This sermon by James S. Stewart is the next in the series after the one I posted in August, "Behold the Man." Both are taken from The Strong Name.
THERE was a day when death had darkened the home of that rugged but sensitive soul, Thomas Carlyle. Some one, taking a New Testament, opened it at the Gospel of St. John, and read the familiar words : " Let not your heart be troubled. In My Father's house are many mansions." " Aye," muttered the bereaved man, " if you were God, you had a right to say that ; but if you were only a man, what do you know any more than the rest of us ? "
That incident may well give us our starting-point to-day, reminding us, as it does, that on the answer which we individually give to the question " Who is this Jesus ? " hang for us the most momentous issues of life. " If you were God, Jesus, we can face the darkest hours victoriously ; but if you were only a man, life has us beaten for ever."
Let me recall in a word the path our thoughts travelled in our previous study. We were dwelling on the true and full humanity of Jesus. We saw that from every page of the Gospels there emerged a Figure of real human lineaments — not some heavenly Being disguised or masquerading as a man, but a man in very truth — really tempted, really suffering, really knowing those experiences of conflict and weariness, of yearning and limitation, which are what we mean by being " human." We recognized how crucial this fact was for our Christian faith : for if Jesus does not meet us on our own level, He is no Saviour for us.
But now, supposing all that is granted, we have still not finished with our question. Or rather, it has not finished with us. He was true Man : but is that all ? He was (as even unbelievers and non-Christians agree) the greatest Man who ever lived : but is that the final truth ? Will conscience and spiritual insight, or even reason and commonsense, be content to leave the matter there, and probe the mystery no further ? Are human categories sufficient to explain this strange phenomenon—this unique personality that confronts us in the Gospels, this historic power that blazes a track across the centuries, this living presence that stands and judges us in the deep places of our souls ? He is Son of man : but is He simply to be classified with all the other sons of men ? If not, what name are we to give Him ? Must it not be at last the name which is above every name ?
Let me say at once that this is a question which can be settled only from within a Christian experience. I mean that it is only as we consent to follow Christ and live with Christ that we can come to know who He really is. It is well that we should labour under no misapprehensions at this point. To attempt to demonstrate the divinity of Jesus—that He is God manifest in the flesh—to a man who has no inclination for the life of discipleship, and no intentions of embarking on it, is simply wasted effort: and all our arguments and discussions, under these conditions, are just beating the air. That needs to be said, and ought to be said quite frankly. It is only from within a Christian experience that the divinity of Christ can be understood. Let it not, however, be imagined that to say this is to take refuge in evasion and give the case away. For is it not true that in our daily life we are in contact with a whole series of facts which can be grasped and appreciated only as we yield and submit ourselves to their influence ? Well then, why should this rule not hold of our relationship to the fact of Christ ? Just as you cannot really see the marvellous " Five Sisters " window at York as long as you stand outside the Minster—you have to enter and look upon it from within, and then the matchless profusion of its beauty is revealed; just as you cannot appreciate great music at its true value unless you submit yourself humbly and quite deliberately to its influence and its working; just as you cannot understand the deeper reaches of friendship unless you are prepared to make the adventure of trusting yourself to your friend—so you cannot come to a knowledge of who this Christ really is, except from within the life of Christian discipleship. That stands to reason. Some men declare unconcernedly, or even truculently, that they do not believe in Christ. But then, some men have no right to believe in Christ. They have no qualification for believing, no conceivable possibility of understanding the fact of Christ, because they have not yielded to the challenge of the fact. I repeat, therefore, it is only as we follow Jesus, and seek to live with Him, that there can break on us at last the incredible yet inevitable truth of who this Jesus is.
Keeping that in mind, we return now to our question. This Christ is perfect man—but is He more ? What name are we to give Him ? You would not thank me, I imagine, in this the supreme issue of our faith, for being vague and nebulous and talking generalities. I invite you, therefore, to consider five facts, all pointing decisively to the same overwhelming conclusion : " In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily."
The first cardinal fact is the claim Jesus made for Himself. Do we realize how astonishing and unprecedented this is ? Think of other great religious teachers and leaders who have arisen—Socrates, Buddha, Confucius—and then ask, What was their paramount concern ? Not to fix attention upon themselves, but to win acceptance for their message. " I am nothing," they seemed to say, " the truth is everything. Perish my name, if only the message live ! " But with Jesus and with Him alone, it is utterly different.
