It is a commonplace with those who take literature seriously that what is to reach the heart must come from the heart; and the maxim may be applied conversely—that what has reached a heart has come from a heart—that what continues to reach the heart, among strange peoples, in distant lands, after long ages, has come from a heart of no common make. The Anglo-Saxon boy is at home in the Odyssey; and when he is a man—if he has the luck to be guided into classical paths—he finds himself in the Aeneid; and from this certain things are deduced about the makers of those poems—that they knew life, looked on it with bright, keen eyes, loved it, and lived it over again as they shaped it into verse.
When we turn to the first three Gospels, we find the same thing. Here are books with a more worldwide range than Homer or Virgil, translated again and again from the first century of their existence on to the latest—and then more than ever—into all sorts of tongues, to reach men all over the globe; and that purpose they have achieved. They have done it not so much for the literary graces of the translators or even of the original authors, though in one case these are more considerable than is sometimes allowed. That the Gospels owe their appeal to the recorded sayings and doings of our Lord, is our natural way of putting it to-day; but if for "our Lord" we put a plainer description, more congenial to the day in which the Gospels were written, we shall be in a better position to realize the significance of the worldwide appeal of his words. Thus and thus, then, spoke a mere provincial, a Jew who, though far less conspicuous and interesting, came from the region of Meleager and Philodemos—not from their town of Gadara, nor possibly from their district, but from some place not so very far away.
It was not to be expected that he should win the hearts of men as he did. He had not the Greek culture of the two Gadarenes. Celsus even found his style of speech rather vulgar. But he has, as a matter of common knowledge—so common as hardly to be noted—won the hearts of men in every race and every land. The fact is familiar, but we have as historians and critics to look for the explanation. What has been his appeal? And what the heart and nature, from which came this incredible power and reach of appeal? "Out of the abundance (the overflow) of the heart the mouth speaketh," he said. (Matt. 12:34). This he amplified, as we have seen, by his insistence on the weight of every idle word (Matt. 12:36)—the unstudied and spontaneous expression or ejaculation—the reflex, in modern phrase—which gives the real clue to the man's inner nature and deeper mind, which "justifies" him, therefore, or "condemns" him (Matt. 12:37). The overflow of the heart, he holds, shows more decisively than anything else the quality of the spring in its depths.
Here is a suggestion which we find true in ordinary life as well as in the study of literature. If we turn it back upon its author, he at least will not complain, and we shall perhaps gain a new sense of his significance by approaching him at a new angle, from an outlook not perhaps much frequented. How did he come to speak in this manner, to say this and that? To what feeling or thought, to what attitude to life, is this or the other saying due? If he, too, spoke "out of the overflow of his heart"—and we can believe it when we think of the freshness and spontaneity with which he spoke—of what nature and of what depth was that heart?
We can very well believe that much in his speech that was unforgettable to others, he forgot himself. They remembered, they could not help remembering, what he said; but he—no! he said it and moved on, keeping no register of his sayings; and so much the more natural and characteristic they are. Nor would he, like smaller people, be very careful of the form and turn of his speech; it was never set. Certainly he gave his followers the rule not to study their language (Mark 13:11). Whether or no he had consciously thought it all out; we can see the value of his rule, and how it fits in with his way of life and safeguards it. Under such a rule speech will not be stereotyped; no set form of words will impose itself on the free movement of thought, the mind can and will move of itself unhampered; and when the mind keeps and develops such freedom of movement, it commonly breaks new ground and handles new things. Not to be careful of our speech means for most of us slovenly thinking; but when a man thinks in earnest and takes truth seriously, when he speaks with his eye on his object, his language will not be slovenly, his instinct for fact will keep his speech pure and true. This is what we find in the sayings of Jesus; there is form, but living form, the freedom and grace which the clear mind and the friendly eye communicate insensibly and inimitably to language.
Our task in this chapter is primarily a historical one. From the words of Jesus we have to work back to the type of mind from which they come. There is always danger in such a task. We may forget the wide and living variety of the mind we study; our own minds may not be large enough, nor tender enough, not various, quick and sympathetic in such a degree as to apprehend what we find, to see what it means, and to relate it to itself, detail to whole. How much greater the danger here! While we analyse, we have to remember that the most correct analysis of features or characteristics may easily fail to give us a true idea of the face or the character which we analyse. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The face and the character have an "integrity," a wholeness. The detail may be of immense value to us, studied as detail; but for the true view the detail, familiar as it may be to us, and dear to us, must be sunk in the general view. Especially is this true of great characters. The "reconstruction of a personality"—to borrow a phrase from some psychologists—is a very difficult matter, even when we are masters of our detail. There is a proportion, a perspective, a balance, a poise about a character—my terms may involve some mixture of metaphors, but if the mixture brings out the complexity and difficulty of our task, it will be justified. Above all there is life, and as a life deepens and widens, it grows complex, unintelligible, and wonderful. It is more so than ever in the case of Jesus. Yet we have to grapple with this great task, if we are to know him, even if here as elsewhere we realize quickly that the beginning of real knowledge is when we grasp how much we do not know, how much there is to know. Attempted in this spirit, a study of the mind of Jesus and his characteristics should help us forward to some further intimacy with him.
The Gospels do not, like some biographies ancient and modern, give a place to the physical characteristics of Jesus. Suetonius in a very short sketch adds the personal aspect of the poet Horace, who, it is true, had led the way by such allusions (Epist. i. 4, 15-16), and tells us how Augustus said he was "a squat little pot" (sessilis obba). The "Acts of Thekla" in a similar way describe St. Paul's short figure with its suggestion of quickness. But the only personal traits of this sort that I recall in the New Testament are the eyes of Jesus and Paul's way of stretching out a hand when he spoke. In view of this reticence, it is rather remarkable how often the Gospels refer to Jesus "looking." He "looked round about on" the people in the Synagogue, and then—with some suggestion of a pause and silence while he looked, "he saith unto the man" (Mark 3:5). When Peter deprecated the Cross, we find the same; "when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter" (Mark 8:33). When the rich young ruler came so impulsively to him to ask him about eternal life, Jesus, "looking upon him, loved him"—and we touch there a certain reminiscence of eye-witnesses (Mark 10:21). There are other references of the same kind in the narratives—the look seems to come into the story naturally, without the writers noticing it. There must have been much else as familiar to his friends and companions. They must have known him as we know our friends—the inflections of his voice, his characteristic movements, the hang of his clothes, his step in the dark, and all such things. Did he speak quickly or slowly? or move his hand when he spoke? The teaching posture of Buddha's hand is stereotyped in his images. We are not told such things about Jesus, and guessing does not take us very far. Yet a stanza in one of the elegies written on the death of Sir Philip Sidney may be taken as a far-away likeness of a greater and more wonderful figure—and not lead us very far astray:—
A sweet, attractive kind of grace;The full assurance given by looks;Perpetual comfort in a face;The lineaments of Gospel books.
If we are not explicitly told of such things by the evangelists, they are easily felt in the story. The "paradoxes," as we call them—a rather dull name for them—surely point to a face alive with intellect and gaiety. The way in which, for instance, the leper approaches him, implies the man's eyes fixed in close study on Jesus' face, and finding nothing there to check him and everything to bring him nearer (Mark 1:41). When Mark tells us that he greeted the Syro-Phoenician woman's sally about the little dogs eating the children's crumbs under the table with the reply, "For the sake of this saying of yours …," we must assume some change of expression on such a face as that of Jesus (Mark 7:29).
