Chapter VII. The Preaching To The Multitudes.
It was, as I believe, soon after that “feast of the Jews” lately mentioned (pp. [180] and [181] note), that the news of the apprehension of the Baptist by Herod reached our Lord at Jerusalem. At once He enters on His own Great Work[139] and [pg 189] goes straight into Galilee, preaching on the way that the Kingdom of God is come. The reasons for His holding back, came to an end together with the liberty of John. We lose now the guidance of St John, and we pass to the more continuous transcript of events which the Synoptists give.
Up to this time of His advent into Galilee our Lord was in part, as I have said, exploring the condition and the tempers of the people in quest of the fittest cradle for the Faith. It may possibly have been that our Lord in His visit to Jerusalem was giving the Holy City a last trial; but I see no ground to suppose that our Lord ever seriously contemplated any course different from that which He actually took. In any case, this outbreak of [pg 190] hostility on the part of the scribes settled the matter: for the kind of mental growth which our Lord wished to bring about in the disciples could not go on in the midst of party warfare.
Young men on the watch for attack are not in a state for fertilizing "seed thoughts" or for turning over hard matters in their minds, and care for the state of the recipient characterizes the teaching of Christ. Men are to take heed how they hear, as well as what they hear, and are to reach full growth and shape, not from outward moulding but by living process from within. Our Lord's eye is never off His pupils, and yet visible direction hardly ever appears; He sways them by an insensible touch. A great truth is brought to light by an incident of wonder, a pregnant word is let drop, a hard parable is delivered now and then; but between whiles the disciples are left to dwell on their own thoughts, as their fishing boat sails along, or as they follow their Master among the northern hills. Our Lord is ever bent on making men thoughtful and on calling out in each the inner life which is proper to the man, and for this, tranquillity, or at least frequent opportunity for quiet communing with their own thoughts, was absolutely required.
The antagonism at Jerusalem might have stopped short of violence and yet the wrangling spirit of the place might have had a very evil effect on the disciples. It was above all essential that they should have a single hearted love of truth; [pg 191] and this can hardly grow up when party is ranged against party and each tries to set the views and statements of the other in the most damaging light, and to dispose his own propositions in polemical order with a strategic view. As soon therefore as the hostility of the scribes was displayed, it became clear, that the schooling of the Apostles must be brought about elsewhere than in Judæa. But apart from this, Jerusalem was, for other reasons easy to perceive, ill-suited for the purpose. It was too Academical; the place was full of Rabbis, round whose feet a circle of pupils sat. Each school adopted its master's dicta with the undiscriminating loyalty of youth; and the scholars of other teachers, by steadily taking it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth was a teacher like the Rabbis they knew, would have half persuaded His followers that there was something in common between Him and the Doctors who expounded the Law.
The Rabbis gave their scholars something to show for their lessons—expositions of the Law and systematic doctrine—and their pupils would have said to the disciples, “Our master gives us this or that; what does your master give you?” This would have set them looking for what was intentionally withheld. Our Lord did not fill them with opinions or directions to be remembered, but He made them what He wanted them to be.
To understand how wisely things were ordered, we must give a glance to what would have been [pg 192] the result of the most obvious and apparently “the most natural” course. Our Lord's brethren recommended that He should go and show Himself and teach at Jerusalem. I have shown the ill effects this would have had on the training of the disciples; I will now say a word on the way in which it would have affected the Church. If Jerusalem had been the seat of teaching, the disciples there, instead of numbering “a hundred and twenty,” would have been a large body. Possibly they might have offered armed resistance to the apprehension of our Lord; and the whole moral of the action would have been lost if they had. But passing this by, if a large body of disciples dwelling at Jerusalem had claimed our Lord as peculiarly their own, the universality of His work would have been obscured. The Church at Jerusalem might have dwelt more on His being their particular Founder and Bishop than on His being the Redeemer of the World.
Again, How would it have been with the authority of the Twelve? Those who had sat at His feet and listened, just as the Apostles had done, might have hesitated when He was gone to acknowledge the Twelve as the founders of the Church; for the Church, they would have said, began with themselves. More than this, practical evils would have come about; for these original disciples, regarding themselves as the depositaries of tradition, would have recalled every practice of [pg 193] their Lord,—for instance the way in which He had given thanks at meat, or ordered service in prayer, as well as His practice as to the Sabbath and fasting,—these would have been passed down as Divinely sanctioned, and the externals of religion would have been stereotyped as thoroughly as though they had been a new Ceremonial Law, like that from which He desired to release mankind. Moreover the body of believers who had personally known our Lord, would have constituted a kind of ecclesiastical aristocracy; and distinctions—respect of persons—would have been introduced from the first. What actually happened was far more consistent with the general tenour of Christ's plan so far as we can make it out. The few original disciples at Jerusalem were lost in the crowd who were added to the Church after the day of Pentecost, and the Apostles ruled with unquestioned authority from the first.
