Jesus of History — Chapter V - The Teaching of Jesus upon God

THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD

It is worth taking some trouble to realize how profoundly Jesus has changed the thinking of mankind about God.

"Since Jesus lived," Dr. Fairbairn wrote, "God has been another and nearer Being to man."

"Jesus," writes Dr. Fosdick, "had the most joyous idea of God that ever was thought of."

That joyous sense of God he has given to his followers, and it stands in vivid contrast with the feelings men have toward God in the other religions.

Christianity is the religion of joy.

The New Testament is full of it.

We know the general character of Jesus' attitude to God, his feeling for God, his sense of God's nearness.

How immediate his knowledge of God is, how intimate!

Of course, here, as everywhere, his teaching has such an occasional character--or else the records of it are so fragmentary--that we must not press the absence of system in it; and yet, I think, it would be right to say that Jesus puts before us no system of God, but rather suggests a great exploration, an intimacy with the slow and sure knowledge that intimacy gives.

He has no definition of God,[21] but he assumes God, lives on the basis of God, interprets God; and God is discovered in his acts and his relations.

He said to Peter, in effect--for the familiar phrase comes to this in modern English: "You think like a man; you don't think like God" (Mark 8:33).

Elsewhere he contrasts God's thoughts with man's--their outlooks are so different "that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15;

the Greek words are very interesting).

In other words, he would have men see all things as God sees them.

That we do not so see them, remains the weak spot in our thinking.

What Luther said to Erasmus is true of most of us: "Your thoughts concerning God are too human."

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall _see_ God," said Jesus (Matt.

5:8), and throughout he emphasizes that the vision of God depends on likeness to God--it is love and a glowing purity that give that faculty, rather than any power of intellect apart from them.

Jesus brings men back to the ultimate fact.

Our views are too short and too narrow.

He would have us face God, see him and realize him--think in the terms of God, look at things from God's point of view, live in God and with God.

In modern phrase, he breaks up our dogmatism and puts us at a universal point of view to see things over again in a new and true perspective.

How and where did he begin himself?

Whence came his consciousness of God, his gift for recognizing God?

We do not know.

The story of his growth, his inward growth, is almost unrevealed to us.

We are told that he learnt "by the things which he suffered" (Heb.

5:8), and that he "increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man" (Luke 2:52).

Where does anyone begin, who takes us any great distance?

It is very hard to know.

Where did our own thoughts of God begin?

What made them?

How did they come?

There is an inherited element in them, but how much else?

Whence came the inherited element?

How is it that to another man, with the same upbringing as ours, everything is different, everything means more?

Remark, at any rate, in the teaching of Jesus, that there is no mysticism of the type so much studied to-day.

There is nothing in the least "psychopathic" about him, nothing abnormal--no mystical vision of God, no mystical absorption in God, no mystical union with God, no abstraction, nothing that is the mark of the professed mystic.

Yet he speaks freely of "seeing God"; he lives a life of the closest union with God; and God is in all his thoughts.

A phrase like that of Clement of Alexandria, "deifying into apathy we become monadic," is seas away from anything we find in the speech of Jesus.

That is not the way he preaches God.

He is far more natural; and that his followers accepted this naturalness, and drew him so, and gave his teaching as he gave it, is a fresh pledge of the truthfulness of the Gospels.

Again, his knowledge of God is not a matter of quotation, as ours very often tends to be.

He is conscious always of the real nearness of God.

He seems to wonder how it is that man can forget God.

We do forget God.

Augustine in his "Confessions" (iv.

12, 18) has to tell us that "God did not make the world and then go away."

The practical working religion of a great many of us rests on a feeling that God is a very long way off.

Our practical steps betray that we half think God did go away, when he had made the world.

Prayer to us is not a real thing--it is not intercourse face to face; far too often it is like conversation over a telephone wire of infinite length which gets out of order.

Even if words travel along that wire, there is so much "buzzing" that they are hardly recognizable.

