[ p. 199 ]
CAESAREA Philippi marks the great division in the known life of Jesus. Before that moment he had been primarily a teacher; after it, he was Messiah, or Messiah-to-be. And to this great change in the life of Jesus corresponds a great change in his teaching.
But the change was not abrupt Jesus’ life, from his baptism in Jordan to his death, was an organic whole ; each successive phase grew inevitably from all that had gone before. It was the same with his teaching, and necessarily the same, f&r the uniqueness and the eternal validity of his teaching lay in the fact that it was lived.
That a great teacher should live his teaching is really an unfamiliar conception at a time when the divorce between the intellectual consciousness and the instinctive being has become extreme. For the meaning we naturally attach to the idea that a teacher should live his teaching is that he should [ p. 200 ] live up to his teaching. That conception itself has meaning only in relation to a conception of divorce between knowledge and being. But Jesus had overcome -this divorce ; when he first entered human history, he had already attained to a new condition of wholeness. On that attainment his teaching and his life were based. Therefore, no conceptions which are derived from the condition of divorce can serve to define them. The conceptions belong to a different and a lower category than the thing defined.
Jesus did not live up to his teaching : he lived it. There is no sign of effort or of strain in what we know of his teaching, or of his life as a teacher. Effort and strain had been in the past before his teaching began : they were to be again in his brief life as Messiah-to-be. But Jesus the teacher and Jesus the Messiah are distinct.
They are distinct; but they cannot be separated. The living historical Jesus inevitably became Messiah. To understand that inevitability is a prime necessity if we are to understand Jesus at all. But when we have understood his life as a single whole, then with the knowledge of its unity present in our minds we must turn back upon it, and distinguish [ p. 201 ] between the teaching and the Messiahship of Jesus.
Jesus the teacher and Jesus the Messiah are distinct. It would be bitter indeed for mankind were it not so. Jesus became Messiah because he was not only a teacher of an ultimate wisdom, but also rejected and a Jew. There was no place for a teacher of his knowledge, and his authority in a Jewish vision of things save as Messiah. Had Jesus been born of another people at another time, he would still have been essentially the same Jesus ; but his way of conceiving himself , and perhaps his destiny, would have been different. But Jesus was a man born of a certain nation, at a certain time in the world process. He had to fit himself into the world-conception of his race. By the very fact that his teaching shattered the world-conception of his race, he was bound to claim for himself a position at once supreme in Jewry and completely detached from Jewry. There was but one such position—the Messiah.
Jesus, as a Jew, could be only Messiah. There was, when he had become conscious of his isolation, no other place for him to take. He was more than a prophet, and he knew it But Jesus the Jew [ p. 202 ] no longer directly concerns mankind. What concerns mankind, to-day more than ever before, is Jesus the teacher.
But Jesus the teacher is far more than the angelic doctor of lovely precepts conceived by the liberalism of the nineteenth century. Jesus discovered and taught a final wisdom ; and this wisdom was such that it could be declared only by being lived. Therefore it can be learned from him only as a person. It is necessary to know the Jesus who went to his death to become Messiah in order that we may know Jesus the teacher; unless we understand his death we shall never fully understand his teaching. But this is not because his death was implicit in his teaching ; but because his teaching was implicit in his life. We have to know the loneliness, the courage, the human perfection of the man, in order to approach the living reality of what he taught For the teaching of Jesus was a teaching of life through life.
Nevertheless, though it is true that the teaching of Jesus can be truly apprehended only through his life and death, it remains tnle that Jesus the teacher and Jesus the Messiah are distinct Inseparable in fact, but distinct in significance. Jesus, [ p. 203 ] having his knowledge, because he was a Jew, became to himself Messiah; not his Messiahship, therefore, but his knowledge holds the primary significance. In order that his eternal knowledge could be expressed in the time and place in which he lived, he had to take upon himself a unique position. As his knowledge was unique, so his position must also be unique.
