© 2002 Bruce Barton
© 2002 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
I was one of those who are called by some: “the unchurched.” As a Urantian, I felt at times this gave me great advantages over many other readers. For one thing, I had almost no religious baggage — I had my own acquired idea of what Jesus was really like. I almost never attended church, and although the family was technically Catholic, I knew almost nothing of the religion. One day, at about the age of nine, I came across an old book in a box in our basement. It was titled: “The Man Nobody Knows … a Discovery of the Real Jesus.” It was written by Bruce Barton, who (I would discover many years later) was a famous advertising man. This book made a great impression on my young mind. Somehow I retained this book over the years. As a Urantian, many years later, I am amazed how close Bruce Barton came in 1924 to describing what I believe was the real Jesus. I hope you enjoy these excerpts.
Larry Mullins
The little boy’s body sat bolt upright in the rough wooden chair, but his mind was very busy. This was his weekly hour of revolt. The kindly lady who could never seem to find her glasses would have been terribly shocked if she had known what was going on inside the little boy’s mind.
“You must love Jesus,” she said every Sunday, “and God.”
The little boy did not say anything. He was afraid to say anything; he was almost afraid that something would happen to him because of the things he thought.
Love God! Who was always picking on people for having a good time, and sending little boys to hell because they couldn’t do better in a world which he had made so hard! Why didn’t God take some one his own size? Love Jesus! The little boy looked up at the picture which hung on the Sundayschool wall. It showed a pale young man with flabby forearms and a sad expression. The young man had red whiskers.
Then the little boy looked across to the other wall. There was Daniel, good old Daniel, standing off the lions. The little boy liked Daniel. He liked David, too, with the trusty sling that landed a stone square on the forehead of Goliath. And Moses, with his rod and his big brass snake. They were winners — those three. He wondered if David could whip Jeffries. Samson could! Say, that would have been a fight!
But Jesus! Jesus was the “Lamb of God.” The little boy did not know what that meant, but it sounded like Mary’s little lamb. Something for girls — sissified. Jesus was also “meek and lowly,” a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He went around for three years telling people not to do things.
Sunday was Jesus’ day; it was wrong to feel comfortable or laugh on Sunday. The little boy was glad when the superintendent thumped the bell and announced: “We will now sing the closing hymn.” One more bad hour was over. For one more week the little boy had got rid of Jesus.
Years went by and the boy grew up and became a business man. He began to wonder about Jesus.
He said to himself: “Only strong magnetic men inspire great enthusiasm and build great organizations. Yet Jesus built the greatest organization of all. It is extraordinary.”
The more sermons the man heard and the more books he read the more mystified he became. One day he decided to wipe his mind clean of books and sermons. He said, “I will read what the men who knew Jesus personally said about him. I will read about him as though he were a new historical character, about whom I had never heard anything at all.”
The man was amazed.
A physical weakling? Where did they get that idea? Jesus pushed a plane and swung an adze; he was a successful carpenter. He slept outdoors and spent his days walking around his favorite lake. His muscles were so strong that when he drove the money-changers out, nobody dared to oppose him!
A kill-joy? He was the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem! The criticism which proper people made was that he spent too much time with publicans and sinners (very good fellows, on the whole, the man thought) and enjoyed society too much. They called him a “wine bibber and a gluttonous man.”
A failure? He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world. When the man had finished his reading, he exclaimed, “This is a man nobody knows.”
“Some day,” said he, “some one will write a book about Jesus. Every business man will read it and send it to his partners and his salesmen. For it will tell the story of the founder of modern business.”
So the man waited for some one to write the book, but no one did. Instead, more books were published about the “Lamb of God” who was weak and unhappy and glad to die.
The man became impatient. One day he said, “I believe I will try to write that book, myself.” And he did.
It was very late in the afternoon in Galilee.
If you would like to learn the measure of a man, that is the time of day to watch him. We are all half an inch taller in the morning than at night; it is fairly easy to take a large view of things when the mind is rested and the nerves are calm. But the day is a steady drain of small annoyances, and the difference in the size of men becomes hourly more apparent. The little man loses his temper; the big man takes a firmer hold.
The dozen men who had walked all day over the dusty roads were hot and tired, and the sight of a village was very cheering, as they looked down on it from the top of a little hill. Their leader, deciding that they had gone far enough, sent two members of the party ahead to arrange for accommodations, while he and the others sat down by the roadside to wait. After a bit the messengers were seen returning, and even at a distance it was apparent that something unpleasant had occurred. Their cheeks were flushed, their voices angry, and as they came nearer they quickened their pace, each wanting to be the first to explode the bad news. Breathlessly they told it — the people in the village had refused to receive them, had given them blunt notice to seek shelter somewhere else.
The indignation of the messengers communicated itself to the others, who at first could hardly believe their ears. This back-woods village refuse to entertain their master — it was unthinkable! He was a famous public character in that part of the world. He had healed sick people and given freely to the poor. In the capital city crowds had followed him enthusiastically, so that even his disciples had become men of importance, looked up to and talked about. And now to have this country village deny them admittance as its guests — “Lord, these people are insufferable,” one of them cried. “Let us call down fire from Heaven and consume them.” The others joined in with enthusiasm. Fire from Heaven — that was the ideal! Make them smart for their boorishness! Show them that they can’t affront us with impunity! Come, Lord, the fire!
