Pastor Pastorum; Or, The Schooling of the Apostles by Our Lord

by Henry Latham

However plausible the appeal of the Tempter, it was not entertained. We can conceive that a whole array of objections would arise; some may have been such as these—

This putting of God to trial by a test of my own choosing, that I may determine whether I will believe His words or not: this implying that I will admit His authority if He speaks in one way and not if He speaks in another—Is this befitting one called to a work like this?

Then came another point—He was hungry. As St Mark says nothing about the fasting it will be best not to assume that the fasting was part of our Lord's original purpose; but as, in the desert of [pg 130] Judea, food could not be got without a journey of some miles, our Lord, whether designedly or not, had put Himself out of the immediate reach of food. Should He remedy this by using the mysterious power with which He felt He was invested? This power was given Him to forward God's Kingdom upon earth—should He use it for Himself?

Then the tempter might return to the assault. There are fluxes and refluxes in human feeling; we are always afraid that we have gone too far in one direction, or been too obstinate about our own point; it strikes us that perhaps we have made more of it than it was worth, and then we listen submissively to the other side.

Such a whisper as this may have come—"These powers are given you to enable you to set up God's Kingdom upon earth; for this you must win adherents. These adherents must be maintained. Your opponents are supported by the great ones of the earth; the God of Heaven has committed to you His powers for the support of yours. This little incident of the loaves only points the way to a much weightier matter; you must use your special powers to supply your own bodily wants in the coming contest,—why not begin with using them for this purpose now?"

Here we have arrived at the gravest point of the debate—Were these powers really to be used for His bodily wants or not? As the true conditions of His work rose before Him, the principles grew [pg 131] clearer; He was to deliver mankind as the Son of Man, He was to work as man, to suffer as man, that suffering men might always look to Him, saying “He was one of us.” And how could this be, if His lot was so unlike theirs that He met His own wants by a word of command directly they arose? How could His followers own the duty of labouring for their daily bread, if stones at a word were turned into loaves for Him? How could He tell men not to think overmuch of the meat that perisheth, if He had used Divine powers to provide it for Himself as soon as He possessed them? If He were to be the stay of loving human hearts, He must say to men, “As you live, I live: of all your ills and troubles I claim my part.”

Our Lord's answer points out a train of thought along which He may have passed, until at length He reached a firm resolve and reduced the Tempter to silence. It will not be irreverent to imagine what might, consistently with what we learn, have been its nature.

Man wants no reminding that he lives by bread. There is no fear of his not giving care enough to the needs of his body; but there is danger lest he should think of nothing but these needs, and starve his soul and become such that eternal life, without a body to care for, would only be a condition of aimless weariness. He resolved therefore to keep His powers apart for spiritual ends. He will work no miracle to shew that He can work a miracle, or [pg 132] to assure either Himself or others that He is the Son of God; neither will He use this power to provide what others win by toil, or to preserve Himself or His followers from the common ills of human life.

There are a few of our Lord's Signs which might, at first sight, look as if in them this principle were not observed. At the marriage of Cana in Galilee, the Sign is worked as an act of kindness to save the host from mortification arising from an accident.

I have mentioned, as regards the miracles of the loaves and fishes, that on both occasions the supply which our Lord's own company had with them was sufficient for their immediate wants. The crowds, however, had, by their rapt attention to our Lord, been detained away from their homes and their supplies, and, if they had had to go a distance to buy bread, they would have suffered from taking so long a journey fasting. The case was an exceptional emergency parallel to that of illness, and our Lord meets it by miraculous means.