FOOTSTEPS OF THE MASTER
"The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."
Our Lord asserts nothing more frequently than that he
came to this world, not as other men come, but as a voluntary
exile from a higher and purer life. He said in public,
speaking to the Jews, "I came down from heaven, not
to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me."
When the Jews tauntingly said to him, "Thou art not yet
fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?" he answered,
"Before Abraham was, I AM." In fact, while he
walked as a brother among men, there were constant and
mysterious flashes from the life of a higher sphere. Jesus
moved about in our life as a sympathetic foreigner who
ever and anon in moments of high excitement breaks out
into his native language. So Christ at times rose into the
language of heaven, and spoke for a moment, unconsciously
as it were, in the style of a higher world.
He did not say, "Before Abraham was, I was," but "I
AM," using the same form which in the Old Testament is
used by Jehovah when he declares his name to Moses, "I
AM that I am." So, too, when conversing with Nicodemus,
our Lord asserts that he is the only person competent
to bear testimony to heavenly things, because he came
from heaven.
He says, "No man hath ascended into heaven but he
that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which
is in heaven." This last is one of those changes into the
language of a higher world which so often awed and perplexed
those who talked with Jesus. It would seem that
he had the power by moments to breathe aside the veil
which separates from the higher state, and to be in heaven.
Such a moment was this, when he was declaring to an
honest-minded, thoughtful inquirer the higher truths of
the spiritual life, and asserting his right to know about
heavenly things, because he came down from heaven—yea,
because for the moment he was in heaven.
But in the last hours of his life, when he felt the
scenes of his humiliations and sufferings approaching, he
declared this truth, so often shadowed and intimated, with
explicit plainness. He said, "I came forth from the
Father, and am come into the world. Again, I leave the
world, and go to the Father." This was stating the truth
as plainly as human words can do it, and the disciples at
last understood him fully. "Lo! now speakest thou
plainly, and speakest no proverb." And in that affecting
prayer that followed our Lord breathes the language of an
exile longing to return to the home of his love: "And
now, O Father! glorify me with thine own self—with
the glory that I had with thee before the world was."
It is then most plain on the face of the New Testament
that our Lord had a history before he came to this world.
He was a living power. He was, as he says, in glory
with the Father before the world was. Are there any
traces of this mysterious Word, this divine Son, this
Revealer of God in the Old Testament? It has been the
approved sentiment of sound theologians that in the Old
Testament every visible appearance of an Angel or divine
Man to whom the name of Jehovah is given is a pre-appearance
of the Redeemer, Jesus. It is a most interesting
study to pursue this idea through the Old Testament
history, as is fully done by President Edwards in his
"History of Redemption" and by Dr. Watts in his "True
Glory of Christ." In Milton's "Paradise Lost" he represents
the Son of God as being "the Lord God who walked
in the Garden of Eden" after the trespass of our first
parents, and dwells on the tenderness of the idea that it
was in the cool of the day,—
"when from wrath more cool
Came the mild Judge and Intercessor both."
This sentiment of the church has arisen from the plain
declaration in the first chapter of John, where it is plainly
asserted that "no man hath seen God at any time, but the
only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father,
he hath declared him." The Old Testament records to
which our Lord constantly appealed were full of instances
in which a being called Jehovah, and spoken of as God,—the
Almighty God,—had appeared to men, and the inference
is plain that all these were pre-appearances of Christ.
It is an interesting study for the sacred season of Advent
to trace those pre-appearances of our Lord and Saviour in
the advancing history of our race. A series of readings of
this sort would be a fit preparation for the triumphs of
Christmas, when he, the long-desired, was at last given
visible to man.
We shall follow a few of these early appearances of the
Saviour, in the hope that some pious hearts may be led to
see those traces of his sacred footsteps, which brighten the
rugged ways of the Old Testament history.
In the eighteenth chapter of Genesis we have an account
of a long interview of Abraham with a being in human
form, whom he addresses as Jehovah, the Judge of all the
earth. We hear him plead with him in words like these;—
"Behold now, I have taken on me to speak unto Jehovah,
which am but dust and ashes ... that be far from thee to
do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked:
and that the righteous should be as the wicked. Shall not the
Judge of all the earth do right?"
What a divine reticence and composure it was, on the
part of our Lord, when afterwards he came to earth and
the scoffing Jews said to him, "Thou art not yet fifty
years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?" He did not
tell them how their father Abraham had been a suppliant
at his feet ages ago, yet he must have thought of it as
they thus taunted him.
Again we read in Genesis xxviii., when Jacob left his
father's house and lay down, a lonely traveler, in the fields
with a stone for his pillow, the pitying Jesus appeared to
him:—
"He dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and
the top of it reached unto heaven; and behold the angels of
God ascending and descending upon it. And behold, Jehovah
stood above it, and said, I am Jehovah, God of Abraham, thy
father."
As afterwards Jesus, at the well of Samaria, chose to
disclose his Messiahship to the vain, light-minded, guilty
Samaritan woman, and call her to be a messenger of his
good to her townsmen, so now he chose Jacob—of whom
the worst we know is that he had yielded to an unworthy
plot for deceiving his father—he chose him to be the
father of a powerful nation. Afterward our Lord alludes
to this vision in one of his first conversations with Nathaniel,
as given by St. John:—
"Jesus said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee
under the fig-tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things
than these, Verily I say unto you, hereafter ye shall see heaven
open and the angels of God ascending and descending upon
the Son of man."
This same divine Patron and Presence watches over the
friendless Jacob until he becomes rich and powerful, the
father of a numerous tribe. He is returning with his
whole caravan to his native land. But the consequence of
his former sin meets him on the way. Esau, the brother
whom he deceived and overreached, is a powerful prince,
and comes to meet him with a band of men.
Then Jacob was afraid and distressed, and applies at
once to his heavenly Helper. "I am not worthy," he
says, "of all the mercy and all the truth which thou hast
shown to thy servant, for with my staff I passed over this
Jordan and now I am become two bands. Deliver me, I
pray thee, from the hand of my brother Esau, for I fear
him, lest he come and smite me and the mother with the
children." Such things were common in those days—they
were possible and too probable—and what father
would not pray as Jacob prayed?
Then follows a passage of singular and thrilling character.
A mysterious stranger comes to him, dimly seen in
the shadows of the coming dawn. Is it that human Friend—that
divine Jehovah? Trembling and hoping he strives
to detain him, but the stranger seeks to flee from him.
Made desperate by the agony of fear and entreaty, he
throws his arms around him and seeks to hold him. The
story is told briefly thus:—
"And Jacob was left alone. And there wrestled A MAN
with him until the breaking of day. And when he saw that
he prevailed not he touched the hollow of his thigh, and the
hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with
him. And the man said, Let me go, for the day breaketh; and
he said, I will not let thee go except thou bless me. And he
said, What is thy name? and he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy
name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince
thou hast power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
And Jacob said, I beseech thee tell me thy name. And he
said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And
he blessed him there."
How like is this mysterious stranger to the One in the
New Testament history who after the resurrection joined
the two sorrowful disciples on the way to Emmaus.
There is the same mystery, the same reserve in giving
himself fully to the trembling human beings who clung to
him. So when the disciples came to their abode "he
made as though he would go farther," and they constrained
him and he went in. As he breaks the bread they know
him, and immediately he vanishes out of their sight.
In his dying hour (Gen. xlviii.) the patriarch Jacob,
after an earthly pilgrimage of a hundred and forty-seven
years, recalls these blessed visions of his God:—
"And Jacob said to Joseph, God Almighty appeared to me
at Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me."
And again, blessing the children of Joseph, he says:—
"God, before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk,
the God which fed me all my life long unto this day, the Angel
which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads."
But it was not merely to the chosen father of the chosen
nation that this pitying Friend and Saviour appeared.
When the poor, passionate, desperate slave-girl Hagar was
wandering in the wilderness, struggling with the pride and
passion of her unsubdued nature, he who follows the one
wandering sheep appeared and spoke to her (Gen. xvi.).
He reproved her passionate impatience; he counseled submission;
he promised his protection and care to the son
that should be born of her and the race that should spring
from her. Wild and turbulent that race of men should
be; and yet there was to be a Saviour, a Care-taker, a
Shepherd for them. "And she called the name of the
Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me; for she
said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?"
Afterwards, when the fiery, indomitable passions of the
slave-woman again break forth and threaten the peace of
the home, and she is sent forth into the wilderness, the
Good Shepherd again appears to her. Thus is the story
told (Gen. xxi.):—
"And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the
child under one of the shrubs, and she went and sat down a
good way off, for she said, Let me not see the death of the
child. And God heard the voice of the lad, and the angel of
the Lord called to Hagar out of heaven, saying, What aileth
thee, Hagar? fear not. God hath heard the voice of the lad
where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, hold him in thy hand, for
I will make of him a great nation. And God opened her eyes,
and she saw a well of water."
Thus did he declare himself the Care-taker and Saviour
not of the Jews merely, but of the Gentiles. It was he
who afterwards declared that he was the living bread
which came down from heaven, which he gave for the life
of the WHOLE WORLD.
Afterwards, in the history of Moses in the wilderness of
Sinai, we read of a divine Being who talked with him in
a visible intimacy:—
"And it came to pass, as Moses entered into the tabernacle,
the cloudy pillar descended and stood at the door of the tabernacle,
and Jehovah talked with Moses. And all the people saw
the cloudy pillar stand at the tabernacle door, and all the people
rose up and worshiped, each man in his tent door. And
Jehovah spake unto Moses, face to face, as a man speaketh unto his
friend."
Some record of this strange conversation is given.
Moses was a man of wonderful soul, in whom was the
divine yearning; he longed to know more and more of his
God, and at last beseeches to have the full beatific vision
of the divine nature in its glory; but the answer is:
"Thou canst not see my face [in its divine glory], for
there shall no man see me and live." That overpowering
vision was not for flesh and blood; it would dissolve the
frail bonds of mortality and set the soul free, and Moses
must yet live, and labor, and suffer.
What an affecting light this interview of Moses sheds
on that scene in the New Testament, where, just before
his crucifixion, the disciples see their Master in the glory
of the heavenly world, and with him Moses and Elijah,
"who spake with him of his decease, which he should
accomplish at Jerusalem,"—Moses, who had been taught
by the divine Word in the wilderness how to organize all
that system of forms and sacrifices which were to foreshadow
and prepare the way for the great Sacrifice—the
great Revealer of God to man. We see these noble souls,
the two grandest prophets of the Old Testament, in communion
with our Lord about that last and final sacrifice
which was to fulfill and bring to an end all others.
A little later on, in the Old Testament history, we
come to a time recorded in the Book of Judges when the
chosen people, settled in the land of Canaan, sunk in
worldliness and sin, have forgotten the Lord Jehovah, and
as a punishment are left to be bitterly oppressed and
harassed by the savage tribes in their neighborhood. The
nation was in danger of extinction. The stock from which
was to come prophets and apostles, the writers of the
Bible which we now read, from which was to come our
Lord Jesus Christ, was in danger of being trampled out
under the heel of barbarous heathen tribes. It was a
crisis needing a deliverer. Physical strength, brute force,
was the law of the day, and a deliverer was to be given
who could overcome force by superior force.
Again the mysterious stranger appears; we have the
account in Judges xiii.
A pious old couple who have lived childless hitherto
receive an angelic visitor who announces to them the birth
of a deliverer. And the woman came and told her husband,
saying, "A man of God came unto me, and his countenance
was like the countenance of an angel of God, very
terrible; but I asked him not whence he was, neither told
he me his name." This man, she goes on to say, had
promised a son to them who should deliver Israel from the
hand of the Philistines. Manoah then prays to God to
grant another interview with the heavenly messenger.
The prayer is heard; the divine Man again appears to
them and gives directions for the care of the future child,—directions
requiring the most perfect temperance and
purity on the part of both mother and child. The rest of
the story is better given in the quaint and beautiful words
of the Bible:—
"And Manoah said to the angel of Jehovah, I pray thee let
us detain thee till we shall have made ready a kid for thee.
And the angel of Jehovah said to Manoah, Though thou detain
me I will not eat of thy bread; and if thou wilt offer a burnt
offering thou must offer it unto Jehovah. For Manoah knew
not that he was an angel of Jehovah. And Manoah said, What
is thy name? that when thy sayings come to pass we may do
thee honor. And the angel of the Lord said unto him, Why
askest thou my name, seeing that it is secret? So Manoah
took a kid with a meat offering and offered it upon a rock to
the Lord; and the angel did wonderously, and Manoah and his
wife looked on. For it came to pass, when the flame went up
to heaven from off the altar, that the angel of Jehovah ascended
in the flame on the altar, and Manoah and his wife fell on their
faces on the ground. And Manoah said, We shall surely die,
for we have seen God."
This tender, guiding Power, this long-suffering and
pitying Saviour of Israel, appears to us in frequent
glimpses through the writings of the prophets.
Isaiah says, "In all their affliction He was afflicted, and
the Angel of his Presence saved them; in his love and his
pity he redeemed them, and he bore and carried them all
the days of old."
It is this thought that gives an inexpressible pathos to
the rejection of Christ by the Jews. St. John begins his
gospel by speaking of this divine Word, who was with
God in the beginning, and was God; that he was in the
world, and the world was made by him, and the world
knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own
received him not.
This gives an awful, pathetic meaning to those tears
which Christ shed over Jerusalem, and to that last yearning
farewell to the doomed city:—
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and
stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have
gathered thy children as a hen doth gather her brood under her
wings, and ye would not."
It gives significance to that passage of Revelation where
Christ is called "the Lamb slain from the foundation of
the world."
Not alone in the four years when he ministered on earth
was he the suffering Redeemer; he was always, from the
foundation of the world, the devoted sacrifice: bearing on
his heart the sinning, suffering, wandering race of man,
afflicted in their afflictions, bearing their griefs and carrying
their sorrows, the friend of the Jew and the Gentile,
the seeker for the outcast, the guide of the wanderer, the
defender of the helpless, the consoler of the desolate, the
self-devoted offering to and for the sins of the world.
In all these revelations of God, one idea is very precious.
He reveals himself not as a fixed Fate—a mighty,
crushing, inexorable Power—but as a Being relenting,
tender, yearning towards the race of man with infinite
tenderness. He suffers himself to be importuned; he
hides himself that he may be sought, and, although he is
omnipotent, though with one touch he might weaken and
paralyze human strength, yet he suffers human arms to
detain and human importunity to conquer him, and he
blesses the man that will not let him go except he bless.
On this scene Charles Wesley has written his beautiful
hymn beginning,—
"Come, O thou Traveler unknown."
The struggles, the sorrows, and aspirations of the soul for
an unknown Saviour have never been more beautifully
told.
In the Old Testament Scriptures we have from the
beginning of the world an advent dawn—a rose sky of
Promise. He is coming, is the mysterious voice that
sounds everywhere, in history, in prophecy, in symbol,
type, and shadow. It spreads through all races of men;
it becomes an earnest aspiration, a sigh, a moan of struggling
humanity, crying out for its Unknown God.
In the Garden of Eden came the first oracle, which
declared that the Seed of the woman should bruise the
serpent's head. This was an intimation, vague yet distinct,
that there should come a Deliverer who should break
the power of evil. From that hour every mother had
hope, and child-bearing was invested with dignity and
blessing. When the mother of all brought the first son
into the world, she fondly hoped that she had brought
forth the Deliverer, and said, "I have gotten the MAN
Jehovah."
Poor mother! destined to a bitter anguish of disappointment!
Thousands of years were to pass away before the
second Eve should bring forth the MAN Jehovah.
In this earliest period we find in the history of Job the
anguish, the perplexities, the despair of the helpless
human creature, crushed and bleeding beneath the power
of an unknown, mighty Being, whose ways seem cruel and
inexplicable, but with whom he feels that expostulation is
impossible:—
"Lo, he goeth by me and I see him not; he passeth on also
and I perceive him not. Behold, he taketh away, and who can
hinder him? who will say unto him, What doest thou? If
God will not withdraw his anger, the proud helpers do stoop
under him. How then shall I answer him and choose out
words to reason with him?"
Job admits that he desires to reason with God to ask
some account of his ways. He says:—
"My soul is weary of my life. I will speak in the bitterness
of my soul. I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; show
me why thou contendest with me. Is it good that thou shouldest
oppress, that thou shouldest despise the work of thy
hands?"
He then goes through with all the perplexing mysteries
of life. He sees the wicked prosperous and successful,
and he that had always been devoted to God reduced to
the extreme of human misery; he wrestles with the problem;
he longs to ask an explanation; but it all comes to
one mournful conclusion:—
"He is not a man as I am, that I should answer him, and we
should come together in judgment. Neither is there any daysman
[arbiter] between us, that might lay his hand on both of
us. Let him take his rod away and let not his fear terrify me.
Then would I speak; but it is not so with me."
Here we have in a word the deepest want of humanity:
a daysman between the infinite God and finite man; a
Mediator who should lay his hand on both of them! And
then, in the midst of these yearnings and complainings,
the Spirit of God, the Heavenly Comforter, bearing witness
with Job's spirit, breaks forth in the prophetic
song:—
"I know that my Redeemer liveth
And that he shall stand in the latter days upon the earth.
And though worms destroy this body,
Yet in my flesh shall I see God.
I shall see him for myself and not another.
My reins are consumed with longing for that day."
As time passes we have the history of one man, called
from all the races of men to be the ancestor of this Seed.
Abraham, called to leave his native land and go forth
sojourning as a pilgrim and stranger on earth, receives a
celestial visitor who says: "Abraham, I am the Almighty
God. Walk before me and be thou perfect." He exacts
of Abraham the extremes of devotion—not only to leave
his country, kindred, friends, and be a sojourner in a
strange land, but to sacrifice the only son of his heart.
And Abraham meets the test without a wavering thought;
his trust in God is absolute: and in return he receives the
promise, "In THY SEED shall all the nations of the earth
be blessed." How Abraham looked upon this promise we
are told by our Lord himself. The Jews asked him,
"Art thou greater than our father Abraham?" And he
answered, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day—he
saw it, and was glad."
The same promise was repeated to Jacob in the self-same
words, when he lay sleeping in the field of Luz and
saw the heavenly vision of the Son of man.
From the time of the first announcement to Abraham
his descendants became the recipients of a special divine
training, in which every event of their history had a forelooking
to this great consummation. They were taken into
Egypt, and, after long suffering, delivered from a deadly
oppression. In the solemn hour of their deliverance the
blood of a spotless lamb—"a lamb without blemish"—was
to mark the door-posts of each dwelling with a sign
of redemption. "Not a bone of him shall be broken,"
said the ancient command, referring to this typical sacrifice;
and when in a later day the Apostle John stood by
the cross of Jesus and saw them break the limbs of the
other two victims and leave Jesus untouched, he said,
"that it might be fulfilled which was commanded, not a
bone of Him shall be broken."
The yearly festival which commemorated this deliverance
was a yearly prophecy in every Jewish family of the sinless
Redeemer whose blood should be their salvation. A
solemn ritual was instituted, every part of which was prophetic
and symbolic. A high priest chosen from among
his brethren, who could be touched with the feelings of
their infirmities, was the only one allowed to enter that
mysterious Holy of Holies where were the mercy-seat and
the cherubim, the throne of the Invisible God. There,
for the most part, unbroken stillness and solitude reigned.
Only on one memorable day of the year, while all the
congregation of Israel lay prostrate in penitence without,
this high priest entered for them with the blood of atonement
into the innermost presence of the King Invisible.
Purified, arrayed in spotless garments, and bearing on his
breast—graven on precious gems—the names of the
tribes of Israel, he entered there, a yearly symbol and
prophecy of the greater High Priest, who should "not by
the blood of bulls and of goats, but by his own blood,
enter at once into the holy place, having obtained eternal
redemption for us."
Thus, by a series of symbols and ceremonies which filled
the entire life of the Jew, the whole national mind was
turned in an attitude of expectancy towards the future
Messiah. In the more elevated and spiritual natures—the
poets and the prophets—this was continually bursting
forth into distinct predictions. Moses says, in his last
message to Israel, "A prophet shall the Lord your God
raise up unto you from the midst of your brethren like
unto me; unto Him shall ye hearken." Our Lord referred
to this prophecy when he said to the unbelieving Jews,
"Had ye believed Moses ye would have believed me, for
he wrote of me."
The promise made at first to Abraham was afterwards
repeated not only to Jacob, but long centuries afterward to
his descendant, David, in a solemn, prophetic message,
relating first to the reign of Solomon, but ending with
these words: "And thy house and thy kingdom shall be
established forever before thee. Thy throne shall be
established forever." That David understood these words
as a promise that the Redeemer should be of his seed is
evident from the declaration of St. Peter in Acts ii. 30,
where he says that "David being a prophet, and knowing
that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit
of his loins he would raise up Messiah to sit on his throne,
spake thus concerning him."
The Psalms of David are full of heaving, many-colored
clouds and mists of poetry, out of which shine here and
there glimpses of the mystic future. In the second Psalm
we have a majestic drama. The heathen are raging
against Jehovah and his anointed Son. They say, Let us
break their bands in sunder and cast away their cords.
Then the voice of Jehovah is heard in the tumult, saying
calmly, "Yet have I set my king on my holy hill of
Zion." Then an angelic herald proclaims:—
"I will declare the decree.
The Lord hath spoken:
Thou art my Son;
This day have I begotten thee:
Ask of me and I will give the heathen for thine inheritance,
And the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession."
This mighty king, this glorious defender, is celebrated
as the All-Loving One. His reign is to be a reign of
truth and love. All the dearest forms of human affection
are used to shadow forth what he will be to his people.
He is to be the royal bridegroom; his willing people the
bride. So, in the forty-fifth Psalm, entitled "A Song of
Love," we have the image of a mighty conqueror—radiant,
beloved, adored, a being addressed both as God and
the Son of God, who goes forth to victory:—
"Thou art fairer than the children of men.
Grace is poured into thy lips.
Therefore God hath blessed thee forever.
Gird thy sword on thy thigh, O most mighty, with thy glory and majesty.
And in thy majesty ride prosperously because of thy truth and meekness and righteousness.
Thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things.
Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.
A sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom.
Thou lovest righteousness and hatest iniquity.
Therefore God—thy God—hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows."
Then follows a description of the royal bride, the king's
daughter, who is all glorious within—her clothing of
wrought gold—who with gladness and rejoicing shall be
brought to the king to become mother of princes.
It is said by some that this is a marriage hymn for the
wedding of a prince. It may have been so originated;
but in the mind of the devout Jew every scene and event
in life had become significant and symbolical of this greater
future. Every deliverer suggested the greater Deliverer;
the joy of every marriage suggested the joy of that divine
marriage with a heavenly bridegroom.
So the seventy-second Psalm, written originally for Solomon,
expands into language beyond all that can be said of
any earthly monarch. It was the last poem of David, and
the feelings of the king and father rose and melted into a
great tide of imagery that belonged to nothing earthly:—
"Yea, all kings shall fall down before him;
All nations shall serve him.
He shall deliver the needy when he crieth;
The poor also, and him that hath no helper.
He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy.
He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence,
And precious shall their blood be in his sight.
And he shall live, and to him shall be given the gold of Sheba.
Prayer also shall be made for him continually, and daily shall he be praised.
His name shall endure forever.
His name shall be continued as long as the sun.
Men shall be blessed in him.
All nations shall call him blessed."
But in these same Psalms there are glimpses of a divine
sufferer. In the twenty-second Psalm David speaks of sufferings
which certainly never happened to himself—which
were remarkably fulfilled in the last agonies of Jesus:—
"All they that see me laugh me to scorn.
They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,
He trusted in God that he would deliver him.
Let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.
I am poured out like water; all my bones are out of joint.
My heart is like wax—it is melted in my bosom.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd.
My tongue cleaveth to my mouth.
Thou hast brought me into the dust of death.
For dogs have compassed me,
The assembly of the wicked have inclosed me;
They pierced my hands and my feet.
I may tell all my bones. They look and stare on me.
They part my garments among them
And cast lots for my vesture."
In this Psalm, written more than a thousand years before
he came into the world, our Lord beheld ever before him
the scenes of his own crucifixion; he could see the heartless
stare of idle, malignant curiosity around his cross; he
could hear the very words of the taunts and revilings, and
a part of the language of this Psalm was among his last
utterances. While the shadows of the great darkness were
gathering around his cross he cried, "My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?" It would seem as if the
words so bitterly fulfilled passed through his mind, as one
by one the agonies and indignities followed each other, till
at last he bowed his head and said, "It is finished."
As time rolled on, this mingled chant of triumph and of
suffering swelled clearer and plainer. In the grand soul
of Isaiah, the Messiah and his kingdom were ever the
outcome of every event that suggested itself. When the
kingdom of Judah was threatened by foreign invasion, the
prophet breaks out with the promise of a Deliverer:—
"Behold, the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a
virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son and shall call his
name Immanuel [God with us]."
Again he bursts forth as if he beheld the triumph as a
present reality:—
"Unto us a child is born
Unto us a son is given.
The government shall be upon his shoulders.
His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end,
Upon the throne of David and his kingdom,
To establish it with justice from henceforth and forever.
The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this."
Again, a few chapters further on, he sings:—
"There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse
A Branch shall grow out of his roots.
The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him;
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and might,
The spirit of knowledge, and fear of the Lord.
With righteousness shall he judge the poor,
And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth."
Then follow vivid pictures of a golden age on earth,
beneath his sway, when all enmities and ferocities even of
the inferior animals shall cease, and universal love and joy
pervade the earth.
In the fifty-third of Isaiah we have again the sable
thread of humiliation and sorrow; the Messiah is to be
"despised and rejected of men;" his nation "hide their
faces from him;" he "bears their griefs, and carries their
sorrows," is "wounded for their transgressions," is "brought
as a lamb to the slaughter," is "dumb before his accusers,"
is "taken from prison to judgment," is "cut off out of the
land of the living," "makes his grave with the wicked and
with the rich in his death," and thence is "raised again to
an endless kingdom."
Thus far the tide of prophecy had rolled; thus distinct
and luminous had grown the conception of a future suffering,
victorious Lord and leader, when the Jewish nation,
for its sins and unfaithfulness, was suffered to go to wreck.
The temple was destroyed and the nation swept into captivity
in a foreign land.
But they carried everywhere with them the vision of
their future Messiah. In their captivity and sufferings
their religious feelings became intense, and, wherever they
were, the Jews were always powerful and influential men.
Daniel, by his divine skill in spiritual insight, became the
chief of the Chaldean magi, and his teachings with regard
to the future Messiah may be traced in those passages of
the Zendavesta which predict his coming, his universal
dominion, and the resurrection of the dead. Everywhere
through all nations this scattered seed of the Jews touched
the spark of desire and aspiration—the longing for a
future Redeemer.
In the prophecies of Daniel we find the predictions of
the Messiah assuming the clearness of forewritten history.
The successive empires of the world are imaged under the
symbol of a human body, with a head of gold, a breast of
silver, body and thighs of brass, legs and feet of iron.
By these types were indicated the Babylonian, Medo-Persian,
Greek and Roman nations, with their successive rule.
In prophetic vision, also, a stone was without hands cut
out of the mountains, and it smote the feet of the image,
so that the whole of it passed away like the chaff of the
threshing-floor.
How striking this description of that invisible, spiritual
force which struck the world in the time of the Roman
empire, and before which all the ancient dynasties have
vanished!
In the ninth chapter of Daniel, verses 25, 26, 27, we
find given the exact time of the coming of the Messiah, of
his death, of the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem by
the Romans, and the cessation of the Jewish worship and
sacrifices. Remembering that Daniel was the head of the
Chaldean magi, we see how it is that their descendants were
able to calculate the time of the birth of Christ and come
to worship him.[2]
At length the Jews were recalled from captivity and the
temple rebuilt. While it was rebuilding prophets encouraged
the work with prophecies of the Lord who should
appear in it. The prophet Haggai (ii. 3-9) thus speaks to
those who depreciate the new temple by comparing it with
the old:—
"Who is left among you that saw this house in her first
glory? Yet now be strong, all ye people of the land, and
work, for I am with you, saith the Lord of Hosts. For thus
saith the Lord: Yet a little while and I will shake the heavens
and earth, the sea and the dry land, and the Desire of all nations
shall come, and I will fill this house with glory, saith the
Lord. The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of
the former, for in this house will I give peace, saith the Lord
of Hosts."
The prophecies of Zechariah, which belonged to the same
period and had the same object,—to encourage the rebuilding
of the second temple,—are full of anticipation of the
coming Messiah. The prophet breaks forth into song like
a bird of the morning:—
"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion;
Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem:
Behold, thy king cometh unto thee.
He is just and hath salvation;
He is lowly, riding upon an ass—
Upon a colt, the foal of an ass."
Again he breaks forth in another strain:—
"Awake, O sword, against my Shepherd,
Against the man that is my fellow, saith the Lord of Hosts.
Smite the Shepherd,
And the sheep shall be scattered."
We remember that these words were quoted by our
Lord to his disciples the night before his execution, when
he was going forth to meet his murderers. A hundred or
so of years later, the prophet Malachi says:—
"Behold, I send my messenger.
He shall prepare the way before me.
The Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his temple:
Even the messenger of the covenant, in whom ye delight;
But who may abide the day of his coming?
Who shall stand when He appeareth?
For, like a refiner's fire shall He be,
And like fullers' soap.
He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.
He shall purify the sons of Levi."
How remarkably this prophecy describes the fiery vehemence
and energy of our Lord's first visit to the temple,
when he drove out the money-changers and completely
cleansed the holy place of unseemly traffic!
With this prophet the voice of prediction ceases. Let
us for a moment look back and trace its course. First, the
vague promise of a Deliverer, born of a woman; then, a
designation of the race from which he is to be born; then
of the tribe; then of the family; then the very place of
his birth is predicted—Bethlehem-Ephratah being mentioned
to discriminate it from another Bethlehem. Then
come a succession of pictures of a Being concerning whom
the most opposite things are predicted. He is to be honored,
adored, beloved; he is to be despised and rejected—his
nation hide their faces from him. He is to be
terrible and severe as a refiner's fire; he is to be so gentle
that a bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax
shall he not quench. He is to be seized and carried from
prison to judgment; he is surrounded by the wicked; his
hands and feet are pierced, his garments divided; they
cast lots for his vesture; he is united by his death both
with the wicked and with the rich; he is cut off from the
land of the living. He is cut off, but not for himself; his
kingdom is to be an everlasting kingdom; he is to have
dominion from sea to sea, and of the increase of his government
and of peace there is to be no end.
How strange that for ages these conflicting and apparently
contradictory oracles had been accumulating, until
finally came One who fulfilled them all. Is not this
indeed the Christ—the Son of God?
We should have supposed that when the time came for
the entrance of the great Hero upon the stage of this
world, magnificent preparations would be made to receive
him. A nation had been called and separated from all
tribes of earth that he might be born of them, and it had
been their one special mission to prepare for the coming of
this One, their Head and King, in whom the whole of
their organization—laws, teachings, and prophecies—was
to be fulfilled. Christ was the end for which the tabernacle
was erected and the temple built, for whom were
the Holy of Holies, the altars, and the sacrifices. He was
the Coming One for whom priests and prophets had been
for hundreds of years looking.
What should we have expected of divine wisdom when
the glorious hour approached? We should have thought
that the news would be sent to the leaders of the great
national council of the Sanhedrim, to the High Priest and
elders, that their Prince was at hand. Doubtless we
should suppose that the nation, apprised of his coming,
would have made ready his palace and have been watching
at its door to do honor to their newborn King.
Far otherwise is the story as we have it.
In the poorest, most sordid, most despised village of
Judæa dwelt, unknown and neglected, two members of the
decayed and dethroned royal family of Judæa,—Joseph
the carpenter and Mary his betrothed. Though every
circumstance of the story shows the poverty of these individuals,
yet they were not peasants. They were of royal
lineage, reduced to the poverty and the simple life of the
peasants. The Jews, intensely national, cherished the
tradition of David their warrior and poet prince; they sang
his Psalms, they dwelt on his memory, and those persons,
however poor and obscure, who knew that they had his
blood in their veins were not likely to forget it.
There have been times in the history of Europe when
royal princes, the heirs of thrones, have sojourned in
poverty and obscurity, earning their bread by the labor of
their hands. But the consciousness of royal blood and
noble birth gave to them a secret largeness of view and
nobility of feeling which distinguished them from common
citizens.
The Song of Mary given in St. Luke shows the tone of
her mind; shows her a woman steeped in the prophetic
spirit and traditions, in the Psalms of her great ancestor,
and herself possessing a lofty poetic nature.
We have the story of the birth of Christ in only two of
the Evangelists. In Matthew we have all the facts and
incidents such as must have been derived from Joseph, and
in Luke we have those which could only have been told
by Mary. She it is who must have related to St. Luke
the visit of the angel and his salutation to her. She it is
who tells of the state of her mind when those solemn mysterious
words first fell upon her ear:—
"Hail thou, highly favored! The Lord is with thee: Blessed
art thou among women!"
It is added,—
"And when she saw him she was troubled and cast about in
her mind what manner of salutation this should be."
Only Mary could have told the interior state of her
mind, the doubts, the troubles, the mental inquiries,
known only to herself. The rest of the interview, the
magnificent and solemn words of the angel, in the nature
of things could have come to the historian only through
Mary's narrative.
"Thou shalt conceive and bring forth a Son and shalt call his
name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of
the Highest, and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne
of his father David, and he shall reign over the house of Jacob
forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end."
In St. Matthew we have the history of the hesitation of
Joseph, his manly delicacy and tenderness for his betrothed
wife, and the divine message to him in a dream; all of
which are things that could have been known only through
his own narration.
We find also in this history, whose facts must have
come from Joseph, a table of genealogy tracing his descent
back to David, while in the account given by Mary in St.
Luke there is another and different table of genealogy.
The probable inference on the face of it would be that the
one is the genealogy of Joseph and the other of Mary;
and it confirms this supposition to find that she was spoken
of in Rabbinic writings of an early period as the daughter
of Heli,[3] who concludes the genealogy given in Luke, and
on this supposition would be the father of Mary and grandfather
of Jesus. Moreover, as the angel himself in announcing
the birth of Christ laid special stress upon the
fact that his mother was of the house of David, it is quite
probable that the genealogy which proved that descent was
very precious in Mary's eyes, and that this is therefore
imbedded in the account which St. Luke derives from her,
as the very chief treasure of her life. That genealogical
record was probably the one hoarded gem of her poverty
and neglect—like a crown jewel concealed in the humble
cottage of an exiled queen.
When the conviction was brought home to both these
hidden souls that their house was to be the recipient of
this greatest of all honors, we can easily see how it must
have been a treasury of secret and wonderful emotions and
contemplations between them. A world of lofty thought
and feeling from that hour belonged to those two of all the
world, separating them far as heaven is above the earth
from the sordid neighborhood of Nazareth. Every tie
which connected them with the royal house of David must
have been wakened to intense vitality. All the prophecies
with regard to the future Messiah must have blazed
with a new radiance in the firmament of their thoughts.
The decree from Cæsar that all the world should be taxed,
and the consequent movement towards a census of the
Jewish nation, must have seemed to them a divine call
and intimation to leave the village of Nazareth and go to
their ancestral town, where prophecy had told them that
the Messiah was to be born:—
"And thou Bethlehem-Ephratah, though thou be little among
the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall come a Governor
which shall rule my people Israel, whose goings forth have been
from of old, from everlasting."
On this magnificent mystery were these two poor,
obscure, simple people pondering in their hearts as they
took their journey over the picturesque hill-country
towards the beautiful little town of Bethlehem, the village
of their fathers; Bethlehem, the city of the loving Ruth,
and her descendant, the chivalrous poet king, David.
It seems they went there poor and without acquaintance,
casting themselves in simple faith on the protection of
God. The caravanserai of those days bore more resemblance
to camping-huts than anything suggested by our
modern inn. There was a raised platform which gave to
the traveler simply space to spread his bed and lie down,
while below this was the portion allotted to the feeding
and accommodation of the animals.
When these two guests arrived the space allotted to
travelers was all taken up, and a shelter had to be arranged
in the part allotted to the animals. We are so accustomed
to look at that cradle in Bethlehem through the mists of
reverential tradition that we have ceased to realize what
a trial and humiliation it was to these children of a royal
race to find themselves outcasts and homeless in the city
of their fathers—in the very hour when home and its
comfort were most needed. We must remember they had
to live by faith as well as we. Though an angel had
announced this coming child as the King of Israel, still
their faith must have been severely tried to find themselves,
as the hour of his birth approached, unwelcomed,
forlorn, and rejected by men, in the very city of David.
