The person of our blessed Lord is a type of the mystic personality of His Church. The notes by which He was manifested to the world as the true Messiah are notes by which also His Church is manifested to the world as the true Church. He was to be the true Healer and Comforter of all, bringing good tidings of good, binding up broken hearts, loosing prisoners out of bondage, comforting mourners, sympathising with all, drawing all that are afflicted to Himself, by the consciousness of their own miseries and by the attractions of His compassion. And this He did by His own Divine love, by His perfect human sympathy, by His own mysterious experience as the Man of Sorrows.
I. Such was His character and ministry; such is the character and ministry of His mystical body, the Church. The anointing which was upon Him flowed down from the Head to the members. So we find after His ascension. The Holy Ghost came upon the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost, and thenceforward they opened their work of compassion and of spiritual mercy by works of healing and by words of consolation. It was indeed the dispensation of the Comforter; the Church was the almoner of the poor, the physician of souls, the solace of the afflicted. It spoke peace, forgiveness, ransom, purity, gladness of heart, to all. And after the descent of the Spirit, the Church passed into that truest discipline of sympathy, the experience of sorrow. Christians were sons of consolation, because they were men of sorrows. To the poor was given the first place in Christ's earthly kingdom; widows, orphans, mourners, were so many distinct orders whom the Church nourished and consoled; little children were among its chiefest cares. The whole visible system of hospitals, asylums, alms-houses, and the like, are the expression and means of fulfilling the ends of mercy for which the Messiah was anointed by the Spirit of the Lord.
II. What has been said will show us the benefit of affliction to the Church. It is most certain that it was never so like its Divine Head as when it suffered for His name's sake. Whatsoever adversity be upon us, it is manifestly a token not only of God's love, but of God's purpose, to make us fitter for His work of mercy to the world.
III. Another thing we learn from what has been said is the design of God in afflicting the several members of the Church. It is to make them partakers of this true note of Christ's mystical body. We are all by nature hard and unsympathising. By our regeneration we learn to see the great truth of Christian compassion; but it lies dormant in us, until by the visitations of God's hand it is unfolded into contrition and spiritual sorrow. It is God's deepest way of teaching, and what we learn by affliction is our truest learning.
H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. ii., p. 200.
It is a blessed name of Jesus, and as true as it is blessed the Liberator. We can scarcely conceive anything grander, or more delightful, than to be always going about making everything free. To this end, Christ first liberated Himself.
I. As in Him there was no sin, He never indeed could know the worst of all bondage the bondage of the spirit to the flesh. But He did know the restraints of fear; He did feel the harassing of indecision; He did experience the irksomeness of the sense of a body too narrow for the largeness of His soul; and He did go through the contractions of all that is material, and the mortifying conventionalities of life, for He was hungry, thirsty, weary, sad, and the sport of fools. From all this Christ freed Himself distinctly, progressively, He freed Himself. Step by step, He led captivity captive. He made for Himself a spiritual body, which, in its own nature, and by the law of its being, soared at once beyond the trammels of its humanity. And therefore He is the Liberator, because He was once Himself the Prisoner.
II. And all Christ did, and all Christ was, upon this earth His whole mission was essentially either to teach or to give liberty. His preaching was, for the most part, to change the constraint of law into the largeness of love. Every word He said, in private or in public, proved expansion. He was always opening new fields of thought and being, bidding men go out into the breadth of the liberty of their sonship and their destiny and their immortality. His disciples were always looking down into the valleys and shut-up things: He led them to the high hills beyond. Men saw the shadows: He pointed to the sun travelling in its strength, without which those shadows could not be, and into which all those shadows were to be absorbed.
III. When Christ burst through all the tombs the moral tombs and the physical tombs in which we all lay buried and when He went out into life and glory, He was not Himself alone, He was at that moment the covenanted Head of a mystical body, and all that body rose with Him. If so be you have union with Christ, you are risen; bondage is past; you are free.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,7th series, p. 274.
I. There are two kinds of broken hearts: the natural and the spiritual. They may be united; and sometimes the heart is broken in nature, when it is very plain that it may be broken in grace. Often they are divided. Every broken heart becomes the subject of Jesus' care, and is dear to Him, if for no other reason in the world but for this because it is unhappy.
II. Christ was Himself well trained in the school of suffering hearts, that He might learn to bind the mourners. All which goes to break men's hearts He felt. No wonder then that the bindings are what they are. (1) They are delicate. (2) They are very wise. (3) They are sure and thorough. There is no such thing as a half-cure in that treatment. No heart which has not known a breaking knows indeed what strength is.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,7th series, p. 269.
References: Isaiah 61:1. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,7th series, pp. 262, 282; A. F. Barfield, Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 70; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxvii., No. 1604; Homiletic Magazine,vol. xiii., p. 337; W. M. Punshon, Old Testament Outlines,p. 239.