Hope of the Gospel — Jesus in the World - Part 2
Think for a moment how Jesus was at home among the things of his father.
It seems to me, I repeat, a spiritless explanation of his words--that the temple was the place where naturally he was at home.
Does he make the least lamentation over the temple?
It is Jerusalem he weeps over--the men of Jerusalem, the killers, the stoners.
What was his place of prayer?
Not the temple, but the mountain-top.
Where does he find symbols whereby to speak of what goes on in the mind and before the face of his father in heaven?
Not in the temple; not in its rites; not on its altars; not in its holy of holies; he finds them in the world and its lovely-lowly facts; on the roadside, in the field, in the vineyard, in the garden, in the house; in the family, and the commonest of its affairs--the lighting of the lamp, the leavening of the meal, the neighbour's borrowing, the losing of the coin, the straying of the sheep.
Even in the unlovely facts also of the world which he turns to holy use, such as the unjust judge, the false steward, the faithless labourers, he ignores the temple.
See how he drives the devils from the souls and bodies of men, as we the wolves from our sheepfolds!
how before him the diseases, scaly and spotted, hurry and flee!
The world has for him no chamber of terror.
He walks to the door of the sepulchre, the sealed cellar of his father's house, and calls forth its four days dead.
He rebukes the mourners, he stays the funeral, and gives back the departed children to their parents' arms.
The roughest of its servants do not make him wince; none of them are so arrogant as to disobey his word; he falls asleep in the midst of the storm that threatens to swallow his boat.
Hear how, on that same occasion, he rebukes his disciples!
The children to tremble at a gust of wind in the house!
God's little ones afraid of a storm!
Hear him tell the watery floor to be still, and no longer toss his brothers!
see the watery floor obey him and grow still!
See how the wandering creatures under it come at his call!
See him leave his mountain-closet, and go walking over its heaving surface to the help of his men of little faith!
See how the world's water turns to wine!
how its bread grows more bread at his word!
See how he goes from the house for a while, and returning with fresh power, takes what shape he pleases, walks through its closed doors, and goes up and down its invisible stairs!
All his life he was among his father's things, either in heaven or in the world--not then only when they found him in the temple at Jerusalem.
He is still among his father's things, everywhere about in the world, everywhere throughout the wide universe.
Whatever he laid aside to come to us, to whatever limitations, for our sake, he stooped his regal head, he dealt with the things about him in such lordly, childlike manner as made it clear they were not strange to him, but the things of his father.
He claimed none of them as his own, would not have had one of them his except through his father.
Only as his father's could he enjoy them;--only as coming forth from the Father, and full of the Father's thought and nature, had they to him any existence.
That the things were his fathers, made them precious things to him.
He had no care for having, as men count having.
All his having was in the Father.
I wonder if he ever put anything in his pocket: I doubt if he had one.
Did he ever say, 'This is mine, not yours'?
Did he not say, 'All things are mine, therefore they are yours'?
Oh for his liberty among the things of the Father!
Only by knowing them the things of our Father, can we escape enslaving ourselves to them.
Through the false, the infernal idea of _having_, of _possessing_ them, we make them our tyrants, make the relation between them and us an evil thing.
The world was a blessed place to Jesus, because everything in it was his father's. What pain must it not have been to him, to see his brothers so vilely misuse the Father's house by grasping, each for himself, at the family things!
If the knowledge that a spot in the landscape retains in it some pollution, suffices to disturb our pleasure in the whole, how must it not have been with him, how must it not be with him now, in regard to the disfigurements and defilements caused by the greed of men, by their haste to be rich, in his father's lovely house!
Whoever is able to understand Wordsworth, or Henry Vaughan, when either speaks of the glorious insights of his childhood, will be able to imagine a little how Jesus must, in his eternal childhood, regard the world.
Hear what Wordsworth says:-- Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.
Hear what Henry Vaughan says:-- Happy those early dayes, when I Shin'd in my angell-infancy!
Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy ought But a white, celestiall thought;
When yet I had not walkt above A mile or two, from my first love, And looking back--at that short space-- Could see a glimpse of His bright-face;
When on some gilded cloud, or flowre My gazing soul would dwell an houre, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinfull sound, Or had the black art to dispence A sev'rall sinne to ev'ry sence, But felt through all this fleshly dresse Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.
