An Essay upon the Preaching of Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ was moved with compassion. There are no other words wliicli so expressively declare Ms power as a preacher. It would appear from New Testament history that Christian preaching is not a little indebted for its enduring and far-reaching influence to the pureness and intensity of its pathos. As God himself is love, His messages must be lovingly delivered if they are to tell upon the deepest life of mankind. That there is a pathos which is little more than physical sensibility is no argument against that true pathos which expresses emotionally all the highest thinking and keenest conviction of the intelj lect. Persuasion by logic may shut up the mouth of gainsaying without touching the viciousness of the moral life, but persuasion by love brings the heart into holy captivity, and burns with unquenchable fire the desires which move towards darkness and evil. There is no coldness in the preaching of Jesus Christ. AVhen He calls to repentance, the tones are more than vocal; the cry of pain broadens and softens into a voice of hopefulness and welcome, and men’s hearts know the voice by its shepherdliness, and by something in it which tells of care and home. Pathos is a universal language. What if preaching become but an angry contention with men who pride themselves in unbelief? Then it attempts to do with the hand what can be done only by the heart, and thus it puts itself to disadvantage where it might establish itself in gracious and beneficent victory. Christianity has, indeed, its great rocks of argument, but it has also pastures where the flock feeds, and woods where the birds make music. Few men can argue, all men can feel. Where one man has difficulties which are purely intellectual, ten thousand men have sorrows that lie beyond the province of logical analysis or solution. Jesus Christ spake the word of hope to the world’s heart. Now and again, indeed, (and herein He will be followed by every zealous minister) He dealt with special classes and particular difficulties, but the substance of His ministry belongs to all men through all time. When it is said that the common people heard Him gladly/ it is not to be understood that He was a preacher to a distinct class of the community; it is rather to be understood that His preaching i:ouched the common heart of the world,, and that man as man heard in His voice a tone absent from all other human speech. When Jesus Christ preached to Nicodemus the argument soon widened from the appeal made to ’a ruler in into the most universal and pathetic of all revelations —” God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

This universality came out of the compassionateness of Jesus Christs heart. He rules most who feels most. The preacher is to attempt a universal work; — the pastor the teacher the critic may do a work more special, yet of incalculable interest and importance. On going into the presence of a man who is preaching the Gospel, as Jesus Christ preached it, the hearer should soon become conscious that he is expected to take the deepest interest in the spoken word, and that he can only exclude himself from its influence by the most irrational and cruel self-suppression. Is it not possible for a preacher to speak almost wholly in an unknown tongue? When, in a miscellaneous conb2 gregation, he speaks of objective and subjective,”’ of the unconditioned and absolute/ and when lie uses such words as liypotliesis, psychology, phenomena, and cognoscibility, is he not talking something else than the language of Englishmen? Such words, proper enough and most convenient in a book, separate the preacher from the hearer at a time when the current of sympathy should be complete and strong. There IS but one cure for such mischief, — a purification and de&pening of yearning comjpassionateness over human sin, and jpain, and want. Where there is strong com-

passion, there will be simple speech. Love will not wait for a golden chariot of utterance, but will rush out in haste, and tell her story with all frankness and pathos. The preacher who tells his audience that he is about to point out the difference between intuitive and empirical morality does not speak the language of the race, but the jargon of a class. He may be a, philosopher, but he is no preacher. One of the first lessons he has to learn is the lesson of self-denial in the use of words: his tastes lie in the direction of difficult phrases, and those tastes must be put to death

/ before he can speak to such people as form the

majority of all congregations assembled for Christian

s purposes. The hearers of Jesus Christ often stumbled

at the doctrine, but when did they complain of the

hardness or obscurity of the mere words? In this, as

THE PREACHING OE JESUS CHRIS!. 5

in all else Jesus Christ says — ‘’ I have given you an j example/^ There is a language which is common property, and there is a language which belongs to a class. How rich is the speech which belongs to the whole world! Take examples: — Grod Truths Rights Wrong, Love, Peace, Faith, Trust, Hope, Light, Home, Rest, Joy, Life, Death, — a child can say such words, yet what man can tell all their meaning! The one sure remedy for the use of unprofitable words in the Christian pulpit is an increase of intelligent and genuine convpassionateness for the spiritual state of mankind. The presence of sin should wound, even to agony and bleeding, the heart of the Christian preacher; and, on the other hand, the presence of the love of God as seen in the life and work of his Son should move towards speech of entreaty and welcome unequalled for simplicity and gentleness.

