the Week of Proper 28 / Ordinary 33
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Bible Dictionaries
Character of Christ
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or CHARACTER OF CHRIST
Introduction: (a) Aim. (b) Sources: (1) their trustworthiness; (2) their sufficiency. (c) Theological value of a study of the character of Christ.
i. Formative influences—.
1. Parentage.
2. Home.
3. Education.
4. The years of silence.
ii. The Vocation of Christ, the determining principle of His character—.
1. His Designation of His vocation.
2. His Dedication to His vocation.
3. His Confirmation in His vocation.
iii. Characteristics of Christ—.
1. Spiritual-mindedness: (1) His knowledge; (2) His teaching; (3) effect of His presence.
2. Love to God: (1) obedience, (2) trust.
3. Love to men.
iv. Social relations, and virtues manifested therein—.
1. Family.
2. Friends: (1) His dependence upon them; (2) His self-communications to them; (3) their response to Him.
3. Mankind: (1) lowliness; (2) considerateness; (3) compassion; (4) forbearance and forgiveness.
v. Virtues of His vocation—.
1. Faithfulness.
2. Courage.
3. Patience.
4. Calmness.
5. Self-sacrifice.
Concluding Estimate—.
1. His absolute goodness.
2. His sinlessness: (1) testimony of those who knew Him.; (2) His own self-knowledge and self-witness.
Literature.
Introduction.—(a) The aim of this article is to make a purely ethical study of the character of Christ. In such a study there must be no dogmatic presuppositions regarding the constitution of His person, whether favourable or hostile to the statements of Nicene orthodoxy. There must be no abstract separation of His humanity from His Divinity, and no attempt to relegate certain acts or phases to one side and others to the other side. We must proceed in the case of Jesus Christ as we do in that of the great men who have forced succeeding ages to the task of understanding them, though it may well be that in the end we shall be constrained to set Him, with reasoned conviction, in a class apart, high above the greatest of men.
(b) The sources for such a study are, of course, the four Gospels. It is obviously impossible to appeal to the Epistles, save for any reminiscences they may contain of the historic Christ. Their conceptions of the risen Christ cannot come here into view. In thus restricting ourselves to the earthly life of Christ, we are not excluding any view which faith might take of His present existence. If Christ be alive now, He must be the same, morally, as He was when on earth. There is no other Christ than the Christ of the Gospels.
As soon as we turn to the Gospels, we are met by various critical problems. The solution of these must be sought in the various works which are devoted to their discussion. For the study in which we are to be engaged two positions are essential, which may be stated here as assumptions, though they are in reality conclusions of the study itself. (1) The first is the trustworthiness of the Gospels as portraitures of Christ. Grant the ordinary critical results, that the Gospels were written late in the 1st cent., that contemporary I ideas and experiences have influenced their authors or editors, that in some cases the Evangelists have misunderstood or misreported their Master; yet the fact remains, that the character of Christ, as presented in these documents, was not, and could not have been, an invention or a fiction, a product of progressive meditation, or a creation of enthusiastic feeling. Do justice to the portrait of Christ, let its harmony and its uniqueness, its profound naturalness and its transcendent loveliness, make their due impression, and the conclusion presses, that the Christ of the Gospels is not a construction but a memory, an actual Figure, once beheld by eyes of flesh, and now discerned through a medium upon which contemporary influences have had no distorting effect, and which, accordingly, permits Him to be known as He was.
It may be said that, while these remarks are true of the Synoptic Gospels, they cannot fairly he applied to the Fourth Gospel. A distinction, however, must be observed. The Synoptic Gospels are mainly ethical in their aim and method. Ontological and theological conclusions are certainly suggested; but they are not explicitly stated. In the Fourth Gospel these results are avowed in the Prologue, referred to again and again in the body of the work, and summarized in the conclusion. While thus frankly theological, however, it presents its doctrinal positions as the result of an ethical study, which it also gives. With the correctness of these doctrinal inferences we are not concerned. Our sole interest lies in the portrait of Christ; and with respect to it two things are certain: it is in complete harmony with that given by the Synoptists, it is another picture of the same person; and it can be regarded, as little as that of the Synoptists, as an invention or fiction. For our present purpose, accordingly, which is ethical and not theological, we shall use the materials presented in the Fourth Gospel, for a study of the character of Christ, with the same freedom and confidence with which we turn to the Synoptic narratives.
(2) The second assumption follows naturally upon the first, and maintains the sufficiency of the Gospels for knowledge of Christ. It is obvious that they do not aim at extensive completeness. They are not chronicles; nor are they biographies in the modern sense. A shorthand report of the sayings of Jesus, a minute record of His life, during even the short period covered by the narratives, would have swelled their brief outlines to portentous volumes. It is certain that they do aim at intensive or central completeness. We do not need to know everything about a man in order to know him. For the purpose of character study, much that is interesting, that affectionate curiosity would like to know, is needless and irrelevant. The materials of our study must be, and need only be, such words and deeds as express the whole man, and are the organic utterance and outcome of his very self. This is one aspect of the uniqueness of the Gospels, one element in the proof that they are memorials, not inventions, that the Christ they represent is a unity. There is not the faintest trace of artificiality, of an ingenious synthesis of heterogeneous elements. No portrait painter, no artist in words, ever invented a figure of such perfect harmony. There are many things about Christ which we should like to know; but such things have been told as enable us to know Christ. From the Gospels we learn enough to know what manner of man He was. And if He be alive now, and able to influence persons now living on this earth, it is certain that His communications will be simply the unfolding and the application of the character which was expressed in such words and deeds as the Gospels record.
