The Line of Transition

I have now traced the course of Jesus down one half of the Pauline ladder. You will remember how Paul describes it — as a descent from the mount to the valley. We have followed, so far, the steps of this process. We have seen Jesus begin by ‘emptying Himself’ of all conscious power — consenting to be led blindfold by the Father’s will. We have seen Him begin His mission standing on the height with only a vague and undetailed view of the work before Him — taking, indeed, the form of a servant, but as yet rather of the angel than of the man. Then we beheld Him in the likeness of man — inaugurating a league of pity and training its members for the field. At last, where we now stand, we see Him in what Paul calls ‘the likeness of men’ — of ordinary,

working, struggling men, In the intercourse: $11 with that multitude in the desert of Bethsaida. He meets with humanity on its secular side. Instead of insisting that they shall rise to Him, He goes down to them, and breaks to them the bread of communion on their own ground. The first stage of that communion is now complete; Jesus has entered into fellowship with the secular world. Its second and higher stage is still to come; the secular world must enter into fellowship with Jesus.

The opening of this second period is the real beginning of the life of the Man of sorrows, for it is the lifting of man’s moral as distinguished from his physical burdens; it is Christ’s bearing of human sin. It will, when it comes, be an experience foreign to Jesus. It will be more foreign to Him than the sorrows of the desert multitude. To commune with the physically toiling, to be in contact with the physically laden, was not alien to the soul of Jesus; but to be in contact with evil was. When this second period comes it will reveal to Jesus a new experience; it will overshadow the ideal of His approaching kingdom. The.

point is one of such deep significance that I should like to dwell upon it for a moment.

Jesus had in His soul the ideal of a future kingdom. I think this ideal blazed out more brightly after the success of the first mission. I have no doubt whatever that to the human soul of Jesus there was present at this time the hope of a near realisation; this is the view of most religious thinkers, and particularly of the most evangelical. I have no doubt that, as He stood in the desert of Bethsaida, and surveyed the first act of Christian communion, there swam before His eyes the prospect of a kingdom not only to be realised on earth but to be realised in His own visible presence. He had come to give His life to the Father in whichever way it might be demanded, nay, He was giving His life now. But why should not the result of this /zvzmg surrender be the establishment of a kingdom of righteousness, a kingdom which He Himself should remain to build, and whose glory He should witness with His earthly sight?

So Jesus asked Himself. He asked Himself that question in spite of the labour and the ladenness which He saw in the desert. One would think the sight of the toiling multitude would have dispelled so near a prospect. So it would, if Jesus had looked upon life’s physical burdens as incompatible with His kingdom. But He did not. It did not occur to Him that these must be abolished to make room for the reign of righteousness. On the contrary, His promise of rest to the sou, implied that the coming of the kingdom need not wait for their abolition. The reign of righteousness was to be manifested precisely in the support of those physical burdens from which the reign of wzrighteousness had recoiled. Jesus is never weary of emphasising the inwardness of His kingdom. It is at the root of every parable — the sower, the leaven, the mustard-seed, the pearl. If anything is certain in the world it is that, in the view of Jesus, the coming of the kingdom of God had to wait for no external condition. Its coming was to be ‘without observation,’ and therefore it was to be independent of outward things.

But was it to be independent also of inward things? No; and here lay the possibility for an interrupted ideal. The kingdom was not to be alien to the continuance of human Zo7/, but it was to be alien to the continuance of human sin. For, what was this kingdom which glittered in the eyes of Jesus? Was it a hereditary monarchy? Was it a republic? Was it a democracy? No, it was none of. these — or rather in one sense it was all of them, It was a community in which men were to start equal, inasmuch as all former grounds of distinction, without being superseded, were to be deemed irrelevant. But by and by the highest type of character was to come to the front, and rule by moral influence. Starting from the level of a spiritual democracy, the best men were to rise to the surface, and reign; and their power was to be proportioned to their excellence. Paul says, in speaking of the resurrection life, ‘Every man shall rise in his own order.’ Where did he get that? From a heavenly vision? No, from a verbal or written record of the earthly teaching of Jesus.

