CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH

_"The Son of Man came ... to give His life a ransom for
many."_--MARK X. 45.


The death of Jesus Christ has always held the foremost place in the
thought and teaching of the Church. When St. Paul writes to the
Corinthians, "I delivered unto you first of all that which also I
received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures," he is the spokesman of every Christian preacher and
teacher, of the missionary of the twentieth century no less than of the
first. It is with some surprise, therefore, we discover when we turn to
the teaching of Jesus Himself, that He had so little to say concerning a
subject of which His disciples have said so much. It is true that the
Gospels, without exception, relate the story of Christ's death with a
fullness and detail which, in any other biography, would be judged
absurdly out of proportion. But this, it is said, reveals the mind of
the evangelists rather than the mind of Christ. And those who love that
false comparison between the Gospels and the Epistles of which so much
is heard to-day, have not been slow to seize upon this apparent
discrepancy as another example of the way in which the Church has
misunderstood and misinterpreted the simple message of the Galilean
Prophet.

But, in the first place, as I will show in a moment, the contrast
between the Gospels and Epistles in this matter is by no means so
sharply defined as is often supposed. And further, granting that there
is a contrast--that what in the Gospels is only a hint or suggestion,
becomes in the Epistles a definite and formal statement--it is one which