The Jesus of History Part 3

Authority and tradition only too readily a.s.sume control of human life; but a mind like that of Jesus, like that which he gave to his followers, will never be bound by authority and tradition. Moses is very well, but if G.o.d has higher ideas of marriage--what then? The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat (Matt. 23:2), but that does not make them equal to Moses; still less does it make their traditions of more importance than G.o.d's commandments (Mark 7:1-13).

The Sabbath itself "was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath"

(Mark 2:27).

Where the habit of mind is thus set to fact, and life is based on G.o.d, on G.o.d's will and G.o.d's doings, it is not surprising that in the daily round there should be noted "sanity, reserve, composure, and steadiness." It may seem to be descending to a lower plane, but it is worthwhile to look for a moment at the sheer sense which Jesus can bring to bear on a situation. The Sabbath--is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Well, if a man's one sheep is in a pit on the Sabbath, what will he do? (Matt. 12:11), or will he refrain from leading his ox to the water on the Sabbath (Luke 13:15)? Such questions bring a theological problem into the atmosphere of sense--and it is better solved there. He is interrupted by a demand that he arbitrate between a man and his brother; and his reply is virtually, Does your brother accept your choice of an arbitrator?

(Luke 12:14)--and that matter is finished. "Are there few that be saved?" asks some one in vague speculation, and he gets a practical answer addressed to himself (Luke 13:23). Even in matters of ordinary manners and good taste, he offers a shrewd rule (Luke 14:8). Luke records also two or three instances of perfectly ba.n.a.l talk and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n addressed to him--the bazaar talk of the Galilean murders (Luke 13:1)--the pious if rather obvious remark of some man about feasting in the Kingdom of G.o.d (Luke 14:15)--and the woman's homey congratulation of Mary on her son (Luke 11:27). In each case he gets away to something serious.

Above all, we must recognize the power which every one felt in him.

Even Herod, judging by rumour, counts him greater than John the Baptist (Matt. 14:2). The very malignity of his enemies is a confession of their recognition that they are dealing with some one who is great. Men remarked his sedative and controlling influence over the disordered mind (Mark 1:27). He is not to be trapped in his talk, to be cajoled or flattered. There is greatness in his language--in his reference of everything to great principles and to G.o.d; greatness in his freedom from ambition, in his contempt of advertis.e.m.e.nt and popularity, in his appeal to the best in men, in his belief in men, in his power of winning and keeping friends, in his gift for making great men out of petty. In all this we are not stepping outside the Gospels nor borrowing from what he has done in nineteen centuries. In Galilee and in Jerusalem men felt his power.

And finally, what of his calm, his sanity, his dignity, in the hour of betrayal, in the so-called trials, before the priests, before Pilate, on the Cross? The Pharisees, said Tertullian, ought to have recognized who Christ was by his patience.

CHAPTER IV

THE TEACHER AND HIS DISCIPLES

It was as a teacher that Jesus of Nazareth first began to gather disciples round him. But to understand the work of the Teacher, we must have some general impression of the world to which he came. The background will help us understand what had to be done, and what it was he meant to do.

Bishop Gore, in a book recently published, suggested that the belief that G.o.d is Love is not axiomatic. Many of us take it for granted, as the point at which religion naturally begins; but, as he emphasized, it is not an obvious truth; it is something of which we have to be convinced, something that has to be made good to men.

Unless we bear this in mind, we shall miss a great deal of what Jesus has really done, by a.s.suming that he was not needed to do it.

"Out of a darker world than ours came this new spring." We must look at the world as it was, when Jesus came. In a later chapter we shall have to consider more fully the religions of the Roman world. One or two points may be antic.i.p.ated. First of all, we have to realize what a hard world it was. Men and women are harder than we sometimes think, and the natural hardness to which the human heart grows of itself, needed more correction than it had in those days.

