The Jesus of History Part 6

The same thought is to be traced in the teaching of Jesus. It is implied in what he says about prayer. There is a want of faith, a half-heartedness about men's prayers; they pray as Augustine says he himself did: "Give me chast.i.ty and continence, but not now" (Conf, viii. 7, 17). That is not what Jesus means by prayer--the utterance of the half-Will. Nor is it this sort of surrender to G.o.d that Jesus calls for--no, the question is, how thoroughly is a man going to put himself into G.o.d's hands? Does he mean to be G.o.d's up to the cross and beyond? Does he enlist absolutely on G.o.d's terms without a bargain with G.o.d, prepared to accept G.o.d's will, whatever it is, whether it squares with his liking or not? (cf. Luke 17:7-10). Are his own desires finally out of the reckoning? Does he, in fact, deny--negate--himself (Mark 8:34)? Jesus calls for disciples, with questions so penetrating on his lips. What a demand to make of men!

What faith, too, in men it shows, that he can ask all this with no hint of diminished seriousness!

Jesus is the great believer in men, as we saw in the choice of his twelve. To that group of disciples he trusts the supremest task men ever had a.s.signed to them. Not many wise, not many mighty, Paul found at Corinth (1 Cor. 1:26); and it has always been so. Is it not still the gist of the Gospel that Jesus believes in the writer and the reader of these lines--trusts them with the propagation of G.o.d's Kingdom, incredible commission? Jesus was always at leisure for individuals; this was the natural outcome of his faith in men. What else is the meaning of his readiness to spend himself in giving the utmost spiritual truth--no easy task, as experience shows us--even to a solitary listener? If we accept what he tells us of G.o.d, we can believe that the individual is worth all that Jesus did and does for him, but hardly otherwise. His gift of discovering interest in uninteresting people, says Phillips Brooks, was an intellectual habit that he gave to his disciples. We think too much "like men"; he would have us "think like G.o.d," and think better of odd units and items of humanity than statesmen and statisticians are apt to do. It has been pointed out lately how fierce he is about the man who puts a stumbling-block in the way of even "a little one"--"better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea"; no mere phrase--for when he draws a picture, he sees it; he sees this scene, and "better so--for him too!" is his comment (Mark 9:42). There was, we may remember, a view current in antiquity that when a man was drowned, his soul perished with his body, though I do not know if the Jews held this opinion. It is not likely that Jesus did. What is G.o.d's mind, G.o.d's conduct, toward those people whom men think they can afford to despise? "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). And to whom did he say this? To the most ordinary people--to Peter and James and John; for all sorts of people he held up this impossible ideal of a perfection like G.o.d's. What a faith in man it implies! "All things are possible to him that believes" (Mark 9:9.3). Why should not _you_ believe? he says.

His faith in the soul's possibilities is boundless, and in marked contrast with what men think of themselves. A man, for instance, will say that he has done his best; but nine times out of ten it means mere fatigue; he is not going to trouble to do any more. How _can_ a man know that he has done his best? The Gospel of Jesus comes with its message of the grace of G.o.d, and the power of G.o.d, to people who are stupid and middle-aged, who are absolutely settled in life, who are conscious of their limitations, who know they are living in a rut and propose to stick to it for the remainder of their days; and Jesus tells them in effect that he means to give them a new life altogether, that he means to have from them service, perfectly incredible to them. No man, he suggests, need be so inured to the stupidity of middle age but there may be a miraculous change in him. A great many people need re-conversion at forty, however Christian they have been before. This belief of his in the individual man and in the worth of the individual is the very charter of democracy. The original writings of William Tyndale, who first translated the New Testament from Greek into English, contain the essential ideas of democracy already in 1526--the outcome of familiar study of the Gospel. Jesus himself said of Herod: "Go and tell that fox" (Luke 13:32). Herod was a king, but he was not above criticism; and Christians have not failed at times to make the criticism of the great that truth requires.

