THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS' HOPE CHARLES HENRY DICKINSON I Jesus' hope for the world seems to separate him from the tasks of civilization. All his teachings have reference to the Kingdom of God, which, as he conceived it, is not to be obtained by historic progress, but is to descend suddenly from heaven in divine power. The short interval, which he expected between his announcement that the Kingdom is at hand and its catastrophic inauguration, was not to be for its evolution, but for preparation of heart for the Kingdom's appearing. His absorption in that celestially originated order excluded from his mind the problems of the developments of industry, government, culture, as these demands confront us. The influence of Jesus upon the progress of social institutions seems to many to be based upon one of the most fortunate misconceptions that ever blessed mankind. But now that his authentic thought and ideal have been recovered, we can no longer profit by the age-long mistake. The limits of an article on this subject permit only a few unexpanded reflections and suggestions. Their lacks will be evident to everyone who appreciates that all the contents of Jesus' soul were fused into his expectation and molded by it; that the main current of spiritual history flowed through it; that the contrasts between his gospel and the conditions that men have to face and the work that men have to do, may separate life into discordant realms, with increasing confusions of faith and action. The arguments for modern scholarship's view of Jesus' eschatology I must, except for a few intimations, leave to each reader to find or to work out for himself. Those who may think that my emphasis upon the social motives of Jesus' hope is at the expense of its religious and personal elements, will recognize that I am obliged to make a selection. Yet I acknowledge that my social emphasis is because of my conviction that the faith and hope of Jesus are social in ground and origin, social in essence, social in fulfilments. A detailed knowledge of Jesus' expectation would require much clearer and fuller reports of his teaching than we possess. In such paucity of data we should be cautious of exaggerating contradictions and incongruities, and should concentrate upon elements of his prophecy that are pervasive. There are important differences from Jewish, Pauline, and other forms of the hope then prominent in Israel, of an impending revolution of the world by divine interference. From these are derived many statements incorrectly attributed to Jesus by the evangelists. But there remain in the synoptic records utterances derived from their most authentic sources and which are consistent with our best substantiated knowledge and clearest impression of him. In these reports we recognize his own message. Jesus shared the general hope. He purified it. He poured into it his own spiritual consciousness and social passion. Jesus' expectation differs from the materialism, secularism, and exclusive nationalism of the Jewish and-with modifications-the Jewish-Christian eschatology. It also differs from the celestially inclined hope of Paul, from which the colors of Jesus' earth of the glorious future have faded, and from the still more transcendentalized expectation of the gospel and epistle called by the name of John. Jesus looked into the near future of the world for the realization of the Kingdom of God, and anticipated there a social order worthy of God to give and of men to receive.1 Careful readers of the New Testament, though not technically trained, can construct the expository argument on its main lines for themselves. They should keep to the first three gospels, read "age" for "world" in most places where it makes sense, and understand "treasure-or reward-in heaven" not of where the treasure is to be enjoyed, but where it is being kept. Also, "the Kingdom of God" is evidently Jesus' usual phrase; and Luke 17:21 refers to the Kingdom's sudden irruption: the translation "among you" is near enough. These hints may help to correct other misapprehensions. The change which Jesus expected is only subordinately a change in the material world. It is a regenerated, revolutionized order of human life upon the earth. Some synoptic passages indeed, judged to be essentially his because they are characteristic of him and closely represent their oldest sources, appear inconsistent with this anticipation. Such incongruities are unavoidable in a conception which no vision or thought can make a complete unity. There are glorious confusions from hopes so exultant that they can never, to our thought at least, be realized on this earth; as the absence of death, the tangible presence of those risen from the dead, including himself, and the ordering of the forms of human life upon celestial models-"like unto the angels." That these confusions did not confuse him is due to his prophetic consciousness, essentially different from the claim of a magical clairvoyance of future events. It is not a rationalizing, systematically constructive consciousness. He was not concerned to work out a utopian system. The