Chapter VIII: Part VI: Christ’s Ministry. Act II

“What is it that ye came to note?
A young man preaching from a boat.”

A. CLOUGH.

THE second period of our Lord’s ministry is one, in the main, of joyful progress and triumph, in which the test of true manliness must be more subtle than when the surroundings are hostile. It consists, I think, at such times in the careful watchfulness not to give wrong impressions, not to mislead those who are touched by enthusiasm, conscious of new life, grateful to Him who has kindled that life in them.

It is then that the temptation to be all things to all men in a wrong sense,—to adapt and accommodate teaching and life to a lower standard in order to maintain a hold upon the masses of average men and women, who have been moved by the words of lips touched by fire from the altar of God,—has generally proved too much for the best and strongest of the world’s great reformers. It is scarcely necessary to labour this point, which would, I think, be sorrowfully admitted by those who have studied most lovingly and carefully the lives of such men for instance as Savonarola, or Wesley. If you will refer to a recent and valuable work on the life of a greater than either of these, Mr. Bosworth Smith’s _Mohammed and Mohammedanism_, you will find there perhaps the best illustration which I can give you of this sad experience.

When Mohammed returns from Medina, sweeping at last all enemies out of his path, as the prophet of a new faith, and the leader of an awakened and repentant people, his biographer pauses to notice the lowering of the standard, both in his life and teaching. Power, he pleads, brings with it new temptations, and new failures. The more thoroughly a man is carried away by his inspiration, and convinced of the truth and goodness of his cause and his message, the more likely is he to forget the means in the end, and to allow the end to justify whatever means seem to lead to its triumph. He must maintain as he can, and by any means, his power over the motley mass of followers that his mission has gathered round him, and will be apt to aim rather at what will hold them than at what will satisfy the highest promptings of his own conscience.

We may allow the plea in such cases, though with sorrow and humiliation. But the more minutely we examine the life of Christ, the more we shall feel that, here again, there is no place for it. We shall be impressed with the entire absence of any such bending to expediency, or forgetting the means in the end. He never for one moment accommodates His life or teaching to any standard but the highest: never lowers or relaxes that standard by a shade or a hair’s breadth, to make the road easy to rich or powerful questioners, or to uphold the spirit of His poorer followers when they are startled and uneasy, as they begin half blindly to recognise what spirit they are of. This unbending truthfulness is, then, what we have chiefly to look for in this period of triumphant progress and success, questioning each act and word in turn whether there is any swerving in it from the highest ideal.

It is not easy to mark off distinctly the time over which it extends, but it seems to me to commence with His return to Capernaum, after the healing of the centurion’s son, when He hears of the imprisonment of John, and to end with the estrangement of many of His followers at His teaching as to the bread of life, and the nearly contemporaneous and final and open rupture with, and defiance of, the chief priests and scribes and Pharisees, when they change from suspicious and watchful critics into open and avowed enemies, baffled for the moment, but dogging His footsteps and thirsting for His blood.

It is upon His relations with these scribes and Pharisees more particularly that we must keep our attention fixed, as it is here, if anywhere, that we may look for a failure of nerve and truthfulness, and therefore of manliness.

We must gather our connected view of this period from all the narratives, and shall find the beginning most clearly indicated in St. Matthew, in the last part of the 4th chapter, where He recalls to His side Peter and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee—who appear to have left Him for the moment and to have returned to their boats and nets at Bethsaida—and opens His ministry in the lake cities by the Sermon on the Mount. For the end we must go to the 11th chapter of St. Luke, where, in the house of a Pharisee, He speaks the words which madden Pharisees and lawyers into urging Him vehemently to speak of many things, and watching for the words which will enable them to entangle, and, as they think, to destroy Him.

First, then, as to the main facts so far as they are necessary for our purposes. We may note that our Lord accepts at once the imprisonment of the Baptist as the final summons to Himself. Gathering, therefore, a few of John’s disciples round Him, and welcoming the restless inquiring crowds who had been roused by the voice crying in the wilderness, He stands forward at once to proclaim and explain the nature of that new kingdom of God, which has now to be set up in the world. Standing forth alone, on the open hill-side, the young Galilean peasant gives forth the great proclamation, which by one effort lifted mankind on to that new and higher ground on which it has been painfully struggling ever since, but on the whole with sure though slow success, to plant itself and maintain sure foothold.

In all history there is no parallel to it. It stands there, a miracle or sign of God’s reign in this world, far more wonderful than any of Christ’s miracles of healing. Unbelievers have been sneering at and ridiculing it, and Christian doctors paring and explaining it away, ever since. But there it stands, as strong and fresh as ever, the calm declaration and witness of what mankind is intended by God to become on this earth of His.

As a question of courageous utterance (with which we are here mainly concerned), I would only ask you to read it through once more, bearing in mind who the preacher was—a peasant, already repudiated by His own neighbours and kinsfolk, and suspected by the national rulers and teachers; and who were the hearers—a motley crowd of Jewish peasants and fishermen, Romish legionaries, traders from Damascus, Tyre, and Sidon, and the distant isles of Greece, with a large sprinkling of publicans, scribes, Pharisees and lawyers.

The immediate result of the sermon was to bow the hearts of this crowd for the time, so that He was able to choose followers from amongst them, much as He would. He takes fishermen and peasants, selecting only two at most from any rank above the lowest, and one of these from a class more hated and despised by the Jews than the poorest peasant, the publicans. It is plain that He might at first have called apostles from amongst the upper classes had He desired it—as a teacher with any want of courage would surely have done. But the only scribe who offers himself is rejected.

