BY JOSEPH PARKER (1867)
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The measure of consciousness is the measure of life.

The life of intelligent beings is not merely a question of years; lapse of time may not increase vitality; life is to be measured by the sensitiveness and enlightenment of consciousness, so that over-consciousness may be one meaning of precocity or prematurity of manhood. The first public intimation of consciousness of his great position on the part of Christ, if we accept the answer which he made to his mother, is found in immediate connection with his baptism. When John remonstrated with him, saying, “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” he answered, “Suffer it to be so now.” There is here clearly personal consciousness of his identity as the long-announced Man who was to be at once Son and Lord of humankind. At that moment he knew himself. The fire which had been in him from the beginning shot up into a bright flame, which John saw, and which all who were afar off were to see. Up to that time, in all probability, Christ was not fully conscious of his Messiahship. The poor frail flesh which he had inherited from a depraved race could not have borne the presence of full consciousness for thirty years: when it did come, it consumed him in as many months. He had but three years of avowed battle. Such a man could never do his work with indifference. Every  moment was a strain upon his life. No man ever gave so much to time, or ever exacted so much in return. To assume full consciousness on the part of Christ during the years of his obscurity seems to separate him too widely from man by reducing his humanity to a minimum; but to assume that he “grew” in consciousness as he “grew in favor with God and man,” is to bring him into close fellowship with the weakest of his followers. We cannot afford to contract in the least degree the amplitude of Christ’s manhood; it is upon that side particularly that he belongs to us; it is as the ladder reading unto heaven whereby men may ascend. By so much as he was human he was limited, during his obscurity, in consciousness; by so much as he was divine, his full consciousness overbore his humanity. All men who have done any notable work in the world have felt the consciousness of its importance, as a fire in the bones. They could not languidly dream of it, nor contemplate it from a hazy and mellowing distance. They have hasted unto the battle; they have said, “I am straitened until it be accomplished.” Such a consciousness makes men die young. It carries the soul into an agony of passion. It drives the blood along the channels with an urgency which greatly distresses nature, and strains the intellectual nerve until the brain sees strange lights and often trembles for its own safety. Only men of strong natures know what is meant by this lavish expenditure of life—this willingness to taste death for every man.

Common life supplies the example of consciousness in the matter of mutual affection. Wisely and mercifully this has been made a matter of growth. Human nature would be altogether overdriven did this consciousness set in fully during the period of education and discipline. From the general kindness and simplicity of childhood we advance until the heart begins to individualize its sentiments, to concentrate its energies; by-and-by there seems to be but one life in all the world, and then begins the consuming passion of perfect love. Human lives grow gradually up to this. To so great a passion they must have come by wisely graduated degrees, or it would have rent and destroyed them. Still, all through there has been a consciousness of love, and in all the simple trust and generosity of young affection there have been hints of a great possibility, which only time and circumstances could develop. And this full love means, if need be, sacrifice, cross, death! All love is ready for the thorns, and prepared for the slaughter; only by so much as it is so ready is it worthy of the name of love. It may not be driven so far along the line as these things lie, but these things do lie in the line of pure, self-obvious affection. Man is never so near the cross as when he is in the highest mood of love. To misanthropy, to all narrow-heartedness and self-worship, the cross must be the sum of all horrors; they stand on different planes, they speak languages mutually unknown: but the cross is the very next thing to love; there is but a step between them!

This may illustrate in some degree the growth of consciousness in Jesus Christ. The three years of his heart-consuming ministry were backed by thirty years of quiet and thoughtful life. In such backing lies the strength of all great workers. Nothing consumes like love; how soon, then, must he be consumed who did nothing but love! The brevity of his life must have some meaning. Three years as reckoned by human tables are but a span; there must have been in those three years a fire which burned fiercely, and made them unlike any other three years in all human history.

This view of Christ’s consciousness detracts in no degree from Christ’s deity; rather it throws into bolder and more peculiar relief the elements which contra-distinguished him from all others, while it retains him amongst us as the Man Christ Jesus. The horizon seems gradually but surely to have widened, until he who “came to his own” saw “all men coming to him,” and he who was “lifted up” drew all nations to his cross. This might have been, would have been, too much for the youth in his humble home at Nazareth. All was getting in readiness for the drove that was to mark the opening of the new era. There was to be a descent upon him—a special point of concurrence which was to signalize the quickening of perfect consciousness. It is to that concurrent pint that we have now to look.

