The Face of Christ
The Face of Christ
"It is by the transfigured lives of His people that God desires to make faith in Him easy to other men. The kingdom is to win its way by the moral superiority of its citizens. The Church is to lighten the world by the glory that radiates through her people."
Great ideas are best comprehended when expressed in simple, accessible things. Beauty is an abstraction until it finds expression in a flower. Music is a fantasy until the notes of an instrument give it speech. Art is ethereal until it embodies itself in sculpture or in picture. The great things of created and uncreated thought are only grasped when they find expression in some easy, intelligible, and often substantial form.
Can we discover any suitable form of expression to embody the glory of God? In the old dispensation men were impressed by magnitude. They felt the awe of the vast reaches of unpeopled space. The magnificence of the heavens, the majesty of the mountains, the mystery of the sea provoked solemn thought and haunting fear. When men looked for indications and evidences of Deity they confessed, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork.”
The divine glory was revealed in the ample sweep of earth and sky, the immensity of unmeasured space, the golden beams of sunshine, the silver rays of moonlight, the blue heavens studded with twinkling starlight, veiled by morning mist, or marked by the track of fleecy clouds. So regularly do the heavenly bodies move in their silent circles that men measure time by their movements, and sailors steer by their positions. They come and go at their appointed seasons, “not one faileth.” All these things showed forth the greatness and excellence of the divine handiwork.
The sweet singers of Israel saw God in everything. The breeze was His chariot—He “rides upon the wings of the wind.” When the storm rushes through the forest, it is His voice that “breaketh the cedars.” The joy of harvest awakens fresh gratitude; it is His “crowning of the year.” To them the earth was crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. “Study nature,” urged Kingsley, “do not study nature for its own sake, but as the countenance of God. Try to extract every line of beauty, every association, every moral reflection, every inexpressible feeling from it. Adore God!”
It would be impossible for us to tell how much of the merit we find in nature is to be attributed to the knowledge of life and of God which we have derived from Jesus Christ. An honest investigation would prove that apart from the teaching of Christ and His influence on human thought, we should find nature to be a very inadequate instructor. Nature, without Christ, does not offer intelligent and intimate communion with the Unseen. No one can say that he is acquainted with an artist because he admires the artist’s workmanship. The man behind the art must become a voice we hear, a face we recognize; he must make us feel the warmth of human intimacy if we are to have the ennobling sense of kinship.
And so, while the heavens declare the glory of God, the revelation they impart is imperfect and inadequate for the needs of life. Our admiration of the heavens and our appreciation of nature will not teach us lessons of prayer and sacrifice, or wash out the defiling stains of wrong. The power and skill of God may be revealed in nature, but the character of God is revealed in Jesus Christ.
In Christ, the glory of God became personal. It was expressed in terms of love and speech. It came close up to the lives of men, warm, sweet, and tender, lifting them to itself in affection, purity, and peace. “No man hath seen God at any time. The only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” That is the perfect, permanent, final revelation. The glory was revealed in personal form; in living, throbbing personality. That personality was so complete and perfect that Jesus could say with all the calm dignity of truth, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.”
The glory of condescending grace is manifest in Christ. But the wonder of the advent was that Jesus did not come in clouds of glory, did not come like a king, with scepter and crown and magnificent attendance. He emptied Himself and came in the form of a servant. His world was the street and His retinue was gathered from the poor.
The glory of God shone in the manner of His life. At the very opening of His public ministry we find Him at a wedding feast where He reveals His power to change things. The historical sentence runs, “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth His glory.” The glory found a new point of expression. It would be a mistake to confine the manifestation of glory to the miracle. The glory shone all over His life and all around the common incidents of experience.
The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ did not express itself in isolated splendor, in unfamiliar solitariness, in abstinence from social joys. The man who preserves silence may easily be accounted wise. The man who holds himself aloof from the common contact and jostle of life may wrap about him a mysterious veil of sanctity and receive the honor of a saint. But Jesus did not cultivate this habit of holiness. He entered into all the familiar relationships of life in their everyday dress, their easy terms of intimacy, their unaffected simplicity. He mixed with the common crowd of men and things, claiming no exemption from the hardships of life, seeking no shelter from its rough exposure, unprotected from the pride and greatness of the world; and not only did He carry Himself through it all uncorrupted and unspoiled, but He shed everywhere around our common life the hallowing, sanctifying glory of God, and made men feel the greatness of existence when God is in it.
