THE MIND OF A POET
Robert Meyers

The German poet and dramatist Schiller once said, “Even the gods fight in vain against stupidity.” When one reads the Gospel of John, he sees how much Christ was handicapped by people who insisted upon interpreting his poetic speech with wooden literalness.

Nicodemus mumbled about the impossibility of a new birth, as if Jesus spoke of the flesh. The woman at the well thought Jesus was about to fix it so that she would never be thirsty again, or have to come to that wearisome place to pull on the rope. The Jews who knew the parents of Christ stared at him obtusely when he spoke of being the bread that came down from heaven. All these prosaic people stubbed their toes on literalism.

No man can understand a poet unless he has some little bit of the poet in him. And Shelley was right when he called Jesus the greatest poet who ever lived. It would be a real service to thousands of believers if teachers could demonstrate for them, often, how poetic the mind of Christ was. He spoke almost constantly in metaphors and in the lovely parallelisms of Jewish poetry, his quick mind forever searching for analogies between the world of tangible reality and the inner truths which he sought to make known. Above all else, the poetic mind is a seeker of analogies. And above all other teachers, Jesus sought them.

The kingdom, he said, is like a farmer sowing; like a mustard seed growing ten thousand times beyond its size; like treasure found in a field; like . . . like. . . like. Never the prosy definitions, never the dull dead language of laboratory demonstration. Instead, the quicksilver analogies of the truly poetic mind. And the eternal glory of poetry is that it opens out, instead of shutting in. It pushes the responsive mind out upon highroads of mental adventure. But one must respond.

How many dreary religious debates would have been avoided if men had responded more sensitively to the poetry of Christ instead of splitting hairs as if he had been the lawyer to end all lawyers, dividing and sub-dividing the rules so that finally a written code would be available for every conceivable situation. He was above all else a divine poet in his way of teaching.

Everyone who has ever taught school has dreamed of the ideal system of courses. It is probably part of the providence of a wise God that we do not all get to put them into practice, but I have often wished that a specific course could be made requisite for students in Christian colleges. It would explore the nature of Biblical poetry, in both Testaments, and it would stress the vital importance of interpreting poetry and prose differently. The great utterances of Christ, almost invariably poetic in their structure, simply cannot be interpreted by the rules which apply to prose. If they are, something is lost at the center which distorts or destroys the meaning.

Understood as metaphors, his sayings are vivid and illuminating. Understood as legalistic commentaries, they often provide only the ammunition for endless logic-chopping. Think how many futile debates would never take place if young men and women could be taught that Christ was a poet in love with people, not a lawyer devising the world’s most elaborate book of rules!