The humblest member of the Church of Christ is not without his gift. The grace of the Gospel elevates and sanctifies all his powers and opportunities, and turns them into noblest uses.
II. That the gifts of Christ to His Church are distributed with the lavish generosity of a conqueror returning from the field of victory (vers. 8–10).—We have read of the profuse gifts of victorious warriors:—of Gonsalvo, the great Spanish captain, whose unselfish prodigality was proverbial. “Never stint your hand,” he was accustomed to say: “there is no way of enjoying one’s property like giving it away”;—of Alexander the Great, who on one occasion gave a blank draft to one of his generals with liberty to fill in any amount he chose. When the treasurer, surprised at the enormous sum inserted, asked his imperial master if there was not some mistake, he answered: “No; pay it, pay it; the man honours me by assuming the inexhaustible resources of my empire”;—of Belisarius, whose victories were always followed by liberal and extravagant largesses. “By the union of liberality and justice,” writes Gibbon, “he acquired the love of his soldiers, without alienating the affections of the people. The sick and wounded were relieved with medicines and money, and still more efficaciously by the healing visits and smiles of their commander. The loss of a weapon or a horse was instantly repaired, and each deed of valour was rewarded by the rich and honourable gifts of a bracelet or a collar, which were rendered more precious by the judgment of Belisarius. He was endeared to the husbandmen by the peace and plenty which they enjoyed under the shadow of his standard. Instead of being injured, the country was enriched by the march of the Roman armies; and such was the rigid discipline of their camp that not an apple was gathered from the tree, not a path could be traced in the fields of corn. Victory by sea and land attended his armies. He subdued Africa, Italy, and the adjacent islands, led away captives the successors of Genseric and Theodoric, filled Constantinople with the spoils of their palaces, and in the space of six years recovered half the provinces of the Western empire”;—and of Aurelian, whose triumphant entry into Rome after his victories in the East was the longest, most brilliant, and imposing of any recorded in the annals of the empire, and was signalised by rich donations to the army and the people; the Capitol and every other temple glittered with the offerings of his ostentatious piety, and the temple of the sun alone received above fifteen thousand pounds of gold. But who can measure the munificence of the ascended Saviour, the Divine Conqueror, who, as the fruit of His unparalleled victory, has scattered His gifts among men, to enrich them for ever? He gives not grudgingly and sparingly, but after the measure of His own great nature. He gives not for display but for blessing, and His smallest gift out-values the most lavish donation of the richest earthly benefactor.
III. That the gifts of Christ qualify man for special work in His Church (ver. 11).—The “apostles, prophets, evangelists” linked Church to Church and served the entire body; the “pastors and teachers” had charge of local and congregational affairs. The apostles, with the prophets, were the founders of the Church. Their distinctive functions ceased when the foundation was laid and the deposit of revealed truth was complete. The evangelistic and pastoral callings remain; and out of them have sprung all the variety of Christian ministries since exercised. Evangelists, with apostles or missionaries, bring new souls to Christ and carry His message into new lands. Pastors and teachers follow in their train, tending the ingathered sheep, and labouring to make each flock that they shepherd, and every single man, perfect in Christ Jesus.
IV. That the gifts of Christ furnish the full moral equipment of the members of His Church (ver. 12).—Christ’s gifts of great and good men in every age have been bestowed for a thoroughly practical purpose—“the perfecting of the saints, the work of the ministry, the edifying of the body of Christ.” No one man has all the gifts requisite for the full development of the Church; but it is the privilege and honour of each worker to use his special gift for the general good. The combination of gifts, faithfully and diligently employed, effects the desired end. The Church must be built up, and this can be done only by the harmonious use of the gifts of Christ, not by mere human expedients. “We may have eloquent preaching, crowded churches, magnificent music, and all the superficial appearance of a great religious movement, whilst the vaunted revival is only a poor galvanised thing, a corpse twitching with a strange mimicry of life, but possessed of none of its vital energy and power.” Gifts are dangerous without the grace and wisdom to use them. Many a brilliant genius has gone down into oblivion by the reckless abuse of his gifts. Christ endows His people with gifts that they may use them for the increase and upbuilding of His Church, and they must be exercised in harmony with the rules and purposes of the Divine Architect. “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.”
Lessons.—1. Christ’s estimate of His Church is seen in the spiritual riches He has lavished upon it. 2. The gifts of each member of the Church are for the benefit of all. 3. The gifts of Christ to His Church are the offerings of a boundless love.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.
Ver. 7. The Gospel according to Mark.—The writers of the four Gospels completed their work not for the sake of making a literary reputation for themselves, or of adding to the literary masterpieces of the world, but for the spiritual benefit of the Christian Church. Christ our Lord sitting in the heavens, seeing exactly what was wanted in the apostolic Churches, and in the Church of all time, seeing what was wanted in the evangelists themselves if they were to supply the Church’s wants, measured out His gifts to the evangelists. Accordingly, to each evangelist He gave that special gift which was needed in order to do his particular work. What was the grace that was given to St. Mark? It has been said that St. Mark’s Gospel has no special character, that it is the least original of the four, that it is insipid, that it might have been dispensed with without loss to the harmony of the evangelical narrative. Even St. Augustine has spoken of it as an epitome of St. Matthew; and his deservedly great authority has obtained a currency of this opinion in the Western Church. But in point of fact, although St. Mark has more in common with St. Matthew than with any other evangelist, he is far from being a mere epitomist of the first Gospel. He narrates at least three independent incidents which St. Matthew does not notice. He has characteristics which are altogether his own.
