| Had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory —1 Corinthians 2:8. WHATEVER ELSE IS TO BE MADE OF IT, everyone feels that the cross stands out a hideous tragedy, a dreadful fact black as a splash of ink upon our human records "They have crucified the Lord of Glory!" gasps Paul in horror. And as often as it comes in sight of Calvary, the heart of mankind echoes that shuddering cry, stands rooted to the spot, staring incredulously at what can't be true; yet there it really is! How did it happen, this appalling thing? What sudden orgy of insanity overwhelmed for one mad day the human nature that we think we know so well, and swept it headlong into this? For we feel hotly that it must have been something monstrous, inexplicable, blown in from the darkness round us, that was guilty of that horror. Yet the last haunting terror of it is that it was brought about by ordinary mortals like ourselves, kindly and likable in many ways, no doubt-their children ran with happy shouts to father that day he came home from Calvary, well satisfied, as he kept telling his wife as he played with his little one, with the day's admirable work-that it was not something unthinkable and gross and obviously devilish that was responsible to our Lord's cross; but that it was set up by the quite ordinary, decent and respectable little sins of decent and respectable people, by the kind of thing into which we are all apt to drift every other day. Let us remember that with a great shivering awe, lest in our lives too there rings out that sound of hammering, as the nails run home. "The past throws light on the future," says Guicciardini, "because the world was ever on the same make; and all that is or will be in another day has already been, and the same things return, only with different names and colors. It is not everyone who knows them under the new face, but the wise know them." And age by age the Lord Christ is crucified. And we too have crowded eagerly to Calvary and nailed Him to His cross, and laughed up into His face, and watched Him die, and gone our way well pleased and much relieved that we have hustled Him out of the way—yes, even we.
The Role of the Pharisees Who brought this infamy about, who did it? Well, to begin with then, there were the Pharisees. As a class they disliked Christ, and they said so frankly. They resented the intrusion of this layman—and an ill-educated man at that, they snarled-into their own domain. 1-ks teaching, or much of it, seemed to them sheer blasphemy. His habits they thought just disgusting. You can always tell a man by the kind of company he keeps, they sneered, and, with a meaning shrug of the shoulders, glanced scornfully at the sorry rabble of impossible persons with whom Christ was not ashamed to mingle. Yet they were zealously religious people, keen church-going folk as we would say, more keen and zealous by far than we are. They prayed, they fasted, they disciplined themselves with a thoroughness along their own lines that might well make us with our cheap amateur haphazard methods much ashamed. They were good people in their way, devout and desperately in earnest so far as they saw. But they made two mistakes. They were apt, as Jesus told them bluntly, to keep their life and their religion in separate compartments, and to try to compound for the one by offering that other. To pray and fast and keep their multitudinous rules was hard enough, but after all, that was a good deal easier than to be kind and unselfish when that clashed with their desires. They hoped and felt that it might do instead. They prayed long and ardently, but it had small effect upon their characters. Their temper, prayers or no prayers, remained still uncurbed, the fierceness of their animosities and party spirit were hardly checked. Nor did that seem to vex them, or to make them feel that something was wrong somewhere. That that was the end of religion had not somehow struck them. And so, while praying hard, and thronging to the Temple day by day, they planned Calvary, and worked it out triumphantly into a fact of history. This is a very solemn warning for us all. For Jesus tells us very gravely that His experience of men has taught Him that this, or something like this, is a very common failing. People can be eagerly, even fussily religious, and yet nothing may come of it in their characters. And He keeps begging each of us to make quite certain that it is not so in his case. He pursues us in this matter with blunt, awkward, pertinacious questions, difficult to face. These prayers of yours, He asks, what are they doing in you? Do they end with themselves? Are they really making you more like God; or do you run them up as a cheap substitute for worthy living? Your knowledge of the Father, and of the brotherhood of man, is the one forcing you to live your life too in God's way? Is the other making your conscience more acute to things about you which formerly you didn't notice, so that you can't pass by now upon the other