The Plan of the Life of Jesus

You will remember that I said Jesus had no plan. Nor had He; but His had, that is to say, His Father had. There is no individual life without a plan of development. This is true on any interpretation of nature which we choose to adopt; it is true of the system of theism; it is true of the system of evolution. It is a very different question whether the individual life is conscious of its plan. I should say, never. I should think such a consciousness would destroy development itself on the part of the individual; it would make the life complete from the beginning. I believe that the individual man has in many cases a prophecy of his mission. The poet may have a presentiment of poetic greatness; the reformer may have

the sense of an incumbent duty. But the very E glory of such presentiments is the absence of detail. Their brightness originates in the fact that they shine in the dark. They have to keep their light through difficulty, through obstacle, through seeming denial. They do not create their circumstances; they are often counteracted by their circumstances. They reach their highest triumph when they can preserve their conviction through suffering. Jesus had the sense of a mission — an ever-growing sense. At first, as I have said, I think it was tentative. It broke upon Him in a voice which whispered ‘Try.’ Whether that voice came in the unrecorded years, whether it first spoke to Him as a child musing in the temple, whether it flashed out its message through the hammers in the workshop of Nazareth, I cannot tell. But I am told that He ‘grew in knowledge,’ and I think it must have been Messianic knowledge. If so, then His sense of a Messianic mission must have been revealed, as one of His disciples says, ‘from faith to faith.” It must have ascended from peak to peak in certainty. It must have been a veritable Pilgrim’s Progress in which the conviction climbed from dawn to day — rose from an aspiration to a hope, from a hope to a faith, from a faith to a forecast, until it culminated in a height of full realisation.

The mission of Jesus, then, began with an aspiration — a yearning to be the Holy One of God. It was essential to that yearning that, so far as Jesus was concerned, it should have no plan. His very proposal was the negation of a plan; it was the effort to yield His own life to the life of the Father. Such a surrender demanded the relinquishing of personal foresight. It necessitated the abandonment of any individual scheme. It was the determination to follow exclusively the will of the Father — whatever it might be, wherever it might lead. He felt that if He were the Messiah He had ‘a baptism to be baptized with. But the essence of this baptism was its original indefiniteness. It was the command to wait upon the Divine Will, to follow that Will without inquiring what it would bring It prescribed the attitude, not of the far-seeing politician, but of the common soldier — of the man who refuses to map out the course of his own march, who waits upon the orders of another, and obeys these orders on the judgment of another. The Messianic mission was essentially a surrender of the will; anda surrender of the will implies the giving up of any personal plan.

But it is a very different matter when we look at the life of Jesus retrospectively. There we stand at the top of the hill, and gaze downward from a luminous exposure, We see the end before the beginning. We see that this life of Jesus was not an accidental life — that the way by which it travelled was an ordered way. That is a highly significant scene which is depicted on the road to Emmaus. Jesus is then at the top of the hill. He is looking down upon His life from a vantage-ground. He sees the six days of incompleteness from the height of the seventh morning. While He was passing through these six days there were many things which straitened Him, some things at which He marvelled; there were even times in which He had felt as if His mission had been a failure. But from the top of the hill the whole landscape of the past was changed. The path so obscure in its prospect, so tortuous in its experience, became luminous and straight in its retrospective view; and the suffering from which He had momentarily recoiled appeared a thing essential to the entrance into His glory.

We, then, of later times can see something in Jesus which was not revealed to His first disciples — not originally revealed to Himself. What is that? It is the plan of the Father. We who stand on the road to Emmaus have the privilege of looking back to the lower and surmounted ground, and of Seeing that the lower was the avenue to the higher. What, then, is this plan of the life of Jesus? Volumes have been written on what is called ‘the plan of salvation’; but it is not this we are here in search of. It is something more simple and more within the range of history — the plan of a /zfe. We want to know what is that order of development revealed in the earthly path of Jesus. Let us ask what view was taken by the age immediately succeeding His own — that age in which to the eyes of men the Original was replaced by the Portrait. Let us take the man whom we have already introduced as the figure standing nearest to the Picture — the man Paul. He has never seen the Original; his eyes have only rested on the Portrait. But of that Portrait he has had a front view — the foremost view. I do not think even the first disciples had such a view. You may read more in a man’s portrait than your neighbour does in the mam. Paul read in the Picture of Jesus what neither Matthew nor Mark detected in the Original. To Matthew He is the fulfilment of a prophecy; to Mark He is the Man who spake and it was done; to Paul He is from dawn to dark the Man of sacrifice.