We read again and again of the interest men and women found in his preaching and teaching—how they hung on him to hear him, how they came in crowds, how on one occasion they drove him into a boat for a pulpit. It is only familiarity that has blinded us to the "charm" they found in his speech—"they marvelled at his words of charm" (Luke 4:22)—to the gaiety and playfulness that light up his lessons. For instance, there is a little-noticed phrase, that grows very delightful as we study it, in his words to the seventy disciples—"Into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace to this house (the common "salaam" of the East); and if a son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it; if not, your "salaam" will come back toyou" (Luke 10:6). "A son of peace"—nottheson of peace—what a beautiful expression; what a beautiful idea too, that the unheeded Peace! comes back and blesses the heart that wished it, as if courteous and kind words never went unrewarded! Think again of "Solomon in all his glory" (Matt. 6:29)—before the phrase was hackneyed by common quotation. Do not such words reveal nature?
A more elaborate and more amusing episode is that of the Pharisee's drinking operations. We are shown the man polishing his cup, elaborately and carefully; for he lays great importance on the cleanness of his cup; but he forgets to clean the inside. Most people drink from the inside, but the Pharisee forgot it, dirty as it was, and left it untouched. Then he sets about straining what he is going to drink—another elaborate process; he holds a piece of muslin over the cup and pours with care; he pauses—he sees a mosquito; he has caught it in time and flicks it away; he is safe and he will not swallow it. And then, adds Jesus, he swallowed a camel. How many of us have ever pictured the process, and the series of sensations, as the long hairy neck slid down the throat of the Pharisee—all that amplitude of loose-hung anatomy—the hump—two humps—both of them slid down—and he never noticed—and the legs—all of them—with whole outfit of knees and big padded feet. The Pharisee swallowed a camel—and never noticed it (Matt. 23:24, 25). It is the mixture of sheer realism with absurdity that makes the irony and gives it its force. Did no one smile as the story was told? Did no one see the scene pictured with his own mind's eye—no one grasp the humour and the irony with delight? Could any one, on the other hand, forget it? A modern teacher would have said, in our jargon, that the Pharisee had no sense of proportion—and no one would have thought the remark worth remembering. But Jesus' treatment of the subject reveals his own mind in quite a number of aspects.
When he bade turn the other cheek—that sentence which Celsus found so vulgar—did no one smile, then, at the idea of anybody ever dreaming of such an act (Matt. 5:39)? Nor at the picture of the kind brother taking a mote from his brother's eye, with a whole baulk of timber in his own (Matt. 7:5)? Nor at the suggestion of doing two miles of forced labour when only one was demanded (Matt. 5:41)? Nor when he suggested that anxiety about food and clothing was a mark of the Gentiles (Matt. 6:32)? Did none of his disciples mark a touch of irony when he said that among the Gentile dynasties the kings who exercise authority are called "Benefactors" (Luke 22:25)? It was true; Euergetes is a well-known kingly title, but the explanation that it was the reward for strenuous use of monarchic authority was new. Are we to think his face gave no sign of what he was doing? Was there no smile?
We are told by his biographer that Marcus Aurelius had a face that never changed—for joy or sorrow, "being an adherent," he adds, "of the Stoic philosophy." The pose of superiority to emotion was not uncommonly held in those times to be the mark of a sage—Horace's "nil admirari". The writers of the Gospels do not conceal that Jesus had feelings, and expressed them. We read how he "rejoiced in spirit" (Luke 10:21)—how he "sighed" (Mark 7:34) and "sighed deeply" (Mark 8:12)—how his look showed "anger" (Mark 3:5). They tell us of his indignant utterances (Matt. 23:14; Mark 11:17)—of his quick sensitiveness to a purposeful touch (Mark 5:30)—of his fatigue (Mark 7:24; Luke 8:23)—of his instant response, as we have just seen, to contact with such interesting spirits as the Syro-Phoenician woman and the rich young ruler. Above all, we find him again and again "moved with compassion." We saw the leper approach him, with eyes fixed on the face of Jesus. The man's appeal—"If thou wilt thou canst make me clean"—his misery moves Jesus; he reaches out his hand, and, with no thought for contagion or danger, he touches the leper—so deep was the wave of pity that swept through him—and he heals the man (Mark 1:40-42). It would almost seem as if the touching impressed the spectators as much as the healing. Compassion is an old-fashioned word, and sympathy has a wide range of suggestions, some of them by now a little cold; we have to realize, if we can, how deeply and genuinely Jesus felt with men, how keen his feeling was for their suffering and for their hunger, and at the same moment reflect how strong and solid a nature it is that is so profoundly moved. Again, when we read of his happy way in dealing with children, are we to draw no inference as to his face, and what it told the children? Finally, on this part of our subject, we are given glimpses of his dark hours. The writer to the Hebrews speaks of his "offering up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears" and "learning obedience by the things that he suffered" (Heb. 5:7, 8), and Luke, perhaps dealing with the same occasion, says he was "in agony" (Luke 22:44), a strong phrase from a man of medical training. Luke again, with the other evangelists, refers to the temptations of Jesus, and in a later passage records the poignant and revealing sentence—"Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations" (Luke 22:28). Finally, there is the last cry upon the Cross (Mark 15:37). So frankly, and yet so unobtrusively, they lay bare his soul, as far as they saw it.
From what is given us it is possible to go further and see something of his habits of mind. His thought will occupy us in later chapters; here we are concerned rather with the way in which his mind moves, and the characteristics of his thinking.
First of all, we note a certain swiftness, a quick realization of a situation, a character, or the meaning of a word. Men try to trap him with a question, and he instantly "recognizes their trickery" (Luke 20:23). When they ask for a sign, he is as quick to see what they have in mind (Mark 8:11-13). He catches the word whispered to Jairus—half hears, half divines it, in an instant (Mark 5:36). He is surprised at slowness of mind in other men (Matt. 15:16; Mark 8:21). And in other things he is as quick—he sees "the kingdoms of this world in a moment of time" (Luke 4:5); he beholds "Satan fallen (aorist participle) from heaven like lightning" (Luke 10:18)—two very striking passages, which illuminate his mind for us in a very important phase of it. We ought to have been able to guess without them that he saw things instantly and in a flash—that they stood out for him in outline and colour and movement there and then. That is plain in the parables from nature, and here it is confirmed. Is there in all his parables a blurred picture, the edges dim or the focus wrong? The tone of the parables is due largely to this gift of visualizing, to use an ugly modern word, and of doing it with swiftness and precision.
Several things combine to make this faculty, or at least go along with it—a combination not very common even among men of genius—an unusual sense of fact, a very keen and vivid sympathy, and a gift of bringing imagination to bear on the fact in the moment of its discovery, and afterwards in his treatment of the fact.
On his sense of fact we have touched before, in dealing with his close observation of Nature. It is an observation that needs no note-book, that is hardly conscious of itself. There is, as we know, a happy type of person who sees almost without looking, certainly without noticing—and sees aright too. The temperament is described by Wordsworth in the opening books of "The Prelude". The poet type seems to lose so much and yet constantly surprises us by what it has captured, and sometimes hardly itself realizes how much has been done. The gains are not registered, but they are real and they are never lost, and come flashing out all unexpectedly when the note is struck that calls them. So one feels it was with Jesus' intimate knowledge of Nature—it is not the knowledge of botanist or naturalist, but that of the inmate and the companion, who by long intimacy comes to know far more than he dreams. "Wise master mariners," wrote the Greek poet, Pindar, long before, "know the wind that shall blow on the third day, and are not wrecked for headlong greed of gain." They know the weather, as we say, by instinct; and instinct is the outcome of intimacy, of observation accurate but sub-conscious.