(c) The relation of a purely ethical study of the character of Christ to the theological consideration of His person is obvious. The one presents the problem with which the other deals. However high we may place Christ as a moral teacher, or even as the founder of a religion, nevertheless, if His moral type remain the same as that recognizable in other pure and lofty souls, if His moral achievement is generically the same as theirs, there can be no problem of His person. Christology is not merely an impossibility, it is a huge irrelevancy. Only if a study of the character of Christ raise from within the question of His relation to men on the one side and to God on the other, can there be a theological problem of the constitution of His person. Only in that case are the Christological elements in the NT warranted, and the long controversies of subsequent theological development justified. If the Divinity of Christ is not to be a dead dogma, soon to be abandoned by the minds which it perplexes and the religious instincts which it depresses; if it is to be a living conviction, sustaining faith and unifying thought, it must not be treated as though it hung, gaunt and naked, in a metaphysical vacuum; it must be regarded and expounded in its organic connexion with the character of which it is the necessary presupposition, and from which it derives its intellectual cogency. The only pathway to faith is that trodden by the first disciples. Belief in the Godhead of Christ, if it is to be more than a mere theologoumenon, must be rooted in acquaintance with Him; and that acquaintance is informed and enriched, made close, luminous, and full, through the medium of the portraiture in which the character of Christ is disclosed to our reverent gaze.
i. Formative influences.—In the making of men, three factors are to be distinguished—influences operating from without, the reaction of personality, and the agency of the Divine Spirit. It would be a mistake, in the case of Christ, to concentrate attention wholly upon the second of these, as though He were a mere apparition in the moral universe, standing in no vital or intelligible relation to His visible or invisible surroundings. The other factors are amply recognized in the Gospel narrative. The first of them alone comes into view in our present study. The operations of the Spirit of God belong to the theological interpretation of the character of Christ, and can be understood only from the point of view of a definite conception of His person, to which our present effort is introductory. We approach our subject, accordingly, by briefly indicating the influences which operated on the youth of Jesus.
1. Parentage.—Pre-natal influence, whose mode of operation is beneath observation, is an undoubted fact. Parentage affords the conditions, physical and psychological, under which that recapitulation of the ancestral past, which gives to human character its richest and most interesting elements, takes place in the individual. If we conclude (anticipating our judgment) that in Jesus there is reproduced and perfected the highest type of OT spiritual life, the conditio sine qua non of this most lovely product is to be found in His parentage. This thought does not even suggest a supernatural birth. The question of the Virgin-birth is part of the wider and profounder problem, which we are not now facing, whether His person is to be regarded as an evolution from beneath or an incarnation from above, the entrance of God, at the crisis of human need, for the redemption and perfecting of men. It remains true, however, that whether we assume or deny the Virgin-birth, it is to His mother we are directed in our view of His parentage. The idea of her sinlessness is certainly not even suggested in any record of her life; it is merely the logical result of the blunder of making the sinlessness of Jesus depend on physical conditions. Yet it is beyond all doubt that she belonged to the inner circle of those who, in Israel, best preserved the spiritual heritage of the race; and it is beyond cavil that of this deeply exercised generation of waiting souls she was herself a choice and lovely representative. With a fitness which suggests, in its tenderly human and deeply religious quality, a Divine selection, she filled the office of living personal medium, through which the stream of spiritual energy, which flows through the whole history of Israel, poured in upon her Son, to well up within His soul in the finest features and characteristics of the national religion. In part, at least, we understand Jesus through His mother. Most assuredly, He was more than a Hebrew; but He was a Hebrew born. What He came to be is determined, in His case as in others, by the dark and mystic tabernacle wherein His physical frame was formed, by the bosom whereon He lay, and the life-force whereby His own was nourished. Preparation is thus made in birth for a character which shall be true to the national type, and, at the same time, deeply and broadly human.
2. Home.—Of all the characters who have risen to eminence from the lowliest surroundings, Jesus Christ is the most remarkable. What attracts attention to His home, however, is not the contrast between His early circumstances and His later attainments, but the harmony between the setting of His childhood’s years and the noblest of His manhood’s virtues and achievements. The chief quality of His home was its pure humanity. None but the simplest elements of human life are here. The home at Nazareth is as far removed from luxury and artificiality on the one hand, as it is from squalor or depravity on the other. The inward features of the home correspond with its outward conditions. The father and mother belong to what we know as ‘the special secdplot of Christianity.’ They were ‘poor in spirit’; they ‘waited for the consolation of Israel.’ Lofty aspirations, prayers and songs inspired and moulded by OT conceptions and forms, conversation enriched by the ideas of the profoundest thinkers on religion whom the world has ever known, lives instinct with pure and passionate devotion to God: amid such benign and holy influences the plastic soul of Jesus grew to its maturity. Such a home provides a perfect environment for One whose personal secret is His communion with God, whose message is God’s fellowship with men.
Without mere fancifulness we can conceive what the childhood of Jesus really was—contented, happy, trustful. Certain features of His manhood, His freedom from extremes of feeling, His openness of mind, His wide and deep charity, find the conditions of their growth in His childhood’s home, with its thorough naturalness and its nearness to central truth regarding God and man.
The words which record that ‘Jesus advanced in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and men’ (Luke 2:52), describe a perfectly normal human growth, a development without breach or strain or crisis, conducted by the Spirit of God, toward the realization of the Divine ideal of humanity. It is impossible to reconcile them with an abstract conception of His Godhead; impossible also to reconcile them with an equally abstract conception of His ‘mere humanity’ (whatever that may be). But it is certain they present a unique fact, which must have full weight given to it in any estimate of the character and the person of Christ. It might be suggested, indeed, that the complete normality of His growth may have been imperilled by communications made to Him by His mother regarding the mystery of His birth or the greatness of His vocation. Such communications, however, were not made before His twelfth year. Mary’s words in the temple (Luke 2:48) make that certain. Even on the supposition that certain communications were made at a later date, they may have aided Him in the discovery of His relation to God and His mission to men; but the thoughts they may have awakened in His mind would not then act injuriously upon the growth of a perfectly proportioned human character. The greatness which was coining upon Him was leading Him nearer to men, not farther away from them. We must always look for what is unique in Christ within and not beyond His normal human character.
