THE TEACHER AND HIS DISCIPLES
It was as a teacher that Jesus of Nazareth first began to gather
disciples round him. But to understand the work of the Teacher, we
must have some general impression of the world to which he came. The
background will help us understand what had to be done, and what it
was he meant to do.
Bishop Gore, in a book recently published, suggested that the belief
that God is Love is not axiomatic. Many of us take it for granted,
as the point at which religion naturally begins; but, as he
emphasized, it is not an obvious truth; it is something of which we
have to be convinced, something that has to be made good to men.
Unless we bear this in mind, we shall miss a great deal of what
Jesus has really done, by assuming that he was not needed to do it.
"Out of a darker world than ours came this new spring." We must look
at the world as it was, when Jesus came. In a later chapter we shall
have to consider more fully the religions of the Roman world. One or
two points may be anticipated. First of all, we have to realize what
a hard world it was. Men and women are harder than we sometimes
think, and the natural hardness to which the human heart grows of
itself, needed more correction than it had in those days.
Among the many papyrus documents that have been found in late years
in Egypt--documents that have pictured for us the life of Egypt, and
have recorded for us also the language of the New Testament in a
most illuminative way--there is one that illustrates only too aptly
the unconscious hardness of the times. It is a letter--no literary
letter, no letter that any one would ordinarily have thought of
keeping; it has survived by accident. It was written by an Egyptian
Greek to his wife. She lived somewhere up the country, and he had
gone to Alexandria. She had been expecting a baby when he left, and
he wrote a rough, but not an unkind, letter to her. He writes:
"Hilarion to Alis . . . greetings.... Know that we are still even
now in Alexandria. Do not fidget, if, at the general return, I stay
in Alexandria. I pray and beseech you, take care of the little
child, and as soon as we have our wages, I will send you up
something. If you are delivered, if it was a male, let it live; if
it was a female, cast it out . . . . How can I forget you? So don't
fidget."[15]
The letter is not an unkind one; it is sympathetic, masculine,
direct, and friendly. And then it ends with the suggestion,
inconceivable to us to-day, that if the baby is a girl, it need not
be kept. It can be put out either on the land or in the river, left
to kite or crocodile. The evidence of satirists is generally to be
discounted, because they tend to emphasize the exceptional; and it
is not the exceptional thing that gives the character of an age, or
of a man. It is the kind of thing that we take for granted and
assume to be normal that shows our character or gives the note of
the day; and what we omit to notice may be as revealing.
In the plays of the Athenian comic poets of the third and fourth
centuries B.C. we find, to wearisomeness, one recurring plot. The
heroine turns out to be, not just a common girl, but the daughter of
the best family in Athens, exposed when she was a baby. When Plato
sketched his ideal constitution, in addition to the mating of
suitable pairs to be decided by government, he added that, if the
offspring were not good enough, it should be put away where it would
not be found again. Aristotle allowed the same practice. The most
cultured race on earth freely exposed its infants; and this letter
of Hilarion to Alis--a dated letter by the way, of September or
October in the year 1 A.D.--makes it clear that the practice of
exposure of children still prevailed; and there is other evidence
which need not now detain us. It is a hard world, where kind people
or good people can think of such things as ordinary and natural.
Evidence of the character of an age is given by the treatment of
criminals; and that age was characterized by crucifixion. They would
take a human being, spread him out on a cross on the ground, drive
nails through his hands and feet; and then the cross was raised--the
agony of the victim during the movement is not to be imagined. It
was made fast; and there the victim hung, suspended between heaven
and earth, to live or die at his leisure. By and by crows would
gather round him. "I have been good," said the slave. "Then you have
your reward," says the Latin poet, "you will not feed the crows on
the cross."[16] There is a very striking phrase in St. Matthew: "And
sitting down they watched him there" (Matt. 27:36). The soldiers
nailed three men to crosses, and sat down beneath them to dice for
their clothes. Our tolerances, like our utterances, come out of the
abundance of the heart, and stamp us for what we are.
