WHO IS THIS JESUS?
‘And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is This?’ (Matthew 21:10)
FOR nineteen hundred years one Figure has haunted the memory and troubled the conscience of mankind. This one Figure has divided all history into two great divisions, so that every event is now dated with reference to His coming, either before or after. Whenever the years are numbered, whether by believers or unbelievers, time is counted from the year of His incarnation, before Christ and after Christ. No other name has so dominated history. No other influence has so profoundly affected human life. No other birthday is so widely observed. No other teachings so much discussed. Of no one else have so many books been written. To the cause of no other leader have so many followers given their lives.
‘Who is this?’ they asked at the street corners in Jerusalem long ago. It is no mere academic interest that prompts the question in our time. It is life, history. It is all that is deepest in your experience and mine that forces it upon us. Who is this Jesus?
Now let us recognise at the outset that the Christian religion is first and foremost and in its heart a message about God. It is not primarily a new ethic. It is not just a philosophy of brotherliness and loving our neighbour and accepting the Golden Rule. It is not a way of thinking or looking at life. Nor is it a social programme. It includes all of these, to be sure. But basically it is a message about God.
That message is this: that the living God, infinite, eternal and unchangeable had at one definite point broken into history in an unprecedented way. Once and for all, in an actual life lived out upon this earth, God has spoken, and has given the full and final revelation of Himself. In Jesus, God has come! Such is the dramatic and astounding statement on which the Christian religion is built. That is the foundation of it.
With almost two thousand years of Christian tradition behind us, we may have become almost too familiar with this fact so that we fail to grasp it as they did back there in the first century.
They tell us that for the greater part of His life He was a working carpenter. He stood among the shavings making tables and chairs and yokes for the oxen. His home was in an obscure provincial village. He was born in a stable adjoining a roadside inn. He had no money, no standing in society. He wrote no books. As far as we know, He wrote nothing. He left no written message, for the only time we read of His writing anything, it was traced with His Finger in the sand, and the eddies of wind that swirled round the pillars of the temple porch covered it up. He fought no battles. He had no army. The applause of listening senates was never His to command. His friends were mostly as poor as He was, fishermen and peasants. When He began His public ministry and took to preaching, His family tried to talk Him out of it, thinking and actually saying He was mad.
The theologians and the learned people of His day ridiculed His teachings because they said He had never been to school. At first He attracted great crowds, whether moved by curiosity or the attraction of the new and the sensational. But they soon dwindled away and, at one time, He feared His own followers might likewise melt away. At the end they did desert Him and leave Him to His fate. He died a criminal’s death, reviled and mocked, tormented and laughed at, hanging between two thieves and murderers. He was buried in a borrowed grave.
But then a strange thing happened. It was rumoured that death had not finished Him. It was reported that He had been seen alive. True, the body with the marks of the nags and the spikes had disappeared. On this they all agreed. The body was gone. There were many attempted explanations but, somehow, none of them were adequate.
Suddenly, His disciples, the very men who had run away, who had gone underground for a tirne, appeared in the streets proclaiming that He had risen from the dead. They said that He had come back to them. They were different, not the same men at all. Their terror had gone, and they were no longer afraid. They spoke boldly. Threats did not intimidate them. They said fantastic things-that this Jesus had risen from the dead and was at the right hand of God in heaven. They said that now they saw clearly, what had been hidden from them before, and from the first God had been uniquely present in Jesus, making the invisible apparent, the eternal a matter of history, and God had become man.
Such a message, as you would suppose, was laughed at. ‘These men are drunk,’ was the first popular verdict. Then, ‘They are mad.’Â The tale was so incredible. And when the wild story began to circulate beyond Jerusalem, the whole Roman Empire began to ring with contemptuous laughter for a tirne. Then they tried to stop it by force and threats. ‘Don’t say these things again,’ the disciples were told, ‘if you value your lives.’ But they did not stop. They even seemed to become more eloquent and more bold. Throw them into prison and they made the cell a pulpit and the dungeon a choir. Stone them with stones, and they rose from the dust bleeding and bruised, but with more convincing testimony. Lash them with whips, and they praised God the more. Nothing could stop them. They made human torches of believers in this fantastic rigmarole. They illumined the arenas to light up Roman holidays and yet, in their death, they made converts to this strange preaching. Hunted and persecuted, thrown to the lions, tortured and killed, yet they seemed to live on, and grow.
