Individual and Collective Humanity

“Jesus then lifted up his eyes and saw a great company.” — JOHN vi. 5.

THE sight of a crowd of human beings always is impressive. The crowd may be of any sort and gathered on any occasion. It may be a great, rapt multitude listening together to exalted and exalting music. It may be a mob, wild and tumultuous with passion. It may be an army marching like one great, marvellous machine, to meet the enemy. It may be the chance gathering of passengers whom some accidental obstruction has stopped upon the street. Whatever be its cause, it is a crowd; and it is interesting to any truly human soul that stands and watches it. It is not simply for the special thoughts which it suggests. It is not Xerxes weeping at the sight of the army of which in a few years no man will be left alive. It is not so definite as that. It is the general sense of human life, the very essence of this mysterious and mighty thing, apart from particular conditions, apart from curious speculations upon it. It is the fact of life laid on the heart of the living man that makes the interest of a great crowd. A sensitive child will feel it. It is in some sense the personal impression broadened and deepened and richened; but there is also something in it which no contact with the individual produces, — a pure impression of humanity, as if you were able to extricate from all its entanglements the one essential, universal quality which makes a man a man; and, making it concrete and visible, yet preserving all the broadness of abstraction, to hold it before your eyes and let it impress itself upon your heart. This is the general impressiveness of a crowd. But, no doubt, the impression cannot be uniform. It must vary with the character of the observer, of the human being upon whom the impression falls. In the words of my text, Christ is the Observer. He has crossed the sea of Tiberias with His disciples. He is sitting on a hillside of the Eastern country. He has been pondering, and perhaps praying. By and by He lifts up His eyes and sees a great company. The multitude whom He left beyond the lake has followed Him across, and He is face to face with them again. He cannot escape from men. Then He accepts them into His life and deals with them. And we can feel, I think, that as they impress themselves on Him we are getting, as it were, the largest and truest impression which humanity has ever made on man. That which I tried to say just now of the essential life making itself known, must have been more real with Jesus Christ than with any other watcher of his fellow-men that ever lived; for here was Man in His completeness receiving men in their completeness. More and more we come to see that this was what the Incarnation meant. It was the Son of man, in whom the whole of all the life of man was gathered up, who sat and watched the multitude and first realized Himself in them, and then knew them in Himself as they had never been known before.

Let us think for a while about Christ looking upon a crowd of men. And first, let us try to see the picture which is in the words with which the scene is introduced to us. It is an old Bible phrase, one that recurs very often in the Bible story, in which the Saviour is described as “lifting up his eyes” to see the people. The picture is of a man sitting with his eyes bent down. He is in thought and contemplation. He is seeing with the inward sight. He is seeing the invisible. He is looking at truth. He is questioning Himself. So sitting, Jesus is the type of all introspection and meditation and study, of all that occupation of mankind which is turned away from active human life and is dwelling on the unseen things. We recognize at once the quiet, absorbed Figure on the hillside.

Do we not also recognize at once the quick response with which, in answer to the bustling feet of the approaching crowd, Christ turns and looks up, and listens and is ready for them, and gives Himself in answer to their claim. He is theirs. No self-indulgence, even in the deepest thought or highest vision, even in prayer to His Father, must make Him deaf or blind to human life appealing to Him and requiring His help. Therefore He lifts up His eyes.

Could the conditions and obligations of our human life be more vividly set forth than here? There is no study or dream, no meditation or prayer, which must not hold itself subject to the demand of men. It is not simply that the dream or study is less important, and must sacrifice itself when the human need requires; it is more than that. It is that the study and the dream need for their ‘rectification and fulfilment this readiness to report themselves to man and his nature. They must justify and know themselves before the face of human life looking to them out of its anxieties and hopes.

The illustrations of this are everywhere. Philosophers study and ponder to adjust their system of the universe to man. They cannot, they must not, be satisfied with their systems till they have lifted up their eyes and seen the “great company.” Will their philosophy watch the world and explain it? they ask themselves. Can they tell man what his life is, and how to live it? The abstract student of political science must sooner or later see before him men waiting to be governed. The military theorists must tell how this especial battle is to be fought and won. The medical inquirer must know that there is sickness crying out to be cured. The theologians must be aware of eager souls appealing to them with the pathetic question, “What must I do to be saved?” The safety of man, the rescue of the thinker from the perils of his thought, the assurance that the farthest and deepest shall always be at the service of the immediate and pressing, lies in this readiness of all true men to lift up their eyes and see the “great company.”

