The Personality of the Priest

We: have seen how plainly the Bible tells us that we

are dead. If Jesus Christ confirms this account, He will at once take upon Himself the severest task. A point of exciting interest thus arises. Either Jesus Christ will go back to the beginning of the Book of Genesis, and address Himself to the dead man who has just been thrown out of Eden, or, like an ordinary reformer, He will mingle with His contemporaries, as if His work had reference only to the principles and customs of a particular nation which ought to be set right according to a standard which He would supply. Happily we have not to wait one moment for the satisfaction of our wonder. Boldly, as became His view of the occasion, He said, “I am come that ye might have LIFE.” Thus He boldly went to the dead Adam (man), and assumed, 2.¢., took upon Himself, all the difficulties which attach to so desperate a case. What I want you now to admit is that no other man ever made such an offer: you have Moses and the Prophets, search them and see if any one of their number ever rose to such a height and graciousness, even of mere fancy, as to offer life to his fellow-men. It will be something gained if you can be brought to admit that this Man, Jesus Christ, had at least magnificent conceptions, whether able or unable to bring them to effect. If I accept the statement that human nature (all appearances to the contrary) is dead, I am bound to admit that this Man instantly addressed

48 Lhe Priesthood of Chrest.

Himself to that appalling fact. Beating about the bush there is none, nor is there any play upon words; there is — frankness, there is simplicity, there is earnestness. JI speak purposely as if Christ were a man only. He says, “I am the life; he that believeth on Me hath everlasting life; he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life; and ye will not come unto Me that ye might have life.” He calls Himself the Resurrection and the Life. You see, therefore, how closely He addresses Himself to the very letter of the Bible, and does not seek a brilliant reputation by attempting to do many dazzling but useless things. If He fails to give life He will fail altogether; though His eloquence brings tears, and His generosity reward Him with the admiration and acclaims of all observers, yet if He fail to give what He Himself calls 4fe, His ministry will be a disappointment and sorrow to His own heart. This is not so important teus, however, just now, as is the fact that His ability or inability to give life will determine the value and authority of all the claims which He directly and inferentially sets up. It ought to be nothing to us that His words are beautiful, or that His temper is sweet; these accidents or felicitous characteristics must not divert us from a severe inquiry into His ability to give life; the one may entitle Him to be thought of as an amiable enthusiast, but the other alone can entitle Him to be received and worshipped in any proper sense as the Saviour of the world. He begins peculiarly, yet in a manner most interesting. A consideration of this manner alone ought to beget for Him our favourable regard. His method is gradual; it is a development, a process moving towards perfection. As I read the life of Christ, I say, This Man always begins where He can; that is, where people will allow Him to begin. For example, He sees a sick man, and says unto him, “Wilt thou be made whole?” (A question which

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Chrast in the Gospels. 49

meant more than was at once apparent.) He sees a leper, and cleanses him. “His fame went throughout all Syria, and they brought unto Him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy, and He HEALED THEM!” Does this look as if He had come to give men life? It does! And it looks all the more so because He did not cure one kind of disease only, but all kinds; as if He could touch the spring of life itself and heal it at the source. See, then, how faithful He is to His own word. It is clear that if this Healer had met Adam when he left the garden a dishonoured and shattered man, He would have asked, “Wilt thou be made whole?” And that question would itself have been a revelation to the sufferer; it would have been as a door opening into a new world. Sometimes a question may change a destiny. As Jesus Christ healed men, He uttered words which He did not explain. He said, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And truly it would seem so to sufferers relieved! The cleansed leper would say, as new life bounded joyously through his veins, So it is! this is heaven! The lunatic restored would say, The kingdom of heaven is at hand; look at me and believe! You know what it is to be relieved of great pain; you exclaim, This is heaven! It is hardly an exaggeration. To yourself indeed it is no exaggeration at all. Jesus Christ meant this, and yet He meant infinitely more; but in meaning infinitely more, He began where alone the people could begin with Him. He meant life, but they were not then prepared to understand more than health, so He gave them health, the alphabet and earnest of immortality. To Jesus Christ the words, “kingdom of heaven” meant everything true, pure, beautiful, and good; but the people who heard the words could see only one