We cannot easily realize all that slavery meant. When we read in the
Fourth Gospel that "the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the
world" (John 1:29), that was written before Jesus Christ had
abolished slavery; for, we remember, it was done by his people
against the judgement of the business experts. Slavery meant robbing
the man of every right that Nature gave him; and, as Homer said long
ago, "Farseeing Zeus takes away half a man's manhood, when he brings
the day of slavery upon him."[17] He became a thief, a liar, dirty,
and bad; and with the woman it was still worse. The slave woman was
a little lower than the animal; she might not have offspring. It was
"natural," men said; "Nature had designed certain races to be
slaves; slavery was written in Nature; it was Nature's law." These
were not the thoughts of vulgar people, but of some of the best of
the Greeks--not of all, indeed; but society was organized on the
basis of slavery. It was an accepted axiom of all social and
economic life.
As to the spiritual background, for the present let us postpone the
heathen world and consider the Jews, who represented in some ways
the world's highest at this period. Modern scholarship is shedding
fresh light on the literature and ideas that were prevalent between
the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. But what
uncertainty about God! Why some people should think that it was
easier to believe in God in those days than now, I do not see. Far
less was known of God; the record of his doings was not so long as
it is for us, and it was not so well known. No one could understand
what God meant, if he was quite clear himself. Look at what he did
with the nation. He chose Israel, he established the kingdom of
David. They did not get on very well, and at last were carried away
into Captivity in Babylon. So much he did for his people; and when
he brought them back again to the Promised Land, it was to a very
trying and difficult situation; and worse still followed after
Nehemiah's day. Alexander the Great's conquest of the East left a
Macedonian dynasty ruling those regions, and one of their great
kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to stamp out the religion of
Jehovah altogether. The Book of Daniel is a record of that
persecution about 166 B.C. The Maccabeean brothers delivered Israel,
and rescued the religion of Jehovah; and a kingdom of a sort was
established with them; but the grandsons of the liberators became
tyrants. What did God mean? Out of all the promises to Israel, to
the House of David, this is what comes. Herod follows--a foreign
king and an Edomite; and the Romans are over all, suzerains and
rulers.
In despair of the present men began to forecast the future. A time
will surely come, they said, when God will give an anointed one, the
Messiah; he will set all Israel free, will make Israel rule the
world instead of the Romans; he will gather together the scattered
of Israel from the four winds, reunite and assemble God's people in
triumph in Palestine. And then, when the prophet paused, a plain man
spoke: "I don't care if he does. My father all his life looked
forward to that. What does it matter now, if God redeems his people,
or if he does not? My father is dead." The answer was, why should
your father not come with the redeemed Israel? But what evidence is
there for that? Does God care for people beyond the grave? Is there
personal immortality?--that became the anxious question.[18]
But is this kingdom of the Messiah to be an earthly or a heavenly
kingdom? Will it be in Jerusalem or in heaven? Are you quite sure
that there is any distinction in the other world between good and
bad, between Jew and Gentile? Some people thought the kingdom would
be in Jerusalem; others said it would be in heaven, and added that
the Jews will look down and see the Gentiles in hell--something
worth seeing at last. But, after all, it was still guesswork--
"perhaps" was the last word.
When the question is asked, "Was Jesus the Messiah?" the obvious
reply is, "Which Messiah?" For there seems to have been no standard
idea of the Messiah. The Messiah was, on the whole, as vague a term
as, in modern politics, Socialism or Tariff Reform. Neither of them
has come; perhaps they never will come, and nobody knows what they
will be till they do come. Jesus is not what they expected. A Jewish
girl, at an American Student Conference a year or two ago, said
about Jesus: "I do not think he is the Messiah, but I do love him."
Of course he was not in her Jewish sense. The term was a vague one.
