Jesus - His Messiahship

1.3.2 - A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age

The Origin of Christianity

Jesus - His Messiahship

It was in connection with his baptism that Jesus seems to have received for the first time the revelation of his own Messiahship, of his own intimate and peculiar relation to the kingdom for whose coming he was looking. The words that he is reported to have heard spoken from heaven on the occasion: "Thou art my beloved son, in thee I am well pleased," [Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22; Matt. 3:17] imply nothing less than his conviction of his Messiahship, for they combine two familiar prophetic utterances, which were at that time commonly regarded as referring to the Messiah [Psalm 2:7; Isaiah 13:1]; and that he had not previously reached that conviction is rendered probable by the fact that the temptation immediately followed.

That experience can be understood only in its relation to Jesus' Messianic consciousness; and if that consciousness had come to him at an earlier time, the remarkable scene described in such poetic form by Matthew and Luke must have taken place then.

What that temptation, meant, if it was, as it must have been, a real temptation, we can hardly doubt. Our Knowledge of Jesus' character forbids the supposition that he was tempted to use his Messianic calling a power for merely selfish purposes.

And yet through the whole scene runs the conflict of a lower ideal with a higher, the conflict apparently of the common Messianic ideal of his countrymen, who were looking for the bestowal upon Israel of earthly plenty, earthly glory, earthly power, with the higher ideal of man's supreme blessedness which his own religious experience had given him.

That Jesus had shared the common Messianic ideals of his people, the temptation itself seems to show, though we cannot believe that he had seen in improved earthly conditions the only, or even the chief, blessing of the coming kingdom.

But the Messianic call brought him face to face with the question, not whether early prosperity and a life of conscious divine sonship are theoretically compatible, but whether he could, consistently with his own character and experience, devote himself to the fulfillment of the common earthly hopes of his countrymen; whether he could be true to himself and yet be the kind of Messiah they expected.

When he had reached the conviction that he could not be, that there was nothing in him to respond to their demands, that loyalty to God, whose fatherhood had been so clearly revealed to him through the experience of years, forbade the use of his powers for any but a single end, and that the very highest, there may perhaps have pressed upon him the temptation to doubt the reality of his Messianic call. Of such a temptation, most natural under the circumstances, the repeated taunt of the Devil, "If thou be the Son of God," seems to contain at leas a suggestion.

But Jesus prevailed over the tempter, and his victory meant the assured and permanent conviction not only of his own Messiahship, but also of his call to be not an earthly prince and conqueror, but the revealer to all his brethren of the fatherhood of God; the mediator to them of the blessedness of divine sonship which he had himself for so long enjoyed, and which he knew to be man's highest possession. But, of course, in this conviction was involved a changed conception of the nature of the expected Messianic kingdom.

If Jesus, being the Messiah, was called not to secure for Israel earthly plenty and earthly power, but to be the medium for the impartation of purely spiritual gifts, the messianic kingdom was to be a kingdom marked by the possession of spiritual blessings, and in it were to be fully realized God's fatherhood and man's divine sonship.

It is such a kingdom that Jesus proclaimed, according to all our sources; and it must have been such a kingdom that he had in mind at the very beginning, when "after John was delivered up, he came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying the kingdom of God is at hand." [Mark 1: 14,15]

But we must not suppose that in preaching thus Jesus was proclaiming any other that the promised messianic kingdom to which the Jews had so long been looking forward. Our sources make it very clear that he believed himself to be no an unannounced and unheralded messenger of God, but the Messiah of the prophets, and the kingdom of God which he proclaimed, the kingdom foretold by them.

This being the case, Jesus was not concerned, as he must otherwise have been, to turn the thoughts of his contemporaries from the kingdom of their hopes to another kingdom, and to deny the coming of the former in order to clear the way for the latter. He began with the announcement of the approach of that for which they were all looking, and throughout his ministry it was this kingdom, and none other, of which he spoke

It is very significant that Jesus nowhere sets over against the pictures of the kingdom drawn by the apocalyptic writers and current among the people, a new picture, or description, or definition of it. He dwells with constant insistence upon the spirit and the life which characterize the kingdom, and which must characterize all within it, upon the state of heart without which a man cannot enter it; but beyond that he rarely goes.

And so when we seek to determine his conception of it, were left to formulate it for ourselves a best we can, upon the basis chiefly of parables which were employed by him for another purpose, the practical purpose of bringing those who heard him into the right attitude toward God their father. It has been supposed by many that Jesus adopted the phrase "kingdom of God" simply as a convenience, and that he employed it in his preaching only because he could thus best secure the attention of his countrymen and convey to them his divine message. But the supposition is unwarranted. There can be no doubt that he believed profoundly in the kingdom, and that his career was molded to no small degree by that belief.

Much of his teaching can be understood on no other supposition. It was not simply a Gospel that he had to preach, it was the Gospel of the kingdom. And so the conditions of realizing one's divine sonship were conceived by him as conditions of entering the kingdom, and the actual realization of that sonship as life within the kingdom. All the way through the thought of the kingdom dominates.

Used by permission of the publisher.

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