side, happy in your own comforts, until these wrongs are righted? The thrills in a service when our souls are moved may become only a kind of luxury, and even an intemperance; and it has no religious value unless that emotion ends in definite action. "I fell in," says Bunyan, "with the customs of the time, to wit, to go to church twice a day, and there would I sing and pray with the foremost, yet retaining my evil life." What if we, too, are like that merchant whose bales, won at the price of such far traveling and sacrifice, on being opened, fell into mere dust? Hot, perspiring, diligent, that man, says Christ, is simply losing all his labor and creating bitter disappointment and sheer ruin for himself. He is building upon sand, and the first gush of temper, the first claim of selfishness, the first evil day, will sweep away all his so-called religion. They are mere planks and wreckage tossing for a second on wild waters, and then gone. But, though it seems much the less of the two, it was their other error that proved far the more tragic. These Pharisees had minds that were old-fashioned, narrow, bigoted. They stood for the old ways and the accepted forms of things. They themselves would have said that they were men of principle, and not to be cajoled aside. But in reality they were simply inhospitable to new light, frankly incredulous that there was any more to find. To them change meant, of necessity, degeneracy. Their particular form of stating truth was final. To their fathers there had been vouchsafed amazing spiritual experiences; and they, the children, not only remembered them with gratitude and founded on them, as was right and fitting, but took it for granted that the way in which God acted then must be the way in which He would act now, if He did so at all. They forgot, indeed, that God was alive in their day too, that even the best in history did not exhaust Him, that there was "still much light to break forth from His word." To them the book was closed, the revelation and their understanding were alike, they felt, completed. They had no hope of progress—no expectation of any further news bursting in to them from God. When rumors of that reached them, at once and without examination, they discredited them as impossible and, on the face of things, quite evidently unauthentic. For, in effect, boldly they laid it down that their poor passing conceptions were a perfect reflection of God's thoughts. Their theories were not simply theories but the eternal facts, which could not be improved, and which must not be altered. Moses said this! Moses did that! they said; and for them that was final. And when Jesus stood forth and said, No doubt he did; but I now tell you something wholly different and vastly better, they clapped quick horrified hands over their outraged ears and would not listen. They resolved at once that this appalling person must be hustled out of the way. For if these notions of His spread abroad, why, plainly, there is an end of religion! And it was that that set up the cross on Calvary! That thoughtful but forgotten author, Arthur Helps, remarks with truth that, "To be tolerant of intolerant people, to see how natural their intolerance is, and, in fact, thoroughly to comprehend it and feel it, is the last stage of tolerance, which few men, I suppose, in the world attain." Faced by that drastic test, once again Christ stands forth supreme. It was with compassion that He looked at these dull, angry souls shut into their cramped comer of a world, mistaking their dim, smoky rushlights for God's sun. The prophets grow quite fierce over that habit of the human mind, either to look back wistfully to the great days of long ago when God really was God, and things really happened, whereas now our lot is cast in a flat and prosaic time, or else to assume that what they have is all that they can have. Don't keep talking of Egypt, they fairly shout, almost shaking them. For if you, too, have only a touch of the faith they had then, now in our day things far more wonderful will happen in your own experience! Don't rest content with such glimpses of truth as you have caught. Look here, and here, and here, at all the glories in it hidden from you still. And they are hot and angry. But Christ, remembering how natural it is, is very gentle. No one, He says, prefers new wine to old; and to be satisfied with the accustomed, the familiar, that in which one was brought up, is all but universal. He did not think it strange that many did not take to Him at once, and He was content to wait for their slow stumbling minds. Nonetheless, again and again He urges on us to keep our minds open and our hearts expectant-on the outlook for God. Not to do so, He indicates, is a moral failure that may have tragic consequences. And with fearsome reason! For when you come to look at things, it was no hideous and ugly sin, but just a prejudice, a narrowness of mind, a lack of mental hospitality, just an unwillingness to credit or even consider