Glorying in the Cross

But far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.—Galatians 6:14.

1. Early in the Apostolic age Judaizing teachers appeared in the churches, who, by the dissemination of principles which were subversive of the gospel, beguiled disciples from the simplicity of Christ, and produced discord and division among the brethren. The error which they propagated in the churches of Galatia was so prolific of evil that it sapped the foundation of the sinner’s hope toward God, poisoned and petrified that flowing fountain which had been opened at the cross “for sin and for uncleanness,” nullified the proclamation of free pardon which the gospel carries on its loving bosom to all the children of the Fall, thwarted the benevolent purposes of Jehovah, and robbed the redeeming Saviour of that glory which was due to Him for the matchless work He had achieved “for us men and for our salvation.” The error consisted in preaching circumcision as essential to salvation. They “taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.” Their object, says St. Paul, was to make a fair show in the flesh and to avoid persecution.

The “cross” seemed a hindrance to their success, and therefore they hid it out of sight as much as possible; but all the time they were compromising a principle, and there was nothing in this mere outward conformity that could help men to an inward life of truth and grace. It was all a question of trifles, of a mere glorying in the flesh; but, says the Apostle, “Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.”

2. St. Paul’s passionate declaration sums up in itself all the positive teaching of the letter to the Galatians; it is this—that his soul makes her boast in the cross of Jesus Christ; that for the exaltation of this cross of Jesus he will cast everything aside—his past, his reputation among his own people, the future grandeur of the historic Israel, all that the world might reasonably be expected to offer to an innocent ambition. And what made this declaration so potent with the Galatians and all others to whom he addressed it was that it was a fact of experience. For these words represent the deliberate convictions at which the Apostle had arrived after much thought and long experience. So far from being the outcome merely of a passing mood, they tell of a growing intensity of feeling and of a belief deeply rooted in knowledge. It is quite true that the experience which lies behind the words was an exceptional one, and that they represent a very lofty level of life and thought. But to the man who uttered them they were real, and though for us they may seem to point to an ideal, it is at least one that we may count to be attainable.

3. St. Paul makes the cross the measure of all things. He brings the world and all the glories of the world to the cross, and weighs them there as in a balance, and he finds them wanting. Now let us try to understand what St. Paul means by the cross, and not put too narrow a limitation upon it. It was not the piece of wood, or the physical sufferings of the Divine Victim, or the painful, shameful death of the crucifixion scene. St. Paul, when he spoke of the cross, saw before him the vision of a splendid and a fruitful Life, crowned by a tragic end. To him the cross of Jesus Christ included all that was covered by the incarnation of the Son of God and the redemption of man. The whole life and work of Jesus Christ—His pure and holy manhood, His Divine wisdom, His tender sympathy, His saving grace, His glorious sacrifice, His risen power—all was summed up for the Apostle in the single word, the Cross.

The very Rev. old Ebenezer Brown I have twice heard preach, and a most interesting exhibition it is; he is a specimen of old Presbyterian eloquence and style. There is something very dignified in his energetic yet subdued manner; his old broad Scotch, his deep sonorous voice, rendered very inarticulate now from old age, but famed in his youth for reaching a mile at open air preachings; and oh how fain would he that it reached many and many a mile, if he could but bring poor sinners to his loved Saviour! Somehow, every word he utters melts me to tears; Christ crucified is all his theme, all his salvation, and all his desire. Humility, simplicity, serene peace, and that single repose in the Saviour which has brought the spirit of Jesus so eminently and so purely into his heart and life, are what characterize this aged saint. The pathos, the spirit, the unction of his preaching, surpasses all eloquence, and is overcoming to an unutterable degree; none could imitate it, none could ever equal it, unless imbued with the same spirit from on high.1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 360.]

