When we realize what His teaching and commandment require of us, our sense of the beauty and simplicity of His life is overshadowed by the terror aroused in us by His expectation of us. We know that the ugliness of our lives can never reproduce the beauty of His. From a human point of view, the imitation of Christ is a complete impossibility, and one wonders how so many Christians can go on, generation after generation, thinking that this is their task and that they can accomplish it. Yet it is clear that He expects us to be members of His body and to do His work in our time. Is it possible that He asked us to do something that is beyond our powers of accomplishment? If this is so, then far from being Savior, He is one of the most cruel of men. There must be some other answer. The answer, of course, is that Christ did not leave us alone to carry out His commandments, summed up in the great commandment: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."[8] He understood only too well the ambiguity of our lives. How understanding He was of vacillating Peter, and yet He called him the Rock. Had Peter possessed any self-understanding, he must have wondered why his Lord gave him that name. But after the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, Peter became the Rock, because then he incarnated the Spirit of his Lord. As with Peter, so with us. The presence of the Spirit makes possible an imitation of Christ. Now we can read the Gospels without dread, and not as patterns for us to imitate literally and slavishly. The New Testament provides the understandings that help us to test whether or not we are responding to His Spirit and letting Him accomplish His work in and through us. Thus, like Peter, we may become rocks, incarnating the Spirit of our Lord. Nor do we need to be embarrassed by our humanity. We begin to sense that we cannot be Christian without first being human, which means that we shall be both loving and hostile, both righteous and sinful, both courageous and cowardly, both dependable and vacillating. We are in the world and of the world as other men are, and we share the lot of human existence. But in addition, we have been given the spirit of power and love and self-control, not that we may be condescending toward the world, or try to regulate it as if it were a recalcitrant child, but that we may be embodiments of the Spirit of God in human affairs through whom He may accomplish His purposes in the world. In the process, because His Spirit is in us, men will know that they have seen Jesus. Thus we may come to understand the life of the people of God, and to find therein a basis for a true evangelism; and thus we may participate in the life and teaching of Christ, which are at once our ideal and pattern of living, and at the same time our judgment. _Participation in the Crucifixion_