THE RADIANCE OF JESUS

ONE of the glorious things about the thinking of this generation is that we are getting into our minds a more complete picture of Jesus. One of the most important things in the Christian life is that at the back of our experience we should have a picture of Christ which is as true as we know how to make it. Christian experience may be said to be a reflection of the inner picture of Christ which a person cherishes. Because this is true the bad name the Christian has got for himself as a person of long face and solemn demeanour partly derives from a picture of Christ which depicted Him merely as the Man of Sorrows. We might try this little experiment with ourselves. We might shut our eyes and see what kind of picture of Jesus leaps most readily on to the screen of the mind. Is it a Man on a cross or staggering under it ? Is it a Man wearing the crown of thorns ? Most of us would, I think, find that that picture was pre­eminently sad, and that picture is not to be lightly set aside when we remember that, after all, it is the Cross which is set in the midst as the symbol of Christianity. At the same time, I want us to see that Jesus Christ was and is the most radiant per­sonality in history.

Painters and poets are partly to blame for the
208
false emphasis. Pictures of the Man of Sorrows are far more numerous than pictures of the Man of joys, and among the poets we find Goethe saying that ' Christianity is the religion of sorrow,' and Swin­burne, in his 'Hymn to Proserpine,' penning his famous line:

Thou bast conquered, 0 pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath.

The criticism one can hardly help making is that, in the main, both poet and painter fail to realize that great sorrow does not inhibit radiance of spirit, and is not a denial of it. Both in picture and in poem we have a Christ whose eyes are just deep melancholy or anguish; whereas we have all met people who in the very depths of trouble are still radiant in spirit, and whose eyes, swimming it may be in tears, yet shine out at you with a quiet, glad serenity which means that in the secret place there is a radiance which no sorrow in this world can ever dispel. And these are the people, one feels, who are most like Christ. After all, the men who have done the most radiant work in the world have not been the men most free from sorrow.

Probably we shall have to emphasize almost to the point of exaggeration the gayer sides of Christ's character before we can correct the picture of Him which is in most people's minds. Many people, for instance, are still quite shocked at the thought that Jesus ever made jokes or was deliberately 'humorous. Yet how else can one interpret some of His sayings? He tells a story of a man grumbling
209
at the speck in his brother's eye when a great ' plank ' ‑for this is the meaning of the word translated ' beam '‑is sticking out of his own. He pictures a Pharisee drinking. It may have been soup. He does not say. But he carefully strains out a gnat, and gulps down a whole camel. Whether the Phari­sees laughed at that I don't know, but I am sure the little boys sitting round his feet and playing on the edge of the crowd did. Does a man light a lamp, He asks in one of His addresses, and put it under the bed ? Do you think that question could have been asked seriously ? Take the story of the friend at midnight asking for three loaves. The response is a sleepy ' Go away! I am with my children in bed.' I believe that is an obvious touch of humour. Then, you remember, the friend goes on pestering him till at last the man rises, ' not because the other is his friend, but because of his importunity, and gives him whatsoever he desires.' In other words, he does not want to be troubled, but the other makes such a noise that at last the father says that if only he will stop making that noise, which may wake the baby at any moment, he will give him the whole house. Jesus paints another picture of Pharisees invited to a feast. One of them excuses himself on the ground that he has bought two oxen, another that he has bought a field, another that he has married a wife. Fancy a corpulent old Pharisee missing a free meal because he had to try his oxen or look at a muddy field, or, we should say, hold his wife's hand!  Surely there is the ring of real humour in His voice and a sparkle in His eyes! I think also that the radiant
210
humour of Jesus probably explains many passages that he sound harsh. Unfortunately we cannot recapture the flash in His eye, or the tone of voice on which the character of many of His replies depends. For instance, you will remember the story of the Syro-­phoenician woman who comes to Him, and to whom He says a thing that sounds cruel and hard, even rude: ' I was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. . . . It is not meet to take the children's food and cast it to the dogs.' What an awful thing to say!  But you cannot see His eyes. You know He was joking from the woman's answer. She would never have dared to answer a rabbi as she did unless she had seen in His eyes that He was only teasing her. 'No,' she said, ' but even the puppies (she uses a different word from His word for dogs) eat the crumbs under the table.' And then He did what she had asked Him to do. Sometimes, when I hear these matchless stories read in church by some solemn, pompous person, I imagine Peter and John sitting together in the back pew, and the former nudging the latter and saying, ' He wouldn't read it like that if he had been there, and heard Jesus say it."

