[ p. 67 ]
WHAT was it in Jesus that so seized upon his followers that they left all and followed him? How did they come to find in him the master of their souls? What caused their belief in him to grow with such amazing bounds that they ended by putting him in the place of God and giving him the honor due only to divinity?
The answer is beyond dispute. To quote one whose profession of faith does not go the full extent of the creedal confessions: “The immediate effect of the teaching of Jesus was an effect of power, of authority and mastery, the compelling impressiveness of a leader of men. It is the note of strength. His ministry was dynamic, commanding, authoritative. His dominant trait is force. He has the quiet consciousness of mastery, the authority of the leader; for softness and sentimentality, such as characterizes ‘the feminine man,’ there was no room in his rugged, nomadic, homeless life.”
This impression of mastery, we are reminded, confronts us from whatever side we approach the life of Christ. We see it in the ethical aspect of strength and in the intellectual aspect of the same quality of power—“a strength of reasoning, a sagacity of insight, [ p. 68 ] an alertness of mind, which gave him authority over the mind not less than the will.” We are thinking, now, however, in a simpler way of the masterful Christ. We are thinking of his quiet consciousness of power as that of a man who held sway over the souls of others by the force of a strong personality, simple, manly, honest, courageous, true.
Perhaps some of us need an introduction to the real Jesus Christ. For years we have been learning many things of him which are true, indeed, and never to be forgotten, but which make up only one element of his many-sided character. We have been taught of his tenderness, his gentleness, his meekness; we know of his love and his long-suffering; but we need to be introduced to the Christ who was master of men and held all the vital forces of a complete manhood in reserve for any emergency. The thing which first drew men to him was his power, his forcefulness of personality, his commanding strength.
This is a side of the character of Jesus which specially needs reemphasizing in our day. Youth in revolt will never be won merely by patience, meekness, gentleness. It does appreciate robust and masterful strength, especially if touched with idealism. That sort of leadership may have for it a romantic attraction.
Think, for example, of Calvary as youth would see it. There is the soldier at the foot of the cross who was won to faith as Christ died. He was a centurion of the Roman guard, detailed to oversee the arrangements for the execution—a rough, plain man whose [ p. 69 ] mind did not turn naturally to spiritual things, who had known little and cared less about the ecclesiastical disputes among the Jews which led to the Good Friday morning trial. There he stood, impatient for the end, ready to go back and make his report when it was all over. He had given little thought to what the whole matter was about, and he looked on, at first, just curiously. But whatever else he did not know, at least he knew a man when he saw one; and when he had seen Christ die, there awoke in this rough man of battle the essence of faith. “Truly,” he said, “this was a son of God.” [1] Christianity is concentrated for a moment on these two men—Christ on the cross and the Roman captain looking on—and when the one whose trade had to do with death saw in the dying man, not weakness, but strength, no sign of anything save a power that strangely moved and stirred him, Christ won.
One may look into the mind of the penitent thief and see his response to the same compelling power. He was, possibly, a young man who had become a member of one of the insurrectionist or robber bands that infested the country near Jerusalem. As a youth, he had been captivated by the bold spirit of the leader of such a band; eventually he had joined his company
perhaps out of pure love of adventure, perhaps out of boyish worship of its daring leader, perhaps because his imagination had been fired by some tale of a social wrong that had made his hero an outcast. Now he [ p. 70 ] had come to the end of his mistaken career, and he was dying on the cross. Next him hung this fellow prisoner. He knew something of Christ’s claims and had heard of his career. He watched the prisoner; and as he watched, slowly he came to see that all his old hero worship had been misplaced. Here was a hero who could inspire his moral respect: courageous, but large-hearted as well as brave; magnanimous, and always bearing himself in a big way. Christ excited in him a love and loyalty that sprang from a sense of his greatness of heart and splendid manliness. Then the thief saw something more, the power that shone through the Lord’s weakness, and in a flash recognized his royalty and passed on to quick faith. “Lord, remember me, when thou comest into thy kingdom.”
Jesus Christ was so great in every moment of his life that it is no wonder men gave him ready allegiance. His words were always with power. His life was like his words; his death, like his life.
There are many today who need to be shown Christ in just that way. There was nothing weak or unmanly about him, and there is nothing small or narrow about his religion. He is, indeed, all that we have been taught to picture him in his meekness and lowliness. He was the Lamb of God, who patiently suffered for the sins of men. He was as tender and compassionate as the gentlest woman. No one who has visited a hospital ward will wish to forget that the care shown there is the fruit of Christian love and a reflection of the mind of the compassionate Christ. Yes, Jesus is [ p. 71 ] all that we have been told in his tender pity. He stretched out his hand and touched the leper, who had not felt the warmth and pressure of a human hand since his loathsome disease came upon him. He went about through the Galilean countryside, by his gracious influence softening men’s ills, healing their sicknesses, soothing and comforting their distress. We think of him—and rightly—as the Good Shepherd, carrying the lambs in his bosom.
Yes, all of that he was—and we must never forget it. But he had also the strength of the strongest manhood. He was gentle—yes; but the strong man can always be a gentle man. He was meek and lowly— yes, in disciplined and trustful dependence on his Father. He was no mere quiet visionary, no sadly contemplative saint. He was, as Tennyson says, the “Strong Son of God.” He was called the “Master” and men called him such because it was true; he was indeed master of their souls.
