With the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah the closest possible connexion was established, for every devout Jew, between Jesus’ message and his person; for it is in the Messiah’s activity that God Himself comes to His people, and the Messiah who does God’s work and sits at the right hand of God in the clouds of heaven has a right to be worshipped. But what attitude did Jesus himself take up towards his Gospel? Does he assume a position in it? To this question there are two answers; one negative and one positive.
In those leading features of it which we described in the earlier lectures the whole of the Gospel is contained, and we must keep it free from the intrusion of any alien element: God and the soul, the soul and its God. There was no doubt in Jesus’ mind that God could be found, and had been found, in the law and the prophets. “He hath showed thee, 0 Man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” He takes the publican in the temple, the widow and her mite, the lost son, as his examples; none of them know anything about “Christology,” and yet by his humility the publican was justified. These are facts which cannot be turned and twisted without doing violence to the grandeur and simplicity of Jesus’ message in one of its most important aspects. To contend that Jesus meant his whole message to be taken provisionally, and everything in it to receive a different interpretation after his death and resurrection, nay, parts of it to be put aside as of no account, is a desperate supposition. No! his message is simpler than the churches would like to think it; simpler, but for that very reason sterner and endowed with a greater claim to universality. A man cannot evade it by the subterfuge of saying that as he can make nothing of this “Christology” the message is not for him. Jesus directed men’s attention to great questions; he promised them God’s grace and mercy; he required them to decide whether they would have God or Mammon, an eternal or an earthly life, the soul or the body, humility or self-righteousness, love or selfishness, the truth or a lie. The sphere which these questions occupy is all-embracing; the individual is called upon to listen to the glad message of mercy and the Fatherhood of God, and to make up his mind whether he will be on God’s side and the Eternal’s, or on the side of the world and of time. The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son. This is no paradox, nor, on the other hand, is it “rationalism,” but the simple expression of the actual fact as the evangelists give it.
But no one had ever yet known the Father in the way in which Jesus knew Him, and to this knowledge of Him he draws other men’s attention, and thereby does “the many” an incomparable service. He leads them to God, not only by what he says, but still more by what he is and does, and ultimately by what he suffers. It was in this sense that he spoke the words, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”; as also, “The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many.” He knows that through him a new epoch is beginning, in which, by their knowledge of God, the ”least” shall be greater than the greatest of the ages before; he knows that in him thousands—the very individuals who are weary and heavy laden— will find the Father and gain life; he knows that he is the sower who is scattering good seed; his is the field, his the seed, his the fruit. These things involve no dogmatic doctrines; still less any transformation of the Gospel itself, or any oppressive demands upon our faith. They are the expression of an actual fact which he perceives to be already happening, and which,, with prophetic assurance, he beholds in advance. When, under the terrible burden of his calling and in the midst of the struggle, he comes to see that it is through him that the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the poor have the Gospel preached to them, he begins to comprehend the glory which the Father has given him. And he sees that what he now suffers in his person will, through his life crowned in death, remain a fact efficacious and of critical importance for all time: He is the way to the Father, and as he is the appointed of the Father, so he is the judge as well.
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