Rome could not stop Jesus. What actually happened was that Jesus stopped Rome, and on the ashes of her broken splendour set the foundations of the empire of God which was to be. That is why the question comes back to us today nineteen hundred years afterward, ‘Who is this Jesus?’
Now when the first Christians called Him Lord, and when they worshipped the Galilean Carpenter, were they just dreaming, yielding to the intoxication of a foolish fancy? Were love and imagination running away with them? Or was the thing true?
You will find that there is mystery here – great mystery, supernatural mystery. You have to deal with a personality, a power and a presence. His personality is a startling study in contrasts. He was rneek and lowly with an amazing humility yet, He said, He would come on the clouds of Heaven in the glory of God. He was so austere that evil spirits and demons cried out at His coming, yet little children ran to Him as a friend and climbed up on His knee. No one was ever half so kind or compassionate to sinners, and no one ever spoke such red-hot searing words about sin. His whole life was love, yet He demanded of the Pharisees how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. He was a seer of visions, and a dreamer of dreams, yet a realist of the first degree. He claimed their loyalty and obedience, yet He washed their feet. A changed woman came weeping to anoint His feet, and the hucksters and traders fell over one another in the Temple to get away from the fire they saw blazing in His eyes. He saved others, they all admitted that in the end, but He could not save Himself. What a union of contrasts in the mystery of this personality!
But what about the mystery of His power? What is the secret of it? In His name great movements have swept the earth. In His name men and women of every age and race have ‘wrought righteousness, stopped the mouths of lions, and out of weakness have been made strong.’
Consider our institutions that have sprung from this mysterious power, the churches everywhere pointing their spires like fingers of stone to God, the hospitals, the schools, the Red Cross, the Community Chests, all philanthropic and benevolent work, all stemming back to this power and influence.
After nineteen centuries we still dedicate our children in His name. When love and marriage come, His is the blessing we invoke, and at His altar we plight our troth. When the last call comes, and the clock has chimed for our loved ones, we lay them down beneath His cross, and it is in His message that we find our comfort and our hope. His is the power that sets the prisoners free, in whatever bondage they languished. Testimonies are without number. Changed lives all ascribe the glory to Him. It is to Him that credit belongs for newness of life and victories that men and women have achieved. How many there are who will testify to this power – the power that saves, that forgives, that pleads and guides through life. There it is. What a mystery! What a power!
But it is still more. It is the mystery of a Presence. ‘Lo, 1 am with you always,’ He had said, and they found it true, gloriously true. Part of the mystery is this, that He lived nineteen centuries ago, in a far-away little land of Palestine. He wore oriental robes and sandals. Yet His words and His presence are as real and as relevant as if spoken last night on the radio in English from New York or San Francisco. Even in our day of neon signs and penthouses, of skyscrapers and fast aeroplanes, He is authoritative for us. And this is because the human heart is still the same in its loves and hates, its joys and sorrows, its fears and hopes, its passions and defeats. And also because this Christ is not a dead memory, not a pious legend, not an embalmed relic, but a Living Spirit. This Christ is a present fact and men know it.
Read the new Testament for yourself, and see if this same Jesus does not step out of the page and walk beside you. See if He does not look at you from the record with eyes that see into your very soul. It is not merely speaking metaphorically to say that to many men and women He is a Presence tapping them on the shoulder, nudging them now and then, walking beside them in sorrow, standing in the shadow watching, waiting always. Yes, it is the mystery of a Presence.
What then are we to say of Him? Have you answered that question in your own mind? Has your heart whispered its own answer? What think ye of Jesus? That is an old question, but it keeps coming up, again and again, and every one must answer it sometime. Reason and conscience alone demand an answer,’Who is this Jesus?’
I am not sure which is the greater heresy, to deny that He was God, or to deny that He was man. It is worthy of note that the first heresy that ever vexed the Christian Church, the so-called Docetic heresy of the first and second centuries, was not a denial of the deity of Jesus, it was a denial of His true manhood. It asserted His God-head and virtually emptied His manhood of all reality. There is some danger that we might do the same thing today. Let us never forget that Jesus was truly man – really man, tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. It is a mystery how the two natures were in One person – the human nature and the divine. I cannot explain it, nor do I understand it. I only know that both were there, both full and real.
He was no stranger to pain, for He explored all the vast treasuries of it that we may never know. It was no rnakebelieve when the Roman lash fell across His shoulders. And the nails – were they not real? – as real as the blood He shed on the cross!
