Chapter VI: Part IV: The Call of Christ

“Sound, thou trumpet of God! come forth, great cause, to array us! King and leader, appear! thy soldiers sorrowing seek thee.”—A. CLOUGH.

AT last the good news for which they had been longing comes to the expecting nation. A voice is heard in the lonely tracts beyond Jordan—the route along which the caravans of pilgrims from Galilee passed so often, to and from the feasts at Jerusalem—proclaiming that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The news is soon carried to the capital, and from Jerusalem and all Judæa, and all the region round about Jordan, the people go out to hear it; and, when they have heard it, are baptized in crowds, eagerly claiming each for himself a place in this kingdom. It gathers strength till it moves rulers and priests, council and Sanhedrim, as well as the people who know not the law; and presently priests and Levites are sent out from Jerusalem to test messenger and message, and ask, “Who art thou? What kingdom is this thou art proclaiming without our sanction?” It spreads northward also, and the despised Galileans, from lake-shore and half-pagan cities, flock down to hear it for themselves, and the simplest and bravest souls amongst them, such as Andrew and Simon Peter, to attach themselves to the preacher. From the highways and lake cities it pierces the Galilean valleys, and comes to the ears of Jesus, in the carpenter’s cottage at Nazareth.

He, too, is moved by the call, and starts for the Jordan, filled, we may be sure, with the hope that the time for action has come at last, that the God of Israel is again about to send deliverance to His people. May we not also fairly conjecture that, on His way to Bethabara, to claim His place in the national confession and uprising, He must have had moments of rejoicing that the chief part in the great drama seemed likely after all to be laid on another? As a rule, the more thoroughly disciplined and fit a man may be for any really great work, the more conscious will he be of his own unfitness for it, the more distrustful of himself, the more anxious not to thrust himself forward. It is only the zeal of the half-instructed when the hour of a great deliverance has come at last—of those who have had a glimpse of the glory of the goal, but have never known or counted the perils of the path which leads to it—which is ready with the prompt response, “Yes—we _can_ drink of the cup; we _can_ be baptized with the baptism.”

But in Christ, after the discipline of those long waiting years, there was no ambition, no self-delusion. He had measured the way, and counted the cost, of lifting His own people and the world out of bondage to visible things and false gods, and bringing them to the only Father of their spirits, into the true kingdom of their God. He must, indeed, have been well enough aware how infinitely more fit for the task He Himself was than any of His own brethren in the flesh, with whom He was living day by day; or of the men of Nazareth with whom He had been brought up. But He knew also that the same voice which had been speaking to Him, the same wisdom which had been training Him, must have been speaking to and training other humble and brave souls, wherever there were open hearts and ears, in the whole Jewish nation. As the humblest and most guileless of men He could not have assumed that no other Israelite had been able to render that perfect obedience of which He was Himself conscious. And so He may well have hurried to the Jordan in the hope of finding there, in this prophet of the wilderness, “him who should come,” the Messiah, the great deliverer—and of enlisting under his banner, and rendering him true and loyal service, in the belief that, after all, He Himself might only be intended to aid, and hold up the hands of, a greater than Himself. For, we must remember that Christ could not have heard before He came to Bethabara that John had disclaimed the great title. It was not till the very day before His own arrival that the Baptist had told the questioners from Jerusalem, “I am not He.”

But if any such thought had crossed His mind, or hope filled His heart, on the way to the Baptist, it was soon dispelled, and He, left again in His own loneliness, now more clearly than ever before, face to face with the task before which even the Son of God appointed to it before the world was, might well quail, as it confronted Him in His frail human body. For John recognises Him, singles Him out at once, proclaims to the bystanders, “This is He! Behold the Lamb of God! This is He who shall baptize with the fire of God’s own Spirit. Here is the Deliverer whom all our prophets have foretold.” And by a mysterious outward sign, as well as by the witness in His own heart and conscience, Christ is at once assured of the truth of the Baptist’s words—that it is indeed He Himself and no other, and that His time has surely come at last.