I

The Cross and Christianity

Christianity is the religion of the cross. Its subject-matter is called the cross. Its Author and Lord is the incarnate, risen, and exalted Son of God who died upon the cross. Its aim—salvation—is accomplished through the cross. The true instinct of Christendom has echoed St. Paul’s words, and accepted this his spiritual ultimatum. The cross—not the holy cradle or the broken tomb—has always been its chosen, its prized and beloved emblem. It rises over the Christian Sanctuary, ornamented in richness, and wreathed into forms of beauty. It was once an emblem of shame, all and more than all that the gallows is to us; but now it is the sacred form which men delight to enrich with their jewels and their gold, or even to mould to lovely shapes, in which its own roughness seems almost lost. Outwardly at least, all Christendom has gloried in the cross. But such glorying, such rejoicing in the cross, marks a joy which has in it an undercurrent of seriousness.

Taking this tone and spirit of glorying for granted as the only one which becomes a Christian, surely we can see very clearly, and feel deeply, why we should glory in the cross. There are grounds upon which every disciple may take his stand in echoing the language of the Apostle—reasons why he should declare his determination to glory in nothing else save the cross, why he should refuse to bring into comparison or competition with it anything, however illustrious it may be, of an earthly or human nature.

The more it is pondered, the more the power of Christianity is found to lie in the cross. The incarnate Christ, the risen and exalted Christ, and all His mysterious presence among us and experiences in our midst, become intelligible when we find Him acting for us and upon us by His death on the cross, acting in us and through us, by awakening in us the very spirit that led Him to the cross. Of course the cross does not say all. It is but a symbol, and no symbol can. But “the very power of a symbol lies in the sublime inadequacy and yet practical effectiveness of its suggestion.” And this symbol is associated so intimately with the great critical, crucial event in the Saviour’s work for the world’s salvation that we are not surprised that the gospel is called the word of the cross. The cross symbolizes the service He did for us. It symbolizes the nature of the service He expects of us. And if it reminds us that the ideal life for man is no smooth, easy progress over carpeted tracks, but strenuous, arduous, often wrestling with things repellent and cruel, it tells us, too, that Christ asks nothing of His followers harder than that which He has faced for them of His own gracious will, for

Not in soft speech is told the earthly story,

Love of all Loves! that showed Thee for an hour;

Shame was Thy kingdom, and reproach Thy glory,

Death Thine eternity, the Cross Thy power.1 [Note: R. J. Drummond, Faith’s Certainties, 145.]

1. The cross gives us a new conception of God.—Mankind before Christ went about, in St. Paul’s phrase, “groping after” God, as one gropes in the dark for an object suspected to be there yet nowhere to be found. He was not far, to be sure, from any one of them. Yet they had to “seek God, if haply they might feel after him, and find him.” And they would hopelessly strive to pierce through the darkness which surrounds the throne of the Almighty, and, even were they successful in finding God, they would not find the Father. But the light streaming from the cross dispels all the mist, and actually lays bare the very heart of the Eternal One in its paternal longings for men. All His revelations in the Old Testament, His ordinances, institutions, promises, judgments, reach their fulfilment and find their real explanation in the cross. More than that, all the hints of truth current among heathen nations—all their sighing and striving after the knowledge of God and communion with Him, all attempts to get rid of the consciousness of guilt, to atone for sin, and to effect a perfect restoration to Divine favour—in short, everything regarding the nature of God and His designs which glimmered as a ray of light here and there in this darkness obtains in Christ and in Christ crucified its goal, because in Him it finds its full manifestation. In the cross we have revealed most perfectly every one of the Divine attributes, and, in the very forefront, the completeness of the Divine understanding of, and the intensity of the Divine sympathy with, human suffering and sorrow.

In one of his sonnets in the Vita Nuova, Dante instils the essence of sympathy into two lines. Speaking of one who offered him comfort in his great grief over the death of Beatrice, he says,

Our life revives, since one doth now console

Who sorrows with us, healing grief with grief.

That goes to the heart of things. The sympathy that we feel to be most real is that which has behind it a kindred experience—can heal grief with grief.

