The same thought is to be traced in the teaching of Jesus. It is implied in what he says about prayer. There is a want of faith, a half-heartedness about men's prayers; they pray as Augustine says he himself did: "Give me chastity and continence, but not now" (Conf, viii. 7, 17). That is not what Jesus means by prayer—the utterance of the half-Will. Nor is it this sort of surrender to God that Jesus calls for—no, the question is, how thoroughly is a man going to put himself into God's hands? Does he mean to be God's up to the cross and beyond? Does he enlist absolutely on God's terms without a bargain with God, prepared to accept God's will, whatever it is, whether it squares with his liking or not? (cf. Luke 17:7-10). Are his own desires finally out of the reckoning? Does he, in fact, deny—negate—himself (Mark 8:34)? Jesus calls for disciples, with questions so penetrating on his lips. What a demand to make of men! What faith, too, in men it shows, that he can ask all this with no hint of diminished seriousness!
Jesus is the great believer in men, as we saw in the choice of his twelve. To that group of disciples he trusts the supremest task men ever had assigned to them. Not many wise, not many mighty, Paul found at Corinth (1 Cor. 1:26); and it has always been so. Is it not still the gist of the Gospel that Jesus believes in the writer and the reader of these lines—trusts them with the propagation of God's Kingdom, incredible commission? Jesus was always at leisure for individuals; this was the natural outcome of his faith in men. What else is the meaning of his readiness to spend himself in giving the utmost spiritual truth—no easy task, as experience shows us—even to a solitary listener? If we accept what he tells us of God, we can believe that the individual is worth all that Jesus did and does for him, but hardly otherwise. His gift of discovering interest in uninteresting people, says Phillips Brooks, was an intellectual habit that he gave to his disciples. We think too much "like men"; he would have us "think like God," and think better of odd units and items of humanity than statesmen and statisticians are apt to do. It has been pointed out lately how fierce he is about the man who puts a stumbling-block in the way of even "a little one"—"better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea"; no mere phrase—for when he draws a picture, he sees it; he sees this scene, and "better so—for him too!" is his comment (Mark 9:42). There was, we may remember, a view current in antiquity that when a man was drowned, his soul perished with his body, though I do not know if the Jews held this opinion. It is not likely that Jesus did. What is God's mind, God's conduct, toward those people whom men think they can afford to despise? "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). And to whom did he say this? To the most ordinary people—to Peter and James and John; for all sorts of people he held up this impossible ideal of a perfection like God's. What a faith in man it implies! "All things are possible to him that believes" (Mark 9:9.3). Why should notyoubelieve? he says.
His faith in the soul's possibilities is boundless, and in marked contrast with what men think of themselves. A man, for instance, will say that he has done his best; but nine times out of ten it means mere fatigue; he is not going to trouble to do any more. Howcana man know that he has done his best? The Gospel of Jesus comes with its message of the grace of God, and the power of God, to people who are stupid and middle-aged, who are absolutely settled in life, who are conscious of their limitations, who know they are living in a rut and propose to stick to it for the remainder of their days; and Jesus tells them in effect that he means to give them a new life altogether, that he means to have from them service, perfectly incredible to them. No man, he suggests, need be so inured to the stupidity of middle age but there may be a miraculous change in him. A great many people need re-conversion at forty, however Christian they have been before. This belief of his in the individual man and in the worth of the individual is the very charter of democracy. The original writings of William Tyndale, who first translated the New Testament from Greek into English, contain the essential ideas of democracy already in 1526—the outcome of familiar study of the Gospel. Jesus himself said of Herod: "Go and tell that fox" (Luke 13:32). Herod was a king, but he was not above criticism; and Christians have not failed at times to make the criticism of the great that truth requires.
Jesus had no illusions about men; he sees the weak spots; he recognizes the "whited sepulchre" (Matt. 23:27). He is astonished at the unbelief of men and women (Mark 6:6). He does not understand why they cannot think (Mark 8:21), but he notes how they see and yet do not see, hear and do not understand (Matt. 13:13). He is impressed by their falsity, even in religion (Matt. 15:8). He knows perfectly well the evil of which the human heart is capable (Matt. 15:19). A man who steadily looks forward to being crucified by the people he is trying to help is hardly one of the absent-minded enthusiasts, mis-called idealists. There never was, we feel, one who so thoroughly looked through his friends, who loved them so much and yet without a shade of illusion. This brings us to the subject of the next chapter.
In the meantime let us recall what he makes of the wasted life. "In thinking of the case," said Seeley. "they had forgotten the woman"—a common occurrence with those who deal in "cases." It was once severely said of the Head of a College that "if he would leave off caring for his students' souls and care for them, he would do better." Jesus does not forget the man in caring for his soul—he likes him. He is "the friend of publicans and sinners" (Luke 7:34); he eats and drinks with them (Mark 2:14). Let us remember again that these were taunts and were meant to sting; they were not conventional phrases. See how he can enter into the life of a poor creature. There is the wretched little publican, Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10)—a squalid little figure of a man, whom people despised. He was used to contempt—it was the portion of the tax-collector enlisted in Roman service against his own people. Jesus comes and sees him up in the tree; he instantly realizes what is happening and invites himself to the house of Zacchaeus as a guest; something passes between them without spoken word. The little man slides down the tree—not a proceeding that makes for dignity; and then, with all his inches, he stands up before the whole town, that knew him so well, in a new moral grandeur that adds cubits to his stature. "Half my goods," he says, "I give to the poor. If I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, he shall have it back fourfold." That man belonged to the despised classes. Jesus came into his life; the man became a new man, a pioneer of Christian generosity. Again, there is the woman with the alabaster box, the mere possession of which stamped her for what she was. It was simply a case of the wasted life. I have long wondered if she meant to give him only some of the ointment. A little of it would have been a great gift. But perhaps the lid of the box jammed, and she realized in a moment that it was to be all or nothing—she drew off her sandal and smashed the box to pieces. However she broke it, and whatever her reasons, Mark's words mean that it was thoroughly and finally shivered (Mark 14:3). Something had happened which made this woman the pioneer of the Christian habit of giving all for Jesus. The disciples said they had done so (Matt. 19:27), but they were looking for thrones in exchange (Mark 10:37); she was not. The thief on the cross himself becomes a pioneer for mankind in the Christian way of prayer. "Jesus, remember me!" he says (Luke 23:42). How is it that Jesus comes into the wasted life and makes it new? "One loving heart sets another on fire."
With all his wide outlook on mankind, his great purpose to capture all men, Jesus is remarkable for his omission to devise machinery or organization for the accomplishment of his ends. The tares are left to grow with the wheat (Matt. 13:30)—as if Jesus trusted the wheat a good deal more than we do. Alive as he is to the evil in human nature, he never tries to scare men from it, and he seems to have been very little afraid of it. He believed in the power of good—because, after all, God is "Lord of the Harvest" (Matt. 9:38). He invents no special methods—a loving heart will hit the method needed in the particular case; the Holy Spirit will teach this as well as other things (Matt. 10:19, 20). How far he even organized his church, or left it to organize itself if it so wished, students may discuss. Would he have trusted even the best organized church as such? Does not what we mean by the Incarnation imply putting everything in the long run on the individual, quickened into new life by a new relation with God and taught a new love of men by Jesus himself? The heart of friendship and the heart of the Incarnation are in essence the same thing—giving oneself in frankness and love to him who will accept, and by them winning him who refuses. Has not this been the secret of the spread of the Gospel? The simplicity of the whole thing, and the power of it, grow upon us as we study them. But after all, as Tertullian said, simplicity and power are the constant marks of God's work—simplicity in method, power in effect ("de Baptismo", 2).