There are times when nothing a man can say is nearly so powerful as saying nothing. Every executive knows that instinctively. To argue brings him down to the level of those with whom he argues; silence convicts them of their folly; they wish they had not spoken so quickly; they wonder what he thinks. The lips of Jesus tightened; his fine features showed the strain of the preceding weeks, and in his eyes there was a foreshadowing of the more bitter weeks to come. He needed that night’s rest, but he said not a word. Quietly he gathered up his garments and started on, his outraged companions following. It is easy to imagine his keen disappointment. He had been working with them for three years … would they never catch a true vision of what he was about? He had so little time, and they were constantly wasting his time. … He had come to save mankind, and they wanted him to gratify his personal resentment by burning up a village!
Down the hot road they trailed after him, awed by his silence, vaguely conscious that they had failed again to measure up. “And they went to another village,” says the narrative — nothing more. No debate; no bitterness; no futile conversation. In the mind of Jesus the thing was too small for comment. In a world where so much must be done, and done quickly, the memory could not afford to be burdened with a petty slight.
“And they went to another village.”
Eighteen hundred years later an important man left the White House in Washington for the War Office, with a letter from the President to the Secretary of War. In a very few minutes he was back in the White House again bursting with indignation. The President looked up in mild surprise.
“Did you give the message to Stanton?” he asked. The other man nodded, too angry for words. “What did he do?”
“He tore it up,” exclaimed the outraged citizen, “and what’s more, sir, he said you are a fool.”
The President rose slowly from the desk, stretching his long frame to its full height, and regarding the wrath of the other with a quizzical glance.
“Did Stanton call me that?” he asked. “He did, sir, and repeated it.”
“Well,” said the President with a dry laugh, “I reckon it must be true then, because Stanton is generally right.”
The angry gentleman waited for the storm to break, but nothing happened. Abraham Lincoln turned quietly to his desk and went on with his work. It was not the first time that he had been rebuffed. In the early months of the way when every messenger brought bad news, and no one in Washington knew at what hour the soldiers of Lee might appear at the outskirts.
Other leaders in history have had that superiority to personal resentment and small annoyances which is one of the surest signs of greatness; but Jesus infinitely surpasses all. He knew that pettiness brings its own punishment. The law of compensation operates inexorably to reward and afflict us by and through ourselves. The man who is mean is mean only to himself. The village that had refused to admit him required no fire; it was already dealt with. No miracles were performed in that village. No sick were healed; no hungry were fed; no poor received the message of encouragement and inspiration-that was the penalty for its boorishness. As for him, he forgot the incident immediately. He had work to do.
Much theology has spoiled the thrill of his life by assuming that he knew everything from the beginning — that his three years of public work were a kind of dress rehearsal, with no real problems or crises. What interest would there be in such a life? What inspiration? You who read these pages have your own creed concerning him; I have mine. Let us forget all creed for the time being, and take the story just as the simple narratives give it — a poor boy, growing up in a peasant family, working in a carpenter shop; gradually feeling his powers expanding, beginning to have an influence over his neighbors, recruiting a few followers, suffering disappointments and reverses, finally death. Yet building so solidly and well that death was only the beginning of his influence!
Stripped of all dogma this is the grandest achievement story of all! In the pages of this little book let us treat it as such. If, in so doing, we are criticized for overemphasizing the human side of his character we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that our overemphasis tends a little to offset the very great overemphasis which has been exerted on the other side. Books and books and books have been written about him as the Son of God; surely we have a reverent right to remember that his favorite title for himself was the Son of Man.
Nazareth, where he grew up, was a little town in an outlying province. In the fashionable circles of Jerusalem it was quite the thing to make fun of Nazareth — its crudities of custom and speech, its simplicity of manner. “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” they asked derisively when the report spread that a new prophet had arisen in that country town. The question was regarded as a complete rebuttal of his pretensions.
The Galileans were quite conscious of the city folks’ contempt, but they bore it lightly. Life was a cheerful and easy-going affair with them. The sun shone almost every day; the land was fruitful; to make a living was nothing much to worry about. There was plenty of time to visit. Families went on picnics in Nazareth, as elsewhere in the world; young people walked together in the moonlight and fell in love in the spring. Boys laughed boisterously at their games and got into trouble with their pranks. And Jesus, the boy who worked in the carpenter shop, was a leader among them.
Later on we shall refer again to those boyhood experiences, noting how they contributed to the vigorous physique which carried him triumphantly through his work. We are quite unmindful of chronology in writing this little book. We are not bound by the familiar outline which begins with the song of the angels at Bethlehem and ends with the weeping of the women at the cross. We shall thread our way back and forth through the rich variety of his life, picking up this incident and that bit of conversation, this dramatic contact and that audacious decision, and bringing them together as best to illustrate our purpose. For that purpose is not to write a biography but to paint a portrait. So we pass quickly over thirty years of his life, noting only that somehow, somewhere there occurred in those years the eternal miracle — the awakening of the inner consciousness of power.
