One strong peculiarity of the teaching of Jesus--we might even call it
its outstanding feature--is that it is frequently disclosed in a series
of incidents. Unlike most teachers He philosophizes little about life.
A single chapter of the Gospels, or at most two, would contain all the
maxims about life which He thought necessary for wise and lofty
conduct. His method is rather to put Himself in relation to the
crucial occurrences of life, and to reveal the true way of regarding
them by His own attitude towards them. When He would teach the beauty
of humility it is by putting a little child in the midst of His
arrogant and vainglorious disciples, that the child may become the
living and memorable parable of His sentiments. When He would teach
humanity, He does so by His own conduct to lepers. When He would
discredit and expose the barbarism of the Mosaic Sabbatarian laws as
interpreted by scribes and Pharisees, He does so by healing the sick
and blind upon the Sabbath day. He is all for the concrete, teaching
not by theory, but by example. The method is novel, and its advantages
are obvious. The best conceived discourses on humility, mercy, or
sympathy, might be forgotten, but no one can forget the child among the
disciples, nor the raptured gaze of the blind man when his purged eyes
open to behold the face of his miraculous Physician, nor the picture of
Jesus touching without fear or disgust the leper whose unclean
contagion made him an object of aversion even to the pitiful.
It is a wonderful method of instruction; it makes every other method
seem trite and wearisome. Its effect is to make the Gospels a series
of tableaux, which dwell in the memory as things actually seen. The
groups upon the stage perpetually shift and rearrange themselves; each
represents some phase of life, some problem, some combination of
circumstance more or less common in the experience of men, something
that is typical, for Jesus chooses only the typical and essential
things of life for these occasions. The lesser things of life He
passes over; it is the great and crucial matters which attract Him.
But what are the great things of life?
They all fall into one category, they all present problems in human
relationship. No problems are so difficult. They are not speculative,
but practical. A man who may be wise as the world counts wisdom, and
able to pierce with acute analysis to the depth of the abstrusest
philosophic problem, may nevertheless find himself hopelessly baffled
by some quite common fact of life, such as how to treat a wayward son,
or a sinful woman. I am not likely to lose a night's rest because I am
unable to define the Trinity but with what sore travail of heart do I
toss through midnight hours when I have to settle some course of action
towards the friend who has betrayed me, the brother who has brought me
shame, the child who scoffs at my restraint, and hears the call of the
far country in every swift pulsation of his passionate heart! And why
cannot I settle my course of action? Because my mind is confused by
something which I call justice, to which custom has given authority and
consecration. Justice prescribes one course of action, affection
another. The convention of the world insists that wrong-doing should
be punished, which is manifestly right; but when it insists that I
should be the punisher, I suspect something wrong. The more closely I
study conventional justice the more I am conscious of something in
myself that distrusts and revolts from it. The more I incline to the
voice of affection the more I fear it, lest I should be guilty of
weakness which would merit my own contempt. The struggle is one
between convention and instinct, and I know not which side to take.
But one thing I do know; it is that I have no certain clue to guide me,
no clear determining principle that divides the darkness with a sword
of light, no voice within myself that is authoritative.
Now the wonderful thing in Jesus is that He is always sure of Himself.
Nothing takes Him by surprise, nothing produces the least hesitation in
His judgment. Therefore He must have had an unfailing clue to which He
trusted in the maze of life. Behind all consistency of judgment there
must exist consistency of principle. The principle that governed all
the thoughts of Jesus was _that love was the only real justice_. He
came not to condemn, not to destroy men's lives, but to save them.
There was no problem of human relationship that could not be solved by
love; there was no other principle needed for the regulation of
society; and no other could produce that general peace and good-will
which He called the Kingdom of God.
Thus, on one occasion Jesus tells a story which is so lifelike in every
touch that we may accept it, without doubt, as less a parable than an
incident. A father has two sons, one of whom is industrious and
dutiful, the other wayward and rebellious. The wayward son finally
casts off all pretense of filial obedience, goes into a far country,
and wastes his substance in riotous living. Here we have one of the
saddest of all problems in human relationship, for presently the
disgraced son comes home a beggar. The elder brother who represents
the average social view, has no doubt whatever as to what should be
done. He is offended that the disgraced son should come home at all;
he would have thought better of him if he had hidden his shame in the
country that had witnessed it. Probably his sense of pride and
respectability is offended more than his love of virtue, though he
characteristically gives his jealous anger the illusion of morality.
This, I say, is the average social view. There are few things more
cruel than affronted respectability. The elder brother is an eminently
respectable person, totally unacquainted with wayward passions, and his
only feeling for his brother is disdain.
Jesus tells the story, however, in such a way as to discredit the
average social view. He begins by making us feel that whatever follies
the prodigal had committed, he had already been punished for them in
the miseries he had endured. It is not for man to punish with his whip
of scorn one who has already been flaggellated with a whip of scorpions
in the desert places of disgrace and shame. Jesus makes us feel also
that whatever sins might be laid to the charge of the disgraced son,
there is nevertheless in his heart a warmth of feeling of which the
elder brother gives no sign. The boy loves his father, otherwise he
would not have turned to him in his anguish of distress. The elder
brother's attitude to his father is arrogant and harsh; the younger
brother's is humble and tender. Lastly the father himself is revealed
as the embodiment of love. He asks no questions, utters no reproaches,
imposes no conditions; he simply takes his son back, in the rush of his
affection cutting short the boy's pitiful confession, and calling for
shoes and new robes and festal music, as though his son had returned in
dignity and triumph. In the last scene of all, implied rather than
described, the restored prodigal sits at the feast, leaning on his
father's bosom, but the respectable son stands without in a darkness of
his own creation--the darkness which a harsh spirit and an unlovely
temper never fail to create in men of his unhappy temperament.
It is a very strange story, if we come to think of it; almost an
immoral story, as no doubt it was considered by the Pharisees, and
persons of their cold and mechanical type of virtue. But Jesus
anticipates their criticism with one of the most startling statements
that ever fell from inspired lips, "There is more joy in heaven among
the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and
nine righteous persons who need no repentance." Heaven approves the
story, if they do not. Thus God Himself would act, for God is love.
Thus love must needs act, if it be the kind of love that "suffereth
long and is kind, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own,
is not provoked, taketh not account of evil, beareth all things,
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." And if
we ask what becomes of justice, Jesus assures us that love is the only
real justice. For the main object of justice is not punishment but
reclamation. A truly enlightened justice is less concerned with the
punishment of wrong than its reparation.
The gravest question in the case of this unhappy boy is not what he has
made of himself by sin and folly, but what can yet be made of him by
wise and tender treatment. Had the father coldly dismissed the
prodigal with some bitter verdict on his past folly, he himself would
have been unjust to the boy's possibilities, and thus would have sinned
against his son with a sin much less capable of excuse than the son's
sin against him. The worst sinner in the story is not the son who went
wrong, but the son who had never done anything but right, yet had done
it in such a way that it had begotten in him a vile, censorious,
loveless temper. No one can be just who does not love; and so, once
more removing the story into that unseen world which Christ called in
to redress the balance of this visible world, we sinful men and women
build our hopes upon the great saying that God's forgiveness is God's
justice: if we confess our sins, He is not only faithful, but JUST in
forgiving us our sins.