and secretly, but they were not satisfied with any prayers recommended
by the lukewarm, bookish priests of the Temple. They wanted a prayer of
their own which would be like a countersign among the fraternity of
Christ. Jesus on the Mount taught for the first time the Pater-noster,
the only prayer which He ever taught. It is one of the simplest prayers
in the world, the most profound which goes up from human homes to God, a
prayer neither literary nor theological—neither bold nor servile—the
most beautiful of all prayers. But though the Lord’s Prayer is simple,
it is not always understood. The century-old, mechanical reiteration of
tongues and lips, the formal ritual repetition, have made it almost a
string of syllables from which the original meaning has been lost.
Reading it over word for word to-day like a new text, which we read for
the first time, it loses its ritual banality, and freshens into its
first meaning.
“Our Father”; for we have sprung from Thee and love Thee as sons; from
Thee we shall receive no wrong.
“Which art in heaven”—in that which is opposed to the earth, in the
opposite sphere from matter, in spirit and in that small but eternal
part of the spirit which is our soul.
“Hallowed be Thy name”; let us not only adore Thee with words but be
worthy of Thee, drawing nearer to Thee with greater love, because Thou
art no longer the avenger, the Lord of Battles, but the Father who
teaches the joyfulness of peace.
“Thy Kingdom come”—the Kingdom of Heaven, of the spirit of love, that of
the Gospel.
“Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven”—may Thy law of goodness
and of perfection rule both spirit and matter, both the visible and
invisible universe.
“Give us this day our daily bread”; because our material body, necessary
support of the spirit, needs every day a little material food to
maintain it. We do not ask of Thee riches, dangerous burden, but only
that small amount which permits us to live, to become more worthy of the
promised life. Man does not live by bread alone, and yet without a
morsel of bread the soul, living in the body, could not nourish itself
on other things more precious than bread.
“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Pardon us because we
pardon others. Thou art our eternal and infinite creditor. We can never
pay our debt to Thee, but remember that because of our weakness, it is
more of an effort for us to forgive one single debt of a single one of
our debtors than it is for Thee to sweep away the record of all that we
owe Thee.
“Lead us not into temptation.” We are weak, still snared in fleshliness
in this world which at times seems so beautiful and calls us to all the
delights of faithlessness. Help us that our struggling transformation
may not be too difficult, and that our entry into the Kingdom may not be
too long delayed.
“Deliver us from evil”—Thou who art in Heaven, who art spirit, who hast
power over evil, over stubborn and hostile matter which surrounds us
everywhere, and from which it is hard to free ourselves, Thou enemy of
Satan, negation of matter, help us! Our true greatness lies in this
victory over evil, over evil which springs up constantly because it will
not be truly conquered until all have conquered it. But this decisive
victory will be less distant if Thou helpest us with Thy alliance.
With this appeal for aid, the Lord’s Prayer ends. In it are none of the
tiresome blandishments of Oriental prayers, rigmaroles of adulation and
hyperbole which seem invented by a dog, adoring his master with his
dog’s soul, because his master permits him to exist and to eat. There
are none of the querulous, complaining supplications of the Psalmist who
asks God for every variety of aid, more often temporal than spiritual,
laments if the harvest has not been good, if his fellow-citizens do not
respect him, and calls down wounds and arrows on the enemies whom he
cannot conquer himself. In the Lord’s Prayer the only word of praise is
the word “Father”; and that praise is a pledge, a testimony of love.
From this father we ask only for a little bread, and we ask in addition
the same pardon that we give our enemies; and at the last a valid
protection in our fight with evil, the enemy of all, the great wall
which hinders our entry into the Kingdom.
He who says “Our Father” is not proud but neither is he humbled; he
speaks to his Father with the intimate quiet accent of confidence almost
as from one equal to another. He is sure of his love and he knows that
his father needs no long speeches to know his desires. “Your Father,”
says Jesus, “knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him.”
