It is wonderfully gentle and lenient. He speaks no rebuke. He does not
reject the proffered devotion. He does not even say that there was
anything defective in it, but simply answers by a quiet statement of
what the vow was pledging the rash utterer to do. Christ's words are a
douche of cold water to condense the steam which was so noisily
escaping, to turn the vaporous enthusiasm into something more solid,
with the particles nearer each other. His object was not to repel, but
to turn an ignorant, somewhat bragging vow into a calm, humble
determination, with a silent 'God helping me' for its foundation. To
repel is sometimes the way to attract. Jesus Christ would not have any
one coming after Him on a misunderstanding of where he is going, or
what he will have to do. It shall be all fair and above board, and the
difficulties and sacrifices and necessary restrictions and
inconveniences shall all be stated. He does not need to hide from His
recruits the black side of the war for which He seeks to enlist them,
but He tells it all to them to begin with, and then waits--and He only
knows how longingly He waits--for their repeating, with full knowledge
and humble determination, the vow that sprang so lightly to their lips
when they did not understand what they were saying. Of course our Lord's
words had literal truth, and their original intention was to bring
clearly before this man the hard fact that following Jesus meant
homelessness. It is as if He had said, 'You are ready to follow Me
wherever I go--are you? You will have to go far, and to be always going.
Creatures have their burrows and their roosting-places, but I, the Lord
of creatures, the Son of Man, whose kingdom prophets proclaimed, am
houseless in My own realm, and My followers must share My wandering
life. Are you ready for that?' Jesus was homeless. He was born in a
hired stable, cradled in a manger, owed shelter to faithful friends, was
buried in a borrowed grave; He had 'not where to lay His head,' living
or dying. And His servants, in literal truth, had to tramp after Him,
through the length and breadth of the land. And if this man was meaning
to follow Him whithersoever He went, he had not before him a little
pleasure-journey across the lake, to come back again in a day or two,
but he was enlisting for a term of service, that extended over a life.
But then, beyond that, there is a deeper lesson here. 'The Son of Man'
on our Lord's lips not only expressed His dignity as Messiah, but His
relation to the whole race of men; and declared that He was what we
nowadays call ideal manhood. And that is the point, as I take it, of the
contrast between the restful lives of the lower creatures, who all have
a place fitted to them, where they curl themselves up, and go to sleep,
and are comfortable, and the higher life of men, which is homeless in
the deepest sense. 'The Son of Man,' He in whom the whole essence of
humanity is, as it were, concentrated; and who, in His own person,
presents the very type and perfection of manhood, cannot but be
homeless.
Ah, yes I man's prerogative is unrest, and he should recognise it as a
blessing. It is the condition of all noble life; it is the condition of
all growth. 'The foxes have holes,' and the fox's hole fits it, and
therefore the hole of the fox to-day is what it was in the beginning,
and ever shall be. Man has no such abode, therefore he grows. Man is
blessed with that great 'discourse that looks before and after,' and his
thoughts wander through eternity, and therefore he is capable of endless
advance, and if he is in the path where his Maker has meant him to be,
sure of endless growth. The more a man gets like a beast, the more has
he of the beast's lot of happy contentment in this world. And the more
he gets like a man, like the 'Son of Man,' the more has he to realise
that he is a pilgrim and a sojourner, as all his fathers were.
And so, dear friends, because disciples must follow the Son of Man who
is the King, and whose life is the perfect mirror of manhood, restless
homelessness is our lot, if we are His disciples. Ay! and it is our
blessing. It is better to sleep beneath the stars than beneath golden
canopies, and to lay the head upon a stone than upon a lace pillow, if
the ladder is at our side and the face of God above it. Better be out in
the fields, a homeless stranger with the Lord, than huddling together
and perfectly comfortable in houses of clay that perish before the
moth.
Do not let us repine; let us be thankful that we cannot, if we are
Christ's, but be strangers here; for all the bitterness and pain of
unrest and homelessness pass away, and all sweetness and gladness is
breathed into them, when we can say, 'I am a sojourner and a stranger
_with Thee_,' and when in our unrest we are 'following the Lamb
whithersoever He goeth.'