aspect of this infinite significance. y Still Jesus Christ went on, with sweet and wonderful patience, with both His works and His doctrine. Many a beautiful speech He made, yet His words perplexed the people, and sometimes made them question His sanity. They thought He was a good worker, but when He began to say some of His deepest things to them, they told Him that He was mad and had a devil! We ourselves know what it is for a man to be almost a sage on one side of his life, and almost a fool on another. We know men who, when flying on the wings of fancy, can sing high in the air some song which they have certainly heard in heaven, yet when they come to their feet again, their whole attitude, speech, and personality is hardly above being despicable in feebleness and absurdity. When the people looked at Christ’s works, they said, “He hath done all things well.” The mother blessed Him for blessing her child, but when He began to speak of His glory and His kingdom, His heavenliness and love of truth, she exclaimed in painful surprise, “What is this that He saith? I cannot tell what he saith.” Jesus did not cease talking on this account. It is not always the best preaching that is fully comprehended without attention or mental strain, yet there must be something in it that shall hold all men as by a spell; or there must be something in the preacher that shall give hope that, when all is explained, it will be found to be a true and glorious doctrine. Something of that kind there was undoubtedly in and around the spoken word of Christ, for the common people heard Him gladly, and wise men looked on with wonder that sometimes moved towards worship, and sometimes darkened towards distrust and abhorrence. Notwithstanding the ever-changing and uncertain state of feeling on the part of observers and hearers, attention was never allowed to flag, This was enough in the meantime. He gains much who gains attention. It is to the expectant heart that great messages are delivered. Jesus Christ was so far satisfied that His works and sayings should be quietly accepted, as to desire expressly, and even with much warmth of feeling, that, people would not say anything about them for a while. Observe this, if you please. Jesus Christ said again and again, Do not report this; tell no man until the Son of Man be risen from the dead. He wished to guard Himself from half-stories and partial statements, and yet to give the assurance that the time would come when all the world might be told everything He had ever said and done. God took care to have the whole world ready before He made man; but Christ could not repeat this Divine wisdom; He had to do much of His work piece by piece, openly in the plain daylight, with throngs of people looking on and questioning Him. But He took occasion, when circumstances were favourable, to do in the part what he would have done in the whole had it been possible, namely, to impose silence until there was something complete and self-explaining to be told. And yet this necessary disclosure of processes was turned to good account. Sentences that were mysterious were lighted up by the final act, and even old prophecies were re-vivified and made lustrous as when the disciples, seeing their Master’s devotion, and feeling the rays of His glowing ardour, “remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.” In the sunset there was a light which fell upon things unexplained in the morning, and in the autumn the harvest was given as the explanation of the seed-time labour.

As you read the words of Jesus Christ you will wonder what His mission was precisely. What it was generally, you will gather at once. I question, however, whether you can understand the doctrine until you understand the Man. If you plead that you can surely understand words and arguments, I might demur to the justice of your self-flattery, or even strongly deny your claim to a power which seems to be an almost vital part of human nature itself. Possibly you may understand the words of an equal; and even that possibility may be extreme unless by the very fact of your equality you do understand the speaker himself, and see things in a common atmosphere. But how to understand fully a speaker who is not your equal, who is felt to belong to another class, a higher, a better? That is the question. You would not be surprised if a man spoken of as rich by an agricultural labourer should be described as poor by a millionaire, yet both men speak one language, and both are equally impartial. A hundred other illustrations will occur to you, and will show, what it is here so needful to enforce, that the meaning of words is not so easy as it looks, and that some men must themselves be explained before the complete and final value of their words can be determined. Of all men this seems to me to be pre-eminently true of Jesus Christ. Upon His personality it wholly depends whether some words are blasphemous or holy, absolutely insane, or infinitely Divine. So there was, of course, continual contention about His words: some said He had a devil; some said He was a teacher sent from God; some said He was Beelzebub; others said He was Elias or “that prophet.” Bear this in mind, and it will help to explain some words, and modify your impatience with the mystery of others. or the son of a carpenter, Himself a mechanic and a peasant, to say, “Man, thy sins are forgiven thee,” was a plain violation of piety and good sense: for the Son of God to say it, might be a gracious and supremely glorious revelation. Mark how the difference turns wholly upon personality; the words are the same, but what of their relative compass and value? I am not about to argue the question of the Incarnation, but to point out that if Jesus Christ was begotten of the Holy Ghost, His life, from its very first

