The teaching of our Lord

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BS 2415 . P84 1908

Pullan, Leighton, 1865-1940

The teaching of our Lord

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The Rev. LEIGHTON PULLAN, M.A.,
St. John’s College, and Lecturer in Theology
at St. John’s and Oriel Colleges, Oxford.

The Hebrew Prophets. The Rev. R. L. Ottley, D.D., Canon
of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology
in the University of Oxford.

Outlines of Old Testament Theology. The Rev. C. F. Burney,
D.Litt. , Lecturer in Hebrew at St. John’s College, Oxford.
The Text of the New Testament. The Rev. K. Lake, D.D.,
Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christian
Literature in the University of Leyden.

Early Christian Doctrine.

The Rev. Leighton Pullan, M.A.

An Elementary History of the Church in Great Britain.

TheVen.W. H. Hutton, B.D., Archdeacon of Northampton
and Canon of Peterborough.

The Reformation in Great Britain.

H. O. Wakeman, M.A., late Fellow of All Souls College,
Oxford, and the Rev. Leighton Pullan, M.A.

The History of the Book of Common Prayer.

The Rev. J. H. Maude, M.A. , Examining Chaplain to the
Bishop of St. Albans.

The Articles of the Church of England.

Tne Rev. B. J. Kidd, D. D. , Vicar of St. Paul’s, Oxford.
In2Vols. Vol. I. — History and Explanation of Articles i.-viii.
Vol. II. — Explanation of Articles ix.-xxxix.

May also be had in one vol. is. net.

The Continental Reformation. The Rev. B. J. Kidd, D.D.

A Manual for Confirmation. The Rev. T. Field, D.D.,
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A History of the Church to 325. The Rev. H. N. Bate,
M. A., Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of London.

The Church, its Ministry and Authority.

The Rev. Darwell Stone, D.D. , Principal of Pusey House,
Oxford.

A History of the American Church to the close of the Nine¬
teenth Century. The Right Rev. Leighton Coleman,
S.T.D., LL.D., Late Bishop of Delaware, U.S.A.

London : Rivingtons, 34 King Street, Covent Garden.
ii. 1912.

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Oxford Church Text Books — Continued.

The Future State. The Rev. S. C. Gayford, M.A.,

Vice- Principal of Bishops’ College, Cheshunt.

Evidences of Christianity. The Rev. L. Ragg, M.A.,
Prebendary and Vice-Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral.
Scottish Church History. The Right Rev. Anthony Mitchell,
Bishop of Aberdeen.

The Teaching- of our Lord.

The Rev. Leighton Pullan, M.A.

A Short Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament.
The Rev. G. H. Box, M.A. , Rector of Sutton, Beds. ; formerly
Hebrew Master at Merchant Taylors’ School.

The Apostles’ Creed. The Rev. A. E. Burn, D.D.,

Vicar of Halifax ; Prebendary of Lichfield,
and Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Lichfield.

The Nicene Creed. The Rev. A. E. Burn, D.D.

The Athanasian Creed. The Rev. A. E. Burn, D.D.

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL
Brief Histories of Her Continuous Life

Edited by The Ven. W. H. HUTTON, B.D.,
Archdeacon of Northampton and Canon of Peterborough.
The Church of the Apostles.

The Rev. Lonsdale Ragg, M.A, 4s. 6d. net.

The Church of the Fathers. 98-461.

The Rev. Leighton Pullan, M.A. 5s. net.

The Church and the Barbarians. 461-1003.

The Editor. 3s. 6d. net.

The Church and the Empire. 1003-1304.

D. J. Medley, M.A. , Professor of History in the University
of Glasgow. 4s. 6d. net.

The Age of Schism. 1304-1503.

Herbert Bruce, M.A. , Professor of History in the Univer¬
sity College, Cardiff. 3s. 6d. net.

The Reformation. 1503-1648.

The Rev. J. P. Whitney, B.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical
History at King’s College, London. 5s. net.

The Age of Revolution. 1648-1815.

The Editor. 4s. 6d. net.

The Church of Modern Days. 1815-1900.

The Rev. Leighton Pullan, M.A.

London : Rivingtons, 34 King Street, Covent Garden.

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The Teaching of Our Lord

BY

THE REV. LEIGHTON PULLAN, M.A.

FELLOW AND LECTURER OF ST. JOHN BAPTIST COLLEGE
AND LECTURER IN THEOLOGY AT ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD

RIVINGTONS

34 KING STREET , CO VENT GARTEN
LONDON
1908

PREFACE

This little book is an attempt to provide intelli¬
gent readers with an account of our Lord’s own
teaching. It is based on a thoroughly scientific
study of the Gospels in the light of modern
research. The author has tried to avoid all desire
to attain apparent simplicity at the expense of
truth, or to represent ingenious conjecture as
genuine criticism. The Gospels are repeatedly
quoted throughout the book in a manner which is
intended to help those who wish to read the New
Testament seriously and systematically.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

i. The Method of Christ’s Teaching, . . 1

ii. Christ and the Jewish Law, ... 13

hi. God the Father, . 24

iv. Our Lord’s Teaching about himself, . . 30

v. The Kingdom of God, . 49

vi. The Righteousness of the Kingdom of

God— i., . 63

vii. The Righteousness of the Kingdom of

God— ii., . 74

viii. Our Lord’s Teaching about His Death, . 85

ix. The Holy Spirit and the Church, . . 96

x. Our Lord’s Teaching about the End of the

World, . 109

Index, . 122

THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

CHAPTER I

THE METHOD OF CHRIST^ TEACHING

How Christ taught. — The Gospel of Jesus Christ was not
at first a book, but a spoken message in which heart
spoke to heart. He might have written a collection of
laws such as we find in the Hebrew books of Deutero¬
nomy or Leviticus. He might have written a book of
wise Hebrew proverbs, or a volume of moral philosophy.
But He seems to have left behind Him no single page.
Only once is it recorded that He wrote a sentence, and
it was written on the dust ( John viii. 6). The teaching
contained in our four Gospels is His preaching seized at
the moment, treasured in some faithful memory or other,
and written down at different periods within about fifty
years after His death. Sometimes we feel compelled
to wonder how much of His teaching has been lost, and
sometimes we wonder at the marvel that so much has
been preserved.

All the sayings of our Lord which we now possess
might be slowly read within the space of two days, and
it is more than probable that a vast number of sayings
have been left unrecorded. And yet we possess so
much. The period of His teaching was less than three
years, whereas Isaiah and Jeremiah, the greatest of the
Hebrew prophetical writers, worked and preached for
more than forty years. But those two spaces of forty
years are filled with comparatively few separate dis¬
courses and incidents. On the other hand, the short
ministry of Jesus Christ is crowded with life and move¬
ment. And the actual words which are recorded, though
few in number, are clear and strong as diamonds. They
are themselves the secret of their own preservation, and
they also preserve for us a true portrait of Jesus Christ.
Perhaps men will always in some degree understand our

A

2 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Lord differently. The writers of the New Testament them¬
selves understand and interpret Him differently. This
does not mean that they do not understand Him truly.
His words show Him to be so unique and so truly divine
that every man who has the spirit of moral intuition and
the spirit of prayer finds in Jesus all that is best and
highest for himself. And all such will say to Him,

‘ Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of
eternal life ’ ( John vi. 68). Sometimes a great genius like
Shakespeare has such an insight into the varieties of
human nature that he is able in a few hundred lines to
create a clear impression of the characters which he has
invented. But only of Jesus can we say that His own
few sayings leave us with the certainty that He is above
all time and change, and that history seems already to
verify His words, ‘ Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but my words shall not pass away/

f Never man so spake ’ ( John vii. 46) was the verdict
of those who heard the Lord Jesus. He employed
several different methods of teaching, but in all these
methods we find a freshness and a force which are
unique. His teaching is natural as well as super¬
natural, and authoritative as well as informal.

The Men who heard Christ. — Why, then, did the Jews
oppose and kill Him? To answer this question it will
be necessary both to show by instances how our Lord
used the Old Testament, and to estimate the whole
nature of His teaching. We must know something of
all His work if we are to understand why men opposed
Him then, and why they oppose Him now. But first
it will be useful to fix our attention on the Jews of
Palestine. It is hardly necessary for us to consider the
Jews of the Diaspora (dispersion) scattered outside
Palestine among different heathen populations. These
Jews are important and interesting in many ways, and
especially for the manner in which they prepared for
the spread of Christianity and the development of some
parts of Christian theology. But it was with the Jews of
Palestine itself that our Lord was concerned, and there¬
fore we must devote ourselves to this portion of the
race alone.

1. The Sadducees. — The origin of the name fSadducee’
is still obscure. But there is no doubt as to the views

METHOD OF CHRIST’S TEACHING

O

O

and aims of the Sadducees. They were both priests and
aristocrats, and formed a small but powerful political
party. The high priests were Sadducees. They had
an intense dislike of novelty, and wished to maintain
their own authority. They specially revered the Penta¬
teuch. The peculiarities of their doctrine were negative.
They denied the existence of angels and spirits, and
denied the resurrection, personal immortality, and the
future life. Their temper was worldly and materialistic,
and our Lord warned His disciples against it. They
demanded to know His authority ( Mark xi. 27), sought
to destroy Him, and tried to compromise Him in the
eyes of the Romans by asking Him whether it was lawful
to give tribute to Csesar {Luke xx. 22). And they vainly
tried to discredit His teaching by proposing to Him a
riddle about the resurrection {Matt. xxii. 23). Their
wdiole rationalistic attitude, like their comfortable cir¬
cumstances, made them inclined to oppose the new
Prophet.

The Herodians seem to have been a political party
anxious to support the rule of the Herods, and there¬
fore anxious to suppress any agitation in favour of the
Messiah. This accounts for their uniting with the
Pharisees to secure the overthrow of our Lord {Matt.
xxii. 16). Their principles were probably nearer to
those of the Sadducees than those of the Pharisees.

2. The Pharisees. — This party represented the essence
of patriotic Judaism. They were called ( Pharisees/ or
f separated,’ because they separated themselves from the
Sadducee court party between b.c. 135 and 105. They
added to the Pentateuch many traditions, most of which
the Sadducees rejected. They held elaborate doctrines
about immortality and good and evil spirits ; they be¬
lieved a doctrine of predestination resembling that of
St. Paul ; they believed in God’s government of His
special people ; they were active missionaries, and they
formed a separate society or confraternity of their own.
To this party belonged most of the Scribes, or profes¬
sional students of the Jewish law (see p. 5). Along with
a considerable amount of superstition they maintained
most of what was good in Judaism. But they illustrate
admirably the way in which the good may become the
enemy of the better. The desire to keep Judaism unde-

4 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

filed by heathenism caused them not only to make their
ceremonial stricter and stricter, but to treat with the
most contemptuous scorn the so-called e people of the
land/ who were ignorant of Pharisaic traditions. And
their anxiety for the victory of God’s cause made them
expect a material national kingdom under a Messiah
who would not suffer, but would reign gloriously over
His people.

Nothing can be clearer than the causes of the opposi¬
tion of the Pharisees to Jesus Christ. They opposed Him
because He disregarded both the Jewish law and their own
traditions, mingling freely with Samaritans, tax-gatherers,
and social outcasts. What they reckoned as defilement,
He regarded as a solemn duty. Secondly, they opposed
Him because He taught that He was the Son of God
and Messiah, and a suffering Messiah. The divine autho¬
rity which He claimed over the affairs of men, and His
assertion that He worked miracles as the Son of God
and by the Holy Spirit, aroused their strongest antagon¬
ism. He disregarded their Sabbath rules, and forgave
sins. He set aside their whole theory of e separation,’
and their theory of the kingdom of God ; and did it as
being one with God himself.

The Zealots were the most extreme and violent Phari¬
sees, prepared to take an active part in overthrowing
Roman rule. One of the Apostles was a member of
their party {Matt. x. 4 ; Luke vi. 15).

3. The ‘ People of the Land.’ — This title was given at
this period to the common people, more especially those
of the country districts. Just as the word e pagan’ first
meant the people who lived in villages, and then acquired
a religious meaning, so it was with this Jewish phrase.
It was used by the Pharisees to signify the { uncultured/
and so ‘irreligious.’ The Pharisees regarded them with
a detestation which is exactly reflected in the saying,
‘ This multitude which knoweth not the law are accursed ’
{John vii. 49). The rabbis accuse them of not paying
tithes, not wearing phylacteries, etc. Even at their
worst they were to Jesus ‘the lost sheep of the house
of Israel’ {Matt. x. 6). And it is not hard to believe
that in secluded regions, such as the liill-country {Luke
i. 39) of Judaea and Galilee, there were many simple
God-fearing hearts. To the Pharisees they would seem

METHOD OF CHRIST’S TEACHING 5

barbarous, and even wicked. But they were e the poor
in spirit ’ beloved by God, wistfully looking- for the con¬
solation of the Messiah’s coming. Such were Zacharias
and Elisabeth^ Simeon and Anna. And such most truly
were Mary and Joseph, as we find them depicted in the
Gospels.

4. The Essenes.— Near the Dead Sea there were the
settlements of a sect called Essenes. They were influ¬
enced by some forms of Oriental paganism; especially
Persian. They had their goods in common; and led
a severely ascetic life. They greatly revered the suii;
and practised ceremonial washings of a more than
Pharisaic minuteness. It is doubtful whether our Lord
came into direct contact with them.

Our Lord in the Synagogues. — Our Lord began His
ministry in Galilee by ‘ teaching in their synagogues
and preaching the gospel of the kingdom’ {Matt. iv. 23).
In the synagogues; so long as they were open to Him,
He would take a text from the Old Testament and
make this text the subject of His address. St. Luke
has graphically described to us the scene at Nazareth,
where f he entered, as his custom was, into the syna¬
gogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read.’ He
opened the Book of Isaiah, and chose as His text the
words :

fThe Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to
the poor :

He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovering of sight to the blind.

To set at liberty them that are bruised ;

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.’

Then we are told how He closed the book, gave it back to
the attendant, sat down, and explained that this scripture
was fulfilled in His own teaching {Luke iv. 16-30).

His teaching in the synagogues challenged attention
and opposition. f They were astonished at his teaching :
for he taught them as having authority, and not as the
scribes’ {Mark i. 22). In the Judaism of this period
the Scribes were indispensable and almost ubiquitous.
They lectured on the law, they taught it to their pupils,
and they administered it in the Sanhedrin and other
courts. They behaved as aristocrats of sacred learning

0 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

among- tlie country people who ( know not the law.
But they could not speak with that solemn sense of
a direct divine commission which marked the words of
Jesus ; and the punctilious care which they gave to
developing and filling up the law, accumulating pre¬
cedents and working out deductions, was so different
from His method that it prejudiced them against Him.

The Parables. — Perhaps the most characteristic method
of our Lord’s teaching is to be found in His parables.
It is very remarkable that there is no parable in the
New Testament except in the Gospels. lhe early
Christians seldom attempted to imitate the parables
of their Master. And when they attempted, they failed.
The parables of the Old Testament are very few and
comparatively poor ; those of the Jewish rabbis are not
worthy to be compared with those of Christ. A parable
uses some event in nature or in human experience in
order to convey some religious truth. There are three
kinds : (a) those in which some fact in the outward
world is mentioned to illustrate a religious principle.
These are brief and undeveloped parables, parables in
germ. Such are the sayings : ( They that are whole have
no need of a physician, but they that are sick ’ ( Mark ii.
17); fNo man seweth a piece of undressed cloth on an
old garment’ ( Mark ii. 21). Sometimes these are simply
f maxims ’ of condensed moral truth {Matt. xv. 14). There
are ( b ) short stories told to make some moral precept
clearer. The four best examples of this kind of parable
are the story of the good Samaritan, of the man who
trusted in his riches, of Dives and Lazarus, and of the
Pharisee and Publican {Luke x. 29-37 ; xii. 16-21 ;
xvi. 19-31 ; xviii. 9-14). There are (c) the parables of
the ordinary kind, vivid, glowing pictures, full of life
and interest, such as the parable of the sower going
forth to sow, the labourers in the vineyard, and the
prodigal son. These two latter kinds of parable, ( b ) and
(c), are the only f parables ’ in the modern English sense
of the word. Both compare some fact of the spiritual
life with some parallel fact in natural life. But they
differ, because the first kind simply uses a scene or story
to suggest some great principle, while the second kind
draws a fuller parallel between the two. Parables like
those in the great series in Matt. xiii. are stories which

METHOD OF CHRIST S TEACHING 7

are acted on two different stages at the same time. On
the lower stage we see sowing wheat, harvest, and fish¬
ing ; on the higher we see the process by which Christ
saves our souls.

Were the parables ever enigmas ? — The teaching of our
Lord was intended to teach and help every one who was
willing to be taught, and was ordinarily simple as well as
profound. A great deal of difficulty has therefore been
felt with regard to the words recorded by St. Mark after
the parable of the sower :

e And when he was alone, they that were about him
with the twelve asked of him the parables. And
he said unto them, Unto you is given the
mystery of the kingdom of God : but unto them
that are without, all things are done in parables :
that seeing they may see, and not perceive; and
hearing they may hear, and not understand ;
lest haply they should turn again, and it should
be forgiven them’ {Mark iv. 10-12).

Some critics have supposed that these texts do not
accurately represent our Lord’s teaching, and some have
gone so far as to say that they were invented in order to
find a reason for the unbelief of the Jews and their
rejection by God. But such explanations as these
become quite unnecessary when we understand the
circumstances in which St. Mark records these words.

The Scribes, Pharisees, and Herodians had already to
a great extent rejected our Lord. They had practically
put themselves ‘ without,’ outside the kingdom of God,
as they were trying to put Him outside their synagogues
and to destroy Him. The greater part of the f multitude '
were also still outside, they were not able to understand
f the mystery of the kingdom of God.’ No one regretted
their hardness of heart so truly as Jesus, no one was so
willing to explain the truth as He„ But His teaching
about the inward and spiritual coming of God’s kingdom
and the gradual nature of its growth, was totally different
from the popular conception. The people expected
some outward and sudden change. The disciples were
slowly learning to appreciate the group of secrets con¬
nected with the coming of the kingdom and its signs.
Others had not the same moral capacity for the truth.
Therefore they only saw the parable and not the secret,

8 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

they saw the story which moved on the lower stage,
but not the drama of the soul. Thus the warning ot
Isaiah was fulfilled, and they were not converted (Isa. vi.
9-10). The lesson is the same as that taught in St.
John’s Gospel (xii. 46-48). The Son of Man did not
pass any outward final judgment on those who heard
Him. His word judged them automatically. The food
which was meant for their life became for them the means
of destruction when by self-will or sloth they counter¬
acted its effect. It is the same whenever we misuse the
great forces of nature. Electricity and heat can be used
for life or for death.

In Matt. xiii. 11 ff. this teaching of our Lord is pre¬
sented in a slightly different form. He does not lay
stress upon the result so much as the fact of the
people’s failure to understand. He speaks of teaching
in parables because they do not understand, whereas in
Mark He speaks of their only seeing the outward story
with the result that they .could not understand. And in
Matthew He adds the words : f Whosoever hath, to him
shall be given, and he shall have abundance : but who¬
soever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that
which he hath.’ There will always be something
esoteric in the teaching of our Lord. Only he fthat
hath ears to hear ’ will hear. That there is a real
mystery about the laws of God’s kingdom and the means
by which it is to come, is surely proved by the fact that
earnest men have not wholly agreed as to those laws and
means. And yet it remains true that the nearer men live to
Jesus, the more they understand the mystery. It was His
desire that men should grow in understanding, and there¬
fore we are told f with many such parables spake he the
word unto them, as they were able to hear it ’ ( Mark iv. 33).

Parables in St. John’s Gospel. — There are some parables
in St. John’s Gospel which are called by another Greek
name (see John x. 6 ; cf. xvi. 25, 29). They employ a
method of comparison by which our Lord reveals some
great feature of His character or Person. In this way
He describes Himself as the Good Shepherd, the Door of
the sheep, the Vine, and the Light of the world. In
these sayings the metaphor and the object described by
it are blended together, as a painter might mix two or
more colours to represent a single flesh-tint. They are

METHOD OF CHRIST’S TEACHING 9

what we should call in modern language, allegories. Thus,
when our Lord calls Himself ‘ the Door of the sheep,
He means that it is only through Him that we can enter
into the Church of God.

Discourses in St. John’s Gospel. — St. Justin Martyr, an
important Christian writer who was horn near a.d. 100,
describes part of Christ’s teaching in the following
sentence : ‘The words that He spoke are short and con¬
cise ; for He was not a sophist.’ It has often been
argued that this description does not apply to the dis¬
courses of Christ in St. John’s Gospel, lliese discourses
have been represented as long monotonous arguments
which are mere variations of a particular doctrine about
our Lord’s divine nature. It is even said that if He
uttered the short pithy sentences which He utters in the
other Gospels, He could not have spoken as He speaks
in the fourth Gospel. And we are told to make our
choice, and warned that if the sayings in the other
Gospels are genuine those in the fourth Gospel are
invented.

All this criticism is exaggerated and prejudiced. St.
John never pretends that he is doing more than giving a
selection of our Lord’s doings (see xxi. 25). And, as
a matter of fact, the actual sayings in John are no longer
than those in Matthew. They also include a very large
number of pithy, pregnant sayings such as, ‘Make not
my Father’s house a house of merchandise’ (ii. 16);
‘ Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him
shall never thirst’ (iv. 14); ‘Ye shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free’ (viii. 32). St. John
never represents our Lord as talking like a professional
Greek debater or orator. Nor are these discourses
really monotonous. They have been condensed and
shaped to some extent by the evangelist’s own spiritual
experience. But they are true discourses of Jesus, in
spite of the fact that we are sometimes left in doubt as
to where the evangelist’s record ends and his own
reflection on that record begins (an instance is in iii. 27-
36). To accuse them of monotony is like complaining of
the monotony of the sky with all its delicate changes
of movement and colour. Certainly there is no mono¬
tony in a dialogue such as our Lord’s conversation with
the woman of Samaria, or His words with the Jews about

10 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

circumcising' on the Sabbath day, or His answer to their
charge that He is possessed by a devil, or to their claim
to be Abraham’s children. And the longer discourses,
such as that in the synagogue in Capernaum in chap. vi.
and His last discourses with His disciples in chap, xiv.-
xvi., are wholly worthy of our Lord. It is quite true
that the simple moral teaching of the other Gospels is
left behind, and doctrinal teaching about the relation
between Christ and His followers is in the foreground.
But it was natural that one form of discourse should
have been used by our Lord to supplement the other.

The other evangelists record the failure of the mass of
the people to understand the meaning of the parables.
And this prepares us naturally for the fact that in the
fourth Gospel a misunderstanding on the part of His
hearers is the occasion of the continuance of the dis¬
courses related by St. John. Nicodemus does not
understand how a man can be ‘born again’ (iii. 4), the
Jews do not understand how Jesus is the Bread that
came down from heaven (vi. 41), or how Abraham has
already seen His day (viii. 56 f.). All this is probable.
On the one hand there was His perfect intuition into
heavenly things, and on the other hand their crude and
carnal understanding. And as in St. Mark’s Gospel
Jesus asks even His own disciples, ‘Do ye not yet per¬
ceive, neither understand?5 (viii. 17, 18), so it is here.
His gentle rebuke of Philip (xiv. 9), and of Thomas (xx.
27), show that it is the same Master speaking to the
same men who were so ‘slow of heart.’

Paradoxical and Symbolic Language. — The character¬
istics of two different types of the teaching given by our
Lord require special notice. The first is His use of
language which must have arrested attention, and still
arrests attention, by its bold and forcible nature. Its
very boldness and unexpected form necessarily suggest
new truth. Such sayings are not only strong but also
illuminating. ‘ He that humbleth himself shall be ex¬
alted ’ ; ‘Ye cannot serve God and Mammon’ ( i.e . riches);

‘ Many are called, but few chosen,’ are instances of the
simpler kind of His wise sayings. Still stronger and
stranger are such sayings as — ‘ Whosoever would save his
life shall lose it’; ‘If any man would go to law with
thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke

METHOD OF CHRIST’S TEACHING 11

also’ ; fIf any man cometh unto me, and hateth not his
own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can¬
not be my disciple.’ This language is partly symbolic.
The truth is embodied in a form which arrests attention,
and each one has to consider the lesson which this form
is meant to convey personally to himself. Still more
symbolic are the sayings in which our Lord declares that
the right eye must be plucked out, or the right hand cut
off, if it causes us to stumble {Matt. v. 29). Our Lord
means that nothing, however close or dear, must be
permitted to influence us, if its influence hinders our
spiritual progress. In the same way He speaks of faith
as able to remove a mountain {Matt. xxi. 21). By this
He means indeed that His immediate disciples will be
given a great power of commanding physical nature,,
as proved to be the case. But His words also imply that
through the strength gained by faith and prayer we can
accomplish what appears to be impossible in spiritual
matters.

A second characteristic is that our Lord, living as a
Jew among Jews, accommodated His language to their
comprehension. His language is essentially Jewish.
And the fact that the evangelists record it in a Jewish
form is a plain proof that the teaching of Jesus is not
the invention of a later period. For the Church soon
became far more Greek than Jewish. And no Greek
would of his own accord have represented Christ as
using such distinctly Hebrew phrases as ‘ I beheld Satan
fallen from heaven’ {Luke x. 18), or c Ye shall sit upon
twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel’
{Matt. xix. 28) ; and we may be sure that no Greek would
have invented the passage where our Lord makes use
of the popular Jewish distinction between Jews as
f children’ and Gentiles as f dogs’ {Mark \ ii. 27). Our
Lord uses the ordinary language of His contemporaries.
But He repeatedly uses it in order to put a new meaning
into it. Sometimes, in fact, it is merely a necessary
scaffolding wherein He, the Wisdom of God, builds His
house.

Symbolic Actions. — Our Lord not only uttered symbolic
words, but also did symbolic actions. In so doing He
was acting as a Prophet. The prophets of the Old

12 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Testament by God’s command sometimes performed
dramatic actions in order to declare some particular
message to the people. Three instances may here be
mentioned. Ahijah the Shilonite tore up a new garment
in the presence of Jeroboam to show the approaching
division of the kingdom (1 Kings xi. 29-32). Isaiah
walked for three years without his upper garment and
barefoot to foretell the captivity of Egypt and Ethiopia,
two powers in which many Jews foolishly trusted (Isa.
xx. 1-6). Jeremiah broke in pieces an earthen bottle at
Topheth as a sign that God will break the nation in
pieces (Jer. xix. 10).

Some of our Lord’s signs are no less dramatic. Thus
He cleansed the Temple, overturning the tables of the
money-changers and driving out the merchants with a
scourge of cords (John ii. 14). He cursed the barren
fig-tree which had a fair show of leaves but no fruit, in
order to warn His disciples against a spiritual deadness
like that of Jerusalem with its outward piety and inward
hardness (Mark xi. 13). His last entry into Jerusalem
on Palm Sunday was a symbolic act of high importance,
emphasising His claim to be the Messiah (Mark xi. 8).

Of a somewhat different nature is the washing of His
disciples’ feet by our Lord, in order to teach them the
duty of mutual humble service (John xiii. 12). We find
too both in Mark viii. 22-26 and John ix. 6 our Lord
touches the eyes of the blind men before healing them;
and apparently to encourage the blind, who, as Orientals
were familiar with that form of remedy, touched the eyes
with saliva. A final instance of symbolic action is the
case of our Lord’s breathing upon His disciples when on
the evening after His resurrection He gave them the
gift of the Holy Ghost and the power of forgiving sins
(John xx. 21 f.). To men who knew the Old Testament,
this breathing would suggest God communicating life to
nature both at the creation of the world and at other
times. The breath of God meant a manifestation of His
power.

That all the miracles of Jesus were signs is also true.
But they were not signs in the sense of astonishing
prodigies, such as His hearers sometimes desired. They
were revelations of the moral power of God to save the
souls and bodies of His children.