I am not trying to prove that Jesus was a humorist, but trying to correct the picture most of us have of the Man of Sorrows, by emphasizing the other side, in order that we may see running through every part of His life manifestations of a radiant spirit, of which a sense of humour is one of the signs.

The records of His life, moreover, are constantly
211
letting things slip out, some of them almost accidentally, which show what a radiant man He must have been, and therefore is. 'The common people heard Him gladly.' Not a doleful, sorrowful person, then I 'Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord.' We read that He loved children and that they loved Him. They made their way to Him with a child's persistence and instinct for a friend. They refused to be driven away from Him. That is sure proof of a radiant personality. Then think of that phrase: 'a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.' Dr. Glover has called that ' the most precious bit of slander that ever slipped from slimy lips.' It is, for it could never have arisen unless there had been a radiant attractive­ness and friendliness about Jesus for all kinds of people. Take the offended cry of those who said, 'The disciples of John fast often, but Thy disciples fast not.' Jesus has a very clever answer. ' Can the children of the bridechamber fast when the bridegroom is with them?' I say' clever' because, according to Jewish law, a bridal party was always exempt from fasting, and He is saying that to be with Him is always radiant happiness.

One wonders in this connexion what really happened at the wedding‑feast at Cana. Jesus may have turned the water into wine, however hard the miracle seems to modem minds. That which is difficult must not be excluded as impos­sible, especially where a unique person is operat­ing. That would be an unscientific as well as
212
presumptuous attitude. That the miracle is only recorded in the Fourth Gospel does suggest, how­ever, that it may have been coloured by the minds in which it was stored‑minds in which ideas were quickly changing‑during the long interval between the event and its being incorporated into the Fourth Gospel.

So some have thought that at this rollicking feast the wine gave out, that Jesus ordered the wine‑jars to be filled with water, and that they drank water. We can imagine that Jesus was the life and soul of the party, the centre and instigator of the fun, and that the bridegroom, with that exaggerated courtesy of the East, made some such remark as, ' In your companionship even the water tastes like wine,' and that the ruler of the feast, taking up the joke, made his remark about keeping the good wine until the end. Those of us who have lived in the East know that it would only need a servant passing through the room when the ruler made his remark for the rumour to go quickly around and be taken up. The East loves to endow its great men with miraculous powers. I remember an Indian graduate asking for leave from his college that he might investigate whether Mr. Gandhi really had changed a woman into a man. Another rumour said that he had made a spinning‑wheel for a poor woman by telling her to bury two strands of her sari in the earth and dig up the 9pinning­wheel after the lapse of a few hours. If such rumouis can get about during a great teacher's lifetime, there is room for such a theory as I have
213
indicated when over half a century passes between an event and its incorporation into a document, especially when, in the meantime, the leader is claimed to be divine with a divinity thought to be substantiated by deeds of magic. What does emerge indubitably is the radiant spirit of the Master.

Take another sentence: 'Jesus wept.' I have often wondered why they put that down, unless it was because it was such a very rare thing. They do not say ' He laughed,' though He must have often done so. So they record that He wept because it was so very rare. And if there was one word more often on His lips than another, it was 'Be of good cheer.' That is the word of a radiant spirit. He says it to the sick of the palsy. ' Be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee.' He says it in the darkest hour of all, just before His death. ' In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world;' And to me it is very significant that Paul had so learnt Christ that when he is dreaming of Christ, in his very dreams Christ uses His characteristic words. ' The night following the Lord stood by me and said, "Be of good cheer; for as thou hast testified con­cerning Me at Jerusalem, so thou also at Rome." '

It was the Master's purpose that we should enter into His radiance. 'These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy may be in you and that your joy may be fulfilled.' Do we possess this radiant Christianity of Jesus ?
214
Let me set down, by way of contrast to all this, one of the dreariest passages in English literature. It is a quotation from The Revolution in Tanner's Lane, by Mark Rutherford. ' Spiritual teaching, spiritual guidance these poor peasants had none, and when the Monday came they went to their work in the marshes and elsewhere, and lived their blind lives under grey skies, with nothing left in them of the Sunday save the recollection of a certain routine performed which might one day save them from some disaster with which flames and brim­stone had something to do. It was not, however, a reality to them. The wheelwright and his wife, and the six labourers with their wives, listened as oxen might listen, wandered home along the lanes heavy‑footed like oxen, with heads towards the ground, and went heavily to bed.'

