The passage: The Pharisees and Sadducees came to test Jesus, asking Him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered that they could read the sky — red at evening means fair weather, red and lowering in the morning means storms — yet they could not read the signs of the times. He called them hypocrites: a wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, and none will be given it but the sign of the prophet Jonah. Then He left them. Mark records the same event, adding that Jesus sighed deeply and asked why this generation seeks a sign, saying none would be given it. Luke gives the corresponding words, that as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so shall the Son of Man be to this generation.
This matter of signs comes up so often, and the Evangelists stress it so strongly, that it deserves careful thought. The Pharisees clearly believed they were asking for a proof quite unlike anything Jesus had already given them. Healing the sick and casting out devils did not count, in their minds, as adequate proof of His power. It showed He had some power, but was it power from heaven? To settle that, there had to be a visible token in the heavens showing He came from there and drew His power from there. This is the crucial test that reveals what they thought heaven was. However their rabbis divided the first, second, and third heaven, all of these had the same sense-bound character. However they condemned heathen idolatry, they were themselves worshipping a mere God of nature, a cloud-driver, as much as any Greek did. What they wanted was a visible sign in a visible sky; that alone counted with them as a sign from God. Must not He who came preaching the Kingdom of heaven, His Father’s Kingdom, have sighed deeply when the very people chosen from all nations to witness to the true God showed they could no longer recognize any God but a God of the senses? His words say exactly what that sigh meant: a wicked and adulterous generation seeks a sign — a generation wholly given over to the senses and to self, unable to look on heaven except as a shadow cast by the earth, which alone seemed to them real. And the words “no sign shall be given them but the sign of Jonah the prophet” match exactly what we have found in the preaching of the Baptist and of Jesus. Whatever else the sign of Jonah may mean, its first and plainest sense is the one these passages give, the one Matthew and Luke put forward most prominently, and the one that explains Mark’s flat “no sign” — for if the only sign given was Jonah’s, then no sign would be given in the sense the Pharisees wanted. Jonah came preaching repentance to the Ninevites, calling them to turn from their evil ways or see their long-standing city destroyed. That marked him as a prophet from heaven. The people accepted him because he spoke to their consciences and exposed their evil. The scribes and Pharisees would not accept this mark of a prophet. The other kind of sign would come to them in due time: there would be signs in heaven and earth that the city of David was to be left desolate, a horror and a hissing to all peoples. This discourse about signs is thus important for showing the purpose of the three Evangelists, and for showing how far they were from being the crude materialists that the clever men of our day suppose them to have been.
The Leaven of the Sects
The passage: Jesus warned His disciples to take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.
The warning is reported somewhat differently in each Gospel. Matthew names the Pharisees and Sadducees. Mark (chap. ix. ver. 15) names “the leaven of the Pharisees and of the leaven of Herod.” Luke (chap. xii. ver. 1) speaks of only one sect: “Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.” In Matthew and Mark the warning is tied to the disciples’ having forgotten to bring bread; they imagined He was afraid of poison. In Luke the words belong to a general discourse, and the reason given is that nothing covered will stay hidden, but all will be revealed and known.
