THE DATE OF THE PAROUSIA We have already referred elsewhere (p. 239) to the well-known word in which Jesus declares that 'of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.' It is needless to say that it has been disputed, but it may be worth while to indicate the purely subjective grounds on which this is done. When Jesus was asked about the precise date of the Messianic advent, He declared roundly, says Loisy," that this was the secret of the heavenly Father: all He could guarantee was that the Kingdom of heaven would appear suddenly and unexpectedly; no one would have foreseen it, hardly any one would have given it a thought. This is set down as the declaration of Jesus, and then M. Loisy proceeds: 'In the form which Mark has given it, it seems to suggest an apologetic preoccupation, as though there were a desire to justify the Christ for not having indicated the date of an advent which was clearly being delayed, by alleging that according to Jesus Himself this was a point of which the angels were ignorant, and of which the Messiah might well be ignorant too.' Could arbitrariness be more wantonly arbitrary than this? The form which Mark has given' to the utterance of Jesus is the only form in which we know anything about it; to adequate description of the Messiah, we might say that this passage was on a level with those belonging to our other early source in which He speaks of Himself as 'more than Jonah,' 'more than Solomon,' 'more than the Temple' (see p. 250); but the words in which God addresses the Messiah, and which it is impossible to leave out of account, lift us to a far greater height. One may say this without going as far as Dalman, who (referring to Isaiah 49 5, Jer. 15) thinks it would only be natural that Jesus being the Son,' as distinguished from all servants, should presuppose, not merely selection and predestination, but also a creative act on the part of God, rendering Him what no one, who stands in a merely natural connexion with mankind, can ever by his own efforts become.The Words of Jesus, p 286. Les Évangiles Synoptiques, ii. 438. assume that we know what Jesus meant, apart from this, and on the strength of this assumed knowledge of His meaning to criticise Mark's record of His words, is simply unreal. There is something almost naïve in the assertion that in the circumstances in which Jesus preached the gospel it ought to have been enough (devait suffire) to declare that the date in question was the secret of the Father; there was no need to say more than, No one knows but the Father.' Things do not happen in accordance with our à priori notions of what ought to be adequate in the circumstances; and the real ground on which this saying is rejected is unambiguously given in what follows. 'The use of the term Son, without qualification, to designate the Saviour, does not belong to the language of Jesus nor to that of the primitive evangelic tradition.' This assertion, however, is as unsupported as it is peremptory. If we do not know the language of Jesus and that of the primitive evangelic tradition through Mark and the other document we have examined, we do not know anything about it, and this unqualified use of Son is common to both (see p. 240). To eject it from both is only possible if we reject the historical evidence altogether, and proceed on a dogmatic assumption that Jesus cannot have been conscious of such a relation to God as this use of the term implies. But our whole study of the gospels has brought us into contact with a Person whose consciousness of His relation to God is nothing if not unique; and there is no reason, with the evidence of the two most ancient sources in our hands, to doubt that on occasion He expressed it in this striking way. Nothing, as Schmiedel has insisted, was less likely to be invented by men. It is rather curious that Dalman, who also rejects the evangelist's testimony here, and ultimately on the same grounds as Loisy, thinks that the original saying ran: Of that day or hour not even the angels in heaven know'-the words referring to the Father and the Son being added afterwards.-The Words of Jesus, 194. who worshipped Christ than the statement in this text about the Son. Far from serving any apologetic purpose, it called itself for defence which Christians were often perplexed to give. The circumstance that the Son is used in it, in a sense which did prevail in the consciousness of Christians afterwards, is no evidence that it originated there; it only shows again that the consciousness of Christians is not unsupported by that of the Christ. THE LAST SUPPER Nothing in the gospel, as it was understood by its writer, reveals Jesus more clearly than the Last Supper. But before proceeding to this involved subject, we may refer in passing to the memorable word recorded as spoken by Jesus at the anointing at Bethany: 'She hath done what she could: she hath anointed My body beforehand for the burying. And verily I say unto you, wheresoever the gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, that also which this woman hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her' (Mark 14 f.). We must remember that when these