_THE ESCHATOLOGY OF THE GOSPEL._
Coifi, in his parable to the thanes and nobles of the North Humber
country, likened the present life of man to the flight of a sparrow
through one of their lighted halls, coming out of the night, and then
disappearing in the dark winter whence it came; and he asked for
Christianity a candid hearing, if perhaps she might tell the secrets of
the beyond. And so indeed she does, lighting up the "dark winter" with a
bright, though a partial apocalypse. It is not our purpose to enter into
a general discussion of the subject; our task is simply to arrest the
beams of inspired light hiding within this Gospel, and by a sort of
spectrum analysis to read from them what they are permitted to reveal.
And--
1. The Gospel teaches that the grave is not the end of life. It may seem
as if we were stating but a truism in saying this; yet if a truism, it
perhaps has not been allowed its due place in our thought, and its
restatement may not be altogether a superfluous word. We cannot study
the life of Jesus without noticing that His views of earth were not the
views of men in general. To them this world was everything; to possess
it, even in some infinitesimal quantity, was their supreme ambition; and
though in their better, clearer moments they caught glimpses of worlds
other than their own, yet to their distant vision they were as the
twinkling stars of the azure, far off and cold, soon losing themselves
in the haze of unreality, or setting in the shadows of the imposing
earth. To Jesus earth was but a fragment of a vaster whole, a fragment
whose substances were but the shadows of higher, heavenlier realities.
Nor were these outlying spaces to His mind voids of silence, a "dark
inane," without life or thought; they were peopled with intelligences
whose personalities were as distinctly marked as is this human _Ego_,
and whose movements, unweighted by the gyves of flesh, seemed subtle and
swift as thought itself. With one of these worlds Jesus was perfectly
familiar. With heaven, which was the abode of His Father and innumerable
hosts of angels, He was in close and constant correspondence, and the
frequent prayer, the frequent upward looks tell us how near and how
intensely real the heavenly places were to Him. But in the mind of Jesus
this empyrean of happiness and light had its antipodes of woe and
darkness, a penal realm of fearful shadow, and which, borrowing the
language of the city, He called the Gehenna of burning. Such were the
two invisible realms, lying away from earth, yet closely touching it
from opposite directions, and to one or other of which all the paths of
human life turned, to find their goal and their self-chosen destiny.
And not only so, but the transition from the Seen to the Unseen was not
to Jesus the abrupt and total change that it seems to man. To us the
dividing-line is both dark and broad. It seems to us a transmigration to
some new and strange world, where we must begin life _de novo_. To Jesus
the line was narrow, like one of the imaginary meridians of earth, the
"here" shading off into the "hereafter," while both were but the
hemispheres of one round life. And so Jesus did not often speak of
"death;" that was too human a word. He preferred the softer names of
"sleep" or "exodus," thus making death the quickener of life, or
likening it to a triumphal march from bondage to liberty. Nor was "the
Valley of the Shadow" to Jesus a strange, unfamiliar place. He knew all
its secrets, all its windings. It was His own territory, where His will
was supreme. Again and again He throws a commanding voice across the
valley, a voice which goes reverberating among the heights beyond, and
instantly the departed spirit retraces its steps, to animate again the
cold clay it had forsaken. "He is not the God of the dead, but of the
living," said Jesus, as He claimed for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob an
existence altogether apart from the crumbling dust of Hebron; and as we
see Moses and Elias coming to the Mount of Transfiguration, we see that
the departed have not so far departed as to take no interest in earthly
things, and as not to hear the strike of earthly hours. And how clearly
this is seen in the resurrection life of Jesus, with which this Gospel
closes! Death and the Grave have done their worst to Him, but how little
is that worst! how insignificant the blank it makes in the Divine Life!
The few hours in the grave were but a semibreve rest in the music of
that Life; the Easter morning struck a fresh bar, and the music went on,
in the higher spaces, it is true, but in the same key and in the same
sweet strain. And just so is it with all human life; "the grave is not
our goal." Conditions and circumstances will of necessity change, as the
mortal puts on immortality, but the life itself will be one and the
same life, here amid things visible and temporal, and there amid the
invisible and eternal.
