[ p. 19 ]
IT WAS impossible that John should for one moment have conceived that the Mightier One was among the crowd that listened to him. Before we can approach towards an understanding of the true history of Jesus and his sublime achievement, we must put absolutely out of our minds the Christian doctrine that Jesus was, in his own lifetime, the Messiah. Jesus came to believe that he would be, and he was such a man that after-generations found it possible, nay necessary, to believe that he was. But all this was in the future. The real conviction that Jesus was the Messiah was only possible after he was dead. And at the time when Jesus listened to John the Baptist the thought was far from his own mind, and utterly inconceivable to another man’s.
For the Messiah imagined in Jesus’ day was not, nor ever was to become, a living man among men. He was a transcendental and superhuman figure, at [ p. 20 ] whose advent into the world the sun would be darkened and the heavens rolled up like a scroll. We have a glimpse of him in the Book of Daniel, in the figure of “one like unto a Son of Man,” and one still more vivid in the Book of Revelation. There the Messiah has been, so to speak, Christianized ; but essentially the Lamb of God in that book is the Messiah of the Jewish imagination in Jesus’ day. No living man could be the Messiah, for the Messiah did not belong to the order of humanity at all. Nor did Jesus ever come to believe that he was the Messiah ; but only that he was to become the Messiah. The thought that a living man should become the Messiah was terribly hard even—for Jesus for the ordinary Jew it was impossible—but that a living man should be the Messiah was simply unthinkable.
This must be understood, for except we understand it, there is no understanding the life of Jesus. John the Baptist did not recognize and could not have recognized Jesus for the Messiah. Jesus was not what he was expecting ; he was not expecting a man at all, but an ineffable Presence, at whose advent the end of the world would come. He looked for a sign, a sign of signs, far more intently than [ p. 21 ] the Pharisees, for he knew the end was at hand and they did not There was no sign. There was no voice from Heaven that John could hear, no cloud of glory that he might see, no dove descending that his eyes might follow. What happened to Jesus, as he came up out of the waters of Jordan, happened to him alone.
“As he came up out of the river he saw the heavens parted above him and the Spirit descending like a dove towards him ; and he heard a voice sounding out of the heavens and saying:
“Thou art my beloved son : I have chosen thee.”
There were other versions of these words, of which one has been preferred to another by the Church of after-times for reasons which would have seemed incomprehensible to Jesus. For these words were his words, in which months afterwards he sought to tell the nearest of his disciples of the strange happening to his soul. He must have tried one way and yet another to communicate to them this incredible and simple thing. At another time the words he gave to the voice were these :
“Thou art my beloved son : this day have I begotten thee.”
[ p. 22 ]
These are not words which conflict one with another, and are therefore to be preferred one to another. They tell, with equal truth, of the same ineffable happening. In the former it was the beatitude, in the latter the completeness, of rebirth which Jesus strove to communicate. And surely he did communicate these things, and surely all were true. This happening was a sudden birth, yet an unutterably blissful thing: something that was not he descended swiftly and softly upon his soul, as it were a dove, and brooded upon it. There was suddenness, happiness, peace, and joy—peace and joy not his own, yet not of another than himself, in something that he was and was not. In some one, therefore; and in the later days he spoke of what he knew : “There is more joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over the ninety and nine which need not repentance.”
For he had come to be baptized by John as a sinner, among a crowd of sinners. He had come as more than a sinner, but as a sinner he had indeed come. Whatever this man was, he was the incarnation of honesty. He would have sought no baptism for the remission of sins, had he not been conscious gf sin. He came out also to see and to hear [ p. 23 ] a prophet; he would have seen him and heard him, but he would not have sought his baptism for no cause, and become one with the outward ritualists whom he so passionately contemned. In his later words, we hear beyond all doubt the voice of one who had known sin, and the consciousness of sin, and the joy in heaven over the sinner that repenteth.
What he knew that day, as he prayed on the bank of the Jordan, and the Spirit rested on his soul like a dove, and the voice echoed within him, was that he was a son of God. It is hard to approach those words with candor and simplicity: for the skeptic they are meaningless, for the believer they have acquired a meaning utterly remote from the actual experience of Jesus on that day.