what was new and unaccustomed, just a dislike of being jostled out of one's settled lines of thought, just that, that set up Christ's cross upon Calvary! When today one hears some people, passionate in their dislike of any innovation in theology or in religious thinking, proudly declaring it is loyalty to Christ that makes them take their stand, the fact stares at us that it was such people, animated in their day by just such motives-quite sure that they too were right and working for God's honor-who crucified our Lord. Its every age since then, they have continued doing it. It was when Man soul fell that old crabbed Mr. Prejudice, with sixty deaf men under him, was set to guard Eargate. And it was that sinister guard that was the crucifixion squad that day Christ died, their hands that pushed Him forward, that laid Him on the cross, that ran the spear into His side—"old, angry, ill-conditioned Prejudice"—and his deaf ears and his inhospitable heart. Are our hands clean? It is so easy to lose the gallant spirit of adventure that follows truth unflinchingly wherever truth may lead, to settle down and go no farther, to imagine that our poor little bundle contains everything that is of value, and to refuse to undo it again to pack in the new finds, to grow tired of always realizing that our thoughts of Christ are utterly inadequate, and so once more the walls, beginning to rise, have to come down and we must start rebuilding on a wider plan. "God offers to every mind its choice between Truth and Repose," said Emerson. "Take which you please. You can never have both." We choose repose and let truth go. And yet in the New Testament, however high they pitched their thoughts of Christ, they found these couldn't anything like meet the facts that came crowding in upon them from their own experience, that they must make their thinking of Him vastly ampler still, and they kept doing it joyously. And, indeed, it is a poor tribute to Christ to say that we have come to the end of Him and know everything in Him there is to know; that the men of Nicea or Westminster, or even Paul, saw out to the end of the universe, and that there are no other stars, no further constellations to be found and charted. Always then we cease growing, we have started to decay. When water is not running, it is getting sour and stale and just a trifle smelly. Thought's a strange land-
Some dig its fields with diligence,
Some pass through it steadfastly, like pilgrims to the Sepulchre,
Some haste in dust and beat-toward what goal?
Some climb its difficult hills, and clouds receive them from our sight,
Some take a neat villa, and plant geraniums in their borders,
And test the drains, and trim the wandering roses,
And set up a paling to hide the restless road, says Miss Underhill. Most of us do that last. For we are tired of footing it. We hide the restless road and settle down in some snug corner that we think will do. But she, for one, is all for pushing on and on, until the marshes and the salt winds and the strange voyaging birds make clear that we are near the sea. There on the fringes of thought when night is falling,
I'll wait the invading tide. Give Christ a mind like that and He will lead you ever deeper. Yes, but do we give it to Him? Are you never afraid that had you lived in His day you also, to a certainty, would have been hot against Him? Suppose it had been in our time a young man suddenly emerged out of an obscure Highland village, a tradesman in a little country way, who had never been much out of His own valley, and, talking in that provincial accent of His, told us that our accredited teachers were in many ways all wrong and our religion largely obsolete, that He had come to show us a more excellent way, a far truer faith, would we listen to Him any more than they did then? Do we listen when He does send His messengers to us with some new light? "Christ," said Tertullian, "did not call Himself the custom, but the truth." And while we are all loyal worshipers of custom, truth has few real disciples. Always it has had to fight its way to victory through hostile minds, distrustful and suspicious. Are you never afraid, I say, that at the last He may answer and say, In what way are you different from My murderers long ago? I am the Truth; and you, too, have denied Me entrance, would have none of Me, tried, as they did, to throttle Me! It was not something monstrous, it was sins like yours that long ago did Me to death. Aye, and yours, too, have often hindered Me. "I observe," wrote Jonathan Edwards in his Diary, "that old men seldom have any advantage of new discoveries, because these discoveries are beside a way of thinking they have long been used to. Resolved, therefore, that if ever I live to years I will be impartial to hear the reason of all pretended discoveries, and receive them, if rational, how longsoever I have been used to another way of thinking." Such an entry in the diary of Caiaphas or Annas, lived out, would have saved us the cross. Glancing