when we compare the work jesus proposed to do in the world with the

schemes of earth’s greatest ones we cannot classify him with mere men.

what did he think he came into the world to do? what did he consider his

mission to be?

we cannot be in the least doubt for the answer; there was no confusion in

his thought, no ambiguity in his words. if we ask what jesus thought his

mission was we will easily find the answer—unparalleled by the thought of

any, absolutely unique, stupendous, but as unmistakable in meaning as

simple in the form of expression.

we will answer in his own words: “the son of man is come to seek and to

save that which is lost.” “i came not to call the righteous, but sinners

to repentance.” “god sent not his son into the world to condemn the

world, but that the world through him might be saved.” “i came not to

judge the world, but to save the world.” more forcibly, if possible, than

in his words, his conception of his mission is shown by his work, his

living, and his dying. st. luke, in the acts of the apostles, gives us in

a simple statement the whole history; it is, in a line, the biography of

the god-man, “he went about doing good.”

that jesus should have seen in the world evil that needed to be remedied,

that he should have tried to remedy the evil he saw, does not, in itself,

difference him from good and wise men who have observed the facts of human

life and have deplored human miseries. all the great teachers and

reformers have recognized evil in the world, and many of them have

distinctly recognized this evil as moral evil. the doctrine of jesus is

peculiar in this; all the evil that is in the world is moral evil, and all

moral evil is, at its root, sin, and sin, considered as a quality in man’

s character, is a state of being that is out of harmony with god;

considered as a fact, it is life in violation of god’s law. the bad man

is, in his spirit, at enmity with god; in his life he breaks god’s law.

he loves evil because evil is in him; his life is wicked because his heart

is bad.

and jesus comes to take away sin; to deliver men from it, its penalty, and

its power. said the angel to mary: “thou shalt call his name jesus, for

he shall save his people from their sins.”

in the view of jesus sin is the one evil; deliverance from sin is

deliverance from all evil; it is salvation. he struck at sin as the root

of all possible evil; he recognized no evil that was in man’s

circumstances, as if his evil came out of fate or in some way invincible

by him; it is all of sin.

wherefore jesus does not set about bettering man’s circumstances, by

direct effort improving the sanitary, economic, political, or social

conditions of life; he works upon man himself. whatever improves man’s

condition is, in the doctrine of jesus, to be desired; but it is not

enough to make man comfortable; he must be made good. he teaches that all

that is truly good and needful will come to men who are delivered from

sin, and that no real good can come to him whose sin remains in him.

first, last, all the time, jesus makes deliverance from sin the one thing

needful—the chief good.

as his manner was, he does not argue about it; he states his doctrine

positively, “with authority,” as one knowing the whole truth of the

case. there is no qualifying word to tone down his statements and to leave

place for retreat from possible mistakes.

his doctrine he taught and illustrated in every possible way. it is in his

more formal discourses, his briefest comments on men and things, his most

occasional conversations and most incidental remarks. his doctrine is in

all his efforts to do men good, as it is in every warning and every

promise.

and there is never a shadow of doubt, a suspicion of hesitation. from his

first word to the last, from the beatitudes to the prayer on the cross, it

is always the same thing; man’s trouble is all in his sin; his only

salvation is deliverance from sin.

it comes out in the most incidental way. when the penitent magdalene

washed his feet with her tears, at simon’s table, he said not a word

about her lost social position or of its possible restoration. he said, “

thy sins are forgiven; thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.”

when the four kind and loving friends of capernaum—whose names we would

like to know—had brought their palsied neighbor to peter’s house, and

had at last, with much trouble, through the broken roof laid him down at

the feet of jesus, the first words were not about palsy and healing, but

about sin and salvation: “son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” this is what

the story of the penitent publican, crying out, “god be merciful to me a

sinner,” means. it is what the story of the prodigal means; it is what

the whole life and teaching of jesus mean.

