The Manliness of Christ

“Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see rue have.” — LUKE xxiv. 39.

IN these words Christ after his resurrection appeals to His disciples to bear witness that He is a true living man, and not a disembodied spirit. He bids them use their human senses to discover that He is truly human like themselves. The words therefore may represent to us the perpetual appeal which Christ makes to our human consciousness and to the perceptions of mankind to recognize His true humanity. As He then offered His human body for the inspection of His disciples, and bade them own that it was truly a man’s body, so He is al ways offering His whole human nature and calling on men to witness that He is truly human in thought and feeling and character, the pattern and fulfilment of humanity.

I want to speak this morning of the Manliness of Christ. It is a subject of which many thoughtful men are thinking. A recent book of Mr. Thomas Hughes, whom one may almost call a student and connoisseur of manliness, has dwelt with very great force and beauty upon the manliness of Christ, and has turned many people’s thoughts that way. He frankly accepts the challenge that if Christ is really the perfection of our humanity He must present our human nature in such a shape and action that we men shall be able to recognize it by our best human standards as the truest and the best; not weak, timid, sentimental; but strong, brave, vigorous, full of feeling but also full of conscience; full of reason; patient by abundance not by lack of life; tolerant, forgiving, meek, not from superficialness but from the depth of insight and emotion. So does this writer, with his genius for manliness, describe the manly Christ. He holds His picture up and as it were cries anew “Ecce Homo,” “Behold the Man.” But at the same time he owns that somewhere, somehow, there has grown up a certain distrust of Christ’s manliness, a certain misgiving that the man of the four gospels does not completely match with the standard of manly life which is most popular and current among men. There are actions of His, there are features of His character, which men need to study, which perhaps they need to grow to, be fore they can see that they are the types of truest manliness. It is from these two facts that I wish to start in what I have to say. First, the fact that the character of Christ does satisfy the highest conceptions of our humanity; and second, the fact that it is only the highest conception of our humanity which it satisfies, that the lower, the current, ordinary, commonplace notions of manliness are puzzled by it. Both of these facts are true and both are important. At first sight they may seem contradictory; but out of a consideration of both of them together I think that we must reach a true idea of the nature and mission of the manliness of Jesus.

And let me add one remark more. The very word “manliness” has a certain ambiguity about it. I think it is a word which many men are beginning to hesitate at using though they hardly know the reason why. It has a touch of cant. What does it mean? It surely ought to mean the sum of the best qualities which characterize our humanity, joined in their true proportion. That is what manliness ought to mean. And evidently if it did mean that, then if our manhood is continually changing, rising, opening new possibilities, revealing new qualities, it must follow that manliness must be not one single invariable quality, but a constantly advancing and enlarging ideal of character, never completely and permanently settled until manhood shall have reached its best. It is necessary to bear in mind, I think, that manliness, in its truest definition, must be this ever changing and developing idea; even while we feel our selves at liberty to use the word in the popular and ordinary way, as if it were one fixed and constant and clearly recognizable condition of human life. At any rate it is only with this fullest conception of what manliness means that we can rightly understand the nature and influence of the manliness of Jesus.

The Incarnation, then, the beginning of the earthly life of Christ, was the fulfilment, the filling full, of a human nature by Divinity. We do not ask, we do not dare to hope to know, what was the influence upon Divinity of that mysterious union. But of what was its influence upon humanity there certainly can be no doubt. It made the man in whom the miracle occurred, absolutely perfect man. It did not make Him something else than man. If it had done that, all His value as a pattern for humanity, all His temptation of men to be like Him would be gone. Whenever He says to men “Follow Me;” “Be like Me,” He is declaring that He is man as they are men, that the peculiar Divinity which filled Him, while it carried humanity to its complete development, had not changed that humanity into something which was no longer human. Can we picture that to ourselves? Is it not just as when the sunlight fills a jewel? The jewel throbs and glows with radiance. All its mysterious nature pal pitates and burns with clearness. It opens depths of color which we did not see before. But still it is the jewel’s self that we are seeing. The sunlight has made us see what it is, not turned it into something different from what it was. Or to take another illustration which perhaps comes nearer to our truth. A man be comes a scholar. He learns all rich and elevating truth. As that truth enters into him, his human nature opens and deepens and unfolds its qualities. He becomes “more of a man,” as we say in one of our common phrases. But that very phrase, “more of a man,” implies that he becomes not something different from man, but more truly and completely man. His manhood is not changed into something else; it is developed into a completer self by the truth which he learns.

