THE PARABLE OF THE GREAT SURPRISE.
IN a remarkable paper which appeared in the current number of the Hibbert Journal the author describes the life-long desire of an imaginary hero to experience conversion. The story is so well told that a sympathetic reader can hardly fail to share in a sense of spiritual hunger and disappointment. At last, at the end of the article, the hero dies, and dies at peace with Heaven. He is not able to point to the hour of his own conversion, but he believes he has found "the essence of Christianity. ' Where do you find the essence of Christianity ? ' asks his inter- locutor. ' In the Parable of the Great Surprise,' he answered. Which do you mean?' I asked. 'All the parables are great surprises in a sense." Yes ; but the one I mean is not merely a surprising parable, it is the parable of a surprise,'" and he quotes the Parable of the Judgment Day in which the righteous demur to the statement that their good deeds were done for Christ, saying, "Lord, when saw we Thee ? "
The notion that the Gospel is full of surprises sets one thinking. We all know it so well. Only now and then it comes to us in the light of a new thing. Sometimes some new experience robs it of its surface familiarity or the irritation caused by some conventional interpretation, and once more opens our minas to receive the eternal surprise of inspiration. The great paradoxes of the Sermon on the Mount startle every man to whose spiritual ears they attain—indeed, they so startled the world in the beginning that even now it is not quite sure if it has heard aright, if Christ could possibly have meant what He said.
A great many of the startling sayings of the Gospel fall very gratefully upon the ears of the twentieth century. Take this very Parable of the Judgment, for instance: Did Christ foresee how hard it would one day become to recog- nize His Person after all these hundred years P In asking such a question we surely create a difficulty for ourselves. The possession of prophetic foresight is beside the point if He knew " what was in man." Inspired sympathy is free of the limitations of time. There before Him in Jerusalem He saw good men who did not know Him : the sort of people who are not drawn to hear a new teacher, simple, practical people full of pity, and others, perhaps— for types do not change, and " Job " is not a new book— who, though their hearts were good, were none the wiser when they bad heard; for whom every new 'theory about spiritual matters was one new thread added to the great entanglement. Et was not in their natures to find rest in the spiritual good news any more than it was in their natures to pass a man who had fallen among thieves. It is an irresistible temptation to all religious teachers to despise such people—to all we mean but Christ. He had compassion on the multitude, who know what to do, but do not know what to think.
Our Lord's saying that He did not come to call the righteous to repentance has always filled the Churches with surprise. Often they seem hardly to admit that He ever said that, or they get out of the difficulty by declaring that as there are no righteous the words have no meaning. " They that are whole need not the Physician," He said. Have we any possible warrant for taking His words in a satirical sense P Yet they are so taken. But in their plain sense they are surprising if we think about them. But if His habitual attitude towards the ordinary righteous man, to the man He described as " whole," can still surprise us, how much more surprising is His occasional attitude towards the morally sick. He took the trouble to make a Pharisee admit that of two debtors the one forgiven the most would feel the most love, and He certainly suggested—or the circumstances suggested —that by debtors He meant breakers of the laws of God. With the Pharisee we also are constrained to admit the proposition. All the same, we can but wonder that He should have pointed out a fact with bearings so little moral. Did he want to set the Pharisee thinking that the way to the heart of the universe is not by logic ? Did He try to blast away the crust of the reward and punish- ment notion wherewith we all surround God and to show that the Deity is not simply as the Pharisee thought, the spirit of all justice ? If these startling sayings could be adequately explained they would lose what the writer in the Hibberl Journal calls their "explosive" force.
There is a very surprising saying, which is generally attributed to Christ, though it is only recorded in the Book of Revelation : " Behold, I stand at the door and knock ; if a man will open unto Me I will come in." If we take the conventional explanation of the saying it is simply untrue. How many men not only open the door, but are always going outside to implore the Divine Visitant to enter. But why need we make the Word of God of no effect with our tradition ? If Christ said the words He said them of the people round Him, not of the group who could hear Him speak, but of the world. He must have meant that, recognized or unrecognized, He came in —if He was wanted. Once more His words imply that He can act in the persons of those who do not recognize by whom they are influenced. We are always told—Christ Himself has told us—that He turned out no man who came to Him. Yet the story of a man whom He sent back to his friends and refused to allow to follow Him is plainly set down in the Gospel "However, he that had been possessed of the Devil prayed Him that he might be with Him." However,
Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, "Go home to thy friends and tell them what great things the Lord bath done for thee." Was He using the man as a missionary ? It is hardly likely. The man only knew Him as a healer. " See thou tell no man " is what He more often said to the subjects of His cures. He did not propose to teach this man the higher things of the Spirit—that seems evident. He thought his Jewish home and his ancestral religion were the best things for him, and that although the man would like to have left them and remained with the Teacher whose Personality had so powerfully affected him for good. Plainly this was not what Christ meant by "turning out." He must have regarded the man's moral nature as already healthy and acceptable. One more instance suggests itself to our minds. It is a very surprising thing that Christ should have said that those who entered the kingdom of Heaven must enter " as a child." What did He mean ? It is very difficult to say. But it is, as a rule, the " ordinary man," not the man of special spiritual insight or theological ability or genius in any form who has this attribute of a child's heart. It is not at all confined to what we call "convinced" Christians either. It is a text upon which the obscurantists have laid hold, not realizing that there is nothing so sophisticated as the obscurantist theory. Children are incorrigible realists.
Again, what a strange saying is the one so endlessly dis- puted that was said to Peter : " On this rock will I build My Church." Now to all outward seeming the Church was built on Paul—on the man of surpassing genius and abnormal emotion, of supreme courage and intellectual daring. Peter, look at him how we will, was a very ordinary person. He touches the ordinary man for that very reason—the man whom Paul's Epistles leave indifferent. Is it possible that we do not see the true outlines of the Church at all—that it is built upon the vast mass of ordinary men, that it is supported upon the shoulders of countless so-called " in- differents " who have unconsciously opened to the knocking of the Spirit and obeyed the vital moral instinct to " turn again " P Is it they against whom Christ said the gates of hell shall not prevail ? Who can say ? All the Churches would deny it. The foundation is sacerdotal, say some. It is theological, say others. The laity, however, will never make unconditional surrender to logic. " Ye take too much upon you, ye sons of Levi."
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