Page 17 of 43
It is not with observation, said Jesus, that the supreme thing that he taught—the seeking and finding of the Kingdom of God—will come. Do not seek it at some other place, some other time. It is within, and if within it will show forth. Make no mistake about that,—it will show forth. It touches and it sensitises the inner springs of action in a man's or a woman's life. When a man realises his Divine sonship that Jesus taught, he will act as a son of God. Out of the heart spring either good or evil actions. Self-love, me, mine; let me get all I can for myself, or, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself—the Divine law of service, of mutuality—the highest source of ethics.
You can trust any man whose heart is right. He will be straight, clean, reliable. His word will be as good as his bond. Personally you can't trust a man who is brought into any line of action, or into any institution through fear. The sore is there, liable to break out in corruption at any time. This opening up of the springs of the inner life frees him also from the letter of the law, which after all consists of the traditions of men, and makes him subject to that higher moral guide within. How[Pg 110] clearly Jesus illustrated this in his conversations regarding the observance of the Sabbath—how the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, and how it was always right to do good on the Sabbath.
I remember some years ago a friend in my native state telling me the following interesting incident in connection with his grandmother. It was in northern Illinois—it might have been in New England. "As a boy," said he, "I used to visit her on the farm. She loved her cup of coffee for breakfast. Ordinarily she would grind it fresh each morning in the kitchen; but when Sunday morning came she would take her coffee-grinder down into the far end of the cellar, where no one could see and no one could hear her grind it." He could never quite tell, he said, whether it was to ease her own conscience, or in order to give no offence to her neighbours.
Now, I can imagine Jesus passing by and stopping at that home—it was a home known for its native kindly hospitality—and meeting her just as she was coming out of the cellar with her coffee-grinder—his quick and unerring perception enabling him to take in the whole situation at once, and saying: "In the name of the Father, Aunt Susan, what were you doing with your coffee-grinder down in the cellar on this beautiful Sabbath morning?[Pg 111] You like your cup of coffee, and I also like the coffee that you make; thank God that you have it, and thank God that you have the good health to enjoy it. We can give praise to the Father through eating and drinking, if, as in everything else, these are done in moderation and we give value received for all the things that we use. So don't take your grinder down into the cellar on the Sabbath morning; but grind your coffee up here in God's sunshine, with a thankful heart that you have it to grind."
And I can imagine him, as he passes out of the little front gate, turning and waving another good-bye and saying: "When I come again, Aunt Susan, be it week-day or Sabbath, remember God's sunshine and keep out of the cellar." And turning again in a half-joking manner: "And when you take those baskets of eggs to town, Aunt Susan, don't pick out too many of the large ones to keep for yourself, but take them just as the hens lay them. And, Aunt Susan, give good weight in your butter. This will do your soul infinitely more good than the few extra coins you would gain by too carefully calculating"—Aunt Susan with all her lovable qualities, had a little tendency to close dealing.
I think we do incalculable harm by separating Jesus so completely from the more homely,[Pg 112] commonplace affairs of our daily lives. If we had a more adequate account of his discourses with the people and his associations with the people, we would perhaps find that he was not, after all, so busy in saving the world that he didn't have time for the simple, homely enjoyments and affairs of the everyday life. The little glimpses that we have of him along these lines indicate to me that he had. Unless we get his truths right into this phase of our lives, the chances are that we will miss them entirely.
And I think that with all his earnestness, Jesus must have had an unusually keen sense of humour. With his unusual perceptions and his unusual powers in reading and in understanding human nature, it could not be otherwise. That he had a keen sense for beauty; that he saw it, that he valued it, that he loved it, especially beauty in all nature, many of his discourses so abundantly prove. Religion with him was not divorced from life. It was the power that permeated every thought and every act of the daily life.
If we would seek the essence of Jesus' revelation, attested both by his words and his life, it was to bring a knowledge of the ineffable love of God to man, and by revealing this, to instil in the minds and hearts of men love for God, and a knowledge of and following of the ways of God. It was also then to bring a new emphasis of the Divine law of love—the love of man for man. Combined, it results, so to speak, in raising men to a higher power, to a higher life,—as individuals, as groups, as one great world group.
It is a newly sensitised attitude of mind and heart that he brought and that he endeavoured to reveal in all its matchless beauty—a following not of the traditions of men, but fidelity to one's God, whereby the Divine rule in the mind and heart assumes supremacy and, as must inevitably follow, fidelity to one's fellow-men. These are the essentials of Jesus' revelation—the fundamental forces in his own[Pg 114] life. His every teaching, his every act, comes back to them. I believe also that all efforts to mystify the minds of men and women by later theories about him are contrary to his own expressed teaching, and in exact degree that they would seek to substitute other things for these fundamentals.
I call them fundamentals. I call them his fundamentals. What right have I to call them his fundamentals?
An occasion arose one day in the form of a direct question for Jesus to state in well-considered and clear-cut terms the essence, the gist, of his entire teachings—therefore, by his authority, the fundamentals of essential Christianity. In the midst of one of the groups that he was speaking to one day, we are told that a certain lawyer arose—an interpreter of, an authority on, the existing ecclesiastical law. The reference to him is so brief, unfortunately, that we cannot tell whether his question was to confound Jesus, as was so often the case, or whether being a liberal Jew he longed for an honest and truly helpful answer. From Jesus' remark to him, after his primary answer, we are justified in believing it was the latter.
His question was: "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus said unto him, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy[Pg 115] God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
Here we have a wonderful statement from a wonderful source. So clear-cut is it that any wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot mistake it. Especially is this true when we couple with it this other statement of Jesus: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." We must never forget that Jesus was born, lived, and died a Jew, the same as all of his disciples—and they never regarded themselves in any other light. The basis of his religion was the religion of Israel. It was this he taught and expounded, now in the synagogue, now out on the hillside and by the lake-side. It was this that he tried to teach in its purity, that he tried to free from the hedges that ecclesiasticism had built around it, this that he endeavoured to raise to a still higher standard.
