The
Intolerant Christ
by
J. Stuart Holden (1874-1934)
Edited
by Doktor Riktor Von Zhades
"He
that is not with Me is against Me." Matthew 12:30
Brethren:
I
would if you will allow preface this sermon with a comment. Too often
in these times we hear the above word in the title tossed around. To
paraphrase a character from the movie “The Princess Bride”, “ I
don’t think it means what most people think it means” Herein
below find an interesting lesson into the persona that is Jesus
Christ.
THERE
is something bewildering in the endless variety of Christ s
character. The many-sidedness and withal the perfect symmetry of His
life has always puzzled men even while it persuaded them. At one time
He is the Man of gentleness, calling the weary and heavy-laden with a
voice which thrills with sympathy and is irresistible in its wooing
winsomeness. At another time He is the Man of sternness, denouncing
insincerity with a voice now vibrant with passion, and flashing the
light of a pure indignation upon all that is unholy and untrue. At
one time it is His lowliness, and at another His loftiness which sets
Him forth in compelling vividness as "not of this world."
At one time the closeness of His intimacy with common men and their
interests invests Him with a magnetic attraction to which all hearts
respond; while at another His remoteness and unapproachableness
inspire with a sense of reverent awe those who venture nigh.
And
yet despite all, or perhaps because of all the perplexing variations
of His revealed nature there is a something about Christ which seems
to harmonize these apparent contradictions into one unique
perfection. In Nature the many-hued rays unite in forming the bright
beam of light, and what at first seem mutually contradictory are
discovered as being in reality mutually complementary. So is it in
Christ. The conjunction of apparently irreconcilable qualities in a
beauty which is the light and life of men, goes far to attest the
reality alike of His humanity and His divinity. Without these
mystifying anti-theses which abound in Him it would be hard to
recognize Him as fulfilling His own claims. The preciousness and
fairness of a jewel is only discerned by means of its many facets;
and new brilliance and beauty only break forth as the gem is held at
changing angles to the light.
It
is with the desire of new and enriching discovery in Christ that we
think upon the quality of intolerance which, though often overlooked
by His people, nevertheless, characterized in marked fashion all His
life and work for men; and is of deep and real significance to us
all. For He changes not with the fleeting years.
Now
at first sight the use of such a word as intolerance to describe
Christ is almost repugnant to us. It sounds harsh; for we are
accustomed to think of Him as of One so full of love as to be without
asperities of any kind. Of broader mind and more charitable judgment
than any who preceded or who have succeeded Him, can it be that we
find anything akin to intolerance in Him? Is He not too large and
generous to have aught of the smallness of mind by which we usually
identify the intolerant man today? Is not the divine nature too ample
to admit of what at any time seems petulant and impatient? For we do
not usually commend intolerance as being the quality of the truly
great. On the contrary, we rather pity the man who is so small as to
be intolerant of all but his own views and his own order, and who
intolerantly excludes and condemns those who are not in agreement
with him. And in this we do well. For nothing is so unseemly and
unlovely as an intolerant man, who is commonly but an ignorant one.
But
herein lies the essential difference between the intolerance of
Christ and of all others most of all of His professed disciples.
Their intolerance is the expression of imperfect and fragmentary
knowledge. His is the intolerance of One Who knows! He knows the why
and wherefore of the mission on which He has been sent by the Father.
He knows the subtlety and strength of the sin which He has come to
combat for and in men. He knows the wide range of possibility in
every life to which He makes appeal, the full value of the capacity
and aptitude which He seeks to deliver from the grip of destructive
forces. He knows the grieved love of the sadly-wronged God, and the
yearning of the Father-heart over the alienated affection of the
deceived child. And, knowing all this, He would be less than divine
were He not intolerant of all that arrays itself against God's
purpose of recovery and deliverance, of all that binds and blinds men
to their true life, of all that impairs and incapacitates them, of
all that deceives and denies them, of all that outrages the love
which is everlasting in its patience and faith.
Then,
His intolerance is not only the expression of His knowledge but of
His love. It were impossible to think of Him as the true lover of
men, apart from just this unaccommodating austerity, which at all
times declares absolute truth in its tonic bitterness. There is an
intolerance in moral and spiritual issues, which is the only possible
voice by which love can declare itself, and by which truth can win
recognition for itself. And this is the intolerance of the Son of
God. The scientist is inspired to intolerance in his unresting fight
with the deadly diseases in the world, just because he knows the
virulence of the foe, and wants to benefit man kind by its complete
conquest. Were he more tolerant he would be less benevolent. The
artist is intolerant of ugliness and discord by reason of the fine
sensibilities of his nature. He feels with an exquisite pain anything
which outrages the canons of beauty and taste. Hence his protests,
often it is to be feared ineffectual despite their sincerity. But
notwithstanding his failure to secure a popular verdict, he must lift
up his voice and declare the faith that is in him; for intolerance is
part of his nature, and is of the very essence of his art. The
statesman too(as distinguished from the mere politician) is
intolerant of anything which threatens or imperils his country; and
we applaud the rare self-sacrificing service by which his intolerance
makes itself known.
