Part 7 (2/2)
Simply to communicate and impart that was to spread the Kingdom among men.
A teacher like John the Baptist--possessed by the idea of righteousness, and of the world's deficiency, but without tranquillity in his own heart--could look only for a divine interposition, a catastrophe. John is a sort of Carlyle. But Jesus, hearing him, and brooding the deeper truth, goes about proclaiming a present heaven.
The marks of this inner state defined themselves against the conditions of life he saw about him.
Thus, he shows his estimate of wealth in the story of the young ruler.
”Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor!”
Toward the other prize which men most seek, reputation, his feeling is expressed to the two brethren asking chief places: ”He that will be chief among you, let him be your servant.”
As to learning, intellectual attainment, his characteristic word is, ”Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” ”Be as little children.”
The prevalent forms of religious observance he quietly acquiesced in, except where they barred the free play of human charity. Then he set the form aside, as being only the servant of the spirit. ”The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
Such was his att.i.tude toward wealth, honor, intellectual wisdom, ceremonial.
Toward the outcasts, the publican and harlots, his att.i.tude was of pure compa.s.sion. Toward the Pharisees it was denunciatory. Wealth of ceremony and poverty of spirit, self-complacency mixed with scorn for others and with hostility to new light and love, roused in him a wrath which broke in lightning-flashes. ”Woe unto you! whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones, children of h.e.l.l!”
In the ethics of Jesus chast.i.ty has a high place, yet he has few words about it. His is an exalted and ardent goodness, of which purity is an almost silent element. His effect is like that of a n.o.ble woman, whose presence is felt as an atmosphere. When he speaks, his words set the highest mark,--”Be pure in _heart_.”
We may contrast the scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene with that between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota. The philosopher is proof against allurement, and gives kindly advice, which clearly will have no effect; Jesus, without conscious effort, wakes a pa.s.sion of repentance which transforms the life. So again we may compare the check which Epictetus prescribes against undue tenderness, ”Say while you kiss your child, he is mortal,” with the habitual att.i.tude of Jesus toward children,--taking them in his arms, and saying, ”Of such is the kingdom of heaven.” It is in such scenes as these--in his relations especially with women and with children--that we best see the genius of the heart, the newness which came into the world with Jesus.
While dwelling in an inner realm of joy, he had the keenest sense of the sin and sorrow in men's lives. ”He was filled with compa.s.sion for the mult.i.tude, as sheep having no shepherd.” Their epilepsies, leprosies,--the hardness of heart, the insensibility to the higher life,--these moved him with a great pity. Scarcely save in little children did he see the heart-free joy, the natural freedom and happiness, which was his own. The hard-heartedness of the rich, the scorn of the self-righteous for the outcasts, moved his indignation.
Thus the holy happiness of his own life was mingled with a profound sense of the trouble of other lives.
His reading of the trouble was very simple: there were but two forces in the world, moral good and evil, G.o.d and Satan, and G.o.d was shortly to give an absolute triumph to the good.
Among the chief impressions he made was that of commanding power. He must have been full of healthy and majestic manhood. Women and children were attracted to him, as the weak are attracted by the strong. In the storm on the lake, his spirit so rose above the elemental rage--as if upborne with delight by the sublime scene--that his companions forgot their fears, and in the remembrance it appeared to them that the sea and wind grew calm at his word. His strength seemed to impart itself to the weak, his health to the sick. The stories of marvel which richly embroider the whole story are partly the halos of imagination investing a personality which commanded, charmed, inspired.
Sometimes evil was considered the work of wicked spirits,--so especially in cases of lunacy. Over some such cases Jesus had a peculiar power. He even imparted this power to some of the disciples, who caught his inspiration. The disciples, and probably Jesus, believed that this power extended to other sicknesses. Of the uniformity of nature there is no recognition in the New Testament. Man's power over events is believed to be measured by his spiritual nearness to G.o.d. ”If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed,” ye can cast mountains into the sea.
When the soul exchanges its solitary communing for the actual world, it needs to see manifested there the divinity it has felt. Jesus found this manifestation partly in his power through faith to do ”mighty works,”
partly in the expectation of the near coming of the Kingdom.
These in one sense typify the forms in which the religious soul always and everywhere finds the divine presence. Man himself masters the forces of nature, and as he does so has the consciousness of some higher power working through him. And he looks for a better future for himself and for mankind.
But the peculiarity of Jesus--looked at from a modern standpoint--was that he combined the most ardent, pure, and tender feeling and conduct with a simple belief that in the course of events only moral and spiritual forces are to be reckoned with; that man has power over nature in proportion to the purity and intensity of his trust in G.o.d; and that the whole order of society is to be speedily transformed by a divine interposition. These ideas were inwrought in Jesus, and blended with his ardor of goodness, his tenderness, his sense of a mission to seek and save the lost.
In his teaching, G.o.d feeds and clothes his children as he feeds the birds and clothes the gra.s.s. There is no need that they should be anxious about their physical wants. Their troubles will be banished if they will pray in faith. Disease, lunacy, all devilish evil, will vanish before the presence of the trusting child of G.o.d. All the injustice and wrong of the world are speedily to vanish through the direct intervention of G.o.d. It is the old anthropomorphic idea of G.o.d--the idea of the Prophet and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender, through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary interpretation of the world.
What the ruling power of the universe will do he infers from the most attractive human a.n.a.logy. If even an unjust human judge yields to the importunity of a pet.i.tioner, much more will the divine judge listen to the cry of the wronged and suffering. If a human father gives bread to his children when they ask, much more will the divine father.
We are to remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time. The force in him which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating the higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight. This insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life.
But it could not suffice to disclose those broad facts as to the procedure of the phenomena of nature which we call science. To the Jew of the New Testament period,--to Paul as much as to the fishermen of Galilee,--the world was directly administered by a personal being who habitually set aside for his own purposes the ordinary course of events.
The higher minds of the Greek-Roman world had reached a different conception. Thinkers like Aristotle had a.s.sumed the constancy of nature as the basis of their teaching, poets like Lucretius had proclaimed it.
But the great ma.s.s of the Greek-Roman world still believed, as the entire Jewish people believed, in the habitual intervention of some divine personality. What distinguished and dignified the Jewish belief was that it attributed all such interventions to a single deity who embodied the highest moral perfection, instead of to a mixed mult.i.tude representing evil as well as good impulses. All Jewish history was written on this hypothesis. The only records of the past which Jesus knew were the Old Testament and its Apocrypha, in which each crisis of the nation or the individual displayed the decisive interference of the heavenly power.
The occurrences which we name miracles were hardly distinguished by the Jew as generically different from ordinary occurrences; they were only more marked and special instances of G.o.d's working. That a man especially beloved of G.o.d for his goodness should be given power to heal the blind and the lunatic seemed as natural as it was that his loving compa.s.sion should win the outcast and his fiery rebuke appall the hypocrite.
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