Thus the most beautiful of all the prayers is a daily calling to mind of
all that we need if we are to become like God.
POWERFUL DEEDS
After He had given out the new law of the imitation of God, Jesus came
down from the Mount.
One cannot always remain on the heights. The moment we arrive on the
summit of a mountain we are fated to descend. Every ascent is a pledge
of descent, a promise to come down again. He who has something to say
must make himself heard; if he always speaks on the summits, few will
stay with him; it is cold on the summits for those who are not all on
fire; and his voice will reach few. He who has come to give, cannot ask
men, weak lungs, tired hearts, nerveless legs, to follow him upward,
hobbling along to the heights. He must follow them down to the plain,
into their houses; he must stoop to them if he is to lift them up.
Jesus knew that exalted teaching on the heights would not suffice to
spread the good news to all. He knew that men need less abstract words,
picture-making words, narrated words, words almost as tangible as facts.
And He knew that even these words would not be enough.
The simple, rustic, coarse, humble people who followed Jesus were men
whose lives were based on material things, men who could only understand
spiritual things slowly, with great effort, through material proofs,
signs and material symbols. They could not understand a spiritual truth
without its material incarnation; without evidence simple enough for
them to weigh, evidence stated in the terms of the everyday world. An
illustrative fable can lead men to moral revelation; a prodigy is to
them confirmation of a new truth, of a contested mission. Preaching,
made up of abstract axioms and aphorisms, left these imaginative
Orientals unsatisfied. Jesus had recourse to the marvelous and to
poetry: he performed miracles and spoke in parables. For many moderns
the miracles recounted by the Evangelists are a compelling reason for
turning away from Jesus and the Bible. Their shriveled brains cannot
take in the miraculous; therefore, they reason the Gospel lies, and if
it lies in so many places none of it can be believed. It is out of the
question that Jesus can ever have raised the dead: therefore, His words
have no value.
The people who reason in this way reason ill. They give to miracles a
weight and a meaning much greater than that which Jesus gave them. If
they had read the four Gospels they would have seen that Jesus is always
reluctant to perform miracles, that He does not feel this divine power
of His is of supreme importance. Every time that He finds a fair reason
for refusing, He refuses; if He yields, it is to reward the faith of the
sorrowing man or woman who calls on Him; but the Gospels show that for
Himself, for His own salvation, He never performs miracles. He performs
no miracles in the wilderness with Satan, none at Nazareth when they
wish to kill Him, none at Gethsemane when they come to arrest Him, nor
on the cross when they challenge Him to save Himself. His power is only
for others, to benefit His mortal brothers.
There are many who ask for a sign, a sign from Heaven, a sign to
persuade the unbelievers that His word is the true word: “An evil and
adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be
given to it, but the sign of the Prophet Jonas.” What is this sign? The
writers of the gospel who wrote after the resurrection thought that
Jonah emerging the third day from the whale symbolizes Jesus emerging
the third day from the tomb, but the rest of what Jesus says shows that
He meant something else. “The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with
this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the
teaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.” Nineveh
did not ask for prodigies: it was converted by the word alone. Men whom
Jesus cannot convert by truths infinitely greater than those announced
by Jonah, are below the level of the men of Nineveh, idolaters,
barbarians. Faith must not rest on marvels alone, nevertheless let us
remember that faith—though it is higher and more perfect when achieved
without miracles—can by its very fervor accomplish miracles. Hardened
hearts, locked shut against truth, are not converted even by the
greatest miracles. “If they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither
will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” He was neglected
and rejected by the cities which were the scenes of the greatest
prodigies. “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if
the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon,
they would have repented long ago, in sack-cloth and ashes.”
Jesus never held that miracles were His exclusive privilege. When they
came to tell Him that some man was driving out Demons in His name, He
answered, “Forbid him not.” This power was not denied to the disciples.
“Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils:
freely ye have received, freely give.”
