Jesus Christ and the world today

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GRACE HUTCHINS

AND ANNA ROCHESTER

BY

GRACE HUTCHINS

AND

ANNA ROCHESTER

NEW <^§Jp YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY. II

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMTCRTPA

JUL 26 1922 LC Control Number

Preface

The aim of these studies is to seek in and through the mind and experience of Jesus Christ the way of life for individuals, churches, classes, and nations that shall lead toward a solution of our present problems. We believe that Jesus Christ is the hope of the world ; the studies assume this belief and attempt to analyze its implications for the world today. They do not attempt, however, to present an economic or political program. "We believe that such programs are very definitely the concern of Christians, but intelligent discussion of programs must follow a clear analysis of our personal share in social wrongs and of the kind of relationships we should try to express in our economic and political life.

Just as the preparation of these studies was begun, The Untried Door, by the Reverend Richard Roberts, came to us. We read it with a deep sense of agreement and gratitude. We must express our indebtedness, also, to the late Walter Rauschenbusch whose Christianity and the Social Crisis translated for us several years ago the hope of the Kingdom into terms of modern life.

G. H.

A. R.

Contents

PAGE

Preface y

CHAPTER

Chapter One THE HOPE

A small country, engrossed in its own affairs and primitive in its economic structure, separated from us by nineteen centuries of shifting empire and changing civilization, the Palestine in which Jesus spent the years of his earthly life, faced, in miniature, certain problems that today are shaking the world. Our essential kinship with the people among whom Jesus lived is perhaps obscured by our differences in form, with the paraphernalia of modern comfort, the machinery of large scale production and intercommunication, the subways and office buildings and factories and schools and tenements and museums and palaces of a modern city. We recognize, of course, a certain identity of individual sins. We do not so easily see the identity of the evils in their social structure and in our own.

Such problems as child labor in factories, bad

housing in congested districts, industrial accidents

of married women whose children need them at home — to mention only a few among many — have so clear a relation to the age of machine industry that obviously they had no parallel in Palestine. But these are all corollaries of the great fundamental problem of poverty. And poverty and riches were distinct in Palestine.

Again, the conflicts between labor and capital, and between subject nations and an imperial overlord, such disputes as that between American oil companies and the Mexican government, and between Japan and China over the control of Shantung, even the antagonisms that made possible the Great War, have their roots in a desire for domination. Even so, in Palestine, power was held by a few who were watchful against losing it and who used violence and corruption to maintain it.

Within America, race antagonisms are evidenced by our attitude towards the uneducated immigrant, by the white man's sense of superiority to the Negro, expressed in a hundred ways ranging from benevolent leadership to mob torture, and by the Negro 's increasingly bitter hatred for the white race. So during the centuries preceding the birth of Jesus the race pride of the Jews had kept them distinct from all others and had led to war and continuing enmity with the Samaritans.

Before we attempt to trace the experience of Jesus and the way in which He approached the problems of Palestine, let us picture as well as we can the form of the problems Jesus faced, keeping in mind the identical roots of the evils of his day and of our own : riches and poverty, control of power, and pride of race.

Consider first some of the rich men and the sources of riches among the Jews that appear in the gospel pages. There was the rich land-owner with his bailiff and under-servants, 1 and the other rich land-owner who wanted to rebuild his barns. 2 There were the men with a position to maintain which required attention to the niceties of dress. 3 There were bankers and money-changers in the Temple courts, 4 and money-lending as a profitable occupation was common enough to be used as an illustration in the parables of Jesus. Others besides money-lenders — the owner of a vineyard, for example — were men of substance who" could leave their business or their estate to the care of subordinates 5 and have their income continue while they traveled or spent the season at Jerusalem. Merchants bought and sold, and their traffic was sometimes in luxuries that only the wealthy could buy. 6 There were those who collected their possessions in private houses. 7 The extortion of the Pharisees and their devouring of widows ' houses are not explicitly described, but their wealth was such that even lovers of money 8 could make large contributions without inconvience to themselves. The high priest lived in a mansion with a courtyard and hired servants. The anger of the priests when Jesus cleared the courts of the money-changers and the dealers in animals 9 suggests

that the priests were profiting from the business. (A contemporary protest in the Jewish Talmud has come down to us against the amount of the Temple revenue that found its way into the pockets of the priests.)

