JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN
"For clear-thinking ethical natures," writes a modern scholar, "for
natures such as those of Jesus and St. Paul, it is a downright
necessity to separate heaven and hell as distinctly as possible. It
is only ethically worthless speculations that have always tried to
minimize this distinction. Carlyle is an instance in our times of
how men even to-day once more enthusiastically welcome the
conception of hell as soon as the distinction between good and bad
becomes all-important to them."[26]
Here in strong terms a challenge is put to many of our current
ideas. Is not this to revert to an outworn view of the Christian
religion--to reassert its dark side, better forgotten, all the
horrible emphasis on sin and its consequences introduced into the
sunny teaching of Jesus by Paul of Tarsus, and alien to it? Before
we answer this question in any direct way, it is worth while to
realize for how many of the real thinkers, and the great teachers of
mankind, this distinction between good and evil has been
fundamental. They have not invented it as a theory on which to base
religion, but they have found it in human life, one and all of them.
If Walt Whitman or Swami Vivekananda overlook the difference between
virtue and vice, and do honour to the courtesan, it simply means
that they are bad thinkers, bad observers. The deeper minds see more
clearly and escape the confusion into which the slight and quick,
the sentimental, hurl themselves. Above all, when God in any degree
grows real to a man, when a man seriously gives himself not to some
mere vague "contemplation" of God but to the earnest study of God's
ways in human affairs, and of God's laws and their working, the
great contrasts in men's responses to God's rule become luminous.
When God matters to a man, all life shows the result. Good and bad,
right and wrong stand out clear as the contrast between light and
darkness--they cannot be mistaken, and they matter--and matter for
ever. They are no concern of a moment. Action makes character; and,
until the action is undone again, the effect on character is not
undone. Right and wrong are of eternal significance now in virtue of
the reality of God.
Gautama Buddha, for instance, and the greater Hindu thinkers, in
their doctrine of Karma, have taught a significance inherent in good
and evil, which we can only not call boundless. Buddha did this
without any great consciousness of God; and many Indian thinkers
have so emphasized the doctrine that it has taken all the stress
laid on "Bhakti" by Ramanuja and others to restore to life a
perspective or a balance, however it should be described, that will
save men from utter despair. Nor is it Eastern thinkers only who
have taught men the reality of heaven and hell. The poetry of
Aeschylus is full of his great realization of the nexus between act
and outcome. With all the humour and charm there is in Plato, we
cannot escape his tremendous teaching on the age-long consequences
of good and evil in a cosmos ordered by God. Carlyle, in our own
days, realized the same thing--he learnt it no doubt from his
mother; and learnt it again in London. In Mrs. Austen's
drawing-room, with "Sidney Smith guffawing," and "other people
prating, jargoning, to me through these thin cobwebs Death and
Eternity sate glaring." "How will this look in the Universe," he
asks, "and before the Creator of Man?" When someone in his old age
challenged him with the question, "Who will be judge?"--(it is
curious how every sapient inanity strikes, as on an original idea,
on the notion that opinions differ, and therefore--apparently, if
their thought has any consequence--are as good one as another)--Who
will be judge? "Hell fire will be judge," said Carlyle, "God
Almighty will be the judge now and always." There is a gulf between
good and evil, and each is inexorably fertile of consequence. There
is no escaping the issue of moral choice. That is the conclusion of
men who have handled human experience in a serious spirit. As
physical laws are deducible from the reactions of matter and force,
and are found to be uniform and inevitable, fundamental in the
nature of matter and force, so clear-thinking men in the course of
ages have deduced moral laws from their observation of human nature,
laws as uniform, inevitable and fundamental. In neither case has it
been that men invented or imagined the laws; in both cases it has
been genuine discovery of what was already existent and operative,
and often the discovery has involved surprise.
If Jesus had failed to see laws so fundamental, which other teachers
of mankind have recognized, it is hardly likely that his teaching
would have survived or influenced men as it has done. Mankind can
dispense with a teacher who misses patent facts, whatever his charm.
But there never was any doubt that Jesus was alive to the difference
between right and wrong. His critics saw this, but they held that he
confused moral issues, and that his distinctions in the ethical
sphere were badly drawn.
