the Week of Proper 4 / Ordinary 9
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Bible Dictionaries
Popularity (2)
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or POPULARITY (of Jesus).—The general subject of popularity, as treated in the foregoing article, is strikingly illustrated by the course of our Lord’s public ministry; and in the present article we shall consider (1) the popularity of Jesus, (2) the grounds on which it rested, (3) the value He attached to it, and (4) the reasons of its decline.
1. The fact of His popularity.—Although the earthly life of Jesus began in a stable and ended on a cross, there was a period in His ministry when He was at once the most conspicuous and the most popular personage in Palestine. From Jn. we learn that His first definite appeal to the nation was made in Jerusalem (John 2:12 ff.). There, however, the dominant influences were hostile to His acceptance (John 2:18 ff., John 3:2; John 3:12). He soon felt that the nation was not yet ripe for a direct Messianic ministry, and so for a time He fell back in Judaea on a work of preparation similar to that which the Baptist was still carrying on (John 3:22, John 4:1-2). But when John was cast into prison, He knew that the time was come to make His own distinctive appeal to Israel, and having met with little favour in Jerusalem, He now chose Galilee as the scene of His labours (Mark 1:14 ff. ||). The Synoptic Gospels show that an extraordinary popularity was the almost immediate result (Mark 1:28). Crowds flocked to Him from every quarter (Mark 1:45, Mark 2:13, Mark 4:1, Mark 5:21 and passim), and followed Him about wherever He went (Mark 3:7, Mark 6:33). The people were astonished at His teaching (Mark 1:22; Mark 1:27), but also delighted with it (Luke 5:1-15, cf. Mark 12:37); they saw His miracles with joy and amazement, and glorified God in Him (Mark 2:13 ||). The enthusiasm and excitement soon spread far beyond the borders of Galilee; and from Jerusalem and Idumaea, from beyond Jordan, and even from the region of Tyre and Sidon, multitudes came to see and hear the great Prophet of Nazareth (Mark 3:8). All along, it is true, the scribes and Pharisees persistently opposed Him (Mark 2:6 ff., Mark 2:16 f., Mark 2:24 ff., Mark 3:2 ff.), coming from Jerusalem for this express purpose (Mark 3:22, Mark 7:1). But with the great mass of His countrymen, during the earlier period of His Galilaean ministry, Jesus had a popularity of the most unqualified kind.
2. To what was this popularity due?—(1) Much must be ascribed to His personal qualities, and among these (a) to His perfect accessibility and entire naturalness. In His attitude to the people there was nothing either of the supercilious contempt of the scribes and Pharisees (John 7:48-49) or of the ascetic austerity of John the Baptist (Matthew 3; Matthew 11:18). Any one might approach Him at any time, with the certainty of being readily and kindly received. It mattered not who came to Jesus,—rough fishers of the Galilaean lake (John 1:37 ff., Mark 1:16 ||), anxious parents seeking a blessing for their children (Mark 5:2 ff; Mark 7:25 ff; Mark 10:13 ff.), publicans whom everyone else despised (Matthew 9:10; Matthew 10:3; Matthew 11:19, Luke 19:2 ff.), sinful women from the city streets (Luke 7:37 ff., Matthew 21:31),—to all He presented Himself as a man and a brother. (b) No personal gift conduces more to popularity than the subtle, indefinable quality of charm, and Jesus appears to have possessed this in an exceptional measure. It may be that the χἀρις or ‘grace,’ of which St. Luke tells us in his account of the sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth (Matthew 4:22), refers wholly to Christ’s message, and not at all to the manner of His speech. But the way in which men and women and little children were drawn to the Saviour, as if by a kind of magnetism, testifies to a winsomeness of nature that must have gone far to secure the favour of every unprejudiced heart. (c) Still more the intense sympathy of Jesus must have appealed to the people. A man may make himself accessible for reasons of policy, and even the quality of charm sometimes proves to be a superficial gift of pleasing that is no guarantee for any expenditure of heart. But the Saviour’s profound sympathy for the sick, the sinful, the sorrowful, could not fail to make an impression on the popular mind. We can hardly realize, perhaps, what it meant for Him to be besieged day after day by a pressing crowd of men and women with loathsome diseases and festering sores—all demanding the touch of His hand as well as the pity of His heart (Luke 4:40 ||). The nervous tension must have been tremendous, the physical and spiritual expenditure a constant drain upon His strength (Mark 5:30, Luke 6:19). But the crowd, which not only read in His face that compassion which was one of His most characteristic qualities (Matthew 9:36; Matthew 14:14; Matthew 15:32, Mark 1:41, Luke 7:13), but saw Him in the thick of His daily deeds of grace, must have dimly perceived something of that vicarious sacrifice which lay at the root of the Redeemer’s sympathy, as it lies at the root of all true sympathy, and which led an Evangelist to bethink himself of the prophet’s words, ‘Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases’ (Matthew 8:17, cf. Isaiah 53:4).
