SERMON V.

THE GREATER THAN JONAS.

MATT. xii. 41.

"The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas, and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here."

THERE could not be a charge, in support of which it would be more difficult to find even an appearance of proof, than that which should accuse Christ of arrogant assumption of superiority to others. We do not know that the charge has ever been distinctly made: but certainly, if there be one feature of our Lord's character more strongly marked than another, it is his meekness, a meekness which withheld Him from bearing witness of Himself, and prompted Him to the leaving his pretensions to be inferred from what He did, rather than

1 Preached at Great St. Mary's, on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

to their bold and open assertion. There is no discoverable anxiety to force his claims on men's notice, or to compel their reverence by the mention of what He was. And when we think of the immeasurable distance at which He stood from every other of our race, of his immense superiority to the mightiest, and wisest, and best, it may well strike us as an astonishing fact, that He should have moved amongst men with the humility of a child, and that it should have been only on extraordinary occasions, when it was required by the circumstances of his hearers, that He was moved to proclaim his own greatness by words as well as by actions.

We do not imagine that any thing could be more unlike than this to the probable conduct, whether of an enthusiast or an impostor. The total absence of any approach to boasting or ostentation; the quiet submission to insult and derision, in place of the bold avowal of superhuman dignity; the manifest unwillingness to put Himself forward, except that He might be useful to others-these are indications at once of honesty and magnanimity, which are not to be reconciled with the supposition that He was either a deceiver or deceived.

And when you have observed the wonderful meekness of our Lord, his humble and retiring dispositions, which prompted Him to avoid rather than court the public applause, you will be more struck by those instances in which He swerved from his ordinary practice, and asserted his own majesty and

authority. If it had been his habit to enlarge on his pretensions, to contrast Himself with former teachers, and assert his vast superiority, we could not indeed have been surprised, for we should have known that He spake only truth; but, at the same time, we could have drawn no argument in his behalf from the habit itself, neither perhaps should we have found much to interest us in its several displays. But now, not only does the opposite habit furnish strong proof that He was indeed a Divine Teacher; but, whenever He departs from this habit, we have contrasts to examine which are valuable because rare, and which, we can be confident, would not have been drawn, had they not deserved the closest attention.

It is thus in regard of our text and the verse which immediately follows. Christ here departs from his ordinary rule, bears witness of Himself, and affirms without reserve his superiority to individuals of high repute and esteem. In our text He declares, referring to Himself, "Behold, a greater than Jonas is here" in the following verse, "Behold, a greater than Solomon is here." The latter declaration is, in some respects, the more remarkable of the two. If we may use the expression, there is more of assumption in it; the claim which it puts forth is the bolder and more startling. It had been distinctly said by God to Solomon, "Lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart, so that there was none like unto thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee." It seemed almost a contra

diction to this, to affirm that a wiser than Solomon had arisen, one whose discourses were more worthy of being listened to than those which had attracted the "queen of the south." And yet our Lord, averse though He was to the magnifying Himself, did not hesitate, when the unbelief of his countrymen required stern reproof, to declare Himself greater than Solomon, more deserving to be heard with reverence and fear. "6 'Behold, a greater than Solomon is here." He insists on no proofs, He enters into no demonstrations, of his superiority: there is the calm assertion of a Being who felt, and had manifested, his greatness, and who knew that it would be like throwing suspicion on his pretensions, to refer to them as needing additional evidence.

But whilst there is much to repay your attention in the contrast which Christ draws between Solomon and Himself, there is, we think, yet more in the words of our text, where it is with Jonah that the Saviour is compared. You will observe that certain of the Scribes and Pharisees had gathered round Christ, and demanded of Him "a sign from heaven." Our Lord had wrought many and wonderful miracles, sufficient, beyond doubt, to have convinced all but the wilfully blind. Hence the demand of a sign did but indicate obstinate infidelity: it implied that all preceding evidence had been defective, and therefore proved a determination to disbelieve, unless more were done than could consist with human accountableness. Hence Christ declared, with reproaches of

their obduracy, that the desired sign should not be vouchsafed; adding, however, that there should yet be a sign, even "the sign of the prophet Jonas." In this He referred, as you know, to his own resurrection; his return to life, after lying three days in the grave, would be a sign of the same kind as the deliverance of Jonah from the belly of the whale; and if this failed to convince the Jews, they must perish in their unbelief, and be condemned at the judgment by the Ninevites. And there is a great deal, as we before hinted, in the contrasts thus drawn-the contrast between Christ and Jonah, and that between the Jews and the Ninevites-which will require and repay the closest attention. It is clearly implied

that more was done for the Jews than had been done for the Ninevites; and that, on this account, the repentance of the latter would be "a swift witness" against the former. We shall employ a great part of our discourse on the establishing and illustrating this fact, though there are many practical considerations, suggested by the alleged rising up of one nation to give evidence against another, which it would not become us to omit. Let us then endeavour, in the first place, to show you that sufficient cause is to be found in the different circumstances of the two, why the repentant Ninevites should be witnesses against the impenitent Jews; and, in the second place, to derive from the text those practical lessons which its reference to the last judgment may have been intended to furnish.