We may notice again his respect for the reserve of other people. On the whole, how slowly Jesus comes to work with men! He never "rushes" the human spirit; he respects men's personalities. Men and women are never pawns with him. He does not think of them in masses. The masses appeal to him, but that is because he sees the individual all the time. To one of his disciples he says, "I have prayed for thee" (Luke 22:32). What a contrast to the conventional "friend of man" in the abstract! With all that hangs upon him, he has leisure to pray intensely, for a single man. It gives us an idea of his gifts in friendship. His faith in his people is quite remarkable, when we think of it. He believes in his followers; he shares with them some of the deepest things in his life; he counts them fit to share his thought of God. He makes it quite clear to them how he trusts them. He puts before them the tremendous work that he has to do—work more appalling in its vastness the more one studies it; and then he tells them that he is trusting the whole thing with them. What a faith it implies in their moral capacity! What acceptance of the dim beginnings of the character that was to be Christian! Someone has spoken of his "apparently unjustified faith in Peter." What names he can give to his friends as a result of this faith in them! "Ye are the light of the world," he says (Matt. 5:14), "the salt of the earth." When we remind ourselves of his clear vision, his genius for seeing fact, how much must such praises have meant to these men!
Think how he gives himself to them in earnest; how he is at their disposal. He is theirs; they can cross-question him at leisure; they tell him that the Pharisees did not like what he said (Matt. 15:12), they doubt with Peter the wisdom of his open speech (Mark 8:32); they criticize him (Matt. 13:10). If they do not understand his parable, they ask what he means (Matt. 15:15) and keep on asking till he makes it plain. He is in no hurry. He is the Master and their Teacher, and he is at the service of the slowest of them.
But there is another side to friendship; for one great part of it is taking what our friends do for us, as well as doing things for them. How he will take what they have to give! He lets them manage the boat, while he sleeps (Mark 4:38), and go and prepare for him (Luke 9:52), and see to the Passover meal (Mark 14:13). The women, we read, ministered to him of their substance (Luke 8:3). There is a very significant phrase in St. Luke (22:28), where he says to them at the end: "Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations." He tells them there that they have helped him. How? Apparently by being with him. Is not that friendship? In the same chapter (Luke 22:15) we find an utterance that reveals the depth of his feeling for his friends: "With desire I have desired (a Greek rendering of a Semitic intensive) to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." They are to help him again by being with him, and he has longed for it, he says. The Gospel of John sums up the whole story in a beautiful sentence: "Jesus, having loved his own which were in the world, loved them unto the end" (John 13:1). Augustine is right. "One loving spirit sets another on fire."
Note again the word which he uses in speaking to them ("Tekna": Mark 2:5, 10:24). It is a diminutive, a little disguised as "children" in our English version. It reappears in the Fourth Gospel in even more diminutive forms ("Teknia", 13:33; Paidia, 21:5) with a peculiarly tender suggestion. The word of Mark answers more closely than anything I know to "Boys," as we used it in the Canadian Universities. "Men," or "Undergraduates," is the word in the English Universities; "Students," in Scotland and in India; in Canada we said "Boys"; and I think we get nearer, and like one another better, with that easy name. And it was this friendly, pleasant word, or one very like it, that he used with them. Nor is it the only one of the kind. "Fear not, little flock!" he said (Luke 12:32). Do not the diminutives mean something? Do they not take us into the midst of a group where friendship is real? And in the centre is the friendliest figure of all.
