It is worth noticing that Jesus stands alone in refusing to despair of the greater part of mankind.  Contempt was in his eyes the unpardonable sin (Matt. 5:22).  How swift and decisive is his anger with those who make others stumble! (Luke 17:2).  The parable of the lost sheep reveals what he held to be God’s feeling for the hopeless man; and, as we have seen, his constant aim is to lead men to “think like God.”  The lost soul matters to God.  He sums up his own work in the world in much the same language as he uses about the shepherd in the parable:  “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost” (Luke 19:10).  The taunt that he was the “friend of publicans and sinners” really described what he was and wished to be (Luke 7:34).  God was their Heavenly Father.  The sight, then, of the masses of his countrymen, like worried sheep, worn, scattered, lost, and hopeless, waked in him no shade of doubt—­on the contrary, it was further proof to him of the soundness of his message.  Changing his simile, he told his disciples that the harvest was great, but the labourers few, and he asked them to pray the Lord of the harvest to thrust forth labourers into His harvest (Matt. 9:38).  The very name “Lord of the harvest” implies faith in God’s competence and understanding.  From the first, he seems to have held up before his followers that this wide service was to be their work—­“Come ye after me,” he said, “and I will make you to become fishers of men” (Mark 1:17)—­men, who should really “catch men” (Luke 5:10).

Like all for whom the world has had a meaning, Jesus, as we have seen, accepted the necessary conditions of man’s life.  Human misery and need were widespread, but God’s Fatherhood was of compass fully as wide, and Jesus relied upon it.  “Your heavenly Father knows,” he said (Matt. 6:32), and “with God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27).  The very miseries of the oppressed and hopeless people added grounds to his confidence.  People who had touched bottom in sounding the human spirit’s capacity for misery, were for him the “ripe harvest” (Matt. 9:37), only needing to be gathered (Mark 4:29).  He understood them, and he knew that he had the healing for all their troubles.  With full assurance of the truth of his words, he cried:  “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).  He spoke of a rest which careless familiarity obscures for us.  What understanding and sympathy he shows, when he adds:  “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light!” Misery, poverty and hunger, he had found, taught men to see realities.  The hungry, at least, were not likely to mistake a stone for bread—­they had a ready test for it, on which they could rely.  Poverty threw open the road to the Kingdom of God.  The clearing away of all temporary satisfactions, of all that cloaked the soul’s deepest needs, prepared men for real relations with the greatest Reality—­with God.  So that Jesus boldly said:  “Blessed are ye poor”; “Blessed are ye that hunger now”; “Blessed are ye that weep now” (Luke 6:20, 21); but he had no idea that they were always to weep.  If it was his to care for men’s hunger, it was not likely that he would have no comfort for their tears—­“Ye shall find rest unto your souls” (Matt. 11:29)—­“They shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4).