" Jesus then lifted up his eyes and saw a great company." JOHN
vi. 5.
THE sight of a crowd of human beings always is
impressive. The crowd may be of any sort and
gathered on any occasion. It may be a great, rapt
multitude listening together to exalted and exalting
music. It may be a mob, wild and tumultuous with
passion. It may be an army marching like one great,
marvellous machine, to meet the enemy. It may be
the chance gathering of passengers whom some ac-
cidental obstruction has stopped upon the street.
Whatever be its cause, it is a crowd ; and it is inter-
esting to any truly human soul that stands and
watches it. It is not simply for the special thoughts
which it suggests. It is not Xerxes weeping at the
sight of the army of which in a few years no man
will be left alive. It is not so definite as that. It
is the general sense of human life, the very essence
of this mysterious and mighty thing, apart from
particular conditions, apart from curious specula-
tions upon it. It is the fact of life laid on the heart
of the living man that makes the interest of a great
crowd. A sensitive child will feel it. It is in some
sense the personal impression broadened and deep-
ened and richened ; but there is also something in it
which no contact with the individual produces, a
pure impression of humanity, as if you were able to
extricate from all its entanglements the one essen-
tial, universal quality which makes a man a man ;
and, making it concrete and visible, yet preserving
all the broadness of abstraction, to hold it before
your eyes and let it impress itself upon your heart.
This is the general impressiveness of a crowd.
But, no doubt, the impression cannot be uniform.
It must vary with the character of the observer, of
the human being upon whom the impression falls.
In the words of my text, Christ is the Observer. He
has crossed the sea of Tiberias with His disciples.
He is sitting on a hillside of the Eastern country.
He has been pondering, and perhaps praying. By
and by He lifts up His eyes and sees a great com-
pany. The multitude whom He left beyond the
lake has followed Him across, and He is face to face
with them again. He cannot escape from men.
Then He accepts them into His life and deals with
them. And we can feel, I think, that as they im-
press themselves on Him we are getting, as it were,
the largest and truest impression which humanity
has ever made on man. That which I tried to say
just now of the essential life making itself known,
must have been more real with Jesus Christ than
with any other watcher of his fellow-men that ever
lived; for here was Man in His completeness re-
ceiving men in their completeness. More and more
we come to see that this was what the Incarnation
meant. It was the Son of man, in whom the whole
of all the life of man was gathered up, who sat and
watched the multitude and first realized Himself in
them, and then knew them in Himself as they had
never been known before.
Let us think for a while about Christ looking upon
a crowd of men. And first, let us try to see the
picture which is in the words with which the scene
is introduced to us. It is an old Bible phrase, one
that recurs very often in the Bible story, in which
the Saviour is described as "lifting up his eyes" to
see the people. The picture is of a man sitting with
his eyes bent down. He is in thought and contem-
plation. He is seeing with the inward sight. He
is seeing the invisible. He is looking at truth. He
is questioning Himself. So sitting, Jesus is the type
of all introspection and meditation and study, of all
that occupation of mankind which is turned away
from active human life and is dwelling on the unseen
things. We recognize at once the quiet, absorbed
Figure on the hillside.
Do we not also recognize at once the quick re-
sponse with which, in answer to the bustling feet of
the approaching crowd, Christ turns and looks up,
and listens and is ready for them, and gives Himself
in answer to their claim. He is theirs. No self-
indulgence, even in the deepest thought or highest
vision, even in prayer to His Father, must make
Him deaf or blind to human life appealing to Him and
requiring His help. Therefore He lifts up His eyes.
Could the conditions and obligations of our human
life be more vividly set forth than here? There is
no study or dream, no meditation or prayer, which
must not hold itself subject to the demand of men.
It is not simply that the dream or study is less im-
portant, and must sacrifice itself when the human
need requires ; it is more than that. It is that the
study and the dream need for their rectification
and fulfilment this readiness to report themselves to
man and his nature. They must justify and know
themselves before the face of human life looking to
them out of its anxieties and hopes.
