Jesus in the Heart of the Earth

Jesus in the Heart of the Earth JESUS IN THE HEART OF THE EARTH
By T. H. Etheridge This subject is my part of this gospel symposium arranged by President Cox for this Lectureship on the larger theme: “Jesus Is the Christ the Son of the Living God.” In Matthew 12:38-41, we read: “Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee. But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and tnere shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preachmg of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.” This talk is arranged in two major parts. The first part deals with an exegesis of the passage from which the arranged theme gets its justification, and the second, part is its larger significance, viz. its suggestiveness for the larger implication which was in Brother Cox’s mind when he assigned the subject to me, viz. Jesus in the Presence of His Enemies.

I invite, your attention t" the passage itself, the first part of the theme to be discussed.

Jesus in the Heart of the Earth

It may not be amiss to suggest some of the things for which this talk will not be responsible, however intriguing such matters may be for speculation and study; as for instance: first, the historicity and credibility of Jonah. Doubtless this is valuable, but it lies outside the bounds of the task which I have set for myself. Those of you who are interested in this matter could profitably study McGarvey’s scholarly and thought-provoking book entitled, Jesus and Jonah. Secondly, I am not interested—in this discourse, at least—in prophecy and its fulfillment. That has already been discussed, and no doubt ably so. Thirdly, I am not going to spend valuable time refuting the heretical and speculative errors of those who claim that while Jesus was in the grave he preached to the “spirits in prison,” or as others have said, “preached the gospel to the souls of the dead” while he was in the Unseen World.

Nor, fourthly, am I going to speculate on the “three days and three nights” Jesus was “in the heart of the earth” so as to try to set the crucifixion day. I might refer to this matter in passing, however, only so as to remark, that it is fortunate that we do not know the day of the crucifixion. The fact that the day is not revealed shows that it was not to be observed as the crucifixion day as such. Some men in their ignorance observe the traditional day, and it is probable that more would observe it, if they knew when it was; and their knowledge might then lead them into error. It-is bad enough that; men are led astray by ignorance ; it would be tragic, if they were led into error by knowledge. Good Friday exercises are unscriptural, and the Maundy Thursday observance of the Lord’s Supper, so popular with our “Progressive Brethren,” is without a leg to stand on—since no one knows the crucifixion day of our Lord, and consequently does not know the exact time of the first observance of the Supper, even if such observance counted. All attempts at setting dates of events of the Passion Week of our Lord are provisional and hypothetical at best; they are absurd and devilish at their worst. On this point the scholarly Westcott remarks, “The difficulties connected with the chronology of the Paschal Week are acknowledged on all hands to be very considerable, and the various solutions which have been proposed have tended to perplex the question still more by introducing uncertainty into the interpretation of the terms involved.” I am content to leave the matter right there, in so far as this address is concerned. With these animadversions to what this study is not, let us now see what the study is. In a word, as I understand it, it is an analogy of Jonah’s experience in the whale with that of our Lord in his death.

I. Jesus and Jonah Contrasted When we open the book of Jonah we find that Jonah “fled from the presence of the Lord.” But Jesus lived always in the presence of the Father. Since “man had far wandered from God” and Jesus came to bear man’s sins to the cross, as though he himself were the sinner, it was perhaps necessary in the hour of trial for God to withdraw his presence from his Son that full vicarious suffering might be endured. So much did the Son crave his Father’s presence that we have in his dying gasp the only complaint in all his suffering, in these aching words, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” Jonah withdrew himself from God but God withdrew himself from his only begotten Son.

Jonah fled from duty; Jesus met duty’s every de-mand, even though it involved drinking the cup of suffering to its bitter dregs and treading the winepress of the wrath of God alone.

Jonah was helpless and futile in the storm to save himself or his fellows, yet Jesus spoke to the raging billows of the sea and they obeyed his will. The wind and waves obeyed his will when his soothing voice, soft as a mother’s lullaby to her cradled babe, uttered his imperial, “Peace! Be still."

