Part 2 (2/2)
Was Jesus right in these conclusions? Can human life proceed along the lines He indicated? Certainly it has never yet done so. The woman who is a sinner finds no Jesus to absolve her utterly among the priests of His religion. The resentment of injury is regarded even by good men as entirely justified when injury to the person involves the rights of social order. Force is regarded by persons of the highest amiability as necessary to the defense of society, and the Church applauds the punishments inflicted by the civil magistrate, and even hastens to bless the banners and baptize the deadly weapons of the warrior.
Meekness, which endures injury without resentment, is regarded as the sign of a servile and cowardly spirit, and is the subject of ridicule and contempt. No Christian society exists in which a Peter would be freely pardoned his offense; the best that could be hoped would be the infliction of humiliating penance, and a reluctant reinstatement in the apostles.h.i.+p after a long period of bitter ostracism. Yet who would venture to challenge the conduct of Jesus in these respects? Who would not find his opinion of Jesus tragically lowered, and his adoration practically destroyed, if some new and more authentic Gospel were discovered by which we learned that Jesus smote with leprosy the Pharisees who resisted Him, as Elisha smote Gehazi: that He sanctioned the stoning of the adultress taken in the act of sin; or that He branded Simon Peter for his perfidy, and drove him out forever from the apostles.h.i.+p he had disgraced, denouncing him as a son of h.e.l.l and a predestined citizen of the outer darkness? Could such acts be attributed to Jesus, though each act in itself would precisely represent the common temper of Christian courts and so-called Christian men under circ.u.mstances of similar and equal provocation, the wors.h.i.+p of Jesus would at once cease throughout the world.
The dilemma is truly tragic. A Jesus who should be proved to have lived according to the conventions we respect, who did not rise above conventional ideals of either love or justice, who approved force, and resented injuries, who repudiated the friend who had betrayed Him, who shunned the contact of persons whose touch dishonoured Him--such a Jesus would cease to be our Jesus. He would no longer attract us, He would not touch our hearts, He would barely command our respect.
Astounding fact! Those very things in the life of Jesus which we disapprove are the things for which we love Him; and those tempers which we ourselves disallow are in Him the sources of our adoration.
We are bound therefore to ask, can that method of conduct be wrong which has won this triumphant issue? It may be ironically true that we love Him most for those very acts of His which we are least likely to imitate; but is not this our tacit testimony to the essential rightness of these acts? In our better, or our softer moments; or in those moments when we are most conscious of the cruelty of life, and most in need of love, do we not feel, as the life of Jesus grows before us, that this is how life should be lived? Dare we question that a world governed wholly by the ideals of Jesus would be a far happier world than this we know? Love, as the one necessary law of life, clearly stands justified in Jesus, since it has produced the most adorable character in history. If we admit this, it is foolish to speak of Christ's ideals as impracticable. What we approve in another's life we cannot wholly repudiate in our own. Let it be added also, that a life lived by another is always a life that others can live. We may seek to cover our failure, and the world's failure, to reproduce the life of Jesus, by the plea of incompetence, but against our plea Jesus records His verdict, ”_Behold I have left you an example_.”
From that verdict there is no appeal.
LOVE AND JUDGMENT
_MOTHER AND SON_
_When, for the last time, from His Mother's home The Son went forth, foreseeing perfectly What doom would happen, and what things would come, Was there upon His lips no stifled sigh For happy hours that should return no more, Long days among the lilies, pure delights Of wanderings by Galilee's fair sh.o.r.e, And converse with His friends on starry nights?
Yet brave He stepped into the setting sun With this one word, ”Father, Thy will be done!”_
_With a low voice the stooping olive-trees Whispered to Him of His Gethsemane; The cruel thorn-bush, clinging to His knees, Proclaimed, ”I shall be made a crown for Thee!”
And, looking back, His eyes made dim with loss, He saw the lintel of the cottage grow In shape against the sunset, like a cross, And knew He had not very far to go.
Yet brave He stepped into the setting sun, Still saying this one word, ”Thy will be done!”_
_So, when the last time, from His Mother's home The Son pa.s.sed out, no choir of angels came, As long before at Bethlehem they had come, To comfort Him upon the road of shame.
Alone He went, and stopped a little s.p.a.ce, As one overburdened, stopped to look again Upon His Mother's pleading form and face, And wept for her, that she should know this pain.
Then, silently, He faced the setting sun And said, ”Oh, Father, let Thy will be done!”_
VII
LOVE AND JUDGMENT
Just as Jesus called in the vision of the unseen world to redress the balance of the visible world, when He said that there was more joy in heaven over the penitent sinner than over ninety and nine just men who needed no repentance, so in His final addresses to His followers He again discloses the unseen world. These final addresses deal with the tremendous problem of a future judgment. Over no problem does the human mind hover with such breathless interest, such unfeigned alarm.
But with characteristic perversity the elements in Christ's vision of the judgment on which men have seized most tenaciously, are precisely those elements which are least intelligible, and least capable of strict definition. It is around the word ”eternal” and the nature of the punishment suggested, that the theological battles of centuries have centred. Yet the really central point of both the vision and the teaching, is not here at all; and it is only man's habitual love of enigma which can explain the pa.s.sion with which men have opposed one another over the interpretation of words and phrases which must always remain enigmatic.
Let us turn to Christ's vision of the Judgment, as recorded by St.
Matthew, and what do we find? First that the same Son of Man, whose whole life was an exposition of the law of love, is Himself the final judge of men and nations. ”_The Son of Man shall sit on the throne of His glory, and before Him shall be gathered all the nations, and He shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats_.” No alien judge, observe, unacquainted with the nature of man, but one who knows human life so thoroughly that He is the representative man--”the Son of Man”; and although He is now the Judge, yet He still calls Himself by the tender name of the Shepherd.
The tribunal is therefore the tribunal of love, and the court is the court of love. He who shall judge mankind is He who judges Peter and the woman who was a sinner, He of whose tenderness and sympathy we have a.s.surance in a hundred acts of mercy, pity, and magnanimity. Yet for centuries the Church has sung its terrible _Dies Irae_, has clothed the judgment seat with thunder, has put into the hands of Jesus bolts of flame, and has applauded and enthroned in His sanctuaries such pictorial blasphemies as Michael Angelo's _Last Judgment_, which represents Jesus as an angry Hercules, and even gratifies the private spite of the artist by overwhelming in a sea of fire one who had offered him a personal affront.
Blasphemy indeed, and falsehood too; for the second thing we find is that the one principle which governs the entire vision of Jesus is that Love judges, and that it is by Love that men are tested. The men and women of loving disposition, who have wrought many little acts of kindness which were to them so natural and simple that they do not so much as recollect them, find themselves mysteriously selected for infinite rewards. The men and women of opposite disposition, in spite of all their outward rect.i.tude of behaviour, find themselves numbered with the goats. A cup of cold water given to a child, a meal bestowed upon a beggar, a garment shared with the naked--these things purchase heaven. One who Himself had been thirsty, hungry, and naked, judges their worth, and He judges by His own remembered need. It is love alone that is divine, love alone that prepares the soul for divine felicity. With a beautiful unconsciousness of any merit, the people who have lived lovingly plead ignorance of their own lovely acts and tempers; but they have been witnessed by the hierarchies of heaven, the morning stars have sung of them, they have made glad the heart of G.o.d; and the reward of these humble servitors of love now is that having added to the joy of G.o.d, henceforth they shall share that joy forever.
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