No, says Jesus, God is near, God is here--so near, that Jesus never feels that men have any need of a priesthood to come between, or to help them to God; God does all that.

There is no common concern, no matter of food or clothing, no mere detail of the ordinary round of common duty and common life--father and mother, son, wife, friend--nothing of all that, but God is there; God knows about it;

God is interested in it; God has taken care of it; God is enjoying it.

How is it that men can "reject the counsel of God," refuse God's plans and ideas (Luke 7:30)?

How is it that they forget God altogether?

Jesus is surprised at the dullness of men's minds (Mark 8:17); it is a mystery to him.

The rich fool, as we call him, though it is hard to see why we should call him a fool, when he is so like ourselves, had forgotten God somehow, and was startled when God spoke, and spoke to him.

That story, seen so often among men,--the story of the thorns choking the seed (Matt.

13:22)--makes Jesus remark on the difficulty which a rich man finds in entering into the kingdom of God.

God knows--that is what Jesus repeats, God cares; and God can do things; his hands are not tied by impotence.

The knowledge of God is emphasized by Jesus; "Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matt.

10:30); "your Father knoweth" (Luke 12:30); "seeth in secret" (Matt.

6:4); "knoweth your hearts" (Luke 16:15); knows your struggles, knows your worries, knows your worth; God knows all about you.

And "all things are possible with God" (Matt.

19:26).

There is nothing that he cannot do, nothing that he will not do, for his children.

Will a father refuse his child bread; will God not give what is good?

(Matt.

7:11).

Is it too big a thing for the Giver of Life to give food--which is the more difficult thing to give?

(Luke 12:23).

Look at God, as Jesus draws him--interested in flowers; God takes care of them, and thinks about their colours, so that even "Solomon in all his glory" is not equal to them (Matt.

6:30).

God knows the birds in the nest--knows there is one fewer there to-day than there was yesterday (Matt.

10:29).

God cares for them; how much more will he care for you (Matt.

6:26)?

"Ye are of more value than many sparrows" (Matt.

10:31).

And God thinks out man's life in all its relations, and provides for it.

Society moves on lines he laid down for it; his plans underlie all.

Thus, when Jesus is challenged on the question of marriage and divorce, with that clear thought and eye of his, he goes right back to God's intent--not to man's usage, not to the common law and practice of nations, but to God's intent and God's meaning.

God ordained marriage; he thought it out (Matt.

19:4).

Marriages will be better, if we think of them in this way.

God gave men their food, does still, and all things that he gives are clean (Luke 11:41).

We cannot have taboos at our Father's table.

Over all is God's throne (Matt.

23:22).

That idea, it seems to me, lapses somehow from our minds to-day.

When Luther had to face the hostility of the Kaiser, the Emperor Charles V. , he wrote to one of his friends: "Christ comes and sits at the right hand--not of the Kaiser, for in that case we should have perished long ago--but at the right hand of God.

This is a great and incredible thing; but I enjoy it, incredible as it is; some day I mean to die in it.

Why should I not live in it?"

So Luther wrote--in not quite our modern vein.

We hardly calculate on God as a factor; we omit him.

Jesus did not.

God's rule is over all; and in all our perplexity, doubt, and fear, Jesus reminds us that the first thing is faith in God.

The fact is that "Thine is the Kingdom" means peace; it is a joyous reminder.

For if he speaks of the Kingdom of God, the King is more than the Kingdom.

It is the Kingdom, the rule, of the God whom Jesus teaches us to trust and to love.

The Father is supreme.

But that has more aspects than one.

If our Father is supreme for us, he is supreme over us.

Jesus emphasizes the will of God--God's commandment against man's tradition, God's will against man's notions (Mark 7:8).

What a source of rest and peace to him is the thought of God's will!

When Dante writes: "And His will is our peace," it is the thought of Jesus.

And at the same time God's judgements are as real to Jesus' mind.

"I will tell you," he says, "whom to fear, God--yes, fear him!"

(Luke 12:5).

