The Jesus of History Part 2

There was no telling. What was needed--some time--it was bound to come--and the voice sank--a Theudas, or a Judas again (Acts 5:36, 37)--it would not be surprising. ... There were no newspapers, no approved and reliable sources of news such as we boast to have from our governments and millionaires; all was rumour, bazaar talk--"Lo!

here!" and "Lo! there!" (Mark 13:21). "Prohibiti sermones ideoque plures", said Tacitus of Rome--rumours were forbidden, so there were more of them. The Messiah _must_ come some time, said one man who might be a friend of the Zealots. In any case, reflected another, those Galileans had probably angered Heaven and got their deserts; ill luck like that could hardly come by accident; think of the tower that fell at Siloam--anybody could see there was a judgement in it.

Might it not be said that G.o.d had discredited John the Baptist, now his head was taken off? So men speculated (cf. John 9:2). Jesus saw through all this, and was radiantly clear about it.

So they chattered, and he heard. Then the talk took another turn, and tales were told--bad eyes flashed and lips smacked, as one story-teller eclipsed the other in the familiar vein. The Arabian Nights are tales of the crowd, it is said, rather than literature in their origin, and will give clues enough to what might be told.

Jesus heard, and he saw what it meant; and afterwards he told his friends: "From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders ... foolishness; all these evil things come from within, and defile the man" (Mark 7:21-23). The evil thought takes shape to find utterance, and gains thereby a new vitality, a new power for evil, and may haunt both speaker and listener for ever with its defiling memory.

By and by he intervened and spoke himself. Every one was shocked, and said, "Blasphemy!" They were not used to think of G.o.d as he did, and it seemed improper.

Then the whole question of human speech rises for him. What did they mean by their words? What could their minds be like? G.o.d dragged in and flung about like a counter, in a game of barter--but if you speak real meaning about G.o.d it is blasphemy. "Rabbi, Rabbi" to the great man's face--he turns his back--and his name is smirched for ever by a witty improvisation. Why? Why should men do such things?

The magic in the idle tale--ten minutes, and the memory is stained for ever with what not one of them would forget, however he might wish to try to forget. The words are loose and idle, careless, flung out without purpose but to pa.s.s the moment--and they live for ever and work mischief. How can they be so light and yet have such power?

Later on he told his friends what he had seen in this matter of words. They come from within, and the speaker's whole personality, false or true, is behind what he says--the good or bad treasure of his heart. There are no grapes growing on the bramble bush. No wonder that of every idle word men shall give account on the day of Judgement (Matt. 12:36). The idle word--the word unstudied--comes straight from the inmost man, the spontaneous overflow from the spirit within, natural and inevitable, proof of his quality; and they react with the life that brought them forth.[13]

So he grows up--in a real world and among real people. He goes to school with the boys of his own age, and lives at home with mother and brothers and sisters. He reads the Old Testament, and forms a habit of going to the Synagogue (Luke 4:16). All points to a home where religion was real. The first word he learnt to say was probably "Abba", and it struck the keynote of his thoughts. But he knew the world without as well,--turned on to it early the keen eyes that saw all, and he recognized what he saw. Knowledge of men, but without cynicism, a loving heart still in spite of his freedom from illusions--these are among the gifts that his environment gave him, or failed to take away from him.

CHAPTER III

THE MAN AND HIS MIND

It is a commonplace with those who take literature seriously that what is to reach the heart must come from the heart; and the maxim may be applied conversely--that what has reached a heart has come from a heart--that what continues to reach the heart, among strange peoples, in distant lands, after long ages, has come from a heart of no common make. The Anglo-Saxon boy is at home in the Odyssey; and when he is a man--if he has the luck to be guided into cla.s.sical paths--he finds himself in the Aeneid; and from this certain things are deduced about the makers of those poems--that they knew life, looked on it with bright, keen eyes, loved it, and lived it over again as they shaped it into verse.

When we turn to the first three Gospels, we find the same thing.

Here are books with a more worldwide range than Homer or Virgil, translated again and again from the first century of their existence on to the latest--and then more than ever--into all sorts of tongues, to reach men all over the globe; and that purpose they have achieved. They have done it not so much for the literary graces of the translators or even of the original authors, though in one case these are more considerable than is sometimes allowed. That the Gospels owe their appeal to the recorded sayings and doings of our Lord, is our natural way of putting it to-day; but if for "our Lord"

we put a plainer description, more congenial to the day in which the Gospels were written, we shall be in a better position to realize the significance of the worldwide appeal of his words. Thus and thus, then, spoke a mere provincial, a Jew who, though far less conspicuous and interesting, came from the region of Meleager and Philodemos--not from their town of Gadara, nor possibly from their district, but from some place not so very far away.

