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By Joseph Parker

Hitherto the Beloved Son has been alone. In his Baptism and Temptation no man stood with him; but shortly afterward he began to move more conspicuously in society, and to clear for himself a space in the world. Christ’s call upon men to join him is, perhaps, more astonishing than many of the miracles which he wrought. First words are generally key-words. They commit the speaker to a policy, and when spoken to minds which have been excited by great expectation are probably never forgotten. Looking at Christ’s moral work in light of his miracles, one cannot but wonder why such a man did not prosecute his work single-handed. What need had he for fellowship? How could men be associated with him, without feeling most oppressively the impassible chasm which lay between him and themselves?

Christ used the imperative mood freely at the beginning of his ministry; “repent,” “follow,” were among his earliest public words. In the wilderness he had gradually risen to an imperative tone, from a great principle which underlay all life, to a written revelation, and then to a moral indignation which could not tolerate the presence of the enemy—“Get thee hence, Satan.” This seems to have been the process through which he passed to the highest courage: it was not at first that he commanded Satan to begone; it was not until attack had followed attack that the tone of personal supremacy penetrated the heart of the tempter. On leaving the wilderness he brings with him this noble courage, and opens his ministry by calling upon men to repent and to follow him. Had he left the wilderness other than as a conqueror, his tone would at least have been hesitant; but having dealt the first shattering blow upon the diabolic empire, he follows it up by publicly drawing a line of separation between one class of men and another. The subtle consistency between the tone of the victor and the tone of the evangelist should not be lost sight of in estimating the value of the Christian argument. The quality of the voice is the same in both cases; the same firm emphasis; the same direct appeal. The postponement of the call, too, until the close of the temptation, is a fact of supreme importance. What confidence could an untried man have in himself? The man who has no faith in himself is weak; the man who has a false faith in himself is deceptive; the man whose faith is founded upon the fact of a great conquest is strong and honest in proportion to that faith. The devil had never been ordered out of the way so peremptorily before, and the utterance of such an order, straining as it must have done all the forces of the soul, was succeeded by a period of great prostration. Angels came and ministered strength, and then followed just what has followed in all human experience—a consciousness of tried power, a calm but fervent determination to put the hard-gained influences to further uses. He who had successfully ordered off the devil must now do other work. The great battle must be succeeded by a great construction.

Christ, claiming to be King and Ruler of men, began his society with two obscure laborers. The narrative gives no warrant for concluding that the men had heard any private and special exposition of his views, doctrines or plans. In common with all Jews, they might have had expectations and desires in reference to a king, but there is no authority for saying that they had had any preliminary intercourse with Jesus Christ. The call met a deep craving of the heart, and at once they joined Christ the Man without knowing anything of Christ the Doctrine. The heart wanted a heart: life demanded life. The world had lived long enough upon written promises; the cold parchment was becoming colder day by day. There was an aching at the heart of society—a great trouble—an exciting wonder. The call had a peculiar charm about it in so far as it demanded attachment to a visible person. Not a Creed, but a Life, bade them “follow.” The men who were called were not likely to know much about doctrine. Who could, at the beginning? Life can be reared only by life. It is so in the family, and must be so in the church. The last thing that earnest inquirers care about is a written, formal, dogmatic creed. Such a creed, in fact, is simply a sign that there has been overbearing dictation on one hand, or hypocrisy on another. A written creed is, in the nature of things, only an inconvenient convenience. The heart can never write all that it believes. What wonder then if, when a living and glowing love comes to read the tabulated doctrines of the church, it should complain, hesitate, or rebel? It has often been asserted that Christ did not set down in sequential order what is known in these modern days as a system of divinity. The assertion is not only true as a matter of fact, but true as an evidence of his Godhead. The divine, the immeasurable, the eternal, cannot be formulated. Life cannot be systematized. Architecture may, so may astronomy, botany, and all other arts and sciences. But life is not a science: the soul is not an art. Immediately that the scientific line is crossed, the power of systematizing, if not lost, is so crippled and deranged as to be but a poor accommodation. Language itself, as partaking of the nature of a system, is often felt to be an inconvenience, useful for expressing what is uppermost, but nearly powerless in the articulation of what is deepest in the soul. Wisely, therefore, Christ wrote nothing, for written language is more difficult of interpretation than spoken language. The eye, the tone, the smile, help words that are spoken; which is but another way of saying that life is the only true interpreter. The moment that the grammar and the lexicon are called in, strife begins and logomachy deposes wisdom. A tone would do more than all syntax, to give the meaning of some doctrines. The spoken word is life; the written word is statuary. To have come, therefore, with a written creed in quest of signatures would have been a vain errand. The world had differed more over the interpretation of its own writing than over anything else—so much so that the interpretation of writing has become a profession, in which the directest contradictions are constantly maintained at the cost of vindictive or credulous clients. Parliamentary debates may be ambiguous, but Parliamentary Acts are incomprehensible.