He feels the tenderness and the awfulness of God at once.

In speaking of God, it is noticeable that Jesus chiefly emphasizes God's interest in the individual, as giving the real clue to God's nature.

On the whole, there is very little even implied, still less explicit, in the Gospels, about God as the great architect of Nature--hardly anything on the lines familiar to us in the Psalms and in Isaiah--"The sea is his, and he made it; and his hands formed the dry land" (Psalm 95:5)--"He taketh up the isles as a very little thing" (Isaiah 40:15).

There is little of this in the Gospels; yet it is implied in the affair of the storm (Matt.

8:26).

The disciples in their anxiety wake him.

He does not understand their fear.

Whose sea is it?

Whose wind is it?

Whose children are you?

Cannot you trust your Father to control his wind and his sea?

Of course it is possible that he said more about God as the Author of Nature than our fragmentary reports give us; but it may be that it is because the emphasis on God's care and love for the individual is hardest to believe, and at the same time best, gives the real value of God, that Jesus uses it so much.

Perhaps the Great Artificer is too far away for our minds.

He is too busy, we think; and yet, after all, if God is so great, why should he be so busy?

If he is a real Father, why should not he be at leisure for his children?

He is, says Jesus;

a friend has leisure for his friends, and a father for his children;

and God, Jesus suggests, always has leisure for you.

The great emphasis with Jesus falls on the love of God.

Thus he tells the story of the impossible creditor with two debtors (Luke 7:42).

One owed him ten pounds, and the other a hundred.

When they had nothing to pay, they both came to him and told him so.

The ordinary creditor, at the very best, would say: "Well, I suppose I must put it down as a bad debt."

Jesus says that this creditor took up quite another attitude.

He smiled and said to his two troubled friends: "Is that all?

Don't let anything like that worry you.

What is that between you and me?"

He forgave them the debt with such a charm ("echarisato"), Jesus says, that they both loved him.

One feels that the end of the story must be, that they both paid him and loved him all the more for taking the money.

What a delightful story of charm, and friendship and forgiveness!

And it is a true picture of God, Jesus would have us believe, of God's forgiveness and the response it wakes in men.

If we do not definitely set our minds to assimilate the ideas of Jesus, we shall make too little of the heart of God.

With Jesus this is the central and crucial reality.

He emphasizes the generosity of God.

God makes his sun rise on the good and on the bad; he sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matt.

5:45).

God's flowers are just as beautiful in the bad man's garden.

God knows what his child needs, and gives it, whether it is a very good child or a very bad one.

The Father is the same great wise Friend in either case.

The peacemakers are recognized as the children of God, because of their family likeness to God (Matt.

5:9).

They come among people, and find them in discord with one another, and their presence stills that; or they come into a man's life, when it is all in disorder and pain, and they bring peace there.

They may not quite know it, but they do these things almost without meaning to do them.

And Jesus says that this is a family likeness by which men know they are God's children.

But it is not every teacher, pagan or Christian, who lays such stress on God's gift of peace, or is so sure of it.

He uses Hosea's great saying about God--"I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Hosea 6:6), as giving the truth about God.

Matthew represents him as quoting it twice (Matt.

9:13, 12:7); and we can well believe that he found in it the real spirit of God and often referred to it.

His own heart has taken him to the tenderest of the utterances of the Old Testament spoken by the most suffering of the Prophets.

"Love your enemies," he says (Matt.

5:44); yes, for then you will be the real children of God.

Or he speaks of the great patience of God, how God gives every man all the time and all the chance that he needs--sometimes, he half suggests, even a little more.

Look at the parable of the fig tree, how the gardener pleads for the tree, begs and obtains another chance for it (Luke 13:8); that is like God, says Jesus.

It is easy enough to talk in a vague way about the love of God.

But the love of God implies surely the individual; love has little content indeed if its object is merely a collective noun, an abstract, a concept.

But that God loves individual men is very difficult for us to believe in earnest.

