In every disciple, even in those who seem most loyal, there is the seed of a Judas. A disciple is a parasite, a middleman who robs the seller and tricks the buyer; a dependent who, invited to dine, nibbles at the hors d’œuvres, licks the sauces, picks at the fruit, but does not attack the bones because he has no teeth, or only milk teeth, to crack them and suck out the meaty marrow. The disciple paraphrases sentences, obscures mysteries, complicates what is clear, multiplies difficulties, comments on syllables, travesties principles, clouds evidence, magnifies non-essentials, weakens the essential, dilutes the strong wine, and retails this hodge-podge as elixir distilled and quintessence. Instead of a torch which gives light and fire, he is a smoky wick giving no light even to himself.
And yet no one has been able to dispense with these pupils and followers, nor even to wish to. For the great man is so foreign to the multitude, so distant, so alone, that he needs to feel some one near him. He cannot teach without the illusion that some one understands his words, receives his ideas, transmits them to others far away before his death and after his death. This wanderer who has no home of his own needs a friendly hearth. To this uprooted man who cannot have a family of his own flesh and blood, the children of his spirit are dear. The prophet is a captain whose soldiers spring up only after his blood has soaked into the ground, and yet he longs to feel a little army about him during his life-time. Here is one of the most tragic elements in all greatness: disciples are repugnant and dangerous, but disciples, even false ones, cannot be dispensed with. Prophets suffer if they do not find them; they suffer, perhaps more, when they have found them.
A man’s thought is bound with a thousand threads to his soul even more closely than a child to a parent’s heart. It is infinitely precious, delicate, fragile, and the newer it is, the harder it is for other men to understand. It is a tremendous responsibility, a continued torture and suffering to confide it to another, to graft it on another’s thought, to give it into the hands of the man incapable of respecting it, this gift so rare, a thought new in human life. And yet every great man longs to share with all men what he has received; and to achieve this sharing with humanity is more than he can do single-handed. Then, too, vanity insinuates itself even in noble breasts: and vanity needs caressing words, needs praise, even offensive praise, needs assent, even verbal, consecration even from the mediocre, victories even if they are only apparent.
Christ has none of this smallness of the great, and yet in order to share all the burdens of mankind, He accepted with the other trials of earthly life the burden of disciples. Before being tormented by His enemies, He gave himself over to be tormented by His friends. The priests killed him, once and once only; the disciples made Him suffer every day of their life with Him. The anguish of His passion would not have been completely intolerable if it had not included the desertion of the Apostles in addition to the Sadducees, the guards, the Romans, the crowd.
We know who the Apostles were. A Galilean, He chose them from among the Galileans. A poor man, He chose them from among the poor; a simple man, but of a divine simplicity transcending all philosophies, He called simple men whose simplicity kept them like clods. He did not wish to choose them from among the rich, because He had come to combat the rich; nor among the scribes and doctors, because He had come to overturn their law; nor among the philosophers, because there were no philosophers living in Palestine, and had there been, they would have tried to extinguish His supernatural mysticism under the dialectic bushel.
He knew that these souls were rough but had integrity, were ignorant but ardent, and that He could in the end mold them according to His desire, bring them up to His level, fashion them like clay from the river, which is only mud, and yet when modeled and baked in the kiln, becomes eternal beauty. But flame from the Holy Ghost was needed for that transformation; until the day of the Pentecost their imperfect nature had too often the upper hand. To the Twelve much should be pardoned because almost always they had faith in Him; because they tried to love Him as He wished to be loved; and, above all, because after having deserted Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, they never forgot Him and left to all eternity the memory of His word and of His life.
And yet our hearts ache if we look at them closely in the Gospels, those disciples of whom we have some knowledge. They were not always worthy of their unique and supreme felicity, those men who were so inestimably fortunate as to live with Christ, to walk, to eat with Him, to sleep in the same room, to look into His face, to touch His hand, to kiss Him, to hear His words from His very mouth; those twelve fortunate men, whom throughout the centuries millions of souls have secretly envied.
We see them, hard of head and of heart, not able to understand the clearest parables of the Master; not always capable of understanding, even after His death, who Jesus had been and what sort of a new Kingdom was proclaimed by Him; often lacking in faith, in love, in brotherly affection; eager for pay; envying each other; impatient for the revenge which would repay them for their long wait; intolerant of those who were not one with them; vindictive towards those who would not receive them, somnolent, doubtful, materialistic, avaricious, cowardly.
One of them denies Him three times; one of them delays giving Him due reverence until He is in the sepulcher; one does not believe in His mission because He comes from Nazareth; one is not willing to admit His resurrection; one sells Him to His enemies, and gives Him over with His last kiss to those who come to arrest Him. Others, when Christ’s teachings were on a too-lofty level, “went back and walked no more with Him.”
Many times Jesus was forced to reprove them for their slowness of mind. He told them the parable of the sower, and they did not understand its meaning. “Know ye not this parable, and how then will ye know all parables?” He warns them against the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and they think that He is speaking of material bread. “Why reason ye because ye have no bread, perceive ye not yet, neither understand? Have ye your heart yet hardened? Having eyes see ye not, and having ears hear ye not?” Like the common people they constantly feel that Jesus should be the worldly Messiah, political, warlike, come to restore the temporal throne of David. Even when He is about to ascend into Heaven they continue to ask Him: “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the Kingdom to Israel?” And after the resurrection, the two disciples of Emmaus say: “But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.”