THE SON OF MAN FORESHADOWED

Mark xiv. 21; Dan. vii. 13 (John iii. 13, xii. 34; Matt. xxvi. 24; Luke xviii. 31, xxii. 22).

Some phrases, like living beings, have interesting histories. They are born, they develop to fullness and power, they serve high ends, and perhaps pass away. The title Son of Man, which Jesus used to designate Himself, is one of these. It was not invented by Him. Yet He used it constantly as if something in its make up or history had made Him fond of it. He identified Himself with it, and it with Himself in a way which has suggested to some the notion that He used it simply as a substitute for the pronoun I. This is certainly not the case. And yet the way in which He separated it from all other uses and made it the vehicle of His own thought is more than interesting — it is significant.

Quite as significant is the strangeness of the phrase to other New Testament writers, and even to the immediate disciples of Jesus. If it is not true that they never used it, it is true that they used it because they could not avoid it — not because they found it ready to hand to do service as a vehicle of their thought. Outside of the circle of His followers it is still less familiar. It perplexes the multitude. In attempting to familiarise them with its purport, in solving the perplexity of the multitude as to its meaning, His first care was to impress it on them that though the source of His power was divine, its nature and exercise were to be in the highest sense human — humane, it would be better to say, were it not that even that beautiful word is scarcely full enough of the meaning infused into humanity by Jesus. It suggests-—

1. Humanity in Contrast with Brutality.

Humanity is distinguished from brutality by intelligence, compassion, and aspiration. Intelligence changes the stubborn ignorance of the brute to courage. Compassion utilises power in the service of love. Aspiration links all resources with the highest ends.

"Who is this Son of Man?" The question was asked by those who should have known the answer. They did not, because they had allowed themselves to be led by their thoughts of who the Messiah ought to be. How often we allow our prejudgments to shut our eyes to the very plain things that enter into our lives. The figure of the Son of Man stood very clearly on the pages of Daniel.

It is true, before the days of Daniel to speak of a "son of man" was to indicate human frailty and liability to failure. It had been said, "God is not man that he should lie, neither the son of man that he should repent" (Num. xxiii. 19); and when Ezekiel was addressed as "Son of man," it was in order that he might be made conscious of his dependence on divine help and grace for his work. But human weakness receded into the background and dignity and value into the foreground, as the Psalmist took up the phrase, and after placing before his eye the humble and meaningless side of human nature,he set overagainst it the great and noble as an endowment from on high. "What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?" Yes, "Thou hast made him but lower than God, and crownedst him with glory and honour. Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet." Man was to be looked at not merely against the background of God's infinite greatness and holiness, but also against that of the lower creation. If, as placed in the foreground of the picture in which God is the background, man appears puny and feeble and unworthy, placed on the canvas with the inanimate and brute world behind him he looms large, he is seen to possess excellences and merits that make him unique and supreme.

The occasion which furnished the revelation of this view of man was the struggle of the Jewish nation with the great forces of the Gentile world during the Exile and after. The Jews never aspired to rule more than their own well-defined corner of the world. But they came in touch with the races successively dominant to the east of them in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris, and they were enabled to realise that the lust for world dominion could take the central place among the motives of national life. Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, and Macedonia had actually come near reaching this goal. But each of them, as it successively climbed up to the place of power, had undergone a process of moral decline. The last of these world-powers had shown a special tendency toward inward disintegration. It was felt that the end was near, and with it the whole series of non-moral, and hence sub-human, powers must pass away. To the Jewish mind, with its firm grasp on the truth that the heart and essence of the universe is the righteous will of a personal God, the breaking up of the purely natural era of brute force must necessarily bring into view the moral order. And this order was not a new creation, but the real and inner life of the universe. It was not to be brought into existence, only revealed as already maturing within the decrepit and decadent succession of world-powers. But when revealed, this inner and divine principle would manifest itself as in utter contradiction and contrast to all its predecessors. Since brute force had been their characteristic, human intelligence and humane feeling would be its characteristic. It would command indeed, and in this respect it might be arrayed with them as another, and the last in the succession of powers — but the note and the distinctive sign of its dominion would be humanness just where those that had preceded had shown brutality.