Among the many papyrus doc.u.ments that have been found in late years in Egypt--doc.u.ments that have pictured for us the life of Egypt, and have recorded for us also the language of the New Testament in a most illuminative way--there is one that ill.u.s.trates only too aptly the unconscious hardness of the times. It is a letter--no literary letter, no letter that any one would ordinarily have thought of keeping; it has survived by accident. It was written by an Egyptian Greek to his wife. She lived somewhere up the country, and he had gone to Alexandria. She had been expecting a baby when he left, and he wrote a rough, but not an unkind, letter to her. He writes: "Hilarion to Alis ... greetings.... Know that we are still even now in Alexandria. Do not fidget, if, at the general return, I stay in Alexandria. I pray and beseech you, take care of the little child, and as soon as we have our wages, I will send you up something. If you are delivered, if it was a male, let it live; if it was a female, cast it out ... . How can I forget you? So don't fidget."[15]

The letter is not an unkind one; it is sympathetic, masculine, direct, and friendly. And then it ends with the suggestion, inconceivable to us to-day, that if the baby is a girl, it need not be kept. It can be put out either on the land or in the river, left to kite or crocodile. The evidence of satirists is generally to be discounted, because they tend to emphasize the exceptional; and it is not the exceptional thing that gives the character of an age, or of a man. It is the kind of thing that we take for granted and a.s.sume to be normal that shows our character or gives the note of the day; and what we omit to notice may be as revealing.

In the plays of the Athenian comic poets of the third and fourth centuries B.C. we find, to wearisomeness, one recurring plot. The heroine turns out to be, not just a common girl, but the daughter of the best family in Athens, exposed when she was a baby. When Plato sketched his ideal const.i.tution, in addition to the mating of suitable pairs to be decided by government, he added that, if the offspring were not good enough, it should be put away where it would not be found again. Aristotle allowed the same practice. The most cultured race on earth freely exposed its infants; and this letter of Hilarion to Alis--a dated letter by the way, of September or October in the year 1 A.D.--makes it clear that the practice of exposure of children still prevailed; and there is other evidence which need not now detain us. It is a hard world, where kind people or good people can think of such things as ordinary and natural.

Evidence of the character of an age is given by the treatment of criminals; and that age was characterized by crucifixion. They would take a human being, spread him out on a cross on the ground, drive nails through his hands and feet; and then the cross was raised--the agony of the victim during the movement is not to be imagined. It was made fast; and there the victim hung, suspended between heaven and earth, to live or die at his leisure. By and by crows would gather round him. "I have been good," said the slave. "Then you have your reward," says the Latin poet, "you will not feed the crows on the cross."[16] There is a very striking phrase in St. Matthew: "And sitting down they watched him there" (Matt. 27:36). The soldiers nailed three men to crosses, and sat down beneath them to dice for their clothes. Our tolerances, like our utterances, come out of the abundance of the heart, and stamp us for what we are.

We cannot easily realize all that slavery meant. When we read in the Fourth Gospel that "the Lamb of G.o.d taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29), that was written before Jesus Christ had abolished slavery; for, we remember, it was done by his people against the judgement of the business experts. Slavery meant robbing the man of every right that Nature gave him; and, as Homer said long ago, "Fa.r.s.eeing Zeus takes away half a man's manhood, when he brings the day of slavery upon him."[17] He became a thief, a liar, dirty, and bad; and with the woman it was still worse. The slave woman was a little lower than the animal; she might not have offspring. It was "natural," men said; "Nature had designed certain races to be slaves; slavery was written in Nature; it was Nature's law." These were not the thoughts of vulgar people, but of some of the best of the Greeks--not of all, indeed; but society was organized on the basis of slavery. It was an accepted axiom of all social and economic life.

