JESUS' CONCERN FOR OUR SELF‑RESPECT

I LOOKED in the dictionary, hoping that there would be a definition of self‑respect which would make a useful distinction between the self‑respect on which we pride ourselves and its exaggerated forms that we dislike. But the dictionary con­tented itself with the illuminating definition that self‑respect is respect for oneself, so that I was thrown on my own resources for a definition.

Rightly or wrongly, I conceive self‑respect to be belief in one's own worth‑worth to God and worth to man. It may, of course, abnormally develop until it becomes pride, conceit, or arrogance ; or it may be minimized, making a man slack, careless, and shabby in character as in dress. But we can all echo the prayer of the old Edinburgh weaver, ' 0 God, help me to hold a high opinion of myself.' 'The first thing to be done to help a man to moral regeneration ' says Macdougall, the great psycholo­gist, ' is to restore if possible his self‑respect.'

First of all, let us take a look at Jesus. That is a good place to begin and to end. Let me very briefly sketch four pictures, two concerning women and two concerning men. Jesus is reclining at table in the house of Simon the leper. Pointed omissions
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have been made in regard to Him: the customary kiss of welcome, the servant ready to unloose the sandal and bathe the dusty feet and anoint the hair with oil‑these have been left out ; but Jesus is quite happy in His own mind. He reclines on a couch at an angle with the table, in the room dimly lit by flickering lamps, with curtains hanging in the arches. A woman‑‑one of the harlots of Magdala‑like a moonbeam, gliding from pillar to pillar, eludes the servants and is standing at His feet. She anoints them with ointment, and wipes them with her hair, and then losing control, as we should say, she bursts into tears. We all know the feeling of nerve‑strain when, as we moderns say, we ' could sit down and howl.' You will notice what Jesus says. In the fullness of His pity He does not pretend that she is not a sinner. Although He wants to give her back her self‑respect, He cannot deny obvious facts; so He praises the thing that is most praiseworthy about her‑her love‑and says, 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.'

The second picture is that of the woman taken in adultery. Jesus would not look at her while the crowd was there. He stoops down and fingers the dust. God knows there were enough mor­bid, curious eyes already' fi~xed upon her. But when His incisive words had driven her tor­mentors away and there was not even a woman left to stand by her, He gives her back her self­respect, her belief in her own worth‑' Neither do I condemn thee;‑go thy way; from henceforth sin no more.'
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The third picture is that of Zacchaeus, looked down upon for more reasons than one, despised as a mean and contemptible profiteer, who had sold his birthright as a Jew to serve a hated foreign power : a man who expected to be scorned, and who, amongst Jews at any rate, had completely lost his self­respect. Yet Jesus calls him a son of Abraham, the title he was most hungry to hear, and brings upon Himself the criticism of all who stood round by going in to be the guest of this man in order that He might give him back his self‑respect.

The last picture is that of the thief hanging upon a cross. A thief can maintain self‑respect while he evades the law. There is a certain tang in evading capture which ministers to a man's self ‑regard ; but what self‑respect can be left to a thief captured and crucified ? Yet through the gathering gloom there comes a quiet Voice, full of certainty and full of assurance: 'To‑day thou shalt be with Me in para­dise.' Through the gates of death they would go together ; a common thief and the Saviour of the World. Jesus will stop at nothing to give a man back his self‑respect.

Not only in such definite incidents, but in all His contacts with people, Jesus showed a great concern for men's self‑respect. Sometimes you see a man of quick mind and nimble wit direct his powers against a person of simpler mentality. I think this ought to be done very, very carefully. If the victim of our wit is a great friend, or perfectly able to defend himself, the exercise is harmless enough, and full of
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humour. Within the family, for instance, it is a good thing that minds should sharpen themselves one against another. But it is so easy to wound a person's self‑respect, and again and again I have seen a timid soul shrink right inside his shell because there was a feeling of inability to meet the thrusts of a quicker mind. Jesus was very careful in this not to wound men's self‑respect. He was never sarcastic at the expense of simple‑minded people. When He was dealing with rabbis and educated Pharisees, His thrusts were keen and quick, because the rabbis were shrewd and witty themselves. But people without humour and without a certain dex­terity of mind are merely confused and bewildered by the quick thrust. ' I am no match for him,' they will say, and promptly become silent. And what the other has done is not to score a victory, but to wound self‑respect, which may be more calculated to lessen efficiency than if a wound had been in­flicted in the flesh.

