The man of the ages, and other recent sermons

Contents

I. The Man of the Ages i

II. The Reconciling Truth 21

III. God Imaged in Human Relation-

I. €]^e 0ian of tl^e ageis

I.

THE MAN OF THE AGES.

Jesus said unio them, Verify, verify, I say unto you, Before AbraJiam was, I am. — St. John viii. 58.

THERE is a confusion of tenses in this saying of Jesus Ciirist which strikes strangely upon the ear. It is language evidently from some sphere foreign to our earth. It seemed to the Jews awful blasphemy, for it was so that God had named Himself to Moses out of the burning, fiery bush on Horeb. Jesus Christ dared to rise, in His conflict with the baffled Pharisees, to this sublimity of presumption. There He stood, a care-worn peasant of Galilee, with nothing in the outward conditions of His life to separate Him from the humblest of His fellows. It was the claim of a lunatic, which could not have survived beyond the moment of its utterance, had there not been something in Him to give it dignity and conceivability. It has sur- 3

THIS M/tN OF THE AGLS.

vived. It has stood the test of ages. " They crucified Him," but somehow it seems quite natural and not at all strange, as we read the words now, that He should have had to speak from outside of time — from the " eternal Now " : " Before Abraham was, I am."

The words can mean nothing less than that He is " I AM " in and over all the ages of time. He claims to be unchangeably present — a living, undying force at every point of human history. It was a splendid claim. What, indeed, could realise more fully all that human need and philosophy and science are striving after than such a Man of the Ages, set like a fixed star in our firmament, and shining more and more, while other stars rise and set, or flash meteorlike across our view and vanish into darkness?

I ask you to think with me of some features of the Christ-life which seem to place Him above all other religious leaders and to confirm His claim to be the Man of the Ages.

I. And first note that the ages which preceded Him ivere fuljillcd i?i Hint. He came, not to destroy, but to fulfil. The word " fulfil " in the Greek of the New Testament means

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much more than our English word in its popular acceptation. It means to " fill up to the full," or, using the more philosophical form of expression, to " realise the full and complete ideal."

The teaching of Christ was not original, — it would have been a foreign tongue to the world of humanity if it had been, — but the truth of His person and life and work was original. It was the emerging into form and power and a new, visible creation, of that which had been struggling towards the light in the minds of men from the beginning. He was the " realised ideal " of that which they had been darkly groping after, "if haply they might find Him." He dimmed the lesser lights of Jewish, Egyptian, Persian, Buddhistic, and Greek thought.

It is not necessary to prove that all the ages of Jewish history were leading up to Him. This is a fact which is bound up in our Bible. He realised in Himself temple and prophecy. Christianity is the culmination and completion of that Judaism which reached back over twenty centuries. With the clear vision of one to whom and in whom all ages were living. He said to the Jews, in language from above, which

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they could not understand : " Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day : and he saw it, and was glad."

Outside of the Jewish world were the nations of whom Christ said : " Many shall come from the east and the west, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of God." Confucius, Sakya-Muni the Buddha, and the Greek philosophers were prophets too, who saw as through a glass, darkly, the truth which Christ realised in fact. The Greek philosophy was the purest expression of spiritual thought, the loftiest reach of human reason, which the thinkers of the world had attained. But the beautiful abstractions of Plato, too remote for the common life of men, were transmuted by Christianity into the current gold of the very humanity that his mind regarded as hopelessly barbarian. Plato himself taught that " we must wait for one, be it a God or a God-inspired man, who will teach us our religious duties and take away the darkness from our eyes." The Christ in His person and life and word realised this long-looked-for ideal, and in the brightness of His rising made a new day for the world.