Jesus had no illusions about men; he sees the weak spots; he recognizes the "whited sepulchre" (Matt. 23:27). He is astonished at the unbelief of men and women (Mark 6:6). He does not understand why they cannot think (Mark 8:21), but he notes how they see and yet do not see, hear and do not understand (Matt. 13:13). He is impressed by their falsity, even in religion (Matt. 15:8). He knows perfectly well the evil of which the human heart is capable (Matt. 15:19). A man who steadily looks forward to being crucified by the people he is trying to help is hardly one of the absent-minded enthusiasts, mis-called idealists. There never was, we feel, one who so thoroughly looked through his friends, who loved them so much and yet without a shade of illusion. This brings us to the subject of the next chapter.

In the meantime let us recall what he makes of the wasted life. "In thinking of the case," said Seeley. "they had forgotten the woman"--a common occurrence with those who deal in "cases." It was once severely said of the Head of a College that "if he would leave off caring for his students' souls and care for them, he would do better." Jesus does not forget the man in caring for his soul--he likes him. He is "the friend of publicans and sinners" (Luke 7:34); he eats and drinks with them (Mark 2:14). Let us remember again that these were taunts and were meant to sting; they were not conventional phrases. See how he can enter into the life of a poor creature. There is the wretched little publican, Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10)--a squalid little figure of a man, whom people despised. He was used to contempt--it was the portion of the tax-collector enlisted in Roman service against his own people. Jesus comes and sees him up in the tree; he instantly realizes what is happening and invites himself to the house of Zacchaeus as a guest; something pa.s.ses between them without spoken word. The little man slides down the tree--not a proceeding that makes for dignity; and then, with all his inches, he stands up before the whole town, that knew him so well, in a new moral grandeur that adds cubits to his stature. "Half my goods," he says, "I give to the poor. If I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, he shall have it back fourfold."

That man belonged to the despised cla.s.ses. Jesus came into his life; the man became a new man, a pioneer of Christian generosity. Again, there is the woman with the alabaster box, the mere possession of which stamped her for what she was. It was simply a case of the wasted life. I have long wondered if she meant to give him only some of the ointment. A little of it would have been a great gift. But perhaps the lid of the box jammed, and she realized in a moment that it was to be all or nothing--she drew off her sandal and smashed the box to pieces. However she broke it, and whatever her reasons, Mark's words mean that it was thoroughly and finally shivered (Mark 14:3). Something had happened which made this woman the pioneer of the Christian habit of giving all for Jesus. The disciples said they had done so (Matt. 19:27), but they were looking for thrones in exchange (Mark 10:37); she was not. The thief on the cross himself becomes a pioneer for mankind in the Christian way of prayer.

"Jesus, remember me!" he says (Luke 23:42). How is it that Jesus comes into the wasted life and makes it new? "One loving heart sets another on fire."

With all his wide outlook on mankind, his great purpose to capture all men, Jesus is remarkable for his omission to devise machinery or organization for the accomplishment of his ends. The tares are left to grow with the wheat (Matt. 13:30)--as if Jesus trusted the wheat a good deal more than we do. Alive as he is to the evil in human nature, he never tries to scare men from it, and he seems to have been very little afraid of it. He believed in the power of good--because, after all, G.o.d is "Lord of the Harvest" (Matt. 9:38).

He invents no special methods--a loving heart will hit the method needed in the particular case; the Holy Spirit will teach this as well as other things (Matt. 10:19, 20). How far he even organized his church, or left it to organize itself if it so wished, students may discuss. Would he have trusted even the best organized church as such? Does not what we mean by the Incarnation imply putting everything in the long run on the individual, quickened into new life by a new relation with G.o.d and taught a new love of men by Jesus himself? The heart of friendship and the heart of the Incarnation are in essence the same thing--giving oneself in frankness and love to him who will accept, and by them winning him who refuses. Has not this been the secret of the spread of the Gospel? The simplicity of the whole thing, and the power of it, grow upon us as we study them. But after all, as Tertullian said, simplicity and power are the constant marks of G.o.d's work--simplicity in method, power in effect ("de Baptismo", 2).

