THE SON OF MAN AND SIN.
When we compare the work Jesus proposed to do in the world with the
schemes of earth’s greatest ones we cannot classify him with mere men.
What did he think he came into the world to do? What did he consider
his mission to be?
We cannot be in the least doubt for the answer; there was no confusion
in his thought, no ambiguity in his words. If we ask what Jesus thought
his mission was we will easily find the answer--unparalleled by the
thought of any, absolutely unique, stupendous, but as unmistakable in
meaning as simple in the form of expression.
We will answer in his own words: “The Son of man is come to seek and
to save that which is lost.” “I came not to call the righteous, but
sinners to repentance.” “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn
the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” “I came not
to judge the world, but to save the world.” More forcibly, if possible,
than in his words, his conception of his mission is shown by his work,
his living, and his dying. St. Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, gives
us in a simple statement the whole history; it is, in a line, the
biography of the God-man, “He went about doing good.”
That Jesus should have seen in the world evil that needed to be
remedied, that he should have tried to remedy the evil he saw, does
not, in itself, difference him from good and wise men who have observed
the facts of human life and have deplored human miseries. All the
great teachers and reformers have recognized evil in the world, and
many of them have distinctly recognized this evil as moral evil. The
doctrine of Jesus is peculiar in this; all the evil that is in the
world is moral evil, and all moral evil is, at its root, sin, and sin,
considered as a quality in man’s character, is a state of being that is
out of harmony with God; considered as a fact, it is life in violation
of God’s law. The bad man is, in his spirit, at enmity with God; in his
life he breaks God’s law. He loves evil because evil is in him; his
life is wicked because his heart is bad.
And Jesus comes to take away sin; to deliver men from it, its penalty,
and its power. Said the angel to Mary: “Thou shalt call his name Jesus,
for he shall save his people from their sins.”
In the view of Jesus sin is the one evil; deliverance from sin is
deliverance from all evil; it is salvation. He struck at sin as
the root of all possible evil; he recognized no evil that was in
man’s circumstances, as if his evil came out of fate or in some way
invincible by him; it is all of sin.
Wherefore Jesus does not set about bettering man’s circumstances, by
direct effort improving the sanitary, economic, political, or social
conditions of life; he works upon man himself. Whatever improves man’s
condition is, in the doctrine of Jesus, to be desired; but it is not
enough to make man comfortable; he must be made good. He teaches that
all that is truly good and needful will come to men who are delivered
from sin, and that no real good can come to him whose sin remains in
him. First, last, all the time, Jesus makes deliverance from sin the
one thing needful--the chief good.
As his manner was, he does not argue about it; he states his doctrine
positively, “with authority,” as one knowing the whole truth of the
case. There is no qualifying word to tone down his statements and to
leave place for retreat from possible mistakes.
His doctrine he taught and illustrated in every possible way. It is in
his more formal discourses, his briefest comments on men and things,
his most occasional conversations and most incidental remarks. His
doctrine is in all his efforts to do men good, as it is in every
warning and every promise.
And there is never a shadow of doubt, a suspicion of hesitation. From
his first word to the last, from the beatitudes to the prayer on the
cross, it is always the same thing; man’s trouble is all in his sin;
his only salvation is deliverance from sin.
It comes out in the most incidental way. When the penitent Magdalene
washed his feet with her tears, at Simon’s table, he said not a word
about her lost social position or of its possible restoration. He said,
“Thy sins are forgiven; thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.”
When the four kind and loving friends of Capernaum--whose names we
would like to know--had brought their palsied neighbor to Peter’s
house, and had at last, with much trouble, through the broken roof laid
him down at the feet of Jesus, the first words were not about palsy and
healing, but about sin and salvation: “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.”
This is what the story of the penitent publican, crying out, “God be
merciful to me a sinner,” means. It is what the story of the prodigal
means; it is what the whole life and teaching of Jesus mean.
