Part 8 (1/2)
It seems clear that Jesus, not less than his disciples, regarded his power over physical ills as just as truly an incident of his character and mission as was the power to inspire conduct and reclaim the erring.
What differentiated him from them was that he held the physical marvels of far less relative account than they did. Obscure as the detailed narratives must remain to us, it seems unmistakable that he habitually discouraged all publicity and prominence for his works of healing. His spiritual genius showed him that the stimulation of curiosity and expectation in this direction diverted men from the princ.i.p.al business of life, and the essential purport of his message,--to love, obey, and trust.
The point at which the idea of divine intervention most seriously affected his work seems to have been in his growing expectation of a speedy consummation which should in a day establish on earth the kingdom of truth and righteousness. His earlier teachings include striking utterances upon the gradual development of character in man, the slow ripening of society, as in the parables of the leaven and the sower.
Here he was on the firm ground of his own observation and consciousness.
But as the problem of his own mission pressed for an explicit solution; as the lofty pa.s.sion of the idealist, the yearning tenderness of the lover of men, were thwarted and baffled by the prodigious inertia of humanity,--so he was thrown back more and more on that promise of some swift catastrophic judgment and triumph which was the closing word of ancient prophecy, and which seemed to answer the cry of his soul.
The later chapters of the synoptic Gospels are intensely colored with this antic.i.p.ation of a divine judgment close at hand. The promise, the threat, the tremendous imagery, were dear to the heart of the early church. They fed the imagination of the mediaeval church. But that modern Christianity which finds in Christ the source and embodiment of all its own refined and exalted conceptions is inclined to look away from all this millennial prophecy; to weaken or ignore its significance, or to attribute it to the misconception of the disciples. This modern Christianity fastens its attention on those teachings of purely spiritual and universal truth in which Jesus indeed spoke as never other man spoke.
This exclusive insistence on the ethical and spiritual element may suffice for those to whom Christ is an ideal or a divinity. But if we are to study the historical development of our religion, and not merely its present form, it seems necessary to recognize this belief in the Judgment and Advent as a very important factor in the story.
Unless we attribute to his disciples and biographers a misunderstanding almost inconceivable, he identified himself with the Son of Man whom the prophecy of Daniel and the popular belief expected to set up a divine kingdom on earth. The whole story in the later chapters of the Gospels is pervaded by this idea. The powerful imagery of a Day of Judgment, the splendid promises and lurid threatenings, the specific incidents of teaching and event, the overstrained eagerness,--which will not suffer a son to wait to bury his father, or allow a fig-tree to refuse miraculous fruit,--all agree in the presentation of Jesus as absorbed with this tremendous expectation.
That he was on the whole so little unsteadied by this antic.i.p.ation seems due to his profound, sympathetic sense of the sad and sorrowful elements which somehow mingle with human destiny. He was not thinking chiefly of himself,--not even though he was to be G.o.d's vicegerent. What filled his heart, was the destiny of men. He wept over Jerusalem,--he mourned for those who would go away into darkness. The realities of human experience, widened by sympathy, came close home to him.
It seems plain--so far as anything can be plain in the details of the story--that as his mission went on his temper of a pure spiritual idealism changed into a controversy with the leaders of the established religion. He went to Jerusalem, foreseeing that the controversy would there take an acute form, with the gravest issues. At times the presage rose of his own defeat and death. Suppose that were to happen?
Still--so spoke his victorious faith--G.o.d's cause would triumph. And it would triumph speedily and visibly. So he heartened his followers for any event. ”Be prepared--you who are to me brothers and sisters and mother--be prepared even for my death. All the same, my truth will vindicate itself, G.o.d will triumph, you shall be saved!”
Jerusalem, it is plain, struck him much as Rome did Luther. Gorgeous buildings, splendid ceremonies, august authorities, and along with it a ma.s.s of greed, formality, worldliness.
A solemn sense comes over him that this cannot endure. The disciples childishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikes him as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, ”There shall not one stone be left upon another.”
His indignation rises and seeks expression in some outward act which shall blaze upon the dull mult.i.tude the sense of their sinful state. He goes into the courts of the Temple, drives out the money-changers and merchants, overthrows their tables, scatters all the apparatus of trade.
This is the turning-point in his career; he has given an effective handle against him to the formalists and bigots who already hated him, and they speedily bring about his ruin.
The life of Jesus culminates in the scenes of the last night. At the supper, sure now of his impending fate, his willing self-devotion expresses himself in that poetry of humble objects which was characteristic of him, and with pa.s.sionate intensity. ”This bread is my body.” ”This wine is my blood.” ”I give myself for you.”
The scene in Gethsemane shows the dismay and recoil of the hour when his ardent faith met full the stern actuality. G.o.d was not to interfere, defeat and death were before him. All was hidden, save a fate which rose upon his imagination in dark terror. ”O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pa.s.s from me!” Then comes the victory of absolute self-surrender, ”Not my will, but thine, be done.”
