Our Lord, it would appear, wished to give John as nearly as might be the same advantages as His disciples had. The emissaries are accordingly made witnesses of the Signs. They are told to relate what they saw and He adds the significant words, “And [pg 264] blessed is he whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in me.”[181] Our Lord could not say that He was the Messiah without letting loose all the divers erroneous imaginations which hovered round the name. Our Lord, after His fashion, gives the Baptist a suggestive hint, leaving it to him whether He should follow out the clue rightly or not. As soon as John's messengers, who for a while had witnessed the works that He did, had turned back home, our Lord addressed himself to the company who were with him, people, disciples and all, and spoke to them of John. This discourse contained lessons of tolerance which helped to widen the disciples' minds, and I shall therefore discuss it at some length. It has a bearing extending beyond those to whom it was addressed.
I shall take St Luke's version of this discourse because in that of St Matthew it is, I think, mixed with matter spoken on other occasions.
It is our Lord's way to point the drift of a whole discourse by a pregnant sentence at the end, in which the expositor finds the key to the whole. Such a saying we have here, in the closing words,
“And wisdom is[182] justified of all her children.”[183]
The meaning of the passage turns on the sense given to the word “justified.” It is employed, near the beginning of the discourse, in the same sense which it has here at the end, and this helps us to [pg 265] understand its particular meaning in this place. I refer to the passage:
“And all the people when they heard, and the publicans, justified God, being baptized with the baptism of John. But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected for themselves the counsel of God, being not baptized of him.”[184]
The word “justified” is used in this passage in the sense it has when we say “my son has justified all my outlay,” or “the event justified all my precautions.”
The publicans by accepting the baptism of John shewed that God's good offices in their behalf were not thrown away, that they had not been regarded with excessive hopefulness or a too indulgent eye; but the Scribes and Pharisees frustrated God's good purpose in their behalf. So far as they were concerned his measures were of no effect. They would have none of them. The fact was, that, though they talked about God, they were in fact God-blind, and when asked to follow His teachers they found special reasons for declining in each particular case. John renewed an ideal which had passed out of sight; he appeared in the ascetic garb of the prophets of old; his strict life and his outspoken words disturbed their consciences and they put him aside by the readiest of expedients, they declared that he was mad. Then came our Lord declaring Himself the Son of Man, living as other men did, [pg 266] and consecrating thereby the ordinary course and usages of human life. In His case also the Scribes had an objection to make. A messenger from God, they thought, would come upon the earth in a different way from other men, and all his doings would be of an exceptional kind: whereas Christ lived to all appearance just as they did themselves. In the same way that courtiers surround a prince by a wall of etiquette in order to elevate him and hold him apart from the people, so would the Scribes have encompassed God's messenger with hallowed observances. They were not likely to understand that the closer Jesus kept to the ordinary and universal ways of men which were of natural growth, the more He was at home in the Kingdom of His Father who had made the world and ordered the ways of men.
Christ goes to the root of both these objections. He takes an image drawn from what was always under their eyes. He supposes a crowd of children playing in the market place, while others are sitting somewhat sullenly by. They play at a wedding, and they pretend to pipe and dance, but those who sit by will not stir; and then they change to a funeral, and imitate the wailing of the relatives and of the train of hired mourners, but those whom they wish to gain for playmates will not have this either; they do not want to play at all. The people would learn from this image as much as was within their comprehension. They could see that when [pg 267] the Pharisees objected on opposite grounds to two courses, their aversion was really not to either course but to that to which both courses tended. But the last verse, “wisdom is justified of all her children,” goes beyond what the people would see at the time; and, indeed, as St Matthew in his version omits the important word all, it looks as if he had himself missed the full sense.
The text conveys a lesson of ample tolerance which even in these days, all minds are not stretched wide enough to receive. The point is this. God has children of more types than one, and all these, in their own different ways, justify God's thought for them by taking advantage of His help. The ways of Jesus and the ways of John differ widely, but men may reach God coming round by either way. Some may gain access to the Kingdom through John and others by Jesus; but all who are God's will get there by some way or other. If the Scribes and Pharisees were winnowed away by this trial it was because the germs of a Divine nature within them had been suffered to perish. They were God's children no longer, and God's ways for His children would not succeed with them.