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.

JESUS AND JOHN the Baptist

(Matt. 11 2-19, 21 23-32, Luke 7 18-35)

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 20 1 ff.), and according to the fourth gospel, 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 1010). 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 come. It is fortunate that the record of this has been preserved for the most part in the common source of Matthew and Luke (Matt. II 2-19, Luke 718-35), and to this we shall confine ourselves here.

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 of wonderful works wrought by Jesus. For the evangelists, these works identified Jesus as the promised Messiah: Matthew calls them expressly (ch. II) '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

break down into despair that is heard in John's question. And that this is so is confirmed by the significant words with which the direct answer of Jesus closes: Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me. This answer undoubtedly has in it a note of warning. But a note of warning is only appropriate on the evangelic, not on the so-called critical, view of the situation. Jesus would not snub nascent faith by unprovoked severity, but it was necessary for Him to warn even one whose services to God had been so distinguished as John's against stumbling at the divine as it was represented by Himself. The gospels do not speak of any one as being offended in Jesus unless He has first felt His attraction. It is people who are conscious of something in Jesus which appeals to them, and who go with Him a certain length, but then encounter something in Him which they cannot get over, who are represented as 'offended.' The warning involved in the beatitude is appropriate only to a person thus affected or in danger of being thus affected to Jesus; in other words, it is appropriate to John as a person who had once had hopes of Jesus which his own unfortunate experiences, in spite of all he heard, were making it difficult for him to sustain. It is gratuitous, therefore, to say that the narrative invalidates that of the baptism, and on any theory whatever of the spiritual history of John it throws a welcome light on Jesus' mind about Himself.

The following points in it call for special notice. First, there is the reference of Jesus to His works. 'Go and tell John the things ye see and hear: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have the gospel preached to them.' The evangelists, no one doubts, understood this literally, but it is another critical tradition that it must be taken figuratively. Perhaps it

13 f.

should be taken both ways, but it is to be taken literally at least. In Matt. 11 21-23, which with its parallel in Luke IO goes back to the source we are at present depending on, Jesus speaks twice of his dováμses or mighty works, and it is impossible to question that these are what we usually speak of as His miracles. Jesus appealed to His wonderful works, crowned as they were by the preaching of glad tidings to the poor, to identify Him as the Coming One. They were not, perhaps, what John expected, whose imagination was filled with the axe and the fan; but they were the true insignia of the Messiah. It is with the sense of their worth that Jesus adds, And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me. This sentence may be easily passed by, but there is not a word in the gospel which reveals more clearly the solitary place of Jesus. It stands on the same plane with those wonderful utterances already considered in which He speaks of confessing and denying Him before men, of hating father and mother, son and daughter for His sake. Unemphatic as it may appear, it makes the blessedness of men depend upon a right relation to Himself; happy, with the rare and high happiness on which God congratulates man, is he who is not at fault about Jesus, but takes Him for all that in His own consciousness He is. That Jesus in this informal utterance claims to be the Christ is unquestionable; or if 'claims' is an aggressive word, we can only correct it by saying that He speaks as the Christ. That is the character which He bears in His own mind, and in the consciousness of which He declares Himself. He is & épуóμsvos; and He is there, the bearer of God's redeeming love, the Person through whom the purpose of God is to be achieved and His promises fulfilled. We do not need to raise any such technical question as, What precisely is meant by calling Jesus the Christ? It is

not by studying Messianic dogmatic that we learn to understand the gospels, it is in the words and deeds of Jesus that we find the material for filling with their proper meaning this and all other titles which are applied to Him. But taking this simple sentence in its simplicity we do not hesitate to say of it, as of Matt. IO 2, that there is nothing in the fourth gospel which transcends it. The attitude which it so calmly and sovereignly assumes to men, the attitude which it as calmly and sovereignly demands from men-even from men so great as John the Baptist-is precisely the attitude of Christians to their Lord in the most 'Christian' parts of the New Testament. It is not they who gratuitously, and under mistaken ideas of what He is, put Him into a place which no human being ought to give to another; but He Himself from the very beginning spontaneously assumes this place as His. The Christian faith in Christ, which the New Testament exhibits throughout, would be justified by this one word even if it stood alone. But it does not stand alone even in this passage. The word of warning spoken by Jesus might have seemed to those who heard it to reflect upon the character of the Baptist, but the moment the messengers are gone Jesus breaks into a striking panegyric upon John.' He is not a reed shaken with the wind-a weak and inconstant nature. He is not clothed in soft raiment, with a silken tunic under his camel's hair-a man making his own privately out of a pretended divine mission. He is a prophet, yes, and far more than a prophet. The prophets had their place in the carrying out of God's gracious purpose towards men, but this man's place excelled theirs. Both Matthew and Luke, and no doubt therefore their source, explain this by applying to John the pro

It may be that all that is here reported does not belong to the present or to any one occasion, but this is immaterial.