CHAPTER V. THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR - PART C

105. The Apostolate. --Perhaps the formation of the Apostolate ought to be placed side by side with miracles and preaching as a third means by which He did His work. The men who became the twelve apostles were at first only ordinary disciples like many others. This, at least, was the position of such of them as were already His followers during the first year of His ministry. At the opening of His Galilean activity, their attachment to Him entered on a second stage; He called them to give up their ordinary employments and be with Him constantly. And probably not many weeks afterwards, He promoted them to the third and final stage of nearness to Himself, by ordaining them to be apostles.

106. It was when His work grew so extensive and pressing that it was quite impossible for Him to overtake it all, that He multiplied Himself, so to speak, by appointing them His assistants. He commissioned them to teach the simpler elements of His doctrine and conferred on them miraculous powers similar to His own. In this way many towns were evangelized which He had not time to visit, and many persons cured who could not have been brought into contact with Himself. But, as future events proved, His aims in their appointment were much more far-reaching. His work was for all time and for the whole world. It could not be accomplished in a single lifetime. He foresaw this, and made provision for it by the early choice of agents who might take up His plans after He was gone, and in whom He might still extend His influence over mankind. He Himself wrote nothing. It may be thought that writing would have been the best way of perpetuating His influence and giving the world a perfect image of Himself; and we cannot help imagining with a glow of strong desire what a volume penned by His hand would have been. But for wise reasons He abstained from this kind of work and resolved to live after death in the lives of chosen men.

107. It is surprising to see what sort of persons He selected for so grand a destiny. They did not belong to the influential and learned classes. No doubt the heads and leaders of the nation ought to have been the organs of their Messiah, but they proved themselves totally unworthy of the great vocation. He was able to do without them; He needed not the influence of carnal power and wisdom. Ever wont to work with the elements of character that are not bound to any station of life or grade of culture, He did not scruple to commit His cause to twelve simple men, destitute of learning and belonging to the common people. He made the selection after a night spent in prayer, and doubtless after many days of deliberation. The event showed with what insight into character He had acted. They turned out to be instruments thoroughly fitted for the great design; two at least, John and Peter, were men of supreme gifts; and, though one disciple turned out a traitor, and the choice of him will probably, after all explanations, ever remain a very partially explained mystery, yet the selection of agents who were at first so unlikely, but in the end proved so successful, will always be one of the chief monuments of the incomparable originality of Jesus.

108. It would, however, be a very inadequate account of His relation to the Twelve merely to point out the insight with which He discerned in them the germs of fitness for their grand future. They became very great men, and in the founding of the Christian Church achieved a work of immeasurable importance. They may be said, in a sense they little dreamed of, to sit on thrones ruling the modern world. They stand like a row of noble pillars towering afar across the flats of time. But the sunlight that shines on them, and makes them visible, comes entirely from Him. He gave them all their greatness; and theirs is one of the most striking evidences of His. What must He have been whose influence imparted to them such magnitude of character and made them fit for so gigantic a task? At first they were rude and carnal in the extreme. What hope was there that they would ever be able to appreciate the designs of a mind like His, to inherit His work, to possess in any degree a spirit so exquisite, and transmit to future generations a faithful image of His character? But He educated them with the most affectionate patience, bearing with their vulgar hopes and their clumsy mis-understandings of His meaning. Never forgetting for a moment the part they were to play in the future, He made their training His most constant work. They were much more constantly in His company than even the general body of His disciples, seeing all He did in public and hearing all He said. They were often His only audience, and then He unveiled to them the glories and mysteries of His doctrine, sowing in their minds the seeds of truth, which time and experience were by and by to fructify. But the most important part of their training was one which was perhaps at the time little noticed, though it was producing splendid results--the silent and constant influence of His character on theirs. He drew them to Himself and stamped His own image on them. It was this which made them the men they became. For this, more than all else, the generations of those who love Him look back to them with envy. We admire and adore at a distance the qualities of His character: but what must it have been to see them in the unity of life, and for years to feel their molding pressure? Can we recall with any fullness the features of this character whose glory they beheld and under whose power they lived?

109. The Human Character of Jesus.-- Perhaps the most obvious feature which they would remark in Him was Purposefulness. This certainly is the ground-tone which sounds in all His say-ings which have been preserved to us, and the pulse which we feel beating in all His recorded actions. He was possessed with a purpose which guided and drove Him on. Most lives aim at nothing in particular but drift along, under the influence of varying moods and instincts or on the currents of society, and achieve nothing. But Jesus evidently had a definite object before Him, which absorbed His thoughts and drew out His energies. He would often give as a reason for not doing something, 'Mine hour is not yet come,' as if His design absorbed every moment, and every hour had its own allotted part of the task. This imparted an earnestness and rapidity of execution to His life which most lives altogether lack. It saved Him, too, from that dispersion of energy on details, and carefulness about little things on which those who obey no definite call throw themselves away, and made His life, various as were its activities, an unbroken unity.