It chimes in with this instinct for fact, that Jesus should lay so much emphasis on truth of word and truth of thought. Any hypocrisy is a leaven (Matt. 16:19; Luke 12:1); any system of two standards of truth spoils the mind (Matt. 5:33-37). The divided mind fails because it is not for one thing or the other. If it is impossible to serve God and mammon, truth and God go together in one allegiance; and a non-Theocentric element in a man's thought will be fatal sooner or later to any aptitude he has by nature for God and truth.
We find this illustrated in Jesus' own case. At the heart of his instinct for fact is his instinct for God. He goes to the permanent and eternal at once in his quest of fact, because his instinct for God is so sure and so compelling. Bishop Phillips Brooks noted in Jesus' conversation "a constant progress from the arbitrary and special to the essential and universal forms of thought," "a true freedom from fastidiousness," "a singular largeness" in his intellectual life. The small question is answered in the larger—"the life is more than meat and the body is more than raiment" (Luke 12:23). When he is challenged on divorce, he goes past Moses to God (Matt. 19:4)—"He which made them at the beginning made them male and female." Every question is settled for him by reference to God, and to God's principles of action and to God's laws and commands; and God, as we shall see in a later chapter, is not for him a conception borrowed from others, a quotation from a book. God is real, living, and personal; and all his teaching is directed to drive his disciples into the real; he insists on the open mind, the study of fact, the fresh, keen eye turned on the actual doings of God.
When life and thought have such a centre, a simplicity and an integrity follow beyond what we might readily guess. "When thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light, … if thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light" (Luke 11:34-36). It is this fullness of light that we find in Jesus; and as the light plays on one object and another, how clear and simple everything grows! All round about him was subtlety, cleverness, fastidiousness. His speech is lucid, drives straight to the centre, to the principle, and is intelligible. We may not see how far his word carries us, but it is abundantly plain that simple and straightforward people do understand Jesus—not all at once, but sufficiently for the moment, and with a sense that there is more beyond. His thought is uncomplicated by distinctions due to tradition and its accidents. His whole attitude to life is simple—he has no taboos; he comes "eating and drinking" (Matt. 11:19); and he told his followers, when he sent them out to preach, to eat what they were given (Luke 10:7); "give alms," he says, "of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you" (Luke 11:41). If God gives the food, it will probably be clean; and the old taboos will be mere tradition of men. He is not interested in what men call "signs," in the exceptional thing; the ordinary suffices when one sees God in it. One of Jesus' great lessons is to get men to look for God in the commonplace things of which God makes so many, as if Abraham Lincoln were right and God did make so many common people, because he likes them best. The commonest flowers—God thinks them out, says Jesus, and takes care of them (Matt. 6:28-30). Hence there is little need of special machinery for contact with God—priesthoods, trances, visions, or mystical states—abnormal means for contact with the normal. When Jesus speaks of the very highest and holiest things, he is as simple and natural as when he is making a table in the carpenter-shop. Sense and sanity are the marks of his religion.
"Sense of fact" is a phrase which does not exclude—perhaps it even suggests—some hint of dullness. The matter-of-fact people are valuable in their way, but rarely illuminative, and it is because they lack the imagination that means sympathy. Now in Jesus' case there is a quickness and vividness of sympathy—he likes the birds and flowers and beasts he uses as illustrations. They are not the "natural objects" with which dull people try to brighten their pages and discourses. They are happy living things that come to his mind, as it were, of themselves, because, shall we say? they know they will be welcome there; and they are welcome. His pity and sympathy are unlike ours in having so much more intelligence and fellow-feeling in them. He understands men and women, as his gift of bright and winning speech shows. After all, as Carlyle has pointed out in many places, it is this gift of tenderness and understanding, of sympathy, that gives the measure of our intellects.[14] It is the faculty by which men touch fact and master it. It is the want of it that makes so many clever and ingenious people so futile and distressing.
The sense of fact and the gift for sympathy and the foundations, so to speak, of the imagination which gives their quality to the stories and pictures of Jesus. He thinks in pictures, as it were; they fill his speech, and every one of them is alive and real. Think, for example, of the Light of the world (Matt. 5:14), the strait gate and the narrow way (Matt. 7:14), the pictures of the bridegroom (Mark 2:19), sower (Matt. 13:3), pearl merchant (Matt. 13:45), and the men with the net (Matt. 13:47), the sheep among the wolves (Matt. 10:16), the woman sweeping the house (Luke 15:8), the debtor going to prison accompanied by his creditor and the officer with the judge's warrant (Luke 12:58), the shepherd separating his sheep from the goats (Matt. 25:32), the children playing in the market-place pretending to pipe or to mourn (Luke 7:32), the fall of the house (Matt. 7:27)—or the ironical pictures of the blind leading the blind straight for the ditch (Matt. 15:14), the vintagers taking their baskets to the bramble bushes (Matt. 7:16), the candle burning away brightly under the bushel (Matt. 5:15; Luke 11:33), the offering of pearls to the pigs (Matt. 7:6)—or his descriptions of what lay before himself as a cup and a baptism (Mark 10:38), and of his task as the setting fire to the world (Luke 12:49). There is a truthfulness and a living energy about all these pictures—not least about those touched with irony.
There are, however, pictures less realistic and more imaginative—one or two of them, in the language of the fireside, quite "creepy." Here is a house—a neat, trim little house—and for the English reader there is of course a garden or a field round it, and a wood beyond. Out of the wood comes something—stealthily creeping up towards the house—something not easy to make out, but weary and travel-stained and dusty—and evil. A strange feeling comes over one as one watches—it is evil, one is certain of it. Nearer and nearer to the house it creeps—it is by the window—it rises to look in, and one shudders to think of those inside who suddenly seethatlooking at them through the window. But there is no one there. Fatigue changes to triumph; caution is dropped; it goes and returns with seven worse than itself, and the last state of the place is worse than the first (Luke 11:24-26). Is this leaving the real? One critic will say it is, "No," says another man, in a graver tone and speaking slowly, "it's real enough; it's my story." But have we left the text too far? Then let us try another passage. Here is a funeral procession, a bier with a dead man laid out on it, "wrapped in a linen cloth" (Matt. 27:59), "bound hand and foot with grave-clothes" (John 11:44)—a common enough sight in the East; but who are they who are carrying him—those silent, awful figures, bound like him hand and foot, and wound with the same linen cloth, moving swiftly and steadily along with their burden? It is the dead burying the dead (Luke 9:60). Add to these the account of the three Temptations—stories in picture, which must come from Jesus himself, and illustrate another side of his experience. For to the mind that sees and thinks in pictures, temptation comes in pictures which the mind makes for itself, or has presented to it and at once lights up—pictures horrible and once seen hard to forget and to escape. No wonder he warns men against the pictures they paint themselves in their minds (Matt. 5:28; cf. Chapter VII, p. 154). Add also the other pictures of Satan fallen (Luke 10:18) and Satan pushing into God's presence with a demand for the disciples (Luke 22:31). Are we to call these "visions"—the word is ambiguous—or are they imaginative presentments of evil, as it thrusts itself on the soul, with all its allurements and all its ugliness? "Visions" in the sense that is associated with trance, we shall hardly call them. They are pictures showing his gift of imagination.
