There are, as it were, two strands running through the prophetic
passage which He quotes, one in reference to Himself, one in
reference to those whom He came to help. To the latter I now turn,
to get our Lord's point of view when He looked upon the facts of
human life.
No man will ever do much for the world whose ears have not been
opened to hear its sad music. An inadequate conception of its
miseries is sure to lead to inadequate prescriptions for their
remedy. We must bear upon our own hearts the burdens that we seek to
lift off our brothers' shoulders. There is nothing about the
Master's words concerning mankind more pathetic and more plain than
the sad, stern, and yet pitying view which He always took concerning
them and their condition.
In the passage on which Jesus based His claims, as given by Luke,
one of the clauses is probably not in this place genuine, for 'the
healing of the brokenhearted' should be struck out of the true text.
There are then four symbols employed: the poor, the captives, the
blind, the bruised. And these four are representations of the result
of one fell cause, and that is--sin.
Sin impoverishes. Our true wealth is God. No man that possesses Him,
by love, and trust, and conformity of will and effort to His
discerned will, is poor, whatever else he has, whatever else he
lacks. And no man who has lost this one durable treasure, the loving
communion with, and possession of, God, in mind and heart and will
and effort, but is a pauper whatever else he possesses. Wherever a
man has sold himself to his own will, and has made himself and his
own inclinations and misread good his centre and his aim, which is
the definition of sin, there bankruptcy and poverty have come.
Thieves sometimes beset travellers from the gold mines, as they are
bringing down their dust or their nuggets to market, and empty the
pockets of the gold, and fill them up with sand. That is what sin
does for us; it takes away our true treasure, and befools us by
giving us what seems to be solid till we come to open the bag; and
then there is no power in it to buy anything for us. 'Why will ye
spend your labour for that which satisfieth not?' The one poverty is
the impoverishment that lays hold of every soul that wrenches
itself, in self-will, apart from God. Sin makes poor.
Sin not only impoverishes, but imprisons 'the captives.' Ah! you
have only to think of your own experience to find out what that
means. Is there nothing in the set of your affections, in the
mastery that your passion has over you, in the habits of your lives,
which you know as well as God knows it, to be wrong and ruinous, and
of which you have tried to get rid? I know the answer, and every one
of us, if we will look into our own hearts, knows it: we are 'tied
and bound by the chains of our sin.' You do not need to go to
inebriate homes, where there are people that would cut their right
hands off if they could get rid of the craving, and cannot, to find
instances of this bondage. We have only to be honest with ourselves,
and to try to pull the boat against the stream instead of letting it
drift with it, to know the force with which the current runs. A tiny
thread like a spider's draws after it a bit of cotton a little
thicker, and knotted to that there is a piece of pack-thread, and
after that a two-stranded cord, and then a cable that might hold an
ironclad at anchor. That is a parable of how we draw to ourselves,
by imperceptible degrees, an ever-thickening set of manacles that
bind our wills and make us the servants of sin. 'His slaves ye are
whom ye obey.' Sin imprisons. That is, your sin--do not let us
befool ourselves with abstractions--_your_ sin imprisons you.
Sin blinds. Wherever there comes over a soul the mist of self-will
and self-regard, sight fails; and all the greatest things are
blurred and blotted. The man that is immersed in his own evil is
like one plunged in the ocean. The cold, salt waters are about him,
and above him; and to him the glories of the sky, and the brightness
of the sun, the tenderness of the colouring, are all blotted out. He
who goes through life as some of us do, never seeing God, never
seeing the loftiest beauty of goodness, never beholding with any
clearness of vision the radiant possibilities of the future and its
awful threatenings, may indeed see the things an inch from the point
of his nose; but he is blind and cannot see afar off, and can only
behold, and that darkly, the insignificances that are around him.
Sin blinds.
And sin bruises. It takes all the health out of us, and makes us,
from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head, masses of
'wounds and bruises and putrifying sores.'
