Our Lord's action prospective.
But if our Lord's behaviour in secular matters is often hard to explain, unless we suppose Him to have had a glimpse of what has actually come to pass, much more is this the case in what concerns the building of His Church. We know from His own words that He saw His end to be near at hand. We know how He loved the Apostles and we know how His heart was set on His great work; so that it is inexplicable that He should have left the Apostles without directions for their personal conduct, and as to the practical shape they were to give to the work in view. All is explained, if they were merely being exposed to a few hours of trial, and if our Lord meant to commission them with definite duties and give the necessary directions, when He rose again. Apart from any miraculous [pg 412] foreknowledge, our Lord could foresee that His end was near, and that persecution awaited those who for more than two years had formed the chief visible interest of His life. Would He have left them at Jerusalem perfectly at a loss, would He have left them in the position of a boat's crew in the open sea, whose captain has died without giving them their course? If He had not felt certain of being soon again by their side, then indeed we should, with the author of “Ecce Homo,” have felt constrained to confess “that there was no historical character whose motives, objects and feelings remained so incomprehensible to us.”
After the Resurrection, the forms needful for a religious community are delivered to the Apostles. They are given a rite, marking admission to the body, and sacramental words serving as a symbol and the nucleus of a creed. They are to go and baptize all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Moreover they are told what they are, for the moment, to do. They are to remain at Jerusalem, till they be endowed with power from on high. Christ opens to them the Scriptures and possibly left some instruction as to the earliest form of His Church which, agreeably to His unfailing method, He does not communicate to aftertimes. He will not stereotype the outward garb which he would have adapt itself to the changing wants of men.
Christ's intimations of the future wear the appearance of being given, less to communicate fore-knowledge than that when the event came to pass the hearers might feel that Christ had “told them before:”[309] if He had thought good He would have made the lessons plainer. It may have helped to sustain the Apostles during the terrible hours when their Master lay in the grave, to turn to these words of forecast and from them to gather that all was being carried forward towards a purpose preordained of God. It is true that our Lord had told the Apostles again and again what the end was to be, but they could not believe that He would permit His enemies to prevail, and our Lord hardly seems to expect that they would take His words as literal truth. If, during the last days, they had really believed that He was about to perish on the cross, they would have been paralysed with anguish and dismay, and the last lessons would have fallen on the ears of men who were prostrated and stunned.
That our Lord's action was suited to what did actually happen, and not to what was likely to happen after the judgment of men, appears also in another way.
The Apostles, both in themselves and in virtue of their training, were exactly adapted to the part which came into their hands, but they were by no means of the sort which the leader either of a [pg 414] political or a religious movement would have picked out to carry it forward when He should die. They were not men to fascinate crowds and lead them whither they would, they were not men to discover that aspect of a dogma which should commend itself to the understandings of their hearers. They had no skill in policy, no experience in government or in organising bodies of men; their strength lay not in their talent but their truth. If they had possessed brilliant capacity, and all or any of the qualities named above, the danger of disunion or of there being as many different followings as there were Apostles (see 1 Cor. i. 12) would have been thereby increased. We read in History or Philosophy of great men who have left empires or systems for their chosen successors to maintain. Did such successors keep free from dissension and disruption in the way that those did whom Jesus chose and trained? Did any such body answer its purpose as the Apostles did?
The training of the Apostles fitted them admirably, as has been said above, for witnesses who should carry credit with the world; it brought them, by the road of personal devotion to a visible Master, unto Faith in an unseen God; it endowed them with wonderful endurance, it taught them the patience whereby they might “win their souls;”[310] it educated their intuitions to discern [pg 415] God's ways and recognise God's whisper in the voice which spake at their hearts. But they were destitute of eloquence and of many of the gifts with which the founder of a sect would have been careful to see that those were furnished who were to take His place; and this omission only becomes intelligible when we find that the deficiencies are supplied by Christ's presence with them, and by the Spirit from on high.