Look for a moment at the men who followed him; at the type he calls. They are simple people in the main—warm hearts and impulsive natures. The politics of Simon the Zealot might at one time have been summed up as "the knife and plenty of it," a simple and direct enough type of political thought, in all conscience, however hopeless and ineffectual, as history showed; but he gave up his politics for the friendship of Jesus. Peter, again, is the champion example of the impulsive nature. Why Jesus called James and John "the sons of thunder" (Mark 3:17) I am not sure. Dr. Rendel Harris thinks because they were twins; other people find something of the thunderstorm in their ideas and outlook. The publican in the group is of much the same type; he is ready to leave his business and his custom-house at a word—once more the impulsive nature and the simple. It is possible that Jesus looked also to another type of which he gained very little in his lifetime; for he speaks of "the scribe who has turned disciple again, and brings out of his treasure things new and old" (Matt. 13:52)—the more complicated type of the trained scholar, full of old learning, but open to new views. In the meantime he draws to him people with the warm heart—yes, he says, but cultivate the cool head (cf. Matt. 10:16). Again and again he will have men "count the cost" (Luke 14:28)—know what they are doing, be rid of delusions before they follow him (Mark 8:34). What did they expect? They had all sorts of dreams of the future. When we first find them, there is friction among them, which is not unnatural in a group of men with ambitions (Mark 9:33. 10:37). Even at the Last Supper their minds run on thrones (Luke 22:24). They are haunted by taboos. Peter long after boasts that nothing common or unclean has entered his lips (Acts 10:14). They fail to understand him. "Are ye also without understanding?" he asks, not without surprise (Mark 8:17, 21). At the very end they run away.
There, then, is the group. What is to be the method? There is not much method. As Harnack says about the spread of the early Church, "A living faith needs no special methods"—a sentence worth remembering. "Infinite love in ordinary intercourse" is another phrase of Harnack in describing the life of the early Church. It began with Jesus. He chose twelve, says Mark (3:14), "that they may be with him." That is all. And they are with him under all sorts of circumstances. "The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" (Luke 9:58). They saw him in privation, fatigued, exhausted. With every chance to see weaknesses in his character, they did not find much amiss with him. That is surely significant. They lived with him all the time, in a genuine human friendship, a real and progressive intimacy. They were with him in popularity and in unpopularity; they were with him in danger, when Herod tried to kill him and he went out of Herod's territory. But friendship depends not only on great moments; it means companionship in the trivial, too, it means idle hours together, partnership in commonplace things—meals and garden—chairs as well as books and crises. Ordinary life, ordinary talk, gossip, chat, every kind of conversation about Herods and Roman governors, and the Zealots—custom-house memories, tales of the fishermen's life on the lake, stories of neighbours and home—rumours about the Galileans who were murdered by Pilate (Luke 13:1-4)—all the babbling talk of the bazaar is round Jesus and his group, and some of it breaks in on them; and his attitude to it all is to these men a constant revelation of character. They are with him in the play of feelings, with him in the fluxes and refluxes of his thought—learning his ways of mind without realizing it. They slip into his mind and mood, by a series of surprises, when they are imagining no such thing. Anything, everything serves to reveal him. They tramp all day, and ask some village people to shelter them for the night. The villagers tell them to go away. The men are hungry and fatigued. "What a splendid thing it would be, if we could do like Elijah and burn them up with a word!" So the hot thought rose. He turned and said, "You know not what manner of spirit you are of."—What a gentle rebuke! "The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:51-56). Then follows one of the wonderful sentences of the Gospel, "they went unto another village"—very obvious, but very significant. A missionary from China told me how, thirty years ago or more, he was driven out of the town where he lived; how the gentlefolk egged on the mob, and they wrecked his house, and hounded him out of the place. He told me how it felt—the misery and the indignity of it. Jesus took it undisturbed. He taught a lesson in it which the Church has never forgotten.
Their life was full of experiences shared with him. He has his reserve—his secret; yet, in another sense, he gives himself to them without reserve; there is prodigality of self-impartation in his dealings with them. He lets them have everything they can take. He becomes theirs in a great intimacy, he gives himself to them. Why? Because he believes, as he put it, in seed. Socrates saw that the teacher's real work, his only work, is to implant the idea, like a seed; an idea, like a seed, will look after itself. A king builds a temple or a palace. The seed of a banyan drifts into a crack, and grows without asking anyone's leave; there is life in it. In the end the building comes down, but for what the banyan holds up. The leaven in the meal is the most powerful thing there. There is very little of it, but that does not matter; it is alive (Matt. 13:33). Life is a very little thing but it is the only thing that counts. That is why the farmer can sow his fields and sleep at nights without thinking of them; and the crop grows in spite of his sleeping, and he knows it (Mark 4:26). That is why Jesus believes so thoroughly in his men, and in his message; God has made the one for the other, and there is no fear of mischance.