The census in which they came to have their names
enrolled was the last step in the humiliation of their
nation; it was the preparation for their subjugation and
taxation as a conquered tribe under the Roman yoke: and
they, children of the royal house of David, were left to
touch the very lowest descent of humiliation, outcasts
from among men, glad to find a resting-place with the
beasts of the stall.
Christ is called the Morning Star, and truly he rose in
the very darkest hour of the night. The Friend of the
outcast, the Care-taker of the neglected, the poor man's
Helper, must needs be born thus.
But was there no message? Yes. In those very hills
and valleys of Bethlehem where David kept his father's
sheep were still shepherds abiding. The Psalms of David
were there the familiar melodies; they lived by the valley
and hill, as when he sang of old,—
"The Lord is my Shepherd;
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters."
These shepherds probably were poor men of a devout
and simple faith, men who longed and prayed and waited
for the consolation of Israel. Their daily toil was ennobled
by religious associations. Jehovah himself was addressed
as the
"Shepherd of Israel;
He that leadeth Joseph like a flock;
He that dwelleth between the cherubims."
It was to such souls as these, patient, laborious, prayerful,
that the message came; that the Good Shepherd—the
Shepherd and Bishop of Souls—was born. No comment
can brighten or increase the solemn beauty of those
simple words in which this story is told:—
"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in
the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo,
the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the
Lord shone round about them; and they were afraid. And
the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you
good tidings of joy, which shall be to all people. For unto
you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is
Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall
find the babe wrapped in swaddling-clothes, lying in a manger.
"And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of
the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in
the highest, and on earth Peace, Good-will toward men.
"And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from
them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us
now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come
to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they
came with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe
lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made
known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this
child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things
which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all
these things, and pondered them in her heart.
"And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God
for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told
unto them."
They received the reward of faith; having heard the
heavenly message, they believed and acted upon it. They
did not stop to question or reason about it. They did not
say, "How can this be?" but "Let us go even unto Bethlehem
and see this thing which is come to pass." And so
it was that they were rewarded by seeing and hearing the
wonders "as it was told unto them."
The visit of these simple, confiding souls doubtless
cheered the patient hearts of the humble outcasts, and
strengthened their faith.
If now it be asked, Why was all this so? we have only
to answer that heaven is a very different world from our
earth, and that heavenly ways of viewing people and things
are wholly above those of earth. The apostle says that the
foolishness of God is wiser than man, and the weakness of
God is stronger than man; that the things that are highly
esteemed among men are abominations in the sight of God.
When a new king and a new kingdom were to be set up
on earth, no pomp of man, no palace made with hands,
was held worthy of him; few were the human hearts
deemed worthy of the message, and these were people that
the world knew not of—simple-minded, sincere, loving,
prayerful people.
The priests and scribes were full of national pride and
bitterness, burning for revenge on the Romans, longing for
conquest and power. They were impatiently waiting for
the Leader whose foot should be on the necks of their
enemies. They had no sense of sin, no longing for holiness,
no aspirations for a Spiritual Deliverer; and therefore
no message was sent to them.
But to the simple-minded Joseph the angel said, "Thou
shalt call his name Jesus (Saviour) for he shall save his
people from their sins." Not from the Romans but from
their sins he came to save, and the message of his coming
was to humble souls, who wanted this kind of salvation.
But there was a fitness furthermore in these circumstances.
Up to this time the poor and the unfortunate
had been the despised of the earth. It had been predicted
again and again that the Messiah should be the especial
Friend of the poor:—
"He shall deliver the needy when he crieth,
The poor and him that hath no helper.
He shall spare the soul of the needy,
And precious shall their blood be in his sight."
As a mother when seeking a lost and helpless child,
outcast in some den of misery, would pass by palaces and
refuse the shelter of luxurious roofs, to share the poverty
of her beloved, so the poor man's Friend and Lord chose
to come in the hut and the stable rather than in the palace,
that he might be known forever as the God of the poor,
the Patron of the neglected, and the Shepherd of the lost.
There was one woman whom the voice of a divine
Messenger, straight from heaven, pronounced highly favored.
In what did this favor consist?
Of noble birth, of even royal lineage, she had fallen
into poverty and obscurity. The great, brilliant, living
world of her day knew her as the rushing equipages and
palatial mansions of our great cities know the daughters of
poor mechanics in rural towns.
There was plenty of splendor, and rank, and fashion in
Jerusalem then. Herod the Great was a man of cultivation
and letters, and beautified the temple with all sorts
of architectural embellishments; and there were High
Priests, and Levites, and a great religious aristocracy
circling about its precincts, all of whom, if they thought
of any woman as highly favored of heaven, would have
been likely to think of somebody quite other than the
simple country girl of Nazareth. Such an one as she was
not in all their thoughts. Yet she was the highly favored
woman of the world; the crowned queen of women; the
One whose lot—above that of all that have lived woman's
life, before or since—was blessed.
The views adopted in the Roman Church with respect
to this one Woman of women have tended to deprive the
rest of the world of a great source of comfort and edification
by reason of the opposite extreme to which Protestant
reaction has naturally gone.
John Knox was once taken on board a ship manned, as
he says, by Popish sailors, who gave into his hand an image
of the Virgin Mary and wanted to compel him to kiss it.
Stout John tossed it overboard, saying, "Let our Lady now
save herself; she is light enough, let her learn to swim."
To have honored the Virgin Mary, even in thought, was
shrunk from by the Protestants of those times as an approach
to idolatry. An image or a picture of her in a Puritan
house would have been considered an approach to the
sin of Achan. Truth has always had the fate of the shuttlecock
between the conflicting battledoors of controversy.
This is no goddess crowned with stars, but something
nobler, purer, fairer, more appreciable—the One highly
favored and blessed among Women.
The happiness of Mary's lot was peculiar to womanhood.
It lay mostly in the sphere of family affection.
Mary had in this respect a lot whose blessedness was
above every other mother. She had as her child the loveliest
character that ever unfolded through childhood and
youth to manhood. He was entirely her own. She had
a security in possessing him such as is not accorded to
other mothers. She knew that the child she adored was
not to die till he had reached man's estate—she had no
fear that accident, or sickness, or any of those threatening
causes which give sad hours to so many other mothers,
would come between him and her.
Neither was she called to separate from him. The
record shows that he was with his parents until their
journey to Jerusalem, when he was twelve years old; and
then, after his brief absence of three days when he was
left behind, and found in the temple disputing with the
doctors, we are told that "he went down to Nazareth and
was subject unto them."
These words are all that cover eighteen years of the
purest happiness ever given to mortal woman. To love,
to adore, to possess the beloved object in perfect security,
guarded by a divine promise—this blessedness was given
to but one woman of all the human race. That peaceful
home in Nazareth, overlooked by all the great, gay world,
how many happy hours it had! Day succeeded day, weeks
went to months, and months into years, and this is all the
record: "Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in
favor with God and man."
Looking at Jesus as a mere human being, a historical
character, as some do, the one great peculiarity of him is
the intensity of the personal affection he has been able to
inspire. The Apostles give him one title which was his
above all the other children of men, "The Beloved."
Christ has been and now is beloved, as no other human
being ever was. Others have been good men,—true men,
benefactors of their race,—but when they died their personality
faded from the earth.
Tell a Hottentot or a Zulu the story of Socrates, and it
excites no very deep emotion; but, for eighteen hundred
years, Hottentots, Zulus, South Sea Islanders and savages,
Greenlanders,—men, women, and children in every land,
with every variety of constitutional habit,—have conceived
such an ardent, passionate, personal love to Jesus
of Nazareth that they have been ready to face torture and
death for his sake.
"It is not for me to covet things visible or invisible,"
said Polycarp, on his way to martyrdom, "if only I may
obtain Jesus Christ. The fire, the cross, the rush of wild
beasts, the tearing asunder of bones, the fracture of limbs,
and the grinding to powder of the whole body, let these,
the devil's torments, come upon me, provided only that I
obtain Jesus Christ."
So felt the Christians of the first ages, and time does
not cool the ardor. There are at this present hour hundreds
of thousands of obscure men and women, humble
artisans, ignorant negroes, to whom Christ is dearer than
life, and who would be capable of just this grand devotion.
It is not many years since that in the Island of Madagascar
Christian converts were persecuted, and there were those
who met death for Christ's sake with all the triumphant
fervor of primitive ages. Jesus has been the one man of
whom it has been possible to say to people of all nations,
ages, and languages, "Whom having not seen ye love, and
in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye
rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."
If we should embody our idea of the Son with whom
Mary lived in secure intimacy for thirty years, we should
call him Love, itself. He was not merely lovely, but he
was love. He had a warming, creative power as to love.
He gave birth to new conceptions of love; to a fervor,
a devotion, a tenderness, of which before the human soul
scarcely knew its own capacity.
Napoleon asserted the divinity of Jesus from the sole
fact of his wonderful power of producing love. "I know
men," he said, "and I know Jesus was not a man;—eighteen
hundred years ago he died defeated, reviled, and
yet at this hour there are thousands all over the world
who would die for him. I am defeated and overthrown,
and who cares for me now? Who fights, who conquers
for me? What an abyss between my misery and the
triumph of Jesus!"
The blessedness of Mary was that she was the one
human being who had the right of ownership and intimate
oneness with the Beloved. For thirty years Jesus had
only the task of living an average, quiet, ordinary human
life. He was a humble artisan, peacefully working daily
for the support of his mother. He was called from her
by no public duty; he was hers alone. When he began
his public career he transcended these limits. Then he
declared that every soul that heard the will of God, and
did it, should be to him as his mother—a declaration at
which every Christian should veil his face in awe and
gratitude.
We may imagine the peace, the joy, the serenity of
that household of which Jesus was the centre. He read
and explained the Scriptures, and he prayed with them,
in such blessed words as those that are recorded in St.
John's Gospel. In this life of simplicity and poverty he
taught them that sweet and sacred secret of a peaceful
daily looking to God for food and raiment that can be
learned only by the poor and dependent. He made labor
holy by choosing it as his lot.
Many little incidents in Christ's life show the man of
careful domestic habits. He was in all things methodical
and frugal. The miraculous power he possessed never was
used to surround him with any profusion. He would
have the fragments of the feast picked up and stored in
the baskets, "that nothing should be lost." His illustrations
show the habits of a frugal home. His parable of the
kingdom of heaven, likened to the leaven hidden in three
measures of meal, gives us to believe that doubtless he had
often watched his mother in the homely process of bread-making.
The woman, who, losing one piece of money
from her little store, lights a candle and searches diligently,
brings to our mind the dwelling of the poor where
every penny has its value. His illustrations from husbandry—ploughing,
sowing, growing, the lost sheep, the
ox fallen into the pit, the hen and her chickens—all show
a familiarity and a kind sympathy with the daily habits
and life interests of the poor. Many little touches indicate,
also, the personal refinement and delicacy of his
habits, the order and purity that extended to all his ways.
While he repressed self-indulgence and the profusion of
extravagant luxury, he felt keenly and justified bravely
that profusion of the heart that delights in costliness as an
expression of love.
There seems to be reason to think that the retirement
and stillness of the peasant life in Nazareth, its deeply
hidden character, was peculiarly suited to the constitutional
taste both of Jesus and his mother.
Mary seems, from the little we see of her, to have been
one of those silent, brooding women who seek solitude and
meditation, whose thoughts are expressed only confidentially
to congenial natures. There is every evidence that
our Lord's individual and human nature was in this
respect peculiarly sympathetic with that of his mother.
The prophecy of Isaiah predicts this trait of his character:
"He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be
heard in the street." In the commencement of his ministry
we find the same avoidance of publicity. He hushed
the zeal of his disciples. He wrought miracles with injunctions
of secrecy—"See thou tell no man." The rush
of sensational popularity seemed especially distasteful to
him, and we find him after a little retiring from it.
"Come ye with me into a desert place and rest awhile,"
he says to his disciples, "for there were so many coming
and going that they found no leisure so much as to eat."
Thus, the retirement of the Garden of Gethsemane—where
it is said Jesus ofttimes resorted with his disciples—and
the quietude of the family of Mary, Martha, and
Lazarus at Bethany, seemed to be especially attractive to
him. Indeed, so great a desire had he for quiet and peace,
and for the calm of that congenial thought and communion
that can be had with but a few, that his public life must
be regarded as a constant act of self-abnegation. It was
as foreign to him to be out in the hot glare and dust of
publicity, and to battle in the crowded ways of life, as to
the most gentle woman. Divine Love was ever, in this
bustling, noisy, vulgar, outward life, lonely, and a
stranger. "He was in the world," says St. John, "and the
world was made by him, but the world knew him not."
There was one woman of all women to whom it was
given to know him perfectly, entirely, intimately—to
whom his nature was knit in the closest possible union
and identity. He was bone of her bone and flesh of her
flesh—his life grew out of her immortal nature. We are
led to see in our Lord a peculiarity as to the manner of
his birth which made him more purely sympathetic with
his mother than any other son of woman. He had no
mortal father. All that was human in him was her
nature; it was the union of the divine nature with the
nature of a pure woman. Hence there was in Jesus more
of the pure feminine element than in any other man. It
was the feminine element exalted and taken in union with
divinity. Robertson has a very interesting sermon on
this point, showing how the existence of this feminine
element in the character of Jesus supplies all that want in
the human heart to which it has been said the worship of
the Virgin Mother was adapted. Christ, through his
intimate relationship with this one highly favored among
women, had the knowledge of all that the heart of man
or woman can seek for its needs.
There is in the sacred narrative a reticence in regard
to the mother of Jesus which would seem to bear very
significantly upon any theories of their mutual relations,
and especially upon their present connection in spiritual
matters—the idea that Mary, as Mother of God, retains
in heaven authority over her son, and that he can deny
her nothing. St. John takes care to state specifically the
scene in Cana of Galilee where Jesus informs his mother
that, in his divine relations and duties, her motherly relation
has no place. "Woman, what have I to do with thee?
mine hour is not yet come."
The address, though not in the connection wanting in
respect, or so abrupt as it appears in the translation, was
still very decided, and was undoubtedly one of those declarations
meant not only for her but for mankind. In the
same spirit are his words where, in his public ministration,
word was brought to him that his mother and his brethren
stood without, desiring to see him:—
"Who is my mother, and who are my brethren? And he
looked around on them that sat about him, and said, Behold
my mother and my brethren. For whosoever shall do the will
of God, the same is my brother and sister and mother."
From that noble utterance, the Song of Mary,—retained
by the church as a Magnificat,—there is evidence of a soul
not only exalted by genius and enthusiasm, but steeped
in the traditions of ancient prophecy. It is so like the
Psalms of David that a verse of it, if read out casually,
might seem to be taken from them. There is no doubt that
a soul like this, when possessed of the great secret of prophecy,
devoted itself with ardor to all in the Hebrew
Scriptures which foreshadowed her son's career. She was
the first teacher of the child Jesus in the Law and the
Prophets. One of Raphael's most beautiful conceptions of
her represents her sitting thoughtfully, holding the hand
of the infant Jesus, while the roll of the prophecies lies
in her lap, and her eyes are fixed on the distance as in
deep thought. There is a similar picture of her by Palma
Vecchio. The communings of Christ and his mother on
these subjects must have been so long and so intimate that
she more calmly and clearly knew exactly whither his life
was tending than did his disciples. She had been forewarned
in Daniel of the time when the Messiah was to be
cut off, but not for himself; she understood, doubtless,
the deep, hidden meaning of the Psalm that describes the
last agonies, the utter abandonment of her son.
There is in her whole character a singular poise and
calmness. When the Angel of the Annunciation appeared
to her she was not overcome by the presence of a spiritual
being as Daniel was, who records that "he fell on his face
and there was no strength in him." Mary, in calm and
firm simplicity, looks the angel in the face, and ponders
what the wonderful announcement may mean. When she
finds that it really does mean that she, a poor lonely
maiden, is the chosen woman of all the human race—the
gainer of the crown of which every Jewish woman had
dreamed for ages—she is still calm. She does not sink
under the honor, she is not confused or overcome, but
answers with gentle submission, "Behold the handmaid of
the Lord, be it unto me according to his word."
Yet the words of the Magnificat show a keen sense of
the honor and favor done her. She exults in it with an
innocent heartiness of simplicity. "He hath regarded the
low estate of his handmaid, for from henceforth all nations
shall call me blessed."
It is remarkable that Mary was never in any one instance
associated in public work with Jesus. She was not
among the women who are mentioned as following and
ministering unto him. She was, it seems, in Jerusalem
at the last Passover of our Lord, but it was not with her,
or at her table, that he prepared to eat the Passover. He
did that as master in his own house, with a family of little
children of his own choosing. Mary was not at the first
Eucharistic feast. Undoubtedly there was foreknowledge
and divine design in all this, and doubtless Jesus and
Mary were so completely one in will and purpose that she
was of perfect accord with him in all these arrangements.
There are souls so perfectly attuned to each other, with
such an exact understanding and sympathy, that personal
presence no longer becomes a necessity. They are always
with each other in spirit, however outwardly separated.
But we find her with him once more, openly and visibly,
in the hour when all others forsook him. The delicacy of
woman may cause her to shrink from the bustle of public
triumph, but when truth and holiness are brought to
public scorn she is there to defend, to suffer, to die.
Can we conceive what this mob was, that led Jesus
forth to death? Mobs in our day are brutal, but what
were they then? Consider what the times must have
been when scourging was an ordinary punishment for
criminals, and crucifixion an ordinary mode of execution;
what were the sights, the sounds, the exhibitions of brutality
among which Mary and the women friends of Jesus
followed him to the cross!
And Mary did not faint—did not sink. She did not
fall to the earth when an angel predicted her glory; she did
not fall now, when the sword had gone through her heart.
It is all told in one word, "Now there stood by the cross
of Jesus his mother." The last word that Jesus spoke to
any mortal ear was to commend her to his dearest friend.
After the resurrection Mary appears once more among
the disciples, waiting and praying for a descent of the
Holy Ghost—and then in the sacred record we hear of
her no more.
But enough is recorded of her to make her forever dear
to all Christian hearts. That Mary is now with Jesus,
that there is an intimacy and sympathy between her soul
and his such as belong to no other created being, seems
certain. Nor should we suffer anything to prevent that
just love and veneration which will enable us to call her
Blessed, and to look forward to meeting her in heaven as
one of the brightest joys of that glorious world.
In the first recorded public prayer of the Apostles after
the resurrection of our Lord he is called "Thy Holy
Child Jesus."
The expression is a very beautiful one if we couple it
with the Master's declaration that the greatest in the kingdom
of heaven is the most like a little child, and that to
become as a little child is the first step toward fitness for
the knowledge of spiritual things.
There has been in this world one rare flower of Paradise,—a
holy childhood growing up gradually into a holy
manhood, and always retaining in mature life the precious,
unstained memories of perfect innocence. The family at
Nazareth was evidently a secluded one. Persons of such
an elevated style of thought as Joseph and Mary, conscious
of so solemn a destiny and guarding with awe the treasure
and hope of a world, must have been so altogether different
from the ordinary peasants of Nazareth that there
could have been little more than an external acquaintance
between them. They were undoubtedly loving, gentle,
and tender to every one, full of sympathy for trouble and
of kind offices in sickness, but they carried within their
hearts a treasury of thoughts, emotions, and hopes, which
could not be perceived by those whose spiritual eyes had
never been opened. It is quite evident from the surprise
that the Nazarenes manifested when Christ delivered his
first sermon among them that they had never seen anything
unusual in the family, and that Christ himself had
been living among them only as the carpenter's son. This
case is not peculiar. The great artist or poet often grows
to manhood without one of his townspeople suspecting who
he is, and what world he lives in. Milton or Raphael
might so have grown up unknown in a town of obscure
fishermen.
The apocryphal gospels have busied themselves in inventing
legends of this child-life of Jesus. Nothing so
much shows the difference between the false and the true
as these apocryphal gospels compared with the real. Jesus
is represented there as a miraculous child, using supernatural
power for display among his schoolmates and for
the gratification of childish piques and resentments.
The true gospel gives but one incident of the child-life
of Jesus, and that just at the time when childhood is
verging into youth; for the rest, we are left to conjecture.
We are told that his infancy was passed in the land of
Egypt. Jesus was the flower of his nation,—he was the
blossom of its history,—and therefore it seemed befitting
that his cradle should be where was the cradle of his great
forerunner, Moses, on the banks of the Nile. The shadows
of the Pyramids, built by the labors of his ancestors,
were across the land of his childhood, and the great story
of their oppression and deliverance must have filled the
thoughts and words of his parents. So imbued was the
Jewish mind with the habit of seeing in everything in
their history the prophecy and type of the great Fulfiller,
that St. Matthew speaks of this exile in Egypt as having
occurred that the type might find completeness, and that
Israel, in the person of its Head and Representative, might
a second time be called out of Egypt:—
"That it might be fulfilled that was spoken of the Lord by
the prophet,
"Out of Egypt have I called my son."
We do not know with any definiteness the length of
this sojourn in Egypt, nor how much impression the weird
and solemn scenery and architecture of Egypt may have
made upon the susceptible mind of the child; but to the
parents it must have powerfully and vividly recalled all
that ancient and prophetic literature which in every step
pointed to their wonderful son. The earliest instructions
of Jesus must have been in this history and literature of
his own nation—a literature unique, poetic, and sublime.
But we have no tidings of him till that time in his history
when, according to the customs of his people, he was of
age to go up to the great national festival at Jerusalem.
The young Jewish boy was instructed all the earlier
years of his life in view of this great decisive step, which,
like confirmation in the Christian Church, ranked him as
a fully admitted member of the house of Israel. It was
customary to travel to Jerusalem in large companies or
caravans, beguiling the way with hymns of rejoicing as
they drew nigh to the holy city. Jesus, probably, was
one of many boys who for the first time were going up to
their great national festival.
One incident only of this journey is given, but that a
very striking one. After the feast was over, when the
caravan was returning, they passed a day's journey on
their way without perceiving that the child was not among
the travelers. This—in a large company of kinsfolk and
acquaintance, and where Jesus might have been, as he
always afterward seemed to be, a great personal favorite—was
quite possible. His parents, trusting him wholly,
and feeling that he was happy among friends, gave themselves
no care till the time of the evening encampment.
Then, discovering their loss, they immediately retraced
their steps the next day to Jerusalem, inquiring for him
vainly among their acquaintances. They at last turned
their steps toward the outer courts of the temple, where
was the school of the learned Rabbins who explained the
law of God. There, seated at their feet, eager and earnest,
asking them questions and hearing their answers, the
child Jesus had awakened to a new and deeper life, and
become so absorbed as to forget time, place, friends, and
everything else in the desire to understand the Holy
Word.
It is a blot upon this beautiful story to speak of Jesus
as "disputing" with the teachers of his nation, or setting
himself up to instruct them. His position was that of
a learner; we are not told that he asserted anything, but
that he listened and asked questions. The questions of
a pure child are often the most searching that can be
asked; the questions of the holy child Jesus must have
penetrated to the very deepest of divine mysteries. Those
masterly discussions of the sayings of the Rabbins, which
years after appeared in the Sermon on the Mount, may
have sprung from seeds thus dropped into the childish
mind.
But, while he is thus absorbed and eager, his soul burning
with newly kindled enthusiasm, suddenly his parents,
agitated and distressed, lay hold on him with tender
reproach: "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?
Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing."
Jesus answers, as he so often did in after life, as speaking
almost unconsciously out of some higher sphere, and
in higher language than that of earth: "How is it that
ye sought me? Did ye not know that I must be about
my Father's business?"
It seemed to say, "Why be alarmed? is not this my
Father's house; is not this study of his law my proper
work; and where should I be but here?"
But immediately it is added, "He went down to Nazareth
and was subject to them." Even Christ pleased not
himself; the holiest fire, the divinest passion, was made
subject to the heavenly order, and immediately he yielded
to the father and mother whom God had made his guides
an implicit obedience.
We have here one glimpse of a consuming ardor, a
burning enthusiasm, which lay repressed and hidden for
eighteen years more, till the Father called him to speak.
That simple, natural utterance in the child's mouth—"My
Father"—shows the secret of the holy peace which
kept him happy in waiting. The Father was a serene
presence, an intimate and inward joy. In the beautiful
solitudes about Nazareth the divine benediction came down
upon him:—
"I will be as the dew to Israel:
He shall grow as the lily,
And cast forth his roots as Lebanon."
These two natural symbols seem fittest to portray the
elements of that holy childhood which grew to holiest
manhood. They give us, as its marked characteristics,
the shining purity of the lily and the grand strength and
stability of the cedars of Lebanon.
"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judæa, in the days of
Herod the king, behold there came wise men to Jerusalem, saying,
Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in
the east, and are come to worship him."
Was the Messiah to be the King of the Jews alone?
No; he was for the world; he was the Good Shepherd of
nations, and declared that he had "other sheep, not of
this fold."
It seems to be most striking that, in the poetical and
beautiful account of the birth of Jesus, there is record of
two distinct classes who come to pay him homage—not
only the simple-minded and devout laboring people of the
Jews, but also the learned sages of the Gentiles.
There are constant intimations throughout the Old Testament
that God's choice of the Jews was no favoritism;
that he had not forgotten other races, but was still the
God and Father of mankind; and that he chose Israel not
to aggrandize one people, but to make that people his gift-bearers
to the whole world.
There are distinct evidences in the Old Testament that
the coming Saviour was caring for others beside the Jewish
race. Witness his gracious promise to the slave Hagar
that he would bless her descendants. In the very family
line from which Messiah was to be born a loving and
lovely Moabite woman was suffered to be introduced as
the near ancestress of King David, and the name of the
Gentile Ruth stands in the genealogy of Jesus as a sort
of intimation that he belonged not to a race but to the
world. In a remarkable passage of Isaiah (xliv. 28, xlv. 1,
4, 5) Jehovah, proclaiming his supreme power, declares
himself to be He
"That saith of Cyrus—
He is my shepherd,
He shall perform all my pleasure.
Even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built;
And to the Temple, Thy foundations shall be laid.
Thus saith the Lord to his anointed,
To Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden.
. . . . . . . .
For Jacob my servant's sake,
For Israel mine elect,
I have called thee by my name:
I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me.
I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me:
I girded thee, though thou hast not known me."
The Babylonian captivity answered other purposes beside
the punishment and restoration of the Jewish nation
to the worship of the true God. It was a sort of prophetic
"Epiphany," in which the Messianic aspirations of
the Jews fell outside of their own nation, like sparks of
fire on those longings which were common to the human
race. Even the Jewish prophet spoke of the Messiah as
"The Desire of all Nations."
And this desire and the hope of its fulfillment were
burning fervently in the souls of all the best of the Gentile
nations; for not among the Jews alone, but among all the
main races and peoples of antiquity, have there been prophecies
and traditions more or less clear of a Being who
should redeem the race of man from the power of evil and
bring in an era of peace and love.
The yearning, suffering heart of humanity formed to
itself such a conception out of its own sense of need.
Poor helpless man felt himself an abandoned child, without
a Father, in a scene of warring and contending forces.
The mighty, mysterious, terrible God of nature was a
being that he could not understand, felt unable to question.
Job in his hour of anguish expressed the universal
longing:—
"Oh that I knew where I might find him! I would come
even to his seat, I would order my cause before him, I would
fill my mouth with arguments. Would he plead against me
with his great power? Nay, but he would put strength in
me."
And again:—
"He is not a man as I am that I should answer him, and
that we should come together in judgment. Neither is there
any daysman that might lay his hand on both of us."
It was for this Mediator, both divine and human, who
should interpret the silence of God to man, who should be
his Word to his creatures, that all humanity was sighing.
Therefore it was that the first vague promise was a seed
of hope, not only in the Jewish race, but in all other
nations of the earth.
One of the earliest and most beautiful prophecies of the
coming Messiah is from the heathen astrologer, Balaam:—
"Balaam the son of Beor saith,
The man whose eyes are open, saith,
He which heard the word of God
And knew the knowledge of the Most High,
Which saw the vision of the Almighty,
Falling into a trance and having his eyes open:
I shall see Him, but not now.
I shall behold Him, but not nigh.
There shall come a Star out of Jacob,
A sceptre shall rise out of Israel.
Out of Jacob shall come He that shall have dominion!"
Of late there has been discovered in Nineveh a large
work on the system of magic of the Chaldee soothsayers,
written on tiles of baked clay, in the "arrow-head" characters.
Here we have a minute account, of the Chaldeans—the
astrologers and the sorcerers spoken of in Daniel—with
specimens of their liturgic forms and invocations.
M. Lenormant, who has issued a minute account of this
work with translations of many parts of it, gives an interesting
account of the religious ideas of the Chaldees in the
very earliest period of antiquity, as old or older than that
of the soothsayer Balaam.
He says the supreme divinity, whom they called EA,
was regarded as too remote and too vast to be approached
by human prayer, and that he was to be known only
through the medium of another divinity, his first-begotten
Son, to whom is given a name signifying the Benefactor of
Man. The prayers and ascriptions to this divinity remind
us of the Old Testament addresses to the Messiah. The
Hebrew poet says:—
"Of old hast thou laid the foundations of the earth,
And the heavens are the work of thy hands."
The ancient invocation upon the tiles of Nineveh addressed
to the Mediator runs thus:—
"Great Lord of earth! King of all lands,
First-begotten Son of Ea,
Director of heaven and earth,
Most merciful among the gods,
Thou who restorest the dead to life."
. . . . . . . .
We see here the reflection of a Being such as the contemporaries
of Abraham in the land of the Chaldees must
have looked forward to—an image of that diffused and
general faith which pervaded the world in the days when
the patriarch was called to be the Father of a peculiar
people.
In the Zendavesta—begun about the age of Daniel—also
are traces of the same Being, with prophecies of his
future appearance on earth to restore the human race to
peace and goodness.
In one of the Zend books we have a passage strikingly
like some of the prophetic parts of Daniel. As Nebuchadnezzar
saw the future history of the world under the form
of an image, made of four precious metals, so Zoroaster
was made to see the same under the image of a tree in
which four trunks proceed from a common root. The
first was a golden, the second a silver, the third a steel,
and the fourth an iron one.
In the same manner as in Daniel, these trees are interpreted
as successive monarchies of the earth. The last,
the iron one, was to be the dominion of demons and dark
powers of evil, and after it was to come the Saviour, or
Sosiosch (a Zend word), who was to bring in the restitution
of all things from the power of evil, and the resurrection
of the dead.[4]
The same ideas were expressed in the Sibylline oracles.
The story of the Sibyl who offered her books to Tarquin,
in the early days of Rome, is known to every child who
studies Roman history. From the remains of these writings,
still extant, they appear to contain predictions of
the world's future, much resembling those of Daniel and
Isaiah. They predict the coming of a Great Deliverer of
the human race, a millennium of righteousness, a resurrection
of the dead, and a Day of Judgment.
About forty years before the birth of Christ, Virgil
wrote his beautiful Eclogue of Pollio. The birthplace of
Virgil was near the town of Cumæ, where lived the
Cumæan Sibyl, and her traditionary history and her writings
must have deeply impressed his mind. Possibly he
only thought of them as a poet thinks of a fine theme for
the display of poetic imagery; and possibly he may have
meant to make of this eclogue a complimentary prophecy
of some patron among the powerful of his times. But
when we remember that it was published only about forty
years before the birth of Christ, and that no other historical
character corresponding to this prediction ever appeared,
it becomes, to say the least, a remarkable coincidence.
Bishop Lowth says that the mystery of this eclogue has
never been solved, and intimates that he would scarcely
dare to express some of the suppositions which it has
inspired.
May not Virgil, like Balaam, have been carried beyond
himself in the trance of poetic inspiration, and seen afar
the "Star" that should arise out of Israel? He too might
have exclaimed:—
"I shall see him, but not now.
I shall behold him, but not nigh."
The words of Virgil have a fire and fervor such as he
seems to have had in no other composition, as he sings:—
"The last age of the Cumæan song is come.
The great cycle of ages hastens to a new beginning.
Now, too, returns the reign of Justice.
The golden age of Saturn now returns.
While thou, Pollio, art consul,
This glory of our age shall make his appearance.
The great months begin to roll.
He shall partake of the life of the gods,
And rule the peaceful world with his father's virtues."
Then follow a profusion of images of peace and plenty
that should come to the world in the reign of this hero.
All poisonous and hurtful things shall die; all rare and
beautiful ones shall grow and abound; there shall be no
more toil, no more trouble. Then, with a fine burst of
imagery, the poet represents the Fates themselves as singing,
to the whirring music of their spindles, a song of
welcome:—
"Ye ages, hasten!
Dear offspring of the gods, set forward on thy way to highest honors;
The time is at hand.
See, the world with its round weight bows to thee.
To thee bow the earth, the regions of the sea and heaven sublime.
See how all things rejoice at the approach of this age!
O that my life might last to see and sing thy deeds!"
The close of this eclogue has a mysterious tenderness.
The poet predicts that this sublime personage, for whom
the world is waiting, should be born amidst the afflictions
of his parents and under a cloud of poverty and neglect:—
"Come, little boy, and know thy mother with a smile.
Come, little boy, on whom thy parents smile not,
Whom no god honors with a table,
No goddess with a cradle."
It would seem as if the sensitive soul of Virgil, in the
ecstasy of poetic inspiration, acquired a vague clairvoyance
of that scene at Bethlehem when there was no room for
Joseph and Mary at the inn, and the Heir of all things
lay in a manger, outcast and neglected.
Not in Virgil alone, but scattered also here and there
through all antiquity, do we find vague, half-prophetic
aspirations after the divine Teacher who should interpret
God to man, console under the sorrows of life, and charm
away the fears of death. In the Phædo, when Socrates is
comforting his sorrowful disciples in view of his approaching
death, and setting before them the probabilities of a
continued life beyond the grave, one of them tells him
that they believe while they hear him, but when he is
gone their doubts will all return, and says, "Where shall
we find a charmer then to disperse our fears?" Socrates
answers that such a Charmer will yet arise, and bids his
disciples seek him in all lands of the earth. Greece, he
says, is wide, and there are many foreign lands and even
barbarous countries in which they should travel searching
for Him, for there is nothing for which they could more
reasonably spend time and money.
And in the discourse of Socrates with Alcibiades, as
given by Plato, the great philosopher is represented as
saying, "We must wait till One shall teach us our duty
towards gods and men."
Alcibiades asks, "When, O Socrates, shall that time
come, and who will be the Teacher? Most happy should
I be to see this man, whoever he is." The Sage replies,
"He is One who is concerned for thee. He feels for thee
an admirable regard."
When one reads these outreachings for an unknown
Saviour in the noblest minds of antiquity, it gives pathos
and suggestive power to that emotion which our Lord
manifested only a few days before his death, when word
was brought him that there were certain Greeks desiring
to see him. When the message was brought to him he
answered with a burst of exultation, "The hour is come
that the Son of man should be glorified! Except a corn
of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone,
but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit, and I, if I be
lifted up, will draw all men unto me!"
He was indeed the "Teacher" who had been "concerned"
for Alcibiades, who had cared for Socrates. He
was the "Charmer" whom Socrates bade his disciples seek
above all things. He was the unknown bringer of good
for whom Virgil longed. He was the "Star" of Balaam,
the "Benefactor" of the Chaldee astrologers, the "Saviour"
predicted by the Persian Zoroaster. He was, it is
true, the Shepherd of Israel, but he had a heart for the
"other sheep not of this fold," who were scattered through
all nations of the earth. He belonged not to any nation,
but to the world, and hence aptly and sublimely did the
last prophecy proclaim, "The desire of all nations shall
come!"
One great argument for the divine origin of the mission
of Jesus is its utter unlikeness to the wisdom and ways of
this world. From beginning to end, it ignored and went
contrary to all that human schemes for power would have
advised.
It was first announced, not to the great or wise, but to
the poor and unlettered. And when the holy child, predicted
by such splendid prophecies, came and had been
adored by the shepherds and magi, had been presented in
the temple and blessed by Simeon and Anna—what then?
Suddenly he disappears from view. He is gone, no one
knows whither—hid in a distant land.
In time the parents return and settle in an obscure village.
Nobody knows them, nobody cares for them, and the
child grows up as the prophet predicted, "As a tender plant,
a root out of dry ground;" the lonely lily of Nazareth.