Jesus could not have ignored the problem of sin and forgiveness,
even if he had wished to ignore it. To this the thought of mankind
had been gravitating, and in Jewish and in Greek thought, conduct
was more and more the centre of everything. For the Stoics morals
were the dominant part of philosophy; but for our present purpose we
need not go outside the literature of the New Testament. Sin was the
keynote of the preaching of John the Baptist. It is customary to
connect the mission of Jesus with that of John, and to find in the
Baptist's preaching either the announcement of his Successor (as is
said with most emphasis in the Fourth Gospel), or (as some now say)
the impulse which drove Jesus of Nazareth into his public ministry.
Whatever may be the historical connexion between them, it is as
important for us at least to realize the broad gulf that separates
them. They meet, it is true; both use the phrase "Kingdom of God,"
both preach repentance in view of the coming of the Kingdom; and we
are apt to assume they mean the same thing; but Jesus took some
pains to make it clear, though in the gentlest and most sympathetic
way, that they did not.
On the famous occasion, when John the Baptist sent two of his
disciples to Jesus with his striking message: "Art thou he that
should come? or look we for another?" (Luke 7:19-35; Matt. 11:1-19),
Jesus, when the messengers were gone, spoke to the people about the
Baptist. "What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed
shaken with the wind? A man clothed in soft raiment? A prophet? Yea,
I say unto you, and much more than a prophet. Among those that are
born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist,
but he that is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he." I am
not sure which is the right translation, whether it is "he that is
less, least, or little," and I do not propose to discuss it. The
judgement is remarkable enough in any case, and the words of Jesus,
as we have seen, have a close relation to real fact as he saw it.
Why does he speak in this way? Our answer to this question, if we
can answer it, will help us forward to the larger problem before us.
But, for this, we shall have to study John with some care.
There is a growing agreement among scholars that there is some
confusion in our data as to John the Baptist. There are gaps in the
record--for instance, how and why did the school of John survive as
it did (Acts 18:25, 19:1-7)? And again there are, in the judgement
of some, developments of the story. The Gospel, with varying degrees
of explicitness, and St. Paul by inference (Acts 19:4) tell us that
John pointed to "him which should come after him." Christians, at
any rate, after the Resurrection, had no doubt that this was Jesus.
Whether John was as definite as the narratives now represent him to
have been, has been doubted in view of his message to Jesus. But
that is not our present subject. We are concerned less with John as
precursor than as teacher and thinker.
Even if our data are defective, still enough is given us to let us
see a very striking and commanding figure. We have a picture of him,
his dress, his diet, his style of speech, his method of action--in
every way he is a signal and arresting man. The son of a priest, he
is an ascetic, who lives in the wilderness, dresses like a peasant,
and eats the meanest and most meagre of food--a man of the desert
and of solitude. And the whole life reacts on him and we can see
him, lean and worn, though still a young man, a keen, rather
excitable spirit--in every feature the marks of revolt against a
civilization which he views as an apostasy. Luke, using a phrase
from the Old Testament, says, "The word of God came upon John in the
wilderness" (Luke 3:2). Luke leans to Old Testament phrase, and here
is one that hits off the man to the very life. Jesus himself
confirms Luke's judgement (Mark 11:29-33). The Word of the Lord has
come on this ascetic figure, and he goes to the people with the
message; he draws their attention and they crowd out to see him. He
makes a great sensation. He is not like other men--for Jesus quotes
their remark that "he had a devil" (Luke 7:33)--a rough and ready
way of explaining unlikeness to the average man. When he sees his
congregation his words are not conciliatory; he addresses them as a
"generation of vipers" (Luke 3:7); and his text is the "wrath to
come."
Jesus asks whether they went out to see a reed shaken by the wind,
or someone dressed like a courtier--the last things to which anyone
would compare John. There was nothing supple about him, as Herod
found, and Herodias (Mark 6:17-20); he was not shaken by the wind;
there was no trimming of his sails. The austerity of his life and
the austerity of his spirit go together, and he preached in a tone
and a language that scorched. He preached righteousness, social
righteousness, and he did it in a great way. He brought back the
minds of his people, like Amos and others, to God's conceptions and
away from their own. Crowds of people went out to hear him (Mark
1:5). And he made a deep impression on many whose lives needed
amendment (Matt. 21:26, 32; Luke 20:6).[27] We have the substance of
what he said in the third chapter of St. Luke; how he told the
tax-collectors to be honest and not make things worse than they need
be; the soldiers to do violence to no man and accuse no man falsely,
and to be content with their wages; and to ordinary people he
preached humanity: "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him
that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise." It may
be remarked of John, and it is true also of Jesus, that neither
attacked the absent nor inveighed against economic conditions, as
some modern preachers do with, let us say, capitalists and the
morality of other nations. Neither says a word against the Roman
Empire. Slavery is not condemned explicitly even by Jesus, though he
gave the dynamic that abolished it. The practical guidance that John
gave, he gave in response to men's inquiries.
