Mark 15

Mark 15:1-32

XXVIII “He saved others; Himself He cannot save”- Mark 15:31. Mark 15:1-52. THESE words were uttered by the religious rulers in Israel, the chief priests. With them were associated the moral rulers, the scribes. Mark distinctly tells us that the words were spoken among themselves, but evidently in the hearing of the assembled people. The statement revealed the thought, at the moment, of the spiritual and moral rulers of Israel concerning Jesus. They were spoken, as Mark also reveals, with equal distinctness, in mockery. They were the words of jeering contempt.

This becomes the more patent as we read the remainder of what they said: “Let the Christ, the King of Israel, now come down from the Cross, that we may see and believe.” Those words were saturated with the spirit of contempt and mockery. Jesus had claimed to be the Christ, on solemn oath before the high priest but a few hours previously. He had claimed to be the King of Israel, with equal solemnity before Pilate the Roman Procurator, even more recently. Let this Christ, this King of Israel come down from the Cross. Then mark the last tone of satire: “That we may see and believe; “He has always been calling us to believe, and declaring that unless we believed we should die in our sins; let Him now give us some proof, so that we may believe! It was the language of jeering contempt.

They were singularly cruel and devilish words, for supposing them to be true, in the sense in which they meant them, then the cruelty of uttering them under such conditions is almost unthinkable and utterly appalling. Observe their admission: “He saved others.” That was a fact which even they could not deny. Everywhere, in Jerusalem, in all the towns and villages and hamlets through the countryside, were those whom He had saved. Palsied limbs were stilled with peacefulness; blind eyes were looking out with joy upon the light of day; dumb mouths were uttering forth the praises of the Lord; men long oppressed with serious disease, and women bowed down with long infirmities, were well. “He saved others.” They were bound to admit the fact. There could be no contradiction. What refinement of brutality then, to taunt Him in this hour with His inability to deliver Himself!

Even if they believed that His claims to Messiahship were worthless, common decency would have said, now it is over, let Him die in peace. But no! such is the human heart, in spite of all refinement, in spite of all culture. So they taunted Him in His dying, “He saved others; Himself He cannot save.”

‘These words of the spiritual and moral rulers were singularly revealing, drawing attention to the then condition of Jesus, making us look at Him and think. They were singularly revealing also, in manifesting the ignorance of the men who uttered them. But these words, uttered in the ignorance both of contempt and hatred, were most of all remarkable in that in the uttering of them they declared, all unwittingly, the supreme and central truth concerning Him: “He saved others; Himself He cannot save.”

Let us then, first look at Him as they saw Him; secondly, consider their double mistake; and finally, think of the issue of that upon which they looked, but did not understand.

In the first place we will attempt to see Him as He was seen of men that day. Two ugly words cover the whole story. They saw Him, condemned and executed. We are not dwelling in these meditations upon details. I am growingly impressed, that the only way to come to these stories of Christ is with the self-same reticent reverence which characterized the men who wrote the story. We have no detailed description of the actual crucifixion in either Gospel.

When these writers came to the actuality, they ever dismissed it, as it seems to me, in an almost half-whisper: “They crucified Him.” I wish Art had been as reticent, in all the centuries, and that we had no pictures of Jesus on the Cross. I say we are not dealing with details, but we must not forget this dark background; He was condemned, executed; high lifted upon the Roman gibbet; apparently one of three malefactors, doers of evil. That is how they saw Him; condemned, found guilty by the highest religious court, of blasphemy against God Almighty; rejected for Barabbas, Barabbas being chosen by the priest-inspired crowd, fickle and unstable as a crowd always is;-God pity the man who depends upon a crowd; finally they saw Him delivered, as expedient, by political authority, that of Pontius Pilate.

After He had raised Lazarus from the dead, a council was held among these-self-same chief priests and rulers, and the subject of discussion at the council was this: What are we doing? Everybody is going after this Man, and unless we stop His influence, we shall to quote the spirit of the passage lose our power and place with the Roman authorities. It was then and there that Caiaphas the high priest had said: “It is expedient for you that one should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” John interpreted the deeper meaning of that, for he added, “This he said not of himself;” but what Caiaphas meant was this: We must get rid of Him, it is politically necessary to get rid of Him. That was the ground of their appeal to Pilate, and the ground upon which Pilate delivered Him. His condemnation was considered expedient in the interest of political necessity.

