'Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath
made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and
Christ.'--ACTS ii. 36.
It is no part of my purpose at this time to consider the special
circumstances under which these words were spoken, nor even to enter
upon an exposition of their whole scope. I select them for one reason,
the occurrence in them of the three names by which we designate our
Saviour--Jesus, Lord, Christ. To us they are very little more than
three proper names; they were very different to these men who listened
to the characteristically vehement discourse of the Apostle Peter. It
wanted some courage to stand up at Pentecost and proclaim on the
housetop what he had spoken in the ear long ago, 'Thou art the Christ,
the Son of the living God!' To most of his listeners to say 'Jesus is
the Christ' was folly, and to say 'Jesus is the Lord' was blasphemy.
The three names are names of the same Person, but they proclaim
altogether different aspects of His work and His character. The name
'Jesus' is the name of the Man, and brings to us a Brother; the name
'Christ' is the name of office, and brings to us a Redeemer; the name
'Lord' is the name of dignity, and brings to us a King.
I. First, then, the name Jesus is the name of the Man, and tells us of
a Brother.
There were many men in Palestine who bore the name of 'Jesus' when He
bore it. We find that one of the early Christians had it; and it comes
upon us with almost a shock when we read that 'Jesus, called Justus,'
was the name of one of the friends of the Apostle Paul (Col. iv. 11).
But, through reverence on the part of Christians, and through horror on
the part of Jews, the name ceased to be a common one; and its
disappearance from familiar use has hid from us the fact of its common
employment at the time when our Lord bore it. Though it was given to
Him as indicative of His office of saving His people from their sins,
yet none of all the crowds who knew Him as Jesus of Nazareth supposed
that in His name there was any greater significance than in those of
the 'Simons,' 'Johns,' and 'Judahs' in the circle of His disciples.
Now the use of Jesus as the proper name of our Lord is very noticeable.
In the Gospels, as a rule, it stands alone hundreds of times, whilst in
combination with any other of the titles it is rare. 'Jesus Christ,'
for instance, only occurs, if I count aright, twice in Matthew, once in
Mark, twice in John. But if you turn to the Epistles and the latter
books of the Scriptures, the proportions are reversed. There you have a
number of instances of the occurrence of such combinations as 'Jesus
Christ,' 'Christ Jesus,' 'The Lord Jesus,' 'Christ the Lord,' and more
rarely the full solemn title, 'The Lord Jesus Christ,' but the
occurrence of the proper name 'Jesus' alone is the exception. So far as
I know, there are only some thirty or forty instances of its use singly
in the whole of the books of the New Testament outside of the four
Evangelists. The occasions where it is used are all of them occasions
in which one may see that the writer's intention is to put strong
emphasis, for some reason or other, on the Manhood of our Lord Jesus,
and to assert, as broadly as may be, His entire participation with us
in the common conditions of our human nature, corporeal and mental.
And I think I shall best bring out the meaning and worth of the name by
putting a few of these instances before you.
For example, more than once we find phrases like these: 'we believe
that _Jesus_ died,' 'having therefore boldness to enter into the
holiest by the blood of _Jesus_,' and the like--which emphasise His
death as the death of a man like ourselves, and bring us close to the
historical reality of His human pains and agonies for us. '_Christ_
died' is a statement which makes the purpose and efficacy of His death
more plain, but '_Jesus_ died' shows us His death as not only the work
of the appointed Messiah, but as the act of our brother man, the
outcome of His human love, and never rightly to be understood if His
work be thought of apart from His personality.
There is brought into view, too, prominently, the side of Christ's
sufferings which we are all apt to forget--the common human side of His
agonies and His pains. I know that a certain school of preachers, and
some unctuous religious hymns, and other forms of composition, dwell, a
great deal too much for reverence, upon the mere physical aspect of
Christ's sufferings. But the temptation, I believe, with most of us is
to dwell too little upon that,--to argue about the death of Christ, to
think about it as a matter of speculation, to regard it as a mysterious
power, to look upon it as an official act of the Messiah who was sent
into the world for us; and to forget that He bore a manhood like our
own, a body that was impatient of pains and wounds and sufferings, and
a human life which, like all human lives, naturally recoiled and shrank
from the agony of death.
And whilst, therefore, the great message, 'It is Christ that died,' is
ever to be pondered, we have also to think with sympathy and gratitude
on the homelier representation coming nearer to our hearts, which
proclaims that 'Jesus died.' Let us not forget the Brother's manhood
that had to agonise and to suffer and to die as the price of our
salvation.
Again, when the Scripture would set our Lord before us, as in His
humanity, our pattern and example, it sometimes uses this name, in
order to give emphasis to the thought of His Manhood--as, for example,
in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 'looking unto Jesus, the
Author and Perfecter of faith.' That is to say--a mighty stimulus to
all brave perseverance in our efforts after higher Christian nobleness
lies in the vivid and constant realisation of the true manhood of our
Lord, as the type of all goodness, as having Himself lived by faith,
and that in a perfect degree and manner. We are to turn away our eyes
from contemplating all other lives and motives, and to 'look off' from
them to Him. In all our struggles let us think of Him. Do not take poor
human creatures for your ideal of excellence, nor tune your harps to
their keynotes. To imitate men is degradation, and is sure to lead to
deformity. None of them, is a safe guide. Black veins are in the purest
marble, and flaws in the most lustrous diamonds. But to imitate Jesus
is freedom, and to be like Him is perfection. Our code of morals is His
life. He is the Ideal incarnate. The secret of all progress is,
'Run--looking unto Jesus.'
Then, again, we have His manhood emphasised when His sympathy is to be
commended to our hearts. 'The great High Priest, who is passed into the
heavens' is '_Jesus_' ... 'who was in all points tempted like as we
are.' To every sorrowing soul, to all men burdened with heavy tasks,
unwelcome duties, pains and sorrows of the imagination, or of the
heart, or of memory, or of physical life, or of circumstances--to all
there comes the thought, 'Every ill that flesh is heir to' He knows by
experience, and in the Man Jesus we find not only the pity of a God,
but the sympathy of a Brother.
When one of our princes goes for an afternoon into the slums in East
London, everybody says, and says deservedly, 'right!' and 'princely!'
_This_ prince has learned pity in 'the huts where poor men lie,' and
knows by experience all their squalor and misery. The Man Jesus is the
sympathetic Priest. The Rabbis, who did not usually see very far into
the depth of things, yet caught a wonderful glimpse when they said:
'Messias will be found sitting outside the gate of the city _amongst
the lepers_.' That _is_ where He sits; and the perfectness of His
sympathy, and the completeness of His identification of Himself with
all our tears and our sorrows, are taught us when we read that our High
Priest is not merely Christ the Official, but Jesus the Man.
And then we find such words as these: 'If we believe that _Jesus_ died
and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring
with Him': I think any one that reads with sympathy must feel how very
much closer to our hearts that consolation comes, 'Jesus rose again,'
than even the mighty word which the Apostle uses on another occasion,
'Christ is risen from the dead.' The one tells us of the risen
Redeemer, the other tells us of the risen Brother. And wherever there
are sorrowing souls, enduring loss and following their dear ones into
the darkness with yearning hearts, they are comforted when they feel
that the beloved dead lie down beside their Brother, and with their
Brother they shall rise again.
So, again, most strikingly, and yet somewhat singularly, in the words
of Scripture which paint most loftily the exaltation of the risen
Saviour to the right hand of God, and His wielding of absolute power
and authority, it is the old human name that is used; as if the writers
would bind together the humiliation and the exaltation, and were
holding up hands of wonder at the thought that a Man had risen thus to
the Throne of the Universe. What an emphasis and glow of hope there is
in such words as these: 'We see not yet all things put under Him, but
we see _Jesus_'--the very Man that was here with us--'crowned with
glory and honour.' So in the Book of the Revelation the chosen name for
Him who sits amidst the glories of the heavens, and settles the
destinies of the universe, and orders the course of history, is Jesus.
As if the Apostle would assure us that the face which looked down upon
him from amidst the blaze of the glory was indeed the face that he knew
long ago upon earth, and the breast that 'was girded with a golden
girdle' was the breast upon which he so often had leaned his happy head.
So the ties that bind us to the Man Jesus should be the human bonds
that knit us to one another, transferred to Him and purified and
strengthened. All that we have failed to find in men we can find in
Him. Human wisdom has its limits, but here is a Man whose word is
truth, who is Himself the truth. Human love is sometimes hollow, often
impotent; it looks down upon us, as a great thinker has said, like the
Venus of Milo, that lovely statue, smiling in pity, but it has no arms.
But here is a love that is mighty to help, and on which we can rely
without disappointment or loss. Human excellence is always limited and
imperfect, but here is One whom we may imitate and be pure. So let us
do like that poor woman in the Gospel story--bring our precious
alabaster box of ointment--the love of these hearts of ours, which is
the most precious thing we have to give. The box of ointment that we
have so often squandered upon unworthy heads--let us come and pour it
upon His, not unmingled with our tears, and anoint Him, our beloved and
our King. This Man has loved each of us with a brother's heart; let us
love Him with all our hearts.
II. So much for the first name. The second--'Christ'--is the name of
office, and brings to us a Redeemer.
