The Temptation on the Mount.
Next comes a scene in which the Spirit of the World is represented as pointing out all the glories of the empire of the inhabited earth, and offering it to our Lord on the strange condition that He should fall down and worship him. This represents, in plain and very forcible imagery, a spiritual temptation to which those who have laboured to regenerate mankind have fallen victims over and over again. Those who have most nearly attained universal conquest, Mahomet, Zengis, Timour, and many great political leaders as well, have begun with a genuine wish to alleviate the ills of mankind, of whom eventually they became a scourge.
I believe that what our Lord sets before us here is the temptation to aim at visible and comparatively immediate success, and to bring about [pg 135] our ideal by using the arts of worldly policy; which were to be supported in the case before us by superhuman power.
We can conceive a Tempter, such as the Satan of Paradise Regained, saying as he does,
“Great acts require great means of enterprise,”
and urging worldly counsels such as these:—“You seek to set up a perfect kingdom upon earth, to minimise evil by wise laws, and to make men love God and serve God out of love. You want success and you want it soon, in order that in your lifetime you may see your plans matured. For this, first of all, you must have at your back not merely disciples who shall listen and meditate, but men who can advance a cause. The uppermost feeling of the people among whom you have come is the desire to be free from Rome. They have drawn from the Scriptures a notion that a Messiah will soon come and restore the kingdom to Israel. With this view, be it right or wrong, you must fall in. You carry with you powers like those wielded by the prophets of old. Proclaim yourself such a Messiah as men expect. Strike to the ground the Roman eagles that are sent against you. Offer to all who fall on your side a paradise of palpable enjoyments such as they can understand. Shew yourself invulnerable, and be everywhere foremost in the fight. Your superhuman power will balance the enormous might of Rome. In order to win the empire of the world you [pg 136] must employ policy as well as arms. You must excite enthusiasm. You must fascinate crowds by eloquence and lead them to serve your purpose when they think that you are serving theirs. When you have secured the empire, you can inaugurate a golden reign and call on men to bless your Father who sent you to their aid.”
If suggestions such as these had been made to our Lord by such a Tempter as Milton imagines, we can see from the reply in our narrative how they would have been met. This kingdom, our Lord would say, so gained might indeed be mine but assuredly it will not be God's; and my business is not to work for myself but for Him. It was this utter absence of self, in our Lord, which men could not comprehend; their common standards could not measure Him—they are bewildered by this, and all but the higher sort are put out of touch with Him.
The picture which our Lord leaves us of His struggle with the evil suggestions of His insidious foe teaches us many lessons, but the clearest of all are these—If we fight the world with its own weapons we soon put our hands out for using any others than those. If we seek what the world has to give we soon fall down and worship it, without having the least intention of doing anything of the kind. But besides giving a lesson for after ages, our Lord here indicates a particular resolve which shaped His action upon earth. It [pg 137] was this,—He would not employ His superhuman powers to force men to obey, or even to resist the violence which might be offered Him. He would not use them to assist in setting up the outward fabric of a Kingdom of God: and then, going a little further, He determines not to set up by His own hand any outward fabric of such a Kingdom at all. He was not to be an aspirant for worldly distinction—He was not to be the leader of a cause—He was not to be the founder of a school of philosophy or of any external form of religion at all. He came to do a Work, The Central Work of the History of mankind. He declared God, and declared Himself to be united to God, and that He would be with men for ever until the end of the world. But all that has to do with organisation, outward customs, effective sanctions, or the condensing of doctrines into the formulæ of creeds, belongs to the human side of religion, and men of different climes and ages must shape such matters for themselves. He came, as I have said, only to kindle the fire and to set a new force moving in the world. This Law,—that neither force nor worldly policy should be used to carry out the Work of God,—governs all our Lord's acts. It need hardly be said that there is no miracle of our Lord's recounted in the canonical Scriptures in which violence is either done or repelled. In the apocryphal Gospels we find endless legends of the retribution which our Lord brought on [pg 138] those who injured Him, especially in His boyish years.
Neither do we ever find that our Lord so displays His signs or shapes His conduct, as to win from the crowd material support for the work He is carrying on. It was never more important for Him to win over the enthusiasm of the people than when He taught in Jerusalem in the week of the Passover: but no public miracle at all is then performed. It must have seemed strange to the disciples that He did not confound Pilate on his judgment seat, or Herod on his throne, but we see that the whole meaning of His coming would have been lost if He had. The disciples however are not left at that time without some indication that His Divine power remained unimpaired—the withering of the fig-tree, and the foretelling to Peter that he should deny Him thrice, shewed them that Jesus was still the Lord. When the Lord in the hands of His enemies turned and looked upon Peter, how striking must have been the contrast between the Kingdoms of the earth and of God!
There is one occasion where our Lord is urged to act in violation of this principle. The sons of Zebedee ask whether they may not call down fire from Heaven on those who would not receive them. “But He turned and rebuked them.”[66]
Again, if He had come down from the cross when challenged to do so, this principle would have [pg 139] been broken through. Those who said “He saved others, Himself He cannot save,”[67] uttered a truth deeper than they dreamed of: it was of the very essence of His mission that He should not use His powers for Himself.
In connexion with this it may be noted that when St Peter is delivered from the prison,[68] and St Paul and Silas at Philippi, these deliverances are represented, not as being worked by St Peter or St Paul, but as being worked for them by the Divine power, without any doing of theirs.