The social differences resulting from, wealth may have been more marked in Jerusalem than among the Jews in the country of Judea or in Galilee, but riches and *the distinction between rich and poor were evidently a commonplace in all the regions where Jesus taught. The educated look down on the unlettered; the rulers of the synagogue stand out from the multitude. There are chief seats and titles of honor, with an aristocracy of birth in the priestly families and an aristocracy of learning among scribes and Pharisees. Theoretically any Jew might rise to distinction in scholarship, but practically — according to the teacher Ben Sira — this was possible only to a man of means. And wealth by itself seems to have brought social position, except that no Jewish gentleman might be a tax-collector for the Bomans. Apart from the slaves and the beggars who stand out so prominently in the picture of the Palestine in which Jesus lived, there were thousands of poor working people — craftsmen of all sorts, fishermen, shepherds, farmers and vinedressers, hired servants and day laborers — who had neither slaves nor servants to wash their feet or prepare their meals or sweep their houses or till their soil. Even in the simple agricultural life of Palestine the difference between riches and poverty was so well recognized that the Hebrew law provided for substitute offerings to be made by the poor man who could not aiford the animal required from the well-to-do. Every Jewish boy was taught to work with his hands, and manual labor was more highly regarded among the Jews than among the Greeks or the Romans. But the men who did manual work appear in the gospels among those who lived in simplicity and made the offerings of the poor. The wealthy were using the work of others — usually slaves, but not always — or were profiting from banking or commerce.

And wealth brought power. The slave was not the only Jew who was subject to others. Within the Jewish community and apart from the domination of Borne, a minority controlled the people. The fact that every boy learned a trade did not by itself ensure his security. "We read in the gospels of the men standing idle in the market place * waiting to be employed, and Josephus tells us that one reason why Herod the tetrarch set 50,000 men to work on various building projects was that great numbers were unemployed. 2 WTien they were hired, the workers must do the employer's bidding and accept his conditions.

In the organization of the Jewish church the common people were subject to the priestly caste and were exploited by them. They were taxed heavily for the support of the Temple and the priests, and any one who refused to pay his Temple tax became a " sinner " and an outcast. When

2 Mathews, Shatter. History of Neio Testament Times in Palestine, p. 124.

the people went to the Temple they were made to pay more than a fair price for the changing of their coins and the purchase of their sacrifices.

The administration of justice also lay with those who had wealth and social position. The Sanhedrin, to which the Eomans allowed supreme jurisdiction in all matters peculiar to the Hebrew law and usually in civil cases or in criminal cases not subject to death penalty, was composed of priests and of scribes learned in the law and of other rulers and " elders' ' representing the two parties of Pharisees and Sadducees. The irregularities to which they would descend when the issue was sharp between the people and themselves are illustrated by their conduct of the trial of Jesus.

The Eoman dominion also fell most heavily on the poor. ~ Customs duties and taxes on sales were added to direct taxation. These indirect taxes, farmed out to contractors and by contractors farmed out to collectors (publicans) invited graft and extortion, and were acutely oppressive. Contemporary history records that in one year the people of Asia had to pay the Eoman taxes three times over. The Eoman method of maintaining power may be favorably compared to the methods of oriental empires that preceded Eome, but it still included a free use of violence. Eome stood by while King Herod disposed of possible rivals by killing all male infants in a certain district, and a little later Pontius Pilate the procurator (who was so well regarded by the imperial government that he held his office for ten years) killed a number of Galileans who had come up to Jerusalem and were suspected of sedition. Officials of the empire thought it expedient to keep down unrest by executions which often took the form of crucifixion. False accusations and extortion violently enforced were sufficiently common to be rebuked by John the Baptist when he saw Eoman soldiers in the crowd that came to hear him.

Practically all Jews resented subjection to the heathen Eomans. The Maccabean revolt against Syria and the short period of independence when prosperity and national prestige had reached their highest point since the days of Solomon had intensified racial pride. But in the different classes among the Jews this racial pride was mingled with various other elements. Parties which united in believing that the Jews were a superior race and that Jehovah would ultimately establish their kingdom differed profoundly in their immediate desires and programs. The sense of living in a special covenant with Jehovah had for generations been inculcated in every Jewish child. With the Pharisees this had developed into a desire for complete separation from the Gentile world, and their resentment against Borne was fed from the two springs of national pride and religious pride. In the main, however, the Pharisees were not inclined to violent revolt. They were free to follow the Law without interference ; the Sanhedrin, in which at the time of Jesus' public life the Pharisees were the majority party, had enough power to satisfy the instinct for domination, and materially they prospered in spite of Boman taxes. Possibly the sense of martyrdom under such pleasant circumstances enhanced their self-satisfaction. The Sadducean party was less concerned with religious separation from the Gentiles than with increase of political authority for the priests. They had even flirted with Hellenism in the past, and were frankly worldly in their philosophy. The Sadducean party included the chief priests and many of the wealthy conservative families whose sympathies were with the priestly class. The party of the Pharisees was also dominated by men of wealth, but it included the leaders in scholarship and piety. Even the best of the Pharisees had little understanding of the needs of the multitude. The scribes of the Pharisees were by training and by position of the privileged class. The scribe was not only a religious leader but a lawyer, a judge, and a scholar. By their education and by their rank as teachers or rabbis these lawyers of the Pharisees were separated from the common people. The Pharisees' hope for freedom from Rome was based on faith in the righteous kingdom of Jehovah, but such present details as the oppression of poor Jews by the Romans and by wealthy Jews seem not to have troubled them.

