ft Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https ://archive.org/details/realismoftjesuspa0Ofind THE REALISM OF JESUS J. ALEXANDER FINDLAY THE REALISM OF JESUS A Paraphrase and Exposition of ihe ! Sermon on the Mount BY J. ALEXANDER FINDLAY Didsbury College, Manchester NEW os YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY THE REALISM OF JESUS. I PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NOTE BY THE AUTHOR THE paraphrase of the three chapters of the First Gospel containing the “Sermon on the Mount” appeared as one of a series of “Fellowship Manuals” published by the “Epworth Press.”’ My thanks are due both to the “Epworth Press” and to the editors of the series of “Fellowship Manuals” for their kind permission to in- clude the paraphrase in this volume. Its object is not to take the place of any ancient or modern translation of the “Sermon,” but to express what I take to be the thoughts of Jesus in the current colloquial language of our time. There is no attempt at word-by-word trans- lation; my motive has been to bring out as much as possible of what is suggested without adding or omitting anything. The studies which follow the para- phrase first appeared in The Methodist Times, though they have been considerably expanded for republica- tion, I am glad to bear testimony to the kindness of the editor of that paper; he has not only allowed, but urged their reissue. The leading idea of these studies is that the ideal described by Jesus is not so much a “counsel of perfec- tion” as the only really wholesome and natural way of life possible for men with natures like ours in a world like this; that the appeal of the Teacher is never merely to questionable theory, but to facts which all men ac- knowledge. I have tried honestly to face the difficul- Vv v1 Note by the Author ties which seem most real to me, but such exposition as I have attempted is deliberately untechnical and con- cerns actual life rather than pure thought. The giving of references is avoided of set purpose, because the aim oi the studies contained in this volume is exclusively practical. Readers of Jesus as they saw Him will per- haps recognise some of the same ideas here; but the chief purpose of that volume was to interest readers in the Synoptic Gospels, and so bring them to the feet of the Saviour whose form and figure can be seen per- haps most clearly there; here I am concerned rather to try and shew the liveableness of the way of life He proclaims. I should like once more to thank my friends, and most of all, my teacher, Dr. Rendel Harris, for all the help, encouragement and direction they continue to give me. CONTENTS Note by the Author The Sermon on the Mount: A Paraphrase . I IT The Age to Which Jesus Came Town and Country in Syria The Jew at Home and Abroad Jesus and the Pharisees The Breach with the Pharisees The Beatitudes . The Old Religion and the New Sex-Relations On Truthfulness in Speech . On True Justice . On Patriotism The Perfect Law of Liberty On the Practice of Charity . On Prayer The Lord’s Prayer . On Self-Discipline On the Saving of Money vil 114 Vill XVIII P.aid.¢ xX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI Contents Then Why Does Provision Fail? Necessities and Luxuries “peek Ve First. His Life of Trust and Our Distrustfulness What Are We to Do with Our Critical Faculty ? ‘ On Reverence The Christian Adventure “Other Foundation Can No Man Lay” The Last Fear and the Way Through It PAGE 119 126 134 140 146 I51 157 163 172 THE REALISM OF JESUS THE REALISM OF JESUS The Sermon on the Mount A Paraphrase Chapter 5.—When He saw the crowds gathering He went up to higher ground; there He sat down, and when His disciples had come up to Him, He opened His heart to them, saying in the course of His teach- ing: “I have good news for the lowly-minded, to them belongs the new age that God is bringing in; for mourners—there is good cheer in store for them; for the patient and forbearing—theirs by native right is the lordship of the life of man; for those who are hungry and thirsty for the ideal life—they shall receive full satisfaction; for the brotherly—they shall be treated with brotherly consideration; for those who long for purity 1—they shall look upon God’s face; for peacemakers—they shall be called God’s men in the world; to those who have ever suffered hardship in the cause of right—God’s new world is their pos- session. That is why you should never fear persecu- tion; indeed, when you have to put up with reproach, ill-treatment, every kind of slander, all because you will be My disciples, you should welcome your troubles *Or “for the single-minded.” II 12 The Realism of Jesus with exulting joy; you will be real prophets then, and God will reward such people as you in His own great way. You are the salt of Society; that is what you were meant for, to keep life wholesome, to make it bearable. No one has any use for insipid salt; people pitch the stuff into the street, and there is an end of it. You are all the light the world has; like yonder town on the hill-top, you cannot hide if you try. Even with the lamp at home, you do not light it, and then put it under a basin, but on the lampstand, so that everyone in the room may see by its light. Take care then that your light shines out in all men’s sight, that they may not fail to be struck by the rightness of the things you do, and may come to thank God that they ever met you. Do not suppose that I have come to destroy the old religion; my mission is not to supersede the ancient sanctions, rather to unfold their deeper mean- ing. Mark this! the universe itself shall pass away before the smallest detail of God’s law revealed in Scripture comes to be out of date; rather shall every part of it disclose a larger truth. It follows that the man whose teaching lessens the force of what seems to be the least important of God’s laws, has a very humble place in the age which I proclaim; on the other hand, he whose practice and teaching enhance their authority shall have wide influence there. All the same, your living out of the moral law must go far beyond the code of conduct for which your professional moral- ists stand; only a new way of life can qualify you for the new world that is coming. “I will illustrate My meaning; you know the old words of Scripture, ‘You are not to commit murder’ ; The Sermon on the Mount 13 your teachers go on to say, ‘Whoever kills must stand his trial.’ What I have to tell you is that everyone who persists in unreasonable anger with a brother-man, must stand his trial; whoever treats another with con- tempt shall be indicted for blasphemy; whoever curses another shall bring upon himself the doom he has in- voked. And more than this; until you are on good terms with your brother, you must not bring your gift to God’s altar; if you remember, when you have brought your gift, that he has anything against you, better leave your gift where it is, go and make friends with your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Never lose a chance of making friends; if you are involved in a lawsuit, you should come to an under- standing with your opponent on the way to court. Re- member, God is judge; if you are responsible for pro- longing the quarrel, it will be you He will condemn, whatever happens to the other man; the man who nurses ill-will always pays, and to the last penny too. “Again the word of Scripture runs, ‘You must not commit adultery.’ What I have to say on this subject is; everyone who casts upon a woman a lustful look has already in his heart seduced her. If some passion of this kind is your hindrance, you must tear yourself away from it at all costs; better live a thwarted life, than with all your bodily powers about you, to be plunged into a hell of unsatisfied desire. If your daily business puts a hindrance in your way, be rid of it at all hazards; better be a broken man, than in the full tide of your well-being to find yourself in hell. The old law ran: “Whoever would be rid of his wife must make proper provision for her!’ I goa stage further 14 The Realism of Jesus and say, even if there has been misconduct, you are not to part company with your wives at all; if you do, you are to blame if they go wrong, while the man who marries a woman already divorced commits adultery himself. “Another illustration: you have all heard the law once given to your fathers; ‘You must not commit perjury, but must fulfil your vows as in God’s sight.’ I tell you, you should not need to swear by this and that at all. Heaven is God’s throne, earth His foot- stool, Jerusalem the city of the greatest of all Kings; your head, for the matter of that, is sacred too—you know you cannot make one hair really white or black. Great words like these are God’s gift to you, and are not to be used as makeweights to your light talk. “Yes, yes’; ‘No, no’; there is emphasis enough for you; when you go beyond such simple speech you are giving the devil his chance. “Once more; you know the words ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth’; your teachers explain them as mean- ing ‘slap for slap, or give as good as you get.’ I tell you that to follow the promptings of revenge is to measure yourself with the devil. Whoever slaps you on the right side of the neck, let him do it again if he wants to;1 if someone takes you into the law-courts, and to pay the cost of the case, you have to forfeit your under-garment, make him a present of your upper- garment as well; if you are pressed to go one mile on Government faa of your own accord accompany the officer who conscripts you the rest of the league.?, You That is, “if anyone insults you.” ® Reading with Codex Bezae “two miles more.’ The Sermon on the Mount 15 are to be at the service of every claimant, and are not to turn churlishly away from anyone who wants to borrow of you. “Again; you have heard the words of Scripture, “Love your fellow-countrymen,” and know the con- clusion your teachers draw ; ‘Of course this means that you are to hate all foreigners.’ I tell you, you must love those whom you have learnt to think of as your enemies, and, if they treat you badly, must pray for them. So shall you really be like God your Father; you know He makes His sun shine down on bad and good alike, and sends His rain on all men, whether they obey or disobey His will. Supposing you love those only who love you in return, there is no special merit in that, is there? Quite disreputable people rival you there! Or if you are friends only with the people of your own set, that implies nothing more than aver- age good-nature; the very heathen are equal to that. You are to be God’s men; your love is to be as catholic as His. Chapter 6.—‘“Be careful not to follow the way of life now laid down for you with one eye upon the effect you produce; if you do so, you take all the virtue out of it from God’s point of view. When you are practising your charities, you are not to obtrude them upon public notice as self-advertising philanthropists do in church and street, to win the applause of the public. Of course, they have something to show for their outlay, but that is all it amounts to. When you are doing a brotherly action, your left hand is not to know what your right hand is about; you are not even to feel virtuous about it. Nor need you concern your- 16 The Realism of Jesus selves about reward, for there are no secrets to which God is not a party, and He will make it up to you. “When you pray, you are not to go about it like the people who air their piety; you know how fond they are of engaging in prayer for the edification of on- lookers. They get what they want—a reputation for devotion; but God your Father has nothing to do with this kind of thing. When any one of you is drawn to pray, he will do well to go apart and retire into himself, there holding converse with God who dwells in secret places; his Father, from whom no secrets are hid, will Himself reward him. When you are praying in com- pany with others, do not talk for the sake of talking, as the heathen do in their endless sing-song prayers; leave it to them to think they can impress Heaven by grandiloquence. You must not be like them, for you must remember that your Father knows what you want before you begin to ask. I will give you a model for your public prayers; ‘Our Father God, may all men come to know and revere Thee by the name of Father ; let Thy new world come, Thy will be all men’s law, on earth, as in heaven; give us to-day our food for the day that is coming;! and release us from our debts, as we too have released our debtors; and bring us not into trial, but rescue us from the devil.’ You see, if you have forgiven your fellow-men their offences against you, your Father will also forgive you your offences against Him; if you will not, neither will He forgive you. , “When you are keeping Lent, do not go about with a sour expression, as do those who fast for appearance’ *Or “our needful food.” The Sermon on the Mount 17 sake. You know they murder their natural good looks, that everybody may see what martyrs they are. Of course, they, like the others, get the reputation they desire. When any one of you resolves on a season of abstinence, he should be better groomed and more sociable than usual; the attention of his friends is not to be drawn to his self-denial. His Father who dwells in the hidden life of the heart will see it; his Father who reads all secrets will reward him. ‘Do not hoard material possessions; the moth will get into your wardrobe, rust will tarnish your gold, thieves may break into your strong rooms and carry allaway. Your provision for future needs is to be laid up in God’s bank; no moth, no rust, with Him; no one can rob you of that treasure. You know a man’s interest is sure to centre round the concerns in which his savings are invested. The eye is the lamp of the soul, and everything in your life depends on the clear- ness of your vision. Just as when the lamp at home burns badly, the room you live in looks dark and for- bidding, but if the light is good, all around it reflects its radiance; so with your social life. If a man looks at others without suspicion or prejudice, his life with his fellows is all sweetness and light; if, on the other hand, his way of thinking about them is churlish and grudging, the world he lives in will look gloomy in- deed; he carries the outer darkness about with him! You must make your choice, then, between devotion to God and absorption in the world’s business. No man can bind himself down to the service of more than one master at a time; he will either dislike the 18 The Realism of Jesus one and love the other, or he will become attached to one and neglect the other. “So I bid you not to worry about yourselves, so far as food and clothes are concerned. You are far more than the food you eat, your bodies do not depend for their beauty upon the clothes you wear. Study the wild birds—they do not sow or reap, or lay up a store against the winter; yet God your Father looks after them, and you are more precious in His sight than they! Worry never makes your life any longer, does it? What then is the use of worrying about clothes? Learn a lesson from the wild flowers—they do not work for their living or make their own clothes, yet I tell you that Solomon in full dress was not so well clothed as they. If God dresses so well what you call ‘common grass,’ the flowers which grow in the meadow to-day and are cast into the oven to-morrow, surely He will take more pains with you, your poor mistrustful people! You must not let yourselves worry then, or say, ‘How are we going to make ends meet?’ or, ‘What about the clothes I want so badly?’ The thoughts of the worldly revolve round subjects like these; God your Father knows all the things you want! The bringing in of God’s new world, the practice of the way of life prescribed to you by Him, should be your first concern; all other needful things will come your way, if this be so. Live a day at a time, and let to-morrow look after itself. Every day that comes brings its own burden of care, and one day’s trouble at a time is as much as you can manage. Chapter 7. “Do not indulge your critical faculties too freely—you lay yourself open to criticism if you The Sermon on the Mount 19 do; in the long run you will be done by as you did. Why do you take so much notice of the splinter in your brother-man’s eye, never stopping to reflect that there is a whole log in your own? Why do you busy your- selves with other men’s small faults so much, and for- get your own big ones? Self-deluded man, first get rid of the log in your own eye, then you will see straight to pick the splinter out of your brother’s eye! “Your fellowship with Me and each other is your signet-ring,! your circlet of pearls; you are not to ex- pose this sacred bond to the tender mercies of cynical outsiders and scandalmongers; if you do, they will trample what should be sacred to you in the dirt, then turn upon you and take away your character too. On the other hand, he who has a precious thing and does not share it with others, commits a sin.?_ Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and the door shall fly open. Everyone who persists in asking gets something; the seeker makes discoveries; to the persevering knocker God’s door does open. Yes, you will always get something for the asking, and it will be something good. There is not a man among you who would give his boy a stone when asked for a loaf, or a snake as a substitute for a fish, is there? If then, sinful men like you know what is best to give your children, surely you can trust your Heavenly Father to give good things to those that ask Him! My rule of life is this: you are to treat everyone as you would 1 Reading, by a slight change in the suggested Aramaic original, “signet-ring” for “holy thing.” * Supplied from Tatian’s harmony of the Four Gospels—the “Diatessaron.” 20 The Realism of Jesus like people to treat you; this is the essence of God’s revealed law of conduct. “The door I have opened to you now is narrow, but you must enter it; the road that leads to a wasted life is broad and smooth, and there is always company enough that way; the gate is narrow and the road toilsome which leads to life in God’s new world, and few discover where it lies. Do not be misled by men who beckon you another way—they call themselves prophets and come, looking as harmless as sheep— really they are greedy wolves: you can tell what they are only by the mischief they make. You do not gather grapes from a thorn-bush, or figs from the thistle, do you? So every tree whose fruit is wholesome is a good tree to have in your garden; but if its fruit disagrees with you, you had best keep away from it. It is not in nature for fruit that is good to eat to come from a tree that is bad, nor for a poisonous bush to bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is fated to be cut down and burnt. This, then, is the test you are to apply—you can measure their sin It is not a ques- tion of words merely, for not everyone who calls Me ‘Lord, Lord’ shall have a place in God’s new world. Nor is it only a question of the results that men can see, for in the day when I come again many shall say, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not been great prophets, saved men from the sway of dark powers of evil, healed them body and soul, and all in your service?’ And after all I shall have to tell them publicly, ‘You were never Mine; depart from Me; you are rebels, all of you.’ All depends upon the reality of men’s relations with The Sermon on the Mount 21 Me. The man who listens to My words and carries them into action is like a sensible builder, who builds his house upon solid rock. The rainy season comes, the river rises, fierce gusts of wind come sweeping down upon the house, yet it does not fall; its founda- tion stands secure upon the rock. As for the man, whoever he be, who listens to My words and does not try to live them out, he is like a heedless builder, who builds his house in the valley-sand. The rainy season comes, the river rises, fierce gusts of wind batter the house—it sways—then down it comes in utter ruin.” I The Age to which Jesus Came In no field of research has knowledge grown so rap- idly during the last twenty years as in the study of the life and language of the people in the countries which look out upon the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, at the time when the Saviour was born. It is no exag- geration to say that the centuries which preceded and followed the beginning of the Christian era are more accurately known, as well as spiritually more akin to us, than are the sixteenth, seventeenth, or even perhaps the eighteenth centuries in the history of our own country. That is partly because, like our own, it was an age of books, papers, and letters; unlike our own, an age when books and letters were kept. Writing materials were not as scarce and dear as the scholars of the last generation were inclined to think, and as they became later, and everybody wrote or got someone else to write for them. Year by year an abundant stream of documents has been recovered from the sand of Egypt, into which they were once dropped, or un- wrapped from her mummies, and the life of the people of Egypt and Syria has written itself out for our edification down to its smallest details, in records which can be trusted, because they were never intended for publication. Of the times of Our Lord His word has 22 The Age to which Jesus Came 23 been strangely fulfilled; what was spoken in the ear in the inner chamber has been proclaimed from the house-tops. Not only did the Son of God come “in the fulness of the time”—that is, at the ideal time—but care has been taken that we moderns should have a better chance than any previous generation of Chris- tians has enjoyed, of understanding His Message— becatise we can know so much more of the world to which it came. In the Greco-Roman world of those days they had their morning newspapers, their trade-guilds, their laments about the decay of the middle classes and the falling birth-rate, their crowded cities and depopulated countryside, their new rich and war-profiteers, their Socialist agitators, their fully organised credit and banking system. We know how their cheques were made out and how their trade accounts were presented and receipted. “In such matters as transit, public health, police, water-supply, engineering, building and so forth, Rome of the second century left off pretty much where the Victorian age was to resume. The hot-air system which warms the hotels of modern Europe and America was in general use in every com- fortable villa of the first century. Education was more general and more accessible to the poor in A.D 200 than in a.D. 1850.” The vices of the age were largely the same as ours, with some significant exceptions; they were luxury, gambling, and the mad rush for wealth along with appalling sexual immorality and a degrading idleness at both ends of the social scale. They had their revues, their star-actors and profes- sional athletes who earned fabulous wages, they had 24 The Realism of Jesus their comic artists and cartoonists, their horse-races and betting on horses, their public libraries in every moderately large town (given by munificent donors whose names are duly recorded), and their private col- lections of books, their art-collectors and curio-hunters, while tourists thought less of passing from one end to the other of the Mediterranean than did our great- grandfathers of travelling from London to Edinburgh. There were universities, too, attracting students from all parts of the Roman world, there were itinerant lec- turers and street-preachers, while “honorary” degrees were as numerous and often as unmeaning as they are coming to be now. Our modern boxing contests, it is true, only faintly recall their gladiatorial shows, but they minister to the same instinct. It was a restless neurotic age of disillusionment, for peace and pros- perity had not brought rest to the souls of men; their virility sapped by a succession of world wars, they had not yet been able to make the best of the great peace. We must not jump to the conclusion, however, that Christianity has not meant incalculable moral and social progress. Hilarion writes a charming love-letter to his wife, and we are drawn very near to him; he ends his note by charging her, quite as a matter of course, to expose her newly-born child, if it is a girl, and we realise with a start the difference Christ has made. Seneca, one of their loftiest ethical teachers, says quite coolly, ‘““Weak and misshapen infants we drown, for it is not anger, but reason, to separate the useless from the healthy”; even the modern eugenist is not capable of this. The more usual practice with unwanted chil- dren was to leave them for some passer-by to pick up The Age to which Jesus Came 25 if he chose and there was a flourishing trade in foundlings, who were kept and trained for immoral purposes. Vices were recognised and indeed fashion- able then which are now criminal offences, and then there were the slaves—in Rome alone in 5 B.C. more than half a million of them. Slaves from the West were employed chiefly on the land, those from the East in domestic and skilled labour. They were abso- lutely at the mercy of their masters, and their number, of course, diminished the demand for free work and lowered wages ; this process in turn sent the rural popu- lations into the vices and idleness of the towns. The proletariat of Rome was kept at the expense of the State, and all the cruelties of the emperors were perpe- trated at the expense of the old families; the reigning monarch was always popular among the masses and in the provinces. Instead of strikes they had the vastly more dangerous and horribly cruel slave-wars. The old Greek and Roman religions had quite lost their hold upon educated and uneducated alike, and from the time when Alexander’s conquests had opened up the East as far as India to Western travellers and merchants, a steady infiltration of Oriental religions had set in. One after another they had been admitted into Rome and officially recognised there. The mystery religions, an earlier importation from Syria and Egypt, had long had a great vogue in Greece; in this period they became the dominant religions of the civilised world. They all offered some satisfaction to the universal craving for a warmer and more sym- pathetic faith, appealing to the emotions, they all catered for men’s agelong love of secret initiation and 26 The Realism of Jesus mysterious ritual. For the purposes of our study, their most significant characteristic, common to all of them, is to be found in the fact that they centred upon the idea of a god or hero who died and rose again, thus ministering to the hope of immortality. The new god from the East was depicted in their ceremonial pa- geantry as set upon and torn to pieces by the represen- tatives of older faiths, only to be born again, as spring comes to life again after the dark, sad months of winter. Ina bath of blood, or in secret mystical rites finding their climax in a sacramental meal in which the participants share the eternal life of their god, men can be born again to everlasting youth. None of these cults, it will have been noticed, had any direct connexion with anything which we should call morality—only with ceremonial purifications—and indeed many of them were bound up with vicious sexual practices of the most demoralising kind. All the same, they were a most potent factor in the preparation of the Western world for the coming of Christianity. Side by side with these popular religions ran the imperial cult imposed upon the East by the West, as the mystery-religions had been taught to the West by the East. It found a ready welcome every- where except amongst the Jews, because it expressed men’s gratitude for the great Roman peace, the im- mense improvement in order and prosperity that the Empire brought in its train. It as associated in the Oriental mind with the breaking down of national frontiers and the fact, impressed upon men in a hun- dred and one ways every day of their lives, of a catholic state in being. This prepared the way, along another The Age to which Jesus Came 27 channel, for the idea of a universal Kingdom as preached by Jesus. In reconstructions of the life of Christ it has often been forgotten, or at least not sufficiently emphasised, that Syria was then part of the Roman Empire. Though unlike the rest of the world in many ways, some of which I hope to discuss in another chapter, all round Nazareth there ran in full strength the currents of this strange, many-coloured, restless heathen life. We need very badly another life of Christ taking into account our new knowledge of its place in the greater world, II Town and Country in Syria GALILEE in Our Lord’s day was far less isolated from the greater Roman world than was Jerusalem. Up to this time, indeed until a.p. 40 when the emperor Caligula threatened, to set up his statue in the Temple, the imperial government had been signally considerate to the susceptibilities of the Jews of Jerusalem. A special coinage without the head of the reigning em- peror was issued for their benefit, though it was stipu- lated that the taxes should be paid in the recognised Roman money. In the Temple, on the other hand, the imperial coinage was forbidden, and a