disciples aside and says that this
question of the Messiahship is solely His affair. This separate,
solitary character of Christ's work is important: it reminds us of the
exceptional dignity and greatness of it; it reminds us of the unique
insight and power possessed by Him who alone conceived and carried it
through.

There is no question, then, of Christ's willingness to be our
substitute; the question rather is, Is it possible that He should suffer
for our sin and so save us from suffering? and does this scene in the
garden help us to answer that question? That this scene, in common with
the whole work of Christ, had a meaning and relations deeper than those
that appear on the surface none of us doubts. The soldiers who arrested
Him, the judges who condemned Him, saw nothing but the humble and meek
prisoner, the bar of the Sanhedrim, the stripes of the Roman scourge,
the material cross and nails and blood; but all this had relations of
infinite reach, meaning of infinite depth. Through all that Christ did
and suffered God was accomplishing the greatest of His designs, and if
we miss this Divine intention we miss the essential significance of
these events. The Divine intention was to save us from sin and give us
eternal life. This is accomplished by Christ's surrender of Himself to
this earthly life and all the anxiety, the temptation, the mental and
spiritual strain which this involved. By revealing the Father's love to
us He wins us back to the Father; and the Father's love was revealed in
the self-sacrificing suffering He necessarily endured in numbering
Himself with sinners. Of Christ's satisfying the law by suffering the
penalty under which we lay Paul has much to say. He explicitly affirms
that Christ bore and so abolished the curse or penalty of sin. But in
this Gospel there may indeed be hints of this same idea, but it is
mainly another aspect of the work of Christ which is here presented. It
is the exhibition of Christ's self-sacrificing love as a revelation of
the Father which is most prominent in the mind of John.

We can certainly say that Christ suffered our penalties in so far as a
perfectly holy person can suffer them. The gnawing anguish of remorse He
never knew; the haunting anxieties of the wrong-doer were impossible to
Him; the torment of ungratified desire, eternal severance from God, He
could not suffer; but other results and penalties of sin He suffered
more intensely than is possible to us. The