XIX. The Shadow Christ
1
Gerald Stanley Lee: It was a most startling hypothesis that came to the unknown Isaiah: "If God were to come to Judea and live, what kind of man would he be?"
To be original is to discover the commonplace of a thousand years - to face at first the sneer that no one would have thought of it, and at last the indifference because any one would.
He who thinks a mighty thought weaves him an immortal shroud. Fame is the beginning of forgetting. To be great is to take one of the habits of the gods - to move everywhere unknown - to be accorded the world for a burial-ground - to be a spirit, a thought - to breathe through the unnamed winds. To be great is to be capable of becoming as commonplace as the rustling of the leaves, and sunshine, and Christ!
It shall need a prophet to tell who a prophet was - to distill his spirit out of the souls of men. He shall be a wraith, gathered out of life like the morning mists. Men shall strive to divine his face, shall paint and sing - shall seek to say, "This is he"; but out of the Dust and the Spirit he came. To the Spirit and the Dust he shall return.
Immortality has been the romance of little men thrumming their harps in a little age. Out of the ground itself has science brought its mighty measure. It shall be a silent word. With his tinsel little thousands of years, there is one who sings the loves of a woman in Troy. His name is called immortal. With the pantomime of history flocking through his heart, there is one who sings the coming of the love of God, and the generations ask, "What is his name? Where was his abiding-place? Who knew him first?" And the answer shall be to every man: "His name shall be upon thy forehead. The spirit in thine eyes shall be to him for a name. Its secret shall be life."
A prophet shall be the world itself. His breath shall blow from the seas. His immortality shall be nameless - like the immortalities of God - through the passing of flowers and suns. He shall be a conviction. He shall be a habit among the sons of men. About his spirit we shall build the faint and curious scaffoldings of history - that we may strive to rebuild his life.
We shall gather from afar the tokens of his time - the pathetic little heaps - the dust of research. We shall blow it wisely in each other's eyes; but we shall not know - that greatest knowledge of all - that knowledge of how knowledge came - that knowledge of how it was before the knowledge came; or guess but dimly that mighty day when the Incarnation Truth was fresh in the heart of a man - fresh as the face of the earth when God gazed down that Creation morning, when He unfolded it out of darkness and loved it first.
We shall never know how dark it was nor how light the light was, when, like a vast conjecture - amorphous, terrible, beautiful, tender, infinite, in the spirit of one who dreamed, there loomed the great Redeemer-Dream and sounded the chorus of all the earth - when to the first disciple of Jesus, hundreds of years away, there came as generations coming with oratorios on their lips:
Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard? Hath it not been told thee from the beginning? (Isa. 40:28)
It is the everlasting God - the Lord - the Creator of the ends of the earth -
then the sudden silence - the Isaiah silence - and the sweetest, strangest solo in all the world singing like a little child's heart:
He shall feed His flock like a shepherd; He shall gather the lambs in His arms and carry them in His bosom, and gently lead those that are with young. (Isa. 40:11)
The time of the blending of a human song with the music of the spheres, when Isaiah caught the longing of God from the stars - when he knew the divinity of His coming down - bitterly and completely down - to the love of Mary and the cry on the Cross.
The more beautiful [than the actual] Bethlehem was in Isaiah's heart. Like the Wise Men of the East, Moses and Job and David had brought their offerings there, and in the synthesis of the three great conceptions of God - in the wonder of their being together - the book that is called Isaiah is the struggle of the world's dream - the Saviour sleep - the unwaked New Testament.
XX. The Shadow Christ
2
A GREAT man is one who makes the world greater to find room for himself. A thousand years to him and God are but as yesterday when it is passed. He has the mimic omnipresence of a soul wont to walk under the eaves of heaven with the Maker of the earth. The mighty one of every era is thousands of years away from those who dwell with him, and all the great men of the scattered years are nearer to each other than to the dates that gossip on their tombstones - the little difference that it makes when they are born, or the figures that tell us when they could not die.
The hero's solitude is his fellowship with heroes. From the years to the east and the years to the west they come. The paths are short between the centuries, when, seeking their mighty kindred, the great go forth to visit in a prophet's heart; and from the beginning of the world transfiguration is the habit, the secret of every colossal life.
