The Teaching of Jesus
by George Jackson · English · Gutenberg #11580 · 321,573 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Teaching of Jesus
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Teaching of Jesus
Author: George Jackson
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #11580]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11580
Credits: Produced by John Hagerson, Kevin Handy and PG Distributed Proofreaders
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TEACHING OF JESUS ***
THE TEACHING OF JESUS
BY THE REV. GEORGE JACKSON, B.A.
"_Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the teaching of
Christ, hath not God: he that abideth in the teaching, the
same hath both the Father and the Son._"--2 JOHN IX (R.V.).
1903
* * * * *
TO MY CHILDREN DORA, KENNETH, BASIL, ARNOLD MY WISEST TEACHERS IN THE
THINGS OF GOD
* * * * *
PREFACE
The following chapters are the outcome of an attempt to set before a
large Sunday evening congregation--composed for the most part of working
men and women--the teaching of our Lord on certain great selected
themes. The reader will know, therefore, what to look for in these
pages. If he be a trained Biblical scholar he need go no further, for he
will find nothing here with which he is not already thoroughly familiar.
On the other hand, the book will not be wholly without value even to
some of my brother-ministers if it serve to convince them that a man may
preach freely on the greatest themes of the gospel, and yet be sure that
the common people will hear him gladly, if only he will state his
message at once seriously and simply, and with the glow that comes of
personal conviction. Indeed, one may well doubt if there is any other
kind of preaching that they really care for.
My indebtedness to other workers in the same field is manifold. As far
as possible detailed acknowledgement is made in the footnotes. Wendt's
_Teaching of Jesus_ and Beyschlag's _New Testament Theology_ have been
always at my elbow, though not nearly in such continual use as Stevens'
_Theology of the New Testament_, a work of which it is impossible to
speak too highly. Brace's _Kingdom of God_, Stalker's _Christology of
Jesus_, Harnack's _What is Christianity?_ Horton's _Teaching of Jesus_,
Watson's _Mind of the Master_, Selby's _Ministry of the Lord Jesus_, and
Robertson's _Our Lord's Teaching_ (a truly marvellous sixpenny worth),
have all been laid under contribution, not the less freely because I
have been compelled to dissent from some of their conclusions. Like many
another busy minister, I am a daily debtor to Dr. Hastings and his great
_Dictionary of the Bible_. And, finally, I gladly avail myself of this
opportunity of expressing once more my unceasing obligations to the Rev.
Professor James Denney, of Glasgow. Now that Dr. Dale has gone from us,
there is no one to whom we may more confidently look for a reasonable
evangelical theology which can be both verified and preached.
It only remains to add that in these pages critical questions are for
the most part ignored, not because the pressure of the problems which
they create is unfelt, but because as yet they have no place among the
certainties which are the sole business of the preacher when he passes
from his study to his pulpit.
GEORGE JACKSON.
EDINBURGH, 1903.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
I
INTRODUCTORY
Luke xxiv. 19. "_A prophet mighty in word before God and all
the people._"
John iii. 2. "_A teacher come from God._"
II
CONCERNING GOD
John xvii. 11. "_Holy Father._"
III
CONCERNING HIMSELF
Matthew xvi. 15. "_Who say ye that I am?_"
IV
CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH
Mark x. 45. "_The Son of Man came ... to give His life a
ransom for many._"
V
CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
John xiv. 16. "_I will pray the Father, and He shall give you
another Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the
Spirit of truth._"
John xvi. 7. "_It is expedient for you that I go away: for if
I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I
go away, I will send Him unto you._"
VI
CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF GOD
Matthew vi. 10. "_Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in
heaven, so on earth._"
VII
CONCERNING MAN
Luke xv. 10. "_There is joy in the presence of the angels of
God over one sinner that repenteth._"
VIII
CONCERNING SIN
Luke xi. 2, 4. "_When ye pray, say,... Forgive us our sins._"
IX
CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS
Matthew vi. 33. "_Seek ye first ... His righteousness._"
X
CONCERNING PRAYER
Matthew vii. 9-11. "_What man is there of you, who, if his son
shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he
shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then,
being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good
things to them that ask Him?_"
XI
CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES
Matthew xviii. 21, 22. "_Then came Peter, and said to Him,
Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive
him? until seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto
thee, until seven times; but, until seventy times seven._"
XII
CONCERNING CARE
Matthew vi. 25, 31, 34. "_Be not anxious for your life ... nor
yet for your body. ... Be not anxious, saying, What shall we
eat? or, What shall we drink? ... Be not anxious for the
morrow._"
XIII
CONCERNING MONEY
Luke xviii. 24, 25. "_How hardly shall they that have riches
enter into the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to
enter in through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter
into the kingdom of God._"
XIV
CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT
Matthew xxiv. 30, 36. "_They shall see the Son of Man coming
on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.... Of that
day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven,
neither the Son, but the Father only._"
XV
CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT
Matthew xxv. 31-33. "_When the Son of Man shall come in His
glory, and all the angels with Him, then shall He sit on the
throne of His glory: and before Him shall be gathered all the
nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as the
shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats: and He shall set
the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left._"
XVI
CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE
Matthew vi. 20. "_Where neither moth nor rust doth consume,
and where thieves do not break through nor steal._"
Mark ix. 48. "_Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not
quenched._"
* * * * *
INTRODUCTORY
"O Lord and Master of us all!
Whate'er our name or sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine.
We faintly hear, we dimly see,
In differing phrase we pray;
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee
The Light, the Truth, the Way."
WHITTIER.
* * * * *
I
INTRODUCTORY
"_A prophet mighty in word before God and all the people._"--LUKE xxiv.
19.
"_A teacher come from God._"--JOHN iii. 2.
In speaking of the teaching of Jesus it is scarcely possible at the
present day to avoid at least a reference to two other closely-related
topics, viz. the relation of Christ's teaching to the rest of the New
Testament, and the trustworthiness of the Gospels in which that teaching
is recorded. Adequate discussion of either of these questions here and
now is not possible; it must suffice to indicate very briefly the
direction in which, as it appears to the writer, the truth may be found.
First, then, as to the relation of the teaching of Jesus to the rest of
the New Testament, and especially to the Epistles of St. Paul. There can
be no doubt, largely, I suppose, through the influence of the Reformers,
that the words of Jesus have not always received the attention that has
been given to the writings of Paul. Nor is this apparent misplacing of
the accent the wholly unreasonable thing which at first sight it may
seem. After all, the most important thing in the New Testament--that
which saves--is not anything that Jesus said, but what He did; not His
teaching, but His death. This, the Gospels themselves being witness, is
the culmination and crown of Revelation; and it is this which, in the
Epistles, and pre-eminently the Epistles of Paul, fills so large a
place. Moreover, it ought plainly to be said that the Church has never
been guilty of ignoring the words of her Lord in the wholesale fashion
suggested by some popular religious writers of our day. Really, the
Gospels are not a discovery of yesterday, nor even of the day before
yesterday. They have been in the hands of the Church from the beginning,
and, though she has not always valued them according to their true and
priceless worth, she has never failed to number them with the choicest
jewels in the casket of Holy Scripture. Nevertheless, it may be freely
granted that the teaching of Jesus has not always received its due at
the Church's hands. "Theology," one orthodox and Evangelical divine
justly complains, "has done no sort of justice to the Ethics of
Jesus."[1] But in our endeavour to rectify one error on the one side,
let us see to it that we do not stumble into another and worse on the
other side. The doctrines of Paul are not so much theological baggage,
of which the Church would do well straightway to disencumber itself.
After all that the young science of Biblical Theology has done to reveal
the manifold variety of New Testament doctrine, the book still remains a
unity; and the attempt to play off one part of it against another--the
Gospels against the Epistles, or the Epistles against the Gospels--is to
be sternly resented and resisted. To St. Paul himself any such rivalry
would have been impossible, and, indeed, unthinkable. There was no claim
which he made with more passionate vehemence than that the message which
he delivered was not his, but Christ's. "As touching the gospel which
was preached by me," he says, "neither did I receive it from man, nor
was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ."
The Spirit who spoke through him and his brother apostles was not an
alien spirit, but the Spirit of Christ, given according to the promise
of Christ, to make known the things of Christ; so that there is a very
true sense in which their words may be called "the final testimony of
Jesus to Himself." "We have the mind of Christ," Paul said, and both in
the Epistles and the Gospels we may seek and find the teaching of
Jesus.[2]
It is, however, with the teaching of Jesus as it is recorded in the
Gospels that, in these chapters, we are mainly concerned. We come,
therefore to our second question: Can we trust the Four Gospels? And
this question must be answered in even fewer words than were given to
the last. As to the external evidence, let us hear the judgment of the
great German scholar, Harnack. Harnack is a critic who is ready to give
to the winds with both hands many things which are dear to us as life
itself; yet this is how he writes in one of his most recent works:
"Sixty years ago David Friedrich Strauss thought that he had almost
entirely destroyed the historical credibility, not only of the fourth,
but also of the first three Gospels as well. The historical criticism of
two generations has succeeded in restoring that credibility in its main
outlines."[3] When, from the external, we turn to the internal evidence,
we are on incontestable ground. The words of Jesus need no credentials,
they carry their own credentials; they authenticate themselves.
Christian men and women reading, _e.g._, the fourteenth of St. John's
Gospel say within themselves that if these are not the words of Jesus, a
greater than Jesus is here; and they are right. The oft-quoted challenge
of John Stuart Mill is as unanswerable to-day as ever it was. "It is of
no use to say," he declares, "that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels,
is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable
has been super-added by the traditions of His followers.... Who among
His disciples, or among their proselytes, was capable of inventing the
sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character
revealed in the Gospels?"[4]
I
Assuming, therefore, without further discussion, the essential
trustworthiness of the Gospel records, let us pass on to consider in
this introductory chapter some general characteristics of Christ's
teaching as a whole.
Mark at the outset Christ's own estimate of His words: "The words that I
have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life;" "If a man keep My word
he shall never see death;" "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My
words shall not pass away;" "Every one which heareth these words of Mine
and doeth them "--with him Christ said it should be well; but "every one
that heareth these words of Mine and doeth them not"--upon him ruin
should come to the uttermost. Sayings like these are very remarkable,
for this is not the way in which human teachers are wont to speak of
their own words; or, if they do so speak, this wise world of ours knows
better than to take them at their own valuation. But the astonishing
fact in the case of Jesus is that the world has admitted His claim. Men
who refuse utterly to share our faith concerning Him and the
significance of His life and death, readily give to Him a place apart
among the great teachers of mankind. I have already quoted the judgment
of John Stuart Mill. "Jesus," says Matthew Arnold, "as He appears in the
Gospels ... is in the jargon of modern philosophy an absolute"[5]--we
cannot get beyond Him. Such, likewise, is the verdict of Goethe: "Let
intellectual and spiritual culture progress, and the human mind expand,
as much as it will; beyond the grandeur and the moral elevation of
Christianity, as it sparkles and shines in the Gospels, the human mind
will not advance."[6] It would be easy to multiply testimonies, but it
is needless, since practically all whose judgment is of any account are
of one mind.
But now if, with these facts in our minds, and knowing nothing else
about the teaching of Jesus, we could suppose ourselves turning for the
first time to the simple record of the Gospels, probably our first
feeling would be one of surprise that Jesus the Teacher had won for
Himself such an ascendency over the minds and hearts of men. For
consider some of the facts which the Gospels reveal to us. To begin
with, this Teacher, unlike most other teachers who have influenced
mankind, contented Himself from first to last with merely oral
instruction: He left no book; He never wrote, save in the dust of the
ground. Not only so, but the words of Jesus that have been preserved by
the evangelists are, comparatively speaking, extremely few. Put them all
together, they are less by one-half or two-thirds than the words which
it will be necessary for me to use in order to set forth His teaching in
this little book. And further, the little we have is, for the most part,
so casual, so unpremeditated, so unsystematic in its character. Once and
again, it is true, we get from the Evangelists something approaching
what may be called a set discourse; but more often what they give us is
reports of conversations--conversations with His disciples, with chance
acquaintances, or with His enemies. Sometimes we find Him speaking in
the synagogues; but He is quite as ready to teach reclining at the
dinner-table; and, best of all, He loved to speak in the open air, by
the wayside, or the lake shore. Once, as He stood by the lake of
Gennesaret, the multitude was so great that it pressed upon Him. Near at
hand were two little fishing-boats drawn up upon the beach, for the
fishermen had gone out of them, and were washing their nets. "And He
entered into one of the boats, which was Simon's, and asked him to put
out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes
out of the boat." It is all so different from what we should have
expected; there is about it such an air of artless, homely simplicity.
Finally, we cannot forget that Jesus was a Jew speaking to Jews. Son of
God though He was, He was the son of a Jewish mother, trained in a
Jewish home, in all things the child of His own time and race. Whatever
else His message may have been, it was, first of all, a message to the
men of His own day; therefore, of necessity, it was their language He
used, it was to their needs He ministered, it was their sins He
condemned. The mould, the tone, the colouring of His teaching were all
largely determined by the life of His country and His time.
Yet this is He concerning whom all ages cry aloud, "Never man spake like
this man." This is He before whom the greatest and the wisest bow down,
saying, "Lord" and "Master." How are we to explain it? Much of the
explanation lies outside of the scope of our present subject; but if we
will turn back to the Gospels again we may find at least a partial
answer to our question.
II
(I) I said just now that Christ's teaching was addressed in the first
place to the Jews of His own day. Yet the note of universality is as
unmistakable as are the local tone and colouring. Christ may speak as
the moment suggests, but His words are never for the moment only, but
for all time. He refused almost sternly to go unto any save unto the
lost sheep of the house of Israel; yet the Gospels make it abundantly
plain that in His own thoughts His mission was never limited to the tiny
stage within which, during His earthly years, He confined Himself. "I am
the light of the world," He said; and in His last great commission to
His disciples He bade them carry that light unto the uttermost parts of
the earth. In the great High-Priestly prayer He intercedes not only for
His disciples, but for those who through their word should believe on
Him. "I will build My church," He declared, "and the gates of Hades
shall not prevail against it."
(2) So, again, too, in regard to the form of Christ's sayings; to speak
of their artlessness and homely simplicity is to tell only a small part
of the truth concerning them. They are, indeed and especially those
spoken in Galilee, and reported for the most part in the Synoptists, the
perfection of popular speech. How the short, pithy, sententious sayings
cling to the memory like burs! Let almost any of them be commenced, and
as Dr. Stalker says, the ordinary hearer can without difficulty finish
the sentence. Christ was not afraid of a paradox. When, _e.g._, He said,
"Whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,"
He was ready to risk the possibility of being misunderstood by some
prosaic hearer, that He might the more effectually arouse men to a
neglected duty. His language was concrete, not abstract; He taught by
example and illustration; He thought, and taught others to think, in
pictures. How often is the phrase, "The kingdom of heaven is like
unto----" on His lips! Moreover, His illustrations were always such as
common folk could best appreciate. The birds of the air, the lilies of
the field, the lamp on the lamp-stand, the hen with her chickens under
her wings, the servant following the plough, the shepherd tending his
sheep, the fisherman drawing his net, the sower casting his seed into
the furrow, the housewife baking her bread or sweeping her house,--it
was through panes of common window-glass like these that Christ let in
the light upon the heaped-up treasures of the kingdom of God. No wonder
"the common people heard Him gladly"; no wonder they "all hung upon Him
listening"; or that they "came early in the morning to Him in the temple
to hear Him"! Yet, even in the eyes of the multitude the plain homespun
of Christ's speech was shot with gleams of more than earthly lustre.
There mingled--to use another figure--with the sweet music of those
simple sayings a new deep note their ears had never heard before: "the
multitudes were astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as one
having authority, and not as their scribes." It was not the authority of
powerful reasoning over the intellect, reasoning which we cannot choose
but obey; it was the authority of perfect spiritual intuition. Christ
never speaks as one giving the results of long and painful gropings
after truth, but rather as one who is at home in the world to which God
and the things of the spirit belong. He asserts that which He knows, He
declares that which He has seen.
(3) Another quality of Christ's words which helps us to understand their
world-wide influence is their winnowedness, their freedom from the chaff
which, in the words of others, mingles with the wholesome grain. The
attempt is sometimes made to destroy, or, at least, to weaken, our claim
for Christ as the supreme teacher by placing a few selected sayings of
His side by side with the words of some other ancient thinker or
teacher. And if they who make such comparisons would put into their
parallel columns all the words of Jesus and all the words of those with
whom the comparison is made, we should have neither right to complain
nor reason to fear. Wellhausen puts the truth very neatly when he says,
"The Jewish scholars say, 'All that Jesus said is also to be found in
the Talmud.' Yes, all, and a great deal besides."[7] The late Professor
G.J. Romanes has pointed out the contrast in two respects between Christ
and Plato. He speaks of Plato as "the greatest representative of human
reason in the direction of spirituality"; yet he says "Plato is nowhere
in this respect as compared with Christ." While in Plato there are
errors of all kinds, "reaching even to absurdity in respect of reason,
and to sayings shocking to the moral sense," there is, he declares, in
literal truth no reason why any of Christ's words should ever pass away
in the sense of becoming obsolete. And it is this absence from the
biography of Christ of any doctrines which the subsequent growth of
human knowledge--whether in natural science, ethics, political economy,
or elsewhere--has had to discount which seems to him one of the
strongest arguments in favour of Christianity.[8]
(4) One other quality of Christ's words, which specially caught the
attention of His hearers in the synagogue at Nazareth, should not be
overlooked: "All bare Him witness, and wondered at the words of grace
which proceeded out of His mouth." The reference is, as Dr. Bruce
says,[9] rather to the substance of the discourse than to the manner.
That there was a peculiar charm in the Teacher's manner is undoubted,
but it was what He said, rather than the way in which He said it--the
message of grace, rather than the graciousness of the Messenger--which
caused the eyes of all in the synagogue to be fastened on Him. He had
just read the great passage from the Book of the prophet Isaiah:
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor.
He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."
Then, when the reading was finished, and He had given back the roll to
the attendant, and was sat down, He began to say unto them, "To-day hath
this Scripture been fulfilled in your ears." This was His own programme;
this was what He had come into the world to do--to bear the burden of
the weary and the heavy-laden, to give rest unto all who would learn of
Him.
This, then, is the Teacher whose words we are to study together in these
pages. He Himself is saying to us again, "He that hath ears to hear let
him hear." See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh. And again He says,
"Take heed how ye hear." Gracious as He is, this Teacher can be also
very stern. "If any man," He says, "hear My sayings and keep them not, I
judge him not. ... He that receiveth not My sayings hath one that
judgeth him; the word that I speak, the same shall judge him in the last
day." We read of some to whom "good tidings" were preached, whom the
word did not profit. Let us pray that to writer and readers alike it may
prove the word of eternal life.
* * * * *
CONCERNING GOD
"Our Father, who art in Heaven.
_What meaneth these words_?
God lovingly inviteth us, in this little preface, truly to
believe in Him, that He is our true Father, and that we are
truly His children; so that full of confidence we may more
boldly call upon His name, even as we see children with a kind
of confidence ask anything of their parents."--LUTHER'S
CATECHISM.
