He walked down a street; and the scene of misery or of sin came upon him with pressure; he could not pass by, as we do, and fail to note what we do not wish to think of.  He knows a pressure upon his spirit for the man, the child, the woman—­for the one who sins, the one who suffers, the other who dies.  They must be got in touch with God.  He sits with his disciples at a meal—­the men whom he loved—­he watches them, he listens to them.  Peter, James, John, one after the other, becomes a call to him.  They need redemption; they need far more than they dream; they need God.  That pressure is there night and day—­it becomes intercession, and that grows into inspiration.  Our prayers suffer, some one has said, for our want of our identification with the world’s sin and misery.  He was identified with the world’s sin and misery, and they followed him into his prayer.  It becomes with him an imperative necessity to effect man’s reconciliation with God.  All his experience of man, his love of man, call him that way.

The second great momentum comes from the love of God, and his faith in God.  Here, again, we must emphasize for ourselves his criticism of Peter:  “You think like a man and not like God” (Mark 8:33).  We do not see God, as Jesus did.  He must make plain to men, as it never was made plain before, the love of God.  He must secure that it is for every man the greatest reality in the world, the one great flaming fact that burns itself living into every man’s consciousness.  He sees that for this God calls him to the cross, so much so that when he prays in the garden that the cup may pass, his thoughts range back to “Thy will” (Matt. 26:42).  It is God’s Will.  Even if he does not himself see all involved, still God knows the reason; God will manage; God wishes it.  “Have faith in God,” he used to say (Mark 11:22).  This faith which he has in God is one of the things that take him to the cross.

In the third place, we must not forget his sense of his own peculiar relation to God.  If it is safe to rely on St. Mark’s chronological date here, he does not speak of this until Peter has called him the Messiah.  He accepts the title (Mark 8:29).  He also uses the description, Son of Man, with its suggestions from the past.  He forgives sins.  He speaks throughout the Gospels as one apart, as one distinct from us, closely as he is identified with us—­and all this from a son of fact, who is not insane, who is not a quack, whose eyes are wide open for the real; whose instinct for the ultimate truth is so keen; who lives face to face with God.  What does it mean?  This, for one thing, that most of us have not given attention enough to this matter.  I have confined myself in these chapters to the Synoptic Gospels, with only two or three references to the Fourth Gospel, and on the evidence of the Synoptic Gospels, taken by themselves, it is clear that he means a great deal more than we have cared to examine.  He is the great interpreter of God, and it is borne in upon him that only by the cross can he interpret God, make God real to us, and bring us to the very heart of God.  That is his purpose.