St. Andrew's Episcopal Church
Ayer, Massachusetts
Faith, Community, and Love
We Believe: A Simple Exposition of the Creeds
CHAPTER V. WE BELIEVE IN THE SON--HIS WORK FOR US
"For us men and for our salvation"
THE APOSTLES CREED simply states the barest outline of Christ's life. He was born, suffered, died, rose again. The Nicene Creed says what He lived and died for--"for us men and for our salvation."
Salvation is not a familiar word in our ordinary speech, though we find it often in the Bible, in hymns and prayers. Most of us would find it hard to say what it means. But there is another word very close to it which is plain enough, the word "save." That means to rescue, to keep from being lost, to preserve alive. We could change the wording of the creed without changing its meaning so that it would read, "to save us men, to preserve our life, and keep us from being lost."
Then the question would be, "To save us from what or for what?" When a lifeguard "saves" a woman from drowning or a doctor "saves" a man by an operation, we have no doubt as to what the person was saved from. Because men are made so that they cannot live under water, and that a serious infection is likely to kill them, these people were in danger of losing their lives. They were saved from death and for life.
Christ said that He came "to seek and to save that which is lost." He spoke often of what men must do if they are to "enter into life" and of the danger they were in of "losing their souls." But the life for which He came to save them was more than the life of the body. He saw that men were meant for a deeper kind of life than the life of the body and that they were in danger of losing that deeper kind of life. They were capable of a life of sonship with God and brotherhood with men. They were capable of a life of self-forgetful service. They could possess things that last forever instead of things that last only for a short time. They were like the people of Israel living in slavery in Egypt or in fear and want in the wilderness, when not very far away was a Promised Land into which God wanted to lead them. He called that Promised Land the Kingdom of God. Most of His teaching was about that promised Kingdom of God which was so near and which men were likely to lose. It was not a place somewhere on earth. It was a way of life. It was not something men could see with their outward eyes or touch with their hands. It was an Unseen Kingdom, everlasting like the God who is its rule and center. The road to it is a narrow road, easily missed. Men find it whose hearts are set on it, on the Will of God, on brotherliness and service and cleanness. Men lose it whose hearts are set on their own gain. The people who are forever trying to spare themselves end by losing the life of the Promised Kingdom. The people who forget themselves in the service of God and their neighbors gain the greatest happiness of life in the Kingdom. It is worth giving up everything else we care for to gain that. We are kept from it because we care for the wrong things, because we think too much about ourselves and too little about God and our neighbors. Christ came to lead men out of a life of slavery to themselves, out a life of unbrotherliness and deadness of soul into the more abundant life of the Kingdom in which the Father rules.
Men were best able to see what Christ meant by life in the Kingdom of God by looking at His life. There the great laws of the Kingdom were being lived. God was loved first with all His heart. Men were loved as He loved Himself. He owned very little that thieves could steal or moth and rust could corrupt, but he owned a companionship with God and with men, a high kind of happiness, and a freedom from fear that nothing could take away. The cleanness of Christ, His lack of all pretending, His joy, were all part of what goes with the rule or Kingdom of God. He wanted men to have what He had found and He came to help them find it.
Christ's work was to save men for a life of eternal fellowship with God and with their brothers in the Kingdom. How did he do His work? He did it partly by teaching. Men cannot walk in a way they do not know. Wrong thoughts of God, of themselves, and of their neighbors lead them astray. Christ came to help them lay hold of true thoughts of God and themselves. Even more, He did His work of saving men by living out the love of God for men in the world. Men cannot follow a goodness they have not seen. Love does not spring out of nothing. It is an answer to the goodness and love seen in another life. It is caught by contagion from companionship with another person. It was not enough that Christ should tell men of the Father and His forgiveness and His seeking desire for the obedience and the answering love of men. It was not enough that He should tell men that they were brothers and that the way to fullness of life is that of service. He must "show them the Father," show the Father's unfailing love, show His kindness to the just and the unjust, His welcome to the disloyal. Christ did His work for men by being what He was and is,--the embodiment or incarnation of God's nature in a truly human life. He saved men in the time of His earthly life and has saved men ever since by laying hold of them with the persuasion of His own love and goodness and taking them with Him into a life of love for God and men. There is nothing that does more to make us what we are than the companions we keep. Christ offers to men a new companionship, that walking with Him we may enter the life of the Kingdom with Him.
"Crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate."
