The mind of Christ; an attempt to answer the question, what did Jesus believe?

Front matter

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Copyright^ ,

Preface

The following pages are an attempt to interpret in plain speech the belief of Jesus. There attend upon the worship of every church numbers of strong, spiritual people who are not confessed followers of Jesus, because they misunderstand Him and what He stands for. Christianity, as they understand it, means something unintelligible or unpractical. The religion they need is one which they can confess with all their hearts not only, but also with all their minds. The religion they want is one which will make a vital difference in their " yeses " and " noes," their loves and hates, a religion through which they shall work righteousness, from weakness be made strong, wax valiant in fight, turn to flight armies of distress and injustice. For these and for all earnest people who want to get at the rock-bottom facts of Christianity I have ventured to make this interpretation of the mind of Christ.

Jesus was the first Christian, the kind of Christian men want to be and ought to be, the kind of Christian men can be if only they will think His thoughts, feel His feelings and give

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VI PREFACE

themselves up to His master idea. This then, is the vital thing to know, What did Jesus believe? What did God mean to Him? How did He think of Himself and of His fellow men? These are the fundamental questions of modern religion.

In what I have written I disclaim all controversial intent. The thing farthest from my thought is to suggest, or to arouse debate upon any theory of the Person of Christ. For myself none of the creeds, nor all of them put together can adequately express my adoration of the Lord Jesus Christ. But in these chapters I would so present Him that, whatever one's personal metaphysic of Christ, he may unite in the " Song of a Heathen, sojourning in Galilee, A. D. 32,"

"If Jesus Christ is a man, — And only a man, — I say That of all mankind I cleave to Him, And to Him will I cleave alway.

If Jesus Christ is a God, —

And the only God, — I swear I will follow Him through heaven and hell,

The earth, the sea, and the air."

I cannot forbear expressing my great gratitude to two friends who among many others gave me suggestions which have been worked out in these essays. The one is the beloved Charles Cuthbert Hall, who in his beautiful life and death witnessed so splendidly to his belief in the supreme Lordship

PREFACE Vll

of Jesus. The other is the Rev. Prof. George William Knox, D.D., whose monograph in " The Christian Point of View " gave me the idea for the eleventh chapter, and whose " Direct and Fundamental Proofs of The Christian Religion " gave me material for the last essay.

T. Calvin McClelland.

Memorial Church Manse, January 25, 1909.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. Jesus' Idea of God i

II. Jesus' Idea of Himself 19

II

" Knew ye not that I must be in my Father's house ? "

" All things have been delivered unto me of my Father : and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son; and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him."

"As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus commanded them, saying, Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen from the dead."

* Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of tne devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He afterward hungered. And the tempter came and said unto Him, If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become bread. But He answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh Him into the holy city; and he set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto Him, If thou art the son of God, cast thyself down; for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning thee: and, on their hands they shall bear thee up, lest haply thou dash Thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not make trial of the Lord thy God. Again, the devil taketh Him unto an exceeding high mountain, and showeth Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and he said unto Him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve."

u I ascend unto my Father and your Father."

II

The Gospel of Jesus was good news about God. It was not Himself that the Master seemed interested in, His theme was the Father. His desire was not to get men to call Him Lord, but to get them to do the will of His Father. But as one cannot get the grain without the sower, so one cannot know the Father without Jesus. He is indispensable, and what is more, He knows He is indispensable ; " He that soweth the good seed," said He, " is the Son of Man." Buddha, Plato and Socrates are contented to be a mere factor in their message; Jesus knows Himself to be His Gospel's personal realization and dynamic; as one says, " He knows no more sacred task than to point men to His own person." Given the other God-seeker's message and we can do without the messenger; would we have Jesus' message we must obey the call " Come unto me." So it is we must ask, what place Jesus believed He Himself had in His Gospel; what was Jesus' idea of Himself?

