The two words, "Ecce homo," contemptuously spoken by the cynical Roman
governor contained the highest tribute that had been given to Jesus.
How empty appear all the high sounding titles, such as king and
emperor, beside this significant one of Man. How sad and self-damning
the bitter railing of His enemies in the light of that serene dignity.
How puerile the bickering over words and ways of worship, and all the
wrangling that blinded them to the heavenly radiance of that all
glorious manhood. The wonder of Jesus is not in the deeds He did, but
in the being He was. And the wonder of His being is not in that it
offers elements for arguments as to a divine personality, but it is
that of a simple, clear, sublimely perfect manhood. It is upon this
perfection of personal character that His abiding claim to divinity
must rest; it depends not on His birth but on His being.
There is something strange about the perversity with which the church
has emphasized the least attractive aspects of its master's person.
The preachers have scolded men for not coming to church, and when they
did come they offered them pictures of an emaciated, effeminate being
for their adoration. With them the painters have conspired to set on
canvas and in church window representations from the reality of which
we would turn with repulsion or on which we would look with pity.
If Jesus is to be the leader of men He must go before them. He must
stand in the front, not set there by artificial arguments as to His
right to rule over men, but there because He belongs there, first
because He is first in all that makes manhood; He is king because He
can, and because He has overcome in life's great conflict.
If He is to show us the way we should go He must walk in that way; He
must be flesh of our flesh, true man, knowing the full fellowship of
our lives. If He was born with a halo; if He lived on angel's fare; if
somehow He belongs to another world and His perfections are not those
of our nature, then, almighty as He may be as a leader for beings of
another world, He has no value to us.
But men have ever set aside the weavings of minds so absorbed in the
wonder of their speculations that they could not see the truth. They
have seen through the dreamings of poets, painters, and preachers, who
pictured only their sickly ideals. And, instead of their caricatures,
men have held in their hearts a man, one of their own. And this true
fellow, brother and friend, has spurred them to noble deeds and lofty
living.
Perfection is seen in strength, not in weakness, in virility and not in
tears, in majesty, the majesty truly of meekness, but not of a maudlin,
mooning etherealism. The revelation of the perfect man cannot come in
a form that a child will pity; it will be admirable from all points of
view. It is the heroic rather than the esthetic we must admire.
The men who followed that one long ago did so not because they had
heard arguments as to His divine claims, but because they were drawn by
the heavenly power of His manhood. This it is that wins men ever, the
magnetism of manhood. The force of a great life is mightier than any
of the things it does. There is about this leader, Jesus, that which
compels us to greatness, spurs us to strife for our better selves,
strengthens to sacrifice and to service for our fellows.
It matters little whence a life like this has come; the greater
question is where does it lead us. Childish minds spend time on the
genealogical trees of the giants; the wise men follow them. The value
of the life of the great Teacher does not depend on our ability to
comprehend it biologically or arrange it chronologically, but on our
vision of its moral and manly perfections and on the power these
attributes have over our lives.
This world will be little helped by the most irrefutable syllogism
concerning the peculiar nature and separate exclusive divinity of its
great religious Teacher. But lives will be lifted everywhere in the
measure that they see the man in Him who taught us of God. For men
need not so much a God who has come down as a man who has attained to
God, not a descent, but an ascent, one who is the life and the truth
because He is the way which they may tread up to the glory that is
their heritage and the God who is their own.