"For clear-thinking ethical natures," writes a modern scholar, "for natures such as those of Jesus and St. Paul, it is a downright necessity to separate heaven and hell as distinctly as possible. It is only ethically worthless speculations that have always tried to minimize this distinction. Carlyle is an instance in our times of how men even to-day once more enthusiastically welcome the conception of hell as soon as the distinction between good and bad becomes all-important to them."[26]
Here in strong terms a challenge is put to many of our current ideas. Is not this to revert to an outworn view of the Christian religion—to reassert its dark side, better forgotten, all the horrible emphasis on sin and its consequences introduced into the sunny teaching of Jesus by Paul of Tarsus, and alien to it? Before we answer this question in any direct way, it is worth while to realize for how many of the real thinkers, and the great teachers of mankind, this distinction between good and evil has been fundamental. They have not invented it as a theory on which to base religion, but they have found it in human life, one and all of them. If Walt Whitman or Swami Vivekananda overlook the difference between virtue and vice, and do honour to the courtesan, it simply means that they are bad thinkers, bad observers. The deeper minds see more clearly and escape the confusion into which the slight and quick, the sentimental, hurl themselves. Above all, when God in any degree grows real to a man, when a man seriously gives himself not to some mere vague "contemplation" of God but to the earnest study of God's ways in human affairs, and of God's laws and their working, the great contrasts in men's responses to God's rule become luminous.
When God matters to a man, all life shows the result. Good and bad, right and wrong stand out clear as the contrast between light and darkness—they cannot be mistaken, and they matter—and matter for ever. They are no concern of a moment. Action makes character; and, until the action is undone again, the effect on character is not undone. Right and wrong are of eternal significance now in virtue of the reality of God.
Gautama Buddha, for instance, and the greater Hindu thinkers, in their doctrine of Karma, have taught a significance inherent in good and evil, which we can only not call boundless. Buddha did this without any great consciousness of God; and many Indian thinkers have so emphasized the doctrine that it has taken all the stress laid on "Bhakti" by Ramanuja and others to restore to life a perspective or a balance, however it should be described, that will save men from utter despair. Nor is it Eastern thinkers only who have taught men the reality of heaven and hell. The poetry of Aeschylus is full of his great realization of the nexus between act and outcome. With all the humour and charm there is in Plato, we cannot escape his tremendous teaching on the age-long consequences of good and evil in a cosmos ordered by God. Carlyle, in our own days, realized the same thing—he learnt it no doubt from his mother; and learnt it again in London. In Mrs. Austen's drawing-room, with "Sidney Smith guffawing," and "other people prating, jargoning, to me through these thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sate glaring." "How will this look in the Universe," he asks, "and before the Creator of Man?" When someone in his old age challenged him with the question, "Who will be judge?"—(it is curious how every sapient inanity strikes, as on an original idea, on the notion that opinions differ, and therefore—apparently, if their thought has any consequence—are as good one as another)—Who will be judge? "Hell fire will be judge," said Carlyle, "God Almighty will be the judge now and always." There is a gulf between good and evil, and each is inexorably fertile of consequence. There is no escaping the issue of moral choice. That is the conclusion of men who have handled human experience in a serious spirit. As physical laws are deducible from the reactions of matter and force, and are found to be uniform and inevitable, fundamental in the nature of matter and force, so clear-thinking men in the course of ages have deduced moral laws from their observation of human nature, laws as uniform, inevitable and fundamental. In neither case has it been that men invented or imagined the laws; in both cases it has been genuine discovery of what was already existent and operative, and often the discovery has involved surprise.
If Jesus had failed to see laws so fundamental, which other teachers of mankind have recognized, it is hardly likely that his teaching would have survived or influenced men as it has done. Mankind can dispense with a teacher who misses patent facts, whatever his charm. But there never was any doubt that Jesus was alive to the difference between right and wrong. His critics saw this, but they held that he confused moral issues, and that his distinctions in the ethical sphere were badly drawn.
Jesus could not have ignored the problem of sin and forgiveness, even if he had wished to ignore it. To this the thought of mankind had been gravitating, and in Jewish and in Greek thought, conduct was more and more the centre of everything. For the Stoics morals were the dominant part of philosophy; but for our present purpose we need not go outside the literature of the New Testament. Sin was the keynote of the preaching of John the Baptist. It is customary to connect the mission of Jesus with that of John, and to find in the Baptist's preaching either the announcement of his Successor (as is said with most emphasis in the Fourth Gospel), or (as some now say) the impulse which drove Jesus of Nazareth into his public ministry. Whatever may be the historical connexion between them, it is as important for us at least to realize the broad gulf that separates them. They meet, it is true; both use the phrase "Kingdom of God," both preach repentance in view of the coming of the Kingdom; and we are apt to assume they mean the same thing; but Jesus took some pains to make it clear, though in the gentlest and most sympathetic way, that they did not.
On the famous occasion, when John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to Jesus with his striking message: "Art thou he that should come? or look we for another?" (Luke 7:19-35; Matt. 11:1-19), Jesus, when the messengers were gone, spoke to the people about the Baptist. "What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind? A man clothed in soft raiment? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet. Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist, but he that is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he." I am not sure which is the right translation, whether it is "he that is less, least, or little," and I do not propose to discuss it. The judgement is remarkable enough in any case, and the words of Jesus, as we have seen, have a close relation to real fact as he saw it. Why does he speak in this way? Our answer to this question, if we can answer it, will help us forward to the larger problem before us. But, for this, we shall have to study John with some care.
There is a growing agreement among scholars that there is some confusion in our data as to John the Baptist. There are gaps in the record—for instance, how and why did the school of John survive as it did (Acts 18:25, 19:1-7)? And again there are, in the judgement of some, developments of the story. The Gospel, with varying degrees of explicitness, and St. Paul by inference (Acts 19:4) tell us that John pointed to "him which should come after him." Christians, at any rate, after the Resurrection, had no doubt that this was Jesus. Whether John was as definite as the narratives now represent him to have been, has been doubted in view of his message to Jesus. But that is not our present subject. We are concerned less with John as precursor than as teacher and thinker.
Even if our data are defective, still enough is given us to let us see a very striking and commanding figure. We have a picture of him, his dress, his diet, his style of speech, his method of action—in every way he is a signal and arresting man. The son of a priest, he is an ascetic, who lives in the wilderness, dresses like a peasant, and eats the meanest and most meagre of food—a man of the desert and of solitude. And the whole life reacts on him and we can see him, lean and worn, though still a young man, a keen, rather excitable spirit—in every feature the marks of revolt against a civilization which he views as an apostasy. Luke, using a phrase from the Old Testament, says, "The word of God came upon John in the wilderness" (Luke 3:2). Luke leans to Old Testament phrase, and here is one that hits off the man to the very life. Jesus himself confirms Luke's judgement (Mark 11:29-33). The Word of the Lord has come on this ascetic figure, and he goes to the people with the message; he draws their attention and they crowd out to see him. He makes a great sensation. He is not like other men—for Jesus quotes their remark that "he had a devil" (Luke 7:33)—a rough and ready way of explaining unlikeness to the average man. When he sees his congregation his words are not conciliatory; he addresses them as a "generation of vipers" (Luke 3:7); and his text is the "wrath to come."
Jesus asks whether they went out to see a reed shaken by the wind, or someone dressed like a courtier—the last things to which anyone would compare John. There was nothing supple about him, as Herod found, and Herodias (Mark 6:17-20); he was not shaken by the wind; there was no trimming of his sails. The austerity of his life and the austerity of his spirit go together, and he preached in a tone and a language that scorched. He preached righteousness, social righteousness, and he did it in a great way. He brought back the minds of his people, like Amos and others, to God's conceptions and away from their own. Crowds of people went out to hear him (Mark 1:5). And he made a deep impression on many whose lives needed amendment (Matt. 21:26, 32; Luke 20:6).[27] We have the substance of what he said in the third chapter of St. Luke; how he told the tax-collectors to be honest and not make things worse than they need be; the soldiers to do violence to no man and accuse no man falsely, and to be content with their wages; and to ordinary people he preached humanity: "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise." It may be remarked of John, and it is true also of Jesus, that neither attacked the absent nor inveighed against economic conditions, as some modern preachers do with, let us say, capitalists and the morality of other nations. Neither says a word against the Roman Empire. Slavery is not condemned explicitly even by Jesus, though he gave the dynamic that abolished it. The practical guidance that John gave, he gave in response to men's inquiries.
