 Chapter 5 of The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 5 The Teaching of Jesus Upon God It is worth taking some trouble to realize how profoundly Jesus has changed the thinking of mankind about God. Since Jesus lived, Dr. Fairburn wrote, God has been another and nearer being to man. Jesus, writes Dr. Fosnick, had the most joyous idea of God that ever was thought of. That joyous sense of God he has given to his followers, and it stands in vivid contrast with the feelings men have towards God in other religions. Christianity is the religion of joy. The New Testament is full of it. We know the general character of Jesus's attitude to God, his feeling for God, its sense of God's nearness, how immediate his knowledge of God is, how intimate. Of course, here, as everywhere, his teaching has such an occasional character, or else the records of it are so fragmentary, that we must not press the absence of system in it. And yet, I think, it would be right to say that Jesus puts before us no system of God, but rather, suggests a great exploration, an intimacy with the slow and sure knowledge that intimacy gives. He has no definition of God, but he assumes God, lives on the basis of God, interprets God, and God is discovered in his acts and his relations. He said to Peter, in effect, for the familiar phrase comes to this in modern English, you think like a man, you don't think like God. Elsewhere, he contrasts God's thoughts with man's. Their outlooks are so different, that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God. In other words, he would have men see all things as God sees them. That we do not so see them remains the weak spot in our thinking. What Luther said to Erasmus is true of most of us. Your thoughts concerning God are too human. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, said Jesus, and throughout he emphasises that the vision of God depends on likeness to God. It is love and a glowing purity that give that faculty, rather than any power of intellect apart from them. Jesus brings men back to the ultimate fact. Our views are too short and too narrow. He would have us face God, see him and realise him. Think in the terms of God, look at things from God's point of view, live in God and with God. In modern phrase, he breaks up our dogmatism and puts us at a universal point of view to see things over again in a new and true perspective. How and where did he begin himself? Since came his consciousness of God, his gift for recognising God. We do not know. The story of his growth, his inward growth, is almost unrevealed to us. We are told that he learnt by the things which he suffered, and that he increased in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and man. Where does anyone begin who takes us any great distance? It is very hard to know. Where did our own thoughts of God begin? What made them? How did they come? There is an inherited element in them, but how much arse? Whence came the inherited element? How is it that to another man, with the same upbringing as ours, everything is different? Everything means more? Remark at any rate, in the teaching of Jesus, that there is no mysticism of the type so much studied today. There is nothing in the least psychopathic about him, nothing abnormal, no mystical vision of God, no mystical absorption in God, no mystical union with God, no abstraction, nothing that is the mark of the professed mystic. Yet he speaks freely of seeing God. He lives in a life of the closest union with God, and God is in all his thoughts. A phrase like that of Clement of Alexandria, day of fire into apathy, we become monadic, is seized away from anything we find in the speech of Jesus. That is not the way he preaches God. He is far more natural, and that his followers accepted this naturalness, and drew him so, and gave his teaching as he gave it, is a fresh pledge of the truthfulness of the Gospels. Again, his knowledge of God is not a matter of quotation, as I was so very often tends to be. He is conscious always of the real nearness of God. He seems to wonder how it is that man can forget God, we do forget God, or Guston in his confessions has to tell us that God did not make the world and then go away. The practical working religion of a great many of us rests on a feeling that God is a very long way off. Our practical steps betray that we half think God did go away when he made the world. Prayer to us is not a real thing. It is not intercourse face to face. Far too often it is like conversation over a telephone wire of infinite length which gets out of order. Even if words travel along that wire, there is so much buzzing that they are hardly recognizable. No, says Jesus, God is near, God is here, so near, that Jesus never feels that men have any need of a priesthood to come between or to help them to God. God does all that. There is no common concern, no matter of food or clothing, no mere detail of the ordinary round of common duty and common life, father and mother, son, wife, friend, nothing of all that, but God is there. God knows about it. God is interested in it. God has taken care of it. God is enjoying it. How is it that men can reject the counsel of God, refuse God's plans and ideas? How is it that they forget God altogether? Jesus is surprised at the dullness of men's minds. It is a mystery to him. The rich fool as we call him, though it is hard to see why we should call him a fool when he is so like ourselves, had forgotten God somehow, and were startled when God spoke, and spoke to him. That story seen so often among men, the story of the thorns choking the seed, make Jesus remark on the difficulty which a rich man finds in entering the kingdom of God. God knows. That is what Jesus repeats. God cares, and God can do things. His hands are not tied by impotence. The knowledge of God is emphasised by Jesus. Even the very hairs on your head are all numbered. Your Father knoweth, seeth in secret, knoweth your hearts, knows your struggles, knows your worries, knows your worth. God knows all about you, and all things are possible with God. There is nothing he cannot do, nothing he will not do for his children. Will a father refuse his child bread? Will God not give what is good? Is it too big a thing for the giver of life to give food? Which is the more difficult thing to give? Look at God as Jesus draws him, interested in flowers. God takes care of them, and thinks about their colours, so that even Solomon in all his glory is not equal to them. God knows the birds in the nest, knows there is one fewer today than there was yesterday. God cares for them. How much more will he care for you? Ye are of more value than many sparrows. And God thinks outmands life in all its relations, and provides for it. Jesus moves on lines he laid down for it, his plans underlie all. Thus, when Jesus is challenged on the question of marriage and divorce, with that clear thought and eye of his, he goes right back to God's intent, not to man's usage, not to the common law and practice of nations, but to God's intent, and God's meaning. God ordained marriage. He thought it out. Jesus will be better if we think of them in this way. God gave men their food, does still, and all things that he gives are clean. We cannot have taboos at our father's table. Overall is God's throne. That idea, it seems to me, lapses somehow from our minds today. When Luther had to face the hostility of the Kaiser, the Emperor Charles V, he wrote to one of his friends, Christ comes and sits at the right hand, not of the Kaiser, for in that case we would have perished long ago, but at the right hand of God. This is a great and incredible thing, but I enjoy it, incredible as it is. Someday I mean to die in it. Why should I not live in it? So Luther wrote, in not quite our modern vein, we hardly calculate on God as a factor. We omit him, Jesus did not. God's rule is over all, and in all our perplexity, doubt and fear, Jesus reminds us that the first thing to faith is God. The fact is that Thine is the Kingdom means peace. It is a joyous reminder, for if he speaks of the Kingdom of God, the King is more than the Kingdom. It is the Kingdom, the rule of the God who Jesus teaches us to trust and to love. The Father is supreme, but that has more aspects than one. If our Father is supreme for us, he is supreme over us. Jesus emphasises the will of God, God's commandment against man's tradition, God's will against man's notions. Not a source of rest and peace to him is the thought of God's will. When Dante writes, and his will is our peace, it is the thought of Jesus, and at the same time God's judgments are as real to Jesus' mind. I will tell you, he says, whom to fear. God, yes, fear him. He feels the tenderness and the awfulness of God at once. In speaking of God, it is noticeable that Jesus chiefly emphasises God's interest in the individual, has giving the real clue to God's nature. On the whole, there is very little, even implied, still less explicit in the Gospels, about God as the great architect of nature. Hardly anything on the lines familiar to us, in the Psalms and in Isaiah. The sea is his, and he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. He taketh up the aisles as a very little thing. There is very little of this in the Gospels, yet it is implied in the affair of the storm. The disciples, in their anxiety, wake him. He does not understand their fear. Whose sea is it? Whose wind is it? Whose children are you? Cannot you trust your father to control his wind and his sea? Of course it is possible that he said more about God as the author of nature than our fragmentary reports give us. But it may be that that is because the emphasis on God's care and love for the individual is hardest to believe, and at the same time best gives the real value of God that Jesus uses it so much. Perhaps the great artificia is too far away for our minds. He is too busy, we think, and yet, after all, if God is so great, why should he be so busy? If he is a real father, why should he not be at leisure for his children? He is, says Jesus. A friend has leisure for his friends, and a father for his children. And God, Jesus suggests, always has leisure for you. The great emphasis with Jesus falls on the love of God. Thus he tells the story of the impossible creditor with two debtors. One owed him ten pounds, and the other a hundred. When they had nothing to pay, they both came to him and told him so. The ordinary creditor, at