Religion
Eternal triumph
Martin Sullivan
I came across a remarkable passage in Plato the other day which reads like an inspired prophecy of the message of the Crucifixion. "The perfectly just mari",-he says, "if he ever appears will be misjudged and maltreated, and he will die; yet it will be well with him."
"Let us picture him", he goes on, "the best of men, and let him be thought the worst. Then we shall see whether the fear of disgrace affects him at all. Let him continue thus till the hours of death, being righteous, and being thought unrighteous. This just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, tortured, bound, blinded, and at last, after suffering every kind of evil he will be crucified."
Here is a heathen philosopher, a Greek 400 years before Christ, divining the great lesson that it is essential that the perfect man should fail, utterly fail, in life. It is clear that Christ accepted this philosophy and lived it out. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says of him, "Who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross." His ready and joyful choice of this kind of failure, and His rejection of all that the world, the flesh and the devil could offer Him, is the true conquest of death, the real victory of which the bodily resuscitation is only the outward and visible sign.
But there was no lack of reality in His attitude to the Cross. Crucifix ion is a shocking torture and although Christ faced it calmly enough, knowing He had won this victory despite all that His out stretched body nailed and racked might have to endure, He still tasted the bitterness of despair. He was not a god playing at being human. If we had only the first two Gospels we should suppose that He died, in contradiction of all that we have said, with a cry of utter dereliction on His lips, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" There was no sign of victory in that dread hour and no assureance of anything but failure itself.
If this is the end of the perfect man, either life is a hideous joke, or goodness is beyond the capacity and understanding of any of us. There has to be some ' inner rationale in beauty and truth and righteousness, and we must be able' to recognise it and appreciate it. Christ's victory over the Cross was not simply that He could climb down from it and go on living. He himself did not believe that to be true. Resurrection was not a prize for sticking it out. It was a vindication, a justification of every choice, every acceptance, every decision He had made.
Those of us who are Christians must take the long view. "God does not make up His accounts every week," says a homely German proverb. In the end the finest purposes cannot fail. "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things." There is a strength and a vitality in this philosophy which neither time can obliterate nor any antagonism subdue. Failure, in the light of this belief, becomes triumph deferred. There is a difference, however, between the Master and His servants, that while He knew what was the work given Him to do, we for the most part do not know it. We plan one thing and achieve another, and often believe that in missing the goal we aimed at, we have failed. The lesson of Good Friday is a sharp correction of this attitude. It ought not therefore to be a sorrowful day. Jesus wept over Jerusalem on the occasion of His victorious entry into the city, but on Friday he shed no tears. "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me," He said to the waiting crowd on the Via Dolorosa. We cannot presume to pity one who met death in such a way. Good 'S Friday and Easter Day are not two. separate days but one, and the empty naked Cross is the sign of eternal triumph.
Martin Sullivan is Dean of St Paul's
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