It was not to be expected that he should win the hearts of men as he did. He had not the Greek culture of the two Gadarenes. Celsus even found his style of speech rather vulgar. But he has, as a matter of common knowledge--so common as hardly to be noted--won the hearts of men in every race and every land. The fact is familiar, but we have as historians and critics to look for the explanation. What has been his appeal? And what the heart and nature, from which came this incredible power and reach of appeal? "Out of the abundance (the overflow) of the heart the mouth speaketh," he said. (Matt. 12:34).

This he amplified, as we have seen, by his insistence on the weight of every idle word (Matt. 12:36)--the unstudied and spontaneous expression or e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n--the reflex, in modern phrase--which gives the real clue to the man's inner nature and deeper mind, which "justifies" him, therefore, or "condemns" him (Matt. 12:37). The overflow of the heart, he holds, shows more decisively than anything else the quality of the spring in its depths.

Here is a suggestion which we find true in ordinary life as well as in the study of literature. If we turn it back upon its author, he at least will not complain, and we shall perhaps gain a new sense of his significance by approaching him at a new angle, from an outlook not perhaps much frequented. How did he come to speak in this manner, to say this and that? To what feeling or thought, to what att.i.tude to life, is this or the other saying due? If he, too, spoke "out of the overflow of his heart"--and we can believe it when we think of the freshness and spontaneity with which he spoke--of what nature and of what depth was that heart?

We can very well believe that much in his speech that was unforgettable to others, he forgot himself. They remembered, they could not help remembering, what he said; but he--no! he said it and moved on, keeping no register of his sayings; and so much the more natural and characteristic they are. Nor would he, like smaller people, be very careful of the form and turn of his speech; it was never set. Certainly he gave his followers the rule not to study their language (Mark 13:11). Whether or no he had consciously thought it all out; we can see the value of his rule, and how it fits in with his way of life and safeguards it. Under such a rule speech will not be stereotyped; no set form of words will impose itself on the free movement of thought, the mind can and will move of itself unhampered; and when the mind keeps and develops such freedom of movement, it commonly breaks new ground and handles new things. Not to be careful of our speech means for most of us slovenly thinking; but when a man thinks in earnest and takes truth seriously, when he speaks with his eye on his object, his language will not be slovenly, his instinct for fact will keep his speech pure and true. This is what we find in the sayings of Jesus; there is form, but living form, the freedom and grace which the clear mind and the friendly eye communicate insensibly and inimitably to language.

Our task in this chapter is primarily a historical one. From the words of Jesus we have to work back to the type of mind from which they come. There is always danger in such a task. We may forget the wide and living variety of the mind we study; our own minds may not be large enough, nor tender enough, not various, quick and sympathetic in such a degree as to apprehend what we find, to see what it means, and to relate it to itself, detail to whole. How much greater the danger here! While we a.n.a.lyse, we have to remember that the most correct a.n.a.lysis of features or characteristics may easily fail to give us a true idea of the face or the character which we a.n.a.lyse. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The face and the character have an "integrity," a wholeness. The detail may be of immense value to us, studied as detail; but for the true view the detail, familiar as it may be to us, and dear to us, must be sunk in the general view. Especially is this true of great characters. The "reconstruction of a personality"--to borrow a phrase from some psychologists--is a very difficult matter, even when we are masters of our detail. There is a proportion, a perspective, a balance, a poise about a character--my terms may involve some mixture of metaphors, but if the mixture brings out the complexity and difficulty of our task, it will be justified. Above all there is life, and as a life deepens and widens, it grows complex, unintelligible, and wonderful. It is more so than ever in the case of Jesus. Yet we have to grapple with this great task, if we are to know him, even if here as elsewhere we realize quickly that the beginning of real knowledge is when we grasp how much we do not know, how much there is to know. Attempted in this spirit, a study of the mind of Jesus and his characteristics should help us forward to some further intimacy with him.

