Pastor Pastorum Part 22

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 _quant.i.ty_ 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.

James and John, we must recollect, had just witnessed the Transfiguration, this helps to explain their mood of mind. They dwelt upon the recollection of this all the more because it was a secret possession of the three. The contrast of their Master's inherent greatness and the humiliation to which He was subjected moved their indignation. The Lord of heaven was refused hospitality by a village in Samaria, and this not out of n.i.g.g.ardliness-that would have moved the Apostles less-but from an old animosity about where men should worship. They, no doubt, regarded their "jealousy for the Lord G.o.d" as something commendable, and were surprised at our Lord's rebuking them and telling them that they knew not what Spirit they were of. The fact was, that our Lord detected in this fierce proposal a further growth of that tendency to spiritual arrogance which had been indicated by their forbidding the man who followed not with them, and this seems to cause our Lord concern. He treats it as a spiritual affection which it would require care to remove. He does not inveigh against it, but His parables and the drift of His teaching militate against the propensity to exercise "Lordship" over men.

Our Lord subsequently takes occasion to exalt the blessing of forgiveness and to teach that overmuch must not be expected or demanded from men. He gives the parables of the Prodigal Son and of the unjust Steward, of which last I shall speak in the next chapter. Peter saw that when our Lord said, "Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching," He had His eye upon the future rulers of His community.

"And Peter said, Lord, speakest thou this parable unto us, or even unto all? And the Lord said, Who then is the faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall set over his household, to give them their portion of food in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Of a truth I say unto you, that he will set him over all that he hath. But if that servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; and shall begin to beat the men-servants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken; the lord of that servant shall come in a day when he expecteth not, and in an hour when he knoweth not, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint his portion with the unfaithful."(277)

There is a hint of possible priestly oppression in the mention of the ill-treatment of inferiors by those upper servants, who, forgetting that their master might at any moment return, deal with the possessions as their own.

I said a little while ago that in this matter the "Sons of thunder"

justified their name. If we had not this pa.s.sage, critics would wonder how such a surname could have been chosen; St John, it is true, forbade the working of cures by one who "followed not with them," still we regard him as the Apostle of Love, and in the Gospels we hear nothing of St James.

This coincidence, though in a small matter, is worth noting. This incident preserved by St Luke shews that there was at the bottom of the natures of these two, loving though they were, a fund of impetuousness and wrath, and that they could break out into a storm of indignation, bearing out the name imposed. It is worth mentioning that this falls in with what we read in the Acts, viz. that when "Herod the king put forth his hands to afflict certain of the church" the first on whom he seized was "James the brother of John;"(278) this shews that James was a vehement, energetic character standing in the front, who to the political authorities was a marked man.

For this was a political execution; if the priests had dealt with him for blasphemy he would have been stoned, not "slain with the sword." Our Lord gathered round Him men of very various temperaments; it is not only one type of man, but those of all types, the impetuous as well as the gentle, for whom Christ finds place in the realm of action.

On arriving at Jerusalem, Jesus "went up into the Temple and taught."(279) His discourse is addressed to the crowd; and as many visitors would come from the cities of Asia, the tone of it is necessarily very different from that of His sermons in Galilee. It is even possible, as many of the strangers had lost their Hebrew, that He spoke in Greek,(280) this would account for the disuse of parables, a form of speech which went with the Hebrew tongue. During all His stay, in or near Jerusalem, possibly of some weeks' duration, broken by Mission journeys, we hear nothing of the disciples; all our Lord's discourses are with "the Jews," and in general with "the Pharisees." (See St John, Chaps. vii. and viii.) The Apostles, or at least some of them, may have been absent on mission duties, for St Luke places the sending out of the seventy near this time.

The question may be asked, where during this time did our Lord reside?

During the feast Jerusalem was thronged with strangers, it was a time when all were keeping holiday; every family left their house, and lived in a tent or booth decorated with vine branches and flowers. Jerusalem at any time, was not, as I have said in an earlier chapter,(281) favoured by our Lord as a residence for His disciples, and He is not likely to have suffered them to stay there long during the turmoil of the feast. At the beginning of the fragment concerning the woman taken in adultery we find a line which points to Bethany as the place where our Lord sojourned. This doc.u.ment, which I regard as genuinely historical, begins abruptly thus,(282) "And they went every man unto his own house, but Jesus went unto the mount of Olives." It looks as if the writer was speaking of the breaking up of a gathering, towards nightfall. Bethany was just beyond the Mount of Olives, something more than two miles to the east of Jerusalem.