As to the spiritual background, for the present let us postpone the heathen world and consider the Jews, who represented in some ways the world's highest at this period. Modern scholars.h.i.+p is shedding fresh light on the literature and ideas that were prevalent between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. But what uncertainty about G.o.d! Why some people should think that it was easier to believe in G.o.d in those days than now, I do not see. Far less was known of G.o.d; the record of his doings was not so long as it is for us, and it was not so well known. No one could understand what G.o.d meant, if he was quite clear himself. Look at what he did with the nation. He chose Israel, he established the kingdom of David. They did not get on very well, and at last were carried away into Captivity in Babylon. So much he did for his people; and when he brought them back again to the Promised Land, it was to a very trying and difficult situation; and worse still followed after Nehemiah's day. Alexander the Great's conquest of the East left a Macedonian dynasty ruling those regions, and one of their great kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to stamp out the religion of Jehovah altogether. The Book of Daniel is a record of that persecution about 166 B.C. The Maccabeean brothers delivered Israel, and rescued the religion of Jehovah; and a kingdom of a sort was established with them; but the grandsons of the liberators became tyrants. What did G.o.d mean? Out of all the promises to Israel, to the House of David, this is what comes. Herod follows--a foreign king and an Edomite; and the Romans are over all, suzerains and rulers.

In despair of the present men began to forecast the future. A time will surely come, they said, when G.o.d will give an anointed one, the Messiah; he will set all Israel free, will make Israel rule the world instead of the Romans; he will gather together the scattered of Israel from the four winds, reunite and a.s.semble G.o.d's people in triumph in Palestine. And then, when the prophet paused, a plain man spoke: "I don't care if he does. My father all his life looked forward to that. What does it matter now, if G.o.d redeems his people, or if he does not? My father is dead." The answer was, why should your father not come with the redeemed Israel? But what evidence is there for that? Does G.o.d care for people beyond the grave? Is there personal immortality?--that became the anxious question.[18]

But is this kingdom of the Messiah to be an earthly or a heavenly kingdom? Will it be in Jerusalem or in heaven? Are you quite sure that there is any distinction in the other world between good and bad, between Jew and Gentile? Some people thought the kingdom would be in Jerusalem; others said it would be in heaven, and added that the Jews will look down and see the Gentiles in h.e.l.l--something worth seeing at last. But, after all, it was still guesswork-- "perhaps" was the last word.

When the question is asked, "Was Jesus the Messiah?" the obvious reply is, "Which Messiah?" For there seems to have been no standard idea of the Messiah. The Messiah was, on the whole, as vague a term as, in modern politics, Socialism or Tariff Reform. Neither of them has come; perhaps they never will come, and n.o.body knows what they will be till they do come. Jesus is not what they expected. A Jewish girl, at an American Student Conference a year or two ago, said about Jesus: "I do not think he is the Messiah, but I do love him."

Of course he was not in her Jewish sense. The term was a vague one.

The main point was that men were uncertain about G.o.d. G.o.d was unintelligible. They did not understand his ideas, either for the nation or for the individual; G.o.d's plans miscarried with such fatality. Or if he had some deeper design, it was still all guesswork. It seemed likely, or at least right, that he should achieve somehow the final d.a.m.nation of the Gentiles--the Romans, and the rest of us--but nothing was very clear. In the meantime, if G.o.d was going to d.a.m.n the Gentiles in the next world, why should not the Jews do it in this? Human nature has only too ready an answer for such a question--as we can read in too many dark pages of history, in the stories of wars and religious persecutions.

The uncertainty about G.o.d in Judaism reacted on life and made it hard.

Even the virtues of men were difficult; they were apt to be nerveless and uncertain, because their aim was uncertain, and they wanted inspiration. Of course there are always kindly hearts; but a man will never put forth quite his best for an uncertainty. There was a want of centre about their virtues, a want of faith, and as a result they were too largely self-directed.[19]

A man was virtuous in order to secure himself in case G.o.d should be awkward. There was no sufficient relation between man and G.o.d. G.o.d was judge, no doubt; but his character could be known from his att.i.tude to the Gentiles. Could a man count on G.o.d and how far?

Could he rely on G.o.d supporting him, on G.o.d wis.h.i.+ng to have him in this world and the next? No, not with any certainty. It comes to a fundamental unbelief in G.o.d, resting, as Jesus saw, on an essential misconception of G.o.d's nature; and this resulted in the spoiling of life. Men did not use G.o.d. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," Jesus said (Luke 12:34); and it was not in G.o.d.

