Christ, the Ideal Man.
Man needs a perfect ideal, an ideal that shall permanently defy criticism, a sample of what human goodness is in its truth and its completeness. We are sure we men that there is such a thing as this. How else, we ask, should there be so universal an aspiration towards that which would, upon this hypothesis, have no existence in fact? It is our Lord, and our Lord alone, who satisfies this human want of an ideal of goodness. He shows us what human goodness was meant to be. He offers us, in His life, the ideal life, the life of man at his best, in his perfection.
I. In the ideal which His life presents to us, let us observe, first, the absence of any disturbing flaw. In the midst of a soiled and sinful world, He alone is absolutely sinless. He, too, is tempted, as was Adam. Unlike Adam, He resists temptation. We shall seek in vain for any trace of evil in that perfect Life, for any word, any action, any gesture or movement which implies a will averted from good, which implies sin. He challenges His contemporaries to convince Him of sin if they could. The human conscience in all ages, like the conscience of His contemporaries, listens to that astonishing question in reverent silence, and whispers to itself, "He He has a right to ask it, for He He alone is without sin."
II. The ideal of goodness presented to us by our Lord is perfectly harmonious. We see in Him nothing of the narrowness or the one-sidedness which is traceable, more or less, in all merely great men. As a rule, we men can only appropriate one part of goodness at the cost of the rest. In our Lord there is no one predominating virtue that throws others into the shade. Every excellence is adjusted, balanced, illustrated, by other excellences. He is in His character, and as by the terms of His mediatorial office, at once the Lamb led forth to sacrifice withal the Lion of the tribe of Judah.
III. The type of goodness presented to us in the life of Jesus is a strictly universal type. It is flavoured, so to speak, by no race or clime or sect. He speaks to the human soul in all countries and ages with the authority of one in whom every soul finds at last its ideal representative. And if any have dared, of His grace, to say, with His Apostles, "Be ye followers of me," they have quickly added, "Even as I also am of Christ."
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 764.
Christ, the Authoritative Teacher.
I. We see in Christ the authority of certain knowledge. The Scribes argued, conjectured, balanced this interpretation against that; this tradition against the other. They were often learned and laborious, but they dealt with religion only as antiquarians might deal with old ruins or manuscripts, so that when it reached the people the underlying elements of truth were overlaid with a mass of doubtful disputations, of which none could see the precise value or drift. When, then, our Lord spoke with clear distinctness, as one who saw spiritual truth, who took the exact measure of the seen and of the unseen, who described without any ambiguities what He saw, the effect was so fresh and so unlooked for as to create the astonishment which St. Matthew describes. Jesus, with His "Verily, verily, I say unto you," is the Teacher of teachers, the most authoritative Teacher, pouring forth a flood of light upon all the great problems of human interest.
II. Observe in Him, too, that authority which among religious teachers has been comparatively rare. Many a man will occasionally say strong or paradoxical things, who is by no means continually fearless. If he fears not the world at large, or his declared opponents, he fears his friends, his supporters, his patrons. He fears them too much to risk their goodwill by telling them unpopular truth. Here, as elsewhere, our Lord is above all. Look at the Sermon on the Mount, in which the most comfortable glosses on the old awful law of Sinai are sternly exposed and set aside; in which the exigency of its spirit as distinct from the easy obedience to its literal requirements is insisted on; in which, as afterwards in those discourses reported by St. John, before the climax of the Passion, the great authority of the most powerful classes of Jerusalem is confronted with uncompromising resistance. Jesus enunciated truth as depending on its internal strength, harmony, necessity; as being no passing or local influence like opinion, but unchanging, eternal, and dear to God; and whether in the triumphs of its representatives, or their failure, aye, their martyrdom, holding from God a charter of ultimate victory.
III. Observe in Him, lastly, the authority of His pure, disinterested love. We miss in the prophets that tender love of individual souls which is so conspicuous in our Lord as a teacher. While His horizon of activity and aim is infinitely greater than theirs; while He is gazing steadily on a vast future of which they had only dim and imperfect presentiments, He devotes Himself, we may dare to say, to a publican, to a Syrophenician stranger, to a Nicodemus, to a Samaritan woman, to a family at Bethany, as if, for the time being, there were none others in the world to engage His attention. Nowhere, perhaps, is this aspect of His teaching so prominent as in His last discourse in the supper-room the language, as that is, of the uncreated love speaking directly to human hearts in words which, at the distance of eighteen centuries, retain this, the secret of their matchless authority.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 768.