Even charlatanical wizards could perform prodigies which seemed
miracles. In His time a certain Simon was doing miracles in Samaria;
even the disciples of the Pharisees performed miracles. But miracles are
not enough to enter into the Kingdom. “Many shall say to Me in that day,
Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Thy name and in Thy name cast out
devils, and in Thy name do many mighty works? And then will I profess
unto them, I never knew you; depart from Me, all ye workers of
iniquity.” It is not enough to cast out devils, if thou has not cast out
the devil in thee, the devil of pride and cupidity.
Even after His death men will see others perform miracles. “For there
shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great
signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall
deceive the very elect.” I have put you on your guard: do not believe in
these signs and these wonders until thou shalt see the Son of Man. The
miracles of false prophets do not prove the truth of what they say.
For all these reasons, Jesus abstained, as often as possible, from
working miracles, but He could not always resist the pleadings of the
sorrowful, and often His pity did not wait for the request. For a
miracle is an attribute of faith, and His faith is infinite, and that of
the believers very great. But often, as soon as the healing was
complete, He asked the ones He had healed to keep it secret. “See thou
tell no man; Go thy way.” Those who do not listen to the truth of
Christ, because they are troubled by the miracles, should remember the
profound saying which was addressed to Thomas, “Blessed are they that
have not seen and yet have believed.”
THE BLIND SEE
Men cannot live without three things, bread, health and hope. Deprived
of everything else men can—raging and cursing—go on living. But if they
have not at least these three, they hasten to summon Death, because
without them life is like Death. It is death with suffering added, an
aggravated, embittered, envenomed death, without even the anæsthetic of
insensibility. Hunger is the wasting away of the body; pain makes the
body hateful; despair—not to expect anything better, a relief, an
alleviation—takes the savor out of everything, takes away every reason
to be, and every reason to act. There are men who do not kill themselves
because suicide is an action.
He who wishes to draw men to him must give them bread, health and hope.
He must feed them, heal them and give them faith in a more beautiful
life.
Jesus gives this faith. To those who followed Him into the wilderness
and upon the mountains, He distributed material and spiritual bread. He
was not willing to transform stones into loaves, but He made the real
loaves of bread sufficient for thousands. And the stones which men carry
in their breasts He changed into loving hearts.
And He did not reject the sick. Jesus is no self-tormentor, no
flagellant. He does not believe that pain is necessary to conquer evil.
Evil is evil and must be driven away, but pain also is evil. Sorrow of
the soul is enough for salvation: why should the body suffer also,
needlessly? The old Jews thought of sickness as a punishment: Christians
believe it above all as an aid to conversion.
But Jesus does not believe in vengeance taken on the innocent, and does
not expect that true salvation can be won by ulcers or by hair shirts.
Render unto the body that which is the body’s due, and unto the soul
that which is the soul’s. He likes the friendly supper-table; He does
not refuse good old wine; and He does not send away women who pour
perfumes on His head and on His feet. Jesus can fast many days; He can
be satisfied with a bit of bread, with half of a broiled fish; and He
can sleep on the ground with His head on a stone; but till it is
unavoidable He does not seek out want, hunger and suffering. Health
seems to Him a good thing and the innocent pleasure of dining with
friends; a cup of wine drunk in good company, the fragrance of a vase of
nard, seem good and acceptable to Him also when such things cause no
suffering to others.
If a sick man accosts Him, He cures him. Jesus comes not to deny life,
but to affirm it, to institute a happier and more perfect life. He does
not purposely seek out the sick. His mission is to drive away spiritual
suffering, to bring spiritual joy. But if, by the way, it happens to Him
to drive out also suffering of the flesh, to quiet pain, to restore,
along with the health of the soul, the health also of the body, He
cannot refuse to do it. He shows Himself adverse to it, for the most
part, because His aim is higher; and He would not wish to appear in the
eyes of the people like a vagabond wizard, or like the worldly Messiah
whom most men were expecting. But since He wishes to conquer evil, and
there are men who know Him capable of conquering all evils, His love is
forced to drive out also those of the body.