It ought to be a mark of Christ's man that he invariably shows a concern for the self‑respect of others; because self‑respect, which I have defined as a belief in one's own worth to God and to society, is the basis of the confidence without which we can never achieve anything.

May I put in a word here for this grace, especially in regard to children ? I was speaking only the other day to a great friend of mine who had the most vivid memories of his childhood when visitors to the house were shown photographs of his elder brother‑
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'Look what a lovely baby so‑and‑so was '‑whereas no photographs were ever shown of him. He had un­forgettable memories of the way in which this brother did everything right, was clever and neat in his appearance, whereas he himself was always in the wrong. His parents only seemed to look for birn if something had been broken. And one night they found him sobbing away in an attic, feeling that no one wanted him at all. To wound in this way the self‑respect of a little child is to hurt him far more than any thrashing could do. If you are bound constantly to rebuke a child for one fault which he often commits, do praise him for other qualities which he possesses. I heard lately of a father saying to his son, ' I do not know what you are going to be. I can't imagine anybody giving you a job; you'll never make anything of life,' and so on. Yet if the child believed that he never would inake anything of life, the belief would actualize to some extent, but it would not be his own fault. The responsibility must be laid at the door of his father, who, in robbing him of his self‑respect, robbed him of a God‑given quality which is one of the greatest driving‑forces of the personality. Ridicule, sarcasm, pcorn, and contempt, which produce a sense of inferiority, should always be avoided with a child. In five minutes, or in five seconds, in a fit of anger you can do an injury to a child's mind which it will take years to eradicate, and the emotions con­nected therewith, if repressed or bottled up, may produce neurotic symptoms and nervous break­downs when the child is a man or a woman of
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forty years of age. Even to burst out laughing at a child who mispronounces a word, or makes some error in what we are pleased to call etiquette, may drive him to dissimulation and lying, in sheer fear of being laughed at, and of thus losing his self­respect. Remember the words of the Master about those who cause His little ones to stumble.

It will be a mark of a Christian society to have a concern for people's self‑respect. A little while ago I went to visit a man in jail. I took with me his young wife, who, by the kind permission of the governor, was allowed, under exceptional circum­stances, an interview with her husband. How those grim walls frightened that girl I Was her man so bad that he had to be locked up and guarded with such impressive care? Leaving her in an ante­room, I was conducted round the building, and the thing that impressed me, which I could hear in my dreams almost, was the locking and unlocking of doors. Go into the bakery and a door must be unlocked before you, and it is locked behind you. Go into the laundry and a door is unlocked and relocked. To get out for exercise it would appear to the outsider that a man had to pass through half a dozen locked and guarded doors. You can see the result on a man's mind‑' Am I such a desperate person that I need locking up like that?  I wish there were another way of treating the men who have slipped into faults which in the eyes of God are no worse than the faults of most of us, but which are punished because they are sins against a social
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system. And I could not get out of my mind the lines written by a man in prison:

I know not whether laws be right
Or whether laws be wrong,
My only thought both day and night
That prison walls are strong;
And every day is like a year

Whose days are very long,
And every foot of prison walls
Is made of bricks of shame.
And Christ the Lord sees through the bars

How men their brothers maim.

I am not making an attack on the prison system. I am saying that, when society is really Christianized, nothing will ever be done to a man, however he has sinned, which will rob him of his self‑respect. If he has lost it already, everything will be done to give it back to him.

The danger of unemployment, from a religious and psychological point of view, lies here. It tends to undermine a man's self‑respect. You see the effect on his mind. 'Is there no service I can render ? Is there nothing that I can do which people want ? Have I no gift at all with which I can enrich the common stock ? Am I utterly use­less to society ? ' A lot‑, of fun has been made in regard to 'the dole,' and probably in many cases it has been misused. But I do plead with Christian people not to regard it as a kind of national charity, but rather to regard it as a retaining fee paid to worthy men and women whom society would be glad to use but for the rottenness of the economic
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conditions prevailing, for which in a sense we are all responsible : a retaining fee paid to keep men and women fit for that healthier time when the community will be only too glad to avail itself of their services. Remember that if a war broke out we should soon change our tune about the unemployed, whom many now regard as a nuisance. Five minutes after war was declared they would be regarded as heroes. We must not allow them to feel like parasites, just because conditions offer them no work, lest we undermine their self‑respect and lower the morale of the nation.