Like an Old Testament prophet (cf. Amos 3:2), John tore to tatters any plea that could be offered that his listeners were God's chosen people, the children of Abraham. Does God want children of Abraham?—John pointed to the stones on the ground, and said, if God wanted, he could make children of Abraham out of them; a word and he could have as many children of Abraham as he wished. It was something else that God sought.
"John," writes the historian Josephus a generation later, "was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue both in justice toward one another and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for so baptism would be acceptable to God if they made use of it, not to excuse certain sins, but for the purification of the body, provided that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness."[28] This interpretation of John's baptism makes it look very like the baptisms and other purificatory rites of the heathen. The Gospels attribute to John a message, richer and more powerful, but essentially the same; and the criticism of Jesus confirms the account. The great note in his preaching is judgement; the Kingdom of God is coming, and it begins with judgement. Again, it is like Amos—"The axe is at the root of the tree," "His fan is in His hand." And as men listened to the man and looked at him—his intense belief in his message, backed up by a stern self-discipline, a whole life inspired, infused by conviction—they believed this message of the axe, the fan, and the fire. They asked and as we have seen received his guidance on the conduct of life; they accepted his baptism, and set about the amending of character (Matt. 21:32).
Jesus makes it quite clear that he held John to be an entirely exceptional man, and that he had no doubt that John's teaching was from God (Matt. 21:32; Luke 7:35, 20:4; and, of course, Luke 7:26-28). It was all in the line of the great prophets; and the Fourth Gospel shows it us once more in the work of the Holy Spirit—"when he is come, he will reprove (convict) the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement" (John 16:8). And yet, as Jesus says, there is all the difference in the world between his own Gospel and the teaching of the Baptist.
In Mark's narrative (2:18) a very significant episode is recorded. John inculcated fasting, and his disciples fasted a great deal ("pykna", Luke 5:33); and once, Mark tells us, when they were actually fasting, they asked Jesus why his disciples did not do the same? Jesus' answer is a little cryptic at first sight. "Can the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them?" Who fasts at the wedding feast, in the hour of gladness? And then he passes on to speak about the new patch on the old garment, the new wine in the old wine skins; and it looks as if it were not merely a criticism of John's disciples but of John himself. John, indeed, brings home with terrific force and conviction that truth of God which the prophets had preached before; but he leaves it there. He emphasizes once more the old laws of God, the judgements of God, but he brings no transforming power into men's lives. The old characters, the old motives more or less, are to be patched by a new fear.
"Repent, repent," John cries, "the judgement is coming." And men do repent, and John baptises them as a symbol that God has forgiven them. But how are they to go on? What is the power that is to carry John's disciples through the rest of their lives? We are not in possession of everything that John says, but there is no indication that John had very much to say about any force or power that should keep men on the plane of repentance. It is our experience that we repent and fall again; what else was the experience of the people whom John baptised? What was to keep them on the new level—not only in the isolation of the desert, but in the ordinary routine of town and village? In John's teaching there is not a word about that; and this is a weakness of double import. For, as Jesus puts it, the new patch on the old garment makes the rent worse; it does not leave it merely as it was. If the "unclean spirit" regain its footing in a man, it does not come alone—"the last state of that man is worse than the first" (Luke 11:24-26). Jesus is very familiar with the type that welcomes new ideas and new impulses in religion and yet does nothing, grows tired or afraid, and relapses (Mark 4:17).
Again, in John's teaching, as far as we have it, there is a striking absence of any clear word about any relation to God, beyond that of debtor and creditor, judge and prisoner on trial, king and subject. God may forgive and God will judge; but so far as our knowledge of John's teaching goes, these are the only two points at which man and God will touch each other; and these are not intimate relations. There is no promise and no gladness in them; no "good news." John taught prayer—all sorts of people teach prayer; but what sort of prayer? It has been remarked of the Greek poet, Apollonius Rhodius, that his heroes used prayers, but their prayers were like official documents. Of what character were the prayers that John taught his disciples? None of them survive; but there is perhaps a tacit criticism of them in the request made to the New Teacher: "Teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). One feels that the men wanted something different from John's prayers. Great and strenuous prayers they may have been, but in marked contrast to the prayers of Jesus and his followers, because of the absence in John's message of any strong note of the love and tenderness of God.
Finally, the very righteousness that John preaches with such fire and energy is open to criticism. Far more serious than the righteousness of the Pharisees, stronger in insight and more generous in its scope, it fails in the same way; it is self-directed. It aims at a man's own salvation, and it is to be achieved by a man's own strength in self-discipline, with what little help John's system of prayer and fasting may win for a man from God. John fails precisely where his strength is greatest and most conspicuous. His theme is sin; his emphasis all falls on sin; but his psychology of sin is insufficient, it is not deep enough. The simple, strenuous ascetic did not realize the seriousness of sin after all—its deep roots, its haunting power, its insidious charm. St. Paul saw far deeper into it "I am carnal, sold under sin. What I hate that do I. The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. I see a law in my members bringing me into captivity to the law of sin. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7:14-24). Sin, in John's thought, is contumacy or rebellion against the law of God; he does not look at it in relation to the love of God—a view of it which gives it another character altogether. Nor has John any great conception of forgiveness—a man, he thinks, may win it by "fruits worthy of repentance" (Luke 3:8). Here again Paul is the pioneer in the universal Christian experience that fruits of repentance can never buy God's forgiveness. That is God's gift. That forgiveness may cost a man much—an amended life, the practices of prayer and fasting and almsgiving—John conceives; but we are not led to think that he thought of what it might cost God. John has no evangel, no really good news, with gladness and singing in it (1 Peter 1:8).
When we return to the teaching of Jesus, we find that he draws a clear and sharp line between right and wrong. He indicates that right is right to the end of all creation, and wrong is wrong up to the very Judgement Throne of God (Matt. 25). He views these things, as the old phrase puts it, "sub specie aeternitatis", from the outlook of eternity. Right and wrong do not meet at infinity. There is no higher synthesis that can make them one and the same thing. Everything with Jesus is Theocentric, and until God changes there will be no very great change in right and wrong. Partly because he uses the language of his day, partly because he thinks as a rule in pictures, his language is apt to be misconstrued by moderns. But the central ideas are clear enough. "How are you to escape the judgement of Gehenna?" he asks the Pharisees (Matt. 23:33; the subjunctive mood is worth study). It is not a threat, but a question. There yawns the chasm; with your driving, how do you think you can avoid disaster? He warns men of a doom where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched; a man will do well to sacrifice hand, foot or eye, to save the rest of himself from that (Mark 9:43-48). But a more striking picture, though commonly less noticed, he draws or suggests in talk at the last supper. "Simon, Simon, behold Satan asked for you to sift you as wheat, but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and thou, when thou comest back, strengthen thy brethren" (Luke 22:31, 32). The scene suggested is not unlike that at the beginning of the Book of Job, or that in the Book of Zechariah (chap. 3). There is the throne of God, and into that Presence pushes Satan with a demand—the verb in the Greek is a strong one, though not so strong as the Revised Version suggests. Satan "made a push to have you." "But I prayed for thee."
