Now about the midst of the feast Jesus went up into the Temple and taught
Christ as a teacher
Whatever theory men hold respecting Christ’s person and work, all regard Him as an unparalleled teacher.
Four things distinguish Him from all His competitors.
I. HE POPULARIZED RELIGION. The common people heard Him gladly. What audiences He drew I When He began to teach religion had lost its hold on the world. People were wearied of the parodies which went by the name. Christ taught that it was not a doctrine but a life; not a speculation, but a love; not conversion to a sect, but change of heart; and that teaching was at once a revelation and a revolution. What, in despair, the people had come to regard as dreary and repulsive, He made them feel was bright and beautiful, and so popularized religion.
II. HE REVOLUTIONIZED THINKING. It is more important to make men think aright than to teach them what is right. You cannot ensure their believing or obeying your instruction, but if you can start them in conscientious search of what is good, you do them enduring service. Christ did both, but pre-eminently He liberated the intellect and rationalized its operations. There was plenty of colossal thinking before Christ, but it was simply constructive speculation or destructive criticism. And when He came, it was not as another philosopher, to build another stagey system. Men complain that His thinking is defective because fragmentary; but this is its strength. When men asked for His principles He threw in a simple sentence, “You must be born again,” “Love your neighbour,” some terse, pregnant phrase which has become the current mental coin of the leading people of the earth. Any other teacher would have said, “Come into my class-room and take my lectures; the curriculum is seven years.” Christ could settle it in seven minutes.
1. He initiated spontaneous judgment. Instead of sending people to books, He sent them to their own hearts.
2. He introduced liberty of conscience. Whoever heard of men demanding freedom to think and judge for themselves before He came? And yet that freedom has been a ruling maxim of society since. Out of these two changes have grown infinite results, and are quite sufficient to prove that He revolutionized thinking.
III. HE REORGANIZED SOCIETY. The liberty He vindicated involved equality and fraternity. It is fashionable to denounce Socialism, and when it becomes Nihilism or Communism it is a senseless burlesque. He meant that men should serve each other, and not that the lazy should share with the diligent; that as there was a common Fatherhood in God there must be a common brotherhood among men. So He reconstructed society on the basis of mutual respect and reciprocal love. This reconstruction meant
1. That He recruited our hopes. He came to a weary world. Then a few proud, petrified men ruled, and the heart of the crowd was crushed and despairing. The Beatitudes fell on their sad hearts like rain on a drooping flower, and they looked up and felt that a new chance was open to them all. So it is wherever Christ comes now.
2. That He verified our aspirations. Men sighed for another world, but they scarcely knew whether or not to look for it. He came and said, “If it were not so I would have told you; I go to prepare a place for you.”
IV. HE DIGNIFIED PASSION. Passion, whether good or bad, is the greatest power in the world. When He came it was everywhere disordered. He purified and released and transformed it into affection. Up to that time men knew not exactly what to make of the emotions implied by such words as sorrow, pain, suffering. He gave them at once a status and vindicated their place in the economy of God. The tendency previously was to stifle pathos, and sneer at sentiment. He sanctified and employed them for the noblest ends. (W. R. Attwood.)
Characteristics of Christ’s teaching
Wherein did its peculiar power consist? The secret of its influence lies in no peculiar excellence of diction. Jesus was no poet, orator, or philosopher. It is not the charm of poetry that attracts us, not the ingenious application which surprises, not flights of eloquence which carry us away, not bold speculation which evokes our astonishment. No one could speak with more simplicity than Jesus, whether on the Mount, in the parables, or in the high priestly prayer. But this is the very reason of His influence, that He utters the greatest and most sublime truths in the present words, so that, as Pascal says, one might almost think He was Himself unconscious what truths He was propounding, only He expressed them with much clearness, certainty, and conviction, that we see how well He knew what He was saying. We cannot fail to see that the world of eternal truth is His home, and that His thoughts have constant intercourse therewith. He speaks of God and of His relation to Him, of the super- mundane world of spirits, of the future world and the future life of man; of the kingdom of God upon earth, of its nature and history; of the highest moral truths, and of the supreme obligations of man; in short, of all the greatest problems and deepest enigmas of life--as simply and plainly, with such an absence of mental excitement, without expatiating upon His peculiar knowledge, and even without that dwelling upon details so usual with those who have anything new to impart, as though all were quite natural and self-evident. We see that the sublimest truths are His nature. He is not merely a teacher of truth, but is Himself its source. He can say “I am the Truth.” And the feeling with which we listen to His words is, that we are listening to the voice of truth itself. Hence the power which these have at all times exercised over the minds of men. (Prof. Luthardt.)