Galilee we have seen, as a retired spot with an honest-hearted people, was admirably fitted for the scene of the ministry; but yet it could not be “that a prophet should perish out of Jerusalem,” and it was imperative that there the end should come. The Holy City was also fitted, in a very peculiar manner, to be the centre from which the new movement was to radiate forth. The Lord's death, the Supreme Event in the history of mankind, was not to take place in a corner. The circumstances of it could not be too notorious or too widely [pg 194] vouched. It was to be made known in East and West to the Hebrew, the Greek, the Roman and to all mankind. Now Jerusalem, both geographically, and as the point to which the Jews of the dispersion bent watchful eyes from many lands, was wondrously adapted to be a centre of diffusion. It was in a very remarkable way a “city set upon a hill.” It stood accessible to three continents, at the centre of gravity of the known world, and it was on the watershed of two civilizations: the Aryan and Semitic races and languages and the different modes of thinking which go along with the languages were brought together there.
Moreover, owing to the dispersion of the Jews and their custom of visiting Jerusalem at the great feasts when they possibly could, “devout men from every nation under Heaven” were drawn together there from time to time, and a common interest in what concerned “Israel” was spread over the globe. The agency of these festivals connected Jerusalem, as by electric threads, with every great city in the inhabited world, and the Israelites who were settled in every large town of the empire afterwards provided nests for the new Faith.
The Apostles, as was natural, after the Resurrection went back to Galilee. It can only have been owing to directions they must have received, that they all returned to Jerusalem for the Ascension. Our Lord then enjoined them to remain and from thence to propagate the Faith. This injunction [pg 195] explains their abandonment of their homes and callings, which is hard to account for otherwise.
I now proceed with the history. During this chapter I shall for the most part follow St Mark, who relates the events nearly in the order in which I believe they happened. After a brief notice of John and of the temptation he proceeds thus:
“Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the gospel.”[140]
The Evangelist does not say that our Lord came from Judæa, but He could have come from nowhere else. It would seem that our Lord on arriving in Galilee went at once to the Lake shore and called the two pair of fisher brethren to His side.
“And passing along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew brother of Simon casting a net in the sea: for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. And straightway they left the nets, and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who also were in the boat mending the nets. And straightway he called them: and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went after him.”[141]
This passage would offer an opening for criticism, if it were not for the light thrown on it by St [pg 196] John's Gospel, by help of which an apparent difficulty is turned into a coincidence.
If we did not possess the Gospel of St John, the story of the call of the Apostles would stand thus: It would appear that our Lord came down to the Sea of Galilee, and said to two fishermen—whom, for all we should know to the contrary, He had never seen before,—“Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.” These would seem startling words to hear from a stranger, but the brothers, without asking further, and without one consulting the other, at once left their work and followed our Lord.
This would be unlikely, but not passing belief; men are mastered in a moment, by personal influence, now and then; but still the preponderance of probabilities is against the truth of the story. The Evangelist however goes on to relate that our Lord passes on along the Lake side, and within a few hundred yards comes upon another pair of brothers, also fishermen; he addresses them nearly in the same terms and they also leave their nets and follow Him. Now this repetition, the critic would say, savours in itself of the Eastern legend. But, what is far more than this, the combination of the two improbabilities produces an improbability of a far higher order.[142]
The information gained from the Gospel of St John clears the difficulty away. We may learn from this, how a word or two of fresh information might, in like manner, clear away other discrepancies which are stumbling-blocks to learners now.
There we find, that these fisher brethren were old disciples of our Lord. It is consistent with the Gospel to suppose that during the summer they had been at their work, nursing the memory of their Master all the time. They now hear that He has come preaching the Kingdom of God in their own land. They are waiting for Him and expecting His call. The two pair of brethren stood in the same relation to Him, consequently they were treated in the same way, and the result was naturally the same. This unhesitating compliance on the part of the brethren, which seems so strange, points to a previous acquaintance with our Lord; of this acquaintance St John's Gospel speaks, and so St Mark strengthens St John just as St John does St Mark.
In the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark, which we suppose to be both based on a primitive document, the story is told without the slightest idea of obviating objection or mistrust. The writers never appear to contemplate readers to whom the fact that Simon and the rest had, before this, been associated with our Lord should be unknown. They took it for granted that this was too notorious to call for mention.
But we have another Evangelist, St Luke, a more practised writer, whose design was to present [pg 198] his account in a coherent form. He did not possess the Gospel of St John and possibly did not know the particulars of the earlier call of Simon and Andrew and John. It may well have been that he was himself somewhat startled at the abruptness of our Lord's call to the Apostles, and at their unhesitating compliance with it, as related in the primitive document, and felt that it required to be accounted for: consequently, having the account of the miraculous draught of fishes among the materials he speaks of—an account not contained in the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark—he finds in this Sign an explanation of the prompt adherence of the pairs of brethren, and he combines the two events.
We should gather from him that the Apostles were struck by the miraculous draught of fishes, and that the Lord thereupon invited them to follow and become “fishers of men,” but I think it most likely that the call took place as St Matthew and St Mark relate. The circumstantial minuteness of the details in these two Gospels, and the naturalness of the picture—two brothers are engaged in casting, and the other pair in mending their nets—convinces me that this relation comes originally from one who saw for himself. This draught of fishes may have taken place some days after the call of the brethren. For we need not suppose, that, before the Twelve were chosen, those who were called abandoned the craft by which they lived, although they probably resorted to their Master day by day.