Christ passed, so to speak, through two gates, the one strait, the other straiter, respectively named Baptism and Temptation. The inaugural processes are characterized by the same mystery that has overshadowed us all along. They are congruous with all that we have seen in the foretelling of his birth. The duality remains without wrench or flaw. There is an upward, there is also a downward side. There had been, to us suddenly and must inexplicably, a brief dispensation interposed between Christ and his work—a dispensation embodied in one man, and that man as little like Christ as the thunderstorm is like the calm which it precedes. Other dispensations had been long, this was brief: other prophets spake, but saw not; this prophet baptized the very man of whom he prophesied. Never did divine processes seem to hurry upon one another so urgently as about this time; for from the Inauguration to the Ascension but three summers shone! The movement of events never faltered for a moment. Jesus Christ, as he had been the burn of other dispensations, was to be the burden of this. He was to find his name on all other pages, and now it was to be written on this rugged leaf which tells the story of the “voice crying in the wilderness.” Men are valuable to us as teachers in proportion as they represent a great compass of history. When the aroma of all lands floats from their robes, and the accents of all languages blend in their speech, they have a right to speak with authority. The world’s Savior must have come through the world’s great throng of hearts; he had come through Moses, the minstrels, the prophets, and on his way he now takes up this transient dispensation of the “voice.” Thus Christ publicly identified himself with the current of divine purposes as shown in human history. He worked with man as well as for man, and was thus the contemporary of all ages. Men should study the divine idea of each age, and become intelligent co-workers with God. Christ’s example shows that obedience to the divine spirit of the time ever brings fuller disclosures and attestations of the divine blessing. The heavens are opened to every obedient man, and the Spirit of God descends on the last as on the first. John’s baptism had gone no farther than repentance; but Christ, standing with the dove resting upon him, showed that there was a baptism unto holiness. By John’s baptism men were put into a right relation to the past; but as they followed Christ they were put into a right relation to the future; from the negative condition of repentance they had passed to the affirmative attitude of holiness. This is the culmination of human history. We have come through man, servant, prophet, messenger, up to Son. The very nomenclature is pregnant with sublime morel significance; we pass from “made” to “begotten,” from “upright” to “beloved” from the “us” of creating Trinity to the “my” of the benignant Father, from the “very good” of the first Adam to the “well-pleased” of the second.

John’s baptism looked towards repentance, why then should Jesus Christ undergo it? To prove his human nature, his vital connection on his mother’s side with the whole human state, and to supersede it by fulfillment. The world could be taught only gradually; it needed “water” before “fire,” the bodily lustration before the spiritual fervor. The dispensations have all worked from the outward to the inward, from the body to the soul; but Christ inverted this method, and established the only really spiritual dispensation. Did Christ, then, need to repent? No more than he needed to pray, or to do any religious exercise that men do. In so far as he was human, it became him to adopt the duties of each dispensation.

The place of baptism in the Christian system is one of great simplicity. Men like—indeed require—something objective. They cannot at one bound attain that which is purely spiritual. Ceremonies and all ordinances, great or small, are only accommodations to human weakness. Men require something to fall back upon. Even a recollection may come up in the soul with all the gracious power of inspiration: the simple fact that we have done something, or that something has been done for us, may save us from despair, and incite us to do more. Many a soul that has sunk from God in higher things has been stayed in its sinking by coming against the fact of its baptism in its downward course. It was well, therefore, as an accommodation to human weakness, to conjoin baptism with faith in framing the evangelical commission. If any man wishes to undergo the “baptism unto repentance,” it may be a question how for he is at liberty to take a backward step in dispensations. Baptism provides for the lower and coarser part of human nature. It associates in a very natural way fact with faith—something done, with something yet to be done—and thus is made a help to us. To make anything more important of it would be to abet the theological charlatanry which has kept back many souls from the kingdom of God.