To return to my old point. The objection to speaking of Christ’s death as penalty is two-fold. God could not punish One with whom He was always well pleased. Consequently Christ could not suffer punishment in the true sense of the word without having a guilty conscience. If the bearing of punishment were the whole of Christ’s work, there was something in that way which He did not and could not do – He could not bear the penalty of remorse. But the whole of His work, was not the bearing of punishment; it was not the acceptance of suffering. It was the recognition and justification of it, the “homologation” of God’s judgment and God’s holiness in it.
The death and suffering of Christ was something very much more than suffering – it was atoning action. At various stages in the history of the Church – not the Roman Catholic Church only but Protestantism also – exaggerated stress has been laid upon the sufferings of Christ. But it is not a case of what He suffered but what He did. Christ’s suffering was so divine a thing because He freely transmitted it into a great act. It was suffering accepted and transfigured by holy obedience under the conditions of curse and blight which sin and brought upon man according to the holiness of God. The suffering was a sacrifice to God’s holiness. In so far it was penalty. But the atoning thing was not its amount or acuteness, but its obedience, its sanctity.
There are pathetic ways of thinking about Christ regard Him too much as a mere individual before God. They do not satisfy if Christ’s relation with man was a racial one and He represented Humanity. Especially they do not hold good if that relationship was no mere blood relationship, natural relationship, but a supernatural relationship – blood relationship only in the mystic Christian sense. We are blood relations of Christ, but not in the natural sense of that term, only in the supernatural sense, as those who are related to Him in His blood, in His death, and in His Spirit. The value of Christ’s unity and sympathy with us was not simply that He was continuous with the race at its head. It was not a relation of identity. The race was not prolonged into Him. The value consists in that life-act of self-identification by which Christ the eternal Son of God became man. We hear much about Christ’s essential identity with the human race. That is not true in the sense in which other great men, like Shakespeare, for instance, were identical with the human race, gathering up in consummation its natural genius. Christ’s identity was not natural or created identity, but the self-identification of the Creator. Everything turns upon this – whether Christ was a created being, however grand, or whether He was of increate Godhead.
As Head of the human race by this voluntary self-identification with it, Christ took the curse and judgment, which did not belong to Himself as sinless. And what He owned was not so much the depth of our misery as the depth of our guilt; and He did it sympathetically, by the moral sympathy possible only to the holy. Nor did He simply take the full measure of our guilt. His owning it means very much more than that His moral perceptions were so deep and piercing that He could measure our guilt as a bystander of acute moral penetration could. He carried it in His own moral experience as only divine sympathy could. And in dumb action He spread it out as it is before God. He felt sin and its horror as only the holy could as God did. We learn in our measure to do that when we escape from the indifference of our egotism and come under His Cross and near His heart; we learn to do as Christ did as we enter into living union with Christ. And we then rise above purity – for purity is only shamed by sin – we rise to holiness, which is burdened with sin and all its load. How much more than pure Christ was! How much fuller of meaning is such a word as “holy” or “holiness” than either “pure” or “purity”. Purity is shamed by human sin. Holiness carries it as a load, and carries it to its destruction. In the great desertion Christ could not feel Himself a sinner whom God rejects. For the sinner cannot carry sin; he collapses under it. Christ felt Himself treated as the sin which God Recognizes and repels by His very holiness. It covered and hid Him from God. He was made sin (not sinful, as I say). The holiness of God becomes our salvation not by slackness of demand but by completeness of judgment; not because He relaxes His demand, not because He spends less condemnation on sin, lets us off or lets sin off, or lets Christ off (“spared not”); but because in Christ judgment becomes finished and final, because none but a holy Christ could spread sin out in all its sinfulness for thorough judgment. I have a way of putting it which startles some of my friends. The last judgment is past. It took place on Christ’s Cross. What we talk about as the last judgment is simply the working out of Christ’s Cross in detail. The final judgment, the absolute judgment, the crucial judgment for the race took place in principle on the Cross of Christ. Sin has been judged finally there. All judgment is given to the Son in virtue of His Cross. All other debts are bought up there.