The enchantress having worked all this havoc, then gives us a cup of
illusion which, when we drink, we know not that there is anything
the matter with us. We are like a lunatic in a cell, who thinks
himself a prince in a palace, and though living on porridge and
milk, fancies that he is partaking of all the dainties of a
luxurious table. The deceitfulness of sin is not the least of its
tragical consequences.
III. Lastly, we have here our Lord's conception of Himself and of
His own work.
Your time will not allow of my dwelling upon this as I would fain
have done, but let me point out one or two of the salient features
of this initial programme of His. He claims to be the theme and the
fulfilment of prophecy. Now, whatever influences modern notions
about the genesis of the Old Testament, and the characteristics of
its prophetic utterances may have done, they have not touched, and
they never will touch, this one central characteristic of all that
old system, that embedded in it there was an onward-looking gaze,
anticipatory of a higher fulfilment and a further development of all
that it taught. To those of us to whom Christ's words are the end of
all strife I need only point out that, here, He endorses the belief
that prophetic utterances, however they may have had, and did have,
a lower and immediate meaning, were only realised in the whole sweep
and significance in Himself. So He presents Himself before His
acquaintances in the little synagogue at Nazareth, and before the
whole world to all time, as the centre-point and pivot on which the
history of the world, so to speak, revolves; all that was before
converging to Him, all that was after flowing down from Him. 'They
that went before, and they that followed after, cried, Hosanna!
blessed be He that cometh in the name of the Lord.'
He claims to possess the whole fullness of the divine Spirit: 'The
Spirit of the Lord is upon Me.' That is a reminiscence, no doubt, of
the experience by the fords of the Jordan, at the Baptism. But it
also opens up a wondrous consciousness, on His part, of a complete
and uninterrupted possession of the divine life in all its fullness,
which involves an entire separation from the miseries and needs of
men. He claims to be the Messiah of the Old Covenant, with all the
fullness of meaning, and loftiness of dignity which clustered round
that word and that thought. He claims not only to proclaim, but to
bestow, the blessings of which He speaks. For He not only comes to
'preach good tidings to the poor,' but 'to heal the broken-hearted,'
and 'to set at liberty all them that are bound.' He is the Gospel
which He utters. He not merely proclaims the favour of heaven, but
He brings 'the acceptable year of the Lord.'
This, in barest outline--which is all that your time will admit--is
the summary of what Jesus Christ, in that first sermon in the
synagogue at Nazareth, asserted Himself to be.
He does not detail the means by which He is about to bring the
golden year, the year of Jubilee, 'the acceptable year of the Lord.'
But I venture to say that it is hard to find, in the life of Jesus
Christ, that which fulfils Christ's own programme, as thus
announced, unless you bring in His death on the Cross for the
abolition of sin, His Resurrection for the abolition of death; His
reign in glory for the bestowment on all sinful and bruised souls of
the Spirit of healing and of righteousness.
These Nazarenes listened. Their hearts and consciences attested the
magnetic power of His personality, and the truth of His word. So do
the hearts and consciences of most of us. They wondered at the 'words
of grace'--whose matter was grace, whose manner was gracious--that
proceeded from His mouth. So do most of us. But they let the incipient
movement of their hearts be arrested by the cold, carping question,
'Is not this Joseph's son?' and all the enthusiasm chilled into
indifference; 'indignation' followed, and some of those who had
almost been drawn to Him, in an hour's time had their hands on His
robe, to cast Him from the brow of the hill on which their village
was built. Every man who comes to the point of feeling some emotions
towards Christ as his Redeemer, as his King, is at a fork of the
road. He may either take to the right, which will lead him to full
communion and acceptance; or he may go to the left, which will carry
him away out into the desert. The critical hour in the alchemist's
laboratory was when the lead in his crucible began to melt. If a
cold current got at it, it resumed its dead solidity, and no gold
could be made.
Brother! do not let the world's cold currents get at your heart and
freeze it again, if you feel that in any measure it is beginning to
melt into penitence, and to flow with faith. The same voice that in
the synagogue of Nazareth said, 'He hath anointed Me to preach the
Gospel to the poor' speaks to us to-day from heaven, saying, 'I
counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest
be rich ... and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve that thou mayest
see.'
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