No, you cannot read your Gospels without feeling that here was a Man – The Man – He is true rnan, this Jesus. That truth can never grow dim.. Could you possibly find in Him your Saviour were He not fully rnan? ‘There is one mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus.’ That’s what it says. The Book declares it. Let us not forget it!
But that is not all. That is not the final word. That alone does not explain Christ. There is more, much more. He was truly man – He was more – He was God in the flesh.
As you consider yourself in relation to the question: ‘Who is this Jesus?’ I ask you to consider the claims He made for Himself. Do you realise that He placed Himself at the very centre of His message? He sought to win their devotion of His own person. He does not merely claim to have found the answer to all men’s needs, He claims to be the answer. ‘Come unto Me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and 1 will give you rest.’
Who ever before or since has dared to say a thing like that? He declares that at the Day of Judgment the final test will be ‘Ye have done it unto Me …. Ye did it not to Me. … He that loseth his life for My sake, shall find it.’ His whole attitude is ‘God and I’. I could quote you scores of such statements.
Now what shall we say about all this? Either it is sheer nonsense, or it is true. Either He speaks as a deranged megalomaniac, or else He is who He says He is. You have to choose one or the other. Somehow, on His lips, these claims do not appear to be ridiculous. On the lips of anyone else, they would, but not on His.
His own life – His public life and His private life – is as startling as His claims, for in it there was no sin, no fault, no blemish. Neither friend nor foe could find anything of which to accuse Him. And He alone flung over His shoulder His challenge to time and history: ‘Which one of you accuseth me of sin?’ Who else could have said that? The saintliest people in all the world have been most conscious of their own sin. Read the biographies of Paul, Thomas a Kempis, Francis of Assissi and, again and again, you will come across their feelings of guilt and unworthiness. But not with Jesus. He never confessed to any sin, for He had none to confess.
But you find Him forgiving sin in others. Not merely mumbling the words of absolution, but bringing into troubled and contrite hearts the feeling of being forgiven, the sense of being at peace with God. It was this action of His that roused the Pharisees so. They pointed out that nobody could forgive sin but God only and argued that, consequently, Jesus must be an imposter and a blasphemer. Their premise was absolutely correct. Their conclusion absolutely wrong.
Only God can bring peace to the human heart. Yet Christ has done it for unnumbered millions of souls. Only God can open the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven. For how many has Christ opened it? Only God can supply the power to break the chains of enslaving habits. Yet Christ has done it for men and women in the New Testament, and in nineteen hundred years of history since the New Testament was written. Only God can redeem, yet I am sure that Christ is my Redeemer, and I know that my Redeemer liveth. Millions of souls have said that, and believed it most surely. If Christ thus does what only God can do, who then is this Jesus?
Consider the universality of Jesus. How else could you account for it? Think of some modern writers who have written books about Him, caught alike in the spell and adoration of the Carpenter of Galilee, Giovanni Papini and Bruce Barton, as different as an Italian mystic and American businessman could be. Scholem Asch and Emil Ludwig, Middleton Murray and Lloyd Douglas, and a host of others as different as the poles, yet all fascinated by this one mystery of Christ! Who can this be Who can grip and captivate the souls of people so utterly different as Luther and Loyola, Dwight L. Moody and John R. Mott, General Booth and George A. Buttrick, Muriel Lester and David Livingstone, Father Damien of Molokai and Robert E. Speer, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Niemuller and Gypsy Smith? What an amazing universality! What sort of beleaguering spirit is His?
But here is the most amazing thing of all, and you will find it today if you have never found it before. You begin exploring the fact of Christ, and before you know it, the fact is exploring you, spiritually and morally. Is not that so? You set out to see what you can find in Christ, and sooner or later God in Christ finds you. And then you will have the final and complete proof of His deity in your own heart.
Maybe there is someone who has never acknowledged Christ; maybe someone who has said that he or she did not believe in Christ. Well, there are some who have no right to believe in Him because they have no qualifications for believing or understanding the fact of Christ, because they have never really faced it. Will you face it now?
But I would not be satisfied simply to have you face the fact. I now want to ask you what you will do about it?
When Saul of Tarsus was confronted on the Damascus road with Christ, his first impulsive cry was ‘Who art Thou, Lord?’ But then immediately and instinctively a second question came, ‘What wilt Thou have me to do?’ That is the point to which I would bring you now. What is your response going to be?