Thus we see Him upon the Cross, crucified with malefactors; as a danger to the Roman rule, as having exercised an evil influence among the people of His time, as being the enemy of God. Therefore we look upon Him with the eyes of these men, as done for, and done with. The body is destroyed, the spirit is dismissed, and the world is rid of Him. The body is destroyed; those feet that have travelled long, long miles for three persistent years ; and those hands that have been held out in blessing, and have touched men from disease into health, from death into life, from suffering into joy; they are fast at last ; they have nailed them to the gibbet. Those ears that have always been open to listen to a story of sorrow, those eyes that have flashed with the light of essential emotion and tenderness and strength; the ears are deafening as He hangs there, and the light of the eyes is fading. That voice that has so often been heard, is soon to be silenced.

They have destroyed the body and they have dismissed the spirit. The Sadducees probably denied that He had a spirit; the Pharisees claiming that He had, now saw it passing into Hades, the world of departed, spirits. At least they would be rid of Him. It was then that they said, “He saved others; Himself He cannot save.”

Now let us observe their double mistake; first their literal blunder; and secondly, their spiritual blunder.

As to their literal blunder, let us for the moment forget all that we know spiritually of the significance of these words of our text. It is a little difficult to get away from the ultimate spiritual interpretation, even at the beginning of our meditation. They said, “He saved others,” a great admission-“Himself He cannot save,” a strong declaration. They were wrong, and first they were entirely wrong, even in the sense in which they meant the thing they said. Jesus, during those four and twenty hours, could easily have saved Himself. His being upon the Cross was not the result of their victory over Him.

They had not caught Him, trapped Him, shut Him up, imprisoned Him, crucified Him, and so beaten Him. His being on the Cross was not their victory. All that is not the deepest truth. Jesus could have escaped the Cross in three ways. He could have escaped the Cross by diplomacy with Pilate. Pilate earnestly sought some loophole of escape, wrought with strange and weird persistence to discover some way by which he could deliver Him; and a word from Jesus would have been enough.

Some word of diplomacy, of policy, of arrangement; and all the priests would have been powerless to persuade Pilate to the thing he ultimately did. It was the silence, the heroic silence of Jesus that compelled Pilate to do what he finally did. If for the moment that is not convincing, then hear the words of Jesus spoken to Pilate as recorded by another evangelist: “Thou wouldest have no power against Me, except it were given thee from above.” He could have escaped.

But there was another way in which He might have escaped, and in proportion as we really get into the atmosphere of this wonderful scene we shall realize it. He could have escaped by popular appeal. The cry of the crowd, presently hissed between shut teeth, “Crucify, crucify!” was but a parrot cry. They were only repeating what they had been told to say. The high priests persuaded them to it. If one catches a mob anywhere at the psychic moment, it will shout anything under God’s heaven!

Individually, that mob may go home to repent of what it shouted, but under the influence of excitement they will do it. The crowd was driven by the high priests because they appealed to it first. Supposing Jesus had reached them first with an appeal! The attempt of the rulers to avoid the feast time as the hour of His arrest, was based on their knowledge that this was so. They said: “Not during the feast, lest a tumult arise among the people.” They knew perfectly well that He had but to stand erect for one moment, and say something to that crowd, and the whole mob would have swept the priests out of the way, and delivered Him. But He did not do it.

He did not save Himself,

I cannot consider this matter without going further; for He is not wholly a man as I am. If not by diplomacy with Pilate, if not by popular appeal, then He could have escaped by Divine wrath and destruction of His enemies. Listen to Him as He said, but a little while before to one of His own disciples: “Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech My Father, and He shall even now send Me more than twelve legions of angels?” Knowing full well the danger, or, at least the inadequacy of imagination, yet as I look upon that scene, being no Sadducee, believing as I do in angels as well as spirits, it seems as though the very hosts of heaven could hardly be restrained from delivering Him. One glance of His eye, one word of power, and Pilate and priests and mob would have been swept away. He could have delivered Himself. That was their literal blunder.