the very best, would say, well, I suppose I must put it down as a bad debt. Jesus says that this creditor took up quite another attitude. He smiled and said to his two troubled friends, is that all? Don't let anything like that worry you. What is that between you and me? He forgave them the debt, with such a charm, Jesus says, that they both loved him. One feels that the end of the story must be that they both paid him and loved him all the more for taking the money. What a delightful story of charm and friendship and forgiveness. And it is a true picture of God, Jesus would have us believe, of God's forgiveness, and the response it wakes in men. If we do not definitely set our minds to assimilate the ideas of Jesus, we shall make too little of the heart of God. With Jesus this is the central and crucial reality. He emphasizes the generosity of God. God makes his son rise on the good and on the bad. He sends rain on the just and the unjust. God's flowers are just as beautiful in the bad man's garden. God knows what his child needs and gives it, whether it is a very good child or a very bad one. The father is the same great wise friend in either case. The peacemakers are recognized as the children of God because of their family likeness to God. They come among people and find them in discord with one another, and their presence stills that. Or they come into a man's life when it is all in disordered pain and they bring peace there. They may not quite know it, but they do these things almost without meaning to do them. And Jesus says that this is a family likeness by which men know that they are God's children. But it is not every teacher, pagan or Christian, who lays such stress on God's gift of peace or is so sure of it. He uses her see as great saying about God, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, as giving the truth about God. Matthew represents him as quoting it twice, and we can well believe that he found in it the real spirit of God, and often referred to it. His own heart has taken him to the tenderness of the utterances of the Old Testament, spoken by the most suffering of the prophets. Love your enemies, he says, yes, for then you will be the real children of God. Or he speaks of the great patience of God, how God gives every man all the time and all the chance that he needs. Sometimes he half suggests, even a little more. Look at the parable of the fig tree, how the gardener pleads for the tree, begs, and obtains another chance for it. That is like God, says Jesus. It is easy enough to talk in a vague way about the love of God, but the love of God implies surely the individual. Love has little context indeed if its object is merely a collective noun, an abstract, a concept. But that God loves individual men is very difficult for us to believe in earnest. The real crux comes when the question rises in a man's own heart, does God love me? Jesus says that he does, but it is very hard to believe except in the company of Jesus and under his influence. Jesus throughout asserts and re-asserts the value of the individual to God. Look for example at the picture he draws when he tells of the recovery of the lost sheep and brings out the analogy. At the end of the book of Job the poet carries his reader back to the first sight of a world, new maid, and tells how God, like the real artist and creator—we might not have thought of all this, but the poet did—loves his work so much that he must have his friends sharing it with him. He calls them. He shows them the world he has made, the beauty and the wonder and the power, as Browning says. The poet tells us that what followed was that the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. The sight was so good that song and shout came instinctively, almost involuntarily. Is it not the same picture which Jesus draws of joy and heaven in the presence of the angels of God over one synod that repenteth? We can believe in such joy when God made the world, but can we believe that there was the same joy in the presence of God yesterday when Akuli gave his heart to God? Jesus does. That is the central thing, it seems to me, in his teaching about God, that God cares for the individual to an extent far beyond anything we could think possible. If we can wrestle with that central thought and assimilate it, or, as the old divine said, appropriate it, make it our own, the rest of the Gospel is easy. But one can never manage it except with the help and in the company of Jesus. Jesus goes a step further and believes in the possibility of a man loving God and God enjoying that, too. If he speaks of prayer, must we not think that he means God wants it as much as the child can want it? How much is involved in the name father, of which Jesus so uniformly gives God? Something less than the word carries in the case of a human father, or more. What is the attitude of a father to his child? Jesus, as we have seen, uses this illustration to bring out God's care for the actual needs of his children. But is that all? What is the innermost thing in a father's relation to his children? Is it really something more than the bird's instinct to feed her young or to gather them under her wings? Is not one of the most real features of parenthood enjoyment of the child? Do not men and women frankly enjoy the grappling of the little mind with big things? Is there not a charm, as says one of the early Christian fathers, about the half words that a child uses as he learns to talk, and wrestles with a grown-up vocabulary? Are the extraordinary pictures that he will draw of ships or cows? The quaint stories he will invent, the odd ways in which his gratitude and his affection express themselves, is it a real fatherhood where such things do not appeal? Jesus's language about God, his whole attitude to God, implies throughout that God is as real a father as anybody, and it suggests that God loves his children the more because they are real, because they are not very clever, because they do make such queer and imperfect prayers, because in short they need him, and because they fill a place in his heart. We have to remark how firmly Jesus believes in his gospel of God and man needing each other, and finding each other, his good news, as he calls it. He bases all on his faith on what has been called man's incurable religious instinct, that instinct in the human heart that must have God, and in God's response to that instinct, which he himself implanted, and which is no accident found here and missing there, but a genuine God-given characteristic of every man, whatever his temperament or his range in emotions may be, his swiftness or slowness of mind. The repeated parables of seed and leaven, the parables of vitality again and again suggest his faith in his message, his conviction that God must have man and man must have God, that as St Augustine puts it, thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart knows no rest till it rests in thee. That is the essence of the gospel. How this union of the soul with God comes about, Jesus does not directly say, but there are many hints in his teaching that bear upon it. The kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation, he said. Religious truth is not preached by quick turns of self-applauding intellect, nor by demonstrations. It comes another way, the quiet familiarity with the deep true things of life, till on a sudden they are transfigured in the light of God, and truth is a new and glowing thing, independent of arguments and the strange evidence of thought meturgy. This is the normal way, and Jesus holds by it. The great people, men of law and learning, want more. They want something to substantiate God's messages from without. If Jesus comes to them with a word from God, can he not prove its authenticity, preferably with a sign from the sky, for the signs he gives and the evidence he suggests are unsatisfactory? And he sighed deeply in his spirit and saith, Why doth this generation seek after a sign? Verily I say unto you, There shall no sign be given unto this generation. So he left them, and went up into the ship again, and went away. That scene is drawn from life. But why no sign? In the parallel passage we read, The wicked generation and adulterous seeketh a sign, but there shall be no sign given it but the sign of the prophet Jonah. So he left them and departed. The real explanation of this reference to Jonah is given by Luke, and missed or misdeveloped in Matthew. Nineveh recognized instinctively the inherent truth of Jonah's message, and repented. Eve is its own evidence, like leaven in the meal, like seed in the field. It does its work, and its life reveals it. God is known that way. When the chief priest's demand of Jesus to be told plainly what is his authority, he carries the matter a stage further. Was the baptism of John, he asks, from heaven, i.e. of God, or was it of men? Does God make his message clear? Does he properly authenticate himself? And the uneasy weighing of alternatives summarized by the evangelist leads to the answer that they could not tell whence it was. And Jesus rejoins that he has nothing to say to them about his authority. He had taken what we might call an easy case, where it was evident that God had spoken, and this was all they made of it. They could not tell. It was plain then, either that these men did not recognize the obvious message of God, the word of God came upon John, or that, if they did recognize it, they thought it did not matter. For the insincere and the trivial, there is no message from God, no truth of God. How could there be? If we pursue this line of thought, we can see how, in Jesus' opinion, a man may be sure of God, and of God's word for him, if a man be candid with himself, if he face the common facts of life, with seriousness, and in the doing of duty, perplexities vanish. Such a man is prepared for the great fact, by faithfulness to the little facts, and then God dawns on him in them. This is put directly in the fourth Gospel, and in parable in the Snoptists. The leaven works till the whole is leavened, the uneasy process is over, and the result achieved. Or it comes more quietly still, the seed grows, while the farmer sleeps and rises, night and day, the blade springs up, and the ear forms on the blade, the seed grows in the ear, and the end is reached, and God's kingdom is a reality. Or the knowledge of God comes like a lightning flash, sudden, illuminative, decisive. The Son reveals God