Once more the vital thing is Jesus" conception of G.o.d. Here, as elsewhere, we sacrifice far more than we dream by our lazy way of using his words without making the effort to give them his connotation. To turn again to pa.s.sages already quoted, will a father give his son a serpent instead of the fish for which he asks, a stone for bread? It is unthinkable; G.o.d--will G.o.d do less? It all goes back again to the relation of father and child, to the love of G.o.d; only into the thought, Jesus puts a significance which we have not character or love enough to grasp. "Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things," he says about the matters that weigh heaviest with us (Luke 12:30). Even if we suppose Luke"s reference to the Father giving the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13), to owe something to the editor"s hand--it was an editor with some Christian experience--it is clear that Jesus steadily implies that the heavenly Father has better things than food and clothing for his children. How much of a human father is available for his children?
Then will not the heavenly Father, Jesus suggests, give on a larger scale, and give Himself; in short, be available for the least significant of His own children in all His fullness and all His Fatherhood? And even if they do not ask, because they do not know their need, will he not answer the prayers that others, who do know, make for them? Jesus at all events made a practice of intercession--"I prayed for thee," he said to Peter (Luke 22:32)--and the writers of the New Testament feel that it is only natural for Jesus, Risen, Ascended, and Glorified, to make intercession for us still (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25).
We have again to think out what G.o.d"s Fatherhood implies and carries with it for Jesus.
"The recurrence of the sweet and deep name, Father, unveils the secret of his being. His heart is at rest in G.o.d."[23] Rest in G.o.d is the very note of all his being, of all his teaching--the keynote of all prayer in his thought. "Our Father, who art in heaven," our prayers are to begin--and perhaps they are not to go on till we realize what we are saying in that great form of speech. It is certain that as these words grow for us into the full stature of their meaning for Jesus, we shall understand in a more intimate way what the whole Gospel is in reality.
The writer to the Hebrews has here an interesting suggestion for us.
Using the symbolism of the Hebrew religion and its tabernacle, he compares Jesus to the High Priest, but Jesus, he says, does not enter into the holiest alone. "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us ... let us draw near with a true heart in full a.s.surance of faith" (Heb. 10:19). In the previous chapter he discards the symbol and "speaks things"--"Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of G.o.d for us" (Heb. 9:24). There he touches what has been the faith of the Church throughout--that in Christ we reach the presence of G.o.d. Without saying so much in so many words, Jesus implies this in all his att.i.tude to prayer. G.o.d is there, and G.o.d loves you, and loves to have you speak with him. No one has ever believed this very much outside the radius of Christ"s person and influence. It is, when we give the words full weight, an essentially Christian faith, and it depends on our relation to Jesus Christ.
Jesus was quite explicit with his friends in telling them they did not know what to ask, but he showed them himself what they should ask. "Seek ye first the kingdom of G.o.d and his righteousness" (Matt.
6:33), he says, and tells us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins and for deliverance from evil. Pray, too, "Thy kingdom come." "Pray ye the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest" (Matt. 9:38). This is perhaps the only place where he asked his disciples to pray for his great work. Identification with G.o.d"s purposes--identification with the individual needs of those we love and those we ought to love--identification with the world"s sin and misery--these seem to be his canons of prayer for us, as for himself. For both in what he teaches others and in what he does himself, he makes it a definite prerequisite of all prayer that we say: "Thy will be done." Prayer is essentially dedication, deeper and fuller as we use it more and come more into the presence of G.o.d.
Obedience goes with it; "we must cease to pray or cease to disobey,"
one or the other. If we are half-surrendered, we are not very bright about our prayers, because we do not quite believe that G.o.d will really look after the things about which we are anxious. We must indeed go back to what Jesus said about G.o.d; we had better even leave off praying for a moment till we see what he says, and then begin again with a clearer mind.