But it was, in fact, an accident that his knowledge was unique. He did not expect it; for him it was indeed a bitter tragedy. He had no desire that his should be a lonely knowledge : on the contrary his consuming desire was that all men should share it. No one did; no one could: he was born too many years before his time : his knowledge that he hoped to share remained with him alone. Therefore he conceived for himself a lonely majesty to correspond to his lonely knowledge, and steeled himself to his destiny. That was the best, the only thing that he could do : but it was, even for himself, a sublime pis-aller, a hazard which failed. JeSus taught a knowledge for men to understand ; if men had understood, he would never have become Messiah.
[ p. 204 ]
Here, therefore, at the parting of the ways> marked by his secret assumption of Messiahship at Caesarea, is the moment when we must seek to gather up into a unity the teaching of Jesus. Hitherto it has been presented in some sort of historical sequence, as it grew from the ineffable moment when Jesus was conscious of loving union with God: but the historical sequence cannot be preserved. There is no evidence on which to build. Relatively much of Jesus’ teaching was remembered, but few of the occasions. The brave attempt of Luke to provide historical settings for many of Jesus’ sayings is one that no modern writer can dare to emulate.
The central conception of Jesus as teacher is the conception of the Kingdom of God. At all times he conceived the Kingdom of God under two aspects : objectively, as a mysterious condition of existence which was to descend upon the universal world—the actual reign of God—and, subjectively, as a condition of existence to be achieved by the individual within himself. The relation between these two conditions was simple. The man who achieved the new condition within himself [ p. 205 ] would be, and knew that he would be, a partaker of the new condition when it overtook the universe.
The establishment of the objective condition in the universe, which we call, for mere distinction’s sake, the Reign of God, was not a new idea in the Jewish religion. On the contrary, it was an old one ; and it was one of the most living religious ideas of the pious Jew when Jesus began his ministry. Sometimes the Reign of God was understood materially, as a triumph of Israel, with God for their King, over all the nations of the earth; sometimes with a high degree of spirituality, as in the belief (not held by Paul alone) that the Jews were the chosen nation only in the sense that they had received “the oracles of God.” Thus their partaking of the Reign of God depended upon their obedience to those oracles. Obviously such a conception was capable of a profound spiritual significance, and in the mind of the highly spiritual Jew the triumph of Israel over the nations might well become little less than the ultimate union of the world under the immediate sovereignty of God.
Between the world as it was and the Reign of God, clearly a gulf was fixed. The religious imagination [ p. 206 ] of the Jew was busy, in the years immediately before the birth of Christ, in striving to bridge the gulf ; to fill it, so to speak, with a picture of the mighty transition. The picture thus created was eschatology, the science of the last things. It had no firm outlines, it was still in actual process of creation when Jesus appeared. Jesus himself was to give it a transcendent form. So that, to a certain but very limited extent, those are right who would regard Jesus as the great eschatological prophet. He was that, indeed, but that was the less important part of him.
Though the outlines of the picture of last things were vague and variable, certain things in it were fixed; above all, the coming of a supernatural figure called Messiah, and the judgment of the world by him. This judgment was essential, for only those who had by their lives deserved the reward could be partakers of the Reign of God; the others must be swept away. Again, the general belief was agreed that a forerunner would come to announce the advent of Messiah, and that this forerunner would be Elijah.
All this Jesus, as prophet, accepted : these were to him the conditions of the objective manifestation [ p. 207 ] of the Reign of God. As a teacher, he was not greatly concerned with them ; as prophet and as Messiah-to-be, he was. As teacher, he was above all concerned with the attainment by the Individual man of the subjective Kingdom of God. If this were achieved, the Last Things could take care of themselves : the members of the Kingdom of God could be sure of partaking of the Reign of God. Indubitably Jesus believed, when he began his ministry, that the Reign of God was imminent But the prime importance to him of that impending cosmic revolution was that it made unspeakably urgent the achievement of the Kingdom of God within the individual that he might partake of the Reign of God. It was a call upon him to change his mind and soul.
