06 - Teaching of Jesus
VI. TEACHING OF JESUS
1. The Johannine Jesus.—The Gospel narratives not only present us, however, with dramatizations of the God-man, according to their authors’ conception of His composite person. They preserve for us also a considerable body of the utterances of Jesus Himself, and this enables us to observe the conception of His person which underlay and found expression in Our Lord’s own teaching. The discourses of Our Lord which have been selected for record by John have been chosen (among other reasons) expressly for the reason that they bear witness to His essential Deity. They are accordingly peculiarly rich in material for forming a judgment of Our Lord’s conception of His higher nature. This conception, it is needless to say, is precisely that which John, taught by it, has announced in the prologue to his Gospel, and has illustrated by his Gospel itself, compacted as it is of these discourses. It will not be necessary to present the evidence for this in its fulness. It will be enough to point to a few characteristic passages, in which Our Lord’s conception of His higher nature finds especially clear expression. That He was of higher than earthly origin and nature, He repeatedly asserts. "Ye are from beneath," he says to the Jews (John 8:23), "I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world" (cf. John 17:16). Therefore, He taught that He, the Son of Man, had "descended out of heaven" (John 3:13), where was His true abode. This carried with it, of course, an assertion of preexistence; and this preexistence is explicitly affirmed: "What then," He asks, "if ye should behold the Son of man ascending where he was before?" (John 6:62). It is not merely preexistence, however, but eternal preexistence which He claims for Himself: "And now, Father," He prays (John 17:5), "glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was" (cf. John 17:24); and again, as the most impressive language possible, He declares (John 8:58 A.V.): "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am," where He claims for Himself the timeless present of eternity as His mode of existence. In the former of these two last-cited passages, the character of His preexistent life is intimated; in it He shared the Father’s glory from all eternity ("before the world was"); He stood by the Father’s side as a companion in His glory. He came forth, when He descended to earth, therefore, not from heaven only, but from the very side of God (John 8:42; John 17:8). Even this, however, does not express the whole truth; He came forth not only from the Father’s side where He had shared in the Father’s glory; He came forth out of the Father’s very being—"I came out from the Father, and am come into the world" (John 16:28; cf. John 8:42). "The connection described is internal and essential, and not that of presence or external fellowship" (Westcott). This prepares us for the great assertion: "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30), from which it is a mere corollary that "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9; cf. John 8:19; John 12:45). In all these declarations the subject of the affirmation is the actual person speaking: it is of Himself who stood before men and spoke to them that Our Lord makes these immense assertions. Accordingly, when He majestically declared, "I and the Father are" (plurality of persons) "one" (neuter singular, and accordingly singleness of being), the Jews naturally understood Him to be making Himself, the person then speaking to them, God (John 10:33; cf. John 5:18; John 19:7). The continued sameness of the person who has been, from all eternity down to this hour, one with God, is therefore fully safeguarded. His earthly life is, however, distinctly represented as a humiliation. Though even on earth He is one with the Father, yet He "descended" to earth; He had come out from the Father and out of God; a glory had been left behind which was yet to be returned to, and His sojourn on earth was therefore to that extent an obscuration of His proper glory. There was a sense, then, in which, because He had "descended," He was no longer equal with the Father. It was in order to justify an assertion of equality with the Father in power (John 10:25, John 10:29) that He was led to declare: "I and my Father are one" (John 10:30). But He can also declare "The Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). Obviously this means that there was a sense in which He had ceased to be equal with the Father, because of the humiliation of His present condition, and in so far as this humiliation involved entrance into a status lower than that which belonged to Him by nature. Precisely in what this humiliation consisted can be gathered only from the general implication of many statements. In it He was a man a man who hath told you the truth, which I have heard from God’ (John 8:40), where the contrast with "God" throws the assertion of humanity into emphasis (cf. John 10:33). The truth of His human nature is, however, everywhere assumed and endlessly illustrated, rather than explicitly asserted. He possessed a human soul (John 12:27) and bodily parts (flesh and blood, John 6:53 if.; hands and side, John 20:27); and was subject alike to physical affections (weariness, John 4:6; and thirst, John 19:28; suffering and death), and to all the common human emotions—not merely the love of compassion (John 13:34; John 14:21; John 15:8-13), but the love of simple affection which we pour out on "friends" (John 11:11; cf. John 15:14-15), indignation (John 11:33, John 11:38) and joy (John 15:11; John 17:13). He felt the perturbation produced by strong excitement (John 11:33; John 12:27; John 13:21), the sympathy with suffering which shows itself in tears (John 11:35), the thankfulness which fills the grateful heart (John 6:11, John 6:23; John 11:41). Only one human characteristic was alien to Him: He was without sin: "the prince of the world," He declared, "hath nothing in me" (John 14:30; cf. John 8:46). Clearly our Lord, as reported by John, knew Himself to be true God and true man in one indivisible person, the common subject of the qualities which belong to each.
