01.03. GLIMPSES OF THE HEART OF JESUS.

Chapter 3 GLIMPSES OF THE HEART OF JESUS " Being moved with compassion, He stretched forth His hand."

Mark 1:41 The Gospels seldom speak of what Jesus felt. They are for the most part content to let His words and deeds speak for themselves, as they have indeed spoken, leaving an impression, marvellous in its clearness, depth, and universality, when compared with the four tiny booklets which have made it. But this evangelist somewhat more frequently than the others lifts a corner of the veil, and gives a momentary glimpse into the holy of holies in the heart of Jesus. If the old idea that Peter was the source of this Gospel is true, we have a natural explanation of its minute details, and can picture the apostle, whose quickness of observation was accelerated and sharpened by passionate love, watching with keen eye, and remembering in a faithful memory, every look and gesture and fleeting expression of countenance which told of the heart’s emotions. The image of Christ enshrined in the hearts of men owes much of its sweetness to the small traits contributed by this evangelist to the common stock. We purpose, then, in this sermon, to deal with Mark’s glimpses of the heart of Jesus, of which the words taken as our text are the earliest.

It may be well at the outset to enumerate them. There is first the compassion noted in the text. Next we have (Mark 3:5) anger blended with grief at the hardening of His opponents’ hearts. Further, we find two instances in chapter five : one (Mark 5:6), wonder at unbelief; and another (Mark 5:34), compassion for the helplessness of the untaught multitude. There are also two instances in Mark 10:1-52, in which are recorded our Lord’s displeasure with the disciples’ keeping children from His embrace, and the outgoing of His love to the young ruler. Then there is a solemn and pathetic pair in Mark 14:1-72 : one, the evangelist’s description of Jesus as " sore amazed and very heavy ; " and the other, His own plaintive word to the three drowsy disciples : " My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." If we study the picture resulting from the combination of all these, we may gain some deepened impressions of the glory and sweetness of that pure manhood, which may knit our thankful hearts in closer affection and service to Him.

I We note then, first, the Christ who pities all sorrow. The two instances in which compassion is attributed to our Lord by Mark may be taken as covering the whole ground of human misery. The former is that in our text, which represents the pity that welled forth at the sight of physical suffering. The other (Mark 5:34) is that in which the emotion sprang up at the sight of the weary multitude who had followed Him for His teaching, as His penetrating gaze looked beneath their bodily weariness to their spiritual want of guidance from prophet, priest, or ruler. Thus, physical evil and spiritual darkness and weariness smote on His heart. Once besides in this Gospel we find Christ’s compassion mentioned, but by Himself, not by the evangelist ( Mark 8:6), when He assigns it as His motive for consulting the disciples as to how the crowds are to be fed. Luke, who only once speaks of our Lord’s compassion, does so in connection with a specially sad story, that of the poor woman whom Jesus and His disciples met as they toiled up the hill to Nain, weeping behind the bier of the sole light of her widowed home, her only son. No wonder that such grief and such loneliness touched the springs of pity in His solitary heart. Matthew, too, tells of our Lord’s compassion in the parallel passage to our text, and in other places.

These two cases teach us the impartial width of our Lord’s compassion. He was open to appeals to His pity made by sickness, hunger, and the other ills that flesh is heir to, and He was not less quickly and deeply touched by compassion for ignorance, spiritual and intellectual want of guidance, and the weariness and unrest which these caused. Such capacity of feeling with equal strength the appeal of the two great forms of man’s misery is rare, and more frequently we find that the men who are quick to pity the hungry and the sick have little sympathy for the ignorant and them that are out of the way, while, on the other hand, the compassion of religious men is often apt to be somewhat indifferent to material wants, and to leave dealing with them to others. So it comes to pass that there are two sets of philanthropists in the world, who do not look at each oilier with altogether friendly eyes, the one of whom cares for men’s bodies, and thinks it rather waste to spend pity and effort on their " souls," and the other of whom is so much concerned about their souls that it gives little help to attempts to improve material conditions. The Church has often laid itself open to the world’s taunt of neglecting the lower needs, which are more clamorous than the higher ; but there are many tokens that a clearer understanding of the width of Christian compassion and duty is beginning to prevail. Possibly the warning against the impending possibility of harmful exaggeration in a new direction may not be unnecessary. The new impulses to recognizing the mission of Christianity in regard to social questions are sure to carry some light weights too far. As Luther says somewhere, in his rough strong way, " Human nature is like a drunken peasant. If he is put up on one side of his horse, he is sure to fall over on the other." It will be a dark day for the progress of the Christian Church if good men suffer themselves to be drawn aside from its primary work, the preaching of the gospel and the dealing with the deepest sources of human misery in human sin, to throwing their chief energy into the needful but secondary work of dealing with the fruits of spiritual evil in physical distress. It is true that Jesus pitied the hungry and fed them, and therein He has taught us how wide our sympathies and efforts should be, but it is also true that He rebuked the crowds who came after Him only for loaves, and pressed upon them as His true and proper gift the flesh and blood which are the sources and supports of a better life.