* * * * *
II
CONCERNING GOD
_"Holy Father."_--JOHN xvii. 11.
It is natural and fitting in an attempt to understand the teaching of
Jesus that we should begin with His doctrine of God. For a man's idea of
God is fundamental, regulative of all his religious thinking. As is his
God, so will his religion be. Given the arc we can complete the circle;
given a man's conception of God, from that we can construct the main
outlines of his creed. What, then, was the teaching of Jesus concerning
God?
I
In harmony with what has been already said in the previous chapter,
concerning Christ's manner and method as a teacher, we shall find little
or nothing defined, formal, systematic in Christ's teaching on this
subject. In those theological handbooks which piloted some of us through
the troublous waters of our early theological thinking, one chapter is
always occupied with proofs, more or less elaborate, of the existence of
God, and another with a discussion of what are termed the Divine
"attributes." And for the purposes of a theological handbook doubtless
this is the right course to take. But this was not Christ's way. Search
the four Gospels through, and probably not one verse can be found which
by itself would serve as a suitable definition for any religious
catechism or theological textbook. Christ, we must remember, did not, in
His teaching, begin _de novo_. He never forgot that He was speaking to a
people whose were the law and the prophets and the fathers; throughout
He assumed and built upon the accepted truths of Old Testament
revelation. To have addressed elaborate arguments in proof of the
existence of God to the Jews would have been a mere waste of words; for
that faith was the very foundation of their national life. Nor did
Christ speak about the "attributes" of God. Again that was not His way.
He chose to speak in the concrete rather than in the abstract, and,
therefore, instead of defining God, He shows us how He acts. In parable,
in story, and in His own life He sets God before us, that so we may
learn what He is, and how He feels toward us.
Christ, I say, built upon the foundation of the Old Testament. To
understand, therefore, the true significance of His teaching about God,
we must first of all put ourselves at the point of view of a devout Jew
of His day, and see how far he had been brought by that earlier
revelation which Christ took up and carried to completion. What, then,
did the Jews know of God before Christ came?
They knew that God is One, Only, Sovereign: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our God is one God." It had been a hard lesson for Israel to learn.
Centuries had passed before the nation had been purged of its
idolatries. But the cleansing fires had done their work at last, and
perhaps the world has never seen sterner monotheists than were the
Pharisees of the time of Christ.[10] And He whom thus they worshipped as
Sovereign they knew also to be holy: "The Holy One of Israel," "exalted
in righteousness." True, Pharisaism had degraded the lofty conceptions
of the great Hebrew prophets; it had taught men to think of God as
caring more for the tithing of mint, and anise, and cumin than for the
weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith, making
morality merely an affair of ceremonies, instead of the concern of the
heart and the life. But, however Jewish teachers might blind themselves
and deceive their disciples, the Jewish Scriptures still remained to
testify of God and righteousness, and of the claims which a righteous
God makes upon His people: "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil
of your doings from before Mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do
well." Nor, accustomed though we are to think of the God of the Old
Testament as stern rather than kind, were the tenderer elements wanting
from the Jewish conception of Deity. Illustration is not now possible,
but a very little thought will remind us that it is to the Hebrew
psalmists and prophets that we owe some of the most gracious and tender
imagery of the Divine love with which the language of devotion has ever
been enriched.
Nevertheless, with every desire to do justice to a faith which has not
always received its due, even at Christian hands, it is impossible for
us, looking back from our loftier vantage-ground, to ignore its serious
defects and limitations. It was an exclusive faith. It magnified the
privileges of the Jews, but it shut out the Gentiles. God might be a
Father to Israel, but to no other nation under heaven did He stand in
any such relation. It was the refusal of Christ to recognize the
barriers which the pride of race had set up which more than anything
else brought Him into conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem. And
when once from the mind and heart of the Early Church the irrevocable
word had gone forth, "God is no respecter of persons; but in every
nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to
Him," the final breach was made; no longer could the new faith live with
the old. And even within the privileged circle of Judaism itself men's
best thoughts of God and of His relation to them were maimed and
imperfect. He was the God of the nation, not of the individual. Here and
there elect souls like the psalmists climbed the heights whereon man
holds fellowship with God, and spake with Him face to face, as a man
with his friend. But with the people as a whole, even as with their
greatest prophets, not the individual, but the nation, was the religious
unit.
Such was the Old Testament idea of God. Now let us return to the
teaching of Jesus. And at once we discover that Christ let go nothing of
that earlier doctrine which was of real and abiding worth. The God of
Jesus Christ is as holy, as sovereign--or, to use the modern term--as
transcendent as the God of the psalmists and the prophets. Their
favourite name for God was "King," and Christ spake much of the "kingdom
of God." To them God's people were His servants, owing to Him allegiance
and service to the uttermost; we also, Christ says, are the servants of
God, to every one of whom He has appointed his task, and with whom one
day He will make a reckoning. But if nothing is lost, how much is
gained! It is not merely that in Christ's teaching we have the Old
Testament of God over again with a _plus_, the new which is added has so
transformed and transfigured the old that all is become new. To Jesus
Christ, and to us through Him, God is "the Father."
It is, of course, well known that Christ was not the first to apply this
name to God. There is no religion, says Max Müller,[11] which is
sufficiently recorded to be understood that does not, in some sense or
other, apply the term Father to its Deity. Yet this need not concern us,
for though the name be the same the meaning is wholly different. There
is no true comparison even between the occasional use of the word in the
Old Testament and its use by Christ. For, though in the Old Testament
God is spoken of as the Father of Israel, it is as the Father of the
nation, not of the individual, and of that nation only. Even in a great
saying like that of the Psalmist:
"Like as a father pitieth his children,
So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him,"
it is still only Israel that the writer has in view, though we rightly
give to the words a wider application. But there is no need of argument.
Every reader of the Old Testament knows that its central, ruling idea of
God is not Fatherhood, but Kingship: "The Lord reigneth." Even in the
Psalms, in which the religious aspiration and worship of the ages before
Christ find their finest and noblest expression, never once is God
addressed as Father. But when we turn to the Gospels, how great is the
contrast! Though not even a single psalmist dare look up and say,
"Father," in St. Matthew's Gospel alone the name is used of God more
than forty times. Fatherhood now is no longer one attribute among many;
it is the central, determining idea in whose revealing light all other
names of God--Creator, Sovereign, Judge--must be read and interpreted.
And the God of Jesus Christ is the Father, not of one race only, but of
mankind; not of mankind only, but of men.
II
It was indeed a great and wonderful gospel which Christ proclaimed--so
great and wonderful that all our poor words tremble and sink down under
the weight of the truth they vainly seek to express. By what means has
Christ put us into possession of such a truth? How have we come to the
full assurance of faith concerning the Divine Fatherhood? In two ways:
by His teaching and by His life; by what He said and by what He did. And
once more a paragraph must perforce do, as best it can, the work of an
essay.
To the ear and heart of Christ all nature spoke of the love and care of
God. "Behold the birds of the heaven," He said; "they sow not, neither
do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth
them. Are not ye of much more value than they?" And again He said,
"Consider the lilies of the field"--not the pale, delicate blossom we
know so well, but "the scarlet martagon" which "decks herself in red and
gold to meet the step of summer"--"Consider the lilies of the field, how
they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you that
even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these. But
if God doth so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and
to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye
of little faith?" Or, He bade men look into their own hearts and learn.
"God's possible is taught by His world's loving;" from what is best
within ourselves we may learn what God Himself is like. Once Christ
spoke to shepherds: "What man of you, having a hundred sheep, and having
lost one of them"--how the faces in the little crowd would light up, and
their ears drink in the gracious argument! You care for your sheep, but
how much better is a man than a sheep? If you would do so much for them,
will God do less for you? And once the word went deeper still, as He
spoke to fathers: "What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask
him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish
will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good
gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in
heaven give good things to them that ask Him?" Why, Christ asks, why do
you not let your own hearts teach you? If love will not let you mock
your child, think you, will God be less good than you yourselves are?
But more even than by His words did Christ by His life reveal to us the
Father. "He that hath seen Me," He said to Philip, "hath seen the
Father." In what He was and did, in His life and in His death, we read
what God is. We follow Him from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from Nazareth to
Gennesaret, from Gennesaret to Jerusalem, to the Upper Room, to
Gethsemane, and to Calvary, and at every step of the way He says to us,
"He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." We are with Him at the
marriage feast at Cana of Galilee, and in the midst of the mourners by
the city gate at Nain; we see Him as He takes the little children into
His arms and lays His hands upon them and blesses them; we hear His word
to her that was a sinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee; we stand
with John and with Mary under the shadow of the Cross; and still, always
and everywhere, He is saying to us, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father; if ye had known Me ye should have known my Father also." Within
the sweep of this great word the whole life of Jesus lies; there is
nothing that He said or did that does not more fully declare Him whom no
man hath seen at any time. To read "that sweet story of old" is to put
our hand on the heart of God; it is to know the Father.
III
"Yes," says some one, "it is a beautiful creed--if only one could
believe it." Christ took the birds and the flowers for His text, and
preached of the love of God for man, but is that the only sermon the
birds and flowers preach to us? Does not "nature, red in tooth and claw
with ravine," shriek against our creed? And when we turn to human life
the tragedy deepens. Why, if Love be law, is the world so full of pain?
Why do the innocent suffer? Why are our hearts made to sicken every day
when we take up our morning paper? Why does not God end the haunting
horror of our social ills? They are old-world questions which no man can
answer. Yet will I not give up my faith, and I will tell you why. "I
cannot see," Huxley once wrote to Charles Kingsley, "one shadow or
tittle of evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomena of
the universe, stands to us in the relation of a Father--loves us, and
cares for us as Christianity asserts." And, perhaps, if I looked for
evidence only where Huxley looked, I should say the same; but I have
seen Jesus, and that has made all the difference. It is He, and He
alone, who has made me sure of God. He felt, as I have never felt, the
horrid jangle and discord of this world's life; sin and suffering tore
His soul as no soul of man was ever torn; He both saw suffering
innocence and Himself suffered being innocent, and yet to the end He
knew that love was through all and over all, and died with the name
"Father" upon His lips. And, therefore, though the griefs and graves of
men must often make me dumb, I will still dare to believe with Jesus
that God is good and "Love creation's final law."
But while thus, on the one hand, we use Christ's doctrine of God to our
comfort, let us take care lest, on the other hand, we abuse it to our
hurt and undoing. There has scarcely ever been a time when the Church
has not suffered through "disproportioned thoughts" of God. To-day our
peril is lest, in emphasizing the Divine Fatherhood, we ignore the
Divine Sovereignty, and make of God a weak, indulgent Eli, without
either purpose or power to chastise His wilful and disobedient children.
"God is good; God is love; why then should we fear? Will He not deal
tenderly with us and with all men, forgiving us even unto seventy times
seven?" The argument is true--and it is false. As an assurance to the
penitent and to the broken in heart, it is true, blessedly true; in any
other sense it is false as hell. He whom Christ called, and taught us to
call "Father," He also called "Holy Father" and "Righteous Father." Have
we forgotten Peter's warning--we do not need to ask at whose lips he
learned it--"If ye call on Him as Father ... pass the time of your
sojourning in fear." This is no contradiction of the doctrine of
Fatherhood; strictly speaking, it is not even a modification of it;
rather is it an essential part of any true and complete statement of it.
Peter does not mean God is a Father, and He is also to be feared; that
is to miss the whole point of his words; what he means is, God is a
Father, and, therefore, He is to be feared; the fear follows necessarily
on the true idea of Fatherhood. Ah, brethren, if we understood Peter and
Peter's Lord aright, we should be not the less, but the more anxious
about our sins, because we have learnt to call God "Father." "Evil," it
has been well said, "is a more terrible thing to the family than to the
state."[12] Acts which the law takes no cognizance of a father dare not,
and cannot, pass by; what the magistrate may dismiss with light censure
he must search out to its depths. The judgment of a father--there is no
judgment like that. And if it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands
of the living God, for him who all his life through has set himself
against the Divine law and love, it is a still more fearful thing
because those hands are the hands of a Father.
But this is not the note on which to close a sermon on the Fatherhood of
God. Let us go back to a chapter from which, though I have only once
quoted its words, we have never been far away--the fifteenth of St.
Luke, with its three-fold revelation of the seeking love of God. The
parables of the chapter are companion pictures, and should be studied
together in the light of the circumstances which were their common
origin. "The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, This man
receiveth sinners and eateth with them." These parables are Christ's
answer. Mark how He justifies Himself. He might have pleaded the need of
those whom the Pharisees and scribes had left alone in their
wretchedness and sin, but of this He says nothing; His thoughts are all
of the need of God. The central thought in each parable is not what man
loses by his sin, but what God loses. As the shepherd misses his lost
sheep, and the woman her lost coin, and the father his lost son, so,
Christ says, we are all missed by God until, with our heart's love, we
satisfy the hunger of His. The genius of a prose poet shall tell us the
rest. We have all read of Lachlan Campbell and his daughter Flora, how
she went into the far country, and what brought her home again. "It iss
weary to be in London"--this was Flora's story as she told it to Marget
Howe when she was back again in the glen--"it iss weary to be in London
and no one to speak a kind word to you, and I will be looking at the
crowd that is always passing, and I will not see one kent face, and when
I looked in at the lighted windows the people were all sitting round the
table, but there was no place for me. Millions and millions of people,
and not one to say 'Flora,' and not one sore heart if I died that
night." Then one night she crept into a church as the people were
singing. "The sermon wass on the Prodigal Son, but there is only one
word I remember. 'You are not forgotten or cast off,' the preacher said:
'you are missed.' Sometimes he will say, 'If you had a plant, and you
had taken great care of it, and it was stolen, would you not miss it?'
And I will be thinking of my geraniums, and saying 'Yes' in my heart.
And then he will go on, 'If a shepherd wass counting his sheep, and
there wass one short, does he not go out to the hill to seek for it?'
and I will see my father coming back with that lamb that lost its
mother. My heart wass melting within me, but he will still be pleading,
'If a father had a child, and she left her home and lost herself in the
wicked city, she will still be remembered in the old house, and her
chair will be there,' and I will be seeing my father all alone with the
Bible before him, and the dogs will lay their heads on his knee, but
there iss no Flora. So I slipped out into the darkness and cried,
'Father,' but I could not go back, and I knew not what to do. But this
wass ever in my ear, 'missed,'"--and this was the word that brought her
back to home and God.[13]
* * * * *
CONCERNING HIMSELF
"Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was
Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is
no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable."
JOHN DUNCAN, _Colloquia
Peripatetica_.
* * * * *
III
CONCERNING HIMSELF
"_Who say ye that I am_?"--MATT. xvi. 15.
I
This was our Lord's question to His first disciples; and this, by the
mouth of Simon Peter, was their answer: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of
the living God." And in all ages this has been the answer of the Holy
Catholic Church throughout all the world. In the days of New Testament
Christianity no other answer was known or heard. The Church of the
apostles had its controversies, as we know, controversies in which the
very life of the Church was at stake. Division crept in even among the
apostles themselves. But concerning Christ they spoke with one voice,
they proclaimed one faith. The early centuries of the Christian era were
centuries of keen discussion concerning the Person of our Lord; but the
discussions sprang for the most part from the difficulty of rightly
defining the true relations of the Divine and the human in the one
Person, rather than from the denial of His Divinity; and, as Mr.
Gladstone once pointed out, since the fourth century the Christian
conception of Christ has remained practically unchanged. Amid the fierce
and almost ceaseless controversies which have divided and sometimes
desolated Christendom, and which, alas! still continue to divide it, the
Church's testimony concerning Christ has never wavered. The Greek
Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the various Protestant Churches,
Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists,
Christian men and women out of every tribe and tongue and people and
nation,--all unite to confess the glory of Christ in the words of the
ancient Creed: "I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten
Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light
of Light, Very God of very God."
This, beyond all doubt, has been and is the Christian way of thinking
about Christ. But now the question arises, Was this Christ's way of
thinking about Himself? Did He Himself claim to be one with God? or, is
it only we, His adoring disciples, who have crowned Him with glory and
honour, and given Him a name that is above every name? To those of us
who have been familiar with the New Testament ever since we could read,
the question may appear so simple as to be almost superfluous.
Half-a-dozen texts leap to our lips in a moment by way of answer. Did He
not claim to be the Messiah in whom Old Testament history and prophecy
found their fulfilment and consummation? Did He not call Himself the Son
of God, saying, "The Father hath given all judgment unto the Son; that all
may honour the Son, even as they honour the Father"? Did He not declare,
"I and My Father are one"? and again, "All things have been delivered
unto Me of My Father: and no one knoweth the Son, save the Father;
neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
Son willeth to reveal Him"? And when one of the Twelve bowed down before
Him, saying, "My Lord and my God," did He not accept the homage as
though it were His by right? What further need, then, have we of
witnesses? Is it not manifest that the explanation of all that has been
claimed for Christ, from the days of the apostles until now, is to be
found in what Christ claimed for Himself?
This is true; nevertheless it may be well to remind ourselves that
Christ Himself did not thrust the evidence on His disciples in quite
this wholesale, summary fashion. It is an easy thing for us to scour the
New Testament for "proof-texts," and then, when they are heaped together
at our feet like a load of bricks, to begin to build our theological
systems. But Peter and Thomas and the other disciples could not do this.
The revelation which we possess in its completeness was given to them
little by little as they were able to receive it. And the moment we
begin to study the life of Jesus, not in isolated texts, but as day by
day it passed before the eyes of the Twelve, we cannot fail to observe
the remarkable reserve which, during the greater part of His ministry,
He exercised concerning Himself. When first His disciples heard His call
and followed Him, He was to them but a humble peasant teacher, who had
flung about their lives a wondrous spell which they could no more
explain than they could resist. Indeed, there is good reason to believe,
as Dr. Dale has pointed out,[14] that the full discovery of Christ's
Divinity only came to the apostles after His Resurrection from the dead.
At first, and for long, Christ was content to leave them with their
poor, imperfect thoughts. He never sought to carry their reason by
storm; rather He set Himself to win them--mind, heart, and will--by slow
siege. He lived before them and with them, saying little directly about
Himself, and yet always revealing Himself, day by day training them,
often perhaps unconsciously to themselves, "to trust Him with the sort
of trust which can be legitimately given to God only."[15] And when at
last the truth was clear, and they knew that it was the incarnate Son of
God who had companied with them, their faith was the result not of this
or that high claim which He had made for Himself, but rather of "the
sum-total of all His words and works, the united and accumulated
impression of all He was and did" upon their sincere and receptive
souls.[16]
Are there not many of us to-day who would do well to seek the same goal
by the same path? We have listened, perhaps, to other men's arguments
concerning the Divinity of our Lord, conscious the while how little they
were doing for us. Let us listen to Christ Himself. Let us put ourselves
to school with Him, as these first disciples did, and suffer Him to make
His own impression upon us. And if ours be sincere and receptive souls
as were theirs, from us also He shall win the adoring cry, "My Lord and
my God." Let us note, then, some of the many ways in which Christ bears
witness concerning Himself. In a very true sense all His sayings are
"self-portraitures." Be the subject of His teaching what it may, He
cannot speak of it without, in some measure at least, revealing His
thoughts concerning Himself; and it is this indirect testimony whose
significance I wish now carefully to consider.
