POPULARITY
Popularity
POPULARITY.The word does not occur in the NT, but the thing itself is not infrequently treated of. There is a true and there is a false popularity. The latter belongs to him who makes the praise of men his object, and seeks it by ostentatious piety and hypocritical charity (Mat 6:2; Mat 6:5; Mat 6:16); the former is the accompaniment of that behaviour whose ruling aim is to do the will of God regardless of all worldly ends (Mat 6:3-4; Mat 6:7-8; Mat 6:17-18; Mat 6:20-21). True popularity is that love and admiration which unselfish devotion to the welfare of others, springing from the whole-hearted love of God, cannot fail to arouse in the breasts of all who have eyes to see and hearts to understand the good and pure. They shall see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven (Mat 5:16; cf. Joh 15:8). The hypocrites who sound a trumpet before them when they do their alms, who pray at the corners of the streets for all to see, who disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to fast, are examples of those who seek and obtain the reward of false popularity. Fasting and prayer that flow from a desire to hold communion with God, charity that is the outcome of gratitude to the Heavenly Father for His wondrous mercy, are ever done in secret, so that there can be no suspicion of any unworthy motive; but the effect of these things is revealed in the mans whole life and character; it must win for him the praise and love of all good men, and for God the glory.
All this is in perfect harmony with the inwardness of Christs life and teaching. His aim was to change the world from within outwardnot to attach good fruit to a worthless tree, but to make the tree good, and to await the fruit which in due time it was bound to bear. In the same sense true popularity is inward; false, outward. The latter springs immediately from outside acts which may not beprobably are notthe revelation of the true man: the former is the effect produced upon the world by the outspeaking of the whole man as he is in himself in his relation to God. At the very opening of His career Jesus rejected the outward, the false, popularity as a means of propagating the truth He came to teach. He perceived it to be the suggestion of the Evil One that He should obtain the dominion of the kingdoms of the world by the external method, by the force of His authority, by the admiration which He could so easily have produced. Even to employ His miraculous power to gain the ear of His own countrymen He put from Him as a temptation (Mat 4:1-10 || Luk 4:1-13); and when, aroused to enthusiasm by their miraculous feeding, the multitude would fain have taken Him by force to make Him their king, He fled from them (Joh 6:15). He would have nought to do with any enthusiasm, however sincere, that was based upon a false conception of the nature of His Messiahship, that sprang from admiration of His power and the hope of sharing its blessings, and not from the clear perception of His holiness and the longing to share it (Joh 2:23-25). The kind of impression which He wished to make was that which expressed itself in such phrases asNever man so spake (Joh 7:46); He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes (Mat 7:29); The common people heard him gladly (Mar 12:37). It was neither to nor by flesh and blood that He desired to reveal Himself and to win a place in the hearts of men, but to the Divine germ within each soul, and by the revelation of the Heavenly Father (Mat 16:17). See following article.
And as with the Master so must it be with the servants. As the world had hated Him, so would it hate them. He had come to send not peace on the earth, but a sword and fire (Mat 10:34 || Luk 12:51), the sword which would part brother from brother and father from sonthe fire which should try and reveal the essential nature of each heart. This hatred and persecution are therefore to be to the disciples a cause of rejoicing (Mat 5:11-12), for these will be the signs that they are in truth the followers of Christ. If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love its own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you (Joh 15:18-19). But the more the world persecutes them, the more must they bear testimony to the cause of Christ by their loving fellowship one with another. By this, He says, shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another (Joh 13:35); and again(I pray) that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me (Joh 17:21)Among the disciples there must be no selfish striving for place or power. The truest popularity, the truest greatness, is to belong to the humble heart that ever preferreth other to itself, that rejoiceth to minister and to serve, to give itself freely to all even as Christ did (Mat 20:28 || Mar 10:45).
Literature.Comm. on the Gospels; works on NT Theol. by Beyschlag and by Weiss; Stalker, Life of Jesus Christ, ch. iv.; Pressens, Jesus Christ7 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , pp. 263286.
W. J. S. Miller.
Fuente: A Dictionary Of Christ And The Gospels
Popularity
POPULARITY (of Jesus).The general subject of popularity, as treated in the foregoing article, is strikingly illustrated by the course of our Lords public ministry; and in the present article we shall consider (1) the popularity of Jesus, (2) the grounds on which it rested, (3) the value He attached to it, and (4) the reasons of its decline.
