^ No one has yet discovered the word Jesus ought not to have said, none suggested the better word He might have said. No action of His has shocked our moral sense ; none has fallen short of the ideal. He is full of surprises, but they are all the surprises of perfection. You are never amazed, one day by His greatness, the next by His littleness. You are ever amazed that
no THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS
He is incomparably better than you could have expected. He is tender without being weak, strong without being coarse, lowly without being servile. He has conviction without intolerance, enthusiasm without fanaticism, holiness without Pharisaism, passion without prejudice. This man alone never made a false step, never struck a jarring note. His life alone moved on those high levels where local limitations are transcended and the absolute Law of Moral Beauty prevails. It was life at its highest.^
^ It is a singular picture the evangelic portraiture of Jesus, and the first peculiarity which arrests our attention is this — that it portrays a sinless man. The evangelic Jesus is completely human, sharing all our common infirmities and restrictions. He suffers weariness, hunger and thirst, and pain. His knowledge is limited, and He confesses its limitations. Yet He is never worsted in the moral conflict. He passes through the daily ordeal stainless and blameless. The marvel of this representa- tion is twofold. On the one hand, Jesus claimed to be sinless. Searched by a multitude of curious and critical eyes, He issues His confident challenge : " Which of you convicteth me of sin ? " He often felt the pang of hunger, but never the sting of remorse ; He was often weary, but He was never burdened by guilt ; He abounded in prayer, but in His prayers there was no contrition, no confession, no cry for pardon. Not only before the world but before God He maintained His rectitude unfalteringly to the last. This is a unique representation. A lively and keen sense of sin is a constant characteristic of the saints. . . . No word of self-con- demnation ever passed His lips, no lamentation over indwelling corruption, no sigh for a closer walk with God. It was not that He closed His eyes to the presence of sin or made light of its guilt. Renan, being asked what he made of sin, answered airily : " I suppress it ! " but that was not the manner of Jesus. No soul has ever been so sensitive as His to the taint of impurity ; no heart has ever been so oppressed by the burden of the world's guilt. His presence was a rebuke and an inspiration ; and to this hour the very thought of Him has the value of an external con- science. His spotless life is a revelation at once of the beauty of holiness and of the hideousness of sin. And not only does the evangelic Jesus claim to be sinless, but His claim was universally allowed. His enemies in the days of His flesh would fain have found some fault in Him, and they searched Him as with a lighted candle ; yet they discovered only one offence which they might lay to His charge ; and they did not perceive that it was in truth a striking testimony to His perfect holiness. They saw Him ^ John Watson, The Miiid of the Master.
I TIMOTHY III. i6 III
mingling freely with social outcasts, conversing with them and going to their houses and their tables; and they exclaimed: " This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them ! " It would have been no surprise to those Scribes and Pharisees had He associated with sinners, being Himself a sinner. Their astonish- ment was that He should do this, being Himself apparently so pure ; and their outcry was a covert suggestion that, for all His seeming holiness, He must be a sinner at heart. The fault, how- ever, lay not with Him but with themselves. They did not understand that true holiness is nothing else than a great com- passion. Such was the holiness of Jesus, and it was a new thing on the earth, an ideal which the human heart had never conceived. It is very significant that our Lord's claim to sinlessness should have been thus allowed and unwittingly attested by those who were bent upon disproving it. Bronson Alcott once said to Carlyle that he could honestly use the words of Jesus, " I and the Father are one." " Yes," was the crushing rejoinder, " but Jesus got the world to believe Him." ^
III.
" Seen of angels."
We now come to the third clause, " seen of angels," and it is only natural to suppose that it, too, must have some connexion with and direct relation to what has gone before. The central theme of the verse is the incarnation, and we must interpret these words in the light of the incarnation. " Seen of angels " must have been one of the great results and purposes of the manifestation of the Son of God "in the flesh." Proceeding a step further, let us notice the word translated "seen" in this clause. It is a remarkable word, for it is the same word as we find often used in the Gospels of the appearances of our Lord after His resurrection from the dead, as, for instance, in Luke xxiv. 34, where we read : " The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon." The word occurs some twenty-three times in the New Testament and, as Bishop EUicott says, it is used " nearly always with reference to the self-exhibition of the subject," that is, it implies more than the mere act of seeing, which may be wholly independent of the person or the object seen, for it involves a ^ David Smith, The Historic Jesus, 65.