Pastor Pastorum Part 10

In our Lord's reply to Nathanael we find His first recorded utterance as a Preacher of the Word; here He first speaks of Himself as the Son of Man, and here we have the first hint of the Law, "To him who hath shall be given," a law which has been several times before us and will be so again before long. Nathanael _had_ something already; he was enough in earnest to drop his prejudices; a slight token had enabled him to see in our Lord "the Son of G.o.d, the King of Israel:" he is told that he shall see greater things than these. Jacob had dreamed of old(97) that there was a ladder between earth and heaven, by which G.o.d's angels went and came; such a ladder Christ was, and he, the Israelite in whom there was no guile, should see "the angels of G.o.d ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."(98)

So far I have followed the Gospel of St John. The Synoptists afford corroborative matter to shew that the little company, which had met at Bethabara, continued to hang together.

(1) In St Mark's(99) list of the Apostles-the names "and Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew" come together in the enumeration. If we were asked for the names of a society of twelve men whom we knew-they would occur by the twos and threes who were most together. St Peter, whom we may regard here as St Mark's informant, gives the names as they came to mind.

He recalls journeys in the hill country, when the disciples had walked in scattered groups, three or four together. In one of these little knots Andrew, Philip, and Bartholomew may commonly have been found.

(2) From the way in which St Matthew's(100) list is given we may infer something of greater interest still. St Matthew gives the names of the Apostles _in pairs_: Simon and Andrew, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew-and so on. Immediately after the list of names we have the sending forth of the Apostles to the cities of Israel. I believe that the Apostles went on this mission in the pairs which are above-named. Why else should the names be coupled together? The Evangelist had in his eye the party as they had stood listening to their Master's words, with their staves in their hands, ready to start. He recollects their separating-two going one way, and two another,-and therefore, two by two, he puts them down in his list.(101) It is curious that though St Matthew _couples_ the names, yet he does not say, as St Mark and St Luke do, that the Apostles were sent _two and two_ together. The coupling in St Matthew is a kind of coincidence with that express direction which is preserved by St Mark and St Luke.

Not only, then, is there probable evidence to shew that, out of the little body of the earliest disciples, three clung together; but also that two of them-Philip and Bartholomew-formed one of the pairs that went forth declaring to the villages of Galilee that the Kingdom of G.o.d was at hand.

At all events the Synoptists testify to a special intimacy between two disciples; and circ.u.mstances, which are disclosed by St John alone, shew how this intimacy naturally arose. Thus we have, what is always worth noting, a corroboration by the Synoptists of the narrative of the fourth Evangelist.

To return to the history in the Gospel of St John. Our Lord sets out on His return to Galilee, and may have been Nathanael's guest at Cana for the night preceding the wedding. It does not fall within my scope to say more about the miracle than has been said already. The statement important for my purpose is, that our Lord manifested His glory, "and _His disciples_ believed on Him."(102) The fact that a new teacher worked wonders and drew disciples round him made a stir in the district; and this may throw light upon the pa.s.sage which follows.

"After this he went down to Capernaum, he, and his mother, and his brethren, and _his_ disciples: and there they abode not many days."(103)

This event leads to no consequences in the history. It would only have been mentioned by one who, having the sequence of occurrences in his head, detailed them all. Still, there must have been some motive for this removal of the whole family to Capernaum. I will hazard a conjecture, which if correct will help to explain the following text which occurs later on:

"And after the two days he went forth from thence into Galilee.

For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country. So when he came into Galilee, the Galilaeans received him, having seen all the things that he did in Jerusalem at the feast: for they also went unto the feast."(104)

Why does the Evangelist say that our Lord was Himself an instance of the rejection of a prophet in his own country, at the very time when he is about to say that the Galileans _did_ receive Him because they had seen what He did at the feast? There must have been some previous occasion on which He had _not_ been received. I believe that the last quoted pa.s.sage, fully expressed, might run thus: "He went forth from thence into Galilee _but not to Nazareth_, for Jesus Himself testified that a prophet hath no honour in his own country," and _therefore_ He pa.s.sed by Nazareth and went on to Cana, a few miles further north. Now, at what time could our Lord have experienced this ill reception? I find no occasion on which such disparagement of His claims can have been shewn, excepting in the short interval between the miracle at Cana and this withdrawal of the whole family to Capernaum. I would therefore conjecture that on leaving Cana, after the miracle, our Lord had returned with His mother to Nazareth, and that the inhabitants had then in some way shown ill-will.(105) He probably brought with Him some disciples belonging to Cana-a place of which they were jealous-hailing Him as Rabbi, and proclaiming Him their Master. The people of Nazareth resented this a.s.sumption of superiority on the part of a townsman whom they had known from His birth. The whole family are involved in the unpopularity, and remove to Capernaum, to wait the time for going up to the Pa.s.sover.