The word “leaven” might naturally have suggested to the disciples a suspicion that was not wholly groundless, given what they knew of these sects’ practices and their special malice against Jesus. Yet the use of the word in their own Scriptures, read in light of the Passover, should have shown them—had they entered into their Master’s spirit—that this was not the meaning He most likely intended. He rebukes them directly for not trusting Him to give them the bread they needed, after all the proof of His power they had seen; and He rebukes them by implication for seeing nothing in its inward meaning and everything in its coarse, fleshly sense. In doing so He also makes clearer what mixture the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians all introduced into their teaching, however sharply they differed and opposed one another. The Pharisee’s leaven was especially, as Luke says, hypocrisy. Ordinary bread is leavened, yet leaven is thought to make it less pure—it gives the other elements consistency, but in a sense by destroying their proper qualities. So the Pharisee mixed the earthly with the heavenly until the whole substance was changed. God’s Law and Covenant were meant to separate a man from his evil nature and bring him under a new principle; the Pharisee instead fused the Law and Covenant with that evil nature, using its motives and tendencies to hold together the maxims of the Divine Law and make it work. So his whole life, outwardly consistent, became one great practical contradiction. He was an actor. A mask made in imitation of the true, living, divine Form took its place. His inner being died a little more each day, because what should have kept it alive had itself been turned into the instrument of its destruction. To the Pharisee the words applied above all: what is hidden shall be known, what is covered shall be revealed. The secret ground of his heart, the inner man growing ever more unknown to itself, buried under outward practices and hidden by fleshly desires and religious self-deceit, would be brought into the open. The man would be exposed to himself, and by his evil acts to the world; and a clear line would be drawn between the divine bread he had defiled and the leaven he had mixed into it. All this fit the Pharisee most exactly—he was emphatically the hypocrite, since no other sect recognized, and so perverted, divine spiritual principles in the same way or degree. But the Sadducee and the Herodian were each, in his own way, also leavening the divine food given for the nourishment of themselves and all Israel. The one did it with the maxims of merely earthly, prudential morality, the other with the rules of state-expediency, both turning God’s righteousness into a human system useless for guiding men, serving their pride, and favoring dishonesty. They too were hypocrites, though not religious ones like the Pharisee. Each had a reputation to keep up—the Sadducee for wisdom and freedom from vulgar prejudice, the Herodian for political shrewdness and for wanting to preserve Jewish custom and religion alongside submission to the Cæsars. Each tried to blend contradictions, to reconcile the traditions of their fathers with their own narrow, corrupt, grovelling aims. This was the leaven the disciples had to beware of. It belonged to no single sect or opinion, but was sure to debase anyone who did not take pains to shut it out; no notions or practices guarded against it. They could be saved from it only by remembering that they had a Lawgiver and King always with them, who was working to separate the chaff from the wheat—the part of them that wanted truth from the part that clung to earth and nature, the divine seed from the evil seed an enemy had sown in their hearts.
Peter’s Confession
The passage: When Jesus came to the region of Cæsarea Philippi, He asked His disciples what people said He, the Son of Man, was. They answered that some said John the Baptist, some Elias, some Jeremias or one of the prophets. Then He asked what they themselves said He was, and Peter answered, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” All three Evangelists give nearly the same account. In Mark the answer is simply “Thou art the Christ”; in Luke, “Thou art the Christ of God.” All three agree that He then charged His disciples to tell no one that He was the Christ.
No one can doubt how much weight each Evangelist gives this story, and I think there is little disagreement about its main meaning. As all the Gospels indicate — Matthew most clearly — Peter had somehow reached a conviction that the people generally did not share, even those who thought most highly of Jesus. They could believe He was a prophet, or a miraculous figure, or someone long dead returned, or John the Baptist raised with new powers. But the idea of a Son of God, the Christ of God, had not occurred to them; they could not say He was this. And the disciples were told not to make it known — He strictly charged them not to. Why? Was it not the very purpose of John the Baptist, and of the miracles, parables, and life of Jesus, to declare the Christ? Yes — to declare the King who was ruling invisibly over men’s hearts and spirits. So while He was visibly present, He was not to be proclaimed as the Christ; announcing it that way would have lost the whole power and mystery of the words. In acts of healing love, in the Gospel to the poor, in His smallest acts, in His face, the truth came out as truth. Turned into a bare proposition and offered to carnal hearts, it would have been turned outward and made false. The time for that form would come later, when the preacher’s main message would be “Jesus is the Christ.” For now the message was “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” and the disciple was to make the nature of that kingdom felt. To do more would be to set up the kingdom of a Herod or a Cæsar, not of a Christ. One can see how well Matthew’s words fit this — “Flesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in Heaven” — and equally how the rebuke fits, “Get thee behind me, Satan; for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men,” spoken when the same Peter showed he still could not reconcile the King with the sufferer. I will not go into the famous words about the rock, since they belong only to Matthew, nor dwell on the rebuke of Peter, since Luke does not mention it. I say this much because the very next passage, common to all three and linked by them all to the question at Cæsarea Philippi, holds the essence of that rebuke. I hope I have shown, without adding anything new to the usual explanation, that these three Evangelists were possessed by the sense that the Kingdom they spoke of was, in the highest sense, spiritual, and that they never thought of Jesus as anything other than the Son of God.