And then there were thirty years of silence, when
nobody thought of him and nobody expected anything
from him. There was time for Zacharias and Elisabeth
and Simeon and Anna to die; for the shepherds to cease
talking of the visions; for the wise ones of the earth to
say, "Oh, as to that child, it was nothing at all! He is
gone. Nobody knows where he is. You see it has all
passed by—a mere superstitious excitement of a few credulous
people."
And during these hidden years what was Jesus doing?
We have no record. It was said by the Apostle that "in
all respects it behooved him to be made like his brethren."
Before the full splendor of his divine gifts and powers
descended upon him, it was necessary that he should first
live an average life, such as the great body of human
beings live. For, of Christ as he was during the three
years of his public life, it could not be said that he was in
all respects in our situation or experiencing our trials.
He had unlimited supernatural power; he could heal the
sick, raise the dead, hush the stormy waters, summon at
his will legions of angels. A being of such power could
not be said to understand exactly the feelings of our limitations
and weaknesses. But those years of power were
only three in the life of our Lord; for thirty years he
chose to live the life of an obscure human being.
Jesus prepared for his work among men by passing
through the quiet experience of a workingman in the lower
orders. The tradition of the church is that Joseph, being
much older than Mary, died while Jesus was yet young,
and thus the support of his mother devolved upon him.
Overbeck has a very touching picture in which he represents
Joseph as breathing his last on the bosom of Jesus;
it is a sketch full of tenderness and feeling.
What balance of mind, what reticence and self-control,
what peace resulting from deep and settled faith, is there
in this history, and what a cooling power it must have to
the hot and fevered human heart that burns in view of the
much that is to be done to bring the world right!
Nothing was ever so strange, so visionary, to all human
view so utterly and ridiculously hopeless of success, as the
task that Jesus meditated during the thirty years when he
was quietly busy over his carpenter's bench in Nazareth.
Hundreds of years before, the prophet Daniel saw, in a
dream, a stone cut out of the mountain without hands,
growing till it filled the earth. Thus the ideal kingdom
of Jesus grew in the silence and solitude of his own soul
till it became a power and a force before which all other
forces of the world have given way. The Christian religion
was the greatest and most unprecedented reform ever
introduced.
In the present age of the world, the whole movement
and uneasiness and convulsion of what is called progress
comes from the effort to adjust existing society to the
principles laid down by Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount
was, and still is, the most disturbing and revolutionary
document in the world.
This being the case, what impresses us most in the
character of Jesus, as a reformer, is the atmosphere of
peacefulness that surrounded him, and in which he seemed
to live and move and have his being.
Human beings as reformers are generally agitated, hurried,
impatient. Scarcely are the spirits of the prophets
subject to the prophets. They are liable to run before
the proper time and season, to tear open the bud that
ought to unfold; they become nervous, irascible, and lose
mental and physical health: and, if the reform on which
they have set their heart fails, they are overwhelmed with
discouragement and tempted to doubt divine Providence.
Let us now look at Jesus. How terrible was the state
of the world at the time when he began to reflect upon it
in his unfolding youth! How much was there to be
done! What darkness, cruelty, oppression, confusion!
Yet he, knowing that that was the work of reorganizing,
showed no haste. Thirty years was by Jewish law the
appointed time at which a religious teacher should commence
his career. Jesus apparently felt no impulse to
antedate this period; one incident alone, in his childhood,
shows him carried away beyond himself by the divine
ardor which filled his soul.
Even then, his answers to his mother showed the consciousness
of a divine and wonderful mission such as
belonged only to one of the human race, and it is immediately
added, "And he went down to Nazareth and was
subject to them." Eighteen years now passed away and
nothing was known of the enthusiastic spirit. When he
appears in the synagogue at Nazareth, he is spoken of
simply as "the carpenter." "How knoweth this man letters?"
was the cry of his townsmen.
Nothing shows more strongly the veiled and hidden
and perfectly quiet life that Jesus had been leading among
them. He had been a carpenter, not a teacher. The
humble, calm, unobtrusive life of a good mechanic, who
does every day's duty in its time and place, is not a thing
that calls out any attention in a community. There are
many followers of Jesus in this world who are living the
same silent, quiet life, who would not be missed in the
great world if they were gone, who, being always in place
and time, and working without friction or jar, come to be
as much disregarded as the daily perfect work of nature.
The life of Jesus must also have been a silent one. Of
all the things that he must have been capable of saying we
find not one recorded. And the wonder of his townsmen
at his capacity of speech shows that there had been no
words spoken by him before to accustom them to it.
In our Saviour's public career we are surprised at
nothing so much as his calmness. He was never in haste.
His words have all the weight of deliberation, and the
occasions when he refrains from speech are fully as remarkable
as the things he says.
There seems to be about him none of the wearying
anxiety as to immediate results, none of the alternations
of hope and discouragement that mark our course. He
had faith in God, whose great plan he was working,
whose message he came to deliver, and whose times and
seasons he strictly regarded. So, too, did he regard the
mental and spiritual condition of the imperfect ones by
whom he was surrounded. "I have many things to say
to you, but ye cannot bear them now," he said even to his
disciples. When their zeal transcended his, and they
longed to get hold of the thunderbolts and call down fire
from heaven, his grave and steady rebuke recalled them:
"Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of."
We see his disciples excited, ardent,—now coming back
with triumph to tell how even the devils were subject to
them, now forbidding one to cast out devils because he
followed not them, now contending who should be greatest;
and among them sits the Master, lowly, thoughtful,
tranquil, with the little child on his knee, or bending to
wash the feet of a disciple, the calmest, sweetest, least
assuming of them all.
This should be the model of all Christian reformers.
He that believeth shall not make haste is the true motto
of Christian reform.
And these great multitudes, to whose hands no special,
individual power is given—they are only minute workers
in a narrower sphere. Daily toils, small economies, the
ordering of the material cares of life, are all their lot.
Before them in their way they can see the footsteps of
Jesus. We can conceive that in the lowly path of his life
all his works were perfect, that never was a nail driven
or a line laid carelessly, and that the toil of that carpenter's
bench was as sacred to him as his teachings in the
temple, because it was duty.
Sometimes there is a sadness and discontent, a repressed
eagerness for some higher sphere, that invades the minds
of humble workers. Let them look unto Jesus, and be
content. All they have to do is to be "faithful over a
few things," and in his own time he will make them
"ruler over many things."
The Bible presents us with the personality of a magnificent
Being—the only-begotten Son of God—who, being
in the form of God and without robbery equal with God,
emptied himself of his glory and took upon him the form
of a servant; and, being found in fashion as a man, humbled
himself and became obedient to death—even the
death of the cross.
This great Being, we are told, entered the race of mortality,
divested of those advantages which came from his
divine origin, and assuming all those disadvantages of
limitation and dependence which belong to human beings.
The Apostle says, "It behooved him in all respects to be
made like unto his brethren." His lot was obedience—dependence
upon the Father—and he gained victories by
just the means which are left to us—faith and prayer.
Now, there are many good people whose feeling about
prayer is something like this: "I pray because I am commanded
to, not because I feel a special need or find a
special advantage in it. In my view we are to use our
intellect and our will in discovering duties and overcoming
temptations, quite sure that God will, of course, aid those
who aid themselves." This class of persons look upon all
protracted seasons of prayer and periods spent in devotion
as so much time taken from the active duties of life. A
week devoted to prayer, a convention of Christians meeting
to spend eight or ten days in exercises purely devotional,
would strike them as something excessive and unnecessary,
and tending to fanaticism.
If ever there was a human being who could be supposed
able to meet the trials of life and overcome its temptations
in his own strength, it must have been Jesus Christ.
But his example stands out among all others, and he is
shown to us as peculiarly a man of prayer. The wonderful
quietude and reticence of spirit in which he awaited
the call of his Father to begin his great work has already
been noticed. He waited patiently, living for thirty years
the life of a common human being of the lower grades of
society, and not making a single movement to display
either what may be called his natural gifts, of teaching,
etc., or those divine powers which were his birthright.
Having taken the place of a servant, as a servant he
waited the divine call.
When that call came he consecrated himself to his great
work by submitting to the ordinance of baptism. We are
told that as he went up from the waters of baptism, praying,
the heavens were opened and the Holy Ghost descended
upon him, and a voice from heaven said, "Thou
art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased."
Might we not think that now the man Jesus Christ
would feel fully prepared to begin at once the work to
which God so visibly called him? But no. The divine
Spirit within him led to a still farther delay. More than
a month's retreat from all the world's scenes and ways,
a period of unbroken solitude, was devoted to meditation
and prayer.
If Jesus Christ deemed so much time spent in prayer
needful to his work, what shall we say of ourselves?
Feeble and earthly, with hearts always prone to go astray,
living in a world where everything presses us downward
to the lower regions of the senses and passions, how can
we afford to neglect that higher communion, those seasons
of divine solitude, which were thought necessary by our
Master? It was in those many days devoted entirely to
communion with God that he gained strength to resist the
temptations of Satan, before which we so often fall.
Whatever we may think of the mode and manner of that
mysterious account of the temptations of Christ, it is
evident that they were met and overcome by the spiritual
force gained by prayer and the study of God's word.
But it was not merely in this retirement of forty days
that our Lord set us the example of the use of seasons of
religious seclusion. There is frequent mention made in
the Gospels of his retiring for purposes of secret prayer.
In the midst of the popularity and success that attended
his first beneficent miracles, we are told by St. Mark that,
"rising up a great while before day, he went out into a
solitary place and there prayed." His disciples went to
look for him, and found him in his retirement, and
brought him back with the message, "All men are seeking
for thee." In Luke v. 16, it is said: "He withdrew
himself into the wilderness and prayed;" and on another
occasion (Luke iv. 42), he says: "And when it was day,
he departed and went into a desert place." Again, when
preparing to take the most important step in his ministry,
the choice of his twelve Apostles, we read in Luke vi. 12:
"And it came to pass in those days that he went out into
a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to
God; and when it was day, he called unto him his disciples;
and of them he chose twelve, whom also he named
apostles."
It was when his disciples found him engaged in prayer,
and listened for a little while to his devotions, that they
addressed to him the petition, "Lord, teach us to pray."
Might we not all, in view of his example, address to him
the same prayer? Surely if there is anything in which
Christ's professed disciples need to learn of him it is in
prayer.
Not only in example but in teaching did he exhort to
prayer. "Watch and pray" were words so often upon
his lips that they may seem to be indeed the watchwords
of our faith. He bids us retire to our closets and with
closed door pray to our Father in secret. He says that
men "ought always to pray and not to faint," though the
answer be delayed. He reasons from what all men feel
of parental longings in granting the requests of their little
children, and says, "If ye, being evil, are so ready to hear
your children, how much more ready will your Father in
heaven be to give good things to them that ask him."
Nay, he uses a remarkable boldness in urging us to be
importunate in presenting our requests, again and again,
in the face of apparent delay and denial. He shows instances
where even indifferent or unjust people are overcome
by sheer importunity, and intimates how much
greater must be the power of importunity—urgent, pressing
solicitation—on a Being always predisposed to benevolence.
By all these methods and illustrations our Lord incites
us to follow his prayerful example, and to overcome, as
he overcame, by prayer. The Christian Church felt so
greatly the need of definite seasons devoted to religious
retirement that there grew up among them the custom
now so extensively observed in Christendom, of devoting
forty days in every year to a special retreat from the things
of earth, and a special devotion to the work of private and
public prayer. Like all customs, even those originating
in deep spiritual influences, this is too apt to degenerate
into a mere form. Many associate no ideas with "fasting"
except a change in articles of food. The true spiritual
fasting, which consists in turning our eyes and hearts
from the engrossing cares and pleasures of earth and fixing
them on things divine, is lost sight of. Our "forty days"
are not like our Lord's, given to prayer and the study of
God's Word. Nothing could make the period of Lent
so much of a reality as to employ it in a systematic effort
to fix the mind on Jesus. The history in the Gospels is so
well worn that it often slips through the head without
affecting the heart.
But if, retiring into solitude for a portion of each day,
we should select some one scene or trait or incident in the
life of Jesus, and with all the helps we can get seek to
understand it fully, tracing it in the other evangelists,
comparing it with other passages of Scripture, etc., we
should find ourselves insensibly interested, and might hope
that in this effort of our souls to understand him, Jesus
himself would draw near, as he did of old to the disciples
on the way to Emmaus.
This looking unto Jesus and thinking about him is a
better way to meet and overcome sin than any physical
austerities or spiritual self-reproaches. It is by looking at
him, the Apostle says, "as in a glass," that we are
"changed into the same image, as from glory to glory."
Intimately connected with the forty days of solitude
and fasting is the mysterious story of the Temptation.
We are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews that our
Lord was exposed to a peculiar severity of trial in order
that he might understand the sufferings and wants of us
feeble human beings. "For in that he himself hath suffered,
being tempted, he is able to succor those who are
tempted." We are to understand, then, that however
divine was our Lord's nature in his preëxistent state, he
chose to assume our weakness and our limitations, and to
meet and overcome the temptations of Satan by just such
means as are left to us—by faith and prayer and the
study of God's Word.
There are many theories respecting this remarkable history
of the temptation. Some suppose the Evil Spirit to
have assumed a visible form, and to have been appreciably
present. But if we accept the statement we have quoted
from the Epistle to the Hebrews, that our Lord was
tempted in all respects as we are, it must have been an
invisible and spiritual presence with which he contended.
The temptations must have presented themselves to him,
as to us, by thoughts injected into his mind.
It seems probable that, of many forms of temptation
which he passed through, the three of which we are told
are selected as specimens, and if we notice we shall see
that they represent certain great radical sources of trial to
the whole human race.
First comes the temptation from the cravings of animal
appetite. Perhaps hunger—the want of food and the
weakness and faintness resulting from it—brings more
temptation to sin than any other one cause. To supply
animal cravings men are driven to theft and murder, and
women to prostitution. The more fortunate of us, who
are brought up in competence and shielded from want,
cannot know the fierceness of this temptation—its driving,
maddening power. But he who came to estimate our
trials, and to help the race of man in their temptations,
chose to know what the full force of the pangs of hunger
were, and to know it in the conscious possession of miraculous
power which could at any moment have supplied
them. To have used this power for the supply of his
wants would have been at once to abandon that very condition
of trial and dependence which he came to share
with us. It was a sacred trust, not given for himself but
for the world. It was the very work he undertook, to
bear the trials which his brethren bore as they were called
to bear them, with only such helps as it might please the
Father to give him in his own time and way.
So when the invisible tempter suggested that he might
at once relieve this pain and gratify this craving, he
answered simply that there was a higher life than the
animal, and that man could be upborne by faith in God
even under the pressure of utmost want. "Man shall not
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth
out of the mouth of God." How many poor, suffering
followers of Christ, called to forsake the means of livelihood
for conscience' sake, have been obliged to live as
Christ did on the simple promise of God, and to wait.
Such sufferers may feel that they are not called to this
trial by one ignorant of its nature or unsympathetic with
their weakness. And the same consolation applies to all
who struggle with the lower wants of our nature in any
form. Christ's pity and sympathy are for them.
All who struggle with animal desires in any form, which
duty forbids them to gratify, may remember that God has
given them an Almighty Saviour, who, having suffered,
is able to succor those that are tempted.
The second trial was no less universal. It was the
temptation to use his sacred and solemn gifts from God
for purposes of personal ostentation and display. "Why
not," suggests the tempter, "descend from the pinnacle of
the temple upborne by angels? How striking a manifestation
of the power of the Son of God!" To this came the
grave answer, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God,"—by
needlessly incurring a danger which would make
miraculous deliverance necessary.
Is no one in our day put to this test? Is not the young
minister at God's altar, to whom is given eloquence and
power over the souls of men, in danger of this temptation
to theatric exhibitions—ostentatious display of self—this
seeking for what is dramatic and striking, rather than
what is for God's service and glory? Whoever is intrusted
with power of any kind or in any degree is tempted to
use it selfishly rather than divinely. To all such the
Lord's temptation and resistance of it gives assurance of
help if help be sought.
But finally came the last, the most insidious temptation,
and its substance seemed to be this: "Why not use these
miraculous gifts to make a worldly party? Why not flatter
the national vanity of the Jews, excite their martial
spirit, lead them to a course of successful revolt against
their masters, and then of brilliant conquest, and seize
upon all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them?
To be sure, this will require making concession here and
there to the evil passions of men, but when the supreme
power is once gained all shall go right. Why this long,
slow path of patience and self-denial? Why this conflict
with the world? Why the cross and the grave? Why
not the direct road of power, using the worldly forces first,
and afterwards the spiritual?" This seems to be a free
version of all that is included in the proposition: "All
this power will I give thee, and the glory of it; for that
is delivered unto me and to whomsoever I will I give it.
If, therefore, thou wilt worship me all shall be thine."
The indignant answer of Jesus shows with what living
energy he repelled every thought of the least concession to
evil, the least advantage to be gained by following or
allowing the corrupt courses of this world. He would not
flatter the rich and influential. He would not conceal
offensive truth. He would seek the society of the poor
and despised. He taught love of enemies in the face of
a nation hating their enemies and longing for revenge.
He taught forgiveness and prayer, while they were longing
for battle and conquest. He blessed the meek, the
sorrowful, the merciful, the persecuted for righteousness,
instead of the powerful and successful. If he had been
willing to have been such a king as the Scribes and Pharisees
wanted they would have adored him and fought for
him. But because his kingdom was not of this world they
cried: "Not this man, but Barabbas!" It is said that
after this temptation the Devil departed from him "for
a season." But all through his life, in one form or another,
that temptation must have been suggested to him.
When he told his Apostles that he was going up to
Jerusalem to suffer and to die, Peter, it is said, rebuked
him with earnestness: "That be far from thee, Lord; such
things shall not happen to thee."
Jesus instantly replies, not to Peter, but to the Invisible
Enemy who through Peter's affection and ambition is
urging the worldly and self-seeking course upon him:
"Get thee behind me, Satan, thou art an offence unto me.
Thou savorest not the things that be of God but of man."
We are told that the temptation of Christ was so real
that he suffered, being tempted. He knew that he must
disappoint the expectations of all his friends who had set
their hearts on the temporal kingdom, that he was leading
them on step by step to a season of unutterable darkness
and sorrow. The cross was bitter to him, in prospect as
in reality, but never for a moment did he allow himself to
swerve from it. As the time drew near, he said, "Now is
my soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me
from this hour? But, for this cause came I unto this
hour;—Father, glorify thy name!"
Is not this lifelong temptation which Christ overcame
one that meets us all every day and hour? To live an
unworldly life; never to seek place or power or wealth by
making the least sacrifice of conscience or principle; is it
easy? is it common? Yet he who chose rather to die on
the cross than to yield in the slightest degree his high
spiritual mission can feel for our temptations and succor
us even here.
The Apostle speaks of life as a race set before us, which
we are to win by laying aside every impediment and looking
steadfastly unto Jesus, who, "for the joy that was set
before him, endured the cross." Our victories over self
are to be gained not so much by self-reproaches and self-conflicts
as by the enthusiasm of looking away from ourselves
to Him who has overcome for us. Our Christ is
not dead, but alive forevermore! A living presence, ever
near to the soul that seeks salvation from sin. And to
the struggling and the tempted he still says, "Look unto
ME, and be ye saved."
The life of Jesus, regarded from a mere human point
of view, presents an astonishing problem. An obscure
man in an obscure province has revolutionized the world.
Every letter and public document of the most cultured
nations dates from his birth, as a new era. How was this
man educated? We find he had no access to the Greek
and Roman literature. Jesus was emphatically a man of
one book. That book was the Hebrew Scriptures, which
we call the Old Testament. The Old Testament was his
Bible, and this single consideration must invest it with
undying interest for us.
We read the Bible which our parents read. We see,
perhaps, pencil-marks here and there, which show what
they loved and what helped and comforted them in the
days of their life-struggle, and the Bible is dearer to us
on that account. Then, going backward along the bright
pathway of the sainted and blessed who lived in former
ages, the Bible becomes diviner to us for their sake. The
Bible of the Martyrs, the Bible of the Waldenses, the
Bible of Luther and Calvin, of our Pilgrim Fathers, has
a double value.
I have in my possession a very ancient black-letter
edition of the Bible printed in 1522, more than three
hundred years ago. In this edition many of the Psalms
have been read and re-read, till the paper is almost worn
away. Some human heart, some suffering soul, has taken
deep comfort here. If to have been the favorite, intimate
friend of the greatest number of hearts be an ambition
worthy of a poet, David has gained a loftier place than
any poet who ever wrote. He has lived next to the heart
of men, and women, and children, of all ages, in all
climes, in all times and seasons, all over the earth. They
have rejoiced and wept, prayed and struggled, lived and
died, with David's words in their mouths. His heart has
become the universal Christian heart, and will ever be, till
earth's sorrows, and earth itself, are a vanished dream.
It is too much the fashion of this day to speak slightingly
of the Old Testament. Apart from its grandeur, its
purity, its tenderness and majesty, the Old Testament has
this peculiar interest to the Christian,—it was the Bible
of the Lord Jesus Christ.
As a man, Jesus had a human life to live, a human
experience to undergo. For thirty silent years he was
known among men only as a carpenter in Nazareth, and
the Scriptures of the Old Testament were his daily companions.
When he emerges into public life, we find him
thoroughly versed in the Scriptures. Allusions to them
are constant, through all his discourses; he continually
refers to them as writings that reflect his own image.
"Search the Scriptures," he says, "for they are they that
testify of me."
The Psalms of David were to Jesus all and more than
they can be to any other son of man.
In certain of them he saw himself and his future life,
his trials, conflicts, sufferings, resurrection, and final triumph
foreshadowed. He quoted them to confound his
enemies. When they sought to puzzle him with perplexing
questions he met them with others equally difficult,
drawn from the Scriptures. He asks them:—
"What think ye of the Messiah? whose son is he? They say
unto him, the Son of David. He saith unto them, How then
doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said unto
my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies
thy footstool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?"
So, when they ask the question, "Which is the greatest
commandment of all?" he answers by placing together
two passages in the Old Testament, the one commanding
supreme love to God and the other impartial love to man's
neighbor. The greatest commandment of all nowhere
stands in the Old Testament exactly as Jesus quotes it, the
first part being found in Deuteronomy vi. 5, and the second
in Leviticus xix. 18. This is a specimen of the exhaustive
manner in which he studied and used the Scriptures.
Our Saviour quotes often also from the prophets. In
his first public appearance in his native village he goes into
the synagogue and reads from Isaiah. When they question
and disbelieve, he answers them by pointed allusions
to the stories of Naaman the Syrian and the widow of
Sarepta. When the Sadducees raise the question of a
future life, he replies by quoting from the Pentateuch that
God calls himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
and God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the
living, for all are alive to him. He cites the history of
Jonah as a symbol of his own death and resurrection; and
at the last moment of his trial before the High Priest,
when adjured to say whether he be the Christ or not, he
replies in words that recall the sublime predictions in the
Book of Daniel of the coming of Messiah to judgment.
The prophet says:—
"I saw in my vision, and, behold, One like the Son of man
came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of
days; and there was given unto him dominion and glory and
a kingdom, that all people and nations and languages should
serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, that
shall not pass away or be destroyed."
When the High Priest of the Jews said to Jesus, "I
adjure thee by the living God that thou tell us whether
thou be Messiah or not," he answered, "I am; and hereafter
ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand
of power and coming in the clouds of heaven."
So much was the character of our Lord's teaching colored
and impregnated by the writings of the Old Testament
that it is impossible fully to comprehend Jesus without an
intimate knowledge of them. To study the life of Christ
without the Hebrew Scriptures is to study a flower without
studying the plant from which it sprung, the root and
leaves which nourished it. He continually spoke of himself
as a Being destined to fulfill what had gone before.
"Think not," he said, "that I am come to destroy the
Law and the Prophets. I am not come to destroy but to
fulfill." He frequently spoke of himself as of the order
and race of Jewish prophets; like them he performed
symbolic acts which were visible prophecies, as when he
knew his nation had finally rejected him he signified their
doom by the awful sign of the blasted fig-tree. Through
all the last days of Jesus, as his death approaches, we find
continual references to the Old Testament prophecies, and
quotations from them.
And after his resurrection, when he appears to his disciples,
he "opens to them the Scriptures;" that talk on
the way to Emmaus was an explanation of the prophecies,
by our Lord himself. Would that it had been recorded!
Would not our hearts too have "burned within us!"
Now, a book that was in life and in death so dear to
our Lord, a book which he interpreted as from first to last
a preparation for and prophecy of himself, cannot but be
full of interest to us Christians. When we read the Old
Testament Scriptures we go along a track that we know
Jesus and his mother must often have trod together. The
great resemblance in style between the Song of Mary and
the Psalms of David is one of the few indications given in
Holy Writ of the veiled and holy mystery of his mother's
life. She was a poetess, a prophetess, one whose mind
was capable of the highest ecstasy of inspiration. Let us
read the Psalms again, with the thought in our mind that
they were the comforters, the counselors of Jesus and
Mary. What was so much to them cannot be indifferent
to us.
Nor did the disciples and Apostles in the glow of the
unfolding dispensation cease to reverence and value those
writings so closely studied by their Lord. They did not
speak of them as a worn-out thing, that had "had its
day," but they alluded to them with the affectionate veneration
due to divine oracles. "The prophecy came not
of old times by the will of man, but holy men of old spake
as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." St. Paul congratulates
Timothy that "from a child thou hast known
the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise
unto salvation," and adds: "all Scripture is given by inspiration
of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof,
for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the
man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all
good works."
Even while the New Testament was being formed, its
writers gave this complete testimony to the Old, as being
able to make men "wise unto salvation," and to complete
a man's spiritual education. This book, then, so dear to
Christ and his Apostles, is something that should be dear
to all Christians. Its study will enrich the soul. It is
wonderful, mysterious, unique—there is no sacred book
like it in the world; and in reading it we come nearer to
Him who was foretold by it, and who when he came upon
the earth found in it nourishment for his soul, instruction
and spiritual refreshment by the wayside, comfort even in
the extreme agonies of a dreadful death. However dear
to us may be the story of his life in the Gospels and his
teachings through his Apostles and their Epistles, let us
in following his steps forget not "the Scriptures" which
he bade us search, but diligently read and love the Bible
of our Lord.
The first public sermon of the long-desired Messiah—his
first declaration of his mission and message to the world—what
was it?
It was delivered in his own city of Nazareth, where he
had been brought up; it was on the Sabbath day; it was
in the synagogue where he had always worshiped; and it
was in manner and form exactly in accordance with the
customs of his national religion.
It had always been customary among the Jews to call
upon any member of the synagogue to read a passage from
the book of the prophets; and the young man Jesus, concerning
whom certain rumors had vaguely gone forth, was
on the day in question called to take his part in the service.
It was a holy and solemn moment, when the long
silence of years was to be broken. Jesus was surrounded
by faces familiar from infancy. His mother, his brothers,
his sisters, were all there; every eye was fixed upon him.
The historian says:—
"And there was delivered unto him the book (or roll) of
the prophet Isaiah, and when he had unrolled the book he found
the place where it is written (Isaiah lxi.):—
The spirit of the Lord is upon me.
He hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor;
He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted;
To preach deliverance to the captives;
The recovering of sight to the blind;
To set at liberty them that are bruised;
To preach the acceptable year of the Lord."
We may imagine the sweetness, the tenderness, the
enthusiasm with which this beautiful announcement of his
mission was uttered; and when, closing the book, he looked
round on the faces of his townsmen and acquaintances, and
said, "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears,"—it
was an appeal of Heavenly love yearning to heal and to
save those nearest and longest known.
It would seem that the sweet voice, the graceful manner,
at first charmed the rough audience; there was a thrilling,
vibrating power, that struck upon every heart. But those
hearts were cold and hard. A Saviour from sin, a Comforter
of sorrow, was not what they were looking for in
their Messiah. They felt themselves good enough spiritually,
in their observance of the forms of their law and
ritual; they were stupidly content with themselves and
wanted no comforter. What they did want was a brilliant
military leader. They wanted a miracle-working, supernatural
Lord and Commander that should revenge their
national wrongs, conquer the Romans, and set the Jewish
people at the head of the world. Having heard of the
miracles of Christ in Cana and Capernaum, they had
thought that perhaps he might prove this Leader, and if
so, what a glory for Nazareth! But they were in a critical,
exacting mood; they were in their hearts calling for some
brilliant and striking performance that should illuminate
and draw attention to their town. Although the congregation
were at first impressed and charmed with the gracious
words and manner of the speaker, the hard, vulgar spirit of
envy and carping criticism soon overshadowed their faces.
"Who is this Jesus—is he not the carpenter? What
sign does he show? Let him work some miracles forthwith,
and we will see if we will believe."
It was this disposition which our Lord felt in the atmosphere
around him; the language of souls uttered itself to
him unspoken. He answered as he so often did to the
feeling he saw in the hearts rather than the words of those
around him. He said, "Ye will say to me, Physician,
heal thyself. Do here in thy native place the marvels we
have heard of in Capernaum. I tell you a truth; no
prophet is accepted in his own country. There were many
widows in Israel in the time of the prophet Elijah, but
he was sent only to a widow of Sarepta, a city of Sidon.
There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha,
yet none of them was healed but Naaman the Syrian."
It would seem as if our Lord was preparing to show them
that he had a mission of love and mercy that could not be
bounded by one village, or even by the chosen race of
Israel, but was for the world.
But the moment he spoke of favors and blessings given
to the Gentiles the fierce national spirit flamed up; the
speech was cut short by a tumultuous uprising of the
whole synagogue. They laid violent hands on Jesus and
hurried him to the brow of the precipice on which their
city was built, to cast him down headlong. But before
the murder was consummated the calm majesty of Jesus
had awed his persecutors. Their slackened hands dropped;
they looked one on another irresolute: and he, passing
silently through the midst of them, went his way. He
had offered himself to them as their Saviour from sin and
from sorrow in the very fullness of his heart. Heavenly
tenderness and sweetness had stretched out its arms to
embrace them, and been repulsed by sneering coldness and
hard, worldly unbelief.
Nazareth did not want Him; and he left it. It was
the first of those many rejections which He at last summed
up when he said, "How often would I have gathered thy
children, and ye would not."
But, though he thus came to his own and his own
received him not, yet the lovely and gracious proclamation
which he made then and there still stands unfading and
beautiful as a rainbow of hope over this dark earth. The
one Being sent into the world to represent the Invisible
Father, and to show us the hidden heart and purposes of
God in this mysterious life of ours, there declared that his
mission was one of pity, of help, of consolation; that the
poor, the bruised, the desolate, the prisoner, might forever
find a Friend in him.
There are times when the miseries and sorrows of the
suffering race of man, the groaning and travailing of this
mysterious life of ours, oppress us, and our faith in God's
love grows faint.
Then let us turn our thoughts to this divine Personality,
Jesus, the anointed Son of God, and hear him saying
now, as he said at Nazareth:—
"The spirit of the Lord is upon ME.
He hath sent me to preach good tidings to the poor;
He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted,
To preach deliverance to the captives,
The recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised!"
It is said of him in the prophets: "He shall not fail
nor be discouraged till he have set judgment in the earth.
The isles shall wait for his law. Our Redeemer is mighty;
the Lord of Hosts is his name—our Saviour, the Holy
One of Israel!"
In turning our thoughts toward various scenes of our
Lord's life, we are peculiarly affected with the human
warmth and tenderness of his personal friendships. The
little association of his own peculiar friends makes a picture
that we need to study to understand him.
St. John touchingly says: "Now when the time was
come that Jesus should depart out of the world unto the
Father, having loved his own which were in the world he
loved them unto the end." When we think that all that
we know of our Lord comes through these friends of his—the
witnesses and recorders of his life and death—we
shall feel more than ever what he has made them to us.
Without them we should have had no Jesus.
Our Lord, with all that he is to us, is represented to us
through the loving hearts and affectionate records of these
his chosen ones. It is amazing to think of, that our Lord
never left to his church one line written by his own hand,
and that all his words come to us transfused through the
memories of his friends. How much to us, then, were
these friendships of Jesus—how dear to us, for all eternity,
these friends!
We are told that immediately after the resurrection there
was an associated church of one hundred and twenty, who
are characterized by Peter as "men that have companied
with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out
among us."
The account of how these friends were gathered to him
becomes deeply interesting. St. John relates how, one
day, John the Baptist saw Jesus walking by the Jordan
in silent contemplation, and pointed him out to his disciples:
"Behold the Lamb of God." And the two disciples
heard him speak and followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned
and said, "What seek ye?" They said, "Master, where
dwellest thou?" He answered, "Come and see." They
came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that
day. We learn from this that some of the disciples were
those whose spiritual nature had been awakened by John
the Baptist, and who, under his teaching, were devoting
themselves to a religious life. We see the power of personal
attraction possessed by our Lord, which drew these
simple, honest natures to himself. One of these men was
Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, and he immediately
carried the glad tidings to his brother, "We have found
the Messiah;" and he brought him to Jesus. Thus, by
a sort of divine attraction, one brother and friend bringing
another, the little band increased. Some were more distinctly
called by the Master. Matthew, the tax-gatherer,
sitting in his place of business, heard the words, "Follow
me," and immediately rose up, and left all and followed
him. James and John forsook their nets, in the midst
of their day's labor, to follow him. In time, a little
band of twelve left all worldly callings and home ties,
to form a traveling mission family of which Jesus was
the head and father. Others, both men and women, at
times traveled with them and assisted their labors; but
these twelve were the central figures.
These twelve men Jesus took to nurture and educate as
the expounders of the Christian religion and the organizers
of the church. St. John, in poetic vision, sees the church
as a golden city descending from God out of heaven, having
twelve foundations, and in them the names of these
twelve Apostles of the Lamb. This plan of choosing honest,
simple-hearted, devout men, and revealing himself to
the world through their human nature and divinely educated
conceptions, had in it something peculiar and original.
When we look at the selection made by Christ of these
own ones, we see something widely different from all the
usual methods of earthly wisdom. They were neither the
most cultured nor the most influential of their times. The
majority of them appear to have been plain workingmen,
from the same humble class in which our Lord was born.
But the Judæan peasant, under the system of religious
training and teaching given by Moses, was no stolid or
vulgar character. He inherited lofty and inspiring traditions,
a ritual stimulating to the spiritual and poetic
nature, a system of ethical morality and of tenderness to
humanity in advance of the whole ancient world. A good
Jew was frequently a man of spiritualized and elevated
devotion. Supreme love to God and habitual love and
charity to man were the essentials of his religious ideal.
The whole system of divine training and discipline to
which the Jewish race had been subjected for hundreds of
years had prepared a higher moral average to be chosen
from than could have been found in any other nation.
When Jesus began to preach, it was the best and purest
men that most deeply sympathized and were most attracted,
and from them he chose his intimate circle of followers—to
train them as the future Apostles of his religion.
The new dispensation that Jesus came to introduce was
something as yet uncomprehended on earth. It was a
heavenly ideal, and these men—simple, pure-hearted, and
devout as they were—had no more conception of it than
a deaf person has of music. It was a new manner of life,
a new style of manhood, that was to constitute this kingdom
of Heaven. It was no outward organization—no
earthly glory. Man was to learn to live, not by force,
not by ambition, not by pleasure, but by Love. Man
was to become perfect in love as God is, so that loving
and serving and suffering for others should become a fashion
and habit in this world, where ruling and domineering
and making others suffer had been the law. And Jesus
took into his family twelve men to prepare them to be the
Apostles of this idea. His mode was more that of a mother
than a father. He strove to infuse Himself into them by
an embracing, tender, brooding love; ardent, self-forgetful,
delicate, refined. As we read the New Testament narrative
of the walks and talks of Jesus with these chosen
ones, their restings by the wayside, their family conversations
at evening, when he sat with some little child on his
knee, when he listened to their sayings, reproved their
failings, settled their difficulties with one another, we can
see no image by which to represent the Master but one of
those loving, saintly mothers, who, in leading along their
little flock, follow nearest in the footsteps of Jesus.
Jesus trusted more to personal love, in forming his
church, than to any other force. The power of love in
developing the intellect and exciting the faculties is
marked, even on the inferior animals. The dog is changed
by tender treatment and affectionate care; he becomes half
human, and seems to struggle to rise out of the brute
nature toward a beloved master. Rude human natures are
correspondingly changed, and he who has great power of
loving and exciting love may almost create anew whom he
will.
Jesus, that guest from brighter worlds, brought to this
earth the nobler ideas of love, the tenderness, the truth,
the magnanimity, that are infinite in the All-Loving.
