To ask, then, in what sense the Death of Christ was a sacrifice, is to ask how far that Death realised the moral and spiritual truths which underlay the ancient institution of sacrifice, and to which all sacrifices ultimately pointed.
1. The first of these ideas, as we have seen, is that death is necessary to the fulness of life, that life can only be won by the surrender of life. That ancient conception constitutes the fundamental teaching of Christ: “He that willeth to save his life, shall lose it, and he who willeth to lose his life . . . shall save it unto life eternal.” And of that great truth, which is nothing less than the formative principle of the Christian life, the Cross was the supreme expression “Herein have we come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”
The laying down of life, self-sacrifice, of which the Cross is the highest manifestation, alone brings life, alone is fruitful. “Except a grain of corn fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Selfishness, whether as self-assertion or self-seeking, is essentially barren and unproductive, both in
regard to the lives of others and our own lives. Only so far as we are, in some real sense, laying down our lives for others, denying (not that which belongs to us, but) ourselves, for their sake, can we hope to influence other persons for good, to be the cause of moral fruitfulness, of spiritual life in them. And for ourselves, we only win the fulness of our own lives, so far as we lose them in the lives of others, so far as we identify ourselves with their joys, sufferings, interests, pursuits, well-being; for our lives are real, and rich, and full exactly in proportion to the extent to which they include the lives of others.
And the Death of Christ ceases to be an unintelligible mystery, when it is regarded as the consummation of His Life of self-sacrifice. “Christ also pleased not Himself.” “He went about doing good.” And at last, in the fulfilment of a mission received of the Father for the good of men, His brethren, He crowned the Life, in which self-pleasing was not, by His Death, the necessary result, as we have seen, of His carrying out that mission in a world of sinful men. For Himself, that Death was, so He willed, the portal to the glory of the Resurrection. And the fruits of His uttermost self-sacrifice are still, after all these centuries, being gathered in, as in innumerable souls brought back from the darkness of sin into the light of the Divine Life, “He sees of the travail of His soul, and is satisfied.”
2. But what answers, in the Death of Christ, to
that in regard to which the death of the victim served but as a means to an end, the sacred meal of communion? The sacrificial principle has been laid down by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, “without shedding of blood, there is no remission.” Blood to the modern mind speaks of death, and usually of a violent and painful death. To the ancient mind, heathen or Israelite, blood stood for and symbolised life. “The Blood makes atonement by the Life that is in it.” Man can only be made at one with God, can only have “remission of sins”—the barrier which sin interposes to communion with God can only be removed, he can only be restored to that Divine fellowship for which he was made—by actual reception into himself of the Divine life, of the life of Him Who, being God, became man, in order to impart His own Divine Life to our humanity which He assumed. And Christ’s Life only then became available for men, capable of being imparted to each man, when it had passed through Death to Resurrection. If the grain die—only if it die first—“it bringeth forth much fruit.” “If I go not away, the Comforter, the Paraclete, will not come unto you.” Only by virtue of that “going away” of Christ, which includes His Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, could the Spirit which indwells His glorified manhood, come to impart the life of Christ to the members of the Body of Christ. Pentecost is the final consummation of man’s atonement and redemption.
We may still more briefly summarise these two fundamental principles which constitute the sacrificial aspect of the Death of Christ.
1. Christ died, not that we should be excused from offering, but that we might be enabled to offer the one acceptable sacrifice to God, that is, the sacrifice of ourselves in that service of God which is the service of our fellow-men.