To any reader who has any feeling or imagination, what do these short sentences mean? What can they mean, from the lips of a thinker so clear and so serious, and a friend so tender? What but unspeakable peril? The language has for us a certain strangeness; but it shows plainly enough that, to Jesus' mind, the disciples, and Peter in particular, stood in danger, a danger so urgent that it called for the Saviour's prayer. So much it meant to him, and he himself tells Peter what he had realized, what he had done, in language that could not be mistaken or forgotten. To the nature of the danger that sin involves, we shall return. Meanwhile we may consider what Jesus means by sin before we discuss its consequences.
"The Son of Man," says Jesus, in a sentence that is famous but still insufficiently studied, "is come to seek and to save that which is lost" (Luke 19:10). Our rule has been to endeavour to give to the terms of Jesus the connotation he meant them to carry. The scholar will linger over the "Son of Man"—a difficult phrase, with a literary and linguistic history that is very complicated. For the present purpose the significant words are at the other end of the sentence. What does Jesus mean by "lost"? It is a strong word, the value of which we have in some degree lost through familiarity. And whom would he describe as "lost"? We have once more to recall his criticism of Peter—that Peter "thought like a man and not like God" (Mark 8:33)—and to be on our guard lest we think too quickly and too slightly. We may remark, too, that for Jesus sin is not, as for Paul and theologians in general, primarily an intellectual problem. He does not use the abstraction Sin as Paul does. But the clear, steady gaze turned on men and women misses little.
There are four outstanding classes, whom he warns of the danger of hell in one form or other.
To begin, there is the famous description of the Last Judgement (Matt. 25:31-46)—a description in itself not altogether new. Plenty of writers and thinkers had described the scene, and the broad outlines of the picture were naturally common property; yet it is to these more or less conventional traits that attention has often been too exclusively devoted. Jesus, however, altered the whole character of the Judgement Day scene by his account of the principles on which the Judge decides the cases brought before him. On the right hand of the Judge are—not the Jews confronting the Gentiles on the left—nor exactly the well-conducted and well-balanced people who get there in Greek allegories—but a group of men and women who realize where they are with a gasp of surprise. How has it come about? The Judge tells them: "I was an hungered and ye gave me meat," and the rest of the familiar words. But this does not quite settle the question. Embarrassment rises on their faces—is it a mistake? One of them speaks for the rest: "Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee?" They do not remember it. There is something characteristic there of the whole school of Jesus; these people are "children of fact," honest as their Master, and they will not accept heaven in virtue of a possible mistake. And it appears from the Judge's answer that such instinctive deeds go further than men think, even if they are forgotten. Wordsworth speaks of the "little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love" that are "the best portion of a good man's life."[29] The acts of kindness were forgotten just because they were instinctive, but, Jesus emphasizes the point, they are decisive; they come, as another of his telling phrases suggests, from "the overflow of the heart," and they reveal it. With the people on the left hand it was the other way. They were fairly well in possession of their good records, but they had missed the decisive fact—they were instinctively hard. Such people Jesus warns. So familiar are his words that there is a danger of our limiting them to their first obvious meaning. Eighty years ago Thomas Carlyle looked out on the England he knew, and remarked that it was strange that the great battle of civilized man should be still the battle of the savage against famine, and with that he observed that the people were "needier than ever of inward sustenance." Is there a warning in this picture of the people on the left hand that applies to deeper things than physical hunger? A warning to those who do not heed another's need of "inward sustenance," of spiritual life, of God? It looks likely. Otherwise there is a risk of our declining upon a "Social Righteousness" that falls a long way short of John the Baptist's, and does less for any soul, our own or another's.
The second class warned by Jesus consists of several groups dealt with in the Sermon on the Mount—people whose sin is not murder or adultery, but merely anger and the unclean thought—not the people who actually give themselves away, like the publicans and harlots—but those who would not be sorry to have that ring of Gyges which Plato described, who would like to do certain things if they could, who at all events are not unwilling to picture what they would wish to do, if it were available, and meanwhile enjoy the thought (Matt. 5:21, 22, 27-29). Here St. Paul can supply commentary with his suggestion that one form of God's condemnation is where he gives up a man to his own reprobate mind (Romans 1:28—the whole passage is worth study in the Greek). The mind, in Paul's phrases, becomes darkened (Rom. 1:21), stained (Titus 1:15), and cauterized (1 Tim. 4:2), invalidated for the discharge of its proper functions, as a burnt hand loses the sense of touch, or a stained glass gives the man a blue or red world instead of the real one. Blindness and mutilation are better, Jesus said, than the eye of lust (Matt. 5:28). How different from the moralists, for whom sin lies in action, and all actions are physical! The idle word is to condemn a man, not because it is idle, but because, being unstudied, it speaks of his heart and reveals, unconsciously but plainly, what he is in reality (Matt. 12:36). Thus it is that what comes out of the mouth defiles a man (Matt. 15:18)—with the curious suggestion, whether intended or not, that the formulation of a floating thought gives it new power to injure or to help. That is true; impression loose, as it were, in the mind, mere thought—stuff, is one thing; formulated, brought to phrase and form, it takes on new life and force; and when it is evil, it does defile, and in a permanent way. Marcus Aurelius has a very similar warning (v. 16)—"Whatever the colour of the thoughts often before thy mind, that colour will thy mind take. For the mind is dyed (or stained) by its thoughts." "Phantazesthai" and "phantasiai" are the words—and they suggest something between thoughts and imaginations—mental pictures would be very near it.
The third group whom Jesus warned, the most notorious of all, was the Pharisee class. They played at religion—tithed mint and anise and cumin, and forgot judgement and mercy and faith (Matt. 23:23). Jesus said that the Pharisee was never quite sure whether the creature he was looking at was a camel or a mosquito—he got them mixed (Matt. 23:24). Once we realize what this tremendous irony means, we are better able to grasp his thought. The Pharisee was living in a world that was not the real one—it was a highly artificial one, picturesque and charming no doubt, but dangerous. For, after all, we do live in the real world—there is only one world, however many we may invent; and to live in any other is danger. Blindness, that is partial and uneven, lands a man in peril whenever he tries to come downstairs or to cross the street—he steps on the doorstep that is not there and misses the real one. He is involved in false appearances at every turn. And so it is in the moral world—there is one real, however many unreals there are, and to trust to the unreal is to come to grief on the real. "The beginning of a man's doom," wrote Carlyle, "is that vision be withdrawn from him." "Thou blind Pharisee!" (Matt. 23:26). The cup is clean enough without; it is septic and poisonous within—and from which side of it do you drink, outside or inside? (Matt. 23:25). As we study the teaching of Jesus here, we see anew the profundity of the saying attributed to him in the Fourth Gospel, "The truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). The man with astigmatism, or myopia, or whatever else it is, must get the glasses that will show him the real world, and he is safe, and free to go and come as he pleases. See the real in the moral sphere, and the first great peril is gone. Nothing need be said at this point of the Pharisee who used righteousness and long prayers as a screen for villainy. Probably his doom was that in the end he came to think his righteousness and his prayers real, and to reckon them as credit with a God, who did not see through them any more than he did himself. It is a mistake to over-emphasize here the devouring of widow' houses by the Pharisee (Matt. 23:14), for it was no peculiar weakness of his; publicans and unjust judges did the same. Only the publican and the unjust judge told themselves no lies about it. The Pharisee lied—lying to oneself or lying to another, which is the worse? The more dangerous probably is lying to oneself, though the two practices generally will go together in the long run. The worst forms of lying, then, are lying to oneself and lying about God; and the Pharisee combined them, and told himself that, once God's proper dues of prayer and tithe were paid, his treatment of the widow and her house was correct. Hence, says Jesus, he receives "greater damnation" (A.V.)—or judgement on a higher scale ("perissoteron krima").