words were spoken Jesus' death was at hand. He Himself knew it, and though probably His disciples generally were far enough from 8 The writer has no doubt whatever that this is a genuine word of Jesus, and just as little doubt that it must be taken absolutely as a disclaimer on the part of Jesus of all knowledge whatsoever as to the time of the advent. To say that one does not know the day or the hour when a great event will happen is an impressive rhetorical way of saying that He does not know the time at all; and we can easily believe that Jesus used it in this sense. It is hardly conceivable that He used it in any other. If it is taken, not absolutely, but as a qualification of the sentence that the decisive event in question will certainly happen in the lifetime of living men, it ceases to be impressive and becomes trivial, not to say grotesque. It is practically incredible that Jesus should have said ‘All this will happen within a generation, but it is not in the power of man or angel, no nor even of the Son, to fix the precise date.' But if Mark 13 32 is not to be taken as a qualification of Mark 13 30, but absolutely and by itself, the probabilities are that in spite of their juxtaposition in the Gospel they originally referred to different things. entering into His mind, there was one person near who had divined that they could not have Him long with them, and whose heart overflowed in this passionate demonstration of affection. It is Jesus who puts the mournful poetic interpretation upon the act of the woman-she hath anointed My body beforehand for the burial; it is Jesus also, moved by a love so generous, who solemnly rewards it with an immortality of renown. The criticism is hardly to be envied which finds anything here to question, yet it has become almost a commonplace of criticism in a certain school that the last words do not come from Jesus, but are the reflection of a Christian preacher. One can understand that a Christian preacher in repeating them might involuntarily change 'the gospel' (as in Mark) into 'this gospel' (as in Matthew)—thinking as he spoke of the message which he was actually delivering-but it is not easy to understand how they originated in preaching. It may be that Jesus was not ordinarily accustomed to speak of the gospel' or of 'the whole world,' but the circumstances were not ordinary, and He must have had means of expressing the ideas (cf. 13 10). Anything which suddenly and deeply moved Him seems to have opened to His mind the vast issues of His work-the devotion of this woman, or the faith of the centurion-which called up the vision of the multitudes who should come from the East and the West, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of God (Matt. 810). But there is a more serious difficulty in the way of ascribing this saying to a Christian preacher, and then supposing that it has been mistakenly transferred to the lips of Jesus. As the word of a Christian preacher it is disagreeable, to say the least-a pompous homiletical extravagance, having no vital relation to the circumstances; in the lips of Jesus and in the historical situation it is living, natural and sublime-a word of the Lord which needs no attes tation, but that it stands where it does, as His word. Who could so reward such an expression of devotion, who could think of so rewarding it, but He who was touched by its passion and challenged to its defence? The common sense, not to say the general heart, of man may safely be appealed to here against the pedantry in which criticism sometimes loses its way. The interest of this word of Jesus for our subject is that it virtually identifies Himperhaps it would not be too much to say that in particular it virtually identifies the story of His death-with the glad tidings to be brought to all the world. The anointing at Bethany is in Mark the prelude to the passion: it is as an actor in the opening scene of the great drama of the redemption that this woman has a perpetual memorial in the Church. This is in keeping with Mark 10 45 and with what we shall presently find in the narrative of the Supper, but we cannot think this agreement unfavourable to its truth. What it does discredit is the idea that in its conception of the gospel the Christian Church entered on lines not only unknown to the mind of Jesus but directly opposed to it. If the Church was conscious of being redeemed through His passion, He was conscious that through His passion He became its Redeemer. The story of the Supper, so far as we are here concerned with it, is given in Mark 14 22 ff. And as they were eating He took bread, and when He had blessed, He brake it and gave to them, and said, Take ye: this is My body. And He took a cup, and when He had given thanks, He gave to them: and they all drank of it. And He said unto them, This is My blood of the covenant, which is shed for many. Verily I say unto you, I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine, until that day when 1 A striking illustration in Loisy's remark ad loc.: En faisant dire à Jésus que cette histoire aura sa place dans l'Evangile, Marc donne à entendre qu'elle n'y a pas toujours été. Really? |