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 see that looking 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) "spoke things." 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.



CHAPTER IV

THE TEACHER AND HIS DISCIPLES

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 on doing with 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."



CHAPTER V

THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD

It is worth taking some trouble to realize how profoundly Jesus has changed the thinking of mankind about God. "Since Jesus lived," Dr. Fairbairn wrote, "God has been another and nearer Being to man." "Jesus," writes Dr. Fosdick, "had the most joyous idea of God that ever was thought of." That joyous sense of God he has given to his followers, and it stands in vivid contrast with the feelings men have toward God in the other religions. Christianity is the religion of joy. The New Testament is full of it.

We know the general character of Jesus' attitude to God, his feeling for God, his sense of God's nearness. How immediate his knowledge of God is, how intimate! Of course, here, as everywhere, his teaching has such an occasional character—or else the records of it are so fragmentary—that we must not press the absence of system in it; and yet, I think, it would be right to say that Jesus puts before us no system of God, but rather suggests a great exploration, an intimacy with the slow and sure knowledge that intimacy gives. He has no definition of God,[21] but he assumes God, lives on the basis of God, interprets God; and God is discovered in his acts and his relations. He said to Peter, in effect—for the familiar phrase comes to this in modern English: "You think like a man; you don't think like God" (Mark 8:33). Elsewhere he contrasts God's thoughts with man's—their outlooks are so different "that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15; the Greek words are very interesting). In other words, he would have men see all things as God sees them. That we do not so see them, remains the weak spot in our thinking. What Luther said to Erasmus is true of most of us: "Your thoughts concerning God are too human." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," said Jesus (Matt. 5:8), and throughout he emphasizes that the vision of God depends on likeness to God—it is love and a glowing purity that give that faculty, rather than any power of intellect apart from them. Jesus brings men back to the ultimate fact. Our views are too short and too narrow. He would have us face God, see him and realize him—think in the terms of God, look at things from God's point of view, live in God and with God. In modern phrase, he breaks up our dogmatism and puts us at a universal point of view to see things over again in a new and true perspective.

How and where did he begin himself? Whence came his consciousness of God, his gift for recognizing God? We do not know. The story of his growth, his inward growth, is almost unrevealed to us. We are told that he learnt "by the things which he suffered" (Heb. 5:8), and that he "increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man" (Luke 2:52). Where does anyone begin, who takes us any great distance? It is very hard to know. Where did our own thoughts of God begin? What made them? How did they come? There is an inherited element in them, but how much else? Whence came the inherited element? How is it that to another man, with the same upbringing as ours, everything is different, everything means more? Remark, at any rate, in the teaching of Jesus, that there is no mysticism of the type so much studied to-day. There is nothing in the least "psychopathic" about him, nothing abnormal—no mystical vision of God, no mystical absorption in God, no mystical union with God, no abstraction, nothing that is the mark of the professed mystic. Yet he speaks freely of "seeing God"; he lives a life of the closest union with God; and God is in all his thoughts. A phrase like that of Clement of Alexandria, "deifying into apathy we become monadic," is seas away from anything we find in the speech of Jesus. That is not the way he preaches God. He is far more natural; and that his followers accepted this naturalness, and drew him so, and gave his teaching as he gave it, is a fresh pledge of the truthfulness of the Gospels.

Again, his knowledge of God is not a matter of quotation, as ours very often tends to be. He is conscious always of the real nearness of God. He seems to wonder how it is that man can forget God. We do forget God. Augustine in his "Confessions" (iv. 12, 18) has to tell us that "God did not make the world and then go away." The practical working religion of a great many of us rests on a feeling that God is a very long way off. Our practical steps betray that we half think God did go away, when he had made the world. Prayer to us is not a real thing—it is not intercourse face to face; far too often it is like conversation over a telephone wire of infinite length which gets out of order. Even if words travel along that wire, there is so much "buzzing" that they are hardly recognizable. No, says Jesus, God is near, God is here—so near, that Jesus never feels that men have any need of a priesthood to come between, or to help them to God; God does all that. There is no common concern, no matter of food or clothing, no mere detail of the ordinary round of common duty and common life—father and mother, son, wife, friend—nothing of all that, but God is there; God knows about it; God is interested in it; God has taken care of it; God is enjoying it. How is it that men can "reject the counsel of God," refuse God's plans and ideas (Luke 7:30)? How is it that they forget God altogether? Jesus is surprised at the dullness of men's minds (Mark 8:17); it is a mystery to him. The rich fool, as we call him, though it is hard to see why we should call him a fool, when he is so like ourselves, had forgotten God somehow, and was startled when God spoke, and spoke to him. That story, seen so often among men,—the story of the thorns choking the seed (Matt. 13:22)—makes Jesus remark on the difficulty which a rich man finds in entering into the kingdom of God.