The Pharisees were men who believed in God—only that with his world, they re-created him (as we are all apt to do for want of vision or by choice); but what is atheism, what can it be, but indifference to God's facts and to God's nature? If religion is union with God, in the phrase we borrow so slightly from the mystics, how can a man be in union with God, when the god he sees is not there, is a figment of his own mind, something different altogether from God? Or, if we use the phrase of the Old Testament. prophet and of Jesus himself, if religion is vision of God, what is our religion, if after all we are not seeing God at all, but something else—a dummy god, like that of the Pharisees, some trifling martinet who can be humbugged—or, to come to ourselves, a majestic bundle of abstract nouns loosely tied up in impersonality? For all such Jesus has a caution. Indifference to God's facts leads to one end only. We admit it ourselves. There are those who scold Bunyan for sending Ignorance to hell, but we omit to ask where else could Ignorance go, whether Bunyan sent him or not. Ignorance, as to germs or precipices or what not, leads to destruction "in pari materia"; in the moral sphere can it be otherwise? This serves in some measure to explain why Jesus is so tender to gross and flagrant sinners, a fact which some have noted with surprise. Surely it is because publican and harlot have fewer illusions; they were left little chance of imagining their lives to be right before God. What Jesus thought of their hardness and impurity we have seen already, but heedless as they were of God's requirements of them, they were not guilty of the intricate atheism of the Pharisees. Further, whether it was in his mind or not, it is also true that the frankly gross temptations do bring a man face to face with his own need of God, as the subtler do not; and so far they make for reality.
The fourth group are those who cannot make up their minds. "No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62). The word is an interesting one ("euthetos"), it means "handy" or "easy to place." (The word is used of the salt not "fit" for land or dunghill (Luke 14:35), and the negative of the inconvenient harbour (Acts 27:12).) This man is not adapted for the Kingdom of God; he is not easy to place there. Like the man who saved his talent but did not use it (Matt. 25:24), he is not exactly bad; but he is "no good," as we say. Jesus conceives of the Kingdom of God as dynamic, not static; state or place, condition or relation, it implies work, as God himself implies work. He holds that truth is not a curiosity for the cabinet but a tool in the hand; that God's earnest world is no place for nondescript, and that there is only one region left to which they can drift. What part or place can there be in the Kingdom of Heaven—in a kingdom won on Calvary—for people who cannot be relied on, who cannot decide whether to plough or not to plough, nor, when they have made up their mind, stick to it? Jesus cannot see. (What a revelation of the force and power of his own character!)
These, then, are the four classes whom Jesus warns, and it is clear from the consideration of them that his view of sin is very different from those current in that day. Men set sin down as an external thing that drifted on to one like a floating burr—or like paint, perhaps—it could be picked off or burnt off. It was the eating of pork or hare—something technical or accidental; or it was, many thought, the work of a demon from without, who could be driven out to whence he came. Love and drunkenness illustrated the thing for them—a change of personality induced by an exterior force or object, as if the human spirit were a glass or a cup into which anything might be poured, and from which it could be emptied and the vessel itself remain unaffected. Jesus has a deeper view of sin, a stronger psychology, than these, nor does he, like some quick thinkers of to-day, put sin down to a man's environment, as if certain surroundings inevitably meant sin. Jesus is quite definite that sin is nothing accidental—it is involved in a man's own nature, in his choice, it comes from the heart, and it speaks of a heart that is wrong. When we survey the four groups, it comes to one central question at last: Has a man been in earnest with himself about God's dealings with him? Hardness and lust make a man play the fool with human souls whom God loves and cares for—a declaration of war on God himself. Wilful self-deception about God needs no comment; to shilly-shally and let decision slide, where God is concerned, is atheism too. In a word, what is a man's fundamental attitude to God and God's facts? That is Jesus' question. Sin is tracked home to the innermost and most essential part of the man—his will. It is no outward thing, it is inward. It is not that evil befalls us, but that we are evil. In the words of Edward Caird, "the passion that misleads us is a manifestation of the same ego, the same self-conscious reason which is misled by it," and thus, as Burns puts it, "it is the very 'light from heaven' that leads us astray." The man uses his highest God-given faculties, and uses them against God.
But this is not all. Many people will agree with the estimate of Jesus, when they understand it, in regard to most of these classes; perhaps they would urge that in the main it is substantially the same teaching as John the Baptist's, though it implies, as we shall see, a more difficult problem in getting rid of sin. Jesus goes further. He holds up to men standards of conduct which transcend anything yet put before mankind. "Be ye therefore perfect," he says, "even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). When we recall what Jesus teaches of God, when we begin to try to give to "God" the content he intended, we realize with amazement what he is saying. He is holding up to men for their ideal of conduct the standard of God's holiness, of God's love and tenderness. Everything that Jesus tells us of God—all that he has to say of the wonderful and incredible love of God and of God's activity on behalf of his children—he now incorporates in the ideal of conduct to which men are called. John's conceptions of righteousness grow beggarly. Here is a royal magnificence of active love, of energetic sympathy, tenderness, and self-giving, asked of us, who find it hard enough to keep the simplest commandments from our youth up (Mark 10:20). We are to love our enemies, to win them, to make peace, to be pure—and all on the scale of God. And that this may not seem mere talk in the air, there is the character and personality of Jesus, embodying all he asks of us—bringing out new wonders of God's goodness, the ugliness and evil of sin, and the positive and redemptive beauty of righteousness.
The problem of sin and forgiveness becomes more difficult, as we think of the positive ideals which we have not begun to try to reach. Let us sum up what it involves.
Jesus brings out the utter bankruptcy to which sin reduces men. They become "full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (Matt. 23:28), so depraved that they are like bad trees, unproductive of any but bad fruit (rotten, in the Greek, Matt. 7:17); the very light in them is darkness, and how great darkness (Matt. 6:23). They are cut off from the real world, as we saw, and lose the faculties they have abused—the talent is taken away (Matt. 25:28); "from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath" (Matt. 25:29). The nature is changed as memory is changed, and the "overflow of the heart" in speech and act bears witness to it. The faculty of choice is weakened; the interval in which inhibition—to use our modern term—is possible, grows shorter. The instincts are perverted and the whole being is disorganized. In a word, all that Jesus connotes by "the Kingdom of God" is "taken from them" (Matt. 21:43), and nothing left but "outer darkness" (Matt. 22:13). The vision of God is not for the impure (Matt. 5:8). Meanwhile sin is not a sterile thing, it is a leaven (Matt. 16:6). If our modern medical language may be applied—and Jesus used the analogy of medicine in this very case (Mark 2:17)—sin is septic. In the first place, all sin is anti-social—an invasion "ipso facto" of the rights of others. The man who sins either takes away what is another's—a man's goods, a widow's house, or a woman's purity—or he fails to give to others what is their due, be it, in the obvious field, the aid the Good Samaritan rendered to the wounded and robbed man by the roadside (Luke 10:33), or, in the higher sphere, truth, sympathy, help in the maintenance of principle, or in the achievement of progress and development (cf. Matt. 25:43). Sin is the repudiation of the concepts of law, duty, and service, in a word, of the love on God's scale which God calls men to exercise. And its fruits are, above all, its dissemination. Injustice, a historian has said, always repays itself with frightful compound interest. If a man starts to debauch society, his example is quickly followed; and it comes to hatred.