"Live, O my mighty brother," the Secret says, "live in the littleness about thee, doomed to the dullness, gentle with the pain. When the empty roar is stilled and over the dear blind makers of the Noise shall reach the great soft hand of Sleep - there shall be the sound of coming - the gathering of thy brothers from afar; in the peace above the world shalt thou walk with them. In the trysting-place [secret meeting place] of prophets thou shalt touch their hands. From their eyes thy soul shall drink. As the night gathers the dew, their thought shall descend upon thee - glistening, refreshing, full of morning love; it shall be to thee for solemn delight - the faith for thy sacrifice."
"It shall be the word thou shalt speak when the Dawn and thou go down between the hills. Thou shalt not look back nor falter. Thy brotherhood with prophets shall be to live without them. It shall be to believe in the greatness of little men - calling to it - pleading with it. Whether it come to thy face or to thy cross or to thy grave, their greatness shall be for thy greatness - created out of thy heart, humbled with thy sorrow, builded into the world."
The "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people" (Isa. 40:1) was the Unknown Isaiah's way of coming down from transfiguration.
Going to and fro, looking into every face for a hero, demanding, expecting, challenging, believing, Isaiah prophesied the Christ. Across the souls of his brothers he saw Him coming. Out of the east, out of the west, out of the north and the south, out of sorrow and exile and desire and despair - the gathering of God - to be born in Bethlehem.
The Wise Men saw the star in the East and came across the deserts to the birth. Isaiah saw it in the spirit of men. He was in Gethsemane. The cry of the mob and the cry on the cross were convictions in the struggle of his life. His prophecy was the irrevocable insight of love. The Night gathered as he gazed upon men. Tenderly and softly over his glowing thoughts, the Christ-spirit came - the hush, the Shadow, the Cross.
It was no fragmentary, unconnected, beautiful reverie of sadness, coming like a voice on the air to be noted down with a pen. It was not a reported prophecy. It was life itself. It was his coming down from a transfiguration, it was the more actual, intimate prophecy - written on the street. Looking into his brothers' eyes he wrote it. He saw that the denials of Peter were there, that the stripes of Pilate could not be helped, and that Philip's cruel question was eternal upon the lips of men ["Can any good thing come out of Galilee?" John 1:46]. He knew. He utterly knew - that on an earth where even a man could not be great without a sorrow, a God without a cross would not even be a man.
It was no great outside angel's voice leaning over his trembling body and telling him to write. It was no journalistic divining of events, no inspired information of circumstance. It was a profound experience with the nature and law of life - a colossal judgment of the human race.
Gazing into its grandeur and its cowardice, he saw the inevitable conflict there. Out of the human heart itself deciphered the Creator's Secret for this earth - the passion of history - the Gethsemane - the Truth.
XXI. The Shadow Christ
3
ISAIAH'S transfiguration - his talking with Jesus across the generations - his outreaching through the future for a Man, was but the half of his prophecy. There have been candidates for prophets and candidates for saviours. There have been great-men-elect - natures that have conquered the forty days' fast and the temptation with Satan - who could not put their transfigurations behind them - and failed. Poets may live in transfigurations. Prophets will not. They may go there to rest - as Christ with Moses and Elias - to be soothed a little, to feel the coolness and the peace of God's hand, that it may touch for a moment the fever on their brows. Then to work.
The mingling of a transfiguration and a fact makes a prophet possible. The looking for a Man now makes him inevitable. Poetry may be truth. Prophecy is where truth connects with the next thing to do. It is the sad end - of the truth, but it is the end where heroes are, where ideals are idealized into facts, where great men, struggling for their faith, reach up their holy hands as though they would fasten the skies to the earth, as though with their very crosses they would hold them low for the prayers of men.
The forgetful transfiguration may be more beautiful than the applied one - the foreign beauty, the unrighteous beauty of peace when there is no peace; but Isaiah prophesied the incarnation because incarnation was the habit of his life. He speaks the truth for all times because he was trying to find a truth big enough for his own - and build it there. This is the essential fact about the essential prophecy of history. It was incarnation that conceived Incarnation.