Like an Old Testament prophet (cf. Amos 3:2), John tore to tatters
any plea that could be offered that his listeners were God's chosen
people, the children of Abraham. Does God want children of
Abraham?--John pointed to the stones on the ground, and said, if God
wanted, he could make children of Abraham out of them; a word and he
could have as many children of Abraham as he wished. It was
something else that God sought.
"John," writes the historian Josephus a generation later, "was a
good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue both in justice
toward one another and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism;
for so baptism would be acceptable to God if they made use of it,
not to excuse certain sins, but for the purification of the body,
provided that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by
righteousness."[28] This interpretation of John's baptism makes it
look very like the baptisms and other purificatory rites of the
heathen. The Gospels attribute to John a message, richer and more
powerful, but essentially the same; and the criticism of Jesus
confirms the account. The great note in his preaching is judgement;
the Kingdom of God is coming, and it begins with judgement. Again,
it is like Amos--"The axe is at the root of the tree," "His fan is
in His hand." And as men listened to the man and looked at him--his
intense belief in his message, backed up by a stern self-discipline,
a whole life inspired, infused by conviction--they believed this
message of the axe, the fan, and the fire. They asked and as we have
seen received his guidance on the conduct of life; they accepted his
baptism, and set about the amending of character (Matt. 21:32).
Jesus makes it quite clear that he held John to be an entirely
exceptional man, and that he had no doubt that John's teaching was
from God (Matt. 21:32; Luke 7:35, 20:4; and, of course, Luke
7:26-28). It was all in the line of the great prophets; and the
Fourth Gospel shows it us once more in the work of the Holy
Spirit--"when he is come, he will reprove (convict) the world of
sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement" (John 16:8). And yet,
as Jesus says, there is all the difference in the world between his
own Gospel and the teaching of the Baptist.
In Mark's narrative (2:18) a very significant episode is recorded.
John inculcated fasting, and his disciples fasted a great deal
("pykna", Luke 5:33); and once, Mark tells us, when they were
actually fasting, they asked Jesus why his disciples did not do the
same? Jesus' answer is a little cryptic at first sight. "Can the
children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with
them?" Who fasts at the wedding feast, in the hour of gladness? And
then he passes on to speak about the new patch on the old garment,
the new wine in the old wine skins; and it looks as if it were not
merely a criticism of John's disciples but of John himself. John,
indeed, brings home with terrific force and conviction that truth of
God which the prophets had preached before; but he leaves it there.
He emphasizes once more the old laws of God, the judgements of God,
but he brings no transforming power into men's lives. The old
characters, the old motives more or less, are to be patched by a new
fear.
"Repent, repent," John cries, "the judgement is coming." And men do
repent, and John baptises them as a symbol that God has forgiven
them. But how are they to go on? What is the power that is to carry
John's disciples through the rest of their lives? We are not in
possession of everything that John says, but there is no indication
that John had very much to say about any force or power that should
keep men on the plane of repentance. It is our experience that we
repent and fall again; what else was the experience of the people
whom John baptised? What was to keep them on the new level--not only
in the isolation of the desert, but in the ordinary routine of town
and village? In John's teaching there is not a word about that; and
this is a weakness of double import. For, as Jesus puts it, the new
patch on the old garment makes the rent worse; it does not leave it
merely as it was. If the "unclean spirit" regain its footing in a
man, it does not come alone--"the last state of that man is worse
than the first" (Luke 11:24-26). Jesus is very familiar with the
type that welcomes new ideas and new impulses in religion and yet
does nothing, grows tired or afraid, and relapses (Mark 4:17).
Again, in John's teaching, as far as we have it, there is a striking
absence of any clear word about any relation to God, beyond that of
debtor and creditor, judge and prisoner on trial, king and subject.
God may forgive and God will judge; but so far as our knowledge of
John's teaching goes, these are the only two points at which man and
God will touch each other; and these are not intimate relations.