Much and grievous misunderstanding of Jesus’ teaching has been caused by rendering Jesus’ call for a change of mind and soul as a call for “repentance.” “Repentance” is ultimately a Pauline conception, which depends for its force upon an extreme consciousness of sin. The word, and above all the consciousness behind the word, has no real place in Jesus’ thought or teaching, which was profoundly different and quite differently profound [ p. 208 ] from Paul’s. It was of another and a higher order.
The achievement of the Kingdom of God in the individual was for Jesus supereminently a natural process. It was a passing beyond the condition of strain and effort There were, for him, three stages in the life of man: the unconscious life of the child, the conscious life of the man, and the new life of the member of the kingdom. In the unconscious life of the child there was spontaneity and wholeness; in the conscious life of the man there was inhibition and division ; in the new life of the member of the Kingdom, there was spontaneity and wholeness once more. Jesus taught, in the fullest sense of the word, the necessity and possibility of rebirth, not in the narrow and sectarian meaning, but with a new positiveness. The Pauline conception of unsleeping war between the soul and the body would have been abhorrent to him. Wholeness and spontaneity these were the marks of the member of the Kingdom.
This is the meaning of his singular insistence that children are by nature and birthright members of the Kingdom, and therefore examples of the change that must overtake men ; and unless the [ p. 209 ] attainment of the Kingdom within the individual can be conceived as the entry into a new condition of wholeness, wherein after a period of separation knowing and being are once more at one, the significance of Jesus’ teaching cannot be apprehended. “To do the will of God,” for instance, meant for Jesus something very different from what is generally understood by the words. For Jesus, the will of the reborn man was identical with the will of God. There was no effort: it was no question of keeping commandments. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, therefore man is lord also of the Sabbath.” The keeping of commandments, even of the two commandments which for Jesus comprehended the whole of the Law, was not so much insufficient as irrelevant. The member of the Kingdom did the will of God because he embodied the will of God.
The crucial reference for the teaching of “the mystery of the Kingdom of God” is the fourth chapter of Mark If it be accepted that Mark’s gospel is based upon the reminiscences of Peter, the fundamental importance of that chapter, in itself obvious, is immeasurably enhanced. There is [ p. 210 ] singularly little of Jesus’ teaching in Mark’s Gospel ; and the significance of the one chapter that is wholly devoted to it is increased accordingly. We may conclude that Peter believed that the real essence of Jesus’ message was contained therein.
The immediately striking features of the chapter are, first, that the parables in it are wholly concerned with the sowing and growing of seed, and, second, that these parables are accompanied by some of the hardest of all Jesus’ sayings. After speaking the parable of the Sower to the crowd at large, and ending with the almost esoteric formula : “He that can understand, let him understand,” Jesus was asked for an explanation. He gave it, and the explanation, unlike other explanations of parables in the Gospels, is palpably authentic. But Jesus was plainly disappointed with the failure of his disciples to comprehend the first of his parables of the mystery of the Kingdom. “You do not understand this parable! How then will you understand the rest of the parables?” And, again, after giving his explanation, he said :
Is a lamp brought to be put under a basket or a bed? Is it not to be put on a lamp-stand?
“For there is nothing hidden except to be revealed; [ p. 211 ] nor is anything mysterious exggpLto -be made plain.
“He that can understand, let him understand.”