Was it not to express the will and the nature of God? But if man is made in the image of God, the rule of God on earth must be godlike, that is to say, human. It is this that the apocalyptist-prophet was endeavouring to put before his sorely persecuted and oppressed fellow-believers. The dominion of the brute force was destined to pass away, and its place on the throne was to be occupied by a figure the very opposite of brutal — that of the Son of Man. Nay, the real throne was already occupied by this Figure. While the world was witnessing the rule of an outward and visible monarch on a throne of earthly splendour, the heavenly throne was neither vacant nor filled by a potentate of brutal nature. The Ancient of Days had as an assessor the Son of Man.

Thus, the Son of Man was at the same time a future and a present power to be reckoned with. While the genius of Hebrew prophecy seized upon the future of this figure and evolved the idea of the Messiah, the essence of the thought shows a deeper and more abiding importance in the present significance of it.

The Son of Man "which is in heaven" and a present Sovereign, has ever been also a future ruler. To-day He is sovereign in a fuller sense, because He once manifested Himself upon earth. From the right hand of the Ancient of Days He came to take "dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all the people and nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom shall not be destroyed." And His reign, as in the ancient vision, is still the reign of the human as contrasted with the brutal in the world. The question whether in the vision of Daniel the Son of Man is an individual king or a racial kingdom is of secondary importance. The essential idea in it is that the reign of sheer force is to be supplanted by the predominance of intelligence and goodwill.

But the world has not altogether discarded sheer force. The brutal principle still struggles for ascendancy. The lust for conquest, greed for territory, the subjugation of weaker peoples by stronger, the cruel exactions of the hard earnings of the subject race by some autocratic monarch — all these, in spite of change of method, still continue. But they continue no longer unchallenged, no longer recognised as the normal and ideal for all mankind. Side by side with them has arisen the kingdom of the Son of Man, — the reign of the Humane One, — who desires and aims that all shall have equity and justice dealt out to them. The old regime of force is still carrying on its administration. But beside it there stands the new one. There are two ideals challenging comparison. "Look on this picture, and on this." And the Son of Man is content to let the case rest upon this appeal. The more earnestly and persistently the contrast is insisted on, the more rapidly international and social brutality will be rebuked, shamed, and forced to hide its ugliness; and the more hopefully we may look to the disappearance of brutality and the triumph of humanity.

Perhaps no single character in modern history more signally typifies the dominance of force which, according to the vision of Daniel, the Son of Man was to supersede, than Napoleon the Great. He bled half Europe white with slaughter; he deserted his early principles for a crown; he broke every pledge; he ruined the land that had trusted and exalted him, but he was the most forceful individual who walked on the earth in his own day, or for that matter in any day; and mankind had not quite outgrown its worship of force while he lived, nor has it as yet. He murdered prominent men in cold blood, but he led armies across continents and over mountains. He overthrew the First Republic, but he made kings dance to his piping. He ploughed Europe with the iron plough of his ambition, and a hundred years have not levelled the furrows. Yet he himself on his death-bed confessed Jesus Christ mightier than himself. The Son of Man had, according to his confession, established a more lasting kingdom.

But brutality as a ruling principle does not necessarily work through the forms of empire or monarchy. Overcome and expelled as the rule of kings and potentates, it re-enters through social injustice and industrial inequality. The spirit of greed, the demon of selfishness, seizes upon the new conditions and leads men to the same pitilessness, the same cruelty (only exercised in subtler and more indirect forms), as those shown by the Assyrian and Babylonian monarchs. What matters it that the crushing, mangling, dehumanising work is done by social and industrial machinery instead of by armed hosts and uniformed officials? Nevertheless, this order too must pass away and give place to the just and humane reign of the Son of Man.