By what has Christianity subdued the world if not by the apotheosis of grief, by its marvellous transmutation of suffering into triumph, of the crown of thorns into the crown of glory, and of a gibbet into a symbol of salvation? What does the apotheosis of the cross mean if not the death of death, the defeat of sin, the beatification of martyrdom, the raising to the skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain?—“O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?” By long brooding over this theme—the agony of the just, peace in the midst of agony, and the heavenly beauty of such peace—humanity came to understand that a new religion was born, a new mode, that is to say, of explaining life and of understanding suffering.1 [Note: Amiel’s Journal (trans. by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 167.]

“What shall I ask for Thee, my Child?”

Said Mary Mother, stooping down

Above the Babe all undefiled.

“O let Him wear a kingly crown.”

From wise men’s gifts she wrought the crown,

The robe inwove with many a gem;

Beside the Babe she laid them down.

He wept and would have none of them.

“What shall I get for Thee, my Child?”

Unto the door she slowly went,

And wove a crown of thorn-boughs wild:

He took it up, and was content.

Upon the floor she gathered wood,

And made a little Cross for Him;

The Child smiled for He understood,

And Mary watched with eyes grown dim.

“Since these He doth prefer to gold,”

She sadly said, “Let it be so;

He sees what I cannot behold,

He knows what I can never know.”

That night the eyes of Mary saw

A Cross of stars set in the sky,

Which after it the heavens did draw,

And this to her was God’s reply.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Empire of Love, 120.]

2. The cross gives us a new hope.—Not only does the cross reveal the Divine nature and the Divine purpose, but it is the great and efficient means by which this Divine purpose is carried out. On the cross atonement is made for sin, pardon is procured for the sinner, the work of grace is carried out to its last requisite, and everything perfected that belongs to the plan of redemption. Through the cross we have our consciences purged from dead works. We have a right to enter the holy place through His blood. We stand in the presence of the burning glory of the Shechinah, unabashed, unashamed, accepted in the Beloved, for we know that “there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”

It is evident that St. Paul is here contemplating the Redeemer’s work in this vital aspect of it. He speaks in the next verse (Galatians 6:15) of “a new creature”—that renewal of the heart which is everything in personal religion, and without which all mere rites and ceremonies are utterly worthless. And he manifestly traces the power which produces a new birth and new life to the cross of Christ. It is there that the opened eye of the heart first learns that God is not eager to punish, but generous to atone: that our sins in the past offer no longer a hopeless bar to our return to His favour; that on the contrary, He waits to receive and is prompt to forgive us for Jesus’ sake.

The cross of Christ is no longer to you the symbol of a bargain between a vindictive Deity and a self-sacrificing Deity, between the individual and selected Soul and the Trinity, but the expression of the great truth of life that self-renunciation, the way of the cross, is the only pathway in spiritual life, and that not as a duty or a trial, but as the only means of freedom, hope and joy. People will tell you Buddha taught this, and that all the ascetics have taught the same; but their teaching was not like Christ’s. They wanted to kill self, an impossible feat. He meant the self to be lost in love for others, and devotion to them; that by the miracle of spiritual life the lost self should return on the great spiral of progress to its old point in the plane, but to such elevation in height that it shines with immortality, and light, and love as with the garments of God’s Kingdom. This was the joy that was set before Him. This is the unhoped, unexpected joy set before our dim eyes. God help us to attain it, and in this we make no selfish prayer, for so truly is God love that He has made the condition of our progress (as James Hinton so well says) “others’ needs,” no selfish and self-sympathizing isolation and introspection, no weary attempts to perfect the self by the self. Thank God, the cross sweeps all those hardnesses away; and you in Dumbarton and I in Buenos Ayres, this busy and excited town, can live the life better than any hermit. And we won’t shrink from any suffering and anxiety He, in His love, puts before us, knowing that these things and His sweet love bring us into the fellowship of suffering, the world’s suffering, little understood and little aided.1 [Note: W. Denny, in Life, by A. B. Bruce, 430.]

