THE MAN AND HIS MIND
It is a commonplace with those who take literature seriously that
what is to reach the heart must come from the heart; and the maxim
may be applied conversely--that what has reached a heart has come
from a heart--that what continues to reach the heart, among strange
peoples, in distant lands, after long ages, has come from a heart of
no common make. The Anglo-Saxon boy is at home in the Odyssey; and
when he is a man--if he has the luck to be guided into classical
paths--he finds himself in the Aeneid; and from this certain things
are deduced about the makers of those poems--that they knew life,
looked on it with bright, keen eyes, loved it, and lived it over
again as they shaped it into verse.
When we turn to the first three Gospels, we find the same thing.
Here are books with a more worldwide range than Homer or Virgil,
translated again and again from the first century of their existence
on to the latest--and then more than ever--into all sorts of
tongues, to reach men all over the globe; and that purpose they have
achieved. They have done it not so much for the literary graces of
the translators or even of the original authors, though in one case
these are more considerable than is sometimes allowed. That the
Gospels owe their appeal to the recorded sayings and doings of our
Lord, is our natural way of putting it to-day; but if for "our Lord"
we put a plainer description, more congenial to the day in which the
Gospels were written, we shall be in a better position to realize
the significance of the worldwide appeal of his words. Thus and
thus, then, spoke a mere provincial, a Jew who, though far less
conspicuous and interesting, came from the region of Meleager and
Philodemos--not from their town of Gadara, nor possibly from their
district, but from some place not so very far away.
It was not to be expected that he should win the hearts of men as he
did. He had not the Greek culture of the two Gadarenes. Celsus even
found his style of speech rather vulgar. But he has, as a matter of
common knowledge--so common as hardly to be noted--won the hearts of
men in every race and every land. The fact is familiar, but we have
as historians and critics to look for the explanation. What has been
his appeal? And what the heart and nature, from which came this
incredible power and reach of appeal? "Out of the abundance (the
overflow) of the heart the mouth speaketh," he said. (Matt. 12:34).
This he amplified, as we have seen, by his insistence on the weight
of every idle word (Matt. 12:36)--the unstudied and spontaneous
expression or ejaculation--the reflex, in modern phrase--which gives
the real clue to the man's inner nature and deeper mind, which
"justifies" him, therefore, or "condemns" him (Matt. 12:37). The
overflow of the heart, he holds, shows more decisively than anything
else the quality of the spring in its depths.
Here is a suggestion which we find true in ordinary life as well as
in the study of literature. If we turn it back upon its author, he
at least will not complain, and we shall perhaps gain a new sense of
his significance by approaching him at a new angle, from an outlook
not perhaps much frequented. How did he come to speak in this
manner, to say this and that? To what feeling or thought, to what
attitude to life, is this or the other saying due? If he, too, spoke
"out of the overflow of his heart"--and we can believe it when we
think of the freshness and spontaneity with which he spoke--of what
nature and of what depth was that heart?
We can very well believe that much in his speech that was
unforgettable to others, he forgot himself. They remembered, they
could not help remembering, what he said; but he--no! he said it and
moved on, keeping no register of his sayings; and so much the more
natural and characteristic they are. Nor would he, like smaller
people, be very careful of the form and turn of his speech; it was
never set. Certainly he gave his followers the rule not to study
their language (Mark 13:11). Whether or no he had consciously
thought it all out; we can see the value of his rule, and how it
fits in with his way of life and safeguards it. Under such a rule
speech will not be stereotyped; no set form of words will impose
itself on the free movement of thought, the mind can and will move
of itself unhampered; and when the mind keeps and develops such
freedom of movement, it commonly breaks new ground and handles new
things. Not to be careful of our speech means for most of us
slovenly thinking; but when a man thinks in earnest and takes truth
seriously, when he speaks with his eye on his object, his language
will not be slovenly, his instinct for fact will keep his speech
pure and true. This is what we find in the sayings of Jesus; there
is form, but living form, the freedom and grace which the clear mind
and the friendly eye communicate insensibly and inimitably to
language.
