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A PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE GOSPEL
HISTORY.
(Concluded from page 56.)
The Redeemer of the world
is on His second Preaching Circuit throughout Galilee, carrying through
town and village the glad news of the Kingdom of God about to be set up.
All noiselessly had He done this before, nor indeed did He ever "strive,
or cry, or cause His voice to be heard in the streets;" but on this second
progress He bears about with Him some of the notable trophies of the
first. A band of healed and grateful women were permitted to accompany
Him, and honoured to minister to His temporal wants and those of the
Twelve, during all this tour. The names of some of these attached debtors
to the love of Jesus, and one or two particulars of their case, serve,
like the touches of some inimitable artist, to identify and familiarise
them to every student of this divine picture. We have been looking at them
in our two former papers one by one, and observing with delight, but with
no surprise, how common attachment to the Lord Jesus, common attendance
upon Him, and common services to Him, had welded them into one sisterhood
of dear affection for each other, which drew and held them together at all
the most stirring scenes which followed this one in the earthly history of
their Lord.
But as we were preparing to
take our leave of them, we beheld in the countenance of a Christian sister
who had followed us in our study of this picture, something like an
expression of envy, which seemed to say, 'Ye Galilean women, why was not I
with you on that evangelistic tour, ministering to the Lord of my
substance also? Mine's a debt as large as yours, and mine the heart
through grace to pay it; but I was born, it seems, out of due time for
such service.'
Not so, my sister in Christ
Jesus. Listen to me, while I now read you the picture which we have been
studying in common, or, in other words, try to bring out the idea3 for all
time which it embodies. If I do this to any purpose, you will find
yourself in the very position of these Galilean women, but in a sense
every way more exalted.
Know, then, that although
Christ Himself is now " rich," never again to "become poor," He has left
His cause upon earth in the same necessitous condition as Himself was in
the days of His flesh; that faith and love have now to do the same offices
to it which then they did to Him; and that Christ in heaven so identifies
Himself with His Cause upon earth, that whatsoever is done in faith and
love to it, is, in His estimation, done to Him.
"Saul, Saul, why
persecutest thou me?" said the ascended Redeemer, in overpowering glory,
to Saul of Tarsus, as he drew near to Damascus to crush out the life of
Christianity there. "And I said, Who art Thou, Lord? And He said, I am
Jesus whom thou persecutes!." (Acts xxvi. 14, 15.) ' Thou hast punished me
oft in every synagogue; many of my saints hast thou shut up in prison;
and, when they were put to death, thou gavest thy voice against Me.' Yes,
in every indignity done to His saints, every blow aimed at His truth,
every attempt to extinguish His interest or "His name" upon earth, He
feels Himself to be the Object struck at. Catching up this awful idea, one
apostle speaks of those who have " trodden under foot the Son of God,"
(Heb. x. 29,)—dreadful charge to underlie!—and another represents the
whole antichristian territory as a second Jerusalem, "the great city where
our Lord was crucified." (Rev. xi. 8.) Nor was it to teach us merely the
sympathy of the Redeemer, in the loose sense in which it is commonly
apprehended, that the Son of God was 3een walking with the three Hebrew
youths in the midst of Nebuchadnezzars' burning fiery furnace (Dan. iii.
25); but that He identifies Himself with His suffering witnesses, and
holds Himself the party cast into the fire.
And is it, for a moment to
be thought that the ascended Redeemer still experiences through His
members contempt, dishonour, imprisonment, and death, but does not, in the
opposite treatment of them, feel Himself countenanced, kindly entreated,
espoused, and honoured? Let Himself give the answer: "When the Son of Man
shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He
sit upon the throne of His glory. And before Him shall be gathered all
nations, and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd
divideth his sheep from the goats. And He shall set the sheep on His Tight
hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on His
right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared
for you from the foundation of the world. For I was an hungered, and ye
GAVE ME MEAT; I WAS THIRSTY, AND YE GAVE ME DRINK; I WAS A STRANGER, AND
YE TOOK ME IN; NAKED, AND YE CLOTHED ME; I WAS SICK, AND YE VISITED ME; I
WAS IN PRISON, AND YE CAME UNTO me." (Matt. xxv. 31-36.) 'Not we,' the
astonished souls reply; 'we never did that, Lord; we were born out of due
time, and enjoyed not the high privilege of ministering unto Thee.' 'But
ye did it to my poor ones, to these my brethren, now beside you, whom I
cast upon your love.' 'Truth, Lord, Thy name was indeed dear to us, and we
thought it an honour too great to suffer shame for it. When amongst the
needy and distressed we espied any of the household of faith, we will not
deny that our hearts leapt at the discovery; when they came to us as
petitioners, it seemed as though "our Beloved Himself had put in His hand
by the hole of the door, and our bowels were moved for Him." (Cant. v. 4.)
