Let us now consider Jesus’ views as to the nature of God and as to man’s relation to him. First of all he taught his disciples that they must regard God as their Father. This idea was by no means new or foreign to the thoughts of his hearers. In the Old Testament we not infrequently find Israel spoken of as the son of God; it was said that God took a special and gracious interest in the people of Israel, that he cared for them wholly, or especially, and that they were his beloved people whom he had chosen to be the agents of his revelation. Jesus taught that God’s fatherhood expresses itself in infinite love for men, that this love extends not only to the righteous but to the wicked as well, so that both receive his care and blessings: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.”[302] Furthermore he showed that the divine care is given to the humblest and smallest parts of the universe, so that the heavenly Father marks even the fall of a sparrow to the ground. The perfect nature of God’s love Jesus made the measure of God’s perfection; and, although he recognized man’s limitations and the moral value of an honest advance in righteousness, he set as man’s ultimate goal nothing less than the perfection of God himself as shown in perfect love.[303] Again he gave a new hope to outcasts and sinners by declaring that those who repented of their sins and desired to enter into right relations with God would not be despised. That was the meaning of the parable of the Prodigal Son: it illustrated the generosity of God’s affection and showed that it reached to the poorest and worst of men. To realize fully the significance of this teaching we must remind ourselves of the attitude of self-righteous Pharisees not only toward publicans and sinners but toward the common people, association with whom they scrupulously shunned and among whom they hardly admitted that true piety could exist. It was a scandal in their eyes that Jesus mingled freely with the classes whose contact was defilement and whose intimacy was shame, while he declared that he came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.