Taking Up the Cross
The passage: Jesus told His disciples that anyone who would follow Him must deny himself, take up his cross, and come after Him. Whoever tries to save his life will lose it; whoever loses his life for Christ’s sake will find it. What good is it to gain the whole world and lose your own soul? What could a man trade for his soul? For the Son of Man will come in His Father’s glory with His angels, and reward each person according to what he has done. And some standing there would not die before they saw the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom. The three Evangelists agree here more closely than almost anywhere else. The only notable differences are that in Matthew Jesus speaks to His disciples, in Mark He calls the crowd along with His disciples, and in Luke He speaks “to them all” — apparently meaning the disciples; and that Mark and Luke add here the important words, “Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of My words, of him shall the Son of Man be ashamed,” words that had already appeared in a slightly different form in Matthew’s tenth chapter.
No passage is quoted more often than this, as though it were a stand-alone maxim or proverb; but I think its meaning can hardly be grasped if we forget where it stands in all the Gospels — between Peter’s confession and the Transfiguration. It is striking how each Gospel brings in the title Son of Man right after the declaration, “Thou art the Son of God.” This shows, more plainly than any words could, the very nature of our Lord’s own self-denial, and so points to what He asks of His followers. He accepts His Apostle’s confession as true and rejoices in it; yet at that very moment He shows that the glory of the Son of God consists in giving up all self-subsisting greatness, in choosing to have nothing of His own, in sharing man’s sufferings and death. How this fits with the story of the Temptation, and how it bears on the Baptism, will, I think, commend itself to everyone’s conscience. But the point I chiefly want to press is the difference between the morality of the passage seen this way and the morality of it taken as an independent maxim that tells Christ’s disciples to look after their souls and count nothing so precious as themselves. No one who reveres Him can deny that obeying His words in their fullest sense saves the soul, and forgetting them loses it. But we must not overlook His actual language in order to reach that result faster by a notion of our own. This very passage says that whoever saves his soul shall lose it. I will not settle how we ought to render ψυχή; but I do say that however we read it in one part of the passage, we must read it the same way in another. We cannot make it animal life where He speaks of losing it, and something wholly different, even opposite, where He speaks of saving it. In some sense He tells us that everything belonging to us — animal life, intellectual life, spiritual life, our very selves — must be given up and lost if we would have it saved, and if we would be His disciples. To use this passage as a ground for constantly urging men simply to seek the safety of their souls involves a dangerous contradiction, and risks setting aside both the letter and the spirit of the command. But if the whole context is kept in view — if Christ, the King of men and the Son of God, is truly seen as the great self-denier, not because these glories were not His but because they were, and because He could only assert and display them by glorifying His Father and giving up Himself — then the self-denial of His disciples is seen to consist likewise in giving up everything that is individually theirs, owning it as wholly their Lord’s, realized, possessed, and enjoyed only in Him.
The Transfiguration
The passage: Six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a high mountain by themselves, and was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun and His clothes became as white as light. Moses and Elijah appeared, talking with Him. Peter said, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, let me build three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah.” While he spoke, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear Him.” The disciples fell on their faces in fear, but Jesus touched them and said, “Arise, do not be afraid.” When they looked up they saw only Jesus.