Involved within it, is that which is the deeper thing; their spiritual blunder. He could not save Himself! But His inability was born of His ability; His weakness was the outcome of His strength. He was strong enough not to save Himself, strong enough to decline diplomacy with the Procurator, strong enough to be silent when one word would have turned the mob into an army of His friends, strong enough to .restrain His own omnipotence, and to bow, bend, stoop, submit. He could not save Himself.

Whence came that strength which manifested itself in weakness? What were the secrets of that ability which had its most eloquent expression in disability? I shall attempt to answer the question, by putting the actual facts concerning the Lord Jesus, in contrast with the ways already suggested, that were open to Him for escape.

Instead of employing diplomacy, we see Him cooperating with God; that is, acting in conformity with truth, moving along the line of the essential and the eternal; setting His face resolutely, in spite of all that such setting of His face involved, in the direction of holiness and light. Here we pass into the mists. Here we come into the presence of the mystery. Yet, through the mists, out of which the light breaks; and the. mystery, through the darkness of which the revelation has proceeded, He was striving against sin, and He was resisting unto blood! Because that was the Divine pathway-why it was, is not now under discussion,-because in the Divine economy He could only slay death by dying, only end sin by being made sin in an appalling mystery, He would have no conference with any suggestion of escape from that pathway. In that cooperation with God, in conformity to the underlying and essential truth, however dark the way and mysterious the hour, He was strong enough to be weak enough to die.

Or again; the second method of escape that was certainly open to Him on the natural level was that He might have escaped by popular appeal. He did not, because He was acting in separation from man-that is by separation from sinners, uninfluenced by their advice, by their votings, by their clamour-and with God for their sakes. Perhaps we can understand this better if we allow our minds to travel away from the scene for a moment, and remember that ever and anon in human history, as those have appeared who have trod this self-same pathway-not in the same degree, but obedient to the self-same principle-over and over again the men who have fashioned the ages, and have made the conditions which have been brighter and better and purer for the world, have had to stand alone, separating themselves from humanity in the interest of humanity, travelling up new Calvaries, Calvaries for which they gathered inspiration here. So He withdrew from the crowd, He did not ask its aid. He made no appeal to them; and that for their sakes. In the interest of their condition, and in order that presently He might win from them a truer judgment, a more righteous vote, a sanctified assent, He asked nothing of them. He trod the winepress alone, separate in His heroism from humanity, for the sake of humanity.

Or again, if we really seek for the secret of His strength, it is to be found finally, fundamentally, and inclusively in that He, Who might that day have escaped the Cross by an act of Divine destruction inspired by Divine wrath, accepted the Cross in order to an act of salvation inspired by Divine love. He was still acting under the mastery of the will of His God; here also, as surely as when He declined diplomacy, and stood alone for truth, He was moving along the line of the essential and the eternal; here, He was not in conflict with God, but in cooperation with Him. He could not save Himself, because He was one with God in a double determination; the determination to smite and blast and destroy sin; and the determination to heal and lift and ennoble a sinning race. Not these things held Him; the court, and the brutality of His enemies; but His o’ermastering, and o’ erwhelming love. He could not save Himself. Therefore He can save others.

So, finally, let us glance at the issue of what they did not understand. Yet the whole truth of that was expressed in what they themselves did say. What is the issue of that attitude of Jesus? He saved others. Perhaps it would be better to change their statement a little, not to interfere with its essential thought, but to change merely the tenses of its verbs; so that from beneath the mistake, the essential truth which they knew not may emerge. They said, “He saved others,” and the tense was past. They were looking back. “Himself He cannot save,” and the tense was present. They were looking at Him on the Cross.

We look back at this scene, and say: Himself He could not save. We look around to-day, and say: He saves others. Though they did not understand it-even the disciples themselves did not understand, but presently light came, and ever and anon these men who wrote the records reveal in some passing phrase their past ignorance and their new illumination-the truth is this, that all those whom He had already saved, He had saved in the power of the fact that He could not, in that final way, save Himself. He had opened blind eyes, He had healed palsied limbs, He had driven fever away, He had restored physical conditions; but He always did these things upon the basis of His passion and His atonement. The writers came to know it, I repeat, and one memorable passage comes to mind, in which Matthew tells the secret of a wonderful eventide by the side of the sea. They brought unto Him from all the countryside the sick folk, and He healed then! all.

