The name Son of Man, whatever more it means, declares the historical
fact of His Incarnation, and the reality and genuineness, the
completeness and fullness, of His assumption of humanity. And so it is
significant to notice that the name is employed continually in the
places in the Gospels where especial emphasis is to be placed, for some
reason or other, upon our Lord's manhood, as, for instance, when He
would bring into view the depth of His humiliation. It is this name
that He uses when He says: 'Foxes have holes and the birds of the air
have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.' The use
of the term there is very significant and profound; He contrasts His
homelessness, not with the homes of men that dwell in palaces, but with
the homes of the inferior creatures. As if He would say, 'Not merely am
I individually homeless and shelterless, but I am so because I am truly
a man, the only creature that builds houses, and the only creature that
has not a home. Foxes have holes, anywhere they can rest, the birds of
the air have,' not as our Bible gives it, 'nests,' but
'roosting-places, any bough will do for them. All living creatures are
at home in this material universe; I, as a Representative of humanity,
wander a pilgrim and a sojourner.' We are all restless and homeless;
the creatures correspond to their environment. We have desires and
longings, wild yearnings, and deep-seated needs, that 'wander through
eternity'; the Son of Man, the representative of manhood, 'hath not
where to lay His head.'
Then the same expression is employed on occasions when our Lord desires
to emphasise the completeness of His participation in all our
conditions. As, for instance, 'the Son of Man came eating and
drinking,' knowing the ordinary limitations and necessities of
corporeal humanity; having the ordinary dependence upon external
things; nor unwilling to taste, with pure and thankful lip, whatever
gladness may be found in man's path through the supply of natural
appetites.
And the name is employed habitually on occasions when He desires to
emphasise His manhood as having truly taken upon itself the whole
weight and weariness of man's sin, and the whole burden of man's guilt,
and the whole tragicalness of the penalties thereof, as in the familiar
passages, so numerous that I need only refer to them and need not
attempt to quote them, in which we read of the Son of Man being
'betrayed into the hands of sinners'; or in those words, for instance,
which so marvellously blend the lowliness of the Man and the lofty
consciousness of the mysterious relation which He bears to the whole
world; 'The Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto, but to
minister, and to give His life a ransom for the many.'
Now if we gather all these instances together (and they are only
specimens culled almost at random), and meditate for a moment on the
Name as illuminated by such words as these, they suggest to us, first,
how truly and how blessedly He is 'bone of our bone, and flesh of our
flesh.' All our human joys were His. He knew all human sorrow. The
ordinary wants of human nature belonged to Him; He hungered, He
thirsted, and was weary; He ate and drank and slept. The ordinary wants
of the human heart He knew; He was hurt by hatred, stung by
ingratitude, yearned for love; His spirit expanded amongst friends, and
was pained when they fell away. He fought and toiled, and sorrowed and
enjoyed. He had to pray, to trust, and to weep. He was a Son of Man, a
true man among men. His life was brief; we have but fragmentary records
of it for three short years. In outward form it covers but a narrow
area of human experience, and large tracts of human life seem to be
unrepresented in it. Yet all ages and classes of men, in all
circumstances, however unlike those of the peasant Rabbi who died when
he was just entering mature manhood, may feel that this man comes
closer to them than all beside. Whether for stimulus for duty, or for
grace and patience in sorrow, or for restraint in enjoyment, or for the
hallowing of all circumstances and all tasks, the presence and example
of the Son of Man are sufficient. Wherever we go, we may track His
footsteps by the drops of His blood upon the sharp flints that we have
to tread. In all narrow passes, where the briars tear the wool of the
flock, we may see, left there on the thorns, what they rent from the
pure fleece of the Lamb of God that went before. The Son of Man is our
Brother and our Example.
And is it not beautiful, and does it not speak to us touchingly and
sweetly of our Lord's earnest desire to get very near us and to bring
us very near to Him, that this name, which emphasises humiliation and
weakness and the likeness to ourselves, should be the name that is
always upon His lips? Just as, if I may compare great things with
small, some teacher or philanthropist, that went away from civilised
into savage life, might leave behind him the name by which he was known
in Europe, and adopt some barbarous designation that was significant in
the language of the savage tribe to whom he was sent, and say to them:
'That is my name now, call me by that,' so this great Leader of our
souls, who has landed upon our coasts with His hands full of blessings,
His heart full of love, has taken a name that makes Him one of
ourselves, and is never wearied of speaking to our hearts, and telling
us that it is that by which He chooses to be known. It is a touch of
the same infinite condescension which prompted His coming, that makes
Him choose as His favourite and habitual designation the name of
weakness and identification, the name 'Son of Man.'
