03.12. CHAPTER XII. CHRIST THE TEACHER FROM GOD
CHAPTER XII.
CHRIST THE TEACHER FROM GOD.
"Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher, come from God." John 3:2
John calls Jesus, the "Word of God." What is a word? It is the invisible thought taking form: Wordsworth says, "Language is the incarnation of thought." Spoken words are sounds, articulate and significant: sounds in which there is soul. Written words are visible signs of intelligence and intellect; thought has determined their exact form, order, relation.
God is represented as pure Spirit, and cannot be known by sense. He would communicate with man, and so puts his thought and love in a visible form in Christ, who is therefore beautifully called the living ’Word of God.’ As God does everything perfectly, we are justified in looking for such an expression of His mind and heart in his incarnate Son as shall excel all other revelations of himself. In Christ, as the Word of God, we may properly expect to find the clear and unmistakable stamp of the divine mind. In his teaching there must be a divine authority, majesty, originality, spirituality, vitality, essential worth and practical power, such as no merely human teaching could display. Let us candidly apply the test.
Even the wisest and best of human teachers have dealt largely in such words as "if "and "perhaps;" have spoken with doubt and hesitation on great moral questions, reasoning that "it might be so," or, sometimes with deeper conviction, "it must be." But Christ, with an authority that in a mere man would be audacity, says, with unfaltering tongue, on the most perplexing questions, "It is so!" Never once does He hesitate in unfolding the mystery of the divine being, the present life, the future state. To Nicodemus he calmly but firmly declares the necessity of the new birth; of a character and a life built from the foundation on godly principles, and He does not even stop to answer the question, "How can these things be?" To the woman at the well, He speaks of the spirituality of God, and that all- pervading Presence which makes every spot a place where the soul of man may come near to Him. To the unbelieving Jews He affirms His equality and identity with God the Father, and His power to raise the dead and pronounce that judgment on human character and destiny, from which there is no appeal. He dares to challenge men to "search the Scriptures," and find them, from Moses to Malachi, witnessing to Him; affirms that, in whatever disguise of law, prophecy or psalm, rite, ceremony or historic event, the careful reader may still see His features clearly revealed. And yet He was but thirty years old, and the Scriptures were fifteen hundred! He not only said "Moses wrote of me," but "your father Abraham saw my day, and was glad;" and when the astounded Jews replied, "Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?" He, with the calmness of divine certainty, said, "Verily, verily I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am!" Mark the exact words not "I was," but "I am;" for the Eternal One knows no tenses; past and future are present to Him who is both without beginning and without end. At the sepulchre of Lazarus He said, "I am the resurrection and the life;" and when He says, "Lazarus, come forth," it is as when, out of the sepulchre of eternal night, God bade light come forth! Even before Pilate and Herod there is the same commanding bearing, yet it is not the vanity of conceit; it is the sublimity of conscious omnipotence voluntarily held in suspense. "My kingdom is not of this world;" "Thou couldst have no power at all against me if it were not given thee from above;" "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?" "Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven!" Nay, even amid the anguish and agony of dying, He turns to the penitent thief, and with still unfaltering tongue himself no longer having even a garment to cover His person - promises him the inheritance of eternal bliss: "Verily, I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise."
I. Authority appears to have been the first impression made, if not the last impression left, by Christ’s teaching. Matthew completes his report of that "Sermon on the Mount," which inaugurates Christ’s public ministry, by adding these significant words: "When Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at His doctrine [i.e., teaching]; for He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes." The scribes were the transcribers of the law; the pen in their hands was the printing-press of those days for the multiplication of copies of the blessed Word. Their necessary familiarity with the letter of the law - "Scriptures," literally so called - gave them a certain right to teach, but not with authority. They referred their hearers to the law; their language was, "Thus saith the law." But Christ’s habitual language was, "I say unto you." He taught as a teacher having authority, original, ultimate, underived; as one who had himself made and could modify the law. He expounded the Scriptures not as a commentator, but as the author. Hear his sermon on the mount! With what calm, firm hand he lifts from the law of God the huge mass of human tradition and interpretation which had covered and hidden it, as God would, by an earthquake, upheave some buried monument, or with one breath, as by a tornado, brush away from it the sands of centuries!
