03.13. CHAPTER XIII. THE ORIGINALITY OF CHRIST'S . . .
CHAPTER XIII. THE ORIGINALITY OF CHRIST’s TEACHING.
”Never man spake like this man." John 7:46.
ORIGINALITY conspicuously marked Christ’s teaching: it was novel, even in its repetition or resurrection of old truths; as he himself said, they were "new and old," at the same time: old, because all truth is eternal; new, because the form, dress, illustrations and applications of truth were exactly suited to existing needs. A piece of spar, held in your hand, seems dull and opaque; but if you turn it till the light strikes it, at a certain angle, it shews lustre, beautiful and brilliant colors. This divine teacher took even the sterner and more forbidding attributes of God and turned them around, that the light might so strike them as to shew the glory and beauty. Who has not been repelled by the prevailing notions of divine wrath, common to all human religions! Anger in God was only an ugly human passion, in a gigantic growth, and called by divine names. It meant revenge, backed by the power that none can resist, and armed with all the tortures that infinite wisdom can devise - it meant malice and malignity and hate - dwelling in the bosom of the deity. Men could understand divine wrath only by their experience of human wrath, which is vindictive and cruel. Christ turned the dark attribute around, till it exhibited its glory, its lovely aspect. God’s anger was seen to be, not a passion, but a principle - the eternal hatred of wrong, which corresponds with the eternal love of right, and which is only another aspect of love. The magnetic needle swings on its delicate axis: it attracts at one end; it repels at the other: attracts at one end because it repels at the other. In the light of Christ’s teaching, we see in the one attribute, Benevolence, a divine magnet, with two poles - love of holiness, hate of evil - both equally essential to its perfection; and so we learn to love God because He hates sin. His wrath is not an impetuous and changeable passion but an eternal and unchangeable principle, not malevolent but benevolent, not so much destructive as constructive, not retaliative but retributive, not vindictive but vindicative. It is one of the two equal pillars, on which rests the very arch of the divine government - a necessity to the very law and rule of God. Here is wrath, perfectly consistent with love; that hates not the soul, but the sin, and hates the sin for the soul’s sake. "Amat err antes, odit err ores." God’s wrath is but the certainty of ruin to the evil doer, who prostrates himself across God’s track. Shall He move aside from the straight path of truth and right to spare the willfully wicked? This would make God become a transgressor for the sake of saving the transgressor.
Jesus taught us that wrath in God is the unchangeable perfection of holiness; and that holiness is love to the holy and wrath to the guilty. The same fire that warms and cheers, that refines and purifies, also burns and blasts, tortures and consumes; it all depends on our relation to the fire, whether it be our friend or our foe. We ourselves, by our sin, create the repulsion, with which we often find fault in God. In Retsch’s illustrations of Goethe’s Faust, there is one plate, where angels are seen dropping roses down upon the demons who are contending for the soul of Faust. But every rose falls like molten metal, burning and blistering wherever it touches. God rains roses down, but our sinful hearts, meeting divine love with hate, and grace with stubborn, willful disobedience, turn love into wrath; and what dropped from His hand, a flower beautiful and fragrant, becomes, when it touches the ungrateful and unloving soul, a live coal.
All purely human notions of God are necessarily imperfect, and bear the stamp of their origin. What is beyond our experience we can conceive only in accordance with our experience, i.e., our notions must be qualified and limited by what we have seen and known. If we think of eternity, it is only time indefinitely prolonged. If we try to imagine pure spirit, we give it involuntarily a bodily shape, form and features. We build our heaven out of earthly pleasures and elements. God himself reminds us of our infirmity, in framing conceptions of Him: "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself." Our highest idea of God, independent of the help of the Bible, would be simply man on a grand scale.
If Christ was a teacher come from God, there will be in his portrait of God, features not at all human. If he be, himself, God, and speak as one who knows what Godhood is, though he may have to use imperfect human terms, he will impart superhuman ideas of God. And is it not so? When we think of eternity we do not drop the idea of succession, which belongs to time - we talk of a present, a past, a future. But Christ teaches that God’s eternal existence has no past nor future. "Before Abraham was, I am." No man would talk in that way; man would say, before Abraham was, I was; but while man is, was and shall be, God can only say, "I am;" for all the past and future are present to Him.