If Matthew had written his record that night, he would have written with wonder and amazement; but later on the publican saw things as he had never seen them; and in the light of the resurrection, when he wrote his record afterwards, this is what he said: He healed them all, “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through Isaiah the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases.” Behind all His physical healing, was the spiritual passion of the Lord. I reverently declare that the Man of Nazareth would never have healed a sick lad or lass, man or woman, but in the power of that hour, when they mocked Him and scorned Him.

Turning from that past, to which they looked, and considering that future toward which He was looking when He could not save Himself because He would not save Himself, let us ask what is the issue of that great fact. We will confine ourselves to the atmosphere of this very story in considering this matter; measuring the strength by the weakness; going again to the threefold door of escape that was open to Him in the natural, and considering the threefold issue in the supernatural. He might have escaped by diplomacy. He was bound by the simplicity of truth. He might have escaped by popular appeal. He was bound by a separation from popular acclaim in order to the redemption of the populace.

He might have escaped by the exercise of His Divine power in wrath. He was bound by the consideration of a Divine love and mercy.

Now what has the issue been? He established authority on the basis of truth, rather than on the shifting sand of diplomacy. Jesus Christ is not ruling over men by diplomacy, by compromise. Perhaps one of the most terrific things, one of the most frightening things, and one of the most blessed things concerning Him is that He will not make a compromise with men, that He will enter into no diplomatic relationship with them by which, if they grant Him so much, He will grant them so much, He will not meet men half-way. There is no diplomacy in the government of Jesus. The day will dawn, which is not yet, but which must be, when delegated authority;-and all authority is delegated to the Christian; in his understanding of the universe, and his philosophy of the world, the final authority is God, and the powers that be are all ordained by God for beneficent purposes;-shall be based, not upon diplomacy but upon truth.

I do not say that all diplomacy must be untrue, but it is in terrible danger of being untrue. I will go so far as to say that when in this country we have done with a good deal of our diplomacy, and the whole truth of foreign conditions is before the people, we shall do better than we have done ; when we have simple, clear statements of the facts of the case, and not half-veiled lies that deceive. That day is coming. We are moving toward it slowly, through catastrophe and cataclysm and blood and fire and vapour of smoke; and all the way He leads, the Man Who can save others, because He would not save Himself.

Consequently, therefore, by His action He prepared for a popular vote which shall be inspired by wisdom and by love. He prepared for a people ransomed, and a people emancipated, who presently will bow to the authority of His truth, and acclaim Him Lord. To-day we may hold almost in contempt the opinion of the crowd. How soon a man is forgotten. Let him drop out, and who thinks or cares for him? Let a prophet be gone, and within a decade there will be a letter in the newspaper, drawing attention to the fact that his grave is neglected!

If a man is going to depend upon the opinion of a crowd, God pity that man. Nevertheless, the day is coming when all peoples and kindreds and nations and tongues and temperaments will forget their differences, and merge in one great song, and it will be the song that proclaims Immanuel, King of kings, and Lord of lords. But that day would never have been reached but by His pathway of loneliness.

Finally, therefore, He made possible the saving of those very men who otherwise would have been destroyed. What men? Those very men locally, for the universal will best be seen here in the light of the local. The men who were round His Cross, the soldiers who crucified Him, the mob that clamoured against Him; the priests, those very men could be saved because He did not save Himself. There is a little statement of history, in the Acts of the Apostles, full of interest: “And the word of God increased, and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem exceedingly; and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.” These very men that mocked Him, that jeered at Him, He made possible their saving! In that is the greatness of His victory.

This, blessed be God, is the Gospel. He saves others; Himself He could not save. Or once again, to change the reading: To save others, He did not save Himself. He could not save Himself, because He was determined to save others.

If we name His name, if we wear His sign, if we profess that we are Christ’s men and Christ’s women, then we have to remember that this is not the Gospel only; it is the law. It is the abiding principle of the propagation of the Gospel, and must be to the end of stress and strain and conflict. Every Christian worker of whom it is true that he or she is saving others, cannot save himself or herself. Or again to change the method of the statement; the measure in which we are at the end of attempting to save ourselves, is the measure in which we are moving out upon the highway of being able to save others. That is true in statesmanship. That is true in all the ministry of men to the needs created by the tragedy of life. It is true of the Sunday School class; and it is true of the pulpit.