That is to say—surely the meaning is unmistakable—that if Jesus spoke mysteriously, it was because he could do no other. In his strange parables, his mysterious words, was a light, an aid to direct comprehension; and in them he used his light as a light should be used, not to make things dark, but to make them clear. He went on:
“Take care what you understand. For with the measure with which you measure, it shall be measured to you again, and more added. For to him that hath, it shall be given: and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
It is clear that the two sayings, of which one is indeed hard, express, with the parallelism of Hebrew poetry, the same meaning; it is also clear that the saying : “With what measure you measure, it shall be measured to you again, . and more added,” whatever may be its application in other and later contexts, has here, in its original place, nothing to do with conduct. Jesus is not telling his disciples to take care what they do, but to take care [ p. 212 ] what they hear; he is saying that in proportion to their understanding of his words they shall be recompensed, but not equally—more shall be given to them as a free gift Likewise the saying: “To him that hath, it shall be given; and from him that hath not it shall be taken, even that which he hath,” applies not to money, but to the same thing, namely understanding. These two grim sayings—and they are grim—have precisely the same meaning. If a man have a spark of understanding, it will be made a flame: if he have no spark, he is condemned forever to darkness.
But understanding of what? That is clear: the understanding of “the mystery of the Kingdom of God,” which he sought to make clear in his parables of sowing and of seed. And the parables precisely fit the dark sayings. There is the sower who went forth to sow, and some of his seed fell on good ground and brought forth some thirty, some sixty, some an hundredfold. . . . “To him that hath, it shall be given . . . with the measure wherewith you measure it, it shall be measured to you again, and more added.” There is a natural, yet miraculous growth in the soul of him who is able to receive the word. Again, “The Kingdom [ p. 213 ] of God is as when a man casts seed on the earth, and sleeps by night and wakes by day, and the seed sprouts and shoots up—he knows not how. . . . Of itself the earth bears fruit, first the green leaf, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.” Let but the seed be given its earth in the human soul, and the growth follows, inevitable, incommensurable, by no act of the man. Again, the Kingdom is like a grain of mustard seed, the smallest seed of all, yet it leaps up and becomes a tree which birds may roost in.
It is not really possible to mistake Jesus’ meaning: he is speaking of the human soul and the knowledge of the mystery of the Kingdom of God. If a man can understand a little, he will understand all—swiftly, but naturally. No arduous intellectual effort is necessary, nor will it avail him. Given the gleam of understanding, full comprehension follows, not of the man himself. It happens : without the gleam nothing happens at all.
But what is the mystery? That Jesus himself could not expound. It was a true mystery, and he called it by that name. But the mystery of the Kingdom of God is the mystery of the Fatherhood of God—the vast and loving indifference of the [ p. 214 ] Creator. To know this mystery a rebirth of the individual man is necessary: rebirth and knowledge go hand in hand. This knowledge is therefore either meaningless or true; but if a man understands, the understanding is wonderful. Suddenly he catches a glimpse, and it shines “like a treasure hid in a field which when a man finds he goes joyfully and sells all that he has to buy that field.”
In Jesus’ teaching the rebirth of the individual man was a birth into a knowledge of God as Father, Apart from this rebirth, God could not be known; to know him was to know him as Father. Therefore, to assert or deny the fatherhood of God, without experience of this rebirth, is to utter empty words. Only those who have become God’s sons can know him as Father. This is the real meaning of the famous sentence : “No man knoweth the Son but the Father, nor the Father save the Son.” It is probable, and it has been supposed in the previous narrative, that these words were spoken at a moment when Jesus had realized that his teaching of rebirth had been rejected, and he had no choice but to believe himself the only actual son of God ; but it is certain that the knowledge [ p. 215 ] of God as Father which he claimed for himself was unique only by bitter accident He taught that potentially all men were God’s sons in precisely the same sense as he: the tragedy was that they refused to realize their potentialities.
