The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel According to St. MarkChadwick, G. A. (George Alexander)
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel According to St. Mark
Chadwick, G. A. (George Alexander)
Bible. Mark -- Commentaries
Large allowances are to be made for the Greek in Plato, the Roman in
Epictetus, before we can learn of them. Each and all are the sons of their
tribe and century, not of all mankind and all time. But who will point out
the Jewish warp in any word or institution of Jesus? In the new man which
is after His image there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and
uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, but Christ is all
and in all, something of Him represented by each, all of them concentrated
in Him. He alone speaks to all men without any foreign accent, and He
alone is recognised and understood as widely as the voices of nature, as
the sigh of waves and breezes, and the still endurance of the stars.
Reading the Gospels, we become aware that four writers of widely different
bias and temperament have all found an equally congenial subject, so that
each has given a portrait harmonious with the others, and yet unique. It
is because the sum total of humanity is in Christ, that no single writer
could have told His story.
But now consider what this implies. It demands an example from which
lonely women and heroic leaders of action should alike take fire. It
demands that He should furnish meditation for sages in the closet, and
should found a kingdom more brilliant than those of conquerors. It demands
that He should strike out new paths towards new objects, and be supremely
original without deviating from what is truly sane and human, for any
selfish or cruel or unwholesome joy. It demands the gentleness of a sheep
before her shearers, and such burning wrath as seven times over denounced
against the hypocrites of Jerusalem woe and the damnation of hell. It
demands the sensibilities which made Gethsemane dreadful, and the strength
which made Calvary sublime. It demands that when we approach Him we should
learn to feel the awe of other worlds, the nearness of God, the sinfulness
of sin, the folly of laying up much goods for many years; that life should
be made solemn and profound, but yet that it should not be darkened nor
depressed unduly; that nature and man should be made dear to us, little
children, and sinners who are scorned yet who love much, and lepers who
stand afar off—yes, and even the lilies of the field, and the fowls of the
air; that He should not be unaware of the silent processes of nature which
bears fruit of itself, of sunshine and rain, and the fury of storms and
torrents, and the leap of the lightning across all the sky. Thus we can
bring to Jesus every anxiety and every hope, for He, and only He, was
tempted in all points like unto us. Universality of power, of sympathy,
and of influence, is the import of this title which Jesus claims. And that
demand Jesus only has satisfied, Who is the Master of Sages, the Friend of
sinners, the Man of Sorrows, and the King of kings, the one perfect
blossom on the tree of our humanity, the ideal of our nature incarnate,
the Second Adam in Whom the fulness of the race is visible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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