Now, we all have, on our list of acquaintances, people whom we have labelled disagreeable, who continually rub us the wrong way, as we put it. There is the man who is always talking about himself, and is filled with conceit like a bladder with air. “There is the man,” says Hazlitt in one of his Essays, “who asks you fifty questions as to the commonest things you advance, and, you would sooner pardon a fellow who held a pistol at your breast and demanded your money.” There is the ill-tempered, sulky person, and the grumbling, whining, dolorous soul never without an ache or a grievance. So we can all draw up our own private “Index Expurgatorius” of the people we bar or dislike. We say these people are unlovable.
And, since the corruption of the best is the worst, we are agreed that the most unlovable of all types is the religious undesirable, the smug, unctuous, oily person, for example, whose sincerity is continually in question, the narrow, intolerant, little soul who cannot see any sort of truth or righteousness except his own, or the prim and pious man who is cocksure of his interest in the life to come, but is not straight in the affairs of the life which now is. There are others, but enumeration is not a very profitable or a pleasant task. Take them all together, gather them in a crowd in your memory, and then set yourself this exercise for your sanctification and growth in grace. Realise that the Lord your God is the God also of these unlovable people. Get that idea thoroughly into your heart, and say it to yourself, if need be, many times a day. These people look up to Him in worship just as you do. They have their sacred hours in His presence just as you have. There is nothing you look for to God, that they do not seek, too, from Him. They are not of a different order from you, but the same order. And though you do not love them, God does. Though they are outside of your circle, they are not outside of His. The God of Jacob is their God. And therein lies for them, as it did for Jacob, the hope and promise of better things to come.
If we remembered that, should we not be more patient and forbearing with them than we are, keener to look for the best in them, and to make the best of them than we are? Just to think of what is meant by the “God of Jacob” is to set our sharp and bitter judgments of others over against the infinitely tender compassion and patience and long-suffering of God. All the wonder of the divine grace is hidden in the phrase. And this is the wonder—that God never grows tired even of disagreeable people. He does not give up caring even for the unlovable. But oh! what poor sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty we are, with our quick, rash final judgments and our hard, unbrotherly hearts!
Did you ever ask yourself what some of these unlovable people are doing, the while you and I are telling each other how impossible and unlovable they are? George Eliot suggests it somewhere thus:—“While we are coldly discussing a man’s career, sneering at his mistakes, and labelling his opinions ‘Evangelical and narrow’ or ‘Latitudinarian and pantheistic,’ or ‘Anglican and supercilious,’ that man in his solitude is perhaps shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is a hard one, because strength and patience are failing him to speak the difficult word and do the difficult deed.” Ah, yes, it’s a mercy that there is a God even for unlovable people!
But there is a question that has been waiting all this time, and we must ask it before we close. What about ourselves, you and me? Are we such lovable people that we can afford to judge others? Do we never rub our friends the wrong way, and, without meaning it, annoy and disappoint and repel them? Are our religious profession and our daily practice so very much in keeping that we may talk about prigs and self-righteous people as if they belonged to an entirely different world? May I speak for you all and say humbly “No”? No, God knows they are not! The fact is that if we know ourselves at all well, we must be aware that we have it in us to be quite as disagreeable and selfish and self-righteous as anybody. It is only our best beloved who do not get tired of us, and sometimes even they must be hard put to it.
But there is a blessed Gospel for those who have made that discovery about themselves. There is a God of Jacob. Abraham is too high for us, and Isaac is too saintly, but Jacob, faulty, disappointing, unlovable, yet by God’s grace redeemed and perfected at last, Jacob is the man for us! The hope and comfort of all who have learned what they really are is that “the God of Jacob is our refuge.”
Prayer
Bring us, we pray Thee, O God, into a truer knowledge of ourselves. Make us to learn how frail we are, how poor and blind and naked; to the end we may regard with due charity the shortcomings of others, and may worthily praise Thy great Mercy, who yet hast not turned