To be reborn was to know God as Father with the same immediate knowledge that Jesus had achieved. But what was it—to know God as Father? Unfortunately, unless a man has felt in himself the need, and touched in himself the experience of rebirth, it is impossible to convey to him even an inkling of the content of this knowledge, concerning which Jesus himself spoke the inexorable sentence : “To him that hath, it shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away that which he hath.” But, although there was in Jesus’ experience of God a quality peculiar to himself, an ineffable sweetness of personal reunion, which directly derived from the personal quality of Jesus himself, the kind of the experience was not unique: it can be paralleled exactly from the experience of great saints and great poets. Fundamentally, it was an act of profound obeisance to the apprehended wonder and beauty of the universe a sudden and forever incontrovertible [ p. 216 ] seeing that all things have their place and purpose in a great harmony. This is the meaning of Jesus’ words :
“Love your enemies, and pray for them that do you harm. That thus ye may be sons of your Father : for he makes his sun to rise upon good men and bad, and his rain to fall upon the just and the unjust.”
The utterance is crucial, for it reveals that to know the Father is to know, and to be filled with love for, the power which makes no distinction between good men and bad, just and unjust. That power which created the ineffable harmony of good and evil in the world created it with the surpassing love of the great Demiurge : and those who can for a moment see the universe with the Father’s eyes must love it with his love.
It is manifest that a command to show love of the kind enjoined by Jesus in that saying cannot be obeyed, except by the reborn man. In order to be sons of the Father, men must know the Father ; in order to love like the Father, they must know how the Father loves ; in order to be perfect like the Father, they must know how the Father is perfect. Jesus’ teaching of conduct is therefore in the main an enunciation of the spontaneous acts of [ p. 217 ] the reborn man. When he sought to reduce It Into the form of commandments, it was comprised in two simple ones which, being commands to love, are impossible to obey. No man can love either God or his neighbor by taking thought; nor is love an end in itself to be pursued. Indeed, it cannot be pursued without falsity. And again, it is utterly impossible to separate loving one’s neighbor from its first source, in loving God ; until you can love your neighbor with God’s love, you cannot really love him; until you know God you cannot know what his love is. The loving of men which can exist apart from the knowing of God is not love, as Jesus meant it, at all. The man who knows God knows immediately that he must forgive his enemies; and the man who does not know immediately that he must not resist evil, does not know God.
Of this order is most of Jesus’ teaching of conduct: it is a description of the spontaneous and necessary acts of the man reborn into membership of the Kingdom and knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. Men were to be reborn into a new condition of being in which they naturally did the will of God; as one thus reborn, Jesus spoke and performed [ p. 218 ] the will of God. If we conceive rebirth as the creation of a living and unbroken unity between the member of the Kingdom and God himself, we can distinguish two kinds in Jesus’ teaching of conduct: he enjoined not only acts which were the fruit of this union between man and God, but also acts which should remove obstacles to this union. He declared what men did when they were reborn; and declared also what men must do if they desired to be reborn.
To the latter kind belongs his unmistakable teaching concerning possessions, which can indeed be mistaken only by those whose chief concern is not to expound, but to make palatable Jesus’ teaching. He again and again demanded the complete abandonment of all possessions : not because of any evil inherent in money as such, but because wealth was a mighty obstacle in the way of union with God. It is the fashion among commentators to speak of the injunction to absolute poverty as “the Ebionite heresy.” But who declared the Ebionites heretical? Not Jesus.
Nevertheless, it would be foreign to the spirit of Jesus’ teaching to press the injunction to poverty in isolation. Not the possession of wealth so much [ p. 219 ] as the attachment to wealth was what he denounced. “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” And Jesus believed that the possession of wealth almost inevitably involved attachment to it, and consequently an inability to receive and respond to the teaching of the Kingdom. In the parable of the Sower the “deceit of riches” is represented as among the influences most hostile to an understanding of the mystery of the Kingdom.
