[ p. 235 ]
FROM Caesarea Philippi, where the great decision was taken by himself and confirmed by God, Jesus went straight to his journey’s end Jerusalem and death. He had a choice of roads before him : either to take the road east of Jordan, through Decapolis and Herod’s tetrarchy of Peraea; or to take the road west of Jordan, through Galilee and Samaria. Both were dangerous : on either hand he must pass through Herod’s territory.
For himself and a few inner disciples he chose the latter ; and it seems that others with the bulk of his Galilean followers—perhaps a few hundreds—took the common pilgrim road through Peraea to meet him again at the Jordan ford not far from Jericho.
He passed through Galilee concealed; yet he could not resist the desire to revisit for the last time his second home, “the house” at Capernaum. [ p. 236 ] On the road thither he told his disciples once more of his coming suffering that he must be betrayed to death. “But they could not understand,” says Mark, “and they were afraid to ask him.”
“So they came to Capernaum,” Mark continues. “And when he was in the house, he asked them, What were you disputing about on the road?’ ”
There are no more pregnant words, in any history, than these bare and naive sentences of Mark. Jesus did not know what his disciples had been disputing: he had been walking, silent anji alone, on the road ahead of them ; only the murmur of their petulant voices had reached him. They were afraid to speak to him, now he was become a being apart, whom they could no longer approach as in the old days. They could not understand his words : he had told them that he was to be betrayed.
That was new. Not that they did not understand it because it was new; they understood nothing of him now. But now for the first time Jesus spoke of his betrayal.
Was it a new thought that came to him as he strode ahead? Had he chosen betrayal, and his betrayer? The more one reads the Gospel narrative, the more certain it seems that Jesus’ betrayal [ p. 237 ] and the manner and the agent of it were predetermined by himself.
Jesus had deliberately chosen the way of suffering and death; it was forced upon him by his consciousness of what he was. ’ There was no place for the solitary son of God upon this earth, nor for a living Messiah in the world. Having chosen his ineluctable destiny, he made his face rigid to go to Jerusalem. He had chosen to die in Jerusalem, and to die at the feast of the Passover. He would be the sacrificial lamb of his people and of the world : “As the sheep before the shearers is dumb, so he would open not his mouth.”
It was an unparalleled imagination. Two thousand years of history, through which its appeal to the soul of Western men has never been diminished, vindicate it as man’s supreme achievement. That through the centuries it has been understood in a way a modern mind can no longer understand it as the self-sacrifice of God himself incarnate is of little moment: formulations change, but the spiritual verity is the same. What the devout Christian has worshiped in the God-man, we can revere in the man-God. He could not believe that a man was capable of so supreme an imagination ; [ p. 238 ] we can. That is the only difference. We understand the old forms: the spiritual verity shines through them for any man to see. But we know simply because we belong to the twentieth century and must not reject our birthright that the old forms are forms. We see their beauty and their necessity. The man who sees nothing in the great Christian dogmas but illusion and error is blind indeed.
The Christian verity is a statement of this sublime imagination and act of the man Jesus. Two thousand years ago it appeared to those who contemplated it so sublime that it must be the imagination and the act of God. So, in the final contemplation, it was. In Jesus God was manifest as he has never since been manifest in man : but manifest in him, because he was wholly man. God is not manifest otherwise; he does not exist save in all the particularity of creation. Jesus was the supreme manifestation of God simply because he was the supreme manifestation of Man.
Faith in the God-man, knowledge of the man-God, both spring alike from contemplation of the imagination and act of the man Jesus. One is the response of a soul which says : No man could have [ p. 239 ] conceived or done this thing ; the other the response of the soul which says : No one but a man could have conceived or done it. Both are true. But the former truth belongs to the past; the latter to the future.
