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connects Him immediately with God, and makes His presence with us the guarantee and the equivalent of the presence of God Himself. This, at least, is how the evangelist conceived it, and nothing could show more clearly the place which Jesus filled in his faith. Of necessity it is a place in which He can have neither rival nor partner. As God with us, Jesus is protected by the same jealousy which says, Thou shalt have no other Gods before me. In everything that concerns our religious life, our relations to God, we must be determined by Him alone.

There is another point in his narrative at which the peculiarities of Matthew's gospel may be supposed to throw light on the religious value which he ascribed to Jesus. It is that at which Peter makes the confession of Jesus' Messiahship at Cæsarea Philippi. In Mark's version Jesus asks simply, Whom say ye that I am? and Peter answers as simply, Thou art the Christ. In Matthew both the question and the answer are significantly expanded. The question becomes, Who do men say that the Son of Man is? and the answer, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. The balancing of the Son of Man and the Son of the living God is remarkable. Possibly there is the germ in it of what came centuries afterwards to be known as the doctrine of the two distinct natures, divine and human, in the one person of the Saviour; but even if such precise theological definition were far from the evangelist's thoughts, we feel that the person so solemnly and sublimely described is one who stands quite alone. In a way of which we cannot but be sensible, though we may not be able to explain it, He is related to God and to man, and has a significance for God and for man which cannot be shared. To think of Him as a person who can be put into His place among the distinguished servants of God

who from time to time appear in the world to animate and bless their weaker fellows-as 'a prophet, or one of the prophets'-is not to think of Him as Matthew does.

The place which Jesus occupied in the faith of Matthew is, however, seen most conspicuously and unambiguously in his account of the appearance of the Risen Saviour to the eleven. Those who will not regard as historical the words ascribed to Jesus on this occasion are all the more bound to look at them, as they usually do, as expressing the evangelist's own faith. Jesus is exalted as Lord of all. He has all power given to Him in heaven and on earth. He commissions His disciples, in virtue of this exaltation, to go and make all nations His disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever He had commanded; and He promises them His abiding presence to the end of the world. Granting for the moment that what we hear in this place is not so much the historical voice of Jesus as the voice of the Catholic Church telling itself through the evangelist what it has realised Jesus to be, there can be no mistake about the place in which it sets Him. He shares the throne of God, and there is no power in heaven or on earth which can dispute with His. He is destined to a universal sovereignty in grace, and sends His chosen witnesses to make disciples of all the nations. Baptism, the initiatory rite of the new religious community, is baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; its value is that when men accept it in penitence and faith it brings their life into vital relation to that name; all that is signified by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit becomes theirs; the benediction, inspiration, and protection of this holy name enter into and cover all their life. But here, as we have often had occasion to remark already, the Son

stands in the same line with the Father and the Spirit, confronting all nations. He belongs to the Divine as contrasted with the human side in religious experience. That He was truly human it could never have occurred to the evangelist to doubt; but just as little could it have occurred to him to think that He was merely human, another child of the same race, to whom we are related precisely as we are to each other. Jesus as Matthew sees Him and exhibits Him at last is the Lord-the Lord who is exalted in divine power and glory, and who is perpetually present with His own.

How far this conception of Jesus modified the presentation of His life in the gospel, or whether it modified it at all, are questions reserved for the present: what we are concerned to note is that His place in the faith of the evangelist is that which is assigned Him in New Testament faith in general. The facts may or may not be able to support His greatness, but this greatness is what they are asked to support.

(c) The Gospel according to Luke

In the third gospel it is easier even than in Matthew to point out the characteristics of the writer's faith. They are conspicuous alike in what he tells of the birth of Jesus, and of His intercourse with the disciples after the resurrection. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and the evangelist does not leave us in any doubt as to what these epithets mean. He does, indeed, in the opening chapters, use language of a peculiarly Jewish cast in describing the Saviour and the work He had to do: 'He shall be great and shall be called Son of the Highest, and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David, and He shall rule over the house of Jacob for ever, and of His kingdom there shall be no

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end' (1 82 f.). But like Matthew he refers the origination of the historic person who is the subject of this prophecy to the immediate act of God. 'The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee,' the angel says to His mother, 'and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee; wherefore also that which is to be born shall be called holy, the Son of God' (15). Clearly, to the writer, the Divine Sonship of Jesus was nothing official, nothing to which any Israelite might aspire, or to which any man by the favour of heaven might be promoted; it is of His very being, and in the nature of the case can belong to Him alone. Any one who will may say that the mode in which the personality of Jesus originated cannot be a question of religious importance: but, however that may be, those who believed that His personality did originate in this unparalleled way must have given Him an unparalleled place in their faith.

In the body of his gospel the scene which throws most light upon Luke's way of regarding Jesus, is that which is given in ch. 4 16-30. This scene is antedated by the evangelist, as is clear from the reference to a ministry of Jesus at Capernaum in ver. 23, but it stands where it does because it is characteristic for the writer, and forms to his mind an appropriate frontispiece to the story of Jesus. The heart of it lies in the words, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears; but as these are words of Jesus, not of the evangelist, their full import need not be considered here. All we are called to remark is that Luke, though he makes no continuous appeal, like Matthew's, to the argument from prophecy, still writes from the beginning in the consciousness that God's gracious promises to His people were fulfilled in Jesus. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for He hath anointed Me to preach glad tidings to the poor.' The universal scope of the gospel-the fact that it is destined for all

mankind, and that Jesus, therefore, is Lord of all-is hinted also in this typical introduction to His ministry. He is rejected in His own city, but reminds His unbelieving townsmen how in ancient times, though there were many widows and many lepers in Israel, only a Sidonian and a Syrian had experienced the mercy of God. But all that is characteristic in Luke's faith is condensed into what he tells us of the Risen Jesus and His intercourse with the eleven. It is the Risen Jesus who is the Christ, and we see in Luke 24 44 ff. his significance in the evangelist's religion. It is He who is the subject of the Old Testament throughout; in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms-in the three great divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures—there are things written which have been fulfilled in Him, and to which His life, death, and resurrection are the only key. He opens the mind of His disciples to understand these things. The purport of all revelation, He would have them know-and this certainly is the understanding of Luke-is that the Christ should suffer, and should rise again on the third day, and that repentance for remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations. That the commission implied in this may be properly discharged, and the disciples prove worthy witnesses to their Master, He promises to send forth upon them the promise of the Father, the Spirit which will invest them in power from on high. It needs a greater effort than we can easily make to realise that Jesus had the place which this implies in the hearts of men who knew Him upon earth. But it is not open to question that it is the place He had in the mind of Luke. He owed His being in the world to the immediate and mysterious act of God. In His baptism He Himself was clothed with power from on high. The great and gracious purpose of God, shadowed forth in ancient

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