Chapter Viii — Jesus Through Experience
CHAPTER VIII
JESUS THROUGH EXPERIENCE
RELIGION is the life of God in the soul issuing in the kingdom of God on earth. But first of all it is the life of God in the soul. Religion means realization. If not, then religion soon means ritual, and that means death.
The early disciples had little ritual but a mighty realization. They went out not remembering Christ, but realizing him. They did not merely call him back into memory, they communed with him in the deeps. He was not a mere fair and beautiful story to remember with gratitude—he was a living, redemptive, actual Presence then and there. They went out with the joyous and grateful cry, “Christ liveth in me!” The Jesus of history had become the Christ of experience. They were almost irresistible, for they brought certainty into that uncertain world. Pliny the Elder had said, “There is nothing certain save the absence of certainty,” and Plato longed for “some sure word from God” that would be a raft to carry him across the uncertain seas of human existence. The apostles brought certainty.
Someone has suggested that the early Christians conquered that pagan world because they out-thought, they out-lived and they out-died the pagans. But that was not enough: they out-experienced them. Without that it would have lacked the vital glow. If the word of Christ becomes paramount in India, it will be because those who follow him out-experience those who do not follow him. When Elijah stood upon Mount Carmel he made this the test: “The God that answers by fire let him be God.” The test of the surviving God is now different. We say, “The God that answers by producing radiant healed men let him be God.” It is just that certain note that needs to be struck in India. Not the note of aggressive dogmatism, but the persuasive note of Christian experience.
If, as someone suggests, all great literature is autobiography, then all great appeals to the non-Christian world must be a witness. Drummond would never preach anything that had not first gone through his own experience, and Drummond therefore spoke with power.
Doctor Farquhar said to me regarding this matter: “There are two things that are almost irresistible to the Indian mind just now—Christ and Christian experience.” I agreed most heartily, for it was the thing I had been driven to: Christ must be interpreted through Christian experience.
But the Hindu has this reservation: he does not feel that a religious experience should be shouted from the housetops, he feels that to do this would be indelicate and would take away its bloom and beauty. Results should be whispered to one’s neighbors. Doctor Tagore told me of the man whom he had found who had come into a great spiritual experience. He asked him if he was not going to tell it to the world? “No,” he said; “if it is real, they will come to me.” When I told the head pundit of an ashram that I had found one Hindu who said he was a jiwan mukta—one who had found living salvation—he replied, “He was not one if he said he was one.” I can share the hesitancy of the Hindu when he feels the indelicacy of speaking about it.
But the genius and glory of Christian experience is that we have not earned it—it is a gift, absolutely undeserved and unmerited. When one accepts it he loses all thought of the part he has had in it, and rapturously thinks of the Giver. It is not boasting, it is testimony. It is sharing with others what has been shared with us. We are to be witnesses in behalf of Another.
The Christ of the Indian Road pauses as he passes through the throngs and says, “Who touched me?” Knowing what the healing has meant to us, we can only acknowledge that our trembling touch upon him has meant life to us.
This lesson of being a witness was burned into my very being by a tragic beginning of my Christian ministry. When I was called to the ministry I had a vague notion that I was to be God’s lawyer—I was to argue his case for him and put it up brilliantly. When I told my pastor of my call he surprised and thoroughly frightened me by asking me to preach my first sermon on a certain Sunday night. I prepared very thoroughly, for I was anxious to make a good impression and argue his case acceptably. There was a large crowd there full of expectancy, for they wished the young man well. I began on rather a high key. I had not gone a half dozen sentences when I used a word I had never used before (nor have I used it since!)—“indifferentism.” When I used that word I saw a college girl in the audience put down her head and smile. It so upset me that when I came back to the thread of my discourse it was gone—absolutely. I do not know how long I stood there rubbing my hands hoping that something would come back. It seemed an age. Finally I blurted out, “Friends, I am very sorry, but I have forgotten my sermon!” I started down the steps leading from the pulpit in shame and confusion. This was the beginning of my ministry, I thought—a tragic failure. As I was about to leave the pulpit a Voice seemed to say to me, “Haven’t I done anything for you?”