Lord Northwick brought from Italy a fine picture of St. Gregory, by Annibale Carraci. To secure its safe delivery, he hired a mere dauber to paint over it, in body color, an imitation of some inferior artist. On exposing the canvas, his friends saw nothing but a rude and repulsive daub; but he took a sponge, and, as washed the colors from the surface, the masterpiece was gradually revealed to enraptured eyes. Somewhat so, carnalism and literalism had during centuries glossed over the holy Word, till what scribes and Pharisees taught men to revere as God’s law was largely the traditions and commandments of men. And, with the calmness of divine authority, Jesus boldly wipes away these glosses of false comment and perversion, and makes the law to be seen once more in its true spirit and intent." Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time" - that is the human daub; "but I say unto you" - that is the divine original! This authority lifts Christ above all other teachers. Even the great Greek philosophers disclaimed all original right to teach. When Leon, charmed with the silver tongue of Pythagoras, asked him wherein lay his highest excellence, the great teacher could only reply, "I am in nothing a master, but only φιλοσοφος" - a lover of wisdom; and hence came the word "philosopher." An old legend tells how there came to be seven sages in Greece. The priestess of Apollo had awarded a golden tripod to the wisest of the Greeks. It was sent to Bias, who said, "Thales is wiser;" and so it was sent to Thales, and passed through the hands of the seven, each claiming that the other was wiser than he, till, simply because no master could be found to claim it, it was sent back to Apollo’s temple. God’s golden tripod waited four thousand years for one to claim and hold it; none of the wisest ever dared to assume the right to teach with underived authority, until He came "who was found worthy to open the Book" of God and "loose the seven seals."
If human teachers wield influence, their teaching must commend itself and command attention; if it has not the authority of truth, they can add to it no authority. Even prophets could only declare, "Thus saith the Lord." But Christ spake as never man spake - "I am the truth."
Such authority could not exist without independence. The sneer of enemies expressed the fact: "Master, thou teachest the way of God in truth; neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men." No bait of applause could turn Him aside, nor pelting hail of human hate drive Him into a politic silence. Burke said to the electors of Bristol: "I conformed to the instructions of nature and truth. I maintained your interests against your convictions!" But even such fidelity was but a feeble reflection of that absolute candor that made the name of Jesus the synonym of loyalty to right and truth. To the reluctant and the willing ear alike, whether met by fervent love or by fierce hate, He, with unfaltering tongue, told the truth. With what audacious positiveness He grasps the grandest themes, which even the foremost of philosophers have touched but hesitatingly and tremblingly. Plato thought the soul must be immortal, but he spoke not as one who knew. Cicero said, "There is, I know not how, in the minds of men a certain presage, as it were, of a future existence; and this takes deepest root and is most discoverable in the greatest geniuses and most exalted souls." This was as far as mere human teaching ever got. But not so speaks the Bible. Job, 1500 B. C., could say, "I know that my Redeemer liveth;" Paul could say, "We know that if our earth house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Life and immortality were brought to light by Him who, on the most delicate, difficult and perplexing questions, spake with authority, and who gathered up in one bold affirmation the substance of all Bible-teaching on the immortality of the soul: "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." Such boldness and calmness of utterance, on the most difficult and doubtful questions, could mark but one of two orders of mind either a mind seized with an insane fanaticism, or a mind inspired by the certainties of conscious knowledge. Christ was certainly neither a fool nor a fanatic. There are about Him the proportions of a giant, and yet the perfection of symmetry, and the firm and fearless tread of conscious power!
Truly, "never man spake like this man!" An impostor he could not be; for whence came such a life? It is, on the loftiest scale, pure, noble, heroic! the one peak that soars to the stars and defies the approach even of an impure atmosphere! A fanatic or enthusiast he could not be; for his wisdom, self-poise, intellectual and moral perfection, are inconsistent with a lack of balance! The firmness of his tread, the weight of his words, the justness of his decisions, the clearness of his judgment, the profoundness of his ethics, the faultless beauty of his life, leave no room for doubt that he could neither deceive nor be deceived.
