'… Who is this Son of Man?'—JOHN xii. 34.
I have thought that a useful sermon may be devoted to the consideration
of the remarkable name which our Lord gives to Himself—'the Son of
Man.' And I have selected this instance of its occurrence, rather than
any other, because it brings out a point which is too frequently
overlooked, viz. that the name was an entirely strange and enigmatical
one to the people who heard it. This question of utter bewilderment
distinctly shows us that, and negatives, as it seems to me, the
supposition which is often made, that the name 'Son of Man,' upon the
lips of Jesus Christ, was equivalent to Messiah. Obviously there is no
such significance attached to it by those who put this question. As
obviously, for another reason, the two names do not cover the same
ground; for our Lord sedulously avoided calling Himself the Christ, and
habitually called Himself the Son of Man.
Now one thing to observe about this name is that it is never found upon
the lips of any but Jesus Christ. No man ever called him the Son of Man
whilst He was upon earth, and only once do we find it applied to Him in
the rest of Scripture, and that is on the occasion on which the first
martyr, Stephen, dying at the foot of the old wall, saw 'the heavens
opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.' Two
other apparent instances of the use of the expression occur, both of
them in the Book of Revelation, both of them quotations from the Old
Testament, and in both the more probable reading gives 'a Son of Man,'
not '_the_ Son of Man.'
One more preliminary remark and I will pass to the title itself. The
name has been often supposed to be taken from the remarkable prophecy
in the Book of Daniel, of one 'like a son of man,' who receives from
the Ancient of Days an everlasting kingdom which triumphs over those
kingdoms of brute force which the prophet had seen. No doubt there is a
connection between the prophecy and our Lord's use of the name, but it
is to be observed that what the prophet speaks of is not 'the Son,' but
'one _like_ a son of man'; or in other words, that what the prophecy
dwells upon is simply the manhood of the future King in
contradistinction to the bestial forms of Lion and Leopard and Bear,
whose kingdoms go down before him. Of course Christ fulfils that
prediction, and is the 'One like a son of man,' but we cannot say that
the title is derived from the prophecy, in which, strictly speaking, it
does not occur.
What, then, is the force of this name, as applied to Himself by our
Lord?
First, we have in it Christ putting out His hand, if I may say so, to
draw us to Himself—identifying Himself with us. Then we have, just as
distinctly, Christ, by the use of this name, in a very real sense
distinguishing Himself from us, and claiming to hold a unique and
solitary relation to mankind. And then we have Christ, by the use of
this name in its connection with the ancient prophecy, pointing us
onward to a wonderful future.