There are students and dreamers and theorists enough who are not ready. Sometimes their absorption and irresponsiveness makes other men rudely and crudely denounce all meditation and speculation, and say that the far-off heavens shine only for their own luxury, and have no light to give to the darkened earth. But such vexation is slight and temporary. The crowd looks to the scholar and the dreamer and the saint, and does not look in vain. It is a history full of instruction and encouragement that He who saw the deepest vision and prayed the holiest prayer was the very first to turn away from both, to lift up His eyes and see the multitude, and love them, and come down to break for them the bread of life.

But let us, before we come directly to the thought of how Christ looked upon the crowd, consider somewhat more fully what the sight of a host of his fellow-beings may be to any man who looks them in the face. May it not be summed up by saying that a crowd may be to any man a mirror into which he looks and sees what he is, and what he ought to be.

There is, first, the revelation of what a man is which comes to him in the presence of a crowd. I mean of what he is essentially, intrinsically, behind and separate from the countless accidents of his existence and the peculiar characteristics of his lot. This belongs with what we saw of the power which a great crowd has to present essential and absolute humanity to our minds. Facing that great presentation, many things which are not essential drop off and fall away. You go out from your individual life, from your self-absorbed existence, and stand face to face with a great host of your fellow-men, and as you stand there (have you not felt it?) all that is really human in you throbs with vitality. It is alive with sympathy, while that which is not human manifests its weak vitality and begins to die. Your artificialnesses are exposed. You feel what shams your shams are, how selfish are your selfishnesses. Thus you see yourself in the mirror.

In the same mirror, in the face of the same crowd, you see also what you ought to be. For, along with the sense of how thoroughly your humanity is one with that of the crowd on which you look — not interfering with it, but increased and deepened by it, — there is the other sense of how distinct your life is from the lives of all these men. You are a separate being. There are some things which specialize in you the universal human life. The gifts and endowments which you possess become real to you; all the privileges of your life grow clear. You are entirely unable to be proud of them. They are yours for the sake of this multitude. They become the personal expression of the universal life, bound to restore themselves in service to those human necessities which look into your face with their appeal out of this one great face of the crowd.

I think that no man of true sensitiveness has come forth from his studies and contemplations into the storm and host of human living, without this becoming his revelation. He was himself for all of these. They claimed all that he was and had. If he was rich when they were poor, it was their riches that he held. If he was wise when they were ignorant, it was their wisdom. Who was it that had made him to differ? Even the Father who had first made him one with them. And so humility and responsibility, which are so often in contention and stand apart from one another, meet in the heart of the true man who stands face to face with the crowd of his fellow-men.

It is these things, then, which all true men find, and which Jesus Christ, we cannot doubt, found in the presence of a multitude, — self-revelation and noble impulse — these two together. When He saw the gathering in the Temple at the time of the journey which He made there in His boyhood, when He looked upon the host who were waiting for their baptism at Jordan, when He came down from the mountain and found the crowd waiting in the plain, when He preached in the thronged synagogue at Capernaum, when He walked the streets of Jerusalem or stood in the courts of the great Temple, — everywhere these two things were taking place: He was knowing how truly He was one with man, and He was feeling that that in Him which was more than man was being claimed by the human need. The woods and mountains could not do these things for Him; therefore He turned from mountains and woods to the places where men were.

We cannot picture Christ to ourselves as a mere dreamer. The Oriental standard of the holy man — the mystic sitting in rapt, useless meditation year after year — wholly fails in Him. The nature-worshipper, listening to what the trees and streamlets have to say, drinking in, after our modern notion of him, the unarticulated wisdom of the clouds and the flowers, — that is not the Jesus of the Gospels, the Jesus of the Christian faith. He is a man of men. Any day the murmur of a crowd will draw Him from the silence of the hillside. For the deep know ledge of Himself and the impulse of service pour into Him out of the eager faces and the pictures of suffering and joy which throng upon Him.

These are the elements out of which character is made. And so it is in presence of the world, in contact with the world, that character has birth. This was the truth which Goethe taught, the truth of a talent shaping itself in stillness, but a character in the activity of life. It is character, not talent, for the lack of which the world suffers. It is be cause of too little character, not because of too little talent, that the careers of human beings come to wreck. Therefore that which makes character must always be the true salvation of mankind. Therefore man, and not nature, is the true school of Human Life.

With this general truth concerning Christ’s relation to the multitude of men clear in our mind, we are prepared to go on and speak of two or three of the special effects which it produced in Him. And the first which I ask you to observe is this: the perfect mingling of respect and pity in the way in which He felt about mankind. It would be useless to deny that pity, as we ordinarily know it, has in it almost always a mixture of contempt. It is not respectful to the nature of the man whom it pities.

