WHAT I FIND IN THE GOSPELS
By H. G. WOOD
WE usually approach the Gospels under the influence of a long line of commentators and authors of lives of Jesus who have sought to harmonise the records and make a clear, connected narrative out of their contents. In con- sequence we slur over the limitations and the inconsistences of our sources. Since we expect to find in them something in the nature of a biography, we are surprised when we realise the uncertainty attaching to all attempts to write a life of Jesus. Mr. Joad, bringing an independent judgement to the re-reading of the Gospels, discovers at once (as he in the nature of a biography, we are surprised when we realise the uncertainty attaching to all attempts to write a life of Jesus. Mr. Joad, bringing an independent judgement to the re-reading of the Gospels, discovers at once (as he told us in last week's Spectator) an outstanding charac- teristic which German scholars have been laboriously demonstrating in the post-War period. The Gospels consist in the main of detached fragmentary tradi- tions, preserved and arranged for purposes of evangelism and edification. They are not simple historical records. They tell us what the primitive Church believed about her Lord, and it may be that, in Dr. R. H. Lightfoot's words, " for all the inestimable value of the Gospels, they yield us little more than a whisper of His voice: we trace in them but the outskirts of His ways."
If the fact that the Gospels were written to inspire faith in Jesus as Son of God evokes mistrust in twentieth- century minds, the archaism of the authorised version sometimes occasions misunderstanding. Few sayings of Jesus are more often misinterpreted than " Take no thought for the morrow," which should be rendered " Be not anxious for the morrow." Jesus is not commending lack of fore- thought, He is condemning that feverish anxiety for economic security which is in part the real cause and in part the dis- honest defence of aggression in the modern world. Jesus did indeed direct His disciples, when they went out to pub- lish the good news, to rely on hospitality to supply their daily needs, and He encouraged them to believe that they would not be disappointed. But He never promised them an easy time, and He held out to them the prospect of per- secution and martyrdom.
Some characteristics of the original teaching also lead to misconception. Sometimes the sayings of Jesus resemble proverbial wisdom, where complementary truths are stated in seemingly contradictory forms, as in such pairs as " Look before you leap " and " Nothing venture, nothing have," or " Penny wise, pound foolish " and " Look after the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves." It is easy to discover contradictions in teaching of this kind, but the discoverer is deservedly suspected of failing to penetrate below the surface. Still more disconcerting are those " pregnant and magnanimous hyperboles," as R. L. S. called them, in which Christ so often finds words that " transcend all commonplace morality." " It is easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom." Men have sought to soften the challenge of such a pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole, by identifying the needle's eye with a low narrow gateway in Jerusalem through which an unloaded camel might squeeze. It is not blind unbelief, but plain common sense that is sure to err and scan such sayings to no purpose. No reader finds much in the Gospels who does not appreciate what R. L. S. called " the bold poetry of thought by which men can be strung up above the level of everyday conceptions to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher principle of conduct."
I doubt whether it is possible for any of us to come to the Gospels without theological and other prepossessions. But it is strange how some prepossessions linger. Early im- pressions go deep, and if the first fond prayers which our lips in childhood framed took the form, " Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child," we cannot rid our minds of this childish picture. Yet this picture is shattered for ever for anyone who has read William Blake's Everlasting Gospel,
Was Jesus gentle or did He Show any marks of gentility?
And in spite, or perhaps because, of his poetic madness, Blake is not to be despised as an interpreter. He at least under- stood how Jesus could speak so simply of Mercy, Pity, Truth and Love and yet confront men with the thunder and lightning of apocalyptic judgements. Underlying all apparent oppositions of mercy and judgement, there is a unity in the everlasting Gospel, which is lost when we dis- tinguish ethical plums from apocalyptic dough.
If orthodoxy tends to emasculate Jesus and deny His full humanity by reducing His emotions to compassion and pity, the humanitarian always sets out to find the supremely wise teacher or the revolutionary social re- former in the prophet or the carpenter of Nazareth, and so when he re-reads the Gospels with any sincerity, he is bound to register his disappointment, for the Jesus of the Gospels is neither the one nor the other. Classify Jesus with Confucius and Lao-tze, with Buddha and Socrates, and at once we have the uneasy feeling of a misfit. Jesus has no Weltanschauung, no philosophy of religion, no systematic ethic. No problem of life or conduct is discussed or analysed in the Gospels, and Schlegel's saying is true, " If Jesus be not other and greater than Socrates, then a Socrates He was not." Nor is the result much happier when we try to find in Jesus the greatest Socialist that ever lived. He gave us no analysis of the problem of poverty and He offered no programme of social reform. Certainly He befriended the poor and the outcast and He exposed relentlessly the dangers of wealth, but as a champion of social righteousness He was less outspoken and insistent than many an Old Testament prophet. We feel Him to be revolutionary, but His revolution goes deeper than all others. He would transform the Marxist as well as the Conservative, and many Socialists lose interest in Jesus when they realise that He is calling them to repent as well as the capitalist and the Pharisee. Our discovery that Jesus is not the kind of teacher we are sure He ought to have been may indicate the limitations of the wise and prudent. There is an oft-quoted sentence of Thomas Huxley to this effect, " Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every pre-conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." The fact of Christ must be approached in the same spirit or we shall never understand the mystery of the kingdom. Rationalists always stumble over the saying that we must become as little children and over the thanksgiving for the revelation to babes, even though the wise and prudent of whom Jesus was speaking were theologians rather than rationalists. And the rationalists do well to be offended, for indeed Jesus is here commending the humility of the true scientist and his freedom from preconceived notions, and condemning by implication the prejudices that masquerade as free-thought. But there is much more in this commendation of the child- like spirit than an endorsement of the true temper of scientific inquiry, for it seems to reflect Jesus' immediate awareness of God as His Father and His absolute trust in God. For this is what sets Jesus apart from all other teachers, even from the Old Testament prophets. If He was mistaken in His confidence in God, Jesus means less to us than many other teachers. If He was justified, no other teacher can mean so much to us. Jesus lived and died only to present to men the challenge of God's rule. The kingdom of God is at hand and men must make up their minds about it. The decision is a matter of life or death, of eternal life or eternal loss and destruction. The whole story set forth in the Gospels is instinct with movement and dominated by the sense of c is In St. Mark's Gospel, with its repeated " and immediately," events succeed one another with almost breathless swiftness. The ministry of Jesus illuminates the human scene as by a flash of lightning. The element of stern judgement is un- deniable and undisguised, yet it was good news that Jesus brought—good news of God who is not the unmoved mover of the universe, but who is active love, seeking the least, the lowliest and the lost, and from the time of Jesus calling men to return to Him with a new and disquieting urgency.
There is a scene suggested in two or three brief phrases in St. Mark's Gospel. " And they were in the way going up to Jerusalem: and Jesus went before them and they were amazed: and as they followed, they were afraid." This fear and amazement are rightly understood as reverential awe. The disciples here dimly apprehend the mystery of Jesus, His dedication to His Father's will. For Jesus was no rabbi, no philosopher, no social reformer: He was and He continues to be the strange bewildering embodiment of God's appeal for men's love and trust.
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