Lastly, on this part of our subject, let us remind ourselves of the many parables and pictures and sayings which put God himself before us. Here is the bird's nest, and one little sparrow fallen to the ground—and God is there and he takes notice of it; he misses the little bird from the brood (Matt. 10:29; cf. Luke 12:6). Here again is quite another scene—the rich and middle-aged man, who has prospered in everything and is just completing his plans to retire from business, when he feels a tap on his shoulder and hears a voice speaking to him, and he turns and is face to face with God (Luke 12:20). And there are all the other stories of God's goodness and kindness and care; is not the very phrase "Our Father in heaven" a picture in itself, if we can manage to give the word the value which Jesus meant it to carry? When one studies the teaching of Jesus, and concentrates on what he draws us of God, God somehow becomes real and delightful, in a most wonderful way.
With all these faculties brought to bear on all he thinks, and lucent in all he says, there is little wonder that men recognized another note in Jesus from that familiar in their usual teachers. Rabbi Eliezer of those times was praised as "a well-trough that loses not a drop of water." We all know that type of teacher—the tank-mind, full, no doubt, supplied by pipes, and ministering its gifts by pipe and tap, regulated, tiresome, and dead. "The water that I shall give him," days Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (John 4:14), "shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." The water metaphors of the New Testament are not of trough and tank. Jesus taught men—not from a reservoir of quotations, like a scribe or a Rabbi, "but as possessed of authority himself" (Matt. 7:29). Who gave him that authority? asked the priests (Matt. 21:23)? Who authorizes the living man to live? "All things are delivered unto me of my Father" (Matt. 11:27). "My words shall not pass away" (Mark 13:31).
He has proved right; his words have not passed away. The great "Son of Fact," he went to fact, drove his disciples to fact, and (in the striking phrase of Cromwell) "spokethings." And we can see in the record again and again the traces of the mental habits and the natural language of one who habitually based himself on experience and on fact. Critics remark on his method of using the Old Testament and contrast it with contemporary ways. St. Paul, for instance, in the passage where he weighs the readings "seeds" and "seed" (Gal. 3:16), is plainly racking language to the destruction of its real sense; no one ever would have written "seeds" in that connexion; but in the style of the day he forces a singular into an utterly non-natural significance. St. Matthew in his first two chapters proves the events, which he describes, to have been prophesied by citing Old Testament passages—two of which conspicuously refer to entirely different matters, and do not mean at all what he suggests (Matt. 2:15, 23). The Hebrew with the Old Testament, like the Greek of those days with Homer, made what play he pleased; if the words fitted his fancy, he took them regardless of connexion or real meaning; if he was pressed for a defence, he would take refuge in allegory. A fashion was set for the Church which bore bad fruit. The Old Testament was emptied of meaning to fortify the Christian faith with "proof texts." When Jesus quotes the Old Testament, it is for other ends and with a clear, incisive sense of the prophet's meaning. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Matt. 9:13 and 12:7, quoting Hosea 6:6). He not merely quotes Hosea, but it is plain that he has got at the very heart of the man and his message. Similarly when he reads Isaiah in the Synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:17), he lays hold of a great passage and brings out with emphasis its value and its promise. He touches the real, and no lapse of time makes his quotations look odd or quaint. When he is asked which is the first commandment of all, he at once, with what a modern writer calls "a brilliant flash of the highest genius," links a text in Deuteronomy with one in Leviticus—"Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength" (Deut. 6:4-5), and, he adds, "the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these" (Levit. 19:18; Mark 12:29-31). Thus his instinct for God and his instinct for the essential carry him to the very centre and acme of Moses' law. At the same time he can use the Old Testament in an efficient way for dialectic, when an "argumentum ad hominem" best meets the case (Mark 7:6; Luke 20:37, 44).
Going to fact directly and reading his Bible on his own account, he is the great pioneer of the Christian habit of mind. He is not idly called the Captain by the writer to the Hebrews (Heb. 2:10, 12:2). Authority and tradition only too readily assume control of human life; but a mind like that of Jesus, like that which he gave to his followers, will never be bound by authority and tradition. Moses is very well, but if God has higher ideas of marriage—what then? The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat (Matt. 23:2), but that does not make them equal to Moses; still less does it make their traditions of more importance than God's commandments (Mark 7:1-13). The Sabbath itself "was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27).
Where the habit of mind is thus set to fact, and life is based on God, on God's will and God's doings, it is not surprising that in the daily round there should be noted "sanity, reserve, composure, and steadiness." It may seem to be descending to a lower plane, but it is worthwhile to look for a moment at the sheer sense which Jesus can bring to bear on a situation. The Sabbath—is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Well, if a man's one sheep is in a pit on the Sabbath, what will he do? (Matt. 12:11), or will he refrain from leading his ox to the water on the Sabbath (Luke 13:15)? Such questions bring a theological problem into the atmosphere of sense—and it is better solved there. He is interrupted by a demand that he arbitrate between a man and his brother; and his reply is virtually, Does your brother accept your choice of an arbitrator? (Luke 12:14)—and that matter is finished. "Are there few that be saved?" asks some one in vague speculation, and he gets a practical answer addressed to himself (Luke 13:23). Even in matters of ordinary manners and good taste, he offers a shrewd rule (Luke 14:8). Luke records also two or three instances of perfectly banal talk and ejaculation addressed to him—the bazaar talk of the Galilean murders (Luke 13:1)—the pious if rather obvious remark of some man about feasting in the Kingdom of God (Luke 14:15)—and the woman's homey congratulation of Mary on her son (Luke 11:27). In each case he gets away to something serious.
Above all, we must recognize the power which every one felt in him. Even Herod, judging by rumour, counts him greater than John the Baptist (Matt. 14:2). The very malignity of his enemies is a confession of their recognition that they are dealing with some one who is great. Men remarked his sedative and controlling influence over the disordered mind (Mark 1:27). He is not to be trapped in his talk, to be cajoled or flattered. There is greatness in his language—in his reference of everything to great principles and to God; greatness in his freedom from ambition, in his contempt of advertisement and popularity, in his appeal to the best in men, in his belief in men, in his power of winning and keeping friends, in his gift for making great men out of petty. In all this we are not stepping outside the Gospels nor borrowing from what he has done in nineteen centuries. In Galilee and in Jerusalem men felt his power. And finally, what of his calm, his sanity, his dignity, in the hour of betrayal, in the so-called trials, before the priests, before Pilate, on the Cross? The Pharisees, said Tertullian, ought to have recognized who Christ was by his patience.
It was as a teacher that Jesus of Nazareth first began to gather disciples round him. But to understand the work of the Teacher, we must have some general impression of the world to which he came. The background will help us understand what had to be done, and what it was he meant to do.
Bishop Gore, in a book recently published, suggested that the belief that God is Love is not axiomatic. Many of us take it for granted, as the point at which religion naturally begins; but, as he emphasized, it is not an obvious truth; it is something of which we have to be convinced, something that has to be made good to men. Unless we bear this in mind, we shall miss a great deal of what Jesus has really done, by assuming that he was not needed to do it.
