Sunday, December 21, 2008
Sermons and Lessons
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Walter Rauschenbusch, professor of church history Rochester Theological Seminary 1902-1918; born Rochester, N. Y., October 4, 1861; graduated with first honors in classical gymnasium, Gutersloh, Germany, 1883; University of Rochester, 1884; graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary, 1886, D.D.; studied abroad 1891,2, 1907,8; ordained to the Baptist ministry, 1886; author of “Christianity and the Social Crisis.”
“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye can not bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth.” - John 16:12-13.
We all have our unspoken thoughts. Some are thoughts so envious, mean, or despairing that we are ashamed to utter them. Some are thoughts so righteous, brave, and far-reaching that we are afraid to express them for fear of social consequences. Jesus had no Bluebeard‘s chamber to lock up, nor was He afraid of the prophet ‘s martyrdom. His silences, like His words, were prompted by love and pedagogic wisdom.
I have many things to say, but ye can not bear them now.” His pupils were not yet out of fractions, and He was not going to burden them with quadratic equations. In regard to the truth, too, His yoke was easy and His burden light.
Some of His thoughts were so sad that they would have bruised His friends with grief. All great minds have a subsoil of profound melancholy. Jesus saw the cross from afar, gaunt and threatening, first as a possibility, finally as a certainty, but it was a long time before He told His friends that His career was not to end in a triumphal march and royal enthronement, but in apparent failure and an outlaw’s death. One of His most pathetic words, through which we catch a glimpse of His continued spiritual sufferings, is this: “When the Son of man comes, shall he find faith on earth? “ But if He foresaw this, He did not tell His friends that after nineteen hundred years only a fraction of humanity would own Him king, and that only a fraction of that fraction would be serious about it.
There were other thoughts so radical and far-reaching that they would have unsettled the foundations of faith for His followers. He did not tell them that the Jewish nation would be superseded and the kingdom given to the Gentiles. He did not tell them outright that the temple and its worship and all the ceremonial ritual of their ancestral religion were to be laid away like the kindergarten material of childhood. There are plain indi¬cations that He knew and that His mind was working more and more consciously in that direction, but He did not force these ideas upon His followers.
But while Jesus had His silences, like every reserved mind and like every wise teacher, He looked forward to the time when the truths withheld would be revealed. “When the Spirit of truth is come, he shall guide you into all the truth.” One of the finest facts about Judaism and about Christianity is that both are unfinished religions. The Old Testament does not claim that the revelation of God is completed; on the contrary, the air of expectancy is through it all: a new prophet like Moses, a greater king than David, a new covenant of the Spirit written in the hearts of men, a fuller outpouring of the Spirit, a perfect reign of God were to come. In the same way in the New Testament every face is turned to the better future. Christianity at the outset was quite as much a religion of hope as a religion of love. But if you consider how prone the great leaders, and especially the great system-makers, are to think they know it all, the more does this spiritual modesty, this unquenchable hopefulness, this sense of the inexhaustible resources of God, seem proof that the Christian religion really was illuminated by the light of God.
We know that the expectation of Jesus came to pass. Nothing is more remarkable about the beginnings of the Church than the capacity for growth inherent in its leaders. This crude human material from Galilee was transformed by an inward power that lifted them beyond themselves and turned fishermen into apostles and initiators of a new spiritual era. They had three propulsive forces upon them: a great aim, a real human brotherhood, and the mysterious Spirit of God within. I believe in the Spirit of God. When He brooded over the waters, He turned chaos into form and beauty, and when He broods over a human soul, the creative force is present which works miracles on human nature. Other men merely rearrange what is already present in human life. The rare men who listen to the inner voice, whose vision is clarified by conscious contact with God, and whose will is hardened to the steel-edge by leaning back on the Eternal - they introduce new forces into the stale world. The individuals and the religious bodies who have trusted to the mystic enlightenment have usually been distrusted and derided by their contemporaries, but somehow the subsequent progress of religion and of morality swings over into the track marked out by these pioneers who followed God and not tradition. They have often anticipated the social evolution of mankind by centuries. There is no teacher like the Spirit.
