In the third place, he clearly announces an intention to achieve something in itself of import by his death.  There are those who would have us believe that his mind was obsessed with the fixed idea of his own speedy return on the clouds, and that he hurried on to death to precipitate this and the new age it was to bring.  References to such a coming are indeed found in the Gospels as we have them, but we are bound to ask whence they come, and to inquire how far they represent exactly what he said; and then, if he is correctly reported, to make sure that we know exactly what he means.  Those who hold this view fail to relate the texts they emphasize with others of a deeper significance, and they ignore the grandeur and penetration and depth of the man whom they make out such a dreamer.  He never suggests himself that his death is to force the hand of God.

He himself is to be the doer and achiever of something.  We have been apt to think of him as a great teacher, a teacher of charm and insight, or as the great example of idealism, “who saw life steadily and saw it whole.”  He lived, some hold, the rounded and well-poised life, the rhythmic life.  No, that was Sophocles.  He is greater.  Here is one who penetrates far deeper into things.  His treatment of the psychology of sin itself shows how much more than an example was needed.  Here, as in the other chapters, but here above all we have to remember the clearness of his insight, his swiftness of penetration, his instinct for fact and reality.  He means to do, to achieve, something.  It is no martyr’s death that he incurs.  His death is a step to a purpose.  “I have a baptism to be baptised with,” he says (Luke 12:50).  “The Son of Man,” he said, “is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).

In discussing in the previous chapter what he meant by the term “lost,” our conclusion was that for Jesus sin was far more awful, far more serious, than we commonly realize.  We saw also that so profound and true a psychology of sin must imply a view of redemption at least as profound, a promise of a force more than equal to the power of sin—­that “violence of habit” of which St. Augustine speaks.  If the Son of Man is to save the lost, and if the lost are in danger so real, it follows that he must think of a thoroughly effective salvation, and that its achievement will be no light or easy task.  “To give one’s life as a ransom for many,” says a modern teacher, “is of no avail, if the ransom is insufficient.”  What, then, and how much, does he mean by “to save,” and how does he propose to do it?  When the soul of man or woman has gone wrong in any of the ways discussed by Jesus—­in hardness or anger, in impurity, in the refusal to treat God and his facts seriously—­when the consequences that Jesus recognized have followed—­what can be done to bring that soul back into effective relation with the God whom it has discarded and abandoned?  That is the problem that Jesus had to face, and most of us have not thought enough about it.