However hard commentators have worked to fit the Gospels into schemes of passovers and journeys to and from Galilee, they have not been able to miss that this event, supernatural as it is, is one of the great landmarks in the three Evangelists—one all of them felt bound to record, and which they saw not as standing apart from the history but as explaining both what comes before and what follows. No wonder the follower of Strauss seizes on such an event as proof that myth is mixed with ordinary earthly narrative. On his starting assumption it must simply be discarded as having nothing to do with the life of Jesus of Nazareth—only one of those grand inventions by which the human spirit has expressed its sense of its own dignity and deified itself. But anyone who has followed my inquiry so far will ask whether every narrative we have looked at does not rest on the same principle as this one, and must stand or fall with it. And anyone who studies the narrative itself, without leaning toward either Strauss’s scheme or mine, will ask whether the human spirit ever found so strange a way of expressing its reverence, for itself or for a hero, as what appears here. There is no pomp of words in any of the Gospels, no attempt to startle the reader by the writer’s own excitement; the language is orderly, calm, plain to the point of bareness—yet it is such a description as the greatest painters have felt held an awe they scarcely dared to render. The vision is preceded by words of humiliation and nothingness and followed by words and acts of the same kind; in its outward form it is fleeting, almost momentary, leaving behind only the words heard at the Baptism, “This is my beloved Son,” and those other words showing that His Word, which spoke to the inward heart, was mightier and more divine than the face shining like the sun or the garments shining like light—indeed, that it was the invisible, inward glory that produced the change in the bodily form which the eye could hardly bear. If this passage were one of the exaggerated departures from the ordinary story that Strauss supposes, it is strange that the crude, blundering Galileans, the earthly, sense-bound Hebrew, managed to keep so entirely to the style of ordinary speech and to avoid all inflation; stranger still that the writer seems afraid to linger on this outward manifestation, and eager to show that the greatness of the Son of God rested on higher proofs than these. But if we grant that the purpose of all these narratives is to set forth the Son of God—declared throughout as possessing a power that begins in the innermost region and is meant to spread through to the most outward and sensible, renewing the human form and at last the whole earth with the heavenly life poured into it—then to omit a passage like this would be a mark of weakness and incompleteness; the heart would look for something it did not find, and the Gospels would not truly be Gospels of the Kingdom of God.
The Epileptic Boy
The passage: A man knelt before Jesus, begging mercy for his son, who was lunatic and badly afflicted, often falling into fire or water. The man had brought the boy to the disciples, but they could not cure him. Jesus said, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring him here to me.” He rebuked the devil, it left the boy, and the child was cured from that hour.
Raphael’s fine instinct saw at once that this event had to be joined with the very different scene we have just discussed. He felt that both the unity of place and the unity of time had to be given up for the sake of a deeper and more mysterious unity that all three Evangelists had seen — the unity that made them set the earthly crowd and the faithless disciples at the foot of the mountain as part of the same picture with the still and awful scene at its top. If the painter broke the formal rules of his art, he did so, I think, in obedience to a higher principle of art — not to make a glaring contrast, but to give reality to our sense of the Transfiguration and to connect it with ourselves. This was his daring experiment. All rules of art rest, I suppose, on some ground deeper than themselves, which they point to but cannot reach. And the theological truth embodied in this meeting of opposites lies at the very heart of Christianity: a truth words cannot express, seen fully only in the life of Christ, which we can grasp even faintly only when we acknowledge that the one who suffers alongside man and delivers man is, first and in His inmost being, the well-beloved Son of God. This illustration of the principle I am pressing is too remarkable to leave out. But since I have already spoken of our Lord’s miracles in general, I have no reason to dwell on the details of this one, striking as its circumstances are.
Prophecy of the Passion
The passage: While they were staying in Galilee, Jesus told them that the Son of Man would be handed over to men, who would kill Him, and that on the third day He would rise again. And they were very sorrowful.
Connected with this narrative is another of Christ’s prophecies of His death and resurrection, kept by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and apparently placed by all of them at the same time. The words of all three evangelists — St. Mark and St. Luke even more than St. Matthew — leave no doubt that they saw the Transfiguration as the appointed prelude, not to a single discourse, but to a whole series of discourses on this subject; that from this point on it became the main theme of our Lord’s teaching among His own disciples; and that this prepared them for His final entrance into Jerusalem. Anyone who compares the brief passages about this period will, I think, agree that even for the chronology of the Gospels they are the most important we can find. I do not claim to shed any light on that chronology, but I am convinced the light must come from where commentators have looked for it least — from the parts of the narrative that are most plainly supernatural and heavenly.
The Greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven
The passage: The disciples came to Jesus and asked who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. He called a little child, set him among them, and said that unless they turned and became like little children they would not enter the Kingdom; whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest, and whoever receives one such child in his name receives him.
The same conversation appears in Mark, at the ninth chapter, verse thirty-three, where the occasion is put a little differently: in the house Jesus asked what they had been disputing on the road, and they were silent, because they had argued which of them should be greatest. Luke, in the ninth chapter, verse forty-six, follows Mark with a slight change: a reasoning arose among them about who should be greatest, and Jesus, perceiving the thought of their hearts, took a child. In Matthew the discourse begins from the child’s face and winds on for some time; in Mark and Luke it is soon broken off by John’s words, that they had seen someone casting out devils in Jesus’ name and had forbidden him. References both to the disciples’ dispute and to the subject itself occur often in the Evangelists—one very memorable instance in Luke’s account of the Paschal Supper. But the face of the child shows that these three narratives refer to the same conversation, even where details of time and place do not agree.
John, our Lord, and the disciples he sent out had all proclaimed that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Anyone would expect such an announcement to work powerfully on those who heard it, and still more on those who had spoken it: the Kingdom has been at hand a long while—is it not now actually coming? The Transfiguration, preceded by the words that some standing there would not taste death till they saw the Kingdom of God coming with power, must have greatly heightened the expectation of its speedy appearance, and the warnings about their Master’s rejection and death, which the Apostles could not understand, would hardly quiet it. So everyone has seen in the Gospels signs of a growing impatience in the disciples to know when the promise would be fulfilled and what their own places would be when the new reign began. And nearly everyone has seen that our Lord’s discourses, especially once he set his face toward Jerusalem, were aimed at just this feeling. But the point most worth noting is that he never once changes the language he had used before. He never suggests that it is not a Kingdom in the strict ordinary sense that he has come to set up. He only frees his Apostles from certain common but perfectly natural notions about a kingdom, which they shared with most of their countrymen—Pharisees as much as Publicans—and with most people in every age and land. They tied to the idea of a kingdom the triumph of the few over the many, rivalry among those few, and the dominance of one. These have indeed always been the accidents of earthly kingdoms, but they were its destructive accidents. No kingdom ever lasted by the ambition of the few, the weakness of the many, the rivalry of the great, or the eventual tyranny of the shrewd or lucky chief. It lasted by its power to resist these forces, which were always working to overthrow it, by the higher impulses stirring even in selfish citizens and leading them to seek its good at the cost of their own. If the rule of a single tyrant was felt to be better than the anarchy leading to it, that is because the tyrant was less selfish than the crowd, did more work for the whole, was more its servant. So the law that the greatest of all is the servant of all had really been the law of all society, implied in its very existence; all wrong came from breaking it. The eagerness to break it, to treat it as the principle of human fellowship, was precisely the lie of the evil nature and the evil spirit, the thing that all tyranny and falsehood lived upon, and the thing the Son of God must come to cast out. So when he took a child and set him among his disciples, he did not say he was founding a kingdom to be called the kingdom of Jesus, or the Christian kingdom, which could set itself up and boast that it was unlike all kingdoms and came to overthrow them. He said, in keeping with all he had said before, that he came to reveal the kingdom lying beneath all other kingdoms and implied in the existence of all; that the true King, who is the true servant of all, had appeared to show what he was and what his government meant, and to make some of those who rule under him aware of their own true position—that true rule means subjection, that selfish rivalry is a contradiction—and so ready to feel with him that becoming little children, giving up supremacy, and owning their weakness is the one way to make the government he exercises through them feared, loved, and obeyed.
Divorce
The passage: Anyone who divorces his wife (except for unfaithfulness) and marries another commits adultery; and whoever marries a woman so divorced commits adultery.
