All this new life, this new
joy, this new victory over death and sin is attached to the living
and victorious Son of God. The task of Paul and the others is, as
Dr. Cairns says, "re-thinking everything in the terms of the
resurrection." It is the new factor in the problem of God, so to
speak--the new factor which alters everything that relates to God.
That is saying a great deal, but when we look at Christian history,
is it saying too much?

But still our first question is unanswered; why should it have been
the cross? One thinker of our day has suggested that, after all,
suffering is a language intelligible to the very simplest, while its
meaning is not exhausted by the deepest. The problem of pain is
always with us. And he chose pain. He never said that pain is a good
thing; he cured it. But he chose it. The ancient world stumbled on
that very thing. God and a Godlike man, their philosophers said, are
not susceptible to pain, to suffering. That was an axiom, very
little challenged. Then if Jesus suffered, he was not God; if he was
God, he did not suffer. The Church denied that, just as the Church
to-day rejects another hasty antithesis about pain, that comes from
New England. He chose pain, and he knew what he was choosing. Then
let us be in no hurry about refusing it, but let us look into it. He
chose it--that is the greatest fact known to us about pain.

Again, the death of Christ reveals sin in its real significance, in
its true perspective, outside the realm of accident and among the
deepest things of God, "sub specie aeternitatia". Men count
themselves very decent people; so thought the priests and the
Pharisees, and they were. There is nothing about them that one
cannot find in most religious communities and in all governing
classes: the sense of the value of themselves, their preconceptions
and their judgements--a strong feeling of the importance of the work
they have to do, along with a certain reluctance to face strange
facts, and some indifference as to what happens to other people if
the accepted theory of the Cause or the State require them to
suffer. There is nothing about Pilate and Herod, and the Pharisees
and the priests, that is very different from ourselves. But how it
looks in front of the cross! We begin to see how it looks in the
sight of God, and that alters everything; it upsets all our
standards, and teaches us a new self-criticism.

"You think like man, and not like God," said Jesus (Mark