When and how and where does the eternal miracle occur in the lives of men and women destined for greatness? At what hour, in the morning, in the afternoon, in the long quiet evenings, did the audacious thought enter the mind of each of them that he or she was larger than the limits of a country town, that his life might be bigger than his father’s? When did the thought come to Jesus? Was it one morning when he stood at the carpenter’s bench, the sun streaming in across the hills? Was it late in the night, after the family had retired, and he had slipped out to walk and wonder under the stars? Nobody knows. All we can be sure of is this — that the consciousness of his divinity must have come to him in a time of solitude, of awe in the presence of Nature. The western hemisphere has been fertile in material progress, but the great religions have all come out of the East. The deserts are a symbol of the infinite; the vast spaces that divide men from the stars fill the human soul with wonder. Somewhere, at some unforgettable hour, the daring filled his heart. He knew that be was bigger than Nazareth.
Another young man had grown up near by and was beginning to be heard from in the larger world. His name was John. How much the two boys may have seen of each other we do not know; but certainly the younger, Jesus, looked up to and admired his handsome, fearless cousin. We can imagine with what eager interest he must have received the reports of John’s impressive success at the capital. He was the sensation of that season. The fashionable folk of the city were flocking out to the river to hear his denunciations; some of them even accepted his demand for repentance and were baptized. His fame grew; his uncompromising speeches were quoted far and wide.
The business men of Nazareth who had been up to Jerusalem brought back stories and quotations. There was considerable head-wagging as there always is; these folk had known of John as a boy; they could hardly believe that he was as much of a man as the world seemed to think. But there was one who had no doubts. A day came when he was missing from the carpenter shop; the sensational news spread through the streets that he had gone to Jerusalem, to John, to be baptized.
John’s reception of him was flattering. During the ceremony of baptism and for the rest of that day Jesus was in a state of splendid exultation. No shadow of a doubt darkened his enthusiasm. He was going to do the big things which John had done; he felt the power stirring in him; he was all eager to begin. Then the day closed and night descended, and with it came the doubts. The narrative describes them as a threefold temptation and introduces Satan to add to the dramatic quality of the event. In our simple story we need not spend much time with the description of Satan. We do not know whether he is to be regarded as a personality or as an impersonalization of an inner experience. The temptation is more real without him, more akin to our own trials and doubts. With him or without him, however, the meaning of the experience is clear. This is its meaning: the day of supreme assurance had passed; the days of fearful misgiving had come. What man of outstanding genius has ever been allowed to escape them? For how many days and weeks do you think the soul of Lincoln must have been tortured? Inside himself he felt his power, but where and when would opportunity come? Must he forever ride the country circuit, and sit in a dingy office settling a community’s petty disputes? Had he perhaps mistaken the inner message? Was he, after all, only a common fellow — a fair country lawyer and a good teller of jokes? Those who rode with him on the circuit testify to his terrifying moods of silence. What solemn thoughts besieged him in those silences? What fear of failure? What futile rebellion at the narrow limits of his life?
The days of Jesus’ doubt are set down as forty in number. It is easy to imagine that lonely struggle. He had left a good trade among people who knew and trusted him — and for what? To become a wandering preacher, talking to folks who never heard of him? And what was he to talk about? How, with his lack of experience, should he find words for his message? Where should be begin? Who would listen? Would they listen? Hadn’t he perhaps made a mistake?
He could go to Jerusalem and enter the priesthood; that was a sure road to distinction. He could do good in that way, and have the satisfaction of success as well. Or he might enter the public service, and seek political leadership. There was plenty of discontent to be capitalized, and he knew the farmer and the laborer; he was one of them; they would listen to him.
For forty days and nights the incessant fight went on, but once settled, it was settled forever. In the calm of that wilderness there came the majestic conviction which is the very soul of leadership the faith that his spirit was linked with the Eternal, that God had sent him into the world to do a work which no one else could do, which-if he neglected it — would never be done. Magnify this temptation scene as greatly as you will; say that God spoke more clearly to him than to any who has ever lived. It is true. But to every man and woman of vision the clear Voice speaks; there is no great leadership where there is not a mystic. Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside themselves was superior to circumstance. To choose the sure thing is treason to the soul.
If this was not the meaning of the forty days in the wilderness, if Jesus did not have a real temptation which might have ended in his going back to the bench at Nazareth, then the forty days’ struggle has no real significance to us. But the temptation was real, and he conquered. The youth who had been a carpenter stayed in the wilderness, a man came out. Not the full-fledged master who, within the shadow of the cross could cry, “I have overcome the world.” He had still much growth to make, much progress in vision and self-confidence. But the beginnings were there. Men and women who looked upon him from that hour felt the authority of one who has put his spiritual house in order, and knows clearly what he is about.
Success is always exciting; we never grow tired of asking what and how. What, then, were the principal elements in his power over men? How was it that the boy from a country village became the greatest leader?
First of all he had the voice and manner of the leader — the personal magnetism which begets loyalty and commands respect. The beginnings of it were present in him even as a boy. John felt them. On the day when John looked up from the river where he was baptizing converts and saw Jesus standing on the bank, he drew back in protest. “I have need to be baptized of you,” he exclaimed, “and you come to me?” The lesser man recognized the greater instinctively. We speak of personal magnetism as though there were something mysterious about it — a magic quality bestowed on one in a thousand and denied to all the rest. This is not true. The essential element in personal magnetism is a consuming sincerity — an overwhelming faith in the importance of the work one has to do.