The strength of the best manhood is not mere brute force, it is quiet confidence of power. And because Christ was this kind of man, his whole ministry was a ministry of power. That was the reason why men, when they looked up into his face, obeyed. He called them from their homes, their boats, their tax booths, and they gave heed to his call and followed. If women were drawn to him with peculiar loyalty of devotion, it was partly because women as well as men are won by masterful personalities. How marvelously he combined all that is best in woman and all that is best in man! He had patient endurance and he had wonderful [ p. 72 ] forcefulness, the power to suffer and the power to defy. He was the one man who has combined the beauty of womanly tenderness with the strength of sturdiest manhood. In the same hymn in which we sing of him as “Jesus meek and gentle,” we call him “Son of God most high.”
Take a few instances: He is “led as a lamb to the slaughter,” but “he set his face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem”; a man’s man, with a man’s fate, and facing it with such resoluteness that as his disciples followed they “were amazed and were afraid.” He weeps in love and pity over Jerusalem; but in the temple he is terrible, as with his whip of rushes he drives out those who are defiling its courts with noisy trade. He prays in Gethsemane in an agony of emotion; but when he steps out of the garden, the crowd of soldiers quails before his stern glance. He is all gentleness to the woman who is a sinner; but he stands face to face with the Pharisees and is unsparing in his denunciation—his words bite and burn and they are flung in the very teeth of the men who have power to drive him to death. Little children love to be near him and are unafraid in his presence; but his message to Herod begins, “Go and tell that fox.” Even his opponents recognize his fearlessness: “Master, we know that you are true and care for no man: neither do you have regard for the persons of men.”
Perhaps the most potent source of the misconception of the nature of Jesus is found in the conventional pictures of him. These represent a man of less than middle stature, with golden-brown hair and beard, [ p. 73 ] delicate features, and small hands and feet; often the complete and perfect embodiment of everything that is unmanly. The worst examples of this “religious art,” unfortunately, are found in the pictures designed for children, thus stamping on the minds of the little ones a perverted idea which will abide with them for life. When such a figure is represented, for example, as driving the traders from the temple, the effect is ludicrous; it is impossible to imagine what the merchants are afraid of. The man who could act in such a way in such a place must have been impressive in appearance and of great physical strength. As a Jew of Palestine, moreover, his hair and beard would have been intensely black. As a professional carpenter, or builder, his hands, while skillful, would have been rough and hard.
If he was that sort of man, then of course he was not demonstrative and gushing—God save us from thinking that mere effusiveness is ever going to attract men to religion—he had dignity as well as strength. Nor, on the other hand, was he narrow and censorious; no true man is. He was not sad and somber, but natural and spontaneous. He was glad and free, an out-ofdoors man who loved people, was genial and companionable, unaffected, fond of the society of his day, meeting people of all sorts in the hearty comradeship of common life, likable and lovable, genuine, generous, large-hearted, straightforward, and strong.
We have all of us known men who have an unconfessed but very apparent dislike for religion just be [ p. 74 ] cause they cannot admire the kind of goodness they think Christianity asks them to admire. They do not see that Christ, with his eager delight in life, with his frank and alert interest in the common affairs of common people, with his buoyancy of spirit, has shown us that we can be good without ceasing to be natural; especially, that we can be good without being miserable; and above all (though we shall come to that later) that our God is the kind of God who is just like Christ.
The Christian character is two-sided. It has softness and it has strength; self-renunciation and self-expression. It is the two-sided character of the Jesus who was meek and lowly, but was also the “Strong Son of God.” Its humility is the humility of him who could bend to the task of a slave and gird himself and wash his disciples’ feet, just because he came forth from God and went to God. The Christian character, in its meekness and gentleness, is the upgrowth of moral greatness; its power is the fruit of its peace. It is rooted and grounded in self-sacrificing love.
And yet—because this foundation robs what rises from it of all self-interest and self-seeking—the Christian character that issues out of this self-surrender, if it is to grow to perfection, must be daring and impetuous, vehement and intense.
It is just here that we have failed. We have softened and weakened our Christianity and left out the heroic, instead of trying to disentangle the heroic from all that is brutal and boastful. We have supposed the Christian life to mean patient submission, with passions [ p. 75 ] subdued and vehemence moderated, instead of learning that vehemence and strength and passion and earnestness must still be there, only liberated and detached from self-assertion and self-seeking. We have forgotten that the spirit of Christ is always a challenge to the heroic. What shames us, what humiliates our Lord, what makes anti-Christian cults grow apace, is that we have allowed our Christianity to become so shrunken and withered, so mean and unheroic, so comfortable and commonplace, so little like the splendid self-sacrifice of our leader. If we are indeed his followers, we must have hearts of tremendous purpose, a very passion for righteousness, an intense and burning zeal, an unflinchingly persistent determination to live true to the highest and best, a willingness to do and to dare, if need be, to suffer and endure and die.
A son of God; not the Son of God—which a Roman soldier could not have said. Luke gives the saying as interpreted, “a righteous man” —godlike person. ↩︎