said it.  None the less, it is a wonderful summary of what Jesus has done, especially wonderful if we think of it being written fifty or sixty years after the crucifixion.  For, as we survey the centuries, we find that the Lamb of God has taken away the sin of the world—­to a degree that no one can imagine who has not studied the ancient world.  Those who know the heathen world intimately will know best the difference he has made.  All this new life, this new joy, this new victory over death and sin is attached to the living and victorious Son of God.  The task of Paul and the others is, as Dr. Cairns says, “re-thinking everything in the terms of the resurrection.”  It is the new factor in the problem of God, so to speak—­the new factor which alters everything that relates to God.  That is saying a great deal, but when we look at Christian history, is it saying too much?

But still our first question is unanswered; why should it have been the cross?  One thinker of our day has suggested that, after all, suffering is a language intelligible to the very simplest, while its meaning is not exhausted by the deepest.  The problem of pain is always with us.  And he chose pain.  He never said that pain is a good thing; he cured it.  But he chose it.  The ancient world stumbled on that very thing.  God and a Godlike man, their philosophers said, are not susceptible to pain, to suffering.  That was an axiom, very little challenged.  Then if Jesus suffered, he was not God; if he was God, he did not suffer.  The Church denied that, just as the Church to-day rejects another hasty antithesis about pain, that comes from New England.  He chose pain, and he knew what he was choosing.  Then let us be in no hurry about refusing it, but let us look into it.  He chose it—­that is the greatest fact known to us about pain.

Again, the death of Christ reveals sin in its real significance, in its true perspective, outside the realm of accident and among the deepest things of God, “sub specie aeternitatia”.  Men count themselves very decent people; so thought the priests and the Pharisees, and they were.  There is nothing about them that one cannot find in most religious communities and in all governing classes:  the sense of the value of themselves, their preconceptions and their judgements—­a strong feeling of the importance of the work they have to do, along with a certain reluctance to face strange facts, and some indifference as to what happens to other people if the accepted theory of the Cause or the State require them to suffer.  There is nothing about Pilate and Herod, and the Pharisees and the priests, that is very different from ourselves.  But how it looks in front of the cross!  We begin to see how it looks in the sight of God, and that alters everything; it upsets all our standards, and teaches us a new self-criticism.