Emerson said, “What you are thunders so loud I can’t hear what you say.” And Mirabeau, watching the face of the young Robespierre, exclaimed, “That man will go far; he believes every word he says.”
Most of us go through the world mentally divided against ourselves. We wonder whether we are in the right jobs, whether we are making the right investments, whether, after all, anything is as important as it seems to be. Our enemies are those of our own being and creation. Instinctively we wait for a commanding voice, for one who shall say authoritatively, “I have the truth. This way lies happiness and salvation.” There was in Jesus supremely that quality of conviction. Even very successful people were moved by it. Jesus had been in Jerusalem only a day or two when there came a knock at his door at night. He opened it to find Nicodemus, one of the principal men of the city; a member of the Sanhedrin, a supreme court judge.
One feels the dramatic quality of the meeting — the young, almost unknown, teacher and the great man, half curious, half convinced. It would have been easy to make a mistake. Jesus might very naturally have expressed his sense of honor at the visit; he might have said: “I appreciate your coming, sir. You are an older man and successful. I am just starting on my work. I should like to have you advise me as to how I may best proceed.” But there was no such note in the interview — no effort to make it easy for this notable visitor to become a convert. One catches his breath involuntarily at the audacity of the speech: “Verily, verily, I say to you, Nicodemus, except you are born again you can not see the kingdom of Heaven.” And a few moments later, “If I have told you earthly things and you have not believed, how shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” The famous visitor did not enroll as a disciple, was not invited to enroll; but he never forgot the impression made by the young man’s amazing self-assurance.
In a few weeks the crowds along the shores of the Sea of Galilee were to feel the same power and respond to it. They were quite accustomed to the discourses of the Scribes and Pharisees — long, involved arguments backed up by many citations from the law. But this teacher was different. He quoted nobody; his own word was offered as sufficient. He taught as “one having authority and not as the scribes.” Still later we have more striking proof of the power that supreme conviction can carry. At this date he had become so large a public influence as to threaten the peace of the rulers, and they sent a detachment of soldiers to arrest him. They were stern men, presumably immune to sentiment. They returned, after a while, emptyhanded.
“What’s the matter?” their commander demanded angrily. “Why didn’t you bring him in?” And they, smarting under their failure and hardly knowing how to explain it, could make only a surly excuse. “You’ll have to send some one else,” they said. “We don’t want to go against him. Never man so spake.”
They were armed; he had no defense but his manner and tone, but these were enough. In any crowd and under any circumstances the leader stands out. By the power of his faith in himself he commands, and men instinctively obey. This blazing conviction was the first and greatest element in the success of Jesus. The second was his wonderful power to pick men, and to recognize hidden capacities in them. It must have amazed Nicodemus when he learned the names of the twelve whom the young teacher had chosen to be his associates. What a list! Not a single well-known person on it. Nobody who had ever made a success of anything. A haphazard collection of fishermen and smalltown business men, and one tax collector — a member of the most hated element in the community. What a crowd!
Nowhere is there such a startling example of executive success as the way in which that organization was brought together. Take the tax collector, Matthew, as the most striking instance. His occupation carried a heavy weight of social ostracism, but it was profitable. He was probably well-to-do according to the simple standards of the neighborhood; certainly he was a busy man and not subject to impulsive action. His addition to the group of disciples is told in a single sentence: “And as Jesus passed by, he called Matthew.”
Amazing. No argument; no pleading. A smaller leader would have been compelled to set up the advantages of the opportunity. “Of course you are doing well where you are and making money,” he might have said. “I can’t offer you as much as you are getting; in fact you may have some difficulty in making ends meet. But I think we are going to have an interesting time and shall probably accomplish a big work.” Such a conversation would have been met with Matthew’s reply that he would “have to think it over,” and the world would never have heard his name.
There was no such trifling with Jesus. As he passed by he called Matthew. No executive in the world can read that sentence without acknowledging that here indeed is the Master. He had the born leader’s gift for seeing powers in men of which they themselves were often almost unconscious.
One day as he was coming into a certain town a tremendous crowd pressed around him. There was a rich man named Zacchaeus in the town; small in stature, but with such keen business ability that he had got himself generally disliked. Being curious to see the distinguished visitor he had climbed up into a tree. Imagine his surprise when Jesus stopped under the tree and commanded him to come down saying, “Today I intend to eat at your house.” The crowd was stunned. Some of the bolder spirits took it upon themselves to tell Jesus of his social blunder. He couldn’t afford to make the mistake of visiting Zacchaeus, they said. Their protests were without avail. They saw in Zacchaeus merely a dishonest little Jew; he saw in him a man of unusual generosity and a fine sense of justice, who needed only to have those qualities revealed by some one who understood. So with Matthew — the crowd saw only a despised tax-gatherer. Jesus saw the potential writer of a book which will live forever.
So also with that “certain Centurion,” who is one of the anonymous characters in history that every business man would have liked to meet. The disciples brought him to Jesus with some misgivings and apology. They said, “Of course this man is a Roman employee, and you may reprove us for introducing him. But really he is a very good fellow, a generous man and a respecter of our faith.” Jesus and the Centurion looking at each other found an immediate bond of union — each responding to the other’s strength. Said the Centurion:
“Master, my servant is ill; but it is unnecessary for you to visit my house. I understand how such things are done, for I, too, am an executive; I say to this man ‘Go’ and he goes; and to another ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it. Therefore, speak the word only, and I know my servant will be healed.”