This saying is joined in Matthew and Mark to a discussion of marriage; in Luke it comes, strikingly, between the parable of the unjust steward and that of Dives and Lazarus. I may look later, when I treat the differences among the Evangelists, at how it relates to those discourses. Here I only note that in all three the Pharisees prompted the remark, and that in all three it bears on the nature and purpose of the Law. In two of them the Pharisees say Moses allowed a man to give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away; and Jesus answers that Moses gave this rule because of the hardness of their hearts, but that from the beginning it was not so. Luke reports it differently: the Law and the Prophets were until John, and since then the kingdom of God is preached and everyone presses into it; it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one small stroke of the law to fail — and then the words about divorce follow.
So this is plainly set out as a striking case that shows the relation between the Law of Moses and the Kingdom of Heaven. The Pharisees, who often charged Jesus with relaxing the Law, here suspected that in this one matter He made it stricter. He does not deny it. He condemns the use of a privilege they had allowed themselves and that Moses had permitted. And He does this in exact agreement with the principle He had laid down about the sabbath, where He was so often accused of laxity. There was no laxity in either case. He asserted the true idea and principle of the sabbath, as expressed in the commandment itself, and insisted that keeping this meaning was essential to keeping the commandment: forget the meaning and the day was not kept, even if no ear of corn was plucked. In the same way He asserted the principle and meaning of marriage, which was assumed in the very law that sanctioned divorce. The permission was granted for their hard hearts — a measure for an evil emergency, which the Pharisees, mistaking mere decrees and statutes for laws, had confused with one of the primary and inviolable institutions of human life. People were pressing into the Kingdom of Heaven, hoping to find an easier yoke than the letter-worshippers had laid on them. They would find it easier, because it was the yoke the human heart and spirit were made to wear — a yoke that is the pledge of freedom, not of servitude. They would not find it easier if they were looking for mere licenses and exemptions. It would not cause one small stroke of the Law to fail. It brought to light, re-established, and set on its deepest foundation all that belonged to the true order of humanity. The right actions that laws, in their weakness, could not compel would come forth from the life of the Lawgiver; and the irregularities the Law was forced to tolerate He would undermine.
Blessing the Little Children
The passage: People brought little children to Jesus so that He might lay His hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked them, but Jesus said to let the children come to Him and not to hinder them, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these. He laid His hands on them and went away.
There is a sentimental interest that has gathered around this record, and I would be sorry to see it stripped away, though I wish it rested on something more solid. People think all the Evangelists felt bound to include it because it was such a proof of the human sympathy and tenderness of Jesus. And so it was; the higher our idea of Him, the more precious every such token of His real humanity becomes. But we have no right to read into these writers a purpose other than their own words state. They tell us He said, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” It is because He said this that the incident deserves a place in the record of the life of the Son of God on earth. Blessing little children was part of the revelation of the Kingdom of Heaven. That Kingdom would consist of such — not of men putting on the airs of children, pretending to become children by giving up the intellectual powers of men, pretending to be simple and so being, at the deepest level, artificial: without a child’s frankness, openness, or trust, full of craft and subtlety because they will not and dare not be manly. Not such, but real little children, ready to receive, opening every avenue of the spirit to receive, full of wonder, aware of their own ignorance, craving knowledge and light, believing that all treasures are meant for them — the treasures of earth and heaven, even the infinite wisdom and love of God Himself. As has often been said, the man of the deepest science is, and must be, a little child: he must stop seeing himself reflected in the things around him and be content to see everything as it reveals itself by its own light, not as measured and colored by his. Of such, then, must the Kingdom of Heaven be — only those who can take everything as a gift, who think of the object rather than their own seeing or believing, of Him who works in them rather than their own acts, can be true brethren and fellow-citizens of Him who did not glorify Himself, but His Father who sent Him.
The Temptations of the Rich Man
The passage: A man came to Jesus asking what good thing he must do to have eternal life. Jesus asked why he called Him good, since only God is good, and told him that to enter life he must keep the commandments. Asked which, Jesus named the commands against murder, adultery, theft, and false witness, and to honor parents and love one’s neighbor. The young man said he had kept all these from his youth and asked what he still lacked. Jesus told him that to be perfect he should sell what he had, give to the poor, and follow Him, and he would have treasure in heaven. Hearing this, the man went away sorrowful, for he was rich. Jesus then told His disciples that a rich man can hardly enter the kingdom of heaven — easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. The amazed disciples asked who then could be saved, and Jesus said that what is impossible for man is possible for God.