The early miracles were mostly wrought in the sight of the multitude; they seem meant to show that the Kingdom of God was come; but this miracle of the draught of fishes was performed when few but disciples were by. It was a miracle of instruction, it lent great impressiveness to great lessons; it emphasized in a way never to be forgotten the call to become “fishers of men,” and it gave good augury of success. The thought of this draught must have come back to Peter at many a juncture in his life, a notable one being the morrow of the Feast of Pentecost, when “there were added unto them in that day about 3000 souls.”[143]
The Apostles may have learned another lesson from this miracle. All night they had toiled and taken nothing, yet they had not given up in despair but had worked on hard; the morning brought success beyond all hope. Men, waiting long for the yield of their labour, have found encouragement in calling this to mind. Simon, though thinking there is little hope of taking fish, nevertheless obeys at once. He frankly tells his Master his view of a matter about which he might be supposed to know best, and leaves Him to judge, but he does immediately as his Master bids. Our Lord does not promise him success; He only tells him to try once more; and thereupon without a word, wearied and out of heart as he may be supposed to have been by a night of bootless labour, he does what [pg 200] he is told. It is enough for Simon to know that his Master wishes him to “Put out into the deep and let down his nets for a draught.”[144] His cheerful compliance shews a happy disposition and a loyal nature; for if there had been a grain of peevishness or selfishness in him, it would have been likely to be uppermost then.
In the last chapter, we saw our Lord exploring the characters of classes of men. His eye is now turned on individuals; He is peering down into His disciples' hearts, taking them unawares, when their every day selves lie uppermost, putting them, by chance as it were, through some little exercise which shall reveal some tendency or some hidden quality; and to our Lord this incident brought the secret heart of Simon into the light of day.
It shewed that he was altogether free from that kind of stubbornness which is born of self-regard, and that he did not attach a sanctity to an opinion or a resolve, merely because it was his. He learnt from this miracle that it was best to trust to Christ. He might say to himself, “I never felt more convinced that we should take nothing by letting down the nets, than I did on that morning on the lake, but I let them down and found I was wrong.” A memorable act is not done with, educationally, when it is over. The recollection of it is an attendant monitor always pointing the same way; and so this miracle may have done much towards accustoming [pg 201] Peter to look to the Lord's prompting, and to be ready at His word to give up that about which he felt most sure. It may well have helped him to that openness of mind, which stood the Church in good stead, years after at Joppa, when the envoys of Cornelius were knocking at Peter's door.
This miracle has been called a miracle of coincidence, meaning that the marvel lay in the passing of the shoal at the moment when the net was cast; it might not be a miracle at all, because the chances against its being a natural phenomenon, though enormous, are not absolutely infinite. It is not one which would appal ordinary beholders: the boatmen, we may suppose, thought chiefly of securing the fish. Our Lord is now testing the capacity of men for discerning God, and He therefore performs miracles of a less striking order first; these impress those only who have their eyes open for the manifestation of what is spiritual; and those who are found to possess this “vision and faculty Divine” are afterwards shewn “greater things than these.”
Simon had no doubt seen our Lord work cures, but this mastery of our Lord over the creation comes more home to him than His power over disease, and his feelings break forth. It is characteristic of him, that what is in him must come out at once; whether it be an objection that occurs to him, or a motion of indignation or of [pg 202] elation, or of the panic to which Orientals are subject—out it must come; this is the point in which the identity of his character is most visibly preserved in all our narratives. Here he is mastered by the emotions of the moment and must give them outward show; and along with his gush of feeling comes the sense of his unworthiness, the impression of his being wholly unequal to the duty and position thrust upon him; an impression not uncommon with men in such junctures; though biographies abundantly show that those who feel it most very often acquit themselves admirably when the trial comes. Touched by this, Simon throws himself at his Master's feet and says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”[145]
We go back now to the course of the narrative in St Mark's Gospel, and there we find that the first thing which struck the hearers of our Lord was the authority with which He spoke.
“And they were astonished at his teaching: for he taught them as having authority, and not as the scribes.”[146]
We saw in the last chapter, that men bowed to the authority in the air of our Lord when He purged the Temple of Jerusalem: this authority now passed into His words, and it swayed the hearts of men. It is the special instinct of a crowd that it quickly discerns those whom it must hear, and [pg 203] this multitude saw that our Lord had something to tell them and that, not of tradition, but out of His own very self. Here was a genuine authority coming of nature or of God, by the side of which the stated legal authority of the officiating scribes paled away out of sight.
In what ways was it, we may ask, that this authority of Christ shone out now, and took such hold of men? First of all, I would answer, He brought to the birth, within men, thoughts which were lying in embryo in their own hearts. This, which was also Socrates' way, I have spoken of in the Introductory Chapter and once or twice since. Our Lord wakened within men the perception of truths which they seemed to have once known and forgotten; especially that God was the Father, not only of Israel as a nation, but of every particular man in it. The common people had been told by the learned that they were not worth God's notice, and when Christ asserted the dignity of each individual soul they said to themselves “we always thought it must be so; and so it is.” The beatitudes in like manner commended themselves to men's hearts; they felt that if there was a God in the world, it ought to be as our Lord said it was.
