In the history of the last two thousand years there is but one Person
who has been, and is supremely loved. Many have been loved by
individuals, by groups of persons, or by communities; some have
received the pliant idolatries of nations, such as heroes and national
deliverers; but in every instance the sense of love thus excited has
been intimately associated with some triumph of intellect, or some
resounding achievement in the world of action. In this there is
nothing unusual, for man is a natural worshipper of heroes. But in
Jesus Christ we discover something very different; He possessed the
genius to be loved in so transcendent a degree that it appears His sole
genius.
Jesus is loved not for anything that He taught, nor yet wholly for
anything that He did, although His actions culminate in the divine
fascination of the Cross, but rather for what He was in Himself. His
very name provokes in countless millions a reverent tenderness of
emotion usually associated only with the most sacred and intimate of
human relationships. He is loved with a certain purity and intensity
of passion that transcends even the most intimate expressions of human
emotion. The curious thing is that He Himself anticipated this kind of
love as His eternal heritage with men. He expected that men would love
Him more than father or mother, wife or child, and even made such a
love a condition of what He called discipleship. The greatest marvel
of all human history is that this prognostication has been strictly
verified in the event. He is the Supreme Lover, for whose love,
unrealizable as it is by touch, or glance, or spoken word, or momentary
presence, men and women are still willing to sacrifice themselves, and
surrender all things. The pregnant words of Napoleon, uttered in his
last lonely reveries in St. Helena, still express the strangest thing
in universal history: "Caesar, Charlemagne, I, have founded empires.
They were founded on force, and have perished. Jesus Christ has
founded an empire on love, and to this day there are millions ready to
die for Him."
Napoleon felt the wonder of it all, the baffling, inexplicable marvel.
Were we able to detach ourselves enough from use and custom, to survey
the movement of human thought from some lonely height above the floods
of Time, as Napoleon in the high sea-silences of St. Helena, we also
might feel the wonder of this most wonderful thing the world has ever
known.
That the majority of men, and even Christian men, do not perceive that
the whole meaning of the life of Christ is Love is a thing too obvious
to demand evidence or invite contradiction. I say men, and Christian
men, thus limiting my statement, because women and Christian women,
frequently do perceive it, being themselves the creatures of affection,
and finding in affection the one sufficing symbol of life and of the
universe. It is a St. Catherine who thinks of herself as the bride of
Christ, and dreams the lovely vision of the changed hearts--the heart
of Jesus placed by the hands that bled beneath her pure bosom, and her
heart hidden in the side of Him who died for her. It is a St. Theresa
who melts into ecstasy at the brooding presence of the heavenly Lover,
and can only think of the Evil One himself with commiseration as one
who cannot love. It is true that Francis of Assisi also thought and
spoke of Christ with a lover's ecstasy, but then Francis in his
exquisite tenderness of nature, was more woman than man. No such
thought visited the stern heart of Dominic, nor any of those makers of
theology who have built systems and disciplines upon the divine poetry
of the divine Life.
Love, as the perfect symbol of life and the universe, does not content
men, simply because for most men love is not the key to life, nor an
end worth living for in itself, nor anything but a complex and often
troublesome emotion, which must needs be subordinated to other
faculties and qualities, such as greed, or pride, or the desire of
power, or the dominant demands of intellect. Among men the poets alone
have really understood Jesus: and in the category of the poets must be
included the saints, whose religion has always been interpreted to them
through the imagination. The poets have understood; the theologians
rarely or never. Thus it happens that men, being the general and
accepted interpreters of Christ, have all but wholly misinterpreted
Him. The lyric passion of that life, and the lyric love which it
excites, has been to them a disregarded music. They have rarely
achieved more than to tell us what Christ taught; they have wholly
failed to make us feel what Christ was. But Mary Magdalene knew this,
and it was what she said and felt in the Garden that has put Christ
upon the throne of the world. Was not her vision after all the true
one? Is not a Catherine a better guide to Jesus than a Dominic? When
all the strident theologies fall silent, will not the world's whole
worship still utter itself in the lyric cry,
Jesu, Lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly.
Is it then not within the competence of man to interpret Christ aright,
simply because the masculine temperament is what it is? By no means,
for such a statement would disqualify the evangelists themselves, who
are the only biographers of Jesus. But in the degree that a
temperament is only masculine, it will fail to understand Jesus.
Napoleon could not understand; he was the child of force, the son of
the sword, the very type of that hard efficiency of will and intellect
which turns the heart to flint, and scorns the witness of the softer
intuitions. Francis could understand because he was in part
feminine--not weakly so, but nobly, as all poets and dreamers and
visionaries are. Paul could understand for the same reason, and so
could John and Peter; each, in varying degrees, belonging to the same
type; but Pilate could not understand, because he had been trained in
the hard efficiency of Rome; nor Judas, because the masculine vice of
ambition had overgrown his affections, and deflowered his heart. What
is it then in Paul and John and Peter, what element or quality, which
we do not find in Pilate, Judas, or Napoleon? Clearly there is no lack
of force, for the personality of these three first apostles lifted a
world out of its groove and changed the course of history. Was it not
just this, that each had beneath his masculine strength a feminine
tenderness, a power of loving and of begetting love in others? John
lying on the bosom of Jesus in sheer abandonment of love and sorrow at
the last Supper; Peter, plunging naked into the Galilean sea, and
struggling to the shore at the mere suspicion that the strange figure
outlined there upon the morning mist is the Lord; Paul praying not only
to share the wounds of Jesus, but if there be any pang left over, any
anguish unfulfilled, that this anguish may be his--these are not alone
immortal pictures, but they are revelations of a temperament, the
temperament that understands Jesus. He who could not melt into an
abandonment of grief and love over one on whom the shadow of the last
hour rested; he who would spring headlong into no estranging sea to
reach one loved and lost and marvellously brought near again; he who
can share the festal wine of life, but has no appetite for agony, no
thirsting of the soul to bear another's pain--these can never
understand Jesus. They cannot understand Him, simply because they
cannot understand love.