It is worth noticing that Jesus stands alone in refusing to despair of the greater part of mankind. Contempt was in his eyes the unpardonable sin (Matt. 5:22). How swift and decisive is his anger with those who make others stumble! (Luke 17:2). The parable of the lost sheep reveals what he held to be God's feeling for the hopeless man; and, as we have seen, his constant aim is to lead men to "think like God." The lost soul matters to God. He sums up his own work in the world in much the same language as he uses about the shepherd in the parable: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost" (Luke 19:10). The taunt that he was the "friend of publicans and sinners" really described what he was and wished to be (Luke 7:34). God was their Heavenly Father. The sight, then, of the masses of his countrymen, like worried sheep, worn, scattered, lost, and hopeless, waked in him no shade of doubt—on the contrary, it was further proof to him of the soundness of his message. Changing his simile, he told his disciples that the harvest was great, but the labourers few, and he asked them to pray the Lord of the harvest to thrust forth labourers into His harvest (Matt. 9:38). The very name "Lord of the harvest" implies faith in God's competence and understanding. From the first, he seems to have held up before his followers that this wide service was to be their work—"Come ye after me," he said, "and I will make you to become fishers of men" (Mark 1:17)—men, who should really "catch men" (Luke 5:10).
Like all for whom the world has had a meaning, Jesus, as we have seen, accepted the necessary conditions of man's life. Human misery and need were widespread, but God's Fatherhood was of compass fully as wide, and Jesus relied upon it. "Your heavenly Father knows," he said (Matt. 6:32), and "with God all things are possible" (Mark 10:27). The very miseries of the oppressed and hopeless people added grounds to his confidence. People who had touched bottom in sounding the human spirit's capacity for misery, were for him the "ripe harvest" (Matt. 9:37), only needing to be gathered (Mark 4:29). He understood them, and he knew that he had the healing for all their troubles. With full assurance of the truth of his words, he cried: "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28). He spoke of a rest which careless familiarity obscures for us. What understanding and sympathy he shows, when he adds: "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light!" Misery, poverty and hunger, he had found, taught men to see realities. The hungry, at least, were not likely to mistake a stone for bread—they had a ready test for it, on which they could rely. Poverty threw open the road to the Kingdom of God. The clearing away of all temporary satisfactions, of all that cloaked the soul's deepest needs, prepared men for real relations with the greatest Reality—with God. So that Jesus boldly said: "Blessed are ye poor"; "Blessed are ye that hunger now"; "Blessed are ye that weep now" (Luke 6:20, 21); but he had no idea that they were always to weep. If it was his to care for men's hunger, it was not likely that he would have no comfort for their tears—"Ye shall find rest unto your souls" (Matt. 11:29)—"They shall be comforted" (Matt. 5:4).
It was in large part upon the happiness which he was to bring to the poor that Jesus based his claim to be heard. There is little reasonable ground for doubt that he healed diseases. Of course we cannot definitely pronounce upon any individual case reported; the diagnosis might be too hasty, and the trouble other than was supposed; but it is well known that such healings do occur—and that they occurred in Jesus' ministry, we can well believe. So when he was challenged as to his credentials, he pointed to misery relieved; and the culmination of everything, the crowning feature of his work, he found in his "good news for the poor." The phrase he borrowed from Isaiah (61:1), but he made it his own—the splendid promises in Isaiah for "the poor, the broken-hearted, captives, blind and bruised," appealed to him. Time has laid its hand upon his word, and dulled its freshness. "Gospel" and "evangelical" are no longer words of sheer happiness like Jesus' "good news"—they are technical terms, used in handbooks and in controversy; while for Jesus the "good news for the poor" was a new word of delight and inspiration.