The Gospels do not, like some biographies ancient and modern, give a place to the physical characteristics of Jesus. Suetonius in a very short sketch adds the personal aspect of the poet Horace, who, it is true, had led the way by such allusions (Epist. i. 4, 15-16), and tells us how Augustus said he was "a squat little pot" (sessilis...o...b..). The "Acts of Thekla" in a similar way describe St. Paul's short figure with its suggestion of quickness. But the only personal traits of this sort that I recall in the New Testament are the eyes of Jesus and Paul's way of stretching out a hand when he spoke. In view of this reticence, it is rather remarkable how often the Gospels refer to Jesus "looking." He "looked round about on" the people in the Synagogue, and then--with some suggestion of a pause and silence while he looked, "he saith unto the man" (Mark 3:5).

When Peter deprecated the Cross, we find the same; "when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter" (Mark 8:33). When the rich young ruler came so impulsively to him to ask him about eternal life, Jesus, "looking upon him, loved him"--and we touch there a certain reminiscence of eye-witnesses (Mark 10:21).

There are other references of the same kind in the narratives--the look seems to come into the story naturally, without the writers noticing it. There must have been much else as familiar to his friends and companions. They must have known him as we know our friends--the inflections of his voice, his characteristic movements, the hang of his clothes, his step in the dark, and all such things.

Did he speak quickly or slowly? or move his hand when he spoke? The teaching posture of Buddha's hand is stereotyped in his images. We are not told such things about Jesus, and guessing does not take us very far. Yet a stanza in one of the elegies written on the death of Sir Philip Sidney may be taken as a far-away likeness of a greater and more wonderful figure--and not lead us very far astray:--

A sweet, attractive kind of grace; The full a.s.surance given by looks; Perpetual comfort in a face; The lineaments of Gospel books.

If we are not explicitly told of such things by the evangelists, they are easily felt in the story. The "paradoxes," as we call them--a rather dull name for them--surely point to a face alive with intellect and gaiety. The way in which, for instance, the leper approaches him, implies the man's eyes fixed in close study on Jesus' face, and finding nothing there to check him and everything to bring him nearer (Mark 1:41). When Mark tells us that he greeted the Syro-Phoenician woman's sally about the little dogs eating the children's crumbs under the table with the reply, "For the sake of this saying of yours ...," we must a.s.sume some change of expression on such a face as that of Jesus (Mark 7:29).

We read again and again of the interest men and women found in his preaching and teaching--how they hung on him to hear him, how they came in crowds, how on one occasion they drove him into a boat for a pulpit. It is only familiarity that has blinded us to the "charm"

they found in his speech--"they marvelled at his words of charm"

(Luke 4:22)--to the gaiety and playfulness that light up his lessons. For instance, there is a little-noticed phrase, that grows very delightful as we study it, in his words to the seventy disciples--"Into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace to this house (the common "salaam" of the East); and if a son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it; if not, your "salaam" will come back to _you_" (Luke 10:6). "A son of peace"--not _the_ son of peace--what a beautiful expression; what a beautiful idea too, that the unheeded Peace! comes back and blesses the heart that wished it, as if courteous and kind words never went unrewarded! Think again of "Solomon in all his glory" (Matt. 6:29)--before the phrase was hackneyed by common quotation. Do not such words reveal nature?

A more elaborate and more amusing episode is that of the Pharisee's drinking operations. We are shown the man polis.h.i.+ng his cup, elaborately and carefully; for he lays great importance on the cleanness of his cup; but he forgets to clean the inside. Most people drink from the inside, but the Pharisee forgot it, dirty as it was, and left it untouched. Then he sets about straining what he is going to drink--another elaborate process; he holds a piece of muslin over the cup and pours with care; he pauses--he sees a mosquito; he has caught it in time and flicks it away; he is safe and he will not swallow it. And then, adds Jesus, he swallowed a camel. How many of us have ever pictured the process, and the series of sensations, as the long hairy neck slid down the throat of the Pharisee--all that amplitude of loose-hung anatomy--the hump--two humps--both of them slid down--and he never noticed--and the legs--all of them--with whole outfit of knees and big padded feet.

The Pharisee swallowed a camel--and never noticed it (Matt. 23:24, 25). It is the mixture of sheer realism with absurdity that makes the irony and gives it its force. Did no one smile as the story was told? Did no one see the scene pictured with his own mind's eye--no one grasp the humour and the irony with delight? Could any one, on the other hand, forget it? A modern teacher would have said, in our jargon, that the Pharisee had no sense of proportion--and no one would have thought the remark worth remembering. But Jesus'

treatment of the subject reveals his own mind in quite a number of aspects.