(2) But the popularity of Jesus was due not only to His personal qualities, but to His methods as a Teacher and the gospel that He brought. (a) Much lay in His methods—in the simplicity and directness, the homeliness and picturesqueness of His language, and its entire freedom from all the professional pedantries of the Rabbis (Mark 1:22; cf. Mark 12:37). The undying power of His parables, simply as literature, enables us to form some idea of what it must have been to hear those wonderful stories as they first fell from His own lips. (b) But these things were only the outer swathings of His message—the husk, not the kernel. The form of His teaching might appeal to the imagination, but it was the substance—the joyful Galilaean gospel of the Kingdom of God—that warmed and thrilled the listening multitudes. Christ’s words were ‘words of grace’—words about the Heavenly Father’s love and the blessings that lay within the reach of every one who was willing to be God’s child; words of forgiveness for the sinful, and liberty for the captive, of comfort for the mourner, and rest for the weary and heavy-laden soul. ‘The gospel of the kingdom’—in that Christ’s message was all summed up (Mark 1:14). And if the forerunner shook the nation to its centre when he cried, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand!’ (Matthew 3:2), what must have been the effect of Christ’s proclamation that the Kingdom of God was already come (Matthew 5:3-11; Matthew 12:28)—that this was the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:19; Luke 4:21).
(3) But it is in the miracles of Jesus above all that we find the explanation of His popularity. His miracles of healing were evidently wrought upon a very wide scale—much wider than the enumeration of individual cases gives any idea of (cf. Mark 1:34; Mark 3:10; Mark 6:55-56). And though there were ungrateful recipients of His mercy (Luke 17:17-18), we know that at other times both those whom He had cured and their friends and relatives were filled with a passion of gratitude and devotion to His Person (Luke 17:15-16, Mark 5:20; Mark 10:52, John 11:2; John 12:3). But these gracious miracles stretched in their effects far beyond the wide circle of the actual beneficiaries. They created great expectations in the popular mind—expectations that were immensely heightened by yet more astonishing miracles, in which Christ’s ‘compassion for the multitude’ led Him to make them in their thousands the direct partakers of His bounty (Mark 6:34 ff. ||, Mark 8:1 ff. ||, John 6:5 ff.). These great miracles were taken to be ‘signs’—signs of wonderful events that might be about to happen in Israel. Jesus, it began to be surmised, was not merely a great prophet as His teaching showed, but much more than a prophet; not merely a marvellous healer of the sick, but the expected Deliverer of Israel. Unfortunately, however, in spite of all His teaching as to the nature of the Kingdom of God, the popular ideas on the subject were still utterly astray. And so His popularity, just when it seemed to be soaring to its highest, was made to rest upon the least worthy foundations. This brings us to the sharp dividing line (see preceding art.) between a popularity that is true and a popularity that is false, a popularity that Jesus could desire and welcome and one that He inevitably loathed and repelled. Jn.’s narrative shows that it was Christ’s fame as a miracle-worker, and most of all His feeding of the Five Thousand in the wilderness, that raised His popularity to its point of culmination (John 6:14-15) But it was just then that Jesus rejected most emphatically a kind of popularity He did not want. And it was also from that day that the tide of popular favour which had swelled so high began to ebb.
