An Aggressive Teacher

By Sagittarius

Christ was an aggressive teacher. Verbally, he hit back hard when attacked. No "gentle Jesus meek and mild" about him. His method was always to counter-attack and put the attacker on the defensive.

When Buddha came to a rest-house with a few followers one night and heard a sadhu there holding forth against him and his teaching he neither intervened nor allowed his followers to. This magnanimity had such an effect that the attacker became a follower. When abused he answered mildly that since he refused to accept the abuse it must fall back on its utterer. When, on the other hand, to take one characteristic example among many, some Pharisees asked Jesus why his disciples ate without the prescribed ritualistic washing of hands, he rounded on them, calling them hypocrites, quoting Isaiah against them and adding: "You are so busy holding on to the traditions of men that you let go the Commandment of God."* True, of course; but certainly the way to make enemies.**
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* In these articles my quotations from the Gospels will normally be taken from the translation of J. B. Philips, The Gospel in Modern English, Fontana paperback, Collins, as the Authorised Version is so over-familiar and its wording so obscure to the ordinary reader that the sharp edge of the sayings is blunted.
** St. Mark, ch. VII, v. 6-8Once when he was accusing some Pharisees of hypocrisy a doctor of law protested: "Master, when you say things like that you are insulting us as well."

And he returned: "Yes and I do blame you experts in law! For you pile up backbreaking burdens for other men to bear, but you yourselves will not raise a finger to lift them. Alas for you, for you build memorial tombs for the Prophets - the very men whom your fathers murdered. You show clearly enough how you approve of your father's actions. They did the actual killing and you put up a memorial to it."*
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* St. Luke, ch. XI, v. 46-48 Many of the lawyers may have deserved rebuke for being formalists - many lawyers do in all ages; but they could hardly help being antagonised by such an onslaught. Many of the Pharisees may have been hypocrites, but we known from surviving Jewish accounts that some at least of them were men of integrity and devotion sincerely trying to perpetuate all that was best in the Jewish tradition. Moreover, Christ's saying that all who were not for him were against him implied that they were deliberately being treated as enemies. To recognise the new teaching and Teacher must have required such integrity and understanding that there were bound to be quite a number who did not - priests, lawyers, ordinary people - and a wholesale denunciation of them seems unnecessarily aggressive to those steeped in any Eastern tradition. Buddha rejected the Brahmin monopoly of wisdom as firmly as Christ did that of the Pharisees, but he never denounced them; he simply accepted non-Brahmins into his Order on the same footing as Brahmins.

It was not only what Christ taught that was aggressive but the circumstances he chose for teaching it in. Buddha wandered quietly about the country, teaching those who would listen. The Maharshi did not even do that; he stayed at his Ashram at Tiruvannamalai and if any came and asked questions he answered them. But Jesus went and taught in the great Temple of Jerusalem during the most crowded festival of the Jewish year and while doing so mingled his own teaching with violent attacks on the guardians of the Jewish tradition, warning the people not to imitate their way of living* and telling them: "You are like white-washed tombs, which look fine on the outside but inside are full of dead men's bones and all kinds of rottenness. For you appear like good men on the outside - but inside you are a mass of pretence and wickedness."** From the social point of view, the priests and lawyers (and they were the guardians of the social order - the more important since political power was in the hands of an alien conqueror) must have regarded much of this as rabblerousing and the speaker as a dangerous revolutionary.
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* St. Matthew. ch. XXIII, v. 3
** St. Matthew, ch. XXIII, v. 27-28

Another striking feature is that Jesus constantly demanded belief not only in his teaching but in himself, and denounced those who did not believe in him. "The difference between us is that you come from below and I am from above. You belong to this world but I do not. That is why I told you, you will die in your sins. For unless you believe that I am Who I am you will die in your sins."* There is a similar emphasis in Islam; the Quran is full of assertions that Muhammad is a true Prophet and denunciations of those who do not recognise him as such. In both cases the assertion may have been true, the denunciation justified, but apart from the truth of a teaching there is the manner in which it is delivered to be considered. The former might be called 'vertical', the descent from Formless Truth to the forms of a human world, the latter 'horizontal', the permeation of the human world. Between the two is the impact, the striking of the vertical on the horizontal, and the nature of this can vary. How much more gracious it seems when Buddha says: "Don't believe because I tell you or anyone else does. Try it out for yourselves and see whether it works, and only believe if you find it brings good results."
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* St. John, ch. VIII, v. 23-24

But Christ's was the aggressive way.