II
Observe, in the first place, how Christ speaks of God and of His own
relation to Him. He called Himself, as we have already noted, "the Son
of God." Now, there is a sense in which all men are the sons of God, for
it is to God that all men owe their life. And there is, further, as the
New Testament has taught us, another and deeper sense in which men who
are not may "become" the sons of God, through faith in Christ. But
Christ's consciousness of Sonship is distinct from both of these, and
cannot be explained in terms of either. He is not "_a_ son of God"--one
among many---He is "_the_ son of God," standing to God in a relationship
which is His alone. Hence we find--and we shall do well to mark the
marvellous accuracy and self-consistency of the Gospels in this
matter--that while Jesus sometimes speaks of "_the_ Father," and
sometimes of "_My_ Father," and sometimes, again, in addressing His
disciples, of "_your_ Father," never does He link Himself with them so
as to call God "_our_ Father." Nowhere does the distinction, always
present to the mind of Christ, find more striking expression than in
that touching scene in the garden in which the Risen Lord bids Mary go
unto His brethren and say unto them, "I ascend unto My Father and your
Father, and My God and your God."
This sense of separateness is emphasized when we turn to the prayers of
Christ. And in this connection it is worthy of note that though Christ
has much to say concerning the duty and blessedness of prayer, and
Himself spent much time in prayer, yet never, so far as we know, did He
ask for the prayers of others. "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to
have you, that he might sift you as wheat: but I made supplication for
thee, that thy faith fail not." So did Jesus pray for His disciples; but
we never read that they prayed for Him, or that He asked for Himself a
place in their prayers. How significant the silence is we learn when we
turn to the Epistles of St. Paul and to the experience of the saints.
"Brethren, pray for us"--this is the token in almost every Epistle. In
the long, lone fight of life even the apostle's heart would have failed
him had not the prayers of unknown friends upheld him as with unseen
hands. There is no stronger instinct of the Christian heart than the
plea for remembrance at the throne of God. "Pray for me, will you?" we
cry, when man's best aid seems as a rope too short to help, yet long
enough to mock imprisoned miners in their living tomb. But the cry which
is so often ours was never Christ's.
It has further been remarked that, intimate as was Christ's intercourse
with His disciples, He never joined in prayer with them.[17] He prayed
in their presence, He prayed for them, but never with them. "It came to
pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of
His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also
taught his disciples. And He said unto them, When ye pray, say----."
Then follows what we call "The Lord's Prayer." But, properly speaking,
this was not the Lord's prayer; it was the disciples' prayer: "When _ye_
pray, say------." And when we read the prayer again, we see why it could
not be His. How could He who knew no sin pray, saying, "Forgive us our
sins"? The true "Lord's Prayer" is to be found in the seventeenth
chapter of St. John's Gospel. And throughout that prayer the holy
Suppliant has nothing to confess, nothing to regret. He knows that the
end is nigh, but there are no shadows in His retrospect; of all that is
done there is nothing He could wish undone or done otherwise. "I
glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which Thou
hast given Me to do." It is so when He comes to die. Among the Seven
Words from the Cross we are struck by one significant omission: the
dying Sufferer utters a cry of physical weakness--"I thirst"--but He
makes no acknowledgement of sin; He prays for the forgiveness of
others--"Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do"--He asks
none for Himself. The great Augustine died with the penitential Psalms
hung round his bed. Fifty or sixty times, it is said, did sweet St.
Catharine of Siena cry upon her deathbed, _Peccavi, Domine miserere
mei_, "Lord, I have sinned: have mercy on me." But in all the prayers of
Jesus, whether in life or in death, He has no pardon to ask, no sins to
confess.
We are thus brought to the fact upon which of recent years so much
emphasis has been justly laid, namely, that nowhere throughout the
Gospels does Christ betray any consciousness of sin. "Which of you," He
said, "convicteth Me of sin?" And no man was able, nor is any man now
able, to answer Him a word. But the all-important fact is not so much
that they could not convict Him of sin; _He could not convict Himself._
Yet it could not be that He was self-deceived. "He knew what was in
man;" He read the hearts of others till, like the Samaritan woman, they
felt as though He knew all things that ever they had done. Was it
possible, then, that He did not know Himself? Not only so, but the law
by which He judged Himself was not theirs, but His. And what that was,
how high, how searching, how different from the low, conventional
standards which satisfied them, we who have read His words and His
judgments know full well. Nevertheless, He knew nothing against Himself;
as no man could condemn Him neither could He condemn Himself. Looking up
to heaven, He could say, "I do always the things that are pleasing to
Him."[18] This is not the language of sinful men; it is not the language
of even the best and holiest of men. Christ is as separate from "saints"
as He is from "sinners." The greatest of Hebrew prophets cries, "Woe is
me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in
the midst of a people of unclean lips." The greatest of Christian
apostles laments, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of
the body of this death?" Even the holy John confesses, "If we say that
we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." It is
one of the commonplaces of Christian experience that the holier men
become the more intense and poignant becomes the sense of personal
shortcoming. "We have done those things which we ought not to have done;
we have left undone those things which we ought to have done:" among all
the sons of men there is none, who truly knows himself, who dare be
silent when the great confession is made--none save the Son of Man; for
He, it has well been said, was _not_ the one thing which we all are; He
was _not_ a sinner.
This consciousness of separateness runs through all that the evangelists
have told us concerning Christ. When _e.g._ He is preaching He never
associates Himself, as other preachers do, with His hearers; He never
assumes, as other preachers must, that His words are applicable to
Himself equally with them. We exhort; He commands. We say, like the
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Let us go on unto perfection"; He
says, "Ye shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." We
speak as sinful men to sinful men, standing by their side; He speaks as
from a height, as one who has already attained and is already made
perfect. Or, the contrast may be pointed in another way. We all know
what it is to be haunted by misgivings as to the wisdom of some course
which, under certain trying circumstances, we have taken. We had some
difficult task to perform--to withstand (let us say) a fellow-Christian
to his face, as Paul withstood Peter at Antioch; and we did the
unpleasant duty as best we knew how, honestly striving not only to speak
the truth but to speak it in love. And yet when all was over we could
not get rid of the fear that we had not been as firm or as kindly as we
should have been, that, if only something had been which was not, our
brother might have been won. There is a verse in Paul's second letter to
the Church at Corinth which illustrates exactly this familiar kind of
internal conflict. Referring to the former letter which he had sent to
the Corinthians, and in which he had sharply rebuked them for their
wrong-doing, he says, "Though I made you sorry with my epistle, I do not
regret it, though I did regret"--a simple, human touch we can all
understand. Yes; but when did Jesus hesitate and, as it were, go back
upon Himself after this fashion? He passed judgment upon men and their
ways with the utmost freedom and confidence; some, such as the
Pharisees, He condemned with a severity which almost startles us;
towards others, such as she "that was a sinner," He was all love and
tenderness. Yet never does He speak as one who fears lest either in His
tenderness or His severity He has gone too far. His path is always
clear; He enters upon it without doubt; He looks back upon it without
misgiving.
This contrast between Christ and all other men, as it presented itself
to His own consciousness, may be illustrated almost indefinitely. His
forerunners the prophets were the servants of God; He is His Son. All
other men are weary and in need of rest; He has rest and can give it.
All others are lost; He is not lost, He is the shepherd sent to seek the
lost. All others are sick; He is not sick, He is the physician sent to
heal the sick. All others will one day stand at the bar of God; but He
will be on the throne to be their Judge. All others are sinners--this is
the great, final distinction into which all others run up--He is the
Saviour. When at the Last Supper He said, "This is My blood of the
covenant which is shed for many unto remission of sins"; and again, when
He said, "The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many," He
set Himself over against all others, the one sinless sacrifice for a
sinful world.
There is in Edinburgh a Unitarian church which bears carved on its front
these words of St. Paul. "There is one God, and one mediator between God
and man, the man Christ Jesus." I say nothing as to the fitness of any
of Paul's words for such a place--perhaps we can imagine what he would
have said; I pass over any questions of interpretation that might very
justly be raised; I have only one question to ask: Why was the quotation
not finished? Paul only put a comma where they have put a full stop; the
next words are: _"Who gave Himself a ransom for all."_ But how could He
do that if He was only "the _man_ Christ Jesus"?
"No man can save his brother's soul,
Nor pay his brother's debt,"
and how could He, how dare He, think of His life as the ransom for our
forfeited lives, if He were only one like unto ourselves? There is but
one explanation which does really explain all that Christ thought and
taught concerning Himself; it is that given by the first disciples and
re-echoed by every succeeding generation of Christians--
"THOU ART THE KING OF GLORY, O CHRIST.
THOU ART THE EVERLASTING SON OF THE FATHER."
* * * * *
CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH
"While there is life in thee, in this death alone place thy
trust, confide in nothing else besides; to this death commit
thyself altogether; with this shelter thy whole self; with
this death array thyself from head to foot. And if the Lord
thy God will judge thee, say, Lord, between Thy judgment and
me I cast the death of our Lord Jesus Christ; no otherwise can
I contend with Thee. And if He say to thee, Thou art a sinner,
say, Lord, I stretch forth the death of our Lord Jesus Christ
between my sins and Thee. If He say, Thou art worthy of
condemnation, say, Lord, I set the death of our Lord Jesus
Christ between my evil deserts and Thee, and His merits I
offer for those merits which I ought to have, but have not of
my own. If He say that He is wroth with thee, say, Lord, I
lift up the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between Thy wrath
and me."--ANSELM.
* * * * *
IV
CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH
_"The Son of Man came ... to give His life a ransom for
many."_--MARK X. 45.
The death of Jesus Christ has always held the foremost place in the
thought and teaching of the Church. When St. Paul writes to the
Corinthians, "I delivered unto you first of all that which also I
received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures," he is the spokesman of every Christian preacher and
teacher, of the missionary of the twentieth century no less than of the
first. It is with some surprise, therefore, we discover when we turn to
the teaching of Jesus Himself, that He had so little to say concerning a
subject of which His disciples have said so much. It is true that the
Gospels, without exception, relate the story of Christ's death with a
fullness and detail which, in any other biography, would be judged
absurdly out of proportion. But this, it is said, reveals the mind of
the evangelists rather than the mind of Christ. And those who love that
false comparison between the Gospels and the Epistles of which so much
is heard to-day, have not been slow to seize upon this apparent
discrepancy as another example of the way in which the Church has
misunderstood and misinterpreted the simple message of the Galilean
Prophet.
But, in the first place, as I will show in a moment, the contrast
between the Gospels and Epistles in this matter is by no means so
sharply defined as is often supposed. And further, granting that there
is a contrast--that what in the Gospels is only a hint or suggestion,
becomes in the Epistles a definite and formal statement--it is one which
admits of a simple and immediate explanation. Christ--this was Dr.
Dale's way of putting it--did not come to preach the gospel; He came
that there might be a gospel to preach. This must not be pressed so far
as to imply that it is only the death and not also the life of Christ
that has any significance for us to-day; but if that death had any
significance in it at all, if it was anything more to Him than death is
to us, if it stood in any sort of relation to us men and our salvation,
manifestly the teaching which should make this plain would more
fittingly follow than precede the death. And they at least who accept
Christ's words, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot
bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall
guide you into all truth"--they, I say, who accept these words can find
no difficulty in believing that part of the revelation which it was the
good pleasure of the Father to give to us in His Son, came through the
lips of men who spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Moreover,
when we turn to the Gospels we see at once that the interpretation of
Christ's death was just one of those things which the disciples as yet
were unable to bear. The point is so important that it is worth while
dwelling upon it for a moment. So far were the Twelve from being able to
understand their Lord's death, that they would not even believe that He
was going to die. "Be it far from Thee, Lord," cried Peter, when Christ
first distinctly foretold His approaching end; "this shall never be unto
Thee." When, at another time, He said unto His disciples, "Let these
words sink into your ears; for the Son of Man shall be delivered up into
the hands of men," St. Luke adds, "But they understood not this saying."
And again, after another and similar prophecy, the evangelist writes
with significant reiteration, "They understood none of these things; and
this saying was hid from them, and they perceived not the things that
were said." So was it all through those last months of our Lord's life.
His thoughts were not their thoughts, neither were His ways their ways.
They followed Him as He pressed along the highway, His face steadfastly
set to go up to Jerusalem, but they could not understand Him. Why, if as
He had said, death waited Him there, did He go to seek it? Think what
utter powerlessness to enter even a little way into His thoughts is
revealed in a scene like this: Two of His disciples, James and John,
came to Him to ask Him that they might sit, one on His right hand, and
one on His left hand, in His glory. Jesus said unto them, "Ye know not
what ye ask. Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink? or to be
baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" And they said unto
Him, "We are able." What could Jesus do with ignorance like
this--ignorance that knew not its own ignorance? He could be "sorry for
their childishness"; but how could He show them the mystery of His
Passion? What could He do but wait until the Cross, and the empty grave,
and the gift of Pentecost had done their revealing and enlightening
work?
At the same time, as I have already pointed out, it is altogether a
mistake to suppose that Christ has left us on this subject wholly to the
guidance of others. From the very beginning of His ministry the end was
before Him, and as it drew nearer He spoke of it continually. At first
He was content to refer to it in language purposely vague and
mysterious. Just as a mother who knows herself smitten with a sickness
which is unto death, will sometimes try by shadowed hints to prepare her
children for what is coming, while yet she veils its naked horror from
their eyes, so did Jesus with His disciples. "Can the sons of the
bride-chamber fast," He asked once, "while the bridegroom is with them?
... But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from
them, and then will they fast in that day." But from the time of Peter's
great confession at Cæsarea Philippi all reserve was laid aside, and
Christ told His disciples plainly of the things which were to come to
pass: "From that time began Jesus to show unto His disciples, how that
He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and
chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised
up." And if we will turn to any one of the first three Gospels, we shall
find, as Dr. Denney says, that that which "characterized the last months
of our Lord's life was a deliberate and thrice-repeated attempt to teach
His disciples something about His death."[19] Let me try, very briefly,
to set forth some of the things which He said.
I
First of all, then, _Christ died as a faithful witness to the truth._
Like the prophets and the Baptist before Him, whose work and whose end
were so often in His thoughts, He preached righteousness to an
unrighteous world, and paid with His life the penalty of His daring.
That is the very lowest view which can be taken of His death. No
Unitarian, no unbeliever, will deny that Jesus died as a good man,
choosing rather the shame of the Cross than the deeper shame of treason
to the truth. And thus far Christ is an example to all who follow Him.
In one sense His cross-bearing was all His own, a mystery of suffering
and death into which no man can enter. But in another sense, as St.
Peter tells us, He has left us by His sufferings an example that we
should follow His steps. It is surely a significant fact that the words
which immediately follow Christ's first distinct declaration of His
death are these, "If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself,
and take up his cross and follow Me." His death was the supreme
illustration of a law which binds us, the servants, even as it bound
Him, the Master. In the path of every true man there stands the cross
which he must bear, or be true no more. Let no one grow impatient and
say this is no more than the fringe of Christ's thoughts about His
death; even the fringe is part of the robe, and if, as the words I have
quoted seem clearly to indicate, Christ thought of His death as in any
sense at all a pattern for us, let us not miss this, the first and
simplest lesson of the Cross.
There are few more impressive scenes in the history of the Christian
pulpit than that in which Robertson of Brighton, preaching the Assize
Sermon at Lewes, turned as he closed to the judges, and counsel, and
jury, and bade them remember, by "the trial hour of Christ," by "the
Cross of the Son of God," the sacred claims of truth: "The first lesson
of the Christian life is this, Be true; and the second this, Be true;
and the third this, Be true."
II
But though this be our starting-point, it is no more than a starting-point.
If Jesus was only a brave man, paying with His life the penalty
of His bravery in the streets of Jerusalem, it is wasting words to call
Him "the Saviour of the world." If His death were only a martyrdom,
then, though we may honour Him as we honour Socrates, and many another
name in the long roll of "the noble army of martyrs," yet He can no more
be our Redeemer than can any one of them. But it was not so that Christ
thought of His death. The martyr dies because he must; Christ died
because He would. The strong hands of violent men snatch away the
martyr's life from him; but no man had power to take away Christ's life
from Him: "I lay it down of Myself," He said. The Son of Man _gave_ His
life. He was not dragged as an unwilling victim to the sacrifice and
bound upon the altar. He was both Priest and Victim; as the apostle puts
it, "He gave Himself up." True, the element of necessity was there--"the
Son of Man _must_ be lifted up"; but it was the "must" of His own love,
not of another's constraint. Not Roman nails or Roman thongs held Him to
the Cross, but His own loving will. It is important to emphasize this
fact of the _voluntariness_ of our Lord's death, because at once it sets
the Cross in a clearer light. It changes martyrdom into sacrifice; and
Christ's death, instead of being merely a fate which He suffered,
becomes now, as Principal Fairbairn says, a work which He
achieved--_the_ work which He came into the world to do: "The Son of Man
came ... to give His life."[20]
III
Again, Christ taught us that His death was _the crowning revelation of
the love of God for man._ And it is well to remind ourselves of our need
of such a revelation. We speak sometimes as though the love of God was a
self-evident truth altogether independent of the facts of New Testament
history. "God is love"--of course, we say; this at least we are sure of,
whatever becomes of the history. But this jaunty assurance will not bear
looking into. The truth is that, apart from Christ, we have no certainty
of the love of God. A man may cry aloud in our ears, "God is love, God
is love"; but if he have no more to say than that, the most emphatic
reiteration will avail us nothing. But if he can say, "God is love, and
He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son"; if, that is
to say, he can point us to the Divine love made manifest in life, then
he is proclaiming a gospel indeed. But let us not deceive ourselves and
imagine that we can have Christ's gospel apart from Christ.
Now, according to the teaching of the Gospels, all Christ's life--all He
was and said and did--is a revelation of the love of God. But the crown
of the revelation was given in His death. It is the Cross which was, in
a special and peculiar sense, as Christ Himself declared,[21] the glory
both of the Father and the Son. And the apostles, with a unanimity which
can only be explained as the result of His own teaching, always
associate God's love with Christ's death in a way in which they never
associate God's love with Christ's life. "God," says St. Paul,
"commendeth His own love toward us, in that ... Christ died for us."
Christ's death, then, we say, establishes the love of God. But how does
this come to pass? How does the death of one prove the love of another?
If--to use a very simple illustration--I am in danger of drowning, and
another man, at the cost of his own life, saves mine, his act
undoubtedly proves his own love; but how does it prove anything
concerning God's love? If the apostle had said, "_Christ_ commendeth His
own love towards us, in that He died for us," we could have understood
him; but how, I ask again, does Christ's death prove _God's_ love? The
question is answerable, as indeed the whole of the New Testament is
intelligible, only on the assumption of the Trinitarian doctrine of
Christ. If Christ were indeed the Son of God, standing to God in such a
relation that what He did was likewise the doing of God the Father, we
can understand the apostle's meaning. On any other hypothesis his
language is a riddle of which the key has been lost. A further question
still remains to be answered. I said just now that if St. Paul had
written, "_Christ_ commendeth His own love towards us, in that He died
for us," we could have understood Him. But here, also, something is
implicit which requires to be made explicit. How does Christ in His
death prove His love for us? Obviously, only in one way: by bearing
responsibilities which must otherwise have fallen upon us. There must
be, as Dr. Denney rightly argues, some rational relation between our
necessities and what Christ has done before we can speak of His act as a
proof of His love. If, to borrow the same writer's illustration, a man
lose his own life in saving me from drowning, this is love to the
uttermost; but if, when I was in no peril, he had thrown himself into
the water and got drowned "to prove his love for me," the deed and its
explanation would be alike unintelligible. We must take care when we
speak of the death of Christ that we do not make it equally meaningless.