Yet see how close they come. For the believer in the God-man, the passion and the manner of Jesus was predetermined by God ; for the believer in the man-God it was predetermined by himself. But for both alike predetermined. That is the essential. On this essential predetermination of his passion all rationalistic lives of Jesus are wrecked. It is for the rationalist an element imported into the story by after-generations to correspond with their belief in his Godhead : for the rationalist and the liberal Jesus is, however kindly they may put it, only the fanatic who lost his life at the head of a heretical and revolutionary movement. He did not, because he could not, predetermine the manner and day of his death. He could not do this, because he was only a man. And for the rationalist and the liberal “only a man” means “only a man like me.” What they could not do, he could not do. Never was there yet a liberal or a rationalist life of Jesus that did not [ p. 240 ] end on a note of sympathetic condescension : he did this, and it was Very beautiful, but we understand better.
We do not understand better. To look for a liberal Jesus is mistaken. But it is mistaken, also, to do as the eschatologist and put him into an abyss of darkness, with the assurance that we cannot understand him. Understanding is not the faculty by which Jesus can be known: but intuition. We have to seize in act a greater spirit than our own, we have to pluck from the future, the man of the future. Jesus can be reached, if he can be reached at all, through the man of genius alone. But he will never be understood.
Jesus was not a fanatic who lost his life in a heretical movement He was a new kind of man, who was inexorably driven by reason of his new faculties to believe himself the only son of God, and to seek the only death that was fitting for such a one. The manner of that death he predetermined for his own great ends. He was able to predetermine it because he was a man of new faculties and new powers.
To die at Jerusalem as the Paschal Lamb was not an easy thing to accomplish. At Jerusalem [ p. 241 ] was a Roman procurator and a Roman garrison, ready indeed to do Roman justice upon him were he to appear as an enemy of the civil power. But what had he to do with the civil power? He was deliberately indifferent to it And as for placing himself in a position in which he should die as a common criminal, nothing could be more alien from his purpose. His purpose was to die as the suffering Messiah.
To proclaim himself openly as Messiah would be fatal. He would be condemned not as Messiah, but as a common f actionary. There had been Messiahs before in Jewish history, would-be restorers of Israel on earth: and Roman justice had been done upon them. Jesus was an utterly different Messiah—unthinkable to Jewish expectation and harmless to the Roman. The Messiah that he was was completely beyond the comprehension of even his own disciples. He could not openly proclaim himself that Messiah; it would be only a decision and a blasphemy.
How then was he to achieve his purpose? There was no way but the one he chose, by the intuition of genius. His secret Messiahship should be betrayed at his own appointed time to the rulers of [ p. 242 ] Jerusalem: at the last moment, when it had been placed secure beyond all doubt that he was no leader of an earthly Israel. Till the day came he would preach and teach his own message in Jerusalem; when the day came his chosen disciple should betray his secret to his enemies. Till the day came they should find no cause of action against him ; when the day came his fate would be certain. He would be condemned as the Messiah, but as the Messiah of a spiritual Israel, and he would die as the Paschal Lamb.
He needed but one man: one to betray him. Judas of Kerioth is lost forever in the darkness of history. His memory has been blotted out. Yet, even by the believers in the God-man, the name of Judas should have been revered as the name of the man by whose hand God’s sacrifice was made possible. For a believer in the man-God Judas stands next to Jesus himself in the great story. For he, when all were without understanding, must have understood. Perhaps not all, but something. Whether Jesus knew his weakness, or discovered his strength; whether he was the unconscious instrument or the conscious partner in Jesus’ purpose—must remain forever hidden. The man who [ p. 243 ] betrayed Jesus and hanged himself in sorrow, judged by the commonest measure, was a man, and perhaps more a man than the disciples who left their Master and fled, or than Peter who denied him thrice.