O how I long to travell back, And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plaine, Where first I left my glorious traine;
From whence th' inlightned spirit sees That shady City of palme trees.
Whoever has thus gazed on flower or cloud; whoever can recall poorest memory of the trail of glory that hung about his childhood, must have some faint idea how his father's house and the things in it always looked, and must still look to the Lord.
With him there is no fading into the light of common day.
He has never lost his childhood, the very essence of childhood being nearness to the Father and the outgoing of his creative love; whence, with that insight of his eternal childhood of which the insight of the little ones here is a fainter repetition, he must see everything as the Father means it.
The child sees things as the Father means him to see them, as he thought of them when he uttered them.
For God is not only the father of the child, but of the childhood that constitutes him a child, therefore the childness is of the divine nature.
The child may not indeed be capable of looking into the father's method, but he can in a measure understand his work, has therefore free entrance to his study and workshop both, and is welcome to find out what he can, with fullest liberty to ask him questions.
There are men too, who, at their best, see, in their lower measure, things as they are--as God sees them always.
Jesus saw things just as his father saw them in his creative imagination, when willing them out to the eyes of his children.
But if he could always see the things of his father even as some men and more children see them at times, he might well feel _almost_ at home among them.
He could not cease to admire, cease to love them.
I say _love_, because the life in them, the presence of the creative one, would ever be plain to him.
In the Perfect, would familiarity ever destroy wonder at things essentially wonderful because essentially divine?
To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace--the most undivine of all moods intellectual.
Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.
Could we see things always as we have sometimes seen them--and as one day we must always see them, only far better--should we ever know dullness?
Greatly as we might enjoy all forms of art, much as we might learn through the eyes and thoughts of other men, should we fly to these for deliverance from _ennui_, from any haunting discomfort?
Should we not just open our own child-eyes, look upon the things themselves, and be consoled?
Jesus, then, would have his parents understand that he was in his father's world among his father's things, where was nothing to hurt him;
he knew them all, was in the secret of them all, could use and order them as did his father.
To this same I think all we humans are destined to rise.
Though so many of us now are ignorant what kind of home we need, what a home we are capable of having, we too shall inherit the earth with the Son eternal, doing with it as we would--willing with the will of the Father.
To such a home as we now inhabit, only perfected, and perfectly beheld, we are travelling--never to reach it save by the obedience that makes us the children, therefore the heirs of God.
And, thank God!
there the father does not die that the children may inherit;
for, bliss of heaven!
we inherit with the Father.
All the dangers of Jesus came from the priests, and the learned in the traditional law, whom his parents had not yet begun to fear on his behalf.
They feared the dangers of the rugged way, the thieves and robbers of the hill-road.
For the scribes and the pharisees, the priests and the rulers--they would be the first to acknowledge their Messiah, their king!
Little they imagined, when they found him where he ought to have been safest had it been indeed his father's house, that there he sat amid lions--the great doctors of the temple!
He could rule all the _things_ in his father's house, but not the men of religion, the men of the temple, who called his father their Father.
True, he might have compelled them with a word, withered them by a glance, with a finger-touch made them grovel at his feet; but such supremacy over his brothers the Lord of life despised.
He must rule them as his father ruled himself; he would have them know themselves of the same family with himself; have them at home among the things of God, caring for the things he cared for, loving and hating as he and his father loved and hated, ruling themselves by the essential laws of being.
Because they would not be such, he let them do to him as they would, that he might get at their hearts by some unknown unguarded door in their diviner part.
'I will be God among you; I will be myself to you.
--You will not have me?
Then do to me as you will.
The created shall have power over him through whom they were created, that they may be compelled to know him and his father.
They shall look on him whom they have pierced.'
His parents found him in the temple; they never really found him until he entered the true temple--their own adoring hearts.
The temple that knows not its builder, is no temple; in it dwells no divinity.
But at length he comes to his own, and his own receive him;--comes to them in the might of his mission to preach good tidings to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance, and sight, and liberty, and the Lord's own good time.