"Ask, and ye shall receive," he says; and if we have no obedience, or love, or faith, or any of the great things that make prayer possible, he suggests that we can ask for them and have them. The Gospel gives us an ill.u.s.tration in the man who prayed: "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief" (Mark 9:24). But it is plain we have to understand that we are asking for great things, and it is to them rather than to the obvious little things that Jesus directs our thoughts. Not away from the little things, for if G.o.d is a real Father he will wish to have his children talk them over with him--"little things please little minds," yes, and great minds when the little minds are dear to them--but not little things all the time. There is a variant to the saying about seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven, which Clement of Alexandria preserves. Perhaps it is a mere slip, but G.o.d, it has been said, can use misquotations; and Clement"s quotation, or misquotation, certainly represents the thought of Jesus, and it may give us a hint for our own practice: "Ask," saith he, "the great things, and the little things will be added unto you" (Strom. i. 158).
The object of Jesus was to induce men to base all life on G.o.d.
Short-range thinking, like the rich fool"s, may lead to our forgetting G.o.d; but Jesus incessantly lays the emphasis on the thought-out life; and that, in the long run, means a new reckoning with G.o.d. That is what Jesus urges--that we should think life out, that we should come face to face with G.o.d and see him for what he is, and accept him. He means us to live a life utterly and absolutely based on G.o.d--life on G.o.d"s lines of peacemaking and ministry, the "denial of self," a complete forgetfulness of self in surrender to G.o.d, obedience to G.o.d, faith in G.o.d, and the acceptance of the sunshine of G.o.d"s Fatherhood. He means us to go about things in G.o.d"s way--forgiving our enemies, cherishing kind thoughts about those who hate us or despise us or use us badly (Matt. 5:44), praying for them. This takes us right back into the common world, where we have to live in any case; and it is there that he means us to live with G.o.d--not in trance, but at work, in the family, in business, shop, and street, doing all the little things and all the great things that G.o.d wants us to do, and glad to do them just because we are his children and he is our Father. Above all, he would have us "think like G.o.d" (Mark 8:33); and to reach this habit of "thinking like G.o.d," we have to live in the atmosphere of Jesus, "with him" (Mark 3:14). All this new life he made possible for us by being what he was--once again a challenge to re-explore Jesus. "The way to faith in G.o.d and to love for man," said Dr. Cairns at Mohonk, "is, as of old, to come nearer to the living Jesus."
CHAPTER VI
JESUS AND MAN
When, on his last journey, Jesus came in sight of Jerusalem, Luke tells us that he wept (Luke 19:41). There is an obvious explanation of this in the extreme tension under which he was living--everything turned upon the next few days, and everything would be decided at Jerusalem; but while he must have felt this, it cannot have been the cause of his weeping. Nor should we look for it altogether in the appeal which a great city makes to emotion.
Dull would he be of soul who could pa.s.s by A sight so touching in its majesty.
Yet it was not the architecture that so deeply moved Jesus; the temple, which was full in view, was comparatively new and foreign.
There is little suggestion in the Gospels that Art meant anything to him, perhaps it meant little to the writers. As for the temple, he found it "a den of thieves" (Luke 19:46); and he prophesied that it would be demolished, and of all its splendid buildings, its goodly stones and votive offerings, which so much impressed his disciples, not one stone would be left upon another stone (Mark 13:9; Luke 21:5). But the traditions of Jerusalem wakened thoughts in him of the story of his people, thoughts with a tragic colour. Jerusalem was the place where prophets were killed (Luke 13:34), the scene and centre, at once, of Israel"s deepest emotions, highest hopes, and most awful failures. "O Jerusalem! Jerusalem!" he had said in sadness as he thought of Israel"s holy city, "which killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!" (Luke 13:34).
And now he is in sight of Jerusalem. The city and the temple suddenly meet his view, as he reaches the height, and he is deeply moved. Any reflective mind might well have been stirred by the thought of the ma.s.ses of men gathered there. Nothing is so futile as an arithmetical numbering of people, for after a certain point figures paralyse the imagination, and after that they tell the mind little or nothing. But here was actually a.s.sembled the Jewish people, coming in swarms from all the world, for the feast; here was Judaism at its most pious; here was the pilgrim centre with all it meant of aspiration and blindness, of simple folly and gross sin.
The sight of the city--the doomed city, as he foresaw--the thought of his people, their zeal for G.o.d and their alienation from G.o.d--it all comes over him at once, and, with a sudden rush of feeling, he apostrophizes Jerusalem--"If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes ... . Thou knewest not the time of thy visitation!" (Luke 19:42-44).
