When our Lord spoke, the children of the bridechamber the companions of the bridegroom's youth, were still with Him, but He and they would soon have to part. Sorrow must needs come upon them for the following reason, if for no other, that man's education cannot be perfect without it. Then indeed would they fast, not because it was enjoined, [pg 224] not of any stated precept, but because they were bereaved of their Lord.
Our Lord now turns to a metaphor, it was a familiar one. The lesson it seems to carry is this: our Lord will not meddle with the old form of things, He will not patch up the old tenement in order that the new spirit may make shift to dwell in it. Change with Him is never mechanical, always organic; it comes, not by alteration in construction, but always purely of growth. He is propagating spiritual truth in the souls of men; the time is not yet ripe for rites and ordinances and hours of worship. But the days would come when the truth would need a garb—it would have to struggle amongst human institutions, and it must then have outer expression just as other institutions have. This expression men must give, and Christ was careful that, when the time came for this to be done, the right men should be in their place to do it.
He takes a second metaphor to set forth the second part of His work: He will have new flasks for the new wine. This new doctrine was not committed either to the disciples of John or even to scribes enlightened about the kingdom of heaven, but to those who, having no preconceptions, received it as children do their parents' words. This new wine would go on working and would want room to expand. Peter we know expanded with it; but men whose minds had stiffened into shape under [pg 225] existing systems were like old flasks of skin, so harsh and dry that they would sooner crack than stretch; they were neither plastic nor elastic, and our Lord wanted vessels that should be both the one and the other. These new flasks were now soon to be chosen; and when this was done the work would enter on a new phase.
Up to the time of the call of the Apostles, our Lord's most conspicuous concern is for the multitudes. After that call, the Apostles occupy the foreground, and the whole manner of teaching is rather suddenly changed. It is no longer adapted to a congregation of peasants; parables take the place of plain speech, and instead of everything being done for the learner as before, much is left to be done by him for himself. We mark another change also in the manner. Hitherto there has been no haste, all has proceeded in the most leisurely way; but soon danger will begin to threaten and time to press, and act to follow act in close succession.
Following the subject of my book, I have been careful to mark how our Lord from the very first had an eye for characters of the sort He wanted and how He shaped them, with an unseen hand; but I must not have it supposed, because we see little lasting outcome from the preaching to the multitude, that therefore it was unimportant compared with the training of the Apostles. We must not suppose that Christ taught and healed chiefly that the Apostles might listen and learn.
We can discern two kinds of good wrought by our Lord. In preaching to the multitude he was, then and there, bringing God's light into the souls of men. In choosing and fashioning the disciples, He was providing for the future of His Church. The work which the Apostles should set on foot would spread over the earth and affect all future times, while our Lord could Himself touch but a single generation in a single spot. Those, however, who heard Him, carried to their homes a memory to last their lives; among them His Personality survived. If, afterwards, troubled questions arose about Him they would put them by, feeling that they had drunk at the source before the stream had got sullied on its way.
When our Lord came into villages where He was known, people crowded to him from all sides, and the new delight of communion with God—the assurance that the whisper which told them that God cared for them was a true voice—beamed from the hearers' faces and gladdened the Master's soul.
It was during this active ministry of our Lord, that the choice of the Apostles was made and the foundations of their education were laid. The differences in their minds and characters would be brought into prominence by the greater intensity of the lives they afterwards led; new capacities would peep out among those who, beholding the intense earnestness of our Lord, learned to be in earnest themselves. No defined line was as yet [pg 227] drawn between the multitude and the disciples. Those who were of the multitude one day, and chose to follow, might count as disciples on the morrow. Our Lord never wholly loses sight either of the multitude or of the disciples; but, while the former were His first care in the period embraced in this chapter, the disciples, and especially the apostles, will be so in that which will come before us in the next.[153]