Probably the greatest stumbling block to the extension of Christ’s influence is scholastic or formulated theology. The world is now waiting for a voice crying in the wilderness that men are to be saved not by theology but by Christ. The Church must go back to Christ’s own living and mighty way of talking to craving and aching hearts. Men must behold the Lamb, not the controversies which have raged about him. Throughout his ministry the exaltation of himself was the most conspicuous feature—“follow me,” “come unto me,” “he that believes on me,” “he that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”—this is the personal strain from beginning to end, and it is the only strain adapted to the capture and redemption of the world. It is often possible to understand a man when it is difficult to understand his creed. The author may be less a problem than his book. Christ calls men to himself without first setting forth a list of points to be accepted; men go to the doctrine through the man, not to the man through their doctrine. We dare not ask Christ what he believes, or what we ourselves may have to believe at some future time; we have to believe in the Revealer, and then we shall have no difficulty about revelation. In the first instance we go to the man Christ Jesus, and sit at his feet, waiting, wondering, and loving much. We are touched by his love, subdued by his tendencies, before we are enriched by his doctrine.

The call of the Church often differs from the call of Christ in being a call to theology. In some places in modern Christendom it will be found that the Lord’s table is surrounded by theologians, persons who have passed successfully through more or less of a theological examination: and that many feel themselves excluded from the memorial service because, though they love Christ, and could die for him, yet they cannot pronounce the doctrinal shibboleth. What does a newly quickened heart, coming up out of the waters of penitence, and just about to move into the wilderness of temptation, know about the Trinity in Unity, the federal headship of Adam, the philosophy of sacrifice, or the metaphysics of theology? Probably nothing. Yet such ignorance is not incompatible with young life. Does the infant know the mystery of love when it is clasped in the parental breast? Do parents insist that their children shall study agriculture before they eat of the fruits of the earth? When a man declares that he loves Jesus Christ, he has a right to eat of the bread and drink of the cup which the Lord appointed.

Love first, knowing afterwards; with love to begin with, all else will come quietly, “without observation,” yet with unspeakable joy. A heart will build up a belief as it wants it, and wear it gracefully because it is its own. The faith which Christ seeks is probably not to be found in any one sect; part of it is in all, and when it is collated and arranged, it will be the best representative of national churchism. Uniformity of theological creed is a simple impossibility, and as undesirable as it is impossible. The object is the same, yet the views are different; the foundation is the rock, yet each man may adopt his own architectural style; the parents may be the same, yet in stature, form, faculty, disposition, the children may be entirely different. The sun brings all manner of flowers out of the earth, varying endlessly in the hue and fragrance; what if the light about the brightness of the sun bring a still more varied summer out of the winter-bound heart of man?

This view does not finish the influence of belief. It merely points out that the man comes before the creed, and that there is a difference of the gravest importance between trust in the living Christ and the acceptance of a few theological statements about him. In the former case there is a full surrender of love, in the latter a mere intellectual assent, unaccompanied by moral enthusiasm. The one is necessarily associated with passion and demonstration, the other may consist with the lowest indifference.

The manner of the Call was quite consonant with the mystery of all that is summed up in the word Christ. Its abruptness cannot be overlooked. The ages had been undergoing a long and exciting preparation, and by the very strain of eager watching and listening had been educated to the finest sensibility. Otherwise how can the promptness and unstudied grace of the fishermen’s response be accounted for? There was no personal intercourse, so far as the narrative goes, no collusion, no prearrangement; yet at a word the lowly men abandon their vocation, and assume a new attitude towards society. At once the Abrahamic call is suggested: here is the same abruptness, the same urgency, the same mystery of the end. Men of quick ear have heard the same tone in the second call was as heard in the first, and have come to know better what was meant by the bewildering statement, “Before Abraham was, I am.” But these men were not Abrahams. Though we make their acquaintance somewhat abruptly, we do them no injustice in saying that we do no see in them the breadth and general vitality of manhood which were so prominent in the father of the faithful. When we first meet Simon and Andrew, they are but names to us; we have had no preparatory hint of the quality of the men, and cannot therefore but hesitate before coupling them in the same commendation with Abraham. A man with an historic reputation is not to be dwarfed into the stature of men whose world hardly extended beyond the boats in which they spent their unknown lives. We think we hear an earlier call than that of Abraham; this seems to be the call of something beautiful out of something rude; and whether or not it does not accord with “Let us make man,” is a question which ought not to be left unconsidered. The material was low and rough; if out of such dust man could be rebuilt, the rebuilder must surely be God. Another word on this presently.