110. Very closely connected with this quality was another prominent one, which may be called Faith, and by which is meant His. astonishing confidence in the accomplishment of His purpose, and apparent disregard both of means and opposition. If it be considered in the most general way how vast His aim was--to reform His nation and begin an everlasting and world-wide religious movement; if the opposition which He encountered, and foresaw His cause would have to meet at every stage of its progress, be considered; and if it be remembered what, as a man, He was--an unlettered Galilean peasant--His quiet and unwavering confidence in His success will appear only less remarkable than His success itself. After reading the Gospels through, one asks in wonder what He did to produce so mighty an impression on the world. He constructed no elaborate machinery to ensure the effect. He did not lay hold of the centers of influence--learning, wealth, government, etc. It is true He instituted the Church. But He left no detailed explanations of its nature or rules for its constitution. This was the simplicity of faith, which does not contrive and prepare, but simply goes forward and does the work. It was the quality which He said could remove mountains, and which He chiefly desiderated in His followers. This was the foolishness of the gospel, of which Paul boasted, as it was going forth, in the recklessness of power, hut with laughable meagerness of equipment, to overcome the Greek and Roman world.

111. A third prominent feature of His character was Originality. Most lives are easily explained. They are mere products of circumstances, and copies of thousands like them, which surround or have preceded them. The habits and customs of the country to which we belong, the fashions and tastes of our generation, the traditions of our education, the prejudices of our class, the opinions of our school or sect--these form us. We do work determined for us by a fortuitous concourse of circumstances; our convictions are fixed on us by authority from without, instead of waxing naturally from within ; our opinions are blown to us in fragments on every wind. But what circumstances made the Man Christ Jesus? There never was an age more dry and barren than that in which He was born. He was like a tall, fresh palm springing out of a desert. What was there in the petty life of Nazareth to produce so gigantic a character? How could the notoriously wicked village send forth such breathing purity? It may have been that a scribe taught Him the vocables and grammar of knowledge, but His doctrine was a complete contradiction of all that the scribes taught. The fashions of the sects never laid hold of His free spirit. How clearly, amidst the sounds which filled the ears of His time, He heard the neglected voice of truth, which was quite different from them l How clearly, behind all the pretentious and accepted forms of piety, He saw the lovely and neglected figure of real godliness l He cannot be explained by anything which was in the world and might have produced Him. He grew from within. He directed His eyes straight on the facts of nature and life and believed what He saw, instead of allowing His vision to be tutored by what others had said they saw. He was equally loyal to the truth in His words. He went forth and spoke out without hesitation what He believed, though it shook to their foundations the institutions, the creeds and customs of His country, and loosened the opinions of the populace in a hundred points in which they had been educated. It may, indeed be said that, though the Jewish nation of His own time was an utterly dry ground, out of which no green and great thing could be expected to grow, He reverted to the earlier history of His nation and nourished His mind on the ideas of Moses and the prophets. There is some truth in this. But, affectionate and constant as was His familiarity with them, He handled them with a free and fearless hand. He redeemed them from themselves and exhibited in perfection the ideas which they taught only in germ. What a contrast between the covenant God of Israel and the Father in heaven whom He revealed; between the temple, with its priests and bloody sacrifices, and the worship in spirit and in truth; between the national and ceremonial morality of the Law and the morality of the conscience and the heart! Even in comparison with the figures of Moses, Elijah and Isaiah, He towers aloft in lonely originality.

Parable of the lost sheep.

112. A fourth and very glorious feature of His character was Love to Men. It has been already said that He was possessed with an overmastering purpose. But beneath a great life-purpose there must be a great passion, which shapes and sustains it. Love to men was the passion, which directed and inspired Him. How it sprang up and grew in the seclusion of Nazareth, and on what materials it fed, we have not been informed with any detail. We only know that, when He appeared in public, it was a master-passion, which completely swallowed up self-love, filled Him with boundless pity for human misery, and enabled Him to go forward without once looking back in the undertaking to which He had devoted Himself. We know only in general that it drew its support from the conception which He had of the infinite value of the human soul. It overleapt all the limits which other men have put to their benevolence. Differences of class and nationality usually cool men's interest in each other; in nearly all countries it has been considered a virtue to hate enemies; and it is generally agreed to loathe and avoid those who have outraged the laws of respectability. But He paid no heed to these conventions; the overpowering sense of the preciousness which He perceived in enemy, foreigner and outcast alike, forbidding Him. This marvelous love shaped the purpose of His life. It gave Him the most tender and intense sympathy with every form of pain and misery. It was His deepest reason for adopting the calling of a healer. Wherever help was most needed, thither His merciful heart drew Him. But it was especially to save the soul that His love impelled Him. He knew this was the real jewel, which everything should be done to rescue, and that its miseries and perils were the most dangerous of all. There has sometimes been love to others without this vital aim. But His love was directed by wisdom to the truest weal of those He loved. He knew He was doing His very best for them when He was saving them from their sins.

