Study Questions
Chapter 3
The character of Christ
Some years ago I received a letter from a young man I knew slightly. ‘I have just made a great discovery,’ he wrote. ‘Almighty God had two sons. Jesus Christ was the first; I am the second.’ I glanced at the address at the top of his letter. He was writing from a well-known psychiatric hospital.
There have of course been many pretenders to greatness and to divinity. Psychiatric hospitals are full of deluded people who claim to be Julius Caesar, the prime minister, the president of the United States or Jesus Christ. But no-one believes them. No-one is deceived except themselves. They have no disciples, except perhaps their fellow patients. They fail to convince other people for the simple reason that they don’t actually seem to be what they claim to be. Their claims are not supported by their character.
Now the Christian’s conviction about Christ is greatly strengthened by the fact that he really does appear to be who he said he was. There is no inconsistency between his words and his deeds. There is no doubt that he would need to be a very remarkable character in order to authenticate his extravagant claims. But Christians believe that he was exactly that. His character doesn’t prove his claims to be true, but it does strongly confirm them. His claims were exclusive. His character was unique. Carnegie Simpson wrote:
Instinctively we do not class him with others...Jesus is not one of the group of the world’s great. Talk about Alexander the Great and Charles the Great and Napoleon the Great if you will...Jesus is apart. He is not the Great; he is the Only. He is simply Jesus. Nothing could add to that.
Napoleon himself wrote:
Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love...
But even to say that Jesus is ‘the greatest man who has ever lived’ doesn’t fully do him justice. The point is that when it comes to thinking about where he stands in relation to other dominant figures from history, we’re not comparing like with like. We need to focus instead on the complete contrast that there is between him and everyone else. ‘Why do you call me good?’ he asked someone on one occasion. ‘No-one is good – except God alone.’ That’s it exactly. It’s not simply that he is better than others, nor even that he is the best human being who has ever lived, but that he is good – good with the absolute goodness of God.
The importance of this claim is very clear. What Christians call sin is a congenital disease which is endemic throughout the human race. We are all born with its infection in our nature. It is a universal ailment. Therefore, if the claim that Jesus of Nazareth was without sin is true, then he cannot have been human in exactly the same way that the rest of us are human. If he really was sinless, he was distinct from us. He was supernatural.
His character was more wonderful than the greatest miracle.
This separateness from sinners is not a little, but a stupendous thing; it is the presupposition of redemption; it is that very virtue in Christ without which he would not be qualified to be a Saviour, but would, like us, need to be saved.
We can summarize the evidence for the sinlessness of Christ under four headings.
What Christ himself thought
On one or two occasions Jesus stated directly that he was without sin. When a woman was discovered in the act of adultery and dragged before him, he issued an embarrassing challenge to her accusers, ‘Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her’ (TNIV). Gradually they drifted away until there was no-one left. A little later in the same chapter (John 8), it is recorded that Jesus issued another challenge, this time about himself: ‘Can any of you prove me guilty of sin?’ No-one could answer. They slipped away when he accused them. But when the roles were reversed and he invited them to accuse him, he had no difficulty at all in staying where he was and bearing their scrutiny. They were all sinners; he was without sin. He lived a life of perfect obedience to his Father’s will. ‘I always do what pleases him,’ he said. There was nothing boastful about those words. He spoke entirely naturally, with no fuss or pretension.
Similarly, by the very nature of his teaching, he placed himself in a moral category all by himself. One of his stories was about two men who went to the temple to pray. The first, a Pharisee, came up with a prayer of arrogant thanksgiving, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people.’ But you wouldn’t ever find Jesus himself doing anything like that. His uniqueness was completely unselfconscious. He didn’t need to draw attention to it. It was a fact so obvious to him that it didn’t need emphasizing. It was implied rather than asserted. Everyone else was a lost sheep; he had come as the Good Shepherd to seek and to save them. Everyone else was sick with the disease of sin; he was the doctor who had come to heal them. Everyone else was trapped in the darkness of sin and ignorance; he was the light of the world. Everyone else was a sinner; he was born to be their Saviour and would die for the forgiveness of their sins. Everyone else was hungry; he was the bread of life. Everyone else was dead in wrongdoing and sin; he could be their life now and their resurrection in the future. All these metaphors express the moral uniqueness of which he was clearly conscious.