Christ has introduced both new words and new ideas among men. "Humanity is a word you look for in vain in Plato and Aristotle: the idea of mankind as one family, as the children of one God, is an idea of Christian growth; and the science of mankind and of the languages of mankind without Christianity would never have sprung into existence." In the Greek, there is a word which means humility: (ταπεινοφροσυνην) but this humility meant, with rare exceptions, meanness of spirit, the cringing, fawning spirit of the conscious slave. Christian humility is a virtue, a noble condescension, which, in its very lowliness is lofty.* *Trench on Words, 45, 46
What new conceptions Christ gave us of the dignity and worth of the human soul! Man has speculated upon the relation of mind to matter, and could arrive at no certainty. The body might be like a harp, and the thoughts and feelings, sensations and perceptions, like the harmony of the harp. But how came the harmony? Is the harp like the aeolian, that you set in your window, for the chance breeze to fan into music, or is there, aside from the instrument and the vibration of its chords, a master hand that sweeps the strings! Christ shewed men the human spirit, the true self, made in God’s image; as Joseph Cook says, beside the harp and the harmony, the harper, presiding at the harp and making the harmony. And he taught us that the harmony may be no longer heard and the harp itself be shattered, and yet the harper survive, exchanging the earthly harp for the heavenly, and with fingers trained to divine skill, evoking such melodies and harmonies as earth never hears or knows!
Christ Jesus taught us a new philosophy of sorrow and suffering. The old pagan idea, which largely permeated and penetrated the Hebrew people, was that all suffering is the penalty of sin, and a judgment of God. Hence when any calamity came upon a man, a family, a nation, something must be done to appease the anger of a revengeful deity. Offerings were brought to the temple to buy God’s favor, victims poured out blood in rivers to make reconciliation for sin; the first born of the body was sacrificed to please and placate the awful chastiser and avenger. Of course there is much suffering that is penal or punitive or retributive; the judgment of God upon evil doing, and the sign of His providential and moral government in the world. Terrible as these judgments are, they awaken profound gratitude: for by them wickedness is both rebuked and checked; and "the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness." What a fearful abode would this world be, if God had withdrawn from its active control; and left it to the unaided struggle between right and wrong, and to the might of a simply human arm! Thankful, indeed, ought we to be for God in history, although his presence on the throne be, at times, revealed in flames of fire such as consumed Sodom, or floods of water such as overwhelmed the old world, or signal wars such as destroyed Jerusalem, or such plagues and pestilences as the black death that swept millions from the earth.
There is much suffering that is not judicial retribution but organic penalty; it comes by a natural law of cause and consequence: as for example, the bodily pains that follow neglect or violation of laws of health, or the pangs of remorse that follow crime. But while this divine Teacher did not deny both these offices of suffering, he taught men a higher use of sorrow, viz., to discipline and develop the soul. "Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit he purgeth it that it may bring forth more fruit."* The husbandman comes with his knife to cut off dead branches and burn them - here is retributive judgment: he comes also to prune even the living and fruitful branches, that they may bear more fruit: surely that is not retributive suffering, it is rather corrective, educative, to purify, beautify, glorify.
*John 15:2. Our views of the power and office of sorrow are very partial and imperfect. Jesus teaches that suffering is not always a penalty, either judicial or organic: it is designed to purge away our faults and follies, perfect our character and enlarge our capacity for service. This original and glorious conception of the discipline of sorrow, is in various forms elaborated and illustrated in the New Testament. God has an "inheritance in the Saints," and He sets a high value upon it: and in order to complete and perfect that inheritance He subjects his saints to sorrow and suffering, as a proprietor plows up his land and pulls down his homestead that barrenness may give place to fertility, verdure and flowers, and the old house be reconstructed in a new and more beautiful form: he is simply improving his inheritance!
Captain Lott used to say that a head-wind, which seems to hinder, helps the progress of the ocean steamer; it "makes the furnaces draw." What a solace would God’s sorrowing saints find in their very trials, could they but see in them the means of speeding their spiritual progress!
Some virtues and graces depend on sorrow for their very life and growth. Patience is a flower that blooms only at night, and fully only at midnight; it implies something to be patient about something borne. The heavenly mind is acquired only by that process that refines away the worldly mind. We must be weaned from the temporal and perishable; the wine must be poured from vessel to vessel: otherwise it will settle on the lees, and take their taste. The assurance of hope comes only after hope’s anchor, tested by the gale, has held us fast and firm to the rocks of promise. And how shall we get capacity to comfort others until we have ourselves been comforted of God?