But wealth is but one form of attachment to the unregenerate life. Jesus no less peremptorily enjoined the dissolution of far more precious attachments, the abandonment of home and family. And it would be dishonest to mitigate the injunction. Jesus evidently believed that a complete severance from all attachments whatsoever was a necessary preliminary of complete rebirth. We know he had chosen this path himself, and we know the result that was obtained thereby; we may understand, therefore, that Jesus’ teaching of this necessity is extreme. He demands that, in order to prepare the way for the union of complete suffusion by God, a man should “hate his father and his mother, aye, and even his own life”; he demands, if need should be, even physical mutilation. “If thine eye [ p. 220 ] is an obstacle, pluck it out and cast it from thee. . . ”
But it is all-important to realize that this ruthless rejection of all attachments is simply a means to the great end—the preparation of the good soil into which the mystery of the Kingdom may be received, and the swift and sudden growth into the knowledge that God is Father and men his sons. There is an ascetic side to Jesus’ teaching; but this asceticism is as it were the preliminary technique of attainment The goal once attained, the element of self -constraint immediately disappears ; as Jesus fasted in the Wilderness, but never again. A new, rich spontaneity of life is achieved : the living water wells upward from the depths and flows gaily through the new-born man ; in this newness of life attachments are not refused, the condition of attachment becomes simply impossible. The reborn son of God moves with an utter freedom through the worldly life. He does not need to hold himself aloof from it No tension of the will nor rigor of denial is required of him. He is become simply incapable of attachments, because he is become wholly the living and conscious instrument of God’s will. God has gained a new [ p. 221 ] organ of expression, therefore his mere living is secured to him by God, and mere living—the maintenance of his physical body as the perfect organ of God’s will—is all that he needs or desires.
“Do not go seeking for food and drink, and do not worry. It is the pagans of the world who set their minds on these. But your Father knows that you need them. Seek for his Kingdom, and these things shall be given you also.”
The famous passage to which these words are the conclusion—“Take no thought for the morrow, what ye shall eat and what ye shall drink”—has in it not the faintest tinge of ascetic rigor. It is a description of the life of an achieved member of the Kingdom, not a command to abnegation as a means of entering it. The asceticism of Jesus’ teaching applies only to the period of preparation ; the preparation past, and rebirth achieved, the asceticism also is past, and the care-free life begins. For the new-born son the essentials of life are provided by God: he becomes one with the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. He sups joyfully with tax-gatherers and sinners, he gladly receives the harlot’s perfume and loves the gift for “a thing of beauty”; he is to the eye of ascetic rigor “a gluttonous [ p. 222 ] man and a winebibber.” He lives, to outward seeming, at all adventure; he absolutely rejects all rules and ordinances ; he fasts or feasts at his own sweet will, which is the sweet will of God. The member of the Kingdom is an absolutely free man, because he is absolutely obedient to God’s will ; and it is possible for him to be thus absolutely obedient because, by the preliminary abandonment of all attachments, he has made himself perfectly responsive to the voice of God.
Forgiveness, love, non-resistance to evil—these follow as the night the day in the new condition. The secret of it is that “You must be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect” Man becomes one with God : just as God makes his sun rise on the evil man and the good, so the son of God loves the evil man and the good alike. He sees, as with God’s own eyes, that these things must be so and not otherwise, and that evil will never be overcome save by the goodness which knows that evil has its own perfect right to existence. The goodness which denies evil, and rules directly to destroy it, is not goodness at all, for it is not in accordance with that perfection of God which has created evil [ p. 223 ] and good alike. The perfect tolerance of God must be achieved by man. Therein we touch the secret center of Jesus’ profoundest teaching : it is no less than that man must be God. It is the highest and the truest wisdom ever taught to men ; and of the man who lived it is no rtiystery that his followers should have come to believe that he was God made man. There was nothing else for them to believe. And even to-day there are only two things that can be believed about Jesus by those who can see the facts at all. Either Jesus was God made man, or he was man made God. It is easier and less exacting to believe the former: but the latter is the truth.