God knows—that is what Jesus repeats, God cares; and God can do things; his hands are not tied by impotence. The knowledge of God is emphasized by Jesus; "Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matt. 10:30); "your Father knoweth" (Luke 12:30); "seeth in secret" (Matt. 6:4); "knoweth your hearts" (Luke 16:15); knows your struggles, knows your worries, knows your worth; God knows all about you. And "all things are possible with God" (Matt. 19:26). There is nothing that he cannot do, nothing that he will not do, for his children. Will a father refuse his child bread; will God not give what is good? (Matt. 7:11). Is it too big a thing for the Giver of Life to give food—which is the more difficult thing to give? (Luke 12:23). Look at God, as Jesus draws him—interested in flowers; God takes care of them, and thinks about their colours, so that even "Solomon in all his glory" is not equal to them (Matt. 6:30). God knows the birds in the nest—knows there is one fewer there to-day than there was yesterday (Matt. 10:29). God cares for them; how much more will he care for you (Matt. 6:26)? "Ye are of more value than many sparrows" (Matt. 10:31). And God thinks out man's life in all its relations, and provides for it. Society moves on lines he laid down for it; his plans underlie all. Thus, when Jesus is challenged on the question of marriage and divorce, with that clear thought and eye of his, he goes right back to God's intent—not to man's usage, not to the common law and practice of nations, but to God's intent and God's meaning. God ordained marriage; he thought it out (Matt. 19:4). Marriages will be better, if we think of them in this way. God gave men their food, does still, and all things that he gives are clean (Luke 11:41). We cannot have taboos at our Father's table.

Over all is God's throne (Matt. 23:22). That idea, it seems to me, lapses somehow from our minds to-day. When Luther had to face the hostility of the Kaiser, the Emperor Charles V., he wrote to one of his friends: "Christ comes and sits at the right hand—not of the Kaiser, for in that case we should have perished long ago—but at the right hand of God. This is a great and incredible thing; but I enjoy it, incredible as it is; some day I mean to die in it. Why should I not live in it?" So Luther wrote—in not quite our modern vein. We hardly calculate on God as a factor; we omit him. Jesus did not. God's rule is over all; and in all our perplexity, doubt, and fear, Jesus reminds us that the first thing is faith in God. The fact is that "Thine is the Kingdom" means peace; it is a joyous reminder. For if he speaks of the Kingdom of God, the King is more than the Kingdom. It is the Kingdom, the rule, of the God whom Jesus teaches us to trust and to love. The Father is supreme. But that has more aspects than one. If our Father is supreme for us, he is supreme over us. Jesus emphasizes the will of God—God's commandment against man's tradition, God's will against man's notions (Mark 7:8). What a source of rest and peace to him is the thought of God's will! When Dante writes: "And His will is our peace," it is the thought of Jesus. And at the same time God's judgements are as real to Jesus' mind. "I will tell you," he says, "whom to fear, God—yes, fear him!" (Luke 12:5). He feels the tenderness and the awfulness of God at once.

In speaking of God, it is noticeable that Jesus chiefly emphasizes God's interest in the individual, as giving the real clue to God's nature. On the whole, there is very little even implied, still less explicit, in the Gospels, about God as the great architect of Nature—hardly anything on the lines familiar to us in the Psalms and in Isaiah—"The sea is his, and he made it; and his hands formed the dry land" (Psalm 95:5)—"He taketh up the isles as a very little thing" (Isaiah 40:15). There is little of this in the Gospels; yet it is implied in the affair of the storm (Matt. 8:26). The disciples in their anxiety wake him. He does not understand their fear. Whose sea is it? Whose wind is it? Whose children are you? Cannot you trust your Father to control his wind and his sea? Of course it is possible that he said more about God as the Author of Nature than our fragmentary reports give us; but it may be that it is because the emphasis on God's care and love for the individual is hardest to believe, and at the same time best, gives the real value of God, that Jesus uses it so much. Perhaps the Great Artificer is too far away for our minds. He is too busy, we think; and yet, after all, if God is so great, why should he be so busy? If he is a real Father, why should not he be at leisure for his children? He is, says Jesus; a friend has leisure for his friends, and a father for his children; and God, Jesus suggests, always has leisure for you.

