That one first notices in the Gospels is the fact that these writers did not look upon our Lord's life as beginning at birth and ending at death, but as eternal, both in time and space, so that before all worlds He was there, and without Him no star or system of stars could have come into being. This was what they thought, not about some distant and secluded saint, but about an intimate personal Companion, with whose voice they were familiar; to whom, with their own hands, they furnished daily food; whose every habit had been disclosed to them. These witnesses, some of them fishermen, one a doctor, another a Pharisee, another a tax-gatherer, agreed that Jesus was one with the Creator, and that whatever multi-myriads of living creatures inhabited worlds unknown, all of them--good or bad--were as it were tested by their attitude to the Man of Nazareth. It was as if the biographers of George Washington had begun their story, no} with his birth at Bridges Creek, in. Virginia, but with the creation of the Rocky Mountains and the first thunders of Niagara. He Himself used a phrase like "in the beginning" with a significant familiarity, as of an eye-witness of those operations whereby our life had its origin. "In the beginning," He would say, "it was not so." Ancient as are our divorce laws--to take one illustration--to Him they were innovations. Moses and Abraham, the founders of His country's greatness, were to Him among the moderns.
Constant attempts have been made to belittle these claims, particularly by the assertion that the date of the Gospels allowed an interval during which "the legend" of Christ's majesty was developed by superstitious followers. But the world is ever drawn back to a Personage who with effortless grandeur fills the stage of history; and even the most careless of us realizes, when he gives himself time to think, that if Christ's status be reduced, so is the status of all mankind. Slavery, sweating, injustice, vice--these and every degradation of our race are rebuked in Christ and cannot survive. Once and for all, He challenged Rousseau's despairing dictum, that " man is born free, but is everywhere in chains." He lost His life, but He never surrendered or misused His liberty.
These ideas about Jesus did not begin with the Gospels and Epistles written after His death. We find them in psalms and prophecies which were read in the synagogues regularly centuries before He came. Here was a definite hope, committed to writing long before the event, that a Messiah would one day arise, who should save His people from their sins. No girl in Judea, with womanhood dawning upon her, dreamt of marriage without a prayer that her firstborn might be the Deliverer of Israel. One asks whether there is any parallel for this intense domestic yet religious patriotism--this wonderful belief in the sacredness of children. And according to their faith was it unto them. Many champions did arise. There were the Maccabees. There was Judas of Galilee, whom Gamaliel mentioned. There was Theudas. There were many Messiahs. Many mothers hoped that their sons would be the Chosen of God. The oblivion which has overwhelmed these comparatively obscure careers is the measure of Christ's unapproachable greatness. For one person who can tell you anything about the Maccabean Wars, there are ten thousand who can tell you much more about the Galilean mission.
The Prophets and Christ
Prophecies are said to contribute to their own fulfilment. Precisely; that is part of the story. Jesus saturated His mind with the teaching of the Old Testament. By that standard He tested His entire destiny. We might, indeed, almost write His life from the psalms and the prophets. His mother was to be a maiden. He was to be reckoned with the tribe of Judah and the royal house of David. He was to be born in Bethlehem. A massacre of young children was to afflict that famous market-town. He was to visit Egypt. He was to grow up, unprotected, as a tender plant, in a civilization as unhopeful as the dry ground. His personality was to be devoid of the popular graces, and He was to be despised and neglected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Much of His ministry was to be devoted to Zebulun and Naphtali, Galilee of the Gentiles, where the people, sitting in darkness, were to see a great light. But He was to enter Jerusalem as King, yet lowly and seated on an ass. For He would not strive nor cry, nor lift up His voice in the streets, but would be gentle with men and persuasive, neither breaking the bruised reed nor quenching the smoking flax, until--I like that tremendous until--until He sends forth His sword unto victory.
A follower of Elijah, rugged of habit and bold of speech, was to prepare His way, but He Himself was to bear the griefs of men and carry their sorrows, to feed them like a shepherd, to unstop the deaf ears, open the blind eyes, heal the sick, strengthen the lame, and, most mysterious of all sacred functions, carry on His heart and conscience the iniquities of us all. Finally, He was to be mocked, scourged, and killed--a silent and willing victim--not by sword, nor stoning, nor by the gallows, but by some strange and awful martyrdom which would expose His tortured frame to the public gaze--His lips parched with thirst, His hands and His feet cruelly pierced, yet His bones unbroken. After betrayal by one who was to eat with Him from the same dish, He was to share this fate with the wicked, yet was to be buried among the rich, and, after burial, was to see no corruption, but out of defeat was to ride forth to victory, and claim the unbounded allegiance of nations yet unborn! That was what men knew of Him, centuries before His mother first clasped her unconscious Baby to herself.
Christ the Revealer of God
The one supreme truth which the Jews realized clearly was that God was as much a part of their lives as a river at which they watered their flocks, a rock under which they sheltered themselves from the sun, or their friends and their enemies. But John, who wrote the fourth of our Lord's biographies, declared that God is more than this. He is not only near to us, and actively concerned in our affairs, but He constantly expresses Himself, as a man utters " a word," so that color and form and movement and sound--in sunset, mountain, and leaf, in running streams and the flight of birds--are the language of God, which we, by our art and our enjoyment, may make our language. So that we draw near to God when we build aisles like the forest glade, and domes like the sky above us, and consider the lilies, how they grow, and note that the very sparrows are unforgotten.