Jesus’ face kindled with admiration. “I have not found anywhere such faith as this,” he exclaimed. This man understood him. Both were executives. They had the same problems and the same power; they talked the same language.
Having gathered together his organization, there remained for Jesus the tremendous task of training it. And herein lay the third great element in his success-his vast unending patience. The Church has attached to each of the disciples the title of Saint and thereby done most to destroy the conviction of their reality. They were very far from sainthood when he picked them up. For three years he had them with him day and night, his whole energy and resources poured out in an effort to create an understanding in them. Yet through it all they never fully understood. We have read and heard of their petulance. The narratives are full of such discouragements.
In spite of all he could do or say, the apostles were persuaded that he planned to overthrow the Roman power and set himself up as ruler in Jerusalem. Hence they never tired of wrangling as to how the offices should be divided. Two of them, James and John, got their mother to come to him and ask that her sons might sit, one on his right hand and one on his left. When the other ten heard of it they were angry with James and John; but Jesus never lost his patience. He believed that the way to get faith out of men is to show that you have faith in them; and from that great principle of executive management he never wavered.
Of all the disciples Simon was most noisy and aggressive. It was he who was always volunteering advice, forever proclaiming the staunchness of his own courage and faith. One day Jesus said to him, “Before the cock crows tomorrow you will deny me three times.” Simon was indignant. Though they killed him, he cried, he would never deny! Jesus merely smiled — and that night it happened. A lesser leader would have dropped Simon. “You have had your chance,” he would have said, “I am sorry but I must have men around me on whom I can depend.” Jesus had the rare understanding that the same man will usually not make the same mistake twice. To this frail, very human, very likable ex-fisherman he spoke no word of rebuke. Instead he played a stroke of master strategy. “Your name is Simon,” he said. “Hereafter you shall be called Peter.” (A rock.) It was daring, but he knew his man. The shame of the denial had tempered the iron of that nature like fire; the day would come when there was no faltering in Peter, even at the death.
John the Baptist could renounce, but he could not construct. He drew crowds willing to repent at his command, but he had no program for them after his repentance. They waited for him to organize them into some kind of effective service, but John was no organizer. So his followers drifted away and his movement gradually collapsed. The same thing might have happened to the work of Jesus. He started with much less reputation than John and a much smaller group of followers. He had only twelve, and they were untrained simple men, with elementary weakness and passions. Yet because of the fire of his personal conviction, because of his marvelous instinct for discovering their latent powers, and because of his unwavering faith and patience, he molded them into an organization which carried on victoriously. Within a very few years after his death, it was reported in a far-off corner of the Roman Empire that “these who have turned the world upside down have come hither also.” A few decades later the proud Emperor himself bowed his head to the teachings of this Nazareth carpenter, transmitted through common men.
To most of the crowd there was nothing unusual about the scene. That is the tragedy of it. The air was filthy with the smell of animals and human beings herded together. Men and women trampled one another, crying aloud their imprecations. At one side of the court were the pens of the cattle; the dove cages at the other. In the foreground, hard-faced priests and money-changers sat behind long tables exacting the utmost farthing from those who came to buy. One would never imagine that this was a place of worship. Yet it was the Temple — the center of the religious life of the nation. And to the crowds who jammed its courts, the spectacle seemed perfectly normal. That was the tragedy of it.
Standing a little apart from the rest, the young man from Nazareth watched in amazement which deepened gradually into anger. He had not been in the Temple since his twelfth year, when Joseph and Mary took him up to be legally enrolled as a Son of the law. He had witnessed the turmoil in the outer courts, but this day was different. He had heard some of the pilgrims mutter about the extortions of the money-changers. A woman told how the lamb which she had raised with so much devotion the previous year, had been scornfully rejected by the priests, who directed her to buy from the dealers. An old man related his experience. He had brought down the month’s savings to purchase his gift, and the moneychangers converted his provincial currency into the temple coin at a robber’s rate. Other pilgrims had similar stories. Today the young man faced the sordid reality with cheeks flushed.
A woman’s shrill tones pierced his revelry like a knife; he turned to see a peasant mother protesting vainly against a ruthless exaction. An unruly animal threatened to break through the bars, and a part of the crowd fell back with cries of terror. The young man had picked up a handful of cords from the pavement and was now braiding them into a whip, watching the whole scene silently. And suddenly, without a word of warning he strode to the table where a fat money-changer sat and violently turned it over. The startled robber lurched forward, grasping at his gains, lost his balance and fell sprawling on the ground. Another step and a second table was overturned, and another, and another.
The crowd which had melted back at the start began to catch a glimmering of what was up, and surged forward around the young man. He strode on, looking neither to right nor left. He reached the counters — here the dove cages stood — with quick sure movements the cages were opened and the occupants released. Brushing aside the group of dealers who had taken their stand in front of the cattle pens, he threw down the bars and drove the bellowing animals out through the crowd and into the streets, striking vigorous blows with his little whip. The whole thing happened so quickly that the priests were swept off their feet.