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Renan has said : " Eliminate from the teaching cf Jesus Christ all the moralities which were known to the world before Him, and what have you left?" It is a very shallow saying. No thoughtful Christian denies that there were moral instincts seeking and finding expression in the wisdom of philosophers before Christ. It is the v\'orn-out taunt of sceptics that the golden rule is to be found in the teaching of Confucius. It is true that a negative form of it is to be found there: "Whatsoever ye would not that men should do to you, do ye not to them." The positive saying of Christ, " Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," is a flowering out of it as superior as the law, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," is superior to the Jewish negations, " Thou shalt not kill, steal, or commit adultery." There are doubtless many resemblances to be traced between the positive teaching of Christ and the fragmentary suggestions which preceded Him ; but the fact remains that on these two commandments, in the broadest possible sense, hang all the law and the prophets : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God v^ath all thy heart, and . . . soul,

THE MAN OF THE AGES.

and . . . mind, and . . . strength ; and thy neiglibour as thyself." Eliminate from the natural creation all the seething forces which were at work when " the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep," and what have you left? It is true that there would be no beautiful creation at all. But God said, " Let light be: and light was " ; and man was evolved, made in God's image, after God's likeness.

The same is true in our spiritual world. The new creation in Christ Jesus, and its infinite possibilities, could have no existence apart from humanity and its strivings after God and truth ; but " God," says Paul, " who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The light and the life were potent in Him for a new creation, as they were not in all the chaotic ages which preceded Him. There was nothing in all the thought of the ages before Him worthy to survive which was not absorbed in the brightness of His shining as the sun absorbs the dawn.

THE MAN OP THE AGES.

II. But I ask you to observe again that, while the ages which preceded Christ were fulfilled, or filled full, by Him, He overfloived the age into which He was historically born. He was a Jew, but Judaism could not contain Him. His thought burst from the Mosaic seed-shell into words which were spirit and life. He had to speak down to the capacity of His own nation, as a teacher speaks to children by object-lessons. No one can read with an unbiassed mind the New Testament, and fail to be impressed by the immense reserve force of His character and words. He taught them " many things in parables" because they were in the childhood of the infinite life of that " whole family in heaven and earth " which was present to His mind. Even to His chosen few, unto whom it was " given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God," He could not make Himself fully known. They began to realise the depth and universality of His purpose only after He had left the earth.

He was strangely outside of His own time ; and yet He was no recluse, neither did He exhaust Himself in vague or wild speculations.

THE MAN OF THE AGES.

He \v8.s simply the carpenter's son, until He showed Himself in the broad daylight of those three brief years of public ministry. He was known then as the " Friend of publicans and sinners." His followers were poor, obscure, unlearned fishermen. He seems to have drawn them by the force of His personahty rather than by His teaching. He touched the groaning humanity of His time with an infinite pity, which found expression in healing, helping acts, and which, reinforcing His words, marked the beginnings of a great uplifting. But His life was not understood. They said: "He casteth out de\'ils through Beelzebub the prince of the devils." He preached the gospel to the poor, and proclaimed a kingdom not of this world. They looked for a temporal lord and kingdom. He knew that His life and words, while He lived, could not be understood. This consciousness appears through all His living in time. It was the shadow of that cross which awaited Him at the end. He attempted no local or national reforms ; He would not entangle Himself with any of the political, religious, or social questions of His time. They brought Him the

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tribute-money, asking if it was lawful to give tribute unto Caesar or not, and He answered: " Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's ; and unto God the things that are God's." They brought Him their marriage problems, and He replied to the question of divorce in words of profound meaning : " What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder " ; and to the question, " Whose wife shall she be hereafter who has been seven times married?" "In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage ; but are as angels in heaven." One came to Him with a property grievance, saying : " Speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with mc." He answered: "Man, who made me a judge and a divider over you ? Take heed, and beware of covetousness." There is a sublime consciousness of something far greater than earthly empire — yes, higher than even we can yet understand — in His reply to Pilate when, haggard, bleeding, the crown of thorns upon His head, He stood before that wavering governor in the judgment-hall : "Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world.

that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth ]\Iy voice."

Because He could not possibly be understood by His own people, He had to die. It was strange, but true, that He could give His life and truth to the world only by dying. Had He yielded to the blind literalism of His own people. He might have been, like Mohammed, the maker of kingdoms, but He would not have been the world's Christ. He could not be the spiritual King of men, and take the sword. He could prove Himself superior only by yielding to the sword. He lived His life out to the bitter end with a calm, unfaltering purpose which no threatening could shake nor temptings of ambition cause to swerve. He gave Himself to the cross, and " He is alive for evermore."