How Christ Himself thought of it as related to the necessities of sinful
men, the next and last division of this chapter will, I hope, make
plain.
IV
_"The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many;" "This is My
blood of the covenant which is shed for many unto remission of sins."_
These are the two great texts which reveal to us the mind of Christ
concerning the significance of His death. There has been much discussion
of their meaning into which it is impossible here to enter. But whatever
questions modern scholarship may raise, there can be little doubt as to
the sense in which Christ's words were understood by the first
disciples. "His own self," said Peter, "bare our sins in His body upon
the tree." "Herein is love," said John, "not that we loved God, but that
He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." He
"loved me," said Paul, "and gave Himself for me." It is open, doubtless,
to question the legitimacy of these apostolic deductions, and to fall
back upon Matthew Arnold's _Aberglaube;_ but who, it has been well said,
"are most likely to have correctly apprehended the significance which
Jesus attached to His death, men like John and Peter and Paul, or an
equal number of scholars in our time, however discerning and candid, who
undertake to reconstruct the thoughts of Jesus, and to disentangle them
from the supposed subjective reflections of His disciples? Where is the
subjectivity likely to be the greatest--in the interpretations of the
eye and ear witness, or in the reconstructions of the moderns?"[22]
Christ gave His life "a ransom for many." The truth cannot be put too
simply: "God forgives our sins because Christ died for them;" "in that
death of Christ our condemnation came upon Him, that for us there might
be condemnation no more;" "the forfeiting of His free life has freed our
forfeited lives."[23]
"Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood;
Alleluia! what a Saviour!"
If this is true, the New Testament has a meaning, and, what is more, we
sinful men have a gospel. If it is not true, it is difficult to know why
the New Testament was written, and still more difficult to know what we
must do to be saved. It does not help to point us to the parable of the
Prodigal Son, and tell us that there is a story of salvation without an
atonement. The whole gospel cannot be put into a parable, not even into
such a parable as this. Besides, if the argument proves anything, it
proves too much. The parable is not only a story of salvation without an
atonement, it is a story of salvation without Christ; and if no more is
needed than what is given here, Christ Himself is no part of His own
gospel, forgiveness can be had with no reference to Him. But it is not
so the redeemed have learned Christ; it is not thus they have received
forgiveness. They _know_ that it is "in Him" they have their redemption,
through His blood; and apart from Him there is no salvation and no
gospel.
It is time to bring our reasonings to an end. We are under the shadow of
the Cross; let us worship and adore. When Christ died on the tree
nineteen hundred years ago, there were some that mocked, and some that
watched and yet saw nothing--nothing but a miserable criminal's
miserable end; a few there were that wept, and one there was who cried,
with lips already white with death, "Jesus, remember me when Thou comest
in Thy kingdom." And still does that Cross divide men. Where is our
place, and with whom are we? Not, I think, with them that mock; for
these to-day are a broken and discredited few. We choose rather the
centurion's cry, "Certainly this was a righteous man." But is this all
we have to say? He who gave His life-blood for us, shall He have no more
than this--the little penny-pieces of our respect? If we owe Him aught
we owe Him all; and if we give Him aught let us give Him all--not our
thanks but our souls. "He loved _me_, and gave Himself up for _me_"--
there is the secret of the Cross which no man knows save he who cannot
speak of it without the personal pronouns. Until then we are but as
blind watchers that look and see not. "Jesus, remember me"--this is the
word that becomes us best. Let us cry unto Him now, and He who heard the
robber's prayer on the Cross will hear and save us.
* * * * *
CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
"Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,
And lighten with celestial fire;
Thou the Anointing Spirit art,
Who dost Thy sevenfold gifts impart.
Thy blessed unction from above
Is comfort, life, and fire of love:
Enable with perpetual light
The dullness of our blinded sight;
Anoint and cheer our soiled face
With the abundance of Thy grace;
Keep far our foes; give peace at home;
Where Thou art guide no ill can come;
Teach us to know the Father, Son,
And Thee of Both, to be but One:
That, through the ages all along,
This, this may be our endless song,
'Praise to Thy eternal merit,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!'"
Amen!
BISHOP JOHN COSIN.
* * * * *
V
CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
_"I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another
Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit
of truth."_--JOHN xiv. 16.
_"It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not
away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I
will send Him unto you."_--JOHN xvi. 7.
It was the night in which He was betrayed. Jesus and His disciples were
spending their last hours together before His death. For Him the morrow
could bring with it no surprise. He knew that His hour was come--the
hour to which all other hours of His past had pointed; and He was ready.
Before He left that Upper Room, He lifted up His eyes to heaven and
said, "Father, the hour is come; glorify Thy Son." But to the disciples
that night was a night of darkness, and terror, and confusion. They
remembered how He had told them He must die; they knew the bloodhounds
in Jerusalem were on His track; they could see the shadow's black edge
creeping nearer and nearer; and yet they could do nothing; they could
not even persuade Him that anything needed to be done. Nay, it almost
seemed as if He were taking part with His enemies against them. "It is
expedient for you," He said, "that I go away"--veiling in His pity the
horror of His going. "Expedient" for them? How could He speak like that?
Was He not everything to them? If He went away, what was to befall them?
They would be as sheep in the midst of wolves, as orphans in an unkindly
world. Is it any wonder that sorrow filled their hearts?
And not only to these His first disciples, but to many of His followers
in later days, this word of Jesus has proved a hard saying. If only, we
think, He were with us as He was with Peter and James and John; if only
we could hear Him teach in our streets, or in our church, as once He
taught in the streets of Jerusalem and the synagogue at Nazareth; if
only He could enter our homes, as once He entered the home at Bethany,
how easy it would be to believe! But, now He is no longer here, the air
is filled with doubting voices, and faith is very hard.
So sometimes we speak. But, have we noticed, this is never the language
of the New Testament. To begin with, it is not the language of Christ.
There is an unmistakable emphasis in His words: "Because I have spoken
these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart. Nevertheless, I
tell you the truth: it is expedient for you that I go away." When Paul
was a prisoner in Rome, he wrote to the Philippians, saying, "I am in a
strait betwixt the two, having the desire to depart and be with Christ;
for it is very far better; yet to abide in the flesh is more needful for
your sake." That is how a good man, in the prospect of death, naturally
feels towards those who are in any way dependent on him. But Christ's
language is the very opposite of this; He says, not that it is needful
to abide, but that it is expedient to depart. And in every reference to
Christ by the apostles after His Ascension, the same note is struck. It
is hardly too much to say, as one writer does, "that no apostle, no New
Testament writer, ever _remembered_ Christ."[24] They thought of Him as
belonging, not to the past, but to the present; He was the object, not
of memory, but of faith. Never do they wish Him back in their midst;
never do they mourn for Him as for a friend whom they have lost. On the
contrary, they felt that Christ was with them now in a sense in which He
had never been. There is no hint that any even of the Twelve would have
gone back to the old days had it been possible. They had lost, but they
had also gained, and their gain was greater than their loss. "Even
though we have known Christ after the flesh," they also would have said,
"yet now we know Him so no more." Read over again St. Luke's account of
our Lord's Ascension: "He led them out until they were over against
Bethany; and He lifted up His hands and blessed them. And it came to
pass, while He blessed them, He parted from them, and was carried up
into heaven. And they worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with
great joy; and were continually in the temple, blessing God." Christ had
gone from them a second time, no more to return as before He had
returned from the tomb; yet now it is not despair but joy which fills
their hearts: "They returned to Jerusalem with great joy." When in the
Upper Room, Christ had said, "It is expedient for you that I go away,"
sorrow had filled their hearts; but, now that He is gone, their sorrow
is turned into joy. How shall we explain this strange reversal?
I
It is to be explained in part, of course, by the Resurrection of Christ
from the dead, but mainly--and this is the fact with which just now we
are concerned--by the gift of the Holy Spirit whom Christ had promised
to His disciples to abide with them for ever. But now, what do we mean
when we speak of the gift of the Holy Spirit? What is the Holy Spirit,
and what is it that He does for us? Many of us, I think, must have felt
how extremely unreal, and therefore unsatisfying, the discussions of
this great subject often are. The doctrine somehow fails to find a place
among the proved realities of our Christian experience. It remains, so
to speak, outside of us, a foreign substance which life has not
assimilated. And hence it has come to pass that there is no small danger
to-day lest New Testament phrases about being filled with the Spirit,
baptized with the Spirit, and so forth, become the mere jargon of a
school which wholly fails to interpret the mind of Christ. Doubtless
there are faults on both sides, the faults of neglect and the faults of
false emphasis, and for both the true remedy is a more careful study of
the teaching of Jesus.
What, then, is the Holy Spirit, and what is it He does for us? "I will
pray the Father," Christ said, "and He shall give you another
Comforter," or "another Paraclete." The word translated "Comforter,"
which occurs so often in this discourse of our Lord, is found nowhere
else in the New Testament except in the First Epistle of St. John, where
it is rendered "Advocate"; "If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the
Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous." And this, without doubt, is a more
faithful rendering of the word which Christ used than the more familiar
"Comforter." An advocate is one who is called to our side to be our
friend and helper, more especially to plead our cause in a court of
justice; and this also is the meaning of the word "Paraclete." Perhaps,
however, the word "Comforter" may be retained without loss, if only we
remember to give it its full and original meaning. To "comfort" is not
primarily and originally to console, but to strengthen, to _fort_ify;
and the "Comforter" whom Christ promised to His disciples was not only
one who should soothe them in their sorrows, but should stand by them in
all their conflicts, their unfailing friend and helper.
Further, Christ said God "shall give you _another_ Comforter." That is
to say, Christ Himself was a Comforter, and all that He had been to His
disciples the Holy Spirit should be also. And, if we examine the three
chapters of this Gospel which contain this great discourse of our Lord,
we shall find this idea taken up, and repeated, and developed in passage
after passage. The Holy Spirit was to come in Christ's name, as Christ's
representative and interpreter. "He shall not speak from Himself,"
Christ said; "He shall bear witness of Me. He shall glorify Me; for He
shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you." In the presence of
the Spirit Christ Himself would be present: "I will not leave you
desolate," He said; "I come unto you;" "I will see you again, and your
heart shall rejoice." And, for the sake of such a presence, a presence
which was to be not for a little while but for ever, it was best for His
friends that He should leave them.[25]
It is in these words, I believe, that we have the key to the New
Testament doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of
Christ; He is sent by Christ; He comes to continue the work of Christ.
He is, as one writer has it, Christ's _alter ego_, or, as it was said
long ago, Christ's "Vicar," or substitute, on the earth.[26] When,
therefore, we speak of the presence of the Spirit, what we mean, or what
we ought to mean, is the spiritual presence of Christ. In the Holy
Spirit Christ Himself is present, wherever, as He said, two or three are
gathered together in His name. In the Holy Spirit, given to be with us
for ever, He makes good to His disciples the great word of His promise,
"Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." This is the
fact continually to be kept in mind--the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ;
for, if this be forgotten, then, as all experience shows, either the
doctrine is wholly ignored, or it is made the subject of that vague,
unreal way of speaking, which, alas! is so often the bane of spiritual
truth.
At the same time, what has been said must not be interpreted so as to
suggest that the Holy Spirit is merely an impersonal influence. On the
contrary, the words of our Lord quoted above distinctly imply what we
call "personality," and a personality separate from His own. If all that
Jesus really meant to teach was that He would manifest His own invisible
presence to His disciples by spiritual influences, we can only conclude
that His words have been tampered with; as they stand, it is impossible
that this should exhaust their meaning. To teach, to bear witness, to
guide, to bring to remembrance, to declare the things that are to
come,--these are the acts, not of a Power, but of a Person; and all
these things, Christ said, the Holy Spirit should do. Indeed, it is not
easy to see how language could have been framed to set forth the idea of
a Divine Person, separate alike from the Father and the Son, more
explicitly than we find it in these chapters.[27]
II
We turn now to the second part of our question: What is it that the Holy
Spirit does for us? Christ's teaching on the work of the Spirit may be
gathered up under two heads: (1) His work in the Church; (2) His work in
the world.
(1) When we speak of the Spirit's work in the Church, it must be
understood that the reference is to no particular ecclesiastical
organization, but to the people of Christ generally, "the men and women
in whom the spiritual work of Christ is going forward." And among these
the Holy Spirit works in two ways.
(_a_) He is the Spirit of truth, the Divine Remembrancer: "He shall
guide you into all the truth;" "He shall take of Mine, and shall declare
it unto you;" "He shall teach you all things, and bring to your
remembrance all that I said unto you." It is not, it will be observed,
all truth, but all the truth of Christ, with which the Spirit deals--the
truth concerning Him, and the truth which He taught. Nor is it a new
revelation which the Spirit gives, but rather a more perfect
understanding of that which has been already given in Christ. Here,
then, is the test by which to try all that claims the authority of
spiritual truth. Does it "glorify" Christ? Does it lead us into a fuller
knowledge of Him "in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge
hidden"? "Whosoever goeth onward," says St. John, in a remarkable
passage, for which English readers are indebted to the Revised Version,
"and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God." In other
words, no true progress is possible except as we abide in Christ. If He
be ignored and left behind, though we still keep the name and boast
ourselves "progressives," we have lost the reality. On the other hand,
every new discovery, every movement in the life of men, every
intellectual and spiritual awakening which serves to make manifest the
glory of Christ as Creator, or Revealer, or Redeemer, is a fresh
fulfilment of His promise concerning the guiding Spirit of truth.
Perhaps our best commentary is the history of the Church. In the New
Testament itself we have the first-fruits of the Spirit's work. There we
may see, in Gospels and Epistles, how the Spirit took of the things of
Christ and showed them unto His disciples. And all through the varied
history of the Church's long past, that same Divine Remembrancer has
been at work, calling us through the lips of an Augustine, a Luther, or
a Wesley, into the fullness of the inheritance of truth which is ours in
Christ Jesus.
(_b_) The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of power. "Behold," said the
ascending Christ, "I send forth the promise of My Father upon you; but
tarry ye in the city until ye be clothed with power from on high." And,
again, "Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon you."
Of Jesus Himself it was said by one of His disciples "that God anointed
Him with the Holy Ghost and with power"; and of His disciples Jesus
said: "He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall He do also;
and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto the Father."
Here, again, our best commentary is the history of the Church, and
especially the first chapter of that history as it is written in the
Acts of the Apostles. This was the promise, "Ye shall receive power,"
and this, in brief, the story of its fulfilment, "With great power gave
the apostles their witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus." Let
any one read the early chapters of St. Luke's narrative; let him mark
the utter disparity between the "acts" and the "apostles"--between the
things done and the men by whom they were done--and then let him ask if
there is any explanation which does really bridge the gulf short of
this, that behind Peter and John and the rest there stood Another,
speaking through their lips, working through their hands, Himself the
real Doer in all those wondrous "acts"? When D.L. Moody was holding in
Birmingham one of those remarkable series of meetings which so deeply
stirred our country in the early 'seventies, Dr. Dale, who followed the
work with the keenest sympathy, and yet not without a feeling akin to
stupefaction at the amazing results which it produced, once told Moody
that the work was most plainly of God, for he could see no real relation
between him and what he had done. Is not this disparity the very
sign-manual of the Holy Spirit's presence? "Why," asked Peter, when the
multitude were filled with wonder and amazement at the healing of the
lame man, "Why fasten ye your eyes on us as though by our own power or
godliness we had made him to walk?" Work that is really of God can never
be accounted for in that fashion. There is always a something in the
effects which cannot be traced back to a human cause. Let "our own power
and godliness" be what they may--and they can never be too great--they
are all vain and helpless apart from the power of God. "I planted,
Apollos watered; God gave the increase." Wherefore let the Church trust
neither in him that planteth nor in him that watereth, but in God who
giveth the increase.
(2) We come now to the Holy Spirit's work in the world. And, just as in
speaking of the "Church" it was not any visible organization which we
had in mind, so now by the "world" is not meant merely the persons who
are outside all such organizations. There is, as we are often reminded
nowadays, a Church outside the Churches; and, on the other hand, not a
little of what Christ meant by the "world" is often to be found inside
what we mean by the "Church." The "world," then, is simply the mass of
men, wherever they are to be found, who are living apart from God. Now,
of this world Christ said it "cannot receive" the Spirit of truth; "it
beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth Him." If, therefore, there is a
ministry of the Spirit in the world, it must be wholly different in kind
from that spoken of above. And this is what we learn from Christ's
teaching: "He, when He is come, will convict the world in respect of
sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment." There is a ring of judicial
sternness in the words; they call up to our minds the solemnities of a
court of justice--the indictment, the conviction, the condemnation. And
yet one can well believe that there were hours in the after life of the
apostles when, of all the comforting, reassuring words which Christ had
spoken to them in that Upper Room, there were none more helpful than
these. For they knew now that, when they stood up to bear their witness
before a hostile world, they had a fellow-witness in men's hearts. They
could go nowhere--in Jerusalem, Judæa, Samaria, or the uttermost parts
of the earth--where the gracious ministries of the Spirit had not
preceded them. He, the Paraclete, was not only with them, their
"strong-siding Champion," He was in the world also, in the hearts even
of them who set themselves most stoutly against the Lord and against His
Anointed, subduing their rebelliousness and reconciling them to God. We
who teach and preach to-day, do we think of these things as we ought?
Does not our message sometimes win a response which is at once a
surprise and a rebuke to us? We knew that the seed which we cast into
the ground was the word of God; but the soil seemed so poor and thin we
scarce had looked for any harvest; yet the seed sprang up and grew, we
knew not how. We had forgotten that over all that wide field which is
the world the Divine Husbandman is ever at work, at work while men
sleep, breaking up the fallow ground, and making ready the soil for the
seed. We need to learn to count more on God, to grasp more fully the
glorious breadth of promise which He has given us in His Spirit, to
remember that, not only in the Church, but in the world--which is His
world--that Spirit is always present to testify of God, to convict men
of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.
And yet, while we encourage ourselves with thoughts like these, we dare
not forget that men may resist, they may grieve, they may quench the
Holy Spirit. He is grieved whensoever He is resisted; He may be resisted
until He is quenched. It was Christ Himself who spoke of a sin against
the Holy Spirit which "hath never forgiveness." Is there any more
painful, perplexing, and yet more certain fact in life than this, that
man can resist God? Is there any that has bound up with it more terrible
and inevitable issues? "Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and
ears," cried the martyr Stephen to his judges, "ye do always resist the
Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye." And the end for their
fathers and for them we know. Wherefore the Holy Spirit saith: "To-day,
if ye shall hear His voice, harden not your hearts."