The illustrations of this are everywhere. Philoso-
phers study and ponder to adjust their system of
the universe to man. They cannot, they must not,
be satisfied with their systems till they have lifted
up their eyes and seen the "great company." Will
their philosophy watch the world and explain it?
they ask themselves. Can they tell man what his
life is, and how to live it? The abstract student of
political science must sooner or later see before him
men waiting to be governed. The military theorists
must tell how this especial battle is to be fought and
won. The medical inquirer must know that there
is sickness crying out to be cured. The theologians
must be aware of eager souls appealing to them with
the pathetic question, "What must I do to be
saved?" The safety of man, the rescue of the
thinker from the perils of his thought, the assurance
that the farthest and deepest shall always be at the
service of the immediate and pressing, lies in this
readiness of all true men to lift up their eyes and
see the "great company."
There are students and dreamers and theorists
enough who are not ready. Sometimes their ab-
sorption and irresponsiveness makes other men
rudely and crudely denounce all meditation and
speculation, and say that the far-off heavens shine
only for their own luxury, and have no light to give
to the darkened earth. But such vexation is slight
and temporary. The crowd looks to the scholar and
the dreamer and the saint, and does not look in vain.
It is a history full of instruction and encouragement
that He who saw the deepest vision and prayed the
holiest prayer was the very first to turn away from
both, to lift up His eyes and see the multitude, and
love them, and come down to break for them the
bread of life.
But let us, before we come directly to the thought
of how Christ looked upon the crowd, consider some-
what more fully what the sight of a host of his fellow-
beings may be to any man who looks them in the
face. May it not be summed up by saying that a
crowd may be to any man a mirror into which he
looks and sees what he is, and what he ought to be.
There is, first, the revelation of what a man is
which comes to him in the presence of a crowd. I
mean of what he is essentially, intrinsically, behind
and separate from the countless accidents of his
existence and the peculiar characteristics of his lot.
This belongs with what we saw of the power which
a great crowd has to present essential and absolute
humanity to our minds. Facing that great presen-
tation, many things which are not essential drop off
and fall away. You go out from your individual
life, from your self-absorbed existence, and stand
face to face with a great host of your fellow-men,
and as you stand there (have you not felt it ?) all that
is really human in you throbs with vitality. It is
alive with sympathy, while that which is not human
manifests its weak vitality and begins to die. Your
artificialnesses are exposed. You feel what shams
your shams are, how selfish are your selfishnesses.
Thus you see yourself in the mirror.
In the same mirror, in the face of the same crowd,
you see also what you ought to be. For, along with
the sense of how thoroughly your humanity is one
with that of the crowd on which you look not in-
terfering with it, but increased and deepened by it,
there is the other sense of how distinct your life is
from the lives of all these men. You are a separate
being. There are some things which specialize in
you the universal human life. The gifts and endow-
ments which you possess become real to you ; all the
privileges of your life grow clear. You are entirely
unable to be proud of them. They are yours for
the sake of this multitude. They become the
personal expression of the universal life, bound to
restore themselves in service to those human neces-
sities which look into your face with their appeal
out of this one great face of the crowd.
I think that no man of true sensitiveness has come
forth from his studies and contemplations into the
storm and host of human living, without this becom-
ing his revelation. He was himself for all of these.
They claimed all that he was and had. If he was
rich when they were poor, it was their riches that he
held. If he was wise when they were ignorant, it
was their wisdom. Who was it that had made him
to differ? Even the Father who had first made him
one with them. And so humility and responsibility,
which are so often in contention and stand apart
from one another, meet in the heart of the true man
who stands face to face with the crowd of his fellow-
men.
It is these things, then, which all true men find,
and which Jesus Christ, we cannot doubt, found in
the presence of a multitude, self-revelation and
noble impulse these two together. When He saw
the gathering in the Temple at the time of the
journey which He made there in His boyhood, when
He looked upon the host who were waiting for their
baptism at Jordan, when He came down from the
mountain and found the crowd waiting in the plain,
when He preached in the thronged synagogue at
Capernaum, when He walked the streets of Jerusa-
lem or stood in the courts of the great Temple,
everywhere these two things were taking place : He
was knowing how truly He was one with man, and
He was feeling that that in Him which was more
than man was being claimed by the human need.