It was there, St Luke tells us, that "A certain woman, Martha," received our Lord-but, as far as appears, not any disciples-"into her house." This was on some subsequent journey, but our Lord's affection for Lazarus and his sisters may have arisen, or at least have grown up, during the weeks following this feast. Bethany would furnish for such of the Apostles as were with our Lord just the retreat desired.

At this point I shall cease to attempt to follow the order of time. We can indeed trace our Lord's movements in St John's Gospel, and we can find in St Luke's account indications of journeys which may be made fairly well to correspond with these movements, but much uncertainty must attend the a.s.signing of particular events or parables to their proper occasions.

St Luke in this part of his Gospel had lost, it would seem, the guidance of the original memoir which is supposed to have been the basis of the rest, but he was in possession of much valuable matter, a part of which was, very possibly, in the form of detached doc.u.ments, which he does his best to arrange in order of time. We can understand that parables, such as those of Lazarus and the Prodigal Son, would be copied and circulated and handed from preacher to preacher, as would also incidents of particular interest, or discourses of our Lord. This part of St Luke's Gospel seems drawn from such sources, and the connecting matter is sparingly supplied.

Nothing, then, will be gained by endeavouring to keep any longer to chronological order. Henceforth, therefore, I shall treat the points of interest as separate topics and, pa.s.sing over all that does not immediately bear on the Schooling of the Apostles, I shall take the matters connected with it, about which I have something to say, and discuss them one by one.

NOTE.-The pa.s.sage 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 Judaea, 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d."

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 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 doc.u.ment in his history just before his account of the mission. Thus St Matthew in his narrative puts the pa.s.sage 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 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 pa.s.sage 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."

It was, I think, in Galilee, as St Matthew tells us, that this profession of adhesion was made. At the time he speaks of, popular feeling in our Lord's favour was at its greatest height, and it was owing to the thronging of the mult.i.tude to the Lake sh.o.r.e near Capernaum that our Lord gave orders to depart unto the other side. The circ.u.mstances tally perfectly with the language of the pa.s.sage, for our Lord was then going into a wild country. But where the pa.s.sage stands in St Luke, our Lord is travelling "as it were in secret" from a village in Samaria to Jerusalem.

In this journey, rapidly made, he would not have been likely to have fallen in with the scribe at all, and, as He did not preach as He went, we cannot account for the emotion which the scribe displays; moreover, it could hardly be said that at Jerusalem, He would not have "where to lay His head."

What most particularizes the scribe is his impulsiveness. We have here another example of that mistrust of emotional fervour which our Lord uniformly shews. The woman who cried "Blessed is the womb that bare thee,"(285) the scribe in the case before us, and St Peter, when he said, "I am ready to go with thee both to prison and to death,"(286) all are answered by our Lord in the same tone of repression.(287)

Sudden transports and ebullitions of feeling like those just named, come mainly of temperament and of pa.s.sing physical conditions which subjugate the agent, and our Lord does not regard them as betokening a character on which he can depend.

It speaks well for the right feeling of this scribe that he forbears to press his suit. He divined, with the delicacy of a well bred Oriental, that our Lord's reply, though apparently only discouraging him from following for his own sake, shewed that He held it best that he should stay behind. He is satisfied that our Lord's judgment will be right and he yields at once. A man with less perception might have protested against the imputation on his endurance, and have declared that he would go with the Master though he should have to lie on the bare earth.

That, however genuine his devotion may have been, it was best for the scribe to stay at home is easy to understand; he had been used to an indoors life and under hardships and exposure he would have broken down; besides, while being a burden to the rest, he could, as a jaded man, have gained little in moral or spiritual growth. He was moreover, both as to culture and social caste, of a different type from the rest, and his presence would have made the party less h.o.m.ogeneous. Another important consideration was this; by remaining where he was, he might do that particular kind of good for which he was suited by temper and condition better than by following our Lord. The course which had taken hold of his imagination may not have been that in which he could do the best work. By remaining in Galilee and mixing with other educated men, he, like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, might help to spread tolerance and leaven the ma.s.s.