There is no promise and no gladness in them; no "good news." John
taught prayer--all sorts of people teach prayer; but what sort of
prayer? It has been remarked of the Greek poet, Apollonius Rhodius,
that his heroes used prayers, but their prayers were like official
documents. Of what character were the prayers that John taught his
disciples? None of them survive; but there is perhaps a tacit
criticism of them in the request made to the New Teacher: "Teach us
to pray, as John taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). One feels that
the men wanted something different from John's prayers. Great and
strenuous prayers they may have been, but in marked contrast to the
prayers of Jesus and his followers, because of the absence in John's
message of any strong note of the love and tenderness of God.
Finally, the very righteousness that John preaches with such fire
and energy is open to criticism. Far more serious than the
righteousness of the Pharisees, stronger in insight and more
generous in its scope, it fails in the same way; it is
self-directed. It aims at a man's own salvation, and it is to be
achieved by a man's own strength in self-discipline, with what
little help John's system of prayer and fasting may win for a man
from God. John fails precisely where his strength is greatest and
most conspicuous. His theme is sin; his emphasis all falls on sin;
but his psychology of sin is insufficient, it is not deep enough.
The simple, strenuous ascetic did not realize the seriousness of sin
after all--its deep roots, its haunting power, its insidious charm.
St. Paul saw far deeper into it "I am carnal, sold under sin. What I
hate that do I. The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which
I would not, that I do. I see a law in my members bringing me into
captivity to the law of sin. O wretched man that I am! Who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7:14-24). Sin, in
John's thought, is contumacy or rebellion against the law of God; he
does not look at it in relation to the love of God--a view of it
which gives it another character altogether. Nor has John any great
conception of forgiveness--a man, he thinks, may win it by "fruits
worthy of repentance" (Luke 3:8). Here again Paul is the pioneer in
the universal Christian experience that fruits of repentance can
never buy God's forgiveness. That is God's gift. That forgiveness
may cost a man much--an amended life, the practices of prayer and
fasting and almsgiving--John conceives; but we are not led to think
that he thought of what it might cost God. John has no evangel, no
really good news, with gladness and singing in it (1 Peter 1:8).
When we return to the teaching of Jesus, we find that he draws a
clear and sharp line between right and wrong. He indicates that
right is right to the end of all creation, and wrong is wrong up to
the very Judgement Throne of God (Matt. 25). He views these things,
as the old phrase puts it, "sub specie aeternitatis", from the
outlook of eternity. Right and wrong do not meet at infinity. There
is no higher synthesis that can make them one and the same thing.
Everything with Jesus is Theocentric, and until God changes there
will be no very great change in right and wrong. Partly because he
uses the language of his day, partly because he thinks as a rule in
pictures, his language is apt to be misconstrued by moderns. But the
central ideas are clear enough. "How are you to escape the judgement
of Gehenna?" he asks the Pharisees (Matt. 23:33; the subjunctive
mood is worth study). It is not a threat, but a question. There
yawns the chasm; with your driving, how do you think you can avoid
disaster? He warns men of a doom where the worm dies not and the
fire is not quenched; a man will do well to sacrifice hand, foot or
eye, to save the rest of himself from that (Mark 9:43-48). But a
more striking picture, though commonly less noticed, he draws or
suggests in talk at the last supper. "Simon, Simon, behold Satan
asked for you to sift you as wheat, but I prayed for thee, that thy
faith fail not; and thou, when thou comest back, strengthen thy
brethren" (Luke 22:31, 32). The scene suggested is not unlike that
at the beginning of the Book of Job, or that in the Book of
Zechariah (chap. 3). There is the throne of God, and into that
Presence pushes Satan with a demand--the verb in the Greek is a
strong one, though not so strong as the Revised Version suggests.
Satan "made a push to have you." "But I prayed for thee."
To any reader who has any feeling or imagination, what do these
short sentences mean? What can they mean, from the lips of a thinker
so clear and so serious, and a friend so tender? What but
unspeakable peril? The language has for us a certain strangeness;
but it shows plainly enough that, to Jesus' mind, the disciples, and
Peter in particular, stood in danger, a danger so urgent that it
called for the Saviour's prayer. So much it meant to him, and he
himself tells Peter what he had realized, what he had done, in
language that could not be mistaken or forgotten. To the nature of
the danger that sin involves, we shall return. Meanwhile we may
consider what Jesus means by sin before we discuss its consequences.