3. Education.—Hellenic or Roman culture might be brilliant, but it was narrow, limited to the conditions of life in a Greek city, or to the uses of a ruling race. Its faults are plain; intellectual pride, superficial cleverness, abundance of ideas together with dearth of ideals. Conceive now the training of a Hebrew boy. Ignorant of much that a Greek lad knew, he was thoroughly instructed in the books of the OT. These constituted a national literature, which, on any fair comparison, vastly excels the utmost that the Hellenic spirit could produce, in its power to quicken and direct the activities of the soul, to deepen it, and to enrich it with noblest conceptions of human life and destiny. Such a literature is the most splendid instrument of education the world has ever seen; and such was the education even of a carpenter’s son in an obscure village. No doubt even a system so excellent might be perverted; but always in education the result is determined not by the perfection of the instrument, but by the reaction of the pupil. From school Jesus might have gone on to be a Rabbi of the common dogmatic and narrow type. If He did not, if His thought is wide, His insight deep, His spirit noble and gentle; if He moves on the plane of the greatest prophets of the OT, and sees beyond their highest vision; we must trace this result to His education, and to the response made to it by His quick and intelligent sympathy. It is because He is moulded by the influences of the OT that His character is at once more spiritual and more universal than it would have been, had He been steeped to the lips in Hellenic culture. The measure of His acquaintance with the apocalyptic literature which many of His contemporaries were studying, cannot accurately be determined. But we shall make a profound mistake, if we imagine that we can explain His teaching or understand Himself by any such reference. We can come within sight of Him only by retracing the steps of His own education, and approaching Him from the point of view of the OT. The groundwork of His character and the spring of His thinking are to be found in the OT. What He came to be or to reveal, beyond that stage of moral and religious attainment, stands in organic connexion with it. Other educational influences must be remembered and their power duly estimated: the historic scenes which were within His view, with the splendid and tragic memories they were fitted to awaken; the highways of the world’s business which were visible from the hills behind which Nazareth lay; the pleasant country which was spread all around His home. Such aspects of His character as His intense patriotism, His wide humanitarian sympathies, and His feeling for nature, find their antecedents in the physical surroundings of His early years.
At this point we pause to note an incident which enables us, as efficiently as a score of haphazard reminiscences would have done, to discern the fruition of His life’s preparation, so far as it had gone. Here it is well to remind ourselves of the reverence which is due to all childhood in our endeavour to analyse its utterances. ‘How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’ (Luke 2:49).* [Note: ἐν τοῖς σοῦ πατρὀς μον. Our argument is not affected whether we adopt the above rendering (AV and RVm), or that of RV, ‘in my Father’s house.’] No platitudes as to moral paternity, no pedantic references to the Trinity, help us to understand this wondering question. The words have no doctrinal meaning. They ought not to be used as proof of a dogma. Did Mary ask her Son what He meant? If she had asked, could He have made her understand? The words, however, while thus far removed from ontological problems, do reveal most surely what manner of child He must have been who uttered them. He must have lived till that hour in a fellowship with God which had known no interruption, which had been so deep and holy and tender, that Mary’s word, applied to an earthly parent, provides its secret. ‘Thy father and I,’ said His mother; and He replied, surely not in any self-conscious, didactic mood, but in glad and confident adoption of her word, ‘my Father’s business.’ It is certain that one who uttered this phrase out of the fulness of a child’s unreflective experience, had never passed through the agonies of a violated conscience. His experience is not the abnormal type to be seen in St. Paul, Augustine, Luther, Bunyan, but the profoundly normal type of the human relation to God, as God designed it to be. Operating upon Him, through parentage and home and education, operating within Him in ways beneath consciousness and beyond observation, the Divine Spirit had led Him into, and enabled Him to abide within, a continuous, loving fellowship with God, of which the earthly relationship of father and son is the reflexion and the symbol. It is certain that Jesus never knew any inward dislocation of spirit, never passed through agonies of conviction, or emerged into the rapture of an experience which overwhelmed the judgment with surges of emotion. His character is not created by the healing of some deep breach of soul. It bears none of the marks of manufacture. It is a steadfast growth, the uninterrupted unfolding of the wealth of ethical meaning that lay, from the beginning, within His soul. From the village street He passes to the temple courts, to find Himself there at home, and to occupy Himself with His Father’s concerns. From the temple He returns to His village home, without surprise and without disappointment, still to be in His Father’s presence, and to be about His Father’s business. ‘He went down with them, and came to Nazareth; and he was subject unto them’ (Luke 2:51).
4. The years of silence.—For eighteen years we lose sight of Jesus. When they are past, not His physical frame only but His moral stature also has reached its fulness. The years themselves, apart from the incidents which must have filled them, are the most potent of the formative influences which are our guide to the understanding of Jesus. There are certain deeply marked features of His character, which are the imprint upon Him of the passage of these silent years.
(1) Quietness and confidence.—In His manhood there is no restlessness as of one who is uncertain of his goal, none of the strained eagerness of one who is still in pursuit of undiscovered truth. Plato’s image of the aviary in no way resembles the mind of Jesus. No distinction is to be found in Him between possessing and having. He possesses, or rather is possessed by, fundamental and universal principles. His life and teaching are their exposition and illustration. We may debate their validity, but we cannot dispute the absolute certainty with which He grasped them. Eighteen years of silence had breathed their restfulness into Him, and conferred on Him the precious gifts of a quiet mind and an assured heart.
