Saturday: Eternal Greatness in the Passage of Temporal Fact
WEEK 1
SATURDAY
ETERNAL GREATNESS IN THE PASSAGE OF TEMPORAL FACT
Matthew 7:28-29
We saw yesterday that the second pillar was the Word become revelation—“all that Jesus began to do and teach.” His teaching came out of his doing; it was his doing made vocal. And that made a difference. All other teachers have pointed beyond themselves to truth. Jesus pointed to himself and said: “I am the truth.” And somehow or other we believe it; for if we could sit down and try to imagine a perfect illustration of abstract truth translated into life and action, we could not think for the life of us of a better illustration than Jesus of Nazareth, a man who lived two thousand years ago. And now when I think of truth, I do not add truth to truth to get Truth—I think of Jesus. When I say Truth, I think of Jesus. When I say Goodness, I think of Jesus. And when I say God, I think of Jesus. If I don’t, I miss Truth, I miss Goodness, I miss God.
So our Christian faith is not a following of an impossible ideal; it is the following of the Ideal become Real. Whitehead says: “I hazard the prophecy that that religion will conquer which can render clear to popular understanding some eternal greatness incarnate in the passage of temporal fact.”* That has happened in Jesus. The victory goes to him for “in any battle of ideas the victory goes to those ideas which are guaranteed by the facts.”** In the Christian faith all the ideas are guaranteed by the fact of Jesus.
All the ideas of the Christian faith set forth not idealism but realism. For all the ideas look out at us from tender eyes and touch us with warm redemptive hands; therefore they shake us like a passion. Jesus never used words ending in “ity”—abstractions. He did not teach us to respect personality; he taught us to love persons. He did not glorify purity; he said the pure in heart see God. In Jesus we see realism so far ahead of us that we think it idealism. But it is Realism. It has all been worked and worked where you and I have to work it, namely, in the stream of ordinary human history. And the working has been so wonderful that we have never gotten over the spell of it. And never will.
O Lord, we have seen the authentic in Jesus. And seeing him, we see all. Our hearts can never rest this side of him. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Since I have seen the Real, I must be real in thought, word, and deed.
* Alfred North Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933), 33.
** No published source was found for this quotation.