2. The Gospel shows in what respects the conditions of the after-life
will be changed. In chapter xx. 27 we read how that the Sadducees came
to Jesus, tempting Him. They were the cold materialists of the age,
denying the existence of spirits, and so denying the resurrection. They
put before Him an extreme, though not impossible case, of a woman who
had been the wife, successively, of seven brethren; and they ask, with
the ripple of an inward laugh in their question, "In the resurrection
therefore whose wife of them shall she be?" Jesus answered, "The sons of
this world marry, and are given in marriage: but they that are accounted
worthy to attain to that world, and the resurrection from the dead,
neither marry, nor are given in marriage: for neither can they die any
more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are sons of God, being
sons of the resurrection." It will be observed how Jesus plays with the
word around which the Sadducean mind revolves. To them marriage was a
key-word which locked up the gates of an after-life, and threw back the
resurrection among the impossibilities and absurdities. But Jesus takes
up their key-word, and turning it round and round in His speech, He
makes it unlock and open the inner soul of these men, showing how, in
spite of their intellectuality, the drift of their thoughts was but low
and sensual. At the same time Jesus shows that their test-word is
altogether mundane. It is made for earth alone; for having a nature of
flesh and blood, it cannot enter into the higher kingdom of glory.
Marriage has its place in the life whose termini are birth and death. It
exists mainly for the perpetuation and increase of the human race. It
has thus to do with the lower nature of man, the physical, the earthly;
but in the world to come birth, marriage, death will be outdated,
obsolete terms. Man then will be "equal unto the angels," the coarser
nature which fitted him for earth being shaken off and left behind,
amongst other mortalities.
And exactly the same truth is taught by the three posthumous appearances
recorded in this Gospel. When they appeared upon the Mount of
Transfiguration, Moses and Elias had been residents of the other world,
the one for nine, the other for fourteen centuries. But while possessing
the form, and perhaps the features of the old body of earth, the
glorious body they wear now is under conditions and laws altogether
different. How easy and aërial are its movements! Though it possesses no
wings, it has the lightness and buoyancy of a bird, moving through space
swiftly and silently as the light pulses through the ether. Or take the
body of Christ's resurrection life. It has not yet become the glorified
body of the heavenly life; it is in its transition state, between the
two; yet how changed it is! Lifted above the needs and laws of our
earth-bound nature, the risen Christ no longer lives among His own; He
dwells apart, where we cannot tell. When He does appear He comes in upon
them suddenly, giving no warning of His approach; and then, after the
bright though brief apocalypse, He vanishes as mysteriously as He came,
passing at the last on the clouds to heaven. There is thus some
correspondence between the body of the old and that of the new life,
though how far the resemblance extends we cannot tell; we can only fall
back upon the Apostle's words, which to our human ear sound like a
paradox, but which give us our only solution of the enigma, "It is
raised a spiritual body" (i Cor. xv. 44). It is no longer the "natural
body," but a supernatural one, with a spiritual instead of a material
form, and under spiritual laws.
But taking the Apostle's words as our base-line, and measuring from
them, we may throw our lines of sight across the hereafter, reading at
least as much as this, that whatever may be the pleasures or the pains
of the after-life, they will be of a spiritual, and not of a physical
kind. It is just here that our vision sometimes gets blurred and
indistinct, as all the descriptions of that after-life, even in
Scripture, are given in earthly figures. And so we have built up before
us a material heaven, with jasper walls, and gates of pearl, and gardens
of perennial fruits, with crowns and other palace delights. But it is
evident that these are but the earthly shadows of the heavenly
realities, the darkened glasses of our earthly speech, which help our
dull vision to gaze upon glories which the eye of our mortality hath not
seen, and which its heart cannot conceive, except dimly, as a few
"broken lights" pass through the dark lenses of these earthly figures.
What new senses may be created we do not know, but if the body of the
after-life is "a spiritual body," then its whole environment must be
changed. Material substances can no longer affect it, either to cause
pleasure or pain; and though we may not yet tell in what the delights of
the one state, or the pains of the other will consist, we do know that
they must be something other than literal palms and crowns, and other
than material fires. These figures are but the stammerings of our
earthly speech, as it tries to tell the unutterable.
