“And Jesus was left alone” (Jn. 8:9).
The word “alone” (monos) is used eight times in the Gospels in connection with the Saviour. It truly expresses one aspect of the cost to Him of becoming incarnate in this world of sin. One hesitates to speak of His being lonely; the word hardly seems reverent applied to Him.
MORAL ISOLATION
But eight times we are told that He was alone, and it will be profitable to consider what that implied and involved to Him. John 8:9 may be our initial passage as it stresses the moral isolation of the sinless Son of God on His shining way to the Cross. That day in Jerusalem, surrounded by a critical crowd of sinners, His searching words so convicted them of sin that they were literally driven, one by one, from His holy Presence, until “Jesus was left alone” with the woman.
I think that scene gives the clue, and supplies the underlying reason why so often He was alone, isolated by His innate purity and holiness. From eternity He had dwelt “in the light no man can approach unto.” And in His earthly life this continually compelled that moral solitude, which must have been His experience through the years, and have cost Him so dearly.
HIS “ADOPTED” FAMILY
He had shrouded His glory, He had laid aside His riches when He came to earth, but His purity He could not lay aside. But having a body “prepared” for Him, His humanity longed for human sympathy and fellowship. This was largely denied Him. “God setteth the solitary in families,” wrote the Psalmist, but the Saviour’s natural family had failed Him as we shall see, and His “adopted” family did not really come into “the fellowship of His sufferings” till after He had gone back to heaven, with the result that He was called to tread “the winepress alone” (Isa. 63:3).
We have only one glimpse of Him as a child, when in Jerusalem His mother discovered Him “in the midst of the doctors” (Luke 2:46). And then the curtain drops, and nothing is revealed of the eighteen hidden years that follow in Nazareth. What did He do and say those unrecorded years? How did He feel? At least we know how He lived; as ever it was, “I do always those things which please Him.” We know, too, how He toiled for a living. “Is not this the carpenter?” records Mark 6:3. How much that sentence reveals and implies. He did not preach, those silent years of preparation in Nazareth, or they would have remembered it, and not merely referred to Him as “the carpenter.” No mighty works were done those years either, for the “beginning of miracles” was at Cana. Of public witness there was none in Nazareth, for “His hour was not yet come.”
Did He find sympathy in Nazareth with His mission, or fellowship in His solitude? Evidently the common people never realized that in their midst lived One so high and holy, nor shared in His sorrow over sin. His very friends (Mark 3:21) deemed Him “beside Himself” when He began to preach later on. They evidently had no glimpse of His glory. His “brethren” too, did not believe in Him (John 7:5) when His ministry began. We must suppose that in earlier years they, too, must have failed Him in real sympathy and understanding. Even then Psalm 69:8 was being fulfilled: “I am . . . a stranger unto my mother’s children.”
MARY, HIS MOTHER
There remains then Mary, His mother. Could He make a real confidant of her? We know at His miraculous birth “Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). And with the doctors Mary “kept all these sayings in her heart” (Luke 2:51). More we are not told. The scene at Cana does imply Mary’s perfect confidence in her Son and His power. But does it imply she was His confidant? Had He been able to unburden His heart to her, as to His person and mission, and coming death as sinbearer? Did He find in her that solace for His solitude, that human sympathy which He sought later on? It hardly seems as if this could have been so, even with Mary, for as Psalm 69:20 puts it: “I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.” So for “about thirty years” He lived in Nazareth, the solitary Saviour, cut off from human sympathy and understanding, unrecognized, unknown.
There indeed, day after day, the Lord had been living the Sermon on the Mount years before ever He preached a word of it. Yet, strange to say, that perfect life lived as an example, changed no other lives. It would take the Cross to do that.
NAZARETH
Later, when His ministry had begun, He paid a visit to Nazareth, where alone in all the world a perfect human life had been lived; and with what result? In His hometown of Nazareth, we read: “He could do no mighty work . . . because of their unbelief.” Pathetic verdict! Thank God He has changed His hometown now, and dwells in the heart of every believer. Yet, alas, though His abode is different, only too often the home conditions are the same; unbelief still is in the heart, hence no mighty work, to His sorrow and our loss. “Lord, increase our faith.”