He got it from the parables — from the seed that bore in different degrees, from the talents that received their respective rewards. The kingdom of Jesus was to be a kingdom whose thrones and principalities and powers were to be filled by the different grades of the life of sacrifice, The men dead to self — ‘the dead in Christ ’ — were to rise first. The least were to be the greatest. The humanitarian souls were to lead in the van. They were to lead because they had most power to bend. They were to be appointed judges of the world’s sin because they were at the head of the league of pity. Jesus Himself declared that His right to sit on the throne of judgment was to rest upon the fact, not of His supernaturalness, but of His intense intimacy with the weakness of human nature: ‘The Father hath given Him authority to execute judgment because He is the Son of Man,’

Now, it requires no prophet to see that if ever Jesus is to be wounded it will be here. If ever He is to make the transition from the man of joy to the man of sorrows, it will be through this ideal of the kingdom. I call this ideal of the kingdom the transition line between the Christ who fed the multitude and the Christ who hung on the cross. If Jesus had merely aspired to be’ a benefactor, He might have reaped on earth perpetual joy. But that was only one half of the aspiration of Jesus. He had been appeasing the hunger of the multitude, and the thought had given Him joy. But He, too, was hungry, thirsty. There was a part of His nature which earth had not satisfied, which was as much the desert to Him as Bethsaida was to them. He longed for the day when the relation between Him and the multitude should be reversed. At present He was the giver and they were the receivers; He yearned for the time when they should be the givers and He the receiver. He had communed with them on their own ground; He wanted them to commune with Him on His ground, He was seeking a kingdom — a kingdom in which the good should be paramount and the bad subordinate. What if the good should not be found? What if the bad should so outnumber them that a kingdom would be im- possible? Would not this be the solitude of — the Son of Man? In His deepest nature Jesus had always been alone; no disciple had as yet become a companzon. But He had been cheered by the prospect of a City of God, of voices harmonious with His own. If that prospect should fade, if these voices should cease to sound in the ear of hope, Jesus must be wounded in His innermost heart — His ideal of a broken solitude,

Now, even where we stand, the first sight of a cloud appears. It is a little cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand; but what startles us is the fact that we have seen it before. As we look closer we remember where we have seen it; it was in the first desert — the desert of temptation. There Jesus had received the suggestion of raising a kingdom by force. Here that suggestion is repeated. It comes as the direct result of the great communion miracle. The multitude had received miraculous bread, and they had received it from the hand of Jesus; they had been recognised as a social factor, ‘They were exultant, they were enthusiastic; and they expressed their enthusiasm in a very drastic manner. They suggested an outward revolution. They would make Jesus a temporal king; they would put Him on the throne of David; they would revive the glories of the ancient Jewish line. That proposal closed the day of triumph with an hour of sadness, In the thought of Jesus, it emptied the desert in a moment; He felt suddenly alone. And because He /e/t alone He desired to Je alone. He withdrew into the solitude of the mountains, What was the cause of His sadness? Was it because the multitude desired something which He did not desire? No; but because the thing which they desired showed how little they were in sympathy with His real purpose. He felt alone amid the crowd because the ideal of the crowd was miles distant from /7zs ideal. There is no loneliness like the separation in sympathy — the solitude of the soul. Five thousand may be in contact with your hand — as they were with the hand of Jesus in the desert ef Bethsaida; but if they are not in contact with your ideal, if they do not love what you love, the desert of Bethsaida remains a desert still.

I call this withdrawal of Jesus into the mountain solitude the crossing of the transition line. It is the first distinctive step in His passage to the cross. From the communion of the desert to the communion of the upper room is a path of ever-deepening sorrow brightened only by one or two partial gleams, It is a path of increasing sorrow because it is a path of increasing solitude. From this time the crowd begins to melt away. It is the period when He is ‘found in fashion as a man’ — a battered, broken, wayfaring man. Men had expected to find a king; here they ask, ‘Where are the signs of royalty!’ From this time forth I date the beginning of the change from the man pressed by the crowd to the man who trod the winepress alone.

