The Gospel or Blessedness
Matt. iv. 23.
Mark i. 1, 14, 15.
Luke i. 19.
ix. 35-
viii- 35*
ii. 10.
xi. 5.
x. 29.
iv. 18, 43.
xxiv. 14.
xiii. 10.
vii. 22.
xxvi. 13.
xiv. 9.
viii. 1.
xvi. 15.
ix. 6.
xvi. 16.
XX. I.
Matt. xi. 3-1 1.
Luke vi. 20-23.
xiii. 16.
vii. 23.
xvi. 17.
x. 23, 28.
xxiv. 46.
xi. 28.
xii. 37> y, 43
xiv. 14, 15-24
xv. 22-24.
xxiv. 36.
WHEN Aristotle and the ancient thinkers spoke of the Highest Good, their meaning was, that, in this earthly life of ours, there is for everyone a single supreme attainment, which, if missed, will render life a failure but, if gained, will render it a success. And it can escape the notice of no attentive reader of the Gospels that the same truth underlies, as an assumption, the entire teaching of Jesus, besides being expressed by Him in a variety of forms. This, for example, is what is intended in such parables as the Pearl of Great Price and the Plidden Treasure, which imply that this world affords to everyone a supreme opportunity of making life worth living. The same is implied in His frequent promise to give “life” to those who come to Plim.* But the most obvious expression of this intention is the constant use by Jesus of the word Gospel as a comprehensive name for His message.
* Matt. vii. 14; xviii. 8, 9; xix. 16, 17, 29; xxv. 46; Mark ix. 43, 45; x. 30; Luke xviii. 30. So “peace,” Mark v. 34; Luke vii. 50; and “rest,” Matt. xi. 29.
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In its original sense, this term * summons up in the imagination the picture of a city in a state of uncertainty and anxiety. The watchmen on the walls are looking eagerly in a certain direction. At last a messenger is descried in the distance, his manner of running betokening that he is the bearer of glad tidings. At the gate of the city he is met by the multitude, who crowd round him. He un¬ folds his tale, which rapidly passes from mouth to mouth and from group to group, till the whole city is rocking with excitement and jubilation. St. Matthew enters exactly into the spirit of such a scene when he describes the commencement of the preaching of Jesus in these words: “The people which sat in darkness saw a great light, and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up”; and the descriptions in all the Gospels of the opening ministry of our Lord, when the inhabitants of city and village came streaming in thousands from one end of the country to the other, to hear His preaching and profit by His miracles, entirely correspond to such a situation. In the later stages of the earthly course of Jesus this sunny aspect of His ministry may not have been so conspicuous; but it reasserted itself in the early preaching of the apostles after the Resurrection. Wherever St. Paul, for example, went as a missionary, he must have conveyed the impression that he was bringing tidings
* To evayyiktov. which it concerned everyone to hear for his own welfare and happiness; and, in spite of the persecutions he had to endure, he himself was borne up with the sense that he was the bearer of a secret of infinite value. This is the fundamental note of Christianity at all times; the salt has lost its savour if the preaching of the Christian pulpit does not convey an impression of gladness, novelty and surprise.
When, however, we take the next step and inquire about the contents of the good news of which Jesus was the herald, the reply is not exactly what might be anticipated. If the ordinary man were asked what the Gospel of Jesus was about, he would reply without hesitation that it was the gospel “of salvation,” or “of the grace of God,” or perhaps “of justification by faith.” But, if requested to verify his statement by reference to the actual words of Christ, he would scarcely be able to produce from the record a trace of such phraseology. What he would find, in place of it, would be “the gospel of the kingdom,” or “the gospel of the kingdom of God,” or “the gospel of the kingdom of heaven,” all these forms of the same phrase occurring in the Gospels, and being constantly employed as comprehensive expressions for the message delivered by our Lord and the apostles. Thus “the Gospel” may be called the envelope in which the message of Jesus comes, while “the kingdom” is the message itself
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The tendency has prevailed of late to pass the former term lightly by and concentrate attention on the latter. But this is an envelope which conveys a message of its own, besides the one which it en¬ closes: there lies a deep significance in the fact that the most comprehensive name for the teaching of Jesus is the Gospel, as well as in the other fact that this gospel is the Gospel of the Kingdom.