"The Son of Man," says Jesus, in a sentence that is famous but still
insufficiently studied, "is come to seek and to save that which is
lost" (Luke 19:10). Our rule has been to endeavour to give to the
terms of Jesus the connotation he meant them to carry. The scholar
will linger over the "Son of Man"--a difficult phrase, with a
literary and linguistic history that is very complicated. For the
present purpose the significant words are at the other end of the
sentence. What does Jesus mean by "lost"? It is a strong word, the
value of which we have in some degree lost through familiarity. And
whom would he describe as "lost"? We have once more to recall his
criticism of Peter--that Peter "thought like a man and not like God"
(Mark 8:33)--and to be on our guard lest we think too quickly and
too slightly. We may remark, too, that for Jesus sin is not, as for
Paul and theologians in general, primarily an intellectual problem.
He does not use the abstraction Sin as Paul does. But the clear,
steady gaze turned on men and women misses little.
There are four outstanding classes, whom he warns of the danger of
hell in one form or other.
To begin, there is the famous description of the Last Judgement
(Matt. 25:31-46)--a description in itself not altogether new. Plenty
of writers and thinkers had described the scene, and the broad
outlines of the picture were naturally common property; yet it is to
these more or less conventional traits that attention has often been
too exclusively devoted. Jesus, however, altered the whole character
of the Judgement Day scene by his account of the principles on which
the Judge decides the cases brought before him. On the right hand of
the Judge are--not the Jews confronting the Gentiles on the
left--nor exactly the well-conducted and well-balanced people who
get there in Greek allegories--but a group of men and women who
realize where they are with a gasp of surprise. How has it come
about? The Judge tells them: "I was an hungered and ye gave me
meat," and the rest of the familiar words. But this does not quite
settle the question. Embarrassment rises on their faces--is it a
mistake? One of them speaks for the rest: "Lord, when saw we thee an
hungered and fed thee?" They do not remember it. There is something
characteristic there of the whole school of Jesus; these people are
"children of fact," honest as their Master, and they will not accept
heaven in virtue of a possible mistake. And it appears from the
Judge's answer that such instinctive deeds go further than men
think, even if they are forgotten. Wordsworth speaks of the "little
nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love" that are "the
best portion of a good man's life."[29] The acts of kindness were
forgotten just because they were instinctive, but, Jesus emphasizes
the point, they are decisive; they come, as another of his telling
phrases suggests, from "the overflow of the heart," and they reveal
it. With the people on the left hand it was the other way. They were
fairly well in possession of their good records, but they had missed
the decisive fact--they were instinctively hard. Such people Jesus
warns. So familiar are his words that there is a danger of our
limiting them to their first obvious meaning. Eighty years ago
Thomas Carlyle looked out on the England he knew, and remarked that
it was strange that the great battle of civilized man should be
still the battle of the savage against famine, and with that he
observed that the people were "needier than ever of inward
sustenance." Is there a warning in this picture of the people on the
left hand that applies to deeper things than physical hunger? A
warning to those who do not heed another's need of "inward
sustenance," of spiritual life, of God? It looks likely. Otherwise
there is a risk of our declining upon a "Social Righteousness" that
falls a long way short of John the Baptist's, and does less for any
soul, our own or another's.
The second class warned by Jesus consists of several groups dealt
with in the Sermon on the Mount--people whose sin is not murder or
adultery, but merely anger and the unclean thought--not the people
who actually give themselves away, like the publicans and
harlots--but those who would not be sorry to have that ring of Gyges
which Plato described, who would like to do certain things if they
could, who at all events are not unwilling to picture what they
would wish to do, if it were available, and meanwhile enjoy the
thought (Matt. 5:21, 22, 27-29). Here St. Paul can supply commentary
with his suggestion that one form of God's condemnation is where he
gives up a man to his own reprobate mind (Romans 1:28--the whole
passage is worth study in the Greek). The mind, in Paul's phrases,
becomes darkened (Rom. 1:21), stained (Titus 1:15), and cauterized
(1 Tim. 4:2), invalidated for the discharge of its proper functions,
as a burnt hand loses the sense of touch, or a stained glass gives
the man a blue or red world instead of the real one. Blindness and
mutilation are better, Jesus said, than the eye of lust (Matt.
