06 - Chapter 06
VI. CHRIST’S RECEPTION BY THE JEWS.
He came unto his own, and his own received him not (John 1:11).
Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block (1 Corinthians 1:23).
ONE of the strangest, saddest things in the life of our Saviour is to be found in the fact that He was rejected by His own people. ’ He came unto his own, and his own received him not’
Why did the Jews as a nation reject Christ?
Why was He a stumbling block unto them? When we think of their faith in God and remember all their hopes and anticipations, we naturally expect to find the Jews giving to Jesus a unanimous reception and a loyal and willing obedience. But our surprise passes away when we remember that the Messiah whom the Jews of Christ’s day were prepared to receive was the Christ of ordinary Jewish expecta-tion and not the Christ of Calvary a conquering Christ, not one who was to suffer and to die.
Even the disciples did not like to hear Christ talking about a kingdom founded by the death of the King, of a society which was to be in the world and yet not of it, of the Master whom they knew and loved betrayed, forsaken, and denied by His chosen friends. And as for the Jewish people as a whole, they had made up their mind with regard to what the Messiah ought to be and must be. And because Jesus did not become to them what they wished Him to be, and because being merely, as they thought, a man like themselves, He yet put forth wonderful claims in behalf of Himself, they began to regard Him as an impostor and as an enemy of their religion, and so they turned against Him, and made His life all sad and anguished by their enmities, and at last they nailed Him to the tree of shame.
Christ was a stumbling block to the Jews because, while He seemed to put forth in behalf of Himself claims which they did not expect the Messiah to make, He yet was not outwardly and with power fulfilling their expectations with regard to the Messiah. They did not imagine that the Messiah would make Himself equal with God or claim the power to forgive sins. But they believed that He would be specially sent of the Lord that He would be possessed of a power which would unmistakably prove his divine mission, and that he would appear with a pomp and circumstance which would compel the obedience, if not the love, of all. And so the Jews were far from being satisfied with the appearance of Christ and with His method of living and working. These were not sufficiently extraordinary and marvellous, they thought, for the accomplishment of God’s purposes towards Israel and towards the world. The work that required to be done could only be effected by a great manifesta-tion of power. God must lay bare His arm, God must put forth His might, God must rend the heavens and come down if the Messianic kingdom was to be established at once and for ever. And so they could not accept Christ as the Messiah, the Great One sent of God, simply because He did not seem to be endowed with sufficient power and authority. From this fact it is possible for many of us to learn a lesson. In our desire to do justice to the Divinity of Christ we are apt to forget the limitations to which He voluntarily subjected Himself in order that He might be one with us for our salvation.
We think of the virgin-birth: we dream of an immaculate conception: and we are amazed when we find St. Paul saying that Jesus was ’ made of a woman,’ ’ sent in the likeness of sinful flesh,’ ’ born of the seed of David according to the flesh.’
We look at Christ as He is portrayed in the Gospels, and we see His Divinity shining out through His humanity, and beholding His glory we become so absorbed in the thought of His Divine Sonship that we forget about His humanity, and we are surprised when at every point in His history we are confronted with the fact that He was a man a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
We start with certain preconceptions with regard to the Divinity of our Lord, and we do not know what to make of those passages of Scripture which bring before us the human nature of Christ, and which remind us of the truth that is in the words, “ the divine is to be sought in Him only in the form in which it is capable of being found in a man.” ’ Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? None is good save one, even God’ ’ Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be for-given him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.’ ’ But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’ ’ My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? ’ Passages such as these, testify-ing to the humanity of Christ, do not seem to be quite in harmony with our presuppositions with regard to the Divinity of Christ, and we have difficulty in accepting them as genuine. How apt we are to forget that it is passages such as these which seem to keep some who approach the Gospels without our presuppositions from rejecting them as works of imagination destitute of a real basis in historical fact.
Christ was in very truth God manifest in the flesh; but just because we believe Him to have been such, we naturally expect to find not merely sparks continually flashing forth from His Divinity, but also miraculous deeds done by Him in almost constant succession. And yet how different the reality is from such an expectation! He was born of a woman, but there is nothing extraordinary in that.