The two cases which follow, no doubt, puzzled the disciples much. Our Lord had so strenuously enforced a man's duty to his parents, that they would have expected these pleas for delay to be admitted without a word. They are however very positively rejected, and the refusal is put in so impressive a form that I cannot but infer that our Lord intended these colloquies to be recorded.

It has commonly been taken for granted, that the father of the spokesman in the first of these cases was lying dead when our Lord met him and bade him follow; but Eastern usages almost preclude this view, for the Jews buried within twenty-four hours of the death, and for a son to be seen in public while his father was lying dead would to their minds have been highly indecent. Some think that, the father being in extreme age, the son asked to be allowed to stay with him till he died; what seems to me more likely is that the completion of the ten days of strict mourning was regarded as part of the obsequies, and that the word "buried" applies to this. The father might have been laid in the ground, but the ten days not having expired, the funeral solemnities were not considered over.

I think that our Lord meant in this case to leave a lesson, and that the lesson was this. Family ties and duties, blessed though they usually are, must not be turned into idols or suffered to hamper the "clear spirit" in its ascent to G.o.d. There is such a thing as the tyranny of family just as there is of social usage or public opinion, and from each and all of these our Lord would set men free. This kind of freedom would cost a struggle as other kinds also would, and owing to divisions caused by change of Faith even parents might be set against children and children against parents-a heavy price indeed, but one that vanishes compared with the opening of eternal life to mankind. Supposing, as I do, that these disciples were summoned by our Lord to go forth with the seventy, I find in this inflexibility which our Lord displays something quite of a piece with the order to "salute no man by the way,"(288) and to wipe off the dust from their feet when not received; all this is consistent, when taken together, and viewed as a lesson in the dignity of consecration to G.o.d and the imperative character of the charge imposed.

It is important to observe that though these disciples make excuse, and our Lord has usually little tolerance for excuses, yet, instead of being dismissed, these men are despatched to preach the Kingdom of G.o.d. This shews that the defect in them was not organic, and that it had not touched the vital centres. Their malady was of a different order from that of the guests invited to the great supper who said, "I pray thee have me excused," for these latter made light of the invitation; while, if my view be correct, these two men were terrified and overawed by being called to duties which their imagination painted as beyond their powers. They were sensitive and distrustful of self, with highly strung nerves, and the suddenness of the call to preach the Kingdom of G.o.d took away their breath. They do not refuse, but they beg for delay. If they had obtained such a postponement it would have been all the worse for them, because they would have been working themselves into a fever all the while. They are panic stricken at the idea of going into strange districts proclaiming the Kingdom of G.o.d. They were quailing under a nerve-storm and by devising excuses they only gave it greater force; every moment that they lingered increased the hold of the morbid impression: a foreign will must come to their help and take the place of that which was failing. Such a will acts most effectively in the form of an imperative command, calling the patient to immediate positive action. This treatment is followed here. These two men, no doubt, followed as they were bidden. They yielded to authority and herein they found their cure; they, like the rest, set out with only their staves in their hands and came back exulting that the devils were subject to them through the Lord's name. Thus each of the three personages receives the proper specific for his case; Christ divines the treatment that every particular diathesis requires.

But the crowning case of all is yet to come. It belongs to a later time than the above, and is related more at length. It was soon after our Lord had entered on his final public journey to Jerusalem, teaching and discoursing as He went, that a young man, "a certain ruler," in St Luke's words, ran to Him and threw himself at His feet. St Mark's account is the most full of detail.

"And as he was going forth into the way, there ran one to him, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good save one, _even_ G.o.d. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honour thy father and mother. And he said unto him, Master, all these things have I observed from my youth. And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. But his countenance fell at the saying, and he went away sorrowful: for he was one that had great possessions."(289)

Behind the young man's question there lay this view. He regarded eternal life as the reward of certain good works and the punctilious observance of what was divinely enjoined. Our Lord on the other hand represents it, not as being granted or withheld according to the record of performances, but rather as coming "of congruity"(290) along with the fitness for it which has been acquired in the whole education of a life. The man's works have no doubt had very much to do with making him what he is, but other influences have acted as well.

