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4 ||| | ||p lIFJ 111 dl&B iHHIIk I Wl IM 111 ■BHmI iß[ b | Strength Blessing Weakness. “And it came to pass, as he went into the house of one of the Pharasees to eat bread on the Sab bath day ,that they watched him. And, behold, there was a certain man before him which had the dropsy. And Jesus answering, spake unto the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, ‘ls it lawful to heal on the Sab bath day?’ And they held their peace. And he took him, and healed him, and let him go. And answered them, saying, ‘Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the Sabbath day?’ And they could not answer him again to these things. And he put forth a parable to those which were bidden, when he marked how they chose out of the chief rooms; saying unto them, ‘When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room lest a more honorable man than thou be bidden of him, and he that bade thee shall come and say to thee, ‘Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room. But when thou art bidden go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, “Friend, go up higher;’ ‘then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee. For whosover abaseth himself shall be exalted.’ ” Luke 14: 1-11. The lesson that Jesus desires to teach at this feast is one concerning the obligation strength owes to weakness. To accomplish this he does two things. First, he heals the man of the dropsy, and second, he submits the parable of the “Highest Room” at the Feast. I know commentators have disassociated the heal ing of the man with the dropsy and the parable of the man at the feast, holding that the healing of the man with the dropsy was incidental, and has no spe cial bearing upon the other truth taught. This is not true. The whole incident from beginning to end is keyed to the one idea of strength blessing weak ness. The Pharisee’s Feast. Let us see the feast: Again Jesus is present at a feast in the house of a Pharisee. This time his host is one of the chief of the Pharasees. What the real purpose of the feast is, we do not know. We know, however, that it is given on the Sabbath day. This may surprise us at first thought, for the Phar isees were pretendedly very rigid in their obser vance of this day. As a matter of fact, however, we know that it was a frequent occurrence for them to turn the Sabbath into a day of feasting. I am sorry to say that many good people to-day follow their example. We all know good people who use this holy day to give big dinners. Some use it as a day of visiting their relatives. Country people come to town, or town people go to the country. Men are not as careful as they ought to be about this matter. Sometimes good men thought lessly cause their wives to miss church to prepare big dinners for them and their friends on the Sab bath day. I believe it is wrong—l know it. It is wrong to the housekeeper, wrong to the servant, and bad teaching for the children. We will see it some day, but it may be too late to remedy the evil. Parents cannot be too careful to stamp the sacredness of the Sabbath upon their children. LT e n G. Broughton- Jesus Was There. Jesus was present at the feast. He was there by invitation of the Pharisee in whose house the feast was given. There was evidently some purpose in his being invited, for there was no intimacy be tween the Pharisees and Jesus. His presence could only serve to mar the pleasure of the guests. My judgment is, his invitation was a part of a well thought scheme to entrap him. The Pharisees were ever at such plots. The whole bent of their lives was to entrap Jesus. But Jesus was there from choice. No mere trap of the Pharisees could have caught him. He knew all things. Nor would he have gone for a mere so cial function. His plans were too important to be interrupted by simply social invitations. He could not fritter away his time with big dinners and idle “chat a chat.” The whole underlying purpose of Jesus was to use the occasion to teach a lesson of compassion. He knew the cold legalism of the Pharisees; he knew how they needed sympathy, mercy and grace to bap tize their forms and ceremonies. The task then ahead of Jesus was to use whatever came up at the feast to teach The Lesson of Compassion. Let us see how he does it: First, he does it by healing the man with the dropsy. How came this man to be at the feast, we do not know. I think he was invited, or he would not have been there. I do not think the invitation was because they de sired his presence, but that they might use him to help carry out their plan of entrapping Jesus. Notice the first verse of the story: “And it came to pass, as he went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on the Sabbath day, that they watched him.” They knew that this poor man with the dropsy was there. They watched to see what Jesus would do for him. It was just such watching as we see to-day. The world has ever had its eyes turned upon Je sus. If he had failed to bless this poor man with the dropsy the Pharisees would have had a good case against him. But they surely did not know Jesus. His heart of compassion was too big to pass