up awe-struck at what sins like ours can do, let us, too, pledge ourselves to that, praying God for the open mind that recognizes Jesus when He comes. The Role of the Saducees And then there were the Sadducees. They held all the high places in the church, yet they had lost all spirituality, and indeed all belief in it. Religion was all very well, they said, but really, to get things done, you must look, not in that direction, but to politics. The axioms on which pious people founded were all more than doubtful, utterly unprovable, and almost certainly untrue. There was no resurrection-that, at least, was certain-no rewards and punishments hereafter; this brief life of ours was really all. A soul? Oh yes, no doubt there was a soul. But what was wanted was not brooding over that. Give us plain, practical measures of reform for this life here, and, not a doubt of it, the soul will take care of itself. And this upsetting person was becoming troublesome with His insistence upon secondary things-or so they conceived them-and was breeding trouble where they wanted peace and quiet. Yes, they felt, He were better away; and in the Council they, too, voted death. And isn't all that very typical of our own day? If you wanted a label for us, would you find a better one than a Sadducean age? We also are not worrying about immortality, hardly believe in it, or at least are not sure. We, too, have limited ourselves to this dust-speck of time, leaving unclaimed the vast inheritance beyond of which Christ told us. We, too, are putting all our zeal and passion and enthusiasm into things of this earth here, ay, and material things at that, quite certain that that is the only road to progress, and that this everlasting chatter about the soul is quite beside the point. They are all so earnest, and so certain, work so hard, are animated often by such lofty motives, are so sure that there is really no manner of need for Christ. Given this, and this, and this, each of them pushing forward his particular panacea, the world will manage very well. To talk about Christ and changing people's hearts and making us new creatures is merely to lose precious time and wander from the practical into vague daydreaming of which nothing comes. And year by year their voices grow a little harder, and they eye Christ more and more askance, feel sourly that He is a bit of a nuisance and a stumbling block to progress, keeping people quiet who should not be quiet, lulling them with these dim immaterial, fantastic, spiritual hopes of His which they think have no body, and can't save. Once more the whisper grows, "Were He not far better away?" Meantime we can ignore Him, they say; and they do. How many do! Today, too, there is a great shouting for Barabbas for the man of action: we, too, believe in politics and economics, but religion? Oh! no doubt there is a soul! But, set their circumstances right, and men will need no Savior, will soon show that they can take care of themselves! If, said Christ once, if the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! If the enthusiasms and nobilities of an age, the cures and remedies for which it works with such eager self sacrifice, are shallow, superficial, touching none of the real roots of the disease, what then? And still Christ holds to it, as He did in His own day full as ours is now of social sores and of tremendous economic problems, that in the last resort nothing can save the world but a new race of men and women, with new aims and ends and likings, and a new unselfishness and ardor of self sacrifice. And still that angers men, and they rise up and cast Him out. We are all members of the council before which He is tried. And how does your heart vote? This is a Sadducean age, and in the mass we think with them entirely.
The Role of Judas And there was Judas, that unhappy soul. Always in thinking of him we must start from this, that Christ loved Judas, Christ believed in Judas, Christ chose Judas with long prayer and deliberation as one of the twelve men whom He loved best to have beside Him, and of whom He hoped the most. Judas was a great soul, or had the makings of that in him. And when we come upon that horror, scarcely human, lying mangled there at the cliff foot, instinctively we look up, and with a shudder of fear and pity see how high he once walked in glory, and from what he fell to this. The gospel writers are frankly not fair to their fallen colleague. Always that ghastly end of his there before their eyes, and from the very first they find it difficult to mention him without adding with that shiver of soul, they, who could tell the story of the crucifixion without one hot word concerning anyone, "who also betrayed Him." Yet, far from deepening the tragedy, they rather lessen it by that; because, so doing, unconsciously they leave the impression on the reader's mind that almost he was chosen for the traitor's part, as an actor is cast to be the villain of the piece, and is marked villain from the