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

by Henry Latham

There must have been in this man “a soul of goodness” of rare efficacy in resisting influences to ill. His position must have offered temptation to exaction. This was corrupting, but the steady and persistent effect of feeling himself despised must have been more so even than this. He was hated [pg 215] not only as the tax-gatherer, but also as having accepted the service of the foreign oppressors of the land. However justly the publican might have striven to act, it would be taken for granted that he was endeavouring to fleece those who came into his hands; and a man soon becomes what people about him will have it that he is.

Now and then, however, in all positions, we come across natures which run counter to the influences around them, or which by a happy chemistry decompose the evil and turn its elements to good. Everything in the publican's calling fostered the love of gain; and to be able to save enough to give it up and live down ill report was his only hope. But Matthew breaks with his means of subsistence totally and at once. At one word of our Lord he throws all away without a moment's thought, and joins the little band of followers which was being drawn into closer attendance on our Lord. This man surely had “salt in himself.”

St Matthew has left us his Gospel. We learn from this which way his thoughts lean, and we see that he was not of that type of mind most commonly associated with the idea of the Apostle of a new creed. He was probably not very young and his views were formed and fixed: his national sympathy was intense. God was to him, first of all, the God of Israel, and he regarded our Lord as the Messiah, after the type which Jewish hopes and fancies had fashioned for themselves. In all that [pg 216] occurred he saw the reproduction of what was narrated in the old books; and the burden “Now this was done that the Scripture might be fulfilled” runs through all his writings.

Here then, some might say, we have a man chosen as a witness and promulgator of a faith which is to be universal, yet this man's sympathies flow only along one narrow channel, and he is wedded to old ways of reading the mind of God. He was however a guileless, God-fearing, high-hearted man; and it could not but strengthen the cause to have among the Apostles one who could enter into the minds of those who looked for the consolation of Israel in the old Hebrew way. The first function of the Apostles,—one on which I shall soon speak pretty fully—was that they were to bear witness of Christ. This was set forth in that which, so to say, was their charter of incorporation. “Ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judæa and Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”[149] Now the more varied the characters of the witnesses the stronger would be the case when they agreed.

Our Lord, then, will have, among His immediate followers, minds of every sort. He does not pick out those only who are most after His own heart, nor does he mould men into one fashion, so that they should think on all points alike. We cannot have freedom among human beings without diversity. [pg 217] St Matthew, we perhaps say, had old world views; but it may have been just because of these, that he was the most fit Apostle for the Eastern world. There would be crowds of men whom he would understand and who would understand him, but whose minds would have been closed to the utterances of Paul. The vineyard to which Christ called his labourers was the whole world; it contained vines of every stock growing on every soil. It was well then, that there should be labourers bred in various schools of husbandry, and that each should work in the fashion in which he felt he could do it best.

Another point to be noted about the call of St Matthew is this: The choice of a publican was a practical proof to the other disciples, as it is to the Church for ever, that Christ is in no way a respecter of persons. The two pairs of brethren who followed our Lord may have been startled at the call of Matthew, for they no doubt looked on publicans as their countrymen did; and this act of our Lord's taught them, more forcibly than any words could have done, that with Him outward circumstance went for nothing and the inward man was all in all. In this call of Matthew the spirit of universality which belongs to the Christian Church is folded up like the embryo in the seed. Our Lord makes no comment on this call; nor do we hear of any murmurs from the disciples, who had by this time learned that our Lord was wiser than they, as Peter had found when he let down the net.

Shortly before the call of St Matthew a miracle occurred, the cure of the sick of the palsy, when our Lord's renown was at its height—a miracle at the performance of which “there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were come out of every village of Galilee and Judæa and Jerusalem.”[150] The presence of these strangers bears on what follows.

Hitherto we have read of no contest or conflict in Capernaum; but these Pharisees conceived misgivings about the movement they had come to see. This hostility was very different from that of the Sadducees in Jerusalem, who, regarding the movement as an insane delusion likely to bring things about their ears, set themselves remorselessly to root it out. But the Pharisees do not seem at first to have borne our Lord any personal hatred, but only to have been uneasy about the new teaching which went too far for them, and did not follow the course which they had expected.

The Pharisees, nevertheless, were now on the watch for occasion to find fault. This is not an occupation which brings out the amiable side of men's natures; and they became still more soured by finding nothing on which to hang a charge; so that at last they even leagued with the Herodians, their natural opponents, against our Lord. The most popular of all accusations, and one for which [pg 219] it was easy to find ground, was a breach of the traditionary rules for keeping the Sabbath.

The Sabbath was an inestimable Law. It was maintained by Divine sanction at a time when a Law could not be upheld by any other means: it debarred men from “doing what they would with their own” on one day out of seven, so far as regarded the labour of themselves or of their children, their servants, their ox or their ass. It secured for the race this portion of time against the greed of gain: but all this was done for men, although the Jews had come to look on it as something done by men for God, and in so doing they made God a taskmaster like the gods of the pagans. Moreover the Sabbath kept alive in each Israelite his self-respect as one of God's people; however sordid his calling, he put away every seventh day his squalor and his toil and resumed the dignity of Abraham's son. The Sabbath question was the chosen battle-ground of those who reduced all virtues to that literal unquestioning obedience to authoritative records, which was so damaging to moral and spiritual life. Men thought that God's favour was won or His wrath incurred in virtue of acts—such as the keeping within or the overstepping the limit of the journey allowed on the Sabbath-day—which in themselves had no moral significance at all.