II. But now turn to what is equally distinct and clear in this title.
Here we have our Lord distinguishing Himself from us, and plainly
claiming a unique relationship to the whole world.
Just fancy how absurd it would be for one of us to be perpetually
insisting on the fact that he was a man, to be taking that as his
continual description of himself, and pressing it upon people's
attention as if there was something strange about it. The idea is
preposterous; and the very frequency and emphasis with which the name
comes from our Lord's lips, lead one to suspect that there is something
lying behind it more than appears on the surface. That impression is
confirmed and made a conviction, if you mark the article which is
prefixed, _the_ Son of Man. A Son of man is a very different idea. When
He says '_the_ Son of Man' He seems to declare that in Himself there
are gathered up all the qualities that constitute humanity; that He is,
to use modern language, the realised Ideal of manhood, the typical Man,
in whom is everything that belongs to manhood, and who stands forth as
complete and perfect. Appropriately, then, the name is continually used
with suggestions of authority and dignity contrasting with those of
humiliation. 'The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath,' 'The Son of Man
hath power on earth to forgive sins' and the like. So that you cannot
get away from this, that this Man whom the whole world has conspired to
profess to admire for His gentleness, and His meekness, and His
lowliness, and His religious sanity, stood forward and said: 'I am
complete and perfect, and everything that belongs to manhood you will
find in Me.'
And it is very significant in this connection that the designation
occurs more frequently in the first three Gospels than in the fourth;
which is alleged to present higher notions of the nature and
personality of Jesus Christ than are found in the other three. There
are more instances in Matthew's Gospel in which our Lord calls Himself
the Son of Man, with all the implication of uniqueness and completeness
which that name carries; there are more even in the Gospel of the
Servant, the Gospel according to Mark, than in the Gospel of the Word
of God, the Gospel according to John. And so I think we are entitled to
say that by this name, which the testimony of all our four Gospels
makes it certain, even to the most suspicious reader, that Christ
applied to Himself, He declared His humanity, His absolutely perfect
and complete humanity.
In substance He is claiming the same thing for Himself that Paul
claimed for Him when he called Him 'the second Adam.' There have been
two men in the world, says Paul, the fallen Adam, with his infantile
and undeveloped perfections, and the Christ, with His full and complete
humanity. All other men are fragments, He is the 'entire and perfect
chrysolite.' As one of our epigrammatic seventeenth-century divines has
it, 'Aristotle is but the rubbish of an Adam,' and Adam is but the dim
outline sketch of a Jesus. Between these two there has been none. The
one Man as God meant him, the type of man, the perfect humanity, the
realised ideal, the home of all the powers of manhood, is He who
Himself claimed that place for Himself, and stepped into it with the
strange words upon His lips, 'I am meek and lowly of heart.'
'Who is this Son of Man?' Ah, brethren! 'who can bring a clean thing
out of an unclean? Not one.' A perfect Son of Man, born of a woman,
'bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,' must be more than a Son of
Man. And that moral completeness and that ideal perfection in all the
faculties and parts of His nature which drove the betrayer to clash
down the thirty pieces of silver in the sanctuary in despair that 'he
had betrayed innocent blood'; which made Pilate wash his hands 'of the
blood of this just person'; which stopped the mouths of the adversaries
when He challenged them to convince Him of sin, and which all the world
ever since has recognised and honoured, ought surely to lead us to ask
the question, 'Who is this Son of Man?' and to answer it, as I pray we
all may answer it, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!'
This fact of His absolute completeness invests His work with an
altogether unique relationship to the rest of mankind. And so we find
the name employed upon His own lips in connections in which He desires
to set Himself forth as the single and solitary medium of all blessing
and salvation to the world—as, for instance, 'The Son of Man came to
give His life a ransom for the many'; 'Ye shall see the heavens opened,
and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.' He
is what the ladder was in the vision to the patriarch, with his head
upon the stone and the Syrian sky over him—the Medium of all
communication between earth and heaven. And that ladder which joins
heaven to earth, and brings all angels down on the solitary watchers,
comes straight down, as the sunbeams do, to every man wherever he is.
Each of us sees the shortest line from his own standing-place to the
central light, and its beams come straight to the apple of each man's
eye. So because Christ is more than a man, because He is _the_ Man, His
blessings come to each of us direct and straight, as if they had been
launched from the throne with a purpose and a message to us alone. Thus
He who is in Himself perfect manhood touches all men, and all men touch
Him, and the Son of Man, whom God hath sealed, will give to every one
of us the bread from heaven. The unique relationship which brings Him
into connection with every soul of man upon earth, and makes Him the
Saviour, Helper, and Friend of us all, is expressed when He calls
Himself the Son of Man.