Secondly, our Lord not only told men that they were the children of God, that they should strive after their Father's likeness, and that they might approach nearer and nearer to being perfect as He is perfect: but, what was more than this, in every [pg 204] word He spake,—whether of teaching, or reproof, or expostulation, or in His passing words to those who received His mercies—He treated them as God's children. Man, as man, has in His eyes a right to respect. Anger we find with our Lord often, as also surprise at slowness of heart, indignation at hypocrisy and at the Rabbinical evasions of the Law; but never in our Lord's words or looks do we find personal disdain. Towards no human being does He shew contempt. The scribe would have trodden the rabble out of existence; but there is no such thing as rabble in our Lord's eyes. The master, in the parable, asks concerning the tree, which is unproductively exhausting the soil, why cumbers it the ground; but it is not to be rooted up, till all has been tried. There it stands, and mere existence gives it claims, for all that exists is the Father's. This notion, that every thing belonged to God, and was therefore to be reverently regarded, lay very deep in the hearts of the children of Israel, even the poorest in Galilee; and when the Lord brought it to light, men listened to Him with breathless respect.
Thirdly. If a scribe spoke to the people, he bethought himself of topics within their comprehension: he had a double self; one he showed to them and one he kept for his equals: he was afraid of talking over his hearers' heads, so he took them on the side of what he supposed they might understand, of their interests, for example, and spoke [pg 205] of the advantages of good repute, or, at the highest, of the blessings which God brought on His servants in this life and hereafter, and of the ill fate which awaited offenders. All this implied, “We who speak to you, of course, have for ourselves higher principles and purer motives than those we have named, but these are quite good enough for you.” Now there is nothing that men, young or old, so surely detect, as whether a man serves them with the same thoughts that he gives to himself and his friends.
The people, moreover, are always grateful for being supposed capable of higher sentiments than mere hope of gain and fear of loss, and for the appreciation shewn in taking them on higher ground; they seldom fail the speaker who boldly addresses their consciences; they are eager to justify his trust in them: “He has treated us as men,” they say, “and men he shall find we are.” Above all they feel the compliment of being not flattered, but supposed reasonable enough to hear the truth about themselves and shewn their failings; and we feel sure that men went away from the Sermon on the Mount confident of Christ's respect and regard for them, without His telling them of it in so many words. He talks to them quite naturally of their Father who is also His Father, just as men speak of any common tie: and this took hold of their hearts.
Fourthly. We find in the earlier portions of the Sermon on the Mount, which best represent this [pg 206] preaching to the multitude,[147] that our Lord assumes a certain positive authority, by putting His own commands in contrast with the written Law.
It had probably been given out by our Lord's opponents that He had come to destroy the Law, and our Lord in this Sermon declares that He is not come to destroy but to fulfil.
We shall see the point most clearly, if we understand the word “fulfil,” to mean, “carry out into its full completeness.” For our Lord does not destroy the Law but he supersedes it by bringing God's ways to light, and merging in this light the previous partial revelations, of which the Mosaic Law was one. A mathematician supersedes the practical rules which the pupil at first employs for solving particular cases of a problem, by giving a complete and general solution of the whole subject. This may illustrate the way in which our Lord merges the particular case of human conduct in a wider rule embracing human dispositions, and which regards, not only what men do, but also what they are, and what they will become.
To take another point. Slavery to the letter of a written Law hampered moral and spiritual growth; it led men to regard authority as the sole test of truth; it tended to prevent their thinking for [pg 207] themselves as our Lord desired them to do. No word of our Lord countenances the idea of verbal inspiration. He treats the provisions of the Levitical Law as subject to criticism, He never attributes them to God, but either to Moses or those of old time, and after quoting them in His sermon and elsewhere He commonly adds, “But I say unto you” and then delivers His own precept—embracing that of Moses no doubt—but so widely overstepping it, that it would seem to the people to amount to a repeal. A teaching which claimed authority coordinate with that of Moses might well startle the multitude by its contrast with that of the scribes.
It may be asked—“Why, if our Lord desired to free men's minds, did He not declare how far and in what sense their sacred books contained the word of God.” We answer, “He would have caused utter bewilderment if He had entered on such a matter at all.” The truth may be gathered by observing His practice. He never states abstract principles, but He acts as He deems fit and leaves us to infer His views by marking what He does. He never contests the rules about the Sabbath, but He observes them only in His own way. He does not tell the Jews that their Law is not traced by the finger of God, but He amends and criticizes its provisions as though they were of man.