That is the reason why it is resented almost as if it were insulting. “Do not pity me,” the proud man cries. “Neglect me if you will; abuse me, but do not pity me.” It is not simply that pity declares of necessity the misfortune of him on whom the pity is bestowed. That is inevitable. It is that pity, as we give it, seems to interpret and comment on misfortune. It seems to say that the man must be not worth much who could come to this. It seems to set the pitier over against the pitied in an assertion of superior desert.

Your friend has passed into some one of the great clouds of sorrow which darken the houses and the hearts of men. You, from outside the cloud, radiant with the sunshine of prosperity, speak in to him and tell him how you pity him. Do you not know the feeling of suspense with which you listen to hear how he will receive your words? Do you not know how hard it is, first to keep, and then to make him know that you keep, a true respect for him through all his suffering; and that there is no slightest latent spark of the consciousness of superiority in the commiseration which you offer him? The Book of Job, with the supercilious comfort of the prosperous friends, repeats itself in countless homes of sorrow.

It is the absolute absence of all this in Jesus Christ which makes the wonder of His life. There is never a touch of contempt in His dealing with distress. When He touches the blind man’s eyes and gives him sight; when He steps across the threshold of the dead girl’s chamber; when, by the Pool of Bethesda, He probes the intention and desire of the sick man’s soul; when He calls to the buried Lazarus at Bethany; — everywhere, do you not feel the infinite and exquisite reverence which is in His touch and His voice for the human nature to which His word is spoken, or on which His hand is laid?

It is not merely that Christ is a sufferer Himself. It is not merely that He is poor, and so is in special sympathy with poverty and distress. That would make Him the friend of a class, almost the partisan of a party among men — the party of the wretched and distressed. It is something larger and deeper than that. It is the reverence of the Lord of human nature for the human nature which He rules, — nay, of the Creator of man for the man whom He created. Who knows the wonder and mystery of the organ like the man who built it, who piled pipe on pipe, each with its capacity of various sound? And so, who is it that shall touch the jarred and untuned organ, and call it back to harmony, like him in whose soul the organ’s primitive and ideal harmony forever dwells, and to whom all its discord and disorder is a sadness and a shame?

Therefore it is that Jesus Christ pities not merely the sorrow and the poverty which He knows by fellow-feeling, by being sorrowful and poor himself. He pities far more the sin and meanness and moral misery which He knows by its contrast with His own soul, and its departure from that purpose of human nature which lies always in the depths of His divine and human soul. He pities sorrow, but He pities sin far more. Pilate and Herod and Judas and the

Pharisees, — these are the truly pitiable creatures of the earth for Him. And yet, even for them the reverence is not lost in the pitifulness. The mystery and richness of their human nature still abides behind their cowardice and selfishness. Can you not feel it in the marvellous loftiness and courtesy of that conversation at the judgment seat? Does it not tremble even in the simple words with which, at the Last Supper, the Lord dismisses the traitor to his dreadful work?

The work of the Gospel on the soul which it saves, bears the conclusive witness of the respect which mingles with the pity which is the power of salvation. Where is the soul, rejoicing in the work which Christ has done for it, that has not wondered when it saw how the very visitation of Divinity which made its sin manifest, and bowed it down with penitence, also made manifest its preciousness, and opened visions of its possible attainment! You knew how you needed salvation when you met Christ. You knew how worth saving you were when you met Christ. The awe which a soul feels before itself as its spiritual capacity is being revealed in its conversion, — what is it but the reflection and echo of the reverence which is in the heart of Christ for the soul which He is saving by His grace?

What the soul feels the world feels. There is a certain insolence in most reformers. It hinders the triumphs of reform. It sullies the splendor of much of the noblest progress which the world has made. The leader stands before the host, and bids them to the battle almost with a taunt and a jeer. There is nothing of that in Christ. There is a profound reverence for the army which He leads. Therefore the army has followed Him as it has followed no other captain. And when He leads it into its final victory, the victory will be sure.

Let me pass on to another impressive point in the way in which Christ looks at the crowd of men. It is something which we feel rather than see; but I do not think that we can be mistaken regarding it. It is the way in which the individual and the combined life do not hinder, but help each other, to His mind. To us the individual loses himself in the crowd, and we cannot find him. A new being — the multitude — takes his place. We cannot think that it was so with Jesus. We are sure that, to Him, each person in the crowd remained distinct, in spite of the host by whom He was surrounded.