The centre in all the thoughts of Jesus, as we have to remind ourselves again and again, is God. If, as Dr. D. S. Cairns puts it, "Jesus Christ is the great believer in man," it is—if we are reading him aright at all—because God believes in man. Let us remind ourselves often of that. "Thou hast made us for Thyself," said Augustine in the famous sentence, of which we are apt to emphasize the latter half, "and our heart knows no rest till it rests in Thee" (Confessions, i. 1). Jesus would have us emphasize the former clause as well, and believe it. The keynote of his whole story is God's love; the Father is a real father—strange that one should have to write the small f to get the meaning! All that Jesus has taught us of God, we must bring to bear on man. For it is hard to believe in man—"What is man that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him?" quotes the author of "Job" in a great ironical passage (Job 7:17; from Psalm 8:4). The elements and the stars come over us, as they came over George Fox in the Vale of Beavor; what is man? Can one out of fifteen hundred millions of human beings living on one planet matter to God, when there are so many planets and stars, and there have been so many generations? Can he matter? It all depends on how we conceive of God. Here it is essential to give all the meaning to the term "God" that Jesus gave to it, to believe in God as Jesus believed in God, if we are to understand the fullness of Jesus' "good news." It all depends on God—on whether Jesus was right about God; and after all on Jesus himself. "A thing of price is man," wrote Synesius about 410 A.D., "because for him Christ died." The two things go together—Jesus' death and Jesus' Theocentric thought of man.
It is a familiar criticism of idealists and other young hearts, that it is easy to idealize what one does not know. "Omne ignotum pro magnifico" is the old epigram of Tacitus. It is not every believer in man, nor every "Friend of man," who knows men as Jesus did. Like Burns and Carlyle and others who have interpreted man to us to some purpose, he grew up in the home of labouring people. He was a working man himself, a carpenter. He must have learnt his carpentry exactly as every boy learns it, by hammering his fingers instead of the nail, sawing his own skin instead of the wood—and not doing it again. He knew what it was to have an aching back and sweat on the face; how hard money is to earn, and how quickly it goes. He makes it clear that money is a temptation to men, and a great danger; but he never joins the moralists and cranks in denouncing it. He always talks sense—if the expression is not too lowly to apply to him. He sees what can be done with money, what a tool it can be in a wise man's hands—how he can make friends "by means of the mammon of unrighteousness" (Luke 16:9), for example, by giving unexpectedly generous wages to men who missed their chances (Matt. 20:15), by feeding Lazarus at the gate, and perhaps by having his sores properly attended to (Luke 16:20). That he understood how pitifully the loss of a coin may affect a household of working people, one of his most beautiful parables bears witness (Luke 15:8-10). With work he had no quarrel. He draws many of his parables from labour, and he implies throughout that it is the natural and right thing for man. To be holy in his sense, a man need not leave his work. Clement of Alexandria, in his famous saying about the ploughman continuing to plough, and knowing God as he ploughs, and the seafaring man, sticking to his ship and calling on the heavenly pilot as he sails, is in the vein of Jesus.[24] There were those whom he called to leave all, to distribute their wealth, and to follow him; but he chose them (Mark 3:13, 14); it was not his one command for all men (cf. Mark 5:19). But, as we shall shortly see, it is implied by his judgements of men that he believed in work and liked men who "put their backs into it"—their backs, eyes, and their brains too.
Pain, the constant problem of man, and perhaps more, of woman—of unmarried woman more especially—he never discussed as modern people discuss it. He never made light of pain any more than of poverty; he understood physical as well as moral distress. Nor did he, like some of his contemporaries and some modern people, exaggerate the place of pain in human experience. He shared pain, he sympathized with suffering; and his understanding of pain, and, above all, his choice of pain, taught men to reconsider it and to understand it, and altered the attitude of the world toward it. His tenderness for the suffering of others taught mankind a new sympathy, and the "nosokomeion", the hospital for the sick, was one of the first of Christian institutions to rise, when persecution stopped and Christians could build. "And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them," says Matthew (21:14) in a memorable phrase. I have heard it suggested that it was irregular for them to come into the temple courts; but they gravitated naturally to Jesus.
The mystic is never quite at leisure for other people's feelings and sufferings; he is essentially an individualist; he must have his own intercourse with God, and other people's affairs are apt to be an interruption, an impertinence. "I have not been thinking of the community; I have been thinking of Christ," said a Bengali to me, who was wavering between the Brahmo Samaj and Christianity. The blessed Angela of Foligno was rather glad to be relieved of her husband and children, who died and left her leisure to enjoy the love of God. All this is quite unlike the real spirit of the historical Jesus. "Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses," was a phrase of Isaiah that came instinctively to the minds of his followers (Matt. 8:17, roughly after Isaiah 53:4). Perhaps when we begin to understand what is meant by the Incarnation, we may find that omnipotence has a great deal more to do than we have supposed with natural sympathy and the genius for entering into the sorrows and sufferings of other people.