flourishing trade in money changing, with a commission on the trans- action, was carried on in the court of the Gentiles. Moreover, all Jews were exempt from military service because of their Sabbath-law, and their absence from the ceremonies of the imperial religion was tacitly ex- cused everywhere. Julius Cesar, the founder of the Empire, was specially favourable to them, and they were prominent in the public mourning at the time of his assassination. There was a reaction after this, but it was only under pressure from headquarters that Herod ventured to carry through the census in Judea at the time when Jesus was born; even then, he modi- fied the usual arrangements, and allowed Jews to re- 28 Town and Country in Syria 29 turn to their native-town for the enrolment; this was not the general Roman practice. A fence, “the middle- wall of partition’ as Paul calls it, had been set up en- closing all the Temple proper for the use of Jews only, no Gentile being permitted to pass this boundary on pain of death, and this exclusion was not merely sanctioned, but enforced, by the Roman authority. Julius Cesar had, moreover, restored to the Jews many of the towns which Pompey had taken from them, and there justice was administered in the synagogues by Jewish magistrates, only the right to carry out a death- sentence being reserved for the imperial power. We must distinguish between towns where the Jews held the predominance from those which came under the normal imperial régime. At the time when Jesus was born, Herod represented the Roman power in Judza; after the short reign of Archelaus, his succes- sor, a Roman governor took his place, while Herod Antipas was charged with the administration of Galilee and Perea, the district which lay between the south end of the lake of Galilee and the Dead Sea on the eastern side of the Jordan. To the east and south-east of the lake lay ten Greek cities in which Greek culture and Greek vices held free sway; they had their amphi- theatres within a comparatively short distance of Galilee itself. Czesarea was not far away to the south- west, and Czsarea was a Roman city; while due west- ward over the hills of Upper Galilee you came to the Greek and Roman seaport town Ptolemais, the “far country’—though all too near—to which the prodigal son from many a Jewish home would betake himself. On the lake itself Herod held the fortified city of 30 The Realism of Jesus Tiberias, from which he kept the plain of Gennesaret almost literally under his eyes, and to the northward was Cesarea Philippi, with its marble temple set up upon a rock in honour of the emperor. Galilee itself was full of Gentiles and so came to be called “‘Galilee of the Gentiles” ; the towns by the lakeside, nominally Jewish, were crowded with men of all nationalities. This was specially true of Tarichee and Tiberias; all strict Jews avoided the latter, as Herod had violated an old graveyard to make room for his new city be- tween the mountains and the lake; and so he had been compelled to populate it with the scum of all nations. The Galileans themselves, and by the Galileans IL mean the Jews who had been long settled in Galilee, like, the Syrians of later days, were either peasants (fella- heen) or townspeople (belladeen). Nazareth was an unwalled village, and Jesus belonged to the peasant- class. His parents’ home, that is to say, would be a cottage built of mud, in which the family lived by night and day in one room, lit by what is called in the Gospels a “lamp,” but was really a bowl of oil on the top of a wooden stand, and warmed in winter by a fire of green wood, the smoke from which could only escape, when the door was closed, by one or two small slits in the wall and roof. Here the family would sleep, each on his own mattress; there was no undressing, but the “beds” were rolled up and put away in a recess during the day. The lamp was kept alight all night for fear of spirits, and in winter, when the weather in the hill- country is often extremely cold, the fire was never allowed to go out. In some of the more ambitious cottages by the lakeside there was probably a roof- Town and Country in Syria 31 chamber which could accommodate a lodger, and this was perhaps the case with Simon and Andrew’s house at Capernaum; but Nazareth would know no such luxuries. We can understand that it was not mere churlishness that made the unneighbourly neighbour in the parable of the friend at midnight so reluctant to get up; he could not get to the cupboard without dis- turbing the whole family. It is not certain, though it is quite likely, that there was a school at Nazareth; at any rate there was a synagogue, ‘and most of our Lord’s knowledge of the Old Testament would be ac- quired there, for very few peasant families would pos- sess copies of any of the Scriptures. Altogether dis- tinct from the “people of the land,” as they were contemptuously called, were the townspeople, who were engaged in various trades, and lived very much more comfortable lives, and the fishermen, who were despised because their work obliged them to go almost naked. Jesus, then, was by birth and upbringing a member of the poorest and least advanced class of Syrian peas- antry; He came from one of those Arab villages into which the Western traveller finds it so difficult to get admittance. Nazareth is not on the main road to the coast, but is in sight of the “way of the sea,” if one climbs to the top of the hill on the side of which the village still stands. The “stable” in which He was born would not be an inn-stable, for if “there was no room for Him in the inn,” it is certain there would be no room in the inn-stable. In the peasant’s house the space near the door where a beast can be tethered is called the stable, and the “manger’’ is sometimes a rough pit dug out in the mud floor, sometimes a 32 The Realism of Jesus wooden trough raised a little way from the ground. The Son of God, if He had searched from end to end of the Roman world, could scarcely have stooped lower. All His life He probably wore the peasant dress; we can understand why Simon the Pharisee thought it enough to ask the young countryman to dinner without troubling about the courtesies usual amongst gentle- folk! It is clear from the one authentic story of His boyhood which has come down to us that Jesus found His home-life unsatisfying and was glad to linger in the Temple among His Father’s people for a little while. The services in the synagogue had only made Him long to know more of the book of which the Rabbis spoke from Sabbath to Sabbath, and He must have looked forward with intense eagerness to His first visit to Jerusalem, where surely He could find men who could teach Him more. What memories visited Him on the quiet hills of another life with God His Father we do not know, but as the years went by the fact that He was somehow different from the other village people must have been more and more borne in upon Him. He would form His own estimate of the sermons to which He listened, but, whatever He thought of their preaching, He could not but be im- pressed by the Pharisee, the man to whom at any rate religion was the most important thing in life. Many of the peasant-people were Pharisees, as far as devotion to the law was concerned, though we gather that it was only rarely that any of them aspired to become a Rabbi. Even in Nazareth the power and prestige of the Rabbis must have been one of the outstanding realities of every-day life; they preached in the synagogues, taught Town and Country in Syria 33 in the schools, and administered justice day by day. In Jewish villages the heads of families acted as magis- trates, but Rabbis who lived in the neighbourhood were always called in as assessors, and practically settled the verdict. They were not clergy, for they worked at their trades during the day, and taught in their leisure- hours; but their power was as great as that of any priesthood. Sentences passed at their suggestion were submitted to, though they had no legal right to enforce them. The imperial government interfered as little as possible with local administration, so long as taxes were paid. The Rabbis not only administered the law; they made it, and in the villages their authority was un- questioned, In the next chapter we shall examine a little more closely the strength and the weakness of their position. III The Jew at Home and Abroad THROUGH the restless pagan world described in Chap- ter I there moved the Jew, everywhere to be met with and everywhere at home. Envied for his success in commerce, disliked because of his proud reserve and uncanny prosperity, a reluctant and somewhat super- cilious missionary of his faith, he had become the riddle of the Roman world, and his meeting-houses and places of prayer, to be found in every town of any size in some back street or by the riverside, were watched and ~ attended by crowds of devout or curious enquirers. In the universal corruption of manners his home-life was strangely wholesome; he alone of all men kept away from the theatre and the arena, and his devotion to the sabbath-law had already procured for him exemption from military service. His deliberate avoidance of participation in emperor-worship went for long without challenge. Of course thére were any number of Jews of another type, but it was the real Jew, the ‘““Pharisee,” who was noticed and feared, openly ridiculed and se- cretly admired. By the time the Fourth Gospel came to be written the Pharisees were known as “the Jews.” When the Gentile, easily impressed by the Jew’s piety and puritanism, in a world which knew little of either, sought to discover the secret of his strength and se- 34 The Jew at Home and Abroad 35 renity, the answer was quickly forthcoming. There it was in black and white, in his mouth and in his heart, for in