The bare idea of having a Messiah turns upon the Isaiah experience without one - the fierce intentness of a practical struggler with a nation, forced into prophecy by the problem of life - the problem that comes to all of us, as, out of the sad and scattered years, comrades of the sun and comrades of the grave, we walk between them, this one great question ringing in our ears through the irrevocable days: "Shall we be impossible gods, poor wistful gods, half-created gods, on this earth of men;, or shall we not?" - the challenge of the incarnation.
To accept it is to live with the divine, the infinite, the unattainable, striking its splendid sorrow through all our deeds - beautiful, incomplete, glorious, defeated, dying. To refuse it is to mumble a love of what we dare not be, and call it worship. It is to whimper for a better world and call it religion. It is to be abdicated gods, because divinity has no chance withal, because there are no conveniences for heroes on the earth.
When our hearts are in tumult, and we are cast down, the incarnation challenge comes. When the day is over, when our brother has returned us hate for love, dullness for insight, when he has cursed the dearest we could give, we shall go forth to the calm and absent-looking sky. We shall say: "It were simple to be a God safe beyond the stars."
From the vast resting-places in the deep the winds shall come to us. They shall blow upon the fever in our faces and we shall say:
"It were simple enough to be a God - off where the winds begin; to be a God alone, to be a monk-God, with a universe for a hermitage, with worlds for infinite retreat; but to be a god here, to have a god's desires and a man's chance - to be mockingly eternal and cabined in days and nights, - to be infinite and dream stars, and be riveted down to the ground, - to have wings of love and be fastened to hate and wedded to blindness and mingled with beasts and harried hither and thither in the great unseemly shambles, where men think they live and do not even learn to die, and where they curse, and cast their souls into the filth, and trample their brothers under their feet for the filth itself, and burn their heroes at the stake! Safe in infinity, with all Space in which to be Himself, shall a God who has made the worlds as He wished them to be require a man to be a god in a world which he did not make, a world which he did not choose, a world where to undertake to be a man is more than a god would care to do?"
Thus the incarnation challenge comes.
It were indeed a god's world, framed for heaven, with its vast delights, bounded by skies and singing its own music day unto day. With one's own soul listening in it, it were easy to be a god alone - to let the links of light and the links of darkness, of song and starlight and sleep, fall across the years and bind us to its joy forever. It were easy to be a god thus - or to be a god with gods, - to troop through the vales of the earth and look into each other's souls; but to be a god with men?
The problem of every soul when the sons of God go forth to live.
Therefore God's problem - the struggle with environment. The Messianic answer was the conviction of history, the gathered voice of the human race, exalted into the utterance of one who prophesied the Messiah because to him a God who would ask of His creatures more than He would do Himself would not be a God at all.
Thus came to pass the tremulous gospel - the writing of John across the soul of Isaiah.
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among men." (John 1:1, 14)
XXII. The Shadow Christ
4
THE righteousness of God had been conceived before. Moses had bound it about the soul. His fatherhood had been conceived. David had sung it into one of the habits of Hebrew life. Job had made it an infinite fatherhood. Ethics had been thought out as a science. Men had conceived of a man in God's place for thousands of years. The man had been their God.
Isaiah was a poet and conceived of a God in a man's place. The turning of this thought was the crisis of the world. Henceforth worship, which had been an effort - a scattering, an outgoing of the human heart into the Vast, a spreading of our little prayers across the sky - should be an incoming, a shining down. The incarnation was the concentration of God - the decree that the infinite should be the neighborhood of life.
But the greater idea, in its divine necessity, its logicalness, was not Isaiah's idea of having a Messiah. It was his idea of what He would be when He came: the incredible conception that when the Maker of the earth descended, He would be despised and rejected of men - the sublimest accusation of history, the supreme satire upon the human race, the most beautiful and awful reach of insight the world has known.
It was the intense humanness of this divinest prophet which alone could have anticipated the divinity, not of God's being a God, but the greater divinity of His being a man; His giving up a God's opportunities, His being a struggling God, with the little human outfit of Space and Time and Circumstance with which He asked Isaiah to be a prophet for Him and Peter to die for Him.