Christ tn the Gospels. By

day, must have a specialty which will communicate its own uniqueness to every word and every act. I ask you, therefore, to allow to Jesus Christ a right which you concede to others, the right of being judged according to His personality. If you walk through the wonderful history of His life according to this common and proper rule of judgment, you will walk in the lght and never stumble. But if you determine to crush all His words into the mould of your own capacity, and refuse every meaning to them which would not attach to them in your own use, He will perplex and annoy you in every discourse.

Jesus Christ evidently takes something for granted in His way of addressing mankind. He takes for granted the fact of His Incarnation. He says that He came from above; that God is His Father; that no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him. It was this fundamental assumption, that was either denied or not apprehended, which led to endless misconception and controversy. The only person who could have absolutely no doubt as to His heavenly origin was His Mother; she alone of all humanity knew this as an indisputable and awful fact; it will be most interesting, therefore, to get some hint of her estimate of Jesus Christ; if she would speak but one word, it might help us like a revelation. Happily, she did speak that word, and she spoke it so incidentally as to add much to its pertinence and value in this discussion. At the marriage-feast in Cana of Galilee, she and her Son had a brief conversation upon a point which she herself had raised, and in the result she said to the servants, “Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it,” — words which must be admitted to be pregnant with profound and vital meaning. Consider what they imply. For thirty years mother and Son had lived together in seclusion, and no miracle had He publicly done; for thirty years she had watched His temper, His disposition, and

His habits; all these things she had pondered in her heart, and yet she knew not the whole purpose of a daily growth in beauty and revealed nobleness; but somehow she felt that in a time of need help would come from Him and from Him alone, and in one sentence she expressed the conviction, the love, and the religious honour of a lifetime, when she said unto the servants, Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it. Thus the mother unconsciously revealed the Son, and the Son Himself seems to have caught the words, and to have immortalised in them His filal love, for long afterwards He said, Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you! Both the sentences are full of the spirit of rulership, the mother’s not less than the Son’s. For years she had been doing His will, not slavishly, but by a sweet and tender compulsion, and so good had she found it, so Invariably right, wise, and beneficent, that when she became His first preacher to the world, she summed up her own hitherto undeclared subjection and love in the injunction, Whatsoever He saith unto you, do rt.

You will observe that Jesus Christ did not speak in what we now term a systematic or methodical manner, In the first chapter of Genesis, we see how orderly He could be (for all things were created by Him), and in the Gospels we see how different is life from mechanism. An orderly or scholastic statement, such as rabbinical hearers would have approved, would have been out of keeping with a mission designed to have universal effects. Every one must hear something which he could understand; a parable or a proverb, a doctrine or a prophecy: there must be a word for the little child, and an allusion which would make the hoary rabbi think. It is, therefore, from a most miscellaneous mass of graphic and vivid talk that you have to pick out and piece together the Speaker’s meaning. But this miscellaneousness comes to an end in one subject, the appalling subject of the Speaker’s own death and resurrection. We may, by listening to Him now, be able to gather something of His intention. To talk of death at little more than thirty years of age! It is unnatural. Can the young spring wither and shed yellow leaves like autumn? Can morning die? Yet Jesus in the early prime of manhood said He must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness! He said He came to give His life a ransom for many; that His flesh was bread, and that His blood was shed for men; that no man took away His life from Him, but that He laid it down of Himself; and that greater love no man could have than so to lay down his life. He said He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the chief priests and elders, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. When Nicodemus said that He was a Teacher come from God, He answered, “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life,’ — not a Teacher only, but a Saviour and Giver of life. When Moses and Elias talked with Him, it was about the decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem. Instead of talking of kingliness, power, dominion, and glory, He spoke of suffering, rejection, pain, humiliation, and death. Not only, however, did He speak of death, He spoke also of resurrection from the dead, and the disciples reasoned among themselves, wondering what the rising again from the dead could mean. He said that if He was lifted up, He would draw all men unto Him, and that some things He would explain, or would be explained, when He rose again from the dead. The principal point He Himself did actually explain, in most remarkable terms: “It behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations.”

