| "O blessed day which giv'st the eternal lie To self, and sense, and all the brute within; Oh! come to us amid the war of life; To hall and hovel come! to all who toil In senate, shop, or study! and to those Ill-warmed and sorely tempted-- Come to them, blest and blessing, Christmas Day! Tell them once more the tale of Bethlehem, The kneeling shepherds and the babe divine; And keep them men indeed, fair Christmas Day!" |
| --Charles Kingsley. |
PALESTINE IN THE DAYS OF THE LORD JESUS
Palestine was a busy country in the days when the Lord Jesus lived in it. Hundreds of little villages were scattered all over its hills, with here and there a great town, where all day long crowds of people passed in and out the gates of the gray stone walls. Greatest of all the cities, loved by every Jew in the world, was Jerusalem, but more trade flowed in and out of some other cities. All over the country were roads running from city to city. He who traveled on a great road saw much of the world. There were the country people going into the city to sell fruit and firewood, merchants riding past on asses, patient pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem, trains of mules and long caravans of slow-moving camels loaded with the goods of distant countries, crossing Palestine to the ports of the Mediterranean Sea, and here and there a Roman officer hurrying past on some grave business of the empire. All this made the roads, even to a boy shut in by the hills of Galilee, a series of pictures that waked his imagination of the great world beyond the mountains. This was even more the case in Galilee, where Jesus lived when a boy, than it was in the southern part of the land, in Judaea. In Judaea nearly all the people were Jews, and very proud they [{18}] were of the fact. In Galilee many belonged to other nations, and the Judaeans looked down on Galilee and thought it was half heathen. But even in Galilee there were many earnest Jews, and it may be doubted if, after all, half-heathen Galilee was not a better place for a boy to grow up in than was proud Jerusalem. It is better for a boy to be able to sympathize with those who do not belong to his set, than to look down on other people because they are somehow different from him.
And then the schools and the churches! Every village in Palestine had them, and the school was in the church. The beginning of the training was at home. There is little doubt, however, that in the time of Jesus, Nazareth had a school, and that Jesus with the other boys was taught to read the Old Testament in Hebrew. The people no longer spoke the language in their homes, but it was always read in the services on the Sabbath, and the teaching of the schools was in it, as in the olden time the teaching of the schools in Europe was in Latin. On the Sabbath all the people came to these places of worship, which were called synagogues, and read the Old Testament and prayed to God and sometimes heard a sermon from some wise man who had something he wished to say to the people. Sometimes the man who preached was an old rabbi, who had thought about the great things of his religion for many years, until all the people had come to look with great respect on so wise and venerable a man. Sometimes it was a younger man, but with the fire of youth, and then when the people went home their hearts burned with a great [{19}] longing that their God would show himself to them in some wonderful deed of power. But the years passed on and the divine deed of power never came. So some of the people became disheartened and almost ceased to care what happened to their religion, except that if anyone insulted it, their anger burned up very quickly, and their hands reached for sticks and stones to throw at the man who dared to say a word against their faith. But others studied their old books with still more diligence, and strove so hard to keep all the laws they found, that almost no time was left to do anything else. Very much above the common people they felt themselves in their religious pride, and religious pride is the very worst pride in all the world. Such were the Pharisees, of whom the New Testament tells so much. But all over the country, both among the Pharisees and among the other people, were many patiently waiting and earnestly praying that God would show himself to his people.
How did they want God to show himself? In some great act of relief for the nation. During these years Rome ruled over all the lands of western Asia. Now the rule of Rome was the wisest and best rule that these lands had ever known. Sometimes a selfish or a cruel officer appeared, who cared for nothing but the money he could get from the people, or who turned his soldiers into the streets to kill and plunder as they pleased, but generally the Romans made good and just governors. But the Jews were not content. They remembered the time when kings of their own nation had ruled over them, and they dreamed [{20}] dreams of a glorious future when God would free them from all foreign power, and Jerusalem should rule the world. They were very sure that this would come sometime. God would not always let a heathen army keep the castle which overlooked his own temple in Jerusalem. They read in the prophets of the Old Testament about a Prince and a Saviour whom God would send some day. This Prince was called the Messiah, and the hope of his coming was the Messianic hope. Every generation hoped that he would come in their day. Year by year they said, "It must be before long. God cannot wait much longer." Some of them thought that Israel itself was not pure enough, and that this kept back the Messiah. "If Israel kept the law perfectly for one day," so they said, "the Messiah would come." Others thought that they ought not to sit still and do nothing, but should be brave and strike a blow for their own liberty. Such men were looking for a leader, but no leader had yet been found. So all the people, with their various ways of thinking, were looking and longing and waiting for the Messiah. Is it any wonder that, when Jesus began to teach and do cures, the people asked one another if this might not be the Messiah, and that they sometimes tried to make him a leader to free them from the Romans? To understand what the people thought of Jesus and how Jesus talked to the people, one must know how this hope of the Messiah was all the time in the people's minds. They were ever saying, "Is not this the Messiah?" Jesus was ever answering, "Not the Messiah you expect." They were ever asking him, "Will you now found the kingdom?"
GATHERING TARES IN THE STONY FIELDS NEAR BETHEL.
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood and used by special permission.