HI. I have said that the Christ fulfilled the past and overflowed the age in which He historically lived. There is another fact which adds to His years nineteen centuries. The present has not exhausted Him ; He is still the "I AM."

That He once lived on the earth, and was

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" crucified, dead, buried," the severest criticism will allow. That something happened after His death which gave a wonderful impulse to the faith and zeal of His disciples must also be admitted. That through and in them He has lived and been a powerful, wide-spreading influence down to the present (creating, indeed, a new civilization), are obvious, commonplace facts of history. Account as you may for the facts, there was such force in the leaven which Christ put into the minds of a few obscure men that it spread in spite of persecution, and permeated the known world. It is beyond all criticism true that His influence in the world has worked exactly as He said it would — "like leaven," silently, slowly, continuousl)^ powerfully. It is a working, living force to-day, as perplexing to foes, and as inexhaustible in its m.eaning for mankind, as when He taught in Jerusalem. It is too late, in this age of long perspective down through the ages of history, to hold Jesus Christ responsible for the evil that has been done in His name. The very spirit of this later age which denounces it, is the evolution of His spirit through and over it. I am quite aware that in

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THE MAN OF THE AGES.

the fervent heat of our modern thought Christianity is being tested as never before. But through all the glow of the burning, fiery furnace, I see the glorified form of Jesus Christ shining with undimmed lustre. John Stuart Mill expressed the mind of pure, merciless, logical reason in the one concession which he was forced to make to revealed religion, in the words : " Whatever else may be taken away by rational criticism, Christ is still left, a unique figure, not more unlike all His precursors than all His followers; nor even now would it be easy even for an unbeliever to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life." The science of to-day recognises the infinities as it did not thirty years ago. The reconciliation of science with all honest progressive Christian thought is indeed a fact accomplished. There are boundless possibilities in this and other movements towards unity. I am quite sure that no unbiassed naturalist of thirty years ago would have recognised " the doctrine of Jesus Christ as the summit and crown of the orcranic se-

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ries, . . . expressing the final result of that directed striving which began hundreds of millions of years ago, and through infinite toil and pain has led to this supreme accomplishment." It is the language of a mature naturalist of to-day who cannot be suspected of a religious bias. It is the clear, cold crystallisation of a mind working through the processes of long observation and experience, and as such is the type of a whole class of thinkers,

I well remember, in my own early ministry, the stir caused by Draper's somewhat virulent history of the " Conflict between Science and Religion." That history has been rewritten by a scholar of to-day, who discriminates, as Draper did not, between religion and dogmatic theology ; and after an exhaustive, valuable, and severely impartial review of the latest biblical research, he uses these words : " It has disengaged more and more as the only valuable residuum, — like the mass of gold at the bottom of the crucible, — the personality, spirit, teaching, and ideals of the blessed Founder of Christianity."

Philosophy is imbued with the spirit of l6 THE MAN OF THE AGES.

Christ's teaching. The broadest thought along the lines of the theory of evolution finds the ultimate destiny of man in the time when the physical shall be dominated by the psychical, and in the truest sense " the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of . . . Christ ; and He shall reign for ever and ever," " King of kings, and Lord of lords." Literature is putting into popular form the story of the Christ, and both literature and art are full of Him in a renaissance of Christian thought peculiar to our time. A very modern French realistic painting suggests as the scene of the crucifixion a hill overlooking Paris, with the dead form and the weeping Vv'omen, and a workingman shaking his fist over the gay, indifferent city. Now do not suppose that I am blind to the fact that there is a wide-spread scepticism, or at least indifference to the forms of religion, in our time. I am not arguing that the world is Christian, but that Christ is working profoundly in the^world's highest thought, and that He is surviving through the most intense criticism that can be focussed upon Him. It was through His own "preaching the gospel to the poor"

THE MAN OF THE AGES. i-j that the new principle of free and universal education entered into our modern life. The world's best thought circulates through the whole body, and when that thought is reacting towards God and Christ and the infinities we need not dread the issue.

