The Teaching of Jesus Part 9

"O man, forgive thy mortal foe, Nor ever strike him blow for blow; For all the souls on earth that live To be forgiven must forgive, Forgive him seventy times and seven: For all the blessed souls in Heaven Are both forgivers and forgiven."

CONCERNING CARE

"My spirit on Thy care, Blest Saviour, I recline; Thou wilt not leave me in despair, For Thou art Love Divine.

In Thee I place my trust, On Thee I calmly rest; I know Thee good, I know Thee just, And count Thy choice the best.

Whate'er events betide, Thy will they all perform; Safe in Thy breast my head I hide, Nor fear the coming storm.

Let good or ill befall, It must be good for me, Secure of having Thee in all, Of having all in Thee."

H.F. LYTH.

XII

CONCERNING CARE

"_Be not anxious for your life_ ... _nor yet for your body_.... _Be not anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? ... Be not anxious for the morrow._"--MATT.

vi. 25, 31, 34.

I

"_Take no thought for_ your life" is the more familiar rendering of the Authorized Version. And if the words conveyed the same meaning to us to-day as they did to all English-speaking people in the year 1611, there would have been no need for a change. A great student of words, the late Archbishop Trench, tells us that "thought" was then constantly used as equivalent to anxiety or solicitous care; and he gives three ill.u.s.trations of this use of the word from writers of the Elizabethan age. Thus Bacon writes: "Harris, an alderman in London, was put in trouble, and died with _thought_ and anxiety before his business came to an end." Again, in one of the _Somer's Tracts_, we read, "Queen Katharine Parr _died of thought_"; and in Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_, "_Take thought_ and die for Caesar," where "to take thought" is to take a matter so seriously to heart that death ensues.[46] In 1611, therefore, the old translation did accurately reproduce Christ's thought. To-day, however, it is altogether inadequate, and sometimes, it is to be feared, positively misleading. For neither in this chapter nor anywhere in Christ's teaching is there one word against what we call forethought, and they who would find in the words of Jesus any encouragement to thriftlessness are but misrepresenting Him and deceiving themselves. Every man, who is not either a rogue or a fool, must take thought for the morrow; at least, if he does not, some one must for him, or the morrow will avenge itself upon him without mercy.

What our Lord forbids is not prudent foresight, but worry: "Be ye not _anxious_!" The word which Christ uses ((Greek: merimnate)) is a very suggestive one; it describes the state of mind of one who is drawn in different directions, torn by internal conflict, "distracted," as we say, where precisely the same figure of speech occurs. A similar counsel is to be found in another and still more striking word which only Luke has recorded, and which is rendered, "Neither be ye of doubtful mind."

There is a picture in the word ((Greek: meteorizesthe)) the picture of a vessel vexed by contrary winds, now uplifted on the crest of some huge wave, now labouring in the trough of the sea. "Be ye not thus," Christ says to His disciples, "the sport of your cares, driven by the wind and tossed; but let the peace of G.o.d rule in your hearts, and be ye not of doubtful mind."

It cannot surprise us that Jesus should speak thus; rather should we have been surprised if it had been otherwise. How could He speak to men at all and yet be silent about their cares? For how full of care the lives of most men are! One is anxious about his health, and another about his business; one is concerned because for weeks he has been without work, and another because his investments are turning out badly; some are troubled about their children, and some there are who are making a care even of their religion, and instead of letting it carry them are trying to carry it; until, with burdens of one kind or another, we are like a string of Swiss pack-horses, such as one may sometimes see, toiling and straining up some steep Alpine pa.s.s under a blazing July sun. Poor Martha, with her sad, tired face, and nervous, fretful ways, "anxious and troubled about many things," is everywhere to-day.

Nor is it the poor only whose lives are full of care. It was not a poor man amid his poverty, but a rich man amid his riches, who, in Christ's parable, put to himself the question, "What shall I do?" The birds of care build their nests amid the turrets of a palace as readily as in the thatched roof of a cottage. The cruel thorns--"the cares of this life,"

as Jesus calls them--which choke the good seed, sometimes spring up more easily within the carefully fenced enclosure of my lord's park than in the little garden plot of the keeper of his lodge. On the whole, perhaps, and in proportion to their number, there is less hara.s.sing, wearing anxiety in the homes of the poor than in those of the wealthy.

And what harsh taskmasters our cares can be! How they will lord it over us! Give them the saddle and the reins, and they will ride us to death.

Seat them on the throne, and they will chastise us not only with whips but with scorpions. It is no wonder that Christ should set Himself to free men from this grinding tyranny. He is no true deliverer for us who cannot break the cruel bondage of our cares.