He was made under the law, but there is nothing miraculous in that. He was touched with the feeling of our infirmity, and He was subjected to all the ordinary troubles and trials of humanity, but there is nothing save the common experience of men in all that. And as He lived and worked among men, and went out and in among friends and foes, was not His life, on the whole, of such a kind that in all honesty even the most severe critics can accept as historical facts, at least the main incidents in that divinely tragic career which is so vividly portrayed for us by the Evangelists? That Jesus lived a life of transcendent moral and spiritual beauty that He spoke, with authority, words of heavenly wisdom that He was vehemently opposed by the priests and rulers of his day that He was betrayed by one of His disciples, denied by another, and deserted by all of them that He was condemned to death; that He was crucified on the Cross; and that in His death-hour He prayed for His enemies in the words, ’ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do ’ are facts accepted by men whom no one could regard as credulous. But facts such as these are not what we naturally expect to find when we begin the study of the Gospels with certain mental prepossessions with regard to the Divinity of Christ.
There is consequently more significance than at first seems apparent in the words of Canon Scott Holland: “ Is it not amazing that a Creed which starts with such tremendous assertions about the person of its founder, should keep itself so well in hand, so rigidly under control, that its main force is spent in exhibiting the loyalty with which the only begotten Son of God submitted to every ordinance of man and nature, how He bent Himself down to the hard and narrow frontiers of His natural lot? The Incarnation is the revelation of the binding force of natural law, to the necessities of which God gave up His Son. It is the loud proclamation of the deference God pays to that nature which is His own creation. Where indeed can we learn more em-phatically than from the Cross of Christ the validity, the sanctity of those natural conditions which God of His own will obeyed even to the death of His Son rather than break? “In the second place: Do we not, in our divided Christendom, sometimes sigh for an infallible autho-rity in matters of faith? an authority that will relieve us of the difficulty and responsibility of judging for ourselves. And since we cannot believe, as many do, in the infallibility of the Pope, we are prone to dream of an infallible Church a Church armed with power to silence all doubt, to root out all unbelief, and to force us to believe in spite of ourselves. And are we not tempted to believe that such a Church exists in the world when we read such words as these? ’ Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ ’ Lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.’ ’ When he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will guide you into all truth.’ The Church, it is true, is a divine institution. It owes its origin to Christ. It was begotten of the Revelation of Himself which God made in Him who was the chiefest among ten thousand, the altogether lovely. But the Church is also a human society. It is a continuation and extension of the fellowship of the disciples who were personal friends of Christ, and who were held together after His death, not merely by their affectionate remembrance of Him, but also by the convictions, the spirit, the life, the faith, the hope which they had in common. ’ Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above,’ but God’s good gifts to us come not directly but indirectly, not un-conditionally but conditionally, through material, animal, human agencies. Consider the lilies of the field how they grow. God arrays them in a glory greater than Solomon’s not directly, but mediately through the kindly influence of dews, and rain, and sunshine. The health of the body is from God, but care is necessary for its preservation, and when we are unwell we consult a physician and submit to his treatment And it is even so in the spiritual domain.
God is the source of all wisdom, but He imparts it through the lips and pens of human teachers.
God uses man to bring man to Himself. “ Through man to man is the primal law of the Incarnation.”
Even the Son of God had to become man in order that He might bring sinful men back to God. And everything we know of Him who is the Light of the world has been mediated to us through men. No written word has come from Christ to us, and we have no means of knowing what He was, what He said, what He did, except through the words of those who had been with Him. But whatever we may think of these things, it is perfectly obvious that the Church can have no authority other than the authority of Christ. And Christ did not compel the Jews to believe.
He never dreamt of arbitrarily subjecting His hearers to earthly loss or physical pain on account of their unbelief. He did not require from His followers a mere blind attachment to His person, or an unquestioning and unreasoning acceptance of His doctrine. He imparted to His hearers the truth as they were able to bear it, and He always aimed at awakening their spiritual intelligence and at leading them into an ever fuller knowledge and realisation of the truth. The authority of Christ was the authority of those divine truths which He revealed to men; truths concerning the nature of God and the true nature of man; truths con-cerning the relationship of God to us and our relationship to God. It was “the authority of the divine character of the perfect man swaying, because of His divine perfectness, the hearts and minds of men.” It was the authority of truth approving itself to man’s understanding, the autho-rity of justice, righteousness, and holiness com-mending themselves to men’s consciences, the authority of goodness and love appealing to the hearts of men and constraining them to live, not unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again. And what authority can be stronger or more enduring than this? Yea, what other authority do men and women require? We are saved, not by the number of articles in a creed which we carelessly accept, but by those truths, few and simple it may be, in which we have faith, and in which we believe the more, the more we test and try them by living in accordance with them.
