The Mockers at the Cross.
I. The first remark that strikes me as deducible from the whole of these words before us is this, that Christ's cross apparently shatters to fragments Christ's claims. Either Jesus Christ died and rose again from the dead, and then He is the Son of God, as He claimed to be; or He died like other men, and there is an end of it. And then it is of no use to talk about Him as a wise teacher and a lovely perfect character; He is a fanatical enthusiast, all the beauty of whose religious teaching is marred and spoiled by the extravagant personal claims which He attached to it. We must dismiss the fair dream of a perfect Man, unless we are prepared to go farther, and say an incarnate God. The cross of Christ shatters the claims of Christ, except He be risen from the dead and exalted to the right hand of God.
II. "He saved others; Himself He cannot save." The cross of Christ is a necessity, to which He voluntarily submitted in order to save a world. These men only needed to alter one letter to be grandly and gloriously right. If instead of "could not," they had said "would not," they would have grasped the very heart of the power, and the very central brightness of the glory of Christianity. It was His own will, and no outward necessity, that fastened Him there; and that will was kept steadfast and immovable by nothing else but His love. He Himself fixed the iron chain which bound Him.
III. The cross is the throne of Christ. In one aspect His death is the lowest point of His humiliation; in another it is the highest point of His glorifying. In one aspect it is His stooping to the lowliest condition of the lowly whom He would serve; in another it is, as He called it Himself, the hour in which "the Son of man shall be glorified."
IV. The concluding taunt here gives us another thought, viz., that the death of Christ is the great proof that God had delight in Him. Christ's faith never reached a higher energy than it did in that solemn and mysterious moment when it blended with the sense of desolation in that cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" and God's delight in His well-beloved Son reached its highest energy in the same moment when He became obedient unto death.
A. Maclaren, Christian Commonwealth,Nov. 12th, 1885.