The young man cried. “It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations,’ but you have made it a den of robbers. ”Stung by his taunt, the priests hesitated, and in their moment of hesitation were lost. The soldiers turned their backs; it was nothing that they cared about. But the crowd burst forth in a mighty cheer and rushing forward bore him out of the Temple, the priests and the money-changers scurrying before him. That night his action was the talk of the town. “Did you hear what happened in the Temple today?” “Not a man of them dared stand up to him.” “Dirty thieves — it was coming to them.” “What’s his name?”
“Jesus … he used to be a carpenter up in Nazareth.”
This is a very familiar story, much preached upon and pictured. But almost invariably the pictures show him with a halo around his head, as though that was the explanation of his triumph. The truth is so much simpler and more impressive. There was, in his eyes, a flaming moral purpose; and greed and oppression have always shriveled before such fire. But with the majesty of his glance there was something else which counted powerfully in his favor. As his right arm rose and fell, striking its blows with that little whip, the sleeve dropped back to reveal muscles hard as iron. No one who watched him in action had any doubt that he was fully capable of taking care of himself. No flabby priest or money-changer dared to try conclusions with that arm.
There are those to whom it will seem almost irreverent to suggest that Jesus was physically strong. They think of him as a voice, a presence, a spirit; they never feel the rich contagion of his laughter, nor remember how heartily he enjoyed good food, nor think of what his years of hard toil must have done to his arms and back and legs. Look for a minute at those first thirty years. There was no soft bed for his mother on the night he entered the world. He was brought forth in a stable, amid animals. He was wrapped in rough garments and expected, almost from the beginning, to look after himself. When he was still an infant the family hurried away into Egypt. On the long trip back, some years later, he was judged old enough to walk, for there were younger children. And so, day after day, he trudged beside the little donkey, or scurried into the woods by the roadside to find fuel. It was a hard school for babyhood but it gave him a hardness that was an enormous asset later on.
Early in his boyhood Jesus, as the eldest son, went into the family carpenter shop. The practice of carpentry was no easy business in those simpler days. Doubtless the man who took a contract for a house assumed responsibilities for digging into the rough hillside for its foundations; for felling trees in the forest, and shaping them with an adze. In after years those who listened to the talk of Jesus by the Sea of Galilee, and heard him speak of the “man who built his house upon a rock” had no doubt that he knew what he was talking about. Some of them had seen him bending his strong clean shoulders to deliver heavy blows; or watched him trudge away into the woods, his ax over his shoulder, and return at nightfall with a rough-hewn beam.
So he “waxed strong” as the narrative tells us, a phrase which has rather been buried under the toofrequent repetition of “the meek and lowly” and “the lamb.” As he grew in stature and experience he developed with his personal skill an unusual capacity for directing the work of other men so that Joseph allowed him an increasing responsibility in the management of the shop. And this was fortunate, for the day came when Joseph stood at the bench no longer — having sawed his last board, and planed it smooth — and the management of the business descended upon the shoulders of the boy who had learned it so thoroughly at his side. Is it not high time for a larger reverence to be given to that quiet unassuming Joseph? To Mary, his wife, the church has assigned a place of eternal glory. It is impossible to estimate how great an influence has been exerted for the betterment of woman’s life by the fact that millions of human beings have been taught from infancy to venerate a woman.
But with the glorification of Mary, there has been an almost complete neglect of Joseph. The same theology which has painted the son as soft and gentle to the point of weakness, has exalted the feminine influence in its worship, and denied any large place to the masculine. This is partly because Mary lived to be known and remembered by the disciples, while nobody remembered Joseph. Was he just an untutored peasant, married to a superior woman, and baffled by the genius of a son whom he could never understand? Or was there, underneath his self-effacement, a vigor and faith that molded the boy’s plastic years? Was he a happy companion to the youngsters? Did he carry the youngest, laughing and crowing on his shoulders from the shop? Was he full of jokes at dinner time? Was he ever tired and short tempered? Did he ever punish?
To all these questions the narrative gives no answer. And since this is so, since there is none who can refute us — we have a right to form our own conception of the character of this vastly significant and wholly unknown man, and to be guided by the one momentous fact which we do know. It is this. He must have been friendly and patient and fine; he must have seemed to his children to be an almost ideal parent — for when Jesus sought to give mankind a new conception of the character of God, he could find no more exalted term for his meaning than the one word “Father.”
Thirty years went by. Jesus had discharged his duty; the younger children were big enough for selfsupport. The strange stirrings that had gone on inside him for years, setting him off more and more from his associates, were crystallized by the reports of John’s success. The hour of the great decision arrived; he hung up his tools and walked out of town.
What sort of looking man was he that day when he appeared on the bank of the Jordan and applied to John for baptism? What had the thirty years of physical toil given him in stature and physique? Unfortunately the Gospel narratives supply no satisfying answer to these questions; and the only passage in ancient literature which purports to be a contemporary description of him has been proved a forgery.
Nevertheless, it requires only a little reading between the lines to be sure that almost all the painters have misled us. They have shown us a frail man, under-muscled, with a soft face — a woman’s face covered by a beard — and a benign but baffled look, as though the problems of living were so grievous that death would be a welcome release. This is not the Jesus at whose word the disciples left their business to enlist in an unknown cause. And for proof of that assertion consider only four aspects of his experience: the health that flowed out of him to create health in others; the appeal of his personality to women — weakness does not appeal to them; his lifetime of outdoor living; and the steel-like hardness of his nerves. First, then, his power of healing.
