01.01. CHAPTER I - THE PASSION OF JESUS
CHAPTER I - THE PASSION OF JESUS That word “ passion” has gotten into bad company if, as Dr. Crothers says, “a noun is known by the company it keeps.” The word itself is a pure word. It simply means love on fire. A master of English literature has said all high poetry has its source in passion. Of course that passion may take form in love, or jealousy, or hate, or any other strong passion that transports the mind out of and above itself. It was left for Christianity to give to that word its highest meaning. The passions of the human heart were crowded into the yearning of a life and the agony of the cross. The symbol of our faith is a cross. On that cross our Master died, and our chief business is to declare a love that even the cross could not halt. Everytthing great in life is a passion, and religion, if alive, must be impassioned, must be threaded through and through with a network of exquisite nerves. I am the more anxious to impress this, because we are living in an age that aims to rob religion of its “ inflammatory touch.” There are those who look upon all signs of emotion and devotion with distress. They seek to set forth their faith in mental crystals, they keep a cold bath for every fervor, and when their epitaph is written, sad-eyed angels will carve in the marble, “They died of too much self-control.” “ Light enough, but no heat,” was the way someone described ancient philosophy. That is a good description of much of the theorizing of today. It is heat the world needs quite as much as light. The path to sound thinking is not always through a big brain, sometimes it is through a warm heart.
“The heart is wiser than the intellect And works with surer hands and swifter feet Toward wise conclusions.” A big brain and a big heart ought to go together. Neither is complete without the other.
It is a life on fire that kindles another. The fiercest enemy to be fought in our day is sheer apathy. We have been talking about religious unrest. As a matter of fact, there is too little of it the people are asleep. What breaks the heart of the enthusiast is to fire red hot shells into a mud bank. Have you ever meditated on the passion of our Lord? Is there a more pathetic story in literature than the rejection of Jesus? He caine unto His own and His own received Him not.
He was poor and lowly. He was cast out as evil.
He died upon the cross died deserted, and men called Him mad. He was born among the cattle and He died among thieves. We marvel how the Jews could turn away from Him, but if the Lord of Glory came among us today, would we give Him any kindlier reception? He was eager; we are cold. He was enthusiastic; we are indifferent.
He wept over Jerusalem; we seldom weep even for ourselves. The Church’s -thermometer has dropped; her step in many quarters is leaden and her spirit dull. “We have lost the fine fervor of our early rapture. There are too few with blazing eye and burning heart. Some way we must win back that early enthusiasm. Do we not need the coming of that spirit that shall convict of sin and righteousness and judgment, so that our hearts shall burn and our tongues kindle? Time was when sin was an ugly thing; people were positive about moral things. There were two colors things were very black or very white. There was a sharp line drawn between him who served God and him who served Him not. In our disposition to be tolerant, have we not lost the real sense of values? Our black and white seems to have faded into a general gray. The bad are not so bad as they might be; the good are not so good as they think they are. As George Eliot says, “Like an omnibus, we take on board anybody and anything which beckons as we pass. We entertain God and the Devil on the same floor and on equal terms.”
How often we read in the Scriptures that Jesus was moved with compassion. “When He saw the multitude, He was moved.” Not simply touched, hut swept as hy a storm. He wept over Jerusalem, because He saw the people sinning, saw them missing the mark, saw the harvest of it all. Of course it would be trite and I shall be enrolled among those who ask silly and impertinent questions, but may I venture to ask if any of us ever really wept over Boston, or New York, or Chicago, or St. Louis, or any lesser city, or town where God gave us our place for service?
It was a beautiful Jerusalem that Jesus looked upon; the temple like a mountain of snow, forty and six years in building; palaces for Herod and Caiaphas, a grand theater, and a great hippodrome; three historic towers on the north and east, and an acropolis, a sight to stir the souls of men, and an unspeakable anguish to contemplate its catastrophe. Some of you have climbed the Mount of Olives and marked what yet remains of the walls the Saracen builded and the ruins of other days. Have you also climbed the hills around Boston or Pittsburgh? Have you gone to the Metropolitan or Woolworth tower and looked upon the riches of our great city, the clustered spires of cathedral and university where millions of people come and go, and have you wept over those who go down those streets to shame and death the flotsam and jetsam of a great city? Or have you cried as Bliicher cried from the dome of St. Paul’s, in London, “What a city for pillage!” And have you gone down to join the crowd in its quest after pelf to wrest something for yourself out of the general forage and plunder? I hardly dare venture to ask it, but if you were to open your desk and take out your diary, would there be in it any record of nights of anguish and of prayer for lost men such as they put down who wrote in the Gospels, the diary of the Son of God? “At the foot of the cross,” says Sir Oliver Lodge, “there has been a perennial experience of relief and renovation. Ours is not a creed, it is a passion. Men in every age have died for it. In every land where its tale is told and with every new sun that dawns, drunkards may be found whom it has made sober, thieves whom it has taught to be honest, harlots whom it has lifted up to chastity, selfish men who, touched by its preaching, live by a great law of self-sacrifice. It is the root whence blossom great heroisms and charities. All human sorrows hide in His wounds. All human self denials lean on His cross.”
