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THE
LIFE OF CHRIST
BY
REV. WILLIAM HANNA, D.D. LL.D.,
EDINBURGH,
AUTHOR OF THE LIFE OF REV. DR. CHALMERS
WRITTEN AFTER DR. HANNA'S OWN PERSONAL VISIT TO PALESTINE.
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AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY.
150 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK.
CONTENTS.
THE EAELIEE YEAES OF OUE LOED'S LIFE ON EAETIL
Preface ¦ — page 7
L The Annunciation — Mary and Elizabeth . • 13
IL The Nativity 21
UL The Presentation in the Temple 31
IV. The Visit of the Magi 41
V. The Massacre of the Innocents, and the Flight into Egypt ' 51
VX The Thirty Years at Nazareth — Christ among the Doctors 60
VIL The Forerunner 69
-TUL TheBaptism -*- 80
IX. Tho Temptation 88
X. The First Disciples - 100
XL The First Miracle 110
XIL The Cleansing of the Temple 121
XHL Tho Conversation -with Nicodemus 129
XIV. The Woman of Samaria 138
XV. The Jewish Nobleman and the Roman Centurion 149
XVL The Pool of Bethesda - 157
XVIL The Synagogue of Nazareth ¦>- 165
XVHL First Sabbath in Capernaum, and First Circuit of Galilee 174
CHRIST'S MTNISTEY IN GALILEE.
L The Two Healings — the Leper and the Paralytic -- 185
IL The Charge of Sabbath-Breaking 194
UL The Calling to the Apostolate of St. Peter, St Andrew, St James, St John,
and St. Matthew - 204
4 CONTENTS.
IV The Sermon on the Mount 213
V. The Baising of the Widow's Son and tho Buler's Daughter 221
VL The Embassy of the Baptist — the Great Invitation 230
VII The Woman who was a Sinner -- - - — 243
VHL The Collision with the Pharisees— the First Parables— the Stilling of the
Tempest — the Demoniac of Gadara 250
IX. The Mission of the Twelve 268
X The Feeding of the Five Thousand, and the Walking upon the Water 277
XL The Discourse in the Synagogue of Capernaum — 285
XDI. Pharisaic Traditions — the Syro-Phoenician Woman - 296 <
XHL The Circuit through Decapohs 304
XLV. The Apostolic Confession at Csesarea-Philippi 31ii
XV. The Rebuke of St. Peter - 320
XVI Tho Transfiguration 329
Soto 337
THE CLOSE OF CHRIST'S MTNISTEY.
L The Descent of the Mount of Transfiguration 341
EL The Payment of the Tribute-Money — the Strife as to Who should be Greatest
in the Kingdom of Heaven- 350
IH. Christ and his Brethren - ...... 367
IV. Christ at the Feast of Tabernacles - 365
V. Jesus the Light of the World 373
VL The Cure of the Man born Blind - - 381
VIL The Good Shepherd — 390
VEH. Incidents in Our Lord's Last Journey to Jerusalem . 403
IX Our Lord's Ministry in Persea, East of tho Jordan . 411
X The Parables of the Persean Ministry 42]
XL The Good Samaritan — . . . 431
XH. The Lord's Prayer 439
XHI. Jesus the Kesurrection and the Life ... 447
XIV. The Raising of Lazarus • 457
XV. The Last Journey through Perasa: the Ten Lepers— the Coming of the King.
dom— the Question of Divorce— Little Children brought to Him the
Young Ruler ^gg
XVL Jesus at Jericho— the Request of the Sons of Zebedee 475
XVII. The Anointing at Bethany . . 434
CONTENTS. 6
THE PASSION WEEK.
I. The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem . . 493
H The Fig-Tree Withering away— The Second Cleansing of the Temple 500
ECt. The Barron Fig-Tree— Parables of the Two Sons and of the Wicked Hus
bandmen - 508
IV The Marriage of the King's Son — Question as to the Tribute-Money 516
V Question of the Sadducees as to the Resurrection of the Dead 526
VL The Lawyer's Question — tne Two Great Commandments — Christ is David's
Son and David's Lord - 534
VIL The Woes denounced upon the Pharisees - - 541
VHL The Widow's Mite — Certam Greeks desire to see Jesus - 547
IX The Prophecies ofthe Mount 556
X The Prophecies of the Mount 664
XL The Parable of the Ten Virgins 570
XH. The Parable of the Talents 679
XIHt Tlie Day of Judgment- ---------- -•••••••o»«««*»««a*a»3M»-sa***:33=s*****-*o-3:aaiD» 588
XIV. The Day of Judgment 596
XV. The Washing of the Disciples' Feet 603
XVL The Exposure of Judas 611
XVH. The Lord's Supper 622
XVDX Gothsemane 631
THE LAST DAY OF OUE LOED'S PASSION.
L The Betrayal and the Betrayer 643
H The Denials, Repentance, and Restoration of St. Peter -- 653
UL The Trial before the Sanhedrim 663
IV. Christ's First Appearance before Pilate 672
V. Christ's Appearance before Herod • • 681
VI. Christ's Second Appearance before Pilate 690
VEL The Daughters of Jerusalem Weeping — 701
VHL The Penitent Thief- 711
IX The Mother of our Lord - 723
X The Darkness and the Desertion •- 733
XL "It is Finished" — 741
XH The Attendant Miracles 749
XHL The Physical Cause ofthe Death of Christ 759
XIV. The Burial - 7«fl
6 CONTENTS.
THE FOETY DAYS AFTEE OUE LOED'S EESUEEECTION.
L The Resurrection 777
IL Appearance of Mary Magdalene 786
HI, The Journey to Emmaus - - 794
IV. The Evening Meeting - • 802
V. The Incredulity of Thomas 811
VL The Lake-Side of Galilee 820
VIL Peter and John 827
VHL The Great Commission - -. - — 836
IX The Ascension ................................ S5S
PREFACE.*
"PREFIXED TO "THE FORTY DAYS AFTER OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION," "WHICH '-TAB ISSUED
NEXT AFTER "THE LAST DAY OF OUR LORD'S PASSION," THE PART OF THE LIFE FIRST
PUBLISHED.]
I have long had the conviction that the results of that fuller and
more exact interpretation of the books of the New Testament to which
biblical scholars have been conducted, might be made available for
framing such a continuous and expanded narrative of the leading in
cidents in our Eedeemer's life as would be profitable for practical
and devotional, rather than for doctrinal or controversial purposes,
Ii was chiefly to try whether I could succeed in realizing the concep
tion I had formed of what such a narrative might be made, that the
volume on the Last Day of our Lord's Passion was pubhshed. The
favorable reception which it met has induced me to issue a companion
volume on the succeeding and closing period of our Lord's life on
earth. Should this meet with anything hke equal favor, I shall be
encouraged to prosecute the task of completing the narrative in a
similar form.
To one who previously had doubts of the historic truth of the
entire gospel narrative, a personal inspection of the localities in which
the events are represented as having occurred, must have a peculiar
interest and value. It was in such a state of mind, half inclined to
* By means of the best critical helps, the writer was, in the first instance,
at pains to read aright and harmonize the accounts given by the different evan
gelists. Out of them he has endeavored to construct a continuous and expanded
narrative, intended to bring out, as vividly as possible, not only the sequence of
the incidents, but the characters, motives, and feelings of the different actors
and spectators in the events described. He has refrained from all critical or
doctrinal discussions as alien from the object he had in view; nor has he thought
it necessary to burden the following pages with references to all the authorities
consulted. The English reader will find in the writings of Alford, Stier, or Elli-
oott, the warrant for most of those readings of the original and inspired records
upon which the following narrative is based. [From the part first issued. Mav a. «*».'
8 PREFACE.
beheve that the whole story of the gospel was legendary, that M.
Eenan visited the Holy Land three years ago. He has told us the
result. "All that history," he says, "which at a distance seemed to
float in the clouds of an unreal world took' instantly a body, a solidity,
which astonished me. The striking accord between the texts and the
places, the marvellous harmony of the evangelical picture with the
country which served as its frame, were to me as a revelation. I had
before my eyes a fifth gospel, mutilated but still legible ; and ever
afterwards in the recitals of Matthew and Mark, instead of an ab
stract Being that one would say had never existed, I saw a wonderful
human figure hve and move." In listening to this striking testimony
as to the effect of his visit to the East, we have deeply to regret that
with M. Eenan the movement from incredulity towards behef stopped
at its first- stage.
Besides its use in cases hke that of Eenan, in removing preexist
ing doubts, a journey through Palestine is of the greatest service in
giving a certain freshness and vividness to one's conceptions of the
incidents described by the evangelists, which nothing else can impart.
Its benefits in this respect it would be difficult to exaggerate. But if
any one go to the Holy Land full of the expectation of gazing on
spots, or limited localities, once hallowed by the Eedeemer's pres
ence, and closely linked with some great event in his history ; or if he
go, cherishing the idea that a study of the topography will throw
fresh hght upon some of the obscurer portions of the gospel record,
he will be doomed, I apprehend, to disappointment. I had the
strongest possible desire to plant my foot upon some portion of the
soil of Palestine, on which I could be sure that Jesus once had stood.
I searched diligently for such a place, but it was not to be found.
Walking to and fro, between Jerusalem and Bethany, you have the
feeling — one that no other walks in the world can raise — that He
often traversed one or other of the roads leading out to the village.
But when you ask where, along any one of them, is a spot of which
you can be certain that Jesus once stood there, you cannct find it.
The nearest approach you can make to the identification of any such
spot, is at the point where the lower road curves round the shoulder
of Mount Olivet, the point from which the first view of Jerusalem
would be got by one entering the city by this route. It is here that
Dr. Stanley supposes Jesus to have paused and beheld the city, and
PREFACE, g
to have wept over it. There is every likelihood that his supposition
is correct ; and it was with his description fresh in the memory, that
more than once I visited the memorable spot. I found, however, that
the best topographer of Jerusalem and its neighborhood, whom I had
the fortune to meet there — one who had studied the subject for years —
was strongly inclined to the belief that it was along the higher and
not the lower road that the triumphal procession passed; and that it
was on his reaching the summit of Mount Ohvet, that the city burst
upon the Saviour's view. It did not alter my own conviction that Dr.
Stanley was correct; but it hindered, indeed destroyed the impression
which absolute certainty would have produced.
There is indeed one circle of limited diameter, I beheve but one,
that you can trace on the soil of Palestine, and be absolutely certain
that Jesus once stood within its circumference — that which you may
draw round Jacob's well near Sychar. I had determined to tread
that circle round and round; to sit here and there and everywhere
about, so as to gratify a long-cherished wish. How bitter the disap
pointment on reaching it to find no open space at the well-mouth ;
but, spread all round, the remains of an old building, over whose
ruinous waUs we had to scramble and slide down, through heaps of
stones and rubbish, till through two or three small apertures we look
ed down into the undiscoverable well!
It would seem indeed that, Jacob's well excepted, there is not a
definite locality in Palestine that you can certainly and intimately
connect with the presence of Jesus Christ. The grotto shown at
Bethlehem may have been the stable of the village inn, but who can
now assure us of the fact? It is impossible to determine the site of
that house in Nazareth under whose roof, for thirty years, Jesus lived.
Of Capernaum, the city in which most of his wonderful works were
wrought, scarcely a vestige remains. Travellers and scholars are
disputing which is Capernaum among various obscure heaps of ruins
on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee. No one, I beheve,
can tell the exact place where any one of our Lord's miracles was
wrought, or any one of his parables was spoken. The topographical
obscurity that hangs around the history of Jesus, reaches its climax
at Jerusalem. Bethany is sure, but the house of Lazarus is a fable.
The Mount of Olives remains, but it cannot have been where they
show it, so near the city, that the real Gethsemane lay. You cannot
10 PREFACE.
err as to the ridge on which of old the temple stood, but where were
the courts around it, in which Jesus so often taught ; where the palace
of the high priest, the hall of Pilate, the ground on which the cross
stood, the new sepulchre in which they laid his body ? Whenever
you try to get at some fixed and hmited locality, it eludes your search.
All is obscurity; either utterly unknown, or covered with a thicken
ing cloud of controversy. May it not have been meant that the
natural, but in this case too human curiosity that we cherish, should
be baffled? Is it not better that he should have passed away, leaving
bo little of minute local association connected with his presence in the
midst of us? Does it not seem more in accordance with the dignity
of his divine character, that of all the lives that were ever lived on
earth, his should be the one that it is least possible to degrade by rude
familiarities of conception ; his the name which it is least possible to
mix up with that superstition which ever seeks an earthly shrine at
which to offer its incense?
It is true that tradition has fixed on many holy places in Pales
tine, and that each year sends crowds of worshippers to these shrines ;
but as the darkness of those ages in which these traditions arose is
giving place to hght, the faith in many of these holy places cannot
stand against the gathering force of evidence. The time must come,
however long it be in arriving, when what is doubtful and what is sure
shall be clearly known; and if then, still more than now, it shall
appear that the most wonderful of all earthly lives has left the fewest
visible marks of itself behind in recognisable localities, it will also,
perhaps, be believed that this is so, not without a purpose, but that
it should be manifest that the ties of Jesus of Nazareth were not with
places, but with persons; the story of his life one easily and equally
understood in all ages and in every land.
It was while the sheets of this volume were passmg through the
press, that the Vie de Jesus came into the writer's hands. I need not
say with what lively interest I turned to that part of it in which the
period of our Saviour's life of which this volume treats should have
been represented. I found an utter blank. "For the historian," says
M. Eenan, " the life of Jesus terminates with his last breath." It
would perhaps scarcely be fair to call this a verdict against evidence,
as M. Eenan has told us that in a future volume he will explain to us
how the legend of the resurrection arose. We must be permitted
PREFACE. 11
however, even in absence of such explanation, to express our strong
conviction of the unreasonabless of that procedure which assumes that
what are good and sufficient materials for history up to the death of
Jesus, are utterly useless afterwards. Admitting for the moment that
the resurrection, as a miraculous event, did not and could not happen,
the seeing and conversing with Jesus was surely a thing as much
within the power of human testimony to establish at one time as at an
other. And if those witnesses are to be credited, as M. Eenan admits
they are, who tell us of seeing and hearing him before the crucifixion,
why are the same witnesses to be discredited when they tell us of
seeing and hearing him after that event ? If the mixture of miracle
with recorded incident throws the later period out of the historian's
pale, should it not have done the same with the earher period also ?
This however is not the place to enter upon any of those momen
tous topics which M. Eenan has brought up afresh for discussion.
There are different modes in which his Life of Jesus may be met and
answered. One is a full and critical exposure of all the arbitrary
assumptions and denials, affirmations without proofs, doubts without
reasons, inconsistencies and contradictions, errors historical and ex
egetical, which are to be met with throughout the volume. Eenan' s
own range of scholarship is so extensive, and he has derived his ma
terials from so many sources, that we trust no incompetent hand will
rashly undertake the critical dissection of his book. A simpler, more
direct, and more effective method of dealing with this work, would
be to expose its flagrant failure in what may be regarded as
its capital design and object : to eliminate all that is superhuman
and divine from the character and life of Christ, and yet leave
him a man of such pure, exalted, unrivalled virtue, as to be worthy
of the unreserved and unbounded love and reverence of mankind.
Let the fancy sketch of Jesus of Nazareth, which M. Eenan has
presented to us, be stripped of that rich coloring which he has thrown
around it, and it will appear as that of a man who at times showed
himself to be ignorant, weak, prejudiced, extravagant, fanatical;
wno in his teaching advanced sometimes what was foolish, some
times what was positively immoral; who in his practice, was often
himself misled, and became at least an accomplice in mislead
ing and deceiving others. It is such a man whom he holds forth
to us, and would have us venerate as the author of the Christian
12 PREFACE.
faith. Here in this latest assault upon the divinity of Christ, we have
it set before us what kind of human character is left to Him if his.
Sonship to God be denied. It is a singular result of this attempt to
strip Christ of all divine quahties and perfections, that it mars and
mutilates his character even as a man. The two elements — the hu
man, thr divine — are so inseparably interwoven, that you cannot take
away the one and leave the other unimpaired. If Jesus be not one
with the Father in the possession of divine attributes, he can nd longer
be regarded as the type and model of a perfect humanity. A curious
inquiry thus suggests itself into the modifications to which the hu
manity was subjected by its alliance with divinity in the complex
character of the Eedeemer, and into the manner in which the natural
and the supernatural were woven together in his earthly history.
But without any controversial treatment, the evil which M. Eenan's
work is fitted to produce may be neutralized by a simple recital of
the Life of Jesus, so as to show that the blending of the natural with
the miraculous, the human with the divine, is essential to the cohe
rence and consistency of the record — absolutely precluding such a
conception of Christ's character as that which M. Eenan has pre
sented — that the fabric of the gospel history is so constructed that if
you take out of it the divinity of Jesus, the whole edifice falls into
ruins. The writer ventures to hope that such a Life of Jesus as he
meditates may at least partially serve this purpose, and be useful in
promoting an intelligent and devout faith in Jesus of Nazareth, the
Son of Mary, as the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind.
W. HANNA
Edinbubqh, Nov. 11, 1863.
V The Appendixes added to the last two parts of the Life have been omitted, and
slight retrenchments made in the chapter on onr Lord's baptism.
THE
LIFE OF CHRIST.
THE EARLIER YEARS OF OUR LORD'S LIFE 0^
EARTH.
The Annunciation — JVLary and -Elisabeth.*
" In the sixth month" — half a year from the time when, within the
tioly place at Jerusalem, he had stood on the right side of the altar
A incense, and announced to the incredulous Zacharias the birth of
the Baptist — the angel Gabriel was sent to an obscure Galilean vil
lage to announce a still greater birth — that of the Divine Eedeemer
of mankind. As we open, then, the first page in the history of our
Lord's earthly life, we come at once into contact with the supernatural.
The spirit-world unfolds itself ; some of its highest inhabitants become
palpable to sense, and are seen to take part in human affairs. In the
old patriarchal and prophetic ages angels frequently appeared, con
versing with Abraham and Hagar, and Lot and Jacob ; instructing
in their ignorance, or comforting in their distress, or strengthening
in their weakness, Joshua and Gideon, and Elijah and Daniel and
Zechariah. Excluding, however, those instances in which it was the
Angel of the Covenant who appeared, the cases of angelic manifesta
tion were comparatively rare, and lie very thinly scattered over the
four thousand years which preceded the birth of Christ. Within the
half century that embraced this hfe we have more instances of angelic
in terposition than in all the foregoing centuries of the world's history.
At its opening and at its cJose angels appear as taking a special
interest in events which had httle of outward mark to distinguish
o Luke 1 : 26-56.
14 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
them. Gabriel announces to Zacharias the birth of John, to Mary
the birth of Jesus. An angel warns Joseph in a dream to take the
young child down to Egypt. On the night of the great birth, and for
the first time on earth, a multitude of the heavenly host is seen. In
the garden of Gethsemane, an angel comes to strengthen our Lord in
his great agony. On the morning of the resurrection, angels appear,
now sitting, now standing, within and without the sepulchre, as if
they thronged around the place where the body of the Lord had lain
When from the top of Olivet the cloud carried the rising Jesus out
of the apostles' sight, two angels stand beside the apostles as they
gaze so steadfastly up into the heavens, and foretell his second coming.
Nor do they withdraw from human sight when the ministry of our
Lord has closed. Mingling with the other miraculous agency where
by the kingdom of Christ was estabhshed and extended, theirs
appears. An angel releases Peter, commissions Philip, instructs
Cornelius, smites Herod, stands amid the terrors of the shipwreck
before Paul.
Is there aught incredible in this ? If there be indeed a world of
spirits, and in that world Christ fills the place our faith attributes to
him ; if in that world there be an innumerable company of angels ; if
the great design of our Lord's visit to this earth was to redeem our
sinful race to God, and unite us with the unfallen members of his
great family, then it was not unnatural that those who had worship
ped around his throne should bend in wonder over his cradle, stand
by his side in his deep agony, roll away the stone rejoicing from his
sepulchre, and attend him as the everlasting doors were lifted up,
when, triumphant over death and hell, he resumed his place in the
eternal throne. When the Father brought his First-begotten into the
world, the edict was, " Let all the angels of God worship him." Shall
we wonder, then, that this worship, in one or two of its acts, should
be made manifest to human vision, as if to tell us what an interest
the incarnation excited, if not in the minds of men, in another and
higher branch of the great community of spirits ? From the begin*
ning angels were interested spectators of what transpired on earth/
When under the moulding hand of the Great Creator the present
economy of material things was spread forth — so good, so beautiful —
they sang together, they shouted for joy. When sin and death made
their dark entrance, angels stood by, hailing the first beams of Hght
that fell upon the darkness, welcoming the first human spirit that
made its way into the heavenly mansions. The slow development of
the divine purposes of mercy in the history of human redemption,
they watched with eager eye. Still closer to our earth they gathered,
MARY AND ELISABETH. 15
still more earnest was their gaze as the Son of the Eternal prepared
to leave the glory he had with the Father, that he might come down
and tabernacle as a man among us. And when the great event of his
incarnation at last took place, it looked for a short season as if they
were to mingle visibly in the affairs of men, and of that new kingdom
which the Ancient of Days set up. It was the Son of God who
brought these good angels down along with him. He has mediated
not only between us and the Father, but between us and that elder
branch of the great commonwealth of spirits, securing their services
for us here, preparing us for their society hereafter. He has taught
them to see in us that seed out of which the places left vacant by the
first revolt in heaven are to be filled. He has taught us to see in
them our elder brethren, to a closer and eternal fellowship with whom
we are hereafter to be elevated. Already the interchange of kindly
offices has commenced. Though since he himself has gone they have
withdrawn from human vision, they have not withdrawn from earthly
service under the Eedeemer. Are they not all ministering spirits
sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs of salvation ? Who
shall recount to us wherein that gracious ministry of theirs consists ;
who shall prove it to be a fancy, that as they waited to bear away
the spirit of Lazarus to Abraham's bosom, they hover round the
death-bed of the behever still, the tread of their footstep, the stroke
of their wing unheard as they waft the departing spirit to its eternal
home? "The angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Gahlee,
named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man, whose name was
Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary."
Little information is given in the gospels as to the previous history
either Of Joseph or Mary. He, we are told, was of the house of
David, of royal lineage by direct descent; but that hne now fallen
so low that he was but a village mechanic, a carpenter. Mary too,
we have reason to beheve, was also of the royal stock of David; yet
in so humble a condition of life as made it natural that she should be
betrothed to Joseph. This betrothal had taken place, and the new
hopes it had excited agitate the youthful Mary's heart. She is alone
in her dwelling, when, lifting up her eyes, she sees the form of the
angel, and hears his voice say unto her : " Hail, thou that art highly
favored, the Lord is with thee : blessed art thou among women." To
Zacharias he had spoken at once by name, and had proceeded with
out prelude to deliver the message with which he had been charged.
He enters more reverently this humble abode at Nazareth than he had
entered the holy place of the great temple at Jerusalem. He stands
16 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
more reverently before this youthful maiden than before the aged
priest. He cannot open to her his message till he has offered her
such homage as heavenly messenger never paid to any member of our
race. Is it any wonder that saluted so by one who, wearing, as in
all likelihood he did, our human form, was yet like no man she had
aver seen, Mary should have been "troubled at his saying;" troubled
as she felt the privacy of her seclusion thus invaded, and looked upon
that strange, unearthly, yet most attractive form which stood before
her ? She is not so troubled however as to hinder her from casting
in her thoughts "what manner of salutation this should be." She
receives the salutation in silence, with surprise, with awe, with
thoughtful wonder. In sympathy with feelings depicted in her alarm
ed yet inquiring countenance, Gabriel hastens to reheve her fears
and satisfy her curiosity. "Fear not," he says, after a brief pause
"Fear not, Mary;" the very familiar mention of her name carrying
with it an antidote against alarm. " Fear not, Mary ; for thou hast
found favor with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb,
and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be
great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest ; and the Lord God
shall give unto him the throne of his father David : and he shall reign
over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be
no end." There was scarce a woman in Israel, in those days, who did not
cherish it as the very highest object of desire and ambition to be the
mother of the promised Messiah. Mary was a woman in Judah, and
the man to whom she was betrothed belonged also to that stock from
which the Messiah was to spring. Perhaps the hope had already
dawned that this great honor might be in store for her. Her devout
and thoughtful habits had made her f amiliar with the old prophecies
that foretold the Messiah's advent, and with the manner in which his
kingdom was there spoken of. Obscure and mysterious as much of
what Gabriel said may have appeared to her, she seems at once to
have apprehended that it was of the birth of this great Son of David
that he was speaking. She does not ask, she seems not to have
needed any information on that point. Nor does she hesitate to ac
cept as true ah that Gabriel had declared. She puts indeed a ques
tion which, if its meaning had not been interpreted by the manner in
which Gabriel dealt with it, and by the subsequent conduct of Marv
herself, we might have regarded as akin to that of Zacharias; as
indicating that she too had given way to incredulity. But hers was
a question of curiosity not of unbelief; a question akin, not to the
one which Zacharias put about the birth of John, but to that of
MART AND ELISABETH. . 17
Abraham about the birth of Isaac, when he said to the angel, "Where
by shall I know this ?" a question implying no failure of faith, for we
know that Abraham staggered not at the promise through unbelief,
but expressive simply of a desire for further information, for some
sign in confirmation of his faith. He got such a sign and rejoiced.
And so with Mary : her question, hke the patriarch's, springing not
from the spirit of a hesitating unbelief, but from natural curiosity,
and the wish to have the faith she felt confirmed. Her desire was
granted. She was told that the Holy Ghost should come upon her,
that the power of the Highest should overshadow her, that the child
afterwards to be born was now miraculously to be conceived. And
as a sign, this piece of information, new to her we may believe, was
given, that her relative, the aged Elisabeth, was also to have a son.
Her question having been answered, and the manner of the great
event so far revealed as to throw her back simply on the promise and
power of God, Mary says : " Behold the handmaid of the Lord ; be it
unto me according to thy word." What a contrast here between
Zacharias and Mary! The aged priest had been taught from child
hood in one of the schools of the prophets, and must have been
familiar with all those narratives and prophecies which might have
prepared him to beheve, and he had besides the experience of years
to give power to his trust in God. Mary was of humbler parentage ;
her opportunities of instruction but meagre compared with his; hers
too was the season of inexperienced youth ; her faith was as yet un
fortified by trial. What he was asked to beheve was unlikely indeed,
and altogether unlooked for, yet not beyond the power of nature.
What she is asked to believe is a direct miraculous forthputting of the
great power of God. Tet the old priest staggers, while the young
maiden instantly confides.
In Mary's immediate and entire behef of the angel's word, a far
greater confidence in God was shown than could have been shown by
Zacharias, even had he received Gabriel's message as she did, with
out a suspicion or a doubt. She who, being betrothed, proved un
faithful, was, by the law of Moses, sentenced to be stoned to death ;
and though that law had now fallen into disuse, or was but seldom
literally executed, yet she who was deemed guilty of such a crime
stood exposed to the loss of character, and became the marked object
of pubhc opprobrium. Mary could not fail at once to perceive, and
to be sensitive to the misconceptions and the perils which she would
certainly incur. She might, in self-vindication, relate what Gabriel
had told her, but how many would believe her word? What voucher
could she give that it was actually a heavenly messenger she had
Ufa of OlirHt. 2
18 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
seen, and that what he had said was true ? Many a distressing fear
as to the future— as to the treatment she might receive from Joseph
the calumnies, the shame, the scorn to which from other quarters she
might be exposed — might have arisen, if not to check her faith, ye1
to hold her own acquiescence in the will of God in timid and trem
bling suspense; but, strong in the simphcity and fulness of her trust,
•she puts all fears away, and committing herself into the hands of him
whose angel she beheves Gabriel to be, she says, " Behold the hand
maid of the Lord ; be it unto me according to thy word."
Let us notice one other element in Mary's faith : its humility, its
complete freedom from that undue thought of self which so often
taints the faith of the most believing. Wonderful as the announce
ment is, that a child born of her should, by such miraculous concep
tion as Gabriel had spoken of, be the Son of the Highest, should be
a king sitting on the throne of David — his kingdom one that should
outrival David's, of which there never should be an end— Mary har
bors no doubt, raises no question, thinks not, speaks not of her own
unworthiness to have such honor conferred on her, or of her unfit
ness to be the mother of such a child. As if one so unworthy of the
least of God's mercies had no right or title to question his doings,
however great a gift it pleased him to confer, she sinks ah thought
of self in thought of him, and says, "Behold the handmaid of the
Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." A finer instance of
simple, humble, childlike, unbroken trust, we shall scarcely find in
any record human or divine. "Blessed," let us say with her cousin
Elisabeth, "is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of
those things which were told her from the Lord." " Thou hast found
favor," said Gabriel to her, " with God." It is possible to interpret
that saying without any reference to Mary's character ; to rest in the
explanation, which is no doubt so far true, that it was God's good
pleasure to select out of all the maidens of Israel this Mary of Naza
reth, to be the most honored of the daughters of Eve. But if it be
true, as we are elsewhere taught, that to him that hath it is given;
that it is done unto every one according to his faith ; that to him that
beh'eveth, all things are possible; if all the recorded experience of
God's people confirms these general sayings of the divine word — are
we wrong in considering the high honor conferred by God on Mary
as a striking exemplification of the principle of adapting the gift tc
the character and capacity of the receiver?
His errand accomphshed, Gabriel withdrew ; and after the brief
and exciting interview, Mary was left in sohtude to her own thoughts.
The words she had so lately heard kept ringing in her ears. She
MART AND ELISABETH. 19
tried to enter more and more into their meaning. As she did so, into
what a tumult of wonder, and awe, and hope, must she have been
thrown! She longs for some one with whom she can converse, to
whom she may unburden her full mind and heart. There is no one
near to whom she can or dare lay open all her secret thoughts ; but
she remembers now what Gabriel had told her about her kinswoman
Ehsabeth, who may well be intrusted with the secret, for she too has
been placed in something hke the same condition. Eager for sym
pathy, thirsting for companionship and full communion of the heart,
she arises in haste, and departs for the distant residence of her cousin,
who hves amid the far-off hills of Judah. It is a long — for one so
young and so unprotected, it might be a perilous journey; nearly the
whole length of the land — at least a hundred miles to traverse. But
what is distance, what are dangers to one so hfted up with the exalted
hopes to which she has been begotten ! The hundred miles are quickly
trodden ; joy and hope make the long distance short. She reaches
at last the house in which Ehsabeth resides, and, with all due respect —
such as is due from the inferior in station, the junior in years— she
salutes the wife of the venerable priest. How filled with wonder
must she have been, when, instead of the ordinary return to her sal
utation, Ehsabeth breaks forth at once with the exclamation, "Blessed
art thou among women;" the very words which the angel had so
lately spoken in her astonished ear; "blessed is the fruit of thy
womb." She need not tell her secret ; it is already known. What a
fresh warrant this for the truth of all that Gabriel had said! It comes
to confirm a faith already strong, but which might, perhaps, other
wise have begun to falter. It did not waver in the angel's presence ;
but had month after month gone by, with no one near to share her
thoughts or build her up in her first trust, might not that trust have
yielded to human weakness and shown some symptom of decay?
Well-timed, then, the kindly aid which the strange greeting of her
cousin brought with it, supplying a new evidence that there should
indeed be a performance of all those things which were told her of
the Lord.
" And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should
come to me ?" If in Mary we have one of the rarest exhibitions of
humility towards God, of entire acquiescence in his will, in Ehsabeth
we have as rare and beautiful an instance of humility towards others,
tlie entire absence of all selfish, proud, and envious feehngs. Ehsabeth
leaves out of sight all the outer distinctions between herself and her
humble relative, forgets the difference of age and rank, recognises at
once, and ttngrudgingly, the far higher distinction which had been
20 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
conferred by God upon Mary, and wonders even at the fact that to
such a home as hers the honored mother of her Lord should come.
But now the same spirit which had enlightened her eyes, and filled
her heart, and opened her lips to give such a greeting to her cousin,
comes in still fuller measure upon Mary, and to the wonderful saluta
tion she gives the still more wonderful response in that strain of rapt
and rhythmical praise which the holy cathohc church has ever treas
ured as the first and fullest of our Christian hymns.
It divides itself into two parts. Eising at once to God as the
source of all her blessings, her soul and all that was within her being
stirred up to bless him, she celebrates, in lofty strains of praise, the
Lord's goodness to herself individually. " My soul doth magnify the
Lord." The Lord had magnified her, by his goodness had made her
great, and she will magnify the Lord. The larger his gift to her, the
larger the glory she will render to his great name. " My spirit hath
rejoiced in God my Saviour." She hails the coming Saviour, as one
needed* by her as by all sinners, and embraces him, though her own
son according to the flesh, as her God and Saviour; glorying more in
the connection that she has with him in common with the entire mul
titude of the redeemed, than in that special maternal relationship in
which she has the privilege to stand to him. Eoyal though her line
age, hers had been a low estate; her family poor in Judah; she
among the least in her father's house ; but in his great grace and in
finite condescension the Lord had stooped to raise her from the dust,
to set her upon a pinnacle of honor, and gratefully and gladly will
she acknowledge the hand that did it. "For he hath regarded the
low estate of his handmaiden." And how high had he exalted her!
The angel had called her blessed at Nazareth. Elisabeth, in the city
of Judah, had repeated his saying; but Mary herself rises to the full
conception and full acknowledgment of the honor the Lord had put
•npon her: "For, behold," she says, "from henceforth, all generations
shall call me blessed." But it fills her with no pride, it prompts to
no undue familiarity with God, or with his great name. She knows
to whom to attribute this and every other gift and grace, and in the
fulness of a devout and grateful reverence, she adds : " He that is
mighty hath done to me great things ; and holy is his name."
So much about herself and all that the Lord had done for her-
but now she widens the embrace of her thanksgiving and praise, and
losing all sense of her individuahty, her virgin lips are touched with
fire, and as poetess and prophetess of the infant church she pours
forth the first triumphal song which portrays the general character of
the gospel kingdom then to be ushered in.
THE NATIVITT. 'M
In these strains there breathed the spirit at once of the Baptist
and of Christ ; of the two children of the two mothers who stood now
face to face saluting one another. It is the voice of him who cried in
the wilderness, " Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in
-the desert a highway for our God : every valley shall be exalted, and
every hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough places plain ; and the glory of the Lord shall be re
vealed." It is the voice of him who opened his mouth on the moun
tain side of Galilee, and said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek: for they
shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst
after righteousness: for they shall be filled." Do we not recognise
the very spirit of the ministries both of John and of Jesus in the words:
-"He hath showed strength with his arm : he hath scattered the proud
¦in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty
from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the
hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy ; as
he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever."
II.
The Nativity.*
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to decide whether it was before
or after her visit to Ehsabeth, that Joseph was made acquainted with
the condition of his betrothed. It must have thrown him into pain
ful perplexity. He was not prepared at first to put implicit faith in
her narrative, but neither was he prepared utterly to discredit it.
To put her pubhcly away by a bill of divorce would have openly
stamped her character with shame, and branded her child with infa
my. He was unwilling that either of these injuries should be inflict
ed. To put her away privily would at least so far cover her reputa
tion that the child might still be regarded as his ; and this he had
generously resolved to do, when the angel of the Lord appeared ta
him in a dream, removed all his doubts, and led him to take Mary a**
his wife. This difficulty overcome, Mary was quietly awaiting at
Nazareth the expected birth. But it was not at Nazareth that the
Messiah was to be born. An ancient prophecy had already designated
¦another village, not in Galilee, but in' Judea, as the destined birth-
• Luke 2: 1-20.
22 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
place. " But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah "—so had the prophet Micah
spoken seven hundred years before — "though thou be httle among
the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me
that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of
old, from everlasting." To this village of Bethlehem Mary was to
be guided at such a time as should secure the fulfilment of the
prophecy. A singular instrumentality was employed to gain this end. The
Eoman empire had now stretched its dominion to its widest limits,
its power extending from the Euphrates to the British islands — from
the Northern ocean to the borders of Ethiopia. Amid the prevalence
of universal peace, the emperor, judging it a fit opportunity to ascer
tain by accurate statistics the population and resources of the different
provinces of his dominions, issued an edict that a general census of
the empire should be taken. It gratified his pride ; it would be use
ful afterwards for many purposes of government, such as determining
the taxes that might be imposed, or the levies that might be drawn
from the different provinces. This edict of Augustus came to be
executed in Judea. That country was not yet, in the outward form
of its government, reduced to the condition of a Eoman province ; but
Herod, while nominally an independent king, was virtually a Eomar.
subject, and had to obey this as well as the other edicts of the em
peror. In doing, so, however, Herod followed the Jewish usage, and
issued his instructions that every family should repair forthwith to
the seat of his tribe, where its genealogical records were kept. The
distinction of inheritance among the Jews had long been lost, but the
listinction of famihes and tribes were still preserved, and Herod
grounded upon that distinction the prescribed mode of registration
or enrolment. Joseph and Mary, being both of the house and lineage
of David, were obhged to repair to Bethlehem.
The manner in which the power of the Eoman empire was thus
employed to determine the birthplace of our Lord, naturally invites
us to reflect upon the singular conjunction of outward circumstances,
the strange timing of events that then took place. Embracing the
whole sphere of reflection which thus opens to our view, let us, before
fixing our attention upon the incidents of the particular narrative now
before us, dwell for a httle on the Divine wisdom that was displayed
in fixing upon that particular epoch in the world's history as the one
in which Jesus was born, and lived, and died. " When," says the
inspired apostle, " the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth
his Son, made of a woman, made under the law." The expression
used here, " the fulness of the time," evidently implies not only that
¦Hiilalill!
m
THE NATIVIT1. 23
there was a set time appointed beforehand of the Father, but that a
series of preparatory steps were prearranged, the accomplishment of
which had, as it were, to be waited for, ere the season best suited for
the earthly advent of our Lord arrived. Some peculiar fitness must
then have marked the time of Christ's appearance in this world. We
are inclined to wonder that his appearance should have been so long
delayed. Looking at all the mighty issues that hung suspended on
his advent, we are apt at times to be surprised that so many thousand
years should have been suffered to elapse ere the Son of God came
down to save us ; and yet, could the whole plan and counsels of the
Deity be laid open to our eye, we cannot but believe that as there
were the best and weightiest reasons why his coming should be defer
red so long, there were also the best and weightiest reasons why it
should be deferred no longer. To attempt on either side the state
ment of these reasons would be to attempt to penetrate within the
veil that hides from us the secret things of God. Taking up, however,
the history of the world as it is actually before us, it can neither be
unsafe nor presumptuous to consider the actual and obvious benefits
which have attended the coming of the Saviour at that particular
period when it happened.
In the first place, we can readily enough perceive that it has
served greatly to enhance the number and the force of the evidences
in favor of the Divine origin and authority of his mission. Two of
the chief outer pillars upon which the fabric of Christianity as a rev
elation from Heaven rests, are prophecy and miracles. But if Christ
had come in the earhest ages ; had the Incarnation followed quickly
upon the Fall, so far as that coming was concerned there had been
no room or scope for prophecy — one great branch of the Christian
evidences had been cut off. As it now is, when we take up that long
line of predictions, extending over more than three thousand years,
from the first dim intimation that the seed of the woman should bruise
the head of the serpent, down to the last prophecy of Malachi, that
the Lord, whom the Jews sought, should come suddenly to his temple
as the Messenger of the Covenant, whom they delighted in ; when we
mark the growing brightness and fulness that characterize each suc
ceeding prediction, as feature after feature in the life and character of
the great Messiah is added to the picture ; when we compare tho
actual events with the passages in those ancient writings, in which
they were repeatedly foretold, what a strong confirmation is given
thereby to our faith, that He, of whom all those things had been
spoken so long beforehand, was indeed the Christ, the Son of the
living God. How much, then, in regard to prophecy, should we have
24 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
lost, had the interval between the Fall and the Incarnation not been
long enough for that wonderful series of prophecies to be interposed.
Even as to the miracles we should have been put to great and se
rious disadvantage. Our faith in the reality of these miracles rests
upon human testimony. That testimony is embodied in the writings
of the apostles and their contemporaries. Those writings were issued
at an advanced stage in the history of the world. They have come
down to us through the same channel — they come, accompanied with
the same vouchers for their authenticity — with a vast mass of other
ancient writings, whose genuineness and credibility no one has ever
denied. Our behef in the miracles of Jesus is thus bound up with
our behef in a large portion of ancient history, for our knowledge of
which we are indebted to writings of equal and greater antiquity than
those of the New Testament. If we renounce the one, we must, in all
fairness, renounce the other also. We must blot out all that is
alleged to have happened in the world from this date upwards. It
has been of the greatest possible service in the defence of Christianity
against the attack of scholarly men, that the life of Jesus Christ, re
corded in the four gospels, forms part and parcel of so large a portion
of the preserved literature of antiquity — written, as it were, with the
same ink, published at the same time, preserved in the same manner,
so that together they must stand or together fall. How should it
have stood, if, instead of being as it is, those miracles of Christ had
been wrought far back in the world's history; the record of them
written at some period preceding that from which any other authentic
narrative had come down to us, some centuries before the date of the
first acknowledged book of common history? Who does not perceive
to what exceptions, just or unjust, they would, in consequence, have
been exposed? Who does not perceive that, fixing his eye upon the
barbarous and fabulous age in which the record originated, and upon
the longer and more perilous passage that it had made, with some
show at least of reason, with some apparent ground for the distinc
tion, other ancient histories might have been received, and yet this
one rejected? We have to thank God then for the wisdom of that
order of things whereby, in consequence of the particular time at
which Christ appeared, our faith in him as the heaven-sent Saviour
rests upon the" same solid basis with our faith in the best accredited
facts of common history.
We can discern another great and beneficial purpose that was
served by the appearance of Christ at so late a period. The world
was left for a long while to itself, to make full proof of its capabilities
and dispositions. Many great results it reahzed. There were coun
THE NATIVITT. 25
tries unvisited by any light from heaven, upon which the sun of civil
ization rose and shone with no mean lustre ; where the inteUect of
man acted as vigorously as it has ever done on earth ; where all the
arts and refinements of life were brought to the highest state of cul
ture; where taste and imagination revelled amid the choicest objects
of gratification; where, in poetry and in painting, and in sculpture
and in architecture, specimens of excellence were furnished which re
main to this day the models that we strive to imitate. Was nothing
gained by allowing Egypt, Greece, and Eome to run out their full
career of civilization, while the hght from heaven was confined mean
while to the narrow hmits of Judea ? Was nothing gained by its
being made no longer a matter of speculation but a matter of fact,
that man may rise in other departments, but in religion will not, left
unaided, rise to God; that he may make great progress in other kinds
of knowledge, but make no progress in the knowledge of his Maker;
that he may exercise his intellect, regale his fancy, refine his taste,
correct his manners, but will not, cannot purify his heart ? For what
was the actual state of matters in those countries unblest by revela
tion ? We have the description drawn by an unerring hand : " They
became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was dark
ened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, ai*d
changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like
to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping
things ; who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and
served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever."
We should have lost that exhibition of the greatest refinement coupled
with the grossest idolatry, had the hght of Eevelation mingled uni
versally from the first with the hght of ordinary civilization.
Let us look a httle more closely at the condition of Judea rela
tively to the Eoman Empire at the time of our Lord's birth and death.
It was owing, as we have already mentioned, to Herod's being nomi
nally a sovereign but virtually a subject, that the order for registra
tion came to be executed in Palestine which forced Mary from Naza
reth to Bethlehem. Is there nothing impressive in seeing tho power
of Eome thus interposed to determine the Eedeemer's birthplace ; the
pride and pohcy of the world's great monarchy employed as an instru
ment for doing what the hand and counsel of the Lord had deter
mined beforehand to be done? But even that nominal kingdom
which Herod enjoyed soon passed from his family. A few years after
the birth of Christ, Archelaus, who reigned in Judea in the room ol
his father Herod, was deposed and banished. Judea had then a
Eoman governor placed over it. Still, however, whether through
26 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
respect to its banished princes, or some latent reverence for its temple
and ancient laws, the old national and priestly authorities were suf
fered to continue and enjoy some part of their old power and privi
leges. It was an anomalous and short-hved state of things ; a Jewish
law and Jewish officers, under a Eoman law and Eoman officers : the
.two fitted into each other by certain limits being assigned to the in
ferior or Jewish judicatories which they were not permitted to over
pass. To no Jewish court, not even to the highest, the Sanhedrim,
was the power of inflicting capital punishment intrusted ; and it was
wholly owing to that pecuhar and temporary adjustment that all the
formality of an orderly trial, and all the publicity of a legal execution
was stamped upon the closing scenes of the Saviour's life. Had Jesus
Christ appeared one half-century earher, or one half-century later than
he did; had he appeared when the Jewish authorities had uncheck
ed power, how quickly, how secretly had their deadly malice dis
charged itself upon his head ! No cross had been raised on Calvary.
Had he come a few years later, when the Jews were stripped even of
that measure of power they for a short season enjoyed, would the
Eoman authorities, then the only ones in the land, of their own mo
tion have condemned and crucified him? Even as it was, it was im
possible to persuade Pilate that Jesus was either a rival whom Csesar
had any reason to fear, or a rebel whom it became him to punish.
Why then was the rule over Judea at this time in the hands of Eome?
and why was that power induced to treat Judea for a time so differ
ently from her other subject provinces? Why, but that she might
be standing there ready, when Christ fell into the hands of his exas
perated countrymen, to extricate him from that grasp under which in
darkness he might have perished; and, though she too denied him
justice, yet by her weak and vacillating governor, that hers might be
the voice proclaiming aloud his innocence ; hers the hand to erect the
cross, and lift it up so high that the eyes of all the nations and all the
ages might behold it.
But let us now turn to the narrative of our Eedeemer's birth.
When Mary was at first informed that Joseph and she must go to
Bethlehem, perhaps she shrunk from so long a journey, lingered to
the last ere she entered on it, and took it slowly. She was late at
least in her arrival at the village. The inn, we may well suppose the
single one that so small a place afforded for the entertainment of
strangers,* was crowded. She had to take the only accommodation
° The inn or khan was frequently in the earliest times the house of the sheikh
jr chief man of the place. A very interesting resume of all the historical notices
af the inn or khan of Bethlehem is given in the Athenceum for December 26,
THE NATIVITT. 27
that the place afforded. Adopting here the early tradition of the
church, as reported by Justin Martyr, who was born about a century
afterwards, and within fifty miles from Bethlehem, let us say, she had
to go into one of the caves or grottos in the rock common in the
neighborhood, connected with the inn. There, where the camels and
the asses had their stalls; there, far away from home and friends,
among strangers all too busy to care for her; amid all the rude ex
posure and confusion of the place, Mary brought forth her first-born
son, and when her hour was over, having swathed Hm with her own
weak hands, laid him in a manger.
A very lowly mode of entering upon human life : nothing what
ever to dignify, every thing to degrade. Yet the night of that won
derful birth was not to pass by without bearing upon its bosom a
bright and signal witness of the greatness of the event. Sloping
down from the rocky ridge on which Bethlehem stood, there lay some
grassy fields, where ah that night long some shepherds watched their
flocks ; humble, faithful, industrious men ; men, too, of whom we are
persuaded that, Simeon-like, they were waiting for the Consolation ot
Israel ; who had simpler and more spiritual notions of their Messiah
' than most of the well-taught scribes of the metropolis. They would
not have understood the angel's message so well; they would not
have beheved it so readily ; they would not have hastened so quickly
to Bethlehem ; they would not have bent with such reverence over so
humble a cradle ; they would not have made known abroad what had
been told them concerning this child — made it known as a thing in
which they themselves most heartily beheved — had they not been
devout, believing men. Under the starry heavens, . along the lonely
hiU-sides, these shepherds are keeping their watch, thinking perhaps
of the time when these very sheep-walks were trodden by the young
son of Jesse, or remembering some ancient prophecy that told of the
coming of one who was to be David's son and David's Lord. Sud
denly the angel of the Lord comes upon them, the glory of the Lord
encompasses them with a girdle of light brighter than the mid-day
sun could have thrown around them. They fear as they see that
form, and as they are encircled by that glory, but their alarm is in
stantly dispelled. "Fear not," says the angel, "for, behold, I bring
you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto
you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ
the Lord." Mary had been told that her child was to be called
1863, which makes it more than probable that the place of Christ's birth wae
close to, if not within, the very house to which Boaz conducted Ruth, and in
•which Samuel anointed David king.
28 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Jesus, that he was to be great, to be son of the Highest, the heir to
his father David's throne, the head of an everlasting monarchy.
Joseph had been told that he was to caU the child born of Mary,
Jesus, for he was to save his people from their sins — a simpler and
less Jewish description of his office. The angel speaks of him to
these shepherds in still broader and sublimer terms. Unto them and
unto all people this child was to be born, and unto them and unto all
he was to be a Saviour, Christ the Lord, the only instance in which
the double epithet, Christ the Lord, is given in this form to him. A
universal, a divine Messiahship was to be his.
The shepherds ask no sign, as Zacharias and Mary had done ; yet
they got one : " And this," said the angel, " shaU be a sign unto you :
Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a
manger.' But one such child, born that night, wrapped up in such
a way, lying in such a place, could so small a village as Bethlehem
supply. That village lay but a mile or so from the spot they stood
on; the sign could speedily be verified. But they have something
more to see and hear ere their visit to the village is paid. The voice
of that single angel has scarce died away in the silence of the night —
lost in wonder they are still gazing on his radiant form — when sud
denly a whole multitude of the heavenly host bursts upon their aston
ished vision, lining the illuminated heavens. Human eyes never saw
before or since so large a company of the celestial inhabitants hover
ing in our earthly skies ; and human ears never heard before or since
such a glorious burst of heavenly praise as those angels then poured
forth — couching it in Hebrew speech, their native tongue for the time
foregone, that these listening shepherds may catch up at once the
cradle-hymn that heaven now chants over the new-born Saviour;
that these shepherds may repeat it to the men of their own genera
tion ; that from age to age it may be handed down, and age after age
may take it up as supplying the fittest terms in which to celebrate
the Eedeemer's birth— "Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace,
good will towards men."
At the moment when these words first saluted human ears, what
a contrast did they open up between earth and heaven! As that
babe was born in Bethlehem, this world lay around him in silence, in
darkness, in ignorant unconcern. But all heaven was moved ; for
large as that company of angels was which the shepherds saw, what
were they tothe thousands that encircle the throne of the Eternal!
And the song of praise the shepherds heard, what was it to the voice,
as of many waters, which rose triumphant around that throne! That
little dropping of its praise committed for human use to human keep-
THE NATIVITT. 29
ing, heaven hastily veiled itself again from human vision. The whole
angelic manifestation passed rapidly away. The shepherds are startled
in their midnight rounds; a flood of glory pours upon them; their
eyes are dazzled with those forms of light ; their ears are full of that
thrilling song of praise; suddenly the glory is gone; the shining
forms have vanished; the stars look down as before through the
darkness; they are left to a silent, unspeakable wonder and awe.
They soon, however, collect their thoughts, and promptly resolve to
go at once into the village. They go in haste ; the sign is verified ;
they find Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in the manger. They
justify their intrusion by telling all that they had just seen and
heard ; and amid the sorrows and humiliations of that night, how
cheering to Mary the strange tidings that they bring ! Having told
these, they bend with rude yet holy reverence over the place where
the infant Saviour lies, and go their way to finish their night-watch
among the hills, and then for all their life long afterwards to repeat
to wondering hsteners the story of that birth. With those shepherds
let us bend for a moment or two over the place where the infant
Eedeemer lay, to meditate on one or two of the lessons which it is
fitted to suggest.
By the manner of his entrance into this world, Christ hath digni
fied the estate of .infancy, has hallowed the bond which binds the
mother to her new-born child. He, the great Son of God, stooped to
assume our humanity. He might have done so at once ; taken it on
him in its manhood form. The second Adam might have stood forth
, hke the first, no childhood passed through. Why did he become an
infant before he was a man ? Was it not, among other reasons which
may suggest themselves, that he might consecrate that first of human
ties, that earhest estate of human life ? The grave, we say, has been
hallowed — has not the cradle also — by Christ's having lain in it ?
By the humiliation of his birth, he stripped the estate of poverty
of all reproach. Of all who have ever been born into this world, he
was the only one with whom it was a matter of choice in what condi
tion he should appear. The difference, indeed, between our highest
and our lowest — between a chamber in a palace, and a manger in a
stable — could have been but slight to him ; yet he chose to be born
in the stable, and to be laid in the manger. And that first stage of
his earthly life was in keeping with all that foUowed. For thirty
years he depended on his own or others' labor for his daily bread
for three years more, he was a houseless, homeless man, with no pro
vision but that which the generosity of others supphed: "The foxes
had holes, and the birds of the air had nests ; but he had not where
30 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to lay his head." And has not that life of his redeemed poverty from
all disgrace ; has it not lifted it to honor ?
As we bend in wonder over the infant Saviour, we learn the dif
ference between the inferior and higher forms of an earthly greatness.
On that night when Christ was born, what a difference was there in
all outward marks of distinction, between that child of the Hebrew
mother as he lay in his lowly cradle, and the Augustus Caesar whose
edict brought Mary to Bethlehem, as he reposed in his imperial
palace ! And throughout the lifetimes of the two there was but httle
to lessen that distinction. The name of the one was known and hon
ored over the whole civilized globe : the name of the other scarce
heard of beyond the narrow bounds of Judea. And when repeated
there, it was too often as a byword and a reproach. How stands it
now ? The throne of the Csesars, the throne of mere human authority
and power, has perished. That name, at which nations trembled,
carries no power over the spirits of men. But the empire of Jesus,
the empire of pure, undying, self-sacrificing love, will never perish;
its sway over the conscience and hearts of men, as the world grows
older becomes ever wider and stronger. His name shall be honored
while sun and moon endure ; men shall be blessed in him ; all nations
shall call him blessed. This world owes an infinite debt to him, were
it for nothing else than this, that he has so exalted the spiritual
above the material ; the empire of love above the empire of power.
Again we bend over this infant as he lies in that manger at Beth
lehem, and as we do so, strange scenes in his after life rise upon our
memory. Those httle, tender feet, unable to sustain the infant frame,
are yet to tread upon the roughened waters of a stormy lake, as men
tread the solid earth. At the touch of that httle, feeble hand, the
blind eye is to open, and the tied tongue to be unloosed, and diseases
of all kinds are to take wings and flee away. That soft, weak voice,
whose gentle breathings in his infant slumbers can scarce be heard,
is to speak to the winds and the waves, and they shall obey it ; is to
summon the dead from the sepulchre, and they shall come forth.
Who then, and what was he, whose birth the angels celebrated in
such high strains ? None other than he of whom Isaiah, anticipating
the angels, had declared: "Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is
given ; and the government shall be upon his shoulder : and his name
shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The ever
lasting Father, The Prince of Peace." It was He, the Word, who
was from the beginning with God and who was God, who was thus
made flesh and came to dwell among us. This is, in truth, the cen
tral fact or doctrine of our rehgion; the mystery of mysteries; tho
THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 31
one great miracle of divine, everlasting love. Admit it, and all the
other wonders of the Saviour's life become not only easy of belief —
they appear but the natural and suitable incidents of such a history
as his. Deny it, and the whole gospel narrative becomes an inex
plicable enigma. The very heart of its meaning taken out of it, yon
may try to turn it into a myth or fable if you please ; but a credible
story it no longer is. No; not credible even in that part of it into
tvhich nothing of the supernatural enters. Christ was either what he
claimed to be, and what all those miraculous attestations conspire to
estabhsh that he was; he was either one with the Father, knowing
the Father as the Father knew him, doing whatever the Father did —
so direct and full a revelation of the Father that it could be truly
said that he who had seen him had seen the Father likewise ; or
his character for simplicity and honesty and truthfulness stands im
peached, and the whole fabric of Christianity is overturned.
Let those angels teach us in what light we should regard the birth
of Christ, the advent of the Eedeemer. They counted it as glad
tidings of great joy that they gave forth when they announced that
birth; they broke forth together in exulting praises over it, as glori
fying God in the highest, as proclaiming peace on earth, as indi
cating good will towards men. In that good will of God to us in Christ
let us heartily believe; into that peace with God secured to us in
Christ let us humbly and gratefully enter. Those glad tidings of
great joy let us so receive as that they shall make us joyful, that so
Christ may be glorified in us on earth, and we be glorified with him
throughout eternity.
III.
The Presentation in the Temple.*
On the eighth day after his birth Christ was circumcised : the
visible token of his being one of the seed of Abraham according to
the flesh was thus imposed. In his case, indeed, this rite could not
have that typical or spiritual meaning which in all other cases it bore.
It could point to no spiritual defilement needing to be removed. But
though on that ground exemption might have been claimed for him,
on other grounds it became him in this as in other respects to fulfil
the requirements of the Jewish law. From the earliest period, from
the first institution of the rite, it had been the Jewish custom to give
* Luke 2 : 21-88.
32 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
its name to the child on the occasion of its circumcision. The angel,
indeed, who had appeared to Zacharias and to Mary, had in each
instance announced beforehand what the names of the two children
were to be. These however were not formally imposed till the day
of their circumcision. In the Baptist's case there was a large assem
blage of relations and friends upon that day; and springing out of
the peculiar condition of the father, the naming of John was attended
with such striking circumstances, that the fame of them was noised
abroad throughout all the hill country of Judea. At Bethlehem
Joseph and Mary were too far away from all their kindred to call
any assemblage of them together. In their humbler position they
might not have done it, even had they been resident at the time in
Nazareth. Quietly, privately, obscurely, they circumcised their child,
and gave to him the name of Jesus, that name so rich in meaning, so
full of promise.
Forty days after the birth of Jesus, Joseph and Mary carried the
infant up to Jerusalem. There was a double object in this visit.
Mary had to present the offering which the Jewish law required at
the hands of every mother when the days of her purification were
accomphshed. This offering, in the case of aU whose circumstances
enabled them to present it, was to consist of a lamb of the first year
for a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or a turtle-dove for a sin-
offering. With that consideration for the poor which marks so many
of the Mosaic ordinances, it was provided that if the mother were not
able to furnish a lamb, a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons
were to be accepted, the one for the burnt-offering, and the other for
the sin-offering. That such was the offering which Joseph and Mary
presented to the priest, carried with it an unmistakable* evidence of
the poverty of their estate. Besides discharging this duty, Mary had
at the same time to dedicate her infant son as being a first-born child
to the Lord, and to pay the small sum fixed as the price of his re
demption. There were few more common, few less noticeable sights than the
one witnessed that forenoon within the temple when Christ's presen
tation as a first-born child took place. It happened every day that
mothers brought their children to be in this way dedicated and re
deemed. It was part of the daily routine work of the priest-in-wait
ing to take their payments, to hold up the children before the altar,
lo enroll their names in the register of the first-born, and so to com
plete the dedication; a work which from its commonness he went
through without giving much attention either to parents or to child,
unless indeed there was something special in their rank, or their
THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 33
appearance, or their offerings. But here there was nothing of this
kind. A poor man and woman, in humblest guise, with humblest
offerings, present themselves before him. The woman holds out her
first-born babe ; he takes, presents, enrolls, and hands it back to her;
all seems over, and what is there in so common, plain, and simple an
old Jewish custom worthy of any particular notice? We shall be
able to answer that question better, by considering for a moment
what this rite of the dedication of the first-born among the Israel
ites really meant, especially as applied to this first-born, to this child
Jesus. When Moses first got his commission from the Lord in Midian,
and was told to go and work out the great dehverance of his people
from their Egyptian bondage, the last instruction he received was
this: "And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, Israel
is my son, even my first-born. And I say unto thee, Let my son go,
that he may serve me : and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I
will slay thy son, even thy first-born." Exod. 4: 22, 23. As a mother
reclaims her infant from the hands of a cruel nurse, as a father
reclaims his son from the hands of a severe and capricious school
master, so the Lord reclaimed his son, his first-born Israel, from the
hands of Pharaoh. But the king's haughty answer to the demand
was : " Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice to let Israel
go?" Sign after sign was shown, wonder after wonder wrought, woe
after woe inflicted, but the spirit of the proud king remained unbro
ken. At last, all lesser instruments having failed, the sword was put
into the hands of the destroying angel, and he was sent forth to exe
cute that foretold doom, which — meant to strike at the very heart of
the entire community of Egypt — fell actually only upon the first-born
in every family. The nation was taken as represented by these its
first and best. In their simultaneous death on that terrible night,
Egypt throughout all its borders was smitten. But the first-born of
Israel was saved, and through them, as representatives of the whole
body of the people, all Israel was saved; saved, yet not without
blood, not without the sacrifice of the lamb, for every household had
the sprinkling of its shed blood upon the lintel and door-post. It
was to preserve and perpetuate the memory of this judgment and this
mercy, this smiting and this shielding, this doom and this deliverance,
that the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, " Sanctify unto me all the
first-born, both of man and beast; it is mine: for on the day that I
smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt, I hallowed unto me all
the first-born in Israel ; mine they shall be : I am the Lord. And it
shall be, when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What is
Life of Chrllt. 3
84 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
this ? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand the Lord
brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage : and it came
to pass, when Pharaoh would hardly let us go, that the Lord slew all
tho first-born in the land of Egypt, both the first-born of man and
the first-born of beast : therefore I sacrifice to the Lord all that open-
eth the matrix, being males ; but all the first-born of my children I
redeem." Exod. 13 : 1 ; Numb. 3 : 13 ; Exod. 13 : 14, 15. During the
earlier and simpler patriarchal economy, the first-born in every fam
ily was also its priest. Had that rule been foUowed when the twelve
tribes were organized into the Theocracy, the first-born invested with
a double sacredness, as pecuharly the redeemed of the Lord, would
have been consecrated to the office of the priesthood. Instead of
this, the tribe of Levi was set apart that it might supply all the
priests required for the services of the sanctuary; and the first-born
for whom they were thus substituted were redeemed or released from
that service by the payment each, on the day of their presentation in
the temple, of a merely nominal gratuity; by that payment, the
original right and title, as it were, of the first-born to the office of the
priesthood being still preserved.
This rite, then, of the presentation of the first-born in the temple
had a double character and office. It was a standing memorial or
remembrancer of a past fact in the history of the Jewish people — the
deliverance of their forefathers from the bondage of Egypt, and espe
cially of the shielding of their first-born from the stroke which fell on
all the first-born of the Egyptians; but the deliverance from Egyp
tian bondage was itself a type and prophecy of another higher and
wider deliverance, and especially of the manner in which that deliv
erance was to be wrought out.
In the hght of this explanation, let us look yet once again at our
Lord's presentation in the temple as a first-born child, and see
whether — as the eye of faith looks through the outward actions to
that which the actions symbolize, looks through the outward form
and discerns the spiritual significance — the whole scene does not
become, as it were, transfigured before us. You mount the steps, and
come up into this temple at Jerusalem. It is neither a feast-day nor
a Sabbath-day, nor is it the fixed hour for prayer. A few priests, or
Levites, or other hangers-on of the holy place, are loitering in the
outer courts. A man and woman in Galilean dress, the woman bear
ing an infant in her arms, cross the court and go forward to whore
the priest is standing, whose duty it is to present whatever individual
sacrifices or oblations may that day be offered. They tell the priest
their errand, hand to him or to one of his attendants the two young
THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 35
turtle-doves and the five shekels of the sanctuary. He in his turn
goes through with his part of the prescribed ceremonial, and gives
the child back again to his parents as a first-born child that had been
duly devoted to the Lord. The father, the mother, the priest, what
ever onlookers there are, all imagine that nothing more has been
done in all this than is so often done when first-born children are
consecrated. But was it so ? Who is this child that hes so passive
on its mother's breast, and all unconscious of what is being done with
him, is handled by the officiating priest? He is, as his birth had
proclaimed him to be, one of the seed of Abraham, and yet he after
wards said of himself, " Before Abraham was, I am." He is, as the
angel had proclaimed him to be, David's son and David's heir ; but
as he said afterwards of himself, the root as well as the branch of
David : David's Lord as well as David's son. He is the first-born of
Mary, but he is also the first-born of every creature, the beginning
of the creation of God. He is the infant of a few weeks old, but also
the Ancient of Days, whose goings forth were from of old, from ever
lasting. Here then at last is the Lord, the Jehovah, whom so many
of the Jews were seeking, brought suddenly, almost, as one might
say, unconsciously into his own temple. Here is the Lamb of God,
of old provided, now pubhcly designated and set apart — of which the
paschal one, the sight of whose blood warded off the stroke of the
destroying angel, was but the imperfect type. Here is the one and
only true High Priest over the house of God, consecrated to his
office, of whose all prevailing, everlasting, and unchangeable priest
hood, the Aaronic priesthood, the priesthood of the first-born, was
but the dim shadow. Here is the Son presented to the Father, within
the holy place on earth, as he enters upon that hfe of service, suffer
ing, sacrifice, the glorious issue of which was to be his entering not
by the blood of bulls and goats, but by his own blood, into that holy
place not made with hands, having obtained eternal redemption for
us, there for ever to present himself before the Father, as the hving
head of the great community of the redeemed, the general assembly
and church of the first-born which are written in heaven.
How httle did that Jewish priest, who took the infant Saviour and
held him up before the altar, imagine that a greater than Moses, one
greater than the temple, was in his arms ! How little did he ima
gine, as he inscribed the new name of Jesus in the roll of the first
born of Israel, that he was signing the death-warrant of the Mosaic
economy now waxing old and ready to vanish away; that he was
ushering in that better, brighter day, when neither of the temple
upon Mount Zion, nor of that upon Gerizim, it should be said that
36 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
there only was the true worship of Jehovah celebrated; but when,
taught by this very Jesus to know God as our Father in heaven,
unfettered and redeemed humanity in every land should worship him
who is a Spirit in spirit and in truth. Yet even so it was; Christ's
first entrance into the temple, his dedication there unto the Lord,
was no such common ceremonial as we might fancy it to be. Simple
in form, there lay in it a depth and sublimity of meaning. It was
nothing else than the first formal earthly presentation to the Father
of the incarnate Son of God, his first formal earthly dedication to
that great work given him to do. And was it not meet when the
Father and the Son were brought visibly together in this relation
ship, that the presence of the Holy Spirit should be manifested; that
by that Spirit Simeon and Anna should be called in, and by that
Spirit their lips should be made to speak the infant Saviour's praise ;
that so within the temple, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit might all
appear, dignifying with their presence our Lord's first entrance into
the holy place ; his consecration to his earthly mediatorial work ?
Two fitter channels through which the Spirit's testimony might
thus be given could scarcely have been chosen. Simeon and Anna
both belonged to that limited number, who in the midst of all the
crude and carnal conceptions of the Messiah prevalent among their
countrymen, were waiting for Christ and longing for his ooming, not
so much for the temporal as for the spiritual benefits which his com
ing and kingdom were to convey. Both were well stricken in years,
fit representatives of the closing age of Judaism; both were full of
faith and hope, fit representatives of that new age whose earliest
dawn they were among the first to notice and to welcome.
So ardent as his years ran on had Simeon's faith and hope
become, that this one thing had he desired of the Lord, that before
his eyes closed in death they might rest upon his Saviour. And he
was heard as to that for which he had so longed. It was revealed to
him that the desire of his heart should be granted, but how and when
he knew not. That forenoon, however, a strong desire to go up into
the temple seizes him. He was not accustomed to go there at that
hour, but he obeyed that inward impulse, which perhaps he recog
nized as the work of the Divine Spirit, by whom the gracious revela
tion had been made to him. He enters the temple courts ; he noti
ces a httle family group approach ; he sees an infant dedicated to the
Lord. That infant, an inward voice proclaims to him is the Messiah
he has been waiting for, the Consolation of Israel come at last in the
flesh. Then comes into his heart a joy beyond all bounds. It kin
dles in his radiant looks ; it beats in his swelling veins ; the strength
TiiK PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 3?
of youth is back again into his feeble limbs. He hastens up to Mary,
takes from the wondering yet consenting mother's hands the conse
crated babe, and clasping it to his beating bosom, with eyes uplifted
to heaven, he says, " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace, according to thy word ; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
which thou hast prepared before the face of all people ; a light to
lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel." Joseph
and Mary stand lost in wonder. How has this stranger come to see
aught uncommon in this child; how come to see in him the salvation
of Israel ? Have some stray tidings of his birth come into the holy
city from the hill country of Judea, or has the wondrous tale the
shepherds of Bethlehem "made known abroad," been repeated in
this old man's hearing ? What he says is in curious harmony with
all the angel had announced to Mary and to the shepherds about the
child, and yet there is a difference; for now, for the first time, is it
distinctly declared that this child shall be a light to lighten the Gen
tiles ; nay, his being such a light is placed even before his being the
glory of Israel. Has Simeon had a separate revelation made to him
from heaven, and is this an independent and fuller testimony borne
to the Messiahship of Jesus ?
Simeon sees the wonder that shines out in their astonished looks;
ind, the spirit of prophecy imparted — that spirit which had been
mute in Israel since the days of Malachi, but which now once more
lifts up its voice within the temple — he goes on, after a gentle bless
ing bestowed upon both parents, to address himself particularly to
Mary, furnishing in his words to her fresh material for wonder, while
opening a new future to her eye. "Behold," he said to her, "this
child of thine is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel."
He may have meant, in saying so, that the purpose and effect of the
Lord's showing unto Israel would be the casting down of many in
order to the raising of them up again ; the casting of them down from
their earher, worldlier thoughts and expectations, in order to the
lifting them to higher, worthier, more spiritual conceptions of his
character and office. Or, perhaps it was to different and not to tho
same persons that he referred, the truth revealed being this : that
while some were to rise, others were to fall; that the stone which to
some was to be a foundation-stone elect and precious, was to others
to be a stone of stumbling and rock of offence; that Jesus was to
come for judgment into the world, that those who saw not might see,
that those who saw might be made blind; his name to be the savor
of life unto life to the one, the savor of death unto death to the
other.
38 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
From aU Mary had yet heard, she might have imagined that her
child would be welcomed by aU Israel — so soon as the day for his
revelation came — as its long-looked for deliverer; and that a career
of unsuffering triumph would lie before him — a career in whose hon
ors and bliss she could scarcely help at times imagining that she
should have a share. But now, for the first time, the indication is
clearly given that all Israel was not to haU her chUd and welcome
him as its Messiah ; that hostility was to spring up even within the
ranks of the chosen people ; that he was to be a " sign which should
be spoken against;" or rather — for such is the more hteral rendering
of the words — a butt or mark at which many shafts or javelins should
be launched. Nor was Mary herself to escape. Among the many
swords or darts levelled at his breast, one was to reach hers: "Yea,
a sword shaU pierce through thine own soul also." Strange that in
the very centre of so broad and comprehensive a prophecy concern
ing Christ, such a minute and personal allusion to Mary should come
in; a high honor put upon the mother of our Lord that her individual
sorrows should be foretold in this way in connection with the deeper
sorrows of her Son ; and a singular token of the tender sympathy of
Him by whom it was prompted, that now when her heart was filling
with strange, bright hopes, now whUe her chUd was yet an infant,
now ere the evU days drew on, when she should have to see him
become the object of reproach and persecution, and stand herself to
look at him upon that cross of shame and agony on which they hung
him up to die — that now to temper her first-born joy, to prepare and
fortify her for the bitter trials in store for her, this prophecy should
have been thus early spoken.
" That the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." No such
revealer of the thoughts of men's hearts has the world ever seen as
Jesus Christ. His presence, his character, his ministry brought out
to light the hidden th ings of many a human spirit. He walked abroad
applying upon all sides the infallible test which tried the temper of
the soul : " If I had not come," he said, " they had not had sin, but
now they have no cloak for their sin." In its uncloaked nakedness
he made the sin be seen. "I know you," said he to the Jews,
"that ye have not the love of God in you;" and the reason that he
gave for this was, that they had rejected him. Coming into contact
with them all in turn, he revealed the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, the
worldliness of the young ruler, the faith of the Syro-Phcenician woman,
the malice of the Sanhedrim, the weakness of PUate, the treachery
of Judas, the rashness of Peter, the tender care and sympathy of
Mary. Throughout the whole of his earthly life, the description given
THE NATIVITT. 39
here by Simeon was continually being verified. That description
itself throughout reveals its divine origin and character. It proves
itself to have been no bold conjecture of human wisdom, but a reve
lation of the future made by God.
Simeon's prophetic portraiture of the intention and effect of the
advent of the Eedeemer had scarcely been completed when another
testimony was added, that of the aged Anna, the daughter of Phanuel,
who, hke her venerable compeer, appears but this once in the sacred
page, and then is hidden for ever from our eyes. It is not said that
any special impulse drew her to the temple. It was her daily haunt.
Instantly serving God day and night, her life was one of fastings and
prayers. When it was also made known to her that the infant whom
she met in the temple was no other than the Christ of God, her song
of praise was added to that of Simeon, but the words of it are lost.
It would, we may be assured, be a suitable accompaniment, a fit
response to his. He, as may be beheved, retired from the temple
to close his eyes in peace ; but she was moved to go about and speak
of the Lord whom she had found to all that looked for redemption in
Jerusalem — the first preacher of the gospel, the first female evangelist
in the holy city.
In the briefest terms, let one or two practical reflections be now
suggested. Simeon did not wish to die till he had seen the Lord his Saviour;
as soon as he saw Him he was ready and willing to depart. TiU our
spiritual eyes be opened to see Him who is the way, the truth, and
the life, which of us is ready to meet our Maker — is prepared to
behold his face in peace ? But when once our eyes have seen and
our hearts embraced him, which of us should fear to die ? Simeon
desired to depart. It was not that, like Job, he wished to die because
life had become burdensome. His wish to depart was not the prod
uct of hours of bitter sorrow, but of a moment of exceeding joy. It
was not that, hke Paul, he desired to depart in order to be with
Christ. It was the fulness of that gratitude which he felt for the
great gift of God in aUowing him to see Christ in the flesh ; it was
the depth of that satisfaction and dehght which filled his heart as
his arms enfolded Jesus, which, leaving nothing more, nothing higher
that he could hope for in this world, drew forth, as by a natural
impulse, the expression, " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart
in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." Though nothing
is said about his age in the evangelical narrative, we may beheve that
the length of years which he had already reached, making the thought
of approaching departure from this world familiar, conspired, if not
40 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to beget, yet to give emphasis to this expression of his desire. But
it may be well, even though we be not in his exact position, to put to
ourselves the question whether any desire or any wiUingness we have
ever had. to die was the fruit of hours of earthly disappointments, or
of moments of spiritual elation and joy.
Christ was set for the faU and rising again of many in Israel; he
is set for the faU and rising again of many stUl. His gospel never
leaves us as it finds us. It softens or it hardens, it kUls or it makes
alive. That §tone which the Jewish buUders rejected is rejected by
many buUders stiU, and yet it is the headstone of the corner. Blessed
is he who grounds thereon his humble yet undoubting trust. " But
many among them," saith the prophet, " shaU stumble and faU, and
be broken" upon this stone. May our feet be shielded from such
a fate! The sufferings of Mary were linked with the sufferings of her Son.
It was his being wounded that wounded her. It was the stroke which
descended on him that sent the sword into her heart. The same kind
of tie should bind every believer to Christ. He is so sensitive as to
aU that affects his people's welfare and happiness, that whatever
hurts the least of these his httle ones touches the apple of his eye.
And they in turn should be so sensitive as to aU that affects his honor,
his cause, his kingdom on earth, that whatever damages or injures
them should send a thrill of answering sorrow through their heart.
Finally, Christ is the great Eevealer of the thoughts and intents
of the heart. Are we proud, are we covetous, are we worldly, are we
self-willed? Nothing wUl more bring out the sway and empire of
these or any kindred passions over us than the bringing closer home
to us the holy character and unmitigable claims of Jesus Christ.
Keep them at a distance, and the strong man armed keeps the pal
ace of the soul, and all comparatively is at peace. Bring them near,
force them home upon the conscience and the heart; then it is that
the inward struggle begins; and in that struggle the spirit uncon
sciously revealeth its true condition before God.
THE VISIT OF THE MAGI. d
IV.
The Visit of the Magi.*
Three striking incidents marked the birth and infancy of our
Lord. First, the midnight appearance of the angelic host to the
shepherds on the plains of Bethlehem, and their visit to the village
in which the great birth had that night occurred ; second, the presen
tation of Jesus as a first-born chUd in the temple, and the testimony
there given to him in the prophetic utterances of Simeon and Anna ;
and third, the visit of the wise men from the East, and the worship
and offerings which they presented to the new-born child. Each of
these had its special wonders ; in each a supernatural attestation to
the greatness of the event was given ; and woven together, they form
the wreath of heavenly glory hung by the Divine hand around the
infancy of the Son of Mary.
It is impossible to determine the date of the visit of the wise men.
It must have occurred not long after the birth, whUe Joseph and Mary
stiU lingered in Bethlehem, and it is of httle moment whether we
place it before or after the presentation in the Temple at Jerusalem.
The epithet by which Matthew describes to us these Eastern str?>n-
gers is not so vague and indefinite as it seems in our translation. He
caUs them Magi from the East. The birthplace and natural home of
the magian worship was in Persia. And there the Magi had a place
and power such as the Chaldaeans had in Babylon, the Hierophants
in Egypt, the Druids in Gaul, and the Brahmins still have in India.
They formed a tribe or caste, priestly in office, princely in rank. They
were the depositaries of nearly aU the knowledge or science existing
in the country where they hved ; they were the first professors and
practisers of astrology, worshippers of the sun and the other heav
enly bodies, from whose appearance and movements they drew their
divination as to earthly events — aU illustrious births below being
indicated, as they deemed, by certain peculiar conjunctions of the
stars above. Both as priests and diviners they had great power.
They formed, in fact, the most influential section of the community.
In political affairs their influence was predominant. The education
of royalty was in their hands ; they filled all the chief offices of state ;
they constituted the supreme counsel of the realm. As originaUy
applied to this Median priest-caste, the term Magi was one of dig
nity and honor. Afterwards, when transferred to other countries.
* Matthew 2 : 1-12.
42 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
and employed to designate not that peculiar sacerdotal order, but all
persons of whatever description who were professors of astrology and
practisers of divination, as these astrologers and diviners sunk in
character, and had recourse to aU kinds of mean imposture, the name
of magian or magician was turned into one of dishonor and reproach.
There seems no reason, however, to doubt that it was in its earher
and honorable meaning that it is used in the gospel narrative.
Eemarkable passages, both from Eoman and Jewish writers,*
have been quoted which inform us that at the period of our Saviour's
birth, there prevaUed generally over the East, in regions remote from
Palestine, a vague but strong behef that one born in Judea was to
arise and rule the world. Popularly this expectation was confined to
the appearance of some warrior chief who, by the might of his victo
rious arms, was to subdue the nations under him. But there were
many then in every land,whose faith in their old hereditary religions
had been undermined; who from those Jews now scattered every
where abroad, had learned some of the chief elements of the pure
Israelitish faith; and haU embracing it, had risen to a desire and
hope which took a higher ground, and who in this expected king that
was to spring out of Judah, were ready to hail a spiritual guide and
deliverer. Such, we beheve, were the Magi of Matthew's narrative.
Balaam, a man of their own or a kindred tribe, in their own or in a
neighboring country, had centuries before foretold that a star should
come out of Jacob, and a sceptre rise out of Israel. Numb. 24 : 17.
This and other of those old Jewish prophecies which pointed to the
same event may have in some form or other reached their ears, pre
paring them for the birth of one who in the first instance was to be
the king of the Jews, but whose kingdom was to connect itself with
other than mere earthly interests, to have intimate relationships with
man's highest hopes and his eternal destiny. Sharing the general
hope, but with that hope purified and exalted, let us beheve that
these Magi were earnestly, devoutly, waiting the coming of this new
king of the Jews and of mankind. Their office and occupation led
them to the nightly study of the starry heavens ; but stiU as they
gazed and speculated and divined, they felt that it was not from that
ghttering broadspread page of wonders hung above their heads that
any clear or satisfying information as to the divine character and
purposes was to be derived. Much as they fancied they could glean
from them as to man's earthly fortunes, what could the bright mute
stars tell them of the eternal destinies of those unnumbered human
spirits which beneath their hght were, generation after generation,
* Suetonius, Tacitus, Josephus.
THE VISIT OF THE MAGI. 43
passing away into the world beyond the grave? How often may the
deep sigh of disappointment have risen from the depths of these
men's hearts, as to aU their earnest interrogatories not a word of dis
tinct response was given, and the heavens they gazed on kept the
untold secret locked in their capacious bosom. But the sigh of the
earnest seeker after truth, hke the sigh of the lowly, penitent, and
contrite heart, never rises to the throne of heaven in vain. Many
errors may have mingled with those men's rehgious opinions, much
superstition have been in their rehgious worship, but God met in
mercy the truth-seeking spirit in the midst of its errors, and made its
very superstition pave the way to faith.
One night, as those Magi stood watching their cloudless skies,
their practised eye detected a new-come stranger among the stars.
The appearance of new stars is no novelty to the astronomer. We
have authentic records of stars of the first magnitude, rivaUing in their
brilliance the brightest of our old familiar planets, shining out sud
denly in places where no stars had been seen before, and after a sea
son vanishing away. Singular conjunctions of the planets have also
been occasionaUy observed, some of which are known to have occur
red about the time of the Eedeemer's birth. It may possibly have
been some such strange appearance in the heavens that attracted the
eyes of the wise men. It is said, however, in the narrative, that the
star went before them tiU it came and stood over where the young
chUd was. Understanding this as implying an actual and visible
movement of the star — that it went, lantern-like, before them on their
way, and indicated in some way, as by a finger of pointing hght, the
very spot where they were to find the chUd — as no such function
could be discharged by any of the ordinary inhabitants of the
heavens, aU about its appearance must be taken as supernatural, and
we must regard it as some star-like meteor shining in our lower at
mosphere. But be it what it might, however kindled, whatever curi
osity its strange appearance might excite — though the Magi, pene
trated by the popular behef, might naturaUy enough have regarded
it as an omen of the great expected birth — the star could of itself teU
nothing. However miraculous its appearance, if left without an inter
preter, it was but a dumb witness after aU. The conviction is almost
forced upon us that, in addition to the external sign, there was some
divine communication made to these Magi, informing them of tha
errand which the star was commissioned to discharge. But why the
double indication of the birth — the star without, the revelation made
within ? Why, but as an evidence and Ulustration of the care and
gracious condescension of Him who not only to the spiritual commu-
44 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
nication added the external sign, to be a help to the weak, infant,
staggering faith, but who, in the very shaping of that outward sign,
was pleased to accommodate himself to these men's earthly caUing;
and whUe to Mary and to the shepherds— Jews hving in a land where
stories of angelic manifestations were current — angels were sent to
make announcement of the Eedeemer's birth, to those astrologers of
the East he sends a star, meeting them in their own familiar walks,
showing itself among the divinities of their erring worship, gently to
lead them into His presence to whom the world's true worship was to
be given. But when this star appeared, and after they understood what its
presence betokened, was it a spontaneous impulse on their part to go
and do homage to the new-born King, or did He who revealed the
birth enjoin the journey ? Whatever the prompting, human or divine,
on which they acted, it does not appear that in the first instance any
thing beyond the general information was communicated, that some
where in Judea the birth had taken place. The star, it would appear,
did not' go before them all the way, for in that case they would not
have needed to institute any further inquiry. Its first office dis
charged, the star disappeared, leaving them to have recourse to such
common sources of information as lay open to them. It was at Jeru
salem, in the capital of the country over which this new-born King
was to reign; it was there, if anywhere, the needed intelligence was
to be obtained. To Jerusalem, therefore, they repair. Entering the
holy city, they put eagerly and expectantly the question, "Where is
he that is bom King of the Jews ? for we have seen his star in the
east, and are come to worship him."
The question takes the startled city by surprise. No one here has
seen the star, no one here has heard about this king. The tidings of
the arrival of those distinguished strangers, and of the question which
they asked, are carried quickly to the palace, and circulate rapidly
through the city. Herod is troubled. The usurper trembles on his
throne. Has a new claimant, with better title to that throne, indeed
been born? How comes it, if it be so, that he has never heard of
such a birth ? Has treachery been already busy at its work ; have
they been concealing from him this event ? Have the enemies of
himself and of his famUy been cloaking thus their projects, waiting
only for the fit time to strike the blow, and hurl him from his seat?
The blood he had already shed to reach that height begins to cry for
vengeance, and spectres of the slaughtered dead shake their terrors
in his face. Herod's trouble at the tidings we weU can understand,
but why was it thai all Jerusalem was troubled along with him:
THE VISIT OF THE MAGI. 45
Was it the simple fear of change, the terror of another re*-, olution ;
the knowledge of Herod's jealous temper and bloodthirsty disposi
tion ; the alarm lest his vindictive spirit might prompt him to some
new deed of cruelty, in order to cut off this rival? If so, how low
beneath the yoke of tyranny must the spirit of those citizens of Jeru
salem have sunk ; how completely, for the time, must the selfish have
absorbed the patriotic sentiment in their breasts !
But whatever alarm he felt, whatever dark purposes were brood
ing in his heart, Herod at first concealed them. He must know more
about this affair, get some information before he acts. He calls
together the chief priests and the scribes, and at no loss, apparently,
to identify the King of the Jews that the Magi asked about with the
Christ the Messiah of ancient prophecy, he demands of them where
Christ should be born. As httle at a loss, they lay their hand at
once upon the prophecy of Micah, which pointed to Bethlehem as the
birthplace. Furnished with this information, the King invites the
Magi to a private interview, conveys to them the information he had
himself received, and concealmg his sinister designs, sends them off
to Bethlehem to search diligently for the child, and when they had
found him, to bring him word again, that he too, as he falsely said,
might go and worship him.
Let us pause a moment here to reflect upon the impression which
this visit to Jerusalem, and the state of things discovered there, was
fitted to make upon these eastern visitors. It must surely have sur
prised them to come among the very people over whom this new-born
King was to rule, to enter the capital of their country, the city of the
chief priests and scribes by whom, if by any, an event so signal
should have been known, and to find there no notice, no knowledge
of the birth ; to find instead that they, coming from a strange land,
professors of another faith, are the first to teU these Jews of the
advent of their own king. It must have done more than surprise
them ; they too, in their turn, must have been troubled and perplexed
to see how the announcement, when it was made, was received ; to
see such jealousy, such alarm; and, at the last, so great increduhty
or indifference, that near as Bethlehem was, and interesting as was
the object of their visit to it, there were none among those inhabit
ants of Jerusalem who cared to accompany them. Was there noth
ing here to awaken doubt — for such faith as theirs to stagger at?
Might they not have been deceived ? Perhaps it was a delusion they
had listened to — a deceitful appearance they had seen in their own
land. Had these Magi been men of a weak faith or an infirm pur
pose, they might, instead of going on to Bethlehem, have gone forth
46 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
despondii.gly and distrustfuUy from Jerusalem, and taken their way
back to their own homes. But strange and perplexing as aU this is,
it neither shakes their faith nor affects their conduct. They had
good reason to believe that the communication at first made to them
came to them from God, and once satisfied of this, no conduct on
the part of others, however unaccountable or inconsistent, moves
them away from the beginning of their confidence. Though aU the
dweUers in Jerusalem be troubled at tidings which should have been
to them tidings of great joy ; though not a Jew be ready to join
them, or to bid them Godspeed ere they leave the city's gate, to
Bethlehem they go.
But a new perplexity arises. Somewhere in that village the birth
has taken place, but who shall tell them where? If the inhabitants
of the capital knew and cared so httle about the matter, what help
wUl they get from the villagers at Bethlehem ? They may require to
search dihgently, as Herod bade them, and yet, after aU, the search
may be vain. Just then, in the midst of their perplexity, the star
which they had seen in the east once more shone out above their
heads, to go before them till it stood over where the young chUd lay.
No wonder that, when they saw that star, they rejoiced with an
exceeding great joy. It dispelled all doubt, it relieved from aU per
plexity. When first they saw it, in the East, it wore the face of a
stranger among old friends; now it wears the face of an old friend
among strangers, and they haU it as we haU a friend we thought was
lost, but who comes to us at the very time we need him most.
Let us note the contrast, as to the mode and measure of divine
guidance given, between the Magi from the East and the shepherds
of Bethlehem and the chief priests and scribes of Jerusalem. The
shepherds were as sincere, perhaps more devout than the wise men;
understanding better who and what the Messiah was to be, and long
ing more ardently for his coming ; but they were uneducated men —
men at least whose position and occupation prevented them from
instituting independent inquiries of their own. They were left to find
out nothing; to them a full revelation was at once given. Such
minute information was furnished as to the time and place and cir
cumstances of the birth, that they were enabled, with httle or no
inquiry, to proceed directly to the place where the young chUd lay.
The Magi, on the other hand, were men of intelligence, education,
wealth. They had the leisure, and they possessed aU the means for
prosecuting an independent research. To them no such fuU and
minute directory of conduct was supphed. What they could not
learn otherwise than by a divine revelation, was in that way commu-
THE VISIT OF THE MAGI. 47
nicated; but what they could learn by the use of ordinary means,
they were left in that way to find out. They repair to, and they
exhaust aU the common sources of knowledge which he open to them.
They go to Jerusalem as to the hkehest place ; they get there tho
information as to the place of the Lord's birth; they act upon the v
information thus obtained up to the farthest limit to which it can
carry them. They tarry not in the unbeheving city, as many might
have done, tiU further light was given them. They turn not the
incredulity of others into a ground of doubt, nor the incompleteness
of the inteUigence afforded into a ground of discouragement and
delay. They know now that somewhere in Bethlehem the object of
their search is to be found, and if they faU in finding him, it wiU be
in Bethlehem that the faUure shaU take place. Nor is it tUl they are
on their way to that village, that the star of heavenly guidance once
more appears ; but then it does appear, and sends gladness into their
hearts. And have we not aU, as followers of the Crucified, another and
higher journey to perform ; a journey not to the place of the Saviour's
earthly birth, but that of his heavenly dwelling? And if, on that
journey, we act as those men did, God wiU deal with us as he dealt
with them. The path before us may be often hidden in obscurity;
our hghts may go out by the way; we may know as httle of what the
next stage is to reveal, as those men knew at Jerusalem what awaited
them in their path to Bethlehem ; but if, like them, we hold on our
course, unmoved by the example of others; if we foUow the hght
given us to the farthest point to which that hght can carry us, then
on us too, when hghts aU faU, and we seem about to be left in utter
darkness, some star of heavenly guidance wiU arise, at sight of which
we shall rejoice with an exceeding joy. Unto those that are thus
upright, there shall arise hght in the darkness ; and to him that order-
eth thus his conversation aright, God shall show his salvation.
But look now at the chief priests and scribes of the holy city, into
whose hands the ancient oracles of God had been specially commit
ted. They could tell at once, from the prophecies of Micah, the place
of the Messiah's birth ; and they could almost as readUy and as accu
rately from the prophecies of Daniel have known the time of his
advent. To them, as furnished already with sufficient means of infor
mation, no supernatural communication of any kind is made ; to them
no angel comes, no star appears, no sign is given. Had they but used
aright the means already in their hands, they should have been wait
ing for the coming of the Lord, with ears aU open to catch the first
faint rumors which must have reached Jerusalem from a village not
48 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
more than six mUes off, of what the shepherds saw and heard; they
should have been out to Bethlehem before these Magi came, ready
to welcome those visitors from a far country, and to conduct them
into the presence of their new-born King. But they neglected,
/ they abused the privUeges they possessed ; and now, as the proper
fruit of their own doings, not only is the same kind of information
supplied to others denied to them, but the very way in which they
are first informed works disastrously, and excites hostile prejudices
in their breast. " Where is he," these strangers say to them, " who
is born King of the Jews?" Has an event hke this occurred —
occurred within a few mUes of the metropolis — and they, the heads
and rulers of the Jewish people, not know of it ! For their first
knowledge of it must they be indebted to these foreigners, men igno
rant of Judea, unread in their sacred books ! A star, forsooth, these
men said, had appeared to them in the East; was it to be beheved
that for them, in their land of heathen darkness and superstition, such
a fresh hght should be kindled in the heavens, while to God's own
appointed priesthood no discovery of any kind had been made ? Wo
discern thus in its very earliest stage, that antipathy to the son of
Mary which, beginning in incredulity and fostered by pride, grew
into malignant hatred, and issued in the nailing of Jesus to the cross.
And even in the first stage of the course they foUowed, they appear
before us reaping the fruit of their former doings, and sowing the
seeds of their after crimes ; for it is thus that the husbandry of wick
edness goes on — the seed-time and the harvest, the sowing and the
reaping going on together. What a singular spectacle does the proud
and jealous priesthood of Judea thus present, learned in the letter of
their own Scriptures, but whoUy ignorant of their spirit; pointing the
way to others, not taking a single step in it themselves ; types of the
nation they belonged to, of the function which the Jews have so
largely since discharged— the openers of the door to Gentile inqui
rers, the closers of that door upon themselves.
We rejoin now the Magi at Bethlehem. They enter the indicated
house, and stand before a mother and her child: a mother of very
humble appearance; a child clad in simplest attire. Can this, they
think, as they look around, be the roof beneath which infant royalty
lies cradled! Can that be the child they have come so far to see and
worship ! Had they known aU about that infant which we now know ;
had they known that an angehc choir had already sung his birth,
lading the midnight breezes with a richer freight of melody than they
had ever wafted through the skies ; had they known that in that ht
tle hand which lay folded there in feebleness, in the gentle breath
THE VISIT OF THE MAGI. 49
which was heaving that infant bosom, the power of omnipotence lay
slumbering — that at the touch of the one, the blind eye was to open
and the tied tongue to be unloosed — that at the bidding of the other,
the wildest elements of nature in their stormiest march were to stand
still, devUs were to be driven out from their usurped abodes, and the
dead to come forth from the sepulchre ; had they known that at the
death of this Son of Mary the sun was to be darkened, the rocks
were to be rent, and the graves to give up their old inhabitants — that
he himself was to burst the barriers of the tomb, and rise in triumph,
attended by an angel escort, to take his place at the right hand of the
Majesty in the heavens — we should not have wondered at the ready
homage which they rendered to him. But they knew nothing of aU
this. What they did know we cannot teU. We only know that
instantly, in absence of aU outward warrant for the act, in spite of
the most unpromising appearances, they bow the knee before that
-undistinguished infant, lower than it bent before the haughty Herod
at Jerusalem ; bow in adoration such as they never rendered to any
earthly sovereign. And that act of worship over, they open their
treasures and present to him their gifts : the gold, the frankincense,
and the myrrh, the rarest products of the East; an offering such as
any monarch might have had presented to him by the ambassadors
from any foreign prince. When we take the whole course of these
men's conduct into account ; when we remember that they had none
of the advantages of a Jewish birth or education, of an early acquaint
ance with the Jewish Scriptures; when we think of their starting on
their long and perilous journey with no other object than the making
of this single obeisance to the infant Eedeemer of mankind; when
we look at them standing unmoved amid all the discouragements of
the Jewish metropohs ; when we attend them on their sohtary way
to Bethlehem ; when we stand by their side, as beneath that lowly
roof they sUently worship, and spread out their costly gifts — we can
not but regard their faith as in many of its features unparaUeled in
the gospel narrative ; we cannot but place them in the front rank of
that goodly company in whose acts the power and the triumph of a
simple faith shine forth.
That single act of homage rendered, they return to their own
country, and we hear of them no more. They come hke spirits, cast
ing no shadow before them; and like spirits they depart, passing
away into that obscurity from which they had emerged. But our
affection foUows them to their native land — would fain penetrate the
secret of their after hves and deaths. Did these men see and hear
and know no more of Jesus ? Were they hving when — after thirty
Life of CtirUL 4
•50 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
years of profoundest sUence, not a rumor of his name going any
where abroad — tidings came at last of the words he spake, the deeds
he did, the death he died ? We would fain beheve, so far, the quaint
old legend of the middle ages, that connects itself with the fancied
•resting-place of their rehcs in the Cathedral of Cologne ; we would
iain believe that they hved to converse with one of the apostles of
the Lord, and to receive Christian baptism at his hands. However
it may have been, we can scarce believe that He whose star carried
them from their eastern homes to Bethlehem, and whose Spirit
iprompted the worship they then rendered, left them to die in hea
then ignorance and unbelief. Let us cherish rather the behef that
they who bowed so reverently before the earthly cradle, are now wor
shipping with a profounder reverence before the heavenly throne.
But what special significance has this incident in the early life of
oar Eedeemer? Why were these men summoned from their distant
homes to come so far to pay that single act of homage to the infant
Jesus, and then retire for ever from our sight ? Why, but that even
with the first weak beginnings of the Saviour's earthly hfe, there
might be a foretokening of the wide embrace of that kingdom he
came to establish ; a first fulfilling of those ancient prophecies which
had foretold that the GentUes should come to this light, and kings to
the brightness of its rising; that aU they from Sheba should come,
bringing gold and incense. These eastern Magi were the earhest
ambassadors from heathen lands, the first shadowy precursors of
that great company to be gathered in from the east, and from the
west, and from the north, and from the south, to sit down with Abra
ham in the kingdom of the just. In these persons and in their act
the GentUe world, of which they formed a part, gave an early wel
come to the Eedeemer, and hastened to lay its tribute at his feet.
They were, in fact — and this should bind them the closer to our
hearts — they were our representatives at Bethlehem, making for us
Gentiles the first expression of our faith, the first offer of our aUe-
giance. Let us rightly follow up what they did in our name. First,
they worshipped, and then they gave the best and richest things they
had. The gold, the frankincense, the myrrh had been of little worth
had the worship of the heart not gone before and sanctified the gift.
But the gift most appropriately foUowed the worship. First then
let us give ourselves to the Lord, our heart the first oblation that wo
proffer; for the heart once given, the hand wiU neither be empty not
idle, nor wUl it grudge the richest thing that it can hold, nor the best
service it can render.
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 61
The Massacre of the Jnnocents, and the Flight
into -jsgyft.*
There are three Herods who appear prominently in the pages of
the New Testament. First, Herod the Great, the son of a crafty and
wealthy Idumean or Edomite, who, during the reign of the last of
the Asmonean princes, attained to great political mfluence in Judea,
securing for his eldest son Phasael the governorship of Jerusalem;
and for Herod, his younger son, the chief command in GalUee. Pha
sael was cut off in one of those political commotions which the
raising of a foreign family to such an elevated position engendered;
but Herod escaped aU the perils to which he was thus exposed, dis
tinguished himself by his address and bravery, showed great pohti
cal foresight in allying himself closely with the power which he saw
was to prevaU in Judea as over aU other lands, sought and won the
personal friendship of Cassius and of Mark Antony, and, mainly by
the influence of the latter, was proclaimed king of the Jews.
Second, Herod Antipas, a son of this first Herod, who, in that
division of his father's kingdom which took place at his decease,
became tetrarch of Galilee and Perea. This was the Herod who so
often appears in the narrative of our Lord's ministry, who at first
heard John the Baptist gladly, but who afterwards gave the order
for his execution ; who happened to be in Jerusalem at the time of
Christ's trial and condemnation, and who was brought then into such
singular contact with Jesus.
Third, Herod Agrippa, a grandson of the first Herod, though not
a son of Herod Antipas, who was invested by the Eomans with the
royal dignity, and ruled over all the country which had been subject
to his grandfather. This was the Herod who appears in the history
of the Acts df the Apostles ; who stretched forth his hands to vex
certain of the church; who killed James, the brother of John, with
the sword ; who, because he saw that it pleased the Jews, proceeded
to take Peter also; and whose awful death so soon afterwards at
Cfrsarea St. Luke has so impressively recorded.
Our Saviour, we know, was born near the end of the long reign
of the first of these Herods ; and the latest and most successful inves
tigations of the chronology of Christ's life have taught us to beheve
that it was in the last year of Herod's reign, and close upon that
o Matt. 2 : 13-23.
52 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
monarch's last illness and death, that the birth at Bethlehem took
place. The terrible malady which made his closing scene not less
awful than that of his grandson Agrippa had already begun its work,
and given forewarning of the fatal issue. He was in a moody, suspi
cious, vengeful state of feeling. His reign had long been outwardly
brilliant and prosperous. He had defeated all the schemes of his
political opponents. With a firm and cruel hand, he had kept down
ah attempts at intestine revolt. By a large remission of taxation, by
extraordinary liberality in times of famine, by lavish expenditure on
pubhc works, the erection of new cities and the rebuilding of the
temple at Jerusalem, he had sought to dazzle the pubhc eye and
win the pubhc favor. But nothing could quench the Jewish suspi
cion of him as an Edomite. This suspicion fed upon his attempts to
introduce and encourage heathen games and pastimes, and grew
intensely bitter as it watched with what unrelenting hate he perse
cuted and cut off all the members of that Maccabean famUy whose
throne he had usurped, around whom Jewish gratitude and hope stUl
fondly clung. This Ul-concealed enmity preyed upon the proud, dark
spirit of Herod. It taught him to see his deadliest foes in the bosom
of his own family. Passionately attached to her, he had married the
beautiful but ill-fated Mariamne, the daughter of Alexander, one of
the Asmonean princes. She inherited the pride and ambition of her
f amUy ; bitterly resenting, as weU she might, the secret order which
she discovered Herod had issued, that she should be cut off if he
faUed to secure the throne for himself in the embassage to Eome
which he undertook after the defeat of Mark Antony, his first patron.
Her resentment of this order had the worst interpretation put upon
it, and in the transport of a jealousy in which both personal and
political elements were combined, Herod ordered her to be beheaded.
Then foUowed those transports of remorse which, for a time, bereft
the frantic prince of reason. Mariamne gone, the father's jealousy
was directed to his two sons by her, in whose veins the hated Asmo
nean blood was flowing. He sent for Antipater, his son by the wife
he had divorced in order to marry Mariamne, and set him up as their
rival and his successor. But the popular favor clung to Alexander
and Aristobulus, the sons of the murdered Mariamne. Herod's court
and famUy became a constant gloomy scene of dissension and dis
trust. Charges of treasonable designs on the part of Alexander and
Aristobulus against his person and government were secretly poured
into the ear of Herod. Men of inferior rank, supposed to be impli
cated, were seized, tortured, and executed, tiU at last, by their father's
own order the two young princes, then in the flower of their early
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. oil
manhood, were strangled. Antipater had been the chief instrument in
urging Herod on to this inhuman deed, and now in that very son whom
he had done so much for he found the last worst object of his jealous
wrath. Antipater was proved to have conspired to poison his old,
doting, diseased, and dying father. He was summoned to Jerusa
lem. Herod raised himself from his bed of suffering, and gave the
order for his execution. His own death drew on. It maddened him
to think that there would be none to mourn for him; that at his
death there would be a general jubUee. The fiendish idea seized
him, that if there were none who voluntarUy would weep for him,
there should at least be plenty of tears shed at his death; and so
his last command — a command happUy not executed — was, that the
heads of aU the chief families in Judea should be assembled in the
Hippodrome, and that as soon as it was known that he had drawn
his last breath they should be mercUessly slaughtered; and thus, his
body consumed by inward ulcers and his spirit with tormenting pas
sions, Herod died.
I have recited thus much of this king's history, that you may see
in what harmony with his other doings was his massacre of the inno
cents at Bethlehem. When he heard of the coming of the Magi and
of the birth of this new King of the Jews, the sceptre was already
dropping from his aged and trembhng hands.* But as the dying
hand of avarice clutches its gold the firmer as it feels the hour draw
on when it must give it up, so did the dying hand of ambition clutch
the sceptre, and he determined that if he could hold it no longer, he
would at least try to cut off aU who might claim to wield it at his
death. A lifetime's practice had made him a proficient in craft. He
inquired privUy of the wise men as to the time at which the star
appeared. Had he even then, when he made this inquiry, matured
his bloody project; and did he wish, by knowing the precise time of
the star's appearance, to assure himself of the exact age of the chUd
he intended to destroy; or was the inquiry made for the purpose of
ascertaining whether any like star had been seen anywhere in Judea,
seeking thus to confirm or invalidate what the wise men said ? This
•only we can say, that if it were but a few days after the birth of Jesus
that the Magi visited Jerusalem, and if the order that Herod after
wards issued to his executioners was founded on the information
given him as to the time of the star's appearance, then the first
appearance of the star must have been coincident, not with the birth
of Jesus, but with the annunciation of that birth to Mary. Herod
may have fancied from what he learned from the Magi that the chUd
* He was seventy years old when he died.
64 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
must now be about a year old, and giving a broad margin that no
chance of escape might be given, his order ran that aU under two
years of age should be destroyed.
Perhaps, however, Herod's only object in his first private inter
view with the Magi was to extract from them aU the information he
could, with no precise or definite purpose as to how he should act
upon the information so obtained. When he told them to go and
search diligently for the chUd, and when they had found him, to
come and bring him word, it was not with any purpose on his part
to go and worship him ; in saying that he meant to do so, we may
weU beheve him to have been playing the hypocrite; but neither
may it have been with an already fixed resolution to act as he after
wards did. But the wise men did not return; he ascertained that
they had been in Bethlehem, that they had left that place, that with
out coming to see him and report as to the result of their search,
they were already beyond his reach on their way back to their dis
tant home. The birth was, by this very circumstance, made aU the
surer in his eyes, and to his natural alarm at such a birth, there was now
added bitter chagrin at being mocked in this way by these strangers.
Had they seen through the mask which he imagined he had fash
ioned so artfuUy and worn so weU ? Nothing galls the crafty more
than when their craft is discovered, and the discovery is turned
against themselves. Angry with the men who had treated him thus.
Herod is angry, too, with himseU for having given them the oppor
tunity to outwit him. Why had he not sent some of his own trusty
servants with them to Bethlehem ? Why had he been so foolish as
to trust these foreigners? Irritated at them, irritated at himself,
determined that this child shaU not escape, he sends his bandits out
upon their bloody errand.
That errand was to be quickly and stealthily executed. In so
smaU a village as Bethlehem, and in the thinly scattered population
which lay around it, there could be but a few male infants under two
years old. It is but one of the dreams of the middle-age imagina
tion which has swelled the numbers of the slaughtered to thousands ;
one or two dozens would be nearer to the mark. A few practised
hands such as Herod could easily secure would have little diffi
culty in finishing their work in the course of one forenoon. It was
spring-time of the year ;* the parents were busy in the fields ; the
unprotected homes lay open. Before any concerted resistance could
be offered, half the chUdrer might be slain. Every precaution, we
* It has been accurately ascertained that Herod must have died between the
13th March and the 4th April, 750 a. o. a.
mM:fMi
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 55
may beheve, was taken by Herod that it should not be known at
whose instance the deed was done. He was too wily a politician to
make any such public manifestation of his vindictive alarm as his
sending forth a company of executioners, clothed visibly with tho
royal authority, would have made. But secretly, promptly, vigor
ously as his measures were taken, they came too late. When told
that not a male child of the specified age had been permitted to
escape, he may have secretly congratulated himseU on that peril to
his government being thus summarUy set aside. But an eye more
vigUant than his was watching over the safety of the infant Jesus.
In a dream of the night the angel of the Lord had appeared to
Joseph ; told him of the impending peril, and specially directed him
as to the manner of escape. Without an hour's delay, the warning
given was acted on. The journey from Bethlehem to the nearest
part of Egypt was soon performed, and secured from the stroke of
Herod's bandits and placed beyond the after-reach of Herod's wrath,
the child was safe. The flight was hasty, and the sojourn in Egypt
was but short.* The way for the return was open, and in fulfilment
of his promise, the angel came to Joseph to tell him that they were
dead who sought the young chUd's hfe. Struck by all the circum
stances which had accompanied the birth there, Joseph and Mary
had perhaps resolved to take up their residence in Bethlehem. But
on entering Judea they heard that though Herod was dead, his son
Archelaus ruled in his stead ; a prince who early proved that the
spirit of his father had descended on him, one of the first acts of his
reign being the slaughter of three thousand of his countrymen in
Jerusalem. The apprehensions of Joseph were verified by the angel's
once more appearing to him in a dream, and directing him to pass on
through Judea, and take up his abode again in Nazareth, a hamlet in
the province of Gahlee.
In the narrative of this passage of our Lord's infant life as given
by St. Matthew, two things strike us.
1. The prominent part assigned to, and assumed by Joseph as the
earthly guardian of the child ; the frequency, the minuteness, and the
manner in which these divine intimations were made to him on which
he acted. In every instance it was in a dream of the night that the
heavenly warning came. Nor was the warning in any instance vague,
but remarkably definite and satisfactory. He was told at first not
* Accepting either the close of the year 749 A. u. o. or th6 beginning of 750
A. tj. c. ob the most probable date of the birth of Christ, and assuming that tha
visit of the Magi succeeded the presentation in the temple, the stay in Egypt
aould PAve been but 3nori.
56 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
simply that danger was at hand ; he was told specifically what that
danger was: " Herod wUl seek the young chUd to destroy him." He
was told not simply to escape from Bethlehem, but to flee into Egypt;
of Herod's death he got timely information, and while hesitating as
to what he should do on his return into Judea, he had his doubts
removed and his fears aUayed by another divine direction. Are we
wrong in interpreting the heavenly messenger's manner of acting
towards the foster-parent of our Saviour as indicative of a very
watchful and tender solicitude on Joseph's part for the safety of that
strange chUd to whom he was united by so strange a tie ? He ap
pears as the heaven-appointed, heaven-instructed sentinel, set to
watch over the infant days of the Son of the Highest, chosen for this
office, and aided in its discharge, not without such regard to his per
sonal qualifications as is ordinarily shown under the divine govern
ment in the selection of fit agents for each part of the earthly work.
We are led thus to think of him as taking an almost more than
paternal interest in the babe committed to his care, thinking about
him so much and so anxiously by day that his dreams by night are
of him, and that it is in these dreams the angel comes to give the
needed guidance, and to seal, as it were, by the divine approval the
watchful care by which the dreams had been begotten. And we are
the more disposed to think thus favorably of Joseph as we reflect
upon the peculiar relationship in which he stood to Jesus, and re
member that this is the only glimpse we get of the manner in which
the duties of that relationship were discharged. In the record of our
Lord's ministry he never appears. The conclusion seems natural that
he had died before that ministry began. It is only in his connection
with the birth and infancy and childhood of Jesus that any sight of
Joseph is obtained, and it pleases us to think that he who was hon
ored to be the guardian of that sacred life in the first great peril to
which it was exposed, was one not unworthy of the trust, but who
lovingly, faithfully, tenderly executed it.
2. In reading this portion of the gospel of St. Matthew, we are
stnick with the frequent references to the history and prophecies of
the Old Testament. Such references are peculiar to St. Matthew,
and they are due to the character of those to whom his gospel was
especiaUy addressed, and to the object he had especially in view. His
gospel was written for converted Jews, and his great aim was to
present to such Jesus Christ as the Messiah promised to their fathers.
Continually, therefore, throughout his narrative, as almost nowhere
in the narratives of the other evangelists, he quotes from the Old
Testament Scriptures with the view of showing how accurately and
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 57
completely they were fulfiUed in the life and death of Jesus of Naza
reth. The very formula, " that it might be fulfiUed," is pecuhar to
the first gospel. The method thus foUowed by St. Matthew was ad
mirably fitted to soothe the prejudices of Jewish converts, and estab
lish them in a true faith in Christ. Thus it is that in the passage
now before us, he attempts to obviate objections that might naturaUy
arise in Jewish minds, on their being told of such events — to them so
untoward and unlooked for — in the life of the infant Messiah as his
being forced to find a temporary retreat in the land of Egypt, the
slaughter of so many infants on his account, and the fixing of his
abode in a remote hamlet of GalUee. Nothing could be more calcu
lated to aUay any prejudice created by the recital of such incidents
than to point to paraUel or analogous ones in the history of ancient
Israel. The three citations of this kind which St. Matthew makes
differ somewhat in their character. Of only one of them is it cer
tain that there was a hteral fulfilment of a prophecy uttered with im
mediate and direct reference to Christ. He came and dwelt, it is
said, in Nazareth, " that it might be fulfiUed which was spoken by
the prophets, He shall be caUed a Nazarene." Yet it is singular that
this prophecy, which was obviously one spoken directly of the Mes
siah, is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament Scriptures as they
now are in our hands. But this hinders not our behef that by some
one or other of the ancient prophets the words that St. Matthew
quotes had been spoken. As Jude recites and verifies a prophecy of
Enoch of which otherwise we should have been ignorant, as St. Paul
reports a saying of our Lord which otherwise should not have been
preserved, so St. Matthew here records a prophecy which but for his
citation of it would have perished.
It is different, however, with the other two citations from ancient
prophecy. These we can readily lay our hands upon, and in doing
so become convinced that St. Matthew did not and could not mean
to assert that in the events which he related they had directly and
hteraUy been verified. His object was rather to declare — and that
was sufficient — that the incidents to which those old prophecies did
in the first instance refer, were not only kindred in character, but
were typical or symbohcaUy prophetic of those which he was describ
ing in the life of Jesus. He quotes thus a part of that verse in the
lit! chapter of Hosea which runs thus : "When Israel was a chUd,
then I loved him, and caUed my son out of Egypt." If that ancient
Israel of which the Lord said, "He is my son," "He is my first
born," whUe yet he was as it were but an infant, was carried down
into and thereafter brought safe out of Egypt, was it a strange thing
58 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
that He who was Jehovah's own and only Son, the First-born among
many brethren, of whom and of whose church that Israel was a type,
should in his infancy have to pass through a hke ordeal of persecu
tion and of deliverance? The point of the fulfilment of the prophecy
here aUeged does not lie in Hosea's having Christ actually and per-
BonaUy in his eye when he penned the words quoted by St. Matthew,
but in the fact related by Hosea having a typical reference to a like
fact in that after history which stands shadowed forth throughout in
the outward history of ancient Israel.
It is in the same way that we are to understand the quotation
from the 31st chapter of the prophecies of Jeremiah. It is in direct
connection with his statement of the fact that Herod sent forth and
slew aU the children that were in Bethlehem, from two years old and
under, that St. Matthew says, "Then was fulfilled that which was
spoken by Jeremy the prophet." "Matthew," says Calvin, "does not
mean that the prophet had predicted what Herod should do, but that
at the advent of Christ that mourning was renewed which many ages
before the chUdren of Benjamin had made." PrimarUy the words of
the prophet referred to the carrying away of a large portion of the
tribes of Benjamin and Judah captives to Babylon. In describing
the bitter grief with which the heart of the country was then smitten,
Jeremiah, by a figure as bold as it is picturesque and impressive,
summons the long-buried Eachel, the mother of Benjamin, from her
grave, representing her as roused from the sleep of ages to bewaU the
captivity of her chUdren. But Eachel's grave lay near to Bethlehem,
and now another bitter woe had come upon the land in the murder
of those innocents in that village ; and what more natural than that
St. Matthew should revive, re-appropriate, and re-apply that image of
Jeremiah, representing Eachel as anew issuing from her tomb to weep
over these her slaughtered chUdren.
But there was something more here than a mere apposite applica
tion to a scene of recent sorrow of a poetical image that originaUy
referred to the grief caused by the captivity. That very grief which
fiUed the land of Judah may have been intended to prefigure the
lamentation that now filled Bethlehem and all its borders. Eachel
rising from her tomb, and filling the air then with her lamentations,
may have been meant to stand as a type or representative of these
mothers of Bethlehem, all torn in heart by the snatching of their
little ones from their struggling arms and the killing of them before
their eyes. If it be so, then that passage in Jeremiah speaks of some
thing more than of the mere suffering inflicted and the sorrow it pro
duced. The weeping Rachel is not suffered to weep on, to weep out
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 59
her grief. There are words of comfort for her in her tears. There is
a message from the Lord to her that speaks in no ambiguous terms
of the after destiny, the future restoration of those chUdren so rudely
torn from their maternal embrace. For what are the words which
immediately foUow those which St. Matthew has quoted: "Thus saith '
the Lord, Eefrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears
for thy work shaU be rewarded, saith the Lord ; and they shall como
again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope in thine end,
saith the Lord, that thy children shaU come again to their own bor
der." If we have any right to apply this part of the prophecy to this
incident of the evangehc history, then may we take the words that I
have quoted as carrying with them the assurance that those children
who perished under the stroke of Herod's hirelings died not spiritual
ly ; that they shaU come again from the land of the last enemy, come
again with Him whose birth was so mysteriously connected with their
death. We know that those infants, whose ghastly remains the weep
ing mothers gathered up to lay in their untimely graves, shaU rise
again in the resurrection at the last day. To them that resurrection,
itseU a fruit of the Saviour's advent, must come as a boon, a benefit,
not as a bane or curse. They wiU rise to eternal life. To believe
otherwise of them, and of aU who die in infancy, would be to believe
that those who are caUed away from this world whUe yet the first
dewdrops of life are on them, are placed thereby in a worse condi
tion than that in which it is the declared purpose of the gospel to
place aU mankind. It is a belief which we cannot adopt. Our assur
ance is clear, and, as we think, weU grounded — though these grounds
we cannot now pause to unfold — that all who die in infancy are saved.
Distinguished among them aU, let us believe this of those slaughtered
babes of Bethlehem. Their fate was singularly wrapped up with that
of the infant Saviour. The stroke that fell on them was meant for him ;
the sword of persecution which swept so mercUessly in many an after
age through the ranks of Christ's httle ones was first reddened in
their blood. The earhest victims to hatred of the Nazarene — if not
consciously and wiUingly, yet actuaUy dying for him — let us count
them as the first martyrs for Jesus, and let us beheve that in them
the truth of the martyrs' motto was first made good, "Near to the
sword, near to God." "O blessed infants!" exclaims Augustine;
"He who at his birth had angels to proclaim him, the heavens to tes
tify, and Magi to worship him, could surely have prevented that these
should have died for him, had he not known that they died not in
that death, but rather hved in higher bliss."
60 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
VI.
The Thirty Years at Nazareth — £hrist ^monq
The Doctors.*
Up among the hiUs of Galilee, in a basin surrounded by sweUing
eminences, which shut it in on every side, hes the little viUage of
Nazareth. Its name does not occur in Old Testament history. Jose
phus never mentions it, though he speaks of places lying all around
it. Its inhabitants were not worse than their neighbors, nor exposed
on account of their character to any particular comtempt, yet Natha-
nael, himself a GalUean, could say, " Can there any good thing come
out of Nazareth?" so small and insignificant was the place. It was
here, as in a fit retreat, that the childhood, youth, and early manhood
of our Lord passed quietly and unnoticed away. Those thirty years
of the life of the Son of God upon this earth, how deeply hidden from
us do they he ! how profound the silence regarding them which the
sacred writers preserve ! a sUence aU the more remarkable when we
consider how natural and strong is our desire to know something, to
be told something of the earlier days of any one who, at some after
period of his life, has risen to distinction. But aU that here is told us
of the first twelve years of our Saviour's life is that the chUd grew,
waxed strong in spirit, was filled with wisdom, and that the grace of
God was upon him. Had any of those wonders which attended his
birth been renewed, had any thing supernatural occurred in the
course of those years, we may presume it would have been related or
aUuded to. Nothmg of that kind we may infer did happen. Out
wardly and inwardly the growth of Jesus under Mary's care at Naz
areth, obeyed the common laws under which human infancy and
childhood are developed. Beyond that gentle patience which noth
ing could ruffle, that simple truthfulness which nothing could turn
aside ; beyond that love which was always ready to give back smUe
for smUe to Mary and the rest around, and to go forth rejoicingly on
its httle errands of kindness within the home of the carpenter ; be
yond that wisdom which, wonderful as it was, was chUdlike wisdom
still, growing as his years grew, and deriving its increase from aU
the common sources which lay open to it ; beyond the charm of aU
the graces of chUdhood in their full beauty and in their unsullied per
fection—there was nothing externally to distinguish his first twelve
years. So we conclude from the absence of aU notices of them in the
0 Luke 2 : 40-52.
THE THIRTY YEARS AT NAZARETH. 61
gospel narrative. Of the void thus left, however, the Christian church
became early impatient. Many attempts were made to fiU it up. In
the course of the first four centuries numerous pseudo-gospels were in
circulation, a long hst of which has been made up out of references to
them which occur in the preserved writings of that period* Some ot
these apocryphal gospels are stiU extant, two of them entitled the
Gospel of the Infancy ; and it is very curious to notice how those suc
ceeded who tried to Uft the veil which covers the earher years of
Christ. One almost feels grateful that such early attempts were
made to fill up the blank which the four Evangelists have left.f
They enable us to contrast the simplicity, and naturalness and con
sistency of aU that the Evangehsts have recorded of Christ, with such
empty and unmeaning tales. They do more. These apocryphal gos
pels were written by men who wished to honor Christ in aU they said
about him ; by men who had that portraiture of his character before
them which the four gospels supply; and yet we find them narrating,
as being in what seemed to them entire harmony with that character,
that when boys interrupted Jesus in his play, or ran against him in
the street of the village, he looked upon them and denounced them,
and they feU down and died. It was said, I beheve by Eousseau, that
the conception and delineation of such a character as that of the
man Christ Jesus, by such men as the fishermen of Gahlee, would
have been a greater miracle than the actual existence of such a man.
In these apocryphal gospels we have a singular confirmation ot that
saying; we have the proof that men better taught, many of them,
than the apostles, even when they had the full delineation of the
• See Jones on the Canon.
t These Gospels of the Infancy of our Lord are full of miracles of the most
frivolous description, miracles represented as wrought first by the simple pres
ence of the infant, by the clothes he wore, the water in which he was washed,
wrought afterwards by the Son of Mary himself as he grew up at Nazareth, many
alleged incidents of his boyhood there being gravely related : as when we are told
that he and the other children of the village went out to play together, busying
themselves in making clay into the shapes of various birds and beasts, where
upon Jesus commanded his beasts to walk, his birds to fly, and so excelled them
all ; or again, when we are told that passing by a dyer's shop he saw many pieces
of cloth laid out to be dyed, all of which he took and flung into a neighboring
furnace, throwing the poor owner of the shop into an agony of consternation and
grief, and then pleasantly relieving him by drawing all the pieces out of the fur
nace each one now of the very color which had been desired. Such are the speci
mens, chosen chiefly because they are the least absurd of the many which are
recorded in these gospels. It was thus, as these writers would exhibit it, that
the early boyhood of our Lord was spent ; it was by miracles such as those which
I have recited, that he even then distinguished himself.
62 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
manhood of Jesus in their hands, could not attempt a fancy sketch of
his chUdhood without not only violating our sense of propriety, by
attributing to him the most puerile and unmeaning displays of divine
power, but shocking our moral sense, and falsifying the very picture
they had before their eyes, by attributing to him acts of vengeance.
Joseph and Mary "went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of
the Passover." The Mosaic law required that all the male inhab
itants of Judea should go up three times yearly to the capital, to
keep the three great festivals of the Passover, Pentecost, and Taber
nacles. A later Eabbinical authority had laid an injunction upon
women to attend the feast of the Passover. Living as they did in so
remote a part of the country, it is probable that the parents of our
Lord satisfied themselves with going up together once yearly to Jeru
salem; Joseph thus doing less, and Mary more than the old law
enjoined. When Jesus was twelve years old, Joseph and Mary took
him up with them to Jerusalem. He had then reached that age,
when, according to Jewish reckoning, he crossed the line which
divides childhood from youth, got the new name of a son of the Lord,
and had he been destined to any public office, would have passed into
the hands of the Eabbis for the higher instructions which their
schools supphed. Jesus, however, had received no other instruction
than the village school, attached to the synagogue at Nazareth, had
supphed, and was destined to no higher employment than that of the
trade his father foUowed. The purpose of Joseph and Mary in
taking him up with them to Jerusalem was not that he might be
placed at the feet of Gamaliel, or any other of the great distinguish
ed teachers of the metropolis, but simply that he might see the holy
city, and take part with them in the sacred services of the Pass
over. There a new world opened to the boy's wondering eyes. With
what interest must he have looked around, when first he trod the
courts of the temple, and gazed upon the ministering priests, the
altar with its bleeding sacrifice and rising incense, the holy place, and
the secret shrine that lay behind the veU. The places, too, of which
we shall have to speak immediately, where youths of his own age
were to be found, would not be left unvisited. What thoughts were
stirred within his breast by all these sights, it becomes us not even
to attempt to imagine. The key is not in our hands with which we
might unlock the mysteries of his humanity at this stage of its devel
opment. He has himself so far unveUed his thoughts and feelings
as to teach us how natural it was that he should linger in the holy
city, and undei the power of a new attraction feel for a day or two as
THE THIRTY YEARS AT NAZARETH. 63
if the ties that bound him to Nazareth and to his home there were
broken. The seven days of the feast went by. It had been a crowded
procession from Galilee which Joseph and Mary had joined. GalUee
was then, as Josephus informs us, very thickly populated, studded
with no less than two hundred and forty towns, containing each
fifteen thousand inhabitants or more, sending forth in the war with
the Eomans an army of no less than one hundred thousand men.
The separate companies which this crowded population sent up at
the Passover time to Jerusalem would each be large, and as the
youths of the company consorted and slept near one another in the
course of the journey, it is the less surprising that, on leaving Jerusa
lem to return to Nazareth, Joseph and Mary should not during the
day have missed their son, who had stayed behind, nor have become
aware of his absence tiU they sought for him among his companions
when they rested for the night. The discovery was a peculiarly dis
tressing one. What if some oversight had been committed by them?
if they had faUed to teU their son of the time of the departure, if they
had faUed to notice whether he was among the other youths before
they left the city? They had such confidence in that child, who
never before in a single instance had done any thing to create anxiety
or distrust; they were so sure that he would be where, as they
thought, he ought to be, that they had scarcely felt perhaps an ordi
nary degree of parental sohcitude. And where could he now be;
what could have happened to him? Their eager inquiries would
probably soon satisfy them that he had not fallen aside by the way,
that he had never joined the returning traveUers, that he must have
remained behind in Jerusalem. But with whom? for what? He
knew no friends there with whom to stay. Had some accident be
fallen him ? was he detained against his will ? Did any one at Jeru
salem know the secrets of his birth ; were there any there who stiU
sought the young chUd's hfe ? Herod was dead ; Archelaus was
banished; the parents themselves had not been in Jerusalem since
the time they had presented the infant in the temple. It was not
hkely they should be recognized ; none of their friends at Nazareth
knew about the mysteries of the conception and the birth. They
had thought there was no risk in taking Jesus with them, but now
their hearts are full of dark forebodings ; some one may have known,
may have told ; some secret design may still have been cherished
Where was their chUd, and what had happened to him ?
You may imagine what a night of sleepless anxiety foUowed their
discovery at the first nightly resting place of the caravan. Midday
64 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
saw them back in the city. It is said to have been after three days'
search they found him; if we count the day of their return as one ol
these three, there would stiU be one entire day's fruitless search.
There may have been two such days— days of eager inquiry every
where throughout the city, in the house where they had hved, among
aU those with whom they had had any converse or connection. At
last they find the lost one, not in the courts of the temple, not in
any of those parts of the edifice consecrated to pubhc worship, tut
in one of those apartments in the outer buildings used as a school of
the Eabbis. Among the Jews at this period, each synagogue had a
schoolroom attached to it, in which the rudiments of an ordinary
education were taught. Besides, however, these schools for primary
instruction, wherever there were ten men in a position to devote their
whole time to this purpose, a room was buUt for them, in which they
carried on their pupUs in aU the higher walks of the sacred learning
of the Jews. These constituted the schools of the Eabbis, and
formed an important instrument in the support and extension of that
system of Eabbinism which, as Milman tells us, " became, after the
ruin of the temple, and the extinction of public worship, a new bond
of national union, and the great distinctive feature in the character
of modern Judaism." There were three apartments employed in this
way attached to the temple. It was in one of these that Joseph and
Mary found their son. He was sitting in the ordinary attitude, and
engaged in the ordinary exercises of a pupil in the middle of the
doctors, hearing them and asking them questions — the Jewish method
of education being chiefly catechetical — the pupU himself sometimes
answering the questions put, and astonishing his hearers with his
wisdom. When this strange, plain-looking, bright-looking, solemn-
looking Galilean boy first came in among them, was it the wisdom he
then showed which drew the hearts of some of these Eabbis to him,
and led them, as if anxious to gain a scholar who might turn out to
be the chief ornament of their school, to take him in and treat him
tenderly? Was it with them, in the room they occupied in the outer
temple buildings, that the two nights in which Jesus was separated
from his parents were spent ? The tie, whatever it was, between him
and them, is now destined to be broken, never to be renewed.
Joseph and Mary find him in the midst of them. Joseph is too
much astonished to say any thing, nor is it likely that Mary spoke
tiU he had gone with her apart; but now her burdened mother's
heart finds utterance. " Son," she says to him, " why hast thou thus
dealt with us?" words of reproach that were new to Mary's lips.
Never before had she to chide that chUd. Never before had he done
THE THIRTY YEARS AT NAZARETH. 65
any thing to require such chiding. But now, when it appears that
no accident had happened, no restraint had been exercised, that it
had been of his own free wiU that Jesus had parted from his parents,
and was sitting so absorbed by other persons and with other things,
she cannot account for such conduct on his part. It looks like neg
lect, and worse ; hke indifference to the pain which he must have
known this separation would cost them. "Son," she says, "why hast
thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee
sorrowing." Innocently, artlessly, chUdishly, in words which, though not meant
to meet the reproach with a rebuke, yet carried with them much of
the meaning and effect of the words spoken afterwards at the mar
riage-feast at Cana, Jesus answers, "How is it that ye sought me?
could you, Mary, beheve that I would act under other than heavenly
guidance ; could you allow the idea of my being liable to any risk or
danger simply because I was not under your eye and care ; do you
not know, were you not told whose Son I truly am ; and should not
that knowledge have kept you from seeking and sorrowing as you
have done ; wist you not, that wherever I was I must have been still
beneath that Father's eye and care — whatever I was about, I must
have been about that Father's business ? Mary, you have caUed me
Son, and I acknowledge the relationship ; you have caUed Joseph my
father ; that relationship I disown ; my own, my only Father is He in
whose house you have now found me, whose wiU I came on earth to
do; about whose matters I must constantly, and shall now hence
forth and for ever be engaged."
It is in this consciousness of his pecuhar relationship to God, now
for the first time, perhaps, fully realized, that we catch the true
meaning, and can discern something of the purpose of this early, only
recorded incident in the history of our Lord's youth. Mary, we are
told, understood not the answer of her son. With the knowledge
that she possessed, we can scarcely imagine that she had any diffi
culty in at once perceiving that Jesus spake of his Father in heaven,
and comprehending in so far at least the meaning of his words. But
there may have been a special reason for Mary's surprise here — the
difficulty she felt of comprehension and behef. It cannot readUy be
imagined that she had herself told her chUd during the first twelve
years of his life, or that any one else had told him, of the mystery of
his birth. From the first dawning of conscious inteUigence, he must
have been taught to caU Joseph father, nor had it outwardly been
communicated to him that he was only his reputed father, that
he had no earthly parent, that his true and only father was God. If
Life of Chrlat, 5
6C THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
that were the actual state of the connection between Mary and Jesus
up to the time of this incident in the temple; if she had never
breathed to him the great secret that he was none other than the
Son of the Highest; if there had been nothing, as she knew there was
not, in the quiet tenor of the life which for twelve years Jesus hved,
to afford any outward indication or evidence, either to himself or
others, of the nature of his Sonship to God— then how surprised
must Mary have been when in the temple, and by that answer to
hei question, Jesus informed her that he knew all, knew whence he
wa3, knew for what he came, knew that God was his Father in such
a sense that the discharge of his business carried with it an obhgation
which, if the time and the season required, overbore aU obhgation to
real or reputed earthly parents.
But whether it came upon Mary by surprise or not, was there no
object in letting us and aU beUevers in the Saviour know, as the
record of this incident does, that Jesus was thus early and fuUy aUve
to the singularity of his relationship to God? Conceive that it had
been otherwise; that these thirty years had been veUed in an impen
etrable obscurity; that not one single glimpse had been given of how
they passed away; that our first sight of the man Christ Jesus had
been when he stood before John to be baptized in the waters of the
Jordan, and to receive the Holy Ghost descending upon him. How
natural in that case had been the impression that it was then for the
first time, when the voice from heaven declared it, that he knew him
self to be the Son of God ; that it was then, when the Spirit first
descended, that the Divine associated itseU in close and ineffable
union with the human. Then had those thirty years appeared in a
¦quite different hght to us ; then had we conceived of him as hving
throughout their course the simple common life of a GalUean viUager
and craftsman. But now we know, and we have to thank this narra
tive of St. Luke for the information, that if not earher, yet certainly
at his tweUth year, the knowledge that he and the Father were one,
that the Father was in him, and that he was in the Father, had
visited and filled his spirit, had animated and regulated his life.
With what a new sacredness and dignity do the eighteen years that
-intervened between this incident and that of his pubhc manifestation
to Israel become invested, and what new lessons of instruction do
they bring us. At the bidding of a new impulse, excited within his
youthful breast by this first visit to the temple, he breaks for a day
or two aU earthly bonds, and seems lost amid the shadows of the
Sanctuary, absorbed in the higher things of Him who was worshipped
there. But at the caU of duty, his hour for pubhc service, for speak-
THE THIRTY YEARS AT NAZARETH. 67
ing, acting, suffering, dying, before all, and for all, not yet come, he
yields at once to the desire of Joseph and Mary, and returns with
them to Nazareth; becommg subject to them, burying, as it were,
this great secret in his breast ; consenting to wait, submitting to all
the restraints of an ordinary household, putting himself once more
under the yoke of parental authority, taking upon him aU the com
mon obligations of a son, a brother, a neighbor, a friend, a Galilean
viUager, a Jewish citizen; discharging aU without a taint of sin;
travelling not an inch beyond the routine of service expected in these
relationships ; doing absolutely nothing to betray the divinity that
lay within, nothing to distinguish himself above others, or proclaim
his heavenly birth; living so naturally, unostentatiously, undemon-
stratively, that neither did his brethren, the inmates of his home, his
own nearest relatives beheve in him, discerning not in all those years
any marks of his divine prophetic character ; his name so little known
in the immediate neighborhood that Nathanael, who hved in Cana,
a few mUes off, had never heard of him, and was quite unprepared
to believe PhUip, when he told him, that in one Jesus of Nazareth
he had found him of wrhom Moses in the law, and the prophets,
did write.
From the bosom of that thick darkness which covers the first
thirty years of our Lord's earthly life, there thus shines forth the
hght which irradiates the whole period, and sheds over it a lustre
brighter than ever graced the life of any other of the children of men.
You may have wondered at this one event of his chUdhood being
redeemed from obhvion, so insignificant does it seem, and at first
sight so httle correspondent with our preconceived conceptions of the
great Messiah's character and work. Looking at Jesus as nothing
more than the son of Joseph and Mary, there might be some diffi
culty in explaining his desertion of them at Jerusalem. But when
you reflect on his seh-recognition at this time as the Son of God ; on
his declaration of it to Mary ; on his thenceforth acting on it in life ;
on his words in the temple, foUowed by eighteen years of self-denial,
and gentle, cheerful, prompt obedience; on his growing conscious
ness of his divine lineage, and his earthly work and heavenly heri
tage; on the evUs he came on earth to expose and remedy; on the
selfishness, the worldliness, the formalism, the hypocrisy he detected
aU around him at Nazareth ; when you reflect further on his divine
reticence, on his sublime and patient self-restraint, on his refraining
from aU interference in public matters, and all exposure to public
notice, on his devoting himself instead to the tasks of daily duty in a
very humble sphere of hfe ; when you reflect fixedly and thoughtfully
68 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
on these things, do you not feel that there rests on this portion of the
hfe of Jesus, and upon its introductory and explanatory incident, an
interest different indeed in kind, yet in fuU and perfect harmony with
that belonging to the period when he stood forth as the Saviour of
the world? If he came to empty himself of that glory which he had
with the Father before the world was, to take upon him the form of
a servant, to seek not his own glory, to do not his own wiU, not to be
ministered unto but to minister, then assuredly it was not only during
the three years of his pubhc ministry, but during aU the three-and-
thirty years of his hfe on earth, that the ends of his mission were
accomphshed. We think, I apprehend, too httle of these quiet domestic years of
secluded unpretending piety at Nazareth. Our eyes are dazzled by
the outward glory which surrounded his path when he burst at last
from his long concealment, and showed himself as the Son of the
Highest ; and yet there is a sense in which we should have more
interest in the earher than in the later period of his life. It is liker
the life we have ourselves to lead. The Jesus of Nazareth is more of
a pattern to us than the Jesus of Gethsemane and the cross. He was
not less the Son of God in the one case than in the other ; not less in
the one character than in the other has he left us an example that
we should follow his steps. It was thus the great lesson of his life
at Nazareth, as interpreted by his sayings in the temple, that we
should be doing our Father's business in the counting-house, in the
workshop, at the desk, as much as in any of the higher or more pub
hc walks of Christian or phUanthropic effort ; that a life confined and
devoted to the faithful execution of the simple, humble offices of daUy
domestic duty, if it be a life of faith and love, may be one as full of
God, as truly divine and holy, as Christ-like and as honoring to
Christ, as a life devoted to the most important public services that
can be rendered to the church on earth. In the quiet and deep-lying
vaUeys of life, all hidden from human eye, who may tell us how many
there are, who, buUt up in a humble trust in Jesus, and animated by
their hope in him, are performing cheerfuUy their daily tasks because
a Father's wisdom has allotted them, and bearing patiently their
daUy burdens because they have been imposed by a Father's love ?
Content to hve and labor, and endure and die, unnoticed and un
known, earthly fame hanging no wreath upon their tomb, earthly
eloquence dumb over their dust, these are they, the last among men,
who shall be among the first in the kingdom of the just.
THE FORERUNNER. 69
VII.
The Forerunner.*
The same angel who announced to Mary at Nazareth the birth of
Jesus, had six months previously announced the birth of John to the
aged priest Zacharias, as he ministered before the altar, within the
temple at Jerusalem. Zacharias was informed that his wife Elisa
beth should have a son, whose name was to be John, who was to be
"great in the sight of the Lord," going before him "in the spirit and
power of Elias, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord."
Zacharias doubted what the angel said. At once as a punishment of
his incredulity, and as a new token of the truth of the angehc mes
sage, he was struck with a temporary dumbness. When he came
forth he could not tell his brother priests or the assembled people
any thing about what he had seen or heard within. From the signs
he made, and the strange awe-struck expression of his countenance,
they fancied he had seen a vision ; but it is not likely that he took
any means of correcting whatever false ideas they entertained. His
one wish was to get home and reveal the secret to his wife Elisabeth.
His days of ministration lasted but a week, and as soon as they were
over, he hastened to his residence in the hiU country of Judea. In
due time what Gabriel had foretold took place. The child was born.
The eighth day, the day for its circumcision and the bestowing of its
name, arrived. A large circle of relatives assembled. They proposed
that the chUd should be called Zacharias, after his father. Foresee
ing that some such proposal might be made, Zacharias had provided
against any other name than that assigned by the angel being given
to his son. Acting upon his instructions, Elisabeth interposed, and
declared that the child's name should be John. The relatives re
monstrated. None of her kindred, they reminded her, had ever borne
that name. The dumb father was now by signs appealed to. He
caUed for a writing-table, and wrote the few decisive words, " His
name is John." They were all wondering at the prompt and peremp
tory settlement of this question, when another and greater ground of
wonder was supphed : the tongue of the dumb was loosed, and, in
rapt, rhythmical, prophetic strains that remind us forcibly of those in
which, three months before, and in the same dwelling, Mary and
Ehsabeth had exchanged their greetings, he poured out fervent thanks
to God for having visited and redeemed his people, and foretold the
* Luke 1 : 1-18 ; Matt. 3 : 1-12 ; Mark 1 : 1-8.
70 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
high office which his own newborn son was to execute as Forerunner
of the Messiah.
With that scene of the circumcision day the curtain drops upon
the household of Zacharias and Elisabeth; nor is it lifted tiU many
years are gone, and then it is the child only, now grown to manhood,
who appears. His parents had been weU stricken in years at the
date of his birth, and as no mention of them is made afterwards, we
may presume that, like Joseph, they were dead before any thing
remarkable in the hfe of their son had happened. Little as we know
of the first thirty years of the hfe of Jesus, we know still less of the
like period in the hfe of John. AU that we are told is that tUl the
time of his showing unto Israel he was in the desert, in those wUd
and lonely regions which lay near his birthplace, skirting the north
western shores of the Dead sea. True to the angehc designation,
accepting the vow that marked him as a Nazarite from his birth,
John separated himself early from home and kindred, retired from
the haunts of men, buried himself in the rocky sohtudes of the wU
derness, letting his hair grow tiU it fell loose and dishevelled over his
shoulders, denying himself to all ordinary indulgences whether of
food or dress, clothing himseU with the roughest kind of garment he
could get, a robe of hair-cloth, bound around him with a leathern
girdle, satisfying himseh by feeding on the locusts and wUd honey oi
the desert. But it was not in a morose or ascetic spirit that he did
so. He had not fled to those sohtudes in chagrin, to nurse upon the
lap of indolence regrets over bygone disappointments ; nor had he
sought there to shroud his spirit in a rehgious gloom deep as that of
Engedi and AduUam, which may have been among his haunts. His
whole appearance and bearing, words and actions, when at last he
stood forth before the people, satisfy us that there was httle in him
of the mystic, the misanthrope, or the monk. Though dwelling
apart from others, avoiding observation, and shunning promiscuous
intercourse, he was not wasting those years in idleness, heedless
of the task for the performance of which the life he led was intend
ed, as we presume he must have been informed by his parents, to
prepare him. Through the loopholes of retreat we can weU imagine
the Baptist as busily scanning the state of that community upon
which he was to act. When he stepped forth from his retirement,
and men of aU kinds and classes gathered round him, he did not need
any one to teU him who the Pharisees, or the Sadducees, or the pub
licans were, or what were their peculiar and distinctive errors. He
appears from the first to have been well informed as to the state of
things outside the desert. It may, in truth, in no smaU measure have
THE FORERUNNER. 71
served to fit him for his peculiar work that — removed from aU the
influences which must have served, had he hved among them, to
blunt his sense of surrounding evils, and to mould his character and
habits according to the prevailing forms and fashions of Jewish life —
he was carried by the Spirit into the desert to be trained and educa
ted there, thence, as from a watch-tower, to look down upon those
strange sights which his country was presenting, undistractedly to
watch, profoundly to muse and meditate, the fervor of a true prophet
of the Lord kindling and glowing into an intenser fire of holy zeal ;
till at last, when the hour for action came, he launched forth upon
his brief earthly work with a swift impetuosity, like the rush of those
short-hved cataracts, yet with a firmness of unbending wiU and pur
pose, hke the stabUity of those rocky heights among which for thirty
years he had been hving.
But what had those thirty years in the current of Jewish history
presented ? At their beginning those intestine wars which previously
had somewhat weakened the Eoman power, had closed in the peace
ful establishment of the empire under Augustus Csesar. The dangers
to Jewish hberty grew all the greater, and the impatience of the peo
ple under the Eoman yoke became the more intense; the extreme
patriot party, who were in favor with the people generally, became
fanatic in their zeal. After the death of Herod the Great, whUe yet
it remained uncertain whether Augustus would recognize the acces
sion of Archelaus to the throne, an insurrection broke out in Jerusa
lem, which was only queUed by the slaughter of three thousand of the
insurgents, and by the ill-omened, stoppage of the great Passover fes
tival. , Augustus, unwiUing to lay any heavier yoke on those who'
were already fretting beneath the one they bore, confirmed the wUl
of Herod by which he divided his kingdom among his sons, suffered
the Jews stiU to have nominaUy a government of their own, and rec
ognized Archelaus as king over Judea and Samaria. His reign was
a short and troubled one, and at its close Judea and Samaria were
attached to Syria, made part of a Eoman province, and had procu
rators or governors from Eome set over them, of whom the sixth in
order was Pontius Pilate, who entered upon his office about the very
time when the Baptist began his ministry. The hngering shadows
of royalty and independence were thus removed. Not content with
removing them, the usurper intermeddled with the ecclesiastical as
weU as the civil government of Judea. In the Mosaic Institute, the
high priest, the most important public functionary of the Jews,
attained his office hereditarily, and held it for hfe. The emperor
now claimed and exercised the right of investiture, and appointed
72 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
and deposed as he pleased. During the period between the death
of Herod and the destruction of Jerusalem, we read of twenty-eight
high priests holding the office in succession, only one of whom retain
ed it tiU his death. This dependence on Eome, not only for the
appointment but for continuance in it, necessarily generated great
servUity on the part of aspirants to the office, and great abuses in
the manner in which its duties were discharged. A supple, saga
cious, venal man, hke Annas, though not able to estabhsh himself
permanently in the chair, was able to secure it in turn for five of his
sons, for his son-in-law Caiaphas, with whom he was associated at
the time of the crucifixion, and afterwards for his grandson. Such a
state of things among the governing authorities fomented the popu
lar animosity to the foreign rule. The whole country was in a fer
ment. Popular outbreaks were constantly occurring. The pubhc
mind was in such an inflammable condition that any adventurer, dar
ing enough and strong enough to raise the standard of revolt, was
foUowed by multitudes. Among those insurrectionary chiefs, some
of whom were of the lowest condition and the most worthless charac
ter, Judas of GalUee distinguished himself by his open proclamation
of the principle that it was not lawful to pay tribute to Csesar, and
his pohtical creed was adopted by thousands who had not the cour
age, as he had, to pay the penalty of their hves in acting it out. It
can easily be imagined what a fresh hold their faith and hopes as to
the foretold Messiah would take upon the hearts of a people thus
galled and fretted to the uttermost by political discontent. The
higher views of his character would naturaUy be swaUowed up and
lost in the conception of him as the great dehverer who was to break
those hated bonds which bound them, restore the old Theocracy, and
make Jerusalem, not Eome, the seat and centre of a universal mon
archy. Such was the state of public affairs and of the pubhc feeling, when
a voice, loud and thrilling hke the voice of a trumpet, issues from the
desert, saying, " Eepent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."
Crowds come forth to hsten; they look at the strange man, true son
of the desert, from whose hps this voice cometh. He has aU the
aspect, he wears the dress of one of their old prophets. They ask
about him ; he is of the priestly order. Some old men begin now to
remember about his father in the temple, and the strange " sayings
that were noised abroad through all the hill country of Judea" soon
after his birth. They listen to his words; it is true he does not
directly claim divine authority; the old prophetic formula, "Thus
saith the Lord," he does not employ; he points to nc sign, he works
THE FORERUNNER. 73
no miracle ; he trusts to the simple power of the summons he makes,
the prophecy he utters ; yet there is something in the very manner of
his utterance so prophet-like, that a prophet they cannot help behov
ing him to be. There is nothing particularly ingratiating in his call
to repent, but the announcement that the kingdom of heaven is at
the door, and that they must aU at once arise and prepare for it,
meets the deepest, warmest wishes of their hearts. It is at hand
at last, this strange man says — the kingdom for which they have
so long been waiting; and shall they not go forth to welcome its
approach and rejoice in its triumphs? The speU of the Baptist's
preaching, in whatever it lay, was one that operated with a speed and
a power and to an extent of which we have the paraUel only in times
of the greatest excitement, like those of the Crusades, or of the
Eeformation. " Then went out to him," we are told, " aU Judea, and
they of Jerusalem, and all the region round about Jordan, and were
baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins." It would seem as
if with one consent the entire population of the southern part of Pal
estine had gathered around the Baptist, and for the time were phant
in his hands. It may have facihtated their assemblage if, as has been
conjectured, it was a Sabbatic year when John began his work, and
the people, set free from their ordinary labors, were ready to foUow
him, as he led them to the banks of the Jordan to be baptized.
This baptism in the river was so marked a feature in the ministry
of John, that it gave him his distinctive title, The Baptist. It was a
new and pecuhar rite ; of Divine appointment, as appears not only
from the question which our Lord put to the Jewish rulers, " The
baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men?" but also from the
declaration of John himself, " He that sent "me to baptize with
water." It may have been suggested by, as it was in some respects
simUar to, the various ablutions or washings with water prescribed
in the Mosaic ritual ; yet from aU of these baptisms, if baptisms they
could be caUed, it differed in many respects. They were aU intended
simply as instruments of purification from ceremonial defilement ; it
had another character and object. With a few exceptional cases,
they were aU performed by the person's own hands, who went through
the process of purification; it was performed by another, by the
hands of John himself, or some of his disciples. They were repeated
as often as the defilement was renewed; it was administered only
once. There was indeed one Jewish custom which, if then in use,
presents a clear analogy to the baptism of John. When proselytes
from heathenism were admitted into the pale of the Jewish common
wealth, after circumcision they were baptized. "They bring the
74 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
proselyte," says an old Jewish authority,* "to baptism, and being
placed in the water, they again instruct him in some weightier and
in some lighter commands of the law, which being heard, he plunges
himself and comes up, and behold he is an Israelite in all things."
It would look as if the baptism of John was borrowed from this
proselyte baptism of the Jews; but though it were, it will at once
appear to you that the former rite had marked pecuharities of its
own. And as it stood thus distinguished from aU Jewish, so also did
it stand distinguished from the Christian rite ordamed by our Lord
himseU, which involved a fuUer faith, symbolized a higher privilege,
and was always administered in the name of Christ. The one rite
might be regarded indeed as running into and being superseded by
the other, but of the great difference between them we have proof in
the fact that those who had received the baptism of John were never
theless re-baptized on their admission into the Christian church.t
John's baptism, like every thing about his ministry, was imperfect,
preparatory, temporary, and transient, involving simply a confession
of unworthiness, and a faith in one to come, through whom the re
mission of sins was to be conveyed.
The people who flocked around John readily submitted to his
baptism, whether regarding it as altogether new, or the modified
form of some of their own old observances. The accompaniment of
his teaching with the administration of such an ordinance may have
helped to reconcUe the Pharisees, who were such lovers of the ritual
istic, to a preaching which had httle in itself to recommend it to them,
as the absence on the other hand of all doctrinal instruction, all
references to the unseen world, to angels and spirits, and the resur
rection, may have helped to conciliate the prejudices of the Saddu
cees. At any rate, we learn that, borne along with the flowing tide,
Pharisees and Sadducees did actuahy present themselves before
John to claim baptism at his hands. His quick, keen, spiritual in
sight at once detected the veiled deceit that lay in their doing so,
and in the very spirit which his great Master afterwards displayed,
he proceeded to denounce their hypocrisy, giving them indeed the
very title which Jesus bestowed on them. John's whole ministry,
his teaching and baptizing, if it meant any thing, meant this, that
without an inward spiritual change, without penitence, without refor
mation, no Israehte was prepared to enter into that kingdom whose
advent he announced. His preaching was the preaching of repent
ance, his baptism the baptism of repentance ; the one great lesson
the whole involved, was that aU Israel had become spirituaUy unfit
0 Maimonides. •**• See Acts 19.
THE FORERUNNER. 75
for welcoming the Messiah, and sharing the blessings of his reign.
But here were some, the Pharisees and Sadducees who now stood be
fore him, of whom he knew, that so far from entertaining the least
idea that they required to go through any such process, they regard
ed themselves as preeminently the very ones to whom from thei/t
position in Israel this kingdom was at once to bring its blessings.
Penetrating their secret thoughts, the Baptist said to them, " Think
not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father," and
therefore are, simply as his descendants, entitled to aU the benefits
of that kingdom which is to be set up in Judea ; " I say unto you,
that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham;"
a dim, yet not uncertain preintimation of the spiritual character and
wide extension of the new kingdom of God ; the possibility even of
the outcast and down-trodden GentUes being admitted into it.
John's bold and honest treatment of the Pharisees and Sadducees
only made him look the more prophet-like in the eyes of the common
people. It encouraged them to ask, "What shaU we do then ?" In a
form of precept like to that which Christ frequently employed, John
said to them, " He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that
hath none. He that hath meat, let him do likewise." There is no
better sign morally of a community than when such kindly links of
brotherly sympathy so bind together all classes, as that those who
have are ever ready to help those who want ; as, on the other hand,
there is no clearer proof of a community morally disorganized than
the absence of this benevolent disposition. Judea was at this time,
both as to its rehgious and pohtical condition, thoroughly disorgan
ized ; and in inculcating in this direct and emphatic way the great
duty of a universal charity, John was at once laying bare one of the
sorest of existing evUs, and pointing to the method of its cure.
Then came to him the pubhcans also, those Jews who for gain's
sake had farmed the taxes imposed by the Eomans ; a class odious
and despised, looked upon by their countrymen generally as traitors,
who, by extortion, drew large profits out of the national degradation.
They, too, get the answer exactly suited to them : " Exact no more
than what is appointed to you." Then came to him soldiers, Jews
we may beheve who had enhsted under the Eoman standard, and
who not satisfied with the soldier's common pay abused their power
as the mihtary pohce of the country, and by force, or threat of accu
sation before the higher authorities, sought to improve their condi
tion. They, too, got the answer suited to their case : " Do violence
to no man : neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your
wages." These are but a few stray specimens of the manner in
76 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
which the Baptist dealt with those who came to him : one quite new,
yet so much needed. What power must have been exerted over a
people so long accustomed to the inculcation of a mere ceremonial
pietism, by this thoroughly intrepid, downright, plain, practical, un
accommodating and uncompromising kind of teaching. The great
secret of its success lay here : that unsupported by any confirming
signs from heaven — in a certain sense not needing them — he incul
cated the duties of justice, truthfulness, forbearance, charity, by a
direct appeal to the simple, naked sense of right and wrong that
dwells in every human bosom. And the world has seldom seen a
more striking proof of the power of conscience, and of the response
which, when taken suddenly and before it has time to get warped
and biased, conscience wiU give to all direct, sincere, and vigorous
addresses to it, than when those multitudes from Judea and Jerusa
lem, and all the land, gathered round the Baptist on the banks of the
Jordan. What an animating spectacle must these banks have then exhib
ited; a spectacle which has ever since been annually renewed by the
resort of thousands of pilgrims thither. Our last and best describer
of Palestine* brings it thus before our eyes : " No common spring or
tank would meet the necessities of the multitudes. The Jordan now
seemed to have met with its fit purpose. It was the one river of
Palestine sacred in its recoUections, abundant in its waters ; and yet
at the same time the river not of cities but of the wUderness, the
scene of the preaching of those who dwelt not in king's palaces, nor
wore soft clothing. On the banks of the rushing stream the multi
tudes gathered; the priests and scribes from Jerusalem, down the
pass of Adummim ; the pubhcans from Jericho on the south, and the
lake of Gennesareth on the north; the soldiers on their way from
Damascus to Petra, through the Ghor, in the war with the Arab
chief Hareth; the peasants from Galilee, with One from Nazareth,
through the opening of the plain of Esdraelon. The taU reeds or
canes in the jungle waved, shaken by the wind; the pebbles of the
bare clay hills lay around, to which the Baptist pointed as capable of
being transformed into the chUdren of Abraham; at their feet rushed
the refreshing stream of the never-failing river."
This description, indeed, applies to a period in the narrative a
little farther on than the one which is now immediately before us.
The " One from Nazareth" may have left his viUage home, and been
already on the way, but as yet he was buried in obscurity, deep
bidden among the people. AU the people were musing in their
° Stanley.
THE FORERUNNER. 77
hearts whether John were not himself the Christ. He knew what
was in their hearts ; he knew how ready they were to hail him as
their promised dehverer. No man of his degree has ever had a fairer
opportunity of lifting himself to high repute upon the shoulders of an
acclaiming multitude. Did the tempting thought for a moment flit
across his mind that he should seize upon the occasion so presented ?
If it did, he was in haste to expel the intruder, and prevent the mul
titude by at once proclaiming that he was not the great prophet they
were ready to beheve he was ; that another was at hand much greater
than he, to whom he was not worthy to discharge the lowest and most
menial office of a slave, the carrying of his sandal, the unloosing of
his shoe-latchet. He, John, baptized with water unto repentance, an
incomplete and altogether preparatory affair ; but the greater than he
would baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire.
Such was the prompt and decisive manner in which he disowned
aU high pretensions. And when, shortly afterwards, posterior to our
Lord's baptism, of which they may have heard nothing, a deputation
from Jerusalem came down to ask him, "Who art thou?" he met the
question with the emphatic negative, "I amnotthe Christ." "Art thou
Elias then?" they said. John knew that the men who put this query
to him were caring only about his person, and careless about his
office — in the true spirit of aU religious formalists, wanting so much
to know who the teacher was, and but little heeding what his teach
ing meant; he knew that their idea was that the heavens were to
give back Ehjah to the earth, and that he was to appear in person
to announce and anoint the Messiah, and that many of them believed
that besides Ehas another of the old prophets was to arise from the
dead, to dignify by his presence the great era of the Messiah's inau
guration. Answering their questions according to the meaning of the
questioners when they said, "Art thou Elias?" he said, "I am not;"
when they asked him, "Art thou that prophet?" he answered, "No."
And when stiU further they inquired, " Who art thou then, that we may
give an answer to them that sent us?" he said, that he was but a
voice and nothing more, " the voice of one crying in the wUderness,
Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias."
Pressing him still farther by the interrogation, why it was that he
baptized if he were neither Christ, nor Ehas, nor that prophet ; he
speaks again of his own baptism as if it were too insignificant a
matter for any question about his right to administer it being raised
or answered, and of the greater than he already revealed to him
by the sign from heaven: "I baptize with water, but there stand
eth one among you whom ye know not. He it is who coming after
78 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
me is preferred before me, whose shoe-latchet I am not worthy to
unloose." It is this prompt acknowledgment of his own infinite inferiority
to Christ, his thorough appreciation of the relative position in which
he stood to Jesus, the readiness with which he undertook the honorable
but humble task of being but his herald, the unimpeachable fidelity
and unfaltering steadiness with which he fulfilled the special course
marked out for him by God, and above all the entire and apparently
unconscious self-abnegation which in doing so he displayed, that
shine forth as the prominent features in the personal character of the
Baptist. To these, particularly to the last, we shall have occasion hereafter
to aUude. Meanwhile, let us dwell a moment on the place and office
which the ministry of John occupied midway between the old and the
new economy. "The law and the prophets were untU John." In
him and with him they expired. He was a prophet, the only one
among them all whose coming and whose office were themselves of
old the subject of prophecy, honored above them all by the nearness
of his standing to Jesus, by his being the friend of the Bridegroom,
to whom it was given to hear the Bridegroom's hving voice. But he
was more than a prophet. Of the greatest of his predecessors, of
Moses, of Elijah, of Daniel, it was true that they filled but a limited
space in the great dispensation with which they were connected;
their days but a handbreath in the broad cycle of events with which
their hves and labors were wrapped up, the individuality of each, if
not lost among, yet linked with that of a multitude of compeers.
But John presents himself alone. The prophet of the desert, the
forerunner of the Lord, appears without a coadjutor, a whole distinct
economy in himself. To announce Christ's advent, to break up the
way before Him, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord, this
was the specific object of that economy which began and ended in
John's ministry.
The kind, and amount of the service which the Baptist thus ren
dered, as well as the need of it, it is difficult for us now thoroughly
to understand and appreciate. In what respect Christ would have
been placed at a disadvantage had not John preceded him ; in what
respects the Baptist did open up the way before the Lord ; in what
respects John's ministry told upon the condition of the Jewish
people, morally and spiritually, so as to make it different from what
it otherwise would have been— so as to make the soU all the better
prepared to receive the seed which the hand of the Divine sower
scattered — it is not very easy for us to estimate. One thing is cleat
THE FORERUNNER. 79
enough, that it was John's hand which struck the first bold stroke at
the root of the strong national prejudice which narrowed and carnal
ized the expected kingdom of their Messiah. It is quite possible,
that, as to the true nature and extent of the coming kingdom, John
may have been as much in the dark as the twelve apostles were till
the day of Pentecost. One thing, however, was revealed to him in
clearest hght, and it was upon his knowledge of this that he spoke
with such authority and power, that whatever the future kingdom
was to be, it should be one in which force and fraud, and selfishness
and insincerity, and all sham piety, were to be denied a place ; for
which those would stand best prepared who were readiest to confess
and give up their sins, and to act justly and benevolently towards
their feUow-men, humbly and sincerely towards their God. You
have but the rudiments, indeed, of the true doctrine of repentance in
the teaching of the Baptist — the Christian doctrine but in germ ; but
it is not difficult to see in it the same great lesson broached as to the
inner and spiritual qualifications required of all the members of the
kingdom of Christ, which was afterwards, with so much greater depth
and fulness, unfolded privately to Nicodemus at the very beginning
of our Lord's ministry in Judea, when he said to him : " Except a
man be born again, he cannot see, he cannot enter into the kingdom
of God ;" and pubhcly to the multitudes on the hiU-side of GalUee,
when the Lord said to them: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
It would be quite wrong, it would indicate an ignorance of the
peculiar service which the Baptist was called upon to render, were
we to imagine that there must be a preparatory process of repentance
and reformation gone through by each of us before we beheve in
Jesus, and by faith enter the kingdom. Our position is so different
from that occupied by the multitude to whom John preached, that
what was most suitable for them is not so suitable for us.
And yet not without some broad and general lessons for the
church, at aU times and in aU ages, was it ordered so that the gentle
preacher of peace should be preceded by the stern preacher of re
pentance ; that John should be seen in the desert in advance of Jesus,
in his appearance, his haunts, his habits, his words, his ordinance,
proclaiming and symbolizing the duty and discipline of penitence.
It was only thus, by the ministry of the one running into the ministry
of the other, that the Christian life, in its acts of penitence, as weU
as in its acts of faith and love, could stand before us in vivid rehef,
embodied in a full-orbed and personal portraiture. Jesus had no sin
of hi3 own to mourn over, no evU dispositions to subdue, no evil
80 THE LIFE OF CHRIST'.
habits to relinquish. In the person, character, and life of Jesus, the
great and needful duty of mortifying the body of sin and death could
receive no visible illustration. He could supply to us no model or
exemplar here. Was it not then wisely ordered that moving before,
and for a time beside him, there should be seen that severer figure of
the Baptist, as if to teU us that the proud spirit that is in us must be
bowed, a.ud the mountain-heights of pride in us be laid low, and tho
crooked things be made straight, and the rough places plain, to make
way for the coming in of the Prince of Peace, and the setting up of
his kingdom in our hearts ; that we must go with the Baptist into the
solitudes of the desert, as well as with the Saviour into the happy
homes and viUages of Galilee? Would you see, in its full, finished,
and perfect form, the character and course of conduct, which, as fol
lowers of the Crucified, we are to aim at and to realize, go study it in
the life of Jesus. But would you see it in its formption as weU as in
its finish, go study it in the hfe of the Baptist; put the two together,
John and Jesus, and the portraiture is complete.
VIII.
The j3aptism.*
We have no definite information as to the date of the commence
ment of John's ministry, or his own age at that time. As we know,
however, that he was six months older than Jesus, as we are told that
Jesus was about thirty years of age when he began his public minis
try, and as that was the age fixed in the Jewish law for the priests
entering on the duties of their office, it seems reasonable to conclude
that the ministry of John had already lasted six months when Jesus
presented himself before the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan. This
would allow fuU time for intelligence of a movement which so rapidly
pervaded the entire population of the southern districts of the coun
try, penetrating Galilee, and reaching even to Nazareth. Moved by
this intelhgence, other GalUeans of that district as weU as Jesus may
have followed the wake of the multitude, and directed their steps to
the place where John was baptizing. In these circumstances Christ's
departure from his home may not have created the surprise which it
otherwise would have done. When Mary saw her son, who had
hitherto so quietly and exclusively devoted himself to their discharge,
throw up all his household duties and depart; when she learned
• Matt. 3 : 13-17 ; Mark 1 : 9-11 ; Luke 3 : 21-23 , John 1 : 30-33.
THE BAPTISM. 81
whither it was that his footsteps were tending, and gathered, as she
may have done, from the tidings which were then afloat, that it was
none other than the son of her relative Elisabeth who was shaking
the entire community of the south by his summons to repent, and his
proclamation of the nearness of the kingdom, she could scarcely
have let Jesus go, for the first time that he had ever so parted from
her, without foUowing him with many wistful, wondering anxieties
and hopes. But she did not know that he now left that home in
Nazareth never but for a few days to return to it. Had she known
it. could she have let him go alone? It was alone, however, and
externaUy undistinguished among the crowd, that Jesus stood before
John, and craved baptism at his hands. He did this in the simplest,
least ostentatious way, aUowing the great mass of the baptisms to be
over, mingling with the people, and offering himself as one of the
last to whom the rite was to be administered. "It came to pass,"
Luke teUs us, that "when aU the people were baptized," Jesus was
baptized also. But his baptism did not go past as the others did.
So soon as John's eye feU upon this new candidate for the ordinance,
he saw in him one altogether different in person and character from
any who had hitherto been baptized. He felt at once as if this
administration of his baptism would be altogether out of place ; that
for Jesus to be baptized by him would be to invert the relationship
in which he knew and felt that they stood to one another. By earnest
speech or expressive gesture he intimated his unwillingness to comply
with the request. The word which St. Matthew uses in telling us
that John forbade him, is one indicative of a very strenuous refusal
on his part. This refusal he accompanied with the words : "I have
need to be baptized of thee ; and comest thou to me !"
These words, you wiU particularly remark, were spoken at the
commencement of their interview, before the baptism of our Lord,
before that sign from heaven was given of which he had been fore
warned, and for which he was to wait before pronouncing of any
individual that he was the greater One who was to come, who was to
baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. TiU he saw the Spirit
descending and remaining, John could not know certainly, and had
no warrant authoritatively to say that this was He of whom he spake.
From the Baptist saying twice afterwards, " I knew him not," it haa
been imagined that up to this meeting John had never seen Jesus,
had no personal acquaintance with his relative the son of Mary; and
the distance at which they hved from one another, with the entire
length of the land between them, the retired life of the One at Naza
reth, and the dwelling of the other in the desert, have been referred
82 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to as explaining the absence of aU acquaintance and interccurse.
That there could have been but little intercourse is .clear; that they
may nevei have seen each other till now is possible. But if so, how
are we to explain John's meeting the proposal of Jesus with so instant
and earnest a declaration, and saying to him, "I have need to be bap*
tized of thee ; and comest thou to me !" Jesus must either before
these words were spoken have told John who he was, and the Bap
tist must have known from ordinary sources what a sinless and holy
life he had been leading for these thirty years at Nazareth, or
this knowledge must have been supernaturahy communicated; for
knowledge of Jesus to this extent at least, that he was no fit subject
for a baptism which was for sinners, was obviously imphed in this
address. Is it, however, so certain, or even so probable, that John and
Jesus had never met tiU now ? Zacharias and Ehsabeth had to instruct
their son as to his earthly work, his heavenly calling, and in doing so
must have told him of the visit of Mary and the birth of Jesus. He
must have learned from them enough to direct his eye longingly and
expectantly to his GalUean relative as no other than the Messiah, for
whose coming he was to prepare the people. True, he retired early
to the desert, which was his place of ordinary residence tiU the time
of his showing unto Israel, but did that imply that he never was at
Jerusalem, never went up to the great yearly festivals? Jesus was
once, at least, in Jerusalem in his youth, and' may have been often
there before his thirtieth year. So, too, may it have been with John,
and if so, they must have met there, and become acquainted with one
another. Much, however, as there may have been to lead John to
the behef that Jesus was he that was to come after him, the lapse of
those thirty years, during which the two had been almost totally
separated, and the absence of aU sign or token of the Messiahship
during Christ's secluded life at Nazareth, may have led him to doubt.
Even after he had received his great commission he might continue
in the same state of uncertainty waiting, as he had been instructed,
tiU the sign from heaven was given. Whatever John's inward sur
mises or convictions may have been, he must have felt that it became
him neither to speak of them nor to act on them, tiU the promised
and visible token of the Messiahship lighted on him whom he was
then to hold forth to the people as the Lamb of God, who was to
take awa*/ the sin of the world. Such we conceive to have been the
state of John's mind and feelings towards Jesus when He presented
himself before him for baptism. From previous acquaintance he may
instantly have recognised him as the son of Mary, to whom his
THE BAPTISM. 83
thoughts and hopes had for so many years been pointing. He cer
tainly did at once recognise him as his superior, as one at least so
much holier than himself that he shrunk from baptizing Him. But
he did not certainly know him as the Christ the Son of God; did not
so know him at least as to be entitled to point him out as such to the
people. When, some weeks afterwards, he actuaUy did» so, he was
at pains to teU those whom he addressed that it was not upon the
ground of any previous personal knowledge, or individual connection,
that he spake of him as he did. " I knew him not," he said ; " but
he that sent me ta baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon
whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him,
the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw,
and bear record that this is the Son of God."
We now know more of Jesus than perhaps John did when Christ
stood before him to be baptized; we know that he was the Holy One
of God, who had no sin of his own to confess, no poUution to wash
away; and we too, hke John, may wonder that the sinless Son of God
should have submitted to such a baptism as his, a baptism accompa
nied with the acknowledgment of sin and the profession of repentance,
and which was the symbol of the removal of the polluting stains of
guilt. But our Lord's words faU upon our ears as they did on those
of John: "Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil aU
righteousness." Firmly yet gently, authoritatively yet courteously,
clothing the command in the form of a request, he carries it over the
reluctance and remonstrance of the Baptist. " Suffer it to be so
now," for this once, so long as the present transient earthly relation
ship between us subsists. Suffer it, " for so it becometh us to fulfil
aU righteousness." It is not then as a violator, but as a fulfiUer of
the law that Jesus comes to be baptized ; not as one who confesses
the want of such a perfect righteousness as might be presented for
acceptance to God, but as one prepared to meet every requirement
of his Father, and to render to it an exact and complete obedience.
Who could speak thus, as if it were such an easy, as well as such a
becoming thing in him to fulfil aU righteousness, but the only begot
ten of the Father — he who, in coming into this world, could say, " Lo,
I come to do thy wiU, O God."
And here in subjecting himseh to the baptism of John, you have
the first instance of Christ's acting in his pubhc official character as
the Messiah. He steps forth at last from his long retirement, his
deep seclusion at Nazareth, to appear how ? to do what ? To appear
as an inferior before the Baptist, to ask a service at his hands, to
enroU himself as one of his disciples ; for this was the primary pur-
«4 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
pose of this ordinance. It was the initiatory rite by which repentant
Israehtes enroUed themselves as the hopeful expectants of the coming
kingdom; and He, the head of that kingdom, stoops to enroU himself
in this way among them. " By one spirit," says the apostle, " we are
aU baptized into one body ;" the outward baptism the sign or symbol
of our incorporation into that one body the church. In the same way
the Lord himself enters into that body, honors the ordinance which
God had sent John to administer, conforms even to that preparatory
and temporary economy through which his infant church was called
to pass, putting himself under the law, making himself in aU things
like -unto his brethren.
StiU, however, the difficulty returns upon us as to what meaning
such a rite as that of John's baptism could have in the case of Jesus ;
sin he had none to confess, nor penitence to feel, nor reformation to
effect, nor a faith in the One to come to cherish. Yet his baptism in
the Jordan was not without meaning; nay, its singular significance
reveals itself as we contemplate the sinlessness of his character. We
rightly regard the baptism of Jesus as the first act of his pubhc min
istry; and does he not present himself at the very outset in that
peculiar character and office which he sustains throughout his medi
atorial work, identifying himseU with his people as their representa
tive and their head ; taking on him their sins, numbering himself with
transgressors — doing now, enduring afterwards what it became them
as sinners to do, as sinners to suffer ?
But let us now fix our eye on what happened immediately after
the baptism of Christ. He came up straightway out of the water.
He did not wait, as the Jews asked the proselyte to do, to hsten to
stiU further instruction out of the law ; instruction hkely to be the
more deeply impressed by the time and circumstances under which
it was given. He did not wait, as we are led from the very expres
sion employed here to believe that many of those did who received
the baptism from John. In him there was no need for such delay or
any such instruction. The law of his God, was it not written whoUy,
deeply, indelibly in his heart ? Straightway, therefore, he goes forth
from under the Baptist's hands. John's wondering eye is on him as
he ascends the river banks. There he throws himself into the atti
tude, engages in the exercise of prayer, and then it is, as with uplifted
hands he gazes into the heavens, that he sees them opened above his
head, the Spirit of God descending hke a dove and lighting on him,
and a voice from heaven saying to him, " Thou art my beloved Son,
in whom I am weU pleased."
The requirements of the narrative, as given by St. Matthew, St.
THE BAPTISM. 8a
Mark, and St. Luke, do not involve us in the behef that the bystand
ers generally, if present in any numbers, saw these sights and heard
that voice. Its being so distinctly specified by each of the evange
lists that it was He who saw and heard, would rather lead us to the
inference that the sight and the hearing were confined to our Lord.
John, indeed, teUs us that he saw the vision, and we may believe
therefore that he also heard the voice, but beyond the two, who
may have been standing apart and by themselves, it would not seem
that the wonders of this incident were at the time revealed. Other
instances of hke manifestations had this feature attached to them,
that they were revealed to those whose organs were opened and
aUowed to take them in, and were hidden from those around. Ste
phen saw the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the
right hand of God. The clamorous crowd about him did not see as
he did. Had the vision burst upon their eyes, it would have awed
their tumultuous rage to rest. When Saul was struck down on his
way to Damascus, his companions saw indeed a hght and heard some
sounds, but they neither saw the person of the Saviour nor distin
guished the words he spoke, though in one sense in a much fitter
condition to do so than Saul was. It is said of the disciples on the
day of Pentecost, that there appeared unto them tongues as of fire
which rested on the head of each ; it is not hkely that these were
«een by those who mocked.
But be it as it may as to the other spectators and auditors, it is
evident that these supernatural appearances gave to the baptism of
Jesus a new character in the Baptist's eyes, as they should do in
ours. In the descending dove, outward emblem of the descending
Spirit, he not only saw the preappointed token that the greater than
he, who was to baptize with the Holy Ghost, was before him, but in
the whole incident he beheld the first great step in our Lord's public
and official life — the setting of him openly apart as the Lamb for the
¦sacrifice
As Jesus stepped forth after the baptism on the banks of the river,
he stood severed from the past, connected with a new future ; Naza
reth, its quiet home, its happy days, its peaceful occupations, lay
behind; trials and toils and suffering and death lay before him. He
would not have been the Son of man had he not felt the significance
and solemnity of the hour; he would not have been the fuU partaker
of our human nature had the weight of his new position, new duties,
new trials not pressed heavily upon his heart. He turns, in the pure,
true instinct of his sinless humanity to seek support and strength in
God, to throw himself and aU his future upon his Father in prayer.
86 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
But who may teU us how he felt and what he prayed? what desires,
what hopes, what solicitudes went up from the heart at least, if not
from the lips, of this extraordinary supphant! Never before had the
throne of the heavenly Grace been thus approached, and never
before was such answer given. The prayer ascends direct from earth
to heaven, and brings the immediate answer down. It is as he prays
that the Spirit comes, bringing hght and strength and comfort to the
Saviour, sustaining him under that consciousness of his Sonship to
God, which now fills, expands, exalts his weak humanity. And does
not our great Head and Eepresentative stand before us here a type
and pattern of every true behever in the Lord, as to the duty, the
privUege, the power of prayer ? Of him, and of him only of the sons
of men, might it be said that he prayed without ceasing; that his life
was one of constant and sustained communion with his Father; and
yet you find him on all the great occasions of his life having recourse
to separate, sohtary, sometimes to prolonged acts of devotion. His
baptism, his appointment of the twelve apostles, his escape from the
attempt to make him a king, his transfiguration, his agony in the gar
den, his death upon the cross, were all haUowed by prayer. The first
and the last acts of his ministry were acts of prayer. From the low
est depth, from the highest elevation of that ministry, he poured out
his spirit in prayer. For his mission on earth, for all his heaviest
trials, he prepared himself by prayer. And should we not prepare
for our poor earthly service, and fortify ourselves against temptations
and trials, by foUowing that great example ? The heavens above are
not shut up against us, the Spirit who descended hke a dove has not
taken wings and flown away for ever from this earth. There is a
power by which these heavens can stiU be penetrated, which can stiU
bring down upon us that gentle messenger of res*fc — the power that
hes in simple, humble, earnest, continued believing prayei.
The Holy Spirit, as he descended upon Jesus, was pleased to
assume the form and gentle motion of a dove gliding down from the
skies. He came not now as a rushing mighty wind. He sat not on
Jesus as a cloven tongue of fire. It was right that when he came to
do the work of quick and strong conviction necessary in converting
the souls of men, to bestow those gifts by which the first missions
ries of the cross should be qualified for prosecuting that work, the
rush as of a whirlwind should sweep through the room in which the dis
ciples were assembled, and the cloven tongues of fire should coma
down and rest upon their heads. But the visitation of the Spirit to
the Saviour was for an altogether different purpose, and it could not
be more fitly represented than by the meek-eyed dove, the choset
THE BAPTISM. 87
symbol of gentlenses and affection. The eagle with its wing of power,
its eye of fire, its beak of terror was the bird of Jove. The dove the
bird of Jesus. To hirn the Spirit came not, as in dealing with the
souls of men, to bring light out of darkness, order out of confusion,
but to point out as the Saviour of the world the meek and the lowly,
the gentle and the loving Jesus.
But was no ulterior purpose served by the descent of the Spirit
on this occasion ? We touch a mystery here we cannot solve, and
need not try to penetrate. The sinless humanity of Jesus was brought
into intimate and everlasting union with the divine nature of the Son
of God, doubly secured as we should say from sin, and fuUy qualified
for aU the Messianic service, and yet we are taught that that human
ity was impregnated and fitted for its work by the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit. He was born of the Holy Ghost. He was led by the
Spirit into the wUderness. In the synagogue of Nazareth, where he
had first opened his hps as a pubhc teacher, there was given to him
the book of the prophet Isaiah ; he read the words, " The Spirit of the
Lord is upon me ;" and having read the passage out, he closed the
book, and said, " This day is this scripture fulfiUed in your ears."
John testified of him saying: "He whom God hath sent speaketh
the words of God, for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto
him." Jesus said of himself: "If I cast out devils by the Spirit of
God, then is the kingdom of God come unto you." " God anointed
Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power." It was
through the eternal Spirit that he offered himself without spot
to God. Heb. 9 : 14. He was declared to be the Son of God with
power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from
the dead. Eom. 1:4. It was through the Holy Ghost that he gave
commandments to the apostles whom he had chosen, until the day
in which he was taken up. Acts 1:2. So it is that through every
stage of his career the Spirit is with him, quahfying him for every
work, why or how he alone could teU us who could lift that veil which
shrouds the innermost recesses of the Spirit of the incarnate Son
of God. As the Spirit lighted upon Jesus, there came to him a voice from
heaven. This voice was twice heard again ; on the Mount of Trans
figuration, and within the temple. It was the voice of the Father.
No man, since the faU of our first parent, had ever heard that voice
before, as no man has ever heard it since. The faU sealed the
Father's hps in silence ; all divine communications afterwards with
man were made through the Son. It was he who appeared and
spate to the patriarchs; it was he who spake from the summit of
88 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Sinai, and was the giver of the law; but now for the first time
the Father's hps are opened, the long-kept silence is broken, that
this testimony of the Father to the Sonship of Jesus, this expression
of his entire good pleasure with him as he enters upon his ministry,
may be given. That testimony and expression of approval were
repeated afterwards in the very same words at the transfiguration;
the words indeed on that occasion were spoken not to, but of Jesus,
and addressed to the disciples ; and so with a latent reference per
haps to Moses and Ehas, the Father said to them: "This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased : hear ye him." But at the
baptism St. Mark and St. Luke agree in stating that the words were
spoken not of, but directly to Christ himself. PrimarUy and emi
nently it may have been for Christ's own sake that the words were
upon this occasion spoken ; and as we contemplate them in this hght,
we feel that no thought can fathom their import, nor gauge what
fulness of joy and strength they may have carried into the bosom of
our Lord. But here too there is a veU which we must not try to lift.
Instead of thinking then what meaning or power this assurance of
his' Sonship, and of the Father's fuU complacency in him, may have
had for Christ, let us take it as opening to our view the one and only
way of our adoption and acceptance by the Father, even by our being
so well pleased in all things with Christ, our having such simple, im
plicit faith in him, that the Father looking upon us as one with him,
becomes also weU pleased with us.
IX.
The Temptation.*
Satan was suffered to succeed in his temptation of our first
parents. His success may for the moment have seemed to him com
plete, secure; for did not the sentence run, "In the day that thou
eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die"? And did not that sentence
come from One whose steadfast truthfulness— dispute it as he might
in words with Eve— none knew better than himself? Having once
then got man to sin, he might have fancied that he had broken for
ever the tie that bound earth to heaven, that he had armed against
the first inhabitants of our globe the same resistless might, and the
•ame unyielding justice, by which he and the partners of the first
0 Matthew 4 : 1-11 ; Mark 1 : 12, 13 ; Luke 4 : 1-13.
THE TEMPTATION. 89
revolt in heaven had been driven away into their dark and ignomini
ous prison-house. But if such a hope had place for a season in the
tempter's breast, it must surely have given way when, summoned
together with his victims into the divine presence, the Lord God
said to him: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and
between thy seed and her seed ; it shall bruise thy head, and thou
shalt bruise his heel." Obscure as these words may at the time have
seemed, yet must they have taught Satan to know that his empire
over this new-formed world was neither to be an undisputed nor an
undivided one. An enmity of some kind between his seed and the
woman's seed was to arise ; no mere temporary irritation and insub
ordination on the part of his new . subjects, but an enmity which
would prove fatal to himself and to his kingdom, the final advantage
in the predicted warfare being all against him ; for while he was to
bruise the heel of his enemy, that enemy was to bruise his head, to
crush his power.
It could not therefore have been with a sense of security free
from uneasy anticipations, that from the days of the first Adam down
to the birth of the second, the God of this world held his empire over
our earth. His dominion was the dominion of sin and death, and his
triumph might seem complete, none of aU our race being found who
could keep himself from sin; whUe every one that sinned had died.
But were there no checks to the exercise of his power, nothing to
inspire him with alarm? Had not Enoch and Ehjah passed away
from the world without tasting death? And must it not have
appeared to him an inscrutable mystery that so many human spirits
escaped at death altogether from beneath his sway? There were
those prophecies, besides, dehvered in Judea, of which he could not
be ignorant, getting clearer and clearer as they grew in number,
speaking of the advent of a great deliverer of the race ; there were
those Jewish ceremonies prefiguring some great event disastrous
to his reign ; there was the whole history and government of that
wonderful people, the seed of Israel, guided by another hand than
his, and regulated with a hostUe purpose.
AU this must have awakened dark forebodings within Satan's
breast ; forebodings stirred into a heightened terror when one of the
woman's seed at last appeared, who, for thirty years, with perfect
ease, apparently without a struggle, resisted aU the seductions by
which his brethren of mankind had been led into 3in. The visit of
Gabriel to Nazareth, the angehc salutations, the angels that appeared
and the hymns that floated over the hiUs of Bethlehem, the adora
tion of the shepherds, the worship of the wise men, the prophecies
90 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of the temple— aU these, let us beheve, were known to the great adver
sary of our race ; but not one nor aU of them together excited m him
such wonder or alarm as this simple fact, that here at last was one
who stood absolutely stainless in the midst of the world's manifold
pollutions. So long, however, as Jesus lived quietly and obscurely
at Nazareth he might be permitted to enjoy his sohtary triumph
undisturbed, but his baptism in the Jordan brings him out from his
retreat. This voice from heaven, a voice that neither man nor devil
had ever heard before, resounding through the opened skies, pro
claims Him to be more than a son of man— to be, in very deed, the
Son of God. Who can this mysterious being be ?— an ahen and an
enemy, Satan has counted him from his youth. But his Sonship to
God. What can that imply; how is it to be manifested? The time
has come for putting him to extreme trial, and, if he may not be per
sonahy overcome, for forcing him to disclose his character at the
commencement of his career.