II. Sublimity. Christ can be accounted for as a teacher on no merely human theory. The Jews had scores of intelligent teachers, such as the scribes, rabbi, doctors of the law, Pharisees, learned members of the Sanhedrim; but none of them taught like Christ. To prevent errors in copying the Scriptures, or intentional additions and corruptions in the sacred text, the Masorites counted and recorded the words and letters, nay, even the points and accents, and noted literally every jot and tittle. So minute was the accuracy insured, that the verses of each book and of each section were numbered and recorded. The interpretations of scripture, and the rules and maxims of these teachers, had become similarly minute and trivial. They worshiped the letter and forgot the spirit; they taught a hollow, shallow, heartless, lifeless creed, cumbered with cerements of technical trifles and empty forms. Nothing is more surprising than the puerile absurdities over which the various schools of rabbi quarreled. Think of writing learned treatises on this question: "If a man should be born with two heads, on which forehead must he wear the phylactery?" The school of Shammai taught that an egg laid on a festival day could be eaten, while the school of Hillel remonstrated against such a breach of propriety; and the Pharisees had long and learned controversies over such unimportant questions as, whether a stream, made by pouring water from a clean into an unclean vessel, is itself technically clean or unclean, and whether touching the holy Scriptures could make the hands unclean, in the Levitical sense. We need not marvel, therefore, at the petty exclusiveness which forbade a Jew to shew an uncircumcised traveler his lost way, or point him to a spring where he might quench his thirst; nor at the hair-splitting nicety which discriminated between swearing by the temple, and by the gold of the temple - the altar, and the gift upon it. The foremost religious teachers of that day descended to what was puerile and trivial. Believing the prophetic spirit withdrawn, they tried to make up for its absence by a system of petty rules, tithing herbs and washing cups, and for getting justice and love and purity of heart. In place of a morality, based on love of the right, they devised the most "frivolous casuistry ever known," loaded men’s memories and consciences with countless rules so trifling that they rival the paltry regulations of the Koran; and then left the grandest duties to relax their hold on the human heart, by putting these trifles in their place. In what school did Christ learn to teach on a scale of such grandeur, majesty, dignity and authority? Who revealed to this obscure Nazarene who died at thirty-three, who had no scholastic training, and at whose ignorance of letters his enemies laughed who taught him to insist upon great vital truths and grand first principles, that lifted him infinitely above the superficial trifles, over which the whole Jewish church wrangled?
Christ, as a teacher, is a marvel. The whole Hebrew church was corrupted by the leaven of Pharisaic Ritualism and Sadducean Rationalism: the blind were leading the blind, and all alike falling into the ditch. Out of a village, so mean and low that to hail from it was a reproach, there comes this young man, trained neither in Greek schools as at Tarsus, nor in Hebrew schools as at the feet of Gamaliel; He comes forth from a carpenter’s shop, where, like all other well-trained Hebrew youth, he had learned his father’s trade, and his first public utterance is the most original and revolutionary address on practical morals which the world ever heard. It overturns the whole existing system of both Pagan and Hebrew ethics and religion. It plants a huge lever underneath formalism, ritualism, rationalism, hypocrisy, immorality, insincerity; the aristocracy of blood, birth, wealth; all mere outside propriety and false distinctions of society, and announces that all are to be demolished - and if you ask where he is to rest his lever, where to find his που στω - you see that he already has his fulcrum in the instincts of the human conscience, for wherever, then or now, might may lie, right is on his side, and must triumph.
We are spell-bound before the magnitude and magnificence of his moral teaching, as we stand in awe before Mt. Blanc, pillaring the skies upon its white brow; yet we are as much amazed by the simplicity as by the sublimity of his teaching, and know not which seems most divine.
Such wisdom the world waited four thousand years to hear; yet there is not a sign of pedantry. It requires no great learning to take his meaning, no trained mind or memory to classify and retain his precepts, no subtle logic to follow his argument. There is no studied method, no tedious analysis, no wearisome division and sub-division. There is no aim at rhetoric: the thought, not the word, absorbs him; yet the word just fits the thought. His illustrations suggest no great knowledge of history, philosophy, science - they are simply windows to let in light, and, that they may let in the more light, are not cumbered with elaborate framework, nor dimmed, as with stained glass. You do not see the window, but only find yourself in the light. His language is the language of the common folk, and there is not a taint of self-seeking in it all. Yet all the love and the wisdom of the ages have never been the golden setting to such a jewel as that simple discourse enshrines. As Augustine says: "His life is lightning; his words are thunder!" To say that Christ’s teaching was wise is to speak tamely: in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.* How wide the range and scope of his teaching! What revelations of divine love and goodness! how broad his basis of morals! how profound and penetrating his insight into human conduct and character. Samuel Johnson wrote as the epitaph of Oliver Goldsmith: "He left nothing that he did not touch, and touched nothing that he did not adorn!" But whatever Jesus touched he left gilded with glory, transfigured! And yet he adapted himself to the lowest and lowliest of his hearers; and, with the highest skill, gave his teaching the form best fitted to the place, time, object, occasion and audience. Yet though he condescended, he never descended; never forgot his lofty character, his heavenly themes - instead of taking a lower level, He lifted his hearers to a higher one.