CHAPTER II

CHRIST AND THE JEWISH LAW

Reverence for the Old Testament. — Our Lord Jesus Christ
brought His message to a people who already believed in
God, and believed that God had already spoken to them
by other messengers. Even the Samaritans, who rejected
the later prophets, were sure that the voice of God had
come to the ancient patriarchs such as Jacob, and to
Moses, whose laws they reverenced. And our Lord took
His stand upon the Old Testament. Ihe whole volume
of the canonical books of the Old testament was not
finally put together by the Jews into one collected
volume until a short time after the destruction of
Jerusalem at a council held at Jamnia soon after a.d.
70. But it is quite certain that most of the books were
already regarded as forming a sacred f canon or list of
inspired writings, and it is probable that the remaining
books were already commonly regarded by thoughtful
Jews as part of the same canon. Our Lord himself is
shown in the Gospels to have studied the Old testament
deeply, and to have quoted it freely. 1 he Gospels record
twenty-one quotations made by our Lord from the Jewish
prophets ; and though He sets aside part of the teaching
of Moses, He assumes that the authority of Moses had
been valid. He took for granted the religious truths
implied in the Old Testament with regard to God and
creation, man and God’s care for man, and God s pur¬
pose to help the world by means of His special gifts to
the people of Israel. He treated the history of the Old
Testament and the utterances of the Hebrew prophets as
a preparation for His own coming into the world. He
used it to explain His own mission and to illuminate His
own death. He fed His own soul upon its holiest,
strongest, and most tender verses. He knew that a
special revelation had been given to the Jews, the
Father of whom He spoke was the God whom the Jews

14 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

worshipped. It was a revelation so much fuller and
clearer than any other nation possessed, that He said to
the Samaritan woman: cYe [Samaritans] worship that
which ye know not: we [Jews] worship that which we
know : for salvation is from the Jews’ ( John iv. 22).

The Old Testament and false tradition. — Our Lord
taught that the Old Testament contained ‘the word of
God ’ and ‘ the commandment of God ’ ( Mark vii.
13, 8, 9). In the very passage where He speaks in this
manner. He insists on the contrast between the word of
God and the perversion of it by the Pharisees:

‘Full well do ye reject the commandment of God,
that ye may keep your tradition. For Moses
said, Honour thy father and thy mother ; and. He
that speaketh evil of father or mother, let him
die the death : but ye say. If a man shall say to
his father or his mother, That wherewith thou
mightest have been profited by me is Corban,
that is to say, Given to God ; ye no longer
suffer him to do aught for his father or his
mother ; making void the word of God by your
tradition, which ye have delivered : and many
such like things ye do’ ( Mark vii. 9-13).

This chapter in Mark is of very great importance for
the clear and sharp distinction which it draws between
the interpretation of the Old Testament given by our
Lord and that given by the Pharisees and the Scribes of
Jerusalem (vii. 1). And it deals with an important stage
in our Lord’s ministry. It is soon after the beginning of
the middle period which opened about the time of
Passover a.d. 28, when the zeal of the populace for
Jesus reached its high tide and began to ebb away, and
when St. Peter in the name of the disciples made his
great confession of belief in Jesus as the Son of God.
But Christ’s attitude was always the same towards both
the spirit and the letter of those Pharisaic additions to
the rules of the Old Testament. It was the attitude of
stern hostility towards a mere parade service which was
performed without the heart drawing any nearer to God.
The religious observances of His own disciples are to be
essentially different. Their almsgiving, their prayers,
and their fasting, must not be directed towards the eyes
of human observers :

CHRIST AND THE JEWISH LAW 15

‘ When therefore thou doest alms, sound not a
trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in
the synagogues and in the streets, that they may
have glory of men. Verily I say unto you.
They have received their reward ’ {Matt. vi. 2).

It is neither difficult nor unprofitable to secure applause
by an outlay of this kind. But its religious value is less
than nothing.

Pharisaism denounced. — In Matt, xxiii. our Lord utters
a tremendous closing denunciation of the Scribes and
Pharisees. It opens with the somewhat startling state¬
ment, fThe scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat ;
all things therefore whatsoever they bid you, these do
and observe.’ It is plain from the verses which follow
that our Lord cannot mean more than that they are to
be obeyed when they are true to the Old Testament
itself. He goes on to scourge the sins of the Scribes and
Pharisees with words of fire. He repeats His old charge
against them. The religion is a play f done to be seen of
men.’ It is to be seen and admired for their orthodoxy
that they make broad the phylacteries and the symbolical
borders of their garments. It is to assert their personal
authority that they love the chief seats in the synagogues,
and the title of * rabbi.’ Their moral theology was
trickery, allowing men to swear by the Temple and then
break their oath with impunity, while asserting that to
swear by the gold of the Temple was a really binding
oath. They were indeed right to give to God tithes even
of herbs such as mint and anise. But so pedantic was
their regard for these trifles that they had forgotten
6 judgement, and mercy, and faith.’ Jesus himself con¬
formed to many of the ritual requirements of the Mosaic
Law. When the element of liberty in His teaching was
noticed, some doubt was felt as to whether He would pay
for the support of the Temple. But He instructed St.
Peter to pay for them both the half-shekel which every
Jew paid {Matt. xvii. 24). He also, when He healed a
leper, said, fGo thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and
offer the gifts that Moses commanded, for a testimony
unto them ’ {Matt. viii. 4). These instances help us to
understand how it might be right for the hearers of our
Lord to obey even the Scribes and Pharisees. And yet,
by their very desertion of the inward spirit of the noblest

16 THE TEACHING OF OUll LORD

parts of the teaching of Moses, they brought upon them¬
selves Christ’s condemnation. After He had taught that
defilement was really inward and not outward we are
told :

f Then came the disciples and said unto him,
Knowest thou that the Pharisees were offended,
when they heard this saying ? But he answered
and said, Every plant which my heavenly
Father planted not, shall be rooted up. Let
them alone : they are blind guides. And if
the blind guide the blind, both shall fall into
a pit’ {Matt. xv. 12-14).

Is the whole Law permanent ? — The above passages show
how deep a line of cleavage our Lord drew between ‘ the
law of God’ contained in the Old Testament and the
Jewish Halacha or ‘tradition of men.’ Did He then
sanction the whole of the teaching contained in the Old
Testament and regard it as a law for all time? There
are some verses which seem to answer that He did thus
sanction it all. He said, ‘Verily I say unto you, fill
heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall
in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be
accomplished. Whosoever therefore shall break one of
these least commandments, and shall teach men so, shall
be called least in the kingdom of heaven ; but whosoever
shall do and teach them, he shall be called great in the
kingdom of heaven’ {Matt. v. 19). No assertion could
be more emphatic, and yet it seems at first sight to be
inconsistent with several commandments which He him¬
self issued, especially with regard to the laws of revenge
and divorce. The contradiction, however, can be done
away if one condition is fulfilled. If there exists some
law within the law, so far-reaching as to penetrate
everything that Moses and all the devout writers of the
Old Testament directed to be done, and ablejo complete
all that they left incomplete, the contradiction dis¬
appears. This law within the law is love. And Jesus
reissued the law in a developed and perfect form because
He showed us the character of perfect love :

‘And one of the scribes came, and heard them
questioning together, and knowing that he had
answered them well, asked him, What command¬
ment is the first of all? Jesus answered, The

CHRIST AND THE JEWISH LAW 17

first is. Hear, O Israel ; The Lord our God, the
Lord is one : and thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.
The second is this. Thou shalt love thy neigh¬
bour as thyself’ ( Mark xii. 28-31).

The Scribe who questioned Jesus seems to have
assumed that some commandments in the law are in¬
significant and some significant, and if so, which is the
most significant? Our Lord meets the questioner on
his own ground. He seems to say, ‘ Yes, there is one
commandment more important than all others ; not in
the sense which you mean but in a deeper sense ; the
essential duty is the duty of love, and the command to
love is the greatest commandment.’ And the Scribe
understood, and declared that to love God and one’s
neighbour ‘ is much more than all whole burnt-offerings
and sacrifices.’ By laying down these principles as the
real basis of duty our Lord was able to say with truth :

‘Think not that I came to destroy the law or the
prophets ; I came not to destroy but to fulfil ’
{Matt. v. 17).

By ‘fulfil’ our Lord here means ‘ bring to full perfec¬
tion ’ by His own teaching. We notice at once that while
the ordinary Jewish theology of the time made the legal
enactments of far greater importance than the prophets,
our Lord brings the prophets into the same prominence
as the law. The Scribes added new precepts to the
law ; our Lord did not add but subtract. But to all that
He retained He gave an intensified and more spiritual
meaning. In their literal sense ‘the law and the pro¬
phets were until John’ {Luke xvi. 16), and were then
superseded by the Gospel. But their moral teaching
was not discarded but absorbed by the Gospel ; and this
absorption was accompanied by an abrogation of cere¬
monial rules which makes the yoke of Jesus ‘easy ’ and
His burden ‘light’ to all who have learned His spirit
{Matt. xi. 30).

A few illustrations will now be given in order to show
how our Lord sometimes abrogated and sometimes sanc¬
tioned the Jewish law.

Some ceremonial laws abolished. — The law had pre¬
scribed in detail what kinds of food defiled the person

B

18 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

who ate them. Our Lord, on the other hand, sgid,

‘ There is nothing from without the man, that going
into him can defile him : but the things which proceed
out of the man are those that defile the man ( Mark vii.
15). This is not a mere criticism and condemnation of
Pharisaic additions to the law. It is a great maxim
which overthrew the whole of the ancient Hebrew con¬
ception of the ceremonial cleanness or uncleanness of
food. Christ refuses to sanction a religious distinction
between clean and unclean, except in the sphere of
morality. It is not a sign of indifference towards the
good of cleanliness, nor is it a repudiation of the moral
usefulness of self-denial in matters of food. But it is the
assertion that food as such, all of it created by the
one good God, cannot be divided into pure and impure.
St. Mark perceived the wide application of the maxim,
as is shown by his comment, ‘ This he said, making all
meats clean.’ And then St. Mark records the words of
Jesus, ‘That which proceedeth out of the man, that
defileth the man.’ Foul and cruel thoughts and acts,
deceit, pride and foolishness, ‘ defile the man.’ This is
the principle for which St. Paul contended against his
Jewish and half- Jewish opponents. He says to the
Romans, ‘The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking,
but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost’
{Bom. xiv. 17).

In order to avoid all risk of contamination, the Jews
used an elaborate system of ablutions, both of the person
and of vessels employed. The purification of vessels
alone occupies thirty chapters of a book of the Jewish
Mishna. In John ii. 6 we find a reference to six stone
water-pots for the water of purification at the marriage
at Cana in Galilee. If their hands were ceremonially
clean the Jews washed them before eating, and washed
them twice if they were known to be unclean. Some
washed their hands between the courses of a meal. Such
attention was paid to this exterior cleanliness that the
need of inward purity was obscured. The Mohammedan
religion, which is a mixture of corrupted Judaism and
corrupted Christianity, shows us the danger of the
Pharisaic views about cleanliness, for it teaches that a
man’s prayers are invalid if his ablutions have not been
performed correctly. Our Lord’s teaching on this

CHRIST AND THE JEWISH LAW 19

subject went to the root of the question of purity, and
in so doing cut through the ceremonial law of the
Pentateuch.

The laws of the Sabbath corrected. — For the orthodox
Jew the Sabbath bristled with conscientious difficulties,
and our Lord’s treatment of the Sabbath was narrowly
watched by His critics. Properly considered, the Sabbath
as a weekly day ol rest and worship was a blessing to
man and beast. Rut the Pharisees had done much to
make it into a troublesome burden. Jesus therefore
came constantly into collision with the Jews on this
question. One Sabbath day Jesus and His disciples were
crossing some corn-fields. The disciples while walking
plucked the ears of corn to eat. This was permitted by
the law ( Deut . xxiii. 25), no doubt as a humane concession
to the wants of poor and hungry people. But according
to one of the refinements of Pharisaic interpretation, to
pluck the ears was equivalent to reaping, and to rub
them in the hands was threshing. And this was for¬
bidden on the Sahbath. In reply Jesus showed from an
incident in the life of David that a law with regard to
eating might be broken when it clashed with the need
of supporting life. And then He laid down the principle
that ‘ the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for
the Sabbath’ ( Mark ii. 27). This does not abrogate the
Sabbath, but it repudiates all rules which make the
Sabbath injurious to the real needs and true interests of
man.

Another instance is to be found in Mark iii. 1-G. It
is the question which was often raised, that of the right
to heal on the Sabbath. Christ was in a synagogue where
there was present a man with a withered hand. The
Pharisees watched Him with the intention of finding
Him guilty of some misdemeanour which would make it
possible for them to bring about His death. He de¬
liberately asked them, ‘Is it lawful on the Sabbath day
to do good, or to do harm?’ The Pharisees could not
deny that it might be lawful to do good, for they them¬
selves held that a neighbour might be assisted, if his life
was in danger. They held their peace. And our Lord
pressed the point home to His hearers by asking, ‘What
man shall there be of you, that shall have one sheep,
and if this fall into a pit on the Sabbath day, will lie not

20 THE TEACHING OF OUll LORD

lay hold on it, and lift it out?’ {Matt. xii. 11). A man
was of much more value than a sheep. So He restored
the man’s withered hand. Very similar is the case of
the healing of the man with the dropsy on a
Sabbath day when Jesus was eating bread in the house
of a leading Pharisee {Luke xiv. TO), and the pathetic
story of the woman who had been f bowed together for
eighteen years, and whom He healed on the Sabbath to
the indignation of the ruler of the synagogue where the
miracle was performed. In all this teaching and action
the principle is that the Sabbath is a means and not an
end, and the claims of humanity are greater than the
claims of human tradition. More than this. He asserts
His right as Son of Man, as representative and King of
the human race, to be Lord of the Sabbath {Mai k ii.
28 ; cf. Matt. xii. 5-8). He can use the Sabbath as He
wills. So it is plain that though He did not pronounce
on all Sabbath rules and customs. He felt free to
abrogate not only Pharisaic rules with regard to the
Sabbath, but also such a rule as that of the law itself
which ordered a man to be put to death if he gathered
sticks to make a lire on the Sabbath {Nam. xv. 32-36).

The Sabbath in St. John's Gospel.— The first three Gospels
therefore prepare us for the great passages in St. John
which deal with the Sabbath day {John v. 1-1/ ; ix. 1-41).
They show that He both asserted the right for all to
do beneficent deeds on the Sabbath, and claimed a
personal authority to modify the law by developing its
best latent meaning. The objection of the Jews is funda¬
mentally the same in St. John’s Gospel as in the others.
When Christ opened the eyes of the blind man, they
say, f This man is not from God, because he keepeth not
the' sabbath ’ {John ix. 16). Our Lord had previously in
Jerusalem healed a paralytic man at the pool of
Bethesda. And our Lord defended His action in the
simple words, f My Father worketh even until now, and
1 work ’ ( John v. 17). He shows that the kind and bene¬
ficent action of God is continuous; it has lasted every
Sabbath day since sabbaths first began. It has known
no interruption, and the saving and beneficent work of
the Son has been equally continuous and uninterrupted.
He co-ordinated the character and duration of His work
with that of His Father. He cannot act differently from

CHRIST AND THE JEWISH LAW 21

the Father. This sentence justifies His treatment of the
Sabbath by an appeal to a higher ground even than that
which is stated in the words, "The Son of Man is Lord
even of the Sabbath.’ At the same time it explains it.
It is His relation to the Father which explains His
authority as the Son of Man. This we shall have to
consider more thoroughly in ch. iv., when we study our
Lord’s teaching about himself.

The Temple and its Sacrifices. — Our Lord attended the
great festivals at Jerusalem. In His boyhood He went
there for this purpose (Luke ii. 42), and in His later life
He attended several such feasts. In fact the story of
St. John’s Gospel hangs upon His visits to these feasts.
He paid for the maintenance of the Temple worship the
half-shekel, in Greek money two drachmas, required by
the law (Matt. xvii. 27). He directed a leper whom He
had healed to offer the usual sacrifice (Matt. viii. 4). He
directed that a man, who when offering a gift at the
altar remembered that he had wronged another man,
should leave his gift to God unoffered and be reconciled
to his brother (Matt. v. 23). He never opposed the
offering of sacrifices : they were prophetic of His oblation
of himself to God. At the same time He said nothing
to imply that the offering of the Jewish sacrifices was a
permanent duty. On the contrary, He foretold the de¬
struction of the Temple, the ruin of which would neces¬
sarily entail the cessation of those sacrifices. While He
lived on earth the Temple was to Him the place where
God dwells (Matt, xxiii. 21). The Temple was for Him
the c house of prayer for all the nations,’ and therefore
He overthrew the tables of the money-changers and the
seats of them that sold doves for sacrifices, men who had
turned the Temple into fa den of robbers,’ and He did
this both at the beginning and at the close of His min¬
istry (John ii. 14; Mark xi. 15). The Temple was a place
where God welcomed prayer such as the prayer of the
humble publican (Luke xviii. 14), and where the widow’s
mite was more valued by God than the easy gifts of the
wealthy (Mark xii. 44). He resented the profanation of
tiie Temple because it was a place for communion with
God. And when He repeated the words of the prophet,

‘ I will have mercy and not sacrifice,’ He did not mean
that sacrifice was wrong, but that merely symbolical and

22 THE TEACHING OF OUll LORD

external sacrifices were as nothing compared with a
heart which is in touch with God.

Fasting. — The Old Testament prescribed only one fast,
that of the Day of Atonement {Lev. xvi. 29). To this
the Jews had added two weekly fast days, Monday and
Thursday ( Luke xviii. 12). It is very improbable that
our Lord and His disciples omitted to fast on the Day of
Atonement. But He did not prescribe any distinctive
fast days for His disciples, or observe the Pharisaic fasts.
f And John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting :
and they come and say unto him, Why do John’s dis¬
ciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but thy
disciples fast not?’ ( Mark ii. 18). Our Lord’s reply is in
effect that while He the Bridegroom of the soul is with
them tliey cannot fast, but when He is taken from them
‘ then will they fast in that day.’ This seems to mean
that they will fast in their sorrow at His death. The
sayings which follow about the futility of putting a
strong new piece of cloth on an old garment, and of
putting strong new wine into old wine-skins, imply that
the new spiritual life of Christendom cannot be confined
in the forms of Judaism. It does not at all mean, as it is
sometimes interpreted to mean, that no outward ob¬
servances will be matters of duty for the Christian. For
our Lord speaks of new wine being put into fresh wine¬
skins, showing that the potent new life must have new
forms of its own. And to impress upon His disciples
the truth that fasting must never be a matter of ostenta¬
tion, but a welcome discipline. He says, fThou, when
thou fastest, anoint thy head, and wash thy face : that
thou be not seen of men to fast, but of thy Father which
is in secret : and thy Father, which seeth in secret,
shall recompense thee’ {Matt. vi. 17).

Conclusion. — If we are to estimate how vast was the
change which Jesus inaugurated by His relation to the
Old Testament, we must follow the example of St. Paul
and remind ourselves of the terrible words of the ancient
code, words contained in a book which is full of humane
regulations marking a great advance on the laws of a
less developed age : ( Cursed be he that confirmeth not
the words of this law to do them ’ {Deut. xxvii. 20). Side
by side with this we must place the words also quoted by
St. Paul, f Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my

CHRIST AND THE JEWISH LAW 23

judgements ; which if a man do, he shall live in them ’
{Lev. xviii. 5). And then we think of Jesus, reared in
the midst of pious Jewish people, teaching openly that
the law is relative, imperfect, requiring to be trans¬
formed. Or we think of Him saying to the woman of
Samaria, c Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when
neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye
worship the Father. . . . But the hour cometh, and now
is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father
in spirit and truth ’ ( John iv. 21, 23). It was the change
of the partial into the perfect, of the local into the uni¬
versal, of the temporary into the everlasting.

CHAPTER III

GOD THE FATHER

The Christian God and Paganism. — Jesus Christ has shown
God to men. And the religion of Christians cannot be
divorced from their knowledge of God. If they are
blind to the vision of God as shown to them by Jesus
Christy their life cannot be the same as it is when they
carry that vision in their hearts. Now, it was a vital
fact in the teaching of Jesus Christ that He taught men
that their life and their duty depend upon an Almighty
Spirit whom He calls ‘The Father.’ It was not a new
thing to speak of God as Father. It is true that some
great religions and philosophies show no real knowledge
or intuition of this truth. There is some noble moral
teaching in the early form of Buddhism, but Buddhism
had nothing to teach men concerning God. It ignored
Him, and the result has been that later Buddhism has
tried to appease man’s hunger for God either with
teaching about God which contains some resemblance
to Christianity, or, more frequently, with gross idolatry.
Hinduism has no clear idea of a personal God, but thinks
of the Supreme Being as a vague law of nature showing
itself in every form of good and evil alike. The Greeks
had sometimes spoken of Zeus, the god of the bright
sky, as ‘Father of men and gods.’ But their stories
concerning Zeus were of such a kind as to imply the
widest difference between religion and morality. That
difference was a chasm which the Greek philosophers
were never able to bridge completely. The later Greek
philosophy, though it taught some high principles of
morality, was inclined to a vague, abstract, impersonal
idea of God. The result was the same as in the case of
Buddhism. The last great form of Greek philosophy,
that called Neo-Platonism, had to fortify itself with
gross superstition. Magic, spiritualism, amulets, baths
in the blood of consecrated bulls, were used as means

24

GOD THE FATHER

25

for securing the help of unseen powers hy men who
could not persuade themselves that the Highest Being
took a personal interest in their welfare.

The Christian God and Judaism. — On the other hand,
the Hebrews for centuries before the birth of Jesus
Christ had believed that there is only one God ; and
that He is a God of power, love, and pity, who can be
called by the name of Father. And it was of this same
God that Jesus spoke. But here, as in other parts
of His teaching, it is as important to notice where He
differed from the great Hebrew writers as where He re¬
peated their words. We find in the Old Testament such
sayings attributed to God as — f Israel is my son, my first¬
born’ (Exod. iv. 22), and f When Israel was a child, then
I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt’ (Hos. xi. 1).
The idea of God’s fatherhood here seems to denote love
and favour. Sometimes it rather denotes creation and
sovereignty. These ideas seem prominent in the text :
fDo ye thus requite the Lord,

O foolish people and unwise ?

Is not he thy father that hath bought thee ?

He hath made thee, and established thee.’

(. Deut . xxxii. 6.)

In such passages God is regarded as the Father of the
Hebrew nation, and not of individual men and women.
It has been doubted whether there is a single passage in
which it is implied that the relationship of a son is open
to every individual man in his intercourse with God.
But great tenderness is associated with the words f our
Father ’ in Isaiah lxiii. 16, and God is said to pity His
people ^ like as a father pitieth his children’ {Psalm ciii.
13). And the later Jewish literature, issuing as it does
from a time when religious individualism had grown
stronger, speaks of God as the Father of the righteous
man. In the Book of Wisdom the wicked are represented
as mocking at the righteous man for vaunting that God is
his Father (ii. 16). In Ecclesiasticus God is addressed
as eO Lord, Father and Master of my life’ (xxiii. 1).
There was therefore a tendency to give a more personal
sense to the name f Father,’ and about the end of the first
century of the Christian era we find that some eminent
rabbis used the term c heavenly Father,’ which we find in
the New Testament.

2 0 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

On the other hand; we must take into account two
other tendencies in Judaism, (a) There is an element
of uncertainty about God, tending almost to Agnosticism.
It finds its expression in Job, confronted by the great
riddle of the universe :

f Oh that I knew where I might find him,

That l might come even to his seat ! . . .

Behold I go forward, but he is not there ;

And backward, hut I cannot perceive him :

On the left hand, when he doth work, hut I cannot
behold him :

He hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot
see him ’ {Job xxiii. 3, 8, 9).

It finds vent in the lamentable cry in Proverbs xxx.
2-4 :

f Surely I am more brutish than any man,

And have not the understanding of a man :

And I have not learned wisdom.

Neither have I the knowledge of the Holy One.

Who hath ascended up into heaven, and descended ?

Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?

Who hath bound the waters in his garment?

Who hath established all the ends of the earth ?

What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if thou
knowest ? ’

A similar uncertainty is reflected in the too Greek and
too abstract idea of God which we find in Philo, the great
Jewish philosopher who lived at Alexandria in the time of
Christ, (b) There is an element of anxious fear in the
reverence of God which tends to superstition. Con¬
cerning this fear we must speak with respect. It con¬
tained the same profound truth as we find in the later
Jewish conception of the seriousness of sin and the need
of holiness in worship. It was probably a good thing
that the Jews were inclined to drop the use of such
proper names as Abi-el, Eli-ab, Abi-ya, in which the
primitive Semitic idea of the Fatherhood of God was
enshrined. The name of God was realised as something
too sacred to he bandied to and fro in daily social inter¬
course. But a more sombre aspect of this reverence is
to be seen in the insertion of myriads of imaginary
angels, good or evil or mischievous, between God and
the world, distracting the minds of men from the thought

GOD THE FATHER

27

of God. And the realisation that God is a King was
not free from the Oriental associations of despotism and
courtly magnificence. God was described by strange
titles as Heaven, the Place, the Height, the Throne
of God, and finally was thought to communicate with
creation only through a ‘ secretary,’ the chief of spirits,
named the Metatron, an angel who sits in the inner¬
most chamber before God, while the other angels only
hear His commands from behind the veil. The word
Metatron appears to be of Greek origin, signifying
‘ beside the throne.’

The Memra or Word of God. — There is in the Jewish
Targums, or ancient paraphrases of Scriptures, a word
which never occurs in the Talmud. It is ‘ Memra.’ It
is a remarkable fact that God as revealing himself and
coming into connection with the world, is called the
‘ Memra,’ or Word. The Memra is distinct from the
angelic Metatron. It is God speaking, and is not
identical with a word spoken by God, such as was
called by the Jews pithgama. Of great interest is the
Targum of Onkelos on Deut. xxxiii. 27, where instead
of ‘underneath are the everlasting arms,’ we find ‘and
by his Memra was the world created,’ exactly as in
John i. 10. The doctrine of the Memra, unlike the
Stoic idea of the divine Logos, rests on a basis more
religious than philosophical. The Memra is more per¬
sonal than the Logos of the pre-Christian Greeks. The
idea of a God who is thus transcendent, distinct from
the world, and yet consciously coming near to Hi&
creatures, prepared for the truth that ‘the Word was
made flesh,’ as St. John has taught us.

Devotion of Jesus to the Father. — The name ‘Father’
is in the New Testament a counterpart of the name
Jehovah (Yahwe) in the Old Testament. It is the fullest
revelation of God that is or can be conveyed in one name.
But this revelation is conveyed to us less in a name than
in a life. The life of Jesus is a life of human devotion
to the Father, so perfect that it has no parallel. This-
prompt, humble, persevering devotion on the part of our
Lord is no unreality, no mere figure of speech. It is
the crown and excellence of His human character. In
early times the Church had to struggle against the semi-
Christian teaching of sects such as Docetists, Gnostics, and

28 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Apollinarians, who from a mistaken reverence deformed
our Lord’s humanity, by denying either the reality of
H is body or the reality of His soul. They thought that
if Christ was divine He could not have been truly man.
Teaching of this kind hedged round whole regions of
our Lord’s life as not really imitable on the part of His
followers. But the Gospels glow with a great truth
which must be grasped as an experience by all Christ’s
followers to the best of their power. It is the experience
of intercourse with, communion with, the Father. This
is our Lord’s own habit of mind, and it is manifested by
Him in a way which shows His desire that it should he
the habit of mind found in His disciples.

This devotion to the Father is quite as much emphasised
by St. John as by the other evangelists. The very fact
that St. John says even more than the Synoptists to exalt
his readers’ conception of Jesus, seems to stimulate his
desire to record those sayings of the Master which showT
Him living in the shadow of the Father’s glory. St. Luke
gives us the one authentic story of His boyhood, in which
He says to His ‘ parents ’ who have found Him disputing
in the Temple with the Jewish teachers :

‘How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that
I must be in my Father’s house?’ {Lukeii. 49).

When He begins to teach. He calls His hearers to be
like ‘ your heavenly Father ’ {Matt. v. 48). The Father
is in the background of one parable after another. It is
not those who call Christ ‘ Lord, Lord ’ with hypocritical
lips who shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but
‘ he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven ’
{Matt. vii. 21). He gives thanks to the Father for reveal¬
ing to ‘ babes ’ the truths which the wise and prudent
were too sophisticated to perceive {Matt. xi. 25). He
thanks the Father before partaking of food {Luke xxii.
17 ff.). But His true meat is to do the will of the
Father {John iv. 34). ‘I seek not mine own will, but
the will of him that sent me’ {John v. 30). He again
explicitly declares :

‘ I am come down from heaven, not to do mine own
will, but the will of Him that sent me’ {John vi. 88).
lie declares that He received from ‘my Father’ the
commandment to lay down His life and take it again
{John x. 18). His Father’s house is the place of many

29

GOD THE FATHER

mansions where He will receive His faithful disciples.
He prays for power to glorify the Father. When He in
agony foresaw His death, He prayed with the Aramaic
word that He learnt in childhood, c Abba, Father’ {Mark
xiv. 36). The uttermost limit of His sufferings on the
Cross was to be forsaken by Him to whom He had
devoted all His life; and unless we understand some¬
thing of that devotion, we can understand nothing of
the pain of that desolation {Mark xv. 34). And at the
last moment of His awful dying. He who had prayed
to the 4 Father’ to forgive His murderers, prayed for
Himself in the words :

f Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’

{Luke xxiii. 46).