When he bade turn the other cheek--that sentence which Celsus found so vulgar--did no one smile, then, at the idea of anybody ever dreaming of such an act (Matt. 5:39)? Nor at the picture of the kind brother taking a mote from his brother's eye, with a whole baulk of timber in his own (Matt. 7:5)? Nor at the suggestion of doing two miles of forced labour when only one was demanded (Matt. 5:41)? Nor when he suggested that anxiety about food and clothing was a mark of the Gentiles (Matt. 6:32)? Did none of his disciples mark a touch of irony when he said that among the Gentile dynasties the kings who exercise authority are called "Benefactors" (Luke 22:25)? It was true; Euergetes is a well-known kingly t.i.tle, but the explanation that it was the reward for strenuous use of monarchic authority was new. Are we to think his face gave no sign of what he was doing? Was there no smile?

We are told by his biographer that Marcus Aurelius had a face that never changed--for joy or sorrow, "being an adherent," he adds, "of the Stoic philosophy." The pose of superiority to emotion was not uncommonly held in those times to be the mark of a sage--Horace's "nil admirari". The writers of the Gospels do not conceal that Jesus had feelings, and expressed them. We read how he "rejoiced in spirit" (Luke 10:21)--how he "sighed" (Mark 7:34) and "sighed deeply" (Mark 8:12)--how his look showed "anger" (Mark 3:5). They tell us of his indignant utterances (Matt. 23:14; Mark 11:17)--of his quick sensitiveness to a purposeful touch (Mark 5:30)--of his fatigue (Mark 7:24; Luke 8:23)--of his instant response, as we have just seen, to contact with such interesting spirits as the Syro-Phoenician woman and the rich young ruler. Above all, we find him again and again "moved with compa.s.sion." We saw the leper approach him, with eyes fixed on the face of Jesus. The man's appeal--"If thou wilt thou canst make me clean"--his misery moves Jesus; he reaches out his hand, and, with no thought for contagion or danger, he touches the leper--so deep was the wave of pity that swept through him--and he heals the man (Mark 1:40-42). It would almost seem as if the touching impressed the spectators as much as the healing. Compa.s.sion is an old-fas.h.i.+oned word, and sympathy has a wide range of suggestions, some of them by now a little cold; we have to realize, if we can, how deeply and genuinely Jesus felt with men, how keen his feeling was for their suffering and for their hunger, and at the same moment reflect how strong and solid a nature it is that is so profoundly moved. Again, when we read of his happy way in dealing with children, are we to draw no inference as to his face, and what it told the children? Finally, on this part of our subject, we are given glimpses of his dark hours. The writer to the Hebrews speaks of his "offering up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears" and "learning obedience by the things that he suffered" (Heb. 5:7, 8), and Luke, perhaps dealing with the same occasion, says he was "in agony" (Luke 22:44), a strong phrase from a man of medical training. Luke again, with the other evangelists, refers to the temptations of Jesus, and in a later pa.s.sage records the poignant and revealing sentence--"Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations" (Luke 22:28). Finally, there is the last cry upon the Cross (Mark 15:37). So frankly, and yet so un.o.btrusively, they lay bare his soul, as far as they saw it.

From what is given us it is possible to go further and see something of his habits of mind. His thought will occupy us in later chapters; here we are concerned rather with the way in which his mind moves, and the characteristics of his thinking.

First of all, we note a certain swiftness, a quick realization of a situation, a character, or the meaning of a word. Men try to trap him with a question, and he instantly "recognizes their trickery"

(Luke 20:23). When they ask for a sign, he is as quick to see what they have in mind (Mark 8:11-13). He catches the word whispered to Jairus--half hears, half divines it, in an instant (Mark 5:36). He is surprised at slowness of mind in other men (Matt. 15:16; Mark 8:21). And in other things he is as quick--he sees "the kingdoms of this world in a moment of time" (Luke 4:5); he beholds "Satan fallen (aorist participle) from heaven like lightning" (Luke 10:18)--two very striking pa.s.sages, which illuminate his mind for us in a very important phase of it. We ought to have been able to guess without them that he saw things instantly and in a flash--that they stood out for him in outline and colour and movement there and then. That is plain in the parables from nature, and here it is confirmed. Is there in all his parables a blurred picture, the edges dim or the focus wrong? The tone of the parables is due largely to this gift of visualizing, to use an ugly modern word, and of doing it with swiftness and precision.