* * * * *
CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF GOD
"The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost."--ST. PAUL.
* * * * *
VI
CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF GOD
"_Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on
earth._"--MATT. vi. 10.
I
One of the most obvious features of the teaching of Jesus is the
prominence which it gives to what is called "the kingdom of heaven," or,
"the kingdom of God." And this prominence becomes the more striking when
we turn from the Gospels to the Epistles where the phrase is only rarely
to be found. With Jesus the kingdom was a kind of watchword which was
continually on His lips. Thus, _e.g._, St. Mark begins his account of
the preaching of Jesus in these words: "After that John was delivered
up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God and saying, The
time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and
believe in the Gospel." In like manner, St. Matthew tells us that "Jesus
went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching
the gospel of the kingdom." Parable after parable opens with the formula
"The kingdom of heaven is like unto--," or, "So is the kingdom of God as
if--," or, "How shall we liken the kingdom of God?" When Christ sent
forth the Twelve, this was His command, "Go ... and as ye go, preach,
saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand." Again, when He sent forth the
Seventy, He said, "Into whatsoever city ye enter ... say unto them, The
kingdom of God is come nigh unto you." And in the great Forty Days,
before He was received up, it was still of "the things concerning the
kingdom of God" that He spake unto His disciples. Every time a little
child is baptized we call to mind His words, "For of such is the kingdom
of God." Every time we repeat the prayer He taught His disciples to pray
we say, "Thy kingdom come." In all, it is said, there are no less than
one hundred and twelve references to the kingdom to be found in the
Gospels.
When, however, we turn to the Epistles what do we find? In the whole of
St. Paul's Epistles the kingdom is not named as often as in the briefest
of the four Gospels. It is mentioned only once by St. Peter, once by St.
James, once by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and not at all
in the three Epistles of St. John. Not only so, but at least until quite
recent times, the Church of Christ has in the main followed the lead of
the apostles, and has said but little of the kingdom of God. How is this
to be explained? Does it mean that the whole Church of Christ, including
the Church of the apostles, has failed to understand the mind of the
Master, and has let slip an essential element of His teaching? So some
recent writers do not hesitate to declare. Burke once said that he did
not know how to draw up an indictment against a whole people; but these,
apparently, have no difficulty in drawing up an indictment against the
whole Church. "With all respect to the great Apostle," writes one of
them, "one may be allowed to express his regret that St. Paul has not
said less about the Church and more about the Kingdom."[28] To which I
hope one may be forgiven if he is tempted to retort that the great
apostle probably knew what he was about as well as his modern critic can
tell him. We shall do well to pause, and pause again, before we accept
any interpretation of the facts of the New Testament which implies that
we to-day have a better understanding of the mind of Christ than the
apostles had. For my own part, whenever I come across any writer who
tries to correct Paul by Jesus, I find it safest to assume that he has
misread Paul, or Jesus, or both. Moreover, though we need make no claim
of infallibility for the Church, yet, if we believe in a Holy Spirit
given to guide the disciples of Christ into all the truth of Christ, we
shall find it difficult to believe at the same time that the whole
Church has from the beginning missed the right way, and in a matter so
important as this, failed to apprehend the thought of Christ.
We are not, however, shut up to any such unworthy conclusions. There is
another and sufficient explanation of the facts to which reference has
been made. It was natural that Jesus, speaking in the first instance to
Jews, should move as far as possible within the circle of ideas with
which they were already familiar. Now, no phrase had a more thoroughly
familiar sound to Jewish ears than this of the kingdom of God. It
needed, of course, to be purified and enlarged before it could be made
the vehicle of the loftier ideas of Jesus. Still, the idea was there, "a
point of attachment," as one writer says, in the minds of his hearers to
which Jesus could fasten what He wished to say. But after our Lord's
Resurrection and Ascension, and especially after the fall of Jerusalem,
the whole condition of things was changed. A phrase which in the
synagogues of the Jews proved helpful and illumining, might easily
become, among the populations of Asia Minor, of Greece, and of Italy, to
whom the gospel was now preached, useless, and even misleading. Is it
any wonder, therefore, if the first Christian missionaries quietly
dropped the old phrase and found others to take its place? Men who knew
themselves guided by the Spirit of Jesus would not feel compelled to
quote the words of Jesus, if, under altered circumstances, other words
more fittingly expressed His thoughts.[29]
II
What did Jesus mean when He spoke of the kingdom of God? The idea as set
forth in the Gospels is so complex, the phrase is used to cover so many
and different conceptions, that it is practically impossible to frame a
definition within which all the sayings of Jesus concerning the kingdom
can be included. The nearest approach to a definition which it is
necessary to attempt is suggested by the two petitions in the Lord's
Prayer which are quoted above. The second petition explains the first:
the kingdom comes in proportion as men do on earth the will of God. For
our present purpose, therefore, we may think of the kingdom as a
spiritual commonwealth embracing all who do God's will. To much that
Christ taught concerning the kingdom--its Head, its numbers, its growth
and development--it is impossible, in one brief discourse, even to
refer. Here again, it must suffice to single out one or two points for
special emphasis:
(1) In the doctrine of the kingdom of God, we have set before us the
social aspect of Christ's teaching; it reminds us of what we owe, not
only to Him who is its King, but to those who are our fellow-subjects.
Of particular duties it is impossible to speak, though these, as we
know, fill a large place in the teaching of Jesus. But let us at least
bring home to ourselves the thought of obligation, obligation involved
in and springing out of our common relationship as members of the
kingdom of God. The obligation is writ large on every page of the New
Testament--in the Gospels, in the doctrine of the kingdom; in the
Epistles, in the corresponding doctrine of the Church. It can hardly be
said too often, that, according to the New Testament ideal, there are no
unattached Christians. The apostles never conceive of religion as merely
a private matter between the soul and God. All true religion, as John
Wesley used to say, is not solitary but social. Its starting-point is
the individual, but its goal is a kingdom. Christ came to save men and
women in order that through them He might build up a redeemed society in
which the will of God should be done. We do, indeed, often hear of
Christians whose religion begins and ends with getting their own souls
saved. This simply means that so far as it is true they are not yet
Christian. To think only of oneself is to deny one of the first
principles of the kingdom. Wesley taught the early Methodists to sing--
"A charge to keep I have.
A God to glorify;
A never-dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky;"
and some of his followers, both early and later, seem to have thought
that this was the whole of the hymn; but the verse goes on without a
full stop--
"To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfil;
O may it all my powers engage
To do my Master's will!"
And until we who profess and call ourselves Christians have learned this
lesson of service, and have entered into Christ's thought of the
kingdom, with its interlacing network of obligations, we have still need
that some one teach us again the rudiments of the first principles of
the oracles of God.
(2) Again, the kingdom of God, Christ taught, is _present_; it is not
of, but it is in, this world, set up in the midst of the existing order
of things. There are, it is true, passages in which Christ speaks of the
kingdom as in the future, and to come. Thus, _e.g._, He speaks of a time
when men "shall come from the east and west, and from the north and
south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God"; when "the righteous
shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father"; when they
shall "inherit the kingdom prepared for" them "from the foundation of
the world"; and so forth. But there is no real contradiction between
this and what has been already said. The kingdom is a growth, a movement
working itself out in history, and therefore it may be said to be past,
present, or future, according to our point of view. In the sense that it
has not yet fully come, that its final consummation is still waited for,
it is future; and so sometimes Christ speaks of it. But it is simply
impossible to do justice to all His sayings and deny that in His thought
the kingdom is also present. Its consummation may belong to the future,
its beginnings are here already. When Christ calls it the kingdom of
_heaven_, it is rather its origin and character that are suggested than
the sphere of its realization. In parable after parable He speaks of it
as a secret silent energy already at work in the world. He called on men
here and now to seek it, and to enter it. So eagerly were the lost and
the perishing pressing into it that once He declared that from the days
of John the Baptist the kingdom of heaven suffered violence. Not in some
future heaven but here "on earth" He bade His disciples pray that God's
will might be done. "When Jesus said the kingdom of heaven, be sure He
did not mean an unseen refuge, whither a handful might one day escape,
like persecuted and disheartened Puritans fleeing from a hopeless
England, but He intended what might be and then was in Galilee, what
should be and now is in England."[30] "Thy kingdom come"--it is here on
earth we must look for the answer to our prayer. And every man who
himself does, and in every possible way strives to get done, God's will
among men, is Christ's co-worker and fellow-builder.
"I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."
That is the spirit of all the true servants of Jesus.
(3) But the most important fact concerning the kingdom in Christ's view
of it is that it is _spiritual_. And, because it is spiritual, it failed
wholly to satisfy the earth-bound ambitions of the Jews. For generations
they had fed their national pride with visions of a world obedient to
Israel's sway, and when one who claimed to be the Messiah nevertheless
told them plainly that His kingdom was not of this world, they turned
from Him as from one that mocked. He and they both spoke of a kingdom of
God, but while they emphasized the "kingdom" He emphasized "God." So
wholly did men fail to enter into His mind that on one occasion two of
His own disciples came to Him asking that they might sit, one on the
right hand, and one on the left hand in His glory. And even when He was
just about to leave them, and to return to His Father, the old ambitions
still made themselves heard. "Lord," said they, "dost Thou at this time
restore again the kingdom to Israel?" But with all such dreams of
temporal sovereignty Christ would have nothing to do; He had put them
from Him, definitely and for ever, in the Temptation in the wilderness.
He completely reversed the current notions concerning the kingdom.
"Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God cometh, He
answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation;
neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, There! for lo, the kingdom of God
is within you." And when self-complacent religious leaders flattered
themselves that, of course, the first places in the kingdom would be
theirs, He sternly warned them that they might find themselves
altogether shut out while the publicans and harlots whom they despised
were admitted. Through all His teaching Christ laid the emphasis on
character. Pride, and love of power, and sordid ambitions, and all
self-seeking--for these things, and for them that cherished these
things, the kingdom had no place. "Blessed," Christ said, "are the poor
in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." "Except ye turn, and
become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of
heaven." "Whosoever would become great among you, shall be your
minister; and whosoever would be first among you shall be servant of
all"--these are they that are accounted worthy of the kingdom of God.
The earliest account of Christ's preaching which has already been
quoted, gives us the right point of view for the interpretation of
Christ's idea of the kingdom as spiritual: "Jesus came into Galilee,
preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the
kingdom of God is at hand: Repent ye, and believe in the gospel." He had
come to establish a kingdom whose dominion should be for ever, against
which the gates of hell should not prevail, and the foundation of it He
laid in the penitent and obedient hearts of men. This explains why
Christ had so little to do with programmes, and so much to do with men.
If a man's right to the title of reformer be judged by the magnitude of
the revolution which he has effected, it is but bare justice to call Him
the greatest reformer who ever lived. Yet He put out no programme; He
made Himself the spokesman of no party, the advocate of no social or
political reform. To the disappointment of His friends, as much as to
the confusion of His enemies, He absolutely refused to take sides on the
vexed political questions of the hour. "Unto Caesar," He said, "render
the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."
But on individuals He spent Himself to the uttermost. "He is not only
indifferent to numbers, but often seems disinclined to deal with
numbers. He sends the multitude away; He goes apart into a mountain with
His chosen disciples; He withdraws Himself from the throng in Jerusalem
to the quiet home in Bethany; He discourses of the profoundest purposes
of His mission with the Twelve in an upper room; He opens the treasures
of His wisdom before one Pharisee at night, and one unresponsive woman
by the well."[31] Always His work is done not by "external organization
or mass-movements or force of numbers," but from within: "Repent ye and
believe in the gospel."
Now, this was the vary last kind of message that the Pharisees of
Christ's day were looking for. They wanted the world put
right--according to their own ideas of right--it is true; but to be told
that they must begin with themselves was not at all what they wanted.
Are not many of us in the same case to-day? We are all eager for
reforms, at least so long as they are from without. We have a touching
faith in the power of machinery and organization. We are quite sure that
if Parliament would only pass this, that, and the other bit of
legislative reform, on which our hearts are set, the millennium would be
here, if not by the morning post, at least by the session's end. And
there is much, undoubtedly, that Parliament can and ought to do for us.
Nevertheless, was not Christ right? Instead of the old prayer, "Create
in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me," some of
us, as one writer says, would rather pray, "Create a better social
order, O God; and renew a right relation between various classes of
men." We are ready to begin anywhere rather than with ourselves, at any
point in the big circumference rather than at the centre. "I don't deny,
my friends," wrote Charles Kingsley to the Chartists, "it is much
cheaper and pleasanter to be reformed by the devil than by God; for God
will only reform society on the condition of our reforming every man his
own self, while the devil is quite ready to help us to mend the laws and
the Parliament, earth and heaven, without ever starting such an
impertinent and 'personal' request as that a man should mend himself."
Yet without self-reform nothing is possible. "The character of the
aggregate," says Herbert Spencer, "is determined by the characters of
the units." And he illustrates thus: Suppose a man building with good,
square, well-burnt bricks; without the use of mortar he may build a wall
of a certain height and stability. But if his bricks are warped and
cracked or broken, the wall cannot be of the same height and stability.
If again, instead of bricks he use cannon-balls then he cannot build a
wall at all; at most, something in the form of a pyramid with a square
or rectangular base. And if, once more, for cannon-balls we substitute
rough, unhewn boulders, no definite stable form is possible. "The
character of the aggregate is, determined by the characters of the
units." Every attempt to reconstruct society which leaves out of account
the character of the men and women who constitute society is foredoomed
to failure. Behind every social problem stands the greater problem of
the individual, the redemption of character. We may get, as assuredly we
ought to get, better houses for the working-classes; but unless we also
get better working-classes for the houses, we shall not have greatly
mended matters. And no turn of the Parliamentary machine will produce
these for us. We can pass new laws; only the grace of God can make new
men. "For my part," says Kingsley once more, speaking through the lips
of his tailor-poet, "I seem to have learnt that the only thing to
regenerate the world is not more of any system, good or bad; but simply
more of the Spirit of God." "_Except a man be born anew, he cannot see
the kingdom of God._"
* * * * *
CONCERNING MAN
"Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours,
What know we greater than the soul?"
TENNYSON.
* * * * *
VII
CONCERNING MAN
"_There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one
sinner that repenteth._"--LUKE XV. 10.
This is one of many sayings of our Lord which reveal His sense of the
infinite worth of the human soul, which is the central fact in His
teaching about man, and the only one with which in the present chapter
we shall be concerned. Other aspects of the truth will come into view in
the following chapter, when we come to consider Christ's teaching about
sin.
I
"The infinite worth of the human soul"--this is a discovery the glory of
which, it is no exaggeration to say, belongs wholly to Christ. It is
said that one of the most magnificent diamonds in Europe, which to-day
blazes in a king's crown, once lay for months on a stall in a piazza at
Rome labelled, "Rock-crystal, price one franc." And it was thus that for
ages the priceless jewel of the soul lay unheeded and despised of men.
Before Christ came, men honoured the rich, and the great, and the wise,
as we honour them now; but man as man was of little or no account. If
one had, or could get, a pedestal by which to lift himself above the
common crowd, he might count for something; but if he had nothing save
his own feet to stand upon, he was a mere nobody, for whom nobody cared.
We turn to the teaching of Jesus, and what a contrast! "Of how much more
value," He said, "are ye than the birds!" "How much then is a man"--not
a rich man, not a wise man, not a Pharisee, but a man--"of more value
than a sheep!" "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole
world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for
his soul?" It was by thought-provoking questions such as these that
Jesus revealed His own thoughts concerning man. And, of course, when He
spoke in this way about the soul, when He said that a man might gain the
whole world, but that if the price he paid for it were his soul, he was
the loser, He was not speaking of the souls of a select few, but of the
souls of all. Every man, every woman, every little child--all were
precious in His sight. It is man as man, Christ taught, that is of worth
to God.
Consider how much is involved in the bare fact that Christ came into the
world the son of a poor mother, and lived in it a poor man. "A man's
life," He said, "consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he
possesseth." And the best commentary on the saying is just His own life;
for He had nothing. There is something very suggestive in Christ's use
of the little possessive pronoun "My." We know how we use the word.
Listen to the rich man in the parable: "My fruits," "my barns," "my
corn," "my goods." Now listen to Christ. He says: "My Father," "My
Church," "My friends," "My disciples"; but He never says "My house," "My
lands," "My books." The one perfect life this earth has seen was the
life of One who owned nothing, and left behind Him nothing but the
clothes He wore. And not only was Christ poor Himself, He spent His life
among the poor. "To believe that a man with £60 a year," Canon Liddon
once said, "is just as much worthy of respect as a man with £6000, you
must be seriously a Christian." You must indeed. Yet that which is for
us so hard never seems to have cost Christ a struggle. We cannot so much
as think of mere money, more or less, counting for anything in His
sight. The little artificial distinctions of society were to Him
nothing, and less than nothing. He went to be guest with a man that was
a sinner. A woman that was a harlot He suffered to wash His feet with
her tears, and to wipe them with her hair. "This man," said His enemies,
with scorn vibrant in every word, "receiveth sinners and eateth with
them." And they were right; but what they counted His deepest shame was
in reality His chiefest glory.
Now, what does all this mean but simply this, that it was for man as man
that Christ cared? Observe the difference in the point at which He and
we become interested in men. We are interested in them, for the most
part, when, by their work, or their wealth, or their fame, they have
added something to themselves; in other words, we become interested when
they become interesting. But that which gave worth to man in Christ's
eyes lay beneath all these merely adventitious circumstances of his
life, in his naked humanity, in what he was, or might be, in himself.
This is why to Him all souls were dear. We love them that love us, the
loving and the lovable; Christ loved the unloving and the unlovable. He
was named, and rightly named, "Friend of publicans and sinners." Then
were bad men of worth to Christ? They were; for, as Tennyson says, "If
there be a devil in man, there is an angel too." Christ saw the possible
angel in the actual devil. He knew that the lost might be found, and the
bad become good, and the prodigal return home; and He loved men, not
only for what they were, but for what they might be.
It would be easy to show that this high doctrine of man underlies, and
is involved in, the whole life and work and teaching of Jesus. It is
involved in the doctrine of God. Indeed, as Dr. Dale says, the Christian
doctrine of man is really a part of the Christian doctrine of God.[32]
Because God is a Father, every man is a son of God, or, rather, every
man has within him the capacity for sonship. It is involved in the
doctrine of the Incarnation; that stupendous fact reveals not only the
condescension of God but the glory and exaltation of man. If God could
become man, there must be a certain kinship between God and man; since
God has become man, our poor human nature has been thereby lifted up and
glorified. The same great doctrine is implied in the truth of Christ's
atonement. When He who knew Himself to be the eternal Son of God spoke
of His own life as the "ransom" for the forfeited lives of men, He
revealed once more how infinite is the worth of that which could be
redeemed only at such tremendous cost.
Such, then, is Christ's teaching about man. And, as I have already said,
it was a new thing in human history. Nowhere is the line which divides
the world B.C. from the world A.D. more sharply defined than here.
Before Christ came, no one dared to say, for no one believed, that the
soul of every man, and still less the soul of every woman and child, was
of worth to God, that even a slave might become a son of the Most High.
