Lloyd G. Douglas, in his book The Robe paints a very beautiful word picture. All the world was at Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of the Passover. The conversation takes place between two men with the familiar split ear-lobe that marks them as slaves. One was Demetrius of Corinth. The other was a small, ill-scented little fellow from Athens.
Everybody seemed excited. The crowd was yelling something about a King. They were also shouting a Hebrew word the slaves could not understand. It sounded something like Misshia (Messiah). The other man was shorter than Demetrius. He could not see above the crowd. Standing on tip-toe for an instant in the swaying crowd, Demetrius caught a fleeting glimpse of the one who seemed to be the center of attention, a brown-haired, bare-headed, well-favored Jew. He was clad in a simple brown mantle with no decorations of any kind, and the handful of men—his intimate friends, no doubt — who tried to shield him from the pressure of the throng, wore the commonest sort of garb.
Demetrius among all the others remained quiet. He did not feel like shouting. “Gradually the brooding eyes moved over the crowd until they came to rest on the stained, bewildered face of Demetrius. Perhaps, he wondered, the man’s gaze halted there, because he alone—in all the welter of hysteria — refrained from shouting. His silence singled him out. The eyes calmly appraised Demetrius. They neither widened nor smiled; but in some indefinable manner, they held Demetrius in a grip so firm it was almost a physical compulsion. The message they communicated was something other than sympathy, something more vital than friendly concern: a sort of stabilizing power that swept away all such negations as slavery, poverty, or any other afflicting circumstances. Demetrius was suffused with the glow of this curious kinship. Blind with sudden tears, he elbowed through the throng and reached the roadside. The uncouth Athenian, bursting with curiosity, inopportunely accosted him.”
“See him Close up,” He asked
Demetrius nodded; and turning , began to trace his steps toward his abandoned duty.
“Crazy,” persisted the Athenian, trudging along.
“No!”
“King!”
“No,” muttered Demetrius soberly,”not a King.”
“What is he then?” demanded the Athenian piqued by the Corinthian’s aloofness.
“I don’t know,” mumbled Demetrius, in a puzzled voice, ” but he is something more important than a King.”
Something more important than a King has been the consensus of opinion through the years. Men have cursed him, laughed at him, hated him and disbelieved in him. But they cannot overlook him or ignore him. When Nikita Khrushchev made his famous trip to America about a year ago, reporters asked him if he believed in God. He said: “No, I suppose you would call me an Atheist.” Yet a few days later he said to a press club in San Francisco, “We are all brothers in Jesus.” In his recent tirades before the United Nations General Assembly, he made more than ten direct quotes from the words and parables of Jesus.
Dorthy Sayers, whom some of you remember as a detective novelist, is also quite a theologian in her own right. She has said that the Christian Faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man. The world has asked of the Church: “What think ye of Christ?” “Who is he?”
The answer to this question has been forthright, categorical and uncompromising. He is Jesus-bar-Joseph, born in Bethlehem, reared in Nazareth, was in the most exact and literal sense God, “By whom all things were made.” His body and his brain were those of a common man. His personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. Yet, he was not a kind of a demon or fairy pretending to be human. He was in every respect a genuine living man. On the other hand, he was not merely a man so good as to be “Like God.” He was God.
Now this brings about the strange theology of Christianity. What does this incarnation of God mean? If it means anything, it means this. Here is a God who has the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he not only laid down the rules, but he kept them himself and played fair. He does not demand anything of man that he has not exacted from himself. He has run the whole gamut of human experience from the trivial relations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death— as manifested and dramatized so terribly in the tragedy of the day of the cross.
Of course, Christianity was not the only religion that had a God who became incarnate in human flesh. The Egyptian Osiris died and rose again. Aeschylus in the play Eumenides, reconciled man to God by the theory of a suffering Zeus. In most theologies, the God is supposed to have died in some remote prehistoric time—whereof only legend can relate. This is not so with the Christian story. When Matthew was writing he could say: “When Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the days of Herod the King.” St. Luke goes one step further and pins down the date to a time of particular Government finance, when for tax purposes the people were being enrolled. Thirty years later this “God was executed under Pontius Pilate” for being a public nuisance. It was as definite and concrete as all that.
Of course, there are some disquieting things about this story of the God, who came to walk among men. The common people heard him gladly. But the leading authorities in the church and state thought that he talked too much, and uttered too many disconcerting truths. So, they bribed his friends to hand him over to the authorities, and they tried him on a rather vague charge of creating a disturbance. They had him flogged and hanged on the common gallows of their day, thanking God with religious fervor that they were rid of the knave.