The great emphasis with Jesus falls on the love of God. Thus he tells the story of the impossible creditor with two debtors (Luke 7:42). One owed him ten pounds, and the other a hundred. When they had nothing to pay, they both came to him and told him so. The ordinary creditor, at the very best, would say: "Well, I suppose I must put it down as a bad debt." Jesus says that this creditor took up quite another attitude. He smiled and said to his two troubled friends: "Is that all? Don't let anything like that worry you. What is that between you and me?" He forgave them the debt with such a charm ("echarisato"), Jesus says, that they both loved him. One feels that the end of the story must be, that they both paid him and loved him all the more for taking the money. What a delightful story of charm, and friendship and forgiveness! And it is a true picture of God, Jesus would have us believe, of God's forgiveness and the response it wakes in men.

If we do not definitely set our minds to assimilate the ideas of Jesus, we shall make too little of the heart of God. With Jesus this is the central and crucial reality. He emphasizes the generosity of God. God makes his sun rise on the good and on the bad; he sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). God's flowers are just as beautiful in the bad man's garden. God knows what his child needs, and gives it, whether it is a very good child or a very bad one. The Father is the same great wise Friend in either case. The peacemakers are recognized as the children of God, because of their family likeness to God (Matt. 5:9). They come among people, and find them in discord with one another, and their presence stills that; or they come into a man's life, when it is all in disorder and pain, and they bring peace there. They may not quite know it, but they do these things almost without meaning to do them. And Jesus says that this is a family likeness by which men know they are God's children. But it is not every teacher, pagan or Christian, who lays such stress on God's gift of peace, or is so sure of it. He uses Hosea's great saying about God—"I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Hosea 6:6), as giving the truth about God. Matthew represents him as quoting it twice (Matt. 9:13, 12:7); and we can well believe that he found in it the real spirit of God and often referred to it. His own heart has taken him to the tenderest of the utterances of the Old Testament spoken by the most suffering of the Prophets. "Love your enemies," he says (Matt. 5:44); yes, for then you will be the real children of God. Or he speaks of the great patience of God, how God gives every man all the time and all the chance that he needs—sometimes, he half suggests, even a little more. Look at the parable of the fig tree, how the gardener pleads for the tree, begs and obtains another chance for it (Luke 13:8); that is like God, says Jesus.

It is easy enough to talk in a vague way about the love of God. But the love of God implies surely the individual; love has little content indeed if its object is merely a collective noun, an abstract, a concept. But that God loves individual men is very difficult for us to believe in earnest. The real crux comes when the question rises in a man's own heart, "Does God love me?" Jesus says that he does, but it is very hard to believe, except in the company of Jesus and under his influence. Jesus throughout asserts and reasserts the value of the individual to God. Look, for example, at the picture he draws, when he tells of the recovery of the Lost Sheep, and brings out the analogy. At the end of the Book of Job (ch. 38) the poet carries his reader back to the first sight of a world new-made, and tells how God, like the real artist and creator—we might not have thought of all this, but the poet did—loves his work so much that he must have his friends sharing it with him. He calls them; he shows them the world he has made—"the beauty, and the wonder, and the power," as Browning says. The poet tells us that what followed was that "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." The sight was so good that song and shout came instinctively, almost involuntarily. Is it not the same picture which Jesus draws of "joy in heaven in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth"? We can believe in such joy when God made the world; but can we believe that there was the same joy in the presence of God yesterday when a coolie gave his heart to God? Jesus does. That is the central thing, it seems to me, in his teaching about God—that God cares for the individual to an extent far beyond anything we could think possible. If we can wrestle with that central thought and assimilate it, or, as the old divines said, "appropriate" it, make it our own, the rest of the Gospel is easy. But one can never manage it except with the help, and in the company, of Jesus.