But Christ believed it, and Christ said it, and when He said it, the new
world, the world in which we live, began to be. The great difference
between ancient and modern civilizations, one eminent historian has
said, is to be found here, that while ancient civilization cared only
for the welfare of the favoured few, modern civilization seeks the
welfare of all. And when we ask further what has made the difference,
history sends us back for answer to the four Gospels and the teaching of
Jesus concerning the infinite worth of the soul of man.
II
And now, to bring matters to a practical issue, have we who profess the
faith of Christ learnt to set, either upon others or upon ourselves, the
value which Christ put upon all men? Far as we have travelled from
ancient Greece and Rome, are we not still, in our thoughts about men,
often pagan rather than Christian? Our very speech bewrayeth us, and
shows how little even yet we have learnt to think Christ's thoughts
after Him. He declared, in words which have already been quoted, that "a
man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he
possesseth." Nevertheless, in our daily speech we persist in measuring
men by this very standard; we say that a man "is worth" so much, though,
of course, all that we mean is that he has so much. Again, we allow
ourselves to speak about the "hands" in a factory, as if with the hand
there went neither head nor heart. If we must put a part for the whole,
why should it not be after the fashion of the New Testament? "And there
were added unto them in that day"--so it is written in one place--"about
three thousand souls"--"souls," not "hands."[33] And we may depend upon
it there would be less soulless labour in the world, and fewer men and
women in danger of degenerating into mere "hands," if we would learn to
think of them in Christ's higher and worthier way.
Let me try to show, by two or three examples, how Christ's teaching
about man is needed through all our life.
(1) There was, perhaps, never a time when so many were striving to
fulfil the apostle's injunction, and, as they have opportunity, to do
good unto all men. More and more we busy ourselves to-day with the good
works of philanthropy and Christian charity. And what we must remember
is that our philanthropy needs our theology to sustain it. They only
will continue Christ's work for man who cherish Christ's thoughts about
man. Sever philanthropy from the great Christian ideas which have
created and sustained it, and it will very speedily come to an end of
its resources. All experience shows that philanthropy cut off from
Christ has not capital enough on which to do its business. And the
reason is not far to seek. They who strive to save their fellows, they
who go down into the depths that they may lift men up, see so much of
the darkened under-side of human life, they are brought so close up to
the ugly facts of human baseness, human trickery, human ingratitude,
that, unless there be behind them the staying, steadying power of the
faith and love of Christ, they cannot long endure the strain; they grow
weary in well-doing, perchance even they grow bitter and contemptuous,
and in a little while the tasks they have taken up fall unfinished from
their hands. "Society" takes to "slumming" for a season--just as for
another season it may take to ping-pong--but the fit does not last; and
only they keep on through the long, grey days, when neither sun nor
stars are seen, who have learnt to look on men with the eyes, and to
feel toward them with the heart, of Jesus the Man of Nazareth.
(2) "Whoso shall cause one of these little ones that believe on Me to
stumble, it is profitable for him that a great mill-stone should be
hanged about his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depth of the
sea." Once more is revealed Christ's thought of the worth of the soul.
How the holy passion against him who would hurt "one of these little
ones" glows and scorches in His words! Is this a word for any of us? Is
there one among us who is tempting a brother man to dishonesty, to
drink, to lust; who is pushing some thoughtless girl down the steep and
slippery slope which ends--we know where? Then let him stop and listen,
not to me, but to Christ. Never, I think, did He speak with such solemn,
heart-shaking emphasis, and He says that it were better a man should
die, that he should die this night, die the most miserable and shameful
death, than that he should bring the blood of another's soul upon his
head. It must needs be that occasions of stumbling come, but woe, woe to
that man by whom they come, when he and the slain soul's Saviour shall
stand face to face! Oh, if there be one among us who is playing the
tempter, and doing the devil's work, let him get to his knees, and cry
with the conscience-smitten Psalmist, "Deliver me from blood-guiltiness,
O God, Thou God of my salvation"; and peradventure even yet He may hear
and have mercy.
(3) Let fathers and mothers ponder what this teaching of Jesus
concerning man means for them in relation to their children. There came
into your home a while ago a little child, a gift from God, just such a
babe as Jesus Himself was in His mother's arms in Bethlehem. The child
is yours, bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh, and it bears your
likeness and image; but it is also God's child, and it bears His image.
What difference is the coming of the little stranger making in you? I do
not ask what difference is it making _to_ you, for the answer would be
ready in a moment, "Much, every way"; but, what difference is it making
_in_ you? Does it never occur to you that you ought to be a different
man--a better man--that you ought to be a different woman--a better
woman--for the sake of the little one lying in the cradle? Do you know
that of all the things God ever made and owns, in this or all His
worlds, there is nothing more dear to Him than the soul of the little
child He has committed to your hands? What hands those should be that
bear a gift like that! Perhaps we never thought of it in that way
before. But it is true, whether we think of it or not. Is it not time to
begin to think of it? This night, as we stand over our sleeping child,
let us promise to God, for the child's sake, that we will be His.
(4) Last of all, we must learn to set Christ's value upon ourselves.
This is the tragedy of life, that we hold ourselves so cheap. We are
sprung of heaven's first blood, have titles manifold, and yet, when the
crown is offered us, we choose rather, like the man with the muck-rake,
in Bunyan's great allegory, to grub among the dust and sticks and straws
of the floor. In the times of the French Revolution, French soldiers, it
is said, stabled their horses in some of the magnificent cathedrals of
France; but some of us are guilty of a far worse sacrilege in that holy
of holies which we call the soul. "Ye were redeemed, not with
corruptible things, with silver or gold," but with blood, precious
blood, even the blood of Christ. And the soul which cost that, we are
ready to sell any day in the open market for a little more pleasure or a
little more pelf. The birthright is bartered for the sorriest mess of
pottage, and the jewel which the King covets to wear in His crown our
own feet trample in the mire of the streets. The pity of it, the pity of
it!
In one of Dora Greenwell's simple and beautiful _Songs of Salvation_, a
pitman tells to his wife the story of his conversion. He had got a word
like a fire in his heart that would not let him be, "Jesus, the Son of
God, who loved, and who gave Himself for me."
"It was for me that Jesus died! for me, and a world of men,
Just as sinful, and just as slow to give back His love again;
And He didn't wait till I came to Him, but He loved me at my worst;
He needn't ever have died for me if I could have loved Him first."
And then he continues:--
"And could'st Thou love such a man as me, my Saviour! Then I'll take
More heed to this wand'ring soul of mine, if it's only for Thy sake."
Yes, we are all of worth to God, but we must needs go to the Cross to
learn how great is our worth; and, as we bow in its sacred shadow, may
we learn to say: "For Thy sake, O Christ, for Thy sake, I'll take more
heed to this wandering soul of mine."[34]
* * * * *
CONCERNING SIN
"O man, strange composite of heaven and earth!
Majesty dwarfed to baseness! fragrant flower
Running to poisonous seed! and seeming worth
Choking corruption! weakness mastering power!
Who never art so near to crime and shame,
As when thou hast achieved some deed of name."
NEWMAN.
* * * * *
VIII
CONCERNING SIN
"_When ye pray, say.... Forgive us our sins._"--LUKE xi. 2, 4.
A recent writer has pointed out that sin, like death, is not seriously
realized except as a personal fact. We really know it only when we know
it about ourselves. The word "sin" has no serious meaning to a man,
except when it means that he himself is a sinful man. And hence it comes
to pass that we can still turn to the penitential Psalms, to the seventh
chapter of Romans, to the _Confessions_ of St. Augustine, or to the
_Grace Abounding_ of John Bunyan, and make their words the language of
our own broken and contrite hearts. For when Bunyan and Augustine and
Paul and the psalmists spoke of sin, they spoke not the thoughts of
others, but their knowledge of themselves; they looked into their own
hearts and wrote. That is why their words "find" us to-day.
Nevertheless, paradox though it may seem, our greatest Teacher
concerning sin, Himself "knew no sin." Born without sin, living and
dying without sin, Christ yet "knew what was in man," knew the sin that
was in man, and from His own sinless height once for all revealed and
judged and condemned it. Let us seek, then, to learn the mind of Christ
on this great matter.
And once more, as I have had occasion to point out in a previous
chapter, we must not look for anything formal, defined, systematic in
Christ's teaching. We cannot open the Gospels, as we might some modern
theological treatise, and read out from them a scientific exposition of
sin--its origin, its nature, its treatment. The New Testament is not
like a museum, where the flowers are dried and pressed, and the fossils
lie carefully arranged within glass cases, and everything is duly
classified and labelled. Rather it is like nature itself, where the
flowers grow wild at our feet, and the rocks lie as the Creator's hand
left them, and where each man must do the classifying and labelling for
himself. Museums have their uses, and there will always be those who
prefer them--they save so much trouble. But since Christ's aim was not
to save us trouble, but to teach us to see things with our own eyes, to
see them as He saw them, and to think of them as He thinks, it is no
wonder that He has chosen rather to put us down in the midst of a world
of living truths than in a museum of assorted and dead facts.
I
What, then, is the teaching of Jesus concerning sin? His tone is at once
severe and hopeful. Sometimes His words are words that shake our hearts
with fear; sometimes they surprise us with their overflowing tenderness
and pity. But however He may deal with the sinner, we are always made to
feel that to Jesus sin is a serious thing, a problem not to be slurred
over and made light of, but to be faced, and met, and grappled with.
Christ's sense of the gravity of sin comes out in many ways.
(1) It is involved in His doctrine of man. He who made so much of man
could not make light of man's sin. It is because man is so great that
his sin is so grave. No one can understand the New Testament doctrine of
sin who does not read it in the light of the New Testament doctrine of
man. When we think of man as Christ thought of him, when we see in him
the possibilities which Christ saw, the Scripture language concerning
sin becomes intelligible enough; until then it may easily seem
exaggerated and unreal. It is the height for which man was made and
meant which measures the fall which is involved in his sin.
(2) Call to mind the language in which Christ set forth the effects of
sin. He spoke of men as blind, as sick, as dead; He said they were as
sheep gone astray, as sons that are lost, as men in debt which they can
never pay, in bondage from which they can never free themselves. The
very accumulation of metaphors bears witness to Christ's sense of the
havoc wrought by sin. Nor are they metaphors merely; they are His
reading of the facts of life as it lay before Him. Let me refer briefly
to two of them, (_a_) Christ spoke of men as in bondage through their
sin. "If," He said once, "ye abide in My word ... ye shall know the
truth, and the truth shall make you free." And straightway jealous
Jewish ears caught at that word "free." "Free?" they cried, "Free? we be
Abraham's seed, and have never yet been in bondage to any man: how
sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free?" Yet even as they lift their hands
in protest Christ hears the clink of their fetters: "Verily, verily, I
say unto you, every one that committeth sin is the bond-servant--the
slave--of sin." "To whom ye present yourselves as servants unto
obedience, his servants--his slaves--ye are whom ye obey; whether of sin
unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness." Apostle and Lord mean
the same thing, true of us as it was true of the Jews: "Every one that
committeth sin is the slave of sin." (_b_) Further, Christ says, men are
in debt through their sin. In one parable He tells us of a certain
lender who had two debtors; the one owed five hundred pence, and the
other fifty; but neither had wherewith to pay. In another parable we
hear of a servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents--a gigantic
sum, vague in its vastness, "millions" as we might say--and he likewise
had not wherewith to pay. Further, in the application of each parable,
it is God to whom this unpayable debt is due. Now, it is just at this
point that our sense of sin to-day is weakest. The scientist, the
dramatist, the novelist are all proclaiming our responsibility toward
them that come after us; with pitiless insistence they are telling us
that the evil that men do lives after them, that it is not done with
when it is done. Yet, with all this, there may be no thought of God. It
is the consciousness not merely of responsibility, but of responsibility
God-ward, which needs to be strengthened. When we sin we may wrong
others much, we may wrong ourselves more, but we wrong God most of all;
and we shall never recover Christ's thought of sin until, like the
psalmist and the prodigal, we have learned to cry to Him, "Against Thee
have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."
(3) But sin, in Christ's view of it, is not merely something a man does,
it is what he is. Go through Paul's long and dismal catalogue of "the
works of the flesh": "Fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions,
divisions, heresies, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like."
Yet even this is not the whole of the matter. Sin is more than the
sum-total of man's sins. The fruits are corrupt because the tree which
yields them is corrupt; the stream is tainted because the fountain
whence it flows is impure; man commits sin because he is sinful. It was
just here that Christ broke, and broke decisively, with the traditional
religion of His time. To the average Jew of that day righteousness and
sin meant nothing more than the observance or the non-observance of
certain religious traditions. "For the Pharisees, and all the Jews,
except they wash their hands diligently, eat not, holding the tradition
of the elders: and when they come from the market-place, except they
wash themselves, they eat not; and many other things there be which they
have received to hold, washings of cups, and pots, and brazen vessels."
"Nay," said Jesus, "you are beginning at the wrong end, you are
concerned about the wrong things, for from within, out of the heart of
men, evil thoughts proceed, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries,
covetings, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing,
pride, foolishness: all these evil things proceed from within." Deep in
the heart of man evil has its seat, and until that is touched nothing is
done.
(4) And, lastly, Christ says all men are sinful. Of course, He did not
say, nor did He imply that all are equally sinful. On the contrary, He
said plainly that whereas the debt of some is as fifty pence, the debt
of others is as five hundred pence. Neither did Christ teach that man is
wholly sinful, in the sense that there is in man nothing that is good,
or that every man is by nature as bad as he can be. Nor, let it be said
in passing, is this what theology means when it speaks, as it still
sometimes does, about the "total depravity" of human nature. What is
meant is, as Dr. Denney says, that the depravity which sin has produced
in human nature extends to the whole of it.[35] If I poison my finger,
it is not only the finger that is poisoned; the poison is in the blood,
and, unless it be got rid of, not my finger merely, but my life is in
peril. And in like manner the sin which taints my nature taints my whole
nature, perverting the conscience, enfeebling the will, and darkening
the understanding. But with whatever qualifications Christ's indictment
is against the whole human race. He never discusses the origin of sin,
but He always assumes its presence. No matter how His hearers might
vary, this factor remained constant. "If ye, being evil" that mournful
presupposition could be made everywhere. He spoke of men as "lost," and
said that He had come to seek and save them. He summoned men, without
distinction, to repentance. He spoke of His blood as "shed for many unto
remission of sins." The gospel which, in His name, was to be preached
unto all the nations was concerning "repentance and remission of sins."
Even His own disciples He taught, as they prayed, to say, "Forgive us
our sins." And though it is true He said once that He had not come to
call the righteous but sinners to repentance, He did not thereby mean to
suggest that there really are some righteous persons who have no need of
repentance; rather was He seeking by the keenness of His Divine irony to
pierce the hard self-satisfaction of men whose need was greater just
because it was unfelt.
"All have sinned;" but once more let us remind ourselves, sin is not
seriously realized except as a personal fact. The truth must come home
as a truth about ourselves. The accusing finger singles men out and
fastens the charge on each several conscience: "Thou art the man!" And
as the accusation is individual, so, likewise, must the acknowledgement
be. It is not enough that in church we cry in company, "Lord have mercy
upon us, miserable offenders"; each must learn to pray for himself, "God
be merciful to me a sinner." Then comes the word of pardon, personal and
individual as the condemnation, "The Lord also hath put away thy sin."
II
In what has been said thus far I have dwelt, for the most part, on the
sterner and darker aspects of Christ's teaching about sin. And, as every
student of contemporary literature knows, there are voices all around us
to-day ready to take up and emphasize every word of His concerning the
mischief wrought by moral evil. Take, _e.g._, a passage like this from
Thomas Hardy's powerful but sombre story, _Tess_:--
"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to me like
the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and
sound--a few blighted."
"Which do we live on--a splendid one, or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one."
Or, turn to the works of George Eliot. No prophet of righteousness ever
bound sin and its consequences more firmly together, or proclaimed with
more solemn emphasis the certainty of the evil-doer's doom. "Our deeds
are like children that are born to us," she says; "nay, children may be
strangled, but deeds never"--this is the note one hears through all her
books. If we have done wrong, it is in vain we cry for mercy. We are
taken by the throat and delivered over to the tormentors until we have
paid the uttermost farthing.
"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
And this is all that writers such as these have to say to us.
Retribution they know, but not Redemption. "There are no arresting
angels in the path"--only the Angel of Justice with the drawn sword.
But this is not the teaching of Jesus concerning sin. He is not blind,
and if we give ear to Him He will not suffer us to be blind, either to
its character or its consequences; but He says that sin can be forgiven,
and its iron bondage broken. Jesus believed in the recoverability of man
at his worst. It is a fact significant of much that the first mention of
sin in the New Testament is in a prophecy of its destruction: "Thou
shalt call His name Jesus; for it is He that shall save His people from
their sins." And throughout the first three Gospels sin is named almost
exclusively in connection with its forgiveness.[36] What Christ hath
joined together let no man put asunder. Herein is the very gospel of
God, that Christ came not to condemn the world, but that the world,
through Him, might be saved. "Do you know what Christ would say to you,
my girl?" said a missionary to a poor girl dying. "He would say, 'Thy
sins are forgiven thee.'" "Would He, though, would He?" she cried,
starting up; "take me to Him, take me to Him." Yes, thank God, we know
what to do with our sin; we know what we must do to be saved.
Let us go back again for a moment over the ground we have already
travelled. We are in debt, with nothing to pay; but Christ has taken the
long account, and has crossed it through and through. We are in bondage,
with no power to set ourselves free; but Christ has come to rend the
iron chain and proclaim deliverance to the captives. We are wrong, wrong
within, wrong at the core; but again He is equal to our need, for
concerning Him it is written that He shall take away not only the "sins"
but the "sin" of the world. Is anything too hard for Him? Just as a
lover of pictures will sometimes discover a portrait, the work of an old
master, marred and disfigured by the dirt and neglect of years, and will
patiently cleanse and retouch it, till the lips seem to speak again, and
the old light shines in the eyes, and all its hidden glory is revealed
once more, so does Christ bring out the Divine image, hidden but never
lost, in the sinful souls of men. And all this He can do for all men;
for Christ knows no hopeless ones.
One of the saddest sights in a great city is its hospital for
incurables. Who can think but with a pang of pity and of pain of
these--old men and little children joined in one sad fellowship--for
whom the physician's skill has done its best and failed, for whom now
nothing remains save to suffer and to die? But in the world's great
hospital of ailing souls, where every day the Good Physician walks,
there is no incurable ward. He lays His hands on the sick, and they are
healed; He touches the eyes of the blind, and they see; unto the leper
as white as snow his flesh comes again as the flesh of a little child;
even souls that are dead through their trespasses and sins He restores
to life. But never, never does He turn away from any, saying, "Thou art
too far gone; there is nothing that I can do for thee." "I spake to Thy
disciples," cried the father of the child which had a dumb spirit, "I
spake to Thy disciples that they should cast it out; and they were not
able." "Bring him unto Me," said Jesus. Then He rebuked the unclean
spirit, saying unto him, "Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I command thee,
come out of him and enter no more into him." Verily, with authority He
commandeth even the unclean spirits and they obey Him.