Several things combine to make this faculty, or at least go along with it--a combination not very common even among men of genius--an unusual sense of fact, a very keen and vivid sympathy, and a gift of bringing imagination to bear on the fact in the moment of its discovery, and afterwards in his treatment of the fact.

On his sense of fact we have touched before, in dealing with his close observation of Nature. It is an observation that needs no note-book, that is hardly conscious of itself. There is, as we know, a happy type of person who sees almost without looking, certainly without noticing--and sees aright too. The temperament is described by Wordsworth in the opening books of "The Prelude". The poet type seems to lose so much and yet constantly surprises us by what it has captured, and sometimes hardly itself realizes how much has been done. The gains are not registered, but they are real and they are never lost, and come flas.h.i.+ng out all unexpectedly when the note is struck that calls them. So one feels it was with Jesus' intimate knowledge of Nature--it is not the knowledge of botanist or naturalist, but that of the inmate and the companion, who by long intimacy comes to know far more than he dreams. "Wise master mariners," wrote the Greek poet, Pindar, long before, "know the wind that shall blow on the third day, and are not wrecked for headlong greed of gain." They know the weather, as we say, by instinct; and instinct is the outcome of intimacy, of observation accurate but sub-conscious.

It chimes in with this instinct for fact, that Jesus should lay so much emphasis on truth of word and truth of thought. Any hypocrisy is a leaven (Matt. 16:19; Luke 12:1); any system of two standards of truth spoils the mind (Matt. 5:33-37). The divided mind fails because it is not for one thing or the other. If it is impossible to serve G.o.d and mammon, truth and G.o.d go together in one allegiance; and a non-Theocentric element in a man's thought will be fatal sooner or later to any apt.i.tude he has by nature for G.o.d and truth.

We find this ill.u.s.trated in Jesus' own case. At the heart of his instinct for fact is his instinct for G.o.d. He goes to the permanent and eternal at once in his quest of fact, because his instinct for G.o.d is so sure and so compelling. Bishop Phillips Brooks noted in Jesus' conversation "a constant progress from the arbitrary and special to the essential and universal forms of thought," "a true freedom from fastidiousness," "a singular largeness" in his intellectual life. The small question is answered in the larger--"the life is more than meat and the body is more than raiment" (Luke 12:23). When he is challenged on divorce, he goes past Moses to G.o.d (Matt. 19:4)--"He which made them at the beginning made them male and female." Every question is settled for him by reference to G.o.d, and to G.o.d's principles of action and to G.o.d's laws and commands; and G.o.d, as we shall see in a later chapter, is not for him a conception borrowed from others, a quotation from a book. G.o.d is real, living, and personal; and all his teaching is directed to drive his disciples into the real; he insists on the open mind, the study of fact, the fresh, keen eye turned on the actual doings of G.o.d.

When life and thought have such a centre, a simplicity and an integrity follow beyond what we might readily guess. "When thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light, ... if thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright s.h.i.+ning of a candle doth give thee light" (Luke 11:34-36). It is this fullness of light that we find in Jesus; and as the light plays on one object and another, how clear and simple everything grows! All round about him was subtlety, cleverness, fastidiousness. His speech is lucid, drives straight to the centre, to the principle, and is intelligible. We may not see how far his word carries us, but it is abundantly plain that simple and straightforward people do understand Jesus--not all at once, but sufficiently for the moment, and with a sense that there is more beyond. His thought is uncomplicated by distinctions due to tradition and its accidents. His whole att.i.tude to life is simple--he has no taboos; he comes "eating and drinking" (Matt.

11:19); and he told his followers, when he sent them out to preach, to eat what they were given (Luke 10:7); "give alms," he says, "of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you"

(Luke 11:41). If G.o.d gives the food, it will probably be clean; and the old taboos will be mere tradition of men. He is not interested in what men call "signs," in the exceptional thing; the ordinary suffices when one sees G.o.d in it. One of Jesus' great lessons is to get men to look for G.o.d in the commonplace things of which G.o.d makes so many, as if Abraham Lincoln were right and G.o.d did make so many common people, because he likes them best. The commonest flowers--G.o.d thinks them out, says Jesus, and takes care of them (Matt. 6:28-30). Hence there is little need of special machinery for contact with G.o.d--priesthoods, trances, visions, or mystical states--abnormal means for contact with the normal. When Jesus speaks of the very highest and holiest things, he is as simple and natural as when he is making a table in the carpenter-shop. Sense and sanity are the marks of his religion.