Nay, more than that, are we not sure that the person was more distinct because of the host in whose midst his life was set? There was one token of this being so in one event of Christ’s life. Do you remember where the poor Syrian woman crept up and laid a timid finger on His robes, and, when Christ recognized and owned it, His disciples almost rebuked Him with their surprise? “Master, the multitude throng Thee and press Thee; and sayest Thou, who touched me?” The blurring of the single face in the great sea of faces, the loss of the one in the many, the sacrifice of personality to society, — all this, with which we are familiar, we think of as wholly absent from the life of Jesus Christ. When the great company came pouring up the hill upon the other side of Gennesaret, it was as a whole, making each part of which it was composed more vividly distinct, that Jesus saw the advancing multitude when He “lifted up His eyes.”

We wrestle with the problem of socialism and individualism, the problem of the many and the one; and we wonder which of the two must be sacrificed to the other, which of the two shall ultimately overcome the other arid remain the triumphant principle of human life. Let us be sure that to Christ, to God, there is no problem. Let us be sure, therefore, that in the end it shall not be by the victory of either over the other, but by the perfect harmo nizing of the two, that the perfect condition of human life shall be attained. When society shall be complete, it shall perfectly develop the freedom of the individual. When the individual shall be perfect, he will make in his free and original life his appointed contribution to society.

Therefore — and here is what it is good for us to remember — it is not by elaborate plans for the building of the social structure; nor, on the other hand, by frantic assertions of personal independence; but by patiently and unselfishly being his own best self for the great good of all, that every man best helps the dawning of the Golden Age. Many a patient and unselfish worker is making valuable contribution to the great end who never dreams of what he is doing. Every man makes such a contribution who looks upon the crowded swarm of human life as Christ looked upon it; neither losing the man in the multitude, nor the multitude in the man; neither letting the forest drown the trees, nor letting the trees dissipate and destroy the forest.

Sometimes, when for a moment we catch the view of Christ and share His vision, there comes great clearness into our spiritual experience, and that which has sometimes been the source of confusion and obscurity becomes the fountain of enlightenment and strength. Do you not know how, sometimes, it is because of the countless multitude of souls that the experience of each soul grows vague and unreal? In such a host does the great Captain know and care for every soldier? Does God feed and guard and educate me, individually, when all these millions are His children? Does the Holy Spirit bring His special gift to this one nature among all the innumerable natures which must have His grace? And at the last, shall this one little life, which goes trembling out of this familiar existence through the vast door of death, be surely kept sacred, and separate, and precious, and imperishable in the great world of life beyond? These are the haunting questions which beset our souls. Where are the answers to them, except in this which we believe to have been true of Jesus Christ, — that the more men there were, the more clearly did each man stand out distinct to Him who knew and loved them all. The crowd intensified and not obscured the individual.

Let that truth of the Incarnation be true in all the care of God for man, and does not our anxiety — what is sometimes almost our terror — pass away? Because I am one among millions of needy souls, the Holy Spirit shall the more surely find me with my own peculiar food. Because no man can number the immortal, therefore my immortality is the more certain, and He who keeps all spirits will keep mine. With such assurance I look up and face the overwhelming multitude of life, and am not overwhelmed, but filled with buoyant faith and carried onward as on a flood of strength.

One other impression of the “great company” upon the mind of Jesus, I may allude to in a few words. He must have been filled, as He looked at them, with a sense of danger, and a sense of hope together. Danger and hope, so it would seem, be long together in this world where we are now living. Sometime a world may come where hope may be conceived entirely apart from danger; but now and here, when man looks far ahead and dares to anticipate great things, the certainty that great evil as well as great good may come starts up at once and will not be forgotten. It started up to Christ, and He never tried to forget it. No eyes ever saw more distinctly than His eyes saw the peril of human life. He read it in every human face. He had learned it in the temptation in the wilderness. Only, be cause He was God and knew the evil to be weaker than the good, He always kept the hope behind and within the danger. Because man had in him the power to be this dreadful thing, therefore he also had in him the power to be this splendid thing. I know that, if we had been in Jerusalem, and had met the blessed Saviour in the street, we should have read all this in His features: the fear and hope together, the hope intensified by the fear, but always conquering it and making Him eager to call every human creature with the invitation of the divine Love, whose might He knew.

Shall we not see all that in His face as He looks at us? We have not begun to know our danger as He knows it. He is anxious for your soul as you never began to be. But He hopes for you as you never hoped for yourself. Let His hope take possession of you! Lift up your heart and know, as He knows, how perfectly you can be saved!

Thus, then, it is that Jesus Christ looks upon the crowded world: with reverence and pity; with the sight of the whole and also the recognition of the single life; with the sense of danger and the sense of hope. The result of it all, in Him, is that glorious consecration of His whole Being to the world, by which He is its Saviour. Let us see mankind as nobly as He does, and we shall be consecrated like Him; and in some true, deep, blessed way, we shall share His Saviourship, — perhaps by the sharing of His Cross, but we shall share His Saviourship. What more could man ask than that?