The calling of the apostles is followed by a succession of discourses and miracles, which move the people more and more, until, after that of the loaves, the popular enthusiasm rises to the point it had so often reached in the case of other preachers and leaders of this strange people. They are ready to take Him by force and make Him a king.

The apostles apparently encourage this enthusiasm, for which He constrains them into a ship, and sends them away before Him. After rejoining them and rebuking their want of understanding and faith, He returns with them to the multitudes, and at once speaks of Himself as the bread from heaven, in the discourse which offends many of His disciples, who from this time go back and walk no more with Him. The brief season of triumphant progress is drawing to an end, during which He could rejoice in spirit in contemplating the human harvest which He and His disciples seem to be already successfully garnering.

But, even while the prospect was fairest, while the people were surging round Him in the first enthusiasm of their new faith, there had been ominous signs of that antagonism of the rulers which was to end on Calvary, and we have now to glance at the relations of Christ with them during this same period.

This antagonism was of gradual growth. In the first instance many of the scribes and Pharisees seem to have followed Him, more for the purpose of hearing and watching, than in a spirit of direct hostility. In the Sermon on the Mount He only once alludes to them directly, when He tells His hearers that unless their righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, there can be no place for them in this kingdom of which He is now proclaiming the laws. It does not appear however at first that they were alienated by what was then said, for soon afterwards we find Pharisees and doctors of the law from Jerusalem “and every town of Galilee and Judæa” sitting by while He teaches, “and the power of the Lord was present to heal them.”

Now, however, they are aroused and startled by Christ’s address to the palsied man—“Thy sins are forgiven thee.” The cure of the man silences them for the moment. They are filled with fear, and glorify God, saying, “We have seen strange things to-day.” But Christ’s next act again rouses their jealousy afresh. He has not called any of them to His side; that, probably, they would have deemed presumption. They are waiting and watching; thinking, doubtless, that their presence gives a sanction and respectability to the young teacher, which He, and the crowds who come to hear and be healed, will in due course learn to appreciate. Meantime it might restrain Him and them from rash acts and words, which would ruin a national movement that might possibly be hereafter guided to the advantage of Israel.

But now, while the great men are thus balancing, and probably admiring themselves for their liberality, Christ singles out Levi the publican, calls him as an apostle, and goes to his house to feast with a large company of other publicans. The great people remonstrate angrily. Such an act outrages all their notions of the orthodox conduct of a prophet. Christ replies simply, that He has come to call sinners, not the righteous, to repentance.

A few days later an even more serious question is raised between them. On a Sabbath day His disciples pluck and eat the corn, and Christ justifies them. On the next Sabbath, while they are watching Him, He heals a man, with the obvious purpose of trying them, and claims to be Lord of the Sabbath, as He had claimed power to forgive sins. They begin to be filled with madness, and commune what they can do to Him.

Still, however, the breach is not final. They have not abandoned the hope of using the young preacher and prophet for their purposes. So Simon, one of their number, invites Him to his house, and, though neglecting the usual courtesies of an entertainer (as out of place in the case of a peasant), is evidently not treacherous in the invitation. He might well flatter himself on his freedom from class prejudices, and feel that such condescension would have a good effect on his guest, and might lead Him in good time to rely on and consult persons moving in the upper ranks of Jewish society as to His future course.

The story of the woman, a sinner, who gets into the room and anoints Christ’s feet, and the use which He makes of the incident—to bring home to Simon’s mind, with the most exquisite temper and courtesy, but with the most faithful firmness, his shortcomings as a host, and his want of true insight as a man—are amongst the finest illustrations we have of His method with the great and powerful of His nation. Before leaving the house He once more reasserts His power to forgive sins.

We must now follow Him to Jerusalem, to which He goes up to one of the feasts, and, at the headquarters of the scribes and Pharisees, deliberately raises afresh, at headquarters, the burning questions which He had left rankling in the minds of the provincial hierarchy. He heals the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath day, and sends him through the streets carrying his bed. Challenged to defend Himself (probably before the Sanhedrim), He claims, more explicitly than ever before, that God is His Father, and has given Him not only power to do mighty works, but “authority to execute judgment”; that their own scriptures testify of Him, as He who can give them life if they will come to Him for it. Upon which they, naturally enough, seek to slay Him; but He gets back unscathed to Galilee, and then follows the scene which I have referred to as the end of this period of His ministry.

The Pharisees are now dogging his footsteps wherever He goes, but even yet have not given up the hope of coming to some terms with One whom they cannot help acknowledging to wield a power over the people which has slipped away from themselves. Influenced possibly by a discourse in which He upbraids the people as an evil generation, without specially alluding, as was so often His custom, to the people’s leaders and teachers as those upon whom the chief guilt rested, they again invite Him into their own circle. But now the time is past for the kindly courtesy of the feast in Simon’s house. The usual means of washing before meat are there, but He rejects them. They express a well-bred astonishment, and then follows that scathing denunciation of their hypocrisies and tyrannies, of their “inward parts full of ravening wickedness,” which makes the breach final and irrevocable between the Son of man and the rulers of Israel.

Thenceforth Christ has more and more to “tread the wine-press alone,” surrounded by bewildered followers, and powerful enemies resolved on His destruction, and unscrupulous as to the means by which it must be compassed.

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