Therefore let us despair of no man; therefore let no man despair of
himself. If we will, we can; we can, because Christ will. "I was
before," says St. Paul, "a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious;
howbeit I obtained mercy." "I am a wretched captive of sin," cries
Samuel Rutherford, "yet my Lord can hew heaven out of worse timber."
There is no unpardonable sin--none, at least, save the sin of refusing
the pardon which avails for all sin. "'Mine iniquity is greater than can
be forgiven.'[37] No, Cain, thou errest; God's mercy is far greater,
couldst thou ask mercy. Men cannot be more sinful than God is merciful
if, with penitent hearts, they will call upon Him."
We have all read of the passing of William MacLure in Ian Maclaren's
touching idyll. "A'm gettin' drowsy," said the doctor to Drumsheugh,
"read a bit tae me." Then Drumsheugh put on his spectacles, and searched
for some comfortable Scripture. Presently he began to read: "In My
Father's house are many mansions;" but MacLure stopped him. "It's a
bonnie word," he said, "but it's no' for the like o' me. It's ower guid;
a' daurna tak' it." Then he bid Drumsheugh shut the book and let it open
of itself, and he would find the place where he had been reading every
night for the last month. Drumsheugh did as he was bidden, and the book
opened at the parable wherein the Master tells what God thinks of a
Pharisee and a penitent sinner. And when he came to the words, "And the
publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes to
heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a
sinner," once more the dying man stopped him: "That micht hae been
written for me, Paitrick, or ony ither auld sinner that hes feenished
his life, an' hes naething tae say for himsel."
Nothing to say for ourselves--that is what it comes to, when we know the
truth about ourselves. And when at last our mouth is stopped, when our
last poor plea is silenced, when with penitent and obedient hearts we
seek the mercy to which from the first we have been utterly shut up,
then indeed we
"have found the ground wherein
Sure our soul's anchor may remain."
"Not by works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves, but
according to His mercy He saved us."
* * * * *
CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS
"I spend my whole life in going about and persuading you all
to give your first and chiefest care to the perfection of your
souls, and not till you have done that to think of your
bodies, or your wealth; and telling you that virtue does not
come from wealth, but that wealth, and every other good thing
which men have, whether in public, or in private, comes from
virtue."--SOCRATES.
* * * * *
IX
CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS
"_Seek ye first_ ... _His righteousness._"--MATT. vi. 33.
Righteousness, as it was understood and taught by Christ, includes the
two things which we often distinguish as religion and morality. It is
right-doing, not only as between man and man, but as between man and
God. The Lawgiver of the New Testament, like the lawgiver of the Old,
has given to us two tables of stone. On the one He has written, "Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind "; and on the other, "Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself." In these two commandments the whole law is summed
up, the whole duty of man is made known. It is well to emphasize this
two-fold aspect of the truth at a time when we are often tempted to
define religion wholly in the terms of morality, and, while insisting on
the duties which we owe to each other, to forget those which we owe to
God. If there be a God righteousness must surely have a meaning in
relation to Him; it cannot be simply another name for philanthropy.
Christ at least will not call that man just and good who does right to
all except his Maker. In the Christian doctrine of the good life room
must be found for God. At the present moment, however, it is the subject
in its man-ward aspect that I wish specially to keep in view, partly
because some limitation is obviously necessary, and partly also because
it is this of which Christ Himself had most to say.
I
What, then, is Christ's idea of righteousness? In other words, what did
He teach concerning the good life? Now here also, as in His teaching
about God, Christ did not need to begin _de novo_. Those to whom He
spoke had already their own ideals of duty and holiness. True, these
were sadly in need of revision and correction. Nevertheless, such as
they were, they were there, and Christ could use them as His
starting-point. Consequently, therefore, we find His ideas of
righteousness defined largely by contrast with existing ideas. "It was
said to them of old time ... but I say unto _you_." This is the note
heard all through the Sermon on the Mount. The contrast may be stated
in two ways.
(1) In the first place, Christ said that the righteousness of His
disciples must exceed that of publicans and heathen: "If ye love them
that love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same?
And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not
even the Gentiles the same?" There are virtues exhibited in the lives of
even wholly irreligious men. There are rudimentary moral principles
which they that know not God nevertheless acknowledge and obey. It was
so in Christ's time; it is so still. The popular American ballad, "Jim
Bludso," and Ian Maclaren's touching story of the Drumtochty postman,
are familiar illustrations of self-sacrificing virtues revealed by men
of coarse and vicious lives. Nor ought we to deny the reality of such
virtues; still less ought we to follow the bad example of St. Augustine
and call them "splendid vices." Such was not Christ's way. He assumed
the existence and reality of this "natural goodness," and with familiar
illustrations of it on His tongue turned upon His disciples with the
question, "What do ye more?"
"What do ye more?" Yet in some respects, it is to be feared, the
morality of the Church sometimes falls behind that of the world. One of
the most painful passages in St. Paul's epistles is that in which he
tells the Corinthian Christians that one of their own number had been
guilty of immorality such as would have shocked even the conscience of
an unbelieving Gentile. And it was but the other day that I came across
this sentence from the pen of an observant and friendly critic of
contemporary religious life: "I am afraid," he said, "it must be
admitted that the idea of honour, though in itself an essential part of
Christian ethics, is much stronger outside the Churches than within
them." How far facts justify the criticism I will not stay to inquire;
but the very fact that a charge like this can be made should prove a
sharp reminder to us of the stringency of the demands which Jesus Christ
makes upon us. There is no kind of sound moral fruit which is to be
found anywhere in the wide fields of the world which He does not look
for in richer and riper abundance within the garden of His Church.
A great Christian preacher has given an admirable illustration of one
way in which we may examine ourselves in this matter. He has grouped
together a number of precepts from the writings of some of the great
heathen moralists, such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and then has
urged the question how far we who profess to be the disciples of a
loftier faith are true even to these ancient heathen ideals.[38]
Perhaps, however, this is not a method of self-examination which is open
to us all. But this, at least, we can do: we can test ourselves by that
moral law, which God gave to the Jews by Moses, and which Christ
reinterpreted in the Sermon on the Mount. "Thou shalt not kill, thou
shalt not commit adultery"--all these commandments in their literal
meaning we must observe; yet this is not enough; "do not even the
publicans the same?" and Christ's demand is, "What do ye more than
others?" The murderous thought, Christ says, that is murder; the lustful
look, that is adultery. "Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love
thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your
enemies, and pray for them that persecute you." As we listen to words
like these must not we also confess, "Either these sayings are not
Christ's, or we are not Christians"?
(2) Christ's idea of righteousness is further defined by contrast with
that of the Pharisees: "Except your righteousness shall exceed the
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter
into the kingdom of heaven." What was the Pharisees' idea of religion?
Let us take the words which Christ Himself put into the lips of a
representative of his class: "God, I thank Thee, that I am not as the
rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I get." This is a
full-length portrait of the finished Pharisee. Religion to him was a
round of prescribed ritual, a barren externalism, a subjection to the
dominion of the letter, which never touched the heart, nor bowed the
spirit down in penitence and humility before God. The Pharisee's whole
concern was with externals; but Christ declared that he who is only
right outwardly is not right at all. There is no such thing, He said, as
goodness which is not from within. The alms-deeds, the prayer, the
fasting of the Pharisee were all done before men, to be seen of them;
and so long as that which men saw was right and seemly, he was
satisfied. But Christ went back behind the outward act to the heart. A
man is really, He said, what he is there. You may hang grapes on a
thorn-bush, that will not make it a vine; you may put a sheep's fleece
on a wolf's back, but that will not change its wolfish heart. And men
are what they are within. Just as to get good fruit you must first of
all make the tree good, so to secure good deeds you must first make good
men. This was the truth which Pharisaism ignored; with what results all
the world knows. In the long history of man, it remains, perhaps, the
supreme illustration of the fatal facility with which religion and
morality are divorced when once the emphasis is laid upon the outward
and ceremonial instead of the inward and spiritual. All experience helps
us to understand how the system works. There is no deliberate intention
of setting ritual above righteousness, but it is so much easier to count
one's beads than to curb one's temper, so much easier to fast in Lent
than to be unswervingly just, that if once the easier thing gets
attached to it an exaggerated importance, fidelity in it is allowed to
atone for laxity in greater things, and the last result is Pharisaism,
where we see conscience concerned about the tithing of garden herbs, but
with no power over the life, and religion not merely tolerating but
actually ministering to moral evil. It was in the name of religion that
the Pharisees suffered a man to violate even the sanctities of the Fifth
Commandment, and to do dishonour to his father and mother. The righteous
man in their eyes was not he who loved mercy, and did justly, and walked
humbly with his God, but he who observed the traditions of the elders.
So that, as Professor Bruce says,[39] it was possible for a man to
comply with all the requirements of the Rabbis and yet remain in heart
and life an utter miscreant. "Outwardly," said Christ, "ye appear
righteous unto men, but inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity."
Is it any wonder that He should call down fire from heaven to consume a
system which had yielded such bitter, poisonous fruits as these?
But let us remember, as Mozley well says,[40] there are no extinct
species in the world of evil. The value for us of Christ's condemnation
lies in this, that it is a permanent tendency of human nature which He
is condemning. Pharisaism is not dead. Have I not seen the Pharisee
dressed in good broad-cloth and going to church with his Bible under his
arm? And have I not seen him sitting in church and reading the
twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, and thinking to himself what
shockingly wicked people these men must have been of whom Christ spoke
such terrible words, and never once supposing that there is anything in
the chapter that concerns him? No, Pharisaism is not dead; and when we
read of those who devoured widows' houses and for a pretence made long
prayers, using their religion as a cloak for their villainy, let us
remember that Christ says to His disciples to-day, even as He said to
them centuries ago, "Except your righteousness shall exceed the
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter
into the kingdom of heaven."
II
Thus far we have considered Christ's idea of righteousness only in
contrast with other ideas. When we seek to define it in itself we fall
back naturally on the words of the two great commandments which have
already been quoted: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind;" and "Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself." Righteousness, Christ says, is love,
love to God and love to man.
But to them of old time it was said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour."
Where, then, is the difference between the old commandment and the new?
It lies in the new definition of "neighbour." The old law which said,
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour," said also, "and hate thine enemy";
which meant that some are and some are not our neighbours, and that
toward those who are not love has no obligations. But Christ broke down
for ever the middle wall of partition, and declared the old distinction
null and void. In His parable of the Good Samaritan He taught that every
man is our neighbour who has need of us, and to whom it is possible for
us to prove ourselves a friend. As we have opportunity we are to do good
unto all men. The same lesson with, if possible, still greater emphasis,
Christ taught in the Upper Room: "A new commandment I give unto you,
that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love
one another." A love that goes all the way with human need, that gives
not itself by measure, that is not chilled by indifference, nor thwarted
by ingratitude, that fights against evil until it overcomes it--such was
the love He gave, and such is the love He asks. And in that command all
other commands are comprehended. Christ might have made His own the
daring word of St. Augustine, "Love, and do what you like."
When first men heard this law of the heavenly righteousness how wondrous
simple it must have seemed in contrast with the elaborate scribe-made
law which their Rabbis laid upon them. Pharisaism had reduced religion
to a branch of mechanics, a vast network of rules which closed in the
life of man on every side, a burden grievous and heavy to be borne,
which crushed the soul under its weary load. This was the yoke of which
Peter said that neither they nor their fathers were able to bear it. Was
it any marvel that from such a system men should turn to Him who cried,
"Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for My yoke is easy, and My
burden is light"? But if Christ's law of love is simpler it is also far
more exacting than the old law which it superseded. It has meshes far
finer than any that Pharisaic ingenuity could weave. Rabbinical law can
secure the tithing of mint and anise and cumin, the washing of cups and
pots, and many such like things; it can regulate the life of ritual and
outward observance; and after that it has no more that it can do. But
Christ's law of love is a mentor that searches out the deep things of
man. The inside of the cup and platter, the things that are within, the
hidden man of the heart--it is on these its eyes are fixed. It gives
heed both to the words of the mouth and the meditations of the heart.
And, sometimes, when the lips are speaking fair, suddenly it will fling
open the heart's door and show us where, in some secret chamber, Greed
and Pride and Envy and Hate sit side by side in unblest fellowship.
Verily this law of love is living and active, sharper than any two-edged
sword, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints
and marrow, quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.
There is no room to do more than mention the fact which crowns the
revelation of this new law of righteousness. Christ's words about
goodness do not come to us alone; they come united with a life which is
their best exposition. Christ is all His followers are to be; in Him the
righteousness of the kingdom is incarnate. From henceforth the righteous
man is the Christ-like man. The standard of human life is no longer a
code but a character; for the gospel does not put us into subjection to
fresh laws; it calls us to "the study of a living Person, and the
following of a living Mind."[41] And when to Jesus we bring the old
question, "Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal
life?" He does not now repeat the commandments, but He says, "If thou
wouldest be perfect, follow Me, learn of Me, do as I have done to you,
love as I have loved you."
III
Such, then, is the good life which Christ reveals, and to which He calls
us. To say that to Him we owe our highest ideal of righteousness, is
only to affirm what no one now seriously denies. John Stuart Mill has,
it is true, alleged certain defects against Christianity as an ethical
system, yet Mill himself has frankly admitted that "it would not be easy
now, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of
virtue from the abstract to the concrete, than to endeavour so to live
that Christ would approve our life." If Christ be not our one Master in
the moral world, it will at least be soon enough to discuss a rival's
claims when he appears; as yet there is no sign of him. But the point I
am most anxious to emphasize just now is not simply that Jesus has put
before us an ideal, the highest of its kind in the world, but that there
is nothing of any kind to be desired before it. To be good as Christ was
good, here in very truth is the _summum bonum_ of life, the greatest
thing in the world, that which, before all other things, a man should
seek to make his own, There are times, perhaps, in the lives of all of
us when we are tempted to doubt it--times when the kingdoms of this
world, the kingdoms of wealth and power and knowledge lie stretched at
our feet, and the whispering fiend at our elbow bids us bow and enter
in. But once again, if we be true men, the moment comes,
"When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,"
when the sacred, saving faith in righteousness returns, and we know that
Christ was right, that for ever and for ever it is true that better than
to be rich, or to be clever, or to be famous, is it to be true, to be
pure, to be good.
Yes, goodness is the principal thing; therefore get goodness, and with
all thy getting--at the price of all that thou hast gotten (such is the
true meaning of the words)[42]--get righteousness. Is this what we are
doing? Goodness is the first thing; are we putting it first? Day by day
are we saying to it, "Sit thou on my right hand," while we put all other
things under our feet? "Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if
I remember thee not; if I prefer not thee above my chief joy"--is this
the kind of honour that we are paying to it? "We make it our ambition,"
said St Paul, "to be well pleasing unto Him."[43] Where this is the
master ambition, all other lawful ambitions may be safely cherished and
given their place. But if some lesser power rule, whose right it is not
to reign over us, the end is chaos and night. "Seek ye first His
righteousness;" we subvert Christ's order at our peril. And this
righteousness must be sought. As men seek wealth, as men seek knowledge,
as men seek power, so must we seek goodness. "Wherefore giving all
diligence"--in no other way can the pearl of great price be secured; it
does not lie by the roadside for any lounger to pick up. "With toil of
heart and knees and hands," so only can the "path upward" and the prize
be won. "Blessed," said Jesus, "are they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness." Blessed, He meant, are they who long more than anything
else to be good; for all such longing shall be abundantly satisfied.
Exalt righteousness, and she shall promote thee; she shall bring thee to
honour when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to thine head a
chaplet of grace; a crown of beauty shall she deliver to thee.
It is fitting that a chapter on righteousness should follow one on sin,
for this may find some to whom the other made no appeal. At a meeting of
Christian workers held some years ago in Glasgow, the chairman invited
the late Professor Henry Drummond, who was present, though his name was
not on the programme, to say a few words. He accepted the invitation,
but said he would do no more than state a fact and ask a question. The
fact was this, that in recent revival movements, in which he had had
large experience, there were few indications of that deep and
overwhelming conviction of sin which had been so characteristic a
feature of similar revivals in past days. And this was the question, Did
it mean that the Holy Spirit was in any way modifying the method of His
operation? What answer the wise men of the meeting gave to the
Professor's question I do not know. But fact and question alike deserve
to be carefully pondered. The Spirit, when He is come, Christ said,
"will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of
judgment." "Will convict the world of righteousness"--have we not
sometimes forgotten this? Have we not put the full stop at "sin," as
though the Holy Spirit's convicting work ended there? Nevertheless,
there are many to-day whose religious life begins, not so much in a
sense of their own sin and guilt and need, as rather in the
consciousness of the glory and honour of Christ. It is what they find
within themselves which brings some men to Christ; it is what they find
in Him which brings others. Some are driven by the strong hands of stern
necessity; some are wooed by the sweet constraint of the sinless Son of
God. Some are crushed and broken and humbled to the dust, and their
first cry is "God be merciful to me a sinner"; some when they hear the
call of Christ leap up to greet Him with a new light in their eyes and
the glad confession on their lips, "Lord I will follow Thee
whithersoever Thou goest."
What, then, shall we say to these things? What but this, "There are
diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in
all." Travellers to the same country do not always journey by the same
route; and for some of the heavenly pilgrims the Slough of Despond lies
on the other side of the Wicket Gate. After all, it is of small moment
what brings a man forth from the City of Destruction; enough if he have
come out and if now his face is set toward the city which hath the
foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
* * * * *
CONCERNING PRAYER
"Who seeketh finds: what shall be his relief
Who hath no power to seek, no heart to pray,
No sense of God, but bears as best he may,
A lonely incommunicable grief?
What shall he do? One only thing he knows,
That his life flits a frail uneasy spark
In the great vast of universal dark,
And that the grave may not be all repose.
Be still, sad soul! lift thou no passionate cry,
But spread the desert of thy being bare
To the full searching of the All-seeing eye:
Wait--and through dark misgiving, blank despair,
God will come down in pity, and fill the dry
Dead plain with light, and life, and vernal air."
J.C. SHAIRP.
* * * * *
X
CONCERNING PRAYER
"_What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for
a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish,
will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your
Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask
Him_?"--MATT. vii. 9-11.
There has been in our day much painful disputation concerning prayer and
the laws of nature. Whole volumes have been written to prove that it is
possible, or that it is impossible, for God to answer prayer. I am not
going to thresh out again this dry straw just now. Discussions of this
kind have, undoubtedly, their place; indeed, whether we will or no, they
are often forced upon us by the conditions of the hour; but they had no
place in the teaching of Jesus, and I do not propose to say anything
about them now. I wish rather, imitating as far as may be the gracious
simplicity and directness of the argument of Jesus which we have just
read, to gather up some of the practical suggestions touching this great
matter which are strewn throughout the Gospels alike in the precepts and
practice of our Lord.
I
First of all, then, let us get fixed in our minds the saying of Jesus
that "men ought always to pray and not to faint." The very form of the
saying suggests that Christ knew how easy it is for us to faint and grow
weary in our prayers. Men cease from prayer on many grounds. Some there
are in whom the questioning, doubting spirit has grown so strong that
for a time it has silenced even the cry of the heart for God. Some there
are who are so busy, they tell us, that they have no time for prayer;
and after all, they ask, Is not honest work the highest kind of prayer?