His death and His resurrection are further expressions of the glory of God. They reveal the glory of pardoning mercy and forgiving love, the glory of a great sacrifice, and of complete redemption; the glory of perfected immortality. Jesus was a priest to mankind of the glory of God, which we see not only with His eyes, but in His eyes, and in His face, and in His character. In Him the unseen became visible, the silence found speech, the unknown lived and walked with men. A whole world of progress lies between these two points of expression, “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and “The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” The one indicates greatness, the other expresses grace. The first exhibits power, the second presents personality. The former is material, the latter is spiritual.
The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ reveals a community of nature between God and men. In the beginning God made man in His own image—so close is grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man, such kinship has man with God. Before the beginning of the Christian era, profound minds like Plato felt that man was made by nature to be intimate with God. But Jesus revealed a move from the other side. He expressed God’s great desire to be intimate with man, to enter into the life of man and transform his world from within.
God is, therefore, not a spectator of this world’s tragedy, an unconcerned observer of its woe and want and warfare, as Byron implied, or an indifferent idler, as Carlyle suggested. There is no remoteness in God. He enjoys the world down to the last rose of summer or the last swallow in flight, and above all He loves man. The Old Testament celebrates the glory of creation when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. The New Testament heralds the glory of God’s redemption, “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.” That is the music of an infinitely mightier and sweeter song.
The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is the glory of His entrance into our nature, His revelation of the potentialities of human life. It is the redemption and dedication of our nature that God can express Himself in our flesh. And that expression is not the weakness of God—it is the glory of God. It is the greatest thing God can do. It reveals the greatest thing man can be. What God did in Jesus He seeks to do in you and me. He is not far from us either in distance or in affection. Speech with Him is not a telephonic message across leagues of space. It is a conversation in a closet with the door shut. Fellowship with Him requires no mediating priesthood. God lives and walks with the man himself whose spirit is humble and whose life is
surrendered.
That is what Paul is working out when he says, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.” The vessel is of earth, but through it, as through the simplest transparency, God sheds forth His own exceeding glory. When F. W. H. Myers heard Bishop Temple preach, he felt, as he says, that God was about,
For as he spake I knew that God was near,
Reflecting still the immemorial plan;
And, once in Jewry, and for ever here,
Loves as He loved, and ends what He began.
It is a great thing to know someone whose life illustrates some great principle or expresses some great idea. There are truths we never realize until they are pointed out to us by the high merit of some true life. There are virtues that escape our attention until they are revealed in their scope and variety by someone whose conduct and example exhibit them before our eyes. The service we need is the presence among us of souls that make God real and near. It is by the transfigured lives of His people that God desires to make faith in Him easy to other men. The kingdom is to win its way by the moral superiority of its citizens. The Church is to lighten the world by the glory that radiates through her people. They are the lamps that burn with holy fire. Their kindly light leads wayward feet to God, and men rise up and bless their saving radiance.
There are faces about us that represent ambition, passion, or pride. “Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters,” said Shakespeare’s tragic queen to her husband. There are faces that express avarice, prejudice, guilt, vanity, indulgence; and faces that own an inward faith and loyalty, conscience and courage. Here, face values are life values. The outward and the inward life wear one look, speak with one voice, are one unified whole.
The highest dedication of any life is to interpret and express and illustrate God. The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ reproduces itself in the character of holy men, revealing purpose, sympathy, strength, faithfulness and love. They make other men feel that in their very neighborhood God Himself is near. “What is there in the face of Dante which is absent from the face of Goethe,” Fitzgerald asked Tennyson as they considered the marble busts of the two men. “The divine,” answered the poet. The presence or absence of God makes the whole difference between the full and the empty life. For the purposes of sacred art Millais looked for the faces of Jews in London to supply the qualities he desired. For the purposes of His glory God makes no special selection of face. Any life will do.
“In thy face,” said a dying scholar to the wife whose devotion had made scholarship possible, “In thy face I have seen the eternal.”
O God of mountains, stars and boundless spaces!
O God of freedom, and of joyous hearts!
When Thy face looketh forth from all men’s faces,
There will be room enough in crowded marts;
Brood Thou around me, and the noise is o’er;
Thy universe, my closet with shut door.
The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ has reproduced itself through the ages in the face, soul, and character of those who are His disciples. It is the supreme distinction of the gospel that this solemn dedication is within the reach of all God’s people. Every single life may be a separate expression of the glory of God. “We all reflecting as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” Trust Him to do His work. Confront the glory night and day. Face it in success or sorrow. Front it in pleasure or in pain.
Surrender your life to its sway. If you do this, I humbly affirm by the Word of the Lord, you will be changed into the same image, and the glory of God will kindle another light by which to lead the feet of men through the dark ways of time to the radiant habitations of eternity.
—The Face of Christ, John MacBeath, London: Marshall Morgan and Scott, 1935) pp. 8-16.