It is quite plain from the Gospels that crowds had always an appeal for Jesus. At times he avoided them; but when they came about him, they claimed him and possessed him. Over and over again, we read of his pity for them--"he saw a great mult.i.tude and was moved with compa.s.sion toward them" (Matt. 14:14)--of his thought for their weariness and hunger, his reflection that they might "faint by the way" on their long homeward journeys (Mark 8:3), and his solicitude about their food. Whatever modern criticism makes of the story of his feeding mult.i.tudes, it remains that he was markedly sensitive to the idea of hunger. Jairus is reminded that his little girl will be the better for food (Mark 5:43). The rich are urged to make feasts for the poor, the maimed and the blind (Luke 14:12). The owner of the vineyard, in the parable, pays a day"s wage for an hour"s work, when an hour was all the chance that the unemployed labourer could find (Matt. 20:9). No sanct.i.ty could condone for the devouring of widows" houses (Matt. 23:14).
The great hungry mult.i.tudes haunt his mind. The story of the rich young ruler shows this (Mark 10:17-22). Here was a man of birth and education, whose face and whose speech told of a good heart and conscience--a man of charm, of the impulsive type that appealed to Jesus. Jesus "looked on him," we read. The words recall Plato"s picture of Socrates looking at the jailer, how "he looked up at him in his peculiar way, like a bull"--the old man"s prominent eyes were fixed on the fellow, glaring through the brows above them, and Socrates" friends saw them and remembered them when they thought of the scene. As Jesus" eyes rested steadily on this young man, the disciples saw in them an expression they knew--"Jesus, looking on him, loved him." Their talk was of eternal life; and, no doubt to his surprise, Jesus asked the youth if he had kept the commandments; how did he stand as regarded murder, theft, adultery? The steady gaze followed the youth"s impetuous answer, and then came the recommendation to sell all that he had and give to the poor--"and, Come! Follow me!" At this, we read in a fragment of the "Gospel according to the Hebrews" (preserved by Origen), "the rich man began to scratch his head, and it did not please him. And the Lord said to him, `How sayest thou, "The law I have kept and the prophets?" For it is written in the law, "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"; and behold! many who are thy brethren, sons of Abraham, are clad in filth and dying of hunger, and thy house is full of many good things, and nothing at all goes out from it to them." And he turned and said to Simon, his disciple, who was sitting beside him: `Simon, son of John, it is easier for a camel to go through a needle"s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven."" We need not altogether reject this variant of the story.
But it was more than the physical needs of the mult.i.tude that appealed to Jesus. "Man"s Unhappiness, as I construe," says Teufelsdrockh in "Sartor Resartus", "comes of his Greatness, it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one s...o...b..ack happy?" We read in a pa.s.sage, which it is true, is largely symbolic, that one of Jesus"
quotations from the Old Testament was that "Man shall not live by bread alone" (Luke 4:4). Hunger is a real thing--horribly real; but it is comparatively easy to deal with, and man has deeper needs. The s...o...b..ack, according to Teufelsdrockh, wants "G.o.d"s infinite universe altogether to himself." In the simpler words of Jesus, he is never happy till he says, "I will arise and go to my Father"
(Luke 15:18).
This craving for the Father the men of Jesus" day tried to fill with the law; and, when the law failed to satisfy it, they had nothing further to suggest, except their fixed idea that "G.o.d heareth not sinners" (John 9:31). They despaired of the great ma.s.ses and left them alone. They did not realize, as Jesus did, that the Father also craves for his children. When Jesus saw the simpler folk thus forsaken, the picture rose in his mind of sheep, worried by dogs or wolves, till they fell, worn out--sheep without a shepherd (Matt.
9:36). Every one remembers the shepherd of the parable who sought the one lost sheep until he found it, and how he brought it home on his shoulders (Luke 15:5). But there is another parable, we might almost say, of ninety and nine lost sheep--a parable, not developed, but implied in the pa.s.sage of Matthew, and it is as significant as the other, for our Good Shepherd has to ask his friends to help him in this case. The appeal that lay in the sheer misery and helplessness of ma.s.ses of men was one of the foundations of the Christian Church. (The Good Shepherd, by the way, is a phrase from the Fourth Gospel (John 10:11), but we think most often of the Good Shepherd as carrying the sheep, and that comes from Luke, and is in all likelihood nearer the parable of Jesus.)