It is not surprising, therefore, that although we are told about the temptations of Jesus, we hear nothing of his sins. He never confesses his sins or asks for forgiveness, although he tells his disciples to do so. He shows no awareness at all of moral failure. He appears to have no feeling of guilt and no sense of separation from God. He did indeed go through John the Baptist’s ‘baptism of repentance’. But John tried to discourage Jesus from being baptized, and Jesus submitted to it, not because he needed to admit to being a sinner, but so that he could ‘fulfil all righteousness’ and begin to identify himself with the sins of others. He himself seems to have lived in unbroken communion with his Father.
This absence of all moral discontent and sense of unclouded friendship with God are particularly remarkable for two reasons. The first is that Jesus possessed a keen moral judgment. He did not need to be told what other human beings were like because ‘he knew what was in them’. The Gospel accounts often record his ability to read the inner questions and perplexities of the crowd. His clear perception led him fearlessly to expose the duplicity of the religious leaders. He hated their hypocrisy. He pronounced woes upon them as thunderous as those of the Old Testament prophets. Ostentation and pretence disgusted him. Yet his penetrating eye saw no sin in himself.
The second reason why his self-conscious purity is astonishing is that it is quite unlike the experience of other holy people. Christians know that the closer they get to God, the more they become aware of their own sin. In this the saint is rather like the scientist. The more scientists find out, the more they realize how little they know and how much there is still to discover. Similarly, the more Christians grow in their imitation of Christ, the more aware they become of the vast distance which still separates them from him.
A glance into any Christian biography underlines this – if our own experience is not sufficient evidence. Let me offer just one example. David Brainerd was a young pioneer missionary among the Indians of Delaware at the beginning of the nineteenth century. His diary and letters reveal the rich quality of his devotion to Christ. Despite great pain and crippling weakness, which led to his death at the age of twenty-nine, he gave himself totally to his work. He travelled on horseback through thick forests, preached and taught without rest, slept out in the open, and was content to have no settled home or family life. His diary is full of expressions of love to ‘my dear Indians’ and of prayers and praises to his Saviour.
We might imagine that he is a saint of the first order. Surely his life and work can’t have been unduly tainted by sin. Yet as we turn the pages of his diary, he continually laments what he describes as his moral ‘corruption’. He complains of his lack of prayer and the poverty of his love for Christ. He calls himself ‘a poor worm’, ‘a dead dog’, and ‘an unspeakably worthless wretch’. This is not because he had a morbid conscience. It was the closeness of his relationship with Christ that made him so painfully aware of his sinfulness.
Yet Jesus Christ, who lived more closely to God than anybody else has done, was free from all sense of sin.
Yet Jesus Christ, who lived more closely to God than anybody else has done, was free from all sense of sin.
What Christ’s friends said
It is clear, then, that Jesus believed himself to be sinless, just as he believed himself to be the Messiah and the Son of God. But could he have got this all wrong? One way of approaching this is to ask what others thought at the time. Did his disciples share the extraordinary opinion he had of himself?
We may feel that the disciples of Christ were not particularly good witnesses. It has been argued that they were biased, and that they deliberately painted him in rather more glowing colours than he deserved. But this is very unfair. Their statements cannot be dismissed so lightly. There are several reasons why we can be confident in what they say about him.
First, they were in close contact with Jesus for about three years. They lived together. They experienced the cramped conditions of the same boat. They even had a common purse (and a common bank account can be a potent cause of discord!). The disciples got on one another’s nerves. They quarrelled. But they never found in Jesus the sins they found in themselves. Familiarity normally breeds contempt, but not in this case. Indeed, two of the chief witnesses to the sinlessness of Christ are Peter and John (as we shall see later), and they belonged to that inner group (consisting of Peter, James and John) to whom he gave special privileges and particular opportunities to get to know him better.