This was the view not only of the Evangelist but of John Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites, who taught us that all arts are to be tried by their fidelity to God's will in nature. In Jesus, the disclosure of God was more deeply unfolded. The "Word" became actual flesh and dwelt among us. Just as in our own persons, certain hopes, calculations, ideals, ambitions, are, as it were, embodied in our eyes and ears, the gestures of our hands, the progress of our feet-so in Christ the thoughts of God became the life and the light of men. What we call "the incarnation " was not incredible; it was inevitable. It follows from a landscape by Turner, which is not mere paint; from the flash of a diamond, which is not mere charcoal; and from this very print, which is not mere ink. And thus it was that while Matthew traced our Lord's pedigree to Abraham, and Luke carried it back to Adam, John, by his eagle glance, pierces the mists of time, and flashes out the truth that Jesus and His Father are ONE. The Messiah sprang from the eternal Godhead.
One detects an absorbing significance in those earthly genealogies which are given us by Matthew and Luke--partly because they appear to be irrelevant. Joseph was not Christ's father; he repudiated the paternity; yet it is his ancestry and not Mary's that we find in the Gospels. Doubtless Joseph, warned by a dream, assumed legal responsibility for the Child, and some authorities think that Luke's table of ancestors really represents the family of the Virgin. Be that as it may--and I prefer to go not one inch beyond what is actually stated in the New Testament--it is incontestable that Jesus grew up, one of a family of brothers and sisters, yet Himself under irreverent reflection, owing to the marvelous circumstances attending His coming among men. We remember the difficulties of the other Joseph with his brethren, the domestic jealousies that arose, the criminal intrigues. The only protection of Jesus against the humiliation of what seemed to be the bar sinister-He who had not abhorred the Virgin's womb-was His utter goodness, and certain other memories that illuminated His birth.
The Two Genealogies
These long pedigrees are an illustration of what Paul meant when he wrote about having one's treasure in earthen vessels. Not one of us to-day worships Christ because, according to Matthew, Joseph had royal blood in his veins, while, according to Luke, this royal blood was as ancient as Adam. In the veins of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns there is royal and ancient blood, but to neither dynasty do we pay our homage. The very candor with which Matthew annotates his genealogy is among the supreme, the inspired ironies of literature. With a sure instinct, he points out every blot on that impoverished yet proud escutcheon. He tells how the sons of Judah, Phares and Zara, were born of Tamar, and were thus of irregular descent. He tells how the mother of Boaz was Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, when Jericho was in the last stages of moral decay. He tells how the grandmother of David was Ruth, the pagan woman of Moab. He tells how Solomon's mother was Bath-Sheba, the wife of Uriah, the Hittite. That lineage, according to the flesh, omitted most of the men and women whose genius rendered the Jewish race illustrious. There is no. Moses, no Joshua, no Samuel. There is no Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, or Jeremiah. One might almost imagine that it was the purpose of the Evangelists to show how little of worth is included in the most exalted peerage of Israel, and that the hereditary principle, as adopted, let us say, in Islam--where children of the Prophet are still distinguished by the green turban--is not applicable to a saving faith. They teach us that the Spirit, like wind, bloweth where it listeth, on rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, who thus become of one family with Him, and true children of Abraham, when, in all humble obedience, they do the works of Abraham and of Jesus. And they also show that our Saviour came, not only to share the glory of our race, at its best, but to redeem our race from the worst.
Though inaccuracy is not proved, the pedigrees of Matthew and Luke are not identical, either with each other or with certain documents in the Old Testament. At this distance of time, no research can compose the discrepancies--which, I confess, is no difficulty to me, for I see therein the truth that the God of the Past is and ever will be as unsearchable as the God of the Present and the God of the Future. But the curious arrangement in Matthew, whereby fourteen generations carry us, first from Abraham to David, then from David to the Captivity, and finally from the Captivity to Joseph and our Lord, is indicative of a deep meaning. Seven is the perfect number, and in each period of fourteen selected generations you have successively--first, the perfect evolution of political kingship; secondly, the complete decline of that political kingship and the enslavement of a people destined to be free; and, finally, the perfect preparation for a spiritual kingship, essentially distinct from David's, yet the fulfillment of it. The pedigrees may be in these days of as little account as earthen vessels, yet we are richer with them than without them; because, if we break up these genealogies, as Gideon's soldiers broke their pitchers, we find a lamp within which guides us onward to the truth that, even in the most high-sounding genealogy, there was none righteous, no not one. None righteous, I would repeat, yet, in addition, none hopeless. Tamar and Rahab and Ruth and Bathsheba stand out before us as the immortal examples of the human soul, rising by faith above circumstances, and so fulfilling the dimly understood purposes of God.
There are no further pedigrees in the New Testament, and the liberalizing influence of Christ over minds narrowly cabined and confined by ideas of a privileged heredity is splendidly displayed in Paul's declaration that, beginning life as an Israelite, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews, he counted these advantages but loss, and proclaimed to the Gentiles also a spiritual inheritance the equal of his own.