Look at his method of teaching. People "marvelled at his words of charm" (Luke 4:22)—"hung about him to hear him" (Luke 19:48). He said that the word is the overflow of the heart. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" (Matt. 12:34; Luke 6:45). What a heart, then, his words reveal! How easy and straightforward his language is! To-day we all use abstract nouns to convey our meaning; we cannot do without words ending in -ality and -anon. But there is no recorded saying of Jesus where he uses even "personality." He does not use abstract nouns. He sticks to plain words. When he speaks about God he does not say "the Great First Cause," or "Providence," or any other vague abstract. Still less does he use an adverb from the abstract, like "providentially." He says, "your heavenly Father." He does not talk of "humanity"; he says, "your brethren." He has no jargon, no technical terms, no scholastic vocabulary. He urges men not to over-study language; their speech must be simple, the natural, spontaneous overflow of the heart.[20] Jesus told his disciples not to think out beforehand what they would say when on trial (Mark 13:11)—it would be "given" to them. He was perfectly right; and when Christians obeyed him, they always spoke much better than when they thought out speeches beforehand. They said much less for one thing, and they said it much better. Take the case of the martyr—an early and historical one—whose two speeches were during her trial "Christiana sum" and, on her condemnation, "Deo gratias".
With this, remark his own gift of arresting phrase; the freshness of his language, how free it is from quotation, how natural and how extraordinarily simple. Everything worthwhile can be put in simple language; and, if the speech is complicated, it is a call to think again. "As a woman, over-curiously trimmed, is to be mistrusted, so is a speech," said John Robinson of Leyden, the minister of the Pilgrim Fathers. The language of Jesus is simple and direct, the inevitable expression of a rich nature and a habit of truth. You feel he does not strain after effect—epigram, antithesis, or alliteration. Of course he uses such things—like all real speakers—but he does not go out of his way for them. No, and so much the more significant are such characteristic antitheses as: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Luke 16:13), and "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it" (Matt. 16:25), coming with a spontaneous flash, and answering in their sharpness to the sharp edges of fact. His words caught the attention, and lived in the memory; they revealed such a nature; they were so living and unforgettable.
Remark once again his preference for the actual and the ordinary. There are religions in which holiness involves unusual conditions and special diet. Some forms of mysticism seem to be incompatible with married life. But the type of holiness which Jesus teaches can be achieved with an ordinary diet, and a wife and five children. He had lived himself in a family of eight or nine. It is perhaps harder, but it is a richer sanctity, if the real mark of a Saint is, as we have been told, that he makes it easier for others to believe in God. In any case the ordinary is always good enough with Jesus. Only he would have men go deeper, always deeper. Why can you not think for yourselves? he asks. Signs were what men demanded. He pictures Dives' mind running on signs even in hell (Luke 16:27). "What could you do with signs? Look at what you have already. You read the weather for to-morrow by looking at the sky to-day. The south wind means heat; the red sky fair weather. Study, look, think" (Luke 12:55). His animals, as we saw, are all real animals; it is real observation; real analogy. When he speaks of the lost sheep, it is not a fictitious joy that he describes or an imaginary one; it is real. The more we examine his sayings with any touch of his spirit, the more we wonder. Of course it is possible to handle them in the wrong way, to miss the real thought and make folly of everything. Thus, when he says he is the door, the interpreter may stray into silly detail and make faith the key, and—I don't know what the panels and hinges could be. That is not the style of Jesus. The soul of the thing, the great central meaning, the real analogy is his concern. Seriousness in observation, seriousness in reflection, is what he teaches. Men and women break down for want of thinking things out. Many things become possible to those who think seriously, as he did—and, so to speak, without watertight compartments.