The Christ of To-Day

Hebrews xiii. 8.

I want to notice just how this word emerges. The road leading up to a text often yields the secrets of its interpretation. Its momentum is revealed in the prelude. We often miss the rich significance of a word because we have not followed the track of the thought which leads up to it. Over what sort of road, then, has the writer of this great letter been travelling? He has been leading his fellow-believers over a very wonderful road which is trodden by pilgrims of faith. The road is crowded with them. Everyone of the pilgrims is radiant with victory. Everyone is distinguished by some exploit. Everyone is carrying the palm of a great venture. It is as if a procession were to wind through the streets of our city, a procession in which every man in the ranks breathes a spirit of chivalry, and bears upon his breast the guerdons of gallant conduct. Man after man strides along, regiment after regiment, a perfect galaxy of courage and renown. And here is this nobler procession, the children of faith, marching along the way of life, everyone wearing a cross of a more distinguished order, and all proclaiming their confidence in a Leader who never betrayed their trust. They have kindled their ardour at His fires. Their crusade was born in His will. Their triumphs were won in His grace. They rose out of frailty, for He gave them vigour. They shook off their timidities, for He gave them valour. In the power of His grace a menace is now an invitation, a difficulty is now a lure. They can do anything and everything in the equipment of His boundless resources. In Him they have strength, and exhilarancy, and buoyancy and song! Such is the radiant procession which winds up the pilgrim way, and as they march along I hear them sing: “Who shall dream of shrinking, by our Captain led?” These are the children of faith, and they are the men and women who do the impossible.

Such is the road over which the writer has been leading us. Now, when that road fades out of our eyes, and all its shining company with it, and we wake to reality as from a beautiful dream, when we find ourselves back on our own road — so drab, so heavy, so difficult, so unromantic — how then? That old procession, with its exploits and its songs — to look at it was like gazing upon a legendary world through the coloured lens of romance. But here is our road, the very real road which you and I have to travel to-day. It is a road ploughed into confusion by warfare. Old guide-posts have been broken down and have lost their use. Many old lamps are blown out. Many comfortable, cosy hostels are in ruin. A rugged and a troubled road is ours, not much like a highway, but much more like an uncertain and marshy track across a moor. What, then, has this man to say to us, this man who has been taking us over the romantic road of faith? What has he to say to the men and women of to-day? He has this to say, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever!” Jesus Christ, the same to-day! That is what he has to say to us. The old Leader is on the new road. There is no wasting of His resources. There is no drought among the springs of grace. He is still honouring faith by fellowship and power. He acknowledges no mastery in hostile circumstances.

He pays no homage to hoary iniquities. He offers the inexhaustible fountains of His own virtue and strength. He answers faith with grace. He crowns venture with triumph. He links the exploits of the fathers to the exploits of their children. The old Leader is on the new road, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever.

“Jesus Christ, the same to-day!” Christ is not an anachronism. The passing of the centuries does not leave Him far behind. He is not a tale that is told. He is as modern as our most modern necessities. He is as original as the most novel circumstance. He is level with our immediate task. He keeps pace with the most startling and unexpected challenge. Nay, the promise of the word is even more than this; He not only keeps level with things, He goes before. He is always in front of the age. He is ever ahead with a more exacting call. As soon as we have grasped one achievement He is alway in front striding out toward another. There is no final goal in this Leader’s journeyings. He is ever ahead! “With the cross of Jesus going on before!” He is the same yesterday, and to-day and for ever.

“Jesus Christ to-day!” Is He ahead to-day? What is the challenge of to-day? And how does Christ Jesus meet it? Let us survey our circumstances. What do we see? We see a great and contagious awakening of the democratic spirit. The labouring man has been feeling out for his fellow-labourer, and in the grasp of his brother he has more than doubled his strength. The workman is emerging from his thraldom, and he is even now destroying the bulwarks of the feudalism in which he has so long been bound. He is asserting the dignity of his life, and he is proclaiming the royal prerogatives of manual toil. He is breaking up that heavy, unillumined, contemptuous word, “masses,” and he is showing that behind the huddled term there are fine instincts, and large capacities, and noble passions. The Caliban of centuries is giving powerful witness that he has essential kinship with Ariel. Demos is emerging from contempt and he is laying his hands upon his inheritance, and claiming his sovereign rights. The democratic spirit is breathing over the face of the land, and it is the moving air of a new day.

Well, in all this, is Christ Jesus left far behind? Is He only the shining apparition of yesterday, and has He vanished with His age? Or is He a Leader for to-day, and can we proclaim Him to democracy as the Pioneer of all pioneers in the exploration of larger fellowships and nobler fraternity? Was He only the Christ of yesterday, or is He also the Christ of to-day? Has He anything for democracy, or must democracy seek its treasure elsewhere? Let us look at Him. When He came among us to reveal the life and character of God, He housed His holy body in the narrow circle of a working-man. In His boyhood He donned the workman’s apron, and for thirty years, in a little market town, He served His fellows as the village carpenter. He was the bread-winner for a widowed mother, the eldest son of a large family. He knew the workman’s lot, and if He be now alive how can labour be to Him anything but something noble and venerable, and how can He regard the apron of the worker as anything but one of the robes of righteousness and one of the garments of salvation?

