IV.
Perhaps it was by the recollection of how deeply he had vowed to stick by Christ, even if he should have to die with Him, that Peter was pricked on to do something. The others, however, had said the same thing. Did they remember it now? It is to be feared, not: the apparition of mortal danger drove everything out of their minds but the instinct of self-preservation. Sometimes, in cases of severe illness, especially of mental disease, the curious effect may be observed—that a face into which years of culture have slowly wrought the stamp of refinement and dignity entirely loses this, and reverts to the original peasant type. So the fright of their Master's arrest, coming so suddenly on the prayerless and unprepared disciples, undid, for the time, what their years of intercourse with Him had effected; and they sank back into Galilean fishermen again. This was really what they were from the arrest to the resurrection.
Here again their conduct is in absolute contrast with their Master's. As a mother-bird, when her brood is assailed, goes forward to meet the enemy, or as a good shepherd stands forth between his flock and danger, so Jesus, when His captors drew nigh, threw Himself between them and His followers. It was partly with this in view that He went so boldly out and concentrated attention on Himself by the challenge, "Whom seek ye?" When they replied, "Jesus of Nazareth," He said, "I am He: if therefore ye seek Me, let these go their way." And the fright into which they were thrown made them forget His followers in their anxiety to secure Himself.
This was as He intended. St. John, in narrating it, makes the curious remark, that this was done that the saying might be fulfilled which He spake, "Of them which Thou gavest Me have I lost none." This saying occurs in His great intercessory prayer, offered at the first Communion table; but in its original place it evidently means that He had lost none of them in a spiritual sense, whereas here it seems to have only the sense of losing any of them by the swords of the soldiers or by the cross, if they had been arrested with Him. But a deep hint underlies this surface meaning. St. John suggests that, if any of them had been taken along with Him, the likelihood is that they would have been unequal to the crisis: they would have denied Him, and so, in the sadder sense, would have been lost.
Jesus, knowing too well that this was the state of the case, made for them a way of escape, and "they all forsook Him and fled." It was perhaps as well, for they might have done worse. Yet what an anticlimax to the asseveration which everyone of them had made that very evening, "If I should die with Thee, I will not deny Thee in any wise!" I have sometimes thought what an honour it would have been to Christianity, what a golden leaf in the history of human nature, had one or two of them—say, the brothers James and John—been strong enough to go with Him to prison and to death. We should, indeed, have missed St. John's writings in that case—his Revelation, Gospel and Epistles. But what a revelation that would have been, what a gospel, what a living epistle!
It was not, however, to be. Jesus had to go unaccompanied: "I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with Me." So they "bound Him and led Him away."
[1] Speira=cohors, tenth part of legion. See Ramsay, R.A., 381.
[2] katephilesen. It is used of the woman who was a sinner, when she kissed the feet of the Saviour.
[3] Psalm lv. 13-14.
[4] Other instances in Süskind, Passionsschule, in loc.
[5] See fuller details in Imago Christi, last chapter.