We must notice particularly that the mere conception of a divine
incarnation is not peculiar to the story of Jesus. The notion
of incarnation, the idea of the gods taking a form of flesh and
manifesting themselves to men, is in the traditions of almost every
nation. It has been said, hastily, I believe, that there are some
races, at least some tribes, so low in development as to have no idea
of God whatever. It is easy to be mistaken in such matters; it is
difficult for a cultivated man to find out what a savage really thinks
about any subject, least of all his religion. Perhaps the language
difficulty is the least bar to understanding in such a case; the
differences between men are not measured by differences in speech only.
It is certain that the conception of God is, in some form, in most
nations. I believe it is in all. And in every nation there is some sort
of notion of divine manifestation.
The attempt to represent the gods in stone, in metal, in wood, or even
in rude drawings and paintings, comes after a traditional belief has
long held its place in men’s thoughts of their manifestation in some
visible and tangible form.
It is not always a human form; it is generally not a human form,
except as it is part of the conception: as in the eagle-headed Belus
of Babylon, as in the winged bulls, with the head of a man and the
feet of a lion, that Layard found in the ruins of Nineveh. These
composite images represented ideas of the gods, not facts concerning
them. Thus the image found in the ruins of Nineveh represented
strength, swiftness, courage, intelligence. But the ideas expressed
in these strange and grotesque forms grew out of traditions of divine
manifestation, of incarnation.
All the mythologies tell us of incarnations; but the idea of divine
incarnation in the story of the evangelists differs, not in some
incidents, but in all essentials from all others. One unique fact,
as has heretofore, in a different connection, been pointed out, is
that Jesus was simply a man who, as to his appearance, had absolutely
nothing that was peculiar. Neither stature, beauty, swiftness, nor
strength is attributed to Jesus.
We might speak of the limitations that go with other conceptions of
gods incarnate. They are specialized by race and localized by country.
This thought has been illustrated elsewhere. It may answer now simply
to remind you that Vishnu is Hindustanee, Isis and Osiris Egyptian,
Odin and Thor Scandinavian. Not one of them has relations to the whole
human race. But Jesus, who calls himself “the Son of man,” is of all,
and belongs to all.
But the most notable difference to be considered now, that which alone
would place Jesus apart from all others, whether men or legendary
gods, is in the end he proposed to accomplish. The gods became
incarnate and appeared to men, or dwelt among them, to do many and very
different things; Jesus to do just one thing, and to do what no other
ever proposed to do, or so much as thought of doing. He, “the Son of
man,” was of all and for all, and he proposes an end that concerns all.
The evil he would remove from all is not a Hebrew trouble; it is in the
human race.
This is plainer in comparison. Vishnu, the supreme god of Hindustanee
mythology, has condescended, so the old stories tell us, to almost
innumerable incarnations. But for what end? Always to work some
prodigies; to do some strange things on the plane of men’s lives; to do
things affecting men’s circumstances, not men’s character. He comes to
do something in a limited sphere; something for his people, Hindustanee
people, not for the whole race of man. Vishnu, when he comes in mercy,
comes to remedy external conditions; he delivers from pestilence,
famine, wild beasts, poisonous serpents. When he comes in wrath it is
to crush his enemies.
In mythology the very conception men had of the coming of the gods
grew out of their circumstances. Thus in India the conception of evil
itself was determined by conditions peculiar to India. With them
evil grew out of the jungles where pestilence was bred, serpents
abounded, and fierce man-eating tigers hid themselves and waited for
their prey. It was determined by those conditions of life peculiar to
dense populations, subject to the scourges that followed war, and evil
natural conditions--plague and famine.
The evil Jesus considered was peculiar to no people and to no country;
it did not grow out of natural conditions; it was in man himself, and
it was sin.
Among warlike nations the gods came down to take part in mere national
matters; they fought the battles of their friends and punished their
enemies. Your Homer tells you all this in the story of the siege of
Troy. Virgil tells you the same thing; your classical authors are full
of it. The poor Indians and negro tribes tell of such incarnations.