Though St John makes no mention, in its proper place, of the animosity of the people of Nazareth, yet the recollection of it remains in his mind; so that, when he says that our Lord went _into Galilee_ on His return from Samaria, this seems to him noticeable, as though it were strange He should go where He had been ill received before; and he tells us why He is well received on this occasion; namely, because some had brought back word of His vigorous action in cleansing the Temple. Our Lord does not go to Nazareth, but again makes His stay at Cana.

To return to this short stay at Capernaum. The point I am most concerned with is, that it is here that the disciples are first mentioned as attached to our Lord in His movements; they form, as it were, part of His family. If our Lord had already met with opposition, as I have conjectured, this would have helped to bind the little company closer together. We hear of no preaching or working of Signs during the short stay at Capernaum. We are not positively told that the disciples went with our Lord to Jerusalem;(106) but I imagine that the five of whom we have read went up to the Pa.s.sover, though some may have returned to Galilee soon after the feast.(107)

The narrative of the cleansing of the Temple shews how burning was our Lord's indignation at practices that degraded men's notions of G.o.d.

Personal attacks He bore with meekness, "when He was reviled He reviled not again, when He suffered He threatened not;"(108) but He gives free vent to a G.o.dly wrath when He finds men driving a traffic in holy things.

A personal characteristic of our Lord, shewn again and again, comes for the first time before us here: He carried authority in His air, an authority that needed no a.s.sertion, but to which men bowed. The owners of the oxen yield without resistance to the determination He shews. It is only the Hierarchy who ask, "What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things?"(109) I need not say that on demand He will work no Sign at all: this is His invariable rule.

St John says nothing of the nature of the miracles wrought by our Lord at this time; we only hear that they induced people "to believe in His name."(110) They may have been chiefly miracles of introspection, like the recognition of Peter, the seeing of Nathanael under the fig-tree, and the divining of His mother's meaning when she said "they have no wine;" for St John a.s.siduously keeps before his hearers this insight of our Lord into men's minds. In particular he says, in reference to the disciples who gathered round Him in Judaea,

"But Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all men, and because he needed not that any one should bear witness concerning man: for he himself knew what was in man."(111)

When our Lord drove out the money-changers and those who sold doves, people thronged to Him in Jerusalem, thinking that the leader whom they sought had come. But these were not disciples after His own heart, not such as should receive the kingdom of G.o.d as little children. These were men who had both notions and a purpose of their own; men who would follow Him as long as He went _their_ way; and who, when He did not, would "go back and walk no more with Him."(112) The relation of our Lord to these early Judaean disciples was very different from that in which He stood, either to the five who had gone with Him from Bethabara to Cana and Capernaum, or to those who afterwards thronged to His preaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. To these Judaean disciples our Lord as far as we know delivers no lessons and issues no directions; we do not hear that they were especially chosen for witnesses of the Signs in Jerusalem, or that they formed an organised body in any way. It seems rather as if a body of men ranged themselves round our Lord and, from their admiration for Him, took the name of His disciples, but did not hold themselves to be under orders, and came and went as they pleased.

Our Lord had not yet begun His real Ministry; He was probing the capacities and natures both of individual men and of different cla.s.ses in the community, with a view to testing their fitness for taking part in His great work.

Something inclined Him, we may suppose, to take Galilee for the cradle of the new movement; and the circ.u.mstance that those who first adhered were all Galilaeans pointed along the same way. It would appear to be a method of Divine guidance, to speak by a whisper within, and, at the same time, so to order circ.u.mstances without, that one should fall in with the other: sometimes this coincidence will be perceived and will strike the beholder with a kind of awe, and sometimes it will operate on him without his being aware.