The Gospel is the superior idea, beneath which the other is subsumed; and it is not a matter of in¬ difference which is taken first. In our Lord’s conceptions of Himself and of His plan there mingle two elements — the one temporary and local, the other universal and eternal — and, while the former of these might come under the general title of “the Kingdom,” the latter would naturally be described as “the Gospel.” At present there is on the Continent a very active school of young theologians who start from the former side, emphasizing the messianic element in the consciousness of Jesus. They maintain that, like every other historical character, Jesus was the creature of His age, and must be interpreted as a product of the conditions amidst which He was born and brought up. Hence they throw themselves with avidity on the literary remains of the age immediately preceding His birth. These are principally of the apocalyptic and pseudepigraphical order, and to the ordinary reader a weariness of the flesh; but to such enthusiasts nothing is discouraging, and they are editing the relics of one of the most arid epochs of the human mind with wonderful perseverance, and pouncing upon every word and phrase bearing any resemblance to an anticipation of a thought of Jesus. According to them, Jesus was confined within the circle of the ideas of His time, and His conception of Himself and His own career was entirely messianic. When at last His death was impending and manifestly inevitable, He took refuge in the notion of a second coming, when He should achieve all the glory which He had expected but which had failed to accrue to Him at His first appearance. In this belief He died, and He bequeathed the illusion to His followers, who all expected Him to reappear within a generation.
It cannot be denied that for all this a great deal that is plausible may be said, or that a large number of the sayings of Jesus can be quoted in support of it. But there is an opposite side of His consciousness, which is left entirely unexplained. It can be proved from His words that He foresaw and foretold a slow and gradual development of His cause such as history has actually exhibited; anc nothing is more certain than that He expected to be put by His death into a new and world-wide relation¬ ship to men. No theory of His consciousness which does not do justice to such facts can be regarded with confidence.
This is well expressed by Harnack in his recently
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published work, The Essence of Christianity, and his words are all the more interesting because of his near kinship with the school just referred to. “Certainly,” he remarks, “the task of the historian is difficult and responsible when he has to separate kernel from shell, what is inherited from what is original, in the preaching of Jesus about the kingdom of God. How far dare we go? We must not take from this preaching its native quality and colour, converting it into a bloodless moral system. But, on the other hand, we must not lose its peculiar power by acting as those do who resolve the whole into a complex of contemporary fancies. The way in which Jesus Himself distinguished among the ideas of His contemporaries, casting none aside in which there was a spark of ethical power, and adopting none by which the ambitious expectations of His fellow-countrymen would have been strengthened, proves that He spoke and preached out of a deeper knowledge than theirs. But we possess much more striking proofs. He who desires to know what the kingdom of God and the coming of this kingdom mean in the preaching of Jesus must read and ponder His parables. There it will dawn upon him what Jesus is thinking about. The kingdom comes when it comes to the individual, making entry to the soul which embraces it. The kingdom is the reign of God, no doubt; but it is the reign of the holy God in individual hearts, it is God Himself with His power. Everything dramatic, in the external and historical sense, here disappears, and the whole external hope of a future upon earth also sinks out of sight. Take any parable you please — that of the Sower, or that of the Pearl of Great Price, or that of the Treasure hidden in the Field — and you perceive that the Word of God, or rather God Himself, is the kingdom; and what you are reading about is not angels or devils, thrones or principalities, but God and the soul, the soul and its God.” *
These eloquent observations ought to do some¬ thing to divert the young theologians of Professor Harnack’s country, who are at present turning their zeal so earnestly to the study of the words of Christ, from divagations into paths where there is no thoroughfare. The hint is a wise one that it is in His teaching about the individual that the essence of our Lord’s preaching even on the subject of the kingdom is to be found. Some of our own scholars at present, in their eagerness to find in the teaching of Jesus a justification for the social ideas by which they are themselves possessed, have represented His originality as consisting in the deliverance of man¬ kind from an individual and selfish view of religion through the introduction of a religion of brotherhood and common endeavour. But such a representation can only be made through oblivion of the facts of the case. The conception of religion as a corporate
* From the close of the Third Lecture.
