The Great Exemplar.
I. That which strikes us first in the example which Christ has left is its faultlessness. We are startled by His own sense of this. He never utters one word to God or to man which implies the consciousness of a single defect. Read the lives of the great servants of God in the Old or New Testament of Abraham, of Moses, of Samuel, of David, of Elijah, of St. Peter, of St. Paul. They all confess sin. They all humble themselves before men. They implore the mercy of God. Think of any great man whom you have ever known, or whose life you have read. He has feared God, loved God, worked for God through long years; yet he is full of the sense of his inconsistencies, of his imperfections, pervading his life and his conduct. He is profuse in his acknowledgments of his weakness and of his sin. Nay, if he were not thus willing to confess his sin, you yourself would question his goodness, for what he says is, as you instinctively feel, no more than the fact. But Jesus Christ reproaches Himself for nothing, confesses nothing, regrets nothing. He is certain of all that He says and does. "I do always those things that please the Father." In this sinlessness He is, although our model, yet beyond our full reach of imitation. We cannot in our maimed and broken lives reproduce the complete image of the immaculate Lamb. The best of men knows that in his best moments he is beset by motives, thoughts, inclinations, from which Christ was utterly free. "If we say that we have not sinned, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." But this does not destroy on the contrary, it enhances the value of His ideal example. In all departments of thought and work the ideal is, strictly speaking, by man unattainable. Yet man may never lose sight of the ideal. In the Gospels ideal human life appears in a form of flesh and blood. It is the ideal, and, therefore, it is beyond us; yet it is not the less precious as a stimulus and guide to our effort at self-improvement.
II. And then, again, we are struck by the balance and perfection of excellences in our Lord's human character. As a rule, if a man possesses some one excellence in an unusual degree, he will be found to exhibit some fault or shortcoming in an opposite direction. Now, of this want of balance in excellence, of this exaggeration of particular forms of excellence, which thus passes into defect, there is no trace in our Lord. Read His life over and over again with this object in view, and, unless I am mistaken, nothing will strike you more than its faultless proportions.
III. Consider, again, a feature which runs through His whole character: its simplicity. In nothing that He says or does can we detect any trace of striving after effect. The number of men of whom anything remotely like this is true is very small indeed. The effort to create an impression is the result sometimes of timidity, sometimes of vanity, but it always impairs moral beauty, whether of speech or work. Our Lord always says what He has to say in the most natural and unpretending words. His sentences unfold themselves without effort or system, just as persons and occasions demand. Every situation offers an opportunity, and He uses it. He attends a wedding; He cures a paralytic; He stoops to write upon the ground; He eats with a Pharisee; He raises a corpse to life; He washes the feet of His disciples, just as it comes, just as is right from day to day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute. The most important and useful acts follow on with the most trivial and ordinary. There is no effort, no disturbing or pretentious movement. All is as simple as if all were commonplace. It is this absence of anything like an attempt to produce unusual impressions which reveals a soul possessed with a sense of the majesty and the power of truth. Depend upon it, in the degree in which any man becomes really great, he becomes also simple.
IV. And one further point to be remarked in our Lord's example is the stress which it lays upon those forms of excellence which make no great show, such as patience, humility, and the like. As we read the Gospels we are led to see that the highest type of human excellence consists less in acting well than in suffering well. The ancient world never understood this. With them virtue was always active force. Yet the conditions of our human life are such that, whether we will or no, we are more frequently called upon to endure than to act; and upon the spirit in which we endure everything depends. Our Lord restored the passive virtues to their forgotten and true place in human conduct. He revealed the beauty, the majesty, of patience, of meekness, of uncomplaining submission. Experience has shown that Christ's Divinity is no bar whatever to an imitation of His life as man. And this imitation is not a duty which we are free to accept or decline. "The elect," says St. Paul, "are predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son of God." If there is no effort at this conformity, there is no note of a true predestination. We cannot enter into the designs of God in giving us His Son if we are making no effort to be like His Son. Like the law, the life of Christ is a schoolmaster to bring us to the cross of Christ. After gazing at Him we come to Him out of heart with ourselves, emptied, happily emptied, of self, crushed by a sense of our utter unworthiness to bear His name, to wear His livery; and He once more stretches His pierced hand to pardon, and offers the chalice of His blood to strengthen our souls for such work as may remain to make them more like Himself.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,New Series, No. 1091.
References: 1 Peter 2:21. R. Balgarnie, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxix., p. 407; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for aYear,p. 152; Ibid., The Life of Duty,vol. i., p. 218; Preacher's Monthly,vol. v., p. 354; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. ii., p. 91.