THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD
It is worth taking some trouble to realize how profoundly Jesus has
changed the thinking of mankind about God. "Since Jesus lived," Dr.
Fairbairn wrote, "God has been another and nearer Being to man."
"Jesus," writes Dr. Fosdick, "had the most joyous idea of God that
ever was thought of." That joyous sense of God he has given to his
followers, and it stands in vivid contrast with the feelings men
have toward God in the other religions. Christianity is the religion
of joy. The New Testament is full of it.
We know the general character of Jesus' attitude to God, his feeling
for God, his sense of God's nearness. How immediate his knowledge of
God is, how intimate! Of course, here, as everywhere, his teaching
has such an occasional character--or else the records of it are so
fragmentary--that we must not press the absence of system in it; and
yet, I think, it would be right to say that Jesus puts before us no
system of God, but rather suggests a great exploration, an intimacy
with the slow and sure knowledge that intimacy gives. He has no
definition of God,[21] but he assumes God, lives on the basis of
God, interprets God; and God is discovered in his acts and his
relations. He said to Peter, in effect--for the familiar phrase
comes to this in modern English: "You think like a man; you don't
think like God" (Mark 8:33). Elsewhere he contrasts God's thoughts
with man's--their outlooks are so different "that which is highly
esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15;
the Greek words are very interesting). In other words, he would have
men see all things as God sees them. That we do not so see them,
remains the weak spot in our thinking. What Luther said to Erasmus
is true of most of us: "Your thoughts concerning God are too human."
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall _see_ God," said
Jesus (Matt. 5:8), and throughout he emphasizes that the vision of
God depends on likeness to God--it is love and a glowing purity that
give that faculty, rather than any power of intellect apart from
them. Jesus brings men back to the ultimate fact. Our views are too
short and too narrow. He would have us face God, see him and realize
him--think in the terms of God, look at things from God's point of
view, live in God and with God. In modern phrase, he breaks up our
dogmatism and puts us at a universal point of view to see things
over again in a new and true perspective.
How and where did he begin himself? Whence came his consciousness of
God, his gift for recognizing God? We do not know. The story of his
growth, his inward growth, is almost unrevealed to us. We are told
that he learnt "by the things which he suffered" (Heb. 5:8), and
that he "increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and
man" (Luke 2:52). Where does anyone begin, who takes us any great
distance? It is very hard to know. Where did our own thoughts of God
begin? What made them? How did they come? There is an inherited
element in them, but how much else? Whence came the inherited
element? How is it that to another man, with the same upbringing as
ours, everything is different, everything means more? Remark, at any
rate, in the teaching of Jesus, that there is no mysticism of the
type so much studied to-day. There is nothing in the least
"psychopathic" about him, nothing abnormal--no mystical vision of
God, no mystical absorption in God, no mystical union with God, no
abstraction, nothing that is the mark of the professed mystic. Yet
he speaks freely of "seeing God"; he lives a life of the closest
union with God; and God is in all his thoughts. A phrase like that
of Clement of Alexandria, "deifying into apathy we become monadic,"
is seas away from anything we find in the speech of Jesus. That is
not the way he preaches God. He is far more natural; and that his
followers accepted this naturalness, and drew him so, and gave his
teaching as he gave it, is a fresh pledge of the truthfulness of the
Gospels.
Again, his knowledge of God is not a matter of quotation, as ours
very often tends to be. He is conscious always of the real nearness
of God. He seems to wonder how it is that man can forget God. We do
forget God. Augustine in his "Confessions" (iv. 12, 18) has to tell
us that "God did not make the world and then go away." The practical
working religion of a great many of us rests on a feeling that God
is a very long way off. Our practical steps betray that we half
think God did go away, when he had made the world. Prayer to us is
not a real thing--it is not intercourse face to face; far too often
it is like conversation over a telephone wire of infinite length
which gets out of order. Even if words travel along that wire, there
is so much "buzzing" that they are hardly recognizable. No, says
Jesus, God is near, God is here--so near, that Jesus never feels
that men have any need of a priesthood to come between, or to help
them to God; God does all that. There is no common concern, no
matter of food or clothing, no mere detail of the ordinary round of
common duty and common life--father and mother, son, wife,
friend--nothing of all that, but God is there; God knows about it;
God is interested in it; God has taken care of it; God is enjoying
it. How is it that men can "reject the counsel of God," refuse God's
plans and ideas (Luke 7:30)? How is it that they forget God
altogether? Jesus is surprised at the dullness of men's minds (Mark
8:17); it is a mystery to him. The rich fool, as we call him, though
it is hard to see why we should call him a fool, when he is so like
ourselves, had forgotten God somehow, and was startled when God
spoke, and spoke to him. That story, seen so often among men,--the
story of the thorns choking the seed (Matt. 13:22)--makes Jesus
remark on the difficulty which a rich man finds in entering into the
kingdom of God.