III. And now one last word in regard to the predictive character of
this designation.
Even if we cannot regard it as being actually a quotation of the
prophecy in the Book of Daniel, there is an evident allusion to that
prophecy, and to the whole circle of ideas presented by it, of an
everlasting dominion, which shall destroy all antagonistic power, and
of a solemn coming for judgment of One like a Son of Man.
We find, then, the name occurring on our Lord's lips very frequently in
that class of passages with which we are so familiar, and which are so
numerous that I need not quote them to you; in which He speaks of the
second coming of the Son of Man; as, for instance, that one which
connects itself most distinctly with the Book of Daniel, the words of
high solemn import before the tribunal of the High Priest. 'Hereafter
shall ye see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and
coming in the glories of heaven'; or as when He says, 'He hath given
Him authority to execute judgment also because He is the Son of Man';
or as when the proto-martyr, with his last words, declared in sudden
burst of surprise and thrill of gladness, 'I see the heavens opened,
and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.'
Two thoughts are all that I can touch on here. The name carries with it
a blessed message of the present activity and perpetual manhood of the
risen Lord. Stephen does not see Him as all the rest of Scripture
paints Him, _sitting_ at the right hand of God, but _standing_ there.
The emblem of His sitting at the right hand of God represents
triumphant calmness in the undisturbed confidence of victory. It
declares the completeness of the work that He has done upon earth, and
that all the history of the future is but the unfolding of the
consequences of that work which by His own testimony waa finished when
He bowed His head and died. But the dying martyr sees him _standing_,
as if He had sprung to His feet in response to the cry of faith from
the first of the long train of sufferers. It is as if the Emperor upon
His seat, looking down upon the arena where the gladiators are
contending to the death, could not sit quiet amongst the flashing axes
of the lictors and the purple curtains of His throne, and see their
death-struggles, but must spring to His feet to help them, or at least
bend down with the look and with the reality of sympathy. So Christ,
the Son of Man, bearing His manhood with Him,
'Still bends on earth a Brother's eye,'
and is the ever-present Helper of all struggling souls that put their
trust in Him.
Then as to the other and main thought here in view—the second coming of
that perfect Manhood to be our Judge. It is too solemn a subject for
human lips to say much about. It has been vulgarised, and the power
taken out of it by many well-meant attempts to impress it upon men's
hearts. But that coming is _certain_. That manhood could not end its
relationship to us with the Cross, nor yet with the slow, solemn,
upward progress which bore Him, pouring down blessings, up into the
same bright cloud that had dwelt between the cherubim and had received
Him into its mysterious recesses at the Transfiguration. That He should
come again is the only possible completion of His work.
That Judge is our Brother. So in the deepest sense we are tried by our
Peer. Man's knowledge at its highest cannot tell the moral desert of
anything that any man does. You may judge action, you may sentence for
breaches of law, you may declare a man clear of any blame for such, but
for any one to read the secrets of another heart is beyond human power;
and if He that is the Judge were only a man there would be wild work,
and many a blunder in the sentences that were given. But when we think
that it is the Son of Man that is our Judge, then we know that the
Omniscience of divinity, that ponders the hearts and reads the motives,
will be all blended with the tenderness and sympathy of humanity; that
we shall be judged by One who knows all our frame, not only with the
knowledge of a Maker, if I may so say, as from outside, but with the
knowledge of a possessor, as from within; that we shall be judged by
One who has fought and conquered in all temptations; and most blessed
of all, that we shall be judged by One with whom we have only to plead
His own work and His own love and His Cross that we may stand acquitted
before His throne.
So, brethren, in that one mighty Name all the past, present, and future
are gathered and blended together. In the past His Cross fills the
retrospect: for the future there rises up, white and solemn, His
judgment throne. 'The Son of Man _is_ come to give His life a ransom
for the many'; that is the centre point of all history. The Son of Man
_shall_ come to judge the world; that is the one thought that fills the
future. Let us lay hold by true faith on the mighty work which He has
done on the Cross, then we shall rejoice to see our Brother on the
throne, when the 'judgment is set and the books are opened.' Oh,
friends, cleave to Him ever in trust and love, in communion and
imitation, in obedience and confession, that ye may be accounted worthy
'to stand before the Son of Man' in that day!