It is worth noticing that Jesus stands alone in refusing to despair of the greater part of mankind. Contempt was in his eyes the unpardonable sin (Matt. 5:22). How swift and decisive is his anger with those who make others stumble! (Luke 17:2). The parable of the lost sheep reveals what he held to be G.o.d"s feeling for the hopeless man; and, as we have seen, his constant aim is to lead men to "think like G.o.d." The lost soul matters to G.o.d. He sums up his own work in the world in much the same language as he uses about the shepherd in the parable: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost" (Luke 19:10). The taunt that he was the "friend of publicans and sinners" really described what he was and wished to be (Luke 7:34). G.o.d was their Heavenly Father. The sight, then, of the ma.s.ses of his countrymen, like worried sheep, worn, scattered, lost, and hopeless, waked in him no shade of doubt--on the contrary, it was further proof to him of the soundness of his message. Changing his simile, he told his disciples that the harvest was great, but the labourers few, and he asked them to pray the Lord of the harvest to thrust forth labourers into His harvest (Matt. 9:38). The very name "Lord of the harvest" implies faith in G.o.d"s competence and understanding. From the first, he seems to have held up before his followers that this wide service was to be their work--"Come ye after me," he said, "and I will make you to become fishers of men"
(Mark 1:17)--men, who should really "catch men" (Luke 5:10).
Like all for whom the world has had a meaning, Jesus, as we have seen, accepted the necessary conditions of man"s life. Human misery and need were widespread, but G.o.d"s Fatherhood was of compa.s.s fully as wide, and Jesus relied upon it. "Your heavenly Father knows," he said (Matt. 6:32), and "with G.o.d all things are possible" (Mark 10:27). The very miseries of the oppressed and hopeless people added grounds to his confidence. People who had touched bottom in sounding the human spirit"s capacity for misery, were for him the "ripe harvest" (Matt. 9:37), only needing to be gathered (Mark 4:29). He understood them, and he knew that he had the healing for all their troubles. With full a.s.surance of the truth of his words, he cried: "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28). He spoke of a rest which careless familiarity obscures for us. What understanding and sympathy he shows, when he adds: "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light!"
Misery, poverty and hunger, he had found, taught men to see realities. The hungry, at least, were not likely to mistake a stone for bread--they had a ready test for it, on which they could rely.
Poverty threw open the road to the Kingdom of G.o.d. The clearing away of all temporary satisfactions, of all that cloaked the soul"s deepest needs, prepared men for real relations with the greatest Reality--with G.o.d. So that Jesus boldly said: "Blessed are ye poor"; "Blessed are ye that hunger now"; "Blessed are ye that weep now"
(Luke 6:20, 21); but he had no idea that they were always to weep.
If it was his to care for men"s hunger, it was not likely that he would have no comfort for their tears--"Ye shall find rest unto your souls" (Matt. 11:29)--"They shall be comforted" (Matt. 5:4).
It was in large part upon the happiness which he was to bring to the poor that Jesus based his claim to be heard. There is little reasonable ground for doubt that he healed diseases. Of course we cannot definitely p.r.o.nounce upon any individual case reported; the diagnosis might be too hasty, and the trouble other than was supposed; but it is well known that such healings do occur--and that they occurred in Jesus" ministry, we can well believe. So when he was challenged as to his credentials, he pointed to misery relieved; and the culmination of everything, the crowning feature of his work, he found in his "good news for the poor." The phrase he borrowed from Isaiah (61:1), but he made it his own--the splendid promises in Isaiah for "the poor, the broken-hearted, captives, blind and bruised," appealed to him. Time has laid its hand upon his word, and dulled its freshness. "Gospel" and "evangelical" are no longer words of sheer happiness like Jesus" "good news"--they are technical terms, used in handbooks and in controversy; while for Jesus the "good news for the poor" was a new word of delight and inspiration.