Sweet was the fellowship we had with them, as though we had "entertained
angels unawares" (Heb. xiii. 2); all difference between giver and receiver
melted away under the beams of our common love of Thee; it knit us
together; or, if any difference remained to be felt, it was when, leaving
us with expressions of gratitude for our poor givings, we seemed the
debtors to them, rather than they to us. But, Lord, it was not Thee we
were kindly entreating V 'Yes, it was me,' replies the King from the
throne of His glory—'Me in the disguise of my poor. I came to you, and ye
knew me; when a homeless "stranger ye took me in." Seized and imprisoned
by the enemies of the truth, "ye came unto me," at the risk of your own
liberty and life, cheering me in my solitude, and "oft refreshing me in my
bonds." When shivering in nakedness, "ye clothed me," and I felt warm. My
parched lips, when thirsty, ye moistened with cups of cold water; and when
famished with hunger, "ye gave me meat," and my spirit recovered. "Ye did
it unto me." As for you on the left hand, ye did nothing for Me. I came to
you also, but ye never knew Me, and had neither warm affections nor kind
deeds to spend upon Me. I was as one despised in your eyes." 'In our eyes,
"Lord, Lord?" We never saw Thee until now, and sure never so behaved
ourselves to Thee." 'Yes, ye did; for in the disguise of these My poor
members I came soliciting your pity, but ye shut up your bowels of
compassion from Me. I asked relief, but ye had none to give Me. Take back,
then, what ye gave — your own coldness, your own contempt, your own
dismissal. Ye bid Me away from you:—"Depart from me, therefore, ye
cursed!'"
On these mysterious
"ministrations," then, to the lord of Glory in disguise upon earth—as once
on this Galilean circuit, so in His evangelistic operations from age to
age—will He suspend, it seems, each one's blissful or blighted eternity. "
Come, ye blessed, for ye did it unto me.—Depart, ye cursed, ye did it not
to me." In that "me" lies an emphasis which no tongue can utter. On the
affection we shall be found to have borne, and the services of love we
shall be found to have rendered here below to Him who shall gather before
Him all nations, will turn our everlasting weal or woe.
But certainly, of the
Redeemer's debtors, woman has the least cause to envy her Galilean sisters
the honour of being "with Him, and ministering to Him of their substance."
For these Galilean women did but exemplify woman's noblest altitude and
special sphere in the service of Christ.
