The Altar and the Hearth

I am now coming to an aspect of the Portrait which must often have struck the artiststudent. I have already pointed out an apparent contradiction in the artistic arrangement of the life of Jesus. I have shown that, though the land of Galilee was the land of freedom, the freest utterances of Jesus were given after He left it. I must now direct attention to a second paradox. Galilee was not only the land of freedom; it was the land of home. It contained the home of Jesus; it contained the homes of the first followers of Jesus; it contained the elements of home-life in general. Here the spirit of youth was uncurbed; here the instincts of the heart were unrepressed; here the fireside was more powerful than the cloister. And yet, the fact remains that it is not in Galilee the Portrait of Jesus assumes its most domestic aspect. It is precisely when the home influences are with drawn that the life of Jesus becomes homely. The Galilean ministry of Jesus might have been expected to favour a domestic experience. It was not carried on under the shadow of another world; death was not foreseen as its inevitable sequel. It was transacted amid the joys of nature — with the lily of the field at His feet, with the bird of the air overhead, with the songs of the reaper in His ear. And yet, it is when the shadows of another world appear that the home-life of Jesus seems to bloom. It is when Jerusalem opens its gates to Him, it is when the precipice yawns for Him, it is when death becomes imminent to Him, that the heart of Jesus seems to fly nearer to the earth. At the very moment when He hears a call to leave the world He bursts upon our view in the attitude of one to whom human ties are dear. It is then that for the first time He breaks upon our sight as a man of the fireside, a man of the home, a man of the domestic circle — a man to whom the inter course of earthly friendship is intrinsically precious, and to whom the hour of social fellowship is, for its own sake, dear.

I have entitled this chapter ‘The Altar and the Hearth ’ to describe the meeting of these seeming contradictions. The Jerusalem ministry is the union of these two heterogeneous elements. Jesus is at once the man of the altar and the man of the hearth. Let me glance at each of the extremes. And first, He is the man of the altar. He is standing face to face with death. I have shown in the previous chapter the cause of His danger. He had claimed a wider origin than the stock of Abraham — a special origin from the universal Father. That, on the lips of a Jewish Messiah, was in the eyes of Israel equivalent to high treason. It was tantamount to sweeping away the line of David. It was the assertion that the Jew’s Messiah was everybody’s Messiah. It was a claim which stripped Jerusalem of its pre-eminence, which robbed Palestine of its peculiarity. It threatened to do for the Jewish nation what the doctrine of modern astronomy has done for the united earth; it made it an atom in the mass. It said to the land of Israel: ‘You need not be proud of your privilege. Your privilege is simply to have had the first revelation of a birthright which belongs to every one as well as you. The Gentile also can trace his origin to your Messiah. You may shut him out from the line of David, you may shut him out from the line of Abraham; but he can claim his descent by another stair. It has been discovered that your Messiah is sprung from a higher life, derived from an earlier parentage, begotten of that universal Father who is outside all national lines. Your wall of separation has therefore no meaning, your fence no significance, your genealogy no triumph. The Gentiles need not come to the Messiah through you; they can approach Him through their own door.’

There, to my mind, lay the imminence of death. The danger to the life of Jesus was not the mystic character of His Jerusalem speeches; it was their political character. The

Jews might not have been able to understand what was meant by Christ’s descent from heaven, but they could all understand what was implied in it. The philosophy might tax their brain; the politics did not. They knew very well that if their Messiah came from heaven He was not really theirs — the pitcher was broken at the fountain, the line of David was superseded. The precepts of Galilee had involved no politics; the parables of Galilee had involved no politics; but the transcendental discourses at Jerusalem smote the ground. They shook the common earth; they raised a political ferment. And Jesus knew it. He was quite conscious of the gathering storm. He perceived His danger and the cause of His danger. He felt that words like His, falling on the ears of the Jewish nation, could bring only a thirst for His blood. Death was staring Him in the face. How did He regard it? what did He feel about it? Have we any clock to mark the time of day? Have we any record of His experience at this special hour? Are we bound to imagine, to reason, to infer? Is there no chart which can indicate that stage of the mind of Jesus at which we have now arrived, and tell us the precise spot on which our feet are standing?

There is. We have no need to ponder possibilities. There is extant a document of the day and hour — a document derived from the very lips of Jesus. It is the parable of the good shepherd. To me the interest of that parable is the date of its utterance. It is the first direct record I have of the thoughts of Jesus under the shadow of death. I do not think it is His completed thought. Gethsemane is not yet reached; if this were His completed thought there would be no room for Gethsemane. If you want to preserve the consistency of the life of Jesus, you must reserve for the Garden a margin for uncertainty about death. There was one feature in death which was very dark to Jesus — which remained dark until Gethsemane. He could only die, as I have said, through the culmination of the world’s sin. What He feared from death was an interference with His own work of expiation

—the raising of a barrier to the Father’s reconciliation with Man. When He spoke the parable of the good shepherd, He had still that fear. Death was not dear to Him. Nobody can read the parable without seeing that He deemed the facing of it a brave thing. It is stigmatised as ‘the wolf — as a power in the way of the sheep — a power so dreadful that a hireling shepherd will not meet it. This is not the language of endearment, nor even 01 vanquished loathing; it is the language of strong repulsion. But none the less, nay, all the more, is Jesus determined not to avoid death. He feels that the mark of a good shepherd is to lead the sheep even though death does lie in the path. That is His position in the parable. He is not seeking the wolf, does not personally desire to encounter it; but He is convinced that the path on which He is leading the sheep is the only path on which they can continue to live, the only one where they will have a chance of food. For that chance He will brave death. He has proclaimed Himself the

Messiah of the united world; that is the only path on which the sheep can breathe; their one hope of life is there. He will not desert them; He will not leave them. Let the wolf come, let death come, let all imaginable horrors come — He will stand at the post of duty and the post of danger!