He was teaching one day in Capernaum, in a house crowded to the doors, when a commotion occurred in the courtyard. A man sick in bed for years had heard reports of his marvelous power, and persuaded four friends to carry him into the house. Now, at the very entrance, their way was blocked. The eager listeners would not give way even for a sick man; they refused to sacrifice a single word. Sorrowfully the four friends started to carry the invalid back to his house again. But the poor fellow’s will was strong even if his body was weak. Rising on his elbow he insisted that they take him up the stairway on the outside of the house and lower him through the roof. They protested, but he was inflexible. It was his only chance for health and he would not give it up until everything had been tried. So at length they consented, and, in the midst of a sentence the teacher was interrupted dramatically; the sick man lay helpless at his feet. Jesus stopped and bent down, taking the flabby hand in his firm grasp; his face was lighted with a wonderful smile. “Son, thy sins are forgiven thee,” he said.
“Rise, take up thy bed and walk.” The sick man was stupefied. “Walk!” He had never expected to walk again. Didn’t this stranger understand that he had been bedridden for years? Was this some sort of cruel jest to make him the laughing-stock of the crowd? A bitter protest rushed to his lips; he started to speak and then halting himself, he looked up up to the calm assurance of those eyes, the supple strength of those muscles, the ruddy skin that testified to the rich red blood beneath — and the healing occurred! It was as though health poured out of that strong body into the weak one like electric current from a dynamo. The invalid felt the blood quicken in his palsied limbs; a faint flush crept into his thin drawn cheeks; almost involuntarily he tried to rise and found to his joy that he could!
“Walk!” Do you suppose for one minute that a weakling, uttering that syllable, would have produced any result? If the Jesus who looked down on that pitiful wreck had been the Jesus of the painters, the sick man would have dropped back with a scornful sneer and motioned his friends to carry him out. But the health of the teacher was irresistible; it seemed to cry out, “Nothing is impossible, if only your will power is strong enough.” And the man who so long ago had surrendered to despair, rose and gathered up his bed and went away, healed — like hundreds of others in Galilee — by strength from an overflowing fountain of strength.
One day later, as Jesus walked in a crowd, a woman pushed forward and touched his garment; and by that single touch was cured. The witnesses acclaimed it a miracle and so it was; but we need some definition of that word. He himself was very reticent about his “miracles.” It is perfectly clear that he did not interpret them in the same way that his followers did, not attach the same importance to them. He was often reluctant to perform them, and frequently insisted that the individual who had been healed should “go and tell no man.” And on one celebrated occasion — his visit to his home town Nazareth — the narrative tells us clearly that the miraculous power was powerless, and for a very interesting and impressive reason. The people of Nazareth were his boyhood acquaintances and they were skeptical; they had heard with cynical scorn the stories of the wonders he had performed in other towns; they were determined not to be fooled; he might deceive the world, which knew him only as a teacher; but they knew him better-he was just Jesus, their old neighbor, the son of the local carpenter. So of that visit the gospel writers set down one of the most tragic sentences in literature. “He could do there no mighty work,” they tell us, “because of their unbelief.” Whatever the explanation of his miraculous power may be, it is clear that something big was required of the recipient as well as the giver. Without a belief in health on the part of the sick man, no health was forthcoming. And no man could have inspired that belief unless his own health and strength were so perfect as to make even the impossible seem easy.
Men followed him, and the leaders of men have very often been physically strong. But women worshiped him. This is significant. The names of women constitute a very large proportion of the list of his close friends.
They were women from widely varying stations in life, headed by his mother. Perhaps she never fully appreciated his genius; certainly she was not without her periods of serious doubt as we shall discover later on; yet her loyalty to his best interests, as she conceived them, remained true, and she stood tearful but unwavering at the foot of the cross. There were Mary and Martha, two gentle maiden ladies who lived outside Jerusalem and in whose home with Lazarus, their brother, he enjoyed frequent hospitality; there was Joanna, a rich woman, the wife of one of Herod’s stewards — these, and many others of the type which we are accustomed to designate as “good” women, followed him with a devotion which knew no weariness or fear.
The important, and too often forgotten, fact in these relationships is this — that women are not drawn by weakness. The sallow-faced, thin-lipped, so-called spiritual type of man may awaken maternal instinct, stirring an emotion which is half regard, half pity. But since the world began no power has fastened the affection of women upon a man like manliness. The men who have been women’s men in the finest sense, have been the vital, conquering figures of history.
The other sort of women came into contact with him, too — women of less fortunate experience and reputation — whose illusions regarding men were gone, whose eyes saw piercingly, and whose lips were well-versed in phrases of contempt. As he taught in the temple, one of them was hurried into his presence by a vulgar crowd of self-righteous Scribes and Pharisees. She had been taken in the act of infidelity, and according to the Mosaic law — she could be stoned to death. Shrinking, embarrassed, yet with a look in which defiance and scorn were mingled too, she stood in his presence, and listened while their unclean lips played with the story of her shame. What thoughts must have raced through her mind — she who knew men and despised them all, and now was brought to judgment before a man! They were all alike, in her philosophy; what would this one do and say?
