Christ’s Charity to the Wavering
‘© When he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped Him, and cried with a loud voice, What have I to do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of the most high God! I adjure Thee by God, that Thou torment me not.” — Mark v. 6, 7.
HAT a strange contradiction in conduct!
A man is so eager to meet Jesus that he actually runs to Him from a far distance and worships Him as the Son of God! And yet immediately afterwards this same man is distressed by the possibility of contact with the Divine, and would give worlds to get away! How are we to account for this inconsistency! But is it inconsistency? I think not. The man had two lives in him, and each life was consistent with himself; the human personality said one thing, and the foreign spirit said another. We all have these two lives in us as well as the demoniac. We have a life which is all our own and we have a life
which has come to us from our ancestors.
Often these lives pull different ways. Often is the one crying, “Jesus, Thou Son of God!” while the other is exclaiming, “I adjure Thee that Thou torment me not!” I have seen a young man of the most noble impulses manifest a genuine horror of Church fellowship. His own impulse was to run to Christ; but there was a tendency in him not his own — a hereditary weakness — the love of alcohol. The ery of the hereditary spirit was opposed to the cry of the man. The hereditary spirit felt that, if Christ came in, 7¢ must go out — go out with a great rending; it dreaded the rending and therefore it deprecated the Christ. But I want to point out that of these two voices Jesus answered the nobler one. He accepted the man in spite of his double cry. He accepted the man although the ignoble voice was the later voice, although the choice of the evil appeared last upon the scene. On what ground could He do that? On one ground only — that there is something in the human soul for which it is not chargeable, not responsible. He looked at the man apart from his surroundings. He separated, in thought, the pure aspirations of the individual soul from the corruptions it had derived from the air; and the verdict He pronounced was this, “The aspiration is the man.”
O Lord, I admire and reverence the exceeding kindness of Thy love. How few of us would have accepted such a halting approach! We should all have said, “The last state of the man is worse than the first; we will not let him in.” Not so Thou. Thou receivest not only sinners, but what is worse — lapsed Christians. It is not good to be impervious to beauty; but to have seen the beauty and to have then gone back to ugliness — that is sad indeed. Yet even to such Thou hast opened Thy doors, O Lord. Many there be that have run to Thee from afar and yet recoiled from the close pressure of Thy hand. Did I not see them in the Garden with Thee! Couldst Thou have any fellowship with those who could meet Thee in the Garden and shun Thee in the judgment-hall! If they who ran to greet me in the morning fled from me at night, I would never speak to them again. But Thou art not like me. Thou hast accepted the first voice as the true voice. Thou hast attributed the after-failure to another spirit — a foreign spirit. Thou hast judged me by my early song. My voice hast Thou heard “in the morning,” O Lord. Thou hast not measured me by the afternoon — when heart and flesh are weary with the burden and heat of the day. Thou hast taken my trill for my triumph, my desire for my deed, my will for my work, my cry for my conduct, my flower for my fruit, my dawn for my day, my faith for my following, the sigh of my heart for the service of my hand. Marvellous to me has been Thy mercy, O Lord.