The centre in all the thoughts of Jesus, as we have to remind ourselves again and again, is G.o.d. If, as Dr. D. S. Cairns puts it, "Jesus Christ is the great believer in man," it is--if we are reading him aright at all--because G.o.d believes in man. Let us remind ourselves often of that. "Thou hast made us for Thyself,"
said Augustine in the famous sentence, of which we are apt to emphasize the latter half, "and our heart knows no rest till it rests in Thee" (Confessions, i. 1). Jesus would have us emphasize the former clause as well, and believe it. The keynote of his whole story is G.o.d"s love; the Father is a real father--strange that one should have to write the small f to get the meaning! All that Jesus has taught us of G.o.d, we must bring to bear on man. For it is hard to believe in man--"What is man that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him?" quotes the author of "Job" in a great ironical pa.s.sage (Job 7:17; from Psalm 8:4). The elements and the stars come over us, as they came over George Fox in the Vale of Beavor; what is man? Can one out of fifteen hundred millions of human beings living on one planet matter to G.o.d, when there are so many planets and stars, and there have been so many generations? Can he matter? It all depends on how we conceive of G.o.d. Here it is essential to give all the meaning to the term "G.o.d"
that Jesus gave to it, to believe in G.o.d as Jesus believed in G.o.d, if we are to understand the fullness of Jesus" "good news." It all depends on G.o.d--on whether Jesus was right about G.o.d; and after all on Jesus himself. "A thing of price is man," wrote Synesius about 410 A.D., "because for him Christ died." The two things go together--Jesus" death and Jesus" Theocentric thought of man.
It is a familiar criticism of idealists and other young hearts, that it is easy to idealize what one does not know. "Omne ignotum pro magnifico" is the old epigram of Tacitus. It is not every believer in man, nor every "Friend of man," who knows men as Jesus did. Like Burns and Carlyle and others who have interpreted man to us to some purpose, he grew up in the home of labouring people. He was a working man himself, a carpenter. He must have learnt his carpentry exactly as every boy learns it, by hammering his fingers instead of the nail, sawing his own skin instead of the wood--and not doing it again. He knew what it was to have an aching back and sweat on the face; how hard money is to earn, and how quickly it goes. He makes it clear that money is a temptation to men, and a great danger; but he never joins the moralists and cranks in denouncing it. He always talks sense--if the expression is not too lowly to apply to him. He sees what can be done with money, what a tool it can be in a wise man"s hands--how he can make friends "by means of the mammon of unrighteousness" (Luke 16:9), for example, by giving unexpectedly generous wages to men who missed their chances (Matt. 20:15), by feeding Lazarus at the gate, and perhaps by having his sores properly attended to (Luke 16:20). That he understood how pitifully the loss of a coin may affect a household of working people, one of his most beautiful parables bears witness (Luke 15:8-10). With work he had no quarrel. He draws many of his parables from labour, and he implies throughout that it is the natural and right thing for man.
To be holy in his sense, a man need not leave his work. Clement of Alexandria, in his famous saying about the ploughman continuing to plough, and knowing G.o.d as he ploughs, and the seafaring man, sticking to his ship and calling on the heavenly pilot as he sails, is in the vein of Jesus.[24] There were those whom he called to leave all, to distribute their wealth, and to follow him; but he chose them (Mark 3:13, 14); it was not his one command for all men (cf. Mark 5:19). But, as we shall shortly see, it is implied by his judgements of men that he believed in work and liked men who "put their backs into it"--their backs, eyes, and their brains too.
Pain, the constant problem of man, and perhaps more, of woman--of unmarried woman more especially--he never discussed as modern people discuss it. He never made light of pain any more than of poverty; he understood physical as well as moral distress. Nor did he, like some of his contemporaries and some modern people, exaggerate the place of pain in human experience. He shared pain, he sympathized with suffering; and his understanding of pain, and, above all, his choice of pain, taught men to reconsider it and to understand it, and altered the att.i.tude of the world toward it. His tenderness for the suffering of others taught mankind a new sympathy, and the "nosokomeion", the hospital for the sick, was one of the first of Christian inst.i.tutions to rise, when persecution stopped and Christians could build. "And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them," says Matthew (21:14) in a memorable phrase. I have heard it suggested that it was irregular for them to come into the temple courts; but they gravitated naturally to Jesus.