Our task in this chapter is primarily a historical one. From the
words of Jesus we have to work back to the type of mind from which
they come. There is always danger in such a task. We may forget the
wide and living variety of the mind we study; our own minds may not
be large enough, nor tender enough, not various, quick and
sympathetic in such a degree as to apprehend what we find, to see
what it means, and to relate it to itself, detail to whole. How much
greater the danger here! While we analyse, we have to remember that
the most correct analysis of features or characteristics may easily
fail to give us a true idea of the face or the character which we
analyse. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The face and
the character have an "integrity," a wholeness. The detail may be of
immense value to us, studied as detail; but for the true view the
detail, familiar as it may be to us, and dear to us, must be sunk in
the general view. Especially is this true of great characters. The
"reconstruction of a personality"--to borrow a phrase from some
psychologists--is a very difficult matter, even when we are masters
of our detail. There is a proportion, a perspective, a balance, a
poise about a character--my terms may involve some mixture of
metaphors, but if the mixture brings out the complexity and
difficulty of our task, it will be justified. Above all there is
life, and as a life deepens and widens, it grows complex,
unintelligible, and wonderful. It is more so than ever in the case
of Jesus. Yet we have to grapple with this great task, if we are to
know him, even if here as elsewhere we realize quickly that the
beginning of real knowledge is when we grasp how much we do not
know, how much there is to know. Attempted in this spirit, a study
of the mind of Jesus and his characteristics should help us forward
to some further intimacy with him.
The Gospels do not, like some biographies ancient and modern, give a
place to the physical characteristics of Jesus. Suetonius in a very
short sketch adds the personal aspect of the poet Horace, who, it is
true, had led the way by such allusions (Epist. i. 4, 15-16), and
tells us how Augustus said he was "a squat little pot" (sessilis
obba). The "Acts of Thekla" in a similar way describe St. Paul's
short figure with its suggestion of quickness. But the only personal
traits of this sort that I recall in the New Testament are the eyes
of Jesus and Paul's way of stretching out a hand when he spoke. In
view of this reticence, it is rather remarkable how often the
Gospels refer to Jesus "looking." He "looked round about on" the
people in the Synagogue, and then--with some suggestion of a pause
and silence while he looked, "he saith unto the man" (Mark 3:5).
When Peter deprecated the Cross, we find the same; "when he had
turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter" (Mark
8:33). When the rich young ruler came so impulsively to him to ask
him about eternal life, Jesus, "looking upon him, loved him"--and we
touch there a certain reminiscence of eye-witnesses (Mark 10:21).
There are other references of the same kind in the narratives--the
look seems to come into the story naturally, without the writers
noticing it. There must have been much else as familiar to his
friends and companions. They must have known him as we know our
friends--the inflections of his voice, his characteristic movements,
the hang of his clothes, his step in the dark, and all such things.
Did he speak quickly or slowly? or move his hand when he spoke? The
teaching posture of Buddha's hand is stereotyped in his images. We
are not told such things about Jesus, and guessing does not take us
very far. Yet a stanza in one of the elegies written on the death of
Sir Philip Sidney may be taken as a far-away likeness of a greater
and more wonderful figure--and not lead us very far astray:--
A sweet, attractive kind of grace;
The full assurance given by looks;
Perpetual comfort in a face;
The lineaments of Gospel books.
If we are not explicitly told of such things by the evangelists,
they are easily felt in the story. The "paradoxes," as we call
them--a rather dull name for them--surely point to a face alive with
intellect and gaiety. The way in which, for instance, the leper
approaches him, implies the man's eyes fixed in close study on
Jesus' face, and finding nothing there to check him and everything
to bring him nearer (Mark 1:41). When Mark tells us that he greeted
the Syro-Phoenician woman's sally about the little dogs eating the
children's crumbs under the table with the reply, "For the sake of
this saying of yours ...," we must assume some change of expression
on such a face as that of Jesus (Mark 7:29).
We read again and again of the interest men and women found in his
preaching and teaching--how they hung on him to hear him, how they
came in crowds, how on one occasion they drove him into a boat for a
pulpit. It is only familiarity that has blinded us to the "charm"
they found in his speech--"they marvelled at his words of charm"
(Luke 4:22)--to the gaiety and playfulness that light up his
lessons. For instance, there is a little-noticed phrase, that grows
very delightful as we study it, in his words to the seventy
disciples--"Into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace to this
house (the common "salaam" of the East); and if a son of peace be
there, your peace shall rest upon it; if not, your "salaam" will
come back to _you_" (Luke 10:6). "A son of peace"--not _the_ son of
peace--what a beautiful expression; what a beautiful idea too, that
the unheeded Peace! comes back and blesses the heart that wished it,
as if courteous and kind words never went unrewarded! Think again of
"Solomon in all his glory" (Matt. 6:29)--before the phrase was
hackneyed by common quotation. Do not such words reveal nature?