The opportunity for making the attempt is given. " Then was
Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wUderness to be tempted of the
devU." It was not, we may beheve, under any thing hke compulsion,
outward or inward, that Jesus acted when immediately after his
baptism he retired to the desert. Between the promptings of the
Spirit of God and the movements of Christ there ever must have
been the most entire consent and harmony. Why, then, so instantly
after his pubhc inauguration to his earthly work, is there this volun
tary retirement of our Lord, this hiding of himself in lonely sohtudes?
Accepting here the statement of the Evangehst, that it was to furnish
the prince of darkness with the fit opportunity of assaulting him,
may we not beheve that these forty days in the wUderness without
food served some other ends besides — did for our Lord in his higher
vocation what the forty days of fasting did for Moses and Ehjah in
their lesser prophetic office; that they were days of preparation,
meditation, prayer — a brief season interposed between the peaceful
private life of Nazareth, and the public troubled life on which he was
about to enter, for the purpose of girding him up for the great task
assigned to him — a season of such close, absorbing, elevating, spirit
ual exercises that the spirit triumphed over the body, and for a time
felt not even the need of daily food? It was not tUl these forty days
were over that he was a hungered, nor was it tiU hunger was felt
that the tempter came in person to assault. The expressions used
indeed by St. Mark and St. Luke appear to imply that the tempta
tion ran through all the forty days; but if so, it must, in the first
instance, have been of an inward and purely spiritual character, such
THE TEMPTATION. 91
as we can weU conceive mingling with and shadowing those other
exercises to which the days and nights of that long solitude and fast
ing were devoted.
And yet, though the holy spirit of our Lord prompted him to fol
low with willing footstep the leadings of the Holy Ghost, his tiue
humanity may weU have shrunk from what awaited him in the desert.
He knew that he was there to come into close contact with, to meet
in personal encounter the head of that kingdom he was commissioned
to overthrow; and, even as in the garden human weakness sank
tremblingly under the burden of immeasurable woe, so here it may
have shrank frdm such an interview and such a conflict, needing as
it were to be urged by Divine compulsion, and thus authorizing the
strong expression which St. Mark employs, "Immediately the Spirit
driveth him into the wUderness." It may in fact have been no smaU
part of that trial which ran through the forty days, that he had con
tinuaUy before him the approach and the encounter with the prince
of darkness. Whatever that state of his spirit was which rendered him insensi
ble to the cravings of hunger, it terminates with the close of the forty
days. The inward supports that had borne him up during that rapt
ecstatic condition are removed. He sinks back into a natural condi
tion. The common bodUy sensations begin to be experienced; a
strong craving for food is felt. Now, then, is the moment for the
tempter to make his first assault upon the Holy One, as weak, fam
ished, the hunger of his long fast gnawing at his heart, he wanders
with the wild beasts as his sole companions over the frightful soli
tudes. Coming upon him abruptly, he says to Jesus, "If thou be the
Son of God, command that these stones be made bread." The words
of the recent baptismal scene at the Jordan are yet ringing in Satan's
ears. He knows not what to make of them. He would fain believe
them false ; or better stiU, he would fain prove them false by prevaU-
ing upon Christ himself to doubt their truth. For, for him to doubt
his Father's word would be virtuaUy to renounce, disprove his Son-
ship. Even then, as by his artful insidious speech to the woman in
the garden — "Yea, has God said, In the day thou eatest thou shalt
die ?" — he sought to insinuate a secret doubt of the divine truthful
ness and divine goodness, so here, into the bosom of Jesus in the
wUderness, he seeks to infuse a kindred doubt.
'If thou be reaUy the Son of God, as I have so lately heard thee
called — but canst thou be? can it be here, and thus, alone in these
desert places, foodless, companionless, comfortless, for so many days,
But if thou wUt not doubt
92 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
that thou art his Son, surely God could never mean or wish that his
Son should continue in such a state as this ? If thou be truly what
thou hast been caUed, then aU power must be thine; whatsoever
things the Father doeth, thou too must be able to do. Show, then,
thy Sonship, exert thy power, relieve thyself from this pressing
hunger; " command that these stones be made bread." ' The temp
tation is here twofold : to shake if possible Christ's confidence in Him
who had brought him into such a condition of extreme need, and to
induce him, under the influence of that distrust, to exert at once his
own power to dehver himself, to work a miracle to provide himself
with food. The temptation is at once repeUed, not by any assertion
of his Sonship, or of his abiding trust in God, in opposition to the
insidious doubt suggested — for that doubt the Saviour never cherish
ed; the shaft that carried this doubt in it, though artfuUy contrived
and skUfully directed, glanced innocuous from the mind of that con
fiding Son, who was ever so well pleased with the Father, as the
Father had declared himself to be with him.
Nor was the temptation repeUed by any such counter argument
as that it was inadmissible to exert his Divine power merely for his
own benefit ; but by a simple quotation from the book of Deuteron
omy : " It is written, Man shaU not Uve by bread alone, but by every
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Jesus waives thus
aU question about his being the Son of God, or how it behooved him in
that character to act. He takes his place as a son of man, and lays his
hand upon an incident in the history of the chUdren of Israel, who,
led out into the wilderness, and continuing as destitute of common
food forty years as he had been for forty days, received in due time
the manna provided for them by God, who said to them afterwards,
by the lips of Moses : "The Lord thy God humbled thee, and suffered
thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, that he might make thee
know that man doth not hve by bread alone, but by every word that
proceedeth out of the mouth of God." It was by the word of the
Lord's creative power that for those hungry Israehtes the manna was
provided; that word went forth at the Lord's own time, and to meet
his people's wants in the Lord's own way; and upon that word, that
is, upon Him whose word it was, Jesus, when now hke the Israehtes
a hungered in the wUderness, wiU rely. It is not necessary for him
to turn stones into bread in order to sustain his life; other kinds of
food his Father, if he so pleased, could provide, and he wiU leave him
to do as he pleases. From that entire dependence on his Father, to
which in his present circumstances, and under that Father's guid
ance, he had been shut up, he had no desire to be reheved— would
THE TEMPTATION. 93
certainly do nothing prematurely to relieve himself, and least of aU
at Satan's bidding would use the higher, the divine faculty that was
in him, as a mere instrument of seU-gratification. It was in the same
spirit of self-denial, that ever afterwards he acted. Those who taunt
ed him on the cross, by saying, " If thou be the Son of God, come
down from the cross," knew not how exact an echo their speech at
Calvary was of Satan's speech in the wilderness — how thoroughly
they were proving their parentage, as being of their father the devU.
But Jesus would do neither as Satan nor these his children bade him.
His power divine was given him to execute the great office of our
spiritual deliverer : his way to the execution of his office lay through
trial, suffering and death, and he would not caU that power in to save
him from any part of the required endurance ; neither from the hun
ger of the wUderness, nor from any of the far heavier loads he had
afterwards to bear.
FoUed in his first attempt, accepting but profiting by his defeat,
the artful adversary at once reverses his method, and assaults the
Saviour precisely on the other side. He has tried to shake Christ's
trust in his Father; he has failed; that trust seems only to gather
strength the more severely it is proved; he wUl work now upon
that very trust, and try to press it into presumption. "Then the
devU taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle
of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast
thyself down." ' I acknowledge that you have been right in the wU
derness, that you have acted as a true Son of the Father. You have
given, in fact, no mean proof of your entire confidence in him as your
Father, in standing there in the extremity of hunger, and virtuaUy
saying, 'I am here by the wiU of God, here he can and he wUl pro
vide, I leave aU to him.' But come, I ask you now to make another
and still more striking display of your dependence in all possible
conjunctures on the Divine aid. Show me, and all those worship
pers in the court below, how far this faith of yours in your Father
wiU carry you. Do now, what in the sight of all wUl prove you to be
the very one the Jews are looking for. If thou be the Son of God,
then, as we shaU presume thou art, cast thyself down ; the God who
sustained thy body without food in the wUderness, can surely sustain
it as you fling yourself into the yielding air; the people who are long
ing to see some wonder done by their expected Messiah, wiU hail
you as such at once, when they see you, instead of being dashed to
pieces, floating down at their feet as gently as a dove, and ahghting
in the midst of them. Give to me and them this proof of the great
ness of your faith, the reality of your Sonship to God"; and if you
94 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
want a warrant for the act in those Scriptures which you have already
quoted, remember what is written in one of those ancient Psalms, a
psalm that the wise men say relates to you : "He shall give his angels
charge concerning thee, and in their hands shaU they bear thee up,
Jest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone." !
As promptly as before the Lord replies: "It is written again,
Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." Here again, there is no
attempt at argument, no correction of the quotation which the temp
ter had made, no reminding him that, in quoting, he had omitted one
essential clause, "He shaU keep thee in all thy ways," the ways of
his appointment, not of thine own fashioning. The one Scripture is
simply met by the other, and left to be interpreted thereby. "Thou
shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." To trust was one thing, to
tempt another. Jesus would rely to the very uttermost upon the
Divine faithfulness, upon God's promised care and help; but he
would not put that faithfulness to a needless trial. If put by the
devU in a position of difficulty and danger, he wUl cherish an un
bounded trust in God, and if extrication from that position be desir
able, and no other way of effecting it be left, he wiU even believe that
God wiU miraculously interpose in his behaU. But he will not of his
own accord, without any proper caU or invitation, for no other pur
pose than to make an experiment of the Father's wiUingness to aid
him, to make a show of the kind of heavenly protection he could
claim ; he will not voluntarily place himself in such a position. He
was here on the pinnacle of the temple, from that pinnacle there was
another open, easy, safe method of descent ; why should he refuse to
take it if he desired to descend; why fling himself into open space?
If he did so unasked, unordered by God himseU, what warrant could
he have that the Divine power would be put forth to bear him up?
God had indeed promised to bear him up, but he had not bidden him
cast himself down, for no other purpose than to see whether he would
be borne up or no ; to do what Satan wished him to do, would be to
show not the strength of his faith, but the extent of his presumption.
Thus once again by that sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of
God, is the second thrust of the adversary turned aside.
These first two temptations, whUe opposite in character, have yet
much that is common to both. The preface to each of them is the
same: "If thou be the Son of God," a preface obviously suggested
by the recent testimony at the baptism. They have also the common
object of probing to the bottom, and thus trying to ascertain, the
powers and privileges which this Sonship to God conferred. There
was curiosity as weU as malice in the double effort to do so, and the
THE TEMPTATION. 95
subtlety of their method lay in this, that they were so constructed that
had Christ yielded to either, in the very disclosure of his Godhead
there had been an abuse of its power. Had Jesus taken the devU's
way of proving his strength, he would have taken the very way to
have broken it. In those first two temptations, Satan had spokec
nothing of himself, had revealed nothing of his purposes : but balked
in them he now drops the mask, appears in his own person, and bold
ly claims homage from Christ : "Again, the devU taketh him up into an
exceeding high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the
world, and the glory of them ; and saith unto him, AU these things wiU
I give thee, if thou wilt faU down and worship me." Had it been upon
the actual summit of the temple at Jerusalem that Jesus previously
had been placed, and if so, how was his conveyance thither effected?
was it upon the actual summit of some earthly mountain that the feet
of our Saviour were now planted, and if so, how was it, how could it be
that all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them were brought
before his eye ? We have no answer to give to these questions ; we
care not to speculate as to the outward mode in which each tempta
tion is managed. We are willing to beheve any thing as to the acces
sories of this narrative which leaves untouched its truthfulness as an
historic record of an actual and personal encounter between the
prince of darkness and the Prince of Light. That the gospel narra
tive is such a record, we undoubtingly believe, and are strengthened in
our faith as we perceive not only the suitableness and the subtlety of
each individual temptation, as addressed to the humanity of our
Lord, assaulting it in the only quarters in which it lay open to as
sault ; but the comprehensiveness of the whole temptation, as exem
plifying those classes of temptations by which humanity at large, by
which each of us, individuaUy, is seduced from the path of true obe
dience unto God. The body, soul, and spirit of our Lord were each
in turn invaded; by the lust of the flesh, by the lust of the eyes, by
the pride of life, it was attempted to draw him away from his aUe-
giance. The first temptation was buUt upon bodily appetite, the
hunger of the long fast ; the second, upon the love of ostentation, the
desire we aU have to show to the. uttermost in what favor we stand
with God or men; the third, upon ambition, the love of earthly, out
ward power and glory.
The third had, however, a special adaptation to Christ's personal
character and position at the time, and this very adaptation lent to it
pecuhar strength, making it, as it was the last, so also the most
insidious, the most alluring of the three. Jesus knew the ancient
prophecies about a universal monarchy that was to be set up in the
y6 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
days of Messiah the prince. From the days of his childhood, when
in the temple he had sat among the doctors, hearing them and asking
them questions, the sacred volume which contained these prophecies
had been in his hands. Who shaU tell us with what interest, with
what wonder, with what self-application these prophecies were pon
dered by him in the days of his youth, during which he grew in wis
dom as he grew in years? Who shaU teU us how soon or how fully
he attained the sublime consciousness, that he was himself the Mes
siah of whom that volume spake? Whatever may have been his ear
her experience, at the time at least when the attestation at his bap
tism was given, that consciousness fiUed and pervaded his spirit. But
he fell not into the general delusion which, in its desire for a conquer
ing and victorious prince, lost sight of a suffering, dying Eedeemer.
He knew fuU weU that the path marked out for him as the Saviour of
mankind lay through profoundest sorrow, and would end in an ago
nizing death. How much of aU this Satan knew, it would be pre
sumptuous to conjecture. This, however, we are assured that he
knew — for he had heard and could quote the ancient prophecies
which pointed to it — he knew about a monarchy that in the last days
the God of heaven was to set up, which was to overturn his own,
which was to embrace all the kingdoms of the world, and into which
nil the glory of these kingdoms was to be brought. And he may, we
might almost say he must, have known beforehand of the toU and
strife and hard endurance through which the throne of that mon
archy was to be reached by his great rival.
And now that rival is before him, just entering upon his career.
Upon that rival he will make a bold attempt. He wUl show him ah
those kingdoms that have been so long under his dominion as the
god of this world. He wiU offer them aU to him at once, without a
single blow being struck, a single peril encountered, a single suffering
endured. He wiU save him all that conflict which, if not doubtful in
the issue, was to be so painful in its progress. He wiU lay down his
sceptre, and suffer Jesus to take it up. In one great gift he wUl
make over his whole right of empire over these kingdoms of the world
to Christ, suffer him at once to enter upon possession of them, and
clothe himself with aU their glory. This is his glittering bribe, and
all he asks in return is that Jesus shall do him homage, as the supe
rior by whom the splendid fief was given, and under whom it is held
A bold and blasphemous attempt, for who gave him those king
doms thus to give away ? And how could he imagine that Jesus was
open to a bribe, or would ever bow the knee to him ? Let us remem
ber, however, that we aU judge others by ourselves ; that there are
THE TEMPTATION. 97
those who think that every man has his price ; that, make the bribe
but large enough, and any man may be bought. And at the head of
such thinkers is Satan. He judged Jesus by himself. And even as
through lust of government he, archangel though he was, had not
hesitated to withdraw his worship from the Supreme, so may he have
thought that, taken unawares, even the Son of God himseU might
have faUen before the dazzling temptation. Had he done t>o, Satan
would indeed have triumphed ; for putting whoUy out of the question
the violated relationship to the Father, Jesus would thus have re
nounced aU the purely moral and rehgious purposes of his mission —
would have ceased to be regarded as the author of a spiritual revolu
tion, and the founder of a spiritual kingdom, affecting myriads of
human spirits from the beginning to the end of time, and would
thenceforth have taken up the character of a mere vulgar earthlv
monarch. But Satan knew not with whom he had to do. The eye of Jes .;
may for a moment have been dazzled by the offer made, and this
implied neither imperfection nor sin, but it refused to rest upon the
seducing spectacle. It turned quickly and resolutely away. No
sooner is the bribe offered than it is repeUed. In haste, as if that
magnificent panorama was not one on which even his pure eye should
be suffered to repose ; as if this temptation were one which even he
oould not afford to daUy with; in anger too at the base condition
coupled with the bribe, and as if he who offered it could no longer be
suffered to remain in his presence, he caUs the devU by his name, and
says: "Get thee hence, Satan; for it is written, Thou shalt worship
the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Satan had want
ed Jesus to give him some proof of his divine power, and now he
gets it; gets it as that command is given which he must instantly
obey. At once aU that glittering iUusion that he had conjured up
vanishes from the view. At once his hateful presence is withdrawn,
the conflict is over, the victory is complete. Jesus stands once more
alone in the wUderness, but he is not left alone. Angels come and
minister unto him, gazing with wonder on that mysterious man who
has entered into this sohtary conflict with the head of the principali
ties and powers of darkness, and foUed him at every point.
But how are we to look upon this mysterious passage in the life
of Christ ? Are we to read the record of it as we would the story of
a duel between two great chiefs, under neither of whom we shaU ever
have to serve, in the mode and tactics of whose warfare we have con
sequently but httle interest ? The very reverse. He who appeared
that day in the wUderness before Jesus, and by so many wUy acts
Ufa ofCbrisl 7
98 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Btiove to rob him of his integrity as a Son of the Father, goeth about
stUl as the arch-enemy of our souls; seeking whom he may devour.
His power over us is not weakened, though it faUed on Christ. His
mahce against us is not lessened, though it was impotent when tried
on him. The time, the person, the circumstances all bestowed an
undoubted peculiarity upon these temptations of the wUderness, the
temple, and the mountain-top. We may be very sure that by temp
tations the same in outward form no other human being shall ever be
assaUed. But setting aside all that was special in them, let us lay
our hand on the radical and essential principle of each of these three
temptations, that we may see whether each of us is not stiU person
ally exposed to it.
In the first instance, Christ, when under the pressure of one of
the most urgent appetites of our nature, is tempted to use a powei
that he got for other purposes, to minister to his own gratification
He is tempted, in fact, to use unlawful means to procure food. Is
that a rare temptation? Not to speak here of those poor unfortu
nates who, under a like pressure, are tempted to put forth theh
hands to what is not their own, what shaU we say of the merchant
whom, in the brightest season of his prosperity, some sore and unex
pected calamity overtakes ? Through some reckless speculation, he
sees the gay vision of his hopes give way, and utter ruin stand before
him but a few days off. The dismal picture of a family accustomed
to wealth plunged into poverty already haunts his eye and rends his
heart. But a short respite stiU is given. Those around him are
ignorant how he stands, his credit stUl is good, confidence in him is
still unbroken. He can use that credit, he can employ the facilities
which that confidence still* gives. He dishonorably does so ; with
stealthy hand he places a portion of his fortune beyond the reach of
his future creditors to keep it for his famUy's use. That man meets
and falls under the very same temptation with which our Lord and
Master was assailed. Distrusting God, he Uses the powers and
opportunities given him, unrighteously and for selfish ends. He for
gets that man liveth not by bread alone, but by every word which
proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
Or what again shall we say of him who, fairly committed to the
faith of Christ, and embarked in the great effort of overcoming all
that is evil in his evU nature, plunges, witb scarce a thought, into
scenes and amid temptations such that it would need a miracle to
bring him forth unscathed? That man meets and falls under the
very same temptation with which our Saviour was assaUed, when the
devU said, " Cast thyself down," and quoted the promise of Divine
THE TEMPTATION. 99
support. Many and most precious indeed are the promises of Divine
protection and support given us in the word of God, but they are not
for us to rest on if recklessly and needlessly we rush into danger,
crossing any of the common laws of nature, or trampling the dictates
of ordinary prudence and the lesson of universal experience beneath
our feet. It is not faith, it is presumption which does so.
It might seem that we could find no actual parallel to the last
temptation of our Lord, but in truth it is the one of aU the three that
is most frequently presented. Thrones and kingdoms, and all their
glory, are not held out to us, but the wealth and the distinctions, the
honors and the pleasures of life — these in different forms, in different
degrees, ply with their sohcitations aU of us in every rank, from the
highest to the lowest, tempting us away from God to worship and
serve the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever
more. A spectacle not so wide, less gorgeous in its coloring, but au
sensuous, as Ulusive as that presented to Jesus on the mountain-top,
the arch-deceiver spreads out before our eyes, whispering to our
hearts, "AU this wiU I give you;" aU this money, aU that ease, all
that pleasure, aU that rank, aU that power ; but in saying so he deals
with us more treacherously than he dealt with Christ of old. With
him he boldly and broadly laid it down as the condition of the grant,
that Christ rhould faU down and worship him. He asks from us no
bending of the knee, no act of outward worship ; all he asks is, that
we beheve his false promises, and turn away from God and Christ to
give ourselves up to worldliness of heart and habit and pursuit. If
we do so, he is indifferent how we now think or act toward himself
personaUy, for this is one of the worst peculiarities of that kingdom
of darkness over which he presides, that its ruler knows no bettel
subjects than those who deny his very being and disown his rule.
But if it he to the very same temptations as those which beset
our divine Lord and Master, that we are stiU exposed, let us be grate
ful to him for teaching us how to overcome them. He used through
out a single weapon. He had the whole armory of heaven at his
command; but he chose only one instrument of defence, the word,
the written word, that sword of the Spirit. It was it that he so suc
cessfuUy employed. Why this exclusive use of an old weapon? He
did not need to have recourse to it. A word of his own spoken would
have had as much power as a written one quoted; but then the les
son of his example had been lost to us — the evidence that he himself
has left behind of the power over temptation that hes in the written
word. Knowing, then, that you wrestle not with flesh and blood
alone, but with angels, and principalities, and powers, and with him
100 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the head of aU, of whose devices it becomes you not to be ignorant,
take unto you the whole armor of God, for aU is needed; but remem
ber, of aU the pieces of which that panoply is composed, the last that
is put into the hand of the Christian soldier .by the great Captain of
his salvation— put into his hand as the one that He himself, on the
great occasion of his conflict with the devU, used— put into his hand
as the most effective and the only one that serves at once for defence
and for assault— is the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. By it.
aU other parts of the armor are guarded. The helmet might be shat
tered on the brow, the shield wrenched from the arm, did it not pro
tect ; for hope and faith, that helmet and that shield, on what do they
rest, but upon the word of the hving God ? When the tempter comes.
then, and plies you with his manifold and strong solicitations, be
ready to meet him, as Jesus met him in the wilderness, and you shall
thus come to know how true is that saying of David : " By the words
of thy hps I have kept me from the path of the destroyer."
X.
The First Discifj-es.*
Feom the forty days in the desert, from the long fast, from tho
triple assault, from the great victory won, from the companionship of
the ministering angels, Jesus returns to the banks of the Jordan, and
mingles, unnoticed and unknown, among the disciples of the Baptist.
On the day of his return, a deputation from the Sanhedrim in Jeru
salem arrives, to institute a formal and authoritative inquiry into the
character and claims of the great preacher of repentance. John's
answers to the questions put by these deputies are chiefly negative
in their character. He is not the Christ ; he is not Ehjah risen from
the dead; neither is he that prophet by whom, as they imagined,
Elijah was to be accompanied; who he is he would not say, however
pointedly interrogated. But what he is, he so far informs them as
to quote and apply to himself the passage from the prophecies of
Isaiah, which spake of a voice crying in the wilderness, " Prepare ye
the way of the Lord, make his paths straight." ChaUenged as to his
right to baptize, if he is not that Christ, nor Elias, nor that prophet,
John can now speak as he had not been able to do previously. Hith
erto he had spoken indeterminately of one whom he knew not, the
greater than he, who was to come after him; but now the sign from
• John 1 : 29-51.
THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 101
•heaven had been given, the Spirit had been seen descenlM'g andjabi-
ding on Jesus. From the day of his baptism Jesus ha\"withdrawn
John knew not whither, but now he sees him in the crowd, and says:
*' I baptize with water : but there standeth one among you, whom ye
know not; he it is, who, coming after me, is preferred before me,
whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose."
Having got so little to satisfy them as to who the Baptist was, it
does not seem that the deputies from Jerusalem troubled themselves
to make any inquiries as to who this other and greater than John
was. Nor was it otherwise with the multitude. Though the words
of the Baptist, so pubhcly spoken, were such as might weU awaken
curiosity, the day passed, and Jesus remained unknown, assuming,
saying, doing nothing by which he could be recognized. That John
needed to point him out in order to recognition confirms our behef,
derived in the first instance directly from the narrative itseU, that at
"the baptism none but John and Jesus heard the voice from heaven, or
saw the descending dove. Had the bystanders seen and heard these,
among the disciples of John there would have been some ready at
once to recognize Jesus on his return from the desert. But it is not so.
Jesus remains hidden, and will not with his own hand lift the veil —
wiU not bear any witness of himself — leaves it to another to do so.
But he must not continue thus unknown — that were to frustrate
the very end of aU John's ministry. The next day, therefore, as John
sees Jesus coming to him, whUe yet he is some way off, he points to
him, and says: "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the
sin of the world ! This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man
which is preferred before me ; for he was before me. And I knew him
not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I
come baptizing with water I saw the Spirit descending from
heaven hke a dove, and it abode upon him. And I knew him not ¦
but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me.
Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on
him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I
saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God."
John's first pubhc official testimony to Christ was, as it seems to
me, particularly remarkable, as containing no reference whatever to
that character or office in which the mass of the Jewish people might
have been willing enough to recognize him, but confined to those two
attributes of his person and work which they so resolutely rejected.
There is no mention here of Jesus as Messiah, the Prince, the King
of Israel. The record that John bears of him is, that he is the Son
of God, the Lamb of God. He had lately heard the voice from
102 THE LIFE OF CHRIST
heaven saying: "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am weD
pleased." In giving him then this title, in caUing him the Son ot
God, John was but reechoing, as it were, the testimony of the Father.
Taught thus to use and to apply it, it may be fairly questioned wheth
er the Baptist in his first employment of it entered into the full sig
nificance of the term, as declarative of Christ's unity of nature with
the Father. That in its highest, its only true sense indeed, it did
carry with it such a meaning, and was understood to do so by those
who knew best how to interpret it, appears in many a striking pas
sage of the life of Jesus, and most conspicuously of aU, in his trial
and condemnation before the Jewish Sanhedrim. It was a title whose
assumption by Jesus involved, in the apprehension of those who
regarded him but as a man, nothing short of blasphemy. Such is
the title here given to him by the Baptist. Whether he fuUy under
stood it or not, we can trace its adoption and employment to an
obvious and natural source.
But that other title, the Lamb of God, and the description annexed
to it, " which taketh away the sin of the world," how came the Baptist
to apply these to Christ, and what did he mean by doing so ? Here
we cannot doubt that the same inner and divine teaching which
taught him in a passage of Isaiah's prophecies to see himself, taught
him in another to see the Saviour, and that it was from that passage
in which the prophet speaks of the Messiah as the Lamb brought to
the slaughter, as a sheep dumb before his shearers, that he bor
rowed the title now for the first time bestowed upon Jesus. From
the same passage too he learned that the Anointed of the Lord was
to be " wounded for our transgressions, to be bruised for our iniqui
ties, the chastisement of our peace was to be upon him, and with
his stripes we are to be healed." Here in Jesus John sees the
greater than himseU whose way he was to prepare before him, but
that way he sees to be one leading him to suffering and to death ;
his perhaps the only Jewish eye at that moment opened to discern
the truth that it was through this suffering and this death that the
spiritual victories of the great King were to be achieved; that it was
upon them that his spiritual kingdom was to have its broad and deep
foundations laid. John's baptism had hitherto been one of repent
ance for the remission of sins. This remission had been held out in
prospect as the end to which repentance was to conduct; but alt
about its source, its fulness, its certainty had been obscure— obscure
perhaps to John's own eyes; obscure at least in the manner of his
speaking about it; but now he sees the Lamb of God, the suffering,
dying Jesus, taking away by bearing it the sin of the world— not
THE FIRST DISCIPLES 103
taking away by subduing it the sinfulness of the world ; that John
could not have meant, and Jesus has not done— but taking the world's
sin away by taking it on himseh, and expiring beneath its load,
making the great atoning sacrifice, fulfilling aU the types of the Jew
ish ceremonial, all that the paschal lamb, aU that the lamb of the
morning and evening sacrifice had been typifying.
In the two declarations then of John, " This is the Son of God,"
" Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,"
you have in a form as distinct, as short and compendious, as it is any
where else to be found — the gospel of the kingdom. The divine
nature of the man Christ Jesus, the completeness and efficacy of the
shedding of his blood, of the offering up of himself for the remission
of sins, are they not here very simply and plainly set forth ? We are
not asked to beheve that the Baptist himself understood his own tes
timony to Christ, as with the hght thrown upon it by the epistles,
and especiaUy in this instance, by the epistle to the Hebrews, we
now understand it; but assuredly he understood so much of it as
that he himself saw in Christ, and desired that others should see in
him, the heaven-laid channel, opened up through his life and death,
of that Divine mercy which covereth aU the transgressions of every
penitent believing soul.
How interesting to hear this gospel of the grace of God preached
so early, so simply, so earnestly, so behevingly by him whose office
in all the earlier parts of his ministry was so purely moral, a call
simply to repentance, to acts and deeds of justice, mercy, truth. But
this was the issue to which aU those preparatory instructions were to
conduct. The law in the hands of John was to be a schoolmaster to
guide at last to Christ ; and when the time for that guidance came,
was it not with a sensation of rehef, a bounding throb of exulting
satisfaction, that — conscious of how impotent in themselves aU his
efforts were to get men to repent and reform, while the pardon of
their sins was anxiously toUed after in the midst of perplexity and
doubt, instead of being gratefully and joyfuUy accepted as God's free
gift in Christ — the Baptist proclaimed to aU around, "Behold the
Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. '
Nor was he discouraged that his announcement met with no
response that day from the crowd around ; that still his voice was as
the voice of one crying in the wUderness. The many who waited on
his ministry and partook of his baptism came from curiosity, acted
on a passing impulse, hoped that some new and better state of things
sociaUy and politicaUy was to be ushered in by this strange child of
the desert — and had no deeper wants to be supphed or spiritual
!04 THE LIFE OF CHRIST
longings to be satisfied. Quite strange— if not unmeaning, yet unwel
come—to their ears, this new utterance of the Baptist. It was not
after the Lamb of God, not after one who was to take away then
sins, that they were seeking. But there were others of a different
mould, partakers of the spirit of Simeon and Anna, waiting for the
consolation of Israel, for the coming of one to whom, whatever out
ward kingdom he was to set up, they mainly looked as their spiritual
Lord and King, in the days of whose kingdom peace was to enter
troubled consciences, and there should be rest for wearied hearts.
The eyes of these waiters for the morning saw the first streaks of
dawn in the ministry of the Baptist, and some of them had already
enrolled themselves as his disciples, attaching themselves perma
nently to his person.
The next day after he had given his first testimony to Christ's
lamblike and sacrificial character and office— a testimony apparently
so httle heeded, attended at least with no outward and visible result-
John is standing with two of these disciples by his side. He will
repeat to them the testimony of yesterday ; they had heard it already,
but he wiU try whether it wiU not have another and more powerful
effect when given not promiscuously to a general audience, but spe
cifically to these two. Looking upon Jesus as he walked, he directed
their attention to him by simply saying once again, "Behold the
Lamb of God !" — leaving it to their memory to supply aU about him
which in the course of the two preceding days he had declared. Not
now without effect. Neither of these two men may know as yet in
what sense he is the Lamb of God, nor how by him their sin is to be
taken away ; but both have felt their need of some one willing and
able to guide their agitated hearts to a secure haven of rest, and they
hope to find in him thus pointed out the one they need. They fol
low him. John restrains them not; it is as he would wish. WU-
lingly, gladly he sees them part from him to foUow this new Master.
He knows that they are putting themselves under a better, higher
guidance than any which he can give. But who are these two men?
One of them is Andrew, better known to us by his brotherhood to
Simon. The other reveals himseU by the very manner in which he
drawh the veil over his own name. He would not name himself, and
by that very modesty which he displays he stands revealed. It is no
other than that disciple whom Jesus loved ; no other than the writer
of this Gospel, upon whose memory those days of his first acquaint
ance with Jesus had fixed themselves in the exact succession of their
incidents so indelibly, that though he writes his narrative at least
forty years after the death of Christ, he writes not only as an eye-
THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 105
witness, but as one who can teU day after day what happened ; and
no doubt the day was memorable to him, and the very hour of that
day, on which he left the Baptist's side to join himself to Jesus.
John and Andrew foUow Jesus. We wonder which of the two it
was that made the first movement towards him. Let us believe it to
have been John, that we may cherish the thought that he was the
first to follow as he was the last to leave. He was one at least of
the first two men who became foUowers of the Lamb; and that
because of their having heard him described as the Lamb of God.
When this first incident in his own connection with Jesus is consid
ered, need we wonder that this epithet, "the Lamb," became so
favorite a one with John ; that it is in his writings, and in them alone
of aU the writings of the New Testament, that it is to be found,
occurring nearly thirty times in the book of the Apocalypse.
The two disciples foUow Jesus sUently, respectfully, admiringly —
anxious to address him, yet unwilling to obtrude. He reheves them
from their embarrassment. The instinct of that love which is already
drawing them to him tells him that he is being foUowed for the first
time by human footsteps, answering to warm-beating, anxious human
hearts. He turns and says to them, "What seek ye?" A vague
and general question, which left it open to them to give any answer
that they pleased, to connect their movement with him or not. But
their true hearts speak out. It is not any short and hurried con
verse by the way that wiU satisfy their ardent longings. They would
have hours with him, days with him alone in the seclusion of his
home. "Eabbi" — they say to him, the first time doubtless that
Jesus was ever so addressed — "where dweUest thou? He saith to
them, Come, and see; and they came and saw where he dwelt, and
abode with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour." If, in
his gospel, John numbers the hours of the day according to the Jew
ish method of computation, then it must have been late in the after
noon, at four o'clock, having but two hours of that day to run, that
Christ's invitation was given and accepted. We incline to beheve,
however, that John foUows not the Jewish, but the Eoman method
of counting; and if so, then it was in the forenoon, at ten o'clock,
that the two disciples accompanied our Lord. And we are the rather
induced to beheve so, as it gives room for the other incident, the
bringing of Simon to Jesus, to happen during the same day; which,
from the specific and journal-like character of this part of John's
narrative, we can scarcely help conceiving that he did.
But where and whose was the abode to which Jesus conducted
John and Andrew, and how were their hours employed ? It could
Kt6 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
only have been some house which the hospitality of strangers had
opened for a few days' residence to one whom they knew not, and
over all the intercourse that took place beneath its roof the veil is
drawn. It is the earliest instance this of that studied reserve as to
all the minuter details of Christ's daUy hfe and conversation upon
which we may have afterwards to offer some remarks. John has
not yet learned to lay his head on that Master's bosom, but already
he is sitting at his feet. And there for all day long, and on into the
quiet watches of the night, would he sit drinking in our Lord's first
opening of his great message of mercy from the Father. Andrew
has something of the restless, active spirit of his brother in him, and
so no sooner has he himself attained a sure conviction that this is
indeed the Christ whom he has found, than he hurries out to seek
his own brother Simon and bring him to Jesus. We should have
liked exceedingly to have been present at that interview, to have
stood by as Jesus for the first time looked at Simon, and Simon
for the first time fixed his eyes on Jesus. The Lord looks upon
Simon and sees aU he is and all that he is yet to be. His great con
fession, his three denials, his bitter repentance, his restoration, the
great services rendered, the death like that of his Master he is to die,
all are present to the thoughts of Jesus as he looks. " Thou art
Simon," he says at once to him, as U he had known him from his
youth — "Simon, the son of Jona." This word Jona, in Hebrew,
means a dove, and it has been thought, fancifully perhaps, that it
was with a sidelong reference to the place of the dove's usual resort
that Jesus said : " Thou art Simon the son of the dove, which seeks
shelter in the rock ; thou shalt be caUed Cephas, shalt be the rock for
the dove to shelter in." On an aftei*- occasion Jesus explained more
fuUy why it was that this new name of Peter, the Eock, was bestowed.
Here we have nothing but the simple fact before us, that it was at
the first meeting of the two, and before any converse whatever took
place between them, that the change of name was announced; with
what effect on Peter we are left to guess — his very sUence, a sUence
rather strange to him, the only thing to tell us how deep was the
impression made by this first interview with Christ.
The next day, the fifth from that on which this chronicling of the
days begins, Jesus goes forth on his return to Gahlee, finds Philip
by the way, and saith to him, " FoUow me !" PhUip was of Beth
saida. Bethsaida lay at the northern extremity of the sea of Gahlee,
not on the line of Christ's route from Bethabara to Nazareth or Cana.
We infer from this circumstance that, hke John, Andrew, and Peter,
Philip had left his home to attend on the ministry of the Baptist
THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 107
On the banks of the Jordan, or afterwards from one or other of hia
GalUean countrymen who had already joined themselves to Christ,
he had learned the particulars of his earher earthly history. Any
difficulty that he might himself have had in recognizing the Messiah-
ship of one so born and educated was soon got over, the wonder at
last enhancing the faith. Finding Nathanael, Phihp said to him:
" We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets
did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." It was a very nat
ural reply for one who hved so near to Nazareth, and knew how insig
nificant a place it was, to say : " Can there any good thing " — any such
good thing — "come out of Nazareth?" " Come and see!" was PhU
ip's answer. It proved the very simplicity and docility of Nathan-
ael's nature, that he did at once go to see. Perhaps, however, his
recent exercises had prepared him for the movement. Before Phihp
caUed him, he had been under the fig-tree, the chosen place for med
itation and prayer with the devout of Israel. There had he been
pondering in his heart, wondering when the Hope of Israel was to
come, and praying that it might be soon, when a friend comes and
teUs him that the very one he has been praying for has appeared.
With willing spirit he accompanies his friend. Before, however, he
gets close to him, Jesus says, " Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom
is no guUe !" How much of that very guUeless spirit which we have
learned to caU by his name is there in Nathanael's answer ! Without
thinking that he is in fact accepting Christ's description of him as
true, and so exposing himself to the charge of no small amount of
arrogance, disproving in fact that charge by the very blindness that
he shows to the expression of it, he says : " Whence knowest thou
me ?" Our Lord's reply, " Before that PhUip caUed theo, when thou
wast under the fig-tree, I saw thee," we may regard as carrying more
with it to the conscience and heart of Nathanael than the mere proof
that Christ's eye saw what no human eye, placed as he was at the
time, could have seen, but that the secrets of aU hearts lay open to
Him with whom he had now to do. Nathanael comes with doubting
mind, but a guileless heart ; and so now, without deahng with it intel-
lectuaUy, the doubt is scattered by our Lord's quick glance penetra
ting into his inner spirit, and an instant and sure faith is at once
planted in Nathanael's breast.
I am apt to think from the very form of Nathanael's answer, from
the occurrence in it of a phrase that does not seem to have been, a
Jewish synonym for the Messiah, that Nathanael too had been at the
Jordan, and had heard there the testimony that John had borne to
Jesus. 'Eabbi,' he says, 'thou art what I have lately heard thee
^08 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
caUed, and wondered at their calling thee; "Thou art the Son of God,
thou art the King of Israel." ' There was something so fresh, sc
fervent so fuU-hearted in the words, they fell so pleasantly on the
ear of Jesus, that a bright vision rose before his eye of the richer
things that were yet in store for all that beheved on him. First, he
Bays to Nathanael individuaUy, "Because I said unto thee, I saw thee
under the fig-tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than
these;" and then looking on the others, whUe stfll addressing him
self to him, he adds: "Yerily, verily I say unto you, hereafter, or
rather from this time forward, ye shaU see heaven open, and the
angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. You
bave heard, that a few weeks ago, on the banks of the river, the
heavens opened for a moment above my head, and the Spirit was
seen coming down like a dove upon me. That was but a sign.
Believe what that sign was meant to confirm ; believe in me as the
Lamb of God, the Saviour of the world, the baptizer with the Holy
Ghost, and your eye of faith shall be quickened, and you shaU see
those heavens standing continuaUy open above my head— opened by
me for you ; and the angels of God— aU beings and things that carry
on the blessed ministry of reconciliation between earth and heaven,
between the souls of beUevers below and the heavenly Father above-
going up and bringing blessings innumerable down, ascending and
descending upon the Son of man. Son of God — my Father caUed
me so at my baptism, the devU tempted me as such in the desert, the
Baptist gave me that name at Bethabara, and thou, Nathanael, hast
bestowed it on me now once again ; but the name that I now like
best, and shall oftenest call myself, is that of the Son of man; and
yet I am both, and in being both, truly and eternaUy fulfil the dream
of Bethel. It was but in a dream that your father Jacob saw that
ladder set up on earth, whose top reached to heaven, up and down
which the angels were ever moving. It shall be in no dream of the
night, but in the clearest vision of the day — in the hours when the
things of the unseen world shall stand most truly and vividly re
vealed — you shaU see in me that ladder of all gracious communica
tion between earth and heaven, my humanity fixing firmly the one
end of that ladder on earth, in my divinity the other end of that lad
der lost amid the splendors of the throne."
At first sight the narrative of these five days after the temptation,
which we have thus followed to its close, has but httle to attract. It
recounts what many might regard as the comparatively insignificant
fact of the attachment of five men — all of them GalUeans, none of
them of any note or rank among the people — to Christ. But of
THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 109
these five men, four afterwards became apostles ; (aU of them, indeed,
if, as is believed by many of our best critics, Nathanael and Barthol
omew were the same person;) and two of them, Peter and John, are
linked together in the everlasting remembrance of that church which
they helped to found. Had the Baptist's ministry done nothing more
than prepare those five men for the reception of the Messiah, and
hand them over so prepared to Jesus, to become the first apostles of
the faith, it had not been in vain. These five men were the first dis
ciples of Jesus, and in the narrative of their becoming so we have
the history of the infancy of the church of the living God, that great
community of the saints, that growing and goodly company, sweUing
out to a multitude that no man can number, out of every kindred,
and tongue, and people, and nation. If there be any interest in tra
cing the great river that bears at last on its broad bottom the vessels
of many lands, to some httle bubbling fountain up among the hiUs;
if there be any interest in tracing the great monarchy whose power
overshadowed the earth, to the erection of a little organized commu
nity among the Sabine hills ; if the traveUer regards with wonder the
httle gushing stream, or the historian the first weak beginnings of
the Eoman commonwealth ; then may the same emotion be permit
ted to the Christian as he reads the page that tells of the first foun
dations being laid of a spiritual kingdom, which is to outlive aU the
kingdoms of this earth, and abide in its glory for ever.
StiU another interest attaches to the narrative now before us. It
teUs us of the variety of agencies employed in bringing the first oi
his disciples to Christ. Two of these five men acted on the prompt
ings of the Baptist, one of them on the direct caU or summons of oui
Lord himself ; one at the instance of a brother, one on the urgency
of a friend. It would be foolish to take these cases of adherence to
the Christian cause as typical or representative of the numbers brought
respectively to Christ by the voice of the preacher, the word of Christ
himself, and the agency of relative or acquaintance; but we cannot
go wrong in regarding this variety of agency within so narrow hmits,
as warranting aU means and methods by which any can be won to
a true faith in Christ. Whatever these means and methods may be,
in order to be effectual they must finaUy resolve themselves into
direct individual address. It was in this way the first five disciples
were gathered in. By John speaking to two, Jesus to one, Andrew
to one, PhUip to one. It is the same species of agency similarly
employed which God has always most richly blessed ; the direct, ear
nest, loving appeal of one man to his acquaintance, relative, or friend.
How many are there among us who have been engaged for years
HO THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
eithsr in supporting by our liberahty, or aiding by our actual service
Dne or other of those societies whose object is to spread Christianity,
but who may seldom if ever have endeavored, by direct and personal
address, to influence one human soul for its spiritual and eternal
good ! Not tiU more of the spirit of Jesus and John, of Andrew and
Phihp, as exhibited in this passage, descend upon us, shall we rightly
acquit ourselves of our duty as foUowers of the Lamb.
But in my mind the chief interest of the passage hes in the con
duct of our Lord himself. Those five days were not only the birth-
time of the church, they were the beginning of Christ's pubhc minis
try, and how does that ministry open? SUently, gently, unostenta
tiously; no pubUc appearances, no great works done, no new instru-
mentality employed ; by taking two men to live with him for a day,
by asking another to follow him, by deahng wisely and tenderly and
encouragingly with two others who are brought to him — so enters
the Lord upon the earthly task assigned to him. Would any one
sitting down to devise a career for the Son of God descending upon
our earth to work out the salvation of our race, have assigned such
an opening to his ministry ? and yet could any thing have been more
appropriate to him who came not to be ministered unto but to minis
ter, than this turning away from being ministered unto by the angels
in the desert, to the rendering of those kindly and aU-important ser-
rices to John and Andrew and Peter and PhUip and Nathanael ?
XI.
The First Miracle.*
" And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of GalUee."
Looking back to the preceding narrative, you observe that from the
time of the arrival at Bethabara of the deputation from Jerusalem
sent to inquire into the Baptist's character and claims, an exact note
of the time is kept in recording the incidents which foUowed. "The
next day.'' that is, the first after that of the appearance of the depu
tation, John sees Jesus coming unto him, and points him out as the
"Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the w6rld." "Again
the next day after," standing in company with two of his disciples,
John repeats the testimony, and the two disciples foUowed Jesus;
one of them, Andrew, going and bringing his own brother Simon,
the other John, sitting at his new Master's feet. " The day foUow-
• John 2 : 1-12.
THE FIRST MIRACLE. ID
iiig," Jesus, setting oui on his return to Gahlee, findeth PhUip. PhU
ip findeth Nathanael, and so, accompanied by these five, (Andrew,
John, Peter, Philip, and Nathanael,) Jesus proceeds upon his way
back to his home. Occurring in a narrative hke this, where the reg
ular succession of events is so accurately chronicled, we naturally,
in coming to the expression, "the third day," interpret it as meaning
the third day after the one that had immediately before been spoken
of, that is, the one of Christ's departure from the banks of the Jor
dan Two days' easy travel carries him and his new attendants to
Nazareth ; but there is no one there to receive them. The mother of
Jesus and his brethren are at Cana, a vUlage lying a few mUes farther
to the north. Thither they follow him, and find that a marriage is
being celebrated there, to the feast connected with which Jesus and
his five disciples are invited. One of the five, Nathanael, belonged
to Cana, and may have received the invitation on his own account
as an acquaintance of the famUy in whose house the marriage feast
was held. But the others were strangers, only known to that famUy
as having accompanied Jesus for the last few days — their tie of dis-
cipleship to him quite a recent one, and as yet scarcely recognized
by others. That on his account alone, and in consequence of a con
nection with him of such a kind, they should have been at once asked
to be present at an entertainment to which friends and relatives only
were ordinarily invited, would seem to indicate some famUiar bond
between the family at Nazareth and the one in which this marriage
occurs. The idea of some such relationship is supported by the free
dom which Mary appears to exercise, speaking to the servants not
hke a stranger, but as one familiar in the dwelling. Besides, if
Simon, caUed the Canaanite, was caUed so because of his connection
with the viUage of Cana, his father Alphseus or Cleophas, who was
married to a sister of Christ's mother, may have resided there, and it
may have been in his family that this marriage occurred. Could we
but be sure of this — which certainly is probable, and which early tra
dition affirms — the circumstance that when Jesus seated himseh at
this marriage feast he sat down at a table around which mother,
and brothers and sisters, and uncle and aunt, and cousins of his own
now gathered, it would give a pecuharly domestic character to the
scene, and throw a new charm and interest around the miracle which
was wrought at it. At any rate, we may assume that it was in a fam
ily connected by some close ties, whether of acquaintance or relation
ship, with that of Jesus that the marriage feast was kept.
" And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith to him,
They have no wine." The wine, provided only for the original
112 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
number of «guests, began to fail. Mary, evidently watching with a
kind and womanly interest the progress of the feast, and perhaps
ascribing the threatened exigency to the unexpected arrival of her
son and his companions, becomes doubly anxious to shield a famUy
in which she took such an interest from the painful feehng of having
failed in the duties of hospitality. But why did Mary, seeing what
she did, and feeling as she did, go to Jesus and say to him, " They
have no wine"? That she expected him in some way to interfere is
evident ; but what ground had she to expect that he would do so in
any such manner as he did? She had never seen him work a miracle
before. She had no reason, from past experience, to beheve that he
would or could make wine at wiU, or that by his word of power he
would supply the deficiency. She had, however, been laying up in
her heart, and for thirty years revolving aU that had been told her at
the beginning about her son. She had none at Nazareth but Joseph
to speak to ; none but he who would have believed her had she
spoken. Joseph now is dead, and she is left to nurse the swelling
hope in her solitary breast. At last the period comes, when rumors
of the great preacher of repentance who has appeared in the wilder
ness of Judea, and to whom the whole country is rushing, spread
over Gahlee. Her son hears them, and rises from his work, and bids
her adieu ; the first time that he has parted from her since she had
lost him in Jerusalem, now eighteen years ago. What can be his
object in leaving her, his now widowed mother ? She learns — per
haps he himself teUs her — that he goes with other Gahleans who
want to see and hear the new teacher, it may be to enroU themselves
by baptism as his disciples. She asks about this new teacher. Can
it be that she discovers him to be no other than the son of her rela
tive Elisabeth, whose birth was in so strange a manner linked with
that of Jesus? If so, into what a tumult of expectation must she
have been thrown.
But whether knowing aught of this or not, now at last, after a two
months' absence, her son rejoins her, strangely altered in his bear
ing; attended, too, by those who, young as he is, haU him as their
Master and pay him all possible respect. She scarcely ventures to
ask him what has happened in the interval of his absence; but them
she fuUy questions; and as they teU her that John has pubhcly pro
claimed her son to be no other than He whose coming it was his
great object to announce; had pointed to him as the Lamb of God,
the Son of God, the Baptizer with the Holy Ghost; as they tell that
they had found in him the Messias, the Christ, of whom Moses in
the law and the prophets did write, and that it was as such they were
THE FIRST MIRACLE. 113
dow foUowing him — to what a pitch of joyful expectation must she
nave been raised. Now at last the day so long looked for has come.
Men have begun to see in him, her son, the Hope of Israel. Soon aU
Israel shaU haU him as their Messiah. Meanwhile he is here among
friends and relatives; has willingly accepted the invitation given to
join this marriage-feast; has lost nothing, as it would seem, of all his-
early kindly feelings to those around him. What wiU he think, what.
wiU he do, if he be told that owing to his presence, and that of his
disciples, a difficulty has arisen, and discredit is likely to be thrown
upon this famUy, which has shown itself so ready to gratify him, by
asking these strangers to share in the festivities of the occasion ? She
thinks, perhaps, of the cruse of oil, of the barley-loaves of the old
prophets. Surely if her son be that great Prophet that is to appear,
he might do something to provide for this unforeseen emergency; to
meet this want ; to keep the heart of this poor, perhaps, but generous
household from being wounded. But what shaU she ask him to do ?
what shaU she suggest ? She wiU leave that to himself. She knows
how kind in heart, how wise in counsel he is, and beheves now that
his power is equal to his wiU. She modestly contents herseK with
simply directing his attention to the fact, and saying to him, " They
have no wine."
It is the very dehcacy of this approach and address which renders
so remarkable our Lord's reply, "Woman, what have I to do with
thee?" — exactly the same form of expression which, on more than
one occasion, the demons, whom he was about to dispossess, address
ed to Jesus, when they said to him, "What have we to do with
thee?" or, "What hast thou to do with us, Jesus, thou Son of God?"
On their part such language imphed a repudiation of his interference ;
a denial of and a desire to resist his power and authority. And what
can the same form of expression mean as addressed now by Jesus to
his mother? Interpret it as we may; soften it to the uttermost, so as
to remove any thing hke harshness ; stUl it is the language of resist
ance and reproof. There may have been some over-haste or impa
tience on Mary's part ; some motherly vanity mingling with her de
sire to see her son exert his power, and reveal his character before
these assembled guests, which required to be gently checked ; but
our Lord's main object in speaking to her as he did, was to teach
Mary that the period of his subjection to her maternal authority had
expired; that in the new character he had assumed, in that new
sphere of action upon which he had entered, it was not for her, upon
the ground simply of her relationship to him, to dictate or suggest
what he should do. There was some danger of her forgetting this ;
Ul. of Cbiiil. 8
114 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of her cherishing and acting on the behef that he was stiU to be her
son, as he had been throughout those thirty by-past years. It was
right, it was even kind, that at the very outset she should be guarded
against this danger, and saved the disappointment she might have
felt had the limits of her influence and authority been left vague and
undefined. Jesus would, therefore, have her to know definitely, and
from the beginning of his ministry, that mother though she was as to
his humanity, this gave her no right to interfere with him as the Son
•of the Highest, the Saviour of mankind. Thus gently but firmly
does he repel the bringing of her maternal relationship to bear upon
his Messianic work; thus gently but firmly does he assert and vindi
cate his perfect independence, disengaging himself from this the
closest of earthly ties, that he may stand free in aU things to do only
the wiU of his Father in heaven. This manner of his conduct to the
mother whom he so tenderly loved, may be regarded as the first of
those repeated rebukes which Jesus gave by anticipation to that idol
atrous reverence which has carried the human bond into the spiritual
kingdom ; carried it even into the heavenly places ; exalting Mary as»
the queen of heaven ; seating the crowned mother on a throne some
times on a level with, sometimes above that occupied by her Son,
teaching us to pray to her as an equal intercessor with Christ.
"Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet
come." With him no impatience, no undue haste, no hurrying pre
maturely into action. He has waited quietly those thirty years,
without a single trial of that superhuman strength which lay in him,
content to bide till the set time came. And now he waits, even as to
the performance of his first miracle, till the right and foreseen hour for
its performance has arrived. As to this act of his power, and as to
every act of it ; as to this incident of his life, and as to every incident
of it — he could tell when the hour had not come, and when it had.
He who at this marriage-feast could say to Mary, "Mine hour is not
yet come," could say to the Omniscient in the upper chamber at
Jerusalem, "Father, the hour is come, glorify thy Son." Mapped
out before his foreseeing eye in aU its times, places, events, issues,
lay the whole of his earthly hfe and ministry. The perfect unbroken
unity of design and action running throughout the whole proclaims a
previous foresight, a premeditated, weU-ordered plan. It has not
been so with any of those men who have played the greatest and
most prominent parts on the stage of human history. Their own
confessions, the story of their lives, their earher compared with their
later acts, all tell us how httle they knew or thought beforehand of
what they finaUy were to be and do. Instead of one fixed, uniform.
THE FIRST MIRACLE. 115
unchanging scheme and purpose running through and regulating
the whole life, in aU its lesser as weU as its greater movements,
there have been shUtings and changings of place to suit the shUt-
Ings and the changes of circumstances. Surprisals here, disappoint
ments there; old instruments of action worn out and thrown away,
new ones invented and employed ; the life made up of a motley array
of many-colored incidents, out of which have come issues never
dreamed of at the beginning. Was it so with the hfe that Jesus hved
on earth? Had he been a mere man, committing himself to a great
work under the guidance of a subhme, yet purely human, and there
fore weak and bhnd impulse, had he seen only so far into the future
as the unaided human eye could carry, how much was there in the
earher period of his ministry to have excited false hopes, how much
in the latter to have produced despondency ! But the people came
in multitudes around him, and you can trace no sign of extravagant
expectation. The tide of popular favor ebbs away from him, and
you see no token of his giving up his enterprise in despair. No
wavering of purpose, no change of plan, no altering of his course to
suit new and obviously unforeseen emergencies. There is progress : a
steady advance onward to the final consummation of the cross and
the burial, the resurrection and ascension; but aU is consistent, all is
harmonious. The attempt has been lately made, with aU the re
sources of scholarship and aU the skill of genius, to detect a discrep
ancy of design and expectation between the opening and closing
stages of our Saviour's earthly course. It has failed. I cannot help
thinking that aU candid and intelligent readers of that life as we
have it in the gospels, whatever be their rehgious opinions or prepos
sessions, wiU acknowledge that M. Eenan's faUure is patent and com
plete. If so, it leaves that life of Jesus Christ distinguished from aU
others by a fixed, pree'stablished, unvarying design.*
° This feature in our Lord's character appears to have strongly impressed the
mind of Napoleon I., as appears from the following extracts :
" In every other Hfe than that of Christ, what imperfections, what inconsis
tencies ! Where is the character that no opposition is sufficient to overwhelm ?
Where is the individual whose conduct is never modified by event or circum
stance, who never yields to the influences of the time, never accommodates him
self to manners of passions that he cannot prevail to alter ?
"I defy you to cite another life like that of Christ, exempt from the least
vacillation of this kind, untainted by any suoh blots or wavering purpose. From
first to last he is the same ; always the same, majestic and simple, infinitely
severe and infinitely gentle ; throughout a life that may be said to have been
lived under the public eye, Jesus never gives occasion to find fault ; the pru
dence of his conduct compels our admiration by its union of force and gentle-
116 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Our Lord's answer to Mary was Ul-fitted, we might imagine, to
foster hope, postponing apparently to an indefinite period any inter
position on his part. And yet she turns instantly to the servants,
and says to them : "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it." However
surprised or perplexed she may have been, she appeared as confident
as ever that he would interpose. It may have been her strong and
hopeful faith which, notwithstanding the discouraging reply, sus
tained her expectation; or there may have been something in the
tone and manner of her son, something in the way he laid the empha
sis as he pronounced the words, "Mine hour is not yet come," which
conveyed to her the impression that the hour was approaching, was
near, a speedy compliance shining through the apparent refusal.
ness. Alike in speech and action, Jesus is enlightened, consistent, and calm.
Sublimity is said to be an attribute of divinity ; what name then shall we give tc
him in whose character were united every attribute of the sublime ?
" I know men ; and I tell you that Jesus is not a man.
"In Lycurgus, Numa, Confucius, and Mahomet, I only see legislators who
having attained to the first place in the state, have sought the best solution of
the social problem ; I see nothing in them that reveals Divinity ; they themselves
have not pitched their claims so high.
'¦' It is evident that it is only posterity that has deified the world's first despots,
heroes, the princes of the nations, and the founders of the earliest republics.
For my part, I see in the heathen gods and those great men, beings of the same
nature with myself. Their intelligence, after all, differs from mine only in form.
They. burst upon the world, played a great part in their day, as I have done in
mine. Nothing in them proclaims divinity : on the contrary, I see numerous
resemblances between them and me, common weaknesses and errors. Their facul
ties are such as I myself possess ; there is no difference save in the use that we
have made of them, in accordance with the different ends we had in view, our dif
ferent countries and the circumstances of our times.
"It is not so with Christ. Every thing in him amazes me ; his spirit out-
reaches mine, and his will confounds me. Comparison is impossible between
him and- any other being in the wo,rld. He is truly a being by himself : his
ideas and his sentiments, the truth that he announces, his manner of convincing,
are all beyond humanity and the natural order of things.
"His birth, and the story of his life, the profoundness of his doctrine which
overturns all difficulties, and is their most complete solution, his gospel, the sin
gularity of this mysterious being, his appearance, his empire, his progress through
all centuries and kingdoms, all this is to me a prodigy, an unfathomable mystery,
which plunges me into a reverie from which there is no escape, a mystery which
is ever within my view, a permanent mystery which I can neither deny nor
explain. "I see nothing here of man. Near as I may approach, closely as I may ex
amine, all remains above my comprehension, great with a greatness that crushes
me ; it is in vain that I reflect — all remains unaccountable." Sentiments d/> Napo
leon sur le Christianisme, par le Chevalier de Beatjterne.
THE FIRST MIRACLE. 11?
But why did she give that order to the servants, or how could she
anticipate that it was through their instrumentality that the ap
proaching supply was to be conveyed? Without some hint being
given, some word or look of Jesus pointing in that direction, she
could scarcely have conjectured beforehand what the mode of his
action was to be.
Leaving the mystery which arises here unresolved, as being left
without the key to open it, let us look at the simple, easy, unostenta
tious way in which the succeeding miracle was wrought. There
stand — at the entrance, perhaps, of the dwelling — six water-pots
of stone; Jesus saith to the servants, "FU1 the water-pots with water."
They did so, filling them to the brim. Jesus saith, "Draw out now,
and bear unto the governor of the feast." They do so ; it is not water,
but choicest wine they bear ! The ruler of the feast at once detects it
as better wine than they had previously been drinking, and addresses
the bridegroom. The latter gives no reply, for he does not know
whence or how this new supply of better wine has come. As little
know the guests who partake of it; nor, perhaps, tiU the feast is over,
and the servants tell what has been done, is it known by what a mir
acle of power the festivities of that social board have been sustained.
What a veiling this of the hand and power of the operator ! Imagine
only that Jesus had asked the servants, whUe the water was water
still, to draw it out and fill each goblet; had asked each guest to hft
up his cup and taste, and see what kind of hquid it contained ; and
then, by a word of his power, had turned the crystal water into the
ruddy wine ! With what gaping wonder would every one have then
been fiUed! Instead of this, ordering it so that what came to the
guests appeared to come through the ordinary channel, without word
or touch, aught said or done, in obedience to an inward volition of
the Lord, the water hidden in the vessels is changed instantaneously
into wine. There was the same dignified ease and simphcity, the
same absence of ostentation about aU Christ's miracles, proper to
him who used not a delegated, but an intrinsic power.
Struck with the manner in which Christ met the domestic need
and protected the famUy character, we must not overlook the large
ness of the provision that he made. At the most moderate computa
tion, the six water-pots must have held far more than enough to meet
the requirements of the marriage-feast; enough of wine for that
household for many months to come. In the overflowing generosity
of his kindness, he does so much more than Mary would have asked
«r could have conceived. And stfll, to aU who feel their need and
fiome to him to have their spiritual wants supplied, he doss exceed-
118 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ingly abundantly above aU that they ask and aU that they can
think. When the governor of the feast had tasted the new-made wine,
Ae caUed the bridegroom and said to him, " Every man at the begin
ning doth set forth good wine ; and when men have weU drunk, then
that which is worse ; but thou hast kept the good wine until now."
He knew not whence that better wine had come ; he knew not to whom
it was they owed it ; he knew not that, in contrasting as he did the
custom of keeping the best wine to the last with that commonly fol
lowed at marriage-feasts he was but showing forth, as in a figure, the
way in which the spiritual Bridegroom acts to aU those who are caUed
to the marriage-supper of the Lamb. Not as the world giveth gives
Jesus to his own. The world gives its best and richest first. At the
board which it spreads the viands may not faU ; nay, may even grow
in number and improve in quality; but soon they pall on the sated
appetite, and the end of the world's feast is always worse and less
enjoyable than the beginning. Who has found it so of the provisions
of a Saviour's grace — of those quiet, soothing, satisfying pleasures
that true faith in him imparts ? The more of these that any one
receives, the more he enjoys them. The appetite grows with the
food it feeds upon ; the relish increases with the appetite ; better
and better things are stiU provided, and of each new cup of pleasure
put into our hands, turning to the heavenly Provider, we may say,
" Thou hast kept the good wine even until now."
This, the beginning of his miracles, did Jesus in Cana of GalUee.
The miracle lay in the instantaneous transmutation of water into
wine. And yet the water with which those water-pots were filled,
and in which this change was wrought, might have been drawn from
the weU of a vineyard, and instead of being poured into these stone
vessels, might have been poured out over the soil into which the
vine-plants struck their roots, and by these roots might have been
drawn up into the stem, and through the branches been distilled into
the grapes, and out of the grapes been pressed into the vat, and in
that vat have fermented into wine. And thus, by the many steps
and secret processes of nature might that water without a miracle, as
we say, have been converted into wine. But is each step or stage of
that natural transmutation less wonderful ? Does it show inferior
wisdom? Is it done by a feebler power? Just as little can we
explain the process as spread out into multiplied detaUs in the great
laboratory of nature as when condensed into one single act. And
just as much should we see the divine hand and power in the one as-
in the other. He who sees God in the one— the miracle, and net in
THE FIRST MIRACLE. 119
the other, the processes of nature — has not the right faith in God.
If we did not believe that God was operating throughout, working
everywhere, his will and power the spring and support of every move
ment in the material creation, we should not believe that he is oper
ating here or there, in this miracle or in that. It is because we
beheve in the universal agency of the hving God that we are pre
pared to beheve in that agency in any singular form that it occasion-
aUy may take. There is, indeed, a difference between a miracle and
any of the ordinary operations of nature ; a difference not in the agent,
not in the power, but simply in the manner in which the power and
agency are employed. In the one, the hand of the great Operator
works slowly, uniformly, doing the same things always in the same
way; his footsteps foUow each other so surely and so regularly that,
by a delusion of the understanding, we come to think that the things
that foUow each other so uniformly are not only naturaUy but neces
sarily linked to one another — the one by some imagined inherent
power drawing the other after it ; needing no power but their own to
bind them together at the first, or keep them bound together after
wards. Wherever there is orderly succession — and it pervades the
whole universe of material things — we can classify the different pro
cesses that go on, and so reach what we caU the laws of nature, which,
after aU, are but expressions of the orderly manner in which certain
results are brought about ; but to these laws, as if they were living
things, and had a vital power and energy belonging to them, we come
to attribute the actual accomphshment of the result. It happens
thus that the works of his hands in the midst of which we live, and
which, for his glory and our good, the great Creator and Sustainer
makes to move on with such fixed and orderly, stately and beautiful
array, instead of being a clear translucent medium through which we
see him, become often as a thick obscuring veil, hiding him from our
sight. Hence the use of miracles, that He who worketh all in all,
and worketh thus, should sometimes break as it were this order, that
through the rent we might see the hand which had been hidden
behind that self-constructed veU.
And yet when we speak thus of a miracle as a breaking-in upon
the ordinary and estabhshed course of nature, let us not think of it
as U it were discord thrust into a harmony; something loose, irreg
ular, disjointed, coming in to mar the beautiful and orderly progres
sion. In that harmonious progression, the lower ever yields to the
higher. The vital powers, for instance, in plants and animals, are
ever modifying the mechanical powers, the laws of motion ; the wfll
of man comes in, in stfll more striking manner, to do the same thing
120 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
with aU the powers and processes of nature. You do not say that
such crossings and counteractions of lower by higher laws disturb
the harmony of nature ; they help to constitute it. And we beheve
that just as falsely as you would say that the order of nature was
broken, the law of gravitation was violated, when the sap ascenda
in the stem of the tree, and is distributed upwards through its
branches ; just as falsely is it said of the miracles of Christianity, that
they break that order, or violate any of nature's laws ; for did we but
know enough of that spiritual kingdom for whose establishment and
advancement they were wrought, we should perceive that here too
there was law and order, and that what we now caU miracles were
but instances of the lower yielding to the higher; that the grand,
unbroken harmony of the vast universe, material, mental, moral,
spiritual, may be sustained and promoted.
This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Gahlee, and man
ifested forth his glory. The glory that was thus revealed lay not so
much in the forthputting of almighty power (for it is an inferior glory
that the bare exercise of any power, though it be divine, displays)
as in the manner in which the power is exercised, the ends it is put
forth to accomplish. Power appears here as the handmaid and min
ister of loving kindness, and gathers thus a richer glory than its own
around it. Never let us forget that the first act of our Lord's pubhc
hfe was to grace a marriage by his presence. By doing so, he has
for ever consecrated that and every other human bond and relation
ship. And the first exercise of his almighty power was to minister
to the enjoyment of a marriage-feast. He who would not in the
extremity of hunger employ his power to procure food for himself,
put it forth to increase the comforts of others. By doing so, he has
for ever consecrated aU the innocent enjoyments of life. It wfll not
do to say that his example here is no pattern to us ; that what was
safe for him might be injurious to us; for he not only accepted the
invitation for himseh, but took his disciples along with hi-m to the
mairiage-feast. There is something pecuharly striking and instruc
tive in our Lord's coming so directly from consort with the austere
ascetic preacher of the wUderness, and carrying along with him these
first disciples, the majority of whom had been John's disciples before
they were his, and seating them by his side at this festive board.
Does it not teach what the genius and spirit of his rehgion is? That
it affects not the desert; that it shuns not the fellowship of man;
that it frowns not on social joys and pleasures'; that it reioioes as
readily with those who rejoice as it weeps with those who weep;
ready to be with us in our hours of gladness, as well as in our hours
THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 121
of grief. Let no table be spread to which He who graced the mar
riage-feast at Cana could not be invited ; let no pleasure be indulged
in which could not hve in the hght of his countenance. Let his pres
ence and blessing be with us and upon us wherever we go and how
ever we are engaged; and is the way not open by which the miracle
of Cana may, in spirit, be repeated daUy still, and the water of every
earthly enjoyment turned into the very wine of heaven ?
XII.
The Cleansing of the Temple.*
The miracle at the marriage-feast drew a marked hne of distinc
tion between the divine Teacher and the austere Essenes, those ere
mites who dwelt apart, shut up in a kind of monastic seclusion, and
who renounced the use of wine, condemned marriage, and denounced
aU bodUy indulgence as injurious to the purity of the spirit. By act
ing as he did at Cana, Jesus at the very outset of his career placed
himself in direct opposition to the strictest class of pietists then exist
ing — in direct opposition to the spirit and practice of those in aU
ages who have sought, by withdrawal from the world and estrange
ment from aU objects of sense, to cultivate communion with the
unseen, to rise to a closer intercourse with and nearer resemblance to
the Deity.
One effect of this first display by Jesus of his supernatural power
was a strengthening of the faith of the men who had recently attached
themselves to him. "His disciples," it is said, "beheved in him."
They had beheved before, but they beheved more firmly now. The
ground of their first faith had been the testimony of the Baptist.
Their faith had grown during the few days of private intercourse with
Jesus which succeeded, and now by the manifestation of his power
and glory it was stfll more strengthened. It was still, as later trial
too clearly proved, weak and imperfect. But their minds and hearts ,
were in such a condition" that they lay open to the influence of addi
tional hght as to their Master's character, additional evidence of his
authority and power. But there were other spectators of the mira
cle upon whom it exerted no such happy influence. After the mar
riage-feast at Cana broke up, " Jesus and his mother, and his breth
ren, and his disciples went down to Capernaum." This is the first
mention of those brethren of Christ who appear more than once in
« John 2 : 12-21 ; Matt. 21 : 10-17.
122 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the subsequent history, always associated with Mary, as forming part
of her famUy, carefuUy distinguished from the apostles and disciples
of the Lord. They are represented on one occasion as going out
after him, thinking he was beside himself; and when he was told that
Mary and they stood at the outskirts of the crowd desiring to see
him. he exclaimed, " Who is my mother, and who are my brethren ?
Whosoever shah do the will of my Father who is in heaven, the same
is my brother, and sister, and mother." On another occasion, the
Nazarenes referred to them when, astonished and offended, they said
to one another, " Is not this the carpenter's son ? is not his mother
called Mary, and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and
Judas? And his sisters, are they not aU with us?" John tells us
that at a stUl later period, in the beginning of the last year of our
Lord's ministry, these relatives taunted him, "saying, If thou do
these things, show thyseK to the world ; for neither did his brethren
believe in him." Had we been reading these passages for the first
time, we should scarcely have understood them otherwise than as
referring to those who were related to Jesus as children of the same
mother. This would of course imply that Mary had other chUdren
than Jesus, an idea to which from the earhest period there seems to
have been the strongest repugnance. Eesting upon the weU-known
usage which aUowed the term brother and sister to be extended to
more distant relationships, and upon the acknowledged difficulty
which arises in connection with the names of our Lord's brothers as
given by the evangelists, both the Greek and the Latin churches,
though adopting different theories as to the exact nature of the rela
tionship, have indignantly repudiated the idea of Mary's having any
but one child, and have regarded those spoken of as his brothers as
being either his half-brothers, sons of Joseph by another marriage,
or his cousins, the chUdren of Mary's sister, the wife of Alphseus or
Cleophas. It would be out of place here to enter upon the discus
sion of this difficult question. I can only say that, after weighing all
the objections which have been adduced, I can see no sufficient rea
son for rejecting the first and most natural reading of the passages
I have referred to, for not believing that they were brothers and sis
ters of Jesus, who grew up along with him in the household at Naza
reth. Perhaps our readiness to admit this may partly spring from
our not sharing the impression that there is any thing in such a
behef either derogatory to the character of Mary, or to the true dig
nity of her first-born Son.
Whoever they were, and however related to him, these brethren
of the Lord, his nearest relatives, who had aU along been living, if
THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 123
not under the same roof, yet in close and intimate acquaintance with
him, sat beside his disciples at that marriage-feast, and saw the won
der that was done, and they did not beheve. As months roUed on,
they saw and heard of stiU greater wonders wrought in the presence
of multitudes. Eesiding with Mary at Capernaum, they hved in the
very heart of that commotion which the teaching and acts of Jesus
excited. Neither did they then beheve. Their unbehef may have
been in part sustained by Christ's having ceased to make their homo
his home, and chosen twelve strangers as his close and constant com
panions and friends. Nor did any of them believe in Jesus all through
the three years of his ministry. But it is pleasing to note that, though
so long and so stubbornly maintained, their unbelief did at last give
way; you see them in that upper room to which the apostles retired
after witnessing the ascension: "And when they were come in, they
went up into an upper room, where abode both Peter and James,
and John and Andrew, Phihp and Thomas, Bartholomew and Mat
thew, James the son of Alphseus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas the
brother of James. These all continued with one accord in prayer
and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus,
and with his brethren." How many an apt remark on the pecuhar
barriers which the closer ties of domestic life often oppose to the
influence of the one Christian member of a household, and on the
peculiar encouragement which such a one has to persevere, might be
grounded upon the fact that it was not till after his death that our
Lord's own immediate relatives believed in him.
When the marriage-feast at Cana was over, Jesus and his mother,
and his brethren, and his disciples went down to Capernaum. Of
this town we shaU have more to say hereafter, when it became the
chosen centre of our Lord's GaUlean ministry. One advantage of
the short visit that Jesus now paid to it was, that it put him on the
route along which the already gathering bands of visitors from North
ern Galilee passed southwards to the capital. The Passover was at
hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Hitherto, though some time
had passed (two or three months perhaps, but there are no materials
for exactly determining) since his baptism and the public proclama
tion of his Messiahship, Jesus had taken no public step, none imply
ing any assumption on his part of the office to which he had been
designated. Of the few men who attended him, there was but one
whom he had asked to follow him ; nor was it yet understood whether
he and the rest were to accompany him for more than a few days.
The miracle at Cana was rather of a private and domestic than of a
public character. Nothing that we know of was said or done by
124 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Jesus at Capernaum, or throughout the short visit to Galilee, to indi
cate his entrance on a pubhc career.
But now he is in Jerusalem, in the place where most appropri
ately the first revelation of himseU in his new character is made.
Let us acknowledge that it is not in the form in which we should
have expected it; nor in that form in which any Jew of that age
would ever have imagined that the Messiah would first show himseh.
We may be able, by meditating a httle upon it, to see more of its
suitableness than at first sight appears. But even a first glance
reveals how utterly unlike it was to the popular Jewish conception of
the advent of the Messiah. One of the first things our Lord does at
Jerusalem is to go up into the temple. He passes through one of
the gates of its surrounding walls. He enters into the large open
area which on aU sides encompasses the sacred edifice. What a spec
tacle meets his eye ! There all round, attached to the waUs, are lines
of booths or shops in which money-changers are plying their usuri
ous trade. The centre space is crowded with oxen and with sheep
exposed for sale, and between the buyers and the seUers aU the tur
bulent traffic of a cattle-market is going on. It goes on within the
outer enclosure, but close upon the inner courts of the holy place ;
so close that the loud hum from the crowded court of the GentUes
must have been heard to their no smaU disturbance by the priests
and worshippers within. How comes all this ? and who is responsi
ble for this desecration of the temple ? The origin of it in one sense
was natural enough. At aU the great festivals, but especiaUy at the
Passover, an almost inconceivable number of animals were offered up
in sacrifice. Josephus teUs us of more than two hundred thousand
victims sacrificed in the course of a single Passover celebration. The
greatest proportion of these were not brought up from the country
by the offerers, but were purchased on their arrival at Jerusalem.
An extensive traffic, yielding no inconsiderable gain to those engaged
in it, was thus created. Some open area for conducting it was need
ed. The heads of the priesthood, to whom the custody of the temple
was committed, saw that good rents were got for any suitable mar
ket-ground which the city could supply. They were tempted to fill
their own coffers from this source. Jerusalem could furnish no place
so suitable for the exposure of the animals as the Court of the Gen
tiles. What more convenient than that the victims should be pur
chased in the very neighborhood of the place where they were to be
offered up ? The greed of gain prevafled over aU care for the sanc
tity of the temple. ( The Court of the Gentiles was let out to the cat
tle-dealers, and a large amount was thus added to the yearly revenue
THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 125
of the temple. StiU another source of gain lay open, and was taken
advantage of. Every one who came up to the Passover, and desired
to take part in the festival, had to present a half-shekel of Jewish
money to the priests. This kind of money was not now in general
use; it was scarce even in Judea, unknown beyond that land. Noth
ing, however, but the half-shekel of the sanctuary would be taken at
the temple. To supply themselves with the needed coin, visitors had
to go to the money-changer. And where can he find a fitter place
to erect. his booth and set out his table than within the very area in
which the larger traffic was going on ? He offers so much to the
priesthood to be permitted to do so; the bribe is taken, and the
booth and the tables are erected. And so, amid a perfect Babel of
tongues, and thronging, jostling crowds of men and beasts, the buy
ing and the selling and the money-changing are aU going on.
Into the heart of this tumultuous throng Jesus enters. Of the
many hundreds there, few have ever seen him before ; few know
anything about him, either about his baptism in the Jordan or his
late miracle at Cana. He appears as a stranger, a young man clad in
the simple garb of a GaUlean peasant, without any badge of author
ity in his hand. He looks around with an eye of indignant sorrow.
pours out the changers' money, overthrows their tables, forming a
scourge of smah cords drives the herds of cattle before him, and,
mingling consideration with his zeal, says to them who sold the
doves, " Take these things hence ; make not my Father's house a
house of merchandise." Why is it that at the touch of this slender
scourge, and the bidding of this youthful stranger, buyers and sellers
stop their traffic, the money-changers suffer their money to be rudely
handled and their tables to be overturned? The slightest resist
ance of so many against one would have been sufficient to arrest
the movement. But no such resistance is attempted, no opposition
is made, by men not likely from their occupation to be remarkable
for mildness of disposition or pliability of character. How are we to
explain this ? We can understand how, at the last Passovei, at the
close of his ministry, when Jesus, then so well known, so generally
recognised by the people as a prophet, repeated this cleansing of the
temple, there should have been a yielding to his authoritative com
mand. But what are we to say of such an occurrence taking place
at the very commencement of his ministry, his first public act in
Jerusalem? It is a mysterious power which some men, in time of
excitement, by look and word and tone of command, can exercise
over their fellow-men. But grant that rare power in its highest
degree to Jesus, it will scarce account for this scene in the court
126 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of the GentUes at Jerusalem. It would seem as if, in eye and voice
and action, the divine power and authority that lay in Jesus broke
forth into visible manifestation, and laid such a spell upon those
rough cattle-drivers and those cold calculators of the money-tables,
that aU power of resistance was for the time subdued. It would
seem as if it pleased him to exert here within the temple the same
influence that he did afterwards in the garden, when he stepped forth
from the darkness into the fuU moonUght, and said to the rough
band that advanced with lanterns and swords and staves to take
him, "I that speak unto you am he;" and when at the sight and
word they reeled backward and feU to the ground. The effect in
both cases was but temporary. High priests and officers were soon
upon their feet again ; and, wondering at their own weakness in
yielding to a power which at the moment they were impotent to
resist, proceeded to lay hold upon Jesus and lead him away unto
Caiaphas. So was it also, we beUeve, in the temple court. A sud
den, mysterious, irresistible power is upon that crowd. They yield,
they know not why. But by-and-by the spell would seem to be
withdrawn. They soon recover from its effect. Nor is it long tiU,
wondering at their having allowed a single man, and one who had
no right whatever, to interfere with arrangements made by the chief
authorities, and to lord it over them, they return, resume their occu
pations, and all goes on as before.
It was with no intention or expectation of putting an end in this
way to the desecration of the holy place that Jesus acted. What,
then, was the purpose of his act? It was meant to be a pubhc
proclamation of his Sonship to God : an open assertion and exercise
of his authority as sustaining this relation ; a protest in his Father's
name against the conduct of the priesthood in permitting this dese
cration of the holy place. It was far more for the priesthood than
for the crowd in the market-place that it was meant. They were
not ignorant that the chief object of the ministry of the Baptist, with
which the whole country was ringing, was to announce the imme
diate coming of the Messiah. They had not long before sent a depu
tation to the banks of the Jordan to ask John whether he himself
were not the Messiah whose near advent he was foreteUing. The
members of that deputation heard of the baptism of Jesus ; in all
likelihood they had not left the place when Jesus came back from
the temptation in the wilderness, and was pubUcly pointed to by
John as the greater than himself who was to come after him, the
Lamb of God, the Son of God. From the lips of the men whom
they had sent, or from the lips of others, they must have known all
THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 127
about what had happened. And now here among them is this Jesus
of Nazareth ; here he is come up to the temple, speaking and acting
as if it were his part and office authoritatively to interpose and
cleanse the buUding of all its defilements. What else could the
priesthood who had charge of the temple understand than that
here was claimed a jurisdiction in regard to it superior to their
own ? What else could they understand when the words were heard,
or were repeated to them, " Make not my Father's house a house of
merchandise," than that here was one who claimed a relationship to
God as his Father, and a right over the temple as his Father's house,
which none but One could claim ? They go to him, therefore, or they
caU him before them, and entering, you wiU remark, into no justifica
tion of their own deed in hiring out the temple court as they had
done — entering into no argument with him as to the rightness or
wrongness of what he had done, rather admitting that if he were
indeed a prophet, as his acts showed that he at least pretended to
be, his act was justifiable ; they proceed upon the assumption that
he was bound to give to them some proof of his carrying a Divine
commission, and they say to him, "What sign showest thou unto
us, seeing thou doest these things ?"
He had shown a good enough sign already, had they read it aright.
He was about to show signs numerous and significant enough in the
days that immediately succeeded; but to such a haughty chaUenge
as this, coming, as he knew, from men whom no sign would convince
of his Messiahship, he had but this reply: "Destroy this temple, and
in three days I wUl raise it up." A truly dark saying; one that, not
only they did not and could not at the time understand, but that they
were almost certain to misunderstand, and, misunderstanding, to
turn against the speaker, as if he meant to claim the possession of a
power which he never could be caUed upon to exercise. Then said
the Jews, interpreting, as they could scarce fail to do, his words as
applicable to the material temple: "Forty-and-six years has this
+emr>le been in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three davs?"*
Jesus made no attempt to rectify the error into which his ques-
* It is curious that, in saying so, they have left io us one of the few fixed and
certain data upon which we can determine the year when the public ministry of
our Lord began. We know that the building, or rather rebuilding of the tem
ple, was commenced by Herod in the eighteenth year of his reign ; that is — speak
ing according to the Roman method of counting their years, from the foundation
of Rome — during the year that began in the spring of 734, and ended in that of
735. Forty-six years from this would bring us to the year 780-781. Historical
«tfttements and astronomical calculations conspire to prove that it must have been
128 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
tioners had faUen. He could not weU have done so without a pro-
ciature disclosure of his death and resurrection, a thing that he care
fully avoided till the time of their accomphshment drew near. He
left this mysterious saying to be interpreted against himself. It
seems to have taken a deep hold, to have been widely circulated,
and to have fixed itself very deeply in the memory of the people.
Three years afterwards, when they were trying to convict him of
some crime in reference to religion, this first saying of his was brought
up against him, as one uttered blasphemously against the temple ; but
the two witnesses could not agree about the words. And when the
cross was raised, those who passed by raUed on him, saying, "Ah,
thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save
thyself." Whatever differences there were in the remembrances and
reports of the people, in one thing they agreed, in the attributing the
destruction of the temple that Jesus had spoken of here, to himself.
But he had not spoken of the destruction as effected by his own
hands, but by those of the Jews themselves. And he had not had in
his eye the material temple on Mount Moriah, but the temple of his
body, which they were to destroy, and which he, three days after
wards, was to raise from the dead. All this became plain afterwards,
and went, when his real meaning stood revealed in the event, migh
tily to confirm the faith of his followers. And in one respect it may
stiU go to confirm ours, for does not that saying of Jesus, uttered so
early — his first word, we may say, to the leaders of the people at
Jerusalem — does it not, along with so many other like evidences, go
to'prove how clearly the Lord saw the end from the beginning?
The temple at Jerusalem has long been in ruins. In its stead
there stands now before us the church of the body of Christ, the soci
ety of the faithful. In her corporate capacity, in her corporate act
ings, has the church not acted over again what the Jews did with
their temple, when she has made merchandise of her offices and her
revenues, and sold them to the highest bidder, as you would seU oxeD
in the market or meat in the shambles? The spirit which prompts-,
such open sacrilegious acts, such gross making gain of got!!ines&. is
the self-same spirit which our Lord rebuked; and how often does it
creep into and take hold and spread like a defiling leprosy over the
house of God! It does so in the pulpit, whenever self, in one or
other of its insidious forms, frames the speech and animates the
between the 13th March and the 4th April, in the year 750, that Herod died. If
Christ were born a few months before that death, thirty years forward from that
time brings us to the year 780, as that in which our Lord's ministry commenced ;
the two independent computations thus singularly confirming one another.
THE CONVERSATION WITH NICODEMUS. 129
utterance ; it does so in the pew, when in the hour haUowed to prayer
and praise the chambers of thought and imagery within are crowded
with worldly guests. Know ye not, brethren, that ye are the temple
of God ; and that the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are T
Would that half the zeal the Saviour showed in cleansing the earthly
buUding were but shown by each of us in the purUying and cleansing
of our hearts! Truly it is no easy task to drive out thence every.
thing that defileth in his sight, to keep out as well as to put out; for,.
quick as were those buyers and seUers of old in coming back to their*
places in the temple and resuming tlieir occupations there, quicker
stUl are those vain and sinful desires, dispositions, imaginations,.
which in our moments of excited zeal we have expeUed from our
hearts, in returning to their old and weU-loved haunts. The Lord of
the temple must eome himseU to cleanse it ; come, not once or twice
as in the case of the temple at Jerusalem ; come, not as a transient
visitor, but as an abiding guest ; not otherwise than by his own in
dweUing shaU these unhaUowed inmates be ejected and kept without,.,
and the house made worthy of Him who deigns to occupy it.
XIII.
The Conversation with Nicodemus.'
Chkist's first visit to Jerusalem, after his baptism, appears to
have been a brief one : not longer, perhaps, than that usuaUy paid by
those who went up to the Passover. Besides the cleansing of the
temple he wrought some miracles which are left unrecorded, but
which we may believe were of the same kind as his subsequent
ones, and these were generaUy miracles of healing. Many believed
on him when they saw those miracles performed ; beheved on him as.
a wonder-worker, as a man who had the great power of God at his;
command ; but their faith scarcely went farther, involved in it little ¦
or no recognition of his true character and office. Although they,
beheved in him, Jesus did not believe in them (for it is the same/
word which is used in the two cases.) Knowing what was in theEO,
as he knew what was in aU men, undeceived by appearance or pro
fession, he entered into no close or friendly relations with them ; made
uo hasty or premature discovery of himself.
But there was one man to whom he did commit himseU on the
occasion of this first and short residence in Jerusalem, to whom he.
•John 3: 1-21.
Ufc of Ohrtit 9
130 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
did make such a discovery of limseU, as we shaU presently see he
never made to any other single person in the whole course of his
ministry. This was a man of the Pharisees, one of the sect that
became the most bitter persecutors of Christ; a ruler too of the Jews, a
•man well educated, of good position, and in high office ; a member of
the Sanhedrim. He was one of the body that not long ago had sent the
deputation down to the Jordan to inquire about the Baptist. He knew
aU about John's ministry, about his announcing that the kingdom of God
was at hand, that there was One coming after him who was to baptize
not with water but with the Holy Ghost. He had been wondering
what this ministry of John could mean, when Jesus appeared in the
city, cleansed the temple, wrought those miracles. He saw that
among the class to which he belonged, the appearance and acts of
the young Nazarene, who had assumed and exercised such an author
ity within the courts of the temple, and when chaUenged had given
such an unsatisfactory reply, had excited nothing but distrust and
antipathy; a distrust and antipathy, however, in which he did not,
could not share. He could not concur with those who spake of him
as an ignorant rustic, a mere blind zealot, whom a fit of fanaticism
had driven to do what he did in the temple ; still less could he agree
with those who spake of him as an impostor, a deceiver of the people.
We do not know what words of Christ's he heard, what acts of his
he witnessed ; but the impression had come upon him, whencesoever
it came, that he was altogether different from what his feUow-rulers
were disposed to believe. Could this indeed be the man of whom
John spake so much ; could this be indeed the Christ, the Messiah
for whom so many were longing? If he was, what new and higher
truths would he unfold, what a glorious kingdom would he usher in !
Eestless and unsatisfied with things as they were, all his Pharisaic
strictness in the keeping of the law having failed to quiet his con
science and give comfort to his heart, Nicodemus was looking about
and longing for further hght. Perhaps this stranger, who was come
to Jerusalem, may be able to help him. He may be poor and mean,
a GalUean by birth, without official rank or authority ; but what of
that, if he be really what he seems, one clothed with a divine com
mission; what of that, if he can quench in any way this thirst of
heart and soul which burns within? If He could be seen by him
alone, Jesus would surely lay aside that reserve which he appeared to
maintain, and instruct him fuUy as to the mysteries of the coming
kingdom. But how should such a private interview be brought
about? He might send for Him; and sent for by one in his position,
Jesus might not refuse to come. But then it would be noised abroad
THE CONVERSATION WITH NICODEMUS. 131
that he had been entertaining the Nazarene in his dwelling. Or he
might go to Him when He was teaching in pubhc, but then it would
be seen and known of aU men that he had paid Him an open mark of
respect. He was not prepared to face either of these alternatives ; he
was too timid, thought too much of what his companions and friends
and the general pubhc of the city might think or say. Yet he is too
eager to throw the chance away. He must see Jesus, and as his fears
keep him from going to or sending for him by day, he goes by night,
breaks in upon his retirement, asks and obtains the audience.
There was something wrong, no doubt, in his choosing such a
time and way for the interview. It would have been a manlier, more
heroic thing for him to have braved aU danger, and risen above all
fear of man. But whatever blame we may choose on this ground to
attach to Nicodemus, let it not obscure our perception of his obvious
honesty and earnestness, his intense desire for further enlightenment,
his willingness to receive instruction. He came by night, but he was
the only one of his order who came at aU. He came by night, but
it was not to gratify an idle curiosity, but in the disquiet of a half-
awakened conscience to seek for peace. "Babbi,"hesays,assoonas
he finds himseU in Christ's presence. He salutes him with aU respect.
The Eabbis of the temple would have scorned the claim of one so
young in years, unknown in any of their schools, who had given no
proof of his acquaintance with their laws and their traditions — to be
regarded as one of them. But the ruler, in all Ukehhood by many
years Christ's senior, and one who on other grounds might have
counted on being the saluted rather than the saluter, does not hesi
tate to address him thus: "Eabbi, we know that thou art a teacher
come from God : for no man can do these miracles that thou doest
except God be with him." He shows at once his respect, his candor,
his inteUigence, and his faith. He does not doubt that these are
real miracles which Jesus has been working; he is ready to trace to
its true source the power employed in their accomphshment ; he is
prepared at once to acknowledge that the worker of such miracles
must be one sent and sanctioned by God. In saying so, he knows
that he is saying more than perhaps any other man of his station in
Jerusalem would be ready to say. He thinks that he says enough to
win for himself a favorable reception. Tet, he is speaking far below
the truth, much under his own half-formed conceptions and behefs.
It is but as a teacher, not as a prophet, much less the great Prophet,
that he addresses Jesus.
One might have expected that, having addressed him as such, he
would go on to put the questions to which he presumed that such a
132 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
teacher could give rephes. But he pauses, perhaps imagining that*
gratified by such a visit, pleased at being saluted thus by one of the
rulers, Jesus will salute him in return, and save him the trouble of
inquiry by making some disclosures of the new doctrine which, as a
teacher sent from God, he had come to teach; or by telling him
something more about that new kingdom which so many were
expecting to see set up. How surprised he must have been when so
abruptly, yet so solemnly, without exchange of salutation or word of
preface, Jesus says, " Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a man be
born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Such a man as
Nicodemus could scarcely have been so stupid as to believe that in
speaking of being born again, Jesus meant a second birth of the
body. He is so disconcerted, however, disappointed, perplexed,
besides being perhaps a little irritated, by both the manner and the
substance of the grave, emphatic utterance — one which, however
general in its terms, was obviously spoken with a direct and personal
reference — that, in his confusion, he seizes upon the expression as the
only one that had as yet conveyed any definite idea to his mind — as
affording him some ground of exception, some material for reply; and
taking it in its literal sense, he says : "How can a man be born again
when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's
womb, and be born?" The wise and gentle teacher in whose hands
he now is, takes no notice of the foUy or the petulance of the remark.
He reiterates what he had said, modifying, however, his expressions,
so that Nicodemus could not fail to see of what kind of second birth
it was that he was speaking: "Yerily, verily, I say unto thee, Except
a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
kingdom of God."
Had Nicodemus only had time at first to coUect his thoughts, he
would have remembered that it was no new term, framed now for the
first time, that Jesus had been employing in speaking of a second
birth; it being a proverbial expression with his countrymen with
reference to those who became proselytes to the Jewish faith, and
were admitted as such into the Jewish community, that they were as
men new born. The outward mode of admitting such proselytes to
the enjoyment of Jewish privileges was by baptism, by washing with
water. John had adopted this rite, and by demanding that aU Jews
should be baptized with the baptism of repentance, as a preparation
on their part for the coming of the kingdom, he had in fact, already
proclaimed, that, as every heathen man became as a new man on
entering into the commonwealth of Israel, so every Jewish man
must become a new man before entering into that new kingdom which
THE CONVERSATION WITH NICODEMUS. L',3
the Messiah was to introduce and establish. It was virtually to
symbolize the importance and necessity of repentance — that change
of mind and heart which formed the burden of his preaching, as a
quahfication in aU candidates for admission into the kingdom — that
John came baptizing with water. But he took great pains to inform
his hearers that, whUe he baptized with water, there was One coming
immediately who was to baptize with the Holy Ghost. Was it likely
then, or we may even say was it possible that, when Nicodemus now
heard Jesus say, " Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit,
he cannot enter into the kingdom of God," he could faU to perceive
the aUusion to the water-baptism of John and the Spirit-baptism of
the Messiah? In common with aU his countrymen, Nicodemus had
assumed that, be it what it might, come how or when it might, the
Messianic kingdom would be one within which their very birth as
Jews would entitle them to be ranked. This popular delusion John
had already, by his baptism and his teaching, done something to rec
tify. The full truth it was reserved for Jesus, to proclaim, and he
does it now to Nicodemus. This master in Israel has come to Jesus
to be taught ; let him know then that it is not a new doctrine, but
a new hfe which Jesus has come to proclaim and to impart. It is not
by knowing so much, or believing in such truths, or practising such
duties, that a man is to quahfy himself for becoming a subject of the
spiritual kingdom of Jesus Christ. First of all, as a necessary pre
liminary, he must be born again ; born of the Spirit, have spiritual
life imparted, before he can see so as to apprehend its real nature,
before he can enter so as to partake of its true privileges, the king
dom of God. This kingdom is not an outward or a national one, not
the kingdom of a creed, or of an external organized community. It
is a kingdom exclusively of the new-born — of those who have been
begotten of the Spirit— ^of those who have been born again, not of
blood, nor of the flesh, nor of the wiU of man, but of God. For that
which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit
is spirit. A mystic thing it looks to Nicodemus, this second birth — this birth
of the Spirit ; secret, invisible, impalpable ; its origin and issues hid
den, remote. "Marvel not," says Jesus, at its mysteriousness. The
night is quiet around you, not a sound of bending branch or rustling
leaf comes from the neighboring wood ; but now the air is stirred as
by an invisible hand ; the sigh of the night breeze comes through the
bending branches and rustling leaves ; you hear the sound ; but who
can take you to that breeze's birthplace, and show you where and
now it was begotten; who can carry you to its place of sepulture, and
134 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
show you where and how it dies ? Not that the wind-— the air in
motion — is a whit more wilful or capricious, or less obedient to fixed
laws than any other elements, or is chosen upon that account to rep
resent the operations of God's Spirit on the souls of men. All its<
movements are fixed and orderly; but as the movements of an invis
ible agent, they elude our observation ; nor, if you sought for a mate
rial emblem of that hiddenness with which the Holy Spirit works,
could you find in the whole creation one more apt than that which
Jesus used, when he said to Nicodemus, "The wind bloweth where it
listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not teU whence
it cometh and whither it goeth : so is every one that is born of the
Spirit." Already a dim apprehension of that for which he was being appre
hended of Christ has begun to dawn upon Nicodemus. He receives
the truth as affirmed by Jesus as to the necessity of the new birth.
He begins even to understand something as to its nature. Yet a
haze stiU hangs over it. He wonders and he doubts — giving expres
sion to his feelings in the question, " How can these things be ?"
If Christ's answer may be taken as the best interpretation of this
question, Nicodemus was now troubling himself not so much either
with the nature or the necessity of the new birth, as with the manner
of its accomplishment ; the kind of instrumentality by which so great
an inward change was to be effected; for, read aright, our Lord's
reply is not only a description of that instrumentality, but an actual
employment of it. First, however, a gentle rebuke must be given:
'Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things? Hast
thou forgotten aU that is written in the book of the law and in the
prophets about the coming of those days in which the Lord would
pour out his Spirit upon aU flesh ; about the new covenant that the
Lord would then enter into with his people, one of whose two great.
provisions was to be this: "I wUl give them one heart, and I will put
a new spirit within you ; and I will take the stony heart out of their
flesh, and wfll give them a heart of flesh"'? Ezek. 11 : 19. What
had so often and so long beforehand been thus spoken of was now
about to be executed. The Spirit of God was waiting to do his gra
cious work, in begetting many sons and daughters to the Lord. Let
Nicodemus be assured of this, on the testimony of one whose knowl
edge of the spirit- world was immediate and complete. He had spo
ken very confidently about his knowledge, of Jesus. " We know," he
had said, " thou art a teacher sent from God." Let him hsten now
to words of equal confidence, which no mere human teacher, though
he were even sent by God, could weU, upon such a subject, have
THE CONVERSATION WITH NICODEMUS. 135
employed: "Verily, verUy I say unto thee, We speak that we do
know, and testify that we have seen ; and ye receive not our witness."
' This work of the Spirit in regenerating is connected with another—
my own — in redeeming. The one is but an earthly operation; a
work performed within men's souls ; but the other, how high have you
to rise to trace it to its source ; how far to go to foUow it to its
issues ? " If I have told you earthly things, and ye beheve not, how
shaU ye believe if I teU you of heavenly things?"
'And yet who can speak of these heavenly things as I can do?
You take me, Nicodemus, to be a teacher sent from God, perhaps
you might even acknowledge me as a prophet; but know me that I
am no other than He, the Son of man, the Son of God, coming down
from heaven, ascending to heaven, but leaving not heaven behind me
in my descent, bringing it along with me ; whUe here on earth, being
stfll in heaven. No man, I say unto thee, hath ascended up to
heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man
which is in heaven.'
And having thus proclaimed the? ground and certainty of his
knowledge of aU the earthly and aU the heavenly things pertaining
to the kingdom, Jesus goes on to preach his own gospel beforehand
to Nicodemus, taking the lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness
as the type to iUustrate his own approaching lifting up on the cross,
declaring this to be the great and gracious design of his death, that
whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have eternal hfe :
" For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son ;
that whosoever beheveth in him should not perish, but have everlast
ing life."
It does not faU within our scope to Ulustrate at large or attempt
to enforce the great truths about the one and only manner of enter
ing into Christ's spiritual kingdom ; about the universal need of the
Spirit-birth in order to make this entrance ; about his own character
and office; the manner and objects of his death; the faith which^
trusting to him, brings with it everlasting life ; the moral guilt that
hes in the act of rejecting him as a Eedeemer ; the true character of
those tempers of mind and heart which prompt to faith on the one
side and to unbelief on the other, which are all brought out in the
discourse of our Lord to Nicodemus. But it does fall precisely with
in our present design that I ask you to reflect a moment or two —
first, upon the time at which this discourse was delivered; and next,
¦as to its effect upon him to whom it was addressed.
It was dehvered weeks or months before the Sermon on the
Mount, or any other of Christ's public addresses to the people,
136 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Standing in time the first, it stands in character alone. You search
in vain through aU the subsequent discourses of our Lord for any
•such clear, compendious, comprehensive development of the Christian
salvation: of its source in the love of the Father; its channel in the
death of his only begotten Son; and of the great Agent by whom it
js appropriated and applied. You search in vain for any other
instance in which the three persons of the Trinity were spoken of by
our Lord consecutively and conjunctly ; to each being assigned his
proper part in the economy of our redemption. It may even be
doubted whether, in the whole range of the apostolic epistles, there
be a passage of equal length in which the manner of our salvation
through Christ is as fuUy and distinctly described.
DeUvered thus at the very beginning of our Lord's ministry, it
utters a loud and unambiguous protest against the error of those
who would have us to beheve that there was a decided and essential
difference between the earher and later teachings of our Saviour;
between the doctrine taught by Christ and that taught afterwards by
Ms apostles. It is quite true that, until within a few months of the
final decease accomphshed at Jerusalem, our Lord studiously avoided
all reference to his death. It is quite true that, in not a single
instance — not even where one would most naturaUy have expected
it — in the prayer that he taught to his disciples — is there an aUusion
by Jesus to that death, as supplying the ground of our forgiveness.
But that this marked silence is misinterpreted, when it is inferred
that he did not assign to it that place and importance given to it
afterwards, we have here, in this discourse to Nicodemus, the most
convincing proof. I shall have occasion hereafter to refer to those
considerations by which our Saviour was obviously influenced during
the course of his personal ministry in not publicly unfolding the doc
trine of the cross. Let those, however, who delight to dweU on the
simple and pure morahty of the Sermon on the Mount, and to con
trast it with the doctrinal theology of the apostles, declaring their
preference for the teachings of the Master above that of his disci
ples, but ponder well this first of aU our Lord's discourses, and they
will see that instead of any conflict there is a perfect harmony.
But if he never afterwards unfolded his gospel so plainly or so
fuUy, why did he do so now ? why reveal so much to Nicodemus that
he appears to have withheld from the multitude ? Am I wrong in
regarding this as due in part to the very circumstance that this was
a nocturnal and a solitary interview with Nicodemus ? No one but
this ruler of the Jews may have heard the words that Jesus spake
that night, and he would be the last man to go and repeat them to
THE CONVERSATION WITH NICODEMUS. 137
others. There is good reason to believe that the Gospel of St. John
was written and pubhshed some years after those of the other evan
gelists. It is in the Gospel of St. John alone that the interview with
Nicodemus is recorded. The other evangelists appear to have been
ignorant of it. How the beloved disciple came to his knowledge ol
it it is not necessary for us to inquire. He may have received it
from the hps of Nicodemus himself. Enough for us to know that it
was not currently reported in the church till St. John gave it circula
tion. At any rate, we may be sure that it remained unknown aU
through the period of our Lord's own, life. It was not, then, in vio
lation of the rule that he acted on afterwards that he spoke now so
plainly and fully as he did to Nicodemus. It was a rare opportunity,
one that never perhaps returned, to have before him one so qualified
by capacity, by acquirement, by honesty, by earnestness, to receive
the truth; and the very manner in which the Saviour hastened to
reveal it is to us the proof that he saw good sofl here into which to
cast the seed, and the proof too how grateful to him the office of his
band in sowing it.
He knew, indeed, that the seed then sown was long to be dor
mant. For three years there was no token of its germination. Nic
odemus never sought a second interview with Jesus, but kept studi
ously aloof. Once, indeed, and it is the only sight throughout three
years that we get of him, he ventured to say a word in the Council
against a hasty arrest and condemnation of Jesus, but he met with
such a sharp rebuff that he never opened his lips again. The mem
orable words, however, of the midnight meeting at Jerusalem had not
been forgotten. There was much in them that he could not under
stand. Who was He who had spoken of himself as the Son of man,
the Son of God? of his ascending and descending to and from heaven?
of being in heaven even when he stood there on earth ? He had spo
ken of his being lifted up, that men might believe in him, and believ
ing, might not perish, but have everlasting hfe. What could that
lifting up of Jesus be, and how upon it could there hang such issues?
Much to perplex here, yet much to stimulate ; for that life, that eter
nal hfe, of which Christ had spoken, was the very hfe that above aU
things he was longing to possess and realize. In this troubled state
of mind and heart, with what an anxious eye would Nicodemus watch
the after-current of our Lord's history! For a year and a half he
had disappeared from Judea ; was heard of only as saying and doing
wonders down in Galilee. Then came the final visit to the capital,
the great commotion in the temple, the raising of Lazarus, the seizure,
the trial, the condemnation. Was Nicodemus present with the rest
138 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of the CouncU of which he was a member, on the morning of the
crucifixion ? If he was, he must ingloriously have kept sUence, for
the vote was unanimous. I would rather beheve, from what hap
pened on the after part of the day, that he was not present ; did not
obey the hasty summons. With him or without him, the verdict is
given. The hcense to crucify is extorted from the vaciUating gov
ernor ; the cross is raised. At last the words that three years before
had sounded in the ruler's listening ear, and which had since been
frequently recaUed, the mystery of their meaning unrevealed, are
verified and explained. The cross is raised ; Jesus is hfted up. The
darkened heavens, the reeling earth, the prayer for his crucifiers, the
promise to the penitent who dies beside him, the voice of triumph at
the close proclaim the death of that only begotten Son of God whom
he had given to be the Saviour of the world. The scales drop off
from the eyes they so long had covered. Fear goes ont, and faith
comes into Nicodemus' breast, a faith that plants him by Joseph's
side in the garden, and unites their hands in the rendering of the last
services to the body, which they buried in the new sepulchre.
What a flood of light fell then on the hitherto mysterious words
of the Crucified ; what a rich treasure of comfort would the medita
tion of them unfold aU his life long afterwards to Nicodemus; and
what an honor to him that he was chosen as the man to whom were
first addressed those words which have comforted so many millions
since, and are destined to comfort so many millions more in the years
that are to come: " God so loved the world, that he gave his only
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but
have everlasting life."
XIV.
The Woman of Samaria.*
Coming, as he did, to a community that had long been accus
tomed to act in its corporate capacity as a nation in covenant with
God ; coming to be nationally received or nationaUy rejected as the
Messiah ; a reception or rejection which could only be embodied in
some decisive expression of the wiU of the nation, made through its
authorized heads and representatives — our natural expectation is that
Christ's pubhc manifestation of himself would be made principaUy in
Judea and at Jerusalem. And the actual opening of his public minis
* John 4.
THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 139
try convinces us that had no check or hindrance been interposed, had
any readiness been shown by the rulers of the people to look favor
ably on his character and claims, Judea and Jerusalem would havo
been the chief scene of his labors. For before he opened his hps, aa
a teacher sent from God, to any Gahlean audience, or in any provin
cial synagogue, he presented himself in the capital, and by a bold
and striking act, fitted to draw aU eyes upon him, asserted his author
ity within the temple, as the house of his Father, which it became him
to cleanse. The bold beginning was weU sustained by both word
and deed, but no favorable impression was made. The only one of
the rulers who made any approach came to him by night, and went
away to lock up deep within his breast the wonderful revelation that
was made to him. Jesus retired from Jerusalem, but lingered still
in Judea, spending the summer months which succeeded the Pass
over in some district of the country, not far from that in which John
was baptizing.* It seems strange to us that after the sign from
heaven had been given that the greater than he had appeared, in
stead of joining himself to Jesus, as one of his disciples, John should
have kept aloof, and continued baptizing, preserving thus a separate
foUowing of his own. And it seems equahy strange, that now for a
short time, and for this short time only, our Lord's disciples — the
men who had voluntarUy attached themselves to him, none of whom
had as yet been separated from their earthly callings, or set apart as
those through whom a new order of things was to be instituted —
should also have engaged in baptizing, if not at the suggestion, yet
by the permission and under the sanction of their Master. What
ever reasons we may assign for the separate baptisms of John and
Jesus being for this short season contemporaneously sustained, they
serve to bring out fuUy and in striking contrast the character and
disposition towards Jesus of the Pharisees on the one hand and of
the Baptist on the other. At first, in Judea as in Gahlee, the com
mon people heard Christ gladly, and came in great numbers to be
baptized. This for the Pharisees is a new matter of offence, out of
which, however, they construct an implement of mischief, which
they hasten to employ. There can be httle doubt that the question
which arose between John's disciples and the Jews was stirred by
the latter, had respect to the relative value of the two baptisms, and
was intended to sow the seeds of dissension between the two disci-
* As yet all attempts have failed to identify the .aUnon near Salim, to whioh
from the banks of the Jordan John had now removed. It will, in all probability,
be discovered somewhere northeast of Jerusalem, so situated that the way from
it into Galilee lay naturally through Samaria.
140 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
pleships. Fresh from the dispute, and heated by it, some of John's
disciples came to him, and said unto him, evidently with the tone of
men complaining of a grievance by which their feelings had been
hurt : " Eabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou
barest witness, behold, the same baptizeth, and aU men come to him."
We may be aU ready enough to acknowledge the superiority of
another to ourselves in regard to quahties or acts in which we never
sought for prominence or praise. Even as to those quahties and
acts in which we may have ourselves exceUed, we may not be un
willing to confess the superiority of another, provided that we do
not come into direct comparison with him, in presence of those who
embody the expression of their preference in some marked piece of
conduct. But it does subject our weak nature to an extreme trial
when, by one's side, in the very region in which he has attained ex
traordinary and unlooked-for success, he sees another rise whose
success so far outstrips his own as to throw it wholly into the shade.
Eemember, now, that the Baptist was but a man, with aU the com
mon infirmities of our nature clinging to him ; that up to the time he
had baptized Jesus, his course had been one of unparaUeled popu
larity ; that from that time the tide of the popular favor began to ebb
away from him, and to rise around this other, tUl at last he hears
the tidings, He baptizeth, and all men now go to him. And then,
listen to his answer to the complaint of his disciples : "A man," he
said, " can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven."
' This growing baptism of Jesus, this lesser baptism of mine, are both
as Heaven has wUled. The multitudes that once flocked to me were
sent by God ; the power which I had over them I got from God ; and
if the Lord who sent and gave is pleased now to withdraw them from
me, to bestow them upon another, stiU wUl I adore his name. Nor
is it bare submission to his will I cherish. I hear of, and I rejoice at
the success of Christ. " Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said,
I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. He that hath
the bride is the bridegroom : but the friend of the bridegroom, which
standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly, because of the bride
groom's voice. This my joy therefore is fulfiUed. He must increase,
but I must decrease." ' Eare and beautiful instance of an unenvying
humility ; all the rarer and more beautiful as occurring not in one of
weak and gentle nature, but in a character of masculine energy, in
which are often to be found only the stronger passions of humanity.
A rare and beautiful sight it is to see the gentle Jonathan not only
give way to David, as successor to his father's kingdom, but content
.to stand by David's side and hve under the shadow of his throne ;
THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 141
but a rarer, I believe, and still more beautiful thing it is to see the
strong-wiUed Baptist not only make room for Jesus, but rejoice
that his own light, which had " shone out so brilliantly, enlightening
for a season the whole Jewish heavens, faded away and sunk out of
sight in the beams of the rising Sun of righteousness." And John's
final testimony upon this occasion to the character and office of Jesus
is as striking as the involuntary display that he makes of his own
character, going much beyond what he had said before, and contain
ing much that bears a singular likeness to what Jesus had shortly
before said of himself to Nicodemus : " He that cometh from above
is above aU ; he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the
earth ; he that cometh from heaven is above all : and what he hath
seen and heard, that he testifieth ; and no man receiveth his testi
mony. He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that
God is true. For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of
God: for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. The
Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand. He
that beheveth on the Son hath everlasting life : and he that believeth
not the Son shaU not see life ; but the wrath of God abideth on
him." John 3 : 31-36.
Such was the testimony elicited from John on being told of tho
large concourse of people which had gathered round Jesus and his
disciples. Very different was the effect which this inteUigence pro
duced in Jerusalem. It fanned the hostile feehng afready kindled in
the breasts of the Pharisees. How that feeling might have mani
fested itself had Jesus continued in Judea, his disciples gone on bap
tizing, and the people kept flocking to them, we cannot teU. As from
one quarter there burst about this time on the head of John the storm
that closed his public career, so from another quarter might a storm
have burst on the head of Jesus with like effect.
Foreseeing the perU to which he might be exposed, Jesus, "when
he knew how the Pharisees had heard that he made and baptized
more disciples than John, left Judea, and departed again into Gali
lee," his nearest and most direct route lay through the central district
of Samaria. This district was inhabited by people of a foreign origin,
and with a somewhat curious history. When the king of Assyria car
ried the Ten Tribes into captivity, it is said that, in order to fiU the void
which their exile created, he brought "men from Babylon, and from
Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and
placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the chUdren of Israel ;
and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof." 2 Kings
17 : 24. These certainly were idolaters, worshippers of a strange med-
142 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ley of divinities, and brought with them their old faiths to their new
home. Shortly after their settlement, a frightful plague visited them,
and it occurred to themselves, or was suggested by the neighboring
Israehtes, that it had faUen upon them because of their not worship
ping the old divinity of the place. In their alarm they sent an em
bassy to their monarch, who, either humoring or sharing their fears,
sent one of the captive Jewish priests to instruct them in the IsraeH
tish faith. This faith they at once accepted and professed, combining
it with their old idolatries : " They feared the Lord," we are told, " and
served their graven images." 2 Kings 17 : 41. Gradually, however,
they were weaned from their ancient superstitions. When, under the
decree of Cyrus, the captives of Judah and Benjamin, returning from
Babylon, set about rebuilding the temple at Jerusalem, the Samari
tans proposed to join them in the work. The proposal was haughtily
rejected, and that rejection was the first of a long series of disputes. A
fresh ground of offence arose when Manasseh, a grandson of one, and
brother of another high priest, had, contrary to the laws and cus
toms of the Jews, married a daughter of SanbaUat, the governor of
the province of Samaria. CaUed upon to renounce this aUiance and
repudiate his wife, Manasseh, rather than do so, fled from Jerusalem,
and put himself under the protection of his father-in-law. A consid
erable number of the Jews who were dissatisfied with the great strict
ness with which Nehemiah was administering affairs at Jerusalem,
foUowed him. The Samaritans, thus strengthened in numbers, and
having now a member of one of the highest famihes of the priesthood
among them, erected a rival temple on Mount Gerizim, and set up
there a ritual of worship in strict accordance with the Mosaic insti
tute. Their history from this time to the time of Christ is a very
chequered one. Their territory was invaded by John Hyrcanus, one
of the family of the Maccabees, who plundered their capital, and raz
ing the stately temple on Mount Gerizim from its foundations, left it
a heap of ruins, so that when Jesus passed that way, an altar reared
upon these ruins was aU that Gerizim could boast.
Notwithstanding all these vicissitudes, and all the harsh hostilities
to which they were exposed, the Samaritans became purer and purer
in their faith, till aU reUcs of then* Medo-Persian idolatries had dis
appeared. They received, as of divine authorfly, the five Books of
Moses, the Pentateuch, but they rejected aU the books of history and
prophecies which foUowed, and which were full, as the Jews beheved,
of intimations of the future subjection of the whole world to Israeli
tish sway, and the establishment of Jerusalem as the central place
of worship and the seat of universal empire.
THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 143
But though the Jews despised the Samaritans as a people of a
mixed origin and a mutilated faith, and the Samaritans repaid the
contempt, we are not to think that the two communities lived so
much apart that there was no traffic or intercourse between them.
There was little or no interchange of kindly or social feeling ; but it
was quite within the limits of the common usage for the disciples to
go into a Samaritan town, to buy bread for themselves and their
Master by the way.
Their morning's walk had carried Jesus and his disciples across or
along the plain of Mukhna to the entrance of that narrow valley
which hes between Mounts Ebal and Gerizim. Here, upon a spur of
the latter height which runs out into the plain, was Jacob's WeU; the
town of Sychar, the ancient Shechem, the modern Nablous, lying
about a mfle and a half west, up in the vaUey, at the base of Geri
zim. It was the sixth hour — our twelve o'clock — and the Syrian sun
glared hotly upon the traveUers. Wearied with the heat of the day
and the toU of the morning, Jesus sat down by the well-side, while
his disciples went on to Sychar to make the necessary purchases. As
Jesus is sitting by the well alone, a woman of Samaria approaches.
He fixes his eye upon her as she comes near; watches her as she pro
ceeds to draw the water, waiting tfll the full pitcher is upon the weU-
mouth, and then says to her, " Give me a drink." He is a Jew; she
knows it by his dress and speech. Yet as one willing to be indebted
to her, he asks a favor at her hands ; a favor for which, if his look do
not behe him, he wUl be grateful. Not as one unwiUing to grant the
favor, but surprised at its being asked, her answer is: "How is it that
thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, who am a woman of Samaria?"
He wfll answer this question, but not in the way that she expects.
The manner of his dispensation of the great gift he came from heav
en to bestow stands embodied in the words: "Thou would est have
asked, and I would have given thee hving water."*
* There is no doubt that the well still shown to travellers near Nablous is the
well of Jacob. Its position near to Sychar ; its importance as inferred from its
dimensions, being a well of nine feet in diameter and seventy-five in depth ; cut
out of the solid rock, with sides hewn and smooth as Jacob's servants may be
supposed to have left them — go far, of themselves, to determine its identity ; and
the conclusion is confirmed by an undivided, unbroken tradition — Jewish, Sa
maritan, Arabian, Turkish, Christian.
Besides the absence of all doubt as to its identity, there is another circum
stance which surrounds it with a peculiar sacredness. It is the one and only
limited and well-defined locality in Palestine that you can connect with the pres
ence of the Redeemer. Tou cannot in all Palestine draw another circle of lim
ited diameter within whose circumference you can be absolutely certain that
144 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
The woman has taken him to be a common Jew, an ordinary way
farer, whom thirst and the fatigue of travel had overcome, forcing
him perhaps unwillingly to ask for water to drink. He will fix her
attention upon himseU; he will stir up her feminine curiosity by tell
ing her that he who asks has something on his part to give; that if
ehe only knew who he was, and what that living water was which he
had at command, instead of stopping to inquire why he had asked
water of her, she would be asking it of him, and what she asked he>
without question would have given. Living water! — better water
than that which she has in her pitcher. Could it be by going deeper
down, and getting nearer to the bubbling spring beneath, that he,
could get such water ; or was it water of superior quahty from some
other weU than this of Jacob ? " Sir," she says, addressing him with
awakening interest and an increasing respect, " Sir," she says, in her
ignorance and confusion, " thou hast nothing to draw with, and the
well is deep : from whence then hast thou that hving water ? Art thou
greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank there
of himseU. and his chUdren, and his cattle?" Her thoughts are wan
dering away back to the first drinkers at this well, when its waters
first burst out in their freshness, imagining that it must be of them,
or of the water of some other neighboring well, that this stranger
had been speaking. Again, waiving as before aU direct reply to her
Jesus once stood, except round Jacob's Well. I had the greatest possible desire
to tread that circle round and round, to sit here and there and everywhere around
that well-mouth ; that I might gratify a long-cherished wish. But never was
disappointment greater than the one which I experienced when I reached the,
spot. Close by it, in early Christian times, they built a church, whose ruins now-
cover the ground in its immediate neighborhood. Over the well itself they
erected a vaulted arch, through a small opening in which, travellers, a hundred
years, crept down into a chamber ten feet square, which left but a narrow mar
gin on which to stand and look down into the well. This vaulted covering has
now fallen in, choking up so completely the mouth of the well, that it is only
here and there, through apertures between the blocks of stone, that you can find
an entrance into the well. I speak of it as I found it last year. It must have
been more accessible to travellers even a few years ago ; but year by year the
rubbish that is constantly being thrown into it accumulates, and the opecing at
the top is becoming more closed. The Mussulmans of the neighborhood, seeing
the respect in which it is held by Christians, appear to take a pleasure in ob
structing and defiling it. You cannot sit, then, by Jacob's Well, or walk around
it, or look down into its waters. It is stated upon good authority, that recently
Uie well, and the site around it, have been purchased by the Russian church.
Let us hope that they will clear away all the stones and rubbish, and leave it
clear and open, as Jesus found it, when, weary and way-worn, he sat down be
side it
THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 145
question, Jesus with increased solemnity says : " Whosoever drinketli
of this water shaU thirst again : but whosoever drinketh of the water
that I shaU give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall
give him shaU be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting.
life." It is not this water, then; it is no common water; it is water
that this man alone can give; water which is not to be taken in
draughts, with which you may quench your thirst now, and then wait
tiU the thirst comes back again ere another draught be taken; but
water of which a man should constantly be drinking, and if he did so
would be constantly satisfied, so that there would be no recurring
intervals of desire and gratification — this water as received turning
into a weU within the man himself, springing up into everlasting hfe.
Beginning to understand a little, seeing this at least, that it was of
some element altogether different from any water that she had ever
tasted, yet clinging stUl to the notion that it must be some kind of
material water that he means, she says: "Sir, give me this water,
that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw."
One part of Christ's object has now been gained ; he has awa
kened not an idle, but a very eager curiosity ; he has fixed the wom
an's attention on himself as having some great benefit in his hand
which he is not unwilling to bestow. Through a figurative descrip
tion of what this benefit is, he wiU not or cannot carry her farther at
present. Abruptly breaking the conversation off at this point, he
says to her: " Go, call thy husband, and come hither." With great
frankness she says, " I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "Thou
hast weU said, I have no husband, for thou hast had five husbands,
and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband ; in that saidst thou
truly ' In the past domestic history of this woman there had been
much that was pecuhar, though up to the last connection she had
formed there may not have been any thing that was sinful. Christ's
object, however, was not so much to convict her of bygone or exist
ing guilt, as to convince her that he was in fuU possession of all the
secrets of her past hfe, and so to create within her a belief in his;
more than human insight. Not so much as one overwhelmed with
the sense of shame, but rather as one surprised into a new belief as to
the character and capabilities of the stranger who addresses her, sh»
rephes, " Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet." If she had been
a woman of an utterly abandoned character, whose whole bygone
life had been one series of flagrant offences, whose conscience, long
seared with iniquity, Christ was now trying to quicken — very curious
would it appear that so soon as the quickening came, waiving all
questions about her own character, she should so instantly have put
Life of Ohrfit 10
146 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the question about the true place of religious worship, whether here
at Gerizim, or there at Jerusalem.
There may have been an attempt to parry conviction, and to turn
aside the hand of the convincer, by raising questions about places
and forms of worship ; but I cannot think, had this been the spirit
and motive of this woman's inquiries, that Jesus would have dealt
with them as he did; for, treating them evidently as the earnest
inquiries of one wishing to be instructed, assuming, all the dignity of
that office which had been attributed to him, he says to her, 'Wom
an, believe me, the hour cometh (I speak as one before whose eye the
whole history of the future stands revealed ; the hour cometh — I came
myseff into the world to bring it on) when that strong bias to wor
ship that lies so deep in the hearts of men, shall have found at last
its one only true and worthy object in that God and Father of all,
who made aU, and who loves all, and has sent me to reveal him to
aU ; when, stripped of aU the restraints that have hitherto confined it
to a single people, a single country, a single town ; relieved of aU the
supports that were required by it in its weak and tottering child
hood — the spirit of a true piety shaU go forth in freedom over the
globe, seeking for those — whatever be the places they choose, the
outward forms that they adopt — for those who wfll adore and love
and serve him in spirit and in truth, and wherever it finds them,
owning them as the true worshippers of the Father. Woman, be
lieve me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain nor yet in
Jerusalem, nor here, nor there, nor anywhere exclusively, shall men
worship the Father. " God is a Spirit ; and they that worship him,
must worship him in spirit and in truth." ' The newness, the breadth,
the sublimity, if not also the truth of his teaching, at once suggested
to the mind of the listener the thought of that Messiah for whom
every Samaritan and Jew alike were looking. "I know," she said,
" that Messias cometh. When he is come he wUl tell us all things."
Jesus saith to her, "I that speak unto thee am he."
Why was it that that which he so long and studiously concealed
from the Jewish people, that which he so strictly enjoined his dis
ciples not to make known to them, was thus so simply, clearly, and
directly told ? In the woman herself to whom the wonderful revela
tion was made, there may have been much to draw it forth. The
gentle surprise with which she meets the request of the Jewish
stranger; the expression of respect she uses so soon as he begins
to speak of God, and some gflt of his she might enjoy ; her guileless
confession when once she found she was actuaUy in a prophet's
presence ; her instant readiness to beheve that Jew though he was—
THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 147
apparently of no note or mark among his brethren — he was yet a
prophet ; her eager question about the most acceptable way of wor
shipping the Most High ; the quick occurrence of the coming Mes
siah to her thoughts ; the full, confiding, generous faith that she at
once reposed in him when he said, "I that speak unto thee am he;"
ter forgetfulness of her individual errand to the weU ; her leaving her
pitcher there behind her; her running into the city to caU all the
men of Sychar, saying, " Come, see a man who told me aU things that
ever I did; is not this the Christ?" aU conspire to convince us that,
sinful though she was, she was hungering and thirsting after right
eousness, waiting for the consolation of Israel, we trust prepared to
haU the Saviour when he stood revealed.
But besides her individual character, there was also the circum
stance that she was a Samaritan. It is the first time that Jesus
comes into close, private, personal contact with one who is not of the
seed of Israel; for though she claimed Jacob as her father, neither
this woman nor any of the tribe she belonged to were of Jewish
descent. "I am not come," said Jesus, afterwards defining the gene
ral boundaries of his personal ministry, "but to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel." When he sent out the seventy, his instructions to
them were : " Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city
of the Samaritans enter ye not." And yet there were a few occasions,
and this is the first of them, in which Christ broke through the
restraints under which it pleased him ordinarily to act. I beheve
that there are just four instances of this kind recorded in the Saviour's
hfe : that of the woman of Samaria, of the Eoman centurion, of the
Canaanitish woman, of the Greeks who came up to Jerusalem. AU
these were instances of our Lord's dealings with those who stood
without the pale of Judaism, and as we come upon them in the nar
rative, we shaU be struck with the singular interest which Jesus took
in each ; the singular care that he bestowed in testing and bringing
out to view the simplicity and strength of the desire towards him,
and faith in him, that were displayed; the fulness of the revelations
of himself that he made, and of that satisfaction and delight with
which he contemplated the issue. It was the great and good Shep
herd, stretching out his hand across the fence, and gathering in a
lamb or two from the outfields, in token of the truth that there were
other sheep which were out of the Jewish fold, whom also he was
in due time to bring in, so that there should be one fold and one
shepherd. Our idea, that it was this circumstance — her Samaritan national
ity—which lent such interest, in our Saviour's own regard, to his
148 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
interview with this woman by the well-side, is confirmed by casting a
glance at its result. Jesus at their entreaty turned aside, and abode
two days with the Sycharites. You read of no sign or wonder
wrought, no miracle performed, save that miracle of knowledge which
won the woman's faith. Though no part of it is recorded, his teach
ing for those few days in Sychar was, in its general character, like to
his teaching by the well-mouth, and on the ground alone of the
truthfulness, the simplicity, the purity, the spirituality, and the
sublimity of that teaching, many believed on him, declaring they
knew that this was indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.
The phrase is so famihar to the Christian ear, that we may fail to
mark its singularity as coming from the hps of these rude Samari
tans. No Saviour this for Jew alone, or Samaritan alone; for any
one age or country. Not his the work to dehver from mere outward
thraldom, to establish either in Jerusalem or elsewhere any temporal
kingdom : his the wider and more glorious office to emancipate the
human spirit, and be its guide to the Father of the spirits of aU flesh.
Compare the notions which these simple vUlagers had of the Mes
siah, with those prevalent among the Jews; compare with them any
of the most intelligent of our Lord's apostles up to the day of Pente
cost, and your very wonder might create doubt, did you not remember
that it was not from the books of Daniel and Zachariah and Ezekiel,
the books from which the Jews by false interpretations derived their
ideas of the Messiah's character and reign, that the Samaritans de
rived theirs, but from the Pentateuch alone, the five books of Moses :
and when you turn to the latter, and look at the prophecies regard
ing Christ which they contain, you will find that the two things about
him to which they point— that he should be a prophet sent from God,
and that his office should have respect to all mankind, that to him
should the gathering of the people be, and that in him should all
famUies of the earth be blessed — were the very two things that the
faith of these Samaritans embraced when they said, "We know that
this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the ivorld."
The conversation by the weU, the two fruitful days at Bychar,
what is the general lesson that they convey? That wherever Christ
finds an open hstening ear, he has glad tidings that he is ready to
pour into it ; that wherever he finds a thirsting soul, he has living
waters with which he delights to quench its thirst ; that to all who
are truly seeking him, he drops disguise and says: "Behold, even I
that speak unto you, am he;" that wherever he finds minds and
hearts longing after a revelation of the Father, and the true mode of
worshipping him, to such is the revelation given. Had you but stood
THE NOBLEMAN AND THE CENTURION. 149
by Jacob's weU, and seen the look of Jesus, and listened to the tones
of his voice ; or had you been in Sychar during those two bright and
happy days, hearing the instructions so freely given, so gratefuUy
received, you would have had the evidence of sense to tell you with
what abounding joy to aU who are waiting and who are wiUing, Jesus
breaks the bread and pours out the water of everlasting hfe. Multi
plied a thousandfold is the evidence to the same effect now offered to
the eye and ear of faith. StiU from the lips of the Saviour of the
world, over all the world the words are sounding forth: "If any man
thirst, let him come to me and drink." StiU the manner of his dis
pensation of the great gift stands embodied in the words : " Thou
wouldest have asked, and I would have given thee hving water."
And still » these other voices are heard catching up and re-echoing oui
Lord's own gracious invitation: "And the Spirit and the bride say,
Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is
athirst come. And whosoever wiU, let him take the water of hfe
freely."
XV.
The Jewish Nobleman and the Roman Centurion. h
Seated by the side of Jacob's weU, and seeing the Samaritan
woman draw water out of it, Jesus seizes on the occasion to discourse
to her of the water of hfe. So soon as she hears from his own lips
that he is the Messiah, this woman leaves her water-pot behind her,
and hurries into the neighboring city to announce to others the great
discovery which has been made to her. She has scarcely left the
Saviour's side, ere his disciples present themselves with the bread
which they had bought in Sychar, offering it, and saying to him,
"Master, eat." But as U hunger had gone from him, and he cared not
now for food, he answers, " I have meat to eat that ye know not of."
Wondering at his manner, his appearance, his speech, so different
from what they had expected, the disciples say to one another — it is
the only explanation that occurs to them — " Hath any man brought
him aught to eat?" Correcting the false conception, our Lord replies :
" My meat is to do the wfll of Him that sent me, and to finish his
work." He had been eating that meat, he had been doing that will,
while they were away; and so grateful had it been to him to be so
engaged, so happy had he been in instructing a sohtary woman, and
* John 4 : 46-54 ; Luke 7 : 1-10.
150 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
sending her away, in full belief in his Messiahsliip, to go and bring
others to him, that in the joy of a spirit whose first desire had been
granted to it, the bodUy appetite ceases to solicit, and the hunger of
an hour ago is no longer felt. She is gone, but already foreseeing aU,
he anticipates her return — hears and acts upon the invitation given,
has the fruit of these two productive days at Sychar before his eyes,
looking upon the few sheaves then gathered iu as the first-fruits of a.
still wider, richer harvest. The idea of that harvest fining his mind,
he looks over the fields around him, and blending the natural and
the spiritual together, he says to his disciples : " Say not ye, There
are yet four months, and then cometh harvest ? Behold, I say unto-
you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields, for they are white
already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gath
ereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that
reapeth may rejoice together. And herein is that saying true, One
soweth, and another reapeth." How many contrasts as weU as anal
ogies between the husbandry of nature and the husbandry of grace
do these words set forth! The sower in the fields of nature has
always four months to wait ; such is the interval in Palestine between
seed-time and harvest. In those other fields in which Jesus is the
chief sower, as in the very corner of them at Sychar, sometimes the
seed has scarcely sunk into the soil ere it springs up ready for the
reaper's hands. Then not seldom the ploughman overtakes the
reaper, and the reapers and the sowers go on together. And yet
there is often, too, an interval; nor is it always even generaUy true
that it is he who sows who reaps. Nowhere is the common proverb,
that one soweth and another reapeth, oftener verified than here. In
the spiritual domain it is the lot of some to do httle else all their
lives than sow, to sow long and laboriously without seeing any fields
whitening unto the harvest ; it is the lot of others to have httle else to
do than gather in the fruits of others' labors; or, looking at the
broad history of the world and of the church, can we not mark cer
tain epochs which we would particularly characterize as times of
sowing, others as times of reaping, sometimes separated by wide
intervals, sometimes running rapidly into one another ? But whether
they be the same or different agents that are employed in the sowing
and in the reaping; whether longer space intervene or the sowing
and the reaping go together, one thing is true, that when the harvest
oometh, and the everlasting life, towards which all the labor has been
tending, is reached, then shall there be a great and a mutual rejoi
cing — the gladness of those to whom it is given to see that their laboi
has not been in vain in the Lord.
THE NOBLEMAN AND THE CENTURION. 151
It has always been a question whether there was any aUusion
made or intended by Christ to the actual condition of the fieldb
around him as he spake. I cannot but think, though it may be in
opposition to the judgment of some of our first scholars, that there
was. Jesus was speaking at the time when there were as yet four
months unto the harvest. If it were so, then we have good ground
for settling at what period of the year this visit of our Lord to Sychar
took place. The harvest in Palestine begins about the middle of
April. Four months back from that time carries us to the middle of
December, the Jewish seedtime. If so, the interval between the first
Passover at which our Lord had his conversation with Nicodemus,
which took place, as we know, at the commencement of the early
harvest, and the conversation with the woman of Samaria, an inter
val of no less than eight months, was spent by Jesus in Judea, giv
ing to the rulers of the people a privileged opportunity of considering
Christ's character and claims. Nothing but disappointment, neglect,
indifference, or alienation having been manifested, Jesus retired to
Galilee, taking Samaria by the way. The two days at Sychar pre
sented a striking contrast to his reception in Judea. How wiU they
stand in comparison with the reception that awaits him in Galilee ?
Cana Ues farther north than Nazareth. The road to the one
would lead close to, if not through the other. On this occasion
Jesus appears to have passed by Nazareth. Perhaps it was to avoid
such a reception as he knew to be awaiting him there, or it may have
been simply because Mary and the famUy had shifted their residence,
and were now hving near their relatives at Cana. The rumor of the
first miracle which he had wrought there some months before may
have spread widely in the neighborhood. It was done, however, so
quietly, and in such a hidden manner, that one can well conceive of
different versions of it going abroad. It was different with those
reports which the Gahleans who had been up at the last Passover
brought back from Jerusalem. Our Lord's miracles there, whatever
they were, were done openly; many had believed because of them.
The Galileans who were at the feast had seen them aU, and on their
return home had filled the country with the noise of them, aU the
more gratified, perhaps, that he who had drawn aU eyes upon him at
Jerusalem was one of themselves. And now it is told abroad that he
has come back from Judea and is at Cana.
The tidings reach the ear of a nobleman in Capernaum, a Jew of
nigh birth connected with the court of Herod Antipas, at the very time
that a grievous malady is on his son, and has brought him to the very
brink of death. He had not heard, perhaps, that Jesus had restored
152 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the dying to health ; so far as we know, the healing of his son may
have been the first miracle of that kind which Jesus wrought; but he
has heard of his turning the water into wine, he has heard of the
wonders wrought at Jerusalem. He by whom such miracles had
been done should be able to rebuke disease. It is at least worth try
ing whether he will or can. The distance to Cana is but a short one,
some twenty miles or so. He wiU send no servant, he wiU go himself,
and make the trial. He went, saw Jesus, told him his errand, and
besought him that he would come down and heal his son. Why was
it that before Jesus made any reply, or- gave any indication of his
purpose, he said, as the fruit of some deep inward thought which the
application had suggested, " Except ye see signs and wonders ye will
not believe"? It was because he saw all that was in that man, all
the motives by which he had been prompted to this visit ; the strong
affection for his son, which Jesus wiU not rebuke ; his willingness to
be at any pains on his behalf, to seek help from any quarter; his
partial faith in Christ's power to help — for without some faith of this
description, he would not have come at all; yet the absence of aU
deeper faith springing from a sense of spiritual disease, which should
have brought the man to Jesus for himself as weU as for his son, and
which should have taught him to look to Jesus as the healer of the
soul. It was because he saw in this nobleman a specimen of his
countrymen at large, and in his apphcation a type and prelude of the
multitude of like apphcations afterwards to be made to him.
It may have served to suggest this the more readily to Christ's
thoughts, and give the greater intensity to the emotion excited within
his breast, that he had just come from Sychar, where so many had
believed in him without any sign or wonder done, believed in him as
a teacher sent from God, believed in him as the Messiah promised to
their fathers. What a contrast between those simple-minded, sim
ple-hearted Samaritans, whose love and wonder, faith and penitence,
joy and gratitude had been so quickly, so purely, so exclusively
awakened, and this nobleman of Capernaum and his Galilean fellow-
countrymen ! We know that Jesus never returned to Sychar, though
he must more than once have passed near to it on his way to and
from Jerusalem. We know that he gave positive instructions to the
Seventy to go into no city of the Samaritans. It was in fulfilment of
his design that his personal ministry should be confined to the lost
sheep of the house of Israel, that he laid this restraint upon himself
and his disciples. But can we think that it cost him no seU-denial,
that it was with no inward pang that Jesus turned away from those
who showed themselves so wiUing to receive, to those who were foi
THE NOBLEMAN AND THE CENTURION. 153
ever asking a sign from heaven, and who, "after he had done so
many miracles, yet beheved not in him" ? John 12 : 37. Why was
it, then, that when the Pharisees came forth and began to question
him, seekmg of him a sign from heaven, " he sighed deeply in his
spirit, and said, Why doth this generation seek after a sign ?" Mark
8 : 12. The deep sigh came from the depth of a spirit moved and
grieved at this incessant craving for outward seals and vouchers, this
unwillingness to beheve in him simply on the ground of his character
and his doctrine. Though he did not meet the pecuhar demand of
the Pharisees, who, unsatisfied even with his other works, sought
from him a special sign from heaven, our Lord, we know, was lavish
in the performance of miracles, supphed wiUingly and largely that
ground of faith which they afforded, appealed often and openly to
the proof of his divine mission which they supplied. Yet aU this is
consistent with his deploring the necessity which required such a
kind of evidence to be supplied, and his mourning over that state of
the human spirit out of which the necessity arose. " The works that
I do bear witness of me, that the Father hath sent me." "If I do
not the works of my Father, beheve me not. But if I do, though ye
believe not me, believe the works." John 5 : 36; 10 : 37, 38. Such
was Christ's language, openly addressed to the rulers of the people
at Jerusalem. Nor was it differently that he spoke to his disciples in
private : " BeUeve me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me :
or else beUeve me for the very works' sake." John 14 : 11. Jesus
would rather have been beheved in without the works, would rather
that he had not had the works to do in order to win the faith. It is
not, then, a faith in the reality of miracles, nor in him simply as the
worker of them, nor in any thing he was or said or did that rests
exclusively upon his having performed them, which constitutes that
deeper faith in himseU to which it is his supreme desire to conduct
us. And when we read of Jesus sighing when signs were asked, and
sighing as miracles were wrought by him, we cannot interpret his
sighing otherwise than as the expression of the profound grief of his
spirit over those who are so httle ahve to the more spiritual evidence
that his character and works carried along with them, as to need to
have these outward props and buttresses supphed. There are two
different kinds of faith — that which you put in what another is, or in
what another has said, because of your own personal knowledge of
him and your perception of the intrinsic truthfulness of his sayings,
and that which you cherish because of certain external vouchers for
his truthfulness that he presents. Jesus invites us to put both these
kinds of faith in him, but the latter and the lower in order to lead on
154 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to the former and the higher, the real abiding, hfe-giving faith in him
as the Saviour of our souls.
" Except ye see signs and wonders, ye wiU not beheve." We are
scarcely surprised that the nobleman of Capernaum, when his eager
entreaty was met in this way, by the utterance of so broad an aphoi-
ism, should have felt somewhat disappointed and chagrined. Tlu»re
was some hope for him indeed, had he reflected on it, in the words
that Christ had used; for if Jesus had not meant to do this sign and
wonder, he would not have spoken as he did. But the father is in no
mood to take up and weigh the worth and meaning of Christ's words.
What he wants is that Christ should go down with him immediately
to Capernaum ; he has some hope, that if there, he may be able to
cure his son. He has no idea of a heahng wrought at a distance,
effected at Cana by a word of the Lord's power, an act of the Lord's
wiU. " Sir," he says, " come down ere my chUd die :" a tinge of
impatience, perhaps of pride, yet fuU of the good compensatory ele
ment, strong paternal love. " Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way; thy
son liveth." It is the first time, it is one of the few instances in
which Jesus stood face to face with earthly rank and power. Per
haps this nobleman presumed on his position, when he said, with
something of an imperative tone, " Sir, come down ere my chUd die."
11 so, he must have been not a httle astonished to find the tone of
command roUed back upon him thus : " Go thy way; thy son liveth."
How high above the nobUity of earth rises the royalty of heaven!
This is the style and manner of Him who saith, and it is done ; who
eommandeth, and creation throughout aU its borders obeys. None
ever did such works on earth as Jesus did ; none ever did them in .
such a simple, easy, unaffected manner; the manner becoming one
who was exerting not a delegated but a native power.
The manner and the substance of the declaration told alike at
once upon the nobleman. It satisfied him that the end of his visit
was gained. He beheved in the word of Jesus, that the death he
dreaded was not to come upon his son, that the child he loved so
tenderly was to be spared to him. Exactly how this had been brought
about he did not as yet know. Whether the cure had been instanta
neous and complete, or whether the crisis of it had passed and the
recovery had begun ; whether it had been by his possession of a super
human knowledge or by his exercise of a superhuman power that
Jesus had been able to announce to him the fact, " Thy son liveth,"
he neither stayed, nor did he venture to ask any explanation. It was
enough for him to be assured of the fact, and there was something
in the manner in which that "Go thy way" had been spoken which
THE NOBLEMAN AND THE CENTURION. 155
forbade delay. He meets his servants by the way, bearers of glad
tidings. With them he can use aU freedom. He asks aU about the
cure, and learns that it had not been slowly, but instantaneously,
that the fever had gone, and that the time at which it had done so
was the very time at which these words of Jesus, " Thy chUd liveth,"
had been spoken at Cana. He had gone out to that vfllage but half
a believer in Christ's power in any way to help, limiting that power so
much in his conception that it had never once occurred to him that
Jesus could do any thing for him unless he saw the chill. But
now he feels that he has been standing in the presence of One the
extent of whose power he had as much underrated as the depth
and tenderness of his love. Awe, conviction, gratitude fill his soul.
A double sign and wonder has been done in Israel. A jhild has
been cured of a fever at Capernaum by one standing milts away at
Cana, and a father has been cured of his unbelief — the sa; ae kind of
power that banished the disease from the body of the one banishing
distrust from the heart of the other.
How far above all that he had ever asked ! His child was dying
when the father left Capernaum, was stiU nearer death when he
arrived at Cana. Had Jesus done what the father wanted, and gone
down with him to Capernaum, his son might have been dead ere they
got there. The word of power is spoken, and just as the disease is
clasping its victim in a last embrace, it has to relax its grasp, take
wings, and fly away. The father has gone unselfishly, affectionately
on an errand of love, seeking simply his chUd's life, not asking
or caring to get any thing himself from Christ. But now in this
Jesus he recognizes a higher and greater than a mere healer of the
body. Spiritual life is breathed into his own soul. Nor is this aU ;
he returns to Capernaum to teU all the wonders of the cure ; teUs them
to the healed child, who also beheves — and strange would be the
meeting afterwards between that child and Jesus — he teUs them to
the other members of his family, and each in turn beheves. He him
self beheved, and with him aU his house — the first whole household
brought into the Christian fold.
Let us compare for a moment this case with that of the centurion.
Both plead for others ; the one for his child, the other for his servant,
and the pleading of both is signaUy successful; the comphance prompt
and generous. Such honor doth Jesus put on aU kindly intercession
with him on behaU of those to whom we are bound by ties of rela
tionship and affection. In both the cases, too, Christ adopts the unu-
Bual method of curing at a distance, curing by a word. But the treat
ment of the two applicants is different — suited to the state, the char-
156 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
acter, the necessities of each. The one's faith is limited and weak,
and needs to be expanded and strengthened; the other's is strong,
and waits only to be exhibited in combination with that humihty
which covers it as with a crown of glory. The one man, little know
ing what Christ can do for him, and impatient at what looks like a
repulse, says in his haste, " Sir, come down ere my child die." The
other, having a boundless faith in Jesus, ventures not at first to pre
scribe any special mode of cure, but contents himseU with sending
some elders of the Jews to ask that Christ's heahng power should be
exercised on behalf of his servant. Jesus goes not with him who
asks him to do so, having a far greater thing to do for him than to
comply with his request. But he no sooner gets the message deliv
ered by deputy from the other, than he says, " I wUl come and heal
him," and sets off instantly on the errand. But he knew that he
should be arrested by the way. He knew that the Eoman centurion
had such a sense of his own unworthiness that he shrank from receiv
ing him into his house ; he knew that he had such confidence in his
power that aU he wanted was that Jesus should wiU it, and his ser
vant should be cured. He knew that there was a humihty and a faith
in the breast of this Gentile officer — the first Gentile that ever applied
to him — such as was not to be found in any Israelitish bosom. It
was to bring these before the eyes of his feUow-countrymen, and to
hold them up for admiration and rebuke, that he did not at the first
act as he had done at Cana, but made that movement towards the
centurion's dwelhng. Wonderful, indeed, the faith embodied in the
message which the centurion sent : ' I, a Eoman officer, have a lim
ited authority, but within its limits this authority is supreme. I can
say unto one of my soldiers, Go, and he goeth; to another, Come,
and he cometh ; to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. But thou,
Jesus, art supreme over all. As my soldiers are under me, so under
thee are all the powers and processes of nature. Thou canst say to
this disease, Come, and it cometh ; to that other disease, Go, and it
goeth ; to thy servants Life and Death, Do this, and they do it. Say
thou then but the word, and my servant shaU be healed.' And Jesus
marveUed when he heard the message, and he turned about and said
to the people that followed him — it was very much for their sakes
that he had arranged it so, that so many peculiarities should attend
this miracle, and such a preeminence be given to this first exhibition
of Gentile faith in him—" I say unto you, I have not found so great.
faith, no not in Israel." It was the highest exercise of human faith
in him that Jesus had yet met with, and he wondered and rejoiced
that it should be found beyond the bounds of Israel. Midway be-
THE POOL OF BETHESDA. 157
fcween the Gentile and the Jew stood the woman of Samaria ; outside
the bounds of Judaism stood this Eoman centurion. Was it to pre
figure the great future of the gathering in of aU people and nations
and tongues and tribes that so early in his ministry such a manifesta
tion of faith in the Saviour was made ?
But while wondering with Christ at the beautiful exhibition of
humility and faith in a quarter so unlooked-for, let us take home the
warning with which Jesus foUowed up the expression of his approval
and admiration : " And I say unto you, that many shaU come from
the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and
Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven ; but the chUdren of the kingdom
shaU be cast into outer darkness, there shall be wailing and gnash
ing of teeth." Surely from the lips of the living and compassionate
Eedeemer words of such terrible import never would have passed,
had the warning they convey not been needed. Let it then be the
first and most earnest effort of each of us to enter info this kingdom,
of which nominaUy and by profession we are the children, in all
humility, and with entire trust in Christ our Saviour, lest the oppor
tunity for entering in go past, and the door be shut — shut by him
who shutteth, and no man openeth.
XVI.
The Pool of Bethesda.*
Could we ascertain what the feast was to which Jesus went up,
and at which he healed the man beside the pool of Bethesda, it
would go far to settle the question as to the length of our Lord's
public ministry ; but after aU the labor that has been bestowed on
the investigation, it remains still uncertain whether it was the Pass
over, or one of the other annual festivals. If it was the Passover —
as, upon the whole, we incline to think it was, as John mentions
three other Passovers, one occurring before, and two after this one —
Christ's ministry would come to be regarded as covering a space of
about three years and a half ; if it were one or other of the lesser
festivals, a year or more, according to the festival which is fixed upon,
must be deducted from that period. This much, at least, appears
certain, that it was our Lord's second appearance in Jerusalem after
his baptism, and that it occurred at or near the close of a year, the
most of which had been spent in Judea. On the occasion of this
* John 5.
158 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
second visit, Jesus went one Sabbath-day to walk through the cloi*.
ters or colonnades that were buUt round a large swimming bath,
called the pool of Bethesda. Tradition has for many ages pointed to
a large excavation, 360 feet long, 130 feet broad, and 75 feet deep,
lying outside the north wall of the Harem enclosure, and near to St.
Stephen's gate, as having been this pool. The pecuhar character of
its masonry estabhshes the fact that it must have been intended ori
ginally as a reservoir for water. At one of its corners there are two
arched openings or vaults, one twelve, the other nineteen feet wide,
extending backward to an unknown distance, forming part, it may
have been, of the porches of which the evangehst speaks. These
porches, on the day on which Jesus visited them, were crowded.
They formed one of the city resorts ; and, besides numbers of others
that frequented them for the ordinary use of the waters, there lay
around a great multitude of the blind, the halt, and the withered,
waiting for the moving of the water.
If we accept the account given in the fourth verse of the fifth
chapter, the moving of the water, and the healing virtue temporarily
bestowed upon it during the period of its commotion, were due to
angelic agency. The verse, however, is wanting in many of the
most ancient manuscripts, and has come now to be very generaUy
regarded as an interpolation very naturally inserted by the early
transcribers of the gospel, as embodying the expression of what was
then the popular behef. We are disposed the rather to concur in
this view, when we consider how unhke to angehc influence is the
kind of agency here attributed to it as elsewhere described in Holy
Writ, and how singular it would have been had the heahng power
been so bestowed that it should be restricted to the single person
who first stepped in. Of itseU this would not be sufficient ground on
which to reject the idea of a supernatural agency having been em
ployed, but U the verse alluded to did not form part of the original
writing of the evangelist, then we are left at hberty to believe that
this was a pool supplied by an intermittent spring, which at certain
seasons, owing to the sudden formation of particular gases, bubbled
up, throwing the whole water of the reservoir into commotion, im
pregnated for the time with qualities which had a heahng power over
some forms of disease — a power of course greatly magnified in the
popular idea. But whether the verse, and the explanation which it
contains of the moving of the water, be accepted or rejected, the nar
rative of what Jesus said and did remains untouched.
Wandering through these crowded porches, and looking at the
strange array of the diseased waiting there for the auspicious moment,
THE POOL OF BETHESDA. 159
the eye of Jesus rests on one who wears a dejected and despairing
look, as if he had given up aU hope. Thirty-eight years before, the
powers of lfle and motion had been so enfeebled that it was with the
greatest difficulty,, and at the slowest pace, he could creep along the
ground. His friends had got tired perhaps of helping him otherwise,
and as their last resource, had carried him to the porches of the pool,
and left him there to do the best for himseU he could. And he
had done that best often and often, yet had faUed. Every time the
troubling of the water came, he had made the effort ; but every time
he had seen some one of more vigor and alertness, or better helped,
get in before him, and snatch the benefit out of his hands. Jesus
knew all this : knew how long it had been since the paralytic stroke
first feU on him ; how long it was since he had been brought to try
the efficacy of these waters ; how the expectation of cure, at first full
and bright, had been gradually fading from his heart. To rekindle
the dying hope, to fix the man's attention on himseU, Jesus bends
over the bed on which he hes, looks down at him, and says, " WUt
thou be made whole ?" Were the words spoken in mockery ? That
could not be ; a glance at the speaker was sufficient to disprove it.
But the question surely would not have been asked had the speaker
known how helpless was he to whom it was addressed. He said, " I
have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool,
but while I am coming another steppeth down before me." As he
gives this explanation, he looks up more earnestly into the stranger's
face — a face he had never seen before — and gathers a new life and
hope from the expression of sympathy, the look of power that coun
tenance conveys.
" Jesus saith unto him, Eise, take up thy bed, and walk.'' The
command was instantly obeyed. The cure was instantly complete.
The short time, however, that it had taken for him to stoop and hft
the mattress on which he lay, had been sufficient for Jesus to pass
on, and be lost among the crowd. The stopping, the question, the
command, the cure, aU had been so sudden, the man has been so
taken by surprise, that he doubts whether he would be able to recog
nise that stranger U he saw him again. Lifting his bed, and rejoi
cing in the new sensation of recovered strength, he walks through the
city streets in search of his old home and friends. The Jews — an
expression by which, in his gospel, John always means, not the gene
ral community, but some of the ecclesiastical heads and rulers of the
people— the Jews see him as he walks, and say to him: "It is the
Sabbath-day; it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed." No answer
could be more natural, as no excuse could be more valid, than that
160 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
which the man gave when he said : " He that made me whole, the
same said unto me, Take up thy bed and walk." His chaUengers do
not ask him any thing about the healing — as soon as they hear of it,
they suspect who the healer was — but fixing upon the act in which
the breach of the Sabbath lay, and as if admitting the vahdity of the
man's defence, in throwing the responsibihty of that act upon him
who had ordered him to do it, " They asked him, What man is that
which said unto thee, Take up thy bed and walk?" He could not
teU, and so the conversation by the wayside dropped.
Soon after, the healed man is in the temple, thanking God, let us
beheve, for the great mercy bestowed upon him. Jesus, too, is there;
but they might have passed without the healed recognising the healer.
It was not the purpose, however, of our Lord that it should be so.
Finding the man among the worshippers, he says to him, "Sin no
more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." Nothing more seems to
have been said; nothing more to have passed between the two; but
that short sentence, what a hght it threw upon the distant past!
reminding the man that it had been to the sins of his youth that he
had owed the eight-and-thirty years* of infirmity that had foUow
ed ; and what a solemn warning did they carry as to the future — re
minding him that if, on being restored to strength, he should return
to sin, a stiU worse thing than so many years of bodUy infirmity
might be in store for him. Jesus gives this warning, and passes on.
Eecognising him at once as he who had cured him beside the pool, the
man inquires about him of the bystanders, and learns now who he is.
And he goes and teUs the Jews ; not, let us hope, from any mahcious
motive, or any desire to put an instrument into the hands of Christ's
enemies. Considering where and how he had so long been lying, he
may have known so httle of aU that had recently happened, as to
imagine that he was at once pleasing the rulers, and doing a service
to Jesus, by informing them about his cure. But it was no new intel
ligence that he conveyed. The Jews, we presume, knew weU enough
who had effected this cure. But it was the first instance in which
they had heard of Jesus' healing on the Sabbath-day — of itseU in
their eyes a violation of its sanctity ; and as it would appear that, not
content with this offence, he had added another in ordering the man
to carry on that day a burden through the streets — a thing strictly
and literally prohibited by the law — it may have gratified the Jews
to be able to convict Jesus of a double breach of the Sabbath law by
direct and indubitable evidence from the man's own lips. You can
imagine the secret though malignant satisfaction with which they got
and grasped this weapon, one at once of defence and of assault ; how
THE POOL OF BETHESDA. 161
they would use it in vindicating their rejection of Christ as a teacher
sent from God ; for could God send a man who would be guilty of
such flagrant breacnes of his law? how they would use it in carrying;
out those purposes of persecution already brooding in their breasts.
Their hostility to Jesus, which had been deepening ever since his
daring act of cleansing the temple, now reached its height. From
this time forth — and it deserves to be especially noted as having occur
red at so early a stage, inasmuch as it forms the key to much of our
Lord's subsequent conduct — they sought to slay him, because he had
done those things on the Sabbath-day. But though the purpose to
slay him was formed, it was not expressed, nor attempted to be car
ried out. Things were not yet ripe for its execution. Jesus might
be convicted as a Sabbath-breaker, and all the opprobrium of such a
conviction be heaped upon his head; but as things then stood, it
would not be possible to have the penalty of death inflicted on him
upon that ground. They must wait and watch for an opportunity of
accusing him of some crime which will carry that penalty even in the
eyes of a Eoman judge.
Though not serving them much in this respect, they have not to
wait long tUl, in their very presence — so that they have no need to
ask for other proof — Jesus commits a still higher offence than that of
violating the Sabbath. Aware of the charges that they were bring
ing against him as to his conduct at the pool of Bethesda, he seizes
upon some public opportunity when he could openly address the
rulers ; and in answer to the special accusation of having broken the
Sabbath, he says to them, '"My Father worketh hitherto, and I
work." The rest into which my Father entered after his work of
creation, of which your earthly Sabbath rest is but a type, was not
one of absolute inactivity — of the suspension, cessation of his agency
in and over the vast creation he had formed. He worketh on still ;
worketh on continuously, without distinction of days, through the
Sabbath-day as through aU days, sustaining, preserving, renewing,
vivifying, healing. Were this work divine to cease, there would not
be even that earthly Sabbath for you to rest in. And as he, my
Father, worketh, so work I, his Son, knowing as little of distinction.
of days in my working as he. By process of nature, as you call it —
that is, by the hand of my Father — a man is often cured on the Sab
bath-day. And it is only what he thus does that I have done, and
my authority for doing so is this, that I am his Son.'
Whatever difficulty the men to whom this defence of his alleged
Sabbath-breaking was offered, may have had either in understanding
its nature or appreciating its force, one thing is clear, that they did
UhofObrtil J]
162 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
at once and most clearly comprehend that in speaking of God as hia
Father in the way he did, Jesus was claiming to stand to God, not
simply in the relationship of a child — such a relationship as that in
which we all, as the creatures of his power and the preserved of his
providence, may be regarded as standing — but in that of a close, per
sonal, pecuhar sonship belonging to him alone, involving in it, as all
true filiation does, unity of nature between the Father and the Son.
It was thus that the Jews understood Jesus to speak of the Father
and of himself, when he so associated himseU with the Father, as to
imply that if his Father was not a breaker of the Sabbath in healing
men upon that day, neither was he, his Son ; and so they sought
the more to kiU him, because he had not only broken the Sabbath,
but said also that God was his own Father, making himseU equal
with God.
If the Jews had misunderstood Jesus, what was easier than
for him to have said so ; to have denied and repudiated the allega
tion that he had intended to claim any thing hke equahty with God?
Instead of this, what does Jesus do? He goes on to reassert, to ex
plain, and to expand what had been implied in the compendious ex
pression he had employed. Any thing hke such distinction between
the Father and the Son as that the one would or could judge, or will,
or act independently of the other — without or against the other — he
emphatically and reiteratedly repudiates: "Verily, verily, I say unto
you, the Son can do nothing of himself;" "I can of my own seU do
nothing." The very nature of the relationship forbade it that the
Son ever would or could assert for himself any such independence of
the Father as the creature, in its wUfulness and sinfulness, is apt to
assert for himseU. But though all such separation and indepen
dence of council and of action is here precluded, so complete is the
concert that what things soever the Father doeth the same doeth
the Son likewise. Some things that the great Divine Master Work
man does, a superior scholar may copy or imitate. But Jesus does
not say, what things the Father does, the Son does other things
somewhat like them ; but the same things, and whatever things the
Father doeth, the same doeth the Son, and doeth them likewise, that
is, in the very same manner, by the exercise of the same power, for
the furtherance of the same ends.
In far greater works than that simply of healing, will the unity ci
action between them be made to appear. One of these greater works
is that of quickening the dead, by the incommunicable prerogative
of the Creator. This prerogative the Father and the Son have equal
ly. As he wills, and by his wfll, the Father quickeneth; so too does
THE POOL OF BETHESDA. 163
the Son. The highest form of hfe is that which is breathed into
souls spiritually dead. This life is of the Son's imparting equally
as of the Father's. It comes through the hearing of Christ's word ;
through a believing in the Father as he who sent the Son. Verily,
verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the
dead — the spiritually dead — shall hear the voice of the Son of God,
and they that hear shaU live. Another work pecuhar to divinity is
that of judging ; approving, condemningj assigning to every man at
last, in strict accordance with what he is, and has been, and has done,
his place and destiny. Who but the all-wise, all-just, all-gracious
God is competent for such a task? but that task, in the outward
execution of it, the Father has devolved upon the Son, giving him
authority to execute it, because he is not simply the Son of God, in
which character he needs not such authority to be conveyed to him ;
but because he is also the Son of man, and it is in that complex or
mediatorial ofiice with which he is invested, that he is to sit upon the
Throne of Judgment at the last, when aU the inhabitants of the earth
shall stand before his tribunal. Should this then be a subject for
marvel? for the hour was coming, though not yet come, when all that
are in their graves shall hear Christ's voice and shaU come forth ; they
that have done good to the resurrection of life, and they that have done
evil to the resurrection of condemnation. Having thus unfolded the
great truth of the unity of will, purpose, and action, between the Fath
er and the Son, Jesus ceases to speak of himseU in the third person,
and proceeds onward to the close of his address, to speak in the first
person, and that in the plainest way,* of the testimonies that had been
0 "I can of mine own self do nothing : as I hear I judge : and my judgment
is just ; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath
sent me. If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true. There is another
that beareth witness of me ; and I know that the witness which he witnesseth of
me is true. Ye sent unto John, and he bare witness unto the truth. But I re
ceive not testimony from man : but these things I say, that ye might be saved.
He was a burning and a shining, light ; and ye were wiUing for a season to re
joice in his light. But I have greater witness than that of John : for the works
which the Father hath given me to finish, the lame works that I do, bear wit
ness of me, that the Father hath sent me. And the Father himself, which hath
sent me, hath borne witness of me. Ye have neither heard his voice at any
time, nor seen his shape. And ye have not his word abiding in you : for whom
he hath sent, him ye believe not. Search the Scriptures ; for in them ye think
ye have eternal life : and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not
some to me, that ye might have life. I receive not honor from men. But I
know you, that ye have not the love of God in you. I am come in my Father's
name, and ye receive me not : if another shall come in his own name, him ye
*vill receive. How can ye believe, which receive honor one of another, and seek
164 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
borne to him, that of the Father, that of John, that of his own works,
that of the Holy Scriptures, aU of which these Jews had wilfully re
jected. Now the accused becomes the accuser. Now he who had been
charged as a Sabbath-breaker, rises to the height of that very eleva
tion which they had regarded him as a profane and blasphemous man
for venturing to claim; and he teUs these unbeheving Jews, as one
knowing the hearts of all men, and entitled to judge, and exercising
that very authority with which, as the Son of man, he had been clothed,
he teUs them, that they had not the love of God in them, nor his
word abiding in them ; that they did not believe Moses when he wrote
of Him ; that, much as they reverenced their Scriptures, they only
beheved in thein so far as they tallied with their own thoughts and
fancies. Still further, he declares that there was this great obstacle
in the way of their receiving one who came to them as Jesus did, in
the name of the Father, to do alone the Father's wiU, that they were
all too busy seeking after the honor that came from man, minding
earthly things, and seeking not the honor that came from the one only
hving and true God; attributing thus all their perverseness to moral
causes, to motives operating within, over which they should have had
control; this being their condemnation, that they would not come to
him that they might have life. He would, but they would not.
If Jesus Christ were but a man, what are we to make of such a
discourse as this ? What are we to make of the first part of it, in
which he speaks of the Father and his connection with him ? What
of the second part of it, in which he speaks to the Jews and of their
treatment of him? We know not which would be the worst — the
arrogance in the one direction, or the presumption and uncharitable-
ness in the other — if this were but a man speaking of the Creator,
and to his fellows. It can alone relieve him from the guilt of profane
assumption towards God, and unlicensed hberty with man, to beheve
that Jesus was reaUy that which the Jews regarded him as claiming
to be, the Son of, the equal with the Father, whom aU men should
honor, even as they honor God.
But let me ask now your particular attention to the circumstances
under which this marveUous discourse was spoken, and to the object
which, in the first instance, as at first delivered, it was intended to
serve. Jesus voluntarily, intentionaUy created the occasion for its
dehvery. The miracle here — the heahng of the impotent man at the
not the honor that cometh from God only ? Do not think that I will accuse you
to the Father : there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust.
For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me : for he wrote of me,
But if yo believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words ?"
THE POOL OF BETHESDA. loo
pool of Bethesda — was a wholly secondary or subordinate matter,
btended to bring Christ into that relationship with the Jewish rulers
which caUed for and gave its fitness and point to this address. Why
did Jesus choose a Sabbath-day to walk in the porches of Bethesda?
Why did he do what only on one or two occasions afterwards he did,
Instead of waiting to be appUed to, himself single out the man and
volunteer to heal him ? Why did he not simply cure the man, but
bid him also take up his bed and walk ? He might have chosen
another day, and then, in the story of the cure, we should have had
but another instance added to the many of the exertion of our Lord's
divine and beneficent power. He might have simply told the man to
rise up and walk, and none could have told how the cure had been
effected, or turned it into any charge. He chose that day, and he
selected that man, and he laid on him the command he did, for the
very purpose of bringing himseU front to front with the Jewish
rulers. At first the question between them seems to refer only to the
right keeping of the Sabbath. Had Jesus as a man, as a Jew, bro
ken the Sabbath law in curing a man upon that day ? Had he bro
ken it in telling the man he healed to carry his bed through the city?
Had the Jews not misunderstood, overstrained the law, sticking to
its letter, and violating its spirit ? These were grave questions, with
which, as we shaU find, Jesus afterwards did deal, when on another
Sabbath he volunteered another cure. But here Christ waives all
lesser topics — that, among the rest, of the right interpretation of the
Sabbath law— and uses the antecedent circumstances as the basis on
which to assert, and then amphfy and defend, the truth of his true
and only sonship to the Father. His ministry in Judea was now
about to close. Aware of the design against his hfe which had now
been formed, and wishing to baffle it for a season, he retires to Gah
lee. But he wUl not leave Jerusalem tiU he has given one fuU and
pubhc testimony as to who and what he is, so that the Jews in con
tinuing to reject him, shaU not have it in their power to say that he
has not revealed his own character, nor expressed to them the real
grounds upon which their opposition to him is based.
Such was the special drift and bearing of the address of Jesus as
originally deUvered to the Jews. But is there nothing in its close
applicable to ourselves and to aU men in every age ? The same kind
of obstacles that raised such a barrier in the way of the Jews believ
ing in Jesus, do they not still exist? If the spirit of pride and world-
liness, a conventional piety and an extreme thirst for the applause
and honor that cometh from man, occupy and engross our hearts,
wiU they not indispose and render us unable to beheve simply, heart-
166 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ily, devotedly on Jesus Christ ? Of one thing let us be assured, that
whatever be our disposition and conduct towards him, his towards us
is ever a longing desire to have us, keep us, bless us, save us; and
that the one and only thing that stands in the way of our enjoying
aU the benefits of his salvation, is our own unwillingness ; his lament
over aU that wander away from him being ever this, " Ye wiU not
come to me, that ye might have hfe."
XVII.
The Synagogue of Nazareth.*
In the route commonly taken from Jerusalem to the sea of Gah
lee, one of the most interesting day's travel is that which carries you
from Jenin across the three valleys into which, at its upper extrem
ity, the great plain of Esdraelon divides, and up to Nazareth, as it
hes embedded in the southern ridge of the hills of Gahlee. Cross
ing the first valley, we skirted the base of the mountains of Gilboa,
and paused for a few moments upon a gentle elevation, now occupied
by a few houses of the humblest description, on which Jezreel, the
ancient capital of Israel, once stood, with the palace of Ahab in its
circuit, and the vineyard of Naboth hard by. Our eye wandered
along the twelve or fourteen miles of dead-level that run from Jez
reel to Carmel, and the figure of the great prophet running before
the king's chariot rose before us. We turned round and gazed upon
the slopes of Gilboa, and the tide of Saul's last battle seemed to roll
over them, and the sounds of the funeral dirge of David to be linger
ing still among the hUk. The crossing of the next vaUey carried us
to the base of Little Hermon, where a smaU hamlet hes, consisting
of a few miserable-looking hovels, surrounded by ill-kept gardens.
This was the Shunem in which the house once stood which had in it
the prophet's chamber ; and these were the gardens in one of which
his kind hostess' son sickened unto death. Leaving behind us the
place which, in the old prophetic times, saw the dead child given
back to his mother, climbing Little Hermon and descending on the
other side, we entered another village which witnessed another dead
son given back to another bereaved mother, by Him who touched the
bier, and said, " Young man, I say unto thee, arise." Here, in this
village of Nain, we came for the first time on the traces of our Lord's
GalUean ministry. The third plain passed, a steep ascent carried us
° Luke 4 : 16-31.
THE SYNAGOGUE OF NAZARETH. 167
to the summit of that range of hills which forms the northeastern
boundary of the plain of Esdraelon. Descending, we came upon a
circular, basin-shaped depression, girdled all round by a dozen or
more swelling hill-tops that rise from three to four hundred feet
above the vaUey they enclose. Near to the foot of the highest of
these surrounding hills, nestled in a secluded upland hoUow, lies the
village of Nazareth. No village in Palestine is more like what it was
in the days of Jesus Christ, and none more fitting to have been his
residence during the greater part of his hfe on earth. The seclusion
is perfect, greater even than that of Bethany, which on one side looks
out openly upon the country that stretches away to the shore of the
Dead sea. Nazareth is closed in on every side, offering to us an
emblem of the seclusion of those thirty years which were passed there
so quietly. Pure hfll-breezes play over the viUage, and temper the
summer heat. The soU around is rich, and yields the fairest flowers
and richest fruits of Palestine. You seem shut out from the world,
and yet you have but to climb a few hundred feet to the top of the
overlooking hill, and one of the widest, finest prospects in aU the
Holy Land bursts upon your view. Away in the west, a sparkling
hght plays upon the waters of the Mediterranean, reveahng a portion
of the Great Sea that formed the highway to the isles of the Gentiles.
The ridge of Carmel runs out into the waters, closing in the bold
promontory on the side of which Ehjah stood and discomfited the
prophets of Baal. Southward, below your feet, stretches the great
battle-plain of Palestine, behind which rises the hilly district of
Samaria, through the opening between which and the mountains of
Gilboa the eye wanders away eastward across the whole breadth of
the Holy Land, tiU it rests upon that range, the everlasting eastern
background of every Syrian prospect — the mountain range of Bashan
and Gilead and Moab. Turning northward, the whole hill-country
of Galilee Ues spread out before us, the sea of Gennesaret hidden,
but a ghmpse of Safed obtained, the city set upon a hill, above and
beyond which there rise the snowy heights of Hermon, caUed by the
Arabs the Sheikh of the Mountains.
Up to the hill-top which commands this magnificent prospect,
how often in chUdhood, youth, and early manhood must Jesus have
ascended, to gaze — who shaU teU us with what thoughts ? — upon the
chosen scene of his earthly ministry, and upon that sea over whose
waters the glad tidings of salvation were to be borne to so many
lands. It pleases us to think that so many years of our Lord's life
were spent in such a home as that which Nazareth supplied; one so
retired, so rich in natural beauty, with ghmpses of the wide world
168 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
around for the morning or evening hours. There it was, in the fields
below the viUage, that he had watched how the hlies grew, and seen
with what a gorgeous dress, in coloring above that of kingly purple,
their Creator clothed them. There, in the gardens, he had noticed
how the smaUest of aU seeds grew into the tallest of herbs. There,
outside the house, he had seen two women grinding at one mill;
inside, a woman hiding the leaven in the dough. There, in the mar
ket-place, he had seen the five sparrows sold for the two farthings.
The sheep-walks of the hiUs and the vineyards of the vaUeys had
taught him what were the offices of the good shepherd and the care
ful vine-dresser ; and all the observations of those thirty years were
treasured up to be drawn upon in due time, and turned into the
lessons by which the world was to be taught wisdom.
No means are left for ascertaining what impression was made
during these thirty years upon the inmates of his home, the play
mates of his boyhood, the associates of his youth, the villagers
generaUy in the midst of whom he grew up. It may readily be beheved
that the gentleness, the truthfulness, the lovingness displayed by him,
must have won respect. Yet we can imagine, too, that the unearthly
purity and sanctity of such a childhood and such a manhood may have
created an awe, a sense of distance and separation, which in meaner
spirits might deepen into something hke aversion and dishke. At
last he leaves them, and is not seen in Nazareth for many months.
But the strangest tidings about him are afloat through the village.
First, they hear of what happened at his baptism in the Jordan, then
of what he did a few miles off at Cana, then of his miracles in Jeru
salem, then of his curing the nobleman's son of Capernaum ; and now
he is once more among them, and the whole vfllage is moved. The
Sabbath-day comes round. He had been in the habit aU through
these thirty years of attending in the synagogue ; sitting there quietly
and unobtrusively, taking part in the prayers and praises, hstening
to the reading of the law and of the prophets, and to the explanations
of the passages which were read, with what kind and amount of seU-
application none of all around him knew. But how wUl he comport
himseU in the new character that he has assumed? The synagogue
is crowded with men among whom he has been brought up, all curi
ous to see and hear. The earher part of the service goes on as usual.
The opening prayer is recited; the opening psalm is chanted; the
portion from the law, from the book of Moses, is read by the ordina
ry minister ; the time has come for the second reading — that of some
portion of the prophets— when Jesus steps forth and stands in the
reader's place There is no chaUenging of his right to do so. It ia
THE SYNAGOGUE OF NAZARETH. 161)
not a right belonging exclusively to priest or Levite ; any Jew of any
tribe might exercise it. But there was a functionary in every syna
gogue regularly appointed to the office. This functionary, in this
instance, at once gives way, and hands to Jesus the roU of the prophet
Dut of which, according to the calendar, the reading for the day is to
be taken. It is the roU of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus opens it, and
whether it was that the opening verses of the sixty-first chapter were
those actuaUy appointed for that day's service, or -whether it was that
the roU opened at random and these verses were the first that pre
sented themselves, or that Jesus, from the whole book, purposely
selected the passage, he read as foUows : " The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the
poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliver
ance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the bhnd, to set at
liberty them. that are bruised; to preach the acceptable year of the
Lord." And stopping there, in the middle of the sentence, he closed
the book, gave it to the minister, and sat down upon the raised seat
of the reader, taking the attitude usuaUy assumed by Jewish teachers.
There was a breathless stUlness. The eyes of all that were in the
synagogue were fastened on him. "This day," said Jesus, "is this
Scripture fulfiUed in your ears."
It was a Scripture universally understood to be descriptive of the
coming Messiah, his office, and his work. Jesus gives no reason for
appropriating and applying it to himseU; he offers nothing in the
shape of argument or evidence in favor of his being indeed the
Christ, the Anointed of the Holy Ghost. He contents himself with
the simple authoritative assertion of the fact. We have indeed but
the first sentence given that he spoke on this occasion. What fol
lowed, however, we may weU beUeve to have been an exposition of
the passage read, as containing an account of the true character,
ends, and objects of his mission as the Christ of God; the telhng
who the poor were to whom he brought good tidings, who the bruised
and the broken-hearted were whom he came to heal, who the bound
were that he came to hberate, who the bhnd whose eyes he came to
open, what that year was he came to usher in — the long year of
grace which stfll runs on, in the course of which there is acceptance
for all of us with God, through Christ. As Jesus spake of these
things — spake with such ease, such grace, such dignity — the first
impression made upon the Nazarenes, his old familiar friends, was
that of astonishment and admiration. He had got no other, no better
education than that which the poorest of them had received. He
had attended none of the higher schools in any of the larger towns,
170 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
had sat at the feet of none of their chief rabbis to be instructed in
the law; yet no rabbi of the schools could speak with greater fluen
cy, greater authority, greater confidence. Soon, however, as from
tho mere manner, they began to turn their thoughts to the substance
of this discourse, and began to reahze what the position really waa
which Jesus was assuming— that it was nothing short of the very
highest that ever any son of man was to reach; that it was as the
Lord's anointed Christ that he was speaking, and speaking to them
as the poor, the blind, the captives, to whom he was to render such
services — the admiration turns into envy. Who is he that is arroga
ting to himseU all this dignity, authority, and power? who is speak
ing to them as so immeasurably his inferiors, as needing so much his
help? Is not this the son of honest, plain, old Joseph, whom we all
so weU remember as our vUlage carpenter? His brethren and his
sisters, are they not here beside us in the synagogue, listening, appa
rently with no great delight or approval, to this new strain in which
their brother has begun to speak? He the Messiah, the opener of
our eyes, the healer of our hearts, our deliverer from bondage ! Be
fore he asks us to beheve any such thing of him, let him show us
some sign from heaven ; do some of those miracles that they say he
has done elsewhere, particularly at Capernaum. If he wanted us,
who have all known him so well from his childhood, to believe in him
as a prophet, he should have come to us first, convinced us first,
unfolded his credentials to us first, wrought his first miracles here in
Nazareth. Jealousy heightens the offence that envy had created, and
ere long the whole company in that synagogue is looking at him
askance. Jesus sees this, and turning from his former subject of dis
course, tells them that he sees and knows it, lays open their hearts to
them, puts the very words into their hps that they were ready to
utter, and proceeds to vindicate himself for not showing any special
sign to his fellow-townsmen, by quoting two instances in which Ehjah
and Elisha, the two great workers of miracles among the prophets,
passed over all their feUow-countrymen to show favor to the Sidonian
widow and the Syrian officer. There is nothing that men dislike
more than that the evil and the bitter things hidden in their breasts
should be brought to hght. It aggravates this dishke when the dis
coverer and revealer of their thoughts is the very person against
whom the malignant sentiment is cherished. Should he remain calm
and unimpassioned, neither taken by surprise, nor betraying irrita
tion, they are so much the more incensed. So felt the Nazarenes
under the address of our Lord; and when he proceeded to assume
the mantle of Ehjah and Ehsha, as if he were of the same order with
THE SYNAGOGUE OF NAZARETH. 171
these great prophets of the olden time, it is more than they can any
longer bear. They will be lectured no more in such a way by the son
of the carpenter. They rise, they rush upon him, they thrust him
out of the vfllage, and on to the brow *>f a precipice over which they
would have hurled him ; but it pleased him to put forth that power,
and to lay upon them that speU which he laid upon the high priest's
band in the garden of Gethsemane. They are hurrying him to the
brow of the hfll ; he turns, he looks, the speU is on them, their hands
drop powerless by their sides ; he passes through the midst of them,
they offer no resistance, and before they recover themselves he is gone.
About two mUes from Nazareth there is a hUl which shows, upon
the side facing the plain of Esdraelon, a long and steep descent. The
monks of the middle ages — the determiners of most of the sites of the
holy places in Palestine — fixed on this as the precipice over which
the angry Nazarenes designed to throw our Saviour, and gave it the
name of the Mount of Precipitation. The very distance of this inount
from the viUage goes far to disprove the tradition regarding it. But
though this distance had been less, it could not have been the place,
for it is distinctly stated by the evangehst that it was a brow of the
hill on which the city was built from which they intended to cast
him. Modern traveUers are all agreed that it must have been from
some part of the rocky cliff which overhangs the oldest quarter of the
present vfllage of Nazareth that Jesus was about to have been thrown.
This rocky cliff extends for some distance along the hiU on which
Nazareth is built, and shows at different points perpendicular descents
of from thirty to forty feet, which, as they have been fiUed up below
with accumulations of rubbish, must originaUy have been much deeper.
Any one of these would so far answer to the description given by the
evangehst. In taking this view, however, it is necessary to suppose
that on leaving the synagogue, with the deliberate intention of killing
him, the infuriated Nazarenes either forced Jesus up the height from
which they designed afterwards to cast him, or made a circuit up and
round the hfll, in order to reach the intended spot. The same ascent
which it must have been needful thus to make I made, in company
with Eev. Mr. ZeUer, who for some years has been resident as a mis
sionary in Nazareth. On getting to the top of the ridge, we found
ourselves on a nearly level plateau of considerable extent. There
were no houses on this plateau, but Mr. ZeUer pointed out to us here
and there those underground cisterns which are the almost infallible
signs of houses having once been in the neighborhood. Here, then,
on this plateau, a portion U not the whole of the ancient Nazareth
may have stood. If it was so — U even a few houses of the old vii-
A72 THE LIFE OF CHRIST
lage were here — then, as we know it to have been the rule that, wher
ever it was possible, the synagogue was buflt on the highest ground
in or near the city or viUage to which it belonged, it must have been
on this elevated ground that the synagogue of Nazareth stood, not
far from the brow of the hill. It seems more likely that the Naza
renes should, in the frenzy of the moment, have attempted to throw
our Lord from a precipice quite at hand than that, acting on a delib
erate purpose, they should have spent some time, and climbed a hfll
in order to its execution.
But turning now from the locahty and outward circumstances of
this event in our Saviour's hfe, let us try to enter into its meaning
and spirit. So far as we know, this was the first occasion on which
Jesus addressed an audience of his countrymen in the synagogue on
the Sabbath-day ; it would appear indeed to have been the only one
on which he took the duty of the reader as well as that of the exhorter.
It was a common enough thing for any one, even a stranger, to be
asked, when the proper service of the synagogue was over, to address
some words of instruction or encouragement to the audience. The
gospels teU us how frequently Jesus made use of this opportunity ;
and you may remember how at Antioch and Pisidia, after the read
ing of the law and the prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent unto
Paul and Barnabas saying, " Men and brethren, U ye have any word
of exhortation for the people, say on." The pecuharity of the inci
dent now before us lay in this, that Jesus first read the passage from
the prophets, and then grounded directly upon it the address which
he dehvered. * In this respect we might regard it as the first sermon
ever preached; the text chosen, and the discourse uttered by our
Lord himseU. Had these Nazarenes, who, in their insatiate and zeal
ous craving after signs and wonders, wanted him only to do the same
or greater things than he had done in Capernaum, but known how
highly honored, far above that of its being made a mere theatre for
the exhibition of divine power, their synagogue was, in being the first
place on earth in which that instrument was employed which has
been so mighty through God to the pulling down of the strongholds
of the ungodly and the upbuilding of the church, their vanity might
have been gratified ; but they shghted the privilege thus enjoyed,
and so lost the benefit.
The body of the first synagogue sermon of our Saviour has been
lost. The text and introductory sentence alone remain; but how
much do they reveal to us of the nature, the needfulness, the pre-
ciousness of those spiritual offices which our Divine Eedeemer came
on earlh to execute, and which he stiU stands waiting to discharge
THE SYNAGOGUE OF NAZARETH. 173
towards our sinful humanity ! It was to a company of a few hun
dreds at the most that the words of Jesus were spoken in the syna
gogue at Nazareth ; but that desk from which they were spoken was
turned into the centre of a circle whose bounds are the ends of the
earth, and that audience has multiphed to take in the whole family
of mankind. To the men of every land in every age Jesus has been
thus proclaiming what the great ends are of his mission to this earth.