(2) Foresight.—Jesus had no magical acquaintance with future events. Yet it is most noteworthy that He moved amid the circumstances of His life with no hesitating step. It is not merely that, as a religious man, He knows that God has a plan for Him, and will submit to it, whatever it brings Him, however grievous or disappointing; but also that He knew what the plan was. He was in the secret of His Father. In His speaking and acting there is no trace of hesitation or doubt. He never acts on a mere balance of judgment, never wastes a moment on conjecture, not one moment on regret. He acts with instant perception of what is wanted, and goes forward with confident step and calm foreseeing eye. He marvels (twice it is recorded of Him, Matthew 8:10, Mark 6:6); but it is the wonder which is at once the parent and the child of knowledge, not the stupid astonishment of mere ignorance. Events which threatened destruction to Himself and His mission were met by Him with solemn recognition as the issue of a purpose which He served with full intelligence. Such calm wisdom, such quiet faithfulness, such undisturbed peace, had a history; and it lies in these eighteen years of silent waiting.
(3) Serenity and self-possession.—He was haunted by misconception, beset by malice, harassed by malignity. Yet He preserved an austere reserve, which permitted no rash action, no unguarded speech. He met His enemies with a silence which was no dumb resentment, but was on some occasions a most moving appeal, on others a most solemn judgment. No man can be thus silent who is driven ignorantly toward an unknown destiny. The silence of Jesus is proof that His life lay within both His purview and His command. Only in solitude and obscurity can such qualities be developed. Eighteen silent years are not too much to make a soul like that of Jesus Christ, strong, deep, calm, and wise. Not dogmatic prejudice, but respect for the unity of Christ’s character, and for the self-evidencing truth of the portrait presented in the Gospels, condemns, as an outrage upon all psychological probability, the practice of packing into the three recorded years alternations of thought and purpose, and tracing supposed distinctions between the hopes with which He began His career and the convictions which were forced upon Him toward its close. Naturalism of this sort is simply unnatural and foolish. There is nothing too great to be the outcome of years so sublimely silent. What He is to be was then formed within His soul. What He has to say was then laid up for utterance. What He has to do and endure was then foreseen and then accepted.
ii. The Vocation of Christ.—The unity of Christ’s character stands out impressively in the Gospel portrait. The allowances we make, and the averages we strike, in estimating the conduct of other men, are not needed in His case. Woven of the strands of common life, it is yet ‘without seam throughout.’ When we seek to explain this unity, it is not enough to refer to the will of Christ, as though it were a power operating in an ethical vacuum. His is the normal human will, which realizes its freedom by identifying itself with some all-determining principle. When we ask, further, what this principle is, which thus determines His will and unifies His life, we shall be in error if we regard it as an absolutely new idea, to be ascribed to His inventive genius. He is not with complete appropriateness to be designated a religious genius. He has nothing to reveal which is new, if by that epithet we mean to indicate a conception which has no organic relations with the past. Jesus, as believer, thinker, preacher, starts from the OT. His originality consists in perfectly understanding it, in carrying out into concrete reality its ruling conceptions. When, therefore, we seek for the determining principle of the life and character of Christ, we must turn to the OT. From childhood to manhood He lived the life of the ideal Israel, in communion with God and consecration to His service. What is unique in Him is not some idea, derived we know not whence, but His actual adoption of the purpose of God toward Israel as the purpose of His own life. When we endeavour to enter sympathetically into the experience of the Prophetic authors of the OT, and when we compare with their writings the character and career of Jesus, we are led to the conclusion: First, that the core of the OT religion is God’s redeeming purpose toward Israel; and, second, that the vocation of Christ, as understood and accepted by Himself, was to fulfil that purpose. In the nature of the case we cannot have from Jesus a narrative of the experiences which culminated in this great resolve, or an abstract statement of His ideas upon the topic of redemption. Yet, as we follow the occasions of His life, we overhear pregnant sayings, and we observe significant incidents, which corroborate and illustrate the impression which His whole career makes upon us. These we may thus arrange—
1. His Designation of His vocation.—When we inquire how Jesus designated His life’s aim, we are met early in the narrative with one general, yet most definite statement. He is addressing an audience composed of His own disciples, together with a wider range of auditors for whom also His words are meant. We have, indeed, no verbatim report of what is usually called the Sermon on the Mount. Its theme, however, is unmistakable. It is the Kingdom of God as it exists at the stage which, in the person of the Speaker, it has now reached. Plainly, the Kingdom, as Jesus proclaims it, is a new thing. Its righteousness is new. Its blessings are new. At once the question arises, and was thrown at the Preacher with bitter controversial animus, How does this new Kingdom stand related to that which had endured through the centuries of Israel’s history, which was now indeed obscured by political oppression, but which was destined one day to receive a glorious vindication? How do its new views of God and man and duty compare with the venerable system of law, of which the Scribes and Pharisees were the acknowledged defenders?
Then Jesus pronounces words which place Him in the central stream of the Divine purpose, and designate Him as its goal and its complete realization: ‘I came not to destroy, but to fulfil’ (Matthew 5:17). It is noteworthy that to ‘the Law’ Jesus adds ‘the Prophets,’ thus emphasizing that element of the OT religion which the legalists of His day were most apt to neglect. He grasps the OT as a spiritual whole, and this totality of Divine meaning He declares it to be His vocation to fulfil. He has come into the world to carry forward all that had been signified by Law and Prophets to an end foreseen, or at least felt, by OT believers, but not attained in their experience. In Him the OT religion is at once perfected, and accomplished as an abiding reality.
Such a consciousness as this may well suggest thoughts as to the person of Him who thus asserts Himself. What is important for us now, however, is the fact that it was His consciousness, that the vocation thus announced was the end for which Jesus lived, and constituted the organizing principle to which is due the perfect unity of His character.
The same impression of the loftiness and the definiteness of His vocation, as Jesus conceived it, is deepened by a consideration of other sayings in which He condensed the purpose of His life. While, of course, critical conclusions are manifold, it is not reasonably open to doubt (a) that Jesus claimed to possess authority to forgive sins, and so dispense the characteristic blessing of the New Covenant (Jeremiah 31:34, Matthew 9:6); (b) that He claimed to possess a knowledge of God which, in its immediacy and fulness, was generically distinct from that enjoyed by the most advanced OT saint, and to be empowered to reveal God, thus known, to men (Matthew 11:27); (c) that He regarded His death as laying the basis of the New Covenant, and being, therefore, the medium of its blessings (Matthew 26:28 and parallels).