What of God could be expressed and understood by man
He was, and St. John says of his ethereal gentleness and
sweetness of nature: "The light shined in the darkness
and the darkness comprehended it not."
The varieties of natural character in this family of Jesus
were such as to give most of the usual differences of human
beings. The Master's object was to unite them to each
other by such a love that they should move by a single
impulse, as one human being, and that what was lacking
in one might be made up by what was abundant in another.
As He expressed it in his last prayer: "That they
all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee,
that they also may be one in us: that the world may
believe that Thou hast sent me."
How diverse were the elements! Simon Peter, self-confident,
enthusiastic, prompt to speak and to decide.
Thomas, slow and easily disheartened; always deficient in
hope, and inclined to look upon the dark side, yet constant
unto death in his affections. James and John, young men
of the better class, belonging to a rich family, on terms of
intimate acquaintance with the High Priest. Of these
brothers, John is the idealist and the poet of the little
band, but far from being the weak and effeminate character
painters and poets have generally conceived. James and
John were surnamed Boanerges—"sons of thunder."
They were the ones who wanted to call down fire on the
village that refused to receive their Lord. It was they
who joined in the petition preferred by their mother for
the seat of honor in the future kingdom. Young, ardent,
impetuous, full of fire and of that susceptibility to ambition
which belongs to high-strung and vivid organizations,
their ardor was like a flame, that might scorch and burn
as well as vivify. Then there was Matthew, the prosaic,
the exact matter-of-fact man, whose call it was to write
what critics have called the bodily gospel of our Lord's
life, as it was that of John to present the inner heart of
Jesus. These few salient instances show the strong and
marked diversities of temperament and character which
Jesus proposed to unite into one whole, by an intense
personal love which should melt down all angles, and
soften asperities, and weld and blend the most discordant
elements. It is the more remarkable that he undertook
this task with men in mature life, and who had already
been settled in several callings, and felt the strain of all
those causes which excite the individual self-love of man.
In guiding all these, we can but admire the perfect tolerance
of the Master toward the wants of each varying
nature. Tolerance for individual character is about the
last Christian grace that comes to flower in family or
church. Much of the raspings, and gratings, and complaints
in family and church are from the habit of expecting
and exacting that people should be what they never
were made to be. Our Lord did not reprove Thomas for
being a despondent doubter, beset by caution even when
he most longed to believe. He graciously granted the
extremest test which his hopeless nature required—he
suffered him to put his finger in the print of the nails and
to examine the wounded side; and there is but a tender
shadow of a reproof in what he said—"Thomas, because
thou hast seen me, thou hast believed; blessed are they
that have not seen and yet have believed." In our day
there are many disciples of Thomas, loving doubters, who
would give their hearts' blood to fully believe in this risen
Jesus; they would willingly put their hands in the print
of the nails; and for them the Master has a spiritual
presence and a convincing nearness, if they will but seek
it. So, again, we notice the tender indulgence with
which the self-confident Peter is listened to as he always
interposes his opinion. We think we can see the Master
listening with a grave smile, as a mother to her eldest and
most self-confident boy. Sometimes he warmly commends,
and sometimes he bears down on him with a sharpness of
rebuke which would have annihilated a softer nature.
When Peter officiously counsels worldly expediency, and
the avoidance of the sufferings for which Jesus came, the
reply is sharp as lightning: "Get thee behind me, Satan;
thou art an offence unto me; for thou savorest not the
things of God, but those that be of man." Yet we can
see that the Master knows his man, and knows just how
hard to strike. That eager, combative, self-confident
nature not only can bear sharp treatment, but must have
it at times, or never come to anything. We see Peter's
self-asserting nature spring up after it, cheerful as ever.
He yields to the reproof; but he is Peter still, prompt
with his opinion at the next turn of affairs, and the Master
would not for the world have him anybody else but Peter.
We see also that it was a manner of the Master to deal
with the conscience of his children, and rebuke their faults
without exposing them to the censure of others. When
he saw that the sin of covetousness was growing upon
Judas, leading to dishonesty, he combated it by the most
searching and stringent teaching. "Beware of covetousness,
for a man's life consisteth not in the things that he
possesseth;" this and other passages, which will be more
fully considered in another chapter, would seem to have
been all warnings to Judas, if he would but have listened.
So, too, his tenderness for John, whom tradition reports
to have been the youngest of the disciples, marked a delicate
sense of character. To lean on his bosom was not
sought by Matthew or Thomas, though both loved him
supremely; it fell to the lot of John,—as in a family
flock, where one, the youngest and tenderest, is always
found silently near the mother; the others smile to see
him always there, and think it well. There are in St.
John's narrative touches of that silent accord between him
and Jesus, that comprehension without words, which comes
between natures strung alike to sympathy. To him Jesus
commended his mother, as the nearest earthly substitute
for himself. Yet, after all, when for this one so dear, so
accordant with his own personal feelings, a request was
made for station and honor in the heavenly kingdom, he
promptly refused. His personal affection for his friends
was to have no undue influence in that realm of things
which belonged to the purely divine disposal. "The
kingdom of heaven is within you," he taught; and John's
place in the spiritual domain must depend upon John's
own spirit.
There is one trait in the character of these chosen disciples
of Christ which is worth a special thought. They
were not, as we have seen, in any sense remarkable men
intellectually, but they had one preparation for the work
for which Jesus chose them which has not been a common
one, either then or since. They were wholly consecrated
to God. It is not often we meet with men capable of an
entire self-surrender; these men were. They were so entirely
devoted to God that, when Jesus called on them to
give up their worldly callings and forsake all they had, to
follow him, they obeyed without a question or a hesitating
moment. How many men should we find in the church
now that would do the same? Christ proposed this test
to one young ruler,—amiable, reverent, moral, and religious,—and
he "went away sad." He could do a great
deal for God, but he could not give up ALL. Christ's
disciples gave ALL to him, and therefore he gave ALL to
them. Therefore he gave them to share his throne and
his glory. The Apocalyptic vision showed graven on the
foundations of the golden city the names of the twelve
Apostles of the Lamb, those true-hearted men who were
not only to be the founders of his church on earth, but
were, while he was yet in the flesh, his daily companions,
his friends, "his own."
We are struck, in the history of our Lord, with the
unworldliness of his manner of living his daily life and
fulfilling his great commission. It is emphatically true,
in the history of Jesus, that his ways are not as our ways,
and his thoughts as our thoughts. He did not choose the
disciples of his first ministry as worldly wisdom would
have chosen them. Though men of good and honest hearts,
they were neither the most cultured nor the most influential
of his nation. We should have said that men of the
standing of Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus were preferable,
other things being equal, to Peter the fisherman or
Matthew the tax-gatherer; but Jesus thought otherwise.
And, furthermore, he sometimes selected those apparently
most unlikely to further his ends. Thus, when he
had a mission of mercy in view for Samaria, he called to
the work a woman; not such as we should suppose a
divine teacher would choose,—not a preëminently intellectual
or a very good woman,—but, on the contrary, one
of a careless life, and loose morals, and little culture.
The history of this person, of the way in which he sought
her acquaintance, arrested her attention, gained access to
her heart, and made of her a missionary to draw the attention
of her people to him, is wonderfully given by St.
John. We have the image of a woman—such as many
are, social, good-humored, talkative, and utterly without
any high moral sense—approaching the well, where she
sees this weary Jew reclining to rest himself. He introduces
himself to her acquaintance by asking a favor,—the
readiest way to open the heart of a woman of that
class. She is evidently surprised that he will speak to
her, being a Jew, and she a daughter of a despised and
hated race. "How is it," she says, "that thou, a Jew,
askest drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" Jesus now
answers her in that symbolic and poetic strain which was
familiar with him: "If thou knewest the gift of God,
and who this is that asketh drink of thee, thou wouldst
ask of him, and he would give thee living water." The
woman sees in this only the occasion for a lively rejoinder:
"Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is
deep; from whence then hast thou that living water?"
With that same mysterious air, as if speaking unconsciously
from out some higher sphere, he answers, "Whosoever
drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but whosoever
shall drink of the water that I shall give shall never
thirst. The water that I shall give shall be a well in him
springing up to everlasting life."
Impressed strangely by the words of the stranger, she
answers confusedly, "Sir, give me this water, that I thirst
not, neither come hither to draw." There is a feeble
attempt at a jest struggling with the awe which is growing
upon her. Jesus now touches the vital spot in her life.
"Go, call thy husband and come hither." She said, "I
have no husband." He answers, "Well hast thou said I
have no husband; thou hast had five husbands, and he
thou now hast is not thy husband; in that saidst thou
truly."
The stern, grave chastity of the Jew, his reverence for
marriage, strike coldly on the light-minded woman accustomed
to the easy tolerance of a low state of society. She
is abashed, and hastily seeks to change the subject: "Sir,
I see thou art a prophet;" and then she introduces the
controverted point of the two liturgies and temples of
Samaria and Jerusalem,—not the first nor the last was
she of those who seek relief from conscience by discussing
doctrinal dogmas. Then, to our astonishment, Jesus proceeds
to declare to this woman of light mind and loose
morality the sublime doctrines of spiritual worship, to
predict the new era which is dawning on the world:
"Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when neither in
this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem shall ye worship the
Father. The hour cometh and now is when the true
worshipper shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth,
for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a
Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in
spirit and in truth." Then, in a sort of confused awe at
his earnestness, the woman said, "I know that Messiah
shall come, and when he is come he will tell us all things."
Jesus saith unto her, "I that speak unto thee am he."
At this moment the disciples returned. With their
national prejudices, it was very astonishing, as they drew
nigh, to see that their Master was in close and earnest
conversation with a Samaritan woman. Nevertheless,
when the higher and godlike in Jesus was fully enkindled,
the light and fire were such as to awe them. They saw
that he was in an exalted mood, which they dared not
question. All the infinite love of the Saviour, the shepherd
of souls, was awaking within him; the soul whom
he has inspired with a new and holy calling is leaving him
on a mission that is to bring crowds to his love. The disciples
pray him to eat, but he is no longer hungry, no longer
thirsty, no longer weary; he exults in the gifts that he is
ready to give, and the hearts that are opening to receive.
The disciples pray him, "Master, eat." He said, "I
have meat to eat that ye know not of." They question
in an undertone, "Hath any one brought him aught to
eat?" He answers, "My meat and my drink is to do the
will of Him that sent me, and to finish his work." Then,
pointing towards the city, he speaks impassioned words of
a harvest which is at hand; and they wonder.
But meanwhile the woman, with the eagerness and
bright, social readiness which characterize her, is calling
to her townsmen, "Come, see a man that told me all that
ever I did. Is not this the Christ?"
What followed on this? A crowd press out to see the
wonder. Jesus is invited as an honored guest; he spends
two days in the city, and gathers a band of disciples.
After the resurrection of Jesus, we find further fruits
of the harvest sown by a chance interview of Jesus with
this woman. In the eighth of Acts we read of the ingathering
of a church in a city of Samaria, where it is said that
"the people, with one accord, gave heed to the things
spoken by Philip, and there was great joy in that city."
One thing in this story impresses us strongly,—the
power which Jesus had to touch the divinest capabilities
in the unlikeliest subjects. He struck at once and directly
for what was highest and noblest in souls where it lay
most hidden. As physician of souls he appealed directly
to the vital moral force, and it acted under his touch. He
saw the higher nature in this woman, and as one might
draw a magnet over a heap of rubbish and bring out pure
metal, so he from this careless, light-minded, good-natured,
unprincipled creature brought out the suppressed and hidden
yearning for a better and higher life. She had no
prejudices to keep, no station to preserve; she was even
to her own low moral sense consciously a sinner, and she
was ready at the kind and powerful appeal to leave all and
follow him.
We have no further history of her. She is living now
somewhere; but wherever she may be, we may be quite
sure she never has forgotten the conversation at the well
in Samaria, and the man who "told her all that ever she
did."
The absolute divinity of Jesus, the height at which he
stood above all men, is nowhere so shown as in what he
dared and did for woman, and the godlike consciousness of
authority with which he did it. It was at a critical period
in his ministry, when all eyes were fixed on him in keen
inquiry, when many of the respectable classes were yet
trembling in the balance whether to accept his claims or
not, that Jesus in the calmest and most majestic manner
took the ground that the sins of a fallen woman were like
any other sins, and that repentant love entitled to equal
forgiveness. The story so wonderful can be told only in
the words of the sacred narrative:—
"And one of the Pharisees desired him that he would eat
with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house and sat down
to meat. And behold a woman in that city which was a sinner,
when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house,
brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet
behind him, weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears,
and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his
feet and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the
Pharisee which had bidden him saw it, he spake within himself,
saying, This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who
and what manner of woman this is, for she is a sinner. And
Jesus answering said unto him, Simon, I have somewhat to say
unto thee. He said unto him, Master, say on. There was a
certain creditor had two debtors; the one owed him five hundred
pence and the other fifty, and when they had nothing to
pay he frankly forgave them both. Tell me, therefore, which
will love him most. Simon answered and said, I suppose he
to whom he forgave most. And he said unto him, Thou hast
rightly judged. And he turned to the woman and said unto
Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thy house and
thou gavest me no water for my feet, but she hath washed my
feet with tears and wiped them with the hairs of her head.
Thou gavest me no kiss, but this woman, since the time I
came in, hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil
thou didst not anoint, but she hath anointed my feet with
ointment. Wherefore, I say unto you, her sins, which are
many, are forgiven her, for she loved much; but to whom little
is forgiven the same loveth little. And he said unto her, Thy
sins are forgiven. And they that sat at meat began to say
within themselves, Who is this that forgiveth sins also? And
he said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace."
Nothing can be added to the pathos and solemn dignity
of this story, in which our Lord assumed with tranquil
majesty the rights to supreme love possessed by the Creator,
and his sovereign power to forgive sins and dispense
favors. The repentant Magdalene became henceforth one
of the characteristic figures in the history of the Christian
Church. Mary Magdalene became eventually a prominent
character in the mythic legends of the mediæval mythology.
A long history of missionary labors and enthusiastic
preaching of the gospel in distant regions of the earth is
ascribed to her. Churches arose that bore her name,
hymns were addressed to her. Even the reforming Savonarola
addresses one of his spiritual canticles to St. Mary
Magdalene. The various pictures of her which occur in
every part of Europe are a proof of the interest which
these legends inspired. The most of them are wild and
poetic, and exhibit a striking contrast to the concise brevity
and simplicity of the New Testament story.
The mythic legends make up a romance in which Mary
the sister of Martha and Mary Magdalene the sinner are
oddly considered as the same person. It is sufficient to
read the chapter in St. John which gives an account of
the raising of Lazarus, to perceive that such a confusion
is absurd. Mary and Martha there appear as belonging to
a family in good standing to which many flocked with
expressions of condolence and respect in time of affliction.
And afterwards, in that grateful feast made for the restoration
of their brother, we read that so many flocked to the
house that the jealousy of the chief priests was excited.
All these incidents, representing a family of respectability,
are entirely inconsistent with any such supposition. But
while we repudiate this extravagance of the tradition, there
does seem ground for identifying the Mary Magdalene
who was one of the most devoted followers of our Lord
with the forgiven sinner of this narrative. We read of
a company of women who followed Jesus and ministered
to him. In the eighth chapter of Luke he is said to be
accompanied by "certain women which had been healed
of evil spirits and infirmities," among whom is mentioned
"Mary called Magdalene," as having been a victim of
demoniacal possession. Some women of rank and fortune
also are mentioned as members of the same company:
"Joanna the wife of Chusa, Herod's steward, and Susanna,
and many others who ministered to him of their substance."
A modern commentator thinks it improbable that Mary
Magdalene could be identified with the "sinner" spoken
of by St. Luke, because women of standing like Joanna
and Susanna would not have received one of her class to
their company. We ask why not? If Jesus had received
her, had forgiven and saved her; if he acknowledged previously
her grateful ministrations,—is it likely that they
would reject her? It was the very peculiarity and glory
of the new kingdom that it had a better future for sinners,
and for sinful woman as well as sinful man. Jesus did
not hesitate to say to the proud and prejudiced religious
aristocracy of his day, "The publicans and harlots go into
the kingdom of heaven before you." We cannot doubt
that the loving Christian women who ministered to Jesus
received this penitent sister as a soul absolved and purified
by the sovereign word of their Lord, and henceforth there
was for her a full scope for that ardent, self-devoting
power of her nature which had been her ruin, and was now
to become her salvation.
Some commentators seem to think that the dreadful
demoniacal possession which was spoken of in Mary Magdalene
proves her not to have been identical with the
woman of St. Luke. But, on the contrary, it would seem
exactly to account for actions of a strange and unaccountable
wickedness, for a notoriety in crime that went far to
lead the Pharisees to feel that her very touch was pollution.
The story is symbolic of what is too often seen
in the fall of woman. A noble and beautiful nature
wrecked through inconsiderate prodigality of love, deceived,
betrayed, ruined, often drifts like a shipwrecked bark into
the power of evil spirits. Rage, despair, revenge, cruelty,
take possession of the crushed ruin that should have been
the home of the sweetest affections. We are not told when
or where the healing word was spoken that drove the cruel
fiends from Mary's soul. Perhaps before she entered the
halls of the Pharisee, while listening to the preaching of
Jesus, the madness and despair had left her. We can
believe that in his higher moods virtue went from him,
and there was around him a holy and cleansing atmosphere
from which all evil fled away,—a serene and healing
purity which calmed the throbbing fever of passion and
gave the soul once more the image of its better self.
We see in the manner in which Mary found her way
to the feet of Jesus the directness and vehemence, the uncalculating
self-sacrifice and self-abandon, of one of those
natures which, when they move, move with a rush of undivided
impulse; which, when they love, trust all, believe
all, and are ready to sacrifice all. As once she had lost
herself in this self-abandonment, so now at the feet of her
God she gains all by the same power of self-surrender.
We do not meet Mary Magdalene again till we find
her at the foot of the cross, sharing the last anguish of our
Lord and his mother. We find her watching the sepulchre,
preparing sweet spices for embalming. In the dim
gray of the resurrection morning she is there again, only
to find the sepulchre open and the beloved form gone.
Everything in this last scene is in consistency with the
idea of the passionate self-devotion of a nature whose sole
life is in its love. The disciples, when they found not the
body, went away; but Mary stood without at the sepulchre
weeping, and as she wept she stooped down and looked
into the sepulchre. The angel said to her, "Woman, why
weepest thou? She answered, Because they have taken
away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid
him." She then turns and sees through her tears dimly
the form of a man standing there. "Jesus saith unto her,
Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She,
supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if
thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid
him, and I will go and take him away. Jesus saith unto
her, Mary! She turned herself and said unto him, Rabboni,—Master!"
In all this we see the characteristic devotion and energy
of her who loved much because she was forgiven much.
It was the peculiarity of Jesus that he saw the precious
capability of every nature, even in the very dust of defilement.
The power of devoted love is the crown jewel of
the soul, and Jesus had the eye to see where it lay trampled
in the mire, and the strong hand to bring it forth
purified and brightened. It is the deepest malignity of
Satan to degrade and ruin souls through love. It is the
glory of Christ, through love, to redeem and restore.
In the history of Christ as a teacher, it is remarkable
that, while he was an object of enthusiastic devotion to
so many women, while a band of them followed his preaching
and ministered to his wants and those of his disciples,
yet there was about him something so entirely unworldly,
so sacredly high and pure, that even the very suggestion
of scandal in this regard is not to be found in the bitterest
vituperations of his enemies of the first two centuries.
If we compare Jesus with Socrates, the moral teacher
most frequently spoken of as approaching him, we shall
see a wonderful contrast. Socrates associated with courtesans,
without passion and without reproof, in a spirit of
half-sarcastic, philosophic tolerance. No quickening of
the soul of woman, no call to a higher life, came from
him. Jesus is stern and grave in his teachings of personal
purity, severe in his requirements. He was as intolerant
to sin as he was merciful to penitence. He did not extenuate
the sins he forgave. He declared the sins of Mary
to be many in the same breath that he pronounced her
pardon. He said to the adulterous woman whom he protected,
"Go, sin no more." The penitents who joined
the company of his disciples were so raised above their
former selves, that, instead of being the shame, they were
the glory of the new kingdom. St. Paul says to the first
Christians, speaking of the adulterous and impure, "Such
were some of you, but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified,
but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by
the Spirit of God."
The tradition of the church that Mary Magdalene was
an enthusiastic preacher of Jesus seems in keeping with
all we know of the strength and fervor of her character.
Such love must find expression, and we are told that when
the first persecution scattered the little church at Jerusalem,
"they that were scattered went everywhere, preaching
the word." Some of the most effective preaching of Christ
is that of those who testify in their own person of a great
salvation. "He can save to the uttermost, for he has
saved me," is a testimony that often goes more straight to
the heart than all the arguments of learning. Christianity
had this peculiarity over all other systems, that it not
only forgave the past, but made of its bitter experiences
a healing medicine; so that those who had sinned deepest
might have therefrom a greater redeeming power. "When
thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren," was the
watchword of the penitent.
The wonderful mind of Goethe has seized upon and
embodied this peculiarity of Christianity in his great poem
of "Faust." The first part shows the Devil making of the
sweetest and noblest affection of the confiding Margaret
a cruel poison to corrupt both body and soul. We see her
driven to crime, remorse, shame, despair, all human forms
and forces of society united to condemn her, when with
a last cry she stretches her poor hands to heaven and says,
"Judgment of God, I commend myself to you;" and
then falls a voice from heaven, "She is judged; she is
saved."
In the second part we see the world-worn, weary Faust
passing through the classic mythology, vainly seeking rest
and finding none; he seeks rest in a life of benevolence to
man, but fiends of darkness conflict with his best aspirations,
and dog his steps through life, and in his dying
hour gather round to seize his soul and carry it to perdition.
But around him is a shining band. Mary the
mother of Jesus with a company of purified penitents
encircle him, and his soul passes, in infantine weakness,
to the guardian arms of Margaret,—once a lost and ruined
woman, now a strong and pitiful angel,—who, like a
tender mother, leads the new-born soul to look upon the
glories of heaven, while angel voices sing to the victory of
good over evil:—
"All that is transient
Is but a parable;
The unattainable
Here is made real.
The indescribable
Here is accomplished;
The eternal womanly
Draws us upward and onward."
The interest inspired by the wonderful character of
Jesus rests especially on those incidents which are most
purely human, his private, personal friendships, his keen
sympathy with the suffering and the afflicted. Among
these incidents the story and characters of the two sisters,
Martha and Mary, have been set before us with a fine
individualism of dramatic representation that seems to
make them real to us, even at this distance of time.
The two sisters of Bethany have had for ages a name
and a living power in the church. Thousands of hearts
have throbbed with theirs; thousands have wept sympathetic
tears in their sorrows and rejoiced in their joy. By
a few simple touches in the narrative they are so delicately
and justly discriminated that they stand for the representatives
of two distinct classes. Some of the ancient Christian
writers considered them as types of the active and the
contemplative aspects of religion. Martha is viewed as
the secular Christian, serving God in and through the
channels of worldly business, and Mary as the more peculiarly
religious person, devoted to a life of holy meditation
and the researches of heavenly truth. The two were
equally the friends of Jesus. Apparently, the two sisters
with one brother were an orphan family, united by the
strongest mutual affection, and affording a circle peculiarly
congenial to the Master.
They inhabited a rural home just outside of Jerusalem;
and it seems that here, after the labors of a day spent in
teaching in the city, our Lord found at evening a homelike
retreat where he could enjoy perfect quiet and perfect
love. It would seem, from many touches in the Gospel
narrative, as if Jesus, amid the labors and applauses and
successes of a public life, yearned for privacy and domesticity,—for
that home love which he persistently renounced
to give himself wholly to mankind. There is
a shade of pathos in his answer to one who proposed to be
his disciple and dwell with him: "Foxes have holes; the
birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not
where to lay his head." This little orphan circle, with
their quiet home, were thus especially dear to him, and it
appears that this was his refuge during that last week of
his life, when he knew that every day was bringing him
nearer to the final anguish.
It is wonderful how sharply and truly, in a narrative so
brief, the characters of Martha and Mary are individualized.
Martha, in her Judæan dress and surroundings, is,
after all, exactly such a good woman as is often seen in
our modern life,—a woman primarily endowed with the
faculties necessary for getting on in the world, yet sincerely
religious. She is energetic, businesslike, matter-of-fact,
strictly orthodox, and always ready for every emergency.
She lives in the present life strongly and intensely, and
her religion exhibits itself through regular forms and agencies.
She believes in the future life orthodoxly, and is
always prompt to confess its superior importance as a
matter of doctrine, though prone to make material things
the first in practice. Many such women there are in the
high places of the Christian Church, and much good they
do. They manage fairs, they dress churches, they get up
religious festivals, their names are on committees, they are
known at celebrations. They rule their own homes with
activity and diligence, and they are justly honored by all
who know them. Now, nothing is more remarkable in
the history of Jesus than the catholicity of his appreciation
of character. He never found fault with natural organization,
or expected all people to be of one pattern. He did
not break with Thomas for being naturally a cautious
doubter, or Peter for being a precipitate believer; and it
is specially recorded in the history of this family that
Jesus loved Martha. He understood her, he appreciated
her worth, and he loved her.
In Mary we see the type of those deeper and more sensitive
natures who ever aspire above and beyond the material
and temporal to the eternal and divine; souls that are
seeking and inquiring with a restlessness that no earthly
thing can satisfy, who can find no peace until they find
it in union with God.
In St. Luke we have a record of the manner in which
the first acquaintance with this family was formed. This
historian says: "A woman named Martha received him at
her house." Evidently the decisive and salient power of
her nature caused her to be regarded as mistress of the
family. There was a grown-up brother in the family; but
this house is not called the house of Lazarus, but the house
of Martha—a form of speaking the more remarkable from
the great superiority or leadership which ancient customs
awarded to the male sex. But Martha was one of those
natural leaders whom everybody instinctively thinks of as
the head of any house they may happen to belong to. Her
tone toward Mary is authoritative. The Mary-nature is
a nature apt to appear to disadvantage in physical things.
It is often puzzled, and unskilled, and unready in the
details and emergencies of a life like ours, which so little
meets its deepest feelings and most importunate wants.
It acquires skill in earthly things only as a matter of discipline
and conscience, but is always yearning above them
to something higher and divine. A delicacy of moral
nature suggests to such a person a thousand scruples of
conscientious inquiry in every turn of life, which embarrass
directness of action. To the Martha-nature, practical,
direct, and prosaic, all these doubts, scruples, hesitations,
and unreadinesses appear only as pitiable weaknesses.
Again, Martha's nature attaches a vast importance to
many things which, in the view of Mary, are so fleeting
and perishable, and have so little to do with the deeper
immortal wants of the soul, that it is difficult for her even
to remember and keep them in sight. The requirements
of etiquette, the changes and details of fashion, the thousand
particulars which pertain to keeping up a certain
footing in society and a certain position in the world—all
these Martha has at her fingers' ends. They are the
breath of her nostrils, while Mary is always forgetting,
overlooking, and transgressing them. Many a Mary has
escaped into a convent, or joined a sisterhood, or worn the
plain dress of the Quaker in order that she might escape
from the exaction of the Marthas of her day, "careful [or,
more literally, full of care] and troubled about many
things."
It appears that in her way Martha was a religious
woman, a sincere member of the Jewish Church, and an
intense believer. The preaching of Christ was the great
religious phenomenon of the times, and Martha, Mary,
and Lazarus joined the crowd who witnessed his miracles
and listened to his words. Both women accepted his
message and believed his Messiahship—Martha, from the
witness of his splendid miracles; Mary, from the deep
accord of her heart with the wonderful words he had
uttered. To Martha he was the King that should reign
in splendor at Jerusalem, and raise their nation to an
untold height of glory; to Mary he was the answer to the
eternal question—the Way, the Truth, the Life, for
which she had been always longing.
Among many who urge and press hospitality, Martha's
invitation prevails. A proud home is that, when Jesus
follows her—her prize, her captive. The woman in our
day who has captured in her net of hospitalities the orator,
the poet, the warrior—the star of all eyes, the central
point of all curiosity, desire, and regard—can best appreciate
Martha's joy. She will make an entertainment that
will do credit to the occasion. She revolves prodigies of
hospitality. She invites guests to whom her Acquisition
shall be duly exhibited, and all is hurry, bustle, and commotion.
But Mary follows him, silent, with a fluttering
heart. His teaching has aroused the divine longing, the
immortal pain, to a throbbing intensity; a sweet presentiment
fills her soul, that she is near One through whom
the way into the Holiest is open, and now is the hour.
She neither hears nor sees the bustle of preparation; but
apart, where the Master has seated himself, she sits down
at his feet, and her eyes, more than her voice, address
to him that question and that prayer which are the question
and the one great reality of all this fleeting, mortal
life.
The question is answered; the prayer is granted. At
his feet she becomes spiritually clairvoyant. The way to
God becomes clear and open. Her soul springs toward
the light; is embraced by the peace of God that passeth
understanding. It is a soul-crisis, and the Master sees
that in that hour his breath has unfolded into blossom
buds that had been struggling in darkness. Mary has
received in her bosom the "white stone with the new
name, which no man knoweth save him that receiveth it,"
and of which Jesus only is the giver. As Master and
disciple sit in that calm and sweet accord, in which giver
and receiver are alike blessed, suddenly Martha appears
and breaks into the interview, in a characteristically imperative
sentence: "Lord, dost thou not care that my
sister hath left me to serve alone? Bid her, therefore,
that she help me."
Nothing could more energetically indicate Martha's
character than this sentence. It shows her blunt sincerity,
her conscientious, matter-of-fact worldliness, and her dictatorial
positiveness. Evidently, here is a person accustomed
to having her own way and bearing down all about
her; a person who believes in herself without a doubt,
and is so positive that her way is the only right one that
she cannot but be amazed that the Master has not at once
seen as she does. To be sure, this is in her view the
Christ, the Son of God, the King of Israel, the human
being whom in her deepest heart she reverences; but no
matter, she is so positive that she is right that she does
not hesitate to say her say, and make her complaint of
him as well as of her sister. People like Martha often
arraign and question the very providence of God itself
when it stands in the way of their own plans. Martha is
sure of her ground. Here is the Messiah, the King of
Israel, at her house, and she is getting up an entertainment
worthy of him, slaving herself to death for him, and
he takes no notice, and most inconsiderately allows her
dreamy sister to sit listening to him, instead of joining in
the preparation.
The reply of Jesus went, as his replies were wont to
do, to the very root-fault of Martha's life, the fault of all
such natures: "Martha, Martha! thou art careful and
troubled about many things, but one thing is needful, and
Mary hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken
from her." The Master's words evidently recognize that
in that critical hour Mary had passed a boundary in her
soul history, and made an attainment of priceless value.
She had gained something that could never be taken from
her; and she had gained it by that single-hearted devotion
to spiritual things which made her prompt to know and
seize the hour of opportunity.
The brief narrative there intermits; we are not told
how Martha replied, or what are the results of this plain,
tender faithfulness of reproof. The Saviour, be it observed,
did not blame Martha for her nature. He did not
blame her for not being Mary; but he did blame her for
not restraining and governing her own nature and keeping
it in due subjection to higher considerations. A being of
brighter worlds, he stood looking on Martha's life,—on
her activities and bustle and care; and to him how sorrowfully
worthless the greater part of them appeared! To
him they were mere toys and playthings, such as a child
is allowed to play with in the earlier, undeveloped hours
of existence; not to be harshly condemned, but still utterly
fleeting and worthless in the face of the tremendous eternal
realities, the glories and the dangers of the eternal state.
It must be said here that all we know of our Lord leads
us to feel that he was not encouraging and defending in
Mary a selfish, sentimental indulgence in her own cherished
emotions and affections, leaving the burden of necessary
care on a sister who would have been equally glad to
sit at Jesus' feet. That was not his reading of the situation.
It was that Martha, engrossed in a thousand cares,
burdened herself with a weight of perplexities of which
there was no need, and found no time and had no heart
to come to him and speak of the only, the one thing that
endures beyond the present world. To how many hearts
does this reproof apply? How many who call themselves
Christians are weary, wasted, worn, drained of life, injured
in health, fretted in temper, by a class of anxieties so
purely worldly that they can never bring them to Christ,
or if they do, would meet first and foremost his tender
reproof, "Thou art careful and troubled about many things;
there is but one thing really needful. Seek that good part
which shall never be taken away."
What fruit this rebuke bore will appear as we further
pursue the history of the sister. The subsequent story
shows that Martha was a brave, sincere, good woman,
capable of yielding to reproof and acknowledging a fault.
There is precious material in such, if only their powers be
turned to the highest and best things.
It is an interesting thought that the human affection of
Jesus for one family has been made the means of leaving
on record the most consoling experience for the sorrows of
bereavement that sacred literature affords. Viewed merely
on the natural side, the intensity of human affections and
the frightful possibilities of suffering involved in their very
sweetness present a fearful prospect when compared with
that stony inflexibility of natural law, which goes forth
crushing, bruising, lacerating, without the least apparent
feeling for human agony.
The God of nature appears silent, unalterable, unsympathetic,
pursuing general good without a throb of pity for
individual suffering; and that suffering is so unspeakable,
so terrible! Close shadowing every bridal, every cradle,
is this awful possibility of death that may come at any
moment, unannounced and inevitable. The joy of this
hour may become the bitterness of the next; the ring, the
curl of hair, the locket, the picture, that to-day are a
treasure of hope and happiness, to-morrow may be only
weapons of bitterness that stab at every view. The silent
inflexibility of God in upholding laws that work out such
terrible agonies and suffering is something against which
the human heart moans and chafes through all ancient
literature. "The gods envy the happy," was the construction
put upon the problem of life as the old sages
viewed it.
But in this second scene of the story of the sisters of
Bethany we have that view of God which is the only one
powerful enough to soothe and control the despair of the
stricken heart. It says to us that behind this seeming
inflexibility, this mighty and most needful unholding of
law, is a throbbing, sympathizing heart,—bearing with us
the sorrow of this struggling period of existence, and
pointing to a perfect fulfillment in the future.
The story opens most remarkably. In the absence of
the Master, the brother is stricken down with deadly
disease. Forthwith a hasty messenger is dispatched to
Jesus. "Lord, he whom thou lovest is sick." Here is
no prayer expressed; but human language could not be
more full of all the elements of the best kind of prayer.
It is the prayer of perfect trust—the prayer of love that
has no shadow of doubt. If only we let Jesus know we
are in trouble, we are helped. We need not ask, we need
only say, "He whom thou lovest is sick," and he will
understand, and the work will be done. We are safe with
him.
Then comes the seeming contradiction—the trial of
faith—that gives this story such a value: "Now Jesus
loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. When, therefore,
he heard that he was sick, he abode two days in the
same place where he was." Because he loved them, he
delayed; because he loved them, he resisted that most
touching appeal that heart can make,—the appeal of utter
trust. We can imagine the wonder, the anguish, the conflict
of spirit, when death at last shut the door in the face
of their prayers. Had God forgotten to be gracious?
Had he in anger shut up his tender mercy? Did not
Jesus love them? Had he not power to heal? Why
then had he suffered this? Ah! this is exactly the strait
in which thousands of Christ's own beloved ones must
stand in the future; and Mary and Martha, unconsciously
to themselves, were suffering with Christ in the great
work of human consolation. Their distress and anguish
and sorrow were necessary to work out a great experience
of God's love, where multitudes of anguished hearts have
laid themselves down as on a pillow of repose, and have
been comforted.
Something of this is shadowed in the Master's words:
"This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of
God,—that the Son of God might be glorified thereby."
What was that glory of God? Not most his natural
power, but his sympathetic tenderness, his loving heart.
What is the glory of the Son of God? Not the mere
display of power, but power used to console, in manifesting
to the world that this cruel death—the shadow that
haunts all human life, that appalls and terrifies, that scatters
anguish and despair—is not death, but the gateway
of a brighter life, in which Jesus shall restore love to love,
in eternal reunion.
In the scene with the sisters before the Saviour arrives,
we are struck with the consideration in which the family
is held. This house is thronged with sympathizing friends,
and, as appears from some incidents afterwards, friends
among the higher classes of the nation. Martha hears of
the approach of Jesus, and goes forth to meet him.
