The case is not very different in regard to the title "Messiah." Jesus did not, according to the Synoptic Gospels, proclaim Him self to be the Messiah ; but He accepted the acknowledgment that He was the Messiah when it was made by Peter. He ad mitted it to the high priest at His trial, and from His Tempta tion onwards we see Him discharging a vocation which could best be described in terms of Messiahship, the vocation of one anointed by the Spirit of God and equipped for the fulfilment of the age long purpose of God to deliver His people. At the same time, as a description of His vocation as He conceived it, the title was neither accurate nor adequate : there was not in the mind of the Jews of His time any accepted or uniform portrait of the Messiah to which He could be said to conform. That the Messiah would employ force either as a national king or in the exercise of a Divine prerogative was a feature which was commonly taken for granted, but one which Jesus deliberately rejected. That He would teach, make disciples, forgive sins, suffer—these found no place in any form of Messianic expectation; yet these were conspicuous characteristics of His ministry. As factors common to Messi anic expectation and to the consciousness of Jesus we should prob ably recognize the role of Deliverer, King and Judge, and par ticularly commissioned representative of God. But the meaning of the first three of these at least was so transformed in His thought that the words are little more than a shell into which He put His own content. Whether it is Peter conferring the title or Jesus accepting it, they must both be understood as employing a term which was far from expressing accurately or adequately the impression made on the one or the consciousness of the other. Jesus himself was the author of the Messianic conception which He fulfilled.
A more fruitful line of enquiry regarding the self-consciousness of Jesus begins with the recognition that He attached the highest significance both to His own presence in the world and to the attitude which men took up to Him. The beginning of a new era was to be found between John the Baptist and Himself. "Blessed are the eyes which see what ye see"—things that many prophets and kings had desired to see. The repeated references to the reasons why He had come or been sent, together with the reasons themselves testify to the same consciousness. Conversely, the privilege involved in His presence carried with it great respon sibility. Men would classify themselves according as they re sponded or failed to respond to the appeal of His personality and His message. Those who were obtuse to this appeal would meet a fate less tolerable even than that of Sodom. Men are not in the Synoptic Gospels directly called on to "believe on" Him. Yet He looked for a faith which rested on Himself as object, a con fident self-committal which involved readiness to receive all that He had to give, not merely a physical boon but His teaching and His spirit. The absence of such faith precluded Him on occasion from doing any "mighty works." On the other hand, to "receive" Him, just as "to be worthy" of Him is represented as a priceless privilege. "Whosoever receiveth me, receiveth not me but him that sent me." The thought which finds expression in these vari
ous forms is firmly embedded in the Synoptic Gospels, and in volves on the part of Jesus a tacit claim of a stupendous character.
Jesus never refers to Himself as the "Son of God," and the title when bestowed upon Him by others probably involves no more than the acknowledgment that He was the Messiah. But He does describe Himself as "the Son" absolutely, and in one passage, one in which at the same time He disclaims omniscience, He sets himself as "the Son" below the Father but above the angels. Moreover, He uses the word "Father" in the same abso lute way to define His relationship to God—"my Father in heaven"; "all things have been given unto me by my Father." And we find striking, because indirect testimony to the same con sciousness when in the parable of the Wicked Husbandman intro ducing a figure which clearly represents Himself, He says : "last of all he sent his son." It is in this manner of referring to Himself and to God, and in the life He lived in entire consonance with a relation which could be so described that we discover the deepest thing in the self-consciousness of Jesus, a profound and con trolling sense of a relation to God, personal, intimate and per manent, which could only be described in terms of Sonship. As there is only one person who can be called the Father, so there is only one who can be called the Son in this absolute way. And the whole tenor of His life was such as to reveal not only the Fatherhood of God but His own Sonship to the Father. It is conceivable that He did not always realize the uniqueness of this relationship, that in early life He thought of the privilege as one which He shared with other men, but that experience of life and deeper knowledge of human nature forced upon Him the dis covery that in this He stood alone. The first manifestation of the Divine in Jesus lay in this that He did not suffer this singular privilege which was His to separate Him from other men. He bridged what must have been an ever widening gulf ; while re maining one with God He did not cease to be one with men, in sorrow, temptation and pain ; and so in all save that relation to God, which He called Sonship, and in the moral perfectness which was its emblem and its fruit.
In claiming Sonship Jesus claimed a relation to God which was on an entirely different plane from the Messiahship. The one was personal, ethical and inherent, the other functional and official. And what contributed most to the transformation of His conception of Messiahship was the linking with it of another con ception of His function which was symbolized by the figure of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah. The combination appears to have been made for the first time by Jesus Himself, and He made it deliberately and completely : the redeeming work of the Messiah was to be accomplished only through suffering and death; and so he set himself to the way of the Cross, not in dumb acceptance of the inevitable, but in obedient fulfilment of the purpose and method of God, and anticipating as "the glory that should fol low" the final establishment of a "kingdom" of redeemed sons of God.