Again, we cannot fail to feel, in connexion with such words, the drawing on of a mystery in the person of Him who uttered them. Turning aside, however, from all such suggestions, and refraining from all doctrinal construction, we are, nevertheless, not merely permitted, but constrained, to observe that they described the commission under which He acted. They disclose the root of conviction from which His character grew. Take this away, and His character falls to pieces, and becomes no more an ethical unity, but a congeries of inconsistencies. The belief that He was commissioned of God to execute the Divine purpose towards Israel, and, through Israel, towards the world, moved Him from beginning to end of His career, and made Him the character which He was, which we come to know in the Gospels, and which has put its spell upon all subsequent generations.
2. His Dedication to His vocation.—The determining purpose of His life was not made known to Jesus for the first time in the experiences of His baptism. The consciousness which He then manifests had certainly a history. The experiences through which He then passed imply a perfectly prepared soul. In His whole bearing, from the moment of His approach to John, there is not a trace of hesitation or bewilderment. A new thing, no doubt, came to Him; but it did not take Him by surprise or usher Him into a calling which He had not foreseen, or from which He had shrunk. By the discipline of the silent years in Nazareth, by the operation of the Divine Spirit, acting along with all external instrumentalities and beneath the conscious movements of His own spirit, His mind had been informed of the task which awaited Him, His faculties had been exercised in the appropriation of so great a destiny, His soul had been fed at sources of Divine strength, and thus enabled to accept in deep surrender the Divine appointment. His character, when first we see Him pass out of obscurity into the light of history, is not like an unfinished building, with scaffolding to be cleared away, and much still to be done before it be beautiful or habitable. It is like a living organism, rooted in the discipline of past years, perfected by adequate preparation, and now ready for its destined uses and its full fruition. His thirtieth year found Him well aware of His vocation, and waiting only for the summons to take it up. The cry of the Baptist reached Him in Nazareth, and He knew that His hour was come. ‘Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to the Jordan, unto John, to be baptized of him’ (Matthew 3:13). His baptism is at once Christ’s dedication of Himself to His vocation, and the first step in its accomplishment. His experiences at such an hour are too intimate and profound to be comprehended even by the most reverent study. But their meaning must gather round three points—(1) First, the word ‘thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness’ (v. 15). In this pregnant saying we are conveyed back to the heart of the OT. God is righteous when He fulfils the obligations which He imposed on Himself when He instituted His covenant with Israel. It is still His righteousness which moves Him, when, after Israel has sinned itself out of the covenant relationship, He promises a New Covenant, and brings near a better salvation. This is the righteousness which Jesus has full in view on the verge of Baptism. If this righteousness is to be fulfilled, He who is the executor of the Divine purpose must not shrink from His task, whatever it may bring Him, and he who has a lesser function in the Kingdom must not withstand or hinder Him through any mistaken reverence.
(2) Second, the symbolic deed of baptism. Here also the only possible clue is to be found in the OT. There we see the godly in Israel, themselves right with God, bearing in their own souls the load of the people’s transgressions. What is thus, through successive generations, done and suffered by exercised believers, is assigned in Deutero-Isaiah to the Servant of the Lord, who is in that writing the ideal Israel making atonement for the sins of the actual Israel. In descending to baptism, Jesus is certainly not acknowledging personal unworthiness. It is not even enough to say that He is vicariously confessing the sins of others. He is definitely assuming the place and office of the Servant of the Lord. Himself righteous, He assumes in His deepest soul the load of human sin, and thus at once fulfils the righteousness of God and ‘makes many righteous.’ The Baptism of Christ, accordingly, is at once the culmination of a life’s experiences, the product of long years of thought and prayer, and the inauguration of a career whose movement and whose goal were already plainly before His inward eye.
(3) Third, the Divine response (v. 16f.). A decision, whose issues we cannot calculate, was accompanied by a pain which we cannot fathom. The doctrine of the two natures, even supposing it to be proved, throws no light on the experiences of that hour. Jesus never found relief in His Divinity from His human suffering. He took refuge in prayer (Luke 3:21). The Father answered with an endowment ample enough even for the task, an assurance strong enough to raise Him above all doubt. The terms in which the assurance is given form a synthesis of the two great figures through whom in the OT the consummation of the Kingdom is achieved, the Messianic King and the Servant of the Lord (Mark 1:11), and afford additional proof of the consciousness with which Jesus began His ministry. What we observe in lesser men, we see in Jesus—a great purpose determining the life creating the character. In His case, as in others, to miss the purpose leaves the character a hopeless enigma, the life a meaningless puzzle.
3. His Confirmation in His vocation.—Jesus does not sweep forward in emotional enthusiasm from Baptism to the announcement of His claims. The tide of His endowment ‘drove’ Him (St. Mark’s phrase) not to cities and throngs, but into desert solitudes, there to win through conflict what was His by right. Jesus certainly did not describe to His disciples in full detail the strife by which He won His soul. Something He did tell, and told it, as alone it could be told, in symbols. The point at issue in the conflict is the vocation to which Jesus has just dedicated Himself. That vocation is the synthesis of all the lines of action by which, in the OT, God’s purpose was being gradually fulfilled; and specially the synthesis of sovereignty and service. The strain of the Temptation is directed to the rending asunder of these two. The effort to which Jesus is summoned is to hold them together in indissoluble connexion, and not, under whatever subtle seductive influences, to snatch at the one and renounce the other. Any breach between them will mean the defeat of the Divine righteousness. Failure here will make Jesus not the Servant of the Lord but His adversary, servant of His enemy. The stages of the Temptation, accordingly, turn upon the humiliations which the element of service will bring into His career, and their supposed incompatibility with the sovereignty, which is His goal. Surely hunger and toil and poverty are insuperable barriers in the way of reaching that supremacy which Jesus would exercise with such benignant grace! The alternative lay clear before Him, the pathway of supernatural power, leading away from normal human experience, or the pathway of service and suffering, leading nearer and nearer to the throbbing heart of humanity. Jesus made His choice, and in that great decision gained His vantage ground. As for Him, He would be man, and would stand so close to men that He could assume their responsibilities and bear their burdens. Thus Jesus won His victory, a solitary man, in death grips with evil, with no strength save the Spirit of God, no weapon save the Word of God. It was a complete victory. Within a character, thus welded by trial, there was no room hereafter for breach with God or with itself. Though other assaults will be made, though they be made by His dearest (John 2:3-4), His most loyal (Matthew 16:22-23), though in one final onslaught they wring from the Victor sweat of blood, the certainty of their overwhelming defeat is already guaranteed. In studying the character of Christ, we are led from one surprise of loveliness to another; but we are never in any uncertainty as to its permanence, never haunted by any dread of its failure. From the beginning there is the note of finality and absoluteness.
