Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling
What a truly wonderful thing it is to be called by Jesus. Think of the places in the Gospels where it’s recorded he has called someone. When Jesus comes to the home of Mary and Martha just after their brother, Lazarus, has died, he speaks first to Martha and then, the text says, “she went her way and secretly called Mary her sister, saying, `The master has come and is calling for you.’” Then we read, “As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly and came to Him” (John 11:28-29). Mary arose immediately when as she heard Jesus was calling her. Mourning her brother, she knew only Jesus could help her, and now when he called her, she came.
“Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha,” by Johannes Vermeer – fwE2zem7WDcSlA at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21865869
When the master calls and speaks to us, if we would only come and hear, what wonderful things we may know and hear in his presence! Mary and Martha became, like their brother, whom Jesus raised from the dead, friends of Jesus. If we hear his call and come, we, too, may become his friends—if we hear his words and follow them. For he said, “You are my friends if you do what I command you” (John 15:14). Jesus told this to his disciples immediately after he’d told them, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” This is what Jesus was going to do, and did do, for his own—for those he called as he called Mary, Martha and Lazarus. And it’s this love for us which compels us to follow him.
Following him is not the work of a day or moment, but it’s a way of life, and, living such a life we will encounter any number of trials and difficulties, especially in this world which is so hostile to the way of Jesus; it seems everything conspires against our following. But, speaking of that call that a man or woman, boy or girl, originally hears, a call which then goes from the ear to the heart, drawing and leading such a person to follow him, the Apostle Paul says. “I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calls you, who also will do it” (I Thessalonians 5:23-24).
We may doubt we have the strength and faith to follow, but if we will just remember when we’re weak, our very weakness gives God’s grace and strength an opening to come in. We can’t do it, but He can—“Faithful is he that calls you, who also will do it.” We can’t be the victor in all these trying situations, but Christ is always the victor! If the one who is calling us is the one who called Lazarus out of the grave—as we read in the Gospel record—then he can bring us to life, as well! “The people therefore that was with him when he called Lazarus out of his grave, and raised him from the dead, bare record” (John 12:17). This is the mighty power of Jesus calling!
The call of the Lord to receive him, to accept what he did for lost and desperate people when he came, has been the theme of every true minister of the Gospel since the Lord gave his apostles his great commission to go into all the world to share his message of redemption with every creature. This call has been the subject of so many great hymns of the Christian church—and one such hymn is the one referred to in our title for today, “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling.” Have you ever heard it? It begins,
Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
calling for you and for me;
see, on the portals he’s waiting and watching,
watching for you and for me.
The hymn, written in 1880 by Ohio composer Will Thompson, is so beloved. It was sung for the funeral service for the assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on April 8, 1968 and it was also a recurring theme song in the film The Trip to Bountiful (1985), an Oscar-winning movie taken from the stage play and screenplay by Texan Horton Foote. The film is about the adventures of an elderly woman longing to return one last time to her girlhood hometown, Bountiful, Texas. If you go to this website you can hear the hymn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EgJxPbS9ds. It’s sung beautifully by Cynthia Clawson in this 4-minute clip from the film. If you can, listen to her sing this inspiring hymn!
There’s still another story about “Softly and Tenderly” told by Ernest Emurian, a student of the history of hymns. In 1899, when the world-famous preacher, Dwight L. Moody, lay on his deathbed in his Northfield, Massachusetts home, its composer, who was Moody’s friend, made a special visit to inquire about his condition. The attending physician refused to admit him to the sickroom until Moody heard them talking just outside the bedroom door. Recognizing Thompson’s voice, he called for him to come to his bedside. Taking the Ohio poet-composer by the hand, the dying evangelist said, “Will, I would rather have written ‘Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling’ than anything I have been able to do in my whole life.” It’s said Moody was singing it when he died.
Let’s look at the hymn—maybe we can understand a bit about why it has been so beloved.
Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
calling for you and for me;
see, on the portals he’s waiting and watching,
watching for you and for me.
Jesus said he didn’t come for those “who need not a physician,” that is, those who do not see that they are sick with estrangement from God and his goodness. We all are in such a state, but the wish to save ourselves, the wish to try to be all we can be entirely on our own with no reference to our Maker, hides us from our true condition—it makes us blind spiritually. But when we realize this, then we are ready to come to the Great Physician, who heals us by the means of his substitutionary atonement on the cross. That means he pays the penalty of death our sins have earned—freeing us, healing us—by his sacrifice for us.
But notice Jesus is said to softly and tenderly call us—he didn’t come to condemn, to harshly point the finger of shame at us, but to call us in utmost love and kindness—softly and tenderly—to come to him. As the Gospel puts it, “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:17).
And he’s not calling to us from far away, but from very near, just from the very portals of our houses, of our doors, of our hearts, if we would only hear him. It’s as Jesus says, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20). We thus see he pleads for us to hear, to come. There—that close—he waits and watches for us to respond to the call of the Gospel, which is his call. As Paul the Apostle put it, “he called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” II Thessalonians 2:14).