What was most important of all was, that no act or word of Christ's should seem to shut out from their share in Him any section of mankind. Agreeably with this, He never proclaims Himself the Jewish Messiah. No Greek or Roman would have listened for a moment to one who declared Himself the especial prophet of the Jews. Though of the “house and family of David,”[311] He will accept no advantage on this score. He repudiates for the Redeemer of the world the title of “Son of David,”[312] which from its nature was based on legitimacy and must rest on the veracity of genealogical rolls. The Apostles were to divine the nature of His Personality by long and close intercourse[313] with Him, more than by canvassing claims or interpreting texts. When His disciples ask to be taught to pray, “as John also taught his disciples,”[314] He gives them a prayer very unlike what John [pg 416] would have given, for it contains not a word of that petition for blessing upon Israel, which, in any prayer that an Israelite offered, contained, to his mind, the gist of the whole. This prayer too was offered, not to the “Lord God of Israel” or the “God of their Fathers,”—as Jewish prayers[315] were; there was not a word in it, echoing their boast that God was peculiarly their own—but every human being is emboldened by it to turn to God as his Father in Heaven. In all this, however, our Lord never loosens the bonds of Israelite life. He proceeds always in a positive and not a negative way; without removing the Kingdom of Israel from view, He lets it dissolve, as it were, into the Kingdom of God.
There is another point brought out in this later ministry; Christ does not look forward to ultimate visible success in the way of making converts. No hope is held out of the whole world being eventually won over to allegiance—of a spiritual conquest, any more than of a material one—“Howbeit,” says He—and who would have said this but Christ?—“when the Son of man cometh shall he find Faith upon the earth?” No other than Christ ever dared to tell his followers, not only that their Master would be put to death, and they themselves ill used, but also that it was very doubtful whether their cause, as far as visible appearances went, would finally prevail.
With Christ indeed as with God, there is no [pg 417] speaking of such a thing as either failure or success at all; He moves steadily onward toward the development of the Design of the World. But this men do not easily perceive; adversaries of the Faith are apt to say “If this religion were of God, the world would have been compelled to accept it.” But of what good could such acceptance have been? Christianity is not a project of God, which it gratifies Him for men to be made to fall in with. Christ views His word as a winnowing fan sorting out those who are God's, that they may be brought to that knowledge of Him in which eternal life resides. At some epochs of the world's history, the yield will be rich and at others poor; and although Christ may come at a moment when the wheat is almost lost in the abundance of the chaff; nevertheless the grain of earlier harvests will have been sifted out and garnered in heaven, and Christ's work will have accomplished its end. But besides sifting out those who could be educated to eternal life, it is by Christ's words and work that the world has been preserved such that Holiness can grow in it; without this it might have perished of evil. Wickedness might have so got the Mastery that the world could not have served its purpose as an exercise ground for man's capacity for reaching the knowledge of God.
The whole scheme of Christ's action is made complete by the promise, “I am with you always until the end of the world.” Not only is it in virtue of this truth that the Church is a living [pg 418] organism, and not merely a body dispensing doctrines or following directions which have been received once for all, but I also see the fulfilment of this promise in the alacrity and vigour which characterised the Apostles' work. They must have felt that they were something more than a society of men held together by love for a lost Leader; and I cannot explain how the eleven held together, and subordinated every personal care to their Master's glory;—I cannot account for this personal transformation of them, everyone,—except by supposing them animated by the feeling that Christ was among them still.
It is far more in harmony with our Lord's ways for Him to put the Apostles, by His spiritual monitions, into the way of organising their Society for themselves, than that He should peremptorily lay down a formal plan to which they must adhere. What Christ left undone, was what it would be good for man to endeavour to do for himself: but if Christ had not been by to whisper, men might never have set themselves to the work at all. The energy and persistent determination of the Apostles could hardly have been maintained without a sense of Christ's abiding presence; and that they had eye and ear open for discerning this I count to have come, partly of God's free gift, partly of their ingrained nature, but in far greater degree to have been the outcome of the gentle and almost imperceptible Schooling of Christ.