8:33). The
cross reveals God most sympathetically. We see God in the light of
the fullest and profoundest and tenderest revelation that the world
has had. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" that is the
cry of Jesus on the cross. I have sometimes thought there never was
an utterance that reveals more amazingly the distance between
feeling and fact. That was how he felt--worn out, betrayed, spat
upon, rejected. We feel that God was more there than ever. As has
been said, if it is not God, it is nothing. "God," says Paul, "was
in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor. 5:19). He
chose the cross; and in choosing it, Christians have always felt, he
revealed God; and that is the centre of the great act of Redemption.

But there is a condition antecedent to understanding the cross. We
have, as we agreed, to ask ourselves, what is the experience which
led him to think as he did? In the simpler language of the Gospels,
quite plain and easy to understand, the call to follow comes
first--the call to deeper association with Jesus Christ in his love
for men. Do not our consciences tell us that, if we really loved
people as Jesus does, if we understood them as sympathetically and
cared as much for them, the cross would be far more intelligible to
us? But if, in plain fact, we do not see why we should bear the
cross for others, why we should deny and obliterate self on this
scale for the salvation of men--how, I ask, to people of such a mind
should Jesus be intelligible? It is not to be expected. In no other
sphere would one dream of it. When a man avows that he does not care
for art or poetry, who would wish to show him poem or picture? How
should a person, who does not care for men, understand the cross?
Deeper association, then, with Jesus in his love of men, in his
agony, in his trust in God--that is the key to all. As we agreed at
the very beginning, we have to know him before we can understand
him.

It all depends in the long run on one thing; and that we find in the
verse with which we started: "And as they followed, they began to be
afraid." But they followed. We can understand their fear. It comes
to a man in this way. If Jesus crucified means anything like what
the Church has said, and has believed; if God is in that man of
Nazareth reconciling the world to Himself; if there is real meaning
in the Incarnation at all; if all this language represents fact;
"then," he may say, "I am wholly at a loss ab