The Apostle of Christ Jesus
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So the Writer of the Letter has passed before us as the living man, the sufferer of pain and sorrow, carrying with him to the last hour all that is implied in a living personality, and used in all the range of his conscious being to be the Chosen Vessel to bear Another’s name.
Let us pause yet a moment to reflect upon that noble characteristic of the Gospel, its native tendency not to wither or to annul the personal being of the Christian but to develope and dilate it to the utmost. I have been reading lately a masterly book, Some leading Ideas of Hinduism, by an experienced missionary and highly-trained thinker, the Rev. Henry Haigh. Towards the close of the volume the writer expounds the religious issues of the subtle pantheism of the Brahmins, and elaborately delineates the ‘perfect man’ of the system, the human person who has worked out, along the prescribed routine of restraint, observation and concentration, his mukti, his ‘liberation.’ What is the condition of the being thus at length set free? He stands disengaged from all relation to other men. To him all persons, all things, all crimes, all virtues, are indifferent. ‘He is no man;
The Apostle of Christ Jesus
individuality, energy, interest in great causes, self- 2 Tim. i. 1. sacrificing service for others, these are absent in him. Sainthood, in the Vedanta, is the dropping of manhood.’
The Gospel asks of its disciple that he shall wholly surrender himself to the Eternal, yea, till he can say, ‘I live, yet not I’ (Gal. ii. 20). But then, such is its immeasurable difference from the ideal of India, it fills the void left by the surrender of self-will not with nothing but with the Lord of Life and Love. ‘Not I — but Christ liveth — in me.’ And where He lives, this wonderful, this supreme Person, ‘who loved me, and gave Himself for me,’ there the habitation dilates and unfolds itself because of the Inhabitant. The ideal Christian is no passionless vacuum, detached, indifferent. He is indeed a person still, a person whose whole inner world of affection, thought and volition is alive as never before, and in contact more full and tender than ever otherwise it could be with all around him. But the centre of the sphere is occupied now, not by self-love, but by Jesus Christ — radiating His gracious presence through the whole sphere of life.
This reflection brings us to the next words in the An Apostle. address of our Letter. ‘Paul, Apostle of Christ Jesus. He had often called himself by that title before now, in the old days, in the fulness of his powers and of his ministry. It was his joy then to realize himself as just this — the Emissary of his Lord; it filled him continually and at once with a new quietness and a new energy, animating him for
2 Tim. i. 1. ‘the care of all the Churches’ (2 Cor. xi. 28) and for the thousand common duties and burthens of the day. It relieved him of all that fatigue which comes of merely personal ambitions; it precluded the secret dreariness of self-conceit, the dolorous isolation of pride, and the corresponding miseries of mortification. He belonged to Another; there, in that settled fact, was involved at once a repose and a motive inexhaustible. He was the chosen and sent Emissary of Another; in that thought the whole work of preaching and of pastorate was disburthened of the haunting sadness of doubt, and of that exhaustion of the soul which comes with a continual publicity, and it was filled with a sense of sure commission and of never-failing support, as he rested in his Sender’s will. And now once more, yet once more, close to the grave, old and worn-out, and in the persecutor’s final grasp, he calls himself by the old title and rests with all his weariness upon it. He is ‘ Apostle of Christ Jesus, even to the end. He can travel no more, and he has done with governing. He will never found another Church, nor ever plan another tour of inspection and development. He has but to bid farewell and to die. Yet he remains to the last in the unaltered possession of the same Sender. Even if his message-bearing is reduced to one last word to the executioner, he remembers with perfect peace that he is still the Chosen Vessel — ‘chosen not for good in him,’ yet chosen, and at the Chooser’s service to the close, and then for ever.
A serene dignity breathes in this final use of the
The Apostle of Christ Jesus
apostolic title. It means an absolute service. It 2 Tim.i. 1. implies, in this man’s case, a life which has been full of exhausting and difficult labours, and now a death violent and unjust. But it means also a relation to Jesus CuHRist profound and special; to belong to Him, to be used by Him, in life and in death. And this not only gave a divine energy to the fulness of St. Paul’s prime; it infuses here a divine tranquillity into his parting hour.
It is good to live, it is good to die, possessed by Christ Jesus, ‘a vessel meet for the MasrTeEr’s
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use.