Bearing in mind this devotion to the Father, we shall
see that nothing in the life of Jesus is done at random,
and that He bases none of His actions on a mere pre¬
concerted plan of human prudence. To the casual
observer His life might appear to be wayward and His
method capricious. He avoided success where it might
have seemed certain. He occasionally reinforced a hard
saying by one which is still harder. Flis teaching about
His own Person did not make doubt an absolute impos¬
sibility, and He gave this teaching consciously. He
chose to die amid circumstances which spoke simply of
failure and disgrace. But it was increasingly evident to
the few who were faithful to Him that there was a clue
to the mystery. Whether He hid himself, or showed
himself, whether He prayed on the hills or taught in the
city, whether He lived or died. He was following the
Father’s will.

Jesus shows men the Father. — We have noticed that
uninterrupted communion with the Father in which
Jesus lived, the communion of a sinless human soul
with the Creator. But the Christian’s confidence in
f Our Father’ rests upon something still deeper. Jesus
taught that He was ‘ the Son ’ in a supreme and unique
sense. He did not come to men as a son of God such
as He invited us to become, but as e the Son ; not as
a revealer of God like Moses, but as the Revealer. In
chapter iv. we shall endeavour to consider this more
closely. At present we must be content to notice that
He speaks of His own self as the revelation of God s

SO THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Fatherhood {Matt. xi. 27) j and it is through Him only
that men enter into the relation of sonship. His human
devotion to the Father is steeped in something deeper
and diviner. It depends upon and is worthy of a rela¬
tion with the Father which is eternal, existing before the
world began. When St. Philip said to Him, f Lord,
shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us,’ He replied,
* Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not
know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the
Father: how sayest thou, Shew us the Father?’ {John
xiv. 8, 9). In the humanity of our Lord, and mani¬
festing itself through that humanity, there is God.
Jesus is not the Father, but His earthly life is the
utterance in history of all the everlasting love and
goodness of the Father. The Father is best known to
us as Father when He is most evidently love. So He
becomes Father to us in Christ. It is in Jesus that we
recognise both the inward mind of God towards us and
His outward actions. The truth that God is love became
a fact to mankind when in Jesus Christ God made him¬
self one with us and ourselves one with Him. This
sympathy by which God in Christ endured with us all
the trials and conditions of human life show us the
Father. This is not merely the imagination of St. John.
It is implied in all that union of authority and humility
which we see in the sinless pitying Saviour described by
the earlier evangelists. It was His mission to make men
understand the very heart of God, the pulse of which
is always beating in His own Person. He did not use
intellectual arguments to demonstrate God’s Father¬
hood. For neither to the ignorant nor to the learned
can God’s Fatherhood be taught by argument. He there¬
fore did not prove that God is Father, but simply showed
the Father to us.

Teaching of Jesus about the Father. — Having noticed
that in our Lord’s life and His attitude towards mankind
we find shown to us new depths in the nature of God’s
love, we must next notice that His actual teaching
enlarged the meaning of Fatherhood. His teaching
enforces the truths taught by the great Hebrew prophets
that God is One, almighty, absolutely good, omniscient,
beneficent {Mark xii. 29 ; x. 27 ; x. 18 ; Luke xvi. 15 ;
xii. 24). But the central illuminating doctrine about Gocl

31

GOD THE FATHER

in His parables and commandments is that He is ‘ Our
Father.’ In the Old Testament this truth appears occa¬
sionally like a star that is often hidden by fogs and mists ;
in the Gospels it is like a strong genial sun. We can
estimate the greatness of the difference by the fact that in
the Psalms, deep and personal as their language often is,
God is never once addressed directly as f Father,’ where¬
as in the Gospel of St. Matthew alone our Lord speaks
of God as c Father ’ more than forty times. St. Matthew
twenty times puts the expression c heavenly Father ’ on
the lips of our Lord, St. Luke does not use this expres¬
sion at all, and St. Mark only mentions it once. We
can only conclude that our Lord sometimes used the
word ‘ heavenly’ and sometimes not. It would be most
readily appreciated and retained by Jewish disciples,
among a circle of whom St. Matthew’s Gospel was pro¬
bably written. Except for this term f heavenly,’ no
actual definition of God’s Fatherhood in relation to man¬
kind is given. But the dispositions which it emphasises
are made quite clear. Thus our Lord says :

f Let your light shine before men, that they may see
your good works, and glorify your Father which
is in heaven’ {Matt. v. 16).

f Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute
you : that ye may he sons of your Father which
is in heaven : for he maketh his sun to rise on
the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the
just and the unjust. For if ye love them that
love you, what reward have ye? do not even
the publicans the same ? And if ye salute your
brethren only, what do ye more than others ?
do not even the Gentiles the same? Ye there¬
fore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect ’ {Matt. v. 44 ff. ).

This Father, though He is a Person who loves and
provides for all creation, is only the Father of other
persons , capable of conscious fellowship with himself :
e Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not,
neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, and your
{not their) heavenly Father feedeth them’ {Matt. vi. 26).

The disciple is to speak to God in perfect secret in¬
timacy, c and thy Father which seetli in secret shall re¬
compense thee ’ {Matt. vi. 6). He is to be sure that God

32 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

will give him what is good for him : ‘If ye then, being
evi^ know how to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more shall your Father which is in heaven
give good things to them that ask him ?’ (Matt. vii. 11).
He is not to be anxious as to what he shall eat or drink,
‘for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of
all these things ’ (Matt. vi. 32). And all this tender and
attentive care of God obliges us all the more strictly to
fulfil His will. Only he who does it can enter into the
kingdom of heaven (Matt. vii. 21), and to do it is to
share the inner experience of Jesus himself:

‘ For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is
my brother, and sister, and mother ’

(Mark iii. 35).

And so in the words which He spoke to Mary Magdalene
after His resurrection. He bids her ‘Go unto my
brethren, and say to them, I ascend unto my Father and
your Father, and my God and your God 5 (John xx. 17).

In the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke xv. 11-32),
which is really a parable of two sons, one guilty and the
other beyond reproach, the fatherly love of God to men
is enforced with a pathos that is too unique for descrip¬
tion to he possible. The circumstances (vv. 1, 2) show
that the parable is our Lord’s defence of His own action.
He is treating men as God treats them. The love of the
father, the father who had never renounced his son, and
had watched for his coming, is a love illustrated by almost
every single word employed in the parable. And such
is the love revealed in Jesus. And the complaint of the
prodigal’s elder brother, a complaint which has perhaps
found an echo in many Christian lives, is met by the
same affection ; ‘ Child (not son), thou art ever with me,
and all that is mine is thine.’ This is a new revela¬
tion of fatherhood to the son who had ‘served’ his
father scrupulously, but had never quite understood
that his father was asking for his heart.

The Fear of God.— We must not suppose that the ten¬
derness of God towards His children makes it unnecessary
for us to fear God. It is indeed true that St. John tells
us that ‘ perfect love casteth out fear ’ ; as love grows
towards perfection everything like a slavish fear will de¬
part, and in heaven the blessed will lose even their fear
of losing God’s love. But the fear of reverent awe will

GOD THE FATHER 33

lemain foi evei in the saints, and the fear of sinning
will remain in the Christian so long as sin is possible to
him. In prayer our Lord himself addressed the Father
as " Holy Father 5 and " Righteous Father’ {John xvii. 11,
25). And in the prayer which He taught us, immediately
after we call God "Our Father,’ we are taught to say
"hallowed be thy name.’ This is a prayer that God’s
character as revealed to men may be acknowledged by
them to be holy. The name of God must be understood
to cover and include all holiness, and nothing must be
called liolv which is in disagreement with the character
of God revealed in Christ. In the most explicit way our
Loid teaches that the bather punishes. The man who
does not from his heart forgive his brother will receive
from the heavenly Father a punishment compared with
the punishment inflicted by "tormentors’ at the command
of a generous master where generosity has been abused
by a wicked debtor {Matt, xviii. 34).* God has power
over the soul of man. He can call to account suddenly
the man who has made up his mind to eat, drink and be
merry {Luke xii. 20). And since our destiny is in God’s
hand, we must regard Him with a fear which is due to
God only :

" Be not afraid of them which kill the body, but are
not able to kill the soul ; but rather fear him
which is able to destroy both soul and body in
hell ’ {Matt. x. 28).

Is God the Father of all men ?— The question has often
been asked whether our Lord teaches that God is the
Father of all men, or only the Father of those who
believe in Jesus Christ. And sometimes a further ques¬
tion is asked, Did our Lord teach that all men, good or
bad, are children of God ? To these questions the Gospels
compel us to answer that God is the Father of all men
but that men themselves can either bring this relation¬
ship to an end or they can so strengthen and deepen it
that His Fatherhood becomes to them a new thing. God
is the Father of all men in the sense that He created
them, and regards them with love and compassion, and
knows that they are capable of fellowship with himself.
But He is a Father in another sense, differing greatly in
degree, to those who are in moral union with Christ, and
those who, since Christian Baptism has been instituted,

c

34 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

have entered into the blessings and obligations which
baptism implies. This distinction between God’s Father¬
hood as it is shared by all men and that Fatherhood
which is only shared by faithful Christians, is not un¬
real or complicated. It is easily understood when we
remember that the relation between man and God must
be spiritual if it is to be complete. So long as love exists
on one side only, its action is limited ; when it meets
with a response and a mutual love and communion begin,
the limitation is removed. Conscious moral Fatherhood
to be complete requires conscious moral sonship.

The welcome given by the Father to the prodigal son,
and the joy which Christ says is felt in heaven ‘ over one
sinner that repenteth ’ {Luke xv. 7, 10), implies that the
attitude of God is one of fatherly compassionate love
towards those who have wandered from the right way.
And it was to the ‘ multitudes’ as well as to His disciples
that our Lord said, ‘ Call no man your father cm the
earth : for one is your Father, which is in heaven ’ {Matt.
xxiii. 9). The term ‘Father’ expresses, not God’s
relation to some men, but something essential in His
being and universal in application. When St. John says
‘God is love’ (1 John iv. 8), he is condensing Christ’s
own teaching about God’s Fatherhood.

It is no real contradiction of this to say that our Lord
shows that some men do not appropriate this Fatherhood
of God. He never says ‘your Father’ except, when He
is addressing His actual disciples. And in Matt. v. 44,
45 the Greek word shows that it is necessary to imitate
God’s character if we are to become His sons :

‘ Love your enemies, and pray for them that perse¬
cute you ; that ye may become sons of your
Father which is in heaven.’

Once more St. John exactly reflects the teaching of
Jesus when he says : ‘ As many as received him, to them
gave he the right to become children of God, even to
them that believe on his name’ {John i. 12). To refuse
the life of love and to reject Jesus, is to forfeit the right
to be God’s child. To the Jews >vho were physically the
children of Abraham, but were not his true children
because of their hardened unbelief, our Lord says: ‘If
God were your Father, ye would love me’ {John viii. 42).
The passage means: You are not true sons of God, as

GOD THE FATHER 35

you claim to be, just as you are not true sons of
Abraham ; you have no love like God’s, and you have no
faith and do no works such as those of Abraham.

There is therefore a profound difference between the
sense in which God may be called the Father of all men,
and the sense in which He is the Father of those who
through Christ have become sons of God, and whose life
is controlled and blessed by their consciousness of His-
perfect love.

CHAPTER IV

our loro’s teaching about himself

< Who say ye that I am ? ’ Such was the solemn
question addressed by our Lord to St. Peter at a great
turning-point in His life and ministry. A right belief
in himself is the foundation of the Christian life, and
to be a Christian it is necessary to accept the central
fact in the mind of Jesus Christ, the truth that He was

the Son of God. . .

Indirect Teaching about himself. — We should hrst
notice that a great deal of our Lord’s teaching about
His Person and His authority is conveyed indirectly.
The actual titles which He applies to himself and those
which He accepts when they are applied to Him by others,
do not give us the whole clue to the mystery of His
being. His commandments, His actions, and even His
prayers, have to be studied if we are to know who He
was* and whence He came. There was great reserve in
His teaching about himself ; He only revealed him¬
self gradually, and yet He does not leave us in any un¬
certainty about himself. If we have understood the
startling difference between the righteousness that He
requires and all other forms of righteousness, and under¬
stood how much deeper His doctrine concerning God is
than that taught by others, we are already prepared for
something further. We are ready to believe that He
who taught in this unique manner had a . unique
personality. And from the first He made a claim upon
His hearers which one who was only a good man or a
areat prophet could not dare to make. In the Sermon
on the Mount He assumed that He would judge all men :
f Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we
not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast
out devils, and by thy name do many mighty
works? And then will I profess unto them, I
never knew you : depart from me, ye that work
iniquity ’ {Matt. vii. 22, 23).

Cor responding with this claim to judge the world there
36

OUR LORD’S TEACHING ABOUT HIMSELF 37

is His unqualified claim to set aside the ancient law —
f Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time . . .
but I say unto you’ {Matt. v. 33, 34). There is also His
claim upon man’s present allegiance — cIf any man
cometh unto me, and hateth not his own father, and
mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and
sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my
disciple’ {Luke xiv. 26). Side by side with this stern
saying we may set these words of divine consolation :
f Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest. Take my
yoke upon you, and learn of me : for I am
meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall f nd
rest unto your souls’ {Matt. xi. 28-30).

And His power both to judge and to console is to be
seen in the forgiveness which He personally gives to
those who need it. The Pharisees were offended because
He forgave the sins of a man who was paralysed. And
He went beyond all that we can conceive the holiest
human prophet saying when* He said of the sinful woman
who wept over His feet, f Her sins, which are many, are
forgiven ; for she loved much ’ {Luke vii. 47).

Our Lord as Prophet. — In the message of the Gospel
there flows the stream of ancient Jewish prophecy with
its stern moral requirements and message of sympathy
for all mankind. The stream which even in the prophets
was sometimes interrupted, is clear and unbroken in the
message of Christ. And His message, like that of the
old Hebrew prophets, contains predictions of God’s
action in the future.

The people recognised Jesus as a prophet. The
general judgment on Him at the beginning of His
ministry was that ‘a great prophet is arisen,’ and that
f God hath visited his people ’ {Luke vii. 16). So at the
close of His ministry the people declared, ‘This is the
prophet, Jesus, from Nazareth ’ {Matt. xxi. 11). And that
our Lord did in some sense claim the office of a Prophet
is shown by various passages. In the synagogue at
Nazareth He quotes and applies to himself the prophet’s
words, ‘ The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because
he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor’
{Isa. lxi. 1 ; Luke iv. 18). When His hearers were
offended at the difference which they noted between Him

38 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

and His humble family, He said, c A prophet is not
without honour, save in his own country, and in his own
house ’ {Matt. xiii. 58). And when His death was
imminent, He placed himself in the line of the prophets
of Israel, foretelling that, like them. He could perish in no
other place than Jerusalem {Luke xiii. 33). To His own
disciples and also to the multitude He appeared both as
Teacher or Rabbi, teaching deep moral and religious
truth, and as Prophet, announcing God’s judgments and
rewards. And He permitted himself to be addressed by
these titles. But He is Prophet in such a supreme and
final sense that He distinguishes himself from other
prophets in degree and kind. He says ‘ the law and the
prophets were until John’ {Luke xvi. 16). And He, who
expresses the Father perfectly, is above those funto
whom the word of God came’ {John x. 35).

Jesus as the Son of Man. — Our Lord’s favourite title for
himself was fthe Son of Man.’ It occurs 14 times in
St. Mark, 31 times in St. Matthew, 25 times in St. Luke,
and 12 times in St. John. -It cannot be disputed that
the title was really used by our Lord himself. It is
found in all the most primitive parts of the Gospels,
including the Discourses embedded in St. Matthew’s
Gospel, and the special material used only by St. Luke.
It is only found once in Acts (vii. 56), and twice in
Revelation. It never occurs in St. Paul, and is quite
rare in early Christian books later than his time. The
fact seems to be that it was only very imperfectly under¬
stood by Gentile Christians. Some modern critics have
held that even in the Gospels its presence is due to a
misunderstanding, the early Christians having translated
it into Greek from the Aramaic barnasha, which only
meant mankind, though its original literal meaning was
‘ son of man.’ These writers hold that our Lord did not
mean himself when He used the phrase, or that He did
not use it at all. Against this it can be successfully
maintained that the phrase is derived from the Hebrew
rather than from the Aramaic, and that the evidence for
its use by our Lord as a title for himself is over¬
whelming.

The Son of Man in Jewish literature. — In Ezekiel we
find an early use of the phrase, which here signifies man
as weak and creaturely.

OUR LORD’S TEACHING ABOUT HIMSELF 39

A more important use of the phrase is found in Psalm
viii. 4 :

‘ What is man that thou art mindful of him ?

And the son of man, that thou visitest him ?

For thou hast made him but little lower than the
angels,

And crownest him with glory and honour.’

In these words of the Psalmist the idea of man’s
humble dependence upon God is combined with the idea
of the high dignity which God has bestowed upon him.
A great destiny belongs to him in spite of his littleness.
A third and still more important passage is the vision in
Daniel vii. Here the prophet shows us the four great
empires of the ancient world, each represented as a beast
of prey, brought before God’s throne and deposed. Then
a fifth figure comes before God, ( like unto a son of man,’
i.e. like a man. This Figure is a personification of the
f saints of the Most High,’ i.e. a regenerate Israel. He
receives a kingdom which is eternal and does not pass
away like the empires of this world.

The next writing in which such a personification is
found is the Book of Enoch, a Jewish apocryphal book,
of which the part called the Similitudes was probably
written between b.c. 94 and b.c. 64. Here the judgment
scene of Daniel vii. is unfolded, and the Son of Man
who is seated by God on His own throne is the Messiah
who is appointed by God to judge the world.

The Son of Man therefore means The Man of super¬
natural authority, the Messiah who will judge, the
Messiah who will represent and, as it were, include His
people. Though He is human, He is more than human.
The title was not a common title for the Messiah at the
time of our Lord’s ministry. But it existed and was un¬
derstood by some of His hearers. And our Lord used it
to veil and suggest the doctrine of His Person, just as
He used the phrase f kingdom of God.’ The phrase was
old, but in wrapping it round His own Person He filled
it with new and nobler contents. In using it our Lord
added to it both a conception of higher dignity and power,
and a conception of deeper humiliation. With this
element of humiliation we must connect those features
of the Son of Man which recall the suffering Servant of
Jehovah in Isaiah, where this Servant performs the super-

40 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

natural work of atoning1 for human sin. A few passages
will illustrate the claims which this title involves :

1. It is used to teach that Jesus is himself the Judge
of all men, as — f When the Son of man shall come in his
glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit upon
the throne of his glory’ {Matt. xxv. 31). f The Father
gave him authority to execute judgement, because he is
the Son of man’ {John v. 27).

2. It is used in such a manner as to suggest that Jesus
represents mankind, and is in living relation to them, as
when fthe Son of man shall come in his glory’ and shall
say to those who have shown mercy to the hungry, the
stranger, and the naked, f Inasmuch as ye did it unto one
of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto
me’ {Matt. xxv. 31, 40). This use of the phrase may he
compared with the collective meaning which it has in
Daniel vii.

3. It is associated by our Lord with His sufferings and
death. For instance — f He began to teach them, that the
Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by
the elders, and the chief priests, and the scribes, and be
killed, and after three days rise again ’ {Mark viii. 31). It
should be noticed that the disciples did not easily under¬
stand that He would die, or see that the ‘ Son of man ’
was here a title equivalent to the suffering f Servant of
Jehovah’ in Isaiah. St. John’s Gospel agrees with this.
When our Lord said, fI, if I be lifted up from the earth,
will draw all men unto myself,5 the multitude answered,
f We have heard out of the law that the Christ abideth
for ever : and how sayest thou, The Son of man must be
lifted up? who is this Son of man?5 {John xii. 34). This
last verse is particularly important as proving that the
title did not clearly suggest Messiahship to the people.
To the group of verses which suggest the Servant of
Jehovah we must undoubtedly add the verse, fThe Son
of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister,
and to give his life a ransom for many ’ {Mark x. 45).

4. The remaining passages fall more or less under the
above divisions. Some assert His rights and dignity, as
f The Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins ’
{Mark ii. 10), and c The Son of man is lord even of the
Sabbath’ {Mark ii. 28). Others draw attention to His
lowliness and seem to command our reverent compassion.

OUR LORD’S TEACHING ABOUT HIMSELF 41

as, fThe Son of man hath not where to lay his head’
{Luke ix. 58), and f goeth [to death] even as it is written
of him’ {Mark xiv. 21). When we take these different
expressions together, we see that though they imply the
truly human nature of our Lord, they suggest that He
was far more than human. They show a relation between
Him and mankind which cannot be justified if He is not
divine.

Jesus as the Son of God. — Our Lord taught that He was
the Son of God. This phrase, like the phrase Son of
Man, is to be found in the Old Testament. It is applied
to the angels, also to the Hebrew nation, and to the
Israelite king. The prophet Nathan announcing God’s
promise concerning this king says, ‘ I will be his father,
and he shall be my son’ (2 Sam. vii. 14). We may com¬
pare with this verse another :

fThe Lord said unto me, Thou art my son ;

This day have I begotten thee.

Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine
inheritance.

And the uttermost parts of the earth for thy
possession’ {Psalm ii. 7, 8).

This psalm speaks of something higher and wider than a
human monarchy. The Jews undoubtedly interpreted it
to mean the Messiah and his reign, but when hard pressed
by Christian controversy they applied it to David. Thus
the title c Son of God,’ as used by the Jews, implied
special endowments and privileges conferred by God,
and was given by them to the divinely anointed I\ ing
whom they expected to come and reign over them. In
the later Jewish apocryphal books it means the Messiah
(2 Esdras vii. 28, 29).

The title, when first applied to our Lord by others,
probably had only this official sense of Messiah. Thus
the demoniacs address Him as the ‘ Son of God ’ or ‘ the
Son of the Most High God ’ {Mark iii. 11 ; v. 7)- Satan
also challenges Him to prove that He is the Son of God
by turning stones into bread {Matt. iv. 3). Jesus i&
addressed as having supernatural powers, such as
ordinary Jewish belief attributed to the Messiah.

The way in which the term is used in the Gospels by
those who are not His disciples, suggests some further
shades of meaning. At His trial the Jewish high priest

42 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

bade Him say whether He was or was not, ‘the Christ,
the Son of the Blessed ’ ( Mark xiv. 61, 62). Here, and
still more in the parallel verse in St. Luke (xxii. 70),
the title Son of God seems to imply something deeper
than the current use of the word Messiah, and to
approach the fuller meaning suggested in such Old
Testament passages as Isa. vii. 14 ; ix. 6 ; Micah v. 2 ;
Mai. iii. 1, where the representative of God brings God’s
presence in His own person. The murderers who told
Him to come down from the cross, if He was really ‘the
Son of God,’ and the Roman centurion who said, ‘Truly
this man was the Son of God ’ {Mark xv. 39), would
have used the phrase in different senses, according as
they were either heathens or, on the other hand, Jews
and proselytes. On their lips the words would mean a
demigod or the Messiah.

The name ‘Son of God’ as used by the disciples. — Per¬
haps the most important passage of this kind is St.
Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi. Jesus asked His
disciples, ‘ Who do men say that I the Son of Man am ? ’
and they quoted various opinions which show that in the
public opinion of Galilee He was at least a supernatural
personage. These opinions our Lord regards as inade¬
quate, and He asks, ‘ But who say ye that I am ? ’ Simon
Peter then replied, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
living God ’ {Matt. xvi. 16). This is a definite confession
that Jesus is the Messiah expected by the Jews, but it is
more than this. If St. Peter had only intended to con¬
fess that He was the Messiah, he would have been
drawing an obvious inference from what he already
knew. But because it is not an obvious inference but a
great act of inspired faith, our Lord blesses the speaker,
adding ‘ for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee,
but my Father which is in heaven.’ Another passage
which is less clear than St. Peter’s confession is the
confession of Nathanael when he was called by Jesus
early in His ministry. Nathanael exclaimed, ‘ Rabbi,
thou art the Son of God ; thou art King of Israel ’ {John
i. 49). It is probable that this early confession does not
imply more than a strong acknowledgment of His
Messiahship. Otherwise the words ‘Thou art King of
Israel ’ would seriously detract from the force of the
title. As it is, they simply explain it.

OUR LORD’S TEACHING ABOUT HIMSELF 43

What the title meant to our Lord. — At His Baptism,
and again at His Transfiguration, our Lord heard the
Father say the words,

‘ This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased ’ {Matt. iii. 17 ; xvii. 5).

At these two great events our Lord was fully con¬
scious of His entirely exceptional relationship to the
Father. He did not first become conscious of this
fact at His Baptism. He knew it clearly when at the
age of twelve He was found by His mother in His
‘ Father’s ’ house {Luke ii. 49). This sonship is im¬
plied in the accounts of His miraculous birth in St.
Matthew and St. Luke and in His direct assertions in
St. John. No book of the New Testament teaches that
Jesus became the Son of God at His Baptism or at any
period in His ministry. The consciousness that God was
His Father in a special sense lies at the root of His life.
But He is only once in the Synoptic Gospels directly
said to have used the title. And then it was the Jews
round His cross who said,

f He trusteth on God : let him deliver him now, if he
desireth him : for he said, I am the Son of
God ’ {Matt, xxvii. 43).

Even in St. John it is not often hinted that our Lord
directly used the title. But all this reticence is exactly
in accordance with our Lord’s whole method in advancing
His claims. He did not force men to believe ; He left
it possible for them to doubt. He meant their intellec¬
tual belief to advance with, and not independently of,
their moral growth. It is quite clear that all the time
He was assuming and suggesting this relationship of
nature to God. In the parable of the wise and foolish
virgins He is the Bridegroom, whom to follow is to
reach heaven {Matt. xxv. 6). He is the King’s Son for
whom the marriage feast is prepared {Matt. xxii. 2). In
the parable of the wicked husbandmen {Mark xii. 1-12)
He is the Son and Heir of God, absolutely distinct from
the Jewish prophets though their Successor. And when
the Scribes discussed with Him why David called the
Messiah ‘ Lord,’ His handling of the question proves
that He knew that while as the descendant of David He
was to that extent subordinate to David, He was also the
Lord of David because He was the divine Messiah.

44 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Further, our Lord, though He teaches that all men
may become the children of God, always makes a dis¬
tinction between His own sonship and that of His
disciples. He constantly calls God ‘My Father’ {Matt.
vii. 21; x. 32; xi. 27; xv. 13, etc.), and speaks to His
disciples about ‘Your Father.’ But He never calls God
‘Our Father’ except in the prayer which He taught to
His disciples in direct answer to their own request.
The unique character of His sonship is emphasised with
still greater force in the passages where He speaks of
himself simply as ‘the Son.’ Thus St. Mark records a
saying in which our Lord places ‘ the Son ’ apart in the
matter of His knowledge. Speaking of the day of judg¬
ment our Lord says,

‘ But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not
even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but
the Father’ {Mark xiii. 32).

But the most intimate relationship between our Lord
and the Father which we find mentioned in the Synoptic
Gospels is probably that implied in Matt. xi. 27-30, and
xxviii. 19, 20. In the former Jesus says,

‘All things have been delivered unto me of my
Father : and no one knoweth the Son, save the
Father ; neither doth any know the Father,
save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son
willeth to reveal him. Come unto me, all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn
of me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart : and
ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my
yoke is easy, and my burden is light. ’

In the latter passage He says,

‘Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the
nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost :
teaching them to observe all things whatsoever
I commanded you : and lo, I am with you alway,
even unto the end of the world.’

Here our Lord not only inserts His own name between
that of the Father and the Holy Spirit, but also promises
that like the Father He wiil be with His disciples
always. He is, in fact, omnipresent. And in saying
this He is repeating in another form what He had previ-

OUR LORD’S TEACHING ABOUT HIMSELF 45

ously promised when He said, c Where two or three are
gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst
of them ’ {Matt, xviii. 20).

It is most important to observe that though our Lord s
declaration of His Divinity is most plain in St. John’s
Gospel, His most absolute claims upon man are not made
in that Gospel but in those of St. Matthew and St. Luke.
And the earlier Gospels imply the doctrine declared in
St. John. If the statements of the former with regard
to Christ’s Person are true, the statements of the latter
cannot be false.