Christ’s sympathy was incalculably deeper and more poignant than ours can ever be. For His eye was clearer than ours, and saw deeper. To Him the single sufferer represented crowds. The one black drop brought to His mind all the sullen ocean of blackness, which rolls its heavy tides round the whole world. We see but the wave or two that break nearest us, and all the other multitudinous billows escape our knowledge. We mass men in the race, and, generalizing, lose the impression of individuals. We have a vague notion that there is a great deal of sorrow in the world, but we do not receive the impact of it all on our own hearts as Jesus Christ did. He saw as a God what he pitied as a Man. His compassion was not only the pity of a Divine nature which, if it be love, must needs be pity too, but it was the fellow-feeling of one of ourselves, which knew a kindred pang, and was fed by a Divine clearness and sweep of perception that summoned up before Him on the occasion of one bier all the mourners and the dead, and saw in every sorrow but the nearest member of a linked procession girdling the world. Nor did the underlying Divine knowledge alone deepen His sympathy. The purity of His manhood increased it. In Him were no spots insensitive by reason of selfishness, as there are in all others - true witches’ marks, which can be pricked without feeling. A soul entirely delivered from selfish regards would be like an infant’s hand for sensitiveness, whereas our palms are indurated in the cuticle by selfishness, and our fingers have lost the fineness of touch which would secure sympathy with others’ sorrows. With Jesus it was as if the very nerves of His own frame had been prolonged into that of others, so close was His union with them, by the wonderful completeness of his self oblivion. Thus in truest fashion His sympathy answered to the meaning of the word, which so far transcends the ordinary manifestations of it in our hearts, being a real suffering together with those whom He pitied. Our selfishness puts an armour of brass over our hearts, through which the sharp point of others’ woes scarcely reaches us, except as a dull blow that does not pierce deeply enough to bring the blood ; but Jesus came among men with His naked breast exposed to all the slings and arrows that were showered on all, and He was sore wounded by them all. His pity was His life. He was a Man of sorrows because He bare our griefs and carried our sorrows, and the burden was laid upon His shoulders by the perfectness of His pity which made them all His own, long before He fainted beneath the cross on the short journey from the judgment hall to Calvary. Christ’s pity was essential to His service of men. "Looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said, Ephphatha." The sigh had to come before the word of power could come. He was not only impelled to put forth His miraculous power by the cries of the sufferers or of their intercessors, but sometimes by the quick spontaneous outgoing of His own pity. Before men called He answered, for His own heart anticipated their desires. His pity was no luxurious idle emotion, but the impulse to action. The like should be true of all Christians. No help can be rightly rendered unless it come from a sympathetic heart. Much Christian work is spoiled and made worse than useless by being done in hard, supercilious fashion. Benefits need to be wrapped in softest down of sympathy, or they will cut the hand that receives them. A man may be knocked down by a charitable gift flung at his head like a stone. For all forms of Christian service the law is valid - without sympathy no good will be done. Nor is the converse less needful to remember - that with out practical issues no sympathy is worth anything. Not merely is it useless to benefit the sufferers, but it harms the person cherishing it. Every emotion which is allowed to rise and pass without its appropriate action tends to harden the heart. If mercy is twice blessed, lazy compassion is twice cursed.

Christ’s sympathy clings to Him still, and is a permanent attribute of His perpetual and exalted manhood. He bears our griefs on His heart now, and bends over us each with as true a knowledge of our trouble, and as complete a partaking of it, as when on earth He wept by the grave of Lazarus, or felt the loneliness of that sonless widow. If our griefs be small and affecting mainly our material fortunes, we may take heart to believe that since they are great enough to trouble us they are not too small to move His sympathy, when we remember that He Him self declared that He "had compassion on the multitude" because they were hungry.