In all revolutionary movements there have been men who have heard nothing but “follow,” and have gone bravely forward to what was mystery at first, but what became familiar and venerated truth at last. Such men cannot be accounted for. The common rules have no application to them. They are the enigmas of history. We have seen them go, and deemed them mad, but in the end have been compelled to withdraw the charge from them, and fasten it on ourselves. They “saw a hand we did not see, and heard a voice we did not hear.” The prospect before such men has generally been unalluring, often most disheartening; cloud and storm darkening and streaming from the sky, bitter wind striking them in the breast, and treacherous bogs lying between them and the promised land. still they heard the “Follow” which was inaudible to duller ears, and went forward at the cost of their whole reputation for sagacity. What had Simon and Andrew to “follow”? Looked at from the common point of view, their decision was simply fanaticism. The man who had invited them was nameless and powerless, according to to the conventional notions of fame and influence, yet they went with as prompt and complete a surrender as if a king had offered them the riches of a kingdom. It is true that the men were called to a higher vocation; they were to be not fishers only, but “fishers of men;” yet even this promised elevation codes not compass the mystery of the obedience, for multitudes declined Christ’s invitations, and unnumbered millions today hear his voice, and yet practically treat his promises as they would treat so many lies. The result of Christ’s first call cannot but be interesting to all students of his life. What if Simon and Andrew had treated his appeal with contempt? What if James and John had laughed in his face? What if he who conquered the devil had been overmatched by men? The experiment was most perilous for an impostor, was impossible to a mere man, and could have been undertaken by God only. An impostor would have begun more warily; a mere man would have begun at another point; only God would have begun where Christ began. These little circumstances are great revelations.

The persons, then, who were called are not such as might have been expected, yet on examination it will be found that they were the only persons who could have been called, in harmony with the whole mystery of Jesus Christ. The method of calling men which Christ adopted is worth studying if only to see how statesmanlike, how philosophical, yet, on the face of it, how absurd it was. He announces his purpose in one concise sentence: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” This brings us to a wider mean of the term “call” than we have in the word “follow;” yet, take the declaration as an authoritative exposition of Christ’s visit among men, and examine it as a method of stating an object, and we shall see how profound is the conception of human want which it expresses. This is quite a new voice on the earth. It had been understood up to this time that “sinners” had to be “consumed,” “destroyed,” “ashamed,” “confounded,” “desolate;” their teeth were to be “broken,” and their soul was to be “slain.” Every man was apparently under the impression that he praised God in proportion as he cursed the sinner. The evangelical prophecies are no exceptions to this rule; for they were, of course, one with the spirit of him whom they announced. The rule relates to the general spirit of the world, to the tone of government, even government as administered by righteous men. Jesus Christ propounds the startling doctrine that he had come from heaven for the express purpose of calling bad men to him. Could any doctrine, abstractly considered, be more horrifying? We have become accustomed to its repetition, until we think nothing of it; but put the shadow upon the dial back eighteen hundred years, and say, how should we like to put prisoners side by side in the public streets with a man who had openly announced that his sole business on earth was to hold intercourse with bad hearts? The worse the man, the deeper the interest Christ took in him. Polite society was shocked, and “righteous” society horror-stricken; still he held on his way, and still he graciously answered (so graciously that one wonders that every heart on hearing it does not instantly admit him as its Lord): “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” It was a hard errand to come upon, and only the Son of God could have undertaken it. What eye that was merely human could see the grandeur which was concealed under the ruins of humanity?

