Its first and most obvious disclosure is the unchristlikeness, and that means for us the ungodlikeness, of our world.  We study the chief actors in this event, and conclude that had we known personally Caiaphas, Annas and Pilate, and even Herod and Judas Iscariot, we should have found them very like men we meet every day, very like ourselves, with a great deal in them to interest, admire and attract.  And behind them we scan a crowd of inconspicuous and unnamed persons whose collective feelings and opinions and consciences were quite as responsible for this occurrence, as were the men whose names are linked with it; and they impress us as surprisingly like the public of our own day.  It was by no means the lowest elements in the society of that age who took Jesus to the cross; they were among the most devout and conscientious and thoughtful people of their time.  Nor was it the worst elements in them which impelled them to class Him as an undesirable, of whom their world ought to be rid; their loyalties and convictions were involved in that judgment.  They acted in accord with what was considered the most enlightened and earnest public opinion.  We can think of no more high-minded person in Jerusalem than young Saul of Tarsus, the student of Gamaliel; and we know how cordially he approved the course the leaders of Israel had taken in putting Jesus out of the way.

The cross is the point where God and His children, even the best of them, clash.  At Calvary we see the rocky coast-line of men’s thoughts and feelings against which the incoming tide of God’s mind and heart broke; and we hear the moaning of the resisted waves.  The crucifixion is the exposure of the motives and impulses, the aspirations and traditions, of human society.  Its ungodlikeness is made plain.  We get our definition of sin from Calvary; sin is any unlikeness to the Spirit of Christ, revealed supremely in that act of self-sacrifice.  The lifeless form of the Son of God on the tree is the striking evidence of the antagonism between the children of men and their Father.  Jesus completely represented Him, and this broken body on the gibbet was the inevitable result.  Golgotha convinces us of the ruinous forces that live in and dominate our world; it faces us with the suicidal elements in men’s spirits that drive them to murder the Christlike in themselves; it tears the veil from each hostile thought and feeling that enacts this tragedy and exposes the God-murdering character of our sin.  Sin is deicidal.  When that Life of light is extinguished, we find a world about us and within us so dark that its darkness can be felt.  The fateful reality of the battle between love and selfishness, knowledge and ignorance, between God and whatever thwarts His purpose, is made plain to us in that pierced and blood-stained Figure on the cross.  In the sense of being the victim of the ungodlike forces in human life, Jesus bore sin in His own body on the tree.