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new in the Kingdom of God; they are part of a whole which filled His thoughts, and which He revealed in pregnant words to His friends. No doubt they could only grasp them imperfectly at the moment, but it is a mistake. to say that they can only be understood in the context of Paul's theology. They could arrest, fascinate, move, and stimulate the mind; they were there thenceforth with the authority of Jesus for Christian thought to brood upon. Without discussing their authenticity further, we have now to ask what light they cast on Jesus' consciousness of Himself.

It is the nature of a symbol that it can be set in different lights, and always seems to call for further interpretation. But from the very beginning, the symbolism of the Supper and the words which gave the key to it spoke unambiguously to the Christian mind. They spoke of Jesus giving Himself, in His body and blood, in all the reality of His humanity and His passion, to be the meat and drink of the soul. They spoke of a covenant based on His sacrifice of Himself-not merely a bond in which believers realised their brotherhood, but a new relation to God into which they entered at the cost of His life. They spoke of a transcendent kingdom in which all the hopes and yearnings of earth would be fulfilled, and in which the Master, who was about to die, would celebrate His reunion with His followers in a world where death and sorrow have ceased to be. We cannot think that less than this was in the mind of Jesus when He said, 'This is My body—this is My covenant blood-I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine till I drink it new with you in the Kingdom of God.' But no Christian faith ever put Jesus in a more central and commanding place than this. It is not a place which can either be taken or shared by another; it is all His own. This unique and extraor

dinary place is not only given to him, but taken by Him. It is not taken only when it is thrust upon Him; it is assumed in the words He here speaks, and in the symbolic acts which accompany them, before any one has seen what they involve. The experience of the Church for two thousand years justifies the self-assertion, or rather we should say the self-revelation, of Jesus in the Supper, but it is not the Church's experience which is reflected in the narrative. The same wonderful Person whose incommensurable greatness has already flashed upon us in this scene or that of the gospel history here rises as it were to His full stature before our eyes, and shows us the ultimate meaning of His Presence and His work in the world. The revelation is one that justifies all that Christians have ever felt or said of their debt to Jesus; and it is one of the services the Supper does to the Church, that it recalls Christians periodically to the things which are fundamental in their faith-the atoning death of Jesus, fellowship with God through Him, the assurance of immortality. We do not feel it presumptuous to conceive such thoughts or to accept them as true; they are in the mind of Christ before they are in our minds, and we rest on them as realities in Him.

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The trial of Jesus presents many difficulties to the historical student, but it is an excess of scepticism which would question the one reference to be made to it here. As J. Weiss has remarked,' there were ways of knowing what took place at the meeting of the Sanhedrin. Jesus had at least one adherent there, Joseph of Arimathea; and it is simply inconceivable that His friends should 1 Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, 197.

not, after His death, have made the most interested inquiries. The grounds of His condemnation must have been discussed in Jerusalem between His older followers and His enemies, and the evangelists certainly believed what they have put on record. That there are discrepancies in their accounts is indubitable, and that Luke in particular does not at this point follow Mark as he usually does in narrative, but represents an independent tradition, is also, in the opinion of the writer, indubitable; but the divergences are for our purpose immaterial. According to Mark, the council had considerable difficulty in finding a ground on which to condemn Jesus. "They sought witness against Him to put Him to death and did not find it' (1455). The witnesses lied, and were not even coherent or consistent in their lies. The most promising were some who asserted that they had heard Jesus say, 'I will destroy this temple made with hands, and after three days I will build another not made with hands' (1458). The Temple, as the dwellingplace of God, was sacred, and to violate it, as Wellhausen points out, was still, as in the days of Micah and Jeremiah, a blasphemy against God punishable with death. But it is quite needless to argue with him that this was the blasphemy for which Jesus was condemned, and that the reluctance of Christians of the early days to admit that Jesus could have said anything disrespectful to the Temple led them to misrepresent the truth, and to introduce as the ground of condemnation another charge -that of claiming to be the Christ-which does not involve blasphemy at all. It is not clear what Jesus said about the Temple. In Mark 132 He predicts its destruction in the most explicit terms; and as both Matthew and Luke copy them, early Christians do not seem to have been so embarrassed as Wellhausen supposes. But whatever He had said, the representation

of His words by the witnesses was so wanting in consistency that after all it was found impossible to proceed upon it (1459). The council wished to maintain the appearance of legality, and after a vain attempt to get Jesus to compromise Himself about the Temple, the chief priest took another line. He brought up the Messiahship of Jesus. This implies that, though Jesus was not in the habit of publicly declaring Himself to be the Messiah, the idea was somehow or other associated with His name: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and the excitement and significant cries which accompanied it, are evidence that this was so. We may assume that the chief priest, when he said to Jesus, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? had in view the formulation of a charge on which Jesus could be arraigned before Pilate. The Christ, however qualified, means the King; and it was as King of the Jews, a rival to Caesar, that Jesus was to be delated to the governor. In this character, too, He actually was presented and sentenced to die, as the inscription on the Cross proves. But His answer to the priest's appeal-or as Matthew puts it, to his adjuration-goes far beyond a bare assent, 'Jesus said, I am, and ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven' (1462). It is as though at the supreme moment of His life Jesus fully revealed the secret of what He was. 'I am the Christ' means 'I am the promised King, He through whom God's purposes are to be fulfilled and His sovereignty established; I am the Christ, as the future will gloriously declare.' It is needless to argue that for the evangelist and his readers the Speaker and the Son of Man were one and the same; and the independent tradition in Luke makes it clear that this was so also for those who were immediately addressed (Luke 22 66-70). They perceived that Jesus was making for

Himself an astounding, and what they considered, or affected to consider, a blasphemous claim, and it was on the ground of it that their condemnation of Him rested. It is idle to say that there was nothing blasphemous in claiming to be the Messiah, and that such a claim could not explain the action of the council; the council was not scrupulous, and this particular Messianic claim, made by this particular person, with such threatening assurance, might well seem to them the very kind of insolent impiety to which the name blasphemy belonged. It led in fact directly to His death.

In this self-assertion or self-revelation of Jesus there is in a sense nothing new. He has said substantially the same thing before (Mark 91, Matt. 16 28, Luke 927). It expresses indeed the consciousness in which He lived and died-the sense of Himself, and of His vocation and destiny by which the gospels are filled from beginning to end. All that is exhibited in the 110th Psalm ('Sit thou on My right hand')—all that is exhibited in the seventh chapter of Daniel ('the Son of Man,' 'coming with the clouds of heaven')—is to be fulfilled in Him. The sovereignty of God, which means the sovereignty of the human, as opposed to the brutal and unjust, is in Him to have its consummation. The form in which this is put has often proved disconcerting; Jesus, it is said, has not come with the clouds of heaven; and if He were under a delusion about this, can we trust His consciousness of Himself at all? Reference has been made above to the symbolical element in all such language-Daniel 7, for example, is symbolical throughout; but it is permissible here to refer to the fact that both Matthew and Luke give the words of Jesus with a certain qualification. Matthew (264) has: Henceforth (àn' apri) ye shall see the Son of Man seated; and Luke (229), But from this time (ànò тou vov) shall the Son of

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