In both these cases one thing evidently appears; which is that the developing power which brings the being into which it enters to its best has essential and natural relations to the being which it develops. The jewel belongs to the light. The man belongs to the knowledge. And this must always be the truth which must underlie all understanding of the Incarnation. Man belongs to God. The human nature belongs to the Divine. It can come to its best only by the entrance and possession of it by Divinity. The Incarnation, let us always be sure, was not unnatural and violent but in the highest sense supremely natural. It is the first truth of all our existence that man is eternally the son of God. No man who forgets or denies that truth can really lay hold of the lofty fact that God entered into man.

We may pass on then, with this truth clear in our minds that the Christhood was a true development and not a distortion of humanity, we may pass on to study the working of the law of development under other illustrations.

Human nature, we say, is developed by the advance of civilization. Man civilized is man filled out, carried along towards his completion. True civilization does not make man something else than man. It makes his manhood more complete. It gives him no new powers of thought or action. It sets free the powers that belong to him as man. It makes him truly manly. But when we say this we at once remember what different views different men have always had of the effects of civilization. In general men have believed that civilization was an advance. The civilized man has seemed in general to be completer than the savage man. But always, alongside of this opinion, there has run a more or less distinct remonstrance. Always there have been men who have dwelt upon the loss which civilization has involved. Civilization has seemed to some men to mean deterioration. A certain freshness, freeness, breadth, spontaneousness, has seemed to make the saw age a completer man than he who had been trained in many arts, and evolved through a long complicated history. The protest has not been clear or strong enough to shake the general conviction that the civilized man was the more truly human man; but there is surely meaning, as there is deep pathos, in the way in which men have always looked back from the heights of the highest culture, and felt that they had lost something in the progress, longed for some charm of youth which the race remembered but found no longer in itself.

And what is true of the race is true also of the individual. The boy grows up to be a man, and as he ripens he becomes more manly. His human nature, filled out with more knowledge and experience, com- ‘pletes more nearly the full figure of humanity. But who is not aware of that strange sense of loss which haunts the ripening man? With all that he has come to, there is something that he has left behind. In some moods the loss seems to outweigh the gain. He knows it is not really so, but yet the misgiving that freshness has been sacrificed to maturity, intenseness to completeness, enthusiasm to wisdom, makes the pathos of the life of every sensitive and growing man.

We stop a moment to observe how full the Bible is of this idea. The New Jerusalem with which it ends is greater and better than the Garden which blooms at its beginning. A more complete and manlier man walks on the sea of glass mingled with fire than walked in the shade and light of Eden. The whole story is of an education and a progress. And yet all through the Bible runs a tender and live regret for that lost imperfect manhood. Better things may come in the great future, but it seems as if there were something gone in the great past that never could come back. The education and progress are haunted by the memory of a fall. There is no thought of going back. The true completion of humanity always in the Bible lies before and not behind. And yet the naming sword of Genesis always seems to shut man out from a tree of life which he never can forget even while he presses forward to the completer tree of never-failing fruit which grows by the side of the river of the water of life in the Apocalypse.

It would seem then as if this truth were very general, that in every development there is a sense of loss as well as a sense of gain. The flower opening into its full luxuriance has no longer the folded beauty of the bud. The summer with its splendor has lost the fascinating mystery of spring-tirne. The family of grown up men remembers almost with regret the crude dreams which filled the old house with romance when the men were boys. The reasonable faith to which the thinker has’ attained cannot forget the glow of vague emotion with which faith began. The enthusiast, devoted to and filled out by his cause, misses the light and careless life he used to live. It is not that the progress is repented nor that the higher standard is disowned. Rather it seems to be a certain ineradicable charm that belongs to incompleteness, inherent in its consciousness of promise and of hope, which lingers even when the promise has been fulfilled and the hope attained, and makes us sometimes almost seem to be sorry for the fulfilment and attainment.