new order is the Father's gift. It includes every good which the Father can bestow upon his children. How its blessings are to be interrelated is the Father's concern, not his. Of inexhaustible significance is his relation of the Kingdom to the divine Fatherhood. He thought that nothing men can do hastens or retards this impending divine event. Its coming and the moment of its coming depend upon God only. Far from his faith was the Jewish assumption, that if Israel should keep the law for one day the Kingdom of God would come. Yet men are to await it, not with folded hands, but with girded loins and lamps trimmed and burning. "Repent" was his proclamation, "for the Kingdom of God is at hand." The word inadequately translated "repent" means an inward revolution. It is not merely a repudiation of the conduct condemned by the morality and religion of his time or of any imperfect time. It is not satisfied with standards of righteousness below those which his own life expressed. The very spirit of the Kingdom, the inward holiness, self-renouncing devotion, and all-enduring, all-forgiving ministering love, to which the blessings of the new order correspond, must be implanted and must grow in the receptive heart. Not that this establishes the Kingdom in the heart thus directed to it. Nor has it become established in the present fellowship of men thus changed in mind. It is to be a regnant social order, not yet realized. Yet this new life in the soul makes its possessors sons of the Kingdom, no longer children of the present age. This part of Jesus' gospel opens to us his own inexhaustible treasures of character, spiritual life, and devoted ministry. These are the two essential, inclusive elements of Jesus' message: the all-important divine event in the near future and preparation of heart for it. "Be changed inwardly: for the Kingdom of God is at hand." But between these two extends a vast field of human tasks. Only by the fulfilment of our responsibility to the tasks of civilization may mankind advance toward the perfected world-order of Jesus' hope. Admitting, as we are forced to admit, that Jesus was mistaken both in the nearness and the manner of the coming of God's Kingdom on earth, and that he made no conscious provision for our inalienable responsibility, must we undertake it with only incidental help from him, acknowledging that his gospel is not for the world as it is, to make it the world as it ought to be? II The significance of Jesus' expectation, it is said with increasing currency, is his perception that the betterment of the world depends, not upon a process of natural evolution, but upon spiritual forces. In this sense, it is said, the Kingdom descends from heaven and is God's gift, whether it comes soon or late, suddenly or progressively. Without entering upon a critical analysis of this thought, we may accept its estimate of spiritual powers. That appreciation will, I believe, make evident that the essentials of Jesus' hope are indispensable for the task of civilization which we have to do, and inevitably translatable into it. Also, our fulfilment of our task will be found to be historically conditioned upon his hope as he held it, to the practical sufficiency of which its mistakes and limitations are requisites. One with the best spirit of our age, one with a militant and devoted humanism, is Jesus' prophecy of a perfected earth. "The distant triumph song" sounded for him, not from the heaven above us, but from the earth as it is to be, from happy, pure, and loving men, even as we hear it, whose hearts humanity has touched, while we toil for the world's perfecting. His deepest and tenderest consolation to his disciples about to be bereft of him, was not that they should "meet the Lord in the air," nor that he, coming again, would "receive them unto himself," in that heaven to which he was returning, but that he who had so often pledged with them the cup of joy and love would "drink it new with them in the Kingdom of God." It is not heaven that we are working for or can work for, but earth as he foresaw it. The toiler's Kingdom of God is to be here. Often our hope of the world's progress is turned to doubt, sometimes to despair. Then we limit ourselves to patching one rent or another of an old decaying garment. We fret to make some conditions a little less intolerable, some human interrelations a little less discordant, if we can, between man and man, nation and nation, race and race, those who are in possession and those who are frantic to possess. Then we sink to futile compromises. We wander along desert trails that lead nowhere. Both aim and inspiration depart from resultless tasks. We need the reassurance that abides in the spirit of humanity, and which rises in our hearts from the insight and confidence of him who was most human. In his vision we see that the aims most spiritual, the faith most heroic, move unfalteringly on to the hope that is set, not unrelatedly above us, but attainably before us. It is this hope which intensifies the great task of humanity upon earth, the realization of humanity in the conditions and relations of earth. |