I. The first thing which demands our notice in John the Baptist seems to be his singleness in carrying out the work which God appointed him. Consider the time when he appeared. It was no ordinary season. Many eyes were eagerly looking for the dawn of the kingdom of God. The Deliverer to come was much in the thoughts and on the lips of the devout men in Israel. Any one of pre-eminent sanctity and power of persuasion might have gathered the Jewish people round him as their Messiah. It was a moment which might well try the earnestness and singleness of purpose of any of the sons of men. Yet amidst all, how blameless is John how simple-hearted how is his eye ever fixed on the one great object of his mission how totally absent are all self-regard, all visions of ambition, all pretensions to holiness and eminence! To testify to Christ is all his aim, and from that nothing diverts him.
II. Another point in the Baptist's character was his "bold rebuking of vice." We have this exemplified in the strong and fervid exhortations he administered to the various classes of persons who came to his baptism. But it reaches its highest point in his behaviour towards the unprincipled and licentious Herod Antipas. In our witnessing for Christ we must not shrink from this, one of its most imperative, as it is one of its least palatable duties. By the fearless testimony of Christian men almost all the improvements in society and opinions among us have been brought about.
III. The last scene in the Baptist's life stands unsurpassed in history, both for what it does relate and what it does not relate. It furnishes us, on the one hand, with the saddest recorded triumph of vanity and depravity over integrity and godliness. And the saint of God he is utterly worthless in the matter; his life is recklessly sacrificed to the cruelty and caprice of an adulteress. But turn to the other side to that which is not recorded, but left for us to infer. Who are they for whom our hearts bleed in this sad history? Who lie the deepest in misery after the catastrophe the oppressed or the oppressors, the martyr or the tyrant and his court? Hence let us learn to measure all such incidents in the history of the world, and to cast in our lot accordingly.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. v., p. 32.
Nature and Circumstances.
Jesus was telling His disciples that the true greatness of human life must come by following Him. It was inevitable, then, that men should ask, "How is it about those great men who are not His followers; those great men who have gone before Him; those great men who are wholly outside of His influence are they not truly great? And if they are, what has become of His saying that true greatness lies only in Him, and in the kingdom of God to which He is so earnestly summoning us?
I. This question belongs not to the things of Christ, nor to religious things alone. All life suggests it, for in all life there are these two ways of estimating the probable value of men: one by the direct perception of their characters; the other by the examination of the institutions to which they belong, the privileges which they enjoy. Think of the schoolboy who is just graduating from one of our public schools, and of Socrates, who died more than two thousand years ago in Greece. The schoolboy represents the privileged condition which is the result of centuries of civilization. He cannot help knowing things which were utterly out of the power of the ancient philosopher. The philosopher is among the very greatest of historic men; but the least of modern men has that which he, with all his greatness, could not have.
II. Here, then, we see the two elements: there is the greatness of nature, and there is the greatness of circumstances. Christ recognizes the two elements of personal greatness and of lofty condition, and He seems almost to suggest another truth, which is at any rate familiar to our experience of life, which is that personal power which has been manifest in some lower region of life seems sometimes to be temporarily lost and dimmed with the advance of the person who possesses it into a higher condition.
"You must be born again," the Master said to Nicodemus. Nicodemus wanted Christ to meet him in a lower world, a world of moral precepts and Hebrew traditions, where the Pharisee was thoroughly at home. But Christ said, "No, there is a higher world; you must go up there; you must enter into that; you must have a new birth, and live in a new life in a life where God is loved and known and trusted and communed with. He who is least in that kingdom, he who has in any degree begun to live that higher kind of life, has something which the best and noblest soul in the inferior life has not, is greater than the greatest who is not in the kingdom."
Phillips Brooks, Sermons in English Churches,p. 200.
I. These words, as they were spoken, need very little explanation. We can well understand how they rose to the lips of our Lord as He looked back upon the past history of His race, and forward to the larger Church which He came to found. He came to set before men a new ideal, another standard, a higher rule of life, to make a new revelation of God to man; but not for this only. He came to plant a leaven in the world, that must spread and germinate and affect the world, or perish; and therefore, as He looked back on that earlier Church which had been laid step by step to the eve of this era, and forward to the new power and the new life which His own work was to bring alike to the spirit of the individual and the framework of society, He might well say that the humblest of those who were admitted into that new kingdom would enjoy greater privileges, stand on a higher vantage-ground, than even he who, like Moses, had led his race to the verge of the promised land, but had failed to enter.
II. The text may save us from refusing to honour all that justly claims our homage; it may guard us against doing violence to the Christian conscience by accepting a lower or un-Christian standard, by reverencing that which has no claim to reverence. It may remind us that we need not prostrate ourselves in unmanly hero-worship before the mingled clay and gold of mere human greatness; but that we may not refuse to acknowledge and to honour all that is high, all that is good, see it where we may. We cannot admire too fully or too cordially whatever in any age or on any scene is truly great, is truly noble; but we may still prize above all gifts for ourselves and for others the full surrender of the heart to God, the admission into the number of those who seek His voice and do His bidding, and are taught of Him, led by Him, and owned by Him. Verily, I say unto you, we may hear within our hearts that among those born of women there is none greater than this or that hero of this age or of another; yet "he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."
Dean Bradley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 289.
References: Matthew 11:11. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. v., p. 89; S. Macnaughten, Real Religion and Real Life,p. 172; J. Brierley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiv., p. 53.