'The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye
say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a
friend of publicans and sinners!'--LUKE vii. 34.
Jesus Christ very seldom took any notice of the mists of calumny
that drifted round Him. 'When He was reviled He reviled not again.'
If ever He did allude to them it was for the sake of the people who
were harming themselves by uttering them. So here, without the
slightest trace of irritation, He quotes a malignant charge which
was evidently in the popular mouth, and of which we should never
have known if He had not repeated it; not with anger, but simply in
order that He might point to the capricious inconsistency of finding
fault with John and Himself on precisely opposite grounds. The
former did not suit because he came neither eating nor drinking.
Well, if His asceticism did not please, surely the geniality of a
Christ who comes doing both will be hailed. But He is rejected like
the other. What is the cause of this dislike that can look two
different ways at once? Not the traits that it alleges, but
something far deeper, a dislike to the heavenly wisdom of which John
and Jesus were messengers. The children of wisdom would see that
there was right in both courses; the children of folly would condemn
them both. If the message is unwelcome, nothing that the messenger
can say or do will be right.
The same kind of thing is common to-day. Never mind consistency,
find fault with Christianity on all its sides, and with all its
preachers, though you have to contradict yourself in doing so.
Object to this man that he is too learned and doctrinal; to that one
that he is too illiterate, and gives no food for thought; to this
one that he is always thundering condemnation; to that one that he
is always running over with love; to this one that he is perpetually
harping upon duties; to that other one that he is up in the clouds,
and forgets the tasks of daily life; to this one that he is
sensational; to that one that he is dull; and so on, and so on. The
generation that liked neither piping nor mourning has its
representatives still.
But my business now is not with the inconsistency of the objectors
to John and Jesus, but simply with this caricature which He quotes
from them of some of His characteristics. It is a distorted
refraction of the beam of light that comes from His face, through
the muddy, thick medium of their prejudice. And if we can, I was
going to say, pull it straight again, we shall see something of His
glories. I take the two clauses of my text separately because they
are closely connected with our design, and cover different ground.
I. I ask you to note, first, the enemies' attestation to Christ's
genial participation in the joys and necessities of common life.
'The Son of man came eating and drinking.' There is nothing that
calumny, if it be malignant enough, cannot twist into an accusation;
and out of glorious and significant facts, full of lessons and
containing strong buttresses of the central truth of the Gospel,
these people made this charge, 'a winebibber and gluttonous.' The
facts were facts; the inferences were slanders.
Notice how precious, how demonstrative of the very central truth of
Christianity, is that plain fact, 'The Son of man came eating and
drinking.' Then that pillar of all our hope, the Incarnation of the
word of God, stands irrefragable. Sitting at tables, hungering in
the wilderness, faint by the well, begging a draught of water from a
woman, and saying on His Cross 'I thirst!'--He is the Incarnation of
Deity, the manifestation of God in the flesh. Awe and mystery and
reverence and hope and trust clasp that fact, in which prejudice and
dislike could only find occasion for a calumny.
By eating and drinking He declared that 'forasmuch as the children
were partakers of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise took part in
the same.' If it is true that every spirit that confesseth that
Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God,' then it is true that
no miracle in His life, nor any of the supernatural glories which we
are accustomed to regard as evidences of His majesty, are more
blessed, or more important as revelations of His nature, than the
fact that 'the Son of man came eating and drinking.'
But, still further, mark how the truth which gave colour to the
slander attests that Jesus Christ presents to the world the highest
type of manhood. The ideal for life is not the suppression, but the
consecration, of material satisfactions and pleasures of appetite.
And they are likest to the Master who, like the Master, come eating
and drinking, and yet ever hold all appetites and desires rigidly
under control, and subordinate them all to loftier purposes. John
the Baptist could be an ascetic; the Pattern Man must not be.
The highest type of religion, as it is shown to us in His perfect
life, includes the acceptance of all pure material blessings.
Asceticism is second best; the religion that can take and keep
secondary all outward and transitory sources of enjoyment, and can
hallow common life, is loftier than all pale hermits and emaciated
types of sanctity, who preserve their purity only by avoiding things
which it were nobler to enjoy and to subdue.
There is nothing more striking about the Old Testament than the fact
that its heroes and saints were kindly with their kind, and took
part in common life, accepting, enjoying its blessings. They were
warriors, statesmen, shepherds, vinedressers; 'they bought, they
sold, they planted, they builded; they married and were given in
marriage,' and all the while they were the saints of God. That was a
nobler type of religion than the one that came after it, into which
Jesus Christ was born. When devotion cools it crusts; and the crust
is superstition and formalism and punctilious attention to the
proprieties of worship and casuistry, instead of joyful obedience to
a law, and abstinence from, instead of sanctification of, earthly
delights and supplies.