When you come to diagnose the psychology of suicide you will find that probably in the last analysis there is a complete loss of self‑respect, or, according to my definition, the loss of a man's belief in his own worth to God and man. No one has ever com­mitted suicide who was persuaded by another's belief in him to believe in himself; who was still persuaded that he had a value; that society needed him, and that God had a purpose for his life.

Down through the ages comes the voice of the Master, 'By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.' And it is part of love‑nay, the first element of love‑to have a concern for the self‑respect of others.

Some people have an idea that to maintain personal self‑respect one must adopt a certain fine­ness in dress, in mannerisms‑I did not say manners ‑‑and in keeping up appearances. I once heard one woman say of another, ' She has no self‑respect, she even washes her own step.' What of the One
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who washed His disciples' feet? Thank God, the Son of Man was once a carpenter 1 It solves so many problems that might have been raised as to His attitude to labour. There is an old story that, hidden away in some intimate place, Mary always kept one of the hanimers that Jesus used, so that when her Son was at the height of His fame and the darling of the populace she might never cease to remember that He has for ever dignified labour, and once made with His own hands tables and ploughs and yokes.

Some one has said that Jesus' ministry opened with a party and ended with a picnic. At a party He had a concern about the wine, lest the self‑respect of the host should suffer loss. And after His resur­rection, at a picnic on the shore, He Himself was the host. They were strange days, those days after the Resurrection ; days full of emotional experience. I wonder if it was for some kind of ,relief from the quick succeeding emotihal experi­ences of fear, despair, hope, and joy that one night they set off to fish, in a spirit which some of us have known when we have found relief in doing something with our hands., Then, after the long night‑a night half thinking, half fishing‑when fisherman's luck was out, they turned their boat towards the shore and in the dim light of dawn they saw a figure standing on the beach. A voice hails them: 'Boys, have you any food? ' They say, 'No.' But He has seen a shoal of fish near
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the shore, and directs them where to throw their nets, and they try to get the whole shoal, until the nets are breaking. And then, when they get to land, Jesus has made breakfast for them. The Son of God, who knows His friends are cold and discouraged, tired and hungry, lights a charcoal fire with flint and steel, kneels down by it, blows it with His lips, dirties His hands, cooks a breakfast for hungry fisher‑folk, and does it all without any loss of self‑respect. Do you want any finer com­ment on housework than that ?

Always God will have a concern for our self­regard. Dr. Orchard, a teacher to whom I owe more than I can express, paints a picture in one of his books of the beatific vision, in which he describes how awful it would be to come face to face with God. He writes, 'There is nothing so unbearable as to find yourself in company for which you are not fitted, to come into contact with some refinement of nature which makes you seem rude and coarse, to find the judgements of your own mind condemned by a culture which is immediately recognized as superior." I know what Dr. Orchard means, but I think we need not be terrified. We shall always be God's children, and He will guard our self‑respect. We shall not be frightened into submission either in heaven or on earth. The splendour of the beatific vision may break our hearts by its glory‑a glory that may cause us pain, as even things on earth that are ineffably beautiful cause us pain; but the splendour
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of heaven will always be our Father's glory, and we shall always be His children.

I shall never forget a friend of mine, whose father was a very great man, telling me how, as a little boy, he so missed his daddy when public engage­ments took the great man away. One night, when his father was expected home, the lad wanted to stay up to greet him, but he had been rather naughty, and was sent to bed. He wakened be­tween ten and eleven and heard his father's voice, got up, dressed, and came down. He simply couldn't keep away, and yet he half feared a rebuke, for his act was one of disobedience. But his father took him into his arms and held him very close, and said, 'My own little child.' My friend says that he can remember the delicious sense of belong­ing to his jather.

God so guards our self‑respect that, whatever we do, even though we break His heart, He gathers us in the everlasting arms and holds us very close, and says, ' My little child.' Surely we can never feel unwanted or outcast or worthless, for every son of man can sing:

I am His, and He is mine,
For ever and for ever.