What he knew, on that day, with suddenness and peace and joy, was something about himself and something about God. That God existed this son of Israel had no doubt; but to believe that God exists and to know God are things different by the whole breadth of heaven. Jesus had sought to know God ; he had sought to recognize him by his voice in the books of Law and the Prophets. He had turned aside from this accent, and clung to [ p. 24 ] that God was not in the earthquake nor the cloud nor the fire, but in the still small voice. “I desire mercy and not sacrifice:” such was the voice he sought. And with what ardor and eagerness, with what exquisite discrimination, he listened for it, those can judge who read the inspissated and tortured chapters of Hosea out of which Jesus plucked that jewel. Long before he came down from Nazareth to Jordan he was a master of the Scriptures. So were the Pharisees and the interpreters of the Law, the Scribes. But Jesus’ mastery of the Scriptures was of a totally different kind from theirs. It was a creative mastery. For in the Old Testament there is not one God, but many gods ; from among them Jesus sought but one, one who should satisfy his own deep intuitive knowledge of what God must be—a God, whom he could worship.
Jesus was such a man that the God whom he could worship must be the God whom he could love. The second Isaiah also had been, in part, such a man. But Jesus was wholly such a man. Therefore he was a rebel against the tradition of his race. He was the true child of his great nation in that he believed in one God; he was a rebel [ p. 25 ] against it in that the one God in whom he could or would believe was a God whom he could love. It was a Promethean act; of rebellion and creation, and it changed the mind of man and the face of the world. There must have been the days, the years, when the rebellion against the tradition of his race, and against the Law itself, was a sheer nothingness ; the time must have been when he had forsaken the stern and awful God and found none other to take his place, a dark and terrible time when the One was silent and inscrutable before his questioning, and he himself was simply alone, or with the memory only of the one voice which was lovely and ineffably sweet among the many voices with which God had spoken of old.
He went down to John the Baptist, to see and to hear a new prophet, and to be baptized for the remission of his sins. But John’s voice was the familiar voice of the stern and awful God ; he belonged to the old time, to the Law and the Prophets. He had not the knowledge of God which Jesus sought, and because he knew what he sought, already possessed. Jesus made no mistake about John. In the after-months he spoke clearly concerning him:
[ p. 26 ]
Verily I say unto you, Among men born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."
John belonged to the old order and the old knowledge: he was shut out from the new.
This is not justice; but justice has no part in the mystery of creation. The new is born, and the old is cast away. John’s baptism, like the blood on the door-posts of Israel in Egypt, was only a refuge from the Wrath to come. The Kingdom of God that Jesus discovered and created was other than that.
And it was discovered and created on that day when Jesus was baptized by John and went up out of the water. Then Jesus knew that the God whom he had sought existed, and that he and the God whom he had sought were one. Yet more than one, two in an ineffable relation of unity, so complete and so peaceful, so far beyond all that the intellect could comprehend of union between two, that there was but one human relation that would not wholly betray the truth. Father and Son. The Son had found his Father, and the Father his Son. [ p. 27 ] “For this my son was dead and is alive : he was lost and is found.”
In the Gospel of the Hebrews there is yet a third version of the voice which Jesus heard ; it, no less than the others, is authentic. It reads :
“My Son, in all the prophets did I await thee, that thou mightest come and I might rest in thee, for thou art my rest.”
None other than Jesus can have thought that thought or framed those words. The lonely God had longed for his son, for one who should know his secret heart, and pass beyond the terror and the lightning, the earthquake, and the tempest, to the silence of the still small voice. All through the long history of Israel had he waited, and now his son was born to him, born to him by a re-birth of the son’s own seeking, through a love which had followed the echoes of his voice though the prophets. The lonely God had heard their footsteps down the dread corridors as they came near, some so near that his longing heart would burst to speak a word, but none had passed the veil and the word had not been spoken. But now one had not faltered: his son was born, and the lonely God had rest.