What trials the filthy rags undergo before they emerge in the pure, white paper! Torn to pieces, ground to pulp, bleached with chlorine and lime and alum, washed again and again till the levigated stuff is white as flakes of snow, shaken to and fro till fibre crosses fibre and gives firmness to the fabric, ironed by hot cylinders till made smooth and even; how like the divine discipline by which our filth is cleansed; how like the tribulation out of which the host come up whose robes are washed white in the blood of the Lamb!
How much the beauty of the pottery depends on furnace-fires! Even to the dull, dead colors, the heat gives character and quality; the very paint must be fused at white heat, and melt into the substance of the vase or vessel. Even then the pottery must not cool too quickly, and the bloodstone must burnish and polish the decorated surface till it is brilliant and radiant!
Christ taught Paul to "glory in tribulation." because "it works patience, and patience experience." And what is experience but the mark of the divine assayer of the precious metal, who, when he sees that all alloy is released and his own face is reflected in the purified gold, stamps it "Approved?" Yet how many of God’s suffering saints cry, not like Paul, "All things work together for good," but like Jacob, "All things are against me," or, like Rachael, weep for their loved ones and "refuse to be comforted because they are not." Under Christ’s tuition, sorrowing saints learn to rejoice in affliction, like the blind girl who thanked God for blinding the outer eye, that He might put telescopes to the eye of the soul, and bring celestial glories near. The "diamond" of the first water is recognized by retaining its brilliancy under water where other precious stones lose their lustre. And our Lord teaches that a part of the office of affliction is to show how the radiance of the true disciple is undimmed beneath the deep waters of sorrow. Passing through the valley of tears, he makes it a valley of springs and streams. The greatest of poets only echoed the teaching of Christ when he wrote:
"Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head." In the shipwreck of worldly joy, the disciple casts out the four anchors of faith and hope and love and patience, and, swinging from them, waits and wishes for the day! Is sorrow, then, the furnace-fire, The fuller’s soap, the vale of tears?
It still fulfils my deep desire God’s image in my soul appears!
Christ both taught and lived a new law of self-sacrifice. And, to this day, the unselfish use of a love that accepts even death for the sake of the lost is, to all unrenewed souls, a mystery. Satan said of Job that he did not serve God for naught, and declared that a man will give all that he hath for his life. But Job’s life proved that to be a lie; he was moved by a love of holiness that no man can understand if it does not move him also! The men and women who, from Christian lands, go to China to convert pagans who toil and suffer, dare poverty and defy death, without any motive of self-interest are to the most intelligent Chinese simply a marvel. "The Mandarins may comprehend Confucius, but not Christ."
There is a story of a poor sot, rejected by the maiden whom he loved, because he was a slave to drink. She one day saw him lying asleep in the gutter, and, averting her tearful eyes from the repulsive sight, dropped her white handkerchief over his bloated face, to hide his shame. He woke, drew the handkerchief away from his face, and saw her name wrought in its fabric. He rose from the heavy sleep, resolved yet to be worthy of a love that stooped so low in pity for his sin. And many a lost sinner has been first won to God by the thought of a divine love, so unlike the noblest human affection that it is bestowed most lavishly upon the least worthy. Christ taught this new law of love: "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you." Love was not new, but such love was. It had been said by them of old time, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy." The love of men is prone to be selfish and exclusive. Thales, best and wisest of the Greeks, thanked God that he was "born a man, and not a brute" - "a Greek, and not a barbarian." Outside of Greece all were brutes and barbarians, to whom he owed no debt of love. Demosthenes’ noble motto was, "Not father or mother, but dear native land." But this rose no higher than patriotism. Even the Jews, trained under a divine faith, had "no dealings with the Samaritans" - not so much as to show a lost traveler his way, or give a drink to the thirsty. Christ first taught mankind a true philanthropy - the love of man, as man, wherever found. Until Christ came, this grand truth of the universal brotherhood of man was even more obscured and perverted than the universal Fatherhood of God. Schiller, and even Wordsworth, have suggested a contrast between the Pagan and the Christian faith, and hinted that, however divinity might be on the side of the religion of Jesus, the humanity rather appeared on the side of the old gods of Greece. We confess surprise at such a disparaging and unjust comparison. Christ and Christianity