At the same time this regular occupation, though sufficient to prevent any evil spirit finding in them a corner “empty, swept and garnished,” yet was not absorbing or exhausting, it left their minds and wills free play; they could fall into groups as they chose, they could talk freely on the way, they could debate on the meaning of a parable, or on the nature and time of coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.
After, what seems to have been a short mission journey, with the Twelve, into the villages of Gennesareth, which served to initiate them into their new life and to teach them confidence in their Master, our Lord came back to the Lake coast where a great crowd assembled, whom He addressed from a boat upon the Lake near the shore.
The crowd that gathered there heard a teaching new to the world both in matter and in form; men who had listened to the Sermon on the Mount might scarcely believe that the speaker was the same; hitherto the lessons to the multitude had placed before them truths of life, moral and spiritual, put in such a way as to require no effort of the learner to be fully understood; the right or wrong about some matter, with which they had daily to deal, had been set before them in a light in which they had never seen it before. But what they heard now was not apopthegm, not precept, but, on the face of it, only a simple tale. “This” they would say “is all well, but how is it like the Kingdom of God?” Whether much more might not be learnt, even from these plain lessons, by turning them over a second time in the mind, was a question which only a few asked, and of these few the greater part were probably already among the disciples of Jesus. They were no longer given instruction in a condition ready for use, but only material from which they should extract it for themselves; [pg 281] and to do this they must both use their wits and have hearts alive to God. I shall speak, further on, of the principle on which our Lord acted in withdrawing from the mass the opportunities they had had before. He states it himself, in words I have many times cited, “to those who have shall be given”; words which we have not done with yet, but which it would draw me from my point to discuss now.
It was apparently for the sake of the Apostles that this form of teaching is introduced. One of the services it rendered is obvious, it set the hearers thinking. A new form of intellectual exercise was laid before the listeners, something was proposed which they had to solve for themselves; they are given the solution in two cases, and they are provided with other examples on which they are to try their own skill. Beside the stimulus thus given to intellectual activity by the new kind of teaching, it kept before the eyes of the students those lofty conceptions of Divine agency in the world which preachers of the Kingdom of Heaven would require. Personal trust in our Lord's words, cooperating with some intuition of their own, had made them feel sure that God's Kingdom had come. Now they were told that they might know something of its ways; they are set to ponder on them, but the direction their thoughts are to follow is marked out; they are not left to rove hither and thither in their own [pg 282] imaginations, they are not suffered to pass disjointedly from notion to notion as in a dream; the puzzle of the parable arrests their attention, and the thread which the circumstance of it supplies serves as a clue confining their thoughts to move along a certain path. Here again, as we have observed so often, a selective action comes in, for it is the more active intellects that are most drawn towards a puzzle. They find in it something that their minds may work upon and this is what they seek; while the sluggish desire nothing of the kind, but turn aside from anything they cannot at once understand.
Again, if the Apostles solved a parable for themselves and thereby arrived at a new aspect of some Divine truth, this fresh knowledge would be much more their own, and have a far greater effect in forming their minds, than if the solution had come from their Master. A problem solved by the pupil himself does him more good than a dozen of which he reads the solutions in a book. The parable suggested certain parallels between things outward and things spiritual in the world, and, without conceiving anything so abstract as an analogy between these two orders of things, the Twelve may have caught a glimpse of the truth, that a workmanship betokening the same hand runs through all provinces of the universe.
When the disciples had thus been filled with new thoughts and new ideas, our Lord withdrew [pg 283] them from turmoil that the ideas might germinate undisturbed, we read
“And on that day, when even was come, he saith unto them, Let us go over unto the other side.”[193]
An incident in this little voyage served as a test of the condition of that Faith, the growth of which in the Apostles' hearts was being, I believe, watched anxiously by our Lord.
“And there ariseth a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the boat, insomuch that the boat was now filling. And he himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? And he awoke, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. And he said unto them, Why are ye fearful? have ye not yet faith?”[194]
This yet is emphatic. This was a miracle of instruction, and it served also as a test of how far the Apostles were fit for the high lesson in store for them, that namely of trusting in the Lord's protection when they were out of His sight. Their behaviour shewed that they had not as yet fully mastered the easier one of trusting in Him when He was by.