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Those Christians.
Prepared from Huston Smith, The Religions of Man, (1965, Harper and Row, N.Y.), by Ann Bendall, Nambour, Qld.
The man in the street who first heard Jesus' disciples proclaiming the Good News was as impressed by what he saw as by what he heard. He saw lives that had been transformed--men and women, ordinary in every way, except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living. They evidenced a tranquillity, simplicity, and cheerfulness that their hearers had nowhere else encountered. Here were people who seemed to be making a success of the greatest enterprise of all, the enterprise of life itself.
Specifically there seemed to be two qualities in which their lives abounded. The first was mutual affection:- "See how these Christians love one another." In spite of differences in function or social position their fellowship was marked by a sense of real equality.
Just before his crucifixion Jesus told his disciples, "My joy I leave with you." This joy was the second quality that pervaded the lives of the early Christians. Outsiders found this baffling. These scattered Christians were not numerous. They were not wealthy or powerful. If anything, they faced far more adversity than the average man or woman. Yet in the midst of their trials they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that was almost boisterous. Perhaps radiant would be a more exact word, though Paul himself describes the Holy Spirit as intoxicating.
What produced this love and joy in these early Christians? The secret, insofar as we are able to gather it from the New Testament record, is that three intolerable burdens had suddenly and dramatically been lifted from their shoulders. The first of these was fear, even the fear of death.
The second burden from which they had been released was guilt. No one can live without drawing distinctions of some sort between what he judges to be better or worse. Out of these distinctions there arises in every life a concept of what life might be. Paralleling this, there inevitably runs a sense of failure. The times that we violate our norms are not confined to ones in which we treat people less well than we should; they include opportunities that we let slip irretrievably.
Unrelieved guilt always reduces creativity. In its acute form it can rise to a fury of self-condemnation that stifles creativeness completely and brings life to a standstill.
The third release the Christians experienced was from the cramping confines of the ego. In Paul's, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me," the circles of self are broken, leaving love to flow freely from its former self-demanding constraints.
It is not difficult to see how release from guilt, fear, and self could give men a new birth into life. But how did the early Christians get free of these burdens? And what did a man named Jesus, now gone, have to do with the process that they should credit it as his achievement?
There is locked within every human life, a wealth of love and joy that partakes of God himself, but it can be released only through external bombardment, in this case, the bombardment of love. We see this clearly in child psychology. No amount of threat or preachment will take the place of the parents' love in nurturing a loving and creative child. We are beginning to see the point likewise in psychotherapy where love is coming to be the key term in theories of treatment. The best evidence, however, is that of personal experience.
Just imagine the change that would have come over the early Christians if they really knew themselves to be loved by God? Imagination may fail us, but logic need not. If we too really felt loved, not abstractly or in principle, but vividly and personally by one who united in himself all power and perfection, the experience could melt our fear, guilt, and self-concern forever. As Kierkegaard said, "If at every moment both present and future, it were eternally certain that nothing has happened or can ever happen, not even the most fearful horror invented by the most morbid imagination and translated into fact, which can separate us from God's love--here would be reason for joy."
This love of God is precisely what the first Christians did feel. They became convinced that Jesus was God and they felt directly, the force of his love. Melting the barriers of fear, guilt, and self, it poured through them as if they were sluice gates, expanding the love they had hitherto felt for others until the difference in degree became a difference in kind and a new quality, which the world has come to call Christian love, was born. Conventional love is evoked by the lovable qualities in the beloved--beauty, gaiety, friendliness, cheerfulness, personal charm, or some other. The love men encountered in Christ needed no such virtues to release it. It embraced sinners and outcasts, Samaritans and enemies; it gave not prudentially in order to receive, but because giving was its nature.
The strength that this love personally gave the first Christians who preached the Good News throughout the Mediterranean world was the fact that they did not feel themselves to be alone. They were not even alone together, for they believed that their leader was in their
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