CHAPTER XXX

THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS AS A PRODUCT OF HIS EXPERIENCE

ALL ethical teachings that are of any value are the product of experience. It would be no difficult task to draft a code of rules whose ethical demands would be most exacting. But the consciences of men are not stirred by such prescriptions. The great teachers have learned the meaning of life in their own moral struggles, and thus have earned the right to speak the words that men will hear. It was out of the life among his fellow townsmen of Nazareth and in the tetrarchy of Galilee that Jesus brought forth the message that has compelled the attention of the world.

1. HIS RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

While distinction may be made for the purpose of analysis between the religious and the social experience of Jesus, it must be remembered that the distinction is not fundamental. In the largest sense social experience includes fellowship with God. In the life of Jesus comradeship with God and with men constituted a fused experience. He went from God to men, and from men to God, without any break in his sense of reality and of duty.

The beautiful story of the boyhood of Jesus preserved by Luke (2. 41-51) indicates a religious experience that had its foundations in the noblest faith of Israel. The son of Mary entered into the heritage of all that prophets and psalmists had bequeathed to their people of the knowledge of God as a reality in human life. The upright and gracious Joseph gave to the young boy such an exhibition of

fatherhood that that great relationship expressed to him naturally the attitude of God toward men. Evidently, the surest element in the experience of Jesus was that of sonship toward God, whom he knew and loved and trusted as his Father.

This must not be identified with the theological idea of the Fatherhood of God. It is possible to hold that doctrine as a doctrine without any very definite realization of its value in life. An experience of God as Father is a very different matter. Jesus felt that he was in God's world, where it was safe to live without anxiety (Matt 6. 25-34). He held converse with the Unseen not as "an infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry," but as a confident son talking with one who heard and whose answer could be understood (Matt 6. 6; 7. 7f.; Mark 1. 35). He had one clear maxim of conduct: to do what would be pleasing to God (John 8. 29). God's concern with the affairs of this world was a very definite and practical concern in the mind of Jesus (Matt 6. 32; Luke 12. 32). He therefore believed that he could actually be a copartner with God in every good work that fell to him to do (John 5. 17).

Jesus found this experience so satisfying, meeting all the needs of his life, that he felt that it was the supreme need of other men. He found his neighbors worried and harassed because they had no strong faith. He found them acting upon impulse, upon petty motives, and evil motives, for self-indulgence, because they had no sense of the divine. plan in human life. Jesus saw that there were people all around him to whom God was not a Father, and knew that they suffered loss in that lack. To share his experience with others was therefore an inevitable outcome of the nature of the experience.

There was a sense in which that experience could not be shared. Jesus had no personal sense of a broken relationship with God. The filial attitude had been so continuous, so uninterrupted, so eminently natural that the experi