There is yet one other and more inclusive distinction of the character
of Jesus, which must not be omitted, and which sets him off more widely from all the mere men of the race, just because it raises a contrast which is, at once, total and experimental. Human characters are always reduced in their eminence, and the impressions of awe they have raised, by a closer and more complete acquaintance. Weakness and blemish are discovered by familiarity; admiration lets in qualifiers; on approach, the halo dims a little. But it was not so with Christ. With his disciples, in closest terms of intercourse, for three whole years; their brother, friend, teacher, monitor, guest, fellow-traveler; seen by them under all the conditions of public ministry, and private society, where the ambition of show, or the pride of power, or the ill-nature provoked by annoyance, or the vanity drawn out by confidence, would most certainly be reducing him to the criticism even of persons most unsophisticated, he is yet visibly raising their sense of his degree and quality; becoming a greater wonder and holier mystery, and gathering to his person feelings of reverence and awe, at once more general and more sacred. Familiarity operates a kind of apotheosis, and the man becomes divinity, in simply being known.
At first, he is the Son of Mary and the Nazarene carpenter. Next, he is heard speaking with authority, as contrasted even with the Scribes. Next, he is conceived by some to be certainly Elias, or some one of the prophets, returned in power to the world. Peter takes him up, at that point, as being certainly the Christ, the great mysterious Messiah; only not so great that he is not able to reprove him, when he begins to talk of being killed by his enemies; protesting "be it far from thee, Lord." But the next we see of the once bold apostle, he is beckoning to another, at the table, to whisper the Lord and ask who it is that is going to betray him; unable himself to so much as invade the sacred ear of his Master with the audible and open question. Then, shortly after, when he comes out of the hall of Caiaphas, flushed and flurried with his threefold lie, and his base hypocrisy of cursing, what do we see but that, simply catching the great Master's eye, his heart breaks down, riven with insupportable anguish, and is utterly dissolved in childish tears. And so it will be discovered in all the disciples, that Christ is more separated from them, and holds them in deeper awe, the closer he comes to them and the more perfectly they know him.
The same, too, is true of his enemies. At first, they look on him only as some new fanatic, that has come to turn the heads of the people. Next, they want to know whence he drew his opinion, and his singular accomplishments in the matter of public address; not being, as all that knew him testify, an educated man. Next, they send out a company to arrest him, and, when they hear him speak, they are so deeply impressed that they dare not do it, but go back, under a kind of invincible awe, testifying--"never man spake like this man." Afterward, to break some fancied spell there may be in him, they hire one of his own friends to betray him; and even then, when they come directly before him and hear him speak, they are in such tremor of apprehension, lest he should suddenly annihilate them, that they reel incontinently backward and are pitched on the ground. Pilate trembles visibly before him, and the more because of his silence and his wonderful submission. And then, when the fatal deed is done, what do we see but that the multitude, awed by some dread mystery in the person of the crucified, return home smiting on their breasts for anguish, in the sense of what their infatuated and guilty rage has done.
Our experience of men reverse in him. The most conspicuous matter, therefore, in the history of Jesus, is, that what holds true, in all our experience of men, is inverted in him. He grows sacred, peculiar, wonderful, divine, as acquaintance reveals him. At first he is only a man, as the senses report him to be; knowledge, observation, familiarity, raise him into the God-man. He grows pure and perfect, more than mortal in wisdom, a being enveloped in sacred mystery, a friend to be loved in awe--dies into awe, and a sorrow that contains the element of worship! And exactly this appears in the history, without any token of art, or even apparent consciousness that it does appear--appears because it is true. Probably no one of the evangelists ever so much as noticed this remarkable inversion of what holds good respecting men, in the life and character of Jesus. Is this character human, or is it plainly divine?