I. St. Mark is remarkable for his great attention to subordinate details.—He supplies many particulars which evangelists who write more at length altogether omit. From him, for instance, we learn the name of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and of Bartimæus, the blind man healed by our Lord. From him we learn how Simon of Cyrene was related to well-known Christians of the next generation—Alexander and Rufus. He it is who tells us that the woman of Canaan whose petition our Lord so indulgently received was a Syrophenician, and that our Lord was popularly spoken of as the carpenter. He is careful to point out more minutely than do others the scenes in which our Lord took part on four occasions. He describes particularly our Lord’s look. He notes the express affections of our Lord’s human soul, His love for the rich young man, His anger with the Pharisee, His pity for the leper, His groaning in spirit on two separate occasions. And here we have something more than a literary peculiarity—than a style of writing which corresponds to those pre-Raphaelite artists who render every leaf and every blade of grass with scrupulous accuracy. I say that we are here face to face with a moral and spiritual excellence which forms part of the special grace given to St. Mark. Close attention to details in any workman means a recognition of the sacredness of fact. Where details are lost sight of, or blurred over, in the attempt to produce a large, general, indistinct effect, there is always a risk of indifference to the realities of truth. The very least fact is sacred, whatever be its relative importance to other facts. But in a life like that of our Lord, everything is necessarily glowing with interest, however trivial it might appear to be in any other connection. This care for details is thus the expression of a great grace—reverence for truth, reverence for every fragment of truth that touched the human life of the Son of God.
II. St. Mark is remarkable for the absence of a clearly discernible purpose in his Gospel, over and above that of furnishing a narrative of our Lord’s conflict with sin and evil during His life as man upon the earth. The three other evangelists have each of them a manifest purpose in writing of this kind. St. Matthew wishes to show to the Jews that our Lord is the Messiah of the Jewish prophecy. St. Luke would teach the Gentile Churches that He is the Redeemer whose saving power may be claimed through faith by the whole race of men. St. John is, throughout, bent upon showing that He speaks and acts while in the flesh as the eternal Word or Son of God, who has been made flesh and was dwelling among us. And it has been said that St. Mark’s narrative is an expansion of those words of Peter—that Jesus of Nazareth “went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil, for God was with Him.” Probably this is true; but then these words describe not a purpose beyond the narrative, but the substance of the narrative itself. St. Mark simply records a sacred life as he had learned it from the lips of Peter, not for any purpose beyond the narrative itself; but whatever it might prove beyond itself, it was to a believing Christian unspeakably precious.
III. A few words in conclusion.—“Unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.” As no two human souls exactly resemble each other, so no two souls are endowed in an exactly similar way. And for the difference of endowment let us be sure there is always a reason in the Divine Mind, for each soul in every generation has its appointed work to do, without itself as within itself; and it is endowed with exactly the grace, whether of mind or heart, which will best enable it to do that particular work. Some may think that they have received little or nothing—some gift so small as to be scarcely appreciable. The probability is that they have not yet considered what God has done for them. They have spent their time in thinking of what He has withheld, instead of thinking of what He has given; of what they might have been, instead of what they are. Certainly the grace which our Lord gave to St. Paul when he wrote his great epistle to the Romans was immensely greater than that which He gave to Tertius, the poor amanuensis, who took it down from the apostle’s dictation, and who inserts a greeting from himself just at the end of the document. And yet Tertius, too, had his part in the work—a humble but a very real part, according to the measure of the gift of Christ. He did not say, “Because I am not the eye I am not of the body.” He made the most of the grace which was certainly his. And others may think, rightly or wrongly, that unto them very great graces have been given according to the gift of Christ, that they are the hands or the eyes of the holy body, the men who do its work, or the men who discern the truths which support its life. Well, if it be so, this is a reason, not for confident satisfaction, but for anxiety. Such gifts as these are edge tools; they may easily prove the ruin of their possessors. For all such gifts an account must one day most assuredly be rendered; and if self has appropriated that which belongs to God or to His Church, it cannot but entail misery on the possessor. If a man has wealth, or ability, or station; much more if he has cultivated intelligence and generous impulses; most of all if his heart has been fixed by the love of God, and the unseen is to him a serious reality, and he has hopes and motives which really transcend the frontiers of the world of sense, then, assuredly, his safety lies in remembering that he is a trustee who will one day have to present his account at the great audit, when the eminence of his gifts will be the exact measure of his responsibility. Eighteen centuries have passed since St. Mark went to reign somewhere beneath his Master’s throne whose life he had described; but he has left us the result of his choicest gift—he has left us his Gospel. What has it—what have the four Gospels—hitherto done for each of us? It is recorded that John Butler, an excellent Church of England layman of the last generation, stated on his death-bed that on looking back on his life the one thing he most regretted was that he had not given more time to the careful study of the life of our Lord in the four evangelists. Probably he has not been alone in that regret; and if the truth were told, many of us would have to confess that we spend much more thought and time upon the daily papers, which describe the follies and errors of the world, than on the records of that Life which was given for the world’s redemption. The festival of an evangelist ought to suggest a practical resolution that, so far as we are concerned, the grace which he received, according to the measure of the gift of Christ, shall not, please God, be lost. Ten minutes a day seriously spent on our knees, with the Gospel in our hands, will do more to quicken faith, love, reverence, spiritual and moral insight and power, than we can easily think.—H. P. Liddon.