Week 51—Sunday Luke 11:27-28
Week 51—SUNDAY
“THE CONCRETE CHRIST”
In preparing some of my books to be put on the bookstalls of India in a cheap, paperback edition, I read again The Christ of the Indian Road, my first book, and which to my surprise went to over a million copies and was translated into over thirty languages. This book was written thirty-eight years ago [1925]. A second World War has been fought, and world-shaking movements have arisen. But when I reread the chapter with the above title, I felt that this chapter deserved a place with additions, but no corrections, in this my last book—so far!—so that first and last the emphasis is the same. He is “the Concrete Christ.”
Jesus, the mystic, was amazingly concrete and practical. Into an atmosphere filled with speculation and wordy disputation, where people were “drunk with the wine of their own wordiness,” he brings the refreshing sense of practical reality. Jesus taught, but he did not speculate. He never used such words as “perhaps,” “maybe,” “I think so.” Even his words have a concrete feeling about them. They fell upon the soul with the authority of certainty—self-verifying.
He did not discourse on the sacredness of motherhood—he suckled as a babe at his mother’s breast, and that scene has forever consecrated motherhood.
He did not argue that life was a growth and character was an attainment. He “increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52).
He did not speculate on why temptation should be in the world—he met it, and after forty days’ struggle in the wilderness he conquered, and “returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee” (Luke 4:14).
He did not discourse on the dignity of labor—he worked at a carpenter’s bench and this makes the toil of the hands honorable.
O Jesus, you do not merely tell us of the way, you are the Way, not by claim alone, but by demonstration that you are the Way by the way you acted. We see the Way at work, and what a sight! Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Blessed are your eyes which see, and more blessed are you if you do what you see.