Not only over the manger, but over the entire story of his life, hovers the glory of the star. It is a life that will not stay down on the dull earth of mere fact; it always rises into the region of idealism and beauty. It always transcends the things of sight and touch. We have a religion which cannot be confined in a system of doctrine or a code of ethics; it partakes too intimately of life for that. It is, like its Founder, a full rounded reality, rich in inspiration and emotion and wonder, as well as in intellectual ideas and truth. When the star wanes and imagination falls away, and we hold in our thin hands only the husks of a dead system, the power of religion is over.
The same thing is true of the cross. Its power lies in the fullness and richness of the reality. We do not want to reduce it, but to raise it to its full meaning and glory as a way of complete life. The direction of present-day Christianity is certainly not away from Calvary, but quite the opposite. The men who are in these days trying to deliver our religion from formalism and tradition find not less meaning in the cross than a former generation did, but vastly more. The atonement remains at the center, as it has always done, in vital Christianity. All attempts to reduce Christianity to a dry and bloodless system of philosophy, with the appeal of the heart left out, fail now as they have always failed. It is a Savior that men, tangled in their sins and their sorrows, still want—not merely a great thinker or a great teacher.
The Church has, no doubt, far too much neglected the idea of the kingdom of God as Christ expounded it in sermon and parable, and hosts of prominent Christians do not at all understand what this great, central teaching of the Master meant then and means now. His transforming revelation of the nature of God has, too, been missed by multitudes, who still hold Jewish rather than Christian conceptions of God. But patient study of the gospel is slowly forcing these ideas into the thought of men everywhere, and books abound now which make his teaching clear and luminous.
What is needed above everything else now is that we shall not lose any of our vision of Christ as Savior, and that we shall live our lives in his presence. It is through the cross that we touch closest to the Savior-heart, and it is here that we feel our lives most powerfully moved by the certainty of his divine nature. Arguments may fail, but one who looks steadily at this voluntary Sufferer, giving himself for us, will cry out, with one of old, “My Lord and my God.”
Nothing short of that will do, I believe, if Christianity is to remain a saving religion. Good men have died in all ages; great teachers have again and again gone to their deaths in behalf of their truth or out of love for their disciples. It touches us as we read of their bravery and their loyalty, but we do not and we cannot build a world-saving religion upon them. Christ is different! We feel that in him the veil is lifted and we are face to face with God. When we hear with our hearts the words, “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but fear not, for I have overcome the world,” we feel that we are hearing the triumph of God in the midst of suffering—we are hearing of an eternal triumph. Christ can not be for us less than God manifested here in a world of time and space and finiteness, doing in time what God does in eternity—suffering over sin, entering vicariously into the tragedy of evil, and triumphing while he treads the winepress. No one has fathomed the awfulness of sin, until, in some sense, he feels that his sin makes God suffer, that it crucifies him afresh. If Christ is God revealed in time—made visible and vocal to men—then, through the cross, we shall discover that we are not to think of God henceforth as Sovereign—not a Being yonder, enjoying his royal splendor. We must think of him all the time in terms of Christ. He is an eternal Lover of our hearts. We pierce him with our sins; we wound him with our wickedness. He suffers, as mothers who love suffer, and he enters vicariously into all the tragic deeps of our lives, striving to bring us home to him. Jan Ruysbroeck says:
“You must love the Love which loves you everlastingly, and if you hold fast by his love, he remakes you by his Spirit, and then joy is yours. The Spirit of God breathes into you, and you breathe it out in rest and joy and love. This is eternal life, just as in our mortal life we breathe out the air that is in us and breathe in fresh air.”