Pastor Pastorum Part 5

Christ declared that G.o.d was working underneath the ordinary agencies, which seemed to men to be working of themselves. G.o.d had been so working all along from the very beginning, but now Christ had come to reveal G.o.d-that is to say to make men sensible of the Divine presence and Divine agency in all that went on both within them and without. This revelation He would effect in the ways best adapted to make men understand it. And as the unlearned are most readily taught by what is set before their eyes; and as the teacher is much helped by having something to shew; so Christ declares the Kingdom and its nature, not only in parables and discourses, but by practical instances and ill.u.s.trations as well; namely by the Signs He wrought. It was as though He had said, "I have told you that G.o.d's power was lying close about you: Behold it operating here." The combination of the word and the Sign, as the two essential elements of the teaching, is expressly put before us in one pa.s.sage: we read,

"And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and _confirming the word with signs following_.

Amen."(31)

(5) Teaching wrought by signs.

The Signs shew us, not only that the Kingdom _is_ G.o.d's, but something also of the nature of that Kingdom as well.

Our Lord speaks of the power displayed in miracles as G.o.d's power working through Him. It is "by the finger of G.o.d" that He casts out devils and the man who is healed is bidden to tell his friends what G.o.d has done for him.(32)

Christ nowhere claims the power as His own. It rests in G.o.d's hands; but it is granted to His prayer, because His will and G.o.d's are one.

Moreover the Signs set forth G.o.d's love and goodness to men, and thereby they tell us something of His nature. All the Signs worked by our Lord before the people at large, and all the works which the Twelve and the Seventy performed in their mission among the cities of Israel, were works of healing; with the exception of the two instances of the feeding of the mult.i.tudes, which also were works of Divine beneficence. There are other miracles of a different character, as we shall see presently, but those were witnessed either by the disciples only, or by a circle of private friends as at Cana of Galilee.

The men of Galilee had hitherto known the Lord as the G.o.d of Israel, who was especially concerned with the fortunes of their race and nation as a whole; but now they were told that He was the Father of every person in that nation, and was sent especially to the lost sheep among them. It was this declaration-that of the individual relation of each man to G.o.d, and of the preciousness of the very hairs of his head in G.o.d's eyes-that const.i.tuted, in great part, the comforting nature of the "good tidings of G.o.d." The miracles wrought in connection with the preaching could not bring this point very prominently forward: but so far as the miracles bear on the point they are in accord with the teaching. They were worked, not upon ma.s.ses of men at once, but on individuals, and our Lord addresses Himself personally to each particular sufferer, as though his case was considered by itself. I shall soon, for another purpose, notice two miracles recorded by St Mark which afford good instances of our Lord's sympathetic insight into individual cases. He does not, on entering a village, ordain that all the lepers in it shall be cleansed, or all the palsied restored to the use of their limbs. He condescends to take each case by itself.

There is hardly a case of healing narrated in St Mark, who, of all our authorities, gives the most detailed account, which does not shew traces of special attention on the part of our Lord to the spiritual and physical features of the particular case. We will take for an instance the cure of the sick of the palsy. The connection of what is spiritual with that which is physical is here very strongly marked. Our Lord begins by saying to the man "thy sins be forgiven thee." It is possible that the man's condition may have been due to imprudence or something worse; the thought of this may have rankled in his mind and the mental trouble may have aggravated the physical infirmity: the great physician cures both together. His restoration seems to come with the sense of pardon, but he does not shew himself aware of his recovery, until our Lord bids him arise.

The shewing that the Divine power worked blessings on men one by one, contained in itself a lesson as to G.o.d's infinity; for a finite being would have been incapable of concerning himself for every unit of the world's population. Any supply of energy, short of an infinite one, would have been exhausted. Hence the notion of G.o.d's personal care for each soul is bound up with the conception of His infinity.