Singularly enough, immediately after the scene in the desert, the historian puts upon the canvas a picture which, to my mind, bears the stamp of the change. The impression is all the more remarkable because the attitude ascribed to Jesus is apparently one of triumph. In the dead of night He is seen issuing from His mountain retreat and walking alone upon the sea. As our eye meets that strange apparition, what is the thought registered in our hearts? If a preacher were asked to deliver a sermon embodying what the scene symbolises, what would its moral be? The majesty of Jesus? The power of Jesus? The fearless calm of Jesus? I do not think it would be any of these. To my mind, the overmastering suggestion would be the solztude of Jesus. To be alone on the sea must be the acme of loneliness; to be alone on the sea at the dead of night must be solitude personified. One man out of the mass of humanity attempts to come to Him; it is Peter Bar-Jona, ‘Lord, if it be Thou, bid me that I come to Thee on the water’; but even fe falters, and, instead of bringing a companion’s strength, requires to be himself supported. Leaving in abeyance that supernatural element which lies beyond my subject,

and keeping the eye purely on the picture as it has been painted, I see in this narrative a prelude, a foreshadowing. It is the anticipation in miniature of what is to be unfolded through many experiences. To Him there are indeed coming the watches of a night in which He is to walk upon a lonely sea, in which He is to come into contact with depths that none can share. The Son of Man walking alone upon the sea by night may be a spectacle of majesty, but it is the majesty of a solitary grief that sinks not beneath its flood of waters,

And yet, this second period, this period of loneliness, is to lead to a communion compared to which the crowd in the desert of Bethsaida is as a drop to the ocean. The lonely road is, after all, to be the real way to the City of God. It is a curious question: What would have been the effect if Jesus had dzed amongst the mountains of Bethsaidar? What impression would He have left upon the world if He had passed away in what would have been called the blaze of His fame? And the answer must be, ‘Very little.’ ‘How do you know that,’ you say, ‘seeing the event has not taken place?’

Because we of modern times have been permitted to watch the pilgrimages of human thought to the shrine of Jesus. And, strangely enough, they have all taken the lonely road, They have crowded the places once the most silent. It is the Cross that has drawn the thoughts of all men — even Easter Day is a magnifying of the Cross, Christmas is crowned, but it is a borrowed crown — borrowed from Calvary; we keep Christmas Day because it is the prelude to another Day — the Day on which the Son of Man completed His obedience by death. The Sermon on the Mount is crowned, but it, too, has a borrowed crown; what meaning would its bold paradoxes convey unless reflected in the light of a victorious Calvary! The main attraction of the life of Jesus has centred round His second period. Why? I do not ask here why it is so for the Christian; but why is it so for the world as a world? Is it that this period is more full of miracles? It is zof more full. Is it because it is richer in moral teaching? In mere moral teaching it is less rich, It is because this second period has revealed something more original than miracle, more original than moral teaching. It is because men have seen a new kind of strength, a new order of heroism, a new estimate of greatness. They have seen force measured, not by what it has done, but by what it has forborne to do — by its refusal to purchase pleasure at the expense of purity. They have seen the power of passzve strength — a strength that can decline to lift its own imprisoning gates — a strength that can bear for love and will not cry. This second period has been a creative period. It is the Cross that has kindled our admiration for the Cross. Jesus Himself has wreathed the garland with which the world has crowned Him. The light by which we see Him is the light He has Himself diffused. The music by which He has drawn the crowd is the music of His own Name,

ND now, Son of Man, Thou art going forth upon the sea. Thou art leaving the crowd in Bethsaida that Thou mayest travel over the lonely deep. May I go with Thee? Bid me that I come to Thee on the waters! When I see Thee on the waters it is not Thy majesty that moves me; it is Thy loneliness. They have all gone away from Thee. The crowds of the first communion have dropped from Thee like autumn leaves. There is no man brave enough to stand beside Thee in the storm; Thou art all alone. Bid me come to Thee, O Lord! I have followed Thee in Thy joy. I have been with Thee when the multitude pressed and thronged. I have heard Thy voice of majesty on the Mount. I have seen Thy hand of beneficence break bread in the desert. Whenever I have been in want I have sought Thee. But now Thou art to be in want — athirst for human love. The multitude are no longer to be the suppliants; it is Thou. Thine will be a deeper hunger than that of the crowd when Thou shalt stand upon the lonely sea. Thou shalt not go alone; / will follow Thee where Thou goest. Through the dark watches of the night, through the cold surgings of the wave, through the vast spaces of the solitude, I will follow and find Thee. I have bid Thee come to me on the land; bid me come to Thee on the waters. Thou hast answered my prayer, and I will respond to Thine,