The Doctrine of Christ’s Divinity in St. John. — Through¬
out the Gospel according to St. John, there are two
great rivers of teaching which flow from the same throne
of God. In the first we find reflected our Lord’s depend¬
ence upon the Father, in the second we find the unity of
His Being with that of the Father. f I can of myself
do nothing’ ; ‘I seek not mine own will, but the will of
him that sent me’ {John v. 30); (l am come in my
Father’s name’ {John v. 43), are instances of this intimate
dependence upon God. But the dependence is not the
dependence of a creature upon his Creator, but of an
almighty Son upon an almighty Father. Jesus plainly
co-ordinates His work writh that of the father when
He commands an impotent man to carry his bed on
the Sabbath day, and says, f My Father worketh even
until now, and I work’ {John v. 17). While the Father
works, the Son works, doing good on the Sabbath no less
than other days. He teaches that there is a union not
only of co-operation, but also of actual essence, in the
passage where He says, f I and the Father are one thing’
{John x. 30).

A passage where our Lord’s teaching about himself is
sometimes misinterpreted is John x. 34 ff. It is some¬
times supposed that our Lord in there calling himself
( Son of God,’ puts himself on the same level as the
inspired judges of Israel who are called f gods’ in
P.v. lxxxii. 6, claiming merely to be the bearer of a
divine message. This misinterpretation overlooks the
conclusion of our Lord’s argument, and thereby misses
the whole meaning. The Jews accuse Him of blasphemy,
that is, the sin of using profane words. Our Lord
replies that His words are not, even according to their

46 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

own standard, blasphemous. He had called himself
Son of God ; whereas those who were entrusted with a
much lower office are in the Old Testament called
f gods.’ Having showed that He had not sinned in word.
He turns to the question of His deeds. He appeals to
His beneficent and marvellous works as an actual proof
that there is an essential unity between himself and the
Father. His works are divine, therefore His Person is
divine. The Jews perfectly understood His argument,
and saw, what some modern writers have failed to see,
that He had repeated His claim to a real Divinity,
neither titular nor otiose.

Nothing that speaks concerning Jesus anything lower
than the language of the Nicene Creed will satisfy the
Christian who has grasped our Lord’s teaching in St.
John’s Gospel. Christ teaches that He existed before
He came into the world : fl came out from the Father,
and am come into the world : again, I leave the world,
and go unto the Father’ {John xvi. 28). The same
thing is implied in the prayer: f Glorify thou me
. . . with the glory which I had with thee before the
world was’ {John xvii. 5). Another saying of Jesus,
f Verily, verily, I say unto you. Before Abraham was, I
am ’ {John viii. 58), expresses the truth that He is an
eternal being. The words f Verily, verily,’ show the
solemnity of the announcement which is about to be
made, and the words f I am ’ (see Exodus iii. 14) signify
an existence which is not subject to change. When
St. Thomas, the last of the eleven apostles who believed,
said c My Lord, and my God ’ {John xx. 28), his adoring
confession was accepted by Jesus. St. John’s Gospel
shows that our Lord claimed to be essentially divine,
an eternal Person, a conclusion to which the Synoptic
Gospels inevitably point us. Even if the fourth Gospel
could be blotted out as a forgery, no other conclusion
would satisfy a religion based on the first three Gospels.
And if the fourth Gospel is genuine, as we have excellent
reasons for believing, we cannot think that its picture
of Christ is false. If Jesus was only human, then to
represent Him as God would have been equally incon¬
sistent with any true reverence for God and any loyal
affection for a human friend. The writer was no half¬
pagan Greek, who felt able to pay divine honours to a

OUR LORD’S TEACHING ABOUT HIMSELF 47

human saint or hero, but a man who served one God
only, the ‘ jealous’ God of Israel who would not allow
His honour to be paid to others. And his Gospel is a
perpetual witness to the historical fact that Jesus was
not turned into a god by the enthusiasm of ignorant
followers, but that He was God’s expression of himself,
God expressed in human nature and human life.

We may end this chapter by stating briefly what
religious value these titles of our Lord have, and will
continue to have, for mankind.

1. The title ‘Son of Man’ reminds us of His readiness
to minister and to die for the good of men, and it
reminds us of His return to judge the world. It tells us
of a great love freely olfered to us, and the responsibility
that we incur by refusing it. It tells us of His suffering
for our transgressions, and it tells us that He will judge
us according to our deeds. But it also speaks of His
‘infinite sense of brotherhood with toiling and suffering
humanity,’ the sympathy of Him who came ‘to seek and
to save that which was lost ’ ( Luke xix. 10).

2. The title ‘Christ/ though so Jewish in its origin, is
not a name which the Gentile Christian can neglect. In
its simplest meaning of ‘the Anointed One’ it tells us
of that special indwelling of the Holy Spirit which
inspired all the life of Jesus, and enabled Him to do and
suffer more than any other member of our race. Besides
this, the name ‘ Christ’ tells us of the place of the Jews
in God’s plan of redemption. The Jews were, as St.
Athanasius said, ‘the school of the knowledge of God
for the world.’ This small people had a greatness that
belonged to no great heathen empire. For through a
series of unique difficulties, and amid conditions which
were unfavourable to the rapid growth of civilisation,
the Jews did by their creed, their worship, and their
writings, proclaim the Christ to be.

3. The title ‘ Son of God, ’ when understood in the
light of our Lord’s claim upon our souls, is the most
distinctive and most important truth of our religion.
God, the eternal Son, has come to us as man, the man
Christ Jesus. Under essentially human conditions and
experiences we see in Jesus God made manifest. The
everlasting and completely perfect expression of the
Father lived as Man among men. In the midst of

48 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

human humiliation and human sorrow, chosen for our
sake, we see God exercising His highest attribute of love.
It is this proof of God’s sympathy with us that not only
draws men back to God, but gives us a new knowledge
of what our life ought to be. We know nothing in the
nature of God or the nature of man which renders it
impossible for a divine Being to lead a human life and
pass through true human experiences. And a study of
the life and teaching of Jesus in a spirit of moral
sympathy leads us to the necessity of seeing in Jesus
the supreme act of God in humanity. W e find in Him a
true human activity, and yet in Him God comes to us,
and through Him God is in us. If the human experi¬
ences and sufferings of our Lord veil His Deity, it is
nevertheless within those very experiences that we find
that Deity. They are the mightiest work that God has
done on our behalf.

CHAPTER V

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Importance of this doctrine. — One of the most central
thoughts in the teaching of our Lord is that of the king¬
dom of God. It dominates so much of His doctrine, and
stands in such close connection with the doctrine of His
Person, that we cannot understand the Gospels if we
leave it on one side. In the prayer which Jesus taught,
the words, fthy kingdom come, thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven, are placed near the beginning
of the prayer as part of that which ought to be the
Christian s first desire. Christ himself, according to St.
Mark (i. 15), began the preaching of the Gospel by
saying, fThe time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God
is at hand.’ St. Matthew (iv. 23) also describes the
opening of Christ’s ministry in Galilee as f preaching the
gospel of the kingdom.’ St. Luke (iv. 43) represents
our Lord as saying, el must preach the good tidings of
the kingdom of God to the other cities also : for there-
foie was I sent. St. John shows that our Lord regarded
the kingdom of God as a state of blessing and perfection,
for he records His saying to Nicodemus, f Except a man
be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
kingdom of God ’ ( John iii. 5).

What is this kingdom? The title f kingdom of God’
is used by St. Mark and St. Luke. But St. Matthew
uses it only in two passages (xii. 28 ; xxi. 31, 43), re¬
placing it as a rule by the title f kingdom of heaven.’ It
is possible that this means heavenly or divine kingdom,
but it is more probable that it means exactly the same as
‘ kingdom of God,’ for the Jews out of reverence for the
name of ‘ God ’ sometimes replaced it by the word
‘ heaven. ’ In either case the idea is substantially the
same. It means a kingdom, or more accurately a reign,
which is the reign of God, its laws being the will of God.

The kingdom of God in the Old Testament.— The Jews
Mere familiar with the idea; and indeed whoever could

D

50 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

speak with power about the kingdom of God struck a
note which roused the hope and enthusiasm of almost
every Jewish soul.

The actual name ‘ kingdom of God’ does not occur
in the Old Testament, but the idea which it expresses
penetrated the whole of Judaism. After the Covenant
had been made between God and Israel at Sinai, the
Israelites regarded themselves as peculiarly His people.
Scruples were actually felt as to the propriety of
having any earthly king (1 Sam. viii. 4-9), but the earthly
king when chosen was looked upon as a representative
and vice-gerent of God. A deep undying hope existed in
the people’s mind that the words of Nathan to David
would be fulftlled, and that David would always be
represented by a descendant whose throne would be
established for ever, whom God would chastise if he com¬
mitted iniquity, but who would be regarded by God as
His son (2 Sam. vii. 13). The writings of the prophets
overflow with this hope. It animated Isaiah, Micah,
Jeremiah, Zephaniah, and Zechariah. In Daniel vii.
this hope, which had become both a creed and a poem, is
presented in the form of a vision. Daniel represents the
four empires hostile to Israel, that of Nebuchadnezzar,
the Medes, Alexander the Great, and the Syrians, as
successively losing their power before the appearance of
God upon His throne of judgment. Then he adds —

f Behold, there came with the clouds of heaven,
one like unto a son of man, and he came even
to the ancient of days [God], and they brought
him near before him. And there was given
him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that
all the peoples, nations, and languages should
serve him : his dominion is an everlasting
dominion, which shall not pass away, and his
kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.’
Daniel seems to teach that when God judges the world,
the resurrection will take place and the saints will live
for ever. The ‘ one like unto a son of man ’ is a symbol
of the faithful remnant of Israelites, the saints who
shall receive the kingdom (vii. 18). And as the other
empires are literal earthly empires, it is at least possible
that Daniel means that the kingdom of the saints is to
be a kingdom here upon earth.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD 51

The kingdom of God in Aprocryphal Books. — During the
later period of Judaism, when the Jews were oppressed
in turn by the Greeks, by Antiochus Epiphanes and by
the Romans, many looked forward eagerly tojthe judg¬
ment of God and the coming of the Messiah. Numerous
writings were composed to sustain this faith. Such were
the Book of Enoch, written at different periods subse¬
quent to b. c. 133, the Psalms of Solomon soon after b.c.
63, the Assumption of Moses written about the beginning
of the Christian era, and the more familiar Wisdom of
Solomon, written in the last century before that era.
This literature is sometimes definitely apocalyptic. That
is to say, it contains revelations or visions of the coming
glorious time when God will show himself and enable
the Jews to throw off the yoke of their oppressors. In
these apocalyptic pictures the Messiah frequently appears.
Thus the Psalms of Solomon (xvii. 3-5) says, ‘We hope
in God our Saviour, and the kingdom of our God is for
ever and ever over the nations, by the judgment of God.
Thou, Lord, hast chosen David king of Israel, and thou
hast sworn to his race for ever and ever not to permit
his kingdom to perish before Thee. ’ The dreams of these
non-canonical apocalyptic books tend to assume a very
nationalist and political character. They both systema¬
tise and secularise the ancient hope for the reign of God.
We find clear traces of this political element in the New
Testament even among the most devout Israelites.
Zacharias thinks of deliverance from the yoke of the
Gentiles as necessary for the true service of God ( Luke i.
74), and it was with the greatest difficulty that the dis¬
ciples rid themselves of the thought of an earthly political
kingdom.

Nevertheless, holier and calmer thoughts were enter¬
tained. In the Wisdom of Solomon (x. 10) the name
1 kingdom of God ’ occurs. It means the heaven shown
to Jacob when he dreamed of the ladder on which angels
ascended and descended. And in the same book it is
said that the f righteous live for ever, and in the Lord is
their reward, and the care for them with the Most High.
Therefore shall they receive the crown of royal dignity
and the diadem of beauty from the Lord’s hand’ (v. 15,
16).^ And again it is said that f the souls of the righteous
are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.

o2 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

. . . They shall judge nations, and have dominion over
peoples ; and the Lord shall reign over them for ever¬
more’ (iii. 1, 8). This kingdom begins already in the
heart of the righteous :

f For even if we sin, we are thine, knowing thy
dominion ; but we shall not sin, knowing that
we have been accounted thine: For to be ac¬
quainted with thee is perfect righteousness, and
to know thy dominion is the root of immortality ’
(xv. 2, 3).

The texts just quoted are written in the true spirit of
the Psalmist, who sees the Lord reign in all His provid¬
ence and goodness :

{ The Lord is good to all ;

And his tender mercies are over all his works.

All thy works shall give thanks unto thee, O Lord,
And thy saints shall bless thee.

They shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom.

And talk of thy power ;

To make known to the sons of men his mighty acts.
And the glory of the majesty of his kingdom.

Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,

And thy dominion endureth throughout all genera¬
tions ’ (Ps. cxlv. 9fL).

The kingdom is spiritual. — ‘My kingdom is not of
this world ’ ( John xviii. 36). The kingdom of God which
He has entrusted to the hands of His Son is not political.
None of the political revenges and none of the national
enjoyments which the Pharisees and the Zealots expected
are promised by Jesus. He has been charged in modern
times with not stimulating commerce or invention or the
‘ liberal arts.’ And His contemporaries were dissatisfied
because He refused to be made a king ( John vi. 15). At
the beginning of His ministry, and possibly at later
times, He was tempted to take up the part of a national¬
ist Messiah. And He refused, although the refusal
meant poverty and death. We are told how from an
exceeding high mountain He saw ‘ all the kingdoms of
the world, and the glory of them’ {Matt. iv. 8). From
the top of Jebel-es-Sikh, to the north of Nazareth, He
probably saw with outward eyes a vast panorama stretch¬
ing into the pagan world. On one side were the rich
corn-lands of Esdraelon. Below His feet were the roads

THE KINGDOM OF GOD 53

from Egypt and Jerusalem with passing caravans of
merchants. To the north lay the road between Decapolis
and the coast. There He might see the gleam of march¬
ing Roman legions. And far away, there was the bright
sea and the ships laden with foreign cargoes. Satan
made His thoughts an avenue of cruel temptation : ‘ All
these things M ill I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and
worship me/ And Jesus effaced the vision of worldly
glory from His mind and chose the vision of sorrow. To
the vision of His Father’s will He was consistently obe¬
dient. Shortly before His death the Pharisees and the
Herodians deliberately tried to discover whether He was
endeavouring to secure an earthly Messianic throne.
They asked Him, with every show of outward respect for
His learning and courage, whether it was lawful to give
tribute to Cresar or not ( Mark xii. 13 ff.). The question
was a test question, for the right to make money or levy
tribute was a prerogative of the crown. Consequently,
the Jewish false Messiah Bar-Cocliba in a.d. 134 struck
his own coin and forbade the circulation of Roman
money. But Jesus simply replied, ‘ Render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that
are God’s/ His vocation was not to deprive Caesar of his
tribute but to vindicate God’s claim upon the human
soul.

He also struck at all political conceptions of His
kingdom when He told His disciples to ‘beware of the
leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod/ They were to
follow the example of neither the rigorous Jewish
separatists, who wished to see every detail of the law ob¬
served in a new Jerusalem miraculously created, nor the
cultured prince who tinctured a life of diplomacy and
vice with an interest in theology. In both there was a
strong element of cunning. Herod was ‘that fox’ and
the Pharisees were his equal. The empire which Christ
came to found was not one which sought to gain or to
dispose of earthly territories and thrones, and it excludes
cunning. It knows no statecraft but truth and justice.
It was part of the brilliant cunning of the opponents of
Jesus that they persuaded Pilate to condemn Him to
death on the ground that His kingdom was of this world
and that He was politically dangerous. For their objec¬
tion to Him was not that He claimed to be a political

54 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Messiah, but a heavenly Messiah in closest union with
Jehovah. To a Roman sceptic the claim of Jesus to be
t the Son of the Blessed One/ who would one day appear
on the clouds of heaven, could be little more than a harm¬
less fairy tale. But it meant very much indeed to Pilate
that the leading Jews represented Jesus as threatening
the public peace by usurping an outward political
sovereignty. Whether he believed the Jews or not, he
acted upon their suggestion and condemned our Lord to
death.

The kingdom opposed to the power of Satan. — The
kingdom or rule of God excludes and overthrows the
work of Satan. In the teaching of Jesus evil spirits have
not the exaggerated power which they bear in the child¬
ish and fantastic legends of later Judaism. But they
are recognised as spirits, and as ‘ unclean ’ {Matt. xii. 43 ;
Luke xi. 24). Jesus casts them out, and a distinction is
drawn between the expelling of such spirits and the mere
healing of diseases {Matt. x. 8 ; Luke xiii. 32). At the
head of these spirits is Satan, the adversary, also called
the Devil or calumniator. He is a ‘ prince ’ {John xiv. 30),
with a kingdom {Matt. xii. 26), which is an organised rule
opposed to the rule of God. He is in a special sense the
Enemy {Luke x. 19), he sows tares in the field where
Jesus sows good seed {Matt. xiii. 39), and he strove to
‘ sift ’ the apostles f as wheat ’ {Luke xxii. 31). The
Saviour who does not struggle against the power of Rome
struggles against ftlie power of darkness.’ And when
the seventy disciples returned with joy, saying, c Lord,
even the devils are subject unto us in thy name,’ He
said, ( I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven ’
{Luke x. 18). He appealed to His power of casting out
devils as a proof that the kingdom of God had already
come :

‘If I by the Spirit of God cast out devils, then is the
kingdom of God come upon you ’ {Matt. xii. 28).
Now, it may be urged that in certain cases our Lord
conformed His language to the language of the period,
and did not pause to discuss whether certain strange
mental diseases were or were not due to the evil spirits
to which popular belief attributed such maladies. For
instance, the last passage quoted above is adapted to the
exact language used by the Pharisees just previously.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

55

But it does not seem open to dispute that He did mean
to teach that there is a force outside us, not ourselves,
which tempts us to evil and strives to thwart the work of
God. And the victory which He gained over that power
at His first great temptation brought with it the possi¬
bility and the guarantee of all future victories.

The kingdom a gift of God to man. — The preaching and
the appearance of the kingdom of God are new facts in
history. They are not a revival of a forgotten righteous¬
ness, but a new favour from God. All wise men
regard freedom as a blessing and a gift, but the Gospel
reminds us that God’s sovereignty over man brought by
His Son is itself God’s gift and the security for our
freedom. The kingdom is said to ‘ come,’ to f be at
hand,’ to e draw nigh.’ It is ‘ prepared’ by God and
‘ inherited ’ {Matt. xxv. 34). It is f given ’ by God to the
Gentiles after having been misused by the Jews {Matt.
xxi. 43) ; and in a passage where He encourages con¬
fidence in God, Jesus says :

‘ Fear not, little flock ; for it is your Father’s good
pleasure to give you the kingdom ’ {Luke xii. 32).
As it is a gift bestowed, so it is f received’ :

( Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God
as a little child, he shall in no wise enter there¬
in ’ {Mark x. 15).

At the same time we must remember that every gift
of God to man, every privilege granted, demands a moral
effort on man’s side. Faith is not faith if it is a passive
acquiescence. God’s kingdom comes through the doing
by men of the will of God as it is done in heaven. It
cannot be appropriated without effort and self-renuncia¬
tion. To f seek ’ implies trouble, and to c sell ’ everything
for the sake of the Kingdom implies self-denial :

fThe kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant
seeking goodly pearls ; and having found one
pearl of great price, he went and sold all that
he had and bought it’ {Matt. xiii. 45 f.).

God’s purpose for us is fulfilled by our own co¬
operation. And St. Paul understood the true place
of human effort when he wrote, ‘ Work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling ; for it is God which
worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good
pleasure’ {Phil. ii. 12, 13).

56 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

The kingdom tooth present and future. — The kingdom
of God is both present and future. That is to say, it
was present in the world when Jesus taught and worked,
and it is not a rule which will be first inaugurated at His
second coming. Its full realisation is in the future,
but it came among men in the actual Person of our Lord.
It is also important to notice that the future is divided
into the near, the distant, and the more distant future.
The first of these three future periods is that which
immediately followed the Ascension and the descent of
the Holy Spirit ; the second cannot be sharply divided
from the first but begins after the destruction of
Jerusalem in a.t>. 70 and the liberation of the Church
from its national Jewish centre ; the third begins at the
last judgment.

If we bear in mind this complex nature of the kingdom
we shall easily avoid falling into the perplexity which is
often caused by the question ‘ Is the kingdom eschato¬
logical, or is it not ? ’ The word f eschatological’ is applied
to all those ‘last things’ which the Jews expected to
happen at the end of the world ; such as the coming of
the Messiah, the defeat and judgment of His enemies, and
the beginning of the reign of the saints. But the Jews
themselves were not agreed as to the order of these
events. Some believed that the reign of the Messiah
would not begin until after the judgment; others believed
that He would conquer His enemies and begin His reign
some time before the judgment. It is the latter belief
which is nearer to the teaching of our Lord. He trans¬
formed it just as He transformed every other Jewish
belief which He brought into connection with His own
mission. But He did not postpone either the kingdom
or the rule of God (in the New Testament the same word
fiacriXela means both) until the time of His second
coming. The kingdom came into the world as a hope
for the future, but wherever Jesus went the hope
became an actual reality.

(«) The kingdom is present. The preaching of Jesus
begins with the words, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the
kingdom of God is at hand ’ ( Mark i. 15). The old era is
therefore finished and a new era begins. So too the
passage already quoted above implies that Satan ‘the
strong man’ is already being bound :

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

57

( If 1 by the Spirit of God cast out devils, then is
the kingdom of God come upon you. Or how
can one enter into the house of the strong man,
and spoil his goods, except he first bind the
strong man?’ (Matt. xii. 28 = Luke xi. 20).

Jesus exhorts His hearers 4to seek first God’s kingdom
and His righteousness, which implies that both the
kingdom and the righteousness are present and ac¬
cessible (Matt. vi. 33). He also in speaking of John the
Baptist, says,

c Among them that are born of women there hath
not arisen a greater than John the Baptist; yet
he that is but little in the kingdom of heaven
is greater than he. And from the days o.f John
the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven
suffereth violence, and men of violence take it
by force’ (Matt. xi. 11 f.).

Moreover, the parables of the Sower, the Tares, the
Mustard Seed, and the Leaven, all imply that the kingdom
is a present reality. They are certainly intended to
convey other truths, such as the need of receiving the
word rightly, the danger caused by the f Enemy,’ the
rapid growth of the kingdom, and the deeply penetrating
influence which it exercises. 1 he c word of the kingdom ’
plants the kingdom on earth, and as soon as the word
uttered by Jesus is received the kingdom exists in germ.

(b) The kingdom belongs to the near future. It is a
f far-off divine^ event,’ but yet our Lord said, f Verily I
say unto you. There be some here of them that stand by,
which shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the
kingdom of God come with power ’ (Mark ix. 1). St.
Matthew in the parallel passage says, ^ till they see the
Son of man coming in his kingdom ’ (xvi. 28). Which¬
ever of the two verses most accurately represents our
Lord’s own words, a contrast is implied between the king¬
dom as now seen in feebleness, and as it will be seen in its
true vigour after the death and resurrection of Jesus.
This coming of the kingdom in power is itself a coming of
the Lord. St. John, who so often enables us to under¬
stand the earlier Gospels better, tells us how our Lord
promised to come to His disciples in order that they
might not be desolate or f orphaned ’ by His ascension
into heaven. fI come unto you. Yet a little while.

58 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

and the world beholdeth me no more, but ye behold me
(John xiv. 19). They needed a lasting present com¬
munion with Him, and He promised to give it. He
comes not only to impart life, but also to execute judg¬
ment. And it is probably of the judgment executed in
the destruction of Jerusalem that He spoke when He said :

‘ Verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone
through the cities of Israel, till the Son of man
be come ’ (Matt. x. 28).

By this destruction the kingdom of God will be taken
away from the Jews and given to ‘a nation biinging
forth the fruits thereof’ (Matt. xxi. 43). The conversion
of the Gentiles will therefore lead to the development of
the kingdom of God. lhis development is like the
growth of the ‘ blade into the ‘ ear and the full coin
in the ear ’ (Mark iv. 28).

(c) The evolution is to end with a revolution. VV e
must postpone until Chapter x. a fuller account of the
final realisation of the kingdom. The kingdom of God
will be consummated at Christ’s second coming. It
belongs both to the Father and to the Son, and to the
servants of the Son to whom He will say :

f Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom
prepared for you from the foundation of the
world ’ (Matt. xxv. 34).

So when we pray, ‘thy kingdom come,’ we are pray¬
ing not only for God’s glory, but for a glory of which
He condescends to make us heirs.

The disciples are not to be impatient for any coming
of Christ. ‘ The days will come, when ye shall desire to
see one of the days of the Son of man, and ye shall not
see it’ (Luke xvii. 22). ‘God,’ as St. Augustine says,
‘is patient because He is eternal.’ And the Christian
must wait, watch, and work.

The kingdom is universal. — The kingdom, wherein all
are free, is free to all. It was not to be a nationalist
kingdom either for the Jews or for any other race. Our
Lord in teaching thus simply annihilated the fiercely
patriotic dreams of the ordinary Jewish apocalypses.
This universal character of the kingdom seems at first
sight to be contradicted by the severe words spoken
by Jesus to test the faith of the Canaanitish woman,
and the words which He spoke just previously to His

59

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

disciples, 4 I was not sent but unto the lost sheep of
the house of Israel ’ (Matt. xv. 24). It also seems to be
contradicted by the express manner in which Jesus for¬
bade the twelve apostles at the beginning of their
ministry to go into any 4 way of the Gentiles ’ (Matt. x. 5).
But His principle is clear. The mission that He claimed
for himself during His earthly ministry was limited ;
the mission that He claimed for His Gospel was un¬
bounded. It was His deliberate wish to travel unknown
at the time when the Canaanitish woman sought His help
(Mark vii. 24). He did in exceptional cases help the
Gentiles ; but His method was to work upon a small
circle of thoroughly Jewish disciples and through them
send the Gospel to the world as soon as there was a full
Gospel to preach.

When our Lord had died and risen again, the Gospel
which tells men that the remission of their sins is offered
to them by God was ready to be preached. Then, and
not till then, did our Lord give His apostles a world¬
wide commission :

4 Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the
nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost ’
(Matt, xxviii. 19).

But He had before this prepared them for this work
among the Gentiles. He had told His disciples that they
were 4 the salt of the earth ’ and 4 the light of the world,’
not merely the salt and the light of Judaism (Matt. v.
13 f.). The truth that the Gospel was to be carried to the
Gentiles is woven into the fabric of His parables, such as
that of the Barren Fig-tree (Luke xiii. 6-9), the Great
Supper (Luke xiv. 15-24), the Royal Wedding (Matt.
xxii. 1-14), the Two Sons (Matt. xxi. 28-32). And
early in our Lord’s ministry when He healed the servant
of the centurion at Capernaum, He rewarded the
centurion’s exquisite humility and robust confidence
with a great prophecy :

4 Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great
faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you,
that many shall come from the east and the
west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and
Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven :
but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast forth

CO THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

into the outer darkness : there shall be the
weeping and gnashing of teeth ’ {Matt. viii. Ilf.).

The kingdom both inward and outward. — It is certain
that the kingdom is presented to us as an inward power
within the soul. Some scholars believe there is a clear
proof of this in this passage :

f And being asked by the Pharisees, when the
kingdom of God cometh, he answered them and
said, The kingdom of God cometh not with
observation : neither shall they say, Lo, here !
or, There ! for lo, the kingdom of God is within
you ’ {Lake xvii. 20 f.).

Unfortunately the Greek words for e within you’ are
ambiguous, and may mean fin your midst.’ This trans¬
lation gives a good sense. The kingdom is already
there, because Jesus is there, although the Pharisees do
not recognise its coming. We can compare with this
the rebuke addressed by our Lord to the multitudes in
Luke xii. 54. They can interpret correctly the signs of
the weather in earth and sky, they know when rain or
heat are coming, but they cannot interpret the plain
signs of the spiritual change which is being inaugurated.
The first stage of the kingdom is not inaugurated by the
portents, wars and catastrophes which the Pharisees
expected, but by the life of Jesus and those whom He
converts. The good scribe who was fnot far from the
kingdom of God ’ {Mark xii. 34), and those on whom the
beatitudes of Christ are pronounced, show us that the
kingdom is in its essence inward and unseen. f Blessed
are the poor in spirit : for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven’ {Matt. v. 3).