So in simple truth the story is this: He submitted to the simple conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero. What a strange world we live in. When a man stands up and recites the story of this drama, men find it hard to keep awake, finding it somewhat dull and uninteresting. Yet those same men are hoarse and tired, because of shouting at twenty-two men chasing a little leather ball around a field trying to get it over a line. This for us is exciting. However, when we talk of God actually coming down into human history and becoming a man— we wonder if we should go and listen to the story or just stay home in bed.
And how in the later generations we have messed up the story. We talk to our children about the “Gentle Jesus meek and mild?” Or we walk down the hall and listen to our children singing: “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.” Now who in the dickens would ever want to be a sunbeam?
To those who knew him however, he was no milk-and-water person. They objected to him as a dangerous firebrand. True he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with the honest enquirer, compassionate before the needy, and humble before his Heavenly father.
But who could think of him as meek and mild. He insulted respectable clergy calling them hypocrites: he referred to King Herod as “that fox.” He went to parties in disreputable company, and was called that gluttonous man, that winebibber. He insulted indignant tradesman and threw their merchandise out of the Temple. He drove a coach and horses through the stayed conventions and religious customs of his day, shattering them to pieces. He healed diseases by the best means of hand, one time even making mud with his own spit and anointing a blind man’s eyes. He seemed to insult the proud and mighty with his paradoxical and humorous answers to their “How-do-you-answer-this-you-nin-con-poop questions?”
But there was another side to him too. His life radiated an understanding of mankind—a love and a compassion for the needy—a deep religious fervor and devotion to his heavenly father—this and a lot more—that gave a daily beauty to his life that makes all else ugly. John could say: “We beheld his glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of Grace and truth.”
And then finally they crucified him in the midst of two thieves. What a strange mockery he made of that cross. What a shambles he made of that kind of justice. He was hanged to that tree as a common low-down criminal—but his judge’s words could not be forgotten—behold the man — I find no fault in him. He was crowned with a cruel crown of thorns—but strangely that crown has become a jewell-studded diadem of glory—with each drop of blood glistening like a pearl.
In the classic little book for boys called Bevis by Richard Jeffries, the boy in the story looks at a picture of the cross in his little book for a long time. The writer says: “The crucifixion hurt his feelings very much: the cruel nails, the unfeeling spear.” He looked at the picture a long time and then he turned over the page saying: “If God had been there, he would not have let them do it.”
But the strange thing is that God was there in that Cross. George Buttrick reminds us of the famous painting that tries to depict the insight concerning God’s involvement in the cross. The picture shows behind the figure of the cross, another figure shadowy and vast. The nails that pierce the hand of Jesus go through the hands of the shadowy figure behind him. The spear that brings blood from his side, pierces the shadowy figure, too. Who is this figure behind the crucified who is crucified too. Of course it is God.
Someone has said that if God were good, sin would break his heart. Well, it does, and did. Sin broke his heart on the Cross. In a strange way three roads led to the cross. Man the sinner was nailed to that cross—this was the just punishment for his crime. Man the Good and Godly was nailed there. There was no sin in him and neither was any guile found in his mouth. But, God compassionate and redeeming—full of love for mankind was also nailed there. Sinner, saint and God meet at Golgotha—where God was triumphant—the new Adam was born to bring in the redeemed people—and man the sinner was redeemed— and his judgment was done away with.
That is not all. On the third day he rose again from the dead. God was in Christ blazing the way beyond the grave and death for man’s fulfillment. God was fulfilling his creative and redemptive purpose for man. Because he lives we live too.
Now the strange thing is this: No one is compelled to believe a word about this story. If we do not believe, we must take the consequences of a world ruled by cause-and-effect—dominated by wicked and greed-drunken men—enslaved by the very evil genius of man himself—a world bound ultimately for death and extinction.
But, if we believe in him, the whole story is changed. Man is no longer fallen: he is redeemed. He is no longer a creature bound for death and the grave—he is redeemed man— made for eternity and resurrection. The story of man is no longer a tragedy or a comedy, but a glorious triumph.
But it is all tied up in this wonderful story. Christ confronts us today. We cannot escape him. He says: “Come, follow me, be my disciple—lay down your life for me—declare me Lord—give me your all—and you will have all this—reject me turn me away, doubt me, blind your eyes to my love—and you are lost, doomed and gone.” You cannot escape the answer.
Reverend Arthur Schwabe Blog 