It was this very human conception of divine incarnation that filled
the national imagination and sustained the national hopes before Jesus
came. Such an incarnation they were longing for when they rejected him
because they could not use him for their ends; it is a conception that
to this day lingers in Hebrew thought and hope. They looked and prayed
for a divine warrior-king who would lead their armies, restore their
nation, and give it dominion over the world.
How incredible the idea that the evangelists have only given us a
reflection of popular sentiment, the outgrowth of national traditions!
These sentiments and traditions were utterly spoiled by the sort of
incarnation the evangelists describe. The nation resented unto death
the conception Jesus had of his mission to men; before such a king as
Jesus they preferred the Cæsar they hated; they put to death the man
who only sought to save them from their sins because he disappointed
them in their patriotic ambitions.
Speaking in a general way, the gods of the nations, when they become
incarnate, come to do a man’s sort of work. They work upon the outside
of life; they seek to deliver man from external evils and to improve
his external conditions. The “twelve labors of Hercules” tell us what
men thought they needed a divine man to do; the evangelists tell us
what the divine Man thought men needed that he should do. When the gods
of mythology become incarnate they work in the realm of circumstances;
Jesus speaks only of the man himself, his heart, his character, and
seeks only to make him good.
Here is, therefore, the essential difference: his conception of evil,
and back of that, of course, his conception of man himself.
As we have seen, in the thought of Jesus the evil and the good, the
woes and the blessings of humanity are in man himself; they are not
in externals, but internals; not in circumstances, but in character.
Jesus does not, therefore, dwell upon poverty or wealth, sickness or
health, enemies or friends, contempt or favor, servitude or freedom,
early death or long life. He is not concerned about any circumstances
whatever that merely determine man’s external life; he is concerned
about man himself. If there be any real good or any real evil the good
and the evil are inside, not outside the man.
Let us note, too, Jesus never places man’s moral evil, which is the one
evil he recognizes, in mere ignorance of truth, as if instruction and
merely changing man’s opinions could remedy the evil; he always places
it in that something that alienates man’s love from God, that something
that Jesus calls sin, that something that is sin because it antagonizes
the pure will of God. And Jesus teaches that the very constitution of
man’s nature is such that no bettering of his external conditions can
bring any real help whatsoever; that so long as man is out of harmony
with God there can be for him, neither in this world nor the next, any
real good. This he meant in the question that makes a man outweigh a
world: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and
lose his own soul?”
Jesus took very great pains to teach men that in themselves, and not in
their circumstances, was their real evil and their real good. He used
almost every form of speech to teach them to think of a man as a man,
and not as the sport of circumstances.
For poverty Jesus did not care; for wealth he had no respect. The
story of the barn-builder gives us his solemn judgment upon a man who
achieved very great worldly success; who was what most men long and
strive to be--rich and great. But he was a man out of harmony with
God--rich in purse, bankrupt in soul. Jesus, in the face of all human
opinion, plainly calls such a man “a fool.”
The drama of the rich man and Lazarus turns the light of both worlds
upon the question of man’s chief and only good, and emphasizes, by
the despair of the prince in hell, his verdict upon the case of the
prosperous and self-satisfied barn-builder, in whose thoughts and plans
neither his own soul nor the God who made him had any place.
Always--whether speaking of his own personal work or in instructing his
disciples as to their work--Jesus looks to bettering men, not their
conditions. He did not care for conditions, except as they connected
men with influences that made them good or evil; he cared for men only.
Hence he always stressed character and nothing else.
Character, in the teaching of Jesus, is all; it is both test and
measure of what a man is, and there is no other test or measure for
which man ought to care, for which God does care.
The amazement of comfortable and cultured Nicodemus shows us that these
ideas of Jesus were not borrowed from the men of his time and race.
Summing up what is here presented as to the conception Jesus had of his
mission to men, a conception as unique as his own character: only one
thing he hated and sought to destroy--sin; only one thing he loved for
man and sought to bestow--goodness.
Only one thing his true disciples hate--sin; only one thing is worth
striving, living and dying for--goodness: which is another name for
Christ-likeness.