John 8:38-47 I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and you do that which you have seen with your father.… This sinlessness of Jesus stands alone in history in that — I. JESUS CLAIMED IT FOR HIMSELF. Even those who have rejected His Divinity admit that He was preeminently holy; yet no ether man has ever claimed or had claimed for him this sinlessness. On the contrary, in proportion to a man's saintliness he realizes the exceeding sinfulness of sin. It is the guiltiest who do not feel guilt. The cry of the sin-wounded heart is wrung from a David, not from a Herod; from a Fenelon, not from a Richelieu. We hear its groaning in the poems of a Cowper, not of a Byron; in the writings of a Milton, not of a Voltaire. That Jesus should have claimed to be sinless, and to have acted all through on that assumption, can never be explained except upon the ground of His Godhead. Ii He were not sinless and Divine, He would be lower than His saints, for then He would have made false claims, and been guilty of presumptuous and dishonouring self-exaltation. II. THIS CLAIM HAS NOT AND CANNOT BE IMPUGNED. 1. The Jews could not meet His challenge. It was not from want of desire. There is a vein of natural baseness in fallen natures which delights in dragging down the loftiest. Whom has not envy striven to wound? And has it not ever been at the very highest that the mud is thrown? Even , , Whitefield, did not escape the pestilent breath of slander. Yet, though Jesus lived in familiar intercourse with publicans and sinners, not even His deadliest enemies breathed the least suspicion of His spotless innocence. They said, in their coarse rage, "Thou art a Samaritan," etc., but none said, "Thou art a sinner." "Have nothing to do with that just Man," exclaimed the Roman lady. "I find no fault in Him," declared the bloodstained Pilate. "There is no harm in Him," was the practical verdict of Herod. "This Man has done nothing amiss," moaned the dying malefactor. "I have shed innocent blood," shrieked the miserable Judas. His most eager accusers stammered into self-refuting lies; and the crowds around the cross, smiting on their breasts, assented to the cry of the heathen centurion, "Truly this was the Son of God." 2. Subsequent ages have conceded this sinlessness. The fierce light of unbelief and anger has been turned upon His life, and the microscope of historical criticism and the spectrum analysis of psychological inquiry, without finding one speck on the white light of His holiness. The Talmud alludes to Him with intensest indignation, yet dares not invent the shadow of a crime. Outspoken modern rationalists seem as they gaze at Him in dubious wonder to fall unbidden at His feet. Spinoza sees in Him the best symbol of heavenly wisdom, Kant of ideal perfection, Hegel of union between the human and the Divine. Rousseau said that, if the death of Socrates was that of a sage, the death of Jesus was that of a God. His transcendent holiness moved the flippant soul of Voltaire. Strauss wrote whole volumes to disprove His Divinity, yet he calls Him "the highest object we can imagine with respect to religion; the Being without whose presence in the mind religion is impossible." Comte tried to find a new religion, yet made a daily study of the "Imitation of Christ." Renan has undermined the faith of thousands, yet admits "His beauty is eternal, and His reign will never end." How can all this admiration be justified if He, of all God's children, claimed a sinlessness which, if He were not Divine, was a sin to claim? III. MIGHT NOT HIS VOICE ASK US ACROSS THE CENTURIES, "TO WHOM WILL YE LIKEN ME AND SHALL I BE EQUAL?" I do not ask what religion you would prefer to Christianity. Christianity is the true religion, or there is none. No man would dream of matching the best thoughts of the world's greatest thinkers, or the highest truths of the best religion, with Christianity. Not, certainly, the senile proprieties of Confucianism, the dreary, negatious, and perverted bodily service of Buddhism, or the mere retrograde Judaism of the Moslem; and if not these, certainly no other. 1. But compare the founders of these religions with our Lord, The personality of Sakya Mouni is lost in a mass of monstrous traditions; but his ideal, as far as we can disentangle it, was impossible and unnatural. The life of Confucius is tainted with insincerity; and he not only repudiated perfection, but placed himself below other sages. Mohammed stands self-condemned of adultery and treachery. Socrates and Marcus Aurelius were the noblest characters of secular history, but those who know them best confess that the golden image stands on feet of clay. 2. If you turn to sacred history, which will you choose to compare with Him whom, in dim Messianic hope, they saw afar off? Adam? but he lost us Paradise. Moses? but he was not suffered to enter the promised land. David? but does not the ghost of Uriah rise again? 3. But are there not in the long Christian centuries some as sinless as He, since they have had His example to follow and His grace to help? Look up to the galaxy of Christian examples, and it is but full of stars, of which each one disclaims all glory save such as it derives from the sun. Many have caught some one bright colour, but in Him only you see the sevenfold perfection of undivided light. And none have been able to appreciate the many sided glory. All see in Him the one excellence they most admire. The knights saw in Him the model of all chivalry, the monks the model of all asceticism, the philosophers the source of all enlightenment. To Fenelon He was the most rapt of mystics, to Vincent de Paul the most practical of philanthropists, to an English poet "The first true gentleman that ever breathed." His life was the copy over which was faintly traced the biography of all the greatest saints, but each of them presented but a pale image of His Divine humanity. The wisdom of apostles, the faith of martyrs, the self-conquest of hermits, were but parts of Him. In the tenderness of Francis, the thunderings of Savonarola, the strength of Luther, the sincerity of Wesley, the zeal of Whitefield, the self-devotion of Howard, we but catch the single gleams of His radiance. His life was not the type of any one excellence, but the consummation of all. No mind has been large enough to comprehend its glorious contradictions — its clinging friendship and its sublime independence; its tender patriotism and humanitarian breadth; its passionate emotion and unruffled peace; its unapproachable majesty and childlike sweetness. IV. WE HAVE NOT FOUND HIS EQUAL — CAN WE IMAGINE OR INVENT IT? Has this ever been done? The greatest poets and thinkers have striven to picture characters faultlessly ideal. Have they — Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton — done so? No. Why? Because the ideal of every man must be stained more or less with his own individuality, and therefore imperfection. Had the evangelists invented the character of Jesus, it must have been so in their case, too. Christ transcends the utmost capacity of the combined apostles. In the apocryphal gospels invention and forgery were at work — and with what result? The "Imitatio Christi" is a precious and profound work, yet even that realizes but one phase of the Redeemer's holiness. (Archdeacon Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father. |
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