After all, no spiritual truth is really true to us until its truthfulness has taken hold of our hearts and minds. Blind acceptance has no moral worth, and can never be for long truly helpful. What possible good, therefore, could be permanently done to us by a great, overwhelming, arbitrary, and external authority so armed with power as to compel us to believe in things in which we can find no living interest, or in which we can have no real faith at all? In the third place, is there not a tendency, especially among those who do not believe in the infallibility of the Pope or of the General Councils of the Church, to resort to a mechanical and unnatural method of treating Holy Scripture? In order to arm it with what we deem to be a proper external authority, we speak of every letter and syllable of the Bible as due to the direct dictation of the Almighty, and we think of the Bible as coming to us armed with power, and saying sternly to us, reject, tamper with, or overlook one letter or syllable herein contained, and you are an unbe-liever, and therefore in the most deadly peril.
Now, I need scarcely say that this is not the true attitude to take up towards the Word of God.
Doubtless, the Bible comes to us with a message from Heaven, which we reject at our peril. But it brings this message to us by revealing to us truths of the utmost importance with regard to God and ourselves. By enabling us to see the worth and importance of these truths it ennobles our minds and purifies our hearts, and draws us into communion and fellowship with the mind and will of God. The Scriptures are inspired of the Lord, and it is impossible for us to read them with a humble and understanding heart without perceiving and feeling their inspiration without hearing God speaking to us as He speaks in no other book. But while tha Scriptures are inspired of the Lord, they were written by men and for men. They were written in popular language and so as to be understood by the people. They were written by men who, so far from being machines in the hands of God, were able to manifest in their writings their own powers and characteristics and peculiarities. “ Their thoughts were tinged,” says Archbishop Magee, “ by the philosophy, their knowledge was limited by the scientific knowledge of their own times; they spoke the history and the science as truly as they spoke the dialect and the grammar of their day: to suppose anything else would be to suppose not a supernatural, but an unnatural inspiration.” The Bible is inspired; but the inspira-tion of Scripture does not necessarily imply the inerrancy of Scripture the absolute infallibility of every letter, syllable, word, or sentence. Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. “ The Divine Spirit whose office it is to inspire human minds with the knowledge of the Truth, rested,” says Bishop Welldon, “ upon the literary labours of the Evangelists. Without His inspiration the Gospels would not have been what they are; nay, they would not have been at all. But the Evangelists do not claim, and the Gospels, if honestly treated, do not exhibit complete immunity from fault or error... Nobody who is a capable judge of literature doubts that they are true; but their truth lies in the substance, not in the letter; and as authorities they are far more impressive by their dis-crepancy than if they were only so many copies of the same original.” The Bible is divine, and yet it is profoundly human. It contains a message from God, but that message comes to us through the writings of man.
What a heavenly treasure we have here, and yet it is in an earthen vessel. And why should we be sur-prised at this? It is through the human that we see the divine. It is through the finite that the infinite is shadowed forth to us. It is through the material that the spiritual is revealed. It was through the human weakness of Jesus that the glory and the grace of the Highest were made plain to man. It is in the simple elements of Bread and Wine that Christ draws nigh unto us and gives Himself unto us in the Holy Communion. Why then should we be amazed to find that it is through the words of simple honest men that we are put in possession of the Power of God and the Wisdom of God? ’ The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weak-ness of God is stronger than men.’ ’ God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence.’
Misled by appearances, and anxious to demon-strate that there is no heavenly treasure in the earthen vessel, some have laid violent hands upon the earthen vessel, and, smashing it to pieces, they have injured or mutilated the treasure which it con-tains. But even the foolish and unskilful conduct of some who are inclined to deal rashly with the Bible is no sufficient reason why we should resort to a mechanical and unnatural interpretation of it. For such a method of looking at Scripture prevents us from seeing its surpassing beauty and unique value, and keeps us from discovering many of the precious lessons which it has been written to teach us.
