When the question is asked, “Was Jesus the Messiah?” the obvious reply is, “Which Messiah?” For there seems to have been no standard idea of the Messiah.  The Messiah was, on the whole, as vague a term as, in modern politics, Socialism or Tariff Reform.  Neither of them has come; perhaps they never will come, and nobody knows what they will be till they do come.  Jesus is not what they expected.  A Jewish girl, at an American Student Conference a year or two ago, said about Jesus:  “I do not think he is the Messiah, but I do love him.”  Of course he was not in her Jewish sense.  The term was a vague one.

The main point was that men were uncertain about God.  God was unintelligible.  They did not understand his ideas, either for the nation or for the individual; God’s plans miscarried with such fatality.  Or if he had some deeper design, it was still all guesswork.  It seemed likely, or at least right, that he should achieve somehow the final damnation of the Gentiles—­the Romans, and the rest of us—­but nothing was very clear.  In the meantime, if God was going to damn the Gentiles in the next world, why should not the Jews do it in this?  Human nature has only too ready an answer for such a question—­as we can read in too many dark pages of history, in the stories of wars and religious persecutions.

The uncertainty about God in Judaism reacted on life and made it hard.

Even the virtues of men were difficult; they were apt to be nerveless and uncertain, because their aim was uncertain, and they wanted inspiration.  Of course there are always kindly hearts; but a man will never put forth quite his best for an uncertainty.  There was a want of centre about their virtues, a want of faith, and as a result they were too largely self-directed.[19]

A man was virtuous in order to secure himself in case God should be awkward.  There was no sufficient relation between man and God.  God was judge, no doubt; but his character could be known from his attitude to the Gentiles.  Could a man count on God and how far?  Could he rely on God supporting him, on God wishing to have him in this world and the next?  No, not with any certainty.  It comes to a fundamental unbelief in God, resting, as Jesus saw, on an essential misconception of God’s nature; and this resulted in the spoiling of life.  Men did not use God.  “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Jesus said (Luke 12:34); and it was not in God.  Men’s interest and belief were elsewhere.

Now the first thing that Jesus had to do, as a teacher, was to induce men to rethink God.  Men, he saw, do not want precepts; they do not want ethics, morals or rules; what they do need is to rethink God, to rediscover him, to re-explore him, to live on the basis of relation with God.  There is one striking difference between Christianity and the other religions, in that the others start with the idea that God is known.  Christians do not so start.  We are still exploring God on the lines of Jesus Christ—­rethinking God all the time, finding him out.  That is what Jesus meant us to do.  If Jesus had merely put before men an ethical code, that would have been to do what the moralists had done before him—­what moralists always do, with the same naive idea that they are doing a great deal for us.  His object was far more fundamental.