The contemporary Christ

Contents

PAGE

Preface 7

I. The Contemporary Christ 9

Preface

It is perhaps not amiss to say that while some of the sermons in the present volume have been delivered before special conferences of ministers, all of them have been preached in the ordinary pulpit ministry of recent months, and are reproduced in practically the same form as that in which they were orally given. They were neither prepared nor preached in series, yet there runs through them all a continuity of thought and feeling which would seem to warrant their association under the title by which they are introduced. May their witness be not unfruitful to Him for whom they attempt to speak!

J. M. M. G.

I

After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country. — Mark 16. 12.

I do not debate the resurrection now. I am content to say simply that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, all history since his day is incomprehensible. Subject these documents to the severest scrutiny of unrelenting criticism, and they come to this: that either Jesus rose from the dead or his disciples lied. They could not have been innocently mistaken. But then you face the fact that you could not get the life the disciples lived from either a lie or a liar.

"He appeared ... to two of them." But they are not named. If Mark or Peter, whose Gospel Mark wrote down for him, knew these two, neither of them thought their names important enough to be introduced. Saint Luke, writing some fifteen years later, with ample time, and the spirit for the acquisition of details, gives the name of one of them as Cleopas, but even then all we have is the name; we know nothing of the disciple, while not even Luke gives us the name of the other. This appearance is told, not because it happened to two disciples, but because it happened to Christ. But it

ll is a very gracious appearance for all of that. The other appearances recorded in the Gospels, to Mary and to Peter and to the apostles and to Paul, seem too remote from us. They were revelations made to chosen souls; and our commoner, more nameless life finds little, if any, fellowship in them. This appearance is to men so obscure that only one of them is so much as named, while of him we know nothing else. This is a revelation for all the rest of us common folks who walk in many fashions our obscurer way of life.

And the very soul of this narrative and the heart of its message is that he appeared "in another form." So they did not recognize him. Christ was there and they did not know it. They were mourning his death while he walked beside them. They were recounting their shattered hopes when the fulfillment of them was at hand. It is written here that they communed and questioned together. They remembered and inquired. They remembered Christ and inquired about him. It was debate and speculation, argument and skepticism. "And it came to pass, while they communed and questioned together, that Jesus himself drew near, and went with them." And they did not know it.

The reason, of course, is in the very phrase:

He appeared in another form, which means that he had appeared before; and the form of his former appearance blinded them to the fact of his immediate presence. They had known him in the common, simple incidents of daily life. They had seen him as a man upon the dusty roads they traveled. They had looked upon him in the homely circles of the fireside and table. They had watched him in the wonderful but humane and tender ministries to the sick and stricken. They had seen him weeping by the tomb of Lazarus and were familiar with the spectacular and dramatic business of Lazarus coming back to life. He had been superhuman, but he had been human, too; and the superhuman was so mixed and mingled with the human that while they thought it was he that should deliver Israel, the memories of his own bondage to the ills and incidents of life, his hunger and thirst and weariness, were too keen to let their comprehension pass the gates of tragedy. For they had seen him before certain undeniable events had happened. It is not simply that "he appeared in another form unto two of them," but "After that he appeared in another form." After what? After the betrayal and capture; after the trial and crucifixion; after the burial. After all that, he had appeared in another form, and because of that they did not recognize him. Sheer and sharp between them and their former knowledge of him had fallen certain uncompromising realities. We speak of the difference the crucifixion made in Jesus; but without irreverence, was there not almost as much a difference made in the disciples?

One of the most frequently noted effects of the recent war was the extraordinary change made in the character and spirit of the men. They went into battle and march and campaign volatile, exuberant, careless; and they came from the trenches not only worn in body and shaken in nerves, but sobered, solemnized, aged by the mighty tragedy of great events. It is said that early in his career Napoleon applied to the French Department of War for an important command, and was told by the minister of war that "Napoleon is too young to command an army as general-in-chief." Napoleon's answer was, "One soon becomes old on the battlefield, and I come from it." It is not on battlefields alone that one becomes prematurely old. Was it not Charles Lamb who said, "Our spirits show gray before our hairs"? Whether they realized it or not, how gray the crucifixion must have made the disciples' spirits! If there was a change in the form of Christ when that stupendous tragedy was done, what must have been the change also in the very life of those on whom it came with the crash of a bewildering despair! This Christ was not the Jesus whom they had known in those homely, glorious days of human fellowship before; and they were not the same unquestioning and unsophisticated peasant folks that had followed him with bland and blazing hopes. They had been sobered, solemnized, aged by what they had seen and known. The clash of contradictory events, the pitiless disappointment of what had been their simple faith, had brought them uncertainty, skepticism, doubt, and an intimate and personal bewilderment. Their life wrenched by these revolutionary experiences from its old and limited outlook, they had lost the form of Jesus with which they had been familiar and now that he appeared in another form they did not recognize him.