Jesus said the Spirit “shall take of mine and shall declare it unto you.” Truths which Jesus had foreshadowed, suggestions which He had thrown out, corollaries which He had left unformulated, would stand out and loom up as great compelling truths. The spring only quickens the seeds dropped by autumn. The Spirit came like a shower of rain on the seeds that lay dormant in the tropical dust and they woke to life. Every truth contains new truth for a mind stimulated by outward occasion and inward impulse, just as every leaf of the calla lily is a sheath from which the next leaf grows. Our new psychology has shown that the human memory is a vast storehouse of unassimilated information and impressions. The observations made in our childhood, the chance utterances made by our teachers, which seemed so irrelevant or even foolish when we heard them - there they lie. By and by comes some great change in our life, some great impulse of human love or divine aspiration, and the sleeping seeds of truth awaken and take root. Great masses of truth in the New Testament were practically useless to the Church for centuries, and then the Spirit and the occasion met, and they sprang to life. Paul’s thought about the uselessness of the law and the power of faith to justify was unintelligible for the Middle Ages, but it became vivid and vital when the aroused Church of the Reformation was stripping off the inherited legalism of medieval religion. The social contents of the Bible have been lying unrecognized and the social purpose of Jesus was slighted or denied, till the modern world be¬an to agonize over the social problems and the Spirit summoned our generation imperiously to carry into effect the holy will of Christ. Thus the Spirit unfolds and quickens the historical heritage left by Christ in the individual, in the Church, and in humanity, and the unbearable truths become bearable and dear.
Would it be possible to divine what the unspoken thoughts of Jesus were? Could we work back now into the inner recesses of His mind? If the subsequent teachings of the Spirit have really thus unfolded the germinal truths that lay locked in His mind, it might be possible to trace them back to Him; especially if some passing utterance of His showed that He harbored the thought. The undertaking is venturesome, but even if our exploration ends in” Perhaps,” it will carry some reward.
Almost the first great advance step which the Church took, was the recognition of the universal mission of Christianity. The Jewish disciples set out by assuming as a matter of course that salvation was for the Jews, and that heathen could share in it only by becoming Jews. The book of Acts is a bright account of the triumphal transition from Jerusalem to Rome. But from the letters of Paul we learn the dark background of obstinate orthodoxy and pious intrigue which resisted this process at every step. It took the best fighting strength of one of the world’s great fighters to beat down the national barriers and let Christianity out on its world-wide career. Now, I take it that this was one of the truths germinating in the mind of Jesus and unfolded by the Spirit. So far as I remember He nowhere expressly announced it except in one saying ascribed to the time after His resurrection. But his mind was working in that direction. When He met the Roman centurion and saw his spiritual susceptibility, He at once had a vision of heathen coming from East and West to share in the Messianic table round. He emphasized the fact that the one leper who had moral refinement enough to come back and thank Him was a Samaritan, and when He wanted to hold up a model of brotherly kindness, He picked out an heretical alien and set him in lurid contrast to the religious pillars of His own nation. With a mind so little bound by national prejudices and so swift to recognize human worth in outsiders, there were surely daring and hopeful glances across the wall of partition into the vast fields of humanity outside of His nation.
A second truth into which the Spirit had to lead the Church was the great law of development. The common Jewish expectation was that the kingdom of the Messiah would come in suddenly. It was all fixed up and ready in heaven, and some day they would open their eyes and say: “ Lo, there it is… The early Christians shared this catastrophic hope and all their doctrinal thought, their preaching, their moral endeavor and church discipline centered about the great consummation when the Lord should return. It would have shattered their faith if they had known that nineteen centuries would run on without a break. Jesus on the other hand had comprehended the law of spiritual evolution. His parables discouraged the theory of catastrophe and insisted that growth takes time and will not be hurried. But He had to wrap that disappointing truth into parabolic form or they would have resented and repudiated it. The Spirit has had to lead the Church into this truth, and it has not yet comprehended it fully. In its conception of conversion for the individual, and in its outlook for social regeneration the rank and file of the Church have not yet outgrown the youthful hopes of brilliant suddenness.