The mystic is never quite at leisure for other people"s feelings and sufferings; he is essentially an individualist; he must have his own intercourse with G.o.d, and other people"s affairs are apt to be an interruption, an impertinence. "I have not been thinking of the community; I have been thinking of Christ," said a Bengali to me, who was wavering between the Brahmo Samaj and Christianity. The blessed Angela of Foligno was rather glad to be relieved of her husband and children, who died and left her leisure to enjoy the love of G.o.d. All this is quite unlike the real spirit of the historical Jesus. "Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses," was a phrase of Isaiah that came instinctively to the minds of his followers (Matt. 8:17, roughly after Isaiah 53:4).
Perhaps when we begin to understand what is meant by the Incarnation, we may find that omnipotence has a great deal more to do than we have supposed with natural sympathy and the genius for entering into the sorrows and sufferings of other people.
One side of the work of Jesus must never be forgotten. His att.i.tude to woman has altered her position in the world. No one can study society in cla.s.sical antiquity or in non-Christian lands with any intimacy and not realize this. Widowhood in Hinduism, marriage among Muslims--they are proverbs for the misery of women. Even the Jew still prays: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our G.o.d! King of the Universe, who hast not made me a woman." The Jewish woman has to be grateful to G.o.d, because He "hath made me according to His will"--a thanksgiving with a different note, as the modern Jewess, Amy Levy, emphasized in her brilliant novel, where her heroine, very like herself, corrected her prayerbook to make it more explicit "cursed art Thou, O Lord our G.o.d! Who hast made me a woman." Paul must have known these Jewish prayers, for he emphasized that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3:28). Paul had his views--the familiar old ways of Tarsus inspired them[25]--as to woman"s dress and deportment, especially the veil; but he struck the real Christian note here, and laid stress on the fact of what Jesus had done and is doing for women. There is no reference made by Jesus to woman that is not respectful and sympathetic; he never warns men against women. Even the most degraded women find in him an amazing sympathy; for he has the secret of being pure and kind at the same time--his purity has not to be protected; it is itself a purifying force. He draws some of his most delightful parables from woman"s work, as we have seen. It is recorded how, when he spoke of the coming disaster of Jerusalem, he paused to pity poor pregnant women and mothers with little babies in those bad times (Luke 21:23; Matt.
24:19). Critics have remarked on the place of woman in Luke"s Gospel, and some have played with fancies as to the feminine sources whence he drew his knowledge--did the women who ministered to Jesus, Joanna, for instance, the wife of Chuza (Luke 8:3), tell him these illuminative stories of the Master? In any case Jesus" new att.i.tude to woman is in the record; and it has so reshaped the thought of mankind, and made it so hard to imagine anything else, that we do not readily grasp what a revolution he made--here as always by referring men"s thoughts back to the standard of G.o.d"s thoughts, and supporting what he taught by what he was.
Mark has given us one of our most familiar pictures of Jesus sitting with a little child on his knee and "in the crook of his arm." (The Greek participle which gives this in Mark 9:36 and 10:16 is worth remembering--it is vivid enough.) Mothers brought their children to him, "that he should put his hands on them and pray" (Matt. 19:13).
Matthew (21:15) says that children took part in the Triumphal Entry; and Jesus, clear as he was how little the Hosannas of the grown people meant, seems to have enjoyed the children"s part in the strange scene. Cla.s.sical literature, and Christian literature of those ages, offer no parallel to his interest in children. The beautiful words, "suffer little children to come unto me," are his, and they are characteristic of him (Matt. 19:14); and he speaks of G.o.d"s interest in children (Matt. 18:14)--once more a reference of everything to G.o.d to get it in its true perspective. How Jesus likes children!--for their simplicity (Luke 18:17), their intuition, their teachableness, we say. But was it not, perhaps, for far simpler and more natural reasons just because they were children, and little, and delightful? We forget his little brothers and sisters, or we eliminate them for theological purposes.