such an object by without attention. Most of us, I am afraid, would not have been caught by such a plot. Most of us would not have taken time to have given the man a thought. Neglect to attend to the unfortunate is the one weak point in the church today. We know that the world is still watching Jesus. It is not watching him so much now in his life on the earth, for it has found it to be blameless; it is watching him in the lives of his representatives among men. There is a poor, unfortunate man, broken in heart and wrecked in life, standing at the door of the church. He may have come of his own accord, or he may have been sent there by the world. He is there, however, and must be dealt with. What message of sympathy and love has the church to offer that man? He may not need material aid, or he may. What answer is the church of to-day to make to such a man? It is a weighty question, and let us be careful how we answer it, for in answering it we are speaking for our Lord, and not for our selves. The Institutional Church. This is the argument for the institutional church. Christ wants to dominate everything that touches the good of humanity. It makes no difference what it is, if humanity’s good is at stake in any way, Jesus wants to come in. The church is his repre sentative. On leaving his disciples he said, “As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” The church to represent Christ must not be con tent with simply preaching the Gospel of salvation from hell—that is a big thing; it is the biggest The Golden Age for March 22, 1906. thing in the world—but it is not all that Jesus would have the church do. Neither is the church to be content with the work of training for this object alone. Salvation cannot be limited. It is a word that is boundless. It means everything. It saves from hell; it saves to h,eaven; it saves in every way humanity needs saving. To preach salvation in its fullest and broadest sense means to preach a Gospel that remedies every evil that touches humanity. Oh, how derelict the church has been in this par ticular ! How narrow and circumscribed her work! The other day a child working in a cotton mill got its radial artery cut and bled to death. There was a missionary engaged in Christian settlement work in that mill district. She was well-versed in the Scriptures so far as the usual preparation goes. She was present when the accident occurred. There was no doctor in the community, and the child had to die. The slightest training would have enabled that missionary to have stopped the flow of blood and saved the echild’s life. It is almost a crime that she had not been taught, in connection with her other missionary training, something about what to do in such emergencies. The world is watching us, watching the church, to see whether or not the religion is sentiment or service. The world is watching us to see how we treat our fellow-man. They watched to see what Jesus would do at the feast. It was a good time to watch him for never a more selfish crowd got together. The highest seat, the seat of greatest honor, was what every one was determined to get, while the lowest seat no body would have. Jesus saw this selfish scramble and rebuked them by saying, “When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honorable man than thou be bidden of him.” What is the real lesson in this teaching? It is not simply a lecture on good manners ,though such a lecture would not have been out of place. The real lesson is the same as in the healing of the man with the dropsy. It is the obligation strength owes to weakness. The man first at the feast had an ad vantage, but it is not Christian to take it. We may say this is high teaching, too high for us to come up to, but it is no higher than The Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is: “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” This is our profession; it is a part of our creed. The world is watching to see if it is profession only. Never mind what excuses men make, the demand is, that we shall live this creed or change it. If we change it, we reflect upon the Master who gave it. Jesus gave this Golden Rule and demands that his followers shall live up to it. The question for each of us is, are we doing it? Are we even trying to do it? Are we making enough effort in this di rection to even impress the world? I know men say that it is impossible in this day of competition to live up to such high teaching. Then, if this is true, the followers of Jesus must get out of the competition business. But is it true that the Golden Rule is impracti caple for this day? Looking at it from a sane, ra tional standpoint, it presupposes fairness and jus tice to start with. It does not mean that a man who has property shall necessarily sell everything he has, and give it to the man who has none. It takes for granted that the man who has no means would not want the man who has to do it, unless there was reason for it. It takes for granted that the man who has no position would not want the man who has a good place to do that for him, for each is to put himself in the place of the other and hold himself in readiness to do what the other