[ p. 66 ]
HE WENT out from Capernaum to the shore of the lake, and the crowd came to him, and he taught them. It was his message that he preached : That the time was come, that the Kingdom of God was at hand, and that all men could enter into it by knowing themselves sons of God and returning to their Father.
Modern minds have tried to draw an absolute distinction between Jesus’ teaching and his preaching, and have declared that since he believed that the Kingdom would come suddenly upon men, he could not have taught a universal morality to men. Life was to be changed; therefore he could not have taught men what to do in life. He taught only a provisional “morality of the interim”— something wholly dependent on his proclamation of the End, which has lost its validity since the End did not come.
It is wrong. The foundation of all Jesus’ [ p. 67 ] preaching and teaching was single and simple ; it was his knowledge that he was a son of God and that all men might be sons of God like him. It was because he knew that, he knew that the End was coming. What he had to do was to show men how to become God’s sons. His teaching was not this “morality of the interim,” but the most fundamental part of his message. He taught men what they must do to make themselves sons of God, and so bring to pass the end of the dispensation and the coming of the Kingdom of God.
Nor is it possible to declare that this was a dream. The way to become a son of God which Jesus taught has never been tried. Men have avoided it as they would avoid destruction, because they have felt that to follow Jesus was destruction; it meant the annihilation of organized society. Their instinct was true ; it does mean that, and Jesus meant it to mean that. He preached anarchy, but an anarchy such that after a momentary chaos a new and more splendid, a new and ineffable, condition must begin.
No man can say that Jesus was wrong; those who have most deeply understood his thought have felt that he was right. They have felt that if men [ p. 68 ] could follow his teaching, even for one single day, human life would be permanently changed and not the mere temporal conditions of life, but human nature and the human consciousness.
There is that in the sheer and dizzy audacity of Jesus’ thought which seems must forever escape the minds both of the pure rationalist and the believer in Jesus’ divinity. By the latter his anarchic words are rendered innocuous; the dynamic and explosive force is taken from them by regarding them as the words of a God. They thus become the language of an impossible ideal which, by the nature of their source, cannot be meant for the living lives of ordinary men. The rationalist, who is as frequent in the Christian Church as he is out of it, having decided that Jesus was a humanitarian teacher who wanted to make men better, extorts from the reluctant texts an interpretation that Jesus conceived the Kingdom of God as a far-off divine event, or, finding it impossible to ignore the palpable fact that Jesus conceived the Kingdom of God as sudden and imminent, argues that his beliefs must be wholly interpreted in terms of the eschatology current in his day and have no meaning for our own.
[ p. 69 ]
To define and classify Jesus’ thought is impossible; it has to be seized by an act of imagination from the vantage-point within. Then it becomes irrelevant to ask whether Jesus conceived the Kingdom of God as supernatural or natural, as timeless or in time. There is no answer to such questions, because Jesus’ mind moved on a plane where such antitheses have no meaning. ’ Men were to become sons of God: if they would become sons of God, they and all things would be changed. Not gently changed, in the sense that bad men would become good, but radically, catastrophically changed, A new kind of life, a new order of consciousness, would begin, as different from that which men now have, as human life and human consciousness are different from animal life and animal consciousness. Between these there is an abyss. Such an abyss mankind would have leaped when they became sons of God.
Apparently this thought is too hard for most men. It has been all but utterly lost from the Christian Church : inevitably, because it begins by what seems a deliberate invocation of catastrophe. No organization can possibly be built on the catastrophic change. And where some [ p. 70 ] shadow of the thought has endured, as in the beliefs of Second Adventists and the like, who are the lineal descendants of the primitive Christian community and as heretical as they were, it has remained as crude as the primitive Christian belief in the coming of the End. That was almost a parody of Jesus’ thought, although it may well be that it was into such a form that Jesus first poured his own sublime meaning.
For what certainly emerges from his story is that no one, even of his nearest and dearest disciples, understood what Jesus meant when he spoke of the Kingdom of God. They were bewildered by his teaching. It is not unnatural : it is a mysterious teaching, and, like all true mysteries, it is both utterly simple and utterly unintelligible. The sting has been taken out of the mystery by the deification of Jesus, with its comfortable corollary that his ways are the ways of God and therefore past finding out. But with the magnificent and sustained effort of the nineteenth century to discover the historical Jesus, the mystery has returned. For men have found that Jesus of Nazareth cannot be made to fit their conceptions of a historical personality, Some of them [ p. 71 ] have thrown up the effort to rediscover him in despair, declaring that the mixture of truth and legend in his story is beyond elucidation; some have declared him a fiction ; some have consciously and deliberately presented a contradictory figure, and avowed that human science can do no more.
But men have not yet asked themselves the simple question whether the man who spoke Jesus’ words, the man who told the story of the Prodigal Son, the man who fired his followers with such belief in him that, after the extreme of defeat, they so passionately believed him victorious that they infected the whole world with their assurance—whether such a man could possibly fit their conceptions of a historical personality. Doubtless the simple question, if it occurred to them, was dismissed as dangerous*/ To admit the possibility that their conception of human personality would not fit Jesus of Nazareth was surely to admit that he might be divine.
Yet the dilemma was not absolute. The third road, the simple road, lay open, yet none would take it the road that led to Jesus the man of genius. It is hard, very hard, for the modern mind to admit the conception of Jesus as the man of [ p. 72 ] genius. He must have been simpler than ourselves, because he allowed himself to die in agony for what we know to be an illusion. There are illusions and illusions. There are things that are not, and things that are not yet. It takes a genius to conceive the things that are not yet; it takes more than a genius to die for them/" 1 Yet more than a genius is still a man.
Jesus taught, preached, expected, and knew the things that are not yet. Whether he conceived them as coming in time or out of it, we cannot know and he could not say. He saw, for he had known within himself, the change in kind that may overtake humanity, as it overtook the animal when the first tiny homo sapiens blinked at a new world. Then there was a change in kind and the birth of time; man, the time-measurer, had been flung up out of the vast Before him time did not exist; he created it, and cast it backward like a net into the ocean of the timeless past. Jesus saw another change in kind. Was that to be a change in time or out of it? Neither, and both, for it was a change of the time-conceiving soul.