Christ, the Giver of Grace.
Living, as we do, in an age which is pre-eminently devoted to the philosophy of experience, we may be disposed to look askance at such a conception as that of grace. We do not see grace; we cannot catch it examine it through a microscope. We only note that there are effects which presuppose some such cause, and then revelation steps in and tells us that that is the cause. First of all men noted the effects of grace; then they were informed of its reality, its source, its power. But in itself, and to the last, grace remains invisible, invisible like the electric fluid, or like the force of attraction; yet assuredly, in the world of spirits, at least as real, at least as energetic, a force as they.
I. Jesus Christ reveals to us the nature, and He secures to us the gift, of supernatural grace. The immediate minister of grace is revealed as the holy and eternal Spirit. As from all eternity the Holy Spirit is revealed as proceeding from the Son as from the Father, so in time the Spirit is sent, not merely by the Father, but by the Son.
II. We are taught how it is that grace acts upon us, what is the secret of its enabling power. Never acting apart from Christ, the Spirit unites us to, makes us partake in, this Divine humanity, in the glorified human nature of the ascended Son of God. The Spirit's work is to unite us to Christ, to robe us in our Lord's perfect nature, that new nature whereby the Second Adam would repair, and more than repair, what the first had lost. The Eternal Spirit does not act apart. He sets up in the Church and in the heart an inward presence, but that presence is the presence, not of Himself only, but of the Son of Man.
III. We Christians are taught that the certificated points of conduct so to call them with this stream of grace, administered by the Spirit and consisting in union with the manhood of our Lord, are the Christian Sacraments. The Gospel differs from the law as a substance differs from the shadow, and sacraments which are symbols, and nothing but symbols, are in no way better than the legal ordinances which preceded them, and therefore have no place in a system like that of the Gospel of Christ, where all is real. Christ's command to baptize all nations, and to do what He did in the supper-room to the end of time, of itself implies that the sacraments are solemn realities, acts on His part toward us, and not mere instruments for raising our thoughts towards Him.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 788.
Christ, the Deliverer and Restorer.
Our Lord comes into the world, not merely to teach us how to live, not merely to lighten up the dark secrets of our existence and our destiny, but to take away our sins. He is a revelation alike of love and of justice, and of the true term of the reconciliation of love with justice in the counsels of God. The old moral law still holds, "The wages of sin is death." But the new revelation is, "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish." And if it be asked, "How can He possibly stand in this relationship towards man?" we answer it briefly as follows:
I. In the first place He is qualified for it as the sinless One the one sample in all history of an entirely spotless manhood. "He did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth." One stain would have impaired His capacity for pleading for mercy on a world of sinners.
II. He is qualified for this work as the representative of man. It was not a distinct personal man, it was human nature, which the personal Son of God wrapped around Himself, that He might be, not one among many, but the natural representative of all. The acts and words of His life were representative. His active obedience is, if we will, ours. Purified, restored, believing humanity restored and purified because believing acts and speaks in Jesus; and before the eternal purity all the new generations of men are "accepted in the Beloved."
III. He was qualified for this work by offering Himself, voluntarily, to suffer. The notion of injustice attaching to the Atonement proceeds upon the idea the grave misapprehension that Jesus was dragged against His will to Calvary, just as the sacrificial beasts of the old covenant were driven to the altar. He was offered because it was His own will. There is all the difference in the world between a victim whose life is wrung out of him and a soldier who freely devotes himself to death.
IV. He was qualified for this tremendous work as more infinitely more than man. The value of the death of Christ extending itself in His intention, we know, to the whole human family, in all ages of the world, depends upon the fact that He is the Eternal Son of God. And hence every act and suffering of His is weighted, so to speak, with infinity.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 770.
References: Luke 1:78; Luke 1:79. E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation,vol. ii., p. 66; Preacher's Monthly,vol. iv., p. 174; J. Bagot, Church of England Pulpit,vol. xvii., p. 13.Luke 1:80. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 497. Luke 1-2 E. C. Gibson, Expositor,2nd series, vol. iii., p. 116.