THE SON OF MAN IN A SINFUL WORLD

Mark ii. 10, 11 (Matt. ix. 6; Luke v. 24).

There is an explanation of the phrase Son of Man which makes it equivalent to mere man. In support of this explanation the appeal is made to the Aramaic, which Jesus must have used. Since in that language it was customary to call any man son of man, Jesus, it is said, used the expression in this its ordinary sense. What He attributes to the Son of Man may be said of every man as man. This explanation, however, fails to explain the very first appearance of the phrase upon the lips of Jesus, which, if we take the Gospel of Mark as a basis, occurs in connection with the healing of the paralytic. "Thy sins be forgiven thee," He says to the sufferer, and to the mystified bystanders: "The Son of Man has power to forgive sins." What could He have meant by the assertion that "any man" had power to forgive sin, when to demonstrate His own right to do so He thought it necessary immediately afterwards to perform a miracle?

Whatever may be the usage of this phrase from the linguistic point of view, when Jesus undertook to declare the sin of the paralytic forgiven, He was doing more than any man had any authority to do as a man. The astonishment of the scribes, who regarded His words as blasphemous, was justified if Jesus claimed to be nothing more than man; and this precisely He aims to meet when He takes up the challenge and shows by a superhuman deed that He had a right to the more than human declaration He had just made. It was not necessary that He should have claimed a divine nature, but it was necessary that He should establish His right to a special authority because of a special relation to the seat of all authority. All sin is against God, and God alone, if any one, can annul the transgression of His own law. Whoever would proclaim that God has done this in any individual instance, must have some secret or manifest connection with God, enabling him to speak for God and in the place of God.

But the controversy as to the right of Jesus to forgive sins is of intensely practical significance, in that it shows Him at the very first glance in His attitude and relation towards human sin. His first impact with human life brings it into view. How could it be otherwise? If life is pervaded by the baleful and subtle presence of sin, wherever the sinless and ideal man comes into touch with life he must see its work and effect. What did He think of it? What did He see in it?

First He recognised it as a reality; and a reality with no right to exist. The ideal man, the man as he came at the first creation from the hands of God, must in the nature of the case look upon sin as something alien to himself. He cannot close his eyes to it. In himself or in others it cannot but be contrary to the normal order of things. Sin is what ought not to be.

1. The Recognition of Sin.

No matter how eagerly then the ideal man, no matter how eagerly Jesus in the case of the paralytic, may have desired the happiness of all the sons of men, He could never have said to them: "Do not think of your sins, sin is an unreality, a figment of the diseased mind; eliminate it from your thought." "The modern man," says Sir Oliver Lodge, "does not concern himself about his sins." Of course he means that, unlike the mediaeval man, the modern man does not allow himself to be morbidly weighed down by the dread of failure to work out his own salvation. The modern man knows that failure to obtain salvation is not so much the consequence of neglect of arduous duties and painful labours as the refusal to accept the free gift of God. He has learned the lesson of his Heavenly Father's abundant grace. He does not worry himself about his sins, because he has been assured that they need not stand between him and his Maker. Nevertheless, in the sense in which the saying of Sir Oliver has been frequently misunderstood) it does represent a thought diametrically opposed to the thought of Jesus.

Neither did Jesus detach it from the personality of the sinner. It was the sin of the sinner, thy sin.1 It need not necessarily be assumed that the disease of the man was the direct result of his sin. But sin of some kind he had, and it was standing in the way of his welfare. It was some sin known to him, sin that had distressed and harassed him, sin whose presence in his life had darkened that life and cast the pale hue of sadness into its incidents.

Moreover, Jesus did not cut the relation between the man's sin and his responsibility. There is an easy way of absolving evil-doers in our days by representing them as rather the victims than offenders. The blame is laid to circumstances, to heredity, to environment, to evil companionships, to anything else but the choice of the offender himself. We are tempted to sum up our judgment in the compassionate expression, "Poor fellow, he couldn't help it." Not so Jesus. He fixes the responsibility on the sinner. "Thy sin." Never did he extenuate the evil deed, or excuse the evil-doer. "Doth no one condemn thee?" he said to the one above all others who might have been viewed as the victim of others. "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." She had sinned. She was responsible for her sin. She must abandon her sin. These are the fundamentals of His outlook on the matter. These are the essentials of His attitude on sin always. His impact with human life brings it into view, and He recognises it with all its ends.

Again, Jesus sees sin as working out destruction and death in the world of human life. It lies at the root of disease and suffering. Humanity instinctively joins the suffering of the world with the sin of the world. In doing so, it does, of course, allow itself to be misled into confusion of thought. It is true that sin and disease of body are inextricably associated, but it is not true that every disorder in the body is due to a special sin of the individual who is afflicted. It is true that all illness is somehow due to the transgression of divine law; but it is not true that in getting rid of disease one always gets rid of the sin that caused it. It is not true that when the root of the disease in sin is found and plucked out, that the diseased condition is always and at once removed. The chain of results that sin has started into motion becomes somehow independent It is easy to break the dam and start the flow of the water in a reservoir. It is easy to begin the process of ruin and devastation. And it may be easy enough to repair the breach, to stop the torrent from flowing. But it is certainly not easy to restore the crop that has been washed out by its roots, to rebuild the bridges that have been undermined and tumbled together into unshapely masses in the river-beds, to clean up the streets and replace the furniture into the houses from which it was floated out into the fields. It is a moment's work to break the physical constitution by disregarding or violating one of God's wise provisions for its welfare and completeness. But it takes years to give back to the complicated organism its primitive ease in functioning and producing the living forces of a living, unified activity.