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impulse, so far from being a discovery of Jesus, was common to the whole ancient world. It is specially the view of the Old Testament, in which both the reproofs and the promises of the prophets are, as a rule, addressed not to the individual but to the nation at large; and only slowly and dimly, as the Book is drawing to its close, does the idea emerge that the individual is capable of a personal relation to God. In next chapter we shall see that in the great conception of the kingdom of God the social aspect of religion is acknowledged; but the originality of Christ consisted not in emphasizing this, but in seizing on the emergent notion of the dignity and value of the individual soul and elevating it to the forefront; so that preachers are not going back to Christ, but going back beyond Him, to a pre-Christian stage of religion, if, instead of r Magnifying the individual and straining every nerve for his salvation, they wander away to the social or ecclesiastical organism, making this their principal care and the leading element of their testimony.
Professor Harnack’s pronouncement, just quoted, may be looked upon as the summing-up of a controversy as to the nature of the kingdom spoken of by Jesus which has been raging for several years; and the conclusion seems to be that, amidst all the variety and picturesqueness of the sayings in the Gospels on the subject, the deepest and most significant element is not that which is coloured with local and temporary allusions, but that which is more interior and out of time. Of such perhaps the most remarkable of all is the saying: “The kingdom of God is within you.” It is true, the translation is disputed: the words rendered “within you” * may possibly mean “among you.” But the whole context leads up to the more solemn meaning. Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom should come; to which He replied, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.” The last word j is an astronomical term, suggesting that those who had questioned Him expected to see the kingdom come in the very way in which some at the present day assume He was always expecting it Himself — that is, descending in bodily shape from the sky. But this He absolutely denies, going on to add, “Neither shall they say, Lo here, or, Lo there.” It is not to be c sensational spectacle. “P’or, behold,” He concludes “the kingdom of God is within you.” Surely thi< means that it is a thing of the heart, hidden away from all observation — a secret blessedness, known only to him who has received it and to God.J
* ei/TOS Vp.U)V.
t TrapaTiiprjcris.
f The rendering “within you” is confirmed by one of the logia recovered by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt: “Jesus saith, (Ye ask, Who are these) that draw us (to the kingdom, if) the kingdom is in heaven?... the fowls of the air, and all beasts that are under the earth or upon the earth, and the fishes of the sea (these are they which draw) you, and the kingdom
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With this agrees well the parable of the kingdom which the late Dr. Bruce used to consider the most beautiful of all our Saviour’s sayings on this subject, “So is the kingdom of God as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how; for the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.” This exquisite picture of a seed unfolding slowly and unobserved, but surely and prosperously, till it attains to ripeness and perfection, is not a description of a political development, but of the interior life in its most sacred aspects. Harnack’s observation, that it is in the parables that the true genius of the kingdom announced by Jesus is to be discovered, is a happy one; and what these specially suggest, as they are read over one by one, is, that Jesus meant by the kingdom a spiritual principle, secretly and firmly seizing the soul, and pervading it slowly but increasingly as a leaven, till it has leavened the whole lump; it is a spiritual discovery, which fills the soul with joy, and causes every sacrifice to appear cheap, if only the matchless prize can be secured. In short, it is “the Gospel.”
of heaven is within you ( evros v/xav); and whoever shall know himself shall find it. (Strive therefore) to know yourselves, and ye shall be aware that ye are the sons of the (almighty) Father; (and) ye shall know that ye are in (the city of God), and we are (the city).”
In harmony with the foregoing argument is the fact that another great inaugural word of the preaching of Jesus was Blessedness — the very term by which an interior joy would most naturally be described. It was with this keynote He commenced the Sermon on the Mount; and not only did He prefix it to that grand utterance, but He made it ring out no fewer than eight times, eliciting the entire octave of its music.