There came to the vision of the seer, the Cross - the Consistent Creator - showing to the human heart what He really was. Approaching his conception out of the atmosphere of the God of Israel instead of the memory of the Saviour Himself, Isaiah's anticipation bears within it a sense of the divine sacrifice so profound, so masterful, so full of praise and onwardness, of vast, exultant sorrow, that it sweeps its glorious tides into the New Testament itself, where the soul of Isaiah overflows and breaks its prophecies upon the words of Paul and fills the very presence of Christ with the fullness of the past.
It is too much to expect that a man great enough to prophesy a Messiah should have been at hand to interpret him when He came, but one cannot but wonder how much more the gospel of Luke would have revealed of the soul of Christ if it had been written by one who understood Jesus without seeing Him, instead of one who did not understand Him when he did; and while the cruelty of the love that was offered Christ was the supreme necessity of an honest incarnation, one cannot but wonder whether "the things I have yet to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now," (John 16:2) would not have been spoken, if there had been one great heroic soul endowed with habits and insights that would comprehend - to stand between this farewell talk, this pitiful reserve of Jesus and the human heart.
But the sound of the truth shall not be lost. It matters not. With the tide and the sun God brings it back. If the great listener be not at hand, his soul shall gather the murmur out of the ages as the shell gathers the sea. Luther takes the keys out of Peter's hands and Isaiah hears the Beatitudes in his grave, - one before whose father-messiah spirit the blundering peasants who walked with Jesus shall be as children forever, before whose majestic vision the inspired insight of the great apostle to the Gentiles becomes but the beautiful makeshift of the day, in the crisis of the kingdom on the earth.
Does no one feel the dim stirring, the sense of what it would have been, if but one of Paul's epistles could have been assigned to Isaiah - if he who wrote the mighty fore-word had left but one gentle retrospect - if he who spoke the sublimely unfulfilled had sung the fulfillment itself?
We may go, it is true, through all history with our wistful "might have beens." All is answered and answered once for all, by the divine was. We may dare to reconstruct the past, because it is safe from our petty hands; but to ask what Paul would have written had he been in Isaiah's place? Conjecture is the huge shadow-measurement of men. Against its flickering outlines we may lift a soul and trace its greatness on the lives of heroes and the thoughts of God. Would Paul have prophesied the Christ - barely convinced by the Christ Himself? Would he have written anything at all, in that hopelessness which was Isaiah's opportunity? Paul was one who held garments while Isaiahs were being stoned. He belonged to the second order of great men - those who see afterward.
The supreme great man of the divine visit to the earth, wrapped in his thousand years, side by side with Peter, who knew him yesterday, Isaiah walks. Through his radiant New Testament soul, past the metaphysics of Paul and the letters of John the hearts of men gaze deep to know what their Messiah was.
From the point of view of a God descending to live with men - Isaiah's point of view - the emphasis that has been placed upon the cross, the more glaring, obvious cross, must have been the hardest part of dying on it. The picturesqueness - the vulgar appeal of the subtlest, divinest, silentest, most ceaseless sorrow on the earth - the cross was the narrowing down of the incarnation, not to its consummate point, but to its final inexpressibleness. It was the final attempt to crowd the infinite love which had been manifested more in the patience and divineness of every day, into the tiny, awful word that men call Death - the shallow side of suffering.
Standing in the awful light of that moment when Jesus died for them - so much more awful to them than to Him - so much more awful than it was to them when they died themselves - the simple and terrified hearts of the Apostles wrote their memories of the Christ. They could not but be morbid with the cross. It was the key-moment through which they came to all the other moments, and through its immeasurable rebuke they wrote the life and interpreted the days that had passed.
But Isaiah's insight did not come through the blinding misery of his own cowardice and the forsaken death of God. He saw Him through the stern exigencies of his own prophetic life - the greater, more sympathetic, more kindred way of seeing Him - the way that men who see before instead of afterward must always see. He saw what He had given up. He saw Him coming from infinite opportunity to crowd a god into a man as he was trying to crowd a prophet into a man.
He knew the dread necessities He had taken upon his soul as one to whom the real cross would be not dying before - would be coming here at all - an insight which makes the fortieth and fifty-third of Isaiah the supreme interpretation of the New Testament, though a solitary soul was singing it hundreds of years away.