Paul is the first who attempts a spiritual philosophy of the life of Jesus, the first who draws a plan of His human development. Very striking, very original is that plan.

You will find it in a passage to which I have already incidentally alluded. The words are familiar — too familiar. We lose in their repeated sound the sight of their deep meaning, of their abiding freshness. I quote them in full: ‘Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, though in the form of God, thought equality with God a thing not to be snatched at, but emptied Himself, and took upon Himself the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being recognised in the fashion of a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross,’

This is Paul’s philosophy of the life of Jesus. What zs it? It is the description of a ladder of descent. You observe that it goes systematically from the top to the bottom. It begins by delineating the height, and it ends by depicting the vale. Every step of the ladder of Jesus is described as a step downwards. We see Him first ‘in the form of God’ — in the enjoyment of the Divine communion. Then comes the first zmterruption to the communion,

It is a thought — the thought of those who share not the privilege. This thought will not let Him rest satisfied with a personal communion; He will not snatch it for Himself alone. He puts Himself in the place of those outside; He begins by doing so in thought. He empties Himself, in znagination, of His own beatific vision — tries to conceive what life would be without it. Then He passes from imagination into act. Step by step He comes down. He takes the servant’s form — lofty yet subordinate. He comes down lower — to the likeness of ordinary men; He participates in common experience. He descends farther still; He loses His first fame; He is recognised only ‘in the fashion of a man.” He stoops still lower; He ‘humbles Himself’ — gives up His first ideal of an immediate kingdom. Then comes the schooling of His mind to a more dismal ideal; He becomes ‘ obedient unto death.” At last the foot of the ladder is reached in the most repulsive form of death — the form which separated the ordinary man from the despised man — the death of the cross.

Of course I do not mean in my studies of the Portrait of Jesus to follow these steps of Paul’s ladder explicitly, That would reduce the work to a piece of mechanism. I want to look at the experience of Jesus, not as I see it now, but as He felt it then. I shall therefore abstain from formal or explicit insertion of the life into a completed framework. I should like its sequence to be arranged, not by me, nor even by Paul, but by itself. None the less am I convinced that this sequence will be found to follow, if not the steps, at least the principle, described by the man nearest to the Portrait. I cannot withhold my admiration for his philosophy of the life of Jesus — the earliest ever attempted by the mind of man; and I feel that, whatever be said of the details, to all time the przmczple will stand. I feel that the life of Jesus has actually described this course. I feel that its progress has been a descending progress — from the hill to the plain, from the plain to the valley. Each step has been a step in sacrifice. Each circle has

- been a lower circle. I would add that on this very ground it has been a wider circle. Not without reason is it said that Jesus won His empire by stooping. Humanity is like a mathematical triangle; it is widest at its base. We all meet in the valley. We do not all meet on the height; we do not all meet on the plain; but in the valley we are made one. Had Jesus stopped on the high eminence of a merely angelic mission He would have had merely an angel’s audience. But when He stood in the valley of death, He touched that chord of nature which makes the world akin, Apparently in His descent of Paul’s ladder He was doing everything to bury Himself; but I can understand the logic of the apostle’s bold paradox, ‘Wherefore God hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name,’

THOU who art painted, not only in the gallery of the world, but in the gallery

of my heart, help me to follow Thee. Inspire me with Thy power to descend the ladder of human experience. Let me come after Thee in the downward steps of sacrifice. Deeper and deeper let me wend my way toward the valley where the millions meet. Help me, not only to believe in Thy name, but to believe in the way by which Thou hast made Thy name. Reveal to me the power of self-forgetfulness. Teach me that the burial of self is the road to resurrection. Let me learn that only in sympathy with the lowest can I have sympathy with all mankind. Give me communion with the vale that I may have fellowship with the mountain and the plain. I shall only attain Thy crown when I have reached Thy cross,