The real crux comes when the question rises in a man's own heart, "Does God love me?"

Jesus says that he does, but it is very hard to believe, except in the company of Jesus and under his influence.

Jesus throughout asserts and reasserts the value of the individual to God.

Look, for example, at the picture he draws, when he tells of the recovery of the Lost Sheep, and brings out the analogy.

At the end of the Book of Job (ch. 38) the poet carries his reader back to the first sight of a world new-made, and tells how God, like the real artist and creator--we might not have thought of all this, but the poet did--loves his work so much that he must have his friends sharing it with him.

He calls them; he shows them the world he has made--"the beauty, and the wonder, and the power," as Browning says.

The poet tells us that what followed was that "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

The sight was so good that song and shout came instinctively, almost involuntarily.

Is it not the same picture which Jesus draws of "joy in heaven in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth"?

We can believe in such joy when God made the world; but can we believe that there was the same joy in the presence of God yesterday when a coolie gave his heart to God?

Jesus does.

That is the central thing, it seems to me, in his teaching about God--that God cares for the individual to an extent far beyond anything we could think possible.

If we can wrestle with that central thought and assimilate it, or, as the old divines said, "appropriate" it, make it our own, the rest of the Gospel is easy.

But one can never manage it except with the help, and in the company, of Jesus.

Jesus goes a step further, and believes in the possibility of a man loving God and God enjoying that too.

If he speaks of prayer, must we not think he means that God wants it as much as his child can want it?

How much is involved in the name "Father," which Jesus so uniformly gives to God?

Something less than the word carries in the case of a human father, or more?

What is the attitude of a father to his child?

Jesus, as we have seen, uses this illustration to bring out God's care for the actual needs of his children.

But is that all?

What is the innermost thing in a father's relation to his children?

Surely something more than the bird's instinct to feed her young, or to gather them under her wings (Luke 13:34).

Is not one of the most real features of parenthood enjoyment of the child?

Do not men and women frankly enjoy the grappling of the little mind with big things?

Is there not a charm, as says one of the Christian Fathers (Minucius Felix), about the "half-words" that a child uses, as he learns to talk and wrestles with a grown-up vocabulary?

About the extraordinary pictures he will draw of ships or cows--the quaint stories he will invent--the odd ways in which his gratitude and his affection express themselves?

Is it a real fatherhood where such things do not appeal?

Jesus' language about God, his whole attitude to God, implies throughout that God is as real a Father as anybody, and it suggests that God loves his children the more because they are real; because they are not very clever; because they do make such queer and imperfect prayers; because, in short, they need him;

and because they fill a place in his heart.

We have to remark how firmly Jesus believes in his Gospel of God and man needing each other and finding each other--his "good news," as he calls it.

He bases all on his faith in what has been called "Man's incurable religious instinct"--that instinct in the human heart that must have God--and in God's response to that instinct which he himself implanted, and which is no accident found here and missing there, but a genuine God-given characteristic of every man, whatever his temperament or his range in emotions may be, his swiftness or slowness of mind.

The repeated parables of seed and leaven--the parables of vitality--again and again suggest his faith in his message, his conviction that God must have man and man must have God--that, as St. Augustine puts it, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart knows no rest till it rests in Thee" (Conf.

, i.

1).

That is the essence of the Gospel.

How this union of the soul with God comes about, Jesus does not directly say, but there are many hints in his teaching that bear upon it.

"The Kingdom of Heaven cometh not with observation," he said (Luke 17:20).

Religious truth is not reached by "quick turns of self-applauding intellect," nor by demonstrations.

It comes another way.

The quiet familiarity with the deep true things of life, till on a sudden they are transfigured in the light of God, and truth is a new and glowing thing, independent of arguments and the strange evidence of thaumaturgy--this is the normal way; and Jesus holds by it.

The great people, men of law and learning, want more; they want something to substantiate God's messages from without.

If Jesus comes to them with a word from God, can he not prove its authenticity preferably with "a sign from the sky" (Mark 8:11)?