The refrain of the hymn then speaks repeatedly of “home”:
Come home, come home;
you who are weary come home;
earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
calling, O sinner, come home!
Since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, there’s a sense in which we all find ourselves exiled—estranged from “home” and the very purpose for which we were made. The long-ago Christian leader, Augustine, in his famous Confessions, on its very first page, wrote, addressing God, “for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Because Jesus came to lead us back home to our Heavenly Father, when we turn to Christ and trust in what he has done for us, dying for our sins and rising from the dead to be our Lord—if we will only trust in him—we can at last come home; he is calling us to that very thing.
There is a weariness in life for us all because we are not living in the world as it was made to be and we are not in ourselves who we ought to be. But Jesus came to call us, weary as we can be, to himself and to his Father: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls” (Matthew 11:28-29). If we’re weary and heavily laden, burdened with care and guilt through all our shortcomings and so estranged from God, Jesus is calling us to come to him that we might have rest—and return to God. We are sinners, but Jesus came to save sinners! He calls us to come home through the good news of the Gospel!
The second stanza of the hymn underlines Jesus’ love and tenderness toward unhappy sinners:
Why should we tarry when Jesus is pleading,
pleading for you and for me?
Why should we linger and heed not his mercies,
mercies for you and for me?
His mercies are spoken of here. As the Bible tells us, “He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities” (Psalm 103:10). “Thou art a God ready to pardon,” Nehemiah 9:17. “His mercies are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23).
The third stanza reminds us that it is God’s love which is behind it all—a love he has promised and which will have no end, for not only does the Gospel speak of his great mercies and readiness to pardon—but it promises us these loving mercies are forever. This is his gift to all who heed his call—life forever with the lover of our souls, our Maker and Redeemer—“And this is the promise that he hath promised us, even eternal life” (I John 2:25).
O for the wonderful love he has promised,
promised for you and for me!
Though we have sinned, he has mercy and pardon,
pardon for you and for me.
We can finish our remarks on this hymn and the theme of Jesus’ tenderly and softly calling us to repent and turn back to God, with a picture of Jesus calling Matthew, who was to become the Apostle Matthew. Below, the call of Matthew is depicted showing Jesus’ hand extended, beckoning to Matthew, a great sinner, busy doing things that seemed to take him far from the work and life of the godly. Matthew is pointing to himself in disbelief, as if to say, “You’re calling me, a despised publican, such a noted sinner?” But Jesus was calling him, as he calls you, and me. Note Jesus’ hand—the artist is referencing Michelangelo’s hand of God from the “Creation of Adam” painting in the Sistine Chapel in Rome—the hand through which God is depicted giving life to man.
“The Calling of St. Matthew,” by Caravaggio, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15219497, Public Domain, Painted around 1600. Again, notice Jesus’ hand—reminding us of the famous Michelangelo depiction of God giving life to Adam.
“The Calling of St. Matthew,” by Caravaggio, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15219497, Public Domain, Painted around 1600. Again, notice Jesus’ hand—reminding us of the famous Michelangelo depiction of God giving life to Adam.
The calling of Matthew is recorded in all three of the Synoptic gospels. Here it is from Mark 2:14-17:
And as he passed by, he saw [Matthew] Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the receipt of custom, and said unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him. And it came to pass, that, as Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him. And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, “How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?” When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Here is a case of Jesus calling a sinner to come home—and this sinner became the man who wrote the Gospel of Matthew. He knew he was spiritually very sick; he desperately needed the great Physician. He saw that with Christ he was not going to be condemned or despised, though his world despised and condemned him. He forsook all—for he saw all he was doing could not satisfy his heart which thirsted for peace and acceptance and the kind of embrace that nothing could shake—for the love and pardon and mercy of God that was only in Jesus Christ!
It’s a call—the one that goes out to us from Christ and which went out from Jesus to Matthew—not only to our ears, but deeper than that—to the heart. That we hear and respond is not because we are virtuous or pure, for we are not—we are, as the Bible says, “dead in our sins”—that is, dead to God. But the call of Jesus brings us to life, even as the Bible puts it:
And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins…[for] God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) (Ephesians 2:1-5)
God has opened our hearts so we can respond to the call of Jesus—it’s the pure grace of God that we do, for we cannot earn it or make ourselves respond, even as the Apostle Paul reminds us, “For by grace are you saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves” (Ephesians 2:8). When you hear his call and turn to him, you come into his presence, and when you do, to put it in the words of another hymn writer, Dan Burgess, from his hymn, “In His Presence,”
You’ll find strength for every test,
Perfect peace and perfect rest,
In His presence.
Can you think of other places in the Gospels where Jesus is seen softly and tenderly calling? Here are a few: Nicodemus in John 3:1-15, the Samaritan woman in John 4, blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46-52 and the little girl in Luke 8:50-56. Thanks be to God for his soft and tender calling to each of us! He came not to condemn us but that we might be saved and have new life in him!
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