to the simple, Jesus said. The Son of Man may be a disputable figure, whosoever speaketh the word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him. But there is no forgiveness in this world, or in any possible real world where God counteth all, for the refusal of the Spirit of Truth. So he taught, and all history shows that he was right. The refusal of Truth is fatal. Jesus, wrote Matthew Arnold, never touches theory, but bases himself invariably upon experience. It is to experience that Jesus goes to authenticate his message. The real facts of life lead you to God, as the red sky and the south wind teach you to foretell the weather. Days and years, said the Greek thinker, Heraclitus, long before, are bad witnesses for such as have barbarian souls. The Pharisees discredited Jesus. He cast out devils by Beelzebub. Did he, he asked, or was it by the finger of God? Is there no evidence of God in restored sanity? But the strength of his position lies in the good news for the poor, for those who labour and are heavy laden, news of rest and refreshment, as if the intuition of God with the peace it brings were its own proof. Truth is reached less by ingenuity than by intensity. To the simple mind, to the true heart, to the pure soul, to those whose gift is peace, truth comes flooding in. New light on old fact, and new light from old fact, and God is evident. So Jesus judged, and here again, before we decide for or against his view, we have to make sure that we know his meaning, and realise the experience by which he reached his thought, and then perhaps God will be more evident to us in our turn. The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, it is within. So quietly it comes that we may not guess how, in any particular instance, the realisation of God came to a soul. But if we are candid and truth-loving, we can know it when it has come to ourselves, and we can recognise it when it comes to another. We can recognise it in its power and peace. We can see the greatness of the new knowledge and the new man it makes, in the new life, the man of the great spirit, of the great action, the man of the great quiet, the man who has the peace of God. What does the discovery of God mean? Jesus himself speaks of a man turning right about, being converted, of the revision of all ideas, of all standards, of all values. He gives us two beautiful pictures to illustrate what it means, and it repays us to linger over them. First there is the treasure-finder. He is in the country, digging perhaps in another man's field, or idling in the open, and by accident he stumbles on a buried treasure. Palestine was like Belgium, a land with a long history of wars fought on its soil by foreigners, Babylon or Assyria against Egypt, Ptolemies against Lucids. It was the only available route for attack either on Egypt by land, or on Assyria or Mesopotamia or Babylon from the southern Mediterranean. In such a land, when the foreign army marched through, a man had best hide his treasure and hoped to find it again in better times. And again, and again, the secret of the place of its burial died with him. The treasure-finder had no Lord of the Manor to think of, no Treasury Department. He made a great discovery, and made it initially for himself and his own, and for joy thereof he goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. We can see him full of his discovery, full of eagerness, and trying to hide his in a joy, as he realises every penny he can manage, and achieves the great transaction which gives him the field and the treasure. The salient points are a sudden great joy, an instant resolution, a complete sacrifice of everything, and a life unexpectedly and infinitely enriched. And so it is, says Jesus, with the kingdom of God. The pearl-merchant is a more interesting figure. Once we may picture him middle-aged, a trifle worn, somewhat silent, a man of keen eyes. He has been in his trade for years, and he is a master at it. By now he has a knowledge which years give to a man in earnest, a knowledge more like instinct than anything acquired. A glance at pearls on a table, this and this, and this he will take the other, perhaps. He would look at that one, the rest. He shook his head and did not look at them. He saw without looking. One day he is told of a pearl, a good one. He is not surprised, for pearls are always good when they are offered for sale. But again a glance is enough. The price? Yes, it is high, but he will take the pearl, but he must be allowed till evening to get the money. He goes away and sells his stock, the little collection of pearls in his wallet representing the experience of a lifetime. All of them good as he very well knows, and he sells them for what he can get, at a loss it must be. Yesterday's bargainer cuts down his price for this and that pearl, and he has taken up. He never expected to do so well against the old dealer, and he laughs. But the merchant is content too. He has sold all his pearls for what they would fetch, lost money on them, yes, and been laughed at behind his back. But he owns the one pearl of great price. It is his, and he is satisfied. There is no reference to Troy here, or exaltation. But there is the same instant recognition of the opportunity, the same resolve, the same sacrifice, and the same acquisition. Both parables begin with a reference to the Kingdom of God, to that rule and kingship of God, the knowledge of which makes all the difference to a man. A small grammatical difference points us beyond minutiae to the common experience of the two men. Each makes a great discovery, and takes action in a great and urgent resolve, and they are both repaid. If we are to understand the two parables in the sense intended by Jesus, the term God must become alive to us with all the life and power and love that the name implies for him. Then to grasp that this father of Jesus is king, that the God of his thoughts, of his faith, with all the tenderness and power combined that Jesus teaches us to see in him, rules the universe, controls our destiny, and loves us. This is the experience that Jesus compares with that of the treasure finder and the pearl merchant. Worth, he suggests, everything that a man has, and more than all. In passing we may notice that these stories suggest that this experience may be reached in different ways. In the parables of the seed and the leaven, he indicates a natural, quiet, and unconscious growth, a story without crisis, though full of change. With the treasure finder, the discovery is a surprise. How came Jesus so far into the minds of men as to know what a surprise God can be, and how joyful a surprise? The pearl merchant, on the other hand, has lived in the region where he makes his discovery. He is the type that lives and moves in the atmosphere of high and true thought, that knows whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of good report, of help and use. He is no stranger to great and inspiring ideas. And one day, in no strange way, by no accident, but in the ordinary round of life, he comes on something that transcends all that he has been seeking, all that he has known, the one thing worth all. There is little surprise about it, no wild elation, but nothing is allowed to stand in the way of an instant entrance into the great experience. And the great experience is, Jesus says, God. To see God, to know God, that is what Jesus means. To get away from all the fuss and trouble of life into the presence of God, to know he is ours, to see him smile, to realize that he wants us to stay there, that he is a real father with a father's heart, that his love is on the same wonderful scale as every one of his attributes, and in reality far more intelligible than any of them. That is the picture Jesus draws, the sheer incredible love of God, the wonderful change it means for all life. That is his teaching, and he encourages us, in the words of the shorter catechism, to enjoy God forever, as Jesus himself does. Those who learn his secret enjoy God in reality. Wherever they see God with the eyes of Jesus, it is joy and peace. And they realize with deepening emotion that this is also God's gift, as Jesus said. Jesus entirely recast mankind's common ideas of holiness. It is no longer a ceticism, no longer the mystical trance, no longer the fussiness with which the early Christian reproach the Jew, which still haunts all the religions of taboo and merit, and even Christianity in some forms. Where men think of holiness as freedom from sin, the negative conception reacts on life. They begin at the wrong end. Solomon Schechter, the great Jewish scholar, once said of Oxford that they practice vestidiousness there and call it holiness. Unfortunately, Oxford has no monopoly of that type of holiness. But with Jesus, holiness is a much simpler and more natural thing, as natural as the happy, easy life of father and child, and it rests on mutual faith. It is theocentric, positive, active rather than passive, not a state, but a relation and a force. Holiness with him is a living relation with the living God. That is why the first feature in it that strikes us is courage. Be of good cheer, be not afraid. That note rings through the Gospels, and how much it means and has meant in sweet temper and cheerfulness in the very checkered history of the church. His is the great voice of hope in the world. The Lord Jesus Christ, who is our hope, Paul said. Even on the cross, according to one text, Jesus said to the penitent thief, courage, today thou shall be with me in Paradise. We may not know where or what Paradise is, but the rest is intelligible and splendid. Courage, today, thou shalt be with me. Look at the brave heart that the Gospel has made in every age, how venturesome they are, and we find the same venturesomeness in Jesus. For instance, as a German scholar emphasizes, in that episode of the Daughter of Jairus, the messenger comes and says she is dead. Anybody else would stop, but Jesus goes on. That is a great piece of interpretation. Look again at his venturesomeness in trusting the Gospel to the twelve, hand to us, and in facing the cross. It was his knowledge of God, says Professor Peabody, that gave him his tranquility of mind. Jesus, says Dr. Cairns, said that no one ever trusted God enough, and that was the source of all the sin and tragedy. Look at his emphasis again and again on faith, and the language is not that of guesswork. They are the words of the great son of fact who