Natural and supernatural constitute a universal order and an everyday process. It is by such a path, beginning in the lowest forms of nature, that Bushnell finds his way up to holiness as God’s last end; and when that is gained, it will be seen that it is the culmination of a process that embraces all the stages of creation. The redeeming work of Christ will not appear as an intrusion into a continuous order, but only as another and a supreme instance of the supernatural entering into the natural. “The cross of redemption is no after-thought, but is itself the grand all-dominating idea around which the eternal system of God crystallizes.”2 [Note: T. T. Munger, Horace Bushnell, 216.]

Thee such loveliness adorns

On Thy Cross, O my Desire—

As a lily Thou art among thorns,

As a rose lies back against his briar.

Thou art as a fair, green shoot,

That along the wall doth run;

Thou art as a welcoming open fruit,

Stretched forth to the glory of the sun.

Thou art still as one in sleep,

As the blood that Thou dost shed;

Thou art as a precious coral-reef

That scarce lifteth himself from his bed.

Thy limbs are so fine, so long,

’Mid the cords and nails that bind,

Thy body maketh a solemn song,

As a stream in a gorge confined.1 [Note: Michael Field, Mystic Trees, 35.]

II

The Cross and The World

The Apostle rationalizes his boasting, and therefore gives it weight and value, by defining clearly to himself and to his friends the meaning, the inwardness of the cross: “Through which,” he says, “the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.”

1. The “world” here does not mean simply the ordinary occupations and interests of human life. St. Paul was by no means dead to these things. On the contrary, he was a particularly active member of society, and succeeded in profoundly influencing the world. And in this respect at least he would have all Christians follow his example. What he is thinking of here is not so much the life as the thought, the spirit, the ambitions of this present world. It is the whole sensuous and material aspect of things that he here sees in contradiction to the spiritual. St. Paul’s “Cosmos” is the material universe, the sphere of external ordinances. He has ever in his view the evil influence of certain teachers who, afraid of the offence of the cross, sought to belittle it, and to hold up the old ceremonialism of the Jewish law as of equal account.

2. St. Paul himself could have gloried in his Jewish nationality—“an Hebrew of the Hebrews.” In those old days he had gloried in the law and the covenant and the promises. He had felt himself specially favoured of Heaven in having received, as he thought, a mandate to defend the faith of Israel and punish her enemies. He threw himself with vigour into the crusade against Christians; he was eager to obey the law to the last letter; he revelled in the esteem of his elders, and strove eagerly to win new laurels of praise.

But he forsook that career when he heard the words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Up to the point of his meeting with Jesus his whole life had been one long effort to obtain a sure sense of freedom and of the favour of God. For this he had toiled and fought and prayed. And when he found in the cross of Jesus Christ his highest hopes realized, and that which he had striven so desperately to earn offered to him as a free gift and won for him at the price of an infinite sacrifice, his joy and wonder, his gratitude and adoration, knew no bounds.

3. This new relationship between St. Paul and God involved necessarily a new relation between himself and the world around him. The gospel of the cross the Apostle had to preach not by words only but also by his life. We may be sure that his preaching would have been in vain if his way through life had not been beset with difficulties and hindrances. He has himself told us of the troubles which beset him on every hand—of the thirst and weariness, of the stripes and imprisonments, of the watchings and fastings, which he had to endure, as he was going about doing His Master’s work. St. Paul’s life was one long life of crucifixion. All that he loved, desired, and wished to attain was cast down, until at last he lay in the dark dungeon at Rome, waiting for the executioner that should lead him to his Lord. And all this he found to be a daily uplifting into a diviner life. The very submission to the cross of suffering brought him into such closer and closer union with Christ that the Divine life of Christ became incarnate in him. Conscious that his inner life was sustained by the Divine Spirit of Jesus, he could say, “It is not I that live, but Christ liveth in me.” And inasmuch as, like his dear Lord, he had been uplifted into the higher life of union with the Divine on the cross of suffering, as he was conscious that what was foreshadowed for all in the sacrifice and glorification of the human nature of our Lord was being accomplished in himself, he could also say, “Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

If we have not got a cross, alas! we may conclude that we have not got Christ, for it is the first of His gifts.1 [Note: “Rabbi” Duncan, in Recollections by A. Moody Stuart, 219.]