From the bare facts of the synoptic story we are forced to conclude an understanding between Jesus and Judas. Had Judas been simply a common traitor, why should he have chosen the precise moment that Jesus desired and his enemies would have avoided for his treachery? Why did he bend himself so faithfully to Jesus’ purpose? And, apart from this, I think that no one who submits his imagination to the atmosphere of the story of the Passion, mysterious and fragmentary though it is, can fail to feel the tension of a secret and profound understanding between Jesus and his betrayer. Judas also was fulfilling a mission. More than that indeed we cannot say, save that the mere existence of this understanding demands that Judas should have understood something of Jesus’ purpose when the disciples understood nothing at all. May it not be that when Jesus first spoke of the necessity of his betrayal on the road to Capernaum, and the disciples “did not understand his saying and [ p. 244 ] were afraid to ask him,” one of them did understand, and bowed himself to the necessity of his great Master? His name has been darkened by Christian piety. How were men who could not understand Jesus’ purpose to understand the nature of him who served it? And if this plea for Judas seems too strange for sufferance, let it be forgotten as the vagary of one man’s imagination ; but let it be remembered that Judas was more necessary to the great drama than any other of the Master’s disciples.
“What were you disputing about on the road?” Jesus asked his followers when he entered, for the last time, the house in Capernaum.
They were silent At least they had a sense of the incommensurability of their Master’s thought and theirs. They were disputing which of them was the greatest in the Kingdom of God. The irony of it!
Jesus sat down and called a little child to him, and clasped him to him, and said :
“If any one wishes to be first, he must be last of all and servant of all. Verily, I tell you, except you turn and become like little children, you shall [ p. 245 ] not enter the Kingdom of God. Whoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the great one in the Kingdom of God.
And whoever shall receive one such little child in my name, receives me. And whoever receives me, receives not me, but him that sent me. But whoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were good that a mill-stone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the deeps of the sea.
Woe to the world, because of offenses. For it must be that offenses come, but woe to the man through whom comes the offense.
“See that you despise not one of these little ones. For I tell you their angels in heaven do continually behold the face of the Father. Therefore it is not the will oLthe Father that one of these little ones should be lost.”
John said to him:
“Master, on the road we saw a man who was not a follower of ours casting out daemons in your name. We forbade him because he was not a follower.”
Jesus answered:
“Do not forbid him. For no man who does a [ p. 246 ] work of power in my name can easily speak evil of me. He who is not against us is for us.”
It was enough for Jesus now that he should not be opposed and persecuted; he asked no more. The saying is in keeping with the enforced hiding of his brief passage through his native land.
From Galilee he made his way, perhaps with James and John for sole companions, through Samaria.
Of this journey through Samaria we know only Luke’s story how in a certain village no house would take Jesus in because his face was set towards Jerusalem; and how James and John, the naive and clamorous pair, the “Sons of Thunder,” asked that they might call fire from heaven to destroy the villagers. Jesus “turned and rebuked them; and they went to another village.”
The revelation of the gulf that yawned between Jesus’ mind and the thoughts of his nearest disciples is terrible. How could these men have had the smallest gleam of comprehension of his purpose in going to die in Jerusalem, or have understood for a moment what manner of Messiah he was? It was not possible. For them he was a miracleworker who was going to Jerusalem to work the [ p. 247 ] greatest miracle of all. As by a wave of his potent wand, a marvelous kingdom would rise: the disciples in purple and fine linen would be the King’s viceroys, and all their enemies would be defeated and slain.
Scarcely less crude than this were the visions of their minds while they walked behind their silent master. Not that they were confident : they were terribly afraid. The thing seemed so impossible. But it was far easier to believe in such an impossibility than in a Messiah who would be slain. As far as they might, they believed in it.
Who should be first, who greatest? was the incessant subject of their talk. Sometimes he turned to them to tell them that his was to be no earthly glory and no kingdom of gold and jasper. What was the use? What had Jesus to tell that could be understood by one who in his old age imagined the coming of the Lord in the terms of the Book of Revelation? That was when John was old: what would the young imagination of John have been?
