NOT SECRETIVE: A POET

NOT SECRETIVE: A POET

 

 

Jesus seems at first sight secretive. He orders those affected by miracles to say to no man who has cured them; He wishes prayers and charity to be done secretly; when the disciples recognize that He is the Christ, He charges them not to repeat it; after the Transfiguration He bids the three keep silence, and when He teaches He uses parables which all men are not capable of understanding.

On further thought, on really considering the matter, it is apparent that Jesus has nothing of the mysterious. He has no secret doctrine to impart to a few aides. His words are public and open. He always speaks in the public squares of cities, on the beaches of lakes, in the Synagogue, in the midst of the people. He forbids speaking of His miracles in order that He may not be confused with wizards and exor­cists; He commands to do good secretly in order to keep outspoken conceit from destroying merit; He does not wish the Twelve to proclaim Him the Christ before His entry into Jerusalem, the public inauguration of His Messiahship; and He speaks in parables to be better understood by the simple who listen more willingly to a story than to a sermon, and remember a narration better than an argument.

Three of the Evangelists report a speech of Jesus, which seems to contradict this view. "Unto you," He is speaking to the disciples, "it is given to know the mysteries of the King­dom of God, but to others it is not given; therefore I speak to them in parables that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand." (Luke 8:10)

But Jesus means only to say this, "You understand these mysteries, but the many do not understand them, although they have ears and spirits like yours. And to them that they may understand I speak in parables,—that is, in a figurative language of facts because it is easier and more familiar." You teach children with fables and the simple with stories, and "the many" have remained like the simple and the childish. To overcome the slowness of their minds I use words adapted to their nature. They are all fancy, and little intellect; and the parables are an appeal to the imagination more than to the reasoning powers. I do not employ them therefore to hide the truth, but the better to reveal it to those who could not see it in a purely rational form. For if then they do not understand, it is the fault of their obstinacy and unbelief, which often closes the eyes and ears of the soul.

Jesus had no mysteries to dissemble. It was His wish that all, even the most humble and ignorant, should understand Him. The parables were not made to hide His teaching from the profane, but to make it more explicit and understandable to everyone. That sometimes even the intelligence of the Twelve is inferior to this task is a melancholy conclusion by no means unknown to Jesus.

The marvelous content of His message has cast into the shade His poetic originality, not less marvelous. Jesus never wrote—once only He wrote on the sand, and the wind destroyed forever His handwriting—but in the midst of a peo­ple of powerful imagination, of the people who wrote the Psalter, the story of Ruth, the book of Job, the Song of Songs, He would have been one of the greatest poets of all times. His victorious youthfulness of spirit, the racy, popular lan­guage of the country where He grew up, the books He had read, few but among the richest of all poetry—His loving com­munion with the life of the fields and of animals and above all His divine and passionate yearning to give light to those who suffer in the dark, to save those who are being lost forever, to carry utmost happiness to the most unhappy (because true poetry does not catch its fire from the light of the lantern but at the light of the stars and of the sun, is not found in the writings left behind by great-grandfathers, but in love, in sor­row in the deeply moved soul); these things combined made of Jesus a poet, an inventor of living and eternal images with which he achieved a miracle on which the Evangelists make no comment,—the miracle of communicating the highest truth by the means of stories so simple, familiar, full of grace that after twenty centuries they shine with that unique youth which is eternity. Some of these stories are only idyllic or epic restate­ments of revelations which at other times He expounded in ab­stract words; but there are some which express things never said in any other form in His teaching. The parables are the imaginative comments on the Sermon on the Mount, such as could be made only by a poet who merits the title of Divine more truly than any other poet ever born.