"Out of a darker world than ours came this new spring." We must look at the world as it was, when Jesus came. In a later chapter we shall have to consider more fully the religions of the Roman world. One or two points may be anticipated. First of all, we have to realize what a hard world it was. Men and women are harder than we sometimes think, and the natural hardness to which the human heart grows of itself, needed more correction than it had in those days.
Among the many papyrus documents that have been found in late years in Egypt—documents that have pictured for us the life of Egypt, and have recorded for us also the language of the New Testament in a most illuminative way—there is one that illustrates only too aptly the unconscious hardness of the times. It is a letter—no literary letter, no letter that any one would ordinarily have thought of keeping; it has survived by accident. It was written by an Egyptian Greek to his wife. She lived somewhere up the country, and he had gone to Alexandria. She had been expecting a baby when he left, and he wrote a rough, but not an unkind, letter to her. He writes: "Hilarion to Alis . . . greetings…. Know that we are still even now in Alexandria. Do not fidget, if, at the general return, I stay in Alexandria. I pray and beseech you, take care of the little child, and as soon as we have our wages, I will send you up something. If you are delivered, if it was a male, let it live; if it was a female, cast it out . . . . How can I forget you? So don't fidget."[15]
The letter is not an unkind one; it is sympathetic, masculine, direct, and friendly. And then it ends with the suggestion, inconceivable to us to-day, that if the baby is a girl, it need not be kept. It can be put out either on the land or in the river, left to kite or crocodile. The evidence of satirists is generally to be discounted, because they tend to emphasize the exceptional; and it is not the exceptional thing that gives the character of an age, or of a man. It is the kind of thing that we take for granted and assume to be normal that shows our character or gives the note of the day; and what we omit to notice may be as revealing.
In the plays of the Athenian comic poets of the third and fourth centuries B.C. we find, to wearisomeness, one recurring plot. The heroine turns out to be, not just a common girl, but the daughter of the best family in Athens, exposed when she was a baby. When Plato sketched his ideal constitution, in addition to the mating of suitable pairs to be decided by government, he added that, if the offspring were not good enough, it should be put away where it would not be found again. Aristotle allowed the same practice. The most cultured race on earth freely exposed its infants; and this letter of Hilarion to Alis—a dated letter by the way, of September or October in the year 1 A.D.—makes it clear that the practice of exposure of children still prevailed; and there is other evidence which need not now detain us. It is a hard world, where kind people or good people can think of such things as ordinary and natural.
Evidence of the character of an age is given by the treatment of criminals; and that age was characterized by crucifixion. They would take a human being, spread him out on a cross on the ground, drive nails through his hands and feet; and then the cross was raised—the agony of the victim during the movement is not to be imagined. It was made fast; and there the victim hung, suspended between heaven and earth, to live or die at his leisure. By and by crows would gather round him. "I have been good," said the slave. "Then you have your reward," says the Latin poet, "you will not feed the crows on the cross."[16] There is a very striking phrase in St. Matthew: "And sitting down they watched him there" (Matt. 27:36). The soldiers nailed three men to crosses, and sat down beneath them to dice for their clothes. Our tolerances, like our utterances, come out of the abundance of the heart, and stamp us for what we are.
We cannot easily realize all that slavery meant. When we read in the Fourth Gospel that "the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29), that was written before Jesus Christ had abolished slavery; for, we remember, it was done by his people against the judgement of the business experts. Slavery meant robbing the man of every right that Nature gave him; and, as Homer said long ago, "Farseeing Zeus takes away half a man's manhood, when he brings the day of slavery upon him."[17] He became a thief, a liar, dirty, and bad; and with the woman it was still worse. The slave woman was a little lower than the animal; she might not have offspring. It was "natural," men said; "Nature had designed certain races to be slaves; slavery was written in Nature; it was Nature's law." These were not the thoughts of vulgar people, but of some of the best of the Greeks—not of all, indeed; but society was organized on the basis of slavery. It was an accepted axiom of all social and economic life.
As to the spiritual background, for the present let us postpone the heathen world and consider the Jews, who represented in some ways the world's highest at this period. Modern scholarship is shedding fresh light on the literature and ideas that were prevalent between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. But what uncertainty about God! Why some people should think that it was easier to believe in God in those days than now, I do not see. Far less was known of God; the record of his doings was not so long as it is for us, and it was not so well known. No one could understand what God meant, if he was quite clear himself. Look at what he did with the nation. He chose Israel, he established the kingdom of David. They did not get on very well, and at last were carried away into Captivity in Babylon. So much he did for his people; and when he brought them back again to the Promised Land, it was to a very trying and difficult situation; and worse still followed after Nehemiah's day. Alexander the Great's conquest of the East left a Macedonian dynasty ruling those regions, and one of their great kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to stamp out the religion of Jehovah altogether. The Book of Daniel is a record of that persecution about 166 B.C. The Maccabeean brothers delivered Israel, and rescued the religion of Jehovah; and a kingdom of a sort was established with them; but the grandsons of the liberators became tyrants. What did God mean? Out of all the promises to Israel, to the House of David, this is what comes. Herod follows—a foreign king and an Edomite; and the Romans are over all, suzerains and rulers.
In despair of the present men began to forecast the future. A time will surely come, they said, when God will give an anointed one, the Messiah; he will set all Israel free, will make Israel rule the world instead of the Romans; he will gather together the scattered of Israel from the four winds, reunite and assemble God's people in triumph in Palestine. And then, when the prophet paused, a plain man spoke: "I don't care if he does. My father all his life looked forward to that. What does it matter now, if God redeems his people, or if he does not? My father is dead." The answer was, why should your father not come with the redeemed Israel? But what evidence is there for that? Does God care for people beyond the grave? Is there personal immortality?—that became the anxious question.[18]
But is this kingdom of the Messiah to be an earthly or a heavenly kingdom? Will it be in Jerusalem or in heaven? Are you quite sure that there is any distinction in the other world between good and bad, between Jew and Gentile? Some people thought the kingdom would be in Jerusalem; others said it would be in heaven, and added that the Jews will look down and see the Gentiles in hell—something worth seeing at last. But, after all, it was still guesswork— "perhaps" was the last word.
When the question is asked, "Was Jesus the Messiah?" the obvious reply is, "Which Messiah?" For there seems to have been no standard idea of the Messiah. The Messiah was, on the whole, as vague a term as, in modern politics, Socialism or Tariff Reform. Neither of them has come; perhaps they never will come, and nobody knows what they will be till they do come. Jesus is not what they expected. A Jewish girl, at an American Student Conference a year or two ago, said about Jesus: "I do not think he is the Messiah, but I do love him." Of course he was not in her Jewish sense. The term was a vague one.
The main point was that men were uncertain about God. God was unintelligible. They did not understand his ideas, either for the nation or for the individual; God's plans miscarried with such fatality. Or if he had some deeper design, it was still all guesswork. It seemed likely, or at least right, that he should achieve somehow the final damnation of the Gentiles—the Romans, and the rest of us—but nothing was very clear. In the meantime, if God was going to damn the Gentiles in the next world, why should not the Jews do it in this? Human nature has only too ready an answer for such a question—as we can read in too many dark pages of history, in the stories of wars and religious persecutions.
The uncertainty about God in Judaism reacted on life and made it hard.