Though criticised and ridiculed we must go on with our work
Suppose a geometrician should be drawing lines and figures, and there should come in some silly, ignorant fellow, who, seeing him, should laugh at him, would the artist, think you, leave off his employment because of his derision? Surely not; for he knows that he laughs at him out of his ignorance, as not knowing his art and the grounds thereof. (J. Preston.)
And the Jews marvelled, saying, How knoweth this man letters, never having learned.
This testimony of enemies to a fact well known to them strongly confirms what we otherwise must know or must conjecture concerning Christ’s education, or rather the absence in His case of the ordinary ways and means by which other men receive their knowledge. He was neither school-taught, nor self-taught, nor even God-taught (like inspired prophets), in the usual sense of those terms. No doubt He learned from His mother, went to the synagogue, heard and read the Scriptures, studied nature and man, and the Holy Ghost descended upon Him: yet the secret fountain of His knowledge of God and man must be found in His mysterious and unique relation to the Father, and derived from direct intuition into the living fountain of truth in God. He was and continued to be in the bosom of the Father, and explained Him to us as no philosopher or prophet could do. He spent His youth in poverty and manual labour, in the obscurity of a carpenter’s shop; far away from universities, academies, libraries, and literary or polished society; without any help, as far as we know, except that mentioned above. Christ can be ranked neither with the school trained, nor with the self.trained or self-made men; if by the latter we understand, as we must, those who, without the regular aid of living teachers, yet with the same educational means, such as books, the observation of men and things, and the intense application of their mental faculties, attained to vigour of intellect, and wealth of scholarship--like Shakespeare, Boeme, Franklin and others. All the attempts to bring Jesus into contact with Egyptian wisdom, or the Essenic theosophy, or other sources of learning, are without a shadow of proof, and explain nothing after all. He never quotes from books except the Old Testament. He never refers to any of those branches of knowledge which make up human learning and literature. He confined Himself strictly to religion. But from that centre, He shed light over the whole world of man and nature. In this department, unlike other great men, even the prophets and apostles, He was absolutely original and independent. He taught the world as one who had learned nothing from it, and was under no obligation to it. He speaks from divine intuition, as one who not only knows but is the Truth; and with an authority that commands absolute submission or provokes rebellion, but can never be passed by with contempt or indifference. (P. Schaff, D. D.)