2. The Synoptic Jesus.
(a) Mark 13:32. The same is true of His self-consciousness as revealed in His sayings recorded by the Synoptics. Perhaps no more striking illustration of this could be adduced than the remarkable declaration recorded in Mar. 13:82 (cf. Matthew 24:36): ‘But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, nor yet the Son, but the Father.’ Here Jesus places Himself, in an ascending scale of being, above "the angels in heaven," that is to say, the highest of all creatures, significantly marked here as super-mundane. Accordingly, He presents Himself elsewhere as the Lord of the angels, whose requests they obey: "The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them that do iniquity" (Matthew 13:41), "And he shall send forth his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other" (Matthew 24:31; cf. Matthew 13:49; Matthew 25:31; Mark 8:38). Thus the "angels of God" (Luke 12:8-9; Luke 15:10) Christ designates as His angels, the "kingdom of God" (Matthew 12:28; Matthew 19:24; Matthew 21:31, Matthew 21:43; Mar. and Lk. often) as His Kingdom, the "elect of God" (Mark 13:20; Luke 18:7; cf. Romans 8:33; Galatians 3:12; Titus 1:1) as His elect. He is obviously speaking in Mark 13:22 out of a Divine self-consciousness: "Only a Divine being can be exalted above angels" (B. Weiss). He therefore designates Himself by His Divine name, "the Son," that is to say, the unique Son of God (9:7; 1:11), to claim to be whom would for a man be blasphemy (Mark 14:61, Mark 14:64). But though He designates Himself by this Divine name, He is not speaking of what He once was, but of what at the moment of speaking He is: the action of the verb is present, "knoweth." He is claiming, in other words, the supreme designation of "the Son," with all that is involved in it, for His present self, as He moved among men: He is, not merely was, "the Son." Nevertheless, what He affirms of Himself cannot be affirmed of Himself distinctively as "the Son." For what He affirms of Himself is ignorance— not even the Son" knows it; and ignorance does not belong to the Divine nature which the term "the Son" connotes. An extreme appearance of contradiction accordingly arises from the use of this terminology, just as it arises when Paul says that the Jews "crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Corinthians 2:8), or exhorts the Ephesian elders to "feed the church of God which he purchased with his own blood" (Acts 20:28 in.); or John Keble praises Our Lord for "the blood of souls by Thee redeemed." It was not the Lord of Glory as such who was nailed to the tree, nor have either "God" or "souls" blood to shed.
We know how this apparently contradictory mode of speech has arisen in Keble’s case. He is speaking of men who are composite beings, consisting of souls and bodies, and these men come to be designated from one element of their composite personalities, though what is affirmed by them belongs rather to the other; we may speak, therefore, of the "blood of souls" meaning that these "souls," while not having blood as such, yet designate persons who have bodies and therefore blood. We know equally how to account for Paul’s apparent contradictions. We know that he conceived of Our Lord as a composite person, uniting in Himself a Divine and a human nature. In Paul’s view, therefore, though God as such has no blood, yet Jesus Christ who is God has blood because He is also man. He can justly speak, therefore, when speaking of Jesus Christ, of His blood as the blood of God. When precisely the same phenomenon meets us in Our Lord’s speech of Himself, we must presume that it is the outgrowth of precisely the same state of things. When He speaks of "the Son" (who is God) as ignorant, we must understand that He is designating Himself as "the Son" because of His higher nature, and yet has in mind the ignorance of His lower nature; what He means is that the person properly designated "the Son" is ignorant, that is to say with respect to the human nature which is as intimate an element of His personality as is His Deity. When our Lord says, then, that "the Son knows not," He becomes as express a witness to the two natures which constitute His person as Paul is when he speaks of the blood of God, or as Keble is a witness to the twofold constitution of a human being when he speaks of souls shedding blood. In this short sentence, thus, Our Lord bears witness to His Divine nature with its supremacy above all creatures, to His human nature with its creaturely limitations, and to the unity of the subject possessed of these two natures.