Christ does not begin with the abstract and say: "G.o.d is infinite and therefore He can find room in His heart to love men, every one;" but He begins with the concrete and says, "G.o.d does love you and every one else:"

and He leaves it to men to arrive at the truth at the other end of the proposition: viz. that if G.o.d's strength is not lessened by drawing upon it, this can only be because there is no limit to it. From this infinity of G.o.d it also follows that the distinction between what we call great occasions and small ones-between occasions that we think would justify Divine interposition and those which would not-may not exist in G.o.d's eyes. In the presence of His infinity, the difference between great and small things may disappear; certainly His measure will be a very different one from ours.

This brings us to another point in the use of miracles to ill.u.s.trate the ways of G.o.d's Kingdom: they exemplify the truth that G.o.d is no respecter of persons. Neither the persons on whom they are wrought, or before whom they are wrought, obtain this privilege by any merit or superiority. Men are not healed because they deserve it. As G.o.d sends rain on the just and unjust, so Christ cures the sick who come in His way, rich and poor alike-the son of the n.o.bleman, and the blind beggar; for our Lord, worldly distinctions do not seem to exist. A man, _as man_, was of such transcendent value in the eyes of the Son of Man that, compared to this, little outer differences were but as the hills and dales of the earth, which scarcely roughen the surface of the globe when seen as a whole. Men, too, are not, except for very special purposes, picked out by Christ to witness the miracles; any more than they are in G.o.d's world to receive special mercies, or the lessons, or the afflictions of life. Those who were pa.s.sing by saw the Signs, some profited and some did not: Herod and other great men would gladly have witnessed a miracle, but it was not granted them.

The Signs wrought by Christ harmonise with His teaching in another way: they never have the air of ostentatiously overriding and superseding Nature. His power, in its tranquil might, proceeded calmly along the homely track of every-day life; just as if it had always been present ruling quietly in its own domain, and might at any time have interposed without effort, if the Spiritual Order had needed it. A man is healed and an evil spirit is quelled by a word, and a mult.i.tude in the desert is supplied with food they do not know how,-all proceeds in a calm continuous way. Fresh energy is given to natural powers, and effects are produced of vast magnitude and with astonishing rapidity; but these powers seem to work through the organs and along the channels which nature provides: to our Lord there is one primary source of all life and movement and light and force, and that is G.o.d, from Whom all His power comes. He does not call certain visible manifestations nature, and refer others to G.o.d, as though nature and G.o.d were different powers. The Signs, accordingly, are worked in such a way that it is hard to mark the particular point where what is called the supernatural comes into play-to say, in fact, when nature ends and G.o.d begins. The cures, so far as we can trace them, are effected by the renewal of vitality in a disordered organ; this vitality would seem to proceed from Christ; just as the power which set life going on earth proceeded from G.o.d.

"For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself."(33)

Here, of course, we pa.s.s beyond the realm of the forces we can measure, but this imparted force only restores the organs needed for the cure; the optic nerve is reinvigorated or the absorbent vessels are stimulated to abnormal action, and the eye becomes again efficient. The man is not _enabled to see without an eye_, as was claimed to be done by some workers of miracles in the middle ages; and there is no miracle in the Gospels like that mentioned in Paley's Evidences, where a man who had only one leg becomes possessed of two. Christ _restores_ organs and withered limbs. He does not dispense with the proper organ or create new ones.

St Mark gives us full particulars of two cures, of which we can in some degree trace the process.

"And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly."(34)

From this it appears that the eye was gradually restored, and our Lord's question shews that He did not expect an instantaneous cure. He speaks as a surgeon might who had performed an operation. He does not take it for granted that the man must have received his sight. He applies His hands, a second time and then the ill-defined dark objects which the man spoke of, become distinct.

The other case is that of one who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech.

"And he took him aside from the mult.i.tude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain."(35)

The restoration of the disabled organs is clearly indicated here. I have referred to these two cases a few pages back. We now come to-

(6) Miracles as a practical lesson to the disciples.

So far, we have spoken of miracles as performed for the sake of the mult.i.tude; in order to draw them to listen and to sift from among them those fit to become disciples: I have remarked too how the "Signs"

incidentally conveyed instruction, how they exhibited to the crowd the goodness and the power of G.o.d. But there were some miracles, as I have said in the first chapter, which were especially miracles of instruction, and I would say a word or two about those, before I pa.s.s on to miracles as means of a.s.surance. These miracles of instruction were, in almost all cases, performed when but few of the disciples were by; and they are mostly wrought in the later period of our Lord's Ministry.