To eliminate sin is a divine work; and to God all things are possible. To regain what has been lost by sin is man's part, and it may take years to cleanse the system of the brood of germs which have rushed in with the weakening of the body, to give elasticity and resiliency to the tissues that have been devitalised and stiffened, or to knit together those that have been torn and left with ragged edges, incapable of knitting themselves together.

The connections between sin and disease are not on the surface, and each of these two evils must be treated by itself. Nevertheless disease is a consequence of sin, and to see disease is to the healthy minded, ideal man, to see sin behind it.

2. The Son of Man Condemns Sin.

But Jesus, when He first touched human life, did more than recognise sin. He began a warfare on it. He fought it. He assumed from the very first that it ought not to be, that it must be negatived and cancelled, that its power must be broken, its effects destroyed, its hold loosened, its sting removed.

He knew it would be a long and hard struggle. He knew it would cost many a pang, many a sigh; that it would require the sacrifice of self. He realised that he must go on the painful search for the lost, that he must entreat and beseech, persuade and intercede; but he knew also that in a universe created and controlled by his heavenly Father, there is no permanent place for sin. He knew that it is not the natural man, but the denatured man who is sinful. Whenever the first impulses towards a return show themselves, the victims of sin are to see the certain pledge of its extermination.

The Pharisees, accustomed to measure all things by rigid standards of holiness, wondered at His associating with sinners. They were certainly right in their efforts to keep their own lives free from contamination. They must have seen that He no less than themselves was eager for a stainless life. But they could not imagine that, even though unsullied as yet by His touch with sinners, He could always remain so. And then, why should He care for sinners? Why work in such a hopelessly barren field? These publicans and harlots, were they not beyond the reach of all redeeming influences? Reasoning after this manner they were content to leave sin alone if it would leave them alone. Their attitude toward it amounted to a pact of armed but inactive hostility. To Jesus, hostility against sin meant an aggressive warfare at any cost to Himself. The ravages which it worked in the physical and social lives of men must serve to arouse in them some reaction against it, even though crude and low as far as its motive was concerned. They must be made to feel the need of something better than the husks on which sin was starving them. Then would Jesus seize upon this element in their lives and build it into the foundation of their salvation. "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." Thus Jesus never ceased destroying "the works of Satan."

There is much to hearten the disciple of Jesus to-day in the work of saving the world. In two opposite directions sin works out apparently incurable results. On one side it generates a shell of selfishness, isolating its victim like the hard crustacean, impermeable, rough and stone-like armament All approaches to the inner man seem impossible through this shell. This is the peculiar form in which it appears in those whom the world regards as better conditioned. The shell may not always be the same. In some instances it may be high intellectuality, in others aesthetic refinement, in others social standing due to wealth and exclusiveness. In all it is equally potent as a barrier to approach. The disciple of Jesus is likely to despair of the redemption of such.

Again in another direction sin may create an atmosphere of evil, through which the disciple of Jesus may imagine that he sees death and corruption and nothing more. But the Son of Man knew that under the offensive aspect of the lower as well as under the forbidding cover of the higher type of sinner there was that which called for effort to save, and that in both cases effort properly put forth must find response.

Just one type of sin He found beyond reach, and that was the suicidal sin against the Holy Ghost; and that from its nature was impossible to detect. Though, therefore, the warning might be given that there is such a sin, practically it cannot be taken into account, since it gives no evidence of itself to the outside world by which it may be recognised.

3. The Conquest of Sin.

Jesus met sin and recognised it. He saw sin and declared Himself an enemy of it. He fought it because He saw in it the destroyer of God's children. But He did more than this. He conquered sin. "Thy sins are forgiven thee." The Pharisees were right. It was no light thing to utter that momentous declaration. It was easy enough to pronounce the words; but to give effect to them, to show that the facts justified them, that the person to whom they were addressed was indeed and in truth cleansed of his guilt and freed from the power of sin, that was a different matter. It was no empty formula, no magic incantation, no hocus focus that the sinful man needed. This paralytic, it is likely, had had enough of magic and empty formulae in the vain effort to regain his wholeness. What he needed was an assurance backed by reality, and Jesus could give that to him.

Jesus could give him the assurance of sin forgiven because He knew God's nature and will, and He was Himself convinced of His own infallible knowledge of an unchallengeable right to declare the will of God. But even more than this, Jesus was aware that His own greatest achievement would be through His life and death to make away with sin as a barrier between God and man. It was later that He said of His own mission, "" The Son of Man came to give his life a ransom for many"; and it was later that He declared in the institution which was to perpetuate His memory that His "blood," (His life) was being poured for "the remission of sins"; but at no time in His experience could He have failed to realise that His chief work was the conquest of sin.

When men face sin in the world a serious problem is raised. What does its presence mean? Is it a reality? Is it a permanent and inalienable factor of human life? Is it an easy foe to overcome? Must each man grapple with his enemy in his own unaided strength? Questions that will not down, questions that demand and must be answered. Does Jesus give us any help in meeting and answering them?

He assures us that sin ought not to be; that man cannot rid himself of it in his own strength; that he need not fight it alone; that the Son of Man is present with him in his struggles, not to make it unnecessary for him to fight, but to guide the warfare and take upon Himself the larger part of the pain of the struggle, and that in the end victory is assured.

1 The surest fact about sin in my life is just that my sin is my sin" (P. Carnegie Simpson).