It is true of statesmanship. If statesmen are attempting to save themselves and their country, they will fail. If statesmen are seeking the larger good, and are moving along the line of giving themselves out in sacrifice in order to reach the larger goal, they will save others.

In the case of those who minister to human need, doctors and nurses, I need not argue it. It is always true of such that they are not counting their own lives dear unto them, that they may make this sacred service of ministry and sacrifice.

It is true of the Sunday School class. It is true of the pulpit. We can make no contribution toward the victory of spiritual truth save at the point of sacrifice. A young minister fresh from college, said to W. L. Watkinson, that master of satire, upon one occasion, “You know, Dr. Watkinson, preaching does not take anything out of me.” “No,” said Dr. Watkinson, “and therefore, it puts nothing into anyone else!” That is true, Biblically true. If we are to save others, we cannot save ourselves. The only question that we have to face is this: Are we strong enough to be weak, mighty enough to submit, able for the gracious disability out of which the forces that renew, spring for the blessing of humanity?

Mark 15:33-47

XXIX “ A stone against the door of the tomb.”- Mark 15:46. Mark 15:33-47. THERE is a note of brooding melancholy about these words. They revive some of our own most despairing experiences. The open grave, the mortal remains laid therein, the closing of the grave, the going back to face the days ahead without the comradeship of the loved one; these are the things that come crowding back upon us as we read these words, “a stone against the door of the tomb.”

As we separate the thought suggested by the words from the sequel of the narrative, all these feelings of the .heart are accentuated a thousand-fold when we think of the One Whose body was placed within the rock-hewn tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea. The shadows of evening were gathering about the garden when this thing was done. It was the close of a stupendous day. At nine o’clock in the morning they had crucified the prophet of Nazareth, Who, while He saved others, could not save Himself; and for three hours the tides of human passion had raged around Him on His Cross. At noon supernatural darkness had settled upon the scene, and at three of the afternoon He had breathed out His Spirit. Now, at even, two men, Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus, are seen enswathing the body, and laying it in the tomb; while two women, Mary of Magdala and Mary the mother of Jesus, are watching. These acts of love being completed, Joseph rolled the stone to the entrance of the already prepared tomb: “A stone against the door of the tomb.”

Here we pause. This is death’s victory. The world is without Christ. What lay buried in that grave? Our meditation is an attempt to answer that enquiry; that we may consider together the beauty of that which was dead, and the ugliness of the fact of death.

First we see the death of things of beauty. “A stone against the door of the tomb.” When referring to the beauty of that which was dead, I am thinking not so much of the personal and sentimental, as of the universal and essential. To the disciples at the moment, the former things were of course the most real, and supreme; the personal loss, the sense of loss, the sentimental consciousness. It is at this point that we feel the most acute human sympathy with them, realizing that in that scene and those circumstances, there are elements with which we are appallingly and tragically familiar to-day; not with a familiarity that breeds contempt, for no man who loves life loves death, or pretends to admire it. It is ghastly, horrible, devilish, wherever it appears. Yet larger things were involved in the disciples’ sense than those which were personal and sentimental; and our thought is not so much of them in that personal and sentimental sense, as of the world, of the ages, of life in its entirety. In that grave wherein lay the body of the dead Jesus, life was challenged, insulted, and spit upon, as it never had been before, and as it never has been since. Whatever we may feel about the tragedy of death, here it is in its most ghastly form; for here, central to human history, is a death by the side of which none other seems to be able to compare.

I enquire what then lay within that tomb? I propose to answer the enquiry by referring to four things that for those three days and nights the world had lost, and which the world had lost for ever if this had been the end of Jesus. The things of beauty which we have been looking upon as we have studied this Gospel; which our eyes have seen, and we have beheld, which we have heard as we have caught the accents of the voice of the dead Man, which we have spiritually touched and handled as we have grown familiar with Him, walking the ways of men; these things of beauty have been slain, and now lie dead in that rock-hewn tomb.

In that tomb there is first a dead conception of God. There is moreover, a dead ideal of humanity. There is beyond that, a dead passion to redeem. Consequently and finally, there is a dead religion.