Far less important were two other small parties, the Cananeans or Zealots who from time to time attempted to stir up armed revolt against Rome, and the Herodians who openly espoused the cause of the Herods, demanding that the kingdom of Herod the Great should be reunited and have a semblance of independence and that the Roman governor be withdrawn from Judea.

The multitude drifted, sheep without a shepherd. They rose with the Zealots against registration for Boman taxes ; they flocked to John the Baptist when he preached equality of wealth and the end of extortion, and to Jesus the messenger of release to the captives and freedom for those whom tyranny has crushed ; and they shouted for Barabbas, a leader of violent revolt. Practically, national independence had meant little to a class whose insecurity and poverty had been scarcely less when they supported a Jewish high-priestly king than when heavy taxes were paid to a heathen empire. During the period of national independence their hope of a Messiah and a new age of righteousness had been deepened and intensified. Now Borne had become the symbol of oppression, and their one hope of justice, the promised kingdom of the Messiah, was essentially a national hope which could not be realized until Borne was overthrown.

But all Jews, rich and poor, the masters and the oppressed, believed in the special destiny of their race and their essential superiority to the Gentiles. The Greeks, the " nations " or "Gentiles" (Greek sdvrf) represented all who were not Jewish and were therefore looked down upon as foreigners. This exclusiveness made the children of Israel "100% red-blooded" Palestinians. Even in Galilee where many Gentiles had settled and where Jews and Gentiles mingled freely in the daily life of the community, the Jews betray their racial pride in the condescension with which they advise Jesus to heal the centurion's servant because the centurion had built a synagogue. Peter, a Galilean, had a perfectly definite change in his point of view before he was willing to heed the call of a Gentile inquirer.

In relation to the Samaritans the racial pride had blossomed into positive dislike and antagonism. They were a mixed stock of Jews and Gentiles, descended from Jews who had been left in Palestine at the time of the Babylonian captivity and who had intermarried with the Gentile colonists brought in to settle the land. They also treasured the Law and claimed Abraham as their forefather, but since the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the exclusion of "foreigners" from the Temple in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (fifth century) they had been cut off from intercourse with the Jews. It was said with truth, Jews do not associate, with Samaritans. To get the full force of the parable of the good Samaritan in these days, we should have to substitute for the name Samaritan the name of any race of people with whom we do not care to associate. To some of us it would be German ; to others, Japanese or Mexican ; to some of us it would be Negro and to others Jew. The separation between the Jews and the Samaritans of Jesus ' time was complete and full of bitterness and hatred on both sides.

Below this pride was there a genuine difference between the Jewish people and others? What was their peculiar inheritance ? What had they gained, beyond all other peoples, from their sense of a covenant with Jehovah 1 Four points stand out as peculiar to the racial consciousness of the Jews in comparison with the pagan world around them. (1) The Jews helieved that there was one God and that He was intimately concerned with human affairs. (2) They did not separate religion and morality. (3) Every Jewish boy was instructed in the rudiments of the Mosaic Law. (4) They had formulated the hope of a new age in which righteousness would prevail.

The monotheism of the Jews was not the product of philosophy but of experience. The tribal Jehovah of their earliest days, the Presence limited to the Ark of the Covenant, was, for the Jews of the time of Jesus, the Creator, the King, the Lover of Israel, their Guide and Eedeemer who controlled the affairs of all peoples and who would ultimately make his own peculiar people, Israel, to triumph, provided they were faithful to Him. In the school of suffering — Egypt, Babylon, the desolation of Palestine — the nation had learned when evil seemed most triumphant a stronger, more unshakable faith that Jehovah, Eighteousness, was essentially supreme.