To her amazement, and the discomfiture of her critics, he said nothing. He “stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.” They craned their necks to see what he wrote and continued to taunt him with their questions: “Moses says stone her; what do you say?” “Come now, if you are a prophet, here’s a matter for you to decide.” “We found her in the house of So and So. She is guilty; what’s your answer?”
All this time he had not once looked at the woman’s face, and he did not look at her now. Slowly he “lifted himself up,” and facing the evil-minded pack, said quietly: “He who is without sin among you let him first cast a stone at her.” And again, says the narrative, he stooped down and wrote on the ground. A painful silence fell upon the crowd; he continued writing. Writing what? Some have ventured the conjecture that he traced names of people and places that brought a blush of shame to men in that crowd. That may be so, but it is more impressive to think that he wrote nothing of significance; that he merely busied his finger in the sand, not to add to her discomfiture by looking in her eyes. He wrote-and one by one the thick-lipped champions of morality drew their garments around them and slipped away, until the court was empty except for him and her. Then, and only then, his glance was lifted. “Woman, where are your accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?” he inquired, as if in surprise.
Amazed at the sudden turn of affairs she could hardly find her voice. “No man, Lord,” she murmured. “Neither do I condemn thee,” he answers simply. “Go, and sin no more.” From the moment when the noisy vulgar throng had broken in upon him, he was complete master of the situation. Those were men not easily abashed, but they slunk out of his presence without waiting for his command. And she, who knew men so much more truly than men ever know each other, felt his mastery, responded to his power, and spoke to him reverently as “Lord.”
All his days were spent in the open air — this is the third outstanding testimony to his strength. On the Sabbath he was in the synagogue because that was where the people were gathered; but by far the greater part of his teaching was done on the shores of his lake, or in the cool recesses of the hills. He walked constantly from village to village; his face was tanned by the sun and wind. Even at night he slept outdoors, when he could — turning his back on the hot walls of the city and slipping away into the healthful freshness of the Mount of Olives. He was the type of outdoor man whom our modern thought most admires; and the vigorous activities of his days gave his nerves the strength of steel.
Napoleon said that he had met few men with courage of the “two o’clock in the morning variety.” Many men can be brave in the warmth of the sun and amid the heartening plaudits of the crowd; but to be wakened suddenly out of sound sleep, and then to exhibit instant mastery — that is the type of courage which is rare indeed. Jesus had that courage, and no man ever needed it more. In the last year of his public work the forces of opposition took on a form and coherency whose significance was perfectly clear. If he refused to retreat or to compromise, there could be but one end to his career. He knew they would kill him, and he knew how they would kill him. More than once in his journeys he had passed the victims of the justice of that day, writhing, tortured beings nailed to crosses and waiting piteously for release. Sometimes they wilted for days before the end. The memory of such sights must have been constantly with him; at every sunset he was conscious that he had walked just one day nearer to his own ordeal. Yet he never faltered. Calmly, cheerfully he went forward, cheering the spirits of his disciples, and striking those fiery blows against hypocrisy and oppression which were to be echoed by the hammer blows upon his cross.
And when the soldiers came to arrest him, they found him ready and still calm. The week of his trial and crucifixion takes up a large portion of the gospels. For that week alone we can follow him almost hour by hour; we know where he ate and slept, what he said and to whom; we can trace the gathering storm of fury which finally bore him down. And this is the magnificent thing to remember — that through all that long torture of imprisonment, court trials, midnight hearings, scourgings, loss of food and loss of sleep, he never once ceased to be the Master. His accusers were determined. They thronged the courtyard before the palace, clamoring for his blood, yet even they felt a momentary awe when he appeared before them on the balcony.
Even Pilate felt it. The two men offered a strange contrast standing there-the Roman governor whose lips were so soon to speak the sentence of death, and the silent, self-possessed excarpenter-accused and doomed-yet bearing himself with so much majesty, as though he were somehow beyond the reach of man-made law, and safe from the hurt of its penalties. In the face of the Roman were deep unpleasant lines; his cheeks were fatty with self-indulgence; he had the colorless look of indoor living. The straight young man stood inches above him, bronzed and hard, and clean as the air of his loved mountain and lake. Pilate raised his hand; the shouting and the tumult died; a deathly stillness descended upon the crowd. He turned and faced the figure at his side, and from his coarse lips there burst a sentence which is a truer portrait than any painter has ever given us. The involuntary testimony of the flabby cynical Roman in the presence of perfect strength, perfect assurance, perfect calm:
“Behold,” he cried, “the man!”
The Urantia Papers — The Fifth Epochal Revelation — provides us this additional, and revelatory, information:
“Indeed, the fear-ridden Roman governor little dreamed that at just that moment the universe stood at attention, gazing upon this unique scene of its beloved Sovereign thus subjected in humiliation to the taunts and blows of his darkened and degraded mortal subjects. And as Pilate spoke, there echoed throughout all Nebadon, ”Behold God and man!“ Throughout a universe, untold millions have ever since that day continued to behold that man, while the God of Havona, the supreme ruler of the universe of universes, accepts the man of Nazareth as the satisfaction of the ideal of the mortal creatures of this local universe of time and space. In his matchless life he never failed to reveal God to man. Now, in these final episodes of his mortal career and in his subsequent death, he made a new and touching revelation of man to God.” [UB 186:2.11]