Well says Heine, “How great a drama is the passion of Christ. How glorious a figure is that of the Man-God. His words are a balm for all the wounds this world can inflict, and the blood that was shed at Golgotha has become a healing stream for all that suffer. The white marble gods of the Greeks were spattered with His blood and they sickened with terror and can never more regain their health.” The simple record of three short years of Christ’s life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
If proof is wanted of the vital forces that dwell in Christ, we find it in the impression He made upon the men about Him. They were only fishermen, sitters at the seat of custom bits of common clay, but they caught the spirit and took their impulse from Christ. His spirit so wrought in them that when He himself had left the earth, they became heralds not of a creed but of a passion.
Jesus opened the gates into a new universe.
He taught us that the cross on which the sinless one died for the sinful is the supreme interpretation of God. He turned His face to the world in the midst of His own suffering and cried, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” In His own person He brought a spiritual power and dynamic which broke up the old order of the pagan world and founded a system based upon an uncalculating and overwhelming love. He mastered men and events and broke into the leaden night with a blazing passion that was volcanic and irresistible. He broke up the order of His time to the breaking of His own heart. Well says Forsythe, “He was an austere man, a severe critic, a born fighter, of choleric wrath and fiery scorn, so that the people thought he was Elijah or the Baptist. Yet He was gentle to the last degree, especially to those ignorant and out of the way. Clear, calm, determined and sure of His mark, He was the next hour roused to such impulsive passion as if He were beside himself. But if He let himself go, He always knew where He was going. He poured out His soul unto God and unto death and He was the friend of publicans and sinners.*’ At the cleansing of the temple, He was so hot with imperious haste and mighty indignation that from that moment His enemies said, “You to the death,” and they never let up in their persecution until they had Him nailed to the Cross. When His disciples saw His fiery indignation, we can imagine one as saying to the other, “Of what does this remind you?” and the other answers, “It reminds me of the Psalm in which it is written, ’The zeal of thy house hath eaten me up/ “The visual image of zeal as Coleridge calls it, is a boiling pot. The root of the word is in the Greek #60 -to boil. Could there be a more vivid word to describe the boiling over with heat of the passions and emotions of the Son of God? Is it any wonder that it is written, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten; be zealous therefore and repent. ’ ’ The one thing that Jesus could not endure was ease in Zion. The words to the church at Laodicea fairly blistering us, “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
What a phrase that is “to be eaten up with zeal.” All fear of what the people or the leaders might do unto Him is forgotten. All sense of reserve and lamb-like meekness devoured. For the first time we appreciate “the wrath of the Lamb” as we see what He did in His Father’s house that day. With far-reaching emphasis Alexander White says, “His holy zeal sustained Him and impelled Him all through His life, and the same ruling passion was His greatest strength in His death,” His disciples must have recalled it and said to one another even while they forsook him and fled, “The zeal of His Father’s house hath eaten Him up.” They must have said it to themselves as they stood afar off and saw His crucifixion consummated.
Now the Saviour said Himself that it was enough for the disciple to be as his Lord. We bear His name; we represent His life to the world; we are to personify His teachings. How can we do that if we ourselves are not ablaze with holy passion? It was a flame which was the symbol of Pentecost. Those disciples, discouraged and ashamed, were to have every barrier melted away and to go forward with a blazing passion that nothing could stop, until, as tradition has it, Paul’s zeal consumed his body and his head rolled from the block. The rest of the disciples had cruel mockings and scourgings and imprisonments, their devotion so consuming them that they had no heart left for anything save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It was not a new thing for an absorbing passion to consume the lives of men. Love of power had just eaten up Julius Caesar; love of praise had eaten up Tullius Cicero; love of liberty had eaten up Marcus Cato; love of pleasure had consumed Mark Antony. Was it any wonder that Paul, consumed by a greater passion than any of these, should say, “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Put this over against any purely intellectual conception of Christianity, and how frigid all that appears. The one thing necessary for every soul is to catch his Master ’s passion. Small wonder that “Whitefield’s cenotaph has carved upon it a flaming heart, and that the grave of Adam Clark bears similar testimony to a passion which consumed a life in a blaze of flaming devotion. The proposition which I wish to lay down as the prerequisite to all evangelistic endeavor is that no man can be the herald of his Lord’s passion if he does not himself share it. No man can win for God unless he is willing to pay the price in blood and tears. I make my plea to the church and the ministry for a consuming zeal. “No heart will long foe pure that is not passionate, no virtue safe that is not enthusiastic.” Our splendid cathedrals are built according to the most approved plans of the architects, and our altars are set up in noble and stately art. I am ready to grant the virtue of apostolic succession to all who minister there, but the question which I ask with deep heart yearning is this one, Have the fires been kindled and are they blazing on the altar, or have they gone out and are men now shivering in doubt where once God’s prophets led out His hosts in power! In many places the priests of Jehovah seem to be as impotent as the priests of Baal to call down the heavenly fires.
