LECTURE III. THE FACT OF THE ATONEMENT: THE TESTIMONY OF OUR LORD. E have now to inquire whether our Lord gave WE any account of His Death which at all explains the mysterious facts which we considered in the previous Lecture, and to which the Evangelists give so much prominence. Had He been silent on the relation of His sufferings to human redemption, it would have remained true that His Death was present to His mind from the very commencement of His ministry; that when it came near, it filled Him with dismay; and that on the cross He was forsaken by the Father. But He was not silent. Nor are we left to discover His inner thought concerning His Death from obscure allusions to it of ambiguous meaning, or from words spoken incidentally and suggested by circumstances which we might call accidental, or from parables which might be of doubtful interpretation, or from illustrations derived from Jewish institutions about whose precise significance there might be interminable controversy. It was of infinite importance that there should be no misapprehension of His meaning, and He therefore selected for the full and final explanation of the nature and intention of His Death an hour of pathetic solemnity. The explanation was not drawn from Him by any request of His disciples or by any taunts of His enemies: it came altogether from Himself, and as the result of a deliberate purpose. It was veiled under no metaphor. It was expressed plainly, directly, explicitly. As if to save it from all the chances and perils which are inseparable from the transmission of thought to remote countries and remote generations, He connected it with the institution of a new and peculiar sacred rite, which was to be celebrated by His disciples to the end of time. We have four accounts in the New Testament of the institution of the Lord's Supper, St. Matthew's, St. Mark's, St. Luke's, and that given by St. Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. The variations between them are neither uninteresting nor unimportant, but it is unnecessary that I should discuss them. It was the night before His Passion, the night, as St. Paul reminds us, in which He was betrayed. Our Lord and His disciples were celebrating the Passover,1 The force of the argument in the text is not really affected if it is contended that the Lord's Supper was celebrated on the night before the true Passover night. I believe, however, that the traditional view of the Church is sound, and that our Lord celebrated the Passover with His disciples at the time appointed by the Law, and that during the celebration He instituted the great feast of the Church, which has taken its place. The question is discussed at length by all the critical commentators. There is a useful summary of opinions in LANGE'S Commentary on St. John's Gospel, vol. iii. p. 347, and an elaborate discussion of the subject in WIESELER'S Synopsis of the Four Gospels, p. 308, seq. |