So, protesting against all that, and showing the more excellent way,
and hallowing the way because He trod it, 'the Son of man came
eating and drinking.' Hence-forward every table may be a communion
table, and every meal may be a sacrament, eaten in obedience to His
dying injunction: 'This do in remembrance of Me.' If we can feel
that Christ sits with us at the feast, the feast will be pure and
good. If it is of such a sort as that we dare not fancy Him keeping
us company there, it is no place for us. Wherever Jesus Christ went
the consecration of His presence lingers still; whatever Jesus
Christ did His servants may do, if in the same spirit and in the
same manner.
He hallowed infancy when He lay an infant in His mother's arms; He
hallowed childhood when, as a boy, He was obedient to His parents;
He hallowed youth during all those years of quiet seclusion and
unnoticed service in Nazareth; He hallowed every part of human life
and experience by bearing it. Love is consecrated because He loved;
tears are sacred because He wept; life is worship, or may be made
so, because He passed through it; and death itself is ennobled and
sanctified because He has died.
Only let us remember that, if we are to exercise this blessed
hallowing of common things, of which He has set us the example, we must
use them as He did; that is, in such sort as that our communion with
God shall not be broken thereby, and that nothing in them shall darken
the vision and clip the wings of the aspiring and heavenward-gazing
spirit. Brethren! the tendency of this day--and one rejoices, in many
respects, that it is so--is to revolt against the extreme of narrowness
in the past that prescribed and proscribed a great many arbitrary and
unnecessary abstinences and practices as the sign of a Christian
profession. But whilst I would yield to no man in my joyful application
of the principle that underlies that great fact that 'He came eating
and drinking,' I do wish at this point to put in a _caveat_ which
perhaps may not be so welcome to some of you as the line of thought
that I have been pursuing. It is this: it is an error to quote
Christ's example as a cover for luxury and excess, and grasping at
material enjoyments which are not innocent in themselves, or are mixed
up with much that is not innocent. There is many a table spread by
so-called Christian people where Jesus Christ will not sit. Many a
man darkens his spirit, enfeebles his best part, blinds himself to the
things beyond, by reason of his taking the liberty, as he says, which
Christianity, broadly and generously interpreted, gives, of
participating in all outward delights. I have said that asceticism is
not the highest, but it is sometimes necessary. It is better to enjoy
and to subdue than to abstain and to suppress, but abstinence and
suppression are often essential to faithfulness and noble living. If
I find that my enjoyment of innocent things harms me, or is tending to
stimulate cravings beyond my control; or if I find that abstinence from
innocent things increases my power to help a brother, and to fight
against a desolating sin; or if things good and innocent in
themselves, and in some respects desirable and admirable, like the
theatre, for instance, are irretrievably intertwisted with evil
things, then Christ's example is no plea for our sharing in such. It
is better for us to cut off the offending hand, and so, though
maimed, to enter into life, than to keep two hands and go into the
darkness of death. Jesus Christ 'came eating and drinking,' and
therefore the highest and the best thing is that Christian people
should innocently, and with due control, and always keeping
themselves in touch with God, enjoy all outward blessings, only
subject to this law, 'whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever we do,
to do all to the glory of God,' and remembering this warning, 'He
that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption.'
II. Now, secondly, notice the enemies' witness that Christ is the
Friend of outcasts.
As I said about the other charge, so I say of this, the facts were
facts, the inferences were errors. The slanderers saw, as nobody
could help seeing, that there was a strange kind of mutual
attraction between Jesus and publicans and sinners; that harlots as
well as little children seemed to be drawn to Him; and that He
obviously delighted in the company of those at whose presence,
partly from pride, partly from national enmity, partly from
heartless self-righteousness, Pharisaism gathered its dainty skirts
around itself in abhorrence, lest a speck should fall upon their
purity. That being the fact, low natures, who always misunderstand
lofty ones, because they can only believe in motives as low as their
own, said of Jesus, 'Ah! you can tell what sort of a man He is by
the company He keeps. He is the friend of publicans because He is a
bad Jew; the friend of sinners because He likes their wicked ways.'
There was a mysterious sense of sympathy which drew Jesus Christ to
these poor people and drew them to Him. It would have been a long
while before any penitent woman would have come in and wept over
the feet of Gamaliel and his like. It would have been a long while
before any sinful men would have found their way, with tears and yet
with trust, to these self-righteous hypocrites. But perfect purity
somehow draws the impure, though assumed sanctity always repels
them. And it is a sign, not that a man is bad, but that he is good
in a Christlike fashion, if the outcasts that durst not come near
your respectable people find themselves drawn to Him. Oh! if there
were more of us liker Jesus Christ in our purity, there would be
more of us who would deserve the calumny which is praise--'the
friend of sinners.'
