3/22/53

Scripture: (Read Luke 17: 12-26)

Because of long discipline in our thinking, we are accustomed to remember that Jesus spoke, and speaks, to individual lives. We readily meditate on the teaching and spending and sacrifice of his life for our individual souls. He seemed to address a special kind of appeal to the disciples whom he called one by one. And many of us have used the Lenten season to deepen our personal faith, through him, in God. But Jesus also spoke to that side of our nature that lives, and works, and plays with other people. His message is pertinent to the community as well as to the individual. His teachings are full of reference to "the Kingdom of God." His followers readily, and naturally found an affinity of interest with each other, out of which brotherhood the church of Christ grew. And so we do well to remember, during this, another Lenten season, that Christ lived and died not alone for the personal well-being and salvation of each of us as persons, but also for the group, or fellowship, or community of mankind.

For almost 2000 years before Christ’s coming, there had been accumulating in the Hebrew thinking a passion for a righteous social order. The Jews had known the bitter experience of slavery. They knew that the innocent suffered with the guilty when there was a sagging of the group morality. They knew that great successes and great failures had demonstrated the rightness and the wrongness of certain theories of life. Certain distinct gains had been made. Certain experiments had been tried, and did not need to be repeated by every generation.

The prophets had formulated the thought and vision of a community based not on nationality or race but on ethical and spiritual qualities of manhood. They were sure that it was fallacy to base hope for any good social order on autocratic self-pleasing. They advocated, convincingly, the healing power of the principles of brotherhood. And the Hebrew people had experienced some of this healing power.

There were communities of compulsion and fear which furnish the dark background of Jesus’ life. To understand some of what Jesus said, one must remember that the Roman Empire dominated everyone in a world community based on its power. World orders have a way of dictating terms to the smaller communities of the world. It is hard to fight against a world order. Those who fell under the Hitlerian power were given little chance for deviation from his will. Those under Fascist control and under Soviet control have suffered likewise.

The people of Jesus’ time groaned under the load of Roman oppression. That Jesus knew well the hatred of the Jew for his Roman oppressor is perfectly clear in his dealing with the touchy question about giving tribute, or tax, to Caesar, a foreign ruler. The hatred of the Hebrew people for the power of Rome was well illustrated in the popular estimate of anyone who would become a tax gatherer for Rome. Such a one, a Publican, had neither social position nor religious privileges. He was outcaste so far as most Jews were concerned. Jesus must have felt, with his countrymen, a hatred of the community of compulsion under which they all lived.

But there was another "community of compulsion," not primarily political in character, but ecclesiastical. For the Judaism of Jesus’ time was decadent. At its best, under the ideal of the prophets, Judaism was not a religion of fear or force. For the prophets taught that people were to live together in brotherly relationship. But, by Jesus’ time, the priestly routine had triumphed. And the Hebrew religion had become brittle, hard, legalistic. The Pharisees, like the Puritans of early American history, had won a hard and noble fight for religious freedom. But their struggle had bred within them an intolerant temper. And a religion that had earlier possessed a wide outlook and universal appeal, had been narrowed until only a Jew, with all the limitations of a Jew, could enjoy its privileges.

Jesus has, therefore, been pictured as a great leader in revolt. He was in rebellion, or defiance, of some of the shackling power of an immoral community. And he taught a profound doctrine of self-respect. But he was interested in no mere revolt, for revolts sometimes merely substitute for an old tyranny a new tyranny, sometimes more deadly than the old. No permanently good society was ever maintained on the basis of revolt.

Jesus looked forward to a society in which men loved justice more than do those who are willing just to rebel against injustice to others. He looked for a society characterized by such moral and spiritual independence as comes through a self-discipline much more severe than that of Scribe and Pharisee --- a society in which men, through vigorous self-criticism, should learn the art of being just and of giving justice to others.

Jesus had drunk deep from the springs of Hebrew idealism in the prophets. He had a vision of a community held together by something stronger than the compulsion of force or fear. He dared to believe that this binding, building, community force could be love. And this was the power of what he so often referred to as the "Kingdom of God." In this radically different view, those who would be leaders would, strangely enough, be ministering servants rather than imperious lords.

"Jesus called them to him and saith unto them, ‘Ye know that they who are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it is not so among you; but whosoever would become great among you, shall be your minister; [not "clergyman" but "servant]; and whosoever would be first among you, shall be the servant of all. For the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give [spend] his life a ransom for many.’" [Mark 10: 42-45].