Let us suppose, for a moment—not of course that He had cried down the Law like one who [pg 208] exulted in finding a flaw—but that He had attempted to put into men's heads views about it which their minds had not yet shaped themselves to receive; that He had told them, for instance, that laws must be fitted to human needs, and that as these needs vary, laws must vary too, and cannot be the subject of an ordinance unchanging and Divine. Could He, by such explanations, have given His auditors any true view of Divine rule? Would not the Galileans have cried out, “That if the tables of the Law were not graven by God's finger they were nothing at all?” Nothing, in our Lord's wisdom, strikes me more than His moderation with regard to error. What seems false to one man's mind may be true to that of another. When men, as soon as they spy out an error, cry, “Root it up,” our Lord seems to answer, “Along with the tares some wheat needs must go.” Men are complex beings; and much that is best in them is so intertwined with habits and association that we cannot sweep away long-standing notions and outward symbols and ceremonies without destroying also what is of the essence. Take away from an Italian woman her belief in the Virgin, or from a Scotch peasant that in the sacred obligation of the Sabbath, and a great deal of what is best in them will go too.
Our Lord's way of proceeding is always positive, never merely negative. He leaves the Law, but He sows seed which will grow up and displace the spirit [pg 209] of blind subservience to it: just as some particular species in the herbage of a land is often ousted when a more robust one is brought in. The Apostles had, up to the end, many wrong notions, and we may wonder why our Lord did not set them right; but it would have shaken the whole fabric of their belief if He had so done; and the sure teaching of circumstances would, as He knew, dissipate the errors in time.
So far we have dealt chiefly with the matter of our Lord's teaching of the multitudes, but something must be said about its form. One striking point in our Lord's practice in contrast with that of the scribes, is this. He cites no authorities, all comes from Himself; there is hardly a text of Scripture in the fifth chapter of St Matthew, except those which are quoted in order to be extended or gainsaid. The scribes depended on their learning, they overwhelmed men with quotations, they laid text by text, and built up their conclusions upon an array of authorities. Now a preacher, or a teacher of any kind, is sure to lose hold of his audience when he goes away from himself and gives other people's opinions instead of his own. They look to him for guidance; and when he says, “This is one man's view and that is another's,” and not, “This is mine,” then they turn from the trumpet of uncertain sound. The multitude suppose that in all questions there is a right and a wrong—just as there is a right and a wrong answer to a sum—and they do not [pg 210] want to know what one authority says or the other, but what they are to accept.
Again, rightly to apprehend the form of this discourse, we must bear in mind that it is not a written collection of precepts,—though St Matthew may have appended some delivered at a later time—and that still less is it a Code of Laws. It is an oral address to a crowd of villagers gathered on the top of the fell. We mark in it the natural rhetoric of earnest speech: the first necessity is always to win men to listen, and thus the speaker at the opening strikes His most impressive chords.
Words of blessing fell on the ears of those who were used only to hear of their shortcomings and to be treated as outcasts; and when their attention was caught by the unusual sound and they listened to hear who it was who were blessed, they found it was not the strong and the wealthy and the high spirited—those whom they regarded as having the good things of existence while they themselves had the bad—but the blessed are the poor in spirit, and this Kingdom of Heaven, newly proclaimed, belonged to them. The attention caught by the opening is kept alive by the unexpected nature of the matter.
Again, our Lord is at pains so to put what He says that it may not be taken for a fresh body of injunctions added to the Law; for the people were already, as He said, overburdened with such injunctions. He puts therefore what He has to say [pg 211] into such strong forms, and, by way of example, takes such extreme cases, that it is plain that He is illustrating a principle and not laying down a literal rule.
We have
“Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil: but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain.”[148]
He Himself, before the High Priest, does not submit to wrong, without asking in remonstrance “Why smitest thou me?” and the most literal minded of our Lord's hearers would not have felt bound to offer his cloke to one who had stolen his coat. The language shews by its very strength that it is figurative.
Indeed, a code of Law can hardly be delivered in an address to a multitude. If it is to meet all cases it must be complex, and to the hearer wearisome. If our Lord had delivered a treatise telling men what they were to do in the ordinary occasions of life, the precepts must have been so encumbered by qualifications that all impressiveness would have been lost. If to the saying “Give to him that asketh of thee” our Lord had appended all the obvious exceptions—such as the cases in which what is asked for would be hurtful—the [pg 212] whole force of the passage would have been frittered away. As long as a preacher delivers broad truths, put forcibly, his audience are ready to hear; but as soon as he begins to qualify his statements and to make exceptions, his hold over his hearers is gone, and they think he is unsaying what he said.
Our Lord wished to leave seed thoughts lying in men's minds. He knew that His words would have to be carried in men's memories for a long while before being written down. They must therefore be clad in the form in which they would last longest and be easiest to carry. He therefore embodied what He wished to have remembered in terse sayings, illustrated by cases which are familiar but extreme. The hearer could carry these sentences away, and would ponder on them all the more, because in their literal sense they are startling and impracticable as rules of conduct. I can conceive no style better fitted for the purpose which I believe to have been dominant with our Lord, than that employed in the Sermon on the Mount.