Even the virtues of men were difficult; they were apt to be nerveless and uncertain, because their aim was uncertain, and they wanted inspiration. Of course there are always kindly hearts; but a man will never put forth quite his best for an uncertainty. There was a want of centre about their virtues, a want of faith, and as a result they were too largely self-directed.[19]
A man was virtuous in order to secure himself in case God should be awkward. There was no sufficient relation between man and God. God was judge, no doubt; but his character could be known from his attitude to the Gentiles. Could a man count on God and how far? Could he rely on God supporting him, on God wishing to have him in this world and the next? No, not with any certainty. It comes to a fundamental unbelief in God, resting, as Jesus saw, on an essential misconception of God's nature; and this resulted in the spoiling of life. Men did not use God. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," Jesus said (Luke 12:34); and it was not in God. Men's interest and belief were elsewhere.
Now the first thing that Jesus had to do, as a teacher, was to induce men to rethink God. Men, he saw, do not want precepts; they do not want ethics, morals or rules; what they do need is to rethink God, to rediscover him, to re-explore him, to live on the basis of relation with God. There is one striking difference between Christianity and the other religions, in that the others start with the idea that God is known. Christians do not so start. We are still exploring God on the lines of Jesus Christ—rethinking God all the time, finding him out. That is what Jesus meant us to do. If Jesus had merely put before men an ethical code, that would have been to do what the moralists had done before him—what moralists always do, with the same naive idea that they are doing a great deal for us. His object was far more fundamental.
The first thing was to bring people on to the very centre and to get there at once—to get men away from the accumulation of occasional and self-directed virtues, from the self-sustained life, from self-acquired righteousness, and to bring them to face the fact of God, to realize the seriousness of God and of life, and to see God. When he preached self-denial, he did not mean the modern virtue of self-denial with all its pettinesses, but a genuine negation of self, a total forgetfulness of self by having the mind set entirely on God and God's purposes, a readjustment of everything with God as the real centre of all. This is always difficult; it is not less difficult where the conception of God is, as it was with Jesus, entirely spiritual. The whole experience of mankind was against the idea that there could be a religion at all without priest, sacrifice, altar, temple, and the like. There is a very minimum of symbol and cult in the teaching of Jesus—so little that the ancient world thought the Christians were atheists, because they had no image, no temple, no sacrifice, no ritual, nothing that suggested religion in the ordinary sense of the word. We shall realize the difficulty of what Jesus was doing when we grasp that he meant people to see God independently of all their conventional aids. To lead them to commit themselves in act to God on such terms was a still more difficult thing. To believe in God in a general sort of way, to believe in Providence at large, is a very different thing from getting yourself crucified in the faith that God cares for you, and yet somehow wishes you to endure crucifixion. How far will men commit themselves to God? Jesus means them to commit themselves to God right up to the hilt—as Bunyan put it, "to hazard all for God at a clap." Decision for God, obedience to God, that is the prime thing—action on the basis of God and of God's care for the individual.
His purpose that this shall not be merely the religion of choice spirits or of those immediately around him, but shall be the one religion of all the world, makes the task still vaster. He means not merely to touch the Jews. Whether he says so in explicit terms or not, it is implied in all that he says and does, that the new movement should be far wider than anything the world had ever seen; it was to cover the whole of mankind. He meant that every individual in all the world should have the centre of gravity of his thinking shifted.
Again, he had to think of a re-creation of the language of men, till God should be a new word. Our constant problem is to give his word his value, his meaning. He meant that men should learn their religious vocabulary again, till the words they used should suggest his meanings to their minds. Something of this was achieved, when some of his disciples came to him and said: "Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). Further, he had to secure that men should begin the rethinking of all life—personal, social, and national—from the very foundations, on new lines—what is called a transvaluation of all values. With a new centre, everything has to be thought out anew into what St. Paul calls the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4:13). Then finally the question comes, how to secure continuity? Will the movement outlast his personal influence? These are his problems—large enough, every one of them. How does he face them?
The Gospel began with friendship, and we know from common life what that is, and how it works. Old acquaintance and intimacy are the heart of it. The mind is on the alert when we meet the stranger—quick and eager to master his outlook and his ways of thought, to see who and what he is—it is critical, self-protective, rather than receptive. But, as time goes on, we notice less, we study the man less as we see more of him. Yet, in this easier and more careless intercourse, when the mind is off guard, it is receiving a host of unnoticed impressions, which in the long run may have extraordinary influence. Pleasant and easy-going, a perpetual source of interest and rest of mind, the friendship continues, till we find to our surprise that we are changed. Stage by stage, as one comes to know one's friend, by unconscious and freely given sympathy, one lives the other man's life, sees and feels things as he does, slips into his language, and, by degrees, into his thoughts—and then wakes up to find oneself, as it were, remade by the other's personality, so close has been the identification with the man we grew to love. This is what we find in our own lives; and we find it in the Gospels.
A sentence from St. Augustine's Confessions gives us the key to the whole story. "Sed ex amante alio accenditur alius" ("Confessions", iv. 14, 911). "One loving spirit sets another on fire." Jesus brings men to the new exploration of God, to the new commitment of themselves to God, simply by the ordinary mechanism of friendship and love. This, in plain English, is after all the idea of Incarnation—friendship and identification. Jesus has a genius for friendship, a gift for understanding the feelings of men. Look, for example, at the quick word to Jairus. As soon as the message comes to him that his daughter is dead, Jesus wheels round on him at once with a word of courage (Mark 5:36). This quickness in understanding, in feeling with people, marks him throughout. An instinctive care for other people's small necessities is a great mark of friendship, and Jesus has it. We find him saying to his disciples: "Come ye yourselves apart privately into a desert place, and rest awhile" (Mark 6:31). What a beautiful suggestion! He himself, it is clear from the records, felt the need of privacy, of being by oneself, of quiet; and he took his quiet hours in the open, in the wild, where there was solitude and Nature, and there he would take his friends. There were so many coming and going, that they had no leisure to eat, and Jesus says to them in his friendly way: "Let us get out of this—away by ourselves, to a quiet place; what you want is rest." What a beautiful idea!—to go camping out on the hillside, under the trees, to rest—and with him to share the quiet of the lonely place. It is not the only time when he offers to give people rest—"Come unto Me … and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28). How strange, when one thinks of the restless activity of Christian people to-day, with typewriters and conventions, and every modern method of consuming energy and time! How sympathetic he is!
We may notice again his respect for the reserve of other people. On the whole, how slowly Jesus comes to work with men! He never "rushes" the human spirit; he respects men's personalities. Men and women are never pawns with him. He does not think of them in masses. The masses appeal to him, but that is because he sees the individual all the time. To one of his disciples he says, "I have prayed for thee" (Luke 22:32). What a contrast to the conventional "friend of man" in the abstract! With all that hangs upon him, he has leisure to pray intensely, for a single man. It gives us an idea of his gifts in friendship. His faith in his people is quite remarkable, when we think of it. He believes in his followers; he shares with them some of the deepest things in his life; he counts them fit to share his thought of God. He makes it quite clear to them how he trusts them. He puts before them the tremendous work that he has to do—work more appalling in its vastness the more one studies it; and then he tells them that he is trusting the whole thing with them. What a faith it implies in their moral capacity! What acceptance of the dim beginnings of the character that was to be Christian! Someone has spoken of his "apparently unjustified faith in Peter." What names he can give to his friends as a result of this faith in them! "Ye are the light of the world," he says (Matt. 5:14), "the salt of the earth." When we remind ourselves of his clear vision, his genius for seeing fact, how much must such praises have meant to these men!
