The Cross Marks of Christ
The Cross Marks of Christ
He was always overshadowed by the cross which at last He bore on Calvary. His life was a life of humiliation and suffering from the manger to the tomb.
His birth was under a shadow of dishonor and shame. The shadow that fell upon the virgin mother could not be removed from her child, and even to this day only faith in a supernatural incarnation can explain away that reproach.
His childhood was overshadowed by sorrow. Soon after His birth, He was pressed by Herod with relentless hate. He spent His early childhood as an exile in the land of Egypt, which had always been associated in the history of His people as the house of bondage.
His early manhood was spent in toil and poverty and he was known all His later life as “the carpenter’s son.” A modern painter represents Him as under the shadow of the cross even in the early days at Nazareth; as He returns from a day of toil with arms outstretched with weariness, the setting sun flings the shadow of his figure across the pathway, suggestive of a dark cross.
His life was one of poverty and humiliation. He had nowhere to lay His head, and when He died His body was laid even in a borrowed tomb.
He was rejected and despised by the people among whom He labored. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). His work was, humanly speaking, a complete failure. When He left the world, He had but a handful of followers who had remained true to His teachings and person.
His very friends and companions were of the humblest class, rude fishermen and common people without culture and, indeed, often without the ability to appreciate their blessed Master. Coming from the society of heaven, how He must have felt the strange difference of these rude associates; and yet, never once did He complain or even intimate the difference.
The spirit of His life was ever chastened and humble. The veil of modesty covered all His acts and attitudes. He never boasted or vaunted Himself. “He shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets” (Matthew 12:19) was the prophetic picture which He so literally fulfilled. He sought no splendid pageants, asked no earthly honors; and the only time that He did assume the prerogatives of a king, He rode upon the foal of an ass and entered Jerusalem in triumph as the King of meekness rather than of pride.
Perhaps the severest strain of all His life was the repression of Himself. Knowing that He was almighty and divine, He yet held back the exercise of His supernatural powers. Knowing that with one withering glance he could have stricken His enemies and laid them lifeless at His feet, He restrained His power. Knowing that He could have summoned all the angels of heaven to His defense, He surrendered Himself to His captors in helplessness and defenselessness. He even surrendered the exercise of His own will and drew from His heavenly Father the very grace and power which He needed from day to day, the same as any sinful man who lives by faith and prayer. “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30), He said. “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me” (6:57). He took the same place of dependence that the humblest believer takes today and in all things lived a life of self-renunciation.
At last the climax came to the supreme trial of the judgment hall and the cruel cross. When He became obedient unto death, a death of shame and unparalleled humiliations, insults and agonies completed His life sacrifices for the salvation of His people. What words can ever describe, what tongue can ever tell the weight, the sharpness, the agony of that cruel cross, the fierceness of His fight with the powers of darkness and the depths of woe when even His Father’s face was averted and He bore for us the hell that sin deserved.
After His resurrection, He still bore the marks of the cross. The few glimpses that we find of the risen Christ are all marked by the same touches of gentleness, self-abnegation and remembered suffering. The very evidences that He gave them that He was the same Jesus were the marks of the spear and the nails. And in His manifestations to them, especially in that memorable scene at Emmaus, we see the same gentle, unobtrusive Christ, walking with them by the way unrecognized, and then quietly vanishing out of their sight when at last they knew Him.
And even on the throne to which He has now ascended, the same cross marks still remain amid the glories of the heavenly world. John beheld Him as “a Lamb as it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6). The Christ of heaven still bears the old marks of the cross as His highest glory and His everlasting memorial. Such are the marks of the Lord Jesus. And all who claim to be His followers and His ministers may well imitate them. The men who claim to be His apostles and ambassadors, and who come to us with the sound of trumpets, the bluster of earthly pageants and the pompous and egotistical boastings of pride and vainglory, are false prophets and wretched counterfeits of the Christ of Calvary. They can deceive only the blind and ignorant dupes who know nothing of the real Christ.
These were the marks of the Master, and they will be worn by His servants, too.