Grammar of Assent
I think it observable then, that, though our Lord claims to be the Messiah, He shows so little of conscious dependence on the old Scriptures, or of anxiety to fulfil them; as if it became Him, who was the Lord of the Prophets, to take His own course, and to leave their utterances to adjust themselves to Him as they could, and not to be careful to accommodate Himself to them. The evangelists do indeed show some such natural zeal in His behalf, and thereby illustrate what I notice in Him by the contrast. They betray an earnestness to trace in His Person and history the accomplishment of prophecy, as when they discern it in His return from Egypt, in His life at Nazareth, in the gentleness and tenderness of His mode of teaching, and in the various minute occurrences of His passion; but He Himself goes straight forward on His way, of course claiming to be the Messiah of the Prophets,(48) still not so much recurring to past prophecies, as uttering new ones, with an antithesis not unlike that which is so impressive in the Sermon on the Mount, when He first says, “It has been said by them of old time,” and then adds, “But I say unto you.” Another striking instance of this is seen in the Names under which He spoke of Himself, which have little or no foundation in any thing which was said of Him beforehand in the Jewish Scriptures. They speak of Him as Ruler, Prophet, King, Hope of Israel, Offspring of Judah, and Messiah; and His Evangelists and Disciples call Him Master, Lord, Prophet, Son of David, King of Israel, King of the Jews, and Messiah or Christ; but He Himself, though, I repeat, He acknowledges these titles as His own, especially that of the Christ, chooses as His special designations these two, Son of God and Son of Man, the latter of which is only once given Him in the Old Scriptures, and by which He corrects any narrow Judaic interpretation of them; while the former was never distinctly used of Him before He came, and seems first to have been announced to the world by the Angel Gabriel and St. John the Baptist. In those two Names, Son of God and Son of Man, declaratory of the two natures of Emmanuel, He separates Himself from the Jewish Dispensation, in which He was born, and inaugurates the New Covenant.
This is not an accident, and I shall now give some instances of it, that is, of what I may call the independent autocratic view which He takes of His own religion, into which the old Judaism was melting, and of the prophetic insight into its spirit and its future which that view involves. In quoting His own sayings from the Evangelists for this purpose, I assume (of which there is no reasonable doubt) that they wrote before any historical events had happened of a nature to cause them unconsciously to modify or to colour the language which their Master used.
1. First, then, the fact has been often insisted on as a bold conception, unheard of before, and worthy of divine origin, that He should even project a universal religion, and that to be effected by what may be called a propagandist movement from one centre. Hitherto it had been the received notion in the world, that each nation had its own gods. The Romans legislated upon that basis, and the Jews had held it from the first, holding of course also, that all gods but their own God were idols and demons. It is true that the Jews ought to have been taught by their prophecies what was in store for the world and for them, and that their first dispersion through the Empire centuries before Christ came, and the proselytes which they collected around them in every place, were a kind of comment on the prophecies larger than their own; but we see what was, in fact, when our Lord came, their expectation from those prophecies, in the passages which I have quoted above from the Roman historians of His day. But He from the first resisted those plausible, but mistaken interpretations of Scripture. In His cradle indeed He had been recognized by the Eastern sages as their king; the Angel announced that He was to reign over the house of Jacob; Nathanael, too, owned Him as the Messiah with a regal title; but He, on entering upon His work, interpreted these anticipations in His own way, and that not the way of Theudas and Judas of Galilee, who took the sword, and collected soldiers about them,—nor the way of the Tempter, who offered Him “all the kingdoms of the world.” In the words of the Evangelists, He began, not to fight, but “to preach;” and further, to “preach the kingdom of heaven,” saying, “The time is accomplished, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe the Gospel.” This is the significant title, “the kingdom of heaven,”—the more significant, when explained by the attendant precept of repentance and faith,—on which He founds the polity which He was establishing from first to last. One of His last sayings before He suffered was, “My kingdom is not of this world.” And His last words, before He left the earth, when His disciples asked Him about His kingdom, were that they, preachers as they were, and not soldiers, should “be His witnesses to the end of the earth,” should “preach to all nations, beginning with Jerusalem,” should “go into the world and preach the Gospel to every creature,” should “go and make disciples of all nations till the consummation of all things.”
The last Evangelist of the four is equally precise in recording the initial purpose with which our Lord began His ministry, viz. to create an empire, not by force, but by persuasion. “Light is come into the world; every one that doth evil, hateth the light, but he that doth truth, cometh to the light.” “Lift up your eyes, and see the countries, for they are white already to harvest.” “No man can come to Me, except the Father, who hath sent Me, draw him.” “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to Myself.”