The essence of faithfulness to Jehovah was obedience to the Law. Even from the earliest times Jehovah had demanded a certain standard of conduct, and the ritual of sacrifice had developed not to propitiate the whims of a mysterious deity but to atone for breaches in the standard of conduct that Jehovah was understood to require. Emphasis had been laid increasingly on conduct, and standards of right and wrong had risen. Along with this, the synagogue had grown up for instruction in the Law and for prayer without animal sacrifices. For the relation of Jews with one another, the fundamentals of the Law were in advance of the customs and standards of their contemporaries. In spite of their exaggeration of details, their externalism, and the conspicuous neglect hy many Pharisees of "justice and mercy and faith,' ' the Pharisees had rendered a great service to the world in their deliberate exaltation of the Law.

Theoretically this religion of the Law was democratic. Every Jewish boy, whatever his class, was taught certain parts of the Hebrew scriptures, and the synagogue worship was open to all. It is clear that there was a tendency for the well-to-do Pharisees and the scholars who were learned in the great mass of tradition, which had grown up as interpretation of the Law, to dominate the synagogue and to look with contempt on the religion of the common people. But with the perspective of time and in the light of Christ's life and teaching, the rabbinical tradition and the exaggerated piety of the Pharisees seem less important in the life of the Jewish people than the universal instruction in the rudiments of the sacred Law. The people to whom Jesus came knew that God cared what they did and wanted them to do right.

Moreover, this Jewish faith included belief that justice and righteousness would ultimately be expressed in a new nation of the Jews. Their faith in the supremacy of Jehovah and in his insistence upon righteousness had developed into a faith that Jehovah was able to make goodness triumph over evil in every detail of national life. There had arisen a persistent hope of a renewed and transformed society. The new age which was to be suddenly and miraculously established was called the Kingdom of God. This hope of a new order included for some of the apocalyptic 1 writers the hope of a Messiah who should enjoy universal dominion. The names given to this leader who should come were "Messiah" or "Anointed" (in Greek xP tffr ^) , the " righteous king, ' ' the " Elect, ? ' or the "Son of Man." A great day would usher in everlasting joy for the righteous, for Israel and even, in some of the writings, for all mankind. Belief in this new kingdom had become widespread: Only to the worldly Sadducees the expectation meant nothing since they already had all they wanted. To the Pharisees, the hope was colored with desire for universal obedience to the Law, as interpreted by the traditions of the scribes. To the common people, on the other hand, it was more especially a hope of deliverance from poverty and insecurity. The canticles in the first two chapters of St. Luke's gospel seem to express the Messianic hope of the devout poor. Thus in the Magnificat:

He has manifested his supreme strength; He has scattered those who were haughty in the thoughts of their hearts;

iAn apocalypse (Greek dTro/caXv^is ) is a revelation, unveiling, or uncovering of something that has been hidden. It is a technical term used to denote a particular kind of writing in which the hope is set forth that deliverance is coming and that the righteous are to wait for it in patience. The book of Daniel is the great example in the Old Testament of an apocalypse.

He has cast monarchs down from their thrones, And exalted men of low estate; The hungry he has satisfied with choice gifts, And the rich he has sent empty-handed away.

In preparation for the coming of this new age, Elijah, the prophet, embodying the spirit of prophecy, was to appear once more in Israel, according to the popular belief. For more than three centuries no prophet's voice had been raised in Judea. The wise men who wrote the Proverbs and Ben Sira in his writings had set forth a high social ideal, but not in the ringing words of the earlier reformers. There had been no one to call the nation to repentance. The teaching of the scribes, that righteousness was obedience to the traditional interpretation of the Law, had gone unchallenged.