II We note the Christ who feels anger, grief, and wonder because of men’s evil.

We find one instance in Mark 3:5, in which He " looked on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart." The word rendered "grieved " is a compound term expressing the coexistence of some other feeling with the anger. Again we find (Mark 10:14) that our Lord was " moved with indignation " (R.V.). In the first case, the cause of the anger was the obstinate and increasing obduracy of the Pharisees, who had no eyes for anything but a breach of ceremonial law, into which they hoped He would be led. All the beauty of His character, all the power of His words, the mystery of His miraculous working, the joy of the cured man, were nothing to them. That the cure was a miracle brought no conviction to their minds, which could only grasp the fact that the miracle was a breach of rabbinical law. In the second case, the disciples, as it were, dammed up the flow of His tenderness and interfered with access to His mercy. So the evils which especially drew forth His anger were not the gross flagrant transgressions of notorious evil livers, but the sins of formal religionists to whom sacrifice was more than mercy, and of disciples who had imperfectly apprehended the continual flow and width of His love. Surely the lesson is needed at all times and in all Churches. Nothing more effectually blinds to the highest vision of Jesus Christ than a pedantic over estimate of the mere externals of religion. How many of us would not listen to a prophet or to Christ Himself, if He neglected or brushed aside our jealously guarded ceremonials and proprieties of worship ! On the other hand, how often Christian Churches and individuals have, like the disciples, put hindrances in the way of the " little ones " coming to Him ! How often have misplaced regard for the honour of the Master, and other even less reputable motives, forbidden humble souls to draw near for His embracing arm and the benediction of His lips ! A sharper accent marks Christ’s rebuke to His disciples, who cluster round Him like a body guard to keep off the profane, lest they should by their continual coming weary Him, than that which remonstrated with far more coarse guilt. But that anger was not all which these sins excited in His heart. Through the thundercloud looked the sun, and across the heavy drops was flung the rainbow. Grief blended with Christ’s anger. Both emotions must be in that perfect manhood, which is at once the realization of the human ideal and the revelation of the Divine reality. Their union saves us from the misconception of His anger. There can be no heat of passion in it, for it burns side by side with a great fountain of sorrowing pity which would quench any such blaze of wrath. His anger is a noble Divine aversion from evil. Unless Jesus is but half a man and maimed of an essential element in healthy and whole souled humanity, there must be in Him a true recognition of the badness of bad things and an indignant recoil from these. Nor is such aversion less inseparable from lofty conceptions of the Divine nature than from true ones of the human. Nor is there any malevolence in Christ’s anger. It is but a low kind of anger which includes the desire for evil on its objects. The highest kind necessarily includes the opposite desire, as every parent and child knows. Evildoers are to be blamed but pitied too, and however rigorously retribution may be awarded to them, compassion is not to be withheld. Jesus saw the essential character of sin as none else can do, and He knew its issue. Therefore He " grieved " and " was angry," in a blended stream of emotion wherein the darker current neighboured without weakening the other, which in turn accompanied and softened without diluting its sister-flow. That union of anger and grief saves us from exaggeration of His pity, as if He could not condemn or punish. His compassion does not contradict, nor put in the background, the certainty of His righteous judgment. The two are perfectly harmonious. The tears that fell for Jerusalem did not hinder Him from pronouncing her doom, nor did the judicial act of sentencing arrest the tears. Many modern representations of the gentle Christ need correction, for what they call gentleness is nothing nobler than weakness. Let us not forget that the Lamb of God is the Lion of Judah, and that even the Lamb "has seven horns." All truth and pity are in Him, but in Him, too, are righteous anger and fiery indignation. The revelations of an earlier time are not canceled. God in Christ is still " a consuming fire," but in Him we learn that side by side with that fire, or perhaps we may even say, as a necessary element in it, burns lambent the white flame of infinite tenderness and pity. In their deepest roots wrath and pity are one, even as the heat which blisters and the Light which gladdens have the same source. But there is another glimpse given us by Mark of the manner in which men’s evils affected Jesus, in that remark able expression that He "marveled at their unbelief" (Mark 6:6). We are apt to wonder that Christ could wonder, seeing that He knew what was in man. But His manhood was under distinct limitations in regard to know ledge, and the fact that He shared that feeling too is precious, as attesting how truly He emptied Himself of His glory when He assumed the fashion of a man. In another place we read that He also wondered with happier wonder at the ripe faith of a heathen. Here He marvels at the dogged unbelief of " His own." If unbelief evoked Christ’s astonishment, how unreasonable and contrary to all probability it must be! It may have an "excuse," or rather those guilty of it may "make excuses" for it; but these are only got up for show, and are not its real reason, which is found in that perfection of unreason which prefers death to life. The mystery of the world is sin. If we could explain it, we should know all things. It can give no rational account of itself. Try to put the reasons for it into plain words, and their blank irrationality is manifest. What reason can there be why men should be blind to facts which stare them in the face, and should deliberately choose ruin, and turn away from their highest good, and, admitting the most tremendous truths, should straightway proceed to huddle them out of sight lest they should in fluence conduct ? All sin is flagrant unreason, and nothing is more marvellous than that the beauty and sweetness of Jesus should be resisted, and His offered gifts refused. His meek heart had been well schooled in the possibilities of men’s unkindness and contempt ; but, even in its calm, a moment of wonder rose when once again He was forced to feel that He called in vain, and in vain loved. Thus His whole soul was disturbed by contact with sin. It left Him grieved and hurt, wounded and saddened. The compulsory association of some pure heart with criminals and profligates, as in some prison where an innocent man is shut up with criminals, and " vexed " in soul with their "filthy conversation," is but a faint shadow of what Christ bore all His life long. He was " a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief," because He " dwelt among them that are set on fire," and all this sorrow, pity, and wonder He bore because He loved the men who thus tortured Him, even as He loves us who can still grieve Him, and may still find balm in His compassion.