The doing of His work "for us men and for our salvation" led Christ to the Cross. He did not come to die, He came to live and to bring men into fuller life. But all the powers of evil that kept men from the Kingdom of God stood in His way. The regular teachers of His people were angry with this new Teacher, whose teaching was so different from theirs. When we are wrong it usually makes us angry to be told we are wrong and we try to place the blame on the person who criticizes us. The men who were strong and in position of rule wanted to hold on to their power. They were fearful and jealous of this new Leader who had so much attraction for the common people. The chief priests, whose business it was to lead in the worship of God, were shocked at this plain man from a hill town who talked so confidently of God's will and even permitted His disciples to name Him God's King of Men. They called it blasphemy. The Roman governor did not much care about Jewish religious affairs, but he would rather kill an innocent man than have a troublesome disturbance. All the ways of thinking and ways of living that make up the kingdom of this-world-as-it-is were gathering to defend themselves against Christ and the rule of God.
Christ knew that the forces that wanted Him out of the way were strongest in Jerusalem. But He set His face towards Jerusalem. Not to have done that would have been to give up His work. His work was to win His country for God. To win a country you have to take possession of the center of the life of Christ's people. There was the Temple and there were the leaders. He went to Jerusalem to stake everything on a final attempt to free His people from their wrongness and lead them into the rightousness of God's Kingdom.
Why did He not go to Jerusalem as others have done who sought to win a city? Why did He not gather an army, put Himself at the head of it, attack the city by force, kill or imprison the leaders, and set Himself up as a ruler? Why did He go unarmed into the camp of His enemies and let them capture and kill Him? If he had not done that He would have been false to everything He stood for. He was not out to capture men's bodies and compel them to serve God outwardly. He was out to capture men's hearts and wills and win them to an inward, free service of God. You cannot capture men's hearts and wills by violence. He saw how men had been meeting evil with evil ever since the world began. If they were kicked, they kicked back. They met an angry word with an angry word. They took an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Usually they went their enemies one better, or one worse. He saw that this only piled up hatred and conflict. God sent Him to show men a better way. The better way was to meet hatred with love and to answer the kick with a kindness, not because one is afraid or weak, but because that is the only way to set things right and make a new start. When Christ stood face to face with His enemies, He would not give way an inch. He would not compromise a bit. He stood for everything He had always stood for. He was right and they were wrong. But He would not do them any hurt, for He came to them in the name of His Father whose will is always for men's good. If there was any hurting to be done, it was He who would be hurt. He would take all the hurting that comes out of wrongness and swallow it up into His own generous life.
Things looked very black as Christ drew near to the Cross. It seemed that His whole life was a failure. But even in that darkness He held fast to His faith in God. He had been giving up things that He cared for to do the will of God, and God had answered His sacrifices by using His life to help men. He had given up possessions and home and family. And God had given Him more power than could ever come from possessions and more brothers than there are in any family. He dared to trust that even if He gave up His life in the service of God, that sacrifice would be taken by God and made use of for the good of men. On the night that He was betrayed He had a farewell supper with His closest friends. By what He said and what He did He told them that His life was an offering to God.
He was "crucified . . . under Pontius Pilate." From that day to this Christians have been wondering what the crucifixion of Christ meant. Why did His work "for us men and for our salvation" lead to the Cross? Why did God allow His son to suffer? Why did the Best have to go through the worst?
Many answers have been given to these hard questions. We see the beginnings of them in the New Testament, where the death of Christ is spoken of now as a "ransom for all," now as a "propriation for our sins," now as a "sacrifice." Words like these appear often in the prayers we use in our Church services, as when in the Prayer of Consecration in the service of Holy Communion we speak of Christ as one "who made there a full, perfect, and sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world." But even if these words are familiar to us they are likely to leave us still very much in the dark because they speak the language of men of another time, who were more "at home" in ideas of "sacrifice" and "propitiation" than we are.
Back of all the ways in which Christians have tried to express the meaning of the Cross lies the thought that there must be a great separation--more than that, a deep hostility--betwen the perfect goodness of God and the wrongness of men. He who is good hates evil. He who is love hates cruelty. He hates lying and uncleanness and selfishness. The enmity between the goodness of God and the evil of men arises out of their natures. The wrongness of evil lies just in the fact that it hurts what is good. Uncleanness soils what is clean. Lying hides the truth. Ill-will hurts and destroys love. Stupid brutality breaks things that are beautiful. God, the Creator and lover of all that is good, must be the enemy of all who work evil. He is as far from selfishness and lying and injustice as the East is from the West. The men who wrote the New Testament knew this, and they knew that the wrongness which separates men from God and makes men enemies of God was in them.