A third truth which was familiar to Jesus and veiled to His disciples was the pure spirituality of the new religion. All primitive religions were so embedded in traditional forms that form and essence were indistinguishable for most of the worshipers. To the rabbis and Pharisees Jesus seemed to be undermining religion itself when He neglected the ritual fastings and washings. Jesus nowhere called His disciples out of Judaism. He did not tell them to cease the observance of the old rites. Yet He was emancipated from the old forms Himself. He scarcely mentions the temple, the center of religion. He foretold the time when all questions of holy places would be antiquated. He treated the Sabbath from a totally new point of view. The whole business of clean and unclean food He regarded as irrelevant and without religious basis. Forms of prayer were of great moment to His countrymen; Jesus taught only one prayer and the distinguishing characteristic of that is its utter simplicity and directness. To strip religion of all forms and make it purely a matter of love to God and man was so immense an innovation that we have hardly come in sight of it yet. But wherever the tuition of the Spirit can be discerned in the past, we see humanity veering in that direction so far as the professional exponents of religion will permit, and to those who are following the leading of the Spirit, it is indisputably clear that Jesus is with them in it.
Thus we have tried in three instances to divine the unspoken thoughts of Jesus by working back from the later development of the Church to the inner mind of Jesus. Whether we have been successful or not, it is impossible to escape a sense of the affectionate patience of Jesus in giving them only what they could hear. He was a superb teacher, because He loved superbly. Nor can we escape a feeling of our own dullness and slowness. Singly and collectively we have bickered about trivialities and heroically resisted everything that might by chance make Christians of us. We have all been guilty of keeping back the progress of truth. The progress has been so slow that it takes only a fit of melancholy to make a man doubt if there has been any real progress at all. But against our moral stupidity Christ sets his unwavering determination to have us learn. If not today, then tomorrow. Without haste and without rest the great Teacher is urging us on. Learn we must, for some day we are to see God. But for anyone to whom spiritual education is no longer the unwilling task of a slave, but to whom truth is the glad sunlight of the soul, this saying of Jesus opens an endless vista of truth, an ever expanding horizon, mystery after mystery coming out of the grayness of the dawn and breaking into glory.
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Walter Rauschenbusch, professor of church history Rochester Theological Seminary 1902-1918; born Rochester, N. Y., October 4, 1861; graduated with first honors in classical gymnasium, Gutersloh, Germany, 1883; University of Rochester, 1884; graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary, 1886, D.D.; studied abroad 1891,2, 1907,8; ordained to the Baptist ministry, 1886; author of “Christianity and the Social Crisis.”
THE UNSPOKEN THOUGHTS OF JESUS
“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye can not bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth.” - John 16:12-13.
We all have our unspoken thoughts. Some are thoughts so envious, mean, or despairing that we are ashamed to utter them. Some are thoughts so righteous, brave, and far-reaching that we are afraid to express them for fear of social consequences. Jesus had no Bluebeard‘s chamber to lock up, nor was He afraid of the prophet ‘s martyrdom. His silences, like His words, were prompted by love and pedagogic wisdom.
I have many things to say, but ye can not bear them now.” His pupils were not yet out of fractions, and He was not going to burden them with quadratic equations. In regard to the truth, too, His yoke was easy and His burden light.
Some of His thoughts were so sad that they would have bruised His friends with grief. All great minds have a subsoil of profound melancholy. Jesus saw the cross from afar, gaunt and threatening, first as a possibility, finally as a certainty, but it was a long time before He told His friends that His career was not to end in a triumphal march and royal enthronement, but in apparent failure and an outlaw’s death. One of His most pathetic words, through which we catch a glimpse of His continued spiritual sufferings, is this: “When the Son of man comes, shall he find faith on earth? “ But if He foresaw this, He did not tell His friends that after nineteen hundred years only a fraction of humanity would own Him king, and that only a fraction of that fraction would be serious about it.
There were other thoughts so radical and far-reaching that they would have unsettled the foundations of faith for His followers. He did not tell them that the Jewish nation would be superseded and the kingdom given to the Gentiles. He did not tell them outright that the temple and its worship and all the ceremonial ritual of their ancestral religion were to be laid away like the kindergarten material of childhood. There are plain indi¬cations that He knew and that His mind was working more and more consciously in that direction, but He did not force these ideas upon His followers.