1. The fact of His popularity.Although the earthly life of Jesus began in a stable and ended on a cross, there was a period in His ministry when He was at once the most conspicuous and the most popular personage in Palestine. From Jn. we learn that His first definite appeal to the nation was made in Jerusalem (Joh 2:12 ff.). There, however, the dominant influences were hostile to His acceptance (Joh 2:18 ff., Joh 3:2; Joh 3:12). He soon felt that the nation was not yet ripe for a direct Messianic ministry, and so for a time He fell back in Judaea on a work of preparation similar to that which the Baptist was still carrying on (Joh 3:22, Joh 4:1-2). But when John was cast into prison, He knew that the time was come to make His own distinctive appeal to Israel, and having met with little favour in Jerusalem, He now chose Galilee as the scene of His labours (Mar 1:14 ff. ||). The Synoptic Gospels show that an extraordinary popularity was the almost immediate result (Mar 1:28). Crowds flocked to Him from every quarter (Mar 1:45, Mar 2:13, Mar 4:1, Mar 5:21 and passim), and followed Him about wherever He went (Mar 3:7, Mar 6:33). The people were astonished at His teaching (Mar 1:22; Mar 1:27), but also delighted with it (Luk 5:1-15, cf. Mar 12:37); they saw His miracles with joy and amazement, and glorified God in Him (Mar 2:13 ||). The enthusiasm and excitement soon spread far beyond the borders of Galilee; and from Jerusalem and Idumaea, from beyond Jordan, and even from the region of Tyre and Sidon, multitudes came to see and hear the great Prophet of Nazareth (Mar 3:8). All along, it is true, the scribes and Pharisees persistently opposed Him (Mar 2:6 ff., Mar 2:16 f., Mar 2:24 ff., Mar 3:2 ff.), coming from Jerusalem for this express purpose (Mar 3:22, Mar 7:1). But with the great mass of His countrymen, during the earlier period of His Galilaean ministry, Jesus had a popularity of the most unqualified kind.
2. To what was this popularity due?(1) Much must be ascribed to His personal qualities, and among these (a) to His perfect accessibility and entire naturalness. In His attitude to the people there was nothing either of the supercilious contempt of the scribes and Pharisees (Joh 7:48-49) or of the ascetic austerity of John the Baptist (Matthew 3; Mat 11:18). Any one might approach Him at any time, with the certainty of being readily and kindly received. It mattered not who came to Jesus,rough fishers of the Galilaean lake (Joh 1:37 ff., Mar 1:16 ||), anxious parents seeking a blessing for their children (Mar 5:2 ff; Mar 7:25 ff; Mar 10:13 ff.), publicans whom everyone else despised (Mat 9:10; Mat 10:3; Mat 11:19, Luk 19:2 ff.), sinful women from the city streets (Luk 7:37 ff., Mat 21:31),to all He presented Himself as a man and a brother. (b) No personal gift conduces more to popularity than the subtle, indefinable quality of charm, and Jesus appears to have possessed this in an exceptional measure. It may be that the or grace, of which St. Luke tells us in his account of the sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth (Mat 4:22), refers wholly to Christs message, and not at all to the manner of His speech. But the way in which men and women and little children were drawn to the Saviour, as if by a kind of magnetism, testifies to a winsomeness of nature that must have gone far to secure the favour of every unprejudiced heart. (c) Still more the intense sympathy of Jesus must have appealed to the people. A man may make himself accessible for reasons of policy, and even the quality of charm sometimes proves to be a superficial gift of pleasing that is no guarantee for any expenditure of heart. But the Saviours profound sympathy for the sick, the sinful, the sorrowful, could not fail to make an impression on the popular mind. We can hardly realize, perhaps, what it meant for Him to be besieged day after day by a pressing crowd of men and women with loathsome diseases and festering soresall demanding the touch of His hand as well as the pity of His heart (Luk 4:40 ||). The nervous tension must have been tremendous, the physical and spiritual expenditure a constant drain upon His strength (Mar 5:30, Luk 6:19). But the crowd, which not only read in His face that compassion which was one of His most characteristic qualities (Mat 9:36; Mat 14:14; Mat 15:32, Mar 1:41, Luk 7:13), but saw Him in the thick of His daily deeds of grace, must have dimly perceived something of that vicarious sacrifice which lay at the root of the Redeemers sympathy, as it lies at the root of all true sympathy, and which led an Evangelist to bethink himself of the prophets words, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases (Mat 8:17, cf. Isa 53:4).
