BY THE REV. ALEXANDER STEWART, OBAN.
III.—The Servant: His Meekness.
He shall not cry, nor lift up,
Nor cause His voice to be heard in the street.—(ver. 2.)
MATTHEW quotes these words with a slight verbal modification which serves to make the meaning more plain. As used by him the verse reads, “He shall not strive, nor cry, neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets.” The variation fixes the sense in which we are to understand the word cry. It is the crying of strife.
This whole description may be summed up in a single characteristic; and that is Meekness. This is the first mark of the Servant of the Lord. He is brought before us in the actual discharge of the duties of His Office, and we are furnished with a threefold description of His character, by which He may be recognised. First among these comes the quality we are considering. The Servant of the Lord is meek and lowly. Do you see one who strives and cries; whose voice may be heard afar off in loud and boastful disputation? He is not like the Servant of the Lord.
And this, surely, is not the least among the many wonderful things we are told concerning Him. Remember the nature of the undertaking on which He was engaged, the demands of the task He had to accomplish. He was to be the Deliverer. In order to be a deliverer He had first to be a conqueror. He had to take the prey from the mighty. He had to overcome principalities and powers. He had to overthrow the strength and the subtlety of hell. He is spoken of as travelling in the greatness of His strength, with steps of resistless majesty and power. He is described as red in His apparel, like one who, has just emerged from sanguinary conflict. He was to be a king, of whose reign, both in the extent of its supremacy and in the splendour of its riches, the dominion of Solomon in all his glory was only a dim foreshadowing. But when He appeared among men this was the characteristic that distinguished Him from the beginning to the end of His course—He did not cry, nor lift up, nor cause His voice to be heard in the street.
He had indeed a crown from men, but it was a crown of thorns. He had also a throne, but it was on the Cross. Once he accepted at their hands the homage due to royalty, and then He rode into the city of the King on a borrowed ass. He was a mighty Conqueror in very truth, but His career of conquest, so far as His personal ministry is concerned, began in the manger and was finished on the Tree.
He did not come to obtain the victory by external force. He came to conquer through lowly service. His weapons were not carnal but spiritual. His kingdom was not of this world. “If my kingdom were of this world,” He said, “my servants would fight.” He had more resistless forces at His command than swords, or guns, or big battalions; but they were quieter. His way to conquest lay through the valley of humiliation. His path of glory led Him by the Cross. He humbled Himself and made Himself of no reputation: wherefore God hath highly exalted Him. He overcame in the power of meekness, in the might of lowly, loving obedience. He did, indeed, pursue His course to a world-wide dominion; but it was not by force of physical compulsion, but by the power that lies in the still small voice of the Spirit of God.
He shall not strive—with Him that sent Him. The meekness of the Servant was manifested toward God. He did not “cry” in querulous impatience at the severity of His lot; He did not “lift up” in rebellious discontentment; no man ever heard His voice in the streets in murmuring at the conditions of His service. What more common among men than for servants to strive with their masters? They complain of the treatment they receive; they deplore the conditions under which they labour; they are discontented, and serve with a grudge. But it was not so with this Servant. He did not strive. He was ever resigned to the will of God. He was cheerfully submissive to whatsoever His Father saw fit to impose. His burden was heavy, and the way was long and rough. It was a bitter cup that He had to drink; it was an awful sword whose weight He had to feel; but He lifted His load with quiet submissiveness, and said, “Not my will, but thine be done.” It pleased the Lord to bruise Him. It pleased the Servant to endure.
He shall not strive—with men in noisy contention. He did not wrangle about His own claims. He did not meet reviling with reviling, or threatening with threatening. When He was reviled He reviled not again. When He suffered He threatened not. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He opened not His mouth. Men hated Him without a cause, but He repaid their hatred with ungrudging service. How often did He withdraw into seclusion to avoid an open collision with the multitude. With what matchless forbearance did He endure the jeers and taunts and insults of His enemies. With what yet more marvellous patience did He meet the treachery of seeming friends. The heart of Judas was naked and opened unto His eyes in that dark hour in Gethsemane, but He submitted to the traitor’s kiss, and His only comment was a question whose prevailing note would seem to be sad and almost surprised expostulation, “Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?” How often, too, did they seek to entice Him into the field of public controversy, but He refused to be drawn into fruitless disputations.