Jonah loved only'the Jews and fretted when God spared the penitent Ninevites; Jesus loved everybody and came to save to the uttermost all who repent. So conscious was he of his mission to save non-Jews as well as Jews that when Thomas reported to him a band of Greeks had come, saying, “Sirs, we would see Jesus” Jesus said: My hour is come that I may be glorified. When men of other tribes and tongues yearned after him, he was then achieving and nearing his goal.

Jonah reproached God for his mercy to Nineveh, the cruel oppressor of his people; Jesus prayed for his merciless tormentors. Rousseau, the French Deist, compared the death of Socrates of Athens, who blest the hand of his executioner, with the death of Jesus of Nazareth praying for his enemies, and said, “Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ—how like a God!”

Jonah had a gourd given him of Jehovah, of which he was very proud. When God, to show his mercy to sinners, cut it down, Jonah was very angry; but when God, to show his mercy to all mankind, cut down his own Son, he received no reproaches from the suffering Messiah. Rather he became obedient even to the death of the cross, emptying himself into utter selflessness. For this we praise his name and say with Paul: “We remember the grace of our Lord Jesus who, though rich, became poor that we through his great poverty might be rich.” We praise unselfishness which humbles us to say with Tennyson, in his strongest simile,

“Love took up the harp of life,
And smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that
Trembling, past in music out of sight.”

II. Jesus and Jonah Compared

Both Jesus and Jonah were selected by their enemies for a vicarious offering—Jonah by lot through the superstitions of heathen sailors; Jesus through the envy and hate of religious bigotry and callous selfrighteousness. Do you not remember the words of Caiaphas, the high priest, “Ye know nothing at all, nor do ye take account that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. Now this he said not of himself: but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation; and not for the nation only, but that he might gather into one the children of God that are scattered abroad” (John 11:49-52) ?

Each was borne to his experience by foreigners—Jonah by the seamen who plied the sea from Tyre to Tarshish; Jesus by the Romans who nailed him to the tree of the cross. The one was in the whale three days and three nights, the other in the valley of the shadow of death for a like period. Each prayed in his charnal house—the one in deepest penitence; the other in the highest hope, saying, “Thou wilt not leave my soul in hades nor wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption.”

Each was conscious in his house of death, showing that the soul does not sleep in death, that all does “not end in the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust.” Each come forth in a resurrection, Jonah by figure and Christ in fact. And in this coming forth we see a change—Jonah changed morally and Christ mysteriously, so that he holds the keys and bars of death. Hence each came forth to a new life. Each, after his experience became a missionary to others—Jonah to Nineveh, Jesus to all the world, that the gospel might be preached to the whole creation.

Each led a moral reformation. Jonah led Nineveh to repentance. The text says that “Nineveh repented .at (eis) the preaching of Jonah”; that is to say, Nineveh repented into the manner of life prescribed by the preaching of Jonah; Christ leads every nation, tribe and tongue from the power of darkness and death into the light and life of God. Once God overlooked or winked at the ignorance and superstition of the nations but “now commandeth men everywhere that they should repent, because he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world by that man whom he hath ordained” (Acts 17:29-30).

Each depended on the preached word to work the will of God. Neither ever referred to God’s word as a “dead letter.” Each showed the willingness of God to save ^sinners —Jonah the Ninevites, and Jesus all mankind. Their experiences and messages attest at once the power of love to save and to awaken the potential worth of beings created in the image of the eternal God. This is the golden fulcrum of the Christian’s hope.

“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust
(Since he who knows our need is just)
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.
Who hath not learned, in the hour of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own?”—Whitter.

III. The Significance of the Comparison for Us From this comparison of Jesus and Jonah we may draw a lesson of practical significance. Just as Jesus used the case of Jonah as an illustration of his own experience, the apostle Paul afterwards drew an analogy between the experience of Jesus and the experience of men in becoming Christians. You will recall his argument in the 6th chapter of Romans, where the allusion to Jesus’ death is made. The argument runs as follows:

1. Jesus before his death lived the earth life; that is to say the normal life of man, though without sin.
2. Jesus was killed to that life.
3. Jesus was .buried to that life,
4. Jesus was raised from the dead,
5. He arose in a new life—a life unlike his former life.

