The Agony of the Church | Page 9

who am I to teach you? "A reed (from the wilderness) shaken with
the wind"? Not I but the present despair of the world teaches you. I am
only a loud amongst many suffocated cries from West and East, from
North and South, directed to you: lift up your hearts and listen! God is
now doing a great thing through you, and the whole world is expecting
a great thing from you. What is this great thing? How to reach it? Pray
and listen! One thing only is sure, that this great thing will come neither
from any Foreign Office nor from any War Office, but from the living
Christian Church. Yes, she is still living, although she looks dead. She
is only sleeping. But Christ is standing beside her now, calling: "Rise,
ye daughter! Talitha Cumi!"
CHAPTER II
THE DRAMA OF THE CHURCH
The Church is a drama. She represents the greatest drama in the world's
history, yea, she personates the whole of the world's history. She
originated in an astounding personal drama. Humanly speaking, in the
life of Jesus Christ during the three years of His public work there was
more that was dramatic, from an outside and inside point of view, than
in the lives of all other founders of religion taken together. And
speaking from a soteriological and theological point of view, His
life-drama had a cosmic greatness, involving heaven and earth and both
ends of the world's history. Wonderful was the life of Buddha, but his
teaching was still more wonderful than his life. Very striking was the
life of Mohammed, the life of a pious and romantic statesman, but his
work quickly overgrew his personality. Five years after Mohammed's
death, Islam numbered more followers than Christianity five hundred

years after Golgotha. But the life-drama of Jesus was and still is
reckoned as the most marvellous aspect of Christianity: not His
teaching or His work, but His life.
Well, was not His life-drama typical and prophetic for His Church? His
Church had to live through all those agonies, external and internal, that
He Himself lived through. She had to go through sunshine and darkness,
through angelic concerts and devilish temptations, through death and
resurrection. In one word, she had to live His life, again and again,
treading sometimes quickly, sometimes reluctantly, her path, always
asking for light and comfort from her visions of Him. I say the visions
of Him, because those visions were omnipotent, including in
themselves words and works.
There is an impressive picture now circulating in London of an English
soldier lying wounded in agony on the battlefield. Well, what would a
Buddhistic painter put as a simile of consolation for the man in agony?
What else if not a Buddha's sentence or word? And what would a
Mohammedan painter put on the picture to console the expiring soldier
if not also a sentence or word from the Koran or an imaginative view of
the Paradise which is waiting for him? And you know what a Christian
painter depicted--the vision of the Crucified! the soldier lying beneath
this vision grasping with his hand Jesus' bleeding feet; this vision of the
Crucified is greater than any sentence, any word, yea, it includes all the
words of sympathy and of consolation. On another occasion the
Christian painter would paint another appropriate vision, and a painter
of another religion or philosophy would write another appropriate word.
Therefore, it is difficult to learn the Christian religion without pictures,
or to teach it without visions.

THE DRAMATIC FORMATION OF THE CHURCH
It was a quarrel, as usual, among men about God and bread, when Jesus
interrupted them. Peter never thought to fish anything else all his life
but fishes, nor Pilate to sentence to death anyone but criminals, nor the
Jewish patriots that they were losing their greatest opportunity, nor the

heathen of Britannia that they were contemporaries with the very God
in flesh of their posterity. How many times did it happen that Jesus
during the first thirty years of His life was present in the temple when a
Rabbi read the prophetic passages on the Messiah! Reading the
Scriptures the poor Rabbi measured the distance between himself and
the Messiah by thousands of years, and 10--the Messiah in person was
listening to his reading!
All the controversies in the synagogues and in the streets of Jerusalem
were merely repeated platitudes, when a man appeared in Galilee, who
claimed the highest authority and showed the greatest humility at the
same time. The Law was the highest authority for the Jews, and the
Emperor of Rome the highest authority for Pilate. But Jesus declared
himself to be the bearer of an authority which was incomparably higher
than any authority existing on earth. He did not beg either Andrew