To play at being men like the gods of the Greeks, to play at being gods like the poets and the dreamers of the earth, were not difficult; but to be in grim earnest, with uttermost faithfulness, a half-god, with a god's ideals and a man's body in a man's world; to be a half-man with a god's desires - Incarnation is the eternal essence of sorrow - the great creative sorrow which has been the dignity and the destiny of the strong from the beginning of the world.
From the Incarnation downward, which was the story of Christ, to the Incarnation upward, which is the history of the human race, [Girolamo] Savonarola [1452-1498, Italian preacher] and God by the birth in Bethlehem are brought into the same great tragedy - the manhood of the one, "I will be God"; the divinity of the other, "I will be a man."
The great man's conception of a great Messiah, a conception which, approaching the divine life from the God's point of view, makes the manger in the inn a mightier fact than the Cross, and Christmas [the birth of Christ] the anniversary of the greatest sorrow in the world.
By a natural process in the endeavor to reach the feelings of the coarsest men, we have come to emphasize the very release of Jesus as His crowning sacrifice, because it took a form which the very brutes of the field would have dimly understood, and had the impressiveness of the fundamental awe of human life on which to move. The result is an exaggerated, lurid cross, looming high in the consciousness of men, because it is nearest to them, because death is the nearest word to terror, the shibboleth of cowards, of those who have lived not yet where life is deep enough to feel the gentleness of a grave, or know the way it greets a hero, or folds its rest about the incarnation-ones who suffer out the destinies of men.
The prayer in the later days, "Thy will and not mine be done," (Matt. 26:39) shall not be narrowed down to the fear of suffering. It shall be widened out into the hope of suffering longer, the insistence of the incarnation, the spirit of One who in His conflict would have died on three crosses for three more years - of love and tireless trust and infinite expectancy - One who knew that He must die to prove to the world who He was, but who could not believe - not yet, not quite yet - "Oh, my Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me!" (Matt. 26:39) - that He must die to prove to Peter and James and Philip who He was.
To prove ourselves to those who hate, by dying - that might be - but to prove ourselves to those who love, to have them side by side wayfaring with us - dear outsiders in our hearts - to unfold our very souls to them - and ask, "Hast thou been so long time with me and dost thou not know me?" (John 14:9) - to draw their faces in vain to our faces - to know that they will come at last, that they will look down into the eternal silence there - that they will love too late. This is Gethsemane love.
To pass on with an incarnation that has failed - to serve our brothers by being remembered instead of joining our hands with their hands and giving them our very selves - to give up the privilege of dying every day and die once - this was the cross of One who hoped to the last to found His kingdom upon the recognition of men instead of their infinite penitence.
The hero, be he man or God, chooses the living death. He will live in sorrows that make the grave beautiful - a paradise of dust. He will live to sorrow out service for men who make the grave terrible only because it has no more to give, because there shall be no reaching out there, and no cry shall be heard there, and we are drawn into the dumbness of the earth.
The conception which for hundreds of years in the Church - in the counting off of souls and the worship of results - has made the fear of death the courage for conversion, finds but a refinement of itself in the emphasis of the cross - an emphasis which, while it is perfectly just and true and Messianic without the remotest question, is open to the objection that it is not Messianic enough, that it is based on an essential under-estimate of One who was crucified first with the love that was borne Him, then with the hate - who died between two thieves - forever the symbols of His being on the earth, of the strange, sweet, triumphant fellowship He took upon Himself - a fellowship which above and beyond the cross, every day and every hour of misunderstanding, was itself the faithfulness, the realness, the bitter literalness of the incarnation - the being a God - a Comrade-God, among the sons of men.
XXIII. The Shadow Christ
5
THE talking of Jesus with Moses and Elias is the secret way back to Isaiah's prophecy for the modern heart - the parable of Isaiah's life.
Born with the instincts of greatness, one of the kindred of heroic vision, Elias was not as far from Jesus as the way Peter and James and John looked, when they were told what the Kingdom really was. They stand as the sorrowful symbol of contemporary faith in every age, toward every prophet. Wistful, wondering, struggling, ordinary men, day after day, in attracted dullness, they had hung upon His words. In the only way in which men who were arguing who should be greatest could call Him out, they called Him out; but there came a time when there was nothing for them to do but to stand apart - to watch their Master talking with the great.