This is a rough summary of Christ’s work as explained by Himself, and is perhaps sufficient as a basis upon which to found some intelligent opinion of its purpose. This we shall attempt by-and-by. Just now I ask you to note a few points of special significance. first, How easy it would have been to have expressed His object in more direct and positive terms. Thus: Man is immortal; he.is advancing every day towards heaven or hell; by his own sin he has lost his spiritual life, and is utterly unable to regain it; I am his Maker, God manifest in the flesh; T will take all his sins upon Me, I will stand in his stead; whatever is due to him as a punishment for sin shall fall upon Me; and in this way, after I have returned from the dead, I will become his Saviour and Lord evermore. No such formal statement did Jesus Christ ever attempt to make. He proceeded, apparently, on one of two assumptions, either (1) that people already knew who He was, or (2) that His words and works were such as to leave no doubt as to His personality, that is, as to its origin and nature, Second, What apparent reason there was for the strong contentions which His ministry occasioned. It is idle to deny that controversy was inevitable. Some questions He would not answer at all, and others He answered in terms whose exclusive sense was at least not obvious. He contradicted the maxims which were approved by teachers held high for their character and office, and substituted for them principles and injunctions so abstract, ideal, and spiritual, as to be apparently quite impracticable in a world like this. The religious teachers of His day He spoke of as blind leaders of the blind, and He told them that they would all fall into the ditch. He visited suspected characters, and sinners that were universally avoided and condemned by religious people. One day He was quite social; the next He was in the desert hiding Himself from His own disciples. The people who were most thought of He described as false guides, whited sepulchres, and children of the devil. He was so affectionate as to take up little children in His arms and bless them, and so unloving as to ask coldly who His mother was when He was told that she stood without waiting to see Him. No wonder that such a man aroused the most violent controversies, and provoked deadly antagonism. Third: How completely, and almost humiliatingly, He kept His disciples in a secondary position. He did not give them to feel that they were elements of strength to Him, or that they were necessary to His cause. He said that one of them was a devil; another of them He was always taking aside and reproving; He said to His oldest friend, “Get thee behind me, Satan;” and several of them were but errand-runners and managers of small affairs. When they ventured to express an opinion about Him, they were always sure to bring upon themselves a severe rebuke, except in one instance wherein the speaker was told that what He had said was not of his own ability or invention, but was a revelation from heaven, They knew not what manner of spirit they were of. They were blamed for turning the children away; blamed for calling down fire from heaven; blamed for having no faith; blamed for rejoicing; blamed for sleeping. And with all this, never were men so assured of their Master’s love; He comforted them with holy promises; He drove away the fears that darkened around their souls; He said they should be princes and judges; He gave them rest from labour; and He washed their feet. Fourth: What a hich degree of improbability marked His principal assurances and predictions. He had twelve thrones to dispose of. He was before Abraham, and Abraham had rejoiced in His day. His name was to be made known in all nations. He had glory with the Father

