Pastor Pastorum Part 14

"And the Pharisees went out, and straightway with the Herodians took counsel against him, how they might destroy him. And Jesus with his disciples withdrew to the sea: and a great mult.i.tude from Galilee followed: and from Judaea."(157)

The Evangelists seldom speak of our Lord's motives, but here the collocation indicates that it was this confederacy of Pharisees and Herodians which caused our Lord to leave Capernaum. The Herodians were more formidable than the Pharisees. The latter would only set the law in motion, but the former did not scruple to employ violence; and the Macedonian guards of the Tetrarch were at Tiberias within call. Our Lord never, until His time was come, exposed Himself unnecessarily to danger; and at this particular moment His freedom and safety were of vital importance. All that He had done would, humanly speaking, be lost or have to be done over again if He were cast into prison or slain: the pressure of this danger may have hastened the appointment of the Twelve. The body of disciples following our Lord had as yet no corporate life of its own; it was only held together by gravitation to Him and would fall to pieces if He were taken away; at this juncture then, there was no time to be lost in giving the body organic life. As soon as the Twelve received their commission this body became possessed of a vital centre, and the continuous existence of the Church was secured, even though its Master should be removed from earth.

This plot of the Pharisees was probably known but to few-people when they take counsel together do not publish their design on the house-tops-and the absence of excitement among the crowd favours the view that the danger of the prophet of Nazareth was not suspected by them. Whatever may have been His motive, our Lord left Capernaum, together with His followers, and took, it seems, the road along the sea sh.o.r.e towards the north.

Some words of our Lord, belonging probably to this place, are recorded by St Matthew.

"But when he saw the mult.i.tudes, he was moved with compa.s.sion for them, because they were distressed and scattered, as sheep not having a shepherd. Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth labourers into his harvest."(158)

St Matthew probably found in this need of labourers a sufficient reason for the call of the Apostles. More hands were wanted for ministering to the mult.i.tude, and it was desirable that some should be set apart for the work. But our Lord's great earnestness in the matter points, as I have just said,(159) to something more than this, as though this calling of the Twelve was of vital concern for the great work that was being done for the world.

It would only have bewildered the disciples if our Lord had explained to them the meaning and motive of the commissioning of the Twelve. They could not be told that Christ's Kingdom on earth was being vested in the Twelve as an undying body in order that it might not be shattered by His death.

They could not yet be told of the coming Resurrection, or that they were being trained to bear witness of Christ's spiritual presence with His own.

Our Lord's talk with His disciples was primarily suited to their wants and to their minds, and not to those of the people of after times: we must not therefore expect to find in it answers to the questions we want to put.

But we have one advantage which the disciples had not; they, as actors in the drama, were taken up with their parts for the moment, while we contemplate it as spectators from beginning to end; and even if we cannot quite follow the action, yet we can make out enough of sequence to see that this action forms a whole: we mark the drift of the earlier incidents when we see the goal for which all was making, and our Lord's purposes are sometimes made more apparent by the course of His acts than by His words.

Without pretending to enter into our Lord's mind, we cannot help imagining the considerations which the situation must have inspired. The danger to the cause from allowing it to hang upon a single life was becoming more pressing day by day. Though our Lord in pa.s.sing through the country, had kindled men's hearts as He went along, yet He had left no working agency behind. There was no rallying point, no minister, no const.i.tuted body in any district or town. It may be asked, "Why did not our Lord do as St Paul did?" Why did He not "ordain elders in every city," and establish His religion territorially step by step, just as an advancing army occupies the ground it has won? This is part of the wider question, "Why did not our Lord found a Church Himself?" to which an answer has been given before. His business was to "kindle the fire" and only to kindle it. What has been said of ritual (p. 222) applies to Church government as well.

Church polities, like forms of secular government, were to be formed by men of each age for themselves; and to lay down a system, for which a Divine authority would inevitably be claimed, would bar all human intervention in matters ecclesiastical, and hamper men's minds in ways that I have glanced at before. If a system of Christian communities had been spread over Galilee by our Lord as it was spread over Asia Minor by St Paul, the forms of ecclesiastical government so sanctioned, and all that related to outer worship would have been regarded as a part of revealed truth. A visible Church framed by our Lord would have afforded a model, from any line in the construction of which it would have been a heresy to swerve. Men would not only have consecrated the principles of its polity but they would have seized on the visible const.i.tution and points of practice and have battled for these to the death. We should have had an inst.i.tution, Divinely authorised, and which therefore could not in the smallest particular be changed, imposed on races inheriting different temperaments, and one ecclesiastical rule would have been fixed for all time.