What, we asked, did Jesus mean by "lost"? This, above all, that sin cuts a man adrift from God. In the parable of the Prodigal Son this is brought out (Luke 15:11-32). There the youth took from his father all he could get, and then deliberately turned his back on him forever; he went into a far country, out of his reach, outside his influence, and beyond the range of his ideas, and he devoted his father's gifts to precisely what would sadden and trouble his father most. And then came bankruptcy, final and hopeless. There was no father available in the far country; he had to live without him, and it came to a life that was not even human—a life of solitude, a life of beasts. Jesus draws it, as he does most things, in picture form, using parable. Paul puts the same in directer language; sin reduces men to a position where they are "alienated from the life of God" (Eph. 4:18; Col. 1:21), "without God in the world" (Eph. 2:12), "enemies of God" (Rom. 5:10; Col. 1:21); but he does not say more than Jesus implies. Paul's final expression, "God gave them up" (thrice in Rom. 1:24, 26, 28), answers to the Judge's word, in Jesus' picture, "Depart from me" (Matt. 25:41).
O Wedding-guest, this soul hath beenAlone on a wide, wide sea:So lonely 'twas, that God himselfScarce seeméd there to be.
So Jesus handles the problem of sin, but that is only half the story, for there remains the problem of Redemption. The treatment of sin is far profounder and truer than John the Baptist or any other teacher has achieved; and it implies that Jesus will handle Redemption in a way no less profound and effective. If he does not, then he had better not have preached a gospel. If, in dealing with sin, he touches reality at every point, we may expect him in the matter of Redemption to reach the very centre of life.[30] How else can he, with his serious view of sin, say to a man, "Thy sins are forgiven thee"? (Mark 2:5). But it is quite clear from our records that, while Jesus laid bare in this relentless way the ugliness and hopelessness of sin, he did not despair: his tone is always one of hope and confidence. The strong man armed may find a stronger man come upon him and take from him the panoply in which he trusted (Luke 11:21, 22). There is a great gulf that cannot be crossed (Luke 16:26)—yes, but if the experience of Christendom tells us anything, it tells us that Jesus crossed it himself, and did the impossible. "The great matter is that Jesus believed God was willing to take the human soul, and make it new and young and clean again." But the human soul did not believe it, till Jesus convinced it, and won it, by action of his own. "The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost"; and he did not come in vain.
By what they said, I perceived that he had been a great warrior, and had fought with and slain him that had the power of death (Hebrews 2:14), but not without great danger to himself, which made me love him the more—"Pilgrims Progress", Part I
The subject before us is one of the greatest difficulty. Why Jesus chose the cross has exercised the thought of the Christian world ever since he did so. He told his disciples beforehand of what lay before him, of what he was choosing, but it was long before they realized that he meant any such thing. The cross was to them a strange idea, and for a long time they did not seriously face the matter. Once the cross was an accomplished fact, Christians could not, and did not wish to, avoid thinking out what had meant so much to their Master; but it has mostly been with a sense of facing a mystery that in some measure eluded them, with a feeling that there is more beyond, something always to be attained hereafter.
A very significant passage in St. Mark (10:32) gives us a glimpse of a moment on Jesus' last journey to Jerusalem. It is a sentence which one could hardly imagine being included in the Gospel, if it did not represent some actual memory, and a memory of significance. It runs something like this: "And they were in the way, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was moving on before them; and they began to wonder; and as they followed they began to be afraid." He is moving to Jerusalem with a purpose. They do not understand it. He is wrapped in thought; and, as happens when a man's mind is working strongly, his pace quickens, and they find themselves at a distance behind him. And then something comes over them—a sense that there is something in the situation which they do not understand, a strangeness in the mind. They realize, in fact, that they are not as near Jesus as they had supposed. And, as they follow, the wonder deepens into fear.
Anyone who will really try to grapple with this problem of the cross will find very soon the same thing. The first thing that we need to learn, if our criticism of Jesus is to be sound, is that we are not at all so near him as we have imagined. He eludes us, goes far out beyond what we grasp or conceive; and I think the education of the Christian man or woman begins anew, when we realize how little we know about Jesus. The discovery of our ignorance is the beginning of knowledge. Plato long ago said that wonder is the mother of philosophy, and he was right. John Donne, the English poet, went farther, and said: "All divinity is love or wonder." When a man then begins to wonder about Jesus Christ in earnest, Jesus comes to be for him a new figure. Historical criticism has done this for us; it has brought us to such a point that the story of these earliest disciples repeats itself more closely in the experience of their followers of these days than in any century since the first. We begin along with them on the friendly, critical, human plane, and with them we follow him into experiences and realizations that we never expected. It may be summed up in the familiar words of the English hymn,
Oh happy band of pilgrims,If onward ye will treadWith Jesus as your fellow,To Jesus as your head.
These men begin with him, more or less on a footing of equality; or, at least, the inequality is very lightly marked. Afterwards it is emphasized; and they realize it with wonder and with fear, and at last with joy and gratitude.
We may begin by trying steadily to bring our minds to some keener sense of what it was that he chose. To say, in the familiar words, that he chose the cross, may through the very familiarity of the language lead us away from what we have to discover. We have, as we agreed, to ask ourselves what was his experience. What, then, did his choice involve? It meant, of course, physical pain. There are natures to whom this is of little account, but the sensitive and sentient type, as we often observe, dreads pain. He, with open eyes, chose physical pain, heightened to torture, not escaping any of the suffering which anticipation gives—that physical horror of death, that instinctive fear of annihilation, which nature suggests of itself. He took the course of action that would most severely test his disciples; one at least revolted, and we have to ask what it meant to Jesus to live with Judas, to watch his face, to recognize his influence in the little group—yes, and to try to win him again and to be repelled. "He learnt by the things that he suffered" that Judas would betray him; but the hour and place and method were not so evident, and when they were at last revealed—what did it mean to be kissed by Judas? Do we feel what he felt in the so-called trials—or was he dull and numbed by the catastrophe? How did he bear the beating of triumphant hatred upon a forsaken spirit? How did the horrible cry, "Crucify him! crucify him!" break on his ears—on his mind? When "the Lord turned and looked upon Peter" (Luke 22:61), what did it mean? How did he know that Peter was there, and what led him to turn at that moment? Was there in the Passion no element of uneasiness again about the eleven on whom he had concentrated his hopes and his influence—the eleven of whom it is recorded, that "they all forsook him, and fled" (Mark 14:50)? No hint of dread that his work might indeed be undone? What pain must that have involved? What is the value of the Agony in the Garden, of the cry, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani" (Mark 15:34)? When we have answered, each for himself, these questions, and others like them that will suggest themselves—answered them by the most earnest efforts of which our natures are capable—and remembered at the end how far our natures fall short of his, and told ourselves that our answers are insufficient—then let us recall, once more, that he chose all this.
He chose the cross and all that it meant. Our next step should be to study anew his own references to what he intends by it, to what he expects to be its results and its outcome. First of all, then, he clearly means that the Kingdom of Heaven is something different from anything that man has yet seen. The Kingdom of Heaven is, I understand, a Hebrew way of saying the Kingdom of God—very much as men to-day speak of Providence, to avoid undue familiarity with the term God, so the Jews would say Heaven. There were many who used the phrase in one or other form; but it is always bad criticism to give to the words of genius the value or the connotation they would have in the lips of ordinary people. To a great mind words are charged with a fullness of meaning that little people do not reach. The attempt has been made to recapture more of his thoughts by learning the value given to some of the terms he uses as they appear in the literature of the day, and of course it has been helpful. But we have to remember always that the words as used by him come with a new volume of significance derived from his whole personality. Everything turns on the connotation which he gives to the term God—that is central and pivotal. What this new Kingdom of God is, or will be, he does not attempt fully to explain or analyse. In the parables, the treasure-finder and the pearl merchant achieve a great enrichment of life; so much they know at once; but what do they do with it? How do they look at it? What does it mean to them? He does not tell us. We only see that they are moving on a new plane, seeing life from a new angle, living in a fuller sense. What the new life means in its fullness, we know only when we gain the deeper knowledge of God.