(b) Other passages: Son of Man and Son of God:
All these elements of His personality find severally repeated assertions in other utterances of Our Lord recorded in the Synoptics. There is no need to insist here on the elevation of Himself above the kings and prophets of the Old Covenant (Matthew 12:41 if.), above the temple itself (Matthew 12:6), and the ordinances of the Divine Law (Matthew 12:8); or on His accent of authority in both His teaching and action, His great "I say unto you (Matthew 5:21-22), ‘I will; be cleansed’ (Mark 1:41; Mark 2:5; Luke 7:14); or on His separation of Himself from men in His relation to God, never including them with Himself in an "Our Father," but consistently speaking distinctively of "my Father" (e.g., Luke 24:49) and "your Father" (e.g., Matthew 5:16); or on His intimation that He is not merely David’s Son but David’s Lord, and that a Lord sitting on the right hand of God (Matthew 22:44); or on His parabolic discrimination of Himself a Son and Heir from all "servants" (Matthew 21:33 if.); or even on His ascription to Himself of the purely Divine functions of the forgiveness of sins (Mark 2:8) and judgment of the world (Matthew 25:31), or of the purely Divine powers of reading the heart (Mark 2:8; Luke 9:47), omnipotence (Matthew 24:30; Mark 14:62) and omnipresence (Mt. xviii 20; 28:10). These things illustrate His constant assumption of the possession of Divine dignity and attributes; the claim itself is more directly made in the two great designations which He currently gave Himself, the Son of Man and the Son of God. The former of these is His favorite self-designation. Derived from Daniel 7:13-14, it intimates on every occasion of its employment Our Lord’s consciousness of being a super-mundane being, who has entered into a sphere of earthly life on a high mission, on the accomplishment of which He is to return to His heavenly sphere, whence He shall in due season come back to earth, now, however, in His proper majesty, to gather up the fruits of His work and consummate all things. It is a designation, thus, which implies at once a heavenly preexistence, a present humiliation, and a future glory; and He proclaims Himself in this future glory no less than the universal King seated on the throne of judgment for quick and dead (Mark 8:31; Matthew 25:31). The implication of Deity imbedded in the designation, Son of Man, is perhaps more plainly spoken out in the companion designation, Son of God, which Our Lord not only accepts at the hands of others, accepting with it the implication of blasphemy in permitting its application to Himself (Matthew 26:63, Matthew 26:65; Mark 14:61, Mark 14:64; Luke 22:29-30), but persistently claims for Himself both, in His constant designation of God as His Father in a distinctive sense, and in His less frequent but more pregnant designation of Himself as, by way of eminence, "the Son." That His consciousness of the peculiar relation to God expressed by this designation was not an attainment of His mature spiritual development, but was part of His most intimate consciousness from the beginning, is suggested by the sole glimpse which is given us into His mind as a child (Luke 2:49). The high significance which the designation bore to Him is revealed to us in two remarkable utterances preserved, the one by both Matthew (Matthew 11:27 if.) and Luke (Luke 10:22 if.), and the other by Matthew (Matthew 28:19).
(c) Matthew 11:27; Matthew 28:19. In the former of these utterances, Our Lord, speaking in the most solemn manner, not only presents Himself, as the Son, as the sole source of knowledge of God and of blessedness for men, but places Himself in a position, not of equality merely, but of absolute reciprocity and interpretation of knowledge with the Father. "No one," He says, "knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son . . ." varied in Luke so as to read: "No one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son . . ." as if the being of the Son were so immense that only God could know it thoroughly; and the knowledge of the Son was so unlimited that He could know God to perfection. The peculiarly pregnant employment here of the terms "Son" and "Father" over against one another is explained to us in the other utterance (Matthew 28:19). It is the resurrected Lord’s commission to His disciples. Claiming for Himself all authority in heaven and on earth—which implies the possession of omnipotence—and promising to be with His followers ‘alway, even to the end of the world’— which adds the implications of omnipresence and omniscience—He commands them to baptize their converts ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.’ The precise form of the formula must be carefully observed. It does not read: ‘In the names’ (plural)—as if there were three beings enumerated, each with its distinguishing name. Nor yet: ‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,’ as if there were one person, going by a threefold name. It reads: ‘In the name [singular] of the Father, and of the [article repeated] Son, and of the [article repeated] Holy Ghost,’ carefully distinguishing three persons, though uniting them all under one name. The name of God was to the Jews Jehovah, and to name the name of Jehovah upon them was to make them His. What Jesus did in this great injunction was to command His followers to name the name of God upon their converts, and to announce the name of God which is to be named on their converts in the threefold enumeration of "the Father" and "the Son" and "the Holy Ghost." As it is unquestionable that He intended Himself by "the Son," He here places Himself by the side of the Father and the Spirit, as together with them constituting the one God. It is, of course, the Trinity which He is describing; and that is as much as to say that He announces Himself as one of the persons of the Trinity. This is what Jesus, as reported by the Synoptics, understood Himself to be. In announcing Himself to be God, however, Jesus does not deny that He is man also. If all His speech of Himself rests on His consciousness of a Divine nature, no less does all His speech manifest His consciousness of a human nature. He easily identifies Himself with men (Matthew 4:4; Luke 4:4), and receives without protest the imputation of humanity (Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:34). He speaks familiarly of His body (Matthew 26:12, Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:8
These manifestations of a human and Divine consciousness simply stand side by side in the records of Our Lord’s self-expression. Neither is suppressed or even qualified by the other. If we attend only to the one class we might suppose Him to proclaim Himself wholly Divine; if only to the other we might equally easily imagine Him to be representing Himself as wholly human. With both together before us we perceive Him alternately speaking out of a Divine and out of a human consciousness; manifesting Himself as all that God is and as all that man is; yet with the most marked unity of consciousness. He, the one Jesus Christ, was to His own apprehension true God and complete man in a unitary personal life.