One great argument for the divine origin of the mission of Jesus
is its utter unlikeness to the wisdom and ways of this world. From
beginning to end, it ignored and went contrary to all that human
schemes for power would have advised.
It was first announced, not to the great or wise, but to the poor
and unlettered. And when the holy child, predicted by such splendid
prophecies, came and had been adored by the shepherds and magi, had
been presented in the temple and blessed by Simeon and Anna--what
then? Suddenly he disappears from view. He is gone, no one knows
whither--hid in a distant land.
In time the parents return and settle in an obscure village. Nobody
knows them, nobody cares for them, and the child grows up as the
prophet predicted, "As a tender plant, a root out of dry ground;"
the lonely lily of Nazareth.
And then there were thirty years of silence, when nobody thought
of him and nobody expected anything from him. There was time
for Zacharias and Elisabeth and Simeon and Anna to die; for the
shepherds to cease talking of the visions; for the wise ones of the
earth to say, "Oh, as to that child, it was nothing at all! He is
gone. Nobody knows where he is. You see it has all passed by--a mere
superstitious excitement of a few credulous people."
And during these hidden years what was Jesus doing? We have no
record. It was said by the Apostle that "in all respects it behooved
him to be made like his brethren." Before the full splendor of his
divine gifts and powers descended upon him, it was necessary that he
should first live an average life, such as the great body of human
beings live. For, of Christ as he was during the three years of
his public life, it could not be said that he was in all respects
in our situation or experiencing our trials. He had unlimited
supernatural power; he could heal the sick, raise the dead, hush the
stormy waters, summon at his will legions of angels. A being of such
power could not be said to understand exactly the feelings of our
limitations and weaknesses. But those years of power were only three
in the life of our Lord; for thirty years he chose to live the life
of an obscure human being.
Jesus prepared for his work among men by passing through the quiet
experience of a workingman in the lower orders. The tradition of the
church is that Joseph, being much older than Mary, died while Jesus
was yet young, and thus the support of his mother devolved upon
him. Overbeck has a very touching picture in which he represents
Joseph as breathing his last on the bosom of Jesus; it is a sketch
full of tenderness and feeling.
What balance of mind, what reticence and self-control, what peace
resulting from deep and settled faith, is there in this history, and
what a cooling power it must have to the hot and fevered human heart
that burns in view of the much that is to be done to bring the world
right!
Nothing was ever so strange, so visionary, to all human view so
utterly and ridiculously hopeless of success, as the task that Jesus
meditated during the thirty years when he was quietly busy over his
carpenter's bench in Nazareth. Hundreds of years before, the prophet
Daniel saw, in a dream, a stone cut out of the mountain without
hands, growing till it filled the earth. Thus the ideal kingdom
of Jesus grew in the silence and solitude of his own soul till it
became a power and a force before which all other forces of the
world have given way. The Christian religion was the greatest and
most unprecedented reform ever introduced.
In the present age of the world, the whole movement and uneasiness
and convulsion of what is called progress comes from the effort
to adjust existing society to the principles laid down by Jesus.
The Sermon on the Mount was, and still is, the most disturbing and
revolutionary document in the world.
This being the case, what impresses us most in the character of
Jesus, as a reformer, is the atmosphere of peacefulness that
surrounded him, and in which he seemed to live and move and have his
being.
Human beings as reformers are generally agitated, hurried,
impatient. Scarcely are the spirits of the prophets subject to the
prophets. They are liable to run before the proper time and season,
to tear open the bud that ought to unfold; they become nervous,
irascible, and lose mental and physical health: and, if the reform
on which they have set their heart fails, they are overwhelmed with
discouragement and tempted to doubt divine Providence.
Let us now look at Jesus. How terrible was the state of the world at
the time when he began to reflect upon it in his unfolding youth!
How much was there to be done! What darkness, cruelty, oppression,
confusion! Yet he, knowing that that was the work of reorganizing,
showed no haste. Thirty years was by Jewish law the appointed time
at which a religious teacher should commence his career. Jesus
apparently felt no impulse to antedate this period; one incident
alone, in his childhood, shows him carried away beyond himself by
the divine ardor which filled his soul.
Even then, his answers to his mother showed the consciousness of
a divine and wonderful mission such as belonged only to one of
the human race, and it is immediately added, "And he went down
to Nazareth and was subject to them." Eighteen years now passed
away and nothing was known of the enthusiastic spirit. When he
appears in the synagogue at Nazareth, he is spoken of simply as
"the carpenter." "How knoweth this man letters?" was the cry of his
townsmen.
Nothing shows more strongly the veiled and hidden and perfectly
quiet life that Jesus had been leading among them. He had been a
carpenter, not a teacher. The humble, calm, unobtrusive life of a
good mechanic, who does every day's duty in its time and place,
is not a thing that calls out any attention in a community. There
are many followers of Jesus in this world who are living the same
silent, quiet life, who would not be missed in the great world if
they were gone, who, being always in place and time, and working
without friction or jar, come to be as much disregarded as the daily
perfect work of nature.
The life of Jesus must also have been a silent one. Of all the
things that he must have been capable of saying we find not one
recorded. And the wonder of his townsmen at his capacity of speech
shows that there had been no words spoken by him before to accustom
them to it.
In our Saviour's public career we are surprised at nothing so much
as his calmness. He was never in haste. His words have all the
weight of deliberation, and the occasions when he refrains from
speech are fully as remarkable as the things he says.
There seems to be about him none of the wearying anxiety as
to immediate results, none of the alternations of hope and
discouragement that mark our course. He had faith in God, whose
great plan he was working, whose message he came to deliver, and
whose times and seasons he strictly regarded. So, too, did he regard
the mental and spiritual condition of the imperfect ones by whom he
was surrounded. "I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot
bear them now," he said even to his disciples. When their zeal
transcended his, and they longed to get hold of the thunderbolts and
call down fire from heaven, his grave and steady rebuke recalled
them: "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of."
We see his disciples excited, ardent,--now coming back with triumph
to tell how even the devils were subject to them, now forbidding
one to cast out devils because he followed not them, now contending
who should be greatest; and among them sits the Master, lowly,
thoughtful, tranquil, with the little child on his knee, or bending
to wash the feet of a disciple, the calmest, sweetest, least
assuming of them all.
This should be the model of all Christian reformers. He that
believeth shall not make haste is the true motto of Christian reform.
And these great multitudes, to whose hands no special, individual
power is given--they are only minute workers in a narrower sphere.
Daily toils, small economies, the ordering of the material cares of
life, are all their lot. Before them in their way they can see the
footsteps of Jesus. We can conceive that in the lowly path of his
life all his works were perfect, that never was a nail driven or a
line laid carelessly, and that the toil of that carpenter's bench
was as sacred to him as his teachings in the temple, because it was
duty.
Sometimes there is a sadness and discontent, a repressed eagerness
for some higher sphere, that invades the minds of humble workers.
Let them look unto Jesus, and be content. All they have to do is to
be "faithful over a few things," and in his own time he will make
them "ruler over many things."