Christ began at the lowest point in society. The kingdom which he came to establish was to be an everlasting kingdom; and everlasting kingdoms must have adequate foundations. Christ recognized the essential distinction between men and man, and this fact gave him a reach and power over his work which otherwise would have been unattainable. The worst men make the best. A little nature could not accommodate a legion of devils—one man held more than could be held by two thousand swine. By so much as a man is diabolized may he be deified. It was, therefore, a great tribute paid to the worth of human nature when Christ spent his life in gathering and rebuilding its very ruins. He “came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

No statesman can afford to omit the common people from his calculation. They are the very root and core of society. Kings are only the blossoms of the national tree. The roof is more dependent upon the foundation than the foundation upon the roof. Nearly all, if not quite all, the movements which have changed the thinking, and determined the new courses of the world, have been upward, not downward. The great revolutionists have generally been cradled in mangers, and gone through rough discipline in early life. Civilization is debtor to lowly cradles; and unknown mothers hold a heavy account against the world. This is God’s plan of uniting all classes of the family of man.

Christ worked in harmony with the spirit of this plan. People that were rejected on every side became his servants, and brethren, and friends. Even bad women (often so near being the best!) were drawn towards him, as if they could get from him “the piece that was lost.” Some of the most touching scenes, if nothing else remained, is enough to bind the world’s heart to him forever. The occasion was one which brought out the characteristics of the interlocutors very sharply.  A Pharisee had asked Christ to break bread with him, and “a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought in an alabaster box of ointment”—probably all she had in the world—“and stood at his feet behind him, weeping, and began to wash His feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with ointment,”—so near being an angel this poor sinning sister! Never was modesty so modest—stood at his feet—stood behind him—stood behind him weeping: only God can interpret the full meaning of such tears. The cold-eyed Pharisee saw nothing in her but a “sinner:” Christ saw a woman, flesh and blood of his own mother, and his great, gentle heart was shaken with unutterable pity.

The Pharisee saw his opportunity; like all littler natures, he knew more of logic than of philanthropy, and instantly he set up this argument: “This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that touches him; for she is a sinner.” Men are often the victim of their own logic—always, indeed, when logic leads away from love. The eye that saw the “woman” under the “sinner” saw the sneering skeptic under the observing but silent host. That eye read the Pharisee through and through. “Simon,” said Jesus, “I have somewhat to say unto thee. There was a certain creditor which had two debtors; the one owed five hundred pence a day; the other fifty; and when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both: tell me, therefore which of them will love him most?” Simon liked a case of this kind; it was not above his intellectual stature, though he little knew its moral compass. “I suppose,” he answered, “that he to whom he forgave most.” The answer was right; the appeal was overwhelming. “Simon, see thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gave me no water for my feet, but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head; thou gave me no kiss; but this woman, since the time I came in, hath not ceased to kiss my feet; my head with oil thou didst not anoint, but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore, I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loves much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.” The man that spoke these words ought to be dear to the world’s heart forever! The calm tone, the beaming eye, the inimitable pathos, all brought to bear upon the stony Pharisee, with his paltry notions of propriety! It is truly better to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of men. A case like this does more to confirm the Godhead of Jesus Christ than can be done by a sanhedrin of theologians, armed with the genius and the lore of ages. We have in it all the God we need. The Being that saw the woman in the sinner, and the sinner in the woman, that penetrated the dishonorable thought of the haughty self-idolater, and pronounced the contrite woman forgiven, comes before the world with claims which God only could sustain. In the presence of such an incident, all verbal criticism becomes contemptible; the stormed and grateful heart exclaims, Ecce homo! Ecce Deus!

Multiply this simple story by the number of “sinners” in the world; let every one of those sinners love as much as this poor woman loved, and then say if ever king reigned over such an empire as that in which Christ would be enthroned. The bond of union is essentially personal. The love of each heart is lavished upon him. All low motives are expelled by a pure, intense, ever-deepening love. In this way, too, we see light streaming upon an overshadowing and most appalling mystery; the comparative relation of sin to the happiness of the universe, when the divine propose is completed. The principle laid down by Christ is that they who have had much forgiven, love much, and that there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repents, more than over ninety and nine of just persons that need no repentance. Who can measure that “more”? Sin is thus made to have its compensations. The twice-born man shall be a double joy in his Father’s house. Sin shall not be all loss. Even for sin’s sake, heaven shall be filled with a sweeter and gladder hallelujah.