iii. Characteristics of Christ.—All character study is necessarily incomplete. A character which could be exhaustively analysed would not be worth the pains taken in making the necessary investigations. The quality of mystery certainly belongs to the character of Christ to a degree that suggests a source of power, deeper and less restricted than that which would suffice to explain shallower and more intelligible personalities. No biography has ever comprehended Him; the intent meditation of nineteen centuries has not exhausted His fulness. It would, accordingly, be both pedantic and unreal to attempt a logical articulation of the elements of His character or a classified list of His virtues. It seems best, therefore, in this article to move from the more general to the more particular, without too great rigidity of treatment. We begin, then, with those impressions of His character which are at once the broadest and the deepest.
1. Spiritual-mindedness.—St. Paul’s great phrase in Romans 8:6 φρόνημα τοῦ πνεύματος, ‘the general bent of thought and motive’ (Sanday-Headlam) directed toward Divine things, which is applied even to the best men we know, with reserves and limitations, exactly expresses the prevailing direction of Christ’s life and character. He possesses the spiritual mind to a degree which stamps Him as being at once unique among men, and also true and normal man, realizing the ideal and fulfilling the duty of man as such. He moves habitually in the realm of heavenly realities. He does not visit it at intervals. He dwells there, even while He walks on earth, and is found amid the throngs and haunts of men. He carries with Him the aroma of its holiness and peace and blessedness. That His disciples were ‘with him’ (Mark 3:14) was the secret of their preparation, the source of any wisdom they manifested, any success they achieved. The most mature experience of the power of Christ, and the most lofty conception of His person, find their ultimate warrant in this, that the unseen world becomes visible in His character. Apart from this, they are composed of things so unreal as feelings and opinions. Illustration and proof of the spiritual-mindedness of Christ are too abundant to be specified in detail. The following points will suffice to indicate its quality and significance.
(1) His knowledge.—He Himself, on one occasion, distinguished the objects of His knowledge as heavenly things (ἐπουράνια), and earthly things (ἐπίγεια, John 3:12). The former are the mysteries of the Kingdom, the counsels of Jehovah, which in the OT He makes known by the medium of the prophets. The latter are the facts of human nature, as that is essentially related to the being and character of God, and is capable of receiving and experiencing the powers and truths belonging to the Kingdom of God. There is no doubt as to the kind of knowledge He evinced, and believed Himself to possess, regarding heavenly things. He is not inquiring like Socrates, nor reasoning like Plato, nor commenting like a scribe. He knows with absoluteness and fulness (Matthew 11:27). He beholds with immediate direct vision (John 1:18; John 6:46). He reports what He sees and hears (John 3:11; John 8:38; John 15:15). ‘He does not in any formal way teach the religion which lives in Him.… The thing itself He merely expresses, nay, still more presupposes than expresses’ (Beyschlag).
Christ’s knowledge of earthly things, i.e. His insight into the subjective experiences of men and the moral condition of their souls, has the same note of absoluteness; and His judgments upon them and His dealings with them have an authority and finality which would be unwarrantable did they not rest on perfect discernment (Mark 10:21, Luke 7:39, John 1:42; John 1:47; John 2:25). Of this He Himself could not but be aware; and, indeed, He expressly made it His claim (John 13:18). Peter’s heart-broken appeal (John 21:17) belongs to the incidents of the Forty Days, and so cannot be used directly as proof; but no doubt it reflects the impression which the historic Christ made upon those who knew Him, viz. that He saw into their inmost souls with a discernment as intimate and deep as God’s, which, like God’s, could neither be evaded nor hindered.
Whether Christ possessed supernatural knowledge of facts in the order of external nature has been much discussed, but does not now concern us. We are not even concerned at present with any explanation of His knowledge of Divine things. But we are bound to note, and to give full weight to the fact, that in the Gospel portraiture the world of heavenly realities, both in themselves and in their earthly manifestations and applications, is open to Jesus, that He is in complete spiritual affinity with it, and speaks upon all matters that belong to it with definite and self-conscious authority. Even if His Divinity be denied, it must be allowed that He is a man possessed of undimmed spiritual vision.
(2) His teaching.—Jesus is not a lecturer, making statements, however brilliant and luminous, of the results of investigation. He is a revealer, disclosing in ‘the mother-speech of religion’ the heavenly realities which were open to His inward eye. His teaching, therefore, is inexhaustible, begetting, in the process of studying it, the faculty of ethical insight, and continuously raising, in the effort to practise it, the standard of the moral judgment. Yet it retains the quality of spiritual delight which enchained its first listeners. It is gracious in its unfoldings of the Divine compassions; in its disclosure not merely of the fatherliness, but of the fatherhood of God; in its invitations, pleadings, promises; and, most of all, in its astounding declaration, which pride deemed blasphemous and humility never questioned, of the Divine forgiveness, deep, and free, and fearless. It is holy and spiritual, rejecting conventional piety, emphasizing, as even the OT had not done, the inward state of a man’s heart Godward, describing the type of character required in citizens of the Kingdom in terms of such unearthly purity and loveliness, as would produce despair were any other than Himself the speaker. It is universal, perfecting the Law and the Prophets, in this respect also, that it declared the height of spiritual privilege to be attainable, not merely by Israel, but by man as such, irrespective of merit or privilege.