To open blinded eyes, to heal bruised and bleeding and broken hearts,
to unlock the doors, and unloose the fetters of the imprisoned and
the bound ; to announce to the poor, the meek, the humble that theirs
is the kingdom of heaven ; and to proclaim to ah that this is the year
of our Lord, the long year of Christ that takes in all the centuries
down to his second coming, the year in every day and every hour
and every moment of which our heavenly Father waits to forgive,
receive, accept all contrite ones who come to him. Such, our Sav
iour teUs us, is that great work of grace and power for whose accom
plishment he has been anointed of the Father and replenished by the
Spirit. In that high office to which he has thus been set apart, and
for which he has been thus qualified, we all need his services. There
is a spiritual blindness which Jesus only can remove; a spiritual
imprisonment from which he only can release; a deadly spiritual
malady eating in upon our heart which he alone can heal. And shaU
he not do aU this for us, U we feel our need of its being done, since
the doing of it is the very design of his most gracious ministry among
the sinful chUdren of men ? Let us not do him the injustice to believe
that he wiU be indifferent to the accomphshment of the very errand
of mercy on which he came, or that he will refuse in ours or in any
case to enlighten and emancipate, bind up and heal.
It seems to us to throw a distinct, and, though not a very broad,
yet a very clear and beautiful beam of light on the graciousness of
our Lord's character, that instead of reading the number of verses
ordinarily recited, he stopped where he did in his quotation from
Isaiah. Had he gone on, he should have said, "to proclaim the
acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God."
Why not go on, why pause thus in the middle of the sentence ? not
assuredly that he meant either to deny or hide the truth, that the
day of vengeance would foUow upon the acceptable year, if the
opportunities of that year were abused and lost ; but that then and
now, it is his chosen and most grateful office to throw wide open the
arms of the heavenly mercy, and invite aU to throw themselves into
them and be saved.
But though he came in the Spirit to those among whom he had
174 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
been brought up, though he came thus to his own, by his own he waa
not received, by his own he was despised and rejected. His treat
ment at Nazareth was a foreshadowing of tbe treatment given gener
ally to him by his countrymen, and terminating in his crucifixion on
Calvary. • The rude handhng in the Gahlean viUage, the binding, the
scourging, the crucifying in the Jewish capital, were types of that still
rougher spiritual handhng, that crucifying of our Lord afresh which
the world, in every age, has gone on repeating. It was their very
familiarity with him in the intercourse of daUy Ufe which proved such
a snare to the Nazarenes, and tempted them into their great offence.
Let us fear lest our familiarity with him of another kind — the fre
quency with which we hear about him, and read about him, and have
him in one way or other set before us — bhnd our eyes and blunt our
hearts to the wonders of his redeeming love, and the exceeding riches
of his grace and power.
XVIII.
First Sabbath in Capernaum, and First Circuit
of Galilee.*
The first eight months of our Lord's ministry were spent, as we
have seen, in Judea. By the sign from heaven, by the Baptist's
proclamation, by Christ's own words and deeds, he was presented to
the rulers and to the people as the Son of God, the Messiah. His
character was misunderstood ; his claims were rejected. At Jerusa
lem a plot against his Ufe was formed ; it was no longer safe for him
to reside where the Jewish authorities had power. Jesus retired to
GalUee. John 4 : 1-3. Besides the purpose of placing himseU be
yond the reach of the scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem, another
circumstance seems to have had its influence in directing Christ's
footsteps into Gahlee. He heard that John was cast into prison.
The Baptist's work was over; the labors of the Forerunner were
closed ; the ground was open for Jesus to occupy.' Hitherto, in his
earher Judean ministry, he had neither pubhcly taught in the syna
gogues, nor openly and indiscriminately healed the sick, nor caUed
any other disciples to his side than those who voluntarily and tem
porarily followed him.t We may safely say, then, that prior to his
* Matt. 4 : 12-22, 23-25 ; Mark 1 : 21-39 ; Luke 4 : 42-44.
f His disciples, indeed, in imitation of John's practice, had begun to baptize,
but as soon as "the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus had
FIRST SABBATH IN CAPERNAUM. 176
appearance in Galilee, he had taken no steps either to proclaim the
advent of the kingdom, or, by the selection of a band of chosen
adherents, to lay the foundation of that new economy which was to
take the place of the one which was now waxing old and was ready to
vanish away. It looks as U, before fuUy and openly entering on the
task of providing a substitute for that Judaic economy which his own
kmgdom was to overturn, Jesus had gone up to Jerusalem, and given
to the head and representatives of the Jewish commonwealth the
choice of receiving or rejecting him as their Messiah. It was not,
at least, till after he had been so rejected in Judea, that he began in
Gahlee to preach the gospel of the kingdom, (Matt. 1 : 15,) and to
plant the first seeds of that tree whose leaves were to be for the
heahng of the nations. This helps to explain at once the marked
difference between Christ's course of conduct during the period which
immediately succeeded his baptism, which was passed in Judea, and
the laborious months in Galilee which foUowed, and the marked
silence regarding the former which is preserved by the first three
evangehsts, who all make our Lord's ministry begin in GalUee, and
contain no allusion to any thing as happening between the tempta
tion in the wUderness and the opening of his ministry there. Nor do
they allude to any visits of Jesus to Jerusalem prior to those which
he made after his final departure from GalUee, and which preceded
his crucifixion. With them, up to that time, GalUee appears as the
exclusive theatre of our Lord's labors. It is to the supplemental
gospel of St. John that we are indebted for aU our knowledge of the
memorable incidents in Judea, which preceded the first preaching in
the synagogue of Nazareth. We can understand this singular sUence
of the first three evangehsts, if we regard our Lord's earlier appear
ance and residence in Judea as constituting rather a preliminary
dealing with the Jews, in the way of testing their disposition and
capacity to welcome him as their own last and greatest prophet, than
as forming an integral part of that work whereby the foundations of
the Christian church were laid.
Eejected by the chiefs of the people in the capital, Jesus comes
to Gahlee. There, in the synagogue of the town in which he had
made and baptized more disciples than John, (though Jesus himself baptized
not, but his disciples,) he left Judea, and departed again into Galilee." John
4 : 1-3. It would seem to have been a sudden impulse of zeal in their Master's cause
which led those first disciples to engage so eagerly in baptizing— a zeal which,
instead of checking or rebuking, Jesus dealt with by quietly cutting of the occa
sion for its display. By his own removal to Gahlee, an entirely new state ol
things was ushered in, and by John's imprisonment his baptism ceased ; nor do
*we read anywhere of a Galilean baptism by the disciples of Jesus.
176 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
hved so many years, he first pubhcly proclaims his office and hia
work, as the healer of the broken-hearted, the restorer of sight
to the blind, the deliverer of the captives, the preacher of the gospel
to the poor — an office and a work which had nothing of confinement
in it, nothing restricting it to any one age or country. But there,
too, by his feUow-townsmen at Nazareth, as by the rulers of the cap
ital, he is rejected, and so he descends to the shores of the sea of
GalUee. Walking by these shores, he sees first Andrew and Peter
casting a net into the sea. He says to them, "FoUow me, and I
will make you fishers of men. Straightway they leave all and follow
him." A httle farther on, another pair of brothers, James and John,
are in their boat mending their nets. He caUs them in the same way,
and they leave their boat and their nets, their father and the hired,
servants, and follow. He was not speaking to strangers, to those
previously ignorant or indisposed to foUow him. Andrew was one of
the two disciples of John who had heard the Baptist say, " Behold
the Lamb of God," and who had followed Jesus. The other of these
two disciples was John. Andrew had brought his brother Peter to
Jesus; and though it is not said that John had done the same with
his brother James, the latter must already have been acquainted with
Christ. Andrew, Peter, and John had followed Jesus from Betha
bara to Cana, and had witnessed there the first of his miracles. They
had been up at Jerusalem, and seen the miracles which Jesus wrought
at the first Passover which he attended. They may have taken part
in the baptizing, may have been with Jesus at the weU of Jacob.
Mention is made of disciples of Jesus being there with him, and who
so likely to be among them as those wrho first followed him from
Bethabara? But they do not appear as yet to have attached them
selves permanently to his person, nor to have attended him on his
return from his second visit to the metropolis, nor to have been with
him at Nazareth. The stopping of the baptisms, the imprisonment
of John, the scattering of his disciples, may have thrown them into
some doubt as to the intentions of the new Teacher. For a time a*
least they had returned to their old occupation as fishermen, and
were busily employed at it when Jesus met them ; but his voice fell
upon ears that welcomed its sound, his command upon spirits that
were ready to obey. Not that they understood as yet that the sum
mons was one to relinquish finaUy their earthly calling. The present
was but a preliminary imitation to follow Jesus, and chiefly by hear
ing what he said, and watching what he did, to be instructed by him
in the higher art of catching men. It was not tiU weeks afterwards
that they were solemnly set apart as his apostles.
FIRST SABBATH AT CAPERNAUM. 17T
In the meantime, however, they accompanied him into Capernaum.
The entrance of Jesus, attended by the two weU-known brothers —
who, from the mention of hired servants belonging to one of them,
we may beUeve, ranked high among their craft — was soon known
throughout aU the town. The inhabitants of Capernaum had already
heard enough about him to excite their Uvehest curiosity. That curi
osity had the keenest edge put on it by the manner in which the
cure of the nobleman's child had been effected. And now he is
among them. It would be a crowded synagogue on the Sabbath-
day when he stood up there to preach for the first time the gospel of
the kingdom of God. Nothing of what he said upon this occasion
ha* been preserved. The impression and effect upon his auditors
are alone recorded: "They were astonished at his doctrine; for he
taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes;" "his
word was with power." Mark 1:22; Luke 4:32. The scribes, the
ordinary instructors of the people, presented themselves simply as
expositors of the law, written and traditional, claiming no separate or
independent authority, content with simply discharging the office of
commentators, and resting their individual claims to respect on the
manner in which that office was fulfiUed. But here is a teacher of
quite a new order, who busies himseU with none of those difficult or
disputed questions about which the rabbis differed; who speaks to
the people about a new kingdom — the kingdom of God — to be set up
among them, and that in a tone of earnestness, certainty, authority,
to which they were unaccustomed. What can this new kingdom be,
und what position in it can this Jesus of Nazareth occupy?
Of one thing they are speedily apprized, that it is a kingdom op
posed to that of Satan, intended to destroy it. For among them was
a man possessed with a devil, who, as Jesus stood speaking to them,
broke in upon his discourse, and, with a voice so loud as to startle
the whole synagogue, cried out, addressing himseU to Jesus, " Let u*
alone ; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth ; art
thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One
of God." He speaks in the name of others, as representing the
whole company of evil spirits, to whom, at that time, here and there, it
had been aUo wed to usurp the seat of will and power in human breasts,
and so to possess the men in whom they dwelt as to strip them of
their vohtion and conscious identity, and to turn them into human
demons. But how came this human demon into the synagogue, and
what prompted him to utter such cries of horror and of spite? Was
this devil as mucn beside himseU as the poor man in whom he dwelt?
Had the presence the look, the words of Jesus such a power over
Lift of Ohrirt. 12
178 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
him that as the man could not regulate or restrain his own actions,
so neither could the devil regulate or restrain his thoughts and
words? His exclamations sound to our ear hke the mad, involunta
ry, impotent outcries of the vassals of a kingdom who feel that the
reins of empire are passing out of their hands, but who cannot give
them up without telling who the greater than they is who has come
to dispossess them of their power.
Whatever may be thought of the kind of pressure under whioh
the devil who possessed this man acted; whether the testimony he
gave to our Lord's character be regarded as free and spontaneous,
intended rather to injure than to honor; or whether it be regarded as
¦unwillingly drawn forth by close personal contact with the Holy One,
the testimony so given was not welcomed by Christ. It came unsuit
ably from a quarter whence no witness should be borne to him, nor
was wished for, as it came unseasonably, when premature revelations
of his true character were not desired. In other instances as weU as
this Jesus did not suffer the devils to speak, "because they knew
him," acting as to them on the same principle on which he often cau
tioned those whom he healed and his own disciples not to make him
known, seeking by such repression to prevent any hurrying forward
before its time of what he knew would be the closing catastrophe of
his career. But though refused thus, and as it were rejected by oui
Lord, its first wild, impatient utterances aU that it was permitted to
give forth, this voice is most striking to us now as a testimony from
the demon-world, through which a knowledge of who Jesus truly
was seems so rapidly to have circulated. The prince of darkness, in
his temptation of our Lord a year before, seems himseU to have been
in some doubt, as he put. the question so often, " H thou be the Son
¦of God." But no doubt was entertained by the devils who came, as
Ijuke teUs us, " out of many, crying out and saying, Thou art Christ,
the Son of God." Luke 4 : 41. Some have thought that those demo
niacs whom Christ cured were lunatics, and nothing more ; men whose
deranged and disordered intellects were soothed down into calmness
and order by the gentle yet firm voice and look and power of Christ.
But what are we to make of the unique testimony that so many of
(them gave to Christ's Messiahship and Sonship to God, and that at
the very commencement of his ministry? Were lunatics the only
ones who knew him ? or whence got they such knowledge and such:
faith ?
Accepting, with whatever mystery the whole subject of demoniac
possession is clothed, the simple account of the evangehsts, it does
appear most wonderful — the quick inteUigence, the wild alarm, the
FIRST SABBATH IN CAPERNAUM. 179
teiror-striking faith that then pervaded the demon-world, as if aU the
spirits of heU who had been suffered to make human bodies their
habitation, grew pale at the very presence of Jesus, and could not
but cry out in the extremity of their despair.
" Hold thy peace," said Jesus to the devil in the synagogue, " and
come out of him." The man was seen to faU, torn as by violent con
vulsions; a loud, inarticulate, fiendish cry was heard to issue from
his hps ; (Mark 1 : 36 ; Luke 4 : 35 ;) hale and unhurt, the devU gone,
the man himseU again, he rose to converse with those around, and to
return to his home and friends. Amazement beyond description
seized at once on aU who saw or heard of what had happened. Men
said to one another, in the synagogue, on the streets, by the high
ways, ' What thing is this, what a word is this ! for with authority he
commandeth even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him. And
immediately (it could scarce weU have been otherwise) the fame of
TTim went out into every place of the country, and spread abroad
throughout all the region round about Galilee.' Mark 1 : 27, 28 ;
Luke 4 : 36, 37. Chiefly, however, in Capernaum did the excitement
prevail, begun by the cure of the demoniac in the synagogue, quick
ened by another cure that foUowed within an hour or two. The ser
vice of the synagogue closed before the mid-day meal. At its close
Jesus accepted an invitation to go to the house of Simon and Andrew.
These brothers, as we know, were natives of Bethsaida, and had hith
erto resided there. But recently they had removed to Capernaum.
Peter having married, and perhaps taken up his abode in the house
of his mother-in-law, James and John were also of the invited guests.
Jesus did not know that the house he went to was one of sickness,
and his ignorance in this respect creates the belief that it was the
first time he had entered it. But soon he hears that the great fever
(it is the physician Luke who in this way describes it) has seized
upon Simon's wife's mother. They teU him of it ; he goes to, bends
kindly over her, takes her by the hand, rebukes the fever. The cure
is instantaneous and complete. She rises, as U no disease had ever
weakened her, with glad and grateful spirit to wait upon Jesus and
the rest. And so within that home kindly hands were provided, like
those of Martha at Bethany, to minister to the Saviour's wants during
the busiest, most toilsome period of his Ufe, when, in season and out
of season, early in the morning and far on often in the night, he came
-and went, hving longer under that roof of Peter's house at Caperna
um, than under any other that sheltered him after his pubhc ministry
tad begun. This cure, too, was noised abroad through the city.
Here was an opportunity not to be lost, for who could teU but that
180 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
next morning Jeans will be gone? Though it was the Sabbath,
Jesjis had not scrupled to eject the devil and rebuke the fever; but
the people could not so easfly get over their scruples. They wait till
the sun has set before they apply to this new and strange physician.
But meanwhile all that were diseased in Capernaum, and aU that
were possessed, were brought. AU the city had gathered together
at the door of Peter's house. The sun goes down, and Jesus steps
out into that bustling, anxious crowd ; he lays his hand on every one
of the diseased (Luke 4 : 40) and heals them, and casts out aU the
spirits with his word. The stars would be shining brightly in the
heavens ere the busy blessed work was done, and within a few hours
a city which numbered many thousand inhabitants saw disease of
every kind banished from its borders.
After the excitement and fatigue of such a day, Jesus may lay his
head peacefully on his pillow, and take the rest that such labor has
earned. But long before the others — while yet they are aU sleeping
in Simon's house around him — rising up a great while before day, he
goes out into a sohtary place to pray. Was it on his own account
that Jesus thus retired? Was his spirit too much under the dis
tracting influence which such a scene of bustle and excitement as he
had passed through the day before, was fitted to exert ? Did he feel
the need to calm the inward tumult by silent and solitary communion
with heaven ? As we foUow his footsteps, let us be careful to notice
and to remember in what circumstances it was that Christ resorted to
special, sohtary, continued prayer. But in leaving Capernaum, alone
and so early, Jesus had in view the state of others as weU as his own.
He was weU aware how apt, in his case, the office of the healer, the
wonder-worker, was to overshadow that of the teacher, the preacher
of the glad tidings ; how ready the inhabitants of Capernaum already
were to hail and honor him in this one character, however httle they
might be disposed to regard or obey him in the other. He had done
enough of that one kind of work, had got enough of that one kind of
homage, there. And so, when, after an eager search for him, he is
found — and Simon and the disciples teU him that aU men were seek
ing for him, and the people when they came up entreat him that he
should not depart from them (compare Mark 1 : 36, 38, and Luke
4:42, 43) — Jesus says to the one, "Let us go into the next towns,
that I may preach there also;" and to the other, "I must preach the
kingdom of God to other cities also, for therefore am I sent." He
did not, indeed, forsake the city that had treated him so differently
from his own Nazareth. He chose it as the place of his most fre
quent residence, the centre of his manifold labors, the scene of many
FIRST CIRCUIT OF GALILEE. 181
of his most memorable discourses and miracles. But now he must
not rest on the favor which the healings of this wonderful day have
won for him. And for a time he left Capernaum, and "went about
aU Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel
of the kingdom, and heahng aU manner of sickness and aU manner
of disease among the people. And his fame went throughout aU
Syria : and they brought unto him aU sick people that were taken
with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed
with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the
palsy; and he healed them. And there foUowed him great multi
tudes of people from Gahlee, and from Decapohs, and from Jerusa
lem, and from Judea, and from beyond Jordan." Matt. 4 : 23-25.
We read of nine departures from and returns to Capernaum in
the course of the eighteen months of our Lord's Gahlean ministry ;
of three extensive tours through aU the towns and villages of the dis
trict like the one now described ; and of five or six more hmited ones.
Had the three evangelists not been so sparing in their notices of
time and place ; had they not often, shown such entire disregard to
the mere order of time, in order to bring together incidents or dis
courses which were alike in character; could we have traced, as we
cannot do, the footsteps of our Saviour from place to place, from
month to month, as he set forth on these missionary rounds through
Gahlee, made, let us remember, aU on foot, we should have had a
year and a haU before us of varied and almost unceasing toil, the
crowded activities of which would have fiUed us with wonder. As it
is, a general conception of how these months were spent is- all that
we can reach. To give distinctness to that conception, let us remem
ber what, in extent of surface and in the character and numbers of
its population, that district of country was to which these pedestrian
journeys of our Saviour were confined.
Galilee, the most northern of the three divisions of Palestine, is
between fifty and sixty miles in length, and from thirty to forty in
breadth. A three-days' easy walk would take you from Nain, on the
south, to Csesarea Phflippi in the north — which seem to have been
the hmits in these directions of our Saviour's circuits. Less than two
days' travel will carry you from the shores of the sea of Galilee to the
coasts of Tyre and Sidon. Gahlee presented thus an area somewhat
larger than Lancashire and somewhat smaller than Yorkshire. So
far, therefore, as the mere distances were concerned, it would not
take long — not more than a week or two — to travel round and through
it. But then in the Saviour's days it was more densely populated
than either of the Enghsh counties I have named. Josephus, who
182 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
knew it weU, speaks of 204 towns and villages, the smaUest of them
containing above 15,000 inhabitants. Making an aUowance for exag
geration, the population of the province must have been about three
mfllions — as crowded a population as any manufacturing district in
any of the western kingdoms of Europe now presents. And this pop
ulation was of a very mixed character. If the majority were of Jew
ish descent, there were so many Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabs, Greeks,
and others mingled with them, that we may be almost certain that
Jesus never addressed any large assembly in which there were not
Gentiles as weU as Jews. There cannot be a greater mistake than to
imagine that, in selecting Capernaum, on the shores of the lake of
Gennesaret, as his headquarters, and Gahlee as his chosen field of
labor, Jesus was retiring from the populous Judea to a remote and
unfrequented region. In those days there was much more life and
bustle in Gahlee than in Judea. So far as both the numbers and
character of its population were concerned, it was a much better,
more hopeful theatre for such evangelistic labors as those of Jesus.
The people, though no less national in their spirit, were much less
infected with ecclesiastical prejudice. The seed had thus a better
soil to fall upon. Though a Eoman governor was placed over them,
the scribes and Pharisees had great power in Jerusalem, as they
proved in effecting the crucifixion. Herod Antipas, who ruled over
Gahlee, had none of the jealousies of the Jewish Sanhedrim ; and in
point of fact, does not appear tiU the last to have taken much inter
est in, or in any way to have interfered with the proceedings of Jesus.
So long as he confined himself to the work of a rehgious teacher,
Herod had no desire to meddle with his doings ; and even U he had,
Jesus had but to cross the lake of GalUee, to put himseU beyond his
power by placing himself under the protection of Philip, the gentlest
and most humane of the Herods.
WeU adapted every way as GalUee was for our Lord's pecuhar
work — the laying of the first foundations of the Christian faith, a faith
which was to spread over the whole earth — Capernaum was equally
fitted to be the centre whence his labors were to radiate. Looked at
as you find it marked upon the map of Gahlee, it does not occupy any
thing hke a central position. But looked at in relation to the popu
lation and to the means of transit, a better centre could not have
been selected. Wherever its site was, it lay on the northwestern shore
of the sea of Galilee, close upon, if not within the plain of Gennesaret.*
* After visiting the ruins of Khan Mineyeh and Tell Hum, the writer had no
hesitation in deciding in favor of the latter as more likely to have been the site d
Capernaum.
FIRST CIRCUIT OF GALILEE. 18b
This plain — three miles long and two miles broad — was then dot
ted with vfllages teeming with population, and of the most exu
berant fertihty. " One may caU the place," says the Jewish histo
rian, " the ambition of nature, where it forces those plants that are
naturaUy enemies to one another to agree together; it is a happy
contention of the seasons, as if every one of them laid claim to this
country." WhUe aU round its shores the sea of Galilee saw towns
and villages thronged with an agricultural and manufacturing popu
lation, itseU teemed with a kind of wealth that gave large occupation
to the fisherman. How numerous the boats were that once skimmed
its surface, and how large the numbers employed as fishermen, may
be gathered from the fact that in the wars with the Eomans two hun
dred smaU vessels were once collected for the only naval action in
which the Jews ever engaged. Eemembering that the lake is only
thirteen miles long and five or six miles broad, it is not too much,
perhaps, to say that never did so smaU a sheet of water see so many
keels cutting its surface, or so many human habitations circhng round
and shadowing its waves, as did the sea of Galilee in the days ol
Jesus Christ.
Now aU is silent there; lonely and most desolate. TiU last year,
but a single boat floated upon its waters. On its shores, Tiberias in
ruins and Magdala composed of a few wretched hovels are aU that
remain. You may ride round and round the empty beach, and, these
excepted, never meet a human being nor pass a human habitation.
Capernaum, Chorazin, Bethsaida are gone. Here and there yon
stumble over ruins, but none can teU you exactly what they were.
They knew not, those cities of the lake, the day of their visitation ,*
their names and their memory have perished.
THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE.
I.
The two Healings — The Leper and the PARALrTic."
In describing our Lord's first circuit through Galilee, the evange
list teUs us that " they brought unto him aU sick people that were
taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were pos
sessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had
the palsy; and he healed them." Matt. 4 :24. How many and how
varied were the cures effected within the course of this first itineracy
of our Lord can only be conceived by remembering how numerous
were the towns and vfllages through which he passed, and how large
the population with which, one way or other, he was brought into
contact.t Eemembering this, we may beUeve that within a week or
two after his first departure from Capernaum more healings were
effected than the whole put together, of which any specific record has
been preserved in the four gospels.
There was one form of disease, however, which is not noticed in
•St. Matthew's compendious description — a disease pecuhar enough
in its own character, but to which an additional peculiarity attached
from the manner in which it was dealt with by the Mosaic law.
However infectious, however deadly, however incurable, no disease
but one was held to render its victim ceremonially unclean. Such
uncleanness was stamped by the law upon the leper alone. This
strange, creeping, spreading, loathsome, fatal disease appears to have
been selected as the one form of bodily affliction to stand, in the legal
impurity attached to it, and in the penalties visited on that impurity,
as a type of the deep, inward, pervading, corrupting, destroying mal
ady of sin.
Among the Jews the leper was excommunicated. Cut off from
the congregation of the people, he had to live apart, enjoying only
such society as those afflicted with the same disease could offer. He
° Matt. 8:2^; Mark 1 : 40-45, 2 : 1-12 ; Luke 5 : 12-26.
t Earlier Years, pp. 181, 182.
186 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
had to bear upon his person the emblems of sorrow and of death ,
had to wear the rent garments which those wore who were weeping
for the dead ; to shave his head and keep it bare as those must do
who had touched the dead — himself the hving dead, for whom those
omblems of mourning needed to be assumed. His face half covered,
he had to go about crying, " Unclean, unclean," to warn aU others
off, lest they should come too near to him.
From what we know of the prevalence of this disease, it may
be believed that there were many lepers in Galilee when our Lord
made his first journey through it — gathered here and there into small
and miserable communities. Even among these the tidings of the
wonderful cures that were being effected would circulate, for the
segregation was not so complete as to prevent aU intercourse ; and
when these poor exiles from their feUows heard of many being healed
whose complaints were as much beyond aU human remedy as theirs,
the hope might spring up in their hearts that the Great Healer's
powers extended even to their case. But which of them had faith
enough to make the trial — to break through the legal fences imposed,
and go into any of the cities in which Jesus was, and throw himseU up
on his sympathy for succor ? One such there was — the first of those
so afflicted who ventured to approach the Lord ; and his case on that
account was selected for special reference by aU the three evange
hsts. He came to Jesus " when he was in a certain city." * He had
never seen the Lord before, or seen him only at a distance, among a
crowd. He could have known or heard but httle more about him
than what the voice of rumor had proclaimed. Yet so soon as he
recognizes him, see with what reverence he kneels and worships and
f aUs on his face before him, (Luke 5 : 12,) and hear how he salutes
and pleads, " Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." Per
haps Jesus had never seen a man prostrate himseU in his presence as
this man did. Certainly, Jesus was never before addressed in words
so few and simple, yet so fuU of reverence, earnestness, faith, submis
sion. He caUed Jesus Lobd. Was this the first time that Jesus had
been so addressed? Sir, Eabbi, Master — these were the terms in
which Andrew, and Nathanael, and Nicodemus, and the woman of
Samaria, and the nobleman of Capernaum had addressed him. None
of them had spoken to him ds this leper did. . If, indeed, the mirac
ulous draught of fishes by which Peter had been finaUy summoned
away from his old occupation had already occurred, then it would
* Had the name of that city been given it might have helped to trace the
course that Jesus was taking, but here, as in many other instances, the means ol
identification are denied.
THE LEPER AND THE PARALYTIC. 187
be from his hps that this title was first heard coming, when he fell
down at Jesus' feet exclaiming, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful
man, O Lord." That, however, is uncertain; but though it were
true, how much had Simon to elevate his conception of Christ's char
acter — how Httle this leper ! One wonders, indeed, how far he had
got in his idea of who this Jesus — this healer of diseases — was. All
that we can know is that he chose the highest title that he knew of,
and bestowed it on him. " Lord, U thou wilt, thou canst." No hesi
tation as to the power ; no presumption or dictation as to the will.
Upon that free wiU, upon that almighty power, he casts himseU.
" Lord, if thou wUt, thou canst make me clean." Jesus instantly went
forward — went close to him — put forth his hand and touched him.
His disciples hold back; a strange shuddering sensation passes
through the hearts of the onlookers, for, by the law of Moses, it was
forbidden to touch a leper. He who touched a leper himself became
unclean. Yet at once, without hesitation at the time — without act
ing afterwards as if he had contracted any defilement or required any
purification — Jesus lays his hand upon one who was " fuU of leprosy,"
and he says to him, " I will, be thou clean." We lose a httle of the
power and majesty of our Saviour's answer in our translation. Two
words were spoken, (e&&>, KaBapioBvri,) the answer, the echo to the
prayer ; two of the very words the man had used taken up and em
ployed by Jesus in framing his prompt and gracious reply. No petition
that was ever presented to Jesus met with a quicker, more complete,
more satisfactory response. If our Lord's conduct in this instance
was regulated by the principle which we know so often guided it in
the treatment he gave to those who came to him to be cured, great
must have been the faith which was met in such a way. The readiness
which Jesus had displayed to exert his power may partly have been
due to this being the first case of a leper's apphcation to him, and to
his desire to show that no legal barrier would be aUowed by him to
stand in the way of his stretching forth his hand to heal all that
were diseased. Yet, the manner and the speech of the leper himseU
attest that he approached with no ordinary reverence, and petitioned
with no ordinary faith. And, according to his faith, it was done
onto him immediately. As soon as the words, "I will, be thou
clean," had come from the Saviour's Hps, "the leprosy departed
from him, and he was cleansed."
Did any further coUoquy take place between the healed and the
Healer? When, quick as lightning, through the frame the sensatior
passed of an entirely recovered health — when he stood up before the
Lord, not a sign or symptom of the banished leprosy on his person—
188 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
did no thanks burst from his grateful Hps? or did our Lord say
nothing to him about another heahng which he was both willing and
able to effect ? We are not to infer that nothing of the kind occur
red because nothing is recorded. The evangehsts have preserved
alone the fact that, whatever words may have passed between them,
Jesus was in haste to send the leper away, and in doing so gave him
strict command to tell no man, but to go instantly and show himself
to the priest, and offer the gifts that Moses commanded — the hve
birds and the cedar wood, and the scarlet and the hyssop — the means
and instruments by which the purification of one declared free of
leprosy was to be effected, and, reheved from the ban that had been
laid upon him, he was to be reinstated in the possession of aU the
common privUeges of society and citizenship. It is quite possible
that, knowing the opposition which was aHeady kindling against him,
of which we shall presently see traces, Jesus may have desired that,
without throwing out any hint of what had occurred which might
precede him by the way and prejudice the judge, this man should
repair as quickly as possible to the priest upon whom it devolved
judisially to declare that he, so recently a man fuU of leprosy, waa
now entirely free of the complaint. It would be a testimony they
could not weU gainsay, U the fact of the departure of the leprosy were
attested by the acceptance of the offerer's gifts and his readmission
into the congregation of Israel. To prevent any possibility of this
ratification of the reahty of the cure being refused, Jesus might have
enjoined silence and as speedy a resort as possible to the priest; the
silence in such circumstances and with such a view prescribed, to last
only till the desired end was gained. It would seem, however, from
the result, that a more immediate object of the Saviour in laying this
injunction upon the leper was to prevent the influx of a still greater
crowd than that which was ah-eady oppressing him, and thus the
hampering of his movements, and the absorption of too much of hia
time in the mere work of healing. For straightway, though charged
to keep silence, the man when he went from Jesus could not restrain
himself, but "began to publish it much, and to blaze abroad the mat
ter, insomuch that great multitudes came together to be healed of
their infirmities, and Jesus could no more openly enter into the city,
but was without in desert places, and withdrew himself into the wil
derness, and prayed." Mark 1 : 45 ; Luke 5 : 15, 16.
Again, a second time, as it was after that busy Sabbath in Caper
naum, and before his first journey through Gahlee, so now, at the
close of this circuit and under the pressure of the multitude that beset
bis path, Jesus is driven forth from the city's crowded haunts to seek
THE LEPER AND THE PARALYTIC. 189
the solitary place, where for some hours at least he may enjoy un
broken communion with heaven. To watch how and when it was
that he took refuge thus in prayer, mingling devotion with activity,
the days of bustle with the hours of quiet, intercourse with man in
fellowship with God, let this be one of our cherished employments,
foUowing the earthly footsteps of our Lord : for nothing is more fitted
to impress upon us the lesson — how needful, how serviceable it is, if
we would walk and work rightly among or for others around us, that
we be often alone with our Father which is in heaven. A hfe aU
action will be as bad for our own soul as a Hfe aU prayer would be
profitless for others. It is the right and happy blending, each in its
due proportion, of stUlness and of action, of work and prayer, which
promotes true spiritual health and growth ; and the weaker we are —
the more easUy at once distracted and absorbed by much bustling
activity — so much the more of reflection, retirement, and devotion is
needed to temper our spirit aright, and to keep it hi harmony with
that of our Lord and Master.
It is as impossible to teU how long a time it took to make the
first round of the GalUean towns and villages, as it is to define the
line or circle along which Jesus moved. One high authority* con
cludes that it must have occupied between two and three months:
another,t that it did not occupy more than four or five days. A
period of intermediate length would probably be nearer the truth
than either. On completing the circuit he returned to Capernaum,
to take up his abode again in Peter's house. No rest was given him.
The news of his return passed rapidly through the town, and straight
way so many were gathered together "that there was no room to
receive them, no, not so much as about the door." We must remem
ber here, in order to understand what foUowed, the form of a Jewish
house, and the materials of which its roof was ordinarily composed.
There is not now, and there never seems to have been, much variety
in the shape of Syrian dwelling-houses. Externally they aU present
the one dull uniform appearance of so many cubes or squares, seldom
more than one story high — the outer walls showing no windows, nor
any opening on the level of the ground except the door. On entering
you pass through a lesser court, into which alone strangers are admit
ted, and then into the inner uncovered square into which the differ
ent apartments of the building open. In one corner, either of the
outer or inner court — generaUy in the latter — there is a flight of steps
conducting to the roof, a place of frequent resort at aU times, and in
the hotter months of summer turned into the sleeping-place of the
• GreawelL t Ellicott.
190 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
household. The larger houses, in which the wealthier inhabitants
reside, are all separate from one another. The lesser are often with
out any open courtyard, and buflt close together, so that you could
pass readily from roof to roof. These roofs, always flat, are formed
of bricks or tiles, or more generaUy of a compost of mud and straw,
which a day's such rain as we often have would entirely demohsh.
Whatever the size of the houses be, or however they be situated rela
tively to each other, in one way or other, either by a staircase within
the court — open, of course, only to the famfly to which the house
belongs — or by a flight of steps without — which, when the houses are
contiguous, may serve many households as a common means of
access — the roof of each dweUing is easfly reached. We do not need
to settle what size the dwelling was in Capernaum where Jesus took
up his abode ; we have only to imagine it to be of the usual and
invariable Syrian type, to render the narrative inteUigible.
A crowd assembles and fflls the room of the house in which Jesus
sits and teaches. At first this crowd is not so dense but that a sin
gle individual may pass through it, and in this way one and another
of the diseased did press through, and the power of the Lord was
there to heal them. But the crowd grew and thickened, it overflowed
the room, it fiUed the street before the door, till every spot within
reach of Christ's voice was occupied, and stiU there were new-comers
pressing in to try and catch a word ; and to the work of healing with
in an effectual stop seems now to have been put. At this stage four
men appear, bearing a sick man on a Utter. They reach the crowd,
they try to enter, they entreat, they expostulate ; the thing is hope
less, that four men with such a burden ever shaU get through. Is
the project to be given up, the great chance lost ? The bearers con
sult the man they carry. He is paralytic, cannot move a limb, can
do nothing for himself. But he is in full possession of his faculties;
the spirit is entire within. It was his eagerness to be healed, still
more than their readiness to help him, that had led these four men
to lift him and carry him so far, and they are ready stiU to do any
thing — any thing they can. Some one suggests — who so hkely as
the paralytic himself ? — that they might get upon the roof, lift up so
much of it as was required, and let down before Christ the bed on
which the patient lay ; a singular, an extreme step to take, yet one to
which men who were resolved to do any thing rather than lose the
opportunity, might not refuse to have recourse.
They aU were strong in the behef that U only they could get at
Jesus the cure would be effected, but the paralytic himseU had an
eager craving to get into the Saviour's presence, deeper than that
THE LEPER AND THE PARALYTIC. 191
•springing from the desire to have his bodily aflment removed. The
stroke that had taken the strength out of his body had quickened
conscience. He had recognized it as coming from the hand of God ;
it had awakened within him a sense of his great and mamfold bygone
transgressions. His sins had taken hold of him, and the burden was
too heavy for him to bear. He hears of Jesus that he had announced
himself as the healer of the broken-hearted; that there is a gospel,
good tidings that he proclaims to the poor in spirit. If ever a heart
needed healing, a spirit needed comforting, it is his. And now, shaU
he be so near to him whom he has been so anxious to see, and yet
have to go away disappointed, unreheved ? He either himseU sug
gests, or when suggested, he warmly approves, the project of trying
to let him down through the roof. The bearers second his desires
They make the effort — they succeed : noiselessly they hft the tiles—
gently they let down the bed, and before Jesus, as he is speaking, the
bed and its burden He.
But now, before noticing how Jesus met this interruption of his
discourse, and dealt with the man who was so curiously obtruded on
his notice, let us look around a moment on the strangely constituted
audience which Christ at this moment is addressing. Close beside
him are his disciples — around him are many simple-minded, simple-
hearted men, drinking in with wonder words they scarce haU under«
stand. But they are not aU friendly Hsteners who are there, for there
are " Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by," some from Galilee,
some from Judea, some even from Jerusalem. The last — what has
brought them here ? They come as spies — they come as emissaries
from the men who reproved Jesus at Jerusalem for his healing of
another paralytic at the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath-day, and
who sought to slay him, "because he had not only broken the Sab
bath, but said also that God was his Father, making himseU equal
with God." Already these Pharisees counted Jesus a blasphemer,
whose hfe they were seeking but the fit ground and occasion to cut
off. And here are some of their number wearing the mask, waiting
and watching, Httle knowing aU the while that an eye is on them
which foUows every turn of their thoughts, and sees into aU the secret
places of their hearts. It is as one who thus thoroughly knew them,
and would with his own hand throw a fresh stone of stumbling before
their fee*fc — as one who thoroughly knew also the poor, helpless, pal-
sied penitent who Hes on the bed before him, that Jesus now speake
and acts. Meeting those pleading eyes that are fixed so importu
nately upon him, without making any inquiries or waiting to havo
any petition presented, " Son," he says to the sick of the palsy, "be
192 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee." He would not havo
addressed him thus had he not known how greatly he needed to be
cheered, how gladly he would welcome the pardon, in what a suitable
condition he was to have that pardon bestowed. Let us believe then
that, spoken with nicest adaptation to the man's state and wants,
Christ's words were with power — that as quickly and as thoroughly
as the words, " I will, be thou clean," banished the leprosy from the
one man's body, as quickly and as thoroughly these words banished
the gloom and despondency from this man's soul. Thus spoken to
by one in whom he had full confidence, he was of good cheer, and did
assuredly beheve that his sins had been forgiven him. J£ it was so —
if his faith in Jesus as his soul's dehverer was as simple and as strong
as, from the way in which Christ spoke, we presume it was — then too
happy would he be at the moment when the blessedness of him whose
sins are forgiven, whose iniquity is covered, filled his heart, to think
of any thing beside. He is sUent at least, he is satisfied ; he makes
no remonstrance, he proffers no request. There is nothing going on
within his breast that Jesus needs to drag forth to Hght, to detect
and to rebuke. Not so with the scribes and Pharisees, upon whom
those words of Jesus have had a quite startling effect. They too are
silent; nor, beyond the glances of wonder, horror, hate, that they
hastily and furtively exchange, do they give any outward sign ol
what is passing in their hearts. But Jesus knows it aU. They had
been saying within themselves, "This man blasphemeth;" they had
been reasoning in their hearts, to their own entire satisfaction and to
Christ's utter condemnation, saying, "Why doth this man thus speak
blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?" Notwithstand
ing all their seU-assurance, they must have been a Httle startled
when, the thoughts of their hearts revealed, Jesus said to them,
" Why reason ye these things in your hearts? Whether is it easier
to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee ; or to say,
Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk ?" He does not ask which was
easier, to forgive sins or to cure a palsy, but which was easier, to say
the one or to say the other, for he knew that they had been secretly
thinking how easy it was for any man to say to another, " Thy sins be
forgiven thee," but how impossible it was for him to make good such
a saying. " But that ye may know," he added, " that the Son of man
hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the
palsy,) Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thy house."
The man arose and departed to his own house — healed in body,
healed in spirit — glorifying God. The people saw it and were amazed,
and were fiUed with awe; and they said to one another, "We never
THE LEPER AND THE PARALYTIC. 193
saw it in this fashion — we have seen strange things to-day." And
"they glorified God which had given such power to men." The
scribes and Pharisees saw it, and had palpable evidence of the super
human knowledge and superhuman power of Christ given to them —
had a miracle wrought before their eyes in proof of Christ's posses
sion of a prerogative which they were right in thinking belonged to
God only, but they would not let any thing convince them that the
Son of man had power on earth to forgive sins ; and it was not long,
as we shall see, ere new stumbhng-blocks were thrown in their way,
over which they feU.
Our Saviour, in bodily presence, has now passed away from us.
He can touch us no more with his Hving finger; he banishes no more
our bodily diseases with a word ; but the leprosy of the hear*t — the
spreading, pervading taints of ungodliness, selfishness, malignity,
impurity — these it is his office stfll to cure ; these it is our duty stiU
to carry to him to have removed ; and U we go in the spirit of him
who said, "Lord, U thou wilt, thou canst make me clean," the cleans
ing virtue wfll not be withheld.
The Son of man had power on earth to forgive sins ; he exercised
that power; he absolved at once the penitent of Capernaum from aU
his sins ; he caused that man to taste the joy of an immediate, gra
cious, free, and full forgiveness. What is to hinder our receiving the
same benefit — enjoying the same blessing ? Has the Son of man lost
any of his power to forgive sins by his being no more upon this earth,
his having passed into the heavens? Is pardon a boon that he no
longer dispenses, that he holds now suspended over our heads — a
thing to be hoped for but never to be had? No, let us beheve that
his mission on earth has not so fafled in its great object ; that he is as
wiUing as he is able to say and do for each of us what he said and
did for the palsied man in Peter's house at Capernaum; that he
waits but to see us penitent and broken-hearted, looking to and
trusting in him, to say in turn to each of us, "Son — Daughter — be of
good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee."
13
194 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
II.
The Charge of Sabbath-breaking.*
It was a common saying among the Jews, that whoever did any
work on the Sabbath-day denied the work of the creation. The say
ing was grounded on the fact that one principal end of the Sabbatic
institute was, by its continued and faithful observance, to preserve a
knowledge of, and a faith in, the one living and true God as the Creator
of aU things. As being a most exphcit and expressive embodiment
in outward act and habit of the faith of the Jewish people, that in six
days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea and aU that in
them is, it was chosen by God as a fit and appropriate sign of the
pecuhar relationship towards him into which that people had been
brought — the pecuHar standing which among other nations it was to
occupy. "Six days shalt thou labor, and do aU thy work: but the
seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God ; in it thou shalt not
do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man-ser
vant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates ;
that thy man-servant and thy maid-servant may rest as well as thou.
And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and
that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty
hand and by a stretched-out arm : therefore, the Lord thy God com
manded thee to keep the Sabbath-day." Deut. 5 : 13-15. "Where
fore the children of Israel shaU keep the Sabbath, to observe the
Sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual covenant. It
is a sign between me and the chUdren of Israel for ever." Exod.
31:16, 17. "Moreover also I gave them my Sabbaths, to be a sign
between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that
sanctify them. HaUow my Sabbaths; that ye may know that I am
the Lord your God." Ezek. 20:12, 20.
There was no rite, nor institution, not even circumcision, by"
which the Jews were more conspicuously distinguished from sur
rounding nations, and marked off as the worshippers of Jehovah, the
Creator of the ends of the earth. Their Sabbath-keeping was a per
petual and visible token of the connection in which they stood to God,
and of fhe great mission which, under him, they were set apart to
discharge. But how was the Sabbath to be kept so as to serve this
end? Looking back here to the original statutes, and to the earher
practice of the Jewish people, you will find that there was but one
° Mark 1 : 1-31; John 5 : 1-47 ; 9 : 14 ; Matt. 12 : 1 -14; Luke 13 : 10-17; 14 : 1-6.
THE CHARGE OF SABEATH-BREAKING. 195
positive injunction given; the cessation from aU manner of work.
The rest enjoined, however, could not be the rest of total and abso
lute inactivity. The work from which they were to cease could not
be every doing of the human hand. Obviously it was the work of
men's ordinary occupation or trade, the work by which the hours of
common labor were fiUed by those engaged therein. There is, in
deed, one prohibition, the only one, in which there is a specification
of the kind of work to be desisted from, which would seem to point
to a narrower interpretation of the original command. When Moses
had gathered aU the congregation of Israel together at the base of
Sinai, and the people were about to enter on the construction of the
ark and the tabernacle, knowing with what hearty enthusiasm they
were inspired, he prefaced his instructions as to the manner in which
they should carry on the work, by saying, "Six days shaU work be
done, but on the seventh day there shaU be to you a holy day, a
Sabbath of rest to the Lord ; ye shaU kindle no fire throughout your
habitation on the Sabbath-day." They did not need to be told to
kindle no fire for any ordinary culinary purposes. A double portion
of the manna feU upon the day preceding the Sabbath, and they
were to seethe and bake the whole of it, so that no preparation of
food on the Sabbath was required. Issued under such pecuHar cir
cumstances, it seems not unreasonable to beheve that the particular
object of the Mosaic injunction was to check the ardor of those who
might otherwise have been tempted to carry on the mouldings and
the castings in gold and sUver on the Sabbath as on other days : not
that the Jews of aU after generations were prohibited by divine com
mand from having a fire burning in their dwellings, for whatever pur
pose kindled, on the Sabbath-day.
When we turn from what was prohibited to what was enjoined
we find a blank. One or two specific injunctions were indeed laid
upon the priests. The daily sacrifices were to be doubled, and the
show-bread baked upon the Sabbath was to be renewed. That there
was no sabbatism in the temple became in this way a proverb. But
for the people at large there were no minute instructions as to how
the day was to be spent. It could not have been made imperative
on them to assemble for pubhc worship on that day, for during the
times of the Jewish theocracy there was no place but one — the tem
ple — for such worship, and the meeting there each seventh day was
impossible. It was not tfll after the captivity that synagogues were
erected aU over the land, in which weekly assemblages for worship
did take place ; but that was done, not in obedience to any divine
command. It would seem, indeed, to have been the practice of the
196 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Jews, from the beginning, to gather round their prophets on the Sab
bath-days, and to avail themselves of such means of reHgious instruc
tion as they could command. Parents took advantage of the rest to
teach the law unto their chUdren. But there were no pecuhar reh
gious observances prescribed. The day was spent in rest, in thank
fulness, in gladness : spent to a great extent as the festival days of
other countries were spent. Dressed in their best attire, indulging in
better fare, it was to feasting rather than to fasting that the Sabbath
was devoted. But, as the faith of the people grew weak, and then-
allegiance to their divine Sovereign faltered, they grew neglectful of
¦ the Sabbath, and began to profane the day by breaking in upon that
rest from aU the ordinary occupations of Hfe, which should have been
observed. Thus it was that, among other distinctive marks of their
peculiarity as a consecrated people, the only worshippers of the great
Creator, this one became obscured and weU-nigh obliterated. In the
latest years of the Hebrew commonwealth prophet after prophet was
raised up to testify against those defections from the faith, among
which that of neglecting and profaning the Sabbath occupied a con
spicuous place. After the captivity, on the restoration of the Jews
to their own land, the same lax habits prevailed. "In those days,"
says Nehemiah, " saw I in Judah some treading wine-presses on the
Sabbath, and bringing in sheaves, and lading asses; as also wine,
grapes, and figs, and all manner of burdens, which they brought into
Jerusalem on the Sabbath-day : and I testified against them in the
day wherein they sold victuals." Neh. 13 : 15. Nehemiah did more
than testify. Alert and decisive in aU his movements, he had the
gates of Jerusalem shut when it began to be dark before the Sab
bath, and kept them shut tfll the Sabbath was over. It is in the
light of his sayings and doings that we are to interpret the utterance
from the lips of Jeremiah: "Thus saith the Lord: Take heed to
yourselves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath-day, nor bring it in
by the gates of Jerusalem ; neither carry forth a burden out of your
houses on the Sabbath-day, neither do ye any work, but haUow ye
the Sabbath-day, as I commanded your fathers." Jer. 17: 21.
A singular change came over the spirit and habits of the Jewish
people after the restoration from the Babylonian captivity. Previ
ously, in the days of the kings and prophets, they were ever and anon
showing a tendency to idolatry; subsequently no such tendency
appears. Previously they had been neglectful of many of the dis
tinctive rites and ceremonies of their faith ; subsequently they became
strict and punctilious in their observance of them. Great national
calamities -the persecution under the successors of Alexai; ler the
THE CHARGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING. 197
Great, the wars of the Maccabees, the aggression of the Eomans, the
ascent into power of the Idumean family of the Herods, the estab
lishment of the schools of the Eabbis — aU conspired to intensify the
national pride and religious bigotry of the Jews ; who, as they had
nothing but the old laws and traditions to cling to, clung to them
with all the more tenacious grasp. The sect of the Pharisees arose,
and carried the popular sympathy along with it. Every thing re
garded as purely and peculiarly Judaic was exaggerated. Punctil
ious observance of the old ritual was the one great merit compensa
ting for all defects; while around the simpler statute-law of Moses
there arose an oral or traditional law, growing continuaUy in bulk
and overshadowing the primitive Mosaic institute. It had been a
less evil had the original enactments of that institute continued to be
rightly and HberaUy interpreted. Instead of this, the narrowest and
most rigid interpretation was the only one allowed ; and upon each
statute as so interpreted additions and explanations were heaped of
such a character as to turn more and more the keeping of them into
a mere matter of external routine and outward performance. So
fared it with the old, broad, and benignant law as to the Sabbath.
Its primary injunction, "Thou shalt do no manner of work," was
falsely held as aimed at aU kinds of work whatever ; no less than
thirty-nine kinds or classes of work being specified as involved in the
prohibition. It was ruled thus that grass should not be trodden on
the Sabbath, for the bruising of it was a species of harvest-work ;
that shoes with nails should not be worn, as that was the carrying a
burden. To what absurd excesses such a spirit of interpretation led
may be gathered from the single instance of its being actuaUy laid down
in the Mishna that a tailor must not go out with his needle near dusk
on the eve of the Sabbath, lest he should forget, and carry it with
him on the Sabbath. In aU this there was not only a wrong render
ing of the Mosaic precept, but beyond, and much worse than that,
there was the erection of a false standard of duty, a false test of
piety — the elevation of the outward, the positive, the ceremonial over
the inward, the moral, the spiritual ; the putting of the letter that
killeth above the spirit which maketh ahve.
Now let us see how, born and brought up among a people fiUed
with such prejudices, Jesus regulated his conduct. He knew that
heahng the diseased on the Sabbath-day would be regarded as a
breach of the divine law, would shock the Pharisees, and run coun
ter to the convictions of the great mass of the community. Did he
abstain from effecting cures upon that day ? He might easfly have
done so, as no applications were made to hiwK Much as they desired
198 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to have the benefit conferred, the people shrank from bringing their
diseased to be cured on the holy day. Jesus had only to meet their
prejudices by doing nothing. But he did not choose to be thus silent
and acquiescent. No less than seven miracles are recorded as wrought
by him on the Sabbath-day, some of them among the most conspic
uous and memorable in his ministry. 1. The cure of the paralytic
on the occasion of his second visit to Jerusalem. 2. The cure of the
demoniac in the synagogue of Capernaum, when opening his ministry
in Gahlee. 3. The cure of Peter's wife's mother the same afternoon
in the same city. 4. The cure of the man with a withered hand, a
few Sabbaths afterwards, in the same city. 5. The cure of the man
born blind, who sat begging in the porch of the temple at Jerusalem.
6. The cure of a woman who had the spirit of infirmity for eighteen
years. 7. The cure of the man with a dropsy, who happened to be
present at a feast given on a Sabbath-day in the house of a chief
pubHcan, an invitation to which Jesus had accepted. Not one of
these was effected in answer to any apphcation made. They were
all spontaneous, done of Christ's own free will and motion. Nor was
there, in regard to most of them, any urgency requiring that the heal
ing should have been done that day, if done at aU. Jesus might have
chosen another day rather than the Sabbath to walk through the
crowded porches of Bethesda. The impotent man had lain too long
there to make a day earher or a day later of much moment to him.
It was the same with the bhnd beggar of Jerusalem ; and these were
the two instances of cures upon the Sabbath-day which drew most
public notice, and were attended with the most important results.
But Jesus was not content with simply relieving the sufferers on these
occasions. He did himself, or he bade his patients do, what he was
well aware would attract the eye and draw down upon it the con
demnation of the priesthood. How easy had it been for him at
Bethesda to have cured the man in passmg, and told him to he qui
etly there tfll the next day, so that no one should have known any
thing of the cure. But he told him to take up his bed and carry it
through the streets, obtruding thus on the eye of the spectators an
act which seemed to be an open and flagrant breach of the command
delivered by Jeremiah, " Thus saith the Lord : Take heed to your
selves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath-day." Jer. 17 : 21. Hi
curing the man born blind, he spat on the ground and made clay of
the spittle, and anointed the eyes of the man with the ointment, and
said unto him, "Go wash in the pool of SUoam;" both which acts,
the making and applying of the ointment and the washing in the
sacred fountain, were deemed to be desecrations of the Sabbath. It
THE CHARGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING. 199
thus appears that he not only voluntarily selected the Sabbath as the
day for performing the cures, but wrought them in such a way, or
accompanied with such directions, as forced them into notice, and
involved others as weU as himself in what was considered a crime of
the deepest dye — involving in fact the penalty of death.
The paralytic of the porches and the bhnd beggar of the wayside
could both indeed plead in their justification the command of their
healer, and Jesus took upon himself the fuU responsibiUty of their
acts. In meeting the first chaUenge of his conduct as a Sabbath-
breaker, Christ was content, as appears from the narrative in the fifth
chapter of St. John's gospel, to rest his defence on his Sonship to the
Father — a sonship that might seem to entitle him to claim and exer
cise a hberty of action to which no other might legitimately aspire.
But, putting that sonship aside, had Christ's act in healing, and the
man's act in carrying his bed, been violations of the Sabbath law ?
This question was left unsettled by our Lord's first defence of himseU
against the accusation of the Pharisees. It served to bring the mat
ter out, not in a case resting on Christ's pecuhar character, posi
tion, and rights, but in one involving simply the true interpretation of
the existing law, when it was an act of the disciples on which the
charge of Sabbath-breaking was founded. One Sabbath-day he and
his disciples were walking through some cornfields in which the
grain was already white unto the harvest. The disciples being a
hungered, began to pluck the ears of corn, to rub them in their hands,
and eat. In doing so, there was no violation by them, as there would
be with us, of the rights of property. The old Jewish law ran thus : —
"When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbor, then
thou mayest pluck the ears with thy hand; but thou shalt not move
a sickle unto thy neighbor's standing corn." Deut. 23 : 25. The law
and practice of Palestine continue to be this day what they were so
many thousand years ago. We travelled in that country once in
spring. Our course lay through it before the ears of corn were full,
but nothing surprised us more than the Hberties which our guides
took in riding through the fields and letting their horses eat as much
of the standing corn as they pleased. We felt at first as U we were
trespassers and thieves, but were reheved by finding that it was done
under the eye and with the fuU consent of the owners of the crops.
There was nothing wrong, then, in what the disciples of Jesus did.
But it was done upon the Sabbath-day, which was thought to be
onlawful. And there were men who were watching — dogging the steps
of Jesus and his disciples, perhaps to see whether in their walk they
would exceed tho distance to which a Sabbath-day's journey had
200 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
been restricted. So soon as those lynx-eyed men observe what the
disciples were doing, they inform the Pharisees, who go to Jesus and
say, "Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon
the Sabbath-day." They were only expressing the popular belief
which they had helped to form. It had come to be generally believed
that plucking and rubbing in the hand ears of corn was work that
the Sabbath law condemned. Jesus threw a shield of defence over
the act of his disciples by referring to the conduct of David, esteemed
to be a model of Jewish piety. Once when he and his men were a
hungered, he had not scrupled to break the rules, to violate the sanc
tity of the holy place. We may beheve that it was on a Sabbath-
day he did so. Doubly appropriate, therefore, was the reference to
it; but it was not essential to Christ's argument that the act was
done upon the Sabbath-day. What Christ mainly desired by his
aUusion to the case of David, was to estabhsh the principle that the
pressure of hunger vindicated the setting aside for the time of the
strictest even of the temple regulations. But these regulations, and
the whole temple service which they sustained, were held to be of
such superior importance to the Sabbatic law, that when both could
not be kept, the latter had to give way. A vast amount of what else
where would have been accounted as Sabbath-breaking went on every
Sabbath-day in the temple. H the temple, then, carried it over the
Sabbath, and hunger carried it over the temple, as free of fault as
David and his men were, so free of fault were Christ's disciples
To whatever their hunger was due, it had come upon them owing to
their connection with him ; and if in Jerusalem the temple towered
above the Sabbath and threw its protection over its servants engaged
in its work, here in the fields of Galilee was one greater than the
temple, throwing his protection over his disciples as they followed
him. They, too, must be acquitted.
Bi'.t it is not enough that the act of his disciples be in this way
vindicated. Our Lord seizes the opportunity to let the Pharisees
know that they had mistaken the spirit and object of the ceremonial
law, and particularly of the Sabbatic institute. "But if ye had
known," he added, "what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not
sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless." Jesus quotes
here from the book of Hosea (chap. 6 : 6) a saying which m Dre than
once he repeated. It was not a sohtary one. Much to the same
effect were the words which the first of the prophets addressed to the
first of the kings : " Hath the Lord as great dehght in burnt-offerings
and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey
is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." 1 Sam.
THE CHARGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING. 201
15:22. The wisest of the kings responds to the words of Samuel by
the proverb, "To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the
Lord than sacrifice." Prov. 21 : 3. Isaiah and Jeremiah record words
of the same import from Jehovah's lips: "I delight not, saith the
Lord, in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. Wash
ye, make you clean ; put away the evU of your doings from before
mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do weU." "Thus saith the
Lord of hosts, the God of Israel : I spake not unto your fathers, nor
commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of
Egypt, concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ; but this thing com
manded I them, Obey my voice, and I wfll be your God, and ye shaU be
my people; and walk ye in aU the ways that I have commanded you,
that it may be weU unto you." Isa. 1 : 11, 16, 17 ; Jer. 7 : 21-23. There
is something singularly impressive in hearing such emphatic testi
monies to the comparative worthlessness of sacrifices and offerings,
and aU merely ritualistic observances, issuing from the heart of the
old Jewish economy ; spoken at the very time when aU those statutes
and ordinances of the Lord were in full force, that define so minutely
and prescribe so peremptorily the formalities of Jewish worship.
Jesus, in quoting one of these testimonies, and applying it to the
case of his disciples' conduct, puts Sabbath-keeping; so far as it con
sisted merely in abstaining from this or that kind of work, in the same
category as sacrifice, regarding it as part of that formal and external
mode of honoring and serving the Supreme which ought never to
¦stand in the way of any work of need or of benevolence. Had the
Pharisees but listened to the voice of their own prophets, they would
have understood this ; but, deaf to that voice, they had drawn tighter
and tighter the bonds of the required Sabbatic service, ever narrow
ing the field of what was aUowable on the seventh day, till they had
laid a yoke upon men's shoulders too heavy for them to bear. From
this yoke, at aU hazards to himself, Jesus wfll relieve his countrymen,
proclaiming in their ears the great and pregnant truth, "The Sabbath
was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." The Sabbath is
but a means to an end ; that end is man's present comfort, his spirit
ual and eternal good. Wherever, therefore, the keeping of the Sab
bath in the way prescribed, instead of promoting, would frustrate that
end, it was more honored in the breach than in the observance. It
was never to be regarded as in itself an end. Apart from the phys
ical, social, moral, and reHgious benefits to be thereby realized, there
was no merit in painfuUy doing this one thing, or rigorously abstain
ing from that other. The Sabbath was made to serve man ; but man
was not made to serve or to be a slave to the Sabbath. And just
202 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
because it was an institution which, when rightly used, is so emi
nently fitted to minister to man's present and eternal good, the Son
of man, who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, as
Head of our humanity, to render to it the greatest of all services,
and to take aU other servants of it under his care and keeping, would
show himseU to be Lord also of the Sabbath.
It was in this character that Jesus acted on the Sabbath which so
closely followed the incident of the walk in the cornfields. In some
unnamed synagogue he sat and taught. A man whose right hand
was withered stood before him. Had he been brought there to serve
the purposes of these watchful enemies who wished, not simply to
have his own acts to bring up against him, (for these, as the acts of
a prophet, might be regarded as privileged,) but to get from him a
distinct categorical reply to the question whether it was lawful for
any man who had the power of healing to exert it on the Sabbath-
day ? So soon at least as they saw his eye fastened upon the man
with the withered hand, and before he did any thing, they interpose
their question, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath-days?" The
question is met by an appeal to their own practice : " What man
shall there be among you that shall have one sheep, and U it fall
into a pit on the Sabbath-day, wiU he not lay hold on it and lift it
out ? How much then is a man better than a sheep ! Wherefore it
is lawful to do well on the Sabbath-days." But they shaU not only
have its lawfulness asserted, they shaU see the good done before their
eyes. Jesus bids the man with the withered hand stand forth. But
ere he cures him, he turns to the scribes and Pharisees and puts in
his turn a question cutting deep into their deceitful hearts : " Is it
lawful to do good on the Sabbath-days," — as I am doing — " or to do
evil?" — as ye do in suspecting and mahgning me; — "to save hfe," —
as I do — " or to kill," — as ye are doing who are afready meditating
my death ? There is no answer to this question. They stand speech
less before him, but unconvinced and unrelenting.
" And Jesus looked round about on them with anger." The meek
and the gentle and the patient one ! What was it that filled his
breast with such a glow of indignation, that it broke out in this
unwonted look of anger ? It was the sight of men, who, laying hold
of one of his Father's most merciful institutes — that which for man
and beast, and the whole laboring creation, provided a day of return
ing rest, amid whose quiet the reflecting spirit of man might rise to
the contemplation of its higher ends and its eternal destiny — instead
of looking at the primary command to keep holy each seventh day,
as it stood enshrined among those precepts which enjoined a supreme
THE CHARGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING. 203
love to God and a corresponding love to man, and allowing this one
positive and external institute to receive its interpretation from those
immutable moral laws among which it was interposed, had exalted it
into a place of isolation and false importance, attaching a specific
virtue to the bare outward keeping of the letter, magnifying to the
uttermost the minutest acts of bodily service; finding therein the
materials which the spirit of self-righteousness employed for its own
low and sordid purposes, an instrument which it would have used for
defrauding the poor and the needy and the diseased of that help
which the hand of charity was ready to render — such was the source
of that anger with which Jesus looked round about on the scribes
and Pharisees.
But soon his eye, full of the expression of anger as it rests on
them, becomes as fuU of pity as it rests on the man who stfll stands
expectant before him. Jesus says to him, "Stretch forth thy hand."
One can fancy the man replying, " Which hand is it that you bid me
thus stretch forth ? Is it this one that hangs lifeless by my side ?
Oh, if I but saw its wrinkled flesh filled up, did I but feel restored
the power that once was in it, most gladly would I do your bidding;
but mock me not by telling me to stretch forth a hand from which
you see, and I feel, aU power is gone." Had the man thought so,
gpoken so, felt so, he. might have carried his withered hand with him
to the grave. But he did not so think, or feel, or act. He is spoken
tj by one of whom he believes that he can give the strength to exe
cute the command he issues. It is in that faith he acts, and, para
doxical as it may seem, let us say, that if in that faith he had not
made the effort, he never would have got the strength ; and yet U he
had not got the strength, he never could have made the effort. And
is it not thus that the divine Eedeemer still addresses us ? Stretch
forth thy withered heart to love — thy withered hand to serve — such
is his command. Fixing an eye of faith on him, who has afready
fixed his eye of love on us, let us make the effort, and in the very
making of the effort we shaU get the strength.
204 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
III.
The Calling to the ^postolate of St. "Peter, £t
Andrew, St, James, jSt. John, and £t. JVLatthew.*
Exteaoedinabt success naturaUy excites exaggerated hopes. A
sudden blaze of prosperity has blinded the strongest human eye.
Nor can you point to any great enterprise, signaUy successful at its
outset, of which you will not find it true that those engaged in it
were, for a short time at least, seduced into exorbitant expectations.
If ever any success might have operated in this way, it was that
which attended the close of the first year of our Lord's ministry.
The whole population of Galilee, a community of from two to three
millions, stirred to its depths— the excitement spreading aU around,
reaching eastward beyond the Jordan, westward to the coasts of Tyre
and Sidon, southward to the hiU country of Judea. It is no longer,
as in the days that foUowed the baptism by the banks of the Jordan,
an obscure Nazarene travelling with a few friends who had attached
themselves to his person ; it is the great Worker of miracles, the
Healer of all diseases, the Caster-out of devils, surrounded and
pressed in upon so closely by admiring and enthusiastic crowds, that
to get a few quiet hours he had to steal them from sleep — to spend
them in the mountain solitudes. It is no longer in the synagogue
and on the Sabbath-days alone that audiences are to be found ; every
where and at all times assemblages, often too large for his address
ing them, are ready to hang upon his lips. But you search in vain
through all the wonderful excitement and popularity which foUowed
our Lord in his first circuit through Galilee, for the sHghtest evidence
that any false or exaggerated expectations were cherished. The spe
cious appearances that then surrounded Him never dazzled nor
deceived his eye. He knew from the beginning how soon the sudden
fervors of the first great commotion would subside — how soon the
tide that swelled so high would ebb away. He knew that had he
left to themselves those among whom he Hved and labored, had he
done nothing to bind some of them to himseU by ties closer and
stronger than any they spontaneously would have formed, he would
at the close have been left alone. And therefore it was that at the
very time when his popularity was at the highest, he took the first
step towards binding to himseU twelve chosen men in links which,
* Luke 5 : 1-11 ; Matt. 4 : 18—22 ; 9 : 9-17; Mark 1 : 16-20 ; 2 : 14-22 ; Luke
5:27-39.
THE CALLING TO THE APOSTOLATE. 206
lesides all the pains that he took himseU to forge and fasten them,
needed the welding forces of the day of Pentecost to make them
fttrong enough to bind them everlastingly to him.
To these twelve men, an offi.ce, secondary only to the one he him
seU discharged, was to be assigned. They were always to be with
him, the spectators and reporters of aU he said and did and suffered.
They were to share and multiply his labors, to protect and relieve
him from the pressure to which he was exposed. For a short season
he was to send them from his side, to teach and to work miracles as
he did himseU, that a short fore-trial might be made of the work in
which they were afterwards to be engaged. After his death they
were to be the witnesses of the Eesurrection, the expounders of that
gospel which needed the great decease to be accomplished ere in its
full measure it could be proclaimed. By their hands the foundations
of the church were to be laid. Let us note, then, the first steps in
their calling to this high office.
On his return from the Temptation, by the banks of the Jordan,
and on their way thence to Galilee, five men — Andrew, John, Peter,
Philip, and Nathanael — had temporarily attached themselves to Jesus.
Of these, only one — Phihp — had been called by our Lord himself to
follow him. The others were attracted by what they heard about
him or saw in him. At first, however, it was but a loose and uncer
tain bond that united them to Jesus. AU the five were present, we
may beheve, at the marriage feast at Cana, and may have gone up
with him to Jerusalem, to the first Passover which he attended after
his baptism. But they did not remain in constant attendance upon
his person. After his first circuit of Galilee, when his fame was at its
height, three of them had returned to their ordinary occupation as
fishermen. With them a fourth became associated. As Andrew had
brought his brother Peter to Jesus, we may imagine that the same
service had been rendered by John to his brother James ; so that all
the four were already weU known to Christ, had enjoyed much famil
iar intercourse with him, and had appeared often openly as his fol-
, lowers. Perhaps it was the common bond of discipleship to him
which in the course of the year had drawn them into closer union
with one 'another. Peter and Andrew had previously resided at
Bethsaida, a town at the northeastern extremity of the lake, but they
had now removed to Capernaum, had entered into partnership with
the two sons of Zebedee, and had been plying their craft together on
the lake, when aU the four were pointedly and speciaUy summoned
in a way they never before had been to foUow the Lord.
The difficulties that many have felt in harmonizing the narratives
206 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
in the fourth chapter of St. Matthew and first chapter of St. Mark
with that in the fifth chapter of St. Luke, have led them to beheve
that two such summonses were given ; that on the first occasion — the
one referred to by the two former — the four had answered the appeal
by an immediate throwing up of their occupation by the lake side,
but that they had again, and not long afterwards, resumed it, requir
ing a still more impressive instrumentaHty finally to sever the bonds.
We are inchned rather to beheve that all which the three evangehsts
relate occurred in the course of the same morning, and that it hap
pened somewhat in this manner :
The day had dawned. From his solitary place of rest and prayer,
somewhere among the neighboring hills, Jesus had come down to the
quiet beach as the first Hght of the morning struck across the placid
bosom of the lake. The unproductive toil of the night was nearly
over for the fishermen. Out a httle distance upon the waters, Peter
and Andrew had cast in their net for the last time as Jesus approach
ed the shore. But his progress was interrupted by the crowds hur
rying out of Capernaum, so soon as it was known that he was there.
Through these crowds — stopping occasionaUy to address a few words
to them — Jesus made his way to one or other of those small creeks
or inlets still to be seen there, where a boat could ride a few feet from
the shore, and the people, seated on either side and before the speak
er, could hsten quietly to one addressing them from the boat. Here
in this creek two boats were drawn up, the property of the f6ur — the
two pairs of brothers already spoken of. The fishermen had gone
out of them, and were mending their nets ; not so far away, however,
but that one of them, Peter, noticing the Lord's approach, had
returned. Entering into his boat, Jesus asked Peter to thrust out a
little from the land ; and when this was done, he sat down and taught
the people out of the boat. The teaching over, Jesus turned to •
Peter, and said to him, "Launch out into the deep, and let down
your nets for a draught" — a singular command to come from one
who knew so httle— might be supposed to care so Httle — about the
fisherman's craft. StiU it came so decidedly from one whom Peter
had already learned to address as Master, that, with a few words of
explanation, indicative of the smaUness of his hope, he prepares to
comply with it. " Master," he says, " we have toiled all the night,
and have taken nothing ; nevertheless, at thy word I wiU let down
the net.'' He caUs his brother, and launches out — lets down the net.
At once such a multitude of fishes is enclosed that the boat begins to
fill, the net to break. Excited by what they had seen, James and
John had by this time launched their boat, and Peter beckons them
THE CALLING TO THE AFOSTOLATE. 207
to come and help. They come, but aU the help they can give is
scarce sufficient. Both boats are fiUed, and almost sinking as they
get ashore.
Peter had already seen Jesus do wonderful things — turn water
into wine, eject the devfl from the demoniac, raise his own wUe's
mother from the fever-bed ; but somehow this wonder came home to
him as none of them had done — wrought in his own vessel, with his
own net, in the way of his own caUing, after his own fruitless toil.
Never had the impression of a divine Power at work in his immedi
ate presence taken such a hold of him. Never had the sense of his
being in close contact with One in whom such power resided come so
upon his spirit. Astonishment, fear, humihation — the impression,
not of his weakness only, but of his sinfulness — of his unworthiness
to stand in such a presence — fiU and overwhelm his open, ardent,
impressible spirit. He falls at Jesus' knees, as he sat there in the
boat, quietly watching aU the stir and bustle of the fishermen ; and
he gives vent to the feeling that for a moment is uppermost, as he
exclaims, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord !" And
ever stfll, when the first clear and overpowering revelation is made to
any man of an Almighty Being compassing his path, besetting him
before and behind, laying his hand upon him — ever when the first
true and real contact takes place of the human spirit with the Hving
God a3 the Being with whom we have so closely and constantly to
do, wfll something like the same effect be reahzed. So it was with
him who said, " I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but
now mine eye seeth thee ; wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in
dust and ashes." So it was with him who said, " Woe is me ! for I
am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of
unclean lips : for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."
"Depart from me." Nothing could have surprised Peter more
than the Lord's taking him at his word — then and for ever after turn
ing his back upon him. No man then living would have felt such a
forsaking more. Wishing to express how unfit he felt himseU for such
a presence, Peter, with his wonted rashness, had said more than he
really meant. He asks Christ to go, yet he clings to him. "I am a
sinful man, O Lord." Jesus knows that better than Peter does.
Peter wfll know it better when the Lord looks at him in the judg
ment-hall, and he goes out to weep over his denials. But Jesus
knows, also, that it is because he is so sinful a man he must not be
forsaken. And though he is so sinful a man, yet still he may be
chosen to stand in closest relationship to his Master. "Fear not,"
said Jesus to him: "from henceforth thou shalt catch men."
208 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
The words of direction, assurance, promise, addressed in the first
instance to Peter alone, were soon repeated to his three associates.
The shore was reached, the boats hauled up, the fish disposed of, James
and John had carried the broken nets away to a little distance to mend
them, when first to the one pair of brothers, and then to the other,
Jesus said, "Follow me, and I wUl make you fishers of men." And
immediately they left boats and nets, and two of them their father, and
forsook aU, and followed him. We may think it was not much that
they had to leave, but it was their all; and the promptness and en-
tireness of their relinquishment of it shows what power over them
the Saviour had already got — what a readiness for service and for
sacrifice was already in them. And these were the four men who
ever after stood most closely associated with Jesus — the four who
btand at the head of every hst of the twelve apostles.
It was not indeed till some time after this that along with the
other eight, they were set apart to the peculiar office of the aposto
late. This calling of them away from their former avocations, this
attaching of them permanently to his person, was a marked step tow
ard their instalment in that position. It was the same with Matthew,
the publican. The high road from Damascus southward to Judea
and Egypt ran from the slopes of Mount Hermon down to the north
ern extremity of the sea of GaHlee, and for a short distance skirted
along the northwestern shore of the lake, passing through Caper
naum. On the side of this road, close to the lake, stood the booth
in which Matthew sat levying the toU on the passengers and their
goods. He was one of a hated and degraded class. The payment
of the taxes exacted by the foreigners under whose rule they were,
irritated to the last degree the Jews, who regarded it as a visible sign
and token of their bondage. The strong feehng thus excited spent
itseU on aU who had any thing to do with the collection of these
taxes. No Jew who desired to stand weU with his feUow-countrymen
would be a tax-gatherer. The office was commonly held by foreign
ers, or by those who cared but Httle for a purely Jewish reputation.
Matthew was a Jew, yet he had become a publican, and now he is
sitting at the receipt of custom as Jesus passed by. We know noth
ing of his personal character or previous habits. Considering that a
year at least had passed since Jesus had first appeared as a pubhc
teacher in Gahlee — that so prominent a part of his ministry had been
conducted in the very neighborhood in which Matthew Hved — it may
be regarded as a violent supposition that there had been no previous
acquaintance and intercourse between him and our Lord. It would
be more in keeping with Christ's conduct in other instances to imag-
THE CALLING TO THE APOSTOLATE. 209
ine that, so far as his occupation had permitted, Matthew had already
appeared as the follower of the new teacher, had shown himseU to
have been favorably affected towards him. However it was, Jesus saw
in him a man who, under right teaching and training, would be well
suited for the high office he intended to confer upon him ; and so,
despite of the invidious office he now held, Jesus stopped as he
passed by — said, "FoUow me;" and "he left all, rose up, and followed
him," throwing up thus a lucrative engagement, and casting in his
lot with the smaU but growing band which Jesus was forming.
So soon as it was known that a pubHcan had not only been seen
in tlie foUowing of Jesus — which might have occurred and occasioned
no remark — but that Jesus had actuaUy selected a publican and invi
ted him to become one of his immediate attendants, a great commo
tion among the scribes and Pharisees arose. It was a public scandal,
an offence against aU propriety, that one pretending to be a religious
guide of the people — one preaching the Kingdom of God: — should caU
a pubhcan to his side, and take him into his confidence. Bad enough
that he should himself be seen breaking the Sabbath and encouraging
his disciples to do so likewise; but to pass by all the respectable
inhabitants of Capernaum — so many of whom were conspicuous for
the strictness of their observance of all the Jewish ordinances — and
to confer such a mark of favor upon a man with whom none of them
would associate — what was to be thought of such an act? But the
worst had not yet come. Either instantly upon his throwing up his
office, or a few days thereafter, this Matthew makes a feas*fc — a farewell
one, it would seem — to which a number of his old friends and associ
ates were invited, and there Jesu,s and his disciples were to be seen
sitting among the other guests. The Pharisees could not stand this.
They did not venture, indeed, to go and openly reproach Christ per-
sonaUy with it. They were smarting too keenly under the recent
rebuke they had got from him to have courage to do so ; but they go to
his disciples, and they say to them, "Why eateth your Master with pub
hcans and sinners?" Jesus does not leave it to the disciples to reply.
As in so many other instances, he takes the matter into his own
hands, and, haU in irony, half in earnest, he says to them, " They that
be whole need not a physician, but they that be sick." They thought
themselves the hale and healthy ; they spake of these publicans and
sinners as corrupt and diseased ; why, then, blame him if he, as the
great Physician, went where his services were most required? It was
sinners, not the righteous, that he came to caU to repentance. If
they needed no repentance, why blame him if he went to call those
whose ears were open to his entreaties? But were they, indeed, so
Life of Ctrl. I 14
210 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
much better than those whom they despised? The difference be
tween them was far more an outward, a ceremonial, than an inward,
a moral, a spiritual one. Many of these poor pubhcans and sin
ners — excommunicated though they might be — very careless about
religious rites — were men of simpler, truer, more honest natures,
kindlier in their dispositions, and in a sense, too, more devout, than
many of these pretentious pietists. " Go," said Jesus to those who
imagined themselves to be righteous and despised others — "Go, and
learn what that meaneth : I wiU have mercy and not sacrifice " —
mercy rather than sacrifice if the two be put in comparison; mercy
alone, and no sacrifice, if the two are put in opposition — mercy among
pubhcans and sinners rather than sacrifice or any amount of cere
monial observances among scribes and Pharisees.
But now another class interferes, to make common cause with
the Pharisees. Some of the disciples of John the Baptist had early
seen the superiority of Jesus, and at their master's own instance had
enroUed themselves among his foUowers. But others stood aloof,
having more in them of the old Judaic spirit — attracted as much by
the ascetic habits of the Baptist as by any thing about him — recog
nizing in the fasts that he kept, the prayers that he himseU offered
and taught his disciples to offer, a return to a stfll purer and stricter
piety than even that which the Pharisees practised. It was a strange
and repulsive thing to such, at the very hour when their master was
cast into prison and they were mourning and fasting more than
usual on this account, to see Jesus and his disciples going about eat
ing and drinking — nay, accepting invitations to festive entertainments
in publicans' houses! St. Matthew tells us that these disciples of
John went at once to Jesus with their complaint. St. Mark com
pletes the picture by informing us that the Pharisees joined in the
complaint. Nothing more likely than that when the one saw how
differently the discipleship of Jesus was developing itself from what
they had expected, they should rather faU back upon the austerity
of Pharisaism, with its frequent fastings and many prescribed exer
cises of devotion — nothing more natural than that the Pharisees
should seize upon the occasion and ally themselves with the followers
of the Baptist, to aim thereby a fresh blow at Christ's authority and
influence over the people. Christ's answer meets both sets of com-
plainers. " And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the bride-
chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them ? but the
days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and
then shall they fast." Matt. 9 : 15. In the last testimony that the
Baptist had borne to Jesus had he not said, " He that hath the bride
THE CALLING TO THE APOSTOLATE. 211
is the bridegroom ; but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth
and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom's voice."
The position that John had thus claimed for himself, those disciples
against whom the complaint was lodged were now occupying. They
were the friends of the bridegroom — standing and hearing and re
joicing — was it a time for them to mourn and to fast? The days
were to come when the bridegroom should be taken away from
them, then should they fast — the fasting flowing spontaneously,
unbidden, from the grief. There is no general command here pre
scribing fasting, but simply a prophecy, referring to a pecuHar and
brief period in the history of the Lord's disciples ; a prophecy, how
ever, rich in the intimation it conveys that aU external acts and exer
cises, such as that of fasting, should spring naturally out of some
pure and deep emotion of the heart seeking for itself an appropriate
expression. And now two short parables are added by our Lord : the first we
may regard as pecuharly apphcable to the disciples of John, the
other to the Pharisees. "No man putteth a piece of new cloth
unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from
the garment, and the rent is made worse." Matt. 9 : 16. No man
would take a piece of new raw cloth, which would not keep its form
afterwards, which, when wet, would shrink, and sew it into the rent
of an old garment ; for ere long, when the new piece put in con
tracted, it would tear itseU away from the old, and the rent would be
made worse. And let not the disciples of the Baptist think that this'
new piece of their master's asceticism, with its new fastings and new
prayers, was to be sewed, as they seemed to wish to do, into the old,
wornout, rent garment of Pharisaism. To try that would be to try
to unite what could not lastingly be conjoined ; instead of closing
up the rent, it would be to make it wider than ever. "Neither
do men put new wine into old bottles ; else the bottles break, and
the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish : but they put new wine
into new bottles, and both are preserved." Matt. 9 : 17. No man
taketh old dry withered skin bottles, such as then were used, and
filleth them with new wine ; for the new wine would ferment, expand,
and the bottles be burst, and the wine spflled and lost. And let not
the Pharisees think that the new wine of the kingdom, the fresh
spirit of love to God and man, which Jesus came to breathe into
regenerated humanity, could be safely poured into their old bottles
—into those forms and ceremonies of worship, dry as dust, and brittle
as the thinnest and most withered piece of leather. No, there must
be new bottles for the new wine, bottles that will yield to the pres-
212 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
sure from within, and expand as the fermenting Hquid which they
contain expanded. And such new bottles as were thus required
Jesus was finding — not in priestly men, chained up from childhood
within priestly habits— not in those fixed and rigid Levitical institu
tions which the long years that had been draining them of their
vitaHty had been stiffening into an immovable inflexibflity : but in
these fishermen, these pubhcans — natural, homely, unlearned- men,
open to imbibe his spirit in all its richness and expansiveness ;
and in those simple forms and institutions of Christianity, which,
cramped by no formal and immutable injunctions, were to be left
free to take such new outward shapes as the indwelling spirit might
mould. These two homely parables of our Lord, so specially adapted as
they were to the circumstances in which they were uttered — the indi
viduals to whom they were addressed — do they not carry with them
a lesson to aU times and ages of Christianity ? Do they not remind
us of the absolute incompatibility of the legal and the evargehcal
obedience — the spirit of the law and the spirit of the gospel ? There
is a rehgion, of which the Pharisaism of Christ's days was an exag
gerated specimen — the very heart and soul of which consists in pen
ances and prayers and fastings — in worship offered, in duties done,
in sacrifices made, in mortifications inflicted and endured — aU to
soothe an agitated conscience, to win a peace with God, to eke out a
hope of heaven. To this the faith that is in Christ our Saviour
stands directly and diametrically opposed — the one offering as a free
gUt what the other toils after as a reward; the one inviting us to
begin where the other would have us end ; the one putting forgive
ness and acceptance with God in our hand and calling upon us, in
the free spirit of his redeemed, forgiven, adopted children, to live
and serve and in all things to submit to our Father which is in
heaven — the other holding out the forgiveness and the acceptance
away in the distance, and calling upon us, in the spirit of bondage,
to labor aU through life for their attainment; the one the old tattered
garment, the other the piece of new-made cloth.
And the wine of the kingdom, ever as it pours itseU afresh from
its fountain-head on high into the spirit of man, is it not a new wine
that needs new bottles to contain it ? If it be indeed the Spirit of
Christ which is working in hearts that have been opened to receive
it, may we not safely leave it to its own operation there, and allow it
to shape the vessel that holds it as it likes? Both, indeed, are
needed — the outward form, the inner spirit; nor will any wise or
thoughtful man rashly touch or mould into different shape the first,
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 213
thinking thereby to improve the second; but neither wfll he hindei
or hamper the second if, by its own proper motion, it is going on
gently to remould the first.
IV.
The Sermon on The Mount.*
The traveUer from Jerusalem gets his first sight of the sea of Gal
ilee from the top of Mount Tabor. It is but a smaU corner of the lake
that he sees, lying miles away, deep sunk among the hflls. Descend
ing from the height whence this first glimpse of the lake is got, the
road to Tiberias leads over an elevated undulating plateau, the one
marked feature of which is a curious double-peaked hfll, rising about
fifty or sixty feet above the general level of the surrounding table
land, and sloping down on its eastern side into the plain of Gennesa
ret. From the two prominences it presents, this hiU is called the
Horns of Hattin — Hattin being a vfllage at its base. It overlooks
the lake and the plain. Tou see Capernaum from its summit, lying
across the valley about seven miles off. As seen again from Caper
naum and the plain, it appears as the highest and loneliest elevation
f:.at rises upon that side of the lake. It would naturaUy be spoken
of by the inhabitants of Capernaum and its neighborhood, even as
St. Matthew speaks of it, as the mountain. It would naturaUy be the
place to which any one seeking for solitude would retire. When
somewhere in its neighborhood there came around our Lord " a great
multitude of people out of all Judea and Jerusalem, and from the sea-
coast of Tyre and Sidon, and from Gahlee and Decapolis, and from
Idumea and from beyond Jordan," (Luke 6 : 17 ; Mark 3:8; Matt.
4 : 25,) and when, seeking relief from the pressure, it is said that he
went up into a mountain, no one so hkely to be the one referred to
by the evangehst as the Horns of Hattin — to which, as the supposed
place of their utterance, the name of the Mount of the Beatitudes has
for ages been given.
The night upon this mountain was spent by Christ in prayer —
alone perhaps upon the higher summit, the disciples slumbering be
low. At dawn he called them to him, and out of them he chose the
twelve and ordained them, " that they might be with him, and that
ho might send them forth to preach." But on what principle was the
selection made? in what manner was the ordination effected? It
* Matt, chaps. 5, 6, 7 ; Luke 6 : 20-49.
214 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
may be presumed that some regard was had to the personal qualifica
tions of those whom the Lord chose for this high office. We know
indeed too little of any but two or three of the twelve to trace the
special fitness of the human instrument for the work given it to do.
Of all but one, however, we may beheve that such fitness did exist
But how came that one to be numbered with the rest? It is possible
that Judas may have done much to obtrude himself, or that others
may have done much to obtrude him upon the notice of the Saviour.
We read of one who, with great professions of attachment, volunteered
to become a disciple, saying to Jesus, " Master, I wfll follow thee
whithersoever thou goest ;" whom Jesus "neither rejected nor wel
comed, meeting his declaration of adherence with the ominous words,
" The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the
Son of man hath not where to lay his head." If, as some have
thought, the man who came forward in this way and pressed himself
into the discipleship was Judas — U he was a man of acknowledged
ability and considerable influence, whom no- one at the time had the
shghtest reason to suspect, who was welcomed by all the other disci
ples, and commended by them to their Master as a most desirable
associate — if the rejection of such a man in such circumstances would
have seemed to be an act of caprice without known or apparent rea
son, this might serve perhaps in some shght degree to explain to us
how Judas came at first to be numbered with the twelve. Many will
feel as if there were something like profanity in any conjecture of this
kind, and all wiU be satisfied simply to accept the fact that Jesus
chose those twelve men, and yet that one of them was a devil.
Was it by simple designation to the office without any form or
ceremony? or was it by laying of Christ's hand solemnly on the head
of each, then gathering the circle round him and offering up a conse
cration prayer, that the apostles were set apart ? We cannot tell. It
is surely singular, however, that the manner of the ordination of the
apostles by our Lord himseU, in like manner as the ordination of the
first presbyters or bishops of the church by the apostles, should have
been left unnoticed and undescribed.
The ordination over, Jesus descended to a level spot, either be
tween the two summits or lying at their base. Luke 6 : 17. The day
had now advanced, and the great multitude that had followed him,
apprised of his place of retreat, poured in upon him, bringing their
diseased along with them. He stood for a time healing aU who were
brought to him. Eetreating then again to the mountain side, he sat
down. His disciples seated themselves immediately around him,
and the great multitude stood or sat upon the level ground below,
mk %?m\ #
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THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 215
Such were the circumstances under which the Sermon on the
Mount was delivered. It may have been the first discourse of the
kind which St. Matthew had heard ; aU the more natural, therefore,
that he should have been directed to preserve so full a record of it.
We have no authority for saying that it was actuaUy the first formal
and lengthened address delivered by our Lord. Many other longer
or shorter discourses, to smaUer or larger audiences, may Jesus have
spoken during this period of his ministry. But this was the one
selected by Divine Wisdom to be presented as a specimen or sample
of our Lord's teaching, as addressed to mixed Galilean audiences in
the earlier stages of his ministry. There was a change in his mode
of teaching afterwards, even in Galilee, as there was a marked dif
ference between aU his discourses there and those addressed to very
different audiences in Jerusalem. Here upon the mount he had a
vast concourse of people of aU castes and from aU quarters before
him. Nearest to him were his own disciples. To them his words
were in the first instance spoken, but they were meant to reach the
consciences and hearts of the motley crowd that lay beyond.
Now, if there was one sentiment spread more widely than another
throughout this crowd, it was the vague yet ardent expectation beat
ing then in almost every Jewish breast, of some great national deliv
erance — of the near approach of a new kingdom — the kingdom of
God. Of this kingdom they had no higher conception than that it
would bo a free and independent outward and visible Jewish mon
archy. And when it came, then should come the days of hberty and
peace, of honor and triumph, and all kinds of blessedness for poor
oppressed Judea. With what a delicate hand — not openly and rudely
rebuking, yet laying the axe withal at its very roots — was this deep
national prejudice now treated by our Lord. What could have run
more directly counter to the earthly ambitious hopes, swelling up
within the hearts of those around him ? what could have served more
effectuaUy to check them, than the very first words which Jesus
uttered? "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn : for they shall be comfort
ed. Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed
are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness : for they
shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful : for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart ; for they shaU see God. Blessed are
the peacemakers : for they shaU be called the children of God. Bless
ed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake : for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you,
and persecute you, and shaU say all manner of evil against you
816 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
falsely, for my sake. Eejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is
your reward in heaven : for so persecuted they the prophets which
were before you." How different the kind of blessedness thus
described from that which his hearers had been hungering and
Ihirsting after. -How different the kind of kingdom thus described
from that which they had been expecting he would set up. And,
apart from their special use and immediate service as addressed of
old to the Galilean audience, these beatitudes remain to teach us
wherein the only true, pure, lasting blessedness for man consists;
not in any thing outward, not in the gratification of any of our natu
ral passions or desires, our covetousness, or our pride, or our ambi
tion, or our love of pleasure ; not in what we have, but in what we
are in God's sight and in relation to his empire over our souls. The
poor in spirit, those most deeply conscious of their spiritual poverty,
their want of that which can alone find favor with God ; the mourn
ers whose grief is the fruit of guilt and unworthiness realized and
deeply felt ; the meek, who bow patiently and submissively to every
stroke, whoever be the smiter; the hungerers and thirsters after
righteousness, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted for
righteousness' sake — do we regard these as the happiest of our race ?
is theirs the kind of happiness upon which our heart is chiefly set,
and which we are laboring with our utmost efforts to realize ? If not,
however ready we may be to extol the pure and high morahty of the
Sermon on the Mount, we have fafled to take in the first and one of
the greatest truths which it conveys, as to the source, and seat, and
character, and conditions of the only abiding and indestructible
blessedness of sinful man.
But while the multitude were cherishing false ideas and expecta
tions about his kingdom, many were cherishing false ideas and fears
about Christ himself that equally required to be removed. They had
noticed in his teaching the absence of any reference to many of those
rehgious services that they had so punctiliously performed, some dis
regard of them in his own practice and in that of his disciples. "This
man," they began to say, " is an enemy to Moses. He is aiming at
nothing short of a subversion of the old, the heaven-given law."
Jesus must proclaim how untrue the accusation was. " Think not,"
he said, "that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am
not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till
heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from
the law, till all be fulfilled." But in what did the true fulfilment of
the Mosaic law consist ? It was a vast and comphcated code, em
bracing a body of laws for a peculiar people, existing at a particular
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 217
period, and organized for a special purpose ; subject, therefore, to aU
the limitations and exhibiting aU the adaptations to existing circum
stances which, in proportion to the wisdom with which it is framed,
all such legislation must display. It had in it commands of a purely
ethical and reHgious character, conveyed in more general and abstract
forms ; and it had in it a large apparatus of positive enactments and
ordinances chiefly meant to symbolize the truths and facts of the
Christian dispensation. It was not throughout an expression of
God's absolute wfll, perfect, immutable, meant to be of permanent and
universal obUgation. Part of it, perfectly adapted to its design, was
inherently imperfect ; part of it as necessarUy transitory. When the
time came that the Jewish nation should either cease to exist or
cease to have its old functions to discharge, and when aU its types
and ceremonies had their true meaning expressed and their ends
accomphshed, then out of this comphcated law there would come to
be extracted that which was absolutely perfect and universaUy oblig-
atory. Jesus knew that at his advent that time had come, and
assuming the very place and exercising the very prerogative of the
divine legislator of the Jews, he begins in this Sermon on the Mount
to execute this task. He treats the old Jewish practice of divorce as
imperfect, being adapted to a single nation at a particular stage of
its moral training, and lays down the original and perfect law of the
marriage relationship. In Hke manner he deals with the lex talionis —
the rule of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and with the
law and custom as to oaths. But it is especially in his treatment of
those commandments about whose permanent obhgation there was
and could be no doubt, that the novelty and value of his teaching
displayed itseU. These were negative and prohibitory in their form.
"Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not commit adultery," etc. They
had been looked at in the letter rather than in the spirit. They had
been regarded simply as prohibitions of certain outward acts or
crimes. Abstinence from the forbidden deeds had been taken as a
keeping of the Divine commands. Obedience had thus come to be
looked upon as a thing of outward constraint or mechanical con
formity, its merit lying in the force of the constraint, the exactness of
the cor.formity. It was thus that the righteousness of the scribes
and Pharisees consisted mainly in a stiff and formal adherence to the
letter of the precept, to the neglect often and sometimes to the con
tradiction of its spirit. This fatal error Christ exposes, taking up
commandment after commandment, unfolding the spirituality and
extent of the requirement, showing how it reached not simply or
mainly to the regulation of the outward conduct, but primarily and
218 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
above all things to the state of the heart; that murder lay in embryc
in an angry feeling; that adultery lurked in a Hcentious look; that it
was not alone when the name of God was vainly used that irrever
ence might be exhibited and profane swearing practised ; that the
old Jewish rule of retahation was no rule for the regulation of the
Affections or the guidance of the conduct in a pure and perfect state ;
that from the heart every sentiment of malice or revenge must be
banished, and in the conduct the evil done to us by another remain
unresented, unavenged, the enemy to be loved, the persecutor to be
prayed for; and all this done that we might be merciful as our Father
that is in heaven is mercUul, perfect as he is perfect, children of him
who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth
his rain on the just and on the unjust.
This end and aim of being like to, of being imitators of God, was
one too pure, too high, too holy, to suffer corruption and the worm
to enter into it by admixture with the selfish and ignoble motive of
courting human approval, winning human applause. Too much of
the almsgiving and the fasting and the praying that he saw practised
around him was done to be seen of men — prompted by no other mo
tive — was nothing but hypocrisy, utterly offensive to his Father in
heaven. Concealed and unostentatious let the givings and the fast
ings be, short and simple and secret the prayers of those who would
be his disciples and true children of his Father, whom seeing in secret
he would in due time openly reward.
Let aU be done as unto him with an undivided allegiance, for no
man can serve two masters : and with an unbounded trust, for, hav
ing such a Father, why should there be any over-carefulness for
earthly things — those things that He knows we have need of, or any
undue concern about a future which is not ours but his ? Why so
anxious about food and raiment ? It is God who sustains the hfe of
the body ; you must trust him for that, the greater thing : then why
distrust him for the less ? Behold the fowls of the air ; consider the
HUes of the field ; look at the grass that grows beneath your feet.
Not theirs, as yours, the capacity for trust and toil and foresight. A
worthless, fleeting existence theirs as compared with yours ; yet see how
they are not only cared for, but lavishly adorned. " Take, therefore,
no thought for the morrow : for the morrow shaU take thought for
the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. But
seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness ; and afl these
things shall be added unto you."
Conscious of your own far shortcomings from that perfect confi
dence you should cherish, that constant service you should be ren-
THE SERMOJS ON THE MOUNT. 219
dering, be not severe in criticising or condemning others. Judge
not, that ye be not judged. " Why beholdest thou the mote that is
in thy brother's eye, and considerest not the beam that is in thine
own eye ? Thou hypocrite ; first cast out the beam out of thine own
eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy
brother's eye."
It may be very difficult to be all, to do all that I am now telling
you you ought to be and to do; but is there not an open and effectual
way for having every felt spiritual want relieved ? " Ask, and it shall
be given you ; seek, and ye shaU find ; knock, and it shall be opened
unto you." " H ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your
children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give
good things to them that ask him?"
Drawing from the exhaustless fountain of grace and strength that
in him is opened to you, fear not to adopt this as the one comprehen
sive rule of your whole bearing and conduct toward others: "All
things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even
so to them; for this is the law and the prophets."
Before the days of Christ there was a great Jewish teacher, Hillel.
An inquirer once came to him asking the strange question : "Can you
teach one the whole law during the time that I am able to stand on
one foot?" "Yes," said HiUel, "it is contained in this one rule:
Whatsoever ye would not wish that your neighbor should do to you,
do it not to him." This and other sayings of preceding rabbis have
been quoted with a view of detracting somewhat from the originality
of the moral teaching of Christ. Yet even here, while the resem
blance between the lessons taught is so marked, one grand difference
may be discerned — a difference that runs through so large a part of
the Saviour's precepts as compared with those of all other moral legis
lators. He translates the negative into the positive. With him it is
not — be not, do not ; but, be and do. In few instances are any spe
cific rules of conduct laid down. To plant the right spirit and motive
in the heart, out of which all true morality proceeds, is the great
object He aims at. 'Look up to God,' he says to us, 'as indeed your
Father — ever hving, ever loving, patiently bearing with you, largely
providing for you, wiUing to forgive you. Walk humbly, meekly, trust
ingly before him. Commit your way to him, cast all your care on him,
seek all your suppUes from him, render all your returns to him. Look
upon all your feUow-men as children of the same Father, members
of the same family. Love each other, and live together as brethren,
bearing yourselves towards aU around you patiently, forgivingly, gen
erously, hopefully. The gate thus opened is strait, the way is narrow,
220 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
but it is the only one that leadeth unto Hfe. An L finaUy, remember
that it is practice, not profession, that can alone conduct you along
the path to the throne in heaven. Hear then, and do, that ye may be
hke the wise man who buflt his house upon a rock, "and the rain
descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon
that house, and it feU not, for it was founded upon a rock." '
Such is a rapid, imperfect sketch of the Sermon on the Mount,
regarded mainly from an historical point of view, in its bearings upon
the audience to which it was originaUy addressed. The people who
first heard it, we are told, were astonished at its doctrine. WeU they
might be. It was so different from what they had been accustomed
to. No labored argument, no profound discussion, no doubtful dis
putation, no nice distinctions, no scheme of doctrines formaUy and
elaborately propounded, no exact routine of rehgious services pre
scribed. It dealt with the simplest, plainest moral and religious
truths and duties; and did this in the simplest, plainest manner;
directly, familiarly, colloquially — a freshness about it hke that of the
morning breeze which played over the mountain side. The thing,
however, that seems to have struck the hsteners most, was the calm,
unhesitating, authoritative tone in which the whole was uttered.
"They were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one
having authority, and not as the scribes." Here is One who comes
forth from none of the great schools — who has sat at the feet of none
of the great masters — who uses no book language — who appeals to
no authority but his own — a young untaught Nazarene ; and yet he
takes it upon him to pronounce with the utmost confidence as to who
the truly blessed are, and reckons among them those who were to be
railed at and persecuted for his sake. Here is One who does not
shrink from taking into his hands the law and the prophets, acting
not simply as their expositor — the clearer of them from all false tra
ditional interpretations. He is bold enough to say that he came to
fulfil them; in one remarkable instance, at least — that of the law
which permitted divorce — speaking as the original lawgiver was alone
entitled to do, declaring that the time for this permission had now
ceased, and that henceforth such divorces as Moses had tolerated
were not to be aUowed. Here is One who speaks of God as one who
fuUy knew and had a right to declare how his chUdren were to act so
as to please him; whom he would forgive, whom he would reward,
upon whom he would bestow his gUts. Here is One who, though
seated on that Galilean mountain, with nothing to distinguish him
from the humble fishermen around him, speaks of a day on which he
should be seated on the throne of universal judgment, to whom many
THE RAISING OF THE "WIDOW'S SON. 221
should say, " Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name ? and
in thy name have cast out devils ? and in thy name done many won
derful works ?" — to whom he was to reply, " I never knew you : depart
from me, ye that work iniquity."
In consequence of the simphcity, purity, and elevation of the
moral precepts which it contains, and stfll more, perhaps, because of
none of the peculiar doctrines as to the person, character, office, and
work of Christ as the Mediator being found in it, this Sermon on the
Mount has been greedily seized upon and highly extoUed by many as
the true epitome of Christianity — as Christ's own gospel coming from
his own lips. But it is far less difficult for us to discern the reasons
why the truths of the incarnation and the propitiatory sacrifice we're
not at this time and to that audience alluded to or dwelt upon by
Jesus, than it is for any who would reduce him to the level of a mere
moral legislator to account for the position which, even when enunci
ating the simplest moral precepts, he assumed — for the tone of author
ity in which he speaks. Dimly, indeed, through this Sermon on the
Mount does the Jesus of the cross appear, but the Jesus of the throne
is here, and once that we have learned from other after-teachings of
himseU and his apostles to know and love and trust in him as our
great High Priest, who has bought us with his blood, it will be the
habit and dehght of every true and faithful follower of his to take up
and dweU upon that wonderful discourse, in which, more clearly and
fuUy than in any other words of human speech, the very spirit and
essence of a humble, child-like faith in God, and the lofty ideal of a
perfect, a heavenly morahty, are unfolded and enforced.
V.
The Raising of the Widow's Son and the Ruler's
Daughter.*
The multitude that listened to the Sermon on the Mount foUowed
Jesus from the hill-side into Capernaum, thronging round the house
into which he entered, and pressing their sick so urgently on his
notice that he " could not so much as eat bread." A mode of hfe
hke this — out aU night upon the mountain-top, teaching, walking,
working aU day long without food or rest — so affected the minds of
bis immediate relatives when they heard of it, that they " went out
?Luke 7 : 11-17 ; 8 : 41-56 ; Matt. 9 : 18-26 ; Mark 5 : 22-43.
222 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to lay hold of him, for they said, He is beside himself." Failing in
their endeavors, they left him to pursue his eccentric course.
It was in the course of the busy day which foUowed the delivery
of the Sermon on the Mount that the centurion's servant was healed,
and the opportunity was thereby given to Jesus to hold up to the
eyes of the people an example of such faith as he had not found —
no, not in Israel. On the following day he left Capernaum. " Many
of his disciples and much people " went with him. They had a long
day's walk over the hills of Galilee, skirting the base of Tabor, and
descending into the plain of Esdraelon. The sun was sinking in the
west, away behind the ridge of Carmel, and was gilding with his
evening beams the slopes of little Hermon, as Jesus and the band
which followed him approached the village of Nain. This village is
now a confused heap of the rudest Syrian huts, unenclosed, with no
ruins of ancient buildings, nor any antiquities around, save the tombs
in the rock upon the hill-side, where for ages they have buried
the dead. And yet it stands next to Nazareth and Bethlehem and
Bethany in the sacred interest attached to it. We are so sure of its
identity, it is so small, so isolated, having nothing but the one won
derful incident to mark its history, that the Saviour's living presence
was almost as vividly realized by us when entering it as when we sat
by the side of Jacob's weU. We stood at the end of the village
which looks northward towards Galilee, and tried to recall the scene.
Jesus and his train of foUowers have crossed the plain, and are draw
ing near to the viUage. Another company moves slowly and sadly
out of its gate and meets them. It is a funeral procession ; a large
one, for all the villagers have come forth ; but there is no mark or
token that it is the funeral of one who had been rich or in any way
distinguished. The bier is of the plainest, and there foUows it as
chief mourner a sohtary woman, clad in humblest guise. Jesus has
none beside him, as he stops and looks, to tell him who this woman
is — who the dead for whom she mourns. He does not need the
information ; he knows her history ; he knows her grief better than
any inhabitant of Nain. To his eye it is a becommg and beautiful
thing that grief like hers should have such homage paid to it, should
have drawn the whole village out after her by the pure force of sym
pathy. Her claim, indeed, upon that sympathy is strong. This is
not the first bier she has followed. She had wept for another before
she wept for him whom they are now carrying to the grave. She is
a widow — weeping now behind the bier of her only son. Bereft of
every earthly stay she walks, a picture of perfect desolation.
"And when the Lord saw her he had compassion on her." As
THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON. 223
soon as his eye rests on her his heart fflls fuU of pity. Was this
the first funeral he had ever met by the wayside along with his dis
ciples ? Was this the first mourner he had ever noticed go weeping
thus behind the dead ? It may not have been so ; yet never perhaps
before had he seen a poor lone widowed mother shed such bitter
tears over the death of an only son. The sight moves him at least
to do what he had never done before. He goes up to the woman, and
says to her " Weep not." Wrapped up in her consuming grief, how
surprised she must have been at being accosted in such a way at
such a time. Does this stranger mean to mock her, to deal rudely
with her in her grief. In any other she might have been ready to
repel and resent the unseasonable intrusion — the strange unreason
able speech ; but there is something in the loving, pitying eye that
looks at her as she glances at him timidly through her tears — some
thing of hope, of promise, of assurance in the gentle yet authorita
tive tones of his voice that quenches aU disposition to repel or
resent. But why does Christ first say to her, "Weep not"? Does he
not know what he is about to do ? Does he not know that within a
few minutes that will be done by him which, without any bidding on
his part, wfll dry up aU her tears ? He does ; but he cannot go for
ward to his great act without yielding to the impulse of pity ; drop
ping into the ear of the mourner, not as a cold word of command,
fitted only to give needless pain, but as a spontaneous expression of
his warm personal compassion — the words, "Weep not." Such a
preface to the miracle speaks to us as plainly of the tenderness of
Christ's sympathy as the miracle itseU proclaims the infinitude of his
power. " And he came and touched the bier, and they that bore him stood
still." And all stand as stfll as the bearers ; the two groups, the one
from Capernaum and the other from Nain, lost in wonder as to what is
to happen next. AU eyes turn upon Jesus. His turn upon the bier.
The silence is broken by the simple majestic words, " Young man, I
say unto thee, Arise." The young man rises, looks about -with won
der, and begins to speak. Jesus takes him by the hand, hfts him
from the bier, dehvers him to his mother. The deed of mercy is
done, and nothing more is told, but that a great fear came upon
all. "And they glorified God, saying, That a great prophet is
risen up among us ; and, That God hath visited his people. And
this rumor of him went forth throughout aU Judea, and throughout
all the region round about."
It was a few days or weeks before or after this incident (for the
•date is uncertain) that one of the rulers of the synagogue ac Caper-
224 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
naum, Jairus by name, came to Jesus as he sat at meat in the house
of Levi, and " cast himseU at his feet, and worshipped him, and be
sought him greatly, saying, My little daughter Heth at the point ol
death ; come and lay thy hands upon her, that she may be healed,
and she shall Hve." Jesus arose at once and went with Jairus; so
did his disciples, and so did much people; the very promptness of
Christ's comphance with the ruler's request stimulating their curios
ity. The distance could not have been great from the house of Levi
to that of Jairus, and might have speedfly been traversed, but the
crowd that thronged around Jesus by the way somewhat impeded
the movement. It gave, however, to one poor woman the opportu
nity she had long been seeking. Twelve long years she had been a
sufferer, her illness one that made her very touch pollution. AU she
had she had spent upon physicians. It seemed rather to have aggra
vated her complaint. Seeing or hearing about Jesus, a behef in the
healing virtue that lay in him had taken possession of her mind.
Her timidity, her sense of shame, kept her from going openly to him,
teUing him of her malady, and asking him to exert his power on her
behalf. But if she could in any way unseen get at him, if she could
but touch his clothes, she felt that she should be made whole. And
now he goes through this great crowd. It is the very occasion she
has been seeking for, and she seizes it; gets behind him, presses
through the people, and touches the hem of his outer garment. She
is instantly healed, but as instantly arrested. The touch has scarce
been given, the healing scarce effected, when Jesus turns round and
says, "Who touched my clothes?" They all deny the deed. Peter
ixpostulates with his Master. "The multitude," he says, "throng
thee and press thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?" Jesus
knows as weU as Peter that many had been near enough for their and
his garments to have come into contact ; but he knows, too, as Peter
knew not, that there had been a touch with a distinct, dehberate pur
pose, altogether different from that of a mere random contact, a touch
that had drawn virtue out of him. Who gave it? His eye looked
round to see, is already resting on the woman, who, seeing that she
is not hid, fearing and trembling, yet glad and grateful, throws her-
seU on her knees before him, and getting the better of aU her
womanly feelings, declares unto him " before aU the people for what
oause she had touched him, and how she was healed immediately."
Had Jesus been displeased at being touched ? Had he grudged
in any way that the virtue had in such a way been extracted ? Was
it to detect and rebuke a culprit that he had chaUenged the multi
tude ? No : it was because he knew how very strong was this worn-
THE RAISING OF THE RULER'S DAUGHTER. 225
an's faith — a faith sufficient to draw out at once in fullest measure
the heahng efficacy, and yet a faith that had in it a superstitious ele
ment, the fancy that in some magical mysterious way contact of any
kind estabhshed between her and Christ would cure her. H he aUow-
ed her to go away undetected, the heahng filched, as it were, uncon
sciously from the healer, this fancy might be confirmed, the supersti
tious element in her faith enhanced. Therefore it was that he would
not suffer the secrecy. He would meet and answer the faith which
under the heavy pressure and in despair of all other help had thrown
itself somewhat blindly yet confidingly upon his aid. But he wfll not
allow her to depart without letting her know how wrong and how
needless it had been in her to attempt concealment, without letting
her and aU around her know what was the kind of touch that she had
given which had established the right connection between her and
him, and opened the way for the remedy reaching the disease. "And
he said unto her, Daughter, be of good comfort ; thy faith hath made
thee whole, go in peace."
There is not one of all our Saviour's many miracles of healing
fuller of comfort and encouragement. For if his mode of dealing
with our spiritual diseases be shadowed out in the modes of the
bodily cures that he effected, whenever we grow sad or despondent
as we think how much of fear, or shame, or error, or weakness, or
superstition mingles with the faith we cherish, then let us remember
that U only the depth and inveteracy of the spiritual disease be felt,
if with or without a long trial of them we have been led to despair of
all other physicians of the soul, and to look alone to Jesus Christ, he
who accepted this woman's faith with all its weakening and defiling
ingredients, will not cast us off. A timid trembUng touch of him, be
it only the touch of humihty and trust, will stfll bring forth that heal
ing virtue which wraps itself up in no guarded seclusion, but delights
to pour itseff freely out into every open and empty receptacle that is
brought to it.
The stoppage by the way, however brief, must have been some
what trying to Jairus, but he showed no impatience. There was a
short delay, but with it a new proof of Christ's power weU fitted to
fortify his faith. But just as the healed woman is sent away, the
messenger arrives, who says; " Thy daughter is dead, why troublest
thou the Master any further?" The words were perhaps not meant
for the ear of Christ, yet it caught them up, and the moment it did
bo, knowing and feehng to what a strain the faith of Jairus was
exposed, and how much he needed to be assured and comforted, " as
Boon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, he saith to the ruler
TJf« of Chrlrt. IfJ
226 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only beUeve." Jairus hears the
reassuring words, and, heedless of the suggestion made, follows Jesus
as before. At last the house of the dead is reached. Jesus suffers none of
his followers to enter with him save Peter, James, and John, the
three privileged apostles who were with him on the mount of his
transfiguration and in the garden of his agony, the three chosen wit
nesses of the highest exercise of his power, the fullest display of his
glory, the greatest depth of his sorrow. The first apartment of the
ruler's house is occupied by those who fill it with a perfect tumult
of bemoaning sounds. It was the custom to hire such mourners on
these occasions — the more numerous, the more vehement, the higher
the station of the famUy. The outward demonstration of grief that
they here make is excessive, but there is no heart in aU the sound
and show, no true utterance of any real sorrow. As at discord at
once with his own feeling and with his formed purpose, Jesus rebukes
the wailers, and says to them, " Give place ; why make ye this ado ?
the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth." Not dead ? Can they, the
hired officials, not tell the difference between sleep and death ? Who
is he that speaks to them so shghtingly, so authoritatively taking it
on him, stranger though he be, to stop their lamentations? They
" laugh him to scorn :" this real laughter still more incongruous with
his presence and his purpose than the feigned grief. With Jairus to
second him, Jesus puts all the people out, takes " the father and the
mother of the damsel, and them that were with him, and entereth in
where the damsel was lying." He takes the dead child by the hand,
simply says, " Talitha cumi — damsel, arise !" and she rises, weak as
from a bed of illness, yet with all the seeds of the mortal malady
which had laid her low banished from her frame. Having directed
that some food should be given her, Jesus straitly charged the
parents that they should teU no man; an injunction, let us believe,
that they did their best to keep, and yet St. Matthew tells us "the
fame thereof went abroad into all that land."
It is difficult to understand why it was that Jesus laid such a strin
gent injunction of secrecy upon the parents in this instance. Had
the widow's son not been raised from the dead about the same time,
and in circumstances of the utmost publicity, we might have ima
gined that there was a desire on the part of Christ to throw, for a
time at least, a veil over this particular form of the manifestation of
his power. But though that other miracle had not been wrought,
had this one stood alone, how could it be hidden ? There were too
many that had seen the damsel die, or mourned over her when dead,
THE RAISING OF THE RULER'S DAUGHTER. 227
to allow of any concealment. As we think of the difficulty, we might
almost say impossibility, of such concealment, the thought occurs —
and other instances in which the same command was given by Christ
may in the same way be explained — that it was not so much with
any desire or intention to secure secresy that the order was issued,
as to prevent those who had the closest personal interest in the mir
acle being the first or the loudest in noising it abroad.
There does not seem to have been any previous acquaintance
between Christ and the widow of Nain. It may be doubted whether
she had ever seen Jesus till she met him as she was going out to bury
her son. We do not read of Jesus ever being in Nain but on that one
occasion. It lay beyond the hne of those circuits of Galilee which he
was in the habit of making. We are not surprised, therefore, at
noticing that his interference there was voluntary, without any sohci-
tation or hope entertained beforehand on the part of the mourner.
It was different with Jairus at Capernaum. He was a well-known
man, hving in the town which Jesus had chosen as his headquarters
in Galilee. In all likelihood he was one of the rulers of the Jews
who formed the deputation that a short time before had waited on
Jesus to ask his aid on behaU of the Eoman centurion. It was quite
natural that, when his "one only daughter" lay a-dying, he should
apply on her account to Christ. But there may have been in his
character and connections something of which we are ignorant, which
made it undesirable that he should be forward in proclaiming what
had happened in his house.
It was a case of recovery from the dead, about which there might
be some cavflling. The child could have been but a short time dead ;
long enough, indeed, to estabhsh the certainty of the event, yet not
so long as to hinder any one from saying that it was literally and not
figuratively true, " She is not dead, but sleepeth." In this respect
we notice a difference, a progression in the three instances of raising
from the dead recorded by the evangelists — that of Jairus' daughter,
of the widow's son, and of Lazarus. It is not distinctly said to be so ;
but we presume that these were the only three cases in which tho
dead were restored to Hfe by Christ. The one was soon after death, the
other immediately before burial, and the third after the dead man had
lain four days in the grave — the variety of the period after death at
which the restoration was in each case effected not, perhaps, without
ft purpose. For these three great miracles stand, in one respect, at
the head of aU our Lord's works of wonder. They were the highest
instances of the forth-putting of his divine almighty power. With
respect to many of his other works, questions might be raised as to
228 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the nature or extent of the power required for their performance, but
none as to these. Life in aU its forms, from the highest to the low
est, is that mysterious thing which, when once destroyed, none but
the Creator — the great LUegiver — can restore. Were a dead man
actually revivified before our eyes, we could not doubt that the power
of the Omnipotent had gone forth to do it. In no case did Jesus
Christ so conspicuously and undoubtedly show himseU to be clothed
with that power as when he raised the dead. The power, indeed, by
which he wrought such miracles might not have been naturaUy his
own. It might have been a delegated power given him for the time,
not permanently belonging to him. He might have raised the dead
as Ehjah raised the son of the widow at Zarephath, as Ehsha
did the son of the Shunamite. Had it been so, we should have
had some evidence thereof — some appeal on the part of the mere
human agent to the great Being whose power was for the mo
ment lent and exercised. It was with trouble and with pain, after
much and earnest prayer, that Elijah and EHsha, the only raisers of
the dead in aU the preceding ages, had succeeded. No one who saw
or heard them could have imagined that they claimed any natural or
inherent power of their own over the dead to caU them back to hfe.
They would themselves have counted it as the greatest insult to Jeho
vah to do so. How is it in this respect with Jesus Christ ? Stand
beside him as he caUs the dead to Hfe. Look at the manner of his
acting ; hsten to the words that he employs. Is it as a servant, the
delegate of another, that he speaks and acts ? Is it with any con
sciousness on his part, felt or exhibited, that he was rising above the
level at which he ordinarily stood, that he was then doing something
which he had been specially commissioned and supernaturally quali
fied to accomphsh ? Surely there is nothing more remarkable about
these raisings from the dead by Jesus Christ than the simple, easy,
unostentatious way in which they were effected. " Young man, I say
unto thee, Arise !" " Maid, arise !" " Lazarus, come forth !" He speaks
thus to the dead, and they hear and hve. It is in the style of Him
who said, " Let there be light, and there was hght." It is the Lord
of the living and of the dead whose voice penetrates the unseen world,
and summons the departed spirit to resume its mortal tenement.
But if, as to the power he wields, Jesus never presents himseU to
our eye in a diviner, never does he show himself in a more human
aspect than in these raisings from the dead. Can we overlook the
fact that they were those of the only son of a widowed mother, the
only daughter, if not the only child, of two fond parents, the only
brother of two affectionate sisters — of those whose loss in their
THE RAISING OF THE RULER'S DAUGHTER. 22i»
respective homesteads would be so deeply felt, of those whose resto
ration quickened so acute a grief into such an ecstatic joy ? And in
each case there was something quite singular in the tenderness of
our Lord's conduct towards the mourners. He knew beforehand how
speedily the anxiety that he witnessed would be reheved, all the sor
row chased away; but the "Weep not" to the mother before he
touched the bier, the " Fear not, only believe," to the agitated father,
the tears that fell before the grave of Lazarus, what a testimony do
they bear to the exquisite susceptibility of the Saviour's spirit — to the
quickness, the fulness, the liveliness of his sympathy with human grief.
It is even then, when he is most divine, that he is most human —
when he lifts himseU the highest above our level that he Hnks himseU
the closest to us as a true brother of our humanity. Such power to
help, such readiness and capacity to sympathize meet but in one Being.
Many passages of the New Testament might be quoted which
assign it as one of the reasons of the incarnation that there might be
such a Being, one compassed about with infirmities, one touched with
a fellow-feeling with our infirmities, one tempted in all things like as
we are, a merciful as well as a faithful, a compassionate as well as an
all-powerful, all-prevalent High Priest over the house of God. The
great Son of God, when he stooped to become a man, did not become
thereby more mercUnl, more kind, more compassionate than he had
been ; yet are we not warranted to beheve that a human element was
introduced and infused into them which otherwise the mercy, kind
ness, compassion would not have possessed ? If the manhood was
a gainer by bringing it into close, mysterious union with the Divinity,
was there no gain to the Divinity by the incarnation ? — not, of course,
a gain absolutely, not a gain as to any original, essential faculty or
attribute of the Supreme, but a gain as to the bringing of the Divine
Being into closer and more sympathetic feUowship with man ? We
all know how difficult it is, whatever be the natural capacity and
largeness of our pity, to sympathize fully and tenderly with a kind of
trial we have never felt. Those who have never wept over any dead
they loved, can they enter into the grief of the bereaved ? And how
could we, but by the incarnation, have had one who could enter as
Jesus can into aU our sorrows ?
Why was such a sympathy as his provided for us, but that as sin
ners as weU as sufferers we might cast ourselves upon it for support ?
Jesus is the great raiser of human souls as well as of human bodies.
He quickeneth whom he will. The hour has come when all that are
in the grave of sin, of spiritual death, may hear his voice. That
voice is sounding all around us as in the ears of the dead. "Awake,"
230 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
it says to each of us—" awake, thou that sleepest, arise from the
dead, and Christ shall give thee life." Let us awake, and with life
new-given turn to the Lifegiver; rejoicing to know that as tenderlj
as he handed her new-raised son to the widow of Nain, as tenderly
as he ordered the food to be given to the little daughter of Jairus, so
tenderly wfll he watch over the first stages of our spiritual being ; and
that as fuUy as the griefs of widowed mother and weeping parents
were shared in of old by Him in Galilee, so fully wfll he share in all
the griefs of our earthly history, till he take us to the land where his
own gracious hand shaU wipe off the tears from every eye, and we
shaU no more need another to weep with us in our sorrows.
VI.
The -Embassy of the Baptist — the Great Invitation.*
Our Lord's pubhc ministry in Gahlee began at the time that John
had been cast into prison, and had now continued for more than half
a year. There was much in this ministry which those disciples of
the Baptist who kept aloof from Jesus could not comprehend. There
was the entire absence of that ascetic rigor and stern denunciation of
aU iniquity, by which their master's character and teaching had been
distinguished. There were no fastings, no prescribed repeated prayers ;
there was the caU of a pubHcan to be an apostle, there was the eat
ing and drinking with pubhcans and sinners. AU this appeared to
them not only different from, but inconsistent with the idea of that
kingdom of whose advent their master had announced himself as the
herald. Some of them carried their doubts and difficulties to John
himseU in the prison. Hearing from them of the works of Christ,
the Baptist sent two of their number to Jesus, and bade them put to
him the question, " Art thou He that should come, or do we look for
another?" As coming from John himself, and meant for his personal
satisfaction, the question certainly would imply that some temporary
misgiving had crept into the Baptist's mind. It is somewhat difficult
to believe, after the revelations made to him, after what he had seen
and heard at the baptism, after his own repeated pubhc proclama
tions of it, that his faith- in the Messiahship of Jesus had been sha
ken. His long and unexpected imprisonment, however, must have
severely tried his faith. To such a man, from infancy a child of the
desert, who had roamed with such free footstep through the wilder-
•» Matt. 11.
THE EMBASSY OF THE BAPTIST. 231
ness of Engedi, who, when the time came for his manifestation to
Israel, had but exchanged the freedom of his mountain solitudes for
those liberties of speech and action he took with his fellow-country
men, the months of his imprisonment must have moved slowly and
drearily along, turning even his strength into weakness. The chilly
damp of being hurried unexpectedly from Herod's presence and his
former open, active hfe into the cheerless, idle solitude of the prison,
fell aU the chilher upon his heart on his coming to know that Jesus
had been apprised of bis imprisonment, and that yet no message of
sympathy had been sent, that no movement for his deliver an « was
made. His notions of the coming kingdom may not have been dU-
ferent from those entertained at the time by the apostles and other
followers of Christ. Perhaps he fancied that at the setting up of this
kingdom aU injustice and oppression and spiritual wickedness in ligh
places was to be done away, the axe to be laid at their root, the fan
to be so used as thoroughly to purge the threshing-floor. Perhaps,
in rebuking Herod as he did, he thought that it was but a first blow
dealt at that which the mightier than he who was to come after him
was whoUy to destroy. And when, instead of his expectations being
fulfilled, he was left unvisited, uncheered, unhelped ; and he heard of
the course which Jesus was pursuing, gathering crowds indeed around
him, but carefully abstaining from announcing himseU as the Mes
siah, or doing any thing towards the erection of a new kingdom — in
some season of disquietude and despondency, perplexed and a little
impatient, sharing their feelings, and in the hope of at once relieving
their doubts and removing his own misgivings, he sent two of his dis
ciples to put to him a question which might be the rnean^ of drawing
from Jesus a public declaration of his Messiahship, and of inducing
him openly to inaugurate the new kingdom.*
The messengers arrived and delivered their message at a very
opportune conjuncture. " In the same hour he cured many of their
infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits ; and unto many that were
blind he gave sight." Luke 7:21. Jesus kept John's messengers for
a season near him instead of answering them, going on with his heal
ing work. He then turned to them and said, " Go your way, and tell
* Many think that it was for the sake of his disciples, and for their sakes alone,
that the Baptist sent them on this errand, not that he had any doubts himself,
but that he knew they had. It is altogether likely that he had some regard to
their establishment in a true faith in Christ. The question, however, put into
their lips comes too directly from himself, and the answer is directed too plainly
and pointedly to him, to allow us to shut out the idea of personal relief and satifl-
faction l eing contemplated.
232 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see,
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are
raised, to the poor the gospel is preached." It is not simply to the
miracles as displays of superhuman power that Jesus appeals ; it is
to their kind and character, as peculiarly and prophetically Messi
anic. Jesus had hitherto refrained from assuming the title of the
Messiah, or announcing himself as such. John by his messengers
urges him to do so. Christ contents himseU with simply pointing to
such works done by him as the Baptist could not fail to recognize as
a fulfilment of those prophecies of Isaiah, in which the days and
doings of the Messiah were described. Nor can we fail to notice
that, side by side with the greatest of the miracles, reserved as the
closing, crowning testimony to the Messiahship, is the fact that to the
poor the gospel was preached ; to the poor as weU as to the rich, to no
favored people, class, or section of mankind, to aU in that universal
character which all sustain as sinful, responsible, immortal. The
words that Jesus added, "And blessed is he, whosoever shaU not be
offended in me," may have carried with them a special aUusion to the
Baptist, while proclaiming the blessedness of the man who was not
offended at the patience and gentleness of Jesus, his readiness to
wait and to suffer, to invite and encourage, rather than to denounce
and to punish.
Having given them what seemed a sufficient answer, Jesus sent
John's messengers away. He had something more, however, to say
to the people that was not for the Baptist's ear ; which must not be
said till the messengers were gone. What they had just seen and
heard was fitted to create an unfavorable impression, as U the faith,
or fortitude, or patience of John had utterly given way. Eager to
shield the character of his forerunner, Jesus turned to the multitude
and said to them concerning John, "What went ye out into the wil
derness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?" a man bowing and
bending as the reed does before every passing breeze, a man fickle of
purpose, changeable in faith, believing at Bethabara, disbelieving now
at Machserus? Not such a man is John; rock-like, not reed-like—
such as he was in the wilderness, such is he in Herod's prison.
"What went ye out to see? A man clothed in soft raiment?" caring
for the comforts and luxuries of life, or a man who, aU negligent as he
had been of these before, feels now the hair-cloth to be too hard a
garment, and would fain exchange it for a softer one? Not such a
man is John. The wearers and lovers of soft raiment you will find in
palaces, not in prisons. John cares as httle for such raiment now as
when of his own free will he chose the hair-cloth as his garment
THE EMBASSY OF THE BAPTIST 233
'But what went ye out to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you,
and more than a prophet." The only one among all tho prophets
whose course and office were themselves the subjects of prophecy;
whose birth, like that of his great Master, an angel was commis
sioned to announce ; his predecessors seeing but from afar across the
breadth of intervening centuries, he, the friend of the bridegroom,
standing by the bridegroom's side, his office such towards Christ
as to elevate him to a height above any ever reached before, yet
this kind of greatness, one springing from position and office, as
local, external, temporary, not once to be mentioned alongside of that
other kind of greatness which is moral, spiritual, intrinsic, eternal.
"For this is he of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger
before thy face, which shaU prepare thy way before thee. Yerily
I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not
risen a greater than John the Baptist : notwithstanding, he that is
least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."
More than one pubhc testimony had been borne by John to
Jesus. Jesus answers these by the witness he thus bears, to John.
But as he thinks of himself in conjunction with the Baptist, the
strange and inconsistent treatment that they respectively had met
with from the men of that generation presents itself to his thoughts.
Matt. 11 : 16-19. It is but seldom that any thing like criticism or
complaint touching those around him comes from the Hps of Jesus.
All the more interesting is the glance that he here casts, the judg
ment that he here pronounces, upon the men of his own age and
nation. Addressed by two different voices, speaking in two different
tones, they had turned a deaf ear to both. The rigor of the law came
to them in the message of the Baptist ; they took offence at it. The
gentleness and love of the gospel came to them in the message of
Jesus; they took equal offence at it; justUying in either case their
conduct by fixing on something in the character or life of each of
the two messengers which they had turned into matter of complaint
and accusation; guilty of great unfairness in doing so, exhibiting the
grossest inconsistency, charging opposite excesses upon John and
upon Jesus, saying of the one that he was too austere and ascetic,
that he had a devil — saying of the other that he was too free and
social, that he was a gluttonous man and a winebibber, the friend of
pubhcans and sinners. Had it been any other two of Heaven's cho
sen messengers that they had to deal with, they might have had less
difficulty in fixing on some irregularity or eccentricity of conduct out
of which to fashion the shelter they sought to construct. But that
even with them they tried this expedient, and imagined that they had
234 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
succeeded, only shows to what lengths that principle or tendency ol
our nature wiU go which seeks to mix up the claims of rehgion with
tho character of its advocate.
But now the Saviour's thoughts pass onward from the contempla
tion of that folly and inconsistency which a familiar simihtude bor
rowed from the market-place may expose, to dweU more profoundly
upon the conduct of those cities wherein most of his mighty works
wore done. In endeavoring to foUow and fathom from this point
onwards the train of our Lord's reflections, as recorded by the evan
gelist, we enter a region remote and very elevated. "Woe unto
thee, Chorazin ! woe unto thee, Bethsaida ! for if the mighty works
which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they
would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes." "And thou,
Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to
heU; for if the mighty works which have been done in thee, had
been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day." Who
is he who announces so confidently what certain communities would
have done had they been placed in other circumstances than those in
which they actually stood, and what altered outward destiny would
have foUowed the different course pursued? " It shaU be more toler
able for Tyre and Sidon and for the land of Sodom at the day of
judgment than for you." Who is he who anticipates the verdicts of
eternity, pronouncing so confidently upon the greater and the lesser
guilt, fore-announcing the lighter and the heavier doom?
But now, before the eye of the man Christ Jesus, there spreads
out a section of the great mystery that hangs over this world's spirit
ual history. Here are men — these inhabitants of Chorazin, Beth
saida, and Capernaum — involved in aU the greater guilt, incurring all
the heavier doom, in consequence of the presence of Jesus in the
midst of them. There were men — those inhabitants of Sodom, and
Tyre, and Sidon, who, had they lived in an after-age and enjoyed the
privileges bestowed upon the others, would have repented and shared
in aU the blessings of the heavenly kingdom. How many questions,
as we stand in front of facts like these, press upon our thoughts and
rise to our trembling hps — questions touching the principles and pro
cedure of the divine government as affecting the future and eternal
destinies of our race— questions we cannot answer, that it pains and
perplexes us to the uttermost even to entertain! It is in this very
region that there comes one of the greatest trials of our faith. Was
there no trial of the Hke kind for the man Christ Jesus, as he, too,
stood gazing down into these depths? In what way or to what
extent the human spirit of our Lord lay open to that burden and
THE EMBASSY OF THE BAPTIST. 235
pressure which a contemplation of the sins and sufferings here and
hereafter of so many of our feUow-creatures brings down upon every
thoughtful spirit that has any of the tenderness of humanity in it, it
is not for us to determine. But that he who was tempted in all
things like as we are did at this time feel something of this burden
and pressure, seems clear from the attitude into which he immediately
throws himseU. " At that time " — when thought was hovering over
this dark and awful region — Jesus Hfted up his eyes to heaven. Some
hght has broken in upon that darkness from above, drawing his eyes
upwards to its source. Some voice from above has spoken, that
comes, as his own came upon the troubled waters of the lake, to still
the inward agitation of his thoughts. "Jesus answered and said, O
Father, Lord of heaven and earth !" Infinitely wise, infinitely mer
ciful, infinitely loving Father, thou art Lord of heaven and earth.
The past has aU been ordered — the future wfll be all arranged, by
thee, and in thy character and purposes and providence over all as at
once the Father and the Judge, the solution hes of aU that to created
eyes may seem obscure. "I thank thee that thou hast hid
these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto
babes." Why are the things that belong to their eternal peace hid
den from some and revealed to others, hidden from so many, revealed
to comparatively so few? One beam of light faUs upon the darkness
here, and for it the thanks are given.
It is not an arbitrary distinction, drawn by a capricious hand that
loves to show its power. The fate of Sodom, Tyre, and Sidon was
not one that it was impossible for them to have evaded, that nothing
could have turned aside. They might have repented, and had they
repented, the ruin had not come. A thick cloud, charged with bolts
of vengeance, hung over Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum,
because of their unbelief. AU over the land it was but one of a fain •
fly, or two of a city, who had welcomed the Saviour and his message.
The right interpretation of aU this was not given by saying that it
was by a divine decree that had no regard to the character and con
duct of each, that the eyes of some were blinded and the eyes of
others opened to the heavenly light. It was from the wise and pru
dent, who thought themselves so much wiser or better than others,
whose pride it was that bhnded them, that the gospel was hidden.
It was to the babes, to the humble, the meek, the teachable, that it
had been revealed. And it is not so much for the hiding it from the
one as for the revealing it to the other that Jesus here gave thanks.
On two after-occasions of his life he had each of the two alterna
tives — the hiding and the reveahng, separately and exclusively before
236 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
him, and the difference of the emotions felt and expressed by him
marked the difference of their effects upon his mind and heart.
Would we know what impression the revealing made, let us plant
ourselves by his side as the Seventy return from their brief but suc
cessful mission, and teU him of the results ; when, without a shadow
on his joy, he rejoices in spirit, and repeats in words the very thanks
giving that he now offered. Would we know what impression the
hiding made, let us plant ourselves beside him as he beheld the city
and wept over it, exclaiming, " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! if thou hadst
known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong
unto thy peace ! but now they are hid from thine eyes."
But is it a fuU solution of the mystery that those left in darkness
have themselves, by their wilfulness and pride and carnality, created
a medium through which the heavenly light cannot pass ? Why is it,
U the spirits of aU men are equaUy and absolutely beneath the con
trol of the Creator, that any are suffered to remain in such condition?
There is no answer to such a question; for, take up the great enigma
of the doings of God and the destinies of men at what end you may,
approach it from what quarter you please, adopt whatever method of
solution you may prefer, make your way through the difficulties that
beset you as far as you can, sooner or later you reach the point where
explanation fails, and where there is nothing left for us but to join
with him who said, " Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy
sight." The occasion now before us may have been the first in which
Jesus was seen and heard in the act of prayer. The stopping of the
current of his address to them by the offering up of a short and sol
emn thanksgiving to his Father in heaven must have made a deep
impression on the multitude. It was singularly fitted to excite won
der and awe, and to lead them to inquire what the pecuhar relation
ship was in which Jesus stood to the great Being whom he so ad
dressed. Was it not as one reading their thoughts, and graciously
condescending to unfold so much of the mystery of his Sonship to the
Father, that Jesus went on to say, " AU things are delivered imto me
of my Father : and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father, and
he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him." The Baptist, in his closing
testimony to Jesus, had declared, " The Father loveth the Son, and
hath given aU things into his hand." Jesus now takes up and appro
priates this testimony. With special reference, we may believe, to
the things hidden and revealed of which he had been speaking, he
says : ' All things — aU those things concerning man's relationship to
God, and his condition here and hereafter, have not simply been
THE GREAT INVITATION. 237
revealed, but been deUvered to me — handed over for adjustment, for
discovery to and bestowal upon men ; and chiefly that of the true
knowledge of God.' Intimate and complete is the mutual knowledge
which the Father and the Son have of one another, a knowledge in
kind and in degree incommunicable. It is the Father alone who
knoweth who the Son is ; the Son alone who knoweth who the Father
is. " As the Father knoweth me," said Jesus, " even so know I the
Father." John 10 : 15. Finite may measure finite, like comprehend
its hke, man know what is in man, but here it is Infinite embracing
Infinite, the divine Son and the divine Father compassing and fath
oming the divine nature, and the divine attributes belonging equaUy
to both. And yet there is a knowledge of the Father to which man may
reach, yet reach only by receiving it through the Son. Had we been
told simply that no man knoweth the Father but the Son, nor the
Son but the Father, we should not have known to which of the two
we were to look for any such acquaintance with either or both as our
finite minds are capable of attaining; but when Jesus says "no man
knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son wfll
reveal him," he announces himself to us as the sole revealer of the
Father; this is no smaU or secondary part of his gracious office, to
make God clearly known to us as our Father which is in heaven.
To some obscure and partial knowledge of the Supreme Being as
Creator, Upholder, Sovereign, Governor, we may attain without help
of this revelation of him by Christ ; but if we would know him in his
living personality, know him as a God not afar off, but near at hand,
know him in aU the richness and fulness of his mercy and love, know
him as a pitying, forgiving, protecting, providing, comforting, recon
ciled Father, we must get at that knowledge through Christ ; we must
see him as the Son reveals him. No man knoweth thus the Father,
but he to whomsoever the Son wiU reveal him.
But who is he to whom this revelation of the Father is offered ?
Let the broad unrestricted invitation with which the statement of the
Saviour is immediately succeeded supply the answer: "Come unto
me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I wUl give you rest."
This invitation loses haU its meaning, taken out of the connection in
which it was spoken. We understand and appreciate the fulness and
richness of its significance only by looking upon it as grounded on
and flowing out of what Christ had the moment before been saying.
At first sight it might seem as if there was something hke confine
ment and contraction in the preceding utterances of Jesus. He claims
all things as committed to him. Otherwise than through him nothing
238 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
can come to us. He teUs us that for all true knowledge of the Father
we must be indebted exclusively to him. As to our knowing and
receiving, does this not seem to narrow the channel of their convey
ance? Yes, as this channel lies outside our earth, spanning the mys
terious distance between it and heaven; but watch as this channel
touches the earth and spreads out its waters on every side, then see
how all narrowness and contraction disappear. "All things are
dohvered unto me of my Father." But why so deUvered, why put
so exclusively into his hand ? Simply and solely that they might so
easfly, so freely, so fully come unto ours. For us to go elsewhere
than to him, to expect that otherwise than through him we are to
receive any thing, is to resist and repudiate this ordinance of the
Father. But he has all, he holds all as the Treasurer of the king
dom, the Steward of the divine mercies, the sinner's divinely consti
tuted Trustee, and he has aU and holds all under the condition that
there shaU be the freest, most unrestricted, most gracious dispensing
of aU the treasures committed to his custody, that whoever asks shall
get, that no needy one shaU ever come to him and be sent unreheved
away. "No man knoweth the Father but he to whomsoever the Son
will reveal him." But does he niggardly withhold that revelation, or
restrict it to a few? No; wide as the world is, of aU who seek to
know the Father that knowing him they may have peace, so wide is
the unHmited invitation spread. In many a sublime attractive posi
tion do we see Jesus standing while executing his gracious office here
on earth — in none loftier or more divine than when placing himself
in the centre of the wide circle of humanity, and, looking round upon
the burdened mfllions of our race with the fuU consciousness of
one who has the power to reheve aU who come, he says: "Come
unto me, aU ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest." Best — this is what our inward nature most deeply needs ; for
everywhere, in every region of it — in our inteUect, our conscience,
our affections, our will — the spirit of unrest, like a possessing demon,
haunts us with its disturbing presence. Then let us see how Christ
would have us bring these vexed souls of burs to him, that from every
such haunted region of it he may cast the vexing demon out.
Our inteUect, in its search after God, is in unrest, reechoing the
ancient plaint, " Oh that I knew where I might find him ! . . . Behold,
I go forward, but he is not there ; and backward, but I cannot per
ceive him : on the left hand where he doth work, but I cannot behold
him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him."
There dawns upon us the sublime idea of a Being infinitely wise and just
and good, author of all, and ordered of aU but through the clouds and
THE GREAT INVITATION. 239
darkness with which his guidance and government of this woild are so
densely swathed we begin to lose sight of him. Looking at him as re
vealed alone in the ways of his providence, we get perplexed as we look
around upon a world in which such oppressions, wrongs, injustices
are done, where might so often triumphs over right, where sin and
misery so fearfuUy abound, where death comes in to close the short-
hved, chequered scene of every earthly life. Faith begins to lose its
footing ; now believing and now doubting, now aU things clear, now
all things clouded, restlessly we are tossed as on a troubled sea.
What we want is some firm ground for our faith in God to rest on.
Jesus Christ supphes that ground in revealing this God to us as our
Father, in teUing us that such as he himseU was, in love and pity
and care and help to aU around him, such is the God and Father of
us aU to the whole human family. In our anxiety to get one true
clear sight of that great Being whose doings we contemplate with
such a mixture of awe and of uncertainty, we are ready with Philip
to say: "Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." The answer
comes from the Hps of Jesus, "Have I been so long time with you,
and yet hast thou not known me, Phihp? He that hath seen me hath
seen theFather." It is a Father of whose love we have the earthly
image in the love of Christ, who rules the world we Hve in. Can we
doubt any longer that wisdom, mercy, justice, and love shaU direct
the whole train of the administration of human affairs, the whole
treatment of each individual of our race ?
There is unrest in the conscience. A wounded conscience who
can bear? The sense of guilt as it rises within the breast who can
quench? The dark forebodings that it generates who can clear away?
Men tell us our fears are idle ; we try to beheve them, and put our
foot upon those fears to tread them down, but they spring up afresh
beneath our tread. They teU us that God is too merciful — too kind
to punish. We try to believe them, knowing that God is a thousand
fold milder, more mercUul than thought of ours can conceive ; but we
have only to look within and around us upon the sufferings that sin
inflicts, and the vision of a Divinity that does not, will not punish,
vanishes like a dream of the night. Where then can our conscience-
troubled spirits find repose, where but in Him who hath taken our sin
upon him, in whom there is redemption for us through his blood,
even the forgiveness of all our sins? If we may go to Christ for any
thing, it is for this forgiveness. If among the things that have been
delivered unto him of the Father, there be one that more clearly and
conspicuously than another is held out to be taken at once from his
most gracious hand, it is the pardon, the peace, the reconciliation
240 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
with God, offered to us in him. If we put these aside, or will not
take them as the fruits of our Lord's passion, death, and righteous
ness, purchased for us at that great cost to him, gratuitously bestow
ed on us, then if the higher instincts of our moral and spiritual nature
become in any degree quickened, what a weary, toilsome, fruitless
task do they set us to execute. These instincts tell us that we are
the creatures of another's hand, the dependants on another's bounty,
the subjects of another's rule, that to him our first duties are owing,
that against him our greatest offences have been committed, that to
stand weU with him is the first necessity of our being. How then
shaU we remedy the evil of our past ingratitude and disobedience,
how shall we bring things right and keep things right between us and
God ? Oh ! U aU the anxious thought, and weary labors, the pray
ers, the pains, the seU-restraints, the seU-mortifications, the offerings
at aU the altars, the giving to aU the priests, the sacrifices — personal,
domestic, social, of affections, of property, of Ufe — that have been
made by mankind to turn away the apprehended wrath of heaven,
and to work themselves into something like favor with the powers of
the invisible world ; U they could be aU brought together and heaped
up in one great mass before us, what a mountain-pile of toil and suf
fering would they exhibit, what a gigantic monument to the sense of
Bin, the power of conscience in the human heart. With a most mourn
ful eye we look upon that pile as we remember that it has been
heaped up needlessly and in vain, that all that was wanted was the
ceasing on the part of those engaged in it from the effort to establish
a righteousness of their own before God, the ceasing to revert to any
such methods to ward off the displeasure or to win the favor of the
Most High, the ceasing to repair to such harbors of refuge as churches,
altars and priests : and the opening simply of the ear to the words of
Jesus, " Come unto me, aU ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I
will give you rest."
There is unrest in our affections. Here they fooHshly wander,
and there they are bitterly checked ; ever seeking, never finding
full, allowed, complacent rest. And why? Because nowhere here
on earth can a being or object be found on which we can safely,
innocently, abidingly lavish the whole wealth of that affection which
the heart contains. For the right -placing, the full outdrawing,
the perfect and the permanent repose of the heart, we want one to
love — above us, so that reverence may mingle with esteem ; like us,
BO that closely and familiarly we may embrace — one in whom all con
ceivable exceUences meet and centre, aU that the eye covets to admire,
that the heart asks to love. We seek for such a one in vain till we
THE GREAT INVITATION. 241
hear Jesus saying, " Come unto me, and I will give you rest." We
go, and all, and more than all we asked for or could think of, we find in
him. Grace and truth blended in perfect harmony, a beauty undim-
med by a single blemish, a sympathy constant and entire, a love eter -
nal, unchangeable, which nothing can quench, from which nothing
can separate us. Here at last, and here only, do we find one wishing to
be loved and worthy to be loved with the full devotion of the heart.
Restless till it lights on him, with what a warm embrace, when it
finds him, does the heart of faith clasp Jesus to its bosom! " What
is thy beloved more than another beloved?" may the watchman of
the city say. The answer is at hand : ' My beloved is the chief among
ten thousand ; he is altogether lovely. I am my beloved's, and my
beloved is mine — my Lord, my God, my Shepherd, Saviour, Kins
man, Brother, Friend.'
There is unrest in the will. . It is not subject to the law of God,
neither indeed can be. It aims at, it attempts independence. We
would be our own masters; we will not have another to reign over us;
and so, instead of the quiet of a settled order, there is confusion and
anarchy within. All, indeed, is not left absolutely loose, unreined,
unregulated. A yoke of some kind we. aU are born under or wiUingly
take on. Some assume the yoke of a single passion of their nature,
and U that passion be a strong one, such as covetousness, it is not
!ong ere it turns the man into a slave, making him a mere beast of
burden — time for nothing, care for nothing, taste for nothing, joy in
nothing but in working for it and under it. And the more work is
done for it, the more does it impose, Nor does it mend the mat
ter much if, instead of one there be many such yokes about the neck,
jostling one another, fretting and gaUing the wearer by the force and
variety of the impulses that drive him in this direction and in that.
It is to all mankind as bearers of the one yoke or the many that
Jesus says, ' Take up my yoke, throw off these others, the yoke of
pride, of covetousness, of sensuality, of worldliness, of ambition, of
seU-indulgence — take on that yoke which consists in devotedness to
me and to duty, in a life of self-restraint, in a struggle with all that is
evil, a cultivation of all that is beautiful and good and holy. A hard
yoke you may think this to be, but believe me, my yoke is easy, my bur
den is hght, easier and lighter far than those you are groaning under.
One great reason why we are unconscious of the comparative
lightness and easiness of this yoke of the Christian discipleship is,
that we take it on in the spirit of fear, and of a selfish, mercenary
hope, rather than with that trust and love and gratitude which are
the soft wrappings which, laid beneath it, make it so easy to be borne.
'IfeofL'liriit. 16
242 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
It is as those who have been redeemed to God by Christ's most pre
cious blood, whose sins have been all forgiven them for Jesus' sake,
whose peace has been made with God through him ; it is in the spirit
of child-like confidence, looking up to God as our Father in heaven,
and to himself as having ready in his hand for us the grace and
strength we need, that Jesus would have us meet every duty, faca
every temptation, endure every trial of the Christian life. But if
instead of this it be with a doubtful mind and a divided heart that
we put forth the hand to take on the yoke — if we do this, not so much
to render a return for a great benefit already received as to add to
our chance of receiving that benefit hereafter — if it be for peace and
not from peace, for life and not from life that we are working — what
is this but trying without throwing it off to shift the old yoke of self
a little, to loosen some of its fastenings, and by their help try to
attach to us the new yoke of Christ? Is it wonderful that, encum
bered thus, there should be Httle freedom of motion, little capacity
for and Httle enjoyment of the work of faith and labor of love ? If
we desire to know how truly easy the yoke of Jesus is, let us first
enter into the rest that at once and in fuU measure he gives to all
who come to him — the rest of forgiveness, peace, acceptance with
God. And then, animated and strengthened by the possession and
enjoyment of this rest, let us assume the yoke, that in the bearing of
it we may enter into the further rest that there is for us in him — the
rest of a meek and lowly heart, gentle, resigned, contented, patient
of wrong, submissive under suffering, a rest not given at once or in
full measure to any ; to possess which we must be ready to enter into
the spirit of the foUowing verses :
"Fain would I my Lord pursue,
Be all my Saviour taught ; '
Ho as 0 esus bade me do,
And think as Jesus thought.
But 't is Thou must change my heart ;
The perfect gift must come from Thee.
Meek Redeemer, now impart
Thine own humility.
"Lord, I cannot, must not rest
Till I thy mind obtain ;
Chase presumption from my breast,
And all thy mildness gain.
Give me, Lord, thy gentle heart ;
Thy lowly mind my portion be ;
Meek Redeemer, now impart
Thine own humility."
THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 243
VII.
The Woman who was a Sinner.*
Coming, as it does in the narrative of St. Luke, (the only evange
list who records it,) immediately after that discourse which closed
with the invitation, " Come unto me, aU ye that labor and are heavy-
laden, and I wiU give you rest," how natural the thought that here,
in what is told us about the woman who was a sinner, we have one
instance — perhaps the first that foUowed its delivery — of that invita
tion being accepted — of one wearied and heavy laden coming to
Jesus, and entering into the promised rest. Multitudes had already
come to him to get their bodily ailments cured : she may have been
the first who came under the pressure of a purely spiritual impulse —
grieving, desiring, hoping, loving, to get aU and more than all she
sought. Jesus has accepted the invitation of a Pharisee, and reclines
leaning upon his left arm, his head toward the table, his unsandalled
feet stretched outwards. Through the crowd of guests and servants
and spectators, a woman well known in the city for the profligate hfe
she had been leading, glides nearer and nearer, tiU she stands behind
him. As she stands she weeps. The tears fall thickly upon his feet.
She has nothing else with which to do it, so she stoops and wipes the
tears away with her loose disheveUed hair. She gently grasps the
feet of Jesus to kiss them, and now she remembers the box she had
brought, in hope, perhaps, to find some fitting opportunity of pouring
its contents upon his head ; but she can make no nearer approach,
and so she sheds the precious perfumed ointment on those feet which
she had washed with her tears, wiped with the hairs of her head, and
covered with the kisses of her hps.
What has brought this woman here ? what moves her to act in
this way to Jesus. Somewhere, somehow Jesus had recently crossed
her path. She had heard his calls to repentance, his offers of forgive
ness, his promises of peace and rest. The arrow had entered into
her soul. She stood ashamed and confonnded. Her iniquities took
hold of her so that she was not able to look up, yet deep within hei
heart new hopes were rising, dimly before her eye new prospects
dawned. AU the penitence she experienced, aU the new desires,
expectations, resolutions, that were filling her breast she owed to him
—to the gentle and loving, yet resolute and truthful spirit in which
** Luke 7: 36-50.
244 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Jesus had spoken. She had looked at him, had listened to him, had
foUowed him as he opened those arms of his mercy so widely, and
invited all to come to him. And what he so fully offered — the peace
of forgiveness, the blessedness of meekness and lowhuess, of poverty
of spirit, purity of heart — these are what she now, above aU things,.
desired to have. Believing that she can get them alone from hiin,
an irresistible attraction draws her to him. Jewish women were
wont to honor, by one or other mark of favor shown, the Eabbi or
teacher to whom they felt most attached or indebted. But what
shall she render unto One who has already quickened her to a new
hfe of hope and love? She hears of his going to dine with the
Pharisee. Too well she knows how this man and his guests will look
upon her, what an act of effrontery on her part it will appear that
she should obtrude her presence into such a dwelling at such a time
But faith makes her bold, love triumphs over fear. She presses iu
and on, tiU at last she finds herself bending over the feet of Jesus,
with the costliest thing she has, the alabaster box of ointment, in her
hand. As she stands behind that form, as she stoops to embrace
those feet, aU the thoughtlessness, the recklessness, the unrestrained
self-indulgence of past years, the ties she had broken, the injuries
she had done, the reproaches she had incurred, the sins that she had
committed, flash upon her memory. Who is she, that she should
come so near and touch so familiarly the pure and holy Jesus? She
cannot meet his eye, she does not press herseU upon his notice. But
is he not the meek and compassionate, as well as the pure and the
holy One? While others had frowned upon her, avoided her, dis
carded her, treated her as an outcast, had he not shown a deep and
tender interest in her, a yearning over her to take her in his hand
and lead her back to the paths of purity and peace? It was this
kindly treatment that had broken down aU power to resist upon her
part, which had given him such a hold upon her, which had brought
her to the house of the Pharisee to see him, which had drawn her so
close to him. But the very thought of aU the love and pity that he
had shown to her and to all sinners opens afresh the fountains of
shame and self-reproach, and the tears of a true and deep repentance
flow forth ; not the tears of bare self-condemnation — a stinging re
morse goading the spirit to despair. Along with a true sense of her
sin there is an apprehension of the Divine mercy — that mercy re
vealed to her in Jesus. She sorrows not over her sins as one who
has no hope : a trust in Christ's readiness and power to pardon and
to save her has already entered into her heart. The very sense,
however, of his exceeding graciousness quickens the sense of her ex-
THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 245
ceeding sinfulness. The faith and hope to which she has been
begotten intensify her penitence, and that penitence intensifies her
love ; so that as we look upon her — first standing sflently weeping,
then bending down and bathing those feet with her tears, then clasp
ing and kissing them and pouring the rich ointment over them — she
presents herself to our eye as the most striking picture of a loving
humble penitent at the feet of Jesus which the gospels present.
It was with a very different sentiment from that with which we
are disposed to look at her that she was looked at by the Pharisee
who presided at the feast. He had noticed her entrance, watched
her movements, seen that, though not turning round to speak to her,
Jesus was not unconscious of her presence, was permitting her to
wash and wipe and anoint his feet. For the woman he has nothing
but indignation and contempt. He thinks only of what she had
been, not of what she is ; and his only wonder as to her is, how she
could have presumed to enter here and act as she has been doing.
But he wonders also at Jesus. He cannot be the prophet that so
many take him to be, or he would have known what kind of woman
this was; for he could not have known that and yet allowed himself
to be defiled with her touch. Whatever respect he had been pre
pared to show to Jesus begins to suffer loss, as he sees him aUowing
such familiarities to be practised by such hands. Not that this
respect had ever been very spiritual or very profound. The omis
sions that our Lord notices — notices not so much in the way of com
plaint *3 for the purpose of bringing out the contrast between the
treatment given by the two — Simon and the woman — would seem
rather to imply that he had not been careful to show any particular
regard to his guest. Perhaps he thought that he was paying such a
compliment to Jesus in inviting him to his house that he need be the
less attentive to the courtesies of his reception. It was a rare thing
for a man hke him — a Pharisee — to do such a thing. Simon, how
ever, was not one of the strict and rigid, the rehgious devotees of his
order; he was more a moralist than a pietist; and seeing much in
Jesus to approve, and even admire, he was quite ready to ask him
to Iris house, in the hope, perhaps, that in the easy freedom of social
intercourse he might test the pretensions of this new teacher and see
farther than others into his true character and claims. One mark or
token of his order is deeply stamped upon this Simon — pride — a
pride, it may have been, a httle different from that of the Pharisee
whom Jesus represents in the parable as praising himseU before God
for his fasting twice in the week and giving tithes of aU that he pos
sessed, yet quite akin to his in comparing himself with and despising
246 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
others. He too might have stood and prayed thus with himself
" God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners,
unjust, adulterers, or as this woman here." Any thing like concact,
concert, familiar intercourse with such a low, abandoned woman, no
man who had any proper self-respect, he thinks, could practise or
endure. And now that he sees Jesus consenting to be touched and
handled by her, his only explanation of it is that he cannot know
what kind of woman she is. " Now when the Pharisee which had
bidden him saw it, he spake within himself, saying, This man, if he
were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman
this is that toucheth him." Luke 7 : 39.
In thinking and feeling so, he entirely overlooks the change that
had taken place — the evidence of which appeared in the very man
ner of the woman's present conduct, and above aU the nature and
strength of the tie which that change created between her and Jesus.
It was to lift him out of this deep abyss of pride, and U possible to
show him how much closer, deeper, tenderer a relationship it was in
which this penitent stood to him, than that in which he, Simon, stood,
that Jesus stated the case of the two debtors : " And Jesus answer
ing said unto him, Simon, I have somewhat to say unto thee. And
he saith, Master, say on. There was a certain creditor which had
two debtors : the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty
And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both.
TeU me, therefore, which of them wiU love him most. Simon an
swered and said, I suppose that he to whom he forgave most. And
he said unto him, Thou has rightly judged."
As httle as David saw the drift of Nathan's parable of the httle
ewe lamb, so httle did Simon at first perceive the drift of the one now
addressed to himself, and so he promptly answers, " I suppose that it
would be he to whom he forgave most." Out of his own mouth he
stands convicted. It would be straining the short parable in this
instance spoken by our Lord if we took it as strictly and literally
representing the relative positions before God in which Simon and
the woman stood, or as intimating that both had been actually for
given, the one as much more than the other as five hundred exceeds
fifty pence. It is not so much the amount actually owed as that
known and felt by the debtors to be owing, and their conscious ina
bility to meet in any way the payment, that supphes the groundwork
of our Lord's application of the supposititious case. "And he turned
to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman ? I en
tered into thy house, thou gavest me no water for my feet : but she
hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of
THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 247
her head. Thou gavest me no kiss : but this woman since the time I
came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou
didst not anoint : but this woman hath anointed my feet with oint
ment. Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are
forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the
same loveth little." ' Thou hast been watching, Simon, aU that this
woman has been doing, but what is the true explanation of her con
duct, the explanation that vindicates at once her conduct to me and
my conduct to her ? Why is it that she has been showing me marks
of respect and strong personal attachment, contrasting so with those
that you have shown, or rather have omitted to show ? She has done
so because she loves so much; and she loves so much, because she
has had so much forgiven. It is but Httle compared with her that
you feel you owe, but Httle that you can be forgiven ; but little, there
fore, that you love.' In speaking to him thus, how forbearingly, how
leniently did the Lord deal with Simon; how much more leniently
and forbearingly we may be apt to think than he deserved, or than
his case warranted. But it was so in every case with our divine
Master, ever seeking the good of those he dealt with — striving by the
gentle insinuations of his grace to win his way into their consciences
and hearts, rather than by a full display of aU their guilt or stern
denunciation of it. H in this instance he was successful, if Simon's
eyes were opened to discern in the two debtors himself and the wom
an, and in the creditor to whom all their debts were due none other
than He who was sitting at his table, what a wonderful revolution in
his estimate of Jesus must have taken place; for nothing in this
whole narrative strikes so much as the simple, natural, easy, unosten
tatious manner in which Jesus assumes to himself the position of
that Being to whom aU spiritual debts are owing, and by whom they
are forgiven.
"Her sins," said Jesus of the woman to Simon, "which are many,
are forgiven, for she loved much." So to interpret this saying of the
Saviour as to make the loving the ground of the forgiveness would be
to contradict both the letter and spirit of the preceding parable, in
which the love is represented as flowing out of the forgiveness, and
not the forgiveness as flowing out of the love — Jesus points to the
love not as the spring but as the evidence of the forgiveness — to the
strength of the one as indicating the extent of the other.
When Christ said so emphatically to the Pharisee, "Simon, I have
Bomewhat to say to thee," the attention of the woman must have
been for the moment diverted from her own case and directed to the
colloquy that foUowed, the more so as it seemed at first to have no
248 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
reference to her. But when he turned, and looking on her for the
first time, said, " Seest thou this woman ?" into what a strange tumult
of emotion must she have been thrown, aU eyes on her — the contrast
between her attentions and love to Jesus and those of Simon drawn
out in particular after particular by our Lord himseU, all closed by
her hearing him declare, " Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which
are many, are forgiven." The desire, the hope of pardon, had afready
dawned upon her heart. She had trusted in the divine mercy as
revealed to her in Jesus, and already experienced the reHef and com
fort this trust was fitted to impart. Her faith, however, was yet im
perfect ; her sense, her assurance of forgiveness not reheved from
uncertainty and doubt ; but now from the hps of the Lord himseU
she hears the fact announced that her sins had been forgiven ; and,
as if that were not enough — as U he would do every thing that word
of his could do to seal the assurance on her heart — Jesus turns to
her and says, " Thy sins are forgiven." Fear takes wings and flies
away ; doubt can find no more room within ; the sins without num
ber of aU her bygone life rush out of sight into the depths of that sea
into which Jesus casts them. Not ceasing to be penitent, more pen
itent than ever, the bowed-down spirit is hfted up as the fuU blessed
ness enters and possesses it of one whose trangression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
" Thy sins are forgiven thee." Was it in wonder and with an awe
hke that of men who feel themselves in the presence of One in whom
the most peculiar prerogative of the Divinity resides, or was it in
hatred and with contempt of him as an arrogant, presumptuous blas
phemer, that those around the, table began to say to themselves,
"Who is this that forgiveth sins also?" Whatever their state of
mind was as to himseU, Jesus does not lay it bare, nor stop to expose
or correct it. But there was one mistake that they might make as to
the forgiveness he had pronounced. They might imagine it to have
been capriciously or arbitrarily dispensed ; they might fail to trace
its connection with the spiritual condition of her upon whom it was
bestowed ; U not dissevering it from its source in him, they might
dissociate it from its channel, the faith in him which she had cher
ished. Even she herself, after what had been said, might be disposed
to attach the forgiveness to the love, rather than the love to the for
giveness, overlooking the common root of both in that faith which
brought her to Jesus, and taught her to cast her confidence alone
and undividedly on him. Therefore his last word, as he dismisses
her, is, " Thy faith hath saved thee ; go in peace." In peace she
goes, silently as she had entered; not a single word throughou;
THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 24b
escaping from her Hps, her heart at first too full of humiliation, grief,
and shame, now too full of joy and gratitude. In peace she goes,
hght for ever after on her heart the reproach that man might cast
upon her — the Christ-given peace the keeper of her mind and heart.
She goes to hide herseU from our view, her name and aU her after-
history unknown. The faith and traditions of western Christendom
have indeed identified her with Mary of Magdala, and assigned to her
a place among those women who ministered to the Lord of their sub
stance, who were admitted to close and familiar intercourse with him
in Galilee, and who were privileged to be the last attendants on the
cross and first visitors of the sepulchre. We will not presume to say
how far the former hfe of the penitent woman would have interfered
with her occupying such a position ; we wfll not aUude to the diffi
culty that will occur as you try to imagine what substance she could
have had, or whence derived, out of which she could minister to
Jesus. Neither shaU we dweU upon the fact that out of Mary of
Magdala seven devUs had been cast, a possession not necessarUy
implying any former criminaUty of Ufe, yet apparently quite incon
sistent with the kind of hfe that this woman had been leading.
Enough, that when Mary, caUed Magdalene, is first mentioned, as
she is in the opening verses of the next chapter in St. Luke's gospel,
she is introduced as a new person, not amid scenes then, nor at any
time thereafter, that in any way connect her with the woman that
had been a sinner. It is true that, while there is the absence of all
evidence in favor of their identification, there is the absence also of
evidence sufficient positively to disprove it. In these circumstances
it may be grateful to many to trace in the narrative now before us
the earlier history of one so loved, and honored afterwards by Jesus,
as was Mary of Magdala. Much more grateful we own to us is the
behef that this penitent, whose broken heart was so tenderly up-
bound — having got the healing from his gentle, loving hands — from
that notoriety into which her sin had raised her, retired voluntarily
into an obscurity so deep that her name and her dwelling-place, and
all. her after-story, lie hidden from our sight.
The forgiveness so graciously conveyed to this nameless penitent
is equally needed by aU of us, is offered to us aU — Christ is as willing
to bestow it upon each of us as ever he was to bestow it upon her.
The manner of our possession and enjoyment of this gUt depends
apon the manner in which we deal with the tender of it made to us
by him. We may keep it for ever hanging at a distance out before
ns, a thing desired or hoped for, now with more and now with less
eagerness and expectancy, according to the changing temper of oar
250 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
mind and heart. But we might have, we ought to have, this blessing
now in hand as our present, full, secure, peace-giving possession.
And not tiU it thus be ours, not tfll the hand of faith shall grasp and
hold it as ours in Christ, ours through our oneness with him in whom
we have redemption through his blood, even this very forgiveness of
our sins ; not tiU we exchange the vague and general and vacillating
hope for the firm yet humble trust which appropriates at once in its
fuU measure this rich benefit of our Lord's life and death for us; not
tiU the comforting sense that our sins have been forgiven visits and
cheers our heart, can we love our Saviour as he should be loved, and
as he wishes to be loved by us. It is when we know how much it is
that we have owed, and how much it is that we have been forgiven,
that the bond gets closest that binds us to him— a complex, ever
growing, ever-tightening bond, the more that is forgiven ever reveal
ing more that needs forgiveness ; with us as with this woman, as with
aU true believers, the humihty, the penitence, the faith, the love, the
peace that aU accompany or flow forth from the granted forgiveness,
aU intensUying each other, all leading us more simply, more entirely,
more habituaUy, more confidingly to Christ, for mercy to pardon and
grace to help us in every time of need.
VIII.
The Collision with the Pharisees — The First Para
bles — The Stilling of the Tempest — The Demo
niac of Gadara.*
Our Lord's second circuit through Gahlee, U not more extensive,
was more pubhc and formal than the first. He was now constantly
attended by the twelve men whom he had chosen out of the general
company of his foUowers, while certain women, Mary, Joanna, Su
sanna, and many others, some of them of good position, waited on
him, ministering to him of their substance. The crowds that gath
ered round him wherever he went; the wonder, joy and gratitude
with which his miracles, particularly those recent ones of raising the
dead, were hailed ; the impression his discourses had created, and the
steps that he had now obviously taken towards organizing a distinct
body of disciples, fanned into an open flame the long- smouldering
0 Matt. 12 : 22-50 ; 13 ; 8 : 23-34 ; Mark 3: 22-30 ; 4 ; 5 : 1-20 : Luke 11 : 14-54 ;
8:22-39.
THE COLLISION WITH THE PHARISEES. 251
fire of Pharisaic opposition. The Pharisees of Gahlee may not at
first have been as quick and deep in their resentment as were their
brethren of Jerusalem, neither had they the same kind of instruments
in their hands to employ against him. But their resentment grew as
the profound discord between the whole teaching and life of Jesus
and their own more fuUy developed itself, and it was zealously foster
ed by a deputation that came down from the capital. It had already
once and again broken out, as when they had charged him with being
a Sabbath-breaker and a blasphemer. On these occasions Jesus had
satisfied himseU with rebuking on the spot the men by whom the
charges had been preferred. But he had not yet broken with the
Pharisees as a party, nor denounced them either privately to his dis
ciples or pubhcly to the multitude. But now, at the close of his
second circuit through Galilee, after nearly a year's labor bestowed
upon that province, the collision came, and the whole manner of his
speech and action towards them was changed.
Early in the forenoon of one of his longest and most laborious
days in Capernaum, there was brought to him one possessed with a
devil, bhnd and dumb. Blindness and dumbness, whether springing
from original organic defect or induced by disease, he had often before
cured. But here, underlying both, was the deeper spiritual malady
of possession. Jesus cast the devil out, and the immediate effect of
the dispossession was the recovery of the powers of speech and vision.
There must have been something peculiar in the case. Perhaps it
lay in this, that whereas dumbness in all ordinary cases springs either
from congenital deafness or from some defect in the organs of speech,
it was due here to neither of these causes. The man could hear as
well as others, and once he had spoken as weU as they. But from
the time the devU entered he had been tongue-tied, had tried to
speak but could not. A new and horrible kind of dumbness had
come upon him, the closing of his lips by an inward constraint that,
struggle as he might, he could not overcome. St. Luke speaks only
of the dumbness, as if in it more than in the blindness lay the pecu
liarity of the case. Luke 11 : 14. St. Matthew records another
instance of the ejection of a devfl from one who was dumb, in which
the same effect followed ; the dumb speaking as soon as the devil was
cast out. Matt. 9 : 33. It is at least very remarkable that it was in
connection with this class of cases only that the double result appear
ed, of an extraordinary commotion among the people and an extraor
dinary allegation put forward by the Pharisees.
The casting out of devils had been one of the earliest and most
common of our Lord's miracles; always carefully distinguished by
252 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the evangehsts from the healing of ordinary diseases; awakening
generally not more wonder, perhaps not so much, as some of the
bodily cures. If the testimony of Josephus is to be credited, demo
niac possession was common at this period, and exorcism by the Jews
themselves not unfrequent. But when a dumb devfl was cast out.
and instantly the man began to speak, we are told that in one
instance "the multitudes marvelled, saying, It was never so seen in
Israel;" (Matt. 9: 33;) and in another, "AU the people were amazed,
and said, Is not this the Son of David ?" Matt. 12 : 23. Here almost
for the first time was an open expression of faith in Jesus as the
Messiah, who was known and spoken of aU over Judea as the Son of
David. Whatever his words and actions might have implied, Jesus
had not pubhcly taken this title to himself — claimed to be the Mes
siah; but now the people of themselves begin to think that it must be
so — that by none other than he could works Hke these be done. The
man whose character the Pharisees had been attempting to malign,
whose influence with the people they had been doing their utmost to
undermine, is not only hailed as a teacher sent from God, but as a
prophet, nay, more than a prophet, the very Son of David. What
is to be said and done? The facts of the case they do not, they
cannot deny. That the man's dumbness had been nothing but a
common dumbness, that there had been no evil spirit in him to
be cast out of him, they do not venture to suggest. Those ingen
ious scribes that have come down from Jerusalem can see but one
way out of the difficulty. They do not hesitate to suggest it, nor
their friends beside them to adopt it ; and so they go about the crowd
that is standing lost in wonder, saying contemptuously, " This fellow
doth not cast out devUs but by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils."
A winebibber, a gluttonous man, a friend of publicans and sinners,
a Sabbath-breaker, a blasphemer, they had caUed him, but here is
the last and vilest thing that calumny can say of him — that he is in
league with Satan, and that it is to his connection with the devfl, and
to that alone, that he owes all his wisdom and his power. How does
Jesus meet this calumny ? How does he speak of and to the men
who were guilty of forging and circulating it? They were busy among
the crowd secretly propagating the slander, but they must not think
that he was unconscious or careless of what they were saying of him.
He calls them unto him, (Mark 3 : 23,) and they come. His accusers
and he stand forth before the assembled multitude, fairly confronted.
First, in the simplest, plainest manner, obviously for the sake of con
vincing any of the simple-minded people who might be ready to adopt
this new solution of the secret of his power, he exposes its foolish-
THE COLLISION WITH THE PHARISEES. 253
ness and injustice. There was, he assumes, a prince of the devils,
who had a kingdom of his own, opposed to the kingdom of God.
That kingdom of darkness might admit of much internal discord, but
in one thing it was and must ever be united — in its antagonism to the
kingdom of light. No more than any other kingdom, or city, or
house, could it stand, were it, in that respect, divided against itseU.
Yet it was such kind of division that these Pharisees were attributing
to it. Their own sons undertook to cast out devils : was it by Beel
zebub that they did it? If not, why cast the imputation of doing
so upon him? None but a strong one could enter the house of the
human spirit, as the devil was seen to enter it in these cases of pos
session. It must be a stronger than he who binds him, and casts
him forth, and strips him of all his spoils. This was what they had
just seen Jesus do ; and U he, by the mighty power of God, had done
so, then no doubt the kingdom was come unto them — come in his
person, his teaching, his work. He — Jesus — stood now the visible
head and representative of the kingdom, in the midst of them. To
come to him was to enter that kingdom — to be with him was to be
on the side of that kingdom : and such was its nature, such the claims
he made, that there could be no neutrality, no middle ground to be
occupied. He that was not with him was against him ; he that gath
ered not with him was scattering abroad. Much there was in the
spirit and conduct of many then before him whom the apphcation of
this test must bring in as guilty; but let them know that all manner
of sin and blasphemy might be forgiven. In ignorance and unbelief
they might speak against the Son of man, and yet not put themselves
beyond the pale of mercy ; but in presence of that Divine spirit and
power in which he spake and acted, not only to ignore it, but to mis
represent and mahgn it, as these Pharisees had done, was to enter
upon a path of wilful, perverse resistance to the Spirit of God, which,
if pursued, would land the men who took and foUowed it in a guilt
for which there would be no forgiveness, either here or hereafter ; no
forgiveness, not because any kind or degree of guilt could exhaust
the divine mercy or exceed its power, but because the pursuers of
such a path, sooner or later, would reach such a state of mind, and
heart, and habit, that afl chance or hope of their ever being disposed
to fulfil, or capable of fulfilling, those conditions upon which alone
mercy is or can be dispensed, would vanish away. The blasphemy
against the Holy Ghost, which never hath forgiveness, lies not in any
single word or deed. Jesus, though not obscurely hinting that in the
foul calumny that had been uttered there lay the elements of the
unpardonable offence, does not distinctly say that the men before
254 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
him never would or could be forgiven for uttering it. His words are
words of warning rather than of judgment. A monstrous accusation
had been made, one in which if the men who had made it persever
ed, they would be displaying thereby the very temper and spirit of
such blasphemy against the Holy Ghost as never could be forgiven.
It was out of an evil heart that the evil word had been spoken. It
was by a corrupt tree that this corrupt fruit had been borne, and the
heart would get worse, the tree more rotten, unless now made better.
Such bitter words of ungodly mahce and despite as the Pharisees
had spoken, were but outward indices of the state of things within.
Yet such good signs were words in general, that "Verily," said Jesus,
"I say unto you. . . . By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by
thy words thou shalt be condemned."
The men whom Jesus thus pubhcly rebuked — characterizing them
as a generation of vipers — for the moment were silenced. Some of
their party, however, now interposed. Jesus had unequivocally
asserted that his works had been wrought by none other than the
mighty power of God. Let Him prove this as Moses, Joshua, Sam
uel, Ehjah had done. The works themselves were not enough to do
this. The popular belief was that demons and false gods could work
signs on earth. It was the true God only who could give signs from
heaven. Such a sign they had asked Christ to show. Luke 9 : 16.
" The people gathered thick together," we are told, to hear Christ's
answer; but, as at other times when the same demand was made, our
Lord would point to no other sign than that of the most remarkable
foreshadowing in Old Testament times of his own resurrection from
the dead. This allusion to the extraordinary incident in the history
of Jonas was doubly unsatisfactory to his hearers. It was no sign
from above, but rather one from below. It was a sign of that of
which they had as yet no conception — in which they had no faith — it
carried with it to them no additional or confirmatory evidence. No
other sign, however, was to be given to a generation which was act
ing worse than the heathen inhabitants of Nineveh, the Gentile queen
of the south; a greater than Jonas, a greater than Solomon was
among them, yet they despised his wisdom and would not repent at
his call. A brighter hght than had ever dawned upon them was now
shining — nay, was set up conspicuously for them to behold it; but
there must be an eye within to see, as weU as a Hght without to look
at, before any true illumination can take place. And U that eye be
evil — be in any way incapacitated for true discernment, whatever the
external effulgence be, the body remains fuU of darkness. Even such
a darkness was now settling over a people who were going to present
THE COLLISION WITH THE PHARISEES. 255
tout too sad a type of what was sometimes seen in cases of demoniac
possession, when an unclean spirit, for a time cast out, returned with
3even other spirits more wicked than itself. From among the Jewish
people, from and after the Babylonish captivity, the old demon of
idolatry had been ejected. For a time the house had been swept <.md
garnished, but now a sevenfold worse infatuation was coming upon
this generation, to drive it on to a deadlier catastrophe.
The exciting inteUigence that in the presence of a vast multitude
Jesus had been accused by the Pharisees of being nothing else than
an emissary and ally of the devil ; that, not satisfied with defending
himseU against the charge, he had in turn become their accuser, and
broken out into the most open and unrestrained denunciation of their
whole order; that the feud which for months past had been secretly
gathering strength had ended at last in an open rupture, was carried
to the house in which Mary and the Lord's brothers were dwelling.
A fatal thing it seems to them for him to have plunged into such a
deadly strife with the most powerful party in the country. They wfll
try what they can to draw him out of it. They hasten to the spot,
and find the crowd so large, the press so great, that they cannot get
near him. They send their message in to him. " Behold," says one
who is standing next to Jesus, " thy mother and thy brethren stand
¦without, desiring to speak with thee." A mother who, if fond enough,
was yet so fearful, who once before had tried to dictate to him, and
had been checked at Cana ; brethren who thought that he was beside
himself, none of whom as yet believed on him— what right had they
to interrupt him at his work — to move him from his purpose ? " Who
is my mother?" said he to the man who conveyed to him the mes
sage, " and who are my brethren ?" Then pausing, looking " round
about on them which sat about him," stretching forth his hands
towards his disciples, " Behold," he exclaimed, " my mother and my
brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in
heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." A woman
in the crowd, who has been standing lost in a mere human admira
tion of him, hears his mother spoken of, and cannot in the fulness of
her womanly emotion but caU her blessed. " Yea, rather blessed,"
^aid Jesus to her, " are they that hear the word of God, and keep it."
So, when in the very heart of his mission-work on earth they
spake to him about the closest human ties, his nearest earthly rela
tives — close as these were, and willing as he was in their own mode
and sphere to acknowledge them, so resolutely did Jesus waive them
aside, so sublimely did he rise above them, setting himself forth as
the Elder Brother of that whole family in heaven and earth named
256 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
by his name, and who are foUowers in the footsteps of Him who
came not to clo his own wfll, but the will of Him that sent him. The
earthly and the heavenly bonds, the common and the Christian ties,
do not always coincide, neither are they always in harmony. If ever
they interfere — if mother, or brother, or sister, or dearest friend
¦should once tempt us away from him in nearness to whom standeth
our eternal hfe — then let us remember the scene in Capernaum, and
ask our Lord to give us of his own Spirit, here as everywhere to fol
low him.
Jesus did not go out to his mother and brethren when they sent
for him, did not go even to their house when fatigue and exhaustion
called for a brief repose. He rather accepted the invitation of a
Pharisee to take a hurried repast in a neighboring dwelling, the mul
titude waiting meanwhile for him without. In haste to resume his
work, and knowing withal that it was no friendly company he was
asked to join, Jesus went in and sat down at once, neglecting the cus
tomary ablutions. The host and his friends were not slow to notice
the neglect, nor was he slow to notice the sentence against him
they were passing in their hearts. The men around him here were
part of that very band whose vile imputation of confederacy with
Satan had already released his lips from aU restraint, and called for
and vindicated his addressing them as he had done. Nor does he
alter now his tone. We may not, indeed, believe that aU which St.
Luke, in the latter half of the eleventh chapter of his gospel, records
as spoken by him — the woe after woe pronounced upon the Pharisees
and the lawyers — was uttered indoors, as soon as he had seated him
seU at the table. Eiiowing how usual a thing it is with the three
synoptical evangelists to bring together into one discourse sentences
that were uttered at different times and upon different occasions, we
are inclined rather to beheve that the greater part of it was spoken
after the hasty meal was over, and Jesus stood once more the centre
of a vast concourse, with scribes and Pharisees urging him vehe
mently, and provoking him to speak many things, lying in wait for
him to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse
him. Luke 11 : 53, 54. They got this out of his mouth, that here in
Gahlee — a year and more before that memorable day, the last of his
public ministry, when he stood within the temple and closed the exci
ting controversies with those terrible denunciations which St. Mat
thew has preserved to us in the twenty-third chapter of his gospel, in
I riefer and more compendious terms, the very woes that were then
rolled over the heads of the Pharisees of Jerusalem, were rolled over
theirs in Capernaum. A new phase of our Saviour's character — very
THE COLLISION WITH THE PHARISEES. 257
different from that which we had before us in his treatment of the
penitent sinner — thus reveals itself to our view ; his firmness, his
courage, his outspokenness, the depth of his indignant recoil from,
the sternness of his unmitigated condemnation of the inconsistencies,
the hypocrisies, the haughtiness, the cruelty, the tyranny of the
scribes and Pharisees. He had a right to speak and act towards
them which none but he could have. He was their omniscient Judge ;
he knew that in hating him they were hating his Father also, that
the spirit of persecution which they displayed sprang from a deeper
Rource than mere personal animosity to him as a man. As no other
can ever occupy the same position towards his fellow-men as that in
which Jesus stood, so to no other can his conduct here be a guide or
precedent. One thing only remains for us to do : to try to enter as
thoroughly as we can into the entire harmony that there was between
all the love and pity and gentleness and compassion that he showed
towards the ignorant, the erring, the sinful who manifested the least
openness to conviction, the least disposition to repent and believe,
and that profound and, as we may call it, awful antipathy which he
displayed to those who, built up in their spiritual pride, under tho
very cloak of a pretentious pietism, indulged some of the meanest
s.nd most malignant passions of our nature, wilfully shutting their
eyes to the Hght of heaven that was shining in the midst of them,
and plunging on in the darkness towards nothing short of spoken
and acted blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.
