The narrative of the cleansing of the Temple shews how burning was our Lord's indignation at practices that degraded men's notions of God. [pg 167] Personal attacks He bore with meekness, “when He was reviled He reviled not again, when He suffered He threatened not;”[108] but He gives free vent to a godly wrath when He finds men driving a traffic in holy things.
A personal characteristic of our Lord, shewn again and again, comes for the first time before us here: He carried authority in His air, an authority that needed no assertion, but to which men bowed. The owners of the oxen yield without resistance to the determination He shews. It is only the Hierarchy who ask, “What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things?”[109] I need not say that on demand He will work no Sign at all: this is His invariable rule.
St John says nothing of the nature of the miracles wrought by our Lord at this time; we only hear that they induced people “to believe in His name.”[110] They may have been chiefly miracles of introspection, like the recognition of Peter, the seeing of Nathanael under the fig-tree, and the divining of His mother's meaning when she said “they have no wine;” for St John assiduously keeps before his hearers this insight of our Lord into men's minds. In particular he says, in reference to the disciples who gathered round Him in Judæa,
“But Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all men, and because he needed not that any one should bear witness concerning man: for he himself knew what was in man.”[111]
When our Lord drove out the money-changers and those who sold doves, people thronged to Him in Jerusalem, thinking that the leader whom they sought had come. But these were not disciples after His own heart, not such as should receive the kingdom of God as little children. These were men who had both notions and a purpose of their own; men who would follow Him as long as He went their way; and who, when He did not, would “go back and walk no more with Him.”[112] The relation of our Lord to these early Judæan disciples was very different from that in which He stood, either to the five who had gone with Him from Bethabara to Cana and Capernaum, or to those who afterwards thronged to His preaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. To these Judæan disciples our Lord as far as we know delivers no lessons and issues no directions; we do not hear that they were especially chosen for witnesses of the Signs in Jerusalem, or that they formed an organised body in any way. It seems rather as if a body of men ranged themselves round our Lord and, from their admiration for Him, took the name of His disciples, but did not hold themselves to be under orders, and came and went as they pleased.
Our Lord had not yet begun His real Ministry; He was probing the capacities and natures both of individual men and of different classes in the community, with a view to testing their fitness for taking part in His great work.
Something inclined Him, we may suppose, to take Galilee for the cradle of the new movement; and the circumstance that those who first adhered were all Galilæans pointed along the same way. It would appear to be a method of Divine guidance, to speak by a whisper within, and, at the same time, so to order circumstances without, that one should fall in with the other: sometimes this coincidence will be perceived and will strike the beholder with a kind of awe, and sometimes it will operate on him without his being aware.
There was much that made Galilee suitable: its position was at once central and retired, and its inhabitants were, according to Josephus, sturdy and independent, and, of course, free from the pedantry of Rabbinical schools. Jerusalem however claimed a trial from our Lord. He desired to know what was passing there in the minds of those who were seeking truth. It was possible that a cradle for the infant church might be found among the followers of the Baptist, or among Scribes like Nicodemus. Our Lord gauges the fitness of both these bodies of men. We know what conclusion settled itself in His mind during those early days: He must not put new wine into old bottles. The enlightened party among those in authority were more after the type of Erasmus than of Luther, they lacked force: they had been trained to pick their way through difficulties of interpretation, but not to grasp great principles, still less to act; and though they divined that there was a truth dawning from afar, [pg 170] yet their feeling for it was not so much a passion as a taste.
After the discourse with Nicodemus the Evangelist returns to narration, and tells us of a visit of our Lord and His disciples to the district where the Baptist was carrying on his work. It may have been that he meant to represent our Lord as turning from Nicodemus to John's disciples; as if, when He found the former unequal to the need, He would try how the latter might serve. The words are
“After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judæa; and there he tarried with them, and baptized. And John also was baptizing in Ænon near to Salim, because there was much water there: and they came, and were baptized.”[113]