3. Our Gospel teaches that character determines destiny. "A man's life,"
said Jesus, when rebuking covetousness (xii. 15), "consisteth not in the
abundance of the things which he possesseth." These are not life's
noblest aim, nor its truest wealth. They are but the accidents of life,
the particles of floating dust, caught up by the stream; they will be
left behind soon as the sediment, if not before, when they reach the
barrier of the grave. A man's possessions do not constitute the true
life; they do not make the real self, the man. Here it is not what a man
has, but what a man is. And a man is just what his heart makes him. The
outer life is but the blossoming of the inner soul, and what we call
character, in its objective meaning, is but the subtle and silent
influence, the odour, as we might call it, fragrant or otherwise, which
the soul unconsciously throws out. And even in this world character is
more than circumstance, for it gives aim and direction to the whole
life. Men do not always reach their goal in earthly things, but in the
moral world each man goes to his "own place," the place he himself has
chosen and sought; he is the arbiter of his own destiny.
And what we find to be a law of earth is the law of the kingdom of
heaven, as Jesus was constantly affirming. The future life would simply
be the present life, with eternity as its coefficient. Destiny itself
would be but the harvest of earthly deeds, the hereafter being only the
after-here. Jesus shows us how while on earth we may lay up "treasures
in the heavens," making for ourselves "purses which wax not old," and
thus becoming "rich toward God." He draws a vivid picture of "a certain
rich man," whose one estimate of life was "the abundance of the things
which he possessed," the size and affluence of his barns, and whose soul
was required of him just when he was congratulating it on the years of
guaranteed plenty, bidding it, "Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be
merry (xii. 16-12)." He does not here trace for us the destiny of such a
soul--He does this in another parable--but He pictures it as suddenly
torn away, and eternally separated, from all it had possessed before,
leaving it, perhaps, to be squandered thriftlessly, or consumed by the
fires of lust; while, starved and shrivelled, the pauper soul is driven
out from its earthly stewardship, to find, alas! no welcome in the
"eternal tabernacles." In the appraisement of this world such a man
would be deemed wise and happy, but to Heaven he is the "foolish one,"
committing the great, the eternal folly.
The same lesson is taught in the parables of the Housebuilders (vi. 47)
and of the Talents (xix. 12). In each there comes the inevitable test,
the down-rush of the flood and the reckoning of the lord, a test which
leaves the obedient secure and happy, the faithful promoted to honour
and rewards, passed up among the kings; but the disobedient, if not
entombed in the ruins of their false hopes, yet all shelterless from the
pitiless storm, and the unfaithful and slothful servant stripped of even
the little he had, passed downwards into dishonour and shame.
In another parable, that of the Rich Man and Lazarus (xvi. 19-31) we
have a light thrown upon our subject which is at once vivid and lurid.
In a few graphic words He draws for us the picture of strange contrasts.
The one is rich, dwelling in a palatial residence, whose imposing
gateway looked down upon the vulgar crowd; clothed in garments of Tyrian
purple and of Egyptian byssus, which only great wealth could purchase,
and faring sumptuously every day. So, with perpetual banquets, the rich
man lived his selfish, sensual life. With thought all centred upon
himself, and that his lowest self, he has no thoughts or sympathies to
spare for the outlying world. They do not even travel so far as to the
poor beggar who is cast daily at his gate, in hopes that some of the
shaken-out crumbs of the banquet may fall within his reach. Such is the
contrast--the extreme of wealth, and the extreme of poverty; the one
with troops of friends, the other friendless--for the verb shows that
the hands which laid him down by the rich man's gate were not the gentle
hands of affection, but the rough hands of duty or of a cold charity;
the one clothed in splendid attire, the other not possessing enough even
to cover his sores; the one gorged to repletion, the other shrunken and
starved; the one the anonymous Epicurean, the other possessing a name
indeed, but nought beside, but a name that had a Divinity hidden within
it,[6] and which was an index to the soul that bore it. Such were the
two characters Jesus portrayed; and then, lifting up the veil of
shadows, He shows how the marked contrast reappears in the after-life,
but with a strange inverting. Now the poor man is blessed, the rich in
distress; the one is enfolded in Abraham's bosom, the other enveloped in
flames; the one has all the delights of Paradise, the other begs for
just a drop of water with which to cool the parched tongue.
[6] The name "Lazarus" is derived from El-ezer, or "God helps."
