The Man of Galilee

by Atticus G. Haygood

Here is, therefore, the essential difference: his conception of evil, and back of that, of course, his conception of man himself.

As we have seen, in the thought of Jesus the evil and the good, the woes and the blessings of humanity are in man himself; they are not in externals, but internals; not in circumstances, but in character. Jesus does not, therefore, dwell upon poverty or wealth, sickness or health, enemies or friends, contempt or favor, servitude or freedom, early death or long life. He is not concerned about any circumstances whatever that merely determine man’s external life; he is concerned about man himself. If there be any real good or any real evil the good and the evil are inside, not outside the man.

Let us note, too, Jesus never places man’s moral evil, which is the one evil he recognizes, in mere ignorance of truth, as if instruction and merely changing man’s opinions could remedy the evil; he always places it in that something that alienates man’s love from God, that something that Jesus calls sin, that something that is sin because it antagonizes the pure will of God. And Jesus teaches that the very constitution of man’s nature is such that no bettering of his external conditions can bring any real help whatsoever; that so long as man is out of harmony with God there can be for him, neither in this world nor the next, any real good. This he meant in the question that makes a man outweigh a world: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

Jesus took very great pains to teach men that in themselves, and not in their circumstances, was their real evil and their real good. He used almost every form of speech to teach them to think of a man as a man, and not as the sport of circumstances.

For poverty Jesus did not care; for wealth he had no respect. The story of the barn-builder gives us his solemn judgment upon a man who achieved very great worldly success; who was what most men long and strive to be—rich and great. But he was a man out of harmony with God—rich in purse, bankrupt in soul. Jesus, in the face of all human opinion, plainly calls such a man “a fool.”

The drama of the rich man and Lazarus turns the light of both worlds upon the question of man’s chief and only good, and emphasizes, by the despair of the prince in hell, his verdict upon the case of the prosperous and self-satisfied barn-builder, in whose thoughts and plans neither his own soul nor the God who made him had any place.

Always—whether speaking of his own personal work or in instructing his disciples as to their work—Jesus looks to bettering men, not their conditions. He did not care for conditions, except as they connected men with influences that made them good or evil; he cared for men only. Hence he always stressed character and nothing else.

Character, in the teaching of Jesus, is all; it is both test and measure of what a man is, and there is no other test or measure for which man ought to care, for which God does care.

The amazement of comfortable and cultured Nicodemus shows us that these ideas of Jesus were not borrowed from the men of his time and race.

Summing up what is here presented as to the conception Jesus had of his mission to men, a conception as unique as his own character: only one thing he hated and sought to destroy—sin; only one thing he loved for man and sought to bestow—goodness.