God knows--that is what Jesus repeats, God cares; and God can do
things; his hands are not tied by impotence. The knowledge of God is
emphasized by Jesus; "Even the very hairs of your head are all
numbered" (Matt. 10:30); "your Father knoweth" (Luke 12:30); "seeth
in secret" (Matt. 6:4); "knoweth your hearts" (Luke 16:15); knows
your struggles, knows your worries, knows your worth; God knows all
about you. And "all things are possible with God" (Matt. 19:26).
There is nothing that he cannot do, nothing that he will not do, for
his children. Will a father refuse his child bread; will God not
give what is good? (Matt. 7:11). Is it too big a thing for the Giver
of Life to give food--which is the more difficult thing to give?
(Luke 12:23). Look at God, as Jesus draws him--interested in
flowers; God takes care of them, and thinks about their colours, so
that even "Solomon in all his glory" is not equal to them (Matt.
6:30). God knows the birds in the nest--knows there is one fewer
there to-day than there was yesterday (Matt. 10:29). God cares for
them; how much more will he care for you (Matt. 6:26)? "Ye are of
more value than many sparrows" (Matt. 10:31). And God thinks out
man's life in all its relations, and provides for it. Society moves
on lines he laid down for it; his plans underlie all. Thus, when
Jesus is challenged on the question of marriage and divorce, with
that clear thought and eye of his, he goes right back to God's
intent--not to man's usage, not to the common law and practice of
nations, but to God's intent and God's meaning. God ordained
marriage; he thought it out (Matt. 19:4). Marriages will be better,
if we think of them in this way. God gave men their food, does
still, and all things that he gives are clean (Luke 11:41). We
cannot have taboos at our Father's table.
Over all is God's throne (Matt. 23:22). That idea, it seems to me,
lapses somehow from our minds to-day. When Luther had to face the
hostility of the Kaiser, the Emperor Charles V., he wrote to one of
his friends: "Christ comes and sits at the right hand--not of the
Kaiser, for in that case we should have perished long ago--but at
the right hand of God. This is a great and incredible thing; but I
enjoy it, incredible as it is; some day I mean to die in it. Why
should I not live in it?" So Luther wrote--in not quite our modern
vein. We hardly calculate on God as a factor; we omit him. Jesus did
not. God's rule is over all; and in all our perplexity, doubt, and
fear, Jesus reminds us that the first thing is faith in God. The
fact is that "Thine is the Kingdom" means peace; it is a joyous
reminder. For if he speaks of the Kingdom of God, the King is more
than the Kingdom. It is the Kingdom, the rule, of the God whom Jesus
teaches us to trust and to love. The Father is supreme. But that has
more aspects than one. If our Father is supreme for us, he is
supreme over us. Jesus emphasizes the will of God--God's commandment
against man's tradition, God's will against man's notions (Mark
7:8). What a source of rest and peace to him is the thought of God's
will! When Dante writes: "And His will is our peace," it is the
thought of Jesus. And at the same time God's judgements are as real
to Jesus' mind. "I will tell you," he says, "whom to fear, God--yes,
fear him!" (Luke 12:5). He feels the tenderness and the awfulness of
God at once.
In speaking of God, it is noticeable that Jesus chiefly emphasizes
God's interest in the individual, as giving the real clue to God's
nature. On the whole, there is very little even implied, still less
explicit, in the Gospels, about God as the great architect of
Nature--hardly anything on the lines familiar to us in the Psalms
and in Isaiah--"The sea is his, and he made it; and his hands formed
the dry land" (Psalm 95:5)--"He taketh up the isles as a very little
thing" (Isaiah 40:15). There is little of this in the Gospels; yet
it is implied in the affair of the storm (Matt. 8:26). The disciples
in their anxiety wake him. He does not understand their fear. Whose
sea is it? Whose wind is it? Whose children are you? Cannot you
trust your Father to control his wind and his sea? Of course it is
possible that he said more about God as the Author of Nature than
our fragmentary reports give us; but it may be that it is because
the emphasis on God's care and love for the individual is hardest to
believe, and at the same time best, gives the real value of God,
that Jesus uses it so much. Perhaps the Great Artificer is too far
away for our minds. He is too busy, we think; and yet, after all, if
God is so great, why should he be so busy? If he is a real Father,
why should not he be at leisure for his children? He is, says Jesus;
a friend has leisure for his friends, and a father for his children;
and God, Jesus suggests, always has leisure for you.
The great emphasis with Jesus falls on the love of God. Thus he
tells the story of the impossible creditor with two debtors (Luke
7:42). One owed him ten pounds, and the other a hundred. When they
had nothing to pay, they both came to him and told him so. The
ordinary creditor, at the very best, would say: "Well, I suppose I
must put it down as a bad debt." Jesus says that this creditor took
up quite another attitude. He smiled and said to his two troubled
friends: "Is that all? Don't let anything like that worry you. What
is that between you and me?" He forgave them the debt with such a
charm ("echarisato"), Jesus says, that they both loved him. One
feels that the end of the story must be, that they both paid him and
loved him all the more for taking the money. What a delightful story
of charm, and friendship and forgiveness! And it is a true picture
of God, Jesus would have us believe, of God's forgiveness and the
response it wakes in men.
