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CHAPTER IV

I AM COME TO PREACH GLAD TIDINGS TO THE POOR

JESUS in a single sentence has defined the mission of his followers: "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you." He calls on his followers to carry on in successive generations, with his companionship and under his personal but invisible leadership, the work he was commissioned by his Father to do. What that work is he at different times and in different language has explicitly stated.

The earliest of these statements is contained in his first reported sermon preached in the synagogue at Nazareth, in which he declared that he had come to fulfill the prophecies in the Old Testament of a kingdom of God on the earth, and that a distinguished feature of that kingdom would be a new spirit of philanthropy.

He came to Nazareth where he had been brought up: and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the

Sabbath day, and stood up for to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach glad-tidings to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. . . . And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

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Both the teaching and the practice of Jesus interpret this definition of his mission. His religion was a religion of humanity. He came to give a new creative impulse to benevolence and so a new meaning to human life. He put the heretical but humane Samaritan above the callous priest and Levite. He pictured life as an estate left by an absentee landlord in the care of a steward who would be tested by his treatment of the tenants. The nations accounted those great who wrung service from their inferiors; Christ accounted those great who rendered service to others. He esteemed no acts of genuine good-will insignificant. Two farthings in a contribution box or a cup of cold water to a thirsty pilgrim, if the gift of a generous spirit, he accounted an act of religion. To the men

and women whom society, then as now, regarded as outcast sinners he brought promise of pardon and hope of a new life. But the man who devoted himself to accumulating and investing wealth he called a fool; and he declared that hell would be the doom of the rich man who feasted sumptuously every day and left the beggar at his door uncared for, and of the Pharisee who devoured widows' houses and for a pretense made long prayers. In the only description of the last judgment which he ever gave, he declared that the Judge would measure men, not by their creeds, their church attendance, or their scrupulous observance of prescribed rituals and ordinances, but by their treatment of their fellow-men. The fact that they had never known him and were not conscious that they had rendered him any service would not condemn them. The fact that they had known him and confessed him as their Lord would not save them from condemnation.

His life illustrated his teachings. He gave himself with utter abandon to the service of others. Were they hungry, he fed them; sick, he healed them; crazy, he restored to them their recovered

minds; ignorant, he taught them; in despair, he brought them hope; isolated from their fellow men by their pride, he pierced the walls of their prison house with sharp invective. No service was so lowly that he was unwilling to render it. Once his disciples who had been out all night fishing and were disheartened by their failure, when they came on shore found that he had cooked their breakfast for them. Once they had walked the dusty streets of Jerusalem with sandaled but unstockinged feet, and had hotly contested their respective rights to places of preeminence at the supper table. He waited till they had settled this important problem, then he girded himself with a towel as their servant and washed their feet himself. Finally, he freely offered up his life for enemies who hated him and for companions of whom one betrayed him, one denied him, and the rest, with one exception, abandoned him.

Nor was it merely the unhappy condition of the common people which moved his sympathy. At the very outset of his ministry he perceived clearly that the secret of the highest happiness and of the most poignant sorrow is in the spirit of man; in

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his character, not in his condition; in what he is, not in where he is. He saw clearly that he could not fulfill his mission by merely feeding the hungry. Even if he turned the stones into bread the relief would be but slight and temporary. Heart hunger is more difficult to bear than bodily hunger. The blessed are not the rich but the lowly in spirit; not the sorrowless but those who are strengthened by their sorrows; not the grasping who acquire much, but the unselfish who inherit from their Heavenly Father what he chooses to bestow upon them. Alas for you rich! he cries, for you have received your consolation. Alas for you that are full! for you shall hunger. Alas for you laughing ones! for you shall mourn. Alas for you of whom all men shall speak well! for so did their fathers of the false prophets. These four types of men whom we are apt to envy,— the rich, the full, the merry and the popular - Christ pities. The rich, not because he is rich, but because he has gotten that for which he has been striving; the satisfied because he has no aspirations; the laughing ones because life is serious and they never take life seriously; the man whom all men praise because all men never praise the man

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