I do not know any passage in literature which so cleverly expresses the very opposite of what I mean by radiant Christianity as that passage does. It leaves in the mind a picture of religion which is something dreary and depressing beyond all words. It reminds you of a sodden dawn on a Lincolnshire wold, under a sky of unbroken grey, when mist hangs heavy over the coarse, tawny grass, and when the only sound is the sullen booming of North Sea breakers rolling up the desolate sand­dunes on a lonely shore.

To turn to the New Testament is like passing suddenly into a sunny valley where streams laugh their way down the hillside, where birds sing, and flowers bloom, and trees toss joyous messages to
215
one another in the breeze, and where, arched over all, is ' the tender sky of blue.' There is only one word for the Christianity of the New Testament. It is radiant.

You remember how fast it spread. That speaks for its radiance. It spread like a glorious infection, not so much taught as caught. It was called a 'gospel,' which means ' good news,' and it spread with the infectious power good news always has. The men who exemplified it in their lives were radiant men. They revelled in the new life which that good news had brought them. They were alive as others were not alive; and, what is more these others could see that at once. They had an enabling secret. They had resources, with which they seemed in constant touch, which other people had never so much as guessed. Life could never be the same again. Life was thrilling with new meaning. Life was throbbing with new power.  All things had become new. They were radiant men teaching a radiant religion.

Yet it was not because outward circumstance were easy. Some people, when they hear that others are radiant, leap to the conclusion, 'Well, they can't have as much to put up with as I have."

It was after Peter and John had been cruelly beaten that we read 'they departed from the presence of the Council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for the Name.' It was after Paul had been five times flogged, stoned, and three times shipwrecked, that, with one ankle chained to a ring in the wall of his cell. and one wrist chained to a
216
Roman sentry, he wrote from a Roman prison, ' Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, Rejoice.' And this spirit has continued through the ages, so that we might fill many pages recalling case after case of radiance. One of Wesley's helpers, John Nelson, was thrown into a dungeon under­neath a slaughter‑house. He tells us ' it stank worse than a hog‑sty by reason of the blood and filth that flowed into it from above.' Then he adds, ' My soul was so filled with the love of God that it was a paradise to me.' And we could add our own testimony. I think of a high‑caste Indian student studying to be a barrister, whom I baptized into the Name above every name, and who was turned from his home, his studies brought to an abrupt conclusion, his career ruined. To his relatives for ever he is dead. And as he went away to be a clerk in a little village five hundred miles from Madras, hounded out of the place by hate and prejudice, he gripped my hand and said, 'But it is worth it.'

Have you got this brand of Christianity? This is the only genuine brand, with its smiling label on every face.  Insist on seeing the label!  Do people kindle at your radiating personality?  Do they warm their starved souls at the glow of your spirit?  I find I have collected two stories of Phillips Brooks, the great American preacher.  On one occassion he was coming down the aisle after preaching one of his wonderful sermons, and one working man nudged another and said, 'I say, Bill, it makes you feel good just to look at him.'
217
And on another occasion a certain Boston newspaper printed this item: ' It was a dull, rainy day, when things looked dark and lowering, but Phillips Brooks came down through Newspaper Row and all was bright.' Do we make our good news catch­ing like that? Do we remind men of Jesus? Do they say, ' I'd give anything to be like that ' ?