In all the scene which follows we are impressed with
the dignity and worth of Martha's character. We see in
the scene of sorrow that Martha has been the strong, practical
woman, on whom all rely in the hour of sickness, and
whose energy is equal to any emergency. We see her
unsubdued by emotion, ready to go forth to receive Jesus,
and prompt to meet the issues of the moment. We see,
too, that the appreciation of the worth of her character,
which had led him to admonish her against the materialistic
tendencies of such a nature, was justified by the
fruits of that rebuke. Martha had grown more spiritual
by intercourse with the Master, and as she falls at Jesus'
feet the half-complaint which her sorrow wrings from her
is here merged in the expression of her faith: "Lord, if
thou hadst been here my brother had not died; but I
know that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God,
God will give it to thee. Jesus saith unto her, Thy
brother shall rise again." Like every well-trained religious
Jew of her day, Martha was versed in the doctrine
of the general resurrection. That this belief was a more
actively operating motive with the ancient Jewish than
with the modern Christian Church of our day is attested
by the affecting history of the martyrdom of the mother
and her seven sons, in the Book of Maccabees. Martha
therefore makes prompt answer, "I know that he shall rise
again in the resurrection at the last day." Jesus answered
her in words which no mere mortal could have uttered—words
of a divine fullness of meaning—"I am the Resurrection
and the Life: he that believeth in me, though
dead, shall live, and whosoever believeth in me is immortal."
In these words he claims to be the great source of Life,—the
absolute Lord and Controller of all that relates to
life, death, and eternity; and he makes the appeal to
Martha's faith: "Believest thou this?" "Yea, Lord,"
she responds, "I believe thou art the Christ of God that
should come into the world." And then she runs and
calls her sister secretly, saying, "The Master is come and
calleth for thee." As a majestic symphony modulates into
a tender and pathetic minor passage, so the tone of the
narrative here changes to the most exquisite pathos.
Mary, attended by her weeping friends, comes and falls at
Jesus' feet, and sobs out: "Lord, if thou hadst been here
my brother had not died!"
It indicates the delicate sense of character which ever
marked the intercourse of our Lord, that to this helpless,
heart-broken child prostrate at his feet he addresses no
appeal to reason or faith. He felt within himself the
overwhelming power of that tide of emotion which for the
time bore down both reason and faith in helpless anguish.
With such sorrow there was no arguing, and Jesus did not
attempt argument; for the story goes on: "When Jesus
saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping that came
with her, he groaned in spirit and was troubled; and he
said, Where have ye laid him? And they said, Lord,
come and see. Jesus wept." Those tears interpreted for
all time God's silence and apparent indifference to human
suffering; and wherever Christ is worshiped as the brightness
of the Father's glory and the express image of his
person, they bear witness that the God who upholds the
laws that wound and divide human affections still feels
with us the sorrow which he permits. "In all our afflictions
he is afflicted."
And now came the sublime and solemn scene when he
who had claimed to be the Resurrection and the Life made
good his claim. Standing by the grave he called, as he
shall one day call to all the dead, "Lazarus, come forth!"
And here the curtain drops over the scene of restoration.
We do not see this family circle again till just before
the final scene of the great tragedy of Christ's life. The
hour was at hand, of suffering, betrayal, rejection, denial,
shame, agony, and death; and with the shadow of this
awful cloud over his mind, Jesus comes for the last time
to Jerusalem. To the eye of the thoughtless, Jesus was
never so popular, so beloved, as at the moment when he
entered the last week of his life at Jerusalem. Palm
branches and flowers strewed his way, hosannas greeted
him on every side, and the chief priests and Scribes said,
"Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing? Behold the world
is gone after him!" But the mind of Jesus was wrapped in
that awful shade of the events that were so soon to follow.
He passes out, after his first day in Jerusalem, to
Bethany, and takes refuge in this dear circle. There they
make him a feast, and Martha serves, but Lazarus, as a
restored treasure, sits at the table. Then took Mary a
pound of ointment, very precious, and anointed the head
of Jesus, and anointed his feet with the ointment, and
wiped them with her hair.
There is something in the action that marks the poetic
and sensitive nature of Mary. Her heart was overburdened
with gratitude and love. She longed to give something,
and how little was there that she could give! She
buys the most rare, the most costly of perfumes, breaks
the vase, and sheds it upon his head. Could she have put
her whole life, her whole existence, into that fleeting perfume
and poured it out for him, she gladly would have
done it. That was what the action said, and what Jesus
understood. Forthwith comes the criticism of Judas:
"What a waste! It were better to give the money to the
poor than to expend it in mere sentimentalism." Jesus
defended her with all the warmth of his nature, in words
tinged with the presentiment of his approaching doom:
"Let her alone; she is come aforehand to anoint my body
for the burial." Then, as if deeply touched with the
reality of that love which thus devoted itself to him, he
adds, "Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout
the world, there shall what this woman hath done be
had in remembrance." The value set upon pure love,
upon that unconsidering devotion which gives its best and
utmost freely and wholly, is expressed in these words. A
loving God seeks love; and he who thus spoke is he who
afterward, when he appeared in glory, declared his abhorrence
of lukewarmness in his followers: "I would thou
wert cold or hot; because thou art lukewarm I will spue
thee out of my mouth." It is significant of the change
which had passed upon Martha that no criticism of Mary's
action in this case came from her. There might have been
a time when this inconsiderate devotion of a poetic nature
would have annoyed her and called out remonstrance. In
her silence we feel a sympathetic acquiescence.
After this scene we meet the family no more. Doubtless
the three were among the early watchers upon the
resurrection morning; doubtless they were of the number
among whom Jesus stood after the resurrection, saying,
"Peace be unto you;" doubtless they were of those who
went out with him to the Mount of Olives when he was
taken up into heaven; and doubtless they are now with
him in glory: for it is an affecting thought that no human
personality is ever lost or to be lost. In the future ages
it may be our happiness to see and know those whose
history has touched our hearts so deeply.
One lesson from this history we pray may be taken into
every mourning heart. The Apostle says that Jesus upholds
all things by the word of his power. The laws by
which accident, sickness, loss, and death are constantly
bringing despair and sorrow to sensitive hearts are upheld
by that same Jesus who wept at the grave of Lazarus, and
who is declared to be Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and
forever. When we see the exceeding preciousness of
human love in his eyes, and realize his sympathetic nature,
and then remember that he is Resurrection and Life,
can we not trust him with our best beloved, and look to
him for that hour of reunion which he has promised?
The doctrine of the resurrection of the body is a precious
concession to human weakness and human love. How
dear the outward form of our child,—how distressing to
think we shall never see it again! But Christ promises
we shall. Here is a mystery. St. Paul says, that as the
seed buried in the earth is to the new plant or flower, so
is our present mortal body to the new immortal one that
shall spring from it. It shall be our friend, our child,
familiar to us with all that mysterious charm of personal
identity, yet clothed with the life and beauty of the skies;
and then the Lord God will wipe away all tears from all
faces.
There was one great characteristic in the life of Jesus
which his followers succeed in imitating less than any
other, and that is a singular sweetness and attractiveness
which drew toward him even the sinful and fallen. There
are the most obvious indications in all the narrative that
Christ's virtue was not of the repellent kind that drove
sinners away from him, but that there was around him a
peculiar charm and graciousness of manner which affected
the most uncongenial characters.
We are all familiar with a style of goodness quite the
reverse of this—a goodness that is terrible to evil-doers—a
goodness that is instinctively felt to have no sympathy
with the sinner. Such was the virtue of Christ's great
forerunner, John the Baptist. He commanded, but did
not charm; the attraction that drew men toward him was
that of mingled fear and curiosity, but there was no tenderness
in it. When the Scribes and Pharisees flocked to
his baptism, he met them with a thunderbolt: "O generation
of vipers! who hath warned you to flee from the
wrath to come?" He declined all social joys; he would
not eat or drink at men's tables; he dwelt alone in the
deserts, appearing as a Voice—a voice of warning and
terror! His disciples were few; he took no pains to make
them more.
But even this stern and rugged nature felt the charm
and sweetness of Jesus, as something different from himself.
It is very touching to read how the peculiar demeanor
of Jesus impressed this hardy old warrior: "And
looking on Jesus as he walked, he said, Behold the Lamb
of God, that taketh away the sin of the world." The
words seem as if they might have been said with tears in
the eyes. Immediately two of his few disciples left him
and followed Jesus; and he was content. "He must increase
and I must decrease," he said humbly. "He that
is from Heaven is above all."
We find that Jesus loved social life and the fellowship
of men. Though he spent the first forty days after his
mission began in the solitude of the desert, yet he returned
from it the same warm-hearted and social being as before.
The first appearance that he made was at a wedding-feast,
and his very first miracle was wrought to enhance its joy.
A wedding-feast in those lands meant more than with us.
It was not merely an hour given to festivity, but lasted
from three to seven days. There were large gatherings
of relations and friends from afar; there were dances and
songs, and every form of rejoicing; and at this particular
feast in Cana it seems Jesus and his mother were present
as honored and beloved guests. His gentleness and affability
led his mother to feel that she might perhaps gain
from him an aid to the inadequate provision made for the
hospitality of the occasion. His reply to her has been
deemed abrupt and severe. That it was not so understood
by his mother herself is evident from the fact that she did
not accept it as a refusal, but expected a compliance, and
gave orders to prepare for it. It was necessary when
among relatives in his family circle to express with great
decision the idea that his miraculous powers were not to
be considered as in any way under the control of his
private and human affections, and that he must use them
only as a Higher Power should direct.
His presence at this wedding was significant of that
divine love which ever watches over the family, and the
wine that he gave symbolized that cheer and support
which God's ever-present love and sympathy pours through
all the life of the household. We gather incidentally from
many seemingly casual statements that Jesus was often
invited to feasts in the houses of both rich and poor, and
cheerfully accepted these invitations even on the Sabbath
day.
He seems to have been also especially attractive to little
children; he loved them and noticed them; and it would
seem from some parts of the Gospel narrative as if the
little ones watched for his coming and ran to his arms
instinctively. Their artless, loving smiles, their clear,
candid eyes, reminded him of that world of love where he
had dwelt before he came to our earth, and he said, "Of
such is the kingdom of heaven." It was the sense that he
loved little ones that led mothers to force their way with
their infants through reproving and unsympathetic disciples;
there was that about Jesus which made every mother
sure that he would love her child, and that the very touch
of his hands would bring a blessing upon it; and when his
disciples treated the effort as an intrusion it is said "Jesus
was much displeased." He did not merely accept or tolerate
the movement, but entered into it with warmth and
enthusiasm; he did not coldly lay the tips of his sacred
fingers on them, but took them up in his arms and laid
his hands on them and blessed them; he embraced them
and held them to his heart as something that he would
make peculiarly his own.
It is no wonder, therefore, that Jesus was the children's
favorite, and that on his last triumphal entrance into Jerusalem
the hosannas of the children in the temple should
have been so loud and so persistent as to excite the anger
of the priests and Scribes. They called on him to silence
the little voices, as if they felt sure that he could control
them by a word; but that word Jesus refused to speak.
The voices of these young birds of paradise were dear to
him, and he said indignantly, "If these were forbidden to
speak the very stones would cry out."
But still more remarkable is the fact that Jesus was
attractive to a class who as a general thing hate and flee
from religious teachers. The publicans and sinners, the
disreputable and godless classes, felt themselves strangely
drawn to him. If we remember how intensely bitter was
the Jewish sense of degradation in being under Roman
taxation, and how hardly and cruelly the office of collecting
that tribute was often exercised, we may well think
that only Jews who cared little for the opinions of their
countrymen, and had little character to lose, would undertake
it. We know there are in all our cities desperate
and perishing classes inhabiting regions where it would be
hardly safe for a reputable person to walk. Yet in regions
like these the pure apparition of Jesus of Nazareth walked
serene, and all hearts were drawn to him.
What was the charm about him, that he whose rule of
morality was stricter than that of Scribes or Pharisees yet
attracted and drew after him the most abandoned classes?
They saw that he loved them. Yes, he really loved them.
The infinite love of God looked through his eyes, breathed
in his voice, and shed a persuasive charm through all his
words. To the intellectual and cultured men of the better
classes his word was, "Ye must be born again;" but to
these poor wanderers he said, "Ye may be born again.
All is not lost. Purity, love, a higher life, are all for
you,"—and he said it with such energy, such vital
warmth of sympathy, that they believed him. They
crowded round him and he welcomed them; they invited
him to their houses and he went; he sat with them at
table; he held their little ones in his arms; he gave himself
to them. When the Scribes and Pharisees murmured
at this intimacy, he answered, "The whole need not the
Physician, but those that are sick; I came not to call the
righteous, but sinners." His most beautiful parables, of
the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the Prodigal Son, were all
poured out of the fullness of his heart for them—and
what a heart! What news indeed, to these lost ones, to
be told that their Father cared for them the more because
they were lost; that he went after them because they
wandered; and that all around the pure throne of God
were pitying eyes watching for their return, and strong
hands of welcome stretched out to aid them back. No
wonder that the poor lost woman of the street had such
a courage and hope awakened in her that she pressed
through the sneering throng, and under the very eyes of
Scribe and Pharisee found her refuge and rest at the gracious
feet of such a Master. No wonder that Matthew
the publican rose up at once from the receipt of custom
and left all to follow that Jesus, who had taught him that
he too might be a son of God.
And we read of one Zaccheus, a poor worldly little man,
who had lived a hard, sharp, extortionate life, and perhaps
was supposed to have nothing good in him; but even he
felt a singular internal stir and longing for something
higher, awakened by this preacher, and when he heard
that Jesus of Nazareth was passing he ran and climbed
a tree that he might look on him as he passed. But the
gracious Stranger paused under the tree, and a sweet,
cheerful voice said, "Zaccheus, make haste and come
down, for to-day I must dine at thy house." Trembling,
scarce able to believe his good fortune, we are told he
came down and received Jesus joyfully. Immediately, as
flowers burst out under spring sunshine, awoke the virtues
in that heart: "Lord, half my goods I give to the poor,
and if I have taken anything by false accusation I restore
fourfold." This shows that the influence of Jesus was
no mere sentimental attraction, but a vital, spiritual force,
corresponding to what was said of him: "As many as
received him to them gave he power to become sons of
God."
It is a mistake to suppose that wicked people are happy
in wickedness. Wrong-doing is often a sorrowful chain
and burden, and those who bear it are often despairingly
conscious of their degradation.
Jesus carried with him the power not only to heal the
body but to cure the soul, to give the vigor of a new spiritual
life, the joy of a sense of recovered purity. He was
not merely able to say, "Thy sins be forgiven thee," but
also, "Go in peace;" and the peace was real and permanent.
Another reason for the attractiveness of Jesus was the
value he set on human affections. The great ones of the
earth often carry an atmosphere about them that withers
the heart with a sense of insignificance. Every soul longs
to be something to the object of its regard, and the
thought, "My love is nothing to him," is a chilling one.
But Christ asked for love—valued it. No matter how
poor, how lowly, how sinful in time past, the love of a
repentant soul he accepted as a priceless treasure. He set
the loving sinner above the cold-hearted Pharisee. He
asked not only for love, but for intimacy—he asked for
the whole heart; and there are many desolate ones in this
cheerless earth to whom it is a new life to know that a
godlike Being cares for their love.
The great external sufferings of Christ and the prophetic
prediction that he should be a "man of sorrows" have
been dwelt upon so much that we sometimes forget the
many passages in the New Testament which show that the
spiritual atmosphere of Christ was one of joy. He brought
to those that received him a sense of rest and peace and
joy. St. John speaks of him as "Light." He answered
those who asked why his disciples did not fast like those
of John, by an image which showed that his very presence
made life a season of festivity: "Can the children of the
bride-chamber mourn while the bridegroom is with them?"
What a beautiful picture of a possible life is given in his
teaching. God he speaks of as "your Father." All the
prophets and teachers that came before spoke of him as
"the Lord." Christ called him simply "The Father," as
if to intimate that Fatherhood was the highest and most
perfect expression of the great Invisible. He said, therefore,
to the toiling race of man: "Be not anxious, your
Father in Heaven will take care of you. He forgets not
even a little sparrow, and he certainly will not forget you.
Go to him with all your wants. You would not forget
your children's prayers; and your Father in Heaven is
better than you. Be loving, be kind, be generous and
sweet-hearted; if men hate you, love and pray for them;
and you will be your Father's children."
See how the man Jesus, who was to his disciples the
Master, Christ, had power to comfort them in distress, and
how not only his own followers, but also those of his great
forerunner, John, were naturally drawn to confide their
troubles to him.
These disciples who took up the Baptist's disfigured
body after spite and contempt and hate had done their
worst on it, who paid their last tribute of reverence and
respect amid the scoffs of a jeering world, were men—men
of deep emotions and keen feelings; and probably at
that moment every capability of feeling they had was fully
aroused.
It appears from the first chapter of John, that he and
others were originally the disciples of the Baptist during
the days of his first powerful ministry, and had been by
him pointed to Jesus. We see in other places that the
Apostle John had an intense power of indignation, and
was of that nature that longed to grasp the thunderbolts
when he saw injustice. It was John that wanted to bring
down fire from heaven on the village that refused to shelter
Christ, and can we doubt that his whole soul was moved
with the most fiery indignation at wrong and cruelty like
this? For Christ himself had said of the martyr thus sacrificed:
"Among those that are born of women there hath
not risen a greater than John the Baptist." He had done
a great work; he had swayed the hearts of all his countrymen;
he had been the instrument of the most powerful
revival of religion known in his times. There had been
a time when his name was in every mouth; when all
Jerusalem and Judæa, and beyond Jordan, thronged to his
ministry—even the Scribes and Pharisees joining the
multitude. And now what an end of so noble a man!
Seized and imprisoned at the behest of an adulterous
woman whose sin he had rebuked, shut up in prison, his
ministry ended, all his power for good taken away, and
finally finishing his life under circumstances which mark
more than any other could the contempt and indifference
which the great gay world of his day had for goodness and
greatness! The head of a national benefactor, of a man
who had lived for God and man wholly and devotedly
from his birth, was used as a football, made the subject
of a court jest between the courtesan and the prince.
Oh that it had pleased God to give us the particulars
of that interview when the disciples, burning, struggling
under pressure of that cruel indignity, came and told
Jesus! Can we imagine with what burning words John
told of the scorn, the contempt, the barbarity with which
the greatest man of his time had been hurried to a bloody
grave? Were there not doubts—wonderings? Why did
God permit it? Why was not a miracle wrought, if need
were, to save him? And what did Jesus say to them?
Oh that we knew! We would lay it up in our hearts, to
be used when in our lesser sphere we see things going in
the course of this world as if God were not heeding. Of
one thing we may be sure. Jesus made them quiet; he
calmed and rested them.
And all that Jesus taught, he was. This life of sweet
repose, of unruffled peace, of loving rest in an ever-present
Father, he carried with him as he went, everywhere warming,
melting, cheering; inspiring joy in the sorrowful and
hope in the despairing; giving peace to the perplexed;
and, last and best of all, in his last hours, when he sought
to cheer his sorrowful disciples in view of his death and
one of them said, "Lord, show us the Father and it will
suffice," he answered, "He that hath seen me hath seen
the Father." The Invisible Jehovah, the vast, strange,
mysterious Will that moves all worlds and controls all
destinies, reveals himself to us in the Man Jesus—the
Christ.
We are told of an Old Testament prophet that sought to
approach God. First there was a mighty tempest; but
the Lord was not in the tempest. There was a devouring
fire; but the Lord was not in the fire. There was an
earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake.
Then there came at last a "still, small voice:" and when
the prophet heard that he wrapped his face in his mantle
and bowed himself to the earth.
The tempest, the earthquake, the fire, are the Unknown
God of Nature; the still, small voice is that of Jesus!
It is to this Teacher so lovable, this Guide so patient
and so gracious, that our Heavenly Father has committed
the care and guidance of us through this dark, uncertain
life of ours. He came to love us, to teach us, to save us;
and not merely to save us, but to save us in the kindest
and gentlest way. He gives himself wholly to us, for all
that he can be to us, and in return asks us to give ourselves
wholly to him. Shall we not do it?
"We saw one casting out devils, and he followed not us; and we forbade
him. And Jesus said, Forbid him not."
There is nothing in which our Lord so far exceeds all
his followers as in that spirit of forbearance and tolerance
which he showed toward every effort, however imperfect,
which was dictated by a sincere spirit. Human virtue as
it grows intense is liable to grow narrow and stringent;
but divine love has an infinite wideness of allowance.
We are told of the first triumphant zeal of the twelve
Apostles when, endued with miraculous power, they went
forth healing the sick, casting out devils, and preaching
the good news of the kingdom to the poor. They came
back to Jesus exulting in their new success, and we are
told they said unto him, "Lord, we saw one casting out
devils in thy name, and we forbade him, because he followed
not us."
Jesus said unto them, "Forbid him not, for there is no
man that will do a miracle in my name that will lightly
speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is on our
side."
Here our Lord recognizes the principle that those who
seek what he is seeking, and are striving to do what he
is doing, are in fact on his side, even although they may
not see their way clear to follow the banner of his commissioned
Apostles and work in their company. Christ's mission
as he defined it was a mission of healing and saving,
a mission of consolation and the relief of human misery;
and this man who was trying to cast out the devils in his
name was doing his work and moving in his line, although
not among his professed disciples.
Jesus always recognized the many "sheep not of this
fold" which he had in this world—people who were his
followers by unity of intention with what he intended,
though they might never have known him personally.
He tells the Jews, who believed in a narrow and peculiar
church, that "many shall come from the East and the
West, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and
Jacob in the kingdom of heaven," and in his pictures of
the last Judgment he makes the final award turn on the
simple unity of spirit and purpose with Him in his great
work of mercy for mankind.
We see intimated that the accepted ones are amazed to
find themselves recognized as having shown personal regard
to Christ, and say, "Lord, when saw we thee hungry or
athirst or in prison and ministered to thee?" And the
reply is, "Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of
these my brethren, ye did it unto me." A more solemn
declaration cannot be given, that our Lord accepts the spirit
which is in unison with his great work of mercy for mankind,
as the best offering of love to himself; and in this
sense it is true that no man who would seek to do miracles
of mercy in His spirit could lightly speak evil of him.
In this case our Lord might have seen that the arrogant,
dictatorial temper which had come upon his followers in the
flush of their first success might have disgusted and repelled
a sincere man who was really trying to help on the
good work in which Christ was engaged; and perhaps he
may now see, as he looks down among our churches here
and there, some good man in his own peculiar way seeking
to do the work of the Lord, yet repelled from following
in the train of his professed disciples. Instead of forbidding
such "because they follow not us," he would have us
draw them towards us by sympathy in the good they are
doing, trusting in our Lord to enlighten them wherever
they may need more distinct light.
The Protestant must not forbid the Romanist mission
whose plain object seems to be to call sinners to repentance,
and to lead professing Christians to a higher and
holier life; nor must the Romanist in the pride of ancient
authority forbid the Protestant evangelist that is seeking
to make known the love of Jesus. And there are men in
our times, of pure natures and of real love for mankind,
whose faith in divine revelation is shaken, who no longer
dare to say they believe with the "orthodox," but who yet
are faithfully striving to do good to man, to heal the sick
and cast out the devils that afflict society. Sad-hearted
men are they often, working without the cheer that inspires
the undoubting believer, often under a sense of the
ban of the professed followers of Christ; yet the infinite
tolerance of our Lord is leading them as well as those who
more formally bear his name.
It was Cyrus, the Persian king, who worshiped the
Zoroastrian gods, that is called in the prophecy "God's
shepherd;" to whom God says, "Cyrus, whose right hand
I have holden, I girded thee, though thou hast not known
me."
Let us hope that there are many whose right hand
Christ is holding, though they as yet know him not; for
He it is who says:—
"I will bring the blind by a way they know not. I will make
darkness light before them, and crooked things straight: these
things will I do unto them and not forsake them."
It pleased our Lord to number among the twelve Apostles
one of those natures which are constitutionally cautious
and skeptical. Thomas had a doubting head but a loving
heart; he clung to Christ by affinity of spirit and personal
love, with a slow and doubting intellect. Whether Jesus
were the Messiah, the King of Israel, destined to reign
and conquer, Thomas, though sometimes hoping, was somewhat
prone to doubt. He was all the while foreboding
that Christ would be vanquished, while yet determined to
stand by him to the last. When Christ announced his
purpose to go again into Judæa, where his life had been
threatened, Thomas says,—and there seems to be a despairing
sigh in the very words,—"Let us also go, that we
may die with him." The words seemed to say, "this man
may be mistaken, after all; but, living or dying, I must
love him, and if he dies, I die too."
Well, the true-hearted doubter lived to see his Lord
die, and he it was, of all the disciples, who refused to
believe the glad news of the resurrection. No messenger,
no testimony, nothing that anybody else had seen could
convince him. He must put his own hand into the print
of the nails or he will not believe. The gracious Master
did not refuse the test. "Reach hither thy finger and
behold my hand, and reach hither thy hand and thrust it
into my side, and be not faithless but believing," he said,
and the doubter fell at his feet and cried, "My Lord and
my God!"
There was but a gentle word of reproof: "Thomas, because
thou hast seen me thou hast believed; blessed are
they that have not seen and yet have believed." It is
this divine wideness of spirit, this tolerance of love, that
is the most characteristic element in the stages which mark
the higher Christian life. Such spirits as Fénelon, Francis
de Sales, John Woolman, and the apostle Eliot, seem to
have risen to the calm regions of clear-sighted love.
Hence the maxim of Fénelon: "Only perfection can tolerate
the imperfect." But we, in our way to those regions,
must lay down our harsh judgments of others; we must
widen our charity; and, as we bless our good Shepherd for
his patience with our wanderings and failures, must learn
to have patience with those of our neighbors.
In the history of our Lord's life nothing meets us more
frequently than his power of reticence. It has been justly
observed that the things that he did not say and do are as
just a subject of admiration as the things that he said and
did.
There is no more certain indication of inward strength
than the power of silence. Hence the proverb that speech
is silver and silence is golden. The Church of the middle
ages had her treatises on "The Grace of Silence."
In the case of our Lord we have to remember first the
thirty years of silence that preluded his ministry; thirty
years in which he lived the life of a humble artisan in the
obscure town of Nazareth. That he was during those
years revolving all that higher wisdom which has since
changed the whole current of human society there is little
doubt. That his was a spirit from earliest life ardent and
eager, possessed with the deepest enthusiasm, we learn
from the one revealing flash in the incident recorded of his
childhood, when he entered the school of the doctors in
the temple and became so absorbed in hearing and asking
questions that time, place, and kindred were all forgotten.
Yet, eager as he was, he made no petulant objection to his
mother's recall, but went down to Nazareth with his
parents and was subject to them. This ardent soul retreated
within itself, and gathered itself up in silence and
obedience.
When, at the age of thirty, he rose in the synagogue of
his native place and declared his great and beautiful mission
it is quite evident that he took everybody by surprise.
No former utterances, nothing in his previous life, had
prepared his townsfolk for this. They said, "How knoweth
this man letters? Is not this the carpenter?" What
habitual silence and reticence is here indicated! For this
was the same Jesus whose words, when he did speak, had
that profound and penetrating power that stirred the hearts
of men, and have gone on since stirring them as no other
utterances ever did. But when he did speak his words
were more mighty from the accumulated force of repression.
They fell concentrated and sparkling like diamonds
that had been slowly crystallizing in those years of silence;
they were utterances for time and for eternity.
In like manner we see numerous indications that he
withdrew from all that was popular and noisy and merely
sensational with a deep and real distaste. So far as possible
he wrought his miracles privately. He enjoined reticence
and silence on his disciples. He said, "The kingdom
of God cometh not with observation." He pointed
to the grain of mustard seed and the hidden leaven as
types of its power.
In the same way we see him sometimes receiving in
silence prayers for help which he intended to answer.
When the Syro-Phœnician woman cried to him to heal her
daughter, it is said "he answered her never a word;" yet
healing was in his heart. His silence was the magnet to
draw forth her desire, to intensify her faith and reveal to
his disciples what there was in her.
So, too, when word was sent from the sisters of Bethany,
"Lord, behold he whom thou lovest is sick," he
received it in the same silence. It is said, "Jesus loved
Martha and her sister and Lazarus; when he had heard,
therefore, that he was sick, he abode two days still in the
same place where he was." In those two days of apparent
silent neglect, how many weary hours to the anxious
friends watching for him who could help, and who yet did
not come! But the silence and the wailing ended in a
deeper joy at the last. The sorrow of one family was
made the means of a record of the Saviour's tenderness
and sympathy and his triumphant power over death, which
is for all time and for every mourner. As he gave Lazarus
back whole and uninjured from the grave, so he then and
there promised to do for every one who believes in him:
"He that believeth on me shall never die."
In the family of the Saviour was a false friend whose
falseness was better known to the Master than perhaps to
himself. He knew the falsity of Judas to his trust in the
management of the family purse, yet he was silent. He
sought the sympathy of no friend; he did not expose him
to the others. From time to time he threw out general
warnings that there was one among them that was untrue—warnings
addressed to his conscience alone. But he
changed in no degree his manner toward him; he did not
withhold the kiss at meeting and parting, nor refuse to
wash his feet with the others; and the traitor went out
from the last meeting to finish his treachery, leaving his
brethren ignorant of his intended crime. This loving,
forbearing silence with an enemy—keeping him in his
family, treating him with unchanging love yet with warning
faithfulness, never uttering a word of complaint and
parting at last in sorrow more than anger—was the practical
comment left by Jesus on his own words: "Love your
enemies, that ye may be the children of your Father which
is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to shine on the evil
and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the
unjust." This, the last, the highest grade in the science
of love, is one that few Christians even come within sight
of. To bear an enemy near one's person, perfectly to
understand his machinations, and yet feel only unchanging
love and pity, carefully to guard his character, never to
communicate to another the evil that we perceive, to go
on in kindness as the sunshine goes on in nature—this is
an attainment so seldom made that when made it is hard
to be understood. If the example of Jesus is to be the
rule by which our attainments are finally to be measured,
who can stand in the judgment?
The silence of Jesus in his last trial before Herod and
Pilate is no less full of sublime suggestion. We see him
standing in a crowd of enemies clamorous, excited, eager,
with false witnesses distorting his words, disagreeing with
each other, agreeing only in one thing: the desire for his
destruction. And Pilate says, "Answerest thou nothing?
Behold how many things they witness against thee." It
was the dead silence that more than anything else troubled
and perplexed the Roman governor. After he has given
up his victim to the brutalities of the soldiery, to the
scourging and the crown of thorns, he sends for him again
for a private examination. "Whence art thou? Speakest
thou not to me? Knowest thou not that I have power to
crucify thee and power to release thee?" In all the brief
replies of Jesus there is no effort to clear himself, no denial
of the many things witnessed against him. In fact, from
the few things that he did say on the way to the cross, it
would seem that his soul abode calmly in that higher
sphere of love in which he looked down with pity on the
vulgar brutality that surrounded him. The poor ignorant
populace shouting they knew not what, the wretched
scribes and chief priests setting the seal of doom on their
nation, the stolid Roman soldiers trained in professional
hardness and cruelty—he looked down on them all with
pity. "Daughters of Jerusalem," he said to the weeping
women, "weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and
for your children." And a few moments later, "Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do."
We are told by the Apostles that this Jesus is the image
of the invisible God. The silence of God in presence of
so much that moves human passions is one of the most
awful things for humanity to contemplate. But if Jesus
is his image this silence is not wrathful or contemptuous,
but full of pity and forgiveness.
The silence and the great darkness around the cross of
Calvary were not the silence of gathering wrath and doom.
God, the forgiving, was there, and the way was preparing
for a new and unequaled era of forgiving mercy. The
rejected Jesus was exalted to the right hand of God, not
to fulfill a mission of wrath, but to "give repentance and
remission of sins."
Peace! Is there in fact such a thing as an attainable
habit of mind that can remain at peace, no matter what
external circumstances may be? No matter what worries;
no matter what perplexities, what thwartings, what cares,
what dangers; no matter what slanders, what revilings,
what persecutions—is it possible to keep an immovable
peace? When our dearest friends are taken from us,
when those we love are in deadly danger from hour to
hour, is it possible still to be in peace? When our plans
of life are upset, when fortune fails, when debt and embarrassment
come down, is it possible to be at peace?
When suddenly called to die, or to face sorrows that are
worse than death, is it possible still to be at peace?
Yes, it is. This is the peculiarity of the Christian religion—the
special gift of Christ to every soul that will
receive it from him. In his hour of deepest anguish, when
every earthly resort was failing him, when he was about
to be deserted, denied, betrayed, tortured even unto death,
he had this great gift of peace, and he left it as a legacy
to his followers:—
"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you. Not as
the world giveth give I unto you."
He says himself that his peace is not what the world
giveth. It does not come from anything in this life; it
cannot be taken away by anything in this life; it is wholly
divine. As a white dove looks brighter and fairer against
a black thunder-cloud, so Christ's peace is brightest and
sweetest in darkness and adversity.
Is not this rest of the soul, this perfect peace, worth
having? Do the majority of Christians have it? Would
it not lengthen the days and strengthen the health of many
a man and woman if they could attain it? But how shall
we get this gift? That is an open secret. St. Paul told
it to the Philippians in one simple direction:—
"Be not anxious about anything, but in everything, by
prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests
be made known unto God; and the peace of God that passeth
understanding shall keep your heart and mind."
There we have it.
Now if we look back to the history of these Philippians,
as told in the Book of Acts, we shall see that when Paul
exhorted them never to be anxious about anything, but
always with thanksgiving to let their wants be known to
God, he preached exactly what they had seen him practice
among them. For this Philippian church was at first a
little handful of people gathered to Jesus by hearing Paul
talk in a prayer-meeting held one Sunday morning by the
riverside. There Lydia, the seller of fine linen from
Thyatira, first believed with her house, and a little band
of Christians was gathered. But lo! in the very commencement
of the good work a tumult was raised, and
Paul and Silas were swooped down upon by the jealous
Roman authorities, ignominiously and cruelly scourged,
and then carried to prison and shut up with their feet fast
in the stocks. Here was an opportunity to test their
serenity. Did their talisman work, or did it fail? What
did the Apostles do? We are told: "At midnight Paul
and Silas prayed and sang praises to God, and the prisoners
heard them." That prayer went up with a shout of victory—it
was as Paul directs, prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving. Then came the opening of prison doors,
the loosing of bonds, and the jailer fell trembling at the
feet of his captives, saying, "Sirs, what must I do to be
saved?" And that night the jailer and all his house were
added to the church at Philippi. So, about eleven years
after, when Paul's letter came back from Rome to the
Philippian church and was read out in their prayer-meeting,
we can believe that the old Roman jailer, now a leading
brother in the church, said, "Ay! ay! he teaches
just what he practised. I remember how he sung and
rejoiced there in that old prison at midnight. Nothing
ever disturbs him." And they remember, too, that this
cheerful, joyful, courageous letter comes from one who is
again a prisoner, chained night and day to a Roman soldier,
and it gives all the more force to his inspiring direction:
"Be anxious for nothing—in everything, by prayer
and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be
made known unto God."
If Paul had been like us, now, how many excuses he
might have had for being in a habitual worry! How was
he shut up and hindered in his work of preaching the gospel.
A prisoner at Rome while churches that needed him
were falling into divers temptations for want of him—how
he might have striven with his lot, how he might
have wondered why God allowed the enemy so to triumph.
But it appears he was perfectly quiet. "I know how to
be abased, and how to abound," he says; "everywhere,
and in all things, I am instructed both to be full and to
be hungry, both to abound and suffer need. I can do all
things through Christ that strengtheneth me."
But say some, "Do you suppose if you go to God about
everything that troubles you it will do any good? If you
do ask him for help, will you get it?"
If this means, Will God always give you the blessing
you want, or remove the pain you feel, in answer to your
prayer? the answer must be, Certainly not.
Paul prayed often and with intense earnestness for the
removal of a trial so sharp and severe that he calls it
a thorn in his flesh. It was something that he felt to be
unbearable, and he prayed the Lord to take it away, but
the Lord did not; he only said to him, "My grace is sufficient
for thee. My strength is made perfect in weakness."
The permission in all things to let our requests be made
known to God would be a fatal one for us if it meant that
God would always give us what we ask. When we come
to see the record of our life as it is written in heaven, we
shall see some of our best occasions of thankfulness under
the head of "prayers denied."