The drift of the Beatitudes has often been mis¬ understood. They have been supposed to describe the characteristics of true Christians, pronouncing those blessed who possess such-and-such qualities. But the structure is much more complex. The justification of the predicate “blessed” lies not in the possession of a certain character, but in the consequences proceeding therefrom and indicated in each beatitude by a subordinate clause introduced by “for.” In some cases the statement of the beatitude would be a violent paradox without this addition. For example, one of the Beatitudes says, “Blessed are they that mourn”; and, if we stop there, the statement is almost equivalent to the absurd saying, “Happy are the unhappy.” The addition, however, of the words, “for they shall be comforted,” makes all the difference. The blessedness consists not in mourning, but in being comforted; at any rate it consists not only in mourning, but also in being comforted. And the same principle applies to all
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the Beatitudes. Each of them is an equation, on i he one side of which stands “blessed,” while on the other there are two quantities — the one a character or condition, and the other a gift to be given io those who are found in this condition. In several cases the condition is a minus quantity — that is to say, the character alone would be the reverse of blessed — but /the gift introduced by “for,” is a magnitude so great that, when both are united, the minus disappears, and only a substantial plus is visible. Thus, mourning, hungering, persecution are not in themselves and by themselves desirable, but the reverse; yet,- taken along with what is given by Jesus to those thus circumstanced, they are blessed¬ ness itself.
The gifts thus specified will enable us in some degree to fill up our Lord’s conception of Blessedness.
One of them is mercy. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” No claim of Jesus in the days of His flesh was more characteristic than the assertion that He had power to forgive sins. This must be, for all, the initial blessing of the kingdom.
Another of the Beatitudes says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” To “see God” is a well known Old Testament expression; it is a metaphor borrowed from Oriental courts, where access to the sovereign was deemed a precious privilege, while to approach without permission might involve even loss of life. This etiquette of royalty was transferred to God, who was conceived as a great King, dwelling in a palace so brilliant as to be dark with excess of light, where He was surrounded with an innumerable bodyguard of angels and archangels, which mortals were not permitted to pass. But to receive such permission would be felicity; and so the Hebrew poets sang, “Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand in His holy place?” The mind of Jesus, being steeped in such imagery, clothed in this form the thought which, imagery apart, is a promise of complete access to God. To be in the kingdom of God is not only to obtain mercy, as even a criminal might, but to have communion with God and to enjoy His society.
This is expressed in a style still more tender in another of these Beatitudes, which says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” To “see God” is the privilege of a courtier, but a child is in the house forever. This was the very name under which the consciousness possessed by Jesus of His own relation to God was expressed: He was, according to His own frequent statements, “the Son.” And those who receive the kingdom are in a real sense the sons of God and the brethren of Jesus.
These elements of blessedness are lofty; but are they not too lofty? Does not the happiness of ordinary humanity depend, at least in some degree,
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on conditions more sublunary and prosaic? Certainly it does; and, therefore, we are glad to find among the Beatitudes one at least which touches the ground: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” In its form this recalls the promise of Canaan to ancient Israel; and, in fact, it is a verbatim quotation from one of the Psalms. But obviously it has a wider and more human scope, applying to the whole world, and not only to the Holy Land. At first sight, indeed, it seems a paradox; for is it not, on the contrary, the prerogative of the proud and the ambitious to inherit the world? So it may seem; yet there are not lacking instances, which will occur to everyone, tending to prove that, after the conqueror and oppressor has stormed out his little day, those whom he has over¬ looked or trodden underfoot may appear on the scene and take possession of his conquests. This, at any rate, is a promise that those who are fighting on the side of righteousness shall not lack the footing they require to deliver their blows, and that those whose hearts are set on the extension of the kingdom of God shall have room and verge enough in a world of which God is the Author and Governor.
There are some of the gifts mentioned in the Beatitudes which may be passed by at this stage, because they will come up for notice more appropriately at a later stage; but the last beatitude of all — “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake; rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven” — brings out the most important feature of all in the blessedness promised by Jesus — namely, that it will be experienced not only in this world, but in the next — perhaps one ought to say, not in this world, but the next, or at least, more in the next than in this world.
