MINISTRY OBSCURE, BUT ITS CREATION? 241 the mind or the culture that could invent or appreciate large aims. Galilee was a poor field for any work of wide issues, the fishermen of its small inland sea poor scholars for a Teacher of sublime ideals and truths. Yet on this field and among these men Jesus for a few months carried on His mighty ministry. His fame spread as far as Jerusalem and throughout Judea, but no farther; on the wider stage of the capital He may now and then have appeared, and there at last He went to suffer and to die. But even there the arena was of the smallest, watched by the narrowest passions, beset by the meanest issues, with no outlook to a larger atmosphere and freer world. Altogether deepest obscurity marked His ministry, poverty, prejudice, and insusceptibility of soul the men among whom it was exercised. Now, in this obscure ministry, so meanly circumstanced, Jesus proved Himself in the strict sense a Creator; He created a society or state which was at once a new ideal and order for mankind. No one doubts that the idea of the kingdom of Heaven or of God was His peculiar creation. He did not make the phrase, but He made the thing. What He meant stood in direct antithesis and contradiction to what the Jews had understood the words to mean. Speaking with all moderation, His idea as to humanity was the grandest that had ever come to the spirit or consciousness of man, had most promise in it of universal good, of unity, freedom, fraternity, justice, truth. It was the reign of God in man, a state of righteousness, peace, love. The good it promised to all it was to accomplish by making all good. It did not seek to create happiness through kings or statesmen as such, R there was but to create everywhere happy men, whose joy it should be to enlarge the happiness of man. It was not revolutionary in the political sense, yet it was the most radical of all political revolutions. It assailed no existing order, yet its aim was to create an absolutely new order by the creation of a new mankind. It abolished not simply the old priesthood, but all official priesthoods for ever; for it made it every man's right and sovereign duty to draw near to God for himself as a son of the eternal Father, as a subject of the everlasting King. It refused to recognise any of its citizens as kings, for all were subjects, and no respect of persons or classes with God. This was then, and remains still, the most splendid dream of universal empire that has visited our race; but it is an empire which aggrandizes no man, for it is God's and exalts God alone, abases no man, for its purpose is to lift all into the dignity of citizenship in the city of the great King. It is hard in presence of this glorious ideal to speak calmly, yet it is necessary to speak the truth. And it is simple truth to say, the hour when this kingdom was revealed and instituted was and is the supreme hour in the history of man, the greatest of all that stand between the day of his creation and this. For through it was made manifest what he was meant to be, what ever since he has been striving to become. The ideal of Jesus was the ideal of God. He revealed to man the Divine possibilities and purposes immanent in his nature, made humanity know what it was to be one, unified by the reign of God in each, the Fatherhood of God over all. And this splendid ideal we owe to the briefest, obscurest, most tragic ministry on record. In the HIS KINGDOM OF GOD A NEW HUMANITY. 243 ministry there was nothing to suggest or evoke the ideal, everything to suppress or quench any dim feeling that groped or looked towards it. It was a direct creation of Jesus, could be nothing less or else, for He alone explains it, while it in turn helps to explain Him. It stands in essential connection with the characteristics before noted; provides, as it were, for the realization in humanity of what they had manifested to be in Jesus and to have come into the world through Him. What has been described as His universalism, signifies that manhood in Him became what its Maker designed it to be; His was neither tribal nor racial, neither national nor temporal, but universal, man as conceived by God translated into an actual being known to men. His sinlessness is the ethical expression of His perfection, His holiness its positive realization in the sphere of religious relationships and duties. The speech that unfolds the elements or qualities of his ideal, the principles underlying and creating His manhood, incarnates His truth, communicates the secret of His being to men. And it is because He gave this secret to His words that they might bear and distil it everywhere, that they have so rich a grace, so infinite a charm. In loving them men love the ideal of their own humanity; they touch us, for they are as the voice of the eternal Father speaking to the lost but not perished sonship in man, and so they have a sweetness which is like the reminiscence of a past too distant to be remembered, yet so real as to survive in unconscious memories. And what the words are for the individual, the kingdom is to be for the race; it is an ideal for collective humanity, a means, too, for its realization. Isolated units can never be perfect, the perfecting of men and of man must go hand in hand, the regeneration of persons being incomplete till they are incorporated in a regenerated society, a renewed mankind. And so we may say, this obscurest of ministries was the most glorious of revelations, and, must we not also add? why it was so is the foremost problem of history. Without 5. But now the unity and relation of these facts and truths as to the historical Jesus brings us to another point the position He Himself occupied in the realization of His ideals, personal and universal. That position was cardinal, all turned on Him. Him nothing was possible; He had come expressly that these sublime ends of His might be reached and made real. We must recollect what He seemed, and we must now see what He claimed to be. He was "the Son of man," not of any person or people, but of humanity, and so of its God,1 and as such able to forgive sins. He came to fulfil the law and the prophets; they testified of Him, He was their end; all history was a preparation for Him. He was the Lord of the Sabbath, had the right and the power to abolish or create religious institutions. He came to seek and save the lost, to restore sight to the blind, liberty to the captive, life to the dead." He invited all that laboured and were heavy laden to come to Him and He would give them rest; to take His yoke upon them and learn of Him, and they would have peace of soul. The kingdom He had instituted was a kingdom of the truth; its citizens were the men who heard His voice, 1 Matt. ix. 6; xii. 37, 41; xvi. 13. 3 Matt. xii. 8; Mark ii. 28; Luke vi. 5. 2 Matt. v. 17. 4 Luke xix. 10. 6 Matt. xi. 28, 29. WHAT HE SPEAKS OF HIMSELF. 245 and confessed, He is the Christ, the King. No man ever made claims like these; yet Jesus makes them calmly, as if unconscious of the immense issues and the immenser dignities they imply. He is confessedly the humblest, meekest, purest, truthfulest Speaker and Teacher man in all the centuries of his existence has come to know; yet He speaks these great things of Himself as simply as if it were not Himself He was speaking of, and had not the great ends He wished to see accomplished full in view. And in the presence of these sayings, what are we to think? Can we think that they are other than the transcript of His inmost consciousness, the mirror of the truth He knew Himself to be? It seems to be a thing of last incredibility that Jesus, being what we have seen Him to be, could be mistaken as to His own meaning and mission, could have erred in the interpretation of His own person, His place and work in the redemption of humanity. The truth of Jesus becomes the supreme testimony to the Christ; we follow Him, hear Him, learn what He is, what He comes to do, what He has done, and confess, " Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel." III. Our discussion has hitherto been concerned with the Jesus of History, but it has resulted in His becoming the Christ of Faith. The problem with which we started seems to have been solved in the process of our historical analysis; the person known to history appears to have turned out the very person John xviii. 36, 37. |