113. But the crowning attribute of His human character was Love to God. It is the supreme honor and attainment of man to be one with God in feeling, thought and purpose. Jesus had this in perfection. To us it is very difficult to realize God. The mass of men scarcely think about Him at all; and even the godliest confess that it costs them severe effort to discipline their minds into the habit of constantly realizing Him. When we do think of Him, it is with a painful sense of a disharmony between what is in us and what is in Him. We cannot remain, even for a few minutes, in His presence without the sense, in greater or less degree, that His thoughts are not our thoughts, nor His ways our ways. With Jesus it was not so. He realized God always. He never spent an hour, He never did an action, without direct reference to Him. God was about Him like the atmosphere He breathed or the sunlight in which He walked. His thoughts were God's thoughts; His desires were never in the least different from God's; His purpose, He was perfectly sure, was God's purpose for Him. How did He attain this absolute harmony with God? To a large extent it must be attributed to the perfect harmony of His nature within itself, yet in some measure He got it by the same means by which we laboriously seek it--by the study of God's thoughts and purposes in His Word, which, from His childhood, was His constant delight; by cultivating all His life long the habit of prayer, for which He found time even when He had not time to eat; and by patiently resisting temptations to entertain thoughts and purposes of His own different from God's. This it was which gave Him such faith and fearlessness in His work; He knew that the call to do it had come from God, and that He was immortal till it was done. This was what made Him, with all His self-consciousness and originality, the pattern of meekness and submission; for He was for ever bringing every thought and wish into obedience to His Father's will. This was the secret of the peace and majestic calmness, which imparted such a grandeur to His demeanor in the most trying hours of life. He knew that the worst that could happen to Him was His Father's will for Him; and this was enough. He had ever at hand a retreat of perfect rest, silence and sunshine, into which He could retire from the clamor and confusion around Him. This was the great secret He bequeathed to His followers, when He said to them at parting, 'Peace I leave with you; My peace I give unto you.'

114. The sinlessness of Jesus has been often dwelt on as the crowning attribute of His character. The Scriptures, which so frankly record the errors of their very greatest heroes, such as Abraham and Moses, have no sins of His to record. There is no more prominent characteristic of the saints of antiquity than their penitence: the more supremely saintly they were, the more abundant and bitter were their tears and lamentations over their sinfulness. But, although it is acknowledged by all that Jesus was the supreme religious figure of history, He never exhibited this characteristic of saintliness; He confessed no sin. Must it not have been because He had no sin to confess? Yet the idea of sinlessness is too negative to express the perfection of His character. He was sinless; but He was so because He was absolutely full of love. Sin against God is merely the expression of lack of love to God, and sin against man of lack of love to man. A being quite full of love to both God and man cannot possibly sin against either. This fullness of love to His Father and His fellow-men, ruling every expression of His being, constituted the perfection of His character.

115. To the impression produced on them by their long-continued contact with their Master the Twelve owed all they became. We cannot trace with any fullness at what time they began to realize the central truth of the Christianity they were afterwards to publish to the world, that behind the tenderness and majesty of this human character there was in Him something still more august, or by what stages their impressions ripened to the full conviction that in Him perfect manhood was in union with perfect Deity. This was the goal of all the revelations of Himself which He made to them. But the breakdown of their faith at His death shows how immature up till that time must have been their convictions in regard to His personality, however worthily they were able, in certain happy hours, to express their faith in Him. It was the experience of the Resurrection and Ascension which gave to the fluid impressions, which had long been accumulating in their minds, the touch by which they were made to crystallize into the immovable conviction, that in Him with whom it had been vouchsafed to them to associate so intimately, God was manifest in the flesh.

Chapter 5 Part B
Chapter 6 Part A

This text is from James Stalker's Life of Christ. New York, London, Edinburgh, etc.: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1909. Transcribed by David Ash. Used by permission of David Ash, 2 March 2005. David Ash, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, has placed several worthwhile texts online. View his list here. Images are from the CHI archives.