But the kingdom of God is also outward. All spiritual
forces among men must have an outward form, and this
form is a channel and instrument of the inward power.
A treasure of gold may be hidden in an earthen vessel
which merely keeps the treasure together and is no
index to the nature of the treasure. But man’s spiritual
treasure is a life which cannot be kept unless it is able
to expand. The kingdom of God beginning as the
divine rule in the heart, must outwardly manifest itself
in an organised society which passes through a history
of its own. It is impossible not to recognise in the
parable of the tares a reference to the future existence

Cl

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

of the Christian Church in the world. The tares are
sown after the wheat and among the wheat. The
kingdom is that part of the world’s field where the good
seed has been sown by the Son of Man, a part where good
and evil grow together until the end, when the angels
f shall gather out of his kingdom all things that cause
stumbling ’ {Matt. xiii. 41). The kingdom is also a drag¬
net which gathers every kind of fish, good and bad.
That is to say, it is an instrument accomplishing God’s
purpose of saving men, securing even many who will
ultimately be rejected, as well as those who will be
ultimately accepted {Matt. xiii. 47).

The kingdom therefore consists of persons who are
visibly connected with one another. Among these
persons there are differences of rank, for he that is
f but little in the kingdom of heaven ’ is greater than
the Baptist {Matt. xi. 11). Emulation is not unlawful.
But it must be emulation not for office, but for service :
•'Whosoever would become great among you shall be
your minister ; and whosoever would be first among
you shall be your servant’ {Matt. xx. 20). It is a
society of brothers {Matt, xxiii. 8), and it will be the
duty of St. Peter to Establish’ his brethren after his
repentance {Luke xxii. 32). The kingdom of heaven,
of which St. Peter received the keys, must necessarily
have a visible outward form, it must be a society to
which men can be admitted and from which they can
be excluded. To this society Christ gives the name of
‘ my Church ’ :

fThou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build
my church : and the gates of Hades shall not
prevail against it. I will give unto thee the
keys of the kingdom of heaven : and whatso¬
ever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound
in heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt loose on
earth shall be loosed in heaven ’ {Matt. xvi. 18 f.).

The kingdom of Jesus. — The kingdom of God is also
the kingdom of His Son, who founds and administers
it. He definitely calls His own the kingdom where He
has sown the good seed {Matt. xiii. 41). In heaven the
kingdom has been received by Him since He departed
from this world {Luke xix. 12). He promises to come
in His kingdom in the lifetime of His disciples {Matt.

62 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

xvi. 28). And when He tells Pilate c my kingdom is
not of this world, He shows that the heavenly kingdom
is His own {John xviii. 86). He is himself fthe King’
who shall judge the nations at the last day {Matt. xxv.
84), and the faithful disciples shall feat and drink at
my table in my kingdom * {Luke xxii. 30). The king¬
dom of the Son, as a kingdom of a saving redemptive
character, will then have terminated. The mediatorial
work of the King will be completed. It will end when,
as St. Paul says, ‘ he shall deliver up the kingdom to
God, even the Father’ (1 Cor. xv. 24).

Can we define the kingdom? — The kingdom of God
is a power of such wideness and complexity that no
exact definition is possible. We have seen that it
expresses the highest good for man. It is both a sphere
of life, and a society of persons. It is both the influence
of God within the soul here and now, and His reign of
perfect righteousness and joy hereafter. In our Lord’s
teaching on the subject there is infinite variety, but no
contradiction. It is the reign of God in the hearts and
conduct of His children, a reign which was embodied in
the whole character of Jesus Christ, which has expanded
in the life of the Church, and will be perfected at the
second coming of our Lord.

CHAPTER VI

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD — I

The worth of a soul. — To understand what kind of right¬
eousness is necessary in the kingdom of God, we must
understand on what that righteousness is founded. It
is founded on the truth that God is our Father, and that
God values every human soul. Even this does not
express the matter fully enough. It is more just to
say that God values and loves every single life . Our
Lord healed men’s bodies as well as the bruised spirit,
and taught us that our bread and our clothing are God’s
concern. Never before in the history of the world was
such reverence shown towards man, woman, and child,
as was shown by Jesus Christ. He proclaimed that
little children have a right to be respected and a right
to the good things of the kingdom :

f And they brought unto him little children, that
he should touch them : and the disciples re¬
buked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was
moved with indignation, and said unto them.
Suffer the little children to come unto me ;
forbid them not ; for of such is the kingdom
of God. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall
not receive the kingdom of God as a little
child, he shall in no wise enter therein. And
he took them in his arms, and blessed them,
laying his hands upon them’ {Mark x. 13-16).
And again —

f See that ye despise not one of these little ones ;
for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels
do always behold the face of my Father which
is in heaven’ {Matt, xviii. 10).

Not only then has the soul of a child the same right
of access to God as the soul of a man, but the man must
learn something from the child. The Christian is not
required to live in an intellectual doll’s house. The

63

«4 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

man is to ‘put away childish things/ But he is to keep
and cultivate those qualities of trustfulness in God, of
purity and humility, which lead us to see what is most
true and beautiful.

Women aie also called to a position which the civilisa¬
tion of the ancient world did not win for them. In fact
it can be fairly maintained that increased culture in
Greece, Rome, and India, lowered rather than raised
the position of women. Our Lord treated them as
spiritually the equals of man. And St. Luke, who
seems to have depended for part of his narrative on
the evidence supplied by Joanna, the wife of Cliuza,
delicately gives prominence to women in his Gospel.
Jesus sometimes made His home in the house of Lazarus
and his sister Martha, and his other sister Mary, who
chose ‘the good part, which shall not be taken away
*rom her (Luke x. 42). Such were the little group of
women who followed Him and ‘ ministered unto him of
their substance (Luke viii. 3). And, above all, the
years that He spent with His blessed virgin Mother
whose soul was pierced for His sake (Luke ii. 35), and
pondered in her heart the things connected with His
birth (Luke ii. 19), tell us that duty done at home
is the divinely appointed preparation for duty in the
world.

Repentance and Sin The first form which righteous¬
ness takes is repentance. It is impossible to exaggerate
the impoitance which is attached to repentance in the
New testament. The beginning of our Lord’s teaching
was. Repent ye, and believe in the gospel’ (Mark i. 15)
The apostles pursued the same method. They tried to
deepen in men a sense of sin, and to lead them to a
changed mind. St. John the Baptist had administered
a baptism unto repentance ’ ; they administered a
baptism which expressed not only sorrow for sin but also
iaith in Jesus. . Repentance is much more than regret
oi sorrow. It is a change of mind, an acceptance of
God s will and the determination to do that will. Our
eternal destiny depends upon repentance because it is
the attitude of our self towards sin, just as faith is our
attitude towards God and holiness. It has a definite
aim, an aim which must be clearly before it from the
rust, and that aim is the putting away of sin.

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 65

Our Lord never minutely defines sin. He assumes
that sin exists, and that it is universal. It is described
as the mistake of a man who misses his way, as the

transgression of some particular command of God. It

is lawlessness’ violating God’s law as a whole. It is
also regarded by Jesus as a state of slavery. ‘ Every one
that committeth sin is the bond-servant of sin ’ (John

' ma7 a*so be trul7 described as a state of
death, as it implies separation from God, the source of
all life, ty hen i the bather welcomes home His prodigal
soil He says, ‘ This my son was dead, and is alive again ’
(Luho XV. 24). I he forgiveness of a man’s sins by God
follows on his repentance. It occupies a most prominent
part in the teaching of our Lord, who compares it with

lv?iiCE9^ lmga °f -a d?rt J°f ten thousand talents (Matt.
xvm. 24), and himself dispenses forgiveness to the

contrite sou 1. The first blessing of the kingdom offered
to men is the forgiveness of their sins. When a man
struck down by paralysis was brought to Him, our Lord
first healed the disease of his soul. To the astonishment
of the Scribes He said, c Son, be of good cheer; thy sins
are forgiven (Matt. ix. 2). He taught His disciples to
pray for forgiveness : 1

c Forgive us our sins ; for we ourselves also forgive
every one that is indebted to us ’ (Luke xi. 4).
Every kmd of sin can be forgiven, except that sin
which by its very nature excludes repentance :

‘ Whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit
hath never forgiveness, but is guilty' of an
eternal sin ’ (Mark iii. 29).

The passage must be studied as a whole. It shows
that the Scribes who had said that Beelzebub was the
cause of the works done by Jesus were in danger of this
blasphemy, their moral nature being so corrupt that
they could no longer tell the difference between good
and evil, they were in danger of sinning away the
power of repentance, and therefore of salvation.

In spite of the terrible nature of sin, it is a means of
calling out all the love of God. His compassion is shown
in the work of Jesus, and in that fjoy’ which is in
heaven over one sinner that repenteth ’ (Luke xv. 7)

Ri^t1e0asnef is (*) love and faith.— In the language of
the Bible righteousness ’ means conformity with God’s

66 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

requirements. If God is our Father and attaches an
infinite value to every human soul, the righteousness
which He requires must be love and faith. Our Lord
solemnly ratifies the teaching of the Old Testament that
the two great commandments are to love God 4 with all
thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,
and with all thy strength/' and to love thy neighbour ‘ as
thyself’ {Mark xii. 30, 31). If a man fulfils these com¬
mandments, he is doing what God requires. In the first
three Gospels f faith’ specially means a conviction that
God places himself at the service of His children, and
the certainty that all things are possible with God {Luke
xviii. 27 ; Mark x. 27). This is put into a proverbial
form when our Lord says,

f Have faith in God. Verily I say unto you, Whoso¬
ever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou
taken up and cast into the sea ; and shall not
doubt in his heart, but shall believe that what
he saith cometh to pass ; he shall have it
{Mark xi. 23).

And a concrete instance of the faith that He required
is given when the disciples w^ere terrified by the storm
on the Sea of Tiberias, and Christ, after causing the
wind to cease, said to them, f Why are ye fearful ? have
ye not yet faith?’ {Mark iv. 40).

Trust in the power of Jesus Christ is a trust which
must accompany the belief that He is the Son of God.
Faith in God revealed in Christ is linked with faith in
Christ. And in St. John’s Gospel faith is the belief
f that Jesus is the Son of God,’ and those who believe in
the Father are told by Him to * believe also in me ’ {John
xiv. 1). When therefore St. Paul declared that f faith
working through love’ {Gal. v. 6) is the one great
principle of the Christian life, he meant nothing that
contradicts his own assertion that e circumcision is
nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing ; but the keep¬
ing of the commandments of God’ (1 Cor. vii. 19). For
the commandments of God are not kept, unless our
observance of them flows from a positive principle of
active and devoted love.

Righteousness is therefore primarily inward. The
Gospel reveals to us not only the worth of the individual
man, but also the worth of the inner man. The tendency

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 67

of the Pharisees was not the desire to be righteous, but
the desire to be thought righteous. They desired the
praise of man, and in winning it exhausted all the reward
they could ever get (Matt. vi. 2, 5, 16). God gives
nothing to those who merely perform actions which are
only outwardly correct and edifying. The Christian
may seek a reward, but it is the reward of communion
with God, and God’s gift to us of that which adds to the
progress of His kingdom. A man must learn to pray in
‘the closet’ of his heart, alone with God, and, to use
St. Pauls word, ‘buffet’ his sinful and selfish desires in
secret ; he must learn to give alms with no desire for
applause, so that his left hand does not know what his
right hand doeth (Matt. vi. 3). He must train himself
to conceal his fasts by his cheerfulness (Matt. vi. 17).
When he has trained himself to Glo his righteousness ’
in this way, God will recompense him, and perhaps do it
openly by calling him out into the world to raise the
standard of social virtue. Our sole motive must be the
inward desire of serving God, of loving God in man, and
man in God. This is the e single eye,’ or ‘sound eye.’
In the body illumination depends on the eye ; the brain
does not deal properly with an external object unless the
eye is sound and the sight not distorted. So in the moral
sphere, we shall only move rightly when our motives are
directed straight towards God (Matt. vi. 22, 23).

The austerity of the Gospel. — Our righteousness must
f exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees ’
(Matt. v. 20). It must embrace the whole character. If
the tree is good, the fruit will be good ; but if the tree
is corrupt, the fruit will be corrupt. Men ordinarily
think that the tongue need not be controlled severelv,
that a word is a mere breath carried away by the air.
But our Lord teaches that we shall be confronted by our
words at the day of judgment. They will influence our
eternal destiny :

f Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall
give account thereof in the day of judge¬
ment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified,
and by thy words thou shalt be condemned ’
(Matt. xii. 36, 37).

His teaching with regard to anger, lust, oaths, and
revenge, transformed the teaching of the Old Testament

G8 THE TEACHING OF OUll LORD

by carrying into the very recesses ot the soul the pie-
scriptions which had only appeared to affect the outwaid
act. ‘ Ye have heard that it was said to them of old
time, Thou shalt not kill ; and whosoever shall kill shall
be in danger of the judgement : but I say unto you, that
every one who is angry with his brother shall be in
danger of the judgement {Matt. v. 21, 22). T.he Jewish
law forbade murder; Jesus forbids that passion which
desires a brother’s harm and is the source of murder.
So too the law forbade adultery. Jesus forbids a
violation of the law of purity in look or thought , con¬
demning not the involuntary intrusion of a temptation,
but all deliberate cherishing of such a temptation {Matt.
v. 28). The law upheld the sanctity of an oath ; Jesus
condemns all sw'earing ‘by this or that, and declaies
that a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no ought to be as sacied and
binding as a promise made with the most solemn sanction
that could be devised {Matt. v. 33 ff.). The law limited
j.0ygjig0 and laid down the nature of punishment, . An
eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth , Jesus pi ohibits
r0V0nge. He lays such stress upon the duty of patiently
enduring injury rather than requiting it that He seems
to mean that the limit of such patience is to be fixed
by the welfare of the offender himself. ‘ Whosoever
smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also,’ is a command which must not be so acted upon as
to cause the smiter to attack his inoffensive neighbours
indefinitely. But if the endurance of an injury can be
made the means of ‘gaining thy brother’ {Matt, xviii.
15), then it ought to be endured. And lastly, the law'
required men to love their neighbours, and Jewish
exclusiveness had fostered the belief that it was legiti¬
mate and praiseworthy to hate an enemy. But Jesus
enjoins men to love their enemies and pray for those
that persecute them. By such love as this, and by
nothing short of this, ‘Ye may be sons of your Father
which is in heaven : for he maketh his sun to rise on
the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and
the unjust’ {Matt. v. 45).

Righteousness (ii) implies humility. — A sense of God s
perfection and of man’s imperfection and responsibility
begets humility. The humility taught by Christ _ is
totally different from the unmanly pettiness of mind

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 69

which the Greek condemned, and from the morbid
disgust with life and self which the Indian Buddhists
praised. Jesus showed us that as we draw near to God
we grow conscious of our own unworthiness. The
parable of the Pharisee and the publican who went up to
the Temple to pray, illustrates the truth that to be
f justified,’ pardoned and accepted by God, we must not
boast of goodness, but aspire towards goodness by con¬
fessing sin and putting it away :

‘ For every one that exalteth himself shall be
humbled ; but he that humbleth himself shall
be exalted ’ (. Luke xviii. 14).

Another illustration is derived by our Lord from
ordinary social life. A man invited to a marriage feast
takes the chief seat and the host compels him to leave
it for the sake of a more honourable guest :

‘ But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the
lowest place ; that when he that hath bidden
thee cometh, he may say to thee. Friend, go
up higher : then shalt thou have glory in the
presence of all that sit at meat with thee.
For every one that exalteth himself shall be
humbled ; and he that humbleth himself shall
be exalted’ ( Luke xiv. 10, 11).

It is not degradation but exaltation through humility
which we are encouraged to seek. The repression of
self is not an end, but a means, a recoil to be followed
by a leap forward. It is the rule of all sure progress.
No art and no science can be acquired without the
capacity to submit and to learn. And spiritual humility
consists in learning of Jesus, who says, ‘Take my yoke
upon you, and learn of me : for I am meek and lowly in
heart (Matt. xi. 29). The rule that He taught, He
followed first himself ; and we read how He performed
the office of a slave at the last meal that He ate with
His disciples before His death. He washed their feet
and said :

‘ Ye call me, Master, and, Lord : and ye say well ; for
so I am. If I then, the Lord and the Master,
have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash
one another’s feet. For I have given you an
example, that ye also should do as I have done
to you ’ ( John xiii. 12 IF.).

70 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Righteousness implies (iii) active service.— The love
and faith which are the ground of forgiveness (see Luke
vii. 36-50), and are deepened by forgiveness, will express
themselves spontaneously in the service of God :

f He that hath my commandments, and keepeth
them, he it is that loveth me : and he that
loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I
will love him, and will manifest myself unto
him ’ (John xiv. 21).

Love sets all the powers of the soul in motion. And
the way of righteousness is not easy, for it is entered^ by
a narrow gate and demands a strenuous life. The
Christian life requires watchfulness, fidelity, hard
work. Christ’s disciples are described as labourers,
stewards, servants as well as friends. The faithful and
business-like use of even one talent by the servant to
whom it is entrusted, is commended as not merely
good but necessary under pain of punishment (Matt.
xxv. 27). The parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard
shows us well both the gracious interest of God in all
who come to serve Him, and the uncalculating spirit in
which the service ought to be rendered. The men who
have no opportunity of working for God until the
e eleventh hour,’ receive the same recompense as those
who have toiled all day. The purpose of the parable is
to rebuke idleness, to encourage those who began their
work late, and to check the jealousy of those who began
their work early. God does not deal with us on the
legal principle of debit and credit. He expects us to
find joy in working for Him. This work is itself in a
large measure its own reward, and to be jealous about
payment is to show a misapprehension of the goodness of
God (Matt. xx. 1 If.).

The ungrudging character of the service which we owe
to God is shown in the stern parable which ends with the
command —

‘ Even so yd* also, when ye shall have done all the
things that are commanded you, say, We are
unprofitable servants ; we have done that which
it was our duty to do ’ (Luke xvii. 10).

If the parable stood alone, it would seem harsh. For it
implies a parallel between God and a master who makes
his servant work in the fields by day and then in the

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 71

house in the evening-, and yet gives the servant no
thanks. But the principle is exactly that principle which
inspired St. Paul and so many of God’s saints. Our
Lord never meant that our Father in heaven is a hard
Task-master. But He meant us to realise that we never
can do enough for God, never repay what we owe to
Him. And the corresponding truth is that we can never
make a compact with God, never say ‘I will do so much,
if thou wilt give me so much.’ That is a return to the
law. But the religion which Christ has taught us is a
religion of ‘grace,’ that is, of the undeserved loving¬
kindness of God to man, who will give us more than
we deserve, and even more than we desire.

Righteousness implies (iv) devotion to Jesus Christ. —
The Gospel of grace concerns not only our relation to
the Father but our relation to Jesus Christ. Our
attitude towards Him will determine our future through¬
out eternity. ‘ Eternal punishment’ and ‘eternal life’
will depend upon our mercy or lack of mercy shown
towards the needy and the desolate in whose person
Christ comes to us {Matt. xxv. 40 ff.). Our ideal of life must
be His ideal. His complete dependence upon the Father
is expressed in the words ‘ My meat is to do the will of
him that sent me’ {John iv. 34). This obedience to the will
of the Father led Jesus to the Cross. And the imitation
of Christ on our part must include the bearing of any
cross that God may lay upon us :

‘ Whosoever doth not bear his own cross, and come
after me, cannot be my disciple ’ {Luke xiv. 27).
He certainly claims the first place in our affections, as
when He says, ‘He that loveth father or mother more
than me is not worthy of me ’ {Matt. x. 37). This appears
in a severer and more paradoxical form in Luke xiv. 26,
where He says, ‘ If any man cometh unto me, and hateth
not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children,
and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he
cannot be my disciple.’ These strong words imply that
where our duty to Christ is at stake, no pain of separa¬
tion or alienation from those nearest to us must make us
falter. The ‘work’ that God requires of us is the moral
effort of believing in Him whom God hath sent {John vi.
29). We must place ourselves at His disposal without
any reserve. We are to ‘hate’ and ‘lose’ our natural

72 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

life for the sake of a better and ‘more abundant’ life,
a life richer in experience and more potent in influence.
And we are to do this relying on His words, ‘Whosoever
would save his life shall lose it ; and whosoever shall
lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s shall save it’
{Mark viii. 35).

Prayer. —There is one duty which so intimately con¬
cerns the individual soul that it must be included in any
account of the righteousness which God requires. It is
the duty of prayer. Prayer indeed brings a special
blessing when it is united prayer. The Lord’s Prayer
which He taught to His disciples is a prayer taught to
all in common. If two persons agree together to seek
some blessing in prayer, they can pray with a special
assurance {Matt, xviii. 19). And wherever two or three
are gathered together in Christ’s name, He has promised
to be in the midst of them {Matt, xviii. 20). But no
effectual prayer can be made in common until each one
who prays has himself learned how to draw nigh to God.

The Gospels record positive instances of our Lord
praying. They cover the whole of His public life from
His baptism to His death. Of these instances seven are
recorded by St. Luke alone. The evangelist who gives
more prominence than the other two Synoptic writers to
the work of the Holy Spirit, gives special prominence to
prayer which that Holy Spirit prompts. Christ prayed
for himself before His Passion, He prayed for His whole
Church, and He assured St. Peter, ‘ I made supplication
for thee, that thy faith fail not ’ {Luke xxii. 32).

The parable of the Friend who at midnight disturbs
another man teaches us that prayer is never out of
season and may rightly be importunate {Luke xi. 5) ; and
the parable of the Unjust Judge, who at length yields to
the entreaty of a widow, teaches the same lesson of per¬
severance in another form {Luke xviii. 1).

The disposition with which we must offer prayer is
shown in the humility of the publican who cries ‘God
be merciful to me a sinner ’ {Luke xviii. 13) ; and the
prayer which the Prodigal Son meant to make to his
father shows us how rich the reward of genuine humility
may be {Luke xv. 18). The great stress which is laid
upon the necessity of a forgiving spirit in the parable of
the Unmerciful Servant {Matt, xviii. 21) is proportionate

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 73

to the difficulty of this spirit. W atchfulness is also
needful ( Mark xiii. 33), and faith :

‘ All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe
that ye have received them, and ye shall have
them ’ ( Mark xi. 24).

Primarily we must pray to be delivered from temptation,
that is, from all circumstances and all states of mind
which might to us in our actual stage of spiritual progress
be a means of transgression, though to others they might
be means of progress {Matt. vi. 13). We are to pray for
our enemies, such prayer being one of the best tests of
forgiveness {Luke vi. 28). We should also pray for our
temporal gifts, for f daily bread,’ and deliverance from
calamities {Mark xiii. 18). We are to pray also for a
supply of missionaries who shall convert the world {Matt.
ix. 38). W e are not to repeat prayers as if they were
a magical formula {Matt. vi. 7). That is merely heathen.

Above all, when we pray to the Father we are to pray
in the name of Jesus Christ {John xvi. 23). No prayer
is true prayer unless it is consistent with what we know
about the Person, work, and character of our Lord. If
it is to be true, we must be led, as He was led, by the
Spirit of God. It must have the reverence, humility,
and simplicity of Him who was c heard for his godly
fear ’ {Heb. v. 7).

CHAPTER VII

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD — II

Our Lord and social life. — The heart of the life of Jesus
Christ on earth was renunciation and detachment. But
Pie founded a new humanism. He set His face against
the cruder Oriental conceptions of a saint. Though He
retired to the wilderness and the mountains. He did so
for the sake of that communion with the Father which
strengthened Him for intercourse with men. He even
sought the society of men and women, and gladly
accepted their hospitality. St. John records His pre¬
sence at the marriage of Cana, where He turned the
water into wine to provide means for the feast, and a
symbol of the transformation of religion which He was
about to effect ( John ii. 1 ff.). He attended the feast
which Levi made in His honour even though ‘ many
publicans and sinners’ were there ( Mark ii. 15). He
said to Zacchseus, the chief publican, ‘To-day I must
abide at thy house ’ {Luke xix. 5). He sat down at meat
in the house of Simon the Pharisee, where the ‘woman
that was in the city, a sinner,’ poured the contents of an
alabaster cruse of ointment over His feet {Luke vii. 36 ff. ).
He accepted the invitation of another Pharisee to dine
with him, and made use of the opportunity to point out
the difference between a ceremonial washing and inward
purity of heart {Luke xi. 37). He frequented the house
of Lazarus and his sisters at Bethany, and St. John
says, ‘Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister,
and Lazarus’ {John xi. 5). Among His friends, Jesus
loved one friend best, and gave His sanction to
distinctive friendship by this affection for St. John.
His own prayer for His disciples was, ‘ I pray not that
thou shouldest take them from the world, but that thou
shouldest keep them from the evil ’ {John xvii. 15). The
attitude of the Christian towards the world should not
74

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 75

be one of pessimism, but one of humble courage and
hope.

The Family. — Our Lord regarded marriage as a matter
of such great importance that, instead of laying down
merely general principles concerning it, He gave a
precise and emphatic law. We should, before quoting
this law, notice that the title Father which He gives to
God proves the sacred character of the analogy which
existed in His mind between a human family and the
nature of God. Our Lord’s treatment of women and
His condemnation of a deliberately cherished impure
desire also show His regard for a right relation between
the two sexes. The comparatively easy conditions on
which Jewish husbands were allowed to put away their
wives, He treats as a concession to a bygone state of
society. The laxer school of Jewish rabbis, that of
Hillel, permitted divorce for slight provocations, such
as the law never contemplated. The stricter school
only permitted it in case of adultery. The teaching ot
Jesus is that the original plan of God was that a man
should have one wife only :

f But from the beginning of the creation, Male and
female made he them. For this cause shall a
man leave his father and mother, and shall
cleave to his wife ; and the twain shall become
one flesh : so that they are no more twain, but
one flesh. What therefore God hath joined to¬
gether, let not man put asunder ’ ( Mark x. 6-8).
The law is plainly laid down. Just as a brother may
be separated from his brother, but cannot cease to be his
brother, so marriage is an unbreakable bond. Husband
and wife remain husband and wife while life remains.

The teaching of our Lord as recorded in Mark x. 11,
12, and Luke xvi. 18, asserts the general principle that
a man may not put away his wife. In Matthew we find a
puzzling addition, f except for fornication ’ (v. 32; xix. 9).
This undoubtedly raises great difficulties, for it has led
to the opinion that a man may actually separate from
him an unfaithful wife in such a way as to be free to
marry again. This seems neither to agree with our
Lord’s statements in the other Gospels, nor with the
general drift of St. Paul’s teaching (1 Cor. vii. 10, 11).
Hence it has been supposed that these words in Matthew

76 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

are an interpolation made by a Jewish Christian who
lowered our Lord’s doctrine concerning divorce to the
level of the higher of the two Jewish opinions about
divorce, or that they have been caused by some erro¬
neous tradition of the Jewish Christians. It is not
impossible that the passage in Matthew v. 32 has been
influenced by the tradition preserved in xix. 9. In the
latter passage there is a direct reference to the common
practice of the Jews to dismiss a wife f for every cause,’
and marry another. Our Lord says that this is adultery,
but treats the man who has put away an unfaithful wife,
as not guilty of adultery. In neither passage does Christ
command or counsel a new marriage even when a wife is
unfaithful ; He merely abstains from saying that one who
dismisses such a wife is guilty. Permission is given
for a separation. But the woman, so put away, con¬
tinues to be the wife of him who put her away. She is
regarded as such in both passages. This shows that
whether the text has been corrupted or not, an innocent
husband is not free to marry when he has put away his wife.

Civic duties. — Our Lord seems to have made very few
allusions to civic duties and political questions. But
He recognised the province of civil authority and civil
justice. He assumes that it is necessary for a man to
agree with his adversary quickly, lest the judge deliver
liim to the officer, and he be cast into prison until he
Fas paid the last farthing {Matt. v. 25, 26). More im¬
portant was His refusal to be entangled in a political
controversy. The Pharisees and Herodians asked
whether it was lawful to pay tribute to Caesar, or not.
He asked them to show Him a penny :

* And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and
superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar’s.
And Jesus said unto them, Render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the
things t-hat are God’s’ {Mark xii. 13 ff'.).

This answer contains two points, the first intended to
touch His questioners, the second to influence all men.
He first shows the Pharisees that they accepted Caesar’s
•sovereignty by using his coinage, and they therefore had
no right to complain of paying taxes to Caesar. Then
He shows that this obligation is trifling compared with
their obligation to God. The kingdom of God is both

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 77

independent of the civil government and infinitely
higher. They made the kingdom of God equivalent to
the political autonomy of their people. He implies that
it is not. In the same way He told St. Peter to pay the
half-shekel tribute for the support of the Temple service,
both for himself and St. Peter. And He did this in
spite of the fact that He and His disciples were, in His
eyes, free from the requirement to maintain these
services {Matt. xvii. 24 if.). Our Lord did nothing
whatever to countenance anarchy or revolution. He
allowed no kind of resistance to the men whom the
Sanhedrin sent to arrest Him. His enemies were quite
unable to find that He was a law-breaker. And Pilate
doubtless spoke the truth when he said that he could
find no fault in Him {Luke xxiii. 14).