The woods and mountains could not do these things
for Him ; therefore He turned from mountains and
woods to the places where men were.
We cannot picture Christ to ourselves as a mere
dreamer. The Oriental standard of the holy man
the mystic sitting in rapt, useless meditation year
after year wholly fails in Him. The nature-wor-
shipper, listening to what the trees and streamlets
have to say, drinking in, after our modern notion of
him, the unarticulated wisdom of the clouds and the
flowers, that is not the Jesus of the Gospels, the
Jesus of the Christian faith. He is a man of men.
Any day the murmur of a crowd will draw Him from
the silence of the hillside. For the deep know-
ledge of Himself and the impulse of service pour
into Him out of the eager faces and the pictures
of suffering and joy which throng upon Him.
These are the elements out of which character is
made. And so it is in presence of the world, in
contact with the world, that character has birth.
This was the truth which Goethe taught, the truth
of a talent shaping itself in stillness, but a character
in the activity of life. It is character, not talent,
for the lack of which the world suffers. It is be-
cause of too little character, not because of too little
talent, that the careers of human beings come to
wreck. Therefore that which makes character must
always be the true salvation of mankind. Therefore
man, and not nature, is the true school of Human
Life.
With this general truth concerning Christ's rela-
tion to the multitude of men clear in our mind, we
are prepared to go on and speak of two or three of
the special effects which it produced in Him. And
the first which I ask you to observe is this : the per-
fect mingling of respect and pity in the way in which
He felt about mankind. It would be useless to
deny that pity, as we ordinarily know it, has in it
almost always a mixture of contempt. It is not re-
spectful to the nature of the man whom it pities.
That is the reason why it is resented almost as if it
were insulting. "Do not pity me," the proud man
cries. "Neglect me if you will; abuse me, but do
not pity me." It is not simply that pity declares of
necessity the misfortune of him on whom the pity is
bestowed. That is inevitable. It is that pity, as
we give it, seems to interpret and comment on mis-
fortune. It seems to say that the man must be not
worth much who could come to this. It seems to
set the pitier over against the pitied in an assertion
of superior desert.
Your friend has passed into some one of the great
clouds of sorrow which darken the houses and the
hearts of men. You, from outside the cloud, radi-
ant with the sunshine of prosperity, speak in to him
and tell him how you pity him. Do you not know
the feeling of suspense with which you listen to hear
how he will receive your words? Do you not know
how hard it is, first to keep, and then to make him
know that you keep, a true respect for him through
all his suffering ; and that there is no slightest latent
spark of the consciousness of superiority in the
commiseration which you offer him? The Book of
Job, with the supercilious comfort of the prosperous
friends, repeats itself in countless homes of sorrow.
It is the absolute absence of all this in Jesus Christ
which makes the wonder of His life. There is never
a touch of contempt in His dealing with distress.
When He touches the blind man's eyes and gives
him sight; when He steps across the threshold of
the dead girl's chamber; when, by the Pool of
Bethesda, He probes the intention and desire of the
sick man s soul; when He calls to the buried Laza-
rus at Bethany; everywhere, do you not feel the
infinite and exquisite reverence which is in His
touch and His voice for the human nature to which
His word is spoken, or on which His hand is
laid?
It is not merely that Christ is a sufferer Himself.
It is not merely that He is poor, and so is in special
sympathy with poverty and distress. That would
make Him the friend of a class, almost the partisan
of a party among men the party of the wretched
and distressed. It is something larger and deeper
than that. It is the reverence of the Lord of human
nature for the human nature which He rules, nay,
of the Creator of man for the man whom He created.
Who knows the wonder and mystery of the organ
like the man who built it, who piled pipe on pipe,
each with its capacity of various sound? And so,
who is it that shall touch the jarred and untuned
organ, and call it back to harmony, like him in
whose soul the organ's primitive and ideal harmony
forever dwells, and to whom all its discord and dis-
order is a sadness and a shame?