If we do not definitely set our minds to assimilate the ideas of
Jesus, we shall make too little of the heart of God. With Jesus this
is the central and crucial reality. He emphasizes the generosity of
God. God makes his sun rise on the good and on the bad; he sends
rain on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). God's flowers are just
as beautiful in the bad man's garden. God knows what his child
needs, and gives it, whether it is a very good child or a very bad
one. The Father is the same great wise Friend in either case. The
peacemakers are recognized as the children of God, because of their
family likeness to God (Matt. 5:9). They come among people, and find
them in discord with one another, and their presence stills that; or
they come into a man's life, when it is all in disorder and pain,
and they bring peace there. They may not quite know it, but they do
these things almost without meaning to do them. And Jesus says that
this is a family likeness by which men know they are God's children.
But it is not every teacher, pagan or Christian, who lays such
stress on God's gift of peace, or is so sure of it. He uses Hosea's
great saying about God--"I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Hosea
6:6), as giving the truth about God. Matthew represents him as
quoting it twice (Matt. 9:13, 12:7); and we can well believe that he
found in it the real spirit of God and often referred to it. His own
heart has taken him to the tenderest of the utterances of the Old
Testament spoken by the most suffering of the Prophets. "Love your
enemies," he says (Matt. 5:44); yes, for then you will be the real
children of God. Or he speaks of the great patience of God, how God
gives every man all the time and all the chance that he
needs--sometimes, he half suggests, even a little more. Look at the
parable of the fig tree, how the gardener pleads for the tree, begs
and obtains another chance for it (Luke 13:8); that is like God,
says Jesus.
It is easy enough to talk in a vague way about the love of God. But
the love of God implies surely the individual; love has little
content indeed if its object is merely a collective noun, an
abstract, a concept. But that God loves individual men is very
difficult for us to believe in earnest. The real crux comes when the
question rises in a man's own heart, "Does God love me?" Jesus says
that he does, but it is very hard to believe, except in the company
of Jesus and under his influence. Jesus throughout asserts and
reasserts the value of the individual to God. Look, for example, at
the picture he draws, when he tells of the recovery of the Lost
Sheep, and brings out the analogy. At the end of the Book of Job
(ch. 38) the poet carries his reader back to the first sight of a
world new-made, and tells how God, like the real artist and
creator--we might not have thought of all this, but the poet
did--loves his work so much that he must have his friends sharing it
with him. He calls them; he shows them the world he has made--"the
beauty, and the wonder, and the power," as Browning says. The poet
tells us that what followed was that "the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." The sight was so
good that song and shout came instinctively, almost involuntarily.
Is it not the same picture which Jesus draws of "joy in heaven in
the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth"?
We can believe in such joy when God made the world; but can we
believe that there was the same joy in the presence of God yesterday
when a coolie gave his heart to God? Jesus does. That is the central
thing, it seems to me, in his teaching about God--that God cares for
the individual to an extent far beyond anything we could think
possible. If we can wrestle with that central thought and assimilate
it, or, as the old divines said, "appropriate" it, make it our own,
the rest of the Gospel is easy. But one can never manage it except
with the help, and in the company, of Jesus.
Jesus goes a step further, and believes in the possibility of a man
loving God and God enjoying that too. If he speaks of prayer, must
we not think he means that God wants it as much as his child can
want it? How much is involved in the name "Father," which Jesus so
uniformly gives to God? Something less than the word carries in the
case of a human father, or more? What is the attitude of a father to
his child? Jesus, as we have seen, uses this illustration to bring
out God's care for the actual needs of his children. But is that
all? What is the innermost thing in a father's relation to his
children? Surely something more than the bird's instinct to feed her
young, or to gather them under her wings (Luke 13:34). Is not one of
the most real features of parenthood enjoyment of the child? Do not
men and women frankly enjoy the grappling of the little mind with
big things? Is there not a charm, as says one of the Christian
Fathers (Minucius Felix), about the "half-words" that a child uses,
as he learns to talk and wrestles with a grown-up vocabulary? About
the extraordinary pictures he will draw of ships or cows--the quaint
stories he will invent--the odd ways in which his gratitude and his
affection express themselves? Is it a real fatherhood where such
things do not appeal? Jesus' language about God, his whole attitude
to God, implies throughout that God is as real a Father as anybody,
and it suggests that God loves his children the more because they
are real; because they are not very clever; because they do make
such queer and imperfect prayers; because, in short, they need him;
and because they fill a place in his heart.
