The Man of Galilee

by Atticus G. Haygood

Every hearer, whether parent or child, answered out of his heart, “There is not such a man among us.” Jesus concludes: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”

The cold and cruel Pharisees, playing at religion and seeking their own, complained one day that Jesus healed a poor maimed man on the Sabbath day. Jesus made no argument about the nature of the Sabbath. He reminded them that they would lift a sheep out of the ditch on the Sabbath day, and concludes with a question that brought the truth home to them: “How much then is a man better than a sheep?”

These same people, contending about the forms of religion and forgetting God and man, complained that Jesus kept company with “publicans and sinners,” and was kind to them. In answer he told them of the shepherd who, missing one sheep from his flock of a hundred, could not be content with the ninety and nine, but went out into the wilderness seeking the lost one; he told them how glad the shepherd was when in his arms he had tenderly brought it home. He told them also of the woman who could not rest till, with broom and candle, she had searched her house for the piece of money she had lost. He told them of her neighbors rejoicing with her when she had found it. Why he cared for publicans and sinners he made plain when he added: “I tell you there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.”

Jesus would make these hard guardians of what they called the Church and despisers of their brother-men realize the Fatherhood of God. He made no argument of the sort mere men would make.

He tells them of the two sons and how glad the old father was when his poor prodigal got home. The conclusion no human heart can miss: the infinite Father, infinitely better than any earthly father, is infinitely glad when his prodigals return to him. The heart that once takes in this story of the two sons can never again tremble and cower before that horribly heathen conception of God that makes him only an infinite terror, seated on the throne of the universe, to be afraid of, fled from, and hated forever.

Jesus sought to encourage the most despondent and abject to trust in the divine justice as well as mercy. There is no lofty argument concerning the righteousness of God. He tells of the widow and the unjust judge, who feared not God nor regarded man, the judge who made a boast of heartlessness and apologized to himself for seeming to do a good deed. He grants the widow’s prayer because he was selfish and mean; he would not be “wearied with her importunities.” Jesus concludes: “And shall not God avenge his own darlings who cry day and night unto him?”

How clear Jesus made what mere human teachers make dark! What even some preachers of our times, too proud in their false learning to be simple in their methods and language, make so tiresome and so bewildering to hungry souls who ask for bread and get chaff!

We will not understand how unlike the methods of mere men is the method of Jesus till we have wearied ourselves with what they call reasonings; till we have come to understand that no man can teach religion who rejects the methods of Jesus for what he thinks are the methods of what he calls logic and philosophy, truly understanding neither.

What we may call his manner, as distinguished from his method of teaching, differences Jesus from mere men. No great teacher, unless it be some one who has learned of him the true secret of teaching—and how far below the Teacher the best and wisest fall!—ever before or since has the manner of Jesus.

There is a sort of fatality about men’s teaching. Vanity or ignorance makes them seek to appear profound when they are only obscure. What an unspeakable relief and blessing it would bring to all churches and schools if pastors and teachers would only study the method of Jesus and seek to imitate the simplicity of Jesus! Teachers, not a few of them, burden and bewilder their pupils with the dead lumber of learning that is not knowledge; preachers, not a few of them, mystify and mislead their hearers with reasonings, philosophies, and argumentations, mere war of words for the most part, that are not gospel nor life. When Jesus talked of the deepest and highest questions, of God and man, of rights and wrongs, of life and death, of time and eternity, of heaven and hell, it is said, “The common people heard him gladly.” This could never be said of even the good Socrates, or the great Plato; for the “common people” could not understand them.