Across the water is a great cathedral. You have seen pictures of it; you have read about it in books of art and travel. You think you know it. You shut your eyes and imagine the glorious fagade, the lacelike sculpturing, the fine east window, the upward sweeping towers. One day, you cross the water and visit the great cathedral. As evening gathers you approach the minster. There against the blue-black sky leans the beautiful pile. It is more than you dreamed. Suddenly there is a glimmer within, long shafts of light break through the windows, and figures of saints and angels gather in the radiance. On the still air the notes of an unseen organ float, deep as the thunders from, a purple cloud, sweet as the trilling of birds at twilight. The cathedral speaks for itself. No one could tell you what it tells. With its own light and harmony it reveals its transcendent function. We have seen pictures of Jesus, we have read the books of His interpreters; now we come to Jesus Himself; like cathedral light and harmony His own life and words flowing from His soul speak to us of Himself, tell us what He believed about His being and function.

There is a picture in the cathedral which hangs just where it is the first thing we see as we enter. Mary and Joseph had brought the boy down to Jerusalem. While there they lost Him. They searched for Him everywhere. Hoping against hope, Mary came to the temple. There only the grey-beards and the great were used to gather to converse about God's high things and man's deep things. But, there, at home in that company, His face upturned to drink in their speech, His breath drawing deep and slow was her little boy. He wondered only that on missing Him, Mary had not instantly inquired at the temple ; she must have known about His absorbing interest in God's business ; " knew ye not that I must be in my Father's house?" This picture of the boy who cared more about God's things than anything, who could not help wondering about the difference between Himself and His mother is the key to the cathedral of His consciousness. That absorption in God's business which marked the lad became in the man an absorption in God ; " all things " said He " have been delivered unto me of my Father : and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father ; and who the Father is, save the Son ; and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him." At first sight there may seem nothing especially significant in this self-consciousness. The thought of God as Father He shared with others. He could say with them, He taught them to say with Him, " Our Father." But as we listen we catch a something about Jesus' " My Father," a depth of meaning, a richness, a ring which no one else can put into the words. He said no one can say " my Father " as He can, " no one knoweth who the Father is, save the Son." Though with His strong arm around them He gave the saintliest and the shamefulest confidence to repeat after Him, " Our Father ", yet He was conscious of a relationship with the Father which they did not share. There was a difference between the best and Him. His sonship was more than theirs, so much more that He knew Himself to be taking only His proper name when He called Himself " the Son."

Here is a paradox in Jesus' self-consciousness. While He made humility well-nigh the grace out of which everything good grows, yet He named Himself, and Himself alone "the Son"; others were sons, but for Himself He must use the definite article. His sonship was more than other's. Jesus knew, because no one knew the Father save the Son, and of course he to whom the Son would reveal Him. That is, the Father idea was His discovery, to others it must always be a revelation ; He knew it by instinct, they must be given it by instruction; the Father He knew from the beginning, others were only beginning to know ; the Fatherhood which was so patent to Him, to others was brand new good news. While the rest of the children were thinking of God just as King, and of themselves as the King's subjects,

He knew God as Father and Himself and all men as sons, and so He could say " my Father " as no one else could, and for this cause He knew His sonship must be greater than theirs.