we must notice particularly that the mere conception of a divine

incarnation is not peculiar to the story of jesus. the notion of

incarnation, the idea of the gods taking a form of flesh and manifesting

themselves to men, is in the traditions of almost every nation. it has

been said, hastily, i believe, that there are some races, at least some

tribes, so low in development as to have no idea of god whatever. it is

easy to be mistaken in such matters; it is difficult for a cultivated man

to find out what a savage really thinks about any subject, least of all

his religion. perhaps the language difficulty is the least bar to

understanding in such a case; the differences between men are not measured

by differences in speech only. it is certain that the conception of god

is, in some form, in most nations. i believe it is in all. and in every

nation there is some sort of notion of divine manifestation.

the attempt to represent the gods in stone, in metal, in wood, or even in

rude drawings and paintings, comes after a traditional belief has long

held its place in men’s thoughts of their manifestation in some visible

and tangible form.

it is not always a human form; it is generally not a human form, except as

it is part of the conception: as in the eagle-headed belus of babylon, as

in the winged bulls, with the head of a man and the feet of a lion, that

layard found in the ruins of nineveh. these composite images represented

ideas of the gods, not facts concerning them. thus the image found in the

ruins of nineveh represented strength, swiftness, courage, intelligence.

but the ideas expressed in these strange and grotesque forms grew out of

traditions of divine manifestation, of incarnation.

all the mythologies tell us of incarnations; but the idea of divine

incarnation in the story of the evangelists differs, not in some

incidents, but in all essentials from all others. one unique fact, as has

heretofore, in a different connection, been pointed out, is that jesus was

simply a man who, as to his appearance, had absolutely nothing that was

peculiar. neither stature, beauty, swiftness, nor strength is attributed

to jesus.

we might speak of the limitations that go with other conceptions of gods

incarnate. they are specialized by race and localized by country. this

thought has been illustrated elsewhere. it may answer now simply to remind

you that vishnu is hindustanee, isis and osiris egyptian, odin and thor

scandinavian. not one of them has relations to the whole human race. but

jesus, who calls himself “the son of man,” is of all, and belongs to

all.

but the most notable difference to be considered now, that which alone

would place jesus apart from all others, whether men or legendary gods, is

in the end he proposed to accomplish. the gods became incarnate and

appeared to men, or dwelt among them, to do many and very different

things; jesus to do just one thing, and to do what no other ever proposed

to do, or so much as thought of doing. he, “the son of man,” was of all

and for all, and he proposes an end that concerns all. the evil he would

remove from all is not a hebrew trouble; it is in the human race.

this is plainer in comparison. vishnu, the supreme god of hindustanee

mythology, has condescended, so the old stories tell us, to almost

innumerable incarnations. but for what end? always to work some prodigies;

to do some strange things on the plane of men’s lives; to do things

affecting men’s circumstances, not men’s character. he comes to do

something in a limited sphere; something for his people, hindustanee

people, not for the whole race of man. vishnu, when he comes in mercy,

comes to remedy external conditions; he delivers from pestilence, famine,

wild beasts, poisonous serpents. when he comes in wrath it is to crush his

enemies.

in mythology the very conception men had of the coming of the gods grew

out of their circumstances. thus in india the conception of evil itself

was determined by conditions peculiar to india. with them evil grew out of

the jungles where pestilence was bred, serpents abounded, and fierce man-

eating tigers hid themselves and waited for their prey. it was determined

by those conditions of life peculiar to dense populations, subject to the

scourges that followed war, and evil natural conditions—plague and

famine.

the evil jesus considered was peculiar to no people and to no country; it

did not grow out of natural conditions; it was in man himself, and it was

sin.

among warlike nations the gods came down to take part in mere national

matters; they fought the battles of their friends and punished their

enemies. your homer tells you all this in the story of the siege of troy.

virgil tells you the same thing; your classical authors are full of it.

the poor indians and negro tribes tell of such incarnations.

it was this very human conception of divine incarnation that filled the

national imagination and sustained the national hopes before jesus came.