Jesus goes a step further, and believes in the possibility of a man loving God and God enjoying that too. If he speaks of prayer, must we not think he means that God wants it as much as his child can want it? How much is involved in the name "Father," which Jesus so uniformly gives to God? Something less than the word carries in the case of a human father, or more? What is the attitude of a father to his child? Jesus, as we have seen, uses this illustration to bring out God's care for the actual needs of his children. But is that all? What is the innermost thing in a father's relation to his children? Surely something more than the bird's instinct to feed her young, or to gather them under her wings (Luke 13:34). Is not one of the most real features of parenthood enjoyment of the child? Do not men and women frankly enjoy the grappling of the little mind with big things? Is there not a charm, as says one of the Christian Fathers (Minucius Felix), about the "half-words" that a child uses, as he learns to talk and wrestles with a grown-up vocabulary? About the extraordinary pictures he will draw of ships or cows—the quaint stories he will invent—the odd ways in which his gratitude and his affection express themselves? Is it a real fatherhood where such things do not appeal? Jesus' language about God, his whole attitude to God, implies throughout that God is as real a Father as anybody, and it suggests that God loves his children the more because they are real; because they are not very clever; because they do make such queer and imperfect prayers; because, in short, they need him; and because they fill a place in his heart.

We have to remark how firmly Jesus believes in his Gospel of God and man needing each other and finding each other—his "good news," as he calls it. He bases all on his faith in what has been called "Man's incurable religious instinct"—that instinct in the human heart that must have God—and in God's response to that instinct which he himself implanted, and which is no accident found here and missing there, but a genuine God-given characteristic of every man, whatever his temperament or his range in emotions may be, his swiftness or slowness of mind. The repeated parables of seed and leaven—the parables of vitality—again and again suggest his faith in his message, his conviction that God must have man and man must have God—that, as St. Augustine puts it, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart knows no rest till it rests in Thee" (Conf., i. 1). That is the essence of the Gospel.

How this union of the soul with God comes about, Jesus does not directly say, but there are many hints in his teaching that bear upon it. "The Kingdom of Heaven cometh not with observation," he said (Luke 17:20). Religious truth is not reached by "quick turns of self-applauding intellect," nor by demonstrations. It comes another way. The quiet familiarity with the deep true things of life, till on a sudden they are transfigured in the light of God, and truth is a new and glowing thing, independent of arguments and the strange evidence of thaumaturgy—this is the normal way; and Jesus holds by it. The great people, men of law and learning, want more; they want something to substantiate God's messages from without. If Jesus comes to them with a word from God, can he not prove its authenticity preferably with "a sign from the sky" (Mark 8:11)? For the signs he gives, and the evidence he suggests, are unsatisfactory. "And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, 'Why doth this generation seek after a sign? Verily I say unto you, there shall no sign be given unto this generation.' So he left them and went up into the ship again and went away." That scene is drawn from life.

But why no sign? In the parallel passage we read: "'The wicked generation and adulterous seeketh a sign, but there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah'; so he left them and departed" (Matt. 16:4). The real explanation of this reference to Jonah is given by Luke (11:32), and missed or misdeveloped in Matthew (Matt. 12:40). Nineveh recognized instinctively the inherent truth of Jonah's message, and repented. Truth is its own evidence—like leaven in the meal, like seed in the field, it does its work, and its life reveals it. God is known that way. When the chief priests demand of Jesus to be told plainly what is his authority (Mark 11:27), he carries the matter a stage further: Was the baptism of John, he asks, from heaven, i.e. from God, or was it of men? Does God make His message clear, does He properly authenticate Himself? And the uneasy weighing of alternatives, summarized by the evangelist, leads to the answer that they could not tell whence it was; and Jesus rejoins that he has nothing to say to them about his authority. He had taken what we might call an easy case—where it was evident that God had spoken; and this was all they made of it—they "could not tell." It was plain, then, either that these men did not recognize the obvious message of God ("the word of God came upon John," Luke 3:9,), or that, if they did recognize it, they thought it did not matter. For the insincere and the trivial there is no message from God, no truth of God—how should there be?