Then came His public ministry, and the time when, kindly and deliberately, He had to divest Himself of His earthly relations, for now these natural ties were to be superseded by supernatural ties, and brethren after the flesh had to be replaced by brethren in the Spirit.
So, to the seeking mother and brethren (Matt. 12:50) He decreed: “Whosoever shall do the will of My Father . . . the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.” So He turned from His natural family to His adopted family. Twelve of them He called to be His disciples. And the function and purpose of these new adopted relations is carefully and for all time set forth in Mark 3:14. He ordained twelve that: 1) they should be with Him, and that 2) He might send them forth to preach. Those words set forth the order of importance of their purpose and call. Their office was to be twofold: They were to share His joys and sorrows with Him; they were to share His salvation with the world.
WITH HIM
Earliest man “heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” Even then, He was seeking fellowship with His creature man. He has been seeking it ever since. The disciples were called “that they might be with Him.” We too are called (1 Cor. 1:9) “to the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” For the highest function and possibility of man must ever be the fellowship of God. Service, however exalted and essential, is after all but a by-product of Christian life. The main, the highest function is fellowship.
Of course we need preparation for it, even as believers. When the prodigal came home, the Father did not invite him to sit at the feast in rags. It would not have been fitting, nor was it needful to do so. The loving Father could and did fall on his neck and kiss him, in spite of all his rags. They did not prevent reconciliation. They would prevent communion. Even so there is a fellowship with God which cannot be enjoyed by any believer without suitable preparation and apparel, the robe of Christ’s righteousness “put on.” As with the prodigal, this is supplied free, on the terms that we do “put . . . on the Lord Jesus Christ” day by day.
This preparation for fellowship is often long and costly. Many lessons had to be learned by the disciples in their school of prayer. Many must be learned by each of us, yet how well worth the learning! Many indeed are the “strange ways” and acts of God. Time, too, is needed, and there is often bewilderment. Yet there must be patience and trust in the dark. “A saint’s life is in the hand of God, like a bow and arrow in the hands of an archer.” God is aiming at something the saint cannot see, and He stretches and strains, and every now and then the saint cries: “I cannot stand any more!” God does not heed, He goes on stretching till His purpose is in sight, then He lets fly. You cannot see Him clearly just now, you cannot understand what He is doing, but you know Him. You may often have to trust Him in the dark. So, only, is deepest fellowship developed.
“That they might be with Him.” As He said later: they did continue with Him in His temptations; yet only in body; how far off they were in sympathy and understanding! When, “offended” at the truth “many of His disciples . . . walked no more with Him” (John 6:66), He cried: “Will ye also go away?” Then though Peter made a sincere declaration, “Thou art the Christ”; yet when the Saviour spoke of His inevitable cross, Peter, only willing for the crown, cried, “Be it far from Thee, Lord!” So, refusing to discuss His death, he failed Him in His need. Later at the Transfiguration, sent by God to revive their fainting faith, Moses and Elijah spoke with Him concerning just that, “His departure,” and so supplied the disciples’ lack.
But why prolong the recital of the disciples’ failure and the Saviour’s isolation? Only after Pentecost and the gift of the Spirit did the disciples and believers really begin to enter into “the fellowship of His sufferings.” Was there any sorrow like His sorrow? Can we not make amends today? He has promised to enable us to abide in Him. Thus by the Spirit’s aid we may walk in unbroken communion and fellowship with the Saviour. Then, day by day, He may “see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied.”
SENT FORTH TO PREACH
Believers “were called Christians first in Antioch.” The people knew they were actually disciples of Barnabas and Saul, yet those were not the names by which they were called. Because of their evident likeness to their Saviour, they were called Christians. The change was wrought by Him and not by men. Today lives must still authenticate lips. Because they do not, most sermons are in vain.
“From church and creed the light goes out,
The saintly life survives;
The blessed Master none can doubt,
Revealed by sainted lives.”