WHAT has emerged most strongly from the approach to Jesus as a real person, rather than as the theological figure of Christian faith variously represented in the Gospels, is his dynamic character. This dynamism was so much in evidence and exerted such a powerful influence on those who came in contact with him that no version of his career, whatever its doctrinal intentions, could fail to exhibit it. The positiveness and purposefulness of Jesus was such a feature of his personality that it was ineradicable in the memory of his first followers, stamping itself indelibly on Christian tradition. It was this spirit of his communicating itself in retrospect to the first believers which welded them into an active, energetic and bold-speaking community. Nothing perhaps acquaints us more surely with the Jesus of history than the exuberant overspill of the kind of man he was into the circumstances and experience of the early Church. Here we may see the true significance of Pentecost.
For he saw ere his eye was darkened
The sheaves of the harvest-bringing,
And heard while his ear yet harkened
The voice of the reapers singing.
Ah, well! the world is discreet;
There are plenty to pause and wait;
But here was a man who set his feet
Some time in advance of fate.
In the messianic symbolism of a source common to Matthew and Luke, when Jesus died the veil of the Temple was rent from top to bottom. So we, to reach the real Jesus, have to rend in two the embroidered silken curtain of Christian theology.1 The man we then discover, as we have tried to show, is indeed a man of faith, but not of a passive quiescent faith. He is a man who put his intense convictions to the greatest test of all, the test of actions.
When Jesus believed he was the Messiah of Israel it meant for him doing the deeds of the Messiah as the Prophets had foreshadowed, setting the supreme example of right conduct in relation to God and Man, in defiance of the shibboleths of orthodox religion and the enactments of a powerful established government. Nothing could daunt him, neither the cares of life nor the prospect of a traitor's death. He used the resources of his fertile mind to outgeneral and outwit his opponents, to compel their self-interested schemes to comply with his world-interested purposes. He laid his plans and he carried them out: he both guided and guarded the words of his mouth to achieve his aims. The law of loving kindness was on his tongue; but also the biting speech that revealed and dissolved hypocrisy. He was not haughty; but neither was he humble. He came as the Servant, but with the dignity of a master, not the obsequiousness of a slave.
The ruling passion of his life was the coming of the Kingdom of God. For him it had its Hebrew meaning, the time when war and hatred would be banished, and ‘the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea’.2 He told the Pharisees that the Kingdom of God would not come by standing idle and watching for signs. The Kingdom of God was right beside them, under their noses, ready to appear whenever they were willing to comply with the conditions which would inaugurate it. Be alive, be alert, Jesus insisted. The goal will not be reached by a sleeping partnership with God.
Despite all the legends, all the developments of the image of him, all the changes of emphasis, the vividness of Jesus comes over to us in the Gospels, the voice of his messianic authority, the ardour of his enterprise, the utter sincerity of the man in all his dealings. The traditions, hazy in many things, remain infected and impregnated with his glowing, objective and dynamic personality. The historical Jesus has always been there for the finding, not faultless, not inerrant, not divine, but magnificently human.
Of such a man surprising miracles could be told, as of other sages and heroes, and to minds steeped in this kind of adoration they would seem only natural. Such a man could even be worshipped by pagan hearts, as a god, as the son and embodiment of the Highest God. The time when such excessive devotion was an appropriate tribute has not passed yet, since it is maintained by a functioning and erudite body of religious teachers wedded to an old inheritance. The fate and eternal welfare of the individual, a matter of deep personal concern to many, has been made to depend on acceptance of a creed claimed to be the expression of an unalterable and divinely authorised truth.
But more and more people are now achieving emancipation from such ancient thralldom, and there is a trend towards the opposite extreme which seems, but is not necessarily, more rational than what is being discarded. Jesus the Jew believed that vision and action, faith and deeds, are inseparable if man is to evolve and progress. Both are equally needed, inspiration aiding aspiration, and performance taking its incentive from creative dreams. We ignore at our peril intimations that there are ways which are not our ways, and thoughts more comprehensive than our thoughts.
The Messianic Hope which Jesus espoused and in a unique manner personified has not yet exhibited its full potentialities, and so he is still the leader, worthy to be followed, not of a lost cause, but of one ever demanding fuller realisation. He himself saw to it that he would not be forgotten, that he would be continually with us pestering and challenging us. In spite of everything done to stop him in his own time and since, not only by his enemies but by his professed champions, he has continued to come through.
So let no one leave this presentation of Jesus with the notion that it is destructive of faith, or that it reveals Jesus as a deluded fanatic. If any such impression has been formed it is very wide of the mark. What this book has aimed to reveal is that he was a man of so much faith that he dared to translate an age-old and somewhat nebulous imagination into a factual down-to-earth reality. It was useless for the Jews, or any others for that matter, to cherish a noble ideal if they were going to do nothing concrete about it, if they were not going to sweat and strive to put it into effect. Jesus prayed and then he got to work. So many do the first but not the second. They believe it to be enough to give out their fine feelings and thoughts, expecting others to perform the drudgery. This attitude is what Jesus castigated so unmercifully in his own day.
The true spirit of Jesus is manifested in the Epistle of James in the New Testament.
‘Of what avail is it, brothers, for someone to say he has faith, when he has no deeds to show for it? Can faith save him? If a brother and sister are destitute, lacking even daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace. Mind you keep warm and take enough nourishment,” but you give them no physical necessities for the purpose, what avails it? So with faith. Unless deeds spring from it it is dead in isolation. One may put it this way. You have faith, you say, while I have deeds. Show me your faith independent of deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe there is one God, you say. It is well that you do believe it. But so do the demons, and they shudder. Can you not realise, you dunce, that faith without deeds is unproductive? . . . For as the body without the spirit is dead, so is faith without deeds.’3
Much is made of the love and compassion of Jesus, and rightly, but we see these qualities everywhere united with commitment, with doing good rather than being good. He refused to allow himself to be called good. It is said of a seemingly praiseworthy young man who had never put a foot wrong that Jesus looking upon him loved him, and the measure of his love was to tell him promptly to sell all his possessions and distribute them to the poor. Again the emphasis is on deeds as the proof of faith and love.
Because Jesus is not worshipped he is not thereby inevitably played down or diminished in effectiveness. Rather should we be strengthened and encouraged because he is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh and not God incarnate. The mind that was in the Messiah can therefore also be in us, stimulating us to accomplish what those of more careful and nicely balanced disposition declare to be impossible. Thus the victory for which Jesus relentlessly schemed and strove will be won at last. There will be peace throughout the earth.
The Iron Chancellor Bismarck, with reluctant admiration, once said of Disraeli, another famous schemer, ‘The old Jew, there is the man!’ Seen in the messianic light of the Passover Plot we can with more wholehearted approbation say of Jesus, ‘The young Jew, there was the Man!’
1. Professor Hugh Anderson in his book Jesus and Christian Origins has said of the dialectical theologians that they ‘barred the door against any direct knowledge of the human Jesus, acquired by scientific historical methods, as an element in the faith’.
2. Isa. xi. 9.
3. Jas. ii. 14–26 (translated by Hugh Schonfield, The Authentic New Testament).