Yet Christ had come to destroy that separation and hostility between them and God, to bring God near to men and men near to God. His work was to reconcile the Good God and very evil men. That was His work and it led Him to the Cross. Why?
Wrestling with this question, Christians have looked for illustrations taken from human life of what happens when evil or wrong come between persons and how the separation of enmity is overcome.
One of the favorite examples, which is unfortunately too familiar to us, is that of paying a ransom to bandits to set free someone who has been captured by them. Christ's death has often been explained as a kind of ransom. When bandits carry off a man from his home and family, they demand a heavy payment before they will give him up. Using this illustration, Christians have said: "Mankind has fallen into the power of evil. In the Cross of Christ we see God paying the price to evil to have us for His own sons again. We are prisoners of selfishness and ill-will and untruth and uncleanness. The goodness of God cannot have us back without paying a heavy price to evil." This old illustration if taken too literally gives us an unattractive picture of God bargaining with evil, but apart from that there is much truth to it. You cannot pull a person out of a mud hole without getting muddy yourself. The doctor who tries to save people from a deadly disease must go where that disease is and run the risk of being attacked by it himself. Where there is evil and wrong there is always damage. The only question is as to who will take the hurt of it. If the goodness of God in Christ was to rescue men from the power of wrong, He had to go into the midst of it and let it take its toll of Him. The Cross of Christ was the heaviest ransom given to the powers of evil by God.
Take another illustration. Suppose a young man trusted by a bank has taken advantage of his position to steal some of the money which other people have entrusted to the care of the bank. He has gone away to another city and spent the money. Then he is caught. Occasionally we read that the man who controls the bank, wanting to give the thief another chance, has repaid the money that was stolen, out of his own pocket, instead of having the young man sent to prison for his wrong-doing. The damage that was done is carried by the person who was injured rather than by the person who did the injury. The person who is right takes the loss. When the Prodigal Son wasted his inheritance from his father, it was the father who was hurt. The father might well have said that the son had no further claim on him; let him now suffer for his disloyalty and foolishness. Instead of that the father swallowed the loss on what he had gathered and kept for his son. He swallowed his injured pride. He took the loss, and when his son returned repentant the father was ready to give him the best he had and return good for evil. Christ said that was God's way of dealing with wrong. As Christians have thought about the Crucifixion they have come to see that something like that happened then. Men have made bad use of God's gifts. We have wasted the opportunities He has given us. We have considered ourselves more than we have considered Him. When God sent the best He had to give us, we were so stupid and self-willed that we would not receive Him. But the goodness of God in Christ did not turn on us to hurt us for the hurt done to Him. He took the hurt and offered us forgiveness. In the Cross we see God suffering for the sin of the world.
Another way of saying what the Crucifixion of Christ meant is to call it a sacrifice. In every realm, life opens up only in answer to self-devotion, to self-giving. The long-undiscovered parts of the world have been opened up to us by the devotion of explorers. The truth about the stars or about electricity or the workings of our bodies have been revealed only since men devoted themselves to these realms of truth with patience and much sacrifice. This is true in human relationships as well. People draw very near together only by self-devotion. Men have long known that this is true in religion. God can give His best only to those who give their best to Him. In the past men "devoted" or gave their best sheep and even their children to God to gain the best from Him. It took them long to learn that God's greatest gifts are His answer, not to the offering of sheep and oxen, but to the offering of ourselves.
Not only is it true that life opens up only in answer to self-giving; it is also true that life would be much poorer for most of us if we had only what had been won by our own sacrifices. On every side we are greatly in debt to the devotion of those who have had much more to give than we have. Most of the truth we live by has been won by the sacrifices of others. Much of the beauty we enjoy has come out of the devotion of others to beauty. The political freedom which we take for granted has not come to us freely; it has been gained for us by the struggle of heroes and the loyalty of innumerable unknown men. Even in our personal relationships people are constantly doing things for us for the sake of our mothers and fathers and friends. Others have won the truth and love we enter into. There is no use in saying that we must all stand our own feet. None of us stand alone.
