Geoffrey Hoyland: "The Great Outlaw" SCM Press 1944: Introduction; transcribed from a copy kindly supplied by the author's son, Dr H.J.Hoyland.
Unlike most introductions, this one is being written before and not after the book which it introduces. During the twenty-five years of my life as a schoolmaster I have been constantly talking and laying down the law to boys about all the matters that concern a school and all the subjects that are taught -- if not necessarily learned -- therein. I have talked and laid down the law about history and languages, about the rules of cricket and the way to solve simultaneous equations, about keeping the changing-room tidy and the need for brushing one's hair before meals. Constantly, on weekdays in `Scripture' lessons and on Sundays, I have had to talk about the Bible and religion, about the teaching of Jesus and the Christian way of life as it affects a school community. Sometimes I have talked to individuals and sometimes to groups about the inner things that perplex us all, the conflicts and disastrous breakings-down and failures which beset us and which spoil life so terribly for us and for other people, but all the time -- all through these twenty-five years -- it has been talk. It is easy to talk, and it is even fatally easy -- especially for a schoolmaster -- to talk through one's hat. Hard words, and for the matter of that soft words and even silly words, break no bones. There is nobody to gainsay, none to contradict. The words die away into silence and fade into a blur down the years and are gone, and now at the end of it all I am suddenly challenged to write -- not talk -- about the real meaning, to me, of Jesus of Nazareth, the man who stands behind all of life and all of hope in this mad modern world (no madder, perhaps after all, than the world in which he lived), the founder and inspirer of the great Society of Christians which for nearly two thousand years has been called his `Church'.
"Well," you may say, "that ought to be easy enough for one as used to talking as you say you are. All you have to do is to start away with the Nativity, touch on the Presentation in the Temple, pass on to the Baptism and the first Judaean Ministry, putting in a certain amount of local colour, and so on. Just write instead of talk, that's all!" So I thought myself, and so I began. I began several times, but always, after a few pages, I tore up what I had written, in shame and despair. I began to understand, at last, why there are so comparatively few `lives' of Jesus, compared with the thousands and thousands of books that have been written `round' him. You can't write directly about Jesus of Nazareth in that sort of way; it doesn't work, somehow. `Talk' is no good; he is too great for talk; you can talk about Julius Caesar or William the Conqueror or Shakespeare and even if you talk foolishly or ignorantly there is no great harm done, they¯ will not be hurt by it. But when you begin to write about Jesus of Nazareth you are apt to find, after a while, that he is standing at your elbow, reading what you have written. Then your pen falls from your hand and you tear up the paper, and then you begin to ask yourself: "Who am I, that I should attempt this thing? I am not a scholar; I am not even a theologian or a parson or an expert of any sort, and I am certainly not a saint. I am only an ordinary man, so how can I possibly do it?" So I gave it up for a time, till at last an answer did come to my questions and doubts, an answer something like this:
"It is true that you are not a saint or a theologian or a scholar. It is true that you have no special training and that you cannot speak with any authority, but you are, after all, just an ordinary man, and it was ordinary men -- and women -- that Jesus came to save. You yourself have listened to his words, like the crowds around Galilee, and like them you have gaped and misunderstood and gone away and forgotten. Like the Pharisees, you have stood apart and criticised; like Thomas, you have doubted; like Peter, you have denied, and like Judas you have utterly betrayed. Like the priest and the Levite who passed by on the other side, you have turned your back on his suffering friends; like the young ruler, you have preferred your own possessions to his service; like the fool, again and again you have built your house upon the sand and have seen it swept away by the flood. All this you have done and all this you have been, yet he has never taken his presence away from you nor cast you out. Like Bartimaeus, you have received your sight at his touch, not once only, but many times. Like the Magdalene, you have taken from him forgiveness, hope, and life. So, because you love him, you may write of him."
I have written this in order that you, if you read further in these pages, may understand both the method and the limitations of the writer. You may wonder, for instance, why he writes so often in the first person, putting "I think," "I believe," "I feel sure," instead of the more modest and impersonal "It is thought," "There are grounds for assuming," "We may take it for certain." The answer to this is that any writer who uses these latter phrases implies by them that he is speaking with an authority not entirely his own and that he represents some general body of opinion. I can make no such claim; that is why I have to write in the first person. Another, and more serious, criticism may be that so much of this book is pure `make-up'. "What right," you may say, "have you to invent all these scenes and events in the life of Jesus, and, in particular, what right have you to create, out of nothing, the solitary experiences and inner thoughts of his boyhood?"