A dead conception of God. Not long before His Cross, when one of His enquiring disciples, Philip, had in his agony cried out amid the shadows of the upper room, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,” Jesus had said, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” In order to be true to the line of our meditation, without arguing the truth of that declaration of Jesus, but accepting it as from Himself, we now enquire what conception of God had been presented in Him? What was His idea of God? Not the idea of His, teaching, for His claim was not that men who had heard Him had discovered the truth about God; but that “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” In the uttering of that word, on the purely human level, our Lord was proclaiming a truth that is of universal application. Every man reveals his god by what he is in himself. Every man has a god, however much he may deny the existence of the God in Whom we believe, however much he may declare that he bends the knee to none in worship, and recognizes no authority over him other than that of his own will.

The god of a man is that to which he yields the devotion of his life, in thought and energy. It may be gold, pleasure, fame; but seated at the centre of every human life is some master idea, passion, desire, enterprise ; and that is the god of the in. Sooner or later that god will manifest itself in the m’s life. There is a sense therefore, in which every man may say, He that hath seen me hath seen my god; for a man becomes like his god.

Now when Jesus said: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,” I am aware that there were profounder significances in the word than this particular one, but we may begin here. What have we seen in Him as we have walked with Him during this time of our meditation upon this one brief Gospel? We have seen in Him grace and truth; mercy and justice; peace and righteousness. The wonder of the revelation, however, does not consist so much in these particular qualities as they have been represented in Jesus but in the fact of their union in Him. This union was a new revelation in man, and therefore a new revelation of God. Man had known something of God in the past, as to His truth, His justice, and His righteousness; and it is equally true-and no man can have been a diligent student of the old Hebrew prophecies without admitting it-they had known very much of His grace, mercy, and peace.

But in Him these things were united, without doing violence to the distinctive value of either. The wonder and the marvel of the conception of God that had been given to these men who surrounded Jesus, was that in Him these things thus met. John declared, “We beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father” and then he described what he meant in a phrase-“full of grace and truth.” Grace, compassion, mercy; truth, the right, devotion to the essential; and yet the two things always merged in Him; grace and truth, mercy and justice, peace and righteousness. In the few brief years of His public ministry, His conception of God, not in His teaching alone, but in all that He was in Himself, had been given to a little group of men. It was a thing of ineffable beauty, a thing of surpassing wonder, a thing that we are compelled to admit, that after two millenniums have gone the Church has not been able finally to express the beauty of, with all its thinking, and all its devotion. Now that conception of God lies dead in a grave; and the stone is rolled against the door of the tomb.

In the second place there lay dead in that grave an ideal of humanity. Once again to quote the words of Jesus Himself He had said to men, “He that followeth Me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life”; His meaning being that if a man would follow Him, that man would in Him see the light and glory of his own being. He claimed to have fulfilled in His own living the real meaning of the secret of the possibility of every human life. Looking back at Jesus from the standpoint of our common humanity, what then have we seen in Him? We have seen a Being, spiritual, but very definitely material. We have seen One Who in all His thinking and all His speaking and all His acting was perpetually conscious of the supernatural, the vastness that lies beyond; but equally and patently conscious of all the temporal and near, the things His hands touched, and upon which His feet trod.

We have seen One characterized by an awful dignity, even in His humanity; a majesty so pronounced and so profound, that I make one brief statement with which all will agree, no one ever dared to take a liberty with Him. There was an aloofness about Jesus that held men away from Him. Yet there was a meekness which brought all men into the closest touch with Him; and publicans and sinners dared to draw nigh to Him for to hear Him.

Here again, the ideal of humanity revealed in the Person of Jesus is not so much that of these separate qualities, for we have also seen men who have been spiritual; we have come into contact with people supremely, conscious of the supernatural things; individuals who were characterized by a dignified majesty that prevented our taking liberties with them. On the other hand we have found in the common crowd of people, men and women living within the temporal; and also people who were meek and merciful and generous. But the ideal of humanity in Jesus was the merging of these things in Him; for to Him the sacred and the secular were not two realms for ever to be kept apart To Him all secular things were sacred; all sacred things were secular. The things of the vast eternities to Him were the things with which men were to deal every day and every hour in every circumstance, and every condition. All the little things of life were to be dealt with as related to the eternal things. With Him His majesty expressed itself in meekness.