It was an attestation of His love, as I need not remind you. I
suppose there is nothing more striking in the whole wonderful and
unique picture of Jesus Christ drawn in the Gospels than the way in
which two things, which we so often fancy to be contradictory, blend
in the most beautiful harmony in Him--viz. infinite tenderness and
absolute condemnation of transgression. To me the fact that these
two characteristics are displayed in perfect harmony in the life of
Jesus Christ as written in these Gospels, is no small argument for
believing the historical veracity of the picture there drawn. For I
do not know a harder thing for a dramatist, or a romancer, or a
legend-monger to effect than to combine, in one picture--without
making the combination monstrous-these two things, perfect purity
and perfect love for the impure.
But, dear brethren, remember, that if we are to believe Jesus
Christ's own words, that strange love of His, which embraced in its
pure clasp the outcasts, was not only the love of a perfect Man, but
it was the love of God Himself. 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father.' When we see Jesus Christ looking across the valley to the
city, with tears in His sad and gentle eyes; and when we see harlots
and sinners coming near Him with new hope, and a strange
consciousness of a fascination which He wields; and when we see Him
opening His heart to all the impure, just as He laid His clean hand
on the leper's ulcers, let us rejoice to believe that the Friend of
publicans and sinners is God manifest in the flesh.
Then, still further, this wondrous, seeking love of His for all the
outcasts is the sign to us of His boundless hopefulness concerning
the most degraded.
The world talks of races too low to be elevated, of men too hardened
to be softened. Jesus Christ walks through the hospitals of this
world, and nowhere sees incurables. His hope is boundless, because,
first of all, He sees the dormant possibilities that slumber in the
most degraded; and because, still more, He knows that He bears in
Himself a power that will cleanse the foulest and raise the most
fallen. There are some metals that resist all attempts to volatilise
them by the highest temperature producible in our furnaces. Carry
them up into the sun and they will all pass into vapour. No man or
woman who ever lived, or will live, is so absolutely besotted, and
held by the chains of his or her sins, as that Jesus cannot set them
free. His hope for outcasts is boundless, because He knows that
every sin can be cleansed by His precious blood. Therefore,
Christianity should know nothing of desperate cases. There should be
no incurables in our estimate of the world, but our hope should be
as boundless as the Master's, who drew to Himself the publicans
and sinners, and made them saints.
I need not remind you how this is the unique glory of Christ and of
Christianity. Men have been asking the question whether Christianity
is played out or not. What has been the motive power of all the
great movements for the elevation of mankind that have occurred for
the last nineteen centuries? What was it that struck the fetters of
the slaves? What is it that sends men out amongst savage tribes? Has
there ever been found a race of men so degraded that the message of
Christ's love could not find its way into their hearts? Did not
Darwin subscribe to the Patagonian Mission--a mission which takes in
hand perhaps the lowest types of humanity in the world--and did he
not do it because his own eyes had taught him that in this strange
superstition that we call the Gospel there is a power that, somehow
or other, nothing else can wield? Brethren! if the Church begins to
lose its care for, and its power of drawing, outcasts and sinners,
it has begun to lose its hold on Christ. The sooner such a Church
dies the better, and there will be few mourners at its funeral.
The Friend of publicans and sinners has set the example to all of us
His followers. God be thanked that there are signs to-day that
Christian people are more and more waking up to the consciousness of
their obligations in regard to the outcasts in their own and other
lands. Let them go to them, as Jesus Christ did, with no false
flatteries, but with plain rebukes of sin, and yet with manifest
outgoing of the heart, and they will find that the same thing which
drew these poor creatures to the Master will draw others to the
feeblest, faintest reflection of Him in His servants.
And, last of all, dear friends, let each think that Jesus Christ is
my Friend, and your Friend, because He is the Friend of sinners, and
we are sinners. If He did not love sinners there would be nobody for
Him to love. The universality of sin, however various in its degrees
and manifestations, makes more wonderful the universal sweep of His
friendship.
How do I know that He is my Friend? 'Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,' and when we
were yet enemies He was our Friend, and died for us. How shall we
requite that love? 'Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command
you to do.' All over the Eastern world to this day the name by which
the Patriarch Abraham is known is the 'Friend' or the 'Companion.'
Well for us, for time and for eternity, if, knowing that Jesus is
our Friend, we yield ourselves, in faith and love, to become His
friends!