Think how he gives himself to them in earnest; how he is at their disposal. He is theirs; they can cross-question him at leisure; they tell him that the Pharisees did not like what he said (Matt. 15:12), they doubt with Peter the wisdom of his open speech (Mark 8:32); they criticize him (Matt. 13:10). If they do not understand his parable, they ask what he means (Matt. 15:15) and keep on asking till he makes it plain. He is in no hurry. He is the Master and their Teacher, and he is at the service of the slowest of them.
But there is another side to friendship; for one great part of it is taking what our friends do for us, as well as doing things for them. How he will take what they have to give! He lets them manage the boat, while he sleeps (Mark 4:38), and go and prepare for him (Luke 9:52), and see to the Passover meal (Mark 14:13). The women, we read, ministered to him of their substance (Luke 8:3). There is a very significant phrase in St. Luke (22:28), where he says to them at the end: "Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations." He tells them there that they have helped him. How? Apparently by being with him. Is not that friendship? In the same chapter (Luke 22:15) we find an utterance that reveals the depth of his feeling for his friends: "With desire I have desired (a Greek rendering of a Semitic intensive) to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." They are to help him again by being with him, and he has longed for it, he says. The Gospel of John sums up the whole story in a beautiful sentence: "Jesus, having loved his own which were in the world, loved them unto the end" (John 13:1). Augustine is right. "One loving spirit sets another on fire."
Note again the word which he uses in speaking to them ("Tekna": Mark 2:5, 10:24). It is a diminutive, a little disguised as "children" in our English version. It reappears in the Fourth Gospel in even more diminutive forms ("Teknia", 13:33; Paidia, 21:5) with a peculiarly tender suggestion. The word of Mark answers more closely than anything I know to "Boys," as we used it in the Canadian Universities. "Men," or "Undergraduates," is the word in the English Universities; "Students," in Scotland and in India; in Canada we said "Boys"; and I think we get nearer, and like one another better, with that easy name. And it was this friendly, pleasant word, or one very like it, that he used with them. Nor is it the only one of the kind. "Fear not, little flock!" he said (Luke 12:32). Do not the diminutives mean something? Do they not take us into the midst of a group where friendship is real? And in the centre is the friendliest figure of all.
Look for a moment at the men who followed him; at the type he calls. They are simple people in the main—warm hearts and impulsive natures. The politics of Simon the Zealot might at one time have been summed up as "the knife and plenty of it," a simple and direct enough type of political thought, in all conscience, however hopeless and ineffectual, as history showed; but he gave up his politics for the friendship of Jesus. Peter, again, is the champion example of the impulsive nature. Why Jesus called James and John "the sons of thunder" (Mark 3:17) I am not sure. Dr. Rendel Harris thinks because they were twins; other people find something of the thunderstorm in their ideas and outlook. The publican in the group is of much the same type; he is ready to leave his business and his custom-house at a word—once more the impulsive nature and the simple. It is possible that Jesus looked also to another type of which he gained very little in his lifetime; for he speaks of "the scribe who has turned disciple again, and brings out of his treasure things new and old" (Matt. 13:52)—the more complicated type of the trained scholar, full of old learning, but open to new views. In the meantime he draws to him people with the warm heart—yes, he says, but cultivate the cool head (cf. Matt. 10:16). Again and again he will have men "count the cost" (Luke 14:28)—know what they are doing, be rid of delusions before they follow him (Mark 8:34). What did they expect? They had all sorts of dreams of the future. When we first find them, there is friction among them, which is not unnatural in a group of men with ambitions (Mark 9:33. 10:37). Even at the Last Supper their minds run on thrones (Luke 22:24). They are haunted by taboos. Peter long after boasts that nothing common or unclean has entered his lips (Acts 10:14). They fail to understand him. "Are ye also without understanding?" he asks, not without surprise (Mark 8:17, 21). At the very end they run away.
There, then, is the group. What is to be the method? There is not much method. As Harnack says about the spread of the early Church, "A living faith needs no special methods"—a sentence worth remembering. "Infinite love in ordinary intercourse" is another phrase of Harnack in describing the life of the early Church. It began with Jesus. He chose twelve, says Mark (3:14), "that they may be with him." That is all. And they are with him under all sorts of circumstances. "The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" (Luke 9:58). They saw him in privation, fatigued, exhausted. With every chance to see weaknesses in his character, they did not find much amiss with him. That is surely significant. They lived with him all the time, in a genuine human friendship, a real and progressive intimacy. They were with him in popularity and in unpopularity; they were with him in danger, when Herod tried to kill him and he went out of Herod's territory. But friendship depends not only on great moments; it means companionship in the trivial, too, it means idle hours together, partnership in commonplace things—meals and garden—chairs as well as books and crises. Ordinary life, ordinary talk, gossip, chat, every kind of conversation about Herods and Roman governors, and the Zealots—custom-house memories, tales of the fishermen's life on the lake, stories of neighbours and home—rumours about the Galileans who were murdered by Pilate (Luke 13:1-4)—all the babbling talk of the bazaar is round Jesus and his group, and some of it breaks in on them; and his attitude to it all is to these men a constant revelation of character. They are with him in the play of feelings, with him in the fluxes and refluxes of his thought—learning his ways of mind without realizing it. They slip into his mind and mood, by a series of surprises, when they are imagining no such thing. Anything, everything serves to reveal him. They tramp all day, and ask some village people to shelter them for the night. The villagers tell them to go away. The men are hungry and fatigued. "What a splendid thing it would be, if we could do like Elijah and burn them up with a word!" So the hot thought rose. He turned and said, "You know not what manner of spirit you are of."—What a gentle rebuke! "The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:51-56). Then follows one of the wonderful sentences of the Gospel, "they went unto another village"—very obvious, but very significant. A missionary from China told me how, thirty years ago or more, he was driven out of the town where he lived; how the gentlefolk egged on the mob, and they wrecked his house, and hounded him out of the place. He told me how it felt—the misery and the indignity of it. Jesus took it undisturbed. He taught a lesson in it which the Church has never forgotten.
Their life was full of experiences shared with him. He has his reserve—his secret; yet, in another sense, he gives himself to them without reserve; there is prodigality of self-impartation in his dealings with them. He lets them have everything they can take. He becomes theirs in a great intimacy, he gives himself to them. Why? Because he believes, as he put it, in seed. Socrates saw that the teacher's real work, his only work, is to implant the idea, like a seed; an idea, like a seed, will look after itself. A king builds a temple or a palace. The seed of a banyan drifts into a crack, and grows without asking anyone's leave; there is life in it. In the end the building comes down, but for what the banyan holds up. The leaven in the meal is the most powerful thing there. There is very little of it, but that does not matter; it is alive (Matt. 13:33). Life is a very little thing but it is the only thing that counts. That is why the farmer can sow his fields and sleep at nights without thinking of them; and the crop grows in spite of his sleeping, and he knows it (Mark 4:26). That is why Jesus believes so thoroughly in his men, and in his message; God has made the one for the other, and there is no fear of mischance.