His sonship was greater than other's, because the love of Father and son which for them was one-sided, was perfectly reciprocated in Him. As yet the love between the Father and men was all on the Father's side. From the first Jesus loved the Father as the Father loved Him. Here is the wonder of Jesus' self-consciousness, its august self-complacency. He whose presence made the good say, " depart from me, for I am sinful," challenged the good to convict Him of sin. Was he separate from sinners, so was He separate from saints. Saints reached goodness only through fires of remorse and baths of penitence; He said simply, " I do always the things which are pleasing unto the Father." Once He laid down the terms of true sonship, " love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven " ; all needed to be summoned to reach out to his relationship, all but He. Face to face with death, in that hour when the conscience of the morally quick man inexorably sums up his life, Jesus seemed to feel only the moral need of His murderers, and then knowing that He had never edged off from perfection's standard, conscious that He had realized the ideal, He said, " It is finished." He was the Son; men were becoming sons; He was full-grown; men were waiting to be born. Jesus believed Himself to be " the Son of God." But while He called Himself " the Son," He seemed to know no difference in kind between Himself and the other sons of the Father. If He was " the Son of God," He was also " the Son of Man." Indeed Son of God was not His self-designation; His favorite name for Himself was " Son of Man." There is one scene in His life which brings this feeling about His human relationship to the surface. He and three of His students were on a mountain somewhere in north Palestine. Suddenly, the disciples see, or think they see, their blessed Lord in the company of Moses the great law-giver, and Elijah the great prophet. And in a moment a light lighter than the midway sun breaks forth from their Lord and outshines the law-giver and the prophet as the midday sun outshines the ever shining planets. And a great voice is heard, " This is my beloved Son." Then it is written that this divine Lord said, " Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of Man be risen from the dead." They had recognized Him as divine; He cared more that He should be known as human. "Son of Man" is His own name for Himself; translated into our speech its simplest meaning is a standard human being.

Let us call Jesus what names we will, Christ, Lord, Son of God ; these names fit the fact ; but He calls Himself " Son of Man," the standard human being. Exalt His difference as we will He appears to care more that we shall exalt His humanity. We exalt the difference; He exalts the identity. We cherish the divinity; He cherishes the humanity. We call Jesus divine and we know we are true ; He calls Himself human and we know He is true. And then we put the two ideas together and call Him the Divine Man. Does that mean that part of Him is human, and part divine? Nay, it means that humanity and divinity are so alike that Jesus could be both in one homogeneous life. We mean that humanity and divinity overlap so that here is no telling where one begins and the other leaves off. The difference between humanity and divinity is a difference of degree; divinity is humanity raised to its highest power; humanity is divinity in the germ. So the divine Christ makes no claim to be a foreigner from some far off unnatural world, a sort of spiritual wedge driven into the common human nature. His divinity did not make Him something other than human; our humanity does not keep us something other than divine. The path is open all the way to the summit. It is no farther from the bottom to the top than it is from the top to the bottom. Jesus believed Himselfto be " the Son of God," but He believed Himself to be the brother of men.

Jesus believed Himself to be the Father's messenger Son sent to recover the lost children. In our cathedral stands a two-leaved door. It is between the vestibule where hangs the picture of the little Galilean seeking His Father's business, and the great fane where are the altar and the sacrifice. The carving on one leaf of this doorway tells a story like this. For nearly a score of years after that memorable visit to Jerusalem, Jesus lived in the village of Nazareth. For us those are hidden years; what went on in His inward life we may not know, but we may be sure that those years brought to the growing man an ever deepening passion for that business which absorbed Him as a lad, " the Father's business." At last, one day, news came from the southland of a strange preacher who called himself " a voice," and the message of this voice was " the kingdom of heaven is at hand." It was the sort of message Jesus had been listening for; it was just the tocsin to stir the pulses of one who was consumed with a passion for the Father's business. Spirit answered to spirit; the message of the preacher claimed the soul of the Carpenter.

But the preacher did not only preach, John Baptist was forming a society; it was a community of expectant souls pledged to this imminent kingdom, and the ancient rite of baptism was the form of initiation into its fellowship. With complete humility, eager to leave nothing undone which would work toward the great consummation, Jesus sought initiation into this society of the kingdom, He requested baptism. " And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway from the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon Him ; and lo, a voice out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.'' Whatever the dove and the voice were, they were the outward symbols of a genuine inward experience, an experience of which there can be only one interpretation, Jesus was conscious that He was what His race called the Messiah.

That Jesus believed Himself to be the chosen Messiah there can be no question. Toward the end of His life, while in the neighborhood of Csesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples one day what opinions the people held about Him. They told Him that some thought Him to be John Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah or one of the prophets. And then He put to them this question, " But who say ye that I am?" And Simon Peter answered and said, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." For a Jew that confession could have only one meaning, thou art Messiah. The human voice identified what the divine voice had discovered to Him at His baptism, and " Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonas, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven/' Thus Jesus solemnly confirmed the truth of what Simon had said and seriously accepted the designation of Messiah with its implication that He stood in a closer relation to God than do all other men. Five days before He died, He rode into Jerusalem setting Himself into all the symbols with which the prophetic imagination had decorated the expected one, and thus in a way that no one could doubt claimed the august office for Himself.