The main point was that men were uncertain about God. God was
unintelligible. They did not understand his ideas, either for the
nation or for the individual; God's plans miscarried with such
fatality. Or if he had some deeper design, it was still all
guesswork. It seemed likely, or at least right, that he should
achieve somehow the final damnation of the Gentiles--the Romans, and
the rest of us--but nothing was very clear. In the meantime, if God
was going to damn the Gentiles in the next world, why should not the
Jews do it in this? Human nature has only too ready an answer for
such a question--as we can read in too many dark pages of history,
in the stories of wars and religious persecutions.
The uncertainty about God in Judaism reacted on life and made it
hard.
Even the virtues of men were difficult; they were apt to be
nerveless and uncertain, because their aim was uncertain, and they
wanted inspiration. Of course there are always kindly hearts; but a
man will never put forth quite his best for an uncertainty. There
was a want of centre about their virtues, a want of faith, and as a
result they were too largely self-directed.[19]
A man was virtuous in order to secure himself in case God should be
awkward. There was no sufficient relation between man and God. God
was judge, no doubt; but his character could be known from his
attitude to the Gentiles. Could a man count on God and how far?
Could he rely on God supporting him, on God wishing to have him in
this world and the next? No, not with any certainty. It comes to a
fundamental unbelief in God, resting, as Jesus saw, on an essential
misconception of God's nature; and this resulted in the spoiling of
life. Men did not use God. "Where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also," Jesus said (Luke 12:34); and it was not in God.
Men's interest and belief were elsewhere.
Now the first thing that Jesus had to do, as a teacher, was to
induce men to rethink God. Men, he saw, do not want precepts; they
do not want ethics, morals or rules; what they do need is to rethink
God, to rediscover him, to re-explore him, to live on the basis of
relation with God. There is one striking difference between
Christianity and the other religions, in that the others start with
the idea that God is known. Christians do not so start. We are still
exploring God on the lines of Jesus Christ--rethinking God all the
time, finding him out. That is what Jesus meant us to do. If Jesus
had merely put before men an ethical code, that would have been to
do what the moralists had done before him--what moralists always do,
with the same naive idea that they are doing a great deal for us.
His object was far more fundamental.
The first thing was to bring people on to the very centre and to get
there at once--to get men away from the accumulation of occasional
and self-directed virtues, from the self-sustained life, from
self-acquired righteousness, and to bring them to face the fact of
God, to realize the seriousness of God and of life, and to see God.
When he preached self-denial, he did not mean the modern virtue of
self-denial with all its pettinesses, but a genuine negation of
self, a total forgetfulness of self by having the mind set entirely
on God and God's purposes, a readjustment of everything with God as
the real centre of all. This is always difficult; it is not less
difficult where the conception of God is, as it was with Jesus,
entirely spiritual. The whole experience of mankind was against the
idea that there could be a religion at all without priest,
sacrifice, altar, temple, and the like. There is a very minimum of
symbol and cult in the teaching of Jesus--so little that the ancient
world thought the Christians were atheists, because they had no
image, no temple, no sacrifice, no ritual, nothing that suggested
religion in the ordinary sense of the word. We shall realize the
difficulty of what Jesus was doing when we grasp that he meant
people to see God independently of all their conventional aids. To
lead them to commit themselves in act to God on such terms was a
still more difficult thing. To believe in God in a general sort of
way, to believe in Providence at large, is a very different thing
from getting yourself crucified in the faith that God cares for you,
and yet somehow wishes you to endure crucifixion. How far will men
commit themselves to God? Jesus means them to commit themselves to
God right up to the hilt--as Bunyan put it, "to hazard all for God
at a clap." Decision for God, obedience to God, that is the prime
thing--action on the basis of God and of God's care for the
individual.
His purpose that this shall not be merely the religion of choice
spirits or of those immediately around him, but shall be the one
religion of all the world, makes the task still vaster. He means not
merely to touch the Jews. Whether he says so in explicit terms or
not, it is implied in all that he says and does, that the new
movement should be far wider than anything the world had ever seen;
it was to cover the whole of mankind. He meant that every individual
in all the world should have the centre of gravity of his thinking
shifted.