Is that not the experience of men and women to-day? One of the persistent problems of religion is why many men and women of the finest attitude toward life and the most reverent desire for truth, both of knowledge and experience, find themselves outside the Christian faith while honestly wishing they were in it. And oftentimes the heart of the problem is in the fact that once they were in it; that once they were disciples of a Christ whose reality they did not question and whose form was certain. Somewhere between that older day and their present time something happened which changed the very fiber of their life and swept away the form and appearance of the Christ they once had known.

It is that very diverse but very modern mood which speaks to us in this text, "He appeared in another form." That means, as I have already said, that he had appeared before. Some of us can trace our own spiritual history here. He appeared to us when we were children as a very real though mysterious Person. He was God and man all in one. He was all-powerfuL He could answer our prayers. He could give us what we wanted — a fair day, a good time, a new toy. Oh, you know the faith of a child! — full of wonder and credulity, but very real for all of that. And something happened. We grew older. We came to see that our childish sort of belief would not do. And there are men and women in every congregation who have found no other belief to put in its place, and their lives are a great wistfulness and shadow.

Or, Christ appeared to us before as the expression of a certain protecting and personal providence. We read that here he healed the sick. We read that here he stilled the storm upon a sea. We read that here he fed the multitudes with miraculously supplied provisions. We read that here he walked upon the sea to the disciples as they toiled amid the night and storm. And then something happened. Some storm of trouble broke on us and our prayers for sudden peace were never answered. Some appealing threat of sorrow loomed before us, and for all our supplication death was not delayed, and, whatever happened to Lazarus, our loved ones are dead forever. Some tragic monotony of toil without vision and labor without gain dragged over us and in our breaking struggle there came no help. We had thought it was he that should deliver not only Israel but us; and we have been undelivered; and the miraculous, beneficent, providential Christ that we knew is gone.

Or the Christ we knew was not only the indubitable figure of a mighty past; he was the center of a revelation direct from God and gathered into a book whose singular and exceptional character made it the very word of God to men. He was so strangely divine a Being that the very pages which described him were written by the direct and immediate urgency of God himself. No question, criticism, dissent from any of it were possible because it was all of a piece, inspired of the living and omniscient God, and the very vocabulary in which the record was preserved was a vocabulary selected by the unerring precision of the Almighty. That was the Christ we knew, immeasurable, immeasurably remote, exalted, preserved within the sacred spaces of a revelation like to which the world had seen no other, and to which no addition would be made in all the length of time. Then something happened. We went to college; or we read the wider and more scientific literature of our day. We came to see the apparently inexorable law of development working in the realm of religious history as well as elsewhere. We began to see that the scientific test of the Bible was not whether it was inspired, but whether it was true, and that its truth could not be settled by throwing over it the glamour of a mighty word. The whole modern critical advance upon the Bible, the application of the historical method to its study, the spectacle of the New Testament miracles in the light of scientific declarations — all of that went over us in college classrooms or in the quiet of our most intense and intimate reading; and the Christ of an inspired record was gone. Some of us, like these two on the way to Emmaus, have walked sadly ever since. Some have steeled our souls to an insolent intolerance of everything that would relate to the old faith. Some of us have seriously set our lives to generous and social good, thinking to make up for the lost religion by the conduct of a new brotherhood. And this is not simply an experience of men and women who either honestly or insolently refuse to be called Christian; it is many a time the experience of Christian men and women as well. The satisfaction they once had is gone. The certainty they once felt has passed. They want to be Christian, and they claim to be Christian, and they compel themselves to believe where they cannot see, but the old glad and appealing enjoyment of religion has perished. Christ seems strangely faded; and the services of the church and the witness of the New Testament seem to testify a far-off and finished but not-to-be-recalled experience.