Look at his method of teaching. People "marvelled at his words of charm" (Luke 4:22)—"hung about him to hear him" (Luke 19:48). He said that the word is the overflow of the heart. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" (Matt. 12:34; Luke 6:45). What a heart, then, his words reveal! How easy and straightforward his language is! To-day we all use abstract nouns to convey our meaning; we cannot do without words ending in -ality and -anon. But there is no recorded saying of Jesus where he uses even "personality." He does not use abstract nouns. He sticks to plain words. When he speaks about God he does not say "the Great First Cause," or "Providence," or any other vague abstract. Still less does he use an adverb from the abstract, like "providentially." He says, "your heavenly Father." He does not talk of "humanity"; he says, "your brethren." He has no jargon, no technical terms, no scholastic vocabulary. He urges men not to over-study language; their speech must be simple, the natural, spontaneous overflow of the heart.[20] Jesus told his disciples not to think out beforehand what they would say when on trial (Mark 13:11)—it would be "given" to them. He was perfectly right; and when Christians obeyed him, they always spoke much better than when they thought out speeches beforehand. They said much less for one thing, and they said it much better. Take the case of the martyr—an early and historical one—whose two speeches were during her trial "Christiana sum" and, on her condemnation, "Deo gratias".
With this, remark his own gift of arresting phrase; the freshness of his language, how free it is from quotation, how natural and how extraordinarily simple. Everything worthwhile can be put in simple language; and, if the speech is complicated, it is a call to think again. "As a woman, over-curiously trimmed, is to be mistrusted, so is a speech," said John Robinson of Leyden, the minister of the Pilgrim Fathers. The language of Jesus is simple and direct, the inevitable expression of a rich nature and a habit of truth. You feel he does not strain after effect—epigram, antithesis, or alliteration. Of course he uses such things—like all real speakers—but he does not go out of his way for them. No, and so much the more significant are such characteristic antitheses as: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Luke 16:13), and "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it" (Matt. 16:25), coming with a spontaneous flash, and answering in their sharpness to the sharp edges of fact. His words caught the attention, and lived in the memory; they revealed such a nature; they were so living and unforgettable.
Remark once again his preference for the actual and the ordinary. There are religions in which holiness involves unusual conditions and special diet. Some forms of mysticism seem to be incompatible with married life. But the type of holiness which Jesus teaches can be achieved with an ordinary diet, and a wife and five children. He had lived himself in a family of eight or nine. It is perhaps harder, but it is a richer sanctity, if the real mark of a Saint is, as we have been told, that he makes it easier for others to believe in God. In any case the ordinary is always good enough with Jesus. Only he would have men go deeper, always deeper. Why can you not think for yourselves? he asks. Signs were what men demanded. He pictures Dives' mind running on signs even in hell (Luke 16:27). "What could you do with signs? Look at what you have already. You read the weather for to-morrow by looking at the sky to-day. The south wind means heat; the red sky fair weather. Study, look, think" (Luke 12:55). His animals, as we saw, are all real animals; it is real observation; real analogy. When he speaks of the lost sheep, it is not a fictitious joy that he describes or an imaginary one; it is real. The more we examine his sayings with any touch of his spirit, the more we wonder. Of course it is possible to handle them in the wrong way, to miss the real thought and make folly of everything. Thus, when he says he is the door, the interpreter may stray into silly detail and make faith the key, and—I don't know what the panels and hinges could be. That is not the style of Jesus. The soul of the thing, the great central meaning, the real analogy is his concern. Seriousness in observation, seriousness in reflection, is what he teaches. Men and women break down for want of thinking things out. Many things become possible to those who think seriously, as he did—and, so to speak, without watertight compartments.
Jesus is always urging seriousness in reflection. Seriousness in action, too, is one of his lessons—an emphasis on doing, but ondoingwith a clear sense of what one is about, and why. A part of action is clear thought; always exactness, accuracy; you must think the thing out, he says, and then act or let it alone. The artistic temperament, we all know, is very much in evidence to-day. In "The Comments of Bagshot" we are told that the drawback is that there is so much temperament and so little art. Why? Because the artistic temperament means so little by itself. It is one of the secrets of Jesus, that it is action that illuminates. What is it that makes the poem? The poet sees beggar children running races, or little Edward and the weather-cock, or something greater if you like—the light on a woman's hair, or a flower; and you say, he has his poem. He has not. He must work at the thing. When we study the great poets, we realize how these things are worked out to the point of nerve-strain and exhaustion. The poet devotes himself heart and soul to the work; he alters this and that, once and again; he sees a fresh aspect of the thing, and he alters all again; he writes and rewrites, getting deeper and deeper into the essential values of the thing all the time. Where in all this is the artistic temperament? It gave him the impulse, but something else achieves the work of art. I have a feeling that the great works of art are achieved by the shopkeeper virtues in addition to the artistic temperament that sees and feels them at the beginning. It is action that gives the value of a thought. Jesus sees that. He says that frankly to his disciples. If you want to understand in the long run, it is carrying the cross that will teach you the real values.
I have been treating him almost as if he were an authority on pedagogy. Fortunately, he never discussed pedagogy, never used the terms I have been using. But he dealt with men, he taught and he influenced them, and it is worth our study to understand how he did it—to master his methods. "One loving spirit sets another on fire." As for the effects of his words at once, as Seeley put it, they were "seething effervescence . . . broodings, resolutions, travail of heart." Men were brought face to face with a new issue; it was a time of choice; things would not be as they were men must be "with him or against him"—must accept or reject the new teaching, the new teacher, the new life. As he said, "I came to send fire on the earth" (Luke 12:49), to divide families, to divide the individual soul against itself, till the great choice was made; and so it has always been, where men have really seen him. We have to notice further the transformation of the disciples, who definitely accepted him. "Very wonderful to me," wrote Phillips Brooks, "to see how the disciples caught his method." The promise was made to them that they should become fishers of men (Mark 1:17), and it was fulfilled. Jesus made them strong enough to defy the world and to capture the world. There is something attractive about them; they have his secret, something of his charm; they are magnetic with his power. A new impulse to win men marks them, a new power to do it, a new faith which grows in significance as you study it—the faith of William Carey, a hundred years ago, was the same thing—a perfectly incredible faith, that they actually will win men for God and Christ. And they did—and along his lines and by his methods of love—even for Gentiles. "Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel," says St. Paul (1 Cor. 9:16), who to preach the Gospel shipwrecked his life and suffered the loss of all things (Phil. 3:8). But these men are sure that it is worthwhile. They have a new passion for men and women—an interest not merely in the saving of their souls but in every real human need. The early Church made a point of teaching men trades when they had none. They learnt all this from him. The greatest miracle in history seems to me the transformation that Jesus effected in those men. Everything else in Christian or secular history, compared to it, seems easy and explicable; and it was achieved by the love of Jesus.
The Church spread over the world without social machinery. The Gospel was preached instinctively, naturally. The earliest Christians were persecuted in Jerusalem, and were driven out. I picture one of them in flight; on his journey he falls in with a stranger. Before he knows what he is doing, he is telling his fellow traveller about Jesus. It follows from his explanation of why he is on the road; he warms up as he speaks. He never really thought about the danger of doing so. And the stranger wants to know more; he is captured by the message, and he too becomes a Christian. And then this involuntary preacher of the Gospel is embarrassed to learn that the man is a Gentile; he had not thought of that. I think that is how it began—so naturally and spontaneously. These people are so full of love of Jesus that they are bound to speak (Acts 8:4). "One loving heart sets another on fire."