With Him His meekness was powerful in its majesty. These men had lived in close companionship for three years with a Man Who towered above them apart from His Deity, and His claims to Deity in His humanity. He was surpassingly wonderful, at once awe-inspiring and beautiful, in His revelation of the possibility of human life. Now that One lay dead, and they had rolled a stone to the door of His tomb.

Yet once more; and because of our own condition of heart and soul and life and experience, this thing is more wonderful than all. These men had seen in these three years, a human Being mastered by one passion, that of redeeming lost things. This was the story of His life: “The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.” That was new; that was something even the Hebrew religion, divine as it was in its origin, had never understood, never preached; that was something that Greek philosophy had never dreamed of, and would have laughed out of court as being unutterable foolishness. Men had known high inspirations before the coming of Jesus; they had desired to create the new, and that passionate desire was the inspiration of all artistic effort; they had craved to know the truth, and that craving was the inspiration of all philosophy; they had endeavoured to preserve the good, and that endeavour however much they had failed, had been the underlying reason of every attempt at government.

But in Jesus there appeared,-in the midst of the millenniums, centuries, cycles; in the midst of the artistic aspirations, the philosophic endeavours, and the efforts at government;-One Who said: My master-purpose in the world is not to create the new, is not to ,know the truth, is not to preserve the good; but to get hold of the effete, and make it new; to touch the false t and transmute it into the true; to reach the bad, and make it good. “The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.” In proportion as we have the great human experience, in proportion as we are able to escape from ourselves individually, and to think in the terms of humanity as a whole, humanity as we know it, with all its sorrows and sighings, and wounds, with all its weariness, agonies, and heartbreaks, we shall realize that this is what we need supremely; some One Who can lay His hand upon the dead, withered flower, and make it live and blossom with new beauty; Who can lay His hand upon poor, withered, unworthy life, and make it beautiful again; a heart that beats with all the movements of compassionate Deity. That was the passion of Jesus. Where is He? Dead! They have rolled a stone to the door of His tomb!

Ultimately therefore I see dead in that grave, not merely a conception of God, an ideal of humanity, a passion to redeem; but resultantly, a religion; in all the broadest, widest, and most inclusive sense of that great and gracious word. A religion having foundations, having structural processes, having a finality in view; a religion that fundamentally was faith in God and in man; a religion that structurally was love working toward the satisfaction of the Divine heart, and the well-being of human conditions; a religion which in its finality was hope, rejoicing in hope of the glory of God, and consequently rejoicing in hope of the glory of man.

Speaking of Jesus of Nazareth again, as within the strict limitations of His humanity, and the fact of His manhood; that was His religion. It was based on faith in God and faith in man. The first need not be argued. The Christian religion, however, is not merely a religion of faith in God; it is also a religion of faith in man. If we profess to believe in God, and do not believe in man, we are not Christians. The man who is for evermore declaring that humanity is an evil thing in itself, and that it must perish, is thinking without regard to the Christian religion.

The word hopeless, with regard to man, must be cancelled from the vocabulary of all truly Christian souls. Jesus knew no hopeless cases. Individually, or socially, He believed in men. He so believed in them that He was willing to die to realize their latent, paralyzed, possibilities. That was the fundamental fact in His religion; belief in God, and belief in man.

How was His purpose to be realized? By loving God and by loving man. Here no argument is necessary. When He was asked which was the greatest commandment, His own word covers the whole ground: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”; and, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” His faith in God and His faith in man was the inspiration of activity, growing out of His love. The Man Who thus had stood among His compatriots, and consequently at the centre of human history, giving to men this conception of God, giving to men this ideal of humanity, suggesting to men this new inspiration of life, and thus creating for men a religion; where is He, and what has become of Him? They have murdered Him; and now lies He there, and pone so poor as do Him reverence. They have rolled a stone to the door of the tomb.

That we may be led a little further along what is necessarily a melancholy meditation, I want to speak of the ugliness of the death of these things of beauty. His conception of God was denied. In His death there was neither grace nor truth. In the activity that produced His death there was neither mercy nor justice. In His dying there was neither peace granted to Him, nor righteousness. All the things opposed to the things of God, joined to slay Him. Consequently His conception of God was destroyed in the hour of His dying. They put Him on the Cross. By their own action He was slain, and God was withdrawn from human life by the volition of humanity. This God of Jesus, the God of His thinking, His conception of God was absolutely refused.

