RELIGION and LIFE: By PHILEMON

New Zealand Herald, Volume 78, Issue 24141, 6 December 1941, Page 16

RELIGION and LIFE: By PHILEMON

T\7TTH the. return of Advent the Christian mind reviews the groat verities of its faith, and especially the fundamental truth that in .Jesus Cluist God has made His most intimate approach to the human race, in every virtuous life and truth-loving mind tne divine Spirit is present and operative, but our Lord was not a man indwelt and moved „by God. He was Himself God "manifested in the flesh," a profound fact which is basal in Christianity and which makes it what it is. There.is a notable passage in St. Paul which brings us rlose to this truth. He is writing of his ministry, of the courage it demands: the frankness he cultivates, "the opposing darkness to be overcome. He is the hearer of a great Light —"the light of the Gospel of the glory of God." And with the words his mind reverts to the first dawn of day upon a hitherto darkened world; The act of God in the gift of Christ is, he says, a second Fiat Lux. The amazing parallel holds him and he works it out. The miracle of the first day is repeated in human experience. God is still commanding light to shine out of darkness in the hearts o! • men,, "the light of the knowledge of the glory df God in the face of Jcs.:s Christ." t The figure of a revealing light npor. the countenance is of surpassing beauty and truth, and illustrations are never far to seek. The chiselled face of Newton's statue in the silent chapel at Cambridge is still "the marble index of a mind voyaging through strange seas of Thought alope." Elia's fair description of the Quakers gathering for worship can never lose its charm—"l have seem faces in theii; assemblies upon which the dove sate visibly brooding . . . when they come up in their bands they show like troops of shining ones." lu'a vast audiences where is heard "the mu:<ic yearning like a god in pain," the rapt : face of some now solitary listener hetokens he has passed far beyond his fellows into a transcendent workl. And who lias not seen on some young mother's face the light that .never was on sea or land?

But on the face of Jesus Christ there shone, alike in joy and sorrow, something far exceeding all earthly light, it broke into unutterable glory at the Transfiguration, when "His face did shine as the sun." It' spoke of courage and commission when, with determined 1 purpose, He "steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem." Nor was it absent from the visage marred more than that of any man, from the stricken face upon which they spat, The glory of the .Mount was gone, hut still in that i supreme hour of sacrifice, voluntarily endured to the end. Love iouml expression as never before or since. J3ut the apostle's image of light upon the face is meant to convey a wider truth. It was in the wholeness of Christ's character and' life that God 1 came to His unveiling. God, as God, man has never seen, nor ever can see. But in Christ "a light we can bear to look at, and looking at must adore, conies from a Light we cannot bear to look at," even while wc worship it." 1 What Jesus was, God is. What -Jesus suffered. God endured. What Jesus sought, is the end and purpose of God. "What Jesus was io the children ol Palestine," says Dr. John Hunter, "God is to all lowly things; what Jesus was to the bereaved sisters of Bethany. God is to every saddened heart and household; what Jesus was to the traders in the Temple courts, God is to all who try to serve both Himself' and Mammon; what Jesus was in His prayer of unfathomable pity on the Cross, God is to all who reject His love." The "face" of Jesus Christ, of which St. Paul speaks, is thus seen in all the Master's act.? and words and in the spirit that begot them. It is the "face" of a life perfect and complete in every part, of a ministry of light and healing and ascendancy over evil, of Passion and Sin-hearing and the Cross, of Victory oyer the grave, and continued action in the Spirit among men. There is to be seen the "face" of which' the ; apostle speaks, shining and glorious : with "the light of the knowledge of tho glory of God."