If we pursue this line of thought, we can see how, in Jesus' opinion, a man may be sure of God and of God's word for him. If a man be candid with himself, if he face the common facts of life with seriousness and in the doing of duty, perplexities vanish. Such a man is prepared for the Great Fact, by faithfulness to the little facts, and then God dawns on him in them. This is put directly in the Fourth Gospel (7:17), and in parable in the Synoptists. The leaven works, till the whole is leavened; the uneasy process is over and the result achieved. Or, it comes more quietly still—the seed grows while the farmer sleeps and rises, night and day; the blade springs up and the ear forms on the blade, the seed grows in the ear; and the end is reached and God's Kingdom is a reality. Or, the knowledge of God comes like a lightning flash—sudden, illuminative, decisive. "The Son reveals" God to the simple, Jesus said (Matt. 11:27). The Son of Man may be a disputable figure—"Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him" (Matt. 12:32)—but there is no forgiveness in this world, or in any possible real world where God counts at all, for the refusal of the spirit of Truth. So he taught, and all history shows he was right—the refusal of truth is fatal. "Jesus," wrote Matthew Arnold, "never touches theory, but bases himself invariably upon experience." It is to experience that Jesus goes to authenticate his message. The real facts of life lead you to God, as the red sky, and the south wind, teach you to foretell the weather (Matt. 16:2; Luke 12:55).

"Eyes and ears," said the Greek thinker, Heraclitus, long before, "are bad witnesses for such as have barbarian souls." The Pharisees discredited Jesus—he "cast out devils by Beelzebub." Did he, he asked, or was it "by the finger of God" (Luke 11:20)? Is there no evidence of God in restored sanity? But the strength of his position lies in the good news for the poor (Matt. 11:5), for those who labour and are heavy—laden (Matt. 11:28)—news of rest and refreshment—as if the intuition of God, with the peace it brings, were its own proof. Truth is reached less by ingenuity than by intensity. To the simple mind, to the true heart, to the pure soul (Matt. 5:8), to those whose gift is peace, Truth comes flooding in—new light on old fact, and new light from old fact—and God is evident. So Jesus judged; and here again, before we decide for or against his view, we have to make sure that we know his meaning, and realize the experience by which he reached his thought. And then, perhaps, God will be more evident to us in our turn. "The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation" (Luke 17:20)—it is "within" (Luke 17:21); so quietly it comes, that we may not guess how in any particular instance the realization of God came to a soul; but if we are candid and truth-loving we can know it when it has come to ourselves, and we can recognize it when it comes to another. We can recognize it in its power and peace, we can see the greatness of the new knowledge in the new man it makes, in the new life, the man of the great spirit, of the great action, the man of the great quiet, the man who has the peace of God.

What does the discovery of God mean? Jesus himself speaks of a man turning right about, being converted (Matt. 18:3); of the revision of all ideas, of all standards, of all values. He gives us two beautiful pictures to illustrate what it means; and it repays us to linger over them. First, there is the Treasure Finder. He is in the country, digging perhaps in another man's field, or idling in the open; and by accident he stumbles on a buried treasure. Palestine was like Belgium—a land with a long history of wars fought on its soil by foreigners, Babylon or Assyria against Egypt, Ptolemies against Seleucids. It was the only available route for attack either on Egypt by land, or on Syria or Mesopotamia or Babylon from the Southern Mediterranean. In such a land when the foreign army marched through, a man had best hide his treasure and hope to find it again in better times, and again and again the secret of its place of burial died with him. The Treasure Finder had no lord of the manor to think of, no Treasury department. He made a great discovery, and made it initially for himself, and his own—"and for joy thereof he goeth and selleth all that he hath and buyeth that field." We can see him full of his discovery, full of eagerness and trying to hide his inner joy, as he realizes every penny he can manage, and achieves the great transaction which gives him the field and the treasure. The salient points are a sudden and great joy, an instant resolution, a complete sacrifice of everything, and a life unexpectedly and infinitely enriched. And so it is, says Jesus, with the Kingdom of God (Matt. 13:44).

The Pearl Merchant is a more interesting figure. Perhaps we may picture him middle-aged, a trifle worn, somewhat silent, a man of keen eyes. He has been in his trade for years, and he is a master at it. By now he has a knowledge which years give to a man in earnest—a knowledge more like instinct than anything acquired. A glance at pearls on a table—this, and this, and this he will take the other, perhaps; he would look at that one—the rest? he shook his head and did not look at them—he saw without looking. One day he is told of a pearl—a good one. He is not surprised, for pearls are always good when they are offered for sale. But again a glance is enough. The price? Yes, it is high, but he will take the pearl, but he must be allowed till evening to get the money. He goes away and sells his stock—the little collection of pearls in his wallet, representing "the experience of a life-time," all of them good, as he very well knows; and he sells them for what he can get—at a loss, if it must be. Yesterday's bargainer cuts down his price for this and that pearl, and he is taken up; he never expected to do so well against the old dealer, and he laughs. But the merchant is content, too; he has sold all his pearls for what they would fetch—lost money on them, yes, and been laughed at behind his back. But he owns the one pearl of great price; it is his, and he is satisfied. There is no reference to joy here or exultation; but there is the same instant recognition of the opportunity, the same resolve, the same sacrifice, and the same great acquisition (Matt. 13:45).

