256. In the ministry subsequent to the confession of Peter the
self-disclosures of Jesus became more frequent and clear. His predictions
of his approaching death were at the time the greatest difficulty to his
disciples; when considered in their significance for his own life,
however, they prove that his conviction of his Messiahship was as
independent of current and inherited ideas as was his teaching concerning
the kingdom. When he came to see that death was the inevitable issue of
his work, he at once discovered in it a divine necessity; it does not seem
to have shaken in the least his certainty that he was the Messiah.
Associated with this conception of his death is the conviction which
appears in all the later teachings, that in rejecting him his people were
pronouncing their own doom. Because she would not accept him as her
deliverer, Jerusalem's "house was left unto her desolate" (Luke xiii. 35).
His sense of his supreme significance appears most clearly in some of the
later parables, such as The Marriage of the King's Son (Matt. xxii. 1-14)
and The Wicked Husbandmen (Matt. xxi. 33-44), which definitely connect the
condemnation of the chosen people with their rejection of God's Son. Two
other sayings in the first three gospels express the personal claim of
Jesus in the most exalted form,--his declaration on the return of the
seventy: "All things have been delivered unto me of my Father, and no man
knoweth who the Son is save the Father, and who the Father is save the
Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him" (Luke x. 22;
Matt. xi. 27); and his confession of the limits of his own knowledge: "But
of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven,
neither the Son, but the Father" (Mark xiii. 32). The confession of
ignorance, by the position given to the Son in the climax which denied
that any save the Father had a knowledge of the time of the end, is quite
as extraordinary as the claim to sole qualification to reveal the Father.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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