the book of the law, the substance of which he carried about with him on all his sacred days on brow and wrist, the whole will of God was written. He needed no longer to seek for God or struggle for the at- tainment of peace here and eternal life hereafter; he had the secret, for on obedience to the revealed will of God, and on that alone, depended the happiness and health of men. His book had already been translated into Greek, the world-language, and was thus at the disposal of the Gentiles. Sensitive spirits like Virgil soon found in verses of Isaiah the best expression of their own dreams of the golden age. Like Protestants of a later day, the Pharisee had his inspired infallible book; like them, he believed in the right of private judgment within certain well-defined limits. One of these limits consisted in the fact that all exposition must be in line with inspired tradition; on this side he more nearly approaches the Romanist position. But his official interpreters were laymen, not priests; they were the “‘scribes’—the name “Rabbis” to designate the class is later than the Gospels, though scribes were addressed as “Rabbi.” Their authority rested upon the consent of the Church as a whole, not upon ordination. They were, however, mostly re- cruited from the Rabbinic schools, which consisted of groups of young men gathered round him by a popular Scribe; though they had no rite of priestly ordination, they were in practice co-opted. It has been pointed out in the last chapter that they were law-administrators and law-makers as well as teachers. All their decisions 36 The Realism of Jesus were professedly deductions from the law of Moses, interpreted according to the precedents set by previous declarations of accredited Rabbis or conferences of Rabbis. Meetings were held periodically, at which agreement upon disputed points was arrived at by a majority vote. They all practised a trade or profession for a living and were supposed to supply instruction gratuitously. When we wonder at the storm raised by the attacks of Jesus upon the scribes we must remember that His was the first onslaught that had been made for many years upon a class round whose prestige and influence the whole fabric of the nation’s life had been built. Most, though by no means all, of them belonged to the Pharisaic party; away from Jerusalem, at least, the Pharisaic scribe was all powerful, and his power rested upon a conviction wonderfully impressive in its universality and permanence. It not only survived the attacks of Jesus, but became so much stronger in the centuries that followed, that Pharisaism became all the Judaism that was left when the Temple disappeared. In Jerusalem their strength was so preponderant that they formed the majority of members of the San- hedrin, in spite of the fact that their bitter opponents, the Sadducees, held the official positions. Before we can begin to understand the attitude eventually taken up by Jesus toward the Pharisees we must try to do them justice. We owe to them not only the preservation of the whole Old Testament, but also the idea of public worship, not in a central temple but in a local meeting-house—for the “chapel” or “‘little Bethel” is older than the “church’”—and the first sug- gestion to the world of real democracy, or government The Jew at Home and Abroad 37 by consent of the governed. We owe to them, too, the idea of compulsory education, free and open to all equally. The Jew is the father of institutions, the ex- pert in the practical organisation of great ideas. These ideas came to him by research in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, not by any process or reasoning, as was the case with the Greek, or by the pressure of prac- tical need, as with the Roman and the Britisher. Serv- ices were held in the synagogue twice every Sabbath day, in the morning and in the afternoon, and twice during the week, on Monday and Thursday. Lessons were read according to a fixed lectionary at the morn- ing service, the first from the law, the second from the prophets. It is not certain that the Hebrew original was read at all; later at any rate there was an official Targum, or Aramaic paraphrase, used in Palestine, and perhaps this, not the text of the Old Testament itself, was preached from by Jesus at Nazareth. The Targum of the passage in question reads: “The Spirit of prophecy is upon Me, because it has brought Me up.” No wonder the congregation exclaimed “Is not this Joseph’s son?” We owe to the Pharisees, too, the idea of preaching from a text, of ordered and organised exposition. In regard to the sermon, any distinguished stranger might be called upon by the official in charge of the service to deliver an address; anyone, even if he was not of age, could be chosen to read the lessons. This latter fact surely proves fairly conclusive that the original Hebrew, in Our Lord’s time a dead language known only to the learned, could not have been read, even though an interpreter was provided. Even the struc- 38 The Realism of Jesus ture and arrangement of our Church buildings, so far as aisles, porches, and the position of the pulpit are concerned, follow the Pharisaic model, Indeed, our debt to the much-maligned Pharisee is greater than we know. The essential weakness of Pharisee-religion is to be found in the fact that devotion to a Person, God, had been submerged in devotion to a thing, the book. The book, whatever its source, is written in human words, and words are inevitably ambiguous. It follows that an infallible commentary is required to explain the meaning of the infallible book. The Rabbinic theory was that the “tradition of the elders” did not add any- thing to the Torah, but only brought out its hidden meaning. The nation had sailed on its voyage with sealed orders; the scribe was entrusted with the task of opening the envelope, and interpreting its contents, In dealing with the multitudinous details of everyday life, he contented himself, it was declared, with drawing inferences from what was already laid down in Torah. A parallel to his treatment of the problems of conduct on the basis of “the law’ can be found, Mr. H. G. Wood has suggested, in Baxter’s Christian Directory, where counsel is given upon the minutest details of conduct by an elaborate system of “particular infer- ences” from Scripture. But “who shall guard the guardians themselves’? The interpreters themselves need interpreters, until the whole body of doctrine ex- pounded and re-expounded becomes intolerably burden- some, as Jesus declares it to have been in His time. For the book Jesus, in the First and Fourth Gospels alike, substitutes Himseli—a stupendous claim! In The Jew at Home and Abroad 39 the Fourth Gospel He argues that He embodies in His own perfect Sonship the ideal of obedience which was the foundation of Rabbinic religion, in the First He says first “for righteousness’ sake,” then “for My sake” —the two are assumed to be one without argument! Romanism with its infallible Church, the extremer forms of Protestantism with their infallible book, are thus alike the children of Judaism; indeed within the Church Judaism is always the enemy, because it is the one alternative to spiritual religion for earnest men; it offers a kind of satisfaction to the same instincts and demands the same sacrificial loyalty. It provides a retreat, attractive and accessible, from the fatigue and insecurity of private judgment, from the terrible liberty wherewith Christ has set us free. Because of its intricacy Pharisaism is also forced not only to explain, but often to explain away the com- plicated and arduous provisions of its written stand- ards. To explain away is always easier than to ex- plain; thus a system of organised pretence, called casuistry, is soon forthcoming. Life is too short for fulfilment of the law as interpreted by tradition, and so men try, by verbal quibbles and mental tricks, to sophisticate themselves into believing and persuading others that they are fulfilling a law of conduct, which taken literally—and it must be taken literally, or the whole edifice of Pharisaism collapses—is impossible of fulfilment within the limits of human life and powers of endurance. By “hypocrisy” Jesus means every kind of unreality, from conscious play-acting to the most complete self-delusion. The trouble with the most bitter enemies of Jesus was that they had tried so hard 40 The Realism of Jesus to persuade other people that He cast out demons by the help of Beelzebul that they had succeeded in per- suading themselves of the truth of their lie. It is only the simpler forms of self-delusion which meet us in the Sermon on the Mount. Something more is to be said about the early affinities of Jesus with the higher Pharisaism of His time in the next chapter. IV Jesus and the Pharisees WE must not forget that the first disciples of Jesus belonged to one section or another of the Pharisees. Zacharias and Elizabeth walked “in all the command- ments and ordinances of the Lord blamelessly”; in other words, though he was of priestly family, they were Pharisees, as were Simeon and Anna and prob- ably Mary and Joseph. From such little groups of Pharisaic quietists Jesus drew His first adherents in Jerusalem ; they were the “Israelites indeed,” whom He called away from the shelter of “the figtree” of Juda- ism to see greater things than the Messiah of their dreams, “the Son of God,” “the King of Israel.” He did not exaggerate when He called them “the salt of society,” “the light of the world,” for in dark death- shadowed “Galilee of the Gentiles’ they were all the light there was. It has been implied in the last sentence that the first part of the great Sermon at least should be taken as a deliberate appeal to a distinct group of unofficial Pharisees. They were called the “poor,” the “meek of