Did you ever see a little child rushing home from school
in hot haste, with glowing cheeks and tearful eyes, burning
and smarting under some fancied or real injustice or
injury in his school life? He runs through the street;
he rushes into the house; he puts off every one who tries
to comfort him. "No, no! he doesn't want them; he
wants mother; he's going to tell mother." And when he
finds her he throws himself into her arms and sobs out to
her all the tumult of his feelings, right or wrong, reasonable
or unreasonable. "The school is hateful; the teacher
is hard, and the lessons are too long; he can't learn them,
and the boys laugh at him, and won't she say he needn't
go any more?"
Now, though the mother does not grant his foolish petitions,
she soothes him by sympathy; she calms him; she
reasons with him; she inspires him with courage to meet
the necessary trials of school life—in short, her grace is
sufficient for her boy; her strength perfects his weakness.
He comes out tranquilized, calm, and happy—not that
he is going to get his own foolish wishes, but that his
mother has taken the matter in hand and is going to look
into it, and the right thing is going to be done.
This is an exact illustration of the kind of help it is for
us "in everything by prayer to make known our requests
to God." The very act of confidence is in itself tranquilizing,
and the divine sympathy meets and sustains it.
A large class of our annoyances and worries are extinguished
or lessened by the very act of trying to tell them
to such a person as Jesus Christ. They are our burning
injuries, our sense of wrong and injustice done us. When
we go to tell Jesus how cruelly and wickedly some other
Christian has treated us, we immediately begin to feel as
a child who is telling his mother about his brother—both
equally dear. Our anger gradually changes to a kind of
sorrow when we think of Him as grieved by our differences.
After all, we are speaking of one whom Christ is
caring for and bearing with just as he is caring for us, and
the thought takes away the edge of our indignation; a
place is found for peace.
Then there is still another class of troubles that would
be cut off and smothered altogether by the honest effort
to tell them to our Saviour. All the troubles that come
from envy, from wanting to be as fine, as distinguished,
as successful as our neighbors; all the troubles that come
from running races with our neighbors in dress, household
show, parties, the strife "who shall be the greatest" transferred
to the little petty sphere of fashionable life—ah, if
those who are burdened with cares of this kind would just
once honestly bring them to Jesus and hear what he would
have to say about them! They might leave them at his
feet and go away free and happy.
But whatever burden or care we take to Jesus, if we
would get the peace promised, we must leave it with Him
as entirely as the little child leaves his school troubles
with his mother. We must come away and treat it as a
finality. We must say, Christ has taken that. Christ
will see about it. And then we must stop thinking and
worrying about it. We must resolve to be satisfied with
whatever may be his disposal of the matter, even if it is
not at all what we would have chosen.
Paul would much sooner have chosen to be free and
travel through the churches, but Christ decided to allow
him to remain a chained prisoner at Rome, and there Paul
learned to rest, and he was happy in Christ's will. Christ
settled it for him, and he was at peace.
If, then, by following this one rule we can always be at
rest, how true are the lines of the hymn now so often
sung:—
"Oh, what joy we often forfeit!
Oh, what needless pain we bear!
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer."
What is the true idea of a Christian church, and what
the temper and spirit in which its affairs should be conducted?
For this inquiry certainly we are not to go back to New
England or Cotton Mather primarily, nor yet to the earlier
Anglican authorities, or the long line of Roman precedent,
and the Fathers of the Church, nor even to the Apostolic
churches, but to Jesus Christ himself, and to the earliest
association that could be called a Christian church.
There is a difference in this discussion between the
Church and a church. The Church is the great generic
unity or outside organization; a church is a society related
to the whole, as a private family to the State.
In the time of our Lord the generic body—the Church
of God—was the Jewish church. Jesus was a regularly
initiated member of that church, and very careful never
to depart from any of its forms or requirements. He
announced in the Sermon on the Mount that, in regard to
the Jewish law, he was not come to destroy but to fulfill.
He said distinctly to his disciples: "The Scribes and
Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: all things therefore whatsoever
they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do ye not
after their works, for they say and do not." The Apostles
never separated formally from the Jewish church.
They were so careful in this regard that they on one occasion
induced St. Paul, who was reported to be a schismatic,
to go in a very marked and public manner into the Jewish
temple and conform to the Jewish ritual; and when he
addressed a company of Jews on one occasion he commenced
with the words: "Men and brethren, I am a
Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee." He elsewhere speaks
of the perfectness of this initiation into all the customs and
privileges of the national church—that he was a Hebrew
of the Hebrews.
The Christian Church arose inside the Jewish church,
exactly as the Methodists arose inside the Church of England.
They were a society professing subjection and
obedience to the national church in all respects where the
higher law of God did not require them to go against
earthly ordinances. Thus, when the Jewish Sanhedrin
forbade the Apostles to preach in the name of Jesus, they
answered, "Whether it be right in the sight of God to
hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye." In
like spirit did John Wesley and his ministers answer the
bishops when they tried to shut their mouths from preaching
the gospel to the poor of England.
But in the mean time it is to be remembered that the
Lord Jesus gradually formed around himself as a personal
centre an organization of disciples, both men and women.
This band of disciples may be looked upon as the seed
form of the Christian Church, and the order of their union
having been administered immediately by the Master must
be studied as conveying the best example of the spirit and
temper, though not necessarily the exact form, in which
all churches should be constituted.
That this company of believers was regularly organized,
and perfectly recognized as an organization, appears from a
passage in Acts, where it is said that after the ascension
of our Lord this little church came together and abode
together for several days. The names of many of them
are given—the eleven Apostles, the mother of Jesus, his
brethren, and several others, called in the enumeration
"the women," are mentioned, and it is further stated that
"the number of them was about one hundred and twenty."
St. Paul indeed speaks of an occasion on which Christ,
after his resurrection, appeared to five hundred disciples
at once, of whom he says the greater part were living when
he wrote. This hundred and twenty were probably such
a portion of the whole company of disciples as had their
residence in and about Jerusalem, and could therefore
conveniently assemble together. We first see them called
together to perform a corporate act in filling a vacancy
among their officers. The twelve by the appointment of
the Lord had occupied a peculiar position of leadership.
The place of one of these being vacated by the death of
Judas, the little church is summoned to assist in the election
of a successor. The speech of Peter is remarkable as
showing that he considered the persons he addressed as
a body competent to transact business and fill vacancies.
After relating the death and fate of Judas, he ends by
saying, "Wherefore, from these men that have companied
with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out
among us must one be ordained to be a witness with us of
his resurrection." Here, then, are all the evidences of
a regularly trained church already in existence when our
Lord left the world.
But if we look at the twentieth chapter of John we shall
see that the little company that performed this act had
been previously ordained and inspired by Jesus, and wisdom
had been promised to guide their proceedings.
It is said that immediately after Christ's resurrection—after
he had appeared to Mary Magdalene—he suddenly
appeared in an assembly of the disciples, showed them his
hands and his side, said to them, "Peace be unto you,"
breathed on them, and said, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost:
whosesoever sins ye remit they are remitted unto them,
and whosesoever sins ye retain they are retained." The
disciples spoken of here were the whole company of believers
who yet remained faithful—not merely the eleven,
since one of the eleven at least was absent.
The words of the promise are not to be superstitiously
interpreted, as they have been, as giving an arbitrary,
irresponsible power to an aristocracy in the church, but as
expressing this great truth: that whenever a body of
Christians are acting under the influence of the Holy
Spirit, under a high and heavenly state of Christian feeling,
their decisions will be in sympathy with God and be
ratified in heaven. It is only to those who receive the
Holy Ghost that such power pertains.
Having shown, then, that Christ left a trained, inspired,
ordained church of believers to perpetuate his work on
earth, it now becomes interesting to go back and watch
the process by which he trained them.
The history of the formation and gradual education of
this church is interesting, because, although the visible
presence of the Master made it differ from any subsequent
church, yet the spirit and temper in which he guided it
are certainly a model for all. Christ's visible presence
relieved them from all responsibility as to discipline. He
governed personally, and settled every question as it rose.
In this respect no other church can be like it. But the
invisible Christ, the Christ in the heart of all believers,
ought to be with every church, that it may be carried on
in spirit as Christ conducted his.
In the first place, then, Christ carried on this his first
church as a family, of which he was the father, and in
which the law was love. He said to his disciples, "All
ye are brethren;" he addressed them habitually as "children,"
sometimes as "little children," and laid on them
with emphasis a new commandment, that they should love
one another as he had loved them. The old commandment,
given by Moses, was, Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself; the new commandment of Christ was, Love
one another as I have loved you—better than self. St.
John interprets this thus: Hereby we perceive the love
of God, because he laid down his life for us. We ought
also to lay down our lives for the brethren.
This church or family of Christ was very wide and free
in its invitation to any to join, and many did join themselves,
so that at times portions of them traveled with him
as a missionary family from place to place.
Thus, in Luke viii., we read that "it came to pass that
he went through every city and village preaching and
showing the glad tidings of the kingdom; and the twelve
were with him, and certain women whom he had healed
of evil spirits and infirmities; Mary, called Magdalene,
and Joanna, the wife of Chusa, Herod's steward, and
Susanna, and many others, who also ministered unto him
of their substance."
This coöperation of women in the missionary church
would in some countries have given an occasion of offense
and scandal. But the laws and institutions of Moses had
prepared a nation in which the moral and religious mission
of woman was fully recognized. Prophetesses and holy
women, inspired by God, had always held an important
place in its history, and it was in full accord with the
national sense of propriety that woman should hold a conspicuous
place in the new society of Jesus. It is remarkable,
too, that the bitterest and most vituperative attacks
on the character of Jesus which appeared in early centuries
never found cause of scandal in this direction.
These pious women exercised, for the benefit of our
Lord and his disciples, the peculiar gifts of their sex—they
ministered to them as women best know how. One
of them was the wife of a man of high rank in Herod's
court. Several of them appear to have been possessed of
property. Some of them, however, were reclaimed women
of formerly sinful life, but now redeemed. The wife of
Herod's steward, and the spotless matron, the mother of
James and John, did not scruple to receive to their fellowship
and sisterly love the redeemed Mary Magdalene, "out
of whom went seven devils."
The contributions for the support of this mission church
became so considerable, and the care of providing for its
material wants so onerous, as to require the services of
a steward, and one of the twelve, who had a peculiar turn
for financial cares, was appointed to this office. Judas
made all the purchases for the company, dispensed its
charities, and, as financier, felt at liberty to comment
severely on the "waste" shown by the grateful Mary.
It seems that Judas was a type of that class of men who
seek the church from worldly motives. The treatment of
this treacherous friend by Jesus is a model that cannot be
too earnestly studied by every Christian. St. John says,
"Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that
believed not, and who should betray him." But he carried
himself towards him with the same unvarying and tender
sweetness that he showed to all the rest. He was Love
itself. He could not possibly associate with another without
love, and there was something peculiarly delicate and
forbearing in his treatment of Judas (as is more fully considered
in our next chapter).
He might easily have exposed him before his brethren,
but he would not do it. It seems from the narrative that
even when Judas left the little company to complete his
crime, the simple-hearted disciples knew not where he was
going.
There was no calling him to account, no exposure, no
denunciation, no excommunication. Why this care, this
peculiar reticence, on the Master's part? It was a part of
his system of teaching his family what he meant when he
said, Love your enemies. It was a way of teaching that,
when they came to understand it fully, they never would
forget. Moreover, during his whole life, in all his teachings
to this little church, his main object was that they
should be rooted and grounded in that kind of love which
no injury, or cruelty, or perfidy can change, the kind of
love which he showed when he prayed for those who were
piercing his hands and feet. But he found them not apt
scholars. They were apt and ready in the science of
wrath. With them the way of anger and what is called
righteous indignation went down hill, but he always held
them back. When a village refused to receive the Master,
it was James and John who were ready to propose to call
down fire from heaven, as Elias did. But he told them
they knew not what manner of spirit they were of; the
mission of the Son of man was to save—not to kill.
As a delicate musician shudders to strike a discord, so
Jesus would not excite among his little children the
tumult of wrath and indignation that would be sure to
arise did they fully know the treachery of Judas. He so
carried himself that the evil element departed from them
without a convulsion, by the calm expulsive force of moral
influences. He bore with Judas patiently, sweetly, lovingly,
to the very last. He kept the knowledge of his
treachery in his own bosom till of his own free will the
traitor departed.
There is something so above human nature in this—it
is such unworldly sweetness, such celestial patience, that
it is difficult for us at our usual level of life to understand
it. It is difficult to realize that these expressions of love
which Jesus continued to Judas were not a policy, but a
simple reality, that he loved and pitied the treacherous
friend as a mother loves and pities the unworthy son who
is whitening her hair and breaking her heart, and that the
kiss he gave was always sincere.
It is an example, too, that may with advantage be studied
in conducting the discipline of a church. Here was
the worst of criminals meditating the deepest injuries, the
worst of crimes, in the very bosom of the infant church,
yet our Lord so bore with him, so ruled and guided his
little family that there was no quarrel and struggle,—that
the very best and most was made of his talents as long as
they could be used for good,—and when he departed the
church was not rent and torn as a demoniac by the passage
from them of an evil spirit.
But there were other respects in which Jesus trained his
church, besides that of managing a discordant element
within it. There were many who would become disciples
from sudden impulse or sympathy, who had not the moral
stamina to go on to spiritual perfection. Aware of this,
the Master, while ever gracious, ever ready to receive,
exacted no binding pledge or oath. He displayed no
eagerness to get men to commit themselves in this way,
but rather the reverse. Whoever came saying, "Lord, I
will follow thee," met a gracious reception. Yet the
seeker was warned that he must take up his cross, and
that without this he could not be a disciple. He was
admonished to count the cost, lest he should begin to build
and not be able to finish. In some cases, as that of the
young nobleman, the tests proposed were so severe that
the man went away sorrowful; and yet, for all this, the
heart of the Master was freely open to all who chose to
follow him.
But as Jesus would take none without full warning of
the stringency of his exactions, so he would retain none
a moment beyond the time when their hearts were fully
in it. Free they were to come as God's love is free—free
also to go, if on trial they found the doctrine or discipline
too hard for them. Christ gathered his spiritual
army on the principles on which Moses commanded that the
army of Israel should be gathered for battle, when proclamation
was made that any one who for any reason was not
fully in good heart should go home, "What man is fearful
or faint-hearted, let him go and return to his house, lest
his brethren's heart faint as well as his."
There is a very striking passage in the sixth chapter of
John's Gospel, where Jesus, in the most stringent and
earnest manner, spoke of the necessity of eating his flesh
and drinking his blood; or, in other words, of an appropriating
and identifying union of soul with himself as constituting
true discipleship. This exposé of the inner
depths of real spiritual life repelled some, as it is written:—
"Many, therefore, of his disciples said: This is a hard saying.
Who can hear it? When Jesus knew in himself that
his disciples murmured, he said: Doth this offend you?...
But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew
from the beginning who they were who believed not and who
should betray him."
From that time, we are told, many of his disciples went
back and walked no more with him. They left the church;
and we read of no effort to discipline or retain them. The
spiritual life of the church expelled them by the law of
moral repulsion; they felt they were not of it, and they
left, and were suffered to leave. The only comment we
read of as being made by the Lord was this: "Then said
Jesus to the twelve: Will ye also go away?" There was
the door, freely open, would they, too, go? Then said
Peter: "Lord, to whom should we go? Thou hast the
words of eternal life, and we believe and are sure that
thou art the Christ."
We can see here what was the sifting process by which
our Lord kept his little church pure. It was the union
of vivid spirituality with perfect freedom. The doors of
entrance and of exit were freely open; and those who
could not bear the intense and glowing spiritual life were
at all times free to depart; in the words subsequently used
by the Apostle, "they judged themselves unworthy of
eternal life." Hence, like a vigorous human body, Christ's
little church threw out from itself the unvital members,
and kept itself healthy and strong. This perfect freedom
to depart at any time constituted the strength of the little
order. Its members were held together, not by a dead
covenant, not by a conventional necessity, not by past
vows uttered in high excitement—but by a living choice
of the soul, renewed from moment to moment. Even the
twelve had presented to them the choice to go away, and
took anew their vow of constancy. Hence it was that
even the astounding horrors of the sudden fall—the crucifixion
of the Master—did not break their ranks. There
were none left but those so vitally united to him, so "one
with him" that, as he said, they "lived by him." He
was their life; they followed him to the cross and to the
grave; they watched the sepulchre, and were ready to
meet him in the resurrection morning. It was this tried
and sifted remnant to whom he appeared when the doors
were closed, after the resurrection, on whom he breathed
peace and the Holy Ghost, and whose spiritual judgments
and decisions he promised should thereafter be ratified in
heaven.
This little company were, as nearly as human beings can
be, rooted and grounded in perfect love. The lesson of
their lives had been love, taught them by precept from day
to day, as he harmonized their contentions and repressed
their selfish ambitions; and by example, as he persistently
tolerated, loved, bore with a treacherous friend in his own
family.
It was necessary that they should be prepared to exercise
power, for power was about to be intrusted to them.
It was necessary to prepare them to be the governors of
the future Christian Church. But he was unwearied in
efforts to make them understand that superiority must
only be a superiority in doing and suffering for others.
When the mother of James and John asked the highest
two offices for her two sons, he looked at her with a
pathetic sadness. Did she know what she was asking?
Did she know that to be nearest to him was to suffer most?
He answered: "You know not what you ask. Can you
drink of the cup that I shall drink, and be baptized with
my baptism?" And when they ignorantly said, "We are
able," he said that the place of superiority was not his to
give by any personal partiality, but was reserved for the
appointment of the Father. But the ambitious spirit now
roused had spread to the other disciples. It is said that
when the ten heard it they were indignant with James
and John. But Jesus called them to him and said:—
"Ye know that they that are accounted to rule over the
Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and their great ones
exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among
you; but whosoever shall be great among you let him be your
minister, and whosoever will be the chiefest let him be servant
of all; for even the Son of man came not to be ministered
unto, but to minister, and give his life a ransom for many."
One of the very last acts of his life, and one of the most
affecting comments on these words, was his washing his
disciples' feet as a menial servant—a last significant act,
which might almost be called a sacrament, since by it he,
in view of his dying hour, put this last impressive seal on
his teaching of humanity and brotherly love.
The contest which should be the greatest, in spite of all
his efforts, all his teachings, all his rebukes, had only
smouldered, not been extinguished, and was ready at any
moment to flame out again, and all the way up to Jerusalem
when he came to die they walked behind him quarreling
over this old point. As a dying mother calling her
children around her confirms her life-teaching by some last
act of love never to be forgotten, so this Master and Friend
before the last supper knelt in humility at the feet of each
disciple and washed and wiped them, and then interpreted
the act as a sign of the spirit in which leadership in his
church should be sought: "If I, your Lord and Master,
have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another's
feet." In after years the disciples could not but remember
that Jesus knelt at the feet of Judas and washed them
as meekly as those of all the rest; and then they saw what
he meant when he said, "Love your enemies."
From first to last the teaching of Christ was one long
teaching of the doctrine and discipline of perfect love.
When the multitudes followed him, and he went into a
mountain to give his summary of the new dispensation,
we hear of no high, mystical doctrines. We hear doctrines
against censoriousness, against the habit of judging
others. We hear men cautioned to look on their own
faults, not on those of others. We hear love like the
perfect love of God set up as the great doctrine of the new
kingdom—love which no injury, no unworthiness, no
selfishness can chill, or alter, or turn aside; which, like
God's providence, shines on the evil and unthankful, and
sends rain on the just and the unjust—this mystery of
love, deeper than the mystery of the Trinity, was what,
from first to last, the Master sought to make his little
church comprehend.
This love to enemies, this forgiveness, was the hardest
of hard doctrines to them. "Lord, how often shall my
brother transgress and I forgive him?" says Peter; "till
seven times?" "Nay," answers Jesus, "till seventy times
seven." "If thy brother trespass against thee seven times
a day, and seven times turn again saying, 'I repent,' thou
shalt forgive him." The Master taught that no religious
ordinance, no outward service, was so important as to maintain
love unbroken. If a gift were brought to the altar,
and there it were discovered that a brother were grieved
or offended, the gift was to be left unoffered till a reconciliation
was sought.
It is not merely with the brother who has given us cause
of offense, but the brother who, however unreasonably,
deems himself hurt by us, that we are commanded to seek
reconciliation before we can approach a Heavenly Father.
A band of men and women thus trained in the school of
Jesus, careful to look on their own faults, refraining from
judging those of others, unselfish and lowly, seeking only
to do and to serve, so perfected in a divine love that the
most bitter and cruel personal injuries could not move to
bitterness or revenge—such a church is in a fit state to
administer discipline. It has the Holy Spirit of Jesus
with it; and it may be said, without superstitious credulity,
of a church in that spirit that its decisions will be so in
accordance with the will of God that "whosesoever sins
they remit are remitted, and whosesoever sins they retain
are retained."
But where have we such a church?
The church of the Master was one of those beautiful
ideals, fair as the frost-crystals or the dew-drops of morning.
It required a present Jesus to hold it, and then
with what constant watchfulness and care and admonition
on his part was it kept! We can only study at his marvelous
training, and gather some humble inspiration. It
was this church of Jesus, the Master, this tried, sifted,
suffering body of faithful men and women whose prayers
brought down the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost,
and inaugurated the Apostolic Church.
It is one of the mysteries in the life of our Lord that
he was led by the immediate direction of the Father to
incorporate into his little family, and to bring into the
closest personal relations with himself, an unsympathetic
and adverse element that must have been a source of continual
pain to him.
It was after a whole night spent in prayer for the divine
direction that the first twelve Apostles were chosen; and
Judas also was one of them. The history of this man is
a wonder and a warning. That there could possibly be
a human being who could have such advantages, could rise
to such a height of spiritual power and joy, and yet in the
end prove to be utterly without any true spiritual life
seems fearful.
It would appear that Judas had at first a sort of worldly
enthusiasm for Christ and his kingdom; that he received
the divine gift of miracle-working; that he went forth
preaching and healing, and felt all the exultation and joy
which the sense of spiritual power and influence gives.
Judas was among those who returned from the first missionary
tour in triumph, saying, "Lord, even the devils
were subject unto us!" The grave answer of Jesus
reminded them that it was of far more importance to be
really accepted of God as true Christians than to have the
most brilliant gifts and powers.
In our Lord's first Sermon on the Mount, which may
be considered as an ordaining charge to his Apostles, he
had said to them that in the great final day of Judgment
there would be many who would say unto him, "Lord,
have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name cast
out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works?
and then will I say to them, I never knew you; depart
from me, ye that work iniquity." Everywhere in the
New Testament these miraculous powers are spoken of as
something of far less value than the true Christian spirit,
and, if we may trust the word of our Master, many had
them whom he will never acknowledge for his own.
But the warning fell on the ear of Judas unheeded.
Perhaps he did not himself know how selfish and self-seeking
was his zeal for the coming kingdom. Generally
speaking, the first person deceived by a man who plays a
false part is himself. Judas appears not to have excited
the suspicions of the little company of brethren. His
shrewdness and tact in managing financial matters led them
to appoint him the treasurer of the common family purse.
Without doubt, what he saw of the enthusiastic love which
Jesus excited, the ease with which he could make people
willing to lay their fortunes at his feet, opened to his view
dazzling golden visions. He saw himself treasurer of a
kingdom unequaled in splendor and riches, when all the
kingdoms of the world should be subject to his master.
It was more than the reign of Solomon, when gold was to
be as the stones of the street.
If we notice our Lord's teachings delivered in the hearing
of Judas, we must be struck with the explicit and
forcible manner in which he constantly pointed out the
danger of the worldly spirit which was growing upon that
disciple. How solemn the picture of the rich man, absorbed
in plans and calculations how to bestow his great
wealth until God says to him, "Thou fool! this night shall
thy soul be required of thee—then whose shall those
things be that thou hast provided?" "So," he adds, "is
every one that layeth up riches, and is not rich towards
God." Again, he tells them that it is easier for a camel to
go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter into
the kingdom of God. He asks them, What shall it profit
a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
We hear nothing of any replies that Judas makes to
these teachings. He seldom is represented dramatically.
Peter, James, John, and Thomas, all present themselves
vividly to our mind by the things that they say; but
Judas is silent. The Master, who knew him so well, did
not expose him to the others. He did not lessen their
brotherly regard or interrupt the peace of his little family
by any effort at expulsion. As his Father had chosen
this member to be in intimate nearness to himself, Jesus
accepted him, bore with him, loved him, and treated him
to the last with the same unvarying sweetness that he
showed to the more congenial natures. It is affecting to
remember that the very act by which Christ was betrayed
was one that showed that all the external habits of affection
remained still unbroken between him and the traitor.
The kiss of Jesus was sincere; he loved this wretched
man as heavenly beings love, and followed him with love
to the last.
It would seem that towards the last part of the life of
Jesus the moral antagonism between himself and Judas
grew more pronounced and intense.
As the spiritual life of Jesus waxed brighter and
stronger, so much the more vivid became the contrast
between it and the worldly aims of the traitor. Judas
saw the kind of worldly prosperity to which he had aspired
receding. He saw that Jesus, instead of using his splendid
miraculous powers to draw towards him the chiefs of
his nation, was becoming every day more in antagonism
with them. Instead of meeting the popular desire to make
him a king he had drawn back from it, and by that very
act lost many followers. His extreme spiritual teachings
had disgusted many of his disciples and led them to go
back and walk no more with him. And now the talk of
Jesus was more and more of persecutions and sufferings
and death, as lying just before him. To a worldly eye
all this looked like a fanatical throwing away of the very
brightest opportunity for fame and fortune and dominion
that ever was given to a leader. Judas became sullenly
discontented, not yet ready openly to throw off all hopes
of what might be got by adhering to his Master, but yet in
a critical and fault-finding spirit surveying all his actions.
It is an awful thought that it was possible for a man to
share the daily bread of Jesus, to be in his family, treated
as a beloved child, to hear all his beautiful words, to listen
to his prayers day after day, and yet, instead of melting,
to grow colder and harder—to grow more earthly as his
Master grew more heavenly, and to find this want of sympathy
slowly hardening into a sullen enmity which only
waited its hour to declare itself openly. Christ said to
the unbelieving Jews, "Ye have both seen and hated both
Me and my Father." Judas was fast preparing to join
that party.
According to the narrative of St. Matthew, it was after
this rebuke in the matter of Mary that Judas went into
negotiations with those who were plotting the destruction
of Jesus. He was a disappointed man. He had joined
a party which he confidently expected to lead to triumph,
success, and wealth. Instead of this, Jesus had lost every
opportunity, lost the favorable hour of popularity, and
concentrated on himself the hatred of the most powerful
men of the nation, and now was talking only of defeat
and rejection.
The presence of Judas with the household was now that
of a spy, watching his occasion, but making no outward demonstration.
He was in the little family circle that gathered
in the upper room to eat the last passover supper. His
Master bent at his feet and washed them, as he did those
of the faithful ones, in that sacramental action when he
showed them what he meant by true love. It was directly
after this last act of affection that Jesus openly declared
his knowledge of the meditated treachery, for he said: "I
speak not of you all, I know whom I have chosen; but
the Scripture must be fulfilled which saith, He that eateth
bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me." Then
with a deep sigh he adds in plain words, "Verily, verily,
I say unto you, one of you shall betray me."
It is a most lovely comment on the goodness of heart
of these simple men that in so solemn a moment no one
of them thought of criminating the other. Each one said
tremblingly, "Lord, is it I?"
John, leaning down on his Master's breast, inquired
privately who it was; and Jesus gave him a private sign
that it should be he to whom he gave a sop when he had
dipped it. He dipped the sop, and gave it to Judas.
Then Judas, still keeping up the show of innocence, said,
like the rest, "Master, is it I?" Jesus answered, "Thou
hast said it."
It is said that "Satan entered into him" at this moment.
All the smouldering elements of meanness, disgust, dislike
of Jesus, his teaching, his spirit, and his mission were
quickened by the presence of that invisible enemy who
comes to the heart of man only when he is called by the
congenial indulgence of wicked passions.
Judas rose hastily, and our Lord added, "That thou
doest, do quickly." He flung himself out and was gone.
The miserable sum for which he sold his Master, though
inconsiderable in itself, was probably offered as first wages
in a new service. His new masters were the heads of
Israel: all avenues of patronage and power were in their
hands, and the fortune that he could not make on the side
of Jesus he might hope to gather on that of his enemies.
He may have compounded with his conscience by believing
that the miraculous power of our Lord was such that
there was no danger of a fatal termination. In fact, that
his being taken might force him to declare himself and
bring on the triumphant moment of victory. He might
possibly have said to himself that he was at any rate acting
the part of a mediator in bringing matters to a crisis, and
perhaps forcing a favorable result. For, when he found
that Jesus was indeed a victim, he was overwhelmed with
remorse and despair. He threw the wretched money at
the feet of his tempters and departed and hanged himself,
and went, as we are told, "to his own place."
He went to the place for which he had fitted himself,
who, living in the very bosom of Jesus, had grown more
and more unlike him every day. He left Christ—driven
by no force but his own wicked will. To the last the
love of God pursued him: his Master knelt and washed
the very feet that were so soon to hasten to betray him.
It was with a sorrowful spirit, a troubled heart, that Jesus
said, "Woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is
betrayed: good were it for that man if he never had been
born."
Without attempting to solve the mysteries of this deepest
of all tragedies, we may yet see some of the uses and
purposes of it in regard to ourselves.
Our Lord was appointed to suffer in all respects as his
brethren; and the suffering of bearing with antagonistic
and uncongenial natures is one that the providence of God
often imposes on us. There are often bound to us, in
the closest intimacy of social or family ties, natures hard
and ungenial, with whom sympathy is impossible, and
whose daily presence necessitates a constant conflict with
an adverse influence. There are, too, enemies—open or
secret—whose enmity we may feel yet cannot define.
Our Lord, going before us in this hard way, showed us
how we should walk.
It will be appropriate to the solemn self-examination of
the period of Lent to ask ourselves, Is there any false
friend or covert enemy whom we must learn to tolerate, to
forbear with, to pity and forgive? Can we in silent offices
of love wash their feet as our Master washed the feet of
Judas? And if we have no real enemies, are there any
bound to us in the relations of life whose habits and ways
are annoying and distasteful to us? Can we bear with
them in love? Can we avoid harsh judgments, and harsh
speech, and the making known to others our annoyance?
Could we through storms of obloquy and evil report keep
calmly on in duty, unruffled in love, and commending ourselves
to the judgment of God? The examination will
probably teach us to feel the infinite distance between us
and our divine Ideal, and change censoriousness of others
into prayer for ourselves.
Palm Sunday
Nothing in ancient or modern tragedy is so sublime
and touching as the simple account given by the Evangelists
of the last week of our Lord's earthly life.
The church has since his ascension so devoutly looked
upon him as God that we are in danger of losing the
pathos and the power which come from a consideration of
his humanity. The Apostle tells us that, in order that he
might be a merciful and faithful high priest, he was made
in all respects like unto his brethren. He was a Jew.
His national and patriotic feeling was intense. To him
the sacred nation, the temple service, with all its hymns
and prayers and ancient poetic recollections, were more
dear than to any other man of his nation. The nation
was his own, his peculiar, chosen people; he was their
head and flower, for whom the whole gorgeous ritual had
been appointed, for whom the nation had been for centuries
waiting. Apart from his general tenderness and love
for humanity was this special love of country and countrymen.
Then there was the love of his very own—the
little church of tried, true, tested friends who had devoted
themselves to him; and, still within that, his family circle,
for whom his love was strong as a father's, tender and
thoughtful as a mother's. And yet Jesus went through
life bearing in his bosom the bitter thought that his nation
would reject him and instigate one of his own friends to
betray him, and that all seeming success and glory was to
end in a cruel and shameful death. He foresaw how every
heart that loved him would be overwhelmed and crushed
with a misery beyond all human precedent.
It is affecting to read in the Evangelists how often and
how earnestly Jesus tried to make his disciples realize
what was coming. "Let this saying sink down into your
ears," he would say: "the Son of man shall be delivered
into the hands of men;" and then would recount, item by
item, the overthrow, the agonies, the insults, the torture,
that were to be the end of his loving and gentle mission.
At various times and in various forms he took them aside
and repeated this prophecy. And it is said that they
"understood not his word;" that "they were astonished;"
that they "feared to ask him;" that they "questioned one
with another what this should mean." It seems probable
that, warmed with the flush of present and increasing
prosperity and popularity, witnessing his victorious miracles,
they had thrown this dark prophecy by, as something
inexplicable and never literally to be accomplished. What
it could mean they knew not, but that it could have a
literal fulfillment they seem none of them to have even
dreamed. Perhaps they were like many of us, in our
religion, in the habit of looking only on the bright, hopeful,
and easily comprehensible side of things, and letting
all that is dark and mysterious slide from the mind.
Up to the very week before his crucifixion the power
and popularity of Jesus seemed constantly increasing.
His miracles were more open, more impressive, more effective.
The raising of Lazarus from the dead had set the
final crown on the glorious work. It would appear that
Lazarus was a member of a well-known, influential family,
moving in the higher circles of Jerusalem. It was a
miracle wrought in the very heart and centre of knowledge
and influence, and it raised the fame of the new prophet
to the summit of glory. It is an affecting comment on the
worth of popular favor that the very flood-tide of the
fame and glory of Jesus was just five days before he was
crucified. On Monday—the day now celebrated in the
Christian Church as Palm Sunday—he entered Jerusalem
in triumph, with palms waving, and garlands thrown at
his feet, and the multitudes going before and after, shouting
Hosanna to the Son of David; and on Friday of the
same week the whole multitude shouted, "Away with
him! Crucify him! Release unto us Barabbas! His
blood be upon us and upon our children!" and he was led
through those same streets to Calvary. On these six days
before the death of Jesus the historians have expended a
wealth of detail, so that the record of what is said and
done is more than that of all the other portions of that
short life.
There are many touches of singular tenderness conveyed
in very brief words. Speaking of his final journey from
Galilee to Judæa, says one: "When the time came that
he should be received up he set his face steadfastly to go
to Jerusalem." Another narrates that when he was going
up to Jerusalem he walked before his disciples, and as
they followed him they were afraid. Evidently he was
wrapped in an electric cloud of emotion; he was swept
along by a mighty influence—tides of feeling deeper than
they could comprehend were rolling in his soul, and there
was that atmosphere of silence and mystery about him by
which the inward power of great souls casts an outward
sphere of awe about them. Still, as they walked behind,
they had their political dreams of a coming reign of power
and splendor, when the Judæan nation should rule the
world, and they, as nearest to the Master, should administer
the government of the nation—for it is said, by the
way they "disputed who should be the greatest."
He hears their talk, as a dying mother, who knows that
a few hours will leave her children orphans, listens to the
contentions of the nursery. He turns to them and makes
a last effort to enlighten them—to let them know that
not earthly glory and a kingdom are before them, but
cruelty, rejection, shame, and death. He recounts the
future, circumstantially, and with what deep energy and
solemn pathos of voice and manner may be imagined.
They make no answer, but shrink back, look one on
another, and are afraid to ask more. It would seem,
however, that there was one in the band on whom these
words made an impression. Judas evidently thought
that, if this was to be the end of all, he had been taken
in and deceived: a sudden feeling of irritation arises
against One who having such evident and splendid miraculous
power is about to give up in this way and lose his
opportunity and suffer himself to be defeated. Judas is
all ready now to make the best terms for himself with the
winning party. The others follow in fear and trembling.
The strife who shall be greatest subsides into a sort of
anxious questioning.
They arrive at a friendly house where they are to spend
the Sabbath, the last Sabbath of his earthly life. There
was a feast made for him, and we see him surrounded by
grateful friends. By the fact that Martha waited on the
guests and that Lazarus sat at the table it would appear
that this feast was in the house of a relative of that family.
It is said to have occurred in the house of "Simon the
Leper"—perhaps the leper to whom Jesus said, "I will—be
thou clean."
Here Mary, with the abandon which marks her earnest
and poetic nature, breaks a costly vase of balm and sheds
the perfume on the head of her Lord. It was an action in
which she offered up her whole self—her heart and her
life—to be spent for him, like that fleeting perfume.
Judas expostulates, "To what purpose is this waste?"
There is an answering flash from Jesus, like lightning
from a summer cloud. The value that our Lord sets upon
love is nowhere more energetically expressed. This trembling,
sensitive heart has offered itself up wholly to him,
and he accepts and defends it. There is a touch of human
pathos in the words, "She is anointing me for my burial."
Her gift had all the sacredness in his eyes of a death-bed
act of tenderness, and he declares, "Wheresoever through
the world this gospel shall be preached, there also shall
what this woman hath done be told for a memorial of her."
