Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/465

 JEWS

401

JEWS

Rome would speedily come to an end at the appear- ance of the Messias, expected as a mighty deliverer of the faithful "children of the kingdom' . Meantime, it behooved the sons of Abraham to emulate the "righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees" whereby they would secure admittance into the Mes- sianic world-wide empire, of which Jerusalem would be the capital, and of which every Jewish member would be superior in things temporal as well as spirit- ual to the rest of the world then rallied to the worship of the one true God.

In reality, the Jews were far from prepared for the fulfilment of the promises which the Almighty had repeatedly made to their race. This was first shown to them, when a voice, that of John, the son of Zachary and the herald of the Messias, was heard in the Wilder- ness of Juda. It summoned, but with little success, all the Jews to a genuine sorrow for sin, which was in- deed foreign to their hearts, but which could alone, despite their title of "children of Abraham", fit them for the kingdom near at hand. This was next shown to them by Jesus, the Messias Himself, Who, at the very beginning of His public life, repeated John's simi- mons to repentance (Mark, i, 15), and Who, through- out His ministry, endeavoured to correct the errors of Judaism of the day concerning the kingdom which He had come to' found among men. With authorit \' truly Divine He bade His hearers not to be sat islicd wit h the outward righteousness of the Scribes antl the Phar- isees if they wished to enter into that kingdom, but to aim at the inner perfection which alone could lift up men's moral nature and render them worthy worshippers of their heavenly Father. The Kingdom of God, He plainly declared, had come upon His contemporaries, since Satan, God's enemy and man's, was under their eyes cast out by Himself andby His chosen disciples (Mark, xii, 20; Luke,x, IS). The kingdom which the Jews should expect is the Kingdom of God in its modest, secret, and as it were, insignificant origin. It is subject to the laws of or- ganic growth as all living things are, and hence its planting and early developments do not attract much attention; but it is not so with its further extension, destined as it is to pervade and transform the world.

This kingdom is indeed rejected by those who had the first claim to its possession and seemingly were the best qualified for entering into it; but all those, both Jews and Gentiles, who earnestly avail themselves of the invitation of the Gospel will be admitted. This is really a new Kingdom of God to be transferred to a new nation and governed by a new set of rulers, al- though it is no less truly the continuation of the King- dom of God under the Old Covenant. Once this kingdom is organized upon earth, its king, the true son and lord of David, goes to a far country, relying upon Ills representatives to be more faithful than the rulers of the old kingdom. Upon the king's return, this kingdom of grace will be transferred into a kingdom of glor}'. The duration of the kingdom on earth will out- live the ruin of the Holy City and of its Temple; it will be coextensive with the preaching of the Gospel to all nations, and this, when accomplished, will be the sign of the near approach of the kingdom of glory. In thus describing God's kingdom, Jesus justly treated as vain the hopes of His Jewish contemporaries that they should become masters of the world in the event of a conflict with Rome; He also set aside the fabric of legalism which their leaders regarded as to be per- petuated in the Messianic kingdom, but which in reality they shoukl have, considered as cither useless or positively harmful now that the time had come to extend "salvation out of the Jews" to the nations at large; plainly, the legal .sacrifices and ordinances had no longer any reason of being, since they had been in- stituted to prevent Israel from forsaking the true God, and since Monotheism was now firmly established in Is- rael; plainly. too, the" traditions of the Elders" should VIII.— 26

not be tolerated any longer, since they had gradually led the Jews to disregard some of the most essential precepts of the moral law embodied in the Decalogue.

Jesus did not come to destroy the Law or the Prophets, that is those sacred writings which He, no less than His Jewish contemporaries, distinctly recog- nized as inspired by the Holy Spirit; His mission, on the contrary, was to secure their fulfilment. In- deed, He would have destroyed the Law, if He had sided with the Scribes and the Pharisees who had raised a, fence to the Law, which actually encroached upon the sacred territory of the Law itself; but Ho fulfilled it by proclaiming the new Law of perfect love of God and man, whereby all the precepts of the Old Law were brought to completion. Again, He would have destroyed the Prophets, if like the same Scribes and Pharisees, He had pictured an image of God's kingdom and God's Messias solely by means of the glorious features contained in the prophetical writings; but He fulfilled them by drawing a pictiu-e which took into account lioth glorious and inglorious delineations of the Prophets of old, setting both in their right order and perspective. The Kingdom of God as described and founded by Jesus has an historical name. It is the Christian Church, which was able silently to leaven the Roman Empire, which has outlived the ruin of the Jew- ish Temple and its worship, and which, in the course of centuries, has extended to the confines of the world the knowledge and the worship of the God of Abraham, while Judaism has remained the barren fig- tree which Jesus condemned during His mortal life.

The death and resurrection of Jesus fulfilled the ancient types and prophecies concerning Him (cf. Luke, xxiv, 26, 27), and the visible bestowal of the Holy Ghost upon His assembled followers on Pente- cost Day gave them the light to realize this fulfilment (Acts, iii, 15) and the courage to proclaim it even in the hearing of those Jewish authorities who thought that they had by the stigma of the Cross put an end forever to the M&ssianic claims of the Nazarene. From this moment the Church which Jesus had silently or- ganized diu-ing His mortal life with Peter as its head and the other Apostles as his fellow-rulers, took the independent attitude which it has maintained ever since. Conscious of their Divine mission, its leaders boldly charged the Jewish rulers with the death of Jesus, and freely " taught and preached Christ Jesus ", disregarding the threats and injunctions of men whom they considered as in mad revolt against God and His Christ (Acts, iv). They solemnly proclaimed the ne- cessity of faith in Christ for justification and salvation, and that of baptism for membership in the religious community which grew rapidly under their guid- ance, and which recognized the risen Son of God as its Divinely constituted "Lord and Christ", " Prince and Saviour ", in a real, although invisible, manner, during the present order of things. According to them, these are plainly Messianic times as proved by the realiza- tion of Joel's prophecy concerning the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, so that the Jews " first" and next the Gentiles are now called to receive the Divine blessing so long promised in Abraham's Seed for all nations. Much as in these early days the infant Church was Jewish in external appearance, it even then caused Judaism to feel threatened in its whole system of civil and religious life (Acts, vi, 13,14). Hence followed a severe persecution against the Chris- tians, in which Saul (Paul) took an active part, and in the course of which he was converted miraculously.

At his conversion Paul found the Church spread far and wide by the very persecution meant to an- nihilate it, and ofticiallv pursuing its differentiation from Judaism by tlu' rcciptioii into its fold of Samari- tans who rejected the TeniU' worship in Jeru.salem, of the Ethioiiian eunuch, that is, of a class of men di.s- tinctly excludeil from the Judaic community by the Deutcronomic Law, and especially of the uncircum-