Such a voice had never been heard in Israel; not Hosea’s, with its tears of Divine compassion; not Isaiah’s, with its royal amplitude; not his who in pure and lofty song heralded the return from Babylon; not John’s as it rang out from hill to hill his summons to repentance. Astonished by its novelty, wooed by its charm, bowed by its authority, the multitudes followed a little way as it called them heavenward; and some elect souls rested not till they too entered the universe of truth whence Jesus uttered His voice. The greatest foe to faith is the haste which seeks to construct dogmas about Christ before Christ is known. To some souls the time for dogma comes late, or not at all. In any case, dogma, however accurate, must rest on the trustworthiness of Jesus in His disclosure of spiritual fact.
(3) The effect of His presence.—A spiritual mind produces upon those who come under its in influence a twofold impression, that of remoteness and that of nearness and sympathy. This is conspicuously the case with Jesus. We have abundant evidence of His having a dignity of presence, which smote with awe those who had but occasional glimpses of Him, and filled at times His most familiar friends with fear, and also of His being the kindest, gentlest, and most sympathetic of souls. It could not be otherwise. To have discerned the end which created His career, to make choice of it with such full intelligence of all that it involved, to live for it in such entire consistency with its scope and requirements, means a moral grandeur unapproached by sage or prophet. Separated from the mass of men, removed from their pursuits, He must have been. Yet the very greatness of His vocation, the very depth of His insight both into the purpose of God and the need of man, produced in Him, along with that deep distinctiveness, the kindliest appreciation of the little things which make up the life of man, the most sympathetic interest in ordinary human concerns, and an entire approachableness to the humblest applicant for counsel or comfort. This combination of a majesty which smites to the ground the instruments of prostituted justice, with a manner so tender that babes smile in His arms and women tell Him the secret of their care, must have its source deep in the heavenly region which was His habitual abode.
2. Love to God.—The heavenly region which Jesus inhabited was not an abyss of being where the finite loses itself in the absolute. It was a realm of persons, Divine and human, who dwelt together in intelligent, spiritual fellowship. The doctrine of ‘the One,’ which is found in every climate and revives in every century, is not the clue to Jesus’ thought of God. The key to His theology is the doctrine of the Father; His love to the Father is the motive of His life. He proclaimed love to God, absorbing all energies, comprehending all activities, as the first, the great commandment, of which the second, love to man, is the direct corollary. But when we compare His own obedience to the first commandment with that of other men, a very significant distinction is to be observed. The most devout souls in their nearest approach to God are conscious that their love is not perfect. This defect is due in part to sin, and the chastened soul rebukes the coldness of its affection; and in part to finitude, and the adoring soul continually aspires after higher attainments. In the case of Jesus, the note, either of compunction or of aspiration, is never heard. The explanation of this is not that in later recensions of the tradition such notes were struck out, in deference to a mistaken sense of reverence, or to support a novel view of His person; but that the impression of complete spiritual attainment belongs to the very essence of the character as set forth in the Gospels. We may dispute whether such a character ever existed; but we cannot question the fact that such a character has been portrayed, with a verisimilitude which makes the portraiture a greater miracle than the actual reality of the character depicted would have been. Jesus loved God perfectly: this is the only fair interpretation of the record. There is no trace of moral disparity, no failure of mutual understanding, no sign of effort on the part of Jesus to cross a chasm, however inconsiderable, between Himself and God. He receives the communications of the Father’s love without perturbation or amazement, as of one overwhelmed by the Divine condescension; and He responds without extravagance of emotion, in words which do not labour with overweight of meaning, but are easy, natural, simple, and glad, the very language of One who is the Son of such a Father. He and the Father are one. The Synoptic picture, as well as that of the Fourth Gospel, makes this feature plain. There can be no doubt that this fact raises the Christological problem in its profoundest form. What man is He who thus receives and returns the love of God?
Two of love’s characteristic manifestations, moreover, are found in Christ in perfect exercise. (1) Obedience. We have seen that the character of Christ is created by the vocation to which He dedicated Himself. We now observe that this vocation is, in the view of Jesus, nothing impersonal, but is the personal will of the Father. This is the Father’s ‘business,’ and to it He, as the Son, is entirely devoted. The will of the Father does not mean for Jesus a series of commands. It is rather to His deep conviction a purpose, moving throughout His whole life, and comprehending every detail of His activity. The obedience of the Son, accordingly, is not a series of events. It is the identification of His will with the will of the Father, and a complete reproduction of that will in the whole conduct of His life. Sayings in the Fourth Gospel, such as John 4:34; John 6:38; John 8:29, bring into clear utterance the impression conveyed by the whole career of Jesus, and express an obedience which has lost the last trace of distance between the will of the Son and the will of the Father. Again, we must postpone all discussion of the possibility of such obedience, and must emphasize the actuality of the representation. Two things are plain: first, Jesus was conscious of being in complete and constant harmony with God, and profoundly unconscious of even the slightest failure to fulfil the whole will of God; and, second, those who knew Him best believed that in Him they had witnessed a unique moral achievement, viz., an obedience absolutely perfect, both in its extent and in its inward quality. (2) Trust. ‘Perfect love casteth out fear’ (1 John 4:18). Jesus’ trust in God was, like His obedience, complete. It amounted to an entire and unfailing dependence upon God, so that whatever He did, God wrought in Him. In other servants of God we observe, even in their deepest experiences, a certain dualism of self and God, a self assisted to a greater or less degree by God. This account would not be adequate to the experiences observable in the record regarding Christ. He is, without doubt, a person, not will-less, but acting in complete self-determination, and yet His deeds are the Father’s. No process of analysis can distinguish in any word or deed of His an element which comes from Himself and another which comes from God. In Christ we find a perfect spiritual organism—a man so completely inhabited by God that His words and deeds are the words and deeds of God. Follow Him in His career, as it passes with unbroken steadfastness from stage to stage of an unfolding purpose, study Him in His dealing with men, and note the sureness of His touch, penetrate the secret of His consciousness as He from time to time lifts the veil (John 5:20; John 5:30; John 7:16; John 12:49; John 14:10; John 14:24); and the result to which we are forced is, that here is a human life rooted in the Divine, filled and environed by it. This is, of course, no ontological explanation; but it states the ethical and spiritual phenomenon which demands an explanation; and this explanation must reach to the sphere of personal being.