In disclaiming any political character for the kingdom
of God, He disclaimed any political power for himself.
He withdrew from the people who ‘were about to come
and take him by force, to make him king’ {John vi. 15).
And when two of His disciples asked for places by His
side in the glory of what they probably conceived as an
earthly kingdom, He said :

‘Ye know that they which are accounted to rule
over the Gentiles lord it over them ; and their
great ones exercise authority over them. But
it is not so among you : but whosoever would
become great among you, shall be your minister :
and whosoever would he first among you, shall
be servant of all ’ {Mark x. 42 ff.).

There is a pathetic significance in the question addressed
to Jesus by the two messengers sent by the Baptist — ‘ Art
thou he that cometh, or look we for another?’ {Luke vii.
20). It was so natural that the question should be asked
by one who with earnest sincerity had fixed his hopes on
Jesus as the Messiah from the time of His baptism. The
work of Jesus seemed to him so slow, so disappointing.
He had expected the rigorous reform of ‘axe’ and ‘fire’
and ‘ winno wing-fan.’ And instead of this, men were
being healed one by one, and the Gospel was being
preached to the poor. The regeneration of individuals,
not the formation of a new secular state, was our Lord’s
method.

Worldly possessions. — Our Lord directly refused to

78 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

interfere in a question of family property. He would
not divide an inheritance between two brothers. And
He immediately turned the incident into a great lesson :

‘Take heed and keep yourselves from all covetous¬
ness : for a man’s life Consisteth not in the
abundance of the things which he possesseth ’
{Luke xii. 15).

He found that the love of riches was a great obstacle
to the life of faith. ‘The deceitfulness of riches’ is apt
to ‘choke the word’ sown by His hands {Mark iv. 19).
‘ Where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also ’
{Matt. vi. 21). Trade and working for money are not con¬
demned by our Lord. A man may be so absorbed in his
farm or his merchandise as to neglect the gracious invita¬
tion of the King {Matt. xxii. 5). But it is impossible that
our Lord could have uttered parables such as that of the
Talents {Matt. xxv. 14) and that of the Pounds {Lake
xix. 11), if He had disapproved of commerce and of the
accumulation of interest on money. All the evangelists
tell us how He ejected the money-changers from the
Temple. He objected, not to their money, but to their
dishonesty and profanity. He does not condemn pro¬
perty, nor does He make poverty a general condition
of salvation. But there is a case where He seems to do
so. When the rich man asked Him, ‘What good thing
shall I do, that I may have eternal life ? ’ and declared
that he had kept the commandments from his youth, our
Lord wished to test him. He said, ‘If thou wouldst be
perfect, go, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven ; and come,
follow me ’ {Matt. xix. 21). The man went away sorrow¬
ful. Our Lord had unveiled the one duty necessary in
view of his position and his request, the one weakness
which undermined his character. But Christ does
not tell us that worldly possessions are evil. They
may be an instrument of good. God knows that we have
need of food and clothing {Matt. vi. 32). And by means
of ‘ the mammon of unrighteousness,’ the wealth which
‘a steward of unrighteousness’ uses with worldly cunning,
we are to make friends who shall receive us into the
eternal tabernacles of heaven. We are to help those who
cannot repay us here, but will welcome us in a world
where distinctions of class and wealth are gone.

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 79

Love of our neighbour. — It would be impossible for us
to discuss even briefly all that Jesus Christ teaches us
concerning our duty to our neighbour. The command
‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ is a command to be
generous, truthful, and helpful towards all men. The
parable of the good Samaritan, who though a despised
schismatic, aided the wounded traveller whom the priest
and the Levite neglected, tells us who is our ‘ neighbour.’
In the moment of extreme necessity we would be glad
to receive help even from one whose race and whose
religion we regarded as inferior to our own. And there¬
fore we ought to regard him as our neighbour, and our
natural likes and dislikes must give way to a generous
sympathy with all men. Here as in all things the
command to be ‘ perfect ’ requires that we should be
willing to do what God does. We are not even to hope
for forgiveness from God if we do not forgive others :
‘ If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will
your Father forgive your trespasses’ {Matt. vi. 15). The
merciless servant who when forgiven by his master re¬
fused to forgive his fellow-servant withdraws himself
from God’s pity {Matt, xviii. 21 IF.). We are to show
the light of ‘good works’ to others {Matt. v. 16). We
are to be truthful, our ‘ yea ’ is to be ‘ yea,’ and our
‘nay’ is to be ‘nay.’ We are to abstain from oaths, for
the very use of oaths suggests a difference between the
thought in the heart and the word that is spoken. Love
requires that we should not judge others :

‘For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be
judged : and with what measure ye mete, it
shall be measured unto you’ {Matt. vii. 2).
When there has been a quarrel, we are not to bring a
gift to the altar till we have obeyed the precept ‘first be
reconciled to thy brother’ {Matt. v. 28). Real love for
God and for men will also cause us to be prudent in
imparting divine truth ; we are not to give what is holy
unto the dogs, or cast pearls before the swine {Matt.
vii. 6).

Love of our neighbour is also taught us in some
startling paradoxes. Not only are Christ’s disciples
told to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors,
but they are also given this command :

‘ To him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer

80 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

also the other ; and from him that taketh away
thy cloke withhold not thy coat also. Give to
every one that asketh thee ; and of him that
taketh away thy goods ask them not again ’
( Luke vi. 29, 30).

There is also the command to forgive a brother who
wrongs us until ‘ seventy times seven’ (Matt, xviii. 22).
It is not surprising that some difference of opinion should
exist among Christians as to the interpretation of such
startling commands. And the difficulty is not entirely
removed by the explanation that these commands -were not
intended for the Church of future days, hut only for the
little band or family of disciples that followed our Lord
on earth. The writer of this book humbly believes that
Christ deliberately put these commands into a form
intended to stimulate our thought. If He had given
moral directions on the level of those given by the
Baptist (Luke iii. 10 ff.), the result might have been a new
Pharisaism. Men would have done these things more or
less precisely, and then been satisfied. But our Lord’s
commands make self-satisfaction impossible. They are
sometimes quite legal in form, but their purpose is to
abolish legalism, and to interpret them always literally
would be a return to legalism. They suggest that our
love, a love like that of God for man, must be its own
law. The commands are in a form which will always
be in front of us and above us. Our action in each parti¬
cular case must be determined by the good of the parti¬
cular person with whom we are dealing. And our Lord’s
own life is the best explanation of His precepts. He
never either gave or forgave in a manner which would
encourage a man to be slothful or unjust. When
smitten unjustly at His trial before Annas, He said,
( If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil : but if
well, why smitest thou me?’ (John xviii. 28). That was
an appeal to the reason and conscience of the man who
hit Him, not less truly than His amazing forgiveness is
an appeal to the heart. The essence of the doctrine
contained in these great paradoxes of our Lord is, in
St. Paul’s words :

f Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with
good’ (Rom. xii. 21).

The Beatitudes.— W e have reserved to the end of these

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 81

two chapters on Righteousness a short consideration of
those Beatitudes in which our Lord described the happi¬
ness of the Christian life. The virtues of which He
speaks are the characteristics of His own life. They tell
us the blessedness which He attained in His own human
experience, in spite of all the difference which exists
between Him and us. Blessedness is both the condition
and the completion of a perfect life. And those who
have the qualities which Jesus commends are already
blessed, and even now enjoy the kingdom of heaven :

f Blessed are the poor in spirit ; for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn : for they shall be com¬
forted.

Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness : for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful : for they shall obtain
mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see
God.

Blessed are the peacemakers : for they shall be called
sons of God.

Blessed are they that have been persecuted for
righteousness sake : for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall
reproach you, and persecute you, and say all
manner of evil against you falsely^ for my sake.’
{Matt. v. 3-11).

A blessedness which begins with poverty and mourning
and ends on earth with persecution, shows how truly we
ourselves, and not our surroundings, are the cause of
happiness. The environment which suggests misery
may be the very environment which is best for the perfect
life. The ‘poor in spirit’ who do not say that they are
whole, or think that they are already righteous, are
blessed. The character which says ‘ I am rich, and have
gotten riches, and have need of nothing’ is ‘miserable
and poor and blind and naked’ (Rev. iii. 17). Those
who ‘mourn’ over sin and evil, who have a real sorrow
for sin, shall be comforted. An abiding sorrow for sin is
one of the secrets of real progress in the spiritual life.
The ‘meek’ who in their dealings . with their fellow

F

82 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

men are what Jesus was, men who curb all resentment
under provocation, legitimately gain the earth. They
are successful both in enjoying life and in influencing
history. Meekness, in the Christian sense of the word,
is not weakness. The strength of man may be proved
even more by forgiveness than by suffering. ’ Those who
‘ hunger and thirst after righteousness ’ are blessed. It
is not enough to be true to our ideal if our ideal is lower
than God. The hunger to he right with God, and to
make our own the righteousness of Christ, should be
our desire, and it is a desire which God will satisfy.
The merciful’ are blessed. It is necessary to exercise
that pity which we ourselves will one day hope to receive
from God. We shall have in proportion as we have
assimilated. The ‘pure in heart’ whose intention is
single, so that at least in intention and desire their
thoughts and aims are clean and unsullied, shall see God
now and hereafter. The things which hide God from us
are the things that we put between the heart and Him.
The ‘ peacemakers ’ are blessed, all who act as true
ambassadors of God, all who work for an upright peace
in a family or in a State, all who pray and labour for the
union of God’s Church, are promised the joy of a filial
confidence in God. The persecuted’ are blessed. The
death of Jesus is a revelation of what He truly is. His
action under calumny and ill treatment illustrated and
brought to perfection His power of ruling over the
kingdom of heaven. He was glorified, not inwardly
degraded, by His death. Utter devotion to God, a service
that knew no limit, such was the righteousness that
He showed in dying, and it ‘overcame the world.’ He
attained to the completion of blessedness through this
conflict with evil and conquest over evil. So the
Christian may be called to realise his best self through
a process of calumny and martyrdom. In so doing he
manifests the life of Christ ; and through submission to
wrong he learns to master himself and very often is
raised to rule others to the glory of God.

It is true to say that the qualities which bring blessed¬
ness are submissive, gentle, and marked by the absence
of self-assertion. But it is very far from true to say that
these qualities are negative, or merely yielding and
feminine. It requires no easy struggle for a man to

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE KINGDOM 83

forgive an injury or to gain purity of heart. To maintain
a hunger for righteousness and to be a peacemaker are
incompatible with sloth and idle acquiescence in things as
they are. Our Lord never teaches us to ignore the duty
which we owe to self while performing our duty to our
neighbour. The character which He requires in men is
a manly character like His own. But it is a character
which has gained strength through the knowledge of
weakness, and become righteous by faith in the righteous¬
ness of God communicated to us through Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ and Asceticism. — Men sometimes discuss
whether our Lord’s teaching sanctions that form of self-
denial which is called asceticism. Now, the word
* asceticism ’ is ambiguous. Its origin is honourable, it
implied a life of f training/ whether in athletics or in
learning. And such a training undoubtedly had a place
in Greek life. But the greater inwardness and intensity
of Christ’s moral teaching require a severer training.
We may doubt if a Greek would have understood or
sympathised with St. Paul’s statement, f I buffet my body,
and bring it into bondage : lest by any means, after that
I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected.’
The f mortifying ’ or making dead of sinful inclinations,
and the bringing every thought into subjection unto the
obedience of Christ, imply a greater austerity and a greater
blessedness than the pagan world had attained. And
such asceticism is plainly part of our Lord’s teaching;
just as plainly as a scornful neglect of the body and the
idea of acquiring merit by self-torture is not part of that
teaching. The extreme asceticism of the Oriental hermit
or fakir is not in the least Christian.

But the teaching of our Lord, and still more His own
example, prove that God sometimes calls men to a life
which narrows its own development into one deep channel
in order to carry life and vigour to others. Voluntary
poverty and voluntary abstinence from marriage may be
better for some men than wealth well employed and
marriage hallowed by Christ’s presence. It is well with
those who can say, ‘ Lo, we have left all, and followed
thee’ {Matt. xix. 27), if they abstain from asking what
reward they shall have beyond the love of Jesus. Our
Lord does not regard riches as in themselves evil, the
parables of the Unjust Steward and the Talents show

84 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

that they are a deposit from God to be used in doing
good. And yet He denounces woe to those who find
their consolation in riches ( Luke vi. 24), and bids men
not to lay up treasures upon earth {Matt. vi. 19). And
to one in danger of becoming a prey to his wealth He
says, c Go, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor’
{Matt. xix. 21). In the same way He blesses marriage,
and He made a married man tbe chief of His apostles.
But those who have received the gift of becoming dead,
for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, to all that
marriage implies, are to keep the gift {Matt. xix. 12).
Those who are convinced that God desires all their time
and energy in a manner which is not compatible with
marriage, are to remain celibate. The asceticism which
our Lord requires is therefore, in the case of all men,
a struggle and self-discipline in the conquest of mammon
and sensuous desire, and, in some men, the renunciation
of all worldly wealth and all worldly ties in view of a
special work required by God.

CHAPTER VIII

OUR LORI) S TEACHING ABOUT HIS DEATH

The Death of Christ in the New Testament.— No one can
read the Gospels without noticing1 how large a space each
evangelist devotes to the last sufferings of our Lord.
I he events of the last sad week are traced with the
minute care of thankful and adoring love. Exactly
the same impression is produced upon us by nearly all
the other writings contained in the New Testament.
The f word or f story of the Cross/ as St. Paul calls it
(1 Gov. i. 18), has an infinite significance in the writers’
minds. We rise from reading them with the conviction
that the Gospel would not have been the Gospel to them
if Jesus had not died, and died by the hands of men.
They regard the death as indispensable. They do not
believe in a dead Christ, but in a living Christ. They
do not proclaim the story of a defeat, but of a magni¬
ficent victory. They rejoice in telling that Christ rose
from the dead. But the risen Christ bears with Him
the power of His death.

They assume, then, that the death of Christ was neces¬
sary for our salvation. And it was necessary in this
sense, that without it mankind would not be freed from
the condemnation which the holy God pronounces upon
sin, freed from the corrupting influence of sin and in a
living practical union with God. Without it we should
not have f peace ’ with God, f access to God,’ f life.’ And
the Gospels imply the same doctrine as the Epistles and
the Revelation. As soon as we understand who our
Lord is, this doctrine is seen to rest upon a plain and
intelligible foundation. If Jesus Christ were only a
very good man. His death could not bring us peace with
God. Even the courage which He showed in protesting
against sin and in facing the death on the Cross would
be less valuable to us than the action of many martyrs and
heroes. We should have to confess that He made claims

85

86 THE TEACHING OF O U 11 LORD

for himself which were not consistent with any clear
notion of His place in the scale of creation, and perhaps
not consistent with sincere unselfishness. We should
have to regard His death as in some degree the in¬
evitable penalty of His mistakes.

On the other hand, if He is truly Son of Man and
Son of God, His death assumes an entirely different
aspect. It must in some special sense reveal to us what
man ought to be and what God is. The true King of
men, the One in whom God is well pleased, must show
in dying a character which His subjects can regard as
noble to imitate. The Son of the Divine Father, the
expression of God in human life, must show what is
God s own attitude towards death. And this is what the
Gospels tell us. For our Lord so dies that His death
is the consummation of a perfect human life, offered to
the Father in the service of us men. And He so dies
that the wounding of body and soul to which He volun¬
tarily submits, is in proportion to God’s love of sinners
and desire to rescue them from death. When we see
this devotion of Christ trusting in the Father, we must
feel that, if we could have offered it to God, it was due
from us. And when we see Christ’s dying and over¬
coming death by resurrection, we see vindicated God’s
deep concern for all mankind : and all mankind is sinful
mankind.

Death. — It is remarkable that physical death is not
regarded by our Lord as so terrible and evil a thing as
men have usually thought it to he. Death is something
which in a higher state of existence will be done away ;
f they cannot die any more’ ( Luke xx. 36). It puts an
end to earthly wealth and earthly pleasures, as the Rich
Man found when told that his soul would be required
‘ this night (Luke xn. 20). Physical death is neverthe¬
less for those who are at peace with God, rest in sleep
(John xi. 11 ; cf. Matt. ix. 24). The death which our Lord
treats as terrible is the death which is spiritual rather
than physical. rlhe e dead ’ who are told to bury their
dead are those who do not hear His call (Matt. viii. 22).
In St. John’s Gospel it is even more plainly taught that
f death,’ like ‘ life,’ belongs to this present world. It is
moral apathy, a voluntary separation from God. And
the Son of God enables man here and now to pass from

ABOUT HIS DEATH 87

death unto life. Our Lord’s use of the words c death’
and f dead show that physical death is regarded by Him
as a symbol of that more terrible destruction which
is the result of sin. It is no capricious symbol, but one
which closely corresponds with the actual nature of sin.
For sin is not only hostility to the will of God, but is
also suicide. It is the killing of that true life which is
communion with God, who is ‘'Life.’

The Incarnation and Death.— When the Son of God
became Man, He made himself one with a race which
had sinned and which so far as sinful was necessarily
under God s condemnation. He was himself sinless.
He was able to say to His enemies, ‘ Which of you con-
victeth me of sin?’ ( John viii. 46). From the beginning
to the end the Bible teaches in various ways that man¬
kind is a unity. There is a solidarity, on account of
which St. Paul can say, fnone of us liveth to himself,
and none dieth to himself’ (Rom. xiv. 7). And Jesus,
being sinless, was able to sorrow over sin with a sorrow
which in a measure must be reproduced in His servants,
though it cannot be fully reproduced by the greatest of
His saints. Sinless, and infinitely wronged by the
treachery, hypocrisy, and ambition of men, He still
forgave freely and fully. More than this : though He
had told His disciples f Be not afraid of them that
kill the body, and after that have no more that they
can do ’ (Lvlte xii. 4), His own physical death was
terrible to Him. And we cannot reasonably question
that the Apostles and the whole primitive Church
were right in believing that He viewed His own death
in connection with the sins of the world. In our nature
and in our name He entered into a unique under¬
standing of death in a spiritual as well as physical sense.
Like the resurrection which followed, this dying was a
representative act. It was a homage rendered by the
Head of our race to the laws of God. There was nothing
mechanical in this homage, and there was nothing ficti¬
tious in His spiritual suffering. We can neither know
nor tell all that it implied. But we cannot interpret the
original preaching of the Gospel unless we believe that
He mentally realised the evil of sin and the absence
from God which it involves. He did not spiritually die,
but He learned the whole meaning of sin, so far as it was

88 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

possible to know it without sinning. And His voluntary
realisation of the significance of death, physical and
spiritual, was a human acknowledgment of the righteous¬
ness of God in condemning sin. God condemns the
destruction of His children’s life, and this destruction is
sin. Therefore God in manifesting His condemnation 0/
sin, manifests His love.

The Death of Christ was voluntary. — The death of our
Lord was much more than the mere result of fidelity to
righteousness in an unrighteous world. A righteous
man, even a saint, might desire to avoid death under the
impression that his life would be more useful to others
than his death. And a righteous man, even a saint,
might only become convinced that God wished him to
die, when he saw that death was inevitable. But our
Lord chose to die. During the agony which He showed
when praying in Gethsemane we can see that He shrank
from death. It was physically cruel. And it was
morally terrible to Him because in His sinless purity
He realised the true nature of sin and its results. But
both before and after the agony He wished to die, and
showed that He could have saved himself from death, if
He had so willed. He came fto give his life’ {Mai'k x.
45). Once more He says :

f I am the good shepherd : the good shepherd laveth
down his life for the sheep. . . . Therefore
doth the Father love me, because I lay down
my life, that I may take it again. No one
taketh it away from me, but I lay it down of
myself. I have power to lay it down, and I
have power to take it again ’ ( John x. 11, 17 f.).
Men sometimes speak as if it were unjust for the innocent
to suffer for the benefit of the guilty. But when we
think how fruitful is the law of vicarious suffering,
of the moral development which it brings to the sufferer
and often to the persons for whom the suffering is
endured, we shall never speak of injustice as involved
in Christ’s atoning death. Many a parent has suffered,
and even chosen to suffer, for a child, many a friend for
a friend, many have met death even in teaching or
tending the guilty and outcast. And if the Son of God
so loved us as to become man for our sakes, it was not
unjust that He should live by that great law of suffering

ABOUT HIS DEATH 89

for the good of others which does so much to elevate

mankind. . . ...

Jesus came into tlie world to die. — At first sight it may
seem strange that Jesus says comparatively little about
the necessity of His death as a means tor effecting oui
salvation. But on reflection we shall see a good reason
for this. During our Lord’s ministry it was very difficult
for His disciples to realise who He really was, and still
more difficult for them to think that the Son of God and
Messiah could die at all. For them to know that He
was far more than human, and that He must nevertheless
die like a man, must have been most difficult. He could
therefore only teach them gradually. But what He
taught was in His own mind from the first. Ihe theoiy^
that He did not foresee His death until near the end of
His ministry contradicts the evidence of the Gospels as
completely as the theory that He did not attribute to
His death the power of obtaining the remission of sins.

Christ’s earlier teaching about His Death. — All the
Gospels tell us something about our Lord s Baptism.
Other men came to John the Baptist confessing theii
sins ’ ; Christ made no such confession. But His Baptism
was much more than a mere approval of the Baptist’s
message. For in the eyes of the Jews who sunounded
Him, baptism implied an acknowledgment of sin and
repentance. And by submitting to baptism oui Loid
showed openly that He made himself at one with a race
which had sinned, and that He took upon himself part
at least of the responsibility of sin. lliat this interpie-
tation is correct is proved by the voice of the Father
heard by Christ at His Baptism (jtfutt. iii. 1/ ? Muik i. 11 ,
Luke iii. 22). These words partly correspond with
Isaiah xlii. 1 ff. They show that our Lord before
the beginning of His ministry was conscious that He
fulfilled the ancient prophet’s picture of the Servant
of the Lord, who dies as a guilt-offering for the people.
Our Lord afterwards made His own (Luke xxii. 37)
the words of Isa. liii. 12, c He was reckoned with
transgressors,’ which show that He certainly legarded
himself as fthe Servant of the Lord. A guilt-offering
is essentially a sacrifice offered to make satisfaction
and reparation for the infringement of some right oi
the withholding of something due. Christ therefore

90 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

identified himself both with a race that has sinned,
and with the Servant who obtains their pardon by
making- a reparation to the heart of the divine Father.
Very early in our Lord’s ministry He referred to His
death in a manner which shows that it cast a solemn
shadow over His life : ‘ Can the sons of the bride-chamber
fast, while the bridegroom is with them? As long as
they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.
But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be
taken away from them, and then will they fast in that
day’ {Mark ii. 19, 20). This taking away of the bride¬
groom is not only death, but death in the midst of joy,
a death which is unexpected by the bridegroom’s friends.

Another early and more enigmatic reference to His
death is contained in His words to the Jews, f Destroy
this temple, and in three days I will raise it up ’ {John
ii. 19). It was also early in His ministry that He said
to Nicodemus :

‘ As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
even so must the Son of man be lifted up : that
whosoever believeth may in him have eternal
life’ {John iii. 14, 15; cf. viii. 28, xii. 82).

Our Lord’s knowledge of His death was combined with
a knowledge of its divinely appointed necessity. He has
to submit to the ‘ baptism’ of His Passion, and feels
anguish until it is accomplished. He dreads it, and yet
He desires it, because it will kindle a fervent devotion
to himself {Luke xii. 49).

Our Lord’s later teaching. — After St. Peter at Caesarea
Philippi had confessed Jesus to be the Son of God, He
openly instructed His disciples concerning His death.
Their conception of His work was to grow with their con¬
ception of His Person. ‘From that time began Jesus
to show unto his disciples how that he must go unto
Jerusalem and be killed’ {Matt. xvi. 21). The notion
that the Messiah should suffer was at first intolerable to
the disciples, an actual contradiction of their idea of the
Messiahship. Hence St. Peter’s protest, ‘ Be it far from
thee, Lord.’ He had to familiarise them with the idea
of the coming tragedy. All the three Synoptists say that
He made at least three deliberate attempts to do this
{Mark viii. 81 ; ix. 31 ; x. 33 ; and the parallel passages
in Matthew and Luke). The last, passage is of peculiar

91

ABOUT HIS DEATH

importance. Our Lord has for the third time declared
that He will he put to death. Then James and John,
realising perhaps that this death would he the path to
victory, express the wish that they may have places ol
honour in His kingdom. Our Lord asks if they are ablo
to drink of the cup which He drinks of, and he baptized
with the baptism with which He is baptized. Both these
two words refer to His death. The cup is a cup^ which
fills the heart with fear, and is received from God s hand
(Mark xiv. 36; cf. John xviii. 11). The baptism is a
flood which carries Him away. James and John declare
that they are able to endure this cup and this baptism.
Christ promises them that they shall do so, but does
not promise them thrones of glory. He afterwards-
continues :

fYe know that they which are accounted to rule
over the Gentiles lord it over them ; and their
great ones exercise authority over them. But
it is not so among you : but whosoever would
become great among you, shall be your servant :
and whosoever would be first among you, shall
be bond-servant of all. For verily the ^on of
man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister, and to give his life a ransom for many ’
(Mark x. 43-45).

This word ‘ ransom ’ is a word used in the Old lesta-
ment. It means a price offered for a life. Jesus our
King reveals His glory in humiliation and service, and
this service necessitates the giving up of His own life in
order to purchase from bondage the lives which have
been previously brought into bondage. No doubt there
is a metaphor in this. But the metaphor is used to
explain a most solemn fact. Our Lord teaches that His
life is to be the means of recovering or saving the lives
of others from the power of sin and God’s judgment upon
sin. Psalm xlix. 7 f. and Mark viii. 34 f. make this
clear. The first passage asserts that no man can
give to God a ransom with the result that his brother
can live for ever. The second passage teaches us that
when our true life is forfeited as the result of sin, we
cannot by ourselves deliver it. But Christ wins it back,
not by any literal barter, but by means of the lile that
He gave up in the service of God and man. ^o long as-

92 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORI)

we are bound by guilt we are under sentence of spiritual
death. And the possibility of our freedom from guilt
depends upon our availing ourselves of Christ’s devotion
of His own life in love, a devotion which found its climax
in fthe death of the Cross.’ Christ therefore does for
us what no one else can do.

Jesus is the Saviour. — That our Lord through dying
delivers man from sin and the sense of guilt was the
actual experience of the first believers and, since then,
the experience of multitudes that no man can number.
He is called in the Gospels e he that shall save his
people from their sins,’ fthe Saviour,’ fthe Saviour of
the world.’ It was not perhaps with any exclusive refer¬
ence to His death that He said to Zaccliseus,

‘The Son of man came to seek and to save that
which was lost ’ ( Luke xix. 10).

And yet St. Paul, St. Peter, and the author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, regard His death as essential
to the work of ransoming, saving, liberating man. The
same truth is expressed in different words in one book
of the New Testament after another. Jesus died for the
same object as that for which He lived, and still lives,
our salvation. To die was therefore a manifestation of
His glory. In St. John’s Gospel we find that He regards
His crucifixion as the fulfilment of His mission on earth.
His exaltation on the Cross is regarded as a step towards
His exaltation into heaven. After He had entered into
Jerusalem on the Sunday before His death. He said,
‘ The hour is come, that the Son of man should be
glorified’ ( John xii. 23). In His great prayer on the
evening before His crucifixion He prayed,

‘And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine
own self with the glory which I had with thee
before the world was ’ ( John xvii. 5).

The passage from which the first of these two texts is
quoted shows how this glory will be. manifested. For
He compares Himself to a grain of wheat which only
bears fruit if it dies ; otherwise ‘ it abidetli by itself alone. ’
Here our Lord makes His influence depend directly upon
His death ; because He is to perish, He will be the
source of life to others. Only by dying did He in love
completely identify himself with us. This does not
dispense us from holiness. It requires that by living in

93

ABOUT HIS DEATH

union with Him through faith and the help which He
supplies, we should identify ourselves with Him, the
Holy One.