2. Humanity as Saving and Divine.

The Son of Man who is in heaven was to be the means of salvation to the whole creation. The figure in the cloud seen by Daniel was to rescue not Israel only, but the whole world from the dominion of the brute. In the very act of establishing His own kingdom as extensive and world-wide as the kingdom He was to displace and supplant, He would bring His wholesome and beneficent rule over all mankind. It is at this point that Jesus affiliates Himself with the foreshadowed Son of Man. "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life."

And this is the prerogative of humanity as distinguished from brutality in all ages, that it rescues that which has value from waste and destruction, and gives it its birthright in the fair creation of God. It is only as humanity has asserted itself in the world that forces running wild in nature have been tamed and harnessed and compelled to do useful, edifying work. It is only as man has taken the reins of control over them that winds and waves, light and heat, magnetism and electricity have been glorified by being placed in subjection to higher and more abundant life and health-giving services. Left to themselves, storms and tides wear and tear and pull down. Captured and put to service by man, they are transformed into means of building up and furthering onward the ends of life.

No doubt there still remains much brutality in the great and terrible elemental forces of nature. Flood and earthquake still break up and carry away the creations of reason and love. Icebergs and hidden shoals, fever and pestilence, still in many and unforeseen ways work havoc and ruin, lamentation and distress; but man is from generation to generation getting the upper hand in this terrific conflict. Nature, "red in tooth and claw," is being taught to respect and, though unconsciously, to do the works of righteousness and goodwill.

The work of the Saviour of mankind is but the highest manifestation of this universal law. It is the man in Jesus Christ that saves His brethren from the ravages of the brute force of sin. The ancient theologians understood this principle very well when they declined to accept or sanction any doctrine of the person of Christ which assumed that the Saviour was not possessed of a complete humanity. The faith of Christians would never consent to a Christ with a mere phantom physical nature or a mutilated psychological constitution; it would have none of a humanity from which the full power of manhood was strained out It was as man that the Saviour must save. It was the "Son of Man" alone who could "seek and save that which was lost"

The hope of the seer, and with it the hope of all the ages, would be a vain one indeed if the Son of Man in whom they trusted were nothing more than human, if His humanity sprang from the earth and were burdened by the earthly heritage of infirmity and failure. This it is not He is the Son of Man "which is in heaven." In the vision He stands beside the Ancient of Days. If there is anything wholesome in man's nature, it is because he has been patterned after a divine ideal. If he was given "dominion over" the brute creation, if he was declared "better than the fowls," if it was said of him, "how much is a man better than a sheep," it is because there is that in him which links him with God Himself.

He who is the Son of Man is also the Son of God. It is no mere accident that these two titles have become fixed on the same person. He is the Son of Man because he is the Son of God. Theology has worked at the problem of the person of Christ for nineteen centuries, but it has scarcely advanced beyond the fundamental facts of the earliest Christian experience which kindles at the touch of the Spirit of God, enabling devout souls to recognise in Jesus the perfect man and the perfect God. He is perfect man because He is the perfect image of a certain nature and aspect of God.

The heart of the message of Christianity is that God and man are somehow kin. It was possible for God to become man, because in man there was that which could be affiliated and linked with God, and in God there was that which could adapt itself to man and live in association with man. God did become man in the Son of Man, because there was in His heart the yearning for the responsive love of the creature He had made in His own image, His child.

The painter creates his masterpiece, and every lover of beauty is caught by its charm and won by its grace to higher purposes and pure motives; the musician pours his soul into his composition, and those who drink in its soothing or inspiring strains go into the world to achieve or endure what would have been impossible before. It is not because the painting consisted of colours and canvas of a certain kind, or the music of a given number of vibrations in the air, but because the spirit of the artist imparted itself through the materials to spirits needing help. Thus the Son of Man saves because his humanity is the humanity of God.

Nietzsche looked for the solution of the problem of human life in the coming of a being of transcendent power, the Superman; but if Power be force only, the world has known enough of its dominion, and it has known it to its grief and disappointment The rise of a superman of mere Power would be a reversion to brutality. The hope of the world must be fixed in something better, the reign of love, which is the reign of the Son of Man.