And now, after all this, let us come back to the manliness of Christ. I think that it all applies there and may give us some help, Suppose exactly that; to take place which the doctrine of the Incarnation assures us has taken place. Suppose that God should come and perfectly occupy a human life. That life like every human life belongs to Him. He occupies it with a certain supernatural naturalness. And what impression will that life, fully developed, developed completely by the indwelling God, make on the men who see it? Will it not open to them views of their own possibilities which they never had before? Will they not say, “Here for the first time is a man “? Will they not see that all their old standards were poor and partial? Will they not own that it is the supremely manly life? This they will certainly do if by manliness they mean that which before I said they ought to mean, the full ideal of manhood, if they have not stopped short and formalized their notion of manliness at some incomplete attainment of human nature. And yet, will they do this readily and easily? Will there be no clinging to the old standards; no sense of loss in the abandonment of lower ideals; no reaching back here too after the brilliancy of incompleteness, of partial unsymmetrical development; no missing of the morning that came before this full noontide of character which is flooding their souls?

This is precisely what I think we see. Men call Christ the crown of manhood, the perfect man, and yet they need a book, yea, many books, to teach them that He is manly. They have given that name so long to brilliant incompleteness that they find it hard to carry it over to the complete life when it appears. The name of manly has become a certain fixed definite thing, not pliable and capable of advancement and enlargement to some new manifestation of what is worthiest of man, what it is noblest for a man to be.

This seems to me to be the real state of the case. Men own that the human character of Christ is the cornpletest human character that the world has ever seen, and yet they give their admiration to incomplete characters; and, not yet lifted to the full revelation of the Lord, they call that manly which they know all the while is something less than the full-orbed attainment of the perfect man. Here is a Christian boy who loves Christ, honors Him, wants to please Him, wants to serve Him, and yet that boy carries in his mind a distinctly inferior type of character to which he gives this name of manly. He knows that Christ was and is tender and patient. Nay, it is because Christ has revealed to him that tenderness and patience are the consummate utterances of our manhood, that he has recognized the tender, patient Christ as being supremely man. And yet that boy’s soul is haunted by the sense that in giving himself up to these new standards and making it the prayer and struggle of his life to be tender and patient, he would be losing something which he cannot bear to lose, the sternness and hardness and quickness to resent an insult, which all the earlier standards of life have agreed upon as the proofs of manliness. It is a strange condition, but is it not just exactly the condition which we have found in all the instances of progression and development of which we spoke? The acceptance of the higher standard is haunted by a reluctance to let the lower go. Many a man, as I believe, is to-day just in this condition. He knows that the humanity of Jesus is the type of all humanity. He ought, if he knows that, to go right on and say, “Then Jesus is the manliest of men, and what He would do under any given circumstances must be the manliest thing that under those circumstances it is possible for any man to do. If He would not resent an injury but forgive it, then forgiveness, not resentment, must be true manliness.” Does he say that? No, he draws back and cannot let the charm of the old spontaneous unchristian resentment go, and strikes his revengeful blow and says, “I know it is not Christian, but it is manly,” and so abandons his conviction that Jesus is the perfect man.

This is not a mere question of the meaning of a certain word. It is” something far more real than that. It seems to me very clear that while men recognize in Christ a true and high humanity, so that they are willing in all their better moods to own Him as the pattern man, there yet lurks underneath this acknowledgment a quiet, half-conscious misgiving and questioning whether His manliness is one that the human heart can cordially accept and love. The reason is convinced, and the heart hesitates; just the condition of the subject of any development where the heart still looks back with long ing to the undeveloped state. This is the philosophy of that which we see everywhere, that of which I spoke at the beginning of my sermon; the mixture of profound admiration for the character of Christ with a misgiving, a suspicion of some weakness in Him and in the life that implicitly follows Him; a disposition to hold back the name of manly from the perfect man and His disciples.