Men's interest and belief were elsewhere.

Now the first thing that Jesus had to do, as a teacher, was to induce men to rethink G.o.d. Men, he saw, do not want precepts; they do not want ethics, morals or rules; what they do need is to rethink G.o.d, to rediscover him, to re-explore him, to live on the basis of relation with G.o.d. There is one striking difference between Christianity and the other religions, in that the others start with the idea that G.o.d is known. Christians do not so start. We are still exploring G.o.d on the lines of Jesus Christ--rethinking G.o.d all the time, finding him out. That is what Jesus meant us to do. If Jesus had merely put before men an ethical code, that would have been to do what the moralists had done before him--what moralists always do, with the same naive idea that they are doing a great deal for us.

His object was far more fundamental.

The first thing was to bring people on to the very centre and to get there at once--to get men away from the acc.u.mulation of occasional and self-directed virtues, from the self-sustained life, from self-acquired righteousness, and to bring them to face the fact of G.o.d, to realize the seriousness of G.o.d and of life, and to see G.o.d.

When he preached self-denial, he did not mean the modern virtue of self-denial with all its pettinesses, but a genuine negation of self, a total forgetfulness of self by having the mind set entirely on G.o.d and G.o.d's purposes, a readjustment of everything with G.o.d as the real centre of all. This is always difficult; it is not less difficult where the conception of G.o.d is, as it was with Jesus, entirely spiritual. The whole experience of mankind was against the idea that there could be a religion at all without priest, sacrifice, altar, temple, and the like. There is a very minimum of symbol and cult in the teaching of Jesus--so little that the ancient world thought the Christians were atheists, because they had no image, no temple, no sacrifice, no ritual, nothing that suggested religion in the ordinary sense of the word. We shall realize the difficulty of what Jesus was doing when we grasp that he meant people to see G.o.d independently of all their conventional aids. To lead them to commit themselves in act to G.o.d on such terms was a still more difficult thing. To believe in G.o.d in a general sort of way, to believe in Providence at large, is a very different thing from getting yourself crucified in the faith that G.o.d cares for you, and yet somehow wishes you to endure crucifixion. How far will men commit themselves to G.o.d? Jesus means them to commit themselves to G.o.d right up to the hilt--as Bunyan put it, "to hazard all for G.o.d at a clap." Decision for G.o.d, obedience to G.o.d, that is the prime thing--action on the basis of G.o.d and of G.o.d's care for the individual.

His purpose that this shall not be merely the religion of choice spirits or of those immediately around him, but shall be the one religion of all the world, makes the task still vaster. He means not merely to touch the Jews. Whether he says so in explicit terms or not, it is implied in all that he says and does, that the new movement should be far wider than anything the world had ever seen; it was to cover the whole of mankind. He meant that every individual in all the world should have the centre of gravity of his thinking s.h.i.+fted.

Again, he had to think of a re-creation of the language of men, till G.o.d should be a new word. Our constant problem is to give his word his value, his meaning. He meant that men should learn their religious vocabulary again, till the words they used should suggest his meanings to their minds. Something of this was achieved, when some of his disciples came to him and said: "Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). Further, he had to secure that men should begin the rethinking of all life--personal, social, and national--from the very foundations, on new lines--what is called a transvaluation of all values. With a new centre, everything has to be thought out anew into what St. Paul calls the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4:13). Then finally the question comes, how to secure continuity? Will the movement outlast his personal influence? These are his problems--large enough, every one of them.

How does he face them?