That He now thoroughly realised the fact for the first time, and was startled and severely tried by the confirmation of what He must have felt for years to be probable, is not only what we should look for from our own experiences, but seems the true inference from the Gospel narratives. For, although as soon as the full truth breaks upon Him He accepts the mission and work to which God is calling Him, and speaks with authority to the Baptist, “Suffer it to be so now,” yet the immediate effect of the call is to drive Him away into the wilderness, there in the deepest solitude to think over once again, and for the last time to wrestle with, and master, the tremendous disclosure. And the story of the temptation which immediately follows—so full of mystery and difficulty in many ways—is invaluable for the light which it casts, not only on this crisis of His life, but before and after—on the history of the world’s redemption, and the method by which that redemption is to be accomplished, the part which each individual man and woman is called to play in it.

For Christ’s whole life on earth was the assertion and example of true manliness—the setting forth in living act and word what man is meant to be, and how he should carry himself in this world of God’s—one long campaign, in which “the temptation” stands out as the first great battle and victory. The story has depths in it which we can never fathom, but also clear sharp lessons which he who runs may read, and no man can master too thoroughly. We must follow Him reverently into the wilderness, where He flies from the crowds who are pressing to the Baptist, and who to-morrow will be thronging round Him, if He goes back amongst them, after what the Baptist has said about Him to-day.

Day after day in the wilderness the struggle goes on in His heart. He is faint from insufficient food in those solitudes, and with bodily weakness the doubts grow in strength and persistence, and the tempter is always at His side, soliciting Him to end them once for all, by one act of self-assertion. All those questionings and misgivings as to His origin and mission, which we have pictured to ourselves as haunting Him ever since His first visit to Jerusalem, are now, as it were, focused. There are mocking voices whispering again, as of old, but more scornfully and keenly, in His ear, “Are you really the Messiah, the Son of God, so long looked for? What more proof have you to go upon than you have had for these thirty years, during which you have been living as a poor peasant in a Galilean village? The word of this wild man of the wilderness? He is your own cousin, and a powerful preacher, no doubt, but a wayward, wilful man, clad and fed like a madman, who has been nursing mad fancies from his boyhood, away from the holy city, the centre of national life and learning. This sign of a descending dove, and a voice which no one has heard but yourself? Such signs come to many—are never wanting when men are ready to deceive themselves—and each man’s fancy gives them a different meaning. But the words, and the sign, and the voice, you say only meet a conviction which has been growing these thirty years in your own heart and conscience? Well, then, at least for the sake of others if not for your own sake, put this conviction to the proof, here, at once, and make sure yourself, before you go forth and deceive poor men, your brethren, to their ruin. You are famishing here in the wilderness. This, at least, cannot be what God intends for His Son, who is to redeem the world. Exercise some control over the meanest part of your Father’s kingdom. Command these stones to become bread, and see whether they will obey you. Cast yourself down from this height. If you are what you think, your Father’s angels will bear you up. Then, after they have borne you up, you may go on with some reasonable assurance that your claim is not a mere delusion, and that you will not be leading these poor men whom you call your brethren to misery and destruction.”