Judas slinks back, sullen and silent. The gulf between
him and his Master grows hourly more palpable—as the
nature that cannot love and the nature to whom love is
all come in close collision. Judas and Christ cannot blend
any more than oil and water, and the nearer approach only
makes the conflict of nature more evident.
On Monday morning, the day that we now celebrate as
Palm Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem. We are told that
the great city, now full of Jews come up from all parts of
the world, was moved about him. We have in the Book
of Acts an enumeration of the varieties in the throng that
filled Jerusalem at this time: "Parthians, Medes, Elamites,
dwellers in Mesopotamia and in Judæa and Cappadocia, in
Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and
in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome,
Jews and Proselytes, Cretes and Arabians." When all
these strangers heard the shouting, it is said the "whole
city was moved, saying, Who is this? And the multitude
said, This is Jesus, the Prophet of Nazareth in Galilee."
And what was He thinking of, as he came thus for the
last time to the chosen city? We are told "And when
he drew near and beheld the city, he wept over it, saying,
If thou hadst known, even thou in this thy day, the things
that belong to thy peace! but now they are hid from thine
eyes." Then follows the prophetic vision of the destruction
of Jerusalem—scenes of horror and despair for which
his gentle spirit bled inwardly.
One feature of the picture is touching: the children
in the temple crying, "Hosanna to the Son of David!"
The love of Jesus for children is something marked and
touching. When he rested from his labors at eventide, it
was often, we are told, with a little child in his arms—children
were his favorite image for the heavenly life, and
he had bid the mothers to bring them to him as emblems
of the better world. The children were enthusiastic for
him, they broke forth into rapture at his coming as birds
in the sunshine, loud and noisily as children will, to the
great discomfiture of priests and Scribes. "Master! bid
them hush," they said. He turned, indignant—"If
these should hold their peace the very stones would cry
out." These evidences of love from dear little children
were the last flower thrown at the feet of Jesus on his
path to death. From that day the way to the cross was
darker every hour.
Monday in Passion Week
During the last week of the life of Jesus we see him
under the most awful pressure of emotion; the crisis of
a great tragedy, which has been slowly gathering and
growing from the beginning of the world, is now drawing
on. The nation that he had chosen—that he had borne
and carried through all the days of old—was now to consummate
her ruin in his rejection. All his words and
actions during the last week of his life were under the
shadow of that cloud of doom which overhung the city of
Jerusalem, the temple, and the people whom he had loved,
so earnestly and so long, in vain.
When going up to Jerusalem he walked before his disciples,
silent and absorbed; and they dared scarcely speak
to him. Amid the triumphant shouts of the people that
welcomed him to the city he paused on the verge of Olivet
and wept over it. He saw the siege, the famine, the terror
of women and helpless children, the misery and despair,
the unutterable agonies of the sacking of Jerusalem, which
has been a world's wonder; and he broke forth in lamentation.
"Oh, that thou hadst known—even thou in this
thy day—the things that belong to thy peace! But now
they are hid from thine eyes."
All his discourses of this last week are shaded with the
sad coloring and prophetic vision of coming doom, of a
crime hastening to fulfillment that should bring a long-delayed
weight of wrath and vengeance.
His parables now turn on this theme. One day they
tell of a husbandman intrusting a vineyard to the care of
faithless servants; he sends messengers to overlook them;
they beat one and stone another, till finally he sends his
only and beloved son, and then they say, "Let us kill
him;" and they catch him and cast him out of the vineyard
and slay him. "What," he asks, "shall the Lord
of the vineyard do to these husbandmen?" Again, he
speaks of a feast to which all are generously invited, and
all neglect or reject the invitation, and not only reject but
insult and despise and ill-treat the messengers who bear
the invitation; and tells how the insulted King sends the
invitation to others, and decrees, "None of these men
shall taste of my supper." He tells of a wedding feast,
and of foolish virgins who slumber with unfilled lamps
till the door of welcome is shut. He tells of a king, who,
having intrusted talents to his servants, comes again to
reckon, and takes away the talent of the unfaithful one
and casts him to outer darkness.
All these themes speak of the approaching rejection of
the nation on whom God has heaped so many favors for
many years. The thought of their doom seems to press
down the heart of the Redeemer.
The twenty-third chapter of Matthew contains Christ's
last sermon in the temple—his final words of leave-taking
of his people; and a most dreadful passage it is. It is
awful, it is pathetic, to compare those fearful words with
his first benignant announcement at Nazareth. Nothing
in human language can be conceived more terrible than
these last denunciations of the rejected Lord and Lover of
the chosen race. He exposes with scathing severity the
hypocrisy, the greed, the cruelty of the leaders of the
nation; he denounces them as the true descendants of
those who of old killed God's prophets and stoned his
messengers, and ends by rising into the very majesty of
the Godhead in declaring their final doom:—
"Fill ye up the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents! Ye
generation of vipers! How can ye escape the damnation of
hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets and wise
men and scribes; and some of them ye shall kill and crucify,
and some of them ye shall scourge in your synagogues and
persecute from city to city. That upon you might come all
the righteous blood shed upon earth, from the blood of righteous
Abel to the blood of Zacharias,[5] the son of Barachias, whom ye
slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you
all these shall come upon this generation!
"O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! thou that killest the prophets
and stonest those that are sent unto thee—how often would I
have gathered thy children together, even as a hen doth gather
her brood under her wings—and ye would not. Behold, your
house is left unto you desolate, for I say that ye shall see me
no more henceforth till ye say, Blessed is he that cometh in the
name of the Lord."
This was Christ's last farewell—his valedictory to those
whom he had loved and labored for, and who would not
come to him that he might give them life.
To all these awful words was added the language of an
awful symbol. In one of his parables our Lord had
spoken of the Jewish nation under the figure of a tree
which, though carefully tended year by year, bore no fruit.
At last the word goes forth, "Cut it down!" But the
keeper of the vineyard intercedes and prays that it may
have a longer space of cultured care, and so be brought to
fruit-bearing. This last week of our Lord's life he sets
forth the solemn close of that parable by one of those
symbolic acts common among the old prophets and well
understood by the Jews.
Approaching a fair and promising tree on his way into
the city, he seeks fruit thereon, but finds it barren. There
is a pause, and then a voice of deep sadness says, "No
fruit grow on thee henceforth and forever!" and immediately
the fig-tree withered away.
It was an outward symbol of that doomed city whose
day of mercy was past. The awfulness of these last words
and of this last significant sign is increased by the tenderness
of Him who gave them forth. It is the Fountain of
Pity, the All-Loving One, that uttered the doom—a
doom made certain and inevitable not by God's will but
by man's perversity.
The lesson that we have to learn is the reality and
awfulness of sin, the reality of that persistence in wickedness
that can make even the love of Jesus vain for our
salvation. For what hope, what help, what salvation can
there be for those who cannot be reached by His love? If
they have seen and hated both him and his Father—what
remains?
Tuesday in Passion Week
The thought may arise to many minds, if Jesus was so
lovely, so attractive, and so beloved, how could it have
been possible that he should be put to so cruel a death in
the very midst of a people whom he loved and for whom
he labored?
The sacred record shows us why. It was this very
attractiveness, this very power over men's hearts, that was
the cause and reason of the conspiracy against Jesus. We
have a brief and very dramatic account of the meeting of
the Sanhedrim in which the death of Christ was finally
resolved upon, and we find that very popularity urged as
a reason why he cannot be permitted to live. In John
xi. 47, we are told that after the raising of Lazarus the
chief priests and Pharisees gathered a council and said,
"What do we? this man doeth many miracles. If we let
him thus alone all men will believe on him, and the
Romans will come and take away our place and nation."
There is the case stated plainly, and we see that these
men talked then just as men in our days talk. Do they
ever resolve on an act of oppression or cruelty, calling it
by its right name? Never. It is a "sacrifice" to some
virtue; and the virtue in this case was patriotism.
Here is the Jewish nation, a proud and once powerful
people, crushed and writhing under the heel of the conquering
Romans. They are burning with hatred of their
oppressors and with a desire of revenge, longing for the
Messiah that shall lead them to conquest and make their
nation the head of the world.
And now, here comes this Jesus and professes to be the
long-promised leader; and what does he teach? Love and
forgiveness of enemies; patient endurance of oppression
and wrong; and supreme devotion to the pure inner life
of the soul. If Roman tax-gatherers distrain upon their
property and force them to carry it from place to place,
they are to meet it only by free good will, that is, willingness
to go two miles when one is asked. If the extortionate
officer seizes their coat, they are to show only a
kindliness that is willing to give even more than that.
They are to love their bitterest enemies, pity and pray
for them, and continue in unbroken kindness, even as God's
sunshine falls in unmoved benignity on the just and the
unjust!
It must have inflamed these haughty, ambitious leaders
to fury to see all their brilliant visions of war and conquest
and national independence melting away in a mist of what
seemed to them the mere impossible sentimentalism of
love. And yet this illusion gains ground daily; Christ is
received in triumph at Jerusalem, and the rulers say to
each other, "Perceive ye how we prevail nothing? behold
the whole world is gone out after him."
Now, in the Jewish Sanhedrim Christ had friends and
followers. We are told of Joseph of Arimathea, who
would not consent to the deeds of the council. We are
told of Nicodemus, who before now had spoken boldly in
the council, demanding justice and a fair hearing for
Jesus. We may well believe that so extreme a course as
was now proposed met at first strong opposition. There
seems to have been some warm discussion. We may
imagine what it was: that Jesus was a just and noble
man, a prophet, a man all of whose deeds and words had
been pure and beneficent, was doubtless earnestly urged.
The advocates, it is true, were not men who had left all
to follow him, or enrolled themselves openly as his disciples,
but yet they could not consent to so monstrous an
injustice as this. That the discussion produced strong
feeling is evident from the excited manner in which
Caiaphas sums up: "Ye know nothing at all, nor consider
that it is better that one man should die than that the
whole nation should perish." That was the case as he
viewed it, and he talked precisely as men in our days have
often talked when consenting to an injustice or oppression:
Say what you will of this Jesus; I will not dispute you.
Admit, if you please, his virtues and good works; still, he
is a wrong-headed man, that will be the ruin of our nation.
Either he must perish or the nation be destroyed.
And so, on the altar of patriotism this murder was laid
as a sacrifice. And it was this same burning, impatient
national spirit of independence that slew Christ which
afterwards provoked the Roman government beyond endurance,
and brought upon Jerusalem wrath to the uttermost.
The very children and grandchildren of Caiaphas died
in untold miseries in that day of wrath and doom. The
decision to reject Christ was the decision which destroyed
Jerusalem with a destruction more awful than any other
recorded in history.
We are apt to consider the actors in this great tragedy
as sinners above all others. But every day and every hour
in our times just such deeds are being reënacted.
There were all sorts of sinners in that tragedy: Caiaphas,
who sacrificed one whom he knew to be a noble and good
man to political ambition; Pilate, who consented to an
acknowledged wrong from dread of personal inconvenience;
Judas, who made the best of his time in selling out a
falling cause to the newcomers; Peter, the impetuous
friend suddenly frightened into denial; the twelve, forsaking
and fleeing in a moment of weakness; the multitude
of careless spectators, those tide-waiters who turn as
the flood turns, who shouted for Jesus yesterday because
others were shouting, and turn against him to-day because
he is unpopular. All these were there. On the other
hand, there were the faithful company of true-hearted
women that went with Jesus weeping on his way to the
cross; that beloved disciple and the Mother that stood by
him to the last; all these, both friends and foes, represent
classes of people who still live and still act their part in
this our day.
"For, when under fierce oppression,
Goodness suffers like transgression,
Christ again is crucified;
But if love be there true-hearted,
By no pain or terror parted,
Mary stands the cross beside!"
Wednesday in Passion Week
The last chapters of St. John—in particular from the
thirteenth to the seventeenth—are worthy, more than
anything else in the sacred writings, of the designation
which has been given them, The Heart of Jesus. They
are the language of the most intimate love, to the most
intimate friends, in view of the greatest and most inconceivable
of human sorrows. For, though the disciples—poor,
humble, simple men—were dazed, confused, and
misty up to the very moment when they were entering
upon the greatest sorrow of their life, the Master who was
leading them saw it all with perfect clearness. He saw
perfectly not only the unspeakable humiliation and anguish
that were before himself, but the disappointment, the
terror, the dismay, the utter darkness and despair that
were just before these humble, simple friends who had
invested all their love and hope in him.
When we think of this it will seem all the more
strange, the more unworldly and divine to find that in
these very chapters our Lord speaks more often, and with
more emphasis, of Joy than in any other part of the New
Testament. In the fifteenth he says, "These things have
I spoken unto you that my joy might remain in you, and
that your joy might be full." And again, in his prayer
for them, he says, "And now come I to thee; and these
things I speak in the world that they might have my joy
fulfilled in themselves." He speaks of his joy as a treasure
he longed to impart—as something which overflowed
his own soul, and sought to equalize itself by flowing into
the souls of his friends. He was not only full of joy, but
he had fullness of joy to give away.
This joy of Christ in the approach of extremest earthly
anguish and sorrow is one of the beautiful mysteries of our
faith. It is a holy night-flower, opening only in darkness,
and shedding in the very shadow of death light and
perfume; or like the solemn splendor of the stars, to be
seen only in the deepest darkness.
In the representations made of our Lord as a man of
sorrows we are too apt to forget the solemn emphasis
with which he asserts this fullness of joy. But let us
look at his position on the mere human side. At the hour
when he thus spoke he knew that, so far as the salvation
of his nation was concerned, his life-work had been a failure.
His own people had rejected him and had bargained
with a member of his own family to betray him. He
knew the exact details of the scourging, the scoffing, the
taunts, the torture, the crucifixion; and to a sensitive soul
the hour of approach to a great untried agony is often the
hour of bitterest trial. It is when we foresee a great
trouble in the dimness of to-morrow that our undisciplined
hearts grow faint and fail us. But he who had long foreseen—who
had counted in advance—every humiliation,
every sorrow, and every pain, spoke at the same time of
his joy as an overflowing fullness. He spoke of his peace
as something which he had a divine power to give away.
The world saw that night a new sight—a sufferer who
had touched the extreme of all earthly loss and sorrow,
who yet stood, like a God, offering to give Peace and Joy—even
fullness of joy. For our Lord intensifies the idea.
He wants his children not to have joy merely, but to be
full of joy. This is the meaning of the words to "have
my joy fulfilled in them."
We shall see in the affecting history of the next few
hours of the life of Jesus that this heavenly joy was capable
of a temporary obscuration. He was aware that a trial
was coming from a direct collision with the Evil Spirit.
"The Prince of this world cometh, but hath nothing in
me."
Yet we cannot but feel that the mysterious agonies of
Gethsemane, that wrung the blood-drops from his heart,
were in part due to that conflict with cruel and malignant
spirits. It is the greatest possible help to our poor sorrowful
nature that these struggles, these strong cryings and
bitter tears of our Lord, have been recorded, because it
helps us to feel that he was not peaceful because he was
passionless—that his joy and peace did not come from the
serenity of a nature incapable of sorrow and struggles like
ours. There are passages in the experience of such saints
as Madame Guyon that seem like the unnatural exaltations
of souls exceptionally indifferent to circumstances; nothing
makes any difference to them; one thing is just as good
as another. But in the experience of Jesus we see our
own most shrinking human repellencies. We see that
there were sufferings that he dreaded with his whole soul;
sorrows which he felt to be beyond even his power of
endurance; and so when he said, "Not my will, but Thy
will," he said it with full vision of what he was accepting;
and in that unshaken, that immovable oneness of will with
the Father lay the secret of his joy and victory.
It is a great and solemn thing for us to think of this
joy of Christ in sorrow. It is something that we can
know only in and by sorrow. But sorrows are so many
in this world of ours! Griefs, sickness, disappointment,
want, death, so beset our footsteps that it is worth everything
to us to think of that joy of Christ that is brightest
as the hour grows darkest. It is a gift. It is not in us.
We cannot get it by any human reasonings or the mere
exercise of human will, but we can get it as a free gift
from Jesus Christ.
If in the hour of his deepest humiliation and suffering
he had joy and peace to give away, how much more now,
when he is exalted at the right hand of God, to give gifts
unto men! Poor sorrowful, suffering, struggling souls,
Christ longs to comfort you. "I will give to him that is
athirst the water of life freely." "Come unto me, all ye
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
Thursday in Passion Week
There are times in life when human beings are called
to sorrows that seem so hopeless, so cruel, that they take
from the spirit all power of endurance. There are agonies
that overwhelm, that crush,—their only language seems
to be a groan of prostrate anguish. There are distresses
against which the heart cries out, "It is too much. I
cannot, cannot bear it. God have mercy on me!"
It was for people who suffer thus, for those who are
capable of such depths and who are called to go through
them, that the great Apostle and High Priest of our profession
passed through that baptism of agony in the Garden
of Gethsemane. The Apostle says, "It became him for
whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing
many sons and daughters unto glory, to make the
Captain of their salvation perfect through suffering."
And it was at this hour and time that he was to pass
through such depths that no child of his could ever go
deeper. Alone, and without the possibility of human
sympathy, he was to test those uttermost distresses possible
to the most exceptional natures. Jesus suffered all
that he could endure and live. The record is given with
great particularity by three Evangelists, and is full of mysterious
suggestion. Up to this period all the discourses
of our Lord, in distinct view of his final sufferings, had
been full of calmness and courage. He had consoled his
little flock, and bid them not be troubled, speaking cheerfully
of a joy that should repay the brief anguish of separation.
He not only was wholly at peace in his own soul,
but felt that he had peace in abundance to give away.
"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not
as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart
be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
Yet he went forth from speaking these very words, and
this is the account of the scene that followed, collated
from the three Evangelists:—
"Then cometh Jesus with them unto the place that is called
Gethsemane, and said to his disciples, Sit ye here while I go
and pray yonder. And he took with him Peter and James and
John, and began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy (in
extreme anguish). And he said unto them, My soul is exceeding
sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here and watch with
me, and pray that ye enter not into temptation. And he went
forward a little, and fell on his face and prayed that, if it were
possible, the hour might pass from him, saying, My Father, if
it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I
will, but as thou wilt. And he cometh unto his disciples and
findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What! could ye not
watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that ye enter not
into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is
weak. He went away again the second time, and prayed, and
said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away
this cup from me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what thou
wilt. O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me
except I drink it, thy will be done. And he came and found
them asleep again; for their eyes were heavy, neither wist they
what to answer him. And he left them and went away the third
time, and prayed, saying the same words. And, being in an
agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was as it were
great drops of blood, falling down to the ground, and there
appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him.
"And when he rose up from prayer and was come to his
disciples, he findeth them sleeping for sorrow, and saith unto
them, Sleep on now—rest."
There seems here evidence that the anguish, whatever
it was, had passed, and that Jesus had returned to his habitual
peace. He looks with pity on the poor tired followers
whose sympathy had failed him just when he most needed
it, and says, "Poor souls, let them sleep for a little and
rest."
After an interval he rouses them. "It is enough—the
hour is come; the Son of man is betrayed into the hand of
sinners. Rise up; let us go: behold, he is at hand that
doth betray me."
The supposition that it was the final agony of the cross
which Jesus prayed to be delivered from is inconsistent
with his whole life and character. He had kept that end
in view from the beginning of his life. He said, in view
of it, "I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I
straitened till it be accomplished!" He rebuked Peter in
the sharpest terms for suggesting that he should avoid those
predicted sufferings. Going up to Jerusalem to die, he
walked before the rest, as if impelled by a sacred ardor to
fulfill his mission. Furthermore, in the Epistle to the
Hebrews we are taught thus: the writer says, speaking of
the Saviour, "Who in the days of his flesh offered up
prayers with strong crying and tears to him that was able
to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared."
Whatever relief it was that our Lord supplicated with such
earnestness, it was given; and he went forth from the
dreadful anguish in renewed and perfect peace.
We may not measure the depths of that anguish or its
causes. Our Lord gives some intimation of one feature in
it by saying, as he prepared to go forth to it, "The Prince
of this World cometh, and hath nothing in me;" and in
warning his disciples, "Pray that ye enter not into temptation."
The expression employed by St. Mark to describe
the anguish is indicative of a sudden rush—of an amazement,
as if a new possibility of suffering, overwhelming
and terrible, had been disclosed to him, such a sorrow as
it seemed must destroy life—"exceeding sorrowful, even
unto death."
Let these words remain in all their depths, in all their
mystery, as standing for that infinite possibility of pain
which the one divine Man was to taste for every man.
There have been facts in human experience analogous.
We are told that the night before his execution, Jerome
of Prague, in his lonely prison, condemned and held
accursed by the proud Scribes and Pharisees, the Christian
Sanhedrim of his times, fainted and groaned and prayed
as Jesus in Gethsemane. Martin Luther has left on record
a wonderful prayer, written the night before the Diet of
Worms, when he, a poor, simple monk, was called before
the great Diet of the Empire to answer for his faith.
Such strong crying and tears—such throbbing words—that
seem literally like drops of blood falling down to the
ground, attest that Luther was passing through Gethsemane.
Alone, with all the visible power of the Church
and the world against him, his position was like that of
Jesus. A crisis was coming when he was to witness for
truth, and he felt that only God was for him, and he
appeals to him: "Hast thou not chosen me to do this
work? I ask thee, O God, O thou my God, where art
thou? Art thou dead? No, thou canst not die; thou
art only hiding thyself."
In many private histories there are Gethsemanes. There
are visitations of sudden, overpowering, ghastly troubles,—troubles
that transcend all ordinary human sympathy,
such as the helpless human soul has to wrestle with alone.
And it was because in this blind struggle of life such
crushing experiences are to be meted out to the children
of men that Infinite Love provided us with a divine
Friend who had been through the deepest of them all, and
come out victorious.
In the sudden wrenches which come by the entrance of
death into our family circles, there is often an inexplicable
depth of misery that words cannot tell. No outer words
can tell what a trial is to the soul. Only Jesus, who, as
the Head of the human race, united in himself every capability
of human suffering, and proved them all, in order
that he might help us, only he has an arm strong enough
and a voice tender enough to reach us. The stupor of the
disciples in the agony of Jesus is a sort of parable or
symbol of the inevitable loneliness of the deepest kind of
sorrow. There are friends, loving, honest, true, but they
cannot watch with us through such hours. It is like the
hour of death—nobody can go with us. But he who
knows what it is so to suffer; he who has felt the horror,
the amazement, the heart-sick dread—who has fallen on
his face overcome, and prayed with cryings and tears and
the bloody sweat of agony—he can understand us and can
help us. He can send an angel from heaven to comfort
us when every human comforter is "sleeping for sorrow."
It was Gethsemane which gave Jesus the power to bring
many sons and daughters unto glory.
And it may comfort us under such trials to hope that as
he thus gained an experience and a tenderness which made
him mighty to comfort and to save, so we, in our humbler
measure, may become comforters to others. When the
experience is long past, when the wounds of the heart are
healed, then we may find it good to have drank of Christ's
cup, and gone down in that baptism with him. We may
find ourselves with hearts tenderer to feel, and stronger to
sustain others; even as the Apostle says, he "comforteth
us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort
them that are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith
we ourselves are comforted of God."
Good Friday
A peculiar sacredness always attaches to the words of
the dying. In that lonely pass between the here and the
hereafter the meanest soul becomes in a manner a seer,
and a mysterious interest invests it. But the last utterances
of great and noble spirits, of minds of vast feeling
and depth, are of still deeper significance. The last utterances
of great men would form a pathetic collection and a
food for deep ponderings. It is no wonder, then, that the
traditions of the Christian Church have attached a special
value to the last words of Jesus on the cross.
The last words of Socrates, reported by Plato, have had
an undying interest. These words were spoken in the
bosom of sympathizing friends and in the enjoyment of
physical quiet and composure. Death was at hand; but
it was a death painless and easy, and undisturbing to the
flow of thought or emotion.
The death of Jesus, on the contrary, was death with
every aggravation and horror which could make it fearful.
There was everything to torture the senses and to obscure
the soul. It was a whirl of vulgar obloquy and abuse,
confusing to the spirit, and following upon protracted
exhaustion from sleeplessness and suffering of various kinds
for long hours.
In the case of most human beings we might wish to
hide our eyes from the sight of such an agony; we might
refuse to listen to what must be the falterings and the
weaknesses of a noble spirit overwhelmed and borne down
beyond the power of human endurance. But no such
danger attends the listening to the last words on Calvary.
They have been collected into a rosary embodying the
highest Christian experience possible to humanity, the
most signal victory of love over pain and of good over evil
that the world's history presents.
During Passion Week in Rome no services are more
impressive than those of the seven "last words," with the
hymns, prayers, and exhortations accompanying them. To
us the mere quotation of them, unattended by sermon or
hymn or prayer, is a litany of awful power. Have we
ever pondered these as they were spoken in their order in
the words of the simple Gospel narrative?
"And when they came to the place that is called Calvary,
there they crucified him and the malefactors, the one
on his right hand and the other on his left. Then said
Jesus, Father, forgive them; they know not what they
do." This is the first word. Against physical violence
and pain there is in us all a reaction of the animal nature
which expresses itself often in the form of irritation.
Thus, in strong, undisciplined natures, the first shock of
physical torture brings out a curse, and it is only after an
interval that reason and conscience gain the ascendency
and make the needed allowance. In these strange words
of Jesus we feel that there is the sharp shock of a new
sense of pain, but it wrings from him only prayer. This
divine sweetness of love was unvanquished; the habit of
tenderness and consideration for the faults of others furnished
an instant plea. The poor brutal Roman soldiers—they
know not what they do! The foolish multitude
who three days before shouted "Hosanna," and now shout
"Crucify"—they know not what they do! How strange
to the Roman soldiers must those words have sounded, if
they understood them! "What manner of man is this?"
It is not surprising that tradition numbers these poor soldiers
among the earliest converts to Jesus.
The second utterance was on this wise:—
"And the people that stood beholding, and the rulers also
with them, derided him, saying, He saved others; let him save
himself, if he be Christ, the chosen of God. And the soldiers
also mocked him, coming to him and offering him vinegar; and
one of the malefactors railed on him, saying, If thou be the Son
of God, save thyself and us. But the other answering, rebuked
him, saying, Dost thou not fear God, seeing that thou art in the
same condemnation?—and we, indeed, justly, for we receive
the reward of our deeds; but this man hath done nothing
amiss. And he said to Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou
comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily,
I say unto thee, to-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise."
Still unvanquished by pain, he is even with his last
breath pronouncing words of grace and consolation for the
guilty and repentant! He is mighty to save even in his
humiliation!
The third utterance is recorded by St. John as follows:—
"Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his
mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.
When Jesus, therefore, saw his mother standing, and
the disciple whom he loved, he said to his mother, Woman,
behold thy son, and to the disciple, Son, behold thy mother."
Thus far, every utterance of Jesus has been one of
thoughtful consideration for others, of prayer for his enemies,
of grace and pardon to the poor wretch by his side,
and of tenderness to his mother and disciple. But in tasting
death for every man our Lord was to pass through a
deeper experience; he was to know the sufferings of the
darkened brain, which, clogged and impeded by the obstructed
circulation, no longer afforded a clear medium for
divine communion. He was to suffer the eclipse which
the animal nature in its dying state can interpose between
the soul and God. Three hours we are told had passed,
when there was darkness over all the land, like that that
was slowly gathering over the head of the suffering Lord.
"And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice,
saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani, which is, being interpreted,
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" Those words, from the Psalm of David, come now
as the familiar language expressive of that dreadful experience
to which the whole world looks as its ransom:—
"After that, Jesus said, I thirst. And one ran and filled a
sponge full of vinegar and put it on a reed and gave him to
drink. And when he had received the vinegar, he said, It is
finished, and he bowed his head."
What we read of his last utterance is that "he cried
with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost." This last
loud utterance was in the words, "Father, into thy hands
I commend my spirit."
It is the interpretation that the church has given to
these last words that they betokened a sudden flame of
joyful perception, such as sometimes lights up the brain
at the dying moment, after it has been darkened by the
paralysis of death. As he said, "It is finished," light,
and joy, and hope, flushed his soul, and with this loud
cry of victory and joy, it departed like a ray of heavenly
light to the bosom of the Father.
Such were the seven "last utterances" of Jesus—and
when can we hope to attain to what they teach? When
shall we be so grounded in Love that no tumult or jar of
outward forces, no insults, no physical weariness, exhaustion,
or shock of physical pain, shall have power to absorb
us in selfishness, or make us forgetful of others? When
shall pity and prayer be the only spontaneous movement
of our hearts when most hurt and injured—pierced in the
tenderest nerve? When shall thoughtfulness for others,
and divine pity for degraded natures, be the immovable
habit of our souls? How little of self and its sufferings
in these last words; how much of pity and love—the pity
and love of a God!
Could we but learn life's lessons by them, then will
come at last to us the final hour, when, our trial being
completed, we shall say "It is finished," and pass like him
to the bosom of the Father.
Good Friday Evening
What is the darkest hour to us when our friends die?
Not the dying hour; for then love has some last act, some
last word to receive, some comfort to give, some service to
render, that diverts from the bitterness of pain. Not even
when the eyes are closed forever, and the face is fixed in
marble stillness; for still we gather at the side of the cold
clay and feel as if there were something left us of our love.
But when we have carried our dear ones to the grave, and
seen the doors of the sepulchre shut between them and us,
and come back to the house where they are no more—where
they never more may be—then is indeed the darkest
hour.
There is a very touching picture by Delaroche entitled
"The Return from the Cross," in which the mother of
Jesus, leaning on the arm of the beloved John, is seen just
entering a lowly dwelling. A few faithful friends, men
and women, are with them; they have seen him die—seen
him laid in the sepulchre and a great stone rolled
against the door; and now they are come to their desolate
home to think it all over, and to weep.
Do we ask, Why did they not remember the words of
Jesus, that he should rise again? Ah! because they had
just such hearts as we have, and their faith was overpowered
by sight just as ours is.
They may have thought they believed that they should
see their Lord risen from the dead; but at the sight of
the death agonies, and the lifeless form, and the dark, cold
stone of the sepulchre, all this poor faith died in darkness.
It was like carrying a taper out into a tempest. And we,
when we lay our dear ones in the grave, say in solemn
words that we do it "in sure and certain hope of a blessed
and glorious resurrection," when what is sown in weakness
shall be raised in power, what is sown in dishonor shall
be raised in glory. We say it, and we think we believe
it; but does it really then cheer us? Does it dry our
tears? Does it make the return to our desolated home any
less dreadful?
Still we remember the death-bed, the pains, the dying
eyes, the weakness, the sinking—we are overwhelmed by
sorrow, and our souls ache as with a wound. Our hearts
throb and yearn towards the form we can no longer see
or embrace, as if the loved one were a portion of our own
selves that had been violently torn away, leaving us fainting
and bleeding to death. All this—more than all this—was
in the sorrow of the home of Mary and John that
darkest of all nights.
He they mourned was not merely friend, but Lord and
Leader, the Hope of Israel; the hope of the world; and
God had let him suffer and die thus!
It was true that Jesus had made special efforts to provide
against the sinking of this hour. He warned his
friends of it beforehand. He admitted four of his chosen
disciples upon the Mount of Transfiguration to look into
the heavenly world and see him in glory and hear him
speaking with Moses and Elijah of his coming death. All
this was given that their faith might not fail. Then, just
before his death, at the grave of Lazarus, he declared himself
the Resurrection and the Life, and showed them in
the restored form of a well-known friend what he meant
by rising from the dead—for it is said, "They questioned
among themselves what the rising from the dead should
mean."
But all appeared to be gone now. Love still kept
watch. Spices were prepared to embalm the precious form
with no hope, apparently, of its resurrection. It had
faded out from their minds as it seems to fade out of the
minds of us Christians when we bewail our dead and speak
of them as "lost." Their Jesus was to them dead and
gone; and why this thing was permitted was a dark, insoluble
mystery. "We trusted that it had been he that
should have redeemed Israel," said the two disciples, sadly
walking on the way to Emmaus. "We trusted!" All in
the past tense. Not a word of any hope or faith in the
resurrection! And yet their Lord and Master was even at
that moment walking with them and comforting their
hearts.
Surely, in this respect, we modern Christians too often
tread in the footsteps of the saints and suffer as they did.
But our Lord knows our weakness; he knows the physical
faintness which comes from long watching, the obscuration
of mind which comes from sorrow, and he is at hand to
comfort us in our blind weeping. Mary Magdalene knew
him not, because her eyes were full of tears, till his well-known
voice called her name. The mourning disciples as
they walked to Emmaus knew not that Jesus was walking
by them. And so, ever since, to weary hearts and lonely
homes the comforting Christ still comes invisibly, with
sweetness and rest, if only we of little faith would remember
his promises and recognize his presence. Still now,
as he first announced himself, he comes "to heal the
broken-hearted," and is beside them ever in the darkest
and most dreadful hour of their afflictions.
Easter Sunday
There is something wonderfully poetic in the simple
history given by the different Evangelists of the resurrection
of our Lord. It is like a calm, serene, dewy morning,
after a night of thunder and tempest. One of the
most beautiful features in the narrative is the presence of
those godlike forms of our angel brethren. How can it
be possible that critics with human hearts have torn and
mangled this sacred picture for the purpose of effacing
these celestial forms—so beautiful, so glorious! Is it
superstition to believe that there are higher forms of life,
intellect, and energy than those of earth; that there are
races of superior beings between us and the throne of God,
as there are gradations below us of less and lessening power
down to the half-vegetable zoöphytes? These angels, with
their power, their purity, their unfading youth, their tender
sympathy for man, are a radiant celestial possibility
which every heart must long to claim as not only probable
but certain.
The history of our Lord from first to last is fragrant
with the sympathy and musical with the presence of these
shining ones. They announced his coming to the Blessed
among Women. They filled the air with songs and rejoicings
at the hour of his birth. They ministered to him
during his temptations in the wilderness. When repentant
sinners thronged about him and Scribes and Pharisees
sneered, it was to the sympathy of these invisible ones
that he turned, as those whose hearts thrilled with joy
over the repenting sinner. In the last mysterious agony
at Gethsemane it was an angel that appeared and strengthened
him. And now with what godlike energy do they
hasten upon their mission to attend their king's awaking!
"And, behold, there was a great earthquake, for the angel of
the Lord descended from heaven, and rolled back the stone
from the door of the sepulchre, and sat upon it. His countenance
was like lightning, and his raiment was white as snow,
and for fear of him the keepers did shake and became as dead
men."
In another Evangelist we have a scene that preceded
this. These devoted women, in whose hearts love outlived
both faith and hope, rose while it was yet dark, and set
out with their spices and perfumes to go and pay their last
tribute of affection and reverence to the dead.
They were under fear of persecution and death; they
knew the grave was sealed and watched by those who had
slain their Lord, but still they determined to go. There
was the inconsiderate hardihood of love in their undertaking,
and the artless helplessness of their inquiry, "Who
will roll away the stone from the door?" shows the desperation
of their enterprise. Yet they could not but
believe that by prayers or tears or offered payment—in
some way—that stone should be rolled away.
Arrived on the spot, they saw that the sepulchre was
open and empty, and Mary Magdalene, with the impulsive
haste and earnestness which marks her character, ran back
to the house of John, where were the mother of Jesus,
and Peter, and astonished them with the tidings. "They
have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we
know not where they have laid him."
Nothing is said of the Mother in this scene. Probably
she was utterly worn out and exhausted by the dreadful
scenes of the day before, and incapable of further exertion.
But Peter and John started immediately for the sepulchre.
Meanwhile, the two other women went into the sepulchre
and stood there perplexed, till suddenly they saw a vision
of celestial forms, radiant in immortal youth and clothed
in white. One said:—
"Be not afraid. I know ye seek Jesus of Nazareth that was
crucified. Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not
here. He is risen as he said. Behold where they laid him.
Remember how he spake unto you of this when he was in Galilee,
saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands
of sinful men and be crucified, and the third day rise again."
And they remembered his words.
Furthermore, the friendly spirit bids them to go and
tell the disciples and Peter that their Master is risen from
the dead, and is going before them into Galilee—there
shall they see him. And charged with this message the
women had fled from the sepulchre just as Peter and John
came up.
The delicacies of character are strikingly shown in the
brief record. John outruns Peter, stoops down and looks
into the sepulchre; but that species of reticence which
always appears in him controls him here—he hesitates to
enter the sacred place. Now, however, comes Peter, impetuous,
ardent, determined, and passes right into the
tomb.