Again, he had to think of a re-creation of the language of men, till
God should be a new word. Our constant problem is to give his word
his value, his meaning. He meant that men should learn their
religious vocabulary again, till the words they used should suggest
his meanings to their minds. Something of this was achieved, when
some of his disciples came to him and said: "Teach us to pray, as
John also taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). Further, he had to
secure that men should begin the rethinking of all life--personal,
social, and national--from the very foundations, on new lines--what
is called a transvaluation of all values. With a new centre,
everything has to be thought out anew into what St. Paul calls the
fullness of Christ (Eph. 4:13). Then finally the question comes, how
to secure continuity? Will the movement outlast his personal
influence? These are his problems--large enough, every one of them.
How does he face them?
The Gospel began with friendship, and we know from common life what
that is, and how it works. Old acquaintance and intimacy are the
heart of it. The mind is on the alert when we meet the
stranger--quick and eager to master his outlook and his ways of
thought, to see who and what he is--it is critical, self-protective,
rather than receptive. But, as time goes on, we notice less, we
study the man less as we see more of him. Yet, in this easier and
more careless intercourse, when the mind is off guard, it is
receiving a host of unnoticed impressions, which in the long run may
have extraordinary influence. Pleasant and easy-going, a perpetual
source of interest and rest of mind, the friendship continues, till
we find to our surprise that we are changed. Stage by stage, as one
comes to know one's friend, by unconscious and freely given
sympathy, one lives the other man's life, sees and feels things as
he does, slips into his language, and, by degrees, into his
thoughts--and then wakes up to find oneself, as it were, remade by
the other's personality, so close has been the identification with
the man we grew to love. This is what we find in our own lives; and
we find it in the Gospels.
A sentence from St. Augustine's Confessions gives us the key to the
whole story. "Sed ex amante alio accenditur alius" ("Confessions",
iv. 14, 911). "One loving spirit sets another on fire." Jesus brings
men to the new exploration of God, to the new commitment of
themselves to God, simply by the ordinary mechanism of friendship
and love. This, in plain English, is after all the idea of
Incarnation--friendship and identification. Jesus has a genius for
friendship, a gift for understanding the feelings of men. Look, for
example, at the quick word to Jairus. As soon as the message comes
to him that his daughter is dead, Jesus wheels round on him at once
with a word of courage (Mark 5:36). This quickness in understanding,
in feeling with people, marks him throughout. An instinctive care
for other people's small necessities is a great mark of friendship,
and Jesus has it. We find him saying to his disciples: "Come ye
yourselves apart privately into a desert place, and rest awhile"
(Mark 6:31). What a beautiful suggestion! He himself, it is clear
from the records, felt the need of privacy, of being by oneself, of
quiet; and he took his quiet hours in the open, in the wild, where
there was solitude and Nature, and there he would take his friends.
There were so many coming and going, that they had no leisure to
eat, and Jesus says to them in his friendly way: "Let us get out of
this--away by ourselves, to a quiet place; what you want is rest."
What a beautiful idea!--to go camping out on the hillside, under the
trees, to rest--and with him to share the quiet of the lonely place.
It is not the only time when he offers to give people rest--"Come
unto Me ... and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28). How strange,
when one thinks of the restless activity of Christian people to-day,
with typewriters and conventions, and every modern method of
consuming energy and time! How sympathetic he is!
We may notice again his respect for the reserve of other people. On
the whole, how slowly Jesus comes to work with men! He never
"rushes" the human spirit; he respects men's personalities. Men and
women are never pawns with him. He does not think of them in masses.
The masses appeal to him, but that is because he sees the individual
all the time. To one of his disciples he says, "I have prayed for
thee" (Luke 22:32). What a contrast to the conventional "friend of
man" in the abstract! With all that hangs upon him, he has leisure
to pray intensely, for a single man. It gives us an idea of his
gifts in friendship. His faith in his people is quite remarkable,
when we think of it. He believes in his followers; he shares with
them some of the deepest things in his life; he counts them fit to
share his thought of God. He makes it quite clear to them how he
trusts them. He puts before them the tremendous work that he has to
do--work more appalling in its vastness the more one studies it; and
then he tells them that he is trusting the whole thing with them.