based himself on experience. Have faith in God, be not afraid, only believe. All things are possible to him that believeth. When he criticizes his disciples, it is on the score of their want of faith, O ye of little faith. It has been taken as almost a nickname for them. In the hour of trial and danger, they may trust to the spirit of your father. It is remarkable what value he attaches to faith, even of the slightest. Faith has a grain of mustard seed. It is little, but it is of the seed order, a living thing of the most immense vitality with the promise of growth and usefulness in it. This brings us to the question of prayer. Some of us, of course, do not believe very much in prayer for certain philosophical reasons, which perhaps, as a matter of fact, are not quite as sound as we think, because our definition of prayer is a wrong one, resting on insufficient experience and insufficient reflection. What is prayer? We shall agree that it is the act by which man definitely tries to relate his soul and life to God. What Jesus then teaches on prayer will illuminate what he means by God, and conversely, his conception of God will throw new light upon the whole problem of prayer. It is plain history that Jesus, the great son of fact, believed in prayer, told men to pray and prayed himself. The Gospels and the Epistle to the Hebrews, they emphasis on his practice. Early in the morning, he withdrew to the desert. Late at night, he remained on the hillside for prayer, weary by the crowds that thrombed him. He kept apart and continued in prayer. He prays before he chooses the disciples. He gives thanks to God on the return of the 70 from their missionary journey. Prayer is associated with the confession of Caesarea Philippi, with the Mount of Transfiguration, with Gethsemane. The writer to the Hebrews speaks of his strong crying and tears in prayer. The Gospels even mention what we should call his unanswered prayers. The prayer before the calling of the 12 does not exclude Jesus, and the cup does not pass in spite of the prayer in Gethsemane. It is as if we had something to learn from the unanswered prayers of our Master. Certainly the content of the Gospel for us would have been poorer if they had been answered in our sense of the word. And this fact, taken with his own teaching on prayer, and his own submission to the Father's will, may help us over some of our difficulties. But Jesus had no doubt or fear about prayer being answered. Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Are not ambiguous statements in the least? And they come from one who based himself on experience. It is worth thinking out that the experience of Jesus lies behind his recommendation of prayer. All his clear-eyed knowledge of God speaks in these plain sentences. As he was praying, they ask him, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. It looks as if at times the disciples caught him at prayer, or even overheard him, and felt that here was prayer that took them out beyond all they had ever known of prayer. There were men whom Jesus had taught to pray. Was it they who asked Jesus to teach them over again? There may have been some of them who had learnt the Pharisees' way in prayer, and some who stuck to the simpler way they had been taught in childhood. In each case, the old ways were outgrown. We can put together what he taught to them. In the first place, the thing must be real and individual, the first requirement always with Jesus. The public prayer of ostentation is out of the reckoning. It is nothing. Jesus chooses the quiet and solitary place for his intercourse with his father. The real prayer is to the father in secret, his affair, and it will be earnest beyond what most of us think. We are so familiar with the gospel and parable that we do not take in the strenuousness of Jesus' way in prayer. The importune widow and the friend at midnight are his types of insistent and incessant earnestness. Do you, he asks, pray with anything like their determination to be heard. The knock at the door and the pleading voice continue till the request is granted, in each case by a reluctant giver. But God is not reluctant, Jesus says, though God too will choose his own time to answer. It does not mean the mechanical reiteration of the heathen, not at all. That is not the business of praying, but the steady earnest concentration on the purpose with the deeper and deeper clarification of the thought as we press home into God's presence till we get there. It was so that he prayed, we may be sure. It is not idly that prayer has been called the greatest task of the Christian man. It will not be an easy thing, but a strenuous. One part of the difficulty of prayer is recognized by Jesus over and over again. Men do not really quite believe that they will be answered. They are of little faith. But he tells them with emphasis in one form of words and another, driving it home into them that all things are possible with God, have faith in God. One can imagine how he fixes them with the familiar steady gaze, pauses, and then with the full weight of his personality in his words and meaning them to give to his words, the full value he intends says, have faith in God. To see him and to hear him must have given that faith of itself. If the friend in the house to your knowledge has the loaves, you will knock until you get them. And has God not the gift for you that you need? Is he short of the power to help? Or is it the will to help that is wanting in God? Once more, the vital thing is Jesus' conception of God. Here, as I'll swear, we sacrifice far more than we dream by our lazy way of using his words without making the effort to give them his connotation. To turn again to passages already quoted, will a father give his son a serpent instead of the fish for which he asks, a stone for bread? It is unthinkable. God, will God do less? It all goes back again to the relation of father and child, to the love of God. Only into the thought, Jesus puts a significance which we have not character or love enough to grasp. Your father knoweth that you have need of these things. He says about matters that weigh heaviest with us. Even if we suppose Luke's reference to the father, giving the Holy Spirit to those who ask, to owe something to the editor's hand, it was an editor with some Christian experience. It is clear that Jesus steadily implies that the heavenly father has better things than food and clothing for his children. How much of a human father is available for his children? Then will not the heavenly father, Jesus suggests, give on a larger scale and give himself, in short, be available for the least significant of his own children in all his fullness and all his fatherhood. And even if they do not ask because they do not know their need, will he not answer the prayers that others who do know make for them? Jesus, at all events, made a practice of intercession. I prayed for thee, he said to Peter, and the writers of the New Testament feel that he's only natural for Jesus, risen, ascended, and glorified, to make intercession for us still. We have again to think out what God's fatherhood implies and carries with it for Jesus. The recurrence of the sweet and deep name, Father, unveils the secret of his being. His heart is at rest in God. Rest in God is the very note of all his being, of all his teaching, the key note of all prayer in his thoughts. Our Father, who art in heaven, our prayers are to begin. And perhaps they are not to go on till we realize what we are saying in that great form of speech. It is certain as these words grow for us into the full stature of their meaning for Jesus, we shall understand in a more intimate way what the whole gospel is in reality. The writer to the Hebrews has here an interesting suggestion for us. Using the symbolism of the Hebrew religion and its tabernacle, he compares Jesus to the high priest. But Jesus, he says, does not enter into the holiest alone. Having therefore, brethren, bold as to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which he hath consecrated for us, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith. In the previous chapter, he discards the symbol and speaks things. Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us. There he touches what has been the faith of the church throughout, that in Christ we reach the presence of God. Without saying so much in many words, Jesus implies this in all his attitude to prayer. God is there and God loves you and loves to have you speak with him. No one has ever believed this very much outside the radius of Christ's person and influence. It is, when we give the words full weight, an essentially Christian faith, and it depends on our relation to Jesus Christ. Jesus was quite explicit with his friends in telling them they did not know what to ask, but he showed them himself what they should ask. Seek he first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, he says, and tells us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins and for deliverance from evil. Pray to thy kingdom come. Pray the Lord of the harvest that he will send forth laborers into his harvest. This is perhaps the only place where he asked the disciples to pray for his great work. Identification with God's purposes, identification with the individual needs of those we love and those we ought to love, identification with the world's sin and misery. These seem to be his cannons of prayer for us, as for himself. For both in what he teaches others and in what he does himself, he makes it a definite prerequisite of all prayer that we say, thy will be done. Prayer is essentially dedication, deeper and fuller as we use it more and come more into the presence of God. Obedience goes with it. We must cease to pray or cease to disobey, one or the other. If we are half surrendered, we are not very bright about our prayers because we do not quite believe that God will really look after the things about which we are anxious. We must indeed go back to what Jesus said about God. We had better even leave off praying for a moment till we see what he says and then begin again with a clearer mind. Ask and ye shall receive, he says. And if we have no obedience or love or faith or any of the great things that make prayer possible, he suggests that we can ask for them and have them. The gospel gives us an illustration in the man who prayed, Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief. But it is plain we