Moreover, such a method of interpreting Scripture must, in these days, tend to make us the slaves of unnecessary fears: for every now and again we are sure to be seriously alarmed at what we take to be the destruction of the heavenly treasure, but which, in reality, may only be the skilful opening of the earthen vessel in order that the treasure which it contains may be the more clearly seen and the more highly prized. But an operation of this latter kind requires, it need hardly be said, the clearest vision and the most loving care. To get out of the Word of God all that it is capable of teaching us we must study it constantly and reverently, with an eager desire to know the truth, and with an unswerving loyalty to the light which it reveals to us. “ It is,” says Archbishop Magee, “ as we study the Bible: as we make it the rule of our life, as we have recourse to it in our hours of sorrow and weakness, trial and temptation, that we find in it ever some word of God that reaches our souls. It is as we gather from it our consolation in sorrow, our strength in trial, our comfort in adversity, our patience in trouble; it is as we gain from it daily light on our path through the world’s tangled wilder-ness of temptation and sin, that it shall become, in the light of its own revealing, the manifestation of God to us.” The Scriptures are by themselves alone a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. The entrance of God’s Word giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple. “ Those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are,” says the Westminster Confession, “ so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other that not only the learned but the unlearned, in a due sense of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” But all things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves nor alike clear unto all. And when difficulties arise, who is to resolve them? When we are confronted with theological differences what is to be the court of appeal? “ The authority of the holy Scripture,” says the Westminster Con-fession, “ for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church.” “ We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteem of the holy Scriptures; and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God; yet, notwith-standing, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts”
It is easy to criticise the position taken up by the Westminster Confession on the subject of autho-rity in religion. We may say that it does not sufficiently guard us against the play of subjective individualistic fancies. May not an ignorant and mistaken man regard his own foolish notions as due to the working of the Holy Spirit in his heart? And do we not, therefore, require an infallible Church to interpret the Word of God for us? yea, to tell us what the Word of God is? But if the words of the Westminster Confession may in this respect be regarded as defective, it is difficult to keep from believing that they point in the right direction.
Think for a moment of the relation of the Church to the New Testament Scriptures.
We all know that the Gospel was preached for many years before it was written. The Church, therefore, does not owe its existence to the New Testament. On the contrary, the New Testament owes, in a sense, its origin to the Church. But it was not to the Church as an organised corporate body that we are indebted for the New Testament Scriptures. These Books were written by individuals, and at first they were accepted by individuals, either because from their own personal knowledge they knew them to be true, or on account of the authority of the writers, who were men who had seen the Lord or had been companions of those who had seen Him. And notice how necessary, how indispensable, these Scriptures have been, if not to the origin, at all events to the healthy life of the Church. What kind of Church would we now have, and what kind of Gospel would now be preached in it if tradition and hearsay had been the only authorities for our faith, and if during all the Christian centuries the New Testament Scriptures had not been in existence to instruct and correct the Church? The strongest evidence in behalf of the facts which underlie Christianity is that of the Apostles who were com-panions of Christ from His Baptism till His Ascension; and next to theirs comes the testimony of those who have set forth a declaration of the things which they received from those who ’ from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word.’ But the further we come from the time of Christ the less weighty becomes the evidential value of the unsupported assertions of those who tell us with regard to Christ things which are not to be found in the New Testament.
It is true that Christ has promised to be with His Church always, and to guide it into all truth. We must not, therefore, overlook or ignore the religious insight of the living Church when it uses wisely all that is subsidiary. What better, what other, court of appeal can we have than an enlightened Christian consciousness? The decisions on matters of doctrine which are now made by us may not all be final, for even we ourselves may in a short time pass beyond them. Fuller knowledge, increased light, greater purity, tend to clarify our spiritual vision and give us a more perfect insight into the meaning of divine things. And so there is a sense in which every age requires its own theology “ its reasoned system of beliefs expressed in terms of its own consciousness.” But if our religious consciousness be enlightened, if it be penetrated and moulded by the wisest judg-ments of human reason, if it be thoroughly versed in the best conclusions of the age as to the contents of the Bible and as to the meaning of the world and of life, then its doctrinal decisions are the best that under the circumstances can be had by us. They may not be absolutely final, for posterity may be able to go beyond them. But at present they are for us the measure of our apprehension of the truth, and nothing more perfect is in the meantime possible for us.