Just so the apostle reasons:
1. Before becoming a Christian, one lived the life of sin or in sin.
2. In becoming a Christian he was killed to the old life—killed to its love by faith in the sinless Christ,
killed to its practice by genuine repentance, killed to its allegiance by owning or confessing Jesus
as Master and Lord—hence he was dead to the world.
3. As Jesus was buried to the old life after being killed to it, so the penitent believer is buried to the
world by baptism.
4. He has now been raised.
5. He has been raised to a new life, and is morally bound to live a life of holiness—a life different to the
life of a sinner. That this is what was in the apostle’s mind is evident when he wrote, “How shall we who are dead to sin live any longer therein ? Do you not know that so many of us as have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into his death? We are buried therefore with him by baptism into death that like as Christ has been raised from the dead by the glory of the Father; even so, we should also walk in a newness of life. For if we have been planted together with him in the likeness of his death we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.” In this connection, I like to think of the language of the Revised Version. This version says “united with him' in the likeness of his death.” You will remember that Jesus unites himself with Jonah in the language of our text: “As Jonah was in the whale’s belly three days. and three nights, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

Jesus unites himself and his experience with Jonah and his experience in order that you and I may unite our experience in turning from the world to the church with our Lord’s turning from tne world of mortality to the world of immortality; hence we can say with Paul: “For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.”

I like to think of my being united with Christ. I remember that Jesus wants me to be united with him. When he came into the world he took not on himself the nature of angels but human flesh that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be tempted as they are, and that he might feel as they feel, to the end that he might be their high priest faithful and efficient in bringing many sons unto perfection. This makes the Christian religion at once vital and personal. As Christ lives so may 1 live; as he interests himself in others, I am shamed out of myself to become my brother’s keeper. Then in' hours of disappointment or danger I can lean on his breast, knowing that around me are the everlasting arms, and can say with Elizabeth Barrett:

“ . . . . because thou overcomest so, Because thou are more noble and like a king Thou cans! prevail against my fears and flmg Thy purple round me, till my heart shall grow Too close against thme heart henceforth to know How't shook when alone.”' And in joy my union with Christ is enhanced to cause me to sing,
“And he walks with me And he talks with me
And he tells me [ am his own;
And the joy we share As we tarry there
None other has ever known.”

IV. Jesus in the Presence of His Enemies

I turn here to the second major portion of my theme: Jesus in the presence of his enemies on earth. It is well to study the earlh life of our Lord. I am sure we have not preached too much on the death of Christ, and of his love measured by his death. Thai would bo impossible. It is through death that Christ brings to naught him who has the power of death— the devil, When we cease, to preach the efficacy of the cross then to our shame “shall the offense of the cross have ceased.” Nevertheless I am sure we have emphasized too little the life of Jesus. It is stnl true, as the apostle said, “we. are saved by his life.” I turn therefore to the life of our Lord, which is itself a demonstration that he. is the Christ, the Son of God.

I pause however, to ask, did Jesus really live? Was there such a being as we worship; and honor ourselves in honoring? To ask this question would almost make a skeptic blush. Those who deny that Jesus lived—and there are not many such—are hard put to hold countenance even among their fellow skeptics. For very few skeptics deny the vital facts of Jesus’ earthly life. They only deny that he lived as he is said to have lived, that he did the winders that are attrd> uted to him, and that he rose from the dead in any significant sense.

Those who deny that Jesus lived on the earth are hard put to justify their belief that Confucius or Caesar or Charlemagne or Washington ever lived. Most of their fellows do nor relish such an intellectual poser; for they might as rationally deny the existence of Alexander the Great or Justinian or Leonardo da Vinci as to deny the life of Jesus Christ. But in admitting the life of Christ skeptics involve themselves in an uncomfortable dilemma. They must admit on the testimony they accept—so far as his life is concerned—the character of Jesus which the same testimony reveals; or insist that the testimony is untrustworthy—which they have accepted as trustworthy in so far as the “vital statistics” of Jesus is concerned.

