Jesus the Realist: “I Am … the Truth”

“Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock” (Matt. 7:24, 25).

Jesus’ teaching, as set forth in the Gospels of the New Testament, is thought by many people to have little or no direct relation to the hard, stern world in which we live. To be sure, they feel, what Jesus said would be fine if human nature were other and better than it actually is—if, as W. S. Gilbert put it, “hearts were twice as good as gold, and twenty times as mellow.” But as it is, Jesus’ lofty idealism is too impractical for everyday consumption. George Bernard Shaw once described the Sermon on the Mount as “an unpractical outburst of anarchism and sentimentality.” Sigrid Undest has put the same point in a biting sentence in which she speaks about thinking of Jesus as “a frail and kindly visionary with no knowledge of human nature as it really is, or as an amiable young preacher with a special talent for touching the hearts of Women’s Unions.”

At least two things should be said about this whole viewpoint. For one thing, Jesus would have been painfully surprised—not to say dismayed—to find his teaching dismissed in such a way. Certainly he never considered himself a vague and impractical dreamer, living high above the din and tumult of daily life. Still less did he consider himself an effeminate sentimentalist, more at home at pink teas than in the crowded marketplaces of life. On the contrary, he insisted time and time again that his teaching was meant to be soberly realistic in the highest degree. For example, in the well-known fourteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, he describes himself as not only the Way and the Life but also the Truth; and, at the close of the Sermon on the Mount, he claims that whoever hears his sayings, his teachings, and puts them into practice will be like a man who has built his house upon the rock—i.e., the most solid foundation in the world—whereas anyone not applying those teachings he likens to a man who builds his house on shifting sand, the kind of foundation that readily gives way in a storm. There can be no doubt that Jesus meant his teaching to be realistic and practical.

Second, this way of regarding Jesus’ teaching has done untold harm to his cause, for obviously it keeps men from taking his teaching seriously. Says Bishop F. R. Barry:

We have heard too much about Christian “ideals.” Nothing has done more harm to the cause of Christ than flabby talk about the Dreamer of Galilee. For, in fact, there has never been in history a man so wholly devoid of sentimentality. He was the greatest Realist ever born. Before his public activity began, he faced the lure of religious sentimentality, refusing to dwell in an inner world of dreams unrelated to moral actuality. The siren voice called to him in vain. He would be true to the facts at all costs—even at the cost of the Cross and Passion. It is not the authentic religion of Jesus which rides away from life on a vague idealism [The Relevance of the Church, Nisbet, 1935, p. 185].

Let us take some of the basic teachings of Jesus and see whether, in the light of our experience of life, he was a starry-eyed sentimentalist, with his feet solidly planted in mid-air, or a realist of the most practical sort.

To begin with, it was one of Jesus’ basic principles that man’s fundamental need is that of knowing God, and of entering into a fruitful and satisfying experience of fellowship with him. Jesus was not blind to the fact that in human nature there are other needs that cry out for fulfillment—the need for health, for example, and the need for food. He even worked miracles in order to ensure that such needs would be adequately met. But deeper than any other need, he insisted, was the need for a vital experience of fellowship with God. As St. Augustine put it, in well-remembered words, “thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Jesus insisted on this; and it was primarily in order to satisfy this need that he came to earth—he came to bring man to God by bringing God to man.

Today this basic truth is coming home to many people who have no particular bias in favor of Jesus and his religion. For many men and women are breaking down in various kinds of mental illnesses, and their fundamental problem is that they have no adequate experience of fellowship with God. Their symptoms may be diverse—nervousness, a sense of futility in life, a breakdown in morale, sometimes some physical ailments. But, however skilled and sympathetic the psychiatrists or doctors or counselors to whom they turn, these people never get right with themselves until they get right with God. Some years ago Dr. Carl Jung, one of the world’s foremost authorities on applied psychology, wrote a book with the significant title Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Keagan, 1933). In it he made the following statement:

Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them felt ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them was really healed who did not regain his religious outlook [p. 264].

Dr. Leslie D. Weatherhead of London has had an extensive and successful practice in the art of personal counseling. In his book entitled Psychology in the Service of the Soul (Epworth, 1930), he tells the story of one of his patients:

A lady who heard me lecture on psychotherapy asked me to go to a town fifty miles away to see her gardener.… He had been in her employ for thirty years, and had worked well until the last three years. During that time he had become morose, sulky, brooding. He complained of a pain in the chest, and could not do his work. Several doctors had overhauled him without finding anything wrong.… When I saw him, he was in bed. For a time we got nowhere. He could not speak, save in monosyllables. I intuitively felt that he needed God more than any elaborate treatment. Without asking permission, I prayed with him. Then I got up and earnestly invited him to tell me what was on his mind. Out it all came, higgledy-piggledy, in a torrent of language sometimes choked with tears. It was a pretty ghastly story, and I won’t repeat a fact of it. Then I spoke of God’s forgiveness, of its reality and power. I got him to pray, not asking for but taking God’s forgiveness. Suddenly he said: “The pain in my chest has gone.” I went down and told his employer that he would be better; and, while we were still talking in the hall, he came down dressed in his working clothes, and his face was radiant [p. 11].

In this fundamental matter of mankind’s need of God, Jesus’ teaching is inexorably realistic, and to disobey it brings grave calamities in life.

Consider also Jesus’ way of treating wrongdoers. There are three possible ways of handling wrongdoing. First, there is the way of easy-going indulgence and softness. This method consists in not taking the wrongdoing seriously but rather excusing it and glossing it over, either because it is held not to be serious or because the wrongdoer is not regarded as being very blameworthy. In the state, this method of dealing with wrongdoing leads to anarchy, and in the home it leads to pampering and license. Second, and more common, is the way of retribution and revenge. The idea is that if anyone does wrong, he must be punished, not so much to deter other people from such wrongdoing—though this may enter into the picture somewhat—but rather because it is considered just that punishment be meted out to wrongdoers. It was this attitude that, until fairly recently, prompted the penal legislation of most of Europe and America and made prisons the grim, forbidding places they were and in some places still are.