When, on the road trodden by men of health, there come towards Him
groups of lepers, repellent, disfigured, horrible lepers, and when He
sees that swollen lividness, the scaly skin showing through the torn
clothes, that scabby, spotted, cracked skin, the withered, wrinkled skin
which deforms the mouth, half-closes the eyes, and puffs up the hands;
wretched, suffering ghosts, shunned by every one, separated from every
one, disgusting to every one, who are thankful if they have a little
bread, a saucer for their water, the roof of an old shed for a
hiding-place; when painfully bringing out the words through their
swollen, ulcerated lips they beg Him, whom they know to be powerful in
word and deed, beg Him, their only hope in their despair, for health,
for a cure, for a miracle, how could Jesus shun them, as other men did,
and ignore their prayer?
And the epileptics, who writhe in the dust, their faces twisted in a set
spasm, the froth on their lips; those possessed of devils who howl among
the ruined tombs, evil dogs of the night, disconsolate; the paralytics,
trunks which have just enough feeling left to suffer, dead bodies
inhabited by an imprisoned and suppliant soul; and the blind, the awful
blind, shut up from their birth in the night—foretaste of the blackness
of the tomb—stumbling in the midst of the fortunate men who go their way
freely, the terrified blind, who walk with their heads held high, their
eyes staring, as if the light could reach them from the depths of the
infinite, the blind, for whom the world is only a series of more or less
harsh surfaces, among which they grope; the blind, eternally alone, who
know the sun only by its warmth, by the heat on their bodies! How could
Jesus answer “No” to such wretchedness?
THE ANSWER TO JOHN
Jesus heals the sick, but He is in no way like a wizard or an exorcist.
He has no recourse to incantation, to amulets, to smoke, veils and
mystery. He does not call to His aid the powers of Heaven or Hell. For
Him a word is enough, a strong cry, a gentle accent, a caress. His will
is enough, and the faith of the petitioner. To them all He puts the
question, “Dost thou believe I can do this?” and when the cure is
accomplished, “Go, thy faith hath made thee whole.” For Jesus the
miracle is the union of two wills for good, the living contact between
the faith of the healer and the faith of the one healed. “Verily I say
unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto
this mountain, Remove hence, to yonder place; and it shall remove; and
nothing shall be impossible unto you. If ye had faith as a grain of
mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up
by the root and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.”
Those who have no faith, not even as much as the thousandth part of a
grain of mustard seed, swear that no man has this power, and that Jesus
is an impostor.
In the Gospels the miracles are called by three names:
“Dunameis”—forces; “Terata”—marvels; “Semeis”—signs. They are signs for
those who remember the prophecies of the Messiah; they are “marvels” for
those who look for proofs that Christ is the Messiah; but for Jesus and
in Jesus there are only “Dunameis,” mighty works, victorious
lightning-flashes from a superhuman power. The healings of Jesus are
two-fold; they are healings not only of bodies but of souls, and it is
soul-sickness which Jesus wishes especially to heal, so that the Kingdom
of Heaven may be founded also on the earth.
Most sickness is two-fold, mental and physical, and lends itself with
singular exactitude to metaphors and allegory. Jesus cured the maimed,
the halt, the fevered, a man with the dropsy, a woman with an issue of
blood. He healed also a sword-wound—Malchus’ ear struck off by Peter on
the night of Gethsemane—this only in order that His law ... “do good to
those who wrong you” ... might be observed to the very last. But Jesus
healed more often those possessed by devils, the paralytics, the lepers,
the blind, the deaf-mutes. The old name for mental diseases is
possession by devils; even Professor Aristotle believed in possession by
devils. It was believed that lunatics, epileptics, hysterical patients,
were invaded by malign spirits. The contradictory and often merely
verbal explanations of the moderns does not invalidate the fact that
demoniacs, in many cases, are such in the real sense of the word. This
learned and popular explanation lent itself admirably to that
allegorical and figurative teaching of which Jesus was so fond. He
wished to found the Kingdom of God and supplant that of Satan. It was
part of His mission to drive out demons. The difference between bodily
disorders and actual malign obsessions was of no importance: between
bodily infirmities and spiritual infirmities there is a parallelism of
nomenclature, based on real affinity. There is a likeness between the
maniac and the epileptic, between the paralytic and the slothful, the
vile and the leprous, the blind and he who cannot see the truth, the
deaf and he who will not listen to the truth, the cured and the
resurrected.
