In this chapter I have considered the series of Temptations, with reference to their bearing on the miracles. I have tried to shew that they supply insight into our Lord's way of solving the problem of introducing the infinite element without causing the finite to disappear. But this is only a student view; and the lesson which the church has always drawn from them is of infinitely greater practical worth. The heads of this lesson are: that the great prizes of life presented themselves to Jesus as they do to us; that they glittered in His eyes as they do in ours; that they offered themselves to His grasp as they sometimes do to ours, and were deliberately renounced by Him as hollow, compared with the blessing of knowing and doing the will of God. Without this [pg 146] record, could we have conceived our Lord as being “Man of the substance of His mother born in the world”? Might we not have looked on Jesus Christ as only a manifestation of Deity, clad in outer human guise, but without human affections; visible indeed to men's eyes, but destitute of a pulse which beats in unison with theirs? This error would have lodged Christianity in mens' heads instead of in their hearts and would have destroyed its universality and force; and this error, the narrative of the Temptation—whether we regard it as apologue or fact—is alike effectual to dispel.
Chapter VI. From The Temptation To The Ministry In Galilee.
Outset of the Work.
We now come in sight of that part of our Lord's work which is the special subject of this book. We have been shewn something of what passed in His mind during the days in the desert; but we are not told what He intended to accomplish or by what practical steps He would proceed. We need not suppose that He came forth from the desert with His plan of action completely prepared. He may not have settled where He should lay the scene of His work or whom He should take for His helpers. All this would grow clear to Him as time went on. But though He may have been waiting for the guidance of inner voice and outward circumstance as to the way of executing His charge, yet that He had God's work to do and meant to do it is written unmistakeably in His air.
We are shown Him in St John's Gospel on His way to Galilee. A glimpse is given us across His path, and we see Him pass along with the assured tread of one whose part is taken and who knows [pg 148] whither His steps lead. On one point touching the form of His work He is already clear. He is not to come as a practical reformer or as a claimant of power; in these characters He would need active human aid, and the Spirit of the World would enter in: but though He is given functions beyond teaching, yet, in order to wear a garb familiar to the people, He will be in their eyes nothing more, at first, than “a teacher come from God;”[74] His followers are to be purely disciples and not adherents of any other kind. His concern was not with political or social forms of order,—these must be different in different times and different lands. His province was to waken into activity the capacity for knowing God which was practically dormant in the mass of mankind. Before laying down any plan or organising any society, He passes some months in exploring, so to say, the tempers, and minds and capacities of the different classes of persons in Jerusalem and Galilee. He is in search of the fittest receptacles for the word. He looks into the hearts of the disciples of John, and of those who like Nicodemus were “scribes instructed into the kingdom of heaven.” He turns His eye upon Samaritans and peasants of Galilee; and finally, as we know, decides to choose the quiet Lake shore for the cradle of the Faith. The peasants and fishers whose ways He knew—unsentimental, serviceable men—were taken as witnesses for the [pg 149] new revelation: they offered the new flasks wanted for the new wine.
A man who sets about regenerating society commonly begins by remodelling institutions; he trusts to good institutions to make men good: our Lord, as a Teacher, begins at the other end; He goes straight to the men themselves and tries to make them better; better men would bring about better ways of ordering their outward lives; but each generation must do this for itself. The success of His enterprise did not rest on its immediate acceptance; and so, He did not aim at drawing numbers round Him or at gaining influential proselytes or at consolidating a school or a sect. Christ's work was to go on for ever, and mankind would be redeemed equally, whether many followers or few attended Him while on earth.
It may be asked “Did our Lord from the first see all that lay before Him?” The conclusion from the facts of the history must be that, unless when it were specially summoned, His divine prescience remained in abeyance, and that He, as the Son of Man, was subject to those uncertainties as to the future which attend ordinary human action. He could not have worked together with men, as He did with the Apostles, if He had differed so essentially from them as to know perfectly every day what was going to happen on the next: he could not have experienced surprise; and surprise our Lord certainly shews at the dulness of the disciples [pg 150] in catching His meaning: “He marvelled” too at the unbelief of some districts. On occasion we know that He could search men's hearts; but they did not lie bare to His view. Neither can we suppose that, when He charged men not to publish their cures, He knew that He would be disobeyed; or that He chose Judas for an Apostle knowing that he would betray Him. The general drift of the purport of His coming, and His insight into it, grew clearer and clearer the nearer He came to the end; but we have no warrant for supposing that the details of all that would happen on the way lay before Him from the first.
He draws His disciples to Him at first with a cheerful hope: but towards the close of His career He has the air of one moving under a load; and once He gives utterance to what lies at His heart. The words in which He does this throw a light on the question of His purpose and His plan; they are spoken apparently to St Peter—