the earth’; their watchword was “righteousness,” while “they shall see God” reminds us again of Na- thanael of Cana in Galilee, and of Philo’s explanation of the name “Israel” as meaning “the man who sees 41 42 The Realism of Jesus God.” By striving to keep themselves pure, they hoped to attain to the beatific vision—to be Israelites indeed, because, like Jacob, the man of peace, they struggle to know His secret name, but, unlike him, are “without guile.” The traditional ideal of the Pharisaic party had always been pacifist; their predecessors, the Chasidim, had burnt their fingers badly when, under the later Maccabean kings, they had resorted to force, and they had learnt their lesson. Some of their Rabbis, notably Hillel and the Gamaliel who was Paul’s teacher, were very much less severe in their legal de- cisions than were the Sadducees, and might claim the title of “merciful.” The zealots do not appear as a separate organised party till just before the fall of Jerusalem; but it is fairly certain that the tendencies they represented were strongly developed long before that time, and one of the twelve is called by Luke “Simon the zealot.” The zealot’s watchword might have been “God helps those who help themselves,” that of the Pharisees “In God’s good time, but certainly not till the chosen people fulfils the law.” It is inter- esting to see that Jesus takes sides on this question with the Pharisees. We may expound the Beatitudes, then, in this way: “My appeal is to those who are really poor—‘poor in spirit—those who deserve the honourable name of ‘poor’ in the deeper sense ; to mourners—to those who, like their predecessors described by Malachi, ‘walk mournfully before the Lord of hosts,’ because they feel the time to be out of joint; to the ‘meek,’ to those who care for ‘righteousness,’ the life of personal and corporate obedience, to those who practise charitable Jesus and the Pharisees 43 judgment, who with single-minded devotion seek the vision of God. Such men and women are already the ‘salt of society’; like the town on the hill-top, they are noticed and wondered at by everybody.” In every phrase contained in this part of the Sermon Jesus has before Him the kind of people I have been trying to describe. The whole Gentile world was watching the “Israelite indeed,” for he was by himself in that busy world; persecuted, disliked, slandered as he was, men knew in their hearts that he was the best and soundest man to be found anywhere in those days. Little circles of men and women who live to them- selves tend to become unduly self-conscious and su- perior. Either they shrink more and more from con- tact with the world outside and so hide their light, or else they get into the habit of posing; knowing what is expected of them, they become morbidly conscious that they are being watched and discussed, and learn to look for the applause, or at least the interest of people to whom unusual piety or strictness of life pro- vides a novel sensation. They must learn, says Jesus, that no virtue is of any use, unless it helps “all who are in the house,” all, that is, who come within the range of its influence—to believe in God and goodness; but they must also beware of the other and greater danger, that of following the way of life to which they have committed themselves with an eye to human appreciation. When they become uneasily, or perhaps even complacently, conscious of the fact that they are different from others, or begin to be over-aware of their superiority themselves, all the goodness goes out of what they do from God’s point of view, and His is 44, The Realism of Jesus the only verdict that really matters. These are indeed the characteristic defects of Puritan religion, and both tendencies can be traced to the same source, the self- consciousness which breeds shyness or professionalism, which makes men shrink altogether from publicity or court it too eagerly. In Our Lord’s recognition of these dangers we can see the beginnings of His aliena- tion from all but a few of the Pharisees, with whom at the outset of His Galilean ministry He declared Himself to have so much in common. | A very marked feature of modern life both inside and outside the Churches is the increase in the number of fellowships, groups of people bound together by a common interest, and developing an organised corpo- rate life separate from those who do not share the quest and the crusade for which they exist. This is all to the good, for it proves that at least some men and women are beginning to care so intensely for their spiritual and social ideals that they feel that they must express their enthusiasm in some new and more em- phatic way. Moreover the very idea of fellowship is being born again in our days, and we are finding out afresh all that we can do for one another and for our- selves by thinking and working and praying together. But if we begin to dwell more and more upon the comparative coldness and indifference of those who re- main outside our fellowship, if we let ourselves grow over-critical or contemptuous of those to whom our way of thinking does not appeal, the poison of that Pharisaism which Jesus so sternly denounced has al- ready worked its way into our fellowship; it has be- come a mere party, the kind of religious club with Jesus and the Pharisees Ad which Jesus would have nothing to do. We are no use at all unless whatever we have learnt is put at the disposal of all who are in the house, without parade of the fact that we have discovered it, or that they have not; unless we are able to work it out in deeds so ob- viously right and Christian that those who see them may be impressed not so much by the fact that we have done them as by the faith and life that made them possible. Unless our attitude is really right to our fellow-Christians who do not yet see eye to eye with us, Our quest for the secret of power will be in vain; if we bring our gift to the altar, and there remember that they can allege against us any impatience or aloof- ness or scorn, our first act of consecration to the new life must be to go and make friends with our reaction- ary brother, then come and offer the gift. There is a way of bearing witness to blessing received in a fellowship which other Christians have not cared to enter which only provokes and irritates those who have not shared our experience. We are not to speak as though the new truth or the enhanced power was our discovery or the patent of our group. We are, says Jesus, to find out some way of expressing what has been given to us that will call attention not to the fact that everybody else does not do the same, but that this is just the natural thing which every Christian can do, whether he belongs to our special group or not. Fur- ther consideration of the other danger—that of posing for effect or professionalism—must be left to a later chapter. V The Breach with the Pharisees WE have seen that Jesus had much in common with the Pharisees as He entered upon His work, and that sn the first detailed account of His programme He appealed to the rank and file of that party. They held the doctrine of the Fatherly providence of God as He did, though He gave to the idea a far wider range. One of their teachers said, “Not a bird perishes apart from Heaven,” and ‘“There is no forgetfulness before the Throne of His Majesty.” They also believed in the freedom of the will and in the Resurrection. All the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer find a parallel some- where in the maze of the rabbinic writings. Their whole theory of life was that of the 119th Psalm; the law, they would tell us, is no burden, for the greater the number of commandments, the less room there is for misunderstanding of the Father’s will, in perfect obedience to which lies the secret of peace. They looked, as Jesus did, for a kingdom of righteousness, in which God’s will should be done on earth, as in Heaven. Into the service of His campaign He called all their great watchwords, “the poor,” “the meek,” “righteousness,” “peace-makers,” “the Kingdom,” “the Heavenly Father.” Even His humanitarian teaching about Sabbath observance finds its echo in the saying 46 The Breach with the Pharisees 47 reported from Hillel: “To you is the Sabbath given over, and you are not given over to the Sabbath.’ There were, we may be sure, many scribes who, like the eager and responsive questioner in Mark xii, were “not far from the Kingdom of God.” The “golden rule” itself occurs in rabbinic writings, as in the book of Tobit, in the form, “What you would not have other men do to you, do not to others.” Of course, points of difference are at least equally numerous, and perhaps more important—but the great difference is one of atmosphere, of spirit. This may be illustrated by the help of a well-known rabbinic parable about labourers in a vineyard. One young workman works only for one hour, and yet is paid, like those who came in last in corresponding parable of Jesus, as much as the others, who have borne the burden and heat of the day. The other labourers grumble, and are told that the man they are jealous of has done as much work in one hour as they in the whole day; the story finds its raison d’étre in the premature death of a promising young Rabbi. The whole point of the parable in the Gospel is that the men who worked but one hour did not earn their pay; they entered the vine- yard without stopping to ask questions about wages at all, perhaps because they were so much surprised that they of all people in the world should be wanted, that they were inside the gate and at work before they knew what they were doing. All over the writings of the Rabbis lies the trail of the bargaining spirit; so much obedience, so much happiness here, so much reward hereafter. It may be said that Jesus also spoke of