Compassionateness must not be mistaken for weakness. There are tears of the heart as well as tears of the eyes. The compassionateness of Jesus Christ is seen quite as much in the fulness and emphasis of His doctrine as in the persuasiveness of His manner. Compassion first expounds and then pleads. When Jesus Christ welcomed men to the hospitality of God’s love, He carefully pointed out the nature and scope of that love; hence we have in the New Testament His wonderful statements and illustrations of doctrine. He uttered positive doctrines in a tender tone. He revealed the Father not as an Indicator but as a Son. It is at this point that Christian preachers are to enter into the mystery of His grace — they are to declare the Father not as devout speculators but as loving children. The Christian preacher must realize to himself the solemn fact that he has something to say which is perfectly distinct from the instruction given by the teachers of all other subjects, and that he is called upon to say it, not with petty dignity and self-admiring display, but with tenderness, unction, and all the importunity of love. The preacher who undertakes his work under the impulse of mere feeling will soon reach the end of his ministry. Where there is no depth of earth, the green blade will soon wither away; so where there is no substance of doctrine, the mere trick of emotion will speedily bring upon itself a destructive resentment.

The preaching of Jesus Christ was truly theological not in a formal but in a vital sense. It concerned itself deeply and eternally with God. The personality of God stands in the very centre of every discourse. When Jesus speaks of a kingdom, it is the Kingdom of Godj; when He pronounces a blessing, it is the gift of God; when He speaks of the greatest love. He calls it the love of God. Jesus did not lecture upon morals as a branch of philosophy. He found the source of morality in God, Wonderful, too, is the childlike familiarity with which God is treated in the ministry of Jesus Christ: He is the Father; He is mij Father; He is ijoiir Father; He is our Father. In Jesus Christs preaching, God is not an idea but a life, — not a point to reason from, but a living heart, a sanctuary and a refuge for all creatures, yet infinite in righteousness and terrible in judgment! This familiarity often gave strangeness, amounting even to mystery, to the preaching of the Saviour. His briefest sentences came with all the momentum of eternity. His plainest words pointed towards perspectives on which there lay rather a chastened glory than a concealing shadow. Men felt that such a preacher had but to look upward, and he would see God face to face! What is the God of the modern preacher? Is he a God nigh at hand or afar off? Is he the I WAS, or the I AM? Is he to be sought by long and oft-desponding prayer, or is he on our right-hand as a light and a defence all the day? Where the heart lays firm hold of God with every energy of its love, the lips will speak of Him in words which may shock the stranger, but which the child mil know as the sweet speech of home. Jesus Christ sets forth God as a man from whose flock of an hundred sheep one had gone astray; as a woman who had lost one of her ten pieces of silver; as a father who had been shamefully treated by one of his sous; as a liouseliolder who had been despised by his own servants; and as a king whose talent had been returned to him by an indolent hand. In this sense the preaching of Jesus Christ was intensely theological — it was suffused and glorified by the very life of God. Hence it was spiritual preaching directed to spiritual ends. It was nothing that men merely listened, they must be born again or the end was lost. It was nothing that men admired the miracles, they must themselves actually become miracles — miracles of regeneration — or they could not so much as see the Kingdom of God. It was nothing, either, that men had kept all the commandments from their youth up, if they had not attained to that last commandment of f all — the microcosm of all law — the spirit of Love. A! preacher’s idea of God will rule his whole ministry. This was so in the case of Jesus Christ; to Him God was a father, and therefore the Gospel was a message of peculiarly tender love j to Him God was also a King, and therefore under all love lay the eternal righteousness without which life would lose all its security, and the future all the brightness of hope.

Yet though spiritual, how vividly pictorial was the preaching of Jesus Christ! Earth and Heaven combined to simplify and enrich that ministry. Jesus Christ theologised everything. He found sermons everywhere. With what startling rapidity and completeness He dramatised human life! The old star- 1 making power by which He garnished the heavens reasserted itself in the parable-making power by which He lighted up a still higher firmament. “Never man spake like this man/“* The Prodigal will always find the way home again in the 15th chapter of Luke; the philanthropist will for ever see his very type in the good Samaritan j and the preacher will find the best report of his labours in the parable of the Sower who went forth to sow. All these and many more,, parables are as gates which open into the very Kingdom of Heaven. At these gates even little children have tarried until they have seen that the streets of the city beyond “are pure gold, as it were transparent glass.’’“‘Jesus Christ assigned imagination a high function in the Christian ministry. Imagination is to be the helpmeet of Faith, It will put” lily-work on the pillars of understanding, and show to Keason many things that are yet afar off. Parables are not to be ‘)nadbe as the goldsmith makes his jewel. They must be horn ’ in the soul if they would add the grace of life to the ( substance of doctrine. The parabolist is more than a miniature-painter; — like the poet he is “born not made,”’ and from those who would borrow of him he must not turn away.