To Peter and James and John the transfiguration was the way Jesus had never looked for them - the shining in His face when great hearts loved Him back - the moment of His being understood.
To Jesus it was the moment of the mighty listeners, the moment when the men He might have had and the men He had to have faced each other - when the heartache of the difference shot its pain through the shining in His face.
In the soul of the Saviour they stood, these two groups of love. Between them a Cross. A transfiguration with Peter and James and John shut out, an absent-minded transfiguration, could not have come to Him. He was too great for that. He could face His fact and His faith in the one same calm, beautiful mood. It was the very essence of His greatness to think of the fishermen then. The one moment of utter brotherhood in His pitilessly solitary life, with the neighbors of His spirit by His side - He was a Saviour because it was but a moment.
He gave the password of the great, and then walked down the mountain to love ordinary James and try again with Judas and be Peter's brother until He died. The more beautiful transfiguration was the one on the way down, when, listening to the prattle of His apostles, transfiguration became incarnation. "Here in this little Galilee, here, now, with this self-same Peter, with this poor, pitiful James - HERE, NOW, I WILL BE THE SON OF GOD!"
Out of the struggle between his transfiguration love and his love of men, Isaiah prophesied an incarnation like this mighty, daily, irrevocable, immeasurable - the unceasing crucifixion of the Christ. The incarnation was the expectancy of God - His trusting the human heart even beyond a cross, - even unto living with it.
It was only an expectant Isaiah, expectant enough to incarnate, who could have prophesied an expectant Messiah, expectant enough to be a comrade with Judas and Pilate and Mary Magdalene. Incarnation is the literalness of expectancy - the very experiencing of it.
The "shall" which is but the room the prophet invokes from the greatness of God, out of centuries and nations, to fulfil himself, was but Isaiah's indomitable Now, thrown into the long lenses, magnified by the spirit, stretched upon the years. The slide of one intense experience casts the outlines and colors of his soul upon the largest canvas of God. He is the portrait of an age - a prophet.
Peter might have read the history of eighteen hundred years in the Saviour's eyes, had he been a prophet, and Isaiah's face was the shadowing of Christ's.
In the human stress, the agony of solitude, the vow of his own creative love, Isaiah lifted his heart to the ideal. "Not by being great thyself - not by needing great men around thee - but by making great men out of those thou hast, shalt thou be mine," saith the Lord. "In mine own god-like handiwork shalt thou come to me. Men thou shalt bring, wouldst thou be a man."
This was the Isaiah spirit. Striving to connect his transfiguration, struggling to say Now, he discovered the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief. (Isa. 53:3)
Wrought out of stolid human heart by the slowly coming Christ, Isaiah was the first great miracle of His spirit. He prophesied the Messiah He had tried to be. Lifted into the shadow of the mighty love, he was the Almost Christ, the Christ of the Night.
"Not having received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar." (Heb. 11:13)
"Having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth, that they were seeking a country of their own." (Heb. 11:13)
by Gerald Stanley Lee (1862-1944), New York: The Century Co., 1896
Contents
Part 1
INTRODUCTION
I. THE PAGAN EMPHASIS
II. THE EMPHASIS OF LIFE
III. THE EMPHASIS OF THE IDEAL
IV. THE HAGAR NATION
Part 2
V. THOU SHALT NOT
VI. THOU SHALT NOT
VII. THOU SHALT NOT
Part 3
VIII. THUS SAITH THE LORD
IX. MILK AND HONEY
X. I AM THAT I AM
XI. THY GENTLENESS HAS MADE ME GREAT
Part 4
XII. DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP
XIII. WHO GIVETH SONGS IN THE NIGHT
XIV. WHEN THE PEOPLE SAW THE MOUNTAIN SMOKING THEY STOOD AFAR OFF
Part 5
XV. "WHERE WAST THOU WHEN I LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EARTH?"
XVI. CURSE GOD AND DIE
XVII. DOTH NOT WISDOM CRY AND UNDERSTANDING PUT FORTH HER VOICE?
XVIII. VANITY! VANITY! ALL IS VANITY
Part 6
XIX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXI. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXIII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
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