How do they do this? They say that his character, as revealed by the gospels, was invented—created— and exists in a literary sense only.
By this admission they testify to the high character of the Lord. If it were considered an ordinary character, they would not try to explain it—they would only say, “Well—what of it!” But in insisting on a created character of Jesus they run into further difficulties! They must account for the men who created the character. How could they do it? One cannot create a character greater than himself. Shakespeare was greater than either Hamlet or Lear; Goethe was greater than Faust; and John Milton greater than his Satan. To deny that Jesus really displayed this character to men, forces them to say that a greater than Jesus has lived —one great enough to create out of the recesses of his mind the character we attribute to the son of Mary. But that is only one of the difficulties. They must account for four such superhuman geniuses, since four men have each created a perfect character. Their trouble only grows when, in desperation, they insist that the four do not agree on the same one! There is no trouble for the one who holds to the historicity of JesuS. Smaller men often write of the greater. To write of an actual man and what he actually did—however good and wise and great he may have been—is one thing; to create such a one is altogether another thing. Men write of greater men than themselves—how many have written of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson and Franklin who were not their equals—but these writers never created a greater than themselves.

Then skeptics must account for the facts that these literary' geniuses never created anybody before creating Jesus, and then never created anybody else after creating him. Indeed, by the admission of Jesus’ enemies we are constrained to say, no one man created Jesus; no set of men created him—any more than that four men created four of him—but that they wrote of him who lived, who died and who rose again—Jesus the Christ, the Son of the living God! It requires greater credulity to believe the explanations of those vho deny the credibility of the gospel message than the amount of faith that accepts the simple stories as they have been written. But how did Jesus live and die among his enemies? In answer one may say that “he came unto his own and his own received him not, but to as many as received him he gave the right or power to become the sons of God, even to as many as believed on his name.”

“He came to his own.” He came to his own town to be' born but there was no room for him at the inn. He came to his own inheritance, a prince in the line of David—and the reigning monarch sought his life. - He came to his people and they cried, “Away with him. The man Jesus shall not reign over us.” He came to his family and they said, “He is beside himself.” He came to his Father’s house on at least two occasions: On the first, even his mother was surprised that tie was about the Father’s business; and on the second, he found that the house of prayer had become a den of thieves. He came to the leaders of Israel, the sons of the priests and prophets who were the custodians of the faith of Moses, and they preferred a murderer and a robber. He came to his own created world, rich in its opulence; but had no place of his own to lay his head. He came to all mankind that they might have life and have it more abundantly. In this he showed his and his Father’s love so aptly described by an unknown poet:

“Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stem on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God would drain the ocean dry,
Nor would the scroll contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky”; and yet mankind met his coming to them in love by hate, and gave him cruel death on the ignominious Roman cross. In the face of these rebuffs how did Jesus conduct himself ? How did he demonstrate his sonship ? What works and words did he oppose to this unfriendly and vigorous opposition? In answering these questions the erudite will recognize my obligations to Canon Westcott, Bishop Ha- good, and Yale’s Professor Bushnell, which I hereby acknowledge. Everything I know I owe to somebody. If I am anything at all it is not originality. If I should have original ideas in my head they would rattle like seed in a dry gourd; and I have a suspicion that they would be only about as valuable as simlin seed!

Jesus said, “The works that I do they testify of me.” What were some of these? First, there were the miracles over nature. Jesus turned water into wine, “when the water saw its Lord and blushed.” Second, at the feeding of the thousands he multiplied the bread. In this substance was increased, showing Deity to be the source of all subsistence. Third, he walked on the water, and showed force under his control and himself the source of strength.