II

Let us listen, then, to Christ's gracious argument and wise remonstrances. What, He asks, is the good of our anxiety? What can it do for us? "Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto his stature? If, then, ye are not able to do that which is least, why are ye anxious concerning the rest?" "But, the morrow! the morrow!" we cry.

"Let the morrow," Christ answers, "take care of itself; sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; learn thou to live a day at a time." "Our earliest duty," says a great writer of our day, "is to cultivate the habit of not looking round the corner;" which is but another version of Christ's simple precept. And the saying, simple and obvious as it may seem, never fails to justify itself. For one thing, the morrow rarely turns out as our fears imagined it. Our very anxiety blurs our vision, and throws our judgment out of focus. We see things through an atmosphere which both magnifies and distorts. We remember how it was with Mr. Fearing: "When he was come to the entrance of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I thought"--it is Greatheart who tells the story--"I should have lost my man: not for that he had any inclination to go back,--that he always abhorred; but he was ready to die for fear. Oh, the hobgoblins will have me! the hobgoblins will have me! cried he; and I could not beat him out on't." Yet see how matters fell out. "This I took very great notice of," goes on Greatheart, "that this valley was as quiet while he went through it as ever I knew it before or since." And again, when Mr. Fearing "was come at the river where was no bridge, there again he was in a heavy case. Now, now, he said, he should be drowned for ever, and so never see that face with comfort, that he had come so many miles to behold." But once more his fears were put to shame: "Here, also, I took notice of what was very remarkable: the water of that river was lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my life.

So he went over at last, not much above wet-shod."

And even though the morrow should prove as bad as our fears, Christ's precept is still justified, for the worst kind of preparation for such a day is worry. Worry, like the undue clatter of machinery, means waste, waste of power. Anxiety, it has been well said, does not empty to-morrow of its sorrows, but it does empty to-day of its strength. Therefore, let us not be anxious. Let us climb our hills when we come to them. G.o.d gives each day strength for the day; but when, to the responsibilities of to-day we add the burdens of to-morrow, and try to do the work of two days in the strength of one, we are making straight paths for the feet of failure and disappointment. All the many voices of reason and experience are on Christ's side when He bids us, "Be not anxious."

Yet, true as all this is, how inadequate it is! When the tides of care are at the flood they will overrun and submerge all such counsels as these, as the waves wash away the little sand-hills which children build by the sea-sh.o.r.e. "We know it is no good to worry," people will tell us, half-petulantly, when we remonstrate with them; "but we cannot help ourselves, and if you have no more to say to us than this, you cannot help us either." And they are right. Care is the cancer of the heart, and if our words can go no deeper than they have yet gone, it can never be cured. It is an inward spiritual derangement, which calls for something more than little bits of good advice in order to put it right.

And if, again, we turn to the words of Jesus, we shall find the needed something more is given. The care-worn soul, for its cure, must be taken out of itself. "Oh the bliss of waking," says some one, "with all one's thoughts turned outward!" It is the power to do that, to turn, and to keep turned, one's thoughts outwards that the care-ridden need; and Christ will show us how it may be ours.

"Be not anxious," says Jesus; and then side by side with this negative precept He lays this positive one: "Seek ye first the kingdom of G.o.d."

Christ came to establish a kingdom in which "all men's good" should be "each man's rule," and love the universal law. When, therefore, He bids the anxious seek the kingdom, what He means is that they are to find an escape from self and self-consuming cares in service. "When you find yourself overpowered by melancholy," said John Keble, "the best way is to go out and do something kind to somebody or other." And thousands who are sitting daily in the gloom of a self-created misery, with all the blinds of the spirit drawn, if they would but "go out" and begin to care for others, would speedily cease their miserable care for themselves.

"When I dig a man out of trouble," some one quaintly writes, "the hole he leaves behind him is the grave in which I bury my own trouble."[47]

This is not the whole cure for care; but if the mind is to be kept from burrowing in the dark of its own fears and anxieties, it must be set resolutely and constantly on those n.o.bler ends to which Christ in His gospel summons us all.

The care-worn, Christ says, must think of others; and, most of all, they must think of G.o.d. "Let not your heart be troubled ... believe." This is the great argument into which all other arguments run up. This is the larger truth, within whose wide circ.u.mference lie all Christ's words concerning care. We are not to care because we are cared for, cared for by G.o.d. There is, Christ teaches us, a distribution of duties between ourselves and G.o.d. We, on our part, make it our daily business to get G.o.d's will done on earth as it is done in heaven; He, on His, undertakes that we shall not want.

