Studies of the Portrait of Christ, Volume 2

In these pages I have endeavoured to trace the spiritual development, not of the life, but of the work, of Jesus exhibited in the Gospel narrative. Necessarily, therefore, I have fixed my attention not on the Divine or miraculous, but on the human, side of Christ. There can be no development in miracles; it is as wonderful to be an inch above nature as to be a mile. Being a study of development, the chapters, though very short, are rigidly connected and cannot be read in isolation. The book is not an abstract essay with footnotes and references; it is semi-devotional; each chapter ends either with an invocation or a prayer. Having completed the first part of the studies I offer it by way of instalment and by way of experiment. Should it meet with general sympathy I should like to pursue the narrative to its close.

G. M.
EDINBURGH, 1899.

I here resume the Narrative from the point at which my first volume closed — the feeding of the multitude in the desert of Bethsaida. To every word of the previous Preface I adhere; I add a few remarks by way of elucidation. By the Title of this Book I do not mean a study of the different Portraits which have been drawn of Christ, nor even a comparison of the Pictures drawn by the Four Evangelists. The Portrait of Christ is to me the united impression produced upon the heart by these four delineations. My office is not that of a critic, not that of a creator, not that of an amender, but simply that of an interpreter; I study the Picture as it is.

I am glad that the reception by the public has invited me to pursue the subject. I am specially glad that I have not been suspected of a wish to minimise the Divine side of

Christianity. I have been for years persuaded, and with an ever-increasing conviction, that there is an element in Christ which is not to be explained by the stream of human heredity, but which implies an original Divine Sonship. But there is also confessedly that which was human — that which hungered, thirsted, hoped, feared, grew. I believe it grew into a progressive recognition of the steps of that redeeming work for the sake of which He was born, and which was already completed in the heart of the Father — that work whose every step was an act in that great Death-Sacrifice which reached from the depths of the Wilderness to the heights of Calvary. The light which is a unity in the sky is given in fragments by the pool; even so on the waters of earth was the plan of the Father revealed in fragments. The aim of this book is to piece these fragments. I have alluded only to those incidents which bear on the development. For this reason I have paused at Calvary, which is professedly the development’s close.

G. M.
EDINBURGH, 1900.

The last glimpse we had of the Portrait of Jesus was in a light beginning to be overcast. He had crossed a transition line. In the very blaze of His fame He had met with His first real disappointment. I say ‘disappointment, not ‘reverse.’ The crowd had not deserted Him; He had fled from the crowd. He had found that He and they were seeking different things. His solitude was as yet only inward. The multitude were still on His side, but He felt that they were on His side by reason of a delusion. He perceived that He and they were using the phrase ’ kingdom of God ’ in a different sense, in an opposite sense. To them it meant purple, fine linen, faring sumptuously every day; to Him it was an influence from within, which would make even vile raiment beautiful.

VOL. II. A

I have already said that in my opinion the earliest hope of Jesus was that during His life on earth He might witness the establishment of a kingdom of righteousness; this hope I have called His first ideal. I have also expressed my view of the nature of this kingdom which glittered in the soul of Jesus. I should not call it an inward kingdom. It was rather a kingdom from within. It did contemplate an influence on the surface, or, rather, a series of influences in which different men were to exert on society different degrees of power. But then, these degrees of power were to be proportionate to the sacrificial spirit. The influence was not to interfere from the outside. The kingdom of Jesus demanded no smashing up of the Roman Empire, no drastic upheaval of existing orders. It was to be something which could enter the present dwelling without breaking the doors. It was to come silently, unobtrusively. It was to demand no extra space; it was to work, like the leaven, through existing spaces. Its entrance was to abolish nothing; it was to act by addition, not by subtraction. It was to add to the world as it then stood this new commandment, ‘Love one another.’

Such was the ideal that Jesus hoped to realise on earth while He should still be on earth. What a shock to this hope was the attitude of that crowd in the desert of Bethsaida! They clamoured for a social revolution; they proposed to make Him a king. They had been quite sincere in their communion with Jesus; they had been quite sincere in their communion with one another; but in both cases they had mistaken a part for the whole. Their error was not selfishness; they were quite willing to pass the physical bread as well as to appropriate it. Their error lay in supposing that the value of Christ’s mission was merely physical. Their reverence for Him was deep, but it was based on a false impression It rested on the belief that Christian salvation was first and foremost an external thing, and that the beginning and end of the mission of Jesus was to make a new division of the outward inheritance.

So far, it was only a little cloud. The multitude were as yet merely on the threshold; they could not be expected to have reached high spiritual views. But a greater blow was coming. Let us follow the stream of the narrative. From the crowd of mistaken friends in the desert of Bethsaida Jesus takes refuge in flight. He feels that the kingdom proposed by them is a travesty; He is alone in spirit and He longs to be alone in fact. He retires into the mountain recesses where the historian cannot follow Him. His thoughts must have been very sad. The narrative inadvertently reveals this. He has a sleepless night. When others are in the arms of slumber, in the watches of the dark hours He crosses the Sea of Galilee. He joins the band of original disciples — the members of the first league of pity, and those whom they had drawn around them. He comes into Capernaum — the city of His most brilliant triumphs — as if to restore His drooping spirit by a memory of the past. But the pertinacious crowd will not leave Him. They follow in His track; they trace Him to the synagogue of Capernaum; they surround Him there; the experience of the desert is repeated in the city. Jesus faces them with words of stern rebuke. He tells them He is not deceived by their homage. He tells them He is quite aware they are seeking Him for less than the highest gift He has to bestow. And then, passing from rebuke to exhortation, He delivers to them one of the most remarkable sermons on record. I should call it the third epoch-making sermon of His life. The first was at Nazareth; the second was on the summit of Hermon; this was in the synagogue of Capernaum.

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