have to understand that we are asking for great things and it is to them rather than to the obvious little things that Jesus directs our thoughts. Not away from the little things, for if God is a real father, he will wish to have his children talk them over with him. Little things please, little minds. Yes, and great minds where the little minds adhere to them, but not little things all the time. There is a variant to the saying about seeking first the kingdom of heaven, which Clement of Alexandria preserves. Perhaps it is a mere slip, but God, it has been said, can use misquitations and Clement's quotation or misquitation certainly represents the thought of Jesus and it may give us a hint for our own practice. Ask, Seethi, the great things and the little things will be added unto you. The object of Jesus was to induce men to base all life on God. Short-range thinking like the rich fools may lead to our forgetting God, but Jesus incessantly lays the emphasis on the thought out life and that, in the long run, means a new reckoning with God. That is what Jesus urges, that we should think life out, that we should come face to face with God and see him for what he is and accept him. He means us to live a life utterly and absolutely based on God, life on God's lines of peacemaking and ministry. The denial of self, a complete forgetfulness of self in surrender to God, obedience to God, faith in God and the acceptance of the sunshine of God's fatherhood. He means us to go about things in God's way, forgiving our enemies, cherishing kind thoughts about those who hate us or despise us or use us badly, praying for them. This takes us right back into the common world where we have to live in any case and it is there that he means us to live with God. Not in trance, but at work, in the family, in business, shop and street, doing all the little things and all the great things that God wants us to do and glad to do them just because we are his children and he is our father. Above all, he would have us think like God and to reach into this habit of thinking like God, we have to live in the atmosphere of Jesus with him. All this new life, he made possible for us by being what he was, once again a challenge to re-explore Jesus. The way to faith in God and to love for man, said Dr. Keynes in Mohonk, is, as of old, to come nearer to the living Jesus. End of chapter five. Chapter six of The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter six, Jesus and Man. When, on his last journey, Jesus came in sight of Jerusalem, Luke tells us that he wept. There is an obvious explanation of this in the extreme tension under which he was living. Everything turned upon the next few days and everything would be decided at Jerusalem. But while he must have felt this, it cannot have been the cause of his weeping. Nor should we look for it altogether in the appeal which a great city makes to emotion. Dole would he be of soul who could pass by, a sight so touching in its majesty. Yet it was not the architecture that so deeply moved Jesus. The temple, which was full in view, was comparatively new and foreign. There is little suggestion in the gospels that art meant anything to him. Perhaps it meant little to the writers. As for the temple, he found it a den of thieves and he prophesied that it would be demolished and all of its splendid buildings, its goodly stones and votive offerings would so much impress his disciples. Not one stone would be left upon another stone. But the traditions of Jerusalem awakened thoughts in him of the story of his people. Thoughts with a tragic color. Jerusalem was the place where prophets were killed. The scene and center at once of Israel's deepest emotions, highest hopes and most awful failures. Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! He had said in sadness as he thought of Israel's holy city, which killed the prophets and stonest them that it sent unto thee. How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings and ye would not. And now he is in sight of Jerusalem. The city and the temple suddenly meet his view as he reaches the height and he is deeply moved. Any reflective mind might well have been stirred by the thought of the masses of men gathered there. Nothing is so futile as an arithmetical numbering of people, for after a certain point figures paralyze the imagination and after that they tell the mind little or nothing. But here was actually assembled the Jewish people coming in swarms from all over the world for the feast. Here was Judaism at its most pious. Here was the pilgrim center with all it meant of aspiration and blindness, of simple folly and gross sin. The sight of the city, the doomed city as he foresaw, the thought of his people, their zeal for God and their alienation from God. It all comes over him at once. And with a sudden rush of feeling he apostrophizes Jerusalem. If thou hath known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace, but now they are hid from thine eyes. Thou knewest not the time of thy visitation. It is quite plain from the gospels that crowds had always an appeal for Jesus. At times he avoided them, but when they came about him, they claimed him and possessed him. Over and over again we read of his pity for them. He saw a great multitude and was moved with compassion toward them. Of his thought for their weariness and hunger, his reflection that they might faint by the way on their long homer journeys and his solicitude about their food. Whatever modern criticism makes of the story of his feeding multitudes, it remains that he was markedly sensitive to the idea of hunger. Jairus is reminded that his little girl will be the better for food. The richer urged to make feasts for the poor, the maimed and the blind. The owner of the vineyard in the parable pays a day's wage for an hour's work when an hour was all the chance that the unemployed labourer could find. No sanctity could condone for the devouring of widow's houses. The great hungry multitudes haunt his mind. The story of the rich young ruler shows this. He was a man of birth and education whose face and whose speech told of a good heart and conscience, a man of charm, of the impulsive type that appealed to Jesus. Jesus looked on him, we read. The words recall Plato's picture of Socrates looking at the jailer, how he looked up at him in his peculiar way, like a bull. The old man's prominent eyes were fixed on the fellow, glaring through the brows above them, and Socrates' friends saw them and remembered them when they thought of the scene. As Jesus' eyes rested steadily on this young man, the disciples saw in them an expression they knew. Jesus, looking on him, loved him. Their talk was of eternal life, and no doubt to his surprise, Jesus asked the youth if he had kept the commandments. How did he stand as regarded murder, theft, adultery? The steady gaze followed the youth's impetuous answer and then came the recommendation to sell all that he had and give to the poor. And come, follow me. At this, we read in a fragment of the Gospel according to the Hebrews, preserved by origin, the rich man began to scratch his head and it did not please him. And the Lord said to him, how sayeth thou the law I have kept in the prophets? For it is written in the law, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, and behold, many who are thy brethren, sons of Abraham, are clad in filth and dying of hunger, and thy house is full of many good things, and nothing at all goes out from it to them. And he turned and said to Simon, his disciple, who was sitting beside him, Simon, son of John, it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. We need not altogether reject this variant of the story, but it was more than the physical needs of the multitude that appealed to Jesus. Man's unhappiness, as I can true, says Teufelstrock in Sartor Asartos, comes of his greatness. It is because there is an infinite in him, which with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the finite. Will the whole finance ministers and upholsters and confectioners of modern Europe undertake in joint stock company to make one's shoe black happy? We read in a passage, which it is true is largely symbolic, that one of Jesus' quotations from the Old Testament was that man shall not live by bread alone. Hunger is a real thing, horribly real, but it is comparatively easy to deal with, and man has deeper needs. The shoe black, according to Teufelstrock, wants God's infinite universe altogether to himself. In the simpler words of Jesus, he is never happy till he says, I will arise and go to my father. This craving for the father, the men of Jesus' day tried to fill with the law, and when the law failed to satisfy it, they had nothing further to suggest, except their fixed idea that God heareth not sinners. They despaired of the great masses and left them alone. They did not realize, as Jesus did, that the father also craves for his children. When Jesus saw the simpler folk thus forsaken, the picture rose in his mind of sheep, worried by dogs or wolves till they fell, worn out, sheep without a shepherd. Everyone remembers the shepherd of the parable who sought the one lost sheep until he found it, and how he brought it home on his shoulders. But there is another parable, we might almost say, of 99 lost sheep, a parable not developed but implied in the passage of Matthew, and it is as significant as the other, for our good shepherd has to ask his friends to help him in this case. The appeal that lay in the sheer misery and helplessness of masses and men was one of the foundations of the Christian Church. The good shepherd, by the way, is a phrase from the Fourth Gospel, but we think most often of the good shepherd as carrying the sheep, and that comes from Luke, and is in all likelihood nearer the parable of Jesus. It is worth noticing that Jesus stands alone in refusing to despair of the greater part of mankind. Contempt was in his eyes the unpardonable sin. How swift and decisive is his anger with those who make others stumble. The parable of the lost sheep reveals what he held to be God's feeling for the hopeless man. And, as we have seen, his constant aim is to lead men to think like God. The lost soul matters to God. He sums up his own work in the world in much the same language as he uses about the shepherd in the parable. The son of man is come to seek and save that which is lost. The taunt that he was the friend of publicans and