We have to remark how firmly Jesus believes in his Gospel of God and
man needing each other and finding each other--his "good news," as
he calls it. He bases all on his faith in what has been called
"Man's incurable religious instinct"--that instinct in the human
heart that must have God--and in God's response to that instinct
which he himself implanted, and which is no accident found here and
missing there, but a genuine God-given characteristic of every man,
whatever his temperament or his range in emotions may be, his
swiftness or slowness of mind. The repeated parables of seed and
leaven--the parables of vitality--again and again suggest his faith
in his message, his conviction that God must have man and man must
have God--that, as St. Augustine puts it, "Thou hast made us for
Thyself, and our heart knows no rest till it rests in Thee" (Conf.,
i. 1). That is the essence of the Gospel.
How this union of the soul with God comes about, Jesus does not
directly say, but there are many hints in his teaching that bear
upon it. "The Kingdom of Heaven cometh not with observation," he
said (Luke 17:20). Religious truth is not reached by "quick turns of
self-applauding intellect," nor by demonstrations. It comes another
way. The quiet familiarity with the deep true things of life, till
on a sudden they are transfigured in the light of God, and truth is
a new and glowing thing, independent of arguments and the strange
evidence of thaumaturgy--this is the normal way; and Jesus holds by
it. The great people, men of law and learning, want more; they want
something to substantiate God's messages from without. If Jesus
comes to them with a word from God, can he not prove its
authenticity preferably with "a sign from the sky" (Mark 8:11)? For
the signs he gives, and the evidence he suggests, are
unsatisfactory. "And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, `Why
doth this generation seek after a sign? Verily I say unto you, there
shall no sign be given unto this generation.' So he left them and
went up into the ship again and went away." That scene is drawn from
life.
But why no sign? In the parallel passage we read: "`The wicked
generation and adulterous seeketh a sign, but there shall no sign be
given it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah'; so he left them and
departed" (Matt. 16:4). The real explanation of this reference to
Jonah is given by Luke (11:32), and missed or misdeveloped in
Matthew (Matt. 12:40). Nineveh recognized instinctively the inherent
truth of Jonah's message, and repented. Truth is its own
evidence--like leaven in the meal, like seed in the field, it does
its work, and its life reveals it. God is known that way. When the
chief priests demand of Jesus to be told plainly what is his
authority (Mark 11:27), he carries the matter a stage further: Was
the baptism of John, he asks, from heaven, i.e. from God, or was it
of men? Does God make His message clear, does He properly
authenticate Himself? And the uneasy weighing of alternatives,
summarized by the evangelist, leads to the answer that they could
not tell whence it was; and Jesus rejoins that he has nothing to say
to them about his authority. He had taken what we might call an easy
case--where it was evident that God had spoken; and this was all
they made of it--they "could not tell." It was plain, then, either
that these men did not recognize the obvious message of God ("the
word of God came upon John," Luke 3:9,), or that, if they did
recognize it, they thought it did not matter. For the insincere and
the trivial there is no message from God, no truth of God--how
should there be?
If we pursue this line of thought, we can see how, in Jesus'
opinion, a man may be sure of God and of God's word for him. If a
man be candid with himself, if he face the common facts of life with
seriousness and in the doing of duty, perplexities vanish. Such a
man is prepared for the Great Fact, by faithfulness to the little
facts, and then God dawns on him in them. This is put directly in
the Fourth Gospel (7:17), and in parable in the Synoptists. The
leaven works, till the whole is leavened; the uneasy process is over
and the result achieved. Or, it comes more quietly still--the seed
grows while the farmer sleeps and rises, night and day; the blade
springs up and the ear forms on the blade, the seed grows in the
ear; and the end is reached and God's Kingdom is a reality. Or, the
knowledge of God comes like a lightning flash--sudden, illuminative,
decisive. "The Son reveals" God to the simple, Jesus said (Matt.
11:27). The Son of Man may be a disputable figure--"Whosoever
speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him"
(Matt. 12:32)--but there is no forgiveness in this world, or in any
possible real world where God counts at all, for the refusal of the
spirit of Truth. So he taught, and all history shows he was
right--the refusal of truth is fatal. "Jesus," wrote Matthew Arnold,
"never touches theory, but bases himself invariably upon
experience." It is to experience that Jesus goes to authenticate his
message. The real facts of life lead you to God, as the red sky, and
the south wind, teach you to foretell the weather (Matt. 16:2; Luke
12:55).
