Of course, it is possible, in the interests of a theory, to excise such passages from the Gospels, or to explain them away, bu<; why should we wish to do so ? Why should we insist upon interpreting our Lord's words by Jewish apocalypses, which we have no evidence that He ever read, instead of interpreting them by that Old Testament with which we know His mind was saturated ? Why do we forget the destruction of Jerusalem, and the place which we know it to have occupied in His thoughts ? Why, when He tells us that we shall desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, do we insist that He can have but one day ?
ST. LUKE XVII. 20, 2 1 347
Why, when He says that " wheresoever the carcase is, there wiU the eagles be gathered together," do we insist that not till His final coming can there be a lifeless corpse to consume, and that the eagles of judgment must go hungry till then ? Why, above all, when in His great eschatological discourse He distinguishes in successive verses between the judgment that will fall before His own generation passes away and that final judgment whose day and hour not even the Son can know, do we insist upon confusing the one with the other, and declaring our Lord to have claimed the very knowledge which He denies Himself to possess ?
Take that text which seems to be regarded as the stronghold of the purely eschatological view. "Ye shall not have gone through the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come." What difficulty will that verse present to one who is familiar with the Old Testament language ? None whatever. At what exact moment our Lord spoke these words we do not know. Here, as elsewhere, the first Evangelist groups together teachings given at various times. But the Lirst Gospel, as we know, is especially the Gospel of the Jewish Christians, and it is surely with the Apostolic mission to the Jews that our Lord is here dealing. The coming of which He here speaks is His coming for judgment to Israel. What He provides for is that, before the Eoman eagles swoop down upon the guilty land, Israel shall hear the message of the Gospel, and be called to repentance and salvation. And so, surely, His Apostles understood Him. The forty years' respite was apparently used by them to go through the cities of Israel, and proclaim the gospel; and only when the gospel had been proclaimed did the flood come.
Certainly it is true that the Apostles, whom our Lord had trained, expected the final consummation in their own day. So have the most earnest Christians in every age of the Church's history. But do they base that expectation of theirs upon any clear word of our Lord ? Not once. On the contrary, they base it, as the Christians of other ages have done, upon their own reading of the " signs of the times." If, then, it be said that our Lord taught the near approach of His final coming, we can only reply that He did not so teach. In the foreground He saw the destruction of the Jewish theocracy; behind it, in the mists of the future, He saw the final establishment of the Kingdom of
348 THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM
God. He told His Apostles the date of the one, and He denied that He knew the date of the other.
]I If the Jesus of Harnack was not the Jesus of the Church, nor, we think, the Jesus of history either, He was at any rate a noble figure, and a most helpful one. But the Jesus of Schweitzer has no message for us ; he seems to us a self-deluded fanatic, and nothing more.^
H It is really well to consider how entirely our religious teaching and preaching, and our creeds, and what passes with us for " the gospel," turn on quite other matters from the fundamental matter of the primitive gospel, or good news, of our Saviour Himself. This gospel was the ideal of popular hope and longing, an immense renovation and transformation of things : the Kingdom of God. " Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying : The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand ; repent and believe the good news." Jesus went about the cities and villages "proclaiming the good news of the kingdom." The multitudes followed Him, and He "took them and talked to them about the kingdom of God." He told His disciples to preach this. " Go thou, and spread the news of the kingdom of God." " Into whatever city ye enter, say to them : The kingdom of God has come nigh unto you." He told His disciples to pray for it. " Thy kingdom come ! " He told them to seek and study it before all things. " Seek first God's righteousness and kingdom."
It is a contracted and insufficient conception of the gospel which takes into view only the establishment of righteousness, and does not also take into view the establishment of the Kingdom. And the establishment of the Kingdom does imply an immense renovation and transformation of our actual state of things ; that is certain. This then, which is the ideal of the popular classes, of the multitude everywhere, is a legitimate ideal. And a Church of England devoted to the service and ideals of any class or classes — however distinguished, wealthy, or powerful — which are perfectly satisfied with things as they are, is not only out of sympathy with the ideal of the popular classes ; it is also out of sympathy with the gospel, of which the ideal does, in the main, coincide with theirs.^