The originality of Christ as a teacher
We have a great many men who are original in the sense of being originators, within a certain boundary of educated thought. But the originality of Christ is uneducated. That He draws nothing from the stores of learning can be seen at a glance. Indeed, there is nothing in Him that belongs to His age or country--no one opinion, taste, or prejudice. The attempts that have been made to show that He borrowed His sentiments from the Persians and the Eastern forms of religion, or that He had been intimate with the Essence and borrowed from them, or that He must have been acquainted with the schools and religions of Egypt, deriving His doctrine from them--all attempts of the kind have so palpably failed, as not even to require a deliberate answer. If He is simply a man, as we hear, then He is most certainly a new and singular kind of man, never before heard of, as great a miracle as if He were not a man. Whatever He advances is from Himself. Shakespeare, e.g., probably the most creative and original spirit the world has ever produced, and a self-made man, is yet tinged in all His works with human learning. He is the high-priest, we sometimes hear, of human nature. But Christ, understanding human nature so as to address it more skilfully than he, never draws from its historic treasures. Neither does He teach by human methods. He does not speculate about God like a school professor. He does not build up a frame of evidence from below by some constructive process, such as the philosophers delight in; but He simply speaks of God and spiritual things as one who has come out from Him to tell us what He knows. At the same time He never reveals the infirmity so commonly shown by human teachers. When they veer a little from their point or turn their doctrine off by shades of variation to catch the assent of multitudes, He never conforms to an expectation even of His friends. Again, Christ was of no school or party, and never went to any extreme, words could never turn Him to a one-sided view of anything. This distinguishes Him from every other known teacher. He never pushes Himself to any extremity. He is never a radical, never a conservative. And further, while advancing doctrines so far transcending all the deductions of philosophy, and opening mysteries that defy all human powers of explication, He is yet able to set His teachings in a form of simplicity that accommodates all classes of minds. No one of the great writers of antiquity had even propounded, as yet, a doctrine of virtue which the multitude could understand. But Jesus tells them directly, in a manner level to their understandings, what they must do and be to inherit eternal life, and their inmost convictions answer to His words. (H. Bushnell, D. D.)
The teaching of Christ the marvel of unbelief
The wisdom of Christ’s teaching has proved a hard problem to infidels for 1,800 years. To this day it stands above the efforts of the mightiest and most trained minds. (W. H. Van Doren, D. D.)
And Jesus answered them and said, My doctrine is not Mine, but His that sent Me
The teaching of Christ
I. ITS CONTENTS.
1. Concerning God.
(1) His nature--spirit (John 4:24).
(2) His character--love (John 3:16).
(3) His purpose--salvation (John 3:17).
(4) His requirement--faith (John 6:29).
2. Concerning Himself,
(1) His heavenly origin--from above (John 6:38).
(2) This higher being--the Son of the Father (John 6:17).
(3) His Divine commission--sent by God (John 5:37).
(4) His gracious errand--to give life to the world (John 5:21; John 6:51).
(5) His future glory--to raise the dead (John 5:28).
3. Concerning man
(1) Apart from Him, dead (John 5:24) and perishing (John 3:16).
(2) In Him possessed of eternal life.
4. Concerning salvation
(1) Its substance--eternal life (John 5:24).
(2) Its condition--hearing His word (John 5:24), believing in John 5:24), coming to Him (John 5:40).
II. ITS DIVINITY. Three sources possible for Christ’s teaching.
1. Others. He might have acquired it by education. But this Christ’s contemporaries negatived. He had never studied at a rabbinical school (John 5:15).
2. Himself. He might have evolved it from His own religious consciousness. But this Christ here repudiates.
3. God. This He expressly claimed, and that not merely as prophets had received Divine communications, but in a way that was unique (John 5:19-20; John 8:28; John 12:49), as one who had been in eternity with God (1:1, 18; 3:11).
III. ITS CREDENTIALS.
1. Its self-verifying character: such as would produce in the mind of every sincere person who desired to do the Divine will a clear conviction of its divinity (John 5:17).
2. Its God-glorifying aim. Had it been human it would have followed the law of all such developments; its Publisher would have had a tendency to glorify Himself in its propagation. The entire absence of this in Christ’s case was a phenomenon to which He invited observation. The complete.absorption of the messenger and the message in the Divine glory was proof that both belonged to a different than human category.
3. Its sinless bearer. This follows from the preceding. A messenger whose devotion to God was perfect as Christ’s was could not be other than sinless. But if the messenger were sinless there could be no unveracity in His message or in what He said concerning it. Lessons:
1. The marvellous in Christianity.
2. The insight of obedience.
3. The danger of high intellectual endowments.
4. The connection between truth and righteousness.
5. The sinlessness of Jesus an argument for His divinity. (T. Whitelaw, D. D.)