The words of Jesus to his disciples which were spoken on his journey to Jerusalem reveal his constant effort to disabuse his followers’ minds of these crude expectations. He is represented as declaring [ p. 248 ] to them on three different occasions that he would be condemned to death and killed, and on the third day he would rise again ; and the disciples are represented as being bewildered by the saying, as not understanding its meaning, and as afraid to ask him. Two simple considerations make it evident that this prophecy was reshaped after the event Not only would it have been impossible, even for the disciples, to misunderstand the simple statement that he would rise again in the body on the third day, but the conduct of his disciples after the crucifixion makes it certain that they had no such expectation. Contradictory as the narratives of the resurrection are, they agree in this one particular : that the disciples were completely unprepared for such an event. The three prophecies assigned to Jesus, with the addition that the disciples did not understand them, represent the naive effort of the early Church at once to assert that Jesus prophesied his resurrection after three days and to explain away the awkward fact that the disciples had behaved as though his resurrection was inconceivable to them.
Jesus did not expect to be resurrected in the body after three days. He expected something of a different [ p. 249 ] order from bodily resurrection, and he expected this to come before he touched the extreme of bodily death. Moreover, it would be exact to say that Jesus did not believe in bodily resurrection at all. He believed in resurrection: he believed that the human being would rise to a more glorious existence after death : but he did not believe in bodily resurrection. The meaning of his reply to the question of the Sadducees is unmistakable. In their crude conception of the resurrection as a resurrection of the physical body “they were far astray, ignorant both of the Scriptures and the power of God. For when men rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are married, but are as angels in heaven.” By his phrase “like angels in heaven” Jesus was trying to describe another order of existence than the bodily. A glimpse of what the phrase meant to him may be had from his words concerning little children, that “their angels do always behold the face of my Father in heaven.” This did not mean, as it is often interpreted, that little children had guardian angels. Little children were, for Jesus, as it were by nature, members of the Kingdom of God. They were beings who had not yet lost their birthright: [ p. 250 ] They were single and whole. When they grew to man’s estate, and the divided consciousness of the adult took hold of them, they lost their birthright. They could regain it only by being born again and so becoming sons of God and members of the Kingdom once more. Beneath that simple and beautiful phrase concerning the children lies a deep spiritual wisdom, which sees the three great ages of man as the completeness and innocence of the child, the division and consciousness of estrangement of the man, and the regained completeness and innocence of the member of the Kingdom. The child and the son of the Kingdom alike behold, each through his angel or spiritual part, the face of the Father; and the condition of being or having an angel was simply the condition of being in the presence of God. The ignorant who endow the angels of Jesus’ sayings with bodily existence, and the clever who dismiss them as mere relics of an outworn creed, are alike “far astray, not knowing the power of God.”
Jesus, from the beginning of his ministry to his death, was trying to express ineffable truths to simple people; and he expressed them with a simple profundity which has never been approached [ p. 251 ] by another man. His incessant effort was to set aside precisely those crass interpretations which later generations, like the disciples themselves, have thrust upon his teaching. Just as to this day nine men out of ten cannot conceive the resurrection save as a resurrection of the physical body; just as the Church itself was founded on a physical interpretation of indubitable experiences of the continued presence of Jesus so in Jesus’ own lifetime his words were continually misunderstood. He had not only a conception, but a direct and continuous experience, of another kind of existence than the physical. This was his condition of being a son of God, or a member of the Kingdom of God. This condition could be attained, as he himself had attained it, here and now. But men would not; and because they would not, Jesus would, by his death and his return as Messiah, establish the condition for all men.
Jesus believed that at the very moment of his death, before the last spark of consciousness went out, he would be taken up, and pass wholly into this other order of existence. The articulate framework of his belief was derived from the Messianic expectation of his day : he thought in the terms of [ p. 252 ] the age, but he knew a timeless knowledge. At the last his thought betrayed him, but not his knowledge: he had tried to express something which could not be expressed. But he came nearer than any man to expressing the ineffable.
