“You think like man, and not like God,” said Jesus (Mark 8:33).  The cross reveals God most sympathetically.  We see God in the light of the fullest and profoundest and tenderest revelation that the world has had.  “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” that is the cry of Jesus on the cross.  I have sometimes thought there never was an utterance that reveals more amazingly the distance between feeling and fact.  That was how he felt—­worn out, betrayed, spat upon, rejected.  We feel that God was more there than ever.  As has been said, if it is not God, it is nothing.  “God,” says Paul, “was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).  He chose the cross; and in choosing it, Christians have always felt, he revealed God; and that is the centre of the great act of Redemption.

But there is a condition antecedent to understanding the cross.  We have, as we agreed, to ask ourselves, what is the experience which led him to think as he did?  In the simpler language of the Gospels, quite plain and easy to understand, the call to follow comes first—­the call to deeper association with Jesus Christ in his love for men.  Do not our consciences tell us that, if we really loved people as Jesus does, if we understood them as sympathetically and cared as much for them, the cross would be far more intelligible to us?  But if, in plain fact, we do not see why we should bear the cross for others, why we should deny and obliterate self on this scale for the salvation of men—­how, I ask, to people of such a mind should Jesus be intelligible?  It is not to be expected.  In no other sphere would one dream of it.  When a man avows that he does not care for art or poetry, who would wish to show him poem or picture?  How should a person, who does not care for men, understand the cross?  Deeper association, then, with Jesus in his love of men, in his agony, in his trust in God—­that is the key to all.  As we agreed at the very beginning, we have to know him before we can understand him.

It all depends in the long run on one thing; and that we find in the verse with which we started:  “And as they followed, they began to be afraid.”  But they followed.  We can understand their fear.  It comes to a man in this way.  If Jesus crucified means anything like what the Church has said, and has believed; if God is in that man of Nazareth reconciling the world to Himself; if there is real meaning in the Incarnation at all; if all this language represents fact; “then,” he may say, “I am wholly at a loss about everything else.”  A man builds up a world of thought for himself—­we all do—­a scheme of things; and to a man with a thought-out view of the world, it may come with an enormous shock to realize this incredible idea, this incredible truth, of God in Christ.  Those who have dwelt most on it, and value it most, may be most apt to understand what I mean by calling it incredible.  Think of it.  It takes your breath away.  If that is true, does not the whole plan