His ideal of humanity lay dead. His ideal of humanity was proved impossible by His dying. Men mocked it, men trampled on it; men slew it, and would have none of it. Consequently the ideal must be abandoned. When they nailed Him to His Cross, and took the dead body down from the Cross and laid it in the grave, they said in effect: No, we will not have that. That is not the ideal of humanity to which we are willing to bow. They said, as He had indicated in one of His parables, “We will not have this Man to reign over us.” That is not the ideal of humanity that we will accept!

More tragic still in a contemplation like this, producing more poignant grief in the heart than either of the other two; more terrible than the loss of the conception of God, than the loss of the ideal of humanity, is the fact that there lay dead a passion to redeem. It was refused. It was thus declared not worth while to try and redeem men. This was the conviction of the philosophy and wisdom of the age. Moreover it was impossible, and therefore it was foolish. Fling it out. We will not have it. Worthless things are not worth redeeming. There is no wealth in waste. And they were right, apart from Him. It is not worth while, because it cannot be done. That master-passion of the love that goes after lost things was dead, and in its tomb.

Consequently religion was dead. The foundation was destroyed, for He died, and was buried! We cannot believe either in God or man, if this be the end. Many are now reading Russian literature. So far as I have read, and am able to express any opinion, I do not know anything more wonderful in any literature than the writing of Dostoievsky. In his novel The Idiot, he describes two men, looking at Holbein’s picture of Jesus being taken from the Cross.

It is a terrible picture. One of the Russians, looking at the Cross, says: “I like looking at that picture.” “ That picture! that picture!” said his companion. “Why, some people’s faith is ruined by looking at that picture!” That is an illustrative story. That picture must ruin my faith if there be nothing to come after it. They have put that dead body in the tomb, and rolled against the door a stone. I have seen it, and cannot believe in the goodness of God, nor in the possibility of humanity.

Consequently the structural motive of religion is withered at its root, for if I cannot believe in God I cannot love Him. And if I do not believe in humanity I cannot love it.

Finally therefore, and necessarily, the inspiration of religion is quenched; for if I cannot believe in God and love Him, nor in man and love him, I have no hope about to-morrow. A stone is against the door of the tomb!

What did that tomb contain? In the story in Mark there is something which is more significant than perhaps appears upon the surface. Joseph asked for “the body of Jesus.” Pilate gave him “the corpse.” There is a great difference in the two words. They are entirely different. Joseph begged for the body of Jesus, the soma (swma); Pilate gave him the corpse, the ptoma (ptwma). Joseph begged for the body of Jesus.

The Greek word there referred to a body, as sound, and complete. I think when Mark wrote this Gospel, probably under the direction of Peter, he used these words carefully. This Greek word here used for a body, Homer always employed for a dead body, but from Hesiod onward in Greek writings, it was used of a living body. When Joseph asked for the body, he asked in the respectful term that referred to the body in its entirety and its beauty. It was the word that a lover would use. Pilate said He could not be dead already, and sent for the centurion; and as soon as the centurion showed that Jesus was dead, he gave to Joseph the corpse.

What is the significance of that word? The ruin! That is what Pilate granted to Joseph. That is what they put in the grave.

Is that the end? If so, these are the things that we have lost; a conception of God, an ideal of humanity, a new master-passion in life to redeem, and therefore a religion. If that be the end then I declare that every succeeding grave is the continuity of ghastly despair, including the latest graves. If that be the end, then tombs forever accentuate the ghastly failure.

This melancholy consideration is necessary lest we fail to appreciate the transcendent wonder of the sequel. I dare not, however, end a meditation thus. So, while our meditation has been around certain words, we may be led to the sequel in Biblical words, where the same terms are employed, and so our present meditation may be complete. What have we seen?" A stone against the door of the tomb." Let us read again: “And very early on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome come to the tomb when the sun was risen. And they were saying among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the tomb? And looking up, they see that the stone is rolled back!”

In the ineffable glory of the light that breaks, we say, That conception of God is not dead, that ideal of humanity, continues, that passion to save will still inspire, and our religion abides, faith, love, and hope. Therefore all our graves are prophecies of God’s great final victory.