The Gospel began with friends.h.i.+p, and we know from common life what that is, and how it works. Old acquaintance and intimacy are the heart of it. The mind is on the alert when we meet the stranger--quick and eager to master his outlook and his ways of thought, to see who and what he is--it is critical, self-protective, rather than receptive. But, as time goes on, we notice less, we study the man less as we see more of him. Yet, in this easier and more careless intercourse, when the mind is off guard, it is receiving a host of unnoticed impressions, which in the long run may have extraordinary influence. Pleasant and easy-going, a perpetual source of interest and rest of mind, the friends.h.i.+p continues, till we find to our surprise that we are changed. Stage by stage, as one comes to know one's friend, by unconscious and freely given sympathy, one lives the other man's life, sees and feels things as he does, slips into his language, and, by degrees, into his thoughts--and then wakes up to find oneself, as it were, remade by the other's personality, so close has been the identification with the man we grew to love. This is what we find in our own lives; and we find it in the Gospels.

A sentence from St. Augustine's Confessions gives us the key to the whole story. "Sed ex amante alio accenditur alius" ("Confessions", iv. 14, 911). "One loving spirit sets another on fire." Jesus brings men to the new exploration of G.o.d, to the new commitment of themselves to G.o.d, simply by the ordinary mechanism of friends.h.i.+p and love. This, in plain English, is after all the idea of Incarnation--friends.h.i.+p and identification. Jesus has a genius for friends.h.i.+p, a gift for understanding the feelings of men. Look, for example, at the quick word to Jairus. As soon as the message comes to him that his daughter is dead, Jesus wheels round on him at once with a word of courage (Mark 5:36). This quickness in understanding, in feeling with people, marks him throughout. An instinctive care for other people's small necessities is a great mark of friends.h.i.+p, and Jesus has it. We find him saying to his disciples: "Come ye yourselves apart privately into a desert place, and rest awhile"

(Mark 6:31). What a beautiful suggestion! He himself, it is clear from the records, felt the need of privacy, of being by oneself, of quiet; and he took his quiet hours in the open, in the wild, where there was solitude and Nature, and there he would take his friends.

There were so many coming and going, that they had no leisure to eat, and Jesus says to them in his friendly way: "Let us get out of this--away by ourselves, to a quiet place; what you want is rest."

What a beautiful idea!--to go camping out on the hillside, under the trees, to rest--and with him to share the quiet of the lonely place.

It is not the only time when he offers to give people rest--"Come unto Me ... and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28). How strange, when one thinks of the restless activity of Christian people to-day, with typewriters and conventions, and every modern method of consuming energy and time! How sympathetic he is!

We may notice again his respect for the reserve of other people. On the whole, how slowly Jesus comes to work with men! He never "rushes" the human spirit; he respects men's personalities. Men and women are never p.a.w.ns with him. He does not think of them in ma.s.ses.

The ma.s.ses appeal to him, but that is because he sees the individual all the time. To one of his disciples he says, "I have prayed for thee" (Luke 22:32). What a contrast to the conventional "friend of man" in the abstract! With all that hangs upon him, he has leisure to pray intensely, for a single man. It gives us an idea of his gifts in friends.h.i.+p. His faith in his people is quite remarkable, when we think of it. He believes in his followers; he shares with them some of the deepest things in his life; he counts them fit to share his thought of G.o.d. He makes it quite clear to them how he trusts them. He puts before them the tremendous work that he has to do--work more appalling in its vastness the more one studies it; and then he tells them that he is trusting the whole thing with them.

What a faith it implies in their moral capacity! What acceptance of the dim beginnings of the character that was to be Christian!

Someone has spoken of his "apparently unjustified faith in Peter."

What names he can give to his friends as a result of this faith in them! "Ye are the light of the world," he says (Matt. 5:14), "the salt of the earth." When we remind ourselves of his clear vision, his genius for seeing fact, how much must such praises have meant to these men!

Think how he gives himself to them in earnest; how he is at their disposal. He is theirs; they can cross-question him at leisure; they tell him that the Pharisees did not like what he said (Matt. 15:12), they doubt with Peter the wisdom of his open speech (Mark 8:32); they criticize him (Matt. 13:10). If they do not understand his parable, they ask what he means (Matt. 15:15) and keep on asking till he makes it plain. He is in no hurry. He is the Master and their Teacher, and he is at the service of the slowest of them.