"Where is the blessedness I knew, When first I saw the Lord?

Where is the soul-refreshing view Of Jesus and his word?"

Even Luther confessed, "At times I believe and at times I doubt." Hugh Latimer wrote to his friend and fellow martyr Ridley: "Pardon me and pray for me; pray for me, I say. For I am sometimes so fearful that I would creep into a mouse-hole; sometimes God doth visit me again with his comfort. So he cometh and goeth."

Now, it cannot be that God really comes and goes; with him there is no variableness, neither shadow that is cast by turning. It is Latimer's power of recognizing him that varies. Luther sometimes believes and sometimes doubts; but the object of his belief must remain unchanged. It is Luther's sight of it that trembles. It is unthinkable that Christ should get away. He is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. The Christ of childhood, strange, mystic, marvelous, but very real, is the Christ of age, divine, but human and historic. The Christ of miracle, of providence, of personal interest, is the Christ of scholarship, subject to laws of nature and life; the central figure of a literary record written by men^s toiling hands and discriminated by their minds; the inaugurator of a social movement as well as a religious revolution. And the clue to these vast and confusing differences is in the fact with which the text of this sermon is concerned: "He appeared in another form."

II

In another form, but the same Christ! In other words, whatever may be the change in your religious life and thought produced by your age, your experiences, your education; whatever may be your feeling that the Christ you used to know is gone, you have not really lost Christ; you have only lost sight of him.

He has the same presence but not the same 4 proof of it. It is not a difference in identity but of identification. You have the same fact but not in the same fashion. You do not have to recover an old appearance; you have to recognize a new aspect. And it is this changing aspect of things which, in religion, is so bewildering, but which in everything else is so natural and clear.

You cannot think of nature now as you thought of it when you were a child. When we become men we put away childish things. Then there was a wonder and a witchery about the deeps of sky and drifting cloud, which we long since have lost. A storm, a sight of the ocean, a lamp-post at night — anything and all things had a wonderment and interest and familiar mystery to us as children which they do not have now. But they remain the same. You have gone back to your old home, some of you, with high hopes and the tenderest of sentiments and a curious anticipatory awe — and have been terribly disappointed. The streets which you remembered as so wide and long were narrow straggling roads; the house which had seemed palatial in your childhood was quite common in the sight of maturity; the older men and women who had remained in memory as strangely dignified and wise, you found quite common clay, shriveled and narrow, compared to your experience in the world to which you long ago had gone. And you can trace that inevitable change in the aspect of things under other influences than that of age. No man can think of a grave or look at a cemetery, when one he loves is buried, as he did before sorrow touched him. A scholar will recall with curiosity and humor the days of his ignorance, but can never go back to the strange views of things he then had. He does not want to. The man who has been disappointed in his old home does not want to return to the day when it satisfied him; and much as some of us would recall our dead, those who have learned the solemn splendor of a consecrated grief would not exchange it for the careless outlook and incomplete experience of our unsorrowing days. It is only in religion that we think we would go back.

Here, for instance, is Thomas Hood with those haunting lines:

"I remember, I remember

The fir-trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops

Were close against the sky; It was a childish ignorance,

But now 'tis little joy To know I'm farther off from heaven

Than when I was a boy.'*

If the man Thomas Hood was farther off from heaven than when he was a boy, it was not because he had come to know the fir-trees were not against the sky. If that were all that had changed, he was just as near heaven as he was before; but he had to have a new idea of what heaven is. One of the first traditions of the children of my childhood was that the thunder was caused by the angels rolling barrels. Why they should roll barrels, and what the barrels were for, never concerned us. But I confess I do not believe myself farther off from heaven because the barrel theory of thunder has given place to a more scientific conception of electrical disturbances. Here is the trouble with many of us in this matter of our former conceptions of religion. We think of religious ideas as fixed and unchanging solid, while all the rest of life is a stream of ever-changing idea and experience. Here in the book of Revelation, for instance, we have a description of what we thought was heaven: the city with walls of jasper and gates of pearl and streets of gold. And every one of us, as children at least, accepted that as the bona-fide substance and appearance of heaven. Of late years I have heard men reject all belief in any immortality at all, because, as they said, this description is manifestly impossible as a place for departed spirits, and the size of it as it is measured here would be immeasurably too small to accommodate the innumerable populations of a redeemed world. But I need not throw away all heaven because the language of Saint John is inadequate. If this heaven of Saint John is only the literary representation of a reality of social and personal experience quite beyond absolute description, the reality itself need be no less credible and identical because the figure no longer satisfies. So it is with the living presence 4 of Christ. The old forms have failed us, but the old fact remains. He appears in another form, but it is the same Christ. The tragedy of many an honest soul is that it seeks to identify the form and the fact, the appearance and the Person and so seeks an old experience in a new emergency. One of two results follows. Either such a one fails to find the old experience and gives up the search for Christ altogether; or else such a one finds the old experience and so is shrunken to a form he ought long since to have outgrown, instead of measuring up toward the stature of the fullness of Christ. Not long ago some of us heard an elderly and able man saying that he had never found a prayer that suited him like the one he said every night now as he used to say it at his mother's knee sixty years ago:

"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take."

That sounds like a nice sentiment, but it is sheer nonsense. He might just as well have boasted that he had found no literature more satisfying to him than his old first reader. There can be nothing more appealing than to hear that prayer on the lips of a little child at his mother's knee; but to hear it from a man sixty-five years old must bring a sigh or a laugh to the heart of God. Sixty years of experience and thought and feeling, sixty years of labor and love and learning, sixty years of struggle and hope, of victory and defeat, of tears and laughter, of great joy and mighty griefs, and a soul's outlook so narrow that it can be covered by the prayer of a lisping child !

"... Through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns,"

and their thoughts of Christ must keep pace with their years, their experiences, their disciplined and expanding needs. Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, but it is a sameness of character, not of appearance; of response, not of revelation; of effectiveness, not of aspect.

And this is not merely a discrimination between the aspect of Christ to a soul at different stages in its knowledge, experience, or age; it is a discrimination between the forms in which Christ appears to different people. There are not wholly lacking men and women who have been questioning and unsatisfied and unbelieving, and at last, unchristian, because they have not had or have not been able to secure the experience some one else has enjoyed. Here is the answer: "After that he appeared in another form, unto two of them." After what? Not only after the resurrection, and the burial, and the crucifixion, but after he had appeared to Mary. He appeared to her in one form; he appeared to them in another. When he showed himself to Peter we do not know; but in time you have the record of his appearances to the disciples again and again. To these two it was in another form, and it was in another form to all the others. Christ is always doing that. It is written here, among the records of his appearances, that still there were those who doubted; and there are men always doing that. But that does not reflect upon Christ or the reality of his appearances. The inference from it all is not that the appearances were unreal, but that they were varied; not that Christ is gone but that he is present in a multitude of forms. The story here of the persistent doubt of those who saw him is evidence of the truth of the record, not of its falseness. Christ appears to every soul. His appearances will be as varied as the souls themselves. When we see him, we see him each for himself. So that as you turn life once more to seek him you are to look, not for a form, however dear or familiar, but for the fact; not for a particular experience but for the unmistakable Christ.

Ill

This then is the test question, without which all I have said would be but a tedious and speculative waste of time. If Christ is continually appearing in other and ever-changing forms, how shall a soul recognize him? Or to put it more personally, I have lost the Christ of my childish superstition; how shall I discern the Christ of my inquiring and incredulous age? I have lost the Christ of the old providences which failed me in my time of pain or sorrow; how shall I recognize the Christ of my dark and disappointed way? I have lost the Christ of my narrow and uneducated faith; how shall I identify the Christ of my critical and more scientific mind? In other words, what remains unchanged in all the varied forms the living Christ now wears?

Here in the book I turn these pages with all the atmosphere of mystery and awe upon them and read that Mary was standing at the tomb, weeping, and when she had turned back she saw Jesus standing and did not know that it was Jesus. It was another form. But supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said unto her, "Mary." And then she knew him. And I read, again, that Simon and Thomas and Nathanael and John and James and two other disciples toiled all night with their nets upon the sea and took nothing — the most laborious work I know — and "when day was now breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; howbeit the disciples knew not that it was Jesus." It was another form. And he spoke to them and they caught a multitude of fishes, and at the sight and at the voice, John said, "It is the Lord." And Simon flung himself into the sea to swim to Jesus's feet. And I read, again, this story of the two obscure disciples on their way to Emmaus, sad and hopeless, and "Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him." It was another form. And then "it came to pass, when he had sat down with them to meat, he took the bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him." To the one it was in sorrow; to the others it was in labor; to these two in the stress and meditation of perplexed but sincere minds.