But U tl e forenoon of this long and busy day at Capernaum was
isndered remarkable by the change of attitude which Jesus assumed
t( wards the Pharisees, its afternoon was rendered equally U not stfll
more remarkable by the change of method in addressing the multi
tude. More than half of the term allotted to his ministry in Galilee
hai now expired. The temper of the community towards him had
been fairly tried. The result was sufficiently manifest. Here beside
him was a small band of followers — ignorant, yet wiUing to be taught ;
weak in faith, but strong in personal attachment. There against
him was a powerful and numerous band, socially, politically, reli
giously the leaders of the people. Between the two lay the bulk of
the common people — greatly excited by his miracles, hstening with.
wonder and halfcapproval to his words, siding with him rather than
against him in his conflict with the Pharisees. With them, if we
looked only at external indications, we should say that he was gener
ally and highly popular. But it was popularity of a kind that Jesus
hid no wish to gain, as he had no purpose to which to turn it. Be
hind all the show of outward attachment he saw that there was but
life ofdkrlit 17
258 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
little discernment of his true character, but Httle disposition to receive
and honor him as the Eedeemer of mankind, but little capacity to
understand the more secret things of that spiritual kingdom which it
was his office to estabhsh and extend. And as he had altered his
conduct towards his secret enemies by dragging out their opposition
to the Hght and openly denouncing them, so now he alters his con
duct towards his professed friends by clothing his higher instructions
to them in a new and peculiar garb. As he left the house in which
the hasty mid-day meal was taken, the crowd gathered round him —
increased in numbers, a keener edge put upon its curiosity by what
had just occurred. FoUowed by this crowd, he goes down to the
lake-side ; finds the press of the people round about him oppressive
and inconvenient, sees a boat lying in close to the beach, enters it,
sits down, and, separated from them by a little strip of water, ad
dresses the multitude that lined the shore. He speaks about a sower,
and how it fared with the seed he sowed: 'Some of it feU by the
wayside, and some upon stony places, and some among thorns, and
some upon good soil.' He speaks about a field in which good seed
was sown by day but tares by night, and how both grew up, and
some would have them separated ; but the householder to whom the
field belonged would not hear of it, but would have both grow together
till the harvest. He speaks of a man casting seed into his ground,
and finding that by night and by day, whether he slept or woke, was
watching and tending, or doing nothing about it, that seed secretly
grew up, he knew not how. He speaks of the least of seeds growing
up into the tallest of herbs ; of the leaven working in the three meas
ures of meal tiU the whole was leavened; and he teUs his hearers that
the kingdom of heaven is like unto each of the things that he describes.
His hearers are aU greatly interested, for it is about plain, familiar
things of the house, the garden, the field that he speaks ; and yet a
strange expression of mingled surprise and perplexity sits upon every
countenance. The disciples within the boat share these sentiments
equaUy with the people upon the shore. Nothing seems easier than
to understand these little stories of common life ; but why has Jesus
told them? What from his hps can they mean? What has the
kingdom of heaven to do with them ? Teaching by parables was a
common way of instruction with the Jewish Eabbis. But it had not
been in the first instance adopted by Christ ; they had not as yet
heard a single parable from his lips ; and now he uses nothing else- -
parable follows parable, as if that were the only instrument of tho
teacher that Jesus cared to use. And besides the entire novelty of
his employment of the parabolic method, there is that haze, that
THE FIRST PARABLES. 259
thick obscurity which covers the real meaning of the parables he
utters. The disciples take the first opportunity that offers itself of
speaking to him privately, and putting to him the quesiion, "Why
speakest thou to them in parables?" A question which they would
never have put but for the circumstance that they had never before
known him employ this kind of discourse. Now mark the answer to
the question : " Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries
of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whoso
ever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance ;
but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he
hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables : because they seeing
see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hear
ing ye shaU hear, and shall not understand ; and seeing ye shall see,
and shall not perceive : for this people's heart is waxed gross ; and
their ears are duU of hearing, and their eyes they have closed ; lest
at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears,
and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and
I should heal them." Matt. 13 : 1-15.
It was partly then for the purpose of concealment that, upon this
occasion, these parables were spoken. Those before whose eyes this
veil was drawn had already been tried with a different kind of speech.
Most important truths had been announced to them in the simplest
and plainest language, but they had shut their minds and hearts
against them. And now, as a righteous judgment upon them for hav
ing acted thus, these mysteries of the kingdom, which might have
been presented to them in another and more transparent guise, are
folded up in the conceahng drapery of these parables. Speaking
generally, parables are meant to make things plainer, not more ob
scure ; and of many of our Lord's parables, such as those of the Good
Samaritan, the Unjust Judge, the Pharisee and the Publican, it is true
that neither by those who first heard them uttered, nor by any who
have read them since, has there been the slightest doubt or uncer
tainty as to their meaning. But there is another and a larger
class of the parables of Christ to which this description does not
apply, which were not understood by those to whom they were first
addressed, which may still be misunderstood, which, instead of being
homely tales illustrative of the simplest moral and religious truths,
the simplest moral and rehgious duties, are figurative descriptions,
prophetic aUegories, in which the true nature of Christ's spiritual
kingdom, the manner of its estabhshment and extension, and all its
after varied fortunes are portrayed. It was to this class that the
260 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
parables just spoken by our Saviour belonged. And there was mercy
as weU as judgment in their employment. Behind their concealing
drapery bright lights were burning, the very darkness thrown around
intended to stimulate the eye to a keener, steadier gaze. As his dis
ciples had dealt with the instructions that had previously come from
his hps differently from those who seeing saw not, hearing would not
understand, so now Jesus deals differently with them as to the para
bles. They appear to have been at first as much in the dark as to
their meaning as was the general audience on the shore. But they
were wiUing, even anxious to be taught. When the cloud came down
on the teachings of their Master, and these dark sayings were uttered,
they longed to enter into that cloud to gaze upon the light which
burned within. They came seeking, and they found ; knocking, and
the door was opened to them. To them it was given to know the
mysteries of the kingdom ; but to the others, uncaring for it, unpre
pared for it, and unworthy of it as they were, it was not given. By
a private and full explanation of the two first and leading parables,
those of the sower and the tares and the wheat, Jesus put into his
disciples' hands the key to aU the eight parables that he dehvered ;
taught them to see therein the first plantation of the church — the
field, the world — the good seed, the word of God ; the entrance and
the aUowed continued presence of obstruction and opposition — the
silent and secret growth of God's empire over human hearts; the
small enlarging into the great; its persuasive transforming power;
its preciousness, whether found after diligent search or coming into
the possessor's hands almost at unawares ; the end of aU jn the gath
ering out of that spiritual kingdom of the Lord of aU that should
offend. What was true, locally and temporarily, of the instructions of
that single day, of that smaU section of our Lord's teaching, is true
of the whole body of those disclosures of God made to. us in the Bible.
There are things simple and there are thing obscure ; things so plain
that he who runs may read; things so deep that he only can under
stand who has within him some answering spiritual consciousness or
aspiration, out of which the true interpretation springs. We must
first compass the simple, if we would fathom the obscure. We must
receive into honest hearts and make good use of the plainest declara
tions of the divine Word, if we would have that lamp kindled within
us, by whose hght the more recondite of its sayings can alone be
understood. And U we refuse to do so, if we will not foUow the
course here so plainly marked out for us, if we turn our eyes from
that which they could see if they would, U we stop our ears against
THE FIRST PARABLES. 261
that which they could understand, if we foUow not the heavenly
lights already given so far as they can carry us, have we any right
to complain U at last our feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and
we look for Hght, and, behold, it is turned into darkness? It is in an
inner, remote sanctuary, the true Shekinah, where the Hght of God's
gracious presence stfll shineth, to be approached with a humble,
tractable spirit, the prayer upon our Hps and in our heart, " What 1
know not, Lord, teach thou me ; I beseech thee show me thy glory."
It is not in the inteUect, it is in the conscience, in the heart, that the
finest and most powerful organs of spiritual vision lie. There are
seals that cover up many passages and pages of the Bible, which no
hght or fire of genius can dissolve ; there are hidden riches here that
no labor of mere learned research can get at and spread forth. But
those seals melt like the snow-wreath beneath the warm breathings
of desire and prayer, and those riches drop spontaneously into the
bosom of the humble and the contrite, the poor and the needy.
Fivo parables appear to have been addressed by Jesus to the
multitude from the boat, their dehvery broken by the private expla
nation to the disciples of the parable of the Sower. Landing, and
sending the multitude away, Jesus entered into the house. There
the disciples again applied to him, and he declared unto them the
parable of the Tares. Thereafter, the three shorter parables of the
Treasure, the Pearl, and the Net were spoken to the disciples by
themselves. The long, laborious day was now nearly over, and in
the dwelling which served him as a home while in Capernaum, he
might have sought and found repose. Again, however, we see him
by the lake-side ; again under the pressure of the multitudes. Seek
ing rest and seeing no hope of it for him in Capernaum, Jesus said,
"Let us pass over unto the other side." . That other eastern side of
the lake of Galilee offered a singular contrast to the western one.
Its will and lonely hiUs, thinly peopled by a race, the majority of
whom were Gentiles, were seldom visited by the inhabitants of the
plain of Gennesaret. Now-a-days both sides of the lake are desert;
yet still there is but Httle intercourse between them. Few travellers
venture to traverse the eastern shore; fewer venture far into the
regions which he behind, which are now occupied wholly by an Arab
population. As offering to him in some one or other of the deep val
leys which cleave its hills and run down into the sea, a shady and
secure retreat for a day or two from the bustle and fatigue of his
hfe in Galilee, Jesus proposes a passage across the lake. All is soon
ready; and they hurriedly embark, taking Jesus in "even as he was,"
with no preparation for the voyage. It was, however, but a short
262 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
sail of six or eight miles. Night falls on them by the way, and with
the night one of those terrible hurricanes by which a lake which lies
so low, and is bounded on all sides by hills, is visited at times. The
tempest smote the waters, the waves ran high and smote the little
bark. She reeled and swayed, and at each lurch took in more and
more water till she was nearly filled, and once fiUed, with the next
wave that roUs into her she must sink. They were practised hands
that navigated this boat, who knew well the lake in all its moods,
not open to unreasonable fear; but now fear comes upon them, and
they are ready to give up aU hope. Where aU this while is he at
whose bidding they had embarked ? They had been too busy for
the time with the urgent work required by the sudden squall, to think
of him ; the mantle of the night's thick darkness may have hidden
him from their view. But now in their extremity they seek for him,
and find him "in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow."
Unbroken by all the noise of winds and waves without, and all the
tumult of those toiling hands within, how quie,t and deep must that
rest of the wearied one have been! They have some difficulty in
awaking him, and they do it somewhat roughly. "Master! Master!"
they cry to him, "save us! We perish! Carest thou not that we
perish?" With a word of rebuke for their great fear and little faith,
Jesus rises, and speaking to the boisterous elements as one might
speak to a boisterous child, he says to the winds and the waves,
"Peace, be still!" Nature owns at once the sovereignty of the Lord.
The winds cease their blowing — the waves subside — instantly there
is a great calm. Those who had sought and roused the sleeping
Saviour fall back into their former places, resume their former work;
at the measured stroke of their oars the little vessel ghdes silently
over the placid waters. All quiet now, where but a few minutes
before all was tumult ; few words are spoken during the rest of the
voyage, the rowers only whispering to each other as they rowed:
"What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the waves
obey him?"
Jesus lying this moment under the weakness of exhausted strength,
rising the next in aU the might of manifested omnipotence : in close
proximity, in quick succession, the humanity and the divinity that
were in him exhibited themselves. Though suddenly roused to see
himself in a position quite new to him, and evidently of great peril,
Jesus has no fear. His first thought is not of the danger, his first
word is not to the tempest, his first care is not for the safety of the
body, it is for the state of the spirit of those who wake him from his
slumbers , nor is it until he has rebuked their fears that he removes
THE DEMONIAC OF GADARA. 263
the cause ; but then he does so, and does it effectuaUy, by the word
of his power. And so long as the hfe we are living shall be thought
and spoken of as a voyage, so long shall this night scene on the lake
of Galilee supply the imagery by which many a passage in the his
tory of the church, and many in the history of the individual believer,
shall be illustrated. Sleeping or waking, let Christ be in the vessel
and it is safe. The tempest may come, our faith be smaU, our fear
be great, but stfll if in our fear we have so much faith as to cry to
him to save us, still in the hour of our greatest need wfll he arise to
our help, and though he may have to blame us for not cherishing a
livelier trust and making an earlier apphcation, he will not suffer the
winds or the waves to overwhelm us.
The storm is past, the night is over, the morning dawns, the
opposite coast of the Gadarenes is reached. Here, then, in these
lonely places there will be some rest for Jesus, some secure repose.
Not yet, not instantly. Soon as he lands, immediately, from some
neighboring place of graves* there comes forth a wild and frenzied
man, a man possessed by many devils ; for a long time so possessed,
exceeding fierce so that no man could tame him. They had bound
him with fetters and with chains ; the fetters he had plucked asun
der, the chains had been broken by him. Flying from the haunts of
men, flinging off aU his garments, the naked, howling maniac lies
day and night among the tombs, crying and cutting himself with
stones; so fiercely assaulting all who approached him that no man
might pass by that way. From his lair among the graves the devil-
haunted madman rushes upon Jesus. His neighbors had all fled terri
fied before him. This stranger who has just landed flies not, but tran
quilly contemplates his approach. He who had so lately brought
the great calm down into the bosom of the troubled lake, is about
now to infuse a greater calm into this troubled spirit. The voice
that an hour or two before had said to the winds and the waves,
" Peace, be still," has already spoken, while yet the poor demoniac is
afar off, to the possessing devil that was within, and said, " Come out
of him, thou unclean spirit." If underneath that dark and terrible
tyranny of the indweUing demons there still survived within the man
some spark of his native independence, some glimmering conscious
ness of what he once had been and might be again, were but those
usurpers of his spirit quieted; if something of the man stiU were
there, crouching, groaning, travailing beneath the intolerable pres
sure that drove him into madness — what a new and strange sensation
must have entered this region of his consciousness when the devils
As to the locality in which, the miracle was wrought, see note on p. 337.
264 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
which had been rioting within him, claiming and using him as all
their own, heard that word of Jesus, and in their terror began to
cry out, as in the presence of one their acknowledged Superior and
Lord ! What a new hght of hope must have come into that wild
and haggard eye as it gazed upon that mysterious being, hailed by
the devils as the Son of the Most High God ! His rehef, indeed, was
not immediate ; the devils did not at once depart. There was a short
and singular colloquy between Christ and them. They beseech, they
adjure him not to torment them before the time, not to send them
down at once into the abyss, or U he were determined to give hberty
to their human captive, then not to drive them from the neighbor
hood, which, perhaps was their only earthly aUotted haunt, but to
suffer them to enter into a neighboring herd of swine. The permis
sion was given. They entered into the swine — how we know not,
operating upon them how and with what intent we know not. All
we have before us is the fact, that the whole herd ran violently down
a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters. What became
of the devils then ? As the dumb beasts went down into the waters,
did they go down into a darker, deeper depth, to be kept there in
chains and darkness to the judgment of the great day? It is not
said that the devils purposely destroyed the swine. It no doubt was
their entrance and the frenzy into which that entrance drove the ani
mals, that made them plunge headlong into the lake. But who shall
tell us whether in their reckless and intense love of mischief the
foul spirits did not here outwit themselves, creating an impulse
that they could not curb, destroying the new habitation they had
chosen, and by their own inconsistent and suicidal acts bringing
down upon themselves the very fate from which they had prayed
to be delivered ? We know far too little of the world of spirits to
affirm or to deny here ; far too little for us either mockingly to reject
the whole as an idle tale, or presumingly to speculate as U the mys
teries of the great kingdom of darkness stood revealed. It is true,
indeed, that whatever was the design or anticipation of the devils
in entering into the swine, the result must have been known to Jesus.
Knowing then, beforehand, how great the destruction here of prop
erty and animal hfe would be, why was the permission given ? We
shaU answer that question when any man will tell us how many swine
one human spirit is worth — why devils were permitted to enter any
where or do any mischief upon this earth— why such large and suc
cessive losses of human and bestial life are ever suffered, the agencies
producing which are as much under the control of the Creator as
these devils were under that of Christ. To take up the one single
THE DEMONIAC OF GADARA. 265
instance in which you can connect the loss of Hfe, not directly with
the personal agency but evidently with the permission of the Saviour,
and to take exception to that, while the mystery of the large suffer
ance of sin and misery in this world Hes spread out everywhere before
and around us, is it not unreasonable and unfair? We do not deny
that there is a difficulty here. We are not offering any explanation
of this difficulty that we consider to be satisfactory. We are only
pleading, first, that in such ignorance as ours is, and with a thou
sand times greater difficulties everywhere besetting our faith in God,
this single difficulty should throw no impediment in the way of our
faith in Jesus Christ.
The keepers of the herd, who had waited to see the issue, went
and told in the adjoining viUage and in the country round about all
that had happened. At the tidings the whole population of the
neighborhood came out to meet Jesus. They found him, with the man
who had been possessed with devils in the manner they aU knew so
well, sitting at his fee*t — already clothed, in his right mind, aU traces
of his possession, save the marks of the bonds and of the fetters,
gone. They were alarmed, annoyed, offended at what had happened.
There was a mystery about the man, who had such power over the
world of spirits, and used it in such a way, that repelled rather than
attracted them. They might have thought and felt differently
had they looked aright at their poor afflicted brother, upon whom
such a happy change had been wrought. But they thought more of
swine that had perished than of the man who had been saved ; and
they besought Jesus to depart out of their coasts. He did not need
to have the entreaty addressed to him a second time ; he complied at
once — prepared immediately to reembark, and we do not read that
he ever returned to that region — they never had another opportunity
of seeing and hearing him. Nor is it the habit of Jesus to press his
presence upon the unwilling. Stfll he has many ways of coming into
our coasts, and stfll have we many ways of intimating to him our un-
wfllingness that he should abide there. He knows how to interpret
the inward turning away of our thoughts and heart from him — he
knows when the unspoken language of any human spirit to him is —
Depart ; and U he went away so readily when asked on earth, who
shaU assure us that he may not as readily take us at our word, and
when we wish it, go — go, it may be, never to return ?
Christ heard and at once complied with the request of the Gada
renes. But there was another petition presented to him at the same
time, with which he did not comply. From the moment that he had
been healed, the demoniac had never left his side, never thought of
266 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
parting from him, never desired to return to home, or friends, or kin
dred. A bond stronger than aU others bound him to his dehverer.
When he saw Jesus make the movement to depart, he accompanied
him to the shore, he went with him to the boat. And as he feU there
at his feet, we can almost fancy him taking up Euth's words, and say
ing, " Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from foUowing after
thee : for whither thou goest, I wiU go ; and where thou lodgest, I
will lodge ; thy people shaU be my people, and thy God my God."
He is ready, he is anxious to forsake all and foUow Jesus, but he is
not permitted. " Go home to thine own house and to thy friends,"
said Jesus to him, " and teU them how great things the Lord hath
done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee." It was to a hea
then home, to friends that knew little about the Lord, and cared httle
for such knowledge, to whom he was to go. No smaU trial to be torn
thus from the Saviour's side, to go and reside daily among those who
had sent that Saviour away from them. But he did it — did more
even than he was told to do ; not in his own house alone, nor among
his own friends alone, but throughout the whole Gentile district of
Decapohs he pubhshed abroad the great things that Jesus had done
for him. Better for the man himseU, too long accustomed to dwell
alone, taking a tincture of the solitary places in which he dwelt into
his own spirit, to mix thus freely and widely with his feUow-men;
and better undoubtedly it was for those among whom he hved, acting
as the representative of him whom in person they had rejected, but
who seem to have lent a more wiUing ear to the man of their own
district and kindred, for we are told that as he spake of Jesus, " all
men did marvel," and some, let us hope, did believe.
Let one closing glance be given at the strange picture which this
passage in our Saviour's hfe presents. It abounds in hghts and shad
ows, in striking contrasts — the meanest selfishness confronted with
the purest, noblest love. Eeckless frenzy, abject terror, profound
attention, devoted attachment, rapidly succeed each other in him
who, brought into closest union with the highest and the lowest of
the powers of the spiritual world, presents to us a condensed epitome
of the great conflict between good and evil — between Christ and
Satan — in the domain of the human spirit. Undoubtedly it stands
the most remarkable instance of dispossession in the gospel narra
tive, reveahng to us at once the depth of that degradation to which
our poor humanity may sink, and the height of that elevation to
which, through the power and infinite compassion of the Saviour, it
may be raised. Was it for the purpose of teaching us more mani
festly that Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil, that in that
THE DEMONIAC OF GADARA. 267
age of His appearance devils were permitted to exercise such strange
dominion over men ? Was it to bring into visible and personal col
lision the heads of the two opposite spiritual communities — the
Prince of Light and the prince of darkness — and to make more visible
to all men the supremacy of the one over the other? Was it that, a.a
the Sun of righteousness rose in one quarter of the heavens, up- m
the opposite a cloud of unwonted blackness and darkness was aUowed
to gather, that with aU the greater brightness there might shine forth
the bow of promise for our race ? Whatever be the explanation, the
fact hes before us that demoniacal possessions did then take place,
and were not continued. But though the spirits of evil are not
allowed in that particular manner to occupy and torment and degrade
us, have they been withdrawn from all access to and all influence
over our souls ? With so many hints given us in the Holy Scriptures
that we wrestle not with flesh and blood alone, but with angels and
principalities and powers of darkness ; that there are devices of Satan
of which it becomes us not to remain ignorant ; that the great adver
sary goeth about seeking whom he may devour ; with the command
laid upon us, "Eesist the devfl, and he will flee from you ;" with the
promise given, " The Lord shaU bruise Satan under your feet shortly ;"
are we not warranted to believe, and should we not be ever acting on
the conviction, that our souls are the sphere of an unseen conflict, in
which rival spirits are struggling for mastery ? When some light-
winged fancy carries off the seed of the word as it drops in our soul,
may not that fancy have come at Satan's call, and be doing Satan's
work ? When the pleasures and honors and riches of this world are
invested with a false and seductive splendor, and we are tempted to
pursue them as our chief good, may he not have a hand in our temp
tation who held out the kingdoms of this world and all the glory of
them before the Saviour's eye? But however it maybe with evil
spirits, we know that evil passions have their haunt and home within
our hearts. These, as a strong man armed, keep the house till the
stronger than they appears. That stronger one is Christ. To him let
us bring our souls ; and U it please him to bid any unclean spirit go
forth, at his feet let us be sitting, and may he make us wilhng, what
ever our own desire might be, to go wherever he would have us go,
and do whatever he would have us do.
268 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
IX.
The Mission of the Twelve.* -•
Jesus returned across the lake from Gadara to resume his labors
in Galilee. The circuit through its southern towns and villages on
which he now embarked was the last he was to make. He looked on
the multitudes that gathered round him with a singular compassion.
SpfrituaUy to his eye they were as sheep scattered abroad, who when
he left them would be without a shepherd. " The harvest," said he
to his disciples, " truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray
ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers
into his harvest." But was he not himself the Lord of the harvest,
and had he no laborers to send forth ?
Laborers sufficiently numerous, sufficiently trained, there were
not ; but there were those twelve men whom he had chosen, who had
for many months been continuaUy by his side. He can send them;
not permanently, for as yet they were comparatively unqualified for
the work. Besides, to separate them finally from himseU would be
to disqualify them for the office which they afterwards were to exer
cise, of being the reporters of his chief sayings, the witnesses of all
the leading actions of his lUe. But he can send them on a brief, pre
liminary, experimental tour, one happy effect of which would be, that
the townsmen and villagers of Galilee shaU have one more opportu
nity afforded them of hearing the gospel of the kingdom announced.
The hitherto close companionship of the twelve with Jesus may have
presented to Jewish eyes nothing so extraordinary as to attract much
notice and remark. Their great teachers had their favorite pupils,
whom they kept continually beside them, and whose services of kind
ness to them they gratefuUy received and acknowledged. It was
something new, indeed, to see a teacher acting as Jesus did — setting
up no school in any one separate locality, confining himseU to no one
place and to no set times or methods; discoursing about the king
dom, week-day and Sabbath-day alike, pubhcly in the synagogue,
privately at the supper-table, on road-side and lake-side, from the
bow of the boat and the brow of the mountain. And always close to
him these twelve men are seen who had forsaken their former occu
pations, and had now attached themselves permanently to his per
son, ministering to his comfort, imbibing his instructions, forming an
innermost circle of discipleship, within which Jesus was often seen to
¦ * Matt. 9 : 35-38 ; 10 ; Mark 6 : 7-30 ; Luke 9 : 1-9.
THE MISSION OF THE TWELVE. 269
retire, and to which the mysteries of the kingdom were revealed as
there was abihty to receive them.
But now a stiU more singular spectacle is presented. Jesus takes
the twelve, and dividing them into pairs, sends them away from him
two and two; dehvering to them, as he sends them forth, the address
contained in the tenth chapter of the gospel of St. Matthew. A few
minute instructions were first given as to the special missionary tour
on which they were despatched. It was to be confined strictly to
Galilee — to the narrow district that they had already frequently trav
ersed in their Master's company. But he personally was not to be
the burden of their message. They were not to announce his advent
as the Messiah. He had not done so himself, and their preaching
was not to go beyond his own. They were simply to proclaim the
advent of the kingdom, leaving the works and words of Jesus to point
out the place in that kingdom which he occupied. The power of
working miracles they were for the time to enjoy, but they were not
to use it, as they might easily have done, for any selfish or mercenary
purpose. As freely as they got, they were to give. They were to be
absent but a few days. They were going, not among strangers or
enemies, but among friends and brethren. The more easfly and expe
ditiously they got through their work the better. Unprovided and
unencumbered, they were to cast themselves at once upon the hospi
tality of those they visited. "Nor was there in this," says Dr. Thom
son, "any departure from the simple manners of the country. At
this day the farmer sets out on excursions quite as extensive without
a para in his purse, and the modern Moslem prophet of Tarshiha
thus sends forth his apostles over this identical region. Neither do
they encumber themselves with two coats. They are accustomed to
sleep in the garments they wear during the day ; and in this climate
such plain people experience therefrom no inconvenience. They wear
coarse shoes, answering to the sandal of the ancients, but never carry
two pairs ; and, although the staff is the invariable companion of all
wayfarers, they are content with one."* The directions given to the
apostles were proper to a short and hasty journey, such as the one
now before them. On entering any town or village, their first inquiry
was to be for the susceptible, the well-disposed, about whom, after
the excitement consequent upon Christ's former visits, some informa
tion might easfly be obtained. They were to salute the house in
which such resided, to enter it, and if well-received, were to remain
in it, not going from house to house, wasting their time in multiplied
0 " The Land and the Book," p. 346. In St. Matthew's gospel it is said they
were not to take staves : in Mark, that they were to take one, that is, one only.
270 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
or prolonged formahties and salutations by the way. Wherever
rejected, they were to shake off the dust of their feet against that
house or city ; and to create a profound impression of the importance
of the errand on which they were despatched, Jesus closes the first
part of his address to them by saying, "Verily I say unto you, It
shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the
day of judgment, than for that city."
Hitherto, all that he had said had direct reference to the short
and rapid journey that lay immediately before them. But limited as
it was, the task now committed to them carried in it the germ, the
type of that larger apostohc work for which, by the gUt of the Spirit,
they were to be qualified, and in which, for so many years after their
Master's death, they were to be engaged. And so, after speaking of
the one, Jesus passes on to the other, the nearer and narrower mis
sion sinking out of sight as his eye rests on the farther and broader
mission that lay before them. In the one, the nearer, there was to
be no opposition or persecution; in the other, a fiery trial was in
store for the faithful. The one, the nearer, was to be confined to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel; in the other, they were to come
into coUision with the kings and governors of the Gentiles. It is of
this second period — of the persecution on the one hand, and the
gifts of the qualifying Spirit on the other, by which it should be dis
tinguished — that Jesus speaks in the passage embraced in the verses
from the sixteenth to the twenty-third. The second division of the
address closes, as the first does, by a "Verily I say unto you." The
fact thus solemnly affirmed pointing, in the destruction of Jerusalem,
to the close of that period over which Christ's prophetic eye was now
ranging : " Verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the
cities of Israel, tfll the Son of man be come."
But now the whole earthly mission of the twelve presents itself
to the Saviour's eye but as the preface and prelude to that continu
ous, abiding work of witnessing for him upon this earth to which
each separate disciple of the cross is called. Dropping, therefore, all
directions and allusions referring exclusively to the apostles and to
apostolic times, Jesus, in the closing and larger portion of the address,
from the twenty-fourth to the forty-second verse, speaks generally of
all true discipleship to himself upon this earth : foreteUing its for
tunes, describing its character, its duties, its encouragements, and its
rewards. Jesus would hold out no false hopes — would have no one become
his upon any false expectations. Misconception, misrepresentation,
ill-treatment of c ne kind or other, his true and faithful followers must
THE MISSION OF THE TWELVE. 271
be prepared to meet — to meet without surprise, without complaint,
without resentment. The disciple need not hope to be above his
Master, the servant above his Lord. " If they have caUed the mas
ter of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household ?"
But why should the covert slander, the calumny whispered in secret,
be dreaded, when the day was coming when all that is covered shaU
be revealed, aU that is hid shall be made known ? With his disciples
there shaU -be no concealment of any kind. He came to found no
secret society, linked by hidden bonds, depository of inner mysteries.
True, there were things that he addressed alone to the apostles' ear
in private, but the secrecy and reserve so practised by him was meant
to be temporary and transient. "What I tell you thus in darkness,
that speak ye in the light : and what ye hear in the ear, that preach
ye upon the housetops." ' The doing so may imperil hfe, the life of
the body; but what of that ? "Fear not them which kill the body,
but are not able to kill the soul : but rather fear him which is able to
destroy both soul and body in hell." But even the life of the body
shall be watched over, not suffered needlessly to perish. Not a single
sparrow, though worth but half a farthing, falls to the ground with
out God's knowledge, not a hair of your head but is numbered by
him. " Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many spar
rows." The head whose very hairs are numbered by him, your Father
will not see hghtly or uselessly cut off. Leave your fate then in his
hands, and whatever that may be, be open, be honest, be full, be
fearless in the testimony ye bear, for "Whosoever shaU confess me
before men, him will I confess before my Father which is in heaven.
But whosoever shaU deny me before men, him will I deny before my
Father which is in heaven." Times of outward persecution may not
last, but think not that on this earth there shall ever be perfect peace.
"I came not to send peace, but a sword," a sword which, though it
drop out of the open hand of the persecutor, shall not want other
hands to take it up and wield it differently. " I am come to set a
man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her
mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a
man's foes shall be they of his own household." And to no severer
trial shall my foUowers be subject, than when it is not force but affec
tion, the affection of the nearest and dearest on earth, that would
draw them away from me, or tempt them to be unfaithful to my
cause. 'But above aU other claims is the one I make on the love of aU
who choose me as their Saviour and their Lord. I must be first in
their affections: the throne of their heart must be mine; no rival per-
272 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
mitted to sit by my side. It is not that I am selfishly exactive of
affection ; it is not that I am jealous of other love ; it is not that T
wish or ask that you should love others less in order to love mo
more ; but it is, that what I am to you, what I have done for you,
what from this time forth and for evermore I am prepared to be
to and to do for you, gives me such a priority and precedence in
the claim I make, "that he that loveth father and mother more
than me is not worthy of me, and he that loveth son or daughter
more than me is not worthy of me." A bitter thing it may be to
crucify some inordinate earthly desire of affection in order to give
me, or to keep me in, that place of supremacy which is the only one
I possibly or consistently can occupy. But he that taketh not up
the cross for me, even as I have taken up the cross for him ; he
thit will not deny himseU, and in the exercise of that seU-denial
take up his cross daily and foUow me; "he is not worthy of me, he
cannot be my disciple." For this is one of the fixed unalterable con
ditions of that spiritual economy under which you and all men live,
that he who maketh the pursuits and the pleasures of the present
wcene of things the aim of his being ; he who by any manner or form
of self-gratification seeks to gain his Hfe, shall lose it, shaU fail at the
last even in the very thing upon which he has set his heart. Where
as he who for my sake shall give himseU to the mortUying of every
evil affection of his nature, to the crucifying of the flesh with the
affections and lusts thereof, he shall find, the life he seems to bse;
out of the death of the lower shaU spring the higher, the eternal Hfe
of the spirit. And let aU of every degree, whether they be apostles
or prophets, or simple disciples, or the least of these my little
ones, be animated, be elevated throughout that strife with seU and
sin, the world and the devil, to which in Christ they are called, by
remembering what a dignified position they occupy, whose repre
sentatives they are. "He that receiveth you receiveth me; he that
receiveth me receiveth him that sent me." And U it be in the name
or the character of a prophet that any one receives you, he, the
receiver, shaU have a prophet's reward ; or U in the name simply of a
righteous man that any one receive you, he, the receiver, shaU have a
righteous man's reward; nay, more, U it be to any of the least of my
little ones that a cup only of cold water be given in the name of a
disciple, he, the giver, shall in no wise lose his reward.' For so it is,
and ever shaU be, not simply by great men going out upon great em
bassies and speaking words of power to gathered multitudes, or by
great assemblies propounding or enforcing great and solemn truths,
that the kingdom of Jesus Christ is advanced, but by aU, the high
THE MISSION OF THE SEVENTY. 273
and low, and rich and poor, and weak and strong, who bear his name,
looking upon themselves as his missionaries here on earth, sent by
him even as he was sent by his Father ; sent, that they may be to one
another what he has been to them, seeking each other's good, willing
to communicate, giving and in giving receiving, receiving and in
receiving imparting, each doing a little in one way or other to com
mend to others that Saviour in whom is all his trust, these littles
making up that vast and ever multiplying agency by which the
empire of the Eedeemer over human spirits is being continually en
larged. Can any one read over and even partially enter into the meaning
of those words which Jesus spake to his apostles when sending them
for the first time from his side — a season when there was so little
material out of which any rational conjecture, could be formed as to>
his future or theirs, or the future of any school or sect, or institution-
that He and they might found — and not be convinced that open as day
lay aU that future to him who here, as elsewhere in so many of his
most important discourses, sets forth in a series of perspectives — mix
ing with and melting into each other — the whole history of his church
in all its trials and conflicts from the beginning even to the end? But
a greater than a prophet is here — one who speaks of men being
hated, persecuted, scourged, and put to death for his name's sake, as
if there were nothing in any wise unreasonable or unnatural in it;
one who would have all men come to him, and who asks of all who
come, love, obedience, and sacrifice, such as but one Being has a
right to ask, even he who has redeemed us to God by his blood,
whose right over aU we are and have and can do is supreme, unchal
lengeable, unchangeable ; whose, by every tie, we are, and whom,, by
the mightiest of obligations, we are bound to love and serve.
The sight must have been a very extraordinary one, of the apos
tles setting off two by two from their Master's side, passing with such
eagerness and haste through the towns and vfllages, preaching and
working miracles. To hear one man preach as Jesus did, to see one
man confirm his word by doing such wonderful works, filled the whole
community with wonder. To what a higher pitch must that wonder
have been raised when they saw others commissioned by him, endowed
by him, not only preaching as he did, but healing, too, all manner of
disease! True, the circle was a small one to whom such special pow
ers were delegated ; but half a year or so afterwards, as if to to teach
that it was not to the twelve alone — to those holding the high office
of the apostolate — that Jesus was. prepared to grant such a commis
sion, he sent out a band of seventy men, embracing, we are inclined
Ufa of Chrlit. J£j
274 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to beheve, almost the entire body of his professed disciples in the
north who were of the age and had the strength to execute such a
task ; addressing them in almost the same terms, imposing on them
the same duties, and clothing them with the same prerogatives,
olearly manifesting by his employment of so large a number of hia
ordinary disciples that it was not his purpose that the dissemination
of the knowledge of his name should be confined to any one small
and peculiarly endowed body of men.
It appears from the statement of St. Matthew that when Jesus
" had made an end of commanding his twelve disciples, he departed
thence to teach and to preach in their cities," continuing thus his
own personal labors in the absence of the twelve. How long they
remained apart, in the absence of all definite notes of time, can only
be a matter of conjecture. A few days would carry the apostles over
all the ground they had to traverse, and they would not loiter by the
way. Ere very long they were aU united once more at Capernaum.
Tidings met them there of a very sad event which had just occurred,
we know not exactly where, but if Josephus is to be trusted, it was
in the remotest region of that district over which Herod Antipas
ruled. It is very singular that though Herod governed Galilee, and
built and generally resided at Tiberias, a town upon the lake-side a
few miles south of the plain of Gennesaret, he had never met with
Jesus ; had done nothing to interrupt his labors, though these were
making so great a sensation all over the country ; had never, appa
rently, tfll about this time, even heard of him or of his works. It
has not unreasonably been conjectured that soon after throwing John
the Baptist into prison, he had been absent on one of his journeys to
Eome during those very months in which our Lord's Galilean minis
try was most openly and actively conducted. Even, however, had
this not been the case — as we never read of Jesus visiting Tiberias —
we can readily enough imagine that Herod might have been living
there all the time, too much engaged with other things to heed much
what, if at all spoken of in his presence, would be spoken of con
temptuously as a new Jewish religious ferment that was spreading
among the people. The pubhc tranquillity was not threatened; and,
that preserved, they might have as many such religious excitements
among them as they liked. Though fully cognizant of the nature
And progress of the Baptist's ministry, he had done nothing to stop
it. It was not on any pubhc or political grounds, but purely acd
soiely on a personal one, that he had cast John into prison. At first
he had listened to him gladly, and done many things at his bidding,
but the Baptist had been bold enough to tell him that it was not
MARTYRDOM OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 275
lawful for him to have his brother's wUe, and brave enough at all
hazards to stand by what he said. He would neither modify nor
retract. Herod's anger was kindled against him, and was weU nursed
and kept warm by Herodias. She would have made short work with
Ihe impudent intermeddler. But Herod feared the people, and so
tsontented himseU with casting him into that prison in which he lay
so many long and weary months. While lying there alone and inac
tive, he had sent, as we have seen, two of his discipjes to Jesus to
ask him, "Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?"
It was after all but an indirect and ambiguous reply that they had
brought back — enough, and more than enough, to meet any transient
doubt as to Christ's character and office which in any quarter might
have arisen, but carrying with it no reference to the Baptist's per
sonal state — embodying no message of sympathy, holding out no
prospect of rehef. AU that was left to John was to cling to the hope
that his long imprisonment must be near its end. Herod might
relent, or Jesus might interpose ; somehow or other the dehverance
would come. And it did come at last, but not as John had looked
for it. It came in the form of that grim executioner, who, breaking
in upon his sohtude, and flashing before his eyes the instrument of
death, bade him bow his head at once to the fatal stroke. Short
warning this: was no explanation to be given? no interview with
Herod allowed? not a day nor an hour for preparation given? No.
The king's order was for instant execution. The damsel was waiting
for the head, and the mother waiting for the damsel. How did the
Baptist bear himseU at that trying moment ? There were no crowds
to witness this martyr's death ; not one there to teU us afterwards
how he looked, or what he said. Alone, he had to gird his spirit up
to meet his doom. A moment or two, spent we know not how, and
the death-blow feU.
It is said that when death comes suddenly upon a man — when,
this moment in fuU possession of his faculties, he knows that next
moment is to be his last — within that moment there flashes often
upon the memory the whole scenery of a bygone life, li such a
vision of the past rose up before the Baptist's eye, what a strange,
mysterious thing might that hfe of his on earth have seemed — how
like a failure, how seemingly abortive ! Thirty long years of prepa
ration; then a brief and wonderful success, brimful of promise; that
success suddenly arrested ; aU means and opportunities of active ser
vice plucked out of his hand. Then the idle months in prison, and
then the felon's death ! Mysterious, inexplicable as such a hfe might
look to the eye of sense, how looked it to the eye of God ? Many
276 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
flattering things have been said of men when they were hving; many
false and fulsome epitaphs have been graven on their tombs; but the
lips that never flattered have said of John, that of those that have
been born of women there hath not arisen a greater; his greatness
mainly due to his pecuHar connection with Christ, but not unsup
ported by his personal character, for he is one of the few prominent
figures in the sacred page upon which not a single stain is seen to
rest. And though they buried him in some obscure grave to which
none went on pilgrimage, yet for that tomb the pen that never traced
a line of falsehood has written the brief but pregnant epitaph: "John
fulfiUed his course." Terminating so abruptly at such an early stage,
with large capacity for work, and plenty of work to do, shaU we not
say of this man that his lUe was unseasonably and prematurely cut
off? No ; his earthly task was done : he had a certain work assigned
him here, and it was finished. Nor could a higher eulogium have
been pronounced over his grave than this, that he had fulfilled the
course assigned to him by Providence. Let the testimony thus borne
to him convince us that there is a special and narrow sphere which
God has marked out for each of us on earth. To be wise to know
what that sphere is, to accept it and keep to it, and be content with
if; — diligently, perseveringly, thankfully, submissively to do its work
and bear its burdens, is one of our first duties, a duty which in its
discharge wfll minister one of our simplest and purest joys.
The bloody head was grasped by the executioner and carried into
the king's presence, and given to the damsel ; and she carried it to
her mother. The sense of sated vengeance may for the moment have
filled the heart of Herodias with a grim and devilish joy> but those
pale lips, those fixed and glazed eyes, that livid countenance upon
whose rigid features the shadow of its living sternness is still resting,
she cannot look long at them ; she waves the ghastly object from her
sight, to be borne away, and laid we know not where.
The headless body had been left upon the prison floor. So soon
as they hear of what has happened, some of John's disciples come
and lift it up and bear it out sadly to burial ; and that last office
done, in their desolation and helplessness they followed the instinct
of that new faith which their Master's teaching had inspired, they
went and told Jesus. They did what in all our sorrows we should
do : they went and told him who can most fuUy sympathize, and who
alone can thoroughly and abidingly comfort and sustain.
THE FEEDING OF THE FIVE THOUSAND. 277
X.
The Reeding of the Five Thousand, and the
Walking upon the Water.*
Herod first heard of Jesus immediately after the Baptist's death.
While some said that this Jesus now so much spoken of was Ehas,
or one of the prophets, there were others about the Tetrarch who
suggested that he was John risen from the dead. Herod had httle
real faith, but that did not prevent his lying open enough to super
stitious fancies. He was ill at ease about what he had done on his
birthday feast — haunted by fears that he could not shake off. The
suggestion about Jesus feU in with these fears, and helped in a way
to soothe them. And so, after some perplexity and doubt, at last he
adopted it, and proclaimed it to be his own conviction, saying to his
servants, as if with a somewhat Hghtened conscience, " This is John,
whom I beheaded : he is risen from the dead : and therefore mighty
works do show forth themselves in him." John had done no mighty
works so long as Herod knew him, but now, in this new estate, he
had risen to a higher level, to which he, Herod, had helped to ele
vate him — he would like to see him in the new garb.
The disciples of John, who came and told Jesus of their master's
death, had to teU him, also, of the strange credulity and curiosity of
Herod. We are left to imagine the impression their report created.
It came at the very time when the twelve had returned from their
-short and separate excursions, and when, as the fruit of the divided
and multiplied agency that had been exerted, so many were coming
and going out and in among the reassembled band, that " they had
no leisure," we are told, " so much as to eat." Mark 6 : 21. For
himseU and for them, Jesus desired now a httle quiet and seclusion.
For himseU — that he might ponder over a death prophetic of his own,
the occurrence of which made, as we shall see, an epoch in his minis
try. For them — that they might have some respite from accumulated
fatigue and toil. His own purpose fixed, he invited them to join him
in its execution, saying to them, " Come ye yourselves into a desert
place and rest a while." Such a desert place as would afford the
seclusion tnat they sought, they had not to go far to And. Over
against Capernaum, across the lake, in the district running up north
ward to Bethsaida, are plenty of lonely enough places to choose
nmong. They take boat to row across. The wind blows fresh
* Matt. 14 : 12-33 ; Mark 6 : 30-52 ; Luke 9 : 10-17 ; John 6 : 1-2L
278 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
from the northwest ; for shelter, they hug the shore. Their departure
had been watched by the crowd, and now, when they see how close to
the land they keep, and how slow the progress is they make, a great
multitude out of aU the cities — embracing, in all Hkelihood, many of
those companies which had gathered to go up to the Passover — run
on foot along the shore. A less than two hours' walk brings them to
Bethsaida, at the northern extremity of the lake. There they cross
the Jordan, and enter upon that large and uninhabited plain that
slopes down to the lake on its northeastern shores. Another hour or
so carries them to the spot at which Christ and his apostles land,
where many, having outstripped the boat, are ready to receive
them, and where more and more stiU come, bearing their sick along
with them. It was somewhat of a trial to have the purpose of the
voyage apparently thus baffled, the seclusion sought after thus vio
lated ; but if felt at all, it sat light upon a heart which, turning away
from the thought of seU, was filled with compassion for those who
were " as sheep not having a shepherd." Eetiring to a neighboring
mountain, Jesus sits down and teaches, and heals ; and so the hours
of the afternoon pass by.
But now another kind of sohcitude seizes on the disciples. They
may not have been as patient of the defeat of their Master's purpose
as he was himseU. They may have grudged to see the hours that he
had destined to repose broken in upon and so fuUy occupied. True,
they had little to do themselves but listen, and wait, and watch. The
crowd grew, however ; stream foUowed stream, and poured itself out
upon the mountain-side. The day declined ; the evening shadows
lengthened ; yet, as if never satisfied, that vast company stiU clung to
Jesus, and made no movement to depart. The disciples grew anx
ious. They came at last to Jesus, and said, " This is a desert place,
and the time is now past : send the multitude away, that they may go
into the country round about, and into the vfllages, and lodge, and
buy bread for themselves, for they have nothing to eat." "They
need not depart," said Jesus, " give you to them to eat." Turning
to Philip, a native of Bethsaida, one weU acquainted with the adjoin
ing district, Jesus saith in an inquiring tone, " Whence shaU we buy
bread, that these may eat?" Philip runs his eye over the great
assemblage, and making a rough estimate of what would be required,
he answered, " Two hundred pennyworth of bread would not be suffi
cient for them, that every one might ' get a Httle ;' shaU we go and
buy as much ?" Jesus asked how much food they had among them
selves, without needing to go and make any further purchase. An
drew, another native of Bethsaida, who had been scrutinizing the
THE FEEDING OF THE FIVE THOUSAND. 279
crowd, discovering some old acquaintances, said, " There is a lad
here, who has five barley loaves and two small fishes ; but what are
they among so many?" "Bring them to me," said Jesus. They
brought them. " Make the men," he said, " sit down by fifties in a
company " — an order indicative of our Lord's design that there might
be no confusion and that the attention of aU might be directed to what
he was about to do. The season was favorable — it was the full
spring-tide of the year ; the place was convenient — much green grass
covering the broad and gentle slope that stretched away from the
base of the mountain. The marshaUing of five thousand men, besides
women and children, into such an orderly array, must have taken
some time. The people, however, quietly consented to be so arranged,
and company after company sat down, till the whole were seated in
the presence of the Lord, who all the while has stood in silence
watching the operation, with that scanty stock of provisions in his
hand. AU eyes are now upon him. He begins to speak ; he prays ;
he blesses the five loaves and the two fishes, breaks them, divides
them among the twelve, and directs them to go and distribute them
among the others.
And now, among those thousands — sitting there and ranged so
that aU can see what is going on — the mystery of their feeding begins
to show itseU. There were one hundred companies of fifty, besides
the women and children. In each apostle's hand, as he takes his
portion from the hand of Jesus, there is not more than would reach
one man's need. Yet, as the distribution by the twelve begins, there
is enough to give what looks like a sufficient portion to each of the
hundred men, who sits at the head of his company. He gets it, and,
httle enough as it seems for himself, he is told to divide it, and give
the haU of it to his neighbor, to be dealt with in like fashion. Each
man in the ranks, as he begins to break, finds that the half that he
got at first grows into a whole in the very act of dividing and bestow
ing; the small initial supply grows and multiplies in the transmission
from hand to hand. All eat— aU are satisfied. "Gather up," said
Jesus, as he saw some unused food lying scattered upon the ground,
"the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." They do; and
while one basket could hold the five loaves and the two fishes, it now
takes twelve to hold these fragments.
Of the nature and purpose of this great miracle, we shall have
something to say hereafter. Meanwhile, let us notice its immediate
effect. One of its singularities, as compared with other miracles of
our Lord, was this : that such a vast multitude were all at once not
only spectators of it, but participators of its benefits. Seven or eight
280 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
thousand hungry men, women and children sit down upon a hillside.
and there before their eyes, for an hour or two — full leisure given
them to contemplate and reflect — the spectacle goes on, of a few
loaves and fishes, under Christ's blessing, and by some mysterious
acting of his great power, expanding in their hands tfll they are all
more than satisfied. Each sees the wonder, and shares in the result.
It is not like a miracle, however great, wrought instantly upon a single
man. Such a miracle the same number of men, women, and children
might see, indeed, but could not all see as each saw this. The im
pression here of a very marveUous exhibition of the divine power, so
near akin to that of creative energy, was one so broadly, so evenly", so
slowly, and so deeply made, that it looks to us just what we might have
expected when the thousands rise from their seats, when aU is over,
and say one to another, what they had never got the length of say
ing previously, "This is of a truth that Prophet that should come
into the world." No longer any doubt or vagueness in their faith —
no longer a question with them which prophet or what kind of
prophet he was. He is none other than their Messiah, their Prince !
He who can do that which they have just seen him do, what could be
beyond his power? He may not himseU be wiUing to come forward,
assert his right, exert his power — but they will do it for him — they
will do it now ; they wfll take him at once, and force him to be their
king. Jesus sees the incipient action of that leaven which, U aUowed
to work, would lead on to some act of violence. He sees that the
leaven of earthliness and mere Jewish pride and ambition has enter
ed even among the twelve, who, as they see and hear what is going
on, appear not unwilling to take part with the multitude. It is time
for him to interfere and prevent any such catastrophe. He calls the
twelve to him, and directs them to embark immediately, to go alone
and leave him there, to row back to Capernaum, where, in the course
of the night or the next morning, he might join them. A strange
and unwelcome proposal — for why should they be parted, and where
was their Master to go, or what was he to do, in the long hours of
that lowering night that was coming down in darkness and storm
upon the hills and lake? They remonstrate; but with a peremptori-
ness and decision, the very rarity of which gave it. aU the greater power,
he overrules their remonstrances, and constrains them to get into the
boat and leave him behind. Turning to the multitude, whose plot
about taking and making him a king, taken up by his twelve chief
followers, this transaction had interrupted, he dismisses them in such
a way, with such words of power, that they at once disperse.
And now he is alone. Alone he goes up into a mountain — alone
THE WALKING UPON THE WATER. 281
he prays there. The darkness deepens; the tempest rises; midnight
comes with its gusts and gloom. There — somewhere on that moun
tain, sheltered or exposed — there, for five or six hours, till the fourth
watch of the night, tfll after dawn — Jesus holds his secret and close
fellowship with heaven. Into the privacies of those secluded hours
of his devotion we presume not to intrude. But if, as we shaU pres
ently see was actuaUy the case, this threatened outbreak of a blinded
popular impulse in his favor — the attempt thus made, and for the
moment thwarted, to take him by force and make him a king — created
a marked crisis in the history of our Lord's deahngs with the multi
tude, as weU as of their disposition and conduct towards him — this
night of lonely prayer is to be put alongside of the other instances
in which, upon important emergencies, our Saviour had recourse
to privacy and prayer, teaching us, by his great example, where
our refuge and our strength in all like circumstances are to be
found. Meanwhile it has fared ill with the disciples on the lake. Two or
three hours' hearty labor at the oar might have carried them over to
Capernaum. But the adverse tempest is too strong for them. The
whole night long they toil among the waves, against the wind. The
day had dawned, a dim hght from the east is spreading over the
water; they had rowed about five and-twenty or thirty furlongs —
were rather more than halfway across the lake — when, treading on
the troubled waves, as on a level, sohd pavement, a figure is seen
approaching, drawing nearer and nearer to the boat. Their toil is
changed to terror — the vigorous hand relaxes its grasp — the oars
stand stiU in the air or are but feebly phed — the boat rocks heavily —
a cry of terror comes from the frightened crew — they think it is a
spirit. He made as though he would have passed them by — they cry
out the more. For though so like their Master as they now see the
form to be, yet U he go past them in silence, it cannot be other than
his ghost. But now he turns, and, dispelling at once all doubt and
fear, he says, "Be of good cheer; it is I, be not afraid." He is but
a few yards from the boat, when, leaping at once — as was no strange
thing with him — from one extremity to the other, Peter says, "Lord,
if it be thou" — or rather, for we cannot think that he had any doubt
as to Christ's identity- — " Since it is thou, let me come unto thee on
the water." Why not wait till Jesus comes into the boat? Because
he is so pleased, so proud to see his Master tread with such victorious
footstep the restless devouring deep ; because he wants to share the
triumph of the deed — to walk side by side, before his brothers, with
Jesus, though it be but a step or two.
282 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
He gets the permission — he makes the attempt — is at first sue
cessful. So long as he keeps his eye on Jesus — so long as that faith
which prompted the proposal, that sense of dependence in which the
first step out of the boat and down upon the deep was taken, remain
unshaken — aU goes weU. But he has scarce moved off from the boat
when he looks away from Christ, and out over the tempestuous sea.
The wind is not more boisterous, the waves are not higher or rougher
than they were the moment before, but he was not thinking of them
then. He was looking at, he was thinking of, he was hanging upon his
Master then. Now he looks at, thinks only of wind and wave. His
faith begins to fail ; fearing, he begins to sink ; sinking, he fixes his
eye afresh and most earnestly on Jesus. The eye affecting the heart,
rekindling faith in the very bosom of despair, he cries out, "Lord,
save me!" It was the cry of weakness, of wUd alarm, yet it had in
it one grain of gold. It was a cry to Jesus as to the only one that
now could help ; some true faith mingling now with all the fear.
The help so sought for came at once. "Immediately Jesus stretch
ed forth his hand and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of httle
faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" At the grasp of that helping
hand, at the rebuke of that chiding voice, let us beheve that faith
came back into Peter's breast, and that not borne up or dragged
th rough the waters, but walking by his Master's side, he made his
way back to the Httle vessel where his comrades were, to take his
place among them a wiser and a humbler man. As soon as Jesus
and he had entered the vessel, we are told that the wind not only
ceased, but that " immediately the ship was at the land whither they
went." Of those who were in the ship that night some were exceed
ingly but stupidly amazed, their hearts hardened, untouched by the
multiplied miracles (Mark 6:51, 52) of the last twelve hours; others
came and worshipped Jesus, saying, " Of a truth thou art the Son of
God;" one of the first instances in which this great title, of which we
shaU have so much to say hereafter, was applied to him.
We may divide the miracles of our Saviour into two classes:
1. Those wrought in or upon nature. 2. Those wrought in or upon
man. Of the thirty-three miracles of which some detailed account is
given us in the gospels, nine belong to the former and twenty-four to
the latter class. But this gives no true idea of the mere numerical
ratio of the one kind of miracles to the other. It is but a very few of
the many thousand cases of heahng on the part of Jesus of which
any record has been preserved ; while it seems probable that all the
instances have been recounted in which there was any intervention
with the laws or processes of the material universe. It is remarka-
THE WALKING UPON THE WATER. 283
ble at least that of the small number of this class a repetition of the
same miracle is twice recorded — that of the multiplying of bread and
of an extraordinary draught of fishes. Looking broadly at these two
classes of miracles, it might appear like a discriminating difference
oetween them that the one, the miracles on nature, were more works
of power, the miracles on man more works of love. And admitting
for the moment the existence of some ground for this distinction, it
pleases us to think what a vast preponderance Christ's works of
love had over his works of power. But it is only to a very limited
extent that we are disposed to admit the truth of this distinction.
We know of no miracle of our Lord that was a mere miracle of power,
a mere display of his omnipotence, a mere sign wrought to prove that
he was almighty. Every miracle of our Saviour carried with it a les
son of wisdom, gave an exhibition of his character, was a type of
some lower sphere of his working as the Eedeemer of our souls. In
a far more intimate sense than any of them was an outward proof of
his divine authority ; they were aU instances or illustrations in more
shadowy or more substantial form of the remedial dispensations of
his mercy and grace in and upon the sinful children of men, wrought
by him and recorded now for us, far more to teach us what, as our Sav
iour, he is — what he has already done, and what he is prepared to
do for us spiritually — than to put into our hands evidence of the
divinity of his mission.
Let us take the two miracles that we have now before us, both of
which belong to the first and smaller class, the miracles on nature.
Had it been the purpose of our Lord to make a mere display of his
omnipotence in the feeding of five thousand men, one can readily
imagine of its being done in a far more visible and -striking style than
the one chosen. He could have had the men, women, and children
go and gather up the stones of the desert or of the lake-side ; and as
they did so, could have turned each stone into bread. Or he could
have brought forth the five loaves, and in the presence of aU the peo
ple have multiplied them into five thousand by a wave of his hand —
by a word of his power. He chose rather, here as elsewhere — might
we not say as everywhere? — to veil the workings of his omnipotence —
to hide, as it were, the working of his hand and power, mingling it
with that of human hands and common earthly elements. How
muA more it was our Lord's design to convey a lesson of instruction
than to give a display of his almightiness we shaU better be able to
judge when we have before us his own discourse illustrative of this
very miracle, dehvered on the following day. We shall then see how
apt and singular and recondite a symbolism of what he spiritually is
jj#4 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to aU true believers lay wrapped up in his blessing and breaking and
dividing the bread.
But further stiU, was not the agency of aU his ministering ser
vants, of aU his true disciples, most truly, vividly, picturesquely rep
resented in what happened upon that mountain-side ? " Give ye them
to eat!" such were Christ's words to his apostles, as he handed to
each of them his portion of the five loaves and the two fishes. 'Take
and break and give to one another;' such were the apostles' words
to the multitude. And as each took and broke, the haU that he kept
for himseU grew within the hand that broke it, as did in turn the
other haU he handed to his neighbor. Such was the rule and method
of the distribution and multiplication of the bread given to the thou
sands on the desert place of Bethsaida. Such is the rule and method
of the distribution and multiphcation of the bread of Hfe.
Let us gladly and gratefully accept the lesson that the miracle
conveys. Let us believe, and act upon the belief, that the readier we
are to distribute of that bread to others, the fuller and the richer shall
be our own supply — that we do not lose but gain by giving here —
that there is that scattereth here and yet increaseth. From hand to
hand let the life-giving bread be passed, till aU the hungry and the
perishing get their portion — tiU all eat and are satisfied.
Or look again at the other miracle, that of walking upon the
water. It was indeed a miracle of power, but one also of pity too,
and love. He came in the morning watch, far more to reheve from
toil and protect from danger his wbrnout and exposed disciples than,
merely to show that the sovereignty over nature was in his hands.
Nor did he let that coming pass without an incident pregnant with
spiritual instruction to us also ; for is there not much in each of us of
Peter's weakness? We may not have his first courage or faith — for
there was much of both in the stepping out of the boat; or we may
not share in his impetuousness and over-confidence ; and so we may
not throw ourselves among the waves and winds. But often, never
theless, they are around us ; and too apt are we, when so it happens
with us, to look at them — to think of our difficulties and our trials
and our temptations, tfll, Christ forgotten and out of sight, we begin
to sink, happy only if in our sinking we turn to him, and his hand be
stretched out to save us. In his extremity, it was not Peter's laying
hold of Christ, it was Christ's laying hold of him that bore him up.
And in our extremity it is not our hold of Jesus, but his of us, on
which our trust resteth. Our hand is weak, but his is strong; ours
so readily relaxes — too often lets go its hold ; but his — none can pluck
out of it, and none that are in it can perish.
THE DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE. 285
XI.
The Discourse in the Synagogue of Capernaum.*
When, after a single day's absence on the other side of the lake,
Jesus and his disciples returned to the land of Gennesaret, so soon as
they were come out of the ship, "straightway," we are told, "they
knew him, and ran through that whole region round about, and sent
out into aU that country, and brought to him all that were diseased,
and began to carry about in beds those that were sick ; and whither
soever he entered, into vfllages, or cities, or country, they laid the
sick in the streets, and besought him that they might touch U it were
but the border of his garment: and as many as touched him were
made whole." Matt. 14 : 35 ; Mark 6 : 54-56.
Never before had there appeared to be so great and so hvely an
interest in his teaching, or so large a measure of faith in his healing
power. But behind this show of things Jesus saw that there was ht
tle or no readiness to receive him in his highest character and office.
Some were prepared to acknowledge him as Elias, or one of the
prophets; some, Hke Herod, to hail him as the Baptist risen from the
dead; others, like the multitude on the lakeside, to take him by force
and make him a king ; but the notions of all aUke concerning him
and his mission were narrow, natural, earthly, selfish, unspiritual. It
is at this very culminating point of his wonderful apparent popular
ity, that Jesus begins to speak and act as if the hope were gone of
other and higher notions of himseU and of the kingdom of God being
entertained by the nation at large. Hitherto he had spoken much
about that kingdom, and but little about himseU; leaving his place
therein to be inferred from what he said and did. He had spoken
much about the dispositions that were to be cultivated, the duties
that were to be done, the trials that were to be borne, the blessedness
that was to be enjoyed by those admitted into the kingdom — of which
earlier teaching St. Matthew had preserved a fuU and perfect speci
men in the Sermon on the Mount; but he had said little or nothing
of the one hving central spring of hght and lUe and hohness and joy
within that kingdom, giving to it its being, character, and strength.
In plainer or in clearer guise he had proclaimed to the multitude
those outer things of the kingdom whose setting forth should have
allured them into it; but its inner things had either been kept back
fom sight, or presented in forms draped around with a thick mantle
• John C : 22-71.
286 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of obscurity. He had never once hinted at his own approaching
death as needful to its establishment — as laying, in fact, the founda
tion upon which it was to rest; nor had he spoken of the singular
ties by which aU its subjects were to be united personally to him, and
to which their entrance and standing and privileges within the king
dom were to be whoUy due. Now, however, for the first time in pub
lic, he aUudes to his death, in such a way indeed as few if any of his
hearers could then understand, yet one that assigned to it its true
place in the economy of our redemption. Now for the first time in
pubhc he speaks openly and most emphatically of what he is and
must be to all who are saved ; proclaiming a supreme attachment to
himseU, an entire and exclusive dependence on himseU, a vital incor
porating union with himself, to be the primary and essential charac
teristic of aU true subjects of that kingdom which he came down
from heaven to set up on earth. From this time he gives up appa
rently the project of gaining new adherents; withdraws from the
crowds, forsakes the more populous districts of GaHlee, devotes him
self to his disciples, retires with them to remote parts of the country,
discourses with them about his approaching decease, unfolding as he
had not done before, both pubhcly and privately, the profounder
mysteries of his person and of his work.
To the discourse recorded by St. John in the sixth chapter of his
gospel,, the special interest attaches that it marks this transition point
in the teachings and actings of our Lord. The great body of those
miraculously fed upon the five loaves and the two fishes dispersed at
the command of Christ, and sought their homes or new camping
grounds. A number, however, still lingered near the spot where the
miracle had been performed. They had seen the apostles go off with
out Jesus. They had noticed that the boat they sailed in was the
only one that had left the shore. They expected to meet Christ again
next morning ; but, though they sought for him everywhere around,
they could not find him. He must have taken some means to foUow
and rejoin his disciples, though what these were they cannot fancy.
in the course of the forenoon some boats come over from Tiberias,
of which they take advantage to recross the lake. After searching
for him in the land of Gennesaret they find him at last in the syna
gogue of Capernaum. The edge of their wonder stfll fresh, they say
to him, "Eabbi, when earnest thou hither?" — a mere idle question of
curiosity, to which he gives no answer. A far weightier question fo
thorn than any as to the time or the manner in which Jesus had got
here was, why were they so eagerly foUowing him ? This question he
wfll help them to answer. " Verily, verily," is our Lord's reply, "ye
THE DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE. 287
seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of
the loaves and were filled." The miracle of the preceding evening
had introduced a new element of attractive power. The multitudes
who had previously foUowed Jesus to get their sick healed and to see
tlie wonders that he did, were now tempted to foUow him, in the
hope of having that miracle repeated — their hunger again relieved
Sad in heart as he contrasted their eagerness in this direction with
their apathy in another, Jesus said to them, "Labor not for the meat
which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting
life, which the Son. of man shaU give you ; for him hath God the
Father sealed." A dim yet somewhat true idea of what Christ means
dawns upon the minds of his hearers. Accepting, his rebuke, perceiv
ing that he points to something required of them in order to promote
their higher and eternal interests; knowing, no other way in which
this could be done than by rendering some service to God, but alto
gether failing to notice the allusion to the Son of man and what they
were to get from him, " What shaU we do," they say, "that we may
work the works of God?" 'teU us what these works are with which
God wfll be most pleased, by the doing of which we may attain the
everlasting hfe.' "This," said Jesus, "is the work of God, that ye
believe on him whom he hath sent." 'It is not by many works, nor
indeed, strictly speaking, by any thing looked at as mere work, that
you are to gain that end. There is one thing here which, primarily
and above aU others, you are caUed to do : to believe on him whom
the Father hath sent unto you ; to beheve on me : not simply to
credit what I say, but to put your supreme, undivided trust in me as
the procurer and dispenser of that kind of food by which alone your
souls can be nourished up into the life everlasting.' It was a large
and very pecuhar demand on Christ's part, to put believing on himself
before and above aU other things required. Struck with its singular
ity, they say unto him, "What sign showest thou that we may see
and believe thee? what dost thou work?" 'If thou art really what
thou apparently claimest to be — greater than aU that have gone be
fore thee, greater even than Moses — show us some sign ; not one like
those already shown, which, wonderful as they have been, have beua
but signs on earth; show us one from heaven like that of Moses,
"when our fathers did eat manna in the desert, as it is written, He
gave them bread from heaven to eat." ' ' You ask me' — such in effect
is our Lord's reply — 'to prove my superiority to Moses by doing
something greater than he ever did; you point to that supply of the
manna as one of the greatest of his miracles. But in doing so you
make a twof-fld mistake. It was not Moses that gave that bread
288 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
from heaven. It came from a higher than he — from hi-m who is my
Father, and who giveth still the true bread from heaven; not such
bread as the manna, which was distilled Uke the dew in the lower
atmosphere of the earth, which did not give lUe, but only sustained
it, and that only for a limited time and a limited number. The true
¦'¦ bread of God is that* which cometh down from heaven, and giveth
life unto the world." '
Hitherto, Jesus had been speaking of a food or bread which he
and his Father were ready to impart ; describing it as superior to
the manna, inasmuch as it came from a higher region and discharged
a higher office, supplying the wants, not of a nation, but of the
world ; yet stfll speaking of it as if it were a separate outward thing.
Imagining that it was something external, that eye could see, or hand
could handle, or mouth could taste, to which such wonderful quah
ties belonged, with a greater earnestness and reverence than they
had yet shown, his hearers say to him, "Evermore give us this
bread." The time has come to drop that form of speech which Jesus
hitherto has used; to cease speaking abstractedly or figuratively
about a food or bread, to teU them plainly and directly, so that there
could be no longer any misunderstanding, who and what the meat
was which endureth unto everlasting lUe. " Then said he unto them,
I am the bread of life : he that cometh to me shall never hunger, and
he that believeth on me shall never thirst." 'I am not simply the
procurer or the dispenser of this bread, I am more — I am the bread.
If you would have it, you must not only come to me for it, but take
me as it. And U you do so — U you come to me and believe on me—
you shaU find in me that which wfll fully and abidingly meet and sat
isfy aU the inward wants and cravings of your spiritual nature, all
the hunger and the thirst of the soul. Bring these to me, and it
shall not be as when you try to quench or satisfy them elsewhere
with earthly things, the appetite growing even the more urgent while
the things it feeds on become ever less capable of gratifying. Bring
the hunger and the thirst of your soul to me, and they shaU be filled.
But ye will not do so, ye have not done so. "Ye have seen me, and
beheve not." It may look thus as if my mission had fafled, as if
few or none would come to me that they might have hfe ; but this is
my comfort in the midst of all the present and prevailing unbelief,
that, "aU that the Father giveth me shaU come to me," their coming
to me is as sure as their donation to me by the Father. But as sure
also as is his fixed purpose is this fixed fact, "him that cometh to me
I will in no wise cast out;" for I came down from heaven on no
* Not "he,'' as in our translation.
THE DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE. 28&
separate or random errand of my own, to throw myseU with unfixed
purposes amid unforeseen events to mould them to unknown or uncer
tain issues. I came " not to do mine own -will, but the will of him
that sent me ;" and that will of his I carry out in rejecting none that
come to me, in throwing my arms wide open to welcome every one
who feels himself dying of a hunger of the heart that he cannot get
satisfied, in taking him and caring for him, and providing for him,
not letting him perish — no part of him perish, not even that which is
naturally perishable ; but taking it also into my charge to change at
last the corruptible into the incorruptible, the natural into the spirit
ual, redeeming and restoring the entire man, clothing him with the
garment meet for a blessed and glorious immortality ; for " this is the
Father's wiU which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me
I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day."
Let me say it once again, that no man may think there Hes any obsta
cle to his salvation in a preformed purpose or decree of my Father
that aU may know how free their access to me is, and how sure and
full and enduring the hfe is that they shall find in me. "And this is
the will of him that sent me, that every one that seeth the Son and
believeth on him may have everlasting Hfe ; and I will raise him up
at the last day." ' Compare John 6 : 39, 40.
Overlooking all the momentous truths, all the gracious assurances
and promises that these words of Jesus conveyed, his hearers fix upon
a single declaration that he had made. Ignorant of the great mystery
of his birth, they murmur among themselves, saying, " Is not this Jesus
the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it, then,
thathe saith, I came down from heaven?" Jesus does not answer
these two questions, any more than he had answered the question
they had put to him at first as to how he got to Capernaum. He
sees and accepts the offence that had been taken, the prejudice
that had been created, and he does nothing to remove it. He enters
into no explanation of the saying that he had come down from heav
en; but he wfll teU these murmurers and objectors still more 'plainly
than he has yet done why it is that they stand at such a distance
and look so askance upon him. "Murmur not among yourselves."
' Hope not by any such questions as you are putting to one another
. to solve the difficulties that can so easily be raised about this or that
particular saying of mine. What you want is not a solution of such
difficulties, which are, after all, the fruits and not the causes of your
unbeHef. The root of that unbelief lies deeper than where you would
place it. It hes in the whole frame and habit of your heart and life.
The bent of your nature is away from me. You want the desires, the
Ufc of Chriit 1 0
290 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
affections, tl e aims, the motives which would create within you the
appetite and relish for that bread which comes down from heaven.
You want that inward seerot drawing of the heart which also cometh
from heaven, for "no man can come to me except the Father draw
him" — a drawing this, however, that if sought will never be with
held; U imparted, will prevail, for "it is written in the prophets, And
they shall be all taught of God. Every man, therefore, that hath
heard and learned of the Father cometh unto me." Not that you
are to imagine that you can go to him as you can go to me, that you
can see him without seeing me, can hear him without hearing me.
"Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God,
he hath seen the Father." It is in seeing me that you see the Father.
It is in hearing me that you hear the Father. It is through me that
the drawing of the Father cometh. Open eye and ear then, look
unto me, hear, and your soul shaU hve. " Verily, verily, I say unto
you, he that beheveth on me hath everlasting life." He hath it now,
he hath it in me. " I am that bread of life." A very different kind of
bread from that of which ycu boast as once given of old through
Moses. "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and aro
dead." The manna had no hfe in itself. If not instantly used, it
corrupted and perished. It had power to sustain hfe for a time, but
none to ward off death. The bread from heaven is lUe-giving and
death-destroying. "This is the bread which cometh down from
heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die. I am the hving
bread; if any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever; and the
bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the
world.'" However puzzled about the expression of his coming down from
heaven, Christ's hearers might readily enough have understood him
as taking occasion from the recent miracle to represent himself, the
truths he taught, and the pattern life he led, as being for the soul of
man what the bread is for his body. But this change of the bread
into flesh, or rather, this identifying of the two, this speaking of his
own flesh as yet to be given for the life of the world, and when so
given to be the bread of which so much had been already said, star
tles and perplexes them more than ever., Not simply murmuring, but
striving among themselves, they say, " How can this man give us his
flesh to eat?" a question quite akin to that which Nicodemus put'
when he said, "How can a man be born again when he is old?"
and treated by Jesus in like manner, by a repetition, in a stfll mora
Btringent form, of the statement to which exception had been taken:
" Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son ol
THE DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE. 29.1
man, and drink his blood, ye have no hfe in you." To speak of eat
ing his flesh was sufficiently revolting to those who understood him
literally ; but to Jewish ears, to those who had been so positively
prohibited all use of blood as food, how inexplicable, how almost
impious, must the speaking of drinking his blood have been. IndU-
ferent to the effect, our Lord goes on to repeat and reiterate, " Whoso
eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal lUe ; and I wiU
raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my
blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my
blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent
me, and I Hve by the Father; so he that eateth me, even he shall
live by me."
Such, as I have attempted in the way of paraphrase to bring
them out to view, were the most salient points in our Lord's address,
and such the hnks by which they were united. Among aU our Lord's
discourses in Galilee, this one stands by itseU distinguished from all
the others by the manner in which Christ speaks ot himseU. No
where else do you find him so entirely dropping aU reserve as to his
own position, character, services, and claims. Let him be the eternal
Son of the Father who veiled the glories of Divinity, and assumed
the garb of mortal flesh that he might serve and suffer and die for us
men and our redemption, then aU that he here asserts, requires, and
promises appears simple, natural, appropriate. Let the great truths
of the incarnation and atonement be rejected, then how shall this
discourse be shielded from the charges of egotism and arrogance?
But Christ's manner of speaking to the people is here as unprece
dented as the way of speaking about himseU. "Here also there is the
absence of all reserve. Instead of avoiding what he knew would
repel, he seems rather to have obtruded it : answering no questions,
giving no explanations, modifying no statements ; unsparingly expo
sing the selfishness, ungodliness, unbeHef of his auditors. The strong
impression is created that by bringing forth the most hidden myste
ries of the kingdom, and clothing these, in forms liable to give offence,
it was his purpose to test and sift, not the rude mass of his Galilean
hearers only, but the circle of his own discipleship. Such at least
was its effect; for "many of his disciples, when they heard this, said,
This is a hard saying ; who can hear it ?" Jesus does not treat their
murmuring exactly as he had that of the Jews ; turning to them, he
says, "Doth this about my coming down from heaven offend you?"
but " what and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he
was before?" 'Doth this about eating my flesh and drinking my
blood offend you? "It is the spirit that quickeneth;" the mere
292 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
flesh without the spirit profiteth nothing, hath no life-giving power.
It is by no external act whatever, by no outward ordinance or service,
that you are to attain to the hfe everlasting. It is by hearing, believ
ing, spiritually coming to me, spiritually feeding upon me, that this is
to be reached. "The words that I speak unto you, they are the spirit
and they are the Hfe." Stfll I know, for I must speak as plainly to
you as to the multitude, "that there are some of yon that believe not.
Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it
were given unto him of my Father." ' To have hard things said, and
then to have the incredulity they generated exposed in such a way and
attributed to such a cause, was what many could not bear ; and so
from that time many of his disciples went back and walked no more
with him. With infinite sadness, such a sorrow as he only could feel,
his eye and heart follow them as they go away ; but he lets them go
quietly and without further remonstrance ; then, turning to the twelve,
he says, "Wfll ye also go away?" "Lord," is Peter's prompt reply,
" to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life." What
Jesus thought of this confession we shall see, when not long after
wards it was repeated. Now he makes no comment upon it ; but as
one upon whose mind the last impression of the day was that of sad
ness over so many who were alienated from him, he closes the inter
view by saying, " Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a
devil?" Such were its immediate original results. What would be the
effect of a first hearing or first reading of this discourse now ? We
cannot weU answer the question ; we have read and heard it so often,
its phrases are so famihar to our ears, the key to its darkest sayings
is in our hands. Nevertheless, are there not many to whom some of
its expressions wear a hard and repulsive aspect — are felt, though
they would scarcely acknowledge this to themselves, as overstrained
and exaggerated ? It is not possible indeed to understand, much less
to sympathize with and appreciate, the fulness and richness of meaning
involved in many of these expressions, unless we look to our Lord's
death as the great propitiation for our sins, and have had some expe
rience of the closeness, the tenderness, the blessedness of that mystic
bond which incorporates each living member of the spiritual body
¦with Christ the living head. Had Jesus spoken of himself, simply
and alone as the bread of life, it had been possible to have under
stood bim as setting forth his instructions and his example as fur
nishing the best kind of nutriment for the highest part of our nature.
Even so strong a phrase as his flesh being the bread, might have
been interpreted as an aUusion to his assumption of our nature, and
TMJi* DISCOURSE 1JS THE SYNAGOGUE. 293
to the benefits flowing directly from the incarnation. But when he
speaks of his flesh being given for the hfe of the world; when he
speaks of the drinking of his blood as weU as of the eating of his
flesh ; pronounces them to be the source at first and the support after
wards of a life that cannot die, and that shall draw after it the resur
rection of the body, it is impossible to put any rational construction
upon phrases like these other than that which sees in them a refer
ence to our Lord's atoning death as the spring and fountain of the
new spiritual lUe to which through him aU true beUevers are begotten.
But although the great truth of the sacrificial character of Christ'**)
death be wrapped up in such utterances, it is not that aspect of it
which represents it as satisfying the claims of justice, or removing
governmental obstacles to the exercise of mercy, which is here set
lorth, but that which views it as quickening and sustaining a new
spiritual hfe within dead human souls. In words whose very singu
larity and reiteration should make them sink deep into our hearts,
our Saviour tells us that until by faith we realize, appropriate, con
fide in him, as having given himself for us, dying that we might live,
until in this manner we eat his flesh and drink his blood, we have no
life in us. Our true hfe Hes in union with and likeness unto God, in
peace with him, feUowship with him, harmony of mind and heart
with him, in the doing of his will, the enjoyment of his favor. This
life that has been lost we get restored to us in Christ. " He that
hath the Son hath Hfe." We begin to Uve when we begin to love,
and trust, and serve, and submit to our Father who is in heaven ;
when distance, fear, and doubt give place to filial confidence. We
pass from death unto hfe, when out of Christ there floweth the first
current of this new being into our soul. The Hfe that thus emanates
from him is ever afterwards entirely dependent upon him for its main
tenance and growth.
Every Hving thing craves food. It differs from a dead thing
in this, that it must find something out of itseU that it can take
in, and by some process more or less elaborate assimilate to itseU;
using it to repair the waste of vital energy, to build up the hfe into
full maturity and strength. Such a thing as a seU-originated, self-
enclosed, seU-supporting Hfe you can find nowhere but in God. Of
all the lower forms of hfe upon this earth, vegetable and animal, it is
true that by a blind, unerring instinct each seeks and finds the food
that suits it best, that is fitted to preserve, expand and perfect. It is
the high but perilous prerogative of our nature that we are left free to
choose our food. We may try, do try — have we not aU tried, to
nourish our souls upon that which does not and cannot satisfy?
294 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Business, pleasure, society, wealth, honor — we try to feed our soul
with these, and the recurrent cravings of unfilled hearts teU us that
we have been doing violence to the first laws and conditions of our
nature: a nature that refuses to be satisfied unless by an inward
growth in aU goodness, and truth, and love, and purity, and holiness.
It is to all of us, as engaged in the endless fruitless task of feeding
with the husks of the earth a spirit that pants after the glory, the
honor, and the immortality of the heavenly places, that Jesus comes
saying, " Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which satisfieth not?" "I am the bread of
Ufe; my flesh is meat indeed, my blood is drink indeed."
Bread is a dead thing in itseU; the hfe that it supports it did
nothing to originate. But the bread from heaven brings with it the
lUe that it afterwards sustains. Secret and wonderful is the process
by which the living organism of the human body transmutes crude
dead matter into that vital fluid by which the ever-wasting frame is
recruited and reinvigorated. More secret, more wonderful the pro
cess by which the fulness of hfe and strength and peace and holiness
that he treasured up in the living Saviour passes into and becomes
part of that spiritual framework within the soul which groweth up
into the perfect man in Christ Jesus. In one respect the two pro
cesses differ. In the one it is the inferior element assimilated by the
superior, the inorganic changed into the organic by the energy of
the latter ; in the other, it is the superior element descending into the
inferior, by its presence and power transmuting the earthly into the
heavenly, the carnal into the spiritual. There are forms of lUe which,
derivative at first, become independent afterwards. The child severs
itself from the parent, to whom it owes its breath, and lives though
that parent dies. The bud or the branch lopped off from the parent
stem, rightly dealt with, lives on though the old stem wither away.
But the soul cannot sever itseU from him to whom it owes its second
birth. It cannot live disjointed from Christ, and the life it derives
from him it has all the more abundantly in exact proportion to the
closeness, the constancy, the lovingness of its embrace of and its
abiding in him.
Closer than the closest of aU earthly bonds is the vital union of
the believer with Christ. One roof may cover those who are knit in
the most intimate of human relationships. But beneath that roof,
within that family circle, amid all the endearing intercourse and com
munion, a dividing line runs between spirit and spirit ; each dwells
apart, has a hermit sphere of its own to which it can retire, into
¦which none can follow or intrude. But what saith our Lord of the
THE DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE. 295
connection between himseU and each of his own? "He that eateth
my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." He
opens himseU to us as the hiding-place, the resting-place, the dwell
ing-place for our spirit. We flee unto him, and he hides us in the
secret of his presence, and keeps us secretly in that pavilion. What
a safe and happy home ! How blest each spirit that has entered it !
But more wonderful than our dwelling in him is his dwelling in us.
What is there in us to attract such a visitant? what room within our
souls suitable to receive him ? Should he come, should he enter,
what kind of reception or entertainment can we furnish to such a
guest? Yet he comes — he deigns to enter — he accepts the poor pro
vision — the imperfect service. Nay, more : though exposed to many
a slight, and many an open insult, he still waits on ; has pity, has
patience, forgets, forgives ; acts as no other guest in any other dwell
ing ever acted but himseU. " Behold, I stand at the door and knock.
If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I wiU come in to him,
and sup with him, and he with me." "If any man love me, he wiU
keep my words, and my Father wfll love him, and we will come unto
him, and make our abode with him."
To a stfll higher conception of the intimacy of the union between
himself and his own does Jesus carry us: "As the living Father
hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me shall
live by me." It would seem as U aU the earthly imagery elsewhere
employed — that of the union of the branches with the vine, of the
members with the head, of the building with the foundation-stone —
however apt, were yet defective ; as if for the only fit, full emblem
Jesus had to rise up to the heavens to find it in the closest and most
mysterious union in the universe, the eternal, inconceivable, ineffable
union between the Father and himself — " That they all may be
one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be
one in us : I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect
in one." There is a resemblance approaching almost to a coincidence be
tween the language used in the synagogue of Capernaum and that
used in the upper chamber at Jerusalem. "The bread that I will
give,'' Jesus said to the promiscuous audience of Galileans, "is my
flesh, which I wfll give for the lUe of the world." "Take, eat," such
is his language in instituting the supper; "this is my body broken" —
or as St. Luke has it — "given for you." In either case the bread
¦Sums into the flesh or body of the Lord. There had been no wine
nsed in the feeding of the five thousand, and so in the imagery of the
synagogue address, borrowed obviously from that incident, no men-
296 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
tion of wine was made. There was wine upon the supper-table al
Jerusalem, and so, just as the bread which was before him was taken
to represent the body, the wine was taken to represent his blood.
That eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood, of which so much
was said at Capernaum, Jesus, in instituting the ordinance of the
Supper, taught his disciples to identify with a true union with him
self. So close is the correspondence that many have been led to
think that it was to the Eucharist, and to it exclusively that Jesus
referred in his Capernaum address. We cannot teU all that was then
m our Saviour's thoughts. It may have been that in imagination he
anticipated the time when he should sit down with the twelve. The
holy communion may have been in his eye as he spake within tho
Galilean synagogue. But there is nothing in what he said which points
to it alone. He speaks of the coming to him, the beheving in him,
as the eating of the bread which is his flesh. He speaks of spiritual
life owing its commencement, as well as its continuance, to such
coming, such beheving, such eating. Is it in the ordinance of the
Supper, and in it alone, that we so come and believe, eat and hve?
Is there no finding and having, no feeding upon Christ but in the
holy sacrament ? Freely admitting that to no season of communion,
to no spiritual act or exercise of the believer, do the striking words
of our Lord apply with greater propriety and force than to that sea
son and that act, when together we show forth the Lord's death till
he come again, we cannot confine them to that ordinance.
XII.
"Pharisaic Traditions — The Syrophenician Woman.*
The Pharisaic party was well organized, watchful, and intoler
ant. Its chief seat was in the capital, but it kept up an active cor
respondence with and had its spies in all the provinces. Its bitter
hostility, aiming at nothing short of his death, which had driven
Jesus from Jerusalem, tracked his footsteps aU through his Galilean
ministry. At an early period of that ministry, Pharisees from Jeru
salem are seen obtruding themselves upon him, and now as it draws
near its close another company of envoys from the capital appears.
They come clown after the Passover, inflamed by the reports carried
ap to the feast of the open rupture that had taken place between
Christ and their brethren in Gahlee. They come to find out some-
• Matth. 15 : 1-28 ; Mark 7 : 1-30.
PHARISAIC TRADITIONS. 291
thing to condemn, and they have not long to wait. Watching the
conduct of Christ and his disciples, they notice what they think can
be turned into a weighty accusation against him before the people.
Seizing upon some opportunity, when a considerable audience was
present, they say to Jesus, " Why do thy disciples transgress the tra
dition of the elders ? for they wash not their hands when they eat
bread." The oral or traditional law, with its multiphed precepts and
manUold observances which had grown up around the written code,
had come to be regarded as of equal, nay, in some respects, of supe
rior importance. It was the wine, the rulers said, while the other
was but the water. The acknowledgment of its authority forming
the pecuhar distinctive badge of Pharisaism, such a weight was
attached to its observance that breaches of it were looked upon as
greater sins than breaches of the written law. Among these was
that of eating with unwashed hands. What with Persians, Greeks,
and Eomans was but a social custom, the neglect of which was only
a social offence, had been raised among the Jews by the traditions of
the elders into a rehgious duty, the neglect of which was an offence
against God. And so strict were they in the observance of the duty,
that we read of a Jew of the Pharisaic type who, being imprisoned
and put on a short aUowance of water, chose rather to die than not
to apply part of what was given to the washing of his hands before
eating. We can have now but an imperfect conception of how great
the sin was then thought to be with which those Pharisees from
Jerusalem charged pubhcly our Lord's disciples, aiming their real
blow at him by whose precept and example they had been taught to
act as they had done. " Why do thy disciples transgress the tradi
tion of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat
bread." No explanation is given — no defence of his disciples is en
tered upon. Our Lord has ceased to deal with such questioners as
being other than mahgnant enemies. He answers their question only
by another — "Why do ye transgress the commandment of God by
your tradition ?" And as they had specified an instance in which the
traditions of the elders had been violated by his disciples, he in turn
specifies an instance in which they, by their traditions, had nullified
a commandment of God. No human duty was of clearer or more
stringent obhgation than that by which a child was bound to honor,
love, and help his father and his mother. The command enforcing the
duty stood conspicuously enshrined among the precepts of tt e Deca
logue. But the elders in their traditions had found out a way of
reading it by which the selfishness, or the covetousness, or the iU-will
tf a child might not only find room for exercise, but might cloak that
298 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
exercise under a religious garb. AU that one, who from any evil
motive desired to evade the obhgation of assisting his parents, had
to do, was to say " Corban " over that property on which his parents
might be supposed to have a claim — to declare it to be consecrated,
bound over to the Lord — and he was free. Father or mother might
10 longer ask or hope for any thing at his hands. The property
might stiU be his. He might enjoy the hfe use of it ; but the vow
that destined it to God must come in before every other claim. So
it was that these traditionahsts among the Jews of old quenched the
instincts of nature, gave place to evil passions, and broke one of the
first and plainest of the divine commands, all under a pretence of
piety. Nor has the spirit by which they were animated in doing so
ceased to operate ; nor have we far to go before an exact parallel
can be found to the Jewish Corban practice, in the conduct of those
who, passing by their nearest relatives, whose very poverty supphes, it
may be, one of the reasons why they are overlooked, bequeath exclu
sively to charitable or rehgious purposes the money that they cannot
carry with them to the grave. Neither charity nor piety, however
broad or pretentious the aspects they take, the services that they
may seem to render, can ever excuse such a trampling under foot of
the primary ties of nature and the moral duties connected with them.
And upon aU those hospitals, and colleges, and churches that have
been erected and endowed by funds unnaturally and improperly
aHenated from near and needy relatives, we cannot but see that old
Jewish word Corban engraved, and beneath it the condemning sen
tence of our Lord — " Thus have ye made the commandment of God
of none effect."
No further answer will our Lord give to the Pharisees than this
severe retort. But first to the multitude, and afterwards to his dis
ciples, he will say a word or two of that wherein aU real defilement
consists — not in the outward, but in the inward ; its source and seat
within, and not without. In the evil affections, desires, and passions
of the heart — in these and what comes out of them pollution hes ;
not in eating with unwashed hands, nor in the violation of any mere
external, conventional, traditional usage.
Jesus had rolled back upon the Pharisees a weightier charge than
they had brought against his disciples. He had not hesitated openly
to denounce them to the people as hypocrites, applying to them the
words of the prophet, " This people draweth nigh unto me with their
mouth, and honoreth me with their Hps; but their heart is far from
me." They were offended at being spoken to in such a way. Shun
ning any further outbreak of their wrath, seeking elsewhere now the
±*l
THE SYROPHffiNICIAN WOMAN. 299
rest and the seclusion that he had sought in vain on the eastern side
of the lake, Jesus retired to the borders of Tyre and Sidon. He went
there not to teach nor to heal, but to enjoy a few days' quiet and
repose in the lonely hilly region which looks down upon the two
ancient Phoenician cities. But he could not be hid. The rumor oi
his arrival in the neighborhood passed over the borders of the Holy
Land. It reached a poor afflicted mother — a widow, it may have
been — whose httle daughter was suffering under the frightful malady
of possession. This woman, we are told, was a Greek, a Syrophce-
nician by nation — a Canaanite. Phoenician was the general name
given to a race whose colonies were widely spread in very ancient
times. One division of this race occupied the country from which
they were driven out by the Israehtes ; and as that country bordered
upon Syria, they were caUed Syrophoenicians by the Greeks and
Eomans. It was to this tribe that the woman belonged. She was
a daughter of that corrupt stock whom the Jews were commissioned
to exterminate. But besides being by nation a Canaanite, she was a
Greek ; this word describing not her country, but her creed. She
was a heathen, an idolatress — aU such, of whatever country, being-
then caUed Greeks by the Jews. Such then, by birth, by pedigree,
by rehgious faith and profession, was this woman, the first and only
Gentile — a Canaanite besides — who made a direct personal appeal
for help to Christ. The only case of a like kind that meets us in the
Galilean ministry was that of the Eoman centurion. But he was
haU a Jew. Moreover, living among Jews, he had his case presented
to Jesus by the rulers of the Jews, who had the plea to offer on his
behaU, that he loved their nation, and had built them a synagogue.
Here, however, is a Gentile Hving among Gentiles, who has no Jew
ish friends to intercede for her, no services rendered to the Jewish
people to point to. It is a pure and simple case of one belonging to
the great world of heathendom coming to Jesus. How is she re
ceived? Her case, as she presents it to his notice, is of the very
kind that we should have said he would be quickest to sympathize
with and relieve. Meeting him by the way, she cries out in all the
eagerness of passionate entreaty, " Have mercy upon me, O Lord,
thou Son of David ; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil."
Jesus had opened wiUingly his ear to the nobleman of Capernaum
pleading for his son ; to Jairus pleading for his daughter ; the very
sight of the widow of Nain weeping over the bier of her only son had
moved him, unasked, to interfere. Here is another parent interceding
for a child. And that child's condition is one of the most pitiable—
in the tender years of girlhood visited with the most frightful of all
300 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
maladies in one of the worst of its forms — grievously tormented with
a devil. Such a mother, in the agony of such a grief, crying out to
him to have compassion upon her and upon her poor afflicted child,
will surely not have long to wait. But he hears as though he heard
not. He answers her not a word. The kindest of men are not always
equally open-eared, open-hearted, or open-handed to the tale of sor
row. Take them at some unlucky moment, and a cool or a rough
reception may await the most urgent of appeals. Has any thing like
this happened to our Lord ? Has his spirit been fretted with that
late contention with the Pharisees, wearied and worn with the kind
of reception his own had given him, so that ear and heart and hand
are aU for the time shut up against this new and unexpected appeal
of the stranger? It cannot be. Liable as he was to all common
human frailties, our Lord was subject to no such moral infirmity as
that. Disappointment, chagrin, disgust never operated upon him as
they do so frequently on us — never quenched the benevolence of his
nature, nor laid it even momentarily asleep. We must look elsewhere
for the solution of the mystery of the silence — for mystery it was.
The disciples noticed it with wonder. Their Master had never
acted so since they had joined him — had never treated another as he
is treating the Canaanite. But though her cry be thus received,
making apparently no impression, moving him to no response, she
follows, she repeats her cry; continues crying till, haU in real pity
for her and haU with the selfish wish to be rid of her importunity,
the disciples came to him saying, " Send her away, for she crieth ,
after us." Not that they wanted her to be summarily dismissed, her
request ungranted. Christ's answer to this apphcation shows that
he did not understand it in that sense ; that he took it as expressive
of their desire that he should do what she desired and then dis
miss her.
A rare thing this in the history of our Saviour, that he should
even seem to be less tender in his sympathy for the afflicted than his
disciples were, that he should need to be importuned by them to
a deed of charity. But aU is rare here; rare his silence, rare their
entreaty, and rare too the next step or stage of the incident. Still
heedless of the woman — neither looking at her nor speaking to her,
nor apparently feehng for her — Jesus answers his disciples by say
ing to them, " I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of
Israel." He gives this as his reason for paying no attention to this
Gentile's request. And it is so quietly and calmly said, that it looks
hke the expression of a firm and. settled purpose. The poor suitoi
hears it. Does it not at once and for ever quench all hope within hei
THE SYROPHOENICIAN WOMAN. 301
breast? His silence might have been due to the absorption of hia
thoughts with other things. It might be difficult to win the atten
tion or fix it on one who had so httle claim on his regard. But nov
she knows that he has heard, has thought of her, but wilfully, delib
erately, as it would seem, has waved her suit aside. Chfld of a
doomed, rejected race, well mightest thou have taken the Saviour's
words as a final sentence, cutting off aU hope, sending thee back
without relief to thy miserable home, to nurse thy frenzied chfld in
the arms of a dull despair. But there was in thee a depth of affec
tion for that poor chfld of thine, and a tenacity of purpose that will
not let thee give up the case tfll effort after effort be made. There is
in thee, more than this, a keenness of inteUigence, a quickness to dis
cern, that, adverse as it looked, an absolute refusal did not he wrap
ped up in the Saviour's utterance. He is not sent to any but to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel; but does that bind him to reject the
stray sheep of another fold, if perchance it may flee to him for suc
cor? He comes as a servant, with instructions to confine his per
sonal ministry to the chUdren of a favored race. But is he not a son
too as weU as a servant ? Are his instructions so binding that in no
case he may go by a hand's-breadth beyond their Hne, when so going
may serve to further the great objects of his earthly mission ? She
will try at least whether she cannot persuade him to do so. Un
dauntedly she follows him into the house into which she sees that he
has entered, casts herself at his feet, and says, " Lord, help me !"
Before, she had called him Son of David, had given him the title
that, from intercourse with Jewish neighbors, she knew belonged to
him as the promised Messiah. But now she drops this title. As the
Son of David, he was not sent but to the Jews. She caUs him, as
she worships, by the wider name, that carries no restriction in it,
gently intimating that as sovereign Lord of all, he might rise above
his commission, and go beyond the letter of the instructions he had
received: "Lord," she says, as she looks up adoringly, beseech
ingly, "Lord, help me." She has got him at last to fix his eye upon
her. Wfll he, can he refuse to help ? Jesus looks and says, " Let
the children first be filled. It is not meet to take the children's meat,
and to cast it to dogs." Last and worst repulse. Bad enough to be
toll that she lay without the limits of his commission ; but worse to
be numbered with the dogs. Yet stfll she falters not. She accepts
at once the reahty, the justice, the propriety of the distinction drawn.
In the one household there were the children of the family ; there
were also the dogs, and it was right that they should be fed at dU-
ferent times on different food. In the great human household differ-
302 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ences of a like kind existed : there were the favored sons of Abra
ham ; there were the outcast children of Ham and Japhet. She nei
ther disputes the fact nor quarrels with those arrangements of divine
providence under which a different treatment had been given to them;
*3lu takes the lowly place that Christ has given her among the out
cast tribes — among the dogs! But have not the dogs and the chil
dren all one master? Do they not dwell all beneath one roof? May
not even the dogs look for some little kindnesses at their master's
hands ? The finest and the choicest of the food it is right that the
children should have, but are there no fragments for them ? " Truth,
Lord," she says, venturing in the boldness of her ardent faith to take
up the image that Jesus had used or had suggested, and to construct
out of it an argument, as it were, against himseU — "Truth, Lord; yet
the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master's table."
' Truth, Lord, but thou art the Master ; and there dwells in thee
such a kind and loving heart, that I will not believe — no, not though
thine own words and deeds may seem to declare it — that the mean
est creature in thy household will be overlooked or unprovided for.
Truth, Lord, I am not a child, and I ask not, expect not, deserve not
a child's favor at thy hands. I am but as a dog before thee, and it
is no part of the children's food ; it is but a crumb from thy richly
furnished table that I crave ; and what but such among aU the rich
and varied blessings that thou hast come to lavish upon thine own —
what but such would be the having mercy upon the like of me, and
heahng my poor afflicted child?' The Saviour's end is gained. It
was a pecuHar case, and Christ had met it in a pecuHar fashion. He
was about, stiU more distinctly and conspicuously than he had done
in the case of the Eoman officer, by act and deed of his own hand,
to unfold the mystery that had been hid for ages, that the Gentiles
should be feUow-heirs with the Jews of the great spiritual inheritance
of his purchase. In doing so he desired to make it patent upon what
ground and principle the door of entrance was to be thrown open.
Here was a Canaanitish woman applying to him for help. The curing
of her daughter was to be the token that however hmited for the time
his own personal ministry was to be, it was not to be fixedly and for
ever exclusive in its character — confined alone to Jews. Here was a
Canaanitish woman about to be numbered with those on whose
behalf his divine power went forth to heal. To vindicate her admis
sion within the sphere of his gracious operations, it was to be made
manifest that she too, by faith, was a daughter of faithful Abraham.
Therefore it was that her faith was subjected to such repeated trial,
that impediment after impediment was thrown before it, that it might
THE SYROPHCENICIAN WOMAN. 308
be thoroughly tested, and come forth from the ordeal shining in the
lustre of the fuUest and brightest manifestations.
" 0 woman," said Jesus to her, when the trial was over and the
triumph complete, "O woman, great is thy faith!" Many things
besides had there been to commend in her — her strong maternal love,
her earnestness, her importunity, her perseverance, her deep humil
ity. Over aU these the Saviour passes, or rather he traces them all
up to their common root — her faith in him, her trust under aU dis
couragements, in front of aU difficulties, in opposition even to his
own words and acts ; her trust in his good wfll to her, in his disposi
tion to pity and to help. This is what he commends, admires. Two
instances only are recorded in which Jesus passed such an approving
judgment, and looked with such admiring regard upon the faith of
those who came to him ; and it is remarkable that they are those of
the two Gentiles — the Eoman centurion and the Syrophcenician wom
an. "Verily," said he of the one, "I haye not found so great faith;
no, not in Israel!" "Woman," said he to the other, "great is thy
faith." Great faith was needed in those who were the first to force
the barrier that ages had thrown up between Jew and Gentile, and
great faith in these instances was displayed. Of the two, however,
that of the purely Gentile woman was the highest in its character
and the noblest in its achievements. The Soman's faith was in the
unlimitedness of Christ's power — a power he beheved so great that
even as he said to his soldiers, " Go !" and they went; " Come!" and
they came; "Do this!" and they did it — so could Jesus say to dis
ease and hfe and death ; curing at a distance ! saving by the simple
word of his power! The faith of the Canaanite was not simply in
the unlimited extent of Christ's power. His power she never for a
moment doubted. He had no reason to say to her, 'Believest thou
that I am able to do this ?' But his willingness he himself gave her
some reason to doubt. Thousands placed as she was would have
doubted — thousands tried as she was would have failed. Which of
us has a faith in Jesus of which we are quite sure that it would come
through such a conflict unscathed? In her it never seems for a
moment to have faltered. In spite of his mysterious, unexampled
silence — of the explanation given of the silence that appeared to
exclude — beneath the sentence that assigned her a place among the
dogs, her faith lived on, with a power in it to penetrate the folds of
that dark mantle which the Lord for a short season drew around
him — to know and see that behind the assumed veil of coldness,
silence, indifference, repulse, reproach, there beat the willing, loving
heart, upon whose boundless benevolence she casts herself, trusting,
304 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
and not being afraid. This was her confidence, that there was more
love to her in his heart than the outward conduct of Jesus might
seem to indicate. It was this confidence which sustained her from
first to last. It was this confidence which carried her over all the
obstructions thrown successively before her. It was this confidence
which sharpened her wit, and gave her courage to snatch out of
Christ's own hand the weapon by which her last and greatest victory
was won. It was this confidence in him, in spite of aU adverse ap
pearances, which pleased the Lord so much — for he likes, as we all
do, to be trusted in — and which drew from him the unwonted expres
sion at once of approval and of admiration, " O woman, great is thy
faith !" It is the same kind of simple trust in Jesus that we aU need;
and in us too, if we but had it in like degree, it would accomplish
like blessed results. What the silence and the sentences of Jesus
were to that entreating woman, crying after Jesus to have her poor
child cured, his ways and his dealings, in providence and in grace,
are to us crying after him for the healing of our own or others' spir
itual maladies. We cry, but he answers not a word ; we entreat, but
he turns upon us a frowning countenance ; when he speaks, his words
seem to cut us off from comfort and from help. But deal as he may
with us, hide himself as he may, speak roughly as he may, let us still
beheve that there exists in the heart of our Eedeemer a love to us,
upon which we can at all times cast ourselves in fuU, unbounded
trust. "Woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.
And her daughter was made whole from that very hour."
XIII.
The Circuit through Decapolis.*
We have now to follow Jesus through one of the most singular of
his journeyings. His work in Gahlee was done, but some days were
still left ere he set his face to go up to Jerusalem. These days were
devoted to a circuit which carried him in a semicircle round the west
ern, northern, and eastern boundaries of GaHlee, keeping him outside
the jurisdiction of Herod, and beyond the reach of the Jewish hierar
chy . He was seeking for rest, seclusion, security, and he found them
where neither the mistaken attachment of his friends, nor the hate of
his enemies in Galilee, were likely to foUow him. First he travelled
0 Matt. 15 : 29-39 : 16 : 1-12 ; Mark 7 : 31-37 ; 8 : 1-26.
THE CIRCUIT THROUGH DECAPOLIS. 305
over the hflly country that lies to the northwest of the sea of Tibe
rias. There, as he was passing out of the Gahlean territory, he met
the Syrophoenician woman, and by the manner of his treatment of.
her revealed at once the simphcity, humihty, tenacity of her faith,
and the wide embrace of his own love and power. Crossing the
boundary-hne that divided Palestine from Phoenicia, passing the
ancient city of Tyre, he proceeded northward towards Sidon, getting
a glimpse there — it may have been a first and last one — of a country
in which some of the most ancient forms of heathenism still subsist
ed, in the worship of Baal and Astarte. Then, turning eastward, h&
crossed the southern ridge of Lebanon, descended into the valley of
the Leontes, skirted the base of the snow-capped Hermon, and some
where not far from the sources of the Jordan, entered Decapolis,
This was the name given to a large and undefined region which lay
around ten cities, to which pecuHar privileges were granted by the
Eomans after their conquest of Syria. AU of these, with a single-
exception, lay to the east and southeast of the sea of Galilee. At
length he came upon that sea, touching it somewhere along its east
ern shore, not far, it may have been, from the place where he once
before, crossing from Capernaum, had landed for a few hours, and
where he cured the demoniac of Gadara. At the entreaty of the mul
titude Jesus had then instantly retired, not suffering the man upon
whom the cure had been wrought to accompany him, but directing
him to go and teU what had happened to his family and friends.
"And he departed," we are told, " and began to publish in Decapolis
how great things Jesus had done for him; and aU did marvel." The
rumor of that miracle was still fresh, the wonder it had excited had
not died away, when, coming through the midst of the coast of
Decapolis, Jesus sat down upon one of the mountains that ove rlook
the lake. The community through which he had been moving was
more than haU heathenish, the Jewish faith and worship having but
little hold east of the river and the lake. Christ's appearance for th©
first time among this rude and essentially Gentile population, and
the readiness with which he healed the deaf man that had an imped
iment in his speech, produced the very effect which in such circum
stances might have been anticipated. " Great multitudes came to
him, having with them those that were lame, bhnd, dumb, maimed,
and many others," eagerly but somewhat roughly casting them down
at the feet of Jesus; wondering as at an altogether new sight,
beyond measure astonished when they saw the dumb made to
speak, and the blind to see, and the lame to walk, and glorifying,
not any of their own idols, but glorifying the God of Israel, in whose
UfWObrtat 20
306 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
name and by whose power these great works were done. Matt,
15 : 30, 31.
Three days they crowded in upon Jesus, tfll about four thousand
men, beside women and children, were around him on the mountain
side. Many of them had come from a distance, and the food that
they had brought with them was exhausted. That they might not
go fasting away from him, to faint, it might be, on the road, Jesus
repeated the miracle he had once WTOught before, on the same side
of the lake, but at a different season of the year, and for an entirely
different sort of people. Among the coincidences and the differen
ces in the narratives which the evangelists have given of these two
miraculous feedings of the multitudes, there is one not preserved in
our Enghsh version. After the five thousand were fed with the five
loaves and the two fishes, the disciples, we are told, took up twelve
baskets fuU of fragments. After the four thousand were fed with the
seven loaves and the few smaU fishes, seven baskets fuU of fragments
were gathered. In the Greek tongue there are two different words,
describing two vessels of different size and structure, both of which,
without any mark of distinction between them, our translators of the
Bible have rendered into fhe EngHsh word "basket." It is one of these
words which invariably and exclusively is used in describing the first
miracle, and the other which is as invariably and exclusively used in
describing the second. The employment in the two case's of two dif
ferent kinds of vessel has thus been distinctly marked and preserved
as one of the shghter circumstantial pecuHarities by which the two
events were distinguished from one another.
The multitude having been fed and sent away, Jesus took ship
and sailed across the lake, landing on its western shore between
Tiberias and Capernaum. He had scarcely reappeared in the neigh
borhood in which most of his wonderful works had been wrought,
when, once again, in their old spirit of contemptuous chaUenge, the
Pharisees demand that he would show them a sisrn from heaven.
Now, however, for the first time, the Sadducees appear by their side,
leaguing themselves with the Pharisees in a joint rejection of Christ—
in slighting all that he had already said and done — in counting it in
sufficient to substantiate any claim on his part to be their Messiah,
and in demanding the exhibition of some great wonder in the heav
ens, such as, mis-reading some of the ancient prophecies, they falsely
thought should precede Christ's advent. Saddened and vexed, witl«
a word of stern rebuke to the men who stood tempting him, and a
deep sigh heaved over the whole viUage to which they belonged, Jesus
abruptly departed, embarking in such haste that the disciples forgot
THE CIRCUIT THROUGH DECAPOLIS. 307
to furnish themselves with the necessary supply of food. As they
landed on the other side, Jesus charged them to beware of the leaven
of the Pharisees and Sadducees. The pitiful simplicity which they
displayed in failing to see what Jesus meant, and in imagining that
because he had used the word "leaven," it must be their having failed
to bring bread enough with them that he was pointing at, stirred the
gentle spirit of their Master, and ]ed him to administer a more than
ordinarily severe rebuke, the main weight of which was laid, not upon
their stupidity in not understanding him, but in their want of trust,
their forgetting how the many thousands had been provided for in
the desert and on the mountain-side.
At Bethsaida, to which place Jesus went on his way to Csesarea
Philippi, they brought a blind man to him, and besought him to
touch him. This case, and that of the deaf and stammering man
brought to him in Decapolis, have many points of resemblance. In
both, those who brought the diseased to Jesus prescribed to him the
mode of cure. They besought him to lay his hand upon them, or to
touch them. Was it for the very purpose of reproving and counter
acting the prejudice which connected the cure with a certain kind of
manipulation on the part of the curer, that Jesus in both instances
went so far out of his usual course, varying the manner of his action
so singularly, that out of all his miracles of healing these two stand
distinguished by the unique mode of their performance? This at
least is certain, that had Jesus in any instance observed one settled
and uniform method of healing, the spirit of formalism and supersti
tion which hes so deep in our nature would have seized upon it, and
linked it inseparably with the divine virtue that went out of him,
confounding the channel with the thing that the channel conveyed.
More and more as we ponder the Ufe of our Eedeemer, dwelling par
ticularly on those parts of it — such as his institution of the sacra
ments — in which food might have been furnished upon which the
spirit of formalism might have fed, more and more do we wonder at
the pains evidently taken to give to that strong tendency of our nature
as httle material as possible to fasten on.
Besides, however, any intention of the kind thus alluded to, the
variations in our Lord's outward modes of healing may have had
special adaptation to the state of the individuals dealt with, and may
have been meant to symbolize the great corresponding diversity that
there is in those spiritual healings of which the bodily ones were un
doubtedly intended to be types. Let us imagine that the deaf stam
merer of Decapolis was a man whose spiritual defects were as com-
olicated as his physical ones ; whose hard, unclean heart it was sin-
308 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
gularly difficult to reach and to renew; who required repeated effort**
to be made, and a varied instrumentality to* be employed, before he
yielded to the power of the truth, or was brought under its benignant
sway. Then see with what picturesque fidelity and appropriateness
the slowness and difficulty of the one kind of heahng was shadowed
forth in the other. Jesus took him aside from the multitude, went
away with him alone into some quiet and secluded place. The very
isolation — the standing thus alone face to face, was of itseU fitted to
arrest, to concentrate the man's thoughts upon what was about to
happen. Then Jesus put his fingers into his ears, as U by this very
action he meant to indicate the need there was of an operation which
should remove the obstruction, and that his was the hand to do it.
Then with a hke intent he touched the man's dry and withered
tongue with fingers moistened with his own spittle. Then he looked
up to heaven and sighed — the sigh unheard — but the look upward,
and the emotion which it conveyed, not lost upon the man. Then
after aU these preliminaries, in course of which we may believe that
whatever of increduhty or whatever of unbelief there may have lain
within was being graduaUy subdued, at last he said, Ephphatha, and
the ears were opened and the tongue was loosed.
Two things here were peculiar, the sigh and the preserving the
old Aramaic word which Jesus used. Never in any other instance
but in this, when Jesus was about to heal, did a sigh escape from his
lips. What drew it forth here ? It may have been that as he drew
the man aside and confronted him alone, the sorrowful spectacle that
he presented became to the quick sympathies of Jesus suddenly and
broadly suggestive of all the iUs that flesh is heir to, and that it was
over them collectively that the sigh was heaved. Such interpretation
of its meaning leaves unexplained why it was this case, and it alone,
which acted in such a manner upon the sympathies of the Eedeemer.
But the sigh may have had a deeper source. If this were indeed a
man whose soul was difficult of reach and cure, he may have pre
sented himseU to Jesus as the type and emblem of those obstinate
cases of spiritual malady, some of which would so long resist the
great remedy that he came to the earth to furnish.
After the sigh came the utterance Ephphatha, a word belonging
to that dialect of the old Hebrew language caUed the Aramaic, or
Syro-Chaldaic, which was then current in Judea. But U that was
the language which Christ ordinarily used — in which, for example,
the Sermon on the Mount was spoken — why was it that in this and
one or two other instances, and in these alone, the exact words which
Christ employed are preserved in the evangelic record? It cannot
THE CIRCUIT THROUGH DECAPOLIS. 309
be the peculiarity or solemnity of the occasion, or the particular
emphasis with which they were spoken, that entitled them to be
selected and preserved, for we can point to many other occasions in
which, had Jesus used Aramaic words, they would have had as good,
indeed a better claim to have been preserved. The true explanation
jf this matter seems to be that it was only upon a few occasions that
Jesus did employ the old vernacular tongue — and that he ordinarily
spoke in Greek. It has recently, and as I think conclusively, been
established by a great variety of proof, that in the days of our
Saviour, the Jews knew and spoke two languages; all the grown-up
educated population using the Greek as well as the Aramaic tongue.
The Greek predominated in the schools, was employed almost exclu
sively in written documents and by public speakers. It was in this
language that Jesus addressed the crowds in the courts of the temple
at Jerusalem, and the multitudes on the hillsides of Gahlee. We
have, therefore, in our Greek New Testament the very words before
us which came from the lips of our Eedeemer — more sacred, surely,
than if they had been translated from the Aramaic, however faithful
the rendering. Assuming that Greek was the language ordinarily
employed by our Saviour, it would very naturaUy occur that occa
sionally he reverted to the old dialect, and that when he did so the
words that he used should have been preserved and interpreted.
Thus, for instance, in the house of Jairus, Jesus was in the home of
a strictly Jewish family, in which the old language would be used in
all domestic intercourse, the little daughter who lay dead there hav
ing not yet learned perhaps the newly imported tongue. "How
beautifully accordant then with the character of him whose heart was
tenderness itseU, that as he leaned over the lifeless form of the maiden,
and breathed that life-giving whisper into her ear, it should have
been in the loved and familiar accents of the mother tongue, saying,
'Talitha, cumi!' Although dead and insensible the moment before
the words were uttered, yet ere the sound of them passed away there
was hfe and sensibihty within her. Does not every reader perceive
the thoughtful tenderness of the act, and a most sufficient reason
why it was in Hebrew and not in Greek that our Lord now address
ed her ? And do we not also discover a cause why the fact of his
having done so should be especially noticed by the evangelist ? Are
we not thus furnished with a new and affecting example of our Sav
iour's graciousness? And do we not feel that St. Mark, the most
minutely descriptive of aU the evangelists, deserves our gratitude
for having taken pains to record it? Softly and sweetly must the
tones of that loving voice, speaking in the language of her childhood,
310 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
have fallen upon the sleeping spirit of the maiden, and by words ot
tenderness, no less than words of power, was she thus recalled to life
and happiness."*
It was perhaps still more natural that Jesus, in addressing the
deaf stammerer of Decapolis, should have used an Aramaic word
He was a rude mountaineer. The vernacular was perhaps the only
language of which he had any knowledge. At any rate, it was the
one to which he had been the most accustomed. It could have been
solely with regard to the man himseU that Jesus employed the par
ticular term Ephphatha. He meant him to hear and understand it.
And it was heard, we beheve, and understood; for this was not a
case in which the faculty of hearing and speaking had never existed
or been exercised. So soon as the physical impediments were re
moved, the man could speak as he had spoken before the loss of
hearing had been incurred. When, after aU the other signs of the
coming cure had been given, the emphatic word was at last pro
nounced, how wise, how gracious was it that that word — the first
heard after so many years — should have been one of his well-known,
weU-loved mother-tongue !
But let us turn now for a moment to the cure of the blind man at
Bethsaida. Here, too, we may believe that there was something
special in the spiritual condition of the man meant to be typified by
the manner of his cure. In the taking of him by the hand, the lead
ing out of the town, the spitting upon his eyes, and putting his hands
upon him, Jesus may have had the same objects in view which he had
in acting in a similar manner with the deaf man at Decapolis, and
the man born bhnd in Jerusalem ; but there was a singularity that
marks this case from aU the others. It is the only instance of prog
ress in a cure by haU and half, of an intermediate stage in the first
instance reached. Jesus asked him if he saw aught. He looked up
and said that he saw men as trees walking. He saw them — knew
them to be men — noticed and described their motion ; but they were
shapeless to his eye — looked rather hke trees than men. It is this
circumstance which leads us to beheve that he had not been blind
from birth. To endow a man born bhnd with the frdl powers of
vision requires a double miracle — one upon the bodily organ, restor
ing to it its powers ; one upon the mind, conferring upon it the
faculty that in the years of infancy a long education is required to
impart. A youth who had been blind from birth was couched by
Cheselden ; but at first and for some time he could not distinguish
one object from another, however different in shape or size. He had
o See Roberts' "Discussions on the Gospel," pp. 89, 90.
THE CIRCUIT THROUGH DECAPOLIS. 311
to be told what the things were, with whose forms he had been famil
iar from feeling, and slowly learned to recognize them. And slowly
was it that we all in our earliest days learned how to use the eye, and
turn it into the instrument of detecting the forms and the magni
tudes and the distances of the objects by which we were surrounded.
But here — unless, indeed, we believe that there was a double mira
cle — so soon as the man got the fuU power of bodily vision, he knew
how to use it, having learned that art before. It pleased the Saviour,
however, to convey again its lost powers to the organ of the eye step
by step. There was at first a confusion of the outward forms of things
arising from some visional defect. That defect removed, aU was
clear; and the subject of this miracle rejoiced in the exercise of a
long-unused and almost forgotten faculty. It stands a solitary kind
of cure in the bodUy healings of our Lord ; but that of which it is
the type is by no means so rare. Eather, the rare thing is when any
thing like fuU power of spiritual perception is at once bestowed. It
is but slowly here that the lost power comes back — that the eye opens
to a true discernment of the things of that great spiritual world of
which we form a part — sees them in their exact forms, in their rela
tive magnitudes, distances, proportions. Even after the inward eye
has been purged of aU those films which limit and obscure its sight,
a long, a careful, a painstaking education is required to train it, as
our bodily one in infancy was trained. Nor let us wonder if along
the many stages of which this education is made up, we often make
singular discoveries of how bhnd we were before to what afterwards
seems clear as day, or that the operations are often painful by which
a truer, and a deeper, and a wider spiritual discernment is attained.
It is the blessed office of our Saviour at once to restore to the inward
eye its power, and to teach us how to use it. Into his hands let us
ever be putting ourselves ; and let us quietly and gratefully submit
to that disciphne by which our training in the exercise of aU our
spiritual faculties is carried on.
312 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
XIV.
The Apostolic Confession at C^sarea-Philippi,*
In the mythology of the Greeks the worship of Pan — their sylvan
deity — was always associated with shady cave or woody grotto. The
first Grecian settlers in Northern Syria lighted there upon a spot
singularly suited for such a worship — a cave at the southern base of
•Mount Hermon, and at the northeastern extremity of the vaUey of the
Jordan. This cave lay immediately behind a raised yet retired nook
or hollow among the hiUs, and immediately beneath a conical height
of more than one thousand feet, rising between two of those deep ravines
which run up into the great mountain, upon the summit of which
height there now stand the noblest ruins that the whole country
around exhibits ; equal in extent, U not in grandeur, to those of Hei
delberg — the ruins of the Saracen castle of Zubeibeh. Immediately
beneath the entrance into this cave — along a breadth of more than
one hundred fee*t — there gush forth from among the stones a thousand
bubbling rills of water, coming from some hidden fountain-head, and
from their long, dark, subterranean journey springing aU joyously
together into the Hght of day, forming at once by their union a stream
which is one of the chief heads or sources of the Jordan. This lively
and full-born stream does instantly a stream's best eastern work —
clothes its birthplace with exuberant fertility, shadowing it with the
foliage of the ilex and the ohve ; covering its green swards with flow
ers of every name, turning it into such a scene that, lost in admira
tion, Miss Martineau declares that, out of Poussin's pictures, she
never saw any thing in the least like it, while Dr. Stanley caUs it a
Syrian Tivoli.
This chosen spot the first Grecian settlers seized upon and con
secrated, making the cave Pan's sanctuary, cutting niches for the
nymphs out of the sohd rock which forms the face of the mountain
side ; which niches — the statues that once occupied them gone — are
stfll to be seen there ; and called the place Panias, from the name of
the deity there worshipped. The Eomans, when they came, did not
overturn this worship, but they added a new one. Eeturning to this
beautiful nook from having escorted Caesar Augustus to the sea,
Herod the Great erected a fine temple of white marble to his great
patron. One of his sons, Herod Philip, in whose territory, as tetrarch
of Iturea and Trachonitis, it was included, extended and embellished
Matthew 16 : 13-19. .
THE APOSTOLIC CONFESSION. 313
the town which had grown up near the old cavern sanctuary. Think
ing to change its name, he caUed it Csesarea-Phflippi, in honor of
the Eoman emperor, with his own name added, to distinguish it from
the Caesarea on the seacoast. This new name it bore for a few gen
erations, but the old one revived again, and stfll belongs to it under
She Arabic form of Banias.
It was to this Banias, or Csesarea-Phflippi, that our -Lord pro
ceeded, passing through Bethsaida, and up along the eastern banks
of the Jordan. In that circuit already described he may have visited
it, and the attractions of the place may have drawn him back, or this
may have been his first and only visit. It can scarcely be beheved
that he came into the few scattered villages which lay around, and
the remains of which are still visible, without entering Cassarea-Phi-
lippi itseU. His presence there, out of Judea, in a district covered
with tokens of heathen worship, his standing before that cave, his
gazing upon those buildings, those niches, those inscriptions now in
ruins and defaced, but then telling, in their freshness, of idolatries
still in hving power, carries Jesus farther away from Judaism, and
brings him into nearer outward contact with GentUe worship than
any other position in which we see him in the gospel narrative. It
were presumptuous, in us, where no clue is given, to imagine what
the thoughts and intents of the Saviour were ; yet when we find him
going so far out of his way, choosing this singular district as the
place of his temporary sojourn after aU his public labors in Galilee
were over ; when we reflect further that now a new stage of his min
istry was entered on, and that henceforth from teaching the multi
tudes he withdrew, and gathering his disciples around him in pri
vate, began to speak to them as he had never done before, it is
impossible to refrain from cherishing the idea that, surround 3d now
by the emblems of various faiths and worships, types of the motley
forms of superstition that had spread aU over the earth, the thoughts
of the Eedeemer took within their wide embrace that wjrld whose
faith and worship he had come to purify, and that he had, in fact,
purposely chosen, as in harmony with this epoch of his Hfe, and the
purposes he was about to execute, the unique, secluded, romantic
district of Csesarea-Phflippi.
He was wandering in one of its lonely roads with his disciples,
his sole companions, when he left them for a Httle while to engage in
sohtary prayer, (Luke 9 : 18,) to commit himself and his great work,
•*s it was passing into a new stage, to his Father in heaven. On
rejoining them, he put to them the question, " Whom do men say
that I the Son of man am ?" He knew it afready, but for a further
314 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
purpose he would fain have from their Hps what the gross result of
those two years' toil and teaching was — what the ideas were about
himseU, his person, character, and office, which his fellow-country
men now generally entertained. They told him — more than one of
tlieni taking part in the reply — that some said that he was John the
Baptist; some that he was Ehas ; some Jeremiah ; some, without deter
mining which, that he was one of the prophets. His own immediate
foUowers had got somewhat further in their conceptions. Listen
ing to and believing in, though not fuUy understanding the testi
mony of the Baptist, Andrew had said to his own brother Simon,
" We have found the Messiah, which is, being interpreted, the Christ ;"
and Nathanael, remembering what the voice from heaven at the bap
tism had been reported as declaring, had exclaimed, " Eabbi, thou
art the Son of God : thou art the King of Israel." Here and there,
by dumb and blind men and Syrophoenician women, he had been
hailed as the Son of David or the Son of God. On the first impulse
of their wonder at aU being miraculously fed, five thousand men were
ready in the moment to say of him that he was the prophet that
should come into the world. But these were the exceptions — excep
tions so rare that they seemed not to his disciples worthy of account.
Amid aU the variety of impressions made upon them by the discourses
and works of our Lord, the great mass of the people in Judea and in
Galilee regarded Jesus as the Messiah's forerunner or one of his her
alds, not as the Messiah himseU. It was the popular behef of the
period that, prior to the Messiah's advent, one or other of the proph
ets was to rise again from the dead. This Jesus might be he. The
Pharisees had not succeeded in shaking the pubhc confidence in him
as a pure and holy man, weU worthy to be counted as a prophet.
But they had prevailed in scattering the first impressions that the
Baptist's ministry and his own words and deeds had created, that he
was indeed the Christ. And now from the hps of his own foUowers
Jesus hears, what was so weU fitted to try their faith and their Mas
ter's patience, that scarcely anywhere over aU the land was there any
recognition of the Messiahship of Jesus.
On getting their answer, no word of reproach or complaint escapes
the Saviour's Hps. It was not indeed on his own account, it was on
theirs, that his first question had been put. He foUows it with the sec
ond and more pointed one : " But whom say ye that lam?" Peter, the
ever-ready answerer, replies, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
Hving God." Peter had beheved, from the beginning of his connec
tion -with him, that Jesus was the Christ; a faith which had the great
and acknowledged authority of the Baptist to rest on, and which was
THE APOSTOLIC CONFESSION. 315
borne up by the hope that the whole nation would speedily accept
him as such. But in the Baptist's death, that authority has been vio
lently shaken, and the outward and expected support has utterly given
way. Many of the Lord's disciples have forsaken him, and looking
all around, Peter can find few now who so beheve. Yet, amid alii
the prevaihng unbelief in and rejection of his Master, Peter's faith has
oeen gaining and not losing strength. Like the inhabitants of Sychar,
he believed not because of what any one had told him, but upon the
ground of what he himself had seen and heard and known of Jesus.
" Thou art the Christ." ' Such the Baptist said thou wert — such, though
thou hast never expressly put forth the claim — such thy words and
works have been ever asserting thee to be — and such thou truly art.'
Thus it is that in his good confession Peter suffers not the fickle faith
and low conceptions of the multitude to affect him. Though he and
his few companions stand alone, with the whole community against
them, for himself and for them he will speak out and say, " Thou art "
— not any one of those prophets, however honorable the name he
bears — " Thou art the very Christ himself — the Messiah promised to
our fathers."
But stfll another step, in taking which Peter not only confronts
the existing state of popular behef as to who Jesus is, but goes
far on in advance of the existing Jewish faith as to who and what
their Messiah was to be. " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the hving
God." We know from sufficient testimony that the Jews universally
imagined that their Messiah was to be but a man, distinguished for his
virtues and exalted in his office, but still a man. There has dawned
on Peter's mind the idea that Jesus the Christ is something more —
something higher. The voice from heaven had caUed him the Son
of God ; Satan and his host had taken up and repeated the epithet.
What that title fuUy meant we may not, cannot think that Peter now,
or till long afterwards, understood ; but that it indicated some mys
terious indwelling of the Divinity — some mysterious link between
Jesus and the Father which raised him high above the level of our
ordinary humanity, even when endowed with aU prophetic gifts — he
was beginning to comprehend. Obscure though his conceptions
were, there stood embodied in his great confession a testimony to
the mingled humanity and divinity of Jesus. In the faith which
thus expressed itself, Jesus saw the germ of all that hving faith by
which true behevers of every age were to be animated — that faith
the cherishing of which within its bosom was to form the very life and
Strength of the community, the Church, which he was to gather out
from among the nations — the fruit of God's own work within human
316 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
souls. Seeing this, and being so far satisfied — rejoicing in the assur
ance that whatever other men might think or say of him, there were
even now some human spirits within which he had got a hold that
nothing could shake, against which nothing would prevafl — he turns
to Peter and says, " Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona." Simon
Bar-jona ! — the very way in which he named him preparing us for
words of weighty import being about to be addressed to him. Simon
Bar-jona, blessed art thou ! I know not if Jesus Christ ever pro
nounced such a special individual blessing on any other single man ;
and when we hear one of our race caUed blessed by him who knows
so weU wherein the best and highest happiness of our nature con
sists, our ear opens wide to catch the reason given for such a bene
diction being pronounced. "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona, for
flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which
is in heaven." ' Thine own eye hath not seen it, thine own ear hath
not heard it — it hath not come to thee by any ordinary channel from
without — it is not due alone to an exercise of thine own spirit within.
Faint though the hght be that has gleamed in upon thy soul and
hghted up thy faith — faint as the feeblest ghmmer of the morn — it is
a hght from heaven, a dawn giving promise of a bright and cloud-
loss day. It hath come as a revelation from the great Father of
sphits to thy spirit, Simon Bar-jona ; and therefore a blessed man
art thou!' And blessed stiU in the Saviour's judgment — blessed be
yond aU that this world has in it of blessedness to bestow — is he
upon whose darkened mind and heart the faintest rays of that same
heavenly Hght have shone — the God who commanded the hght to
shine out of the darkness, shining in upon his soul, giving him the
light of the true knowledge of God in Christ his Saviour !
" And I say also unto thee." ' Thou hast said to me, " Thou art
the Christ," and hast shown that thou knowest what is the true
meaning of the word ; so now say I unto thee, " Thou art Peter ;" the
name of my own giving, the fitness of whose application to thee thou
art even now justifying in thy prompt and bold confession, in thy full
and resolute faith, in thy firm and immovable adhesion to me, despite
of aU that men think and say of me. Thou art a true Petros—a. liv
ing stone built upon me, the true Petra, the Hving and eternal rock—
the only sure foundation in which you and aU may build their trust
and hopes. And upon thee, as such a stone resting on such a rock,
as having so genuine and strong a faith in me as the Son of man and
Son of God, I will build my church. Because of this thine early, full,
and heaven-implanted faith, thou shalt be honored as one of the first
foundation-stones on which my church shaU be erected. That church
THE APOSTOLIC CONFESSION. 317
•shall be the congregation of men who share thy faith — who aU are
Peters Hke thyseU — aU Hving stones built upon me as the chief cor
ner-stone; and in a sense, too, buflt upon thee; on prophets and
apostles as laid by me and on me, to form the basis of the great spir
itual edifice — the temple of the church.'
But if the church was to consist of those who believed in Jesiu as
Peter did, where was the promise that it should number many within
its embrace ? What the security that it should have any firm or last
ing hold? Was not Jesus at this moment a wanderer — despised and
rejected — driven forth from among his own — surrounded in this place
of his voluntary exile among the Gentiles by a few poor fishermen ?
Where was the earthly hope that the circle of true behevers in him
should widen ? What the prospect that if it did, it could hold its
ground against aU the gathered enmity that was rising to pour itseU
out agamst it ? Calmly, out of the midst of all these unpropitious and
unpromising appearances, the words issue from the lips of Jesus, " T
will build my church, and the gates of heU shaU not prevail against
it." The history of eighteen centuries has confirmed the truth of the
saying. So long has this society of Christian men existed; and
though it has done much to provoke hostility, and been often very
unmindful of the spirit and will of him whose name it bears, yet aU
that power and poUcy, the wiliest intrigues and the fiercest persecu
tion could do against it, have been done in vain.
This is the first occasion on which Jesus used that word — the
church; and he named it in his own lifetime but once again. He did
every thing to lay the true and only foundation of that church ; but
he did almost nothing with his own hand to erect or organize it.
Apart from his selecting twelve men to be his personal associates, his
institution of the office of the apostolate, which there are but few
who regard as an integral and perpetual part of the church's organi
zation — apart from that and his appointment of the two sacraments,
Jesus may be said to have done nothing towards the incorporation of
those attached to him into an external institute. Even here, when he
goes to address a few words of encouragement to Peter, upon whom
so important services in this department were to devolve, he speaks
not of the present but of the future : '¦ I wfll give unto thee the keys
of the kingdom of heaven." ' When that time comes at which, on the
great day of Pentecost, the first admissions into my church by bap
tism shaU take place, then know that the keys of my kingdom are in
thy hand, and that thou mayest use them in the fuU assurance that
thou art not acting without a due warrant.' Keys are the badges ol
authority and power and trust, bestowed as the symbols of the office
318 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
on ministers or ambassadors, secretaries or treasurers of kingdoms;
on whom the duty lies of admitting to, or excluding from, the privi
leges and benefits of the commonwealth, disposmg or withdrawing
the royal bounties and favor. Such keys — in a manner appropriate
to the kind of commonwealth the church is — Jesus here commits to
Peter, as one of the first and greatest of its office-bearers. In the
use of any such authority and power as had been given him within
the church — in admitting to or excluding from its privileges — in taking
his part in the baptism of the three thousand on the day of Pente
cost — in condemning Ananias and Sapphira — in censuring Simon
Magus — in opening the door to take in the Gentile converts, and pre
siding at the baptisms in the household of Cornelius — Peter might
be weighed down by the sense of the feebleness of the instrument he
was using, the smallness of the effects that it could produce. To
comfort and encourage him in the use of the keys when they came to
be employed by him, Jesus adds, " Whatsoever thou shalt bind on
earth shaU be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on
earth shaU be loosed in heaven." 'Act but in the right spirit — follow
out the directions given — let the law of truth and love but regulate
your doings, and you may rest assured that doings of yours on earth
shaU be approved and ratified in heaven.' So far, and no farther, as
it seems to us, do the words of our Saviour, as addressed to Peter, go.
You are aware that it is upon these words — and upon them almost
exclusively, for there is no other passage of any thing of a Hke import
in the evangehc narrative — the church of Eome claims for St. Peter
and his alleged successors in the see of Eome a primacy or popedom
over the universal church of Christ. Upon this claim, so far as it is
attempted to be erected upon this passage, I have to remark :
1. It is singular that of the three evangehsts who have recorded
our Lord's question to the apostles, and St. Peter's reply, St. Mat
thew is the only one who has added that which Jesus said to him
after his good confession had been made. Had our Lord's object in
putting the question been to elicit the confession in order thereupon
to confer certain peculiar honors and privileges upon St. Peter above
all the other twelve, would St. Mark and St. Luke have stopped short
as they do at the confession, and said not a word about Peter and the
rock — the keys and the kingdom ? It is quite true that in many a
narrative two of the evangelists omit what the third has recorded ;
but it is never true, as it would be true here U the Eoman-catholic
interpretation of the passage be adopted, that all three give the ini
tial or introductory part of a narrative, but that one alone supplies
that in which the main scope and object of the whole consists.
THE APOSTOLIC CONFESSION. 319
2. The claim for a primacy of authority over the other apostles,
put forward on behalf of St. Peter, rests on the assumption that he,
and he exclusively, is the rock upon which the church is said to rest.
I will only say, that as a mere matter of exegesis— that is, of inter
pretation of words — it is extremely difficult to say precisely what the
rock was to which Christ alluded. From the beginning, from Jerome
and Origen down to our own times, there has been the greatest diver
sity of opinion. Did Jesus mean to say that Peter himself — individ
ually and peculiarly — was the rock ? or was it the confession that he
had just made, or was it the faith to which he had given expression,
or was Jesus pointing to himself when he spoke of this rock, as he
did elsewhere when he spake of this temple — this shrine — in refer
ence to himseU ? I have already offered the explanation that appears
to me the most simple and natural, as flowing not so much out of a
critical examination of the words as out of a consideration of the
peculiar circumstances and conditions under which the words were
spoken ; but I cannot say that I have offered that explanation with
out considerable hesitation — a hesitation mainly arising from the fact
which does not appear in our English version, that Jesus used two
different words — Petros and Petra — in speaking as he did to the
apostle. A claim which rests upon so ambiguous a declaration can
scarcely be regarded as entitled to our support.
3. Whatever ambiguity there may be now to us, there could have
been no such ambiguity in the words of Christ to those who heard
them. They must have known whether or not Jesus meant to desig
nate Peter as the rock — to elevate him to a pecuhar and exalted posi
tion above his brethren. And yet we find that three times after this
the dispute arises among them which should be the greatest — a dis
pute which never could have arisen had Jesus already openly and
distinctly assigned the primacy to St. Peter — and a dispute, we may
add, which never would have been settled as Jesus in each case settled
it, had any such primacy been ever intended to be conveyed by him.
4. Even admitting that aU that is said here was said personally
and peculiarly of Peter, where is the warrant to extend it to his suc
cessors? If his associates, his fellow-apostles, be excluded, how can
his successors be embraced ? It is ingeniously said here by Eoman-
ists that if St. Peter be the foundation of the Church, then as that
foundation must abide, there ever must be one to take his place and
keep up as it were the continuity of the basis of the building. But
this is to have, not one stone as the foundation, but a series of stones
laid alongside or upon one another; and where is there a hint of such
a thing?
320 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Fifthly, and chiefly. All that is said here to Peter was said twice
afterwards by Christ to all the twelve and to aU the church. You
have but to turn to the eighteenth chapter of St. Matthew, and read
there the eighteenth and nineteenth verses, and to the gospel of St.
John, and read there in the twentieth chapter, from the nineteenth
to the twenty-third verse, to be fuUy satisfied that, put what inter
pretation you may upon the words spoken at Csesarea-PhiUppi to St.
Peter, they conveyed to him no power or privilege beyond that which
Jesus conferred upon the entire coUege of the apostles, and in its col
lective capacity upon the church.*
XV.
The Rebuke of St. Peter. f
Jesus had tested the faith of the apostles. Their reply to his
pointed interrogation, "But whom say ye that I am?" was so far sat
isfactory. They had not been influenced either by the hostihty of the
Pharisees, or the low and unworthy imaginations of the people. They
were ready to acknowledge the Messiahship of their Master, such as
they understood it to be, and had risen even to some dim conception
of his divinity. They were all ready to adopt the declaration of then-
spokesman as the expression of their faith, "Thou art the Christ, the
Son of the living God."
But in this faith of theirs there was one great and fatal defect.
Neither they, nor any of their countrymen of that age, had asso
ciated with the advent of their Messiah any idea of humfliation,
rejection, suffering unto death. Obscure he might be in his first
appearances, and difficult of recognition ; obstacles of various kinds
might be thrown in his path, over which he might have laboriously
to climb ; but sooner or later the discovery of who and what he was
would burst upon the people, and by general acclaim he would be
exalted to his destined lordship over Israel. One, coming unto his
own, and by his own received not ; asking not, and getting not, any
honor from men ; walking in lowhness aU his days ; a man of many
and deeply-hidden griefs, misunderstood by the great mass of the
people, despised and rejected by their rulers, taken at last to be
judged and condemned as a deceiver of the people, a vflifier of Moses,
a blasphemer against God; crucified at last as a malefactor — it had
• See "The Forty Days after our Lord's Resurrection," pp. 807-810.
+ Matt. 16 : 21-28 ; Mark 8 : 31-38 ; 9 : 1 ; Luke 9 : 22-27.
THE REBUKE OF ST. PETER. 321
never entered into their thoughts that such a one could be their Mes
siah. He might suffer somewhat, perhaps, at the hands of his own
and Israel's enemies ; possibly he might have to submit to death, the
common lot of aU men ; but that he should suffer at the hands of the
very people over whom he came to reign, and that by their hands be
Bhould be put to death — no throne erected, and no kingdom won- -
this was not only ahen from, it was utterly contradictory to, their
conceptions and their behef. Yet all this was true ; and from their
earher and false ideas the disciples had to be weaned. Jesus did
this graduahy. At first, during aU his previous converse with them
while engaged in his pubhc labors in Judea and Galilee, he had care
fully abstained from saying any thing about his approaching suffer
ings and death. Not that these were either unforeseen or forgotten
by him. When alone in the midnight interview with Nicodemus, he
could speak plainly of his being hfted up upon the cross as the bra
zen serpent had been upon the pole in the wilderness, that whosoever
looked upon him behevingly might be saved. To the people of Judea
and Gahlee he could drop hints, which, however obscure to his hear
ers, tell us of a fuU knowledge and foresight on his part of all that
awaited him. He could point to his body as to the temple, which,
though destroyed, in three days he should raise up again. He could
tell his Galilean audience the sign that was to be given to that gen
eration ; that as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's
belly, the Son of man should be three days and three nights in the
heart of the earth. But never tiU now, in any of his private conver
sations with his disciples, had he alluded to this topic. He had
allowed them to take the natural and full impression which his teach
ing and miracle-working, and the whole tenor of his life and conver
sation, were fitted to make upon open, honest, devout-minded men.
Their knowledge of him, their faith in him, he had left to grow, tiU
now, as represented in the confession of St. Peter, it seemed strong
enough to bear some pressure. They might now be told what it had
been out of time to teU them earher. And if they were to be told at
all beforehand of the dark and tragic close, it would seem to be the
very best and most fitting occasion to begin, at least, to make the
disclosure to them now, when our Lord himseU, ceasing from his
pubhc ministry, had sought these few days' quiet in the neighbor
hood of Csesarea-Phflippi, that his own thoughts might be turned to
all that awaited him when he went up to Jerusalem. " From that
time forth began Jesus to show unto his disciples how he must go unto
Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and
scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day." A few
UfeotOVijl 21
322 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
days after this, as they descended rrom the Mount of Transfigura
tion, Jesus charged Peter and James and John, saying, " Tell the
vision to no man tiU the Son of man be risen from the dead." A few
days later, while they were stiU in Galilee, passing through it so pri
vately that it evidenced a desire that no man should know it, (Mark
"9 : 30,) Jesus said to his disciples, " Let these sayings sink down into
jour hearts, for the Son of man shaU be betrayed into the hands of
men, and they shall kiU him, and the third day he shaU be raised
again." After the raising of Lazarus there was a brief retreat to
Persea, tiU the time of the last Passover drew on. There was some
thing very pecuhar in the whole manner and bearing of our Lord
when, leaving this retreat, he set forth on his final journey to Jeru
salem. He stepped forth before his disciples, "and they were ama
zed, and as they foUowed they were afraid." It was while they were
on the way thus going up to Jerusalem, that he took the twelve apart,
and said to them, " Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things
that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be
accomphshed ; for he shaU be betrayed unto the chief priests and
unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, and shall
deliver him to the Gentiles, and they shall mock, and shaU scourge,
and shall spit upon, and shaU crucify him, and the third day he shall
rise again." Matt. 20 : 17-19 ; Mark 10 : 32-34 ; Luke 18 : 31-34. It
thus appears that four times at least before the event — thrice in Gal
ilee and once in Persea — Jesus foretold with growing minuteness of
detail his passion and death ; specifying the place — Jerusalem ; the
time — the approaching Passover; the agents — the chief priests,
scribes, and Gentiles ; the course of procedure — his betrayal into the
Hands of the Jewish authorities, his delivery by them into the hands
of the Gentiles ; the manner of his death — crucifixion under a judi
cial sentence ; some of the accompanying circumstances — the scourg
ing, the mocking, the spitting. Any one placed in the position of ,
¦Jesus — seeing the rising tide of bitter enmity, and knowing the goal
at which it aimed — might have conjectured that nothing short of the
death of their victim would appease the wrath of his enemies. But
what mere human foresight could have foretold, at Csesarea-Phflippi,
that Herod would not anticipate the sacerdotal party, and seize upon
Jesus on his way through Galilee, and crown the Baptist's murder
•by that of his successor ? What mere human foresight could ha*v»
(foretold that after so many previous attempts and failures, the one at
the next Passover season would succeed ; that Jesus would not per
ish, as Stephen did, in a tumultuous outbreak ; that aU the formali
ties of a trial and condemnation would be gone through, and death
THE REBUKE OF ST. PETER. 323
by crucifixion be the result? Nor wfll it help to furnish us with any
natural explanation of these foretellings of his sufferings and death
by Jesus, to say that he gathered them from the prophecies of the
Old Testament, with which we know him to have been familiar, and
to which, indeed, even in these foretellings, he pointed ; for, much as
those prophecies did convey, they feU far short of that particularity
which characterizes the sayings of our Lord. Eeceiving the account
of the evangelists as genuine and true, we are shut up to the conclu
sion that in regard to his passion and death Jesus manUested before
hand a foreknowledge proper only to him who knows aU ends from
their beginnings ; and that stfll more was this the case as to his res
urrection, which he predicted still oftener, and could not have pre
dicted in plainer or less ambiguous terms.
It may for a moment appear strange that the disciples were so
taken by surprise when the death and the resurrection of their Mas
ter actually took place. How could this be, we are apt to ask our
selves, after such distinct and unambiguous declarations as those
which we have quoted? Let us remember, however, that the same
authority which instructs us that these predictions were uttered,
Informs us that they were not understood by those to whom they were
in the first instance addressed. "They understood not the saying,
and it was hid from them, and they feared to ask him." Luke 9 : 45.
"And they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with
another what the rising from the dead should mean." Mark. 9:10.
The words of Jesus were in themselves easy enough to understand ;
but was it figuratively or HteraUy they were to be taken? We can
scarcely judge aright of the perplexity into which so unexpected an
announcement must have thrown the disciples at this stage of their
acquaintance with Christ, nor understand how natural it was that
they should explain them away. We so often see them, with other
and less difficult subjects, taking what he meant HteraUy as if it were
figuratively spoken, and what he meant figuratively as U it were to be
literally understood — that it takes the edge off our wonder that in
this instance the disciples should have hesitated how to take the
words that they had heard. The expression, "rising from the dead,"
the one that appears to have perplexed them the most, appears to
us one of the simplest. Yet, when we put ourselves exactly in their
position, we begin to see that they had more ground for their per
plexity than is at first apparent. A raising from the dead was what
they had themselves witnessed. In the general resurrection of the
dead they believed. There was nothing, therefore, creating any diffi-
ty m the way of their understanding the mere Hteral signification
324 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of the phrase — rising from the dead. But the resurrection of Jesus- -
what could it mean? It could not be his sharing in the general res
urrection of aU the dead that he was speaking of. But was he to die
and to rise and to remain risen? or to die and to rise and to dio
again? He could raise others from the dead, but if he were to die,
who was to raise him? Need we be surprised U, with their notions
of who and what their Messiah was to be, the disciples should at times
have beheved that it was of some spiritual death and resurrection —
some sinking into the grave and rising again of his cause and king
dom — that Jesus spoke?
At first, indeed, and before any time for reflecting upon it is
given, St. Peter seizes upon the natural meaning of the words that he
had heard, and interprets them generaUy as predicting suffering and
death ,to his Master, and, offended at the very thought of a future
so different from the one that they aU had anticipated, in the heat of
his surprise and indignation, buoyed up, no doubt, by the praise that
had just been bestowed upon him, he forgets himself so far as actually
to lay hold by arm or garment of our Lord, and in the spirit of a
patron, or protector, he begins to rebuke him, saying, " Be it far from
thee, Lord : this shaU not be unto thee." Kindliness in the act and
speech ; a strong interest in Christ's mere personal weUare — but igno
rance and presumption too ; forgetfulness of the distance that sepa
rated him from Jesus, and a profound insensibility to the higher
spiritual designs which the sufferings and death of Jesus were to be
the means of accomplishing. Now let us mark the manner in which
this interference is regarded and treated by Christ. He turns about,
he looses himself from the too familiar hold, he looks on his disciples
as U craving their special notice of what he was about to say and do,
and by that look having engaged their fixed regard, he says to Peter,
" Get thee behind me, Satan : thou art an offence to me." What was
the secret of the quickness, the sharpness, the stern severity of this
rebuke? Why was it that, for the moment, the apostle disappeared
as it were from the Saviour's view, and Satan, the arch-tempter, took
his place? Why was it that the very word which our Lord had
apphed to Satan in the last and greatest of the temptations of the
wilderness, is here used again, as U the great tempter had reappeared
and renewed his sohcitation? It was because he found the feet of
Peter had actuaUy stepped upon the very ground that Satan, in his
great temptation of our Saviour had occupied. Take aU the king
doms of the world — such had been the bribe held out — take them
now — save thyseU aU the toil, the agony — let the cup pass from thee,
step into the throne without touching or tasting the bitterness of tbe
THE REBUKE OF ST. PETER. 325
cross Promptly, indignantly, was this temptation repeUed in the
wilderness; and when it reappears in the language of his apostle,
"Be it far from thee: this shaU not be unto thee" — when once again
he is tempted to shrink from the sufferings and the death in store for
hun — as promptly and as indignantly is it again repelled, Peter being
regarded as personating Satan in making it, and addressed even as
the great tempter had been.
What a difference between the two sayings, uttered within a few
minutes of each other ! " Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona : for flesh
and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in
heaven." "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence" — or,
as the word means, thou art a stumbhng-stone, a rock of offence —
"unto me." Can it be the same man to whom words of such different
import are addressed ? Yes, the same man in two quickly succeed
ing states. Now (to the eye which seeth in secret) he appears as one
whose mind the Father hath enhghtened, now as one whose heart
Satan has filled and occupied; now the object of praise and blessing,
now of censure and pungent rebuke. And does not this changing
Peter, with those two opposite sides of his character turned so rapidly
to Christ, stand a type and emblem of our weak humanity ? of the
ductile nature that is in the best of the followers of our Lord ? of the
quick transitions that so often take place within us? our souls now
shone upon by the hght from heaven, now ht up with fires of another
kindling ? What lessons of humihty and charity do such experiences
in the history of the best of men inculcate !
Peter must have been greatly surprised when, shaken off by Jesus,
he was spoken to as if he were the arch-fiend himself. Unconscious
of any thing but kindly feelings to his Master, he would be at a loss
at first to know what sinful, Satanic element there had been in the
sentiments he had been cherishing — the words that he had used. It
might at once occur to him that he had been too familiar — had used
too much hberty with him whom he had just acknowledged to be the
Christ, the Son of the hving God. But it surely could not be simply
and solely because of his being offended at the freedom taken, that
Jesus had spoken to him as he did. Some light may have been
thrown upon the matter, even to Peter's apprehension at the time, by
our Lord's own explanatory words: "Get thee behind me, Satan: for
thou savorest not the things that be of God, but the things that be
of men." There are two ways of looking upon those sufferings and
death, of which, now for the first time, Jesus had begun to speak—
the selfish, earthly, human one, and the spiritual, the divine. Peter
was thinking of them solely under the one aspect, thinking of them
326 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
in their bearing alone upon the personal comfort, the outward estate
and condition of his Lord. He would have Jesus avoid them. He
himseU would stand between them and his Master, and not suffer
them to come upon him ; inflicting, as he imagined they would do,
such great discredit and dishonor upon his name and cause. But
he knew not, or forgot, that it was for this end that Jesus came into
the world, to suffer and die for sinners ; that the cup could not pass
from him, the cross could not be avoided, without prophecies being
left unfulfiUed, purposes of God left unaccompUshed, the sin of man
left unatoned for, the salvation of mankind left unsecured. He knew
not, or forgot, that he was bringing to bear upon the humanity of our
Lord one of the strongest and subtlest of aU the trials to which it was
to be exposed, when in prospect of that untold weight of sorrow
which was to be laid upon it in the garden and upon the cross, the
instincts of nature taught it to shrink therefrom, to desire and to pray
for exemption. It was the quick and tender sense our Lord had of
the pecuharity and force of this temptation, rather than his sense of
the singularity and depth of Peter's sinfulness, which prompted and
pointed his reproof. At the same time he desired to let Peter know
that the way of looking at things, in which he had been indulging,
had in it that earthly, carnal element which condemned it in his sight
Nay, more ; he would seize upon the opportunity now presented, to
proclaim once more, as he had so often done, that not in his own case
alone, but in the case of aU his true and faithful foUowers, suffering,
seU-denial, self-sacrifice, must be undergone. He had noticed the
approach of a number of the people who had assembled at the sight
of Jesus and his apostles passing by their dwelhngs. These he called
to him, (Mark 8 : 34,) as if wishing to intimate that what he had now
to say, though springing out of what had occurred, and addressed in
the first instance to the twelve, was yet meant for all — was to be taken
up and repeated, and spread abroad, as addressed to the wide world
of mankind. 'H any man,' he said, 'whosoever, whatsoever he be,
wiU come after me, be a foUower of me, not nominaUy, but really, let
him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. No
other way there was for me, your Eedeemer, your forerunner, than by
taking up the cross appointed, and on that cross bearing your trans
gressions ; and no other way for you to foUow me, than by ear-h of
you voluntarily and daily taking up that cross which consists in the
repudiation of self-indulgence as the principle and spirit of your life,
in the wiUing acceptance of seU-denial as the fixed condition r f the
new lUe's growth and progress in your souls, in the crucifying of
every sinful affection and desire. " For whosoever wfll save his life
THE REBUKE OF ST. PETER. . 327
shall lose it ; but whosoever shaU lose his hfe for my sake and the
gospel's, shall save it." Let it be your main, supreme, engrossing
object, to save your life ; to guard yourseU against its ills, to secure
its benefits, its wealth, its honors, its enjoyments — the end shall be
that the very thing you seek to save you certainly shaU lose. But if
¦from a supreme love to Christ, and a predominating deshe to please
him, you are wiUing to lose life, to give up anything which he caUs
you to give up, the end shall be that the very thing that you were
ready to lose, you shaU at last and most fully gain. For take it even
as a mere matter of profit and loss — but weigh aright what is thrown
into the scale, when you are balancing earthly and eternal interests —
" What is a man profited if he gain the whole world ?" ' No man ever
did so; but suppose he did, imagine that one way or other the veiy
whole, the sum-total that this world — its pursuits, its possessions, its
enjoyments, can do to make one happy — were grasped by one single
pair of arms into one single bosom, would it profit him, would he be
a gainer U, when the great balance was struck, it should be found —
that in gaining the whole world he had lost his own soul ? that it had
been lost to God and to aU its higher duties, and so lost to happiness
and lost for ever ? For U a man once lose his soul, where shall he
find an equivalent in value for it ? where shaU he find that by which.
it can be redeemed or bought again ; what shall he find or give io
exchange for his soul? Too true, alas, it is, that, clear though this
simplest of aU questions of profit and loss be, many wiU not work it
out, or apply it to their own case, content to grasp what is nearest,
the present, the sensible, the earthly, and to overlook the more
remote, the unseen, the spiritual, the eternal. Too true that what
hinders many from a hearty and fuU embrace of Christ and all the
blessings of his salvation, is a desire to go with the multitude; a
¦shrinking, through shame, from any thing that would separate them
from the world. Would that upon the ears of such the solemn words
of our Lord might fall with power : " Whosoever shaU be ashamed of
me, and of my words, of him shaU the Son of man be ashamed, when
he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father's, and of the holy
angels." Luke 9 : 26. And at that coming, when the earth and the
heavens shaU pass away, and we shaU find ourselves standing before
the great white throne, and in the presence of that vast community
of holy beings, how wiU it look then to have been ashamed of
Jesus now ? What will it be then to find him ashamed of us, dis
owning us?
How strangely must this about the Son of man so coming with
power and great glory, have sounded in the ears of those who had
328 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
just been Hstening to him as he told how that he must suffer many
things, and be kflled, and be raised again the third clay. Beyond
that time of dishonor and suffering and death, predicted as so near,
here was another advent of the Son of man, around which every cir
cumstance of glory and honor was to be thrown. But when was that
advent to be realized? Of the day and the hour of its coming no
man was to know ; but this much about it Jesus might even now
reveal, that there were some standing then before him who should
not taste of death tfll they saw the kingdom of God set up, tfll they
saw Jesus coming in his kingdom. It could not be of his personal
and final advent to judgment that Jesus meant here to speak, for
that was not to occur within the lUetime of any of that generation.
Those, besides, who were to be ahve and to be witnesses of that
advent were never to taste of death. Jesus could only mean to speak
of such a visible institution of his kingdom as should carry with it a
prelude and prophecy of the great consummation. As it is now
known that of the twelve apostles John and Phihp alone survived the
great catastrophe Of the destruction of Jerusalem, when the Judaic
economy which Christ's kingdom was meant to supersede was set
aside, it has been generally beheved that it was to that particular
epoch or event that Jesus here referred. H we reflect, however, that
it was to the general audience by whom he was at the time surround
ed, and not exclusively to the twelve, that Jesus addressed these
words, we may be the more disposed to beheve that it was to the
general fact of the open establishment of his kingdom upon earth —
that kingdom which was erected ©n the day of Pentecost, and which
came forth more conspicuously into notice when the Jewish ceremo
nial expired, and it took its pla.ce — that our Saviour alluded. Some
of those to whom Jesus was speaking at Csesarea-Phflippi were to
witness the setting up of this kingdom within the souls of men, and in
this setting up were to behold the visible pledge that he would come
again the second time, to bring the present economy of things to its
close. Let us apply the saying of our Lord in this way to ourselves.
He has a kingdom, not distinguished now by any tokens of external
splendor — his kingdom within the soul. Before we taste of death we
may, we ought, to know that kingdom, to enter into it, be enrolled as
its subjects, be partakers of its privileges and blessings. And if so
by faith we see and own our Lord, yielding ourselves up to him as
the Christ, the Son of the living God, who has come in the name of
the Lord to save us, then when we close our eyes in death, we may do 30
in the humble confidence that when he comes in his own glory, and
THE TRANSFIGURATION. 329
the glory of the Father, and the glory of the holy angels, we shall
not be ashamed before him at his coming, and he will not be ashamed
of us, but wfll welcome us into that kingdom which shaU never be
moved, whose glory and whose blessedness shaU be fuU, unchange-
tble, eternal.
XVI.
The Transfiguration*
Six days elapsed after our Lord's first foretelling of his approach
ing death. These days were spent in the region of Csesarea-Phflippi
and appear to have passed without the occurrence of any noticeable
event : days, however, they undoubtedly would be of great perplexity
and sadness to the disciples. They had so far modified their first
beliefs and expectations, that they were ready to cleave to their
Master in the midst of prevalent misconception and enmity. But
this new and strange announcement that he must go up to Jerusalem,
not only to be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, but
to be put to death and raised again the third day, has disturbed their
faith, and fiUed their hearts with sorrowful anxieties — a disturbance
and anxiety chiefly, we may beheve, experienced by those three of the
twelve already admitted by Jesus to more intimate fellowship and
confidence. The six days over, bringing no rehef, Jesus takes these
three "up into a high mountain apart."
Standing upon the height which overlooks Csesarea-Phflippi, I
looked around upon the towering ridges which Great Hermon, the
Sheikh of the Mountains, as the Arabs call it, projects into the plain.
Full of the thought that one of these summits on which I gazed had
in aU probability witnessed the transfiguration, I had fixed upon one
of them which, from its pecuhar position, form, and elevation might
aptly be spoken of as a " high mountain apart," when casting my eye
casually down along its sides as they sloped into the valley, the
remains of three ancient vfllages appeared dotting the base. I
remembered how instantly on the descent from the mountain Jesus
had found himseU in the midst of his disciples and of the multitude,
and was pleased at observing that the mountain-top I had fixed upon
ant aU the requirements of the gospel narrative. H that were indeed
me mountain-top up to which Jesus went, he never stood so high
above the level of the famfliar lake, nor did his eye ever sweep so
B Matt. 17 : 1-13 ; Mark 9: 2-13 ; Luke 9 : 28-36.
330 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
broadly the hflls of GaHlee. Whichever the mountain was, the shades
of evening were falhng as Jesus climbed its sides. He loved, we
know, the stillness of the night, the soHtude of the mountain. He
sought them for the purposes of devotion — in the loneliness, the
calmness, the elevation, finding something in harmony with prayer.
GeneraUy, however, on such .occasions he was alone. He either sent
his disciples away or separated himseU from their society. Now,
however, as anticipating what was about to happen, he takes with
him Peter and James and John, the destined witnesses of his humil
iation and agony in the garden. The sun sinks in the west beneath
the waters of the Great Sea as the top of the mountain is reached.
Night begins to draw its mantle round them, wrapping in obscurity
the world below. Jesus begins to pray. The three, who rest a httle
space away from him, would join in his devotions, but wearied with
the ascent, less capable of resisting the coming-on of night and the
pressure of fatigue, their eyes grow heavy tfll they close in sleep —
the last sight they rest on, that sombre figure of their Master; the
last sound on their hstening ear, the gentle murmur of his ascending
prayers. From this sleep they waken, not at the gentle touch of the
morning Hght, not to look down upon the plain below, seen under the
beams of the rising day — with stroke of awakening power, a bright,
effulgent radiance has fallen upon their eyehds, and as they Uft them
up, while aU is dark below, the mountain-top is crowned with hght,
and there before them now there are three forms: their Master —
"the fashion of his countenance altered" — his face shining as the
sun — lit up, not alone, as the face of Moses once was; by the linger
ing reflection of the outward glory upon which it had gazed, but illu
mined from within, as if the hidden glory were bursting through the
fleshy veil and kindling it into radiance as it passed — his raiment shi
ning, bright as the ghstening snow that lay far above them upon the
highest top of Hermon — exceeding white, so as no fuller on earth
could whiten them ; and beside him, appearing too in glory, yet in
glory not Hke his — dimmer and less radiant — their forms, their atti
tudes, their words aU showing that they came to wait on him and
do him homage — Moses the lawgiver, and Elijah the reformer and
restorer of the Jewish theocracy. Whence came they? In what"
form did they now appear? How came Peter and James and John
at once to recognize them ? They came from the world of the dead,
the region that departed spirits occupy. Elijah did not need to bor
row for this occasion his old human form. He had carried that with
him in the chariot of fire — the corruptible then changed into the
incorruptible — the mortal having then put on immortality; and now
THE TRANSFIGURATION. 331
in that transfigured body he stands beside the transfigured form of
Jesus. Moses had died, indeed, and was once buried ; but no man
knew where nor how, nor can any man teU us in what bodily or mate
rial shape it was that he now appeared, nor what there was, if any
thing, about the external appearance either of him or of Elijah, whirl
helped the apostles to the recognition. In some way unknown, the
recognition came. It was given them to know who these two shining
strangers were. It was given them to listen to, and so far to under
stand, the converse they were holding with Jesus, as to know that
they were speaking to him about the decease he was to accomplish
at Jerusalem. But it was not given to them either immediately or
any time thereafter to report, perhaps even to remember, the words
they heard. We must remain content with knowing nothmg more
about that conversation — which, whether we think of the occasion or
the speaker or the subject-matter, appears to us as the sublimest
ever held on earth — than generaUy what its topic was. But of what
great moment even that information is we shaU presently have to
speak. Their mysterious discourse with Jesus over, Moses and Elias
make a movement to retire. Peter will not let them go — will detain
them U he can. He might not have broken in upon his Master while
engaged in converse with them ; but now that they seem about to
withdraw, in the fulness of his ecstatic delight, with a strong wish to
detain the strangers, a dim sense that they were in an exposed and
shelterless place, and a very vain imagination that the affording of
some better protection might perhaps induce them to stay, and that
if they did, they might all take up their permanent dwelling here
together, he cannot but exclaim, " Master, it is good for us to be
here: and let us make three tabernacles;" (three arbors or forest-
tents of the boughs of the neighboring trees;) "one for thee, and
one for Moses, and one for Elias." Not knowing what he said, the
words are just passing from his babbling lips, when the eye that fol
lows the retreating figures is filled with another and a brighter light.
A cloud comes down upon the mountain-top — a cloud of brightness —
a cloud which, unfolding its hidden treasures, pours a radiance down
upon the scene that throws even the form of the Eedeemer into
shadow, and in the darkness of whose excessive light the forms of
Moses and Ehas sink away and disappear. This cloud is no other
than the Shekinah, the symbol of Jehovah's gracious presence.
Prom the midst of its excellent glory there comes the voice, " This
is my beloved Son, in whom I am weU pleased ; hear ye him !" — not
Moses, nor Ehas, nor any other lawgiver, nor any other prophet — but
"hear ye him." As the apostles hear that voice, they are sore afraid :
332 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the strength goes out of them, and they fall with their faces to the
ground. Jesus comes, touches them. The touch restores their
strength. He says, " Arise, and be not afraid." They spring up ;
they look around. The voices have ceased, the forms have van
ished, the glory is gone; they are alone with Jesus as at the first.
Such as we have now recited them were the incidents of the
transfiguration. Let us consider now its scope and design. In the
shaded history of the Man of sorrows, this one passage stands out
so unique — a single outburst of hght and glory on the long track of
darkness — that we look at it with the most intense curiosity ; and as
we look, the questions start to our hps, Why was it that for that one
brief season the brow that was to be crowned with thorns was
crowned with glory, the countenance that was to be marred and spit
upon shone as the sun, the raiment that was to be stripped off and
divided among foreign soldiers became so bright and glistering?
Why was it that he who ere long was to be seen hanging up to die
between the two malefactors, was now and thus to be seen, with
Moses and Ehas standing by his side paying to him the most pro
found obeisance ? Why did that clouded glory come down and glide
across the mountain-top, and that voice of the Infinite Majesty speak
forth its awful and authoritative, yet instructive and encouraging
words ? In answer to these questions, we must say that we know
too httle of the world of spirits to take it upon us to affirm or con
jecture what it was, so far as they personally were concerned, or the
community of which they formed a part, which brought Moses and
Elias from their places of abode in the invisible world to stand and
talk for this short season with Jesus on the mount. Doubtless the
benefit, as the honor, to them was singular and great, involving a
closer approach to, a nearer fellowship with Jesus in his glorified
state, than was ever made or enjoyed by any other of our race on
earth, than may be made or enjoyed even by the redeemed in heaven.
But we venture not to specUy or define what the advantage was
which was thus conferred. We know too little also of the inner his
tory of the human mind of the man Christ Jesus, to say how season
able, how serviceable this brief translation into the society of the
upper sanctuary may have been — what treasures of strength and
comfort fitting him for the approaching hour and power of darkness,
the solemn announcement of his Sonship by the Father, the declara
tion of satisfaction with all his earthly work, may have conveyed into
his soul. Doubtless here, too, there were purposes of mercy and
grace towards the Eedeemer subserved, which it is difficult for us to
apprehend, more difficult for us fully to fathom. But there is another
THE TRANSFIGURATION. 333
region lying far more open to our inspection than either of those now
indicated. It is not difficult to perceive how the whole scene of the
transfiguration was ordered so as to fortify and confirm the apostles'
faith. That it had this as one of its immediate and more prominent
objects is evident, from the simple fact that Peter, James, and John
were taken up to the mount to witness it. Not for Christ's own sake
alone, nor for the sake of Moses and Elias alone, but for their sake
also, was this glimpse of the glorified condition of our Lord afforded ;
and when we set ourselves deliberately to consider what the obstruc
tions were which then lay in the way of a true faith on their part in
Christ, we can discern how singularly fitted, in its time, its mode, and
all attendant circumstances, it was to remove these obstructions, and
establish them in that faith.
1. It helped them to rise to a true conception of the dignity of
the Saviour's person. The humbleness of Christ's birth, his social
estate, the whole outward manner and circumstances of his hfe cre
ated then a prejudice against him and his claims to the Messiahship,
the force of which it is now difficult to compute : " Can there any
good thing come out of Nazareth ?" was the question, not of a cap
tious scribe or a hostile Pharisee, but of an Israelite indeed, in whom
there was no guile. " Is not this the carpenter's son ?" was the lan
guage of those who had been intimate with him from his birth, when
they heard him in their synagogue apply the memorable passage in
the prophecies of Isaiah to himself. "Is not this the carpenter's
son? is not his mother caUed Mary, and his brothers, James and
Joses, and Simon and Judas ; and his sisters, are they not all with
us ? And they were offended in him." In the case of his own dis
ciples, his character, his teaching, his miracles, his lUe fully satisfied
them that he was that Prophet who was to be sent. Yet the very
familiarity of their daily intercourse with him as a man stood in the
way of their rising to the loftier conception of his divinity. Besides,
had no such incident as that of the transfiguration occurred in the
Saviour's history, we can weU conceive how at this very stage they
might have been thrown into a condition of mind and feeling exactly
the reverse of that of their countrymen at large. Blinded by pride
and prejudice, the Jews generaUy would not look at those Scriptures
which spoke of a suffering, dying Messiah, but fixing their eyes alone
upon those glowing descriptions given by their prophets of the maj
esty of his person and the glory of his reign, they cast aside at onct
and indignantly the pretensions of the son of the carpenter. Now,
for the first time, the idea of his suffering unto death was presented
to the minds of his own disciples. Afterwards they were more fuUy
334 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
instructed out of the writings of Moses and the prophets how it
behooved Christ to suffer all these things, and then to enter into his
glory. But the glory of which so much had been foretold — that
bright side of the prophetic picture — what was it, and when and how
was it to be revealed ? Here again, just when their faith was widened
in one direction, in another it might have begun to falter. To meet
afl the trials of their position, in mercy to all their weaknesses, one
sight was given of the Lord's transfigured form, one visible mamfes-
tation of the place he held in the invisible kingdom, one ghmpse of
the heavenly glory, with Jesus standing in the midst. Sense stretched
out its vigorous hand to lay hold of blind and staggering Faith. And
lon°* afterwards — thirty years and more from the time that the great
manifestation was made — in Peter's person, Faith, when she had got
over aU her difficulties, and stood serene, secure, triumphant, looked
back and owned the debt, and published abroad her obhgation, say
ing, " We have not foUowed cunningly-devised fables when we made
known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but
were eye-witnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the
Father honor and glory, when there came such a voice to him from
the exceUent glory, ' This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased.' And this voice we heard when we were with Him in the
holy mount."
2. The position which Christ assumed toward the Jewish priest
hood and the Mosaic ritual was not a little perplexing — his habitual
neglect of some, his open and severe condemnation of other reli
gious observances sanctioned by the highest ecclesiastical authorities,
regarded generally as of divine origin and authority, and rigorously
observed by aU who made any pretensions to piety. He wore no
phylacteries ; he made no long prayers ; neither he nor his disciples
fasted ; he and they ate with unwashed hands ; he sat down with pub
licans and sinners ; in many ways, according to the current ideas, he
and his disciples broke the Sabbath ; he separated himseU from the
priesthood ; he walked not in their ways ; he discountenanced many
of their practices ; he taught and he practised a rehgion that made
but little of holy rites and outward orderly observances. The rehgion
of the heart, the home, the secret chamber, the broad highway, the
solitary mountain-side — a reHgion that in its heavenward aspects
opened a way direct for any sinner of our race to God as his heavenly
Father — that in its earthward aspects found its sphere and occupa
tion in the faithful and kindly discharge to aH around of the thousand
nameless duties of human brotherhood — such a religion the scribes.
the Pharisees, the hierarchy, the whole body of the Jewish priett-
THE TRANSFIGURATION. 335
hood, dishked ; they looked askance upon it and upon its author ;
took up the tale against Jesus — many of them, no doubt, believing it —
and circulated it, that this man was an enemy of Moses, was ill-
affected to the law and to the prophets, was an innovator, a revolu
tionist. To see and hear their Master thus arraigned, and w.'th
much apparent reason too, as one throwing himself into a hostile
attitude towards all the venerated popular superstitions, must have
been not a little trying to our Lord's apostles. But if there entered
into their minds a doubt as to the actual inner spiritual harmony
between their Master's teaching and that of Moses and the prophets,
the vision on the mount — the sight of Moses and Elias, the founder
and the restorer, the two chief representatives of the old covenant,
appearing in glory, entering into such feUowship with Jesus, owning
him as their Lord — must have cleared it away, satisfying them by an
ocular demonstration that their Master came not to destroy the law
and the prophets — not to destroy, but to fulfil.
3. The manner of Christ's death was, of itself, a huge stumbling-
block in the way of faith — one over which, notwithstanding all that
had been done beforehand to prepare them, the apostles at first
stumbled and feU. And yet one would have thought that the con
versation which Peter, James, and John overheard upon the mount,
might have satisfied them that a mysterious interest hung around
that death — obscure to the duU eyes of ordinary mortals, but very
visible to the eyes of the glorified. It formed the one and only topic
of that subhmest interview that ever took place on earth. And
doubtless, when the apostles recovered from the first shock of the
crucifixion, and, under Christ's and the Spirit's teaching, the meaning
and object of the great sacrifice for human guilt effected by that
death revealed itseU, and they began to remember all that the Lord
had told them of it, and the seal of silence that had been put upon
the lips of Peter, James, and John was broken — when they could not
only tell that it was about this decease, and about it alone, that Moses
and Ehas had spoken to their Lord, but knew now why it was that it
formed the only selected topic of discourse — that recaUed conversa
tion on the holy mount would contribute to fix their eyes in adoring
gratitude upon the cross, and to open their hps, as they determined
to know nothing among their feUow-men but Jesus Christ, and him
crucified. 4 The pecuhar way in which Jesus spake of his relationship to
God was another great difficulty in the way of faith. It seemed so
strange, so presumptuous, so blasphemous, for a man, with nothing
to mark him off as different from other men, to speak of God as his
336 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Father, not in any figurative or metaphorical sense, not as any one>
every one of his creatures might do, but in such a sense as obviously
to imply oneness of nature, of attributes, of authority, of possession.
How, against aU the counter forces that came into play against it,
was a faith in his true sonship to the Father to be created and sus
tained ? They had his word, his character, his works to build upon.
But knowing the fraflty of that spirit within which the faith had to
be built up, God was pleased to add another evidence, even that of
his personal and audible testimony. And so, from that cloudy glory
which hung for a few moments above the mountain-top, his own
living voice was heard authenticating all that Jesus had said, or was
to say, of the pecuhar relationship to him in which he stood, " This
is my beloved Son, in whom I am weU pleased. Hear ye him."
Once before, at the baptism, had the voice of the Father been
heard uttering the same testimony — confirming the same great fact
or truth. What .more could the Father do than break the silence so
long preserved, bow the heavens and come down, take into his hps
one of our human tongues, and in words that men could understand,
thus twice and so solemnly declare that this Jesus of Nazareth — this
unique sojourner upon our earth — was no other than his only begot
ten, his well- beloved Son, to whom, above all others, we were to open
our ears — to hear and to believe, to obey and to be blessed? In
the shape of mere sensible demonstration, could faith ask a higher,
better proof?
What, then, may we not say as we contemplate the single but
3trong help to faith given in this one brilliant passage of our
Eedeemer's hfe ? What hath God not done to win the faith of the
human family to Jesus Christ as his Son our Saviour? If miracles*
of wonder could have done it; if lights seen on earth that were
kindled before the sun, and forms seen on earth that had passed into
the heavens, and the very voice heard on earth that spake and it was
done, that commanded and all things stood fast, could have done it,
it had been done long ago. But alas ! for hearts so slow and hard
as ours, we need Christ to be revealed to us by the Spirit, as well as
revealed outwardly by the Father, ere to that great saying of his
upon, the mount we make the right response, looking upon Jesus and
saying, " Truly this is the Son of God— my Lord, my God, my one
and only Saviour — with whom I, too, am weU pleased, and through
whom I humbly trust that the Father wfll be weU pleased with me!"
NOTE. 337
NOTE.
Extract from a Journal kept by the Author during
a Visit to the J-Ioly Land in the Spring of the
Jear 1863.
Thuesdat, 23d April. — Our first sight of the Sea of Galilee was from the top
of Tabor. The next -was during our descent this evening to Tiberias from the
elevated ground around Kurun-Hattin. The climate changed sensibly as wo
descended, and the vegetation altered. We had been under considerable alarm
as to the suffocating heat we were to meet with in Tiberias, and the attacks of
vermin to which we were to be exposed. Instead of entering the town, or
encountering the dreaded enemy in his stronghold, where he musters, we are
told, in great force, we pitched our tents in an airy situation on the banks of the
lake, where we suffered no annoyance of any kind. How beautiful it was, as the
sun went down and the stars shone out, to look upon the waters, and to remem
ber that they were the waters of the Lake of Galilee.
Friday, 24th. — A showery night, trying our tents, which stood out well — but
little rain having got entrance. The day cleared up after breakfast, and at eleven
o'clock we went on board the boat which we had secured the night before to be
at our disposal during our stay here. Rowed along the southwestern shores of
the lake. The hills that rise here from the shore are lofty, some of them twelve
or thirteen hundred feet high. Landed for a while on a beautiful pebbly beach
in a little bay, on the shores of which are scattered the ruins of the ancient
Tarichoea. "Within the small enclosure of the bay — less than a quarter of a mile
across — indenting not more than one hundred yards the general shore-line, Jose
phus tells us of more than two hundred vessels being gathered for the only naval
engagement between the Jews and Romans. What an idea does this present of the
former populousness of these now silent and almost boatless waters ! Bathed in the
lake, and lay on the shore gathering shells. Took boat again, and rowed to the
southern end of the lake, where the Jordan leaves it, and, true to its tortuous
character, bends right and left as it issues from the lake. Rowed across heie,
and landed on the eastern shore. We had intended making a minute survey of
the southeastern banks, the general belief having so long been that somewhere
upon them was the scene of our Lord's cure of the demoniac of Gadara. A care
ful inspection of what lay quite open to view at once convinced us that it could
not have been at any place on the eastern side of the lake south of Wady Fik,
which lies nearly opposite Tiberias, that the miracle was wrought, for there is no
steep place whatever at or near the lakeside down which the swine could hav«
run violently. For a long way inland the country is level — never rising io
any such height as would answer to the description in the gospel narrative.
There is a Gadara, indeed, in this neighborhood, but it is at a great distauce
from the lake. It would take three hours to reach it, and the gorge of the river
Jermak intervenes. It cannot have been the Gadara near to which the tombs
were, out of which the inhabitants came immediately on hearing what had hap
pened on the lakeside. A. single look at Kurbit-es-Sumrah (Hippos) must satisfy
'JltofChitot 22
338 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
every observer that it could not possibly have been there, nor anywhere in it«
immediate neighborhood, that the incidents occurred connected with the healing
of the demoniac. We rowed back in the evening to our tents, thoroughly satis-
fled that in this instance the existence of a place called Gadara lying south of the
lake had exercised a misleading influence. It remained for us to examine the
eastern side of the lake, above the point at which we now left it. This we
resolved to do next day. . . .
Saturday, 25th. — Rowed across to Wady Fik, the first place along the eastern
shore coming up from the south at which the miracle could have been performed.
On landing, we asked our boatmen whether there were any tombs in the wady.
Their answer was to point us to a very old burying-ground, scarcely a hundred
yards from the place where we landed, which told its own story by the stones
scattered over it. We scarcely needed to ask whether there were any remains ot*
towns or villages near ; for, looking to our right, on the slope of a hill about
quarter of a mile off, the ruins of a village were to be seen — a very old village our
guide told us it was — its name, as he pronounced it, Kurban, or Dharban, or
Goorban, we could not exactly say which. Immediately fronting us was a lofty
conical height, with the steepest line of descent we had yet seen. This height
was connected by a narrow shoulder of land with the line of hills behind, which
here decline so rapidly to the shore, that either along their sides, or down the
still steeper side of the semi-detached and conical eminence in the mouth of the
wady, the swine may have run. There is indeed a level space, of no great extent,
however, between the shore and the bottom of the hills and of this eminence, but
it might easily have been that under the impulse of the demoniac possession, and
urged by the impetus given in so long and rapid a descent, the swine might have
been hurried across the space into the water. There is, in fact, no steep place
along the whole eastern shore which runs sheer down into the water. Here, then,
in Wady Fik we had enough to satisfy all the requirements of the narrative :
tombs so placed that immediately on Christ's landing a man might have come
out of them ; a mountain near, on which two thousand swine might have been
feeding ; a height down which they might have run so violently as to be driven
into the sea ; and a village at hand to which the tidings might easily be carried.
It remained for us, however, to visit Wady Semakh— the site fixed on by Dr.
Thompson as the scene of the event. Here, too, more than one of the conditions
required by the narrative were fully met : on the hillside, to the right of the
valley, were caves used formerly as tombs ; between us and them, as we stood
upon the shore, were the remains of an old village, while away at a considerable
distance on our right was a slope of a mountain-side that might have served for
the descent. The tombs, however, were too far off. Their position relative to
the village scarcely corresponded with the narrative, from which one would nat
urally infer that the village lay behind — the word needing to be carried to it.
On the whole, after the fairest and fullest comparison we could institute, our
decision was that it was in Wady Fik, and not in Wady Semakh, that the inci
dents of the strange healing occurred. °
The closer survey, however, that we were now able to make of Wady Semakh,
strengthened the impression that eye and glass had conveyed to us — as from the
othor side we nad studied the eastern shores of the lake — that it was in its neigh-
* See " Sinai and Palestine," p. 380
NOTE. 339
borhood that the feeding of the five thousand took place. Let any one run his
eye from the entrance of the Jordan into the lake, down the eastern shore, and
he will notice that all along the land rises with a gentle and gradual slope ; never
till miles behind rising into any thing that could be called a mountain ; never
showing any single height with a marked distinction from or elevation above the
others, so separate and so secluded that it could with propriety be said that Jesus
went up to that mountain apart to pray. Wherever Capernaum was, to pass over
from it to these slopes on the northeastern shore traditionally regarded as the
scene of the miracle, could scarcely be said to be a crossing over to the other side
of the lake. But Wady Semakh presents the very kind of place required by the
record of the events. Looking up into it, with high mountains on either side,
with lesser valleys dividing them from one another, presenting a choice to any
one who sought an elevated privacy on a mountain-top for prayer — and turning
our eye upon the many plateaux or nearly level places, carpeted at this season of
the year with grass, my companion, Dr. Keith Johnson, and I were both per
suaded that our eyes were resting on the neighborhood where the great and
gracious display of the Divine power was made in the feeding of the multitude.
THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY.
I.
The Descent from, the Mount of Transfiguration.*
Moemng has dawned upon the mountain-top which had witnessed
the wonderful night-scene of the transfiguration. Jesus and the three
disciples begin to descend. The silence they at first observe is broken
by our Lord turning to his disciples, and saying, " Tell the vision to no
man, untfl the Son of man be risen again from the dead." A few days
before, Jesus had straitly charged them that they should tell no man
that he was the Christ. The discovery would be premature. The
people were not prepared for it. It would come unsuitably as weU
as unseasonably from the lips of the apostles. It might serve to
interrupt that course of things which was to guide onward to the
great decease to be accomphshed at Jerusalem. And whatever
reasons there were for a temporary concealment from the multitude
of such knowledge as to their Master's true character and office as
the apostles possessed, still stronger reasons were there that they
should preserve silence as to this vision on the mount, the narration
of which would be sure at that time to provoke nothing but derision.
Not even to the other nine were the three to speak of it till the key
to its true interpretation was in all their hands, for even by them, in
the meantime, it was Uttle likely to be rightly apprehended, and it
was not a topic to be rudely handled as a thing of idle and ignorant
talk. The seal thus put upon the lips of the three, we have no reason
to beheve was broken tfll the time came when they stood relieved
from the obUgation it imposed. AU the more curiously would the
matter be scanned by the three when alone. The thing that most
perplexed them as they did so, was what the rising from the dead
could mean. They did not venture to put any question to their
Master. Now, upon the mountain-side, as afterwards, they were
afraid to ask him about it, with something perhaps of the feeling of
those who do not like to ask more about a matter which it has sad-
0 Matt. 17 : 9-27 ; Mark 9 : 9-32 ; Luke 9 : 37-45.
342 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
dened them so much to hear about at aU ; from aU fuller and dis-
tincter sight of which they shrink.
But there was a question, and that a very natural one in the
existing circumstances, which they did venture to put to Jesus by
the way. They had just seen Ehas standing by the side of their
Master, to be with him in that brief interview, and then depart. Was
this that coming of the great prophet about which the scribes spoke
so much ? It could scarcely be so, for that coming was to precede
the advent of the Messiah. But U Jesus were the Christ, and this
which they had just witnessed were the coming of Ehas, the pre
scribed, prophetic order would be reversed. In the uncertainty and
confusion of their thoughts they put the question to their Master,
"Why say the scribes that Elias must first come?" Jesus had
abeady — months before — on the occasion of the visit of the two dis
ciples of the Baptist, said to them plainly enough, " If ye will receive
it, this is Elias which was to come." They had not fully understood or
received it. In common with the whole body of their countrymen,
their original idea had been, that it was to be an actual return of
Elijah himself to the earth which was to be the precursor of the
appearance of their Messiah. This conception the sayings of Jesus
may have served partially to rectify ; but now, when Ehjah comes
and presents himself before their eyes, it returns, and in returning
blinds and confuses them once more. Our Lord's answer is so far clear
enough, that he confirms the dictum of the scribes as founded on a
right reading of the ancient prophecies, especiaUy of the one by
Malachi, recorded in the fourth chapter of that prophet's writings.
It was true, what these scribes had said, that Elias must first come.