Therefore it is that Jesus Christ pities not merely
the sorrow and the poverty which He knows by
fellow-feeling, by being sorrowful and poor himself.
He pities far more the sin and meanness and moral
misery which He knows by its contrast with His own
soul, and its departure from that purpose of human
nature which lies always in the depths of His divine
and human soul. He pities sorrow, but He pities
sin far more. Pilate and Herod and Judas and the
Pharisees, these are the truly pitiable creatures of
the earth for Him. And yet, even for them the
reverence is not lost in the pitifulness. The mys-
tery and richness of their human nature still abides
behind their cowardice and selfishness. Can you
not feel it in the marvellous loftiness and courtesy
of that conversation at the judgment seat? Does it
not tremble even in the simple words with which, at
the Last Supper, the Lord dismisses the traitor to
his dreadful work?
The work of the Gospel on the soul which it
saves, bears the conclusive witness of the respect
which mingles with the pity which is the power of
salvation. Where is the soul, rejoicing in the work
which Christ has done for it, that has not wondered
when it saw how the very visitation of Divinity
which made its sin manifest, and bowed it down with
penitence, also made manifest its preciousness, and
opened visions of its possible attainment ! You
knew how you needed salvation when you met
Christ. You knew how worth saving you were when
you met Christ. The awe which a soul feels be-
fore itself as its spiritual capacity is being revealed
in its conversion, what is it but the reflection and
echo of the reverence which is in the heart of Christ
for the soul which He is saving by His grace?
What the soul feels the world feels. There is a
certain insolence in most reformers. It hinders the
triumphs of reform. It sullies the splendor of much
of the noblest progress which the world has made.
The leader stands before the host, and bids them to
the battle almost with a taunt and a jeer. There is
nothing of that in Christ. There is a profound rev-
erence for the army which He leads. Therefore the
army has followed Him as it has followed no other
captain. And when He leads it into its final victory,
the victory will be sure.
Let me pass on to another impressive point in the
way in which Christ looks at the crowd of men. It
is something which we feel rather than see ; but I
do not think that we can be mistaken regarding it.
It is the way in which the individual and the com-
bined life do not hinder, but help each other, to His
mind. To us the individual loses himself in the
crowd, and we cannot find him. A new being the
multitude takes his place. We cannot think that
it was so with Jesus. We are sure that, to Him,
each person in the crowd remained distinct, in spite
of the host by whom He was surrounded.
Nay, more than that, are we not sure that the
person was more distinct because of the host in
whose midst his life was set? There was one token
of this being so in one event of Christ's life. Do
you remember where the poor Syrian woman crept
up and laid a timid finger on His robes, and, when
Christ recognized and owned it, His disciples almost
rebuked Him with their surprise? " Master, the
multitude throng Thee and press Thee ; and sayest
Thou, who touched me?" The blurring of the
single face in the great sea of faces, the loss of the
one in the many, the sacrifice of personality to so-
ciety, all this, with which we are familiar, we think
of as wholly absent from the life of Jesus Christ.
When the great company came pouring up the hill
upon the other side of Gennesaret, it was as a
whole, making each part of which it was composed
more vividly distinct, that Jesus saw the advancing
multitude when He " lifted up His eyes."
We wrestle with the problem of socialism and in
dividualism, the problem of the many and the one ;
and we wonder which of the two must be sacrificed
to the other, which of the two shall ultimately over-
come the other arid remain the triumphant principle
of human life. Let us be sure that to Christ, to
God, there is no problem. Let us be sure, there
fore, that in the end it shall not be by the victory
of either over the other, but by the perfect harmo-
nizing of the two, that the perfect condition of hu-
man life shall be attained. When society shall be
complete, it shall perfectly develop the freedom of
the individual. When the individual shall be per-
fect, he will make in his free and original life his
appointed contribution to society.