There was much that made Galilee suitable: its position was at once central and retired, and its inhabitants were, according to Josephus, st.u.r.dy and independent, and, of course, free from the pedantry of Rabbinical schools. Jerusalem however claimed a trial from our Lord. He desired to know what was pa.s.sing there in the minds of those who were seeking truth. It was possible that a cradle for the infant church might be found among the followers of the Baptist, or among Scribes like Nicodemus. Our Lord gauges the fitness of both these bodies of men. We know what conclusion settled itself in His mind during those early days: He must not put new wine into old bottles. The enlightened party among those in authority were more after the type of Erasmus than of Luther, they lacked force: they had been trained to pick their way through difficulties of interpretation, but not to grasp great principles, still less to _act_; and though they divined that there was a truth dawning from afar, yet their feeling for it was not so much a pa.s.sion as a taste.

After the discourse with Nicodemus the Evangelist returns to narration, and tells us of a visit of our Lord and His disciples to the district where the Baptist was carrying on his work. It may have been that he meant to represent our Lord as turning from Nicodemus to John's disciples; as if, when He found the former unequal to the need, He would try how the latter might serve. The words are

"After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judaea; and there he tarried with them, and baptized. And John also was baptizing in aenon near to Salim, because there was much water there: and they came, and were baptized."(113)

It is not said that our Lord actually went to the spot where John was; but the narrative favours the view that the two companies were not far from one another. We are told that followers were drawn in large numbers to our Lord and that His disciples baptised them. This adoption of the rite which, though not unknown before, had been brought into special prominence by the Baptist, excited jealousy in John's disciples-

"And they came unto John, and said to him, Rabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou hast borne witness, behold, the same baptizeth, and all men come to him."(114)

One reason of the anxiety of the disciples to baptise may possibly have been this; they saw how that outward rite supplied John's disciples with a badge that marked them out and made one body of them; they were all bound together to the same master by having received baptism at his hands,-bound together not merely by holding the same opinions and honouring the same man, but by something that had been _done_, by a work wrought upon _them_.

Some might interpret this "outward and visible sign" in one way and some in another, but all could see the value of such a sign or symbol for giving coherence and permanency to their new community.

In the fourth chapter we find that the Pharisees at Jerusalem,-they who const.i.tuted the religious world of the place,-had come to the knowledge that the resort to Jesus was greater than that to St John-

"When therefore the Lord knew how that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples), he left Judaea and departed again into Galilee."(115)

I make out St John's meaning to be, that our Lord quitted Judaea because He found Himself thrust into apparent rivalry with John the Baptist. The Judaean disciples wanted a sect of their own; and the Pharisees regarded our Lord's following as an offshoot from the movement of John, an offshoot which was likely to out-top the parent tree.

It seems to me that our Lord was taking a survey of the different religious sections in Judaea and examining their fitness to furnish helpers for His work. Scholars who like Nicodemus were quick to ask "How can these things be?" were not of the right order for setting a great movement afoot. If men were fully possessed with the momentous nature of G.o.d's spiritual working in the world, the idea of this as a _fact_ would take up all their minds leaving no room for the question of _mode_. If Nicodemus had been capable of seeing how sublime was the future presented to him, he would never have expected to understand _how_ it could come to pa.s.s. Next our Lord tried the disciples of John; these may have been too full of the spirit of partizanship, and too much taken up with questions of purifying and the like, to be fit foster parents for the new Faith. Whatsoever were the cause, in neither of these cla.s.ses did our Lord find a cradle for the faith. He required men plastic and receptive, capable of devoted self-surrender and possessed of self-transforming and expanding powers.

These did not grow freely in the social climate of Judaea; our Lord's thoughts then, we may suppose, went back to His own people and His own country, and He preached the Kingdom first in Galilee.

Our Lord's leaving Judaea was precipitated by the rivalry which was threatening between His adherents and those of John; more especially as that rivalry was taking the form of a compet.i.tion in point of numbers. For the spirit which this would engender was to our Lord abhorrent in the extreme. When sect strives with sect, and they would decide the contest for superiority _by counting heads_, they are both in a way to fall down and worship the Spirit of the world.

Our Lord was not founding or setting up a form of religion to which He personally would convert mankind; but He and His work were part of the subject-matter of all religion-the relations of G.o.d to man. The apostles are never encouraged to exult in the number of their converts. Even when they were sent through the cities, on what we might regard as a missionary errand, they are not directed to win men over by strong entreaty-they are not then bidden, as men afterwards were by St Paul, to "be instant in season and out of season;"(116) they are only to proclaim the Kingdom of G.o.d: those who have ears to hear will hear, and the rest will go their way.