There is a touch of homelike minuteness in the description
of the grave as they found it—no discovery of haste,
no sign of confusion, but all in order: the linen grave-clothes
lying in one place; the napkin that was about his
head not lying with them, but folded together in a place
by itself; indicating the perfect calmness and composure
with which their Lord had risen—transported with no
rapture or surprise, but, in this supreme moment, maintaining
the same tranquillity which had ever characterized
him.
It is said they saw and believed, though as yet they
did not fully understand the saying that he must rise from
the dead; and they left the place and ran with the news
to the disciples.
But Mary still lingers weeping by the empty tomb—type
of too many of us, who forget that our beloved ones
have arisen. Through her tears she sees the pitying
angels, who ask her as they might often ask us, "Why
weepest thou?" She tells her sorrowful story—they
have taken away her Lord and she knows not where they
have laid him; and yet at this moment Jesus is standing
by her, and one word from his voice changes all.
It is not general truth or general belief that our souls
need in their anguish; it is one word from Christ to us,
it is his voice calling us by name, that makes the darkness
light.
We mark throughout this story the sympathetic touches
of interest in the angels. They had heard and remembered
what Christ said in Galilee, though his people had
forgotten it. They had had sympathy for the repentant
weeping of Peter, and sent a special message of comfort to
him. These elder brethren of the household seem in all
things most thoughtful and careful of human feelings;
they breathe around us the spirit of that world where an
unloving word or harsh judgment is an impossible conception.
The earlier Christian tradition speaks of our Lord's first
visit to his mother. It may be that in that space of time
while Peter and John were running to the sepulchre Jesus
himself chose to draw near to his mother. To her he gave
one of his last dying words, and we cannot but believe
that one of his earliest risen messages of hope and blessing
was for her. But over an interview so peculiar and so
blessed the sacred narrative has deemed it wise to leave
the veil of silence.
The time after our Lord's resurrection is one full of
mysteries. But few things are told us of that life which
he lived on earth. He no longer walked the ways of men
as before—no longer lived with his disciples, but only
appeared to them from time to time, as he saw that they
needed comfort, counsel, or rebuke. We have the beautiful
story of the walk to Emmaus. We have accounts of
meetings of the disciples with closed doors, for fear of the
Jews, when Jesus suddenly appeared in the midst of them,
saying, "Peace be unto you!" and showing to them his
hands and his side; and it is added, "Then were the disciples
glad when they saw the Lord."
We have an account of how he suddenly appeared to
them by the Lake of Genesareth, when they had been
vainly toiling all night—how he stood on the shore in the
dim gray of morning and said, "Children, have ye any
meat?" They answered him "No;" and he said, "Cast
the net on the right hand and ye shall find." And then
John whispers to Peter, "It is the Lord!" and Peter,
impetuous to the last, casts himself into the water and
swims to the shore. They find a fire prepared, a meal
ready for them, and Jesus to bless the bread,—and very
sweet and lovely was the interview.
How many such visits and interviews there were—when
and with whom—we have no means of knowing,
though St. John indicates that there were many other
things which Jesus said and did worthy of record besides
those of which we are told. We learn from St. Paul that
he appeared to more than five hundred of his followers at
once—a meeting not described by any of the Evangelists.
It is believed by many Christians that Christ is yet
coming to reign visibly upon this earth. That Christ
should reign in any one spot or city of this earth, as
earthly kings reign, with a court and human forms of
administration, is suggestive of grave difficulties. The
embarrassments in the way of our Centennial Exhibition
this year, the fatigue and disturbance and danger to health
and life of such crowds coming and going, might suggest
what would be the effect on human society if in any one
earthly place the universal object of all human desire were
located. But it may be possible that the barrier between
the spiritual world and ours will be so far removed that
the presence of our Lord and his saints may at times be
with us, even as Christ was with the disciples in this
interval. It may become a lawful subject of desire and
prayer and expectation. It may be in that day that in
assemblies of his people Jesus will suddenly stand, saying,
"Peace be unto you!" Such appearances could take place
in all countries and lands, according to human needs, without
deranging human society.
But whether visibly or by the manifestation of his
Spirit, let us hasten and look forward to that final second
coming of our Master, when the kingdoms of this world
shall be the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ.
Ascension Day
At length the visible and mortal pilgrimage of our Lord
was over, and the time come when he must return to his
home in heaven, to the glory with the Father which he
had before the world was.
We cannot fail to notice the calmness, brevity, and simplicity
with which this crowning act of his life is recorded.
He had before told his disciples that it was better for
them that his visible presence should be withdrawn from
them, and that when ascended to the Father he should be
with them as an intimate spiritual presence and power.
He now speaks to them of a baptism of the Holy Spirit
that they should receive after his ascension, and bids them
tarry in Jerusalem till they be endued with this power
from on high.
Then the narrative says: "And he led them out as far
as Bethany; and he lifted up his hands and blessed them,
and while he blessed them he was parted from them and
taken up into heaven; and a cloud received him out of
their sight. And while they were looking steadfastly to
heaven, as he went up, behold two men stood by them in
white apparel, who said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye
gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus which is taken
from you into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye
have seen him go. And they worshipped him, and returned
to Jerusalem with great joy from the Mount of Olives,
and were continually in the temple praising and blessing
God."
The forty days that Jesus lingered on earth had, it
seems, not been in vain. His mourning flock were consoled
and brought to such a point of implicit faith that the
final separation was full of joy.
They were at last convinced that it was better for them
that he go to the Father—that an ascended Lord, seated
at the right hand of power and shedding down spiritual
light and joy, was better than any earthly presence, however
dear. Christ, as a living power of inspiration in the
soul, was henceforth to be nearer, dearer, more inseparable,
more consoling and helpful than the man of Nazareth had
ever been.
Let us all with one heart unite in the beautiful prayer
of the church for this day: "O God, the King of Glory,
who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great
triumph unto thy Kingdom in Heaven, we beseech thee
leave us not comfortless; but send to us thy Holy Ghost
to comfort and exalt us to that same place whither our
Saviour Christ is gone before us, who liveth and reigneth
with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world
without end. Amen."
Whitsuntide
When our Saviour was to go forth on his great mission
he spent forty days in prayer; and so now his little church
were to spend forty days of waiting and devotion till they
should receive the gift from on high. What that gift was
we can see in their history. How dark, how confused,
how unspiritual their views, how low their faith, how
easily upset by the storms of persecution! But when the
divine influence came upon them, what a change! What
clearness, what insight, what courage, what power! When
brought before kings and rulers they bore joyous testimony;
when beaten ignominiously they went out rejoicing
that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his
sake.
Do not all ministers of Christ, all Christians to whose
keeping his honor and cause is confided, need such a baptism
as this, such a new birth in spiritual things? For
the gift came not merely on the twelve Apostles, but on
the whole company of believers, both men and women.
We read the names of the twelve, and then are told that
"these all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication
with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus,
and his brethren,"—a company of a hundred and twenty
persons.
They were united day after day in prayer—their whole
souls, with one accord, were lifted heavenward; all earthly
scenes and interests were put aside, and the attitude of
their minds was one of ardent desire and expectancy.
It was to souls so raised, so enkindled, that at last the
glorious gift came—the spiritual power that made every
Christian man and woman among them an inspired and
convincing witness for Christ. The world witnessed that
day a new sight—an invisible spiritual power, before
which thousands bowed at the name of that Jesus whom
but a few weeks before they had seen crucified. And
why have we not such a baptism and such a power? Is
our faith what it should be,—our zeal, our devotion? If
all Christians were like us, would the world ever be converted
to God? Is there a gift of spiritual power and
constancy of faith to be had in answer to fervent prayer?
and should we not seek it as they did? Of late there
have been in Europe and in this country large conventions
of Christians of all names and denominations to pray and
seek for this gift of the Holy Spirit, to enable them to
witness for Christ as these witnessed; it is a most joyful
sign of our times. Let us hope that such prayers may be
answered in bringing back to the modern church something
of the fervor, the simplicity, the entire devotion that
characterized these first Christians. It is not by arguing
with skeptics, but by a divine and holy life, that Christians
are to convince the world of the truth of our religion.
It is "Christ in us, the hope of glory," that is to be the
power that shall convert the world.
In a moment of profound emotion, when our Lord contemplated
the near approach of the last tragedy in his life,
he said: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and
die, it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much
fruit."
Accordingly, it was but little more than a month after
the scenes of Calvary before Jerusalem was filled with a
harvest of men and women who were born into the Christ-life,
and were living and acting in his spirit.
At the feast of Pentecost Jerusalem was full of strangers,
devout Jews from every nation under heaven, and three
thousand in one day bowed at the feet of the Jesus whom
they had crucified. The chief priests were enraged and
terrified, for everywhere the Apostles of this crucified
Jesus, inspired with a supernatural courage, were working
miracles and preaching with an energy even more overcoming
than that of the Master. Jesus had been among them
but as one man; he had come back as twelve men, every
one of whom was full of him, working his works and
preaching him with overwhelming power.
It is most impressive to read in the Book of Acts how
Peter and John were called before Annas and Caiaphas—the
very tribunal before which Jesus so lately stood, the
tribunal before which Peter denied him and John stood in
trembling silence. Now these same men face high priests
and elders with heads erect and flashing eyes, and say:—
"If we be this day examined of the good deed done to the
impotent man, be it known unto you that by the name of Jesus
Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified and whom God raised
from the dead, doth this man stand before you whole. This is
the stone which was set at naught of you builders, which has
become the head of the corner; neither is there salvation in
any other."
We can imagine the dismay of the Sanhedrim when
such men and such sermons met them at every corner.
The record says that, perceiving the boldness of Peter and
John, and knowing that they were unlearned men, they
marveled, and took knowledge of them that they had been
with Jesus!
It is not likely that the high priest had forgotten the
recent time when Jesus stood bound before him. Evidently
even then his manner had inspired a secret misgiving
awe; and here were these disciples now looking and
speaking just like him, with the same certainty, the same
majesty. It was Jesus of Nazareth returning in his followers.
It was a terror to them all. But we are told the
word of God grew and prevailed, the converts increased in
crowds daily, "a great company of the priests were obedient"
to the word. Of course persecution raged. To confess
Christ was to lose place, patronage, and daily bread.
The Christians, in their new joy, met this by throwing all
their worldly possessions into a common stock and apportioning
support to each.
There were rich men like Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea,
and many others, and we read of men who sold all
they had and laid the money at the Apostles' feet. Thus
those who daily were thrown out of employment for
Christ's sake were supported and relieved. A great financial
and administrative business grew up out of this state
of things, and we are told that there arose a murmuring
among the foreign-born Jews that their widows were
neglected in the apportionment of aid.
The Jews have been in all ages a trading nation. Palestine
was a little country situated in the very heart of the
ancient civilized world. It was a centre of emigration.
Colonies of Jews, bearing their religion, their synagogue,
their national zeal, had foothold and maintained Jewish
worship in almost every leading city of Greece and Rome.
They were called, according to their country, Greeks or
Romans, while as to religion and race they were Jews.
It appears that the proportion of Greek-born Jews among
the converts was so great as to warrant the appointment of
seven deacons, all of whom bear names which show their
Grecian origin. Stephen was evidently a noted man
among them. He is described as full of faith and the
Holy Ghost. For aught we know, Stephen may have
been one of those Greeks who, during the last week of
Christ's life in Jerusalem, came to his disciples, saying,
"Sir, we would see Jesus." He may have been among
the first-fruits of that harvest which Christ then foresaw
when he said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men
unto me." He seems to have been of a nature peculiarly
receptive and lovely—a beautiful medium through whom
the Christ-spirit could reveal itself. If he had been in
Jerusalem at the time of Christ's death, and witnessed
the scenes of Calvary, we may well believe what a fervor
was enkindled in his soul, and with what zeal he devoted
himself to him. His activity was not confined to the temporal
ministrations which were committed to him. He is
described as "full of faith and power, and doing great
miracles." He maintained the cause of Jesus in word as
well as deed. Certain leaders in a Jewish synagogue, of
Greek extraction like himself, who still clung to Jewish
prejudices, disputed with him, and we are told they were
not able to resist the wisdom and power with which he
spoke. A tumult was stirred up, and Stephen was
brought before the Sanhedrim, and stood in the place
where his Master had stood before him. Again, as before,
it was the Jewish national pride and bitterness that were
arrayed against him. Stephen had shown the glories of
that new spiritual kingdom which Christ was bringing in,
where there should be neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian,
Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ should be all in all.
So the accusation was formulated against him:—
"We have heard him say that Jesus of Nazareth shall
destroy this place and shall change the customs which Moses
delivered unto us."
The High Priest probably felt that now he had got a
leading Christian at advantage. He would meet now and
expose this sect that threatened to overthrow their country
and destroy their venerable religion. He said to Stephen,
with a semblance of moderation and justice, "Are these
things so?"
There was a pause, in which Stephen seems to have
been so filled by the vision of the glory and beauty of the
new life which was opening before the world, that he
could not speak. It is said:—
"And all that sat in the council, looking steadfastly on him,
saw his face as it had been the face of an angel."
Then began that noble speech, evidently the speech of
a Greek-born Jew, who had studied the Hebrew history
from a different standpoint from the Rabbins. It is clear
from the fragment of this address that it was designed to
show, even by their past history, that God's dealings with
his people had been irrespective of the temple of Jerusalem
and the worship there. He dwelt on God's calling of
Abraham, his sojourn in Canaan before he possessed it;
of God's suffering the chosen race to sojourn in Egypt; of
Moses, born and nurtured in a Gentile court, and educated
in the wisdom of the Egyptians. This man, who lived
to the age of forty years as an Egyptian prince, begins to
offer himself as a guide and teacher to his oppressed
people, but they reject his mission with scorn. Then
comes the scene of the appearance of Jehovah for their
rescue and the appointment of Moses to accomplish their
deliverance, and he drives home the parallel between Moses
and the rejected Jesus.
This Moses, whom they refused, saying, "Who made
thee a ruler and a judge?" the same did God send to be
a ruler and a deliverer. "This is that Moses who said,
A Prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you like
unto me: him shall ye hear." He then shows how the
Jewish nation disobeyed Moses and God, and turned back
to the golden calf of Egypt. He traces their history till
the time of the building of the temple, but adds that "the
Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands, as
saith the prophet: Heaven is my throne and earth is my
footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord.
Hath not my hand made all these things?" We may
imagine the fervor, the energy of this brief history, the
tone, the spirit, the flashing eye that gave point to every
incident. It was perfectly evident what he was coming
to, what use he was going to make of this recital—that
the Jews were not God's favorites per se; that they were
and always had been an ungrateful, rebellious people; that
God had chosen them, in spite of their sins, to be the
unworthy guardians and receivers of a great mission for
the whole world; that the temple was not a necessity, that
it came late in their history, and that God himself had
declared his superiority to it. It was easy to see that he
was coming round to the mission of Jesus, the prophet
whom Moses had predicted, and whom they had rejected
as they did Moses. But there was evidently a tumult
rising, and Stephen saw that he was about to be interrupted,
and therefore, suddenly, leaving the narrative
unfinished, he breaks forth:—
"Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do
always resist the Holy Ghost—as your fathers did so do ye.
Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? They
slew them which prophesied the coming of that Just One of
whom ye have been the betrayers and murderers; who have
received the law by the dispensation of angels and have not
kept it."
These words were as coals dropping upon naphtha.
They were cut to the heart; they gnashed on him with
their teeth; they raved round him as wild beasts who
collect themselves for a deadly spring.
"But he, full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into
heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the
right hand of God."
There was something in his rapt appearance, his pale,
upturned face and eager eyes, that caused a moment's
silence.
In a voice of exultation and awe he said:—
"Behold! I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing
on the right hand of God."
The Son of man!—the very words that Christ had used
when he stood before Caiaphas about fifty days before,
when he said, "Hereafter ye shall see the Son of man
coming in the clouds of heaven!"
There was a frantic shriek of rage. The court broke
up and became a blind, infuriate mob. All consideration
was forgotten in the blind passion of the hour. Though
they had no legal right to take life without a Roman sentence,
they determined to have the blood of this man, cost
what it might.
They hurried him out of the city with curses and execrations.
The executioners stripped off their outer garments
to prepare for the butchery, and laid them down at
the feet of a young zealot named Saul of Tarsus.
There are many paintings of this scene in the galleries
of Europe. We may imagine him, pale and enraptured,
looking up into the face of that Jesus whom he saw in
glory, and as they threw him violently down he cried,
"Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." Rising to his knees,
wounded and bleeding, he added, "Lord, lay not this sin
to their charge." And then, says the narrative, "He fell
asleep."
The sweetness and tenderness of this expression shows
more than anything else how completely the faith of Christ
had conquered death. Christians spoke of death simply
as a sleep. And here amid the hootings and revilings of
a mob, the crash of stones and insult and execration,
nothing could hinder Christ's beloved from falling asleep.
At peace within, with a heaven of love in his soul, he
pitied and prayed for the wretched creatures who were
murdering him, and passed to the right hand of Jesus—the
first who had sealed his testimony with his blood.
Thus was sown again the first perfected seed of the new
wheat which rose from the grave of Christ! Jesus was
the first whom the world ever saw praying with his dying
breath for his murderers; and Stephen, who had risen to
the same majesty of denunciation and rebuke of sin which
characterized his master, was baptized into the same tenderness
of prayer for the miserable mob who were howling
like wild beasts around him. Heavenly love never shrinks
from denouncing sin; but it has a prayer for the sinner
ever in its breast, and the nearer it comes to the higher
world the more it pities this lower one.
But though the orator was crushed the cause was not
lost.
Jesus, standing at the right hand of God, had only to
reach forth and touch that Saul of Tarsus who stood consenting
to his death, and he fell down at his feet trembling,
crying, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?"
The noble work which Stephen had begun, the message
of universal love to Jew and Gentile, passed from the
hands of dying Stephen to the living Paul, who from that
hour spoke the sentiment that must be the animating spirit
of every true lover and follower of the Master's footsteps:
"I am crucified with Christ; and now it is no more I that
live, but Christ that liveth in me."
"Why should these cares my heart divide,
If Thou, indeed, hast set me free?
Why am I thus, if Thou hast died—
If Thou hast died to ransom me?"
Nothing is more frequently felt and spoken of, as a
hindrance to the inward life of devotion, than the "cares
of life;" and even upon the showing of our Lord himself,
the cares of the world are the thorns that choke the word,
and it becometh unfruitful.
And yet, if this is a necessary and inevitable result of
worldly care, why does the providence of God so order
things that it forms so large and unavoidable a part of
every human experience? Why is the physical system of
man arranged with such daily, oft-recurring wants? Why
does his nature, in its full development, tend to that state
of society in which wants multiply, and the business of
supply becomes more complicated, and requiring constantly
more thought and attention, and bringing the outward and
seen into a state of constant friction and pressure on the
inner and spiritual?
Has God arranged an outward system to be a constant
diversion from the inward—a weight on its wheels—a
burden on its wings—and then commanded a strict and
rigid inwardness and spirituality? Why placed us where
the things that are seen and temporal must unavoidably
have so much of our thoughts, and time, and care, yet said
to us, "Set your affections on things above, and not on
things on the earth. Love not the world, neither the
things of the world"? And why does one of our brightest
examples of Christian experience, as it should be, say,
"While we look not on the things which are seen, but on
the things which are not seen; for the things which are
seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are
eternal"?
The Bible tells us that our whole existence here is a
disciplinary one; that this whole physical system, by
which our spirit is inclosed with all the joys and sorrows,
hopes and fears, and wants which form a part of it, are
designed as an education to fit the soul for its immortality;
and as worldly care forms the greater part of the staple of
every human life, there must be some mode of viewing
and meeting it, which converts it from an enemy of spirituality
into a means of grace and spiritual advancement.
Why, then, do we so often hear the lamentation, "It
seems to me as if I could advance to the higher stages of
Christian life, if it were not for the pressure of my business
and the multitude of my worldly cares"? Is it not
God, O Christian, who, in ordering thy lot, has laid these
cares upon thee, and who still holds them about thee, and
permits no escape from them? And as his great, undivided
object is thy spiritual improvement, is there not some
misapprehension or wrong use of these cares, if they do
not tend to advance it? Is it not even as if a scholar
should say, I could advance in science were it not for all
the time and care which lessons, and books, and lectures
require?
How, then, shall earthly care become heavenly discipline?
How shall the disposition of the weight be altered
so as to press the spirit upward towards God, instead of
downward and away? How shall the pillar of cloud which
rises between us and him become one of fire, to reflect
upon us constantly the light of his countenance, and to
guide us over the sands of life's desert?
It appears to us that the great radical difficulty is an
intellectual one, and lies in a wrong belief. There is not
a genuine and real belief of the presence and agency of
God in the minor events and details of life, which is
necessary to change them from secular cares into spiritual
blessings.
It is true there is much loose talk about an overruling
Providence; and yet, if fairly stated, the belief of a great
many Christians might be thus expressed: God has organized
and set in operation certain general laws of matter
and mind, which work out the particular results of life,
and over these laws he exercises a general supervision and
care, so that all the great affairs of the world are carried
on after the counsel of his own will; and in a certain
general sense, all things are working together for good to
those that love God. But when some simple-minded,
childlike Christian really proceeds to refer all the smaller
events of life to God's immediate care and agency, there
is a smile of incredulity, and it is thought that the good
brother displays more Christian feeling than sound philosophy.
But as life for every individual is made up of fractions
and minute atoms—as those things which go to affect
habits and character are small and hourly recurring, it
comes to pass that a belief in Providence so very wide and
general is altogether inefficient for consecrating and rendering
sacred the great body of what comes in contact with
the mind in the experience of life. Only once in years
does the Christian with this kind of belief hear the voice
of the Lord God speaking to him. When the hand of
death is laid on his child, or the bolt strikes down the
brother by his side, then, indeed, he feels that God is
drawing near; he listens humbly for the inward voice that
shall explain the meaning and need of this discipline.
When by some unforeseen occurrence the whole of his
earthly property is swept away,—he becomes a poor man,—this
event, in his eyes, assumes sufficient magnitude to
have come from God, and to have a design and meaning;
but when smaller comforts are removed, smaller losses are
encountered, and the petty every-day vexations and annoyances
of life press about him, he recognizes no God, and
hears no voice, and sees no design. Hence John Newton
says, "Many Christians, who bear the loss of a child, or
the destruction of all their property, with the most heroic
Christian fortitude, are entirely vanquished and overcome
by the breaking of a dish, or the blunders of a servant,
and show so unchristian a spirit, that we cannot but
wonder at them."
So when the breath of slander, or the pressure of human
injustice, comes so heavily on a man as really to threaten
loss of character, and destruction of his temporal interests,
he seems forced to recognize the hand and voice of God,
through the veil of human agencies, and in time-honored
words to say:—
"When men of spite against me join,
They are the sword; the hand is thine."
But the smaller injustice and fault-finding which meet
every one more or less in the daily intercourse of life, the
overheard remark, the implied censure, too petty, perhaps,
to be even spoken of, these daily recurring sources of disquietude
and unhappiness are not referred to God's providence,
nor considered as a part of his probation and discipline.
Those thousand vexations which come upon us
through the unreasonableness, the carelessness, the various
constitutional failings, or ill adaptedness of others to our
peculiarities of character, form a very large item of the
disquietudes of life; and yet how very few look beyond
the human agent, and feel these are trials coming from
God! Yet it is true, in many cases, that these so-called
minor vexations form the greater part, and in many cases
the only discipline of life; and to those that do not view
them as ordered individually by God, and coming upon
them by specified design, "their affliction 'really' cometh
of the dust, and their trouble springs out of the ground;"
it is sanctified and relieved by no divine presence and aid,
but borne alone and in a mere human spirit, and by mere
human reliances; it acts on the mind as a constant diversion
and hindrance, instead of a moral discipline.
Hence, too, come a coldness, and generality, and wandering
of mind in prayer: the things that are on the heart,
that are distracting the mind, that have filled the soul so
full that there is no room for anything else, are all considered
too small and undignified to come within the pale of
a prayer and so, with a wandering mind and a distracted
heart, the Christian offers up his prayer for things which
he thinks he ought to want, and makes no mention of
those which he does. He prays that God would pour out
his spirit on the heathen, and convert the world, and
build up his kingdom everywhere, when perhaps a whole
set of little anxieties, and wants, and vexations are so
distracting his thoughts, that he hardly knows what he
has been saying: a faithless servant is wasting his property;
a careless or blundering workman has spoiled a lot
of goods; a child is vexatious or unruly; a friend has made
promises and failed to keep them; an acquaintance has
made unjust or satirical remarks; some new furniture has
been damaged or ruined by carelessness in the household;
but all this trouble forms no subject matter for prayer,
though there it is, all the while lying like lead on the
heart, and keeping it down, so that it has no power to
expand and take in anything else. But were God known
and regarded as the soul's familiar friend, were every
trouble of the heart as it rises breathed into his bosom,
were it felt that there is not one of the smallest of life's
troubles that has not been permitted by him, and permitted
for specific good purpose to the soul, how much more
would these be in prayer! how constant, how daily might
it become! how it might settle and clear the atmosphere
of the soul! how it might so dispose and lay away many
anxieties which now take up their place there, that there
might be room for the higher themes and considerations of
religion!
Many sensitive and fastidious natures are worn away by
the constant friction of what are called little troubles.
Without any great affliction, they feel that all the flower
and sweetness of their life have faded; their eye grows
dim, their cheek care-worn, and their spirit loses hope and
elasticity, and becomes bowed with premature age; and in
the midst of tangible and physical comfort, they are restless
and unhappy. The constant undercurrent of little
cares and vexations, which is slowly wearing on the finer
springs of life, is seen by no one; scarce ever do they
speak of these things to their nearest friends. Yet were
there a friend of a spirit so discerning as to feel and sympathize
in all these things, how much of this repressed
electric restlessness would pass off through such a sympathizing
mind.
Yet among human friends this is all but impossible, for
minds are so diverse that what is a trial and a care to one
is a matter of sport and amusement to another; and all the
inner world breathed into a human ear only excites a surprised
or contemptuous pity. Whom, then, shall the soul
turn to? Who will feel that to be affliction which each
spirit feels to be so? If the soul shut itself within itself,
it becomes morbid; the fine chords of the mind and nerves
by constant wear become jarring and discordant; hence
fretfulness, discontent, and habitual irritability steal over
the sincere Christian.
But to the Christian that really believes in the agency
of God in the smallest events of life, that confides in his
love, and makes his sympathy his refuge, the thousand
minute cares and perplexities of life become each one a
fine affiliating bond between the soul and its God. God
is known, not by abstract definition, and by high-raised
conceptions of the soul's aspiring hours, but known as
a man knoweth his friend; he is known by the hourly
wants he supplies; known by every care with which he
momentarily sympathizes, every apprehension which he
relieves, every temptation which he enables us to surmount.
We learn to know God as the infant child learns
to know its mother and its father, by all the helplessness
and all the dependence which are incident to this commencement
of our moral existence; and as we go on thus
year by year, and find in every changing situation, in every
reverse, in every trouble, from the lightest sorrow to those
which wring our soul from its depths, that he is equally
present, and that his gracious aid is equally adequate, our
faith seems gradually almost to change to sight; and God's
existence, his love and care, seem to us more real than any
other source of reliance, and multiplied cares and trials are
only new avenues of acquaintance between us and heaven.
Suppose, in some bright vision unfolding to our view,
in tranquil evening or solemn midnight, the glorified form
of some departed friend should appear to us with the
announcement, "This year is to be to you one of especial
probation and discipline, with reference to perfecting you
for a heavenly state. Weigh well and consider every incident
of your daily life, for not one shall fall out by accident,
but each one is to be a finished and indispensable
link in a bright chain that is to draw you upward to the
skies!"
With what new eyes should we now look on our daily
lot! and if we found in it not a single change,—the same
old cares, the same perplexities, the same uninteresting
drudgeries still,—with what new meaning would every
incident be invested! and with what other and sublimer
spirit could we meet them? Yet, if announced by one
rising from the dead with the visible glory of a spiritual
world, this truth could be asserted no more clearly and
distinctly than Jesus Christ has stated it already. Not
a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Father. Not
one of them is forgotten by him; and we are of more
value than many sparrows; yea, even the hairs of our
head are all numbered. Not till belief in these declarations,
in their most literal sense, becomes the calm and
settled habit of the soul, is life ever redeemed from drudgery
and dreary emptiness, and made full of interest, meaning,
and divine significance. Not till then do its groveling
wants, its wearing cares, its stinging vexations, become
to us ministering spirits, each one, by a silent but certain
agency, fitting us for a higher and perfect sphere.
"It is a beautiful belief,
That ever round our head
Are hovering on viewless wings
The spirits of the dead."
While every year is taking one and another from the
ranks of life and usefulness, or the charmed circle of
friendship and love, it is soothing to remember that the
spiritual world is gaining in riches through the poverty of
this.
In early life, with our friends all around us,—hearing
their voices, cheered by their smiles,—death and the spiritual
world are to us remote, misty, and half fabulous;
but as we advance in our journey, and voice after voice is
hushed, and form after form vanishes from our side, and
our shadow falls almost solitary on the hillside of life, the
soul, by a necessity of its being, tends to the unseen and
spiritual, and pursues in another life those it seeks in vain
in this.
For with every friend that dies, dies also some especial
form of social enjoyment, whose being depended on the
peculiar character of that friend; till, late in the afternoon
of life, the pilgrim seems to himself to have passed over
to the unseen world in successive portions half his own
spirit; and poor indeed is he who has not familiarized
himself with that unknown, whither, despite himself, his
soul is earnestly tending.
One of the deepest and most imperative cravings of the
human heart, as it follows its beloved ones beyond the
veil, is for some assurance that they still love and care for
us. Could we firmly believe this, bereavement would lose
half its bitterness. As a German writer beautifully expresses
it, "Our friend is not wholly gone from us; we
see across the river of death, in the blue distance, the
smoke of his cottage;" hence the heart, always creating
what it desires, has ever made the guardianship and ministration
of departed spirits a favorite theme of poetic fiction.
But is it, then, fiction? Does revelation, which gives
so many hopes which nature had not, give none here? Is
there no sober certainty to correspond to the inborn and
passionate craving of the soul? Do departed spirits in
verity retain any knowledge of what transpires in this
world, and take any part in its scenes? All that revelation
says of a spiritual state is more intimation than assertion;
it has no distinct treatise, and teaches nothing apparently
of set purpose; but gives vague, glorious images,
while now and then some accidental ray of intelligence
looks out,—
"like eyes of cherubs shining
From out the veil that hid the ark."
But out of all the different hints and assertions of the
Bible we think a better inferential argument might be
constructed to prove the ministration of departed spirits
than for many a doctrine which has passed in its day for
the height of orthodoxy.
First, then, the Bible distinctly says that there is a
class of invisible spirits who minister to the children of
men: "Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to
minister to those who shall be heirs of salvation?" It is
said of little children, that "their angels do always behold
the face of our Father which is in heaven." This last
passage, from the words of our Saviour, taken in connection
with the well-known tradition of his time, fully recognizes
the idea of individual guardian spirits; for God's government
over mind is, it seems, throughout, one of intermediate
agencies, and these not chosen at random, but with the
nicest reference to their adaptation to the purpose intended.
Not even the All-seeing, All-knowing One was deemed
perfectly adapted to become a human Saviour without a
human experience. Knowledge intuitive, gained from
above, of human wants and woes was not enough—to it
must be added the home-born certainty of consciousness
and memory; the Head of all mediation must become
human. Is it likely, then, that, in selecting subordinate
agencies, this so necessary a requisite of a human life and
experience is overlooked? While around the throne of
God stand spirits, now sainted and glorified, yet thrillingly
conscious of a past experience of sin and sorrow, and
trembling in sympathy with temptations and struggles like
their own, is it likely that he would pass by these souls,
thus burning for the work, and commit it to those bright
abstract beings whose knowledge and experience are comparatively
so distant and so cold?
It is strongly in confirmation of this idea, that in the
transfiguration scene—which seems to have been intended
purposely to give the disciples a glimpse of the glorified
state of their Master—we find him attended by two spirits
of earth, Moses and Elias, "which appeared with him in
glory, and spake of his death which he should accomplish
at Jerusalem." It appears that these so long departed
ones were still mingling in deep sympathy with the tide
of human affairs—not only aware of the present, but also
informed as to the future. In coincidence with this idea
are all those passages which speak of the redeemed of earth
as being closely and indissolubly identified with Christ,
members of his body, of his flesh and his bones. It is
not to be supposed that those united to Jesus above all
others by so vivid a sympathy and community of interests
are left out as instruments in that great work of human
regeneration which so engrosses him; and when we hear
Christians spoken of as kings and priests unto God, as
those who shall judge angels, we see it more than intimated
that they are to be the partners and actors in that great
work of spiritual regeneration of which Jesus is the head.
What then? May we look among the band of ministering
spirits for our own departed ones? Whom would
God be more likely to send us? Have we in heaven a
friend who knew us to the heart's core? a friend to whom
we have unfolded our soul in its most secret recesses? to
whom we have confessed our weaknesses and deplored our
griefs? If we are to have a ministering spirit, who better
adapted? Have we not memories which correspond to
such a belief? When our soul has been cast down, has
never an invisible voice whispered, "There is lifting up"?
Have not gales and breezes of sweet and healing thought
been wafted over us, as if an angel had shaken from his
wings the odors of paradise? Many a one, we are confident,
can remember such things—and whence come they?
Why do the children of the pious mother, whose grave has
grown green and smooth with years, seem often to walk
through perils and dangers fearful and imminent as the
crossing Mohammed's fiery gulf on the edge of a drawn
sword, yet walk unhurt? Ah! could we see that attendant
form, that face where the angel conceals not the mother,
our question would be answered.
It may be possible that a friend is sometimes taken
because the divine One sees that his ministry can act more
powerfully from the unseen world than amid the infirmities
of mortal intercourse. Here the soul, distracted and
hemmed in by human events and by bodily infirmities,
often scarce knows itself, and makes no impression on
others correspondent to its desires. The mother would
fain electrify the heart of her child; she yearns and burns
in vain to make her soul effective on its soul, and to
inspire it with a spiritual and holy life; but all her own
weaknesses, faults, and mortal cares cramp and confine her,
till death breaks all fetters; and then, first truly alive,
risen, purified, and at rest, she may do calmly, sweetly,
and certainly, what, amid the tempests and tossings of life,
she labored for painfully and fitfully. So, also, to generous
souls, who burn for the good of man, who deplore the
shortness of life, and the little that is permitted to any
individual agency on earth, does this belief open a heavenly
field. Think not, father or brother, long laboring for
man, till thy sun stands on the western mountains,—think
not that thy day in this world is over. Perhaps,
like Jesus, thou hast lived a human life, and gained a
human experience, to become, under and like him, a
saviour of thousands; thou hast been through the preparation,
but thy real work of good, thy full power of doing,
is yet to begin.
But again: there are some spirits (and those of earth's
choicest) to whom, so far as enjoyment to themselves or
others is concerned, this life seems to have been a total
failure. A hard hand from the first, and all the way
through life, seems to have been laid upon them; they
seem to live only to be chastened and crushed, and we lay
them in the grave at last in mournful silence. To such,
what a vision is opened by this belief! This hard discipline
has been the school and task-work by which their
soul has been fitted for their invisible labors in a future
life; and when they pass the gates of the grave, their
course of benevolent acting first begins, and they find
themselves delighted possessors of what through many
years they have sighed for—the power of doing good.
The year just past, like all other years, has taken from
a thousand circles the sainted, the just, and the beloved;
there are spots in a thousand graveyards which have
become this year dearer than all the living world; but in
the loneliness of sorrow how cheering to think that our
lost ones are not wholly gone from us! They still may
move about in our homes, shedding around an atmosphere
of purity and peace, promptings of good, and reproofs of
evil. We are compassed about by a cloud of witnesses,
whose hearts throb in sympathy with every effort and struggle,
and who thrill with joy at every success. How should
this thought check and rebuke every worldly feeling and
unworthy purpose, and enshrine us, in the midst of a forgetful
and unspiritual world, with an atmosphere of heavenly
peace. They have overcome—have risen—are
crowned, glorified, but still they remain to us, our assistants,
our comforters, and in every hour of darkness their
voice speaks to us: "So we grieved, so we struggled, so
we fainted, so we doubted; but we have overcome, we
have obtained, we have seen, we have found—and in our
victory behold the certainty of thy own."