There is little doubt that Jesus essayed the hopeless task of telling his disciples of his expectation. It is certain that he spoke to them dark words which they did not understand, whose meaning they did not dare to ask him. It must have been so. What those words were we can only guess. He was not to rise again from the dead after three days; he was both to die and not to die; at the moment of death he was to be taken up to sit on the right hand of God, whence he would come to judge both the quick and the dead. This did not happen as Jesus expected it to happen. But what the imagination of the disciples hoped against hope to happen was almost a caricature of Jesus’ own expectation. They expected, by some miraculous transfiguration, the establishment of a glorious kingdom on earth, in which the first places would be reserved for themselves.
This crude imagination Jesus sought at every opportunity to correct on his last journey. When [ p. 253 ] the disciples would have prevented the little children from being brought to him, he was angry, and said:
“Let the children come to me: do not prevent them. For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as they. Truly I tell you, whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a child, shall never enter into it.” And he clasped them in his arms, and blessed them, laying his hands upon them.
It was not easy to understand; it never will be easy to understand : and even those who come near to understanding it often err in insisting upon an element of childishness. Not to the childish, but to the childlike and to the child, belongs the Kingdom : to those born whole, and to those reborn into wholeness. But the essential which Jesus sought to impress upon his disciples was that entry into the Kingdom was a condition and an experience. It is indeed to make the same mistake as did his disciples to imagine that this condition and this experience were but the qualification for entrance into the Kingdom. The condition and the experience were all in all; but it followed of necessity that those who partook of it must enter into another [ p. 254 ] order of existence. The Kingdom of God was, at one and the same time, a condition of soul within men, and an order of existence outside them, a universal order of a new world yet to be.
The story of the rich young man, which belongs to this same journey, has a like import. As Jesus took the road again from Capernaum the young man ran towards him and fell on his knees.
“Good master,” he said, “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
“Why do you call me good? No one is good save God. You know the commandments : Do no murder, Commit no adultery, Do not steal, Bear no false witness, Do no injustice, Honour your father and your mother.”
“All these commandments I have kept since a boy, Master!” Jesus looked at him, and loved him.
“One thing is lacking. Go, sell all that you have and give it to the poor and you shall have treasure in heaven: then come hither and follow me.”
His face fell at the word, and he went away sad, for he had many possessions. Those are right who maintain that these words of Jesus contain no absolute injunction of poverty. It was indeed not [ p. 255 ] the rejection of his wealth as such that was “the one thing lacking” to the young man whom Jesus loved, but his rejection of his attachment to his wealth. It was possible that a man might be rich and inherit eternal life ; but yet in truth it was all but impossible. To have riches and not be attached to them; to keep possessions and yet be ready to surrender them at a word ; to be wealthy and live as though one had no wealth at all this was almost beyond human power. If the young man had said, “Master, I will,” Jesus would have called him back : to such a willingness the act was not necessary.
Jesus watched the young man going sadly away: then he said to his disciples :
“How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the Kingdom of God!”
He meant precisely what he said: that it was terribly hard for a rich man to attain that complete surrender to the will of God which was the sign of belonging to the Kingdom. His thought ran on :
“How hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God ! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”
[ p. 256 ]
Once more it was not an absolute impossibility that Jesus was proclaiming, even though it is in fact impossible for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye; it was rather a task of superhuman difficulty, that no man should set himself. The disciples, says Mark, were completely astonished, and said to themselves, “Who then can be saved?” Certainly it was not any declaration that it was impossible for a rich man to enter the Kingdom that thus astonished and perplexed them. Jesus had preached poverty often enough; and they themselves were really poor peasants. There were plenty of poor to be blessed and saved* Their question was, “What rich man can be saved?” And this was the question which Jesus answered.
“With men it is impossible, but not with God. With God all things are possible.”
It was beyond the power of a man so to hold himself towards his riches as to be completely detached from them. Yet Jesus could not accept the thought that the young man whom he had looked on and loved should be excluded from the Kingdom. He as man could see no way for him, but God might Nay, God would. For Jesus would become God’s deputy and Judge.