But they were in error when they looked for a personal visit from the
old prophet as the precursor of the first advent of Christ. They had
fafled to see in the person and ministry of John one coming in the
spirit and power of Elias. They had taken too hastily the Baptist
at his word when he said he was not Elias, as in a hteral sense he
was not. And, misapprehending his character and mission, they had
allowed their natural dishke to such a person and ministry as his to
grow until it culminated in that act of Herod by which the disliked
preacher of righteousness was cut off. Once more, therefore, does
Jesus renew the testimony he had already borne to the Baptist : " I
say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not,
but have done unto him whatsoever they Usted." The treatment
they gave to the forerunner was no inapt symbol of that which they
were preparing for Christ himself, for " likewise shall also the Son of
man suffer of them."
DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 343
Then the disciples understood that " he spake unto them of John
the Baptist." But did they understand that in his answer to their
inquiry our Lord aUuded to another, a future coming of Elias, of
which that of the Baptist was but a type or a prelude, as well as to
another, a future coming of the Son of man with which it was to be
connected? Many think that not obscurely, such an allusion lay
in the words which Christ employed, and that it is in the two advents
each prefaced with its appropriate precursorage, that the full and
varied language of ancient prophecy receives alone its fit and ade
quate accomplishment.
But we must now turn our eye from the httle group conversing
about Elias, as they descended the hillside, to what was occurring
elsewhere, down in the valley, among the villages that lay at the base
of the mountain. Among the villagers there had occurred a case of
rare and complicated distress. A youth, the only son of his father,
had faUen the victim to strange and fearful paroxysms, in which his
own proper speech was taken from him, and he uttered hideous
sounds, and foamed, and gnashed with his teeth, and was cast some
times into the fire, and sometimes into the water, from which he was
drawn with difficulty, half dead. To bodily and mental distemper,
occult and incurable, there was added demoniac possession, mingling
itself with, and adding new horrors to, the terrible visitations. With
the arrival of Christ and his disciples in this remote region, there had
come the fame of the wonderful cures that he had elsewhere effected ;
cures, many of them, of the very same kind of malady with which this
youth was so grievously afflicted. On learning that the company of
Galilean strangers had arrived in the neighborhood of his own dwell
ing, the father of this youth thought that the time had come of relief
from that heavy domestic burden that for years he had been bearing.
He brought to them his son. Unfortunately, it so happened that he
brought him when Christ and his three disciples were up in the moun
tain, and the nine were left behind. It was to them, therefore, that
the application for relief was made. It does not appear that when in
company with Christ the disciples were in the habit of claiming or
exercising any preternatural power over disease. No case, at least,
of a cure effected by their hands in such circumstances is recorded.
But in that short, experimental tour, when they had been sent out away
from him to go two by two through Galilee, Jesus had given them
power over unclean spirits — a power which they had exercised with
out check or failure. And now, when they are left alone, and this most
painful case is brought to them, they imagine that the same power is
vn their hands, and they essay to exercise it. In their Master's name
314 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
again and again they command that unclean spirit to go forth, but
their words return to them void. They stand baffled and covered
with confusion before the crowd that had gathered to witness the
cure. They can give no reason, for they know none, why the failure
has taken place. Nor are they suffered to skulk away in their defeat.
Some scribes are there, ready enough to take advantage of the awk
ward dilemma into which they have been thrown by assuming an
authority which turns out to be impotent — their Master's character
involved in their defeat. We can well imagine what an instrumeni
of reproach would be put thus into the hands of these scribes, and
how diligently and effectively they would employ it ; pressing the dis
ciples with questions to which they could give no satisfactory rephes,
and turning the whole occurrence to the best account in the way ol
casting discredit upon the Master, as well as upon his disciples. A
great multitude had in the meantime assembled ; a profane and scof
fing and haU-malignant spirit had been stealing into the hearts of many,
when Jesus and the three are seen coming down from the hillside.
The suddenness of his appearance — his coming at the very time that
his disciples were hard pressed, perhaps, too, the very calmness and
majesty of his appearance, as some of that glory of the mountain-top
still lingers around him — produces a quick revolution of feehng in the
fickle multitude. Straightway a kind of awe — half admiration, hall
alarm— comes over them, and, "greatly amazed," they leave the
scribes and the discomfited disciples, and they run to him and salute
him — not in mockery, certainly, or hailing him as one whose claims
upon their homage they are ready to set aside — but rather with a
rebound from their recent incredulity, prepared to pay to him the pro-
founder respect. And now, as on some battlefield which subordinate
officers have entered in absence of their chief, and in which they have
been worsted by the foe, at the crisis of the day the chief himseU
appears, and at once the tide of battle turns — so acts the presence of
Chi ist. Bearing back with him the multitude that had run forth to
greet him, he comes up to where the scribes are dealing with the
apostles, and says to them, " What question ye with them ?" The
questioners are struck dumb — stand silent before the Lord. In the
midst of the silence a man comes forward, kneels down before Jesus,
tells him what has happened, how fearful the malady was that had
faUen upon his only child, how he had brought the chfld to the dis
ciples and they had failed to cast the devfl out of him. Too much
occupied with his own grief, too eager to seize the chance now given,
that the Master may do what his disciples could not, he makes no
mention of the scribes, or of the hostile feeling against him they have
DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 345
been attempting to excite. But Jesus knows it all, sees how iu all the
various regions then around him, in the hearts of the people who
speak to him, in the hearts of the disciples from whom he had tem
porarily been parted, in the hearts of those scribes who had been
indulging in an unworthy and premature triumph, the spirit of incre
dulity had been acting. Contemplating the sad picture of prevailing
unbelief, there bursts from his lips the mournful ejaculation, ' 0 faith
less, incredulous, and perverse generation ! how long shall I be with
you and you remain ignorant of who and what I am ? How shall I
suffer you, as you continue to exhibit such want of trust in my willing
ness and power to help and save you ?' Not often does Christ give us
any insight into the personal emotions stirred up within his heart by
the scenes among which he moves — not often does there issue from
his hps any thing approaching to complaint. Here, for a moment,
out of the fulness of his heart he speaketh, revealing as he does so
a fountain-head of sorrow lying deep within his soul, the fulness and
bitterness of whose waters, as they were so constantly rising up to
flood and overflow his spirit, who can gauge ? What must it have
been for Jesus Christ to come into such close familiar contact with
the misconceptions and incredulities, and dislikes and oppositions of
the men he hved among? With a human nature like our own, yet
far more exquisitely sensitive than ours to injustice and false reproach,
what a constant strain and burden must thus have been laid upon his
heart ! What an incalculable amount of patience must it have called
him to exercise !
The brief lament over the faithless and perverse generation
uttered, Jesus says to the father, "Bring thy son hither!" And now
follows a scene to which there are few paraUels in scriptural or in any
other story, for our vivid conception of which we are specially indebted
to the graphic pen of the second evangelist. They go for the youth,
and bring him. So soon as he comes into the presence of Jesus, and
their eyes meet — whether it was that the calm, benignant, heavenly
look of Christ operated as a kind of stimulant upon a wornout, weak,
unstrung, excitable, nervous system, or that the devil, knowing that
his time was short, would raise one last and vehement commotion
within that poor distracted frame — the youth faUs to the ground, wal
lowing, foaming, torn by a power he is unable to resist. Jesus looks
upon him as he hes, and all who are around look at Jesus, wondering
what he wfll do. Is it easy to imagine a conjunction of outward cir
cumstances more striking or affecting ? The youth writhing on the
ground, Jesus bending on him a look of ineffable pity, the father
standing on the tiptoe of eager expectation, the disciples, the scribes,
346 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the multitude pressing on to witness the result. Such was the sea
son, such were the circumstances that Jesus chose for one of the
shortest but most memorable of his conversations. Before he says
or does any thing as to the son, he says quietly, inquiringly, compas
sionately to the fatlier, " How long is it ago since this came unto
him?" The father tells how long, and tells how terrible it has been;
but as if somewhat impatient at such a question being put at such a
time, he adds, "But U thou canst do any thing, have compassion on
us, and help us." Genuine and pathetic utterance of a deep-smitten
fatherly affection, identifying itself with the object of its love, and
intent upon the one thing of getting that child cured ; all right here
in the father's feeling towards his son; but something wrong, some
thing defective in the feeling towards Christ which, for the man's
own sake and for his son's sake, and for the sake of that gathered
crowd, and for the sake of us, and of all who shall ever read this nar
rative, Jesus desired to seize upon this opportunity to correct. " If
thou canst do any thing," the father says. " If thou canst beheve,"
is our Lord's quick reply. ' It is not, as thou takest it, a question as
to the extent of my power, but altogether of the strength of thy faith;
for if thou canst but believe, aU things are possible, this thing can
easily be done.' Receiving the rebuke in the spirit in which it was
gi ven, awaking at once to see and believe that it was his want of faith
that stood in the way of his son's cure, sensible that he had been
wrong in chaUenging Christ's power, that Christ was right in chal
lenging his faith, with a flood of tears that told how truly humble and
broken his spirit was, the man cries out, "Lord, I believe; help thou
mine unbelief." Who is not grateful to the man who lets us see into
that tumult and agony of soul in which true faith is born — how it is
that out of the dull and fearful spirit of mistrust the genuine, child
like confidence of the heart in Jesus struggles into being. "Lord, I
believe." ' I have a trust in thee. I know that thou hast aU power
at thy command, and canst exercise it as thou wilt. But when I look
at that which this power of thine is now caUed to do, my faith begins
to falter. Lord, help mine unbelief. Thou only canst do it. Thou
only canst strengthen this weak and faihng heart of mine. It is thine
to cure the bodily distemper of my son. It is thine to heal the spir
itual infirmities of my soul.' What a mixture here of weakness and
strength— the cry for help betraying the one, yet in that very cry
the other standing revealed ! Few utterances that have come from
human lips have carried more in them of the spirit that we should
all seek to cherish; nor would it be easy to calculate how many
human beings have taken up the language this man taught them
DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 347
to employ, and said to Jesus, "Lord, we believe; help thou oui
unbelief." In answer to this confession and this prayer, something still fur
ther might have been said, had not our Lord perceived a fresh pres
sure in upon them of the neighboring crowd, at sight of which he
delayed no longer, but turning to him who still lies on the ground
before him, in words of sternness and decision he says, " Thou dumb
and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more
into him!" A fresh cry of agony, a last and most violent convulsion,
and the poor afflicted youth lies stretched out so motionless that
many, looking at him, say that he is dead. But Jesus takes him by
the hand and lifts him up, and delivers him perfectly cured to his
glad and grateful father. The work was done ; the crowd dispersed,
" all amazed at the mighty power of God."
Afterwards, when alone with him in the house, the apostles asked
Jesus why it was that they could not cast the devil out. He told
them that it was because of their unbelief. They had suffered per
haps that late announcement which he had made to them of his
impending sufferings and death to dim or disturb their faith, or they
had allowed that stfll more recent selection of the three, and his with
drawal from them up into the mountain, to engender a jealousy which
weakened that faith. One way or other, their faith had given way,
and in its absence they had tried the power of their Master's name,
in the hope that it might act as a charm or talisman. Jesus would
have them know that it was not thus that his name was rightly, or
could ever effectively, be employed. Yet at the same time he would
have them know that the kind of spirit by which this youth had
been possessed was one not easy of ejection— which required, in fact,
on the part of the ejector, such a faith as could only be reached by
much prayer and fasting ; teaching them thus, in answer to their
¦ inquiry, the double lesson — that the primary source of their failure
lay in the defect of their faith ; and that the manner in which that
faith could alone be nourished up to the required degree of strength
was by fasting and by prayer ; by weaning themselves from the pur
suits and enjoyments of sense ; by repeated and earnest supplications
to the Giver of every good and perfect gift, whose office it is to work
m his people the work of faith with power. At the same time Jesus
took the opportunity which this private interview with his disciples
afforded — as he had taken the opportunity of his interview with the
importunate father — to proclaim the great power, the omnipotence of
faith. Matt. 17 : 20. This obviously was the one great lesson which,
in this passage of his earthly history, Jesus designed to teach.
348 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Sudden and very striking must have been the transition from the
brightness, the blessedness of that subhme communion with Moses
and Elias on the mount, to the close contact with human misery in
the shape of the possessed lunatic who lay writhing at his feet; so
sharp and impressive the contrast that the prince of painters, in his
attempt to picture to our eye the glories of the transfiguration, has
thrown in the figure of the suffering child at the base of the moun
tain. But more even than by this contact with human misery does
our Saviour seem on this occasion to have been impressed by his
coming into such close contact with so many forms of human unbe
lief. And he appears to have framed and selected this as the first
occasion on which to announce, not only the need and the benefit,
but the illimitable power of faith.
He could easfly have arranged it so that no application had been
made to his disciples in his absence, but then they had wanted the
lesson the failure carried in its bosom. He could easily have cured
that maniac boy at once and by a word ; but then his father had
missed that lesson which, in the short preliminary conversation with
him, was conveyed. And through both, to us and to all, the great
truth is made known that in this world of sin and sorrow the prime
necessity is, that we should have faith in God and faith in Jesus
Christ — not in certain truths or propositions about God or about
Jesus Christ — but simple, childlike trust in God as our Father, in
Jesus as our Saviour; a faith that wfll lead us in aU times of our
weakness and exposure, and temptation and distress, to fly to them
to succor us, casting ourselves upon a help that never was refused to
those who felt their need of it. Neither for our natural nor for our
spiritual life is the physical removal of mountains necessary ; if it
were, we believe that it would be given in answer to believing prayer;
but mountains of difficulty there are, moral and spiritual, which do
need to be removed ere our way be made plain, and we be carried
smoothly and prosperously along it ; corruptions within us to be sub
dued ; temptations without us to be overcome. These must be met,
and struggled with, and overcome. It is by the might and mastery
of faith and prayer that this can alone be accomphshed. And it is
no small comfort for us to be assured, on the word of our Lord him
self, that though our faith be small in bulk as the mustard-seed, yet
if it be genuine — if it humbly yet firmly take hold of the mighty
power of God and hang upon it, it wfll avail to bring that power
down to our aid and rescue; so that, weak as we are in ourselves,
and strong as the world is to overcome us, yet greater shall he be
.that is with us than he that is in the world, and we shall be able to
DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 349
do all things through Him who strength eneth us. Prayer, it has
been said, moves the arm that moves the universe. But it is faith
which gives to prayer the faculty of linking itself in this way with
Omnipotence, and caUing it to human aid. And so you find that, in one
of the other two instances in which Jesus made use of the same expres
sions as to the power of faith which he employed upon this occasion,
he coupled faith and prayer together. "Master," said Peter, won
dering at the effect which a single word of Jesus had produced —
" Master, behold, the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away !
And Jesus answering said unto them, Have faith in God. For verily
I say unto you, that whosoever shall say to this mountain, Be thou
removed, and be thou cast into the sea, and shaU not doubt in his
heart, but shaU beUeve that those things which he saith shall come
to pass, he shaU have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto
you, What things soever ye desire when ye pray, beheve that ye
receive them, and ye shaU have them." Wonderful words, assigning
an all-embracing, an absolutely unlimited efficacy to faith and prayer —
words not to be lightly judged of, as if they were intended to encour
age the rash and ignorant conceits and confidences of a presump
tuous enthusiasm, but words of truth and soberness, notwithstanding
the width and compass of their embrace, U only we remember that
true faith will confide in God or Christ only for that as to which he
invites, and so warrants, its confidence ; and true prayer will ask for
that alone which is agreeable to the will of God, and will promote the
spiritual and eternal good of him upon whom it is bestowed. These
are the conditions — natural and reasonable — which underlie all that
Christ has said of the power of faith and prayer. And within these
conditions we accept aU that he has said as true in itself, and wanting
only a firmer faith, and a more undoubting prayer than we have exer
cised or put forth, to receive its fulfilment in our own experience.
350 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
II.
The Payment of the Tribute-money — The Strife as
to Who should be Geratest in the J£ingdom of
Heaven.*
Feom his retirement in the neighborhood of Csesarea-Phflippi,
Jesus returned to Galilee — not, however, to resume his public minis
try there. He sought privacy now, even among the scenes of his
former labors — a privacy that he wished to consecrate to the further
enlightenment of the twelve as to his own character and office, and the
true nature of the kingdom he came to institute. Mark 9 : 30, 31.
It was in fulfilment of this purpose that, on the way from the scene
of the transfiguration to his old haunts about Capernaum, he made a
second announcement of his impending death and resurrection, add
ing to the details of his passion formerly given that of his betrayal.
So hid was the meaning of Christ's words, that aU that the apostles
appear to have derived from them was, a vague impression that some
great and decisive events in their Master's history were drawing near,
in contemplation of which they began disputing among themselves
which should be greatest in the kingdom which they hoped to see so
soon set up — keeping, as they imagined, their disputings about this
topic concealed from Christ.
On their arrival at Capernaum, the persons appointed to receive
the annual tribute which was paid for the support of the temple ser
vices came to Peter and said to him, " Doth not your Master pay
tribute?" Those who put this question were not the pubhcans or
ordinary tax-gatherers, who levied the dues laid upon the Jews by
their governors the Romans. Nor was the question one about the
payment of any common tax, any civil impost. The very form of the
question, had it been literally rendered, would have indicated this—
' Doth not your Master pay the didrachma?' a coin then modern and
in circulation, equivalent to the old haU-shekel, which, having gone
out of use, had become rare. Every Jew of twenty years old and
upward was required to give a half-shekel yearly for the maintenance,
first of the tabernacle, and afterwards of the temple. Although this
payment was legally imposed, it does not appear to have been enforced
by civil pains or penalties. It was left rather, like other of the Mo
saic imposts, to the spontaneous action of conscience and a good-will
towards the theocracy on the part of the people. It was to the pay-
° Matt. 17 : 22-27; 18 : 1-35 ; Mark 9 : 33-41 ; Luke 9 : -13-50.
PAYMENT OF THE TRIBUTE-MONEY. 351
ment of this di drachma or half-shekel for the upholding of the temple
and its ordinances that the question put to St. Peter refers. It is
impossible for us to say positively in what spirit or with what motives
the question was put. It certainly was not the question of the lynx-
eyed collectors of the ordinary revenue, detecting an attempted eva
sion of the payment of one or other of the common taxes. From no
civfl obhgation laid upon him by law did Jesus ever claim to be
exempt ; nor would the argument which he used afterwards with the
apostle, embodying a claim to exemption in this case, have been
applicable to any such obhgation. But why did those to whom the
gatherers of this ecclesiastical impost was intrusted speak as they did
to St. Peter ? Was it from doubt or ignorance on their part as to
whether Jesus ought to be asked or now meant to pay this tax?
Priests, Levites, prophets, some tell us that even rabbis were held to
be free from this payment. Had Christ's retirement now from pub
hc duty suggested the idea that he had thrown aside that character
under which immunity might have been claimed by him, and that he
might be called upon therefore to submit to all the ordinary obliga
tions under which every common inhabitant of the country was laid?
Or was this a piece of rude impertinence on the part of the under-
officials of the hierarchy, who, seeing the disfavor into which Jesus
had sunk with their superiors, were quick to take advantage of their
commission to obtrude a question that seemed to cast some reproach
on Christ as U he were a defaulter ? Some color is given to the sup
position that it was in a sinister spirit that the inquiry was made,
from the circumstance of St. Peter's prompt reply — a reply in which
there may have been indignation at an implied suspicion, and a scorn
at disputing about such a trifle — so that without any communication
with Jesus, he shuts the mouths of these gainsayers by saying, ' Yes,
his Master paid, or would pay, the tribute.' Had the tone in which
the question was asked and the apostle's reply was given been known
to us, we might have told whether it was so or not. As it is, it can
only be a conjecture that it was in a hostile and mahcious spirit that
the collectors of the tribute-money acted. Peter, however, was too
rash and hasty. It might be true enough that his Master had no
desire to avoid that or any other service which he owed to the tem
ple and to its worship. It might be safe enough in him to undertake
for bis Master so trifling a payment, which, whether Jesus acqui
esced in the engagement or not, the apostle could easily find the
means for meeting. But in such an instant acknowledgment of the
obhgation, there was an overlooking on Peter's part of the dignity of
Christ's person, and of his position towards the temple. To remind
352 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
him of this oversight, to recaU his attention to what was implied i»
his own recent confession at Csesarea-Phflippi, when they were comt
into the house, without waiting for any communication from Peter as
to what had occurred, Jesus said to him, "What thinkest thou, Simon?
of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute ? of their
own children, or of strangers ?" — those who are not members of their
own family — not sons, but subjects. Peter saith to him, ' Of the lat
ter; of strangers. Jesus saith to him, Then are the children free.'
Upon this simple principle Christ would have Peter to recognize his
immunity from that tribute which was now claimed — for was he not
greater than the temple ? Did he not bear to that temple the rela
tion of the Son in the house of his Father ? And did he not as such
stand free from aU the obhgations which the King and Lord of that
house had laid upon his servants — his subjects ? It will not be easy
to show any pertinence assumed in the plea for immunity thus pre
sented, without admitting the altogether peculiar relationship in
which Christ stood to the Father. Accept the truth of his divine
Sonship to the Father, and the plea holds good ; reject that truth,
and the plea seems weak and void. And was it not for the purpose
of still further illustrating that very Sonship to God which Peter for
the moment had forgotten, that our Lord directed him to do that
which in the issue carried with it so remarkable a proof that in the
great temple of the visible creation Jesus was not a servant, but a
Son; that everywhere within and over that house he ruled; that all
things there were ready to serve him — the flowers of the field, the
birds of the air, the fish of the sea — Seeing that at Christ's bidding
one of the latter was to be ready to grasp at Peter's hook, and on
being taken up, was to have in its mouth the stater, the four-drachm
piece, the very sum required from two persons for the yearly temple-
tax ? It is as viewed in this connection that a miracle which other
wise would look needless and undignified — out of keeping with the
general character of our Lord's great works, all of which in some
way have something more than mere exhibiting of power — takes
rank with all the rest as illustrative of the higher character and office
of the Redeemer. It was not want which forced our Lord upon this
forthputting of his divinity. Even had the bag which Judas carried
been for the moment empty, the sum required to meet this payment
was not so large but that it could easfly have been otherwise pro
cured ; but in the manner in which the need was met, Jesus would
set forth that character on the ground of which he might have claimed
immunity — throwing over the depths of his earthly poverty the glory
of his divine riches, and making it manUest how easy it had been for
PAYMENT OF THE TRIBUTE-MONEY. 353
him to have laid aU nature under contribution to supply all his wants.
Yet another purpose was served by this incident in our Saviour's life.
In point of time, it harmonizes with the first occasions on which Jesus
began to speak of that church, that separate society which was to
spring forth out of the bosom of Judaism, and to take the place oi
the old theocracy. Had he, without explanation made, at once rati
fied the engagement that Peter made for him, it might have been
interpreted as an acknowledgment of his subjection to the customs
and laws of the old covenant. That no offence might be taken —
taken in ignorance by those who were ignorant of the ground upon
which immunity from this payment on his part might, have been
asserted — he was wiUing to do as Peter said he would. In this it
became him to fulfil aU the righteousness of the law; but even in
doing so, he will utter in private his protest, and in the mode wherein
that protest is embodied convey beforehand no indistinct intimation
that a breach was to take place between the temple-service and the
new community of the free of which he was to be the Head.
It is extremely difficult to determine what the exact order of events
was on the arrival at Capernaum. If it were while they were on the
way to the house — most likely that of Peter, in which Jesus took up
his abode — that the coUectors of the temple tax made their applica
tion, then the first incident after the arrival would be the short con
versation with Simon, and the despatching him to obtain the stater
from the fish's mouth upon the lake. In Peter's absence, and after
they had entered the house, Jesus may have said to his disciples,
"What was it that ye disputed among yourselves by the way ?" They
were so struck by surprise, had been so certain that their Master had
not overheard the dispute that had taken place, that they had no
answer to give to his inquiry. Meanwhile, Peter has returned from
his errand, and reported its result, while they in turn report to him
the inquiry that had been made of them. Let us remember here
that up to the time of the arrival in the neighborhood of Csesarea-
Phflippi, no instance is on record of any controversy having arisen
among the personal attendants on Christ as to the different positions
they were to occupy in his kingdom. All had hitherto been so vague
and indefinite as to the time and manner of the institution of the
kmgdom, that aU conjecture or anticipation as to their relative places
therein had been kept in abeyance. Now, however, they see a new
tone and manner in their Master. He speaks of things — they do not
well know what — which are about to occur in Jerusalem. He tells
them that there were some of them standing there before him which
should not taste of death till they had seen the kingdom of God.
Uft of TLrf,t_ OQ
354 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Which of them could it be for whom such honor was in reserve ? He
takes Peter and James and John up with him to the mount, and
appears there before them in so new an aspect, invested with such a
strange and exceeding glory, that the privilege of being present at
such a spectacle must have appeared to the three as a singular dis
tinction conferred upon them. They were not to teU the others what
they had seen, but they could scarcely fail to tell them they had seen
something wonderful beyond any thing that had happened in their
Lord's wonderful hfe, which they were not permitted to reveal.
Would not the seal of secrecy so imposed enhance in their estima
tion the privilege which had been conferred on them, and would it
not in the same degree be apt to awaken a jealousy on the part of
the nine ? At the very time, then, that they all began to look out for
the coming of the kingdom as near at hand, by the materials thus
supplied for pride with some, for envy with the rest, an apple of dis
cord was thrown in among the twelve. They were but men of like
passions with ourselves. They had as yet no other notion of the
kingdom that was shortly to appear than that it would be a temporal
one; that their Master was to become a powerful and victorious
prince, with plabes, honors, wealth, at his command. And what more
natural than that they whom he had chosen to be confidential attend
ants in the days of his humiliation should be then signally exalted
and rewarded ? Such being their common expectations, any mark of
partiality on Christ's part would be particularly noted; and what
more natural than that such a signal one as that bestowed upon the
three, in their being chosen as the only witnesses of the transfigura
tion, should have stirred up the strife by the way as to who should
be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven ?
This first outbreak of selfishness and pride and ambition and envy
and strife, among his chosen companions, was a great occasion in the
sight of Jesus. It might and it did spring to a large extent from
ignorance, and, with the removal of that ignorance, might be sub
dued ; but it might and it did spring from sources which, after fullest
knowledge had been conveyed of what the kingdom was and where
in ils distinctions lay, might still have power to flood the church with
a whole host of evils. Therefore it was that Jesus would signalize
this occasion by words and an act of particular impressiveness.
Peter had returned from the lakeside with the stater in his hand to
pay for himself and for Jesus. The others told him of the question?
that had been put to them, and of the silence they had observed,
As they do so, this new instance of Peter's selection for a separate
service stirs the embers of their former strife, and in their curiosity
STRIFE AS TO WHO SHOULD BE GREATEST. 355
and impatience one of them is bold enough to say to Jesus, "Who is
or shall be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" Jesus sits down,
calls the twelve that they might be aU around him, and says to them,
"If any man, desire to be first, the same shaU be last." 'If any man,
actuated by selfish, covetous, ambitious motives, seek to be first in
my kingdom, he shall be last — the very efforts that he shall make to
filimb to the highest elevation there being of their very nature such
as shaU plunge him to the lowest depths. But if any man would be
first within that kingdom, first in goodness, first in usefulness, first in
honor there, let him be last, wUling to be the servant of others, ready
to. esteem others better than hirdseU, prepared to take any place, to
make any sacrifice, to render any service, provided only that others'
welfare be thereby advanced. In humbling himself so, that man
shall be exalted. I give to this great truth a visible and memorable
representation.' Jesus called a little child to him, and set him in the
midst, then took him into his arms, and said, "Verily I say unto you,
Except ye be converted, and become as httle children, ye shaU not
enter into the kingdom of heaven." 'Te are fighting about places,
power, preeminence in my kingdom ; but I tell you that the selfish
ness, the pride, the ambition, out of which all such strife emerges,
are so wholly alien from the nature of that kingdom which I have
come to introduce and estabhsh, that unless you be changed in spirit,
and become meek, humble, teachable, submissive as this little chfld
which I now hold so gently in my arms, ye cannot enter into that
kingdom, much less rise to places of distinction there. Tou wish to
know who shaU be greatest in that kingdom. It shall not be the
wisest, the wealthiest, the most powerful, but whosoever shall most
humble himself, and in humihty be likest to this little child, the same
shall be greatest in the kingdom of heaven.' 'If that be true,' we
can fancy the apostles thinking and saying, 'if all personal distinc
tion and preeminence must be renounced by us, if in seeking to be
first we must be last, and each be the servant of aU the others, what
then will become of our official influence and authority — who will
receive and obey us as thy representatives?' Our Lord's reply is
this — 'Your true and best reception as my ambassadors does not
depend upon the external rank you hold, or the official authority with
which you may be clothed. It depends upon your own persona'
qualities as humble, loving, devoted followers of me. This is true of
you and of aU ; for whosoever receiveth one such little chfld — one of
these little ones which believe in me, in my name — receiveth me ; and
whosoever receiveth me, receiveth not me but him that sent me.'
This new idea about receiving the least of Christ's little ones in
356 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Christ's name, awakens in the breast of one of his auditors a trou
bling remembrance. John recollects that he and some others of the
disciples had once seen a man castmg out devils in the name of
Christ, and that they had forbidden him to do so, because, as they
thought, he had no authority to do so, had received no commission,
was not even openly a foUower of Jesus. Somewhat in doubt now,
after what he has heard, as to whether they had been right in doing
so, he states the case to Jesus, and gets at once the distinct and em
phatic "Forbid him not, for there is no man which shall do a miracle
in my name that can lightly speak evil of me." John had judged
this man rashly and severely, had counted him guilty of presumption
in attempting, while standing outside the circle of Christ's acknowl
edged friends and followers, to do any thing in his name ; had doubted
or disbelieved that he was a disciple of or a believer in Jesus. Full
of the spirit of officialism, in the pride of his order as one of the
selected twelve, to whom alone, as he imagined the power of working
miracles in Christ's name had been committed, John had interfered
to arrest his procedure — acting thus as the young man and as Joshua
did, of whom we read in the book of Numbers, "And there ran a
young man, and told Moses, and said, Eldad and Medad do prophesy
in the camp. And Joshua the son of Nun, answered and said, My
lord Moses, forbid them." But Moses, in the very spirit of Christ,
said, "Enviest thou for my sake? Would God that all the Lord's
people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his Spirit upon
them." Numb. 11:27, 29. "Forbid him not," said Jesus. 'His
doing a miracle in my name is a far better evidence of his cherishing
a real trust in me, being one of mine, than any external position or
official rank that he could occupy. Be not hasty in deciding as to
who are and who are not my genuine disciples ; for while that is true
which I taught you when I was speaking of those who alleged that I
cast out devils by Beelzebub the prince of the devils, that "he that is
not with me is against me, and he that gathereth not with me scat-
tereth abroad," (Matt. 12 : 30,) it is no less true that "he that is not
against us is on our part." ' Neither of the two sayings, indeed, can
be universally and unlimitedly applied; but there are circumstances
in which absence of open hostihty may of itself be taken as evidence
of friendship ; and there are circumstances in which absence of open
friendship may of itself be taken as evidence of hostility. Instead of
overlooking as they had done, such a strong conclusive evidence as
that of working miracles in Christ's name, John and the others
should have been ready, as their Master was, to recognise the slight
est token of attachment. "For whosoever," added Jesus, "shall give
CHRIST AND HIS BRETHREN. 357
you a cup of water to drink, in my name, because ye belong to
Christ, verily I say unto you, He shall not lose his reward."
" The beginning of strife," the wise man said, " is as when one let-
teth out water." And that beginning of strUe among the apostles
of Christ as to which of them should be greatest, what a first letting
out was it of those bitter waters of contention, envy, and aU unchari-
tableness, which the centuries since Christ's time have seen flooding
the church — its members struggling for such honors and emoluments,
or, when these were but scanty, for such authority and influence as
ecclesiastical offices and positions could confer ! Slow, indeed, has
that society which bears his name been in learning the lesson which,
first in precept, and then in his own exalted example, the Saviour left
behind him, that " whosoever exalteth himseU shall be abased, and
he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."
We have had before us the first of the two instances in which John
was led away by a fiery and intemperate zeal — in this instance to
misjudge and condemn one who, though he had not faith nor forti
tude enough to leave aU and foUow Jesus, yet had faith enough to
enable him to work miracles in Christ's name. It is not told us how
John took the check which Jesus laid upon that spirit of officiahsm
and fanaticism which had been working in his breast. But we do
know how thoroughly that spirit was at last subdued in the heart of
Ihe meekest and most loving of the twelve, and how he moved
afterward among his fellow-men with step of Christ-like gentleness,
and became the " guardian spirit of the little ones of the kingdom."
III.
Christ and his Brethren.*
We like to foUow those who by their sayings and doings have
filled and dazzled the pubhc eye, into the seclusion of their homes.
We like to see such men in their undress, when, all restraint removed,
their peculiarities of character are free to exhibit themselves in the
countless artless ways and manners of daily domestic hfe. It brings
them so much nearer to us, gives us a closer hold of them, makes us
feel more vividly their kinship to us, to know how they did the things
that we have aU every day to do, how they comported themselves in
the circumstances in which we all every day are placed. Great pains
have been taken by biographers of distinguished men to gratify this
* John 7: 1-9.
358 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
desire. Quite apart, indeed, from any object of this kind, we could
scarcely sit down to write out an account of what we saw and heard
in the course of two or three years' close intercourse with a friend,
without dropping many a hint as to the minor modes and habits of
his hfe.
Is there nothing remarkable in the entire absence of any thing of
this kind in the narrative of the four evangelists ? Engrossed with
what they tell us, we think not of what they have left untold; think
not, for example, that they have left no materials for gratifying the
desire that we have spoken of — one so natural and so strong. Tt is
as if, in writing these narratives, a strong bias of our nature had been
put under restraint. They say not a word about the personal appear
ance of their Master ; there is nothing for the painter or sculptor to
seize on. They give us no details of his private and personal habits,
of any pecuharities of look or speech or gesture, of the times or ways
of his doing this thing or that. St. Mark, the most graphic describer
of the four, tells us once or twice of a particular look or motion of our
Lord, but not so as to indicate any thing distinctive in their manner.
Why this silence ? Why thus withhold from us all means of forming
a vivid conception of the Redeemer's personal appearance, and of
foUowing him through the details of his more familiar daily inter
course with the twelve ? Was it that the materials were wanting,
that there were no personal pecuharities about Jesus Christ, that
inwardly and outwardly all was so nicely balanced, aU was in such
perfect harmony and proportion, that as in his human intellect and
human character there was nothing to distinguish him individually
from his fellow-men — nothing, I mean, of that kind by which all the
individual intellects and characters are each specially characterized —
so even in the minor habits of his life there was nothing distinctive to
be recorded? Or was it that the veil has been purposely drawn over
aU such materials, to check aU that superstitious worship of the
senses which might have gathered round minute pictures of our Lord
in the acts and habits of his daily life ? If even as it is, the passion
for such worship has made the food for itself to feed upon, and, living
upon that food, has swelled out into such large proportions, what
would it have] been if such food had from the first been provided?
Is it not well that the image of our Lord in his earthly hfe, while
having the print of our humanity so clearly and fuUy impressed upon
it, should yet be lUted up and kept apart, and aU done that could be
done to keep it from being sullied by such rude, familiar, irreverent
regard ?
What is true of our Lord's habits generaUy, is true of his reh-
CHRIST AND HIS BRETHREN. 359
gious habits — of the time and manner in which rehgious Iuties were
performed. We know something of the manner in which these duties
were discharged by a truly devout Jew of Christ's age, of the dafly
washings before meals, and the frequent fastings, and the repeated
and long prayers, of the attendance at the synagogue, and the regu
lar going up to the great feasts at Jerusalem. Some of these Jesus
appears to have neglected. The scribes and the Pharisees came to
him, saying, " Why do thy disciples trangress the tradition of the
elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread." Matt.
15:2. Again they came to him with another similar complaint,
"Why do the disciples of John fast often and make prayers, and
likewise the disciples of the Pharisees, but thine eat and drink?"
These charges are brought nominaUy agamst the disciples, who only
followed the example of their Master. He neglected the ordinary
ablutions to which in Jewish eyes a sacred character attached. He
himseU did not fast, and he taught his disciples that when they did
so it was to be in such a manner that men might not know that they
were fasting. Of the times and the manner in which our Lord's
private devotions were conducted, how little is revealed ! You read
of his rising up a great whUe before day, and retiring into a solitary
place to pray. Mark 1 : 35. You read of his sending the multitude
away, and going up into a mountain to pray ; of his continuing aU
night in prayer. Matt. 14 : 23 ; Luke 6 : 12. You read of special acts
of devotion connected with his baptism, his transfiguration, his agony
in the garden, his suffering on the cross. We know that it was by
him, and him alone, of all the children of men, that the precept " pray
without ceasing," was fully and perfectly kept — kept by its being in
the spirit of prayer that his whole hfe was spent — but when we ask what
Christ's dafly habit was, how often each day did he engage in specific
acts of devotion, and how, when he did so, were these acts performed,
did he retire each morning and evening from his disciples to engage in
prayer, did he dafly, morning and evening, pray with and for his disci
ples, the evangelists leave us without an answer. The single thing they
tell us, and it conveys but httle precise information, is, that " it came
to pass that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased,
one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John
also taught his disciples." Luke 11 : 1. This took place during the
last six months of our Lord's ministry. It looks as if the disciples
had come upon their Master when engaged in his sohtary devotions,
and had been so struck with what they saw and heard, that one of
them, when the prayer was over, could not help asking him to teach
them to pray. Remembering that this happened at so late a period
360 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
m their intercourse with him, does it not seem as U Jesus had not
been in the habit of daily leading their devotions ? The very diffi
culty that we feel in understanding how at such a time such a ques
tion came to be put to him, shows us what a blank there is here iu
the evangehc narrative, and how ignorant we must be content to
remain. If the generally accepted chronology of our Lord's hfe be the true
one, and we see no reason to reject it, we are not left in such ignorance
as to how another of the rehgious duties practised at the time by those
around him was discharged by Christ. His ministry in Gahlee lasted
eighteen months. During this period, four of the great annual reh
gious festivals at which the Jews were enjoined to attend had taken
place at Jerusalem — two pentecosts, one passover, and one feast of
tabernacles — at none of which Jesus appeared. There was indeed
a reason for his absence, grounded on the state of feeling against
him existing in Jerusalem, and the resolution already taken by the
Jewish leaders there to cut him off by death. Tfll his work in Galilee
was completed he would not place himself in the circumstances which
would inevitably lead on to that doom being executed. But who of
all around him knew of that or any other good or sufficient reason
for his absenting himself from these sacred festivals ? And to them
what a perplexing fact must that absence have appeared! Alto
gether, when you take the entire attitude, bearing, and conduct of
Jesus Christ as to their ablutions, their fastings, their prayers, their
keeping of the Sabbath, then* attendance at the feasts, it is not diffi
cult to imagine what an inexplicable mystery he must have been to
the great majority of his countrymen. I do not speak now of the
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, of whom his teaching and his life
was one continued rebuke, and who hated him with a deadly hatred
from the first, but of the many sincerely devout, superstitiously reh
gious Jews among whom he lived. What a perfect puzzle to such
the character and career of this man Christ Jesus — one speaking so
much and in such a way of God and of godliness, proclaiming the
advent of God's own kingdom on the earth, unfolding its duties, its
privileges, its blessednesses, yet to them seeming so neglectful, so unde-
vout, so irreligious ! We may not be able now thoroughly to put our-
Belves in these men's position — thoroughly to understand with what
kind of eyes it was that they looked upon that wonderful spectacle
which the life of Jesus pressed upon their vision — but we should be
capable of discerning the singular and emphatic protest which that
life was ever raising against all mere formal piety, the piety of times
and seasons and ordinances, the religion of rule and of routine.
CHRIST AND HIS BRETHREN. 361
But let us now rejoin our Lord. He is once more at Capernaum,
01 in its neighborhood. A year and a half has elapsed since he joined
the bands in company with whom he had gone up to Jerusalem to
keep the second passover after his baptism. It is autumn, and aU
around are busy in preparing for their journey to the capital to cele
brate the feast of tabernacles. But he exhibits no intention to
accompany them. He is going apparently to treat this festival as
he had done the four which preceded it. What others thought of
his behavior in this respect we are left to conjecture. His brethren,
however — those who were either his actual brothers or his cousins,
the members of that household in which he had been brought up —
could not let the opportunity pass without telling him what they
thought of his conduct. He and they had latterly been separated.
They did not beheve in him. They did not rank themselves among
his disciples. Yet uninterested spectators of what had been going
on in Galilee they could not remain. Now that Joseph was dead, he
was the head of their family, and they could not but feel that their
position and prospects were in some way linked with his. Somewhat
proud they could not but be that he had excited such great attention,
done such wonderful works, drawn after him such vast crowds. At
first, with aU their incredulity, they were haU inclined to hope that
some great future was in store for him. One who spake so highly
and with such authority as he did, who claimed and exercised such
power, what might he not be and do in a community so peculiarly
placed, so singularly excitable as the Jewish one then was? He
might even prove to be the Messiah, the great princely leader of the
people, for whom so many were waiting. Against that was the whole
style and character of his teaching — in which, instead of there being
any thing addressed to the social or political condition of the people,
any thing fitted to stir up the spirit of Jewish pride and indepen
dence, there was every thing calculated to soothe and subdue — to
lead the thoughts and hopes of the people in quite other than earthly
channels. Against it, too, there was the fact, becoming more appa
rent as the months ran on, that the natural leaders of the community,
the scribes and Pharisees, by and through whom only it could be that
any great civfl emancipation could be effected, were uniting against
hiin in a bond of firmer and fiercer hostility. Even the crowds of
the common people, which had at first surrounded him, were latterly
declining, offended at the way in which he was beginning to speak of
himseU — telling them that except they ate his flesh and drank his
blood they had no hfe in them. Emboldened by afl this to use the
<"d familiarity to which in other days they had been accustomed, his
362 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
brethren come to him and say, " Depart hence, and go into Judea.
that thy disciples also may see the works that thou doest. For there
is no man that doeth any thing in secret, and he himself seeketh to
be known openly: if thou do these things, show thyself to the world."
Imputing to him the common motives by which aU worldly, selfish,
imbitious men are animated, they taunt him with weakness and folly.
Who that possessed such powers as he did would be satisfied with
turnmg them to such poor account? If he were what he seemed,
was he to hide himseU for ever among the hills of Gahlee, and not go
up boldly to the capital, and wrest from the rulers the acknowledg
ment of his claims ? It was but a pitiful success to draw after him
some thousands of a gaping multitude, who followed him because
they ate of the bread that he furnished and were filled — all whose
faith in him was exhausted in wondering at him as the worker of such
miracles. Let him, if he had the spirit of a true courage in him — if
he was fit to take the leadership of the people — let him aim at once
at far higher game — place himself at once in the centre of influence
at Jerusalem, and show himself to the world. Then if, on that broad
theatre, he made his pretensions good, it would be some honor to claim
connection with him ; some benefit to be enrolled as his followers.
How true is all this to that spirit of a mere earthly prudence and
pohcy by which the lives of multitudes are regulated! Christ's own
brothers judge of him by themselves. They cannot conceive but that
he must desire to make the most for his own benefit and aggrandize
ment of whatever gUts he possessed. They count it to be weak in
him, or worse, that he will not do the most he can in this way and for
this end. They measure all by outward and visible success. And if
success of that kind be not realized, all the chances and opportuni
ties that are open to him they regard as thrown away and lost. In
speaking thus to Jesus, they sever themselves by a wide interval from
their great relative. He was not of this world. Unselfish, unworldly
were all his motives, aims, and ends. They are of the world, and
true children of the world they are, in thus addressing him, proving
themselves to be. And this they must be told at least, U they will
not effectually be taught. It was in a tone of assumed superiority
that they had spoken to him when they prescribed the course he
should pursue. How far above them does he rise, as from that alti
tude whose very height hid it from their eyes, he calmly yet solemnly
rolls back on them their rebuke : " My time is not yet come, but your
time is always ready. The world cannot hate you, but me it hateth;
because I testUy of it that the works thereof are evil. Go ye up unto
this feast. I go not up yet unto this feast, for my time is not yet full
CHRIST AND HIS BRETHREN. 363
come." They would have him seize upon the opportunity of the
approaching feast to show himseU to the world, to win the world's
favor and applause. This was their notion of human life. The stage
upon which men play their parts here was in their eyes but as a
mixed array of changes and chances upon which the keen eye of self
ishness should be always fixed, ready to grasp and make the most of
mem for purposes of personal aggrandizement. For such as they
were, the time was always ready. They had no other reckoning to
make, no other star to steer by, than simply to discern when and how
their selfish interests could be best promoted, and what their hands
thus found to do, to do it with all their might. The world could not
hate them, for they were of the world, and the world loveth its own.
Let them court its favor — let them seek its pleasures, its honors, its
profits — and the world would be pleased with the homage that was
offered it, and if they but succeeded, they might count upon its
applause, for men would praise them when they did weU for them
selves. Psa. 49 : 18. It was not so with Jesus, but utterly and dia
metrically the reverse. His was no hfe either of random impulses,
of fitful accident, or of regulated self-seeking. The world he lived in
was to him no antechamber, with doors of aggrandizement here and
there around, for whose opening he was greedily to watch, that he
might go in speedily and seize the prizes that lay beyond before others
grasped them. It was the place into which the Father had sent him
to do there that Father's business, to finish the work there given him
to do. And in the doing of that work there is to be no heat, no hurry,
no impatience with him. The time, the hour for each act and deed,
was already settled in the purposes and ordinances of the Father.
And the Father's time, the Father's hour were his, for which he was
always ready calmly and patiently to wait. The world's hatred he
counted on — he was prepared for. He knew what awaited him at
Jerusalem. He knew what the hatred cherished against him there
would finally and ere long effect ; but he must not prematurely expose
himseU to it, nor suffer it to hasten by a single day the great decease
he was to accomphsh at Jerusalem. His time was coming — the time
of his manflestation to Israel — of his showing forth to the world — a
very different kind of manifestation from that of which his brethren
were dreaming. But it was not yet fuUy come, and therefore he did
not mean to go up to Jerusalem and openly to take part from the
beginning as one of its celebrators in this approaching Feast of Tab
ernacles. This, in ways which we can easily conjecture, but are not
at hberty dogmatically to assert, would have interfered with the
orderly evolution of the great event in which his earthly ministry was
364 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to close. But the time was fixed — that feast was drawing on — when
his hour would come, and then it would be seen how the Son would
glorUy the Father and the Father be glorified in the Son.
And now let us remember that the sharp and vivid contrast drawn
here by our Saviour's own truthful hand — between himseU and his
brethren according to the flesh — is the very same that he has
taught us to draw between aU his true disciples and the world. Let
us Usten to the description he gave of his own in that subhme inter
cessory prayer offered up on the eve of his agony, in that upper cham
ber in which the first communion was celebrated : " They are not of
the world, even as I am not of the world." The Father did not need
to know for whom his Son was then interceding. The Father did not
need to have any description of their character given to him. Yet
twice in that prayer did Jesus say of his true foUowers thus : " They
are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." To know and
feel and act as he did ; under the deep abiding impression that, low
as our hves are compared with his — smaU and insignificant as the
ends are that any of us can accomplish — yet that our times, our ways.
our doings are aU ordered by heavenly wisdom for heavenly ends
that the tangled threads of our destiny are held by a Father's hand,
to be woven into such patterns as to him seems best ; by the cross of
our Redeemer — by the redemption that was by it wrought out for
us — by the great example of seU-sacrifice that was in it exhibited —
by the love of Him who died that we might hve, to have the world
crucified unto us, and ourselves crucified to the world ; to have the same
mind in us that was in Him who came not to be ministered unto, but
to minister; who, though he was so rich, for our sakes became
poor, that we through his poverty might be rich. This would be to
realize the description that our Lord has left behind him of what all
his true disciples ought to be, and in some measure are. As we take
np and apply the test it supplies, how deeply may we aU humble our
selves before him — under the consciousness of how slightly, how par
tially, U at aU, the description is true of us 1
CHRIST AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 365
IV.
Christ at the Feast of Tabernacles.*
Gbeat national benefits, civfl, social, and rehgious, were conferred
upon the Jews by the ordinance that three times each year the whole
adult population of the country should assemble at Jerusalem. The
finest seasons of the year, spring and autumn, were fixed on for these
gatherings of the people. The journeyings at such seasons of friends
and neighbors, in bands of happy feUowship, must have been health
ful and exhflarating. Separated as it was into clans or tribes, the
frequent reunion of the entire community urnst have tended to coun
teract and subdue any jealousies or divisions that might otherwise
have arisen. The meeting together as children of a common progen
itor, living under the same laws, heirs of the same promises, worship
pers of the same God, must not only have cultivated the spirit of
brotherhood and nationahty, but have strengthened their faith and
guarded from the encroachments of idolatry the worship of the coun
try. Among the lesser advantages that these periodical assemblages
brought along with them, they afforded admirable opportunities for
the expression and interchange of the sentiments of the people on
every subject that particularly interested them — what in our times
the press and pubhc meetings do, they did for the Jews. So far as
we know, no nation of antiquity had such full and frequent means of
testing and indicating the state of public feeling. Whatever topic
had been engrossing the thoughts of the community would be sure
to be the subject of general conversation in the capital the next time
that the tribes assembled in Jerusalem. Remembering how fickle
public feeling is, how difficult it is to fix it and keep it concentrated
upon one subject for any considerable period, we may be certain that
it was a subject singularly interesting — one which had taken a gen-
¦ eral and very strong hold of the public mind, that for a year and a
half, during five successive festivals, came up ever fresh upon the hps
of the congregated thousands.
Yet it was so as to, the appearance among them of Jesus Christ.
Eighteen months had passed since he had been seen in Jerusalem,
yet no sooner has the Feast of Tabernacles commenced than the
Jews look everywhere around for him, and say, "Where is he?"
ihe absence of one man among so many thousands might, we should
think, have passed by unnoticed. The absence of this man is the
* John 7 : 11-52.
366 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
subject of general remark. The people generaUy speak of him with
bated breath, for it is well enough known that he is no favorite with
the great men of the capital ; and as they speak, great discord of opin
ion prevails. It gives us, however, a very good idea of the extent
and strength of the impression he had made upon the entire popula
tion of the country, that at this great annual gathering, and after so
long an absence, he is instantly the object of search, and so gene
rally the subject of conversation. Even while they were thus speak
ing of him he was on his way to Jerusalem. Travelling alone, or but
slenderly escorted, and choosing an unfrequented route, so that no
pre-intimation of his approach might reach the city, he arrives about
the middle of the feast, and throws off at once all attempt at conceal
ment. Passing, as we might think, from the extreme of caution to the
extreme of daring, he plants himself among the crowd in the temple
courts, and addresses them as one only of the oldest and most learned
of the rabbis might have ventured to do. Some of the rulers are there,
but the suddenness of his appearance, the boldness of the step he
takes, the manner of his speech, make them for the time forget their
purpose. They can't but hsten hke the rest, but they wont give
heed to the things about the divine kingdom that he is proclaiming.
What strikes them most, and excites their wonder, is that he speaks
eo weU, quotes the Scriptures, and shows himself so accurately
acquainted with the law. " How knoweth this man letters," they say
of him, "having never learned?" They would turn the thoughts of
the people from what Jesus was saying to the consideration of his
title and qualification to address them. ' Who is this ? in what school
was he trained ? at the feet of which of our great rabbis did he sit ?
by what authority does he assume this office ?' Questions very nat
ural for men fuU of aU the proud and exclusive spirit of officialism to
put ; questions by the very putting of which they would lower him in
the estimation of the multitude, and try to strip his teaching of its
power. They give to Jesus the opportunity of declaring, " My doc
trine is not mine, but his that sent me." 'I am not addressing you
either as a self-taught man, or one brought up in any of your schools.
I am not addressing to you truths that I was taught by others, or
have myself elaborated. Think not of me, who or what I am ; think
of what I teach, receive it as coming, not from me, but from him who
sent me. You ask about my credentials ; you would like to know
what right I have to become a teacher of the people. There is a far
simpler and better way of coming to a just conclusion about my teach
ing than the one that you are pointing to, and happily it is one that
hes open unto all. If any man is truly willing to do the Divine will ;
CHRIST AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 367
if he wants to know what that wfll is in order that he may do it ; U
that, in listening to my teaching, be his simple, earnest aim, he shall
¦ know of the doctrine that I am teaching, whether it be of God, or
whether I speak of myself. No amount of native talent, no extent of
school learning of any kind, wfll compensate for the want of a pute
and honest purpose. But U such a purpose be cherished, you shall
see its end gained ; if your eye be single, your whole body shall be
full of hght.' And still the saying of our Lord holds good, that in
the search of truth, in the preserving us from error, in the guiding of
us to right judgments about himself and his doctrine, the heart has
more to do with the matter than the head — the willingness to do
telling upon the capacity to know and to believe. Jesus asks that
he himself be judged by this principle and upon this rule. What, in
teaching was his aim ? Was it to display his talent, to win a repu
tation, to have his ideas adopted as being his ? — was it to please him
self, to show forth his own glory ? How boldly does he challenge these
critical observers to detect in him any symptom of seU-seeking ! With
what a serene consciousness of the entire absence in himself of that
element from which no other human heart was ever wholly free, does
he say of himseU, "He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own
glory : but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true,
and no unrighteousness is in him."
So much is said by Jesus to encourage aU- truly desirous to
know about him, so much to vindicate himseU against the adverse
judgment of the rulers ; but how does all this apply to them ? Have
they the willingness to do? have they the purity and the unsel
fishness of purpose? This feast of tabernacles was the one pecu
liarly associated with the reading of the law. "And Moses com
manded them, saying, At the end of every seven years, in the feast
of tabernacles, when aU Israel is come to appear before the Lord thy
God in the place which he shaU choose, thou shalt read this law
before all Israel in their hearing, that they may hear, and that they
may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to do all the
words of this law." Deut. 31 : 10-12. It is in presence of the very
men whose duty it was to carry out this ordinance, that Jesus is now
standing. From the first they hated him, and from the time, now
eighteen months ago, that he had cured the paralytic, breaking, as
they thought, the Sabbath, and said that God was his father, making
himseU equal with God, they had resolved to kiU him. This was the
way— by cherishing hatred and the secret intent to murder — that
they were dealing with the law. RoUing their adverse judgment of
mm back upon themselves, and dragging out to light the purpose
368 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
that in the meantime they would have kept concealed, Jesus said,
"Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth
the law? Why go ye about to kill me?" Those to whom that
question is more immediately addressed have no answer to give to
it ; but in the crowd are those who, ignorant of the plot against the
life of Jesus, yet sharing in the rulers' contempt and hatred, say
to him, " Thou hast a devil : who goeth about to kiU thee ?" Christ
stops not to deal with such a speech, but takes up at once what
had furnished so painful a weapon in the hands of the Pharisees
against him. He refers to that one deed stiU fresh in the minds
of all those in Jerusalem. The offence of that one act of his in
curing the impotent man on a Sabbath-day, had been made to
overshadow all his other acts, to overbear aU his other claims to
attention and regard. "I have done one work," he said, "and
ye all marvel," as if I had thereby plainly proved myself a breaker
of the Sabbath law. Formerly, before the Sanhedrim, he had
defended himself against this charge of Sabbath breaking by other
and higher arguments. Now, addressing, as he does, the common
people, he takes an instance familiar to them all. The Sabbath law
runs thus : " Thou shalt do no work on the seventh day." How was
this law to be interpreted? If the circumcision of a man on the
(seventh day was not a breach of it, and no one thought it was, what
was to be said of the healing of a man upon that day ? If ye on
the Sabbath circumcise a man, and the law of Moses is not broken,
why " are ye angry at me, because I have made a man every whit
whole on the Sabbath-day?" The analogy was so perfect, and the
question so plain, that no reply was attempted. In the temporary
silence that ensues, some of the citizens of Jerusalem, who were aware
of the secret resolution of the Sanhedrim, struck with wonder at what
they now see and hear, cannot help saying, "Is not this he whom
they seek to kill ? But, lo, he speaketh boldly, and they say nothing
unto him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is the very Christ ?"
We might imagine the words to have come from those who were ready
themselves to see the very Christ in Jesus ; but though they share not
their rulers' persecuting spirit, these men have a prejudice of their
own. It had come to be a very general opinion about this tircae in
Judea, that the Messiah was to have no common human origin — no
father or mother — he was to be raised from the dead beneath, or to
come as an angel from the heavens. His not meeting this require
ment is enough, with these men, to set aside the claims of Jesus of
Nazareth. "Howbeit," they say, as men quite satisfied with the
sureness of the ground on which they go, " Howbeit we know this
CHRIST AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 369
man whence he is : but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence
he is. Then cried Jesus in the temple as he taught " — such an easy
and seU-satisfied way of disposing of the whole question of his Mes
siahship causing him to lift up his voice in loud and strenuous pro
test — "Ye both know me, and ye. know whence I am : and I am not
come of myseU, but he that sent me is true, whom ye know not. But
I know him : for I am from him, and he hath sent me." The old and
oft-repeated truth of his mission from the Father, coupled now with
such a strong assertion of his own knowledge and of these men's
ignorance of who his Father was, they are so irritated as to be dis
posed to proceed to violence ; but upon them, as upon the rulers,
there is a restraint: "No man laid hands on him, because his hour
was not yet come."
So impressed in his favor have many of the onlookers now
become, that they are bold enough to say, " When Christ cometh,
will he do more miracles than these which this man hath done ?"
As Jesus had done no miracles at this time in Jerusalem, the speak
ers obviously refer to what he had elsewhere wrought. Their speech
is immediately reported to the Pharisees and chief priests sitting in
council in an adjacent court of the temple, who, so soon as they hear
that the people are beginning to speak openly in his favor, send offi
cers to take him. With obvious aUusion to the errand on which these
men come, as if to teU them how secure he felt, how sure he was that
his comings and his goings in the future would be aU of his own
free will, Jesus says, " Yet a Uttle while am I with you, and then I
go to him that sent me. Ye shall seek me, and shaU not find me :
and where I am, thither ye cannot come ;" words very plain to us,
but very dark to those who have no other interpretation to put upon
them but that he may mean perhaps to leave Judea and go to the
dispersed among the Gentiles. Little, however, as they were under
stood, there was such a tone of quiet yet sad assurance about them,
that the high priests' officers pause, and return to give this to their
employers as the reason why they had not executed the order given
them, "Never man spake hke this man."
So ended our Lord's first day of teaching in the temple, a day
revealing on his part a wisdom, a courage, a serene, sublime, untrou
bled trust which took his adversaries by surprise, and held aU their
deadly purposes against him in suspense, and on the part of the mul
titude the strangest mixture of conflicting opinions and sentiments,
with which our Lord so dealt as to win exemption from Uke interrup
tions afterwards, and to secure for himself an unbroken audience on
the day when his last and greatest words were spoken.
LlhOfOhrl.t. O^.
370 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
The feast of tabernacles was instituted to commemorate the time
when the Israelites had dwelt in tents during their sojourn in the des
ert. To bring the remembrance of those long years of tent-lUe more
vividly before them, the people were enjoined, during the seven days
that it lasted, to leave their accustomed homes, and to dwell in booths
or huts made of gathered branches of the palm, the pine, the myrtle,
or other trees of a like thick fohage. It must have been a strange
spectacle when, on the day before the feast, the inhabitants of Jeru
salem poured out from their dweUings, spread themselves over the
neighborhood, stripped the groves of their leafiest branches, brought
them back to rear them into booths upon the tops of their houses,
along the leading streels, and in some of the outer courts of the
temple. The dull, square, stony aspect of the city suffered a singu
lar metamorphosis as these leafy structures met everywhere the eye.
It was the great Jewish harvest-home ; for this feast was celebrated
in autumn, after all the fruits of the earth had been gathered in. It
was within the temple that its joyous or thanksgiving character espe
cially developed itself. Morning and evening, day by day, during
.sacrifices more crowded than those of any other of the great festivals,
the air was rent with the praises of the rejoicing multitudes. At the
time of the libation of water, the voice of their glad thanksgiving
swelled up into its fullest and most jubilant expression. Each morn
ing a vast procession formed itseU around the httle fountain of Siloam
down in the valley of the Kedron. Out of its flowing waters the
priests filled a large golden pitcher. Bearing it aloft, they climbed
the steep ascent of Moriah, passed through the water-gate, up the
broad stairs, and into the court of the temple, in whose centre the
altar stood. Before this altar two silver basins were planted, with
holes beneath to let the liquid poured into them flow down into the
subterranean reservoir beneath the temple, to run out thence into the
Kedron, and down into the Dead sea. One priest stood and poured
the water he had brought up from Siloam into one of these basins.
Another poured the contents of a hke pitcher fiUed with wine into
the other. As they did so, the vast assemblage broke out into the
most exulting exclamations of joy. The trumpets of the temple
sounded. In voice and upon instrument, the trained choristers put
forth all their skill and power. Led by them, many thousand voices
chanted the Great HaUel, (the Psalms from the 113th to the 118th,)
pausing at the verses on which the chief emphasis was placed to
wave triumphantly in the air the branches that they all bore, and
make the welkin ring with their rejoicing. This was the happiest
service in aU the yearly ceremonial of Judaism. " He," said the old
CHRIST AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 371
Jewish proverb, "who has never seen the rejoicing at the pouiing
out of the waters of Siloam, has never seen rejoicing aU his Ufe." AU
this rejoicing was connected with that picturesque proceeding by
which the Lord's providing water for his people in their desert wan
derings was symbolized and commemorated. And few, if any, have
doubted that it was with direct allusion to this daily pouring out of
the waters of Siloam, which was so striking a feature of the festival,
that on the last, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried,
"If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink." 'Your fore
fathers thirsted in the wilderness, and I smote the rock for them, so
that the waters flowed forth. I made a way for them in the wilder
ness, and gave rivers in the desert to give drink to my people — my
chosen. But of what was that thirst of theirs, and the manner in
which I met it, an emblem ? Did not Isaiah tell you, when in my
name he spake, saying, " I wiU pour water on him that is thirsty, and
floods upon the dry ground. I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed,
and my blessing upon thine offspring. When the poor and needy
seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the
Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I
will open rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of the val
leys. I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land
springs of water ?" And now I am here to fulfil in person all the
promises that I made by the lips of my servant Isaiah, and I gather
them up and condense them in the invitation, " If any man thirst, let
him come unto me and drink." '
"If any man thirst !" Ah ! the Saviour knew it of these rejoicing
Israehtes, that glad and grateful as they were for the land that they
had entered into out of the wilderness — no dry and thirsty land, but
one of springs ard of rivers, of the early and the latter rain — there
was a thirst that none of its fountains could quench, a hunger that
none of its fruitage could satisfy. And he knows it of us, and of all
men, that a hke deep inward thirst dries up our spirit, a hke deep
inward hunger is ever gnawing at our heart. Are there no desires,
and longings, and aspirations in these souls of ours that nothmg
earthly can meet and satisfy ? Not money, not honor, not power, not
pleasure, not any thing nor every thing this world holds out — they do
not, cannot fill our hearts — they do not, cannot quench that thirst
that burns within. Can any one teU us where we may carry this great
thirst and get it fully quenched? From the hps of the man Christ
•Jesus the answer comes. He speaks to the crowds in the temple at
Jerusalem, but his words are not for them alone ; they have been
given to the broad heavens, to be borne wide over aU the earth, and
372 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
(town through all its generations : " If any man thirst, let him come
unto me and drink." Thirsty we know we are, and thirsty shall
remain tfll we hear these gracious words, and hearing come, and
coming drink, and drinking get the want supphed. Yes, we believe—
Lord help our unbelief — that there is safety, peace, rest, refreshment,
joy for these weary aching hearts in thee, the weU-spring of our eter
nal Ufe.
" He that beheveth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his
belly shaU flow rivers of hying water." Below the spot on which Jesus
stood when speaking in the courts of the temple, there lay vast sub
terranean vaults, whose singular recesses have only recently been
explored. Descending into them, you get a ghmpse, by help of
dimly burning tapers, of a vast cistern below the site of the ancient
temple. Whether this large reservoir be fiUed whoUy from without,
or has a spring of hving waters supplying it from below, remains to
be ascertained. Enough, however, has been discovered to stamp with
truth the ancient Jewish stories about the great cistern, " whose com
pass was as the sea," and about the unfailing waters of the temple.
Nor can we any longer doubt that it was to these subterranean supplies
of water that the prophet Joel alluded when he said, " It shall come
to pass in that day that a fountain shall come forth out of the house
of the Lord, and shaU water the valley of Shittim ;" that the prophet
Zechariah alluded to when he said, " It shall be in that day that
hving waters shall go out from Jerusalem, half of them turned
toward the former sea, and half of them toward the hinder ;" that still
more pointedly the prophet Ezekiel alluded to when he said, "After
ward he brought me again into the door of the house, and behold
waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward,
and the waters came down from under the right side of the house, at
the south side of the altar." And as little can we doubt that Jesus
had these very scriptures in his thoughts, and that cavity beneath
his feet in his eye, when he said, " He that beheveth on me, as the
Scripture hath said, out of his belly shaU flow rivers of living water."
'He that believeth shall not barely and alone have his own thirst
assuaged, but I in him, by my Spirit given, moulding him into my
own likeness, shaU turn him into a separate well-head, from whose
depths rivers of living water shaU flow forth to visit, gladden, fruc
tify some lesser or larger portion of the arid waste around.' Let ue
know and remember then, that Jesus, the Divine assuager of the
thirst of human hearts, imparts the blessing to each who comes to
him, that he may go and impart the blessing to others. He comforts
us with a sense of his presence, guidance, protection, sympathy, that
JESUS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 373
we may go and console others with that same comfort wherewith we
have been comforted of him. He never gives that we may selfishly
hoard the treasure that we get. That treasure, like the bread that
was broken for the thousands On the hfllside of Galilee, multiphes in
the hand that takes it to divide and to distribute.
Jesus the Light of the World.*
Jesus was in the treasury. It stood at the north side of one of
those large enclosures called the Court of the Women,, which lay out
side the temple properly so caUed, and in which, on aU the great
annual festivals, crowds were wont dafly to assemble. In the centre
of this court, at the feast of tabernacles, two tall stands were placed,
each supporting four large branching candelabra. As at the time of
the morning sacrifice, the procession wound its way up from the
fountain of Siloam, and the water was poured out from the golden
pitcher to remind the people of the supply of water that had been
made for their forefathers during the desert wanderings ; so after the
evening sacrifice all the lights in these candelabra were kindled, the
flame broad and brilliant enough to illuminate the whole city, to
remind the people of the pillar of light by which their marchings
through the wilderness were guided. And still freer and heartier
than the morning jubilations which attended on the libation of the
water, were the evening ones, which accompanied the kindling of the
hghts. It was with aUusion to the one ceremony that Jesus said,
" If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink." It was with
allusion to the other, of which both he and those around him were
reminded by the stately chandeliers which stood at the time before
their eyes, that he said, " I am the light of the world ; he that follow
ed me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the hght of life."
In uttering both these sayings, Jesus placed himseU in a singular and
elevated relationship to the whole human family. In the one he
invited the entire multitude of human thirsters to come to him to
have their thirst assuaged. In the other, he claimed to be the one
central source of hght and life to the whole world. Is it surprising
that as they looked at him, and heard him speaking in this way, and
thought of who and what, according to their reckoning he was, the
Jews should have seen egotism and arrogance in his words? There
o John 8: 12-59.
374 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
was in truth the very utmost pitch of such arrogance and egotism in
them, had the speaker been such as they deemed him, a man like
themselves. But one of his very objects in speaking so was to con
vince them and us that he was not such — that he stood toward the
human family in quite other relationship from that in which any
single member could stand to aU the rest — that besides his connec
tion with it, he had another and higher connection, that with his
Father in heaven, which entitled him to speak and act in a way
peculiar to himself. By word and deed, again and again repeated,
Jesus had sought in vain to convey into the minds of these Jews an
idea of how singular that connection was. He tries now once again,
and once again he fails. Instead of their asking, ' Who is this that
offers to quench all human thirst, and who proclaims himself to be
the light of the world ?' saying to themselves in reply, ' He must be
more than human, he must be divine ; for who but One could claim
such a prerogative and power ?' they listen only to find something to
object to, and, grasping greedily at what lay on the very surface of
the sayings, they say to him, " Thou bearest record of thyseU ; thy
record is not true." Perhaps they had our Lord's own words on the
occasion of the former visit to Jerusalem on their memory : " If I bear
witness of myseU, my witness is not true." He was speaking then of
a solitary unsupported testimony — a testimony imagined to be borne
by himself, to himseU, and for himself, as one seeking to advance his
own interests, promote his own glory. Such a testimony, had he
borne it, he had then said would be altogether untrustworthy. His
answer now to those who would taunt him at once with egotism and
inconsistency is, " Though I bear record of myseU, yet my record is
true: for I know whence I came, and whither I go." 'Had I not
known that I came forth from the Father and am going back to the
Father, that I am here only as his representative and revealer — did
the consciousness of fuU, clear, constant union with him not fill my
spirit — I would not, could not speak as I now do. But I know the
Father, even as I am known by him ; he works, and I work with
him ; whatsoever things he doeth I do Ukewise. It is out of the
depth of the consciousness of my union with him that I speak, and
what man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man that is
in him ; and how else are you ever to know what can alone be known
by my revealing it, if I do not speak of myseU, or do not speak as he
only can who stands in the relationship in which I do to the Father
' But " ye cannot teU whence I come and whither I go." You
never gave yourselves any trouble to find it out. You never opened
mind or heart to the evidence that I laid before you. What early
JESUS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 375
alienated you from me was that I came not accredited as you would
have desired, submitted no proofs of my heavenly caUing to you for
your approval, made no obeisance to you on entering on my career,
came not up here to seek instruction at your hands, asked not from
you any liberty to act as a scribe, a teacher of the law — instead of
this, claimed at once this temple as my Father's house, condemned
the way in which you were suffering its sacred precincts to be defiled,
and have ever since, in all that I have said and done, been lifting up
a constant, loud, and strenuous protest against you and your ways.
Tou sit now in judgment upon me — you condemn me. You say that
I am bearing record of myself, and that my record is not true ; but
''ye judge after the flesh." You have allowed human prejudice,
human passion, to fashion your judgment. I so judge no man. It
was not to judge that I came into this world. I came not to con
demn, but to save it. And yet if I judge, as in one sense I must, and
am even now about to do, my judgment is true, for I am not alone,
but I and the Father that sent me judge, as we do every thing,
together. Your own very law declares, " that the testimony of two
men is true." I am one that bear witness of niyself, and the Father
that sent me beareth witness of me.'
As U they wished this second witness to be produced, they say to
him contemptuously, " Where is thy Father ? Jesus answered, Ye
neither know me, nor my Father." ' You think that you know me,
you pride yourselves in not being deceived in me as the poor ignor
ant multitude is — my earthly pedigree, as believed in by you, satis
fies you as to my character and claims. You can scarcely, after all
that I have said, have failed to perceive whom I meant when I was
speaking of my Father. Him, too, you think you know ; you pride
yourselves on your superior acquaintance with him, you present your
selves to the people as the wisest and best expounders of his wfll and
law. But " ye neither know me, nor my Father ;" for to know the one
is to know the other — to remain ignorant of the one is to remain
ignorant of the other. It is your want of aU true knowledge of me
that keeps you from knowing God. It is the want of aU true knowl
edge of God that keeps you from knowing me. Had you known me,
you would have known him ; had you known him, you would have
known me.'
So fared it with our Lord's declaration that he was the hght of
ihe world, as it was at first spoken in the temple ; so ended the first
brief cofloquy with the Jews to which its utterance gave birth.
There was one, however, of its first hearers, upon whom it made a
very different impression from that it made on the rulers of the Jews,
376 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
who treasured it up in his heart, who saw ever, as his Master's hfe
evolved itseU before him, more and more evidence of its truth, whose
spirit was afterwards enlightened to take in a truer, larger idea of the
place and function of his Lord in the spiritual kingdom than has
ever, perhaps, been given to another of the children of men, who, on
this account, was chosen of the Lord to set them forth in his gospel
and in his epistles, and who has given to us this explanation of the
words of his Master : " In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the
beginning with God. AU things were made by him ; and without
him was not any thing made that was made. In him was hfe ; and
the life was the hght of men. And the light shineth in darkness ;
and the darkness comprehendeth it not." John " came for a witness,
to bear witness of the Light, that aU men through him might believe.
He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into
the world." " And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,
(and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the
Father,) full of grace and truth." " That which was from the begin
ning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which
we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of
hfe, for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear wit
ness, and show unto you that eternal hfe which was with the Father,
and was manUested unto us." " This is the true God and eternal hfe."
Such is the description John has left us of him who spiritually is the
sun of this dark world, the central source of aU its Ufe and hght. The
life and light of the soul he in the love of its Creator, in hkeness to
him, communion with him, in free glad service rendered, the joy of
his approval felt. Freshly, fuUy was hfe and hght enjoyed by man
in the days of his innocence ; the light of God's gracious presence
shone upon his soul, and gladdened aU his heart. Made in his Ma
ker's image, he walked confidingly, rejoicingly, in the hght of his coun
tenance, reflecting in his own peaceful, loving, holy, happy spirit as
much as such mirror could of the glory of his Creator. He diso
beyed and died ; the hght went out ; at one stride came the dark.
But the gloom of that darkness, the stillness of that death, were
not suffered to prevail. From the beginning hfe and hght have
gone forth from Christ ; all the spiritual animation that this world
anywhere has witnessed, aU the spiritual light by which its darkness
has been alleviated, spring from him. The great Sun of Righteous
ness, indeed, seemed long in rising. It was a time of moon and stars
ind morning twilight tfll he came. But at last he arose, with heal-
JESUS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 377
ing in his beams. And now it is by coming unto him that death is
turned into hfe, and darkness into hght. He that hath him hath
ufe, he that followeth him walketh not in darkness, but has the light
of hfe. The short coUoquy between Christ and the Pharisees, consequent
upon his announcement of himseU as the light of the world, ended in
their hps being for the moment closed. The silence that ensued was
speedfly broken by our Lord's repeating what he had said before
about his going away — going where they could not follow. The
speech had formerly excited only wonder, and they had said among
themselves, "Will he go unto the dispersed among the Gentiles?"
Now their passion against him has so risen that it excites contempt,
and they say openly, not indeed to him, but of him, " Will he kill
himself ?" ' That would indeed be to go where we could not follow.
Perhaps that may be what he means.' The drawing of such a dis
tinction between themselves and him gives Jesus the opportunity of set
ting forth the real and radical difference that there was between them.
The portraiture of their character and pedigree which, with truthful
and unsparing hand, he proceeded to fill up, amid many rude breaks
and scornful interruptions on their part, we shall not minutely scru
tinize. One or two things only about the manner of our Lord's treat
ment of his adversaries in this word-battle with them, let us note.
He does not say explicitly that he is the Christ. His questioners
were weU aware what kind of person their Messiah was generally ex
pected to be, how different from aU that Jesus was. They would provoke
him to make a claim which they knew would be generally disaUowed
He wfll not do it. When they say, "Who art thou?" he contents
himseU by saying, ' I am essentiaUy or radically that which I speak ;
my sayings reveal myself, and teU who and what I am.' In this, as
in so many other instances of his deahng with those opposed to him
at Jerusalem, his sayings were confined to assertions or revelations,
not of his Messiahship, but of his unity of nature, wfll, and purpose
with the Father. This was the great stumbling-block that the Jews
found ever and anon flung down before them. That in all which
Jesus was and said and did he was to be taken as reveahng the char
acter and expressing the wfll of God, was what they never could aUow,
and the more that the idea of a connection between him and God
approaching to absolute identification was pressed upon them, the
more tney resented and rejected it. But why? Jesus himself told
them Their unbelief, he constantly asserted, sprung from a morally
impure source ; from an unwillingness to come into such living con
tact with the Father • from their dislike to the purity, the benevo-
378 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
lence, the godliness that were in him as in the Father. When driven
from the position they first assumed as children of Abraham, they
claimed a still higher paternity, and said, "We have one Father, even
God." Our Lord's reply was, " If God were your Father, ye would
love me, for I proceeded forth and came from God ; neither came I
)f myseU. but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech ?
even because ye cannot hear my word."
They wore a mask ; behind that mask they hid a malicious' dis
position, and so long as deceitfulness and malignity ruled their spirit
and regulated their lives, children of Abraham, children of God, they
were not, could not be. Thty might boast what other parentage
they pleased, but their works proclaimed that they were none other
than the children of him who was a liar and a murderer from the
beginning. " Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your
father ye wfll do." Very plain language, and very severe — not lan
guage for man to use to man — suitable alone for him who knew what
was in man, who came as its light into the world, and discharged one
of his offices as such in laying bare the hidden corruption with which
he came into contact, for " all things that are reproved are manUest
by the light, for whatsoever doth make manifest is light."
" But as he spake these words many believed on him," and for
them, amid aU his rebukes of his enemies, this was his word of
encouragement, that U they continued in his word, U they but fol
lowed faithfully the light that shone in him, they should know the
truth, know him who was the truth, and in him, and by that truth,
they should be made free. These Jews imagined that simply as the
children of Abraham they were free. So fondly did they cling to this
idea, that often as the yoke of the stranger had been on them, they
were ready proudly to say, " We were never in bondage to any man."
Notwithstanding this, they were slaves — slaves to sin and Satan. In
one sense they were in God's house, numbered outwardly as members
of its household ; but being actuaUy such slaves, in that house they
could not abide for ever. But U he who was not a servant in the
house of another, but an heir in his own house — his Father's house—
if he made his foUowers free, then were they free indeed. And into
what a glorious liberty should they thus be introduced ! freedom from
the Law, its curse and condemnation ; freedom from the yoke of Jew
ish and all other ceremonialism ; freedom from the fear of guilt and
the bondage of corruption ; freedom to serve God wiUingly and lov
ingly — to be aU, do all, suffer all which his will requires — this was
the liberty wherewith Christ was ready to make free. This freedom
was to be tasted but in imperfect measure by any here on earth, for
JESUS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 379
still onward to the end the old tyrant whose subjects they had been,
would be making his presence and power felt ; still onward to the
end, whfle the mind was serving the law of God, a law would be in
the members warring against the law of the mind. But the hour of
a final and complete emancipation was to come at death. Death ! it
looked to nature hke the stoppage of all life, the breaking of aU ties,
the quenching of aU freedom and aU joy. Not such was it to be to
him who shared the hfe that Jesus breathes into the soul. To him
it was to be rather light than darkness, rather hfe than death, the
scattering of- every cloud, the breaking of every fetter, the deliver
ance from every foe, the setting of the spirit absolutely and for ever
free to soar with unchecked, unshadowed wing, up to the fountain-
head of aU hfe and blessedness, to bask in the sunshine for ever.
"Verily, verily, U a man keep my sayings, he shall never see death."
But now let us look a moment at the special testimonies to his
own person and character which, upon this occasion, and in the
course of these rough conflicts with scornful and contemptuous oppo
nents, Jesus bore. Light is its own revealer. The sun can be seen
alone in the beams that he himseU sends forth. So is it with him
who is the light of the world. It is in the light of his own revelation
of himseU that we can see Jesus as he is. And what, as seen in the
beams that he here sheds forth, does he appear? Two features of
his character stand prominently displayed : his sinless holiness, his
preexistence and divine dignity. In proof of the stainless purity of
his nature and his lUe, Jesus when here on earth made a threefold
appeal. He appealed to earth, to hell, to heaven, and earth, hell,
and heaven each gave its answer back. Two of these appeals you
have in the passage that is now before us. Jesus appealed to earth
when, looking round upon those men who with the keen eye of jeal
ousy and hatred had been watching him from the beginning to see
what flaws they could detect in him, he calmly and confidently said,
'Which of you convinceth me of sin, of any sin, the shghtest trans
gression ?' And earth gave her answer when these men stood speech
less before him.
He appealed to hell — to that devfl of whom he spoke so plainly
as the father of all liars and all murderers, who would have accused
and maligned him had he dared. " The prince of this world cometh
and findeth nothing in me" — nothing of his own, nothing that he can
claim, no falsehood, no malice, no selfishness, no unholiness in me.
And hell gave its answer when the devil, whom Christ's word of
power drove forth from his human habitation, was heard to say, " I
know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God."
380 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
" Again, our Saviour carried the appeal to heaven, and, standmg
in the presence of the Great Searcher of aU hearts, he said, in words
that had been blasphemous from any merely human hps, "I do
always those things that please him." And thrice during his mortal
career the heavens opened above his head, and the voice of the Father
was heard proclaiming, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased." What shaU we think or say of him who claimed such perfect
immunity from sin — the entire absence of any thing that could draw
down upon it the Divine displeasure, the fuU presence of all that
could draw down upon it the Divine approval ? Was he, who knew
others so well, ignorant of himseU? or, conscious of transgression, did
he yet deny it ? Ignorant beyond other men, a hypocrite worse than
those whom he charged with hypocrisy, must Jesus Christ have been,
U, in speaking of his sinlessness as he did, his speech was not the free
and natural expression of a self-consciousness of perfect purity, truth,
and holiness of heart and hfe. In presence of one realizing such
unstained perfection, who never once, in thought or word, or deed,
swerved from the right, the true, the good, the holy, how humbled
should we be under the consciousness of how different it is with us ;
and yet with that sense of humihation should not the elevating, enno
bling thought come in, that he in whom the sublime idea of a sinless
perfection stands embodied, was no other than our Lord and Saviour,
who came to show us to what a height this weak and sinful humanity
of ours could be raised, who became partaker of our nature that we
through him might become partakers of the Divine, and of whom we
know that when he shall appear we shaU be like him, for we shall see
him as he is.
" Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and
was glad." Christ's day was no other than that of his manifestation
in the flesh. Abraham rejoiced that he should see that day, and
lived his earthly life cheered by the animating prospect. And he saw
it, as Moses and Elijah did ; for he was one of those who, in Christ's
sense of the words, had not tasted of death, of whom it was witnessed
that he liveth, to whom in the realms of departed spirits the knowl
edge of the Redeemer's advent had been conveyed.
Jesus had said that Abraham had seen his day. They twist his
words as if he had said that he had seen Abraham. " Thou art not
yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham ?" The contemptu
ous query gives to our Lord the opportunity of lifting the veil that
concealed his glory, and making the last, the greatest revelation of
himself . " Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.'
THE CURE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 381
Not simply, " Before Abraham was, I was," not simply a declaration of
a being before Abraham, but a taking to himself the great, the incom
municable name, carrying with it the assertion of self-existence, of
supreme divinity. So they understood it, who instantly took up
stones to stone him as a blasphemer. And so let us understand it,
not taking up stones to stone him, but lifting up hearts and hands
together to crown him Lord of all.
VI.
The Cure of the M.an Born Blind.*
Within the court of the temple, in presence of the Pharisees and
their satellites, Jesus had said, " I am the hght of the world : he that
followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the hght of life."
The saying, resented as egotistical and arrogant, led on to that alter
cation which ended in their taking up stones to cast at him, and in his
hiding himseU in some mysterious way and passing out of the temple,
" going through the midst of them." At one of the temple-gates, or
by the roadside without, " as Jesus passed by he saw a man which was
blind from his birth " — a well-known city beggar, whom Jesus and
his disciples may have often passed in their way up to the temple.
Now, at the very time when we might have imagined him more thaD
ordinarily desirous to proceed in haste, in order to put himseU beyond
the reach of the exasperated men out of whose hands he had just
escaped, Jesus stops to look compassionately upon this man. He
sees in him a fit subject for a work being done, which, in the lower
sphere of man's physical nature, shall illustrate the truth which he
had in vain been proclaiming in the treasury, that he was the light of
the world. As he stops, his disciples gather round him, and fix their
eyes also upon the man whose case has arrested their Master's foot
steps, and seems to have absorbed his thoughts. But their thoughts
are not as his. They look, to think only of the rarity and severity of
the affliction under which the man is laboring — to regard it as a judg
ment of God, whereby some great sin was punished — the man's own, it
would be natural to suppose it should be ; but then, the judgment had
come before any sin had been committed by him — he had been bhnd
from his birth. Could it be that the punishment had preceded the
offence, or was this a case in which the sins of the parents had been
visited on their chfld? " Master," they say to Jesus in their perplex-
* John, chap. 9.
382 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ity, " who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was .born blind ?'
The one thing that they had no doubt about — and in having no such
doubt, were only sharing in the sentiment of all the most devout of
their fellow-countrymen — was that some signal sin had been com
mitted, upon which the signal mark of God's displeasure had been
stamped. It was not as to the existence somewhere of some exceeding
fault that they were in the least uncertain. Their only doubt was
where to lay it. It was the false but deep conviction which lay
beneath their question that Jesus desired to expose and correct when
he so promptly and decisively replied, " Neither hath this man sinned
nor his parents ;" neither the one nor the other has sinned so peculiarly
that the pecuhar visitation of blindness from birth has been visited on
the transgression. Not that Jesus meant to disconnect altogether
man's suffering from man's sins. Had he meant to do so, he would
not have said to the paralytic whom he cured at the pool of Bethesda,
" Go thy way, sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee ;" but
that he wanted, by a vigorous stroke, to lay the axe at the root of a
prevalent superstitious feeling which led to erroneous and presump
tuous readings of God's providences, connecting particular sufferings
with particular sins, and arguing from the relative severity of the
one to the relative magnitude of the other.
Nor was this the only instance in which our Saviour dealt in the
same manner with the same popular error. But a few weeks from
the time in which he spake in this way to his disciples, Jesus was
in Persea. There had been a riot in Jerusalem — some petty prem
ature outburst of that insurrectionary spirit which was rife through
out Judea. Pilate had let loose his soldiers on the mob. Some
Galileans, who had taken part in the riot, or were supposed to have
done so, for the Galileans were always in the front rank of any move
ment of the kind, were slain — slain even while engaged in the act of
sacrificing, their blood mingled with their sacrifices : an incident so
fitted to strike the pubhc eye, to arouse the public indignation, that
the news of it travelled rapidly through the country. It reached the
place where Christ was teaching. Some of his hearers, s'ruck, per
haps, by something that he had said about the signs of the times and
the judgments that were impending, took occasion pubhcly to tell him
of it. Perhaps they hoped that the recital would draw out from him
some burning expressions of indignation, pointed agamst the foreign
yoke under which the country was groaning ; the deed done by tlie
Roman governor had been so gross an outrage upon their national
religion, upon the sacredness of the holy temple. If the tellers of the
tale cherished any such expectation, they were disappointed. As
THE CURE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 383
upon all like occasions, whenever any purely political question was
brought before him, Christ evaded it. He never once touched or
alluded to that aspect of the story. But there was another side of it,
upon which he perceived that the thoughts of not a few of his hear
ers were fastened. It was a terrible fate that these slaughtered Gali
leans had met — not only death by the Roman sword, but death within
the courts of the temple, death upon the very steps of the altar.
There could be but one opinion as to the deed of their murderers,
those rough Gentile soldiers of Pilate. But the murdered, upon
whom such a dreadful doom had fallen, what was to be thought of
them ? Christ's aU-seeing eye perceived that already in the breasts
of many of those around him, the leaven of that censorious, unchar
itable, superstitious spirit was working, which taught them to attach
all extraordinary calamities to extraordinary crimes. " Suppose ye,"
said Jesus, " that these Galileans were sinners above all Gahleans,
because they suffered such things? I teU you nay." To give his
question and his answer a stfll broader aspect — to take out of them
all that was peculiarly Galilean — he quotes another striking and well-
known occurrence that had recently happened near Jerusalem, a ca
lamity not inflicted by the hand of man. " Or those eighteen," he
adds, " upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, think ye that they were
sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem ? I tell you nay." He
floes not deny that either the slaughtered Galileans .or the crushed
Jerusalemites were sinners. He does not say that they did not de
serve their doom. He does not repudiate or run counter to that strong
instinct of the human conscience, which in all ages has taught it to
trace suffering to sin. What he does repudiate and condemn is the
apphcation of that principle to specific instances, by those who know
so httle, as we do, of the Divine purposes and aims in the separate
events of life — making the temporal infliction the measure of the guilt
from which it is supposed to spring. It is not a wrong thing for the
man himself, whom some sudden or peculiarly severe calamity over
takes, to search and try himself before his Maker, to see whether
there has not been some secret sin as yet unrepented and unforsaken,
which may have had a part in bringing the calamity upon him. It
was not a wrong thing in Joseph's brethren, in the hour of their great
distress in Egypt, to remember their former conduct, and to say, " We
are verily guilty concerning our brother, therefore is this distress come
upon us." It was not a wrong thing for the king of Besek, when
they crueUy mutilated him, cutting off his thumbs and great toes, to
say, " Threescore and ten kings, having their thumbs and great toes
cnt off, gathered their meat under my table. As I have done, so
384 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
God hath requited me." But it was a wrong thing in the inhabitants
of Melita, when they saw the viper fasten on Paul's hand, to think
and say that " no doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath
escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live." It was a wrong
thing in the widow of Zarephath, when her son fell sick, to say to
Ehjah, " What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God ? Art
thou come to call my sins to remembrance, and.to slay my son ?" It
was a wrong thing for the friends of Job to deal with their afflicted
brother as U his abounding misfortunes were so many proofs of a like
abounding iniquity. It is a very wrong thing in any of us to pre
sume so to interpret any single dealing of God with others, particu
larly of a dark or adverse kind ; for aU such dispensations of his prov
idence have a double character. They may be retributive ; or they
may be simply disciplinary, corrective, protective, purifying. They
may come in anger, or they may be sent in love. And while as to
ourselves it may be proper that we should view them as bearing
messages of warning, we are not at hberty as to others to attribute
to them any other character than that of being the chastenings of
a wise and loving Father.
"Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the
works of God should be manUest in him." Those works. — works of
mercy and almighty power — were given to Christ to do, and here was an
opportunity for one of them being done. To pause thus by the way, to
occupy himself with the case of this poor blind beggar, might seem a
waste of time, the more so that the purpose of his persecutors to seize
and to stone him had been so recently and so openly displayed. But
that very outbreak of their wrath foretold to Jesus his approaching
death — the close of his allotted time of earthly labor — and so he
says, " I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day;
the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the
world, I am the light of the world." ' I said so to those proud and
unbelieving men from whose rough violence I have just escaped. I
wiU prove now the truth of what I said by bringing the hght physi
cally, mentally, spirituaUy, to this poor blind beggar.
All this time not a word is spoken by the blind man himseU.
Whatever cries for help he may have raised when he heard the foot
steps of the approaching company, as they stop before him he be
comes silent. He hears the question about his own sins and his
parents' sins put by strange Galilean tongues to one addressed evi
dently with the greatest respect. He hears the one thus appealed
to say, with an authority that he wonders at, " Neither hath this man
ginned, nor his parents " — grateful words to the poor man's ear. He
THE CURE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 385
may have thought, in common with others, that he had been signally
marked as an object of Divine displeasure. The words that he now
hears may have helped to hft a load off his heart ; already he may be
more grateful to the speaker of these few words than if he had cast
the largest money-gUt into his bosom. But the speaker goes farther :
he says that he had been born blind " that the works of God should
bp made mamfest in him." If it were not the work of God's anger in
the punishment of his own or his father's sins, what other work could
it be ? And who can this be who is now before him, who speaks of
what he is, and what he does, and what he is about to do, with such
solemnity and seU-assurance ? Who can tell us what new thoughts
about himseU and the calamity that had befallen him, what new
thoughts about God and his purposes in thus dealing with him, what
wonderings as to who this stranger can be that takes such an interest
in him, what flutterings of hope may have passed through this poor
man's spirit while the brief conversation between Christ and his disci
ples was going on, and during that short and silent interval which fol
lowed as Jesus " spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle " ?
This we know, that when Christ approached and laid his hand upon
him, and anointed his eyes with that strange salve, and said to him,
whfle yet his sightless baUs were covered with what would have
blinded for the time a man who saw, " Go wash in the pool of Siloam,"
he had become so impressed as quietly to submit to so singular an
operation, and without a word of arguing or remonstrance to obey
the order given, and to go off to the pool to wash. It lay not far off,
at the base of the hill on which the temple stood, up and around
which he had so often groped his way. He went and washed, and
lo, a double miracle ! — the one wrought within the eyeball, the other
within the mind — each wonderful even among the wonders wrought
by Christ. Within the same compass there is no piece of dead or liv
ing mechanism that we know of so curious, so complex, so full of nice
adjustments, as the human eye. It was the great Creator's office to
make that eye and plant it in its socket, gifting it with all its varied
powers of motion, outward and inward, and guarding it against aU
the injuries to which so dehcate an instrument is exposed. It was
the Creator's wiU that some fatal defect, or some fatal confusion of
its parts and membranes, should from the first have existed in the
eyeball of this man. And who but the Creator could it be that rec
tified the defect or removed the confusion, bestowing at once upon
the renovated organ the fuU power of vision ? Such instant recon
struction of a defective, or mutilated, or disorganized eye, though not
m itseU a greater, appears to us a more surprising act of the Divine
UfeofOMrt. 25
386 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
power than the original creation of the organ. You watch with ad
miration the operation of the man who, with a large choice of means
and materials, makes, and grinds, and pohshes, and adjusts the set
of lenses of which a telescope is composed. But let some accident
happen whereby all these lenses are broken and crushed together in
one mass of confusion, what would you think of the man who could
out of such materials reconstruct the instrument ? It was such a dis
play of the Divine power that was made when the man born blind
went and washed and saw.
But however perfect the eye be, it is simply a transmitter of light,
the outward organ by which certain impressions are made upon the
optic nerves, by them to be conveyed to the brain, giving birth there
to the sensations of sight. But these sensations of themselves con
vey little or no knowledge of the outward world till the observer's
mind has learned to interpret them as signs of the position, forms,
sizes, and distances of the outlying objects of the visible creation. It
is but slowly that an infant learns this language of the eye. It requires
the putting forth of innumerable acts of memory, and the acquiring
by much practice a facility of rapid interpretation. That the man
born blind should be able at once to use his eyes as well as we all do,
it was needed that this faculty should be bestowed on him at once,
without any teaching or training ; and when we fully understand (as
it is somewhat difficult to do) what the powers were which were thus
instantly conveyed, the mental wfll appear not less wonderful than
the material part of the miracle of our Lord — that part of it too, of
which it is utterly impossible to give any explanation but this, that
there was in it a direct and immediate putting forth of the Divine
power. The skilful hand of the coucher may open the eye that has
been blind from birth, but no human skill or power could convey at
once that faculty of using the eye as we now do, acquired by us in
the forgotten clays of our infancy. It may be left to the fanaticism
of unbelief to imagine that it was the clay and the washing which
restored his sight to the man born blind, but no ingenuity of concep
tion can point us to the natural means by which the gUt of perfect
vision could have been at once conferred.
Yet of the fact we have the most convincing proof. It was so pat
ent and public that there could be no mistake about it. It was sub
jected to the most searching investigation — to all the processes of a
judicial inquiry. When one so well known as this blind beggar, whcm
so many had noticed on their way up to the temple, was seen walking
among the other worshippers, seeing as well as any of them, the ques
tion was on all sides repeated, " Is not this he that sat and begged ?"
THE CURE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 387
Some said it was ; others, distrusting their own sight, could only say
he was like him ; but he removed their doubts by saying, " I am he. "
Then came the question as to how his eyes were opened. He told
them. Somehow or other, he had learned the name of his healer.
,:A man that is called Jesus made clay and anointed mine eyes, and
said unto me, Go to the pool of Siloam and wash ; and I went and
washed, and I received sight." But Jesus had not yet been seen
by him ; he knew not where he was. It was so very singular a thing
this that had been done — made more so by its having been done
upon a Sabbath-day — that some of those to whom the tale was told
would not be satisfied tiU the man went with them to the Pharisees,
sitting in council in a side-chamber of the temple. They put the
same question to him the others had done, as to how he had received
his sight, and got the same reply. Even had Jesus cured him by a
word, they would have regarded it as a breach of the Sabbath, but
when they hear of his making clay and putting it on his eyes, and then
sending him to lave it off in the waters of Siloam — aU servile work
forbidden, as they taught — they seize at once upon this circumstance,
and say, " This man is not of God, because he keepeth not the Sab
bath-day." The question now was not about the cure, which seemed,
in truth, admitted ; but about the character of the curer. Such instant
«nd peremptory condemnation of him as a Sabbath-breaker roused a
¦spirit of opposition even in their own court. Joseph was there, or
Nicodemus, or some one of a like sentiment, who ventured, in oppo
sition to the prevailing feeling, to put the question, " How can a man
that is a sinner do such miracles?" But they are overborne. The
man himseU, at least, who is there before them, wiU not dare to defend a
deed which he sees the majority of them condemn. They turn to him,
and say, " What sayest thou of him, that he hath opened thine eyes ?"
They are mistaken. Without delay or misgiving, he says at once,
*' He is a prophet." They order him to withdraw. They are some
what perplexed. They wish to keep in hand the charge of Sabbath-
breaking, but how can they do so without admitting the miracle? It
would serve all their purposes could they make it out that there had
been some deception or mistake as to the man's having been born
blind— the pecuhar feature of the miracle that had attracted to it
such public notice. They summon his parents, who have honesty
enough to acknowledge that the man is their son, and that he was
born blind ; but as to how it is that he now sees, they are too timid
to say a word. They know that it had been resolved that, U any
man confessed that Jesus was the Christ, he was to be excommuni-
Kated— a sentence carrying the gravest consequences, inflicting the
388 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
severest social penalties. But they have great confidence in the
sagacity of their son ; he is quick-witted enough, they think, to extri
cate himseU from the dilemma. "He is of age," they say; "ask
him : he shall speak for himseU." He is sent for ; appears again in
their presence, ignorant of what has transpired — of what his parents,
in their terror, may have said. And now, as if their former judgment
agamst Jesus had been quite confirmed, and stood unquestionable,
they say to him, " Give God the praise " — an ordinary Jewish form
of adjuration. " My son," said Joshua to Achan, " give glory to the
Lord God of Israel, and make confession to him, and tell me now
what thou hast done." And so now these Pharisees to this poor beg
gar : ' My son, give God the praise. We know, and do you confess,
that this man is a sinner.' They are again at fault. In blunt, plain
speech, that tells sufficiently that he wiU not believe that Jesus is a
sinner simply because they say it, he says, " Whether he be a sinner,
I know not ; one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see."
Balked in their first object to browbeat and overawe him, they wfll
try again whether they can detect any inconsistency or contradiction
in his testimony, and so they ask him to tell them over again how the
thing had happened. Seeing through all the thin disguise they are
assuming in seeming to be so anxious to get at the truth, he taunts
them, saying, " I have told you already, and ye did not hear ; where
fore would ye hear it again ? will ye also be his disciples ?" No ambig
uous confession of discipleship on his part. So at least they took it
who rephed, " Thou art his disciple : we are Moses' disciples. We
know that God spake unto Moses ; as for this feUow, we know not from
whence he is." Poor though he be, and altogether at the mercy of
the men before whom he stands, the healed man cannot bear to hear
his healer spoken of in such contemptuous terms. With a courage
that ranks him as the first of the great company of confessors, and
with a wisdom that raises him above aU those high-born and well-
taught Pharisees, he says, " Why, herein is a marveUous thing, that
ye know not from whence he is, and yet he hath opened mine eyes.
Now we know that God heareth not sinners ; but if any man be a wor
shipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth. Since the world
began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was
born bhnd. If this man were not of God, he could do nothing." So
terse, so pungent, so unanswerable the speech, that passion now takes
the place of %rgument, and the old and vulgar weapon of authority w
grasped and used. Meanly casting his calamity in his teeth, they
say, " Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us?"
And they cast him out — excommunicated him on the spot.
THE CURE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 389
Jesus hears of the wisdom and the fearlessness that he had dis
played in the defence of the character and doings of his healer, and
of the heavy doom that had in consequence been visited on him, and
throws himself across his path. Meeting him by the way, he says to
him, " Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" Up to this moment he
\&& never seen the man who had anointed his eyes with the clay and
bidden him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. He might not by look
alone have recognized him, but the voice he never could forget. As
soon as that voice is heard, he knows who the speaker is. Much he
might have liked to tell, and much to ask ; but all other questions
are lost in the one that, with such emphasis, the Saviour puts — " Dost
thou beheve on the Son of God?" He had heard of men of God,
prophets of God, the Christ of God ; but the Son of God — one claim
ing the same kind of paternity in God that every true son claims in
his father — such a one he had never heard of. " Who is he, Lord ?"
he asks, " that I might beheve on him. And Jesus said unto him,
Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee." Never
but once before that we remember — never but to the woman of Sama
ria — was so clear, so direct, so personal a revelation of himseU made
by Jesus Christ. In both — the woman by the weUside, the bhnd beg
gar by the wayside — Jesus found simplicity and candor, quickness of
intelligence, openness to evidence, readiness to confess. Both followed
Ihe light already given. Both, before any special testimony to his
•own character was borne by Jesus himself, acknowledged him to be
a prophet. Both thus stepped out far in advance of the great mass
of thbse around them — in advance of many who were reckoned as dis
ciples of the Lord. The man's, however, was the fuller and firmer
faith. It had a deeper foundation to rest on. Jesus exhibited to the
woman such a miracle of knowledge as drew from her the exclama
tion, " Sir, I perceive thou art a prophet." Upon the man he wrought
such a miracle of power and love as begat within the deep conviction
that he was a true worshipper of God, a faithful doer of the Divine
will, a man of God, a prophet of God ; and to this conviction he had
adhered before the frowning rulers, and in face of all that they could
do against him. He had risked aU, and lost much, rather than deny
such faith as he had in Jesus. And to him the fuller revelation was
imparted. Jesus only told the woman of Samaria that it was the
Messiah— the Christ of God — who stood before her. He told the
man that it was the Son of God that stood before him. How far the
discovery of his Sonship to God — his true and proper divinity— went
beyond that of his Messiahship, we shall have occasion hereafter
to unfold. But see how instantaneous the faith that follows the great
390 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
and unexpected disclosure. "Who is he, Lord," 'the Son of God of
whom you speak ?' " I that speak unto thee am he. And he said,
Lord, I believe, and he worshipped him ;" worshipped him as few of
his immediate followers yet had done ; worshipped him as Thomas
and the others did when they had the great miracle of the resurrection
and the sight of the risen Saviour to establish and confirm their faith.
What shaU we say of this quick faith and its accompanying worship,
evidences as they were of a fresh full tide of light poured into this
man's mind ? Shall we say that here another miracle was wrought--—
an inward and spiritual one, great and wonderful as that when, by
the pool-side of Siloam, he washed those sightless eyeballs, and as he
washed the clear, pure, bubbling water showed itself — the first bright
object that met his opening vision — and he lifted up his eyes and
looked around, and the hiUs of Zion and of Olivet, and the fair val
ley of the Kedron, burst upon his astonished gaze ? That, perhaps,
were wrong : for, great as the work of God's Holy Spirit is in enlight
ening and quickening the human soul, it is not a miraculous one, and
should not be spoken of as such. But surely, of the two — the open
ing of the bodily and the opening of the spiritual vision — the latter
was God's greater and higher gift.
VII.
The Good Shepherd.*
The blind beggar of Jerusalem was healed. How different the
impression and effect of this healing upon the man himseU, on the
one side, and the Pharisees, his excommunicators, on the other!
He, a poor, uneducated, yet simple-minded, simple-hearted man,
grasping with so firm a hold, and turning to such good account the
knowledge that he had, and eager to have more ; reaping, as the fruit
of Christ's act of mercy met in such a spirit, the unfolding by our
Lord himself of his highest character and office : they, the guides and
leaders of the people, so weU taught and so wise, unable to discredit
the miracle, yet seizing upon the circumstance that it was done upon
the Sabbath, and turning this into a reproach, their prejudices fed
and strengthened, their eyes growing more blinded, their hearts more
hardened against Christ. This contrast appears to have struck the
mind of our Lord himself. It was in the temple, the only plac-***
o John 5:39-41; 10,1-39.
THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 391
where he could meet his feUow-men while under the ban of the
Sanhedrim, that the healed man met Jesus. They may have been
alone, or nearly so, when Christ put the question, " Dost thou be
heve on the Son of God?" and having got the answer which showed
what readiness there was to receive further hght, made the great dis
closure of his Divinity. Soon, however, a number of the Pharisees
approach, attracted by the interview. As he sees, compares, con
trasts the two — the man and them — he says, "For judgment am I
come into this world, that they which see not " (as this poor blind
beggar) "may see, and that they which see" (as the Pharisees)
'might be made blind." The Pharisees are not so bhnd as not to
perceive the drUt and bearing of the speech. They mockingly
inquire, " Are we bhnd also ?" " If ye were blind," is our Lord's
reply, ' utterly blind, had no power or faculty of vision,' " ye should
have no sin : but now ye say, We see." ' You think you see ; you
pride yourselves on seeing so much better and so much farther than
others. Unconscious of your existing blindness, you wiU not come
to me to have your eyes opened : wfll not submit to the humbling
operation at my hands : therefore your sin remaineth, abides, and
accumulates upon you. Here was a poor stricken sheep, whom ye,
claiming to be the shepherds of the flock, have cast out from your
fold, whom I have sought and found. Let me tell you who and what
a true shepherd of God's flock is. He is one that enters by the door
into the sheepfold, to whom the porter opens readily the door,
whosn voice the sheep are quick to recognize, who calleth his own
sheep by name, going before them and leading them out. He is a
stranger, a thief, a robber, and no true shepherd of the sheep, who
will not enter by the door, but climbeth up some other way.' Acuta
enough to perceive that this was said concerning human shepherds
generally, leaders or pastors of the people — intended to distinguish
the true among such from the false — and that some aUusion to them
selves was intended, Christ's hearers were yet at a loss to know what
the door could be of which he was speaking, and who the thieves and
robbers were. Dropping, Iherefore, aU generality and all ambiguity,
Jesus adds, " Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the
sheep." ' I have been, I am, I ever shaU be, the one and only door
of entrance and of exit, both for shepherds and for sheep. AU that
ever came before me, without acknowledging me, independently of
me, setting me aside, yet pretending to be shepherds of the sheep —
they are the thieves and the robbers. I am the door ; by me, if any
man enter in, whether he claims to be a shepherd, or numbers him
self merely as one of the flock — those who are shepherds as to others
392 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
being still sheep as to me — U any man so enter in, he shall be saved,
and shall go in and out, and find pasture.'
Thus much being said of the door, the one way of entrance into
God's true fold, the image of the door is dropped, and, without cir ¦
cumlocution or reserve, Christ announces himself as the Good Shep-
Lord, and proceeds to describe his character and work as such. ' I
am the Good Shepherd; not simply a kind or loving shepherd, as
opposed to such as are unkind or harsh in their treatment of the
flock, but I am the one, the only one, in whom all the qualities need
ful to constitute the true and faithful shepherd meet and culminate
in fuU and harmonious perfection. I am the Good Shepherd, who
has already done, who waits stiU to do, that for the sheep which none
other ever did or could do.' On one or two of the qualities or char
acteristics which Christ here claims for himseU, as wearing and exe
cuting the office, let us now fix our thoughts.
1. He sets before us the minute personal interest that he takes in
each individual member of his flock. " He caUeth his own sheep by
name, and leadeth them out." The aUusion here is to the fact that
Eastern shepherds did give a separate name to each separate sheep,
who came, in time, to know it, and, on hearing it, to follow at the
shepherd's call. It is thus that, when Isaiah would set forth the
relation in which the Great Creator stands to the starry host, he
represents him as leading them out at night as a shepherd leadeth out
his sheep. " Lift up your eyes, and behold who hath created these
things ; that bringeth out their host by number : he caUeth them all
by names." It is no mere general knowledge — general care — that
the Great Creator possesseth and exercises. There is not a single
star in all that starry host unnoticed, unguided, unnamed. The eye
that seeth all, sees each as distinctly as U it alone were before it. The
hand that guicleth aU, guides each as carefully as if it alone had to
be directed by it. So is it with Jesus and the great multitude of his
redeemed. Singling each out of that vast company, he says, "I
have redeemed thee : I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine."
" I have graven thy name on the palms of my hands, to be ever there
before mine eye. To him that overcometh will I give a white stone,
and on the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving
he who receiveth it." Individual names are given to mark off individ
ual objects, to separate each, visibly and distinctly, from all others
of the same kind. A new island is discovered, its discoverer gives to
it its new name. A new instrument is invented, its inventor gives to
it its new name. In that island, as distinguished from all other
islands, its discoverer takes ever afterwards a special interest. In
THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 393
that instrument, as different from all others, a like special interest is
taken by its inventor. Another human spirit is redeemed to God : its
Redeemer gives to it its new name, and for ever afterwards in that
spirit he takes a living, personal, peculiar interest : bending over it
continually with infinite tenderness, watching each doubt, each fear,
eacl trial, each temptation, each fall, each rising again, each conflict,
each victory, each defeat, every movement, minute or momentous, by
which its progress is advanced or retarded, watching each and all with
a solicitude as special and particular as if it were upon it that the
exclusive regards of his loving heart were fixed.
It was no vague, indefinite, indiscriminate goodwiU to aU mankind
that Jesus showed when h ere on earth. A large part of the narrative of
his hfe and labors is occupied with the details of his intercourse with
individuals, intended to set forth the special personal interest in each
of them that he took. Phihp brings Nathanael to him. Jesus says,
" Before, that Philip caUed thee, when thou wast under the fig-tree, I
saw thee." " Go, call thy husband and come hither." " I have no
husband," the woman of Samaria answers. Jesus says, " Thou hast
weU said thou hast no husband, for thou hast had five husbands, and
he whom thou now hast is not thy husband ; in that saidst thou truly."
A lone, afflicted woman creeps furtively near to him, that she may
touch but the hem of his garment ; she is healed, but must not go
away imagining that she was unseen, unrecognized. Zaccheus climbs
up into the sycamore, expecting simply to get a sight of him as he
passes by. Christ comes up, stops before the tree, looks up, and says,
" Zaccheus, make haste and come down, for to-day I must abide at
thy house." " Our friend Lazarus sleepeth." " Simon, Simon, Satan
hath desired to have you, that he may sUt you as wheat, but I havo
prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not." Too numerous to go on
quoting thus, were the manUestations of personal and particular
regard shown by Jesus before his death. And when he rose from
the sepulchre, he rose with the same heart in him for special affec
tion. It was the risen Saviour who put the message into the angel's
lips, " Go, tell the disciples and Peter that he is risen from the dead."
And when he ascended up to heaven, he carried the same heart with
him to the throne. " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ?" There
was not one of those, his little ones, whom Saul was persecuting, that
he did not identify with himself. No vague, indefinite, indiscriminate
superintendence is that which the great Good Shepherd stiU exercises
over his flock, but a care that particularizes each separate member of
«, and descends to the minutest incidents of their history.
We rightly say that one great object of the incarnation was so to
394 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
manifest the unseen Divinity, that our weak thoughts and our languid
affections might the more easily comprehend and embrace him as
embodied in the person of Jesus Christ the Son. But we fail to real
ize the full meaning, and to take home to ourselves the full comfort of
tho Incarnation, U we regard not our Divine Redeemer as seeing each
>f us wherever we are as distinctly as he saw Nathanael under the
fig -ti ee, Zaccheus upon the sycamore-tree, as knowing all about our
pasi history as minutely as he knew all about that of the woman by
the weU-side, sympathizing as truly and tenderly with aU our spiritual
trials and sorrows as he did with those of Peter and the churches
whom Saul was persecuting.
2. Christ speaks of the mutual knowledge, love, and sympathy
which unites the Shepherd and the sheep, creating a bond between
them of the closest and most endearing kind. " I know my sheep,
and am known of mine, as my Father knoweth me, and as I know the
Father." The mutual knowledge of the Shepherd and the sheep is
likened thus to the mutual knowledge of the Father and the Son.
The ground of the comparison cannot be in the omniscience pos
sessed equally by the Father and the Son, in virtue of which each
fully knows the other, for no such faculty is possessed by the sheep ;
and yet their knowledge of the Shepherd is said to be the same in
kind with his knowledge of them, and both to be the same in kind
with the Father's knowledge of the Son and the Son's knowledge of
the Father. What possibly can be meant by this but that there is a
bond of acquaintanceship, affection, communion, fellowship, between
each true believer and his Saviour, such in its origin, such in its
strength, such in its sacredness, such in its present blessedness, such in
its glorious issues in eternity, that no earthly bond whatever — no, not
the closest that binds man to man, human heart to human heart — can
offer the fit or adequate symbol of it, to get which we must climb to
those mysterious heights, to that mysterious bond by which the
Father and the Son are united in the intimacies of eternal love?
This bond consists in oneness of lUe, unity of spirit, harmony of
desire and affection. In the spiritual world, great as the distances
may be which divide its members, (and vast indeed is that distance
at which any of us stand from our Redeemer,) hke discerneth hke
even afar off, like draws to hke, like links itself to like, truth meets
truth, and love meets love, and holiness clings to holiness. The new
born soul turns instinctively to him in whom it has found its better,
its eternal hfe. Known first of him, it knows him in return ; loved
first by him, it loves him in return. He comes to take up his abode
in it, and it hastens to take up its abode iu him. He dwells in it ; it
THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 395
dwells in him. And broken and imperfect as, on the believer's part,
this union and communion is, yet is there in it a nearness, a sacred
ness, a tenderness that belongs to no other tie by which the human
spirit can be bound.
3. The manner in which the Good Shepherd leads his flock. " He
calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out ; and when he
piitteth forth his sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow
him." The language is borrowed from pastoral hfe in Eastern lands ;
and it is remarkable that in almost every point in which a resem
blance is traced between the office and work of the shepherd and
that of Christ, the usages of Eastern differ from those of our West
ern lands. Our shepherds drive their flocks before them ; and, in
driving, bring a strong compulsion of some kind to bear upon thf-
herd. This fashion of it puts all noticing, knowing, naming, calling
of particular sheep out of the question ; it is not an attraction from
before, it is a propulsion from behind, that sets our flocks of sheep
moving upon the way ; it is not the hearing of its name, it is not
the call of its master, it is not by the sight of him going on before
that any single sheep is induced to move onward in the path. It
is quite different in the East ; the Eastern shepherd goes before his
sheep he draws them after him — draws them by those ties of depen
dence, and trust, and affection that long years of living together have
established between them. He caUs them by their name ; they hear
and follow. Hence the language of the Old Testament : " The Lord is
my shepherd ; he leadeth me beside the still waters." " Thou leddest
thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and of Aaron." " Give
ear, 0 Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a flock " — a
usage this of Eastern shepherd hfe truly and beautifully illustrative
of the mode by which Jesus guides his people onward to the fold of
their eternal rest ; not by fear, not by force, not by compulsion of any
kind — no, but by love, by the attraction of his loving presence, the
force of his winning example. No guide or pastor he hke those Phar
isees whom Jesus had in his eye when, in contrast to them, he caUed
himself the Good Shepherd — men binding heavy burdens, and laying
them on other men's shoulders, while they would not touch them
themselves with one of their fingers. In our blessed Lord and Mas
ter we have one who himseU trod before us every step that he would
have vis tread, bore every burden he would have us bear, met every
temptation he would have us meet, shared every grief he would have
ns share, did every duty he would have us do. Study it aright, and
it will surprise you to discover over what a wide and varied field of
human experience the example of our Saviour stretches, how difficult
396 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
it is to find a position or experience of our common human hfe to
which you may not find something answering in the life of Jesus of
Nazareth. i. The consummating act of his love for the sheep, and the per
fect voluntariness with which that act is done. "I am the Good
Shapherd : the good shepherd giveth his hfe for the sheep." The
hirehng undertakes to guard the sheep as best he can. It is expected
that he should be vigilant, alert, courageous in their defence, running
at times, if need be, some risk even of hmb or lUe. But no owner of
a flock ever bound it upon the shepherd whom he hired, as a condition
of his office, that if ever it came to be the alternative that the sheep
must perish, or the shepherd perish, the latter must give up his hfe
to save the flock. A human hfe is too precious a thing to be sac
rificed in such a way. The owner of the flock would not give his own
lUe for the sheep : he could not righteously ask his hirehng to do it.
The intrinsic difference in nature and in worth between the man and
the sheep is such as to preclude the idea of a voluntary surrender of
life by the one simply to preserve the other. How much in value above
aU the lives for which it was given was that of God's own eternal Son,
we have no means of computing ; but we can see how far above all
sacrifice that either the owner of the flock acting himself as shepherd,
or any under-shepherd whom he hired, ever made, or could be expected
to make, was that which Jesus made when he laid down his hfe for the
sheep. Yet how freely was this done ! " I lay down my hfe that I
might take it again : no man taketh it -from me, but I lay it down of
myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it
again." Life is that mysterious thing, the giving and restoring of
which the Creator keeps in his own hands. No skiU or power of man
ever made a new living thing. No skiU or power of man ever rekin
dled the mystic light of life when once gone out. The power hes with
man to lay down or take away his own life ; but, once laid down, what
man is he that can take it up again ? Yet Jesus speaks as one who
has the recovery of his own hfe as much at his command as the relin
quishing of it — speaks of laying it down in order to take it again. He
would have it be known, that whatever he might permit the men to
do who had already resolved to take his life, his death would not be
their doing, but his own ; a death undergone spontaneously on his
part, of his own free and unconstrained choice. Most willingly,
•through sheer love and pity, out of the infinite fulness of his divine
compassion, was he to lay down his lUe for the sheep, that thus they
might have hfe, and have it more abundantly than they otherwise
could have —his death their hfe — his hfe from the dead drawing their
THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 397
finite and forfeited lUe up along with it and linking their eternity
with his own.
So we understand, and may attempt to iUustrate this description
by himseU of himseU as the Good Shepherd ; but to the men who
first listened to it, especiaUy to those Pharisees whose conduct a»
shepherds it was meant to expose, how absolutely unintelhgible in
many of its parts must it have appeared ! What an assumption in
making himself the one and only door, in raising himself so high
above aU other shepherds, representing himself as possessed of
attributes that none of them possessed, making sacrifices that none
of them ever made ! If a shepherd gave his hfe for the sheep, one
would think that the sheep would lose instead of gain; would, in
consequence of his removal, be aU the more at the mercy of the
destroyer. But here is a shepherd, whose death is held out as not
only protecting the sheep from death, but imparting to them a new
hfe; who dies, while yet by his dying, they lose nothing — do not
even lose him as their shepherd — for he no sooner dies than he lives
again to resume his shepherd's office. More than obscure — ambi
tious, and utterly self-contradictory must this account of himseU
have appeared to the hstening Pharisees, their recoil not lessened
by Christ's dropping incidentaUy the hint that there were other
sheep, not of the Jewish fold, whom he meant to bring in, so that
there should be one fold, over which he should be the one shepherd.
"There was a division therefore again among the Jews for these
sayings." To many they appeared so presumptuous and inexpli
cable, that they said, " He hath a devil, and is mad ; why hear ye
him?" There were others who, unable to give any explanation ol
the sayings, yet clung to the evidence of his miracles, particularly of
the one they had just witnessed. " These are not the words of him
that hath a devil. Can a devfl open the eyes of the blind ?"
Leaving them to settle these differences among themselves, Jesus
withdrew; and for two months — from the time of the Feast of
Tabernacles to that of the Feast of the Dedication — the curtain
drops over Jerusalem, and we see and hear no more of any thing
said or done by Jesus there. Where and how were those two
months spent ? Many think that our Lord must have remained in
or near the capital during this interval. It appears to us much more
hkely that he had returned to Galilee. We are expressly told that
he would not walk in "Jewry because the Jews sought to kfll him."
After the formal attempt of the rulers to arrest him, and after the
populace had taken up stones to stone him during the feast of taber
nacles, it seems httle likely that he would remain so long a time
398 THE LIFE OF OHKIST.
within their reach and power. When next he appears in Solomon's
porch, and the Jews gather round him, the tone of the conversation
that ensues, in which there is so direct a reference to his declarations
about himself, uttered at the close of the preceding festival, is best
explained by our conceiving that this was a sudden reappearance of
Jesus in the midst of them, when the thoughts both of himself and
his hearers naturally reverted to the incidents of their last interview
in the temple. " Then came the Jews round about him, and said,
How long dost tliou make us to doubt ? If thou be the Christ, tell
us plainly." There was not a little petulance, and a large mixture
of hypocrisy in the demand. These were not honest inquirers seek
ing only relief from perplexing doubts. Whatever Christ might say
about himself, their minds about him were quite made up. They do
not come to ask about that late discourse of his in which he had
spoken so plainly about his being the one and only true shepherd of
the sheep. They do not come to inquire further about that door, by
which he had said that the true fold could alone be entered. They
come with the one distinct and abrupt demand, that he should tell
tlieni plainly whether he was the Christ ; apparently implying some
readiness on their part to believe, but only such a readiness as the
men around the cross expressed when they exclaimed, "Let him
come down from the cross, and we will believe." Thej' want him to
assert that he was the Christ. They want to get the evidence from
his own lips on which his condemnation by the Sanhedrim could be
grounded ; knowing besides that an express claim on his part to the
Messiahship would alienate many even among those whose incre
dulity had been temporarily shaken.
There was singular wisdom in our Lord's reply: "I told you
before, and ye believed not." In no instance had he ever openly
declared to these Jews of Jerusalem that he was the Christ, nor
was he now about to affirm it, in the way that they prescribed.
Nevertheless it was quite true that he had often told them who and
what he was ; told enough to satisfy them that he must be either
their long-expected Messiah or a deceiver of the people. And
even U he had said nothing, his works had borne no ambiguous
testimony to his character and office. But they had not received,
they had rejected all that evidence. They wanted plain speaking,
and now they get it, get more of it than they expected or desired,
for Jesus not only broadly proclaims their unbelief, but reverting to
that unwelcome discourse which was still ringing in their troubled
ears, he tells them of the nature and the source of their unbelief:
"Ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto
THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 399
you." Without dwelling, however, upon this painful topic, one
about which these Jews then, and we readers of the Gospel now,
might be disposed to put many questions, to which no satisfactory
answers from any quarter might come to us, Jesus goes on to dwell
upon what to him, as it should be to us, was a far more grateful
topic, the characteristics and the privileges of his own true and
faithful flock: "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they
follow me." That and more he had previously said whfle speaking
of himseU as the good shepherd, and noting some of the character
istics of his sheep. But now he wiU add something more as to the
origin and nature, the steadfast and eternal endurance, of that new
relationship, into which, by becoming his, aU the true members of
his spiritual flock are admitted.
"And I give unto them eternal life." Spiritual life, life in God,
to God, is the new fresh gUt of Christ's everlasting love. To procure
and to impart it was the great object of his mission to our earth.
"I am come," he said, "that they might have life, and that they
might have it more abundantly." His incarnation was the man
ifestation of this hfe in aU its fulness in his own person. " The life
was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show
unto you, that eternal lUe which was with the Father, and was
rnamfested unto us." "In him was life, and the hfe was the hght
of men." The hfe not flowing from the light, but the light from the
hfe, even as our Lord himself hath said, "I am the hght of the
world; he that foUoweth me shaU not walk in darkness, but shall
have the light of hfe."
There are gifts of Christ's purchase and bestowment that he
makes over at once, and in a full completed form to the believer,
such as pardon of sin, acceptance with God, the title to the heavenly
inheritance. But the chief gift of his love — the hfe of faith, of love,
of meek endurance, of self-sacrificing service and suffering — comes
not to any of us now in such a form. It is but the germ of it that
is planted in the heart. Its history here is but that of the seed as it
hes in the damp, cold earth, as it rots and moulders beneath the
sod, waiting the sunshine and the shower, a large part of it cor
rupting, decaying, that out of the very bosom of rottenness, out
of the very heart of death, the new hfe may spring. Could but an
mtelligent consciousness descend with the seed into the earth,
and attend the different processes that go on there, we should
nave an emblem of the too frequent consciousness that accom
panies those first stages of the spiritual hfe, in which, amid doubts
and fears, surrounded by the besetting elements of darkness, weak-
400 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ness, corruption, death, the soul struggles onward into the life ever
lasting. But weak as it is in itself, in its first beginnings, this spiritual hfe
partakes of the immortality, the immutabihty, of the source from
which it springs. It is this which bestows such preciousness on it.
Put into a man's hand the seed of a flower-bearing or fruit-bearing
plant, it is not the bare bulb he grasps he thanks you for. It would
have but little worth in his eyes were it to remain for ever in the
condition in which he gets it. It is the capacity for after growth,
the sure promise of the hving flower and fruit that hes enwrapped
within, that gives it all its value. Slowly but surely does the myste
rious principle of hfe that lodges in it operate, tiU the flower expands
before the eye and the ripened fruit drops into the hand. So is it
with the seed of the divine hfe lodged by the Spirit in the soul; with
this difference, that for it there is to be no autumn season of decay
and death. It is to grow, and grow for ever, ever expanding, ever
strengthening, ever maturing; its perpetuity due to the infinite and
unchangeable grace and power of Him on whom it wholly hangs.
Strictly speaking, our natural hfe is as entirely dependent on God as
our spiritual one. But there is this great distinction between the
two: the one may run its course, too often does so, without any
abiding sense on the part of him who is passing through it of his
absolute and continued dependence on the great LUegiver; the
other cannot do so. Its essence lies in the ever consciousness of its
origin, its continuance in the preservation of that consciousness.
You may try to solve the phenomena of hfe in its lower types and
forms, by imagining that a separate independent element or prin
ciple is bestowed at first by the Creator, which is left afterwards,
apart from any connection with him, to develop its latent inherent
qualities. You cannot solve thus the life that is hidden with Christ
in God. Apart from him who gave it being, it has no vitality. It
begins in a sense of entire indebtedness to him ; it continues only so
long as that sense of indebtedness is sustained. It is not within
itself that the securities for its continuance are to be found.
" My sheep shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them
out of my hand. My Father which gave them me is greater than
all, and none shall pluck them out of my Father's hands." Are we
not entitled to gather from these words the comforting assuranot
that aU who by the secret communications of his grace have had
ihis life transfused into their souls, shaU be securely and eternally
upheld by the mighty power of Christ, so that they shall never
perish? not so upheld, whatever they afterwards may be or do, not
THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 401
so upheld that the thought of their security may slacken their own
diligence or tempt them to transgress, but so that the very sense of
their having such a presence and such a power as that of Jesus ever
with them to protect and bless, shall operate as a new spring and
impulse to all holy activities, and shall keep from ever becoming or
ever doing that whereby his friendship would be finally and for ever
forfeited and lost. Do we feel the first faint beatings of the new life
in our hearts? Do we fear that these may be so checked and
hardened as to be finaUy and for ever stopped ? Let us not think of
our weakness, but of Christ's strength; of our faith, but of his faith
fulness; of the firmness of our hold of him, but of the firmness of
his hold of us. The hollow of that hand of our Redeemer is the
one safe place for us into which to put our sinful soul. Not into
the hand of the Father, as the great and holy lawgiver, would the
spirit in the first exercises of penitence and faith venture to thrust
itst\U, lest out of that hand it should indignantly be flung, and scat
tered and lost should be the wealth of its immortality. It is into
thi hand of the Son, the Saviour, that it puts itseU. Yet as soon as
evoi it does so, the other hand, that of the Father, closes over it, as
if the redoubled might of Omnipotence waited and hastened to guard
the treasure. " Neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.
.... No man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand."
The behever's life is hid "with Christ." Far up beyond all reach of
danger this of itself would place it. But farther still, it is hid "with
Christ in God." Does this not, as it were, double the distance, and
place the breath of two infinites between it and the possibility of
perishing ?
"I and my Father are one." It was on his saying so that they
took up stones again to stone him. He might have claimed to be
Christ, but there had been nothing blasphemous in his doing so.
Many of the people — some even of the rulers — believed, or half
suspected that he was the Messiah ; yet it never was imagined that
in setting forth such a claim Jesus was guilty of a crime for which
he might righteously be stoned to death. The Jews were not
expecting the divine being to appear as their Messiah. They were
looking only for one in human nature, of ordinary human parentage,
to come to be their king. It is not till he speaks of his hand being
of equal power with the Father's to protect; — till he grounds that
equahty of power upon unity of nature — till he says that he and the
Father are one — that they take up stones to stone him. And their
words explain their actions. While yet the stones are in their
hands, Jesus says to them, "Many good works have I showed you
Iii. of • 0rt,i. Og
402 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of my Father, for which of these works do ye stone me?" Ready
for the moment to concede any thing as to the character of his
works, they answer, "For a good work we stone thee not, but for
blasphemy, and because that thou being a man, makest tliyseli
God." They understood him as asserting his divinity. Had thoy
misunderstood his words, how easy it had been for Christ to correct
their error — to teU them that he was no blasphemer as they thought
him ; that in calling himself the Son of God he did not mean to
claim equality with the Father. He did not do so. He quotes,
indeed, in the first instance, a sentence from their own Scriptures, in
which their judges were caUed gods; but he proceeds immediately
thereafter to separate himseU from, and to exalt himself above those
to whom because of their office, and because of the word of God
coming to them, the epithet was once or twice apphed, and reasons
from the less to the greater. He says, "If he caUed them gods,
unto whom the word of God came, say ye of him whom the Father
hath sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because
I said, I am the Son of God?" At first there was some ambiguity
in the defence. Although intimating that the appellation might be
applied with more propriety to him than to any of their old judges,
it might be on the ground only of a higher office or higher mission
than theirs that Jesus was reasoning. They listen without inter
rupting him. But when he adds — "If I do not the works of my
Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye beheve not me, yet
believe the works : that ye may know, and believe that the Father is
in me and I in him," they see that he is taking up the same ground
as at the first — is claiming to be equal with the Father — is making
himself God ; and so once again they seek to take him, to deal with
him as a blasphemer; but he escaped out of their hands. That
neither upon this nor upon any other occasion of the same kind did
our Lord complain of being condemned mistakenly when regarded
as being guilty of blasphemy, nor offer the explanation which at
once would have set aside the charge, we regard as the clearest of
all proofs that the Jews were not in error in interpreting his sayings
as they did.
We take then, our Lord's wonderful sayings at the feast of dedi
cation as asserting the essential unity of nature and attribute!.
between himself and the Father, and as thus assuring us of thti
perfect and everlasting security and weU-being of all who put theiy
oouls for keeping into his hand.
LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 40iJ
VIII.
Incidents in Our Lord's Last Journey to Jerusalem*
We are inclined to believe that it was during the two months'
interval between the feast of tabernacles and the feast of dedication
that Christ's last visit to Galilee was paid — his farewell taken of the
home of his youth — the scenes of his chief labors. Those labors
had lasted for about two years, and in them an almost ceaseless
activity had been displayed. He had made many circuits through
all the towns and villages of the district, performed innumerable
miracles, and dehvered innumerable addresses to larger or smaller
audiences. Yet the visible results had not been great. He had
attached twelve men to him as his constant and devoted attendants.
There were four or five hundred more ready to acknowledge them
selves as his disciples. A vast excitement and a large measure of
pubhc sympathy had at first been awakened. Multitudes were ready
to hail him as the great expected deliverer. But as the months rolled
on, and there was nothing in his character or teaching or doings,
answering to their ideas of what this deliverer was to be and do,
they got incredulous — their incredulity fanned into strength by a
growing party headed by the chief Pharisees, who openly rejected
and reviled him. There had not been much in his earlier instruc
tions to which exception could be taken, but when he began at a
later period to speak of himseU as the bread of Ufe, and to declare
that unless men ate his flesh and drank his blood they had no life
in them, his favor with the populace dechned, and they were even
ready to beheve aU that his enemies insinuated, as to his being
a profane man — an enemy to Moses and to their old laws. Not
a few were still ready to regard him as a prophet, perhaps the
forerunner of the Messiah; but outside the small circle of his imme
diate attendants there were few U any who recognised him as the
Christ of God. Of this decline in favor with the multitude his
adversaries greedily availed themselves, and Galilee was fast becom
ing as dangerous a home for him as Judea. Meanwhile his own
disciples had been slowly awakening from their first low and earthly
notions of him — their eyes slowly opened to the recognition of the
great mystery of his character, as being no other than the incarnate
Son of God. TiU they were hfted up above their old Jewish notions
of the Messiah — tfll they came to perceive how singular was the
» Luke 9 : 51-6? ¦ 10 : 1-24.
404 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
relationship in which Jesus stood to the Father, how purely spiritual
were the ends which he came to accomplish — he did not, could not,
intelligibly speak to them of his approaching death, resurrection,
and ascension. The confession of Peter in the name of aU the rest
that he was the Christ, the Son of God, marked at once the anival
of the period at which Jesus began so to speak, and the close of his
labors in Galilee. On both sides, on the part ahke of friends and
enemies, things were ripening for the great termination, the time
had come "that he should be received up," and "he steadfastly set
his face to go up to Jerusalem."
Starting from Capernaum and travelling southward by the route
on the west side of the Jordan, he sends messengers before his faco,
who enter a village of the Samaritans. We remember how gladly
he had been welcomed two years before in one town of that district,
how ready the inhabitants of Sychar had been to hail him as the
Messiah, and we may wonder that now the people of a Samaritan
vfllage should so resist his entrance and reject his claims. It may
have been that they were men of a different spirit from that of the
Sycharites. But it may also have arisen from this — that the Samar
itans at first had hoped that if he were indeed the Messiah, he
would decide in favor of their temple and its worship, but that now,
when they see him going up publicly to the feasts at Jerusalem, and
sanctioning by his presence the ordinances of the sanctuary there,
their feelings had changed from those of friendliness into those of
hostility. However it was, the men of this viUage — the first Samar
itan one that lay in the Lord's path — "would not receive him,
because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem." Some
marked expressions of their unfriendliness had been given, some
open indignities flung upon his messengers, of which James and
John were witnesses. These two disciples had been lately with their
Master on the Mount of Transfiguration, and had seen there the
homage that the great prophet Elijah had rendered to him. They
were now in the very region of Elijah's Ufe and labors. They had
crossed the head of the great plain, at one end of which stood
Jezreel, and at the other the heights of Carmel. The events of the
last few weeks had been filling their minds with vague yet un
bounded hopes. Their Master had thrown off much of his reserve,
had shown them his glory on the mount, had spoken to them as he
had never done before, had told them of the strange things that
were to happen at Jerusalem, had made them feel by the very man
ner of his entrance upon this last journey from Gahlee, that the
crisis of his history was drawing on. He courts secrecy no longer,
LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 405
He sends messengers before his face. He is about to make a public
triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Yet here are Samaritans who
cpenly despise him — wfll not give him even a night's lodging in
their vfllage. The fervid attachment to Jesus that beats in the
hearts of James and John kindles into indignation at this treatment.
Their indignation turns into vengeful feeling towards the men who
were guilty of such conduct. They look around. The heights of
Carmel remind them what Elias had done to the false prophets, and
fancying that they were fired with the same spirit, and had a still
weightier wrong to avenge, they turn to Jesus, saying, " Lord, wilt
thou that we command fire to come down from heaven and consume
them, even as Ehas did?" They expect Jesus to enter fully and
approvingly into the sentiment by which they are animated; they
know it springs from love to him; they are so confident that theirs
is a pure and holy zeal, that they never doubt that the fire from
heaven waits to be its minister; they want only to get permission to
use the bolts of heavenly vengeance that they beheve are" at their
command. How surprised they must have been when Jesus turned
and rebuked them, saying, " Ye know not what manner of spirit ye
are of; for the Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to
save them."
Jesus is not now here for any personal insult to be offered — any
personal injury to be inflicted ; but still he stands represented, as he
himself has taught us, in the persons of all his httle ones, in the
body of his church, the company of the faithful. Among these little
ones within that company, how many have there been, how many
are there still who cherish the spirit of James and John? who as
much need our Lord's rebuke, and who would be as much surprised
at that rebuke being given ? There is no one thicker cloak beneath
which human passions hide themselves, than that of religious zeal —
zeal for Christ's truth, Christ's cause, Christ's kingdom. Once let a
man beheve, (a behef for which he may have much good reason, for
it is not spurious but real zeal that we are now speaking of,) once let
a man believe that a true and ardent attachment to Christ, a true
and ardent zeal to promote the honor of his name, the interests of
his kingdom, glows within him, and it is perfectly astonishing to
what extent the consciousness of this may delude him — shut his eye
from seeing, his heart from feehng — that, under the specious guise
of such love and zeal, he is harboring and indulging some of the
meanest and darkest passions of our nature — wounded pride, irrita
tion at opposition, combativeness, the sheer love of fighting, of hav-
mg an adversary of some kind to grapple with and overcome
406 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
personal hatred, the deep thirst to be avenged. These and such
like passions, did they not in the days gone by rankle in the breasts
of persecutors and controversialists? of men who claimed to be
animated in all they said and did by a supreme regard to the honor
of their Heavenly Master ? These and such like passions, do they
not rankle still in the hearts of many, now that the hand of the
persecutor has to so great an extent been tied up, and the pen of the-
controversialist restrained — prompting still the uncharitable judg
ment, the spiteful remark, the harsh and cruel treatment ? Christ's
holy character and noble cause may have insults offered, deep
injuries done to them ; but let us be assured that it is not by getting
angry at those who are guilty of such conduct, not by maligning
their character, not by the visitation of pains and penalties of any
kind upon them, that these insults and injuries are to be avenged;
no, but by forbearance and gentleness, and love and pity — by feeling
and acting towards all such men as our blessed Lord and Master
felt and acted towards the inhabitants of that Samaritan village.
Perhaps it was the gentle but firm manner in which Jesus
rebuked the proposal of the two disciples — telling them how igno
rant they were of the true state of their own hearts — that led the
Evangelist to introduce here the narrative of those cases in which
our Lord dealt with other moods and tempers of the human spirit
which produce often the same self-ignorance, and too often seriously
interfere with a faithful following of Christ. One man comes — a
type of the hasty, the impetuous, the inconsiderate — and, volunteer
ing discipleship, he proclaims, "Lord, I will foUow whithersoever
thou goest." Boastful, seU-ignorant, seU-confident, he has not
stopped to think what following of Jesus means, or whither it will
carry him — unprepared for the difficulties and trials of that disciple
ship which he is in such haste to take on. The quieting reply,
" Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of
man hath not where to lay his head," sends him back to reflect
somewhat more inteUigently and deeply on what his offer and
promise imply. Another is asked by Christ himself to follow him ;
but he says, " Suffer me first to go and bury my father :" a type of
the depressed, the melancholic — of those whom the very griefs and.
sorrows of this life and the sad duties to which these call them stand
as a barrier between them and the services, the sacrifices, the com
forts and consolations of the faith. Such need to be taught that
there is a duty above that of self-indulgence in any human grief*.
and so to this man the Lord's peremptory reply is, "Let the dead
bury their dead, but go thou and preach the kingdom of God." A
LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 407
third man asks, that before obeying the Saviour's call, he might be
allowed first to go and bid his friends and relatives farewell : a very
natural request — one in which we should imagine there was little
that was wrong; but the searcher of all hearts sees that there is a
hankering here after the old famihar way of living — a reluctance of
3ome kind in some degree to take the new yoke on; and so the
warning is conveyed to him in the words, "No man having put his
hand to the plough and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God."
So varied was the spirit in which men approached Jesus, in whom
some readiness to follow him appeared, so varied was the manner in
which our Lord dealt with such, suiting himseU to each particular
case with a nicety of adjustment of which in our ignorance we are
but imperfect judges, but enabhng us to gather from the whole that
it is a deliberate, a cheerful, an entire and unconditional surrender of
the heart and lUe that Jesus asks from all who would be truly and
for ever his.
Rejected by the Samaritans, Jesus turned to another village and
chose another route to Jerusalem, in all likeUhood the weU-known
and most frequented one leading through Persea, on the east side of
the Jordan. In prosecuting this journey, he "appointed other
seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every
city and place whither he himself would come." Our Lord had
gathered around him in passing from Capernaum to Samaria almost
the entire body of his Galilean discipleship. It could scarcely fur
nish more men than were sent forth on this important mission.
Every available disciple of suitable age and character was enlisted in
the service. It can scarcely be imagined that they were employed
for no other purpose than to provide suitable accommodation before
hand for their Master. Theirs was a higher and far more important
errand. For the wisest reasons Jesus had hitherto avoided any public
proclamation of his Messiahship. He had left it to his words and
deeds to tell the people who and what he was. He had not long
before this time, charged his apostles "that they should teU no man
that he was Jesus the Christ." Matt. 16:20. But the time had
come for his throwing aside this reserve — for seeking rather than
shunning pubhcity — for letting aU men know, not only that the king
dom had come, but that he, the head of that kingdom, the Christ,
the Son of David, the king of Israel, was in the midst of them.
Before his depa-r+'jre from among them, the Israelitish nation was
to have this proclaimed through aU its borders. This was to be the
pecuhar distinction of his last journeyings towards the Holy City —
t^t all. aVng upon theh' course his Messianic character should be
408 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
pubhcly proclaimed, that so a last opportunity for receiving or
rejecting him might be afforded. And how could this have been
better effected than by the mission of the seventy? By the advance
of so many men two by two before him, the greatest publicity must
have been given to aU his movements. In every place and city the
foice of his forerunners would summon forth the people to be wait
ing his approach. The deputies themselves could scarcely fail to
feel how urgent and important the duty was which was committed to
their hands. Summoning them around him before he sent them forth,
Jesus addressed to them instructions almost identical with those
addressed to the twelve at the time of their inauguration as his
apostles. The address to the twelve, as reported .by St. Matthew,
(chap. 10,) was longer, bore more of the character of an induction to
a permanent office, carried in it aUusions to duties to be done, perse
cutions to be endured, promises to be fulfiUed, in times that were to
foUow the removal of the Lord ; but so far as that first short mission
of the twelve and this mission of the seventy were concerned, the
instructions were almost hteraUy the same. Both were to go forth
in the same character, vested with the same powers to discharge the
same office in the same way ; to the rejecters and despisers of both
the same guilt was attached, and upon them the same woes were
denounced. We notice, indeed, these slight differences : that the pro
hibition laid upon the twelve not to go into the way of the Gentiles,
nor into any city of the Samaritans, is now withdrawn, and that the
gift of miraculous power is seemingly more limited as committed tc
the seventy, being restricted nominally to the heahng of the sick. But
these scarcely affect the question when comparison is made between
the commissions given to the twelve and to the seventy, as employed
respectively on the two temporary missions on which Jesus sent
them forth. The result of that comparison is, tbat no real distinc
tion of any importance can be drawn between the two. Does this
not serve, when duly weighed, to stamp with far greater significance
than is ordinarily attached to it the mission of the seventy — raising
it to the same platform with that of the apostles? It is quite true
that the apostles were to be apostles for life, and the seventy were
to have no permanent standing or office of any kind in the church.
But it was equally true that in their distinctively apostohc character
and office the twelve were to have — indeed, could have no successors.
If, then, the commissions and the directions given to them are to be
taken as guides to those who were afterwards to hold office in the
ehurch, the commission and directions given to the seventy may
equaUy bo regarded as given for the guidance of the membership of
LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 409
the church at large; this, the great, the abiding lesson that their
employment by Jesus carries with it — that it is not to ministers or
ordained officers of the church alone that the duty pertains of
spreading abroad among those around them the knowledge of Christ
To the whole church of the hving God, to each individual member
{hereof, the great commission comes, " Go thou and make the
Saviour known." As the Father sent him, Jesus sends all who own
and love him on the same errand of mercy. Originally the church
of Christ was one large company of missionaries of the cross, each
member feeling that to him a portion — differing it may be largely
both in kind and sphere from that assigned to others, but still a por
tion — of the great task of evangelizing the world was committed;
and it wfll be just in proportion as the community of the faithful,
through all its parts, in aU its members, comes to recognise this to
be its function, and attempts to execute it, that the expansive power
that once belonged to it wiU return to it again ; and not so much by
organized societies or the work of paid deputies, as by the hving
power of individual pity, sympathy, and love, spirit after spirit wiU
be drawn into the fold of our Redeemer, and his kingdom be en
larged upon the earth.
Where the seventy went, into what places and cities they entered,
how they were received, what spiritual good was effected by them,
all this is hidden from, our view. The sole brief record of the result
of their labors is what is told us about their return. They came
back rejoicing. One thing especiaUy had struck them, and of this
only they make mention — that, though they had not been told of
it beforehand, the very devils had been subject unto them through
their Master's name. They were pleased, perhaps somewhat proud,
that what nine of the Lord's own apostles had failed in doing they
had done. Jesus teUs them that his eye had been on them in their
progress — that he had seen what they could not see — how the
powers of the invisible world had been moved, and Satan had fallen
as lightning from heaven. He teUs them that it was no temporary
power this with which they had been invested — that instead of be
ing diminished it would afterwards be enlarged till it covered and
brought beneath its sway aU the power of the enemy. But there
was a warning he had to give them. He saw that their minds and
hearts were too much occupied by the mere exercise of power — by
\he most striking and tangible results of the exercise of that power.
Knowing how faithless an index what is done by any agent is of
what that agent himseU is, of his real worth and value in the sight
of God, he checks so far their joy by saying, "Notwithstanding, in
410 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather
rejoice because your names are written in heaven." There is a book
of remembrance in the heavens, the Lamb's book of life, in which
the names of all his true and faithful followers are written. It mav
be a great thing to have one's name inscribed in large, enduring
'.etters in the roll of those who have done great things for Christ and
for Christ's cause upon this earth ; but that earthly register does not
correspond with the one that is kept above. There are names to be
found in the one that wiU not be met with in the other. There are
names which shine bright in the one that appear but faintly lumi
nous in the other. There are names that have never been entered in
the one that beam forth with a heavenly brilliance in the other.
The time comes when over the one the waters of obhvion shaU pass,
and its records be all wiped away. The time shall never come when
the names that shaU at last be found written in the other shall be
blotted out.
The joy of the disciples had an impure earthly element in it
which needed correction. No such element was in the joy which the
intelligence that the seventy brought with them kindled in the
Saviour's breast. He was the man of sorrows; a load of inward
unearthly grief lay heavy on his heart. But out of that very grief —
the grief that he endured for the sinful world he came to save — there
broke a joy — the purest, the subhmest, the most blissful — that felt
by him when he saw that the great ends of his mission were being
accomphshed, and that the things belonging to their eternal peace
were being revealed to the souls of men. "In that hour Jesus
rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven
and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and pru
dent, and hast revealed thorn unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it
seemed good in thy sight." Once before Jesus had offered up the
same thanksgiving, in the same words, to the Father. We sought
then to enter a httle into its meaning.* Now from the very repeti
tion of it let us learn how fixed the order is, and how grateful we
should be that it is so — that it is to^the simple, the humble, the
teachable, the childlike in heart and spirit, that the blessed revela
tion cometh.
Blessed we have called it, taking the epithet from Christ's own
hps ; for after he had offered up that thanksgiving to his Father, he
turned to his disciples and said to them privately, "Blessed are the
eyes which see the things that you see: for I teU you that many
prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see,
• See "Ministry in Galilee," p. 235 seq.
OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PERSIA. 411
and have not seen them, and to hear those things which ye heart
and have not heard them."
One closing remark upon the position in the spiritual kingdom
here tacitly assumed or openly claimed by Christ. He prefaced his
instructions to the seventy by saying, "The harvest truly is great,
but the laborers are few : pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest
that he would send forth laborers into his harvest." Who was the
Lord of the harvest, to whom these prayers of his disciples were to
be addressed ? Does he not teU them when he himself immediately
thereafter proceeds to send forth some laborers, instructing them
how the work in the great harvest field was to be carried on?
Parting from Galilee he casts a lingering glance behind upon its*
towns and vfllages — Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum. Who
shall explain to us wherein the exceeding privileges of these cities
consisted, and wherein their exceeding guilt ? Who shall vindicate
the sentence that Jesus passed, the woes that he denounced upon
them, U he was not the Son of God, into whose hands the judgment
of the earth hath been committed? "I beheld," said Jesus, "Satan
as lightning faU from heaven." Was the vision a true one? If
so, what kind of eye was it that saw it? "All things are delivered
to me of my Father ; and no man knoweth who the Son is but the
Father, and who the Father is but the Son, and he to whom the Son
will reveal him." With what approach to truth or to propriety
could language hke this be used by any human, any created being ?
So is it continuaUy here and there along the track of his earthly
sojourn, the hidden glory bursts through the veil that covers it, and
in the full majesty of the aU-knowing, all-seeing, aU-judging, aU-
direeting One — Jesus of Nazareth presents himseU to the eye of
faith.
IX.
Our Lord's Ministry in Peraea.*
The feast of tabernacles, at which St. John tells us that Jesus
was present, was held in the end of October. The succeeding pass-
over, at which our Lord was crucified, occurred in the beginning
of April. Between the two there intervened five months. Had we
depended alone upon the information given us by the first two Evan
gelists, we should have known nothing of what happened in this
* Luke 9 : 51 to Luke 18 : 16.
412 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
interval beyond the fact that, when his ministry in Gahlee was over,
Chri&t went up to Jerusalem to die there. They teU us of two or
three incidents which occurred at the close of this last journey, but
leave us altogether in the dark as to any preceding visit to Jerusalem
or journeyings and labors in any other districts of the land. True
lo his particular object of giving us the details of Christ's ministry
in Judea, St. John enables us so far to fiU up this blank as to insert :
1. The appearance at the feast of tabernacles; 2. The appearance
at the feast of dedication, held in the latter end of December ; 3. A
retirement immediately after the feast to Peraea, the region beyond
the Jordan ; 4. A summons back to Bethany upon the occasion of
the death of Lazarus ; 5. A retreat to " a country near to the wilder
ness, into a city called Ephraim;" and 6. A coming up to Bethany
and Jerusalem six days before the Passover. These cover, however,
but a small portion of the five months. At the first of the two
feasts Jesus was not more than four or five, at the second, not more
than eight days in Jerusalem. His stay at Bethany, when he came
to raise Lazarus from the dead, was cut short by the conspiracy to
put him to death. Not more than a fortnight out of the five months
is thus accounted for as having been passed in Jerusalem and its
neighborhood. Where then was spent the remaining portion of the
time? The gospel of St. Luke and it alone enables us to answer
these questions. There is a large section of this gospel — from the
close of the 9th to near the middle of the 18th chapter — which is
occupied with this period, and which stands by itseU, having noth
ing parallel to it in any other of the Evangelists. This section com
mences with the words, "And it came to pass, when the time was
come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go
to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face: and they went.
and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. '
Luke 9 : 51, 52. St. Matthew describes what is obviously the same
event — our Lord's farewell to Galilee — in these words : "And it came
to pass, that when Jesus had finished these sayings, he departed from
Galilee, and came into the coasts of Judea beyond Jordan." Matt.
19:1. And similarly St. Mark, of the same movement, says, "And
he arose from thence, and cometh into the coasts of Judea by the
farther side of Jordan." Mark 10 : 1. In the same chapters, and but
a few verses after those in which these announcements are made,
both St. Matthew and St. Mark relate the incident of httle children
having been brought to Jesus. But in the gospel of St. Luke, the
record of this incident, instead of foUowing so closely upon the
notice of the departure from Gahlee, does not come in till the close
OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PERJBA. 413
of the entire section already alluded to — so many as eight chapters
intervening. From that point the three narratives become again
coincident, and run on together. We have thus so much as a third
part of the entire narrative of St. Luke, and that continuous — to
which, so far as the sequence of the story goes, there is nothing
that corresponds in any of the other gospels.
In this part of St. Luke's gospel there are so few notices of time
and place, that had we it alone before us, our natural conclusion
would be that it described continuously the different stages of one
long journey from Galilee up through Peraea to Jerusalem. Taking
it, however, in connection with the information supphed to us by St.
John, we become convinced that it includes all the journeyings to and
fro which took place between the time when Jesus finally left Galilee
to the time when he was approaching Jericho, on going up to his last
passover. But how are we to distribute the narrative so as to make
its different parts fit in with the different visits to Jerusalem and its
neighborhood related by St. John? Our first idea here would be to
start with identifying the final departure from Gahlee, described by
St. Luke, with the going up to the feast of tabernacles, as related by
St. John. Looking, however, somewhat more closely at the two nar
ratives, we are persuaded that they do not refer to the same journey.
In the one, public messengers were sent before Christ's face to pro
claim and prepare for his approach; in the other, he went up, "not
openly, but, as it were, in secret." The one was slow, prolonged by
a large circuit through many towns and viUages; the other was rapid —
Jesus waited behind till all his brethren and friends had departed,
and then suddenly appeared at Jerusalem in the midst of the feast.
Did Jesus then return to Gahlee immediately after the feast of the
tabernacles, and was it in the course of the two months that elapsed
between the two festivals that the first part of the journey described
by St. Luke was undertaken ; or was it not till after the feast of dedi
cation that the last visit to Galilee and the final departure from it
took place ? The absolute silence of St. John as to any such return
to Galilee, and the unbroken continuity of his account of what hap
pened at the two feasts, seem to militate against the former of these
suppositions. We remember, however, that such silence is not
peculiar to this case — that there is a similar instance of a visit paid
to Galilee between the time of the occurrences, reported respectively
in the fifth and sixth chapters of St. John's gospel, of which not the
slightest trace is to be discovered there. We remember that U Jesus
did remain in Judea between the feasts, it must have been in conceal
ment, for we are told of this very period, that he would not walk in
414 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Jewry because the Jews sought to kfll him. John 7 : 1. We remembei
that St. John speaks of his going to Perasa after the feast of dedica
tion ,is if it were one foUowing upon another that had recently pre
ceded it, "He went away again beyond Jordan." John 10:40. We
reflect besides that U it were not tiU the beginning of January that
the journey from Galilee commenced, there would be but little room
for all the occurrences detailed in these eight chapters of St. Luke's
gospel ; and we accept it as being much the more hkely thing that
Jesus did retire from Judea to Gahlee instantly after the close of the
feast of tabernacles, and it was then that the series of incidents com
menced, the sole record of which is preserved to us by the third evan
gelist. This, of course, imphes that we break down the portion of his
narrative devoted to the journeys to Jerusalem into portions corre
sponding with the interval between the two festivals, and those between
the latter of these and the visit to Bethany. This might plausibly
enough be done by fixing upon what appears to be something like
one break in the narrative, occurring at chap. 13 : 22, and something
like another at chap. 17 : 11. Without resting much upon this, let us
(distribute its parts as we may) take the whole account contained in
these eight chapters of St. Luke, as descriptive of a period of our
Lord's hfe and ministry which otherwise would have been an utter
blank, as telling us what happened away both from Gahlee and
Judea during the five months that immediately preceded the cruci
fixion. Evidently the chief scene or theatre of our Lord's labors through
out the period was in the region east of the 'Jordan. Departing from
Capernaum — turned aside by the inhabitants of the Samaritan vil
lage—he passed along the borders of Galilee and Samaria, crossed
the Jordan at the ford of Bethshean, entering the southern part of
the populous Decapohs, passing by Jabesh-Gilead, penetrating inward
perhaps as far as Jerash, whose wonderful ruins attest its wealth and
splendor; then turning southward towards Jerusalem, crossing the
Jabbok, pausing at Mahanaim, where Jacob had his long night-
struggle ; climbing or skirting those heights and forests of Gilead to
which, when driven from Jerusalem by an ungrateful son, David
retreated, and which now was furnishing a like refuge to the Son and
Lord of David in a similar but still sadder extremity. Much of this
country must have been new to Jesus. He may once or twice have
taken the ordinary route along the eastern bank of the Jordan, but
it is not at all hkely that he had ever before gone so deep into or
passed so leisurely through this district. Certainly he had never
risited it in the same style or manner. He came among this new
OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PERAEA. 415
population with all the prestige of his great Galilean name. He
came sending messengers before his face — in aU Ukelihood the seventy
expending their brief but ardent activities upon this virgin soil. He
came as he had come at first to the Galileans, at the opening of his
ministry, among whom many of the notices of what occurred here
strikingly remind us, for we are distinctly told when he came into the
*" coasts beyond Jordan he went through the cities and villages," and
"great multitudes foUowed him, and he healed them," and "the
people resorted to him, and gathered thick together; and as he was
wont, he taught them." "And when there were gathered together
an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one
upon another, he began to say unto his disciples." Luke 13:22;
Matt. 19 : 2 ; Mark 10 : 1 ; Luke 11 : 29, 42 ; 12 : 1. Here we have all
the excitements, and the gatherings, and the manifold healings which
attended the earher part of the ministry in Galilee. The two com
munities were similarly situated, each remote from metropolitan influ
ence, more open to new ideas and influences than the residents in
Jerusalem. The instrumentality brought to bear upon them in the
presence of Jesus and his disciples, in the proclamation of the advent
of the kmgdom, in the working of all manner of cures upon the dis
eased among them was the same. Are we surprised at it, that so
many of the very scenes enacted at first in Gahlee should be enacted
over again in Perasa, and that, exactly similar occasions having arisen,
the same discourses should be repeated? that once more we should
hear the same accusation brought against Jesus when he cast out
devils that he did so by Beelzebub, and that against this accusation
we should hear from his hps the same defence? (Matt. 12 : 24; Mark
3:22; Luke 11:14;) that once more, as frequently before, there
should be a seeking of some sign from heaven, and a telling again
the evil generation that so sought after it that no sign but that of
Jonas the prophet should be given ? that once more, when asked by
the disciples to teach them to pray, the Lord should have repeated
the prayer he had recited in the Sermon on the Mount ? that upon
another and equaUy suitable occasion, about haU of that sermon
should now be re-dehvered? that we should have in this period two
cases of healing on the Sabbath, exciting the same hostility, that hos
tility in turn rebuked by the employment of the same arguments and
illustrations? These and other resemblances are not surprising, and
yet it is the very discernment of them which has perplexed many so
much, that (in direct opposition to the expressed purpose of the
gospel as announced in its opening sentence) they have been tempted
to think that, in violation of aU chronological order, St. Luke hia
416 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
imported into what seems to be an account of what occurred after the
departure from Galilee many of the incidents and discourses of the
preceding ministry in Gahlee. Instead, however, of our being per
plexed at finding these resemblances or coincidences, knowing as wo
do otherwise, that it was the practice of our Saviour to reiterate (it
is likely very often) the mightiest of his sayings, they are such as we
should have expected when once we come to understand precisely
the peculiarities of this brief Peraean ministry. But whfle these
coincidences as to events, and repetitions as to discourses, do occur,
there occur along with them, mixed up inseparably with them, many
things both in the spirit and actions of Christ appropriate exclusively
to this particular epoch of his life. No aUusions to the time or man
ner of his own death, no reference to his departure and return,
no pressing upon his disciples of the great duty of waiting and watch
ing for his second advent, no prophecies of the approaching overturn
of the Jewish economy, came from the lips of Jesus during his sojourn
in Galilee. It was not till the time of his transfiguration that he
began to speak of such matters privately to his disciples, and even
then it was with bated breath. But now all the reasons for reserve
are nearly, if not entirely gone. Jesus has set his face to go up to
Jerusalem to die. He waits and works only a little longer in this
remote region beyond Jordan, tfll the set time has come. Nothing
that he can say or do here can have much effect in hastening or
retarding the day of his decease. He may give free expression to
those thoughts and sentiments which, now that it is drawing near,
must be gathering often around the great event. And he may also
safely draw aside, at least partiaUy, the veil which hides the future,
concealing at once the awful doom impending over Jerusalem, and
his own speedy return to judge the nation that had rejected him. ,
And this is what we now find him doing. Herod, under whose juris
diction he stfll was in Peraea, had got alarmed. Fearing the people
too much, having burden enough to bear from the beheading of the
Baptist, he had no real intention to stretch out his hand to slay
Jesus ; but it annoyed him to find this new excitement breaking out
in another part of his territories, and he got some willing emissaries
among the Pharisees to go to Jesus, and to say, as if from private
information, "Get thee out, and depart hence, for Herod wfll kill
thee." And Jesus said, "Go ye and tell that fox" — who thinks so
cunningly by working upon my fears to get rid of me before my time—
"Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and
the third day I shall be perfected. Nevertheless, I must walk to-day,
and to-morrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet
OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PER.EA. 417
perish out of Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! which killest the
prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee ; how often would
I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her
brood under her wings, and ye would not! Behold your house is left
unto you desolate : and verily I say unto you, Ye shall not see mo,
untfl the time come when ye shaU say, Blessed is he that cometh in
the name of the Lord." I have quoted especiaUy these words, the
most memorable of which were repeated afterwards, as they present
a very accurate reflection of the peculiar mood of our Lord's mind,
and the peculiar tone and texture of his ministry at this period.
First, There was a shortness, a decisiveness, a strength of utter
ance in the message sent to Herod, which belongs to all Christ's say
ings of this period, whether addressed to friends or" foes. His instruc
tions, counsels, warnings to his own disciples, he expressed in the
briefest, most emphatic terms. Was he speaking to them of faith,
he said, "If ye had faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye might say unto
this sycamine-tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou
planted in the sea, and it should obey you." Was he inculcating
humihty, he said, " Which of you having a servant ploughing or feed
ing cattle will say unto him by-and-by, when he is come from the
field, Go and sit down to meat? and wfll not rather say unto him,
Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyseU, and serve me, till
I have eaten and drunken, and afterward thou shalt eat and drink ?
Doth he thank that servant because he did the things that were com
manded him ? I trow not. So likewise ye, when ye shall have done
all these things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable
servants, we have done that which was our duty to do." Was he warn
ing them against covetousness, he did it in the story of the rich man
who, as he was making all his plans about throwing down his barns
andbuflding greater ones, had the words addressed to him, " Thou fool,
this night thy soul shall be required of thee; then whose shall those
things be which thou hast provided? " Was he inculcating the neces
sity of seU- denial, an entire surrender of the heart and Ufe to him, he
did it by turning to the multitude that foUowed him, and saying, " If
any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother, and wife,
and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own hfe also, he
cannot be my disciple. And whosoever doth not bear his cross,
and come after me, cannot be my disciple. Whosoever he be of you
that forsaketh not aU that ho hath, he cannot be my disciple."*
0 Luke 14: 26, 27, 33 compared witli Matthew 10 : 37, 38. "He that loveth father or
mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he that loveth son or daughter more
than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross and followeth after me
» not worthy of me."
"*« * otiut 27
418 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
There was curtness even in our Lord's dealings with those who,
influenced with no hostilo feeling, came to him with needless and
impertinent inquiries. "Master," said one of the company, "speak
to my brother that he may divide the inheritance with me. And he
said, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you ? " " There
were present some that told him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate
had mingled with their sacrifices." It was not enough to tell them
that they were wrong if they imagined that these men were sinners
above all the Galileans because they suffered such things. They
must have it also there told to them, " I say unto you, Except ye
repent, ye shall all likewise perish." Marked especiaUy by the same
feature was our Lord's treatment of his enemies, the Pharisees.
Their hostility to Mm had now reached its height. " They began to
urge him vehemently, and to provoke him to speak of many things;
laying wait for him and seeking to catch something out of his mouth,
that they might accuse him," and " as they heard all these things
they derided him." Luke 11:53, 54; 16:14. He gave them indeed
good reason to be provoked. One of them invited him to dinner, and
he went in and sat down to meat. The custom, whether expressed
or not, that he had not first washed before dinner, gave Jesus the fit
opportunity, and in terms very different from any he had employed
in Galilee, he denounced the whole body to which his host belonged.
"Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the
platter ; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. Ye
fools ! Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye are
as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not
aware of them." The first notes thus sounded of that terrible denun
ciation that rung through the courts of the temple as our Lord turned
to take his last farewell of them and of his enemies.
Corresponding with this manner of speaking was our Lord's man
ner of action at this time. The three conspicuous miracles of this
period were the two Sabbath cures and the healing of the ten lepers.
Like all the others of the same class, the two former were spontane
ous on Christ's part, wrought by him pf his own free movement, and
not upon any apphcation or appeal. In a synagogne one Sabbath
day he saw a woman that for eighteen years had been bowed togeth
er, and could in no way lift herself up. And when he saw her, " he
said unto the woman, Thou art loosed from thine infirmity, and he
laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight and
glorified God." Invited on another Sabbath-day to sup with one of
the chief Pharisees, as he entered he saw before him a man which
had the dropsy, brought there perhaps on purpose to see what he
OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PERiEA. 419
would do. Turning to the assembled guests, Jesus put a single ques
tion to them, more direct than any he had put in Galilee. " Is it
lawful to heal on the Sabbath-day?" They said nothing, and he
*" took the man and healed him, and let him go." Entering into a
certain village, he saw before him ten lepers, who stood afar off, and
hfted up their voices and said, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us."
He said to them as soon as he saw them, " Go, show yourselves unto
the priests." ' You have what you ask ; you are cured afready. Go,
do what the cured are required by your law to do.' A few words are
spoken at a distance, and all the men are at once healed. Is there
not a quick promptitude displayed in all these cases, as if the actor
had no words or time to spare ?
But, secondly, our Lord's thoughts were fixed much at this time
upon the future — his own future and that of those around him. His
chief work of teaching and healing was over. True, he was teaching
and heahng stiU, but it was by the way. All was done as by one
that was on a journey — who had a great goal before him, upon which
his eye was intently fixed. With singular minuteness of perspective,
the dark close of his own earthly existence now rose up before him.
"Behold," he said at its close, "we go up to Jerusalem, and all
things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man
shall be accomphshed. For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles,
and shall be mocked, and spitefuUy entreated, and spitted on : and
they shall scourge him, and put him to death." Luke 18 : 31-33. "I
have a baptism to be baptized with," he said at the beginning of the
period, " and how am I straitened tfll it be accomphshed ! " Luke
12 : 50. " And the third day he shaU rise again." But beyond the
days, whether of his own death or of his resurrection, that other day
of his second coming now for the first time is spoken of. He is press
ing upon his disciples the great duty of taking no undue thought for
the future — using the same terms and employing the same images as
he had in the Sermon on the Mount; but he goes now a step farther
than he had done then, closing all by saying, "Let your loins be
girded about, and your hghts burning ; and ye yourselves like unto
men that wait for their lord, when he will return from the wedding;
that, when he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him immedi
ately. Blessed are those servants, whom the lord, when he cometh,
shall find watching. ... Be ye therefore ready also : for the Son of
man cometh at an hour when ye think not." Luke 12 : 35, 36, 37, 40.
Still in darkness as to the true nature of the kingdom of God, irri
tated, it may have been, that after the announcement that it had
«ome so little should ba said about it, so few tokens of its presence
420 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
should appear, the Pharisees demanded of him when the kingdom of
God should come. He told them that they were looking for it in an
altogether wrong direction. " The kingdom of God," he said, " cometh
not with observation ; neither shaU they say, Lo here ! or Lo there J
for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you" — for them, for us, for
aU men/ one of the most important lessons that ever could be taught; —
that God's true spiritual kingdom is in nothing outward, but hes in
the inward state and condition of the soul. Nevertheless, there was
to be much outward and visible enough, much connected with that
kingdom and his own lordship over it, of which these Pharisees were
little dreaming, and which was destined to break upon them and upon
their children with all the terror of a terrible surprise. This was in
his thoughts when, after having corrected the error of the Pharisees
as to the nature of the kingdom, he turned to his disciples and said
to them, "The days will come when ye shaU desire to see one of the
days of the Son of man, and ye shall not see it. And they shall say
to you, See here ! or, See there ! go not after them, nor follow
them ; for as the lightning, that lighteneth out of the one part under
heaven, shineth unto the other part under heaven, so shall also the
Son of man be in his day. But first must he suffer many things, and
be rejected of this generation. And as it was in the days of Noah, so
shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. Likewise also as it
was in the days of Lot. . . . thus shaU it be in the day when the Son
of man is revealed" — our Lord enlarging upon this topic till in what
he said upon this occasion you have the first rough sketch of that
grand and awful picture presented in his last discourse to the apostles
upon the ridge of Mount Olivet, preserved in Matt. 24.
That section of our Lord's hfe and labors, of which a short sketch
has been presented, has been greatly overlooked — thrown, in fact,
into the distance and obscurity which hangs over the region in which
it was enacted. A careful study wfll guide to the conviction that in
it Christ occupied a position intermediate between the one assumed
in Galilee and the one taken up by him at Jerusalem in the days that
immediately preceded his crucifixion.
THE PARABLES OF THE PERSIAN MINISTRY. 421
X.
The ^arables of the -Per^ean Ministry.
Doeing that ministry in Persea whose course and character we
have traced, our Lord dehvered not fewer than ten parables — as
many within these five months as in the two preceding years — a third
of all that have been recorded as coming from his hps. The simple
recital of them will satisfy you how fertile in this respect this period
was, while a few rapid glances at the occasions which suggested
some of them, and at their general drift and meaning, may help to
confirm the representation afready given of the peculiar features by
which that stage in our Lord's hfe stands marked. We have before
us here the parables of the Good Samaritan, the Bich Fool, the Bar
ren Fig-tree, the Great Supper, the Lost Sheep, the Lost Piece of
Money, the Prodigal Son, the Provident Steward, Dives and Lazarus,
the Unjust Judge, the Pharisee and the Publican.
The first of these was given as an answer to the question, " Who
is my neighbor ?" and, as inculcating the lesson of a broad and unsec-
tarian charity, might, with almost equal propriety, have been spoken
at any time in the course of our Lord's ministry. It gives, however, an
additional point and force to the leading incident of the story, when we
think of it as dehvered a few days after our Lord himself had received
such treatment at the hands of the Samaritans as might have re
strained him — had he not been himself the great example of the
charity he inculcated — from making a Samaritan the hero of the tale.
The second sprung from an application made to Jesus, the man
ner of whose treatment merits our particular regard. One of two
brothers, both of whom appear to have been present on the occa
sion, said to him, " Master, speak to my brother that he divide the
inheritance with me." A request not likely to have been made till
Christ's fairness and fearlessness, in recoil from afl falsehood and
injustice, had been openly manifested and generally recognized — a
request, however, grounded upon a total misconception of the nature
and objects of his ministry. The dispute that had taken place
between the two brothers was one for the law of the country to settle.
For Christ to have interfered in such a case — to have pronounced
any judgment on either side, would have been tantamount to an
assumption on his part of the office of the civil magistrate. This
Jesus promptly and peremptorily refused. " Man," said he, " who
made me a judge over you?" More than once was Christ tempted
422 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to enter upon the proper and pecuhar province of the judge. Mor©
than once were certain difficult legal and political cases and ques
tions submitted to him for decision; but he always, in the most mark
ed and decisive manner, refused to entertain them. With the exist-
ing government and institutions of the country, with the ordinarj
administration of its laws, he never did and never would interfere.
You can lay your hand upon no one law, upon no one practice,
having reference purely to man's temporal estate, which had the
sanction of the public authorities, that Jesus condemned or refused
to comply with. No doubt there was great tyranny being practised,
there were unjust laws, iniquitous institutions in operation, but he did
not take it upon him to expose, much less to resist them. For the
guidance of men in all the different relations in which they can be
placed to one another he announced and expounded the great and
broad, eternal and immutable, principles of justice and of mercy.
But with the application of these principles to particular cases he
did not intermeddle. He carefuUy and deliberately avoided such
intermeddling. It is possible indeed that the demand made upon
him in the instance now before us, may not have been for any author
itative decision upon a matter that fell properly to be determined by
the legal tribunals. Had the claim been one that could be made
good at law, it is not so hkely that Jesus would have been appealed
to in the matter. The object of the petitioner may simply have been
to get Christ to act as an umpire or arbitrator in a dispute which the
letter of the law might have regulated in one way, and the principle
of equity in another. But neither in that character would Jesus
interfere. " Man, who made me a divider over you ? " He would not
mix himself up with this or any other family dispute about property.
Willing as he was to earn for himself the blessedness of the peace
maker, he was not prepared to try and earn it in this way. It was
no part of his office, as head of that great spiritual kingdom which
he came to establish upon the earth, to act as arbitrator between such
conflicting claims as these two brothers might present. To set up
the kingdom of righteousness and peace and love in both their
hearts — that was his office. Let that be done ; then, without either
lawsuit or arbitration, the brothers could settle the matter between
themselves. But so long as that was not done— so long as either one
or both of these brothers was acting in the pure spirit of selfish
ness — there was no proper room or opportunity for Jesus to interfere;
nor would interposition, even if he had ventured on it, have realized
any of those ends which his great mission to our earth was intended
to accomplish.
THE PARABLES OF THE PER^EAN MINISTRY. 423
The example of non-intervention thus given by Christ, rightly
interpreted, has a wide range. It apphes to disputes between kings
and subjects, masters and servants, employers and employed. These
in the form that they ordinarily assume, it is not the office of Jesus
to determine. That he who rules over men should be just, ruling in
the fear of the Lord; that we should obey them that rule over us,
hving a quiet and peaceable life in aU godhness and honesty — this
he proclaims, but he does not determine what just ruling is, nor
what the hmits of obedience are, nor how, in any case of conflict,
the right adjustment is to be made between the prerogatives of the
crown and the liberties of the subject; and U ever discord should
arise between oppressive rulers and exacting subjects who, with
equal pride, equal selfishness, equal ambition, try the one to keep
and the other to grasp as much power as possible, in such a struggle
Christianity, U true to her own spirit and to her Founder's example,
stands aloof, refusing to take either side.
"Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal."
Such is the rule that Christianity lays down; but what exactly, in
any particular case, would be the just and equal thing to do — what
would be the proper wages for the master to offer and the servant
to receive — she leaves that to be adjusted between masters and
servants, according to the varying circumstances by which the wages
of all kinds of labor must be regulated. It has been made a ques
tion whether, in our great manufacturing cities, capital gives to labor
its fair share of the profits. One can conceive that question raised
by the employed as against their employers, in the spirit of a purely
selfish and aggressive discontent; and that, so raised, it might
provoke and lead on to open collision between the two. Here, again,
in a struggle, originating thus, and carried on in such a spirit, Chris
tianity refuses to take a part. She would that employers should be
more hberal, more humane, more tenderly considerate, not only of
the wants, but of the feelings of those by the labor of whose hands
it is that their wealth is created. She would that the employed
should be less selfish, less envious, less irritable — more contented.
It is not by a clashing of opposing interests, but by a rivalry of just
and generous sentiments on either side, that she would keep the
balance even — the only way of doing so productive of lasting good.
After correcting the error into which the applicant to him had
fallen — as though the settlement of legal questions, or family dis
putes about the division of estates, lay within his province — Jesus
took advantage of the opportunity to expose and rebuke the principle
which probably actuated both brothers, the one to withhold and the
424 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
other to demand. Turning to the general audience by *« aich he wax
surrounded, he said, " Take heed and beware of covetousness." The
word here rendered " covetousness" is a peculiar and very expressive
one; it means the spirit of greed — that ever-restless, ever-craving,
ever-unsatisfied spirit, which, whatever a man has, is ever wanting
more, and the more he gets still thirsts for more. A passion which
has a strange history; often of honest enough birth — the child of
forethought, but changing its character rapidly with its growth — get
ting prematurely blind — losing sight of the end in the means — tfll
wealth is loved and sought and grasped and hoarded, not for the
advantages it confers, the enjoyment it purchases, but simply for
itself — to gratify that lust of possession which has seized upon the
soul, and makes it aU its own. It was to warn against the entrance
and spread and power of this passion that Jesus spake a parable
unto them, saying, " The ground of a certain rich man brought forth
plentifuUy : and he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do,
because I havo no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said,
This wiU I dc : I wiU puU down my barns, and build greater; and
there wfll I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I wfll say to
my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take
thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou
fool, this night thy soul shaU be required of thee ; then whose shall
those things be which thou hast provided ? So is he that layeth up
treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God."
Beyond the circumstance already noted, that the request which
suggested it was one more appropriate to a late than to an early period
of our Lord's ministry, we have nothing in the parable, any more
than in that of the Good Samaritan, which speciafly connects it with
the ministry in Peraaa. It is different with the two that come next in
order — that of the Barren Fig-tree and of the Great Supper.
Some who were present once told Jesus of those Galileans whose
blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He told them, in
reply, of the eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam feU, repeating,
as he did so, the warning, "Except ye repent, ye shaU aU likewise
perish." We miss the fuU force of the prophetic knell thus sounded
in their ears, in consequence of the word "likewise" being often used
by us as equivalent to "also," or " as well." The intimation, as giveD
by Jesus, was that they would perish in the same manner. The work
done by the Boman sword, the deaths caused by a single falling
tower, were brought before the mind of Jesus; and instantly he
thinks of the wider sweep of that sword, and the falling of all the
towers and battlements of Jerusalem ; and when that terrible calamity*
THE PARABLES OF -THE PERSIAN MINISTRY. 425
(of which we have here the first obscure hint or prophecy that came
from the hps of Jesus) descended upon the Jewish people, then to
the very letter were his words fulfilled, as thousands fell beneath th&
stroke of the Boman sabres — slain, as the Galileans were, in the
midst of their passover sacrifices — and multitudes were crushed to
death beneath the falhng ruins of their beloved Jerusalem. None
but Christ himseU, none of those who listened for the first time to
these warning words, could teU to what they pointed. Forty years
were to intervene before the impending doom came to be executed
upon the devoted city. No sign or token of its approach was visible.
Those around him, some of whom were to witness and to share in the
calamity, were living in security, not knowing how rapidly the period
of forbearance was running out, not knowing that the time then
present was but for them a season of respite. It was to indicate how
false that feehng of security was, to give them the true key to the
Lord's present dealings with them as a people, that Jesus told them
of a fig-tree planted in a vineyard, to which for three successive
years the owner of the vineyard had come seeking fruit and finding
none; turning to the dresser of the vineyard, and saying, "Cut it
down, why cumbereth it the ground?" And the dresser of the vine
yard said to him, " Lord, let it alone this year also, till I dig about it,
and dung it: and if it bear fruit, weU; and if not, then after that
thou shalt cut it down." And there, at the point of the respite
sought and granted, the action of the parable ceases Did the year
of grace go by in vain? Was all the fresh labor of *>ho dresser fruit
less? Was the tree at last cut down? All aboul this the parable
leaves untold. It had been the image of the end, as it crossed the
Saviour's thoughts, that had suggested the parable; but the time
had not yet come for his going farther in the history of the tree than
the telling that its last year of trial had arrived, and that if it
remained fruitless it was to be cut down. The story of the tree was,
in fact, a prophetic aUegory, meant to represent the state and pros
pects of the Jewish people, for whom so much had been done in the
years that were past, and so much more in the year then present :
the story stopping abruptly at the very stage which was then being
described — not without an ominous foreshadowing of the dark doom
in reserve for impenitent Israel — the Israel that refused to benefit
by all the care and the toil that Jesus had lavished on it. It is, of
eourse, not only easy, but altogether legitimate and beneficial, for the
broader purposes of Christian teaching, to detach this parable from
its primary connections and its immediate objects; but, as it ever
should be the first aim in reading any of our Lord's sayings to under-
426 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
stand their significance as at first uttered, in this instance we are left
in no doubt or uncertainty that it was the generation of the Jews
then living, then upon probation, then in the last stage of their trial—
that the fig-tree of the parable, in the first instance, was intended to
represent. Begarded so, how singularly appropriate to the time of
its delivery, in its form and structure, does the parable appear! It
is the first of a series of allegorical prophecies, in which the whole
after-history of the people and age, to which Jesus may be said to
have himself belonged, stands portrayed. Never before had any hint
of the outward or historical issues of his advent, so far as the gene
ration which rejected him was concerned, dropped from the lips of
Jesus. Such aUusion, we may say with reverence, would have been
mistimed had it been made earlier. It was suitable that the great
trial upon which his mission to them put that generation should be
somewhat advanced, be drawing near its close, before the judicial
visitations, consequent upon its treatment of the Messiah, should be
declared. And here, in the narrative of St. Luke, the prophetic
announcement meets us, as made for the first time after our Lord's
labors in Galilee are over, and he is waiting to go up to Jerusalem to
be crucified; and, as the first hint of the kind given, it is, as was fit
ting, brief and limited in its range, throwing a clear beam of hght
upon the time then present, leaving the future enveloped with a
threatening gloom.
The same things are true of the parable that comes next in order
in the pages of St. Luke. It carries the story of the future a little
farther on ; but it, too, stops abruptly. A great supper is made, to
which many had been invited. The servant is sent out to say to
them that were bidden, " Come, for aU things are now ready." With
one consent, but giving different reasons, they all excuse themselves.
The servants are sent out first to the streets and lanes of the city,
then to the highways and hedges, to bring others in, that the table
may be fiUed. The narrative closes with the emphatic utterance of
the giver of the feast — :" For I say unto you, that none of these men
that were bidden shall taste of my supper." Here, in the first invited
guests, we at once recognize the Jews, or rather that section of them
which stood represented by their lawyers and Pharisees, among
whom Jesus was at the time sitting. They had had the invitation long
in their hands, and professed to have accepted it ; but when the time
came, and the call came from the lips of Jesus to enter the kingdom,
to partake of the prepared supper, they all, with one consent, had
made excuse. And they were to reap this as the fruit of their doing
so — that the poor, the lame, the halt, the blind, the wanderers of the
THE PARABLES OF THE PERJEAN MINISTRY. 427
highways and hedges, were to be brought in, and they were to be
excluded. Of this result the parable gives a clear enough fore
shadowing; but it does not actually reveal the issue. It stops wilh
the second mission of the servants and the declaration of a fixed
purpose on the part of the giver of the entertainment: but it doe*-
not describe the supper itself, nor tell how the last errand of the
servant prospered, nor how the fixed resolution of the master of the
house to exclude was carried out. Over these it leaves the same
obscurity hanging, that in the preceding parable was left hanging
over the cutting down of the tree. There is a step taken in advance.
Beyond the rejection of the Jews, we have the gathering in of the
Gentiles in their stead alluded to, but obviously the main purpose of
the parable as indicated by the point at which it stops and the last
speech of the master of the house, which is left sounding in our ears,
is to proclaim that those who had rejected the first invitation that
Christ had brought should, in their turn, be themselves rejected o*
him. Here, then, we have another parable fitting in with the former.
and in common with it perfectly harmonizing with that particulai
epoch at which St. Luke represents it as having been delivered.
The parable of the Great Supper was spoken at table, in the house
of a chief Pharisee, in the midst of a company of Pharisees and law
yers, Soon afterwards, Jesus appears to us in the centre of a very
different circle. "Then drew near unto him all the pubhcans and
sinners to hear him." Jesus welcomed them with joy, devoted him
self with the readiest zeal to their instruction. The Pharisees who
were present were offended at what they had noted or had been told
about the familiarity of his intercourse with these publicans and sin
ners ; his acceptance of their invitations ; his permitting them to use
freedom even with his person. "And they murmured, saying, This
man receiveth sinners and eateth with them." The Pharisees in
Gahlee had done the same thing ; and that St. Luke, in the fifteenth
chapter, is not referring to the same incident that St. Matthew, in his
ninth chapter, has recorded, but is relating what happened over
again in Peraea, just as it had occurred before in Galilee, is evident
from this, that he himseU, in his fifth chapter, records the previous
Galilean incident. In answer to the first murmurings that broke out
against him for companying with publicans and sinners, Jesus had
contented himself with saying, "They that be whole need not a
physician, but they which are sick. I came not to call the righteous,
but sinners to repentance." Now, however, he makes a longer
apology and defence. He will let these murmurers know what it is
in the condition of these pubhcans and sinners which has drawn him
428 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
to them and fixed on them his regard — why and for what it is that
he has attached himself so closely to them — even to bring them to
repentance, win them back to God. He will draw aside for a moment
the veil that hides the invisible world, and let it be seen what is
thought elsewhere, among the angels of God, of that ready reception
of sinners on his part which has evoked such aversion. Christ does
this in three parables — that of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Piece of
Money, and the Lost Son. Taken together, these three parables
compose our Lord's reply to the censure passed upon his conduct by
the Pharisees, and they do so by presenting at once the whole history
of that recovery from their lost condition, which it was Christ's great
object to see realized in those with whom he associated, and the
effect of such recovery as contemplated by those who, not themselves
feeling their need of it, looked askance upon the whole procedure by
which it was reahzed ; for just as clearly as the history of the loss
and the recovery of the one sheep, and the one piece of money, and
the one son, were intended to represent that conversion to God which
it was the main aim of Christ's converse with the pubhcans and sin
ners to effect, just as clearly do the ninety-nine sheep, and the nine
pieces of money, and the elder brother, stand as representatives of
these murmuring scribes and Pharisees — those just persons, just in
their own eyes, who needed no repentance — thought they did not
need it, and who, not understanding the nature or the necessity of the
work of conversion in others, condemned the Saviour when engaged
in this work. There is a difference, indeed, in the three parables, so
far as they bear upon their character and conduct. The ninety and
nine sheep and the nine pieces of money, being either inanimate or
u -intelligent, afforded no fit opportunity of a symbolic exhibition of
the temper and disposition of the Pharisees. This opportunity was
afforded in the third parable, and is there largely taken advantage of.