The Holy Communion and the Death of Christ. — Another
great saying of our Lord’s teaches that the death of the
Messiah is not a disaster to His followers, but a means of
the greatest blessing. These are the words that He said
when He instituted the Holy Communion. There is a
difficulty in determining the precise form of words which
He used, for the different accounts of them vary. But
the meaning is substantially the same in all. St. Luke
writes that our Lord said that His blood was poured out
for you , St. Mark says for many, and St. Matthew says
for many unto remission of sins. All three evangelists
write that our Lord described himself as instituting a
‘ covenant’ or f new covenant’ between God and man.
Even the account given in Mark xiv. 22-25, short though
it is, implies that a unique value is attached to the
shedding of Christ’s blood. That Jesus should speak of
a new covenant would not surprise His disciples, for they
must have known that Jeremiah promised such a cove¬
nant (xxxi. 31). Also the words f blood of the covenant ’
would at once suggest to them the account given in Exodus
xxiv. 3-8 of the first covenant made by Moses between God
and Israel. In this ancient sacrifice the blood offered to
God was sprinkled upon the people as a symbol of a life
which refreshed their life and so expelled sin and unclean¬
ness. So our Lord’s death had a special value about it.
For it was the completion of the offering of His life. It
was a perfect reparation to God for the heartless disobe¬
dience of the human race, offered by the perfect Represen¬
tative of our race. His death was not the sole deed by
which He saves. But to appropriate that death, to hold
communion with the Christ who died and lives, is
necessary for our forgiveness and our life.’ We must
identify ourselves with Him who died if we are to enjoy
the friendship of God.

Feeding on Christ’s flesh and blood. — Our Lord has
taught us how to identify ourselves with Him. This
subject will be further considered in our next chapter.
Let us here notice that when our Lord instituted the Holy
Communion, He described the food of our bodies there
given to us as His body and blood. This the disciples

94 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

understood to be a food for their souls. Christ prepared
them for this belief by a discourse spoken a year before
at Capernaum and recorded in John vi. this great
discourse does not relate solely to the Holy Communion.
It is concerned rather with an intercourse and union
between Christ and the Christian which culminates in
this sacred meal. The idea of a real spiritual feeding
on and assimilating the life of God had been present in
the minds of Jewish writers who spoke of God’s wisdom
as given to be ‘ eaten/ that is,, spiritually appropriated.
Thus we find in Ecclus. xxiv. 19-21, c Ihey that eat me
shall yet be hungry, and they that drink me shall yet be
thirsty.’ Besides this line of thought, we find that the
Jewish sacrifices repeatedly impressed upon the minds of
the worshippers the duty of either feeding on the thing
offered to God in sacrifice, or the need of being touched
by the blood of the life of an animal dedicated to God.
These expressive symbols showed that man must not
regard the offering given by him to God as a mere sub¬
stitute for himself, but must identify himself with the
offering and dedicate himself with it.

Our Lord took up these ideas, elevating them to the
highest level. This long discourse in St. John contains
three sections. The first deals with His own Person (vi.
2(3-40), the second specially calls attention to His saving
work (vi. 41-51), the third deals with that communion
with Him which is specially centred in the sacrament of
His body and blood. In the first He requires that men
should believe in Him as their living Lord, the bread
given by God to men’s souls. In the second He declares
that He is the living bread, and that He will give His
flesh for the life of the world. In the third He speaks
of the necessity of eating His flesh and drinking His
blood. The flesh and blood do not mean himself merely,
but himself as affected by a violent death — a death
endured, as He declares, for the life of the world :

( I am the living bread which came down out of
heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall
live for ever : yea and the bread which I will
give is my flesh, for the life of the world ’
(John vi. 51).

Conclusion. — The religious value which our Lord
attached to His death wras not an afterthought or due to

ABOUT HIS DEATH

95

any change in His plan. The task which He had chosen
for himself involved His submission to death. He taught
that the new covenant or alliance between God and man
included and was based upon the idea of sacrifice. And
He saw and taught that this sacrifice was the sacrifice of
himself. The importance which He attached to His
death is shown in many ways. But it is specially
certified to us by the fact that He instituted a special
service in commemoration of it, and made the observance
of this service binding on His disciples. His death is
for the good of others. It is e for the life of the world ’ ;
though, since all will not avail themselves of it, it is ‘for
many' {Mutt., Mark). His death is symbolised by the
breaking of the bread : and that the death is for the
benefit of His disciples is shown by the distribution of
this bread, now called by Him His f body,’ to the
disciples. He brought mankind nearer to God by using
death as He used life, as a means of moral victory
through trust in God. And in dying as He did, He
revealed God’s nature. His nature of holiness and love,
by that perfect love of man which enabled Him to feel
the whole horror of human sin and yet forgive the
sinner. Without this death, God’s nature would not
have been perfectly disclosed. God was ready to forgive
the world when He had proved to the world His love.
The Cross teaches us what service we owe to God. And
we do more than learn what this service means. We can
place ourselves under the purifying power of His sacrifice,
by repentance and faith, by submission to the Holy
Spirit and a right use of the sacraments. As we do so,
the Atonement takes effect in each of us individually and
we are enabled to live the life of sons of God.

CHAPTER IX

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH

The primitive Church rightly placed together the state¬
ment of its belief in the Holy Spirit, the Church, and
the forgiveness of sins. And we shall therefore in this
chapter consider what our Lord taught in reference to
the Holy Spirit and the community of persons committed
to the Holy Spirit’s care, and then briefly deal with
part of the more important sacramental teaching of our
Lord.

The Holy Spirit. — In the Old Testament the work of
the Spirit of God, an energy proceeding from God to
create, to rule and guide, is frequently mentioned.
This Spirit is a principle of life residing in the divine
nature and exerted upon the world. In some passages
(as Isaiah xlviii. 16) this Spirit is almost, if not quite,
recognised as a distinct personality, especially in pas¬
sages where the Spirit and the W ord of God are con¬
trasted. In the New Testament far more is said about
the Holy Spirit, as He is regarded as the Force which
created and sustains the whole Christian Church and
every Christian’s character. We first notice that our
Lord’s own life and work are intimately associated with
the life and work of the Spirit. In Matthew i. 20 and Luke
i. 35 the birth of Jesus in the world of a Virgin Mother,
is expressly attributed to a miraculous intervention of
the divine creative Spirit. All the evangelists record
that the Spirit descended upon Jesus at His Baptism, the
Head of the Church receiving the gift which in Acts and
the Epistles is described as imparted to His members. By
the Spirit He was led into the wilderness to endure the
temptations which were to bring them forward to per¬
fection. ‘By the Spirit of God’ He declared that He
himself cast out devils {Matt. xii. 28).

The Holy Spirit in the Synoptic Gospels. — The Synoptic
Gospels record but little of our Lord’s teaching about
96

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH 97

the relation of the Holy Spirit to the individual. But
this little is of great importance. One of the most
severe statements of our Lord is this :

f Verily I say unto you. All their sins shall be for¬
given unto the sons of men, and their blas¬
phemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme:
but whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy
Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of
an eternal sin ’ (Mark iii. 28, 29).

Some had ascribed His good works to the power of
tfthe prince of the devils.’ These men had so far made evil
their good as to ascribe good to the source of evil. Such
moral depravity is near to sin against the Holy Spirit,
whose personal existence is implied by the fact that He
can be sinned against. Our Lord does not say that
the men to whom He spoke had reached the depth of
depravity which makes moral recovery impossible. But
His words do imply that the will may become so far
identified with evil as to make such a recovery impos¬
sible. In the parallel passage in Matthew xii. 32 our Lord
describes speaking against the Son of Man as a less sin
than speaking against the Holy Spirit. This saying fits
the circumstances. His hearers at that time might
without sin have a very imperfect view of the Messiah’s
dignity, and to speak against Him might not be very
blameworthy. But every Jew knew that the Holy Spirit
was the Spirit of God and, according to their own stan¬
dard, to speak against Him was the acme of profanity.

To possess the Holy Spirit is to possess a great gift
which God desires to impart to His children :

f If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children, how much more shall your
heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them
that ask him ? ’ (Luke xi. 13).

This Holy Spirit will aid His disciples, and be in them
in their time of trial when they are brought before
governors and kings for Christ’s sake :

f But when they deliver you up, be not anxious how
or what ye shall speak : for it shall be given
you in that hour what ye shall speak. For it is
not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father
that speaketh in you ’ (Matt. x. 19, 20).

So as Jesus himself f rejoiced in the Holy Spirit’ (Luke

G

98 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

x. 21), the disciples are to rely upon a power which
transcends them and yet is to be in them.

The Holy Spirit in the Synoptic Gospels is that divine
power which worked in the life of Jesus ; and to under¬
stand the Spirit, the whole life and teaching- of our Lord
must be studied. The fourth Gospel shows how- in turn
the Spirit interprets Jesus to His Church.

The Holy Spirit in St. John’s Gospel. — St. John’s Gospel
contains a full and detailed teaching about the Holy
Spirit, who is described under the name of Paraclete
{John xiv. 26). The word Paraclete means more than
Comforter. It is f One w ho is called upon to stand by
us, especially in difficulty or conflict.’ So one important
meaning is that of Advocate, and St. John applies it in
this sense to Christ as interceding for us w ith the Father
(1 John ii. 1). We can only briefly sketch the outline
of our Lord’s teaching about the Paraclete. It is this :

1. The Paraclete fproceedeth from the Father’
{John xv. 26). The Father will fgive’ Him at the prayer
of the Son {John xiv. 16), and the Son wdll f send ’ Him
{John xvi. 7). So the Father and the Son together are
responsible for His coming. The Spirit will act as the
Champion of the cause of Christ :

f And he, when he is come, will convict the world
in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of
judgement : of sin, because they believe not on
me ; of righteousness, because I go to the
Father and ye behold me no more ; of judge¬
ment, because the prince of this world hath
been judged5 {John xvi. 8-11).

The activity of the Spirit will show that the world
sinned in not believing in Christ, will testify to the
perfect righteousness of Christ as shown by the fact of
His triumphant Ascension, and will show by His own
spiritual victories that the evil spirit is doomed to con¬
demnation and failure.

2. The Spirit will f glorify’ Jesus.

The Spirit will specially f glorify’ Jesus by enabling
the disciples to know more about Jesus, and such things
as the Father and the Son will that He shall teach. He
is not to speak by His owrn initiative :

‘ He shall not speak from himself ; but what things
soever he shall hear, these shall he speak . . .

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH 99

he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto
you' (John xvi. 13, 14).

W hen the time comes for a deeper apprehension of
some aspect of the truth by the Church, the Spirit hears
from the Son and teaches the Church. It is then the
office of the Holy Spirit, ‘the Spirit of truth,’ to guide
into all the truth (John xvi. 13). This development
of the knowledge of the truth on the part of the disciples
will sometimes be based on a revived remembrance
of the teaching of Jesus. ‘He shall teach you all
things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said
unto you ’ (John xiv. 26).

3. The Spirit will give to the Christian a share in the
life of Jesus.

The Holy Spirit is to do more than teach the disciples ;
He is to give them an actual life-contact with Jesus.
Christ will not leave His followers desolate ; He will return
to them in the coming of the Spirit. St. John in comment¬
ing on certain words of Jesus, says, ‘The Spirit was not
yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified’ (John vii.
39). The Greek of this verse makes it plain that he does
not mean that the Holy Spirit did not exist, but that He
was not yet imparted as an inward influence ; He did not
dwell in man until Jesus was glorified by His Ascension.

I he Spirit is to come, not to annihilate our personality, but
to make it Christian ; to come not as a substitute for an
absent Christ, but to bring His spiritual presence to us :

‘ And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you
another Paraclete, that he may be with you for
ever, even the Spirit of truth ; whom the world
cannot receive : for it beholdeth him not,
neither knoweth him : ye know him ; for he
abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will
not leave you desolate : I come unto you. Yet
a little while, and the world beholdeth me no
y \ e 1 ehold me : because I live, ye
shall live also ’ (John xiv. 16-19).

It is in this way that the promises given early in the
Gospel were to be fulfilled. For ‘life’ is the gift of
Jesus, a life that outlives death, and destroys sin which
is also death. The new birth of the believer is by water
and the Spirit, and Jesus says, fI came that they may
have life, and may have it abundantly’ (John x. 10).

100 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Can we explain this difference which we find between
the Synoptic Gospels on the one hand and the writings
of St. Paul and St. John on the other hand in the degree
of prominence which is given to the Holy Spirit? There
is an explanation which seems reasonable, but which has
not yet received as much attention as it deserves. It is
that the Synoptic Gospels do on the whole represent the
course of teaching which was given to persons who were
preparing for admission into the Christian Church, while
the fourth Gospel represents the more developed teach¬
ing which was given to those who were already baptized.
St. John wrote to deepen the knowledge and faith of
Christians ( John xx. 31), not to give primary instruction.
The prevalence of teaching about the Holy Spirit,
assumed as something which would be readily under¬
stood, in the earliest Epistles of St. Paul, is a fact which
requires explanation. And it can only be explained
naturally if we believe that the Lord himself had given
teaching of the kind recorded by St. John. St. Luke,
who wrote Acts no less certainly than he wrote our third
Gospel, records the words of Jesus Christ :

fYe shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is
come upon you : and ye shall be my witnesses
both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and
Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the
earth ’ {Acts i. 8).

And the whole book of Acts is a record of the fulfilment
of this promise. Previous currents of Jewish thought
with regard to the Messiah and the Holy Spirit are not
strong and clear enough to account for the rise of a
definite belief in the divine personality of Jesus and of
the Holy Spirit. The belief rests on the teaching of
Jesus, not merely Jesus as living in the experience of
the Christian Church, but also the Jesus wdio was his¬
torically known and heard.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity. — If St. Paul and
St. John have not perverted the teaching of Jesus, and
we are right in holding that even in the Synoptic Gospels
a divine personality is ascribed to our Lord Jesus Christ
and to the Holy Spirit, then our Lord taught that God
is One in Three. He taught the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity ; though not in the outward form which w^as
given to it by the Councils of the Church in later times,

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH 101

when it became necessary to explain it in opposition to
attempts which were being made to explain it away.
Words like f consubstantial ’ would not have been intel-
legible to the first disciples of Jewish race. But Christ
taught that the life of God is threefold, and that there
are in the life of God those eternal distinctions which we
know in Christian experience. The Father ‘ before the
world was’ glorified and loved the Son ( John xvii. 5);
and the Spirit which we know as ‘the Lord and Giver of
life’ within us, is the same Spirit that ‘ anointed’ Jesus
in His human nature and was active in the creation of
the world. God who reveals himself to us as Father
and Redeemer and Advocate, is not different in himself
from His revelation made to us. There was always in
God a Fatherhood and Sonship and united devotion to
a personal Being who answers love with love. And the
Three are as truly One as our mind and thought and
will are one. When St. Paul speaks of ‘ the grace of
our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the
communion of the Holy Ghost’ (2 Cor. xiii. 14), his
language justifies the language of our Nicene Creed.
And there is a similar co-ordination of the Father, Son,
and Spirit, even in St. J ude, one of the least theological
writers of the New Testament {Jude 20, 21). God is
personal, but also more than personal. There is a Unity
which is higher and more ultimate than personality as
we know it. To this reality we can fitly give the name
of substance. And the doctrine of the Trinity, and that
alone, preserves the truth of God’s transcendence with
the truth of His indwelling presence in the world.

The Church. — We have already on p. 61 considered
the Church as the outward organised manifestation of
the kingdom of God. It is true that it is only recorded
that Jesus actually used the word Church on two occa¬
sions {Matt. xvi. 18; xviii. 15-17). The Greek word
corresponds with the Hebrew word qdhdl, which was
applied to the congregation or community of Israel.
There is therefore no difficulty in supposing that our
Lord would assume that the Greek or Aramaic word, or
both, would be intelligible to His immediate followers.
It agreed with His purpose not to destroy, but to fulfil,
that the society which He founded should realise what
had been imperfectly realised by the Jewish theocracy.

102 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

But whether Jesus frequently used the word qdhdl or
not; He purposed that His followers should form a dis¬
tinct brotherhood. He called twelve men into a specially
close relation with himself, He trained them for the
special work of furthering His principles. He commis¬
sioned them to preach and heal in His name ( Mark iii.
13-19 ; vi. 7-13 ; Luke vi. 12-10). And all the Gospels
unite in teaching that our Lord after His resurrection
gave to the faithful apostles (i) a world-wide commission,
(ii) a command to baptize or proclaim the remission of sins.
We have here the nucleus of an organisation, a provision
for common belief, common prayer, and common work
for God. Not till our Lord ascended and the Holy Spirit
was outpoured, was the Church constituted and able to
develop its organisation. But our Lord previously col¬
lected the material, and made His apostles the foundation
stones.

Jesus Christ with His Church. — Our Lord promised to
be with His Church (a) in worship : Where two or three
are gathered together in my name, there am I in the
midst of them 5 {Matt, xviii. 20) ; (6) in the exercise of
authority over men: ‘ Verily I say unto you. What
things soever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in
heaven : and what things soever ye shall loose on earth
shall be loosed in heaven ’ {Matt, xviii. 18). To 6 bind
and loose’ is a rabbinical Hebrew phrase for f forbid and
permit.’ The Church is to prohibit or allow according
as the principles of Christ require. Thus the Church
bound or forbade the circumcision of Gentile believers,
and in later times loosed or permitted absolution to be
given when a Christian had for a second time fallen into
deadly sin. Similarly in John xx. 23 our Lord says,
‘ Receive ye the Holy Ghost : whose soever sins ye
forgive, they are forgiven unto them ; whose soever sins
ye retain, they are retained.’ In this, as in the previous
promise, an assurance is given to the disciples that the
actions which are done for the spiritual government and
discipline of the Church will be ratified in heaven, (c)
The special connection of our Lord’s presence with
Baptism, by which souls are brought under the power of
His ( name ’ or revealed personality, and the Holy
Communion, which is the partaking of His body and
blood, will be considered soon. The whole right of the

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH 103

Church to guide and feed the souls of men rests upon
this presence of Christ with her in worship based on a true
faith, in government, and in sacraments. This presence
of Christ is effected by the Spirit. And our Lord, know¬
ing the great possibilities that are involved in His
presence with His Church, prayed to the Father :

e That they may be one, even as we are one : I in
them, and thou in me, that they may be per¬
fected into one ; that the world may know that
thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as
thou lovedst me ’ ( John xvii. 22, 23).

Holy Baptism. — The new revelation of God under the
threefold Name, that of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is
associated with a new rite :

fGo ye therefore, and make disciples of all the
nations, baptizing them into the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost ’
{Matt, xxviii. 19).

The fname’ of God is a Hebrew expression for what
God is. Baptism is therefore immersion e into ’ the Being
of God. The divine fname' is the element into which
the baptized person is immersed, as the source of all
spiritual cleansing. He must henceforth live incor¬
porated in Christ and thus united with God, the words
which declare this incorporation being spoken over him
when he is baptized, that is, ceremonially washed with
water. The state of mind required in the person so bap¬
tized is abundantly illustrated from the early Christian
belief and practice recorded in the New Testament. He
must have faith and repentance. He must believe in the
God revealed to Him in Jesus, and he must have a true
change of mind in respect of sin, repentance being the
first practical effect of faith. God’s response to this faith
is the giving of ‘ remission ’ of sins to the person baptized.
So our Lord is described by St. Luke as saying :

fThus it is written, that the Christ should suffer,
and rise again from the dead the third day ; and
that repentance and remission of sins should be
preached in his name unto all the nations, be¬
ginning from Jerusalem’ {Luke xxiv. 46, 47).

It was the conviction of the primitive Church that the
heart of the Gospel was explained to the Church orally
by the risen Christ. The message is a message of

104 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

forgiveness, of a remission or f putting away/ not fic¬
titious but literally true. It is a remission which at
once raises the believer to a status of sonship with God,
a status won by a living Saviour who imparts His own
strength to the baptized believer.

This gift of a new strength comes with the bestowal of
the Holy Spirit. The New Testament repeatedly connects
the gift of the Holy Spirit with baptism. Our Lord him¬
self spoke of the gift of the Spirit to His disciples as a
baptism. f Ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not
many days hence ’ ( Acts i. 5). After the Holy Spirit came
to them on the day of Pentecost, baptism with the Spirit in
no way displaced baptism with water. It was regarded as
normally coinciding with it (Acts ii. 38 ; ix. 17 If.). But
when the apostles themselves did not baptize and lay
hands on the converts, steps were taken to supply the
gift. The apostles supplied it by laying hands on those
baptized previously (Acts viii. 16-17 ; xix. 1-7).

Baptism into the name of the Lord Jesus. — Acts viii. 16 is
connected with a difficulty concerning baptism itself. It
mentions Christians at Samaria who had not received the
Holy Ghost, f only they had been baptized into the name
of the Lord Jesus ’ (cf. ii. 38 ; xix. 5). It was the opinion
of some writers of the Middle Ages, and the opinion
has been revived in modern times, that when the
primitive Church administered baptism, it for a time
administered it with the formula finto the name of
the Lord Jesus’ and not with the Trinitarian formula
found in Matt, xxviii. 19. It is just possible that
the apostles may have used the Trinitarian formula
in baptizing Gentiles and used the other words as a
formula in baptizing Jews and Samaritans, or that they
replaced the simple formula by the fuller one. But
there is no clear evidence to show that the baptismal
formula ever consisted of the words (l baptize thee
into the name of the Lord Jesus.’ The early Jewish
Christian manual known as the Didache clearly says
f Baptize into the name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Ghost in living water.’ And the New
Testament itself proves that within the lifetime of men
who heard our Lord, it was usual to speak of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit together. We conclude therefore
that it is most likely that f to be baptized into the name of

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH 105

the Lord Jesus ’ means ( to receive Christian baptism. It
does not denote the use of a rival formula. To be bap¬
tized into Christ so as to be incorporated in Him is to be
brought into union with the Father and the Holy Spiiit.

The Holy Communion. — Christianity is in its essence a
sacramental religion. It teaches that a divine Spiiit,
the eternal Son of God, made human nature His own
for ever, so as to be always associated in our minds with
every thought concerning himself. Material natuie is
employed to contribute its share towards the whole
process of redemption. It is made the vehicle of spiritual
life, not cast aside as unspiritual. The early Christians
valued this great principle, and their writers constantly
maintained it against the decadent pagan theories in
which matter was represented as an evil thing. . They
saw that the idea of the highest spiritual gifts coming to
man through material means agrees with the whole
method by which God creates and redeems us. The
sacred meal instituted by Jesus Christ in remembrance
of himself is a great illustration of this method. As
such it is in a peculiar degree analogous to the act by
which fthe Word was made flesh.’ And its very nature
simultaneously makes a great appeal to the individual
conscience and emphasises the social side of true religion.

Concerning the institution of this meal, to which the
Christians at a very early date gave the name ol
Eucharist or c thanksgiving, we have at least thiee
primitive traditions. There is (i) that of St. Maik,
apparently familiar to St. Matthew, (ii) that of St. Luke,
(iii) that of St. Paul. They are as follows

Mark xiv. 22. Matt. xxvi. 26.

And as they were eating he Now as they were eating
took bread, blessed and brake Jesus took bread and blessed

and gave to them and said :
Take :

this is my body.

And taking a cup he gave
thanks

and gave to them
and they all drank of it :
and he said to them :

This is my blood of the cove¬
nant, which is shed on behalf of
many.

and brake and giving to the
disciples said :

Take, eat :
this is my body.

And taking a cup he gave
thanks

and gave to them
saying :

Drink ye all of it :
for this is my blood of the cove¬
nant which for many is shed
for remission of sins.

106 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

We may next compare the accounts of St. Luke and
his friend St. Paul :

Luke xxii. 17.

And he received a cup and
gave thanks and said: Take
this and divide it among your¬
selves ; for I say unto you, I
will not drink from now of the
fruit of the vine, until the
kingdom of God come.

And he took bread and gave
thanks and brake and gave to
them saying :

This is my body

which is given on your behalf :

do this unto my remembrance.

Also the cup likewise after
supper, saying :

This cup is the new covenant
in my blood, this which on
your behalf is shed.

1 Cor. xi. 23.

He took bread and gave
thanks and brake and said :

This is my body

which is on your behalf :

do this unto my remembrance.

Likewise also the cup after
supper, saying :

This cup is the new covenant
in my blood ;

do this, as oft as ye drink it,
unto my remembrance.

In spite of the evidence of some manuscripts, there is
good reason for thinking that St. Luke wrote as above.
The mention of the first cup. in the passage which is here
printed in italics, can be explained. In the time of our
Lord the Jewish Passover feasts which commemorated
the deliverance of the Israelites from the power of the
Egyptians, included the drinking of four cups of wine
mixed with water. The third cup was called ‘ the cup
of blessing/ and this was the cup which Jesus gave as
His blood. St. Paul actually calls the sacramental cup
‘the cup of blessing’ (1 Cor. x. 16). And the first cup
mentioned by St. Luke is not sacramental, but part of
the ordinary Passover meal.

Holy Communion and the Passover. — The best authorities
in the early Church agree with St. John in maintaining
that our Lord did not eat a Passover lamb, but died on
the day when the Passover lambs were killed. The last
supper which He ate with His disciples was therefore
not identical with the Jewish feast and was eaten a
night earlier. But it was nevertheless a Passover. It
included all the most sacred associations of the ancient
rite. Our Lord expressly calls it ‘this Passover.’ • And

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH 107

it was accompanied by the use of the same thin un¬
leavened bread, the same wine mingled with water,
the same ‘sop’ or mixture of bitter herbs, bread and
vinegar, which was eaten to recall the mortar of the
bricks made in Egypt, and followed by the singing of
the same Psalms. Like the Passover this service denoted
deliverance accompanied by sacrifice, and like the Pass-
over it included communion, the sharing of a common
sacred meal. More than this, it inaugurated a ‘new
covenant,’ which is a transfigured renewal of the cove¬
nant made between God and the Israelites by the sacrifice
offered at Sinai ( Exod . xxiv. 6-8). And it also fulfilled in
a spiritualised form the Jewish expectation of the feast
to be given in the kingdom of the Messiah to His people.
Thus the symbols of a feast are treated by our Lord as
equally the symbols of a covenant made by the shedding
of sacrificial blood.

St. John’s Gospel does not record the institution of
the Eucharist, any more than it mentions the institution
of Christian baptism. Instead of this the third chapter
lays peculiar emphasis on the necessity of a new birth
by wrater and the Spirit, and the sixth chapter on the
necessity of feeding on the flesh and blood of Christ.
These two chapters deal with those great truths which
underlie the doctrine of these two sacraments. And by
insisting upon the need of the Christian’s intimate union
with the divine life which He himself possesses, Jesus
declared His intention of communicating to His Church
His own human life. He expressly guarded His words
against any gross or materialistic explanation, by lifting
the minds of His hearers upward to heaven. His words
imply that heaven is His true home, and that after the
Ascension it will not be possible for His disciples to
think that He had intended that they should feed upon
His flesh and blood in a manner recognised by the out¬
ward senses. But He nevertheless teaches that the whole
Christ becomes the living bread to each Christian.

Summary of Eucharistic doctrine. — It is not our purpose
here to describe later theological explanations of the
Lord’s Supper, but to call attention to what our Lord’s
words obviously imply as recorded by the evangelists and
St. Paul.

(i) The bread and wine are identified with Christ s

108 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

body and blood, so that the disciples of our Lord feed on
His life. It is the life which He receives from the
Father, and that life incarnate and offered in death.

(ii) The Lord’s Supper or Eucharist is a service which
He commanded to be repeated.

(iii) The separate giving of the bread as the body of
Christ, and giving of the wine as His blood, are symbolic
of the separation of His body and blood on Calvary.
They therefore represent the sacrificial death which
sealed the fnew covenant’ between God and man.

(iv) The Lord’s Supper is a means of strengthening1
corporate unity between believers. In feeding upon
the same divine sacrifice they themselves become more
truly fone body.’

CHAPTER X

our lord’s teaching about the end of the world

The teaching- of Jesus contains important prophecies with
regard to the future of Jerusalem, the future and end of
the world and of man.

There are some serious problems connected with these
prophecies. The different evangelists lay stress on some¬
what different aspects of the events predicted by Christ,
and there is sometimes some confusion in the record of
what He taught. But on investigation that teaching can
be seen to be a living and organic whole, and the scheme
of it can be intelligently grasped.

The end of Jerusalem. — Among the oldest portions of
our Gospels are certain predictions of the destruction of
Jerusalem. For example :

f Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send
unto them prophets and apostles ; and some of
them they shall kill and persecute ; that the
blood of all the prophets, which was shed from
the foundation of the world, may be required
of this generation ; from the blood of Abel unto
the blood of Zachariah, who perished between
the altar and the sanctuary : yea, I say unto
you, it shall be required of this generation ’
( Luke xi. 49-51).

