Then again, secondly, let me ask you to note here our Lord's own estimate of the place which His death holds in relation to His whole work.
Notice that remarkable variation in the expression in our text. The third day I shall be perfected… It cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.' Then, somehow or other, the perishing' is perfecting.' There may be a doubt as to the precise rendering of the word translated by perfecting'; but it seems to me that the only meaning congruous with the context is that which is suggested by the translation of our Authorised Version, and that our Lord does not mean to say on the third day I shall complete My work of casting out devils and curing diseases,' but that He masses the whole of His work into two great portions --the one of which includes all His works and ministrations of miracles and of mercy; and the other of which contains one unique and transcendent fact, which outweighs and towers above all these others, and is the perfecting of His work, and the culmination of His obedience, service, and sacrifice.
Now, of course, I need not remind you that the perfecting' thus spoken of is not a perfecting of moral character or of individual nature, but that it is the same perfecting which the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks about when it says, Being made perfect, He became the Author of eternal salvation to all them which obey Him.' That is to say, it is His perfecting in regard to office, function, work for the world, and not the completion or elevation of His individual character. And this perfecting' is effected in His perishing.'
Now I want to know in what conceivable sense the death of Jesus Christ can be the culmination and crown of His work, without which it would be a torso, an incomplete fragment, a partial fulfilment of the Father's design, and of His own mission, unless it be that that death was, as I take it the New Testament with one voice in all its parts declares it to be, a sacrifice for the sins of the world. I know of no construing of the fact of the death on the Cross which can do justice to the plain words of my text, except the old-fashioned belief that therein He made atonement for sin, and thereby, as the Lamb of God, bore away the sins of the world.
Other great lives may be crowned by fair deaths, which henceforward become seals of faithful witness, and appeals to the sentiments of the heart, but there is no sense that I know of in which from Christ's death there can flow a mightier energy than from such a life, unless in the sense that the death is a sacrifice.
Now I know there has been harm done by the very desire to exalt Christ's great sacrifice on the Cross; when it has been so separated from His life as that the life has not been regarded as a sacrifice, nor the death as obedience. Rather the sacrificial element runs through His whole career, and began when He became flesh and tabernacled amongst us; but yet as being the apex of it all, without which it were all-imperfect, and in a special sense redeeming men from the power of death, that Cross is set forth by His own word. For Him to perish' was to be perfected.' As the ancient prophet long before had said, When His soul shall make an offering for sin,' then, paradoxical as it may seem, the dead Man shall see,' and shall see His seed.' Or, as He Himself said, If a corn of wheat fall into the ground it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.'
I do not want to insist upon any theories of Atonement. I do want to insist that Christ's own estimate of the significance and purpose and issue of His death shall not be slurred over, but that, recognising that He Himself regarded it as the perfecting of His work, we ask ourselves very earnestly how such a conception can be explained if we strike out of our Christianity the thought of the sacrifice for the sins of the world. Unless we take Paul's gospel, How that He died for our sins according to the Scriptures,' I for one do not believe that we shall ever get Paul's results, Old things are passed away; all things are become new.' If you strike the Cross off the dome of the temple, the fires on its altars will soon go out. A Christianity which has to say much about the life of Jesus, and knows not what to say about the death of Christ, will be a Christianity that will neither have much constraining power in our lives, nor be able to breathe a benediction of peace over our deaths. If we desire to be perfected in character, we must have faith in that sacrificial death which was the perfecting of Christ's work.