“Yes,” I replied, “You have done everything for me.”
“Well,” answered the Voice, “couldn’t you tell that?”
“Yes, I suppose I could,” I eagerly replied. So instead of going to my seat I came around in front of the pulpit below (I felt very lowly by this time and was persuaded I did not belong up there!) and said: “Friends, I see I cannot preach, but I love Jesus Christ. You know what my life was in this community—that of a wild, reckless young man—and you know what it now is. You know he has made life new for me, and though I cannot preach I am determined to love and serve him.” At the close a lad came up and said, “Stanley, I wish I could find what you have found.” He did find it then and there. He is a member of that church now—a fine Christian man. No one congratulated me on that sermon that night, but after the sting of it had passed away, I have been congratulating myself ever since. The Lord let me down with a terrible thump, but I got the lesson never to be forgotten: In my ministry I was to be, not God’s lawyer, but his witness. That would mean that there would have to be living communion with Christ so that there would always be something to pass on. Since that day I have tried to witness before high and low what Christ has been to an unworthy life.
India wants to know: What have you found? The students of a Hindu college asked me to come and to speak to them at the college and they suggested the topic: “Tell your own personal religious experience.” Always, on the last night of every series, I tell my personal experience. They forget many, if not most, of my arguments, but they bring up this matter of experience again and again. It grips.
While I was telling of my conversion in ——— I noticed a Hindu college professor nodding his head with evident delight. At the close he came up eagerly, gripped my hand and said: “Oh, that is it. It is the new birth we need.” The next day he showed me a school book he had written for use in government colleges. It was Annotations on Macaulay’s History of England . Macaulay has given the Puritans a thrust, saying that during the Puritan reign the students, instead of studying the classics, were interrogated as to how and when and in what circumstances they received the new birth. This non-Christian professor took up Macaulay in the matter and in his comments said, “The pity is that Macaulay did not understand the new birth.” Then he quoted the whole of the Nicodemus episode and finished up by saying, “Alas, the Nicodemuses to-day do not understand how these things can be.” Here was a non-Christian professor criticizing a Christian historian for his lack of appreciation of the new birth! To lead a man like that professor we must have something real and vital.
One day I was in the train with a Hindu lawyer, and we discussed, almost argued, for about three hours concerning Hindu and Christian philosophy and teaching. I saw we were getting nowhere, so I turned to him and said, “Would you mind my telling you what Christ has done for me?”
He eagerly replied, “No, I would like to hear.”
When I got through telling of my conversion and the subsequent years there were tears in his eyes, and he said: “Mr. Jones, you have attained. You have reached the last stage of your rebirths. You will never be reborn into this world.”
“That is probably true,” I replied, “for one does not have to go through a weary round of rebirths as you expect to, for here is the new birth open to you—a straight, short-cut to the Father.” There was deep earnestness again when he said, “I wish I had that.” In his voice spoke the voice of India—it is deliverance from rebirths that India craves.
A Hindu student wrote to me, “After attending your addresses I want to be a follower of Christ, for I now see that my religion is a somewhat roundabout method of obtaining the kingdom of God.” Somewhat roundabout! Yes, eight million rebirths, may be. No wonder they shrink from such a prospect—from life itself. It is a joy to offer the new birth as the way out.
Here is a letter to me from a Jain student which speaks its own message of longing for spiritual freedom:
I have deep faith in my own religion. I believe it to be entirely true, but I need not be ashamed to tell that it exacts unflinching duty and knows no grace. Philosophically it is all right. You may believe, according to it, that the Power behind things is supremely just and indifferent, but we err we know not why, we are led on as it were on the waves of sin and mistakes. There are powers too great for our frail being, and I wish then that there were a God who would be kind to me, who would feel my weaknesses and who would extricate me from the meshes of sin and temptation.