Any compet.i.tion with John the Baptist was above all to be shunned. Our Lord and the Baptist were bound together by early ties. Jesus had sought and received Baptism at his hand, and we always see a delicate and unswerving fidelity in His behaviour towards him. It might be that He was to increase and John was to decrease, but it should not be by any action of His that that change of relative position should be brought about. The Gospel itself, then, discloses grounds for our Lord's sudden departure into Galilee. Thus early, among the hearers of our Lord and the Baptist, appeared an insidious tendency to form parties, a tendency which broke out disastrously in later times; when some said, "I am of Paul" and others "I am of Apollos."(117)

There is no valid reason for supposing that our Lord left Judaea from fear of persecution. The Pharisees may have been in commotion when they heard that Jesus baptised more disciples than John; and there may have been some stir in sacerdotal circles at Jerusalem, but there is no appearance of violence having been threatened. Neither do I connect our Lord's journey with the captivity of the Baptist. I believe that John was not thrown into prison till three or four months after this journey through Samaria; but supposing that the imprisonment had already taken place and it had seemed likely that Herod's jealousy of John would extend to Jesus, our Lord would not have left Judaea, which was not under Herod's jurisdiction, and have gone into Galilee which was so.

At any rate our Lord quits Judaea and the Judaean disciples, or all but a few of them, and travels back to Galilee with a little company who were bound to Him, and who tended Him, it would seem, with affectionate solicitude.(118)

It does not come into my plan to discuss the discourses of our Lord except so far as they bear on the training of the apostles, and so I pa.s.s by the discourse with the woman of Samaria, as I have done that with Nicodemus. I believe that only three or four disciples attended our Lord on His journey: if they had been numerous, they would not _all_ have left Him, wearied and alone at the fountain. But in visiting a strange town in Samaria, it might be unwise to enter with a smaller party than three or four; so that if the disciples numbered no more than this, we can account for our Lord being left by Himself.

This journey through Samaria has an important bearing on my subject. Here, for the first time, we have a conversation of our Lord with His disciples; and, what is more, we get a glimpse of an office in store for them, of a work that is to give a meaning to their lives. The disciples of the Baptist had been learners and listeners only; but our Lord's disciples were not to be mere pa.s.sive recipients of teaching. They were to be taught by doing as well as by hearing; they were to take part with Him in the great work that was to be wrought in the world. They were not servants-"for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth,"(119) but they were friends joining in the common cause. We may wonder why no earlier converse of our Lord with His disciples is preserved. Possibly, before this, there were in the company some of those to whom He "did not commit Himself."(120) While these were present, our Lord may have maintained a reserve, and said nothing bearing on His work which it was important for the Evangelist to record. But, when our Lord set out through the semi-hostile country of Samaria in the midst of the early summer heat, those only followed who were in earnest, and on whom He could rely.

I pa.s.s on at once to that address to the disciples to which I have alluded. Our Lord had been cheered by the Samaritan woman's openness to the truth. On leaving the well He comes on a scene, than which few are more gladdening-a great expanse of corn growing luxuriantly, swaying with the wind and glistening in the sun. We mark that He was always keenly alive to external impression, and in all He saw espied matter that fitted what He taught. Our Lord is struck by the sight, He sees in it something that answers to His thoughts, and which seems to convey a promise which rejoices His soul-not for Himself but for His disciples. The discourse is as follows:

"Say not ye, There are yet four months, and _then_ cometh the harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields, that they are white already unto harvest He that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal; that he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. For herein is the saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye have not laboured: others have laboured, and ye are entered into their labour."(121)

The work before the disciples is only to reap: others had ploughed and sown. Prophets and teachers, and also rulers and judges, all who had helped to bring the Israelites into the condition of being ripe for better things-these past teachers of men, as well as all the impersonal workings of the unseen hand which had smoothed the way-all these answered to the ploughers and sowers of the crop which the apostles were now to reap. This "Praeparatio Evangelica," so often before us, had been the combined result of many sorts of action, and into the fruits of this labour the disciples were now to enter. They, along with all those who had sowed and tended, should one day rejoice together, when the grain was garnered in heaven, and when those accounted worthy of the Resurrection to Eternal Life should enter on their reward.

Gleams of gladness in our Lord's career come rarely, and His joy is always for others' sake. It is not for Himself, not even for the cause that He rejoices-that cause would surely triumph in its own time-but His joy is, that He beholds a successful and glorious career opening before His fellow-labourers, the few friends at His side. On the return of the seventy recorded by St Luke, this same joy for His disciples' sake is especially spoken of.