What a faith it implies in their moral capacity! What acceptance of
the dim beginnings of the character that was to be Christian!
Someone has spoken of his "apparently unjustified faith in Peter."
What names he can give to his friends as a result of this faith in
them! "Ye are the light of the world," he says (Matt. 5:14), "the
salt of the earth." When we remind ourselves of his clear vision,
his genius for seeing fact, how much must such praises have meant to
these men!
Think how he gives himself to them in earnest; how he is at their
disposal. He is theirs; they can cross-question him at leisure; they
tell him that the Pharisees did not like what he said (Matt. 15:12),
they doubt with Peter the wisdom of his open speech (Mark 8:32);
they criticize him (Matt. 13:10). If they do not understand his
parable, they ask what he means (Matt. 15:15) and keep on asking
till he makes it plain. He is in no hurry. He is the Master and
their Teacher, and he is at the service of the slowest of them.
But there is another side to friendship; for one great part of it is
taking what our friends do for us, as well as doing things for them.
How he will take what they have to give! He lets them manage the
boat, while he sleeps (Mark 4:38), and go and prepare for him (Luke
9:52), and see to the Passover meal (Mark 14:13). The women, we
read, ministered to him of their substance (Luke 8:3). There is a
very significant phrase in St. Luke (22:28), where he says to them
at the end: "Ye are they that have continued with me in my
temptations." He tells them there that they have helped him. How?
Apparently by being with him. Is not that friendship? In the same
chapter (Luke 22:15) we find an utterance that reveals the depth of
his feeling for his friends: "With desire I have desired (a Greek
rendering of a Semitic intensive) to eat this Passover with you
before I suffer." They are to help him again by being with him, and
he has longed for it, he says. The Gospel of John sums up the whole
story in a beautiful sentence: "Jesus, having loved his own which
were in the world, loved them unto the end" (John 13:1). Augustine
is right. "One loving spirit sets another on fire."
Note again the word which he uses in speaking to them ("Tekna": Mark
2:5, 10:24). It is a diminutive, a little disguised as "children" in
our English version. It reappears in the Fourth Gospel in even more
diminutive forms ("Teknia", 13:33; Paidia, 21:5) with a peculiarly
tender suggestion. The word of Mark answers more closely than
anything I know to "Boys," as we used it in the Canadian
Universities. "Men," or "Undergraduates," is the word in the English
Universities; "Students," in Scotland and in India; in Canada we
said "Boys"; and I think we get nearer, and like one another better,
with that easy name. And it was this friendly, pleasant word, or one
very like it, that he used with them. Nor is it the only one of the
kind. "Fear not, little flock!" he said (Luke 12:32). Do not the
diminutives mean something? Do they not take us into the midst of a
group where friendship is real? And in the centre is the friendliest
figure of all.
Look for a moment at the men who followed him; at the type he calls.
They are simple people in the main--warm hearts and impulsive
natures. The politics of Simon the Zealot might at one time have
been summed up as "the knife and plenty of it," a simple and direct
enough type of political thought, in all conscience, however
hopeless and ineffectual, as history showed; but he gave up his
politics for the friendship of Jesus. Peter, again, is the champion
example of the impulsive nature. Why Jesus called James and John
"the sons of thunder" (Mark 3:17) I am not sure. Dr. Rendel Harris
thinks because they were twins; other people find something of the
thunderstorm in their ideas and outlook. The publican in the group
is of much the same type; he is ready to leave his business and his
custom-house at a word--once more the impulsive nature and the
simple. It is possible that Jesus looked also to another type of
which he gained very little in his lifetime; for he speaks of "the
scribe who has turned disciple again, and brings out of his treasure
things new and old" (Matt. 13:52)--the more complicated type of the
trained scholar, full of old learning, but open to new views. In the
meantime he draws to him people with the warm heart--yes, he says,
but cultivate the cool head (cf. Matt. 10:16). Again and again he
will have men "count the cost" (Luke 14:28)--know what they are
doing, be rid of delusions before they follow him (Mark 8:34). What
did they expect? They had all sorts of dreams of the future. When we
first find them, there is friction among them, which is not
unnatural in a group of men with ambitions (Mark 9:33. 10:37). Even
at the Last Supper their minds run on thrones (Luke 22:24). They are
haunted by taboos. Peter long after boasts that nothing common or
unclean has entered his lips (Acts 10:14). They fail to understand
him. "Are ye also without understanding?" he asks, not without
surprise (Mark 8:17, 21). At the very end they run away.