Can we come to a young man like that with an argument, a doctrine, a superior Book? Unless we can gently and quietly, but with a radiant positiveness share with that young man our own deliverance and victory, we had better not come. Has Christ any answer to a letter like that? Here is the crux of the whole thing—Has he, or has he not? Some of us, knowing that we were there, in that very condition, believe that he has.
Let me pause here just long enough to say that here is where a good deal of present-day presentation is weak. That young man needs something more than Jesus as Example and Teacher. What he needed was not a Sage, but a Saviour, not a moral Example but a moral Extractor, not a Redirector but a Regenerator, not truths but Life.
In a class of Hindu and Mussulman students at the Ashram at ——— one of the students spoke up suddenly and said, “Sir, would you mind telling us what has made your life what it is?” It rather shocked me for a moment. It was a bolt out of the blue, as there was nothing that had led up to this. It was so absolutely spontaneous and real that I could but stop and quietly and prayerfully tell them how Christ had taken an unworthy broken life, and had made it whole again, and had sent my happy soul singing its way down these twenty years. When I had finished, one of them spoke up and said: “Now, sir, we are happy. That is what we wanted to hear.” After the class some of them came with me to my room and we sat and talked for hours about it. In the afternoon some of the young ladies wanted an appointment. When I asked them what they wanted to talk about, one of them answered and said: “We were deeply impressed by what you said about your own personal experience this morning. Do you mind telling us something more about it?” And there we sat a long time upon the floor with the touch of the living Christ upon us all. Our hearts burned within us as we talked with him, and about him, by the way.
The Indian people are as sensitive to spiritual things as the electric needle is to the pull of the pole. In one place a Hindu committee asked not to have questions at the close of the meeting, “for,” they said, “it disturbs the beautiful spiritual atmosphere of the meetings.” I saw a Hindu professor go out at the close of the address one night when the questions began. When the questions were through and I suggested that we might close the meeting with prayer, I saw him come in from the veranda. At the close of the prayer he came up and thanked me and said: “I went out after your address and stood on the veranda until the questions were over, for in your address you had lifted us to God and I did not want that feeling I had in my heart dissipated or disturbed by the questions, so I waited outside for the prayer, since in the prayer you made us again realize his presence.” One feels awed in the presence of such beautiful spiritual sensitiveness as that.
A Hindu came up one night after the prayer and said, “That was very fine, but why don’t you begin the meetings with prayer?” I assented and said I would do so the next night. But in the anxiety to get in the thick of the battle I went into the address without public prayer. Of course one could not get into such a tense situation where every word and idea is being challenged without preceding it with an hour or more of prayer, but I did not pray publicly. While I was speaking I saw a note coming up; the chairman handed it over to me. It read, “Sir, you forgot to begin your meeting with prayer, as you had promised.” I stopped my address, acknowledged my fault, prayed, and went on. But I never forgot the undertone of spiritual yearning which that little incident revealed.
After I had had a long talk with a Hindu one day as he was about to go I suggested that if he liked, we might pray together. “Yes,” he said, “I will be glad to do so, but on one condition, and that is, that you do not pray for things but only for God.”
“All right, my brother,” I replied, “we will not pray for things but only for God,” and we did! Could one face that hour without a deep sense of need for reality and a joyous sense of God? It is not a question as to whether we would or would not interpret Christ through experience—we must. Or else there is no interpretation that is adequate or touches the depths of the situation. We cannot merely talk about Christ to India—we must bring him. He must be a living vital reality—closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet. We must be “God-bearers.”
This God-consciousness should be full and overflowing. A Hindu lawyer recognized this and said to me one day, “What you Christians and the church need to-day is a new Pentecost.” I knew what he meant—we need Christianity as a well of water within us springing up into everlasting life. Principal Jacks pleads that we get back “the lost radiance of the Christian religion.” Queer to hear a Hindu and a Unitarian both pleading for a new fullness of life akin to Pentecost! Even so, Pentecost is normal Christianity. But the church is largely subnormal and anaemic. Because a few have gone up into fever and have done queer things in the name of this great Sanifying and Sanctifying of the human spirit by the inflooding of the Spirit of the living Christ, there is no reason why all the rest of us should be frightened away into an anæmic Christianity. This Christ of the Indian Road is saying, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost,” as well as “Thy sins are forgiven thee.”