In all matters of procedure the one question asked would have been, "What was the practice of the Lord?" Church polity would have depended wholly on conclusions drawn from antiquarian study and, what would have been worse than all, people having outgrown the inst.i.tutions regarded as Divine would have lulled their consciences by being studiously regardful of the form after the meaning had disappeared, and they would have stretched the formulae to make them fit the times. In doing this they would have played fast and loose with their honesty of mind. Moreover it seems to me an incongruity that the Redeemer of the World should also be the founder of a local Church; the disproportion is so vast between the two terms.

A way was perfected in that night of prayer upon the hills, whereby an organic life was imparted to the little community without setting up a Church, from the pattern of which no deviation could be allowed. The Twelve formed a centre round which the disciples might cl.u.s.ter, and this rudiment of organisation was enough for the time. Christ gave only such a germ of external polity as the immediate need required. The commissioning of the Twelve imposed no particular form of rule; but it taught the lesson that organisation and order and the distribution of duty were essential in things spiritual as well as in things temporal, and that it was well for the children of light to be as "wise in their generation" as the children of the world.

When a danger or perplexity offers itself to men, they seek counsel one of another, but our Lord takes counsel of the Father alone, there is with Him no hesitancy, no balancing of this course against that. In this case, when the morning comes His resolve is distinct, and it is forthwith carried out. The const.i.tution and proper functions of the body that He should create, as well as the persons who were to be the first members, all were determined on.

We read:

"He went out into the mountain to pray; and he continued all night in prayer to G.o.d;"(160)

again, we have

"He goeth up into the mountain, and calleth unto him whom he himself would: and they went unto him. And he appointed twelve, that they might be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach, and to have authority to cast out devils."(161)

This is all we are told of the planting of that germ, of which the upgrowth is the Church of Christ. The organisation thus introduced was just enough to make of the disciples one body. Henceforth they could speak of themselves as "we;" but as yet, they were only pupils, chosen to be about their master's person, intrusted with special powers for the good of those among whom they ministered, but with no authority over the rest of the disciples.

The hour to which our Lord had looked forward, the time "when the bridegroom should be taken away," arrived at last, and our Lord's timely measures in finding the right men and training them in the right way proved of signal service then. When the critical moment came the men proper for the work were found upon the spot. When our Lord at Gethsemane, declining all superhuman aid, resigned Himself into His captors' hands, consternation and bewilderment for a moment overcame the Twelve-"they all left Him, and fled."(162) The recollection of this moment's failure may have been of service to them in after days; it may have made them more lenient to the lapses of others, and, like the "thorn in the flesh" given to St Paul, might prevent their being "exalted overmuch." The situation in which the Apostles found themselves called out the qualities desired. As soon as their Master had suffered there came upon them the sense of responsibility, and they rose to the circ.u.mstances as men with depth of character do. The cause did not die down even for a moment, it was kept alive in that upper chamber where the eleven met. To them, from the first, the other disciples looked for direction, and to them they brought their news. The women never doubted about where they were to go with the news that the sepulchre was empty, and late in the Resurrection Day the disciples from Emmaus proceeded straight to the upper chamber, knowing that the eleven would be there.

Hardly had the two who returned from Emmaus told their tale, when

"He himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace _be_ unto you."(163)

The eleven had taken the helm quietly, as a matter of course, when the ship seemed to be disabled. They had been faithful in a little and straightway they are called unto much, they are chosen for witnesses of the Supreme Event in the history of Man, of the Resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

It is this character of witnesses which distinguishes the Apostles from all other depositaries of a Master's cause. This was the charge that governed the disposition of their lives. Other men might organise churches and set forth the teaching of the Lord, but in the character of appointed witnesses of the Resurrection they stood alone. Before the Resurrection they are told

"And ye also bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning,"(164)

and afterwards it is as witnesses that they are singled out by our Lord, "And ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judaea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth."(165) In this distinctive light too they regard themselves. When a successor to Judas has to be appointed, St Peter says, "of these must one become a witness with us of his resurrection"(166) and Peter and all the Apostles say, before the Sanhedrin, "We are witnesses of these things." Peter again, speaking to the brethren from Joppa calls the Apostles "witnesses chosen before of G.o.d."(167)

I find in the Twelve a special fitness for the particular work which it fell to them to perform. They brought to the attestation of the Resurrection the concurring evidence of eleven eyewitnesses, simple, truthloving, matter-of-fact men, of different types of mind.