The elder brother — the type or emblem of those against whom Jesus
is defending himself — is there brought prominently out upon the
stage : a full revelation of his distrustful, spiteful, envious spirit is
made. If thirteen verses are given to the story of the younger
brother, the prodigal son, no fewer than eight are given to that of the
elder brother. The thirteen verses too, it is to be remembered, cover
the incidents of years; the eight, those of a single. evening. Naturally
and properly, the deeper, hvelier, more universal interest that attach
es to the story of the younger overshadows that of the elder brother —
so deeply, indeed, that we think and speak of the parable as that of
the Prodigal Son; but as originally spoken, and for the purposes
originally contemplated, the part played by the elder brother had
THE PARABLES OF THE PERSIAN MINISTRY. 429
much more importance assigned to it than we now are disposed to
give it. He is out in the field when his younger brother is so gladly
welcomed and has the fatted calf killed to celebrate his recovery.
Returning in the evening, he hears the sounds of the music and the
dancing within the happy dwelhng. He calls one of the servants,
and hears from him what had happened. And now all the fountains
of selfishness and pride, and envy and mahgnity, pour out their bitter
waters. He sulkily refuses to go in. His father comes out and
remonstrates with him. But he will listen to no entreaty. He for
gets for the moment all his family relationships. He will not caU his
parent father ; he will not speak to him as to one to whom he had
been indebted — rather he will charge him with injustice and unkind
ness ; he will not caU the once lost, but now found one his brother —
"this thy son" is the way that he speaks of him. Notwithstanding
all his unfihal, unbrotherly, contemptuous arrogance, how kindly,
how patiently is he dealt with ; how mildly is the father's vindication
made; how gently is the rebuke administered! Did it soften him,
subdue him ? did he, too, come to see how unworthy he was to be
the son of such a father ? melted into penitence, did he too, at last
throw himseU into his father's arms, and in him was another lost one
found ? Just as in the parable of the Barren Fig-tree and the Great
Supper, the curtain drops as the scene should come upon the stage
in which the final fortunes of those of whom we take the elder broth
er as the type should have been disclosed. And in so closing, this
parable goes far to proclaim its birth-time as belonging to the period
when Jesus was just beginning to lift the veil which hung over the
shrouded future of impenitent and unbelieving Israel.
The next parable, that of the Unjust Steward, was addressed par
ticularly, and we may say, exclusively, to the disciples. It contains
no note of time by which the date of its delivery might be determined.
We are struck, however, with finding that throughout the period now
before us, it was as servants waiting and watching for the return of
their master, as stewards to whom their absent lord has committed
the care of his household during a temporary departure, that the
apostles and disciples were generally addressed. And even as the
woes impending over doomed Israel were now filling the Saviour's
eye, the first pre-intimation of them breaking forth from his hps, even
so does the condition of the mother church at Jerusalem, in the
dreary years of persecution that preceded the destruction of Jerusa
lem, seem to have lain at this time heavy upon his heart. It was
with reference to the sorrows and trials that his servants should in
that interval endure, and to the wrongs inflicted on them, that the
430 THE LIFE OF CHRIST
parable of the Unjust Judge was spoken. Its capital lesson was
importunity in prayer, but the prayer that was to go up sc often, and
was at last to be heard, was prayer from the persecuted while suffer
ing beneath the lash. This parable, therefore, like so many of its
immediate predecessors, exactly fits the season at which St. Luke
reports it as having been spoken.
Were it not for the interest which attaches to the question wheth
er or not the chapters of St. Luke's gospel, from the ninth to the
eighteenth, present us with a true, and faithful, and orderly narrative
of a period in our Lord's life of which no other of the evangelists tell
us anything, I should not have dwelt so long upon this topic. I
shall have gained the end I had in view, however, U I have brought
distinctly out to view the five months that elapsed after Christ's fare
well to Galilee, as spent, for the most part, in the regions beyond the
Jordan, as occupied with a ministry bearing evident tokens of a
transition period, in which with his face set steadfastly towards the
great decease he was to accomplish at Jerusalem, our Lord's thoughts
were much occupied with the future — the future which concerned
himself, his foUowers, the nation. The events, the miracles, the
parables of the period, are all in harmony; and as a whole we may
safely say, that they carry in their bosom internal evidence of their
having been rightly located by St. Luke, unsuitable as they would
have been either for any preceding or anyr posterior section of our
Lord's hfe. It is but attributing to Christ our humanity in true and
perfect form to imagine that the ending of his labors in Galilee and
Judea, and the near prospect of his death, threw him into an atti
tude of thought and feeling congenial to the circumstances in which
he was placed. It was natural that the unseen and the future should
at this time absorb the seen and the present. . It may be a fancy, but
I have thought, while reading again and again the ten parables
which belong to this period, that far more frequently and more
vividly than ever before in his ministry is the invisible world laid
bare. The spirit summoned that night into the immediate presence
of its judge — the angels rejoicing over each repentant returning sin
ner — the bosom of Abraham upon which Lazarus is represented as
reposing — the heU into which the soul of the rich man in dying
sinks — where in any of the preceding addresses or parables of our
Lord have we the same unfolding of the world that hes beyond the
grave ? Is it not as one who is himself holding closer feUowship with
that world into which he is so soon himseU to enter that Jesus
speaks ? One thing is not a fancy, that more frequently and more
urgently than ever before does Jesus press upon his disciples the
THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 431
duty of holding such feUowship. By the story of the friend at mid
night awakened by the continued and repeated solicitations of his
neighbor, by that of the unjust judge moved to redress her wrongs
by the simple importunity of the widow, by that of the prayer of the
poor pubhcan heard at once and answered, by the appeal to their
own generosity as fathers in the treatment of their children, did Jesus
at this time seek to draw his disciples to the throne of grace, and
keep them there, praying on in the assurance that earnest, renewed,
repeated petitions offered in sincerity and faith shaU never go up to
God in vain. And who is he that encourages us thus to pray — that
gives us the assurance that our prayers wiU be answered? Is he not
our own great and gracious Advocate, who takes our imperfect peti
tions as they spring from our defiled lips, our divided and sinful
hearts, and turns them into his own aU-powerful, all-prevailing plead
ings as he presents them to the Father ?
XI.
The Good Samaritan.*
"Behold, a certain lawyer stood up" — in aU hkeUhood within
some synagogue upon a Sabbath-day. In rising to put a question to
Jesus, he was guilty of no impertinent intrusion. Jesus had assumed
the office of a public teacher, and it was by questions put and an
swered that this office was ordinarily discharged. This lawyer " stood
up and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eter
nal life?" His object might have been to perplex and entangle — to
involve Christ in a difficulty from which he perceived or hoped that
he would be unable to extricate himself. Questions of this kind were
often put to Jesus, their very character and construction betraying
their intent. But the question of the lawyer is not one of this nature.
Something more than a mere idle curiosity, or a desire to test the
extent of Christ's capacity or knowledge, appears to have prompted
it. It is not presented in the bare abstract form. It is not, " Master,
what should be done that eternal hfe be inherited?" but, "Master,
what shall I do to inherit eternal hfe?" It looks as U it came from
one feeling a true, deep, and personal interest in the inquiry.
The manner in which our Lord entertained it confirms this im
pression. Questions of many kinds from many quarters were address
's Luke 10 : 25-29.
432 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ed to Jesus. With one or two memorable exceptions, they were ah
answered, but in different ways; whenever any insidious and sinister
purpose lay concealed beneath apparent homage, the answer was
always such as to show that the latent guile lay open as day to his
eye. But there is nothing of that description here. In the first
instance, indeed, he will make the questioner go as far as he can in
answering his own question. He will tempt — that is, try or prove him
in turn. Knowing that he is a scribe weU instructed in the law, he
wiU throw him back upon his own knowledge. Before saying any
thing about eternal hfe, or the manner of its inheritance, Jesus says,
"What is written in the law? how readest thou?" It is altogether
remarkable that in answer to a question so very general as this — one
which admitted of such various replies — this man should at once have
laid his hand upon two texts, standing far apart from each other —
the first occurring early in Deuteronomy, the second far on in Levit
icus — texts having no connection with each other in the outer form
or letter of the law, to which no pecuhar or pre-eminent position is
there assigned, which are nowhere brought into juxtaposition, nor are
quoted as if, when brought together, they formed a summary or com
pound of the whole ; the two very texts, in fact, which, on an after
occasion, in answer to another scribe, our Lord himseU cited as the
two upon which all the law and the prophets hung. The man who,
overlooking the whole mass of ceremonial or rituahstic ordinances as
being of altogether inferior consideration, not once to be taken into
account when the question was one as to a man's inheriting eternal
life, who so readily and so confidently selected these two command
ments as containing the sum and substance of the whole, gave good
proof how true his reading of the law was. " And Jesus said to him,
Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live." 'Take but
thine own right reading of the law, fulfil aright those two great pre
cepts, Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, Love thy neigh
bor as thyseU, and thou shalt live ; hve in loving and in serving, or if
thou reachest not in this Way the Ufe thou aimest at, thou wilt at
least, by the very failure, be taught to look away from the precepts
to the promises, and so be led to the true source and fountain
of eternal lUe in the free grace of the Father through me the Son.'
Trying to escape from the awkward position of one out of whose
own lips so simple and satisfactory a reply to his own question had
been extracted — desiring to justify himseU for stfll appearing as a
questioner, by showing that there was yet something about which
there remained a doubt — he said to Jesus, "And who is my neigh
bor?" We may fairly assume that one so well read as this man was
THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 433
as to the true meaning of the law, was equally weU read as to the
popular belief and practice regarding it. He knew what interpreta
tion was popularly put on the expression, "thy neighbor," which
stood embodied in the practice of his countrymen. He knew with
¦what supercilious contempt they looked down upon the whole Gentile
world around them — caUing them the "uncircumcised," the "dogs,'
the "poUuted," the "unclean," — with what a double contempt they
regarded the Samaritans living by their side. He knew that it was
no part of the popular belief to regard a Samaritan as a neighbor.
So far from this, the Jew would have no dealings with him, cursed
him pubhcly in his synagogue, would not receive his testimony in a
court of justice, prayed that he might have no portion in the resur
rection. He knew aU this — had himseU been brought up to the
belief and practice. But he was not satisfied with it. Along with
that fine instinct of the understanding which had enabled him to
extract the pure and simple essence out of the great body of the
Jewish code, there was that finer instinct of the heart which taught
him that it was within too narrow bounds that the love to our neigh
bor had been Umited. He saw and felt that these bounds should be
widened; but how far? upon what principle, and to what extent?
Anxious to know this, he says, "And who is my neighbor?"
Christ answers by what we take to be the recital of an incident
that had actually occurred. A fictitious story — a parable invented
for the occasion — would not so fully have answered the purpose he
had in view. A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
We are not told who or what he was : but the conditions and object
of the narrative require that he was a Jew. The road from Jerusa
lem to Jericho — though short, and at certain seasons of the year
much frequented — was yet lonely and perilous to the last degree,
especially to a single and undefended traveller. It passes through
the heart of the eastern division of the wilderness of Judea, and runs
for a considerable space along the abrupt and winding sides of a deep
and rocky ravine, offering the greatest facilities for concealment and
attack. From the number of robberies and murders committed in it,
Jews of old caUed it " the Bloody Eoad," and it retains its character
still. We traveUed it, guarded by a dozen Arabs, who told, by the
way, of an Enghsh party that the year before had been attacked and
plundered and stripped, and we were kept in constant alarm by the
scouts sent out beforehand announcing the distant sight of danger
ous-looking Bedouins. AU the way from Bethany to the plain of
the Jordan is utter solitude — one single ruin, perhaps that of the
very inn to which the wounded Jew was carried, being the only sign
UfoofOhiliC. 28
434 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of human habitation that meets the eye. Somewhere along this road
the solitary traveller of whom Jesus speaks is attacked. Perhaps he
carries his aU along with him, and, unwilling to part with it, stands
upon his defence, wishing to seU life and property as dearly as he
can. Perhaps he carries but little — nothing that the thievish band
into whose hands he faUs much value. Whether it is that a struggle
has taken place, or that exasperation at disappointment whets their
wrath, the robbers of the wilderness strip their victim of his raiment,
wound him, and leave him there half dead. As he hes in that condi
tion on the roadside, first a priest, and then a Levite approaches. A
single glance is sufficient for the priest ; the Levite stops, and takes
a longer, steadier look. The effect in either case is the same — abhor
rence and aversion. As men actuated by some other sentiment
beyond that of mere insensibihty, they shrink back, putting as great
a distance as they can between them and the poor naked wounded
man; as if there were pollution in proximity — as if the very air
around the man were infected — as if to go near him, much more to
touch, to lift, to handle him, were to be defiled. To what are we to
attribute this? To sheer indifference — to stony-hearted inhumanity?
That might explain their passing without a feeling of sympathy
excited or a hand of help held out, but it wfll not explain the quick
and sensitive recoil — the passing by on the other side. Is it, then,
the bare horror of the sight that drives them back? If there be
something to excite horror, surely there is more to move pity. That
naked, quivering body, those gaping, bleeding wounds, the pale and
speechless hps, the eyes so dull and heavy with pain, yet sending out
such imploring looks — where is the human heart, left free to its own
spontaneous actings, they could fafl to touch? But these men's
hearts — the hearts of the priest and Levite — are not left thus free :
not that their hearts are destitute of the common sympathies of our
nature — not that their breasts are steeled agamst every form and
kind of human woe — not that, in other circumstances, they would see
a wounded, haU dead neighbor lying, and leave him unpitied and
unhelped. No! but because their hearts — as tender, it may have
been, by nature as those of others — have been trained in the school
of national and religious bigotry, and have been taught there, not the
lesson of sheer and downright inhumanity, but of that narrow exclu-
siveness which would limit all their sympathies and aU their aid tc
those of then* own country and their own faith. The priest and the
Levite have been up at Jerusalem, discharging in their turn then*
offices in the temple. They have got quickened afresh there all the
prejudices of their calling; they are returning to Jericho, with all
THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 435
their prejudices strong within their breasts ; they see the sad sight
by the way ; they pause a moment to contemplate it. Had it been
a brother priest, a brother Levite, a brother Jew that lay in that
piteous plight, none readier to help than they; but he is naked, there
is nothing on him or about him to teU who or what he is — ho is
speechless, and can say nothing for himself. He may be a hated
Edomite, he may be a vile Samaritan, for aught that they can teU.
The possibility of this is enough. Touch, handle, help such a man !
they might be doing thereby a far greater outrage to their Jewish
prejudices than they did to the mere sentiment of indiscriminate pity
by passing him by, and so they leave him as they find him, in haste
to get past the dangerous neighborhood, to congratulate themselves
on the wonderful escape they had made — for the wounds of the poor
wretch were fresh, and bleeding freely — it could have been but shortly
before they came up that the catastrophe had occurred; had they
started but an hour or two earher from Jerusalem his fate might have
been theirs. Glad at their own good fortune, they hurry on, finding
many an excuse besides the real one for their neglect.
How then are we exactly to characterize their conduct ? It wa3
a triumph of prejudice over humanity — the very kind of error and of
crime against which Jesus wished to guard the inquiring lawyer. And
it was at once with singular fidelity to nature, and the strictest perti
nence to the question with which he was deahng, and to the occasion
that called it forth, that it was in the conduct of a priest and of a
Levite that this triumph stood displayed — for were they not the
fittest types and representatives of that malign and sinister influence
which their rehgion — misunderstood and misapphed — had exerted
over the common sympathies of humanity? Had they read aright
their own old Hebrew code, it would have taught them quite a
different lesson. Its broad and genial humanity is one of the marked
attributes by which, as compared with that of every other rehgion
then existing, theirs was distinguished. "I wiU have mercy and
not sacrifice," was the motto which its great Author had inscribed
upon its forehead. Its weightier matters were judgment and mercy,
and faith and love. It had taken the stranger under its special
and benignant protection. Twice over it had proclaimed, "Thou
shalt not see thy brother's ass or thy brother's ox faU down by the
way and hide thyself from them — thou shalt surely help him to lift
them up again.' And was a man not much. better than an ass or an
ox? And should not this priest and Levite — had they read aright
their own Jewish law — have lUted up again their prostrate bleeding
brother? But they had misread that law. They had misconceived
436 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
and perverted that segregation from aU the other communities of the
earth which it had taught the Jewish people to cultivate. Instead of
seeing in this temporary isolation the means of distributing the bless
ings of the Messiah's kingdom wide over all the earth, they had
regarded it as raising them to a position of proud superiority from
which they might say to every other nation, " Stand back, for we are
holier than you." And once perverted thus, the whole strength of
their reUgious faith went to intensUy the spirit of nationahty, and
inflame it into a passion, within whose close and sultry atmosphere
the lights even of common human kindness were extinguished. It
was in a priest and in a Levite that we should expect to see this
spirit carried out to its extreme degree, as it has been always in the
priestly caste that the fanatical piety which has trampled under foot
the kindliest sentiments of humanity has shown itself in its darkest
and most repulsive form.
After the priest and Levite have gone by, a certain Samaritan
approaches. He too is arrested. He too turns aside to look upon
this pitiable spectacle. For aught that he can teU, this naked wound
ed man may be a Jew. There were many Jews and but few Samari
tans travelling ordinarily by this road. The chances were a thousand
to one that he was a Jew. And this Samaritan must have shared in
the common feelings of his people towards the Jews — hatred repay
ing hatred. But he thinks not of distinction of race or faith. The .
sight before him of a human being — a brother man in the extremity
of distress — swallows up aU such thoughts. As soon as he sees him
he has compassion on him. He alights — strips off a portion of his
own raiment — brings out the oil and the wine that he had provided
for his own comfort by the way — tenderly binds up the wounds —
gently hfts the body up and places it on his own beast — moves with
such gentle pace away as shall least exasperate the recent wounds.
Intent upon his task, he forgets his own affairs — forgets the danger
of lingering so long in such a neighborhood — is not satisfied until he
reaches the inn by the roadside. Having done so much, may he not
leave him now? No, he cannot part with him tfll he sees what a
night's rest wfll do. The morning sees his rescued brother better.
Now he may depart. Yes, but not tiU he has done aU he can to
secure that he be properly waited on till all danger is over. He may
be a humane enough man, the keeper of this inn, but days will pass
before the sufferer can safely travel, and it may not be safe or wise
to count upon the continuance of his kindness. The Samaritan gives
the innkeeper enough to keep his guest for six or seven days, and
tells him that whatever he spends more wfll be repaid. Having
THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 437
thus done aU that the most thoughtful kindness could suggest to
promote and secure recovery, he goes to bid his rescued brother fare
well. Perhaps the good Samaritan leaves him in utter ignorance of
who or what he was. Perhaps those pale and trembling lips are stfll
unable to articulate his thanks — but that parting look in which a
heart's whole swelling gratitude goes out — it goes with him and kin
dles a strange joy. He never saw the sun look haU so bright — he
never saw the plain of Jordan look haU so fair — a happier man than
he never trod the road to Jericho. True, he had lost a day, but he
had saved a brother ; and while many a time in after life the look of
that stark and bleeding body as he first saw it lying on the roadside
would come to haunt his fancy — ever behind it would there come that
look of love and gratitude to chase the spectral form away, and fill
his heart with light and joy.
Here too is a triumph, not one, however, of prejudice over humanity,
but of humanity over prejudice. For it were idle to think that it was
because of any superiority over the priest and the Levite in his abstract
ideas of the sphere of neighborhood, and of the claims involved in
simple participation of humanity, that this Samaritan acted as he
did. No, it was simply because he obeyed the impulses of a kind
and loving heart, and that these were strong enough to lift him above
all those. prejudices of tribe and caste and faith, to which he, equaUy
with the Jew, was liable.
And was there not good reason for it, that in the records of our
Christian faith, in the teachings of its Divine Author, one solemn
warning of this kind should be lifted up — one illustrious example of
this kind should be exhibited? Our Eedeemer came to establish
another and closer bond of brotherhood than the earth before had
known, to knit aU true believers in the pure and holy fellowship of a
common faith, a common hope, a common heirship of eternal hfe
through him. But he would have us from the beginning know that
this bond, so new, so sacred, so divine, was never meant to thwart
or violate that other broader universal tie that binds the whole family
of our race together, that makes each man the neighbor of every
other man that tenants this earthly globe. Christianity, like Juda
ism, has been perverted — perverted so as seriously to interfere with,
sometimes almost entirely to quench, the sentiment of a universal
philanthropy ; but it has been so only when its true genius and spirit
have been misapprehended ; for of aU influences that have ever de
scended upon our earth, none has ever done so much to break down
the walls of separation, that differences of country, language, race,
rehgion, have raised between man and man, and to diffuse the spirit
438 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of tnat brotherly love which overleaps all these temporary and arti
ficial fences and boundary lines — which, subject to no law of hmits,
is a law itself — which, like the air and hght of heaven, diffuses itself
everywhere around over the broad field of humanity — tempering all,
uniting all, brightening aU, smoothing asperities, harmonizing dis»
cords, pouring a healing balm into all the rankling sores of hfe.
" Which now of the three," said Jesus to the lawyer, " was neigh
bor to him that fell among the thieves ?"
Ashamed to say plainly "The Samaritan," yet unwilling or unable
to exhibit any hesitation in his reply, he said, " He that showed mercy
on him." Then said Jesus unto him, " Go, and do thou likewise." It is
not " Listen and applaud," it is " Go and do." If there be anything
above another that distinguishes the conduct of the good Samaritan,
it is its thoroughly practical character. He wasted no needless sym
pathy, he shed no idle tears. There are wounds that may be dressed —
he puts forth his own hand immediately to the dressing of them.
There is a life that may be saved — he sets himself to use every method
by which it may be saved. He gives more than time, more than
money : he gives personal service. And that is the true human char
ity that shows itself in prompt, efficient, self-forgetful, seU-sacrificing
help. You can get many soft, susceptible, sentimental spirits to weep
over any scene or tale of woe. But it is not those who will weep the
readiest over the sorrow who wiU do the most to relieve it. Sympathy
has its own selfishness ; there is a luxury in the tears that it loves idly
to indulge. Tears wiU fill the eye — should fill the eye — but the hand
of active help wiU brush them away, that the eye may see more
clearly what the hand has to do. Mfllions have heard or read the tale
of the Good Samaritan. Their eyes have glistened and their hearts
have been all aglow in approving, applauding sympathy ; but of all
these miUions, how many are there who imitate the example given,
who have given a day from their business to a suffering brother, who
have waited by the sick, and with their own hand have ministered to
his wants ?
The beauty and force of that special lesson which the story of
the Good Samaritan was intended to convey is mightily enhanced as
we remember how recently our Lord himself had suffered from the
intolerance of the Samaritans ; only a few days before, we know not
how few, having been refused entrance into one of their villages.
He himself then gave an exhibition of the very virtue he designed to
inculcate. But why speak of this as any single minor act of universal
love to mankind on his part? Were not his life and death one con
tinuous manifestation of that love ? Yes, bright as that single act of
THE LORD S PRAYER. 439
the Good Samaritan shines in the annals of human kindness, aU its
brightness fades away in the full blaze of that love of Jesus, which
saw not a single traveller, but our whole race, cast forth naked, bleed
ing, dying, and gave not a day of his time, nor a portion of his rai
ment, but a whole lifetime of service and of suffering, that they might
not perish, but have everlasting Ufe.
XII.
, The Lord's Prayer.*
At some time and in some place of which we must be content to
remain ignorant, Jesus had gone apart from his disciples to pray.
They had noticed his doing so frequently before ; but there was a
peculiarity in this case. He had either separated himseU from them
by so short a distance, or they had come upon him afterwards so
sflently and unobserved, that they stood and listened to him as he
prayed. Perhaps they had never previously overheard our Lord
when engaged in private devotion. The impression made on them
was so deep, the prayer that they had been listening to was so unlike
any that they themselves had ever offered — if that and that only be
prayer, they feel they know so httle how to pray — that, on the im
pulse of the moment, one of them, when Jesus had ceased, said to
him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples."
We do not stand in the same peculiar external circumstances with
him who preferred this request, but the same need is ours There is
access still for us into the presence of our Redeemer, nor is there in
coming to him one petition that should spring more quickly to our
hps, one that can come from them more appropriately, than this —
" Lord, teach us to pray." To pray is to realize the presence of the
Supreme — to come into the closest possible connection with the
greatest of Beings. To pray is to lay our imperfect tribute of ac
knowledgment at his feet — to supplicate for that which we know that
he only can bestow — to bring our sin to him, so that it may be for
given — our wants to him, so that he may supply them as seems best
in his sight. What is our warrant for making such approach? how
may it best be made? what should we ask for? and how should we
ask for it? None can answer these questions for us as Jesus could.
How gladly, then, should we welcome, and how carefully should we
study such answers as he has been pleased to give!
» Luke 11 : 1-13.
440 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
On bringing together aU that Christ has declared in the way of
precept, and iUustrated in the way of example, I think it will appear
that as there is no one duty of the religious life of such preeminent
importance in its direct bearing on our spiritual estate, so there is no
one about the manner of whose right discharge fuller instructions
have been left by him. Thus, in the instance now before us, in
answer to the request presented to him, he at once recited a prayer,
which stands as the pattern or model of aU true prayer. Without
entering into a minute examination of the separate clauses of this
prayer, let me crave your attention to three of the features by which
it is preeminently distinguished.
1. Its shortness and simplicity. It is very plain; not a part or
petition of it which, as soon as it is capable of praying, a child can •
not easfly understand. It is very brief, occupying but a minute or
two in the utterance ; so that there is not a season or occasion for
prayer in which it might not be employed. There is no ambiguity,
no circumlocution, no expansion, no repetition here. It is through
out the direct expression of desire ; that desire in each' case clothing
itseU in the simplest, compactest form of speech. In the Sermon on
the Mount, when Jesus first repeated this prayer, he offered it in
contrast with the tedious amplifications and reiterations of which the
Jewish and heathen prayers were then ordinarily composed. The
Jews, as the heathen of old, as the Mussulmans still, had their set
hours throughout the day for prayer ; and so fond were they of ex
hibiting the punctuality and precision and devoutness with which the
duty was discharged, that they often arranged it so that the set hour
should find them in some public place. Such practice, as altogether
contrary to the spirit and object of true devotion, as part of that
mere dead formalism which it was the great object of his teaching to
unmask, Jesus utterly condemned. " When thou prayest, thou shaft
not be as the hypocrites ; for they love to pray standing in the syna
gogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.
Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou
prayest, enter into thy closet; and when thou hast shut thy door,
pray to thy Father which is in secret ; and thy Father, which seeth
in secret, shall reward thee openly. But when ye pray, use not vain
repetitions, as the heathen do : for they think that they shall be heard
for tlieir much speaking. Be not ye. therefore like unto them: for
your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him.
After this manner pray ye." It was as an antidote to the kind of
prayers then generally employed, as well as a pattern specimen for
after use within the Church, that Jesus then proceeded to repeat the
THE LORD'S PRAYER. 441
prayer which has been called by his name. It was not to he by or be
deposited as a mere standard measure by which other prayers were
to be tried. It was to be used — to be repeated. When, many months
after its first recital, it was said to Jesus, " Lord, teach us to pray, as
John also taught his disciples," he was not satisfied with saying
"Pray generaUy in such a mode or style as this;" he prescribed tht
very words, " When ye pray, say," and he repeated the very prayer
that he formerly had spoken. Not that he put much or any import
ance upon the exact words to be employed. In three out of the six
petitions of which the prayer is made up, there are variations in the
words, not enough to make the shghtest difference in the meaning,
but sufficient to show that it was not simply by a repetition of the
words that the prayer was truly offered. With rigorous exactness,
this prayer might be said over and over again tfll it became a very
vain repetition — aU the vainer, perhaps, because of the very excellence
of the form that was so abused. But over and over again — day by
day — it might be repeated without any such abuse. All depends
upon how you use it. Enter into its meaning — put your own soul
and their own sense into the words — let it be the true and earnest
desires of your heart that you thus breathe into the ear of the Eter
nal — and you need not fear how often you repeat it, or think that
because you say the same words over again you sin. Our Lord him
self, within the compass of an hour, repeated the same prayer thrice
in the garden. Use it, however, as a mere form, with no other idea
than that because it has been "authoritatively prescribed" it ought
to be employed — a single such use of it is sin.
2. The order and proportion of the petitions in the Lord's prayei.
It naturaUy divides itseU into two equal parts ; the one embracing
the first three petitions, the other the three remaining ones — these
parts palpably distinguished from each other by this, that in the
former the petitions all have reference to God, in the latter to man.
In the former the thoughts and desires of the petitioner are aU
engrossed with the name, the kingdom, the will of the great Being
addressed ; in the latter with his own wants, and sins, and trials. It
would be carrying the idea of the Lord's prayer as a pattern, or
model, to an illegitimate length, were we to say that because about
one-half of the prayer is devoted to the first of these objects, and one
haU t: the other, our prayers should be divided equaUy between
&ern. Yet surely there is something to be learned from the prece
dence assigned here to the great things which concern the name, and
kingdom, and will of our Heavenly Father, as well as from the space
which these occupy in this prayer. You have but to reflect a moment
442 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
on the structure and proportion of parts in any of our ordinary pray
ers, whether in private or in pubhc, and especiaUy on the place and
room given in them to petitions touching the coming of God's king
dom, and the doing of his wfll on earth as it is done in heaven, to be
¦satisfied as to the contrast which in this respect they present to the
nodel laid down by Christ himseU. Our prayers, such as they are,
with all their weaknesses and imperfections, wfll not, we are grateful
to remember, be cast out because we yield to a strong natural bias,
and cast into the foreground, and keep prominent throughout, those
personal necessities of our spiritual nature which primarily urge us
to the throne of grace. Our Heavenly Father not only knoweth what
things we need before we ask them, he knoweth also what the things
are, the need of which presses first and heaviest upon our hearts.
Nor wfll he close his ear to any returning, repentant, hungering, and
thirsting spirit, simply because these are pressed first and most
urgently upon his regard. Is it not weU, nevertheless, that we should
be reminded, as the prayer dictated by our Saviour so emphatically
does, that selfishness may and does creep into our very prayers, and
that the perfect form of all right approach, all right address, to the
Divinity, is that in which the place of supremacy which of right be
longs to Him is duly and becomingly recognized. More especially
should it be so in all prayers that go up from this sinful earth t<
those pure and holy heavens ; for U it be true — as the whole body o.
the prayer prescribed by Jesus teaches us that it is — that we are hv
ing in a world where God's name is not haUowed as it ought to be, is
often dishonored and profaned — in a world where God's kingdom of
justice and holiness and love is not universally estabhshed, where
another and quite opposite kingdom contests with it the empire of
human souls — in a world where other wills than that of God are
busily at work, not always consenting to or working under his, but
resisting and opposing it ; — then surely if the name, the kingdom,
the wiU of our Father which is in heaven were as dear to us as they
ought to be, first and above all things besides, we should desire that
his name should be haUowed, his kmgdom should come, his wfll
should be done on earth as it is done in heaven. Let us then as
often as we use this prayer receive with meekness the rebuke it casts
upon that tendency and habit of our nature which leads us even in
our prayers to put our own things before the things of our Heavenly
Father ; and let us urge our laggard spirits onward and upward from
the sense and sight of our personal necessities, till, filled with adora
tion, and gratitude, and love, before we even make mention before
him of a single individual want, we be ready with a true heart to say,
THE LORD'S PRAYER. 443
" Our Father, which art in heaven, haUowed be thy name ; thy king
dom come ; thy wiU be done on earth as it is done in heaven."
And whfle receiving the lesson clearly to be gathered from the
place and space occupied by the first three petitions of our Lord's
prayer, let its fourth petition, in its sequence and in its solitariness.
and in its narrowness, proclaim to us the place even among our owe,
things which earthly and bodily, as compared with spiritual pro
visions, possessions, enjoyments, ought to have. Is it without a
meaning that we are taught to pray first, " Thy will be done," and
then immediately thereafter, "Give us this day our daily bread"?
The bread is to be asked that by it the life may be preserved, and
the hfe is to be preserved that it may be consecrated to the doing of
God's will. According to the tenor of the prayer and the connection
of these two petitions, we are not at hberty to ask for the daily bread
irrespective of the object to which the hfe and strength which it pro
longs and imparts are to be devoted. It were a vain and hollow
thing in any of us to pray that God's will be done, as in heaven, so
on earth, U we do not desire and strive that it should be done, as by
others, so also by ourselves. And it is as those who do thus desire,
and are thus striving, that we are alone at aU likely to proceed to
say, " Give us this day our daily bread." A natural and moderate
request, we may be ready to think, which aU men will at once be
prepared to present to God. Yet not so easy to present in the spirit
in which Jesus would have us offer it. Not so easy to feel our con
tinued and entire dependence on God for those very things that we
are most tempted to think we have acquired by our own exertions,
and secured to ourselves and our families by our own skill and pru
dence. Not so easy to pray for a competent portion of the things of
this hfe, only that by the manner of our using and enjoying them the
will of our Heavenly Father, his own gracious purpose in placing us
where we are placed, and in giving us all that we possess, may be
carried out. Not so easy to limit thus our desires and efforts in this
direction, and to be satisfied with whatever the portion be that God
pleases to bestow. Not so easy to renew this petition, day by day,
as conscious that all which comes each day comes direct from the
hand of God — comes to those who have no right or title to claim it
as their own — who should ask and receive it continually as a gift.
Not so easy to narrow the petition to the day, leaving to-morrow in
God's hands. The simplest and easiest, though it seems at first, of
all the six petitions, perhaps this one about our dafly bread is one
that we less frequently than any other present in the true spirit. It
stands there in the very centre of the prayer — the only one bear-
444 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ing upon our earthly condition — preceded and followed by others,
with whose spirit it must or ought to be impregnated — from which it
cannot be detached. Secular in its first aspect, in this connection
Low spiritual does it appear!
3. The fulness, condensedness, comprehensiveness, universality of
the prayer. Of course it never was intended to confine within the
limits of its few sentences the free spirit of prayer. The example of
our Lord himself, of the apostles, of the Church in aU ages, has taught
us how full and varied are the utterances of the human heart, when
it breathes itself out unrestrainedly unto God in prayer. Where the
Spirit of the Lord is, there is hberty — ample the freedom and wide
the range that the Holy Spirit takes when he throws the human
spirit into the attitude, and sustains it in the exercise of prayer —
prompting those yearnings which cannot be uttered, those desires
and affections which words multipUed to the uttermost fail adequately
to express. In the past history, in the existing condition of every
human soul, there is an infinitude of individual pecuharities. To
forbid all references to these, all manifestations of these in prayer —
to tie every one down at every season to pray as every one else — to
allow no minute confession of particular transgressions, no recital of
the circumstances in which they were committed, aggravations by
which they were accompanied, no acknowledgment of special mercies,
nor glad and grateful recounting how singularly appropriate and sat
isfying they had been — to cramp down within one dry and narrow
mould all the plaints of sorrow, the moanings of penitence, the aspi
rations of desire, the beatings of gratitude, the breathings of love, the
exultations of joy and hope, which fill the human heart, and which,
in moments of filial trust, it would pour out into the ear of the
Eternal — this were indeed to lay the axe at the root of aU devotion.
But while pleading for the very fuUest liberty of prayer, let us not be
insensible of the great benefit there is in ever and anon stepping out
of that circle in which our own personal and particular sorrows and
sins shape and intensify our prayers, into that upper and wider region
in which, laying aU those specialities for the time aside, we join the
great company of the prayerful in all ages, in those few and simple,
yet all-embracing petitions which they and we, and all that have
gone before, and all that shall come after, unite in presenting to the
Hearer and Answerer of prayer. And this is what we do in repeating
Hie Lord's prayer. In it we have, stripped of all secondary or ad
ventitious elements, the concentrated spirit and essence of prayer, a
brief epitome of aU the topics that prayer should embrace, a con
densed expression of all those desires of the heart that should go up
THE LORD'S PRAYER. 445
to God in prayer. It is not a prayer this for any one period of life —
for any one kind of character — for any one outward or inward con
dition of things — f or any one country — for any one age. The child may
lisp its simple sentences as soon as it knows how to pray ; it come9
with no less fitness from the wrinkled lips of age. The penitent in
the first hour of his return to God, the struggler in the thick of the
spiritual conflict, the behever in the highest soarings of his faith and
love, may take up and use alike this prayer. The youngest, th6
oldest, the simplest, the wisest, the most sin-stained, the most saintly,
can find nothing here unsuitable, unseasonable. It gathers up into
one what they aU can and should unite in saying as they bend in
supplication before God. And from the day when first it was pub
hshed on the mount, as our Lord's own directory for prayer, down
through all these eighteen centuries, it has been the single golden
link running through the ages that has bound together in one the
whole vast company of the prayerful. Is there a single Christian
now hving upon earth — is there one among the multitude of the re
deemed now praising God in heaven, who never prayed this prayer ?
I beheve not one. It is not then, as isolated spirits, alone in our
communion with God, it is as units in that unnumbered congregation
of those who have bent, are bending, wfll bend, before the Throne,
that we are to take up and to use this prayer. Not " my Father,"
but "our Father," is its key-note. Let it calm, and soothe, and ele
vate our spirits, as, leaving all that belongs to our own little separate
circle of thoughts, and doubts, and fears, and hopes, and joys, be
hind, we rise to take our place in this vast company, and to mingle
our prayers with theirs.
And to what is it that the Lord's prayer owes especially the uni
versality of its embrace — the omnipotence of its power? To the
special character in which it presents God to aU — the peculiar stand
ing before him into which it invites all to enter. It is not to him as
the great I am, the Omnipotent, the Omnipresent Creator and Lord
of all ; it is not to him as dweUing in the hght that no man can
approach to— as clothed with all the attributes of majesty and power,
and justice, and truth, and holiness, the Moral Governor of the Uni
verse — that it invites us to come. No, but to him as our Father in
heaven — a Father regarding us with infinite pity, loving us with an
everlasting love, wiUing and waiting to bestow, able and ready to
help us. It is to him who taught us this prayer that we owe the
revelation of God to us as such a Father. More than that, it is to
Christ we owe the estabhshment of that close and endearing con
nection of sonship to the Father — a connection which it only remains
446 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
for us to recognize, in order to enter into possession of all its privi
leges and joys. He who taught this prayer to his disciples, taught
them, too, that no man can come unto the Father but through him.
It were a great injustice unto him, if, because he has not named his
own name in this prayer, we should forget that it is he who, by his
Incarnation and Atonement, has so linked God and man, earth and
heaven, together, that all those sentiments of filial trust and con
fidence which this prayer expresses, may and should be cherished by
every individual member of our race. There is not a hving man who
may not use this prayer ; for whfle it is true that no man cometh to
the Father but through Christ, it is equally true — indeed the one
truth is involved in the other — that aU men, every man, may now so
come ; not waiting till he is sure that he is a child of God, has such
faith in God, or gratitude to God, or wilhngness to serve God as he
knows a chfld should cherish ; not grounding his assurance of God's
Fatherhood to him on his sonship to God — no, but welcoming the
assurance given to him in and by Jesus Christ, that God is his Father,
and using that very Fatherhood as his plea in his first and last, his
every approach to him. To each and every one of the multitude
upon the mountain-side of Galilee — to them just as they were — to
them simply as sons of men, partakers of that humanity which he
also shared, Jesus said, " God is your Father, treat him as your
Father, commend your future to him, cast all your care upon him as
such." " Take no thought, saying, What shaU we eat ? or, What
shaU we drink ? or, Wherewithal shaU we be clothed ? Your heavenly
Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." Pray to
him as such, then. "When thou prayest, pray to thy Father which
seeth in secret." After this manner pray ye — " Our Father which
art in heaven." And what Jesus said to the multitude on the moun
tain-side, he says to every child of Adam. Was it not indeed upon
the existence and character of that very relationship of God to us
and to aU men that Jesus grounded the assurance he would have us
cherish that our prayers shaU not, cannot, go up in vain to heaven ?
For it is worthy of remark that on both occasions when this prayer
was recited within the compass of the same discourse, shortly after
he had repeated it — as U his thoughts were returning to the subject,
and he wished to fix firm in the hearts of his disciples a faith in the
efficacy of such prayer — he added, " I say unto you, Ask, and it shall
be given ; seek, and ye shaU find ; knock, and it shaU be opened unto
you. For every one that asketh " — asks as I have told you he should,
or for what I have told you he should — "every one that asketh,
receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it
JESUS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 447
shall be opened. If a son shaU ask bread of any of you that is a
father, wfll he give him a stone ? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish
give him a serpent ? . . . . U ye, then, being evil, know how to give
good gUts unto your children, how much more shaU your Heavenly
Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him!"
XIII.
Jesus the Resurrection and the Life.
Christ's first visit to Peraea, on his way up to the Feast of Dedi
cation, was one of much locomotion and manifold activities. His
second was dedicated rather to seclusion and repose. He retired to
one chosen and haUowed spot — the place where John at first bap
tized—where he himself had first entered on his public ministry.
Many resorted to him there, and many believed on him, but he did
not go about as he had done before. Living in quiet with his dis
ciples, a message came to him from Bethany. Some sore malady
had seized upon Lazarus. His sisters early think of that kind friend,
who they knew had cured so many others, and who surely would not
be unwilling to succor them in their distress, and heal their brother ;
but they knew what had driven him lately from Jerusalem, and are
unwilling to break in upon his retirement, or ask him to expose him
seU once more to the deadly hatred of his enemies. The disease runs
on its course; Lazarus is on the very point of death. They can
refrain no longer. They send off a messenger to Jesus. No urgent
entreaty, however, is conveyed that he should hasten to their relief.
No course is dictated. No desire even expressed. They think it is
not needed. They remember all the kindnesses they had afready
experienced at his hands — how often he had made their house his
home — what special marks of personal attachment and regard he
had shown to themselves and to their brother. They deem it enough,
therefore, to bid their messenger say, as soon as he met Jesus,
"Lord, he whom thou lovest is sick." Jesus hears the message,
and, without giving any other indication of his purpose, simply says,
"This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the
Son of God might be glorified thereby." This is all the answer that
he makes to a message so simply and delicately expressed ; by that
very simplicity and dehcacy making all the stronger appeal to his
sympathy. Nothing more being said by Jesus, nor anything further
• John 10 : 39-42 ; 11 : 1-27.
448 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
apparently intended to be done, the messenger of the. anxious sisters
has to be satisfied with this. It seems to be so far' satisfactory :
"This sickness is not unto death." Jesus either knows that Lazarus
is to recover, or he is to take some method of averting death — is to
cure him; may have already done so by a word spoken — a volition
formed at a distance. Treasuring up the sentence that he has heard
uttered, and extracting from it such comfort as he can, the messenger
returns to Bethany, and Jesus remains stfll two days in the place
where he was. During these two days the incidents of the message
and the answer fail not to be the subject of frequent converse among
the disciples. They too might understand it to be the reason of
their Master's saying and doing nothing further in the matter, that
he was aware that the death the sisters dreaded was not to happen;
or they too might think that his great power had already been exerted
on behalf of one whom they knew he loved so much. So might they
interpret the saying, "This sickness is not unto death;" but what can
they make of those other words by which these had been followed
up ? How could it be said of this sickness of Lazarus, whether it
left him naturaUy or was removed by a mysterious exercise of their
Master's powers of heahng, that it was to be "for the glory of God, .
that the Son of God might be glorified thereby"? This was saying
a great deal more of the illness, however cured, than, so far as they
can see, could be truly and fitly said of it. No further explanation,
however, is made by Jesus, and they must wait the issue.
Two days afterwards Jesus calmly and resolutely, but somewhat
abruptly and unexpectedly, says to them, "Let us go into Judea
again." Though nothing was said or hinted about the object of the
proposed visit, it would be very natural that the disciples should con
nect it with the message that had come from Bethany. But U it
was to cure Lazarus that Christ was going, why had he not gone
sooner? If the sickness that had been reported to him was not unto
death, why go at aU? why expose himself .afresh to the mahce of
those who were evidently bent upon his destruction? "Master,"
they say to him, " the Jews of late sought to stone thee, and goest
thou thither again?" a remonstrance dictated by a sincere and laud
able solicitude for their Master's safety, yet not without ingredients
of ignorance and mistrust. "Are there not," said Jesus in reply,
"twelve hours in the day?" 'My time for working, for the doing
&he will of my Father which is in heaven, is it not a set time, its
bounds as fixed as those of the natural day, having, hke it, its twelve
hours, that no man can take from and no man can add to? The
hours of this my aUotted period for finishing my earthly work mast
JESUS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 449
run out their course ; and whfle they are running, so long as I am
upon the path marked out for me, walking by the light that comes
from heaven, they cannot be shortened, go where I may ; so long as
I go under my Father's guidance, so long as I do what he desires,
my hfe is safe. True, eleven hours of this my day may be already
gone ; I may have entered upon the last and tweUth, but tfll it end
a shield of defence is round me that none can break through. Fear
not for me then, till that twelfth hour strike I am as safe in Judea as
here. And for your own comfort, know that what is true of me is
time of every man who walks in God's own hght — the light that the
guiding Spirit gives to every man — kindled within his soul to direct
him through all his earthly work. If any man walk in that light, he
will not, cannot stumble, or fall, or perish ; but U he walk in the night,
go where he is not caUed, do what he is not bidden, then he stumbleth,
because there is no hght in him. He has turned the day into night,
and the doom of the night-traveUer hangs over him.'
He pauses to let these weighty truths sink deep into the disciples'
hearts, then, turning to them, he says, " Our friend Lazarus sleepeth,
but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." In their anxiety about
their Master they had forgotten their absent friend whose love to Jesus
had flowed over upon them, to whom they also were attached. How
humanly, how tenderly does the phrase " our friend Lazarus " recaU
him to their thoughts ! It would seem as if the ties that knit our
Lord to the members of that family at Bethany had been formed for
this as for other reasons, to show how open the heart of Jesus was,
not merely to a universal love to aU mankind, but to the more pecu
liar and specific affections of friendship. Among the twelve there
was one whom he particularly loved ; among the famihes he visited
there was one to which he was particularly attached. Outside the
circle of his immediate foUowers there was one whom he called his
friend. Had he not already so distinctly said that his sickness was not
unto death, the disciples, remembering that he had said of Jairus'
daughter, " she is not dead, but sleepeth," might at first have caught
the true meaning of their Master's words ; but the idea of the death of
Lazarus is so far from their thoughts, that they put the first interpre
tation on them that occurs, and without thinking on the worse than
trifling end that they were thus attributing to Christ as the declared
purpose of his proposed visit, they say, "Lord, if he sleep, he shall
do well." Then said Jesus unto them plainly, " Lazarus is dead ; and
I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may
believe ; nevertheless let us go unto him." Glad that he was not
there ! Yes, for it spared him the pain of looking at his friend in his
nil oi ciiri.t, 99
450 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
agony, at his sisters in their grief. Glad ; for had he been there.
could he have resisted the appeal of such a deathbed over which
such mourners were bending ? Could he, though meaning afterwards
to raise him from the dead, have stood by and seen Lazarus depart ?
Glad that he was not there! Was he insensible, then, to all the
pangs which that departure must have cost Martha and Mary — this
one among the rest, that he was not there, and had not come when
sent for ? Was he insensible to the four days' weeping for the dead
that his absence had entailed ? Glad that he was not there ! Had
the mourning sisters heard the words, they might have fancied that
his affection for their family had suffered a sudden chiU. But there
was no lack of sensibihty to their sufferings ; his sympathies with
them had suffered no reverse. It was not that he loved or pitied
them the less. It was that his sympathies, instead of resting on the
single household of Bethany, were taking in the wider circle of his
discipleship, and through them, or along with them, the whole family
of our sinful, suffering humanity. It was with a calm, deliberate
forethought that, on hearing of the sickness, he aUowed two days to
pass without any movement made to Bethany. He knew when Laz
arus died — knew that he had died two days before he told his disci
ples of it, for the death, followed by speedy burial, must have occurred
soon after the messenger left Bethany, in aU likelihood before he
reached the place where Jesus was ; for if a day's journey carried
the messenger (as it might have done to Bethabara), and another
such day of travel carried Jesus and his disciples back again to Beth
any, as Lazarus was four days in the grave when Jesus reached the
spot, his decease must have taken place within a very short time
after the original despatch of the message. Knowing when it hap
pened, Jesus did not desire to be present at it — deliberately arranged
it so that it should not be tfll four days after the- interment that he
should appear in Bethany. He had already in remote Galilee raised
two from the dead — one soon after death, the other before burial.
But now, in the immediate neighborhood of Jerusalem, in presence
of a mixed company of friends and enemies, he has resolved, in rais
ing Lazarus, to perform the great closing, crowning miracle of his
ministry ; and he will do it so that not the most captious or the most
incredulous can question the reality either of the death or of the res
urrection. It was to be our Lord's last pubhc appearance among the
Jews previous to his crucifixion. It was to be the last pubhc miracle
he was to be permitted to work. From the day that this great deed
was done was to date the formal resolution of the Sanhedrim to put
him to death. This close connection of the raising of Lazarus with
JESUS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 451
his own decease was clearly before his eye. His sayings and doings
at Bethabara show with what deep interest he himself looked for
ward to the issue. If we cannot with certainty say that no miracle
he ever wrought occupied beforehand so much of our Saviour's
thoughts, we can say that no other miracle was predicted and pre
pared for as this one was.
"Lazarus is dead nevertheless let us go unto him." Had
the disciples but remembered their Master's first words, to which the
key had now been put into their hands, they might at once have
gathered what the object of that journey was in which Jesus invited
them to accompany him, and the thought of it might have banished
other fancies and other fears. But slow to realize the glory of the
coming and predicted miracle, or quick to connect it with the after-
risk and danger, they hesitate. One there is among them as slow in
faith as the slowest — fuUer, perhaps, than any of them of mistrust —
yet quick and fervid in his love, seeing" nothing but death before
Jesus if once he shows himself at Jerusalem — who says unto his fel
low-disciples, "Let us also go, that we may die with him:" the ex
pression of a gloomy and somewhat obstinate despondency, sinking
into despair, yet at the same time of heroic and chivalrous attach
ment. Jesus says nothing to the utterer of this speech. He waits
for other and after occasions to take Thomas into his hands, and turn
his incredulity into warm and living faith.
The group journeys on to Bethany, and at last comes near the
village. Some one has witnessed its approach, and goes with the
tidings to where the mourning sisters and those who have to comfort
them are sitting. It may have been into Martha's ear that the tid
ings are first whispered — Mary beside her, too overwhelmed with
grief to hear. As soon as she hears that Jesus is coming, Martha
rises and goes out to meet him. Mary, whether she hears or not,
sees her sister rise and go, yet stays stfll in the house — the two sis
ters, the one in her eager movement, the other in her quiet rest, here
as elsewhere showing forth the difference of their characters. Mar
tha is soon in the Saviour's presence. The sight of Jesus fills her
heart with strange and conflicting emotions. In his kind look she
reads the same affectionate regard he had ever shown. Yet had he
not delayed coming to them in their hour of greatest need? She
will not reproach, for her confidence is still unbroken. Yet she can
not help feehng what looked liked forgetfulness or neglect. Above
all such personal feelings the thought of her dead brother rises. She
thinks of- the strange words the messenger had reported. She knows
not weU what they could have meant, to what they could have point-
452 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ed ; but the hope still lingers in her heart, that now that he at last
is here, the love and power of Jesus may find some way of manifest
ing themselves — perhaps even in recalling Lazarus from the dead.
And in the tumult of these mixed feelings — in the agitation of regret
and confidence, and grief and hope — she breaks out in the simple but
pathetic utterance, " Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had
not died " — ' it is what Mary and I have been saying to ourselves and
to one another, over and over again, ever since that sad and sorrow
ful hour. If only thou hadst been here ! I do not blame you for
not being here. I do not know what can have kept you from com
ing. I will not doubt or distrust your love — but if thou hadst been
here my brother had not died — you could, you would have kept him
from dying — you could, you would have raised him up, and given
him back to us in, health. Nay, "I know that even now whatsoever
thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee." '
The reply of Jesus seems almost to have been framed for the very
purpose of checking the hope that was obviously rising in Martha's
breast. " Thy brother," he says, "shaU rise again" — words not in
deed absolutely precluding the possibihty of a present restoration of
her brother to lUe, but naturally directing her thoughts away from
such a restoration to the general resurrection of the dead. Such at
least is their effect upon Martha, as is evident from her reply, "I
know that he shaU rise again in the resurrection at the last day " —
a reply which, though it proved the firmness of her faith in the future
and general resurrection of the dead, indicated something hke disap
pointment at what Jesus said. But our Lord's great object in enter
ing into this conversation had now been gained. Instead of fostering
the expectation of immediate relief, he had drawn Martha's thoughts
off for a time from the present, and fixed them upon the distant
future of the invisible and eternal world. Having created thus the
fit opportunity — here on the eve of performing the greatest of his
miracles — here in converse with one of sincere but imperfect faith,
plunged in grief, and seeking only the recovery of a lost brother,
Jesus says, " I am the resurrection and the lUe ; he that believeth on
me, though he were dead, yet shaU he live ; and whosoever liveth and
believeth on me shall never die " — as U he had said, 'Martha, Martha,
thou wert troubled once when I was in your dweUing with the petty
cares of your household, but now a heavier trouble has come upon
your heart. You mourn a brother's death, but would that even now
I could raise your thoughts above the consideration of the life, the
death, the resurrection of the perishable body, to the infinitely more
momentous one of the life and the death of the indweUing, the im>
JESUS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 453
mortal soul ! You are looking to me with a lingering hope that I
might find some way to assuage your present grief by giving back to
you the brother that lies buried. You beheve so far in me as to have
the confidence that whatever I asked of God, God would give it me.
Would that I could get you and all to look to me in another and far
higher character than the assuager of human sorrow, the bringer of
a present relief ; that I could fix your faith upon, me as the Prince of
hfe, the author, the bestower, the originator, the supporter, the ma
turer of that eternal life within the soul over which death hath so
little dominion — that whosoever once hath this lUe begun, in dying
still hves, and in living can never die.' For let us notice, as helping
us to a true comprehension of these wonderful words of our Bedeemer,
that immediately after their utterance, he addressed to Martha the
pointed question, " Believest thou this ?" It was not unusual for our
Lord to ask some profession of faith in his power to help from those
on whom or for whom that power was about to be exerted. He did
not need to ask any such profession from Martha. She had already
declared her full assurance that he had the power of Deity at com
mand. The very manner in which the question was put to Martha,
" Believest thou this ?" plainly intimates that some weighty truth lay
¦Trapped up in the words just uttered beyond any to which she had
already assented. Had there been nothing in what Christ now said
beyond what Martha had previously believed — to which he had
already testified — such an interrogation would have been without a
meaning. It cannot be a mere proclamation of the immortality of
the soul and the resurrection of the body, and of Christ's connection
with them, either as their human announcer or their Divine author,
that is here made. No such interpretation would explain or justify
the language here employed. The primary and general assertion, " I
am the resurrection and the life," gets its only true significance assign
ed to it by the two explanatory statements with which it was followed
up. "I am the hfe," said Jesus, not in any general sense as being
the great originator and sustainer of the soul's existence, but in this
peculiar and specific sense, that "whosoever hveth and believeth on
me'* — or rather, liveth by believing on me — "shall never die." And
" I am the resurrection " in this sense, that " whosoever believeth on
me, though he were dead, yet shaU he hve."
Such language connects, in some peculiar way, the life and
resurrection that Jesus is now speaking of with believing on him ; it
at least implies that he has some other and closer connection with
the lUe and the resurrection of men who believe than he has with
those of men who beheve not. Jesus, in fact, is here, in these mem-
454 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
orable words, only proclaiming to Martha, and through her to the
world of sinners he came to save, what the great end of his mission
is, and how it is that that end is accomplished. Sin entered into this
world, and death— not the dissolution of the body, but spiritual
death — this death by sin. "In the day thou eatest thereof thou
shalt die." And the death came with the first transgression. The
pulse of the true spiritual life, of life in. God and to God, ceased its
beatings. Death reigned in all its coldness; the warmth of a per
vading love to God had gone, and the chill of a pervading fear seized
upon the soul. Death reigned in all its silence, for the voice of cease
less prayer and praise was hushed. It rained in aU its torpid inac
tivity, for no longer was there a continued putting forth of the entire
energies of the spirit in the service of its Maker. And the same
death that came upon the first transgressor has passed upon aU men,
for that aU have sinned. And if to be under condemnation be death,
if to be carnally-minded be death ; if amid all the variety of motives by
which we naturally are influenced, there be, but at lengthened inter
vals, a weak and partial regard to that Great Being whom no creature
can altogether banish from his thoughts, then surely the Scriptures
err not in the representation that it was into a world of the dead that
Jesus came. He came to be the quickener of the dead ; having hfe
in himseU, to give of this life to all who came to him for it. " The
life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show
unto you that eternal life which was with the Father, and was mani
fested unto us." " In this was manifested the love of God toward us,
because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we
might live through him." " And we know that the Son of God is
come. This is the true God and eternal hfe." "And this is the rec
ord that God hath given unto us eternal hfe, and this life is in his
Son. He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of
God hath not life. These things have I written unto you that beheve
on the name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eter
nal life, and that ye may beheve on the name of the Son of God."
Such are the testimonies borne by a single apostle in one short
epistle (1st Epistle of John). More striking than any other words
upon this subject are those of our Lord himseU. Take up the gos
pel of St John, the special record of those discourses of our Lord in
which he most fully unfolded himself, telling who he was, and what
he came to this earth to do, and you wiU not find one of them in
which the central idea of life coming to the dead through him is not
presented. Thus, in the conversation with Nicodemus on the occa
sion of his first Passover, you hear him say: "As Moses lUted up the
JESUS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 455
erpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be hfted up .
iiat whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal
fe. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten
on,- that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have
verlasting life." John 3:14-16. Thus, also, in his conversation
ith the woman of Samaria : " If thou knewest the gift of God, and
'ho it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink ; thou wouldest have
sked of him, and he would have given thee living" (life-giving)
water. Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again : but
•hosoever drinketh of the water that I shaU give him shaU never
hirst ; but the water that I shaU give him shall be in him a weU of
•ater springing up into everlasting life." John 4:10-14. Thus, also,
i his next discourse at Jerusalem, on the occasion of his second
'assover : " For as the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth
hem ; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will. Verily, verily, I
ay imto you, he that heareth my word, and believeth on him that
ent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation ;
mt is passed from death unto lUe. Ye wiU not come unto me that
e might have hfe." John 5:21, 24, 40. Thus, also, in the great
iiscourse delivered after the feeding of the five thousand : " This is
be Father's wiU which hath sent me, that every one which seeth tbe
ion, and beheveth on him, may have everlasting life : and I will raise
inn up at the last day. I am that bread of life. This is the bread
rhich cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and
lot die. If any man eat of this bread, he shall hve for ever : and the
iread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of
he world. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of
he Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. He that
ateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in
dm." John 6 : 39, 40, 48, 50, 51, 53, 56. Thus, also, at the Feast of
Tabernacles : " I am the light of the world : he that followeth me shaU
tot walk in darkness, but shall have the hght of hfe. Verily, verily,
say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death."
rohn 8: 12, 51. Thus, also, at the Feast of Dedication : " My sheep
tear my voice, and they follow me, and I give unto them eternal life ;
.nd they shall never perish, neither shaU any man pluck them out of
ay hand." John 10 : 27, 28. And so also on the eve of his last and
jreatest miracle : " I am the resurrection and the hfe : he that believ-
th' in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and whosoever
iveth and beheveth in me shaU never die." Is there nothing strik-
Qg in it that, from first to last, running through all these discourses
'f our Saviour — to be found in every one of them without a single
456 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
exception — this should be held out to us by our Lord himself as the
great end and object of his hfe and death — that we, who were all
dead in trespasses and sins, alienated from the life of God, should
find for these dead souls of ours a higher and everlasting life ir
him? The lUe of the soul hes, first, in the enjoyment of God's favor — in
the light of his reconciled countenance shining upon it, in the ever
lasting arms of his love and power embracing it. The great obstacle
to our entrance upon this Ufe is conscious guilt, the sense of having
forfeited the favor, incurred the wrath of God. This obstacle Christ
bas taken out of the way by dying for us, by bearing our sins in his
own body on the tree. There is redemption for us through his blood,
even the forgiveness of our sins. Not that the cross is a talisman
which works with a hidden, mystic, unknown, unfelt power — not that
the blood of the great sacrifice is one that cleanseth past guilt away,
leaving the old corruption untouched and unsubdued. Jesus is the
lUe in a farther and far higher sense than the opener of a free
way of access to God through the rent veil of his flesh. He is the
perennial source of that new life within, which consists in communion
with God, likeness to God, in gratitude, in love, in peace, and joy,
and hope — in trusting, serving, submitting, enduring. This hfe hangs
ever and wholly upon him; all good and gracious affections, every
pure and holy impulse, the desire and ability to be, to do, to suffer —
coming to us from him to whose light we bring our darkness, to
whose strength we bring our weakness, to whose sympathy our sor
row, to whose fulness our emptiness. Our natural lUe, derived origi
nally from another, is for a season dependent on its source, but that
dependence weakens and at last expires. The infant hangs helplessly
upon its mother at the first. But the infant grows into the child,
the child into the man — the two lives separate. Not such our spirit
ual life. Coming to us at first from Christ, it comes equally and
entirely from him ever afterwards. It grows, but never away from
him. It gets firmer, more matured; but its greater firmness and
maturity it owes to closer contact with him — simpler and more entire
dependence on him, deeper and hoher love to him. It is as the
branch is in the vine, having no lUe when parted from it ; and as a
child is in its parent, that believers are in Christ. There is but one
relationship, of Son to Father — one wholly unique — which fitly repre
sents this union, which was employed by Christ himself to do so.
"That tbey all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee,
that they also may be one in us. I in them and thou in me, that they
may be made perfect in one." It is indeed but the infancy of that
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 457
life which Ues in such oneness with the Son and the Father, that is
to be witnessed here on earth. Yet within that feeble infancy are
the germinating seeds of an endless, an ever-progressive, an inde
structible existence, raised by its very nature above the dominion of
death ; bound by ties indissoluble to him who was dead and is alive
again, and hveth for evermore ; an existence destined to run on its
everlasting course, getting ever nearer and nearer, growing ever hker
and liker to him from whom it flows.
Amid the death-like torpor which hath faUen upon us, stripping
us of the desire and power to hve whoUy in God and whoUy for God,
who would not wish to feel the quickening touch of the great hfe-
giver, Jesus Christ — to be raised to newness of life in him — to have
our life bound up with his for ever — hid with him in God ? This —
nothing less than this, nothing lower than this — is set before us.
Who would not wish to see and feel it realized in his present, his
future, his eternal existence ? Then, let us cleave to Christ, resolved
in him to live, desiring in him to die, that with him we may be raised
at last, at the resurrection, on the great day, to those heavenly places
where, free from aU weakness, vicissitude, corruption, and decay, this
fife shaU be expanded and matured throughout the bright ages of an
unshadowed eternity.
XIV.
The Raising of Lazarus."
It is not hkely that Martha understood in its fuU meaning what
Christ had said about his being the Eesurrection and the Life. So
far, however, as she did comprehend, she believed ; and so when Jesus
said to her, "Believest thou this?" — understanding that he had
spoken about himself, and wished from her some expression of her
faith — she said to him, "Yea, I believe that thou art the Christ, the
Son of God, which should come into the world." With crude ideas
of the character and offices they attributed to him, many were ready
to caU Jesus the Christ, to believe that he was the Messias spoken of
by the prophets. Martha's confession went much farther than tlds :
she beheved him to be also the Son of God, to be that for claiming
to be which the Jews had been ready to stone him, as one making
himseU equal with God. It may have been, regarding him too much
« John 11: 27-54.
458 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
as a mere man having power with God, that she had previously said,
" But I know that even now whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God
will give it thee;" but now that her thoughts are concentrated upon
it, she tells out aU the faith that is in her, and in so doing ranks
herself beside Peter and the very few who at that time could have
joined in the confession, "I beheve that thou art the Christ, the Son
of the living God."
Had Mary and Lazarus not been in his thoughts Jesus might have
pronounced over Martha the same benediction that he did over Peter,
and said to her, "Blessed art thou, Martha, for flesh and blood hath
not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven." As it
is, he simply accepts the good confession, and bids Martha go and
call her sister.
Mary had not heard at first of the Lord's coming, or, U she had,
was too absorbed in her sorrow to heed it. But now when Martha
whispers in her ear, " The Master is come and caUeth for thee," she
rises and hastens out to where Jesus is, outside the viUage. No one
had followed Martha when she went out there. But there was such
an unusual quickness, such a fresh and eager excitement in this move
ment of Mary, that those around her ran with her and followed, say
ing, " She goeth unto the grave to weep there." Thus did she draw
along with her the large company that was to witness the great
miracle. Once again in the Master's presence, Mary is overwhelmed with
emotion. She falls weeping at his feet; has nothing to say as she
looks up at him through her tears but what Martha had said before :
"Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." Her
grief checks all further utterance. Nor has Jesus any thing to say.
Mary is weeping at his feet, Martha is weeping at his side, the Jews
are weeping all around. This is what death had done, desolating a
once happy home, rending with such bitter grief the two sisters'
hearts, melting into kindred sorrow the hearts of friends and neigh
bors. The calm that had its natural home in the breast of the Ee
deemer is broken up: he grieves in spirit and is troubled. Too
heavy in heart himself, too troubled in spirit, as he stands with
hearts breaking and tears falling all around him, to have any
words of counsel or comfort for Mary such as he addressed to
Martha, he can only say, " Where have ye laid him ?" They say
to him, "Lord, come and see." He can restrain no longer. He
wept. What shall we think or say of these tears of Jesus ? There were
some among those who saw him shed them, who, looking at them in
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 45b
their first and simplest aspect — as tears shed over the grave of a
departed friend — said one to another, " Behold how he loved him ! "
There were others not sharing so much in the sisters' grief, who were
at leisure to say, "Could not this man, which opened the eyes of tho
blind, have caused that even this man should not have died?" 'If
he could have saved him, why did he not do it? He may weep now
himseU: had it not been better that he had saved these two poor
sisters from weeping?' We take our station beside these men. With
the first we say, Behold how he pities ! See in the tears he sheds
what a singular sympathy with human sorrow the,re is within his
heart — a sympathy deeper and purer than we have ever elsewhere
seen expressed. To weep with others or for others is no unusual
thing, and carries with it no evidence of extraordinary tenderness of
spirit. It is what at some time or other of their lives all men have
done. But there is a peculiarity in the tears of Jesus that separates
them from all others — that gives them a new meaning and a new
power. For where is Jesus when he weeps? a few paces from
the tomb of Lazarus; and what is he about immediately to do?
to raise the dead man from the grave, and give him back to his
sisters. Only imagine that, gUted with such a power, you had gone
on such an errand, and stood on the very edge of its execution, would
not your .whole soul be occupied with the great thing you were about
to do, the great joy you were about to cause ? You might see the
sisters of the dead one weeping, but, knowing how very soon you
were about to turn their grief into gladness, the sight would only
hasten you forward on your way. But though knowing what a per
fect balm he was so soon to lay upon all the sorrow, Jesus shows
himself so sensitive to the simple touch of grief, that even in such
peculiar circumstances he cannot see others weeping without weep
ing along with them. How exquisitely tender the sympathy man
ifested in the tears that in such peculiar circumstances were shed !
Again we take our station beside the onlookers, and to the second
set of speakers we would say — he could have caused that this man
had not died. But his are no false tears, though shed over a calam
ity he could have prevented. He aUowed Lazarus to die, he aUowed
his sisters to suffer all this woe, not that he loved them less, but
because he knew that for him, for them, for others, for us aU, higher
ends were in this way gained than could have been accomplished by
his cutting the illness short, and going from Bethabara to cure.
Little did the weeping sisters know what a place in the annals of
redemption the death and resurrection of their brother was to
occupy. How earnestly in the course of the illness did they pray
460 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
for his recovery! How eagerly did they despatch their messenger tc
Jesus ! A single beam of hght fell on the darkness when the mes
senger brought back as answer the words he had heard Jesus utter —
" This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the
Son of God might be glorified thereby." What other meaning could
they put upon the words, but that either their brother was to recover,
or Jesus was to interfere and heal him ? Their brother died, and all
the more bitterly because of their disappointment did they bemoan
his loss. But what thought they when they got him. back again —
what thought they when they heard of Christ's own death and resur
rection — what thought they when they came to know, as they had
never known before, that Jesus was indeed the abolisher of death,
the bringer of hfe and immortality to hght? Would they then have
wished that their brother had not died — that they had been saved
their tears, but lost the haUowed resurrection-birth of their brother
to his Lord, lost to memory the chiefest treasure that time gave to
carry with them into eternity ?
Groaning again in spirit, Jesus came to the grave. It was a cave,
and a stone covered the niche within which the body of the dead
was lying. Jesus said, "Take ye away the stone." The doing so
would at once expose the dead, and let loose the foul effluvium of the
advanced decomposition. The careful Martha, whose active spirit
ever busied itself with the outward and tangible side of things, at
once perceives this, and hastens to interpose a check. Gently, but
chidingly, the Lord said unto her, " Said I not unto thee, that, U thou
wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?" 'Was it
not told thee in the words brought back by thy messenger that this
sickness was to be for the glory of God — a glory waiting yet to be
revealed? Have I not been trying to awaken thy faith in myself, as
the resurrection and the hfe? Why think, then, of the existing state
of thy brother's body ? Why not let faith anticipate the future, and
put all such lower thoughts and cares away ? ' The rebuke was gently
given ; but given at such a time, and in such presence, it must have
fallen heavily upon poor Martha's heart.
And now the order is obeyed. Taking a hasty glance within, the
removers of the stone withdraw. Jesus stands before the open sepul
chre. But all is not ready yet. There is to be a slowness, a solem
nity in every step that shaU wind up every spirit to the topmost point
of expectation. Jesus lifts his eyes to heaven and prays, not to ask
God to work the miracle, or give him power to do so. So might
Moses, or Elijah, or any other of the great miracle-workers of earlier
times have done, proclaiming thereby in whose name it was and by
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 461
whose power they wrought. Jesus never did so. He stands alone
in this respect. All that he did was done indeed in conjunction with
the Father. He was careful to declare that the Son did nothing of
himself, nothing independently. It was in faith, with prayer, that all
his mighty works were wrought ; but the faith was as peculiar as the
prayer — both such as he alone could cherish and present. Ordina
rily the faith was hidden in his heart, the prayer was in secret, unut-
tered and unheard. But now he would have it known how close was
the union between him and the Father. He would turn the ap
proaching miracle into an open and incontrovertible evidence that he
was the Sent of the Father, the Son of God. And so, in words of
thanksgiving rather than of petition, he says, "Father, I thank thee
that thou hast heard me" — the silent prayer had already been heard
and answered — "And I knew that thou hearest me always," 'that thy
hearing is not pecuhar to this case, for as I am always praying, so
thou art always answering' — "but because of the people which stand
by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me." In nc
more solemn manner could the fact of his mission from the Father,
and of the full consent and continued cooperation of the Father with
him in all he said and did, be suspended upon the issue of the words
that next come from his lips: "And when he thus had spoken, he
cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth." The hour has come
for the dead to hear and hve. At once, and at that summons, the
body hves, starts into hfe again, not as it had died, the life injected
into a worn and haggard frame. It gets back in a moment all its
healthful vigor. At once, too, and at that summons, from a dream
less sleep that left it nothing to tell about the four days' interval, or
from a region the secrets of which it was not permitted to disclose,
the spirit returns to its former habitation. Lazarus rises and stands
erect. But he is bound hand and foot, a napkin is over his face and
across his eyes. So bound, as good as blind, he could take but a few
timid shuffling steps in advance. "Loose him," said Jesus, "and let
him go." They do it. He can see now all around. He can go
where he pleases. Shall we doubt that the first use he makes of
sight and liberty is to go and cast himself at the Eedeemer's feet?
" Take ye away the stone," "Loose him, and let him go." Christ
could easily by the word of his great power have removed the stone,
untied the bandages. But he does not do so. There is to be no idle
expenditure of the Divine energy. What human hands are fit for,
human hands must do. The earthly and the heavenly, as in all
Christ's workings, blend harmoniously together. So is it stfll in
that spiritual world in which he still is working the wonders of his
462 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
grace, raising dead souls to Ufe, and nourishing the life that is so
begotten. It is not for us to quicken the spirituaUy dead. No human voice
has power to pierce the closed ear, to reach the dull, cold heart.
The voice of Jesus can alone do that. But there are stones of
obstruction which keep that voice from being heard. These we can
remove. The ignorant can be taught, the name of Jesus be made
known, the glad tidings of salvation pubhshed abroad. And when at
the divine call the new life has entered into the soul, by how many
bonds and hgaments, prejudices of the understanding, old holds of
the affections, old habits of the life, is it hampered and hindered!
These, as cramping our own or others' higher life, we may help to
untie and fling away.
But the crowning lesson of the great miracle is the mingled exhi
bition that it makes of the humanity and divinity of our Lord. No
where, at no time in all his life, did he appear more perfectly human,
show himself more openly or fully to be one with us, our true and
tender elder brother, than whan he burst into tears before the grave
of Lazarus. Nowhere, at no time, did he appear more divine than
when with the loud voice he cried, "Lazarus, come forth," and at the
voice the dead arose and came forth. And it is just because there
meet in him the richness and the tenderness of an altogether human
pity and the fulness of a divine power, that he so exactly and so com
pletely satisfies the deepest inward cravings of the human heart. In
our sins, in our sorrows, in our weaknesses, in our doubts, in oui
fears, we need sympathy of others who have passed through the same
experience. We crave it. When we get it we bless the giver, for in
truth it does more than aU things else. But there are many barriers
in the way of our obtaining it, and there are many hmits which con
fine it when it is obtained. Many do not know us. They are so dif
ferently constituted, that what troubles us does not trouble them.
They look upon all our inward struggles and vexations as needless
and seU-imposed, so that just in proportion to the speciahty of our
trial is the narrowness of the circle from which we can look for any
true sympathy. But even were we to find the one in aU the earth by
nature most qualified to enter into our feehngs, how many are the
chances that we should find his sympathy preoccupied, to the full
engaged, without time or without patience to make himseU so master
of aU the circumstances of our lot, and aU the windings of our
thoughts and our affections, as to enable him to feel with us and for
us, as he even might have done ! But that which we may search the
world for without finding is ours in Jesus Christ. AU impediments
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 463
removed, all Umitations hfted off — how true, how tender, how ton-
stant, how abiding is his brotherly sympathy — the sympathy of one
who knows our frame, who remembers we are dust, of one who knows
all about, all within us, and who is touched with a fellow-feeling of
our infirmities, "having himself been tempted in aU things like as we
are." It is not simply the pity of God, with all its fulness and ten
derness : that had not come so close to us, taken such a hold of us '
it is the sympathy of a brother-man that Jesus extends to us, free
from all the restrictions to which such sympathy is ordinarily sub
jected. But we need more than that sympathy ; we need succor. Besides
the heart tender enough to pity, we need the hand strong enough to
help, to save us. We not only want one to be with us and feel with
us in our hours of simple sorrow, we want one to be with us and aid
us in our hours of temptation and conflict, weakness and defeat; — one
not only to be ever at our side at aU times and seasons of this our
earthly pilgrimage, but to be near us then, to uphold us then, when
flesh and heart shall faint and fail ; to be the strength of our hearts
then, and afterwards our portion* for ever. In all the universe there
is but one such. Therefore to him, our own loving, compassionate,
Almighty Saviour, let us cling, that softly in the bosom of his gentle
pity we may repose, and safely, by his everlasting arms, may for ever
be sustained. Let us now resume the narrative. The raising of Lazarus was
too conspicuous a miracle, it had been wrought too near the city,
had been seen by too many witnesses, and had produced too palpable
results, not to attract the immediate and fixed attention of the Jewish
rulers. Within a few hours after its performance Jerusalem would
be filled with the report of its performance. A meeting of the San
hedrim was immediately summoned, and sat in council as to what
should be done. No doubt was raised as to the reahty of this or any
of the other miracles which Christ had wrought. They had been
done too openly to admit of that. But now, when many even of the
Jews of Jerusalem were believing in him, some stringent measures
must be taken to check this rising, swelling tide, or who could tell to
what it may carry them? There were divisions, however, in the
council. It was constituted of Pharisees and Sadducees, who had
been looking at Jesus aU through with very different eyes. The
Pharisees, from the first, had hated him. He had made so httle of
all their boasted righteousness, had exalted goodness and hohness of
heart and hfe so far above aU rituaUstic regularity, had simplified
rehgion so, and encouraged men, however sinful, to go directly to
464 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
God as their merciful Father, setting aside the pretensions of the
priesthood, and treating as things of httle worth the labored theology
and learning of the schools, he had been so unsparing besides in
exposing the avarice, the ambition, the sensuality that cloaked them
selves in the garb of a precise and exclusive and fastidious religion-
•ism, that they early felt that their quarrel with him was not to be
settled otherwise than by his death. Very early, on the occasion of
his second visit to Jerusalem, they had sought to slay him, at first
nominaUy as a Sabbath-breaker, then afterwards, and stfll more, as a
blasphemer.* In Galilee — to which he had retired to put himseU
out of the reach of the Pharisees of the capital — their hostility pur
sued him, till we read of the Pharisees and the Herodians then tak
ing counsel together "how they might destroy him."f Once and
again, at the Feast of Tabernacles, and at the Feast of Dedication,
stones had been taken up to stone him to death, officers had been
sent to arrest him, and the resolution taken and announced, that
that if any man should confess that he was the Christ, he should be
excommunicated. But as yet no formal determination of the Sanhe
drim had been made that he should be put to death. The reason for
this delay, for suffering Christ to go at large even for so long a time
as he did, was in all hkelihood the dominance in the Sanhedrim of
the Sadducean element. The Sadducees had their own grounds for
disliking the person, the character, the teaching, the pretensions of
Jesus, but they were not so vehement or so virulent in their persecu
tion of him. Caring less about rehgious dogmas and observances
than the rival sect, they might have been readier to tolerate him as
an excited enthusiast; but now they also got frightened, for they
were the great supporters of the Eoman power, and the great fearers
of popular revolt. And so when this meeting of the Great Council
was caUed in haste, Pharisees and Sadducees found common ground
in saying to one another, "What do we? for this man does many
miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will beUeve on him ; and
the Eomans shall come and take away both our place and nation,"
Neither party believed that there was any chance of Jesus making a
successful revolt, and achieving by that success a hberation from the
Eoman yoke, as it then lay upon them. The Pharisees, the secret
enemies of the foreigner, saw nothing in Jesus of such a warlike
leader as the nation longed for and required. The Sadducees, dread
ing some outbreak, but utterly faithless as to any good issue coming
out of it, saw nothing before them as the result of such a movement
but the loss of such power as they were stfll permitted to exercise
* John 5 : 16-18. f Mark 3 : *»•
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 465
And so both combined against the Lord. But there was some loose
talking, some doubts were expressed by men hke Nicodemus, or
some feebler measures spoken of, tfll the high priest himself arose —
Caiaphas, the son-in-law of Annas, connected thus with that f amfly in
which the Jewish pontificate remained for fifty years — four of tbe
sons, as well as the son-in-law of Annas, having, with some inter
ruptions, enjoyed this dignity. AU through this period, embracing
the whole of Christ's life from early childhood, Annas, the head of
this favored family, even when himself out of office, retained much of
its power, being consulted on all occasions of importance, and acting
as the president of the Sanhedrim. Hence it is that in the closing
scenes of our Lord's history Annas and Caiaphas appear as acting
conjunctly, each spoken of as high priest. Caiaphas, like the rest
of his family, like aU the aristocracy of the temple, was a Sadducee ;
and the spirit both of the family and the sect was that of haughty
pride and a bold and reckless cruelty. Caiaphas cut the deliberations
short by saying impetuously and authoritatively to his colleagues,
" Ye know nothing at aU, nor consider that it is expedient for us that
one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish
not." One hfe, the hfe of this Galilean, what is it worth? What
matters it, whether he be innocent or guilty, according to this or that
man's estimate of guilt or innocence; it stands in the way of the*
national welfare. Better one man perish than that a whole nation
be involved in danger, it may be in ruin. The false, the hollow, the
unjust plea, upon which the life of many a good and innocent man,
guilty of nothing but speaking the plain and honest truth, has been
sacrificed, had all the sound, as coming from, the lips of the high
priest, of a wise pohcy, a consultation for the nation's good. Pleased
with themselves as such good patriots, and covering with this disguise
all the other grounds and reasons for the resolution, it was deter
mined that Jesus should be put to death. It remained only to see
how most speedily and most safely it could be accomplished.
Unwittingly, in what he said Caiaphas had uttered a prophecy,
had announced a great and central truth of the Christian faith. He
had given to the death determined on too limited a range, as if it
had been for that nation of the Jews alone that Jesus was to die.
But the Evangelist takes up, expounds, and expands his words as
carrying with them the broad significance that not for that nation
only was he to die, but that by his death he " should gather together
in one the children of God that were scattered abroad." Strange
ordering of Providence, that here at the beginning and there at the
close of our Lord's passion — here in the Sanhedrim, there upon the
lift o( OhiUt 3Q
466 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
cross — here from the Jewish high priest, there from the Eoman
governor — words should come by which the unconscious utterera
conspired in proclaiming the priestly and the kingly authority and
office of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ !
XV.
The Last Journey through Peraea (East of the
Jordan) : The Ten Lepers — The Coming of the
JCingdom — The Question of Divorce — Little Chil
dren BROUGHT TO WlM The YOUNG RuLER.*
Cheist's stay at Bethany on the occasion of his raising Lazarus
from the dead must have been a very short one. The impression and
effect of the great miracle was so immediate and so great that no
time was lost by the rulers in calling together the council and com
ing to their decision to put Jesus to death. Hearing of this, no time
on his part would be lost in putting himseU, now only for a short
time, beyond their reach. He retired in the first instance to a part
"of the country near the northern extremity of the wilderness of Judea,
into a city called Ephraim, identified by many with the modern town
of Taiyibeh, which lies a few miles northeast of Bethel. After some
days of rest in this secluded spot, spent we know not how, the Pass
over drew on, and Jesus arose to go up to it. He took a circuitous
course, passing eastw.ard along the border-line between Gahlee and
Samaria, which lay not more than half a day's journey from Ephraim,
descending into the valley of the Jordan, crossing the river, entering
once more into Peraea, traveUing through it southward to Jericho.
It was during this, the last of aU his earthly journeys, that as he
entered into a certain viUage there met him ten men that were lepers,
who stood afar off, as the law required ; but not wishing to let him
pass without a trial made of his grace and power, lUted up theii
voices, and said, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." "Go show
yourselves unto the priests," was all that Jesus said. He gave this
order, and passed on. The first thing that the leper who knew or
believed that the leprosy had departed from him had to do, was to
submit himself for inspection to the priesthood, that his cure might
be authenticated, and he be formaUy relieved from the restraints
under which he had been laid. And this is what these ten men are
« Luke 17 : 11-37, 18 : 15-27 ; Matt. 19 : 1-26 ; Mark 10 : 1-27.
THE LAST JOURNEY THROUGH PERSIA. 467
bidden now to do, while as yet no sign of the removal of the disease
appears. Whether they all had a firm faith from the first that they
would be cured we may well doubt. Perhaps there was but one
among them who had such faith. They aU, however, obey the order
that had been given ; it was at least worth trying whether anything
could come out of it, and as they went they were all cleansed. The
moment that the cure was visible, one of them, who was a Samaritan,
ere he went forward to the priest, went back to Jesus, glorUying God
with a loud voice, and falling at Christ's feet to give him thanks.
The other nine went on, had their healing in due course authen
ticated, returned to their famihes and friends, but inquired not for
their deliverer, nor sought him out to thank him. The contrast was
one that Christ himseU thought fit to notice. "Were there not ten
cleansed," he said, "but where are the nine? There are not found
that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger. And he said
unto him, Arise, go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole." But
now once more the Pharisees betake themselves to their congenial
work, asking him when the kingdom of God should come. He cor
rects their errors, gives them solemn warnings as to a coming of the
Son of Man, in whose issues the men of that generation should be
very disastrously involved, adding the two parables of the Unjust
Judge and of the Pharisee and the Pubhcan. Once more, however,
these inveterate enemies return to the assault. At an earlier period
they had sought in his own conduct, or in that of his disciples, to
find ground of accusation. Baffled in this, they try now a more
insidious method, to which we find them having frequent recourse
towards the close of our Lord's ministry. They demand his opinion
upon the vexed question of divorce. The two great schools of their
rabbis differed in their interpretation of the law of Moses upon this
point. Which side would Jesus take ? Decide as he may, it would
embroil him in the quarrel. To their surprise he shifted the ground
of the whole question from the only one upon which they rested it,
the authority of Moses ; told them in effect that they were wrong in
thinking that because Moses, or God through Moses, tolerated cer
tam practices, that therefore these practices were absolutely right
and universaUy and throughout all time to be observed — furnishing
thereby a key to the Divine legislation for the Israelites, which we
have been somewhat slow to use as widely as we should ; told them
that it was because of the hardness of their hearts, to prevent greater
mischiefs that would have foUowed a purer and stricter enactment,
that the Israehtes had been permitted to put away their wives,
(divorce allowed thus, as polygamy had been,) but that from the
468 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
beginning it had not been so, nor should it be so under the new
economy that he was ushering in, in which, save in a single case, the
marriage tie was indissoluble.
In happy contrast with all such insidious attempts to entangle
him in his talk was the next incident of his last journey through
Persea. They brought little children — infants — to him. It is not
said precisely who brought them, but can we doubt that it was the
mothers of the children? They brought their little ones to Jesus
that he might touch them, put his hands upon them, pray for and
bless them. Some tinge of superstition there may have been in this,
some idea of a mystic benefit to be conveyed even to infancy by the
touch and the blessing of Jesus. But who will not be ready to for
give the mothers here, though this were true, as we think of the fond
regard and deep reverence they cherished towards him? They see
him passing through their borders. They hear it is a farewell visit
he is paying. These little babes of theirs shall never live to see and
know how good, how kind, how holy a one he is ; but it would be
something to tell them of when they grew up, something that they
might be the better of aU their lives afterwards, if he would but
touch them and pray over them. And so they come, bringing their
infants in their arms, first telling the disciples what they want. To
them it seems a needless if not impertinent intrusion upon their
Master's graver labors. What good can children so young as these
get from the Great Teacher ? Why foist them upon the notice and
care of one who has so much weightier things in hand? Without
consulting their Master, they rebuke the bringers of the children, and
would have turned them at once away. Jesus saw it, and he was
" much displeased." There was more than rudeness and discourtesy
in the conduct of his disciples. There was ignorance, there was un
belief; it was a dealing with infants as U they had no part or share
as such in his kingdom. The occasion was a happy one — perhaps
the only one that occurred — for exposing their ignorance, rebuking
their unbelief, and so, after looking with displeasure at his disciples,
Jesus said to them, " Suffer the httle children to come unto me, and
forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." We take the
last words here in the simplest and most obvious sense, as implying
that the kingdom of heaven belongs to infants, is in a measure made
up of them. It is quite true that immediately after having said this
about the infants Jesus had a cognate word to say to the adults
around him. He had to teU them that "whosoever should not
receive the kingdom of God as a httle child should not enter therein.
But that was not said barely and alone as an explanation of his
LITTLE CHILDREN BROUGHT TO HIM. 469
former speech — was not said to take aU meaning out of that speech
as having any reference to the little children that were then actuaUy
in his presence. It might be very true, and a very needful thing for
us to know, that we must be in some sense like to them before we
can enter into the kingdom ; but .that did not imply that they must
become hke to us ere they can enter it. If all that Jesus meant had
been that of suchhke, that is, of those who, in some particular, resemble
liitle children, is the kingdom of heaven, we can see much less appro
priateness in the rebuke of the disciples, and in the action of the
Lord which foUowed immediately upon his use of the expression —
his taking the httle children up into his arms and blessing them.
We accept, then, the expression as implying not simply that of such
like, but of them is the kingdom of heaven. It may be thought that
a shade of uncertainty still hangs over it. John Newton uses the
cautious language, "I think it at least highly probable that in those
words our Lord does not only, U at all, here intimate the necessity of
our becoming as little children in simphcity, as a qualification with
out which (as he expressly declares in other places) we cannot enter
into his kingdom, but informs us of a fact, that the number of infants
"who are effectually redeemed to God by his blood, so greatly exceeds
the aggregate of adult behevers, that his kingdom may be said to
consist of httle children." It is not necessary, however, while adopt
ing generaUy the interpretation which Newton thought so highly
probable, to press it so far, or to infer that the kingdom is said to be
of such because they constitute the majority of its members ; enough
to receive the saying as carrying with it the consoling truth, that
to infants as such the kingdom of heaven belongeth, so that if in
infancy they die, into that kingdom they enter. We would be most
unwilling to regard this gracious utterance of our Lord, and the
gracious act by which it was followed up, as implying anything less
than this.
It is not, however, upon any single saying of our Lord that we
ground our behef that those who die in infancy are saved ; it is upon
the whole genius, spirit, and object of the great redemption. There
is mdeed a mystery in the death of infants. No sadder nor more
mysterious sight upon this earth than to see a little unconscious babe
struggling through the agonies of dissolution, bending upon us those
strange imploring looks which we long to interpret but cannot, which
tell only of a suffering we cannot assuage, convey to us petitions for
help to which we can give no reply. But great as the mystery is
"which wraps itself around the death, stiU greater would be that
¦attending the resurrection of infants U any of them perish. Tho
470 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
resurrection is to bring to all an accession of weal or woe. In that
resurrection infants are to share. Can we believe that, without an
opportunity given of personally receiving or rejecting Christ, they
shaU be subjected to a greater woe than would have been theirs had
there been no Eedeemer and no redemption? Then to them his
coming into the world had been an unmitigated evil. Who can
believe it to be so? Who will not rather beheve, that even as with
out sharing in the personal transgression of the first natural head of
our race, without sinning after the similitude of Adam's transgression,
they became involved in death; even so, though not beheving here —
the chance not given them — they will share in the benefit of that
life which the second, the spiritual Head of our race, has brought in
and dispenses? "Your httle ones," said the Lord to ancient Israel,
speaking of the entrance into the earthly land of promise — "Your
little ones which ye said should be a prey, and your children which
in that day had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall go
in thither." And of that better land into which for us Jesus as the
forerunner has entered, shall we not beheve that our little ones, who
died before they had any knowledge between good and evil, shall go
in thither, go to swell the number of the redeemed, go to raise it to
a vast majority of the entire race, mitigating more than we can well
reckon the great mystery of the existence here of so much sin, and
suffering, and death?
Setting forth afresh, and now in aU Ukelihood about to pass out
of that region, there met him one who came running in aU eagerness,
as anxious not to lose the opportunity, and who kneeled to him with
great reverence as having the most profound respect for him as a
righteous man, and who said, "Good Master, what good thing shall
I do, that I may inherit eternal hfe?" Jesus might at once and
without any preliminary conversation have laid on him the injunction
that he did at the last, and this might equally have served the final
end that the Lord had in view ; but then we should have been left in
ignorance as to what kind of man he was, and how it was that the
injunction was at once so needful and so appropriate. It is by help
of the preparatory treatment that we are enabled to see farther than
we should otherwise have done into the character of this petitioner
He was young, he was wealthy, he was a ruler of the Jews. Better
than this, he was amiable, he was virtuous, had made it from the
first a high object of ambition to be just and to be generous, to use
the advantages of his position to win in a right way the favor of his
feUow-men. But notwithstanding, after all the successful attempts
of his past life, there was a restlessness, a dissatisfaction in his heart.
THE YOUNG RULER. 471
He had not reached the goal. He heard Jesus speak of eternal life,
something evidently far higher than anything he had yet attained,
and he wondered how it was to be secured. Nothing doubting but
that it must be along the same track that he had hitherto been pur
suing, but by some extra work of extraordinary merit, he comes to
Jesus with the question, " Good Master, what good thing shaU I do,
that I may inherit eternal life?" Jesus saw at once that he was put
ting all upon moral goodness, some higher virtue to be reached by
his own effort entithng him to the eternal life. He saw that he was
so fully possessed with this idea that it regulated even his conception
of Christ's own personal character, whom he was disposed to look
upon rather as a preeminently virtuous man than one having any
peculiar relationship to God. Checking him, therefore, at the very
first — taking exception to the very form and manner of his address,
he says, "Why caUest thou me good? there is none good but one,
that is, God."
Endeavoring thus to raise his thoughts to the true source of all
real goodness, rather than to say anything about his own connection
with the Father, which it is no part of his present object to speak
about, Jesus takes him first upon his own ground. There need be
no talk about any one particularly good thing, that behooved to be
done, tfll it was seen whether the common acknowledged precepts of
God's law had been kept. " Thou knowest the commandments, Do
not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false
witness, Defraud not, Honor thy father and thy mother." As the
easiest instrument of conviction, as the one that lay entirely in the
very region to which aU this youth's thoughts and efforts had been
confined, Jesus restricted himself to quoting the precepts of the
second table of the law, and says nothing in the meantime about the
first. The young man, hearing the challenge, listens to the precepts
as they are detailed, and promptly, without apparently a momentary
misgiving, he answers, " All these have I observed from my youth."
There was no doubt great ignorance, great self-deception in this reply.
He knew but little of any one of these precepts in its true significance,
in all the strictness, spirituality, and extent of its requirements, who
could venture on any such assertion. Yet there was sincerity in the
answer, and it pointed to a bygone life of singular external propriety,
and that the fruit not so much of constraint as of natural amiabienesa
and conscientiousness. As he gave this answer, Jesus beholding
him loved him. It was new and refreshing to the Saviour's eye to
Bee such a specimen as this of truthfulness and purity, of all that
was moraUy lovely and of good report among the rulers of the Jews,
472 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Here was no hypocrite, no fanatic, here was one who had not learned
to wear the garb of sanctimoniousness as a cover for all kinds of self-
indulgence ; here was one free from the delusion that the strict
observance of certain formulas of devotion would stand instead of
the weightier matters of justice and of charity ; here was one who so
far had escaped the contagion of his age and sect, who was not seek
ing to make clean the outside of the cup and the platter, but was
really striving to keep himself from all that was wrong, and to be
towards his fellow-men all that, as he understood it, God's law
required. Jesus looked upon this man and loved him.
But the very love he bore him prompted Jesus to subject him to
a treatment bearing in many respects a hkeness to that to which he
subjected Nicodemus. With not a little, indeed, that was different,
there was much that was alike in the two rulers — the one who came
to Jesus by night at the beginning of his ministry in Judea ; the one
who now comes to him by day at the close of his labors in Peraea ;
both honest, earnest men, seekers after truth, and lovers of it in a
fashion too, but both ignorant and self-deceived; Nicodemus' error
rather one of the head than of the heart, flowing from an entire mis
conception of the very nature of Christ's kingdom ; the young ruler's
one of the heart rather than of the head, flowing from an inordinate,
an idolatrous attachment to his worldly possessions. In either case
Christ's treatment was quick, prompt, decisive, laying the axe at once
at the root of the evil. Beneath all the pleasing show of outward
moralities Christ detected in the young ruler's breast a lamentable
want of any true regard to God, any recognition of his supreme and
paramount claims. His heart, his trust, his treasure, were in earthly,
not in heavenly things. He needed a sharp lesson to teach him this,
to lay bare at once the true state of things within. Christ was toe
kind and too skilful a physician to apply this or that emollient that
might have power to aUay a symptom or two of the outward irrita
tion. At once he thrusts the probe into the very heart of the wound.
" One thing thou lackest : go thy way," said he, at once assuming his
proper place as the representative of God and of his claims — " go thy
way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor ; and come, take
up the cross, and follow me." The one thing lacking was not the
renunciation of his property in bestowing it upon the poor. It was a
supreme devotedness to God, to duty — a willingness to give up any
thing, to give up every thing where God required it to be given up,
when the holding of it was inconsistent with fidelity to him. This
was the one thing lacking. And instead of proclaiming his fatal defi
ciency in this primary requirement, without which there could be no
THE YOUNG RULER. 473
true obedience rendered to any part of the Divine law, Christ embod
ies the claim which he knew the young ruler was unprepared to honor,
in that form which struck directly at the idol of his heart, and required
its instant and absolute dethronement.
Not for a moment, then, can we imagine that in speaking to him
as he did, Jesus was issuing a general command, or laying down a
universal condition of the Christian discipleship, or that he was even
holding up the relinquishment of earthly possessions as an act of pre
eminent meritoriousness, which all strivers after Christian perfection
should set before them as the summit to be reached. There is noth
ing of all this here. It is a special treatment of a special case.
Christ's object being to frame and to apply a decisive touchstone or
test whereby the condition of that one spirit might be exposed, he
suited with admirable skill the test to the condition. Had that con
dition been other than it was, the test employed had been different.
Had it been the love of pleasure, or the love of power, or the love of
fame, instead of the love of money that had been the ruling passion,
he would have framed his order so that obedience to it would have
demanded the crucifixion of the ruling passion, the renunciation of
the one cherished idol. The only one abiding universal rule that we
are entitled to extract from this dealing of our Lord with this appli
cant being this : that in coming to Christ, in taking on the yoke of
the Christian discipleship, it must be in the spirit of an entire readi
ness to part with all that he requires us to rehnquish, and to allow no
idol to usurp that inward throne that of right is his.
Christ's treatment, if otherwise it failed, was in one respect emi
nently successful. It silenced, it saddened, it sent away. No answer
was attempted. No new question was raised. The demand was
made in such broad, unmitigated, unambiguous terms, that the young
ruler, conscious that he had never felt before the extent or pressure
of such a demand, and that he was utterly unprepared to meet it,
turned away disappointed and dissatisfied. Jesus saw him go, let
him go, followed him with no importunities to return and to recon
sider. It was not the manner of the Saviour to be importunate — you
do not find in him any great urgency or iteration of appeal. When
once in any case enough is said or done, the individual dealt with is
left to his own free-wiU. Gazing after this young ruler as he depart
ed, Jesus then looked round about, and said to his disciples, "How
•hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God !"
The disciples were astonished at these words, as weU they might be
What ! was the ease or the difficulty of entering into this kingdom
to be measured by the little or by the more of this world's goods that
474 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
each man possessed ? A strange premium this on poverty, as strange
a penalty on wealth. Jesus notices the surprise that his saying had
created, and, aware of the false track along which his disciples'
thoughts were running, in a way as affectionate as it was instructive
proceeded to explain the real meaning of what he had just said.
' Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into
the kingdom of God !" It is not the having but the trusting that
creates the difficulty. It is not the kind or the quantity of the
wealth possessed, but the kind or quantity of the attachment that is
lavished upon it. The love of the penny may create as great impedi
ment as the love of the pound. Nor is it our wealth alone that oper
ates in this way, that raises a mighty obstacle in the way of entering
into the kingdom. It is any thing else than God and Christ upon
which the supreme affection of the spirit is bestowed. A new light
dawns upon the disciples' minds as they listen to and begin to com
prehend the explanation that their Master now has given, and see
the extent to which that explanation goes. They were astonished at
the first, but now the astonishment is more than doubled ; for U it
indeed be true, that before any individual of our race can cross the
threshold of the kingdom, such a shift of the whole trust and confi
dence of the heart must take place — if every earthly living creature-
attachment must be subordinated to the love of God and of Jesus
Christ his Son, who then can be saved ? for who can effect this great
revolution within his own heart, who can take the dearest idol he has
known and cast it down in the dust, who can lay hand upon the usur
per and eject him, who can raise the rightful owner of it to the throne?
Astonished out of measure, the disciples say among themselves, " Who
then can be saved ?" Is the question needless or inappropriate ? Now
is the time, if they have fallen into any mistake, U they are taking too
dark, too gloomy views of the matter, if there be aught of error or of
exaggeration in the conceptions out of which this question springs —
now is the time for Jesus to rectify the error, to remove the miscon
ception. Does he do so ? Nay, but assuming that it is even so — as
difficult to be saved as they imagine — his reply is, " With man it is
impossible, but not with God, for with God all things are possible."
Taught then by our Lord himself to know what aU true entering into
his kingdom implies and presupposes, let us be well assured that to be
saved in his sense of the word is no such easy thing as many fancy,
the difficulty not lying in any want of willingness on his part to save
us— not in any hinderance whatever lying there without. AU such
outward impediments have been, by his own gracious hand, and by
the work of his dear Son our Saviour removed. The difficulty hes
JESUS AT JERICHO. 475
within, in our misplaced affections, in our stubborn and obstinate
wflls, in hearts that will not let go their hold of other things to clasp
him home to them as their only satisfying good. Do you feel the diffi
culty — the moral impossibility of this hinderance being taken away by
yourselves? Then will you pray to him with whom this, as every
thing, is possible, that he may turn the possibility into reahty. He
has done so in the case of multitudes as weak, as impotent as you.
He will do it unto you U you desire that it be done, and commit the
doing of it into his hands.
XVI.
Jesus at Jericho — The Request of the Sons of
Zebedee.*
No district of the Holy Land is more unlike what it once was and
what it still might be than that in which Jericho, the city of palms,
once stood. Its position, commanding the two chief passes up to the
hill country of Judea and Samaria, the depth and fertility of its well-
watered soil, and the warmth of its tropical climate, early indicated
it as the site of a city which should not only be the capital of tho
surrounding territory, but the protection of all western Palestine
against invaders from the east. Joshua found it so when he crossed
the Jordan : and as his first step towards the conquest of the country
which lay beyond, laid siege to a city which had waUs broad enough
to have houses built upon them, and whose spoil when taken, its gold
and its silver, its vessels of brass and of iron, its goodly Babylonish
garments, bore evidence of affluence and of traffic. No town in aU
the territory which the Israelites afterwards acquired westward of
Jordan could compete with Jericho. It fell, was reduced to ruins,
and the curse of Joshua pronounced upon the man who attempted to
raise again its walls. t In the days of Ahab that attempt was made,
and though the threatened evil feU upon the maker, the city rose
* Matt. 20 :17- 34 ; Mark 10 : 2-52 ; Luke 18 : 35-43, 20 : 2-10.
t Within two miles of it, sharing in all its great natural advantages, stood Gil-
gal, the first encampment of the Israelites, where the ark stood till its removal to
Shiloh, which we read of as one of the stations to which Samuel resorted in ad
ministering justice throughout the country, where the tribes so often met in the
days of Saul, to which the men of Judah went down to welcome David back
again to Jerusalem.
476 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
from its ruins to enter upon another stage of progressive prosperity,
which reached its highest point when Herod the Great selected it as
one of his favorite resorts, beautified it with towers and palaces, be
coming so attached to it that, feeling his last iUness to have come
upon him, he retired there to die. Soon after his death the town was
plundered, and some of its finest buildings were destroyed. These,
however, were speedily restored to aU their original splendor by
Archelaus, and as he left it Josephus has described it — its stately
buildings rising up among groves of palm-trees miles in length, with
gardens scattered round, in which all the chief flowers and fruits of
eastern lands grew up in the greatest luxuriance. The rarest and
most precious among them, the balsam, a treasure "worth its own
weight in silver, for which kings made war,"* "so that he," says
the Jewish historian, as he warms in his recital of all its glories, "he
who should pronounce the place to be divine would not be mistaken,
wherein is such plenty of trees produced as is very rare, and of the
most excellent sort. And, indeed, if we speak of these other fruits,
it wiU not be easy to light on any climate in the habitable earth that
can well be compared to it." And such as Josephus has described
was Jericho and the country round when Christ's eye rested on them,
in descending into the vaUey of the Jordan ; and above the tops of
the palm-trees, and the roofs of the palaces, he saw the trace of the
road that led up to Jerusalem. None besides the twelve had gone
with him into the retreats of Ephraim and Persea. But now he is on
the track of the companies from the north, who are going up to the
Passover, that is to be celebrated at the close of the foUowing week.
The time, the company, the road, all serve to bring up to the Saviour's
thoughts events that are now so near, to him of such momentous im
port. A spirit of eager impatience to be baptized with the impending
baptism seizes upon him, and gives a strange quickness and a forward
ness to his movements. His talk, his gait, his gestures aU betoken
how absorbed he is ; the eye and thought away from the present, from
all around, fixed upon some future, the purport of which has wonder
fully excited him. His hasty footsteps carry him on before his fellow-
travellers. "Jesus went before them," St. Mark tells us, "and they
were amazed; and as they followed they were afraid." There was
that in his aspect, attitude, and actions that filled them with wonder
and with awe. It was not long till an explanation was offered them.
He took the twelve aside, and once again, as twice before, but now
with stfll greater minuteness and particularity of detail, told them
what was about to happen within a few days at Jerusalem : how he
* Martineau.
JESUS AT JERICHO. 477
was to be dehvered into the hands of the Jewish rulers, and how they
were to dehver him into the hands of the Gentiles, how he was to be
mocked and scourgedj and spit upon and crucified, tfll all things that
were written by the prophets concerning him should be accomplished,
and how on the third he was to rise again. Every thing was told so
plainly that we may weU wonder that any one could have been at any
loss as to Christ's meaning; but the disciples we are told, "under
stood none of these things, and the sayings were hid from them,
neither knew they the thing which was spoken." This only proves
what a blinding power preconception and misconception have in
hiding the simplest things told in the simplest language — a blinding
power often exercised over us now as to the written, as it was then
exercised over the apostles as to their Master's spoken words. The
truth is, that these men were utterly unprepared at the time to take
in the real truth as to what was to happen to their Master. They
had made up their minds, on the best of evidence, that he was the
Messiah. He had himself lately confirmed them in that faith. But
they had their own notions of the Messiahship. With these such suf
ferings and such a death as were actually before Jesus were utterly
inconsistent. They could be but figurative expressions, then, that he
had employed, intended, perhaps, to represent some severe struggle
with his adversaries through which he had to pass before his king
dom was set up and acknowledged.
One thing alone was clear — that the time so long looked forward
to had come at last. This visit to Jerusalem was to witness the erec
tion of the kingdom. All other notions lost in that, the thought of
the particular places they were to occupy in that kingdom entered
again into the hearts of two of the apostles — that pair of brothers
who, from early adherence, and the amount of sacrifice they had
made, and the marked attention that on more than one occasion
Jesus had paid to them, might naturaUy enough expect that if special
favors were to be dispensed to any, they would not be overlooked.
James and John teU their mother Salome, who has met them by the
way, all that they have lately noticed in the manner of their Master,
and all that he has lately spoken, pointing to the approaching pass-
over as the season when the manUestation of the kingdom was to be
made. Mother and sons agree to go to Jesus with the request that
in his kingdom and glory the one brother should sit upon his right
hand and the other upon his left, a request that in aU likehhood took
its particular shape and form from what Jesus had said but a few
days before, when, in answer to Peter's question, "Behold, we have
forsaken all, and foUowed thee ; what shall we have therefore?" And
478 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Jesus said unto them, "Verily I say unto you, That ye which Lave fob
lowed me in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit in the
throne of his glory, ye also shaU sit upon twelve thrones, judging tho
twelve tribes of Israel." Matt. 19 : 27, 28. What could these thrones,
this judging be ? Little wonder that the apostles' minds were set
a speculating by what still leaves us, after all our speculating, about
as much in the dark as ever. But while Salome and James
and John were proffering their request, and trying to preengage
the places of highest honor, where was Peter? It had not come
into his thought to seek a private interview with his Master for
such a purpose. He had no mother by his side to fan the flame that
was as ready to kindle in his as in any of their breasts. That with
out any thought of one whose natural claims were as good as theirs,
James and John should have gone to Jesus and made the requesl
they did, satisfies us at least of this, that it was not the understand
ing among the twelve that when the Lord had spoken to Peter as he
did after his good confession, he had assigned to him the primacy, oi
indeed any particular preeminence, over the rest.
" Ye know not what ye ask." They did it ignorantly, and so far
they obtain mercy of the Lord. What it was to be placed on his
right and on his left in the scenes that awaited him in Jerusalem, two
at least of the three petitioners, John and Salome, shall soon know
as they stand gazing upon the central cross of Calvary. " Can ye
drink of the cup that I drink of ? and be baptized with the baptism
that I am baptized with? They say, We can." From this reply it
would appear that the disciples understood the Lord as asking them
whether they are prepared to drink along with him some cup of sor
row that was about soon to be put into his hands, to be baptized
along with him in some baptism of fire to which he was about to be
subjected. They are prepared, they think that they can follow him,
they are willing to take their part in whatever suffering such follow
ing shaU entail. Through all the selfishness, and the ambition, and
the great ignorance of the future that their request revealed, there
shone out in this prompt and no doubt perfectly sincere and honest
reply, a true and deep attachment to their Master, a readiness to
suffer with him or for him. And he is far quicker to recognize the
one than to condemn the other. "Ye shaU indeed drink of the cup
that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall
ye be baptized." ' You, James, shall be the first among the twelve
that shaU seal your testimony with your blood. You, John, shall
have the longest if not the largest experience of what the bearing of
the cross shall bring with it. But to sit on my right and on my left
JESUS AT JERICHO. 479
in my kingdom and my glory, ask me not for that honor as if it were
a thing in the conferring of which I am at hberty to consult my own
individual will or taste or humor. It is not mine so to dispense. It
is mine to give, but only to those for whom it is prepared of my
Father, and who by the cuurse of discipline through which he shall
pass them shaU be duly prepared for it.'
James and John have to be content with such reply. Their apph
cation, though made to Christ when alone, soon after became known
to others, and excites no small stir among them. Which of them
indeed may cast the first stone at the two ? They had all been quar
relling among themselves not long before, as to which of them should
be greatest. And they shall aU ere long be doing so again. Christ's
word of rebuke as he hears of this contention is for all as weU as for
James and John. He teUs us that no such kind of authority and
power as is practised in earthly government — the authority of men,
rank, or power carrying it dictatorially and tyrannicaUy over subjects
and dependants — is to be admitted among his disciples; greatness
among them being a thing to be measured not by the amount of
power possessed, but by the amount of service rendered, by their
greater likeness to the Son of man, "who came not to be minis
tered unto, but to minister, and to give his lUe a ransom for many."
The contention is thus momentarily hushed, to break out again, when
it shall receive a still more impressive rebuke.
Jesus and his disciples, and a great multitude of people who had
joined themselves to him by the way, now drew near to Jericho. Of
what occurred in and near the city I offer no continuous narrative,
for it is difficult to frame such out of the details which the different
evangelists present. St. Mark and St. Luke teU us of one blind man
only who was healed. St. Matthew teUs us of two. Two of the
three evangehsts speak of the healing as having occurred on Christ's
departure out of the town, the third of its having taken place on his
entrance into it. We may conclude with certainty that there were
two, and we may conjecture there were three blind men cured on this
occasion. In a city so large as Jericho then was, computed to con
tain well-nigh 100,000 inhabitants — the number swelled by the
strangers on their way to the passover — it would not surprise us that
more cases than one of the kind described should have occurred.
One general remark upon this and all similar discrepancies in the
gospel narratives may be offered. It is quite enough to vindicate the
entne truthfulness of each separate account, that we can imagine
some circumstance or circumstances omitted by aU, the occurrence of
which would enable us to reconcile them. How often does it happen
480 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
that two or three witnesses each teU what they saw and heard ; their
testimonies taken by themselves present almost insuperable difficul
ties in the way of reconciling them ; yet when the whole in all its
minute details is known, the key is then put into our hands by which
the apparent discord is at once removed. And when the whole never
can be known, is it not the wisest course to let the discrepancies
remain just as we find them ; satisfied if we can imagine any way by
which all that each narrator says is true ?
This can easily enough be done in the case before us. Satisfied
with this, let us fix our attention on the stories of Bartimeus and
Zaccheus, on the two striking incidents by which our Lord's entrance
into and exit from Jericho were made for ever memorable. How
different in all the outward circumstances of their lot in life were
these two men ! — the one a poor blind beggar, the other among the
richest men in the community. The revenues derived from the palm-
trees and balsam-gardens of Jericho were so great, that the grant of
them was one of the richest gifts which Antony presented Cleopatra.
Herod farmed them of the latter, and intrusted the coUection of them
to these publicans, of whom Zaccheus was the chief. His position
was one enabling him to realize large gains, and we may beheve that
of that position he had taken the full advantage. Unlike in other
things, in this Bartimeus and Zaccheus were at one — in their eager
ness, their earnestness, their perseverance, their resolution to use all
possible means to overcome aU obstacles thrown in the way of their
approach to Christ. The poor blind beggar sits beneath the shade
of some towering palm, waiting to salute each stray passenger as he
goes by, and solicit alms. Suddenly he hears the tread as of a great
multitude approaching. He wonders what it can be. He asks;
they teU him that Jesus of Nazareth is coming, and is about to pass
by. Jesus of Nazareth ! he had heard of him before, heard of heal
ings wrought by him, of blind eyes opened, of dead men raised.
Many a time in his darkness, in his solitude, as he sat alone by the
wayside, he had pondered who this great miracle-worker could be,
and he had come to the conclusion that he could be no other than
the Son of David, the Messiah promised to their fathers. It had
never crossed his thoughts that he and this Jesus should ever meet,
when now they teU him that he is near at hand, will soon be passing
by. He can, he may do that for him which none but he can do.
The whole faith and hope of his spirit breathed into it, he hfts the
loud and eager cry, " Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." They
check him, they blame him, in every way they can they try to stop
him. He cries "the more a great deal;" it is his one and only
ZACCHEUS. 481
chance. He wfll not lose it, he will do all he can to reach that ear, to
arrest that passer-by. He cries the more a great deal, "Son of
David, have mercy on me."
So is it with the poor blind beggar, and so is it with the rich
publican. He too hears that Jesus of Nazareth is coming into
Jericho. He too has heard much about the Nazarene. He is living
now, he may have been hving then, in the very neighborhood where
John the Baptist taught, where Jesus was himself baptized. The
gospel of the kingdom as preached by both, the gospel of repentance,
of turning from all iniquity and bringing forth fruits meet for repent
ance, was familiar to his ears. The Baptist's answer to publicans
when they came to him, " Exact no more than that which is appointed
you," had sunk into his heart. That was the kingdom, the kingdom
of truth, of righteousness, into which now above all things he desired
to enter. With a conscience quickened, a heart melted and subdued
we know not how, he hears that Jesus is at hand. What would he
not give even for a sight of one whom secretly he has learned to
reverence and to love ! He goes out, but there is a crowd coming ; he
cannot stand its pressure ; he is little of stature, and in the bustle and
the throng wiU not be able even to catch a sight of Jesus. A happy
thought occurs : he sees behind him a large tree which casts its branch
ing arms across the path. He runs and climbs up into the tree. He
cares not for the ridicule with which he may be assailed. He cares
not for the grotesque position which he, the rich man and the honor
able, may be seen to occupy. He is too bent upon his purpose to let
that or anything stand in .the way of the accomplishment of his desire.
And now let us notice how these two men are treated. Jesus
stands stfll as he comes near the spot where poor Bartimeus stands
and cries, points to him, and teUs those around him to go and bring
him into his presence. The crowd halts. The messengers do Christ's
bidding. And now the very men who had been rebuking Bartimeus
for his too loud and too impatient entreaties, touched with pity, say,
" Be of good comfort, rise, he caUeth thee." He does not need to be
told a second time, he does not wait for any guiding hands to lead
him to the centre of the path. His own quick ear has fixed the
point from which the summons comes. His own ready arm flings
aside the rude garment that he had worn, which might hinder him
in his movement. A few eager footsteps taken, he stands in the pres
ence of the Lord. Nor has he then to renew his supphcation.
Jesus is the first to speak. " What wilt thou that I should do unto
thee?" There are not many things among which to choose. There
is that one thing that above all others he would have done. " Lord,"
Ufo ot Chrlit g J
482 THE i^IFE OF CHRIST
says he, " that I might receive my sight." And Jesus said, "Eeceive
thy sight, go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole." And imme
diately he received his sight.
See now how it fares with Zaccheus. He has got up into the
tree, he is sitting there among its branches, half hoping that, seeing
all, he may remain himself unseen. The crowd comes up. He does
not need to ask which is the one he desires so much to see. There
ho is, the centre of the throng, his calm, majestic, benignant look and
bearing marking him off from aU around. The eyes of the chief
publican are bent upon him in one fixed concentrated gaze of wonder
and of love, when a new ground of wonder and of gratitude is given.
Here too Jesus stops, and looking up he names him by his name, as
if he had known him long and weU. "Zaccheus," he said, "make
haste and come down ; for to-day I must abide at thy house."
Such is the free spontaneous mercy in either case exercised by
our Lord ; such is the way in which he meets simphcity of faith, ardor
of desire, strenuousness of effort, as seen in the blind beggar and in
the rich publican. And what in either case is the return? " Go thy
way," said Jesus to Bartimeus. He did not go, he could not go.
His bhnded eyes are opened. The first object they rest on is their
opener. Bright shines the sun above — fair is that valley of the Jor
dan — gorgeous the foliage of the palm and the sycamore, the acacia
and the balsam-tree. New and wondrous sights to him, but he sees
them not, or heeds them not. That fresh faculty of vision is exer
cised on Him by whom it had been bestowed, and upon Him all the
wealth of its power is lavished. And him. "he foUows, glorifying
God." Not otherwise is it with Zaccheus : " Make haste," said Jesus,
" and come down." And he made haste, and came down, and received
Christ joyfuUy, little heeding the derisive looks cast on him as he
made his quick descent, the murmurings that arose from the multi
tude as he received Jesus into his house. The threshold is scarcely
crossed when he stands in aU humility before Jesus and says : " Be
hold, Lord, the haU of my goods I give to the poor ; and if I have
taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore him
fourfold." One scarce can teU whether he is describing a practice
for some time previously pursued, or a purpose then for the first
time in the presence of Jesus deliberately taken. In either case the
evidence of a true repentance on his part is the same. The man
among the Jews who gave the fifth part of his income to the poor,
was counted as having reached the height of perfection as to alms
giving, Zaccheus gives one-haU, and not one-fifth. The law of Moses
required in one special case alone that a fourfold restitution should
JESUS AT JERICHO. 483
be made Zaccheus, in every instance in which he can remember
that by any dishonorable practice on his part any man had suffered
loss promises that restitution to that extent should be made to him.
Jesus, accepting the evidence of a true repentance that is thus pre
sented, makes no criticism upon the course of conduct indicated,
suggests no change, but says, " This day is salvation come to this
house, forasmuch as he also is a son of Abraham " — once a lost sheep
of the chosen fold, lost, but now found by the Good Shepherd, and
by him welcomed back — "for the Son of man," he adds, "is come to
seek and to save that which was lost."
One general feature of these incidents at Jericho let us now glance
at, as singularly appropriate to this particular period of our Lord's
history, the absence of aU reserve, the full disclosure of himself and
of his redemption which he makes. Other blind men had called him
the Son of David, but he had straitly charged them not to make him
¦ known. No such charge is given to Bartimeus. He is permitted to
follow him and glorify God as loudly, as amply as he can. Not tfll
the last stage of his ministry in the north had he ever spoken even
to his disciples of his death. Now he not only speaks to them
more plainly and explicitly than ever before, but he goes on to
announce the great intention and object of his death. The Son of
Man, he declares, is come " to give his hfe a ransom for many ; to
seek and to save that which was lost." Thus it is, as the time is
now so near, and as all the reasons for that reserve which Jesus had
previously studied are removed, that he holds up his death as the
payment of the great price of our redemption, the ransom given
by the Living One for the lost.
Two better instances illustrative of how the sinner and the Saviour
are brought together, of what true faith is, and what true repentance,
you could not well desire, than those of Bartimeus and Zaccheus,
capable each of manUold spiritual applications. We can but gather
up the general warnings and great encouragements that they convey.
Sinners we aU by nature and practice are — as poor, as blind, as
beggared as Bartimeus was — as thoughtless, careless, reckless, world
ly-minded as Zaccheus. And Jesus of Nazareth is passing by. It is
but a single day we have for meeting with him, that short day of
life, the twelve hours of which are so swiftly running out. Let us
but be as earnest to see him as those two men were, as careless of
what others say or do, as resolute to overcome all difficulties ; and we
shall find that he will be as ready to hear, to heal, to come to us, to
take up his abode with us, to bring salvation with him, to gather us,
the lost, into the fold of the saved.
484 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Jericho is changed from what it was. So httle is left of the city,
of its hippodrome and amphitheatre, its towers and its palaces, thai
it is difficult to determine its site. Its gardens and its groves are
gone, not one solitary palm-tree for a blind beggar to sit beneath,
nor a sycamore for any one to climb. The City of Fragrance it was
called of old. There remains now but the fragrance of those deeds
of grace and mercy done there by him who in passing through it
closed his earthly journeyings, and went up thence to Jerusalem
to die.
XVII.
The Anointing at Bethany."
In the whole bearing and conduct of Jesus in and about Jericho
there was much to indicate that some great crisis in his history was
at hand. It does not surprise us to be told of the disciples' believing
"that the kingdom of God should immediately appear." It was
because he knew that they were so misconceiving the future that lay
before him and them, that, either in the house of Zaccheus, or after
wards on the way up to Jerusalem, Jesus addressed to them the
parable of the Pounds. He would have them know, and could they
but have penetrated the meaning of that parable they would have
seen, that so far from any such kingdom as they were dreaming of
being about to be set up for him in Jerusalem, he was going through
the dark avenue of death to another, to a far country, to receive the
kingdom there, and after a long interval to return ; and that, so far
from their being about to share the honors and rewards of a newly
erected empire, they were to be left without a Head, each man to
occupy and to labor till He came again. Another parable, that of the
Laborers in the Vineyard, spoken but a day or two before, had a
kindred object — was intended to check the too eager and ambitious
thirst for the distinctions and recompenses that the apostles imagined
were on the eve of being dispensed. The addressing of two such
parables as these to his disciples, with the specific object of rectify
ing what he knew to be their false ideas and expectations, the readi
ness with which he listened to the cry of the blind beggars by the
wayside, and the interest that he took in the chief of the pubhcans,
conspire to show how far from a mere narrow or selfish one was the
interest with which Jesus looked forward to what was awaiting hinc
* Matt. 26 • 6-13 ; Mark 14 : 3-9 ; John 12 : 1-8.
THE ANOINTING AT BETHANY. 485
in Jerusalem. During the two days' journey from Peraea through
Jericho to the holy city, his thoughts were often and absorbingly
fixed on his approaching sufferings and death, but it was not so
much in their isolated and personal as in their public and world
wide bearings and issues that he was contemplating them ; nor had
die contemplation any such effect as to make him less attentive to
the state of thought and feeling prevafling among his disciples, 01 less
ready to be interested in those who, like Bartimeus and Zaccheus,
threw themselves in his way.
In coming down into the vaUey of the Jordan, Jesus had joined
the large and growing stream of people from the north and the east,
passing up to the approaching Passover. There would be many
Galileans among the group who had not seen him now for many
months, and who, if they had not heard of it before, must have heard
now at Jericho of aU that had happeued at the two preceding Feasts
of Tabernacles and Dedication, of his last great miracle at Bethany,
of the great excitement that had been created, and of the resolution
of the Sanhedrim to put him to death. And now he goes up to face
these rulers, to throw himseU, as they fancy, upon the support of the
people, to unfold the banner of the new kingdom, and call on all his
followers to rally round it. His Galilean friends heartily go in with
what they take to be his designs ; they find the people generally con
curring in and disposed to further them. One can imagine what
was thought and felt, and hoped and feared, by those who accom
panied Jesus as he left Jericho. A few hours' walk would now carry
him and them to the metropolis. It was Friday, the 8th day of their
Jewish month Nisan. The next day was Saturday, their Jewish Sab
bath. On the Thursday foUowing the lamb was to be slain, and the
Passover festival to commence. The great body of the traveUers
press on, to get into the town before the sunset, when the Sabbath
commences. Jesus and his apostles turn aside at Bethany, where
the house of Martha and Mary and Lazarus stands open to receive
them. Here in this peaceful retreat the next day is spent, a quiet
Sabbath for our Lord before entering on the turmoil of the next few
days. Tho companions of his last day's journey have in the mean
time passed into Jerusalem. It is already thronged with those who
had come up from the country to purify themselves for the feast.
With one and aU the engrossing topic is Jesus of Nazareth. Gather
ing in the courts of the temple, they ask about him, they hear what
has occurred; they find that "both the chief priests and the Phari
sees had given a commandment, that if any man knew where he was,
he should show it, that they might take him." What, in the face of
486 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
such an order, wfll Jesus do? "What think ye," they say to one
another, "that he will not come to the feast?" But now they hear
from the newly arrived from Jericho that he is coming, means to be
at the feast, is already at Bethany. They hear that Lazarus, the
man whom he so recently raised from the dead, is also there. He
may not have been there tiU now. He may have accompanied Jesus
to Ephraim, or chosen some other place of temporary retreat, for a
bitter enmity had sprung up against him as weU as against Jesus.
" The chief priests had consulted that they might put Lazarus also
to death, because that by reason of him many of the Jews beheved
on Jesus." Whether he had retired for a time or not, Lazarus is
now at Bethany. Many, unable to restrain their curiosity, go out
to the viUage, " not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see
Lazarus also." It was but a short distance, not much more than a
Sabbath-day's journey. During this day, while Jesus and Lazarus
are there together, many visitors go forth to feast their eyes upon
the sight, and on returning to quicken the excitement among the
multitude. It was on the evening of the Saturday, when the Sabbath was
over, and the next, the first day of the week, had begun, that they
made Jesus a supper in the house of Simon, who once had been a
leper, some near relative in aU Ukelihood of the family of Lazarus,
and Jesus sits at this feast between the one whom he had cured of
his leprosy and the other whom he had raised from the dead.
Martha serves. She had not so read the rebuke before administered
to her as to believe that serving — the thing that she most hked, to
which her disposition and her capabilities at once prompted her —
was in itself unlawful or improper, that her only duty was to sit and
listen. But she had so profited by the rebuke that, concerned as she
is that aU due care be taken that this feast be well served, she turns
now no jealous look upon her sister, leaves Mary without murmuring
or reproach to do as she desires. And Mary seizes the opportunity
now given. She has not now Jesus to herself. She cannot, as in the
privacy of her own dwelling, sit down at his feet to hsten to the
gracious words coming from his hps. But she has an alabaster phial
of fragrant ointment — her costliest possession — one treasured up for
some unknown but great occasion. That occasion has arrived. She
gets it, brings it, approaches Jesus as he sits reclining at the table,
pours part of its contents upon his head, and resolves that the whole
contents shaU be expended upon him. She compresses the yielding
material of which the phial was composed, breaks it, and pours the
last drop of it upon his feet, flinging away the rehcs of the broken
THE ANOINTING AT BETHANY. 487
t/essel, and wiping his feet with her hair. Kingly guest at royal
banquet could not have had a costlier homage of the kind rendered
to him. That Mary had in her possession so rich a treasure may be
accepted as one of the many signs that her family was one of the
wealthiest in the village. That she now took and spent the whole of
it upon Jesus, was but a final expression of the fulness and the
intensity of her devotion and her love.
HaU hidden behind the Saviour's reclining form, she might
have remained unnoticed, but the fragrant odor rose and filled the
house, and drew attention to her deed. Cold and searching and
jealous eyes are upon her, chiefly those of one who never had any
cordial love to Jesus, who never had truly sympathized with the
homage rendered him, who held the bag, had got himself appointed
keeper of the smaU purse they had in common, who afready had
been tampering with the trust, and greedily filching from the narrow
stores committed to his care. Love so ardent, consecration so entire,
sacrifice so costly as that of Mary, he could not appreciate. He dis
liked it, condemned it ; it threw such a reproach by contrast upon
his own feeling and conduct to Christ. And now to his envious,
avaricious spirit it appears that he has got good ground for censure.
He had been watching the movements of Mary, had seen her bring
forth the phial, had measured its size, had gauged the quantity, esti
mated the quality, and calculated the value of its contents. And now
he turns to his fellow-disciples, and whispers in their ears the invid
ious question, " Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred
pence, and given to the poor?" Three hundred pence ! equal to the
hire of a laborer for a whole year — a sum capable of relieving many
a child of poverty, of bringing relief to many a house of want. Had
Judas got the money into his own hands — instead of being all lav
ished on this act of outward attention, had it been thrown into the
common stock — it would not hate been upon the poor that it should
have been spent. He would have managed that no smaU part of the
moDey should have had a very different direction given it. But it
serves his mean malicious object to suggest that such might have
been its destination. And by his craft, which has a show in it of a
wise and thoughtful benevolence, he draws more than one of his
fellow- apostles along with him, so that not loud but deep, the mur
muring runs round the table, and they say to one another, " To what
purpose is this . waste ? this ointment might have been sold for
much, and given to the poor."
Mary hears the murmuring, sees the eyes of one and another
hi aied askance and condemningly upon her, shrinks under the de-
488 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
tracting criticism of the Lord's own apostles, begins to wonder
whether she may not have done something wrong, been guilty of a
piece of extravagance which even Jesus may perhaps condemn. It
had been hard for her before to bear the reproach of her bustling
sister, but harder a thousand times to bear the reproach of the
twelve. But neither then nor now did she make any answer, offer
any defence of herseU. She did not need. She had one to do that
office for her far better than she could have done it for herself. Jesus
is there to throw the mantle of his protection over her, to explain and
vindicate her deed. " Let her alone," he said, " why trouble ye the
woman? she hath wrought a good work upon me." He might have
singled out the first adverse criticiser of Mary's act, the suggester
and propagator of the censorious judgment that was making its
round of the table. Then and there he might have exposed the
hoUowness, the hypocrisy of the pretence about his caring for the
poor, upon which the condemnation of Mary was based. And doing
so, he might have made the others blush that they had given such
ready ear to a speech that such a mean and malignant spirit had
first broached. He did not do this, at least he said nothing that had
any pecuhar and exclusive reference to Judas. But there must have
been something in our Lord's manner — a look perhaps, such as he
bent afterwards on Peter in the judgment-haU — that let Judas know
that before Jesus he stood a detected thief and hypocrite. And it
was not to weep bitterly that he went forth from that supper, but
with a spirit so gaUed and fretted that he took the earhest opportu
nity that occurred to him to commune with the chief priests and the
temple guard as to how he might betray his master, and dehver him
into their hands.
Losing sight of him, let us return to Christ's defence of Mary.
"She hath done a good work," he said, 'a noble work, one not only
far from censure, but worthy of all praise. She hath done it unto
me, done it out of pure deep love — a love that will bring the best, the
costliest thing she has, and think it no waste, but rather its fittest,
worthiest application, to bestow it upon me.' Upon that ground
alone, upon his individual claims as compared with all others, Jesus
might well have rested his vindication of Mary's act. Nay, might he
not have taken the censure of her as a disparagement of himself?
xUl these his general claims— which go to warrant the highest, cost
liest, most self-sacrificing services that an enthusiastic piety can
render — he in this instance is content to waive, fixing upon the pecu
liarity of his existing position and the speciality of the particular
service that she has rendered, as supplying of themselves an ample
THE ANOINTING AT BETHANY. 48D
justification of the deed that had been condemned. The claims of
the poor had been set up, as if they stood opposed to any such ex
penditure of property as that made by Mary in this anointing of the
Saviour. It was open to Christ to say that it was an altogether need
less, false, injurious conflict thus sought to be stirred up — as if to
give to him, to do anything for him, were to take so much from the
poor; as if no portion of the great fund of the church's wealth was
available for any purely devout and reUgious purpose tiU all the
wants of all the poor were met and satisfied — wants, be it remem
bered, of such a kind that though we supplied them aU to-day,
would emerge in some new form to-morrow — wants which it is im
possible so to deal with as wholly and permanently to relieve. He
is no enlightened pleader for the poor who would represent them and
their necessities as standing in the way of the indulgence of those
warm impulses of love to Christ, out of which princely benefactions,
as well as many a deed of heroic seU-sacrifice, have emanated. The
spirit of Judas, indeed — cold, calculating, carping, disparaging — has
often crept even into the Christian society, and men bearing the
name of Jesus have often been ready, when great donations on behalf
of some strictly rehgious enterprise were spoken of, to condemn them
off-hand on this one ground, that it would have been much better
had the money been bestowed upon the poor. Just as, when a large
estate was once sold in this country, and the proprietor, moved by a
favored idea, resolved to devote the entire proceeds of the sale to
Christian missions in India, there were not wanting those who said —
I quote now the words of one of them — " What a mad scheme this
of Haldane's ! How many poor people might that money have fed
and clothed ?" The world, let us bless God for it, is not so poor that
there is but one way — that, namely, of almsgiving — for gratifying
those generous impulses which visit the heart and impel to acts of
singular liberahty. He who put it into the heart of Mary to do
what she did towards the person of Christ, has put it into the hearts
of others since to do like things towards his cause. And if in many
such hke instances there be more of mere emotion, more of the indul
gence of individual taste than of staid and wise-hearted Christian
benevolence, let us not join with the condemners of them, unless we
be prepared to put a check upon all the free, spontaneous expressions
of those sentiments of veneration, gratitude, and love to Jesus Christ,
out of which some of the most chivalrous and heroic deeds have
sprung by which the history of our race has been adorned.
It is, however, as has been already said, upon somewhat narrower
ground that Christ vindicates the act of Mary. It was one of such
490 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
personal attention to him as could be shown to him only while he
was present in the flesh. "The poor," said he, "ye have with you
always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good, but me ye
have not always." Further still, it was one that but once only in all
his earthly life could be shown to Jesus, for "in that she hath poured
this ointment on me, she is come aforehand to anoint my body for
the burial." Had Mary any definite idea that she was doing before
hand what Joseph and Nicodemus would have no time and opportu
nity for doing, what the two other Marys would go out to do to find
only that the need for its being done was over and gone? It may be
assuming too much for her to believe that, with a clearer insight and
a simpler faith in what Jesus had said than had yet been reached by
any of the twelve, she anticipated the death and burial of her Master
as near at hand. But neither can we think that she acted without
some vague presentiment that she was seizing upon a last oppor
tunity, that the days of such intercourse with Jesus were drawing to
an end. She knew the perils to which he would be exposed when
ever he entered Jerusalem. She hadheard him speak of his approach
ing sufferings and death. To others the words might appear to be
without meaning, or only to be allegorically interpreted, but the
quick instinct of her deeper love had refused to regard them so, and
they had fiUed her bosom with an indefinite dread. The nearer the
time for losing, the more intense became the clinging to him. Had
she beheved as the others around her did, had she looked forward
to a speedy triumph of Jesus over all his enemies, and to the visible
erection of his kingdom, would she have chosen the time she did for
the anointing? would she not have reserved to a more fitting oppor
tunity a service that was more appropriate to the crowning of a new
monarch than the preparing of a living body for the tomb ? In
speaking as he did, Jesus may have been only attributing to Mary a
fuller understanding of and simpler faith in his own prophetic utter
ances than that possessed at the time by any of his disciples. Such
a conception of her state of mind and heart would elevate Mary to a
stfll higher pinnacle than that ordinarily assigned to her, and we can
see no good reason for doubting that it was even so. But it does
not require that we should assign to her any such preeminence of
faith. It was the intensity of the personal attachment to Jesus that
her act expressed which drew down upon it the encomium of the
Lord. Thus he had to say of it what he could say of so few single
services of any of his followers — that in it she did what she could,
did aU she could — in that direction there was not a step farther that
she could have taken. Of all like ways and forms of expressing
THE ANOINTING AT BETHANY. 491
attachment there was not a higher one that she could have chosen.
Her whole heart of love went out in the act, and therefore Jesus
said of it, "Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shaU be
preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done
shall be spoken of for a memorial of her" — the one and only case
in which Jesus ever spoke of the after earthly fame of any service
rendered to him, predicting for it such a widespread reputation and
such an undying remembrance. Thus said Chrysostom, when dis
coursing upon this incident : "While the victories of many kings and
generals are lost in silence, and many who have founded states and
reduced nations to subjection are not known by reputation or by
name, the pouring of ointment by this woman is celebrated through
out the whole world. Time hath passed away, but the memory of
the deed she did hath not waned away. But Persians and Indians
and Scythians and Thracians, and the race of the Mauritanians, and
they who inhabit the British Isles, publish abroad an act which was
done in Judea privately in a house by a woman." Fourteen hundred
years have passed and gone since in the great church of St. Sophia
at Constantinople Chrysostom uttered these words, referring to these
British Isles as one of the remotest places of the then known world.
The centuries that have roUed by since then have witnessed many a
revolution, not the least wonderful among them the place that these
Biitish Isles now occupy, but still wider and wider is the tale of Mary's
anointing of her Master being told, the fragrance of the ointment
spreading, yet losing nothing of its sweetness ; such fresh vitality, such
self-preserving power, lodging in a simple act of pure and fervid love.
One single parting glance let us cast upon our Saviour as he
presents himseU to our eye upon this occasion. He sits at a festive
board. He is surrounded by men looking joyously forward to days
and years of success and triumph. But he knows what they do
not — that on that day week his body wfll be lying in the new-made
sepulchre. And he accepts the anointing at Mary's hand as prepar
ing his body for the burial. He sits the invited guest of a man who
had been a leper, surrounded in that village home by a few humble
followers. With serene eye he looks down into the future, and abroad
over the earth, and speaks of it as a thing of certainty that this
gospel — the gospel of glad tidings of salvation in his name — was to
be preached throughout the whole world. If it be true that Jesua
thought and felt and spoke and acted thus, how vain the attempt to
explain away his foresight of the future, to reduce it to the dimen
sions of the highest human wisdom sagaciously anticipating what
was afterwards to occur.
THE PASSION WEEK.
I.
The Triumphal -Entry into Jerusalem — Jesus weep
ING OYER THE ClTY."
SUNDAY,
The road from Jericho to Jerusalem, as it winds up the eastern
slopes of Olivet, passes close by the viUage of Bethany. From the
village a footpath runs up to the top of the mount, and thence down
a steep dechvity into the ravine of the Kedron. This being the
shortest, may have been the path ordinarily taken by the villagers
when going on foot to and from Jerusalem. It was not the way that
any rider, not the way that the caravans of Passover pilgrims coming
up from Jericho, would choose. They naturally would take the
somewhat longer, but much better and more level road, which runs
round the southern shoulder of the ridge as it shelves down toward
the Mount of Offence. The single circumstance that, on the occasion
now before us, Jesus rode into the city, might of itseU have led us to
beheve that it was by the latter road he went. Still further confir
mation of this meets us as we enter into the details of this short but
ever memorable procession.
The quiet day of Sabbatic rest at Bethany is over. Eeleased
from its restraints, visitors may now freely pass from Jerusalem to
Bethany. Of this freedom numbers avail themselves, and the viUage
is crowded. It is understood that at some time in the course of the
day — the first day of the week — Jesus means to go into the city.
During the forenoon the tidings of his intention are widely circulated.
It was now but four days to the Passover, and the crowds df pilgrims,
requiring as they did a day or two of preparation, have nearly aU
arrived. In and about Jerusalem between two and three millions of
Matt. 21 : 1-11 ; Mark 11 : 1-11 ; Luke 19 : 29-4ut their own sentence been in their own hands, there had been no
* Mark 15:1; Luke 23 * 1 4 ; John 18 : 28-39.
HIS FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 67S
difficulty; Jesus would have been led out instantly to execution.
But Judea was now under the Eoman yoke; one bond and badge of
its servitude being this, that whfle the old Jewish courts were per
mitted to try and to punish minor offences, the final judgment of all
capital offences was reserved for the Eoman tribunals. A Eoman
judge must pass the sentence, or, at least, must sign the warrant
that consigns the criminal to execution. At Jerusalem, these reserved
cases were brought up for* adjudication at the time of the great
festivals, when the Eoman procurator, who resided ordinarily at
Csesarea, visited the capital. For the last six years, Pontius Pilate
had held this office in Judea, and he was now in the city on occa
sion of this passover. His order, therefore, for the execution must
be obtained that forenoon, or perhaps not at all. It was now the
last day before the passover on which a court of justice could be
held; and if not held before six o'clock that evening — when the
passover period began, then not for seven days thereafter. To keep
Christ so long in bonds, awaiting his presentation to the Eoman
judge — with an uncertainty, besides, whether Pilate would take up
the case after the passover — were a risk too perilous to run. They
had, indeed, the whole day before them, and there was time enough
to get Pilate's judgment before the passover commenced; but to
keep Jesus not only bound, but bound with the order for his cruci
fixion hanging over him ; to keep him so for eight days to come : to
keep him so till not only citizens of Jerusalem, but the inhabitants
of the whole region round about, had heard aU the particulars of
his apprehension and condemnation — that also were peril which
must, if possible, be avoided. And it could only be avoided by
getting the crucifixion over before that sun which was just about to
rise had set.
Obviously there was urgent need of haste. The consultation,
therefore, was a brief and a hurried one. The resolution was taken
to bind Jesus once more — bind him as men condemned to death
were wont to be bound — and to carry him at once to Pilate, and get
from him the authority to proceed. Thither, therefore, to the official
residence of the procurator, accompanied by the whole multitude
that had assembled in and around the hall of Caiaphas, Jesus is con
veyed. It is a house which the Gentile has occupied and polluted ;
a house from which the leaven has not been cast out; a house to
cross whose threshold at such a time as this — on the very eve of the
passover — was to disqualify the entrant from all participation in the
holy rite. And, though there be among their number those who,
from their position and previous acquaintance, might well have
674 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
claimed the privilege of access, and asked a private audience of
Pilate, to explain to him the nature of the case in which his inter
ference at such an uuseasonable hour was required, yet will not one
of these precise, punctUious chief priests, scribes, and councfllora
venture into that dwelling, lest they should be defiled. They send
in their message by some of Pilate's officers or servants. At once,
with Eoman courtesy, he comes out to them — to where they are all
standing around the bound and sentenced Jesus. The glance of a
quick eye at once revealed to Pilate the general object of this early
visit. These, he knew, as his eye ran round the leaders of the
crowd, were the Jewish judges, and this, as that eye rested upon
Jesus, some one whom they were anxious to get punished. But why
all this haste ? What can it have been that has brought together,
at such an unusual hour, aU these city magnates, and drawn them as
suppliants to his door? What extraordinary crime can this man,
whom they have borne to him, have committed, that they are so
impatient to see him punished ? He looks at Christ again. He had
tried many; he had condemned many; his practised eye was familiar
with the features which great guilt ordinarily wears, but he had
never seen a great criminal look as this man looks; nothing here
«ither of that sunk and hollow aspect that those convicted of great
crimes sometimes show ; nothing here of that bold and brazen front
with which they still more frequently are wont to face their doom:
he looks so gentle, so meek, so innocent, yet so calm, so sefl-
possessed, so dignified. It does not seem that Pilate knew at first
who this bound one was that now stood before him. He must have
heard something, perhaps much, of Jesus of Nazareth before. He
had been governor of the country aU through the years of our Lord's
public ministry, and it could scarcely be but that some report of his
great sayings and doings must have reached his ear ; but no more,
perhaps, than Herod had he ever met him — ever seen him face to
face; nor does he yet know that this is he. He only knows and
feels that never has his eye rested upon one more unlike a hardened
reprobate than this. His curiosity roused, his interest excited, the
favorable impression which this first sight of the accused has made,
cooperating with the instinctive and official sense of justice, Pilate's
first words to these judges and heads of the Jewish people are,
"What accusation bring ye against this man?" Was that question
put in such a way, was it spoken in such a tone, or accompanied bj
such a look as to convey the idea that he who put it was not at once
ready to believe that any very heinous offence had been committed
by that man ? Perhaps it did carry with it some indication of that
HIS FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 675
kind. But whether so or not, it indicated this, that Pilate meant to
open up or re-try the case, or, at least, to get at and go over, upon
his own account, the ground of their condemnation ere he ratified it.
He could not but know — if he had not been distinctly told by the
messengers whom the Jews sent to him, he saw it plainly enough in
all the attendant circumstances — what it was that these Jews were
expecting him to do. But he wiU do it in his own way. He wfll
not sign off-hand, upon their credit and at their bidding, the death
warrant of a man like this. Had he been a judge of the purest
and strictest honor he would not have signed in such a hurried
way the death-warrant of any one ; but we know it from other
sources, and the Jews who stood before him knew it too, that he was
not such a judge, that he had often condemned without a hearing.
And it is this which inclines us to believe that there was something
in the very first impression that our Lord's appearance made upon
Pilate which touched the better part of his nature, and not only
stirred within his heart the wish to know what it was of which they
accused such a man, but also the desire to ascertain, for his own
satisfaction, whether or not that accusation was well founded.
Obviously, to the men to whom it was addressed, Pilate's ques
tion was a disappointing one. They did not want, they had not
expected to be summoned thus to adduce and to substantiate some
charge against Jesus, which, in Pilate's judgment might be sufficient
to doom him to death. They had hoped that to save himself the
trouble of investigation, and in compliment to them at this passover
season — a compliment which, when it cost him nothing, they knew
that he was quite wiUing to pay — he would take their judgment on
trust and proceed upon it. And they stfll hope so. They wfll let
Pilate know how good a right they have to expect this service at his
hand; and how much they wfll be offended if he refuse it. When the
question, then, is put to them, "What accusation bring ye agamst
this man?" they content themselves with saying, "E he were not
a malefactor, we would not have delivered him up to thee " — words
of haughtiness and injured pride. 'Do you think that we, the
whole assembled Sanhedrim; we, the very first men in this Jewish
community over which you happen to have been placed; we, who
have come to you, as we are not often wont to do, and are here
before your gates to ask a very easy act of compliance with our
will — do you think that we would have brought this man to you, U
we had not already ascertained his guflt? Do you think that we
would either have ventured to offer such an insult to you, or our
selves perpetrate such 'injustice?' A very high tone this to take,
676 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
which they have some hope will yet carry their point for them with
the weak and vacillating governor. They are disappointed. Thev
have stirred a pride that is equal to their own. If those Jews wont
tell him what kind or degree of criminality it is that they attribute
to this man, he, Pilate, wont put himself as a blind tool into their
hands. ' If it be your judgment, and your judgment alone, that is
to rule this man's case, "Take ye him, then," said Pilate, "and judge
him according to your own law;"' — a refusal on Pilate's part to do
the thing which they first hoped that they might get him to do
off-hand; a refusal to countersign their sentence, whatever it was,
and by whatever evidence supported. It was as much as saying,
that so far as he had yet heard or known anything of this case, it
was one which their own law, as administered by themselves, was
quite competent to deal with.
Let them take this man, and judge him and punish him as they
pleased, provided only that they kept strictly within the limits that
their conquerors had laid down. This were whoUy to miss their
mark. Their tone changes ; their pride humbles itself. They are
obhged to explain to the governor, what he had known well enough
from the first, but what they had not been candid enough to tell him,
that it was a sentence unto death which they wished to get executed,
a sentence which they were not at liberty to carry out. This deter
mination of Pilate to make personal inquiry into the grounds of that
sentence, obhged them also to lodge some distinct and specific charge
against Jesus ; one of such a kind that the governor would be forced
to deal with it; one too of sufficient magnitude to draw down upon
it the punishment of death. Now mark the deep hypocrisy and utter
falseness of these men. It wont do now to say that it was solely as
a blasphemer, as caUing himself the Son of God, that Jesus had
been condemned before their bar. It wont do to let Pilate know
anything of the only piece of evidence upon which their sentence
has been founded. What cares he about that kind of blasphemy of
which Jesus has been convicted? What cares that Eoman law, of
which he is the administrator, who or what any man thinks himself
to be, or claims to be, in his relationship with God ? Let any Jew
be but a good and faithful subject to Caesar, and, so far as Caesar or
Csesar's representatives are concerned, he may claim any rank he
pleases among the gods. It was necessary, therefore, to draw the
thickest vefl of concealment over their own procedure as judges,
although before the examination at this new bar was over, it oozed
out that Jesus had made himseU the Son of God — with what strange
effect upon Pilate's mind we shaU presently see. But, in the first
HIS FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 677
instance, some civil or political offence, some crime against the com
mon law of the land, must be sought for to charge against Jesus. It
was not easy to find or fabricate such a crime. Our Saviour had
throughout most carefuUy and cautiously avoided everything like in
terference or intermeddhng with, condemning or resisting, the ordi
nary administration of law, the pohcy and procedure of the govern
ment. He refused to entertain a question about the rights of inher-
' itance between two brothers, saying to him who sought his interfer
ence, "Man, who made me a judge or a ruler over you?" These
very men, who are now about to frame their first accusation of him
before Pilate, had tried to get him to pass his judgment upon the
abstract question as to whether it was lawful to pay tribute to Csesar
or not, and had failed in their attempt to entangle him. What con
cealment, then, what deception, what effrontery of falsehood in it —
and it shows to what extremity they were driven — that when forced
to adduce some specific accusation, they said, "We found this feUow
perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Csesar, say
ing that he himself is Christ a king!" They here bring three dif
ferent accusations against him, not one of which — in that sense in
which alone they desire that Pilate should understand them — they
know is true ; and one of which, the second, they know is absolutely,
and in every sense of it, false. But it suits their object to represent
the accused to Pilate as stirring up sedition, refusing to pay custom,
•denying the Eoman right to reign over Judea, claiming to be king of
the country in his own person and of his own right. These, how
ever, were charges which they knew a Eoman governor, whose chief
business in their country was to see that the rights of the emperor
whom he represented should suffer no damage, could not pass by ;
charges by no means unlikely to be true, for Judea was at this time
in a most unsettled state. There were multitudes of Jews who ques
tioned Csesar's right to tax them ; multitudes who regarded him as a
foreign usurper. Give them but a chance of success, and the great
majority of the people would have risen then, as they rose after
wards, and risked their lives to regain their national hberties. One
thing alone was suspicious — that such an accusation should come
from such a quarter; that those leaders of the Jews should be so
very eager to get a man punished for such a crime. It surely could
not be so mighty an offence in their eyes. They were not themselves
so very loyal to Eome as to be anxious to see an enemy to the Eoman
power cut off. Never before, at least, had they displayed any great
zeal in that direction. Pilate had no faith in their sincerity. He
saw through their designs. Perhaps it was now that, for the first
678 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
time, he recognized that it was with Jesus of Nazareth, of whom he
had heard so much, that he had to do. He did not entertain, be
cause he did not beheve, the charge of his being a seditious and
rebeUious subject. But there was one part of the accusation which
was quite new to him, which sounded ridiculous in his ears : that this
poor Nazarene should say that he was a king, the king of the Jews —
a very preposterous pretension ; one sufficient of itself, if there was
any real ground for saying that it ever had actually been set forth, to
suggest a doubt as to whether Jesus was a fit subject for any judicial
procedure whatever being taken against him. Overlooking all else
that had been said against him, Pilate turns to Christ, and says to
him, "Art thou the king of the Jews?" He expected nothing else
than to get an immediate disclaimer of the absurd pretension. To
his surprise, however, Jesus calmly and dehberately replies, "Thou
sayest it — I am the king of the Jews." Very curious this, to hear
such a man, in such a condition, and in such circumstances, speak
in such a way. He must be some egregious, designing, perhaps
dangerous impostor, or, more likely, some wretched, ignorant, haU-
mad enthusiast or fanatic. He would like to search a little into the
matter, and find out how it really stood. The man himself would in
all likelihood be the first to supply the clue; he had so willingly
and so calmly answered that first question that he would answer
others. But it would be better to interrogate him alone, away from
these accusers. He might not be so ready to answer further questions
in their hearing, or they might interfere and prevent Pilate prose
cuting the inquiry in his own way. He retired therefore to his own
dwelling, into that part of it called and used generally as the judg
ment haU, and calls upon Christ to follow him. Jesus at once con
sents. He makes no scruple about crossing that threshold ; he fears
no contagion from contact with the Gentile ; his passover has been
already held. And now, when they are alone, out of sight and out
of hearing of those Jews, Pilate says again to him in a subdued and
under tone, as of one really anxious to get at the truth, "Art thou the
king of the Jews?" Waiving in the meantime anything hke a direct
reply, Jesus said to him, " Sayest thou this thing of thyseU, or did
others tell it thee of me?" 'Art thou but repeating the words of
others, or art thou asking out of the depths of thine own inquiring
spirit? Hast thou, too, Pilate, felt the inward need of some one to
be the governor and lord of thine unruled, unruly spirit ? Lies there
behind the outward form and meaning of that question of thine, the
indistinct, the inarticulate longing after another king and another
kingdom than either Jews or Eomans own ?' Was there, indeed, for
HIS FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 679
one passing moment, far down in the depths of Pilate's strugghng
thoughts, an element of this kind at work ; and did Jesus, knowing
that it was there, try thus to bring it up, that he might proceed to
satisfy it? Tf so, what a moment of transcendent interest to the
Roman judge, of which had he but known how to take advantage,
he too might have entered the kingdom, and shared its security
and blessedness ! But he does not, he will not stoop to acknowledge,
what we suspect was true, that there did mingle in the thoughts and
feelings of that moment some element of the kind described. This is
too personal, too bold, too home a question of the Nazarene. The
pride of the Eoman, the judge, sweUs up within his breast, overbear
ing his eternal interests as a man, a sinner — and so he haughtily
replies: "Am I a Jevr? Thine own nation, and the chief priests,
have delivered thee unto me : what hast thou done?" The chance
of reaching the individual conscience of this man has passed away ;
the trial has been made, and it has failed ; Jesus must take up the
question "not as one between him and Pilate — between Pilate's con
science and PUate's God — but as one simply between himself as a
sentenced criminal, and those Jews without, who are his accusers.
He will not answer the last question of the governor, " What hast
thou done?" upon that he will not enter; it would be of no avail;
but he will satisfy Pilate upon one point. He wfll convince him that
he has committed no political offence ; that he never meant to set
himseU in opposition to any of this world's governments. " My king
dom," said he, " is not of this world. H my kingdom were of this
world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered
tothe Jews; but now is my kingdom not from hence:" 'a king
dom rising up and extending itself by earthly weapons, by outward
force of any kind, not such is that kingdom which I Jesus call my
own.' But U noc, what kind of kingdom can it be? what kind of king is
he who rules it ? So far satisfied, yet stfll wondering and perplexed,
Pilate puts his question, not in its first specific form, but in a more
general one: " Art thou a king then?" 'If not a king like our own
Caesars or your own Herods, U not a king to fight with rival sove
reigns, or ask thy subjects to fight for thee, then in what sense a
king ?' Our Lord's reply, we can perceive, was particularly adapted
to the position, character, acquirements, experience, of him before
whom he stood — a Eoman official of high rank, educated, cultivated;
a man of affairs, of large experience of men — men in different coun
tries and of different creeds ; not given much, perhaps, to any deep
or serious thought about religious matters, yet sufficiently acquaint-
,680 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ed with the rival schools of philosophy and religion by which the
then great living Eoman commonwealth was divided and distracted.
Truth, moral truth, religious truth, was the one proclaimed object of
research, of which some were saying, Lo, here it is, and others,
Lo, there it is ; but of which he, Pilate, in pursuit of quite a different
object, had learned to think that neither here nor there nor anywhere
was it to be found. It is to this man that Jesus says, speaking in
the language that would be most inteUigible to him : " Thou sayest
that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I
into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every
one that is of the truth heareth my voice." As these words fell upon
the ear of Pilate, one can weU enough imagine that the current of
his thoughts ran thus : ' It is even as I suspected ; here is another of
these pretenders, who each would have us to believe that he alone
had discovered the undiscoverable, that he alone had found out and
got exclusive possession of the truth ; here is a new Jewish rival of
those old Stoics of our own, who were ever teaching us that every
wise man was a king — the setter-up of a new system, which he im
agines is to dethrone every other one that the world before has seen,
whose fancy is that he himself is already upon the throne of his
great kingdom — some poor, egotistical, yet quite harmless enthusiast,
whose day-dream none would wish to break ! One thing, at least, is
clear enough, that it is a quite empty, hoUow charge these Jews are
urging here against him. He may sit as long as he hkes upon that
ideal throne of his, without the throne of Tiberius being endangered;
he may get as many subjects as he can to enter that ideal kingdom
of his, and my master, the emperor, have not a loyal subject the less.'
And so with that passing question to Jesus, "What is truth?" — a
question he does not stay to get answered, as he has no faith that
any answer to it can be given ; a question not uttered sneeringly or
scoffingly, but rather sadly and bitterly, so far as he himseU is con
cerned, having come to regard aU truth as a phantom ; and with a
kindly, tolerant, half-pitying, half-envious feeling towards Jesus — with
that question put to Jesus by the way, Pilate goes out to the Jews,
and says to them boldly and emphatically, "I find in him no fault at
all ;" the faultlessness of Christ acknowledged, his kingly claims
scarcely comprehended, and so far as comprehended, rejected, per
haps despised.
Let each of us now ask himseU, How stands it as to me and this
kingdom of the truth, this one great king of the true? Is Jesus
Christ to me the way, the truth, the life ? Does truth, simple, pure,
sternal truth, stand expressed and exhibited to me in those words,
HIS APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 681
those prayers, those acts, those sufferings, that life, that death, of
Jesus Christ? The witness that he bore to the truth, in the living of
that hfe and the dying of that death, have I listened to it, and be
lieved in it, and submitted to it? Am I of the truth; a simple,
humble, earnest seeker after it ; and have I this evidence of my being
go, that I hear the voice of Jesus, hear it and hail it, among all the
conflicting voices that are falhng on my ear, as the voice of him who
rightfuUy claims the lordship of my soul ? Is truth — the truth as to
God, my Creator, my Father, my Eedeemer ; the truth as to myself,
what I am, what I ought to be, what I may be, what I shaU be — is
this truth not a mere form of sound words, not a mere congeries of
acknowledged or accepted propositions ; but does it stand before me
embodied in the person, the Hfe, the death, the mediation of Jesus
Christ ; and have I enshrined and enthroned him as King and Lord
of my weak, my sinful, my immortal spirit ?
V.
Christ's Appearance Before Herod."
Jesus had spoken quite frankly and openly to Pilate when they
were together, out of sight and hearing of the Jews, alone in the
judgment haU. It was quite different when, accompanied by Christ,
Pilate came out again to the attendant crowd, and boldly said to
them, " I find no fault in this man." So far, then, the chief priests
and elders have failed. Failure always embitters. Failure here was
what these men were by no means disposed to submit to. Pilate's
assertion of his behef in the innocence of Jesus only made them the
more vehement in their assertion of his guilt. They became the
more fierce. They accused him, Mark tells us, of many things. But
the waves and the billows of this swelling wrath of theirs broke
harmlessly upon Christ. So absent, so unmoved, so indifferent did
he appear, that it seemed as U he had not heard what they were
saying against him, or hearing had not understood, or understanding
had not heeded. Very different this retirement into himself — this
unruffled composure, this unbroken silence, from those eager and
animated utterances to which the governor had just been listening in
the hall within. Perhaps it is wounded pride that seals the lips of
Jesus. To men like these, animated by such a bitter personal hos-
* Matt. 27 : 12, 13 ; Mark 0 : H-16 ; Luke 9:7-9; 13 : 31, 32 ; 23 : 4-1 2.
682 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
tility to him, exhausting every epithet of vituperation, heaping upon
him all kinds of charges, Jesus may not condescend to give any
answer. But he has not treated, will not treat, the Eoman governor
in the same way ; at least he wiU surely teU him why it is that he
preserves this silence. Pilate says to him, "Hearest thou not how
many things they witness against thee ?" There is no reply. The
lips are as shut at the question of Pilate as at the accusation of the
Jews. Christ has said aU that he meant to say, done all that he
meant to do, so far as those charges were concerned that they were
now bringing against him. He had answered to the Eoman judge
that the kingship which he claimed was not of a kind in any way -to
interfere with this world's governments; he had satisfied him of his
perfect innocence as a subject of the state ; and, having done that,
he would say and do no more.
One observes an almost exact parallel as to his silences and his
speakings in our Lord's conduct before the Jewish and the Gentile
courts of justice. In that preliminary unofficial conversation he held
with Annas before the Sanhedrim sat in judgment on his case, Jesus
had spoken without reserve, had answered the high priest's ques
tions but too fully, and had brought down upon himself the stroke
of the officer who stood by. But when the regular trial commenced,
and charges were formaUy brought forward, and attempted by many
witnesses to be substantiated, Jesus held his peace, so long and so
resolutely, manifesting so little disposition or desire to meddle in any
way with the procedure that was going on, that the high priest rose
from his seat, and put to him a question of the same import with
that which Pilate afterwards put ; and the two questions met with
the very same treatment, to neither of them a single word of reply
was given. But when the high priest rose, and solemnly adjured
Jesus to tell whether he was the Christ the Son of God, just as when
Pilate asked whether he was the king of the Jews, and what kind of
king he was, our Lord made instant and distinct reply. So far as
we can see or understand the principle ruling here the Saviour's con
duct, determining the time to speak and the time to be silent, it was
this: that when the matter immediately and directly concerned his
Divine Sonship and Kingship, he wiU help his judges in every way
he can ; nay, he will himself supply the evidence they want. Upon
that count he will allow himself to be condemned ; he wfll cooperate
with his enemies in bringing about his condemnation ; but of all
these other lesser charges he will take no account; but leave the
manifold attempts to fasten on him any other kind of charge, to break
down of themselves, that, his enemies themselves being witnesses, it
HIS APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 683
might be solely and alone as the Son of God, the King of Israel,
that he should be convicted, condemned, and crucified.
Among the many things that the chief priests were now accusing
Jesus of in the presence of the governor, hoping stfll to convince
Pflate that he was not the guiltless man that he had taken him to
be, there was one thing that they put prominently forward, presented
in every form, amplified in every way, on which they mainly relied
in their deahngs with Pilate — the setting forth of Christ as a ring
leader of sedition. "He stirreth up the people," stirreth them up
against the constituted authorities, preaching rebellion through the
whole country, not here in Judea alone, but there also in Gahlee
where he began this work. This allusion to Galilee as the birth
place of the aUeged seditious movement may have been accidental;
they may have meant merely thereby to signify how widespread
the evil had been which they were caUing upon Pilate to check; or
it may have been done designedly, with that art which was to leave
nothing unsaid or unsuggested, by which the governor could possibly
be influenced. Galilee might have been named by them, to suggest
to Pilate how difficult it was to produce proof of crime committed in
so remote a district ; or to remind him that this Galilee, upon which
so much of Christ's time and labor had been spent, was the chosen
haunt of the resisters of the Eoman authority, the cradle of most ot
the seditious plots concocted against the emperor's government ; or
they might have known of the bad feeling that there was at this
time between Pilate and the king of Galilee, and might have im
agined that it would be rather gratifying to Pilate than otherwise to
lay his hand judiciaUy upon one who might be regarded as a subject
of that prince.
However it was, no sooner had the words escaped their hps, than
a happy thought suggested itself to Pilate. He is in great difficulty
with this case ; he knows not how to deal with it. He had never been
so importuned as he now was by those chief priests and elders ; he
never saw them more bent on anything than on the death of this
man whom they had brought to him ; it would be easy to give him
up to their vengeance — he had done as much as that before — but he
was convinced of this man's innocence ; there was something too, so
peculiar about his whole look, bearing, and conduct, that he could
not make up his mind to have any share in sending him to be
executed as a common criminal. But now he hears, that part at
least, perhaps the greater part of the offence alleged against him
had taken place in GalUee, in that part of the country which was
not under his jurisdiction, but belonged to that of Herod. This
684 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Herod, the king of Galilee, happened at this very time to be in Jeru-
salem. Pilate will send the case to him ; and thus get the responsi
bility of deciding it shifted from his own shoulders, by laying it
upon one who not only may be quite wilhng to assume it, but may
regard as a compUment the reference of the case to his adjudication.
There was a misunderstanding between the two — the Eoman pro
curator and the Gahlean king — which the sending of Jesus to the
latter for trial might serve to heal. Pilate had done something to
displease Herod — something, in aU likehhood, in the very way of
interfering with what Herod regarded as his rights, and the rights of
his subjects. Some Galileans had been up lately at Jerusalem,
offering sacrifice there. There had been a riot, which Pilate had
promptly and summarily quelled; but in doing so he had mingled
the blood of some of these Galileans with their sacrifices — cut them
down without inquiring whose subjects they were, or what right they
might have to demand a trial in one or other of the Herodian courts.
For this, or some such fancied interference with his jurisdiction,
Herod had taken offence at Pilate. The recognition of his jurisdic
tion, then, by sending to him for trial such a notorious person as
Jesus, would be the very kind of comphment most soothing to his
kingly vanity. Herod recognized and appreciated the comphment;
and whatever else Pilate lost by the line of conduct he pursued that
day, he at least gained this — he got the quarrel between himself and
Herod healed.
The happy thought no soonei occurs to Pilate than he acts upon
it. And now, guarded by some Eoman soldiers, accompanied by the
whole crowd of his accusers, Jesus is despatched to Herod. To enter
into the scene that follows, we must go back a little upon this Herod's
history. How John the Baptist and he became first acquainted
we are not told. A part of the territory (Persea) over which Herod's
jurisdiction extended, ran down along the eastern shore of the Dead
Sea, and it is probable that it was in some of the circuits that he
made of this district that he first feU in with the Baptist, engaged in
his great ministry of repentance. Herod was greatly struck alike
with the man and with his teaching. There was a strange fascina
tion about both which drew the attention of the king. As there was
nothing about John's ministry to excite or gratify either the intellect
or the fancy — no miracles wrought, no new doctrines propounded, no
vivid picturing employed; as aU was so purely moral, so plain, so
pointed, so practical in his teaching, we must beheve that what at
first drew Herod to John, and made him Hsten with such pleasure,
was that it was a faithful portraiture of men that John was drawing.
HIS APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 685
an honest and fearless exposure of their sins he made. Herod both
admired and approved; but the pleasure that he had in observing
John, and in listening to his instruction, was by no means a pure or
untroubled one. He feared John, we are told, knowing that he was
a just man and a holy. This fear was the fruit of guilt. He knew
and felt what a different man John was from himself. The very
presence of the Baptist was a rebuke, and he was not yet so hard
ened as to receive that rebuke without alarm. Nor did this first
connection of the king with the Baptist terminate in the mere excite
ment of certain emotions, whether of respect, or admiration, or fear.
Herod did many things, we are told, at John's bidding. I imagine
that, in the first stage of their intercourse, John dealt with Herod
as he dealt with the Pharisees, and the soldiers, and the publicans ;
that he laid his hand upon those open and patent offences of which,
in common with other rulers, Herod notoriously was guilty. The
king not only suffered him to do so, but even went the length of
reforming his conduct in some respects, in obedience to the Baptist's
instructions. But John did not stop there — did not stop where
Herod would have liked ; but, stepping boldly into the inner circle
of his private Hfe, and laying his hand upon the stain which dis
figured it, he said to him, "It is not lawful for thee to have thy
brother's wife."
In all likelihood Herodias was not with Herod when first he met
the Baptist, and heard him so gladly, and did many things at his
bidding. This meeting may have happened in the wilderness, where
Herod ranked but as one of John's large and public audience. But
the king invited the Baptist to his court, and it was there, perhaps in
presence of Herodias, that the rebuke of that particular transgres
sion was given. Herod's anger was kindled at what appeared an
impertinent and officious intermeddhng with his private conduct, his
family affairs. And there was one beside him who resented that
intermeddling stfll more than he, and was at pains to excite and to
nurse his wrath. Herodias would have made short work of it with
this sharp reprover; she would have sealed his lips at once in
death, so that she should no more be troubled with their unwelcome
rebukes; and Herod, notwithstanding aU his earlier readiness to
hear and to obey, notwithstanding aU his respect and regard for
John, would have yielded to her desire ; but he feared the multitude,
and, yielding to that fear, he made a compromise — he cast John
into prison, and kept him there for months. But months could not
quench the thirst for his blood that had been stirred in the heart of
that second Jezebel; still she was asking for the head of the Baptist,
686 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
but Herod would not yield — and took no little credit to himseU, we
may beheve, for being so firm. Forgetting that it was the fear of
the multitude that overbalanced the influence of the queen, he might
even have come to persuade himself that he was dealing very gently
and tenderly with the Baptist. But the queen knew him better than
he knew himself, and so with diabolic art contrived the plot that was
to bring another and still weightier fear, to overbalance in its turn
the fear of the multitude.
All went as she desired. The evening for the royal supper came;
the chief men of Gahlee, with the king in high good-humor at their
head, sat down at the banqueting-table. Salome entered, and
danced before them; the guests, heated with wine, broke out into
rapturous applause. In a transport of dehght, the king made the
fatal promise, and c6nfirmed it with an oath, that he would give her
whatsoever she should ask. Salome went out to consult her mother
as to what her request should be. There was little time spent in
deliberation. The queen's reply was aU ready, for she had conjec
tured what would occur; and as Mark tells, Salome came in straight
way unto the king, and said, "Give me here John Baptist's head
in a charger." The king was taken in the snare; no time for
thought was given, no way of escape left open. There was the oath
which he had taken; there were the witnesses of that oath around
the board. He could not break his oath without standing dishon
ored before those witnesses. The fear of the multitude is overborne
by a stiU higher fear. He gives the order, and the deed is done.
Unhappy man! entangled, betrayed by his own rash vow; his very
sense of honor turned into the instrument that makes him a mur
derer! Herod was exceeding sorry; he knew well how wrong a
thing it was that he was doing; it was with bitter seU-reproach that
the order for the execution was given. For a short time there were
the stings of remorse, but these soon lost their power. John was
beheaded, and no manUestation of popular displeasure made. John
was beheaded ; Herodias and Salome were satisfied, and Herod must
have felt it a kind of rehef to know that, as to him, he should be
troubled by them no more. Eemorse died out, but a strange kind of
superstitious fear haunted Herod's spirit. Beports are brought to
him of another strange teacher who has arisen, and to whom all men
are now flocking, as they had flocked to the Baptist at the first.
And Herod says, "John have I beheaded, but who is this of whom I
hear such things?"
What perplexed him was, that it was said by some that John was
risen from the dead, by some that Ehas had appeared, by others
HIS APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 687
that one of the old prophets had arisen. Herod hesitated for a time
which of these suppositions he should adopt; but at last he decided,
and said to his servants, "This is John the Baptist; he is risen from
the dead, and therefore mighty works do show forth themselves in
him." He desired to see him; a desire in which there mingled at
first so much of awe and dread, that he rather shunned than courted
an interview; so much so, that when Christ came afterwards into
Galflee, and there was some prospect they might meet, he had in a
very artful way, by working on Christ's fears, persuaded him to
withdraw from that part of the country. He sent some Pharisees,
who said to Jesus, " Get thee out, and depart hence, for Herod wiU
kill thee." Herod never could have really meditated such a deed.
We know that afterwards when it was in his power, he declined
taking any part in the condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus. It
was a cunning device to get Herod out of the embarrassments in
which he found that Christ's residence and teaching within his terri
tory might involve him. And so Jesus seems to have dealt with it,
when he said to the Pharisees, whom he at once recognized as the
agents of the king, "Go," said he, "and teU that fox, Behold, I cast
out devils, and I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I
shall be perfected" — 'my times and places for working and for
finishing my work, are aU definitely arranged, and that quite inde
pendently of any stratagem of this cunning king.'
At last, at an unexpected time and place, and in an unexpected
way, Jesus is presented to him by Pilate ; presented as a criminal at
the bar, with whom he may use the greatest freedom, as one who
will surely be anxious to say and do aU he can in order to obtain his
release. Herod, therefore, when he sees Jesus thus placed before
him, is exceedingly glad — he had heard so much about him, had
desired so long to see him. But now, as indicating at once the state
of mind and heart into which worldliness and levity and Hcentious-
ness have sunk this man, and as supplying to us the key that
explains our Lord's singular conduct to him, let us particularly notice,
that in the gladness which Herod feels in having the desire to see
Christ thus gratified, there mingles no wish to be instructed, no
alarm of a guilty conscience, no dread of meeting another Baptist to
rebuke him for his iniquities. He has got over whatever compunc
tion he may at one time have felt. He has quenched the risings of
remorse within his heart. He has come to be once more on such
good terms with himself; so much at ease, that when he looks at
Jesus, it is with no disturbing remembrances of that bloody head
once brought to him upon a charger — no shrinking dread that he
688 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
may see again the Baptist's form, and hear again the Baptist's
voice. It is with an eager, idle, prurient curiosity — having a tinge,
perhaps, of superstitious, wonder in it, that he looks upon Jesus, and
proceeds to question him. As compared with John, this new teacher
had been distinguished by the working of miracles. And if he
wrought them to save others, surely he will do so to save himself.
Herod tries in every way he can think of, to induce him to work
some wonder in his presence. How does Jesus act when addressed
and treated thus by such a man ? Shall it be as if the Baptist had
indeed risen from the dead ? Will Jesus seize upon the opportunity
now given, to take up, reiterate, and redouble upon the profligate
prince the rebuke of his great forerunner ? Shall Herod hear it said
to him now, in tones more piercing than ever John employed, It was
not lawful for thee to take the Baptist's hfe ? Not thus does Jesus
act. Herod puts question after question to him. Jesus looks at
him, but opens not his hps. Herod asks and asks again, that some
sign may be shown, some token of his aUeged power exhibited. Jesus
never lifts a finger, makes not a single movement to comply. Herod
is the only one of aU his judges whom Jesus deals with in this way —
the only one before whom, however spoken to, he preserves a con
tinuous and unbroken sflence. It does not appear that, from the
time when he was presented to Herod, to the time when he was
sent away from him, a single word ever passed the Saviour's Hps.
That deep and death-like silence, the silence of those lips which
opened with such pliant readiness when any word of gentle entreaty
or hopeful warning was to be spoken, how shall we interpret it ? Was
it indignation that sealed those Hps ? Would Christ hold no inter
course with the man who had dipped his hands in such blood as that
of the Baptist ? Did he mean to mark off Herod as the one and only
man so deeply stained with guilt that he will not stoop to exchange
with him a single word ? It had been human this, but not divine ;
and it is a divine meaning that we must look for in this dread and
awful silence. There Hved not, there breathed not upon the earth
the man, however steeped in guilt, from whom that loving Saviour
would have turned away, had but the sHghtest sign of penitence been
shown, the sHghtest symptom of a readiness to listen and be saved.
It was no bygone act of Herod's life that drew down upon him the
doom of that silence — though doom it little seemed to him to be ; it
was the temper and the spirit of the man as he stood there before the
Lord, after all that he had passed through ; it was that which did it.
Why, the very sight of Jesus, connected, as he knew or fancied him
to be in some mysterious way with John, should have been to Herod
HIS APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 689
as though one risen from the dead had actuaUy appeared in his pres
ence. It was he, not Jesus, that should have been speechless when.
they met; or, U he spake at aU, it should have been to ask whether,
in that world of spirits from which Christ came, there was mercy for
a sinner such as he. But, instead of this, instead of anything like
this, instead of deep or earnest or anxious feeling of any kind, there
is nothing but a vainglorious wish to have some talk with this strange
man, with whose name and fame aU the country has been ringing, the
cravings of an empty curiosity, the thirst for some showy exhibition.
of knowledge or of power. Let not that man think that he shall hear
anything of the Lord. Christ could have spoken such a word as.
Herod never would have liked to hear again ; he could have wrought
snch a miracle as would have turned the curiosity of the king into-
terror, his pride into abasement. But he is now to reap the fruit of
his own doings, and that fruit is even this, that he is left unspoken to
by the Lord from heaven. This silence, had he but interpreted it
aright, was perhaps the very thing most fitted to speak homo to his
conscience and his heart. But he did not understand it, (Hd not
enter into the reason of it, never thought of his own past conduct,
his own present character, as the cause of it; it stirred him to no
inquiry, it awakened in him no remorse. The only feeling that it
appears to have produced was irritation ; the irritation of mortified
vanity. Greatly galled, yet in no way softened, when he could make
nothing of this mysterious man, who mantled himseU in such obsti
nate sflence, he and his men of war found nothing else to do than to
set Christ at naught, and mock him, and array him in a white robe,
and send him back to Pilate,
A wonderful instance this of the onward, downward course of
crime, particularly of that peculiar course of crime, levity, and licen
tiousness which Herod had pursued ; an instance how speedily and
how thoroughly a human heart may harden itseU against reproof,
quench its convictions, get over its fears, and bring down upon itseU
that doom, than which there is none more awful: "Ephraim is joined
to his idols ; let him alone." To be left utterly and absolutely alone
to have aU the voices that speak to us of God and duty, the voice ot
conscience from within, the voice of providence from without, the
voice which comes from the lips of Jesus — to have aU these voices
hushed, hushed into an unbroken, perhaps eternal stiUness; can one
conceive any condition of a human spirit sadder or more awful ? Tet
this is the very condition to which the abuse of opportunity, the
indulgence of passion, the drowning of the voices when they do speak
to us, are naturally and continually tending.
U'-oJCMit 44- '
690 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
My young friends, let me entreat you especiahy to take a double
warning from such a case as this : 1st, Beware how you deal with
your first reHgious convictions; tremble for yourselves U you find
them dying by a slow death, as the withering, hardening spirit of
worldliness creeps in upon your soul, or perishing suddenly amid the
consuming fires of some burning passion. They teU us that there is
no ice so close and hard as that which forms upon the surface which
once was thawed ; and there is no hardness of the human spirit so
great as that which forms over hearts that once had melted. And,
2d, Beware of hot fits of enthusiasm, in which you go farther in pro
fession than you are prepared to go in steady and sustained practice.
Herod went too far at first, and got himself involved among obliga
tions and restraints from which, when the hour of temptation came,
he flung himself free by an effort which damaged his moral and spir
itual nature more than it had ever been damaged before ; his revul
sions from religion all the greater on account of the temporary and
partial, but hollow and merely emotional entertainment that he had
given to its claims. What you do, do it with aU your heart ; for it is
good to be zealously affected in a good thing; but do it intelligently,
calmly, deliberately, as those who know and feel that it is the great
est of aU transactions that you engage in, when it is with God and
for your soul's eternal welfare that you transact.
VI.
Christ's Second ^Appearance -Before Pilate.*
"This child," said good old Simeon, as he took up the infant Jesus
into his arms to bless him — " this child is set for the faU and rising
again of many in Israel ; and for a sign that shall be spoken against;
that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." Never were
those words more strikingly fulfilled than in these closing scenes of
the Saviour's life which we are now engaged in tracing. Then many
feU — those forsaking, despairing disciples of Jesus — but fell to rise
again; then was that sign set up, against which so many shafts of so
many kinds were launched ; and then were the thoughts c f many
hearts revealed — among others those of Judas, and Peter, and Caia
phas, and Herod, and Pilate — revealed by the very closeness of their
* Luke 23 : 13-16 ; Matt. 27 : 15-23 ; Luke 23 : 20-23 ; Matt. 27 : 26-30 ; John
19 : 1-16.
HIS SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 691
contact with Christ, by the pecuHarity of those relationships to him
into which they were then thrown. Just now our attention was
concentrated upon Herod; to-day, let us fix our eyes on Pilate, and,
taking him up at that stage where we left him, let us try to under
stand and to follow the working of his thoughts and feelings during
those two hours of their earthly hves in which he and Jesus had to
do with one another — he in the character of judge, Jesus in the char
acter of one accused and condemned by the Sanhedrim.
You will remember that when first he heard, among the other
accusations which the high priests lodged against him, that Jesus had
said that he himself was Christ a King — struck at once with the sin
gularity of the pretension, and with the appearance of the man who
made it, Pilate caUed on Christ to follow him into the inner haU of
his residence ; that there, when alone with him, omitting aU reference
to any other charge, he asked him particularly about this one ; that
Christ fully satisfied him as to there being nothing politicaUy danger
ous or offensive in the claim to a kingdom which he had put forth ;
that, bringing Christ out along with him to the Jews, he had said at
once and decidedly, "I find no fault in this man;" and that then,
taking advantage of a reference to Galilee, he had sent Jesus off to
Herod,'to see what that Gahlean king and judge might think and do.
In this way he hoped to be relieved from the painful and embarrass
ing position in which he felt himself to be placed.
He was disappointed in this hope. Jesus was sent back to him
by Herod ; sent back without any judgment having been pronounced ;
sent back in such a way as to indicate that Herod as weU as he made
light of this poor Galilean's pretension to be a king — thought it, in
fact, more a matter for mockery and ridicule than for serious judicial
entertainment. Although a considerable body of the high priests
and of the people had accompanied Jesus to and from the bar of
Herod, yet in that interval there had been to some extent a scatter
ing of the crowd. Pilate, therefore, caUed together afresh the chief
priests, and the rulers, and the people — the latter particularly men
tioned, as Pilate had now begun to think that his best chance of
gaining the end upon which his heart was set — the deliverance of
Christ out of the hands of his enemies — would be by appealing, over
the heads of their rulers, to the humanity of the common people.
When all, then, were again assembled, he made a short speech to
them, reiterating his own conviction of Christ's innocence, confirming
it by the testimony of Herod, and closing by a proposal that he hoped
would be at once accepted — "I will therefore chastise him, and release
aim." But why, U he were innocent, chastise him at aU ? Why not
692 THE LIFE OF CHRIST
at once acquit the culprit, and send him away absolved from the bai
of Eoman judgment ? It was a weak and unworthy concession, the
first faltering of Pilate's footstep. He cannot but say that he has
found nothing worthy of death in this man ; he is himself thoroughly
satisfied that there is nothing in him worthy of any punishment; but
. it will please his accusers, it will conciliate the people, it may open
the way to their readier acquiescence in his after-dismissal, to inflict
on him some punishment, a proposal not dictated by any spirit of
cruelty, springing rather from the wish to protect Jesus from the
greater penalty, by inflicting on him the less ; yet one that weakened
his position, that made those sharp-sighted Jews at once perceive
that he could be moved, that he was not ready to take up and stand
firmly and fixedly upon the ground of Christ's innocence. In defer
ence to them, he has gone so far against his own convictions; he may
go farther. He has yielded the inch ; they may force him to yiel-f
the ell. The proposal, therefore, of chastising Jesus, and letting him
go, is rejected, and rejected so as to throw Pilate back upon some
other, some new device.