Crucify the rebellious self, mortify yourself wholly, give up all to God, and the peace which is not of this world will descend upon you. For eighteen centuries no grander word has been spoken; and although humanity is for ever seeking after a more exact and complete application of justice, yet her secret faith is not in justice but in pardon, for pardon alone conciliates the spotless purity of perfection with the infinite pity due to weakness—that is to say, it alone preserves and defends the idea of holiness, while it allows full scope to that of love. The Gospel proclaims the ineffable consolation, the good news, which disarms all earthly griefs, and robs even death of its terrors—the news of irrevocable pardon, that is to say, of eternal life. The cross is the guarantee of the gospel. Therefore it has been its standard.2 [Note: Amicl’s Journal (trans. by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 168.]

Thy Cross cruciferous doth flower in all

And every cross, dear Lord, assigned to us:

Ours lowly-statured crosses; Thine how tall,

Thy Cross cruciferous.

Thy Cross alone life-giving, glorious:

For love of Thine, souls love their own when small,

Easy and light, or great and ponderous.

Since deep calls deep, Lord, hearken when we call;

When cross calls Cross racking and emulous:—

Remember us with him who shared Thy gall,

Thy Cross cruciferous.3 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 167.]

Glorying in the Cross

Literature

Aitchison (J.), The Cross of Christ, 193.

Alcorn (J.), The Sure Foundation, 315.

Barry (A.), The Atonement of Christ, 93.

Benson (E. W.), Boy-Life, 295.

Bonar (H.), Short Sermons for Family Reading, 138, 148.

Burrell (D. J.), For Christ’s Crown, 33.

Clayton (C.), Stanhope Sermons, 278.

Craigie (J. A.), The Country Pulpit, 149.

Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, iv. 202.

Drummond (R. J.), Faith’s Certainties, 125.

Dykes (J. O.), Plain Words on Great Themes, 31.

Edgar (R. M.), The Philosophy of the Cross, 221.

Greenhough (J. G.), The Cross in Modern Life, 1.

Grimley (H. N.), The Temple of Humanity, 44.

Henderson (A.), The Measure of a Man, 139.

Ingram (A. F. W.), The Faith of Church and Nation, 159.

Jerdan (C.), For the Lord’s Table, 313.

Lewis (E. W.), The Unescapeable Christ, 183.

Little (J.), The Cross in Human Life, 11.

Little (J.), Glorying in the Lord, 70.

Little (W. J. K.), The Light of Life, 268.

Little (W. J. K.), The Perfect Life, 149, 206.

Mabie (H. C.), The Meaning and Message of the Cross, 21.

Meyer (F. B.), From Calvary to Pentecost, 9.

Milne (R. S.), The True Ground of Faith, 21.

Moss (R. W.), The Discipline of the Soul, 41.

Parks (L.), The Winning of the Soul, 152.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, vi. 241.

Sage (W. C.), Sermons Preached in the Villages, 147.

Selbie (W. B.), The Servant of God, 179.

Winterbotham (R.), Sermons, 166.

Woodward (H.) Sermons, 334.

Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 228 (J. C. Gallaway); xxxvii. 312 (T. Whitelaw); lxiv. 387 (W. Jones); lxvii. 52 (N. H. Marshall); lxxvii. 262 (R. C. Gillie); lxxviii. 124 (H. Bisseker).

Church of England Pulpit, lx. 237 (C. Wordsworth).

Church Pulpit Year Book, 1904, p. 226; 1913, p. 158.