He suggests that this new knowledge comes to a man from God himself—flesh and blood do not reveal it (Matt. 16:17). "Unto you it is given," he says on another occasion, "to know the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven" (Mark 4:11), and he adds that there are those who see and do not see; they are outside it; they have not the alphabet, we might say, that will open the book (cf. Rev. 5:3). He makes it clear at every point in the story of the Kingdom of God that there is more beyond; and he means it. It is to be a new beginning, an initiation, leading on to what we shall see but do not yet guess, though he gives us hints. We shall not easily fathom the depth of his idea of the new life, but along with it we have to study the width and boldness of his purpose. This new life is not for a few—for "the elect," in our careless phrase. He looks to a universal scope for what he is doing. It will reach far outside the bounds of Judaism. "They shall come from the east and from the west, and from the north and from the south, and shall sit down in the Kingdom of God" (Luke 13:29). "Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world," he says (Mark 14:9). "My words shall not pass away" (Luke 21:33). All time and all existence come under his survey and are included in his plan. The range is enormous. And this was a Galilean peasant! As we gradually realize what he has in mind, must we not feel that we have not grasped anything like the full grandeur of his thought?
He makes it plain, in the second place, that it will be a matter for followers, for workers, for men who will watch and wait and dare—men with the same abandonment as himself. He calls for men to come after him, to come behind him (Mark 1:17, 10:21; Luke 9:59). He emphasizes that they must think out the terms on which he enlists them. He does not disguise the drawbacks of his service. He calls his followers, and a very personal and individual call it is. He calls a man from the lake shore, from the nets, from the custom house.
In the third place, he clearly announces an intention to achieve something in itself of import by his death. There are those who would have us believe that his mind was obsessed with the fixed idea of his own speedy return on the clouds, and that he hurried on to death to precipitate this and the new age it was to bring. References to such a coming are indeed found in the Gospels as we have them, but we are bound to ask whence they come, and to inquire how far they represent exactly what he said; and then, if he is correctly reported, to make sure that we know exactly what he means. Those who hold this view fail to relate the texts they emphasize with others of a deeper significance, and they ignore the grandeur and penetration and depth of the man whom they make out such a dreamer. He never suggests himself that his death is to force the hand of God.
He himself is to be the doer and achiever of something. We have been apt to think of him as a great teacher, a teacher of charm and insight, or as the great example of idealism, "who saw life steadily and saw it whole." He lived, some hold, the rounded and well-poised life, the rhythmic life. No, that was Sophocles. He is greater. Here is one who penetrates far deeper into things. His treatment of the psychology of sin itself shows how much more than an example was needed. Here, as in the other chapters, but here above all we have to remember the clearness of his insight, his swiftness of penetration, his instinct for fact and reality. He means to do, to achieve, something. It is no martyr's death that he incurs. His death is a step to a purpose. "I have a baptism to be baptised with," he says (Luke 12:50). "The Son of Man," he said, "is come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10).
In discussing in the previous chapter what he meant by the term "lost," our conclusion was that for Jesus sin was far more awful, far more serious, than we commonly realize. We saw also that so profound and true a psychology of sin must imply a view of redemption at least as profound, a promise of a force more than equal to the power of sin—that "violence of habit" of which St. Augustine speaks. If the Son of Man is to save the lost, and if the lost are in danger so real, it follows that he must think of a thoroughly effective salvation, and that its achievement will be no light or easy task. "To give one's life as a ransom for many," says a modern teacher, "is of no avail, if the ransom is insufficient." What, then, and how much, does he mean by "to save," and how does he propose to do it? When the soul of man or woman has gone wrong in any of the ways discussed by Jesus—in hardness or anger, in impurity, in the refusal to treat God and his facts seriously—when the consequences that Jesus recognized have followed—what can be done to bring that soul back into effective relation with the God whom it has discarded and abandoned? That is the problem that Jesus had to face, and most of us have not thought enough about it.
First of all, how far does Jesus understand salvation to take a man? The ancient creed of the Church includes the article of belief in "the forgiveness of sins." There are those who lightly assume that this means, chiefly or solely, the remission of punishment for evil acts. This raises problems enough of itself. The whole doctrine of "Karma", vital to Buddhism and Hinduism, is, if I understand it aright, a strong and clear warning to us that the remission of punishment is no easy matter. Not only Eastern thinkers, but Western also, insist that there is no avoidance of the consequences of action. Luther himself, using a phrase half borrowed from a Latin poet, says that forgiveness is "a knot worthy of a God's aid"—"nodus Deo vindice dignus".[31] But in any case escape from the consequences of sin, when once we look on sin with the eyes of Jesus, is of relatively small importance. There are two aspects of the matter far more significant.
We have seen how Jesus regards sin as at once the cause and consequence of a degeneration of the moral nature, and as a repudiation of God. Two questions arise: Is it possible to recover lost moral quality and faculty? Is it possible for those incapacitated by sin to regain, or to enjoy, relation with God?
When we think, with Jesus, of sin first and foremost in connexion with God, and take the trouble to try to give his meaning to his words, forgiveness takes on a new meaning. We have to "think like God," he says (Mark 8:33); and perhaps God is in his thoughts neither so legal nor so biological as we are; perhaps he does not think first of edicts or of biological and psychological laws. God, according to Jesus, thinks first of his child, though of course not oblivious of his own commands and laws. Forgiveness, Jesus teaches or suggests, is primarily a question between Father and son, and he tries to lead us to believe how ready the Father is to settle that question. Once it is settled, we find, in fact, Father and son setting to work to mend the past. The evil seed has been sown and the sad crop must be reaped, the man who sowed it has to reap it—that much we all see. But Jesus hints to us that God himself loves to come in and help his reconciled son with the reaping; many hands make light work, especially when they are such hands. And even when the crop is evil in the lives of others, the most horrible outcome of sin, God is still in the field. The prodigal, when he returns, is met with a welcome, and is gradually put in possession of what he has lost—the robe, the shoes, the ring; and it all comes from his being at one with his Father again (Luke 15:22ff.). The Son of Man, historically, has again and again found the lost—the lost gifts, the lost faculties, the lost charms and graces—and given them back to the man whom he had also found and brought home to God.
Let us once more try to get our thoughts Theocentric as Jesus' are, and our problems become simpler, or at least fewer. God's generosity in forgiveness, God's love, he emphasizes again and again. Will a man take Jesus at his word, and commit himself to God? That is the question. Once he will venture on this step, what pictures Jesus draws us of what happens! The son is home again; the bankruptcy, the hideous solitude, the life among animals, bestial, dirty and empty, and haunted with memories—all those things are past, when once the Father's arms are round his neck, and his kiss on his cheek. He is no more "alienated from the life of God" (Eph. 4:18; Col. 1:21), "without God in the world" (Eph. 2:12), an "enemy of God" (Rom. 5:10); he was lost and is found, and the Father himself, Jesus says, cries: "Let us be merry" ("Euphranthomen"). If we hesitate about it, Jesus calls us once more to "think like God," and tells us other stories, with incredible joy in them—"joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." We must go back to his central conception of God, if we are to realize what he means by salvation. St. Augustine (Conf., viii. 3) brings out the value of these parables, by reminding us how much more we care for a thing that has been ours, when we have lost it and found it again. The shepherd has a new link with his sheep lost and found again, a new story of it, a shared experience; it is more his than ever. And Jesus implies that when a man is saved, he is God's again, and more God's own than ever before; and God is glad at heart. As for the man; a new power comes into his heart, and a new joy; and with God's help, in a new spirit of sunshine, he sets about mending the past in a new spirit and with a new motive—for love's sake now. If the fruit of the past is to be seen, as it constantly is, in the lives of others, he throws himself with the more energy into God's work, and when the Good Shepherd goes seeking the lost, he goes with him. Christian history bears witness, in every year of it, to what salvation means, in Jesus' sense. Punishment, consequences, crippled resources—no, he does not ask to escape them now; all as God pleases; these are not the things that matter. Life is all to be boundless love and gratitude and trust; and by and by the new man wakes up to find sin taken away, its consequences undone, the lost faculties restored, and life a fuller and richer thing than ever it was before.