start. But it was far more terrible than that. As you will never understand Macbeth until you take it in that it is a most noble nature we are watching crumbling there to ruin, so is it here. How did it happen, and Christ's confident dreams and hopes for him go out in such a starless night? Some say that Judas saw the game was lost, and in a kind of maddened fury sought revenge on the man who had fooled him, robbing him of long years of his life. Some, not the least De Quincey, seeing, surely, deeper, say that Judas' sin was rather this-that Christ's prolonged delay amazed him—set his mind arguing. Is there not here a lack of nerve? Does He not see the tide is at the full, and He must launch out now? That it is turning; that if anything is ever to be done, then it must be at once; that it is running out faster and faster? And still Christ let chance after chance, as Judas judged, go by, and waited, and for what? Things were not growing better, but much worse. The opposition of the leaders had been given time to harden and lay plans. The people had lost much of that first eager passion of reckless enthusiasm with which, had it been seized at once, and rightly used, anything long ago might have been done. Christ was drifting, Judas felt, straight on the rocks. But vigorous action even yet might save the situation; and he planned to bring Christ to a test that He could not evade, to place Him in such a position as would lay compulsion on Him to take action, force his hand, make Him strike. He had lost patience with Christ, thought His plans were maladroit and crude and clumsy and by far too slow. Judas was looking for a short cut; he thought that he had found it; he took it-and it ended in that horror and the cross! Too ingenious! Perhaps. Who can see clearly in that utter blackness, or say, with conviction, of a thing so ghastly, thus and thus it must have been? And yet if that really was Judas' sin, if in a kind of blundering way he meant well, thinking that he knew better than his Master and because he could not wait for Him and His slow, sure, unhurried ways, sought cleverly to force His hand, God pity us! For are we not all apt to do just that! Is the church ever quite free from a half-bewildered, half-fretful impatience with Him, that can't trust to the steady drip, drip of the weekly services soaking into men's souls, that is irritated by the seeming resultlessness of His appointed methods, must have the kingdom break in with a rush and a loud noise and all men having to take note of it, keeps seeking for a swift immediate revival, not at God's time but now in ours, devising desperate expedients, trying to whistle up the winds of God! And they won't come. And these futilities we thought so wise and good and clever end in nothing except robbing people of their hopes, and so delaying what was in God's mind to give us, what was coming, and might have been here by now, had we not rushed in with our fatuous nothings, our machine-made revivals, our grotesque improvings upon Christ. It is not so that real revivals rise, but, says Christ, like the winds. We hear the sound thereof, but cannot tell whence they have come, or where they go. A miner coming home from work is greeted in a courteous fashion by a friendly stranger, and somehow there on the road there rises up within his heart a passion of affection for his fellowmen which makes him give his life for them, and sweeps them by the thousand into the kingdom! "By Thine agony and bloody sweat, by Thy cross and passion, good Lord deliver us," a parson drones on in a cold age in a cold church at a cold service, with a few drowsy people scattered thinly, here and there, only half listening, if that. And suddenly the meaning of the words, breaking through long familiarity, rushes at one woman, seizes on her imagination, makes her see the thing and realize that this is not mere words but a shuddering fact; and a sob bursts from her, and that emotion spreads all through the church, and out and over a wide stretch of land, and changes lives unnumbered everywhere it passes. God works in His own time, in His own ways. And if we try to dictate to Him, to demand it must be now, and in this fashion we have planned, only confusion comes of that. If we would cease our cunning engineering, our hot organizing, our continual talking and conferring, of which nothing ever seems to come but more conferring, if we would sit quiet and reverent in God's presence, and worship Him, and wait, and give His voice a chance of reaching men instead of ours, how much more might we see! For does our fussiness and cleverness do anything except this? Like Judas, we get in Christ's way and hinder Him, we who had meant to help, were so sure we could help, and had found the very way to do it! It was impatience with His methods, it was thinking he knew better than his Master, it was running on ahead of Him, that, think some, was the sin of Judas and that brought Christ to His cross. And who of us is not guilty of that?