such an incarnation they were longing for when they rejected him because

they could not use him for their ends; it is a conception that to this day

lingers in hebrew thought and hope. they looked and prayed for a divine

warrior-king who would lead their armies, restore their nation, and give

it dominion over the world.

how incredible the idea that the evangelists have only given us a

reflection of popular sentiment, the outgrowth of national traditions!

these sentiments and traditions were utterly spoiled by the sort of

incarnation the evangelists describe. the nation resented unto death the

conception jesus had of his mission to men; before such a king as jesus

they preferred the cæsar they hated; they put to death the man who only

sought to save them from their sins because he disappointed them in their

patriotic ambitions.

speaking in a general way, the gods of the nations, when they become

incarnate, come to do a man’s sort of work. they work upon the outside of

life; they seek to deliver man from external evils and to improve his

external conditions. the “twelve labors of hercules” tell us what men

thought they needed a divine man to do; the evangelists tell us what the

divine man thought men needed that he should do. when the gods of

mythology become incarnate they work in the realm of circumstances; jesus

speaks only of the man himself, his heart, his character, and seeks only

to make him good.

here is, therefore, the essential difference: his conception of evil, and

back of that, of course, his conception of man himself.

as we have seen, in the thought of jesus the evil and the good, the woes

and the blessings of humanity are in man himself; they are not in

externals, but internals; not in circumstances, but in character. jesus

does not, therefore, dwell upon poverty or wealth, sickness or health,

enemies or friends, contempt or favor, servitude or freedom, early death

or long life. he is not concerned about any circumstances whatever that

merely determine man’s external life; he is concerned about man himself.

if there be any real good or any real evil the good and the evil are

inside, not outside the man.

let us note, too, jesus never places man’s moral evil, which is the one

evil he recognizes, in mere ignorance of truth, as if instruction and

merely changing man’s opinions could remedy the evil; he always places it

in that something that alienates man’s love from god, that something that

jesus calls sin, that something that is sin because it antagonizes the

pure will of god. and jesus teaches that the very constitution of man’s

nature is such that no bettering of his external conditions can bring any

real help whatsoever; that so long as man is out of harmony with god there

can be for him, neither in this world nor the next, any real good. this he

meant in the question that makes a man outweigh a world: “what shall it

profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

jesus took very great pains to teach men that in themselves, and not in

their circumstances, was their real evil and their real good. he used

almost every form of speech to teach them to think of a man as a man, and

not as the sport of circumstances.

for poverty jesus did not care; for wealth he had no respect. the story of

the barn-builder gives us his solemn judgment upon a man who achieved very

great worldly success; who was what most men long and strive to be—rich

and great. but he was a man out of harmony with god—rich in purse,

bankrupt in soul. jesus, in the face of all human opinion, plainly calls

such a man “a fool.”

the drama of the rich man and lazarus turns the light of both worlds upon

the question of man’s chief and only good, and emphasizes, by the despair

of the prince in hell, his verdict upon the case of the prosperous and

self-satisfied barn-builder, in whose thoughts and plans neither his own

soul nor the god who made him had any place.

always—whether speaking of his own personal work or in instructing his

disciples as to their work—jesus looks to bettering men, not their

conditions. he did not care for conditions, except as they connected men

with influences that made them good or evil; he cared for men only. hence

he always stressed character and nothing else.

character, in the teaching of jesus, is all; it is both test and measure

of what a man is, and there is no other test or measure for which man

ought to care, for which god does care.

the amazement of comfortable and cultured nicodemus shows us that these

ideas of jesus were not borrowed from the men of his time and race.

summing up what is here presented as to the conception jesus had of his

mission to men, a conception as unique as his own character: only one

thing he hated and sought to destroy—sin; only one thing he loved for man

and sought to bestow—goodness.

only one thing his true disciples hate—sin; only one thing is worth

striving, living and dying for—goodness: which is another name for

christ-likeness.