Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. LukeMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. Luke
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Luke -- Commentaries
But, dear brethren, remember, that if we are to believe Jesus
Christ's own words, that strange love of His, which embraced in its
pure clasp the outcasts, was not only the love of a perfect Man, but
it was the love of God Himself. 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father.' When we see Jesus Christ looking across the valley to the
city, with tears in His sad and gentle eyes; and when we see harlots
and sinners coming near Him with new hope, and a strange
consciousness of a fascination which He wields; and when we see Him
opening His heart to all the impure, just as He laid His clean hand
on the leper's ulcers, let us rejoice to believe that the Friend of
publicans and sinners is God manifest in the flesh.
Then, still further, this wondrous, seeking love of His for all the
outcasts is the sign to us of His boundless hopefulness concerning
the most degraded.
The world talks of races too low to be elevated, of men too hardened
to be softened. Jesus Christ walks through the hospitals of this
world, and nowhere sees incurables. His hope is boundless, because,
first of all, He sees the dormant possibilities that slumber in the
most degraded; and because, still more, He knows that He bears in
Himself a power that will cleanse the foulest and raise the most
fallen. There are some metals that resist all attempts to volatilise
them by the highest temperature producible in our furnaces. Carry
them up into the sun and they will all pass into vapour. No man or
woman who ever lived, or will live, is so absolutely besotted, and
held by the chains of his or her sins, as that Jesus cannot set them
free. His hope for outcasts is boundless, because He knows that
every sin can be cleansed by His precious blood. Therefore,
Christianity should know nothing of desperate cases. There should be
no incurables in our estimate of the world, but our hope should be
as boundless as the Master's, who drew to Himself the publicans
and sinners, and made them saints.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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