It means much, I think, for the average human nature of this year of grace that it is capable of responding to such fiction as Charles Dickens's " Christmas Carol." It is only in the warmth of that new spirit of humanity which Christ breathed into the world that we have become capable either of creating or of being touched by such a conception as that of the old miser weeping bitter, penitent tears over the vision of his ovv'n neglected grave, and crying out: " I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year! "

I have said that Jesus Christ was the realised ideal of the ages which preceded Him ; that He overflowed the age in which historically He lived ; and that, afternineteen centuries. He is before the world as fresh and inexhaustible as when He stood before the scornful Pilate. The doubt of the day finds itself more than ever perplexed by the question, What shall we do, then, \Yith Jesus? As the past has not been able to exhaust Hun, no prophet's vision is needed to perceive that the future cannot outgroiv Him. " You may destroy our churches," said a French peasant to an atheist in the time of the French Revolution, " but you cannot destroy the stars which shine in the eternal heavens. The more you demolish our steeples, the more clearly shall we see these worlds above." The Star of Bethlehem abides, and must abide, because He contains within Himself principles which are eternal in the heavens. Humanity can never outgrow such truths as these : " God is a Spirit : and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." " Love God, and your neighbour as yourself." " Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh." " This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." It matters little, so far as my present argument is concerned, whether He is regarded as the most consummate genius that the world ever knev/, or as God manifest in the flesh ; because the genius was so pure, far-seeing, and

THE MAM OF THE AGES. ig universal that there seems to be no rational escape from the conclusion that He was all that He claimed to be — Immanuel, God with us. I believe that the future will find in the fact of the Incarnation truth which shall reconcile the natural and the supernatural, and " gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth."

Standing as we do upon the threshold of a new century, what thought could be more inspiring and helpful than this? As across the stormy sea, when the disciples were toiling in rowing, they saw Him walking upon the v.-aters, and heard Him saying, " It is I ; be not afraid," so may we be confident that He is above time and space, the master of wind and waves. There is no more certain good in this present scheme of things for you and me than to live as He would have us live — keeping under our bodies, and bringing them into subjection; subduing the flesh to the spirit; walking in love, as He also loved us, and gave Himself for us; seeking in every relation, as mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, citizens, students, business men, and working-men, to make the world of our time the

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better, purer, wiser, and happier for our being. The great poet who has " crossed the bar " sang :

" Ring out the old, ring in the new.

Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true."

He also sang:

*' Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Rinij in the Christ that is to be."

II. €]^e iSeconciling Crut^*

II. The Reconciling Truth

Jesus saith 7inio her, IVoiiian, believe Me, the hour Cometh^ when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship; for salvation is of the Je7vs. But the hour cometh, and notu is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seckefh such to worship JJim. — ?)i\ John iv. 21-23.

THERE are few incidents of our Lord's life in which the human and the divine appear more beautifully blended than in this conversation with the Samaritan woman by Jacob's well. He was human in His weariness. Travel-worn, at the close of the day, He sat by the well. The woman came to draw water. He surprised her by asking her to give Him drink. She was surprised, because the Samaritans and Jews were political and religious foes. It was true at all times, and reaching to the smallest details of the 23

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ordinary daily life, that " the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans." The divine life in Him escapes and overflows the prejudices natural to Him as a Jew. She exclaims, scornfully perhaps, " How is it that Thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, who am a woman of Samaria? " He tells her, in language too spiritual for her comprehension, of the living water which He could give. She flippantly replies : " Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw." She sees only a dusty, travel- worn Jew; but He speedily and sternly reads to her a page out of her own private life w-hich startles her into reverence. " Go call thy husband, and come hither." " I have no husband," she replied. Jesus said: "Thou hast well said, I have no husband : for thou hast had five husbands ; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly." Convicted in her conscience, she seems confusedly to try to excuse herself by pleading the perplexities of the religious question of her time: " Our fathers worshipped in this mountain ; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." It was human

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nature striving, as it has done in all ages, — not, perhaps, without reason, — to justify its imnioraUties by the disagreements and antagonisms of the religious.