Many onlookers‑and there are many‑don't quite know what to make of us as we go about wearing the label 'Christian.' We claim so much for our religion, and yet we seem so little different from those who profess nothing. There is no radiance about us, no sparkle. Shelley and Words­worth got more out of sunsets and clouds and flowers than some of us get from Christ. We are so eager to get men to Christ, and such poor adver­tisements of Him. We try every stunt on this earth to get people to church except that of being such radiant Christians that they would follow uE anywhere to get the radiance in our very voices, and eyes, and handclasp. We adopt an attitud( which says‑'Come and be like us.' And when the3 see the way we go about, and the way we conduci our business, so very little different from the world. ling, and the miserable way we react to the smallesi set‑back and least sign of trouble, they breatho an inward prayer, ' From ever being anything liki you, good Lord deliver me.' When I was lyinj in hospital in Mesopotamia, I used to be visited with painful conscientiousness by a padre whose denomination I won't give away. It wasn't mine.
218
He seemed to come every day. He used to come and stand at the end of my bed and just look at me out of the most melancholy eyes I have ever seen in a long face,'till I wanted to throw things at him. Then he would say, 'Well, Captain Weatherhead ? ' And I would say ' Well ? ' and for a time that was the extent of our conversation. And then he would make a desperate effort to drag the conversation round to religion, until after a time as soon as I saw him come into the ward I used to pretend to be asleep, and I expect he was as relieved as I was not to have to talk to me. There was a little V.A.D. in the ward who' though she said an occa­sional 'damn' when she dropped a thermometer, wore, at any rate, a cheerful face, even when the thermometer was a hundred and fifteen degrees in the shade. The officer in the next bed to myself used to discuss a thrilling situation with me. Did I think that the cheerful little V.A.D. would go to hell and the mournful parson go to heaven; because for himself he would rather go to hell with the V.A.D. than to heaven with the padre? In this I fully agreed with him. Neither was much like Jesus, but of the two the nurse had it easily. The padre's visit was about as cheerful as that of a man who went to see his sick friend in an attic bedroom, and began the conversation with, 'Well, George, they'll have a job getting your coffin down them stairs.'

Jesus derived His radiance from three sources. (I) He had no sense of sin. (2) He was doing God's will. (3) He was certain of God. You are
219
saying, ' How can I be radiant ? I am always falling into sin; I am miserable at the memory of it.' Yes, my dear brother, but Jesus is saying to every man who is penitent, 'Your sins, which are many, are all forgiven.' And that means they are put behind His back, forgiven, forgotten, to be remembered no more for ever. So begin again without a sense of sin and you will be radiant. If God has put your sins behind His back you must put them behind yours.

Jesus was doing God's will. You must do it. And you must see God's will in the job you are doing every day. If it cannot be reconciled with God's will, you must get out of it. But, if it can, you must see God's will in it and God's meanings in it. You mustn't think of doing God's will only when you are taking a Sunday‑school class, for instance, or doing what we call Christian work, for otherwise ninety‑nine per cent. of life will be secular, when all ought to be sacred. Your work is service to the community, and, if well done, is service to God, and you ought to do it radiantly, with all your personality. And, let me add, not with one eye on the clock, as one who lives for closing time! If you are a cobbler,  be the very best cobbler you can be. Remember that by putting leather on shoes instead of brown paper you are helping God to answer the prayers of His people for health in wet weather. You are doing His will as much as a minister or a doctor. A friend of mine told me recently of a tombstone which bears this inscription, ' Here lies the body of Peter Garth, who by
220
the grace of God was cobbler in this village for forty years.'

Jesus was certain of God. So must we be. Not that all is His will, but that all lies within the circle of His redeeming activity. If pain comes, well, let me fight it and win if I can; if not let me try to wrest from it something splendid, some growth of character. Let me co‑operate with God in it so that it shall be forced to work out to His glory and my spiritual gain. If disaster comes, let me be sure that God always says the final word, and that in His own way He will bring me through. I may lose money, position. I may lose all that life holds dear; but let me still be certain, obstinately certain of God, since Jesus, who trod my way, lost all, even life itself, and died, certain of God. Even through your tears you may become more certain of God; for you will have noticed that you can often see the bills better when there is moisture before your eyes.

You cannot have radiance without these three sources of it, any more than you can have the lake, lying radiant and quiet in the sunlight, without the secret streams that come down somewhere‑though you may not see where‑from the hills of God. You can have a certain kind of happiness without these sources, but it is not deep enough to stand any of the tests of life or to carry you through the deep places of pain. Happiness may spring from the heels, but radiance only springs from the heart, a heart quiet and steady, deep and strong, unselfish and disciplined, like some deep mountain tarn
221
unruffled by every breeze that blows, upheld for ever by the strength of the hills in whose bosom it lies, and reflecting the glory of heaven.

I know there are times when radiance seems to desert you. The wine of life runs out. Only the waters of depression and despair are left. The only thing to do is to make your way to Him, till the waters, which threatened to quench your spiritual life, seem like the wine which renews it; until your shamed, tear‑stained face lights up again with radiance. 'They looked unto Him and were radiant, and their faces were not ashamed.'