Among the miracles of this cla.s.s are, The miraculous draughts of fishes, The walking on the sea, The stater in the fish's mouth, The withering of the fig tree, and the Transfiguration. The last named, is not usually cla.s.sed among miracles or considered in books which treat of them, but a "Sign" it certainly was and it carries lessons with it which, bit by bit, the world is learning still.

That miracles should be employed as a means of impressing truths on the learner, we can well understand.

In no way could a great truth be presented so forcibly to the mind as by being clothed in the garb of a miracle. The wondrous circ.u.mstances would print themselves on the mind's eye at once and for ever; and as they recurred in lonely hours of thought, something more of their drift and purport would peep out every time. It is characteristic of our Lord's ways, that His teaching yields its fruit gradually; much as a seed-vessel driven by the wind, which scatters the contents, now of one cell, now of another, as it whirls along.

I trace in many miracles of instruction, a bearing on the great movement in which St Peter was the chief actor; namely, the calling of the Gentiles, and the taking from the Jews thereby their exclusive position, as the one people who knew G.o.d. Our Lord quietly, and by slow degrees familiarizes St Peter with this idea. He is not suddenly brought face to face with a notion which would cause a violent shock to his mind. With men like the Apostles new ideas want a little time to grow into shape: we know how easily a man is startled into shutting his mind against novelty when it is suddenly presented. St Peter could not have been instructed as to G.o.d's plans without a long course of explanation which it was not our Lord's way to give: so He lets the lesson lie in St Peter's mind till the circ.u.mstances shall come which shall be the key to it.

Of what I call miracles of instruction, I propose to consider two briefly, with a view chiefly to ill.u.s.trating the way in which the instruction was conveyed.

There is this singularity about the Transfiguration, that our Lord _foretells_ it, and in most remarkable words.

"And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of G.o.d come with power."(36)

This promise I understand to mean that some of the Apostles should, even while yet alive on the earth, be vouchsafed a glimpse of another world, and behold Christ in the glorified state which belongs to Him. The expression "in no wise taste of death," which occurs in all three accounts, must mean that they should not only have this experience after pa.s.sing from this life to another, but even while yet in mortal frame. For six days these words are allowed to work in the minds of the disciples, and then:

"Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured before them."(37)

During the six days and on the way up the mountain after they were taken from the rest, Peter, James, and John must have wondered what the "coming of the kingdom of G.o.d with power" would be. This prevented their being so stupefied with astonishment as to miss the lesson of the appearance. Here again we note our Lord's mode of _preparation_ for the receiving of truths.

I do not discuss the nature of the vision, because I have now only to deal with the matter as to its educational effect. When the Apostles saw the glorified Lord with Moses and Elijah-their impression was not fear but joy.-"It is _good_ for us to be here" says St Peter. He thought they had arrived in another world, and he proposes to build tents, as if he had landed in a strange island. He expects to be always there.

But what, in the view I am taking is the cardinal point of all, is the voice out of the cloud-"This is my beloved Son, _Hear ye Him_."(38) In these last words the old covenant is replaced by the new. Moses representing the Law, and Elijah the Prophets-they who had been hitherto the spiritual teachers of men,-stood there to hand over their office to the Son. Their work in nursing the minds of a people set apart as the depositary of the knowledge of G.o.d was now at an end; now Humanity had succeeded to its heritage, and its teacher was to be the Son of Man. A religion which is shaped by the history and the mind of a particular people will be cast in a particular mould: its outward form must be rendered plastic if it is to become Universal. So Moses and Elijah the teachers of Israel lay down their functions in the presence of the chosen three, who hear their Master owned as G.o.d's own Son, to whom the world is henceforth to listen.

And when, many years later, the truth broke upon St Peter so that he said:

"Of a truth I perceive that G.o.d is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to him,"(39)