5:28). How different from the moralists, for whom sin lies in
action, and all actions are physical! The idle word is to condemn a
man, not because it is idle, but because, being unstudied, it speaks
of his heart and reveals, unconsciously but plainly, what he is in
reality (Matt. 12:36). Thus it is that what comes out of the mouth
defiles a man (Matt. 15:18)--with the curious suggestion, whether
intended or not, that the formulation of a floating thought gives it
new power to injure or to help. That is true; impression loose, as
it were, in the mind, mere thought--stuff, is one thing; formulated,
brought to phrase and form, it takes on new life and force; and when
it is evil, it does defile, and in a permanent way. Marcus Aurelius
has a very similar warning (v. 16)--"Whatever the colour of the
thoughts often before thy mind, that colour will thy mind take. For
the mind is dyed (or stained) by its thoughts." "Phantazesthai" and
"phantasiai" are the words--and they suggest something between
thoughts and imaginations--mental pictures would be very near it.
The third group whom Jesus warned, the most notorious of all, was
the Pharisee class. They played at religion--tithed mint and anise
and cumin, and forgot judgement and mercy and faith (Matt. 23:23).
Jesus said that the Pharisee was never quite sure whether the
creature he was looking at was a camel or a mosquito--he got them
mixed (Matt. 23:24). Once we realize what this tremendous irony
means, we are better able to grasp his thought. The Pharisee was
living in a world that was not the real one--it was a highly
artificial one, picturesque and charming no doubt, but dangerous.
For, after all, we do live in the real world--there is only one
world, however many we may invent; and to live in any other is
danger. Blindness, that is partial and uneven, lands a man in peril
whenever he tries to come downstairs or to cross the street--he
steps on the doorstep that is not there and misses the real one. He
is involved in false appearances at every turn. And so it is in the
moral world--there is one real, however many unreals there are, and
to trust to the unreal is to come to grief on the real. "The
beginning of a man's doom," wrote Carlyle, "is that vision be
withdrawn from him." "Thou blind Pharisee!" (Matt. 23:26). The cup
is clean enough without; it is septic and poisonous within--and from
which side of it do you drink, outside or inside? (Matt. 23:25). As
we study the teaching of Jesus here, we see anew the profundity of
the saying attributed to him in the Fourth Gospel, "The truth shall
make you free" (John 8:32). The man with astigmatism, or myopia, or
whatever else it is, must get the glasses that will show him the
real world, and he is safe, and free to go and come as he pleases.
See the real in the moral sphere, and the first great peril is gone.
Nothing need be said at this point of the Pharisee who used
righteousness and long prayers as a screen for villainy. Probably
his doom was that in the end he came to think his righteousness and
his prayers real, and to reckon them as credit with a God, who did
not see through them any more than he did himself. It is a mistake
to over-emphasize here the devouring of widow' houses by the
Pharisee (Matt. 23:14), for it was no peculiar weakness of his;
publicans and unjust judges did the same. Only the publican and the
unjust judge told themselves no lies about it. The Pharisee
lied--lying to oneself or lying to another, which is the worse? The
more dangerous probably is lying to oneself, though the two
practices generally will go together in the long run. The worst
forms of lying, then, are lying to oneself and lying about God; and
the Pharisee combined them, and told himself that, once God's proper
dues of prayer and tithe were paid, his treatment of the widow and
her house was correct. Hence, says Jesus, he receives "greater
damnation" (A.V.)--or judgement on a higher scale ("perissoteron
krima").
The Pharisees were men who believed in God--only that with his
world, they re-created him (as we are all apt to do for want of
vision or by choice); but what is atheism, what can it be, but
indifference to God's facts and to God's nature? If religion is
union with God, in the phrase we borrow so slightly from the
mystics, how can a man be in union with God, when the god he sees is
not there, is a figment of his own mind, something different
altogether from God? Or, if we use the phrase of the Old Testament.
prophet and of Jesus himself, if religion is vision of God, what is
our religion, if after all we are not seeing God at all, but
something else--a dummy god, like that of the Pharisees, some
trifling martinet who can be humbugged--or, to come to ourselves, a
majestic bundle of abstract nouns loosely tied up in impersonality?
For all such Jesus has a caution. Indifference to God's facts leads
to one end only. We admit it ourselves. There are those who scold
Bunyan for sending Ignorance to hell, but we omit to ask where else
could Ignorance go, whether Bunyan sent him or not. Ignorance, as to
germs or precipices or what not, leads to destruction "in pari
materia"; in the moral sphere can it be otherwise? This serves in
some measure to explain why Jesus is so tender to gross and flagrant
sinners, a fact which some have noted with surprise. Surely it is
because publican and harlot have fewer illusions; they were left
little chance of imagining their lives to be right before God. What
Jesus thought of their hardness and impurity we have seen already,
but heedless as they were of God's requirements of them, they were
not guilty of the intricate atheism of the Pharisees. Further,
whether it was in his mind or not, it is also true that the frankly
gross temptations do bring a man face to face with his own need of
God, as the subtler do not; and so far they make for reality.