They have poured the waters of doubt over the stones and the sacrifice and they stand forsaken where once there were cleft skies, and falling fires to consume sacrifice and altar and later lick up the last drop of the waters of doubt and demonstrate to all Israel that God and Baal do not keep company on the same Olympus. From crying “Thus saith the Lord,” and saying with holy assurance “I know whom I have believed,” they are shaking limp hands over a credo of faith and immortality which has lost its power, and are looking behind them with the hope that they may be buttressed by scientific investigation rather than the glad assurance of a triumphant faith.
We preach many sermons about the rejection of Christ, and we blame the men of His century, but what is the condition with us? We bow before the conventional and are smug and comfortable.
If we had Jesus with us today, would we not find Him a great inconvenience, and maybe send Him either to jail or to an asylum as a disturber of the peace! Such zeal as His was in the highest degree uncomfortable for the dilettanti of His time.
Even those who represented the Church would not abide it, but the record of history is that in all its great ages humanity has bridged the gulf which threatened it by ’’walking over the body of some fanatic who made himself a highway for his race/’ Jesus was a man of intense feeling and He never held in His emotions. When He saw men robbing their poor neighbors at the seat of the money-changers, He overthrew their tables, and lashed with His tongue those who had prostituted their opportunities and imposed upon their neighbors. When He saw the city given over to indifference and men walking holy places with stolid heart, He wept.
We have a great deal to say in our conventions and stately assemblies about emotionalism. We are greatly fearful lest religion shall seem to be a matter of life instead of a matter of creed. As a matter of fact, there is no fear whatever in our time that there will be too much emotion connected with religion. Even the great evangelistic meetings are not open to that charge. I have been in closest touch with them for the last generation, and I am bound to say that I have nowhere seen anything which approached emotionalism. I have seen tens of thousands of men coming up to shake hands with evangelists, but not one in a hundred had even a tear in his eye. The impelling motive in most cases was purely social or ethical, with no sense of such conviction of sin as would blanch the cheek and make men’s knees knock together. He is a poor student of psychology who does not know that the emotions must lie at the base of all great thinking or doing.
Herbert Spencer said, “In the genesis of a system of thought the emotional nature is a large factor, perhaps as large a factor as the intellectual. ’ ’ It is a sad tribute which Charles Darwin brings. After an experience which had dwarfed his emotional life, he says “At the age of thirty poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure and music was a great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry and I find Shakespeare so intolerably dull that it nauseates me. I have lost my taste for pictures and music. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” In his essays on “Criticism” Matthew Arnold says, * ’ The permanent virtue of religion is that it has lighted up morality, that it has applied the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all.” Dr. Sheridan quotes John Stuart Blackie: “The early church worked by a fervid moral contagion, not by the suasion of cool argument. The Christian method of conversion, not by logical arguments but by moral contagion and the effusion of the Holy Ghost has with the masses of mankind always proved itself the most effective.”
Dr. John Watson will not be accused of lack of clearness in thought; he says: “Every great movement which has stirred the depth of life and changed the face of history has sprung from some profound sentiment and powerful emotion.” Dr. Alexander Maclaren, one of the clearest thinkers of his time, is moved to say, “There is a kind of religious teachers who are always preaching down enthusiasm and preaching up what they call ’sober standards of feeling ’ in matters of religion. By which, in nine eases out of ten, they mean precisely such a tepid condition as is described in much less polite language when the Voice from Heaven says, * Because thou art neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. ’ I should have thought that the last piece of furniture which any Christian Church in the nineteenth century needed was a refrigerator. A poker and a pair of bellows would be much more needful to them. Not to be all aflame is madness, if we believe our own creed.”
“He shall baptize you with fire,” and if it does anything it will kindle emotion. The great glory of the Gospel is to cleanse men’s hearts by raising their temperature, making them pure because they are made warm, and that separates them from their evils.
William James ought to understand the psychology of religious life, and he says, in his “Varieties of Beligious Experience”: “I believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products like the translations of a text into another tongue. ’ ’ Dr. Jowett voices a great truth when he says: “ If the church would be pure, the church must be passionate. Elevation of character depends upon warmth of affection. A fiery heart by the energy of its own heat creates a self-preserving atmosphere against the devil.”