But while Jesus had His silences, like every reserved mind and like every wise teacher, He looked forward to the time when the truths withheld would be revealed. “When the Spirit of truth is come, he shall guide you into all the truth.” One of the finest facts about Judaism and about Christianity is that both are unfinished religions. The Old Testament does not claim that the revelation of God is completed; on the contrary, the air of expectancy is through it all: a new prophet like Moses, a greater king than David, a new covenant of the Spirit written in the hearts of men, a fuller outpouring of the Spirit, a perfect reign of God were to come. In the same way in the New Testament every face is turned to the better future. Christianity at the outset was quite as much a religion of hope as a religion of love. But if you consider how prone the great leaders, and especially the great system-makers, are to think they know it all, the more does this spiritual modesty, this unquenchable hopefulness, this sense of the inexhaustible resources of God, seem proof that the Christian religion really was illuminated by the light of God.
We know that the expectation of Jesus came to pass. Nothing is more remarkable about the beginnings of the Church than the capacity for growth inherent in its leaders. This crude human material from Galilee was transformed by an inward power that lifted them beyond themselves and turned fishermen into apostles and initiators of a new spiritual era. They had three propulsive forces upon them: a great aim, a real human brotherhood, and the mysterious Spirit of God within. I believe in the Spirit of God. When He brooded over the waters, He turned chaos into form and beauty, and when He broods over a human soul, the creative force is present which works miracles on human nature. Other men merely rearrange what is already present in human life. The rare men who listen to the inner voice, whose vision is clarified by conscious contact with God, and whose will is hardened to the steel-edge by leaning back on the Eternal - they introduce new forces into the stale world. The individuals and the religious bodies who have trusted to the mystic enlightenment have usually been distrusted and derided by their contemporaries, but somehow the subsequent progress of religion and of morality swings over into the track marked out by these pioneers who followed God and not tradition. They have often anticipated the social evolution of mankind by centuries. There is no teacher like the Spirit.
Jesus said the Spirit “shall take of mine and shall declare it unto you.” Truths which Jesus had foreshadowed, suggestions which He had thrown out, corollaries which He had left unformulated, would stand out and loom up as great compelling truths. The spring only quickens the seeds dropped by autumn. The Spirit came like a shower of rain on the seeds that lay dormant in the tropical dust and they woke to life. Every truth contains new truth for a mind stimulated by outward occasion and inward impulse, just as every leaf of the calla lily is a sheath from which the next leaf grows. Our new psychology has shown that the human memory is a vast storehouse of unassimilated information and impressions. The observations made in our childhood, the chance utterances made by our teachers, which seemed so irrelevant or even foolish when we heard them - there they lie. By and by comes some great change in our life, some great impulse of human love or divine aspiration, and the sleeping seeds of truth awaken and take root. Great masses of truth in the New Testament were practically useless to the Church for centuries, and then the Spirit and the occasion met, and they sprang to life. Paul’s thought about the uselessness of the law and the power of faith to justify was unintelligible for the Middle Ages, but it became vivid and vital when the aroused Church of the Reformation was stripping off the inherited legalism of medieval religion. The social contents of the Bible have been lying unrecognized and the social purpose of Jesus was slighted or denied, till the modern world be¬an to agonize over the social problems and the Spirit summoned our generation imperiously to carry into effect the holy will of Christ. Thus the Spirit unfolds and quickens the historical heritage left by Christ in the individual, in the Church, and in humanity, and the unbearable truths become bearable and dear.
Would it be possible to divine what the unspoken thoughts of Jesus were? Could we work back now into the inner recesses of His mind? If the subsequent teachings of the Spirit have really thus unfolded the germinal truths that lay locked in His mind, it might be possible to trace them back to Him; especially if some passing utterance of His showed that He harbored the thought. The undertaking is venturesome, but even if our exploration ends in” Perhaps,” it will carry some reward.