Mary found him in her undefeated love, and the fishermen found him as they went about their work, and these two found him in their welcome to new truth. In each appearance it was a different form, but in each revelation it was the identical fact — a commanding spirit and a personal fellowship. Jesus was not something they understood; He was Some One whom they obeyed. He was not something that clarified their opinions; He was Some One who commanded their lives. In neither event was there any solution of the mystery. The Christ whom Mary recognized was as strange, as unexplained, as supernatural, after she had cried, "Rabboni !" as when she supposed him to be the gardener. The Christ of whom John said, "It is the Lord," and to whom Simon flung himself through the startled water, was as mysterious as before they knew that it was he. The Christ whom these two disciples recognized as he broke the bread and disappeared from physical view was as singular and unaccountable as when he walked beside them and their eyes were holden. You will never find a Christ without mystery. You can never have a Christ you wholly understand. You can never cram God into the compass of your mind. And the recognition of Christ which you want in whatever may be the specific need and circumstances of your life, will never be reached upon the highway of your knowledge. Spiritual things, as the New Testament puts it, are only spiritually discerned. Character is always the measure of vision. These two at Emmaus recognized him in the breaking of the bread; it was the supreme act of fellowship. But they remembered that their hearts had burned within them as he spake to them in the way. That is the unchanging fact beneath whatever forms Christ may assume: He commands the heart and reveals himself in fellowship. The search for what you have thought was a lost Christ is not a matter of increased knowledge. The child's Christ is as real and regnant as the sage's. It is not a matter of a thoroughly understood experience. The Christ who seems to be disproved by the calamities which have disappointed prayer is as real as the Christ of wonder-working providence. It is not a matter of broad and liberal education. The Christ of a narrow orthodoxy and the Christ of the most modern criticism vindicates himself alike. It is not an explanation but an experience; not information but inspiration; not a demonstrated argument from premise to conclusion ; but a living spirit felt and operative in the personal life.

How, then, shall we rediscover him? "If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know." Christ, as I have said repeatedly, is not something to be understood; he is a sovereign to be obeyed. We shall find him not in the exercise of the mind alone but in the direction of the heart; not by the instruction of the intellect but by the set of the affections. If you want to find him, do what he commands. If you want to know his presence, give up your life, not for him but to him. The arbitrary figure of your childhood's imagination will be gone; but the certainty of his presence will remain. The wonder-working Christ who, you thought, would save you from all calamity, is gone; but the friendly Christ sustaining you in all calamity, will abide. The remote and limited Christ of a narrower interpretation will be gone; but the spiritual Christ leading into truth is still here. It is not a matter of what you will learn of him; it is a matter of what you will do with him. It does not make any difference whether he satisfies your curiosity; it makes a tremendous difference whether he dominates your life. It is not written that he shall instruct, but that he shall reign.

Those are ominous words of Jesus, "Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me." They might mean, however, that men should seek him and not find him because they did not know enough, or because they would not do enough. But those are terrible words where he says, "Ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sin." They mean that men would fail to find him because they would not be enough. To find him is not a matter of sight but of surrender. It is not a question of capacity but of character. It does not demand special activity of mind but special enterprise of morals. It is not an achievement of wisdom; it is a projection of will. It is not the direction of your look; it is the dedication of your life. He that "willeth to do his will" shall know, not what, but whom he has believed. And to the dedicated life, in other forms perhaps than one has dreamed, in meditation, in labor, in loneliness, in pain; in great knowledge, in appalling mystery, in a mighty joy, in a bewildering sorrow — in another form he will show himself as the one Eternal Fact, the one abiding fellowship, the one inspiring and sustaining Spirit, till, like the disciples of a more dramatic past, one shall be glad because whatever else one does not see, he shall see, through all the experiences and forms of life, his living Lord.