If this be true, then, it points us at once to what is most important, which is that the manliness of Christ has a double mission in the world. It is at once authentication and revelation. It must at once appeal to me to recognize it by the human instinct that there is in me already, and so trust Him for all He has to do; and also it must enlarge, enlighten, and refine the instinct of humanity by which it has first been recognized. I know Christ because I know manhood; and then, knowing Him, He makes me know manhood anew and far more deeply. In other words, it is the work of the human Christ at once to satisfy and to reconstruct our notions of manliness. Alas for us if it were not so. Alas if, coming in among our ordinary human lives, His human life so absolutely fitted in with them that it offered them no suggestion, gave them no lesson or rebuke. The real truth about the manliness of Christ seems to be this: that He is so like us that He makes us know that we may be like Him, and so unlike us that He makes us know that we must be unlike our present selves before we can be like Him. His life fits in among our human lives like a jewel which is so adapted to the gold into which it is set that nobody can doubt that they were made for one another, and yet which so far fails of suiting its place perfectly that we can see that the gold has been bent and twisted and must be twisted back again in order to accommodate it perfectly. He is at once our satisfaction and our rebuke. He has our human qualities; He feels our human motives; but in Him they take new shapes. It is with Him as it is with our best and noblest friends. They all first claim us by their likeness, and then shame and instruct us by their unlikeness. So it is with the manliness of Jesus.

Therefore there will always be a point where we shall fail if we depend simply upon the evident manliness of Jesus to make men believe in Him. If we say to men, “You have the standard in your own manhood to judge Him by,” there will always come a time when, before the judgment of their imperfect manhood, He will fail. But what we may say is: “You have the standard in your hearts to recognize Him by. Recognize Him by that and make Him your Master and it will be His work to develop and refine the nature which first knew Him by His likeness, so that by and by it shall see that in the things in which He seemed to be most unlike to it, He still is and has always been the pattern and completion of its truest self.”

I should like, if there were time, to turn and see with you how in His life on earth, which is recorded in the gospels, Jesus did for the men with whom He came in contact just this same double work. I can only suggest to you the many illustrations of it. There are three things perhaps, above all others, by which men think that they can recognize true manliness. The first is independence; the second is bravery; and the third is generosity. Now look at the life of Jesus as I hope that you remember it in the gospels. There is independence there certainly. He stood almost alone. A little group of disciples who only half understood Him were His company. The rest of the people grew more and more hostile as His career advanced. He more and more outwent His friends and more and more enraged His enemies. Yet still He stood unmoved. Men, whether they loved or hated Him, saw that He carried within Himself the convictions and determinations by which He lived. It was this, first of all, that made them feel His strength. “He speaks as one that has authority,” the people cried one day when His discourse was finished. Another day the Pharisees came to Him and said, “Master, we know that thou art true, neither carest thou for any man, for thou regardest not the person of man.” In all this there was something very powerful. This independence must have impressed the finest young spirits of Capernaum and Jerusalem as very manly. And then, when they were yielding to its influence and gathering round Him, think how they must have been staggered and thrown back at hearing this same independent Master declare as the very central secret of His life and power that He was utterly dependent on a nature which was above His own. “I can of mine own self do nothing; as I hear I judge.” “He that taketh not his cross and followeth after Me cannot be My disciple.” Only the very finest spirits among His followers were able to stand firm and loyal while the manliness which had attracted them at the beginning first seemed to fail them, and then opened before their eyes into a yet nobler type of manliness, of which dependence upon God lay at the very heart.

This same is true of Christ’s courage. Men saw Jesus stand on the hill at Nazareth among a crowd of hooting enemies. They saw Him stand calmly in the boat on the stormy midnight lake and never tremble. They saw Him face the gibbering maniac among the tombs. They saw Him set His face toward Jerusalem and go up thither quietly, knowing that there He would be crucified. They said to one another, “See how brave He is. He does not know anything like fear. Behold, what manliness!” And then, full of this enthusiasm, some of them witnessed Gethsemane. They heard Him pray to be released from the approaching pain. They watched Him in the days before Gethsemane, as the horror of the coming death gathered around Him. “Father, save me from this hour,” they heard Him cry. It is impossible not to believe that their conception of manliness underwent first a shock and then an enlargement, as their Mas ter showed them that sensitiveness to pain is a true and necessary element in the loftiest courage.