Almost the first great advance step which the Church took, was the recognition of the universal mission of Christianity. The Jewish disciples set out by assuming as a matter of course that salvation was for the Jews, and that heathen could share in it only by becoming Jews. The book of Acts is a bright account of the triumphal transition from Jerusalem to Rome. But from the letters of Paul we learn the dark background of obstinate orthodoxy and pious intrigue which resisted this process at every step. It took the best fighting strength of one of the world’s great fighters to beat down the national barriers and let Christianity out on its world-wide career. Now, I take it that this was one of the truths germinating in the mind of Jesus and unfolded by the Spirit. So far as I remember He nowhere expressly announced it except in one saying ascribed to the time after His resurrection. But his mind was working in that direction. When He met the Roman centurion and saw his spiritual susceptibility, He at once had a vision of heathen coming from East and West to share in the Messianic table round. He emphasized the fact that the one leper who had moral refinement enough to come back and thank Him was a Samaritan, and when He wanted to hold up a model of brotherly kindness, He picked out an heretical alien and set him in lurid contrast to the religious pillars of His own nation. With a mind so little bound by national prejudices and so swift to recognize human worth in outsiders, there were surely daring and hopeful glances across the wall of partition into the vast fields of humanity outside of His nation.
A second truth into which the Spirit had to lead the Church was the great law of development. The common Jewish expectation was that the kingdom of the Messiah would come in suddenly. It was all fixed up and ready in heaven, and some day they would open their eyes and say: “ Lo, there it is… The early Christians shared this catastrophic hope and all their doctrinal thought, their preaching, their moral endeavor and church discipline centered about the great consummation when the Lord should return. It would have shattered their faith if they had known that nineteen centuries would run on without a break. Jesus on the other hand had comprehended the law of spiritual evolution. His parables discouraged the theory of catastrophe and insisted that growth takes time and will not be hurried. But He had to wrap that disappointing truth into parabolic form or they would have resented and repudiated it. The Spirit has had to lead the Church into this truth, and it has not yet comprehended it fully. In its conception of conversion for the individual, and in its outlook for social regeneration the rank and file of the Church have not yet outgrown the youthful hopes of brilliant suddenness.
A third truth which was familiar to Jesus and veiled to His disciples was the pure spirituality of the new religion. All primitive religions were so embedded in traditional forms that form and essence were indistinguishable for most of the worshipers. To the rabbis and Pharisees Jesus seemed to be undermining religion itself when He neglected the ritual fastings and washings. Jesus nowhere called His disciples out of Judaism. He did not tell them to cease the observance of the old rites. Yet He was emancipated from the old forms Himself. He scarcely mentions the temple, the center of religion. He foretold the time when all questions of holy places would be antiquated. He treated the Sabbath from a totally new point of view. The whole business of clean and unclean food He regarded as irrelevant and without religious basis. Forms of prayer were of great moment to His countrymen; Jesus taught only one prayer and the distinguishing characteristic of that is its utter simplicity and directness. To strip religion of all forms and make it purely a matter of love to God and man was so immense an innovation that we have hardly come in sight of it yet. But wherever the tuition of the Spirit can be discerned in the past, we see humanity veering in that direction so far as the professional exponents of religion will permit, and to those who are following the leading of the Spirit, it is indisputably clear that Jesus is with them in it.
Thus we have tried in three instances to divine the unspoken thoughts of Jesus by working back from the later development of the Church to the inner mind of Jesus. Whether we have been successful or not, it is impossible to escape a sense of the affectionate patience of Jesus in giving them only what they could hear. He was a superb teacher, because He loved superbly. Nor can we escape a feeling of our own dullness and slowness. Singly and collectively we have bickered about trivialities and heroically resisted everything that might by chance make Christians of us. We have all been guilty of keeping back the progress of truth. The progress has been so slow that it takes only a fit of melancholy to make a man doubt if there has been any real progress at all. But against our moral stupidity Christ sets his unwavering determination to have us learn. If not today, then tomorrow. Without haste and without rest the great Teacher is urging us on. Learn we must, for some day we are to see God. But for anyone to whom spiritual education is no longer the unwilling task of a slave, but to whom truth is the glad sunlight of the soul, this saying of Jesus opens an endless vista of truth, an ever expanding horizon, mystery after mystery coming out of the grayness of the dawn and breaking into glory.
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