Hebrew Life and Times

by Harold B. Hunting

JEWISH HOPES MADE GREATER BY JESUS

This history of the common people of Israel began with certain vague hopes of a happier and nobler way of living for the descendants of Abraham. As the centuries passed these hopes were only very partially realized. But what was more important the Jews came more and more clearly to understand the meaning of their own hopes. Their great teachers helped them to know what they really wanted or ought to want if they would be happy. Moses taught them the first lessons of justice as the foundation of happiness. The great prophets helped them to see that neither happiness nor justice was possible except as they knew and worshiped the true God—not a God of greed and anger to be bribed with sacrifices, but the God of justice and love. A few of the prophets also began to see that such hopes as theirs could not be for Jews alone but must include all mankind.

The Fullness of the Times

The Jews under their Roman masters had come to a time, as we saw in the preceding chapter, when they were wildly expecting an immediate fulfillment of these hopes. The short taste of freedom and happiness which they had enjoyed under Judas and Simon Maccabeus, followed by a tyranny more cruel and distasteful than any which their ancestors had known, made them almost mad with the desire for some kind of a Saviour. And it seemed to them that he must come soon.

The chance for a world-Saviour.—All over the world just at this time there were strange hopes and longings in men's hearts. The Romans had robbed many other nations besides the Jews of their independence. These people had no real nation of their own any longer to live for—and they hated Rome. What was there to make life worth living unless some Redeemer should come from God?

Moreover, it was possible now to think of such a Saviour as a world-Saviour. In the earlier centuries men hardly knew that there was a world outside their own tribe and a few of their neighbors. There were no maps. Only a few could travel, and see for themselves how great a world there really was—and how many nations there were—made up of men like themselves. The common people of Asia scarcely knew that there was a Europe, and the enormous continent of Africa, except for Egypt, did not exist for them. As for what is now called the New World, North and South America, no one knew of its existence.

Preparations for Christianity.—But the Romans built good roads all over the great countries which bordered on the Mediterranean Sea, and many were the travelers who went to and fro upon them. They established one government for all this Mediterranean world. One language came to be understood everywhere—not Latin, the language of the Romans themselves, but Greek. Beyond the boundaries of the empire there were, of course, vast territories. But it was possible now for even the common people to realize that their own village or city or tribe was only a small part of one great world. And for the first time in history there was a chance for some one to take the old Jewish hope of a better and happier Jewish people and change it into a world-hope of a better and happier human race, and to gather a few men and women together and start them working for it.

The Coming of Jesus

In the wonderful providence of God there was born in a manger-cradle just at this moment in history the Baby who was destined to accomplish this miracle; to broaden out to their widest and noblest meanings these hopes which had been handed down from one generation of Jews to another. The story of the life of Jesus will be given in detail in other courses in this series. Here, in a nutshell, is what Jesus did: he helped men to believe in a God who loved all men as his children, whether rich or poor, learned or ignorant, Jews or Gentiles or Samaritans, even the bad as well as the good; for if they were bad, they needed his love to help them to be good. Jesus not only taught this idea of God through his spoken words; he helped men, through his deeds, to understand it. He lived that way, as the Son of such a God. He healed the sick. He fed the hungry. He ate and drank with outcasts. He was everybody's friend.

The inevitable conflict and cross.—Of course Jesus was not able to live that kind of life very long in our kind of world. Very soon he came into conflict with the various kinds of men who enjoyed special privileges of wealth or learning or honor and were not at all willing to share these things in a brotherly way; with the Pharisees, who were considered especially holy and did not want to be brothers to common men, the "people of the land"; with the rich who did not want to be brothers to the poor; with priests who did not want to be brothers to wounded men lying by the side of the Jericho road; with Romans who were afraid the Jews might think brotherhood meant liberty. So after three short years of preaching and healing Jesus was nailed to the cross, praying even as the nails were driven into his hands, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."