Secondly, what the apostles say about this can be trusted because they were Jews whose minds had been soaked since childhood in the teaching of the Old Testament. And one Old Testament doctrine which they had certainly taken on board is the universal character of human sin:
All have turned away,
all have become corrupt;there is no-one who does good,
not even one.(TNIV)
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way.(TNIV)
In the light of this teaching from the Bible, the idea that someone could be without sin is not one which they would have been able to accept at all easily.
Thirdly, the testimony of the apostles to the sinlessness of Jesus is all the more credible because it is indirect. They do not set out to establish the truth that he was without sin. Their references to this are asides. They are discussing some other subject, and refer to his being without sin almost as an afterthought.
This is what they say. Peter first describes Jesus as ‘a lamb without blemish or defect’ and then says that he ‘committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth’. John roundly declares that every human being is a sinner, and that if we say we have no sin or have not sinned, we both are liars ourselves and make God a liar too. But then he goes on to say that in Christ, who came to take away our sins, there ‘is no sin’.
To what Peter and John tell us we can add the words of Paul and of the author of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews. They describe Jesus as one who ‘had no sin’, but rather was ‘holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners’. He was indeed ‘tempted in every way, just as we are – yet he did not sin’.
What Christ’s enemies conceded
We may consider ourselves to be on safer ground when we come to look at what the enemies of Jesus thought of him. They certainly had no bias – at least not in his favour. We read in the Gospels that ‘they watched him closely’ and tried to ‘trap him in his words’. It is well known that when a debate cannot be won by reasoning, then people all too readily descend to personal abuse. If arguments are lacking, mud is a good substitute. Even the history of the church is sadly smudged by the dirt of personal attacks. So it was with the enemies of Jesus.
The Gospel writer Mark sets out four of their criticisms (in 2:1 – 3:6). Their first accusation was blasphemy. Jesus had forgiven a man’s sins. This was a clear invasion of divine territory. It was blasphemous arrogance, they said. But this is to beg the question. If he were indeed divine, it was entirely appropriate for him to forgive sins.
Next, they were (they said) horrified by his evil associations. He spent time with bad people. He ate with those who were on the margins of society. He allowed prostitutes to approach him. No Pharisee would dream of behaving like this. He would gather his robes around him and recoil from contact with such scum. He would have thought himself entirely right to do so, too. He would not appreciate the grace and tenderness of Jesus who, though ‘set apart from sinners’, yet earned the honoured title ‘friend of sinners’.
Their third accusation was that his religion was frivolous. He did not fast and go without food like the Pharisees, or even like the disciples of John the Baptist. He was ‘a glutton and a drunkard’ who came ‘eating and drinking’. Such an attack hardly deserves a serious refutation. It’s true that Jesus was full of joy, but there can be no doubt that he took religion seriously.
Fourth, they were incensed by his sabbath-breaking. He healed sick people on the Sabbath day, the one day in the week when people weren’t supposed to do any work. And his disciples even walked through the cornfields on the Sabbath, picking and eating corn, something which the teachers of the law and Pharisees forbade as practically the same as the farmer’s labour of reaping and threshing. Yet no-one can doubt that Jesus submitted to God’s law. He obeyed it himself, and in debate would refer his opponents to it as the ultimate source of authority. He also affirmed that God had made the Sabbath, and that he had done so for the benefit of humanity. But being himself ‘Lord of the Sabbath’, he claimed the right to set aside erroneous human traditions and to give God’s law its true interpretation.
All these accusations are either trivial or question-begging. So when Jesus was on trial for his life, his detractors had to hire false witnesses against him. But even then they were unable to agree with one another. In fact, the only charge they could come up with was not moral but political. Time after time, his court appearances made it clear that he was blameless. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate, after several cowardly attempts to evade the issue, publicly washed his hands and declared himself ‘innocent of this man’s blood’. King Herod could find no fault in him either. Judas the traitor, filled with remorse, returned the thirty pieces of silver to the priests with the words, ‘I have sinned, for I have betrayed innocent blood.’ The penitent thief on the cross rebuked his fellow criminal for having a go at Jesus and added, ‘This man has done nothing wrong.’ Finally, the centurion, having watched Jesus suffer and die, exclaimed, ‘Surely this was a righteous man.’