*Colossians 2:3 Who could as lawfully hold God’s golden tripod, as he who spanned the breadth, pierced the height, sounded the depth of infinite truth? While human teachers taught forms, he, the spirit; they, ceremonies, he, affections; they, conduct, he, character; they, details, he, duties; they, petty practices, he, grand principles! While they would frame a code so complete that the smallest matter should have its rule, as though man were a machine and must have an iron track to run on - He would fire the soul with that enthusiasm for God and goodness which makes duty delight, and service to God and man, the prompting of Love. And so the spirituality of Christ’s teaching constitutes its sublimity. It lays stress first of all on what is within! not outward act, but inward motive. Down into not only the deep things of God but the deep things of man, his teaching went, into the secret soul where character is born and cradled; beyond the impure act, to the look, and the lust beneath the blow to the hate - beneath the word profane to the irreverent heart, beyond the act of revenge to the vindictive feeling. With the calm confidence of the eagle, whose wings tire not with the longest, loftiest flight, and whose eye dares, undazzled, the noon-day sun, Christ spake of the grandest themes, dissected the very character of God, denied errors that had the authority of antiquity, and revealed truths hitherto wholly unknown.
Christ so magnified and glorified the Scriptures, so interpreted and unfolded their deep meaning, that his evolution of new principles compelled a revolution both in ideas and practices. Their righteousness must exceed even that of the acknowledged leaders of the people, if they would enter into his kingdom, for no correctness of outward life could compensate for the lack of inward love to God and man. Back of the white front of the Pharisee’s life he shewed the dead men’s bones of a lifeless creed, and the uncleanness of a heart full of corruption. Beneath the graceful mound of grass and flowers, the outward beauty of alms and prayers, he shewed the grave where love lies buried, and righteousness is in decay. As the Lord of temple courts overthrew the tables of money changers, so he overturned the common notions of morals and piety, and brought men back to right laws of holy living: while as a faithful executor of the law he declares that to the last, least jot and tittle it shall be fulfilled, like a law-maker he assumes the right to modify and repeal the law itself, wherever, as with the ceremonial code, its object was temporary.
"Where the word of a King is, there," said Solomon, "is power!"* Here was the power of a King’s Word: and it called the spirit of God back into the dead forms of the law, and then called the reanimated law from its sepulchre as Lazarus from the dead! And we can only remember his own majestic words, as he was about to ascend to heaven: "All power (εξουσια) is given unto me in heaven and on earth!"
Ecclesiastes 8:4. Matthew 28:18.
Judged even by a literary standard, where can such teaching elsewhere be found? such parable and poem, such doctrine and discourse, such philosophy and theology, such simplicity and sublimity? Here is the teaching both of the idea and the ideal, precept and practice. He tells men how to live, and then he, by living, shows them how to live. No such ideal was ever imagined, no such heroism ever before became historic; in words and works alike no blemish is seen, no beauty is lacking. The sublimity of Christ’s teachings has overawed even those who dispute his divinity. As we look on the soaring summit of Chimborazo, and feel no emotion of sublimity, as to study his teaching without an impression of the moral sublime. Christ, in any aspect of his character, recalls Goldsmith’s famous lines:
"As some tall cliff, that lifts its awful form, Swells from the vale and midway leaves the storm, Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head."
III. Flexibility is another marked peculiarity in the teaching of Christ its ready adaptation to every new phase of character or need of society. Systems of rules for conduct have often been rigid. Christ saw that conduct, even when conformed to the right, is not always exactly the same. Human relations and conditions change, and so must human laws and human life; but principles never change; and hence, if Christ planted the great germ of holy principles in men, amid all changes of conditions and relations these unchangeable principles would beget right practices. In this, Christ’s teaching was wholly unique and peculiar. The age in which he lived was marked and marred by fearful forms of social sins and crimes; the whole body politic scarred by old wounds or festering leprosy. Polygamy, infanticide, legalized prostitution, capricious divorce, bloody and brutal games, death and punishment by torture, unjust and cruel wars, caste, and slavery; these are some of the awful vices, that existed more or less distinctly as social usages during Christ’s public life and ministry. Yet only one of them all does he name and directly rebuke and denounce. Did the great Teacher approve these immoralities and criminalities? The whole drift of his teaching, with the momentum of a moving glacier was grinding and ploughing the very structure of society into new form; but Christ, instead of attacking even gigantic wrongs, sought to put beneath the whole fabric of society, one all conquering, controlling love of law and law of love. He knew that right principle to be the true lever of Archimedes, that could and would move the world; and this inflexible devotion to right and righteousness is yet strangely flexible, accommodating itself to every new condition of society.
