It need not surprise us when we find the imagi- nation of Jesus reaching its cliniax of realistic vividness in the field of the weird and the ghastly. It is a ti'agic world, and he who, with his imagina- tion in free i)lay, dares to confront its facts im- partially, will certainly see and tell gruesome things. There is, accordingly, frequent reference to loathsome things, whose loathsomeness had evidently atiected Him. A serpent or a scorpion among food (Mt 7'", Lk IV'), a foul cup or platter whose exterior gave promise of cleanliness (Mt 23-^), the corruption of moth and rust among treas- ures of garments or metal (6'"), are among His casual notes of observation. More deliberate and (as it were) classical are such sayings as that about the carcase and the vultures (24-"), and the vipers crawling towards the flames (23"*^). The bitterness of the spiritual life is driven in almost upon our senses as we read that every sacrifice must be ' salted with Hre ' (Mk O'*^), that He is come to bring not peace, but a sword (^It lO*'*), and that only those who eat His flesh and drink His blood can claim to have life in them (Jn G^-*). The same rises to its height in the wild picture presented in the words, ' I am come to cast tire on the earth ; and what will 1, if it be already kindled ? ' (Lk 12^^) ; while the whole of His reference to Mammon (Mt 16'' etc.) is so realistic that it used to be imagined that this was the name of some Syrian god, such as G. F. "Watts has painted, with bloody feet and hands pashing out the life of humanity.
Among the most conspicuotrs of His images of the ghastly, are two that are drawn from human life. The first is that of the cross-bearers (Mt 10^^). It is but too easy to ascertain whence this suggestion must have come, for men bearing crosses to the public places of execution were common enough in Palestine under the Romans. So we have from Jesus the weirdest of all allegorical pictures of the noble life. It is a procession of men bearing crosses, and Himself at its head. The procession is not staggering in weakness along the Via Dolorosa to Calvary. It is winding its way through the sunshine, by the waters of Galilee, in and out of villages where men are working, and Avomen standing by wells, and children playing in the streets. The other figure is that of a spectral funeral procession, in which the dead are burying the dead (8^^). The phrase has become proverbial, but the imaginary scene in which it originated is surely one of the ghastliest. The corpse of a dead man is being carried to its tomb, but in place of the many-coloured robes of an Eastern funeral there are but shrouds like his own in the cortege ; and the march of limbs bloodless and stark, and the sunlight falling upon closed eyes, are images which we may well believe never ceased to haunt the minds of those who first shuddered at them. We are not here concerned with the lessons which these images conveyed. They are among the most im- portant of all His teachings, and the point to note is that He drove them deep into the imagination
of His hearers by the most daring and unrelieved use of the ghastly.
Nature, too, lent her sinister suggestion. The sea was always an object of fear and hatred to the Jews. It was strange to them, as to all inland nations, and for many centuries they were never permitted to become familiar with it on account of the Philistine and Phoenician Gentiles, who held its harbours and its coast. In later days it was significant to them chiefly as the path of the in- vaders, whose maritime base for Syria was con- spicuous from many mountains of Israel at Ca;sarea. Only on a very few occasions does Jesus refer to it, and always in ominous suggestion. He speaks of some who compass sea and land to obtain prose- lytes, only that they may make them children of hell (Mt 23'^). Again, He speaks of a sycamine- tree or a mountain being remo\ed by faith and cast into the sea, as a thing stupendous and silencing (Lk 17''). The most appalling doom that can be set against the sin of injuring His little ones, and which were still better for the injurer than what actually awaits him, is to be cast into the sea with a millstone about his neck to hold him among the wreckage and slime of decaying things in its bot- tom ooze (Mt IS**). Amid the terrors of the latter Day of Jitdgment we hear the booming of the breakers as a terrifying undertone — ' the sea and the waves roaring' (Lk 21-^).
Nothing in nature strikes so cold a fear into the imagination as that strange and sinister combina- tion which has been called ' the beauty and the terror of the world.' In the SAveetest sunshine and under the purest light of stars, lurk ever the savage cruelties and the obscene putrefactions of earth. This also Jesus noted when He spoke of ' the whited sepulchres' (Mt 23^^^) — the brightest spots on many a sunny landscape of the East, yet sug- gesting a condition of physical horror within, which it needs experience to realize. But the utmost extreme of poetic power of this sort is felt in the sudden introduction of the picture of a fig-tree, blossoming peacefully in the full beauty of its leaf- age, into the midst of the magnificent horrors of the picture of the Day of Judgment (24^^).