Precisely at this point, however, when the facts we are describing seem to pass beyond the limits of normal human experience, we are summoned to observe that the trust and obedience of Jesus were not maintained without strenuous solicitude, or the use of those means which aid the human spirit in its adherence to God. His obedience was not easy. His will, in its ceaseless surrender, was subjected to increasing strain. He learned obedience by the things which He suffered (Hebrews 5:8). The ‘disposition of obedience’ was always present. ‘But the disposition had to maintain itself in the face of greater and greater demands upon it. And as He had to meet these demands, rising with the rising tide of the things which He suffered, He entered ever more deeply into the experience of what obedience was’ (A. B. Davidson on Hebrews 5:7-10). His ability to bear the strain to which He was thus subjected is due to a trust in God which was continually revived by His habit of prayer, to which there is such frequent and significant reference in the narrative (Luke 3:21-22, Mark 1:35, Luke 5:16; Luke 6:12-13, Matthew 14:23, Luke 9:18; Luke 9:28, Matthew 26:36-44, Luke 23:46). An increasing revelation of the Divine will, an unceasing advance in obedience, a continuous exercise of trust, are the strands woven together in the character of Christ. The product is that perfect thing, a life which is His own, and is entirely human, which is also, at the same time, the coming of God to man.
3. Love to men.—The source of this characteristic, which shines resplendent from every page of the narrative, is to be found in that which we have just been considering, Christ’s love to God. Here we must do justice to the facts brought before us in the portrait. The noblest servants of God in the field of humanity have done their work out of a sense of obligation. They have received so much from God, that they have felt themselves bound, by constraint of the love of which they are recipients, to serve their fellow-men; and in this service their love for men has grown, till it has become no unworthy reflexion of the love of God. It would be, however, a miserably inadequate account of the facts of Christ’s ministry among men to say that He loved them out of a sense of duty, and served them in discharge of a debt which He owed to God. The vocation which formed His character was not bare will. It was love, seeking the redemption of men. Jesus’ acceptance of this vocation meant that His love to God entered into, and blended with, the love of God to men. He loved God, and the love of God to Him became in Him the motive-power of His love to men. His love to God and His love to men constitute one energy of His soul. He turns toward the Father with the deep intelligence and the full sympathy of the Son; and straightway He turns toward the world with the widest and tenderest charity (Matthew 11:27-28, cf. John 10:15). Those, accordingly, upon whom Jesus poured His love, never sought to distinguish between it and the love of God. Enfolded by the love of Christ, they knew themselves to be received into the redeeming love of God; and their grateful love to Jesus was the proof and seal of the Divine forgiveness. ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven: for she loved much’ (Luke 7:47). Long before the doctrine of His Divinity was framed, the love of Christ was regarded by its recipients as the spiritual medium in which the Divine compassion reached them. Hebrew thought did not work with categories of being and substance. The human heart never works with categories at all. But it can identify love when it receives it; and therefore it makes an experimental synthesis of the love of Christ and the love of God, and sets Christ in a relation toward God occupied by no other man.
The love of God to man being such as He extends to no lesser creature implies that man has a value for God which no other creature possesses; and to Jesus man has the same supreme value. Of this value there are no earthly measurements, not any created thing (Matthew 10:31; Matthew 12:12), not any institution, however sacred (Mark 2:27), not even the whole world (Mark 8:36). Even the moral ruin, in which sin has involved human nature, does not diminish its value, but rather accentuates its preciousness, and adds to the love of God, and therefore also of Jesus, a note of inexhaustible passion (Matthew 18:10; Matthew 18:12-14). Christ’s doctrine of man does not breathe the spirit of 18th cent. individualism. Not for man as a spiritual atom, self-contained and all-exclusive, does Jesus have respect. But for man akin to God, capable of Divine sonship, He has deep and loving admiration. Not for man, harassed with passions for whose might he is not responsible, guilty of acts which to comprehend is to pardon, does Jesus have regard. But for man, meant for so much and missing so much, framed for perfection, destroyed by his own deed, He has love and pity, throbbing in every word, passing through action and through suffering to the ultimate agony, the final victory of the Cross.
iv. Social relations.—We have now to follow the character of Christ, which we have been studying in its origin, its development, and its leading features, as it manifests itself in the relations in which He stood to His fellow-men. The narratives attempt no enumeration of incidents. They present us with typical instances, in which the true self of Jesus is disclosed. From these we are able to conceive the figure of Christ as He moved amid the circles where human life is ordinarily spent.
1. Family.—It is difficult, from the very scanty materials before us, to trace the relations of Jesus towards the members of His family circle, and to distinguish clearly their attitude towards Him. Yet the following points may be regarded as certain: (I) The life of Jesus, prior to His baptism, was spent within the family circle, and was characterized by two features. First, a loyal and affectionate discharge of the duties of a son, presumably as bread winner for His mother. The very astonishment of His fellow-villagers at His subsequent career is sufficient evidence that during the period prior to His public ministry He fulfilled the ordinary obligations of family life.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Character of Christ'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/c/character-of-christ.html. 1906-1918.
