between the human soul and God. This ideal union is expressed continually and with great variety. The vine with its branches[1] symbolizes that relation between Jesus and his followers, which, whatever attitude one may hold towards current evangelical theology, is universally felt to include the relation of the divine and human. His followers are through him to be one, not only with each other, but with God.[2] In his Father's home[3] were, to use his incomparable figure, many mansions, in which he and they were to live. And in his invitation so artistically introduced by Matthew, there is proffered to the weary and the heavy laden a companionship that shall at once make them yoke fellows with himself and friends of the Father.[4]
It is in illustration of this unity of human life with that of the divine that Jesus repeatedly sets himself forth in mystical language as the food of the soul, the bread that came down from heaven.[5] And if at times his language grows more striking than our colder western imaginations often venture,[6] and indeed becomes a hard saying even to his disciples, he instantly explains his analogy in terms that are at once profound and intelligible. The same is true of the symbolical teaching of the Eucharist.[7] So great and essential did this relationship appear to the earliest church that the whole significance of Jesus as a mere ethical teacher is overtopped by it, and in the writings of Paul and John it becomes the leading conception of both the person and the influence of the Christ. He was the incarnate God—the perfect realization of this capacity for union between the human and divine, and at the same time the channel through whom the race itself might be brought into union with God, that it might enjoy
- ↑ John 15:1, 2. It is, perhaps, not without significance that Jesus here speaks of himself as the true vine—as if the relationship thus described was not confined alone to that between himself and men, but that such union was characteristic of men.
- ↑ John 17:23. Compare with this, John 13:20.
- ↑ John 14:2, 3.
- ↑ Matt. 11:27-36.
- ↑ John 6:32, 35.
- ↑ See especially John 6:51-64. The saneness and truth of this passage is seen in the prevailing use made of it in the history of doctrine.
- ↑ Matt. 26:26-30 and parallels. Cf. I Cor. 11:23-26.