The unanimity of the eleven, both as to their testimony and as to their adoption of a particular course of conduct has been less dwelt on by Apologists than I should have expected. If one or two could have been gained over by the Scribes to dissent from the account of the rest, the moral force of the evidence would have been lost. The chances against the agreement of the entire body in an illusion or a misrepresentation are enormous. But an event so transcendent as to wipe out of the minds of the witnesses everything else-"all trivial, fond records" would efface small subjective differences by the overwhelming force of the objective impression; and the occurrence of such an event would account for that perfect agreement in action among men who had not uniformly agreed before, which is among the many striking phenomena which the book of the Acts of the Apostles discloses to our own view.

The chosen witnesses have exactly the qualities which a judge would point out to a jury, as grounds for giving particular weight to their evidence on questions of fact coming within their view. I must say something more on this point.

Nothing carries more weight with a jury than the impression that the witness has an intense belief in the truth of what he says. Such an impression the Apostles conveyed; the possibility that they should themselves doubt in the slightest about any fact to which they speak never occurs to their mind; all through the Acts and the Epistles the atmosphere is one of certainty, settled and serene. The Apostles had not been always so a.s.sured; we find them in the Gospels impatient for clearer statements and more decisive signs: "Now speakest thou plainly and speakest no parable" they regard as high praise. But after the Resurrection all this is changed, they are then quite certain of the fact that Christ is Divine, and they have given up trying to understand the ways and forms in which the Divine power might show itself. They had probably, once thought, like Naaman, that it must operate something after the fashion which absolute power uses upon earth. They have got past this when we meet with them in the Acts.

I have spoken of the difference of character among the Apostles for this reason. That eleven men, and a _particular_ eleven, should all have agreed in an account of what they said they had seen, when by so doing they gained none of the objects of human desire, is hard to explain unless we suppose that they were convinced of the truth of their report. If, however, these men had but one mind among them, either because one or two master spirits controlled the rest, or because they had been so carefully drilled into uniformity that they could not help judging alike, then the value of this unanimity would disappear, for the eleven would become, virtually, only one or two. Now that the Apostles were men of independent minds is clear from what we hear of their disputings by the way, and from the offence taken at James and John when they ask for seats on the right and left at their Master's side; and, indeed, the Gospel portraiture of all the Apostles leaves on us the impression that they were of different types of character and had personalities that were strongly marked.

Certainly St Peter had a turn of mind which was specially his own. He arrived at steadfast conviction not by reasoning from step to step-this was a mental process rarely practised by Galilean fishers-but by inward intuition, after his own strong Hebrew sort. When an impulse seized on him it must have its way, and when his heart was full of a matter he must pour it out.

Of Matthew what I said (p. 215) may stand in place of a notice here. His Gospel shews us from what side he looked on the work then being set afoot.

James and John the "Sons of Thunder" may be set down as representing energy and vehemence. They were not likely to follow a lead, or to fall in with a fantasy started by anyone else. Our notices of Thomas and Philip and Bartholomew, remind us of sketches, in which a few spirited pen-strokes present a figure which we can fancy we have seen. Though Thomas so loved our Lord that he was the first to propose to go with Him to Jerusalem that "they might die with Him,"(168) yet he will not take it on hearsay that Christ is risen. He knew how dearly the disciples longed to have their Master back, and he mistrusted their report because he feared that their impression might come of their strong desire. His doubts however like those of Nathanael, are those of an investigator, not of an a.s.sailant; like him he is "without guile" and is glad to accept the offer "Come and see." Of Philip I have often spoken. His words, "Shew us the Father and it sufficeth us" lay his mind bare before us.

These three men last named were all inclined to be incredulous, they were matter of fact persons, looking without rather than within, and such are the most trustworthy witnesses to external fact. Of one Apostle, Simon, it is true we learn that he had been a "zealot," that is, that he had once belonged to a band of men fired with fanatical devotion. But, when we hear of him, he had caught sight of a different kind of Divine Kingdom from any that he had thought of bringing about, and he was by degrees learning that "the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of G.o.d."(169) Not one of these men had sufficient imagination-sufficient creative faculty-to embody his longings, even if he had such, in a vision so unexampled as that we have. That some of the eleven should have had one illusive fancy and some another would not have been improbable, but that all should have had the same would have been inordinately so. As a matter of fact the portraiture of the risen Lord given in our different memoirs is a conception singularly consistent, and one which the writers could not have drawn except from concurring traditions or personal knowledge of the facts.

There was one Apostle who did not witness the resurrection-Judas Iscariot.