Jesus believed Himself to be the Messiah, but the question arises, what kind of a Messiah did He believe Himself to be? The ideal of Messiah in Jesus' day, though universal was very vague, very elastic. But all the speculations about Messiah and what he should be and do were set into one golden frame ; the Jews believed that a golden age was coming. For centuries the land had been heartbroken. One by one the nations of the world had made sport of it, despoiled it, trampled it as they trampled the grapes to make wine for their royal banquets. But the Jews hugged the hope of that golden age to their bruised breasts. In Jesus' time the hope was a belief that God

Himself, or if not God, then some one like God, would come down to champion Israel, overthrow Caesar, make the ancient kingdom to be the admiration of the world and bring earthly plenty, glory and ease to the children of Abraham. With such a Messiah every Jew would sit in his own vineyard, under his own figtree enjoying the fruits of peace. A few of the people like John Baptist earnestly believed that a revival of real religion had to come before this golden age could be, and as earnestly wrought to prepare themselves and others for it. But withal the ideal Messiah was just a Jewish Caesar, mightier than Caesar even and certainly more moral. How much of this popular ideal was a part of Jesus' idea of His Messiahship? We find the answer to this question in what is called the Temptation. We turn to the second leaf of the golden doorway of our cathedral.

Three of the gospels report an incident in Jesus' life which followed immediately upon His baptism. St. Mark in the briefest way makes mention of the fact, but emphasizes its significance by setting it as the starting point of his memorabilia. St. Matthew and St. Luke describe the event with warm Oriental language. Their narrative lifts the curtain on a tragedy of the inward life. One cannot get away from the feeling that what they write about was something very real and very awful, something which actually took place, something which involved tremendous consequences. It was no dream, no figment of the imagination; it was a crisis out of which Jesus came a changed man. The movement is dramatic, the climax is decisive, the details are picturesque. This is necessarily so; the story cannot be looked at as if it were a photograph. You cannot photograph a soul. It were impossible for us to have the record of an eye-witness. In this supreme experience Jesus was all alone. What the disciples knew about the Temptation, they must have heard from the lips of Jesus Himself.

It is told us that in His early teaching, Jesus always spoke in figurative language, " without a parable spake He not unto them." They were like children. To make them appreciate the inward, the spiritual, He was used to employing the kindergarten method, the story way of teaching. And so the account of the Temptation is to be read like a parable. Jesus had to " thing " it so that they could think it. The picturesque details, the realistic setting, the dramatic movement are to be understood as an attempt through the form of picture to make intelligible for simple minds a high mystical experience. As Frederick W. Robertson says, " The whole majesty of the Temptation is destroyed if you understand it literally." The artist Tissot has the sense of it.

Interpreting the words, " Straightway the Spirit driveth Him into the wilderness/' Tissot pictures Jesus as borne swiftly on the finger-tips of a gigantic spectre; but when you look closely you see that this great spectre is just the shadow of Jesus Himself.

The Temptation occupies a significant position in Jesus' career. It stands like a door between two rooms, the one a dim, small, meagrely furnished chamber; the other a stately, vaulted hall, flooded with light, lined with great pictures and furnished with exquisite care. On the one side of this door is the simple Carpenter of Nazareth, the dutiful son of Mary and Joseph busy with the common duties of a mechanic's day. On the other side of this door is the Teacher, the Christ, the Victim, the light and life of men from whose mystic spell the race would not if it could withdraw. On the one side of the Temptation is the silence of the hidden years of childhood and youth. On the other side of the Temptation is the august claim to be the Son of God, the unveiler of the Father, the opener of the eternal to the sons of men. Before the Temptation, little that His closest friends thought worth recording; after the Temptation sayings and doings which were they written about every one, " I suppose " says the man who knew Him best, " that even the world itself would not contain the books- that should be written." Evidently this Temptation is something very great, something that must be understood to understand the life of Jesus.