sinners really described what he was and wished to be. God was their heavenly father. The sight then of the masses of his countrymen, like worried sheep, worn, scattered, lost and hopeless, waked in him no shade of doubt. On the contrary, it was further proof to him of the soundness of his message. Changing his simile, he told his disciples that the harvest was great, but the laborers few, and he asked them to pray the Lord of the harvest to thrust forth laborers into his harvest. The very name Lord of the Harvest implies faith in God's competence and understanding. From the first, he seems to have held up for his followers that this wide service was to be their work. Come ye after me, he said, and I will make you to become fishers of men. Men who should really catch men, like all for whom the world has had a meaning, Jesus, as we have seen, accepted the necessary conditions of man's life. Human misery and need were widespread, but God's fatherhood was of compass fully as wide, and Jesus relied upon it. Your heavenly father knows, he said, and with God all things are possible. The very miseries of the oppressed and hopeless people added grounds to his confidence. People who had touched bottom in sounding the human spirit's capacity for misery were, for him, the ripe harvest, only needing to be gathered. He understood them, and he knew that he had the healing for all their troubles. With full assurance of the truth of his words, he cried, come unto me, all ye that labour, and a heavy laden, and I will give you rest. He spoke of a rest which careless familiarity obscures for us. What understanding and sympathy he shows when he adds, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Misery, poverty, and hunger he had found taught men to see realities. The hungry, at least, were not likely to mistake a stone for bread. They had a ready test for it on which they could rely. Poverty threw open the road to the kingdom of God, the clearing away of all temporary satisfactions of all that cloaked the soul's deepest needs, prepared men for real relations with the greatest reality, with God. So that Jesus boldly said, blessed are ye poor, blessed are ye that hunger now, blessed are ye that weep now, but he had no idea that they were always to weep. If it was his to care for men's hunger, it was not likely that he would have no comfort for their tears. You shall find rest unto your souls. They shall be comforted. It was, in large part, upon the happiness which he was going to bring to the poor, that Jesus based his claim to be heard. There is little reasonable ground for doubt that he healed diseases. Of course, we cannot definitely pronounce upon any individual case reported. The diagnosis might be too hasty and the trouble other than was supposed, but it is well known that such healings do occur, and that they occurred in Jesus' ministry, we can well believe. So when he was challenged as to his credentials, he pointed to misery relieved, and the culmination of everything, the crowning feature of his work, he found in his good news for the poor. The phrase he borrowed from Isaiah, but he made it his own. The splendid promises in Isaiah for the poor, the broken hearted, captives, blind and bruised, appealed to him. Time has laid its hand upon his word and dulled its freshness. Gospel and evangelical are no longer words of sheer happiness like Jesus' good news. They are technical terms used in handbooks and in controversy. While for Jesus, the good news for the poor was a new word of delight and inspiration. The center in all the thoughts of Jesus, as we have to remind ourselves again and again, is God. If, as Dr. D. S. Cairns puts it, Jesus Christ is the great believer in man, it is, if we are reading him a right at all, because God believes in man. Let us remind ourselves often of that. Thou hast made us for thyself, said Augustine, in the famous sentence of which we are apt to emphasize the latter half, and our heart knows no rest till it rests in thee. Jesus would have us emphasize the former clause as well and believe it. The keynote of his whole story is God's love. The father is a real father, strange that one should have to write the small f to get the meaning. All that Jesus has taught us of God we must bring to bear on man, for it is hard to believe in man. What is man that thou should magnify him and that thou should set thine heart upon him, quotes the author of Job in a great ironical passage. The elements and the stars come over us as they came over George Fox and the Vale of Beaver. What is man? Can one out of 1500 million of human beings living on the one planet matter to God when there are so many planets and stars and there have been so many generations? Can he matter? It all depends on how we conceive of God. Here it is essential to give all the meaning to the term God that Jesus gave to it. To believe in God has Jesus believed in God if we were to understand the fullness of Jesus's good news. It all depends on God, on whether Jesus was right about God and after all, on Jesus himself. A thing of price is man, wrote Sinasius about 410 BC, because for him Christ died. The two things go together, Jesus's death and Jesus's theocentric thought of man. It is a familiar criticism of idealists and other young hearts that it is easy to idealize what one does not know. Omnignotum pro magnifico is the old epigram of Tacitus. It is not every believer in man, nor every friend of man who knows men as Jesus did. Like Burns and Carlisle and others who have interpreted man to us to some purpose, he grew up in the home of laboring people. He was a working man himself, a carpenter. He must have learned his carpentry exactly as everybody learns it by hammering his fingers instead of the nail, sawing his own skin instead of the wood and not doing it again. He knew what it was to have an aching back and sweat on the face, how hard money is to earn and how quickly it goes. He makes it clear that money is a temptation to men and a great danger, but he never joined the moralists and cranks in denouncing it. He always talks sense if the expression is not too lowly to apply to him. He sees what can be done with money, what a tool it can be in a wise man's hands, how he can make friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness. For example, by giving unexpectedly generous wages to men who missed their chances, by feeding Lazarus at the gate and perhaps by having his sores properly attended to. That he understood how pitifully the loss of a coin may affect the household of working people, one of his most beautiful parables bears witness. With work he had no quarrel. He draws many of his parables from Labour and he implies throughout that it is the natural and right thing for man. To be holy in his sense, a man need not leave his work. Clement of Alexandria in his famous saying about the plowman continuing to plow and knowing God as he plows and the seafaring man sticking to his ship and calling on the heavenly pilot as he sails is in the vein of Jesus. There were those whom he called to leave all to distribute their wealth and to follow him, but he chose them. It was not his one command for all men, but as we shall shortly see, it is implied by his judgments of men that he believed in work and he liked men who put their backs into it, their backs, eyes, and their brains too. Pain, the constant problem of man and perhaps more of woman, of unmarried woman more especially, he never discussed as modern people discuss it. He never made light of pain any more than of poverty. He understood physical as well as moral distress, nor did he like some of his contemporaries and some modern people, exaggerate the place of pain in human experience. He shared pain, he sympathized with suffering and his understanding of pain and above all his choice of pain taught men to reconsider it and to understand it and altered the attitude of the world towards it. His tenderness for the suffering of others taught mankind a new sympathy and the note of Chomeon, the hospital for the sick, was one of the first Christian institutions to rise when persecution stopped and Christians could build. And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he heals them says Matthew, in a memorable phrase. I have heard it suggested that it was irregular for them to come into the temple courts, but they gravitated naturally to Jesus. The mystic is never quite at leisure for other people's feelings and sufferings. He is essentially an individualist. He must have his own intercourse with God and other people's affairs are apt to be an interruption, an impertinence. I have not been thinking of the community, I have been thinking of Christ, said a Bengali to me, who was wavering between the Brahma Samaj and Christianity. The blessed Angela of Foligno was rather glad to be relieved of her husband and children who died and left her leisure to enjoy the love of God. All this is quite unlike the real spirit of the historical Jesus. Himself took our infirmities and bear our sickness was a phrase of Isaiah that came instinctively to the minds of his followers. Perhaps when we begin to understand what is meant by the incarnation, we may find that omnipotence has a great deal more to do than we have supposed with natural sympathy and the genius for entering into the sorrows and sufferings of other people. One side of the work of Jesus must never be forgotten. His attitude to woman has altered her position in the world. No one could study society in classical antiquity or in non-Christian lands with any intimacy and not realize this. Widowhood in Hinduism, marriage among Muslims, they are proverbs for the misery of women. Even the Jew still prays, let it art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who has not made me a woman. The Jewish woman has to be grateful to God because he hath made me according to his will. A thanksgiving with a different note as the modern Jew S, Amy Levy, emphasized in her brilliant novel where her heroine, very like herself, corrected her prayer book to make it more explicit. Curse it art thou, O Lord our God, who has made me a woman. Paul must have known these Jewish prayers for he emphasized that in Christ there is neither male nor female. Paul had his views. The familiar old ways of Tarsus inspired them as to women's dress and deportment, especially the veil, but he struck the real Christian note here and laid stress on the fact of what Jesus had done and is