reward con- 48 The Realism of Jesus tinually. He used such phrases as “treasure in heaven” and “what reward have ye?” The difference is sug- gested by the parable just quoted ; the reward He offers does not consist in being singled out from less meri- torious performers for special honour, rather in being admitted along with other faithful people into the fel- lowship of His presence and His triumph, to a com- mon entrance into the “joy of the Lord.” There are sayings, it is true, which suggest special reward for specially selected people; the disciples are to “sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel,” and even in the Kingdom of Heaven there are to be greatest and least ; one slave is to have five cities, another only two. In any conceivable world-order responsible positions of trust and authority must be given to those best fitted to undertake them; and in these cases the reward, if reward it really is, is out of all proportion to_any pos- sible merit. When we have done our best we are to say: “We are slaves; we have only done our duty.” The idea of keeping a kind of credit, account with God is simply laughed out of court. Sometimes the Rabbis suggest the same thing, only they go further; one of them, for example, said, “The reward of a precept iS a precept’”—but this is too cold a rule for men to live by. Jesus knew that we need to work for something else than the mere joy of working. We are to say “We are slaves,” for to be slaves in such a service is reward enough to go on with at any rate. He says “You are My friends,’ because He knows that only a real partnership with such a Master as He can satisfy those deeper instincts which called us into His service. It was not when those first followers of His had fin- OE a See —— The Breach with the Pharisees 49 ished their task that He called them His “friends” ; they became for ever His friends not because they put themselves at His disposal, but because He put Him- self altogether at theirs. Any thought of services rendered is swept away when the Master dies for His servants. We are now in a position to define more exactly in what the difference between Jesus and the Pharisees consisted. The weakness of all Pharisaic religion lies in the fact that it is founded not upon love—and by love is here meant loyal devotion to a person—but upon duty, or devotion to an idea. The Pharisee might reply to this assertion by saying that his ideal was devotion to a person, and his answer would cover a real truth. All the same, there is an unmistakable difference of emphasis, and in these matters emphasis counts for a great deal. For practical purposes, to the Pharisee the one supreme and final revelation of God was in a book ; his devotion to the book separated him from all the nations of the earth, and also from “the people of the land,” the uninstructed careless crowds of his own countrymen. For him the religious life depended upon knowledge, for if right conduct can only come by conscious obedience, and the commands of God are many and intricate, how can the unlettered or stupid man obey what he does not know or cannot under- stand? With the best will in the world, the man who had not leisure or capacity to become learned in the law could never be a saint. It is true that the Rabbis said a good deal about the relative importance of “light” and “weighty” commands, but in theory all precepts were alike, for all alike expressed the will of 50 The Realism of Jesus God. They also said that the whole of the Torah could be summed up in the two greatest of them all, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . .” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbour”; but if we asked them how you were to love God they could only say “By fulfilling His commands,” and that brings us back, of course, to our starting-point. Thus it was that the peasant-class in which Jesus was born came to be regarded as negligible for the pur- poses of religion. They were taught as much as they could take in, in school and synagogue, but they were despised and given to understand that they need not aspire to honour in the Church. The strict Pharisee would not eat with them, any more than he would with publicans or Gentiles, lest he should be betrayed into forgetting any one of the many regulations governing his diet and his manners at table. Self-conscious ex- perts are tiresome people at any time, but specialists in religion, men who profess to exude inspired wisdom, soon become snobs of the most obnoxious kind. With all their affectation of humility, their deferential quota- tion of the dicta of older authorities upon disputed points in exposition, the scribes must have strutted about with the consciousness that they were the people who knew all that was best worth knowing. Some of them might deserve to be called “the salt of society” ; as a class they had grown heavy and sour and useless, because they felt themselves to be indispensable. Into their deferential and comfortable world Jesus broke with His unanswerable common-sense, and they knew by instinct that until this disturbing presence was re- moved they could never get back to the kind of life, The Breach with the Pharisees 51 so flattering to their self-importance, that had once taken up all their thoughts. If the whole will of God is written in a book, you can become an expert, for it is only a matter of brains, time, and trouble; to have the brains and the time and to be willing to take the trouble marks you out at once from those who are less fortunate or industrious. But if religion is concerned with love to a person, there is no limit to duty, and there can be no question of merit. Where we truly love, the idea of merit never comes into our thoughts at all, though the idea of reward, the return and ex- change of love, does. Still we never think that we have deserved the return, we only know that we can never be content without it. Jesus speaks often of a reward, never of deserving it. If the Pharisee had no dealings with “the people of the land” except from the pulpit on the Sabbath, still less could he consort with publicans and Gentiles; he classed the two together. If the publican or the harlot repented, forgiveness was promised. But the sinner must come to the saint, the saint could not go after the sinner; his virtue was too hardly won and too easily lost to be risked in dubious company. We do not always realise how utterly radical Jesus was; Pharisaic religion is based upon a series of distinctions, all of which He undermined. A chosen people, an infallible book, one sacred day, one sex specially qualified for sacramental functions, one spiritual aristocracy, these walls of partition all went down before Him. These ideas are rife in the Church still, for Judaism springs eternal in the human breast. All the real heresies as well as all the abuses that have obstructed the progress 52 The Realism of Jesus of the Kingdom through the centuries can indeed be traced back to those elements in human nature which Pharisaism represents. Romanism, Puritanism of the hard kind, Spiritualism, the narrow orthodoxy of some and the self-confident theorising of others in the mod- ern Church, along with Islam outside, are all directly or indirectly descended from rabbinical Pharisaism; Judaism is the enemy, because it is always the second best, for religiously-inclined people the one alternative to Christianity. VI The Beatitudes Tue word “blessed” has little or no meaning for us, because it has become a technical term of the religious life. One of our greatest handicaps in the interpre- tation of the New Testament lies in the fact that we have not yet discovered how to express the realities of the spiritual life in the realistic language of the peo- ple. We have to deal with a generation that has never learnt to attach a definite meaning to historic Christian phrases; one of our most urgent tasks is that of trans- lation, or rather paraphrase, for word-by-word trans- lation is impossible, if it is to be really translation. “Happy” will not do as a substitute for “blessed,” for to men of our age “happiness” means something quite different from the “‘blessedness” of which Jesus spoke. What is apparently meant is “to be congratulated upon their prospects”; the men and women described in the sentences which begin with this word are likely candi- dates for the Kingdom, as the “rich’’ and “well-fed,” “the strong, the easy, and the glad” are not. Perhaps enough has been said in a previous chapter as to the nature of this first constituency of Jesus; only a little more detailed exposition is here necessary. They were lowly folk who felt themselves out of touch with the restless life about them. Their tendency was 53 54 The Realism of Jesus to shut themselves up with their dreams of the “King- dom,” to live among like-minded associates, to let the foolish world, “the giddy multitude,” as our fathers used to say in their prayers, go by. The word “meek” is specially difficult to render in modern speech, for it has a wealth of meaning. In the Old Testament it seems to mean “humble”; in the New it is applied to Himself by Jesus in close connexion with another phrase translated in our versions “lowly in heart,” but perhaps more adequately rendered “of homely mind,” “easy to get on with.” In the Bible when two epithets are joined by “and,” it will be found very often that each explains the other. “Unassuming” or “ready to. make allowances’ gives us one side of the meaning of the word, “‘patiently persistent” the other. It should be noticed that they are “to inherit the earth”; that is, to fall heirs to the lordship of human life. They are men who, with great ends in view, are willing to give way and make allowances in matters of smaller moment ; they have that rare faculty, the ability to dis- tinguish trifles