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He talks of people whose outer lives are as stately as mausoleums while their inner lives stink of bodies in putrefaction. This is not rhetorical language skilfully added for effect. The language is part of the man himself, stemming from the urgency and passion of his driving conviction.
And what did he use this language to say? Not a great deal quantitatively, as far as our records have it. All the words of Jesus, as reported in the New Testament, can be spoken in two hours. Yet they are the most repeated words in the world: "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye also unto them." "Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Most of the time, however, he told stories--parables we call them. People who heard these stories were moved to exclaim, "Never spake man thus."
They were astonished. And small wonder. If we are not it is only because we have heard his words so often that their edges have worn smooth by familiarity. If we could recover their original impact, we too would be startled. Their beauty would not cover the fact that they are "hard sayings," a scheme of values so radically at odds with those by which we live that they would rock us like an earthquake.
We are told that the publican and the harlot go to heaven before those who are outwardly righteous, whereas the world assumes that the good people, the respectable people, the people who fulfil the norm and have nothing to be ashamed of, will lead the heavenly procession. There blows through these teachings, Berdyaev has said, a wind of freedom and liberty that frightens the world and makes it want to deflect them by postponement--not yet, not yet! H.G. Wells was evidently right. Either there was something mad about this man--or our hearts are still too small for what he was trying to say.
And what, precisely, was he trying to say? Taken together, his parables and his beatitudes, indeed everything he said, form the surface of a burning glass which focusses man's awareness on the two most important facts about life: God's overwhelming love for man, and the need for man to receive this love, then let it flow out again toward his neighbors.
Jesus was an authentic child of Judaism, heir to the best of her magnificent religious heritage. As such he inherited the Jewish vision of a God of infinite loving kindness whose entire being is bent on man's salvation. If Jesus differed from his compatriots, it was only in taking this vision of God more seriously and sensing it more directly, not in believing something different.
Plainly the crater from which Jesus' strenuous perfectionism issues is God's astonishing love for man. Correlatively the reason we find this ethic incredible is that we do not share the premise on which it is based. The reason the love Jesus proposed is so demanding is that it is to be absolutely free, geared entirely to our neighbor's needs, not his due. And the reason this seemed to Jesus the natural way to look at the matter is that this is the way God's love has come to us.
Certainly the most impressive thing about the teachings of Jesus is not that he taught them but that he lived them. His entire life was one of complete humility, self-giving, and love which sought not its own. The supreme evidence of his humility, as E.C. Colwell has pointed out, is that it is impossible to discover what Jesus thought of himself. He was not concerned that men should know what he was. His concern was for people to know God and his will for their lives. By indirection this tells us something about what Jesus thought of himself too, but it is obvious he thought infinitely less of himself than he did of God.
Through the pages of the gospels Jesus emerges as a man of surpassing charm and winsomeness who bore about him, as someone has said, no strangeness at all save the strangeness of perfection.
In the end, especially when he laid down his life for his friends, it seemed to those who knew him best that here was a man in whom the human ego had disappeared completely, leaving his life so completely under the will of God that it became perfectly transparent to that will. It came to the point that, as they looked at Jesus, they were looking at the way God would be if he were to assume human form.
Ann Bendall, Nambour, Australia
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