Our Lord sets a high value on the personal trust and devotion of his disciples, both for its own sake and because it was the bud which was to [pg 233] blossom into the new and transforming quality of Faith: this was forwarded in its early growth by the sunshine of success. The general who would win the young soldier's heart must lead him to glory in his first campaign; he will cling to him through all disasters after his heart is won.
I take up the narrative at the beginning of the third chapter of St Mark's Gospel.
“And the Pharisees went out, and straightway with the Herodians took counsel against him, how they might destroy him. And Jesus with his disciples withdrew to the sea: and a great multitude from Galilee followed: and from Judæa.”[157]
The Evangelists seldom speak of our Lord's motives, but here the collocation indicates that it was this confederacy of Pharisees and Herodians which caused our Lord to leave Capernaum. The Herodians were more formidable than the Pharisees. The latter would only set the law in motion, but the former did not scruple to employ violence; and the Macedonian guards of the Tetrarch were at Tiberias within call. Our Lord never, until His time was come, exposed Himself unnecessarily to danger; and at this particular moment His freedom and safety were of vital importance. All that He had done would, humanly speaking, be lost or have to be done over again if He were cast into prison or slain: the pressure of [pg 234] this danger may have hastened the appointment of the Twelve. The body of disciples following our Lord had as yet no corporate life of its own; it was only held together by gravitation to Him and would fall to pieces if He were taken away; at this juncture then, there was no time to be lost in giving the body organic life. As soon as the Twelve received their commission this body became possessed of a vital centre, and the continuous existence of the Church was secured, even though its Master should be removed from earth.
This plot of the Pharisees was probably known but to few—people when they take counsel together do not publish their design on the house-tops—and the absence of excitement among the crowd favours the view that the danger of the prophet of Nazareth was not suspected by them. Whatever may have been His motive, our Lord left Capernaum, together with His followers, and took, it seems, the road along the sea shore towards the north.
Some words of our Lord, belonging probably to this place, are recorded by St Matthew.
“But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion for them, because they were distressed and scattered, as sheep not having a shepherd. Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth labourers into his harvest.”[158]
St Matthew probably found in this need of labourers a sufficient reason for the call of the Apostles. More hands were wanted for ministering to the multitude, and it was desirable that some should be set apart for the work. But our Lord's great earnestness in the matter points, as I have just said,[159] to something more than this, as though this calling of the Twelve was of vital concern for the great work that was being done for the world.
It would only have bewildered the disciples if our Lord had explained to them the meaning and motive of the commissioning of the Twelve. They could not be told that Christ's Kingdom on earth was being vested in the Twelve as an undying body in order that it might not be shattered by His death. They could not yet be told of the coming Resurrection, or that they were being trained to bear witness of Christ's spiritual presence with His own. Our Lord's talk with His disciples was primarily suited to their wants and to their minds, and not to those of the people of after times: we must not therefore expect to find in it answers to the questions we want to put. But we have one advantage which the disciples had not; they, as actors in the drama, were taken up with their parts for the moment, while we contemplate it as spectators from beginning to end; and even if we cannot quite follow the action, yet we can make out enough of sequence to see that this action forms a whole: [pg 236] we mark the drift of the earlier incidents when we see the goal for which all was making, and our Lord's purposes are sometimes made more apparent by the course of His acts than by His words.
Without pretending to enter into our Lord's mind, we cannot help imagining the considerations which the situation must have inspired. The danger to the cause from allowing it to hang upon a single life was becoming more pressing day by day. Though our Lord in passing through the country, had kindled men's hearts as He went along, yet He had left no working agency behind. There was no rallying point, no minister, no constituted body in any district or town. It may be asked, “Why did not our Lord do as St Paul did?” Why did He not “ordain elders in every city,” and establish His religion territorially step by step, just as an advancing army occupies the ground it has won? This is part of the wider question, “Why did not our Lord found a Church Himself?” to which an answer has been given before. His business was to “kindle the fire” and only to kindle it. What has been said of ritual (p. [222]) applies to Church government as well. Church polities, like forms of secular government, were to be formed by men of each age for themselves; and to lay down a system, for which a Divine authority would inevitably be claimed, would bar all human intervention in matters ecclesiastical, and hamper men's minds in ways that I have glanced at before. If a system [pg 237] of Christian communities had been spread over Galilee by our Lord as it was spread over Asia Minor by St Paul, the forms of ecclesiastical government so sanctioned, and all that related to outer worship would have been regarded as a part of revealed truth. A visible Church framed by our Lord would have afforded a model, from any line in the construction of which it would have been a heresy to swerve. Men would not only have consecrated the principles of its polity but they would have seized on the visible constitution and points of practice and have battled for these to the death. We should have had an institution, Divinely authorised, and which therefore could not in the smallest particular be changed, imposed on races inheriting different temperaments, and one ecclesiastical rule would have been fixed for all time.