Luke 4:32

THE POWER BEHIND

‘His word was with power.’

Luke 4:32

Christ’s word was with power, and it was the consciousness of this that enabled the first Christians, with all their knowledge of human weakness and moral evils, to aim so high, and yet to go forward so hopefully, so triumphantly, into the struggle.

And if we ask in what the power of Christianity lay, as distinct from the authority which a high and pure ideal exercises over the conscience, we find that:—

I. It placed the Christian in organic relation with a higher and supernatural life.—Nothing could have brought the high ideal of Christianity within the region of practical effort for the ordinary man but the belief that a new power had entered into human nature, and that man had become something different from what, in sad experience, he knew himself to be. ‘Teach a man,’ it is said, ‘that he is something greater than he is, and he will soon come to be what he believes himself to be.’ Christianity did not merely teach men that they were greater than they thought; it claimed to make human nature greater than it had been. As Jews, the first Christians were familiar with the thought of a people singled out to a kind of priesthood among the nations brought near to God and entrusted with His oracles, that through them He might educate the world. But that old idea would not contain the wider truth, the larger hope of Christianity. So the new wine burst the bottle. Jewish exclusiveness must be abandoned if the world is to receive the idea of the redemption of man as man, through Him in Whom differences of Jew and Gentile, male and female, barbarian and civilised, disappear, because He is the perfect Man. That notion of the universality of Christianity, though but slowly realised by the first disciples, is yet implicit in Christ’s own teaching; and the Incarnation, both in the order of time, and in the order of thought, is the ground of belief in the brotherhood of man, in it is the justification for that ‘enthusiasm of humanity’ which has become a catchword of the day. And the sure hope which carried the Christian forward was a supernatural hope. Chosen out of the world, the object of the world’s hatred and persecution, he was yet, as he believed, the purpose of God, the world’s conqueror. By the mere fact of his being a Christian he was (if we may use such a phrase) on the winning side in the great moral struggle between light and darkness. The future was with him. For a moment his faith might fail, when Christ, the embodiment of all his expectation, died upon the Cross. But with the new assurance of the Resurrection, the new presence of Whit-Sunday, he went forth fearlessly to overcome the world, the forces of the world, the forces of evil within and around him, knowing that he was endued with power from on high for the regeneration of man.

II. Again the Divine touched the human in an intensely personal relationship.—We see this most plainly in that virtue in which the Christian stood most opposed to the heathen world—the virtue of purity. Here, more than in either of the other parts of temperance, Christianity was committed to an ideal, unknown and unintelligible to heathen morals. We know how the controversy with heathen impurity showed itself in the early days of the Church. What were the weapons which the Christian teacher used? What was his appeal? We have been told of late years that ‘there is no true foundation for the strictest sexual morality other than the social duty which the Greeks asserted.’ Did he appeal, as we might now, to reverence for human personality? To a chivalrous respect for womanhood? To the theoretical, the actual, equality of all members in the body politic? There is not one word of this, nor could there be, for as yet there was, outside the Christian Church, no recognition of humanity as a family with equal rights. What, then, is his appeal? It is direct, personal, immediate. ‘What! know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?’ There were also for the Christian two kinds of love, love to God and love to man. Charity was always a theological virtue; it was love of God, and of our neighbour in God. It was that personal relation of the Christian with God in Christ which saved his service of God from melting away into a dreamy pantheism, and his service of man from being dissipated into a generalised feeling of benevolence. The Master had said, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.’ And the disciple was quick to interpret the thought. If Christ gave up His life for us, we ought also to give up our lives for the brethren.

III. Once more the power of Christianity consisted in the fact that it dealt with man as a social being.—Hence Christianity is not cast upon the world to triumph by its own intrinsic truth and beauty. Nor are individuals, as individuals, drawn to Christ without designs to their fellow-men. The Christianity of Christ is truer to human nature than the Christianity of many Christians. For if we honestly ask ourselves, How did Christ will to give to humanity the salvation which He has wrought for it? we are bound to answer, whatever our prejudices may be, He did not write a book; He did not formulate a creed—He founded a society. He selected and trained its first members for the work they were to do, and then sent them forth to gather into the spiritual kingdom, by the power of personal influence, those who were far off, as well as those who were near, ‘Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’ In these days we spend so much anxious thought on the development of the Church that we are tempted to lose sight of this primary fact. But all these questions as to what is permanent and what is transient in the organisation of the Church serve to throw into the shade the fact which lies behind them all—the fact, namely, that the Christian, just because he is a Christian, is a member of a spiritual society, of which Holy Baptism is the initiatory rite, the Eucharist the living bond of union, while its Magna Charta is the Sermon on the Mount. In the early days of Christianity there were no Christians unattached.

Rev. Canon Aubrey Moore.

Illustration

‘Judged, at least, by those among whom He lived and wrought, our Lord’s claim justified itself in that region where a pretended authority would be most easily found out. Evil spirits recognised His voice. With authority and power He commanded, and they obeyed. If men question His power in the moral world, His power to forgive sins, Christ refers them to that which is open to the eyes of men. “Whether is it easier to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (He saith unto the sick of the palsy), … Arise, and take up thy bed, and go unto thy house.” Thus by proving His power in the world of nature Christ prepared the minds of the Jews to believe in His power in the moral world. With us it is necessarily different. We have exchanged the naively objective attitude of ancient thought for the distrustful introspectiveness of modern days. And it is easier for us to believe in miracles on the strength of what we know of Christ’s power in the moral world, than to base our faith in that power on the evidence of miracles. We must begin with what is nearest to us. And the present power of Christ in the moral life is nearer to each one of us than the miracles which witnessed to that power in days of old.’