III We note, further, the Christ yearning in love towards very imperfect desires after good.

Mark tells us that Jesus " looking upon " the young ruler " loved him." There was much about the youth to draw out love. He was ingenuous, earnest in his desire to do right, had restrained his passions in his hot early man hood, and aspired with some genuine lifting of desire after the world to come. But there were flaws in his character which Jesus manifestly read from the beginning of the conversation. He had but a superficial notion of goodness, and a false conception of the requisites for inheriting eternal life. To him "good" was a thing to "do," and " eternal life " was wholly future, and was payment for acts done here, not because he loved them, but because he wanted their wages. He had so little apprehension of the sweep of the Divine Law, that he was certain that his obedience had been comprehensive of all its precepts and unbroken through his life. And when the final test was put he failed, and thereby proved that there was something in him deeper than the desire for goodness or for eternal life. Yet, for all the flaws, Jesus loved him, and would fain have drawn wholly to Himself a character with so many buds of promise in it. The great heart of Jesus Christ has room in it for all evildoers, and bends with pitying sorrow over debased wills that cleave to earth, and paralyzed spirits that have no touch of aspiration after things lovely and of good report. His love rests with peculiar tenderness on those who have yielded themselves wholly to Him and are walking in the light with Him. But there is a third class, touched with yearning after something higher than they possess, and yet not brought to the point of following Jesus with clear resolve and entire surrender ; and on these, too, His love falls. A harsh word, like a hasty blow struck at a feeble fire, may put out a spark which care would have fostered ; but Jesus does not " quench the dimly burning wick," nor frown away imperfect seekers after a better life. What would become of any of us, if He was not patient with partial knowledge and superficial conceptions of good ? It befits His followers to cherish the beginnings and faint dawnings of such in others, as their Lord did, and as they themselves need that He should do with them. For the most advanced and perfect saint on earth is nearer the most incomplete beginner who has but turned his face to the far off light, than he is to the light to which both are looking and neither have attained. Degrees of imperfection should not despise one another. One arc of a circle may be swept through more degrees of circumference than another, but it is only an unfinished arc after all.