3. What value did Jesus attach to His popularity?—‘He did not care,’ it has been said, ‘for the thing called popularity, but He loved human beings’ (Bruce, Galilean Gospel, p. 10). And it is quite true that there was a kind of popularity that Jesus not only did not care for, but always despised and shunned. And yet, just because He loved human beings so much, He desired a popularity of the right sort. Was it not in search of it that He came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the Kingdom, after He had been coldly received by the ecclesiastical authorities in the capital? To be popular is just to be beloved of the people, and the highest kind of popularity is when a man is beloved of the people on grounds which God and his own conscience can approve. It is impossible for one who loves, not to wish to have his love returned; and Jesus, loving men and women as no other human being ever did, undoubtedly desired them to love Him, and trust Him, and follow Him. This is the meaning of His invitations to them to come to Him, and of His words of sorrow and reproach when they refused. His soul, accordingly, must have filled with gladness and thankfulness when He saw the multitude pressing upon Him to hear His word, and listening to it with evident joy, or when He received the assurance of heart-felt gratitude from those whom He had healed or enlightened or lifted from the depths of self-despair. But, on the other hand, when men came after Him in search of signs and wonders (Matthew 12:38; Matthew 16:1 ||, John 4:48)—something to confirm them in their false ideals of the Kingdom of God, if not merely to gratify their gaping curiosity; worse still, when the multitude began to follow Him in the hope of being furnished gratis with the bread that they might have honestly earned (John 6:26), and to look to Him to set up by the use of His miraculous powers a kingdom of meat and drink and political privilege, He knew that now, under the guise of a dazzling popularity, the same temptation was returning which He had faced and conquered in the wilderness at the very outset of His ministry (Matthew 4:1-11)—the temptation to love the praise of men more than the praise of God, and to attempt to set up the Kingdom of heaven upon earth by methods that were not Divine, but worldly and Satanic.
4. The decline of His popularity.—The miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand was a great turning-point in the life of Jesus. It marked, we have said, the culmination of His popularity, but also the beginning of its decline. And the reason for this decline was just that the popularity it brought was of a kind that Jesus could not accept. The people wished to take Him by force and make Him king (John 6:15), while He wished to win in their hearts a spiritual Kingdom for His Father. They would have set Him on a worldly throne, and He knew that His Kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36). The two ideals were utterly incompatible. Henceforth, He who had sought the people and welcomed their coming began to avoid them (John 6:15, Mark 7:24; Mark 8:10; Mark 8:13; Mark 8:26-27; Mark 9:30), and, when they still came after Him, spoke not only of the gladness of the Kingdom, but of the mysterious pathway of the Cross (John 6:26-65, Mark 8:34 ff; Mark 10:21 ff.). The result was soon apparent. Nothing more quickly cools the enthusiasm of the multitude than the refusal of its object to be popular on the popular terms. After this many even of Christ’s disciples went back and walked no more with Him (John 6:66). And though Peter answered nobly for the Twelve to that pathetic question, ‘Will ye also go away?’ (John 6:67-69), the Lord Knew that one of the very Apostles whom He had chosen had admitted into his heart a devil of dissatisfaction with his Master (John 6:70-71). Soon, with the vision of the Cross before Him, He ‘stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem’ (Luke 9:51). The disciples, as they followed, were afraid (Mark 10:32), and so He prepared them for what was coming, by those great ‘Lessons on the Cross’ which mark the stages of His progress towards the great act of sacrifice (Matthew 16:21-28 ||, Matthew 20:17-28 ||, Matthew 26:6-13; Matthew 26:26-29 ||; cf. Bruce, Training of the Twelve). Day by day the shadows lengthened across the Saviour’s path. And though at His last Passover the raising of Lazarus (John 12:9-11) led to a transitory outburst of fresh enthusiasm among the Galilaeans who had come up to the Feast (cf. Matthew 21:11 with Matthew 21:10), the time of His national popularity was really over from the day of the Capernaum discourse (John 6:24 ff.), and what lay before Him thereafter was a growing opposition that could end only in national rejection and the death on Calvary.
Literature.—Sanday’s art. ‘Jesus Christ’ in Hastings’ db; Andrews, Life of Our Lord; Stalker, Life of Jesus Christ; Bruce, Training of the Twelve, Galilean Gospel; Expositor; v. ii. [1895] 69.
J. C. Lambert.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Popularity (2)'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/p/popularity-2.html. 1906-1918.