[ p. 257 ]
Peter said: “See, we have left everything and followed you.”
Jesus answered the unspoken question :
“Truly, I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or f ather or children or lands for my sake and the good news, who shall not receive a hundredfold now in this world—houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands—with persecutions ; and in the world to come eternal life. And many first shall be last, and many last first.”
Surely the irony is unmistakable, even though the sting has been duly removed by Matthew and Luke. A hundredfold with persecutions. The Kingdom had nothing to do with rewards, either in this world or the next : in the Kingdom all justice was transcended.
The thought is hard, perhaps almost as hard today after centuries of Christianity as it was when Jesus tried to make it clear to his disciples. They did not understand ; not many after them have understood. It is easier to smile at the crudely material imaginations of James and John when they asked that one might sit on his right hand and the other on his left in his glory than to think how [ p. 258 ] simple peasants could otherwise conceive the high knowledge of Jesus. And Jesus’ answer is the only one : “You do not know what you are asking for.” It would be vain indeed to seek to determine how far Jesus gave to his knowledge and his expectation a material embodiment To say what he desired to say, he had to appeal to a familiar scheme ; but it is certain that the material elements of his teaching are precisely those which were exaggerated by the evangelists. The memory and the interpretation of Jesus’ words are ultimately derived from those disciples whose lack of understanding he so often rebuked: to men who, after all Jesus’ efforts to disabuse them, disputed to the last over the question which of them should be the greatest in the Kingdom. What is wonderful is not that Jesus’ teaching should have been coarsened here and there, but that in the main the pure spirituality of his thought concerning the Kingdom should have been so astonishingly preserved. It was saved, we may guess, by its strangeness and its authority. The strangest of Jesus’ words were those he uttered most evidently with the certainty of the son of God.
“You do not know what you are asking for,” he [ p. 259 ] said to the importunate sons of Zebedee. “Can you drink the cup that I drink? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”
“We can.”
“You shall drink the cup that I drink ; and you shall be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with. But to sit on my right hand and my left is not mine to give, but to those for whom it has been prepared.”
There was for Jesus always an unknown element in the Kingdom. The Kingdom as condition he knew; the Kingdom as realization he did not know, and openly confessed his ignorance. He did not know how a rich man could enter it; he did not know the day on which it would be established by his coming as the Son of Man ; he did not know who would sit on his right hand and his left These were things that the Son did not know, only the Father. And yet, even of these three things that Jesus did not know, one became known to him. When he spoke his final parable of the Sheep and the Goats, he knew how a rich man could enter the Kingdom.
Therefore we may say, using a crude analogy, that Jesus knew, and came to know completely, the [ p. 260 ] natural laws of the Kingdom; the only thing he did not know was the details of its realization. Or we may say, perhaps more exactly, that he knew the Kingdom as the master-artist knows his masterpiece to be when he is on the brink of taking up his pen or his brush. He sees it wholly, perfectly with the eyes of the soul ; but the concrete vision which can come only when the work is achieved and done is denied him. And Jesus (if we may follow the image) stood now towards his disciples as the master-artist who should seek to explain his masterpiece to be, which earthly circumstance forbids him to begin. They want to know what it will be like. He shakes his head in despair. It will be like nothing on earth : it will be utterly new the perfect realization of all that whereunto the whole creation groans and travails. Not like this, not like that; you will not say “It is here” or “It is there” ; you cannot ask who will sit here, who there. These things have no meaning. It is a different kind of existence. To be able to conceive it you must be changed. The Kingdom is within you, it will not come by watching: for to conceive it now, or enter it hereafter, you must have passed [ p. 261 ] beyond all thought of greater and less, of reward and punishment.