Christ’s love for imperfect goodness is shown in His clear laying down of the stringent conditions with which it must comply in order to be complete. It was precisely because Jesus, looking on His youthful and eager questioner, "loved him," that " He said unto him, One thing thou lackest," and demanded of him the surrender of all that he had, and the following of Him. Frankness is the truest kindness. What such characters as the ruler’s most need is to see clearly that aspirations and outward acts are not enough, and that it is no slight matter to be "good," but one demanding the entire suppression of self and the use of all possessions as auxiliary thereto. He had been playing with wishes and surface virtues long enough. If he were in earnest, he would welcome the call which showed him the depths. If he were not in earnest, the kindest thing to do for him was to make him conscious that he was not. Therefore our Lord did not hesitate to put the condition of discipleship in the form that would most sharply test the depth and sovereignty of the "will to be perfect." The thin veneer of noble aspiration fell away, and the solid basis of worldly and self regarding worldliness stood confessed. So much the better for the man ; for now that he knew what to do, and that his wealth was the hindrance to his doing it, there was some possibility that present refusal might lead to searchings of heart, and that at a future time he might be ready to accept as a joy what he now shrank from as too great a sacrifice. We may be sure that the love which laid down the conditions did not turn away from him when he recoiled from them, nor cease to follow the young heart which had been touched with real though imperfect longings, though its owner ceased for the moment to follow Jesus. Still He looks with love on such hearts, and still His best gift to them is the clear call to full surrender, in which alone they will find the satisfaction of their desires, and be the objects of His yet tenderer love.

IV We note, finally, Christ bowed down under the burden of the world’s sin.

We turn lastly to Mark’s account of Gethsemane, concerning which the less we say the less shall we err. " Put off thy shoes from off thy feet." Cold analysis is out of place, but a reverent word or two may be permitted. We get a glimpse of Jesus beneath the olives by the quivering moonlight, as one may see by a lightning flash through the darkness of storm a laboring ship out on a wild sea. Mark employs two words to indicate Christ’s emotions at that dread hour. "Greatly amazed" is perhaps scarcely strong enough to modern ears to represent the mental condition intended, since astonishment has encroached on bewilderment, which is the true idea of " amazed." " Appalled " or " stupefied " would probably convey the meaning more clearly. The other expression is better given by the Revised Version as " sore troubled " than by the Authorized Version’s " very heavy." To these two pathetic words we have to add our Lord’s own unique acknowledgment of weakness and appeal for sympathy, " My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death," in which the word rendered "exceeding sorrowful" suggests the image of sorrows as ringing Him round in an unbroken circle. That strong expression, " unto death," must not be weakened into a mere superlative, but taken in its literal force as implying that the grief was all but fatal. One turn more of the rack and actual death would have ensued. Well may such a state be called, as it is by Luke, " agony."

Now we may reverently ask what it was which thus appalled and all but crushed Him, and we shall answer the question most unworthily and inadequately if we suppose that it was merely the apprehension of approaching death. Such an explanation dishonors Him, putting Him lower in fortitude than many of His servants, who have drawn their calmness in the prospect and actual suffering of martyrdom from Him; and it is transparently insufficient. A far heavier weight than that pressed Him down, even the burden of the sins of the whole world, which then met on Him, not only because, in His perfect sympathy and self oblivion, He identified Himself with sinful men, but also because, in a manner which we cannot explain but must accept, if we would do justice to Scripture teaching, " the Lord made to meet on Him the iniquity of us all." Unless the element of vicarious suffering entered into that mysterious agony, it will be very hard to account for it in any manner which will save the character of Jesus from disadvantageous comparisons with that of many a saint, hero, and sage. Socrates with his hemlock cup, and not a few other dying men, are far nobler persons than this shuddering Suppliant beneath the trembling olives, unless His agony was caused by something much deeper than the natural recoil of the living from death. The world for nearly nineteen centuries has bowed in reverence before that pathetic picture of Christ in Gethsemane. Why ? Be it reverently said, that unless the picture shows us "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world," it shows us a very weak man, unmanned by what thousands have faced far better than He did.

Such are the glimpses which this evangelist affords of that infinite heart. It is full today of all the tenderness and pitying love which filled it in that past. It bled and ached for us while it beat on earth, and it still wells over with fellow feeling for the sorrows, and pitying disapproval of the sins, of each of us. Some shade of sadness perhaps flits across even the joy of the Lord, when His brethren, whom He loved to the death, turn from His love, and it may still be possible for us to grieve Him. Be that as it may. He loves and pities all. Each may say, " He loves me, and I have a place in that heart." Let us turn our eyes to behold and our hearts to love that sum of all beauty and infinite mine of all human and Divine perfection made known to us in the heart of Jesus. The glimpses which we have into it here are blessedness. To know it fully is heaven.