Somehow so, if we read the Gospels aright, does Jesus conceive of Salvation. To achieve this for men is his purpose; and in order to do it, as we said before, his first step is to induce men to re-think God. Something must be done to touch the heart and to move the will of men, effectively; and he must do it.
With this purpose in his mind—let us weigh our words here, and reflect again upon the clearness of his insight into life and character, into moral laws, the laws of human thought and feeling, upon his profound intelligence and grasp of what moves and is real, his knowledge (a strong word to use, but we may use it) of God—with this purpose in his mind, thought out and understood, he deliberately and quietly goes to Jerusalem. He "steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51). "I must walk," he said, "to-day and to-morrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem" (Luke 13:33). To Jerusalem he goes.
We may admit that with his view of the psychology of sin, he must have a serious view of redemption. But why should that involve the cross? That is our problem. But while we try to solve it, we must also remember that behind a great choice there are always more reasons than we can analyse. A man makes one of the great choices in life. What has influenced him? Ten to one, if you ask him, he does not know. Nothing else, he will say, seemed feasible; the thing was borne in on me, it came to me: reasons? He cannot tabulate reasons; the thing, he says, was so clear that I was a long way past reasons. And yet he was right; he had reasons enough. What parent ever analysed reasons for loving his children, or would tabulate them for you? Jesus does not explain his reasons. We find, I think, that we are apt to have far more reasons for doing what we know is wrong, than we have for doing what we know is right. We do not want reasons for doing what is right; we know it is right, and there is an end of it. Once again, Jesus, with his clear eye for the real, sees what he must do. The salvation of the lost means the cross for himself. But why? we ask again. We must look a little closer if we are to understand him. We shall not easily understand him in all his thoughts, but part of our education comes from the endeavour to follow him here, to "be with him," in the phrase with which we began.
First of all we may put his love of men. He never lost the individual in the mass, never lost sight of the human being who needed God. The teacher who put the law of kindness in the great phrase, "Go with him twain" (Matt. 5:41), was not likely to limit himself in meeting men's needs. He was bound to do more than we should expect, when he saw people whom he could help; and it is that spirit of abounding generosity that shows a man what to do (Luke 6:38). Everywhere, every day, he met the call that quickened thought and shaped purpose.
He walked down a street; and the scene of misery or of sin came upon him with pressure; he could not pass by, as we do, and fail to note what we do not wish to think of. He knows a pressure upon his spirit for the man, the child, the woman—for the one who sins, the one who suffers, the other who dies. They must be got in touch with God. He sits with his disciples at a meal—the men whom he loved—he watches them, he listens to them. Peter, James, John, one after the other, becomes a call to him. They need redemption; they need far more than they dream; they need God. That pressure is there night and day—it becomes intercession, and that grows into inspiration. Our prayers suffer, some one has said, for our want of our identification with the world's sin and misery. He was identified with the world's sin and misery, and they followed him into his prayer. It becomes with him an imperative necessity to effect man's reconciliation with God. All his experience of man, his love of man, call him that way.
The second great momentum comes from the love of God, and his faith in God. Here, again, we must emphasize for ourselves his criticism of Peter: "You think like a man and not like God" (Mark 8:33). We do not see God, as Jesus did. He must make plain to men, as it never was made plain before, the love of God. He must secure that it is for every man the greatest reality in the world, the one great flaming fact that burns itself living into every man's consciousness. He sees that for this God calls him to the cross, so much so that when he prays in the garden that the cup may pass, his thoughts range back to "Thy will" (Matt. 26:42). It is God's Will. Even if he does not himself see all involved, still God knows the reason; God will manage; God wishes it. "Have faith in God," he used to say (Mark 11:22). This faith which he has in God is one of the things that take him to the cross.
In the third place, we must not forget his sense of his own peculiar relation to God. If it is safe to rely on St. Mark's chronological date here, he does not speak of this until Peter has called him the Messiah. He accepts the title (Mark 8:29). He also uses the description, Son of Man, with its suggestions from the past. He forgives sins. He speaks throughout the Gospels as one apart, as one distinct from us, closely as he is identified with us—and all this from a son of fact, who is not insane, who is not a quack, whose eyes are wide open for the real; whose instinct for the ultimate truth is so keen; who lives face to face with God. What does it mean? This, for one thing, that most of us have not given attention enough to this matter. I have confined myself in these chapters to the Synoptic Gospels, with only two or three references to the Fourth Gospel, and on the evidence of the Synoptic Gospels, taken by themselves, it is clear that he means a great deal more than we have cared to examine. He is the great interpreter of God, and it is borne in upon him that only by the cross can he interpret God, make God real to us, and bring us to the very heart of God. That is his purpose.
The cross is the outcome of his deepest mind, of his prayer life. It is more like him than anything else he ever did. It has in it more of him. Whoever he was, whoever he is, whatever our Christology, one fact stands out. It was his love of men and women and his faith in God that took him there.
Was he justified? was he right? or was it a delusion?
First of all, let us go back to a historic event. The resurrection is, to a historian, not very clear in its details. But is it the detail or the central fact that matters? Take away the resurrection, however it happened, whatever it was, and the history of the Church is unintelligible. We live in a rational world—a world, that is, where, however much remains as yet unexplained, everything has a promise of being lucid, everything has reason in it. Great results have great causes. We have to find, somewhere or other, between the crucifixion and the first preaching of the disciples in Jerusalem, something that entirely changed the character of that group of men.
Something happened, so tremendous and so vital, that it changed not only the character of the movement and the men—but with them the whole history of the world. The evidence for the resurrection is not so much what we read in the Gospels as what we find in the rest of the New Testament—the new life of the disciples. They are a new group. When it came to the cross, his cross, they ran away. A few weeks later we find them rejoicing to be beaten, imprisoned and put to death (Acts 5:41). What had happened? What we have to explain is a new life—a new life of prayer and joy and power, a new indifference to physical death, in a new relation to God. That is one outcome of the cross and of what followed; and as historians we have to explain it. We have also to explain how the disciples came to conceive of another Galilean—a carpenter whom they might have seen sawing and sweating in his shop, with whom they tramped the roads of Palestine, whom they saw done to death in ignominy and derision—sitting at the right hand of God. Taken by itself, we might call such a belief mere folly; but too much goes with it for so easy an explanation. The cross was not the end. As Mr. Neville Talbot has recently pointed out in his book, "The Mind of the Disciples", if the story stopped with the cross, God remains unexplained, and the story ends in unrelieved tragedy. But it does not end in tragedy; it ends—if we can use the word as yet—in joy and faith and victory; and these—how should we have seen them but for the cross? They are bound up with his choice of the cross and his triumph over it all. Death is not what it was—"the last line of all," as Horace says. Life and immortality have been brought to light (2 Tim. 1:10). "The Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world." So we read at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, and the historical critic may tell us that he does not think that John the Baptist said it. None the less, it is a wonderful summary of what Jesus has done, especially wonderful if we think of it being written fifty or sixty years after the crucifixion. For, as we survey the centuries, we find that the Lamb of God has taken away the sin of the world—to a degree that no one can imagine who has not studied the ancient world. Those who know the heathen world intimately will know best the difference he has made. All this new life, this new joy, this new victory over death and sin is attached to the living and victorious Son of God. The task of Paul and the others is, as Dr. Cairns says, "re-thinking everything in the terms of the resurrection." It is the new factor in the problem of God, so to speak—the new factor which alters everything that relates to God. That is saying a great deal, but when we look at Christian history, is it saying too much?