Both parables begin with a reference to the Kingdom of God—to that Rule and Kingship of God, the knowledge of which makes all the difference to a man. A small grammatical difference points us beyond minutiae to the common experience of the two men. Each makes a great discovery, and takes action in a great and urgent resolve; and they are both repaid. If we are to understand the two parables in the sense intended by Jesus, the term "God" must become alive to us with all the life and power and love that the name implies for him. Then to grasp that this Father of Jesus is King—that the God of his thoughts, of his faith, with all the tenderness and the power combined that Jesus teaches us to see in Him—rules the universe, controls our destiny and loves us—this is the experience that Jesus compares with that of the Treasure Finder and the Pearl Merchant—worth, he suggests, everything a man has, and more than all.

In passing, we may notice that these stories suggest that this experience may be reached in different ways. In the parables of the seed and the leaven he indicates a natural, quiet and unconscious growth, a story without crisis, though full of change. To the Treasure Finder the discovery is a surprise—how came Jesus so far into the minds of men as to know what a surprise God can be, and how joyful a surprise? The Pearl Merchant, on the other hand, has lived in the region where he makes his discovery. He is the type that lives and moves in the atmosphere of high and true thought, that knows whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of good report, of help and use; he is no stranger to great and inspiring ideas. And one day, in no strange way, by no accident, but in the ordinary round of life, he comes on something that transcends all he has been seeking, all he has known—the One thing worth all. There is little surprise about it, no wild elation, but nothing is allowed to stand in the way of an instant entrance into the great experience—and the great experience is, Jesus says, God.

To see God, to know God—that is what Jesus means—to get away from "all the fuss and trouble" of life into the presence of God, to know he is ours, to see him smile, to realize that he wants us to stay there, that he is a real Father with a father's heart, that his love is on the same wonderful scale as every one of his attributes, and in reality far more intelligible than any of them. That is the picture Jesus draws. The sheer incredible love of God, the wonderful change it means for all life—that is his teaching, and he encourages us, in the words of the Shorter Catechism, "to enjoy God for ever," as Jesus himself does. Those who learn his secret enjoy God in reality. Wherever they see God with the eyes of Jesus, it is joy and peace. And they realize with deepening emotion that this also is God's gift, as Jesus said (Luke 8:10; 12:39).

Jesus entirely recast mankind's common ideas of holiness. It is no longer asceticism, no longer the mystical trance, no longer the "fussiness," with which the early Christian reproached the Jew, which still haunts all the religions of taboo and merit, and even Christianity in some forms. Where men think of holiness as freedom from sin, the negative conception reacts on life. They begin at the wrong end. Solomon Schechter, the great Jewish scholar, once said of Oxford, that "they practice fastidiousness there, and call it holiness." Unfortunately Oxford has no monopoly of that type of holiness. But with Jesus holiness is a much simpler and more natural thing—as natural as the happy, easy life of father and child, and it rests on mutual faith. It is Theocentric, positive, active rather than passive—not a state, but a relation and a force. Holiness with him is a living relation with the living God. That is why the first feature in it that strikes us is Courage. "Be of good cheer; be not afraid"; that note rings through the Gospels, and how much it means, and has meant, in sweet temper and cheerfulness in the very chequered history of the Church! His is the great voice of Hope in the world. "The Lord Jesus Christ, who is our Hope," Paul said (1 Tim. 1:1). Even on the Cross, according to one text, Jesus said to the penitent thief: "Courage! To-day thou shalt be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). We may not know where or what paradise is, but the rest is intelligible and splendid: "Courage; to-day thou shalt be with me." Look at the brave hearts the Gospel has made in every age; how venturesome they are! and we find the same venturesomeness in Jesus—for instance, as a German scholar emphasizes, in that episode of the daughter of Jairus. The messenger comes and says she is dead. Anybody else would stop, but Jesus goes on. That is a great piece of interpretation. Look again at his venturesomeness in trusting the Gospel to the twelve and to us—and in facing the Cross. "It was his knowledge of God," says Professor Peabody, "that gave him his tranquillity of mind."[22]