“I came to cast fire upon the earth; and what will I, if it is already kindled? But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”[75]
It needed one sent from God to kindle this fire, and to bring home to men the truth that His Spirit worked within them to will and to do; but when the kindling was once effected, the rest might be left to human effort. Men could feed the flame [pg 151] and men could fan it; and so, following the law we have traced in operation so often, to men the flame was left, for them to feed and fan. “This being done,” our Lord might say, “this for which I came,—why do I linger here? what more do I want?” and yet He might add “My whole work is not done: the crowning act remains. Men will never understand my love at all unless I die for them.” Until He was baptised with this baptism of suffering, He was like one straitened on every side by an imperious task which claims his every thought.
Our Lord's movements from the Temptation on to the Ministry in Galilee are made known to us by the Gospel of St John. Jesus appears on the banks of the Jordan, where John was still baptising his disciples; He mixes with the throng; the Baptist points Him out to two young men, one of whom, Andrew, brings his brother to visit Him; the other was probably the Evangelist himself. Afterwards our Lord Himself finds Philip, and Philip finds Nathanael, and the little party travel on foot to Cana of Galilee. No writer, who did not confine himself to facts about which he was certain, would have given so homely a story of the beginning of so mighty a matter.
The Gospel of St John is manifestly written by one who is in the position of a disciple; he sees everything from the disciple's point of view: what the disciples thought of things that happened [pg 152] seems to be always uppermost in his mind. He is not a writer composing a continuous biography of our Lord, but a disciple drawing lessons from particular scenes of his Master's life; and he no more thinks of considering why our Lord took the course He did, than he would consider why the seasons change. An historian might have looked for reasons why our Lord did not appear in public life in Jerusalem; but John does not look on the matter with an historian's eye.
I will here summarise the occasions on which the disciples are mentioned, in the period of the history embraced in this chapter. We first hear of them in the account of the wedding at Cana. The Evangelist relates that “He manifested forth His glory, and His disciples believed on Him.”[76] Next we find the disciples spoken of, as if they stood in a kind of family relation to Him. “He went down to Capernaum, He, and His mother, and His brethren, and His disciples.”[77] When we come to the account of the cleansing of the Temple, it is pointed out how that action struck the disciples. They talked it over among themselves; they recalled the verse in the Psalms, “The zeal of Thine house shall eat me up,”[78] and thought they saw a Messianic prophecy fulfilled: we are told too that after our Lord's death they recalled His words about building the Temple in three days. We hear also that they were numerous: “many believed [pg 153] on His name, beholding the signs which He did.”[79] Next comes a fact of great importance; it is that, though our Lord did not baptise adherents, yet that His disciples did so, and that finally more resorted to them than to the Baptist.[80] A few disciples attended our Lord in the journey through Samaria, and to them His first recorded discourse as a teacher is addressed: there is no further mention of them during the period embraced in this chapter. Such is the summary of the matter bearing on my subject; I proceed to discuss points of interest that arise out of it.
The advent of our Lord differed from that of other enlighteners of mankind in one very striking way. He had, in the Baptist, a special forerunner, who gave out, on all occasions, that the final cause of his own preaching was to prepare the way for one greater than himself. Events of national history, themselves part of that wide-spreading “Preparatio Evangelica” which, to my mind, underlies the history of the world, had raised a ferment in the minds of the inhabitants of Palestine. To this movement the Baptist gave a particular turn. He brought men to desire that the world should become better, and taught them that they must begin by becoming better themselves. Without this preparation, the germs of truth which our Lord scattered would more largely have failed to quicken: the Baptist had broken up the soil to [pg 154] receive the seed; his preaching put the people in an attitude of expectancy, and an expectant condition is a receptive one. The Old Testament prophecies had worked to this same end; they had made expectancy congenial to the nation's mind. The Israelites were like spectators waiting to see a great king come with a procession: the sight of a forerunner sets the crowd astir, and such a forerunner John was. I have observed before, that in carrying out His own work our Lord is careful to use preparation. The disciples are sent “to every place where He Himself would come.” Men were not to be repelled from the new movement by reason of its being strange to them. What this preparation did for the villages of Galilee the Baptist did on a grander scale for all Judæa.
We get but a glimpse of the nature of the relation between John and his disciples, and need only notice it briefly. Young men did not, like those who sat at the feet of a Rabbi, resort to him for definite instruction: the disciples of John did not look to be taught interpretations of the Law or of the Prophets, but they looked for a rule of life for themselves and a brighter future for their country or their race—they were ill-satisfied with the present and eagerly turned to one who represented both in aspect and in utterance the prophets of old. There was one feature in John's ministry, so distinctive that he drew his appellation [pg 155] from it.—He caused his disciples to be baptised. The doctrines implied in the rite do not now concern me; to some it symbolised the cleansing from sin, to others the rising into a new life; but the practical effect of it was to make those who received it feel that they had, in a way, pledged their allegiance to John by receiving baptism at his hands: they had assumed a badge, and were bound by ties of personal loyalty to their master and to one another.[81]
But John's disciples were not separated off from the outside mass by baptism alone. To the mind of his countrymen a religion was not a religion at all, unless it included a regimen, unless it parcelled out their days, according to hours of prayer and times of fasting. With such a distinctive rule John provided his followers. He taught them to pray,[82] he accustomed them to voluntary fasts;[83] and on some points of ceremonial, such as purification, he may have had tenets of his own.[84]
We will now trace the steps by which our Lord gathers disciples round Him. It is possible that even before our Lord left Galilee He had been the centre of a group of young men who looked up to Him, and the Galileans among John's disciples [pg 156] might therefore have heard of Him. It falls in also with this supposition, that our Lord seems to have been already acquainted with Philip of Bethsaida, and to have purposely sought him out. We read—“He findeth Philip, and saith unto him, Follow me.”[85] Philip hastens to Nathanael,[86] who came from Cana in Galilee, and tells him that the Messiah has been found in the person of “Jesus the son of Joseph, the man from Nazareth.”[87] The words in italics may imply “of whom we have all heard;” for Cana was not more than six miles from Nazareth, and Bethsaida was in the same district. The Baptist, we know, regarded Him, when He came to be baptised, as his equal or superior in the favour of God.
Five of the Apostles—John, Andrew, Peter, Philip and Nathanael—were drawn to our Lord in the few days spent at Bethabara on His return from the desert; and probably all these went back with Him to Galilee. Among these five we find traces of a lasting tie. This is worth noting, because such a tie would naturally arise from comradeship in early years, and of this comradeship St John's Gospel speaks. These five had gone together from Galilee, in the zeal of their young days, to listen to the strange preacher in the desert of Judæa; they had lived together, faring alike, and baring their hearts each to the other in [pg 157] the confidence of youth. We can understand that this would bind men fast together, and that St John writing his Gospel at the end of his life, with possibly St Andrew at his side, should have been mindful of all the circumstances in which these old friends took part, and have gladly taken occasion to mention their names.[88]