There, then, is the group. What is to be the method? There is not
much method. As Harnack says about the spread of the early Church,
"A living faith needs no special methods"--a sentence worth
remembering. "Infinite love in ordinary intercourse" is another
phrase of Harnack in describing the life of the early Church. It
began with Jesus. He chose twelve, says Mark (3:14), "that they may
be with him." That is all. And they are with him under all sorts of
circumstances. "The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" (Luke
9:58). They saw him in privation, fatigued, exhausted. With every
chance to see weaknesses in his character, they did not find much
amiss with him. That is surely significant. They lived with him all
the time, in a genuine human friendship, a real and progressive
intimacy. They were with him in popularity and in unpopularity; they
were with him in danger, when Herod tried to kill him and he went
out of Herod's territory. But friendship depends not only on great
moments; it means companionship in the trivial, too, it means idle
hours together, partnership in commonplace things--meals and
garden--chairs as well as books and crises. Ordinary life, ordinary
talk, gossip, chat, every kind of conversation about Herods and
Roman governors, and the Zealots--custom-house memories, tales of
the fishermen's life on the lake, stories of neighbours and
home--rumours about the Galileans who were murdered by Pilate (Luke
13:1-4)--all the babbling talk of the bazaar is round Jesus and his
group, and some of it breaks in on them; and his attitude to it all
is to these men a constant revelation of character. They are with
him in the play of feelings, with him in the fluxes and refluxes of
his thought--learning his ways of mind without realizing it. They
slip into his mind and mood, by a series of surprises, when they are
imagining no such thing. Anything, everything serves to reveal him.
They tramp all day, and ask some village people to shelter them for
the night. The villagers tell them to go away. The men are hungry
and fatigued. "What a splendid thing it would be, if we could do
like Elijah and burn them up with a word!" So the hot thought rose.
He turned and said, "You know not what manner of spirit you are
of."--What a gentle rebuke! "The Son of Man is not come to destroy
men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:51-56). Then follows one of
the wonderful sentences of the Gospel, "they went unto another
village"--very obvious, but very significant. A missionary from
China told me how, thirty years ago or more, he was driven out of
the town where he lived; how the gentlefolk egged on the mob, and
they wrecked his house, and hounded him out of the place. He told me
how it felt--the misery and the indignity of it. Jesus took it
undisturbed. He taught a lesson in it which the Church has never
forgotten.
Their life was full of experiences shared with him. He has his
reserve--his secret; yet, in another sense, he gives himself to them
without reserve; there is prodigality of self-impartation in his
dealings with them. He lets them have everything they can take. He
becomes theirs in a great intimacy, he gives himself to them. Why?
Because he believes, as he put it, in seed. Socrates saw that the
teacher's real work, his only work, is to implant the idea, like a
seed; an idea, like a seed, will look after itself. A king builds a
temple or a palace. The seed of a banyan drifts into a crack, and
grows without asking anyone's leave; there is life in it. In the end
the building comes down, but for what the banyan holds up. The
leaven in the meal is the most powerful thing there. There is very
little of it, but that does not matter; it is alive (Matt. 13:33).
Life is a very little thing but it is the only thing that counts.
That is why the farmer can sow his fields and sleep at nights
without thinking of them; and the crop grows in spite of his
sleeping, and he knows it (Mark 4:26). That is why Jesus believes so
thoroughly in his men, and in his message; God has made the one for
the other, and there is no fear of mischance.
