at Cassop]
The great pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer was walking one day in a public park, brooding deeply and anxiously upon the mysteries and pains of human existence. Like not a few philosophers, Schopenhauer was well-known for his carelessness about his personal appearance—his hair was long and wild, his clothing shabby. A park keeper saw this disreputable looking figure wandering aimlessly in the park, and not unnaturally took him for a suspicious character. He approached the shaggy philosopher and demanded, “Who are you?” And Schopenhauer, still half-engaged in his train of thought replied, “I wish to God you could tell me.”
I think that we do not need to be great philosophers to ask the question that was worrying Schopenhauer. Who am I? What is my place in the world? These questions are not difficult in their most obvious senses. It might not be very hard, and it might be very interesting, to compile a Spring Head Who’s Who. But when you’ve got all the necessary facts for that sort of thing, how far have you advanced? Are you really any nearer to answering the question—Who are we? What is the meaning of this queer human life in which you and I are all involved separately and together? I think we are bound to ask these questions, especially at a time like this and I know people are asking them.
World events are happening on a colossal scale, and we want to know how we stand in relationship to them. It is part of the strength of a totalitarian state that it can give to its people a view of history and a part, however small, in that history. All history and life must be bent towards the service and the expansion of the State, and the individual may or must take his share of the labor, and the glory. Fortunately, we cannot be satisfied as easily as that.11 The problem is not capable of such a straightforward solution. There are moral questions that transcend the theories of mere convenience or safety or selfishness. We know however feebly that life is not fulfilled just when we have gotten our own way. There are things outside ourselves for which it is worthwhile living and dying. We know this even when the shabbiness and selfishness of our lives seem to disprove it. Hamlet gives us the unpleasant contrast:
“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” (Hamlet Acts 2, Scene 2)
Try as he might, human beings can never quite make themselves at home in the world. At best there is always an element of strangeness and perplexity, and at worst there is sheer unrelieved tragedy—sorrow, loneliness, and despair. This is true in the picture of human life in the Bible, for here as everywhere the Bible is true to life. Its men and women are real men and women, living the same lives as ourselves, asking the same questions.
It is perhaps too sweeping a statement but it is tempting to say that the key to the Old Testament is Job 28 or Hebrews 11. Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? What is the spot where a person can stand and see life steadily and see it whole? How can he understand himself, and see the purpose of his sinful, suffering life? “Know thyself” was the watchword of the Greek philosopher, but how? And so these people attested that they were seeking a fatherland, were on the march through life, not resting until they should come upon a place of security and understanding.
So we find, as so often, that the Bible is engaged on the same questions as those which trouble us. The same old problem raises its head out of the dust and splendor of the centuries. Who am I? Whence did I come from? What is my part in the world? Why is my life shaped as it is? “I wish to God you could tell me!” Into this situation the Bible offers a familiar fact and a problem.
THE FACT AND PROBLEM OF JESUS CHRIST
Fact and problem are the right words to use. The New Testament is quite sure in the first place that in Jesus Christ something perfect and definite and decisive happened that had not happened before and would not happen again. It is not by any means easy to make out what precisely they thought had taken place; often the more obvious the facts to them, the more obscure their language becomes to us. And problem is the right word too, for the New Testament always presents Christ with a question mark, not with a doubt of its own assertion, but with an appeal for a response. It must end its declaration with the question, as provocative as may be—What do you think about the Christ? What will you do?
And this is a problem, not an easy question answered off hand. Revelation and understanding about Jesus Christ can never be a secular affair, just a plain conclusion which any human mind can draw from given facts. In the New Testament, revelation is the work and gift of God; a person does not attain it by his own clear thinking. In Jesus they are faced with a problem and with the act of God; and what they make of the problem depends on God.
Jesus was a problem to the people of his own day, a problem to his friends who followed him “awed and frightened”; a problem to his enemies who knew that “never a man spoke as he did” and were afraid to lay hands on him. It is when Jesus ceases to be a problem that he ceases to be a power. I am not worried when a person tells me that he cannot fully understand Jesus; if I could fully understand him myself I could no longer believe in Him. It is when you can conveniently fit Jesus into a watertight mental pigeonhole that he is no longer a figure to be reckoned with. Many people are worried about the Church’s orthodox belief in Christ. No one has ever pretended that the belief was easy and obvious. It is no such thing. It was because on the one side and the other that people were over-simplifying their belief and losing the mystery of Jesus in their own hard heads.
SYNTHESIS
And now we find that the New Testament takes these two problems of humankind and of Jesus Christ and lays them side by side, and declares that they solve one another. I don’t want to fall into the error of suggesting that this is anything like the cutting of the knot of the problem: that in some magical way the name of Jesus pierces a way through the maze of life and makes everything plain sailing, so that there is really no longer any need to think and to strive. It does not seem to me that God works that way. He has not made this world a new paradise in which automatically perfect men and women can live. It is still a world of puzzles and battles, yes of despair and defeat, a world which is not right, unless two wrongs can make it so; a world in which it is right for people to go to war as the only means to defend good and holy things.
What then does the New Testament mean when it finds in Jesus the solution to human questionings? When it sees in him a new humanity, so that as in Adam all die, so all in Christ are made alive? It is not a mere claim which no one could prove, that Jesus was the ideally perfect man, and showed by his example the way for all persons to achieve a full realization of their powers and character. “You are from God in Christ Jesus, related to God in Him, because it is he who has given you a new relation to God.” He himself stood in a unique relationship with his Father. Through Him we are called into the presence of God, to know him, and to stand before him in service.
That is what Jesus was always doing, deconstructing the Babel towers humans made for themselves, and establishing a new and living way. Some of the material in our Gospels bears traces of having been collected in groups in one form or another, before these groups were themselves collected into the Gospels. There is one such group of stories early in Mark, which shows Jesus in conflict with some Jews, and again and again the conflict centers around this question of humanity’s relationship to God. There is first the man sick of the palsy who is forgiven. And last there is Levi who is called into service. Each time Jesus is giving a person a new relationship with God which he could not have won for himself in any way; a relationship which takes a person up into the sphere of God’s purpose and sets him to work for a new life of service in following Christ.
And so the point at issue between Jesus and the Pharisees is not merely whether a person may do this or that on the Sabbath, not whether it is or it is not respectable to take meals with tax collectors and open sinners. The question