Now observe how our Lord meets the problem in which her mind seemed to be entangled. He does not compromise vvith the Samaritan heresy, for He distinctly says : " Ye worship ye know not what: we know what wc worship; for salvation is of the JevvS." His people were in the truth so far as the historic question was concerned. They looked for the Messiah ; they worshipped towards Him ; and He was to come of the " seed of David according to the flesh." But He lifts the whole question out of the local and material into the light and air of a new spiritual day. He tells her that the worship of God is no longer to be limited to places, but that " the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth : for the Father seeketh such to worship Him." He brings in a larger, higher truth, which dissolves away the antagonisms which had their origin in partial knowledge, or ignorance of the whole truth. Neither Jew nor Samaritan had realised the true idea of worship.

They had locaHsed God. They had thought of Him as outside of themselves. They had said, " Lo, here!" or " Lo, there!" and quarrelled. He said: "God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."

There are many timely suggestions for us in Christ's method with the Samaritan question. Here was the standing feud of ages, separating" peoples whose religions had much in common, who lived in close neighbourhood, and yet neither had understood the real question involved. Tlieir differences sprang from their ignorance of the entire truth. Had they understood that which Christ revealed, there v/ould have been no ground for the long, bitter, angry war. The Jews were in the truth so far as it had progressed, and the Samaritans were essentially proselytes, deriving their doctrines and practices from Jewish sources, and regarded by the older tradition as on the level of ignorant Jews. The antagonism continued, and doubtless had its uses, until the hour came for the reconciling truth to disclose itself. There was a process of development going on, a secret, unseen growth, until the time was ripe for the dead branches to drop off or be pruned away, that the new hfe might have free course.

That which was true in the development of Judaism is true in the development of Christianity. There is " first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." The apostolic age, with its baptism of the Holy Ghost, did not exhaust or finally express the whole truth of Christ's teaching. As the words of patriarch and prophet contain deeper meanings than they knew, which a later age interpreted, so, too, the apostles, in their witness of the resurrection and its kindred doctrines, witnessed of mysteries which even they had not fully comprehended. St. Paul, with all his searching wisdom, exclaims, " Great is the mystery of godliness ! " and it is the " mystery of the faith " which is to be " held in a pure conscience," that which he calls the " hidden wisdom." The same Holy Spirit which illumined the apostles is with the Church now, to realise through the faithful Christ's promise, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." The word of Christ has deeper meanings than the honest seekers after truth have yet dreamed of. There is ahvays some new treasure for the honest mind to find, some larger truth to appear when the time is ripe for it, some higher principle or definition to evolve itself and harmonise the lower and material antagonisms. It has a vitality which unfolds, as each age demands, new lights, new helps, new applications. I cannot help thinking that in the tendency now of all earnest thinkers to return to the simple creeds of the first age, the creeds which enshrine the simple divine facts of Christ's life, we have the most cheering sign of growth, of giving way to the richer life, the fresher meanings which are coming — the springtime of a better, broader, sunnier day. Was not St. Paul thinking forward to such times of riper, broader knowledge when, magnifying the riches of God's grace, he declares this to be the divine purpose, " that in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in Him"? H^ere is the very suggestion of that unity towards which the scientific, the social, and the religious thought of the age is tending.

The Christian Church has been slow to realise that there must be unsettlings and changes and new definitions in the progress of a living truth. The Church has walked with Christ like the disciples on the way to Emmaus, whose " eyes were holden that they should not know Him." They were sad and hopeless because the tomb had been found empty, and they could not solve the mystery of the missing body of their Lord. They had not understood the full meaning of that divine life and the power of His resurrection. " O foolish men," He exclaims, " and slow of heart to beheve all that the prophets have spoken ! " The larger, spiritual meaning of His life dawned upon them as He interpreted to them the Scriptures, and in the breaking of bread they knew Him. The story of the Church in its movement down through the ages has been Hke that. Minds have been holden so that the full meaning of His life from the dead has been only partially perceived. He has been looked for in the tomb rather than in the open day ; and yet many hearts have burned within them, not knowing Him as He spake with them by the v/ay. God had His own v/ise purpose in keeping back the