doing for women. There is no reference made by Jesus to a woman that is not respectful and sympathetic. He never warns men against women. Even the most degraded women find in him an amazing sympathy, for he has the secret of being pure and kind at the same time. His purity has not to be protected. It is itself a purifying force. He draws of his most delightful parables from women's work as we have seen. It is recorded how when he spoke of the coming disaster of Jerusalem, he paused to pity poor pregnant women and mothers with little babies in those bad times. Critics have remarked on the place of women in Luke's Gospel and some have played with fancies as to the feminine sources when she drew his knowledge. Did the women who ministered to Jesus, Joanna, for instance, the wife of a chooser, tell him these illuminative stories of the master? In any case, Jesus's new attitude to women is in the record and it has so reshaped the thought of mankind and made it so hard to imagine anything else that we do not readily grasp what a revolution he made. Here, as always, by referring men's thoughts back to the standard of God's thoughts and supporting what he taught by what he was. Mark has given us one of our most familiar pictures of Jesus sitting with a little child in his knee and in the crook of his arm. The Greek participle which gives this in Mark is worth remembering. It is vivid enough. Mothers brought their children to him that he should put his hands on them and pray. Matthew says that children took part in the triumphal entry and Jesus, clear as he was how little the hosannas of the grown people meant, seems to have enjoyed the children's part in the strange scene. Classical literature and Christian literature of those ages offer no parallel to his interest in children. The beautiful words, suffer little children to come unto me, are his and they are characteristic of him and he speaks of God's interest in children. Once more, a reference of everything to God to get it in its true perspective. How Jesus likes children for their simplicity, their intuition, their teachableness we say. But was it not perhaps for far simpler and more natural reasons just because they were children and little and delightful? We forget his little brothers and sisters or we eliminate them for theological purposes. Jesus lays quite an unexpected emphasis on sheer tenderness, on kindness to neighbor and stranger, the instinctive humanity that helps men if it be only by the swift offer of a cup of cold water. The Good Samaritan came as a surprise to some of his hearers. It is our religion, said a Hindu to a missionary to explain why he and other Hindus did not help to rescue a fainting man off the railway tracks, nor even offer water to restore him when the missionary had haught him onto the platform when aided. Not so the religion of Jesus, bury one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, wrote Paul. Pursue hospitality and as we shall see in a later chapter, the last judgment itself turns on whether a man has kindly instincts or not. Matthew quotes to describe Jesus' own tenderness, the impressive phrase of Isaiah, a bruised reed shall he not break. If it is urged that such things are natural to man, do not even the publicans do the same, Jesus carries the matter a long way further. Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. The man who would use such compulsion would be the alien soldier, the hiling of Herod or of Rome, and who would wish to cart him in his goods even one mile? Go two miles, says Jesus. Or if the Syriac translation preserves the right reading, go two extra. Why? Well, the soldier is a man after all and by such unsolicited kindness you may make a friend even of a government official, not always an easy thing to do, at any rate you can help him. God helps him. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father, which is in heaven, is perfect. Ordinary kindness and tenderness could hardly be urged beyond that point, and yet Jesus goes further still. He would have us pray for those that despitefully use us and in no phariseic way, but with the same instinctive love and friendliness that he always used himself. Father forgive them, for they know not what they do. There are religions which inculcate the tolerance of wrong aiming at equanimity of mind or acquisition of merit. But Jesus implies on the contrary that in all this also the Christian denies himself, does not seek even in this way to save his own soul, but forgets all about it in the service of others, though he finds by and by with the start that he has saved it far more effectively than he could have expected. The emphasis falls on our duty of kindness and tenderness to all men and women, because we and they are alike God's children. With his emphasis on tenderness, we make Rupi's teaching on forgiveness. He makes the forgiving spirit an antecedent of prayer. When he stand praying, forgive, if he have ought against any, that your father also, which is in heaven, may forgive you your trespasses. If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and their remembrance thy brother hath ought against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar and go thy way. First be reconciled to thy brother and then come and offer thy gift. The parable of the king and his debtor, painfully true to human nature, brings out the whole matter of our forgiveness of one another into the light. We are shown it from God's outlook. The teaching, as ever, is theocentric. To Peter, Jesus says that a man should be prepared to forgive his brother to 70 times seven if anybody can keep count so far. He sees how quarrels into life and alienate a man from God. Hence comes the famous saying, resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. He would have men even avoid criticism of one another. Epigrams are seductive and there is a fascination in the dissection of character. But there is always a danger that a clever characterisation, a witty label, may conclude the matter, that a possible friendship may be lost through the very ingenuity with which the man has been labelled, who might have been a friend. It is not a small matter in Jesus' eyes. He puts his view very strongly and, as we must always remember, he bases himself on fact. We may lose a great deal more than we think by letting our labels stand between us and his words, by our habit of calling the paradoxes and letting them go at that. It is worthwhile to look at the type of character that he admires. Modern painters have often pictured Jesus as something of a dreamer, a long-haired, sleepy, abstract kind of person. What a contrast we find in the energy of the real Jesus, in the straight and powerful language which he uses to men, in the sweep and range of his mind, in the profundity of his insight, the drive and compulsiveness of his thinking, in the venturesome of his actions. How many of the parables turn on energy? The real trouble with men, he seems to say, is again and again sheer slackness. They will not put their mind to the thing before them, whether it be thought or action. Thus, for instance, the parable of the talent turned on energetic thinking and decisive action. These are the things that Jesus admires, in the widow who will have justice, in the virgin who thought ahead and brought extra oil, in the vigorous man who found the treasure and made sure of it, in the friend at midnight who hammered, hammered, hammered till he got his loaves, in the violent who take the kingdom of heaven by force, in the man who will hack off his hand to enter into life, even the bad steward he commends because he definitely put his mind on his situation. As we shall see later on, indecision is one of the things that in his judgment will keep a man outside the kingdom of God that will make him unfit for it. The matter deserves more study than we commonly give it. You must have a righteousness, he says, which exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees, and the Pharisees were professionals in righteousness. His tests of discipleship illumined the ideal of his character, theocentric thinking, negation of self, the thought out life. He will have his disciples count the cost, reckon their forces, calculate quietly the risks before them, right up to the cross. Like John Bunyan in Bedford Shale, where he thought things out to the Pury and then to the Gallows. So that if it came to the Gallows, he should be ready, as he says, to leap off the ladder blindfold into eternity. That is the energy of mind that Jesus asks of men, that he admires in men. On the other side, he is always against the life of drift, the half thought out life. There they were, he says, in the days of Noah, eating and drinking, marrying, dreaming, and the floods came and destroyed them. So ran the old familiar story and says Jesus, it is always true, men will drift and dream forever, heedless of fact, heedless of God, and then ruin, life gone, the soul lost, the Son of Man come and you yourselves thrust out. It is quite striking with what a variety of impressive pictures Jesus drives home his lesson. There is the person who everlastingly says and does not do, who promises to work and does not work, who receives a new idea with enthusiasm but has not depth enough of nature for it to root itself, who builds on sand that Mr. anything of Bunyan's allegory, nor these alone, for Jesus is as plain on the unpunctual, the easygoing, the sort that compromises, that tries to serve God and mammon, all the practical half and half people that take their bills quickly and write 50, that offer God and man about half what they owe them of thought and character and action, and bid others do the same and count themselves men of the world for their acuteness. And to do them justice, Jesus commends them, they have taken the exact measure of things in their generation, their mistake lies in their equation of the fugitive and the eternal, and it is the final and fatal mistake according to Jesus and a very common one, forgetfulness of God, in fact, a mistake that comes from not thinking things out. Jesus will have men think everything out to the very end. He never says, come unto me, all ye who are too lazy to think for yourselves. It is energy of mind that he calls for, either with me or against me. He does not recognize neutrals in his war. He that is not against us is for us. He that is not with me is against me. Where does a man's will point him? That is a