2. Chrisfs ignorance, or limitation of knowledge —See COX.SCIOUSNESS, Kenosis.
ILLUSTRATIONS.— The use of illustrations is a noticeable mark of Jesus' teaching. He spoke in similes and metaphors and parables ; general rules He illustrated by examples or stated in concrete instances. His aim may be gathered from ob- serving what uses the method actually served.
Stories and similes, concrete facts and instances, catch the ear of the people. He who would win their attention must trick out his message in pictorial garb ; he must weave in his truth with earthly fact and incident on the loom of fancy. Such teaching also remains in the memory. Truth pictured makes vivid appeal to the eye, and what the eye sees the memory retains, store for mind and heart to brood over. Jesus knew what was in man, and, desiring His message to be current coin for all, treasure of life for the simplest. He spoke in pictures and similitudes.
Illustrative examples serve also to make abstract truth more easily understood. A tale may enter in at lowly doors, bearing its load of truth and suggestion, when a truth stated abstractly would remain without. The concreteness of the poet, his vision of truth and symbol wedded together, of principle incarnated in fact, is closely akin to the ordinary man's ways of thinking and speak- ing. It is primary ; the alistractness of thought, the language of reflexion and analysis, is second- ary. Jesus spake to the people after their own fashion.
These uses are obvious ; but they are only sur- face explanations ; they hardly touch the main purpose. When Jesus said (Mt 7"""), ' What man is tliere of you, who, if his .son ask a loaf, will give him a stone? If ye then, licing evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more sluill your F.itljir wliicli is in heaven give good things to tlicin tliat a-.k liiui?'. He was aiming at something irioip than a clear and strik- ing presentation of His tmth. He was speaking from the heart to the heart, appealing to their feeling for what is highest and best, for what is
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reasonable to faith in goodness. His illustration was an argument addressed to the heart. ' In theology,' it is said to be an axiom that ' parables do not act as arguments' (Trench"*, p. 40 n.); but they may in the sphere of faith. The parable of the Unmerciful Servant (Mt 18="-) was an answer to Peter's question, ' How often shall we forgive ? ' It gives no direct answer to that question. It is spoken not to the discursive intelligence busy about problems, but straight to the indigna- tions of the generous spirit. The better nature is enlisted against the man forgiven who was not made thereby tender-hearted and pitiful. When the lawyer put the searching question, ' But who is my neighbour?' (Lk 10--'), Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. That parable also does not answer the question directly. It rather sets before the heart the beauty of kindness, and its power to break down liarricrs between men which the neighbourhoods of race and religion may leave standing. An idea, such as that all men are potentially brothers, is apt to be barren, with- out conviction, without power of intellectual or spiritual inspiration ; a story such as this appeals to the human heart by which we live, that tender- ness in us which leaps up in admiration of a good man's deed.
The aim of our Lord's teaching was not en- lightenment, the bringing of clear ideas to the mind : it was to create faith and sustain it. And the form of His teacliing— His parables, similes, metaphors, concrete instances — was a means to serve that end. ' After all,' says Newman (Grniii. of Assent, 94), 'man is not a reasoning animal; lie is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal.' It is by the lieart that man believes unto salvation. There is the seat of the emotions, the joy we have in things, the intuitions of faith, the admirations which rule conduct and fashion character and shape our beliefs. The heart has its own reasons : visions of what is nol>le and fair, spells mighty there. And .Jesus' illustr.-itions are mostly pictures painted for that inward eye, music played that the ear of faith there may hear.
Many of Jesus' parables and pictures are more than mere illustrations ; they have in them the imagination's power of interpretation, the reveal- ing vision of the poet. The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Lk IS""') is more than an illus- trative example, it is as Jiilicher classes it, 'an example of the spiritual worth of humility before God.' It reveals, as in a transjiarency, the essential and hidden evil of a religious class. Our Lord's con- troversy with the Pliarisees sums itself up in this revealing picture where the inner spirit and ten- dency of Pharisaism is brought to a luminous point. The parable has the force of a revelation, suddenly illumining a whole spiritual world. The same quality is in the illustrations of hypocrisy in Mt 6. These kindle a light in the spiritual imagination. Jesus takes the cases of almsgiving, prayer, fasting. These are not chosen as representing the three spiritual worlds, or spheres of duty— neighbour, God, self (Gore). That activity of the schematizing intellect is foreign to the whole method of Jesus. These were the fashionable religious virtues of the day, and therefore the chosen theatre of hypocrisy : self-seeking in religion leaves the humble seques- tered virtues alone ; and Christ's pictures of ostenta- tious service there, have that direct illumination of the religious and ethical iiii.i'^iii.Uinn which sets it free from the bondage of .ill .xi n ii.ili-in. \hinv of the parables have'this ,|n.tlii y, -u, h .i- i\„- s,, ',( Growing in Secret, the tiuud ,'-^.iiiiurit:ui. ilic I'u- merciful Servant, the Prodigal Son, the Two Debtors.