A friend of mine was preaching in the bazaar in North India when a Hindu came up to him and said, “I want to ask a question, not through criticism but for information. I have been reading the New Testament and am especially struck with the Acts of the Apostles. These men seemed to have had a wonderful power and fullness of spiritual life. Sir, have you found what they had?” My friend was speechless. Though he was a graduate of a university and was a missionary, he knew in the inmost depths of being that he did not have what the early disciples seemed to have found. He went home, fell on his knees, yielded himself fully to Christ and found! His life became one of the richest and most beautiful I have ever been privileged to see. When he died a few years ago an Indian minister said, “It is a good thing that ——— did not die in India, for we would have committed the sin of worshiping his grave.”
India is reading the Bible and wants to know whether our Christianity is like that. An Indian boy, whose zeal and love were better than his English, wrote to me about a great awakening they were having: “We are having a great re-bible here.” Not a bad mistake! We need to be rebibled—especially at the place of the Acts of the Apostles.
It was said of those early apostles that they “testified and preached.” Their preaching was throbbing with testimony. Since it came from the heart it reached the heart. The last night of a series of meetings in South India I spoke on “Christ and Certainty.” On the inspiration of the moment before closing the meeting I said, “Now there are quite a number of Christians here. I would like you to tell before your non-Christian friends in a very few words what you have found—what has Christ done for you?” First of all, there stood up a convert from a low caste and told what Christ had done for him. It was befitting that he should speak first, for in caste-filled India God was taking the weak things to confound the mighty, just as it was befitting that Carey the cobbler should be the first teacher of Brahman India. After him arose one who had been a Brahman Hindu and told of what he had found. Then, to our surprise, the head British official of the district arose and said: “Seven years ago I could not have said that I had found this that we have been talking about here to-night. But seven years ago I found it through an old lady, on board ship coming out to India.” It was a rich testimony from a very Christian life, simply told and meaning much, for many of the men before him were his subordinate officers. Then the leading Roman Catholic layman of the city testified: “Of course I have never spoken in a meeting of this kind before, but I could not sit here and refuse to tell before my non-Christian friends what Christ is to me. I heard him say to me, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ I came. He gave me rest.” It was a striking testimony. Now feel the accumulated effect of that whole thing. Here were low caste and high caste, American and Englishman, Protestant and Catholic, telling before their Hindu friends what Christ was to them. The Hindu chairman of the meeting at the close thoughtfully said to me, “I can answer most of your arguments, but I do not know what to do with this.”
There in miniature was seen what a united witness of the church would mean. Christendom is now talking in different directions—a good part of the time against others called Christians and not much about the Lord—“finding a precarious living,” as someone said of the people of a certain island, “by washing each other’s clothes.” But suppose we should come together at the place of our common Lord and would with one joyous voice witness of him, what would happen—what? Something that would be irresistible, as it was to that Hindu chairman.
In speaking of the witness of the lips, I do not mean to overlook the fact that it must be a witness backed by life. “This man who is to speak to-day is back of everything he says,” said the chairman of a meeting in introducing a speaker. He could have said nothing finer. A friend of mine went into a shoe shop and found the Hindu shopkeeper in deep distress. He had lost his only son. My friend to comfort him said, “Well, my brother, remember in your trouble that God is love.” The Hindu’s face brightened up and he said, “Yes, I know God is love.” My friend, interested at his evident eagerness, asked, “How do you know God is love?” “Oh,” said the Hindu, “I worked for Foy sahib in Cawnpore, and no one could work for Foy sahib and not know God is love.” Here was a witness with the whole of life behind it. Forty years of beautiful living was speaking to the Hindu in his hour of distress.
Christ interpreted through experience and backed by fine living is almost irresistible to India to-day.