The Role of Pilate And Pilate, surely as pathetic a figure as there is in human history. A Roman, with a Roman's sense of justice, he knew at once that these charges against Christ were faked. With a curt question or two, he had the poor, bribed, muddled witnesses tripping and falling over their own impossible story, or contradicting one another at all points, quite evidently twisting innocent words into sinister meanings which they did not carry in the Accused's mouth. Tools, thought the man upon the judgment seat, and looked contemptuously at the hot faces showing through the doors, shouting and bawling yonder, half beside themselves with rage, though they would come no further into a Gentile court, these holy men upon this holy day, lest they might be polluted! How he despised and hated them! The man was hesitant to refuse them, being quite clear that there was really nothing against the strange silent Prisoner, so he tried hard to get Him off. And yet he signed the order for the crucifixion, and goes down in history, hooted and pelted with the infamy of every race. Why did he not leap to his feet and cry, "This is mere malice and not a substantial charge. The Prisoner is acquitted! And as for you, be off with you, lest you stand in His place!" Why, like a noble creature caught fast in a trap, does he only snarl and show his teeth, and struggle and long to hurl himself at his taunting enemies, and yet cannot break free? They say it was old sins that troubled him, the past failures of the man that made things difficult for him now. There had been days when he had been too hectoring and domineering; so at least these impossible people said, though he himself denied it still. At all events, protesting to Rome, they had won the Emperor's ear, and humble their governor. And that must not happen again. Ah me! is not this life of ours a fearsome thing? Take care! take care! For if you sin that sin, be sure that somehow you will pay for it. And it may be at how hideous a price! So Pilate found in his day; so you, too, will find in ours. Our acts follow us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are. Only God knows what may come out of that, if you give way to it. Pilate was curt and domineering to the Jews one day. And it was because of that that months later his unwilling hands set up the cross of Christ; unwilling-but they did it. Take you care! For sin is very merciless. If you have had the sweet, it will see to it that you quaff the bitter to the very dregs. Think, think, and take you care! Yes, but there is another very terrible fact. Fitz-James Stephen thought that Pilate's report of Christ's trial would make, could it be found, one of the most arresting state papers in history. And this is not only because of the Prisoner's personality, but because of the strong case that Pilate could make out for himself. There had been trouble before; there was always trouble with these pestilent Jews, with their mad hearts and touchy patriotism, quick to read offense in just nothing at all, and so unyielding about even their smallest rights. And Rome had laid it down that they must not be irritated. And yet here out of nowhere the old trouble was breaking out once more, and that at the worst possible time in the whole year, when the city was thronged and overflowing far into the country upon every side with multitudes of fanatical creatures, two million of them, it is said, only too ready and willing to be inflamed. These wretched priests would soon have this inflammable mass ablaze, and once more the gutters would be running blood. And that was not to be. The orders given him were strict that bloodshed was to be avoided, and that peace must be kept unbroken. And thus, looking at it from Pilate's standpoint, it comes down to this that it was to keep peace Christ's cross was set up on Calvary. "It is expedient that one man die for the people," so Caiaphas announced. And Pilate, put in a cruel dilemma, came at last to that of it too. The Man was innocent. But did he set Him free-far worse was bound to happen; lives by the score would be sacrificed; and who could say where it would end? We must have peace. That was the one fixed point. And yet he hesitated, was unwilling. If only this had happened any other time! But with these Passover crowds about I cannot risk it. Peace we must have; and He must die. Quite plainly Pilate was impressed by Christ. Yet no doubt there is something in what Luther says. "Pilate took our Savior Christ to be a simple, honest, ignorant man, one perchance come out of a wilderness; a simple fellow, a hermit who knew or understood nothing of the world or of government." Yes, it was a pity, but He must die. For us, looking on, it is easy to say that if the Man was innocent then let the heavens fall, but let justice be done. Yet not so long ago, in our own empire, a mob gathered where they had been forbidden, and a volley was fired, several volleys; and a thrill of horror swept us. But when those in authority stated that in their belief not to have fired meant an uprising and ugly massacres over a widespread area, we all settled down again, reflecting that it was a dreadful position in which they were placed, and no doubt they did what was best where nothing could be really good; and said no more about it. they must judge, they there upon the spot. Pilate, too, had to judge upon the spot. And, looking long at Jesus, slowly he brought himself to vote for peace. And we had better think