Jesus refers often to this everlasting nature of the blessedness He gives, and always with decision and enthusiasm. Herein lies one of the grand contrasts between Him and the teachers who went before Him, not only among the heathen but even among the Jews. In the Old Testament there is many a gloomy page where death seems to be spoken of as the end of everything, while the indications of an opposite description are few and far between. Still there are in the Old Testament at least the germs of an immortal hope; and these would appear to have ripened in the interval between the Old Testament and the New, as the literary remains of that period testify. Yet it is not likely that it was from this source that Jesus derived His faith in this mystery, eagerly as we may believe Him to have perused any such hints accessible to Him. His doctrine on this subject is all His own. It is too fresh and original to have been obtained second-hand. He speaks as .one who has beep there; and the statement of the
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New Testament is literally true, that He brought life and immortality to light by the Gospel.
He represents heaven as a place where the development of His followers will attain to perfection, and all their present sufferings will receive ample compensation. This notion of “reward” * He introduces again and again, constraining His hearers to embrace .His cause, with all its privations and disadvantages, because of the compensations which the future will bring. He does not even scruple to throw into the picture a dash of material felicity, speaking of the drinking of wine in the kingdom, while He adopts warmly the belief in a bodily resurrection. But the false colours of a Mohammedan paradise are altogether avoided. The children of the resurrection
* Not a few authors have been exercised about the frequent employment by Jesus of the notion of “reward,” lest this should betray an appeal to an inferior level of motive. Even an entire book on the subject has been recently published. Jacoby ( Neutestamentliche Ethik ) discusses the difficulty with care, coming to the conclusion that Jesus, finding the idea prevalent in Jewish thought, made use of it, yet in such a way as to abolish it. “While Jesus employs the analogy of a workengagement in which performance and reward correspond, yet He at the same time destroys the analogy by transforming the reward into a gift of love, which transcends the claims that can be raised by the worker’’ — p. 51. Perhaps, however, such apologists are unnecessarily anxious. Jesus regarded Himself as the Guide to the blessed life; and I am specially partial to the work of Titius, who treats the whole of the New Testament teaching, that of Jesus included, under the point of view of Blessedness — Die neutestamentliche Lehre von der Seligkeit und Hire Bedeutung fur die Gegenwart% will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but will be as the angels of God. The feature on which He expatiates with most frequency is the enjoyment of the company of the great and good of former ages. He will be there Himself, in glory, to welcome those who have confessed Him on earth into everlasting habitations; and God Himself — who constantly appears in the discourses of Jesus as the Father “who is in heaven” — will, be there, as the Alpha and the Omega of all blessedness.
When, in the ancient world, the question was asked, What is the chief end of man or the highest good? the answer to it was practically unanimous — that it is happiness. “Since all knowledge and all purpose,” says Aristotle, “aim at some good, what is the highest of all realisable goods? As to its name, I suppose, nearly all men are agreed, for the masses and the men of culture alike declare that it is happiness.” * Against this, indeed, the Stoics in the ancient world protested; and some have protested in modern times — Carlyle, for example, who was never tired of pour¬ ing scorn on this idea. To him the motion, taken for granted, as he would have said, in every foolish brain, that anyone needs to be happy, or has any natural right to happiness, is the most colossal of all blunders. Men are miserable, he argued, because they entertain exorbitant notions of their own deserts, and they
* Nico?nachean Ethics, i. 4.
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are astonished when nature does not agree with them. But let them take it for granted that they deserve nothing, and then they will be delighted with the slightest enjoyments. “Fancy,” says he, “thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot; fancy thou deservest to be hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.”* At the time when such sentiments were expressed by the sardonic philosopher, there was good reason for them in the condition of philosophy and the tendencies of the public mind. But the desire for happiness is too deep-seated and truly natural to be argued away by any eloquence. Jesus, ever true to nature, acknowledged this as one o i the primordial forces of our being, and endeavoured to enlist it among the motives of goodness. Only lie employed the word “blessed” in the place of “happy” — a simple yet a radical change; for blessedness is a happiness pure and spiritual, reaching down to the profoundest elements of human nature and reaching forth to the illimitable developments of eternity.
* Sartor Resartus, ii. 9; Past and Present, iii. 4; and, indeed, his works passim.