And when neither long fasting and weakness, nor natural doubt, distrust, impatience, nor the most subtle suggestions of the tempter, can move His simple trust in His Father, or wring from Him one act of self-assertion, the enemy changes front, and the assault comes from another quarter. “You may be right,” the voices seem now to be saying; “you may not be deceived, or dreaming, when you claim to be the Son of God, sent to redeem this fair world, which is now spread out before you in all its glory. That may be your origin, and that your work. But, living as you have done till now in a remote corner of a despised province, you have no experience or knowledge of the methods or powers which sway men, and establish and maintain these kingdoms of the world, the glory of which you are beholding. These methods and powers have been in use in your Father’s world, if it be His, ever since man has known good from evil. You have only to say the word, and you may use and control these methods and powers as you please. By their aid you may possibly ‘see of the travail of your soul and be satisfied’; without them you will redeem nothing but perhaps a man here and there—without them you will postpone instead of hastening the coming of your Father’s kingdom, to the sorrow and ruin of many generations, and will die a foiled and lonely man, crushed by the very forces you have refused to use for your Father’s service. If they were wholly evil, wholly unfit for the fulfilment of any purpose of His, would He have left them in command of His world till this day? It is only through them that the world can be subdued. Your time is short, and you have already wasted much of it, standing shivering on the brink, and letting the years slip by in that cottage at Nazareth. The wisest of your ancestors acknowledged and used them, and spread his kingdom from the river to the Great Sea. Why should you reject them?”

This, very roughly and inadequately stated, is some shadow of the utmost part or skirt, as it were, of the trial crisis, lasting forty days, through which Christ passed from His private to His public career. For forty days the struggle lasted before He could finally realise and accept His mission with all that it implied. At the end of that time He has fairly mastered and beaten down every doubt as to His call, every tempting suggestion to assert Himself, or to accept or use any aid in establishing His Father’s kingdom which does not clearly bear His Father’s stamp and seal on the face of it. In the strength of this victory He returns from the desert, to take up the burthen which has been laid on Him, and to set up God’s kingdom in the world by the methods which He has learnt of God Himself—and by no other.

Thus in following the life of Christ up to this point, so far as we have any materials, we have found its main characteristic to be patience—a resolute waiting on God’s mind. I have asked you to test in every way you can, whether this kind of patience does not constitute the highest ideal we can form of human conduct, is not in fact the noblest type of true manliness? Pursue the same method as to this isolated section of that life, the temptation, which I readily admit has much in it that we cannot understand. But take the story simply as you find it (which is the only honest method unless you pass it by altogether which would be cowardly), and see whether you can detect any weakness, any flaw, in the perfect manliness of Christ under the strain of which it speaks—whether He does not here also realise for us the most perfect type of manliness in times of solitary and critical trial. Spare no pains, suppress no doubt, only be honest with the story, and with your own consciences.

There is scarcely any life of first-rate importance to the world in which we do not find a crisis corresponding to this, but the nearest parallel must be sought amongst those men, the greatest of their kind, who have founded or recast one of the great religions of the world. Of these (if we except the greatest of all, Moses) Mohammed is the only one of whose call we know enough to speak. Whatever we may think of him, and the religion he founded, we shall all probably admit that he was at any rate a man of the rarest courage. In his case too, it is only at the end of long and solitary vigils in the desert that the vision comes which seals him for his work. The silver roll is unfolded before his eyes, and he who holds it bids him read therein the decrees of God, and tells him, “Thou art the prophet of God, and I his angel.”

He is unmanned by the vision, and flies trembling to his wife, whose brave and loving counsel, and those of his friends and first disciples, scarcely keep him from despair and suicide.

I would not press the parallel further than to remark, that Christ came out of the temptation with no human aid, having trod the wine-press alone, serene and resolute from that moment for the work to which God had called Him.

It remains to follow His life in action, and to scrutinise its special characteristics there. And again I would ask you to sift every step thoroughly for yourselves, and see whether it will not bear the supreme crucial test, from first to last. Apply that test therefore without scruple or limitation in respect of this special quality of manliness, from which we started on our inquiry. I have admitted, and admit again, frankly and at once, that if the life will not stand the test throughout, in every separate action and detail, the Christian hypothesis breaks down. For we may make allowances for the noblest and bravest men, for Moses and Elijah and St. Paul, for Socrates and Luther and Mohammed, and every other great prophet, but we can make none for the perfect Son of man and Son of God. His life must stand the test under all circumstances, and at every moment, or the ground breaks through under our feet, and God has not revealed Himself in man to men, or redeemed the world by the methods in which Christendom has believed for nineteen hundred years.

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