Look at his method of teaching. People "marvelled at his words of
charm" (Luke 4:22)--"hung about him to hear him" (Luke 19:48). He
said that the word is the overflow of the heart. "Out of the
abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" (Matt. 12:34; Luke 6:45).
What a heart, then, his words reveal! How easy and straightforward
his language is! To-day we all use abstract nouns to convey our
meaning; we cannot do without words ending in -ality and -anon. But
there is no recorded saying of Jesus where he uses even
"personality." He does not use abstract nouns. He sticks to plain
words. When he speaks about God he does not say "the Great First
Cause," or "Providence," or any other vague abstract. Still less
does he use an adverb from the abstract, like "providentially." He
says, "your heavenly Father." He does not talk of "humanity"; he
says, "your brethren." He has no jargon, no technical terms, no
scholastic vocabulary. He urges men not to over-study language;
their speech must be simple, the natural, spontaneous overflow of
the heart.[20] Jesus told his disciples not to think out beforehand
what they would say when on trial (Mark 13:11)--it would be "given"
to them. He was perfectly right; and when Christians obeyed him,
they always spoke much better than when they thought out speeches
beforehand. They said much less for one thing, and they said it much
better. Take the case of the martyr--an early and historical
one--whose two speeches were during her trial "Christiana sum" and,
on her condemnation, "Deo gratias".
With this, remark his own gift of arresting phrase; the freshness of
his language, how free it is from quotation, how natural and how
extraordinarily simple. Everything worthwhile can be put in simple
language; and, if the speech is complicated, it is a call to think
again. "As a woman, over-curiously trimmed, is to be mistrusted, so
is a speech," said John Robinson of Leyden, the minister of the
Pilgrim Fathers. The language of Jesus is simple and direct, the
inevitable expression of a rich nature and a habit of truth. You
feel he does not strain after effect--epigram, antithesis, or
alliteration. Of course he uses such things--like all real
speakers--but he does not go out of his way for them. No, and so
much the more significant are such characteristic antitheses as: "Ye
cannot serve God and mammon" (Luke 16:13), and "Whosoever will save
his life shall lose it" (Matt. 16:25), coming with a spontaneous
flash, and answering in their sharpness to the sharp edges of fact.
His words caught the attention, and lived in the memory; they
revealed such a nature; they were so living and unforgettable.
Remark once again his preference for the actual and the ordinary.
There are religions in which holiness involves unusual conditions
and special diet. Some forms of mysticism seem to be incompatible
with married life. But the type of holiness which Jesus teaches can
be achieved with an ordinary diet, and a wife and five children. He
had lived himself in a family of eight or nine. It is perhaps
harder, but it is a richer sanctity, if the real mark of a Saint is,
as we have been told, that he makes it easier for others to believe
in God. In any case the ordinary is always good enough with Jesus.
Only he would have men go deeper, always deeper. Why can you not
think for yourselves? he asks. Signs were what men demanded. He
pictures Dives' mind running on signs even in hell (Luke 16:27).
"What could you do with signs? Look at what you have already. You
read the weather for to-morrow by looking at the sky to-day. The
south wind means heat; the red sky fair weather. Study, look, think"
(Luke 12:55). His animals, as we saw, are all real animals; it is
real observation; real analogy. When he speaks of the lost sheep, it
is not a fictitious joy that he describes or an imaginary one; it is
real. The more we examine his sayings with any touch of his spirit,
the more we wonder. Of course it is possible to handle them in the
wrong way, to miss the real thought and make folly of everything.
Thus, when he says he is the door, the interpreter may stray into
silly detail and make faith the key, and--I don't know what the
panels and hinges could be. That is not the style of Jesus. The soul
of the thing, the great central meaning, the real analogy is his
concern. Seriousness in observation, seriousness in reflection, is
what he teaches. Men and women break down for want of thinking
things out. Many things become possible to those who think
seriously, as he did--and, so to speak, without watertight
compartments.
