[ p. 124 ]
FRESH ANNOYANCE
Mk. iii. 19 b (Mt. viii. I ; Lk. vi. 17)-35 ; Mt. xii. 22 (cf. ix. 32-34)-50; Lk. xi. 14-36 (xii. io), viii. 19-21.
The day would be well advanced when the Lord and His newly ordained Apostles got home to Capernaum. He had need of rest after the night’s vigil and the morning’s employment, but He found none ; nor could they even snatch a hasty meal. For the house was beset by an excited crowd. The occasion of the commotion was the appearance of a deaf mute, conducted thither in the hope of deliverance from the malignant spirit which, according to the belief of the time, had taken possession of him; and the public interest was the more keen since the Rabbinical inquisitors who had already so harassed the Lord and delated Him to the rulers at Jerusalem (Cf. Lk. v. 17), had resumed their espionage and were now watching the issue. Moreover, His kinsfolk—Mary and her sons and daughters—had heard of His doings. His “brethren,” who as yet regarded His claims with open and derisive incredulity and were only won faith by the transcendent demonstration of His Resurrection (Cf. Jo. vii. 3-5; Cf. Ac. i. 14), were persuaded that He was out of His mind, and they had come from Nazareth to arrest Him and convey Him home. Apparently they had imbued Mary with their coarse opinion : at all events she had accompanied them to Capernaum.
He healed the suppliant, and the acclamations of [ p. 125 ] the crowd exasperated the inquisitors. They could not deny the reality of the miracle, but they would not acknowledge it, and in their desperate determination to discredit Him they ascribed it to “black art” : He had power over the demons because He was in alliance with their prince Satan or, as they styled him, Beelzebul. Beelzebub, “Lord of flies,” was of old the god of the Philistian city of Ekron, and the Jews had identified him with Satan, contumeliously modifying the name to Beelzebul, “Lord of dung.”(Cf. 2 Ki. i. 2)
It was a preposterous allegation, and He contemptuously demonstrated its absurdity. It was proverbial that civil strife is fatal to a state ; and if Satan were thus warring with his satellites, his kingdom was doomed. There were Jewish exorcists, and since they had the approval of the Pharisees, why was He condemned for doing what they professed ? (cf. Ac. xix. 13,14) It is only by mastering its lord that a stronghold can be mastered ; and surety His mastery of the evil spirits proved that He had mastered Satan and was not his ally but God’s.
After disposing thus of their allegation, He pronounced upon them a terrible condemnation. He told them that they were guilty of a sin, the one sin, for which there is no forgiveness. For what had they done ? They had not merely “spoken a word against the Son of Man." That they might excusably have done, since it was difficult for them with their Jewish ideal of the Messiah to acknowledge His claim. It was a thing immeasurably worse that they had done. In ascribing to Satanic agency that miracle of mercy, so manifestly a work of God, they had “blasphemed [ p. 126 ] against the Holy Spirit,” and incurred the woe denounced by the ancient prophet on “them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness ; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”Is. v. 20() They had entailed upon themselves, by the operation of an inexorable law, the fatal doom of spiritual atrophy.
The law is that an abused faculty decays ; and it operates universally. Look at the physical domain. “There are,” wrote Henry Drummond, “certain burrowing animals—the mole, for instance—which have taken to spending their lives beneath the surface of the ground. And Nature has taken her revenge upon them in a perfectly natural way—she has closed up their eyes. If they mean to live in darkness, she argues, eyes are obviously a superfluous function. By neglecting them these animals made it clear that they do not want them. And as one of Nature’s fixed principles is that nothing shall exist in vain, the eyes are presently taken away, or reduced to a rudimentary state. There are fishes also which have had to pay the same terrible forfeit for having made their abode in dark caverns where eyes can never be required. . . . Their eyes are a mockery. Externally they are organs of vision—the front of the eye is perfect; behind, there is nothing but a mass of ruins. The optic nerve is a shrunken, atrophied and insensate thread. These animals have organs of vision, and yet they have no vision. They have eyes, but they see not.”
Look again at the intellectual domain. Darwin has told in his Autobiography that up to the age of thirty he had pleasure in poetry and art and music, but in his later years he lost his aesthetic tastes. “My mind,” [ p. 127 ] he says, “seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, . . . and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use.”
And the law operates no less in the spiritual domain. One who is false to love loses the very faculty of loving.
“The fire that’s blawn on Beltane e’en.
May weel be black gin Yule ;
But blacker fa’ awaits the heart
Where first fond luve grows cule.”
And even so it happens with a soul which “does despite to the Spirit of grace.” Its spiritual instincts are blasted. This is the doom which had befallen those Pharisees. They had closed their eyes against the light till they could not see; they had shut their ears to the pleadings of heavenly grace till they could not hear ; they had hardened their hearts till they had grown callous; and now, says our Lord, they were “guilty of” or rather “in the grip of an eternal sin.” Their spiritual nature was atrophied ; repentance was no longer possible for them; and where there is no repentance, there is no forgiveness.