Within the last two centuries, there has been much thinking and writing of a different kind about the treatment of those who have violated the law. One of the first of these works was Crimes and Punishments (1760) by the Italian Marquis Beccaria. This famous book had many followers. One of the principles laid down by Beccaria and his school is that the correct way to treat wrongdoers is to seek to reform them, to restore them to self-respect, and thus in course of time to enable them to become worthy, respectable, and responsible citizens. In principle, at least, this idea is accepted in all up-to-date penology.

What ought to be realized is that this idea goes back to Jesus Christ. Reclamation and restoration was his way of dealing with wrongdoers. Take, for example, the case of Zacchaeus. He was a publican, that is, a Jew who had sold out to the hated Roman overlords of conquered Palestine. He had become one of their collectors of revenue and as such took more for himself than he was legally entitled to take. Not unnaturally, such a man was cold-shouldered by his fellow Jews. Their attitude was this: “He has gone and sold his soul to the devil; well, let him take the consequences. We will have no dealings with him; we will ostracize him and his kind.” But Jesus did not take this attitude at all. He thought more of the man himself than of his sin. So he sought Zacchaeus out, offered him his friendship, and thus converted and reclaimed him (Luke 19:9).

Again, consider the case of the woman taken in adultery, whose story is told in John 8. The legal Hebrew way to treat such a woman was to stone her to death, and those who brought her before Jesus wanted to inflict that very penalty upon her. Jesus refused to approve of such retribution. Instead, he forgave her.

I Feel Sorta Special

When my first son was hit by a car and killed eight years ago, in his first year of school, I didn’t blame God, but I didn’t rush to ask his help either. I did a lot of wallowing in self-pity and other worthless forms of self-indulgence before I finally turned to God. But when I asked for his help, he blessed me immensely and helped me straighten out my life. He gave me two more sons, and the world looked rosy again. I was on the right track, the glory road, with the Lord Jesus Christ as the main theme in my life every day. How happy I was! Life was rich and full and wonderful.

Then another son lay dead in front of our home, the victim of a pickup truck, because he disobeyed and went into the street without looking. He too was just beginning school. This was far too much to bear, and I could do nothing at all by myself. But I told God about it, and he took my burden and made it lighter. He was there every morning when I got up; when I went to bed at night he tucked me in. I was like a poor Crippled child, and my loving Father looked after me.

Grief is a terrible thing. To lose one you love so much, to have your children precede you in death, is a heavy burden to live with. Yet to refuse to let God use this, too, for good only increases the burden. The heartache is very real, but faith in God can far overshadow that hurt. Many blessings have come out of our Ricky’s death, often to people outside our family. God has opened new doors for me, and I’m wise enough now to leave them open and to go through them.

I really feel “sorta special.” Through my suffering I have been fortunate enough to learn “from whence cometh my help,” and I’ve asked for and received that help time after time. God, my heavenly father, has cradled me in his loving arms and rocked me to sleep on many nights, and you can’t help feeling “sorta special” when God is that close.—INA OLSON, Buena Park, California.

This did not, of course, mean condoning or excusing her sin, but by his forgiveness of her, he restored her to decency and purity and self-respect. This was the way in which he habitually dealt with wrongdoers, and today we are realizing that his way is the way of sanity and realism. Dr. Fosdick once quoted Samuel J. Barrows, an American criminologist, as saying:

We speak of Howard, Livingstone, Beccaria, and others, as great penologists who have profoundly influenced modern life, but the principles enunciated and the methods introduced by Jesus seem to me to stamp him as the greatest penologist of any age. He has needed to wait, however, nearly twenty centuries to find his principles and methods recognized in modern law and penology.

Again, consider the question of how man’s social and corporate relationships are to be ordered—that is, how men and groups and nations are to live together in this world. Here Jesus’ teaching was clear and plain. He said that the whole human race was one family of brothers and sisters, with God as the common Father of all. That being so, the only proper way to act was to treat one another as brothers and sisters in the great human family, adopting toward one another that attitude of intelligent and persistent good will which he called love. Such teaching may have seemed sentimental and unrealistic to the Jews of Jesus’ day to whom it was first given. At any rate, it would seem that one reason why they rejected Jesus was that they believed they were God’s chosen favorites, that his favor did not extend to Gentiles and “lesser breeds without the law.” and that these persons were not to be treated as brothers and sisters.

Not only was Jesus’ teaching rejected and flouted in his day by his contemporaries, but to a large degree it has been similarly violated ever since. That is to say, men have tended to treat members of groups other than their own as strangers and foreigners, not as fellow citizens; as raw material for exploitation and robbery, not for understanding and fellowship and good will. This policy has been largely responsible for the sorry state of race relations in this country, and for that international anarchy which, setting nations against one another, threatens an atomic war in which “all men will be cremated equal.” The bankruptcy of every other way of conducting social and corporate life has shown up the sober, sane realism of Jesus Christ’s way. Even George Bernard Shaw, toward the end of his life, said: “I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world’s misery but the way which would have been found by Christ’s will if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman.”

The fact is that, as the late W. Russell Maltby once said, “life will work only one way, and that is God’s way. God’s way has been revealed fully and finally in Jesus Christ, that inexorable realist from Galilee. The sooner we learn this and take it to heart, the better will life be.”

Norman V. Hope is Archibald Alexander Professor of Church History at Princeton Seminary. He holds the B.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Edinburgh University.

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