Thus, while the Jews, relying on their Scriptures with great appearance of reason, looked for a deliverer who should conquer with the sword, we find that Christianity, from the first, not by an after-thought upon trial and experience, but as a fundamental truth, magisterially set right that mistake, transfiguring the old prophecies, and bringing to light, as St. Paul might say, “the mystery which had been hidden from ages and generations, but now was made manifest in His saints, the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you,” not simply over you, but in you, by faith and love, “the hope of glory.”
2. I have partly anticipated my next remark, which relates to the means by which the Christian enterprise was to be carried into effect. That preaching was to have a share in the victories of the Messiah was plain from Prophet and Psalmist; but then Charlemagne preached, and Mahomet preached, with an army to back them. The same Psalm which speaks of those “who preach good tidings,” speaks also of their King’s “foot being dipped in the blood of His enemies;” but what is so grandly original in Christianity is, that on its broad field of conflict its preachers were to be simply unarmed, and to suffer, but to prevail. If we were not so familiar with our Lord’s words, I think they would astonish us. “Behold, I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves.” This was to be their normal state, and so it was; and all the promises and directions given to them imply it. “Blessed are they that suffer persecution;” “blessed are ye when they revile you;” “the meek shall inherit the earth;” “resist not evil;” “you shall be hated of all men for My Name’s sake;” “a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household;” “he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved.” What sort of encouragement was this for men who were to go about an immense work? Do men in this way send out their soldiers to battle, or their sons to India or Australia? The King of Israel hated Micaiah, because he always “prophesied of him evil.” “So persecuted they the Prophets that were before you,” says our Lord. Yes, and the Prophets failed; they were persecuted and they lost the battle. “Take, my brethren,” says St. James, “for an example of suffering evil, of labour and patience, the Prophets, who spake in the Name of the Lord.” They were “racked, mocked, stoned, cut asunder, they wandered about,—of whom the world was not worthy,” says St. Paul. What an argument to encourage them to aim at success by suffering, to put before them the precedent of those who suffered and who failed!
Yet the first preachers, our Lord’s immediate disciples, saw no difficulty in a prospect to human eyes so appalling, so hopeless. How connatural this strange, unreasoning, reckless courage was with their regenerate state is shown most signally in St. Paul, as having been a convert of later vocation. He was no personal associate of our Lord’s, yet how faithfully he echoes back our Lord’s language! His instrument of conversion is “the foolishness of preaching;” “the weak things of the earth confound the strong;” “we hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no home;” “we are reviled and bless, we are persecuted, and blasphemed, and are made the refuse of this world, and the offscouring of all things.” Such is the intimate comprehension, on the part of one who had never seen our Lord on earth, and knew little from His original disciples of the genius of His teaching;—and considering that the prophecies, upon which he had lived from his birth, for the most part bear on their surface a contrary doctrine, and that the Jews of that day did commonly understand them in that contrary sense, we cannot deny that Christianity, in tracing out the method by which it was to prevail in the future, took its own, independent line, and, in assigning from the first a rule and a history to its propagation, a rule and a history which have been carried out to this day, rescues itself from the charge of but partially fulfilling those Jewish prophecies, by the assumption of a prophetical character of its own.
3. Now we come to a third point, in which the Divine Master explains, and in a certain sense corrects, the prophecies of the Old Covenant, by a more exact interpretation of them from Himself. I have granted that they seemed to say that His coming would issue in a period of peace and religiousness. “Behold,” says the Prophet, “a king shall reign in justice, and princes shall rule in judgment. The fool shall no more be called prince, neither shall the deceitful be called great. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid. They shall not hurt nor kill in all My holy mountain, for the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the covering waters of the sea.”
These words seem to predict a reversal of the consequences of the fall, and that reversal has not been granted to us, it is true; but let us consider how distinctly Christianity warns us against any such anticipation. While it is so forcibly laid down in the Gospels that the history of the kingdom of heaven begins in suffering and sanctity, it is as plainly said that it results in unfaithfulness and sin; that is to say, that, though there are at all times many holy, many religious men in it, and though sanctity, as at the beginning, is ever the life and the substance and the germinal seed of the Divine Kingdom, yet there will be many too, there will be more, who by their lives are a scandal and injury to it, not a defence. This again, is an astonishing announcement, and the more so when viewed in contrast with the precepts delivered by our Lord in His Sermon on the Mount, and His description to the Apostles of their weapons and their warfare. So perplexing to Christians was the fact when fulfilled, as it was in no long time on a large scale, that three of the early heresies more or less originated in obstinate, unchristian refusal to readmit to the privileges of the Gospel those who had fallen into sin. Yet our Lord’s words are express: He tells us that “Many are called, few are chosen;” in the parable of the Marriage Feast, the servants who are sent out gather together “all that they found, both bad and good;” the foolish virgins “had no oil in their vessels;” amid the good seed an enemy sows seed that is noxious or worthless; and “the kingdom is like to a net which gathered together all kind of fishes;” and “at the end of the world the Angels shall go forth, and shall separate the wicked from among the just.”