question. Out of the abundance, the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaketh. What is it that a man wills, purity or impurity? It is the inner energy that makes a man. What he says and does is an overflow from what is within. An overflow, it is true, with a reaction. It is what a man chooses and what he wills that Jesus always emphasizes. God knoweth your hearts. Very well then, does a man choose God? That is the vital issue. Does he choose God without reserve? Added a way that God, knowing his heart, will call a whole hearted choice. Senator Gustin, in a very interesting passage, remarks upon the fact that when the mind commands the body, obedience is instantaneous, but that when it commands itself, it meets with resistance. The mind commands that the mind shall will. It is one of the same mind, and it does not obey. He finds the reason. The mind does not absolutely and entirely will the thing, and so it does not absolutely and entirely command it. There is nothing strange after all in all this, he says, partly to will, partly not to will, but it is a weakness of the mind that it does not arise in its entirety, uplifted by truth, because it is born down by habit. Thus there are two wills, because one of them is not complete. The same thought is to be traced in the teaching of Jesus. It is implied in what he says about prayer. There is a want of faith, a half-heartedness about men's prayers. They pray, as Augustin says he himself did, give me chastity and continence, but not now. That is not what Jesus means by prayer, the utterance of the half-will. Nor is it this sort of surrender to God that Jesus calls for. No, the question is, how thoroughly is a man going to put himself into God's hands? Does he mean to be God's up to the cross and beyond? Does he enlist absolutely on God's terms without a bargain with God, prepared to accept God's will, whatever it is, whether it squares with his liking or not? Are his own desires finally out of the reckoning? Does he, in fact, deny, negate himself? Jesus calls for disciples with questions so penetrating on his lips. What a demand to make of men. What faith, too, in men it shows that he could ask all this with no hint of diminished seriousness. Jesus is the great believer in men, as we saw in his choice of the 12. To that group of disciples, he trusts the supreme task men ever had assigned to them. Not many wise, not many mighty poor found at Corinth, and it has always been so. Is it not still the gist of the gospel that Jesus believes in the writer and the reader of these lines, trusts them with the propagation of God's kingdom? Incredible commission. Jesus was always at leisure for individuals. This was the natural outcome of his faith in men. What else is the meaning of his readiness to spend himself in giving the utmost spiritual truth? No easy task as experience shows us, even to a solitary listener. If we accept what he tells us of God, we can believe that the individual is worth all that Jesus did and does for him, but hardly otherwise. His gift of discovering interest in uninteresting people, says Philips Brooks, was an intellectual habit that he gave to his disciples. We think too much like men. He would have us think like God, and think better of odd units and items of humanity than statesmen and statisticians are apt to do. It has been pointed out lately how fierce he is about the man who puts a stumbling block in the way of even a little one. Better for him that a millstone were hanged round his neck and he were cast into the sea. No mere phrase for when he draws a picture, he sees it. He sees this scene add better so for him too, is his comment. There was, as we may remember, a view current in antiquity that when a man was drowned, his soul perished with his body, though I do not know if the Jews held with this opinion. It is not likely that Jesus did. What is God's mind, God's conduct towards those people who men think they can afford to despise? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect. And to whom did he say this? To the most ordinary people, to Peter and James and John, for all sorts of people he held at this impossible ideal of a perfection, like God's. What a faith in man, it implies. All things are possible to him that believes. Why should not you believe, he says? His faith in the soul's possibilities is boundless and in mark contrast with what men think of themselves. A man, for instance, will say that he has done his best, but nine times out of 10, it means mere fatigue. He's not going to trouble to do any more. How can a man know that he has done his best? The Gospel of Jesus comes with its message of the grace of God and the power of God to people who are stupid and middle-aged, who are absolutely settled in life, who are conscious of their limitations, who know they are living in a rut and propose to stick to it for the remainder of their days. And Jesus tells them in effect that he means to give them a new life altogether, that he means to have from them service, perfectly incredible to them. No man, he suggests, need be so inured to the stupidity of middle-age, but there may be a miraculous change in him. A great many people need reconversion at 40, however Christian they have been before. This belief of his in the individual man and in the worth of the individual is the very charger of democracy. The original writings of William Tyndale, who first translated the New Testament from Greek into English, contain the essential ideas of democracy already in 1526, the outcome of familiar study of the Gospel. Jesus himself said of Herod, go and tell that, Fox. Herod was a king, but he was not above criticism and Christians have not failed at times to make the criticism of the great that truth requires. Jesus had no illusions about men. He sees the weak spots. He recognizes the whited sepulchre. He's astonished at the unbelief of men and women. He does not understand why they cannot think, but he notes how they see and yet do not see, here and do not understand. He is impressed by their falsity, even in religion. He knows perfectly well the evil of which the human heart is capable. A man who steadily looks towards being crucified by the people he is trying to help is hardly one of the absent-minded enthusiasts, miscalled idealists. There never was, we feel, one who so thoroughly looked through his friends, who loved them so much and yet without a shade of illusion. This brings us to the subject of the next chapter. In the meantime, let us recall what he makes of the wasted life. In thinking of the case, said Sealy, they had forgotten the woman. A common occurrence with those who deal in cases. It was once severely said of the head of a college that if he would not leave off caring for his student's souls and care for them, he would do better. Jesus does not forget the man in caring for his soul. He likes him. He is the friend of publicans and sinners. He eats and drinks with them. Let us remember again that these were taunts and were meant to sting. They were not conventional phrases. See how he can enter into the life of a poor creature. There is the wretched little publican Zacchaeus, a squalid little figure of a man whom people despised. He was used to contempt. It was the portion of the tax collector enlisted in Roman service against his own people. Jesus comes and sees him up in the tree. He instantly realizes what is happening and invites himself to the house of Zacchaeus as a guest. Something passes between them without spoken word. The little man slides down the tree, not a proceeding that makes for dignity. And then with all his inches, he stands up before the whole town that knew him so well in a new moral grandeur that adds cubits to his stature. Half my goods, he says, I will give to the poor. If I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, he shall have it back fourfold. That man belonged to the despised classes. Jesus came into his life. The man became a new man, a pioneer of Christian generosity. Again, there is the woman with the alabaster box, the mere possession of which stamped her for what she was. It was simply a case of the wasted life. I have long wondered if she meant to give him only some of the ointment. A little of it would have been a great gift, but perhaps the lid of the box jammed and she realized in a moment that it was to be all or nothing. She drew off her sandal and smashed the box to pieces. However she broke it and whatever her reasons, Mark's words mean that it was thoroughly and finally shivered. Something had happened which made this woman the pioneer of the Christian habit of giving all for Jesus. The disciples said they had done so, but they were looking for thrones in exchange. She was not. The thief on the cross himself becomes a pioneer for mankind in the Christian way of prayer. Jesus, remember me, he says. How is it that Jesus comes into the wasted life and makes it new? One loving heart sets another on fire. With all his wide outlook on mankind, his great purpose to capture all men, Jesus is remarkable for his mission to devise machinery or organization for the accomplishment of his ends. The tears are left to grow with the wheat as if Jesus trusted the wheat a good deal more than we do. Alive as he is to the evil in human nature, he never tries to scare men from it and he seems to have been very little afraid of it. He believed in the power of good because after all God is Lord of the harvest. He invents no special methods. A loving heart will hit the method needed in the particular case. The Holy Spirit will teach this as well as other things. How far he even organized his church or left it to organize itself if it's so wished, students may discuss. Would he have trusted even the best organized church as such? Does not what we mean by the incarnation imply putting everything in the long run on the individual quickened into new life by a new relationship with God and taught a new love of men by Jesus himself. The heart of friendship and the heart of the incarnation are in essence the same thing. Giving oneself in frankness and love to him who will accept and by them winning him who refuses. Has not this been the secret of the spread of the gospel? The simplicity of the whole thing and the power of it grow upon us as we study them. But after all, as Tertullian has said, simplicity and power are the constant marks of God's work. Simplicity and method, power in effect. End of chapter six.