For the signs he gives, and the evidence he suggests, are unsatisfactory.

"And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, `Why doth this generation seek after a sign?

Verily I say unto you, there shall no sign be given unto this generation.'

So he left them and went up into the ship again and went away."

That scene is drawn from life.

But why no sign?

In the parallel passage we read: "`The wicked generation and adulterous seeketh a sign, but there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah'; so he left them and departed" (Matt.

16:4).

The real explanation of this reference to Jonah is given by Luke (11:32), and missed or misdeveloped in Matthew (Matt.

12:40).

Nineveh recognized instinctively the inherent truth of Jonah's message, and repented.

Truth is its own evidence--like leaven in the meal, like seed in the field, it does its work, and its life reveals it.

God is known that way.

When the chief priests demand of Jesus to be told plainly what is his authority (Mark 11:27), he carries the matter a stage further: Was the baptism of John, he asks, from heaven, i. e. from God, or was it of men?

Does God make His message clear, does He properly authenticate Himself?

And the uneasy weighing of alternatives, summarized by the evangelist, leads to the answer that they could not tell whence it was; and Jesus rejoins that he has nothing to say to them about his authority.

He had taken what we might call an easy case--where it was evident that God had spoken; and this was all they made of it--they "could not tell."

It was plain, then, either that these men did not recognize the obvious message of God ("the word of God came upon John," Luke 3:9,), or that, if they did recognize it, they thought it did not matter.

For the insincere and the trivial there is no message from God, no truth of God--how should there be?

If we pursue this line of thought, we can see how, in Jesus' opinion, a man may be sure of God and of God's word for him.

If a man be candid with himself, if he face the common facts of life with seriousness and in the doing of duty, perplexities vanish.

Such a man is prepared for the Great Fact, by faithfulness to the little facts, and then God dawns on him in them.

This is put directly in the Fourth Gospel (7:17), and in parable in the Synoptists.

The leaven works, till the whole is leavened; the uneasy process is over and the result achieved.

Or, it comes more quietly still--the seed grows while the farmer sleeps and rises, night and day; the blade springs up and the ear forms on the blade, the seed grows in the ear; and the end is reached and God's Kingdom is a reality.

Or, the knowledge of God comes like a lightning flash--sudden, illuminative, decisive.

"The Son reveals" God to the simple, Jesus said (Matt.

11:27).

The Son of Man may be a disputable figure--"Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him" (Matt.

12:32)--but there is no forgiveness in this world, or in any possible real world where God counts at all, for the refusal of the spirit of Truth.

So he taught, and all history shows he was right--the refusal of truth is fatal.

"Jesus," wrote Matthew Arnold, "never touches theory, but bases himself invariably upon experience."

It is to experience that Jesus goes to authenticate his message.

The real facts of life lead you to God, as the red sky, and the south wind, teach you to foretell the weather (Matt.

16:2; Luke 12:55).

"Eyes and ears," said the Greek thinker, Heraclitus, long before, "are bad witnesses for such as have barbarian souls."

The Pharisees discredited Jesus--he "cast out devils by Beelzebub."

Did he, he asked, or was it "by the finger of God" (Luke 11:20)?

Is there no evidence of God in restored sanity?

But the strength of his position lies in the good news for the poor (Matt.

11:5), for those who labour and are heavy--laden (Matt.

11:28)--news of rest and refreshment--as if the intuition of God, with the peace it brings, were its own proof.

Truth is reached less by ingenuity than by intensity.

To the simple mind, to the true heart, to the pure soul (Matt.

5:8), to those whose gift is peace, Truth comes flooding in--new light on old fact, and new light from old fact--and God is evident.

So Jesus judged; and here again, before we decide for or against his view, we have to make sure that we know his meaning, and realize the experience by which he reached his thought.

And then, perhaps, God will be more evident to us in our turn.