The fourth group are those who cannot make up their minds. "No man,
having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the
Kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62). The word is an interesting one
("euthetos"), it means "handy" or "easy to place." (The word is used
of the salt not "fit" for land or dunghill (Luke 14:35), and the
negative of the inconvenient harbour (Acts 27:12).) This man is not
adapted for the Kingdom of God; he is not easy to place there. Like
the man who saved his talent but did not use it (Matt. 25:24), he is
not exactly bad; but he is "no good," as we say. Jesus conceives of
the Kingdom of God as dynamic, not static; state or place, condition
or relation, it implies work, as God himself implies work. He holds
that truth is not a curiosity for the cabinet but a tool in the
hand; that God's earnest world is no place for nondescript, and that
there is only one region left to which they can drift. What part or
place can there be in the Kingdom of Heaven--in a kingdom won on
Calvary--for people who cannot be relied on, who cannot decide
whether to plough or not to plough, nor, when they have made up
their mind, stick to it? Jesus cannot see. (What a revelation of the
force and power of his own character!)
These, then, are the four classes whom Jesus warns, and it is clear
from the consideration of them that his view of sin is very
different from those current in that day. Men set sin down as an
external thing that drifted on to one like a floating burr--or like
paint, perhaps--it could be picked off or burnt off. It was the
eating of pork or hare--something technical or accidental; or it
was, many thought, the work of a demon from without, who could be
driven out to whence he came. Love and drunkenness illustrated the
thing for them--a change of personality induced by an exterior force
or object, as if the human spirit were a glass or a cup into which
anything might be poured, and from which it could be emptied and the
vessel itself remain unaffected. Jesus has a deeper view of sin, a
stronger psychology, than these, nor does he, like some quick
thinkers of to-day, put sin down to a man's environment, as if
certain surroundings inevitably meant sin. Jesus is quite definite
that sin is nothing accidental--it is involved in a man's own
nature, in his choice, it comes from the heart, and it speaks of a
heart that is wrong. When we survey the four groups, it comes to one
central question at last: Has a man been in earnest with himself
about God's dealings with him? Hardness and lust make a man play the
fool with human souls whom God loves and cares for--a declaration of
war on God himself. Wilful self-deception about God needs no
comment; to shilly-shally and let decision slide, where God is
concerned, is atheism too. In a word, what is a man's fundamental
attitude to God and God's facts? That is Jesus' question. Sin is
tracked home to the innermost and most essential part of the
man--his will. It is no outward thing, it is inward. It is not that
evil befalls us, but that we are evil. In the words of Edward Caird,
"the passion that misleads us is a manifestation of the same ego,
the same self-conscious reason which is misled by it," and thus, as
Burns puts it, "it is the very 'light from heaven' that leads us
astray." The man uses his highest God-given faculties, and uses them
against God.
But this is not all. Many people will agree with the estimate of
Jesus, when they understand it, in regard to most of these classes;
perhaps they would urge that in the main it is substantially the
same teaching as John the Baptist's, though it implies, as we shall
see, a more difficult problem in getting rid of sin. Jesus goes
further. He holds up to men standards of conduct which transcend
anything yet put before mankind. "Be ye therefore perfect," he says,
"even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48).
When we recall what Jesus teaches of God, when we begin to try to
give to "God" the content he intended, we realize with amazement
what he is saying. He is holding up to men for their ideal of
conduct the standard of God's holiness, of God's love and
tenderness. Everything that Jesus tells us of God--all that he has
to say of the wonderful and incredible love of God and of God's
activity on behalf of his children--he now incorporates in the ideal
of conduct to which men are called. John's conceptions of
righteousness grow beggarly. Here is a royal magnificence of active
love, of energetic sympathy, tenderness, and self-giving, asked of
us, who find it hard enough to keep the simplest commandments from
our youth up (Mark 10:20). We are to love our enemies, to win them,
to make peace, to be pure--and all on the scale of God. And that
this may not seem mere talk in the air, there is the character and
personality of Jesus, embodying all he asks of us--bringing out new
wonders of God's goodness, the ugliness and evil of sin, and the
positive and redemptive beauty of righteousness.
The problem of sin and forgiveness becomes more difficult, as we
think of the positive ideals which we have not begun to try to
reach. Let us sum up what it involves.