Our Lord rejects the appellation "Good Master." In these terms, scholars addressed the Rabbi at whose feet they sat, they accepted his dicta, and gave up all independent judgment of their own. But our Lord, fostering and, in some sort, respecting the individual principle in each man, would free them from fetters of all kinds, those of the Rabbis among the rest.

Here He would say, "Why do you run to a human master" (for as such only could the ma.s.s regard our Lord) "to tell you what it is right to do? About this no authority can be absolute but G.o.d, and His commandments you know."

These commandments the young ruler had kept, indeed it was hardly possible that one in his position could have done otherwise, but an empty place was still left in his soul. Life he felt sure must have a higher meaning and more satisfying occupations than any he had yet found. Surely he thought "The Master cannot mean to put me off with telling me to keep the commandments;" and he was right. He had known of no other guide to virtuous life than rules of conduct, and so he had come asking for a fresh set of such rules; but a new light was breaking on his soul and what he really wanted was for the clouds to be cleared away. This young man had a n.o.ble soul and our Lord "looking on him loved him." The scribe, spoken of above, would do best by remaining where he was; but this young man would do best by following. He was worth rescuing from the conventionalities and littlenesses of his every day life and lifting into communion with G.o.d.

Had he the force to wrench asunder the bonds, slender singly but countless in number, which fastened him down, and to give up, not merely soft living-that he would abandon with joy-but the social consideration and what went with it, personal connections and all, which he would fling away by doing as Christ bade? This was the question.

Our Lord had not told the scribe to sell all he had and give to the poor.

He laid no such rule on His disciples, but here it was these possessions and, more than all, the position they conferred that clogged the soul and prevented its rise. The "giving to the poor" is not enjoined merely as benevolence; in that virtue it was not likely that this young man would fail, it is only a means of disposing of the weight that drags him down; the magnitude of the sacrifice required staggered the young ruler and he went sorrowful away; but perhaps there was more hope of him than if, at our Lord's word, he had impulsively surrendered all that he had. He may have been one of those who afterwards sold their land or houses "and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them at the Apostles' feet."(291) From this interview our Lord draws the moral, "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of G.o.d;" this is not a denunciation of the rich but rather a commiseration of them, owing to the peculiar and insidious temptations to which they are unceasingly exposed.

The Apostles are "astonished exceedingly"(292) at our Lord's severity, they had perhaps been pleased at the prospect of the accession to their community of a man who was rich and high in station and well spoken of on all sides. As soon as they had heard him told to give up all and follow, Peter, with a touch of almost infantine nature which stamps the narrative as authentic, looking to his own case says, "Lo we have left all and have followed thee." This was no boast or our Lord would not have answered as he does; it was rather an expression of relief at finding that this special difficulty which beset the young ruler no longer stood in their way. They had been called to leave settled homes and they had done so.

Peter, we know, had a wife, and James and John had a father and mother alive. Our Lord seems to give them very positive comfort. Those who had left home or family or lands for His sake and the Gospel's should now, in this time, receive the same a hundred fold(293) as well as life hereafter.

We seem to find here a direct promise of worldly benefit, which would be strangely out of accord with the general tenour of Christ's words; but then comes a clause, preserved only by St Mark, which alters all the meaning. It contains but two words "with persecutions." This appears to unsay all that was said before; for of what good, in the way of enjoyment, are family and possessions "in the midst of persecution"? Our Lord, to my thinking, in this pa.s.sage has His eye on a certain time to come; the "brethren and sisters and mothers and children" must mean the great Christian family, and the "lands" are the possessions of that community which, while the Church was confined to Jerusalem, had all things common, "When the mult.i.tude of them that believed were of one heart and soul: and not one of them said that aught of the things which he possessed was his own."(294) In the exaltation of spirit in which that community lived, persecution would seem only a superficial ill, without which their happiness would have been too ecstatic for permanent spiritual health.