Then Jesus wrought works of providence. Think of the miracles of expedience: the miraculous draught of fishes, the storm stilled at the cry, “Master, save; we perish”; the money in the fish’s mouth to pay the tribute money; and the miracle of judgment, when the barren fig tree was cursed. But more intimate to us were the miracles on men. Organic defects were cleared away, so that the eyes of the blind were opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame man was made to leap with joy and the tongue of the dumb sang, “Hallelujah.” Mortal fevers were cooled at his touch, and a centurion’s servant was healed at a distance. At his, “I will; be thou clean,” leprosy fled away, and incurable palsy was driven from its victim, so he could take up his couch and walk. In like manner Jesus strode over the opposing spirit world and the princes of the power of the air fled— whether a single unclean spirit, as in the case of the synagogue’s poor lunatic, or the legion in the dweller in the tombs. But this is not all: he brought comfort to the home of bereavement by invading the precincts of death, and at his mandate there arose from the bed and bier and grave an only daughter, an only son, and an only brother. To crown it all, he triumphed openly over death, making good the apparent boast, “I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it up again”; hence he then could say, “I am he that lived, and was dead, but, behold, I am alive forever more; and have in my hands the keys and bars of death!” To a wicked and adulterous generation which sought a sign this was, and is, the “sign of the Prophet Jonas”—the sign of the resurrection, the best-attested fact of ancient history!

If to a generation which sought a sign the Master put the sign of Jonas, then to a generation which sought wisdom he gave a series of paradoxes which stunned to scorn those who refused to believe on him, but which have been justified by the critically examined lives of men of all succeeding ages; so far as the logic of history can prove anything. A few cases only can be referred to, in this address, but those few will serve to illustrate the point. To those who rested on family connections, saying, “We have Abraham to our father,” he said, “Ye must be born again.” To the legalist, he opposed the Sermon on the Mount; to the self-complacent traditionalist, the beatitudes. To the unjust, Jesus propounded the Golden Rule— and confounded them. The rich were taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and the poor had the good news preached to them. To the bearbaiting nationalists of his day he spoke the parable of the Good Samaritan, and to the religiously elite, “up in g” with God (?)—the Pharisaical classes, who objected to his eating and drinking with the masses— he told the story of the forgiveness and love of the father of the Prodigal Son, and of the sorry conceit and self-righteous hate of the Prodigal’s unnatural brother. On trial for his life, possessed of unlimited powers to escape and crush his traducers, he posed Truth to Force in his trial before Pilate, who was the embodiment of all the power of the Roman empire; and he scorned the use of the sword to protect himself or advance his kingdom. Reviled he reviled not again and demonstrated the power of passive resistance by turning the other cheek nineteen centuries before Ghandi. In a period of wars and rumors of war he blest the peacemakers as the “sons of God,” worthier of praise than those who “wade through slaughter to a throne and shut the gates of mercy on mankind.” To those out of the way, ignorant and perishing, he offered a perfect pattern—himself, “the way, the truth and the life.” To those who sought by human wisdom the sunimum bonum he offered the Incarnation—“the Word made flesh” dwelling among men. As Browning made David to say to Saul (I do no violence to read Soul for Saul):

“It is by no breath,
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with death!
As thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved!
He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak.
’Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! My flesh, that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I And it. 0 Saul, it shall be
A face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,
Thou shale love and be loved by, forever; a Hand like this hanci
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!”

Finally to those who would be elevated he offered the greatest paradox of all, viz: he that would save his life shall lose it but he that loses his life for others shall find it; and to those who would be crowned with him that they must go by way of the cross with him.

Hark thou the tune! The gospel muse Sings softly on the air
A glorious theme—and sweet refrain—
To charm the human ear:
God’s Holy Son for man did die That he might life obtain;
Ho, Reapers, forth to fields now white
And gather falling grain.
Midday -is on, the morning’s spent;
And lab’rers few indeed.
Life’s insecure but may be spared Through faith in Abram’s Seed.
0 blessed Cross, whereon did die
The Chosen of the Lord,
We look to thee. Nought else we know (According to His Word)
Can from the soul the stain of sin Remove, and make it white.
0 Blessed Christ, reign over us And save from endless night! This is Jesus, the son of Mary, humiliated “in the heart of the earth”; this is the Christ, the Son of God, crowned with glory in the heavens.