brought not only a new theology, but a new philanthropy. And "after that the kindness and philanthropy of God our Savior toward man appeared,"* etc., for the first time, the world was taught to see in every human being a brother, and, as such, to love him. Christ adopted the old maxim, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor," but gave that word, neighbor, a new and grand meaning. "Who is my neighbor?" Let the parable of the Good Samaritan answer. Not he who lives next door, my fellow-citizen and fellow-countryman, but whosoever is made of one blood with me, who shares my humanity, and, most of all, who, by poverty, misery, want or woe, is most in need of my gentle, generous offices. If, by chance, I pass that way, and even my enemy lies naked and wounded across my path, I am to go to him and bind up his wounds, put at his service my precious healing-oil and strengthening wine, and walk that he may ride, caring for him, and providing for his wants. Did Greece or Rome, even in their golden ages, under Pericles and Augustus, ever teach such doctrine, or exemplify such practice? See the old worn-out slave, and even the aged, helpless parent, turned out to die of starvation and neglect! See the captives taken in war glutting the savage thirst of the lion and leopard in the arena! Go through these two grandest empires of the ancient world, and look in vain for an asylum or hospital for the deformed, the diseased or the dying! And yet we are told that the pagan religions outshine the religion of Jesus in their teaching or practice of humanity and philanthropy! Christ has made all men neighbors, by the delicate and ethereal bond of an unselfish sympathy; his disinterested benevolence is like a telegraph-wire whose starting-point and battery were at Calvary, in the throbbing heart of Him who died with the unselfish prayer for his enemies, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." That bond, reaching from the cross and round the world, establishes between all members of the human family a sym pathetic communication, and makes all men neighbors. The heart of Christendom feels the pulse of the heart of Pagandom, and beats in responsive sympathy. Famine pinches the human brotherhood in India. China and Persia, and ten thousand miles away are felt the sympathetic gnawings of hunger; and out through the arteries of commerce the Christian heart pulses its life-blood. Ships hoist their sails, and trains blow their whistles, to bear food to perishing brethren! Knowing their spiritual famine, even while they do not fully realize it, we send to them the bread of life. Our missionaries are met with coldness and even persecution, die of fever, hunger, exposure, violence; and yet to the unthankful and the evil they continue to go, moved by a love like the perfect love, until in fifty years more than six hundred saintly men and women fall asleep in Jesus, and find a grave in India alone! Can such love as that be found, such humanity, such philanthropy, among the ancient pagans? Did Greece or Rome ever send a missionary to the outside barbarians? And yet London alone encircles the globe with her missionary bands! They cross the Sahara, and pierce the Dark Continent; they dare the Arctic snows and bergs; they face the tigers in the jungles of India, and the cannibals of the southern seas. From the equator to the pole, and from sunrise to sunset, the missionaries London alone has sent out have borne and planted the cross, as a support for this telegraphic circuit of love which binds all men in one brotherhood. And while London is doing all this abroad, she builds within her own borders more than one hundred hospitals, asylums and houses of shelter for the victims of poverty, deformity, disease and misfortune!
O Schiller, O Wordsworth! Poets you may be, but you are scarcely philosophers if you cannot see that Christ taught men a new commandment, and set them a new example, of love; a true philanthropy, unselfish, catholic, impartial; not limited by family circle, nor wider circle of state or church. Here is a benevolence of which the most ample almsgiving is but one expression; a benevolence which means not an act or a feeling, but a spirit and law of life; that sends out angels of mercy on divinest errands to the ends of the earth; not to gather gold or gems to feed the greed of gain; not to learn facts for history or science, or frame theories for philosophy; not to find delicacies and dainties for the palate; but to lift mankind to a higher level for this world and the next; to break down the middle wall of partition between man and man, till, by the simple force of love, no barrier be left, though it had been high as mountains or broad as seas; till there should be neither "Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, male or female, but all one in Christ Jesus." This love teaches us to find our "neighbor" not only in him who is most remote, but even in our enemy. Even the publicans and pagans love their friends, but we are taught to love those who hate us; to love what is unattractive and even repulsive, for the sake of making lovable, because love ennobles and elevates, blesses and saves!