His Task.—It is well to try to realize the nature and magni tude of the task which Jesus set Himself as a Teacher, measured as it may be partly by the teaching itself and partly by what He has accomplished at least for a section of mankind. It was a task of almost incalculable difficulty, nothing less than to give to plain, matter-of-fact men a vision of reality which would become for them a permanent factor of experience and an inspiration for ethical development. It was to lift thought, feeling and aspira tion in such men from the level at which they are bounded by the horizon of this present life to the level they attain when that horizon disappears. It was to reveal and commend the possibility of a "life" of a different quality from that which is nourished "by bread alone," a life natural to the family of God, alike in its joy, its ethical character and its permanence. And He had to do this, making use not only of a language already familiar to His people, but of thought-forms with which they were familiar, however in adequately they might body forth His own conceptions. Illustra tions may be found in "the Kingdom of God" and "the Son of Man," regarding both of which He had much to say, though both of them brought up from the past associated ideas which did not necessarily form part of His own conception.
The Kingdom of God.—The ministry of Jesus opened with His arrival in Galilee proclaiming the Gospel, the great and good news of God, that "the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has drawn near," and much of His recorded teaching was devoted to instruction about the Kingdom, its character, its incommensur able value and the conditions of belonging to it. The interpreta tion of the phrase which commends itself to many scholars is "the sovereignty of God." But that is altogether too abstract to do justice to the conception of Jesus. He presents the Kingdom as something which is both sought and given, both entering into and entered by men, as destined to arrive in the future yet act ually within reach of men now, to arrive one day like a flash yet to grow quietly as the seed grows to the full corn in the ear. We can only do justice to a conception so plastic by recognizing it as involving both the rule and the realm of God ; and though it is a mistake to identify the Kingdom with the Church, the Church is the nearest approximation in human life to the ful filment of the idea. The Kingdom consists of persons who enter it and live within it in happy acceptance of the rule of God and in loyal relation with one another. Thus it is a society, divinely constituted and divinely controlled. It is thus one aspect of the highest good and men are urged to seek it before all else, to count no cost too great to pay for securing it. At the same time it is a thing given, given as the highest conceivable gift by a Father to His children. It has a consummation in the future, being nothing less than the world-purpose of God : and yet it is present already. Its distance is measured not by time, but by a man's moral preparedness to receive it ; its blessings can be ex perienced not only "in the coming Age" but "at this present time." It would be only in accordance with the Jewish habit of identify ing the king with his people if we said that the Kingdom had come because He, the King, had come. And it took visible form from the moment when two or three were gathered together in His name, that is, in a common relation to Jesus, as He was known.
The Soul or Higher Life.—Jesus similarly inculcated the incom mensurable value of the human soul, the human personality as capable of acquaintance and contact with the unseen world of spiritual reality. He represented as the greatest conceivable
disaster the loss of that organ or faculty, as the highest con ceivable ambition the saving or preserving of it. Again, no cost was to be reckoned too great for the securing of this, the highest good conceived in its individual character. "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" And the way to save his soul, his true self, was for a man to treat it as a farmer treats his seed, to be ready for sufficient reason to throw it away. "To one who will think concretely of human relations Christ's paradox, 'He that saveth his life shall lose it,' reveals itself as a simple commonplace of experience, expressing the self transcendence of personality" (McMaster).
Sin.—It is from this point of view that we can best approach the teaching of Jesus on the subject of sin. He saw sin as the great danger, and the great injurer of human happiness; it de stroyed or jeopardized the highest good, whether in the present or in the future. In His handling of the subject, however, we note a distinction of great importance. In regard to actions in which the man himself is the chief or primary victim, or dis positions which employ the organs of the body as instruments of evil, Jesus emphasizes not so much their sinfulness as their danger. They destroy or jeopardize a man's opportunity of "life"; they endanger his participation in the highest good. And they are therefore so serious, so alarming that in order to avoid the danger a man would wisely cut off the member which is for him the organ of evil.
Under this head fall most of those actions or dispositions which even now men commonly reckon as "sins." But Jesus gave a wide extension to the field covered by the term as well as a much deeper conception of the consequences of sin at their worst. The stress laid by the Law, especially as interpreted by some of the Pharisees, upon ritual purity and ritual cleansing encouraged the view that what "defiled" a man was contact with certain external things. This rendered him ceremonially "unclean," disqualified for worship and sacrifice. Jesus, on the other hand, while He emphasized the fact that the dispositions which prompted to acts of sin were as culpable in the sight of God as the acts them selves, swept away the whole theory of ritual defilement, and pro claimed that what really "defiled" a man, and disqualified him for worship or fellowship with God, was what "came out of him," the expressions in action of a character centred upon self and averse from God. And in the list which He gave of the things which thus disqualify a man Jesus made very significant additions to what had been branded as forbidden by Moses and by most moralists. He added such things as envy, insatiableness, vitu peration or railing (A.V. "blasphemy"), insolent superiority and moral insensibility. The last of these corresponds to "the site against the Holy Ghost," something for which there can be no forgiveness, the victim of it having rendered himself impervious to the arrival of mercy. The others are all cases of injury done to the happiness of human individuals or of groups. In a word, morality is changed from a system of commandments and pro hibitions whose justification is hid from men, into a system for the protection of the true welfare and happiness of the individual and of the community. If whatever injures these is what is now branded as "sin," it means that God Himself has taken these under His protection.