By going to the lowest stratum of human nature Christ gave a new idea of the value of man. He built a kingdom out of the refuse of society. To compare small things with great, it has been pointed out by Lord Macaulay that in an English cathedral there is an exquisite stained window which was made by an apprentice out of the pieces of glass which had been rejected by his master, and it was so far superior to every other in the church, that, according to tradition, the envious artist killed himself with vexation. All the builders of society had rejected the “sinners,” and made the painted window of the “righteous.” A new builder came; his plan was original, startling, revolutionary; his eye was upon the contemned material; he made the first last and the last first, and the stone which the builders rejected he made the head stone of the corner. He always especially cared for the rejected stone. Men had always cared for the great, the beautiful, the righteous; it was left to Christ to care for sinners.

The general tone of history was such as to give Christ’s method an appearance of the most grotesque absurdity; he began where no other worker began; precedent, the terror of secondary men, was against him; and his contemporaries either pitied or despised, saying, with much bitter meaning in their tone, “This man receives sinners, and eats with them.” The unity of the mystery is here apparent. He himself, on the other side, began at the highest, and on the other, at the lowest, yet the Child of the manger came to be King of the world. Society is moved by its extremes. Christ showed the value of the extreme that from immemorial time had been despised. It is remarkable that Christ is never said to have called a woman to follow him as he called the disciples; and quite as remarkable that, so far as the evidence goes, no woman ever spoke a word against him, while many women were last at the cross, and earliest at the sepulcher. It seems as though he had assumed that the womanly side of human nature would not require any calling; that the heart of woman would instinctively welcome him as the solution of all difficulties, the sum of all charms, the sovereign of frail and needy creatures who have immense capacity of suffering, but little satisfaction in the results of mere logic. Christ was emphatically, uniquely, the seed of the woman. What woman could reject her own son? Does not every woman look with intensely hopeful love upon the son of her womb? He will be her comfort, her song, her savior; she no longer lives but in him and for him; through him she interprets the future, and for his sake takes a kinder view of all mankind. Christ was born to every woman. Men required to be called, women only to be attracted. Women had but to see him in order to claim him as the fairest among ten thousand, and altogether lovely; to recognize him as the tenderest and wisest friend of womanhood. They needed no call. The dew waits for no voice to call it to the sun. Few women ever go to Christ through the medium of mere doctrine. They live beyond the cold propositional region. The dew finds its way up to the sun without knowing anything of the laws of motion or the mysteries of light, and womanly hearts go up to Christ often knowing little of objective theology, yet wise because inspired and guided by the love which is the elect interpreter of God. God is love, and by her superior capacity of love woman is so much nearer God than man can ever be. It is hardly to be wondered that millions of Christians even now feel that heaven itself requires the distinctive presence of the womanly element, and express the feeling by addressing Mary as the mother of God. If Protestantism were less technical and more human, it would hesitate before condemning the feeling which dictates this startling appellation. The fact may be that God is more human than traditional doctrine has yet dared to conceive. We think of humanity too exclusively by the flesh. It is to be remembered that the body is the lesser portion of the man, and that we speak rightly of the human mind as well as the human body. It is on the mind side that we approach God, through the mind side that we communicate with God, and on the mind side that we resemble God. In this sense God is more human, or man more divine, than has yet been authenticated by the councils of Christendom. God is not declared to be power, but he is declared to be Love; whoever, therefore can love most is most like God. It is not to the point to argue that men excel women in pure intellectual force; even allowing as a conceit what we cannot concede as a fact, it amounts to nothing in this case. A lion is stronger, an eagle is swifter than man, yet it is not to be inferred that they are nearer God than man is; but God is love, and nearness to him in soul quality is a question of love. Nor is it to the point that women have fallen into great depths of sin; the greater the depth, the greater the nature. If God himself could sin, all other sinners would be forgotten in the darkness of the stupendous apostasy.

Christ’s tender recognition of little children was part of his Call. How could he call them but by taking them up in his arms and blessing them? They could not understand his words, but they understood his smile, as flowers understand the morning. He blessed them! Fathers know a little of the meaning, and mothers a little more; as for other critics, they may not know this mystery. He said, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven;” as if heaven contained all youth, and beauty, and trustfulness. “He took them up in his arms;” and they are there still. The “Son of Man” alone knows the nature of a little child. As the Founder of a permanent monarchy, Christ knew the value of young life. What is a king, if he be not supported by the passionate love of the national heart? Passive allegiance is a diplomatic euphemism which signifies the extinction of loyalty.