* S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Rome Ideals, 112.
loo THE GROWTH OF THE CHILD JESUS
that mistake. You think every day and every hour of God's grace to you as the chief of sinners. And though our Lord thought without ceasing of the grace of God that had come to Him ; it was not the same kind of grace as that is which has come to you. The grace of God has come to you bringing salva- tion. But the Saviour of men did not for Himself need salvation. More than one kind of grace came to Him, first and last. But not among them all the grace that has come so graciously to you. And it breeds great light on the kind of grace that came to the Holy Child when we turn from the fortieth verse of this chapter to the fifty-second verse, and there read that He increased in favour with God and man. The true sense here is the same as when a voice came from heaven to the Jordan, and elsewhere, and said : " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." " The good pleasure of God was upon him," that would be the best way to render the text.^
^ The highest reaches we can attain here are but broken fragments of the full Divine beauty. At the best we can only become dimly transfigured ; only faintly does the beauty of the Lord appear in us. The last design made by the great painter, Albert Durer, was a drawing showing Christ on His Cross. It was all completed, except the face of the Divine Sufferer, when the artist was summoned away by death. At the end of the longest and holiest life we shall have but a part of the picture of Christ wrought upon our soul. Our best striving shall leave but a fragment of the matchless beauty. The glory of that blessed Face we cannot reproduce. But when we go away from our little fragment of transfiguration we shall look a moment afterward upon the Divine features, and, seeing Jesus as He is, shall be like Him.2
3. This spiritual life, essentially in Him from His birth, had been naturally developed in His consciousness by means of external circumstances, and through the growth of His intellect. The first gleams of the consciousness of His spiritual life may have arisen through the influence of His home and of outward nature. A kindling influence then came upon His intellect in the religious journey to Jerusalem and the sights He saw at the Feast, and reached its culminating point in the conversation in the Temple.
Accompanying this dawning consciousness of the spiritual
^ A. Whyte, The Walk^ ConverscUioriy and Character of JesiirS Christ our Lord, 47. a J. R. MHler.
ST. LUKE II. 40 loi
light and life which dwelt within Him, there arose also in His mind the consciousness of His redeeming mission. We seem to trace this in the words "my Father's business." It does not appear, however, just to say that this idea was now fully defined and grasped. We should be forced then to attribute more to Him than would agree with perfect childhood; but there is no un- naturalness in holding that it now for the first time became a dim prophecy in His mind. It required for its complete development that the sinfulness of the world should be presented to His growing knowledge as a thing external to Himself. Sin so presented made Him conscious, by the instinctive repulsion which it caused Him, of His own spotless holiness ; and, by the infinite pity which He felt for those enslaved by it, of His own infinite love for sinners ; and out of these two there rose the consciousness of His mission as the Eedeemer of the race from sin. This was the business which His Father had given Him to do. Clearly and more clearly from this day forth, for eighteen years at Nazareth, it grew up into its completed form, till He was ready to carry it out in the action of His ministry.
II I instance one single evidence of strength in the early years of Jesus : I find it in that calm long waiting of thirty years before He began His work. And yet all the evils He was to redress were there, provoking indignation, crying for interference — the hollowness of social hfe, the misinterpretations of Scripture, the forms of worship and phraseology which had hidden moral truth, the injustice, the priestcraft, the cowardice, the hypocrisies : He had long seen them all. All those years His soul burned within Him with a Divine zeal and heavenly indignation. A mere man, a weak emotional man of spasmodic feeling, a hot enthusiast, would have spoken out at once, and at once been crushed. He bided His own time (" Mine hour is not yet come "), matured His energies, condensed them by repression, and then went forth to speak, and do, and suffer. This is strength ; the power of a Divine silence ; the strong will to keep force till it is wanted ; the power to wait God's time.^
^ F. W. Robertson, Sermons, ii. 182.
Always at Home.
Literature.
Holland (H. S.), Pleas and Claims for Christ, 173.
Jerdan (C), Manna for Young Pilgrims, 308.