Among those liberal denominations which have been quite inclined to accept the dictum of President Eliot that the religion of the future will be intellectual and not emotional, that religious emotion is the result of defective culture and will cease when education and evolution have done their work, there is a mighty swing of the pendulum. They are holding evangelistic services night after night. When the present writer was asked to give an address on evangelization before one of the important gatherings of one of the liberal churches, he asked with a smile, “Do you think you can stand my message?” The reply was, “We must have more vital religion.” Of all the addresses which I have given, none were received with greater apparent fervor than the one delivered under such circumstances. To feel the thrill of a great love and to be profoundly interested in men and things is not bad form, it is Christ-like. To warm up to a publican and to warm over a Pharisee is the kind of business which thrills the heart of God. He said there was one thing all men needed, and that was conviction. We have our foibles, our weaknesses, our indifferences, our by-plays and our avocations. The crying need of the world is a few first-class convictions. And what is a conviction? Is it not something that makes a convict of you; that is, something that fastens a man to one thing so that he is not at liberty to roam everywhere to no purpose? Then he can say, “This one thing I believe; this one thing I do.” A Christian without conviction is powerless and is a contradiction of terms. A Christian that prefers plans of salvation to salvation itself, that raises definitions of the nature of Jesus above surrender to the joy-giving Saviour is a travesty on the Son of God. The seal on Adam Clark’s grave, to which I have referred, is a candle burned down to the socket. Underneath are the words “In living for others, I am burned away.”
Livingstone burned out his life that he might overthrow the slave trade of Africa. Aristotle said, ’ ’ No great genius was ever without some admixture of madness.’* It was this joy in service, this uncalculating devotion which has proven itself mighty to change the hearts of men, and the age in which it has lived. It was not Erasmus, the polished, the learned, the vacillating, the mightiest intellect of his time, but it was rough, yearning, burning Martin Luther who made Germany. In his last sermon Joseph Parker said, “As long as the church of God is one of many institutions, she will have her little day. She will die and that will be all. But just as soon as she gets the spirit of Jesus until the world thinks she has gone stark mad, then we shall be on the high road to capture this planet for Jesus. “
One fears that in some quarters the pulpit has lost its nerve and forgotten the evidence of history, that whenever Christianity has been most convincing she has been most victorious, and whenever she has been most apologetic, she has been most futile; and also that it is the schools within Christianity which are constructive and aggressive, and not the schools that are critical and eclectic which have chiefly affected their generation. If, as some think, our fathers were too sure about everything, it would be an immense gain if some of their children were absolutely certain of anything. It would be a great disaster if the intellect of the Church should be so occupied in recasting the form of the Scriptures as to have no strength left for declaring the Gospel which they contain. Is it not time that the strength of the ministry were withdrawn from purely intellectual exercises, from purely intellectual investigations and destructive criticism and given to evangelism? Have we not had enough of recanting? Is it not time for some confessing? We are justified in disbelieving the things which have not been proven, only if we believe and practice upon the things which have been proven. There are some who seem to be ready to refuse to believe anything which our fathers believed, and are quite ready to accept anything if it is not in the Bible. A book which denies is supposed to be honest and thoughtful, and a book which affirms, it is taken for granted, must be narrow and prejudiced.
Those who doubt everything which the Church has held for nineteen centuries give themselves amusing airs of superiority, and the people who hold the heart of the Christian creed are likely to be regarded with intellectual pity. There is one thing worse than the arrogance of wisdom and that is the arrogance of learning, for the learned man ought to be broad enough to know better. As a matter of fact, there is no more ability in doubting than in believing. If there is a bigotry of orthodoxy there is also a bigotry of heterodoxy, and the last appears to be the more insolent.
Why should so many prefer the evidence of nonreligious persons on faith to those who are its chief experimental witnesses? It does not follow that because Darwin knew about earth worms that he was an authority on the soul; or because Mr. Huxley was a most lucid teacher of natural science that he had any right to say the last word on miracles. Even in religion one must be scientific and depend not upon amateurs but upon experts. “In the high affairs of faith, are we not more likely to arrive at the truth by listening to the saints than by listening to persons whose admirable studies have been among the lower animals?” John Watson says there are only two provinces of absolutely sure knowledge one is pure mathematics and the other is the experience of the soul. “If Paul had a right to say ’I,’ and we allow him to be a conscious being, then he had a right to say ’I know.’ And if it be granted that he could know anything, he had perfect right to finish his sentence, and say, ’I know whom I have believed,’ and we can do no better than to accept the certainty of such experience.”
Faith is the center of the financial world. From the man who sends his goods for money he has not seen to the man who accepts the last dictum of science, we move in this world by faith. Unbelief blocks the wheels of all progress. Only faith can right a ruined world. Only faith can make men lay down their arms and pick up the ax and the shovel, and faith finds its highest exemplification in the matters of the soul.