Mark 6:2,3

THE SUPREMACY OF CHRIST

‘From whence hath this man these things? and what wisdom is this which is given unto Him, that even such mighty works are wrought by His hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not His sisters here with us? And they were offended at Him.’

Mark 6:2

So they asked of old; so we ask to-day. For is He not wholly one of ourselves—a Man of our flesh and of our bone? ‘Whence, then, and why?’ Surely a natural question enough, and never was it asked more anxiously or more nervously than to-day. For we in our day have had specially opened to us the Gospel of the humanity of Jesus.

I. Man’s Brother.—How near it has brought Him to us! How real, we feel now, was the surrender of Himself to the limitations of the narrow and local situation! How deep and complete was the process by which He emptied Himself, and took our nature, and talked our language, and shut Himself up in our temporary frontiers, and confined Himself to our round of thoughts, and conformed to the shape of our historical conditions! We start, sometimes, in sudden alarm as the solid actuality of it all comes home to us. It is like a new revelation, with its strong and swift surprise. The Incarnation had been to us but a phrase. We had never imagined that it was so downright and physical a fact as we now see that it must have been. Yes! We start back sometimes in alarm. Yet we recover heart as we recognise the extraordinary gain of the nearness, of the neighbourhood, of the brotherhood into which it has brought Jesus Christ. He had been so mystically remote, so unactual, so visionary, as we first learned of Him through our Creeds. Now we see that it is true in a sense that we had never dreamed of, that He became as one of us, and was on all points tempted like as we are, and was touched with our infirmities.

II. Man’s Master.—It is just here that a new wonder begins to reveal itself, a secret begins to open. This Man, Who was so near, Who was so like the others, so brotherly, so utterly natural, began to take up before man’s eyes such a strange aloofness. He showed Himself so solitary; He was in possession of such unaccountable resources; He assumed such a unique supremacy; He had knowledge which could not be explained; He drew on some hidden fountain of His own; He claimed and exercised an authority for which there was no obvious and intelligible justification. What is it? What does it mean? He dwells apart; He takes counsel with no one; He never classes Himself with other men; He stands over them; He refuses all identification; He speaks out of some far-away pre-eminence. The Gospel story is the record of the growth of this strange singularity—this remote and solitary pre-eminence. He Who begins as man’s Brother shows Himself more and more as man’s Master, as his sole supreme Lord.

III. Man’s King.—His claim is paramount. His authority cannot even be challenged; it cannot submit to criticism. It repudiates, of necessity, all offers from without. It cannot allow itself to be influenced or modified. And the nearer you come to Him the more you find that this is true. It is this total isolation of Jesus on earth among men which makes the Gospel story so impressive. He is come so near, He has made Himself ours; yet what we learn, what we feel, is that He is perfectly separate from us; that not one of us for one moment moves on His level. He draws upon resources of which we have no cognisance, and possesses knowledge which lies outside our experience or proof.

(a) Men are judged at last wholly according to their relationship to Him. ‘I was hungry, and ye gave Me meat … and ye gave Me no meat.’

(b) His appeal to the universal sense of sin. Never for an instant does He exhibit the slightest consciousness of that which is the inevitable experience of all other men. He cannot class Himself among their sinful ranks. He stands wholly outside their sickness of soul, and this is why He can heal them.

(c) His knowledge of the Father is not a knowledge for which He wrestles and strives with other struggling men, gaining a higher insight than others by force of a more prevailing effort. Nay, He delivers it, He assumes it, as an experience possessed by Him alone and with utter certitude.

IV. The keyword.—Once again we are driven back on to the keyword of Christianity: Transfiguration. He takes all as it stands, and, without altering what it is, nevertheless changes it from glory to glory. Without in any way ceasing to be what it is, by nature or substance, His humanity became other than it was. Nothing is gone, nothing is destroyed, nothing is perverted, nothing is de-naturalised; but, for all that, it is a new thing, a new creature. There is nothing else like it, it stands alone; and yet there is no point at which we can leave go of the human nature and reach out for something that we call Divine. The Divine is seen within the human. The Divine revelation is made through the transfigured flesh. Go nearer and nearer to your Brother, Jesus, and you draw nearer and nearer to Christ. Press closer and closer to that Humanity, and lo! you find yourself adoring your God.

V. Nearness and neighbourhood had their own peculiar perils of old, when He was on earth. They retain that peril still. It was just because they knew Him so familiarly, and felt Him so close in ancient Nazareth, when they rejected Him. But by loving Him as a man we shall learn to fear Him as our Judge, to honour Him as our King, and to worship Him as our Lord God.

Rev. Canon H. Scott Holland.

Illustration

‘The holiest of men may to all outward eyes appear exactly like other people. For in what does holiness consist but in a due fulfilment of the relative duties of our state in life, and in spiritual fellowship with God. Now the relative duties of life are universal. Every man has his own. That which makes one man to differ from another is not so much what things he does, as his manner of doing them. Two men, the most opposite in character, may dwell side by side, and do the very same daily acts, but in the sight of God be as far apart as light and darkness.’