(2) But the popularity of Jesus was due not only to His personal qualities, but to His methods as a Teacher and the gospel that He brought. (a) Much lay in His methodsin the simplicity and directness, the homeliness and picturesqueness of His language, and its entire freedom from all the professional pedantries of the Rabbis (Mar 1:22; cf. Mar 12:37). The undying power of His parables, simply as literature, enables us to form some idea of what it must have been to hear those wonderful stories as they first fell from His own lips. (b) But these things were only the outer swathings of His messagethe husk, not the kernel. The form of His teaching might appeal to the imagination, but it was the substancethe joyful Galilaean gospel of the Kingdom of Godthat warmed and thrilled the listening multitudes. Christs words were words of gracewords about the Heavenly Fathers love and the blessings that lay within the reach of every one who was willing to be Gods child; words of forgiveness for the sinful, and liberty for the captive, of comfort for the mourner, and rest for the weary and heavy-laden soul. The gospel of the kingdomin that Christs message was all summed up (Mar 1:14). And if the forerunner shook the nation to its centre when he cried, The kingdom of heaven is at hand! (Mat 3:2), what must have been the effect of Christs proclamation that the Kingdom of God was already come (Mat 5:3-11; Mat 12:28)that this was the acceptable year of the Lord (Luk 4:19; Luk 4:21).
(3) But it is in the miracles of Jesus above all that we find the explanation of His popularity. His miracles of healing were evidently wrought upon a very wide scalemuch wider than the enumeration of individual cases gives any idea of (cf. Mar 1:34; Mar 3:10; Mar 6:55-56). And though there were ungrateful recipients of His mercy (Luk 17:17-18), we know that at other times both those whom He had cured and their friends and relatives were filled with a passion of gratitude and devotion to His Person (Luk 17:15-16, Mar 5:20; Mar 10:52, Joh 11:2; Joh 12:3). But these gracious miracles stretched in their effects far beyond the wide circle of the actual beneficiaries. They created great expectations in the popular mindexpectations that were immensely heightened by yet more astonishing miracles, in which Christs compassion for the multitude led Him to make them in their thousands the direct partakers of His bounty (Mar 6:34 ff. ||, Mar 8:1 ff. ||, Joh 6:5 ff.). These great miracles were taken to be signssigns of wonderful events that might be about to happen in Israel. Jesus, it began to be surmised, was not merely a great prophet as His teaching showed, but much more than a prophet; not merely a marvellous healer of the sick, but the expected Deliverer of Israel. Unfortunately, however, in spite of all His teaching as to the nature of the Kingdom of God, the popular ideas on the subject were still utterly astray. And so His popularity, just when it seemed to be soaring to its highest, was made to rest upon the least worthy foundations. This brings us to the sharp dividing line (see preceding art.) between a popularity that is true and a popularity that is false, a popularity that Jesus could desire and welcome and one that He inevitably loathed and repelled. Jn.s narrative shows that it was Christs fame as a miracle-worker, and most of all His feeding of the Five Thousand in the wilderness, that raised His popularity to its point of culmination (Joh 6:14-15) But it was just then that Jesus rejected most emphatically a kind of popularity He did not want. And it was also from that day that the tide of popular favour which had swelled so high began to ebb.
3. What value did Jesus attach to His popularity?He did not care, it has been said, for the thing called popularity, but He loved human beings (Bruce, Galilean Gospel, p. 10). And it is quite true that there was a kind of popularity that Jesus not only did not care for, but always despised and shunned. And yet, just because He loved human beings so much, He desired a popularity of the right sort. Was it not in search of it that He came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the Kingdom, after He had been coldly received by the ecclesiastical authorities in the capital? To be popular is just to be beloved of the people, and the highest kind of popularity is when a man is beloved of the people on grounds which God and his own conscience can approve. It is impossible for one who loves, not to wish to have his love returned; and Jesus, loving men and women as no other human being ever did, undoubtedly desired them to love Him, and trust Him, and follow Him. This is the meaning of His invitations to them to come to Him, and of His words of sorrow and reproach when they refused. His soul, accordingly, must have filled with gladness and thankfulness when He saw the multitude pressing upon Him to hear His word, and listening to it with evident joy, or when He received the assurance of heart-felt gratitude from those whom He had healed or enlightened or lifted from the depths of self-despair. But, on the other hand, when men came after Him in search of signs and wonders (Mat 12:38; Mat 16:1 ||, Joh 4:48)something to confirm them in their false ideals of the Kingdom of God, if not merely to gratify their gaping curiosity; worse still, when the multitude began to follow Him in the hope of being furnished gratis with the bread that they might have honestly earned (Joh 6:26), and to look to Him to set up by the use of His miraculous powers a kingdom of meat and drink and political privilege, He knew that now, under the guise of a dazzling popularity, the same temptation was returning which He had faced and conquered in the wilderness at the very outset of His ministry (Mat 4:1-11)the temptation to love the praise of men more than the praise of God, and to attempt to set up the Kingdom of heaven upon earth by methods that were not Divine, but worldly and Satanic.