He shall not cry nor lift up—to draw the eyes of men upon Himself. He made no vain-glorious display of His power. He never performed a miracle merely to gratify the popular love of the marvellous. He never pandered to the vulgar curiosity that continually followed His steps. Matthew quotes this prophecy, it will be remembered, in connection with the healing of the multitudes that came to Him. He charged them, we are told, that they should not make Him known. It was in order to avoid publicity. When He questioned His disciples at Caesarea Philippi concerning the impression He had made on the minds of men, He soon showed, if evidence for that were needed, how infinitely removed was His design from the weakness of human thirst for fame. Immediately after Peter’s glorious confession we read that He charged His disciples that they should tell no man that He was Jesus the Christ. The same obligation to secrecy is laid upon the chosen few who were eye-witnesses of His majesty when He received from God the Father honour and glory on the Mount. And again when men sought to take Him by force and make Him king, He put away from Him the bauble of human glory. He kept outside the arena of political strife.
He did not fail to insist upon His own claims when the occasion demanded it—the self-assertiveness of Jesus of Nazareth is indeed a unique proof of His Godhead—but while that remains true we do not find that it was His wont to emphasise in words the honours due to Himself. He allowed what He was and what He did to bear their own weight of testimony. You never hear Him saying, “Behold my condescension.” If men stoop to perform some duties that lie beneath their station, they are very ready to advertise their own humility. They humble themselves noisily. They feed their pride with the appearance of meekness. “See,” say they, “how condescending we are. Think of the height from which we have descended, and admire our lowliness of mind.” But it was not so with the Servant of the Lord. His humility became Him well. When He arose from His lowly bed in the hinder part of the ship on the Sea of Galilee, He did indeed reveal the glory of His power in rebuking the winds and the waves; He showed how high was the plane, on which it was natural for Him to move, above the meanness of His earthly condition; but He says not one word to point the contrast. He does not turn to His disciples and say, “See how I hold the waters in the hollow of my hand, and gather the winds in my fist.” When He girded Himself with the towel and washed His disciples’ feet in the upper room in Jerusalem, John does indeed give us to understand that He did it with the light of heaven shining full upon His own consciousness of what He was; He knew that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He was come from God and went to God; but here again it is not on His own humility that He wishes attention fixed. You do not hear Him saying, “Behold, I am washing your feet now, but the resources of Omnipotence are at my disposal.” When He earned His bread by the sweat of His brow He did not say, “This is the hand that laid the foundations of the universe, and marked the courses of the stars.” When He was hungry He did not cry, “The cattle on a thousand hills are mine.”
In a word, He sought not honour from men. “Who is blind but my servant, or deaf as my messenger that I sent?” Christ was blind to the world’s honours and glories, and deaf to the voice of human applause. This is the mind that was in Christ Jesus. He made Himself of no reputation; in other words, He did not cry, nor lift up, neither did any man hear His voice in the street. It was the mind of lowly self-denial and humility.
And let us not forget that this is a fundamental characteristic of the religion of Christ still. It makes its way quietly. The Kingdom of Heaven cometh not with observation. It can afford to dispense with carnal weapons. When Christianity has had recourse to external force it has departed from the Spirit of Christ. The work of conquering the world goes on secretly and without ostentation. The leaven is quietly doing its work. The seed is springing up without noise. Wherever we see religion borrowing the methods and the weapons of the world, we are justified in questioning whether it is truly the Lord’s service. Wherever we see what professes to be Christian work carried on with ostentatious display and noisy flourish of trumpets, we cannot be far wrong in concluding that the Lord is “not in the wind.” Christ does not yet cry, nor lift up, nor cause His voice to be heard in the street.