0 a ^ tVl “And Jesus was left alone” John 8:9. Christ had divested Himself of 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 very humanity craved human sym pathy and fellowship, and this was largely denied Him. “God setteth the solitary in families,” wrote the Psalmist, but the Saviour’s natural family had failed Him, and His adopted family did not really come into “ the fellowship of His suffer ings” till after He had gone back to Heaven, with the result that He was called to tread “the winepress alone” (Isa. 63:3). As a child, we have only one glimpse of Him: in Jerusalem when His mother discovered Him “in the midst of the doctors” (Luke 2:46). Then the curtain drops, and nothing is revealed of the eighteen hidden years that followed in Nazareth. What did He do and say during those unrecorded years? How did He feel? At least we know how He lived: “I do always those things that please him.” We know, too, how He toiled for a living: “Is not this the car penter?” (Mark 6:3). How much that sentence reveals and implies! He did not preach during those silent years of preparation in Nazareth, else the people 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. No, of public witness evidently 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? Apparently the common people never realized that in their midst lived One so “high and holy,” nor did they share in His sorrow over sin. His very friends (Mark 3:21) considered Him “beside him self” when later on He began to p r e a c h . Evidently they had no glimpse of His glory. His "brethren” too, did not believe in Him when His ministry began (John 7:5). We must suppose that in earlier years they, too, must have failed Him in real Northcote Deck, M. B., T HE word monos (alone) is used eight times in the Gospels in connection with the Saviour. It truly expresses one aspect of the cost to Him of His being made sin for us, when He became incarnate, that He might accomplish our sal vation. One hesitates to speak of His being “lonely,” for the word hardly seems reverent enough to apply to Him. But since eight times we are told that He was alone, it will be profitable to consider what that implied and what was involved in it. We shall employ John 8:9 as our initial passage, as it so stresses the moral isolation of the sinless Son of God, on His shining wjay to CH .M ., F .R .G .S . the cross. That day in Jerusalem, surrounded by a critical crowd of sinners, His searching words so con victed them of sin that they were lit erally 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 He so often was alone, isolated by His innate purity and holiness. From eternity He had dwelt "in the light which 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 which must have been hard for Him. MARCH, 1947 PAGE ELEVEN
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