It seems to me to be part of the strange adaptation of circumstances to the needs of the Faith, that what was most vital and most universal was uttered in the Hebrew tongue. This was the language of the comparative infancy of the world; and there is in the genius of it much—especially its ready lending itself to the form of balanced sentences—which takes hold of the hearts of untutored [pg 213] men. Such men store their wisdom in saws and proverbs; and in like manner the wisdom of the Hebrew is dropped in separate pearls, which can easily be treasured up. When the time came for touching cultured minds, and connected argument was required, Greek forms of thought and speech were needed. Saul was then converted; and Greek became the language of the Word.
Nothing in our Lord's ministry impresses me more than the extraordinary sobriety of the whole movement. We hear nothing of religious transport or ecstatic devotion. People listen in awe to our Lord's preaching as to a communication made from above. They never dare to applaud. He is too much above them for that. Many have since come crying “Lord, Lord,” in different accents, at different times; we have heard of “revivals” among great multitudes, carried headlong by wild excitement, and of religious delirium reaching to the borders of mania. All this is in the strongest contrast with the ways of teaching of our Lord.
True human freedom was with Him a sacred thing; what man was made for was that he might be a free spiritual being; and a man is not free when he is fascinated by fervid oratory and becomes the blind tool of another, or when he is intoxicated by religious fanaticism and is no longer master of his own mind. Any agencies, therefore, which would impair the health and freedom of a man's will Christ refused to employ. They belonged [pg 214] to that Spirit of the World whose alliance He had refused. One cause of this sobriety of the great movement may be found in the elevation and tone of authority which has just been spoken of as characterizing our Lord. He seemed to move in a plane parallel indeed to that of men, but a little above it. For a speaker to kindle men's passions he must be possessed by the notions and feelings of the time: he and his hearers must have common objects of desire, or a common jealousy of those who possess what they themselves want, they must therefore wear the stamp of a passing and particular phase of mankind. Now it was the distinctive peculiarity of our Lord's Personality that it belongs not more to one time or class than to another. The Son of Man represents Humanity in the abstract, and no party has ever been able to claim Him as their own.
In the course of the winter of a.d. 28-29, Levi, in the vernacular of Galilee called also Matthew, a toll-taker on the borders of the lake, is summoned to follow our Lord. He justified our Lord's choice in a signal manner, for “he forsook all, and rose up and followed Him.”
There must have been in this man “a soul of goodness” of rare efficacy in resisting influences to ill. His position must have offered temptation to exaction. This was corrupting, but the steady and persistent effect of feeling himself despised must have been more so even than this. He was hated [pg 215] not only as the tax-gatherer, but also as having accepted the service of the foreign oppressors of the land. However justly the publican might have striven to act, it would be taken for granted that he was endeavouring to fleece those who came into his hands; and a man soon becomes what people about him will have it that he is.
Now and then, however, in all positions, we come across natures which run counter to the influences around them, or which by a happy chemistry decompose the evil and turn its elements to good. Everything in the publican's calling fostered the love of gain; and to be able to save enough to give it up and live down ill report was his only hope. But Matthew breaks with his means of subsistence totally and at once. At one word of our Lord he throws all away without a moment's thought, and joins the little band of followers which was being drawn into closer attendance on our Lord. This man surely had “salt in himself.”
St Matthew has left us his Gospel. We learn from this which way his thoughts lean, and we see that he was not of that type of mind most commonly associated with the idea of the Apostle of a new creed. He was probably not very young and his views were formed and fixed: his national sympathy was intense. God was to him, first of all, the God of Israel, and he regarded our Lord as the Messiah, after the type which Jewish hopes and fancies had fashioned for themselves. In all that [pg 216] occurred he saw the reproduction of what was narrated in the old books; and the burden “Now this was done that the Scripture might be fulfilled” runs through all his writings.
Here then, some might say, we have a man chosen as a witness and promulgator of a faith which is to be universal, yet this man's sympathies flow only along one narrow channel, and he is wedded to old ways of reading the mind of God. He was however a guileless, God-fearing, high-hearted man; and it could not but strengthen the cause to have among the Apostles one who could enter into the minds of those who looked for the consolation of Israel in the old Hebrew way. The first function of the Apostles,—one on which I shall soon speak pretty fully—was that they were to bear witness of Christ. This was set forth in that which, so to say, was their charter of incorporation. “Ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judæa and Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”[149] Now the more varied the characters of the witnesses the stronger would be the case when they agreed.
Our Lord, then, will have, among His immediate followers, minds of every sort. He does not pick out those only who are most after His own heart, nor does he mould men into one fashion, so that they should think on all points alike. We cannot have freedom among human beings without diversity. [pg 217] St Matthew, we perhaps say, had old world views; but it may have been just because of these, that he was the most fit Apostle for the Eastern world. There would be crowds of men whom he would understand and who would understand him, but whose minds would have been closed to the utterances of Paul. The vineyard to which Christ called his labourers was the whole world; it contained vines of every stock growing on every soil. It was well then, that there should be labourers bred in various schools of husbandry, and that each should work in the fashion in which he felt he could do it best.
