WE CHAPTER I THE COMMONPLACE JESUS E simply begin at the beginning, when, in endeavor to delineate the Master, we start out with the Jesus of the fields, the village, and the shop. No most ardent believer in His very godhood can challenge the fact that He was a man of flesh and blood, of thought and feeling, of action and passion, quite like His neighbors. His annals assure us that He was born a babe, that He grew as a child, that He matured into manhood, that He hungered and thirsted even after His resurrection. He walked, He grew weary, He sat down, He reclined, slept, bled, and died. Nay, we may justly infer, from the transference of His cross on the fatal morning of the crucifixion, in the ascent to Golgotha, from His own shoulders to those of a peasant, that His physique was not even of ordinary robustness. Had His personal appearance been impressive for peculiar beauty, or had he varied in any marked way or degree from His kind, in aspect or bearing, it is all but certain that some evidence of this must have survived. The silence of the annalists seems to refute the surmise of pious sentiment, that a Raphael or a Guido would have been delighted to sketch His face or form, or that a Phidias would gladly have preserved His figure in marble. Had Jesus been gifted with extraordinary physical attractiveness, the evangelists would not have failed to disclose somewhere, if only indirectly, the effect of this charm upon friend and foe. Doubtless He had that beauty of expression which a pure and sympathetic nature ever imparts to countenance, gesture, and movement; and we have evidence of a certain majesty of mien, the natural accompaniment of intense individuality and lofty aims. Beyond this He must be deemed, physically, as not above the average Jew of His day. The mental nature of Jesus also conformed to the intellectual habitudes of His race and class. He used the vernacular, with its characteristic ambiguities and idioms. Thus the meaning of John 3: 8, "The wind (va) bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit (võμ)," depends upon the Jewish use of "ruah," the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek word. Ruah in Hebrew meant successively breath, wind, spirit, Divine Spirit; and the saying was one of those earnest plays upon words, in which the Hebrew prophets delighted. Jesus taught by fiction,' by irony,' by sarcasm,' by enigma,' by hyperbole, by denunciation-all figures and forms of speech suggesting the limitations of human intelligence. He perceived with attention, and mused upon what He saw (0εάpet). He seems not to have frowned upon the little, transparent, and wellmeant artifices of social courtesy, and in the walk to Emmaus, "He made as if He would 1 Luke 15: 11-32. 2 Math. 15: 23, 24, 26. 3 Luke 11: 48. Luke 20: 41-44. have gone further." To speak mildly, He evaded His brothers in the matter of going up to Jerusalem for the feast of Tabernacles.1 At times, He acted reluctantly, and many think that He spoke with annoyance at Cana, when His mother suggested that He should work a miracle in the interest of the general merriment. By three evangelists He is described as marveling, though on but two occasions, in the one instance over unusual faith, and in the other over unusual unbelief. Once anger is imputed to Him,' but the circumstances indicate righteous indignation. He indulged in personal preferences, as in the case of Lazarus, John, Mary, and Martha, all of whom He "loved." He was so human that He was capable of loving at sight, and though the object of His sudden liking was so far from being in full sympathy with Him, that "he had great possessions" and went away grieved.3 His pity for the woes of men, very unusual 1 John 7: 8, ovπw is a doubtful reading, see verse 10. |