Therefore and here is what it is good for us to
remember it is not by elaborate plans for the build-
ing of the social structure ; nor, on the other hand,
by frantic assertions of personal independence ; but
by patiently and unselfishly being his own best self
for the great good of all, that every man best helps
the dawning of the Golden Age. Many a patient
and unselfish worker is making valuable contribution
to the great end who never dreams of what he is
doing. Every man makes such a contribution who
looks upon the crowded swarm of human life as
Christ looked upon it ; neither losing the man in the
multitude, nor the multitude in the man ; neither
letting the forest drown the trees, nor letting the
trees dissipate and destroy the forest.
Sometimes, when for a moment we catch the view
of Christ and share His vision, there comes great
clearness into our spiritual experience, and that
which has sometimes been the source of confusion
and obscurity becomes the fountain of enlightenment
and strength. Do you not know how, sometimes,
it is because of the countless multitude of souls that
the experience of each soul grows vague and unreal?
In such a host does the great Captain know and care
for every soldier? Does God feed and guard and
educate me, individually, when all these millions
are His children? Does the Holy Spirit bring His
special gift to this one nature among all the in-
numerable natures which must have His grace?
And at the last, shall this one little life, which goes
trembling out of this familiar existence through the
vast door of death, be surely kept sacred, and sepa-
rate, and precious, and imperishable in the great
world of life beyond? These are the haunting
questions which beset our souls. Where are the
answers to them, except in this which we believe to
have been true of Jesus Christ, that the more men
there were, the more clearly did each man stand out
distinct to Him who knew and loved them all. The
crowd intensified and not obscured the individual.
Let that truth of the Incarnation be true in all
the care of God for man, and does not our anxiety
what is sometimes almost our terror pass away?
Because I am one among millions of needy souls,
the Holy Spirit shall the more surely find me with
my own peculiar food. Because no man can num-
ber the immortal, therefore my immortality is the
more certain, and He who keeps all spirits will keep
mine. With such assurance I look up and face the
overwhelming multitude of life, and am not over-
whelmed, but filled with buoyant faith and carried
onward as on a flood of strength.
One other impression of the " great company"
upon the mind of Jesus, I may allude to in a few
words. He must have been filled, as He looked at
them, with a sense of danger, and a sense of hope
together. Danger and hope, so it would seem, be-
long together in this world where we are now living.
Sometime a world may come where hope may be
conceived entirely apart from danger; but now and
here, when man looks far ahead and dares to antici-
pate great things, the certainty that great evil as
well as great good may come starts up at once and
will not be forgotten. It started up to Christ, and
He never tried to forget it. No eyes ever saw more
distinctly than His eyes saw the peril of human life.
He read it in every human face. He had learned
it in the temptation in the wilderness. Only, be-
cause He was God and knew the evil to be weaker
than the good, He always kept the hope behind and
within the danger. Because man had in him the
power to be this dreadful thing, therefore he also
had in him the power to be this splendid thing. I
know that, if we had been in Jerusalem, and had
met the blessed Saviour in the street, we should
have read all this in His features: the fear and
hope together, the hope intensified by the fear, but
always conquering it and making Him eager to
call every human creature with the invitation of
the divine Love, whose might He knew.
Shall we not see all that in His face as He looks
at us? We have not begun to know our danger as
He knows it. He is anxious for your soul as you
never began to be. But He hopes for you as you
never hoped for yourself. Let His hope take pos-
session of you ! Lift up your heart and know, as
He knows, how perfectly you can be saved !
Thus, then, it is that Jesus Christ looks upon
the crowded world : with reverence and pity ; with
the sight of the whole and also the recognition of the
single life ; with the sense of danger and the sense of
hope. The result of it all, in Him, is that glorious
consecration of His whole Being to the world, by
which He is its Saviour. Let us see mankind as
nobly as He does, and we shall be consecrated like
Him ; and in some true, deep, blessed way, we shall
share His Saviourship, perhaps by the sharing of
His Cross, but we shall share His Saviourship.
What more could man ask than that?