I need not dwell at any length upon the original significance and force
of the name; it is familiar, of course, to us all. It stands as a
transference into Greek of the Hebrew Messias; the one and the other
meaning, as we all know, the 'Anointed.' But what is the meaning of
claiming for Jesus that He is anointed? A sentence will answer the
question. It means that He fulfils all which the inspired imagination
of the great ones of the past had seen in that dim Figure that rose
before prophet and psalmist. It means that He is anointed or inspired
by the divine indwelling to be Prophet, Priest, and King all over the
world. It means that He is--though the belief had faded away from the
minds of His generation--a sufferer whilst a Prince, and appointed to
'turn away unrighteousness' from the world, and not from 'Jacob' only,
by a sacrifice and a death.
I cannot see less in the contents of the Jewish idea, the prophetic
idea, of the Messias, than these points: divine inspiration or
anointing; a sufferer who is to redeem; the fulfiller of all the
rapturous visions of psalmist and of prophet in the past.
And so, when Peter stood up amongst that congregation of wondering
strangers and scowling Pharisees, and said, 'The Man that died on the
Cross, the Rabbi-peasant from half-heathen Galilee, is the Person to
whom Law and Prophets have been pointing,'--no wonder that no one
believed him except those whose hearts were touched, for it is never
possible for the common mind, at any epoch, to believe that a man who
stands beside them is very much bigger than themselves. Great men have
always to die, and get a halo of distance around them, before their
true stature can be seen.
And now two remarks are all I can afford myself upon this point, and
one is this: the hearty recognition of His Messiahship is the centre of
all discipleship. The earliest and the simplest Christian creed, which
yet--like the little brown roll in which the infant beech-leaves lie
folded up--contains in itself all the rest, was this: 'Jesus is
Christ.' Although it is no part of my business to say how much
imperfection and confusion of head comprehension may co-exist with a
heart acceptance of Jesus that saves a soul from sin, yet I cannot in
faithfulness to my own convictions conceal my belief that he who
contents himself with 'Jesus' and does not grasp 'Christ' has cast away
the most valuable and characteristic part of the Christianity which he
professes. Surely a most simple inference is that a _Christian_ is at
least a man who recognises the Christship of Jesus. And I press that
upon you, my friends. It is not enough for the sustenance of your own
souls and for the cultivation of a vigorous religious life that men
should admire, howsoever profoundly and deeply, the humanity of the
Lord unless that humanity leads them on to see the office of the
Messiah to whom their whole hearts cleave. 'Jesus is the Christ' is the
minimum Christian creed.
And then, still further, let me remind you how the recognition of Jesus
as Christ is essential to giving its full value to the facts of the
manhood. 'Jesus died!' Yes. What then? What is that to me? Is that all
that I have to say? If His is simply a human death, like all others, I
want to know what makes the story of it a Gospel. I want to know what
more interest I have in it than I have in the death of Socrates, or in
the death of any man or woman whose name was in the obituary column of
yesterday's newspaper. 'Jesus died.' That is a fact. What is wanted to
turn the fact into a gospel? That I shall know who it was that died,
and why He died. 'I declare unto you the gospel which I preach,' Paul
says, 'how that _Christ_ died for our sins, according to the
Scriptures.' The belief that the death of Jesus was the death of the
Christ is needful in order that it shall be the means of my deliverance
from the burden of sin. If it be only the death of Jesus, it is
beautiful, pathetic, as many another martyr's has been, but if it be
the death of Christ, then 'my faith can lay her hand' on that great
Sacrifice 'and know her guilt was there.'
So in regard to His perfect example. If we only see His manhood when we
are 'looking unto Jesus,' the contemplation of His perfection would be
as paralysing as spectacles of supreme excellence usually are. But when
we can say, '_Christ_ also suffered for us, leaving us an example,' and
so can deepen the thought of His Manhood into that of His Messiahship,
and the conception of His work as example into that of His work as
sacrifice, we can hope that His divine power will dwell in us to mould
our lives to the likeness of His human life of perfect obedience.
So in regard to His Resurrection and glorious Ascension to the right
hand of God. We have not only to think of the solitary man raised from
the grave and caught up to the throne. If it were only 'Jesus' who rose
and ascended, His Resurrection and Ascension might be as much to us as
the raising of Lazarus, or the rapture of Elijah--namely, a
demonstration that death did not destroy conscious being, and that a
man could rise to heaven; but they would be no more. But if '_Christ_
is risen from the dead,' He is 'become the first-fruits of them that
slept.' If _Jesus_ has gone up on high, others may or may not follow in
His train. He may show that manhood is not incapable of elevation to
heaven, but has no power to draw others up after Him. But if _Christ_
is gone up, He is gone to prepare a place for us, not to fill a
solitary throne, and His Ascension is the assurance that He will lift
us too to dwell with Him and share His triumph over death and sin.
Most of the blessedness and beauty of His Example, all the mystery and
meaning of His Death, and all the power of His Resurrection, depend on
the fact that 'it is _Christ_ that died, yea rather, that is risen
again, who is even at the right hand of God.'