It may be said that this is simply parable, set forth in language which
must not be taken literally. So it is; but the parables of Jesus were
not mere word-pictures; they field in solution essential truth. And when
we have eliminated all this figurative colouring there is still left
this residuary, elementary truth, that character determines destiny:
that we cast into our future the shadow of our present selves; that the
good will be blessed, and the evil unblessed, which means accursed; and
that heaven and hell are tremendous realities, whose pleasures and whose
pains lie alike deep beyond the sounding of our weak speech. When the
rich man forgot his duties to humanity; when he banished God from his
mansion, and proscribed mercy from his thoughts; when he left Heaven's
foundling to the dogs, he was writing out his book of doom, passing
sentence upon himself. The tree lies as it falls, and it falls as it
leans; and where is there place for the unforgiven, the unregenerate,
for the sensual and the selfish, the unjust and the unclean, but
somewhere in the outer darkness they themselves have helped to make? To
the sensual and the vile heaven itself would be a hell, its very joys
curdling into pain, its streets, thronged with the multitudes of the
redeemed, offering to the guilty and unrenewed soul but a solitude of
silence and anguish; and even were there no final judgment, no solemn
pronouncement of destiny, the evil could never blend with the good, the
pure with the vile; they would gravitate, even as they do now, in
opposite directions, each seeking its "own place." Wherever and whatever
our final heaven may be, no one is an outcast but who casts himself out,
a self-immolation, a suicide.
But is it destiny? it may be asked. May there not be an after-probation,
so that character itself may be transformed? may not the "great gulf"
itself disappear, or at last be bridged over, so that the repentant may
pass out of its penal but purifying fires? Such, indeed, is the belief,
or rather the hope, of some; but "the larger hope" as they are pleased
to call it, as far as this Gospel is concerned, is a beautiful but
illusive dream. He who was Himself the "Resurrection and the Life," and
who holds in His own hands the keys of death and of Hades, gives no hint
of such a posthumous palingenesis. He speaks again and again of a day of
test and scrutiny, when actions will be weighed and characters assayed,
and when men will be judged according to their works. Now it is at the
"coming" of the Son of man, in the glory of His Father, and with a
retinue of "holy angels;" now it is the returning of the lord, and the
reckoning with his servants; while again it is at the end of the world,
as the angel-reapers separate the wheat from the tares; or as He
Himself, the great Judge, with His "Come ye," passes on the faithful to
the heavenly kingdom, and at the same time, with His "Depart ye," drives
from His presence the unfaithful and unforgiven into the outer darkness.
Nor does Jesus say one word to suggest that the judgment is not final.
The blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, whatever that may mean, shall not
be forgiven (xii. 10), or, as St. Matthew expresses it, "neither in this
world, nor in that which is to come." The unfaithful servant is "cut
asunder" (xii. 46); the enemies who would not have their Lord to reign
over them are slain (xix. 27); and when once the door is shut it is all
in vain that those outside cry, "Lord, open to us!" They had an open
door, but they slighted and scorned it, and now they must abide by their
choice, outside the door, outside the kingdom, with the "workers of
iniquity," where "there is weeping and gnashing of teeth" (xiii. 28).
Or if we turn again to the parable of the Rich Man, where is there room
for the "larger hope"? where is the suggestion that these "pains of
hell" may be lessened; and ultimately escaped altogether? We listen in
vain for one syllable of hope. In vain he makes his appeal to "father
Abraham;" in vain he entreats the good offices of Lazarus; in vain he
asks for a momentary alleviation of his pain, in the boon of one drop of
water: between him and help, yea, between him and hope, is a "great gulf
fixed, ... that none may cross" (xvi. 26).
"That none may cross." Such are the words of Jesus, though here put in
the mouth of Abraham; and if finality is not here, where can we find it?
What may be the judgment passed upon those who, though erring, are
ignorant, we cannot tell, though Jesus plainly indicates that the number
of the stripes will vary, as they knew, or they did not know, the Lord's
will; but for those who had the light, and turned from it, who saw the
right, but did it not, who heard the Gospel of love, with its great
salvation, and only rejected it--for these there is only an "outer
darkness" of eternal hopelessness. And what is the outer darkness itself
but the darkness of their own inner blindness, a blindness which was
wilful and persistent?
Our Gospel thus teaches that death does not alter character, that
character makes destiny, and that destiny once determined is unalterable
and eternal. Or, to put it in the words of the angel to the seer, "He
that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still: and he that is
filthy, let him be made filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him
do righteousness still: and he that is holy, let him be made holy still"
(Rev. xxii. 11).