A more elaborate and more amusing episode is that of the Pharisee's
drinking operations. We are shown the man polishing his cup,
elaborately and carefully; for he lays great importance on the
cleanness of his cup; but he forgets to clean the inside. Most
people drink from the inside, but the Pharisee forgot it, dirty as
it was, and left it untouched. Then he sets about straining what he
is going to drink--another elaborate process; he holds a piece of
muslin over the cup and pours with care; he pauses--he sees a
mosquito; he has caught it in time and flicks it away; he is safe
and he will not swallow it. And then, adds Jesus, he swallowed a
camel. How many of us have ever pictured the process, and the series
of sensations, as the long hairy neck slid down the throat of the
Pharisee--all that amplitude of loose-hung anatomy--the hump--two
humps--both of them slid down--and he never noticed--and the
legs--all of them--with whole outfit of knees and big padded feet.
The Pharisee swallowed a camel--and never noticed it (Matt. 23:24,
25). It is the mixture of sheer realism with absurdity that makes
the irony and gives it its force. Did no one smile as the story was
told? Did no one see the scene pictured with his own mind's eye--no
one grasp the humour and the irony with delight? Could any one, on
the other hand, forget it? A modern teacher would have said, in our
jargon, that the Pharisee had no sense of proportion--and no one
would have thought the remark worth remembering. But Jesus'
treatment of the subject reveals his own mind in quite a number of
aspects.
When he bade turn the other cheek--that sentence which Celsus found
so vulgar--did no one smile, then, at the idea of anybody ever
dreaming of such an act (Matt. 5:39)? Nor at the picture of the kind
brother taking a mote from his brother's eye, with a whole baulk of
timber in his own (Matt. 7:5)? Nor at the suggestion of doing two
miles of forced labour when only one was demanded (Matt. 5:41)? Nor
when he suggested that anxiety about food and clothing was a mark of
the Gentiles (Matt. 6:32)? Did none of his disciples mark a touch of
irony when he said that among the Gentile dynasties the kings who
exercise authority are called "Benefactors" (Luke 22:25)? It was
true; Euergetes is a well-known kingly title, but the explanation
that it was the reward for strenuous use of monarchic authority was
new. Are we to think his face gave no sign of what he was doing? Was
there no smile?
We are told by his biographer that Marcus Aurelius had a face that
never changed--for joy or sorrow, "being an adherent," he adds, "of
the Stoic philosophy." The pose of superiority to emotion was not
uncommonly held in those times to be the mark of a sage--Horace's
"nil admirari". The writers of the Gospels do not conceal that Jesus
had feelings, and expressed them. We read how he "rejoiced in
spirit" (Luke 10:21)--how he "sighed" (Mark 7:34) and "sighed
deeply" (Mark 8:12)--how his look showed "anger" (Mark 3:5). They
tell us of his indignant utterances (Matt. 23:14; Mark 11:17)--of
his quick sensitiveness to a purposeful touch (Mark 5:30)--of his
fatigue (Mark 7:24; Luke 8:23)--of his instant response, as we have
just seen, to contact with such interesting spirits as the
Syro-Phoenician woman and the rich young ruler. Above all, we find
him again and again "moved with compassion." We saw the leper
approach him, with eyes fixed on the face of Jesus. The man's
appeal--"If thou wilt thou canst make me clean"--his misery moves
Jesus; he reaches out his hand, and, with no thought for contagion
or danger, he touches the leper--so deep was the wave of pity that
swept through him--and he heals the man (Mark 1:40-42). It would
almost seem as if the touching impressed the spectators as much as
the healing. Compassion is an old-fashioned word, and sympathy has a
wide range of suggestions, some of them by now a little cold; we
have to realize, if we can, how deeply and genuinely Jesus felt with
men, how keen his feeling was for their suffering and for their
hunger, and at the same moment reflect how strong and solid a nature
it is that is so profoundly moved. Again, when we read of his happy
way in dealing with children, are we to draw no inference as to his
face, and what it told the children? Finally, on this part of our
subject, we are given glimpses of his dark hours. The writer to the
Hebrews speaks of his "offering up prayers and supplications with
strong crying and tears" and "learning obedience by the things that
he suffered" (Heb. 5:7, 8), and Luke, perhaps dealing with the same
occasion, says he was "in agony" (Luke 22:44), a strong phrase from
a man of medical training. Luke again, with the other evangelists,
refers to the temptations of Jesus, and in a later passage records
the poignant and revealing sentence--"Ye are they that have
continued with me in my temptations" (Luke 22:28). Finally, there is
the last cry upon the Cross (Mark 15:37). So frankly, and yet so
unobtrusively, they lay bare his soul, as far as they saw it.