And first we must find out what led up to it. Jesus spent His boyhood and young manhood in the little town of Nazareth. The village lay then as it does now, in a cuplike hollow of the Galilean hills. These hills which ring it round like a giant breastwork defend it from the outside world and made it a natural hermitage for one whose bent is meditative. But just over the edge of this hollow, at the summit of these hills upon the south, there runs a great cleft across the country from the sea-coast to the Jordan valley. And through this cleft lies the chief highway between the East and the West. A little climb from the heart of the village brought one in sight of a panorama of " the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them." For standing on the hills above Nazareth and looking southward one could see winding their way along this ancient trunkline the caravans, whose unceasing movement mingled the peoples of the earth. Moving like colored beads upon a thread of gold there were travellers and merchants, messengers and slaves, and citizens and haughty officials and soldiers of that proud Roman race which held the world enthrall.

Here was ample environment for the culture of a soul. In the little hilltown was the solitude for tne quickening of the spiritual sense, and just a step away was the stirring atmosphere of the thronging world, the unveiling of the race. In this seedplot Jesus grew secretly and silently. No eye may search out the subtle agents which in the workshop of His soul wove those vast ideas and ideals which made Him what He was. The process we may not trace, the result we know. Still this much we may know, He learned as all Hebrew boys learned by heart the collection of the sacred writings. They were not only the literature of His nation, its history and poetry, but they were its law-books, its religion's text-book. He drank deep draughts of those dear dreams and hopes which all Hebrew mothers kept clean and bright in the cupboard of their faith. With the home for a schoolroom Mary and Joseph were His preceptors. He was no son of the schools, no pupil of the Rabbinic teachers, no novitiate of the priesthood. The years drew on, bringing with them, we may not know what eagerness for the fulfillment of His race's dream, of the golden age, of its usher and king, the great Messiah.

And then of a sudden in the lifting of an eyelid, out of the arching heavens into His inmost soul came that astounding discovery, the golden age had come, and He was the Messiah, God's beloved Son through whom the other sons were to participate in the Kingdom of God. He went down into the Jordan the Carpenter of Nazareth, He came out of it the conscious Messiah. The discovery overwhelmed Him. He the mechanic, the son of Mary and Joseph was the Father's Son, the expected Messiah! Could it be true? That was the vital question. The settlement of that question with all it involved was the Temptation of Jesus. The soul in Him needed a loneliness where He might think, where He might meet the issue and define His function. It was an awesome awakening, from mechanic to Messiah, and straightway the Spirit in Him drove Him into the wilderness, and He was there in hunger and thirst of soul, there testing Himself and that stupendous self-discovery, there in sweat and blood of spirit, until at last He had solved these problems, — What was Messiah's work ? Under what conditions must He do Messiah's work? What methods must He as Messiah use?

In the Gospel story the scene shifts three times. First we read, " And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He afterward hungered. And the tempter came and said unto Him, If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become bread. But He answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." He was the Son of God, the question was, what was the Son to do?

Wholly absorbed in His thought Jesus forgot food, till at last He faced stark need. Hungry and with not a morsel to eat; hungry and yet God's Messiah! What a contradiction! How inadequate His life equipment to fit the dream of His people. They were looking for, He Himself had been expecting, a Messiah who should bring with Him earthly plenty, prosperity and peace.

What was it Isaiah said, " The Spirit of the Lord Jehovah is upon me; because Jehovah hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the year of Jehovah's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them a garland for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness ; that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of Jehovah, that He may be glorified. And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and foreigners shall be your ploughmen and your vine-dressers. But ye shall be named the priests of Jehovah ; men shall call you the ministers of our God; ye shall eat the wealth of the nations, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves/'