of that. For today we are all agog for peace-must have it. For us, too, that seems to be our one fixed point. And it is little wonder. For those who have once seen war have no desire ever again to see it. The thing is an insanity. For, quite obviously, to hurl chunks of metal at each other can prove nothing as to the original dispute. And we do well to labor zealously to make it a bad dream, and a forgotten horror left behind. For no man can imagine what another war with all the devilments of science thrown in to the full would be. Yet we can go too far in our pursuit of peace. Is our zeal for it altogether pure, or partly that of a tired world that is not going to make any further sacrifices? Peace! Peace! we cry. Yet, after all, is peace the main thing? What about righteousness? Was Pilate right? And are we not beginning to slip down into his mood. Two little nations begin snarling at each other. And we are very bold. Be off, we say; and they slink away, making faces at each other. But a great power bullies a little one, and hotly announces it will brook no interference, that this touches its national honor. And we all carefully gaze the other way. We must have peace, you see. But must we? What about righteousness? Was Pilate right? Ekken, one of the greatest of Japanese philosophers remarks that "if a man will not give his life for righteousness he does not know the relative values of righteousness and life." "He dodges trouble," House said about Wilson, long before the war. And because, in the world's evil day, a man like that held his position, millions of people in how many lands use that unhappy soul as the last test of their Christianity. "Forgive us our trespasses," they say, "as we forgive them who have trespassed against us" (Matthew 6:12). And then they pause, and wonder, is that true? Do I forgive the man, but for whose dodging of trouble my boy would have been alive today. And they are not quite sure. Pilate, too, tried to dodge trouble. But you can't. Are we, too, trying that? Are we, too, sinking to that level? What if a day comes when you can't have peace and righteousness? What if the gutters must just run with blood, and our homes again be broken, and our hearts along with them, or Christ be led to Calvary? What then?
The Role of the People Lastly, there was the people, the kindly, decent, foolish, likable, thoughtless people. For in the end, as always, it was really they who were responsible. It was they who did it; for they could have stopped it. And they had their chance. When Pilate left it to them, no doubt he was quite certain he had found the way to free Christ. For he must have known of the enthusiasm for Him in the streets, of the long roar of rapturous welcome, must have been aware how many in the city Christ had healed, them or their dear ones. There could be no doubt, he must have felt, about the popular verdict. Christ's reprieve was sure. And he was plainly taken aback and disconcerted when there came that long shout for Barabbas, and no single voice for Christ. It was only a little gathering of course. But where were the others, those on whom Pilate had relied. They must have heard of Christ's arrest and trial, yet they were not there, had not sufficient interest to be there, they who, if they had been there, could have saved Him. Why did they fail? How did they make themselves responsible for this ghastly horror? Oh well, there were the usual excuses we all make. After all it was no affair of theirs, you know. They were busy sight-seeing; for it was not often they were up in the capital. Some of them, it may even be, had not been there before. They had their friends to look up, and these had detained them. Or they were worshiping in the temple. Or, like enough, they felt there was no need for them to hurry to the court. Christ could not be in any pressing danger. He would be all right. The others would be there to shout for Him. There was no lack of voices yesterday. They need not bother running through the heat. And so, because everyone felt there was no need to be there, Christ died—a perfectly unnecessary death, if only even a few had done their part. Let us remember that. For is it not just so that things that the world cries for get delayed and frustrated? It is not through ill-will, nor through hostility, but because people can't be bothered voting, or they stay indoors, or are made to feel that they could make no difference, and will never be missed, that changes are not made. Yet we can all do something that would help. Not much perhaps, yet yours, and yours, and yours, and mine, added together, would be quite enough. And it is because these littles we could offer are awanting nothing happens, and the shame goes on. "When I see a poor devil drunk and brutal," said Morris, "I always feel a sort of shame as if I myself had some hand in it." We have. We are responsible. Their blood is upon us and on our children. We are not hostile, we are not indifferent, we are not against it. But we are not there. And so again Christ dies. So true is it, as Paul cries with eyes glazed with horror, that we, too, you and I, have crucified the Lord of Glory, and have put Him to an open shame. It was not something gross, unthinkable, obscene, that brought Christ to His cross, but little decent sins of ordinary decent people such as we sin every day. Look at your hands, and make sure you have not Christ's blood upon them even now! |
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