From what is given us it is possible to go further and see something
of his habits of mind. His thought will occupy us in later chapters;
here we are concerned rather with the way in which his mind moves,
and the characteristics of his thinking.
First of all, we note a certain swiftness, a quick realization of a
situation, a character, or the meaning of a word. Men try to trap
him with a question, and he instantly "recognizes their trickery"
(Luke 20:23). When they ask for a sign, he is as quick to see what
they have in mind (Mark 8:11-13). He catches the word whispered to
Jairus--half hears, half divines it, in an instant (Mark 5:36). He
is surprised at slowness of mind in other men (Matt. 15:16; Mark
8:21). And in other things he is as quick--he sees "the kingdoms of
this world in a moment of time" (Luke 4:5); he beholds "Satan fallen
(aorist participle) from heaven like lightning" (Luke 10:18)--two
very striking passages, which illuminate his mind for us in a very
important phase of it. We ought to have been able to guess without
them that he saw things instantly and in a flash--that they stood
out for him in outline and colour and movement there and then. That
is plain in the parables from nature, and here it is confirmed. Is
there in all his parables a blurred picture, the edges dim or the
focus wrong? The tone of the parables is due largely to this gift of
visualizing, to use an ugly modern word, and of doing it with
swiftness and precision.
Several things combine to make this faculty, or at least go along
with it--a combination not very common even among men of genius--an
unusual sense of fact, a very keen and vivid sympathy, and a gift of
bringing imagination to bear on the fact in the moment of its
discovery, and afterwards in his treatment of the fact.
On his sense of fact we have touched before, in dealing with his
close observation of Nature. It is an observation that needs no
note-book, that is hardly conscious of itself. There is, as we know,
a happy type of person who sees almost without looking, certainly
without noticing--and sees aright too. The temperament is described
by Wordsworth in the opening books of "The Prelude". The poet type
seems to lose so much and yet constantly surprises us by what it has
captured, and sometimes hardly itself realizes how much has been
done. The gains are not registered, but they are real and they are
never lost, and come flashing out all unexpectedly when the note is
struck that calls them. So one feels it was with Jesus' intimate
knowledge of Nature--it is not the knowledge of botanist or
naturalist, but that of the inmate and the companion, who by long
intimacy comes to know far more than he dreams. "Wise master
mariners," wrote the Greek poet, Pindar, long before, "know the wind
that shall blow on the third day, and are not wrecked for headlong
greed of gain." They know the weather, as we say, by instinct; and
instinct is the outcome of intimacy, of observation accurate but
sub-conscious.
It chimes in with this instinct for fact, that Jesus should lay so
much emphasis on truth of word and truth of thought. Any hypocrisy
is a leaven (Matt. 16:19; Luke 12:1); any system of two standards of
truth spoils the mind (Matt. 5:33-37). The divided mind fails
because it is not for one thing or the other. If it is impossible to
serve God and mammon, truth and God go together in one allegiance;
and a non-Theocentric element in a man's thought will be fatal
sooner or later to any aptitude he has by nature for God and truth.
We find this illustrated in Jesus' own case. At the heart of his
instinct for fact is his instinct for God. He goes to the permanent
and eternal at once in his quest of fact, because his instinct for
God is so sure and so compelling. Bishop Phillips Brooks noted in
Jesus' conversation "a constant progress from the arbitrary and
special to the essential and universal forms of thought," "a true
freedom from fastidiousness," "a singular largeness" in his
intellectual life. The small question is answered in the
larger--"the life is more than meat and the body is more than
raiment" (Luke 12:23). When he is challenged on divorce, he goes
past Moses to God (Matt. 19:4)--"He which made them at the beginning
made them male and female." Every question is settled for him by
reference to God, and to God's principles of action and to God's
laws and commands; and God, as we shall see in a later chapter, is
not for him a conception borrowed from others, a quotation from a
book. God is real, living, and personal; and all his teaching is
directed to drive his disciples into the real; he insists on the
open mind, the study of fact, the fresh, keen eye turned on the
actual doings of God.
