The Influence of Jesus

Hat is the power of Christianity over man, — its source, its character, its issue? This is the question which I wish to study with you in these four lectures which I have been invited to deliver. But it is necessary at the outset that I should indicate the limits within which I wish to work. All that the subject, as I have stated it, would include, not four nor forty lectures could undertake to treat.

I have been led, then, to think of Christianity, and to speak of it, — at least in these lectures, — not as a system of doctrine, but as a personal force, behind which and in which there lies one great inspiring idea, which it is the work of the personal force to impress upon the life of man, with which the personal force is always struggling to fill mankind. The personal force is the nature of Jesus, full of humanity, full of divinity, and powerful with a love for man which combines in itself every element that enters into love of the completest kind. The inspiring idea is the fatherhood of God, and the childhood of every man to Him. Upon the race and upon the individual, Jesus is always bringing into more and more perfect revelation the certain truth that man, and every man, is the child of God. This is the sum of the work of the Incarnation. A hundred other statements regarding it, regarding Him who was incarnate, are true; but all statements concerning Him hold their truth within this truth, — that Jesus came to restore the fact of God’s fatherhood to man’s knowledge, and to its central place of power over man’s life. Jesus is mysteriously the Word of God made flesh. He is the worker of amazing miracles upon the bodies and the souls of men. He is the convincer of sin. He is the Savior by suffering. But behind all these, as the purpose for which He is all these, He is the redeemer of man into the fatherhood of God. It would be deeply interesting to dwell on any one of these special aspects of His wondrous life; but when we want to gather into one great comprehensive statement the purpose for which Jesus lived, and the power which His life has had over the lives of men, we must seize His great idea and find His power there. For every man’s power is his idea multiplied by and projected through his personality. The special actions which he does are only the points at which his power shows itself, — the tips of his powerful life, where its magnetic force is manifested, but not where it is created. And so the power of Jesus is the idea of Jesus multiplied and projected through the person of Jesus. His power is not in the miracles that He did, not even in the marvellous nature which He bore, but in the great truth, the primal and final fact of all the universe, so far as man has any part in it, which the whole nature of the Savior uttered, and with whose splendor every miraculous touch of that nature on the world, or on man’s body or man’s soul, burst forth into light.

I have said already what that idea is, — the relation of childhood and fatherhood between man and God. Man is the child of God by nature. He is ignorant and rebellious, — the prodi- gal child of God; but his ignorance and rebellion never break that first relationship. It is always a child ignorant of his Father; always a child rebellious against his Father. That is what makes the tragedy of human history, and always prevents human sin from becoming an insignificant and squalid thing. To reassert the fatherhood and childhood as an unlost truth, and to re-establish its power as the central fact of life; to tell men that they were, and to make them actually be, the sons of God, — that was the purpose of the coming of Jesus, and the shaping power of His life.

Of course it is not possible to speak of such an idea — which is indeed the idea of the universe — as if it were a message intrusted to the Son of God when He came to be the Savior of mankind. It was not only something which He knew and taught; it was something which He was: No other truth ever so inspires a merely human teacher, so fills his whole life with itself, so comes to be not merely the creed which his lips declare but the life which his whole living utters, as this truth of man’s childhood to God. And in

Him who was at once the manifested God and the completion of humanity, the idea and the person are so mingled that we cannot separate them. He is the truth, and whoever receives Him becomes the son of God.

As I read the Gospels and see what Jesus is trying to do with men, it seems to me as if this, truth that man is the child of God were to him, in a certain genuine sense, a final truth, — a truth beyond which the soul cannot or at least need not go, — a truth which, if it could be really laid upon the soul, would bring its own evidence and its own interpretation. It is indeed capable of being analyzed. It may be resolved into the several elements which make up its meaning. It includes the notions of a common nature between the Father and the son, of a spontaneous affection of the Father, of an essential obligation of the son, and of a possibility of the son’s unlimited growth into the Father’s likeness. All these are present, are assumed in every declaration of man’s sonship to God which Jesus ever makes. But He does not unfold them and define them. It seems to Him as if, when He says to any human creature, “You are God’s child,” all these included truths revealed themselves to the soul in such degree as his spiritual nature was then able to receive them. It seems to Him as if when He says to a sinner, forgetful of his sonship, “Rise up and be God’s child,” all these included truths came in with their own power to restore his life. He always treats the truth of Fatherhood as the best children of the best earthly fathers treat it, not ignorant of the elemental truths of which it is composed, but best satisfied to let it rest in its own unity, as if any analysis must disturb its beauty and its power.

It is more important than we often think, that we should grasp the general idea, the general purpose, of the life of Jesus. The Gospels become to us a new book when we no longer read them merely as the anecdotes of the life of one who, with a great, kind heart, went through the world promiscuously doing good as opportunities occurred to Him. The drifting and haphazard currents gather themselves together, and we are borne on with the full and enthusiastic impulse of a great river which knows itself and knows

Keep reading