That is one side of the Jerusalem ministry — its altar of sacrifice. Jesus is preparing for His hour — the hour of death. And yet, side by side with this picture, there is another and a seemingly opposite one — the picture of the hearth. At the very hour when this world was fading from the eyes of Jesus, He was entering deepest into its innermost circle — its domestic circle. The moment when the clock was on the stroke of eternity was the moment when He began to interest Himself in the minutiae of time. To the south-east of the Mount of Olives there lies a little village called Bethany. It was but two miles from Jerusalem; and from Jerusalem at the close of the day Jesus often bent His steps thither. He had made the acquaintance of the leading family there — a brother and two sisters. In their companionship He had found what I may call a purely secular joy. He experienced, perhaps for the first time since childhood, a delight which was not Messianic, not official, not connected with another world, but purely natural, present, human. He felt in their society the joy of life for its own sake, the inherent gladness of the earth, the native glory of the flower of friendship. Such was the strange anomaly which strode side by side with the approach of Jesus toward the sepulchre; it was like the sound of dance-music amid the dirge of death.

At the time of which we speak there is a curious illustration of this lighter phase. It is an episode recorded by St. Luke, and, as I think, greatly spoiled by our common translation. We make it read as something dreadfully solemn. The testimony of some of the best and earliest MSS., coupled with a view of the circumstances in the light of common sense, has led me to regard it, not as a warning to sinners, but as a wholesome advice to hostesses, conveyed rather with a smile than with a frown. Let us look at the incident.

Jesus has just gone out to Bethany to visit the favourite household. He finds that household in bustle. The sisters are getting up an entertainment on His account; but they are not equally engrossed in the preparation. Mary talks and listens to Jesus; Martha is ‘distracted in her attention’ through arranging the many courses for the coming guests. If the discourse of Jesus was marred to Martha by the preparation of the meal, the preparation of the meal equally suffered from the discourse of Jesus. She feels hampered by the divided attention. She grows irritable, and she vents her irritation promiscuously: c Lord, carest thou not that my sister hath left me to serve alone! ‘Remember, if she was petulant, she was petulant in Christ’s interest; if she was cumbered with much serving, she was cumbered for Him. Her error was not, as our version implies, that she was in need of the secret of eternal life. She loved Jesus; she was loved by Jesus: where was her need!

The truth is, even in her moment of petulance, Jesus was not thinking of the need of Martha but of the need of the guests. She was afraid His interests might be hurt by a social fiasco. He reassures her. Let us paraphrase His words.

‘Martha, you are anxious about a choice of varieties. Why should you? Hospitality requires not such. Few things are needful to hospitality. Your sister, Mary, has chosen one of these. You think she has contributed nothing to the feast; she has — the good part, the inconsumable part. The very fragments of this feast will be as if they had never been. But she who has gazed beforehand into the face of love, she who has entered beforehand into the spirit of unselfish rest, she who has learned beforehand to look at the world in the light of a coming glory, will communicate to the banquet a sweetness and a strength which will not pass away.’

And all this wholesome recipe for the

1 According to many of the best MSS. this is the real read ing for the words of our version, ‘One thing is needful. ’ warming of the natural hearth is given under the shadow of the altar of death! Is there any reconciliation of these extremes? Is there any point in the mind of Jesus where these two ideas meet? There is. Call to mind what it was which exposed Jesus to the danger of death. Was it not simply His defence of the rights of man as man? And where shall we find man as man — man unconventional in his thinking, man spontaneous in his acting? Is it not at the hearth, by the fireside? Does not the household at Bethany represent the very opposite phase of humanity to that represented by the temple at Jerusalem? Does it not stand for man in his freedom, in his universality? Does it not figure as the embodiment of the natural instincts, of the primitive impulses of the heart? Does it not represent that which is earlier than creed, previous to custom, existent before convention? The thing dearest to the heart of Jesus at this moment was the proclamation of a universal gospel, a gospel which should leap the Jewish barriers and fall upon the VOL. II. I 13o THE ALTAR AND THE HEARTH

fields of primitive nature. And where could He find so fine a field as just within the circle of the home, just within that region of human sorrow and human mirth where the natural passions play and the native tendencies are unsuppressed! The union of the altar and the hearth is no contradiction in the life of Jesus; it was for the sake of the hearth that He braved the altar. Bethany was not the antithesis to Calvary; it was the motive to Calvary. He was braving death in the interest of the universal joy; is it wonderful that on His road to the Dolorous Way He should have paused betimes to contemplate that joy! Is it strange that on His path to the altar He should have lingered a while by the hearth!

“TV /T Y soul, keep together the altar and the -*•*-•- hearth! Nothing helps thy hospitality like self-forgetfulness. Wouldst thou be a hospitable host at thine own board? then must thou begin by being crucified. No man is alive to the wants of others until he is dead to his own. I have often heard inhospitality referred to thoughtlessness. Nay, it is not thoughtlessness; it is too much thought in a single direction — the direction of self. Wouldst thou furnish adequately the table of Bethany? Wouldst thou make it a pleasant feast, a happy night, a meeting that will leave no taste of bitterness? Come, then, and sit first at the feet of Jesus! Come, and fill thy heart beforehand with thoughts of beauty! Come, and empty thy spirit of its pride! Come, and disburden thy mind of its care! Come, and crucify thy memories of discontent, thy regrets for what is not and yet might have been! Come, above all, and be filled with a larger love — the love for humanity itself, the hope for thy brother-man! So shalt thou contribute to the feast something which will be imperishable — a light and a music that will survive the social hour; thy contribution will be that good part which will not pass away.