"Eyes and ears," said the Greek thinker, Heraclitus, long before,
"are bad witnesses for such as have barbarian souls." The Pharisees
discredited Jesus--he "cast out devils by Beelzebub." Did he, he
asked, or was it "by the finger of God" (Luke 11:20)? Is there no
evidence of God in restored sanity? But the strength of his position
lies in the good news for the poor (Matt. 11:5), for those who
labour and are heavy--laden (Matt. 11:28)--news of rest and
refreshment--as if the intuition of God, with the peace it brings,
were its own proof. Truth is reached less by ingenuity than by
intensity. To the simple mind, to the true heart, to the pure soul
(Matt. 5:8), to those whose gift is peace, Truth comes flooding
in--new light on old fact, and new light from old fact--and God is
evident. So Jesus judged; and here again, before we decide for or
against his view, we have to make sure that we know his meaning, and
realize the experience by which he reached his thought. And then,
perhaps, God will be more evident to us in our turn. "The Kingdom of
God cometh not with observation" (Luke 17:20)--it is "within" (Luke
17:21); so quietly it comes, that we may not guess how in any
particular instance the realization of God came to a soul; but if we
are candid and truth-loving we can know it when it has come to
ourselves, and we can recognize it when it comes to another. We can
recognize it in its power and peace, we can see the greatness of the
new knowledge in the new man it makes, in the new life, the man of
the great spirit, of the great action, the man of the great quiet,
the man who has the peace of God.
What does the discovery of God mean? Jesus himself speaks of a man
turning right about, being converted (Matt. 18:3); of the revision
of all ideas, of all standards, of all values. He gives us two
beautiful pictures to illustrate what it means; and it repays us to
linger over them. First, there is the Treasure Finder. He is in the
country, digging perhaps in another man's field, or idling in the
open; and by accident he stumbles on a buried treasure. Palestine
was like Belgium--a land with a long history of wars fought on its
soil by foreigners, Babylon or Assyria against Egypt, Ptolemies
against Seleucids. It was the only available route for attack either
on Egypt by land, or on Syria or Mesopotamia or Babylon from the
Southern Mediterranean. In such a land when the foreign army marched
through, a man had best hide his treasure and hope to find it again
in better times, and again and again the secret of its place of
burial died with him. The Treasure Finder had no lord of the manor
to think of, no Treasury department. He made a great discovery, and
made it initially for himself, and his own--"and for joy thereof he
goeth and selleth all that he hath and buyeth that field." We can
see him full of his discovery, full of eagerness and trying to hide
his inner joy, as he realizes every penny he can manage, and
achieves the great transaction which gives him the field and the
treasure. The salient points are a sudden and great joy, an instant
resolution, a complete sacrifice of everything, and a life
unexpectedly and infinitely enriched. And so it is, says Jesus, with
the Kingdom of God (Matt. 13:44).
The Pearl Merchant is a more interesting figure. Perhaps we may
picture him middle-aged, a trifle worn, somewhat silent, a man of
keen eyes. He has been in his trade for years, and he is a master at
it. By now he has a knowledge which years give to a man in
earnest--a knowledge more like instinct than anything acquired. A
glance at pearls on a table--this, and this, and this he will take
the other, perhaps; he would look at that one--the rest? he shook
his head and did not look at them--he saw without looking. One day
he is told of a pearl--a good one. He is not surprised, for pearls
are always good when they are offered for sale. But again a glance
is enough. The price? Yes, it is high, but he will take the pearl,
but he must be allowed till evening to get the money. He goes away
and sells his stock--the little collection of pearls in his wallet,
representing "the experience of a life-time," all of them good, as
he very well knows; and he sells them for what he can get--at a
loss, if it must be. Yesterday's bargainer cuts down his price for
this and that pearl, and he is taken up; he never expected to do so
well against the old dealer, and he laughs. But the merchant is
content, too; he has sold all his pearls for what they would
fetch--lost money on them, yes, and been laughed at behind his back.
But he owns the one pearl of great price; it is his, and he is
satisfied. There is no reference to joy here or exultation; but
there is the same instant recognition of the opportunity, the same
resolve, the same sacrifice, and the same great acquisition (Matt.
13:45).
Both parables begin with a reference to the Kingdom of God--to that
Rule and Kingship of God, the knowledge of which makes all the
difference to a man. A small grammatical difference points us beyond
minutiae to the common experience of the two men. Each makes a great
discovery, and takes action in a great and urgent resolve; and they
are both repaid. If we are to understand the two parables in the
sense intended by Jesus, the term "God" must become alive to us with
all the life and power and love that the name implies for him. Then
to grasp that this Father of Jesus is King--that the God of his
thoughts, of his faith, with all the tenderness and the power
combined that Jesus teaches us to see in Him--rules the universe,
controls our destiny and loves us--this is the experience that Jesus
compares with that of the Treasure Finder and the Pearl
Merchant--worth, he suggests, everything a man has, and more than
all.
