CHAPTER XVIII
PAUL’S ONLY RECORD OF WORDS OF CHRIST
The first words of the sentence were, “For I received from the Lord”—he emphasized “I,” as though it meant “I myself,” or “Whatever others may have received, I received so and so”—“that which I also delivered over to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night on which he was to be delivered over.…” Here I paused and looked back, to see what “for” meant (in “for I received”) and why Paul was introducing this saying of the Lord. I found that the apostle had been warning the Corinthians thus, “Ye meet together, not for the better, but for the worse.” In the first place, he said, there were dissensions among them, and in the next place, “When ye come together it is not possible to eat the Lord’s Supper, for each one taketh his own supper, and one is hungry while another is drunken.” Then I understood that the Lord’s Supper meant that same Christian feast of which Arrian had spoken. This interested me because in Rome, as a boy, I had heard it said that the Christians partook of “a Thyestean meal,” that is, they killed children and served up the flesh to the parents. This I do not think I had myself believed, except perhaps in the nursery; but it was commonly taken as truth among the lower classes in Rome.
Now I perceived that the meal was to have been a joint one—like that of the Spartan public meals or syssitia, where all fed alike. But in that luxurious city of Corinth many of the Christians had introduced Corinthian luxury and turned the public meal into a group of private meals, so that some had too little and others too much. Paul tried to bring them back to better things by telling them what Christ said to his disciples on the night of his last meal, “the night on which he was to be delivered over.” He implied that their meal ought to have been like Christ’s last meal; and now the question for me was, what that, the Lord’s Supper, was like.
But first I had to ask myself the meaning of Christ’s being “delivered over.” About this I had no doubt that it referred to the prophecy in Isaiah concerning the Suffering Servant, who “was delivered over on account of our sins.” These words Paul had quoted in the epistle to the Romans, and he elsewhere spoke of God, or the Father, as “giving,” or “delivering over,” the Son for the salvation of mankind. Now both Isaiah and Paul had made it quite clear that the Servant, or Son, thus “delivered over” by the Father, goes voluntarily to death, and this I assumed to be the case here. But I did not know by what agency God was said to have “delivered him over.” I thought it might be by a warning or dæmonic voice, as in the case of Socrates, bidding him surrender himself to the laws of his country. Or Christ’s own people, the citizens of Jerusalem, might have delivered him up to Pilate, to procure their own exemption from punishment on account of some rebellion or sedition. Or he might be said to have been delivered over by a decree of Fate, to which he voluntarily submitted.
So much was I in the dark that for a moment I thought of Christ as fighting at the head of an army of his countrymen and giving himself up for their sakes, like Protesilaus or the Decii; and I tried to picture Christ doing this, or something like this. But I failed. Still I was being guided rightly so far as this, that I began faintly to recognise that this “delivering over” might be not a mere propitiation of Nemesis, occurring now and then in battles, but part of the laws of the Cosmopolis, occurring often when a deliverance is to be wrought for any community of men. Of such a propitiation Protesilaus was the symbol, concerning whom Homer says,
“First of the Achæans leaped he on Troy’s shore
Long before all the rest.”
He leaped first, in order to fall first. But his country rose by his fall. His wife sorrowed, “desolate in Thessaly,” and his house was left “half built.” But in the minds of men he abides among the firstfruits of the noble dead, who have counted it life to lay down life for others. This legend I now began to apply to spiritual things. I was being prepared to believe that the sons of God in all places and times must needs be in various ways and circumstances “delivering themselves over” as sacrifices to the will of God, in proportion to their goodness, wisdom, and strength—the good spending their life-blood for the evil, the wise for the foolish, the strong for the weak.