In connection with all this depth of doctrine and vividness of illustration there is a peculiar sense of lo AN ESSAY UPON

domesticity about the preaching of Jesus Christ. It is marked by all the ease of conversation. Xot one of His discourses as regards its structure and tone, would have been out of place if addressed to one individual. The Sermon on the Mount might have been spoken at the fire-side, as the discourse to Nicodemus might have been spoken to a great throng. There is no higher attainment in eloquence than to speak to humanitij rather than to mobs and crowds of individuals. In listening to Jesus Christ you were not able to sink your personality in the common mass, for there was a power in His speech that came home to every hearer as if he had been the only man in the presence of the Speaker. The Pentecostal speech of Peter was evidently delivered to a great and most excited audience, and would have been absurd if spoken to one man; much the same may be said of PauPs speech on Mars Hill; but which of the discourses of Jesus Christ might not have been uttered to one person or a limited circle, if we except the cry on the last day — the great day of the feast, —” If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink y and why except even that, when every heart needs it as a special message to itself? But how can the preacher, who is prepared to copy the Master in this feature of His ministry, escape narrowness on the one hand and indignity on the other? To speak as if addressing one individual, may

THE PREACHING OF JESUS CHRIST, n

be to exclude the possible or actual wants of a great number. Undoubtedly so. But who was the one hearer to whom Jesus Christ preached? It was in an. That was the secret of His power. He spoke to human I nature, and in so doing. He spoke to something (how-( ever depraved and enfeebled) that was in every heart ) that came near Him. And how to escape indignity? For as there is a difference between the chaffering swallow and the immortal lark/^ so there is a difference between the feebleness of gossip and the ease of con-/ versational eloquence. A right notion of human nocture will save the Christian speaker from indignity. One man will be to him humanity, and humanity will be as the defaced image of God. Peter spoke to “men and. brethren,” and Paul to ^’’men, brethren, and fathers/^ but, without such oratorical introductions, Jesus Christ s immediately addressed Himself to man. We, indeed, are not at liberty to waive the courtesies which may conciliate attention, but the sooner we get to the heart of our work, the better will it be for those who hear us.

But ‘^ Jesus needed not that any should testify of man,. for He knew what was in man,” what preacher can say that of himself? Not one. Still, human nature may ‘” - be studied, and the range and keenness of spiritual in- / sight may be increased. Every man may study himself

I heart thoroughly, has a key that will help him in the

I study of all others. A look inward is the best look

outward, when the light is from Heaven and the eye is

j directed by the Spirit of God. In all human speech

j there is surely no language so exasperating and so

/ mocking as the language of a man who preaches

religion without human sympathy, and who utters the

truth of God without having first passed it through the

’ experience of his own heart. On this matter there is,

ha23pily, much wisdom in all congregations. “There

is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty

giveth him understanding.-” The voice of the stranger

is easily distinguished from the voice of the shepherd;

and the great, sad, wounded heart of mankind soon

turns away from the fluent vocalist in whose tones there

is no sigh of brotherliness or sympathy.

Whether the preaching of to-day is not in danger of becoming a controversy or an art, is an inquiry which need not be regarded as offensive. That there is a small but influential literary party whose object is to encroach upon the province of Christian preaching, admits of no doubt; and the danger is that the Christian preacher should keep too conspicuously in view some of the most irritating aspects of that encroachment. What will be the consequence? The consequence will probably be, reference, more or less indistinct, to controversies of which the majority of congregations know nothing, tnumpliant answers to persons who will never hear them and a gradual but sure and fatal allurement from the affirmative and spiritual truths which are the very life of a Gospel ministry. The great bulk of the people assembled for Christian worship have just escaped from the entanglements and cares of a fretful week and are therefore, in no mood for a mere war of words as between combatants who would be better men if they had less leisure and more sorrow. The people (exceptions being allowed) come up to the house of prayer and rest to ask, what are God’s messages to the sinful, the faithless, the broken-hearted, and the weary? They come to” worship and bow down and kneel before the Lord our Maker.’’^ This, at all events, should be assumed by the Christian preacher, if he would carry with him the most eager interest of such men as know best the pain of the souFs thirst and the emptiness of every earthly well. By taking another course he may make himself the favourite minister of a few, but by this deeper service he will become the messenger of God to multitudes whose life oscillates between the not remote points of mystery and pain. The people will understand his tones where they cannot follow him in his words; and even when his imagination bears him out of their sight, they will feel quite sure that he will come back with a gift which will add to their hope and strength. The preacher must be allowed the right of excursion into fields unknown to many who listen to him, for as the Son of Man was in Heaven even whilst he was upon earth, so the true preacher must, in the course of his plainest utterances, show himself no stranger to the awful eternity which elevates and chastens the meanest of our lives.

The true preacher has nothing to fear from any rivalry, for the human voice has no adequate substitute. Even a gospel written is not equal to a gospel spoken. The heart will not disdain any instrument of expression, but the instrument which it loves with all its love is the human voice, — all instruments in one, and all inspired. To some, indeed, all voices are alike, but so also are all colours, all lights, all landscapes; their spirituality is at zero, and what life they have is mainly in the blood. Jesus Christ said preach the Gospel, and thereby He gave the human voice a special function in the service of His redeeming purposes. What if the vocal powers be in reality spiritual rather than physical? That they are capable of intense spiritual excitement is evident both in music and in speech, and none will deny that a tone will convey a meaning which can never be properly expressed in symbols. Preach the Gospel — preach it with all the tunefulness of ever-varying experience, and specially with the compassionateness of Him who was himself the Gospel of Ood.