He deliberately places Himself at the very centre of His own message. His supreme concern is not to implant some abstract truth in His hearers' minds : it is to win their devotion to His own person. He does not merely claim to have found the answer to all men's needs: He claims to be the answer. " Come unto Me, all ye who labour, and 7 will give you rest." What other prophet or preacher ever dared to say a thing like that ? If the language were not so familiar, it would simply stagger us with its audacity. Calmly He arrogates to Himself a position transcending all the wisdom and the splendour of the centuries. " A greater than Solomon is here." " Prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them." He declares that at the Day of Judgment the final test will be " Ye have done it unto Me," " Ye did it not to Me." " Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of His Father." " He that loseth his life for My sake, shall find it." His whole attitude is " God and I." " Before Abraham was, I am ! "
What are we to say about all this ? There are just two alternatives. Either it is the infatuation of an absurd megalomania, or else it is really true. Either these sayings are the preposterous, incredible arrogance of a pathetic and pathological egotism—or else He had a right to say them. You have to choose one or the other : there is no third option. The extraordinary thing is that, while on the lips of anyone else these sayings would sound utterly presumptuous and incongruous and unbalanced, somehow on His lips they sound entirely fitting and apt and just and credible. Who, then, is this Jesus ? One signpost we have found marking the way to an answer—the claim He made for Himself.
The second decisive fact concerns His sinlessness. That word indeed is too negative to describe a moral perfection which was always active and energizing ; but the fact stands, on the testimony of friend and foe alike, that this man, alone of all the sons of men, " did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth." Read the Gospels, and again and again you will see His enemies turning the fiercest searchlights of their hostile criticism upon Him. Can they detect one flaw in moral character ? Not one, for all their searching. " In all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin."
Moreover, this stands not only on the evidence of friend and foe, but on the testimony of Christ Himself. Never once is Jesus heard confessing sin. This Man whose whole life was a constant self-identification with sinners, who came far closer to them than any one else before or since, and brought them to the mercy-seat of God for the cleansing of their hearts and lives, never had to bow in penitence nor plead for cleansing for Himself. How many a lesson He taught His disciples on the need of praying for forgiveness every day they lived! Yet He never needs or asks to be forgiven.
That fact surely is startling. And it becomes all the more startling when you consider that it is precisely the saintliest people in the world who have been most conscious of their own sin. Bead the stories of the saints, the spiritual history of a Paul, a Thomas a Kempis, a Teresa, and in every case this fact confronts you—that in proportion as a soul draws close to God, the more vividly does it realize its own personal unworthiness. It is the chief of saints who know best that they are the chief of sinners. The clearer the vision of God, the deeper the dissatisfaction with self. That is the universal rule to which all the saints conform. Does Jesus conform to it ? Ought we not to find that Jesus, having a unique God-consciousness, had also a unique awareness of sin ? Yes, indeed, if He is just the greatest of the saints, we should. But if what we find is the exact reverse ; if here, in this one instance, the rule is broken through completely ; if so far from having a desperate sense of sin, like Paul and a Kempis and Teresa and all the finest souls of history, He alone has none; if He is thus not only different from all sinners, but different also from all saints—then who is He ? Who must He be ? The fact of sinlessness is the second great signpost marking the way towards an answer.
The third decisive fact is this: Jesus does for men what only God could do. Here I am thinking particularly of the experience of being forgiven. Consider it like this. Suppose I do something which I know to be wrong. Suppose that thereupon I " rationalize" my action, finding palliating circumstances, and justifying myself to my own satisfaction. Is that the end of the matter ? In my heart of hearts I know that something else is needed to deal with what has happened and to right the wrong. For what my act has done is to throw me out of gear, not only with my better nature, or with a moral ideal, but with the universe. The barrier that has been raised is not between my higher and my lower self: it is between me and God. And that is the real barrier that must be dealt with. In other words, it is God who must forgive—else there is no true forgiveness possible. It is God who must put me right, or else the wrong remains unannulled. " Thou must save, and Thou alone."
But now see what happens. This thing which none but God can do—this divine, supernatural thing—Jesus does.
Look at your Gospels. He did it again and again in Galilee. And, mark you, it was not only that He pronounced words of absolution—any priest can do that—but it was this, that He actualized God's forgiveness for those poor sinful folk, embodied it, " represented, sealed and applied " it (to use the words of The Shorter Catechism) to their desperate, gaping need; so that having been with Jesus, they knew with a sense of amazed, incredible relief that God was at peace with them, and they with God. And what happened then in Galilee has been happening ever since. Consult your own experience. Have not the hours of your deepest assurance of divine forgiveness been the hours when you have encountered Christ ? Who, then, is this Jesus ? When the Pharisees, attacking Him, declared " No one can forgive sins but God only," and argued that consequently Jesus must be a usurper and an impostor, their first statement was perfectly correct. Only God can convey forgiveness : that is true. And that is what we have to square with this other unimpeachable fact, that forgiveness is conveyed by Jesus. Only God can open the gate of the kingdom of heaven: yet it is certain that for thousands Christ has opened it. Only God can break the chain of a man's sinful nature : yet for thousands Christ has broken it. Only God can redeem: yet I am certain that Christ is my Redeemer. If Christ thus does for us what only God could ever do, who can He be ? What other name is possible except God manifest in the flesh, the fulness of the Godhead bodily ?