before the world was. He would build the temple in three days. He would rise again from the dead. If all these assurances had stood alone they would have justified the strongest suspicion and demanded the most determined resentment. No sane men would have founded themselves as a society upon propositions so wild and impious. But they did not stand alone. They were softened by much humanity, and the slope which culminated in heights so sublime was eraded by many beautiful deeds and words, by beatitudes and sympathies most tender. And what was grand in prediction was made credible by something equally grand in actions which admitted of no doubt. How otherwise could such men as were the disciples, or indeed any men, have received the prediction of His rising again from the dead? That prediction alone, separated from the tissue of His whole history, was enough to confound the disciples by its manifest improbability and its profane self-idolatry. But set in its proper place, surrounded by miracles which seemed to surpass each other in beneficence and splendour, it became one of a number which approached it in sublimity. In such a history as Christ’s, the resurrection was but a commonplace. There are hills in Europe, any one of which taken alone would make the fame of an ordinary landscape, but gathered around Mont Blanc they are little heeded, yet Mont Blanc himself, which would be infinite upon an island lke Great Britain, is modified by the very hills which he dwarfs by his appalling stature. The resurrection of Christ was made credible by the resurrection of Lazarus; the salvation of the world was made probable by the blessing of little children. The preceding acts were but syllables which, when put together, formed the word RESURRECTION: Lastly, and specially, Observe how often the natural and obvious meaning (or that which would be taken as such) of Christ’s words is not the meaning which they were intended to convey. If it may be so expressed, Christ had a way of speaking which must be understood, or the point of many a sentence will be lost. <A few ee eee examples will show how true this is. When Christ spoke of a leaven, the disciples instantly (and not unnaturally) thought that He meant bread, but He did not intend the outer meaning to be taken at all, for He spoke not of bread but of doctrine! Who at first could have inferred that such was His meaning? When Christ spoke of living (spring) water to the woman of Samaria, she found out, on asking Him for the good gift, that He was not talking of water, but of something of which water was a symbol. How was the woman, of plain matter-of-fact mind, to know .that He was using typical language? She took the first meaning of the words, and in doing so she missed the point of the declaration. Christ told a wise man that we must all be born again; the wise man took the first meaning of the words, as did the Samaritan woman, and exclaimed, How can these things be? On another occasion Christ said He would give His flesh for the life of the world; like Nicodemus and the woman of Samaria, the Jews took the obvious meaning of the words, and strove among themselves, saying, How can this Man give us His flesh to eat? He told the disciples that Elias was come already, and He left them to discover that when He said Elias He meant John the Baptist. He told the people that if they would destroy the temple He would build it again in three days; they said (taking the first meaning of the words) that it was impossible, and He left them to find out that He was not talking about the temple at all but about His body! Again and again He said to His disciples, How is it that ye do not understand? They always took His words hterally, they did not see the soul within the body; and thus, even far on in

their training, they were justly described as “fools and slow of heart.” If you put all those instances together, and quite a number of others that will occur to your own recollection, you will see what I mean in saying that Christ had a way of

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speaking, a genius, which must be taken as the key of particular passages, if you are really and usefully to grasp the meaning of His living words. Understand that His words are spirit and life; they are not letters; the letter cramps and distorts the meaning, yet without the letter we could not get even a dim glimpse of the immeasurable and eternal thought. As Christ’s words are spirit and life, so the interpretation of them is a progressive science; not a science of lexicography, but a gift of spiritual discernment, a spirit of truth, an intuition, keen, certain, and sympathetic. We are daily seeing that in matters of science, ceremony, miracle, and parable, the first meaning, say the superficial meaning, was not the meaning which the inspired writers intended to convey. It is our joy to discover that as life passes into higher and nobler developments, it is itself the most lucid and powerful expositor of the inspired text, so that the Bible not only keeps abreast of all progress, but claims to have inspired the very advancement which sometimes apparently threatens its own heavenliness and infallibiity. To what extent Christ privately explained to the disciples the doctrinal meaning of His death, after His resurrection, we do not know; but we do know that He opened their understandings that they might understand the Scriptures, and that He gave them the Holy Ghost. We are certainly justified in believing that there were in the words of the apostles, as in the words of the prophets, meanings of which the speakers themselves had but an imperfect and inadequate conception, if there is any value at all in even the one-thousandth part of the varied and magnificent literature which has sprung from their fertile pages. Out of the short gamut which they were inspired to give, has come every note of the soul’s best music — music tempestuous as a midnight storm at sea, tender as prayers in sorrow, joyful as the gladness of victory; trumpetings that vibrate the world over, and lute tones that soothe the heart, sore with many an unspoken grief. Out of the handful of corn which God sent us by them has come a harvest, thick and golden, that shakes like Lebanon when fanned by the autumn wind. What more has to come who can tell? He who prophesies great things in this direction will be nearer the truth than he who insists upon the completeness and finality of the letter, for who can find out the Almighty unto perfection, and limit the shining of the infinite light?