[ p. 60 ]
JESUS was never satisfied to preach the doctrine of God’s forgiveness in generalities; he was constantly applying the doctrine to individual cases.
On one occasion a Pharisee asked Jesus to eat with him. This particular Pharisee was trying to make up his own mind about the character of the new teacher. The meal progressed in the usual Jewish fashion. The table was placed in the middle of the room, with couches around it; on these the guests reclined, supporting themselves on the left elbow, while the unsandaled feet rested on the edge of the couch toward the walls of the room. Whatever were the faults of the Pharisees, parsimony to the poor was not one of them; they gave alms lavishly and on all occasions. [1] It was no unusual thing, in fact, to open the house door while a meal was in progress and to allow the entrance of beggars; they were permitted to stand behind the couches, and portions of food were passed or tossed to them. Consequently there was nothing strange in the appearance of a woman, described sufficiently as a “sinner,” who took her place behind Jesus.
Her actions, however, proved to be extraordinary. [ p. 61 ] With utter lack of self-consciousness, careless of the crowd, anxious only to show her gratitude, she broke a box of ointment, anointed the Master’s feet, washed them with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. The Pharisee, who knew the woman, stared in dumb amazement. We can see him, untouched, cold, critical, plainly annoyed at the unseemliness of such a “scene” in his own house. He was now quite sure that this teacher was no prophet; if he were, “he would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him”; a properly righteous man might give her alms, but he would shrink from her touch as a pollution. It was then that Jesus said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.”
Jesus “turned”to the woman—looked first at Simon and then down at the penitent—and the parable followed with its moral of the largeness of pardon and blessing: “A certain lender had two debtors: the one owed him five hundred shillings, the other fifty. When they could not pay, he forgave them both. Which of them, therefore, will love him most [2] ?” The woman had borne a heavy load of sin, indeed, and it had been forgiven her; no wonder that she loved much—and no wonder that Jesus was willing to accept outward tokens of love from this child who had returned to the Father.
There was nothing lax about this attitude. If the right relation exists between the child and the father, the child is certain to progress toward the father’s ideals; slowly, perhaps, at first, but none the less surely. What counts is not so much our actual achievement [ p. 62 ] at any given moment as the direction of our progress; what we are becoming is vastly more important than what we are. At the moment, beyond question, the woman was on a lower moral level than Simon, but also at the moment she possessed far greater possibilities for the future. Her path toward God was not blocked off by spiritual pride.
Of course Jesus’ teaching is capable of perversion and of great abuse; the child-father illustration may be pushed so far that it no longer represents his mind. The parallel between the faults of childhood and the sins of maturity is necessarily imperfect. The calculating deliberation with which adults act, for one thing, may give to their deeds a quality childhood never knows. For another, there is a class of people to whom religion seems narrow and belittling as compared with the broader ways of the world, who are in no way conscious of the need of divine grace, who see no reason for self-discipline, but think it rather fine and free and splendid to follow any urge and thus avoid morbid self-consciousness. 1 One can quite see how the story of the prodigal would make a wholly false appeal to an age that is only too glad to think of God—if it thinks of him at all—as a loose, lax, kindly, benevolent Deity, who regards sin as an unlucky misstep or mistake easily overlooked. Ours is an age that conceives God’s Fatherhood as a smiling indulgence which would never dream of punishing any [ p. 63 ] child, no matter how serious its faults. [3] Jesus’ teaching of the Father’s willingness to welcome the returning sinner may thus be made, after a fashion, a justification of the right to sin. The parable of the prodigal has been interpreted as if it excused professional prodigals, who positively enjoy riotous living and expect “fatted calves” of welcome when they weary of other pleasures. The sins of the Pharisees are by no means the only sins in the world!
Jesus was no sentimentalist. He had absolutely nothing in common with those who talk about “the beauty of misery” or—still more inanely—“the beauty of sin.” Misery and sin had no attraction for him. His duty called him into close contact with both— “it is they that are sick who have need of a physician” —and he dealt gently and patiently with the miserable and the sinful. But his purpose was to make them less miserable and less sinful. The poor woman who anointed him had been a sinner, but when he pronounced her forgiven she had ceased from her grosser sins; she had begun to utilize her possibilities of advance. When Jesus said to the paralytic, “Arise, take up thy bed and walk,” his own task was completed, and all hindrance due to disease was removed. The man was now free to use his strength once more. If he had been unwilling to exert himself and had preferred to lie inert, his healing would not have been of the least benefit to him.
If we were inclined to speculate further on the [ p. 64 ] parable of the prodigal, we might well ask what happened to him when the first rejoicing was over. He was restored to his father’s love, and we may hope that his older brother was reconciled to him as well. But he could never recover his old position; his share of his heritage had been squandered and his father had no more to give him. [4] No matter how much affection might soften the facts, his new place in the family must have been something like that of a hired servant, after all, and he faced a lifetime of hard work, without much hope of ever reaching large prosperity. Such a condition was unquestionably infinitely better than herding swine and starving, but it was far other than what he might have enjoyed had he not wasted his most precious years.
Of course, in so imagining the prodigal’s future, we are going beyond Jesus’ purpose in telling the story. We are likewise making a wrong comparison between the father and God, for God’s abundance is never exhausted. He is able to give the penitent more than was lost by sin, and experience shows that he often does so give. None the less, our imaginary continuation of the parable contains a very real truth. God’s welcome of the penitent makes the beginning of the new life wonderfully easy, but at every point in that new life real exertion and steady effort will be necessary.
When such effort is refused, there is an end of any possibility of “becoming sons of your Father who is in [ p. 65 ] heaven.” Where there is no desire to imitate God, where there is a continual assent to selfishness, where there is a persistent preference for the worse instead of the better, then a condition exists that of itself destroys the likeness to the Father. For such a condition, as long as it continues, God Himself can do nothing; “forgiveness” of the sins of a man in such a state would be a meaningless phrase. Just as the pharisaic sins are not the only sins in the world, so the pharisaic obstinacy is not the only obstinacy in the world, and Jesus’ condemnation of the one form applies to all the others with equal force. His warning must never be forgotten. And to turn back from any settled perversion of the moral instinct to sound relations with God and with intense effort “follow after righteousness” is a difficult thing; any doctrine that teaches the contrary simply raises up lying hopes.
Back of all Jesus’ gentleness, back of all the love in God’s Fatherhood, lie the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. Not—we may repeat—as inflexible conditions that must be fulfilled inexorably if we are to win salvation; our salvation we owe solely to the Father who receives us. But if God is to receive us, we must at least have our faces turned toward Him. Our progress, slow though it may be, must be in the direction of the ideals that the Sermon sets forth. We shall no doubt have our moments of hesitation, our moments of stumbling, even occasions when we fall. There is, and never can be, any excuse for that final obstacle to progress, despair; we may always confidently [ p. 66 ] trust to God to help us as we try again. But we must try again. The religion Jesus preached is a constant challenge to perpetual endeavor, a never ending call on us to use our strength; to use our strength in imitation of him, because he was strong.
At times much too ostentatiously, “sounding a trumpet.” ↩︎
In recent times consoling themselves with the psychological argument that they are escaping “repressions.” ↩︎
This has been vigorously, if inelegantly, described as the doctrine of “the papahood of God.” ↩︎
By Jewish law all the rest of the father’s estate must pass to the older brother, whether the father wished it so or not. ↩︎