One side of the work of Jesus must never be forgotten. His attitude to woman has altered her position in the world. No one can study society in classical antiquity or in non-Christian lands with any intimacy and not realize this. Widowhood in Hinduism, marriage among Muslims—they are proverbs for the misery of women. Even the Jew still prays: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God! King of the Universe, who hast not made me a woman." The Jewish woman has to be grateful to God, because He "hath made me according to His will"—a thanksgiving with a different note, as the modern Jewess, Amy Levy, emphasized in her brilliant novel, where her heroine, very like herself, corrected her prayerbook to make it more explicit "cursed art Thou, O Lord our God! Who hast made me a woman." Paul must have known these Jewish prayers, for he emphasized that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3:28). Paul had his views—the familiar old ways of Tarsus inspired them[25]—as to woman's dress and deportment, especially the veil; but he struck the real Christian note here, and laid stress on the fact of what Jesus had done and is doing for women. There is no reference made by Jesus to woman that is not respectful and sympathetic; he never warns men against women. Even the most degraded women find in him an amazing sympathy; for he has the secret of being pure and kind at the same time—his purity has not to be protected; it is itself a purifying force. He draws some of his most delightful parables from woman's work, as we have seen. It is recorded how, when he spoke of the coming disaster of Jerusalem, he paused to pity poor pregnant women and mothers with little babies in those bad times (Luke 21:23; Matt. 24:19). Critics have remarked on the place of woman in Luke's Gospel, and some have played with fancies as to the feminine sources whence he drew his knowledge—did the women who ministered to Jesus, Joanna, for instance, the wife of Chuza (Luke 8:3), tell him these illuminative stories of the Master? In any case Jesus' new attitude to woman is in the record; and it has so reshaped the thought of mankind, and made it so hard to imagine anything else, that we do not readily grasp what a revolution he made—here as always by referring men's thoughts back to the standard of God's thoughts, and supporting what he taught by what he was.
Mark has given us one of our most familiar pictures of Jesus sitting with a little child on his knee and "in the crook of his arm." (The Greek participle which gives this in Mark 9:36 and 10:16 is worth remembering—it is vivid enough.) Mothers brought their children to him, "that he should put his hands on them and pray" (Matt. 19:13). Matthew (21:15) says that children took part in the Triumphal Entry; and Jesus, clear as he was how little the Hosannas of the grown people meant, seems to have enjoyed the children's part in the strange scene. Classical literature, and Christian literature of those ages, offer no parallel to his interest in children. The beautiful words, "suffer little children to come unto me," are his, and they are characteristic of him (Matt. 19:14); and he speaks of God's interest in children (Matt. 18:14)—once more a reference of everything to God to get it in its true perspective. How Jesus likes children!—for their simplicity (Luke 18:17), their intuition, their teachableness, we say. But was it not, perhaps, for far simpler and more natural reasons just because they were children, and little, and delightful? We forget his little brothers and sisters, or we eliminate them for theological purposes.
Jesus lays quite an unexpected emphasis on sheer tenderness—on kindness to neighbour and stranger, the instinctive humanity that helps men, if it be only by the swift offer of a cup of cold water (Matt. 10:42). The Good Samaritan came as a surprise to some of his hearers (Luke 10:30). "It is our religion," said a Hindu to a missionary, to explain why he and other Hindus did not help to rescue a fainting man from the railway tracks, nor even offer water to restore him, when the missionary had hauled him on to the platform unaided. Not so the religion of Jesus—"bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ," wrote Paul (Gal. 6:2)—"pursue hospitality" (Rom. 12:13; the very word runs through the Epistles of the New Testament). And, as we shall see in a later chapter, the Last Judgement itself turns on whether a man has kindly instincts or not. Matthew quotes (12:20) to describe Jesus' own tenderness the impressive phrase of Isaiah (42:3), "A bruised reed shall he not break."