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ever is formal in the New Testament, the belief in Jesus as Judge is not. It is a belief which may be clothed here and there in forms which Jewish theology supplied to the imagination, but it rests on personal experiences and on the sense of Jesus' attitude to men. Whatever else happened to men in the presence of Jesus, they were judged. They knew they were. They had experiences which prompted such utterances as Luke 5: Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord; or John 429: Come, see a man that told me all things that ever I did. Such experiences furnished them with irresistible evidence that this wonderful Person might be the Christ; they were not idle deductions from the fact that He was the Christ. It was impossible not to generalise them, and to realise that with everything else that Jesus might be to men, He was also their Judge. He Himself, it may be said, generalised them, or realised in His own mind all that they involved. Not to speak meanwhile of passages in which He tells of the coming of the Son of Man and of the judgment attendant upon it (e.g. Matt. 1627, 25 31-46), we have in the Sermon on the Mount, when every allowance has been made which historical criticism can demand, a revelation of the mind of Jesus and of His attitude to men, which covers all that is meant by calling Him their final Judge. Resting as it does on the oldest of evangelic records, the source which lies behind the first and third gospels, and at an important point very far behind them, this revelation brings us as close to Jesus as we can historically be brought. It is not the witness of apostolic faith to which it introduces us, but the witness of Jesus. to Himself. It is no exaggeration to say that it may be summed up in the solemn words of James (412): One only is the Lawgiver and Judge, and that One He with whom we are confronted here.

THE HEALING OF THE CENTURION'S SERVANT

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(Matt. 85-13, Luke 7 1-10, 13 28-30)

In Luke the Sermon on the Mount is followed immediately by the account of Jesus' return to Capernaum, and the healing there of a centurion's servant. The same incident is recorded in Matt. 85-13, and comparison of Luke 7 with Matt. 7 28, 85, makes it more than probable that the sequence here indicated goes back to the common source. We have this early authority, therefore, for one of the healing miracles, and in spite of the notable variation of the evangelists with regard to the centurion's mode of approaching Jesus, there is an even more notable agreement-it virtually amounts to identity-in their report both of the officers' words and of Jesus' reply. 'Sir, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my boy shall be healed. For I also am a man under authority, having under myself soldiers, and I say to one Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it' (Matt. 88f., Luke 7 ff.). The centurion evidently believed that Jesus had at His disposal spiritual messengers who could execute His commands, just as he himself had soldiers and slaves, and that therefore His personal presence was not essential to the carrying out of His will. We do not need to accept his interpretation of the way in which Jesus exercised His power: the point is that Jesus enthusiastically welcomed and approved his attitude. 'When He heard, He marvelled and said to those who followed, Verily I say unto you, not even in Israel have I found

1 So Harnack, Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 54, who says it follows 'with certainty that great parts of the Sermon stood together in Q and were followed by this narrative.' Allen, Commentary on St. Matthew, p. 79, doubts this because of the remarkable differences between Matthew and Luke.

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such faith.' We see here that Jesus wanted to find faith, and we see also what faith is. It is that attitude of the soul to Jesus which is confident that the saving help of God is present in Him, and that there is no limit to what it can do. It has become a commonplace to point out that whereas in the theological books of the New Testament Jesus Himself is the object of faith, in the synoptic gospels, which are truer to history, this is never the case. The only case in the synoptics in which Jesus speaks of men believing on Himself is Matt. 18" (these little ones who believe on Me), and in the parallel passage in Mark 9 the decisive words 'on Me' are wanting. Faith in the synoptics, it is argued that is, faith as it was understood and required by Jesus—is always faith in God. In this there is both truth and error. God is undoubtedly the only and the ultimate object of faith, but what the synoptic gospels in point of fact present to us on this and many other occasions is (to borrow the language of 1 Peter 121) the spectacle of men who believe in God through Him. Their faith is their assurance that God's saving power is there, in Jesus, for the relief of their needs. Such faith Jesus demands as the condition upon which God's help becomes effective; and the more ardent and unqualified it is the more joyfully is it welcomed. The faith in Christ which is illustrated in the epistles is in essence the same thing. It has no doubt other needs and blessings in view than those which are uppermost in the synoptics, but as an attitude to Jesus it is identical with that which is there called by the same name. It will be more convenient to examine this subject further when we come to look at the self-revelation of Jesus in Mark, for there the narratives of the 'mighty works' bring it to the front: but it seemed worth while to emphasise here, in connexion with a miracle recorded in the oldest evangelic

source, the memorable utterance of Jesus in which He sets the seal of His joyous approbation on that attitude of the soul to Himself as the bearer of God's saving power in which the Christian religion has had its being from the first. There is no inconsistency here between the Christian consciousness of what Jesus is, and Jesus' consciousness of Himself.

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It has already been remarked that the only one of His contemporaries who made a strong impression upon Jesus was John the Baptist. We do not know that they ever met except on the one occasion when Jesus was baptized in Jordan, but the personality, the mission, and the method of John were much in Jesus' mind. He not only thought much, He spoke repeatedly about him. In the last days of His life He recalled John and his ministry to the Jewish authorities (Mark 11 27 f., Matt. 21 23 ff., Luke 201 ff.), and according to the fourth gospei, where John is particularly prominent, He spent some of the last weeks of His life in the scenes of the Baptist's early ministry (John 10 40). On different occasions He expressly compared or contrasted John with Himself, and in doing so revealed with peculiar vividness His sense of what He Himself was, and of the relation in which He stood to the whole work of God, past and to It is fortunate that the record of this has been preserved for the most part in the common source of Matthew and Luke (Matt. 11 2-19, Luke 7 18-35), and to this we shall confine ourselves here.

come.

There is a certain amount of difference in the historical introduction to the words of Jesus, but both evangelists tell of a message sent by the Baptist, and both give his question to Jesus in precisely the same

terms: 'Art Thou the Coming One, or must we look for another?' The message was sent because John had heard in his prison-according to Luke through his own disciples-c wonderful works wrought by Jesus. For the evangelists, these works identified Jesus as the promised Messiah: Matthew calls them expressly (ch. 112) 'the works of the Christ.' John's attitude, however, is doubtful. It has become almost a tradition in a certain school of criticism that what we have here is the dawning in John's mind for the first time of the idea that Jesus might be the Messiah; and he is supposed to send to Jesus that this nascent idea may be confirmed or corrected. The inference, of course, would be that the story of the baptism-unless John were completely excluded from all knowledge of what it involved-is false; nothing happened at that early date to make John look for anything remarkable from Jesus. But it is gratuitous to set aside the gospel tradition on such dubious grounds. John's state of mind is surely not hard to understand, even if the tradition be maintained. What ever his hopes or expectations of Jesus may have been, they were religious hopes, not mathematical certainties; they belonged to faith, and faith may always be tried and shaken. John had had much to shake his faith. The Messiah in whom be believed was one who was pre-eminently the Judge: when He came, it was to punish the wicked, and especially to right the wronged. Could Jesus be the Coming One when a man like John lay in Herod's dungeon for no other reason than that he had been faithful to the right? If Jesus were indeed the Messiah, would it not be the very first demonstration of His Messiahship He gave, that He would come and avenge upon Herod the wrongs of the just and holy man who had prepared His way? It is not the voice of dawning faith, but the appeal of disappointment ready to

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