In passing, we may notice that these stories suggest that this
experience may be reached in different ways. In the parables of the
seed and the leaven he indicates a natural, quiet and unconscious
growth, a story without crisis, though full of change. To the
Treasure Finder the discovery is a surprise--how came Jesus so far
into the minds of men as to know what a surprise God can be, and how
joyful a surprise? The Pearl Merchant, on the other hand, has lived
in the region where he makes his discovery. He is the type that
lives and moves in the atmosphere of high and true thought, that
knows whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of good report, of
help and use; he is no stranger to great and inspiring ideas. And
one day, in no strange way, by no accident, but in the ordinary
round of life, he comes on something that transcends all he has been
seeking, all he has known--the One thing worth all. There is little
surprise about it, no wild elation, but nothing is allowed to stand
in the way of an instant entrance into the great experience--and the
great experience is, Jesus says, God.
To see God, to know God--that is what Jesus means--to get away from
"all the fuss and trouble" of life into the presence of God, to know
he is ours, to see him smile, to realize that he wants us to stay
there, that he is a real Father with a father's heart, that his love
is on the same wonderful scale as every one of his attributes, and
in reality far more intelligible than any of them. That is the
picture Jesus draws. The sheer incredible love of God, the wonderful
change it means for all life--that is his teaching, and he
encourages us, in the words of the Shorter Catechism, "to enjoy God
for ever," as Jesus himself does. Those who learn his secret enjoy
God in reality. Wherever they see God with the eyes of Jesus, it is
joy and peace. And they realize with deepening emotion that this
also is God's gift, as Jesus said (Luke 8:10; 12:39).
Jesus entirely recast mankind's common ideas of holiness. It is no
longer asceticism, no longer the mystical trance, no longer the
"fussiness," with which the early Christian reproached the Jew,
which still haunts all the religions of taboo and merit, and even
Christianity in some forms. Where men think of holiness as freedom
from sin, the negative conception reacts on life. They begin at the
wrong end. Solomon Schechter, the great Jewish scholar, once said of
Oxford, that "they practice fastidiousness there, and call it
holiness." Unfortunately Oxford has no monopoly of that type of
holiness. But with Jesus holiness is a much simpler and more natural
thing--as natural as the happy, easy life of father and child, and
it rests on mutual faith. It is Theocentric, positive, active rather
than passive--not a state, but a relation and a force. Holiness with
him is a living relation with the living God. That is why the first
feature in it that strikes us is Courage. "Be of good cheer; be not
afraid"; that note rings through the Gospels, and how much it means,
and has meant, in sweet temper and cheerfulness in the very
chequered history of the Church! His is the great voice of Hope in
the world. "The Lord Jesus Christ, who is our Hope," Paul said (1
Tim. 1:1). Even on the Cross, according to one text, Jesus said to
the penitent thief: "Courage! To-day thou shalt be with me in
paradise" (Luke 23:43). We may not know where or what paradise is,
but the rest is intelligible and splendid: "Courage; to-day thou
shalt be with me." Look at the brave hearts the Gospel has made in
every age; how venturesome they are! and we find the same
venturesomeness in Jesus--for instance, as a German scholar
emphasizes, in that episode of the daughter of Jairus. The messenger
comes and says she is dead. Anybody else would stop, but Jesus goes
on. That is a great piece of interpretation. Look again at his
venturesomeness in trusting the Gospel to the twelve and to us--and
in facing the Cross. "It was his knowledge of God," says Professor
Peabody, "that gave him his tranquillity of mind."[22]
"Jesus," says Dr. Cairns, "said that no one ever trusted God enough,
and that was the source of all the sin and tragedy." Look at his
emphasis again and again on faith; and the language is not that of
guesswork; they are the words of the great Son of Fact, who based
himself on experience. "Have faith in God" (Mark 11:22). "Be not
afraid, only believe" (Mark 5:36). "All things are possible to him
that believeth" (Mark 9:23). When he criticizes his disciples, it is
on the score of their want of faith--"O ye of little faith"--it has
been taken as almost a nickname for them. In the hour of trial and
danger they may trust to "the Spirit of your Father" (Matt. 10:20).
It is remarkable what value he attaches to faith even of the
slightest--"faith as a grain of mustard seed" (Matt. 17:90)--it is
little, but it is of the seed order, a living thing of the most
immense vitality with the promise of growth and usefulness in it.
This brings us to the question of Prayer. Some of us, of course, do
not believe very much in prayer for certain philosophical reasons,
which perhaps, as a matter of fact, are not quite as sound as we
think, because our definition of prayer is a wrong one, resting on
insufficient experience and insufficient reflection. What is prayer?
We shall agree that it is the act by which man definitely tries to
relate his soul and life to God. What Jesus then teaches on prayer
will illuminate what he means by God; and conversely his conception
of God will throw new light upon the whole problem of prayer. It is
plain history that Jesus, the great Son of Fact, believed in prayer,
told men to pray, and prayed himself. The Gospels and the Epistle to
the Hebrews lay emphasis on his practice. Early in the morning he
withdrew to the desert (Mark 1:35), late at night he remained on the
hillside for prayer (Mark 6:46). Wearied by the crowds that thronged
him, he kept apart and continued in prayer. He prays before he
chooses the disciples (Luke 6:12). He gives thanks to God on the
return of the seventy from their missionary journey (Luke 10:21).