When John, shut up in prison, sent two disciples to ask Jesus if He were
the awaited prophet, or whether they should await another, Jesus
answered them, “Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and
heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed,
the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.”
Jesus did not separate the gospel from miraculous cures. They are
similar deeds; by that answer he meant that he had cured bodies in order
that the souls might be better disposed to receive the gospel.
Those who did not see the light of the sun can now see the light of
truth; those who did not hear even the words of men can now hear the
words of God; those who were possessed of Satan are freed from Satan;
those who were foul and ulcerated are clean as children; those who could
not move, who were strengthless and shrunken, now follow my footsteps;
those who were dead to the life of the soul have risen at a word from me
... and the poor, after the Good News, are richer than the wealthy.
These are my credentials, my letters proving my legitimacy.
Jesus, Healer and Liberator, is not what the bad faith of His modern
enemies wish to imagine Him, in order to gild once more their
comfortable paganism and to protect it against asceticism. “He is the
God,” they say, “of the sick, the weak, the dirty, the wretched, the
strengthless, the servants.” But all that Christ does is to give health,
strength, purity, wealth, and liberty. He draws near to the sick
precisely in order to drive away their sickness; to the weak to lift
them out of their weakness; to the dirty in order to cleanse them; to
slaves in order to free them. He does not love the sick only because
they are sick: He loves health, just as the men of antiquity did, and He
loves it so greatly that He longs to give it back to those who have lost
it. Jesus is the prophet of happiness, the promiser of life, of life
that is worthier to be lived. The miracles are only pledges of His
promise.
TALITHA QUMI
“The dead shall arise!” This is one of the signs which are to suffice
for John the Baptist in prison. To the good sister, to the hard-working
Martha, Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life: he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever
liveth, and believeth in me, shall never die.” The resurrection is a
rebirth in faith, immortality is the permanent affirmation of this
faith.
The Evangelists know three resurrections, historical events narrated
with a sober but explicit statement of the evidence. Jesus raised up
three who were dead: a young lad, a little girl, and a friend.
He was entering Nain, “the beautiful” set on a little hill some miles
from Nazareth, and met a funeral procession. They were carrying to the
grave the young son of a widow. She had lost her husband a short time
before; this son alone had been left to her; now they were carrying away
the son in turn for burial. Jesus saw the mother walking among the
women, weeping with the amazed and smothered grief of mothers which is
so profoundly moving. She had only two men in all the world who loved
her; the first one was dead, the second was now dead; one after the
other, both of them disappeared. She was left alone, a woman alone
without a man. Without a husband, without a son, without a help, a prop,
a comfort. Gone the love that was a memory of youth, gone the love that
was hope for declining years. Gone both those poor, simple loves. A
husband can console his wife for the loss of their son; a son can make
up for the loss of a husband. If only one had been left! Now her lips
were never to know another kiss.
Jesus had compassion on this mother; her grief was like an accusation.
“Weep not,” he said.
He went to the side of the cataleptic and touched him. The boy was lying
there stretched out, wrapped in his shroud, but with his face uncovered,
set in the stern paleness of the dead. The bearers halted; all were
silent; even the mother, startled, was quiet.
“Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.” And he that was dead sat up, and
began to speak. And He delivered him to his mother. He “delivered” him
because he was now hers. Jesus had taken him from the land of death to
give him back to her who could not live without him, that a mother might
cease from weeping.