But there is another side to friends.h.i.+p; for one great part of it is taking what our friends do for us, as well as doing things for them.

How he will take what they have to give! He lets them manage the boat, while he sleeps (Mark 4:38), and go and prepare for him (Luke 9:52), and see to the Pa.s.sover meal (Mark 14:13). The women, we read, ministered to him of their substance (Luke 8:3). There is a very significant phrase in St. Luke (22:28), where he says to them at the end: "Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations." He tells them there that they have helped him. How?

Apparently by being with him. Is not that friends.h.i.+p? In the same chapter (Luke 22:15) we find an utterance that reveals the depth of his feeling for his friends: "With desire I have desired (a Greek rendering of a Semitic intensive) to eat this Pa.s.sover with you before I suffer." They are to help him again by being with him, and he has longed for it, he says. The Gospel of John sums up the whole story in a beautiful sentence: "Jesus, having loved his own which were in the world, loved them unto the end" (John 13:1). Augustine is right. "One loving spirit sets another on fire."

Note again the word which he uses in speaking to them ("Tekna": Mark 2:5, 10:24). It is a diminutive, a little disguised as "children" in our English version. It reappears in the Fourth Gospel in even more diminutive forms ("Teknia", 13:33; Paidia, 21:5) with a peculiarly tender suggestion. The word of Mark answers more closely than anything I know to "Boys," as we used it in the Canadian Universities. "Men," or "Undergraduates," is the word in the English Universities; "Students," in Scotland and in India; in Canada we said "Boys"; and I think we get nearer, and like one another better, with that easy name. And it was this friendly, pleasant word, or one very like it, that he used with them. Nor is it the only one of the kind. "Fear not, little flock!" he said (Luke 12:32). Do not the diminutives mean something? Do they not take us into the midst of a group where friends.h.i.+p is real? And in the centre is the friendliest figure of all.

Look for a moment at the men who followed him; at the type he calls.

They are simple people in the main--warm hearts and impulsive natures. The politics of Simon the Zealot might at one time have been summed up as "the knife and plenty of it," a simple and direct enough type of political thought, in all conscience, however hopeless and ineffectual, as history showed; but he gave up his politics for the friends.h.i.+p of Jesus. Peter, again, is the champion example of the impulsive nature. Why Jesus called James and John "the sons of thunder" (Mark 3:17) I am not sure. Dr. Rendel Harris thinks because they were twins; other people find something of the thunderstorm in their ideas and outlook. The publican in the group is of much the same type; he is ready to leave his business and his custom-house at a word--once more the impulsive nature and the simple. It is possible that Jesus looked also to another type of which he gained very little in his lifetime; for he speaks of "the scribe who has turned disciple again, and brings out of his treasure things new and old" (Matt. 13:52)--the more complicated type of the trained scholar, full of old learning, but open to new views. In the meantime he draws to him people with the warm heart--yes, he says, but cultivate the cool head (cf. Matt. 10:16). Again and again he will have men "count the cost" (Luke 14:28)--know what they are doing, be rid of delusions before they follow him (Mark 8:34). What did they expect? They had all sorts of dreams of the future. When we first find them, there is friction among them, which is not unnatural in a group of men with ambitions (Mark 9:33. 10:37). Even at the Last Supper their minds run on thrones (Luke 22:24). They are haunted by taboos. Peter long after boasts that nothing common or unclean has entered his lips (Acts 10:14). They fail to understand him. "Are ye also without understanding?" he asks, not without surprise (Mark 8:17, 21). At the very end they run away.

