable, uncleansable stain. All of great Neptune's ocean could not wash away the blot.

The Son of Man was made the victim of this the blackest form of human depravity. Is there any significance in the fact? Was it a mere accident? or was it an incident growing out of the very nature of the relation He sustained to the moral order of the universe? An incident, but inevitable in the circumstances. Its significance must be found in the uncompromising character of the conflict with sin. It was no mere superficial, formal engagement to satisfy an empty code of honour, after the manner of a modern duel. It was a deadly combat in which He grappled with the invisible powers and was assailed by them as a mortal foe. The Son of Man must, indeed, be betrayed into the hands of men. Thus only could He drain the bitterness of the cup to the uttermost.

2. Suffering.

"The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, and by the chief priests, and scribes." "The elders," "the chief priests," "the scribes '' — these are the potent influences in social life which always tend to become. more and more completely organized, and to assume greater and greater authority. "The elders," i.e., those who were appointed to rule, the governing body; "the chief priests," i.e., the officers of the churches, the ministers of religion, those who by reason of their ministering in the religious services had come to be regarded as the specially accredited executors of the divine will; and the "scribes," i.e., the representatives of learning, the teachers of the people, the literary class, who were therefore the guardians of the intellectual interests of the people. The enumeration is exhaustive. All classes of leaders and all types of leadership in the community were concerned with the appearance of the Son of Man. For He presents Himself as the typical and comprehensive leader; and to each type as well as to each individual He has an ideal to hold up. But by each class He is rejected.

Being rejected by the leaders, He was rejected by the community. It is true that some individuals, such as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, would not concur in His rejection; and that others went even further towards Him, and were destined in later days to be His active followers and disciples; but for the moment His rejection was complete, and it expressed the feeling and attitude of the whole community towards Him. Rightly and wrongly the leaders have borne the brunt of the responsibility of His rejection. Rightly, because it belonged to them to guide the people to the best action, and they failed to do this. Rightly, also, because no matter how impotent the leader may be at times when the tide of popular feeling has risen high and passed beyond his control, in the end he is one of the makers of the feeling: and without his active co-operation it could not have risen so high. The leader's responsibility is always greater than that of the mere unit in the crowd. But these leaders have been also in a measure wrongly held accountable for the suffering of Jesus because the people who followed were equally guilty. The ancient prophet's "Like people like priests" was ever a true maxim. No people at any time can place the whole burden of its wrongdoing with the consequent misfortune on the shoulders of its leaders. But whether people or followers were more to blame, the rejection so far as the Son of Man was concerned was complete.

Nor was it a passive or negative one. It was no mere silent disregard, a contemptuous dismissal of His claims, a supercilious scorn that will not condescend to so unworthy an adversary. When a crisis arises it may be met as a great opportunity, a tide with which one may move and advance the world's progress; or it may be met as a call to warfare, a stream that must be stemmed and reversed; and again it may be met as a matter of no immediate concern, since the forces that are to settle the issue raised are adequately at work within the crisis itself. In the last case the statesman adopts a policy of masterly inaction. This was not the way the leaders looked upon the crisis raised by the appearance of Jesus. No policy of silence could satisfy the conditions. They must take note of Him, they must gird themselves to the conflict with Him. He was too great to be passed by; too conspicuous to be ignored.

There is that in Jesus which commands men to some kind of attitude towards Him. The instant His true nature and claims are apprehended, it is necessary to reckon with Him. If not accepted He must be rejected. He always divides the world into opposing camps. He that is not for Him must be against Him. "He came unto his own, and his own received him not." But this was not the end. "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become sons of God." "For judgment I am come into the world, that they which see not might see, and that they which see might be made blind." Has there ever arisen among the sons of men one who, like this Son of Man, has drawn from the lips of His brethren so much animated expression or such vehement rejection?

"He must suffer many things," not necessarily bodily maltreatment. This was severe enough in His case. The scourgings and bufferings, the nails piercing His hands and feet, the carrying of Him bodily to and fro: these are incidents in the suffering of the Son of Man, and serious, no doubt; but more serious than these were the pangs that entered His soul, the hatred and malice, the misunderstanding and misrepresentation, the bitterness of spirit and the hopeless and cheerless ill-will that lay behind these outward acts of His persecutors.

The bodily pain inflicted on Jesus in the days of His flesh was but a circumstance, and an inevitable one, in the whole complex of outward aspects of the life of His age. Offenders must needs be dealt with in that way. The times have changed. That method of treating criminals, either alleged or real, has passed away. Men no longer scourge, buffet, or publicly crucify offenders against the law of the State or the Church. But there is reason to believe that Jesus was not much pained by these outward blows. Those that raised His body on the Cross and otherwise treated it as that of a criminal, elicited from His lips the alleviative: "They know not what they do." But the pain of seeing men vent feelings of malice and hatred, the realisation that the good He was doing them was being misunderstood, the doubt as to the present success at least of His Messianic mission — for these things there seemed to be neither excuse nor extenuation. These pierced Him to the heart.

And has the spirit that actuated the chief priests and scribes in their treatment of Jesus passed away? Men, even the most hostile to Him and to the institutions He has created, would shrink with horror from the idea of inflicting physical pain upon such an one as He was. But do they not still pass from misunderstanding to rejection of Him? Do they not with their evil and unworthy thoughts of Him still cause Him to "suffer many things." Do they not by their contemptuous treatment "of the least" of His brethren, by their proud and censorious attitude towards His gospel of compassion, still grieve and break His. heart? The old prophet characterised the ideal sufferer as "despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." And the description fits, and must always fit, Jesus the sin-bearer, as long as the aim of His coming into the world is hindered and counteracted by the sins of men.

3. Death.

But the valley of humiliation had a deeper level for the Son of Man to tread, even that of death. The Apostle Paul in his familiar portraiture of the ladder through which the Eternal Son reached this depth points out its various rungs. The first step in the downward course was that "he emptied himself"; the second, that He "took the form of a servant"; the third, that "he was made in the likeness of men"; the fourth, that "being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself"; and the fifth, that "he became obedient unto death," and the Apostle adds the cap to the climax as he points to the form of the death, "Yea, the death of the cross."

To submit to death is, in itself, neither misfortune nor merit. It carries neither honour nor deprivation. Death coming at the end of full and complete life may be a blessing. An eminent scientist has propounded the view that by nature man should be endowed with an "instinct for death" just as he is endowed with an instinct for life. It is his meaning that when life has run its course and its stream has spent its force, there should ensue the hunger and expectation for death just as naturally as the desire for sleep after a day of healthy toil, or the desire for food and drink after thorough depletion. The reason such an instinct does not manifest itself in human experience is that life, because of unnatural conditions, is cut off before the proper stage is normally reached for the development of the instinct. However this may be, death certainly has a place in the complete experience of a man, and it cannot in itself be regarded as a curse except in a world that has ceased to be normal.

But why should the Son of Man be put to death? To die is one thing and to be put to death is quite another. Why should the ideal man be put to death? Why indeed, except that he came into a world of sin, a world in which not death as a release from earthly and purely physical conditions was the ruling principle, but one pervaded and completely controlled by sin, — a death in which sin is a controlling factor, a death in consequence of sin.

Thus the death of Jesus, like His life, is symbolised by the whole burnt-offering, a perfect, absolute, unqualified surrender of His whole self, an unreserved dedication of His personality to the work He undertook to accomplish and to the will of His Heavenly Father. "Yea, the death of the cross," exclaims the Apostle as he contemplates the self-sacrifice of the Saviour of mankind. The Son of Man must, indeed, be put to death.