The disciples were very angry with James and John. Jesus called them to him and said :
“You know that those who have the reputation of ruling the heathen lord it over them, and their great ones have authority over them. Let it not be so among you. But whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be the slave of all. For the Son of Man himself did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
To those who would carry impossible and irrelevant logical distinctions into the living center of Jesus’ teaching, and would assert that Jesus was speaking here not of the Kingdom, but of the conduct of his true disciples in this world, let it be said once again that there is no essential distinction between life in this world and life in the Kingdom. The line that is drawn by much modern criticism is arbitrary and false. For the member of the Kingdom, the life of the Kingdom begins here and now, and in every true member of the Kingdom who lives in this world, the Kingdom also exists. [ p. 262 ] That the moment was soon to come when this world would be changed, and a new order of things begin, was assuredly a part and an essential part of Jesus’ belief: but the new order of outward things was but the necessary consequence of the new order of inward being. That new order of being could be, must be, touched here and now. The end of the world was only the completion of its setting. Or, more simply, to know the mystery of the Kingdom involved a profound change in the nature of man’s thoughts and acts : he lived, as it were, from a new center. He was reintegrated.
To this, the spiritual essence of Jesus’ teaching concerning the Kingdom, eschatology is irrelevant. The teaching of Jesus remains ever new and ever true in complete independence of eschatology. But Jesus’ life cannot be divorced from his eschatology, for the eschatology determined his chosen destiny. Eschatology solved the awful problem of Jesus: how he was to bring men, who would not compel the Kingdom to come by their own native act of soul, into the Kingdom, To understand Jesus the man we must understand his eschatology; but even then it is his eschatology that we must understand, pot the eschatology of the pious Pharisee or the [ p. 263 ] pious peasant of Jesus’ day. Nothing is more fatal, more contrary to the spirit of true history or true criticism, than to seek to subdue Jesus to the conceptions of his contemporaries. He used their conceptions to express his knowledge. It is to his knowledge, not to their conceptions, that we must go.
Something of Jesus’ effort to convey to his disciples the true meaning of his message appears in the two parables which are recorded as definitely belonging to this journey the parables of the Talents, and of the Laborers in the Vineyard. Luke says of his version of the parable of the Talents, that “Jesus spoke this parable because he was near Jerusalem and because they thought that the Kingdom of God would appear immediately”; and Matthew convincingly connects the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard with the disciples’ desire to know what their reward would be for forsaking all their possessions.
“A certain nobleman,” he said, “went away to a distant country to assume royal power and to return. And calling his servants he handed over his property to them: to one he gave five talents, to [ p. 264 ] another two, to another one, to each according to his ability”. Then he went away.
The servant with the five talents immediately went and traded with them and gained another five. Likewise he with the two talents gained another two. But he with the one digged a hole and hid his lord’s money.
After a long while his lord returned, having assumed his royal power, and called his servants to account. He with the five talents brought the other five and said: ‘My lord, you gave me five talents. See, I have gained another five.’ His lord said to him: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, you were faithful in little, I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your lord,’ He With the two talents came forward and said : ‘My lord, you gave me two talents. See I have gained another two.’ His lord said to him : ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, you were faithful in little, I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your lord.’
“Then he with the one talent came forward and said : ‘My lord, I knew that you were a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter. I was afraid and went [ p. 265 ] and hid your talent in the earth. See, you have your own.’ His lord replied: ‘You wicked and idle servant, you knew that I reap where I did not sow and gather where I did not scatter. You should have given my money to the bankers and then when I came I should have received my own with interest. Take the talent from him and give it him that has five. For to every one that hath it shall be given, in superfluity. And from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. ’ ”
The concluding words, which must have been often on Jesus’ lips “To him that hath it shall be given . . ” contain, as we have seen, the inmost essence of Jesus’ teaching of the mystery of the Kingdom. And here they are used, not to point the moral of the parable, but as it were to sound a note by which the parable should be understood. For the parable of the Talents is a statement of the mystery of the Kingdom, as modulated by Jesus’ destiny as Messiah-to-be. During his absence long or short the Son knew not, but only the Father the secret of the Kingdom must be at work incessantly in the souls of his true disciples. By its growth within them they would be judged. He, who now departed to become King indeed, had [ p. 266 ] given them the Word, according to their capacity to receive it. If they had received it truly it must grow within them : the talent would be doubled, the seed become a tree. They would realize the Kingdom in themselves. True, its final manifestation would be by the fiat of the Father and the judgment of his Son; but, to pass that judgment victoriously, they must see to it that the Kingdom grew within them, here and now.