Perhaps it is unnecessary to say more concerning Jesus’ teaching of the subjective attainment of the Kingdom of God. The teaching is, and was avowed by Jesus himself to be, either self-evident or incomprehensible. But it is necessary to insist that there was from the beginning a vital connection between the subjective attainment of the Kingdom, and the objective establishment of the Reign of God. The imminence of the Reign of God is everywhere presupposed in Jesus’ teaching. [ p. 224 ] The attainment of the subjective Kingdom carried with it the certainty of sharing in the objective Reign. The single phrase, the Kingdom of God, was used by Jesus in both meanings: and those are wholly wrong who would interpret it rigidly in one sense or the other. The meaning of the phrase is always apparent from the context. What is evident is that the profound originality of Jesus’ teaching lies in his subjective teaching.
For, as we have said, the belief in the imminence of the objective Reign of God was by no means new in Jewish religion. John the Baptist had proclaimed it, and Jesus had followed him. Jesus had, so to speak, inherited from John the certainty that God’s judgment was near at hand. Into the form of this inherited certainty he poured a new knowledge, of the nature of God and his judgment, and of the means by which a man could make himself secure of God’s judgment. Thus, inevitably, the nature of the Reign of God was completely changed from what it had been to John the Baptist : it was changed from the transcendental theocracy established through the stern and awful judgment of God’s Messiah into the blessed company of reborn and reunited sons of God. The Judgment [ p. 225 ] was indeed still to come, but men had now, if they would but hear the glad tidings, a means of knowing beyond all doubt that they would be received in joy by a loving Father.
Therefore Jesus could truly say that John the Baptist had no part in the Kingdom of God: he did not know what it was.
“Verily, I tell you : among men born of women there has not arisen a greater than John the Baptist. But the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.”
And a yet subtler and more profound distinction was to follow.
“From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of God suffers violence, and violent men snatch it to themselves. For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And if you can receive it, this is Elijah that was to come. He that hath ears let him hear !”
With the reference to John as the forerunner of himself, now become Messiah-to-be, which dates the saying as belonging to the time at Caesarea Philippi, we are not now concerned. But the “violence” that was being done to the Kingdom of God from the days of John until the moment of [ p. 226 ] Jesus’ speaking, was the violence done to it by Jesus and those who understood his teaching. By achieving the Kingdom within themselves, they compelled the coming of the Reign. This may appear a violent argument; but, of course, it is not an argument. The attainment of union with God, as of a son with a Father, was in itself the guaranty that this condition was on the brink of perpetuation. The true disciple of Jesus, as it were, tasted already the joys of the eternal Kingdom, and with them the certainty that its establishment forever was but a matter of days. Thus, the member of the Kingdom, who comprehended the mystery of the Kingdom, compelled its coming. John the Baptist could only wait for it.
Therefore John belonged to the old order, the past dispensation; he was reckoned with the Law and the Prophets. For all his greatness, Jesus reckoned him as making one in the essential with the Pharisees who asked when the Kingdom would come, to whom he declared :
“The Kingdom of God will not come by watching for it; nor will men say, ‘Here it is I’ or There it is.’ For, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.”
[ p. 227 ]
That did not mean, at all, for Jesus, that the Kingdom of God was only within men, purely subjective ; but that the objective event could only be brought to pass by the subjective attainment.
Because Jesus’ teaching of the Kingdom was thus rooted in subjectivity it has an eternal validity. No earthly disappointment can touch it The Kingdom of God which has not come is the Kingdom which comes by watching; it will never come. The only Kingdom of God which can come is that which Jesus taught; and if in the fullness of time it comes indeed, it will have come precisely as he taught that it would come, by the sacred “violence” which men will have done to it, and to themselves.