Jesus is always urging seriousness in reflection. Seriousness in
action, too, is one of his lessons--an emphasis on doing, but on
_doing_ with a clear sense of what one is about, and why. A part of
action is clear thought; always exactness, accuracy; you must think
the thing out, he says, and then act or let it alone. The artistic
temperament, we all know, is very much in evidence to-day. In "The
Comments of Bagshot" we are told that the drawback is that there is
so much temperament and so little art. Why? Because the artistic
temperament means so little by itself. It is one of the secrets of
Jesus, that it is action that illuminates. What is it that makes the
poem? The poet sees beggar children running races, or little Edward
and the weather-cock, or something greater if you like--the light on
a woman's hair, or a flower; and you say, he has his poem. He has
not. He must work at the thing. When we study the great poets, we
realize how these things are worked out to the point of nerve-strain
and exhaustion. The poet devotes himself heart and soul to the work;
he alters this and that, once and again; he sees a fresh aspect of
the thing, and he alters all again; he writes and rewrites, getting
deeper and deeper into the essential values of the thing all the
time. Where in all this is the artistic temperament? It gave him the
impulse, but something else achieves the work of art. I have a
feeling that the great works of art are achieved by the shopkeeper
virtues in addition to the artistic temperament that sees and feels
them at the beginning. It is action that gives the value of a
thought. Jesus sees that. He says that frankly to his disciples. If
you want to understand in the long run, it is carrying the cross
that will teach you the real values.
I have been treating him almost as if he were an authority on
pedagogy. Fortunately, he never discussed pedagogy, never used the
terms I have been using. But he dealt with men, he taught and he
influenced them, and it is worth our study to understand how he did
it--to master his methods. "One loving spirit sets another on fire."
As for the effects of his words at once, as Seeley put it, they were
"seething effervescence . . . broodings, resolutions, travail of
heart." Men were brought face to face with a new issue; it was a
time of choice; things would not be as they were men must be "with
him or against him"--must accept or reject the new teaching, the new
teacher, the new life. As he said, "I came to send fire on the
earth" (Luke 12:49), to divide families, to divide the individual
soul against itself, till the great choice was made; and so it has
always been, where men have really seen him. We have to notice
further the transformation of the disciples, who definitely accepted
him. "Very wonderful to me," wrote Phillips Brooks, "to see how the
disciples caught his method." The promise was made to them that they
should become fishers of men (Mark 1:17), and it was fulfilled.
Jesus made them strong enough to defy the world and to capture the
world. There is something attractive about them; they have his
secret, something of his charm; they are magnetic with his power. A
new impulse to win men marks them, a new power to do it, a new faith
which grows in significance as you study it--the faith of William
Carey, a hundred years ago, was the same thing--a perfectly
incredible faith, that they actually will win men for God and
Christ. And they did--and along his lines and by his methods of
love--even for Gentiles. "Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel,"
says St. Paul (1 Cor. 9:16), who to preach the Gospel shipwrecked
his life and suffered the loss of all things (Phil. 3:8). But these
men are sure that it is worthwhile. They have a new passion for men
and women--an interest not merely in the saving of their souls but
in every real human need. The early Church made a point of teaching
men trades when they had none. They learnt all this from him. The
greatest miracle in history seems to me the transformation that
Jesus effected in those men. Everything else in Christian or secular
history, compared to it, seems easy and explicable; and it was
achieved by the love of Jesus.
The Church spread over the world without social machinery. The
Gospel was preached instinctively, naturally. The earliest
Christians were persecuted in Jerusalem, and were driven out. I
picture one of them in flight; on his journey he falls in with a
stranger. Before he knows what he is doing, he is telling his fellow
traveller about Jesus. It follows from his explanation of why he is
on the road; he warms up as he speaks. He never really thought about
the danger of doing so. And the stranger wants to know more; he is
captured by the message, and he too becomes a Christian. And then
this involuntary preacher of the Gospel is embarrassed to learn that
the man is a Gentile; he had not thought of that. I think that is
how it began--so naturally and spontaneously. These people are so
full of love of Jesus that they are bound to speak (Acts 8:4). "One
loving heart sets another on fire."