Prayer is associated with the confession of Caesarea Philippi (Luke
9:18), with the Mount of Transfiguration (Luke 9:29), with
Gethsemane (Luke 22:41). The writer to the Hebrews speaks of his
"strong crying and tears" (Heb. 5:7) in prayer. The Gospels even
mention what we should call his unanswered prayers. The prayer
before the calling of the Twelve does not exclude Judas; and the cup
does not pass in spite of the prayer in Gethsemane. It is as if we
had something to learn from the unanswered prayers of our Master.
Certainly the content of the Gospel for us would have been poorer if
they had been answered in our sense of the word; and this fact,
taken with his own teaching on prayer, and his own submission to the
Father's will, may help us over some of our difficulties. But Jesus
had no doubt or fear about prayer being answered. "Ask, and it shall
be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened
unto you" (Luke 11:9)--are not ambiguous statements in the least;
and they come from one "who based himself on experience." It is
worth thinking out that the experience of Jesus lies behind his
recommendation of prayer. All his clear-eyed knowledge of God speaks
in these plain sentences.
"As he was praying, they ask him, Teach us to pray, as John also
taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). It looks as if at times his
disciples caught him at prayer or even overheard him, and felt that
here was prayer that took them out beyond all they had ever known of
prayer. There were men whom John had taught to pray; was it they who
asked Jesus to teach them over again? There may have been some of
them who had learnt the Pharisee's way in prayer, and some who stuck
to the simpler way they had been taught in childhood. In each case
the old ways were outgrown.
We can put together what he taught them. In the first place, the
thing must be real and individual--the first requirement always with
Jesus. The public prayer of ostentation is out of the reckoning; it
is nothing. Jesus chooses the quiet and solitary place for his
intercourse with his Father. The real prayer is to the Father in
secret--His affair. And it will be earnest beyond what most of us
think. We are so familiar with Gospel and parable that we do not
take in the strenuousness of Jesus' way in prayer. The importunate
widow (Luke 18:2) and the friend at midnight (Luke 11:5) are his
types of insistent and incessant earnestness. Do you, he asks, pray
with anything like their determination to be heard? The knock at the
door and the pleading voice continue till the request is granted--in
each case by a reluctant giver. But God is not reluctant, Jesus
says, though God, too, will choose his own time to answer (Luke
18:7). It does not mean the mechanical reiteration of the heathen
(Matt. 6:7)--not at all, that is not the business of praying; but
the steady earnest concentration on the purpose, with the deeper and
deeper clarification of the thought as we press home into God's
presence till we get there. It was so that he prayed, we may be
sure. It is not idly that prayer has been called "the greatest task
of the Christian man"; it will not be an easy thing, but a
strenuous.
One part of the difficulty of prayer is recognized by Jesus over and
over again. Men do not really quite believe that they will be
answered--they are "of little faith." But he tells them with
emphasis, in one form of words and another, driving it home into
them, that "all things are possible with God" (Mark 10:27)--"have
faith in God" (Mark 11:22). One can imagine how he fixes them with
the familiar steady gaze, pauses, and then with the full weight of
his personality in his words, and meaning them to give to his words
the full value he intends, says: "Have faith in God." To see him and
to hear him must have given that faith of itself. If the friend in
the house to your knowledge has the loaves, you will knock till you
get them; and has not God the gifts for you that you need? Is he
short of the power to help, or is it the will to help that is
wanting in God?
Once more the vital thing is Jesus' conception of God. Here, as
elsewhere, we sacrifice far more than we dream by our lazy way of
using his words without making the effort to give them his
connotation. To turn again to passages already quoted, will a father
give his son a serpent instead of the fish for which he asks, a
stone for bread? It is unthinkable; God--will God do less? It all
goes back again to the relation of father and child, to the love of
God; only into the thought, Jesus puts a significance which we have
not character or love enough to grasp. "Your Father knoweth that ye
have need of these things," he says about the matters that weigh
heaviest with us (Luke 12:30). Even if we suppose Luke's reference
to the Father giving the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13),
to owe something to the editor's hand--it was an editor with some
Christian experience--it is clear that Jesus steadily implies that
the heavenly Father has better things than food and clothing for his
children. How much of a human father is available for his children?
Then will not the heavenly Father, Jesus suggests, give on a larger
scale, and give Himself; in short, be available for the least
significant of His own children in all His fullness and all His
Fatherhood? And even if they do not ask, because they do not know
their need, will he not answer the prayers that others, who do know,
make for them? Jesus at all events made a practice of
intercession--"I prayed for thee," he said to Peter (Luke
22:32)--and the writers of the New Testament feel that it is only
natural for Jesus, Risen, Ascended, and Glorified, to make
intercession for us still (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25).
