4. The poverty of Jesus was the manifestation of His grace ? What is grace ? Grace is a free, undeserved benefit — a benefit
1 Johannes Eckhart. * Literary CJmrckman, xxxii. (1886), 532.
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conferred without any merit, claim, or title on the part of the recipient. Grace is opposed to debt, to hire, or wages, or any- thing a man can obtain for himself or establish a right to. It is a gift in the most absolute sense of the word. This is the sense in which it is used in the text. The grace referred to here is the infinite grace of the Incarnation.
"Grace" is a beautiful word, expressive of a still more beautiful thing. It awakens our oldest and sweetest memories, stands at the heart of our most sacred associations. Men explain it by " favour," but the richest favour is poor grace. The Greek word which is in its root the cognate of the English term, was more suggestive to the Greek than even " grace " can be to the English mind. It runs back into a root expressive of joy, to be glad or happy. Now the happy is ever the benevolent man, the miserable is the malicious. The happy must create happiness, the joy of beatitude is beneficence. So He whose nature is gracious could not allow misery to prevail where He had designed happiness to abide. The sin that made sorrow was a pain to the perfection of God, and the necessity, born of grace, that had made Him Creator now made Him Eedeemer. In " the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ " we see the beatitude of God stooping to work out the salvation or last beatitude of man.
^ Grace is what God is to us : disgrace is what we are to God, until His grace has charmed us into unity with Himself. The disposition, or soul of Grace, is perfect love, unselfish Love ; but we must also include Loveliness of form and robe, otherwise our conception will be one-sided and defective. The Love of God in Christ Jesus makes us adoringly thankful and joyous ; but it will also make us exquisite forms of luminous humanity like the Beloved Throne-Man.^
IIL
"What He Pukposed.
'* That ye through his poverty might become rich."
1. Christ's stooping to poverty was entirely unselfish. " For your sakes he became poor." Nothing could have seemed less ^ John Pulsford, Stray Thoughts of a Life- Time, 85.
266 THE LIBERALITY OF CHRIST
calculated to enrich man than Christ's poverty ; nothing has ever or anywhere so mightily added to the mass of the world's weal. For affirming that it would do so, Paul was charged with foolish- ness ; in confessing that it has done so, we but acknowledge " the wisdom of God."
Here is the emphatic proof that God cares for the mass of men, cares for the poor, cares for man as man. Had Jesus been born in a palace people might still have doubted His message of the love of God. It would have seemed that there was some- thing in poverty that was a degradation to Him. The poor would have thought that their position was despised. But the Son of God came as a poor man. That was the absolute proof that social differences were unknown and unregarded by the Heavenly Father.
^ Abraham Lincoln used to say, " I think God loves the common people because He has made so many of them." So we may say that God loves the mass of men, loves the poor, because He sent)- His Son into the world as one of them. There would have been innumerable barriers between Christ and humanity if He had been born among the mighty of the earth. But coming in poverty He came as man to man, assuring the humblest that God loved and cared. We can scarcely measure the enrichment of the world which has come through this wondrous fact that " though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich." ^
2. Our Lord's poverty enriches by making God's wealth cur- rent coin. In becoming poor Jesus Christ transmuted Divine wealth into a human coin that we can trade with ; He translated heavenly ideas into the broken language of earth. The deepest cause of our abject poverty as moral and spiritual beings is our lack of God, of an overwhelming sense of His glorious presence. When Philip said, " Shew us the Father, and it sufiiceth us," he uttered the deep and far-reaching need of humanity. He might have said, " We have heard of ' the Almighty,' with whom our father Abraham was familiar, and of ' the Jehovah ' who de- clared His name unto Moses ; but all the revelations of the past are dim and shadowy. Show us ' the Father.' " Jesus, bending over Philip, said, " Have I been so long time with you, and yet
' John Reid.
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hast thou not known me, Philip ? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father." You may see the Father's compassion shining through the tears which trickle down My cheeks ; you may hear the accents of the Father's voice in the tones which address you now : you may feel the touch of a Father in the hand that grips you : you may feel the throbbings of a Father's love in this heart which beats in truest sympathy with you. The Father has limited Himself, has translated Himself into human form. " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."