Another point to be noted about the call of St Matthew is this: The choice of a publican was a practical proof to the other disciples, as it is to the Church for ever, that Christ is in no way a respecter of persons. The two pairs of brethren who followed our Lord may have been startled at the call of Matthew, for they no doubt looked on publicans as their countrymen did; and this act of our Lord's taught them, more forcibly than any words could have done, that with Him outward circumstance went for nothing and the inward man was all in all. In this call of Matthew the spirit of universality which belongs to the Christian Church is folded up like the embryo in the seed. Our Lord makes no comment on this call; nor do we hear of any murmurs from the disciples, who had by this time learned that our Lord was wiser than they, as Peter had found when he let down the net.
Shortly before the call of St Matthew a miracle occurred, the cure of the sick of the palsy, when our Lord's renown was at its height—a miracle at the performance of which “there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were come out of every village of Galilee and Judæa and Jerusalem.”[150] The presence of these strangers bears on what follows.
Hitherto we have read of no contest or conflict in Capernaum; but these Pharisees conceived misgivings about the movement they had come to see. This hostility was very different from that of the Sadducees in Jerusalem, who, regarding the movement as an insane delusion likely to bring things about their ears, set themselves remorselessly to root it out. But the Pharisees do not seem at first to have borne our Lord any personal hatred, but only to have been uneasy about the new teaching which went too far for them, and did not follow the course which they had expected.
The Pharisees, nevertheless, were now on the watch for occasion to find fault. This is not an occupation which brings out the amiable side of men's natures; and they became still more soured by finding nothing on which to hang a charge; so that at last they even leagued with the Herodians, their natural opponents, against our Lord. The most popular of all accusations, and one for which [pg 219] it was easy to find ground, was a breach of the traditionary rules for keeping the Sabbath.
The Sabbath was an inestimable Law. It was maintained by Divine sanction at a time when a Law could not be upheld by any other means: it debarred men from “doing what they would with their own” on one day out of seven, so far as regarded the labour of themselves or of their children, their servants, their ox or their ass. It secured for the race this portion of time against the greed of gain: but all this was done for men, although the Jews had come to look on it as something done by men for God, and in so doing they made God a taskmaster like the gods of the pagans. Moreover the Sabbath kept alive in each Israelite his self-respect as one of God's people; however sordid his calling, he put away every seventh day his squalor and his toil and resumed the dignity of Abraham's son. The Sabbath question was the chosen battle-ground of those who reduced all virtues to that literal unquestioning obedience to authoritative records, which was so damaging to moral and spiritual life. Men thought that God's favour was won or His wrath incurred in virtue of acts—such as the keeping within or the overstepping the limit of the journey allowed on the Sabbath-day—which in themselves had no moral significance at all.
Here again we see how our Lord deals with views falling short of the truth. The moral creed of His [pg 220] countrymen was imperfect; it unduly exalted and obtruded formal duties, but it was all that they had; their whole life and that of their nation was moulded by it; instincts fostered by it had become hereditary, and to break it ruthlessly down would have been to lay waste men's souls.
In the instance before us our Lord introduces a freer practice; and trusts to this to give birth in time to more intelligent notions about the Sabbath day.
One passage in the history I purposely passed by. I thought that I might have to write of it at such a length as to break the continuity of the narrative, and I therefore kept it for the close of the chapter. The passage in question, which I subjoin, immediately follows the account of the entertainment of our Lord in Matthew's house.
“Then come to him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not? And Jesus said unto them, Can the sons of the bride-chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then will they fast. And no man putteth a piece of undressed cloth upon an old garment; for that which should fill it up taketh from the garment, and a worse rent is made. Neither do men put new wine into old wine-skins: else the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins perish: but they put new wine into fresh wine-skins, and both are preserved.”[151]
The Pharisees practised fasting on the second and fifth days of the week: the same practice was probably followed by the disciples of John; and if we suppose that Matthew made this feast on one of the fasting days, this would bring the contrast between the ways of John and of Jesus more sharply out.
Before examining the charge and the reply, a word must be said on the absence of all distinctive religious observances in the practice of our Lord and His disciples.
The Baptist, we know, enjoined stated fasts and taught his people to pray, and above all enforced the initiatory rite from which he drew his name. At a later period our Lord's disciples beg to be taught to pray, “as John also taught his disciples.”[152]
In those days people looked to a religion to order the externals of a man's life; hours of prayer portioned out his day; and so, even the disciples appear to have felt that with them there was something lacking, and that they were at a disadvantage compared with John's disciples because they were not, through conformity to a special rule, formed into a body and marked with a badge.
It is easy to find reasons why our Lord should have avoided doing what John did. If He had enjoined any system of religious observance, this would have limited the spread of His Kingdom, and have laid on observances in general more stress than He desired. One Law or one ritual would not suit all nations, or all times; for forms must vary with men's modes of life, and if our Lord had introduced a form of worship He would have particularised that which, of its very essence, was meant to be universal. John came as a prophet and forerunner, and he set on foot a sect, which was held together and long kept alive by usages of its own; but the very observances which gave it vitality as a sect prevented its ever becoming anything more than a sect. Our Lord is not founding a sect at all; He is not a missionary making converts. He comes on earth to proclaim that God loves men, and to open a way by which men should “come to the Father.” He leaves behind Him men suited to direct a religious movement, but He organises none himself. Whether He drew many round Him or few, His great work for the world would equally be completed on the Cross. He never baptised, never instituted rites, laws or fasts, or stated services of prayer; it is not till He leaves the earth that He enjoins the sacraments of His Church. It was to be left to men to put all into shape, for the outer form belongs to man; and, if He had Himself adopted any particular practice in [pg 223] any of the matters above named, men might imagine that this was binding for evermore and had a virtue in itself.