"Make you His service your delight, He'll make your wants His care."

Once more we see how fundamental is Christ's doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood. It is not so much because our anxiety is useless, or because it unfits us for service, but because G.o.d is what He is, that our worry is at once a blunder and a sin. It is mistrust of the heavenly love that cares for us. The sovereign cure for care is--G.o.d.

III

But now a difficulty arises. Christ's doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood is, without doubt, fundamental; but is it true? A G.o.d who clothes the blowing lilies with their silent beauty, without whom no sparrow falleth to the ground, who numbers the very hairs of our head--it is a glorious faith, if one could but receive it. But can we? It was possible once, we think, in the childhood of the world; but that time has gone, and we are the children of a new day, whose thoughts we cannot choose but think. So long as men thought of our earth as the centre of the universe, it was not difficult to believe that its inhabitants were the peculiar care of their Creator. But astronomy has changed all that; and what once we thought so great, we know now to be but a speck amid infinite systems of worlds. The old question challenges us with a force the Psalmist could not feel: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou are mindful of him? and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" The infinity of G.o.d, the nothingness of man: the poor brain reels before the contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask, that He whose dwelling-place is eternity should care for us even as we care for our children? So the question is often urged upon us to-day. But arguments of this kind, it has been well said, are simply an attempt to terrorize the imagination, and are not to be yielded to. As a recent writer admirably says: "We know little or nothing of the rest of the universe, and it may very well be that in no other planet but this is there intelligent and moral life; and, if that be so, then this world, despite its material insignificance, would remain the real summit of creation. But even if this be not so, still man remains man--a spiritual being, capable of knowing, loving, and glorifying G.o.d. Man is that, be there what myriads of worlds there may, and is not less than that, though in other worlds were also beings like him.... No conception of G.o.d is less imposing than that which represents Him as a kind of millionaire in worlds, so materialized by the immensity of His possessions as to have lost the sense of the incalculably greater worth of the spiritual interests of even the smallest part of them."[48]

But this is not the only difficulty; for some it is not the chief difficulty. We have no theories of G.o.d and the universe which bar the possibility of His intervention in the little lives of men. There is nothing incredible to us in the doctrine of a particular Providence. But where, we ask, is the proof of it? We would fain believe, but the facts of experience seem too strong for us. A hundred thousand Armenians butchered at the will of an inhuman despot, a whole city buried under a volcano's fiery hail, countless mult.i.tudes suffering the slow torture of death by famine--can such things be and G.o.d really care? Nor is it only great world tragedies like these which challenge our faith. The question is pressed upon us, often with sickening keenness, by the commonplace ills of our own commonplace lives: the cruel wrong of another's sin, the long, wasting pain, the empty cradle, the broken heart. How can we look on these things and yet believe that Eternal Love is on the throne?

Except we believe in Jesus we cannot; if we do, we must. For remember, Jesus was no shallow optimist; He did not go through life seeing only its pleasant things; He was at Cana of Galilee, but He was also at Nain; over all His life there lay a shadow, the shadow of the Cross; He died in the dark, betrayed of man, forsaken of G.o.d; surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. And yet through all, His faith in G.o.d never wavered. He prayed, and He taught others to pray. When He lifted His eyes towards heaven, it was with the word "Father" upon His lips; and in like manner He bade His disciples, "When ye pray, say 'Father.'"

He took the trembling hands of men within His own, and looking into their eyes, filled as they were with a thousand nameless fears, "Fear not," He said, "our heavenly Father knoweth; let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

"Learn of Me ... and ye shall find rest unto your souls;" herein is the secret of peace. But it is not enough that we give ear to the words of Christ; we must make our own the whole meaning of the fact of Christ.

"G.o.d's in His heaven," sings Browning; "all's right with the world." But if G.o.d is only in His heaven, all is _not_ right with the world. In Christ we learn that G.o.d has come from out His heaven to earth; and in the Cross of Christ we find the eternal love which meets and answers all our fears. Fear not,

"Or if you fear, Cast all your cares on G.o.d; that anchor holds."

"Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

CONCERNING MONEY

"Now I saw in my dream, that at the further side of that plain was a little hill called Lucre, and in that hill a silver-mine, which some of them that had formerly gone that way, because of the rarity of it, had turned aside to see; but going too near the brink of the pit, the ground being deceitful under them, broke, and they were slain;-some also had been maimed there, and could not to their dying day be their own men again."--JOHN BUNYAN.