He recollected that at this time of the passover it was a custom
ary thing, in compliment to the great assembly of the Jews in their
metropolis, for the procurator to arrest in a single instance the ordi
nary course of justice, and to release whatever prisoner the people
might ask to be given up. He recoUected at the same time that
there was a notable prisoner, who then lay bound at Jerusalem, one
Barabbas, who for sedition and murder had been cast into prison;
and the idea occurred to Pflate that if — instead either of asking them
broadly and generaUy who it was that they wished him to release, or
whether they would let him choose for them and release Jesus — he
narrowed in this instance the choice, and presented to them the
alternative of taking Barabbas or Jesus, they could scarcely fail to
choose the latter. To give the greater effect to this proposal Pilate
ascended the movable rostrum or judgment-seat, which stood upon
the tesselated pavement that ran before the vestibule of the palace,
and addressing himself to the multitude, said to them, " Whom will
ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus who is called
Christ?" While waiting their answer, a message was brought to him, the
messenger having been instructed to dehver it immediately, wherever
he was, and however he might be engaged. It came from his wffe;
was distinct and somewhat authoritative, "Have thou nothing to do
with that just man, for I have suffered many things this day in a
dream because of him." Pilate's wife was not a Jew, nor did shr?
HIS SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 693
mix much with the common people of the land. That she should
have learned so much of Jesus as to think and speak of him as "that
just man " — that she should have been so much concerned when she
heard that her husband had been asked to try him, as to take this
uncommon step of sending a warning to him on the judgment-seat —
may be regarded as a proof how widespread and how deep the im
pression was that Christ had made.
The time occupied by the hearing and considering this message—
whose warning knell rung in strange harmony with the alarm that
was already pealing in Pilate's spirit — gave to the chief priests and
the rulers the opportunity they were so quick to seize, to prompt the
crowd as to the answer they should give to Pilate's proposal. We do
not know what kind of stimulants were employed upon this occasion ,
but we all do know what a flexible, impressible, excitable thing a
city mob is, when composed, as this one mainly was, of the lowest of
the people ; and we can at least easily conjecture what the firebrands
were which the expert hands of the priesthood threw in among that
mob, inflaming its passions to the highest pitch, and giving the burn
ing mass into their hands, to be directed as they desired. Eecovered
a httle from the disturbance which his wUe's message cost him, Pilate
turns again to the people, and says to them, " Which of the two, then,
will ye that I release unto you ?" They say, "Barabbas." Surprised
and annoyed at the reply, almost willing to believe there has been
some mistake, he puts it to them in another form : " Will ye that I
release unto you the King of the Jews?" using the epithet, in the
behef that they, as well as he, wfll look upon its claimant more as an
object of pity than of condemnation. But now they leave him in no
doubt as to what their wfll and pleasure is: "Away with this man,"
they all cry out at once, " and release unto us Barabbas !" " What
shall I then do with Jesus, which is called Christ ?" This weak and
almost pitiful asking of them what he should do, ends, as all such
yielding to popular prejudices, cringing to popular passions, ever
floes ; it makes the multitude more confident, more imperious. The
governor has put himself into their hands, and they will make him
do their wfll. "What shaU I do, then, with Jesus?" "Let him be
crucified !" they say. Crucified ! It is the first time the word has
been named in Pilate's hearing, the first time they tell him articu
lately what it is they desire to have done with Jesus. Crucify him —
give up to that worst and most ignominious of all deaths this meek
and gentle man, who he is sure has done no wrong ; whom he sees
well enough that the chief priests seek to get rid of from some reli
gious antipathy that they have taken against him : can the people
694 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
mean it ? He had fancied, whatever the chief priests thought, that
they had a different feeling towards him. "Why," in his surprise he
says to them, "what evil hath he done?" But this now excited and
uproarious crowd is far past the point of answering or arguing with
the governor. Its one and only cry is, "Let him be crucified!"
Twice Pilate asks them to tell him what crime he had committed,
that they should doom him to a felon's death. He gets but that cry
repeated, with louder, angrier voice. Yet a third time — clinging to
the hope that he may still succeed in extricating Jesus from their
grasp, without putting himself entirely wrong with them— he puts the
query, "Why, what evil hath he done?" and gathering up a Httle
strength, as U he were determined to take his own way, and act upon
the suggestion that he had thrown out a few moments before, he adds,
" I have found no cause of death in him. I will therefore chastise
him, and let him go." The very mention of letting him go stirs the
crowd to a tenfold frenzy, and now the voices of the chief priests them
selves are heard swelling and intensifying the cry, "Crucify him!
crucify him !"
Before a storm like this who can stand ? He has done — so Pflate
thinks — the most he can. H he go farther, he wiU raise another city
tumult which it will cost many lives to queU, and the quelling of
which by force may expose him to the very same charges of tyranny
and cruelty which, upon more than one occasion of the kind before,
had actually been transmitted to Eome against him, and drawn down
upon him the rebuke and displeasure of the emperor. The yielding
is but the sacrifice of a single life, which may be made without in
volving the governor in any danger. But the resisting; who can tell
in what that might land ? StiU, however, he is not at ease. He him
self scarce knows the reason why; but somehow he never saw the
man whose blood he would like so ill to have resting upon him as the
blood of Jesus. The private interview they had together in the hall
had raised some strange misgivings in Pilate's heart. What is it
about this man that has given him so strong a hold upon Pilate, and
makes him struggle so hard to get him released? Pilate himseU
could not have told ; but even now, though he has at last resolved to
give him up, he will not, cannot do it without trying in some way to
throw off his shoulders the responsibility of his death. "When
Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but rather that a tumult
was made, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude,
saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person : see ye to it
Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on
our children." And he dehvered Jesus to their wfll.
HIS SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 695
Now, let us pause a moment here in the narrative to mark the
inner workings of conscience and of humanity in the heart of PUate.
[t seemed an ingenious device to give the people their choice. It
was resorted to from a desire on his part to rescue Jesus. It would
gain, as it first seemed to him, a double object— it would prevent the
Jews from saying that he had screened a seditious man, and yet it
would rescue an innocent one from death. But to what did it
amount? It proceeded on the assumption that Christ was guilty; it
asked that as one righteously condemned, he might by an act of
grace be released. There lay one fatal flaw in the proposition. But,
still worse, it put the matter out of Pilate's hands into those of the
people. It was a virtual renunciation on Pilate's part, of the rights
and prerogatives of the judge. And by thus denuding himseU of his
own proper official position, Pilate put himself at the mercy of a
fickle and infuriated populace, and gave them that hold and power
over him which they so mercilessly employed.
This crying out, "Crucify, crucify him!" as contrasted with the
hosannas that a few days before had greeted Christ's entrance into
Jerusalem, has been often quoted to prove how rapid the changes in
popular sentiment sometimes are, how little a multitude can be trust
ed. But was it the same crowd which raised the hosannas of the
one day, that uttered the "Crucify him, crucify him!" of the other?
I rather think that had we been present upon both occasions, and
intimately acquainted with the inhabitants of Jerusalem, we should
have seen that the two crowds were differently constituted ; and that,
however true it may be that tides of pubhc feeling often take sud
denly opposite directions, this can scarcely be quoted as an instance
exactly in point.
But very curious is it to mark the expedient to which PUate had
recourse, in that public washing of his hands. He dehvers Jesus up
to be crucified. Therein lay his guilt ; he might and should have
refused to become a party to his crucifixion. Believing Jesus to be
innocent, to give him up to death was to take a large share of the
criminality upon himself. And yet he thinks that when he gets the
Jews to take it upon them, he has reheved himself, if not entirely,
yet in great measure, of the responsibility. He regards himself as
one coerced by others; and when these others are quite wiUing to
take on themselves the entire weight of the deed, he imagines that
this will go a great length in clearing him. And U ever placed under
strong compulsion from without, urged on to a certain course of con
duct which in our conscience we disapprove, we yield, and in yield
ing take comfort to ourselves from others saying that they are quite
696 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ready to incur the whole responsibiUty of the affair, then let us re
member that we are acting over again the part of Pilate; and that
just as little as that outward washing of his hands did anything to
clear him of the stain he was contracting, so little can we hope that
the guilt contracted by our being a consenting and cooperating party
in any deed of injustice or dishonor, may be thus mitigated or wiped
away. Pilate has given up Jesus to the will of the multitude : given him
up to' be crucified. The judge's work is done; there remains only
the work of the executioner. Over that it is no part of the procura
tor's office to preside. Why, then, does Pilate not withdraw? We
might have thought that, wearied with his conflict with the rabble,
and oppressed with painful feelings as to its issue, he would have
been only too glad to retire — but he cannot ; a singular fascination
still binds him to the spot — perhaps the Hngering hope that he may
yet succeed in rescuing the victim from his bloodthirsty enemies. He
hands Christ over to his soldiers, to have that scourging inflicted
which was the ordinary precursor and preliminary to crucifixion. It
might not be difficult from the narratives of eye-witnesses to give
you some idea of what a military scourging was, what kind of instru
ment they used in it, what kind of wounds that instrument made,
what terrible torture was inflicted, to what length that torture was
often carried; but we would rather have a veU drawn over the purely
physical sufferings of our Saviour, than have them pressed promi
nently upon our eye. We recoil from the attempts so often made to
excite a sympathetic horror by vivid details of our Lord's bodily suf
ferings. We feel as if it were degrading him to present him in that
character, in which so many, equal nay superior in their claims upon
our sympathy, might be put beside him.
But the scourging did not satisfy the rude and brutal soldiers
who had got Christ into their hands. As Eomans, these men knew
little, cared little about any kingship that Christ might claim. With
them it could not be, as with the Jews, a subject of reHgious hate or
•scorn. It was a topic alone of ribald mirth, of Gentile mockery.
This Eoman cohort takes the hint that Herod's men of war had given
them ; who had thrown a white robe over Jesus, clothing him with
something like the garment that their own kings wore, that they
might set at naught his vain pretensions to be a king. And now,
when the scourging is over, these Eoman soldiers wfll outdo their
Jewish comrades ; they will make a more perfect pantomime of this
pool Galilean's royalty. They take some old military cloak, of the
same color with the robes of their emperors ; they throw it over his
HIS SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 697
bloody shoulders ; they plait a crown of thorns, and put it on his head
they thrust a reed, as a mock sceptre into his right hand; and then,
when they have got him robed, and crowned, and sceptred thus,
they bow the knee, and hail him as a king. But they tire even of
that mock homage ; the demon spirit that is in them inspires the
memment with a savage cruelty ; and so, as if ashamed even of that
kind of homage they had rendered, they snatch impatiently the reed
out of his hand, and smite with it the crown of thorns, and drive it
down upon his pierced and bleeding brow, and spit upon him, and
smite him with their hands.
All this is done in an inner court or guard-room, out of sight of
the crowd that is stiU waiting without. Pflate sees it all ; makes no
attempt to mitigate the suffering or the mockery; is absorbed in
wonder as he gazes upon Jesus — such a picture of silent, gentle,
meek, unmurmuring, uncomplaining patience ! standing there, and
taking aU that treatment as though no strange thing were happening,
as U he had expected aU, were prepared for aU, found no difficulty
in submitting to aU. There is no weakness in that patience ; but a
strength, a power, a dignity. The sight moves Pilate's heart: it
would move any heart, he thinks ; may it not move even the hearts
of those people without ? may it not satisfy their thirst for vengeance
to see the suffering Jesus reduced to such a pitiable phght as this ?
He wfll try at least what the sight can do in the way of stirring such
sympathy. He goes forth, with Jesus foUowing, and says to the
multitude, "Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that
I find no fault in him;" then, turning and pointing to Jesus, as he
stood wearing stfll the purple robe and the crown of thorns, bearing
on his face and person the marks of all the sufferings and indignities
ofthe guardhouse, Pilate says, "Behold the man"' 'behold and
pity, behold and be satisfied — behold, and suffer me, now that 1 have
thus chastised him, to let him go !' Alas ! he knew not the intensity
of such fanatic hatred as that which those high priests and rulers
cherished, and had, for the time, infused into the obedient crowd ;
how it quenches every impulse of kindliness in the human heart, and
nerves the human hand for deeds of utmost cruelty. That sight to
which he points, instead of moving any pity, only evokes fresh out
breaks of ferocious violence ; with unabated breath, the same wild
cry from every side salutes the ear of the governor, " Crucify him,
crucfly him !" It not only disappoints, it provokes Pilate to be baf
fled thus again, and baffled by such a display of immovable and un
appeasable mahgnity. " Take ye him and crueUy him," he says ;
1 crueUy l-flm as best you can, but do not expect that I shaU counte-
698 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
nance the deed by any countersigning of your sentence in condemning
the man, as if I thought he deserved to die — take ye him and crueUy
him, for I find no fault in him.'
But the yielding governor is not in this way to slip out of their
hands; he, too, must be a party; and now, at last, they teU him what
hitherto they had concealed — to show him that theirs was not such a
groundless sentence as he imagined it to be — " We have a law," they
said, " and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the
Son of God." It is impossible to say what ideas that phrase, " the Son
of God," excited in the mind of Pilate. He was famihar with aU the
legends of the heathen mythologies, which told of gods and demigods
descending and Hving upon the earth. Like so many of the educated
Eomans of his day, he had thrown off aU faith in their divinity, and
yet somehow there stUl lingered within, a faith in something higher
than humanity, some beings superior to our race. And what if this
Jesus were one of these ! never in all his intercourse with men had
he met one the least hke this, one who looked so kinglike, so God-
Hke : kinghke, Godhke, even there as he now stands with a robe of
faded purple and a crown of plaited thorns. Never in kingly gar
ments, never beneath imperial crown, did he see a sceptred sovereign
stand so serene, so dignified, so far above the men that stood round
him. Whatever the ideas were which passed through Pilate's mind
when he heard that Jesus had made himself the Son of God, they
deepened that awe which from the first had been creeping in upon
and taking possession of his spirit; he was the more afraid. Once
again, therefore, he takes Christ apart, and says to him, " Whence art
thou ?" ' In that first interview, you told me that your kingdom was
not of this world, but whence art thou thyself ? art thou of this earth,
I mean like the rest of us, or art thou other than thou seemest—
comest thou indeed from heaven?' But Jesus gave him no answer.
Of all the silences of our Lord that day, of which this in number was
the fifth, it seems the most difficult to understand. Was it that
Pilate, by the way in which he had then put the question, " What is
truth?" without pausing for a reply, had forfeited his right to an
answer now? Was it that Pilate was wholly unprepared to receive
the answer; that it would have been a casting of pearls before swine
to have told him whence Jesus was? Was it that the information,
had it been given, while ineffectual to stop his course, might have
aggravated Pilate's guilt, and therefore, in mercy, was withheld?
We cannot tell ; but we can perceive that the very silence was in it
self an answer; for, supposing Jesus had been a mere man, had
come into this world even as we all come, would he, had he been sin-
HIS SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 699
cere and upright, have hesitated to say whence he came ? would he
have allowed Pilate to remain in doubt? would he have suffered him,
as his question evidently imphed, to cherish the impression that he
was something more than human? We can scarcely think he would.
By his very silence, therefore, our Lord would throw PUate back upoc
that incipient impression of his Divine origin, that it might be con
firmed and strengthened in his breast.
But here again, even as in the first interview, the haughtiness of
the man comes in to quench aU deeper thought. Annoyed by this
sflence, this calmness, this apparent indifference of Jesus, Pilate, in
all the pride of office, says, " Speakest thou not to me ; knowest thou
not that I have power to crucify thee, and power to release thee ?" —
a very idle attempt to work upon the mere selfish fears of Christ ; — a
question that brings a speedy answer, one in which rebuke and sym
pathy, are singularly blended : " Thou couldest have no power against
me, except it were given thee from above." 'That power of thine, to
crucify me or release, which I do not dispute, which thou mayest ex
ercise as thou pleasest — do not think that it is a power original,
underived, independent. Thou hast it, thou exercisest it but as
Heaven permits ; thou Httle knowest, indeed, what thou doest ; it is
as a mere holder of the power that thou art acting, acting at others'
bidding; therefore, that Jewish judge, who knowing far better at
least than thou what it was he did, and who it was that he was giving
up to death' — "therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the
greater sin." There is something surely very impressive here; that,
sunk as Jesus was beneath the weight of his own sufferings — suffer
ings so acute that they weU might have engrossed his thoughts and
feelings, he yet so calmly weighs in the judicial balance the compa
rative guilt of the actors in this sad scene, and excuses, as far as he
is able, the actings of Pilate. It had something of its proper effect
upon the procurator. Instead of diminishing, it but increased the
desire he afready had to dehver him. He tried again; tried with
still greater earnestness to effect his object. But again he failed, for
now the last arrow in that quiver of his adversaries is shot at him :
"If thou let this man go, thou art not Csesar's friend; whosoever
maketh himself a king, speaketh against Caesar." Pilate knew that
already he stood upon uncertain ground with the imperial authori
ties ; he knew that a fresh report of anything like unfaithfulness to
Csesar would cost him his office. The risk of losing all that by occu
pying that office he had hoped to gain, he was not prepared to face,
and so, yielding to this last pressure, he gives way, and delivers up
Jesus to be crucified-
700 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Now, let us look a moment at the faults and at th6 rirtues of this
man. The fact that it fell to his lot to be governor of Judea at this
time, and to consign the Saviour to the cross, inclines us to form ex
aggerated notions of his criminality. He was not, let us beheve, a
worse governor than many who preceded and who foUowed him in
that office. We know from other sources that he frequently showed
but Httle regard to human Hfe — recklessly, indeed, shed human blood,
when the shedding of it ministered to the objects of his ambition ;
but we have no reason to beUeve that he was a wantonly cruel man,
or a particularly oppressive and tyrannical governor, as governors
then went. His treatment of Christ was marked by anything but a
contempt for justice and an absence of all human feeling. He show
ed a respect, a pity, a tenderness to Jesus Christ that, considering
the Httle that he knew of him, excites our wonder. He struggled
hard to evade the conclusion to which, with such unrelenting mahg-
nity, the Jewish leaders drove him. No other king, no other ruler
with whom Christ or his apostles had to do, acted half as conscien
tiously or haU as tenderly as PUate did. Herod, Felix, Agrippa —
compare their conduct in like circumstances with that of Pilate, and
does he not in your estimate rise superior to them aU? There is
something in the compunctions, the relentings, the hesitations, the
embarrassments of Pilate — those reiterated attempts of his to find
a way of escape for himseU and for Christ, that takes a strong
hold upon our sympathy. We cannot but pity, even whfle forced
to condemn. Condemn, indeed, we must ; for —
1. He was false to his own convictions; he was satisfied that
Christ was innocent. Instead of acting at once and decidedly upon
that conviction, he daUied and he parleyed with it; sought to find
some way by which he might get rid of that clear and imperative
duty which it laid upon him ; and by so doing he weakened and un
settled this conviction, and prepared for its being overborne.
2. He exhibited a sad degree of vacillation, inconsistency, inde
cision. Now he throws all blame upon the priests : "lam innocent
of his blood : see ye to it." Again he takes the entire responsibility
upon himseU: "Knowest thou not that I have power to crueUy thee,
and power to release?" Now he pronounces Jesus innocent, yet with
the same breath proposes to have him punished as guilty : now he
gives him up, and then he has recourse to every kind of expedient to
rescue. Unstable as water, he does not, he cannot succeed.
3. He aUowed others to dictate to him. Carelessly and inconsid
erately he submits that to their judgment which he should have kept
whoUy within his own hold. He becomes thus as a wave of the sea,
THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 701
as a feather in the air, which every breeze of heaven bloweth about
as it listeth.
4. He aUowed worldly interest to predominate over the sense of
duty. Such was the plain and simple issue to which it came at last :
Do the thing he knew was right — acquit the Saviour — do that, and
run aU risks; or do the thing he knew was wrong — do that, and
escape all danger. Such was the alternative which was at last pre
sented to him. Alas for Pilate ! he chose the latter. But let each of
us now ask himseU, Had I been placed exactly in his position, with
those Hghts only to guide me that he then had, should I have acted
a better and bolder part ? We may think and hope we should ; but
in thinking so and hoping so, let us remember how often, when con
science and duty pointed in the one direction, and passion and seH-
interest pointed in the other, we have acted over and over again the
very part of Pilate ; hesitated and wavered, and argued and debated,
and opened our ears to what others told us, or aUowed ourselves to
be borne away by some strong tide that was running in the wrong
direction. Nay more, how often have we, knowing as we do, or pro
fess to do, who Christ was, whence he came, what he did for us, and
whither he has gone — how often have we given him up into unfriendly
hands, to do with him what they would, without even the washing of
our otm hands, or the saying what we thought of him.
VII.
The Daughters of Jerusalem Weeping.*
The mockeries of the judgment hall ended, Jesus is deUvered into
the hands of the officers, to be led away to the place of execution. It
cannot now be settled with certainty or exactness, where this hiU of
Calvary was situated, nor how far it was from the residence of Pilate.
It lay, we know, without the city gate, and a very ancient tradition
points us to a low, bare, rounded elevation, outside and near the
walls, which resembled somewhat in its form a human skull, and is
supposed to have got from that resemblance the name it bore, of
Golgotha. If that indeed was Calvary, the way was but a short one
which the sad procession had to traverse. First, however, ere begin
ning the mournful march, they strip our Lord of the purple robe they
had thrown around his bleeding shoulders, and put his own raiment
* Matt. 27 : 31-34 ; Luke 23 : 27-32.
702 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
on him. It is not said that they took the crown of thorns from his
bleeding brow ; he may have worn that to the last. It was part oi
the degradation of a public crucifixion that the doomed one should
assist in carrying to the place of crucifixion the instrument of death.
They might have spared this indignity to Jesus ; they might have
bad some compassion as they saw with what a faint and weary step
he walked. But compassion has no place in the hearts of these cru-
cifiers, and so they lay the common burden on him. He sinks be
neath the load. They must reheve him of it; but who wfll bear it
instead? not one of themselves will stoop to the low office. A stran
ger, a man from Africa, Simon the Cyrenian, coming in from the
country, meets them by the way. He would wfllingly have let the
crowd go by that presses on to Calvary. But he is the very kind of
man whom they can turn into a tool to do this piece of drudgery.
They lay bold of him and compel him to take up what Jesus was too
weak to bear. Unwillingly he had to obey, to turn upon his steps,
and foUow Jesus, bearing after him the cross ; a reluctant instrument
of an overbearing soldiery and a haughty priesthood.
So far as we can learn, Simon had no previous knowledge of, had
no special interest in Christ; instead of any great sympathy with
him at the moment, he may rather have felt and resented it as a
hardship, that such a service should have been exacted of him, and
in such imperious fashion. But this compulsory companionship with
Jesus in the bearing of the cross, carried him to Calvary ; the sad
tragedy enacted there forced him with so many other idle spectators
to the spot. He stood there gazing upon the scene; he heard the
words that came from the lips of Jesus; he felt the three hours'
darkness come down and wrap them aU around. As the darkness
cleared away, he saw the centurion standing transfixed before the
central cross, as Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.
He heard that Eoman officer, a stranger like himself, break forth
with the exclamation : " Truly this was the Son of God !" What
impression aU that he saw and heard then made upon him we are not
mformed. From its being said, however, that he was the father of
Alexander and Eufus, whom Mark speaks of as being weU-known
disciples of the Lord, may we not indulge the behef that He who,
when he was Hfted up, was to draw aU men unto him, that day drew
this Cyrenian to himseU; that the sight of those sufferings and of
that death led Simon to inquire ; that the inquiry conducted to disci
pleship ; and that ever after he had to thank the Lord for the strange
arrangement of his providence, which led him along that way into
the city, at the very time when they were leading Jesus out to be
THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 703
crucified; that he met the crowd at the very moment that they ivere
wanting some one to do that menial service which in so rough a
manner they pressed him to undertake ?
Another incident marked the sorrowful procession to Calvary.
Some women of the city, looking at him, as first he bends beneath
the cross, and then, with aspect so meek and gentle, yet so sad and
sorrow-stricken, moves onward to be crucified, have their feehngs so
deeply touched, that, unable to restrain their emotions, they openly
bewail and lament his doom. These are not the women who had
followed him from Galilee, and been in the habit of ministering to
him. No more than Simon, were they numbered with his disciples.
It was not with such grief as any of the Marys would have felt, had
they been in the crowd, that these women were affected. They were
not lamenting the loss of a teacher, a master, a friend they had
learned to revere and love. They had joined the crowd as it gath
ered in the city thoroughfares through which it passed. The singu
lar but common curiosity to look at men who are soon to die, and to
see how they comport themselves in front of death, has drawn them
on. Soon, however, out of the three who are going forth to be cruci
fied, their attention fixes upon Jesus. Something of him they may
have known before ; some part of his story they may have picked up
by the way. They hear nothing friendly to him from any who are
there around them. The spirit of the crowd they mingle with is one
of rude and bitter hatred towards him. But woman's loving eye
looks on him, woman's tender heart is melted at the sight ; and de
spite of aU the restraint that might have been imposed on them by
the tone and temper of that crowd, revelling with savage deHght at
the prospect of his crucifixion, and led on by some of the chief men
of the city, they give free vent to that generous pity which swells
their bosoms. They weep as they foUow him. This weeping — the
only circumstance, so far as we know, attending his passage out to
Calvary, that attracted the special notice of our Lord — was the only
one which induced him to break the patient silence he has aU along
observed. But how does he notice it? What does he say? He
stops; he turns; he fixes his eye upon the weepers; and he says,
"Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves,
and for your children."
"Weep not for me." Does he reject that simple tribute of sym
pathy which they are rendering? Is he in any sense displeased at
the tears they shed? Does he blame or forbid such tears? Not
thus are we to interpret our Saviour's words. It may be quite true
that it was not from any very deep, much less from any very pure or
704 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
holy fountain, that those tears were flowing. It may have been noth
ing about him but the shame and the agony he had to suffer which
drew them out. Still, they are tears of kindly pity, and such tears
it never could have been his meaning or intention to condemn. He
had freely shed such tears himseU. They feU before the tomb of
Lazarus, feU simply at sight of the weeping sisters, and of the Jews
weeping along with them. Sympathy with human suffering, simply
and purely as, such, claims the sanction of the tears which upon that
occasion the Saviour shed; and that sanction covers the bewaiUng of
these daughters of Jerusalem. Jesus is not displeased with, Jesus
does not reject, the expression of their pity. So far from this, the
tender sympathy that they show for him stirs a stfll deeper sympathy
for them within his heart. This is the way that he acknowledges and
thanks them for their tears. He thinks of them, he feels for them;
he forgets his own impending griefs as he contemplates theirs. It
had been but an hour or so before, that aU the people who gathered
round the bar of PUate had cried out, " His blood be on us, and on
our chUdren !" How Httle did they know what a doom it was they
thus invoked upon themselves; how near and how terrible! But
Jesus knew it; had thought of it perhaps when that wild cry arose;
was thinking of it still. He had those scenes of famine, fire, and
slaughter, when that iU-fated city of his crucifiers should see the exe
cution of the sentence they had caUed down upon their own heads —
he had them all before his eye when he turned to those women by the
way, and said to them, " Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me,
but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the
days are coming, in the which they shaU say, Blessed are the barren,
and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.
Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, FaU on us ; and to
the hiUs, Cover us."
Many of the very women who were lamenting Jesus by the way,
may have perished in the siege of Jerusalem. That siege took place
within less than forty years from the day of our Lord's crucifixion.
Some of the younger mothers of that weeping band would not have
then seen out the threescore years aad ten of human Hfe. Their
chUdren would be aU in middle Ufe, constituting the generation upon
which those woes were to descend which, three days before, whfle
sitting quietly on the Mount of Olives with his disciples, looking
across the vaUey upon the Holy City, Jesus had described by saying,
thai in those days there should be great tribulation, such as was not
from the beginning of the world to that time, no, nor ever should be
again. When in the straitness of that terrible siege, before the ter-
THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 706
rors of the last assault, they crept into the underground passages and
sewers of the city ; when those who escaped out of the city hid them
selves in the dens and rocks of the mountains — then were those proph
ecies of Isaiah and Hosea, which our Saviour had obviously before
him— some of whose words, indeed, he quotes — in part fulfilled. But
just as, in that more lengthened discourse which our Lord had so
recently dehvered to his disciples, he mixed up in a way that it is
impossible wholly to unravel, the destruction of Jerusalem, his sec
ond coming, and the end of the world; so also, even within the com
pass of this short speech to the daughters of Jerusalem, it is easy
enough to perceive that, beyond that nearer and more limited event,.
of which "these women and their children were to be spectators, our
Lord looks forward to the wider judgment, which at the close of aU
was to enfold the whole world of the impenitent in its embrace.
And widening thus, as we are warranted to do, the scope and
bearing of our Lord's words to these daughters of Jerusalem, let us
ask ourselves, what message of instruction and of warning do they
convey to us and to aU men ? First, I think we shaU not be wrong
if we interpret them as indicating to us the unprofitableness of that
sympathy with human suffering which takes in nothing but the suf
fering it sees, and which expends itseU alone in tears. The sympathy
excited in the breasts of these women of Jerusalem was of this kind.
It was the spectacle of human grief then before their eyes which had
awakened it ; there was a danger at least, that those sensibilities, so
deeply moved as long as the spectacle was before them, should col
lapse when that spectacle was withdrawn, and leave the heart quick
ened, it might be, in its susceptibility to the mere emotion of com
passion, yet not otherwise improved. ' Weep not, then,' the Saviour
says to them, and says to us ; ' weep not for me ; weep not, or weep
not long, and weep not idly, over any sight or story of human suffer
ing which caUs not for your interference, which you have no power,
not even by the sympathy that you expend upon it, to mitigate ; or U,
naturally and irresistibly, properly and becomingly, your tears flow
forth, stop not at their shedding, do not indolently indulge the mere
sentiment of pity ; such indulgence may become but a piece of selfish
gratification, narrowing the heart and paralyzing the hand for the
dispositions and the doings of a true and genuine benevolence.' Pity
was never meant by the Creator to be separately or exclusively culti
vated as an isolated emotion; it was meant to be the spring and the
ally of a ready and generous aid held out to its object; to be the
stimulus to, and the support of active effort. And such is the struc
ture of that beautiful and nicely balanced instrument, the human
Ur« of Christ. 45
706 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
spirit, that U this established connection between action and emotion
be overlooked; U you foster the one without letting it lead on to the
other, you do a serious damage to the soul ; you create in one region
a monstrous overgrowth, in another a stunted deformity; and yon
dislocate and disconnect what the Creator intended should always be
conjoined. Take here the famihar instance of indulging to excess the reading
of exciting fiction — tales in which the hero of the story passes through
terrible trials, endurances, agonies of mind and heart. Our heart
may pulsate aU through with pity as we read; we may wet with tears
the page that spreads out some heart-rending scene. Now, I am not
going to say that it is in itseU a wrong, or a sinful thing, or even a
hurtful thing, to read such stories. On the contrary, I believe that it
is not wrong; that it may be as beneficial as it is agreeable occasion-
aUy to do so. There are pecuHar and there are good services to
mind and heart that a weU-executed fiction may render, which yon
cannot have rendered in any other way so weU. But let such kind of
reading usurp the place that should be given to other and better
employment; let the taste for it be gratified, without the considera
tion of anything beyond the pleasure that it yields; let the heart of
the reader, with all its manifold affections, give itseU up to be played
upon continuaUy by the hand of some great master in the art of
quickening to the uttermost its sympathies with human passions and
human griefs; will that heart, whose sensibflities may thus be stimu
lated until it yield to the gentlest touch of the great describer, wfll it
be made kinder and better in its dispositions ? will it even be made
more tender to the sorrows of the real sufferers among whom it Hves
and moves ? Is it not notoriously the reverse ? You wiU find few
more selfish, few less practically benevolent, than those who expend
aU their stores of pity upon ideal woes. It is a deep weU of pity,
that which God has sunk in most human hearts. They are heahng,
refreshing, fructifying waters that it sends forth to cover the sorrows
of the sorrowful ; but if these waters be dammed up within the heart,
they become first stagnant, and then the breeders of many noxious
vapors, under which the true and simple charities wither away.
But let us now give to our Lord's words a more direct application
to himself; to himself as the bearer of the cross. It cannot be thought
that aU sympathy with the Man of sorrows is forbidden. The recital,
especiaUy of his last sufferings, would not have been so full and so
minute as it is in the sacred page, had it not been intended to take
hold thereby of that sympathy. But the contemplation of Christ
merely as a sufferer if it terminate in nothing else than the excite-
THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEE1ING 707
ment of sympathy, is a barren contemplation. Offer him nothing
besides your compassion, he repudiates and rejects it. It is to dis
honor the Eedeemer to class him with those unfortunates, those un
willing victims of distress, whose unexampled sorrows knock hard at
the heart of pity. Our pity he does not ask, he does not need. He
spreads out before us his unparaUeled griefs; he says, "Behold, and
see U there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow;" but he does so not
to win from us compassion, but to prove how he has loved us, loved
us even to the death, suffering and dying for our redemption. His
sorrows should set us thinking of our own sins. Those sufferings
which rested upon him when he took his place as our great Head
and Eepresentative, should bring up before our minds the sufferings
which hang suspended over the heads of the finaUy impenitent and
unbeheving. " Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves ; for if these things be
done in a green tree, what shaU be done in the dry?" He was him
seU the Green Tree ; the fresh, the vigorous Vine — its stock fuU of
sap, its branches all nourished by union with that parent, life-giving
Stem. Was he, then — in condition so unlike to that of fuel ready for
the fire — cast into that great furnace of affliction ? Had he to endure
all its scorching, though to him unconsuming flames ? What shaU
be done with him whose heart softens not at the sight of this divine
and all-enduring love; whose heart closes up and hardens against
God and Christ, tiU it becomes like one of those dry and withered
branches which men gather and cast into the fire ? If God spared
not his own Son, but gave him up to the death for us all, who is
there, among the rejecters and despisers of such a Saviour, that he
will spare ? Or U you would have the same argument set before you
in yet another form, take it as presented by Peter: "For the time is
come that judgment must begin at the house of God : and if it first
begin at us, what shaU the end be of them that obey not the gospel
of God? And U the righteous scarcely be saved, where shaU the
ungodly and the sinner appear ?" I shall make no attempt either to
expand or enforce, the argument thus employed. Let me only remind
you, that it was by these strange and solemn words of warning, " If
they do these things in a green tree, what shaU be done in the dry?"
that our Lord closed the public teaching of his ministry upon earth.
Quiet as our skies now look, and secure and stable as aU things
around us seem, the days are coming — he has told us among his
latest sayings — when those who resist the approaches of his love
shall see him in other guise, and when at the sight they " shaU cry
to the mountains, FaU on us, and to the hflls, Cover us; hide us from
708 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the face of him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the wrath of
the Lamb : for the great day of his wrath is come ; and who shall be
able to stand?" How wise and good a thing were it for us all, in
prospect of such days coming, to hide ourselves even now in the
clefts of the smitten Eock ; to hide ourselves in Jesus Christ as oui
loving Lord and Saviour; that, safe within that covert, the tribula
tion of those days may not reach us.
And now let me crave your attention, for a moment or two, to
that singular tie of thought which so quickly linked together in the
mind of the Saviour the sight of those sorrowful daughters of Jeru
salem, with the fearful doom that was impending over their city.
It was very remarkable how frequently and how vividly, in all its
minute details, the coming destruction of Jerusalem was present to
his thoughts during the last days and hours of his earthly ministry.
From the day that he raised Lazarus from the grave — knowing that
his enemies had taken counsel together to put him to death — Jesus
walked no more openly among the Jews. He retired to the country
beyond Jordan near to the wUderness. His hour at last approached,
and he set his face to go up to Jerusalem to be crucified. He was
in a part of the country that was under Herod's jurisdiction, and
they told him that Herod sought to kill him. It cannot be, he said,
that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. The naming of the holy
city; the thought of aU the blood of aU the prophets that was to
cry out against her and to seal her doom, fiUed his heart with
sadness, and instantly he broke out into the exclamation, " 0 Jeru
salem, Jerusalem ! thou that kiUest the prophets, and stonest them
which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy
children together, even as a. hen gathereth her chickens under
her wings, and ye would not ! Behold, your house is left unto you
desolate !"
On the Saturday before his death he arrives at Bethany. Next
day he ascends the Mount of Ohves. In the city they have heard of
his coming. They go out to meet him, they hail him as they had
never done before. Garments and palm-branches are spread upon
the ground that he is to tread. Before him and around him the
voices of the multitude are shouting "Hosanna! Blessed is he that
cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna to the Son of David !
Hosanna in the highest!" The ridge of the hill is reached, and
Jerusalem bursts upon the view, lying across the vaUey spread out
before the eye. He pauses; he gazes; his eyes overflow with tears.
How strange it looks to that jubilant multitude ! Ah ! other sounds
than their hosannas are falling on the Saviour's inner ear; other
THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 70S
sights than that of their waving palm-branches are rising before his
prophetic eye. He weeps; and without naming it, looking at the
doomed city, and pointing to it, he says: "If thou hadst known,
even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy
peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall
come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee,
and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall
lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and
they shaU not leave in thee one stone upon another ; because thou
knewest not the time of thy visitation."
Christ's last day in the temple and in Jerusalem was one of great
excitement, of varied incident. Question after question about his
authority to teach, about the payment of tribute-money, about the
resurrection of the dead, is put to him. Attempt after attempt is
made to entangle him in his talk. At last, from being the assaUed,
Jesus in his turn becomes the assailant, puts the question about
Christ being David's Son and David's Lord, which none of them can
answer, and then proceeds to launch his terrible denunciations at
the scribes and Pharisees. Woe is heaped upon woe, tfll all the
righteous blood shed upon the earth seems coming on the men of
that generation, and concentratedly upon that city of Jerusalem.
Again, as when he first turned his face towards the holy city, the
thought melts his spirit into tenderness; the indignation dissolves
and passes away, as, taking up the same words he had used before,
he exclaims, " 0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! thou that kiUest the proph
ets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would
I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth
her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your
house is left unto you desolate" — our Lord's last words within the
temple. As they went out in the afternoon of that day, "Master," said
one of his disciples to him, " see what manner of stones and what
buildings are here ! Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these
great buildings ? Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here
one stone upon another that shaU not be thrown down." Later in
the evening of that day — two days before his crucifixion — he sat
•upon the Mount of Olives over against the temple, looking once
again at these great buildings, and in answer to an inquiry of his
disciples, tired though he must have been with all the incidents of a
most harassing day, he entered upon that lengthened prophecy in
which he told how Jerusalem should be trodden down of the Gen
tiles. And now again, in this last stage of his way to Calvary, the
710 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
days that he had spoken of so particularly in that prophecy are
once more before his eyes. How shall we explain all this? How
was it that the city of Jerusalem had such a hold upon the heart of
Jesus Christ? How was it that the joys and the sorrows, the prov
ocations and the sympathies of his latest days, aU ahke, by some
mysterious link of association, called up before his thoughts the
terrible calamities which Jerusalem was to endure ? Grant aU that
can be claimed for Jerusalem in the way of preeminence both as to
character and destiny over aU the cities of this earth ; acknowledge
the power that the close connection between our Lord's own death
and its destruction must have exerted upon his mind ; but beside all
this, may we not believe that in the human heart of Jesus, as we
know that there was room for special affection, individual attach
ment, so also was there room for the patriotic sentiment, that love of
country by which every true man of woman born is characterized?
Jesus was a Jew. Judea was the land of his birth. Jerusalem was
the chief city of that land. Around its earlier and its later history
there gathered aU of joyful and of sorrowful interest that could touch
a Jewish heart. And it touched the spirit of Jesus to contemplate
its downfaU. Are we wrong in thinking that with that which was
divine, and that which was broadly human, there mingled a Jewish,
a patriotic element in the grief which shed tears over its destruc
tion ? If love of country form part of a perfect man, shall we not
believe that, purified from aU imperfections — its narrowness, its ex-
clusiveness, its selfishness — that affection had a place and found a
home in the bosom of our Lord ?
At such a season as this in the history of our own land we would
fain beheve so. A common loss, a common grief, a common sym
pathy, has knit aU hearts together, as they have but rarely been
united. He can have been no ordinary prince, whose death has
caused so general, such universal grief. And she assuredly is no
ordinary queen, whose sorrow has been made their own by so many
millions of human hearts. There is something cementing, purifying,
ennobling, in a whole nation mourning as ours does now. Let us
try to consecrate that mourning, and whfle we give to our beloved
Sovereign the entire sympathy of our heart, only wishing that she
fuUy knew* what a place she holds in the affections of her people,
let us Hft up our hearts in gratitude to Him who has bestowed on ua
in her such a priceless treasure, and let us lift up prayers to heaven,
that she may have imparted to her that comfort and strength, which,
* This lecture was delivered on the Sunday succeeding the death of the
prince consort, and before full expression of public sympathy had been given.
THE PENITENT THIEF. 711
in such sorrow as hers, the highest and the humblest of earth equally
need, and which are bestowed alike on all who ask, and trust, and
hope, in and through Jesus Christ our Lord.
VIII.
The Penitent Thief.*
One of the first things done by the Eoman soldiers to whom the
execution of the sentence was committed, was to strip our Saviour
and to nail him to the cross. We do not know whether that cruel
operation of transfixing the hands and feet was performed while the
cross yet lay upon the ground, or after it was erected. They offered
him — in kindness let us beUeve rather than in scorn, wine mingled
with myrrh, an anodyne or soothing draught, fitted to dull or deaden
the sense of pain, but he waved it away ; he would do nothing that
might luU the senses, but might at the same time impair the fuU,
clear, mental consciousness. The clothing of the criminal was in aU
such instances a legal perquisite of the executioners, and the soldiers
proceeded to divide it among them. The other parts of his outer
raiment they found it comparatively easy to divide ; but when they
came to his inner coat, finding it of somewhat unusual texture,
woven from the top throughout — it may have been his mother's
workmanship, or the gift of some of those kind women who had
ministered to his wants and comforts — they found no way of dis
posing of it so easy as to cast lots among them whose it should be,
fulfilling thus, but all unconsciously, that Scripture, which, apart
from this manner of disposal of the clothing, we might not well
have understood how it could be verified — "They parted my raiment
among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots."
Pilate's last act that morning, after he had given up Jesus to be
crucified, was to have the ground of his sentence declared in a wri
ting which he directed should be placed conspicuously upon the cross
above his head. To secure that this writing should be seen and
read of all men, Pilate further ordered that it should be written in
Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, the three chief languages of the
time. All the four evangelists record what this writing or super
scription was, yet in each the words of which it was composed are
differently reported. No two of them agree as to the precise terms
* Matt. 27 : 35-37 ; John 19 : 20-22 ; Luke 23 : 28-43.
712 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
of the title, though aU of them are perfectly at one as to its meaning
and intent. It does not in the least surprise us when four different
narrators of some spoken, and it may be lengthened discourse, vary
here and there in the exact words imputed to the speaker. It is
somewhat different when it is a short written public document, like
that placed over the Saviour's head on this occasion, the contents of
which are given. Here we might naturally have expected that the
very words — literatim et verbatim — would have been preserved. And
if it be not so, in this case as well as in others equally U not more
remarkable, such as that of the few words spoken by the voice from
heaven at tho time of the Saviour's baptism, and those spoken by our
Lord himself at the institution of his own supper — U it be the
general sense, and not the exact words which the sacred writers
present to us, is there no warning in this against the expectation of
finding a minute and literal exactness everywhere in the gospel nar
rative? no warning against our treating that narrative as U such
kind of exactness had been intended, and is to be found therein ?
The sight of this title, posted up so prominently above the head
of Jesus, annoyed the Jews. The chief priests were especiaUy pro
voked; nor have we far to go to discover the reason of their provo
cation. Among the last things Pilate said to them, when he brought
out Jesus, had been, "Behold your king!" And among the last
things they said to Pilate, in the heat of their exasperation, and the
urgency of their desire to have Jesus ordered off to instant crucifix
ion, was, " Away, away with him ! crueUy him ! we have no Icing but
Casar" — 'this man is not only a false pretender, but he and all others
except Csesar are traitors who make any such pretension.' Thus, in
that unguarded hour, did they absolutely renounce all desire or hope
of having a king of their own. Pilate took them at their word, and
put over Christ's head such a title as implied that any one claiming
to be king of the Jews might, on that ground alone, whatever his
rights and claims — on the ground simply of the allegiance which the
Jews owed, and which the chief priests had avowed, to the Eoman
emperor — be justly condemned to death. When they looked at that
legal declaration of his crime placed above Christ's head, and thought
of all that it implied, the chief priests hurried back to Pilate, and
asked him to make a modification of it, which should leave it open
that there might be another king of the Jews besides Csesar. "Write
cot," they said to Pilate, "The king of the Jews; but that he said,
I am king of the Jews." Let it be made patent, that it was as an
fllegitimate claimant that he was put to death. In ill humor with
himself, in worse humor with them, Pilate is in no mood to hsten to
THE PENITENT THIEF. 713
thoir proposal. He will hold them tightly to their own denial and
disavowal of any king but Csesar; and so, with a somewhat sharp
and surly decisiveness, he dismisses them by saying, "What I have
written I have written."
Meanwhile, the soldiers have completed their cruel work. It was
when in their hands, or soon after, that Jesus said, "Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do." Such rough handling as
that to which our Lord had been subjected, such acute bodfily suffer
ing as it had inflicted, have a strong tendency to irritate, and to
render the sufferer indifferent to everything beyond his own injuries
and pains. But how far above this does Jesus rise ! No murmur
ing; no threatening; no accusation; no lament; no cry for help; no
invoking of vengeance; no care for, or thought of seU; no obtruding
of his own forgiveness. It is not, I forgive you; but, "Father, for
give them." No sidelong glance even at his own wrongs and suffer
ings, in stating for what the forgiveness is sohcited. "They know
not what they do;" in this simple and subhme petition, not the
slightest, most shadowy trace of seU-consideration. It is from a
heart occupied with thought for others, and not with its own woes ;
it is out of the depths of an infinite love and pity, which no waters
can quench, that there comes forth the purest and highest petition
for mercy that ever ascended to the Father of mercies in the heavens.
It is from the hps of a Brother-Man that this petition comes, yet
from One who can speak to God as to his own Father. It is from
Jesus on the cross it comes ; from him who submits to aU the shame
and agony of crucifixion, that as the Lamb that once was slain for
us, he might earn, as it were, the right thus to pray, and furnish
himseU with a plea in praying, such as none but he possesseth and
can employ. As a prophet, he had spoken to the daughters of Jeru
salem by the way; as the great High Priest, he intercedes for his
crucifiers from the cross.
Nor are we to confine that intercession to those for whom in the
first instance it was exerted. Wide over the whole range of sinful
humanity does that prayer of our Eedeemer extend. For every
sinner of our race, if it be true of him that he knew not what he did,
that prayer of Jesus goes up to the throne pf mercy. It was in
comparative ignorance that those soldiers and those Jews crucified
Jesus. Had they known what they did, we have an apostle's testi
mony for beheving they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
But their ignorance did not take away their guilt. Had it done so,
there had been no need of an intercessor in their behaU. It was
with wicked hands they did that deed. Nor did their ignorance in
714 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
any way entitle them to forgiveness; then might it have been left to
the Father to deal with them without any intercession of the Son.
But their ignorance brought them and their doings within the pale
of that divine mercy for which the prayer of the great Mediator was
presented. How far we are entitled to carry this idea, I shall not
presume to say. Was it because of that element — the element of an
imperfect knowledge of what was done — that for the transgression
of man a Saviour and a sacrifice were provided — not provided for
the sin of faUen angels, of whom it could not, in the same sense, be
said that they knew not what they did? Is it to that degree in
which a partial ignorance of what we do, prevails — that ignorance
not being of itself entirely our own fault — that our transgression
comes within the scope and power of the intercession of the Ee
deemer? To questions such as these we venture no reply. Only
let us remember that sins rise in magnitude as they are committed
against light, and that the clearer and fuUer that light is, and the
greater and more determined and obstinate our resistance to it, the
nearer we approach to that condition which the apostle had in his
eye when he wrote these words of warning: "For it is impossible for
those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly
gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted
the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they
shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance, seeing they
crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open
shame; for if we sin wiUully after we have received the knowledge
of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain
fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall
devour the adversaries."
Their cruel work completed, the soldiers sit down before the
cross to watch. Behind them the people stand beholding. There
is a momentary stiUness. It is broken by some passers-by-— for the
cross was raised near some public thoroughfare — who, stopping for
a moment as they pass, look up, and wag their heads at Jesus, say
ing contemptuously to him, "Ah! thou that destroyest the temple,
and buildest it in three days, save thyself ! If thou be the Son of
God, come down from the cross." That ribald speech strikes the
key-note for other like fiendish taunts and gibes. The chief priests,
the scribes, the elders — their dignity forgotten — hasten to join the
¦mockery; to deaden perhaps some unwelcome voices rising within
their hearts. They do not act, however, like the honest common
people, who in their passing by look up at or speak directly to
Jesus — they do not, they dare not. They stand repeating, as Mark
THE PENITENT THIEF. 715
tells us, among themselves; saying of him, not to him, 'He saved
others, himself he cannot save ; let him save himself if he be Christ,
the chosen of God. If he be the king of Israel, let him como down
from the cross, and we wiU beUeve him. He trusted in God,' (strange
that they should thus blasphemously use the very words of the
twenty-second Psalm,) 'let him deliver him now if he will have him,
for he said, I am the Son of God.' The Eoman soldiers get excited
by the talk they hear going on around. They rise, and they offer
him some vinegar to drink, repeating one of the current taunts, till
at last one of the malefactors, hanging on the cross beside him, does
the same. ,
Strange, certainly, that among those who rail at Jesus at such a .
time, one of those crucified along with him should be numbered.
Those brought out to share together the shame and agony of a
pubhc execution, have generally looked on each other with a kindly
and indulgent eye. Outcasts from the world's sympathy, they have
drawn largely upon the sympathy of one another. Since they were
to die thus together, they have desired to die at peace. Many an
old, deep grudge has been buried at the gaUows-foot. But here,
where there is nothing to be mutually forgotten, nothing to be for
given, nothing whatever to check the operation of that common law
by which community in suffering begets sympathy ; here, instead of
sympathy, there is scorn; instead of pity, reproach. What called
forth such feelings, at such a time, and from such a quarter? In
part it may have been due to the circumstance that it was upon
Jesus that the main burden of the public reproach was flung. Bad
men like to join with others in blaming those who either are, or are
supposed to be, worse men than themselves. And so it may have
brought something hke relief, may even have ministered something
like gratification to this man to find that when brought out for
execution, the tide of pubhc indignation directed itself so exclusively
against Jesus — by making so much more of whose criminality, he
thinks to make so much less of his own. Or is it the spirit of the
reHgious scoffer that vents here its expiring breath? All he sees,
and all he hears— those pouting lips, those wagging heads, those
upbraiding speeches — tell him what it was in Jesus that had kindled
such enmity against him, and too thoroughly does he share in
that spirit which is rife around the cross, not to join in the expres
sion of it, and so while others are railing at Jesus, he too will rail.
It is difficult to give any more satisfactory explanation of his con
duct, difficult in any case Hke this to fathom the depths even of a
single human spirit; but explain it as you may, it was one drop
716 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
added to the cup of bitterness which our Lord on that da/ took into
his hands, and drunk to the very dregs, that not only were his
enemies permitted to do with him what they would, but the very
criminal who is crucified by his side deems himself entitled to cast
such reproachful sayings in his teeth.
But he is not suffered to rail at Jesus unrebuked, and the rebuke
comes most appropriately from his brother malefactor, who turning
upon him, says, "Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the
same condemnation ?" "Dost not thou fear God ?" he does not need
to say, Dost thou not fear man ? for man has already done all that
man can do. But, "Dost not thou fear God?" He knows then that
there is a God to fear, a God before whose bar he and his brother
sufferers are soon to appear ; a God to whom they shaU have to give
account, not only for every evil action that in their past Hves they
have done, but for every idle word that in dying they shall speak.
He knows it now, he feels it now — had he known and felt it sooner,
it might have saved him from hanging on that cross — that over and
above the condemnation of man which he had so lightly thought of,
and so fearlessly had braved, there is another and weightier condem
nation, even that of the great God, into whose hands, as a God of
judgment, it is a fearful thing for the impenitent to faU.
"And we indeed justly." No questioning of the proof, no quar-
reUing with the law, no reproaching of the judge. He neither thinks
that his crime was less heinous than the law made it, nor his punish
ment greater than the crime deserved. Nor do you hear from this
man's lips what you so often hear from men placed in hke circum
stances, the complaint that he had been taken, and he must die,
while so many others, greater criminals than himself, are suffered to
go at large unpunished. At once and unreservedly he acknowledges
the justice of the sentence, and in so doing, shows a spirit penetrated
with a sense of guilt. And not only is he thoroughly convinced of
his own guflt, he is as thoroughly convinced, of Christ's innocence
" We indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds ; bul
this man hath done nothing amiss." Little as he may have seen 01
known before of Jesus, what he had witnessed had entirely convinced
him that His was a case of unmerited and unprovoked persecution;
that he was an innocent man whom these Jews, to gratify their own
spleen, to avenge themselves in their own ignoble quarrel with him,
were hounding to the death.
But he goes much farther than to give expression merely to his
conviction of Christ's innocence — and it is here we touch upon the
spiritual marvels of this extraordinary incident. Turning from speak-
THE PENITENT THIEF. 717
ing to his brother malefactor, fixing his eye upon, and addressing
himseU to Jesus, as he hangs upon the neighboring cross, he says,
"Lord,- remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." How
oame he, at such a time and in such circumstances, to call Jesus
Lord? how came he to beheve in the coming of his kingdom? It is
going the utmost length to which supposition can be carried, to im
agine that he had never met with Jesus till he had met him that
morning to be led out in company with Mm to Calvary. He saw
the daughters of Jerusalem weeping by the way; he heard those
words of Jesus which told of the speaker's having power to with
draw the vefl which hides the future ; he had seen and read tho
title nailed above the Saviour's head, proclaiming him to be the
King of the Jews; from the lips of the passers-by, of the chief
priests, the elders, the soldiers, he had gathered that this Jesus, now
dying by his side, had saved others from that very death he is him
seU about to die, had professed a supreme trust in God, had claimed
to be the Christ, the Chosen, the Son of God : and he had seen and
heard enough to satisfy him that aU which Jesus had claimed to be
he truly was. Such were some of the materials put by Divine Prov
idence into this man's hands whereon to build his faith ; such the
broken fragments of the truth loosely scattered in his way. He takes
them up, collects, combines ; the enhghtening Spirit shines upon the
evidence thus afforded, shines in upon his quickened soul ; and there
brightly dawns upon his spirit the sublime belief that in that strange
sufferer by his side he sees the long-promised Messiah, the Saviour
of mankind, the Son and equal of the Father, who now, at the very
time that his mind has opened to a sense of his great iniquity, and
he stands trembling on the brink of eternity, reveals himself as so
near at hand, so easy of access. His faith, thus quickly formed, goes
forth into instant exercise, and, turning to Jesus, he breathes into his
convenient ear the simple but ardent prayer, "Lord, remember me
when thou comest into thy kingdom."
The hostile multitude around are looking forward to Christ's ap
proaching death, as to that decisive event which shall at once, and
for ever, scatter to the winds aU the idle rumors that have been rife
about him ; aU his vain pretensions to the Messiahship. The faith
of Christ's own immediate foUowers is ready to give way before that
same event ; they bury it in his grave, and have only to say of him
afterwards, " We hoped that it had. been he that should have redeem
ed Israel." Yet here, amid the triumph of enemies, and the failure
of the faith of friends, is one who, conquering aU the difficulties that
sense opposes to its recognition, discerns, even through the dai *£ en-
718 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
velope which covers it, the hidden glory of the Eedeemer, and openly
hafls him as his Lord and Eing. Marvellous, indeed, the faith in our
Lord's divinity which sprung up so suddenly in such an unHkely
region ; which shone out so brightly in the very midnight of the
world's unbelief. Are we wrong in saying that, at the particular mo
ment when that testimony to Christ's divinity was borne, there was
not another fuU beUever in that divinity but this dying thief? H so,
was it not a fitting thing, that He who was never to be left without a
witness, now when there was but one witness left, should have had
this sohtary testimony given to his divinity at the very time when it
was passing into almost total eclipse ; so nearly whoUy shrouded from
mortal vision? There were many to call him Lord when he rose
triumphant from the tomb ; there is but one to call him Lord as he
hangs dying on the cross.
But let us look upon the prayer of the dying thief not only as a
pubhc testimony to the kingly character and prerogative of Jesus,
but as the prayer of individual, appropriating faith ; the earnest,
hopeful, trustful apphcation of a dying sinner to a dying Saviour.
His idea of Christ's character and office may have been obscure ; the
nature of that kingdom into possession of which he was about to
enter, he may have but imperfectly understood. He knew it, how
ever, to be a spiritual kingdom ; he felt that individually he had for
feited his right of admission to its privileges and its joys ; he behev
ed that it lay with Jesus to admit him into that kingdom. Not with
a spirit void of apprehension, may he have made his last appeal. It
may have seemed to him a very doubtful thing, whether, when re
heved from the sharp pains of crucifixion, the suffering over, and the
throne of the kingdom reached, Jesus would think of him amid the
splendors and the joys of his new kingly state. Doubts of a kindred
character have often haunted the hearts of the penitent, the hearts of
the best and the hohest ; but there were two things of which he
had no doubt : that Jesus could save him if He would, and that if
He did not he should perish. And it is out of these two simple
elements that genuine faith is always formed, a deep, pervading,
subduing consciousness of our own unworthiness, a simple and entire
trust in Christ.
It has been often and weU said, that while this one instance of
faith in Jesus formed at the eleventh hour is recorded in the New
Testament, in order that none, even to the last moment of their being,
should despair — there is but this one instance, that none may pre
sume upon a death-bed repentance. And even this instance teaches
most impressively that the faith which justifies always sanctifies;
THE PENITENT THIEF. 719
that the faith which brings forgiveness and opens the gates of para
dise to the dying sinner carries with it a renovating power ; that the
faith which conveys the title, works at the same time the meetness
for the heavenly inheritance. Let a man die that hour in which he
truly and cordially believes, that hour his passage into the heavenly
kingdom is made secure ; but let a window be opened that hour into
his soul, let us see into all the secrets thereof, and we shall discover
that morally and spiritually there. has been a change in inward char
acter corresponding to the change in legal standing or relationship
with God. It was so with this dying thief. True, we have but a
short period of his life before us, and in that period only two short
sayings to go upon ; happily, however, sayings of such a kind, and
spoken in such circumstances, as to preclude all doubt of their entire
honesty and truthfulness ; and what do they reveal of the condition
of that man's mind and heart ? What tenderness of conscience is
here ; what deep reverence for God ; what devout submission to the
divine wfll; what entire relinquishment of all personal grounds of
confidence before God ; what a vivid realizing of the world of spirits ;
what a humble trust in Jesus ; what a zeal for the Saviour's honor;
what an indignation at the unworthy treatment he was receiving !
May we not take that catalogue of the fruits of genuine repentance
which an apostle has drawn up for us, and applying it here, say of
this man's repentance, Behold what carefulness it wrought in him ;
yea, what clearing of himself; yea, what indignation ; yea, what fear;
yea, what vehement desire ; yea, what zeal ; yea, what revenge ! In
all things he proved himseU to be a changed man, in the desires and
dispositions and purposes of his heart. The behef has been express
ed, that in all the earth there was not at that moment such a behever
in the Lord's divinity as he ; would it be going too far to suggest,
that in aU the earth, at that moment, there was not another man
inwardly riper and readier for entrance into paradise ?
"Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom."
Loud and angry voices have for hours been ringing in the vexed ear
of Jesus, voices whose blasphemy and inhumanity wounded him far
more than the mere personal antipathy they breathed. Amid these
harsh and grating sounds, how new, how welcome, how grateful, this
soft and gentle utterance of desire, and trust, and love 1 It dropped
like a cordial upon the fainting spirit of our Lord, the only balm tnat
earth gave forth to lay upon his wounded spirit. Let us, too, be
grateful for that one soothing word addressed to the dying Jesus, and
wherever the gospel is declared let the words which that man spake
•be repeated in memorial of him.
720 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
"Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." Hh
wfll not ask to be remembered now; he wfll not break in upon this
season of his Lord's bitter anguish. He only asks that, when the
sharp pains of his passion shaU be over, the passage made, and the
throne of the kingdom won, Jesus wfll, in his great mercy, tlien think
of him. Jesus will let him know that he does not need to wait so
long ; he wfll let him know that the Son of man hath power, even on
earth, to forgive sin ; that the hour never cometh when his ear is so
heavy that it cannot hear, his hand so shortened that it cannot save ;
and the prayer has scarce been offered when the answer comes,
" Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise."
The hps may have trembled that spake these words; soft and low
may have been the tone in which they were uttered ; but they were
words of power, words which only one Being who ever wore human
form could have spoken. His divinity is acknowledged : the moment
it is so, it breaks forth into bright and beautiful manUestation. The
hidden glory bursts through the dark cloud that veiled it, and, in all
his omnipotence to save, Jesus stands revealed. What a rebuke to
his crucifiers ! They may strip his mortal body of its outward rai
ment, which these soldiers may divide among them as they please ;
his human soul they may strip of its outer garment of the flesh, and
send it forth unclothed into the world of spirits. But his kingly
right to dispense the royal gift of pardon, his power to save, can they
strip him of that? Nay, httle as they know it, they are helping to
clothe him with that power, at the very time when they think they
are laying all his kingly pretensions in the dust. He wfll not do what
they had so often in derision asked him that day to do ; he will not
come down from the cross ; he wiU not give that proof of his divini
ty; he wfll not put forth his almighty power by exerting it upon the
world of matter. But on this very cross he will give a higher proof
of his divinity ; he wfll exert that power, not over the world of
matter, but over the world of spirits, by stretching forth his hand and
dehvering a soul from death, and carrying it with him that day into
paradise. " Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in para
dise." Jesus would not rise from the sepulchre alone; he would
have others rise along with him. And so, even as he dies, the earth
quake does its allotted work, work so strange for an earthquake to
do — it opens not a new grave for the living, it opens the old graves
of the dead ; and as the third morning dawns, from the opened graves
the bodies of the saints arise with the rising body of the Lord —
types and pledges of the general resurrection of the dead, verifying.
•(¦ •(
THE PENITENT THIEF. 721
by their appearance in the holy city, the words of ancient prophecy :
" Thy dead men shaU Hve, together with my dead body shall they
arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust ; for thy dew is as
the dew of herbs, and the earth shaU cast out her dead." And as
Jesus would not rise from the sepulchre alone, so neither will he enter
paradise alone. He wiU carry one companion spirit witn him to the
place of the blessed ; thus early giving proof of his having died upon
that cross that others through his death might Hve, and live for ever.
See, then, in the ransomed spirit borne that day to paradise, the
primal trophy of the power of the uplifted cross of Jesus! What
saved this penitent thief ? No water of baptism was ever sprinkled
upon him ; at no table of communion did he ever sit ; of the virtue
said to he in sacramental rites he knew nothing. It was a simple
beheving look of a dying sinner upon a dying Saviour that did it.
And that sight has lost nothing of its power. Too many, alas ! have
passed, are stiU passing by that spectacle of Jesus upon the cross ;
going, one to his farm, another to his merchandise, and not suffering
it to make its due impression on their hearts ; but thousands upon
thousands of the human race — we bless God for this — have gazed
upon it with a look kindred to that of the dying thief, and have felt
it exert upon them a kindred power. Around it, once more, let me
ask you aU to gather. Many here, I trust, as they look at it, can
say, with adoring gratitude, He loved me; he gave himseU for me ;
he was wounded for my transgression, he was bruised for mine ini
quity ; he is all my salvation, he is aU my desire. Some may not be
able to go so far ; yet there is one step that all of us, who are in any
degree alive to our obhgations to redeeming love, can take — one
prayer that we all may offer; and surely, U that petition got so
ready audience when addressed to Jesus in the midst of his dying
agonies, with certain hope of not less favorable audience may we
take it up, and shaping it to meet our case, may say, Now that thou
hast gone into thy kingdom, O Lord, remember me.
Yet once more let the words of our Lord be repeated, "To-day
shalt thou be with me in paradise." But where this paradise? what
this paradise? We can say, in answer to these questions, that with
this heavenly paradise into which the redeemed at death do enter,
the ancient, the earthly paradise is not fit to be compared. In the
one, the direct intercourse with God was but occasional; in the other
it shall be constant. In the one, the Deity was known only as he
revealed himseU in the works of creation and in the ways of his prov
idence; in the other, it wfll be as the God of our redemption, the
God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus, that he wiU be rec-
UfeofOhriit. 40
722 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ognized, adored, obeyed — all the higher moral attributes of his nature
shining forth in harmonious and illustrious display. Into the earthly
paradise the tempter entered; from the heavenly he wiU be shut out.
From the earthly paradise sad exiles once were driven ; from the heav
enly we shaU go no more out for ever. Still, however, after aU such
imperfect and unsatisfying comparisons, the questions return upon
us, Where, and what is this paradise of the redeemed ? Our simplest
and our best answers to those questions perhaps are these : Where
is paradise ? wherever Jesus is. What is paradise ? to be for ever
with, and to be fully like our Lord. We know — for God has told us
so, of that paradise of the redeemed — that it is a land of perfect light ;
the day has dawned there ; the shadows have for ever fled away. It
is a land of perfect blessedness ; no tears fall there ; no sighs rise
there; up to the measure of its capacity, each spirit fiUed with a
pure, never-ending joy. It is a land of perfect holiness; nothing that
defileth shaU enter there ; neither whatsoever loveth or maketh a he.
But what gives to that land its Hght, its joy, its holiness in the sight
of the redeemed ? it is the presence of Jesus. If there be no night
there, it is because the Lamb is the light of that place. If there be
no tears there,, it is because from every eye his hand has wiped off
every- tear. The holiness that reigneth there is a hohness caught
from the seeing him as he is, And trace the tide of joy that circu
lates through the hosts of the blessed to its fountain-head, you will
find it within that throne on which the Lamb that once was slain is
sitting. To be with Jesus, to be like Jesus, to love and serve him
purely, deeply, unfailingly, unfalteringly — that is the Christian's
heaven. "I love," says one, "to think of heaven;" and as I repeat the
words, they wfll find an echo in each Christian heart :
" I love to think of heaven ; its cloudless light,
Its tearless joys, its recognitions, and its fellowships
Of love and joy unending ; but when my mind anticipates
The sight of God incarnate, wearing on his hands
And feet and side marks of the wounds
Which he for me on Calvary endured,
All heaven beside is swallowed up in this ;
And he who was my hope of heaven below
Becomes the glory of my heaven above."
Yet once again let the memorable words of our Lord be repeated,
" To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise." What a day to that
dying man ! How strange the contrast between its opening and ita
close, its morning and its night ! Its morning saw him a culprit con
demned before the bar of earthly judgment; before evening shad-
THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 723
owed the hiU of Zion, he stood accepted at the bar of heaven. The
morning saw him led out through an earthly city's gates in company
with one who was hooted at by the crowd that gathered round him ;
before night fell upon Jerusalem, the gates of another city, even the
heavenly, were lifted up, and he went up through them in company
with one around whom aU the hosts of heaven were bowing down, as
he passed on to take his place beside the Father on his everlasting
throne. Humblest behever in the Saviour, a like marveUous contrast
if*, in store for you. This hour, it may be, weak and burdened, toss
ing on the bed of agony, in that darkened chamber of stifled sobs
and drooping tears; the next hour, up and away in the paradise of
God, mingling with the spirits of the just made perfect, renewing
death-broken friendships, gazing on the unveiled glories of the Lamb.
Be thou then but faithful unto death ; struggle on for a few more of
those numbered days, or months, or years, and on that day of your
departure hence, in his name I have to say it to you, Verily, thou
too shalt be with him in paradise.
IX.
The M.other op our Lord.*
The last sight we got of the disciple whom Jesus loved was when
he and Peter entered together into the haU of the high priest. SUent
and in the shade, he escaped the scrutiny that his rash companion
drew upon himseU. Of the sad scene that ensued, John was the sor
rowful witness. He saw the Lord turn and look upon Peter ; he saw
Peter turn and leave the hall. It is not Hkely that he foUowed him.
A stronger attraction kept him where he was. He waited to see
what the issue of these strange proceedings should be; waited tiU he
heard the judgment of the Sanhedrim given ; waited tfll he saw the
weak and sorely-badgered governor at last give way; waited perhaps
till the preparations for the crucifixion had commenced. Then may
he have gone in haste into the city; gone to seek out those who, he
knew, would be most interested to hear ; especially to seek out and
to comfort her upon whose wounded heart the burden of these terri
ble tidings would faU most heavily. Most Hkely it was from the lips
of the beloved disciple that Mary first heard that morning of the fate
which awaited Jesus. But where and when did she first see him ?
* John 19 * 25-27.
724 THE "LIFE OF CHRIST.
Not in the palace of the high priest; not in the judgment-hall of
Pilate. Although she had got the tidings soon enough to be there,
these were not places for such a visitant. Nor was she one of those
daughters of Jerusalem that lamented and bewailed him by the way.
The first sight she gets of him is when, mocked by the soldiers, deri
ded by the passers-by, insulted by the chief priests, he hangs upon
the cross. She has her own sister Mary with her, and that other
faithful Mary of Magdala, with John beside them, making up that
Httle group, who, with feelings so different from those of aU the oth
ers, gaze upon the scene.
The prayer for his crucifiers has been offered. The penitent thief
has heard the declaration that opens to him that day the gates of
paradise, when the eye of the Crucified, wandering over the motley
crowd, fixes upon that Httle group standing, quietly but sadly, near
enough to be spoken to. John is addressing some word, or doing
some act of kindness to Mary. They are at least so close to one
another, that though Jesus names neither, neither can mistake of
whom and to whom he speaks, as, bending a tender look upon them,
he says, " Woman, behold thy son !" " Son, behold thy mother !"
John acts at once on the direction given, and withdraws Mary from
the spot, and takes her to his own home in Jerusalem. Amid the
dark and tumultuous, solemn and awful incidents of the crucifixion,
this incident has so much of peaceful repose that we feel tempted to
dweU upon it. At once, and very naturally, it suggests to us a review
of the previous relationship and intercourse between Mary and her
mysterious Son. We cannot, indeed, rightly appreciate our Lord's
notice of her from the cross without taking it in connection with that
relationship and intercourse.
The angehc annunciation, the salutation of Elisabeth, the visits
of the Bethlehem shepherds and the Eastern magi, had aU prepared
Mary to see, in her first-born Son, One greater than the children of
men. AU those sayings — about his greatness and glory, his being
caUed the Son of the Highest, his sitting upon the throne of David
his father, his reigning over the house of Jacob for ever — she kept
and pondered in her heart, wondering exceedingly what manner of
man that child of hers should be, in whom those sayings should be
fulfiUed. As she hstened to all those prophecies of his future great
ness, by which his birth was foretold and celebrated, what bright and
glowing anticipations must have filled Mary's heart ! One discord
ant word alone at this time feU upon her ear, one saying differing
from aU the rest, the meaning of which she could not understand.
'* This child," said the aged Simeon, as he took up the babe into his
THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 725
arms at his presentation within the temple — " this child is set for the
fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign that shall be
spoken against." " Yea," added the aged prophet, as he looked sadly
and- sympathizingly at Mary, "a sword shall pierce through thine
own soul also." Was it to temper her new-born joy; was it to teach
iei to mingle some apprehension with her hopes ; was it to prepare
and fortify her for the actual future that lay before her — so different
from the imagined one — that these words were spoken? Beyond
exciting a fresh wonder and perplexity, I hey could, however, have
had but Httle effect on Mary at the time. She did not, she could not
understand them then ; therefore, with those bright and joyous anti
cipations still within her heart, she retired to Nazareth. The chfld
grew, the evangelist tells us, waxed strong in spirit, was filled with
wisdom, the grace of God was upon him; but beyond that gentleness
which nothing could ruffle, that meekness which nothing could pro
voke, that wisdom which was daily deepening and widening, giving
ever new and more wonderful, yet ever natural and child-Hke exhibi
tions of itseU, that dutiful submission to his reputed parents, that
love to all around him upon earth, that deeper love to his Father in
heaven — beyond that rare and unexampled assemblage of all the vir
tues and graces by which a human childhood could be adorned] there
was nothing outwardly to distinguish him from any chUd of his own
age, nothing outwardly to mark him out as the heir of such a glori
ous destiny.
Twelve years of that childhood pass. Jesus has been to Mary so
like what any other son might have been to his mother, that, uncon
scious of any difference, she assumes and exercises over him all ordi
nary maternal rights. But now, again, just as it was with that speech
of Simeon among the other prophecies that heralded the Eedeemer's
birth, so is it with an act and speech of Christ himseU among the
quiet incidents out of which, for thirty years, his life at Nazareth was
made up. When twelve years old, they take Jesus up to Jerusalem,
the days of the festival are fulfilled, the viUage company to which
Jesus and his famfly were attached, leave the holy city on their
return. Joseph and Mary never for a moment doubt that, acting
with his accustomed wisdom and dutifulness, their son wiU bo with
the other youths from Nazareth and its neighborhood, along with
whom he had made the journey up to the holy city. Not tUl the
nsual resting-place for the night is reached do they miss him. Some
thing must have happened to hinder him from joining the company
at Jerusalem. FuU of anxiety, Joseph and Mary return into the city.
Three days are spent in the sorrowful search. At last they find him,
726 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
sitting quietly among the doctors, as if the temple were his home.
Imagine Mary's feelings at this sight. No accident, then, had hap
pened to him; no restraint had been laid upon him. It had been
voluntarily and deliberately that her son had remained thus behind
for four days after her departure. Never before had Jesus acted in
such a way, never said or done anything fitted to give her pain.
Never before had she occasion to reproach or rebuke him; but now,
in her surprise and grief, she cannot help speaking to him as she had
never done before. " Son," said she, when at last she found him —
" Son, "why hast thou dealt thus with us ? Thy father and I have
sought thee sorrowing." Now mark the Son's reply when spoken to
as if he had been forgetful of the duty that a child owes to his pa
rents. Mary had called him Son; he does not caU her mother; he
never does — never in any conversation related in the gospels. Mary
had spoken of Joseph as his father; he nowise recognizes that rela
tionship. The full consciousness of another, higher Sonship than
that to Mary has entered his youthful heart ; and, under the inspira
tion of this consciousness, his only reply to the maternal appeal is,
" How is it that ye sought me ? wist ye not that I must be about my
Father's business ?" — a very strange and altogether unexpected an
swer; one which, we are distinctly told, neither Mary nor Joseph
understood. It offered no explanation or excuse for his conduct.
It denied all need for any such explanation or excuse. In the matter
of his heavenly Father's business, it repudiated their interference.
Mary had never heard her own or Joseph's authority over him ques
tioned by Jesus. Had this visit to Jerusalem weakened in his heart
the sense of subjection to them? Was he going to throw it off?
Will he refuse to accompany them? Must he stiU continue to be
thus engaged about his Father's business ? No ! Having said thus
much, to teach them that he knew how special his earthly relation
ship to them was, he rose, he left the temple, and returning with
them to Nazareth, was subject to them as before, yet not without
having deposited another seed of wonder in Mary's hear*fc — wonder
as to what that other Father's business was, with her son's mode of
doing which she, as his mother, must not interfere.
Jesus is, as before, Mary's dutiful and submissive son. Joseph
dies, and he, who had been sharer of his reputed father's earthly
labors, becomes perhaps the chief support and solace of his'mothei
in her widowhood. Eighteen years go past. Jesus leaves his home
at Nazareth, alone, for none of his own family believe in him. He
presents himseU on the banks of the Jordan, and asks baptism at
the hands of John. The sign from heaven is given ; the voice from
THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 727
boaven is heard; the Baptist points to him as the Lamb of God.
Phihp hails him as the Messiah promised to the fathers. Nathanael
recognises him as the Son of God, the King of Israel. All this is
told to Mary. A few weeks later her son returns, and finds her at
the marriage-feast at Cana ; returns now with the public vouchers of
his Messiahship, and with five foUowers, who acknowledge him as
their Master. Once more, as at his birth, the hopes of Mary's heart
rise high. It is at the house of a friend — of a near relative, it has
been conjectured — that this marriage-feast is held. The guests,
swelled by Christ's disciples, are more numerous than had been
anticipated. The wine provided fails. If her son be indeed that
great prophet who is to appear, might he not take this public oppor
tunity of partiaUy, at least, revealing himself? Might he not inter
fere to shield the family from discredit? Might he not, with the
wine that still remained, do something Hke to what Ehjah had don®
with the cruse of oil and the barrel of meal? FiUed with such
hopes, she caUs his attention to the deficiency, trusting that he may
possibly, in his new character and office, remove it. " She saith to
him, They have no wine. Jesug saith to her, Woman, what have I
to do with thee ? [or, what hast thou to do with me ?] mine hour is
not yet come." Soften it as we may, relieve it from afl that may
Beem disrespectful, there was discouragement and reproof in this
reply. Presuming upon her motherly relationship, on the privileges
that her thirty years of maternal control have given her, Mary ven
tures to suggest, and she does it in the most delicate manner, what
his course of action might be, now that he enters upon the public
walk of the great Prophet. Upon all such interference on her part,
an instant, gentle, but firm check must be imposed. Mary must be
taught the limits of that influence and authority which her earthly
relationship to him had hitherto permitted her to exercise. She
must be taught that in the new and higher path upon which he was
now about to enter, that motherly relationship gave her no place nor
right to direct or to control.
Mary felt and acted upon the reproof. She never afterwards, at
least that we know of, in any way obtruded herseU. In the history
of our Lord's three years' ministry, she never once appears in direct
intercourse with her son. She may sometimes have been with him
in his many circuits of Galilee, but you will search in vain for her
name among the women who accompanied him, and who ministered
to him. Between the words spoken to her at Cana, and those
addressed to her from the cross, not another word, addressed by
Jesus to his mother, is recorded in the gospels. True, indeed, L«
728 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
speaks of her; and in such instances what was said seems to have
been intended to moderate in the minds of his hearers their estimate
of her position, as his mother. From the outskirts of a crowd that
had gathered round him as he taught, the message was once sent in
to him, " Behold, thy mother and thy brothers stand without, desi
ring to speak with thee." What they wanted with him, we do not
know: it was on no friendly errand that his brothers came; they
disliked his public preaching on the hillsides, to the multitude ; they
thought him beside himseU. They expected, on this occasion, that
so soon as he got their message, he would give up the work in which
he was engaged, and come to them — that he would feel that his
mother and they had a claim upon his attention, superior to that of
the motley company that was pressing in upon him. It was a case
in many respects hke that in the temple, of a competition between
two kinds or classes of obhgations. Very striking was the way in
which Jesus in this instance acted. As soon as he heard the mes
sage, he exclaimed, "Who is my mother or my brethren?" Then,
looking around, he stretches forth his hands to his disciples, (and it
is but rarely that any gesture of our Lord is chronicled in the gospel
story,) and said, "Behold my mother and my brethren; for whoso
ever shall do the wiU of my Father which is in heaven, the same is
my brother, and sister, and mother." Another time, as he was
speaking with great power and effect, one of his hearers, struck with
admiration, broke forth with the exclamation, " Blessed is the womb
that bare thee, and the paps that gave thee suck!" "Yea," said
Jesus, checking instantly and emphaticaUy that spirit which had
prompted the exclamation — "yea, rather blessed is he that heareth
the word of God, and doeth it."
Mary was highly favored. With Gabriel and with all generations
of our race, we are prepared to call her blessed. We are prepared
to render all due honor to that relationship in which she stood to
the Eedeemer of mankind. Among aU the earthly distinctions and
dignities that could have been bestowed upon a woman, the very
greatest, we beheve, was that which was thus conferred on Mary.
And to the reverential regard which this relationship demands, we
are prepared to add the stfll higher regard due to her genuine
modesty, her simple faith. Nor are we sure but that, in the depth
of our recoil from the superstitious reverence that has gathered
round her name, we have overlooked and failed to do full justice
to the simplicity, the beauty, the retiringness of that piety which
makes her among the pious women of the gospels what John was
among the apostles of our Lord. But when asked to worship her,
THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 72'J
to pray to her as the mother of the Lord, to- entreat that she will
exert her influence with her Divine Son, is it possible to overlook
that treatment which she met with at our Lord's own hands when
here upon earth; is it possible to put away from us the thought that,
in that very treatment, he was propheticaUy uttering his own solemn
protest against any such idolatrous magnifying of the position and
relationship in which it pleased God that she should stand to him ?
We say this in the spirit of no mere ecclesiastical quarrel with the
worship of the virgin. We know how soon paganism mingled its
superstitions with the simple worship of the Crucified ; and we can
well, therefore, understand how, in virtue of aU the gentle and sacred
associations that linked themselves with her name, her character,
her pecuhar connection with Jesus, Mary should have come to be
regarded with an idolatrous regard. Nay, further, looking back
upon those dark ages when, under the grinding tread of Northern
barbarism, the civilization of Southern Europe was well-nigh obliter
ated, we can see a beauty, a tenderness, a power in the worship of
Mary ; in the prayers and the hymns addressed to her, which turned
them into a softening and civilizing element. Nay, further stiU, were
we asked, among aU the idolatries that have prevailed upon this idol-
loving, idol-worshipping world of ours, to say which one of them it
was that touched the finest chords of the human heart, awoke the
purest and tenderest emotions, had the best and most humanizing
effect, we do not know but that we should fix upon this worship of
the virgin. But dehvered, as we have been, from the bondage of the
middle-age superstitions; with that narrative in our hands which
tells us how our Lord himseU dealt with Mary ; standing as we do,
or ought to do, in the fuU light of that great truth, that " there is
one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ
Jesus" — it cannot but be matter of surprise, that this worship of the
virgin should stfll prevafl in so many of the enlightened countries of
Christendom; suggesting the reflection, how slowly it is that the
human spirit emancipates itseU from any natural, long-continued,
and fondly cherished superstition.
Keeping now the whole history of Mary's previous connection
with our Lord before our eye, and especially their intercourse during
the three years of his public ministry, let us dwell for a moment or
two upon Christ's recognition of her from the cross. This affec
tionate recognition in his dying agonies, must have been pecuharly
grateful to Mary. His departure from Nazareth, to which he seems
to have paid only one short visit afterwards; his separation from
the members of his own family; his engrossment with the great
730 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
objects of his public Hfe; the checks he had imposed upon her
interference; the manher in which he had publicly spoken of her;
aU these must have created something like a feeling of estrangement
in Mary's breast, as if he had ceased to be to her all that he once
was. How pleasing to her then to learn from that look and speech
af kindness, that his love for her remained unchanged. How sooth
ing to her motherly affection to receive this last, this parting token
of his undying affection for her ! She may banish aU her fears, bury
all her suspicions ; that Son of hers, he loves her stfll, loves her as
he had ever done ; he cannot die without assuring her of that love.
But it is more than a simple expression of affection that comes here
from the Eedeemer's Hps. There is a thoughtful care for Mary's
future earthly comfort, the securing for her the attention of another
son, the providing for her the shelter of a new home. The dying
Jesus has presented to his thoughts the bereaved, the desolate con
dition in which his death will leave his mother ; he wiU make all the
provision he can towards alleviating her distress; silver and gold he
has none to give her, but he has what sUver and gold could never
buy — a hold and power over the heart of one who, if he be well
described as the disciple whom Jesus loved, might almost as aptly
be described as the disciple who loved Jesus. That hold he will
now exercise on her behaU. "Woman, behold thy son!" Woman,
not mother: he might, upon this occasion, have restrained himself
from caUing her so, lest the very mention of her relationship to him
should mark her out to that unfriendly crowd, and expose her to
their ill-treatment. He is but repeating, however, on the cross, the
address of the marriage-feast — "Woman, behold thy son!" Mary,
perhaps up to that moment, had cherished some hope of his deliver
ance ; but at that word this hope gives way ; she is to lose him ; he
is to be her son no more ; that tie is to be broken, and a new one
created in its stead. A better, kinder son than John, Jesus could
not have provided ; but, alas ! Mary feels that he can never fill that
Son's place; stfll there is great kindness in selecting such a sub
stitute. To John, no name, no epithet is applied ; Jesus simply looks at
him, and says, "Behold thy mother!" John had already been kind
to Mary, was at that moment doing what he could to comfort her,
would have cared for her, though no special charge of this kind had
been given; but a son's place, that son's place, he could not have
felt warranted to assume. Now, however, when Jesus with his dying
breath calls upon him to occupy it, he counts it as a high honor con
ferred upon him. He undertakes the trust, and proceeds to execute
THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 7b)
it in the promptest and most dehcate way. Was he but interpreting
aright the look that Jesus gave him, or was he only obeying an
impulse of thoughtful, son-Hke affection in his own breast? How
ever it was, he saw that Mary's strength was failing, that she was
unfit for the closing scene; he instantly led her away to his own
home in the city. She was not at the cross when the darkness
descended; she was not there when the last and bitterest agonies
were borne. You search for her in vain among the women who
stood afar off beholding to the last. By John's kind act of instant
withdrawal, she was saved what she might not have had strength to
bear; and though that withdrawal was neither prescribed nor sug
gested by our Lord himself, one can well imagine with what a grate
ful look he would foUow that son as he discharged this the first
office of his new relationship ; how pleased he too would be that a
mother's heart was spared the pangs of witnessing that suffering
which drew from him the cry, "My God! my God! why hast thou
forsaken me ?" Mary showed the submissiveness of her disposition
in yielding to John's suggestion, and retiring from tbe cross, and
you never see her but once again in the gospel narrative. Neither
at the resurrection nor at the ascension, nor during the forty days
that intervened between them, is her name mentioned, or does she
appear. The one and only glance we get of her is in the first chap
ter of the Acts of the Apostles, where her name and that of our
Lord's brother, who had come then to believe on him, are mentioned
among the hundred and twenty who, after the ascension, continued
in prayer and supphcation, waiting for the promise of the Spirit.
And now, in conclusion, in that love which in his latest hours
Jesus showed to Mary, let us hail the great and perfect example of
filial affection he has left behind him. In that mingling with the
broader thoughts of a world's redemption which must then have
occupied his thoughts, the thoughtful care for her earthly comfort,
let us see the evidence of how essential a part of all true religion it
is to provide, as God enables us, for those whom we leave behind us
in this world. Let no pretext of other and higher obligations
weaken within our breasts the sense of our obligation to discharge
this duty before we die.
From our Saviour's treatment of Mary let us learn, too, to put in
their right place, to estimate according to their real worth, all earth
ly, all external distinctions. To be the mother of our Lord, that
raised her above all other women, and we gladly join with all who,
upon that ground, would call her blessed ; yet would we stiU more
wish to join heart and soul in our Lord's own saying, that '' more
732 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
blessed is he that heareth the word of God, and doeth it." To be the
nearest herald, the immediate harbinger of Jesus, that raised John
the Baptist above all the prophets, and ranked him among the great
est of the chUdren of men. But yet there is another connection with
Christ, higher and still more honorable — a connection in comparison
with which the closest of mere external or official bonds sink into
absolute insignificance — that inward, that spiritual, that eternal tie
which binds the humble, contrite, trustful spirit to the Eedeemer.
To be the least in his kingdom, to be the least among those who
truly love and faithfully obey him, is a more enduring, a more illus
trious distinction than to be the highest among those upon whom the
honors of this world are heaped. And let us bless God for it, that
this, the highest honor to which humanity can be exalted, is one that
is within the reach of aU. It cometh through humihty and faith and
love : it cometh through the weight of our sin being felt, the worth
of our Eedeemer being appreciated. It cometh through our becom
ing as httle children, and yielding ourselves up to those gracious in
fluences of the Divine Spirit, by which alone the proud heart can be
humbled, and the doubtful heart be assured, and the unloving heart
be brought to love. It cometh through the eye of faith being open
ed to discern the closeness and the reahty of the unseen world, that
world of spirits, whose aU-engulfing bosom, when a few more of these
numbered years of ours on earth are over, shaU have received us all.
It cometh from our giving to aU that concerns our spiritual state,
our spiritual welfare and preparation for futurity, that predominance
in our regards, our affections, our Hves, to which their inherent, then
surpassing worth, entitles them. It springs from our caring less foi
the honor that cometh from man, and more for that honor which
cometh from God only.
Finally, let us reahze those relationships to one another estab
hshed in Christ our Lord, which, in their closeness, their blessedness,
their enduringness, so far outmeasure all the other relationships ol
this human hfe. Why was John selected to take Christ's place, to
be a second son to Mary ? Why was Mary so speciaUy committed
to his charge ? She had other sons, upon whom the duty naturally
devolved. They, indeed, as yet were unbelievers; and upon that
ground might fitly have been excluded. But were there not two of
her own sister's sons among the twelve ? Why pass the sister and
the nephews over, and select John to stand to her in this new rela
tionship ? It may have been that John was better placed than they,
as to outward circumstances abler to provide a home for the bereaved;
but can we doubt that another and still weightier consideration de-
THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 733
termined the Saviour's choice — the spiritual affinity between John
and Mary; his capacity to enter into all her sorrows; his power by
sympathy to support? And ties kindred to those which bound John
and Mary together, do they not still bind together those whose hearts
have been taught to beat in unison, and who have been formed to be
mutual helps and comforts amid the trials and bereavements of life?
Thank God for it, if he has given you any such support as Mary and
John found in each other ; and rejoice in the belief, that those rela
tionships which are grounded on and spring out of our oneness in
Jesus Christ, partake not of the mutability of this earthly scene,
but, destined to outlive it, are impressed with the seal of eternity.
X.
The Darkness and the Desertion.*
The frfll bright sun of an eastern sky has been looking down on
what these men are doing who have nailed Jesus to the cross, and
are standing mocking and gibing him. The mid-day hour has come ;
when suddenly there falls a darkness which swaUows up the light,
and hangs a funereal paU around the cross : no darkness of an
eclipse — that could not be as the moon then stood — no darkness
which any natural cause whatever can account for. As we think of
it, many questions rise to which no answer can now be given. Did
it come slowly on, deepening and deepening till it reached its point
of thickest gloom? or was it, as we incline to believe, as instanta
neous in its entrance as its exit : at the sixth hour, covering all in a
moment with its dark mantle ; at the ninth hour, in a moment lifting
that mantle off? Was it total or partial : a darkness deep as that
of moonless, starless midnight, wrapping the cross so thickly round,
that not the man who stood the nearest to it could see aught of the
sufferer ? Or was it the darkness of a hazy twilight obscuring but
not wholly conceahng, which left the upraised form of the Eedeemer
dimly visible through the gloom ? Was it local and limited, confined
to Jerusalem or Judea ; or did it spread over the entire enlightened
portion of the globe ? We cannot tell. We may say of it, and say
truly, that it was inanimate nature, supplying, in her mute elements,
that sympathy with her suffering Lord which was denied by man.
* Mark 15:33, 34.
734 , THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Men gazed rudely on the sight, but the sun refused to look on it,
hiding his face for a season. Men would leave the Crucified, exposed
in shame and nakedness, to die; but an unseen hand was stretched
forth to draw the drapery of darkness around the sufferer, and hide,
bim from vulgar gaze.
But the truest and deepest significance of this darkness is as a type
or emblem of the horror of that great darkness which at this period
enveloped the spirit of the Eedeemer. The outer incidents, U there
were any, of those three hours of darkness, remain untold. We are left
only to believe that its sudden descent wrought like a spell upon the
actors and spectators ; it stopped each wagging head, it silenced each ,
gibing tongue ; not a word seems to have been spoken, not a thing
done ; there they stood, or there they lay, with that speU upon them,
wondering what this darkness meant. We can easfly enough im
agine what' they may have fancied or felt during that strange period
of suspense ; but who can imagine what he was thinking, how he, the
Saviour, was feehng in that dread and awful interval? No eye per
haps may have pierced the outer darkness that shrouded his suffer
ing body ; stiU less may any human eye penetrate that deeper dark
ness which shrouded his suffering soul. We are left here without a
single external index ; not a look, a word, an act, to tell us what was
going on within the Eedeemer's spirit — tiU the ninth hour came, the
moment which preceded the rolling away of the darkness, and the
return of the clear shining of the day, and then the only sound that
strikes the ear is the agonizing cry, " My God, my God ! why hast
thou forsaken me?" a cry wrung, as it were, from the sufferer's Hps,
when the severe agony of the soul has reached its last, its culmina
ting, its closing point ; a cry which, revealing somewhat of the inte
rior of the burdened heart from which it springs, leaves stfll more
[unrevealed ; a cry which, after we have listened to it, and pondered
it, and turned it over and over again in our thoughts, seems to grow
darker instead of brighter to our eye, and of which we become at
last convinced that it was the simple, spontaneous, irrepressible out
cry of a spirit tried to the last hmit of endurance ; the expression of
what must for ever remain to us an indescribable, unfathomable,
unimaginable woe.
It would strip, indeed, this cry of the suffering Saviour of all dtf-
ficulty and mystery, could we look upon him as a man, and nothing
snore ; could we look upon him in dying as subject to the same mental
and spiritual, as well as bodily weakness with any of ourselves;
could we believe that such doubts and fears as have eclipsed the
faith, and darkened for a time the hopes of other dying men, had
THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 735
place within his breast; could we interpret this saying as the utter
ance of a momentary despondency, a transient despair. We are
disposed to go the utmost length in attributing to the humanity of
our Lord aU the sinless frailties of our nature ; and had we seen him
struggling in agony through the tedious death-throes of dissolution,
the sinking body drawing the sinking spirit down along with it, and
draining it of aU its strength— had it been from a spirit enfeebled to
the uttermost, its very powers of thought and apprehension, of faith
and feeling, fainting, failing, that this sad lament proceeded, we can
scarcely teU whether or not it would have been inconsistent with a
right estimate of the humanity of Jesus to attribute to him such a
momentary oppression under doubt and fear as should have forced
this exclamation from his hps, prompted by his obscured perception
of his personal relationship with the Father.
It stands, however, in the way of our receiving any such interpre
tation of this saying, that it came from one whose inteUect was so
clear and unclouded that the moment after it was uttered he could
reflect on aU he had to say or do in order that the Scripture might
he fulfiUed, and whose bodily powers were so far from being reduced
to the last extremity of weakness, that it was " with a loud voice,"
betokening a vigor as yet unexhausted, that he uttered the despair
ing cry.
Besides, we have only to look back upon the few days that pre
ceded the crucifixion, to find evidence that there mingled with the
sufferings which Christ endured upon the cross an element altogether
different from the common pains of dying. On one of the last days
of his teaching in the temple, certain Greeks desired to see him.
Their earnest request sounded to his prophetic ear like the entreaty
of the entire Gentile world. It threw him into a sublime reverie of
thought. Bright visions of a distant future, when all men should be
drawn unto him, rose before his eye ; but with them the vision of a
future even then at hand — of his being hfted up upon the cross. A
sudden change comes over his spirit. He ceases to think of, to
speak with man. His eye closes upon the crowd that stand around.
He is alone with the Father. A dark cloud wraps his spirit. He
fears as he enters it. From the bosom of the darkness there comes
an agitated voice: "Now is my soul troubled; and what shaU I say?
Father, save me from this hour! but for this cause came I unto this
hour. Father glorify thy name !"— some deep, inward trouble of the
heart, a shrinking fro-qi it, a cry for dehverance, a meek submission
to the Divine wfll. You have all these repeated in order, and with
greater intensity in the garden of Gethsemane : " My soul is exceed-
736 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ing sorrowful, even unto death. O my Father, if it be possitie, let
this cup pass from me : nevertheless, not as I wfll, but as thou wilt."
Here, once more, there is the agony, the shrinking, the petition, the
acquiescence. What so troubled Jesus in the temple? what threw him into that
bloody sweat in the garden? what drew from him those strong cry-
ings for deUverance? Can any one believe that it was the mere
prospect of dying upon a cross which thus shook his spirit to the
very centre? To believe so, were to degrade him beneath a level to
which multitudes of his followers have risen. Deaths far more for-
knidable, more protracted, more excruciating, they have contemplated
¦beforehand with unruffled composure, and endured with unshrinking
fortitude. Shall the disciple be greater than the master ? No ; there
was something more in that hour for which Jesus came into this
world, something more in that cup which he took into his trembling
hands, than the mere bitterness of apprehended dissolution. He has
himself taught us, by the language which he employed, to identify
the hour and the cup. He has taught us, too, that this hour was on
on him in the temple ; this cup was there raised by him to his Hps.
The same hour was on him in the garden ; of the same cup he there
drank large and bitter draughts. It was that same hour which came
upon him on the cross, to run out its course during the supernatural
darkness ; it was that same cup which he took once more into his
hands, to drain to the very dregs. Here also, as in the' temple, in
the garden, you have the same features — the conflict, the recoil, the
victory. Perhaps the inward trouble and agony of his soul reached
a somewhat higher pitch on Calvary than in Gethsemane : that bitter
cry, " My God, my God ! why hast thou forsaken me ?" sounds tc
our ear as coming from a prof oun der depth of woe than any into
which Jesus had ever sunk before ; but in source and in character
rfhe sorrow of the Saviour's spirit was in each of the three instances
'the same — a purely mental or spiritual grief, unconnected in two of
j these cases with any bodily endurance, and, in the third, carefully
I to be distinguished from those pains of dissolution with which it
I mingled. Whence did that grief arise ? what were its elements ? how came
it to be so accumulated and condensed, and to exert such a pressure
upon the spirit of our Eedeemer, as to force from him those prayers
in the garden, this exclamation on the cross ? It was because he stood
as our great Head and Eepresentative, and suffered in our room and
stead : " He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for
our iniquities;" he "made his soul an offering for sin;" "he died the
THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 737
just for the unjust, to bring us to God." The testimony of the Scrip
tures to the vicarious, sacrificial, atoning character of the sufferings
and death of Christ, is clear, emphatic, multiform, and unambiguous.
But when we go beyond the simple statements of the inspired record,
and, admitting the great fact of the atonement, inquire into the how
and the wherefore of that fact — resolved to accept imphcitly aU that
the Scriptures teach, but equaUy resolved not to go beyond its teach
ing, nor add any theories of our own to its simple and impressive
lessons— we feel ourselves on the borders of a region too remote, too-
mysterious for eyes like ours fully and accurately to survey.
Let us, however, that we may catch a distant sight of one inner
fountain of our Eedeemer's sufferings, approach it by a path which,.
for some distance at least, is not obscure. It is said in Scripture
that Christ bore our sins in his own body on the tree ; it is said, alsor
that he bore our griefs, and carried our sorrows. Our griefs he bore
by sympathy ; our sorrows he earned by entering into them and ma
king them his own. That central heart of love and pity opened itseU
at every point to aU the forms and varieties of human woe. Its sym
pathy stood free from aU those restraints that lie upon ours. Our
ignorance, our selfishness, our coldness, our incapacity for more than
a few intense affections, narrow and weaken the sympathy we feel.
But he knows aU, can feel for aU; so that not a pang of grief wrings
any human bosom but sends an answering thrill through the loving,
pitying heart of our Divine Eedeemer. Human sympathy, too, deep
ens, takes a pecuHar character, a peculiar tenderness, according to
the closeness and dearness of the tie which binds us to the sufferer.
A mother's feUow-feeling with a suffering child is something very dif
ferent from what any stranger can experience. And it is not -(imply
as one of us, as a brother man, that Jesus feels for us in our sorrows^
It is as one who has linked himself to our race, or rather has hnked
our race to him by a tie the nature and force of which we are little
capable of understanding. Only we may say, that parent was never^
bound to child, nor child to parent, in a bond so close as that which
binds Jesus Christ and those whom he came to redeem. It would
need his own omniscience to fathom the depth and intensity impart
ed to his sympathy by the peculiarity of that relationship in which it
has pleased him to place himself to his own.
Now, Christ's is as much the central conscience as the central
heart of humanity. Conceive him entering into a connection with!
human sin, kindred to that into which he enters with human sorrow,
realizing to himself, as he only could, its extent, its inveteracy, its]
malignity : in this way taking on him aU our sins, and letting the full
Ufe of Christ, 4 7
738 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
impression of their inherent turpitude, their ruinous results, fall upon
his spirit — who shall calculate for us the bulk and weight of that bur
den which might thus come to be borne by him ? Once, in a Jewish
synagogue, he looked round upon a small company of men, and he
was grieved because of the hardness of their hearts. Let us imagine
that grief amplified and intensified to the uttermost by our Lord's
taking upon himself the sin of the world. Let all the hardness of all
men's hearts, all the hard speeches that ungodly sinners have spoken,
the ungodly deeds they have done; let all the impurity, and injustice,
and cruelty, and profanity, and impiety which have been perpetrated
under these heavens — of which the enmity and mahgnity which nailed
him to the cross might be taken as a specimen and index ; let all that
vast accumulation of human iniquity be conceived of as present to
the Eedeemer's thoughts, appropriated and realized by him as the
iniquity of those to whom he had linked himself by a bond of closest
fellowship, of undying, unquenchable love; let all the sins of thai
world he came to save gather in and press down upon the pure and
holy and loving spirit of the man Christ Jesus : do we not get a dim
and distant sight of a fountain of woe thus opened within, sufficient
to send forth waters of bitterness which might weU nigh overwhelm
his soul, putting his capacity to suffer to an extreme trial?
Further stiU, may we not imagine that as he made thus the sins
of our sinful world his own, and thought and dwelt upon that holi
ness of God, upon which they were such terrible invasions ; the wrath
of the Holy One, which they had so thoroughly deserved, and so
"deeply had provoked; the separation from God, the banishment from
his presence, the death they did so righteously entail; that, in the
very fulness of that love and sympathy which made him identify
himseU with us men for our salvation, the horror of such a darknesr
settled over the mind of the Eedeemer, that the face even of his
heavenly Father for a moment seemed obscured, that its smile seemed
changed into a frown, that the momentary apprehension seized him
that in himself that death, that separation from the Father, was about
to be reahzed, so that from his oppressed, bewildered, faltering man
hood there came forth the cry, " My God, my God ! why hast thou
forsaken me ?"
Let us not forget that there was not, indeed could not be — the
nature of the connection forbade it — any absolute or entire desertion
of the Son by the Father. " Therefore," said Jesus, " doth my Father
love me, because I lay down my life for the sheep." Could that love
be withdrawn from Jesus when he was in the very act of laying down
bis Hfe ? " This," said the Father, " is my beloved Son, in whom I
THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 739
am well pleased." Was there ever a time at which he was more
pleased with him than when he was offering himself up in that sac
rifice so acceptable to God ? Nor does the Son ever entfrely lose his
hold of the Father. Even in this moment of amazement and oppres
sion it is still to God, as his God, that he speaks: "My. God, my
God ! why hast thou forsaken me ?" It was the sensible comforW)-rdyi
of the Divine presence and favor which were for the time withdrawn ; '
the felt inflowings of the Divine love which were for the time checked.
But what a time of agony must that have been to him who knew, as
none other could, what it was to bask in the Hght of his Father's
countenance ; who felt, as none other could, that his favor indeed was
life ! On us — so httle do we know or feel what it is to be forsaken
by God — the thought of it, or sense of it, may make but a slight im
pression, produce but Httle heartfelt misery; but to him it was the
consummation and the concentration of all woe, beyond which there
was and could be no deeper anguish for the soul.
I have thus presented to you but a single side, as it were, of that
sorrow unto death which rent the bosom of the Eedeemer, as he was
offering himseU a sacrifice for us upon the cross. Perhaps it is the
side which Hes nearest to us, and is most open to our comprehension.
Certainly it is one the looking at which behevingly is fitted to teU
powerfully on our consciences and hearts — to make us feel the ex
ceeding sinfulness of our sin, and set us hopefully and trustfully to
struggle with the temptations that beset our path.
In a household which enjoyed aU the benefits of high culture and
Christian care, one of the children committed a grievous and unex
pected fault — he told a falsehood to cover a petty theft ; rebuke and
punishment were administered, carried farther than they had ever
been before, but without effect. The offender was not awakened to
any real or deep sorrow for his offence. The boy's insensibility quite
overcame his father. Sitting in the same room with his obstinate
and sullen child, he bent his head upon his hands, and, sobbing,
burst into a flood of tears. For a moment or two the boy looked on
in wonder ; he then crept gradually nearer and nearer to his sobbing
parent, and at last got upon his father's knees, asking, in a low whis
per, why it was that he was weeping so. He was told the reason.
It wrought like a speU upon his young heart ; the sight of his father
suffering so bitterly on his account was more than he could bear,
He flung his Httle arms around his father, and wept along with him.
That father never needed to correct his chfld again for any hke
offence. And surely, if, in that great sorrow which overwhelmed the
spirit of our Eedeemer on the cross, there mingled, as one of ita
740 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ingi'edients, a grief hke, in origin and character, to that which wrung
this father's heart, and melted his chfld to penitence, the sight and
thought of it ought to exert a kindred power over those for whom
Jesus died.
A younger son is guilty of a great offence against his father. His
elder brother, in acting the part of a mediator between the offending
child and his offended parent, might voluntarily submit to the exact
and the fuU punishment which his younger brother had deserved —
by doing so might turn away the father's wrath, and earn the title to
a brother's gratitude. But what U the offender sees his elder brother,
at the pure and simple impulse of love, melted into a profound and
heart-breaking grief, yearning over him, weeping over him, taking on
himself a suffering far more acute than that which the lash of parent
al discipline might righteously have inflicted on the offender, would
not the sight of the pain that his conduct had given one who loved
him so tenderly, tell most powerfully in the way of quickening him to
a sense of his wrong-doing? Transfer this to our Elder Brother, the
Mediator with our offended Father in heaven. The exact punish
ment which our sin entails — remorse, despair, the sting of a torturing
conscience, the felt abiding misery of a soul cut off from the Divine
favor — Jesus could not HteraUy bear. He has, indeed, borne that for
us which has satisfied the Divine justice, and been accepted as a full
and adequate atonement for our transgression ; but may it not have
been that the suffering in our room and stead, which was accepted
of the Father, was part of the suffering which our great sin and his
great love drew down on him, who, by Unking himseU to us by the
tie of a common humanity, laid a brother's heart open to such a sor
row for our sin as none but the Eternal Son of the Father could have
endured? Surely, in the consideration that it was in such kind of
suffering with and for our sins that the great Atonement of the cross,
in a measure at least, consisted, there is one of the most direct and
powerful appeals — one singularly fitted to touch, to soften, to subdue.
I am very conscious how little anything which has as yet been
said is fitted to throw fuU or satisfactory Hght upon that most myste
rious of aU the mysterious sayings of our Lord — the plaintive, lonely,
loud, and bitter cry which emanated from the cross, which, piercing
the overhanging darkness, was heard with wonder in the heavens.
It came out of the depth of an anguish that we have no plummet in
our hand to sound; and we become only the more conscious how
unfathomable that depth is, by trying it here and there with the Hne
of our short-reaching inteUect. Instead of hoping to find the bottom
anywhere, let us pause upon the brink ; adoring, wondering, praising
"IT IS FINISHED." 741
that great love of our most gracious Saviour, which has a height and
a depth, a length and a breadth in it, surpassing aU human, all an
gelic measurement :
" Oh, never, never canst thou know
What then for thee the Saviour bore,
The pangs of that mysterious woe
"Which wrung his bosom's inmost core.
Yes, man for man perchance may brave
The horrors of the yawning grave ;
And friend for friend, or son for sire,
Undaunted and unmoved expire,
From love, or piety, or pride ;
But who can die as Jesus died ?"
XI.
" Jt is Finished."*
With the arrival of the ninth hour, the outer darkness cleared
away, and with it too the horrors of that inner darkness from whose
troubled bosom the cry at last came forth, "My God, my God! why
hast thou forsaken me?" That mental agony, one of whose ingre
dients — perhaps to us the most intelligible — I have endeavored to
describe, had been endured. The hour for which he came into the
world has run its course ; the cup which with such a trembling hand
he had put to shrinking Hps, has been drunk to its dregs ; the powers
of darkness have made on him their last assault, and been repelled ;
the momentary darkness of his Father's countenance has passed
away. As the sun of nature dispels the gloom that for these three
hours had hung around the scene, and sheds once more his iUumina-
ting beams upon the cross ; even so the light of an answering inward
joy comes to cheer in death the spirit of our Eedeemer. It is not in
darkness, whether outward or inward — not in darkness, but in Hghtj
in full, clear, unclouded light, that Jesus dies.
The first, however, and immediate effect of the lUting from his
oppressed and burdened heart that load of inward grief which had
been laid upon it, was a reviving consciousness of his bodily condi
tion, the awakening of the sensation of a burning thirst. Let the
spirit be thoroughly absorbed by any very strong emotion, and the
bodily sensations are for the time unfelt or overborne, they fail to
attract notice; but let the tide of that overwhelming emotion retreat,
* Matt. 27 : 47-50 ; Mark 15 ¦ 35-37 ; Luke 23 : 46 ; John 19 ; 28-30.
742 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
and these sensations once more exert their power. In the shock of
battle, the excited combatant may receive his death-wound, and be
unconscious of pain. It is when they lay him down in quiet to die,
that exhausted nature betrays a sense of suffering. So is it, after a
manner, here with Christ. His lips scarce feel their parchedness as
they utter the cry, " My God, my God ! why hast thou forsaken mo ?"
Too full, too agitated, is the soul within, to be keenly alive to bodily
sensations. But now that the relief from inward agony has come,
the cravings of nature return, and first among these the strong desire
for something to alleviate the thirst. This thirst, however, so far
from entirely engrossing his thoughts, serves but to suggest to the
dying Saviour — and this shows, as we before remarked, how clear
and calm and self-possessed he was to the very las*t — that among all
the numerous prophecies which had spoken of the time and manner
of his decease, of his being numbered with transgressors, of the sha
king of heads, and the shooting out of tongues, the parting of his
garments, the casting lots for his vesture, there still was one (see
Psa. 69) about their giving him in his thirst vinegar to drink, which
remained to be fulfilled. As being, then, at once the natural expres
sion of the feeling of the moment, and the means of bringing about
the fulfilment of that prophecy, " Jesus said, I thirst."
In saying so, he made an appeal to the sympathy of his crucifiers,
in the belief that they would offer him some of that sour wine, or
vinegar which was the ordinary drink of the Eoman soldiers. Did
Jesus know how that appeal would be met and answered? We can
not but believe he did ; and, U so, it stands out as at once the last
act in point of time, and one of the lowest in point of degree, of that
humiliation before men to which it pleased him to stoop, that he ad
dressed himself as a petitioner to those who treated his petition as
they did. Let us try to realize what happened around the cross,
immediately after the departure of the three hours' darkness. One
might have expected that the natural awe which that darkness tad
undoubtedly inspired ; the moaning cry, as from one deserted, that
came from the cross, as it was roUing away ; the fresh sight of Jesus,
upon whose paUid features there lingered the traces of his terrible
agony ; and, last of all, his asking of them to drink — would have con
spired to awaken pity, or at least to silence scorn. The coming back,
however, of the light — relieving, perhaps, a dread they might have
felt that in the darkness Jesus should escape or be delivered — seems.
to have rekindled that fiendish mahgnity which now found a last and
most demoniac way of expressing itself. " Eli ! Eh !" no Jew could
possibly misunderstand the words, or imagine that they were a call
"IT IS FINISHED." 743
to Ehas for help. The Eoman soldiers did not know enough about
Elias to have faUen on any such interpretation. That the words
were taken up, played upon by the bystanders, and turned into a new
instrument of mockery, shows to what a fiendish length of heartless,
pitiless contempt and scorn such passions as those of these scribe s
and Pharisees, if unrestrained, wfll go. One, indeed, of those around
the cross appears to have been touched with momentary pity, per
haps a Eoman soldier, who, when he heard Jesus say, "I thirst," and
looked upon his pale, parched lips, ran and tooK a stalk of hyssop.
From what we know of the size of the plant, this stalk could not have
been much above two feet long, but it was long enough to reach the
lips of Jesus, the feet of a person crucified not being ordinarily ele
vated more than a foot or two above the ground. This circumstance
explains to us how close to the crucified the soldiers must have stood ;
how near many of the outstanding crowd may have been ; how natu
ral and easy it was for Jesus to speak to Mary and John as he did.
To that stalk of hyssop the man attached a sponge, and, dipping it
in the vessel of vinegar, that stood at hand, was putting it to the
Saviour's hps, when the mocking crowd cried out, " Let be ; let us
see whether Ehas wfll come to save him." This did not stop him
from giving Jesus, in his thirst, vinegar to drink. The ancient proph
ecy he must unconsciously fulfil; but it did serve to half-extin
guish the prompting upon which he had begun to act, and induce
him to take up into his own lips, and to repeat the current mockery,
"Let us see whether Elias will come to take him down."
When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, " It is finished!" It
does not faU in with the character or purpose of these remarks, in
tended to be as purely as possible expository, to take up this mem
orable expression of our dying Lord, and use it as a text out of
which a full exposition of the doctrine of the cross might be derived.
Bather, as being more in accordance with our present design, let us
endeavor to conceive of, and to enter into, as far as it is possible, the
spirit and meaning of the expression as employed by our Lord upon
the crosst
First, then, as coming at this time from the Saviour's Hps, it
betokens an inward and deep sensation of rehef, repose ; relief from
a heavy burden ; repose after a toilsome labor. To the bearing of
that burden, the endurance of that toil, Jesus had long and anxiously
looked forward. From that time, if time it may be called, when he
undertook the high office of the Mediatorship, from the beginning,
even from everlasting, through the vista of the future, the cross of
his last agony had risen up before his all-seeing eye, as the object
744 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
towards which, notwithstanding the dark shadows cast before it, the
thought of his spirit stretched forward. In what manner and with
what feeling it was regarded by him in the period which preceded
his incarnation, it becomes us not to speak, as we have no means of
judging ; but we can mark how he felt regarding it after he became a
man. In the earHer period of his ministry, Christ practised a strict re
serve in speaking of his death. In spite, however, of that self-im
posed restraint, broken hints were ever and anon dropping from his
Hps, sounding quite strange and enigmatical in tHe ears to which
they were addressed. " I have a baptism," said he to his disciples,
"to be baptized with, and how am I straitened tfll it be accomplish-
ed !" When, near the end of his ministry, the necessity for reserve
was removed, Jesus spoke openly about his coming death, and always
in such a way as to convey the very deepest impression of the pro
found interest with which he himself contemplated beforehand that
great event. So eagerly did he look forward to it, so striking an in
fluence had that prospect even upon his outward aspect and move
ments, that when, for the last time, he set his face to go up to Jeru
salem, and aU the things that were to happen to him there came
rushing into his mind, he "went before" the twelve, as if impatient
to get forward. They were amazed, we are told, as he did so; and
as they foUowed him, and gazed upon him, they were afraid. The
reason of this rapid gait and strange expression he revealed, when he
took them apart by the way, and told them what his thoughts had
been dweUing on. There was but one occasion on which he could
freely and intelligibly speak out the sentiments of his heart : it was
when he stood with Moses and Ehas on the mount, and there, even
when invested with the glories of transfiguration, the decease which
he was to accomphsh at Jerusalem was the one chosen topic of dis
course. As the time drew near, still oftener was that great decease
before his thoughts ; stfll heavier did its impending weight appear to
press upon his spirit. It was not, it could not be any mere ordinary
human death that so occupied the thoughts of Jesus Christ. We
have previously endeavored to make it apparent to you that the
true, the real sufferings of that death lay in another, far deeper region
than that to which the ordinary pangs of bodily dissolution belong;
and we cannot but believe that that internal conflict, that inner
agony of soul, reserved for the last days and hours of our Eedeemer's
life, was broken, as it were, into parts, distributed between the temple,
the garden, the cross, for the very purpose of making it palpable, even
to the eye of the ordinary observer, that the sufferings of the Ee-
"IT IS FINISHED." 745
deemer's soul formed, as has been well said, the very soul of his suf
ferings. And when those mysterious sufferings, so long looked
foiward to, at last were over, the load borne and lifted off, with what
a deep inward feeHng of rehef and repose must Jesus have said, " It
in finished !"
Secondly, connecting this expression with what went so imme
diately before — our Lord's remembrance of aU that was needful to
be done to him and by him in dying, in order that the Scriptures
might be fulfilled — it may reasonably be assumed that he meant
thereby to declare the final close and completion of that long series
of types and prophecies of his death which crowd the pages of the
Old Testament Scriptures. In the very number and variety of these
types and prophecies, another attestation meets our eye to the preemi
nent importance of that event to which they point. If you take the
twenty-four hours which embrace the last night and day of our Ee
deemer's Hfe, you wfll find that more frequent and more minute preinti-
mations of what occurred throughout their course are to be found in
the prophetic pages, than of what happened in any other equal period
in the history of our globe. The seemingly trifling character of some
of the incidents which are made the subjects of prophecy at first
surprises us ; but that surprise changes into wonder as we perceive
that they fix our attention upon the death of Jesus Christ, as the
central incident of this world's strange history, the one around which
the whole spiritual government of this earth revolves. By all those
promises and prophecies, those typical persons and typical events
and typical services, the raising of the altar, the slaying of the sacri
fice, the institution of the priesthood, the ark with its broken tables
and sprinkled mercy-seat, the passover, the great day of atonement,
the passage of the high priest within the veU ; by the voice of God
himseU speaking, in the first promise, about the seed of the woman,
and the bruising of his heel ; by the wonderful Psalms of David, in
which the general description of the suffering righteous man passes
into those minute details which were embodied in the crucifixion ;
by those rapt utterances of Isaiah, some portions of which read
now more Hke histories of the past than intimations of the future —
the eye of this world's hope was turned to that event beforehand, as
backward to it the eye of the world's faith has ever since been
directed. But, thirdly, that we may make our way into the very heart of
its meaning, does not the expression, "It is finished," suggest the
idea of a prescribed, a distinct, a definite work, brought to a final,
satisfactory, and triumphant conclusion? Spoken in no boastful
746 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
spirit, it is the language of one who, having had a great commission
given him, a great task assigned, announces that the commission has
been executed, the task fulfilled. Taking it as the simple announce
ment of the fact, that some great transaction was brought to its con
summation, we ask ourselves, as we contemplate the entire circle of
lie Eedeemer's services to our race, stfll running out their course,
what part of these services was it of which it could be said that it
was then finished ? Here, in the foreground, we have to put that one
and perfect sacrifice which he offered up for the sin of the world.
Through the Eternal Spirit, he offered himself without spot to God,
and by that one sacrifice for sin, once for all, he hath perfected for
ever those that are sanctified ; he hath done all that was needed to
atone for human guilt, to redeem us from the curse of the law, to
finish transgression, to make an end of sin, to make reconciliation for
iniquity. But again, Christ's death upon the cross brought to a close that
obedience to the Divine law, that perfect fulfilment of all the righte
ousness which is required ; held out to us as the ground upon which
we are to find immediate and full acceptance with our Maker. "As
by one man's disobedience many were made sinners ; so by the obe
dience of one shall many be made righteous." "He made him to be
sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness
of God in him." "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory
of God : being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption
that is in Christ Jesus ; whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation
through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remis
sion of sins that are past ; to declare, I say, at this time his righteous
ness ; that he might be just, and the justifier of him which beHeveth
in Jesus." Farther still — though embraced indeed in the two particulars of
the sufferings and services of the Eedeemer already mentioned—
there was finished upon the cross the new, the fuU, the wonderful
revelation of the Father, that unbosoming of the Eternal, the open
ing up to us of the very heart of the Godhead, the exhibition of the
mingled love and holiness of our Father who is in heaven. There
was completed then that glorious, that attractive, that subduing man
ifestation of the love of God for sinful men, which carried the Divine
Being to the extreme length of suffering and of self-sacrifice, and
which has ever formed the most powerful of all instruments for
pacifying the conscience, melting the heart, moulding the character,
renewing and sanctifying the wfll. '
Whether, then, he looked up to God, and thought of his having
"IT IS FINISHED." 747
glorified his name, finished the work that had been given him to do ;
or whether he looked down to man, and thought of the saving power
which his cross was to exert over millions upon mfllions of the
human famfly, it may well have been to Jesus Christ a moment of
intensest joy, when — his latest pang endured, his last service render
ed, his strictly vicarious work completed — he exclaimed, "It is
finished!" To Jesus Christ alone was given that joy in dying which springs
from the knowledge that aU the ends of living and dying had been
perfectly answered. Looking upon the career he had pursued, he
could see not a single blot nor blank space in the whole. Of what
other man, cut off as he was in the midst of his years, could the
same be said? When good and great men die in the full flush of
their manhood, the full vigor of their powers, we are apt to mourn
the untimely stroke that has laid them low, that has cut short so
many of the undertakings they were engaged in, deprived the world
of so much service that it was in their heart to have rendered. Nor
can any such look back upon the past without this humbling feeling
in the retrospect, that many an offence has been committed, many a
duty left imperfectly discharged. But for us there is no place for
mourning, as we contemplate the death of our Eedeemer, which came
to close the one and only hfe which, stainless throughout its every
hour, did so thoroughly and to the last degree of the Divine require
ment accomphsh aU that had been intended. And for him it was as
if the cup of bitterness having been drunk, the cry of agony as he
drained the last drop of it having been uttered, there was given to
him, even before he died, to taste a single drop of that other cup —
that cup of fuU ecstatic bHss, which the contemplation of the travail
of his soul, of the glory it rendered to the Father, the good it did to
man, shall never cease to yield.
But to what practical use are we to turn this declaration of our
dying Saviour? He rested complacently, gratefuUy, exultingly, in
the thought that his work for us was finished. Shall we not try to
enter into the fuU meaning of this great saying ? Shall we not try,
in the way in which it becomes us, to enter with him into that same
rest? For the forgiveness, then, of all our sins, for our acceptance
with a holy and righteous God, let us put our sole, immediate, and
entire trust upon this finished work of our Eedeemer; let us believe,
that whatever obstacles our guilt threw in the way of our being
received back into the Divine favor, have been removed ; that what
ever the holiness of the lawgiver, and the integrity of his law, and
the moral interests of his government required in the way of atone-
748 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ment or expiation, has been rendered. Let us look upon the way of
access to God as lying quite open to us; let us take the pardon; let
us enter into peace with God ; let us bring all our guflt and bury it
in the depths of his atonement. Let us lay hold of the righteous
ness of Christ, and clothe ourselves with it in the Divine presence ;
and regarding the reconciliation with God, effected by the death of
his dear Son, as only the first step or stage of the Christian salvation,
let us throw open our whole mind and heart to the blessed influences
that Christ's love, his Hfe, his sufferings, his death, his entire exam
ple were intended to exert in making us less selfish, more loving, more
dutiful, more thankful, more submissive, more holy.
There still remain, for one or two brief remarks, these last words
of our Eedeemer: "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit."
The words are borrowed from one of the Psalms. Jesus dies with a
passage of the old Hebrew Scriptures on his lips, only he prefaces
the words by the epithet so familiar to his hps and heart, " Father."
In the depth of his bitter anguish, under the darkness of momentary
desolation, he had dropped this phrase. It had been then, "My
God, my God !" But now, once more, in the Hght that shines with
in, around, he resumes it, and he says, "Father, into thy hands I
commit my spirit." H the saying which went before, "It is finished,"
be taken, as it well may be, as Christ's last word of fareweU to the
world he leaves behind, this may be taken as his first word of greet
ing to the new world that he is about to enter. New world, we say,
for though, as the Eternal Son, he was but returning to the glory
that he had with the Father before the world was, let us not forget
that death was to the humanity of the Lord — as it will be to each
and all of us — an entrance upon a new and untried state. It seems
to us as if, in these last words of our Elder Brother, it was that na
ture of ours he wore which breathed itseU forth in our hearing; that
human nature which, when the hour of departure comes, looks out
with trembling sohcitude into the world of spirits, seeking for some
one there into whose hands the departing spirit may confidently com
mit itseU. In the "It is finished," the voice of the great High Priest,
the Eternal Son of the Father, predominates. In the " Father, into
thy hands I commit my spirit," is it not the voice of the man Christ
Jesus that mainly salutes our ear ? No timidity, indeed, nor fear,
nor any such trembling awe as any of us might fitly feel in dying.
Nothing of these ; not a shadow of them here ; yet certainly solem
nity, concern, the sense as of a need of some support, some upbear
ing hand. And shall we not thank our Saviour, that not only has ho
made the passage before us, and opened for us, in doing so, the gate
THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 749
to eternal Hfe, but taught us, by his own example, not jo wonder if
our weak human nature, as it stands upon the brink, should look out
with an eager sohcitude to find the hands into which, in making the
great transition, it may throw itself ?
And where shaU we find those hands ? He found them in the
hands of that Father, who at all times had been so weU pleased with
him. We find thein in his hands who went thus before us to his
Father and our Father, to his God and our God. He too found them
there who has left us the earliest example how a true Christian may
and ought to die. Considering the small number of the Lord's disci
ples, we may beheve that Stephen was not only the first of the Chris
tian martyrs, but actually the first after the crucifixion who fell asleep
in Jesus. Can we doubt that in dying the last words of Jesus were
in Stephen's memory ? There had been too many points of resem
blance between his own and his Master's trial and condemnation, for
Stephen not to have the close of the Eedeemer's Hfe before his mind.
His dying prayer is an echo of that which came from his Master's
lips; the same, yet changed. It might do for the sinless one to say,
"Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." It is not for the sin
ful to take up at once. and appropriate such words; so, turning to
Jesus, the dying martyr says, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," in that
simple, fervent, confiding petition, leaving behind him, for all ages,
the pattern of a sinner's dying prayer, modeUed upon the last words
of the dying Saviour.
XII.
The Attendant Miracles.*
In aU its outward form and circumstance, there scarcely could
have been a lowher entrance into this world of ours than that made
by Jesus Christ. The poorest wandering gypsy's child has seldom
had a meaner birth. There was no room for Mary in the inn. She
brought forth her firstborn son amid the beasts of the staU, and she
laid him in a manger. But was that birth— which, though it had so
httle about it to draw the notice of man, was yet the greatest that
this earth has ever witnessed — to pass by without any token of its
greatness given? No; other eyes than those of men were fixed on
it, and other tongues were loosened to celebrate it. The glory of tbe
* Matt. 27 : 51-54 ; Mark 15 : 39 ; Luke 23 : 47-49 ; John 19 : 31-37,
750 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Lord shone around the shepherds, and the multitude of the heavenly
host, borrowing for a time the speech of Canaan, filled the midnight
sky with their praises as they chanted, " Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace, goodwill toward men." Never was there a low-
Her cradle than that in which the new-born Eedeemer lay ; but over
what other cradle was there ever such a birth-hymn sung ?
And as with the birth, so also with the death of Jesus. In aU its
outward form and circumstance, a more humihating death than that
of being crucified as one of three convicted felons, he could not have
died. There was no darker, more degrading passage through which
he could have been sent forth from among the living. But was that
death of the Eternal Son of God to have no outward marks of its
importance imprinted on it ? Left to man, there had been none ; but
heaven will not let it pass unsignalized. And so, at mid-day the
darkness came and settled for three hours around the cross; and
when at the ninth hour Jesus gave up the ghost, the veil of the tem
ple was torn in twain from the top to the bottom, and the rocks rent,
and the graves opened. These were the external seals which the
hand of the Omnipotent stamped upon the event, proclaiming its
importance. But these seals were also symbols; they were more
than mere preternatural indications that this was no common death.
Each in its way told something about the character and object of
this death. The mystery of those hidden sufferings of the Eedeem
er's spirit — the inner darkening of the light of his Father's counte
nance — stood shadowed forth in the three hours' darkness. The
rending of the veil had a meaning of its own, which it scarcely need
ed an apostle to interpret. To the few eyes that witnessed it, it must
have been a most mysterious spectacle. Jesus died at the third hour
after mid- day; the very hour when eager crowds of worshippers
would be thronging into the courts of the temple, and aU would be
preparing for the evening sacrifice. Within the holy place, kindling
perhaps the many hghts of the golden candlestick, some priests would
be busy before the inner veil which hung between them and the holy
of holies; that veil no thin, old, time-worn piece of faded drapery,
but fresh and strong, and thickly woven, for they renewed it year by
year; that holy of hohes — the dark, secluded apartment within which
lay the ark of the covenant, with the cherubim above it shadowing
the mercy-seat, which no mortal footstep was permitted to invade,
Bave that of the high priest once only every year. How strange, how
awful to the ministering priests, standing before that veil, to feel the
earth tremble beneath their feet, and to see the strong veil grasped,
as U by two unseen hands of superhuman strength, and torn down in
THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 751
the middle from top to bottom — the glaring light of day, that never,
for long centuries gone by, had entered there, flung into that sacred
tenement, and all its mysteries laid open to vulgar gaze. The Holy
Ghost by all this signified that while as yet that first tabernacle was
standing, the way into the hoHest, the access to God, was not ye**
made manUest ; but now, Christ being come, to offer himseU without
spot to God, neither by the blood of goats nor calves, but by his own
blood, to enter into the true holy of holies — even as he died on Cal
vary that veil was rent asunder thus within the temple to teach us
that a new and living way, open to all, accessible to all, had been
consecrated for us through the rending of the Eedeemer's flesh, that
we might have boldness to enter into the holiest, and might draw
near, each one of us, to God, with a new heart and in full assurance
of faith. Little of all this may those few priests have known who
stood that day gazing with a*we-struck wonder upon that working of
the Divine and unseen hand — to them a sign of terror, rather than a
symbol of what the death on Calvary had done. We read, however,
that not long afterwards — within a year — many priests became obe
dient unto the faith; and it pleases us to think that among those
who, from the inner heart of Judaism, from the stronghold of its
priestly caste, were converted unto Christ, some of those may have
been numbered whose first movement in that direction was given
them as they witnessed that rending of the veil, that laying open of
the most holy place.
"And the earth did quake: and the rocks rent; and the graves
were opened" — the main office, let us believe, of that earthquake
which accompanied, or immediately foUowed upon the death of
Christ — not to strike terror into the hearts of men ; not to herald
judgments upon this earth ; not to swaUow up the Hving in its open
ing jaws; no, but to shake the domains of death; to break the
stony fetters of the dead ; to lay open the graves, out of which the
bodies of the saints might arise. It seems clear enough, from the
words which Matthew uses — who is the only one of the evangelists
who alludes to the event — that they did not come out of their graves
till the morning of our Lord's own resurrection. It is scarcely con
ceivable that they had been reanimated before that time, and lain
awake in their graves till his rising caUed them from their tombs.
Then they did arise, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto
many — one, certainly, of the most mysterious incidents which attend
ed the death and resurrection of the Saviour, suggesting many a
question: Who were they that thus arose? were they of the recently
dead, recognized by loving relatives in the holy city; or were they
752 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
chosen from the buried of many bygone generations .•*" Did they
return to their sepulchres, or did the grave never more close over
them ? Did they, after a brief appearance in the holy city, pass into
the heavenly Jerusalem ? or did they linger upon this earth, to be
the companions of our Lord during those forty days, so small a por
tion of which is occupied by Christ's appearance to his disciples, the
rest spent where and how we know not ; and did they, that ministry
to Jesus over, go up with him into the heavenly places ? All about
them is hid in the deepest obscurity. Like shadows they come, like
shadows they depart. This, however, their presence told, that the
voice which from the cross cried, " It is finished," went where sound
of human voice had never gone before, and did what sound of human
voice had never done. It was heard among the dead ; it stirred the
heavy sleepers there, and piercing the stony sepulchre, went quiver
ing into ears long sealed against aU sound. And when the third
morning dawned, these bodies of the saints arose, to complete as it
were the pledge and promise of the general resurrection of the dead
which our Lord's own rising carried with it, and having done that
office, sflently and mysteriously withdrew. You may have sometimes
seen a day in early spring, stolen from the coming summer, a day of
sunshine so bright and warm, of air so bland, of breeze so gentle,
that, as if fancying that her resurrection-time had come, dead nature
woke, buds began to burst, flower leaves to unfold, and birds to
sing — all to be shut up again in death, as the bleak withering winds
of days that foUowed swept across the plain. Even into such a day
did the appearance of these old tenants of the grave turn that of our
Lord's resurrection, lightening and enriching it with the promise of
the time when aU that are in their graves shall hear Christ's voice,
and his full and final victory over death and the grave shall be accom
plished. Mark the evangelist, to whom we are indebted for so many minute
and graphic incidents in the gospel history, teUs us that at the mo
ment when Christ expired, the Eoman officer in charge was standing
over against him, within a few yards of the cross, gazing on the face
of the Crucified. He had halted there as the darkness roUed away
He heard that loud and piercing cry, as of one forsaken, come from
the hps of Jesus. He saw the change come over the Saviour's coun
tenance, the light that spread over those palhd features, the joy that
beamed from those uplifted eyes. Another and a louder cry — not
now the cry as of one sinking in conflict, but of one rejoicing in vic
tory — when suddenly Jesus bows his head and gives up the ghost ;
that moment, too, the earthquake shook the earth, and the cross of
THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 763
Jesus trembled before the Eoman's eyes. The shaking earth, the
trembling cross, impressed him less, as Mark lets us know, than the
loud cry so instantly followed by death. He had, perhaps, been
present at other crucifixions, and knew weU how long the band he
ruled was ordinarily required to watch the crucified. But he had
never seen, he had never known, he had never heard of a man dying
upon a cross within six hours. He had seen other men expire ; had
watched weak nature as it wanes away at death — the voice sinking
into feebleness with its last efforts at articulation- -but he had never
heard a man in dying speak in tones Hke these. And so impressed
was he with what he saw and heard, that instantly and spontaneously
he exclaimed, " Truly this man was the Son of God !" Foreigner
and Gentile as he was, he may have attached no higher meaning to
the epithet than Pilate did when he said to Jesus, " Art thou then
the Son of God ?" This much, however, he meant to say, that truly
and to his judgment this Jesus was more than human — was divine —
was that very Son of God, whatever this might mean, which these
Jews had condemned him for claiming to be. Such was the faith so
quickly kindled in this Gentile breast. The cross is early giving
tokens of its power. It lays hold of the dying thief, and opens to
him the gates of paradise. It lays hold of this centurion, and works
in him a faith which, let us hope, deepened into a trust in Jesus as
his Saviour. From such unlikely quarters came the two testimonies
borne to the Lord's divinity the day he died.
The centurion speaks of him as one already dead. The pale face
and the drooping head tell all the lookers-on that he has breathed
his last. The great interest of the day is over; the crowd breaks
up; group after group returning to Jerusalem, in very different
mood and temper from that in which they had come out a few hours
before. It had been Httle more at first than an idle curiosity which
had drawn many of those onlookers that morning from their dwc-U-
ings. Cherishing, perhaps, no particular fll-will to Jesus, they had
joined the procession on its way to Calvary. They gather by the
way that this Jesus had been convicted as a pretender, who had
impiously claimed to be their king, their Christ. They see how
irritated the high priests and their followers are at him. It is an
unusual thing for these magnates of the people to come out, as they
now are doing, to attend a public execution. There must surely be
¦something pecuharly criminal in this Jesus, against whom their
enmity is so bitter. Soon these new-comers catch the spirit that
their rulers have breathed into the crowd, and for the first three
hours they heartily chime in with the others, and keep up their
Ufe ol Ctirfrt, 48
754 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
mockery of the crucified. But from the moment that the darkness
faUs upon them, what a change ! There they stand, silently peering
through the gloom ; no jest nor laughter now, nor strUe of mocking
tongues. Lpon that cross, but dimly seen, their eyes are fixed.
The wonder grows as to how all this shall end. It ends with those
prodigies that accompany the death. Appalled by these, they smite
upon their breasts — as Easterns do in presence of all superhuman
power — and make their way back to their homes ; no noisy, shouting
rabble, but each man silent, and fuU of thought and awe. Who or
what, then, could that Jesus be whom they had seen die such a
death — at whose death the whole frame of nature seemed to quiver ?
Whatever he was, he was not what their rulers had told them. No
false, deceitful man, no impious pretender. Was he then indeed
their Christ, their king ? They got the answer to those questions a
few weeks later, when Peter preached to that great company on the
day of Pentecost; and may we not believe that among those who
Hstened to the great apostle on that occasion, and to whom he spake
as to the very men who, with wicked hands, had slain the Lord of
glory, there were not a few of those who now returned to Jerusalem
from Calvary, impressed and haU-convinced, waiting but the work
of the Spirit to turn them into true and faithful followers of tho
Crucified ?
Such was the impression made upon the Eoman officer, and on a
section of the bystanders. But the high priests and their minions,
the true crucifiers of the Lord — what impression has all which has
happened thus at Calvary made on them ? Has it stirred any doubt,
has it awakened any compunction, has it allayed their fears or
quenched their hate? No; they witness aU these wonders, and
remain hard and unrelenting as at the first. Speaking of that
obduracy, which stood out against aU the demonstrations of the
Lord's divinity, St. Gregory exclaims: "The heavens knew him,
and forthwith sent out a star and a company of angels to sing his
birth. The sea knew him, and made itseU a way to be trodden by
his feet; the earth knew him, and trembled at his dying; the onn
knew him, and hid the rays of his light; the rocks knew him, for
they were rent in twain; Hades knew him, and gave up the dead
it had received. But though the senseless elements perceived him
to be their Lord, the hearts of the unbelieving Jews knew him not
as God, and, harder than the very rocks, were not rent by repent
ance." The only effect upon the rulers of the Jewish people of the
sadden death of Jesus was to set them thinking how the crosses and
THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 756
bodies which hung upon them might most speedily be removed.
Their own Jewish code forbade that the body of one hung upon
a tree should remain over a single night: "His body shaU not
remain aU night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him
that day, that thy land be not defiled." See Deut. 21. As cruci-
fixior was a mode of punishment originally unknown among the
J;ws, this command refers to the case of those who, after death by
stoning or strangulation, were hung upon a gibbet. The Eoman
law and practice were different. Crucifixion was the mode of death
to which slaves and the greater criminals were doomed. In ordinary
circumstances, the bodies of the crucified were suffered to hang upon
the cross tfll the action of the elements, at times otherwise aided and
accelerated, wasted them away. Even when sepulture was allowed,
it was thought profitable for the ends of justice that for some days
the frightful spectacle should be exposed to the public eye. In no
case under the Eoman rule did burial take place on the very day of
the execution. If that rule were in this instance to be broken, it
must be under the special leave and direction of Pilate. Besides,
however, the natural desire that their own rather than the Eoman
method of dealing with the crucified should be followed, there was
another and more special reason why the Jews desired that the
bodies should as quickly as possible be removed. Next day was the
Sabbath; no common Sabbath either — the Sabbath of the great
Paschal festival. It began at sunset. Only an hour or two remained.
It would be offensive, ill-ominous, U on a day so sacred three bodies
hanging upon crosses should be exhibited so near the holy city. It
would disturb, defile the services of the holy day. Besides, who
could teU what effect upon the changeful, excitable multitude this
spectacle of Jesus might have, if kept so long before their eyes? A
deputation is despatched, therefore, to Pilate, to entreat him to give
orders that means may be taken to expedite the death by crucifixion,
and have the bodies removed. Pilate accedes to the request; the
necessary order is forwarded to Calvary, and the soldiers proceed in
the ordinary way to execute it. They break the legs of both the
others; they pass Jesus by. There is every sign, indeed, that he is
already dead, but why not make his death thus doubly sure ? Per
haps, even over the spirits of those rough and hardened men, the
Saviour's looks and words, the manner of his death, the darkness
and the earthquake, which they connected in some way with him,
may have caused a feeling of awe to creep, restraining them from
subjecting him to that rough handling which they were ready
enough to give to the others. However this may have been, the
756 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
shield of that prophecy — "A bone of him shaU not be broken,"
guarded his Hmbs from their rude and crushing strokes.
One, indeed, of the soldiers is not to be restrained, and to make
sure that this seeming death is real, he lifts his spear as he passes
by, and thrusts it into the Eedeemer's side; a strong, rude thrust,
sufficient of itself to have caused death, inflicting a wide, deep
wound, that left behind such a scar, that Jesus could say to Thomas
afterwards, "Beach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side."
From that wound there flowed out blood and water, in such quan
tity, that the outflow attracted the special notice of John, who was
standing at some distance from the cross ; the blood and the water
so distinct and distinguishable from one another, that this observer
could not be deceived, and thought it right to leave behind him this
peculiarly emphatic testimony: "He that saw it, bare record, and
his record is true ; and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might
beheve." It has been thought that John was led to put such stress
upon this incident of the crucifixion, and to press into such prom
inence his own testimony as an eye-witness to its reaHty, on account
of the convincing refutation thus afforded of two strange heresies
that sprung up early in the church : the first, that Jesus never really
died upon the cross, but only passed into a swoon, from which he
afterwards revived; and the second, that it was npt a real human
body of flesh and blood, but only the appearance of one that was
suspended on the cross. It may have been that the evangelist had
these behefs in view. But whatever was his immediate object in
testifying so particularly and so earnestly to the fact, it only puts
that fact so much the more clearly now before our eyes, authorizing
us to assume it as placed beyond all doubt, that within an hour or
so after Christ's death— for it could not have been much longer,
when a deep incision was made in the side of the Eedeemer, there
visibly flowed forth a copious stream of blood and water. Is that
fact of any moment, does it give any clue to, or throw any light
upon the proximate or physical cause of the death of Christ ? The
answer to these questions we reserve for the present.
Meanwhile, let us give a moment or two more to reflection upon
that strange variety of impression and the effect which the cruci
fixion of our Lord had upon the original spectators. There were
those whom that spectacle plunged into a despondency bordering
on despair. Mary, the mother of our Lord was not able to bear
that sight, and the love of her divine Son went forth, and withdrew
her early from the trial of seeing him expire. His other acquain
tance, and the women that followed him from Galilee, stood afar off,
THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 757
beholding; half ashamed and haU afraid; with something of hope,
with more of fear; lost in wonder that he, about whom they had
been cherishing such grand, yet false and earthly expectations,
should suffer himseU, or should be suffered by that Father— of whom
he had so often spoken as hearing him always, who had himseU
declared that he was at aU times weU pleased with him — to die such
a death as this. As the darkness feU, perhaps a new hope sprung
up within some of their breasts. Was Jesus about to use that dark
ness as a veU behind which he would withdraw himself, as he had
withdrawn himseU from those who were about to cast him from the
rocky height at Nazareth ? Had he gone up to that cross to work
there the greatest of his miracles ? and was he in very deed about to
meet the taunt of his enemies, and come down from the cross that
they might beheve in him ? Alas ! U any such hope arose, the ninth
hour quenched it ; and when they saw him draw his latest breath, this
band of friends and foUowers of Jesus turned their backs on Calvary,
with slow, sad footsteps to return, dispirited and disconsolate, to
their homes. Mainly this was owing to the strength of that preju
dice which had so early taken such strong possession of their minds,
that the kingdom which their new Master was to set up was a tem
poral one. To that prejudice so sudden and so overwhelming a
shock was given by the crucifixion, that, stunned and stupefied by it,
these simple-minded followers of Jesus were for a time unable to
recall, and unprepared to beUeve, his own predictions as to his
death. Upon the scribes and Pharisees, the chief priests and rulers
of the people, the six hours of the crucifixion had, as we have seen,
none other than a hardening effect. The gentleness, the patience,
the forgiving spirit, the thoughtfulness for others, the sore trouble of
bis own spirit, the supernatural darkness, the returning light, the
sudden and subhme decease, the reeling earth, the opening graves —
all these, which might have moved them, had they not been pos
sessed by the one great passion of quenching for ever the hated pre
tensions of this Nazarene — have no other influence upon their spirits
than quickening their ingenuity to contrive how best, most quickly,
and most securely, they can accomplish their design. And these
are they of all that motley crowd, who knew the most, and made the
greatest profession of religion ! These are the men who would not
that morning cross the threshold of Pilate's dwelhng, lest they might
unfit themselves for the morrow's duties within the temple ! These
are the men who cannot bear the thought that the services of their
great Paschal Sabbath should be polluted by the proximity of the
three crosses of Golgotha ! They can spill, without compunction.
758 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the blood of the innocent. They can take that olood upon them
selves and upon their children, but they cannot suffer the sight of it
to offend their eye as they go up to worship upon Mount Zion.
These are the men who, in their deep self-ignorance, in their proud
and boastful spirit, were wont to say, "If we had been in the days of
our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the
blood of the prophets." These are the men whose whole character
and conduct are suggestive of the hkenesses to themselves that have
arisen in every age of the church, one of whose noted peculiarities is
ever this, that to wound their pride, or expose in any way their
hoUow pretensions, is sure to draw down on all who attempt the
dangerous office the very same mahgnity of dishke and persecution
that nailed our Saviour to his cross.
Upon many of the crowd which stood for those six hours around
the cross, the events that transpired there appear to have produced
that surprise, solemnity, alarm, and subdued state of feehng, they
were so fitted to produce on the bulk of mankind. We have already
ventured to express the hope that, with not a few of them, what they
saw and heard prepared their minds and opened their hearts to
receive the good seed which, scattered on the day of Pentecost by
apostolic hands, was so watered with the influences of the Holy
Spirit. But are we wrong in imagining, of another and perhaps still
larger proportion of those who returned, beating their breasts, to
Jerusalem, that a few days, or a few weeks, brought them down to
their ordinary and natural condition of indifference and unconcern ?
Yes, they would say, that was a wonderful forenoon; there was a
strange occurrence of striking things about the close of that strange
man's lUe; but to any further inquiry after him — the lending their
ears to that gospel which set him forth as crucified to redeem their
souls from death, and cover, by his mediation, the multitude of
their sins — they became too caUous, the world had too strong a hold
of them, to admit of their giving any further or more earnest heed.
Have not these, too, their likenesses among us? men capable of
strong but temporary impressions. Bring them to Golgotha, set up
the cross before them, let them see the Saviour die, and their breasts
may own a sentiment akin to that which affected so many personaUy
at Calvary : but they are morning clouds those feehngs, it is an early
dew this softening of their hearts ; let the bright sun rise, the fresb
breeze blow ; let the day, with so many calls to business and pleas
ure come, and those clouds vanish — this dew disappears. And yet
the cross was not to be Hfted up in vain. It hardened the Pharisees,
PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 759
it dispirited the disciples, it awed the multitude; but it saved the
penitent thief, and it convinced the unprejudiced centurion. "I,"
said the Lord himself, contemplating beforehand the triumph of his
cross— "I, if I be hfted up, will draw all men unto me." And when
he was Hfted up, even before he died, and in the very act of dying,
he drew to him that Gentile and that Jew, each one the leader of a
multitude that no man may number, upon whom the power of that
attraction has since acted. God grant that upon all our spirits this
power may come, drawing us to Jesus now, and Hfting us at last to
heaven.
XIII.
The Physical Cause of the Peath of Christ.*
Had no one interfered, the body of our Lord had been taken
down by the soldiers from the cross, by their cold and careless hands
to be conveyed away to one of those separate burying-places reserved
for those who had suffered the extreme penalty of the law. Not
unfrequently, in such cases, friends or relatives came forward to
crave the body at the hands of the authorities, that they might give
it a more becoming burial. There was but one exception, the case of
those whose crime was treason against the state — the very crime for
which Christ had, nominally at least, been condemned. In that
instance the mode of disposal of the body prescribed by law was
rarely U ever departed from. But where are there any friends or
relatives of Jesus in condition hopefully to interfere? That small
band of his acquaintance, which had stood throughout the crucifixion
beholding it afar off, is composed principally of women. John, in
deed, is there, a witness of the closing scene, and of the preparation
made for the removal of the bodies. But was Pilate, to whom appli
cation must of course be made, likely to listen to any petition that he
might present ? John knew something of the high priest, but noth
ing of the Eoman governor. There was everything in fact to dis
courage him from making any application in that quarter, even U the
idea of doing so had occurred to him. But it is most unlikely that it
had. For what could John, or the disciples generally, have done
with the body of their Master though they had got it into their hands ?
It must be buried quickly — within an hour or so. And where could
* John 19 : 33-35 ; Mark 15 : 42^5.
760 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
these Galilean strangers find a grave at Jerusalem to lay it in, where
but in some exposed and public place of sepulture, unsuitable for the
destiny in store for it ?
At the fitting time, the fit instrument appears. Joseph of Arima-
thea, a rich man, an honorable councillor, a member of the Sanhedrim,
well known as such to Pilate, has either himseU been present at the
•jrucifixion, or hears how matters stand. Shall the body of Jesu3
pass into the rough hands of these Eoman soldiers, and be dragged
by them to a dishonored burial ? Not if he can hinder it. He has a
new sepulchre of his own, close by the very place where Christ has
died, whose very nearness to the spot suggests to him how suitable a
place it would be for so sacred a deposit. Joseph goes instantly to
Pilate, and boldly asks that the body may be given to him. Pilate
makes no difficulty regarding the aUeged crime of Jesus. He never
had believed that Christ was guilty of treason against Csesar's gov
ernment; does not now act on any such assumption. But Joseph
has told him something about the time and manner of the Saviour's
death which he had not heard before, which greatly amazes and
induces him to hesitate. Those Jews who had come to him a short
tirne before, with the request that he would issue an order that the
bones of the three might be broken and their bodies removed, must
have come to him after the three hours' darkness, after the death of
Christ. But they had told him nothing about that death. They
had spoken as if the same means for expediting their decease had to
be taken with aU the three. Now, for the first time, he hears that
Jesus had, even then, breathed his last ; had died just as that myste
rious darkness, which had troubled Pilate as it had troubled the
crowd at Golgotha, had roUed away ; as that earthquake, which had
shaken every dwelling in Jerusalem, had been felt within his resi
dence. Pilate will not beUeve it — can scarcely credit Joseph's story-
must have a thing so strange attested upon better testimony. Wai
ving, in the meantime, aU answer to Joseph's request, he sends for
the centurion, who, doubtless, told him all that he had witnessed;
told him about the loud voice, and the immediately succeeding death;
told him what raised in the eyes of these two Eomans, even to the
height of a miracle, a death Hke this.
We should understand their feelings better were we as familiar as
they were with the common course of things at a crucifixion. It ia
now fifteen hundred years since this mode of punishment ceased to
be practised in Christendom; it was discontinued because of the
sacredness, the spiritual glory which Christ's crucifixion had thrown
around it. With eyes unfamfliar with its details, yet with imagina-
PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 761
tions that dehghted to picture its cruelties and horrors, the priest
hood of the middle ages put these materials into the hands of poets
and painters, out of which the popular conceptions of the erection of
the cross, and the sufferings on the cross, and the taking down from
the cross, have for so long a time been drawn. There is much in
these conceptions, that by using the means of information which we
now possess, we can assure ourselves is incorrect. The cross was no
such elevated structure as we see it sometimes represented, needing
ladders to be appUed to get at the suspended body. It was seldom
more than a foot or two higher than the man it bore ; neither was the
whole weight of his body borne upon the nails which pierced the
hands. Such a position of painful suspension, causing such a strain
upon aU the muscles of the upper extremities, would have added
greatly to the sufferings of the victim, and brought them to a much
speedier close. The cross, in every instance, was furnished with a
small piece of wood projecting from the upright post or beam, astride
which the crucified sat, and which bore the chief weight of his body.
The consequence of this arrangement was, that crucifixion was a
much more lingering kind of death, and in its earlier stages, a much
less excruciating one than we are apt to imagine, or than otherwise
it would have been. As there was but Httle loss of blood — the nails
that pierced the extremities touching no large blood-vessel, and clo
sing the wounds they made — the death which followed resulted from
the processes of bodily exhaustion and irritation ; and these were so
slow, that in no case, where the person was in ordinary health and
vigor, did they terminate within twelve hours. Almost invariably he
survived the first twenty-four hours, lived generally over the second,
occasionaUy even into the fifth or sixth day. The ancient testimo
nies to this fact are quite explicit, nor are modern ones wanting,
although there are but few parts of the world now where crucifixion
is practised. "I was told," says Captain Clapperton, speaking of
the capital punishments inflicted in Soudan, a district of Africa, "that
wretches on the cross generaUy linger three days before death puts
an end to their sufferings."
So weU was it understood by the early lathers of the church, by
those who Hved in or near the times when this mode of capital pun
ishment was still in use, that life never was terminated by it alone
within six hours, as was the case with Christ, that they aU agree in
attributing bis death to a supernatural agency. Most of them, as
well as many of the most distinguished of our modern commentators,
assign it to the exercise by Christ of the power over his own Hfe
Which he possessed; in accordance, it was thought, with his own dec-
762 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
laration: "No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of my
seU. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.
This commandment have I received of my Father." That Christ's
death was entfrely voluntary, submitted to of his own free will, and
not under any outward pressure or constraint, is universally conceded.
This entire voluntariness, however, it will at once appear to you, is
sufficiently covered and vindicated, when we believe that whatever
the physical agencies were which combined to effect the death, it was
an act of pure free wfll in him to submit to their operation. That
without or independent of any such agency, Christ chose to accele
rate his decease upon the cross by a simple fiat of his own will —
breaking the tie which bound body and soul together, was the solu
tion of the difficulty very naturaUy resorted to by those who had the
clearest possible perception of the extraordinary character of this
incident, and who knew of no other adequate cause to which it could
be attributed. Another solution, indeed, has been proposed, reserved for modern
times, but not coming from our highest authorities, which would
explain the speedy death of Jesus on the cross by ascribing it to an
extreme degree of bodily debility induced by the sleepless nights, the
agony in the garden, the scourging in Pilate's haU, and the mental
conflict at Calvary. All these must undoubtedly have told upon the
frame of the suffering Eedeemer, and have impaired its powers of
endurance. But we must remember that they found that frame in the
very flower and fulness of its strength, free, we may beheve, of all con
stitutional or induced defects. Nor should we, in order to make out
this solution to be sufficient, exaggerate then actual effects. How
ever acute the bodily sufferings of Gethsemane may have been, we
know that Jesus was supernaturaUy assisted to sustain them; they
passed whoUy away when the mental agony which produced them
ended. Tou see no trace of them, in our Lord's presentation of
himseU to the band which arrested him, or in his appearances before
Caiaphas and Pflate. The scourging was a not uncommon precursor
of crucifixion, and could not have enfeebled Chri&t more than it did
others. He bent so much beneath the weight of the cross that a
temporary rehef from the burden was given ; but that he had not
sunk in utter exhaustion was apparent enough, from the very manner
in which he turned immediately thereafter to the daughters of Jeru
salem, and from the way in which he spoke to them. Further evi
dence that Jesus did not sink prematurely under physical debflity is
afforded us by the fact, witnessed to particularly by many of the
evangelists, and which, as we have already observed, made a strong
PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 763
impression upon the mind of the centurion. The fact alluded to is
this, that it was with a loud voice, indicating a great amount of
existing vigor, that Jesus uttered his last fervent exclamation on the
cross. He did not die of sheer exhaustion, fainting away in feeble
ness, as one drained wholly of his strength.
Are we, then, to leave the mystery of our Lord's dying thus, at
the ninth hour, in the obscurity which covers it; or is there any
other probable explanation of the circumstance? It is now some
years since a devout and scholarly physician,* as the result, he teUs
us, of a quarter of a century's reading and reflection, ventured to
suggest — dealing with this subject with all that reverence and deli
cacy with which it so especiaUy requires to be handled — that the
immediate physical cause of the death of Christ was the rupture of
his heart, induced by the inner agony of his spirit. That strong
emotion may of itseU prostrate the body in death, is a familiar fact
in the history of the passions.f Joy, or grief, or anger, suddenly or
intensely excited, has been often known to produce this effect. It
is only, however, in later times that the discovery has been made, by
post mortem examinations, that in such instances, the death resulted
from actual rupture of the heart. That organ, which the universal
language of mankind has spoken of as being peculiarly affected by
the play of the passions, has been found in such cases to have been
rent or torn by the violence of its own action. The blood issuing
from the fissure thus created has filled the pericardium,:): and, by its
pressure, stopped the action of the heart. In speaking of those who
have died of a broken heart, we have been using words that were
often exactly and HteraUy true.
K this, then, be sometimes one of the proved results of extreme,
intense emotion, why may it not have been realized in the case of
the Eedeemer ? If common earthly sorrow has broken other human
hearts, why may not that sorrow, deep beyond all other sorrow, have
broken his? We know that of itself, apart from aU external appli
ances, the agony of his spirit in Gethsemane so affected his body
that a bloody sweat suffused it — a result identical with what has
been sometimes noticed of extreme surprise or terror having bathed
* Dr. Stroua, in a treatise *' On the Physical Cause of the Death of Christ,"
published in 1847.
t Ancient story tells us of one of the greatest of Greek tragedians (Soph
ocles) expiring on its being announced to him that the palm of victory had been
awarded him, in a public literary contest in which he was engaged ; of a father
dying on its being told him that, on the same day, three of his sons had been
crowned as victois in the Olympian games.— See Dr. Stroud's treatise.
t The shut sac or bag by which the heart is surrounded and enclosed.
764 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the human body in the same kind of bloody dew. Why, then, should
not the agony of the Saviour's spirit on the cross — which we have
every reason to regard as a renewal of that in the garden — have told
upon his physical frame in a way equally analogous to other results
verified by experience ? Still, however, had we nothing more posi
tive to go upon, it could only be regarded as a conjecture, a thing
conceivable and quite possible, that Jesus had HteraUy died of a
broken heart. But that striking incident, upon the nature of which,
and the singular testimony regarding it, we remarked in the close of
the previous topic, puts positive evidence into our hands; and the
precise weight of this evidence every recent inquiry into the condition
of the blood within the human body after death has been helping na
more accurately and fully to appreciate. Let me remind you, then,
that within an hour of two after our Saviour's death, (it could not
have been more,) what the skiUul knife of the anatomist does upon
the subject on which it operates, the Eoman soldier's spear did upon
the dead body of our Lord — it broadly and deeply pierced the side,
and from the wound inflicted thus there flowed out blood and water;
so much of both, and the water so distinguishable from the blood, as
to attract the particular observation of John, who was standing a
little way off. We cannot be wrong in fixing our attention upon a
fact to which the beloved apostle so especially summons it in his
gospel. First, then, we have it now authenticated beyond reasonable
doubt, that what John noticed, the copious outflow of water, is pre
cisely what would have happened on the supposition that the heart
of our Eedeemer had been ruptured under the pressure of inward
grief — is precisely what has been noticed in other instances of *this
form of death. When it escapes from the blood-vessels, whether
that escape takes place within the body or without, human blood
within a short time coagulates, its watery part separating slowly
from its thicker substance. When rupture of the heart takes place,
and the blood which that organ contains passes into the pericardium,
it ere long undergoes this change ; and, as the capsule into which it
flows is large enough to contain many ounces' weight of hquid, if,
when it is full, the heart be pierced, the contents escaping exhibit
such a stream of mingled blood and water as the eye of John noticed
as he gazed upon the cross. This is what the anatomist has actually
witnessed; numerous instances existing in which the quantity and
quality of the blood escaping from a ruptured heart have been care-
fully noted and recorded. Having satisfied ourselves as to these
facts, from regarding it at first as but an ingenious supposition, we
PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 765
feel constrained to regard it as in the highest degree probable that
Christ our Saviour died this very kind of death. But what shuts us
up to this conclusion is, that no other satisfactory explanation can
be given of the outflow of blood and water from the Saviour's side.
When not extravasated — that is, when aUowed at death to remain in
the vascular system — the blood of the human body rarely coagu
lates, and when it does, the coagulation, or separation into blood
and water, does not take place tfll many hours after death. Li rare
instances — of persons dying from long-continued or extreme debil
ity — the entire blood of the body has been found in a haU watery
condition ; but our Saviour's death was not an instance of this kind,
and even though it should be imagined that what long-continued
illness did with others, agony of spirit did with him, inducing the
same degree of debflity, attended with aU its ordinary physical
results ; this, which is the only other supposition that can be held as
accounting to us for what John witnessed, fails in this respect, that,
pierce when or how it might, it could only have been a few trickhng
drops of watery blood that the spear of the soldier could have
extracted from the Eedeemer's side. Inasmuch, then, as all other
attempted explanations of the recorded incidents of our Eedeemer's
death are found to be at fault, and inasmuch as it corresponds with
and explains them aU, we rest in the behef that such was the bitter
agony of the Eedeemer's soul as he hung upon the cross, that —
unstrengthened now by any angel from heaven, as during the agony
in the garden, when but for that strengthening the same issue
might have been reahzed — the heart of our Eedeemer was broken,
and in this way the tie that bound body and spirit together was
dissolved. But of what use is it to institute any such inquiry as that in
which we have been engaged ? or what gain would there be in win
ning for the conclusion arrived at a general assent ? It might be
enough to say here that, U reverently treated, there is no single
incident connected with the hfe or death of our divine Eedeemer,
upon which it is possible that any light may be thrown, which does
not sohcit at our hands the utmost effort we can make fuUy and
minutely to understand it. Even, then, though it should appear
that no direct or practical benefit would attend the discovery and
establishment of the true and proximate physical cause of the death
of Christ, stfll we should regard the inquiry as one in itseU too fuU
of interest to refrain from prosecuting it. But would it not be won-
dorful, would it not correspond with other evidences of the truth of
the gospel narrative which the progress of our knowledge has elimi-
766 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
nated, should it turn out to be true, as we believe it has done, that
the accounts of the sufferings and death of Jesus, drawn up by four
independent witnesses — all of them uninformed as to the true state
of the case, and signally ignorant how that which they recorded
might serve to reveal it — did, nevertheless, when brought together
and minutely scrutinized, contain within them those distinct and
decisive tokens which the advanced science of this age recognizes as
indicative of a mode of death, so singular in its character, so rare in
its occurrence, so peculiar in its physical effects ?
Would it not also give a new meaning to some of the expressions
which in Psalms 69 and 22 — the two psalms specially predictive of
his sufferings and death — our Saviour is himself represented as em
ploying? Eead together the twentieth and twenty-first verses of
Psalm 69: "Eeproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of
heaviness : and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none ;
and for comforters, but I found none. They gave me also gall for
my meat ; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." If the
very kind of drink they were to offer him was not deemed unworthy
of being specified in that ancient prophecy — the very smaflness, in
fact, of the incident making it serve aU the better the purposes of
the prophecy — need we wonder U it were only the hteral truth which
the speaker uttered when he said, "Eeproach hath broken my heart"?
When so much has turned out to be HteraUy true, it is but ranking
that expression with the others, when it also has that character
assigned to it. Or take the fourteenth verse of Psalm 22: "I am
poured out like water, and aU my bones are out of joint : my heart is
like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels." Here, again, we
feel that, if in other parts of that psalm — if in speaking of the shoot
ing out of the lips, the shaking of the head, the words that were
spoken, the parting of his garments, the casting of lots for his ves
ture — the great Sufferer is recognized as describing that which did
afterwards actually occur, it is not surprising if, in describing hia
own bodily condition, in speaking, as he does, especially of the state
of his heart, he should be speaking of that which also was actually
realized. But there are positive benefits attendant on the reception of that
view of the Saviour's death which I have now unfolded to you. It
serves, I think, to spiritualize and elevate our conception of the suf
ferings of Calvary; it carries our thoughts away from the mere bodfly
endurances of the crucifixion; it concentrates them on that mysteri
ous woe which agitated his spirit, till the very heart that beat within
the body of the agonized Eedeemer, under the powerful impulse of
PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 767
those emotions which shook and wrung his soul, did burst and break.
If the bloody sweat of the garden, and the broken heart of the cross,
were naturally, directly, exclusively the results of those inward sor
rows to which it pleased the Saviour to open his soul, that in the
enduring of them he might bear our sins, then how httle had man to
do physically with the infliction of that agony wherein the great
atonement lay ! If we have read and interpreted aright the details
of our Lord's sufferings in the garden and on the cross, these very
details do of themselves throw into the background the corporeal
part of the endurances, representing it in fact only as the appropri
ate physical appendix to that overwhelming sorrow, by which the
spirit of the Eedeemer was bowed down under the load of human
guflt. This spiritual sorrow formed the body of that agony of which
the corporeal was but the shadow and the sign.
From the very heart of the simple but most affecting records oi
Gethsemane and the cross there issues the voice of a double warn
ing — a warning against any such estimate of the sufferings of the
man Christ Jesus as would assimilate them to the common sorrows
of suffering humanity. As a man there was nothing in all that he
had to endure from man, which can in any way account for his sweat
being as great drops of blood in the garden. In the rending of his
heart upon the cross, his sufferings remain, even in their outward
manifestations and results, inexplicable on any other supposition
than that which attributes to them a vicarious character, represent
ing them as borne by the incarnate Son of God, as the head and
representative of his people. But while the very outward history of
Gethsemane and the cross pleads thus strongly agamst any lowering
of our estimate of the true character and design of Christ's suffer
ings, does it not as strongly and persuasively lift up its protest
against those pictorial and sentimental representations of the Saviour
in his agony and in his death, which make their appeal to a mere
human sympathy, by dweUing upon and exaggerating the bodily en
durances which were undergone ? We approach these closing scenes
of our Eedeemer's lUe, we plant our footsteps in the neighborhood
of the garden and the cross; and as we do so, we begin to feel
that it is very sacred ground that we tread. We try to get nearer
and nearer to the Great Sufferer, to look a Httle farther into the
bosom of that exceeding sorrow of his troubled, oppressed, bewilder
ed spirit. It is not long ere we become convinced, that in that sor
row there are elements we are altogether unable to compute and
appreciate, and that our most becoming attitude, in presence of such
a sufferer as this — the One through whose sufferings for us we look
768 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
for our forgiveness and acceptance with God — is one of childHke
trust, devout adoring gratitude and love. It is too remote, too hid
den a region this for us rashly to invade, in the hope, that with those
dim lights which alone are in our hands, we shaU be able to explore
it. It is too sacred a region for the vulgar tread of a mere human
curiosity, or the busy play of a mere human sympathy.
But what chiefly commends to us the view now given of the Ee
deemer's death, is its correspondence with all that the Scriptures
teach as to the sacrificial character of that death — aU that they tell
us of the virtue of Christ's most precious blood. More clearly and
immediately than any other does this view represent Christ's death
as the proximate and natural result of the offering up of himseU to
God, the pouring out of his soul in the great sacrifice for sin. From
the lips of the broken-hearted, these words seem fraught to us with
a new significance, " No man taketh my lUe from me ; I lay it down
of myseU," — all, even to the very death of the body, being embraced
in his entire willingness that there should be laid upon him the trans
gressions of us all. It was his soul, his Hfe, that Jesus gave a ran
som for many. The Hfe was regarded as lying in the blood, and so
it was the blood of the sacrificed animal that was sprinkled of old
upon the door-posts, upon the altar, upon the mercy-seat — the ato
ning virtue regarded as accompanying the application of the blood ;
and so, Hfting this idea up from the level of mere ceremonialism, we
are taught that " without shedding of blood," without life given for
Hfe, "there is no remission;" and so, still farther pointing us to the
one true sacrifice, we are told that not by the blood of bulls and
goats, but by his own blood Christ has entered into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us. It is the blood of Christ
which "cleanseth us from all sin." It is the blood of Christ which
" purges the conscience from dead works, to serve the living God."
It is the blood of the covenant by which we are sanctified. We know,
and desire ever to remember, that this is but a figurative expression ;
that the blood of Christ stands only as the type or emblem of the
hfe that was given up to God for us. But the blood merely of a
crucifixion does not fill up the type, does not put its frfll meaning into
the figure. Crucifixion was not a bloody death, it was only a few
trickling drops that flowed from the pierced hands and feet. But U,
indeed, it was his very heart's blood which Jesus poured out in the
act of giving up his Hfe for us on Calvary, with what fuUer and richer
significance will that expression, "the blood of Jesus," fall upon the
ear of faith ! This, then, is he — his bleeding broken heart the wit
ness to it — who came by water and by blood ; not by water only, bnt
THE BURIAL. 76fr
by water and by blood. With minds afresh impressed by the thought
how it was that the blood of Christ was shed; with hearts aU fuU of
gratitude and love, let us take up the words that the Spirit has put
into our lips : " Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins
in his own blood, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever."
"Thou art worthy, for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God
by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and
nation." "Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee ;
Let the water and the blood,
From thy riven side that flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power."
XIV.
The Burial.*
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were both rulers of the
Jews, both members of the Sanhedrim — the Jewish council or court,
composed of seventy members, in whose hands the supreme judicial
power was lodged. It was the right and duty of both these men to
have been present at the trial of our Lord on the morning oi the
crucifixion. In common with the other members of the Sanhedrim,
they in aU HkeHhood received the early summons ic assemble in the
hall of Caiaphas. It would seem, however, that they did not obey
the call ; that, knowing something beforehand of the object of the
meeting, of the spirit and design of those who summoned it, they
absented themselves. We infer this from the fact that when, afte*:
Christ's great confession, the high priest put the question, "What
think ye?" to the council, they all condemned him to be guilty of
death. But we are told of Joseph, that he had not "consented to the
counsel and deed" of those by whom the arrest and condemnation of
Jesus were planned and executed. In what way his dissent had been
expressed we are not informed, but having somehow intimated it be
forehand, it is altogether improbable that, without any demur on his
part, he should have been a consenting party to the final sentence
when pronounced. And neither had Nicodemus gone in with the
course which his f eUow-rulers had from the beginning pursued towards
* John 19 : 38-42 ; Luke 23 : 55 ; Matt. 27 : 61.
UfcofCtuM. 49
770 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Jesus. When the officers of the chief priests and Pharisees came
back to their employers, their task unexecuted, giving as their reason
for not having arrested Jesus, that " never man spake like this man,"
so provoked were those Pharisees at seeing such influence exerted
by Jesus upon their own menial servants, that in the passion of the
moment, they exclaimed, " Are ye also deceived ? Have any of the
rulers or of tHe Pharisees beheved on him ? But this people, whp
knoweth not the law, are cursed."
Perhaps the question about the rulers touched the conscience of
Nicodemus, who was present on the occasion ; perhaps he felt that it
was not so true as they imagined, that none of the rulers believed on
Jesus ; perhaps he felt somewhat ashamed of himseU and of the false
position which he occupied. At any rate, the haughty and contempt
uous tone of his brethren stirred him up for once to say a word.
*" Doth our law," said he to them, " judge any man before it hear
him, and know what he doeth?" A very gentle and reasonable
remonstrance, but one which had no other effect than turning against
himseU the wrath that had been expending itself upon their officials.
"Art thou also," they say to him, "of Galilee?" Nicodemus cowered
under that question, and the suspicion that it implied. Neither then
¦noj* afterwards did he say or do anything more which might expose him
to the imp-utation of being a foUower of Jesus; but we cannot think
so ill of hi*m as to beHeve that, beyond concealing whatever behef in
Christ he cherished, he would have played the hypocrite so far as to
let his voice openly be heard as one of those condemning our Lord
to death. Let us judge both these men as fairly and gently as we ourselves
would desire to be judged. To what amount of enlightenment and
behef as to the character and claims of Christ they had arrived pre
vious to his decease, it were difficult to imagine. Both must have
had a large amount of deep, inveterate Jewish prejudice to contend
with in accepting the Messiahship of the Nazarene; not such preju
dice alone as was common to the great mass of their countrymen,' but
such as had a peculiar hold on the more educated men of their time,
when raised to be guides and rulers of the people. Over all this
prejudice Joseph had already triumphed; there was a sincerity and
integrity of judgment in him, an earnest spirit of faith and hope ; he
was a good man and a just ; one who, like the aged Simeon, had been
waiting for the kingdom of God, the better prepared to hail it in
whatever guise it came. He had thus become reaUy, though not
openly or professedly, a disciple of Jesus. We do not know whether
Nicodemus had got so far. We do know, however, that the very first
THE BURIAL. 771
words and acts of Jesus at Jerusalem made the deepest and most
favorable impression on his mind. It was at the very opening of
our Lord's ministry, that this man came to Jesus by night. Instead
of thinking of the covert way in which he came, only to find ground
of censure in it, let us remember that he was the one and only ruler
who did in any way come to Jesus; and that he came — as his very
first words of salutation and inquiry showed — in the spirit of deep
respect, and earnest desire for instruction. Let us remember, too,
that without one word of blame escaping from our Lord's own lips,
it was to this man that, at so early a period of his ministry, our Sav
iour made the clear and fuU disclosure of the great object of his own
mission and death, preserved in the third chapter of the gospel by
John ; that it was to Nicodemus he spake of that new spiritual birth
by which the kingdom was to be entered ; that it was to Nicodemus
he said, that as Moses had lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
even so must He be lifted up : that it was to Nicodemus that the
great saying was addressed, " God so loved the world that he gave
his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not
perish, but have everlasting hfe." Surely he who, up till near the
close, was so chary of speaking about his death even to his own dis
ciples, would not, at the very beginning of his ministry, have spoken
thus to this ruler of the Jews, had he not perceived in him one wil
ling and waiting to be taught. Christ must have seen some good soil
in that man's heart, to have scattered there so much of the good seed.
That seed was long of germinating, but it bore fruit at last, very
pleasant for the eye to look upon.
It was the fault both of Joseph and Nicodemus, that they hid, as
it were, their faces from Christ ; that they were ashamed and afraid
to confess him openly. But who shall teU us exactly what their state
of mind, their faith and feeling toward him were ; how much of hesi
tation both of them may— indeed, we may boldly say must — have felt
as to many things about Jesus which they could in no way harmo
nize with their conceptions of the Great Prophet that was to arise ?
" Search and look," his brother councillors had said to Nicodemus,
at that time when he had ventured to interpose the question which
provoked them— "search and look; for out of Galflee arise th no
prophet." Nicodemus had nothing to say to that bold assertion;
nothmg to say, we may weU beUeve, to many an objection taken to
the pretensions of the Son of the Gahlean carpenter. In common
with Joseph, he may have believed; but both together may have
been quietly waiting tiU some further and more distinct manifesta
tions of his Messiahship were made by Christ. But why did they
772 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
not, so far as they did beheve in him, openly acknowledge it ? Why
did they not feel rebuked by that poor man, bhnd from his birth,
dragged for examination before them, who witnessed in their presence
so good a confession ? It was because they knew so weU that their
brother rulers had agreed that, "if any man did confess that he was
Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue." It was because they
knew so well and felt so keenly what to them that excommunication
would involve : for it was no slight punishment among the Jews to be
expeUed from the synagogue ; it involved in its extreme issue conse
quences far more disastrous than a mere ban of admission into their
reHgious assembhes ; it involved loss of station, separation from kin
dred and the society of their fellow-men. To the poor bhnd beggar
upon whom it actuaUy was passed, that doom may have faUen but
lightly; for he had never known much of that of which this doom
was to deprive him. A very different thing this expulsion from the
synagogue would have been to Joseph and to Nicodemus. Let us
not judge these men too harshly for the reluctance they showed to
brave it; let us rather try to put ourselves exactly in their position,
that we may sympathize with the hesitation which they felt in ma
king any open acknowledgment of their attachment to Christ.
His death, however, at once put an end to that hesitation in both
their breasts. They may not have been present at the crucifixion.
They would not weU have known where to take their station, or how
to comport themselves there. They could not have joined in the
mockery, nor were they prepared to exhibit themselves as friends of
the Crucified. But though not spectators of the tragedy, they were
somewhere in the immediate neighborhood, waiting anxiously to
learn the issue. Could they, members of the same Sanhedrim, thrown
often into contact, witnesses of each other's bearing and conduct, as
to all the steps which had been taken against Jesus, have remained
ignorant of each other's secret leanings toward the persecuted Naza
rene ? Was it by chance that they met together at the cross, to act
in concert there ? We would rather beheve that, attracted by the tie
of a common sympathy with Jesus, the sad news of his being taken
out to Golgotha to be crucified brought themthat forenoon together;
that they were by each other's side as the tidings reached them of
all the wonders which had transpired around the cross, and of the
strange death which Jesus died. The resolution of both is promptly
taken ; and it looks, certainly, as U taken with the knowledge of each
other's purpose. Joseph goes at once boldly to Pilate, and craves
the body of Jesus. An ancient prophecy, of which he knew noth
ing—one that seemed, as Jesus died, most unlikely of accomplish-
THE BURIAL. 773
ment— had proclaimed that he was to make his grave with the rich.
This rich man has a new sepulchre, wherein never man lay, which he
had bought or got hewn out of the rock, with the idea, perhaps, that
he might himself be the first to occupy it. It hes there close at hand,
¦not many paces from the cross. He is resolved to open it, that it
may receive, as its first tenant, the body of the Crucified. Nay, fur
ther ; as there are few, U any, now of Christ's known friends to un
dertake the task, he is resolved — his dignity, the sense of shame, the
fear of the Jews, aU forgotten — to put his own hands to the office of
giving that body the most honorable sepulture that the time and
circumstances can afford.
Once assured, on the centurion's testimony, that it was even as
Joseph said, Pflate at once gives the order that the body shall be
committed into his hands. The centurion, bearing that order, returns
to Golgotha. Joseph provides himself by the way with the clean
white cloth in which to shroud the body. The soldiers, at their offi
cer's command, bear the bodies of the other two away, leaving that
of Jesus still suspended on the cross." It is there when Joseph reaches
the spot, to be dealt with as he likes. How quiet and how lonely the
place, as the first preparations are made for the interment ! few to
help, and none to interrupt. The crowd has all dispersed ; some half-
dozen Galilean women alone remain. But is John not here? He
had returned to Calvary, had seen but a little while before the thrust
of the soldier's spear ; he knew that but a short time was left for dis
posing of the body. Is it at all Hkely that in such circumstances he
should leave, and not wait to see the close ? Let us believe that
though, with his accustomed modesty, he has veUed his presence, he
was present standing with those Galilean women. They see, coming
in haste, this Joseph of Arimathea, whom none of them had ever
known as a disciple of their Master ; they see the white linen cloth
that he has provided ; they notice that the body is committed to his
charge; they watch with wonder as he puts forth his own hand to the
taking down of the body. Their wonder grows as Nicodemus — also
a stranger to them, whom they had never seen coming to Jesus —
joins himseU to Joseph ; not rudely and roughly, as the soldiers had
dealt with the others, but gently and reverently handling the dead.
As they lay the body on the ground, it appears that this new-comer,
Nicodemus, has brought with him a mixture of powdered myrrh and
aloes, about one hundred pounds' weight. The richest man in Jeru
salem could not have furnished more or better spicery for the burial
of his dearest friend. It is evidert that these two men have it in
their heart, and are ready to put to their hands, to treat the dead
774 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
with aU due respect. Their fears disarmed, assured of the friendly
purpose of those interposing thus, the Gahlean women gather in
around the pale and lifeless form. The white shroud is ready, the
myrrh and the aloes are at hand, but who shall spread those spices
on the funeral garment, and. wrap it round the corpse to fit it for the
burial ? This is a service, one of the last and the saddest which our
poor humanity needs, which, as if by an instinct of nature, woman's
gentle hand has in all ages and in all countries been wont to render
to the dead; and though the gospel narrative be silent here, we will
not beheve that it was otherwise at the cross ; we will not beUeve but
that it was the tender hands of those loving women who had watched
at Calvary from morning-tide till now, which offer their aid, and are
permitted and honored to wipe from that mutilated form the bloody
marks of dishonor which it wore, to swathe it with the pure linen
robe, and wrap around the thorn-marked brow the napkin, so falsely
deemed to be the last clothing of the dead.
One thing alone is wanting, that the manner of the Jews in bury •
ing may be observed — a bier to lay the body on, to bear it to the
sepulchre. There has been no time to get one, or it is felt that the
distance is so short that it is not needed. That body has, however,
the best bier of aU — the hands of true affection, to hft it up and
carry it across to the new tomb which waits to receive it. The feet
let us assign to Joseph, the body to Nicodemus, and that regal head
with those closed eyes, over which the shadows of the resurrection
are already flitting, let us lay it on the breast of the beloved disciple.
The brief path from the cross to the sepulchre is soon traversed. In
sflence and in deep sorrow they bear their sacred burden, and lay it
gently down upon its clean, cold rocky bed. The last look of the
dead is taken. The buriers reverently withdraw, the stone is rolled
to the mouth of the sepulchre : separated from the hving — Jesus
rests with the dead —
"At length the worst is o'er, and thou art laid
Deep in thy darksome bed ;
All still and cold behind yon dreary stone
Thy sacred form is gone.
Around those lips where peace and mercy hung
The dew of death hath clung ;
The dull earth o'er thee, and thy friends around,
Thou sleep'st a silent corse, in funeral-raiment wound."
The burial is over now, and we might depart ; but let us linger a
Httle longer, and bestow a parting look on the persons and the place,
the buriers and the burying-ground. The former have been few in
number ; what they have to do, they must do quickly ; for the sun is
THE BURIAL. 775
down in the western sky when Joseph gets the order from Pflate;
and before it sets, before the great Sabbath begins, they must lay
Jesus in the grave. Tet hurried as they have been, with all such
honor as they can show, with every token of respect, have they laid
that body in the tomb ; they have done aU they could. The last service
which Jesus ever needed at the hands of men it has been their privi
lege to render. And for the manner in which they have rendered it,
sliafl we not honor them? Yes, verUy, wherever this gospel of the
kingdom shall be made known, what they thus did for the Lord's
burial shall be told for a memorial of them ; and henceforth we shall
foi-get of Joseph that hitherto he had concealed his discipleship, and
acted as U he were a stranger to the Lord, seeing that, when Christ
was in such a special sense a stranger on the earth, he opened his
own new sepulchre to take him in ; and we shaU forget it of Nicode
mus that it was by night he had come to Jesus, seeing that, upon
this last sad day he came forth so openly, with his costly offering of
inyrrh and aloes, to embalm Christ for his burial. Of the Galilean
women we have nothing to forget; but let this be the token where
with we shall remember them, that, the last at the cross and the first
at the sepulchre, they were the latest at the grave : for Joseph has
departed; Nicodemus and the rest are gone; but there, while the
sun goes down, and the evening shadows deepen around, the very
solitude and gloom of the place such as might have warned them
away — there are Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to be seen sit
ting over against the sepulchre, unable to tear themselves from the
spot, gazing through their tears at the place where the body of their
Lord is laid.
Let us now bestow a parting look upon the burying-ground. "In
the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in that
garden a sepulchre." Plant yourselves before that sepulchre, and
look around. This is no place for graves ; here rise around you no
memorials of the dead. Tou see but a single sepulchre, and that
sepulchre in a garden. Strange mingling this of opposites, the
garden of Hfe and growth and beauty, circling the sepulchre of
death, corruption, and decay. Miniature of the strange world we
Hve in. What garden of it has not its own grave ? Tour path may,
for a time, be through flowers and fragrance ; foUow it far enough, it
leads ever to a grave. But this sepulchre in this garden suggests
other and happier thoughts. It was in a garden once of old — in
Eden, that death had his first summons given, to find there his first
prey; it is in a garden here at Calvary, that the last enemy of
mankind has the death-blow given to him — that the great conqueror
776 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
is in his turn overcome. Upon that stone which they roUed to the
mouth of the sepulchre, let us engrave the words, " O death, where
is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Thanks be to God,
which giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ." What a
change it has made in the character and aspect of the grave, that our
Saviour himseU once lay in it ! He has stripped it of its terrors, and to
many a weary one given it an attractive rather than a repulsive look.
*"I heard a voice from heaven saying" — it needed a voice from heav
en to assure us of the truth — "Blessed are the dead who die in the
Lord." To such the grave is, indeed, a bed of blessed rest. Buried
•with Jesus, they repose tfll the hout of the great awakening cometh,
when with him they shall arise to that newness of Hfe over which no
shadow of death shall ever pass.
THE FORTY DAYS
AFTEB
OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION.
I.