So, in the second parable by which he sought to lift the scales from his disciples’ eyes so that they should see the mystery of the Kingdom, other familiar and repeated words, which also belong to the inmost of the mystery, were used to sound the dominant note : “The first shall be last, and the last first” As before he had striven to drive from their minds the thought that the Kingdom was merely a miraculous creation of God and show that it must be created equally by the souls of men, now he sought to stamp out of their minds the ineradicable notion that membership of the Kingdom was a reward for services done or sacrifices made. The parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard was spoken in final reply to Peter’s unspoken expectation: [ p. 267 ] “See, we have left everything and followed you.” First, he had ironically promised them in this world a hundredfold of what they had sacrificed—“with persecutions”—and in the world to come, eternal life. Eternal life, simply, with no distinction of place or person. Now with an extreme of paradox, yet not strained one hair’s breadth beyond his true meaning, he strove completely to banish from their minds the idea of justice as a law of the Kingdom.
“The Kingdom of Heaven,” he said, "is like a master of a house who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard. And having agreed with them at a shilling a day he sent them into his vineyard. He went out again at the third hour and saw others standing idle in the market place and said to them, ‘Go you also into the vineyard and I will pay you what is just’ And they went. And he went out again at the sixth hour, and at the ninth hour, and did the same. Going out at the eleventh hour, he found others standing, and said to them, ‘Why do you stand thus idle all the day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us. ’ He said to them, ‘Go you too into the vineyard.’
[ p. 268 ]
When evening came the master of the vineyard said to his foreman: ‘Call the workers and give them their wages, beginning from the last and going on to the first.’ When those of the eleventh hour came they received each a shilling. When the first came they thought they would get more. But they too received each a shilling. And, having got their money, they murmured against the master, saying : ‘Those who came last have worked one hour, yet you make them equal to us who have borne the blazing heat and the burden of the day.’
He spoke to one of them and said: ‘Friend, I do you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a shilling? Take that which is yours and go your way. It is my will to give to this last the same as I give to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own? Or is your eye evil, because mine is good?’
“Thus shall the last be first and the first last.”
It is one of the profoundest of all the parables: its pure transparency opens on to illimitable depths of meaning, and the true import of the frequent phrase, “The last shall be first, and the first last,” can be grasped only by its means. In the parable [ p. 269 ] there is an absolute equality of reward: the conception of first and last therefore falls completely away. Yet those of the eleventh hour are paid their equal wage before those of the ninth; and those of the first hour are paid last To ruffle into a final beauty the surface of this absolute equality of condition in the Kingdom has come the breath and influence of perfect love—that which Jesus so often and so unforgettably expressed, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, and in the words : “There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over the ninety and nine which need not repentance”—that element in Jesus’ imagination and knowledge of God which differentiates it forever from other imagination and knowledge of God. This was completely his own : out of it grew all he did and was.
For in the Kingdom as Jesus knew it, though there is neither first nor last, yet the last are first. It is a paradox and a contradiction, but it is the truth. For it is a Kingdom of love. It could not be otherwise: love imagined, love created it. In the Kingdom of love, those who belong to it find their supreme felicity in yielding to the latest [ p. 270 ] comers. “There is more joy in heaven,” for heaven itself is but the blessed company of the sons of God.
Such was the teaching of that grim journey to Jerusalem, when Jesus broke the silence wherein he walked alone, ahead of his frightened followers.