Later, on the occasion of His triumphal entrance into
Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, we are told how, as He
approached the city. He wept over it and said :

‘For the days shall come upon thee, when thine
enemies shall cast up a bank about thee, and
compass thee round, and keep thee in on every
side, and shall dash thee to the ground, and thy
children within thee ; and they shall not leave
in thee one stone upon another ; because thou
knewest not the time of thy visitation

{Luke xix 43, 44)

109

110 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

He also more definitely foretold the destruction of the
Temple ( Mark xiii. 2). And He warned those who were
in Judsea to flee into the mountains when the city should
become surrounded by the invading armies {Luke xxi. 20).
He also said that God would destroy the evil f husband¬
men’ of His vineyard, and ‘give the vineyard unto others’
{Mark xii. 9). All this was fulfilled. The Romans in a.d.
70, within the lifetime of many who saw and heard Jesus,
destroyed both the city and the Temple. The Temple
was never rebuilt ; an effort made three hundred years
later by the Emperor Julian to rebuild it proved abortive.
The Jewish propaganda among the heathen practically
came to an end in the second century, being supplanted
by Christian missionary enterprise.

The Future Coming of our Lord. — It is far more difficult
to determine exactly what our Lord taught with regard
to His future coming, and more especially the time of
that coming. After the instruction which He gave to
the disciples when He sent them forth to teach and to
heal, we find in Matthew a discourse upon the dangers
which they will encounter. In the midst of it comes
the saying :

(1) ‘ But when they persecute you in this city, flee

into the next : for verily I say unto you. Ye
shall not have gone through the cities of Israel,
till the Son of man be come’ {Matt. x. 23).

It is almost certain that the evangelist, in accordance
with his usual custom, has here grouped together sayings
of our Lord according to their subject, and not according
to the order of time in which they were spoken. Part
of these sayings belong to a late period in our Lord’s
ministry. The tribulations here foretold belong to a
time subsequent to the Ascension, not a time before the
Crucifixion. The parallel passage in Mark xiii. 9-13
shows that the evangelisation of ‘all the nations’ is to
accompany these troubles. It is therefore possible that
our Lord is warning His apostles that they will not
succeed in converting the Jews before His visible per¬
sonal return. But it is more likely that He refers to an
invisible return by which His power will be manifested.

(2) A second important passage is in Mark :

{a) ‘For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of
my words in this adulterous and sinful genera-

ABOUT THE END OF T FI E WORLD 111

tion, the Son of man also shall be ashamed of
him, when he cometh in the glory of his Father
with the holy angels. ( b ) And he said unto
them, Verily I say unto you, there be some
here of them that stand by, which shall in
nowise taste of death, till they see the kingdom
of God come with power ’ ( Mark viii. 38-ix. 1).

Clause (a) above in all three Synoptists refers to the
final judgment, and Matthew here represents our Lord as
saying that He c will render unto every man according to
his deeds.’

As for clause ( b ), the parallel passage in Luke agrees
with Mark, as it similarly speaks of ‘the kingdom of
God’ ( Luke ix. 26, 27). But Matt. xvi. 28 replaces the
words about the coming of the kingdom by c till they see
the Son of man coming in His kingdom.’ The fact that
the earliest evangelist, St. Mark, is here supported by
St. Luke, makes it very doubtful if our Lord on this
occasion spoke of His final personal coming as happening
in the lifetime of the bystanders, even if the first evan¬
gelist really thought so.

(3) Another important passage is our Lord’s answer
to the question of the high priest on the night of His
trial :

‘Again the high priest asked him, and saith unto
him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed ?
And Jesus said, I am : and ye shall see the Son
of man sitting at the right hand of power, and
coming with the clouds of heaven ’

( Mark xiv. 61, 62).

In Matt. xxvi. 64 the statement is varied by the inser¬
tion of ‘Henceforth’ before ‘ye shall see.’ In Luke
xxii. 69 the verse appears in a somewhat easier form,
and the words about ‘coming’ are omitted. Thus, accord¬
ing to all the Synoptists, our Lord definitely told the high
priest of His future glory. Possibly He connected this
with a ‘coming,’ though not His final coming.

(4) In addition to this answer given by our Lord to
the high priest, we find in Matt. xxiv. 29-31, Mark xiii.
24-27, Luke xxi. 25-28, unanimous agreement to the
effect that the Son of Man would come after a period of
great tribulation which is described by the evangelists,
and specially the first evangelist, in close connection

112 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

with the fall of Jerusalem. In Matthew we find these
words :

‘ But immediately after the tribulation of those days,
the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall
not give her light, and the stars shall fall from
heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall he
shaken : and then shall appear the sign of the
Son of man in heaven : and then shall all the
tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see
the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven
with power and great glory ’ {Matt. xxiv. 29, SO).

This seems to be the final coming as in Matt. xvi. 27 ;
Mark viii. 38 ; Luke ix. 26.

Short summary of the above evidence. — The principal
facts which the first three Gospels present in connection
with our Lord’s second coming are these : (1) According
to Matthew Jesus said that He would come before His
disciples had finished visiting the cities of Israel ; the
other two Gospels only describe this coming as a coming
of the kingdom or reign of God. (2) According to
Matthew , some of the bystanders who heard our Lord
would see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom ; the
other two Gospels again speak of this as a coming of the
kingdom of God, though they mention the visible return
of the Son in the previous verse. (3) In Matthew and
Mark our Lord is described as telling the high priest
that He would see the Son of man f coming’; in Luke
this statement merely appears as a statement of the Son’s
glory in heaven. The evidence of Matthew and Mark
is here fuller and perhaps more primitive than that of
Luke. (4) All the Synoptists speak of a final return
which Matthew connects closely with the fall of Jeru¬
salem, and Ijuke postpones till somewhat later {Luke
xxi. 24, but cf. xxi. 32).

The evidence of St John’s Gospel. — It has often been
observed that in St. John’s Gospel there seems to be less
said about the future resurrection, future coming of our
Lord and future Judgment, than in the Synoptic Gospels.
St. John does not spiritualise these great events away,
but he emphasises the truth that there is a judgment
executed upon every man, and indeed by every man
upon himself when he comes into contact with Christ
(ix. 39 ; cf. v. 24). He records the teaching of our

ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD 113

Lord that there would be a coming of himself in the
coming of the Holy Spirit, who would unite the disciples
with Christ. ‘ I come unto you. Yet a little while, and
the world beholdeth me no more, but ye behold me ’
(John xiv. 19). He lays stress, like St. Paul, on that
resurrection which takes place in this present life when
a man accepts Christ as his Lord. ‘ Verily, verily, I
say unto you. The hour cometh and now is, when the
dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God : and they
that hear shall live ’ (John v. 25). There is in St. John's
Gospel an almost entire absence of those elements which
surround the day of judgment in the Jewish apocalypses,
a judgment attended by a glorious outward display, such
as is definitely though briefly mentioned in the Synoptic
Gospels. Nevertheless, St. John does record that our
Lord spoke of coming again in a personal sense. He
promised, ‘And if I go and prepare a place for you,
I will come again and will receive you unto myself’
(John xiv. 3). He says with regard to every man who
believes on Him and eats His flesh and drinks His blood,
that He ‘will raise him up at the last day’ (John vi. 39,
40, 44, 54). In a similar way, He gives to Martha a wider
view of the resurrection, but He does not tell her that
she is wrong when she says, ‘ I know that he [Lazarus]
shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day’
(John xi. 24). Immediately after speaking of the
spiritual resurrection, He speaks of ‘all that are in the
tombs ’ coming forth ‘ unto the resurrection of life ’ or
‘the resurrection of judgement’ (John v. 29). And in a
manner which recalls the teaching of both the Jewish
apocalypses and the Synoptists, our Lord says that ‘The
Father gave him authority to execute judgement, because
He is the Son of man’ (John v 27). These passages
show that the teaching about ‘the last day’ in St. John’s
Gospel, though brief, agrees with the Synoptists.

An unwarrantable interpretation. — It is sometimes held
by writers who oppose the Christian faith that Jesus
prophesied His early return in a visible form to judge
finally the world. He expected something which never
happened. He thought that the kingdom of God would
be suddenly established as the Jews expected, and that
He would come again in glory to establish it in a few
years’ time, or less. This theory implies, and is intended

H

114 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

to suggest^ that our Lord was an erring man, and not
what Christians believe Him to be, 'The Way, the Truth,
and the Life.’

Conclusion as to the Second Coming. — The above inter-
pretation is in conflict with a large part of the evidence
which we have. It supposes that St. John’s Gospel is
fictitious. It also directly opposes various passages in the
Synoptists. They show that our Lord anticipated a long
interval before His visible return. The parables of the
Mustard Seed, the Wheat and the Tares, and the Drag¬
net, imply that the consummation of the kingdom is in
the future. Further, a period of grace is to be given to
the Gentiles during which they may learn the truth
{Matt. xxi. 41 ; cf. Luke xxi. 24). And the Gospel has
to be preached to all the world before the end comes
{Matt. xxiv. 14, xxvi. 13, xxviii. 19).

The true explanation, supported by both the Synoptists
and St. John, is to be found in the fact that He spoke
of various 'days of the Son of man {Luke xvii. 22). In
accordance with the teaching of the Jewish prophets. He
taught that there were days of partial and preliminary
judgment, involving a final judgment in the future. The
final judgment day will come suddenly like the flash of
lightning across the sky, and like the flood in the days
of Noah {Luke xvii. 24 ff.). But there are other
epochs in His coming as in the development of His
kingdom. His doctrine of His advent and His judgment
corresponds with His doctrine of the kingdom. Just
as the kingdom has a visible as well as an invisible
existence, so it is with His coming. But there was a
tendency in the early Church to interpret our Lord’s
words about His different ' days ’ or comings as predic¬
tions of the one outward final advent. Thus in Matthew
we find the coming to judgment at. the fall of Jerusalem
confused with the final judgment, which is represented
as 'immediately after the tribulation * {Matt. xxiv. 29).
St. Jerome and St. Augustine long ago observed the
confusion in the report of this eschatological discourse.
It corresponds with that expectation of the immediate
outward return of Christ which we find in the earlier
Epistles of St. Paul, who seems to have made the same
mistake.

No difficulty is occasioned by our Lord’s prophecy to

ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD 115

the high priest, whichever report of His words be the
most correct. Our Lord’s reign did begin out of the
apparent defeat which Fie encountered when condemned
by the high priest. The vision in Daniel is a vision of
the holy element in Israel personified in ‘ one like unto
a Son of man ’ and supplanting the dominion of those
beasts which embody the empires of this world. So at
the hour of His death God glorified His Son, and the
Son of Man received ‘an everlasting dominion, which
shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall
not be destroyed ’ (Dan. vii. 14). The subsequent history
of Christianity has shown that our Lord did not err in
anticipating this victory.

To sum up : our Lord did declare that the kingdom of
God would come in power, and that He would come
within the lifetime of some of His hearers, meaning by
this His return in spiritual force and in the crises of
history. He also foretold that He would return finally
with visible glory after a long interval of time. Th'e
early Jewish Christians to some extent confused Hi&
different sayings with regard to these ‘ days’ of coming,
and the evangelists show traces of this confusion.

The Resurrection. — In one passage in the Synoptic
Gospels the resurrection is specially considered (Matt..
xxii. 23-33 ; Mark xii. 18-27 ; Luke xx. 27-40).

The Sadducees denied the resurrection. And in the
above passage they endeavour to make our Lord and
the doctrine of the resurrection simultaneously appear
ridiculous. They come and put to Him this question :
If a woman should be married to seven brothers succes¬
sively, to which of the seven would she belong after the
resurrection ? In His answer Jesus showed that the
question rested on two false assumptions : (1) the false
idea that God either could not or would not provide for
men a mode of life suited to their new conditions ; and
(2) the false idea that in the next world such relations
as those of marriage would be maintained. Fie then
refuted their denial of the resurrection by referring to
their own Scriptures :

‘Have ye not read in the book of Moses, in the
place concerning the Bush, how God spake unto
him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the
God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob ? He is not

116 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

the God of the dead, but of the living : ye do
greatly err ’ {Mark xii. 26).

The deeply religious meaning attached to the word
^ ^fe ’ in the Bible, and the truth, gradually dawning in
the Old Testament, that fellowship with God can only
be ended by man’s sin, must be borne in mind by the
reader of this saying. The patriarchs’ faith in God was
life-bringing, and such life is eternal, for it is contact
with the eternal God. The argument used by our Lord
might be interpreted to imply only the immortality ot
the soul. But the Jews who had come to believe in the
immortality of the soul had by this time also come to
believe in the resurrection of the body. And Christ
assumes in His answer that for man a merely bodiless

■existence is not real life. . . . Al

The blessedness of the future life is implied m the
parallel passage in Luke xx. 35, 36, where our Lord
speaks of those f that are accounted worthy to attain to
that world, and the resurrection from the dead . . . they
are equal unto the angels ; and are sons of God, being
sons of the resurrection.’ And elsewhere those who
have deserted their earthly possessions for His sake are
promised both a f hundredfold ’ now in this present
time, a f hundredfold’ of spiritual relationships and goods,
*and in the world to come eternal life’ {Mark x. 30).
Whereas the future life, properly so called, belongs
-only to the righteous ; that life which is a judgment,
being the state of the sinner left to his sin and separated
from all good, will be the fate of the wicked :

‘The hour cometh, in which all that are in the
tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come
forth : they that have done good, unto the
resurrection of life ; and they that have done
ill, unto the resurrection of judgement ’

{John v. 29).

The Judgment. — Jesus declared that He was the Judge
•of man. In moral questions He spoke as the Judge who
lays down or voices the law of motive and conduct, who
also rebukes or forgives. In St. John s Gospel we find
that He represents a judgment of men as proceeding
during His ministry. ‘Now is the judgement of this
world ’ ; ‘ Yea, and if I judge, my judgement is true ’ ;

For judgement came I into this world’ {John xii. 31 ;

ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD 117

viii. 16 ; ix. 69). Contact with the truth compels a man
to accept it or neglect it : ‘ And this is the judgement, that
the light is come into this world, and men loved the
darkness rather than the light ; for their works were
evil’ {John iii. 19). This continuous present judgment
will terminate in a future judgment. One is quite com¬
patible with the other. Judgment is long, thorough,
and comprehensive. And it will be no external or
capricious judgment which will be passed at the end.
Jesus, as we saw, said that all judgment had been com¬
mitted to ‘the Son’ {John v. 22, 23). But nevertheless
He said, ‘He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my
sayings, hath one that judgeth him : the word that 1
spake, the same shall judge him at the last day’ ( John

xii. 43). That is, a man is judged by His own attitude
towards the sayings of Jesus. It is the same law as prevails
in our use or misuse of nature. Fire or water may be
the means of saving a man’s life. But if he uses them
wrongly he will be burnt to death or drowned. Each
man causes his own judgment, though that judgment
will finally be pronounced by Jesus Christ.

Principles of the Judgment. — Various parables show us
what principles will regulate the final judgment. By
repeated teaching and a wealth of illustration our Lord
impressed upon His disciples that they must watch and
he morally ready for His coming. As the final coming will
be unexpected, untiring vigilance is necessary :

‘If the master of the house had known in what hour
the thief was coming, he would have watched,
and not have left his house to be broken
through. Be ye also ready ; for in an hour
that ye think not the Son of man cometh ’

{Luke xii. 39, 40).

Christ did not tell His disciples when His final return
would take place. He even says that ‘the Son’ himself
does not know the day and hour {Matt. xxiv. 36 ; Mark

xiii. 32). Our duty is to ‘watch and pray’ {Matt. xxvi.
41 ; Mark xiii. 33).

All the servants of Christ {I^uke xii. 35-38) are to be
as prepared for His coming as the official of the Church
‘whom his lord hath set over his household, to give
them their food in due season ’ {Matt. xxiv. 45 ; Mark
xiii. 34). All are required to show vigilance and a

118 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

strictly faithful observance of their duty. Their minds
must never be immersed in worldly pleasure. Ihe
parable of the Ten Virgins {Matt. xxv. 1-13) bears upon
this subject, and is explained by our Lord himself. Ihe
Virgins are the members of e the kingdom of heaven. ’ The
Bridegroom is Jesus Christ coming to call them to His
marriage feast. He lingers, and all sleep. It seems to be
suggested that all need rest, even the Wise Virgins. But
the Wise have procured oil, and they have only to trim
their lamps when the sudden cry which heralds the Bride¬
groom’s coming wakes them from their sleep. They rested
with an undercurrent of expectation. The Foolish Virgins
rested unprepared and unequipped, and were shut out
from the feast. The parable of the Talents {Matt. xxv.
14-30) and that of the Pounds {Luke xix. 11-27) insist
again upon the necessity of faithful honest work. In
the parable of the Talents we are shown that though
unequal gifts are given by God to different men, He
demands the same diligence from every one. The sin
of the wicked servant was simply that he was too slothful
and too cowardly to use his own talent. In the parable
of the Pounds we are shown that when God gives the
same gift to different men, He expects all to make such
use of it as they honestly can. One may gain ten and
another five pounds ; but the man who makes no effort
to gain anything will lose all.

W atchfulness, fidelity, hard work, are some of the
principles by which we shall be judged. To these we
must add entire sincerity in our Christianity. It will
not be enough to plead that we f did eat and drink’ in
our Lord’s presence, or to say that He did ‘ teach in our
streets’ : in spite of this plea He may say, ‘I know not
whence ye are ’ {Luke xiii. 27). It will not even be
enough to say that we have prophesied in His name
or done ‘many mighty works’ {Matt. vii. 22). For to
be known by Jesus and confessed by Him as being His,
it is necessary to have His spirit :

‘ If any man would come after me, let him deny
himself, and take up his cross and follow me.
For whosoever would save his life shall lose it :
but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake
shall find it. For what shall a man be profited,
if he shall gain the whole world, and forfeit his

ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD 119

life ? or wliat shall a man give in exchange for

his life ? ’ {Matt. xvi. 24-26).

Just as our Lord did not tell His disciples when the
day of judgment would be, but told them to watch; so
He acted when asked, ‘ Lord, are they few that be saved ? ’
{Luke xiii. 23). His answer was an exhortation to strenu¬
ous endeavour : e Strive to enter in by the narrow door.’

As the life of the saved will be supremely blessed, so
the existence of those who have f forfeited’ their life by
sin will be supremely sad. ‘The righteous shall shine
forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father’ {Matt.
xiii. 43). The wicked will be cast into ‘Gehenna.’ This
was originally the name of the valley of Hinnom, near
Jerusalem, where idolatrous Israelites used to sacrifice
their children to the god Moloch, and where in later
times dead bodies were cast for cremation. In our Lord’s
time it was applied to the place of final punishment for
the wicked. This place is also described as ‘the furnace
of fire ’ {Matt. xiii. 42), ‘ the eternal fire ’ {Matt, xviii. 8),
‘the unquenchable fire’ {Mark ix. 43), the place ‘ where
their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched ’ {Mark
ix. 48), ‘the outer darkness’ where there is ‘the weeping
and gnashing of teeth’ {Matt. viii. 12, xiii. 42, etc.).
Punishment in Gehenna is not described by our Lord
as temporary or remedial. It is directly contrasted with
entering into life {Matt, xviii. 8). So in Matt. xxv. 46,
‘ eternal punishment’ is the alternative destiny to
‘ eternal life.’ To translate the Greek word for ‘ eternal ’
as though it meant only ‘ belonging to the world to
come,’ seems to overlook the permanent nature of life
in perfect union with God. But whereas our Lord’s
words compel us to believe that a man’s future doom is
fixed for good or evil by his choice in this present life,
they seem to leave room for a diminution of suffering in
the future world. In Jude 7 the cities of the Plain are
said to have suffered ‘ the punishment of eternal fire,’
where the words mean not that the fire was permanent,
but that its effects were permanent. So when our Lord
speaks of ‘eternal fire’ {Matt, xviii. 8; xxv. 41), it is
possible that He only means a fire the results of w'hich
are a permanent loss of good. That there are different
degrees of punishment is shown in Matt. xi. 22, 24 ;
Luke xii. 47, 48. But so far as we are able to see, our

120 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Lord used the strongest words which the language of
the time afforded for describing the intense misery of
those who wilfully reject the love of God.

The Judgment of the Heathen. — The most striking con¬
trast between the teaching of the Jews and the teaching
of our Lord with regard to the future judgment, is that
the Jews regarded it as primarily a triumph of the
accepted Israelites over the rejected Gentiles, and our
Lord taught that it is essentially religious and ethical.
The Father’s love is so great that it is not His will that
one of His little ones should perish {Matt, xviii. 14). At
the last day it will be shown that those who have not
known our Lord consciously, but have been true to the
light which they had, will be saved. In a solemn and
magnificent description of the judgment, ‘all the
nations ’ are represented as gathered before the throne
of the Son of Man :

‘Then shall the King say unto them on his right
hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit
the kingdom prepared for you from the founda¬
tion of the world : for I was an hungred, and
ye gave me meat : I was thirsty, and ye gave
me drink : I was a stranger, and ye took me in;
naked, and ye clothed me : I was sick, and ye
visited me : I was in prison, and ye came unto
me.

‘Then shall the righteous answer him, saying.
Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed
thee? or athirst, and gave thee drink? And
when saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in?
or naked, and clothed thee ? And when saw we
thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee ?

‘ And the King shall answer and say unto them,
Verily I say unto you. Inasmuch as ye did it
unto one of these my brethren, even these least,
ye did it unto me’ {Matt. x-xv. 34-40).

This picture, like other word pictures of our Lord,
does not mention every feature of the subject described.
But it does give a just test and one of universal appli¬
cation. And the above interpretation agrees with the
teaching of St. John that there is a ‘ light which lighteth
every man coming into the world ’ {John i. 9), and with
the teaching of St. Paul that Gentiles may ‘shew the

ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD 121

work of the law written in their hearts . . . their
thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing
them ; in the clay when God shall judge the secrets ot
men, according to my Gospel, by Jesus Christ’ {Rom. ii.
15, 16).

Paradise. — ‘ To-day shalt thou be with me in
Paradise’ {Luke xxiii. 43). These words of comfort
spoken to a dying thief, unbaptized but repentant,
ignorant but able to call Jesus ‘ Lord,’ possess a wealth
of meaning. They first tell us the wideness of God s
mercy, but they also tell us of something more. The
word Paradise or ‘ park’ was applied by the Jews of later
times to the garden of Eden and to a blessed state in
another world. Our Lord probably used it as best fitted
to the understanding of the penitent malefactor. And it
should mean for us more than for him. It tells us of
a scene of life and rest, of nearness to Jesus, and there¬
fore nearness to God. It tells us of a state which is
without that full glory which ‘the sons of the resurrec¬
tion’ will reach. But it is ‘peace beginning to be,’ and
it is ‘ with Christ. ’

INDEX

Ahijah, symbolic act of, 12.

Angels, 63.

Apocalyptic doctrine of ‘ Son of
man,’ 39, 113.

Apocryphal Jewish books, 39, 51.

Ascetism, 83.

Atonement, 85 ff.

Austerity of the Gospel, 67.

Baptism, Christian, 103 ; * in the
name of Jesus,’ 104.

Barnasha, Son of man, 38.

Beatitudes, 81.

Binding and loosing, 102.

Blood of Christ, 93 ff., 105 ff.

Bread, ‘ Living,’ 94.

Ceremonial law, Christ’s atti¬
tude towards, 15 ff.

Children, their place in Christ’s
teaching, 63.

Church, 61, 101 ff.

Civil government, 76.

Coming, future, of Christ, no;
as represented in Matt., 112;
in John , 112 f.

Daniel , Book of, on Son of
man, 39, 50, 115.

Day, the last, no ff.

Days ‘ of the Son of man,’ 114.

Death of Christ, 85 ff.

122

Devotion of Jesus to the Father,
27.

Divinity of Christ, 41 ff.

Divorce, 75.

Ecclesiasticus, teaching about
God, 25.

Enoch , Book of, 39.

Essenes, 5.

Eternal life, 116 ff.

Eternal punishment, 119.
Eucharist, 93, 106.

Faith, nature of, 66.

Family, the, 75.

Fasting, 22.

Fatherhood of God, 30 ; in what
sense universal, 33.

Fear of God, 26, 32.

Forgiveness, Christian duty of,

73, 80.

Forgiveness of sins, granted by
Christ, 37 ; by the Church, 102.
Friendship, 74.

Gehenna, 119.

God, our Lord's doctrine of, 24 ff.,
100.

Good works, 70.

Grace, 71.

Guilt offering, Christ as, 89.

INDEX

12:3

Halacha, 16.

Heathen, judgment of, 120.

Herodians, 3, 53.

Hillel, teaching on divorce, 75.

Holy Communion, 93, 105.

Holy Spirit, the sin against, 65,
97 ; doctrine of, 96 ff.

Humility, nature of Christian, 68.

Isaiah, symbolic act of, 12 ; on
God's fatherhood, 25 ; on the
Servant of the Lord, 40, 89.

J amma, Jewish council at, 13.

Jerusalem, destruction foretold,
109.

Job, Book of, 26.

John, St., Baptist, 61, 64, 80.

John, St., Gospel of, 8 ff.

Judaism, our Lord’s attitude
towards, 13 ff., 25.

Judgment, doctrine of, 116 ff.

Justin Martyr, on Christ’s teach¬
ing. 9-

Keys, the power of the, 61.

Kingdom of God, 49 ff.

Kingdom of Jesus, 61.

Knowledge, our Lord’s human,
44. 117-

Law , the Jewish, 13 ff., 37 ; Christ
shows himself above, 20.

Life, the Christian, 81.

Life, the future, 116 ff.

Logos, Stoic doctrine of, 27.

Love, place of, in Christ’s teach¬
ing, 16, 30, 34, 68, 88.

Luke, St., gives prominence to
women, 64.

Mary, the blessed Virgin, 5, 64.

Matthew, St., Gospel of, on the
second coming, 112.

Memra, or Word of God, 27.

Messiah, Jewish doctrine of, 39,
41, 50 ff. ; our Lord's doctrine
of, 43 ff. , 54 ff.

Metatron, God’s companion, 27.

Miracles, possess teaching power,
12, 74.

Neo-Platonism, superstition of,
24.

Nicene Creed, agrees with Christ’s
teaching, 46.

Old Testament, our Lord’s use
of, 13 ff.

Onkelos, Targum of, 27.

Opposition to Christ, causes of,
2 ff.

1 Paganism, 24.

Parables, 6 ; whether ever enig¬
mas, 7.

Paradise, 121.

Paradox, our Lord's use of, 10.

Passover and Lord’s Supper, 106.

Paul, St., his agreement with the
Gospels, 62, 66, 85, 101, 106.

‘ People of the land,’ 4.

Peter, St. , his confession of Christ,
14, 90 ; the authority given to,
61.

Pharisees, 3, 15, 60, 67.

Prayer, 72.

Prophet, our Lord as, 12, 37.

Prophetic element in Judaism, 13,
17. 37-

Proverbs, Book of, 26.

Marriage, 75, 84, 115.

1 Ransom, atoning, 91.

124 THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD

Remission of sins, 65, 93, 102 ff.

Repentance, 64.

Resurrection, 115.

Revenge, Christ’s teaching on, 68.

Righteousness, Christian, 63 ff.

Sabbath, in Christ’s teaching,
I9'

Sacraments, 103 ff.

Sacrifice, our Lord’s death as,
89 ff.

Sacrifices, Jewish, Christ’s atti¬
tude towards, 21.

Sadducees, 2, 115.

Saviour, our Lord as, 92.

Scribes, 3, 5, 7.

Service, law of, 12, 61, 70.

Sin, our Lord’s doctrine of, 65.

Sinners, Christ’s treatment of, 4,
32, 37-

Social life, Christ’s teaching on,
74-

Son of God, meaning of title,
41 ff.

Son of man, meaning of title,
38 ff.

Spirit, Holy, 96 ff.

Spirits, evil, 3, 54.

Symbolic actions of Christ, 11.

Symbolic language of Christ, 10.

Teaching, Christ’s method of,
1 ff.

Temple, Christ’s reverence for, 21.

Temptation, our Lord’s, 52 ; our
deliverance from, 73.

Tradition, false, Christ’s attitude
towards, 14.

Trinity, doctrine of, in New Testa¬
ment, xoo.

Virtues, passive, not negative,
82.

Wisdom , Book of, 25, 51.

Women, their position raised by
Christ, 64, 75.

Word, the, 27.

Worldly possessions, 77.

Worship, 21, 72, 102.

Zealots, Jewish party, 4.

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