"Sense of fact" is a phrase which does not exclude--perhaps it even suggests--some hint of dullness. The matter-of-fact people are valuable in their way, but rarely illuminative, and it is because they lack the imagination that means sympathy. Now in Jesus' case there is a quickness and vividness of sympathy--he likes the birds and flowers and beasts he uses as ill.u.s.trations. They are not the "natural objects" with which dull people try to brighten their pages and discourses. They are happy living things that come to his mind, as it were, of themselves, because, shall we say? they know they will be welcome there; and they are welcome. His pity and sympathy are unlike ours in having so much more intelligence and fellow-feeling in them. He understands men and women, as his gift of bright and winning speech shows. After all, as Carlyle has pointed out in many places, it is this gift of tenderness and understanding, of sympathy, that gives the measure of our intellects.[14] It is the faculty by which men touch fact and master it. It is the want of it that makes so many clever and ingenious people so futile and distressing.

The sense of fact and the gift for sympathy and the foundations, so to speak, of the imagination which gives their quality to the stories and pictures of Jesus. He thinks in pictures, as it were; they fill his speech, and every one of them is alive and real.

Think, for example, of the Light of the world (Matt. 5:14), the strait gate and the narrow way (Matt. 7:14), the pictures of the bridegroom (Mark 2:19), sower (Matt. 13:3), pearl merchant (Matt.

13:45), and the men with the net (Matt. 13:47), the sheep among the wolves (Matt. 10:16), the woman sweeping the house (Luke 15:8), the debtor going to prison accompanied by his creditor and the officer with the judge's warrant (Luke 12:58), the shepherd separating his sheep from the goats (Matt. 25:32), the children playing in the market-place pretending to pipe or to mourn (Luke 7:32), the fall of the house (Matt. 7:27)--or the ironical pictures of the blind leading the blind straight for the ditch (Matt. 15:14), the vintagers taking their baskets to the bramble bushes (Matt. 7:16), the candle burning away brightly under the bushel (Matt. 5:15; Luke 11:33), the offering of pearls to the pigs (Matt. 7:6)--or his descriptions of what lay before himself as a cup and a baptism (Mark 10:38), and of his task as the setting fire to the world (Luke 12:49). There is a truthfulness and a living energy about all these pictures--not least about those touched with irony.

There are, however, pictures less realistic and more imaginative--one or two of them, in the language of the fireside, quite "creepy." Here is a house--a neat, trim little house--and for the English reader there is of course a garden or a field round it, and a wood beyond. Out of the wood comes something--stealthily creeping up towards the house--something not easy to make out, but weary and travel-stained and dusty--and evil. A strange feeling comes over one as one watches--it is evil, one is certain of it.

Nearer and nearer to the house it creeps--it is by the window--it rises to look in, and one shudders to think of those inside who suddenly see _that_ looking at them through the window. But there is no one there. Fatigue changes to triumph; caution is dropped; it goes and returns with seven worse than itself, and the last state of the place is worse than the first (Luke 11:24-26). Is this leaving the real? One critic will say it is, "No," says another man, in a graver tone and speaking slowly, "it's real enough; it's my story."

But have we left the text too far? Then let us try another pa.s.sage.

Here is a funeral procession, a bier with a dead man laid out on it, "wrapped in a linen cloth" (Matt. 27:59), "bound hand and foot with grave-clothes" (John 11:44)--a common enough sight in the East; but who are they who are carrying him--those silent, awful figures, bound like him hand and foot, and wound with the same linen cloth, moving swiftly and steadily along with their burden? It is the dead burying the dead (Luke 9:60). Add to these the account of the three Temptations--stories in picture, which must come from Jesus himself, and ill.u.s.trate another side of his experience. For to the mind that sees and thinks in pictures, temptation comes in pictures which the mind makes for itself, or has presented to it and at once lights up--pictures horrible and once seen hard to forget and to escape. No wonder he warns men against the pictures they paint themselves in their minds (Matt. 5:28; cf. Chapter VII, p. 154). Add also the other pictures of Satan fallen (Luke 10:18) and Satan pus.h.i.+ng into G.o.d's presence with a demand for the disciples (Luke 22:31). Are we to call these "visions"--the word is ambiguous--or are they imaginative presentments of evil, as it thrusts itself on the soul, with all its allurements and all its ugliness? "Visions" in the sense that is a.s.sociated with trance, we shall hardly call them.

