Ever since the time when after the feeding of the five thousand, the people wanted to take Him and make Him a King, our Lord has been chary of working Signs and Wonders; and such as are wrought are no longer used for demonstration; Signs are now hardly if at all employed to attract attention and waken interest. They had already done in this way all the good they were likely to effect, and if they had been employed longer, some of those bye-effects, which potent agencies are almost sure to produce along with that which is intended, might have come into operation with injurious results.
Between the journey to the feast of Tabernacles and the week of the Passion, three only of the leading miracles are recorded; they are the giving of sight to one born blind in Jerusalem, the raising of Lazarus, and the opening of the eyes of the blind near Jericho. This last, of which I shall first speak, occurred on that final journey of our Lord to Jerusalem [pg 426] during which He seems to have resumed for a moment His earliest function, that of witness of the Kingdom of God to the people at large. We seem to see, once again, the same Jesus who lived at Capernaum and taught the people by the Lake side.
Whether our Lord, on His way to this last Passover, set out Himself from Galilee or joined on the road the great company travelling from the north is left uncertain, but we find our Lord among a throng of visitants to the feast, who are proud of having the Great Prophet of Nazareth among them; and men come to Him—some with real troubles of soul like the young ruler—and others, like the Pharisees, either curious to obtain His decision on some vexed question, or maliciously setting Him in a dilemma between the contravention of Moses' Law, and the retaining of a burden which men were loth to bear. One small event, preserved to us in the account of this journey, gives us the clearest glimpse of our Lord's air and general demeanour that we ever obtain. There was, about Him, that indefinable something which wins children's confidence at sight. The little ones, who swarmed in the hamlets of the Jordan valley, were drawn to Him by something in His look, and—after long gazing out of their dark eastern eyes, in childhood's own intent way—they made out that they would be safe with Him, and stole to His side.
The miracle of healing, worked on the way, that of the cure of the blind men in Jericho, is nearly after the old sort. As Jesus nears the end, He reverts to the ways with which His revelation began. Our Lord was touched no doubt by the affliction of these men and their urgent cry, and this was a miracle of beneficence, but He takes no pains now to withdraw the act from public view, He does not call them “aside from the multitude,”[322] and heal them in private as He had done on His way back from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon some months before. This miracle stirred the hearts of many beholders, and this emotion of theirs may have played no small part in the great drama to which this journey was the prelude; for the company that came with our Lord from Galilee formed the staple of that great concourse which shouted
“Blessed is the kingdom that cometh, the kingdom of our father David: Hosanna in the highest,”[323]
and this shout of the people not only roused in the priests that terror which “sits hard by hate,” but gave them the very thing they wanted—grounds for calling upon Pilate to prove himself Cæsar's friend.
It is not likely that any of our Lord's doings were without an ordered purpose, and that this cessation [pg 428] of Signs certainly was not so, is apparent from our Lord's words spoken probably soon after the performance of the first of those miracles mentioned above. The words are these.
“And when the multitudes were gathering together unto him, he began to say, This generation is an evil generation: it seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah.”[324]
On this text as given by St Matthew I have already commented; it is only the coincidence of the time when it was spoken with the gradual withdrawal of visible Signs that I have to notice now. Our Lord looks to sowing the germs of spiritual Faith. This would not grow up either from the curiosity of those who sought for Signs, or the stupefaction of those who gazed in wonderment. Henceforth it is “the word of eternal life” which lays hold of men. The questions asked in the deepest earnest turn now upon this.[325] The revelation of it did not come by express statements or descriptions, but rather it grew up in men through their consorting with Christ. They could not believe that He would perish, and He told them that because He lived they should live also.[326] Christ, speaking just before the end, rests His expectation of bringing about the knowledge of God, not on His works but on His Personality. His reply to the words “Shew us the Father,” is [pg 429] not, Have I not done mighty works before your eyes? but, “Have I been so long time with you and dost thou not know me, Philip?”
I now pass to the raising of Lazarus. It is not within my scope to discuss the nature of the miracle, I have to do with it only in its relation to that Law of the working of Signs, which is suggested in the Temptation of the Pinnacle of the Temple. No Sign is given to men whose belief is in the formative stage, in order to force it on; but to those whose belief is already assured a conclusive miracle may be shown, because it does not now constrain judgment but only confirms it. If the miracle had been at once published wherever the gospel was preached, and if it had been supported by testimony which no one could dispute, this would have been an exception to the rule so often marked in our Lord's conduct. This miracle is in its nature appalling and conclusive, and it could not be attributed to Beelzebub; but a loop-hole in point of evidence is left for those indisposed to believe, for it rests on the unsupported testimony of St John. The raising of Lazarus was not, we may conclude, recorded in the Apostolic memoir which some suppose to have been the basis of the Synoptic Gospels. I have said in the last chapter that I think it possible that the entire body of Apostles were not continuously about the person of our Lord during the six months between the Feast of Tabernacles and the last journey. When Thomas [pg 430] said, speaking of the proposed visit to Jerusalem at the time of Lazarus' death, “Let us also go that we may die with Him,”[327] I can hardly suppose that Peter can have been by and have held his peace. Supposing then that the writers of this memoir, among whom Peter must have held a foremost place, confined themselves as much as possible to what they knew from personal knowledge, they would have abstained from introducing a matter so wondrous as that of the raising of Lazarus, which they had not witnessed themselves. In whatever way this silence is to be explained, the silence itself accords with the above-noted Law.