from what is of serious importance, All quarrelsome people justify themselves on the ground that the thing is a question of principle with them; the meek man knows by instinct where he must fight and where he can safely yield ground. It may be claimed that “meekness” in this sense of the word has proved the secret of such success as we have had as an imperial power, as it certainly helped the Roman empire to hold the nations of the world together for so many centuries. Where we have known how to give way, as in South Africa, we have built up our empire; where we have been unyielding, as in the war with our The Beatitudes 55 American colonies in the eighteenth century, and in so much of our dealings with Ireland in this, we have failed disastrously. “Righteousness” in the next verse means conformity to the will of God in social as well as in individual life, and “merciful” carries the sense of “brotherly” rather than “pitiful.” The Gospel idea of “mercy” is not that of the compassionate condescension of a su- perior to one beneath him, rather than of esprit de corps, of the spirit which Sir G. A. Smith calls “leal love.” The phrase “the pure in heart” just hints a contrast with the stress upon ceremonial purity in the religious life of all Pharisees; the side reference to the story of Jacob, the man who was first called “Israel,” because he saw God face to face, has been dealt with already. “Heart,” it should be observed, should be translated “mind” in our current speech; the “pure in heart” not only live and look for the vision of God, but are so much absorbed in their quest that they desire nothing else, they are set free from the hindrance of competing motives, unlike the rest of us, who want so many things at the same time that we never really get anything. The word “peace-makers,’ as I have sug- gested already, contains an allusion to the pacifist tendencies of the Pharisees, but it also has a deeper meaning; the “peacemakers” are those who seek to call their fellows away from the distraction of the desires which divide them and set them against one another, that they may be free from the crusade which unites us all. It is interesting to notice that “the Peace” was one of the common half-superstitious eva- sions of the name of God; a “son of peace” (compare 56 The Realism of Jesus the phrase in Luke x, 6) would be a “son of God,” and so he is, says Jesus, in more senses than one. By and by the peacemakers will be recognised for what they are, God’s men in the world, as reconciling is God’s work; He “was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.” Fach of the Beatitudes, it will be seen, leads us one step higher on the steep road of spiritual attainment. We begin with humility and a “divine discontent,”’ we pass on to forbearance with others coupled with con- centrated aspiration after an ideal always clearly vis- ualised and always beyond us. From the clear view of the ideal and the concentration of soul-hunger upon it, springs a new consciousness of brotherhood with all men—for the range of spiritual vision broadens as we ascend. The summit once reached in the sight of God’s face, our work in life lies clear before us; it is to do God’s work of reconciling men to Him, and each other, and the consequence is persecution, but a perse- cution which should be our delight because it is borne for the sake of an ideal now realised in Christ, and is our guarantee of a place in the apostolic succession of persecuted people. Another way of taking the Beati- tudes is equally illuminating. They run in pairs, the first member of each pair describing a virtue from the point of view of the secret life of the soul with God, the second its expression in social relations. This is true of all except the third (“Blessed are the meek’) and the last (“the persecuted”’) ; these summarise what has gone before. If you are lowly-minded and ill at ease in the world, you will be ready to make allow- ances and will be content to wait. If you have attained The Beatitudes 57 to the vision of God and (consequently ) live to make peace, you will be persecuted. Reading the rest of the Beatitudes in this way, we see at once that the discon- tent praised in the second is the outward side of the poverty of spirit, the consciousness of weakness in the spiritual life, which is the subject of the first. The sense of brotherhood is the working out of the concen- trated aspiration after the new world seen from afar; the desire to call men from issues of less moment to share our experience of God in Jesus comes when we have reached the top of the mountain and look down on the conflict in the plain below. Persecution “‘for right- eousness’ sake” is the result of the quest which has thus become a crusade, and is to be exultantly welcomed not as the penalty but as the reward of service. It is doubtful whether the people addressed by Jesus had yet suffered serious persecution for their religion, so He passes quickly from the past to the future, and from the general statement “I congratulate those who have ever been persecuted” to “I congratulate you, when men persecute and slander you for My sake.” Here the personal note comes in with startling sudden- ness, and we pass from general maxims to a tremen- dous claim. Loyalty to a cause has now become devo- tion to a Person. It will have been noticed that the link which holds the Beatitudes together can be found in the fact that they are all blessings upon a particular kind of discon- tent. The people described here as likely candidates for the new age are men and women who cherish an ideal perpetually challenged by the world in which they live as well as by some of their own less noble moods. 58 The Realism of Jesus Such men are all to themselves, the salt of society and the light of the world because they are different. The constant pressure of public opinion, together with those darker moods common to men of a sensitive tempera- ment, is bound to have its effect upon them as the years go by; how serious its depressing influence upon the best of the Pharisees came to be is shown by the books written by such men in the next generation. “Out of all the trees of the earth,’ complains one of them, “Thou hast chosen Thee one vine . . . out of all the peoples that have become so many hast Thou gotten Thee one people . . . and bestowed upon it Thy law . if the world has been created for our sakes, why do we not enter into possession of our world?” Dis- illusioned and out of love with their times these men soon shut themselves up with their somewhat forlorn and precarious hope. “For the youth of the world is past, and the strength of creation already exhausted . and the pitcher is near to the cistern and the ship to the harbour, and the course of the journey to the city, and life to its consummation.’ They needed the assurance that the true light was already shining, some visible certainty that the world could be redeemed. This new confidence the coming of Jesus was meant to give them; if they could but see it, He was their ideal incarnate. All that they need do, He says, is to add to their creed a glad loyalty to Him and they would enter into “the treasure of an inward Heaven,” the “Kingdom that could not be shaken,” a sudden realisation of their age-long dream in actual workaday experience. Meanwhile they must strive to make the ideal available for the whole community in which they The Beatitudes — 59 lived, no longer keeping their brotherly forbearance and charity to the members of their own group; they must make it tell for all it was worth upon the world about them, for when He came the Kingdom had come with Him into the common life of men; their solitary quest is to become a triumphant crusade. Nowadays, too, we have our idealists, self-denying and earnest people who stand, in face of endless dis- couragement, for the Kingdom, though they express their ideas of Utopia in different language; they dream chiefly of social regeneration, but their inspiration is in essence religious. The whole form and pressure of the age is against them, and they tend to become some- what fretful and petulant. Idealism cannot live with- out hope, and there can be no real hope outlasting youthful optimism and exuberance without Him who is the Kingdom incarnate. The very power to believe in the possibility of the ideal is being gradually worn away in the minds of many of the best people of to-day, because they have only their own convictions to fall back upon. They are always in the opposition, and seem so often to be on the losing side that they become intolerant and sometimes very bitter. Such intolerance is the one thing most calculated to make an ideal, which would be unpalatable anyhow, quite certain to fail in its appeal; when men can charge us with faults of temper and can call us Pharisees with any degree of truth, we put a weapon into their hands more deadly than any they can forge for themselves. Jesus, who gave Himself to the fellowship of men who did not understand Him and could not share His inner life, yet carried the light unshadowed through the darkness 60 The Realism of Jesus around and before Him to the conquest of an unbe- lieving world, because He was and is “the Word made flesh,’ can teach us how to believe in, to bear with and to love those who are unresponsive to our. message. Something remains to’be said about the imagery of these verses. Salt had two chief uses in the domestic life from which Jesus so often took His illustrations. It was first “pure, then peaceable”; in other words, it was employed to keep things from going bad, and as a condiment in cookery. Much of the salt used then, specially that which was brought from the Jordan val- ley and the Dead Sea, was bituminous and of inferior quality, liable to lose its preserving power, to become heavy and sour.