We come now to our Lord's plain and practical answer to the particular questions of the Pharisees which have led to these remarks. Fasting comes by nature when a man is sad, and it is in consequence the natural token of sadness: when a man is very sad, for the loss of relations or the like, he loses all inclination for food. But every outward sign that can be displayed at will is liable to abuse, and so men sometimes fasted when they were not really sad, but when it was decorous to appear so. Moreover a kind of merit came to be attached to fasting as betokening sorrow for transgressions; and at last it came to be regarded as a sort of self-punishment which it was thought the Almighty would accept in lieu of inflicting punishment Himself. Our Lord does not decry stated fasts or any other Jewish practices, they had their uses and they would last their times; only He points men to the underlying truth which was at the bottom of the ordinance.
When our Lord spoke, the children of the bridechamber the companions of the bridegroom's youth, were still with Him, but He and they would soon have to part. Sorrow must needs come upon them for the following reason, if for no other, that man's education cannot be perfect without it. Then indeed would they fast, not because it was enjoined, [pg 224] not of any stated precept, but because they were bereaved of their Lord.
Our Lord now turns to a metaphor, it was a familiar one. The lesson it seems to carry is this: our Lord will not meddle with the old form of things, He will not patch up the old tenement in order that the new spirit may make shift to dwell in it. Change with Him is never mechanical, always organic; it comes, not by alteration in construction, but always purely of growth. He is propagating spiritual truth in the souls of men; the time is not yet ripe for rites and ordinances and hours of worship. But the days would come when the truth would need a garb—it would have to struggle amongst human institutions, and it must then have outer expression just as other institutions have. This expression men must give, and Christ was careful that, when the time came for this to be done, the right men should be in their place to do it.
He takes a second metaphor to set forth the second part of His work: He will have new flasks for the new wine. This new doctrine was not committed either to the disciples of John or even to scribes enlightened about the kingdom of heaven, but to those who, having no preconceptions, received it as children do their parents' words. This new wine would go on working and would want room to expand. Peter we know expanded with it; but men whose minds had stiffened into shape under [pg 225] existing systems were like old flasks of skin, so harsh and dry that they would sooner crack than stretch; they were neither plastic nor elastic, and our Lord wanted vessels that should be both the one and the other. These new flasks were now soon to be chosen; and when this was done the work would enter on a new phase.
Up to the time of the call of the Apostles, our Lord's most conspicuous concern is for the multitudes. After that call, the Apostles occupy the foreground, and the whole manner of teaching is rather suddenly changed. It is no longer adapted to a congregation of peasants; parables take the place of plain speech, and instead of everything being done for the learner as before, much is left to be done by him for himself. We mark another change also in the manner. Hitherto there has been no haste, all has proceeded in the most leisurely way; but soon danger will begin to threaten and time to press, and act to follow act in close succession.
Following the subject of my book, I have been careful to mark how our Lord from the very first had an eye for characters of the sort He wanted and how He shaped them, with an unseen hand; but I must not have it supposed, because we see little lasting outcome from the preaching to the multitude, that therefore it was unimportant compared with the training of the Apostles. We must not suppose that Christ taught and healed chiefly that the Apostles might listen and learn.
We can discern two kinds of good wrought by our Lord. In preaching to the multitude he was, then and there, bringing God's light into the souls of men. In choosing and fashioning the disciples, He was providing for the future of His Church. The work which the Apostles should set on foot would spread over the earth and affect all future times, while our Lord could Himself touch but a single generation in a single spot. Those, however, who heard Him, carried to their homes a memory to last their lives; among them His Personality survived. If, afterwards, troubled questions arose about Him they would put them by, feeling that they had drunk at the source before the stream had got sullied on its way.
When our Lord came into villages where He was known, people crowded to him from all sides, and the new delight of communion with God—the assurance that the whisper which told them that God cared for them was a true voice—beamed from the hearers' faces and gladdened the Master's soul.
It was during this active ministry of our Lord, that the choice of the Apostles was made and the foundations of their education were laid. The differences in their minds and characters would be brought into prominence by the greater intensity of the lives they afterwards led; new capacities would peep out among those who, beholding the intense earnestness of our Lord, learned to be in earnest themselves. No defined line was as yet [pg 227] drawn between the multitude and the disciples. Those who were of the multitude one day, and chose to follow, might count as disciples on the morrow. Our Lord never wholly loses sight either of the multitude or of the disciples; but, while the former were His first care in the period embraced in this chapter, the disciples, and especially the apostles, will be so in that which will come before us in the next.[153]