2 Corinthians 4:6

THE FACE OF JESUS CHRIST

‘For God, Who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ.’

2 Corinthians 4:6

A look is older than a word. You understood your mother’s looks before you understood her words. Your mother’s face was to you the fairest in all the world. And as the years rolled on that face grew fairer and fairer. You thought what Donne wrote of George Herbert’s mother—

‘No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace,

As I have seen in one autumnal face.’

It is said that when Bunsen lay dying, as his wife bent over him he said, ‘In thy face have I seen the Eternal.’ But Bunsen’s words are, after all, only partially true.

I. The fullest revelation of God is in the Face of Jesus Christ (John 14:8).—For that Face shows that ‘God is love.’ There is salvation in a vision of that Face. It is the Face of the Lover of souls. The tender phrase ‘Lover of souls’ is applied to the Divine Being in The Wisdom of Solomon. It certainly belongs to Christ by right. But who can paint the Face of the Divine and Human Saviour?

II. But note well the argument of the text.—‘God … hath shined in our hearts, in order to the shining forth (that is, to others) of the knowledge (we have ourselves) of the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ.’ As the Revised Version renders it, ‘Seeing it is God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, Who shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ.’ If we have light, we are to reflect it and pass it on. If we have seen the Vision, we shall long for others to see it too.

III. The Face of Jesus Christ is the only Face that never fades.—When God spoke to Moses his face shone, and then Moses spoke to the children of Israel with his face still shining, and when he had done speaking he put a veil on his face that they might not see the glory fade. This appears to have been the case if we compare two passages in the Revised Version: ‘And are not as Moses, who put a veil upon his face, that the children of Israel should not look stedfastly on the end of that which was passing away’ (2 Corinthians 3:13): ‘And when Moses had done speaking with them, he put a veil on his face’ (Exodus 34:33). But the glory on the Face of Christ ‘remaineth’ (2 Corinthians 3:11). We have seen many a face that we have loved, perhaps one specially whose face was to us ‘as it had been the face of an angel,’ and the face faded out of our sight. One of the saddest little poems is that one by Charles Lamb in which the refrain recurs again and again, ‘All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.’ But there is one Face bright with eternal Youth from which the glory never dies, from which the light never vanishes, from which the beauty never fades; it is the Face of the Divine and Human Saviour, the Face of ‘Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.’

—Rev. F. Harper.

Illustration

‘In one of Charles Dickens’s tales there is a touching line: “Tell them,” whispered little Dombey when he was dying, “that the Face of the picture of Christ on the staircase at school is not Divine enough”—very true, for in that Face there is a “light that never was on sea or land.” ’