Study for the Week
Christian men have differed widely in interpreting the significance of Christ's suffering and death, but all have agreed that the cross was the effective culmination of his work and the key which unlocks the meaning of his whole life. The Church has always felt that the death of Christ was an event of eternal importance for the salvation of mankind, unique and without a parallel. It has an almost inexhaustible many-sidedness. We are examining here but one aspect. We have seen in the passages studied this week that Jesus himself linked his own suffering and rejection with the fate of the prophets who were before him and with the fate of his disciples who would come after him. He saw a red line running through history, and his own life and death were part of it. He himself generalized the social value of his peculiar experience, and taught us to see the cross as a great social principle of the Kingdom of God. He saw his death as the highest demonstration of a permanent law of human life.
I
Evil is socialized, institutionalized, and militant. The Kingdom of God and its higher laws can displace it only by conflict. “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.” This clash involves suffering. This suffering will fall most heavily on those who most completely embody the spirit and ideas of the Kingdom, and who have the necessary boldness to make the fight.
In most men the eternal moral conflict gets only confused [pg 176] understanding. Sometimes they are aroused by sentimental pity or indignation, but soon tire again. If their own interests are affected they fight well. But there are men and women whose minds have been made so sensitive by personal experiences or so cleansed by right education and by the spirit of God that they take hold of the moral issues with a really adequate understanding. Living somehow on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Heaven, they have learned to think and feel according to its higher ways, and when they turn toward things as they now are, of course there is a collision; not this time a collision of interests, but a clash of principles, of justice with wrong, of truth with crafty subterfuges, or of solidarity with predatory selfishness.
The life and fate of these individuals anticipates the issues of history. This is the prophetic quality of their lives. Working out the moral and intellectual problems in their minds before the masses have realized them, they become the natural leaders in the fight, clarify the minds of others, and thus become, not only forerunners, but invaluable personal factors in the moral progress of the race. “The single living spirits are the effective units in shaping history; all common tendencies working toward realization must first be condensed as personal forces in such minds, and then by interaction between them work their way to general recognition” (Lotze). Lowell's “Present Crisis” is perhaps the most powerful poetical expression of the prophetic function in history.
“Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes—they were souls that stood alone,
While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,