XII
THE FRIENDSHIPS OF JESUS
In turning our thoughts toward various scenes of our Lord's life, we are peculiarly affected with the human warmth and tenderness of his personal friendships. The little association of his own peculiar friends makes a picture that we need to study to understand him.
St. John touchingly says: "Now when the time was come that Jesus should depart out of the world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world he loved them unto the end." When we think that all that we know of our Lord comes through these friends of his—the witnesses and recorders of his life and death—we shall feel more than ever what he has made them to us. Without them we should have had no Jesus.
Our Lord, with all that he is to us, is represented to us through the loving hearts and affectionate records of these his chosen ones. It is amazing to think of, that our Lord never left to his church one line written by his own hand, and that all his words come to us transfused through the memories of his friends. How much to us, then, were these friendships of Jesus—how dear to us, for all eternity, these friends!
We are told that immediately after the resurrection there was an associated church of one hundred and twenty, who are characterized by Peter as "men that have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us."
The account of how these friends were gathered to him becomes deeply interesting. St. John relates how, one day, John the Baptist saw Jesus walking by the Jordan in silent contemplation, and pointed him out to his disciples: "Behold the Lamb of God." And the two disciples heard him speak and followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned and said, "What seek ye?" They said, "Master, where dwellest thou?" He answered, "Come and see." They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day. We learn from this that some of the disciples were those whose spiritual nature had been awakened by John the Baptist, and who, under his teaching, were devoting themselves to a religious life. We see the power of personal attraction possessed by our Lord, which drew these simple, honest natures to himself. One of these men was Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, and he immediately carried the glad tidings to his brother, "We have found the Messiah;" and he brought him to Jesus. Thus, by a sort of divine attraction, one brother and friend bringing another, the little band increased. Some were more distinctly called by the Master. Matthew, the tax-gatherer, sitting in his place of business, heard the words, "Follow me," and immediately rose up, and left all and followed him. James and John forsook their nets, in the midst of their day's labor, to follow him. In time, a little band of twelve left all worldly callings and home ties, to form a traveling mission family of which Jesus was the head and father. Others, both men and women, at times traveled with them and assisted their labors; but these twelve were the central figures.
These twelve men Jesus took to nurture and educate as the expounders of the Christian religion and the organizers of the church. St. John, in poetic vision, sees the church as a golden city descending from God out of heaven, having twelve foundations, and in them the names of these twelve Apostles of the Lamb. This plan of choosing honest, simple-hearted, devout men, and revealing himself to the world through their human nature and divinely educated conceptions, had in it something peculiar and original.
When we look at the selection made by Christ of these own ones, we see something widely different from all the usual methods of earthly wisdom. They were neither the most cultured nor the most influential of their times. The majority of them appear to have been plain workingmen, from the same humble class in which our Lord was born. But the Judæan peasant, under the system of religious training and teaching given by Moses, was no stolid or vulgar character. He inherited lofty and inspiring traditions, a ritual stimulating to the spiritual and poetic nature, a system of ethical morality and of tenderness to humanity in advance of the whole ancient world. A good Jew was frequently a man of spiritualized and elevated devotion. Supreme love to God and habitual love and charity to man were the essentials of his religious ideal. The whole system of divine training and discipline to which the Jewish race had been subjected for hundreds of years had prepared a higher moral average to be chosen from than could have been found in any other nation.