'Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto,
but to minister.'--MATT. xx. 28.
It seems at first sight strangely unsympathetic and irrelevant that
the ambitious request of James and John and their foolish mother,
that they should sit at Christ's right hand and His left in His
kingdom, should have been occasioned by, and have followed
immediately upon, our Lord's solemn and pathetic announcement of His
sufferings. But the connection is not difficult to trace. The
disciples believed that, in some inexplicable way, the sufferings
which our Lord was shadowing forth were to be the immediate
precursors of His assuming His regal dignity. And so they took time
by the forelock, as they thought, and made haste to ensure their
places in the kingdom, which they believed was now ready to burst
upon them. Other occasions in the Gospels in which we find similar
quarrelling among the disciples as to pre-eminence are similarly
associated with references made by our Lord to His approaching
crucifixion. On a former occasion He cured these misplaced ambitions
by setting a child in the midst of them. On this He cures them by a
still more pathetic and wonderful example, His own; and He says, 'I,
in My lowliness and service, am to be your Pattern. In Me see the
basis of all true greatness, and the right use of all influence and
authority. The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister.'
I. So, then, let us look first at the perfect life of service of the
Servant-Lord.
Now, in order to appreciate the significance of that life of service,
we must take into account the introductory words, 'The Son of Man
came.' They declare His pre-existence, His voluntary entrance into
the conditions of humanity, and His denuding Himself of 'the glory
which He had with the Father before the world was.' We shall never
understand the Servant-Christ until we understand that He is the
Eternal Son of the Father. His service began long before any of His
acts of sympathetic and self-forgetting lowliness rendered help to
the miserable here upon earth. His service began when He laid aside,
not the garments of earth, but the vesture of the heavens, and
girded Himself, not with the cincture woven in man's looms, but with
the flesh of our humanity, 'and being found in fashion as a man,'
bowed Himself to enter into the conditions of earth. This was the
first, the chiefest of all His acts of service, and the sanctity and
awfulness of it run through the list of all His deeds and make them
unspeakably great. It was much that His hands should heal, that His
lips should comfort, that His heart should bleed with sympathy for
sorrow. But, oh! it was more that He _had_ hands to touch, lips to
speak to human hearts, and the heart of a man and a brother to feel
_with_ as well as _for_ us. 'The Son of Man came'--there is
the transcendent example of the true use of greatness; there is the
conspicuous instance of the true basis of authority and rule. For it
was because He was 'found in fashion as a Man' that He has won a 'name
that is above every name,' and that there have accrued to Him the
'many crowns' which He wears at the Father's side.
But then, passing beyond this, we may dwell, though all imperfectly,
upon the features, familiar as they are, of that wonderful life of
self-oblivious and self-sacrificing ministration to others. Think of
the purity of the source from all which these wonders and
blessednesses of service for man flowed. The life of Jesus Christ is
self-forgetting love made visible. Scientists tell us that, by the
arrangement of particles of sand upon plates of glass, there can be
made, as it were, perceptible to the eye, the sweetness of musical
sounds; and each note when struck will fling the particles into
varying forms of beauty. The life of Jesus Christ presents in shapes
of loveliness and symmetry the else invisible music of a divine
love. He lets us see the rhythm of the Father's heart. The source
from which His ministrations have flowed is the pure source of a
perfect love. Ancient legends consolidated the sunbeams into the
bright figure of the far-darting god of light. And so the sunbeams
of the divine love have, as it were, drawn themselves together and
shaped themselves into the human form of the Son of Man who 'came
not to be ministered unto, but to minister.'
No taint of bye-ends was in that service; no sidelong glances at
possible advantages of influence or reputation or the like, which so
often deform men's philanthropies and services to one another. No
more than the sunbeam shines for the sake of collateral issues which
may benefit itself, did Jesus Christ seek His own advantage in
ministering to men. There was no speck of black in that lustrous
white robe, but all was perfectly unselfish love. Like the clear
sea, weedless and stainless, that laves the marble steps of the
palaces of Venice, the deep ocean of Christ's service to man was
pure to the depths throughout.
That perfect ministry of the Servant-Lord was rendered with strange
spontaneity and cheerfulness. One of the evangelists says, in a very
striking and beautiful phrase, that 'He healed them that had need of
healing,' as if the presence of the necessity evoked the supply, by
the instinctive action of a perfect love. There was never in Him one
trace of reluctance to have leisure broken in upon, repose
disturbed, or even communion with God abbreviated. All men could
come always; they never came inopportunely. We often cheerfully take
up a burden of service, but find it very hard to continue bearing
it. But He was willing to come down from the mountain of
Transfiguration because there was a demoniac boy in the plain; and
therefore He put aside the temptation--'Let us build here three
tabernacles.' He was willing to abandon His desert seclusion because
the multitude sought Him. Interrupted in His communion with the
Father by His disciples, He had no impatient word to say, but 'Let
us go into other cities also, for therefore am I sent.' When He
stepped from the fishing-boat on the other side of the lake to which
He had fled for a moment of repose, He was glad when He saw the
multitude who had pertinaciously outrun Him, and were waiting for
Him on the beach. On His Cross He had leisure to turn from His own
physical sufferings and the weight of a world's sin, which lay upon
Him, to look at that penitent by His side, and He ended His life in
the ministry of mercy to a brigand. And thus cheerfully, and always
without a thought of self, 'He came to minister.'
Think, too, of the sweep of His ministrations. They took in all men;
they were equally open to enemies and to friends, to mockers and to
sympathisers. Think of the variety of the gifts which He brought in
His ministry--caring for body and for soul; alleviating sorrow,
binding up wounds, purifying hearts; dealing with sin, the fountain,
and with miseries, its waters, with equal helpfulness and equal
love.
And think of how that ministering was always ministration by 'the
LORD.' For there is nothing to me more remarkable in the Gospel
narrative than the way in which, side by side, there lie in Christ's
life the two elements, so difficult to harmonise in fact, and so
impossible to have been harmonised in a legend, the consciousness of
authority and the humility of a servant. The paradox with which John
introduces his sweet pathetic story of our Lord's washing the
disciples' feet is true of, and is illustrated by, every instance of
more than ordinary lowliness and self-oblivion which the Gospel
contains. 'Jesus, knowing that He had come from God, and went to
God, and that the Father had given all things into His hand'--did
what? 'Laid aside His garments and took a towel and girded Himself.'
The two things ever go together. And thus, in His lowliest
abasement, as in a star entangled in a cloud, there shine out, all
the more broad and conspicuous for the environment which wraps them,
the beams of His uncreated lustre.
That ministration was a service that never shrank from stern rebuke.
His service was no mere soft and pliant, sympathetic helpfulness,
but it could smite and stab, and be severe, and knit its brow, and
speak stern words, as all true service must. For it is not service
but cruelty to sympathise with the sinner, and say nothing in
condemnation of his sin. And yet no sternness is blessed which is
not plainly prompted by desire to help.
Now, I know far better than you do how wretchedly inadequate all
these poor words of mine have been to the great theme that I have
been trying to speak of, but they may at least--like a little water
poured into a pump--have set your minds working upon the theme, and,
I hope, to better purpose. 'The Son of Man came ... to minister.'