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one and many-the one Righteous Servant and the many whom He justifies and whose sins He bears at the cost of giving His life for them (Is. 53 10-12). The ideas of the passage, therefore, present no antecedent difficulty: they are ideas which lie at the heart of the ancient religion. Further, there is nothing incongruous, nothing which makes us feel that we have risen (or sunk) to another plane of thought, when these ideas are treated as if they were continuous with that of service. They really are continuous; they are naturally regarded by the Speaker as indicative of the supreme service which the many need and which He must render. He served them in numberless ways, but it was not inconsistent with any of these ways, it was only carrying service to its utmost limit, when He gave His life a ransom for them. It is quite true that the disciples cannot do the same service. Our lives have no such virtue in them as His sinless life, and cannot be prized at such a price. Nevertheless, we must follow Jesus in doing service even to this limit: 'We also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren' (1 John 3 10). If, now, there is no objection on these grounds to Jesus having uttered the words here put into His lips, the only ground on which they can be rejected is that they imply a consciousness, on the part of Jesus, of His own relation to the ideas they convey, which is inherently incredible. The ideas, it must be admitted, were in circulation, and the subsumption of them under the general conception of service is entirely appropriate; all that can be disputed is that Jesus made the application of them to Himself.

This, it may confidently be said, can only be maintained against the total impression which the representation of Jesus in the gospels makes upon us. Jesus is not a prophet, He is to His own consciousness the Messiah, the Person through whom prophecy is to be fulfilled and the Kingdom of God established. To establish God's King

dom is to do the supreme service to humanity, and just as we have seen Him already declare His sole adequacy to the task when it is conceived as the revelation of the Father (p. 239), so here we find Him declare His adequacy to it again when it is conceived as the ransoming of forfeited lives by the surrender of a life worth more than all. "To understand Him'-as Dr. George Adam Smith has said in a memorable page already quoted-'it is sufficient to remember that the redemptive value of the sufferings of the righteous, an atonement made for sin not through material sacrifice but in the obedience and spiritual agony of an ethical agent, was an idea familiar to prophecy. It is enough to be sure, as we can be sure, that He whose grasp of the truths of the Old Testament excelled that of every one of His predecessors, did not apply this particular truth to Himself in a vaguer way, nor understand by it less, than they did. His people's pardon, His people's purity-foretold as the work of a righteous life, a perfect service of God, a willing self-sacrifice-He now accepted as His own work, and for it He offered His life and submitted unto death. The ideas, as we have seen, were not new; the new thing was that He felt they were to be fulfilled in His Person and through His Passion. But all this implies two equally extraordinary and amazing facts: that He who had a more profound sense than any other of the spiritual issues in the history of Israel, was conscious that all these issues were culminating to their crisis in Himself; and that He who had the keenest moral judgment ever known on earth was sure of His own virtue for such a crisis-was sure of that perfection of His previous service without which His self-sacrifice would be in vain. . . . It is a very singular confidence. Men there have been who felt themselves able to say "I know," and who died like Him for their convictions. But He was

1 Jerusalem, ii. 547 f. See above, p. 266,

able to say "I am. I am that to which prophecy has pointed," and was able to feel Himself worthy to be that.' Nothing could be truer to the gospel presentation of Jesus. The difference between 'I know' and 'I am' is the difference between the prophet and the Saviour, between the Old Testament and the New; and the passage with which we are dealing, though a supremely important instance, is only one instance after all of the habitual and characteristic consciousness of Jesus. If it stood alone, the criticism which we have been discussing might seem more plausible; but careful scrutiny of the words in the light of Jesus' self-revelation as a whole lifts them above the shadow of a doubt. In regarding Jesus as Redeemer at the cost of His life, as well as Revealer of God, the consciousness of the New Testament Christian corresponds to the consciousness of the Christ Himself.

THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM
(Mark II 1-10)

The incident we have just examined is closely followed in Mark by another in which also we see how Jesus thought of Himself. The circumstances of His entrance into Jerusalem were not accidental, so far as He was concerned. The fourth gospel, indeed, tells us that His disciples did not realise at the time what they were doing (121) only after the resurrection did it occur to them that they had unconsciously been fulfilling prophecy. But Jesus, it may be said, organised the procession; He sent for the ass's colt on which He was to enter the capital in lowly state. On His part it is a Messianic act, and reveals the consciousness of the King. It is difficult to deny that the multitudes who shouted 'Hosanna' were without some perception of this, though their ideas of the kingship may have differed widely from His. They hailed Him as 'Son of David,' or thought of the Kingdom He

was to restore as that of 'our father David' (Mark 11 1o), but the humble pomp suggested rather a Prince of Peace than the warrior king who had stretched the bounds of Israel from Egypt to the Euphrates. In any case, however, the triumphal entry is the act of One who identifies His own coming with the coming of the Kingdom of God. 'Son of David' may be a misleading description of the Messiah, but it is with the consciousness of being the Messiah that Jesus here passes before us.

THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN
(Mark 12 1-12)

Of the various utterances of Jesus in Jerusalem, the one which is first reported by Mark is not the least important to our argument. It is usually called the parable of the wicked husbandmen, but it is not really a parable, like those which we find in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, but an allegory. A parable is independent of its interpretation and application; the parable of the sower, for example, describes what happens in Nature every year, whether we can discern its spiritual teaching or not. But it is otherwise with allegory. Allegory only comes into existence through the application which is to be made of it: to take the case before us, no proprietor and no husbandmen ever really acted as the proprietor and the husbandmen are here represented as doing. The story has no truth of its own: it is only the relations of God and Israel which are represented in this artificial form. This cannot be disputed, but the confidence with which it is inferred that the words are not those of Jesus is more than the writer can understand. Jülicher, for example,' while admitting that Jesus on ex

1 Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, ii. 385. Cf. Loisy, ii. 319: 'Comme beaucoup d'allégories, celle-ci n'a qu'une valeur de conception théorique et théologique.' The theology, of course, is that of the Church, not of Jesus.

ceptional occasions may have used allegory, not parable, cannot avoid the suspicion that this 'parable' is due to a believer of the first generation, who, in dependence on Isaiah, chapter 5, and on parables of Jesus to which he already gave an allegorical interpretation, is seeking to justify the death of Jesus to the religious sense. It is the last and highest proof of God's patience, and must be immediately followed by judgment. The whole, he thinks, shows us how the history of Israel was regarded by the average man who had seen the crucifixion of Jesus and yet believed in Him as Son of God. It is a piece of early Christian apologetic in which we see how the Christian consciousness answered, partly to itself, partly to Jewish attacks upon it, the difficulties presented by the death of its Messiah. In a similar line the passage is criticised by Loisy and many others.

There are, however, serious objections to this whole mode of treatment. To begin with, there is no reason why Jesus should not have used allegory as well as parable. We may be quite right in thinking that it is an inferior literary genre, but it is not used here for literary but for practical purposes, and what was done by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the Psalmists, may quite well have been done by Jesus too. Further, if this allegory had been the work of an early Christian apologist, there are two points in which it would almost certainly have been different. The drastic statement in verse 9-'He will come and destroy the husbandmen and give the vineyard to others'-would have been qualified. This answers to Jesus' conception of the destiny of Israel or her rulers, and of the Kingdom of God (cf. Mark 132), but not to that which we can see from Acts prevailed among the early Christians. They had no such sense as He of what Israel had forfeited by rejecting Jesus, and of what a complete breach had thus been made between the past

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