Were one internal evidence
of the truth of the Bible, and of the divinity of the religion which it
discloses, to be demanded of me—one that should be at once decisive and
level to ordinary capacity— perhaps the position which it assigns to Woman
might be as safely fixed upon as any other. Whether we take her
destination before the fall, her condition under the fall, and what the
religion of the Bible has done to lift her out of it, the finger of God is
alike clearly to be seen. The formation of Woman was not the creation of a
superior, to overawe or rule over the man, nor of an inferior, to be
looked down upon and used by the Man for subordinate ends, but the
formation from his very self, and from the region of his heart, of "an
help meet for him," (literally, "over against him," "answering to him,")
the counterpart of him, his second self. Had Woman been made without the
intellectual capacity to enter into and sympathise with all that Man was
made for, she would not have been his " counterpart," and the man would,
to the whole extent of this deficiency, have been "alone" which the lord
God had said " it was not good that he should be." But this peculiar
vocation of Woman has been expounded with a clearness and variety at once
affecting and beautiful, both by the fall and by the redemption which is
in Christ Jesus. Dearly has Woman paid the penalty of her bad priority in
transgression. As it was she that drew the Man down under the curse, he,
in the ferocity of his fallen nature, has been judicially permitted to
trample on all that is sacred and sweet in Womanhood, making her the slave
of his brutal tyranny, and the minister of his guilty passions. In all
lands beyond the pale of revealed religion, this is woman's condition. And
yet even here, the original characteristics of the sex peer forth " as
life through the hollow eyes of death." What clinging still to her male
abuser; what heroism of uncomplaining endurance; what unapplauded and
unseen martyrdoms—many times suffered during one life—at the hand of Man,
and, in spite of all, laying herself out to be, so far as permitted and
able, "a help meet for him!" What would such qualities be, one is apt to
say, were they but redeemed from the curse, purified and refined by grace,
consecrated to their true ends, stimulated and cheered by a corresponding
change in the other sex! Well, this is just what Christ has done for
Woman; this is just what we see Christianity accomplishing. Woman is now
made capable of becoming—in the ample and beautiful sense originally
meant—"an help meet for Man;" his counterpart, not only in identity of
interest, mind, and heart with him, in things divine as well as human, but
in that peculiar tenderness, that confiding dependence, those clinging
affections, that heroic fortitude and self-sacrifice which are the very
seal of Womanhood, not to speak of perceptions quick as instinct, and
jealous sensibilities, which, if they lay Woman open to many and deep
wounds, cause her also to melt under kindness shewn her, and surrender
herself to the manifestations of even seeming affection. What are
characteristics like these capable of becoming, when healed by the balm of
Gilead, and directed to their proper, their highest Object?
Space forbids us to trace
the earnest of this consecration of Womanhood to Christ under the Old
Testament, and its full manifestation under the New. Church history but
continues the record of Christian Womanhood which the living oracles have
begun. Wherever there has been any purity, any zeal, any activity, any
prosperity in the Church of Christ, there Woman's presence and aid, as "a
help meet for" the other sex, while they have been bearing the heat and
burden of the day, will be found no unimportant element. It is so at this
day in an eminent degree. Nor do I at all doubt that in the Church's
further efforts to carry the Gospel into all lands, and get for their lord
the sceptre of the world, the spirit and mind of our Galilean women will
be more and more seen stamped upon Christian Womanhood; and as Jesus
"makes His progress through town and village with the glad tidings of the
kingdom of God," there will be found in His train, not only the successors
of the Twelve, but "many women," who, having been "healed by Him," will
say, in the fulness of their hearts, "Entreat me not to leave Thee, nor to
return from following after Thee," and will count it their highest honour
to be allowed to "minister unto Him of their substance."
O woman, self-ruined but
dearly ransomed, "how much owest thou unto thy lord!" You feel it, and
ask, "What shall I render?" I answer, not only all that thou hast in
common with other disciples, but, over and above this, all the
characteristics of sanctified Womanhood. You may, like those women whom
the apostle celebrates, "labour much in the lord," and earn the thanks,
not only of a Paul, but of "all the churches of the Gentiles." But some of
the most beautiful specimens of female Christianity will never be heard of
till the resurrection morn.
"Unseen, unfelt their
earthly growth,
And, self-accused of sin and sloth,
They live and die; their names decay,
Their fragrance passes quite away;
Like violets in the freezing blast,
No vernal steam around they cast:—
But they shall flourish from the tomb,
The breath of God shall wake them into odorous bloom."
—Keble.
This should be enough with
male or female. "Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me?" Then, " Feed my
lambs—Feed my sheep." Go work in my vineyard. "Give him of the gold of
Sheba." (Ps. lxxii. 15.) That thou doest do cheerfully, and love will
convert it into gold. "She hath done what she could" was a noble testimony
from the Lord's own lips to one who poured over His adorable head her box
of ointment. Oh, if every debtor to the Grace that plucks brands from the
fire, and ransomed Woman in particular, were but to do what he or she
could, what busy activities would be brought into play, and how would the
Kingdom of Christ everywhere break forth as streams in the south !
Christ's work is honourable and glorious, but there remaineth very much
land to be possessed. Yet the earth is already the Lord's by purchase, and
will soon be His in possession.
"And the base world, now
Christ has died,
Ennobled is and glorified."
Rise, the Master calleth thee! |
