Note.—The passage from St Luke, xii. 41, &c. (quoted at p. [367]), contains the only mention of St Peter in all the Gospel narrative, between the going up to the Feast of Tabernacles (October) and the final journey to Jerusalem (April); although occasions occur in this interval, such as that when Thomas says: “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (St John xi. 16), when we should have expected that Peter would not be silent. In St John's Gospel he is not named between Chaps. i. and xiii. The question arises, was Peter continuously in attendance on his Master during this last winter; or was he, during part of it, learning to feed his Master's sheep by holding together the disciples at Capernaum? If when his Master was in Judæa, he only went backwards and forwards to him, this would account for the omission of the history of this half year in the Gospel of St Mark, for which Peter furnished the materials, and also for the brief mention of the Temptation; for I suppose our Lord to have given the fuller history of this to the disciples, when he was near the banks of the Jordan, after the Feast of the Dedication (St John x. 40). See p. [119]. St Peter, who may not have been present, would probably limit his narrative to what he had himself seen, or heard from his Master's lips.
Chapter XII. The Later Lessons.
Different cases receive different treatment. St Luke ix. 57-62.
“And as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus said unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the heaven have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. And he said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But he said unto him, Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but go thou and publish abroad the kingdom of God. And another also said, I will follow thee, Lord; but first suffer me to bid farewell to them that are at my house. But Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
What caught attention and led to the collocation of these two (and in St Luke three) instances was the diversity of our Lord's treatment of cases apparently similar. The disciples saw that our [pg 374] Lord repelled one who was willing to follow him at once, and imperatively summoned two others who asked for delay. But though they might be puzzled at this inconsistency, they felt sure that there was a purpose and a meaning in it; so they transcribed these contrasting cases side by side, to show that for different conditions of soul Christ had different treatment ready. The second and third[283] of these colloquies probably took place at a different time from the first. They seem to have been held between our Lord and some of the disciples who were summoned to go out on the mission of the seventy, for St Luke inserts this document in his history just before his account of the mission. Thus St Matthew in his narrative puts the passage where the first incident occurs, while St Luke fixes its place by the second and third.
This individualising in our Lord's treatment of men struck the disciples as something new; they do not indeed point it out as a novel feature, for they never remark upon our Lord's ways, but the care of the Evangelists in preserving the most striking instances of this diversity of treatment shews that it caught their notice. To our Lord's eye every human being had a moral and spiritual physiognomy of his own. He saw at once, what it was in each man which went to make him [pg 375] emphatically and distinctly his very self, and He addressed Himself largely to this.
I will now consider the separate instances one by one.
St Matthew, in the passage parallel to part of this,[284] tells us that the first speaker was a scribe, and it appears that he was, in some sort, also a disciple of our Lord, for on coming to the next case St Matthew speaks of “another of the disciples.”