"The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation" (Luke 17:20)--it is "within" (Luke 17:21); so quietly it comes, that we may not guess how in any particular instance the realization of God came to a soul; but if we are candid and truth-loving we can know it when it has come to ourselves, and we can recognize it when it comes to another.

We can recognize it in its power and peace, we can see the greatness of the new knowledge in the new man it makes, in the new life, the man of the great spirit, of the great action, the man of the great quiet, the man who has the peace of God.

What does the discovery of God mean?

Jesus himself speaks of a man turning right about, being converted (Matt.

18:3); of the revision of all ideas, of all standards, of all values.

He gives us two beautiful pictures to illustrate what it means; and it repays us to linger over them.

First, there is the Treasure Finder.

He is in the country, digging perhaps in another man's field, or idling in the open; and by accident he stumbles on a buried treasure.

Palestine was like Belgium--a land with a long history of wars fought on its soil by foreigners, Babylon or Assyria against Egypt, Ptolemies against Seleucids.

It was the only available route for attack either on Egypt by land, or on Syria or Mesopotamia or Babylon from the Southern Mediterranean.

In such a land when the foreign army marched through, a man had best hide his treasure and hope to find it again in better times, and again and again the secret of its place of burial died with him.

The Treasure Finder had no lord of the manor to think of, no Treasury department.

He made a great discovery, and made it initially for himself, and his own--"and for joy thereof he goeth and selleth all that he hath and buyeth that field."

We can see him full of his discovery, full of eagerness and trying to hide his inner joy, as he realizes every penny he can manage, and achieves the great transaction which gives him the field and the treasure.

The salient points are a sudden and great joy, an instant resolution, a complete sacrifice of everything, and a life unexpectedly and infinitely enriched.

And so it is, says Jesus, with the Kingdom of God (Matt.

13:44).

The Pearl Merchant is a more interesting figure.

Perhaps we may picture him middle-aged, a trifle worn, somewhat silent, a man of keen eyes.

He has been in his trade for years, and he is a master at it.

By now he has a knowledge which years give to a man in earnest--a knowledge more like instinct than anything acquired.

A

glance at pearls on a table--this, and this, and this he will take the other, perhaps; he would look at that one--the rest?

he shook his head and did not look at them--he saw without looking.

One day he is told of a pearl--a good one.

He is not surprised, for pearls are always good when they are offered for sale.

But again a glance is enough.

The price?

Yes, it is high, but he will take the pearl, but he must be allowed till evening to get the money.

He goes away and sells his stock--the little collection of pearls in his wallet, representing "the experience of a life-time," all of them good, as he very well knows; and he sells them for what he can get--at a loss, if it must be.

Yesterday's bargainer cuts down his price for this and that pearl, and he is taken up; he never expected to do so well against the old dealer, and he laughs.

But the merchant is content, too; he has sold all his pearls for what they would fetch--lost money on them, yes, and been laughed at behind his back.

But he owns the one pearl of great price; it is his, and he is satisfied.

There is no reference to joy here or exultation; but there is the same instant recognition of the opportunity, the same resolve, the same sacrifice, and the same great acquisition (Matt.

13:45).

Both parables begin with a reference to the Kingdom of God--to that Rule and Kingship of God, the knowledge of which makes all the difference to a man.

A small grammatical difference points us beyond minutiae to the common experience of the two men.

Each makes a great discovery, and takes action in a great and urgent resolve; and they are both repaid.

If we are to understand the two parables in the sense intended by Jesus, the term "God" must become alive to us with all the life and power and love that the name implies for him.

Then to grasp that this Father of Jesus is King--that the God of his thoughts, of his faith, with all the tenderness and the power combined that Jesus teaches us to see in Him--rules the universe, controls our destiny and loves us--this is the experience that Jesus compares with that of the Treasure Finder and the Pearl Merchant--worth, he suggests, everything a man has, and more than all.

In passing, we may notice that these stories suggest that this experience may be reached in different ways.

In the parables of the seed and the leaven he indicates a natural, quiet and unconscious growth, a story without crisis, though full of change.