will accept and our conscience permit, but the most we can spare, and even more than we can spare. As we often say, but seldom do, we must give until it hurts. How unbusinesslike! But how divine! For to give men what they have earned, or what they seem to us to have deserved, is justice—a good thing, but a cold. To give men what they have not earned or deserved, yet need, is that greatest thing in the world, that godlike thing we call love. And this, Jesus said, is the whole of Law and Prophets. It is also the whole of his gospel. And it is man's only adequate self-expression. CHAPTER IV JESUS THE HERALD OF THE KINGDOM I THOSE who account themselves the only "orthodox" Christians are usually quite insistent that ministers shall "preach the simple gospel." This cant phrase (for such it now is) is oftenest on the lips of those who have not the slightest idea of what the real "gospel" is. Gospel is Good News, the English equivalent of εvayyέhov, the word used in the New Testament documents to denote the Message of Jesus and his apostles. The original content of that Message is very clear. According to Mark, the oldest record that we have of the ministry of Jesus, he began his work in Galilee by announcing: The time is completed, And the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Good News. (1) This was the gospel of Jesus: a declaration that the Kingdom of God was about to be established, and a summons to men to "repent" and "believe" as conditions of membership in the Kingdom. In other words, they were to accept the Message and relate themselves to it. It was a call to a new ideal of life, to a new purpose in life, to a new conduct of life. And the kernel of the Good News was the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God. By this Jesus seems to have intended his hearers to understand the world as God's (1) Mark 1:15. spiritual empire, a realm on earth with the fundamental characteristics of Heaven, a world in which men will be godlike. The chief note of Heaven, in the mind of Jesus, clearly was that it was a divine realm of ideal perfection, because in it God was all in all, and his will was perfectly done. The Kingdom of God on earth would be realized when God became the dominating influence in the hearts and lives of men, when his will is done here as it is in Heaven. Our word "kingdom" fails to express the idea of Jesus; for, while ẞaouela did originally mean "kingdom," to the generation of Jesus it had come to be the equivalent of the Latin imperium, and to mean the Roman Empire, an authority conterminous with the world itself. There could be, in the nature of the case, but one such universal imperium, in the sense of a visible government, with an Imperator at its head, divided into provinces, each with its administrator responsible to the Emperor; and its great army, distributed into legions, all absolutely loyal to the Imperator or commander-in-chief. But there could be alongside of this political and military imperium, and conflicting with it not at all, because moving in a totally different sphere, a religious or "spiritual" Empire, as vast, as perfectly organized, as loyal to its Head. But the words of Jesus nowhere afford us a hint that he had any conception of a Kingdom like that. He never describes the Kingdom of God in terms that can be stretched to cover such a conception. That was a notion of the Kingdom that came to prevail among Christians in consequence of Imperial favor, after Constantine and his successors had made the Holy Catholic Church both in form and spirit a more or less religious counterpart of the political institutions of the Roman State. Jesus used the word that he found on the lips of all men, because it was the only word available. If a religious teacher is to make himself understood at all, he must con form to the speech of his day. He may indeed introduce a few new words, or he may try to give a deeper significance to commonplace words, and in either case he takes the risk of being misunderstood. Nothing is plainer from the Gospels than that, in this matter of the Kingdom, Jesus shot over the heads of his entire generation. True, his hearers hung upon his lips. They remembered many sayings with wonderful accuracy. In due time they wrote down his words and passed them on to others. But they misunderstood, with unanimity and perseverance that one refrains from calling perversity only because they so evidently could not help themselves. Their misunderstanding was as honest as it was tragic. For the mind of the Jew was then full of an idea of the Kingdom of God that he derived from the Empire under which he lived. He was more than he realized under the spell of that tremendous institution, the like of which had never been known before. The "Empires" of Egypt and Babylonia, of Assyria and Persia, and even that of the great Alexander, had been limited and ephemeral things to which it was a joke to apply the name imperium. But here was an authority extending to the very confines of civilization, with common laws, institutions, language. There seemed every reason why it should endure forever. No forces were visible or computable by ordinary human foresight that could smash this vast military, legal and social organization. And as matter of fact, it did endure through fourteen centuries thereafter. Nothing else human and mundane has so nearly deserved the oft-applied epithets, "perpetual" and "eternal." It is rather common to say that the Jew hated the Roman Empire. It might be more exact to say that the Jew hated the Roman, not the Empire. A universal imperium of which Jerusalem should be the centre, the power of which should be wielded by a Son of David, was his dearest dream-that vision summed up his ideas of human felicity and glory. So much admiration did the Roman Empire exact from those who unwillingly submitted to it. So completely as this did it dominate their thought and imagination. The Jew translated the Kingdom of God into terms of this visible organization. It was to a generation with mind preoccupied by such an ideal that Jesus vainly tried to communicate his ideal of a Kingdom of spirit. He said again and again, to men as unreceptive as blocks of wood, things like these: The Kingdom of God is not coming so that you can Nor will men say, "Here it is!" or "There it is!" Jesus could not hope, so far as we can see, to get on with his hearers save by using the accepted word, but the moment he uttered it their minds were obsessed by the phantasy of an empire of this world. It was the only word available, for there were no alternatives that his hearers could have understood better. There were then no republics, still more no democracies. The old Roman res publica had perished, and the Greek "democracies" were never democratic, for they were founded on the economic basis of slavery. But it is notable that, though he uses the word Kingdom, Jesus never describes his ideal as a monarchy, but as a commonwealth, a democracy. The Kingdom is a state of equality, of brotherhood, of mutual service. There can be no aristocracy in it; no one can claim to be greater than his fellows: You know that those considered rulers among the heathen lord it over them, And their great men exercise authority over them; It will not be so among you. So, whoever of you wishes to become first, (1) Or "among you." Luke 17:20, 21. |