Jesus brings out the utter bankruptcy to which sin reduces men. They
become "full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (Matt. 23:28), so
depraved that they are like bad trees, unproductive of any but bad
fruit (rotten, in the Greek, Matt. 7:17); the very light in them is
darkness, and how great darkness (Matt. 6:23). They are cut off from
the real world, as we saw, and lose the faculties they have
abused--the talent is taken away (Matt. 25:28); "from him that hath
not, shall be taken away even that which he hath" (Matt. 25:29). The
nature is changed as memory is changed, and the "overflow of the
heart" in speech and act bears witness to it. The faculty of choice
is weakened; the interval in which inhibition--to use our modern
term--is possible, grows shorter. The instincts are perverted and
the whole being is disorganized. In a word, all that Jesus connotes
by "the Kingdom of God" is "taken from them" (Matt. 21:43), and
nothing left but "outer darkness" (Matt. 22:13). The vision of God
is not for the impure (Matt. 5:8). Meanwhile sin is not a sterile
thing, it is a leaven (Matt. 16:6). If our modern medical language
may be applied--and Jesus used the analogy of medicine in this very
case (Mark 2:17)--sin is septic. In the first place, all sin is
anti-social--an invasion "ipso facto" of the rights of others. The
man who sins either takes away what is another's--a man's goods, a
widow's house, or a woman's purity--or he fails to give to others
what is their due, be it, in the obvious field, the aid the Good
Samaritan rendered to the wounded and robbed man by the roadside
(Luke 10:33), or, in the higher sphere, truth, sympathy, help in the
maintenance of principle, or in the achievement of progress and
development (cf. Matt. 25:43). Sin is the repudiation of the
concepts of law, duty, and service, in a word, of the love on God's
scale which God calls men to exercise. And its fruits are, above
all, its dissemination. Injustice, a historian has said, always
repays itself with frightful compound interest. If a man starts to
debauch society, his example is quickly followed; and it comes to
hatred.
What, we asked, did Jesus mean by "lost"? This, above all, that sin
cuts a man adrift from God. In the parable of the Prodigal Son this
is brought out (Luke 15:11-32). There the youth took from his father
all he could get, and then deliberately turned his back on him
forever; he went into a far country, out of his reach, outside his
influence, and beyond the range of his ideas, and he devoted his
father's gifts to precisely what would sadden and trouble his father
most. And then came bankruptcy, final and hopeless. There was no
father available in the far country; he had to live without him, and
it came to a life that was not even human--a life of solitude, a
life of beasts. Jesus draws it, as he does most things, in picture
form, using parable. Paul puts the same in directer language; sin
reduces men to a position where they are "alienated from the life of
God" (Eph. 4:18; Col. 1:21), "without God in the world" (Eph. 2:12),
"enemies of God" (Rom. 5:10; Col. 1:21); but he does not say more
than Jesus implies. Paul's final expression, "God gave them up"
(thrice in Rom. 1:24, 26, 28), answers to the Judge's word, in
Jesus' picture, "Depart from me" (Matt. 25:41).
O Wedding-guest, this soul hath been
Alone on a wide, wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seeméd there to be.
So Jesus handles the problem of sin, but that is only half the
story, for there remains the problem of Redemption. The treatment of
sin is far profounder and truer than John the Baptist or any other
teacher has achieved; and it implies that Jesus will handle
Redemption in a way no less profound and effective. If he does not,
then he had better not have preached a gospel. If, in dealing with
sin, he touches reality at every point, we may expect him in the
matter of Redemption to reach the very centre of life.[30] How else
can he, with his serious view of sin, say to a man, "Thy sins are
forgiven thee"? (Mark 2:5). But it is quite clear from our records
that, while Jesus laid bare in this relentless way the ugliness and
hopelessness of sin, he did not despair: his tone is always one of
hope and confidence. The strong man armed may find a stronger man
come upon him and take from him the panoply in which he trusted
(Luke 11:21, 22). There is a great gulf that cannot be crossed (Luke
16:26)--yes, but if the experience of Christendom tells us anything,
it tells us that Jesus crossed it himself, and did the impossible.
"The great matter is that Jesus believed God was willing to take the
human soul, and make it new and young and clean again." But the
human soul did not believe it, till Jesus convinced it, and won it,
by action of his own. "The Son of Man came to seek and to save that
which was lost"; and he did not come in vain.