This was Jesus’ only teaching of the Kingdom. It belongs to his ministry before Caesarea Philippi : after Caesarea Philippi he spoke differently concerning it, because he was then no longer a teacher, but the chosen Judge of humankind. He had found that men would not listen to his teaching, or, if they would listen, could not understand. They would not, they could not, by their own attainment, compel the Kingdom to come. There was nothing for it: Jesus alone, unaided, uncomprehended, [ p. 228 ] would pluck down the Kingdom for them. He had waited for the Messiah in vain; now he would be Messiah, and men’s Judge. No more sublime purpose has been conceived by the human mind than that which Jesus conceived when he made the Messiah—himself; and he not only conceived this purpose, but followed and endured it to the end. And if we need to seek for motives of this supreme dedication of himself, we shall find the deepest in his title and his words in the sentence, “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” What men would not and could not receive from him as teacher, he would force upon them by becoming God’s Messiah.
It could not be done. He was not God’s Messiah, and at the last he knew it. But that a teacher of wisdom should have had the loving courage of that attempt to fathom and forestall the inscrutable purposes of God is an event in the history of mankind which even to-day has scarcely begun its full work upon the minds and souls of men. That final, deliberate act of sublime imagination and lonely heroism, absolutely differentiates the teaching of Jesus from that of other profound teachers [ p. 229 ] of mankind. The teaching of Jesus is not his teaching only; it is his life and death.
Nevertheless, to understand it, we must keep distinct Jesus the teacher and Jesus the Saviour; we must remember always that it was only because of men’s blindness of soul and hardness of heart that Jesus became the Saviour. And if we insist on regarding him as the Saviour, we become like the Pharisees who expected salvation as an external event. True, Jesus tried to give it thus to men who could not take it otherwise : but he knew at the last, as he had known at the beginning, that it could not be given save “to him that hath.”
Nor can the conception of Jesus as Saviour and the teaching of Jesus ever be truly reconciled, for Jesus taught that the member of the Kingdom entered into an immediate relation to God. Therefore the idea that this relation should be mediated strikes at the very heart of his teaching. That Jesus himself did verily lay down his life to mediate it, that he did in fact succeed, in another way than any he had dreamed, in mediating it, does not affect the truth that he chose this path as a counsel of despair—a sublime pis-aller. To put the matter simply, to one who does veritably acknowledge [ p. 230 ] the truth of Jesus’ teaching, Jesus cannot be more than fellow son or brother. Greatest of brothers, first of sons, no doubt : but the moment he becomes different in nature from fellow-son or brother, what he taught as teacher is denied.
And it is not possible to understand the teaching of Jesus and to deny it. To understand it is to accept it: it is either meaningless or true. It is, essentially, an obvious teaching. But obvious only to those who have in them a gleam of knowledge of the condition of life which it promises and from which it springs. “To him that hath it shall be given ; and from him that hath not it shall be taken away, even that which he hath” is really a definition of the nature of the knowledge which Jesus taught It is a knowledge which can be apprehended only through a change in the learner’s being. To understand the teaching of the Kingdom, a man must already be of the Kingdom.
Futile, therefore, to attempt to expound the teaching of Jesus in detail. All that may be done is to indicate, as we have tried to do, the living center from which alone it can be apprehended in the spontaneous beauty of its truth. If a single word must be found to describe his teaching, it [ p. 231 ] shall be this word “spontaneous.” Indeed, if the significance of this word “spontaneous,” applied to a fully conscious human being, be understood, the teaching itself is understood. It is a teaching of a profound and final human wisdom; therefore it is spontaneous; for spontaneity is the consummation of wisdom.
In other words, Jesus’ teaching is, and is eternal because it is, a teaching of life. Life cannot be taught, it can only be lived and known. Those alone understand the teaching of Jesus who know that it is not teaching at all, but simply the living utterance of one who had achieved rebirth into a new condition of life. Its purpose is to create this new life in others, and in those who have ears to hear it new life is immediately born. Whether Jesus himself spoke, or. the author of the fourth Gospel imagined them, the secret of Jesus’ teaching is in the words, “I came that ye might have life, and have it more abundantly.” The teaching of Jesus is a gay teaching, as all teaching of life must be. Good news, indeed : a promise of infinite riches : “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all these things shall be added unto you.”