Jesus lays quite an unexpected emphasis on sheer tenderness--on kindness to neighbour and stranger, the instinctive humanity that helps men, if it be only by the swift offer of a cup of cold water (Matt. 10:42). The Good Samaritan came as a surprise to some of his hearers (Luke 10:30). "It is our religion," said a Hindu to a missionary, to explain why he and other Hindus did not help to rescue a fainting man from the railway tracks, nor even offer water to restore him, when the missionary had hauled him on to the platform unaided. Not so the religion of Jesus--"bear ye one another"s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ," wrote Paul (Gal. 6:2)--"pursue hospitality" (Rom. 12:13; the very word runs through the Epistles of the New Testament). And, as we shall see in a later chapter, the Last Judgement itself turns on whether a man has kindly instincts or not. Matthew quotes (12:20) to describe Jesus" own tenderness the impressive phrase of Isaiah (42:3), "A bruised reed shall he not break."
If it is urged that such things are natural to man--"do not even the publicans the same?" (Matt. 5:46)--Jesus carries the matter a long way further. "Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain" (Matt. 5:41). The man who would use such compulsion would be the alien soldier, the hireling of Herod or of Rome; and who would wish to cart him and his goods even one mile? "Go two miles," says Jesus--or, if the Syriac translation preserves the right reading, "Go two _extra_." Why? Well, the soldier is a man after all, and by such unsolicited kindness you may make a friend even of a government official--not always an easy thing to do--at any rate you can help him; G.o.d helps him; "be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). Ordinary kindness and tenderness could hardly be urged beyond that point; and yet Jesus goes further still. He would have us _pray_ for those that despitefully use us (Matt. 5:44)--and in no Pharisaic way, but with the same instinctive love and friendliness that he always used himself. "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do"
(Luke 23:34). There are religions which inculcate the tolerance of wrong aiming at equanimity of mind or acquisition of merit. But Jesus implies on the contrary that in all this also the Christian _denies_ himself, does not seek even in this way to save his own soul, but forgets all about it in the service of others, though he finds by and by, with a start, that he has saved it far more effectually than he could have expected (Mark 8:35; Matt. 25:37, 40). The emphasis falls on our duty of kindness and tenderness to all men and women, because we and they are alike G.o.d"s children.
With his emphasis on tenderness we may group his teaching on forgiveness. He makes the forgiving spirit an antecedent of prayer--"when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespa.s.ses" (Mark 11:25). "If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift" (Matt. 5:23, 24).
The parable of the king and his debtor (Matt. 18:23), painfully true to human nature, brings out the whole matter of our forgiveness of one another into the light; we are shown it from G.o.d"s outlook. The teaching as ever is Theocentric. To Peter, Jesus says that a man should be prepared to forgive his brother to seventy times seven--if anybody can keep count so far (Matt. 18:21-35). He sees how quarrels injure life, and alienate a man from G.o.d. Hence comes the famous saying: "Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matt. 5:39). He would have men even avoid criticism of one another (Matt. 7:1-5). Epigrams are seductive, and there is a fascination in the dissection of character; but there is always a danger that a clever characterization, a witty label, may conclude the matter, that a possible friendship may be lost through the very ingenuity with which the man has been labelled, who might have been a friend. It is not a small matter in Jesus" eyes, he puts his view very strongly (Matt. 5:22); and, as we must always remember, he bases himself on fact. We may lose a great deal more than we think by letting our labels stand between us and his words, by our habit of calling them paradoxes and letting them go at that.
It is worth while to look at the type of character that he admires.