When life and thought have such a centre, a simplicity and an
integrity follow beyond what we might readily guess. "When thine eye
is single, thy whole body also is full of light, ... if thy whole
body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole
shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth
give thee light" (Luke 11:34-36). It is this fullness of light that
we find in Jesus; and as the light plays on one object and another,
how clear and simple everything grows! All round about him was
subtlety, cleverness, fastidiousness. His speech is lucid, drives
straight to the centre, to the principle, and is intelligible. We
may not see how far his word carries us, but it is abundantly plain
that simple and straightforward people do understand Jesus--not all
at once, but sufficiently for the moment, and with a sense that
there is more beyond. His thought is uncomplicated by distinctions
due to tradition and its accidents. His whole attitude to life is
simple--he has no taboos; he comes "eating and drinking" (Matt.
11:19); and he told his followers, when he sent them out to preach,
to eat what they were given (Luke 10:7); "give alms," he says, "of
such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you"
(Luke 11:41). If God gives the food, it will probably be clean; and
the old taboos will be mere tradition of men. He is not interested
in what men call "signs," in the exceptional thing; the ordinary
suffices when one sees God in it. One of Jesus' great lessons is to
get men to look for God in the commonplace things of which God makes
so many, as if Abraham Lincoln were right and God did make so many
common people, because he likes them best. The commonest
flowers--God thinks them out, says Jesus, and takes care of them
(Matt. 6:28-30). Hence there is little need of special machinery for
contact with God--priesthoods, trances, visions, or mystical
states--abnormal means for contact with the normal. When Jesus
speaks of the very highest and holiest things, he is as simple and
natural as when he is making a table in the carpenter-shop. Sense
and sanity are the marks of his religion.
"Sense of fact" is a phrase which does not exclude--perhaps it even
suggests--some hint of dullness. The matter-of-fact people are
valuable in their way, but rarely illuminative, and it is because
they lack the imagination that means sympathy. Now in Jesus' case
there is a quickness and vividness of sympathy--he likes the birds
and flowers and beasts he uses as illustrations. They are not the
"natural objects" with which dull people try to brighten their pages
and discourses. They are happy living things that come to his mind,
as it were, of themselves, because, shall we say? they know they
will be welcome there; and they are welcome. His pity and sympathy
are unlike ours in having so much more intelligence and
fellow-feeling in them. He understands men and women, as his gift of
bright and winning speech shows. After all, as Carlyle has pointed
out in many places, it is this gift of tenderness and understanding,
of sympathy, that gives the measure of our intellects.[14] It is the
faculty by which men touch fact and master it. It is the want of it
that makes so many clever and ingenious people so futile and
distressing.
The sense of fact and the gift for sympathy and the foundations, so
to speak, of the imagination which gives their quality to the
stories and pictures of Jesus. He thinks in pictures, as it were;
they fill his speech, and every one of them is alive and real.
Think, for example, of the Light of the world (Matt. 5:14), the
strait gate and the narrow way (Matt. 7:14), the pictures of the
bridegroom (Mark 2:19), sower (Matt. 13:3), pearl merchant (Matt.
13:45), and the men with the net (Matt. 13:47), the sheep among the
wolves (Matt. 10:16), the woman sweeping the house (Luke 15:8), the
debtor going to prison accompanied by his creditor and the officer
with the judge's warrant (Luke 12:58), the shepherd separating his
sheep from the goats (Matt. 25:32), the children playing in the
market-place pretending to pipe or to mourn (Luke 7:32), the fall of
the house (Matt. 7:27)--or the ironical pictures of the blind
leading the blind straight for the ditch (Matt. 15:14), the
vintagers taking their baskets to the bramble bushes (Matt. 7:16),
the candle burning away brightly under the bushel (Matt. 5:15; Luke
11:33), the offering of pearls to the pigs (Matt. 7:6)--or his
descriptions of what lay before himself as a cup and a baptism (Mark
10:38), and of his task as the setting fire to the world (Luke
12:49). There is a truthfulness and a living energy about all these
pictures--not least about those touched with irony.
There are, however, pictures less realistic and more
imaginative--one or two of them, in the language of the fireside,
quite "creepy." Here is a house--a neat, trim little house--and for
the English reader there is of course a garden or a field round it,
and a wood beyond. Out of the wood comes something--stealthily
creeping up towards the house--something not easy to make out, but
weary and travel-stained and dusty--and evil. A strange feeling
comes over one as one watches--it is evil, one is certain of it.
Nearer and nearer to the house it creeps--it is by the window--it
rises to look in, and one shudders to think of those inside who
suddenly 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.