What we can see for ourselves
In assessing the character of Jesus Christ, we do not need to rely only on the testimony of others; we can make our own estimate. The moral perfection which was quietly claimed by him, confidently asserted by his friends and reluctantly acknowledged by his enemies, is clearly shown in the Gospels.
We are given plenty of opportunity to form our own judgment. The picture of Jesus painted by the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, is a comprehensive one. It’s true that it depicts largely his public ministry of barely three years. But we are given a glimpse of his boyhood, and Luke twice repeats that during his hidden years at Nazareth he was developing naturally in body, mind and spirit, and was growing in favour with God and people.
We see him spending time in private with his disciples, and we watch him in the noisy bustle of the crowd. He is brought before us in the work he did in Galilee, facing the pressures of being hero-worshipped by the mob who wanted to take him by force and make him a king. And we’re able to follow him into the cloisters of the Jerusalem temple where Pharisees and Sadducees were united against him in their subtle inquisition. But whether scaling the dizzy heights of success or plunged into the lonely depths of bitter rejection, he is the same Jesus. He is consistent. He has no moods. He does not change.
Again, the portrait is balanced. There is no trace of the crank in him. He believes ardently in what he teaches, but he is not a fanatic. Some of what he has to say is unpopular, but he is not eccentric. There is as much evidence for his humanity as for his divinity. He gets tired. He needs to sleep and eat and drink like other people. He experiences the human emotions of love and anger, joy and sorrow. He is fully human. Yet he is no mere man.
Above all, he is unselfish. Perhaps nothing strikes us more than this. Although he clearly believed himself to be divine, he did not put on airs or stand on his dignity. He was never pompous. There was no touch of self-importance about Jesus. He was humble.
It is this paradox which is so amazing, this combination of the self-centredness of his teaching and the unself-centredness of his behaviour. In thought he put himself first; in deed last. He exhibited both the greatest self-esteem and the greatest self-sacrifice. He knew himself to be the Lord of all, but he became their servant. He said that he would one day come to judge the world, but he washed the feet of his friends.
Never has anyone given up so much. It is claimed (by him as well as by those who tell us about him) that he renounced the joys of heaven for the sorrows of earth, exchanging an eternal immunity to the approach of sin for painful contact with evil in this world. He was born of a lowly Hebrew mother in a dirty stable in the insignificant village of Bethlehem. He became a refugee baby in Egypt. He was brought up in the obscure hamlet of Nazareth, and toiled at a carpenter’s bench to support his mother and the other children in their home. Eventually he became a travelling preacher, with few possessions, small comforts and no home. He made friends with ordinary people. He touched those with leprosy and allowed prostitutes to touch him. He gave himself away in a ministry of healing, helping, teaching and preaching.
He was misunderstood and misrepresented, and became the victim of people’s prejudices and vested interests. He was despised and rejected by his own people, and deserted by his friends. He gave his back to be flogged, his face to be spat upon, his head to be crowned with thorns, his hands and feet to be nailed to a common Roman gallows. And, as the cruel spikes were driven home, he kept praying for his tormentors, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’
Such a man is altogether beyond our reach. He succeeded where we always fail. He had complete self-mastery. He never retaliated. He never grew resentful or irritable. He had such control of himself that, whatever others might think or say or do, he would deny himself and abandon himself to the will of God and the welfare of his fellow human beings. ‘I seek not to please myself,’ he said, and ‘I am not seeking glory for myself.’ As Paul wrote, ‘For Christ did not please himself.’
This utter disregard of self in the service of God and man is what the Bible calls love. There is no self-interest in love. The essence of love is self-sacrifice. Even the worst of us is adorned by an occasional flash of such nobility, but the life of Jesus radiated it with a never-fading incandescent glow.
Jesus was sinless because he was selfless. Such selflessness is love. And God is love.