When John, with the aspect of Elijah, came out from the wilderness, a social message was once more proclaimed in Palestine. The religious leaders of the Jews had been, for the most part, allied with the class of wealth and privilege. It was the more remarkable that from a priestly family came one who identified himself with the common people. John the Baptist was born a priest and could have succeeded his father in the course of Abijah. All the ease and comfort of the priestly aristocracy might have been his. He could have lived on income from the sale of animals in the Temple and enjoyed a life secluded and protected from the squalor and misery of the world outside. But his father must have brought him up with a sense of vocation to a harder life. John had been under a Nazirite vow since his birth. In the desert he may have been in contact with the Essenes who lived in settlements near the Dead Sea. They were "Pharisees in the superlative degree" and practiced the strictest asceticism, but John cannot be called an Essene. The members of that monastic order were vegetarians while John ate locusts, the food of the poor. His choice of this article of food and of honey from wild bees, of coarse clothes made of camel 's hair with a waist-cloth of leather, marked his identification with the poorest people. In his long hours of prayer and meditation, John had seen clearly the injustice of oppression in Judea, and connected its evils with the glorious hope of a new day which should dawn for Israel. Before the people could be ready for this new day, there must be sincere penitence for the sins of the nation and a change of heart that should mean a turning toward justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Individuals, groups in society, and the nation as a whole, must share in this repentance. With the purpose of " turning the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make a people ready and prepared for the Lord," John began his work. His preaching was at first so popular that people of all classes came to hear him. It required moral courage to face the crowd with the words, You brood of vipers, for among them were the Temple authorities and the other religious leaders of the nation, and they were not accustomed to hear any one question their righteousness. When the crowds, stirred by the call to repentance, asked what they could do to show their sincerity in the new life, John faced frankly the unequal distribution of possessions. "Let every one who possesses two shirts share with him that has none, and let him that has food do likewise. ' ' It seemed to him a simple and obvious necessity to do away with the glaring contrast between those who had more than they needed and those who had not enough for subsistence.

Tax-gatherers who had been trying to gain as much as possible for the magnates who hired them were met with the brief command, "Never exact more than your fixed rate." Eoman soldiers asking, "And we, what are we to do?" were answered, "Never extort money, never lay a false charge, but be content with your pay. ' ' The evils, then, against which John preached were greed for wealth, oppression of the poor and weak, and unjust distribution of privileges. The social conditions of Judea provided for organized selfishness. It was this "individual self-interest massed into a group selfishness" that the Baptist denounced. He pointed out their sin and then to each group of people he gave positive instructions for a new way of life. More than mere preaching, also, was the significant rite of baptism as an outward and visible sign of repentance and as a symbol of initiation into a new movement. Those who confessed their sins and were taken down into the river came out with a feeling that the past was behind them and that they could begin again in newness of life.

But just as in all ages the leaders who dare to speak out freely, in concrete terms, against the organized selfishness of their own time, have been suppressed, imprisoned, and even put to death, so John the Baptist was silenced by those who were in control. It may not have been Herod alone who moved against John. The authorities who had been publicly rebuked by the preacher for oppression and injustice would naturally have watched for an opportunity to do him harm. Josephus records, " Herod who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion, thought it best by putting him to death to prevent any mischief that he might cause." This statement of the Jewish historian supplements the record of the gospels in which the reason given for John's imprisonment is his protest against the marriage of Herod and a woman who was Herod's niece and his brother's wife. A social reformer, with the courage of his convictions, was executed by the order of a weak official who was trying to escape the consequences of his own folly. A fearless preacher was put to death as an agitator, a disturber of public order.

But John's work was finished. He had pointed towards one who was to increase while John himself decreased. The last of the prophets, removing some of the obstacles that stood in the way of a new order, was the forerunner of a master teacher who would make known the principles on which the new order could be built. John had cried, "Kepent, the reign of heaven is near."

Jesus repeated the words and launched his movement on the enthusiasm of John's.

So Jesus came to a nation divided within itself, separated from other nations by national pride, and yet presenting the same problems as the world outside. What principles could set men free from oppression and strife? What would arouse in those on top and in those underneath a passion for justice? What power could make men love each other until all barriers should be broken down? How could men learn that God was love? In Israel, as in every other nation of that age and of every age even to the present, the great ones of the earth were lording it over those whom they considered inferior. Eomans were overbearing towards their subjects; Jews felt superior to Samaritans. The rich exercised authority over the poor. Educated men looked down upon the ignorant masses. Rulers enjoyed the privileges of power, while the multitudes were harassed and scattered. Church and State were bound up together, and religious leaders were identified with influential families.

The religion of the people, however, contained living elements which made Israel peculiarly fitted to be the nation from which the hope of the world should spring. Of all the nations in the ancient world, only Israel believed in one God, Jehovah, who cared for his people. Only Israel looked forward to a new age when justice should "roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." The Jews had been taught to depend on God as one who would " deliver the needy when he crieth and the poor that hath no helper." In preparation for this deliverance, John had preached repentance and started a movement that had already attracted a considerable number of people. There were now many whose expectation was expressed in the words, "Unto you that fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in its wings." This was the hope on which Jesus was to build, supplementing and transforming it by the spiritual impulse of his life.