It was the official inquisitors from Jerusalem that had engaged Him in this sharp controversy, and they would quail before His stern condemnation. But there were some of the local Pharisees in the audience and, resenting the discomfiture of their colleagues and the popular applause, they interposed. Feigning honest perplexity, they suggested that He should [ p. 128 ] accord them an indubitable attestation of His claims by working a miracle in their presence. “Teacher,” said they, “we wish to see a sign from you.” It seemed a safe challenge. Should He accede, they would evade the issue in their accustomed fashion; but probably they anticipated that He would refuse, and then they would represent His refusal as a confession of impotence.
And He did refuse ; but His refusal was no confession of impotence: it was a crushing indictment. A miracle begets wonderment, but wonderment is not faith. Faith is a spiritual persuasion, the soul’s response to a spiritual appeal. “It is,” said He, “an evil and adulterous generation that seeks after a sign ; and no sign will be given it but the sign of Jonah.” And what was the sign of Jonah ? It was his message. He wrought no miracle in Nineveh. He simply warned its sinful people of impending judgment; and they believed and repented and turned from their evil way. 1 No other sign would the Lord grant His contemporaries ; and if they refused it, they would stand condemned. For what message had ever been like His ? The Ninevites had repented at Jonah’s message: “an d behold, something greater than Jonah is here.”(Cf. i Ki. x. 1-13) The Queen of Sheba had travelled far to hear the wisdom of Solomon: “and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.”
[ p. 129 ]
It had been a hot encounter, and He had dealt very sternly with His assailants, yet all the while there was pity in His heart. And truly they had need of pity. For after their perverted fashion they were seeking a high and holy end. They were Pharisees, and they had a zeal for God and righteousness (Cf. Rom. x. 2); but it was an uninstructed zea Righteousness, as they conceived it, was achieved not by the inward operation of heavenly grace but by observance of the ceremonial requirements of the Law. And thus religion was with them not a divine renewal but a process of self-reformation, and it left the heart uncleansed and unsatisfied. It was a miserable and truly perilous condition, and here He portrays by a graphic image the inevitable and disastrous issue. It was believed of old that ruinous and desolate places were the haunts of demons ever eager to exchange their drear abodes for a human lodgement (Cf. Is. xiii. 19-22, xxxiv. 13,14; Jer. li. 37; Rev. xviii. 2). All afflictions, physical, mental, and moral, were ascribed to demoniacal possession, and the remedy lay in the expulsion of the noisome tenant. Often the cure was merely temporary, and then it was supposed that the banished demon had regained possession, exulting in its triumph. “When the unclean spirit has gone out of the man, it roams through waterless places, seeking refreshment, and finds none. Then it says : ‘ I will return to my house whence I came out’ ; and on coming it finds it unoccupied and swept and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and goes in and dwells there. And the last state of that man proves worse than the first.”
[ p. 130 ]
Here, in old-world imagery which His hearers could understand, our Lord depicts a familiar and perennial moral tragedy. Examples abound in the experience alike of nations and of individuals. So it befell England in the seventeenth century. What else was the orgy of profligacy after the Restoration than a reaction from the rigorous restraint of the Reign of the Saints ? Puritanism had forcibly expelled the unclean spirit, and for a season it seemed as though the nation had been cleansed. But it is not enough that the unclean spirit be cast out unless the Holy Spirit enter and take possession. The nation was swept and put in order; but her heart remained tenantless. Some tenant the heart must have ; and when the door was opened, the old tenant returned in sevenfold strength, and the last state of the nation proved worse than the first.
It was a picturesque and eloquent appeal to the Pharisees and the multitude to yield their hearts to the grace of the Holy Spirit, and it evinces how deeply His hearers were moved that His closing words were interrupted by an admiring exclamation. It was a woman that spoke. She had marked His gallant bearing as He confronted so fearlessly and triumphantly His powerful adversaries; and her womanly heart warmed to Him. “O to have a son like that!” was her thought; and she involuntarily exclaimed: “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts which you sucked !” “Nay rather,” was Plis answer, “blessed are they that hear the Word of God and keep it.”
Just then, in pathetic contrast, a message was brought Him that “His mother and His brethren”— [ p. 131 ] Mary and her sons and daughters—were on the outskirts of the crowd, anxious to speak to Him but unable to reach Him. He knew their errand, and He answered : “Who is My mother ? and who are My brothers ?” Then He pointed to His disciples. “Here,” said He, “are My mother and My brothers. Whosoever does the will of My Father in Heaven, that is My brother and sister and mother.” In very truth He was not the son of Mary. He was the Eternal Son of God Incarnate, and spiritual kinship was the only tie which bound Him to the children of men.