THE RELENTLESS LOVE OF JESUS

WHEN the older type of evangelist makes his appeal that people should ' come to Jesus,' or that they should ' open the door of their hearts to Him,' one sometimes feels as though our relation to Jesus is being misrepresented. People are sometimes urged in such a way that the emotion of pity is aroused. The evangelist, preaching perhaps from the text, or pretext, ' There was no room for them in the inn,' asks with real pathos, ' Will you not let Him in? '‑and man's real reaction is that of pity for One who has not where to lay His head. Surely this is to do despite to the majesty and the character of Christ? I We must remind ourselves that He who patiently knocks is the King of Kings, the judge of all the earth, the Lover of Souls, but a Lover whose love has relentless, inexorable qualities in it besides those of the ' Gentle Jesus.' And the phrase 'Come to Jesus,' which, rightly understood and carrying all its implications, is, in three words, the whole gospel message, is some­times used in a context which suggests that to come
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to the great Physician is to be healed by a touch and brought at once to perfect spiritual health. I am in such danger myself of over‑emphasizing the tender and winsome qualities of the Master that I want in this chapter to point out that He is not only a Physician who can use a tender touch, but a Surgeon who can, and may have to use cold steel.

To come to Jesus would be a wonderful experi­ence ; cleansing, purifying, renewing. At the same time, it would be foolish to imagine that that experi­ence would be anything else but surgical. One often hears people say how delightful it must have been to have talked with Jesus and companioned with Him ; but I think there would be, in most of our hearts, the same kind of conflict which swept over Peter when, deeply desirous of Jesus, he could not keep back the exclamation, ' Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, 0 Lord.' To go into His presence in the days of His flesh would not be all honey and sweetness.

Sweeter far Thy face to see,
And in Thy presence rest.

But not until some surgery had been done on our souls. Jesus would not merely give us His peace and His blessing, or put His hand on our head, and, in regard to our sins, say, ' Oh, well, never mind. We won't talk about that.' Within three minutes of meeting Him we should have given ourselves completely away. Our secret hypocrisies and sins and selfishness and shames would be exposed at once to that kindly but relentless eye. The
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self‑excusings under which we hide, the pitiful shelters we make for ourselves, the lies with which we stifle our consciences, would avail nothing. First of all, any experience of coming into contact with Him would be a spiritual operation, and Christ would be a Surgeon whose love would be relentless till the keen edge of His knife had got underneath our moral cancer.

Some one has said that a man is like an island. Sometimes one has to row all round it before one finds a place to land. Most of us land where we think we shall be most welcomed. Jesus landed where He was most needed. He rowed round a life till He saw its real problem ; that is to say, until He saw the place where He was needed most; and just because His love is relentless He landed there. He rowed round the life of the rich young ruler. It was a fair island, and He loved it, but the place on which He landed was the money question. He rowed round the island life of Nicodemus, a fine old man, yet parts of his life were dead through rabbinical custom and tyrannous attention to ceremonial details. Jesus landed there and demanded rebirth. With Zacchaeus, He landed on the question of his exactions from the poor. And in the case of the woman of Samaria He wouldn't be put off, though she did her best to put Him off. He relentlessly insisted on the moral problem of her life.

All of us have in our minds a picture of Jesus a very beautiful picture; and we do right to make much of His love, His gentleness, His winsome
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attractiveness, His quiet happiness, His unbroken peace. It is inspiring to think about Him thus We must not, however, put away from our minds the realization that there has never been anybody on the earth half so searching to face. Many people think of Him, in a modern phrase, as always being 4 nice to people,' or charming. He wouldn't be nice to people at the expense of laying bare the evil in their lives. His thirst for reality, and the relentless nature of His love, must have made Him seem rude to some people. Women of sentiment sought to flatter Him. ' Blessed is the womb that bore Thee, and the breasts which Thou didst suck.' But His answer came back like cold grey steel thrust through a bunch of flowers : ' Blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it.' All that has been written about His gentleness is true, but all that has been written about His love is truer; for the quality of love is not flabby and weak and effeminate, but stem and strong and relentless. He wasn't particularly ' charming ' to the Pharisees. He has blasted their name for ever. ' Ye genera­tion of vipers, how shall ye escape the damnation of hell ? ' That is not being nice to people. ' I will follow Thee withersoever Thou goest,' says an impulsive follower; but through the bunch of flowers came the grey of cold steel : ' Very well, but remember that the foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.' ' Be it far from Thee, Lord,' says Peter, eager to make the way of life easy for the Master, and hating the thought of suffering for
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Him. Listen to Christ's answer to one of His best friends: 'Get thee behind Me, Satan,' ' I came to cast fire upon the world,' He says. ' I came not to bring peace, but the sword of division ; to set father against son, mother against daughter, to make foes within a man's own household, and to demand the bearing of a cross, and uttermost sacrifice.' A love, but a relentless love that won't be satisfied with less than reality. So violent is Jesus sometimes, so stem, so austere, so surgical, so insistent on reality, so relentless, so inexorable, that I sometimes wonder whether, when He said, ' I am meek and lowly in heart '‑a strange thing to say‑it was because He had definitely to tell them that this was His real nature, lest men should gather a wrong impression from the vehemence of some of His words.