They are pictures showing his gift of imagination.

Lastly, on this part of our subject, let us remind ourselves of the many parables and pictures and sayings which put G.o.d himself before us. Here is the bird's nest, and one little sparrow fallen to the ground--and G.o.d is there and he takes notice of it; he misses the little bird from the brood (Matt. 10:29; cf. Luke 12:6). Here again is quite another scene--the rich and middle-aged man, who has prospered in everything and is just completing his plans to retire from business, when he feels a tap on his shoulder and hears a voice speaking to him, and he turns and is face to face with G.o.d (Luke 12:20). And there are all the other stories of G.o.d's goodness and kindness and care; is not the very phrase "Our Father in heaven" a picture in itself, if we can manage to give the word the value which Jesus meant it to carry? When one studies the teaching of Jesus, and concentrates on what he draws us of G.o.d, G.o.d somehow becomes real and delightful, in a most wonderful way.

With all these faculties brought to bear on all he thinks, and lucent in all he says, there is little wonder that men recognized another note in Jesus from that familiar in their usual teachers.

Rabbi Eliezer of those times was praised as "a well-trough that loses not a drop of water." We all know that type of teacher--the tank-mind, full, no doubt, supplied by pipes, and ministering its gifts by pipe and tap, regulated, tiresome, and dead. "The water that I shall give him," days Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (John 4:14), "shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." The water metaphors of the New Testament are not of trough and tank. Jesus taught men--not from a reservoir of quotations, like a scribe or a Rabbi, "but as possessed of authority himself" (Matt.

7:29). Who gave him that authority? asked the priests (Matt. 21:23)?

Who authorizes the living man to live? "All things are delivered unto me of my Father" (Matt. 11:27). "My words shall not pa.s.s away"

(Mark 13:31).

He has proved right; his words have not pa.s.sed away. The great "Son of Fact," he went to fact, drove his disciples to fact, and (in the striking phrase of Cromwell) "spoke _things_." And we can see in the record again and again the traces of the mental habits and the natural language of one who habitually based himself on experience and on fact. Critics remark on his method of using the Old Testament and contrast it with contemporary ways. St. Paul, for instance, in the pa.s.sage where he weighs the readings "seeds" and "seed" (Gal.

3:16), is plainly racking language to the destruction of its real sense; no one ever would have written "seeds" in that connexion; but in the style of the day he forces a singular into an utterly non-natural significance. St. Matthew in his first two chapters proves the events, which he describes, to have been prophesied by citing Old Testament pa.s.sages--two of which conspicuously refer to entirely different matters, and do not mean at all what he suggests (Matt. 2:15, 23). The Hebrew with the Old Testament, like the Greek of those days with Homer, made what play he pleased; if the words fitted his fancy, he took them regardless of connexion or real meaning; if he was pressed for a defence, he would take refuge in allegory. A fas.h.i.+on was set for the Church which bore bad fruit. The Old Testament was emptied of meaning to fortify the Christian faith with "proof texts." When Jesus quotes the Old Testament, it is for other ends and with a clear, incisive sense of the prophet's meaning. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Matt. 9:13 and 12:7, quoting Hosea 6:6). He not merely quotes Hosea, but it is plain that he has got at the very heart of the man and his message. Similarly when he reads Isaiah in the Synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:17), he lays hold of a great pa.s.sage and brings out with emphasis its value and its promise. He touches the real, and no lapse of time makes his quotations look odd or quaint. When he is asked which is the first commandment of all, he at once, with what a modern writer calls "a brilliant flash of the highest genius," links a text in Deuteronomy with one in Leviticus--"Hear, O Israel; The Lord our G.o.d is one Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength" (Deut.

6:4-5), and, he adds, "the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these" (Levit. 19:18; Mark 12:29-31). Thus his instinct for G.o.d and his instinct for the essential carry him to the very centre and acme of Moses' law. At the same time he can use the Old Testament in an efficient way for dialectic, when an "argumentum ad hominem" best meets the case (Mark 7:6; Luke 20:37, 44).

Going to fact directly and reading his Bible on his own account, he is the great pioneer of the Christian habit of mind. He is not idly called the Captain by the writer to the Hebrews (Heb. 2:10, 12:2).