CHAPTER VII

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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 rea.s.sert 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 G.o.d in any degree grows real to a man, when a man seriously gives himself not to some mere vague "contemplation" of G.o.d but to the earnest study of G.o.d's ways in human affairs, and of G.o.d's laws and their working, the great contrasts in men's responses to G.o.d's rule become luminous.

When G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d; 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 h.e.l.l. 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 G.o.d. 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? "h.e.l.l fire will be judge," said Carlyle, "G.o.d 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 G.o.d,"

both preach repentance in view of the coming of the Kingdom; and we are apt to a.s.sume 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d's chosen people, the children of Abraham. Does G.o.d want children of Abraham?--John pointed to the stones on the ground, and said, if G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, and so to come to baptism; for so baptism would be acceptable to G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d (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 pa.s.ses 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 G.o.d which the prophets had preached before; but he leaves it there.

He emphasizes once more the old laws of G.o.d, the judgements of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, beyond that of debtor and creditor, judge and prisoner on trial, king and subject.

G.o.d may forgive and G.o.d will judge; but so far as our knowledge of John's teaching goes, these are the only two points at which man and G.o.d 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 doc.u.ments. 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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d; he does not look at it in relation to the love of G.o.d--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 G.o.d's forgiveness. That is G.o.d'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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d (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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d"

(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 cla.s.ses, whom he warns of the danger of h.e.l.l 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. Embarra.s.sment 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 G.o.d? 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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.d's condemnation is where he gives up a man to his own reprobate mind (Romans 1:28--the whole pa.s.sage is worth study in the Greek). The mind, in Paul's phrases, becomes darkened (Rom. 1:21), stained (t.i.tus 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 gla.s.s gives the man a blue or red world instead of the real one. Blindness and mutilation are better, Jesus said, than the eye of l.u.s.t (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 cla.s.s. They played at religion--t.i.thed mint and anise and c.u.min, 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 gla.s.ses 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d; and the Pharisee combined them, and told himself that, once G.o.d's proper dues of prayer and t.i.the were paid, his treatment of the widow and her house was correct. Hence, says Jesus, he receives "greater d.a.m.nation" (A.V.)--or judgement on a higher scale ("perissoteron krima").

The Pharisees were men who believed in G.o.d--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 G.o.d's facts and to G.o.d's nature? If religion is union with G.o.d, in the phrase we borrow so slightly from the mystics, how can a man be in union with G.o.d, when the G.o.d he sees is not there, is a figment of his own mind, something different altogether from G.o.d? Or, if we use the phrase of the Old Testament.

prophet and of Jesus himself, if religion is vision of G.o.d, what is our religion, if after all we are not seeing G.o.d at all, but something else--a dummy G.o.d, 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 G.o.d's facts leads to one end only. We admit it ourselves. There are those who scold Bunyan for sending Ignorance to h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d. What Jesus thought of their hardness and impurity we have seen already, but heedless as they were of G.o.d'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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d" (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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d as dynamic, not static; state or place, condition or relation, it implies work, as G.o.d himself implies work. He holds that truth is not a curiosity for the cabinet but a tool in the hand; that G.o.d'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 cla.s.ses 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 ill.u.s.trated the thing for them--a change of personality induced by an exterior force or object, as if the human spirit were a gla.s.s 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 G.o.d's dealings with him? Hardness and l.u.s.t make a man play the fool with human souls whom G.o.d loves and cares for--a declaration of war on G.o.d himself. Wilful self-deception about G.o.d needs no comment; to shilly-shally and let decision slide, where G.o.d is concerned, is atheism too. In a word, what is a man's fundamental att.i.tude to G.o.d and G.o.d'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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d-given faculties, and uses them against G.o.d.