Or yet again, think of Christ’s generosity. An open, tolerant, and kindly temper, that welcomes confidence, that overlooks faults, that makes much of any good in other men, that easily forgives wrong; that is a part of any ordinary notion of manliness. And this the men of Palestine found unmistakably in Christ. His life was always open. Whatever He had He would share with any man. “If any one shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him,” He said. “Come unto Me, come unto Me,” He kept saying as He went up and down the land. And to this frank, bright, open summons men did come. They recognized a man and gathered round His manliness. And then how often, just as they were crowding closest to Him, He said some word or did some action which let them see that, much as He loved them and wanted to welcome them, He loved something else behind them more, and could not welcome them completely unless they met Him in the broad chambers of truth and self-devotion. When Nicodemus comes to Him, Christ turns quickly in the midst of His generous greeting and says, “Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” When the eager young man comes running to give himself to the new Master, the Master meets him almost with a blow. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.” Men must have been perplexed and staggered by such words. “Is He then not generous, not cordial? Does He not love us? Does He not want us?” they must have said to one another; and only slowly, as they dealt with Him, the deeper law of generosity must have opened to them, that no man loves his brethren completely unless he loves the truth better than any brother; that no man desires generously for his brethren unless he desires the best things for the best part of them, and will willingly sacrifice the poorer things which belong to the poorer part of them to secure that loftier attainment.

In all these instances, and they might be multiplied indefinitely, the same thing, I think, appears; and that is the way in which Christ’s manliness first claims men; and then, because it is a completer manliness than they have ever seen, it puzzles and bewilders men, and if they are not truly in love with it, repels and casts them off; and only finally, He refines and elevates their idea of what it is to be manly by the deeper revelation of Himself. This is a truth which it seems to me we never can lose sight of when we talk or think about the manliness of Jesus and its power over men. All through the history of Christ’s presentation to mankind He has attracted men and He has repelled men. He has satisfied and He has puzzled men’s standards of human life. Both of the two are true and natural phenomena. If I could take Christ to-day — take Christ Himself and not merely some man’s feebly told version of His story — if

I could take Christ Himself out into the midst of a group of Western roughs, and set His calm presence in their midst, what should I see? What would be His effect on them? They would know His manliness certainly. But would they apprehend how thorough and complete His manliness was? They would call Him strong. But would they not also call Him weak? He would meet and satisfy the best of the standards and instincts which He would find all ready in those rugged hearts; but He would certainly disappoint them too; and only through disappointment, and the revelation of Himself to hearts whose confidence in the completeness of their own first perceptions had been shaken, would they come finally to see that He was most manly in those very things in which He had seemed to them at first to be unmanly.

And so it is that Christ has always come to men. I think that it is very like the way in which He came to the Jews. Christ’s relation to Judaism always seems to me to be a sort of miniature and illustration of the relation in which He stands to humanity. He was a true Jew. Any Jew with a true Jew’s heart must have owned Him for a fellow- Jew without a doubt. But He was too true a Jew to satisfy completely the stunted and imperfect Judaism of his time. A Judaism so far below the actual realization of its own best idea could not but be puzzled by Him. Only the best of the nation was able gradually to be taught by Him the full meaning of the national history, the full depth of the national idea. The life of St. Paul, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, show what the complete conception of Judaism was capable of reaching when it was filled out and interpreted by the complete Jew, Christ.

Let this be the picture and parable of what the man Christ may do for humanity. So truly man that all mankind must know His manliness, He is yet so much truer man than all other men that it is only by the revelation of our humanity which He himself makes to us that we ourselves can know how thoroughly manly He is. Just see then what is the conclusion to which the end of our long study brings us. Is it not this; that there are two knowledges of Christ, one lower and one higher? There is one knowledge by which, just with our ordinary standards, if we are only sincere and true, we may know that this Man is a man above all other men, and take Him for our Master. When, with that knowledge, we have put ourselves into His power so that He may teach us and complete our incomplete conceptions, then another deeper knowledge comes. We learn to know not merely that He is manly because there are in Him those things which we as men most ardently admire; but also that we can be truly manly only as we come by love and admiration and obedience to share the completeness of character which is in Him. The first knowledge brings us to obedience. The second knowledge is the power of spiritual growth.

Into that higher knowledge may we all advance; making Christ ours first, that in the end He may make us His. With reverent hands may we handle Him and see that He is truly manly, that He really wears our humanity, that so we may through His humanity come to the Father God whom He reveals.