We have again to think out what God's Fatherhood implies and carries
with it for Jesus.
"The recurrence of the sweet and deep name, Father, unveils the
secret of his being. His heart is at rest in God."[23] Rest in God
is the very note of all his being, of all his teaching--the keynote
of all prayer in his thought. "Our Father, who art in heaven," our
prayers are to begin--and perhaps they are not to go on till we
realize what we are saying in that great form of speech. It is
certain that as these words grow for us into the full stature of
their meaning for Jesus, we shall understand in a more intimate way
what the whole Gospel is in reality.
The writer to the Hebrews has here an interesting suggestion for us.
Using the symbolism of the Hebrew religion and its tabernacle, he
compares Jesus to the High Priest, but Jesus, he says, does not
enter into the holiest alone. "Having therefore, brethren, boldness
to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living
way, which he hath consecrated for us ... let us draw near with a
true heart in full assurance of faith" (Heb. 10:19). In the previous
chapter he discards the symbol and "speaks things"--"Christ is not
entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures
of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence
of God for us" (Heb. 9:24). There he touches what has been the faith
of the Church throughout--that in Christ we reach the presence of
God. Without saying so much in so many words, Jesus implies this in
all his attitude to prayer. God is there, and God loves you, and
loves to have you speak with him. No one has ever believed this very
much outside the radius of Christ's person and influence. It is,
when we give the words full weight, an essentially Christian faith,
and it depends on our relation to Jesus Christ.
Jesus was quite explicit with his friends in telling them they did
not know what to ask, but he showed them himself what they should
ask. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness" (Matt.
6:33), he says, and tells us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins
and for deliverance from evil. Pray, too, "Thy kingdom come." "Pray
ye the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into
his harvest" (Matt. 9:38). This is perhaps the only place where he
asked his disciples to pray for his great work. Identification with
God's purposes--identification with the individual needs of those we
love and those we ought to love--identification with the world's sin
and misery--these seem to be his canons of prayer for us, as for
himself. For both in what he teaches others and in what he does
himself, he makes it a definite prerequisite of all prayer that we
say: "Thy will be done." Prayer is essentially dedication, deeper
and fuller as we use it more and come more into the presence of God.
Obedience goes with it; "we must cease to pray or cease to disobey,"
one or the other. If we are half-surrendered, we are not very bright
about our prayers, because we do not quite believe that God will
really look after the things about which we are anxious. We must
indeed go back to what Jesus said about God; we had better even
leave off praying for a moment till we see what he says, and then
begin again with a clearer mind.
"Ask, and ye shall receive," he says; and if we have no obedience,
or love, or faith, or any of the great things that make prayer
possible, he suggests that we can ask for them and have them. The
Gospel gives us an illustration in the man who prayed: "Lord, I
believe; help thou mine unbelief" (Mark 9:24). But it is plain we
have to understand that we are asking for great things, and it is to
them rather than to the obvious little things that Jesus directs our
thoughts. Not away from the little things, for if God is a real
Father he will wish to have his children talk them over with
him--"little things please little minds," yes, and great minds when
the little minds are dear to them--but not little things all the
time. There is a variant to the saying about seeking first the
Kingdom of Heaven, which Clement of Alexandria preserves. Perhaps it
is a mere slip, but God, it has been said, can use misquotations;
and Clement's quotation, or misquotation, certainly represents the
thought of Jesus, and it may give us a hint for our own practice:
"Ask," saith he, "the great things, and the little things will be
added unto you" (Strom. i. 158).
The object of Jesus was to induce men to base all life on God.
Short-range thinking, like the rich fool's, may lead to our
forgetting God; but Jesus incessantly lays the emphasis on the
thought-out life; and that, in the long run, means a new reckoning
with God. That is what Jesus urges--that we should think life out,
that we should come face to face with God and see him for what he
is, and accept him. He means us to live a life utterly and
absolutely based on God--life on God's lines of peacemaking and
ministry, the "denial of self," a complete forgetfulness of self in
surrender to God, obedience to God, faith in God, and the acceptance
of the sunshine of God's Fatherhood. He means us to go about things
in God's way--forgiving our enemies, cherishing kind thoughts about
those who hate us or despise us or use us badly (Matt. 5:44),
praying for them. This takes us right back into the common world,
where we have to live in any case; and it is there that he means us
to live with God--not in trance, but at work, in the family, in
business, shop, and street, doing all the little things and all the
great things that God wants us to do, and glad to do them just
because we are his children and he is our Father. Above all, he
would have us "think like God" (Mark 8:33); and to reach this habit
of "thinking like God," we have to live in the atmosphere of Jesus,
"with him" (Mark 3:14). All this new life he made possible for us by
being what he was--once again a challenge to re-explore Jesus. "The
way to faith in God and to love for man," said Dr. Cairns at Mohonk,
"is, as of old, to come nearer to the living Jesus."