High Priest, 'I adjure Thee by the living God that Thou tell us whether Thou be the Christ, the Son of God.' Not the Messiah merely (possibly that would not have been accounted blasphemy), but also 'the Son of God;' St. Luke gives them as two separate questions. Christ accepted the oath, and declared that He was. And that this declaration was understood at the time in the full sense in which the Church has ever understood it, is abundantly proved by what followed1.

If Christ had recalled or qualified His words, when He found them thus understood, He would not have been condemned; but He allowed them to stand, to stand for all ages, as a most solemn assertion of His Divinity.

He died, therefore, a martyr to this truth. Never was the mystery of His Person so clearly revealed as in the process of His death.

2. There was in Christ's Passion an agony which the mere painfulness of the death cannot possibly account for.

This, too, plainly appears from the narrative.

As the hour approached, the agony of His inward sufferings crushed Him to the earth, strained to the very uttermost His human power of endurance.

Contrast this with what we know of the last hours of many of His saints, of the Stephens, Polycarps, Ridleys, Latimers, of later days. Many of them endured torture of body far greater than that of crucifixion; and yet they met their death unflinchingly, even cheerfully,—without any such agony.

Clearly Christ's agony implies that there was far more than appeared, a deep mystery, in His sufferings. 1 See pages 81 and 93.

3. Christ's sufferings were fore-ordained. This is again and again insisted on, not only by the Evangelists, but by our Lord Himself, when training His disciples' minds to understand the mystery of His death. Before the idea of putting Him to death had entered into the heart of a single Jew, we find it vividly present to the mind of Christ. Within two months of His Baptism He was speaking of it, yea, and of the very manner of it, to Nicodemus :—' As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.' Not only did our Lord, on three several occasions, predict the very circumstances, the betrayal, the condemnation by the priests, the delivery to the Romans, the scourging, the crucifixion, the Resurrection on the third day,— but He carefully traced this fore-ordained purpose all through the Old Testament Scriptures; referring not to a few isolated texts, but to all that was 'written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms' concerning Him.

Now here we have a great help towards understanding the mystery of the Death. For how is it to be traced all through the law of Moses? Plainly and necessarily in the sacrificial system of that law. Christ can have meant nothing else; for of direct prediction of the Messiah's death there is not in the books of Moses a single word.

4. Christ's death was therefore a sacrifice. And if so, what a light this throws on the agony of the suffering,—if there was really laid upon Him, in some mysterious way, the sin of mankind! For this was to a Jew's mind, to the Apostles' minds therefore, the essential notion of a sacrifice. A sacrifice was a freewill-offering for the expiation of sin.

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Now both parts of this twofold idea are expressly connected with Christ's death in the Gospels.

Again and again Christ impressed it on His disciples' minds that His approaching death was a freewill-offering:-'I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.' 'Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life.' . . . ‘No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.' 'Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall presently give Me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?' 'Not My will, but Thine, be done !'

So, also, again and again, it is implied that Christ's death was an expiation for the sin of the world :'Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.' 'The Son of Man must be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.' 'If any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever, and the bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.' 'The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many.' 'This is My body which is given for you.'

'For their

'This is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.' sakes I sanctify (or consecrate) Myself.' The sacrificial allusion in all these passages is unmistakable.

5. But there is yet one more mystery connected with Christ's sufferings. There are clear indications in the Gospel narrative that those sufferings involved a conflict, a final conflict, with the Evil One. And if so, again what a light is thrown on that agony in Gethsemane !

And is it not so? After the Temptation, when the Devil left Him, it is added that it was ‘for a season' only. And when did he return? In Gethsemane ; for Christ declared it on His way thither :-' 'The Prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me;' and again, 'this is your hour and the power of darkness.'

There is another ground for supposing that in the Garden the conflict of the Wilderness was renewed: -twice, and twice only, do we read of an angel ministering to Christ, after the Temptation, and after the Agony. May we not see here an indication that in both a victory had been won? And with this thought I would venture to connect those words recorded by St. John1 only:-'Father, save Me from this hour.' 'Father, glorify Thy name' (by giving Me the victory over the Evil One); then came there a voice from heaven, 'I have both glorified and will glorify it again' (once by the victory in the wilderness, once again by the victory in Gethsemane).

Thus, to sum up, it is evident from our Gospel record, that Christ's Passion was not only a martyrdom, but also a most mysterious agony, the fulfilment of a fore-ordained purpose, a sacrifice, and a conflict with the Evil One. That there was all this deep mystery in it, was plainly revealed, as we have seen, by Christ to His Apostles, even before the Pentecostal gift of the Holy Spirit enabled them to comprehend the full doctrine of the Atonement which in that Death was once for all accomplished.

1 John xii. 27, 28.

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CHAPTER VI

On the Chronology of the Gospel Narrative

T has been well said1 that the main purpose of the four Evangelists was not so much to write chronicles, as to set forth such an account of the sayings and doings of our Lord as might best prove Him to be the Messiah. This purpose governs, not only their selection, but also to some extent their grouping, of the incidents. This will be plain to any one who compares the order of the events of the Galilean ministry as told by St. Matthew, on the one hand, with the order of the same events as told by St. Mark and St. Luke, on the other2. Hence the difficulties of the harmonist. But, in the midst of these difficulties, one is ever comforted by the thought that the matter is one of altogether secondary importance.

One who studies these four divine portraitures with the view of compiling from them a dry chronicle, is

1 By Tischendorf in the Prolegomena of his Synopsis Evangelica. To this work, and to the treatise of Wieseler, on which it is based, I need hardly say how deeply I am indebted; and still more, perhaps, to Bishop Ellicott's Historical Lectures, which first led me to study the Gospel arrangement of Wieseler. Where I have ventured to depart from his order of events it has been with much diffidence, and only because I gave yet greater weight to the opinion of some of the early Fathers.

2 See the Table on page 142, for the events of a. D. 28, Jan., Feb., and March, observing the regular sequence of chapters in the Mark and Luke columns, and the irregularity of the Matthew column, noted by the asterisks.