With all that has been written about him, the problems of his call and of the purpose of his treason remain unsolved. If, as many suppose, Judas came from some place in Judaea, Kerioth by name, he was, among the Apostles, the only one who was not a Galilaean. It is possible that he may have been one of those who attached themselves to our Lord at Jerusalem before His active ministry began. Our Lord did not "trust Himself"(170) with these as a body but one or two may have gone with Him through Samaria into Galilee. Judas may have been of a mind less simply receptive than the rest of the twelve. Perhaps he had aims for Israel, perhaps also for himself, the patriotic element may sometimes have been uppermost and sometimes the selfish one, and perhaps he wanted to hasten the Divine scheme and help it forward in His own way.

His presence among the disciples shews that our Lord did not confine his choice to those who were of one type, and that a man who had in him great possibilities, attracted his sympathy, although these possibilities might be turned to evil, and the things meant for his good might become an occasion of falling.

But while each individual of the Apostolic body had a specific character of his own, yet beneath this lay a generic condition common to them all.

They all belonged to the lower middle cla.s.s, living by labour but above want; they were able to read and write and some could probably talk Greek with the neighbouring h.e.l.lenists in the country to the north. The Apostles were plain and homely in their minds and in their talk. In what they heard they saw little beyond the meaning that lay on the surface of the words.

This literal mindedness does not belong to one Apostle or two, but characterizes them all, and it appears in St John's Gospel as frequently as in the other three. The Evangelists relate these displays of simplicity without ever dreaming that they throw thereby any disparagement on the Apostles: such they expected them to be, and such they note that they were.

When men have the wants of the day full in view every morning of their lives, and must supply these wants by the labour of their hands, their thoughts naturally take a practical turn. Now this we note as a signal trait in the behaviour of the Apostles and it is exactly what would characterize men brought up as they had been. They always look first to what under the circ.u.mstances has to be _done_; like seafaring men, they are prompt in resource. When the five thousand stay till nightfall on the mountain side far from any place where food could be got, the thought of the Apostles is, "How are they to be fed?" They take it on them to advise that the crowd be sent away while there was still daylight enough for them to reach the villages. In the little daily business of common life they act as if matters of service fell within their own sphere and on them they had a right to speak. I have already spoken of their pressing our Lord to take food on the journey through Samaria. Again, when the three Apostles are with our Lord on the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter evidently supposes that they have entered a new and heavenly country where they are to stay, and his first thought is to be of service. People, he supposes, will want abiding places in the new country as well as in the old land they had left, so he proposes to build huts as if they had been camping in the hills. An Alpine guide would have spoken much in the same way. These little distinctive characteristics are carefully preserved, and the instinctive thought of the attendant Apostles for their Master in their little acts of personal service is true to nature in a rare and delicate way.

Such men are good witnesses for they have eyes for everything. I contend then, first that the Apostles were singularly adapted for affording the testimony required, and next, that, if men were especially picked out on account of their qualifications as witnesses, then our Lord must have had in view some great event for which witnesses were required. In the selection of these plain men to found the church we light upon the first hint of the distinctive feature of the Christian revelation mentioned above, viz. that it was to be centred, not in _notions_ but in a stupendous Fact (p. 230).

When the gospel had to be preached to Greeks who sought after a methodical system, and the need came for doctrine, the work was given to St Paul. But twelve St Pauls as witnesses to fact would not have carried as much weight as the Apostles did; for though the most truthful of men, yet the world of his own thoughts was nearly as present to him as the world without, and it was not always perfectly clear when he was speaking of one and when of the other. The minds of the Apostles, on the other hand, were quite limpid; they received all "as little children," registering truly what came from without, and declaring it just as their five senses set it before them.

I have said (_l.c._) that the Apostles were not the men whom the Founder of a policy or a school would have chosen to win men over to his views.

Our Lord does not choose his successors for their power of attracting crowds. He does not teach them to argue or to preach. They prevailed by what they were and what they did, more than by what they said. They had not the art of kindling enthusiasm and leading captive the minds of men.

They do not possess the magic which masters the will. Their success comes of what they had to say, not of the way in which they said it. They were indeed to be the promulgators of the religion which was to grow up around the person of Christ, they were to "teach all nations,"(171) but they are not to dominate men and bear them down by impetuous oratory. This is too near akin to delusion and tyranny for teachers of the freemen whom "the truth makes free." Nor were they to rate their success by the mult.i.tude of those they baptized. The truths revealed in Christ's life and death were given to the world to be part of its possessions through all time, and whether they were generally accepted a little sooner or a little later was of small account.

It may be remarked here what a small part in the Divine economy, the gift of eloquence plays. Moses had no utterance, the speech of Paul was contemptible, and the Apostles can, indeed, say what needs saying, but have not the gift, so infinitely valued by the Greek, of leading men captive by persuasive words.