'Who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey
the truth, before whose eye Jesus Christ hath been
evidently set forth, crucified among you?'--GAL.
iii. 1.
The Revised Version gives a shorter, and probably correct, form of this
vehement question. It omits the two clauses 'that ye should not obey the
truth' and 'among you.' The omission increases the sharpness of the
thrust of the interrogation, whilst it loses nothing of the meaning.
Now, a very striking metaphor runs through the whole of this question,
which may easily be lost sight of by ordinary readers. You know the old
superstition as to the Evil Eye, almost universal at the date of this
letter and even now in the East, and lingering still amongst ourselves.
Certain persons were supposed to have the power, by a look, to work
mischief, and by fixing the gaze of their victims, to suck the very life
out of them. So Paul asks who the malign sorcerer is who has thus
fascinated the fickle Galatians, and is draining their Christian life
out of their eyes.
Very appropriately, therefore, if there is this reference, which the
word translated 'bewitched' carries with it, he goes on to speak about
Jesus Christ as having been displayed before their eyes. They had seen
Him. How did they come to be able to turn away to look at anything else?
But there is another observation to be made by way of introduction, and
that is as to the full force of the expression 'evidently set forth.'
The word employed, as commentators tell us, is that which is used for
the display of official proclamations, or public notices, in some
conspicuous place, as the Forum or the market, that the citizens might
read. So, keeping up the metaphor, the word might be rendered, as has
been suggested by some eminent scholars, 'placarded'--'Before whose eyes
Jesus Christ has been placarded.' The expression has acquired somewhat
ignoble associations from modern advertising, but that is no reason why
we should lose sight of its force. So, then, Paul says, 'In my
preaching, Christ was conspicuously set forth. It is like some
inexplicable enchantment that, having seen Him, you should turn away to
gaze on others.' It is insanity which evokes wonder, as well as sin
which deserves rebuke; and the fiery question of my text conveys both.
I. Keeping to the metaphor, I note first the placard which Paul had
displayed.
'Jesus Christ crucified has been conspicuously set forth before you,' he
says to these Galatians. Now, he is referring, of course, to his own
work of preaching the Gospel to them at the beginning. And the vivid
metaphor suggests very strikingly two things. We see in it the Apostle's
notion of what He had to do. His had been a very humble office, simply
to hang up a proclamation. The one virtue of a proclamation is that it
should be brief and plain. It must be authoritative, it must be urgent,
it must be 'writ large,' it must be easily intelligible. And he that
makes it public has nothing to do except to fasten it up, and make sure
that it is legible. If I might venture into modern phraseology, what
Paul means is that he was neither more nor less than a bill-sticker,
that he went out with the placards and fastened them up.
Ah! if we ministers universally acted up to the implications of this
metaphor, do you not think the pulpit would be more frequently a centre
of power than it is to-day? And if, instead of presenting our own
ingenuities and speculations, we were to realise the fact that we have
to hide ourselves behind the broad sheet that we fasten up, there would
be a new breath over many a moribund church, and we should hear less of
the often warrantable sarcasms about the inefficiency of the modern
pulpit.
But I turn from Paul's conception of the office to his statement of his
theme. '_Jesus_ was displayed amongst you.' If I might vary the metaphor
a little, the placard that Paul fastened up was like those that modern
advertising ingenuity displays upon all our walls. It was a
picture-placard, and on it was portrayed one sole figure--Jesus, the
Person. Christianity is Christ, and Christ is Christianity; and wherever
there is a pulpit or a book which deals rather with doctrines than with
Him who is the Fountain and Quarry of all doctrine, there is divergence
from the primitive form of the Gospel.
I know, of course, that doctrines--which are only formal and orderly
statements of principles involved in the facts--must flow from the
proclamation of the person, Christ. I am not such a fool as to run
amuck against theology, as some people in this day do. But what I wish
to insist upon is that the first form of Christianity is not a theory,
but a history, and that the revelation of God is the biography of a man.
We must begin with the person, Christ, and preach Him. Would that all
our preachers and all professing Christians, in their own personal
religious life, had grasped this--that, since Christianity is not first
a philosophy but a history, and its centre not an ordered sequence of
doctrines but a living person, the act that makes a man possessor of
Christianity is not the intellectual process of assimilating certain
truths, and accepting them, but the moral process of clinging, with
trust and love, to the person, Jesus.
But, further, if any of you consult the original, you will see that the
order of the sentence is such as to throw a great weight of emphasis on
that last word 'crucified.' It is not merely a person that is portrayed
on the placard, but it is that person _upon the Cross_. Ah! brethren,
Paul himself puts his finger, in the words of my text, on what, in his
conception, was the throbbing heart of all his message, the vital point
from which all its power, and all the gleam of its benediction, poured
out upon humanity--'Christ crucified.' If the placard is a picture of
Christ in other attitudes and in other aspects, without the picture of
Him crucified, it is an imperfect representation of the Gospel that Paul
preached and that Christ was.