Indeed,
less than intolerance, when the issue involved affects adversely the
life of the nation, would be treachery. And just as their intolerance
attests the reality and worth of these and many others who could
similarly be cited, so the intolerance which is everywhere
discernible in Christ goes far to proclaim His divinity. It is seen,
for instance, in the high claims which He makes for Himself. "I
am the Bread of Life"; "I am the Light of the World";
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." That He can make
such claim without any loss of modesty or show of mere egotism, that
He can so declare Himself without any toleration of possible rival,
is expressive of an undisturbed consciousness of divinity in short,
that He has indeed come from God to men, and that He is God s full
and final word to them. His quiet and altogether seemly intolerance
with regard to His own office and work, is the unfaltering Evangel,
that
"God
hath other words for other worlds;
But
for this world the Word of God is Christ."
How
intolerant, too, is He in the commands which He lays upon men. "Seek
ye first the kingdom of God "; and again, "If any man come
unto Me and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children,
and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My
disciple"; and again, "Follow thou Me." He would save
men from self-love which is self-destruction; from absorption in the
deteriorating lower things of life, into which it is so easy to fall,
and from which it is so hard to rise; from devotion to even the best
things of which the human heart is capable, but which, unrelated to
the central governing affection for which we have been made, make for
our undoing; and from the worship of idols which tend to become
ideals, bringing the whole of life under their sway. And only an
intolerant demand for whole-hearted allegiance and discipleship could
be an effective Gospel unto such a redemption. He cannot be Lord at
all if He is not Lord of all.
The
same intolerance marks His imposition of self-discipline upon His
followers. "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it
from thee. If thine hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from
thee." Sin is the enemy ; and, in respect of it, any toleration
is at once disloyal and disastrous. And conscience and memory unite
in confirmation of this His intolerance, hailing it as being the only
effective way of dealing with sin s defiling enslavements. Were
Christ to be in any degree less intolerant in the matter of sin, or
to impose a less harsh and rigorous discipline upon those who would
follow Him, conscience would shrink from accepting Him. For there is
that within every man in regard to his own sin which, at any rate in
his best moments (and never let us forget that it is then we are most
truly ourselves), shrinks and recoils from any thing like temporizing
or excusing of the wilful transgression. Nothing but the drastic, the
radical, the intolerant, can ever satisfy the clamant need of the
human soul in its sin-created agony. It turns from any cheap and easy
way of peace with an instinctive refusal which is self-protective. It
is drawn to Christ by the intolerant conditions upon which alone His
power of deliverance may be known.
But
it is, perhaps, most conspicuously in His discriminating division of
men that this spirit and quality is seen in Christ. He banishes all
uncertainty and disposes of all ambiguity and that for all time in
declaring that "he that is not with Me is against Me." In
moral issues mere neutrality is quite impossible; and it is of the
very nature of love to make this indubitably clear. Nor can this
issue be evaded. Men must take sides when brought within the zone of
Christ’s compelling personality and mission. There is always "a
division among the people because of Him." For while there is so
much in Christ to quicken love and stimulate faith, there is always
much to stagger the unwilling and unready. The intolerance which
brooked no dissuasion from the pathway of redeeming sacrifice; which
turned a deaf ear to affectionate entreaty, and with steadfast face
set out on the pilgrimage of the Cross, nor rested until all was
accomplished, now seeks the highest place in the hearts of men. For
this is the intolerance of a hungering love. Obviously it is
destructive of self-interest, of sinful affection, of unholy thought
and action, of worldly compliance, and of all that is frequently
found in usurpation of the throne of God in the lives of men. The
issue is thus always between self-will and the will of God.
Popular
imagination, as far as it is exercised at all with regard to Him,
conceives God as One Whose love is to be looked for in His kindly
indulgence of human frailty, and Whose benign kindness and good
nature accepts any kind of homage. We are in deadly peril of drugging
ourselves into the very sleep of death by drinking in, as though it
were the Water of Life, a distorted idea of His graciousness. As
though this was His only quality! We forget the jealousy of a love
which said of old, "Thou shalt have none other gods but Me."
And there is, perhaps, nothing so calculated to arouse and sting us
into a true understanding of things as this word of Christ s
intolerance, "He that is not with Me is against Me." As the
sleeper in the snow is rudely awakened by his rescuer, whose violent
methods, at first resented by the disturbed slumberer, afterwards
evoke his gratitude, so does Christ force us to face the facts of our
life and His.
It
is the vogue amongst people to-day to profess a non-committal
attitude toward Christ, as though they were in some uncertainty as to
His reality, and as though the scales of their moral judgment had not
yet swung in His favour. They imagine themelves to be in a neutral
position with not a little complacent superiority. Christ, however,
intolerant of anything insincere and pretentious, plainly declares
that not " with " Him, such ones are "against"
Him. There is a pathetic folly in imagining ourselves to be judging
Christ, when all the time He is actually judging us, and when our
lives are faithfully recording the judgment. And so with men and
Christ. Every day of our lives is really a judgment-day, which
reveals the hidden man of the heart, and records his determining
attitude toward the Son of Man.
Dear
reader a post-script
It would be well to note that God is indeed
love, but He is likewise first and foremost righteous and as such, as
the author above has made clear, He is indeed “intolerant” of
sin.