There, then, is the group. What is to be the method? There is not much method. As Harnack says about the spread of the early Church, "A living faith needs no special methods"--a sentence worth remembering. "Infinite love in ordinary intercourse" is another phrase of Harnack in describing the life of the early Church. It began with Jesus. He chose twelve, says Mark (3:14), "that they may be with him." That is all. And they are with him under all sorts of circ.u.mstances. "The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" (Luke 9:58). They saw him in privation, fatigued, exhausted. With every chance to see weaknesses in his character, they did not find much amiss with him. That is surely significant. They lived with him all the time, in a genuine human friends.h.i.+p, a real and progressive intimacy. They were with him in popularity and in unpopularity; they were with him in danger, when Herod tried to kill him and he went out of Herod's territory. But friends.h.i.+p depends not only on great moments; it means companions.h.i.+p in the trivial, too, it means idle hours together, partners.h.i.+p in commonplace things--meals and garden--chairs as well as books and crises. Ordinary life, ordinary talk, gossip, chat, every kind of conversation about Herods and Roman governors, and the Zealots--custom-house memories, tales of the fishermen's life on the lake, stories of neighbours and home--rumours about the Galileans who were murdered by Pilate (Luke 13:1-4)--all the babbling talk of the bazaar is round Jesus and his group, and some of it breaks in on them; and his att.i.tude to it all is to these men a constant revelation of character. They are with him in the play of feelings, with him in the fluxes and refluxes of his thought--learning his ways of mind without realizing it. They slip into his mind and mood, by a series of surprises, when they are imagining no such thing. Anything, everything serves to reveal him.

They tramp all day, and ask some village people to shelter them for the night. The villagers tell them to go away. The men are hungry and fatigued. "What a splendid thing it would be, if we could do like Elijah and burn them up with a word!" So the hot thought rose.

He turned and said, "You know not what manner of spirit you are of."--What a gentle rebuke! "The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:51-56). Then follows one of the wonderful sentences of the Gospel, "they went unto another village"--very obvious, but very significant. A missionary from China told me how, thirty years ago or more, he was driven out of the town where he lived; how the gentlefolk egged on the mob, and they wrecked his house, and hounded him out of the place. He told me how it felt--the misery and the indignity of it. Jesus took it undisturbed. He taught a lesson in it which the Church has never forgotten.

Their life was full of experiences shared with him. He has his reserve--his secret; yet, in another sense, he gives himself to them without reserve; there is prodigality of self-impartation in his dealings with them. He lets them have everything they can take. He becomes theirs in a great intimacy, he gives himself to them. Why?

Because he believes, as he put it, in seed. Socrates saw that the teacher's real work, his only work, is to implant the idea, like a seed; an idea, like a seed, will look after itself. A king builds a temple or a palace. The seed of a banyan drifts into a crack, and grows without asking anyone's leave; there is life in it. In the end the building comes down, but for what the banyan holds up. The leaven in the meal is the most powerful thing there. There is very little of it, but that does not matter; it is alive (Matt. 13:33).

Life is a very little thing but it is the only thing that counts.

That is why the farmer can sow his fields and sleep at nights without thinking of them; and the crop grows in spite of his sleeping, and he knows it (Mark 4:26). That is why Jesus believes so thoroughly in his men, and in his message; G.o.d has made the one for the other, and there is no fear of mischance.

Look at his method of teaching. People "marvelled at his words of charm" (Luke 4:22)--"hung about him to hear him" (Luke 19:48). He said that the word is the overflow of the heart. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" (Matt. 12:34; Luke 6:45).

What a heart, then, his words reveal! How easy and straightforward his language is! To-day we all use abstract nouns to convey our meaning; we cannot do without words ending in -ality and -anon. But there is no recorded saying of Jesus where he uses even "personality." He does not use abstract nouns. He sticks to plain words. When he speaks about G.o.d he does not say "the Great First Cause," or "Providence," or any other vague abstract. Still less does he use an adverb from the abstract, like "providentially." He says, "your heavenly Father." He does not talk of "humanity"; he says, "your brethren." He has no jargon, no technical terms, no scholastic vocabulary. He urges men not to over-study language; their speech must be simple, the natural, spontaneous overflow of the heart.[20] Jesus told his disciples not to think out beforehand what they would say when on trial (Mark 13:11)--it would be "given"