Modern painters have often pictured Jesus as something of a dreamer, a longhaired, sleepy, abstract kind of person. What a contrast we find in the energy of the real Jesus--in the straight and powerful language which he uses to men, in the sweep and range of his mind, in the profundity of his insight, the drive and compulsiveness of his thinking, in the venturesomeness of his actions. How many of the parables turn on energy? The real trouble with men, he seems to say, is again and again sheer slackness; they will not put their minds to the thing before them, whether it be thought or action. Thus, for instance, the parable of the talents turns on energetic thinking and decisive action; and these are the things that Jesus admires--in the widow who will have justice (Luke 18:21)--in the virgins who thought ahead and brought extra oil (Matt. 25:4)--in the vigorous man who found the treasure and made sure of it (Matt. 13:44)--in the friend at midnight, who hammered, hammered, hammered, till he got his loaves (Luke 11:8)--in the "violent," who "take the Kingdom of Heaven by force" (Matt. 11:12; Luke 16:16)--in the man who will hack off his hand to enter into life (Mark 9:43). Even the bad steward he commends, because he definitely put his mind on his situation (Luke 16:8). As we shall see later on, indecision is one of the things that in his judgement will keep a man outside the Kingdom of G.o.d, that make him unfit for it. The matter deserves more study than we commonly give it. You must have a righteousness, he says, which exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees (Matt. 5:20)--and the Pharisees were professionals in righteousness. His tests of discipleship illumine his ideal of character--Theocentric thinking--negation of self--the thought-out life. He will have his disciples count the cost, reckon their forces, calculate quietly the risks before them--right up to the cross (Luke 14:27-33)--like John Bunyan in Bedford Gaol, where he thought things out to the pillory and thence to the gallows, so that, if it came to the gallows, he should be ready, as he says, to leap off the ladder blindfold into eternity. That is the energy of mind that Jesus asks of men, that he admires in men.
On the other side, he is always against the life of drift, the half-thought-out life. There they were, he says, in the days of Noah, eating and drinking, marrying, dreaming--and the floods came and destroyed them (Luke 17:27). So ran the old familiar story, and, says Jesus, it is always true; men will drift and dream for ever, heedless of fact, heedless of G.o.d--and then ruin, life gone, the soul lost, the Son of Man come, and "you yourselves thrust out"
(Luke 13:28, with Matt. 25:10-13). It is quite striking with what a variety of impressive pictures Jesus drives home his lesson. There is the person who everlastingly says and does not do (Matt.
23:3)--who promises to work and does not work (Matt. 21:28)--who receives a new idea with enthusiasm, but has not depth enough of nature for it to root itself (Mark 4:6)--who builds on sand, the "Mr. Anything" of Bunyan"s allegory; nor these alone, for Jesus is as plain on the unpunctual (Luke 13:25), the easy-going (Luke 12:47), the sort that compromises, that tries to serve G.o.d and Mammon (Matt. 6:24)--all the practical half-and-half people that take their bills quickly and write fifty, that offer G.o.d and man about half what they owe them of thought and character and action, and bid others do the same, and count themselves men of the world for their acuteness (Luke 16:1-8). And to do them justice, Jesus commends them; they have taken the exact measure of things "in their generation." Their mistake lies in their equation of the fugitive and the eternal; and it is the final and fatal mistake according to Jesus, and a very common one--forgetfulness of G.o.d in fact (Luke 12:20), a mistake that comes from _not_ thinking things out. Jesus will have men think everything out to the very end. "He never says: Come unto me, all ye who are too lazy to think for yourselves" (H.
S. Coffin). It is energy of mind that he calls for--either with me or against me. He does not recognize neutrals in his war--"he that is not against us is for us" (Luke 9:50)--"he that is not with me is against me" (Matt. 12:30).
Where does a man"s _Will_ point him? That is the question. "Out of the abundance, the overflow, of the heart, the mouth speaketh"
(Matt. 12:34). What is it that a man _wills_, purity or impurity (Matt. 5:28)? It is the inner energy that makes a man; what he says and does is an overflow from what is within--an overflow, it is true, with a reaction. It is what a man _chooses_, and what he _wills_, that Jesus always emphasizes; "G.o.d knoweth your hearts"
(Luke 16:15). Very well then; does a man choose G.o.d? That is the vital issue. Does he choose G.o.d without reserve, and in a way that G.o.d, knowing his heart, will call a whole-hearted choice?
St. Augustine, in a very interesting pa.s.sage ("Confessions", viii.
9, 21), remarks upon the fact that, when the mind commands the body, obedience is instantaneous, but that when it commands itself, it meets with resistance. "The mind commands that the mind shall will--it is one and the same mind, and it does not obey." He finds the reason; the mind does not absolutely and entirely ("ex toto") will the thing, and so it does not absolutely and entirely command it. "There is nothing strange after all in this," he says, "partly to will, partly not to will; but it is a weakness of the mind that it does not arise in its entirety, uplifted by truth, because it is borne down by habit. Thus there are two Wills, because one of them is not complete."