This is truest of all in religion. The knowledge of God which we possess could come to us only through the lives that gave themselves wholly to His service. The full power of God to change and heal men comes only in answer to a dedicated life. God shows Himself to us through lives that live for Him. The communion with God which is open to us is ours only because of the heroism of prophets and martyrs and the self-discipline and prayers of saints. The multitude of sacrifices to which we owe so much are all gathered up and crowned in the death of Christ. There in the Cross God's love is revealed as nowhere else and the full ugliness of our wrongness, as that which kills the best, is made plain to us there. After the Crucifixion it was as though a great spring of water had been opened up. New energies flowed into human life. Men called it an outpouring of the Spirit. Great leaders, like St. Paul, were raised up. The New Testament, the Church, gifts of healing, gifts of teaching, a new comradeship between men of many classes and races--these were all part of the good that came to men out of the self-giving and sacrifice of Christ. No wonder that men said, in a picture that seems strange to us, that a healing stream came from His wounded side. No wonder they said that Christ, the great High Priest, by offering Himself had done what all priests up to then by "performing sacrifices" had not been able to do. He had opened up the way to the Holiest. In the Cross we see Christ giving Himself completely to God to win for us new possibilities of life with God and man that we could never have had apart from His sacrifice.
Christ was led to the Cross because he would not let go of God and He would not let go of men. If He had been willing to let go of God He could have accepted the ways of men and they would not have killed Him. They killed Him because He disturbed them in their evil. The evil in us always tries to kill off the good that disturbs us. If Christ had been willing to let go of men He could have gone off with a few sympathetic friends to live the life He believed in. But then He would have left men to go their own way, headed for the destruction that evil always brings. Because His task was to reconcile or bring together God and men, He held them together in His continuing love for each--at the price of His own life. He was the victim of the conflict between the ways of men and the way of God.
"He rose again from the dead: He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God"
Jesus had often told His disciples that "he that saveth his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life . . . shall find it." God keeps and makes great use of the lives that spend themselves freely in His service. The Gospels tell us that Jesus prophesied that God would raise His life up again after His death and give Him a glorious place of power. He went to the Cross with the faith that He was not throwing his life away.
The Resurrection was God's answer to Christ's faith.
The earliest testimony to the fact of the Resurrection is given in a letter which St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth about the year A. D. 55, only twenty-five years after the Crucifixion. St. Paul knew personally the men whose testimony he reports and they were men who had known Jesus personally during His ministry. This is what St. Paul wrote: "I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures; And that He was seen of Cephas (Peter), then of the twelve: After that, He was seen of above five hundred bretheren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, He was seen of James; then of all the Apostles. And last of all, He was seen of me also, as one born out of due time." It is perfectly clear from this testimony that a large number of disciples of Christ were absolutely sure that they had been granted a sight of Jesus alive after He was dead and buried. St. Paul was sure that he had shared in this mysterious experience. The Gospels were written later than this letter of St. Paul. They were written at different times and in various places between the year A. D. 65 and the year A. D. 100. In each of them we have a different form of the Easter stories about the Resurrection. St. Paul puts all his emphasis on the "sight" of Jesus that came to His disciples. The Easter stories in the Gospels put much emphasis on the empty tomb. Even if we did not have the testimony of St. Paul or the Easter stories in the Gospels there would be very strong evidence for the Resurrection. The early Christians went out into the world to testify to it. They began immediately to celebrate Sunday, the first day of the week, instead of Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, as the memorial day of the Resurrection. Men who had been full of fear and discouragement when their Lord was taken prisoner and killed as a criminal were quickly filled with the greatest courage and confidence because of what had happened to them.
That something very real happened to convince these men of Christ's victory over death is certain. When we try to say just what happened we are face to face with great mysteries. Was the "sight" of Jesus, that they were granted, as seeing with the bodily eye, like our everyday seeing? It was granted only to those who had known and loved Christ, or to one like St. Paul, in whom faith and hostility were struggling together for mastery. That suggests that it was a "seeing" with the eye of faith, a spiritual seeing. In the story of St. Paul's conversion in the ninth chapter of the book of Acts, the "vision" of the Lord that came to him at the time of the great change in his life is not at all like ordinary seeing. It is more like the "vision" of God that came to the prophet Isaiah, when God called the prophet into His service (Cf. Isaiah 6). Even in the stories of the Resurrection in the Gospels, where the impression of the bodily is so strong, there is a constant sense of mystery about this "body" which comes and goes so strangely and passes through closed doors.
When we try to understand the Resurrection of Christ we are dealing with something that passes our understanding. We are on the borderland between this seen world and the unseen world. We pass quickly out of our depth. If we give up trying to understand better just what happened and ask what it meant to those first believers in Christ, it is plain it meant to them that God had lifted His life out of defeat, out of dishonor, out of weakness, out of death, into victory and honor and strength and still greater life. His life was not ended; He had entered into new activity. His full greatness as God's King of men was revealed. He was like the heir to a throne who, having passed through great suffering and contempt, was crowned with glory and honor.