When He emerged from the workshop to establish His Kingdom He sought the nucleus of the fellowship among the working men. He chose twelve men, and He found the majority of them among the working class. He knew the stuff He chose. It was very awkward and difficult stuff. He sought to shape it, but it easily lost the shape in which He tried to fashion it. It was almost like giving a shape to water. But He knew the worth of the men, and He held on to them with indomitable patience. And in the long run He made out of these plastic workmen brave knights who could dare to challenge kings, and who could march as to a wedding to face the menace of death. “Having loved His own He loved them unto the end.” And if Christ Jesus is still alive, if He is the same to-day, does anyone doubt that He befriends the common toiler, and that He goes before him to prepare his ways?

But now watch this great Democrat. Examine His teachings. All His basal principles breathe the democratic spirit. His teaching spurns the established boundaries. It leaps across conventional gulfs, across the deep chasms which yawn between race and race, between class and mass, between sex and sex, and between sect and sect. Dip into His teachings where you please, and follow the breadth of its democratic inclusiveness. Take any commandment; who is outside the range of its decree? Or take any beatitude and trace the range of its orbit; who is omitted from the circle of its bounty? Or take any of the larger teachings which blaze like planets in the moral and spiritual firmament. Here is a little cluster of them and I would have you mark the amplitude of their range — all races and peoples are of equal sacredness; character is more important than talent; responsibility is measured according to endowment; neighbourliness is to be defined by the circle of necessity and not by the limitations of race; the success of life is to be measured by its secret fidelities and not by its popular triumphs. That is only a little handful of the principles of Jesus, and they are typical of all the rest, and I ask you what you think of their depth and comprehension, and how you regard the vigour of their democratic spirit. What labour leader to-day, what pioneer is in front of this Jesus in the vital proclamation of democratic worth?

And if you would have the consummation of democratic expression let me ask you to take this pregnant word of our Lord: “One is your Master, and all ye are brethren.” Who is ahead of that great word in spirit, and in vision, and in quest? Christ is the first and the greatest of all democrats, and if ours is the age when democracy us awaking, Christ is its anointed Leader and Pioneer. Christ thinks in terms of the world, and He would make men citizens of the universe. He answers this challenge of the age, for Christ Jesus is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. He is always going on before.

I will listen to another challenge which is to-day sounded loudly down every street of our national life: / mean the challenge of men who are seeking a richer material inheritance. We cannot turn our eyes without seeing the challenge, we cannot open our ears without hearing it. Men and women are everywhere reaching out for more of the life and comfort which can be found in material things. Do you wonder at it? We may perhaps have been irritated by the miners, and perhaps we have been repelled by their somewhat blind and selfish aggression. Have you ever spent even a couple of hours in the gloomy, clammy hole where the miner earns his daily bread? Have you seen him emerging from the mine, and especially have you seen him in old age with bowed body, bent out of natural shape and posture? Have you been into the miner’s house, which he has to call his home, a place which is often little better than the gloomy

241 place where he earns his bread? I do not wonder

that his hands are stretched out for more human

comforts and for a larger share in the fulness of

God’s bountiful world. And it is even so with

the docker. And it is even so with the factory

operative. They are seeking an escape from the

dull, grey monotony of daily circumstance. They

are seeking more of the world’s treasure, more of

its leisure, more of its pleasure. They want the

iron gate to be opened which imprisons their

youth. They want the heaviness to be lightened

which burdens their prime. They want the

menace to be taken out of old age, they want

their years to glide into,

An old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night.

Well, in all these challenging demands how fares it with the Christ? Is He away back in other days? Is He out of touch with grim necessity? Is His teaching an exhausted specific? Have all His goals been reached and left behind? Go into His life and look at Him. What is He doing? He is seeking life and joy for everybody, life and joy in widest commonalty spread. On every side He is opening out life’s possibilities, unveiling capacities which He wants all men to possess and exercise. You cannot think of this Christ as being satisfied with any condition which cramps life, and which sterilizes growth, and creates a dwarf. It is altogether incongruous to imagine Christ contented that a man’s life should be like a caged bird, or like some bleached and anaemic plant in a sunless cellar “I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” I know that the word is elemental, fundamental, and fontal. I know that this was the purpose of His coming, but I for one will draw no petty boundaries within which His treasure is confined. The aim of Christ is a man made whole, liberated to his full capacity in body, mind and soul. “He shall be like a tree planted by rivers of water.” That is the figure which His own inspired word offers to us as a fitting symbol — a healthy tree — a tree, rooted in ample resources, and reaching out on every side in symmetrical strength and beauty. Try to feel the energy of the figure, appreciate the grace of it, realize its every-sided loveliness, and then think of a miner, or of a fireman on a liner, or any typical workman at one of a hundred posts, and then tell me how far he is away from his inheritance purposed by his Lord. Let us fix the contrast in mind, the contrast between a nobly proportioned tree and a man denied his full development.

Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set He in the midst of them, And as they drew back their garment-hem For fear of defilement, “Lo, here,” said He, “The images ye have made of Me!”

Aye, but in His aim, and in His own spirit and reach, Christ is more than on a level with modern aspiration. If a workman says, “I am reaching out,” Christ reaches with him, and beyond the man’s reach, and He would pass through every darkening barrier into larger life and freedom. Verily, He is not only the Christ of yesterday, He is the Christ of to-day; Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

But I cannot stop here when I am reviewing the competency of the Saviour to meet the demands of to-day. We have been listening to the challenging cries of necessities which are ringing down our public streets. But there are necessities which do not march with banners, nor do they cry aloud at the corners of the streets, and they are all the mora profound because they move in secret. Better wages do not hold the clue to final freedom. Money itself is not the pledge of vital growth. A finer house may not make a nobler home. A bit of beautiful garden may not clothe its holder with moral strength and beauty. A man may add acres to his material inheritance and yet add nothing to his moral and spiritual stature. He may increase in goods while he himself is an arrested growth. There are necessities of deeper import than any I have named, and if these are ignored or unreached a man can never find his destined freedom. You may enrich a man as you please with material advantage, but after all the man is in bonds.

How then, is it with Christ and this imperious necessity? Is He up-to-date? Is He level with this exacting demand? Or does it leave Him far behind? Nay, He can deal with it. Deal with what? He can deal with sin, sin which lurks in the heart of a workman, and sin that hides in the heart of a peer. Sin? That is not a modern term. No, but it is a modern thing. I grant that if you search the labour papers through and through, or if you search the organs of the aristocracy, you will never find the word sin.

It is not allowed to show its face in print. It seems a troublesome word. Or it seems to be an obsolete word, about as insignificant as the word selah, and it is given no place in the busy vital currency of our modern terminology. Indeed, some of these papers tell us that the word is just a poor remnant of an old theological invention, and it is now justly relegated to a sort of museum, where rest the discarded remains of myth and legend. The thing itself is an unreal ghost which priests have conjured up, and it is being kept alive in priestly interests to disturb the souls of men.

But when any man, miner or peer, goes quietly and alone to the deep waters of his own soul, and gazes into their depths, he sees* something which is very real and which is the enemy of his peace. The term sin may mystify him, but he knows the thing it represents. He knows when an act of usurpation is committed in the soul. He knows when an unclean passion steals out of its lair and crosses the boundary line, and takes the throne. He knows what he ought to do with it. “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.” He knows when his inner life is dislocated. He knows when a crooked thing wriggles through his soul. He knows when the flag of rebellion is uplifted in the secret place. He knows when he defies God. Get a man quietly to himself, and whether he be a man with a pound a week, or a man with a hundred pounds a week, if his eyes be turned to the deeper things he will confess that there is sin in him, and there is guilt, and that these two have a momentum which holds his life in degrading course and currency.

Well, what about Jesus the Christ? When He faces this necessity is He up-to-date? Can He deal with it? Can He “cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart?” Yes, indeed He can. Can He cleanse the springs of passion? Yes, indeed He can. Can He change the climate of a temperament? Can He take a vagrant soul and bring it to its home in God? Yes, indeed He can. Can He purify and beautify a wasted spirit and set it on its throne? Yes, indeed He can. Jesus can give a man freedom where alone freedom has her royal seat. Christ’s freedom is freedom which means spiritual power. It is freedom which means moral force. Christ creates within a man a secret wealth of vitality which is like a well of water springing up into everlasting life, and in the amplitude of His moral resources all things become possible unto Him.

If Christ can do these wonderful things, and He can, and if we believe it, as we do, let us tell the world about it, let us speak with the same confidence, and with the same impatient eagerness which a man would use were he making known that he had found a perfect cure for cancer. I want a witness that will cut right through loitering ambiguities as a breeze from the mountains would disturb the stagnant air in a fusty room. I present the Christ to you as the Christ of to-day. He is the greatest of all democrats, far ahead of the boldest of all. He is the Pioneer in all human enlargement, with a programme bigger than all. And He is the incomparable Emancipator, descending into depths of secret bondage where no-one else can follow. I present Him to you, the Christ, as the Saviour of to-day — Christ Jesus, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

All hail the power of Jesu’s name,

Let angels prostrate fall,
Bring forth the royal diadem,

And crown Him Lord of all.

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