God uses a strange substance to confine and restrain the ocean’s flood. It is sand, yet sand is peculiarly characterized by mobility: the mighty wave that dashes against and pulverizes the rock-cliff, moves the sand before it and as it recedes washes it back to its place; and so the sea-beach, always changing, never changes: that soft, mobile sand that yields to your footstep, and that a ripple moves, banks in and bounds the sea.* And so the holy principles with which Christ surrounds and restrains the individual and society, accommodate themselves to all fluctuations of social condition, yet eternally abide and imperatively say: "thus far, and no farther!"
IV. Vitality. Christ’s teaching had life-giving power; it was vital and vitalizing. It humbled the heart, wrought deep desires after God and godliness, and transformed and transfigured human lives. And all other teaching is only preparatory to his - even the law is our schoolmaster to lead us to Christ: its precepts are but the sign board at the crossway of duty and inclination, truth and error, with the index finger pointing to him in whom all the glories of prophecy and history center and meet.
We are told of men "whose words shook the world;" and we think of that humble monk who, in the opening of the sixteenth century, came from convent gates at Erfurth, and on the door of All-Saints Church nailed up his theses - at the blow and echo of whose hammer the whole fabric of the Papacy shook and trembled. But what power in the words of Christ! Here is eloquence indeed. When men heard the silver-tongued Cicero they said, "How beautiful his speech!" When men heard Demosthenes they said, "Let us go and fight Philip!" When that great orator was asked what are the three requisites of power in the orator, he answered, not action, but κινησις - that which moves people to act; that which gives motion and stirs emotion. Here we have the divine κινησις - the power to move and mould. Men heard Christ, and they not only said "never man spake like this man," but they said, like Joshua, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord," or, like Thomas, the doubter, "My Lord and my God!"
Well might Mary Magdalene cry, with the mingled rapture of joy and tears, "Rabboni!" Rab was a Hebrew title, meaning a great one, and applied in Jewish schools to acknowledged teachers and masters. Rabbi is more emphatic, "my master," and marks a higher dignity the comparative degree. But "Rabboni" was the superlative, "My great Master," most honorable of all, and applied to but seven persons, all of whom were pre-eminent in the rabbinical schools. In that word, "Rabboni," Mary surrendered her very self to the authority and supremacy of her risen Lord. And blessed are they who, prostrate at his feet, join her in adoring, loving self-surrender. To accept Christ as a divine teacher, as the incarnate Word of God, solves the mystery of his person and his teaching. Indeed, the person cannot be separated from the teaching. Character and utterance must correspond. Theremin is right; "eloquence is a virtue; the ultimate power to move and mould men by the wonderful gift of speech, is the power of a soul filled with knowledge, and fired with love of the truth. Those mighty floods of conviction which overwhelm others with similar conviction; those mighty floods of emotion that sweep all obstacles before them and compel persuasion, imply the correspondingly great channel of a great mind and heart. The highest, grandest influence of eloquent speech is the influence of character, felt through speech; the power to convince and persuade is the power of being convinced and persuaded. A tongue that talks divinely must be taught by a heart that throbs divinely. Great things are spoken by great men; great thoughts are born of great minds; great love grows in great hearts; great teaching is the fruit of great natures." And, as Ruskin says, "they cannot be mimicked but by obedience; the breath of them is inspiration, because it is not only vocal but vital, and you can learn to speak as these men spoke only by becoming what these men were."
Christ, the living Word of God, the Divine Teacher, invites all to accept and obey his teaching. He is a tender, fraternal, cherishing teacher, guarding the pupil of his charge as the pupil of his eye. The disciple is won not only by his wisdom, but, infinitely more, by his love. When Plato came to Socrates to be taught wisdom, Socrates had a dream. He thought a pure dove, white as the snow, flew to his bosom and took refuge there, amid the soft, warm folds of his tunic. He thought he watched it from day to day, and saw its feathers grow and its wings develop, until it suddenly expanded its pinions and soared away till lost from sight among the clouds of heaven. And that dove, Socrates said, was Plato, taking refuge in his bosom only to give his own wings time to grow, and then, in the sublime flights of his pure and lofty philosophy, soar out of sight.
Jesus takes his docile pupil, like a timid, trembling dove, to his own bosom, and there, hidden under nurturing and cherishing care, he learns to fly. Blessed, indeed, are they who learn of Him, who in Him find, like a wandering dove, a rest, and who, under His loving discipline, learn to soar and sing, like the lark winging its way toward the sky!
"Jesus, lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly."