; thus conjoined in Jesus' speech
iOTt
its ethical and spiritual signifio
Son (He 11).
Once more, the originality of Jesus appears most strikingly in the fact that He traces all His teach- ing to His Father (Jn 7"). The veiy refusal of the claim to be independent of God is itself a claim of the most stupendous kind. He whose words and deeds are entirely the speaking and acting of God in Him, between whom and God there is complete intimacy and uninterrupted reciprocity of thought and purpose, .stands apart from all human teachers, even the most brilliant and the most original. His teaching is not His own. It is the message of Another, even of Him who- sent Him to cari-y it to the human race.
(4) The future of the teaching. — Teachers die : their great thoughts perish not. Socrates passed from the market-place ; but Plato and Aristotle, those real Socratics, took up the threads of thought, and wove them into systems which have dominated the intellectual world ever since. It is noticeable, however, that this has not been the history of the ideas of Jesus. He uttered them, and then passed from the scene of His labours. But no disciple took them and expanded them into a system. No philosophical or theological system to-day can claim to Ix! His. He Himself i.redicted a much more ve-
Spirit of God (Jn Hi'-'''). He will take the tliou-lits of Jesus and unfold their meaning, and apply their vitalizing power to the questionings of all succes- sive generations of men, till, finally, all uncer- tainties are resolved in the light of the eternal day. It is certain that He ^vho ' sat thus by the well ' and talked with a woman, who preached in syna- gogues, and taught in the Temple, had this con- sciou.sness of Himself as initiating a teaching which
destined to continue, through the power of he Spirit of God, unfailin<', imperishaole.
and
and man. Th>'.', therefore, revelation, ,Iesus claims to 'iilfil. retain and develop. We are not
indefeasible. In respect of tbis also, Jesus stands apart from and superior to all other teachers of men. 2. Legislator.— Jesus is more than a teacher, whether of the type of a .Jew isli Rabbi or of that of a Greek philos'oi.li. i. Tin- ilisciple band is more than a group of dd.ilr >,mi1-, « 1m. may be expected to assimilate ami | i.i|..ii:ai.' the ideas of their Master. The anal.. -y ..i the Sdiools fails to give us Jesus' point of view. He lias before Him the Kingdom of God, which has existed throughout the past ages of Israel's history, and is now about to pass into a new stage of realization. He speaks, accordingly, not so much in the character of a com- municator of new ideas, as in that of a legislator laying do%\-n principles upon which the community of g51 shall be built or rebuilt, delivering laws which shall guide it in its future historj'. The tone of Jesus is not that of a prophet who, standing within the Kingdom, a member of it, like tho.se wliom he addresses, speaks out of the circumstances of his age, and addresses to his fellow-citizens words of warning, of counsel, of rebuke, and of hope. Jesus stands consciously on a far higher platform, and does not class Himself with those whom He addresses, as though He and they bore the same relation to the Law. They are not His fellow-citizens. They are His subjects, citizens of the commimity of which He is head and lawgiver. The laws of the Kingdom He promulgates by His own personal authority. Six times in the Sermon on the Mount He sets aside 'that which was spoken to them of old time,' and substitutes a rule of His own. In doing so, however. He is no mere revolutionary-. He is talcing the inner spiritual principle of the old
INCARNATION
INCAENATION
801
Law, and liberating it from the restrictions wliich had protected it in the time of man's pupilage. After the same manner He interprets and applies the Sabbath law (Mk 2-^- '-'*). In dealing with per- versions of the Law He is still more peremptory and drastic ; c.rj. as to fasting {i}^^-) and cere- monial purification (7^''-)- The consciousness of One who thus legislates for the Kingdom is not that of a prophet, not even of the greatest of the prophets, who was God's instrument in the first founding of the community, and received the law at His hands. It is rather that of One in whom God comes to His people, who is the Divinely appointed King in Israel, whose relation to God is closer than any mere man's can be, who speaks, therefore, with the very authority of God Himself.
3. Messiah. — The sense in which Jesus claimed the title of Messiah is certainly not to be gathered from any views regarding the Messiah entertained by His contemporaries. The clue is to be sought in Jesus' attitude towards the OT. (a) He regards the OT as a unity. Critical questions are not before
His mind, and upon
them He p
ment. 'David, 'Moses,' 'Isaiah' are simply terms of reference. What He does lay hold of is the unity of the revelation. One mind is revealed. One self -consistent purpose moves amid these varied scenes and ages, (b) He conceives the Divine pur- pose in the OT to be redemptive. The heart of the OT is union with God, the formation of a spiritual fellowship in which God is fully known and men enter upon the position and privilege of sons. In this connexion He preaches the Kingdom not merely as at hand (Mk I'=), but as present in commanding power {Mt 12^). Thus He appro- priates to Himself as descriptive of His own work the picture language of Is 61''^. So also in the most solemn hour of His life, when He was on the verge of laying it down, He claimed redemptive efficacy for His death in accordance M'ith the oracle of the new covenant (Mt 26-'8, Jer 3P'). This was central in the consciousness of Jesus. An eschato- logy, no doubt, He had ; but it was subordinate to the spiritual conception of redemption, and repre- sented in terms of current thought the consum- mation of redemption in the world to come. Messiahship, accordingly, meant for Jesus the vocation in which the redemptive purpose of God, which had been growing to completion tlirough the history of Israel, would be fulfilled. We can understand, therefore, how unwilling He would be to receive such a title, when its meaning in the minds of those who used it differed widely from His own conception of it ; how glad He would be to accept it when it was applied to Him, not because of His sup- posed fulfilment of popular requirements, but in spite of His obvious non-fulfilment of these demands ; and how careful He would be to train those who clung to Him as Messiah in the apprehension of His own transformed idea of it.