Jesus offered himself as the center of the new community. He would be the vine, root and stalk, others would be the branches. Some men endeavor, ruthlessly, to bind others to their will be fear. He would bind men by the strongest, genuine tie which society knows -- love and social faith. Society falling apart from suspicions would find faith returning as men came into contact with him. Even in his death he expected to draw all men unto him. The idea is startling in its simplicity. If some men can ruin a whole world, a personality such as Jesus could save it by becoming the organizing center of a new order of mankind.

A striking symbol of the new order was the fellowship supper at which the disciples partook of the bread and the cup which were a symbol of their union with him. Those who were thus voluntarily bound to him were, because of that bond, held together by confidence in each other. There is here a fellowship of those who have been won to faith through their contact with him. He had been worthy of a great trust, and had created faith in them. Faith was beginning to come back into the world when they had faith in him.

It did something transforming and integrating to their community when they gave him their trust and loyalty. They were not his slaves or even his lieutenants, but his friends. "This is my commandment, that ye love one another even as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man that this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do the things which I command you. No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth; but I have called friends; for all things that I heard from my Father I have made known unto you." [John 15: 12-15].

The community Jesus set out to build was a kingdom free from the old compulsion of heredity. It was not easy for some of his disciples to understand that one did not have to be a Jew -- not even ceremonially made into a Jew -- to be a citizen of the new community. In fact the only "foreigner" to this community would be a bad man. Every good person had a right to citizenship. "There came his mother and his brethren; and, standing without, they sent unto him, calling him. And a multitude was sitting about him; and they say unto him, ‘Behold, thy mother and thy brothers without seek for thee.’ And he answereth them, and saith, ‘Who is my mother and my brethren? For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother and sister, and mother." [Matthew 12: 46-50].

Jesus definitely expected that his new community, characterized by social faith, justice, and brotherliness, would supplant the old community based on autocratic compulsion, fear, force, and naturalistic conditions. Communities based on force and fear have always developed, within themselves, the antipathies which cause them to disintegrate. The chain has not yet been forged which can bind together people who hate each other.

Jesus was not an idle dreamer. He was the keenest of social thinkers. He had seen small communities, like the home community, which centered around a good father, grow strong and persist through all difficulties. He had the Hebrew experience back of him -- the best of their experience. If he could build a world community in which people would have the spirit of their good Father who is in Heaven, he could have a community founded on the rocks which all the storms and floods which sweep through human history could not destroy.

Jesus was perfectly confident that God had called him to found such a community because he believed in God. He was as sure of it as he was sure of the growth of seeds in the soil. He set before his hearers a parable saying, "The kingdom of heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field; which indeed is less than all seeds [so small is it!]; but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof. Another parable spake he unto them; the kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven (yeast) which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened." [Matthew 13: 31-33].

Jesus anticipated the ultimate triumph of his community because He believed that it had power to supplant the old. He had heartily and completely rejected the old type of community. He said that it was fit for the Valley of Gehenna, where was dumped the discarded refuse of the city of Jerusalem. In other words it was ready to be scrapped. It could develop only human hate, and human hate was the negation of community life. It was an impossible old order. His order was possible. It gave promise of joy, happiness, comradeship, and community of spirit; where there would be freshness and growth -- a brotherhood which men would never outgrow.

Jesus never minimized the cost of this kingdom -- this new community. It was a good bargain at any price -- a pearl worth trading all one’s resources to procure. He kept constantly warning his hearers against the fallacy of hoping to secure the new community at too low a cost. It called for a discipline of mind and body more comprehensive than that of the Scribe or Pharisee. It called for people of moral independence. The men who were to make possible the new community would have to give justice in thought as well as in deed. The mind must be disciplined as well as the body, the attitude as well as the purpose. If no murder was to be done, murder must be dealt with in the thought stage, long before one might plan the use of any lethal weapon. The new community must be free from falsehood, free from licentiousness, free from revenge or any plotting of revenge. Those who live for the new community must live with the righteousness of God as their chief concern. They will be conscious of true self-respect; they will not give that which is holy to the dogs.

To this vision of a universal community, a kingdom of God, Jesus was true all his life and unto his death at the hands of the two old world orders whose failure he foretold. Jewish and Roman justice broke down in dealing with Jesus, and therein was revealed the need for a higher righteousness than that exemplified in either of the old orders --- a righteousness to which Jesus dedicated his whole life and which awaits only our daring in this, another day.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 22, 1953.