St Luke speaks of a journey to Jerusalem, and of our Lord's coming to a village of the Samaritans on the way.[272] This journey is identified with that to the feast of Tabernacles (St John vii. 10) which must be the same as that spoken of above by St Mark. It is doubtful whether our Lord saw Capernaum again before His death, but He may have done so just before the final journey to Jerusalem.
A word or two must be said about St John's [pg 362] account of the circumstances under which our Lord set out: his account is this.
“Now the feast of the Jews, the feast of tabernacles, was at hand. His brethren therefore said unto him, Depart hence, and go into Judæa, that thy disciples also may behold thy works which thou doest. For no man doeth anything in secret, and himself seeketh to be known openly. If thou doest these things, manifest thyself to the world. For even his brethren did not believe on him. Jesus therefore saith unto them, My time is not yet come; but your time is alway ready. The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it, that its works are evil. Go ye up unto the feast: I go not up yet unto this feast; because my time is not yet fulfilled. And having said these things unto them, he abode still in Galilee. But when his brethren were gone up unto the feast, then went he also up, not publicly, but as it were in secret.”[273]
This disbelief was not, in our Lord's brethren, grounded on an opposition of will like that of the scribes. It came from the “slowness of heart” of men who had not imagination for things Divine. What came before their eyes was never doubted by them; they did not explain His miracles away as His enemies did, only they did not see what the possession of this power implied. After the Ascension they are found among the believers.[274] Like the rest of the people at Nazareth they admired “the wisdom given unto this man” and “the [pg 363] mighty works wrought by His hands,”[275] but they could not imagine that one who had grown up along with them had a nature of a different order from theirs. Our Lord never upbraids them; they worked their work and He His. They were blameless commonplace men, wondering at their brother's powers and also that, with all His wisdom, He should fail in the practical sense necessary for turning His superiority to account. What was the good of these wonders being wrought if nobody knew of them? That He must aim at notoriety seemed to them too much a matter of course to need saying; and now when the great feast to which all Israel gathered was at hand, it was inexplicable that He should not join the company that travelled from Galilee, and thus enter Jerusalem with a following at his back.
The voice which, at the Temptation, had whispered, “Use your superhuman power to lend material aid to your designs,” spoke in His brothers' advice as it had done by Peter. They were not unconcerned for His safety, if they had foreseen danger they would have kept Him away from the Feast (St Mark iii. 21), but they either underrated the hostility of His foes or assumed that He would protect Himself by His superhuman power; for that, possessing miraculous powers as they knew He did, He should hesitate, on an emergency, to exert them in self-defence was to them an idea too [pg 364] unreasonable to be entertained. The deep truth unconsciously uttered by His foes, “He saved others, Himself He cannot save,” was one which their minds were not constructed to contain. Our Lord foresaw that a public entry into Jerusalem would lead to commotion, and, as afterwards happened, might bring about His death. A man's life, if he have a great matter in hand, is the more precious to him until this be done: so it was with our Lord. Until He had finished what was given Him to accomplish, He took such precautions for personal safety as a prudent man would. To have made light of danger, trusting to baffle it by superhuman means, would have spoiled the lesson and the moral of His life.
When the brethren spoke of His “going up to Jerusalem,” they thought of the journey in public as much as of the feast itself. Half Galilee would be upon the road, men would mix and converse freely on the way, and Jesus, they thought, would, by travelling thus, come in contact with a number of zealous men and increase His following largely. But herein lay one of the dangers which made our Lord shun this course. The people, proud of the great prophet from their own district, might have revived the project of making Him a King, and by a turbulent entry to Jerusalem have alarmed the Romans as well as the scribes. Again, the turmoil of this journey would have disturbed those processes of growth in [pg 365] the Apostles' mind over which our Lord held watch; the feast of Tabernacles was, above all, a festival of joyousness, and the journey to it was made an occasion of pleasure and social union. For the Apostles to have joined the crowd would have been unfavourable for the germination of the solemn thoughts of which our Lord had dropped the seed on His way from the Mount to Capernaum. By going up privately in the middle of the Feast these dangers were avoided. There was no public arrival, no welcome. The Romans would know and care nothing about a new preacher who appeared in the Temple, and the priests, in face of the diversity of opinion about Jesus of Nazareth, would hesitate to lay hands upon Him. For the Apostles too, the journey through an unfriendly country would give plenty of occasion for turning over in their minds the strange words they had heard about the sufferings of the Christ, and the injunctions to “have salt in themselves.”
What gives this journey its great interest to me, with my particular purpose in view, is the refusal of hospitality to our Lord by the Samaritan villages, and the enquiry of James and John, whether they should not call down fire from heaven; wherein the “Sons of Thunder” justify their name.
“And it came to pass, when the days were well-nigh come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the [pg 366] Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he were going to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we bid fire to come down from heaven, and consume them? But he turned, and rebuked them. And they went to another village.”[276]
“Some ancient authorities,” as we read in the margin of our Revised Version, “add, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.”
This is so exactly after our Lord's manner, not only in the quality but in the quantity of rebuke, that I have no doubt but that it is a genuine saying of Christ preserved by tradition whether it were originally in St Luke's Gospel or not. It is like our Lord to drop a word indicating error and leave the real correction to grow up in the learner's mind as though it was supplied by himself. He rarely dilates on what is blameworthy and never recurs to a failing that has been noticed at the time.