And some there are who have ceased to pray, because they have been
disappointed, because nothing seemed to come of their prayers. They
asked but they did not receive, they sought but they did not find, they
knocked but no door was opened to them; there was neither voice, nor any
to answer, nor any that regarded; and now they ask, they seek, they
knock no more. And some of us there are who do not pray because, as one
of the psalmists says, our soul "cleaveth unto the dust." The things of
God, the things of the soul, the things of eternity--what Paul calls
"the things that are above"--are of no concern to us; we have sold
ourselves to work, to think, to live, for the things of the earth and
the dust.
Nevertheless, be the cause of our prayerlessness what it may, Christ's
word remains true. Man made in the image of God ought always to pray and
not to faint. And even more than by His words does Christ by His example
prompt us to prayer. Turn, _e.g._, to the third Gospel. All the
Evangelists show us Jesus at prayer; but it is to Luke that we owe
almost all our pictures of the kneeling Christ. Let us glance at them as
they pass in quick succession before our eyes:
"Jesus having been baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened" (iii.
21).
"He withdrew Himself in the deserts, and prayed" (v. 16).
"It came to pass in these days, that He went out into the mountain to
pray; and He continued all night in prayer to God". (vi. 12).
"It came to pass, as He was praying alone, the disciples were with Him"
(ix. 18).
"It came to pass about eight days after these sayings, He took with Him
Peter and John and James and went up into the mountain to pray. And as
He was praying the fashion of His countenance was altered, and His
raiment became white and dazzling" (ix. 28, 29).
"It came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He
ceased, one of the disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even
as John also taught his disciples" (xi. 1).
"Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you
as wheat; but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not"
(xxii. 32).
"And He kneeled down and prayed, saying, Father, if Thou be willing,
remove this cup from Me: nevertheless not My will, but Thine be done....
And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat became as
it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground" (xxii. 41,
44).
"And Jesus said, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do"
(xxiii. 34).
And if thus He, the Redeemer, prayed, how much greater need have we, the
redeemed, always to pray and not to faint?
"But we are so busy, we have no time." Then let us look at another
picture. This time it is Mark who is the painter. He has chosen as his
subject our Lord's first Sabbath in Capernaum. The day begins with
teaching: "He entered into the synagogue and taught." After teaching
comes healing: "There was in their synagogue a man with an unclean
spirit;" him, straightway, Jesus healed. Then, "straightway, when they
were come out of the synagogue, they came into the house of Simon and
Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a
fever, and straightway they tell Him of her; and He came and took her by
the hand, and raised her up." So the day wore on toward evening and
sunset, when "they brought unto Him all that were sick, and them that
were possessed with devils. And all the city was gathered together at
the door. And He healed many that were sick with divers diseases and
cast out many devils." So closed at last the long day's busy toil. "_And
in the morning, a great while before day, He rose up and went out and
departed into a desert place, and there prayed_;" as if just because He
was so much with men the more did He need to be with God. _Laborare est
orare_, we say, "work is prayer." And, undoubtedly, "work may be
prayer"; but we are deceiving ourselves and hurting our own souls, if we
think that work can take the place of prayer. And if there is one lesson
that these earthly years of the Son of Man--busy as they were prayerful,
prayerful as they were busy--can teach us, it is surely this, that just
because our activities are so abounding, the more need have we to make a
space around the soul wherein it may be able to think, and pray, and
aspire.
One of the best-known pictures of the last half century is Millet's
"Angelus." The scene is a potato-field, in the midst of which, and
occupying the foreground of the picture, are two figures, a young man
and a young woman. Against the distant sky-line is the steeple of a
church. It is the evening hour, and as the bell rings which calls the
villagers to worship, the workers in the field lay aside the implements
of their toil, and with folded hands and bowed heads, stand for a moment
in silent prayer. It is a picture of what every life should be, of what
every life must be, which has taken as its pattern the Perfect Life in
which work and prayer are blent like bells of sweet accord.
II
Another saying of Christ's concerning prayer, not less fundamental is
this: "When ye pray, say, Our Father, which art in heaven." How
essential to prayer is a right thought of God it can hardly be necessary
to point out. "When ye pray say----" what? All depends on how we fill
in the blank. Our thought of God determines the character of all our
intercourse with Him. If "God" is only the name which we give to the
vast, unknown Power which lies behind the visible phenomena of the
universe, if He is only a dim shadow projected by our own minds, or a
collection of attributes whose names we have learned from the Catechism,
our prayers will soon come to an end. When Jesus prayed He said always
"Father"; and the Father to whom He prayed, and whom He revealed, He it
is to whom our prayers should be offered.
This is a matter the practical importance of which it would be hard to
exaggerate. Think, _e.g._, of the questions concerning prayer which
would be answered straightway, had we but made our own Christ's thought
of God. We are all familiar with the little problems about prayer with
which some good people are wont to tease themselves and their friends
and their ministers: Is it right to pray for rain, for fine weather for
the recovery of health, for the success of some temporal enterprize, and
so forth? How shall we meet questions of this sort? Shall we draw a line
and say, all things on this side of the line we may pray about, all
things on that side of the line we may not pray about? This will not
help us. Rather we must keep Christ's great word before us: "When ye
pray, say, Father." There or nowhere is the answer to be found. Just as
every wise father seeks to train his child to make of him his confidant,
to have no secrets from him, to trust him utterly, and in everything, so
would God have us feel towards Him; as free, as frank, as unfettered,
should our fellowship with Him be. To put it under constraint, to fence
it about with rules, would be to rob it of all that gives it worth, And,
therefore, I cannot tell any man, and I do not want any man to tell me,
what we may pray for, or what we may not pray for. "When ye pray, say,
Father;" and for the rest let your own heart teach you. But if we are
left thus free shall we not ask many things which we have no right to
ask, which God cannot grant? Undoubtedly we shall, just as a boy of five
will ask many things that his father, because he loves him, must refuse.
Nevertheless, no wise father would wish to check the childish prattle.
There is nothing that he values more than just these frank,
uncalculating confidences, for he knows that it is by means of them that
the shaping hands of love can do their perfect work. And the remedy for
our mistakes in prayer is not a set of little man-made rules, telling us
what to pray for and what not to pray for, but rather a deeper insight
into, and a fuller understanding of, the glory and blessedness of the
Divine Fatherhood.
III
Passing now from these preliminary counsels concerning prayer, let us
note how great is the importance which, both by His precepts and His
example, Christ attaches to the duty of intercessory prayer. I have been
much struck of late in reading several books on this subject, to note
how one writer after another judges it needful to warn his readers
against the idea that prayer is no more than petition. What they say is,
of course, true; prayer is much more than petition. But, unless I
misread the signs of the times, this is not the warning which just now
we most need to hear. Rather do we need to be told that prayer is more
than communion, that petition, simple asking that we may obtain, is a
part, and a very large part of prayer. "Who rises from prayer a better
man," says George Meredith, "his prayer is answered." This is true, but
it is far from being the whole truth. The duty of intercession, of
prayer for others, is writ large on every page of the New Testament; but
intercession has simply no meaning at all unless we believe that God
will grant our requests as may be most expedient for us and for them for
whom we pray. Let me illustrate the wealth of Christ's teaching on this
matter by two or three examples.
(1) We have all read Tennyson's question--
"What are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friends?"
For themselves and those who call them friends--but Christ will not
suffer us to stop there. "Bless them that curse you," He said; "pray for
them that despitefully use you." So He spoke, and on the Cross He made
the great word luminous for ever by His own prayer for His murderers:
"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."
(2) Christ prayed for His disciples and for His Church: "I pray for them
... neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on
Me through their word." "I will pray the Father and He shall give you
----." Only once are the actual words recorded, but they cover, we are
sure, great stretches of Christ's intercourse with God. And when once in
their work for Him they had failed, He puts His finger on the secret of
their failure thus: "This kind can come out by nothing save by prayer."
Do we pray for our Church? We find fault with it; but do we pray for it?
We blame its office--bearers and criticize its ministers; but do we pray
for them? We go to the house of God on the Sabbath day; but no fire is
burning on the altar, the minister has no message for us, we come away
no whit better than we went. Whose is the blame? Let the man in the
pulpit take his share; but is it all his? Must not some of it be laid at
the door of his people? How many of them during the week had prayed for
him, that his eyes might be opened and his heart touched, that as he sat
and worked in his study he might get from God to give to them? Dr. Dale
used to say that if ever he preached a good sermon, a sermon that really
helped men, it was due to the prayers of his people as much as to
anything he had done himself. If in all our churches we would but
proclaim a truce to our bickerings and fault-findings, and try what
prayer can do!
(3) Christ prayed for the children: "Then were there brought unto Him
little children that He should lay His hands on them, and pray.... And
He took them in His arms, and blessed them, laying His hands upon them."
It is surely needless to dwell on this. What man is there who, if he
have a child, will not speak to God in his behalf? "And all the people
said unto Samuel, Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God that we
die not.... And Samuel said unto the people, God forbid that I should
sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you." God have mercy on him
who has little children who bear his name, but who never cries to heaven
in their behalf! "He blessed them," _i.e._ He invoked a blessing, God's
blessing, upon them. And we are sure the prayer was heard, and the
little ones were blessed. And will not God hear our prayers for our
children? When Monica, the saintly mother of Augustine, besought an
African bishop once and again to help her with her wilful, profligate
son, the good man answered her, "Woman, go in peace; it cannot be that
the child of such tears should be lost." "God's seed," wrote Samuel
Rutherford to Marion M'Naught about her daughter Grizel, "shall come to
God's harvest." It shall, for the promise holds, and what we have sown
we shall also reap.
(4) And, lastly, Christ prayed for individuals: "Simon, Simon, behold,
Satan asked to have you,--all of you," that is; the pronoun is plural--
"that he might sift you as wheat; but I made supplication for thee"--
"thee, Peter"; now the singular pronoun is used--"that thy faith fail
not." The words point to a definite crisis in the experience of Peter,
when the onset of the Tempter was met by the intercession of the
Saviour. To me Gethsemane itself is not more wonderful than this picture
of Christ on His knees before God, naming His loved disciple by name,
and praying that, in this supreme hour of his life, his faith should not
utterly break down. "Making mention of thee in my prayers"--does this
not bring us near to the secret of prevailing prayer? We are afraid to
be individual and particular; we lose ourselves in large generalities,
until our prayers die of very vagueness. There is surely a more
excellent way. "My God," Paul wrote to the Philippians, "shall
fulfil"--not merely "all your need," as the Authorized Version has it,
but--"every need of yours." There is a fine discrimination in the Divine
love which sifts and sorts men's needs, and applies itself to them one
by one, just as the need may be. And when in prayer we speak to God, let
it be not only of "all our need," flung in one great, careless heap
before Him, but of "every need of ours," each one named by its name, and
all spread out in order before Him.
IV
And as Christ teaches us to pray for others, so also does He teach us to
pray for ourselves. Two points only in this connection can be noted.
(1) Let us pray when we enter into our Gethsemane; for every life has
its Gethsemane. Some there are who have not yet entered it; they are
young, and their way thus far has teen among the roses and lilies of
life. But for them, too, the path leads to Gethsemane, and some day they
also will lie prostrate in an agony, under the darkening olive trees.
And some there are to whom life seems but one long Gethsemane. In that
dread agony God help us to pray! Nay, what else then can a man do but,
as Browning says, catch at God's skirts and pray? But that he can do.
Death may build its dividing walls great and high, such as our feet can
never scale; it cannot roof them over and shut us out from God. We
remember how it was with Enoch Arden, stranded on an isle, "the
loneliest in a lonely sea":--
"Had not his poor heart
Spoken with That, which being everywhere
Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone,
Surely the man had died of solitude."
Were it not for the doors opened in heaven what should man that is born
of a woman do? But when in our Gethsemane we offer up "prayers and
supplications, with strong crying and tears," it is after Christ's
manner that we must pray. I said just now that there are some to whom
life seems one long Gethsemane. Can it be because hitherto they have
only prayed, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away
from me"? Not until with Christ we bow our heads and say, "Nevertheless,
not as I will, but as Thou wilt," will the iron gates unfold and the
shadows of the Garden lie behind us.
(2) "Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation." And if there be
some to whom my last word had little or no meaning, here, at least,
Christ speaks to all. And this time I have nothing of my own to add by
way of comment; but I copy out this passage from Charles Kingsley's
_Yeast_, for every young man who reads these words to lay to heart: "I
am no saint," says Colonel Bracebridge, "and God only knows how much
less of one I may become; but mark my words--if you are ever tempted by
passion, and vanity, and fine ladies, to form liaisons, as the Jezebels
call them, snares, and nets and labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you
down through life, stumbling and grovelling, hating yourself and hating
the chain to which you cling--in that hour pray--pray as if the devil
had you by the throat--to Almighty God, to help you out of that cursed
slough! There is nothing else for it!--pray, I tell you!"
* * * * *
CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES
"She, who kept a tender Christian hope,
Haunting a holy text, and still to that
Returning, as the bird returns, at night,
'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,'
Said, 'Love, forgive him:' but he did not speak;
And silenced by that silence lay the wife,
Remembering her dear Lord who died for all,
And musing on the little lives of men,
And how they mar this little by their feuds."
TENNYSON.
* * * * *
XI
CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES
"_Then came Peter, and said to Him, Lord, how oft shall my
brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times?
Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times;
but, until seventy times seven._"--MATT, xviii. 21, 22.
This would seem to be plain enough, even though we had nothing more from
the lips of Jesus concerning the duty of forgiveness. In point of fact,
however, the lesson of these words is repeated a full half-dozen times
throughout the Gospels. It may be well, therefore, to begin by bringing
together our Lord's sayings on the subject.
I
We turn first to the Sermon on the Mount: "Ye have heard that it was
said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy; but I say
unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you."
Then, in the Lord's Prayer we have the familiar petition, "Forgive us
our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us." And it is
surely a fact full of significance that at the close of the prayer our
Lord should single out this one petition from the rest with this
emphatic comment: "For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly
Father will also forgive you. But if ye forgive not men their
trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." The words
quoted thus far are taken from the first Gospel. Similar teaching is
found in the second and third. Thus, in Mark, we read: "And whensoever
ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any one; that your
Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses;" and in
Luke: "If thy brother sin, rebuke him, and if he repent, forgive him.
And if he sin against thee seven times in the day, and seven times turn
again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him." Again, we have
the teaching recorded by Matthew, out of which Peter's question
sprang--"If thy brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault between
thee and him alone; if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy
brother"--followed by the parable of the Unforgiving Servant, with its
solemn warning of inimitable doom: "So shall also My heavenly Father do
unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from your hearts."
And, finally, all these words are made fast for ever in the minds and
consciences of men, by the great act on the Cross when the dying
Redeemer prayed for the men who slew Him: "Father, forgive them; for
they know not what they do."
The meaning of all this is unmistakable. No child could miss the point
of the solemn parable to which I have referred. At the same time, it may
not be out of place to point out that there are not a few instances in
which people may feel themselves wronged, which, nevertheless, do not
come within the scope of Christ's teaching about forgiveness. An
illustration will best explain my meaning. It sometimes happens, both in
business life and in the Church, that two men, equally honourable and
true, but with almost nothing else in common, are often thrown into each
other's company. They have to deal with the same facts, but they look
upon them with wholly different eyes, they approach them from wholly
different points of view. The results are obvious. There are not only
widely differing opinions, but occasional misunderstandings, and
sometimes sharper words than ought ever to pass between Christian men.
Now, to say broadly that one is right and the other wrong, that the one
owes confession and the other forgiveness, is simply not true; what is
true is that the men are different, different in temperament, different
in training, different in their whole habits of thought and life. And
what is needed is that each should learn frankly to recognize the fact.
This is not a case for rebuking, and repenting, and forgiving, but for
mutual forbearance. There are multitudes of good people, people whose
goodness no one who knows them would ever question, whom yet we cannot
take to our bosoms, and treat as intimate personal friends. Even
religion does not all at once straighten out all the twists in human
nature, nor rub down all its hard angularities. And, as I say, it is our
simple, common-sense duty to recognize the fact; and if sometimes we
find even our fellow--Christians "very trying," well, we must learn to
bear and forbear, always remembering that others probably find us no
less trying than we sometimes find them. But where grave and undeniable
injury has been done, immediately Christ's teaching comes into
operation. The injured one must banish all thought of revenge. Never
must we say, "I will do so to him as he hath done to me; I will render
to the man according to his work." Rather must we strive to overcome
evil by good, and by the manifestation of a forgiving spirit to win the
wrong-doer to repentance and amendment.
II
When, now, we take these precepts of Jesus and lay them side by side
with the life of the world, or even with the life of the Church, as day
by day it passes before our eyes, our first thought must be, how little
yet do men heed the words of Jesus, how much mightier is the pagan
spirit of revenge than the Christian spirit of forgiveness. Indeed, of
all the virtues which Christ inculcated, this, perhaps, is the most
difficult. True forgiveness--I do not speak of the poor, bloodless
phantom which sometimes passes by the name:
"Forgive! How many will say 'forgive,' and find
A sort of absolution in the sound
To hate a little longer,"
--not of such do I speak, but of true forgiveness, and this, I say, can
never for us men be an easy thing. Perhaps a frank consideration of some
of the difficulties may contribute to their removal.
(1) One chief reason why Christ's command remains so largely a dead
letter is to be found in our unwillingness to acknowledge that we have
committed an injury. That another should have wronged us we find no
difficulty in believing; that we have wronged another is very hard to
believe. Look at the very form of Peter's question: "How oft shall my
brother sin against me, and I forgive him?" "My brother" the wrong-doer,
myself the wronged--that is what we are all ready to assume. But what if
it is I who have need to be forgiven? But this is what our pride will
not suffer us to believe. That "bold villain" Shame, who plucked
Faithful by the elbow in the Valley of Humiliation, and sought to
persuade him that it is a shame to ask one's neighbour forgiveness for
petty faults, or to make restitution where we have taken from any, is
always quick to seize his opportunity. And he is especially quick when
acknowledgement is due to one who is socially our inferior. If an
employee be guilty of some gross discourtesy towards his master, or a
servant towards her mistress, the master or mistress may demand a prompt
apology on pain of instant dismissal. But when it is the servant or
employee who is the injured person he has no such remedy; yet surely, in
Christ's eyes, his very dependence makes the duty of confession doubly
imperative. "If," Christ said, "thou art offering thy gift at the altar,
and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee"--note
exactly Christ's words; He did not say, "If thou rememberest that thou
hast aught against thy brother"; alas, it is very easy for most of us to
do that; what He said was, "If thou rememberest that thy brother hath
aught against thee." Whom did I overreach in business yesterday? Whose
good name did I drag through the mire? What heart did I stab with my
cruel words? "If thou rememberest that thy brother hath aught against
thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be
reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift."
(2) If the difficulties are great when we have committed the wrong, they
are hardly less when we have suffered it. Thomas Fuller tells how once
he saw a mother threatening to beat her little child for not rightly
pronouncing the
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/11580