My answer to this is that not only have I and every Christian the `right' to do this, but that it is our positive duty to make the attempt, each for himself and in his own way. The more I learn of -- and from -- both children and grown men and women, the more certain I am that the life and character of Jesus are a whole, grown from the seed as it were, and not `bedded out' by some miracle of divine gardening at his baptism. Men of his quality grow slowly, as he did, and the germs of all the thought and action and power of their maturity are to be found in their childhood. This, you may say, is pure imagination on my part. Of course it is; one is simply driven to be imaginative about the Great Outlaw just as an astronomer is driven to be `imaginative' when his telescope tell him that a planet is wandering from its calculated orbit. He must devise some theory to explain the irregularity, and we are no less compelled to seek for and to reconstruct -- out of our imagination, for we have no other materials -- some childish experience in the life of the Great Outlaw which may explain the course of his recorded life.
Before we begin to do so, however, there are two principles which we must lay to heart and never forget. In the first place our imaginary incidents and thoughts must always be true to that which is part of recorded history, to the incidents and the character that we find in the Gospels. Out `imaginary' Jesus must always square with the historic Jesus; it he does not pass that test he is false. In the second place we must never confuse our own imaginings with the historic facts or think for a moment or two that the two are of equal value. When you have finished reading the `imaginations' in this book, if you ever do so, put them aside and reject or forget them, for the real truth is something far greater. But if you cannot accept these you must make new imaginations of your own, for without them you will not understand Jesus.
Remember what St Joan said to Squire Robert in Shaw's great play, when he told her that her `voices' were not the voice of God, but just her own imagination. "Of course," she replied. "That is how the messages of God come to us."
One final word must be added about the title; why "The Great Outlaw"? Recently I have been reading to some children the stories of Robin Hood, and I have been struck again, as many must have been struck before, by the extra-ordinary parallel between the outlaw of Sherwood and the Founder of Christianity. Both of them laid aside a high estate to dwell humbly with the common folk, each gathered to himself, in his outlawry, a band of peasant followers. Both were pursued, persecuted, and finally slain by the powers of the State, and each was extraordinarily tender and chivalrous towards women. Each `robbed the rich to give to the poor,' though the methods of their robbery were widely different, for whereas Robin caught his fat abbots, tied them to trees, feasted them, and then made them disgorge their wealth to pay for their entertainment, Jesus simply talked to his `victims' so that they no longer wanted to be rich, but gave away their possessions gladly and joined his company. Above all, each was an outlaw because he stood for a better law than the law of the world in which he lived.
The word `Sherwood' will appear often in the pages that follow. Some may think it forced and inappropriate to transplant a forest name from the Midlands of mediaeval England to the hills of Palestine two thousand years ago, and yet the name has a wealth of implications clinging to it and I can find no substitute. It stands for the wilds of unspoilt nature to which both youth and age have always looked with longing, the one for adventure and the other for release, and in which, as I believe, the young Christ made his first conscious discovery of God. It stands for the outlaw's milieu, his territory where alone his writ runs and his law is obeyed, for he is an alien in the city and sojourns there at his peril, while in the greenwood he is at home. Sherwood stands, moreover, for hardness and simplicity and a life of few possessions; the wind and the rain are the outlaw's bedfellows and oftentimes he has not where to lay his head. Sherwood's gifts, too, are of a different quality from those of the city; running streams for books, the song of birds for the municipal band, the colours of the morning for tapestries woven by men, and the values of eternity for the fashions of an age. Some day Sherwood will come into its own and the forest and the city will be married together, so that Robin and the Sheriff, reconciled, will be equally at home in each, but that time is not yet. Meanwhile I would ask to be forgiven if, in these pages, I take the greenwood into Palestine; after all, if I err I do so in good company, for did not William Blake set the Countenance Divine amoung our English hillsides and build Jerusalem here among our dark Satanic mills?
Robin Hood is no more than a myth, the embodiment of the vague, resentful sense of injustice felt by the peasant people of England against their feudal masters, but even so, though Sherwood has long since been tamed, town-planned, and `developed,' Robin still lives in the hearts of the common people. "Robin Hood is here agin: all his merry thieves Hear a ghostly bugle-note shivering through the leaves, Calling as he used to call, faint and far away, In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day." (Note ** )
Jesus, the Great Outlaw, is no myth, and his bugle-notes -- more clear and melodious than Robin's -- sound in other places than the greenwood. He is still `calling as he used to call,' but his notes are neither faint nor far away. He still calls his `merry thieves' (he was always fond of thieves; one of them, we read, entertained him with delight in Jericho and another died beside him) to come out into Sherwood to join him, away from the delights and privileges of the city, away from possessions and `goods', into the peace and beauty of the greenwood. There are still hardships to be faced and the shadow of the gallows is still there in the background, but none the less they come, some creeping alone, some by twos and threes, others in great companies with music and the flying of banners. Now and again they cast longing backward glances at the lights behind them, yet still they come, for he who awaits them in Sherwood has words for them such as no other man ever spoke, and his service is the most perfect of all freedoms.
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(The Rejoice & Sing Enchiridion:edited by David Goodall; last amended 21/5/03)