The three Evangelists agree closely in reporting this meeting and what followed. Readers have always felt it holds an important place in the Gospel history. Much has been said about it, but its meaning is not exhausted; it still repays examination in its context and its details.
Most people must have noticed the link between the way the young man framed his question and the weakness Jesus exposed in him. “What good thing shall I do, that I may inherit eternal life?” was exactly the thought of a man used to measuring everything by market standards, who naturally used market language even about life and the kingdom of heaven. Jesus’ reply, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but One,” was aimed at this state of mind. He seized on a phrase the man used only conventionally to set before him what he really needed, something no market standard could measure: God alone is good; to know Him is the life you seek. But how is that life obtained? Here came another humbling lesson: you already have the commandments, given for this very end. They point out the things that keep you from knowing God, the acts and tendencies that put you at a distance from Him. Keep them, hold them fast, shape yourself by them, and you will be on the way to knowing their Giver, the true Good, the true Life. But the man had kept them all from his youth. Was that a false boast? We are not told so; everything points the other way. He had kept them, but not with a view to the end Jesus set before him. He had kept them habitually, by instinct; and as he grew more purposeful, he kept them hoping for a reward. He thought obeying them would buy him blessings in a future life, or rescue him from its punishments — yet he felt more was needed for security. He never put it plainly to himself that he was bargaining with God; his gentle, gracious mind would have recoiled from such words. That was his misfortune: he did not see his own case clearly. He lived in a dim twilight, unaware of his own feelings, ignorant how entirely his idea of heaven was shaped by his earthly circumstances. So he was willing to give something over and above keeping the commandments, to make his claim to that dreamed-of happiness — and his escape from the terrors his conscience spoke of — absolutely certain. Jesus took him at his word: you will give up much to gain heaven; then sell all you have, give to the poor, and follow me. You feel something hinders you from being all you ought and wish to be — you are right; there is such a hindrance, something that twists all your thoughts about right and good and gives them a false object. Give up the thing you love better than God, and you will know what He is; you will have treasure in heaven. Here was the test. He had never known what his heaven was; now he found out. The life he sought was earthly life, though he called it eternal — by “eternal” he meant the endless prolonging of the good he had here. The Evangelists do not tell us the outcome. But they give one cheering hint on which we may build likely guesses: he went away sad. He had come to know himself as never before, and to feel a discontent with himself he had never felt. Good may have come of that sadness. His past keeping of the commandments, and the gracious qualities that St. Mark says Jesus “beheld and loved,” may not have been wasted. If he could not smash his own idol, God may have smashed it for him; or he may later have become one of those who called nothing their own and laid all their goods at the Apostles’ feet. Of him we know nothing more. This fragment is recorded because Jesus grounded on it the saying, “How hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of God.” Why was it so hard? The Apostles were astonished, for who then could be saved? The rich man had time to give to God’s service and money to help the poor. If he could not fulfil the duties and earn the prizes of the Divine Kingdom, who could? Their thoughts were perfectly natural — if the Kingdom of Heaven were not something wholly different from what the young ruler, and the Apostles at that time, supposed. But if it was the kingdom John had proclaimed, and that Jesus had shown in all His parables and miracles — a kingdom at hand, throned in the heart and spirit of every person, the reign of the Son of God over creatures made in His image — then it was certain that everything driving them to seek treasures in the outer world, rather than in Him, was a hindrance to acknowledging His rule, a hindrance man cannot overcome, though God can. And if the Kingdom is a universal one, open to people of every rank, then plainly the outward possessions that made one man think himself above another, and unwilling to stand among his brethren, were nearly insurmountable barriers. Unless the rich man could become poor in the most inward and essential sense, he could no more shrink to the size that fits through the narrow gate than a camel could pass through a needle’s eye.