The birth-hour of the religion of Jesus was that in which he began to declare forgiveness to the outcast and good tidings to the poor. But the birth-hour of Christianity, as the wors.h.i.+p of Jesus, was that in which Mary Magdalene saw her master as risen and eternally living.
The impulse which caught up and gave wings to his work just when it seemed crushed came from the heart of Mary. In a spiritual sense the mother of Christianity was a woman who had been a sinner, and was forgiven because she loved much. The faith that sent the disciples forth to conquer the world was the faith that their Lord was not dead but living, not a memory but a perpetual presence. That conviction first flashed into the heart of Mary. It was born of a love stronger than death, the love of a rescued soul for its savior. It sprang up in a mind simple as a child's, incapable of distinguis.h.i.+ng between what it felt and what it saw, between its own yearning or instinct and the actualities of the outward world. It took bodily form under a glow of exaltation that knew not itself, whether in the body or out of the body. It crystallized instantly into a story of outward fact. It communicated itself by sympathetic intensity to other loving and credulous hearts. They too saw the heavenly vision. Its acceptance as a reality became the corner-stone of the new society. About it grew up, in ever increasing fullness and definiteness of outline, a whole supernal world of celestial personalities. But the initial fact was the heart's conviction--Jesus lives! Our friend and master is not in the grave, nor in the cold underworld; he is the child of the living G.o.d, and he draws us toward him in that divine and eternal life.
To get some partial comprehension of how the belief in Jesus'
resurrection took possession of the disciples' minds, we are to remember that during the last months of their master's life he was in a state of tense, high-wrought expectation, which communicated itself to them.
Something wonderful was just about to happen. There was to be a sudden and amazing manifestation of divine power, by which the kingdom of G.o.d was to triumph and thenceforth to reign. But the way to this consummation might lead through the valley of the shadow of death. In the soul of Jesus a sublime hope and a dark presage alternated and mingled. It is not to be supposed that he held a definite and unchanging conception. Cloud-shadows and sunbursts played by turns across him, with the intensity natural to a soul of vast emotions. Constant through it all was the fixed purpose to be true to his mission, and with victorious recurrence came his confidence in the divine issue. His sympathetic disciples were vaguely, profoundly stirred by this elemental struggle and victory. They too became intensely expectant of some great catastrophe and triumph. After the first shock of the Master's death, all this emotion surged up in them afresh, with their love heightened as death always heightens love, with the fresh and vivid memories of their leader sweeping them on in the current of his purpose and hope and faith. His words were true,--he must, he will, conquer and reign. If he has gone to the underworld, he will live again. ”Will,”--nay, is he not here with us now? Is he not more real to our thought and love than ever before? And first in one mind, then in another, the conviction flashes into bodily image. Mary has seen the Master! Peter has seen him! And for a little time--for ”forty days”--the electric air seems often to body forth that luminous shape. The story, as it grew with years, took on one detail after another, became definite and coherent, was accepted as the charter and foundation of the little society.
To rightly understand the faith of the disciples in the risen Christ, we must look below the stories of sense-appearance in which that faith clothed itself. What they essentially felt--what distinguished their faith from a mere opinion or dogma--was not a mere expectation, ”The dead _will_ rise;” not a mere fact of history, ”Some one _did_ rise;” it was the conviction and consciousness, ”Our friend _is living_.” It was an experience--including and transcending memory and hope--of present love, present communion, present life.
Sight and speech lent their forms to clothe the ineffable experience of Mary and the disciples. For us, the story of outward events--the visible form, the eating of bread and fish, the conversations, the floating up into the clouds--all this fades away as a mirage. The reality below this symbol--the sense of the human friend's continued and higher life--this abides and renews itself; not as an isolated historic fact, but as an instance and counterpart of the message which in every age comes to the bereaved heart--of a love greater than loss, a life in which death is swallowed up.
The religion of the followers of Jesus became a centring of every affection, obligation, and hope, in him.
For the first few years all this was merged in the eager expectation of his return. While this lasted in its fullness, even memory was far less to them than hope. They did not attempt any complete records of his earthly life,--what need of that, when the life was so soon to be resumed? The bride on the eve of her marriage is not reading her old love-letters,--she is looking to the morrow.
That first eager flush had already pa.s.sed when the earliest gospels were written. By that time hope had begun to prop its wavering confidence, by looks turned back even to a remote past. Hence the constant appeals to the supposed predictions of the Old Testament; hence even the imagining of special events in the life of Jesus to fulfill those predictions.
The Old Testament as conceived by the writers of the New is fantastically unlike the original writings. The Evangelists found Messianic prophecies everywhere. The writers of the Epistles, Paul and the rest, dealt with ceremonies and histories as a quarry out of which to hew whatever allegory or argument suited their purpose.
In Luke's Gospel we first see fully displayed the idea of Christ which took possession of the common mind, and has largely held it ever since,--a personal Savior,--a gracious, merciful, all-powerful deliverer.