4. The decline of His popularity.The miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand was a great turning-point in the life of Jesus. It marked, we have said, the culmination of His popularity, but also the beginning of its decline. And the reason for this decline was just that the popularity it brought was of a kind that Jesus could not accept. The people wished to take Him by force and make Him king (Joh 6:15), while He wished to win in their hearts a spiritual Kingdom for His Father. They would have set Him on a worldly throne, and He knew that His Kingdom was not of this world (Joh 18:36). The two ideals were utterly incompatible. Henceforth, He who had sought the people and welcomed their coming began to avoid them (Joh 6:15, Mar 7:24; Mar 8:10; Mar 8:13; Mar 8:26-27; Mar 9:30), and, when they still came after Him, spoke not only of the gladness of the Kingdom, but of the mysterious pathway of the Cross (Joh 6:26-65, Mar 8:34 ff; Mar 10:21 ff.). The result was soon apparent. Nothing more quickly cools the enthusiasm of the multitude than the refusal of its object to be popular on the popular terms. After this many even of Christs disciples went back and walked no more with Him (Joh 6:66). And though Peter answered nobly for the Twelve to that pathetic question, Will ye also go away? (Joh 6:67-69), the Lord Knew that one of the very Apostles whom He had chosen had admitted into his heart a devil of dissatisfaction with his Master (Joh 6:70-71). Soon, with the vision of the Cross before Him, He stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem (Luk 9:51). The disciples, as they followed, were afraid (Mar 10:32), and so He prepared them for what was coming, by those great Lessons on the Cross which mark the stages of His progress towards the great act of sacrifice (Mat 16:21-28 ||, Mat 20:17-28 ||, Mat 26:6-13; Mat 26:26-29 ||; cf. Bruce, Training of the Twelve). Day by day the shadows lengthened across the Saviours path. And though at His last Passover the raising of Lazarus (Joh 12:9-11) led to a transitory outburst of fresh enthusiasm among the Galilaeans who had come up to the Feast (cf. Mat 21:11 with Mat 21:10), the time of His national popularity was really over from the day of the Capernaum discourse (Joh 6:24 ff.), and what lay before Him thereafter was a growing opposition that could end only in national rejection and the death on Calvary.
Literature.Sandays art. Jesus Christ in Hastings db; Andrews, Life of Our Lord; Stalker, Life of Jesus Christ; Bruce, Training of the Twelve, Galilean Gospel; Expositor; v. ii. [1895] 69.
J. C. Lambert.
Fuente: A Dictionary Of Christ And The Gospels
Popularity
Instances of
– David
2Sa 3:36
– Absalom
2Sa 15:2-6; 2Sa 15:13
– Job
Job 29
Fuente: Nave’s Topical Bible
POPULARITY
(A) OF CHRIST, during the early part of his ministry
(1) The Multitudes Follow him
Mat 4:25; Mat 13:2; Mat 15:30; Mat 19:2; Mar 1:33; Mar 2:13; Mar 3:20; Luk 12:1
(2) The Crowds Press upon him
Mar 2:2; Mar 3:10; Mar 5:24; Luk 5:1; Luk 8:19; Luk 8:45
(3) The Common People Heard him Gladly
Mar 12:37; Joh 12:9
(B) POPULARITY SOUGHT BY MEN
Joh 12:43; Act 12:1-3; Act 24:27; Act 25:9; Eph 6:6; Col 3:22
–SEE Fear of Man, FEAR