The Resurrection.*
We left Mary Magdalene and the other Mary keeping their lonely
Watch over "against the sepulchre till the sun of Friday sets. At its
setting, Saturday, the great Sabbath of the passover, begins. Such
a Sabbath never dawned upon this world before or since. AU things
wear an outward look of quiet in Jerusalem. A great calm, a deeper
than Sabbath stillness, has followed the stir and excitement of those
strange scenes at Golgotha. Crowds of silent worshippers fill as
usual the courts of the temple ; and aU goes on, at the hours of the
morning and evening sacrifice, as it had done for hundreds of years
gone by. But can those priests, who minister within the Holy Place,
gaze without some strange misgivings upon the rent in the veil from
top to bottom, which yesterday they had seen so strangely made,
and which they scarce had time imperfectly to repair ? Can they think
without dismay of that rude uncovering of all the hidden mysteries
ofthe most Holy Place, which they had witnessed? Among the
crowds of worshippers without, there are friends and foUowers of
Jesus. They would have been here had nothing happened to their
Master the day before, and they are here now, for by keeping away
they might draw suspicion upon themselves ; but what heart have
they for the services of the sanctuary? They have just had aU their
brightest earthly hopes smitten to the dust ; and so prostrate are
they beneath the stroke, that they cannot even recaU to memory that
but a few months before, Jesus had, more than once, distinctly told
them that he must go up to Jerusalem, and suffer many things of
the elders and chief priests, and be killed, and be raised again the
Matt. 26:62-66: 28:1-6.
778 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
third day. No writer of a fictitious story, no framer of reHgious
myths, had he previously put into Christ's Hps such distinct foretell
ings of his death and resurrection, would have attributed to his follow
ers such an entire forgetfulness of these predictions, such an utter
prostration of afl faith and hope, as that which the evangehsts de
scribe as coming upon aU our Lord's disciples immediately after his
death, lasting tfll the most extraordinary means were taken to re
move them, and yielding slowly then. Tet, after aU, is it not true to
human nature, that upon the minds and hearts of those simple, rude,
uncultivated men and women, fiUed as they had been with other and
quite different expectations, the shock of such a shameful death,
coming in such a way upon their Master, was so sudden and so stun
ning, that aU power of forming a new conception of their Master's
character, and taking up a new faith in him, was gone ; the power
even of remembering what he had said about himself beforehand for
the season paralyzed?
But love Hves on, even where faith dies out, among those discon
solate and utterly hopeless friends and followers of our Lord. Whfle
the two Marys had remained throughout the preceding day before
the sepulchre, others of those Galilean women had hastened to occupy
the short space between the burial and the sunset, in beginning their
preparations for the embalming of their Master's body. And these,
with the two Marys, are waiting now, not without impatience ; for
their hearts, not in the temple services, have gone where they have
seen him laid — till the sunset, the close of the Sabbath, enables them
to have all the needed wrappings, and spices, and ointments prepar
ed, so that when the third morning dawns they may go out to Golgo
tha, to finish there at leisure what Joseph and Nicodemus had more
hurriedly and imperfectly attempted, before they laid Jesus in the
sepulchre. But how, throughout this intervening Sabbath, fares it with the
chief priests and rulers ? Are they quite at ease ; content and happy ;
satisfied with, U not glorying in, their success? They have got rid
of this obnoxious man ; he is dead and buried. What fear can there
be of him now ? What risk or danger to them, or to their supremacy,
can come out of his grave ? May they not bury all their apprehen
sions in that closed sepulchre ? No ; a ghastly fear comes in to mar
the joy of a gratified revenge. They dread that dead man still ; he
miles their spirits from his sepulchre. They would not cross Herod's
threshold the day before, lest they should be defiled. They could hot
bear the thought that Jesus should hang suspended on the cross
throughout the Sabbath-day; it would disturb, it would desecrate
THE RESURRECTION. 779
the services of the holy day, the Holy Place. But they scruple not to
desecrate the Sabbath by their jealous fears ; by their secret councils ;
by their plannings to prevent a future, dreaded danger. And so, no
sooner is the Sabbath over, than they hasten to the governor, saying
to him : "Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet
alive, After three days I wiU rise again." They had themselves heard
him, at the very beginning of his ministry, say publicly: "Destroy
this temple, and in three days I wfll raise it again." They had heard
him at a later period say: "An evil and adulterous generation
seeketh after a sign ; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the
sign of the prophet Jonas : for as Jonas was three days and three
nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of man be three days and
three nights in the heart of the earth." Was it to these vague and
general sayings of our Lord that the rulers now referred? It is
more Hkely that they had in view some of those more recent and
move exphcit declarations of Jesus to his own disciples, such as the
one already quoted, or such as that other and still more explicit one,
when he took his disciples apart by the way, as they were going up
to Jerusalem, and said to them, " Behold, we go up to Jerusalem ;
and the Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests, and un
to the scribes, and they shaU condemn him to death, and shall de
liver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him :
and the third day he shall rise again." What more natural than
that the betrayer himself, to whose act such special allusion was thus
made, should, in some of his communications with the rulers, have
repeated to them those memorable words? They now remember,
whfle the disciples themselves forget. They fear, while the disciples
have ceased to hope. When first reported to them, they had mock
ed at the unmeaning words ; but now that so much of the prophecy
has been accomphshed, they begin to dread lest somehow or other
the remainder of it should also be fulfilled. As yet aU was safe ; it
was not till the third day that he was to rise again. During that
Sabbath-day the body of the Crucified was secure enough in the sep
ulchre; the very sanctity of the day a sufficient guard against any
attempt to invade the tomb. But instant means must be taken that
thereafter there be no tampering with the place of burial. No night-
guard could they get so good as a company of Eoman soldiers whose
iron rule of discipline imposed death upon the sentinel who slept at
his post. Such guard they could get stationed at the sepulchre on
ly under the governor's sanction. " Command, therefore," they said
tc Pflate, " that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest
his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say unto the
780 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
people, He is risen from the dead : so the last error shaU be worse
than the first." Little heeding either the first or the last error, hav
ing no sympathy with their idle fears about the rifling of the sepul
chre, in no good humor either with himseU or with the rulers, yet,
since he had gone so far to please them, not caring to refuse their
last request, PUate complies. " Te have a watch," he says ; ' a de
tachment of my soldiers placed at your disposal during the feast,
use it as you please ; go your way, and, with its help, make the sep
ulchre of that poor innocent Nazarene you got me to crucify, as sure
as ye can.' And they went their way. They passed a cord across
the stone which filled the entrance into the sepulchre, and fastened
it at each end to the adjoining rock with the sealing clay, so that
the stone could not be removed and replaced, however carofufly, in
its first position, without leaving behind a mark of the disturbance.
And they placed the sentinels, with the strict command that they
were to suffer no man in the darkness to meddle with that sepulchre ;
and thus, securely guarded, the dead body of the Eedeemer reposes
The darkness deepens round the sepulchre, the sentinels kindle
their night-lamps, and pace to and fro before it. The midnight hour
has passed ; it is yet dark. The day has but begun to dawn, when
those women, whose wakeful love sends them forth on their early
errand, leave the holy city to go out to Calvary to complete there
the interrupted embalming. They are already near the spot, when a
difficulty, not thought of till then, occurs to them. And they said
among themselves, Who shaU roll away the stone from the door of
the sepulchre? That stone which they had seen two nights before
closely fitted into its place, was too large, too firmly embedded in its
place, for their weak hands to move, and at this hour, and at that
spot, what aid of stronger hands can they obtain ? Another difficul
ty there was ; but of it happily they were ignorant, or it might have
stopped their movement altogether. Of that sealing of the stone, of
that guard planted the preceding day before the sepulchre, they had
heard nothing, else they might have put to one another the further
question, How, with such guard before it, shall we ever get access to
the grave ? It is as they are communing with one another by the
way, that the earth quakes, and the angel descends from heaven, and
rolls the stone back from the door of the sepulchre, and, having
done this service for the embalmers, sits down upon it, waiting their
approach. Was it then that the great event of that morning took
place? Was it as the angel's hand rolled back the stone, and open
ed the entrance of the tomb, that the Great Eedeemer of mankind
awoke, arose, and stepped forth from his temporary rest among the
THE RESURRECTION. 781
dead ? It is not said so. The keepers did not witness the resurrec
tion. They saw the angel, the light of his countenance, the snowy
radiance of his raiment, and for fear of him they became as dead
men. But they saw not the Lord himself come forth. The angel
himself may not have witnessed the resurrection. He did not say
he had. He speaks of it as an ewnt already past. It may not
have been as a spectator or minister to his Lord, in the act of rising
from the dead, that he was sent down from heaven. The Lord of
Hfe needed not that service which he came to render. Through that
stone door he could have passed as easfly as he passed afterwards
through other doors which barred not his entrances nor his exits.
Altogether secret, the exact time and manner of the event unnoticed
and unknown was that great rising from the dead. The clearest ahd
amplest proof was afterwards given of the fact that, some time be
tween sunset of the last and sunrise of the first day of the week, the
resurrection had taken place ; but it pleased not the Lord who then
arose to do so under the immediate eye or inspection of any human
witness. Alarmed by the quaking of the ground beneath their feet, be
wildered by the strange Hght which is seen streaming forth from be
side the sepulchre, the women enter the garden, approach the sepul
chre, gather courage as they see that the stone is already rolled
away, but might have sunk again in terror as they looked at him
who sat upon that stone, had he not prevented their fears by saying
to them, in tones, let us beheve, full of soothing power: "Fear not
ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified" — 'I know
the errand that you come on. I know that it is love to the Crucified
which brings you, thus early, to what was once his grave ; and I
have tidings of him that such love as yours wfll deUght to hear.
True, aU that labor of yours about these spices and ointments is lost ;
you will find here nobody to embalm. But not lost is this visit to the
sepulchre ; for to you first, among all his followers, have I to tell :
"He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place
where the Lord lay;'" and he led them into the sepulchre.
"Come, see the place where the Lord lay." How little did the
angel who first uttered these words, and heard the echo of them die
away among the recesses of the rocky garden — how httle, perhaps,
did he think that the invitation which he thus gave to those few
trembling women who stood before him, would be conveyed down
through aU after times, and be borne to the ears of millions upon
mfllions of the foUowers of Jesus Christ. And yet it has been
even so, and in the course of its long descent and wide circula-
782 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
tion, it has reached even unto us. Let us Hsten to and obey it.
Come, let us look at the place where the Lord once lay, and from
which on that third morning he arose.
We cannot indeed hteraUy accept the angelic invitation, and go
and look into the empty sepulchre. The hand of time, and in this
instance the stiU rougher hands of the devotee and of the infidel,
have wrought such changes in that sacred neighborhood, that the
exact site of the holy sepulchre cannot be identified. But though we
may not be able to plant our footsteps on the very ground that the
trembling women occupied, or foUow them as, angel led, they passed
into the deserted tomb, yet in thought we may stiU bend over the
place where the Lord once lay.
• As we do so, let us reflect upon the proofs of the divine mission
of the Eedeemer afforded by his resurrection from the grave. Evi
dence enough had been afforded by our Lord himseU, during his Hfe-
time, of his divine character and authority. The words he spake, the
works he did, proclaimed him to be the Son of the Highest. But
sufficient as it was to convince the candid, that evidence had not been
sufficient to silence the cavfllers. His words were misunderstood and
misinterpreted; his miracles, though not denied, were attributed to
Satanic agency. It was as a blasphemer that he was put to death.
But his resurrection appears at least to have had this effect, it stopped
the mouths of his adversaries. There might be a few among the more
credulous of them who accepted the clumsy tale that the chief priests
tried to circulate about his disciples coming by night and taking the
body away. But loudly and pubhcly as, both in the heart of Jeru
salem and elsewhere, the apostles proclaimed this fact in the pres
ence of the rulers themselves, it does not appear that its reaHty was
ever openly challenged, or that any such attempt was made to explam
it away as had been made regarding other miracles wrought by the
Saviour's hands. If it faUed to convince, it succeeded at least in
silencing those who would, U they could, have dealt with it in a Hke
manner. It had indeed the force of a double miracle. Alone, and by itseU,
the rising of Jesus from the dead most fuUy authenticated the claims
he had put forth. Had the Son of Mary not been aU that he had
declared himself to be, never would such an exercise of the Divine
power have been put forth on his behaU. But more than this, Christ
had publicly perilled his reputation as the Christ of God, on the
occurrence of this event. When chaUenged to give some sign in
support of his pretensions, it was to his future resurrection from the
dead, and to it alone, that he appealed. Often, as we have seen, and
THE RESURRECTION. 783
that in terms incapable of misconstruction, had our Lord foretold his
resurrection. It carried thus along with it a triple proof of the divin
ity of our Lord's mission. It was the fulfilment of a prophecy, as
well as the working of a miracle; that miracle wrought, and that
prophecy fulfiUed, in answer to a solemn and confident appeal made
beforehand by Christ to this event as the crowning testimony to his
Messiahship. But not yet have we exhausted the testimony which the resurrec
tion of Jesus embodies. He spoke of that resurrection as the rais
ing of himseU by himseU. " Destroy this temple, and in three days
I will raise it up. I lay down my life, that I may take it again. I
have power to lay it down; I have power to take it again." An
assumption by Jesus Christ of a power proper to the Creator alone ;
a clothing of himself with the high prerogative of the giver and the
restorer of Hfe. His actual resurrection, did it not*in the most solemn
manner ratify that assumption, convincing us by an instance of the
highest kind, that whatsoever thing the Pather doeth, the same doeth
the Son likewise?
But further still — and it is this which attaches such importance
to this incident in the history of our Eedeemer, and causes it to be
spoken of in the New Testament Scriptures as standing in such close
connection with aU our dearest hopes as to the hfe beyond the grave —
in the resurrection of the Saviour, the seal of the Divine acceptance
and approval was put upon that great work of service and of sacri
fice, of atonement and of obedience in our room and stead, which
Jesus finished on the cross. The expression and embodiment of that
acceptance and approval in a visible act, an outward and palpable
incident, give an aid and a security to our faith in Christ for our
acceptance with God, far beyond that which any bare announcement
in words could possibly have conveyed. Can we wonder, then, at the
prominence given, in the teachings and writings of the apostles of
our Lord, to an event so full of convincing evidence, so rich in spirit
ual instruction and comfort? To be a witness to this great event
was held — as the election of Matthias informs us— to be the special
function of the apostolic office. It was to this event that Peter
referred at large in his discourse to the multitude on the day of Pen
tecost. "This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we aU are wit
nesses." Questioned, a short time afterwards, before the Sanhedrim,
as to the earliest of the apostohc miracles, "Be it known," said
Peter, " unto you aU, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name
of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised
from the dead, even by him doth this man stand before you whole."
784 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
When Paul addressed the men of Athens, this was the one supernat
ural incident to which in the way of attestation, he referred: "God
hath appointed a day, in the which he wfll judge the world by that
man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance, in
that he hath raised him from the dead." I have but to refer to the
fifteenth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians, to remind you
of the place and prominence given to the event by the great apostle
of the Gentiles : " If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain,
and your faith is also vain."
From the first, it was to that crowning miracle of Christianity
that its teachers made appeal. And now once more, in our own
times, it is by that event that we desire that the entire question of
the supernaturalism of our religion should be decided; for U that
event be true, then any, then all other miracles are at least credible,
for where among them shall a greater than this be found ? JJ that
event be true, then upon it does the entire fabric of our Christian
faith securely rest ; for U we believe that Jesus died and rose again,
then are we prepared along with this, and as harmonizing with this,
to believe aU that the Scriptures have taught us of the glory oi
Christ's person, as one with, and equal to the Father; all that they
have taught us of the design of his lUe and death among us, as the
Eedeemer of our souls from death — the giver, the infuser, the nour
ish er, the maturer of that eternal hfe which is for our souls in him.
Let us then be devoutly grateful for it, that our faith in him — in
knowledge of whom, in union with whom standeth our eternal lUe —
has such a solid foundation of fact to rest upon — a foundation so
firmly embedded among aU those other foundations upon which our
knowledge of the past reposes, that to unsettle, to overturn it, yon
must unsettle, must overturn them all.
" Come, see the place where the Lord lay," that you may contem
plate him, the one and only instance which this world hath witness
ed of the last enemy, Death, being fairly met — met in his own terri
tory, triumphed over in his own domain, by the use of his own weap
ons. That grim, inexorable tyrant, wealth has never bribed, tears
have never softened, beauty has never moved as he made his unfal
tering approach, and struck his unerring blow. To and fro, wide
over the vast field of humanity, has that sheer, cold scythe been ever
swaying, and generation after generation has it laid low in the dust.
Two only out of the many millions of our race — two in olden time
were snatched away before the stroke of the destroyer came upon
them, and passed away without tasting death. But the translation
of Enoch and Ehjah was no victory over death ; they never met, they
THE RESURRECTION. 785
never grappled with this foe ; they were withdrawn from the battle
field before the day of conflict came. Some there were, too, in after
times, who, subject for a season to the dominion of death, were de
livered from its sway ; but neither was theirs the victory, for they
bs.d to return again, and bow once more beneath the yoke of th©
great conqueror. The widow's son, tfre ruler's daughter, and Laza
rus whom Jesus loved, lie low as others in the caverns of the dead.
One alone of human form ever grappled with that strong wrestler
Death, and cast him from him overcome. His way to conquest lay
through brief submission. Like others, he descended into the dark
and dreary prison-house. The grave opened to receive him. He-
seemed to have passed away as the multitudes who had gone before-
But death and the graye never received such a visitant into their
silent and vast domains. He approached the throne of the tyrant, to
wrench the sceptre of empire from his hand. In bursting, as he did,
the barriers of the grave, it was no mere respite that he obtained for
himself, but a fuU and final victory. He bade adieu that morning to
the sepulchre for ever. He left no trophy behind ; nothing of his in
the hands of death ; nothing but that empty sepulchre to teU that he
had once, and for a short season, been under the hold of the destroy
er. Even had this been a solitary conquest, though the sepulchre of
Jesus were to remain for ever as the only one from which the tenant
came forth alive, to return to it no more — still would we draw near to
muse upon this one triumph of humanity over the last enemy.
But we have all a nearer, a more special interest in this deserted
tomb of Jesus Christ. His was no solitary, isolated victory over the
grave. For us he died, and for us he rose again. Firm and fast as
the grave now seems to hold the buried generations of our race, it is
now doomed, as a fruit of Christ's resurrection, to relax its grasp, and
yield them up again. Empty as was Joseph's sepulchre when tho
. angel stood before it and invited the women to enter, so empty shall
one day be every grave of earth, when another angel shaU sound his
trumpet, and it shall ring through aU the regions of the dead, and stir
all to hfe again. Blessed was that morning which dawned apon the
empty tomb at Calvary, but more blessed to us shaU that other morn
ing be which shaU dawn upon all the emptied graves of earth, if oalj
now we Hve in Christ; if at death we sleep in Jesus; U at that res
urrection we be numbered with those who shaU share the resurrec
tion of the just.
60
786 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
II.
Appearance to Mary Magdalene.*
In relating the incidents of the resurrection, St. Matthew tells ua
that it was Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, who, as the first
day of the week began to dawn, went out to the sepulchre. St. Mark
mentions Salome as having accompanied them. St. Luke introduces
the additional name of Joanna. St. John speaks of Mary Magda
lene, and of her only. On the supposition that a number of those
women who came with Jesus from Galflee had agreed to complete as
early as possible the embalming of his body, and that they had either
started together from the city, or, being in different parts of it the
night before, had fixed to meet at early dawn at the sepulchre, we
can readily enough understand that each of the four independent
narrators might name one or more of them without specifying the
others. Looking, however, a little more closely into the four sepa
rate accounts, we notice that, according to Matthew, the women on
their arrival found the stone removed from the entrance of the sepul
chre, and an angel sitting upon it, who invited them to enter and look
at the place where the Lord had lain. Mark, making no allusion to
any vision of an angel without, says that they passed into the sepul
chre, and, on entering, saw "a young man sitting at the right side,
clothed in a long white garment," who addressed to them nearly the
same words which Matthew puts into the mouth of the angel seen
sitting upon the stone. Luke tells us that, finding the stone rolled
away, they entered in and found the sepulchre empty, and as they
stood perplexed at the discovery, " behold, two men stood by them
in shining garments," and spoke to them in terms and in a tone dif
fering considerably from that attributed to the single angel by the
first two evangelists. It appears again, from the narrative of John,
that Mary Magdalene had seen no angel, had heard at least no an
nouncement that the Lord was actually alive, when she hurried off
from the sepulchre in search of Peter and John. What are we to
make of these discrepancies? Was it sometimes one and sometimes
two angels that appeared; were some eyes opened and some eyes
shut to the angehc visions ? Was it one visit, or two, or more, by
the same or different groups of women, which were paid to the sepul
chre ? Various attempts to answer such questions have been made ;
various suppositions have been framed, the adoption of which, it has
* John 20 : 1-18.
APPEARANCE TO MARY MAGDALENE. 787
been thought, would relieve the different accounts from conflicting
with one another; various modes of interlacing them, so as to form
out of them a continuous and consistent narrative, have been present
ed. If it cannot be said that they have all absolutely failed, it must
be said that not one of them is entirely satisfactory. We cannot
doubt that U all the minor and connecting links were in our hands,
we should be able to explain what now seems to be obscure, to har
monize what now seems to be conflicting; but in the absence of such
knowledge, we must be content to take what each writer teUs us, and
regard it as the broken fragment of a whole, all the parts of which
are not in our hands, so that we can put them connectedly together.
But is not this fragmentary character of each of these four separate
accounts just what we might have expected, considering the time and
manner of the events narrated — the obscure hght, the women com
ing, it may have been singly, or in different groups by different routes,
the surprise, the terror, the running in and out, to and from the city —
all this within the compass of an hour or two ? Which one of the
spectators or actors in these busy and broken movements, U asked
afterwards to detail what occurred, but might have given an account
of it differing from that of all the others ? And if any two of these
independent sources of information were apphed to or made use of,
how readily might apparent contradictions emerge upon the face of
the narratives that were afterwards preserved. We do not know
from what particular sources Matthew, Mark, and Luke derived their
information. This special interest, however, attaches to the narra
tive of John — it is partly that of an eye-witness, and partly drawn,
we cannot doubt, from what was told him by Mary Magdalene her-
seU. Overlooking the part taken by all the other women, John con
fines himseU exclusively to her. Even as our Lord himseU singled
her out from among the women who had ministered to him, to make
to her his first appearance after his resurrection, so does the beloved
disciple speak of her alone whfle he details to us the incidents of
that wonderful manUestation.
We feel as U a great injustice had been done to Mary Magdalene,
in identifying her with the woman who was a sinner, who anointed
the Lord's feet with ointment, and wiped them with the hairs of
her head. The name of that woman is not mentioned in the record
of the incident in which she took so prominent a part. The incident
occurred not in Magdala but at Nain. It was after Christ had left
Nain that the first mention of this Mary meets us in the gospel nar
rative: "And it came to pass afterwards, that he went throughout
every city and village, preaching and showing the glad tidings of the
788 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
kingdom of God ; and the twelve were with him, and certain women,
which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called
Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of
Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, which min
istered unto him of their substance." Named thus along with one
whose husband held an important office in Herod's household, named
as one of those who ministered to our Lord of their substance, Mary
Magdalene does not appear to have been a woman of a low or poor
condition. Neither have we any right to ground upon the fact that
seven devils had been cast out of her, the conclusion that she had
been a woman of depraved or dissolute habits. Satanic possession
carried then no more evidence along with it of previous immorahty,
than insanity would do now among ourselves.
But whoever, whatever this Mary was, she was, as we have already
seen, one of the latest at the sepulchre on the evening of the burial,
and now she is one of the earhest at that sepulchre on the morning
of the resurrection. Perhaps, more eager than the rest, she had hur
ried on before, and entered the garden alone. A quick glance, that
waited not to catch even the sight of the angel's form, had shown her
that the entrance was open, and the sepulchre empty. Overwhelmed
with sorrow at the sight; waiting not to hear the angel's intimation
that He had risen; leaping at once to the conclusion that hostile
hands had rifled the sacred tomb, her troubled fancy picturing to her
the indignities to which that form, beloved even in its Hfelessness,
might have been subjected — Mary hurries back to the city. She
seeks the house to which John had carried the mother of our Lord.
She finds there both John and that other apostle, whom a strange
attraction has drawn now to John's side. She has but breath enough
to say, " They have taken away the Lord, and we know not where
they have laid him." Her eagerness of alarm passes, by sympathy,
into the hearts of the two apostles. They arise to run out together
to the sepulchre. John's lighter footstep, quickened by his more
ardent, more unburdened love, carries him soonest to the spot ; but,
at the entrance, his deep and reverential spirit holds him back in
awe. He stops, and bends, and looks into the grave. Peter, of
slower step, and stiU laboring, it may have been, under the burden of
seU-reproach, is behind John in the race ; but, bolder or more impet
uous, he stops not at the door, but, passing John, goes at once into
the sepulchre. He draws his brother apostle after him, the one never
dreaming of the influence he thus exerts, the other as Httle thinking
of the influence he obeys. Both are now within, and have leisure to
look round upon the place. There the linen clothes are lying, with
APPEARANCE TO MARY MAGDALENE. 789
which Joseph and Nicodemus had swathed the body, and there, not
loosely flung upon them in a disordered heap, but carefully folded up
in a pls.ce by itself, lies that napkin which Mary herself may have
helped to bind around the thorn-marked brow. Who had arranged
them thus ? Was it the hand of the great Sleeper himseU, on his
awakening within the tomb ? or was it some angel's hand that took
the death garments as they dropped from around the risen one, and
thus disposed them? Whoever did it, there had been no haste; all
had been done calmly, coUectedly. Neither earthly friends nor earth
ly foes had done it : the one would not have stripped the garments
from the body ; the other would have been at no pains so carefuUy
to arrange and deposit them. Peter, as he looks, is amazed, but his
amazement shapes itseU into no connected thought ; he departs won
dering in himseU at that which had come to pass. John's quieter
and deeper reflection suggests at once the idea that what has taken
plaoe is not a removal, but a reanimation of the body. An incipient
faith in the resurrection forms within his breast ; a faith grounded,
not as it might have been, and should have been, on what he had
already read or heard — for as yet neither he nor any of the apostles
knew from the Scripture, nor believed from Christ's own word, that
he must rise again from the dead — but grounded simply on what he
saw, and especially upon the singular condition which the interior of
the sepulchre displayed. That rising faith John kept to himself; he
never boasted that he was the first of all the twelve to believe in the
resurrection. Perhaps his first pubhc mention of the fact was when,
so many years afterwards, he sat down to write that gospel which
bears his name.
The brief inspection of the empty sepulchre over — there being
nothing more to see or learn — John and Peter return silent and sad
to their own home. Mary Magdalene had foUowed them, as best
she could, in the running out to the sepulchre ; but she does not join
them in their return. Two evenings before, (when all but she and
the other Mary had left the tomb into which she had seen the
body borne for burial,) she had clung to it to the last, and this morn
ing, she clings to it stiU. The Master whom she had lost had ren
dered her the greatest of services ; had been to her the kindest and
best of friends. Her grateful love had clung to him whUe Hving;
and now this love, hving in her sorrow, makes her chng, even when
John has left it, to the spot where in death he had reposed. Mary
Magdalene, standing alone weeping thus before the empty sepulchre,
presents herseU to our eye as the saddest and most inconsolable of
all the mourners for the Crucified. As she weeps, she stoops to take
790 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
another look into the deserted place. She sees a sight that might
weU have diverted her from her grief — two angels sitting, the one at
the head, the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.
They say to her, " Woman, why weepest thou ?" Did you ever read
of a more absorbing grief than that she, who was addressed thus by
angels, should have no surprise, no astonishment to spare ; but, as if
unheeding who they were that spoke to her, should, out of the depths
of her engrossing sorrow, only be able to repeat what she had said
to Peter and John, varying the phrase a little — claiming a closer
property in the departed — "Because they have taken away my Lord,
and I know not where they have laid him." And she turns away,
even from an interview with angels, from converse with those who
may have had as their purpose in putting to her that question, to
teU her about her risen Lord. She turns away even from them,
to weep out, without further interruption, her most bitter grief.
But now, from other lips, the same question, "Woman, why weep
est thou ?" salutes her ear. She sees, but scarcely notices, the person
who thus speaks to her. He is not directly before her, and she cares
not to turn, or make any minute scrutiny of his person. Even had
she done so, seeing him through the veil of dropping tears, she might
have failed to recognise him. She cares as little, in fact, about who
this speaker is, as she had cared about who those angels were.
Taking him to be one who did not need to be told why she wept,
who must know aU about what had happened — the gardener of the
place — she says to him, in the simplest, most artless way, "Sir, U
thou have borne him hence, teU me where thou hast laid him, and I
will take him away." She is willing even to believe that it was with
no unkindly purpose he had been removed. Only let her know where
he is; and, aU forgetful how unfit her weak hands were for such a
task, she says, " I wiU take him away." ' If it be an offence that he
lies here in this rich man's tomb, so near the holy city, I wfll bear him
away to some remoter, burial-place, where he may lie in peace, and
where I may go and weep at wfll over his grave.'
Jesus saith unto her, " Mary." The old familiar voice ! It can be
only He who names her so. Instantly — fully — the revelation of his
living presence bursts upon her. She turns, and forgetting all about
the new strange circumstances in which she sees him, as if the former
days of their famihar intercourse had returned, she says, " Eabboni !'*
and stretches forth her hands to him. Jesus stops the movement.
" Touch me not," he says, " for I am not yet ascended to my Father ;
but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father
and your Father, and to my God and your God." This check upon
APPEARANCE TO MARY MAGDALENE. 791
the ardor of Mary's affectionate approach in the first moments of
recognition, we can only understand by reflecting upon the object of
our Lord's sojourn upon the earth for the forty days after the resur
rection. ,
There is a mystery which hangs around this singular period in
the hfe of our Eedeemer. Why did he tarry so long upon the earth,
when his work appeared to have been finished? What peculiar
service did that keeping empty so long his seat at his Father's right
hand render to his church and people ? During the first eight days,
on the first and last of which alone he showed himself in Jerusalem ;
was he treading unseen the streets of the holy city, or haunting the
household of the loved family of Bethany ? Those midnight hours ;
did they see him once again amid the dark shadows of Gethsemane,
praying now, not that the cup might be taken from him, but that the
fruits of this bygone passion might be gathered in ? The Sabbaths
of these days ; did they see him entering again the temple, passing
behind the rent veil into the holy of holies, quenching with his unseen
hand, and that for ever, the fire that had burned above the mercy-
seat? During the weeks which followed, was he wandering an un
seen spectator over the scenes of his earthly ministry ; revisiting
Nazareth, reentering Capernaum, where most of his mighty works
had been done, looking in with kindly eye upon that nobleman's
famfly, aU of whom had believed in him ; going out to Cana, casting
a passing glance at the dwelling in which the first of his miracles had
been performed; Hngering for a moment by the gate of the little city
of Nain, blessing once more, as he passed, the widow and her recov
ered child ?
It is an idle task, perhaps, for fancy to picture where or how
those forty days were spent. But it is not an unprofitable question
for us to put to ourselves, what ends could his lingering so long on
earth have served ? It cannot be supposed that the mere object of
affording proof enough that he was still alive, would have detained
him here so long. That could have been done in two days as Veil as
in forty. Besides, had that been the main object of his delay, why
did he not appear oftener in a more open and pubhc manner than he
did? Neither can it be imagined, that it was for the purpose of con
tinued and enlarged intercourse with his disciples. The fewness and
shortness of his interviews with them preclude that behef. He was
seen by them but ten times in aU; five of those appearances occur
ring on the day of his resurrection; and four of them, those to Mary,
to Peter, to James, to the two disciples, having more of a private
than of a public character. Out of the forty days there were but six
792 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
on which he held intercourse with any human being, and in those six
days he did not give more than as many hours to fellowship with
those to whom he showed himself. How brief, too, generally, and
abrupt the meetings that made up the hours which were so employ
ed ! In the twilight of the garden ; in the dim-hghted upper chamber;
in the gray dawn of the lake side, he appears, speaks but a few sen
tences, and vanishes as mysteriously as he had appeared. All be
tokens a studied effort to stand aloof, to shun all close, prolonged,
familiar intercourse. What impression was aU this studied distance
and reserve fitted to make upon the minds of his disciples? Put
yourselves into tlieir exact position at this time ; remember that not
one of them before his death had risen to any thought or behef in
his divinity ; that from aU their earher earthly notions of him they
had to be weaned ; that after days and years of the easiest compan
ionship with him, they had to be raised to the belief that it was the
very Lord of heaven and earth with whom they had been holding
¦converse ; yet, that belief was to be so formed within them, as not to
militate against the idea of his true and proper humanity. See, then,
what an important part in the execution of this needful, but most
difficult task, must have been fulfiUed by his mode of dealing with
ihem during the forty days.
For, let us only conceive what should have happened, U one or
other of the two alternatives had been realized : if at once, after a
few interviews, sufficient simply to do away with aU doubt as to his
resurrection, Jesus had passed up into the heavens, never to be seen
again on earth ; let us imagine that the descent of the Spirit had
immediately thereon ensued; that the day of Pentecost had followed
immediately on the day of the resurrection; that the eyes of the
apostles had thus at once and fully been enUghtened, and the great
truth of their Master's Godhead had been flashed upon their minds ;
the danger undoubtedly would have been that, seen in the blaze of
that new glory, shining thus around his person, the man Christ Jesus
had been lost, the humanity swaUowed up in the divinity ; nor would
it have been so easy to persuade those men that, ascended up on
high, seated at the right hand of the Father, he was the same Jesus
still — a brother to them as truly as when he lived among them,
equally alive to all human sympathies as when he walked with them
by the way, or sat down with them in the upper chamber.
Take, again, the other alternative; that after nis resurrection,
Christ had immediately resumed and continued — even let us say for
no longer a time than these forty days — the exact kind of life that
he had led before, returning to aU his old haunts and occupations,
APPEARANCE TO MARY MAGDALENE. 793
spending a day or two with Lazarus and his sister at Bethany;
travelling up through Samaria, and sitting wearied by the weU's
mouth, as before; living in Peter's wife's sister's house, dining with
Pharisees; crossing the lake in the fishing boat; companying with
multitudes on mountain-sides; living and acting outwardly in every
respect as he had done before — would not such a return on his
part to aU the old famiharities of his former intercourse, have had a
tendency to check the rising faith in his divinity; to tie his disciples
down again to a knowing of him only after the flesh ; to give to the
humanity of the Lord such bulk and prominence as to make it in
their eyes overshadow the divinity? Can you conceive a treatment
more nicely fitted to the spiritual condition, to the spiritual wants of
those men at that time, than the very one which the Lord adopted
and carried out — so weU fitted as it was, graduaUy, gently, without
violence, (as is ever the mode of his acting in aU the provinces of his
spiritual empire,) to lead those disciples on from their first misty,
imperfect, unworthy ideas of his person, character, and work, on and
up to clearer, purer, loftier conceptions of Him? In what better
way could a faith in their Master's divinity have been superinduced
upon their former faith in him as a man, a friend, a brother, so that
the two might blend together without damage done to either by the
union; their knowledge of him as human, not interfering with their
trust in him as divine; their faith in him as God, not weakening
their attachment to him as man ?
With this key in our hand — a key which unlocks much of the
mystery of our Lord's conduct throughout those forty, days — let us
return to Mary in the garden. She sees Jesus ahve once more
before her. She hears him as of old caU her by her name. He is
hers, she thinks again; hers, as he had been before; hers, not to be
torn from her again. AU the warmth of those former days of familiar
friendship filling her glad heart, she offers him not the homage of a
higher worship; but, addressing him as he did her, "Eabboni," she
says— my own, my old, my well-beloved Master ! She makes some
gesture as of embracing him. Gently, but firmly, our Lord repels
the too warm, too human, too famUiar approach. "Touch me not,
Mary." 'Tou think of me as given back to be to you the same
exactly that I was before. Tou are mistaken; our relationship is
changed; our method of intercourse must be altered; you must
learn to think of me, and to act towards me, differently from what
you ever did before ; I am here, but it is only for a short season; I
am on earth, but I am now on the way to my Father; my home is
no longer with you and the others here below, it is there with my
794 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Father up in heaven; stiU shall I feel to you and aU the others as
tenderly as I ever felt, not ashamed even to caU them stiU my breth
ren. Touch me not, then, Mary ; stop not to lavish on me an affec
tion that has in it too much of the human, too little of the divine;
but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend to my Father,
and to your Father, and to my God and your God ; my Father and
my God in a sense in which he is not and cannot be yours ; but your
Father and your God in a sense in which he could not have been
yours had I not died and risen, and been on my way now to sit
down with Him on the throne of glory in the heaven.'
III.
The Journey to -Emmaus.*
It was towards evening; the day was far spent when the two
disciples reached Emmaus; yet there was time enough for them,
after they had dined, to return by daylight to Jerusalem, (a distance
of about seven miles, a two or three hours' walk,) and to be present
at that evening meeting, in the midst of which Jesus was seen by
them once more. It must have been between mid-day and sunset
that the journey to Emmaus was taken. Of the two traveUers, the
name of one only has been preserved; that of Cleopas, generally
believed to have been a near relation of Christ — the husband of the
Virgin Mary's sister. It was not, however, the closeness of the
relationship to Jesus which won for him the privilege of that strange
conversation by the way. Had nearness of relationship had anything
to do with the matter, there was one surely to whom, above all others,
we might have expected that he would appear on the day of his
resurrection. Tet neither on that day, nor on any of the forty days he
spent on earth thereafter, does Jesus seem to have made any special
manifestation of himseU to his mother, or indeed to have taken any
individual notice of her whatever. Her name does not once occur iu
the record of this period of our Eedeemer's life. It looks as U with
that kindly, son-like notice of her from the cross, Jesus had dropped
the recognition of the earthly relationship altogether, as one not suit
able to be carried into that kingdom to whose throne he was about
to ascend. And as it was nothing in their outward relationship to Jesus, so
* Luke 24 : 13-33.
TME JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 795
neither was it anything in the personal character, position, or ser
vices of these two men which drew down upon them this great favor
from the Lord. They had occupied no prominent place beside the
Saviour in the course of his ministry. They had exhibited no pecu
liar strength of attachment to him, or to his cause. Had Peter and
James and John been the travellers, it would not have been so
remarkable that he should have given them so many of the hours of
that first day of his resurrection hfe ; more hours, in fact, than he
ever gave to any two disciples besides; nay, so far as we can meas
ure them, more hours than he gave to any other interview of that
period — perhaps as many as were spent in all the other interviews
together, for generaUy they were very brief. What was there in
these two men to entitle them to such a distinction ? They were not
apostles, nor were they of any great note among the seventy. Our
Lord's first words to them may perhaps help us to understand why
it was that he joined himself to them. He has been walking beside
them, so close as to overhear somewhat of their conversation. But
they are so intent upon the topic which engrosses them, that they
notice not that a stranger has overtaken them, and been in part a
listener to their discourse. At last, in manner the easiest and most
natural, least calculated to give offence, expressive at once of interest
and sympathy, Jesus breaks in upon their discourse with the inquiry,
"What manner of communications are these that ye have to one
another, as ye walk and are sad ?" That sadness, who can tell what
power it had in drawing the Man of sorrows to their side ? It was
to Mary, weeping in her lonely grief ; to Peter, drowned in tears of
penitence — that he had already appeared. And now it is to these
two disciples in their sorrow that he joins himseU: so early did the
risen Saviour assume the gracious office of comforting those who
mourn, of binding up the broken heart. But in Mary, Peter, and
these two disciples, three different varieties of human grief were dealt
with. Mary's was the grief of a grateful and affectionate heart,
mourning the loss of one beloved ; Peter's was the grief of a spirit
smitten with the sense of a great offence committed; the grief of the
two disciples was that of men disappointed, perplexed, thrown into
despondency and unbeHef. It is especially noticed that it was while
they communed together, and reasoned with one another, that Jesus
himseU drew near to them. There was much about which they well
might differ and dispute. The yielding of their Master to the power
of his enemies, and his shameful crucifixion two days before— how
could they reconcile with his undoubted pretensions and power, as a
prophet so mighty in words and deeds? This one, that other say-
796 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ing of his, pointing to a future, never now, as they fancied, to be
reahzed, what could they make of them ? Had Jesus himself been
disappointed, deceived ; had he imagined that the people would rise
on his behaU, and prevent his crucifixion? That might have been,
had he not so often shown that he knew all that was passing in
men's hearts. Could he, then, have been ignorant how the multitude
of Jerusalem would feel and act ? There was truth, too, in what so
many of them had flung reproachfully iu his teeth, as he hung upon
the cross : He had saved others, why did he not save himself? What
a confused heap of difficulties must have risen up before these two
men's eyes as they reasoned by the way ! And then besides, there
was what they had heard just before they left the city — the report of
some women that they had gone out, and found the sepulchre empty,
and had seen angels, who had told them that he was ahve. They,
indeed, might easUy have been deceived; but Peter and John had
also gone out. It is true they had seen no angels, nor had any one,
that they had heard of, seen the Lord himseU. But the sepulchre
had been found empty. The women were right so far; were they
right also in what they said about the angel's message? Could
Jesus actuaUy be aUve again ? We wonder that these two men could
have left the city at the time they did; we wonder at this perhaps
the more because we know that, had they but waited an hour or two
longer, they would have had aU their doubts resolved. It is clear
enough, however, that neither of them had any faith in the resurrec
tion; and as clear that they were dissatisfied with their unbelief —
altogether puzzled and perplexed. Ignorant, they needed to be
taught; deeply prejudiced, they needed to have their prejudices
removed. For hours and hours, for days and days, they might have
remained together without clearing up the difficulties that beset
them. But now, in pity and in love, the great Enlightener himself
appears— appears in the garb of a stranger who joins them by the
way. They do not at first, they do not at all through the earnest
conversation which follows, recognize him.
In reading the accounts of aU the different appearances of Christ
after his resurrection, the conviction seems forced upon us, that some
alteration had taken place in the aspect of our Saviour, enough to
create a momentary hesitation in recognizing him, yet not enough,
after a closer inspection, to leave any doubt as to his identity. In
the garden, Mary Magdalene was so absorbed in her sorrow, so
utterly unprepared to meet the living Master — she looked so indi
rectly, with such a heedless glance at the stranger, whom she took
to be the gardener — that we do not wonder at her failing to see at
THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS.
797
first who he was. So soon, however, as her name was uttered, and
she turned and fixed that steadier look upon the speaker, the recog
nition was complete. To the women by the way, to whom next he
showed himseU, his very salutation revealed him, and left them no
room for doubting that it was he. They held him by the feet, too,
for a moment or two, as they worshipped, and got the evidence of
touch as weU as sight to assure them of his bodfly presence. That
evening, in the upper chamber, the disciples were assembled. They
could not be taken by surprise. They were prepared by the reports
of Mary Magdalene, of the women, of Peter, of the two disciples from
Emmaus, to believe that he was alive ; yet when Jesus stood in the
midst of them, they supposed that they had seen a spirit ; so troubled
were they at the sight, so incredulous were they even as they looked
at him, that he had to say to them : " Why are ye troubled, and why
do thoughts arise in your heart ? Behold my hands and my feet,
that it is I myseU; handle me, and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and
bones as ye see me have ;" and stfll further, to remove all doubt, he
asked that some meat should be presented, and he took the piece of
the broiled fish and the honeycomb, and did eat them in their pres
ence. It may have been the sudden apparition of Christ in the midst
of them, whfle the doors of the chamber remained unopened, which,
in part, begot the behef that it was a spirit that stood before them ;
but that there was something too in the changed appearance of their
Master, which helped to sustain that behef, is evident, from what is
told us of his next appearance by the lake side of GalUee. John's
quick's eye and ear recognized him from the boat; but when they
had aU landed and gathered round him, " None of them," it is said,
"durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord."
Whence the desire to put such a question, but from a passing shad
owy doubt, and whence the doubt but from some change in his
appearance? When afterwards, on the mountain which he had
appointed, Jesus showed himself to above five hundred brethren at
once, they saw him, and worshipped ; but some, it is said, doubted—
those, let us believe, who saw him then for the first and only time,
and on whom the sight seems to have had the same effect that it had
in the first instance on nearly aU who witnessed it. It seems to us
the best, if not the only way of accounting for this, to suppose that
the resurrection body of our Lord had passed through a stage or
two in its transition from the natural into the spiritual body; from
its condition as nailed upon the cross, to its etherealized and glori
fied condition as now upon the throne ; the flesh and blood which
cannot inherit the heavenly kingdom, still there, yet so modified as to
798 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
be more plastic under the power of the indwelling spirit, less subject
to the material laws and conditions of its earlier being, the corrupti
ble on its way to the incorruptible, the mortal putting on the clothing
of immortality. And that strange, half spiritual appearance which
the risen Lord presented, may it not have served to further the great
end that our Lord had in view throughout the forty days, namely, to
wean the minds of his disciples from their earlier, lower, more human
conceptions of him, to a true faith in his mingled humanity and
divinity ?
There was, however, something special, I beheve, in this instance
of the two disciples travelhng to Emmaus. They might not have
recognized him, as, clothed perhaps in the garb of an ordinary trav-
eUer, he put his first questions to them by the way; but when he
assumed the office of their instructor, and, showing such intimate
acquaintance with the Scriptures, made their hearts burn within
them, as he unfolded their new meaning, must they not many a tinio
have turned on him a very searching look, wondering, as they looked,
who this strange teacher possibly could be ? Tet were two or three
hours spent in that close and earnest conversation, without their
once suspecting that it was the Lord. How accurately does this
accord with the differing statements of Mark and Luke ! Mark dis
tinctly tells us that he appeared to them in another, in a strange
form — a form different from that in which they had seen him previ
ously. He appeared to them, as to all the others, somewhat changed
in aspect ; but had that been aU, they would speedily have recovered
from their first surprise, and ere many minutes, would have identi
fied him. For a reason, however, hereafter to be aUuded to, our
Lord purposely concealed himseU till his work of instruction was
completed, and drew a veil of some kind over their eyes, which hin
dered their discovery of him by the way.
He comes to them as an entire stranger, such as they might nat
urally have met upon the road ; and it is as a stranger that through
out he converses with them. " What manner of communications," he
says, "are those that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are
sad?" Little need, thought one of them (his own deep interest in
them leading him, perhaps, to exaggerate that felt by the general
community) — httle need of asking such a question. Of what could
any two men leaving Jerusalem, only two days after that crucifixion
had occurred — of what else than of it, and him the Crucified, could
they be talking? "Art thou only," says Cleopas, "a stranger in
Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass
there in these days ?" And the stranger says to him, "What things?"
THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 799
Thus it is, by questions needless for him on his own account to put,
but very useful to them to answer, that Jesus draws out from them
that statement, which at once reveals the extent of their ignorance
and increduhty, but, at the same time, the amount of their belief, the
strength of their attachment to Christ, and the bitterness of that grief
which the disappointment of their expectations regarding him had
created. A stranger though this man is to them, they do not hesi
tate to confess their faith in Jesus of Nazareth as a prophet mighty
in words and deeds ; obnoxious as they know the now hated sect to
be, they do not hesitate to acknowledge themselves openly as disci
ples of this persecuted and now crucified Nazarene, though the hope
they once had, that he should have been the Eedeemer of Israel,
they must confess themselves to have relinquished. Nay, so far has
the kindly and sympathizing inquiry of this stranger won for him a
way into their confidence, that, as if he must be interested in all that
concerned the discipleship of Jesus, they teU him what certain wom
en of their company, and certain others of themselves, had reported
about the sepulchre.
The stranger's end is gained. The wound has been gently probed ;
its nature and extent revealed ; and now the remedy is to be applied.
He who had asked to be informed, takes the place of the instructor ;
he who had been reproached for his ignorance, reproaches in his turn.
" 0 fools, and slow of heart to beheve !" Slow of heart indeed, and
difficult to convince had they been, who, after such exphcit declara
tions of his own beforehand, that he should be dehvered up to the
rulers, and suffer many things at their hands, and be crucified, and
rise again the third day, had nevertheless remained so obstinate in
their increduhty. Truly the rebuke was needed. Tet how faithful
are the wounds of a friend; he wounds but to heal; he rebukes the
unbelief, but instantly proceeds to remove its grounds, even as he
rose from his slumber in the storm-tossed fishing-boat, first to rebuke
the disciples for their unbelieving fears, and then to quiet the tem
pest which had produced them. The one great, misleading preju
dice of the disciples had been their belief that the path of the prom
ised Messiah was only to be one of triumph and of glory. To rectUy
that error, it was only required that they should be made to see that
the predicted triumph and glory were alone to be reached through the
dark avenues of suffering and of death. "O fools, and slow of heart
to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to
have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And begin
ning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in aU the
Scriptures the things concerning himself." Either Christ, then, is
800 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
not himself to be believed — in which case it were useless to hear and
read anything about him — or in those Old Testament Scriptures there
are to be seen everywhere prophetic fingers pointing forward to Him.
To search those Scriptures, and to find Httle or nothing there of
Christ, little or nothing to show how it behooved him to suffer, and
then to enter into his glory, is to handle them after a very different
fashion from that in which they were handled by our Lord himseU.
It is not likely that these three travellers had a copy of the Old
Testament in their hands. It was not by reference to chapter and
verse, that the exposition of the Saviour was conducted ; it was by
no minute criticism of words and phrases, that the conviction of
these wayfaring men was carried. They were familiar generally with
the Scriptures. One or two of the leading prophecies about the Mes
siah, such as that first one of God himseU in paradise, as to the seed
of the woman and the serpent ; such as that of Moses as to the rais
ing up of a prophet like unto himseU ; such as that of Isaiah, when
he saw his glory, and testified beforehand of the sufferings by which
that glory should be preceded and entered ; such as that of Daniel
about the Messiah being cut off, but not for himself — Jesus may have
quoted. But not alone from direct and specific prophecies — from
the paschal lamb, and the smitten rock, and the serpent of brass, and
the blood-sprinkled mercy-seat, but from the whole history of the
Jewish people — from the entire circle of types and ceremonies and
sacrifices, did Jesus draw forth the materials of that wonderful expo
sition by which, for two hours or so, he kept those listening men hang
ing upon his hps. As we think who the expounder in that instance
was, and what the materials of his exposition, how natural the ex
pression, Would that I had heard all these things concerning Christ
illustrated by Christ himself ! But have we not the substance of that
exposition, as much of it as is needful for us to have, preserved in
the writings of the New Testament, and may we not be sure that if
we believe not them, neither would we be persuaded though one rose
from the dead, as Jesus that morning had done, and should teach u»
even as he taught those two disciples?
There was something indeed peculiarly, subhmely interesting in
that two hours' walk and talk of these three men on the way to
Emmaus. Had you been on that road that day, had you met those
travellers as they journeyed on, beyond the earnestness of their con-
rersation -with one another, you would have seen nothing remarkable
about them, nothing to make you turn and look back upon them as
they passed. Two of them are men in humble attire, travelling in
the humblest fashion, returning to one of the humblest village-homes ¦
THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 801
and the third, there is nothing about him different in appearance from
the other two ; nothing to keep them from conversing with him as an
equal, one with whom the most unrestrained familiarity might be
used. Tet who is He ? He who that very morning had burst the
barriers of the grave ; he in honor of whose exit from the tomb an
gels from heaven had been despatched to watch at the foot and at
the head o? flta sacred spot, where in death his body had for a time
reposed; he who was now upon his way to enter into that glory
which he had with the Father before the world was — incarnate Deity
fresh from the conflicts and the victories of the garden, the cross, the
sepulchre. It is literally God walking with men, men walking, though
they knew it not, with God. History teUs us of earthly sovereigns
stripping themselves at times of all the tokens and trappings of roy
alty, for the purposo of mixing on equal terms with the humblest of
their people ; but history never told, and imagination never pictured
a disguise, an incognito hke this. But why was that disguise adopt
ed, and, in this instance, so long preserved? Why, instead of doing
as he did with thr eleven, first manifesting himself, and then opening
their understanding to understand the Scriptures, did he keep him
self unknc-«rL all the time that the work of exposition was going on ?
May it not have been to obtain such a simple, natural, easy access
for the truth into these two men's minds and hearts, as to give it,
even when unsupported by the weight of his own personal authority,
a firmer and securer hold ? Whatever may have been its more spe
cial object as regards the two disciples, wonderful indeed was that
condescension of our Lord which led him to give so many hours of
his first resurrection-day to this humble office. Many a proud scribe
in Jerusalem would have recoiled from it, have deemed it a waste of
his precious time, U asked to accompany two such humble men, and
spend so much of one of his Sabbaths in instructing them out of the
Scriptures. The divine Eedeemer himself thought it not a task too
lowly; and by devoting, in his own person, so much of that first
Christian Sabbath to it, has he not at once left behind him a pattern
of what aU true and faithful exposition of the sacred Scriptures ought
to be, even the unfolding of the things touching a once crucified, but
now exalted Saviour; and has he not dignified, by himself engaging
in it, the work of one man's trying, at any time, or in any way, to
lead another to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus?
It was with heavy hearts that the two disciples had left Jerusa
lem ; and had all the journey been like the first few paces of it, it
had seemed a long way to Emmaus. But they are at the viUage now,
and the road had never appeared so short. Had they imagined they
Life of Cbriit. 51
802 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
could be there so soon, they would have Hngered on the road. And
now this stranger, whose discourse had so beguiled the way, and
made their hearts so burn within them, makes as U he would go far
ther. Emmaus, it would seem, is not his resting-place. But how can
they part from him ? How may that conversation, which has shed
such a fresh light into their understandings, such a new hope into
their hearts, be prolonged ? They invite, they urge him to remain.
He gives, he makes the opportunity for their constraining him to be
their guest. He acts as he had done with the two blind beggars ;
with the disciples in the storm; with the Syrophoenician woman.
He suffers violence to be used with him; and then, when he has
brought out aU the strength of desire and affection towards him in
the earnest entreaty, he yields to the urgency he had himself excited.
The two disciples constrain him, and he goes in apparently to abide
with them. They have him now, as they think, with them for the
whole evening ; and what an evening it shall be, when, supper over,
the conversation of the wayside may be renewed. The humble table
is quickly spread. This is the home, it has been thought, of one of
the two disciples, and he whose home it is prepares to do the duty
of the host. That duty is taken out of his hands. The mysterious
stranger takes the bread ; he blesses, he breaks, he gives. Who but
One could bless and break and give in such a way as this? The
scales f aU from the disciples' eyes. 'T is he, their own lost but now
recovered Lord and Master. Let him wait but a moment or two,
they shaU be clasping him, as Mary would fain have done, to their
hearts, or, falling down, as the women did, and worshipping at his
feet. Time is not given them. He reveals himself, and disappears.
This moment known by them, the next vanishing from their sight.
IV.
The Evening Meeting.*
When they left Jerusalem on the afternoon of the first day of the
week, the two disciples had intended to remain that night, perhaps
permanently, at Emmaus. The Paschal Sabbath over, they had
resolved to return to their village home, to their old way of living,
burying, as best they could, their expectations disappointed. But
the conversation by the way, the manifestation in the breaking of
* Mark 16 : 13, 14 ; Luke 24 : 33-49 ; John 20 : 19-23.
THE EVENING MEETING. 803
bread, that revealed and vanishing presence of their risen Lord,
altered the whole current of their thoughts and acts. They could
not stay at Emmaus. Late as it was, they instantly arose and
returned to Jerusalem. How quickly, how eagerly would they
retrace their steps ! What manner of communications would those
be that they would now have with one another; how different from
those which Jesus had interrupted ; the incredulity turned now into
faith, the sadness into joy. The stranger who had made their hearts
burn within them, on their way out to the village, he too was travers
ing at the same time the road they took on their way back to Jeru
salem. But he did not join them now; he left them to muse in
silence on aU they had seen and heard, or to add to each other's
wonder, gratitude, and gladness, by talking to one another by the
way. Their hearts were now fuU of the desire to tell to the brethren
they had left behind in the city aU that had happened. On reaching
Jerusalem, they get at once the opportunity they so much desire. A
meeting of the apostles, and of as many others as they could conve
niently caU together, or could entirely trust, had quietly, somewhat
stealthily convened ; the first, we may believe, since the Thursday
evening meeting in the upper chamber. And where but in that same
chamber can we imagine that this Sunday evening assembly gather
ed? The doors were closed against intruders, but these two well-
known disciples from Emmaus are easily recognized, and at once
admitted. In what an agitated, conflicting state of thought and feel
ing do they find those assembled there! They had aU heard the
reports of the women and of Mary Magdalene ; but they say little or
nothing about them ; perhaps give them little credit. But there is
Peter, whom no one can weU distrust, telling aU the particulars of
his interview, and carrying the conviction of so many, that they are
joyfuUy exclaiming; " The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to
Simon." But this is not the general, not at least the universal state
of sentiment. The two disciples teU their tale, but it falls on many
an incredulous ear. They are as Httle beheved as the women and
Mary Magdalene had been. They are trying aU they can by a
minute recital of how Jesus had been known of them, to remove the
increduhty, when suddenly, coming as a spirit cometh, casting no
shadow before him, the doors not being open to let him in, no sight
nor sound giving token of his approach, Jesus himself is in the midst
of them, and his "Peace be unto you" stflls at once the conflicting
conversation that had been going on. The manner of this appear
ance may have been wholly miraculous and supernatural, or it may
have been partly or whoUy due to those new properties with which
804: THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the resurrection body of the Saviour was endowed. Upon this diffi
cult topic I have already said aU it seems needful or perhaps possible
to say. We must leave it clothed with the mystery which surrounds
it. No mystery, however, hangs round the kindly, condescending
manner in which Jesus proceeds to deal with the terror which his
sudden appearance had created. He points to his hands, his feet,.
his side, to the marks of those wounds that told of his recent death;
marks which it pleased him that his resurrection body should stiU
bear ; marks which, it would seem from the apocalyptic vision, were
not to be effaced even from that glorified body which he carried to
the throne ; marks which that form is to wear for ever, the only visi
ble memorials that are to survive of the great decease accomplished
at Jerusalem. Jesus asks them to handle him ; an invitation which
it is difficult to say whether they accepted or not. He shows them
his hands and his feet ; and while yet they beheve not for joy and
wonder, he seeks still further to remove their increduhty, by showing
them that he has stiU the power, though no longer the need, of par
taking with them of their ordinary food. He eats of the fish and of
the honeycomb. Doubt now gives place to conviction, fear to be
heving joy; a joy so fresh, so frdl, that it in turn begins to shake the
new-born faith. How true to nature all this rapid succession of con
flicting sentiments. Now at last, however, that httle company of
disciples has settled into a condition fitting it to hsten, and Jesus
returns to the subject, that had engrossed the conversation on the
way out to Emmaus ; to this larger, more influential audience he un
folds the testimony that Moses, the prophets, the Psalms — all the
three divisions into which the Scriptures of the Old Testament were
classified by the Jews — rendered to his Messiahship ; dwelling par
ticularly upon the topic most suited to the existing condition of their
thoughts, how, in accordance with aU that had been beforehand
declared and signified, it behooved him, as the Christ, to suffer and
then to rise again the third day. " Then opened he their understand
ing, that they might understand the Scriptures." Wherever, there
fore, in the writings of any one of these Christ-taught men they refer
an important passage of the Old Testament to the Messiah, we may
conclude that they had for doing so the direct and authoritative
sanction of our Lord's own interpretation.
But his Messiahship, his death, his resurrection, were not matters
in which they alone, their nation alone, were interested. Now that
the needful work of suffering and death was over; now that the won
derful exhibition at once of the sacredness of the Divine law, the
holiness of the Divine character, the deep unutterable love of God,
THE EVENING MEETING. 805
had been given ; now, wide over aU the world, were repentance and
remission of sin to be proclaimed in his name ; and they, the men to
whom Jesus was then speaking, were to be the witnesses, the heralds,
the preachers of this large and all-embracing gospel of peace on earth,
and good-will on God's part towards aU the children of men : the first
and earHest hint this of the nature and the extent of their great com
mission; a hint which they did not then understand, which they did
not understand even under the enlightening and quickening influence
of the day of Pentecost. So far their understanding was opened, that
they saw clearly now that Christ ought to have suffered these things,
and then to enter into his glory ; but their understanding was shut as
to that proclamation of God's forgiving mercy and love, which now
in the name of Jesus was to be borne abroad over the whole earth.
But though it was to be left to time, and the after teachings of
the Spirit, to Hft them out of their narrow conceptions of the Divine
love to man, as U its outgoings were to be hmited to the pale of any
one community upon earth, stUl an initial impression of the sacred
ness of their vocation as his disciples, of the manner in which the
duties of that vocation could alone properly be discharged, and of the
blessed and enduring results which were to follow in the train of that
discharge, might be made upon their minds. And this was the result
which Jesus, in the most striking and solemn manner, proceeded now
to bring about : the first step taken by him in the gradual and slow-
moving process of quahfying them for that mission which they, and
all other disciples of the Saviour after them, were to undertake and
carry out.
Then said Jesus unto them again, "Peace be unto you!" His
first greeting, in which the same words had been used, they had been
too surprised and affrighted to listen to, or take home. Now that
their minds had become more composed, that they had settled down
into a tranquU and joyful conviction that it was indeed their risen
Lord who was in the midst of them, he repeats the greeting; repeats
it that they might not take it — though it was the common salutation
phrase he used, as meant merely to be the usual greeting with which
Jew met Jew in the ordinary intercourse of life ; that they m'ght not
take it as a mere expression of good-wiU, a wish for their welfare ;
but that they might have their thoughts thrown back upon what,
three evenings before, he had said to them : " Peace I leave with
you, my peace I give unto you : not as the world giveth, give I unto
you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid."
He had said so with the cross, with the sepulchre before him. And
now the peace having been secured, and sealed by the blood of the
806 • THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
cross and the rising from the sepulchre, with a new emphasis he says
to them, ' Peace, my peace, peace with God, peace of conscience, the
peace of pardon be unto you ; take it as coming to you through me ;
enter into, and enjoy it as the fruit of my passion, as God's free gift
to you in me. Let the quickening, the comforting assurance that
God is at peace with you, that you are at peace with God, take pos
session of your hearts ; that, having tasted and seen that the Lord is
gracious, you may be prepared for executing the high errand on
which I am about to send you forth, that of pubhshing everywhere
the gospel of this peace; preaching peace by me to them that are
afar off, and to them that are nigh ; " For as my Father sent me,
even so now send I you." I send you forth in my name, and I will
qualify you by my Spirit.' And having said so, he breathed on them,
and said, " Eeceive ye the Holy Ghost" — an outward and expressive
symbol of the twofold truth, that dead, motionless, useless for aU the
common work of this earthly existence, as lay that dust which the
hand of the Creator moulded into human form tiU he breathed into it
the breath of his natural life, so dead, motionless, useless for the
work of our Christian calling do we aU He, tfll the breath of true
spiritual life be breathed into us by the Holy Ghost. And as it was
from the lips of the risen Saviour that the breath proceeded, which
spread out upon the httle company at Jerusalem, so is it from the
risen, exalted Saviour that the Spirit comes, whose Hfe-giving influ
ences spread over the whole church of the first-born. But specially
upon this occasion was the breathing of Jesus upon the disciples,
and the gift which accompanied that breathing, meant to indicate
that the mission on which Jesus was sending these disciples out —
that of being witnesses for him — was one that could alone be dis
charged by those who, through him, had received more or less of that
heavenly gift. It was this importation of the Spirit, which was to
form the one, indispensable quahfication for the work ; without which
it could not be done. We know, historically, that it was but a reij
Hmited measure of this gift which was actually, upon this occasion,
bestowed. The Holy Ghost was not yet in his fulness given, because
that Jesus was not yet glorified. The more plentiful effusion of this
gUt was reserved for the day of Pentecost. That Spirit, who was to
convince of sin, and to lead into all truth, began even then, indeed,
his gracious work in the minds and hearts of these disciples, by con
vincing them of their unbelief and hardness of heart, and by opening
their minds to understand the Scriptures. This was but an earnest
of better things to come — a few sprinkled drops of that fuller bap
tism wherewith they were afterwards to be baptized ; but yet enough
THE EVENING MEETING. 807
to teach that it was by Spirit- taught, Spirit- moved men — by men in
whose breasts the heaven-kindled fire of the true spiritual lUe had
begun to burn — that the commission Jesus had been giving could
alone be executed. And let not those to whom Jesus is now speak
ing, speaking as the heads and representatives of the whole body of
his true foUowers upon earth; let them not think, weak as they are,
powerless as they appear, that, in going forth to proclaim in his
name, to every penitent transgressor, the free, full, instant, gracious
pardon of aU his sins, they are embarking in an ideal, unreal work —
a work of which they shall never know whether they are succeeding
ii it ctz not.
' No,' says the Saviour ; ' Partake of the peace I now impart, ac
cept the commission I now bestow ; go forth in my name ; receive ye
the Holy Ghost to guide you ; announce the news of God to sinners ;
proclaim the remission of sins, and, verfly I say, whosesoever sins ye
thus remit, they are remitted ; whosesoever sins ye retain, they are
retained.' Such I take to be the real spirit and objects of these last
words of Jesus, as spoken by him to his disciples at this time ; words
spoken to animate them in their after work by the assurance that
they should not labor in vain ; that what they should do on earth
should be owned and ratified in heaven. It were to misinterpret the
incidents of that evening meeting ; it were to mistake the simple, im
mediate, and precise object which, in using them, our Lord had in
view, to explain these words, as if they were intended to clothe the
eleven apostles, and after them, their successors or representatives —
to clothe any class of officials in the church, exclusively, with a power
of remitting and retaining sins. Where is the evidence that, as ori
ginally spoken, the words were addressed exclusively to the eleven ?
There were others present as well as they. " The two disciples,"
Luke tells us, " found the eleven gathered together, and those that
were with them." These other members of the infant church, with
the two disciples, had the benediction pronounced on them, as well
as on the eleven ; the instructions were given to them as well as
to the eleven ; the breath was breathed on them as well as on the
eleven. Had Jesus meant, when he spake of this remitting and re
taining sins, to restrict to the eleven the power and privileges con-
ferred, should he not by some word or token have made it manifest
that such was his desire ? At other times he was at pains to single
out the twelve, when he had something meant for their eyes and their
ears alone. Is it Hkely that at this time he would have omitted to
draw a Hne between them and the others who were before him, had
it been to them that these closing words were exclusively addressed ?
808 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
But we have another and stiU stronger reason for not believing in
any such restriction. Jesus had once before used words of nearly
the same import with those that are now before us, and he had ad
dressed them to the disciples at large : " Moreover, if thy brother
sLull trespass against thee, go and teU him his fault between thee and
him alone : if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But
if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in
the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.
And U he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church : but U
he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen
man and a publican. Verfly I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall
bind on earth shall be bound in heaven ; and whatsoever ye shaU
loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you, That
if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they
shaU ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am
I in the midst of them." The two concluding verses, as well as the
preceding context, contain the conclusive evidence, that it was not to
any select class or order of his foUowers that Jesus said, " Whatso
ever ye shall bind on earth shaU be bound in heaven ; and whatso-
soever ye shall loose on earth shaU be loosed in heaven." (Matt.
18 : 15-20.)
We are not in the least disposed to doubt, that whfle Christ
speaks of the remitting and the retaining of sins as pertaining to the
church at large, his words cover the acts of the church in her organ
ized capacity, the inflicting and removing of ecclesiastical censures
through her office-bearers in the exercise of disciphne. Here, how
ever, we have two remarks to make : First, that it is only so far as
these acts are done by spiritual men, seeking and foUowing the guid
ance of the Spirit, only so far as they are in accordance with Christ's
own expressed will, that they are of any avail, or can plead any heav
enly ratification ; and, secondly, that aU the force they carry is nothing
more or less than an authoritative and official declaration of what
that wfll of the Lord is. Neither in any man, in any pope or any
priest, in any community, or in any ecclesiastical court, lies the
absolute, the independent, the arbitrary power to absolve the sinner
from his sins. But did not he, we are asked, with whom alone it is
acknowledged that that power rests, appoint the eleven as his earthly
delegates, and in the commission here given them, convey into then
aands as such, that power? Just as little as in two other commis
sions given to two of the old prophets, he handed over to them that
power over the kingdoms and nations of the earth which we rightly
THE EVENING MEETING. 809
believe and affirm resides alone in the hands of the Almighty.
"Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth: and
the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth
See, I have this day set thee over the nations, and over the king
doms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw
down, and to build, and to plant." Jer. 1 : 9, 10. "It came to pass
also in the twelfth year, in the fifteenth day of the month, that the
word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, wail for the
multitude of Egypt, and cast them down, even her, and the daugh
ters of the famous nations, unto the nether parts of the earth, with
them that go down into the pit." Ezek. 32 : 17, 18.
Here, in terms not less distinct than those in which Christ gives
his disciples power over the sins of men, to remit or to retain, God
gives to the two prophets power over the nations to cast down and
to destroy. The true interpretation of the grant or commission is in
both cases the same. In the exercise of any power, inherent or
delegated, natural or acquired, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were altogether
impotent of themselves to overturn a nation ; in the exercise of any
power, original or conferred, personal or official, the apostles were
just as impotent to remove any sinner's guilt. The prophet's func
tion was limited to the denouncing of a doom which it was for the
hand of Jehovah alone to execute. The church's function is as
strictly limited to the announcing of a pardon which it is for the
grace of the heavenly Forgiver alone to bestow. And U, in execu
ting that simple but most honorable office of proclaiming unto all
men that there is remission of sins through the name of Jesus, she
teaches that it is alone through her channels — through channels
that priestly or ordained and consecrated hands can alone open — the
pardon cometh, she trenches upon the rights and prerogatives of
Him whom she represents, and turns that eye upon herseU that
should be turned alone on him.
But it is the gracious office of the church, of every individual
member thereof, of every distinct community thereof, in the sense
here indicated, to absolve the sinner, to assure him of the divine
forgiveness, to help him to believe in that forgiveness. Wherever
the gospel of the grace of God is preached, not generally, but point
edly, to an individual man, and he is entreated and encouraged to
take hold of peace, to accept of pardon, to trust in the mercy of
Jesus, to beheve in the forgiving love of God— then is that office of
remitting sins in the name of Jesus undertaken and discharged. Two
illustrative instances occur to us; the one pubhc and official, the
other private and personal. The first is that of the penitent offender
810 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
at Corinth, who was in danger of being swaUowed up of overmuch
sorrow. Assuming that it lay with the church to extend her forgive
ness to that offender, desiring to do nothing upon his own individual
authority, claiming no exclusive power of priestly absolution, Paul
¦nvites the Corinthian believers to deal tenderly, forgivingly with
liat man, and to receive him back into their communion, telling
them that he was quite prepared to go along with them in such
treatment of the penitent. "Wherefore I beseech you," he says,
"that you would confirm your love toward him. To whom ye for
give anything, I forgive also ; for U I forgave anything, to whom I
forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it, in the person of Christ." The
great object was to make the repentant one feel how wide, how
generous, how cordial and unreserved was the forgiveness which the
church extended to him, that he might aU the more confidingly
repose in that other sympathy, that other forgiveness, which, far as
the heavens are above the earth, are above all the sympathy, aU the
forgiveness of man.
Our other instance belongs to a late period in the hfe of the
beloved disciple. It Hes beyond the period embraced in the New
Testament history, but is well authenticated. When the tyrant who
sent John to Patmos was dead, the apostle returned to Ephesus.
Engaged in a visitation of the neighboring churches, he saw in one
of them a youth of so attractive an appearance that he specially
committed him to the care and guardianship of the bishop, or chief
minister of the church. The minister took the youth to his own
home, cherished him, educated him, and at length baptized him.
As he grew up, however, the care of his guardian relaxed, and he
feU into the company of a band of idle and dissolute youths, who
plunged together into a career of sin which led to the committal of
offences that exposed them to the severest penalties of the law.
Escaped from all restraint, and forming his association into a band
of robbers, the youth became their captain, surpassing all of them in
deeds of violence and blood. Time ran on, and the aged apostle
once more visited the same church. He asked about the youth, and
wept when he heard his story. He took his way instantly to the
district which the robber-band infested, and was taken prisoner by
the outguard of the banditti. He neither tried to fly nor offered any
resistance to his captors. " Conduct me to your captain," he said to
them; "I have come for the very purpose of seeing him." As soon
as he recognized the venerable apostle advancing towards him, the
captain would have fled; but the apostle pursued him, crying out,
"Why dost thou fly, my son, from me thy father — thy defenceless
THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 811
aged father ? Have compassion on me, my son. Fear not, thou stfl)
hast hope. I wfll intercede with Christ for thee. BeHeve that
Christ hath sent me." The fugitive was arrested. They met once
more. The apostle entreated him ; prayed with him ; solemnly assured
him that there was pardon for him at the hands of Christ; and did
not leave him tfll he led him back again, and restored him to the
church. In the manner of his restoring that erring youth, the be
loved apostle showed how thoroughly he had imbibed the spirit of
his divine Master, from whose Hps haU a century before he had lis
tened to the words, "Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted."
V.
The Incredulity of Thomas.*
Was it his fault, or his misfortune simply, that Thomas* was not
present at that first meeting on the evening of the day of the resur
rection? Clearly enough, we cannot charge his absence with the
same kind of neglect, with which now a refusal to join in the ordinary
services of the sanctuary would be loaded ; for no such services had
then been instituted, nor had any authority, human or divine, as yet
prescribed them. That evening conference, hastily summoned under
the prompting of the strange incidents of the day, was, in fact, the
first of those assemblings on the Lord's day which have since be
come one of the established customs of Christianity. But as no
such custom had as yet been established, Thomas cannot be accused
of violating it. The circumstances, however, under which that con
ference was held, were so peculiar, the pressure which prompted it
so urgent, that we cannot imagine that any slight or fortuitous im
pediment would have kept any one of the eleven away. It may,
therefore, have been Thomas' extreme incredulity as to the fact of
the resurrection, the utter and blank despair into which the death of
his Master had cast him, which indisposed him to join the rest. If
it were so; if he kept aloof from his brethren as believing that no
good could come from their assembhng; that it was all over with
the hopes as to their Master which they had been cherishing; that
they were mere idle tales which had been circulating about his hav
ing risen from the dead — then, for his neglect of aU that Jesus had
predicted about his death and resurrection, and for his treatment of
* John 20 : 24-29.
812 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
the testimony of Peter and the other early visitors of the sepulchre,
he was amply punished, in losing that sight of the risen Jesus given
to the others, and in his being left, for the seven days that fol
lowed, to the wretchedness of uncertainty and doubt — an uncer
tainty and doubt which would be all the bitterer, as contrasted with
the unclouded convictions and new-born joy of his brother disciples.
Whfle they, lifted from the depths of their despair, were congratu
lating one another on the great triumph over death and the grave
which their Master had achieved, were strengthening each other's
faith, and heightening, each other's joy, he, alone and disconsolate,
was scraping together the scanty food on which his increduhty might
nourish itself. In the course of that week, his brethren made many
attempts to rid him of his distrust. But aU in vain ; the more they
insisted, the more he refused. The stronger they affirmed the proof
to be, the more inflexible became his resolution to resist it. The
particulars of the manifold conversations and discussions which
would, no doubt, go on between them, are not preserved. All that
is told is, that he took and kept resolutely to that position behind
which he had entrenched himseU, as he said, " Except I shaU see in
his hands the print of the nafls, and put my finger into the print of
the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I wfll not believe." What
were the grounds, real or fictitious, upon which this increduhty of
Thomas rested? and how came that increduhty to take such a shape,
and to embody itseU in such a declaration ?
Here, I think, by realizing distinctly the actual condition of things,
both as regards the external circumstances which surrounded him,
and the jaundiced eye with which he was disposed to look at them,
we may convince ourselves that the increduhty of Thomas was not
due to any reluctance, on his part, to beheve in the resurrection, sim
ply because of its being a strange, a supernatural occurrence. In
that age, and in that country, this was a form of unbeHef altogether
rare, quite unlikely to have been exhibited by Thomas or any fol
lower of Jesus Christ. A belief in the supernatural was general,
almost universal. To withhold his belief in any occurrence, purely
and solely because it was miraculous, would have made a man about
as conspicuous then, as a behef in aU the alleged miracles of ancient
and modern times would make a man conspicuous now. Between
that time and this, the world has undergone an entire revolution in
the state of its general belief, in the form of its practical infidehty.
Besides, even U there had been a large leaven of Sadduceeism work
ing originally in the mind of Thomas, he had already witnessed, in
his attendance upon Christ, incidents too extraordinary for him to
THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 813
refuse credence to the resurrection purely and solely on the ground
of its singularity. Neither he, nor any others of the Lord's disci
ples — unwilhng, as they all were at first, to believe that their Master
was indeed alive again; difficult as they all were of conviction on
this point — would have admitted their initial hesitation and incredu
lity to have proceeded from any. such source. It was not the charac
ter of the event, it was the nature of their precedent faith in, and
their precedent expectations about, their Master and his kingdom,
which generated the difficulty which was felt by them as to beheving
in the resurrection. The true fountain of their earlier incredulity lay
within, and not without; in their prejudices in regard to other mat
ters, not in the nature and circumstances of the resurrection. There
appears to me, therefore, to be a violence done to the historic truth,
to the real state of the case, when Thomas is taken, as he so often is,
as a type or early instance of that unbelief, belonging rather to mod
ern than to ancient times, which staggers at all miracles, and is indis
posed to admit anything supernatural.
Thomas' increduhty seems to have outstripped that of aU the
other disciples. They would not believe the Galilean women, when
they brought to them the first reports of the resurrection ; but they
had beheved when Peter told them that he had seen the Lord, even
before they saw him with their own eyes. But Thomas will not
beheve, though to Peter's testimony there is added that of the two
disciples who went out to Emmaus, and that of the whole body of
the disciples to whom Jesus had afterwards appeared. To what is
this excess, this peculiar obstinacy of unbeHef on Thomas' part, to be
attributed ? Was he the most prejudiced man among them ; the man
who clung most tenaciously to his earlier ideas and prepossessions,
and would not let them go ? Did those common elements of unbe
lief, which operated in the breasts of the others as well as in his, yet
work in his with so much greater force as to signalize him in this way,
and keep him standing out in his distrust for so long a time beyond
them ? There was one of those elements which we have some reason
to think did work powerfuUy on Thomas. It would be quite a mis
take to conceive of Thomas, because of his abiding incredulity, that
he was a cold, selfish, cautious, unsanguine, naturally misbelieving
man, hard to convince of anything which lay outside the circle of his
own observations, or that did not touch or affect his own interests.
Whatever in origin and nature his skepticism was, it was not the
skepticism of religious indifference, nor did it spring from a predis
position to doubt. That the spirit of curiosity, of inquiry, was strong
in him, we mav perhaps infer from his breaking in upon our Lord's
814 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
discussion in the upper chamber, saying, "Lord, we know not v, hith
er thou goest, and how can we know the way ?" Fuller evidence that
he possessed and knew how to exercise the critical faculty, that he
liked to search and sift the evidence, and get at the real and solid
grounds for believing, will meet us presently; but we must dismiss
•from our minds the idea that he answered in any way to the descrip
tion which Wordsworth has given us of the man—
" A smooth-rubbed soul, to which could cling
No form of feeling, great or small ;
A reasoning, self-sufficient thing,
An intellectual all in all."
The only other notice of him in the gospel narrative, besides the one
already alluded to, and that in the passage now before us, forbids us
to entertain any such ideas of Thomas' natural character and dispo
sition. Escaping out of the hands of his enemies, Jesus had retired
to Bethabara. To him, in his retreat, the sorrowing sisters sent their
message : " Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick." The mes
sengers were left without an answer. But, after two days of delay
and inaction, Jesus abruptly says to his disciples, without explaining
anything of the object of his visit, "Let us go into Judea again." It
seemed a fatal resolution; the disciples try to turn their Master from
acting on it. "Master," they say to him, "the Jews of late sought to
stone thee, and goest thou thither again?" Their Master then tells
of the reason for his going, and of his resolution at all hazards to
carry out his intention. Then, says one of the twelve, U he will go,
go to almost certain death, "let us also go, that we may die with him."
Had the name not been given, had we not been told which of them
it was who so instantly, so warmly, so generously declared himself
ready to die with his Master rather than desert him, we should have
said that it must have been Peter who spake these words; but it was
Thomas, to whom much of Peter's ardor appears to have belonged.
Upon such a man, so ardent in his attachment to his Master, we can
readily beheve that the blow of the crucifixion came with a peculiarly
stunning force. In proportion to the eagerness of his hopes would
be the blackness of his despair; nor is it wonderful that, sunk into
the depths of that despair, he would at first refuse to beheve in the
resurrection. Still, however, attribute what extra force we may to
this one or that other of the ingredients of the unbelief shown by
Thomas in common with his brethren, it seems difficult to understand
the pertinacity of Thomas in standing out so long and so stubbornly
against all attempts of his brethren to convince him. The great bulk
of them had believed before they had seen the Lord. Why should
THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 815
that evidence, which was sufficient to carry their faith, not have car
ried his ? Tes, but they aU at last had seen ; they had seen, and he
had not. In that very -distinction do we not get sight of the secret
bias by which the spirit of Thomas was swayed over to an unwilling
ness to give credence to the resurrection, an incredulity which, in
self-justification, buflt up those buttresses of seU-defence, behind
which it finaUy entrenched itseU, and from which it would not be
dislodged? The others had seen him, and he had not; why should
he be asked to believe on different evidence from theirs? He had
been as attached a follower of Jesus as any of them. Why should
he be singled out, and left the only one who had not seen his Mas
ter ? He did not like, he did not choose to be indebted to others for
the grounds of his beheving. He had just as good a right to ocular
proof as they had; and, in fact, tfll he got it he would not beheve.
The unwillingness that his faith should be ruled by theirs, generated
a disposition to question the soundness of that faith. The evangehst
has given us only the conclusion to which Thomas came, the result-
of the many conferences with his brethren, and to which he for so
many days so resolutely adhered. The very terms in which he em
bodied this resolution enable us to fiU up the blank. Jesus had come
among them, the other disciples would teU Thomas, suddenly, sflent
ly — the door being shut; they Had not seen him till he was standing
in the midst. It was very Hke the mode of a spirit's entrance ; very
unlike the manner in which one clothed with a sohd substantial
body would or could appear. They confessed to Thomas, that unless
it were the two disciples who had just come in from Emmaus, aU of
them at first beUeved that it was a spirit, none of them that it was
Christ : that he had himseU noticed this, and had corrected their first
and false impression. He had eaten in their presence, he had shown
them the marks in his hands and side ; he had said, "Handle me, and
see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have." Tes,
but had any of them accepted the invitation, had any of them made
such scrutiny of these marks, as to be sure that they were not super
ficial ? They could not say they had. Strictly interrogated by one
who was anxious to detect any weak point in the evidence, they could
not deny that it was within the limits of the possible that there might
have been a mistake ; that there was a difference, they could not tell
what, between the appearance of their Master as they had seen him
before death, and as they saw him at the evening meeting. Seising
greedily upon anything which could possibly create a doubt, and
turning it into an instrument of seU-justification, Thomas at last de
clares, "Except I shall not only see in his hands the print of the
816 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
nails, but shall put my finger into the print of the nafls, and thrust
my hand into his side, I will not believe." In this we discern no
smaU amount of ingenious casuistry springing out of wounded pride,
and an exaggerated feeUng of self-consequence working in a nature
not less strong in will than ardent in affection.
"I will not believe." 'And is it even thus,' we feel disposed to
make answer, ' that thy hurt vanity hopes to redeem itseU from the
fancied oversight; is it thus that placed, as thou thinkest, below thy
brethren, by not having got the same proof given them, thou thinkest
to set thyself right by putting thyself above them, and declaring that
that proof may have been enough for them, but is not enough for
thee ? What right hast thou to ask a kind or amount of evidence
above that which has satisfied aU these thy brethren, and which
would have satisfied any one unbiased by deep precedent prejudice?
What right hast thou to dictate thus to God, and to declare that thou
wilt not beheve tfll the form of proof thou prescribest be afforded ?
Thou wilt not believe ! and U thou dost not, who but thyself wfll be
the loser? Hadst thou been in the hands of man, in any other
hands than those of so gracious a Master, thou mightest have waited
long enough ere the proof was given, which in such a spirit was
demanded.' Seven days go past, and the apostles are once more gathered to
gether on the evening of the second first-day of the week. Thomas
is with them now. What brought him there ? Why, if he thought
them wrong in rejoicing over an event, in the reaHty of which they
had not sufficient reason to believe, did he join himseU to their com
pany ? Because, I believe, with all his assumed and declared increduli
ty, he was not in his inmost heart such an utter unbeliever as he would
have others think he was. He had taken up a position which it
behooved him to defend ; but I am much mistaken, U a strong desire,
an expectation, nay, something even of a faith, that it was even as his
brethren had told him, was not working latently, yet strongly in his
breast. We often grievously err in this respect, in our judgment or rep
resentations of others. If a man is known or said to be a covetous or
an ambitious man, we are too apt to make him aU covetousness or all
ambition, and nothing besides. And so, Thomas being obstinately
incredulous, we might imagine him to be utterly so. Not at all likely.
There was room in him, as there is in most men, for very opposite
and conflicting states of thought and emotion. We believe, therefore,
that it was in a very mixed state of faith and feeling that Thomas eat
down that evening with the rest. They have not sat long when
again, in the very same way in which he had come before, Jesus
THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 81*7
enters and stands before them. The general salutation over, and
before another word was spoken, he turns to Thomas and says,
" Eeach hither thy finger, and behold my hands ; and reach hither
thy hand; and thrust it into my side : and be not faithless, but behev
ing.'' How sudden, how unexpected the address! Thomas knew
that lor seven days none of the disciples had seen the Lord ; none of
them could have reported to Him the words that he had used. Tet
now are these very words repeated. It is the omniscient Jesus ; it is
his own weU-loved Master who stands before him ! Instant within
him is the rebound from incredulity to faith, to a far higher faitk
than that simply in the reahty of the resurrection ; of that he has no
doubt. He does not what the Lord desires, and what he himself
desired before. He does not put his finger into the print of the
nafls ; he does not thrust his hand into the side. Enough to see that-
well-known form ; enough to hear that well-loved voice. That sights
tho36 words of Jesus, are sufficient to rebuke and to remove his-
unbeHef. In a moment his doubts aU flee ; faith takes their place ;.
a faith purified, exalted, strengthened ; a faith in the true divinity as
well as in the true humanity of his risen Lord; a faith higher, per
haps, at that moment than that to which any of his brethren aroundl
had attained. Adoring, beheving, loving, the fervent, affectionate
Thomas casts himself at his Master's feet, exclaiming, " My Lord and
my God!"
A great advance here, we may weU beUeve, on aU Thomas' earHer
conceptions of his Master's character. And may we not beheve also
that the bitter experience of the preceding week, the troubled exer
cises of thought through which he then had passed, the searchings
of those Scriptures which it was reported to him had been quoted
and commented on by Christ himseU, had aU been secretly preparing
him to take this advancing step ; to beheve that the Messiah of an
cient prophecy was a very different Being in character and office
from what he had before imagined ; much lowher in some respects,
much higher in others. And now, aU at once, the revelation of the
Eedeemer's glory bursts upon him as Jesus in person stands before
him; and not only does aU his former incredulity die away, but on
its ruins there rises a faith which springs up all the higher and
stronger, because of the pressure by which it had previously been
kept in check. Jesus knew how prepared Thomas was to caU him
Lord and God. He then might be asked to do what to Mary was so
emphaticaUy forbidden. " Touch me not," he said to her whose love
to him had too much in it of the earthly, the human— too Httle of
the spiritual, the divine. "Eeach hither thy hand," he said to
life of tforfrt. 52
818 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Thomas. The invitation may be safely given to him who is ready to
own the divinity of his Lord.
The title given him, conveying as it did so distinct and emphatic
a testimony to that divinity, Jesus at once, as if it were his by birth
right, accepts. But though he refuses not the tendered homage, he
passes no such approving judgment on him who presents it, as he
had formerly done upon Peter when he had mafle a like confession
of his faith, and Christ had called him blessed. Instead of this,
Christ administers now a mild but effective rebuke : " Thomas, be
cause thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they who
have not seen, and yet have believed." Christ could not mean by
saying so, to declare that he who beheves without seeing is more
blessed than he who upon sight beheves : for that would exalt the
weakest believer now above the strongest believer of Christ's own
age. The idea that Jesus evidently intended to convey was this, that
of two kinds of faith equally strong, that was to him a more accepta
ble, and to the possessor a more peace-giving one, which rested on
reasonable testimony in absence of personal observation, than that
which would not yield to this kind of evidence, and demanded that
ocular demonstration should be given. It was, in fact, as addressed
to Thomas, a distinct enough yet dehcate intimation, that his faith
had been all the more acceptable to his Master if it had not been
delayed so long. But though this was the primary meaning of the
saying, it is not without its bearings upon those who, like ourselves,
have not seen, and yet are caUed to beUeve. The spirit of Thomas
still lives among us. Have we not often detected ourselves, thinking
at least, if not saying, that, had we Hved in the days of Jesus Christ,
had we seen what those disciples saw, we would not have doubted as
they did; that, give us but the evidence that they had, and our
doubts would disappear? We practise thus a strange deception upon
ourselves. We transfer ourselves in fancy to those scenes of the
gospel history, carrying with us all the ideas of our age, forgetting
that very different were the ideas of the men of that generation, who,
though they had the advantage of the sight, had the disadvantage of
the prejudices of their country and their epoch. So equalized in
point of advantage and responsibihty do we believe the two periods
to have been, that we may safely affirm, that the men of this genera
tion who will not beUeve in the testimony of the original eye-witness
es, had they been of that generation, would not have believed though
they had been eye-witnesses themselves. He who now says, I wfll
not beheve till I see, would not, even seeing, have then belie red.
Two closing reflections are offered. First: Take this case of
THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 819
i
Thomas, his throwing himseU at once at his Master's feet, exclaim
ing, "My Lord, my God," as a most instructive instance of the exercise
and expression of a true, loving, affectionate, appropriating faith. It
is outgoing, self-forgetting, Christ-engrossed. No raising by Thomas
of any question as to whether one who had been incredulous so long,
would be unwelcome when at last he believed. No occupation of
mind or heart with any personal considerations whatever. Christ is
there before him ; thought to be lost, more than recovered ; his eye
beaming with love, his encouraging invitation given. No doubt about
his willingness to receive, his desire to be trusted. Thomas yields at
once to the power of such a gracious presence, unshackled by any of
those false barriers we so often raise ; the frdl warm gushing tide of
adoring, embracing, confiding love, goes forth and pours itself out in
the expression, " My Lord, and my God /" Best and most blessed
exercise of the spirit, when the eye in singleness of vision fixes upon
Jesus, and, obUvious of itseU, and aU about itself, the abashed heart
fills with adoration, gratitude, and love, and in the fulness of its emo
tion casts itseU at the feet of Jesus, saying with Thomas, " My Lord,
my God."
Second: Let us take this instance of our Lord's treatment of
Thomas, as a guide and example to us how to treat those who have
doubts and difficulties about the great facts and truths of religion.
There was surely a singular toleration, a singular tenderness, a sin
gular condescension in the manner of the Saviour's conduct here
towards the doubting, unbeheving apostle. There was much about
those doubts of Thomas affording ground of gravest censure ; the
bad morale of the heart had much to do with them. It was not only
an unreasonable, it was a proud, a presumptuous position he took up,
in dictating the conditions upon which alone he would believe. What
abundant materials for controversy, for condemnation did his case
supply! Tet not by these does Jesus work upon him, but by love —
by simply showing himseU, by stooping even to comply with the con
ditions so unreasonably and presumptuously prescribed. And U, in
kindred cases— when the spirit of religious incredulity is busy in any
human breast, doing there its unhappy work in blasting the inward
peace— waiving aU controversy we could but present the Saviour as he
is, and get the eye to rest upon him, and the heart to take in a right
impression of the depth and the tenderness and the condescension
of his love, might not many a vexed spirit be led to throw itseU
down before such a Saviour, saying, "Lord, I believe ; help thou mine
unbeHef"?
820 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
VI.
The Lake-Side of Galilee.**
Speaking to his disciples in the upper chamber before his death,
Jesus said to them, "After I am risen again, I will go before you into
Galileo." On the morning of the resurrection, the angel said to the"
first visitants of the empty sepulchre, "Go your way, teU his disci
ples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee : there shaU ye
see him, as he said unto you." And as they went to execute this
message, Jesus himseU met them, and said, "Be not afraid: go tell
my brethren that they go into Galflee, and there shall they see me."
Pointed so frequently and emphatically to Galilee as to the chosen
district within which their Master was to manUest himseU, we might
have anticipated that the apostles would have taken their immediate
departure from Jerusalem. They could not have done so, however,
during the passover week, without being guilty of a great offence
against the reHgious feehng of their feUow-countrymen. They stayed,
therefore, for these ten days still in the holy city. This delay in pro
ceeding to Galflee had their Master's sanction not indistinctly put
upon it, by his twice appearing to them coUectively, while they yet
Hngered in the metropohs. And yet, upon the first of these occa
sions, on the evening of the day of the resurrection, Jesus said to
them, "Behold, I send the promise of my Father unto you: but
tarry ye in the city pf Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from
on high." How are we to explain the contradictory orders upon
which, given in the course of the same day, they were called upon to
act? Galilee had obviously, for some special reasons, been selected
by Christ as the region in which some special revelations of himself,
after his resurrection, were to be given. Did this spring from a
strong desire to revisit the scenes of his early life, the neighborhoods
in which most of his wonderful works were done ? In soHtude and
concealment, shunning everything like frequent or continued inter
course even with his own disciples, Jesus was to spend forty days on
earth, before his ascension to the Father. Would it have been un
natural, that he should desire that the larger number of these days
should be given to regions hallowed to him by associations such as
human memory had never before been intrusted with? Or was it
that, as Galflee had absorbed the largest share of his earthly labors,
* John 21 : 1-14.
THE LAKE-SIDE OF GALILEE. 821
and had yielded to that labor the largest fruits, so it was there that
the largest number of his disciples could be congregated, and that
the quietest and securest opportunity of meeting with them could be
had ? It was there, we know, that he met the five hundred brethren ;
perhaps, it was there only that so many could have been collected,
or, being coUected, could have found a secluded and protected meet
ing-place. Whatever the motives were which prompted the Saviour
to fix beforehand upon Galilee, and to announce it as his chosen
trysting-place for meeting with the brethren at large, one can weU
enough see how desirable it was that the apostles should be laid
under the double obligation, first, of going northward to GaHlee, that
they might share in the benefit of the most public of aU Christ's ap
pearances after his resurrection; and, secondly, of returning to Jeru
salem, as to the place in which the promise of the descent of the
Spirit was to be fulfiUed, and they were to be clothed with power
from on high to execute their great mission upon the earth. Nearly
two months were to elapse, ere that baptism of the Spirit was to be
given. It might have been inconvenient or dangerous for them to
have spent so long an interval idly, without occupation or means of
support, in the metropolis. But neither were they to be suffered to
return to their old Galilean haunts without an intimation being made
to them, that it was in Jerusalem that their apostolic work was to
make its auspicious commencement. It is not likely that the apos
tles saw this at the time as we now see it, as they saw it afterwards
themselves. When they first left Jerusalem, they had perhaps no
smaU difficulty in harmonizing the apparently conflicting instructions
which had been issued. One thing was very apparent, that their
Master intended to show himself to them in Gahlee ; and to Galflee,
therefore, as soon as the passover celebration was over, they retired.
One evening some of them are together by the lake-side. Whether
any of them had ever thought of resuming their old way of Hving, or
had actuaUy engaged in it, we do not know. AU, however, is, this
evening, so inviting; the lake looks so tempting; the night, the best
time for the fisher's craft, so promising ; their old boats and nets so
ready to their hand— that one of them, the very one from whom we
should have expected such a proposition to come, in whom the spirit
of his old occupation should be the readiest to revive, Peter says to
them, "I go a fishing." The others say, " We also go with thee. '
It was not a concerted meeting this by the lake-side. The proposal
is evidently on the part of Peter a thought of the moment, and it is
agreed to in the same quick spirit as that in which it is made. The
meeting, the proposal, the acquiescence, aU seem fortuitous, accidental
822 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
Tet was it not aU foreseen, aU pre-arranged ? An un seen eye foUow**
these seven men as they embark, and watches them at their fishing
toil; even the eye of him who was waiting for them in the morning
by the shore, by whose hand it was that the whole accidents of that
night and morning were regulated. Even so let us beheve, in regar-i
to the most casual occurrences which happen still to the disciples of
Jesus, that a providence as special and as gracious as that of which
these seven men were the objects, is in them aU, and over them all,
causing them all to work together for their eternal good. Fitfully,
curiously, without art or fixed design of ours, may the web of our
destiny be woven, the threads thrown at random together, no orderly
pattern apparently coming out of their conjunction, and yet, of all
that web there is not a single thread whose place, whose color, whose
motion is not arranged with infinite skill, so as to mould our spiritual
and eternal existence according to its predestined plan. As we recall
and review the past, we may trace up to some trivial origin, some
chance meeting, some accidental conjunction of circumstances, our
present position, our present habits, our present character. As we
do so, we may be disposed to ascribe all to a blind fate ; but let this
scene by the Galilean lake-side, and the many other incidents of a
like kind which the life of our Eedeemer supplies, be the living
proofs to us, that " chance also is the daughter of forethought," that
the minutest details as well as the most momentous incidents of our
earthly history, are all under the constant guidance of our Eedeemer.
The disciples toUed all night ; it was the time most favorable for
their work. These seven men knew the lake well, every bay of it
where fish were most hkely to be taken; and they were skilled at
this craft. Tet, though they did their best, and toiled all through
the watches of the night, they caught nothing. Two years before,
Peter had once been out aU night with as little success, but Peter
had never seen so many practised hands in a single boat toiling so
long and toiling so fruitlessly. Had the remembrance of that other
night of like fruitless labor been suggested to any of the seven? It
would not seem that it had. The morning breaks upon the quiet
lake, upon the wearied boatmen, and finds them within one hundred
yards or so of the shore. There, upon the beach, a stranger stands;
stands as any inhabitant of the neighborhood might have stood,
who, having caught sight of the fishing-boat, and knowing how its
occupants must throughout the night have been engaged, wanted to
be one of the first purchasers from them of the fruit of their toil.
One might have thought that the very sight at such an early hour of
a solitary figure upon the shore, would have awakened curiosity in
THE LAKE-SIDE OF GALILEE. 823
the hearts of the disciples, and that, as they had been freqaently and
distinctly told, it was here in Galflee they were to see their Master
again, it might have occurred to them that it was Jesus. The
very kind and form of the question put to them, " Children, have ye
any meat ?" — a question which it appears much more clearly from tho
original than from our EngHsh version, was just the one which any
stranger wishing to become a purchaser of their fish might have
put — may have served rather to allay than to stimulate their curi
osity. It is certain, at least, that they did not at first recognise him.
Having got an answer to his question; having been told that they
had nothing in the boat, Jesus said to the exhausted and hopeless
fishers of the night, " Cast the net on the right side of the" ship, and
ye shaU find." They may have wondered for a moment at an order of
that kind being given ; they may have thought that the stranger had
seen some indication of the. presence of fish in that direction, which
had escaped their eye. They may have had but little faith that the
new cast of their net would be more successful than the many they
had made before. But what the stranger directs can easily be done.
They may try one last throw of their net before they land. They do
so, and now at once they see that not without a reason had the
order been given. Now, they find, that within the small enclosure
which their net makes, such a multitude of fishes is embraced, that
they have difficulty in drawing it through the water towards the
land. And now it is that love proves itseU as quick of eye as it had
already shown itseU to be swUt of foot. When Peter and John ran
out to the sepulchre, John outstripped Peter in the race. He out
strips him also in the recognition. They are together in the boat; a
strange attraction binds the gentlest to the most forward of the
twelve ; and no sooner does it appear that the last cast of the net,
taken in obedience to the command of him who stands upon the
shore, is not only successful, but successful to an extraordinary de
gree, than the thought flashes into the mind of the beloved disciple
that it must be Jesus. "It is the Lord," whispered John to Peter.
The Lord! Thomas has taught them the expression; they begin to
speak of him as the Lord. "It is the Lord," says John, and satisfies
himseU with saying so. And now once again the characteristic dif
ference between the two men reveals itself : John the first to recog
nize, but Peter the first to act upon the recognition. At once
beHeving that it is as John has said, Peter, leaving it to the others
to drag the net to shore, flung himself into the water. It was but a
short distance to the shore— about two hundred cubits, one hundred
yards. He was quickly beside the stranger; although it does not
824 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
appear from the narrative that he gained anything by his greater
forwardness of movement.
It is soon evident that it was not the want of any supply out of
theii boat which had led Jesus to put to them the question, " Chil
dren, have ye any meat?" On landing, the disciples find a fire of coals,
and fish already laid thereon, and bread at hand. Who gathered these
coals? Who kindled that fire? Whence came the fishes and the
bread ? Mysteriously provided, the materials for the morning meal
are there, quite independent of any supply which the last draught of
the net may produce. But though all be ready for the weary and hun
gry fishermen, they must not leave their own proper work unfinished.
As they gather in wonder around that fire to gaze on him who has
furnished this fresh food for them, "Bring," said Jesus to them, "of
the fish which ye have now caught." As U reminded by this order,
of his having fafled to take his proper part in the labor of drag
ging the net to the shore, Peter is now the readiest to act upon this
injunction. It is he who lands the net ; and not till the fish taken in
it have been secured and counted, does Jesus say to them, " Come
and dine." He takes the bread and the fish, breaks and divides
them among the seven. Was the miracle of the mountain-side here,
on a smaller scale, again enacted ? Was there only food enough for
one man there at first, and did that food multiply as he blessed
(which we may assume he did) and parted it among them? This
at least, is certain, that he was known now not of Peter and John
alone, but of all the seven, in the breaking of the bread. They aU
know it is the Lord; yet none of them durst ask him anything about
himself — a mysterious awe felt in his presence sealing their lips. It
is in sflence that this morning meal by the lake-side is partaken of.
This, John says, was the third time that Jesus had showed himseU;
not literally the third time that he had showed himseU to any one,
but the third time that he had showed himself to the disciples col
lectively assembled in any considerable number, after he had risen
from the dead.
It had been by a miraculous draught of fishes, like the one now
before us, that, at the outset of his ministry, Christ had drawn away
three at least of the seven now around him from their old occupa
tions, and taught them to understand that in foUowing him they were
to become fishers of men. Why was that miracle repeated? Be
cause the lesson which it conveyed was needed to be again given and
ree'nforced. Had they been told at first to go to Galilee without the
hint of a power to be given from on high, to be bestowed at Jerusa
lem, they might have returned to their old neighborhoods under the
THE LAKESIDE OF GALILEE. 825
impression that they were to abide there permanently. And now
that, bereft of the companionship of Christ, deprived of the means of
support, if not driven by necessity, yet tempted by opportunity, they
rosume their ancient calling, was it not needful and kind in Jesus to
interfere, and, by the repetition of that miracle, whose symbolic
meaning they could not fail at once to recognize, to teach them that
their first apostohc caUing still held good, that stfll the command
was upon them, "FoUow me, and I wfll make you fishers of men"?
The two miracles, the one wrought at the beginning, the other at
the close of the Lord's ministry, were substantially the same. Be
garded as symbols or mute prophecies, they carried the same signifi
cance. Tet there were differences between them, perhaps indicative
that the one, the earHer miracle, was meant to shadow forth the first
formation ; the latter miracle the future and final ingathering of the
church. In the first instance, Christ was himseU in the vessel; in
the second, he stood upon the shore. In the first, the order was a
more general one : " Launch out into the deep, and let down your
nets for a draught." In the second, a more specific one : " Cast the
net on the right side of the ship." In the first, the nets began to
break, and the ship to sink; in the second, notning of the kind
occurred. In the first, it was a great multitude of fishes that were
enclosed, of aU sizes, we may believe, and of aU quaUties. In the
second, it was a Hmited number of great fishes which was drawn to
land. It may be a fancy — if so, however, it is one that many have
had fond pleasure in indulging — to see in these diversities, the dis
tinction between the present and visible effects of the casting forth of
the gospel net upon the sands of time, and that landing and ingath
ering of the redeemed upon the shores of eternity. Treat this idea
as we may, and great as are the authorities which have adopted it, I
own to the disposition to regard it more as a happy illustration than
a designed symbol — the image is a scriptural one, that both individ
ually with Christians, or coUectively with the church, the present
scene of things is the night of toil, through whose watches, whether
fruitful or not of immediate and apparent good, we have to labor on,
in hope of a coming dawn, when upon the blessed shores we shall
hail the sight of the risen Lord, and share with him in partaking of
the provisions of a glorious immortahty.
The night is far spent; that day is at hand. Let our toil then be
one of hope, and our hope one full of immortaUty. And yot, dark
and often troubled though it be, has not this night of our earthly
sorrow shown us orbs of light we might never have seen by day?
What should we have known of the Saviour had it not been for our
826 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
sin ; what of his power to comfort, but for our present sorrow Ho
is, indeed, the great Hght of this dark world of ours. In his incarna
tion we behold the earthly shining of this light. And what shall we
say of his miracles, that long series of wonders done, of which this
one by the lake- side was the closing one, but that they were the
means taken by him for the fuller shining forth of that hght wh'ch
lighteth every man who cometh into this world ? Of the first miracle
it is said in Scripture, and the saying may be apphed to the last as
to the first, to them all throughout — " This beginning of miracles did
Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manUested forth his glory." His glory
as the Son of the Father stands forth exhibited in these miracles —
there is a simplicity, an ease, a dignity in the very manner of their
performance, which distinguish him from all other wonder-workers.
Moses must plead hard, and struggle long in prayer with God, ere
Miriam is cleansed of her leprosy. Ehjah and Elisha must stretch
themselves upon the dead ere hfe comes back again. Peter must say
to the lame man at the temple gate, "In the name of Jesus Christ of
Nazareth, rise up and walk." These aU act as servants in the name
of Another, who permits them upon rare occasions to speak in their
Master's name, and to use their Master's power. But Christ, as a
Son in his own house, speaks in his own name — puts forth his own
power. His language to a leper is, "I wiU; be thou clean." He
touches the bier, the bearers at the touch stand stfll : he looks upon
the Hfeless body, and saith, "Toung man, I say unto thee, arise."
His word of power is heard in the recesses of the rocky sepulchre :
" Lazarus, come forth."
But chiefly the glory, not of power, but of goodness, of love, was
manUested forth in these miracles of Jesus. The miracles of Moses
were miracles of awe and terror; wrought in rivalry of the colossal
powers of ancient heathenism, they were on a scale of amplitude
befitting their design, their chief sphere external nature, the earth,
the rock, the river, the ocean, and the sky. Around the miracles of
Jesus, a milder but richer glory gathers; their chief sphere, the
region of human life, man's sins, man's sorrows, man's maladies,
man's wants. It is divine power acting as the servant of divine love,
which meets to gladden our eye. Nor is it in these miracles alone of
Jesus that this love and power in blended action are to be beheld.
It is not so much as outward evidences of the divinity of his mission,
but stiU more as exhibitions and illustrations of his divine character,
that we prize and love to study these miracles of our Lord ; and their
chief lesson is lost on us, if we fancy that it was then only when he
was working them, that the divine power and the divine goodness
PETER AND JOHN. 827
that lay in him were acting. That power and love were everywhere
and at all times going forth from him ; and the only true behover in
love and power divine, is he who sees them in every change of na
ture, in every work of providence, in every ministration of grace, and
who never fancies that it is in the working of miracles alone that the
great hand and power of the Omnipotent are to be beheld. The
miracles are to be regarded by us, not as stray specimens, rare and
exclusive manifestations of that unseen Lord whom we adore, but as
methods merely which he has taken, suited to our ignorance and to
our indifference, to startle us into attention, to make visible to us
that which ever lurks behind unseen, to quicken us to that faith
which, when once rightly formed and exercised, shaU teach us to see
God in aU things, and aU things in God.
VII.
Peter and John.*
The repetition of the miraculous draught of fishes was nothing
else than a symbolical renewal of the commission given originally to
the apostles, intended to teach them that their first calling to be fish
ers of men stfll held good. There was one, however, of the seven for
whose instruction that miracle was intended, whose position towards
that apostohc commission was peculiar. He had taken a very prom
inent place among the twelve, had often acted as their representative
and spokesman. But on the night of the betrayal he had played a
singularly shameful and inconsistent part. Vehement in his repeated
assertion that though all men should forsake his Master he never
would, though thrice warned, he had thrice over, with superfluous
oaths, denied that he ever knew or had anything to do with Jesus.
How wfll it stand with Peter, if that apostolic work has to be taken
up again ? Has he sufficiently repented of his sin ? Will he not, in
the depth of that humility and self-distrust which his great fall has
taught him, shrink from placing himself on the same level with the
rest? Does Jesus mean that he should reoccupy the place from
which, by his transgression, he might be regarded as having fallen?
Singling him out when the morning meal by the lake-side was over,
Jesus said to him, 'Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than
these, thy brethren, my other disciples do?' What a skilful yet del-
* John 21 : 15-23.
828 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
icate method, without subjecting him to the painful humiliation of
having his former denials of his Master exposed and dwelt upon, of
testing and exhibiting the trueness-and deepness of Peter's repent
ance. WiU he repeat the offence; will he again compare himself
with the others ; will he again set himseU above them ; wiU he renew
that boasting which was the sad precursor of his fall? How touch-
ingly does his answer show that he perfectly understood the implied
reference to the past; that he had thoroughly learned its humbling
lessons. No longer any comparing himseU with, or setting himseU
above others. He wfll not say that he loves Jesus more than they ;
he will not say how much he loves. He will offer no testimony of his
own as to the love he feels. He will trust his deceitful heart no more.
But, throwing himself on another's knowledge of that heart, which
had proved better than his own, he says : " Tea, Lord, thou knowest
that I love thee."
Our Lord's reply is a most emphatic affirmative response to this
appeal. It is as U he had said at large : ' Tes, Simon Barjona, I do
know that thou lovest me ; I see too that thou wilt make no boast of
thy love; neither in that nor in anything else wilt thou set thyself
above thy fellows ; by the pressure of this probe into thy throbbing
heart it has been seen how true and deep thy penitence has been,
how thoroughly it has done its work in humbhng thee. And now,
that thou, and these thy brethren, may know and see how readily I
own and acknowledge thee as being to me all thou ever wert, I renew
to thee this great commission ; I reinstate thee in the apostolic office :
"Feed my lambs!"'
* Peter was not asked a second time whether he loved more than
others ; but as three times he had been warned, and three timos he
had denied, so three times will Jesus reinstate, restore. Can we
wonder that Peter was grieved when, for the third time, the general
question, "Lovest thou me," was put to him ? It was not the grief of
doubt, as U he suspected that Jesus only half believed his word, but
the grief of contrition, growing into deeper sadness at the so distinct
allusion to his three denials, in the triple repetition of the question.
With a sadder and fuller heart, in stronger words than ever, he
makes the last avowal of his love : "Lord, thou knowest aU things,
thou knowest that I love thee."
In the Greek tongue, the language in which this conversation
between Christ and Peter is recorded, two different words are used
for the one translated love, two different words for the one translated
feed, and two different words for the one translated sheep. We may
believe that in that dialect of the Hebrew which was spoken by
PETER AND JOHN. 829
Christ, from which the Greek was itseU a translation, (for we are to
remember that only in one or two instances have the actual words
spoken by Jesus been preserved,) there was some way of making the
same distinction of meaning which is expressed in the different words
for love, and feed, and sheep. It would be quite out of place to go
farther here into such a topic. The result is that Jesus first asks
Peter whether he cherishes to him a love, spiritual, holy, heavenly :
that Peter declines using the 'term which his Master had employed,
and contents himseU with speaking of a kind of affection, simpler,
more personal, more human ; that Jesus first commits the feeding of
the lambs to Peter, then the general guidance or oversight of the
whole flock that he had purchased with his blood ; and that finaUy
he returns to the simple idea of feeding, as applied to this whole flock.
Of more importance is it to notice (as supplying the room for
this variety) the change of image from that of the fisher to that of
the shepherd, as representing the apostolic or ministerial office.
Had it been solely as fishers of men that Peter and his brethren had
been described, as the business of the fisherman is to get the fish into
the net, and draw them safe to land, so it might be thought that the
one office of the spiritual fisherman was to bring sinners to Christ,
to get them safe into his arms. A true, yet contracted idea of the
scope and bearing of the ministerial office might come thus to be
entertained. It is very different when that office is presented to us
under the idea of a pastorate. A much truer, because ampler con
ception of its manUold privileges, responsibilities, means, duties,
objects, is thus acquired. Oversight, guidance, care, protection, pro
vision, these are of the most varied kind, as adapted to aU the condi
tions, exposures, wants, of aU the separate members of the flock, and
are all embraced within the function of the shepherd. But let us not
here fashion to ourselves a perfect ideal of what the spiritual shep
herd is, or ought to be, and then imagine that each under-shepherd
of the great Christian- flock is bound, in some degree, to reahze, in
his own person and his own work, each separate attribute, each sep
arate mode or class of activities, which go to constitute the model
that we have constructed. The work of the Christian ministry was,
in the apostohc age, almost whoUy evangelistic, aggressive. There
was not tne caU nor the opportunity then for the exercise of many of
those gifts, which came afterwards to be consecrated to the cause of
Christ, to the advancement of his kingdom. Tet, even then, there
was no one fixed course, which aU apostles, and aU presbyters, and
aU elders, and all deacons were alike caUed upon to foUow. Had we
the Hves and labors of aU the twelve apostles before us, I am per-
830 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
suaded that we should be as much struck with the diversity, as with
the multiplicity of their operations. Yery different, as in a single
instance we shall presently see, were the characters, the disposi
tions, the capabihties of the twelve men whom the Lord himseU
selected as the first propagators of his religion upon earth; and
room was found for all these differences acting themselves out in the
different spheres of labor selected by, or assigned to them. So is it,
so should it be stfll, in the labor of individual Christians, in the work
of the Christian ministry. God has scattered among us a great
variety of gUts, has set us where a great variety of services may be
rendered. As there are many members in one body, yet aU have not
the same office; so neither have aU the true members of Christ's
mystical body the same office to discharge. "Let not the hand then
say to the eye, I have no need of thee, nor the head to the foot, I
have no need of thee." Let not those who are engaged in one kind
of Christian work criticise or condemn those who are engaged in
another. Let each of us do the best we can with the kind and
amount of the talent intrusted to us ; let each of us try to do that
which both naturaUy and immediately comes to our hand, not judg
ing one another; "for who art thou who judgest another man's ser
vant ? to his own master he standeth or faUeth," but not to thee.
There is, however, one common, universal, indispensable qualifi
cation for aU genuine Christian work — a supreme, a constraining
love to Christ. Once, twice, thrice, is the question, "Lovest thou
rhe?" put to Peter; and once, twice, thrice, no sooner is an affirma
tive reply given than the injunction foUows: 'If thou lovest me, as
thou lovest me, then feed my lambs, feed my sheep.' And the first,
the second, the third pre-requisite for all true feeding of the lambs,
the sheep of the Saviour's flock, is attachment to himself — a love to
Jesus Christ running over upon aU who, however weakly, do yet
beheve in him. The want of that love, nothing can supply: not
mere natural benevolence — that may lead its possessor to do much
to promote the happiness of others, may win for him their gratitude
and good-wiU, but will not teach him to labor directly and supremely
for their spiritual, their eternal good ; not the mere sense of duty —
that may secure dihgence and faithfulness, but wfll leave the work
done, under its exclusive promptings, sapless and dry — the element
not there of a warm and tender sympathy, that best instrument of
power. It is love-inspired, love-animated labor, which Jesus asks
for at our hands. That we may be able, in any degree, to realize it,
let it be our first desire and effort to quicken within our souls a love
to him who first, and so wonderfully, loved us; the flickering and
PETER AND JOHN. 831
languid flame in us, let us carry it anew, day fry day, to the undying
fire that burns in the bosom of our Eedeemer, to have fresh fuel
heaped upon it, to be rekindled, refreshed, sustained, expanded. To
know and believe in the love that Christ has to us, to feel ourselves
individuaUy the objects of that love, to open our hearts to all the
haUowed influences which a realizing sense of that love is fitted to
exert — this is the way to have our spirits stirred to that responsive
affection to him, which gives to all Christian service purity and power.
"Simon, Simon," our Lord had said to Peter before his fall,
¦"Satan hath desired to sift thee as wheat, but I have prayed for thee
that thy faith fail not; and when thou art converted" — converted,
Jesus means here not in the ordinary sense of the term, but recov
ered, restored — "then strengthen thy brethren." That strengthen
ing of the brethren formed part of the shepherd's office, now anew
committed to Peter; and what a lesson had he got in the treatment
which he had himseU received at the hands of the Chief Shepherd,
as to how that office should be discharged ! The prayers, the warn
ings, the look of love, the angel's message, the private interview, this
conversation by the lake-side — these all told Peter of the thought-
fulness, the care, the kindness, the pitying sympathy, the forgiving
love, of which he had been the object. Thus had he been treated
by Jesus; and let him go and deal with others as Christ had dealt
with him.
So far in what Christ had spoken, while there was much that was
personal and peculiar to Peter, there was much also that had a
wider bearing. But now the Lord has a word, which is for Peter's
ear alone. "Whither I go," (he had said to him in the upper cham
ber,) "thou canst not foUow me now, but thou shalt foUow me after
wards;" and Peter had said in reply, "Lord, why cannot I foUow
thee now? I am ready to go with thee to prison, and to death; I
will lay down my Hfe for thy sake." These words of the apostle,
though sadly falsified the night when they were spoken, stiU were to
hold good. Peter did foUow his Master, even unto death. He did
lay down his Hfe for Jesus' sake; crucified, as his Lord had been.
Knowing this, and knowing that he needed all the encouragement
which could be given him, to fortUy him to meet the martyr's doom,
not only will Jesus in that private interview in the resurrection-day
wipe aU his tears away, and now in presence of his brethren reinstate
him in his apostolic office, but he wiU do for him what he does for
no other of the twelve— he wiU reveal the future so far as to let him
know by what kind of death it should be that he should glorify
God— to let him know that the opportunity would be at last afforded
832 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
him of making good the words which he too hastily and boastfully
had spoken. " Verfly, verily, I say unto thee, when thou wast young
thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest ; but when
thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another
shaU gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not." The
explanatory clause which is introduced here, creates the impression
that there had been a break or an interruption of the discourse.
From verse twentieth, it would appear too, that Jesus had made
some movement of withdrawal. These two circumstances combine in
inducing the idea, that when our Lord said to Peter, "foUow me,"
he meant simply that he should go along with him as he now retired.
If, however, the words of the nineteenth verse were spoken in imme
diate connection with, and in continuation of what is recorded in the
eighteenth, then, in saying "follow me," our Lord might have had in
his eye the very words of Peter about following him to prison and to
death, and have meant, in using them, to say, 'When thou shalt be
old, and another shall seize upon thee and bind thee as they seized
and bound thy Master in preparation for his crucifixion, then Peter,
follow me, through the Cross to glory.'
It is very difficult, owing to the briefness of the gospel narrative,
to picture to our eye the scene which foUowed. Did Jesus, as he
said "follow me," arise to depart, and was Peter in the act of foUow
ing when he turned and saw John foUowing also? Did John mis
take so far the meaning of Christ's word and act, as to consider him
self equally with Peter called upon to foUow? or was it of his own
motion, and without any real or imagined invitation that he was act
ing? However it was, Peter, his mind full of the many thoughts
that this pre-intimation of his death had excited, turns and sees
John by his side. His own fate had been foretold ; what, he won
dered, would be John's ? The beloved disciple had once, at his sug
gestion, put a question to their Master about the others; now he will
put a question about John — a question of natural and of brotherly
curiosity, yet somewhat out of place. He has resumed too rapidly
his old position, and his old hasty and forward ways. Jesus will
not become a fortune-teUer, to gratify even a friendly inquisitive-
ness. He puts a check upon the unbefitting inquiry, and yet, sin
gularly enough, even in rebuking, he answers it. '"HI will that he
tarry till I come, what is that to thee? foUow thou me." Each
man's path, as each man's duty, is separate and distinct. What
the lot of another man may be, has nothing to do with the regula
tion of thine individual course. What is it to thee, Peter, whether
John's destiny shaU be the same or different from thine ? The thing
PETER AND JOHN. 835
for thee to do is not to turn aside to busy thyself with his hereafter,.
but to occupy thyself with the duty that lies immediately before thee
to discharge. What is that to thee? follow thou me.' But "if I wfll
that he tarry till I come :" Only imagine that Jesus was other than
divine, and how arrogant the assumption here of his wfll regulating
human destinies, fixing the time and the manner of his disciples'
death; Deity incarnate alone was entitled to use such language: "If
I will that he tarry till I come." When John wrote his gospel, that
saying of Jesus was not understood. Some regarded it as implying
that John should never die. The beloved disciple himself saw only
so far into its meaning, that it contained no direct assertion of that
kind, but farther he did not then see. Perhaps afterwards, when he
saw all the apostles die out before, and witnessed, as he only did,
the destruction of Jerusalem, of which Christ had often spoken as
identified with his coming — perhaps at that time, forty years after
the meeting by the lake-side, he remembered the words that his
Master had spoken, and wondered as he perceived how remarkably
they were fulfiUed.
Next to the absence of aU notice of our Lord's mother, few things
are more remarkable, in the narrative of the period after the resur
rection, than the sflence respecting John. One of the earHest visii-
ants at the sepulchre, present at both the evening interviews at Jeru
salem, the disciple whom Jesus loved is neither spoken of nor spoken
to. This is tho only case in which he meets our eye, and he appears
here rather in conjunction with Peter than with Jesus. In the ac
count of our Lord's ministry, though John was frequently associated
with Peter, it was as one of the two sons of Zebedee, the tie to his
brother James being then obviously a stronger one than that to Peter.
But from the hour when the two entered together the hall of the
high priest, a singular attraction appears to have drawn these two
men together. The brotherly tie yields to one which has become
still stronger, and instead of its being Peter and James and John, it
is now Peter and John who are seen constantly in company with one
"toother. This is aU the more singular, when one considers how
unlike the two were in natural character, in original disposition.
John was born a lover of repose, of retirement. Left to himseU,
he would never have been an adventurous or ambitious man. Even
in his very motion there had been rest. Had he never seen the Sav
iour, he would have remained quite contented in the occupation to
which he had been brought up. To sit upon the sunny banks of that
lovely inland lake mending his nets, his eye straying occasionaUy
across its placid waters, or lifted to the blue expanse above; to take
TJt e of Chrftt. DO
834 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
his accustomed seat in his fishing-boat, to launch out by night under
these burning heavens, and sweep over the weU-known haunts, would
have been enough for him ; he neither would have desired nor sought
for change. It may seem to militate against this idea of John's char
acter that he and his brother were caUed Boanerges, the sons of
thunder. We are not told, however, the reason why this title was
bestowed on them ; it may have been derived from something pecu
Har in the father rather than in the sons. Nor can we aUow the
bestowal of an unexplained and ambiguous epithet to outweigh the
whole drift and bearing of the gospel narrative, which speaks so
much of the meekness and modesty and gentleness and retiringness
of John. But let us not confound John's yielding gentleness with
that spirit of easy compliance which shuns all contest, because it
does not feel that there is anything worth contending for. Beneath
John's calm and soft exterior there lay a hidden strength. In the
mean, vulgar strife of petty, earthly passions, John might have yield
ed when Peter would have stood firm. But in more exciting scenes,
under more formidable tests, John would have stood firm when Peter
might have yielded. This was proved on the night of the arrest and
the day of the crucifixion. And there was latent heat as well as
latent strength in John. As lightning lurks amid the warm, soft
drops of the summer shower, so the force of a love-kindled zeal
lurked in his gentle spirit. The Samaritans might a thousand times
have refused to receive himself into their dwellings, and it had stirred
no resentment in his breast ; but when they contemptuously refused
to receive the Master to whom he was so ardently attached, it was
more than he could endure. He joined his brother James in saying,
"Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven,
and consume them?" — a sohtary outbreak of a sentiment but seldom
felt, or if felt, habitually restrained; yet that single flash reveals an
inner region where all kinds of vivid emotions lived and moved and
had their being.
Nor let us confound John's simplicity with shaUowness. H it be
the pure in heart who see God, John's was the eye to see farther into
the highest of all regions than that of any of his fellows. H it be he
that loveth who knoweth God — for God is love — John's knowledge of
God must have stood unrivalled. We reckon his as belonging to the
highest order of intellect ; not analytical nor constructive ; the logical
faculty, the reasoning powers, not largely developed; but his the
quick bright eye of intuition, which, at a glance, sees farther into the
heart of truth than by the stepping-stones of mere argumentation you
can ever be conveyed. There were besides under that calm surface
PETER AND JOHN. 835
which the spirit of the beloved disciple displayed to the common eye
of observation, profound and glorious depths. The writer of the
gospel and epistle is, let us remember, the writer also of the Apoca
lypse ; and ii the Holy Spirit chose the vehicle best fitted for receiv
ing and transmitting the divine communications, then to John we
must assign not the pure deep love alone of a gentle heart, but the
vision and the faculty divine, the high imaginative power.
Peter, again, was born with the strongest constitutional tendency
to a restless and excited activity. He could not have endured a life
of monotonous repose. He was a chfld of impulse ; he would have
been a lover of adventure. He was not selfish enough to be a covet
ous, nor had he steadiness enough to be a successfuUy ambitious
man; but we can conceive of him as intensely excited for the time
by any distinction or any honor placed within his reach. Had he
never seen the Lord, one cannot think of him as remaining aU his
Hfe a fisherman of Galilee ; or, U the natural restraints of his position
kept him there, even in that fisherman's lUe he would have found the
means of gratifying his constitutional biases. Eager, ardent, san
guine, it needed but a spark to faU upon the inflammable material,
and his whole soul kindled into a blaze, ready to burst along what
ever path lay open at the time for its passage. The great natural
defect in Peter was the want of steadiness, of a ruling, regulating
principle to keep him moving along one Hne. Left to work at ran
dom, the excitabflity of such a susceptible spirit involved its pos
sessor often in inconsistency, exposed him often to peril. We have,
however, had this apostle so often before us, that we need not say
more of him. Enough has been said to bring out to your eye the
strong contrast in natural character and disposition between him and
John. Tet these were the two of aU the twelve who finally drew
closest together. The day of Pentecost wrought a great change upon
them both, and by doing so Hnked them in stfll closer bonds. The
grace was given them which enabled each to struggle successfully
with his own original defects, and to find in the other that which he
most wanted. It is truly singular, in reading the earlier chapters of
the Acts of the Apostles, to notice how close the coahtion between
Peter and John became. Peter and John go up together to the tem
ple. It is upon Peter and John that the lame man at the gate fixes
his eye. After he was healed, it is said that he held Peter and John
as U they were inseparable. It was when they saw the boldness of
Peter and John that the members of the Sanhedrim marveUed.
And when they commanded them to speak no more in the name of
Jesus, it is said that "Peter and John answered and said," as if in
836 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
very voice as weU as in action they were one. Acts 3:1, 3, II
4:13,19. Blessed fruit this of that aU-conquering grace of God, which lift*
Peter above the fear of reproach, and John above the love of ease;
which brings the most timid and retiring of the twelve to the side of
the most stirring, the most impetuous ; supplying a stimulus to the
one — a regulator to the other ; bringing them into a union so near,
and to both so beneficial — John's gentleness leaning upon Peter's
strength; Peter's fervid zeal chastened by John's pure, calm love.
In the glorious company of the apostles, they shone together as a
double star, in whose complemental Hght, love and zeal, labor and
rest, action and contemplation, the working servant and the waiting
virgin, are brought into beauteous harmony.
VIII.
The Great Commission.*
The very fact that among those who saw Christ upon the moun
tain side of GaHlee there were some who doubted, convinces us that
more than the eleven must have been present at the interview. For
after his repeated appearances to them in Jerusalem, after his meet
ing with them, and eating with them, and showing them his hands
and his side, and asking them to handle him — that any of the eleven
should at this after stage have doubted, is scarcely credible. And
our impression of the incredibihty of this is deepened by reflecting
that it was to a place of his own appointment they now went, and
that for the very purpose of seeing and conversing with him once
more. There are other and stiU weightier reasons, which leave no
ground for doubt, that the appearance of the risen Saviour recorded
by St. Matthew — the only one which this evangelist does record, and
to which we may therefore conclude that a pecuhar importance
attached — was the same with that to which St. Paul refers, when he
says : "After that he was seen of five hundred brethren at once, of
whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen
asleep." It was the will of Christ to show himself alone after his resurreo-1
tion, once, and once only, to the whole coUective body of his disci
ples; to as many, at least, as could conveniently be congregated at
* Matt. 28 : 16-20.
THE GREAT COMMISSION. 837
one time, and in one place. It was in Galilee that this purpose could
best be accomphshed. There, and there only, could so many as five
hundred of his disciples be found, and brought safely together.
After the ascension, when aU assembled at Jerusalem that the city
and its neighborhood could supply, the number of them gathered
there was only one hundred and twenty. Hence, perhaps, one rea
son why, on the night before his death, and on the morning of his
resurrection, the apostles were so repeatedly and emphaticaUy told
by Christ himself, and through the commissioned angel, that he went
before them into Galilee, and it was to be there that they were to
see him. Their attention was thus fixed beforehand upon an inter
view at which the most pubhc and impressive manUestation of their
risen Lord was to be made.
The necessity of the case required that both time and place should
be named beforehand, fixed by our Lord himself, by him communi
cated to the apostles, by them announced to others ; the tidings con
veyed abroad over Galilee, wherever disciples of Jesus were to be
found. One can imagine what intense curiosity, what longing desire
to be present at such an interview, would be kindled wherever the
inteUigence was carried. In due time the day appointed dawns. On
towards the indicated mountain-side, group after group is eagerly
pressing ; the sohtary one from some far-off hamlet, the one of his
family that has been taken whfle the others were left, mingling with
the larger companies that Capernaum and Bethsaida send forth. AU
are gathered now. From knot to knot of old GaUlean friends the
apostles pass, assuring them that this is indeed the day and the
place the Lord himseU had named ; and giving a stfll quicker edge to
the already keen enough curiosity, by telling of the strange things
they had so lately seen and heard at Jerusalem.
What new thoughts about the Crucified would be stirring then in
many a breast ! A prophet, all of them had taken him to be ; but if
aU be true that they now are hearing, he must be more than a proph
et ; for which one of aU their prophets ever burst the barriers of the
grave? The Messiah, many of them had taken him to be; but now,
if they are to retain that faith, their former notions of who and what
the Messiah was to be, must be greatly changed. A Messiah reach
ing his throne through suffering and death, is an idea quite new to
them. They ask about his late appearances, and are lost in wonder
as they hear how few they have been, how short ; at what a distance,
even from the eleven, the risen Jesus had kept; what a studied
reserve there had been in his intercourse with them, so different from
his old familiarity. He is, he must be, a Being other, far higher,
838 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
than they had fancied him to be. Is it really true what they had
heard himself say, but had not frdly understood, that he was the Son
of, the equal of the Father — God incarnate? Thomas teUs them
that he fully believes so. The other apostles tell them that he has
opened their minds through a new interpretation of the prophecies
to quite different notions about himself and his kingdom from any
thing they had hitherto entertamed. In what a very singular condi
tion of thought and feehng, as they try to realize it, must that com
pany of five hundred brethren have been, which collected on the
mountain-side, and stood awaiting Christ's coming ?
At last the Lord appears: we know not how; whether bursting
at once on their astonished vision, without shadow of approaching
form or sound of advancing footstep, seen standing in the midst ; or
whether seen at first far off, alone in the distance, sflently watched,
as treading the mountain-side he drew nearer and nearer to them,
till at last he was by their side. However he came, when they saw
him, we are told they worshipped : with clasped hands, or on bended
knee ; some, hke Thomas, with profound and inteUigent adoration ;.
others with a worship heightened by wonder, somewhat vague,
but pure as the mountain air they breathed. But some doubted —
those who saw him now for the first time after his resurrection. Here,.
as in almost every first interview of the kind, there was a doubt, one
speedily dispelled, whose natural source we have already attempted
to indicate. " And Jesus came and spake to them, saying, AU power is given
to me in heaven and in earth." To whatever height of conception
and beHef the men of that company may have been rising, upon
whose ears these words fell, as Christ's greeting to them in the first,
the only interview they were to have with him after his resurrection,
we may be assured that they went much beyond what they ever ex
pected to hear coming from those hps. Already they had worship
ped, gazing in wonder on him, as one who had come to them from
the dead. But what fresh subject for wonder now ; what higher rea
son for worship now ! Power they knew him to possess ; power over
earth, and air, and water; power over the spirits of aU flesh; power
even over the powers of darkness. Power enough they had attrib
uted to him to set up an earthly kingdom in front of all opposition*
to crush aU his enemies under his feet. Such power they were pre
pared to hear him claim, and see him exercise. But they were not
prepared to hear him say, " AU power is given to me in heaven and
in earth." Far above aU their former thoughts of him does Jesus
thus ascend, and, by ascending, try to lead them up. It has been*
THE GREAT COMMISSION. 83£
alreadj suggested, that one part of Christ's design in dwelling for
these forty days on earth, and in the mode of conduct to his disciples
which he pursued, was graduaUy to lift their minds from lower and
unworthier thoughts of him to a true conception of his divine dignitv
and power ; and it confirms our belief in this to find that in the great
est, the most pubhc, the most solemn manifestation of himself which
Christ at that time made, his first declaration to the assembled
five hundred was, "AU power is given to me in heaven and in
earth!" When first uttered, how many eyes were fixed in wonder upon the
man who spake these words ! Eighteen hundred years have gone
past since then; miUions upon mfllions of the human family have
had these words repeated to them, as spoken by the Son of Mary;
have regarded them as honestly and truly spoken ; as expressing but
a simple fact. How could this have been ? How could a man of
woman born, who had Hved and died as we do, have been regarded
as other than the vainest, most arrogant of pretenders, who said that
all power in heaven and in earth was his, had there not been some
thing in the whole- earthly history of this man which corresponded
with and bore out such an extraordinary assumption ? And even
such were the hfe and death of Jesus of Nazareth. They have now
been for centuries before the world, as the life and death of one who
claimed to be the eternal Son of God, the equal of the Father; of one
who said that as the Father knew him, so knew he the Father; of
one who said that whatsoever things the Father did, the same did
the Son likewise ; that the Father had delivered aU things into his
hand ; that all power was his in heaven and in earth. And no one
has ever been able to show anything in the character, the sayings, the
doings of Jesus Christ, inconsistent with such extraordinary preten
sions ; .aU is in harmony with the claim, aU goes to sanction and sus
tain it. It seems to us that the simple fact that there was a Man
who lived for three-and-thirty years in familiar intercourse with his
feUow-men, who yet, before he left this world, was recognized and
worshipped by five hundred of his fellow-men as one who was guilty
of no presumption in saying, "All power is given me in heaven and
in earth;" and who, since that time, has been beheved in by such
multitudes as the God incarnate, goes far, of itself, to sustain the be
Hef that he was indeed the Son of the Highest, and that it was ne
robbery with him to count himself equal with God ; for, only imagine
that he was no more than he seemed to be, a Jew, the son of a Gali
lean carpenter, educated in a vfllage in the rudest part of Judea —
that such a man, being a man and no more, could have Hved so long
840 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
upon the earth without saying or doing anything which could bene
the idea that in him dwelt aU the fulness of the Godhead bodily, ap
pears to us to present far greater difficulties to faith than does the
doctrine of the Incarnation.
It is not so much, however, as one possessed of it by original and
native right, that Jesus lays claim here to supreme and unHmited
power. He speaks of the " all power in heaven and in earth " as
¦"given" — given by another ; by Him whose law he had so magnified,
whose character he had so glorified in his life and by his death. It
was as the fruit and reward of his obedience unto death that he was
invested by the Father with unlimited authority and power. One of
the conditions of the everlasting Covenant was that, crucified in
weakness, Christ should be raised in power ; that, on account of his
having suffered unto death, he should be crowned with glory and
honor. And his first word to this company on the mountain-side is
the first announcement from his own lips, that, his great decease hav
ing been accomplished, this condition of the covenant had been ful
fiUed ; that he had entered upon possession of the mediatorial sove
reignty. Constituted heir of aU things, the great inheritance had to
be acquired, the kingdom won. The heir stiU lingers for a season
upon earth, but he is on his way to the throne on which he is to sit
down, covered with glory and honor, angels and principalities and
powers being made subject to him. Jesus indeed speaks here as U
he were already upon that throne. As in the upper chamber, when
the agony of the garden and the sufferings of the cross stfll lay before
him, he spake as if the passion were over, as U heaven had been
already entered, saying, "I have glorified thee on the earth, I have
finished the work which thou gavest me to do. Father, I will that
those whom thou hast given me be with me where I am;" so here,
on the mountain-side, he speaks as if the cloud had already carried
him away — as if his feet were already standing within the throne of
universal sovereignty — as if, having raised him by his mighty power
from the dead, the Father had already set him on his own right hand
in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power, and
might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this
world, but also in that which is to come ; had put all things under
his feet, and given him to be Head over aU to the church, which is
his body, the fulness of him that filleth aU in aU.
It is from the lofty elevation thus attained, it is as clothed with
the supreme, Hmitless authority and power thus acquired, that Jesus
issues the great commission to the church, Go ye therefore and teach or
make disciples of all nations ; or as you have it in another evangelist,
THE GREAT COMMISSION. 841
Go, preach the gospel to every creature. A mission so comprehen
sive was as novel as it was subhme. Famfliarity with the idea blunts
the edge of our wonder, but let us recoUect that at the time when, in
a remote Jewish province, gathering a few hundred foUowers around
him, Jesus sent them forth, assigning to them a task which should
not be accomphshed tiU every creature had heard the glad tidings of
salvation in his name, and aU nations had been brought to sit under
his shadow — that at that time the very idea of a reHgion equaUy ad
dressed to, and equaUy adapted to all nations, equaUy needed by, and
equaUy suited to every chUd of Adam, was whoUy new, had never
been broached, never been attempted to be realized. There was no
form or system of idolatry that ever aimed at, or was indeed capable
of such universahty of embrace. The object of its worship was either
confined to certain definite locahties ; the gods of certain mountains,
groves, or streams, whose worship was incapable of transfer ; or they
were the offspring and expression of some peculiar state of society,
whether savage or civilized, suited only to that particular state or
condition of humanity in which they had their birth and being. It
is true that in aU the more educated nations of antiquity, there were
men who soared far above the vulgar prejudices and superstitions of
their times, whose rehgion, such as it was, had certainly nothing
about it of that confinement by which the popular belief and wor
ship were characterized, but if free thus from one kind of confine
ment, their reHgion was aU the more Hable to another. Unfitted for
the many, it was by eminence the religion of the few. Its disciples
gloried in its exclusiveness. It would have lost haU its charm in their
eyes, had the people at large adopted it. But there was no danger
of that. Tt was essentiaUy unfitted for the multitude. Its votaries
would have laughed at the idea of trying to convert even a single
riUage to their faith. Such, in the days of Jesus Christ, in aU
heathen countries, were the multUorm idolatries of the many, the ex
clusive faith of the few. In Judea, it was somewhat different. Sa
cred books were circulating there, in which, under dark prophetic
symbols, hints were given of a future gathering of aU the nations
under one great king and head. But these hints were universally
misunderstood and misapplied. Amid all the confined and exclusive
religions of that period, there was not one more confined, or more
exclusive, than Judaism. Both socially and reUgiously, the Jew of
She Saviour's time was one of the most shut up and bigoted of the
race. Everything about him— his dress, his food, his domestic cu»
toms, nis religious ceremonies — marked him off by a broad wall of
separation from the rest of the species. He gloried in this distinc-
842 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
tion. He thought and spoke of himself and his brethren as the elect
of God, the holy, the clean : the Gentiles were the dogs, the poUuted,
the unclean. His attachment to his religion, as a faith proclaimed
exclusively to his forefathers, and bequeathed by them as a national
heritage to their children, was intense. His faith and his patriotism
were one, and the deeper the patriotism the narrower the faith. And
yet it is among this people ; it is from one who was brought up in
one of its wildest districts ; it is from one for whom birth, position,
education, had done nothing in the way of weaning him from the
common prejudices of his countrymen, making him in that respect
different from any other Jew ; it is from one who, save occasional
visits to Jerusalem, never moved beyond the neighborhood of a Gali
lean village, nor shared in the benefits of any other society than it
supplied; it is from him that a reHgion emanates whose professed
object is to gather into one, within its all-embracing arms, the whole
human family. The very broaching of a project so original, so com
prehensive, so sublime, at that time and in those circumstances,
stands out as an event unique in the history of our race. In vain
shall we try to explain it on the supposition that it was the self- sug
gested scheme of the son of a Galilean tradesman. The very time
and manner of its earthly birth claims for it a heavenly origin. Had
Jesus Christ done nothing more than this — set the idea for the first
time afloat, that it was desirable and practicable to frame for the
world a religious faith and worship which should have nothing of the
confinements of country, or period, or caste, but be alike adapted to
aU countries, all periods, all kinds and classes of men — he would have
stood by himself and above all others.
But he did more than this. He not only announced the project,
but he devised the instrument by which it was to be accomphshed ;
he put that instrument in its complete and perfect form into the
hands of those by whom it was to be employed. Study the history
of all other revolutions, civil or religious, which have taken place
upon this earth, and you will find it to be true of all of them, that the
methods by which they were wrought out were at first devised by
different men and at lengthened intervals, and afterwards perfected
by slow degrees. The men engaged in effecting them had to feel
their way forward ; had often to retrace their steps; had often to cast
aside an old instrument because it was. found to be useless, or be
cause a new and better one had been fallen upon in its stead. It has
not been so with the establishment and propagation upon the earth
of the religion of Jesus Christ. The instrumentahty employed here
has been the same from the beginning. It has never asked for, be-
THE GREAT COMMISSION. 843
cause it never needed, improvement or change. We have it now in
our hands in the same form in which it was put by Christ himself
into the hands of the first disciples of the faith. The experience of
so many centuries has detected no flaw, revealed no weakness, pro
vided no substitute. When Jesus said, Go, make disciples of aU na
tions, he announced — and that in the simplest, least ostentatious
way, as U there were no novelty in the project, no difficulty in ita
execution, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that it
should be taken up, as if it were the surest thing that it could be car
ried out — he announced the most original, the broadest, the sublimest
enterprise that ever human hands have been caUed upon to accom
plish. And when he said, Go, preach the gospel to every creature,
he supplied, in its complete and perfect form, the instrument by
which it was to be reahzed. And that simple gospel of the grace of
God preached, proclaimed, made known among aU nations, to every
creature, has it not proved itself fitted for the work? No nation can
claim this gospel as peculiarly its own. No class or kind of human
beings can appropriate it to themselves. It speaks with the same
voice, it addresses the same message to the wandering savage and to
the civilized citizen, to the most abandoned reprobate and to the most
correct and fastidious moralist. Its immediate and direct appeal is
to the naked human conscience, to man as a sinner before his Maker.
WhoUy overlooking and ignoring aU other distinctions of character
and condition, it regards us all as on the common level of condemna
tion, under the sentence of that law which is holy and just and good.
To each of us, as righteously condemned, it offers a free, full pardon
through the death, an immediate and entire acceptance through the
merits and mediation, of Jesus Christ. It presents the means and
influences by which a holy character and life may be attained on
earth, and it opens up the way to a blissful immortality hereafter.
If, looking simply at the outward means employed, we were asked
wherein lay the secret of the immediate and immense power which
the Christian religion at first exerted upon such multitudes of men,
we should say that it was in the call it carried with it to every man,
just as it found him, to repent, and repenting, enter into immediate
peace with his Maker through Jesus Christ ; in the assurance that it
gave of God's perfect good-wiU to him, His perfect readiness to for
give and accept ; the proclamation which it made that, by Christ's
death, every let or hinderance had been removed, and that every sin
ful chfld of Adam was invited to enter into that rest which Christ had
provided for all who came to him. Only think, when these tidings
were new, and when they were at once heartily and cordiaUy beheved
344 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
in, what a wonderful revolution in man's inner being they were fitted
to effect ! Can you wonder when, to a world grown weary of its fol-
Hes, its idolatries, its philosophies, its gropings in the dark, its strug
gles to find the truth, its passionate desire to know something of that
world beyond the grave, for the first time it was told that God was
not a God afar off but very near at hand, for he had sent his own Son
into the world to make such a revelation of him that it could be said
that whosoever had seen him had seen the Father also; it was told
that a Hfe beyond the grave was no longer a matter of speculation,
for Christ, the Son of the Eternal, had risen as the first-fruits of a
coming general resurrection of the dead ; it was told that access to
God and to God's full favor was no longer a thing of doubt and time
and difficulty, to be reached, if reached at all, through prayer and
priests, and services and sacrifices, for a new and direct and open
way had been revealed by God himseU, through which any one might
step at once into his gracious presence, into the full Hght of his rec
onciled countenance ; it was told that the forgiveness of aU his past
sin was no longer a matter about which, to the last moment of his
Hfe, a man was to be kept hanging between hope and fear, for through
this man Christ Jesus there was offered to all who would accept it
an instant remission of aU their sins; it was told that poor, weak,
tempted, erring, sinful, suffering man had no longer to regard himself
as an ahen, an exile from the world of the pure and the blessed,
frowned on by the beings or powers he worshipped, his whole Ufe
turned into a struggle by one or other kind of propitiatory offerings
to keep on something like good terms with his conscience and his
God, for there was One who had loved and suffered and died to save
him ; a man like himseU, and yet a God ; a man to pity, a God to
protect; a man to sympathize, a God to succor; whose presence,
companionship, friendship, were waiting to cheer his path in Hfe, and
illumine for him the dark valley of the shadow of death ; can you
wonder that when, in aU its simpHcity and in all its fulness of comfort
and consolation, the gospel of the grace of God was first proclaimed
to sinful men, it was hailed by thousands as indeed glad tidings from
the far country ? Or, looking at the Scripture records, can you won
der that the three thousand who were converted on the day of Pen
tecost, as they broke bread from house to house did eat their meat
with such gladness and singleness of heart, praising God? Can yon
wonder, when with one accord the people of Samaria gave heed to
the things spoken by Phflip, preaching peace by Jesus Christ, that
there was great joy in that city? Can you wonder, when the Ethio
pian treasurer had his eyes opened to see who it was who had been
THE GREAT COMMISSION. 845
wounded for his transgressions and bruised for his iniquities, and
found in Jesus the very Saviour that he needed, that he went on his
way rejoicing ? Can you wonder, when at Antioch and elsewhere the
Gentiles heard for the first time all the words of this life, that "they
were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord" ? Many and great
indeed were the hinderances which arose : slow often and difficult the
progress that was made. But the way in which these hinderances
generaUy acted, was to cloud with some obscurity the simple tidings
of the love of God in Christ to sinful men ; to close the door that his
grace had opened; to fetter with this condition or with that, the full
reconciliation with our Maker into which we are all invited at once
to enter; more or less, in fact, to assimilate the reHgion of Jesus to
aU the other rehgions which have represented God's favor as a thing
to be toiled for through life, and to be won, U won at aU, only at its
close — the Hfe itseU to be passed in a sustained uncertainty as to
whether it would be got at last or not — whereas it is the distinction
and the glory and the power of the gospel of the grace of God, that
it holds out to us at the very first, as a gratuity, which it has cost
Christ much to purchase, but which it costs us nothing to acquire —
the forgiving, loving favor of the Most High. It asks us to dismiss
here aU our doubts and fears ; to know and believe the love which
God has to us ; to see in Jesus one in whom we can undoubtingly
confide, who is absolutely to be depended on, on whom it is impossi
ble that too much confidence can be reposed ; who by every way
that love could devise, or the spirit of seU-sacrifice achieve, has
tried to get us to trust alone, unhesitatingly, habituaUy, for ever in
him. What is i*t — how often do we ask these hearts of ours — what is it
which keeps us from welcoming such glad tidings ? What is it which
keeps these tidings from filling our hearts with a full and continued
joy ? What is it which keeps us from trusting one so entirely worthy
of our confidence as Jesus Christ ? Nothing whatever in the tidings ;
nothing in Him of whom the tidings speak.
Try U you can construct any form of words better fitted than
those which meet you in the Bible, clearly and forcibly to express
the idea that God is now in Jdsus Christ most thoroughly prepared,
is most entirely willing, to receive at once into his favor every re
pentant, returning child of Adam, and that there is not a single man
anywhere, or upon any ground, shut out from coming and accepting
this pardon — coming and entering into this peace. "Ho ! every one
that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. H any man thirst, let him
come to me and drink. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are
846 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
heavy laden, and I wfll give you rest. God so loved the world, as to
give his only-begotten Son, that whosoever beheveth in him might
not perish, but have everlasting life. The Spirit and the Bride say,
Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is
¦athirst come. And whosoever wiU, let him take the water of Hfe
freely." Any one — every one — aU — whosoever; we know no other
words which could more thoroughly take in all, excluding none.
These, however, are but words. The great thing is to get fixed in
the mind and heart that which these words point to and express ;
that the God whom we have offended approaches us in love, in Christ,
assuring us of a gracious reception ; the embrace of a Father's guid
ing, protecting arms, and the shelter hereafter of a Father's secure
and blessed home.
" Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and
of the Holy Ghost." Our Lord's forerunner had adopted the practice
of baptizing those who desired to be regarded as his followers. His
baptism, however, was prefigurative and incomplete. It was simply
a baptism unto repentance. It was a faith only in the kingdom as
at hand that was required of those who submitted to it. But the
kingdom had come. The day of Pentecost, on which it was to be
visibly erected, was drawing near. Another higher and fuUer bap
tism was now to be proclaimed, and thenceforward to be administered.
Baptizing into the name : not simply in the name, of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost; this might mean no more than per
forming the rite in the name, that is, by the authority of God. The
name of God, we know, is the term commonly employed in Scripture
to indicate the character and the nature of the Supreme. When the
expression meets us then — the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost — we understand it as expressive of the one nature re
vealed to Us in the three personahties of the Triune Jehovah. Now
to be baptized into that name is to be taken up into, to be incorpo
rated with him whose name is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The
term is expressive or symboHc, not of a mere outward and formal
acknowledgment or confession of our faith in the Divinity, as he has
been pleased to reveal himseU to us under that mysterious distinc
tion of a threefold personahty; but of an inward and spiritual union,
communion, feUowship, with the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.
The Israehtes were aU baptized unto Moses, and, as so baptized, were
taken up into, and incorporated with, that spiritual community of
which the Mosaic was an external type. They did all eat the same
spiritual meat, and did all drink the same spiritual drink ; derived aU
their strength and refreshment from the same spiritual sources. And
THE GREAT COMMISSION. 847
even so are aU baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Ghost, emblematic of that oneness with each and aU of the
three persons of the Trinity, which the Saviour had in his eye when
he prayed for his own: "That they all may be one; as thou, Father,
art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us." And that
same oneness through Christ with the Father and the Holy Ghost, is
it not equaUy if not still more distinctly and impressively held out to
our view in the sacrament of the Supper? "The cup of blessing
which we bless, is it not the communion, or common participation, of
the blood of Christ ? The bread which we break, is it not the com
munion, or common participation, of the body of Christ ? For we,
being many, are one bread and one body; for we are aU partakers of
that one bread." Closest, loftiest, most blessed of all fellowships,
that to which in Jesus Christ we are elevated, and of which our par
ticipation of the two sacraments of the church is the external sign.
" Teaching them to observe aU things whatsoever I have com
manded you." The crowning glory of the gospel — of its proclamation
of a free and fuU justification before God, alone through the merits
of the Saviour — is this, that it opens the way and supplies the motive
to a right and dutiful discharge of aU commanded duty. Enthroning
Christ in the heart, planting deep within it, as its strongest and most
¦constraining motive, a supreme love to him, it produces an obedience
which springs not from fear, but from love. " If ye love me," said
Jesus to his disciples, "keep my commandments." He did not ques
tion or suspect the reaHty of their love. He knew there was a kind
of love they aU had to him. But that affection, tender as it was,
might not be strong; regarding him mainly in the character of a
companion or friend, it might fafl to recognize him in the character
of their Master, their Lord. 'If ye indeed love me, then,' says Jesus
to them and to us, 'let not love die out in the mere feehng of attach
ment to my person; let it find. its becoming and appropriate expres
sion in the keeping of my commandments; so shaU it be preserved
from evaporating in the emotion of the hour ; so shall it be consoli
dated into a fixed, a strong, a permanent principle of action.' All
love, even that of equal to equal, if unexpressed, if unembodied, has
a strong tendency to decHne; but U it be love of a dependent to a
superior, of a servant to a master, the love which does not clothe
itself in obedience, becomes spurious as weU as weak. A bare ac
knowledgment in words, or in some formal act of bare profession of
the fatherly or masterly relationship— what is it worth U the author
ity of the father be disregarded, the orders of the master be diso
beyed? H we fail to regard Christ as the Lord of the conscience,
848 THE LIFE OF CHRIST,
the lawgiver of the life; U our obhgations to be all and do aU he has
commanded be unfelt; if the love we cherish to him go not forth into
action — such barren and unfruitful affection will not be recognized
by him, who hath not only said, "H ye love me, ye will keep my
commandments," but also, " He that hath my commandments and
keepetli them, he it is that loveth me." On the other hand, if our
love to Christ, however faint and feeble it be at the first, has not only
an eye to see him and admire his beauty, but an ear to hear him and
obey his word ; if under the strong conviction that to offer love with
out service to such a Saviour as Jesus is, would be but another vari
ety of that mockery to which he was subjected in the judgment-hall
of Pilate ; U the sincere and honest effort be put forth to obey the
precepts he has given for the regulation of our heart and Ufe — then
shall each fresh effort of that kind, however short it faU of its destined
aim, exert the happiest influence upon the love from which it springs,
quickening, expanding, elevating, intensUying it. Each new attempt
to do his will shaU reveal something more of the loveableness of the
Eedeemer's character. The loving and the doing shall help each
other on, tfll the loving shaU make the doing light; and by the doing
shall the loving be itself made perfect.
And one marked peculiarity of the obedience thus reahzed shall
be this, that all things whatsoever Christ hath commanded wfll be
attempted, at least, U not discharged. " Te are my friends," said
Jesus, "if ye do whatsoever I command you;" a test of friendship
very sad and hopeless in the apphcation of it, were it meant that
whatsoever Christ has commanded must be done, up to the fuU meas
ure and extent of his requirement, before we could be reckoned as his
friends. Then were that friendship put altogether beyond our reach.
A test, however, both true and capable of immediate and universal
apphcation, if we regard it as meaning that it is by the universahty
of its embrace, and not by its perfection in any one individual in
stance, that the obedience of the Christian is characterized; that there
shaU not be one command which is freely, wilfuUy, and habituaUy
violated; not one known duty which is not habitually tried to be dis
charged. As ever then we hope to be acknowledged as his friends,
his true and faithful foUowers, let us esteem every precept he hath
given concerning everything to be right ; and let us give ourselves to
the unreserved, unrestricted doing of his wfll. Matt. 5 : 21, 27.
"Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."
Jesus had spoken much to his disciples about his departure from
them, about his leaving them alone. "I go my way," he had said to
them in the upper chamber, " and none of you asketh, Whither goest
THE GREAT COMMISSION. 849
thou? A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a little while
and ye shaU see me, because I go to the Father. I came forth from
the Father, and am come into the world ; again, I leave the world,
and go to the Father. And ye now therefore have sorrow ; but I will
see you again, and your heart shaU rejoice, and your joy no man
taketh from you." It was in such an affectionate, sympathizing way
that Jesus sought beforehand to prepare the minds and hearts of his
disciples for the shock of his death, the sorrow of his departure. For
a little while they -did not see him ; he was lost in the darkness of the
sepulchre. Again, for a Httle while, they did see him, on those few
occasions when he made himseU visible to them after his resurrec
tion. Even, however, on one of the earHest of these appearances, he
seemed at pains to remove the idea from his disciples' minds that he
had returned in order to abide. " Touch me not," was his language
to Mary, "for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my
brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your
Father, and to my God and your God." It was as one on his way to
the Father, tarrying but a Httle while on the earth, that he desired
during the forty days to be recognized. But now, when in this great
interview on the mountain-side, he manUests forth his glory, takes to
himself his great power, announces the universal sovereignty which
had been put into his hands as the Mediator, issues the great com
mission upon which, in aU ages, his foUowers were to act, he closes
by speaking, not of his approaching departure, but of his continued,
his abiding presence : " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end
of the world." The Omnipotent reveals himself thus as the Omni
present also : ' Go ye into all nations, go to the farthest corner of the
habitable globe, but know that, go where you wfll, my presence goeth
with you. Labor on, generation after generation, but know that the
time shaU never come when I shall leave you or forsake you. My
bodfly presence I remove ; with the eye of sense you soon shaU see
me no more ; but my spiritual presence shaU never be withdrawn; it
shall abide with you continuaUy, even to the end of the world, tfll I
come again, tfll that time arrive when it shaU no longer be said that
I wfll come to you to Uve with you — when I shaU come to take you
to myseU, that where I am there ye may be also.'
The richest legacy he could have left to it is this promise of his
abiding presence with the church. Looking at the church generaUy,
at the church in any one country or in any one city, any one section
of the church — we may often wonder and be afraid as we contemplate
the 6-Mculties she has to contend with in going forth to execute the
great errand upon which she has been sent. This is the Hght, how-
Lft'a of Chrtet. 54
860 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
ever, in all the darkness. AU power has been given to Christ in
Jieaven and earth; he has been constituted Head over aU things for
the church. This headship over aU the principaHties and powers of
darkness, this power over aU things in heaven and earth, shaU he not
employ in helping onward the great movement which is to give him
the heathen for his inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for
his possession ?
It is not indeed by bare might and power that this great con
quest of the world is to be won. When Jesus says, "All power is
given unto me in heaven and earth," he does not add, Go ye there
fore, and by the employment of so much of that power as I may
please to communicate, subdue aU mine enemies, uproot aU rival
thrones, set up and extend thy kingdom. No; but, Go teach and
preach, instruct, persuade; the conversion of the world to me must
be a thing of willingness, and not of compulsion. They must be
taught; for how shall they caU on him in whom they have not
beheved, and how shaU they beheve on him of whom they have not
heard, and how shaU they hear without a preacher, and how shall
they preach except they be sent? As it is written, "How beautiful
are tho feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad
tidings of good things !" But not only must they be taught, the
¦people must be made wiUing in the day of the Lord's power — a
power which shaU work on them, not from without but from within,
drawing them to himseU. But how shaU that power be brought into
f uU and Hving operation ? It comes, it works according to our faith,
in answer to our prayers; it comes through the realizing of the pres
ence of the Saviour; the pleading for the promise of the Spirit to be
fulfiUed. Do we ask ourselves why it is that so many hundred years
have roUed away since these words were spoken in Galflee; since
the world was given by him into the hands of his foUowers, to go oui
upon it and reclaim it unto God, and yet so Httle progress has been
made towards the great consummation ; not half the globe yet ever
nominally won? The answer is at hand: Our lack of faith; ou*
lack of prayer ; our lack of efforts undertaken in the name, and pros
ecuted in the promised strength of the Eedeemer.
But this great parting promise of our Lord is to be taken by us
as addressed not merely to the church at large in her collective
capacity, or as engaged in her public work of propagating the truth
as it is in Jesus. It is to be taken as addressed to every individual
Christian. "Behold," says Jesus, "I stand at the door, and knock
if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I wiU come in to him
and will sup with him, and he with me." "Ii a man love me, he wfll
THE GREAT COMMISSION. 851
keep my words, and my Father wiU love him, and we will come unto
him, and make our abode with him." I wfll come; I and my Father
wfll come. We will come. Was ever such a plural used as that !
Who is he who associates himself in this way with the omnipresent
and omnipotent Jehovah, who engages for the Father, and what he
engages for the Father undertakes equaUy himseU? We wfll come
to him, not to pay a transient visit, not as the wayfaring man who
turns aside to tarry but for a night. We will take up our abode
with him. To have these words of Jesus realized in our dafly,
hourly life, to know and beUeve that he is indeed with us, beside us,
has come to us, has taken up his abode with us, this is our comfort
and our strength. Nothing short of this wfll do. No general belief
in aU that Jesus was and did and suffered here on earth, no behef in
anything about him, nothing but himseU in Hving, loving presence,
seen and felt by us, as a presence as real as that of the closest com
panionship of Hfe; as real, but a thousand times closer, a thousand
times more precious.
How weU he knows this who has said and done so much to
encourage his people in aU ages to realize his presence with them in
all the stages of their earthly Hfe! .A famine drives Isaac from
Judea. He halts at Gerar, meditating a stfll farther flight. The
Lord appears to him and says, " Go not down into Egypt ; dweU
in the land which I shaU teU thee of. Sojourn in this land, and
I wfll be with thee and bless thee." Let the patriarch but know
and feel that the Lord is with him, and no fear shaU drive him
from the place which that God hath appointed as his habitation.
Sleeping Jacob Hes with his head upon the stony pfllow ; the vision
comes to him by night ; the Lord speaks to him from the top of the
mystic ladder : " Behold, 1 am with thee, and will keep thee in all
¦places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land,
for I will not leave thee till I have done that which I have spoken to thee
of." Let Jacob but carry a sense of that presence along with him,
and his sohtary path and his fears of exile shaU be Hghtened, and
that future, so dark to him as he fled from his father's presence, shall
be turned into Hght. It was a heavy task for hands Hke Joshua's to
undertake to be successor to such a man as Moses. When that
great leader of the people died, how destitute and helpless must
Joshua have felt ! What a crowd of difficulties must have risen up
before his mind, as standing in the way of the invasion and the con
quest of Canaan ! But aU his discouragements were met by that
word of Jehovah : " Be strong and of a good courage ; as I was with
Moses, so I will be with thee ; I will not fafl thee nor forsake thee.
852 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
There shaU not any man be able to stand before thee aU the days of
thy Hfe." Solomon had almost as difficult a succession to fill as
Joshua. It was no easy duty to take David's place, and to carry
out his great design. But there was a way in which he might have
been strengthened for the task. " If," said the Lord to him, " thou
wflt hearken unto aU that I command thee, I will be with thee, and
build thee a sure house." And stfll, whatever be the pecuHarities of
our lot in Hfe, the nature of the duties we have to discharge, the
difficulties to contend with, the trials to bear, the temptations to
meet, stfll it is the fulfilment of that most gracious promise, I wiU be
with thee, which alone can bear us up, and bear us through. Let us
rest more simply and entirely on it, trying, as we advance in Hfe, to
have more and more of the spirit of the Psalmist, as he looked out
upon the future and said, "I will fear no evil, for thou art with me,
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Surely goodness and mercy
shaU foUow me all the days of my Hfe ; and I wfll dweU in the house
of the Lord for ever."
IX.
The ^scension.*
There are ten appearances of our Saviour after his resurrection
recorded in the New Testament. So many as five of them occurred
on the day of the resurrection : those, namely, to Mary Magdalene,
to the Gahlean women, to Peter, to the two disciples on their way to
Emmaus, to the ten apostles and others assembled in the evening
within the upper chamber. The sixth appearance was to the eleven
and the rest on the evening of the seventh day from that on which
he rose from the dead. The seventh — spoken of by John as the
third time that he showed himself, inasmuch as it was the third
occasion upon which he had met with them coUectively, or in any
considerable number together — was to the seven disciples by the sea
of Tiberias. The eighth was the great manffestation on the moun
tain side of Galflee. The ninth, of which we should have known
nothing but for the simple record of it preserved in the fifteenth
chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians, was to James the
brother of the Lord; and finally, the tenth, on the occasion of the
ascension. There may have been other unrecorded appearances of
our Lord. It is nowhere said in the gospels or epistles that there
were none else besides the ones related therein. But the nature of
* Luke 24 : 44-53 ; Acts 1 : 3-6.
THE ASCENSION. 853
the case, and the manner of the narrative, force upon us the beHef
that U there were any such, they must have partaken of the charac
ter of the manifestation to James; having a private and personal,
rather than a public object in view. But why, U his interviews with
his foUowers were so few, his intercourse with them so brief, so
broken, so reserved/did Jesus remain on earth so long? Why were
so many as forty days of an existence such as his spent by him in
this way ? It may seem useless even to put a question to which no
•satisfactory answer can be given, inasmuch as, beyond the mere
statement that he afforded thereby many -infallible proofs of his
resurrection, nothing explicit is said in the Scriptures as to the par
ticular object or design of this lingering of our Lord so long upon
the earth. And yet it is scarcely possible for us to forget, or to fail
in being struck by it, that this period of forty days was one which
had already been signalized in the history of redemption; and look
ing at the other instances in which it meets our eye in the Scripture
narrative, we are tempted to put the question, Was it as Moses was
withdrawn from men, to spend these forty days in fasting and prayer
on the mount with God, as the fit and solemn preparation for the
promulgation of the law through his hands at Sinai? Was it as
Ehjah was carried away into the wilderness, to fast and pray there
lor forty days, to prepare him for his great work as the restorer of
the law in Israel ? Was it as Jesus himseU, after his baptism, was
led by the Spirit into the wilderness, to fast there forty days, and at
the end to be tempted of the devil, to fit him for that earthly minis
try which was to close in his death upon the cross ? Was it even so
that now, for another forty days, our Lord was detained on earth, as
the suitable preface or prelude to his entrance upon that higher
-stage of the mediatorial work in which he is to sit upon the throne,
henceforth expecting tfll his enemies be made his footstool ?
Passing, however, from a topic which must remain shrouded in
obscurity, let us take up the incidents of our Lord's parting inter
view with his apostles. They have returned from Galflee, and are
now once more at Jerusalem. There might have been some specific
instructions to that effect delivered in private to themselves, or com
municated to them through James, which brought the disciples back
from Galilee to Jerusalem. But we do not need to suppose that it was
so, in order to account for the movement; for let us remember that
this period of forty days was immediately preceded by the great fes
tival of the Passover, and followed by that of Pentecost, both of
which required the presence of the apostles at Jerusalem. It was
not tfll the first of them was over that they could well leave the Holy
854 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
City, and so you find them remaining there for a week after the
resurrection. And now the promised and appointed meeting in
Galfloe having taken place, the approach of the second festival
naturaUy invited their return.. However it came about, the fortieth
day after the resurrection saw the eleven and their companions once
more assembled at Jerusalem. Christ's former meetings with them
there coUectively had been in the evening, in the closed chamber,
where they had assembled in secret for fear of the Jews. This last
one, though we know not when or how it commenced, may have
begun in the same upper chamber already haUowed by the former
meetings, but it was obviously at an earher hour, and took place
in the broad daylight. The first, or earHer part of ft — that spent
within the city — appears to have been devoted to the renewal and
expansion of such . instructions as he had dehvered to the two dis
ciples on their journey to Emmaus. We gather this from the forty-
fourth to the forty-seventh verses of the twenty-fourth chapter of
St. Luke's gospel. It is very natural to read these verses in imme
diate connection with those which go before, and to regard them
simply as a continuation of the narrative of what occurred at that
meeting on the evening of the resurrection day. And so indeed, in
common with the majority of readers, we were at first disposed to
regard them. By reading on to the end of the chapter, however,
you will at once perceive that the narrator, without any note or
mark of time, has condensed into one short and continuous state
ment all that he had then to say about the period between the resur
rection and the ascension; omitting so entirely all mention of any
after day or after meetings, that if you had had nothing but this last
chapter of Luke to guide you, you might have imagined — indeed,
could not well have thought anything else — that the ascension had
taken place on the very evening of the resurrection day. The same
narrative, however, Lnke has, in the first chapter of the Acts, filled
up, and broken down into its parts' the brief and summary notice
with which he had closed his gospel. And it is when we compare
what he says in the one writing with what he says in the other,
that we become persuaded that the verses from the forty-fourth
downward of the last chapter in his gospel belongs to and de-
scribes, not what happened in the evening interview on the day
of the resurrection, but what happened in the last interview of all
on the day of the ascension; for you wfll notice as common to the
two accounts, the peremptory injunction laid upon the apostles,
that they were not to leave Jerusalem tfll the promise of the Fa
ther had been fulfilled, and the baptism of the Spirit had been
THE ASCENSION. 855
conferred. Such an injunction would not have been proper to the
occasion of the first interview in the upper chamber. They were to
leave Jerusalem, and in point of fact did leave it, after that meeting,
to see the Lord in Galilee. According, however, to the account con
tained in the Acts of the Apostles, it was after the command had
been given that they should not depart from Jerusalem that Jesus
spake to them of their being witnesses unto him in Jerusalem, and
in aU Judea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the
earth ; an announcement which corresponds with that contained in
the forty-seventh and forty-eighth verses of the chapter in the gos
pel, leading us naturaUy to conclude that these verses relate to the
final meeting on the ascension day. We must make a break some
where in the chapter of the gospel; and it seems, on the whole,
much more natural and consistent to make it at the end of the forty-
third that at the forty-eighth verse.
Adopting, then, this idea, we have the fact before us that, in the
first instance, when he met with the eleven in the course of that day
on which he was taken up into heaven, our Saviour occupied himseU
with showing them how needful it was that all things that had been
written in the law of Moses and in the Prophets and in the Psalms
regarding him should be fulfilled ; with showing them how exactly
many of their ancient prophecies had met with their fulfilment in the
manner and circumstances of his death ; with showing them how it
behooved him to suffer, and through suffering to reach the throne of
that kingdom which he came to set up on the earth ; at once unfold
ing to them the Scriptures, and opening their minds to understand
them. As on the first, so now on the last day of his being with them,
this was the chosen theme on which he dwelt; this the lesson upon
which a larger amount of pains and care was bestowed by our Lord
after his resurrection than upon any other. What weight and worth
does this attach to these Old Testament testimonies to his Messiah-
ship ! what a sanction does it lend to our searching of their prophetic
records, in the belief that we shaU find much there pointing, in proph
ecy and type and figure, to the Lamb slain before the foundation of
the earth, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.
Our Lord's exposition of these Scriptures could not have been
whoUy hi vain. The veil which had been upon the hearts of his
apostles in their former reading of the prophecies must have been at
least partially removed. Their notions of a Messiah coming only to
conquer, only to restore and establish and extend the old Jewish the
ocracy, must have been materially altered and rectified. When, then,
after aU these expositions of their Master — after all the fresh light he
856 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
had thrown upon the true nature of his kingdom and the manner of
its establishment, you find them coming to him and saying, " Lord,
wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" it could
scarcely be that, ignoring all they had just heard, and clinging still
to their first belief, they were inquiring about an immediate erection
of a temporal and visible kingdom. Let us rather beheve that, accept
ing all which Jesus had taught them, admitting now fuUy the idea of
a suffering and dying Messiah, their conceptions altered and elevated
at once as to the kind of kingdom he was to set up, and the way in
which that kingdom was to be estabhshed and advanced — building
upon these new foundations, their old spirit of curiosity found now a
new object on which to fasten. They saw now the need there was
that Jesus should have suffered all these things ; but stiU there was
a kingdom which, through these sufferings, he was to reach, a glory
on which, when these were over, he was to enter. Stfll there lay
within these prophecies, which their minds had now been opened to
understand, many a wonderful announcement of the part which Israel
was to take in the erection and consolidation of the Eedeemer's
empire upon this earth. So much had already been accomphshed by
their Lord and Master. He had been wounded for their transgres
sions, bruised for their iniquities ; was he now to see bf the travail
of his soul ; to divide the portion with the great, the spoil with the
strong ? Were nations that knew not him to run unto him ; was he
tc be exalted as Governor among the nations; were aU the ends of
the earth to remember and turn unto the Lord, all the kindreds of
the nations to worship before him ; was his law to go forth of Zion,
and his word from Jerusalem ; and were the nations, as it had been
predicted they should do in the latter days, the days of the Messiah's
reign, to be heard saying, " Come and let us go up to the mountain of
the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob " ? " Lord," they say
to him, with some such thoughts floating vaguely through their
minds, " wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel ?"
Jesus, in answering that question, does not blame, does not rebuke ;
says nothing that would imply that they were radicaUy wrong in the
hopes which they were cherishing; that there was no such kingdom
as that they were asking about. Nay, rather, does he not assume
that the kingdom was to be restored to Israel ; that the question was
only one as to time; that it was here, in their too eager haste and
impatience, that the error of the disciples lay? "And he said unto
them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the
.Father hath put in his own power;" a somewhat different declaration
from that which Jesus made when, speaking of the time of his own
THE ASCENSION. 857
second advent, he said, "Of that day and hour knoweth no man, not
the angels of God," no, not even the Son in his character as the great
prophet and revealer of the future to the church, but the Father
only. But he does not say that he himseU was ignorant of the times
and the seasons. He only says that it was not for them, the disci
ples, to know them. They were among the secret things which the
Father had reserved and kept within his own power, to reveal when
and how and to whom he pleased. Would that these words of
Jesus— among the last he ever uttered— had been sufficiently pon
dered by our prophetic interpreters in their pryings into the unknown
future which Hes before us. Curiosity as to that future is not unnat
ural. There are so many things to make us desire to see things
otherwise and better ordered than they now are. There He too on
the pages of prophecy so many things which remain yet to be accom
phshed, such bright and glorious visions of a coming period of tri
umph for the truth, a coming reign of peace and virtue and piety
upon this earth, that we are not disposed to quarrel much with those
whose eyes are turned longingly upon a future out of whose pregnant
bosom such great and glorious things are to emerge. But we are
most imperatively bound to keep our curiosity here under that check
which the hand of the Eedeemer himseU has laid upon it, and to
remember that he has told us of many things which are yet to come
to pass, not that we might be able to predict them, to specify before
hand the dates of their arrival, but that when they do come to pass
we might beheve.
But if that kind of knowledge which they were seeking for was
denied to the disciples, another and better thing was to be given them
instead. They were to receive power from on high to execute that
great mission upon which they were to be sent forth ; that mission
was to consist in their proclaiming everywhere repentance and remis
sion of sins in the name of Jesus ; and beginning at Jerusalem as
the centre, they. were to go forth, not as prophets of the future, but
as witnesses of the past, witnesses for Christ, to carry the glad tidings
abroad through aU Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost
parts of the earth. Three things are noticeable here :
1. The simphcity of the gospel message as originaUy promulgated
by Christ himself. Eepentance, a turning from all evil, a turning with
true and penitent spirit to God; remission of sins, the covering of all
past transgression by an act of grace on the part of God; the remis
sion of sins, offered in the name of Jesus, coming only, but coming
directly, immediately, ftdly, in and through the name of him who is
the one aU-prevalent Mediator between man and God; such was the
358 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
burden of that simple message which, in parting from them, Jesus
committed to his disciples to make known over all the earth.
2. The wider and wider compass of that sphere over which this
message was to be borne by them. Upon the universahty of ita
embrace — its being a message for all mankind, for men of every age
and country, character, and condition — we have already briefly
commented ; but let us not overlook here the fact as pointing to the
true order in which all evangelistic labors should be prosecuted,
that the apostles were to begin at Jerusalem, to go throughout aU
Judea, to penetrate Samaria with the glad tidings, and then to bear
them on to the uttermost parts of the earth. Whatever else may
have lain at the bottom of these instructions, this at least is apparent,
that their own capital, their own country, their own kindred, their
own immediate neighbors were first to have the tender made to them.
Are we wrong in interpreting the direction of our Saviour as imply
ing that aU Christian effort should be from the centre to the circum
ference ; should be so directed as to fill the inner circles first — the
circles of our own heart, our own home, our own city, our own coun
try ; and that U, overlooking these, neglecting these, we busy our
selves among the broader, wider, outer circles, we are reversing the
order and running counter to the directions of the Master whom we
serve ? I shaU not venture here to say how much better I think it
would be for ourselves and for others, for Christianity and for the
world, U, instead of embarking in enterprises which fascinate by the
wideness of their scope, but upon which, just because of that wide-
ness, so much labor is wasted, each man were to cultivate the Httle
sphere which lies more immediately around him.
3. We notice the qualification for Christian work, the baptism of
the Holy Spirit bestowing the needed power. The apostles had a
great commission given, a great task assigned; the wide world set
forth as the field of their future labors. But they were not as yet
prepared to execute this commission, to take up this work. They
were to wait in Jerusalem ; to wait some days ; do nothing but wait
and pray and hope; a good and useful lesson in itself, subduing,
restraining the spirit of eager and impatient seU-confidence — a lesson
which is stfll in force ; that pause, that period of inaction, those ten
days of stillness between the day of the ascension and the day of
Pentecost, as full of instruction still to us as of benefit originaUy to
the disciples. And when the baptism of fire at last was given, the
wanting element was supplied, said here by Christ himseU to be
power: 'Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, untfl ye be endued with
power from on high." " Te shaU receive power after that the Holy
THE ASCENSION. 859
Ghost is come upon you : and ye shall be witnesses unto me, both in
Jerusalem and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost
part of the earth." Not knowledge so much was wanted but power;
a firmer grasp of truth already known ; a stronger, deeper, steadier
attachment to a Saviour already loved ; conviction, affection ripened
into abiding, controlling, enduring principle of action; power to be,
to do, to suffer. Is not that the very thing which in religion we aU
most need ; the very thing we feel we cannot ourselves attain ; the
very thing which it requires the baptism of a heavenly influence to
bestow ?
But let us foUow Jesus to the mount caUed OHvet. His closing
counsels given, he leads his disciples out of the city. Did they, in
open day, pass along through the streets of Jerusalem ? li they did,
how many wondering eyes would rest upon the weU-known group of
Gahlean fishermen; how many wondering eyes would fix upon the
leader of that group — the Jesus of Nazareth, whom six weeks before
they had seen hanging upon the cross at Calvary. Little heeding
the looks which they attract, they pass through the city gate. They
are now on a weU-known track; they cross the Eedron; they ap
proach Gethsemane. We lose sight of them amid the deep shadows
of these olive-trees. Has Jesus paused for a moment to look, for the
last time, with those human eyes of his, upon the sacred spot where
he cast himself on the night of his great agony, upon the ground ?
Once more they emerge ; they climb the hUlside ; they cross its sum
mit; they are approaching Bethany. He stops; they gather round.
He looks upon them; he Hfts his hands; he begins to bless them.
What love unutterable in that parting look ; what untold riches in
that blessing ! His hands are uphfted; his hps are engaged in bless
ing, when slowly he begins to rise : earth has lost her power to keep ;
the waiting, up-drawing heavens claim him as their own. An attrac
tion stronger than our globe is on him, and declares its power. He
rises; but stiU as he floats upward through the yielding air, his eyes
are bent on these up-looking men ; his arms are stretched over them
in the attitude of benediction, his voice is heard dying away in bless
ings as he ascends. Awe-struck, in silence they follow him with
straining eyeballs, as his body lessens to sight, in its retreat upward
into that deep blue, tfll the commissioned cloud enfolds, cuts off aU
further vision, and closes the earthly and sensible communion between
Jesus and his disciples. That cloudy chariot bore him away, tfll he
was " received up into heaven, and sat down on the right hand of God."
How simple, yet how subhme, how pathetic this parting! No
disturbance of the elements, no chariot of fire, no escort of angels;
860 THE LIFE OF CHRIST.
nothing to disturb or distract the Httle company from whom he parts;
nothing to the very last to break in upon that close and brotherly
communion, which is continued as long as looking eye and listening
ear can keep it up. But who shaU teU us — when these earthly Hnks
were broken, and that cloud carried him to the farthest point in
which cloud could form or float, and left him there — who shaU teU us
what happened above, beyond, on the way to the throne ; in what
new form of glory, by what swUt flight, attended by what angel es
cort, accompanied by what burst of angehc praise, that throne of the
universe was reached ? Our straining eyes we too would turn up
ward to those heavens which received him, and wonder at the recep
tion which awaited him there, tfll on our ears there faUs that gentle
rebuke, " Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" 'Think not with
eyes Hke yours to pierce that cloud which hides the world of spirits
from mental vision. Enough for you to know that this same Jesus
shall so come in Hke manner as ye have seen him go.'
This mild rebuke was given to the men of Galilee upon the moun
tain top by two men in white apparel, who stood beside them, their
presence unnoted till their words had broken the deep silence^ and
drawn upon themselves that gaze hitherto directed towards heaven;
two angels, perhaps the two who watched by the empty sepulchre ;
one of them the same who in the hour of his great agony had been
sent to strengthen the sinking Saviour in the garden, now stationed
here at Olivet to soften, as it were, to the disciples the sorrow of this
parting, to turn that sorrow into joy. But how at that moment, when
they were discharging this kindly but humble office, were the heav
enly host engaged ? Surely, if at the emerging out of chaos of this
beautiful and orderly creation, those sons of God chanted together
the new world's birthday hymn ; surely, if in that innumerable host
above the plains of Bethlehem, a great multitude of them celebrated,
in notes of triumph, a still better and more glorious birth — the entire
company of the heavenly host must have struck their harps to the
fullest, noblest, richest anthem that ever they gave forth, as the great
Son of God, the Saviour of mankind — his earthly sorrows over, his
victories over Satan, sin, and death complete — sat down that day with
the Father on his throne, far above aU principaHties and powers, and
every name that is named, not only in this world, but in that which
is to come. Did these two angels who were left behind on earth, who
had this humbler task assigned them, feel at aU as U theirs were a
lower, meaner service ? No, they had too much of the spirit of TTim
who had for forty days kept that throne waiting to which he had
no\» ascended, that he might tabernacle stfll a Httie longer with the
THE ASCENSION. 861
children of men. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of
these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
" Why gaze ye up into heaven? This same Jesus shaU so come
in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." ' This is not a
final departure of this Jesus from the world he came to save. That
was not the last look the earth was ever to get of him that you got of
him as the clouds covered him from your view. He is to come again;
to come in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.' But
for that, perhaps the disciples might have returned to Jerusalem with
sad and downcast spirits, as those from whose head their Master had
been for ever taken away. As it was, they returned, we are told, with
great joy; the sorrow of the departure swallowed up in the hope of
the speedy return. So vivid, indeed, was the expectation cherished
by the first Christians of the second advent of the Lord, that it need
ed to be chastened and restrained. They required to have their
hearts directed into a patient waiting for that coming. It is very dif
ferent with us. We require to have that faith quickened and stimu
lated, which they needed to have chastened and restrained. It is
more with wonder than with great joy that we return from witness
ing the ascension of our Lord. But let us remember that though the
heavens have received him, it is not to keep him there apart for ever
from this world. He himseU cherishes no such feeling of retirement
and separation now that he has ascended up on high. I have spo
ken to you of his last words of blessing which feU audibly upon fleshly
ears. But what are the very last words that in vision he uttered:
"He that testifieth these things saith, Surely, I come quickly." Our
crowned Saviour waits ; with eager expectancy waits the coming of
the day when his presence shaU be again revealed among us. It may
seem slow to us, that evolution of the ages which is preparing aU
things for his approach. But with him who says, "I come quickly,"
one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day;
and as soon as the curtain shaU drop on the last act of that great
drama of which this earth is now the theatre, then, quick as love and
power can carry him, shall the same Jesus be here again on earth-
coming in Hke manner as these men of Galilee saw him go up to
heaven. Are we waiting for that coming, longing for that coming,
hastening to that coming? Are we ready, as he says to us, "Behold,
I come quickly," to add as our response, "Amen. Even so com^
Lord Jesus !"