Jesus was relentless with Himself, and is relentless with others. He will have no friendship with. us on the basis of a sham. With many of our friends the basis of friendship is mutual admiration. ' You be nice to me and I'll be nice to you.' Think how many friends you've got to whom you could point out an obvious flaw in their character, even in the kindest and gentlest way, without there being for ever after a flaw in the friendship. In many cases, if the faintest breath of criticism were passed, the friendship would break down, at any rate for a time. It is futile to suppose that any friendship with Jesus can be on these terms.

Jesus could have had a very easy time if He had not pressed His own ethical demands and been
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content to give the world His new view of God as the great Father, and of all men as brothers, without relentlessly pushing into the implications of such a gospel. But His love is relentless. The very first time He preached a sermon He preached on a text in Isaiah, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bound, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.' And almost before the sermon was finished the whole synagogue was in an uproar, and His very neighbours were intent on thrusting Him to the edge of the village cliff to cast Him down. He cut right through the conventions and formalities of popular religion, through all the cant and unreality and hypocrisy, to the real thing.

In our concern with things that do not matter vitally we may realize that Jesus in His day was surrounded by controversies ‑ whether Gerizim. or Jerusalem was the proper place to worship; how ceremonially to clean the pots and pans; whether oaths on the Temple were really binding or whether one must mention the gold on the Temple; whether, supposing one had a sacred obligation to support one's parents, one could say ' Corban,' and be re­lieved of the obligation ; whether, if one passed through a cornfield and pulled two or three ears of corn, it was desecration of the Sabbath; and so on. How Jesus broke through these conventional rules and unmeaning details! With what passionate
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utterance He condemned those Pharisees who pre­tended to be the religious elect, and tithed mint, anise, and cummin, and for a pretence made long prayers, enlarged the borders of their garments, and yet laid burdens grievous to be borne upon His beloved people, devoured widows' houses, and were like whited sepulchres, fair to the outwaxd eye, but inside full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. The hymn beginning,

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,

expresses a great trutth, but so does Charles Wesley's hymn,

Thou Son of God, whose flaming eyes
Our inmost thoughts perceive.

And we may also remember that St. John, to whose memories of Jesus which have come through to us in the fourth Gospel we owe some of our own ten­derest pictures of the Master, also wrote these words 1 ' His eyes were as a flame of fire, His voice as the voice of many waters; out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two‑edged sword, and His countenance was as the sun shining in its strength. And when I saw Him I fell at His feet as one dead.'

So if this relentless Lover of our souls walked through our streets and saw the conditions of poverty, ill‑health, and misery such as very few of us realize; if He could meet the landlords of some of the holes where poor people dwell; if He could pass some public‑houses on a Saturday night and see the white
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faces of little children playing on the steps, or sitting in prams while their mothers and fathers drink within; if He could go to our greyhound tracks and see boys and girls recklessly gambling away their wages for an hour's alleged sport, foolish victims of the lust for money on the part of bookmakers rather than wicked sinners; if He could visit some houses where that lovely thing called innocent womanhood is counted very cheap; if He could walk through some of our mills, factories, mines, offices, slums, markets -- yes, even churches -- and we could see His face, we should not be reminded of the ' Gentle Jesus,' but of the ' Son of God whose flaming eyes our inmost thoughts perceive.' ' To call Jesus " Lord " is orthodoxy, and to call Him " Lord, Lord," is piety, but to call Jesus " Lord, Lord," and do not the things that He says, is blasphemy.' And few of us would escape the censure of those eyes; for to find time for business, dress, bridge, golf, dancing, theatres, and our own selfish enjoyment, trying to squeeze the last drop of pleasure out of life, always obsessed by what we can get out of the community and never what we can put into the community, putting self first, and having a good time, repudiating all obligation, and hating all self‑discipline, never sacrificially thinking of our brothers living in an earthly hell, or of children robbed of childhood's heritage, is a greater blas­phemy than to deny the existence of God; and, while our consciences sleep about the things that curse God's lovely world, we are guilty of sharing in them.

So I would leave you face to face with Jesus. But don't think of love, at least His love, as something
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soft and kindly and tolerant. Your friendship with Him, which I think is the centre of all Christian ex­perience, will only be on His terms, and He is a relentless, inexorable, violent Lover who loves us re­lentlessly so as to save us from the hard heart and the impenitent spirit, and that awful death of the soul which makes us unconscious that we are doing wrong. His love smashes through our smug com­placency, our petty, conventional respectability, and our vulgar selfishness and insistence on having a good time. We may say that all the penalties men bring upon themselves in God's law‑bound world are expressions of His violent, relentless love saving them from something worse.

The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide.
Take not Thy thunder from us.
But take away our pricie. . . .

Tie in a living tether
The prince and priest and thrall,
Bind all our lives together,
Smite us and save us all;
In ire and exaltation,
Aflame with faith, and free.
Lift up a living nation
A single sword to Thee.

From the English Hymnal: By permission of the Oxford University Press.