The fourth decisive fact is the universality of Jesus. It is worth asking ourselves the question : How do we propose to account for the unique phenomenon, that Jesus has laid His spell invincibly upon every century and every race and upon all kinds and conditions of men ? Aristotle never did that: he was too Greek, and too academic. Buddha never did it: he was too typically Eastern. Only in Jesus has everything local and temporal been transcended by a spirit universal and eternal.
Look at the first circle of His friends. Peter and John were, temperamentally, poles asunder: yet in His eyes they both beheld the answer to their dreams. Consider His early biographers. Matthew the Jewish taxgatherer and Luke the Gentile doctor had nothing whatever in common: yet to draw His portrait for the world to see was, to both men, the only thing that mattered. Or think of the modern writers who have toiled to tell of Him—Papini and Bruce Barton, as different as an Italian mystic and an American business man could be, Emil Ludwig and Middleton Murry, and a host of others even in this last decade, of utterly diverse intellectual background and racial sympathy and moral ideal, yet all fascinated by this one fact, all drawn by the compulsion of the mystery of Christ! Or pass in review the unbroken ranks of His friends and followers throughout the ages. Who can this be who can grip and captivate the souls of men so utterly different as Luther the Reformer and Loyola the Jesuit, as Francis the friar and Moody the evangelist, as G. K. Chesterton and General Booth, as Cardinal Newman and David Livingstone ? What an amazing universality is Christ's!
" I see His blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of His eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.
All pathways by His feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree."
Could any mortal man thus besiege and lay captive the thinking and the worship of the centuries ? Must not this beleaguering spirit be eternal and divine, the fulness of the Godhead bodily ? The universality of Christ is our fourth significant signpost pointing to the answer.
The fifth and final fact is the most decisive of all. It is the divine self-verification of Christ in conscience. For there is a very wonderful thing which happens : you begin exploring the fact of Christ, perhaps merely intellectually and theologically—and before you know where you are, the fact is exploring you, spiritually and morally. You begin by dealing with a historic Figure as presented in the Gospels, and gradually you become aware that the ultimate reality and heart of things is dealing with you. You begin by looking for the secret of this Master of life who walked the Galilean road, and piercingly you are made to feel that everything that is highest and holiest and divinest in the universe is looking for you. You set out to see what you can find in Christ, and sooner or later God in Christ finds you.
That is the self-verification of Jesus. That, in every age, has been the ultimate and sure foundation of the impregnable conviction of His divinity. In Christ, the one and only God has come. It is a confession of faith which I am constrained and bound to make, because the more I confront myself with the fact of Christ, the more intensely do I know that the living God is confronting me, demanding —as only God can demand—the entire and utter surrender of my soul. If the final reality of the universe comes to meet me anywhere, it comes to meet me here ; and all I know of God—His nature, attributes and ways of working—has come to me through Jesus. Wherefore, with the whole company of His disciples throughout the centuries to whom the glory of the Word made flesh has been revealed, I, too, can take the sublime, imperishable words upon my lips and say—" This is the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Thou art the King of glory, 0 Christ; Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father ! "
In these two studies, we have been facing the fact of Christ, in His humanity and His divinity. But let us not suppose that our quest can ever end in a mere giving of assent to certain truths and propositions. When Saul of Tarsus, in the supreme moment of his life, had received an answer to his first impulsive cry " Who art Thou, Lord ? " immediately and instinctively a second question came— " What wilt Thou have me to do ? " And when from afar we have caught our glimpse of the glory of the Lord, there rises at once and confronts us in the secret place of conscience the inevitable challenge—" If that is Christ, what is our response to be ? "
To that question each of us must find an answer for himself. It will be well if, standing at the foot of the cross, we can give such an answer as that which was given by St. Aloysius long ago :
" O Christ, Love's Victim, hanging high
Upon the cruel Tree,
What worthy recompense can I
Make, mine own Christ, to Thee ?
My sweat and labour from this day,
My sole life, let it be,
To love Thee aye the best I may
And die for love of Thee."