Those early Christians expressed their assurance of what had happened to Christ by saying that "He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God." Here we see how men must turn to picture-language to say what they think about the things of God. The "aboveness" of God is not the same as the "aboveness" of the roof over our heads. The "Ascension" of Christ is not like going upstairs; God had not a literal right and left hand. But the picture of Christ, lifted up very high and placed on a seat of honor beside the throne of God, says what men have felt to be the truth about Him. God has placed Him in the highest position we can imagine. Men have known that because He claimed the highest place in their hearts.
To believe in the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ is not chiefly to believe that something very strange happened in Palestine long ago; it is to believe that something is true for us now. It means that Christ and everything we see in Him, His spirit, His way of thinking and acting, His self-giving for God and man, His love of straightforwardness and hatred of hypocrisy, is now and forever "at the right hand of God," in the position of power and authority. It means that His companionship and leadership and rule are not something that was true once, but something into which we are to enter now. To share His life of service to God and man lifts us out of the passingness and death of this life and gives us a share in His Resurrection. To enter into His humbleness is to have a part in His glory.
"He shall come to judge the quick and the dead"
One of the oldest thoughts that men have had in religion is the thought of a Last Judgement. To believe in God is to believe that how we live and the kind of people we are makes an everlasting difference. If the world and our lives are just an accident that happened in a world without any meaning, then nothing makes an everlasting difference. In that case the only judgement we have to face is the judgement that other men pass on our lives. It may be a fair judgement or it may not, according as to how fair and how wise the people are who judge us. At any rate our judges will soon die themselves. Some day the whole world and all the people in it will cease to be and then we imagine there will be just a dead world spinning around a cooling sun. There won't be anything left to show for what we have done and tried to be. All will be as if nothing had been. But if, as Christians believe, the world and our lives have come out of the everlasting Will of God and He has a purpose for us, then how we live and the kind of people we are does make an everlasting difference. The great, last question then is, "What does God think of us?" We pass through a great many tests and judgements as life goes on. Umpires judge the playing of our games. Teachers judge our work in school. Employers judge our value in their shops or offices. If we get into trouble with the law, courts decide how we stand. The Last Judgement reveals how we stand in the eyes of God.
Men have pictured this Last Judgement in various ways. Sometimes they have imagined their souls being weighed in a great scale. Often they have thought of themselves as coming to a door and being questioned as to who they were and what they had done before they could enter. Naturally the pictures of the Last Judgement have been taken usually from our human courts where a man is brought before a judge, seated on the "bench" in his robes, where all the truth about the man that can be known is brought out and at the end the judgement is passed. God has been pictured as sitting on a throne with all the men and women who have ever lived passing before Him. You can see this scene in old religious pictures.
With the coming of Christ a new figure came into the picture. The new figure was Christ Himself. During His early ministry all sorts and conditions of men stood before Christ and their lives were measured against His life. Sometimes He gave judgement of them in words. Sometimes those who stood before Him knew how things were with them in their own hearts. Often men passed judgement on themselves by the way they dealt with Him. When we stand before something very beautiful, we show what we are by the way we answer to it. If we "see nothing in it," it is we that are condemned, not the thing of beauty we seem to condemn. To stand before Christ and to prefer what we are to what He is, is to judge ourselves, not to judge Him. A rich man came before Christ and heard Him claim all the young man's wealth for the service of God. He went away sorrowful, because he cared more for what he possessed than he cared for God's service. A poor widow put her little into the Temple treasury in the sight of Christ and went her way commended because she had given her best to the best she knew. Christ stopped at the house of two sisters and found one of them so busy with her fussy little duties that she had no time for Him. He said she was missing the best for the second best. The Pharisees condemned Christ and His disciples for being careless about the rules of worship, and Christ said they were like people who washed the outside of a cup and left the inside dirty. They could not see that our wrongness comes from the inside and works out. Peter, in a moment of terrible fear, denied that he was a follower of Christ. Soon afterwards he saw Christ look at him. That look was enough. Peter wept for shame at his own disloyalty.
Out of all these experiences there came a new picture of the Last Judgement. The faith grew among the disciples of Christ that the last and highest test of their lives would be a testing by the mind of Christ. God had set His life on high to be the standard of our lives. God looks at us through the eyes of Christ. In the light of His life, which is the "True Light," we shall stand and be judged.
Continue to Chapter VI. We Believe in the Holy Spirit and the Church