[ p. 24 ]
JESUS was the world’s great religious teacher, whatever else he was. We want to know what sort of teacher he was, and how and what he taught, before we ask other questions about him. Yet we want to know, also, what sort of man he was. And we want to know all the more because somehow we feel that the every-day person’s conception of him has been colored by many false ideas, and the whole picture of Jesus has been distorted. Beyond question, Jesus lived a happy life. We forget this because his career ended in sacrifice and suffering. Christian theology has often made the Cross of Calvary the whole substance of his teaching. It was not always so. In earlier days the church was concerned with the thought of the incarnation—belief in the deity of the Lord, manifested in a perfect humanity. The first teachers could never forget that they had seen “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” In our own day—an age of practical activity, rather than of speculative thought—the emphasis is more often placed on the human example of Christ and the need of following him as “The Way” as well as “The Truth and the Life.” He is
[ p. 25 ]
… the Christ of our hearts and homes,
Our hopes and prayers and needs,
The Brother of want and blame,
The Lover of women and men,
With a love that puts to shame
All passions of mortal ken.
For centuries both these aspects of the great life were almost forgotten in the exclusive insistence upon the sacrifice of Christ as an atonement for the sin of the world—an emphasis so jealous as to minimize other truths and shift the center of Christian teaching. This meant that Jesus was rarely thought of save as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
In Holman Hunt’s picture, “The Shadow of the Cross,” the youthful Jesus and his mother are seen together in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. As the sun streams through the doorway, it casts upon the opposite wall, in the form of a cross, the shadow of his body and outstretched arms. Mary sees the shadow. In the agony of her posture there is suggested the idea that from his boyhood days the shadow of the cross always fell upon his path and darkened his life. There is truth, of course, in the picture—it is quite legitimate to let the imagination have play in reading thus early the significance of the later tragedy—but there is error also; the exaggerated emphasis which not only makes the cross the center of Christian teaching, but can hardly see anything in Christianity except the cross. We need not feel that the only purpose of Christ’s coming was that he might die for men. Nor is it natural to think of his cross as if such an end to his [ p. 26 ] career were so inevitable that he himself apparently had no real choice about it.
That is not true. However c.ark the later days, the early years of his ministry were full of joy, gay and light-hearted in their freedom of friendship. The instinct is perfectly sound that made the Fourth Evangelist begin his description of Jesus’ work with a story of a marriage. Somebody has said that no one would have dreamed of inviting John the Baptist to a wedding, but it was natural that Christ should be bidden to the feast; everyone knew that he would add to the joy of the occasion.
This criticism of John is perhaps overstrained; he was probably devoid of a sense of humor, but he was not necessarily a kill-joy. Unquestionably, however, there is real truth in the estimate of Christ’s character. Sometimes the ecclesiastics felt that he was altogether too friendly. He mixed too much with all sorts and conditions of people; he received sinners and ate with them too frequently; he failed to rebuke the woman of the city who came to Simon’s feast, and his host was distressed and perplexed at what seemed to him a lax and easy-going indifference; he permitted one of his own chosen apostles to gather an extraordinarily disreputable company of friends to meet him at dinner. It comes with something of a shock to read that some of his critics actually called him a glutton and a winebibber.
His public life began with the choice of a few intimate friends, and most of his public teaching was [ p. 27 ] given while he went with them on pilgrimages through Galilee—the north country from which most of his friends came. He rejoiced in the friendship of the Twelve. When questioned about their apparent lack of strict observance of the rules of fasting, he smiled and declared that they could not fast when they were as happy as friends of a newly-wed bridegroom.
Nor was his friendship one in which he gave all, and asked, and really needed, nothing. That destroys his humanness. He seems to have greatly needed friends, so thoroughly human was his hunger for their understanding, their affection, their sympathy and support. There is the desire for such understanding, when he asks of Peter, “Who do men say that I am? Who do you say that I am?” There is longing as well as reproach in the words, “Could ye not watch with me one hour?”
He needed friends—and he had them: Mary and Martha and Lazarus, in whose home affection always gave him a welcome opportunity for relaxation; Peter and James and John, who were a little closer to him than any of the rest of the Twelve; most of all the unnamed disciple—perhaps John, but nobody knows for certain—the best-beloved, into whose care he commended his mother in the hour of parting. Children were among his good friends. He loved them and they loved him. He watched them at play in the public square with amusement and delight, and afterward called attention to their songs. One of them he took on his knees as he talked to his disciples of the need [ p. 28 ] of the childlike spirit in the life of religion. Mothers brought their babies to him, that he might hold them in his arms and bless them.
He had a wonderful capacity for making friends with all sorts of people. Nicodemus took his courage in his hands to go for a quiet talk with him, even though he went after dark. The woman of Samaria involuntarily opened her heart to him. There were even women of Herod’s court in the groups which gathered to hear him and afterward joined his company. A wealthy citizen of Jerusalem came forward in the tragic hour of his death to proclaim his friendship and offer a place in which to bury the body of the defeated leader.
There are several stories of the way in which Jesus made friends, but none more full of color than the account of his winning of Zacchseus. Zacchieus was a profiteer; more than that, a grafting governmental profiteer. He was head of the department for the collection of internal revenue in the district of Jericho, and like other tax-gatherers had lined his pockets with commissions, not all of them honestly levied. He was despised by the people. Yet he was not altogether bad, or he would not have been so curious to see, on his way through Jericho, the man who was thought to be the Messiah. Because he was little of stature, Zacchseus climbed up into a tree to look over the heads of the crowd and see Jesus. He was really a ridiculous object—one may suppose that the boys in the crowd tittered, the girls giggled, the adults (who had paid their taxes) sneered at him.
[ p. 29 ]
Then Jesus passed by and looked up, and seeing him said, “Hurry now, Zacchaeus, and come down; I must be your guest at dinner today.” No wonder Zacchaeus was a changed man. “Here I am,” he thought, “a miserable money-grubber, heaping up a fortune without much thought of how I get the money or what I shall do with it. But this man believes in me. Here before the crowd he asks me to be his host. Today, then, I make a new start. Half of my fortune I will give away in charity and every false collection of taxes I will pay back four times over. This man trusts me and makes me his friend, and I mean to live up to his expectations.”
Another anecdote which tells of a rich young man who came to Jesus adds that “when he saw him, Jesus loved him.” It was of this man that the extraordinary demand was made, “Go, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor.” This unusual injunction was an offer of close friendship, with appointment to apostleship; the refusal is indeed the record of “a great rejection.”
The twelve companions and their Master, and possibly some of the others with them on occasions, went through the fields and along the friendly road, while he talked with them and now and then taught those who gathered about the little company. As he taught, God and goodness became very real.
And so those happy companions on the friendly road thought about God, in the peace of the simple life, as their Master told story after story, each with its special [ p. 30 ] lesson, thus gradually making them understand the whole body of his teaching, slowly bringing them to think of God as Friend and Father, even as he himself was Friend and Brother.