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ON THE evening of a day when Jesus was speaking his parables from the boat to the people, there was an alarm. His men rowed him hurriedly away. “They took him in the boat,” says Mark, “as he was”—without food or rest—“and other boats were with them.”
He had been speaking his parables, calling to them that understood to follow him, all through the afternoon. He was weary with the effort of pouring his soul out in appeal to eyes that did not see and ears that could not hear ; he was utterly weary. He fell instantly asleep in the stern.
As they rowed across to the country of the mountain, there came a sudden violent storm; but he slept on. His men grew terrified and roughly waked him.
“Master !” they cried. “Don’t you care whether we all are drowned?”
“Why are you such cowards?” he said. “How can it be you have no faith?”
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He had no need to tell the waves to be silent He had faith and was unafraid; he knew that it was not God’s will that he should die before his destiny was accomplished. And when his men looked upon his perfect serenity, the fear began to leave their hearts. The storm became less terrible, and they rowed on into calm.
Such, or like this, was the “miracle ;” and it was a miracle, the only sort of miracle that has meaning for grown men—the miracle whereby a hero creates heroes. At the breath of the pure spirit the embers of men’s souls become a flame.
The glimpse of Jesus asleep in the stern of Simon’s boat cannot be forgotten. When we think of his weariness and the cause of his weariness—the putting forth, in vain, of all his secret soul and strength to declare the mystery of the Kingdom and so summon forth the secret soul and strength of other men ; of the rough awakening ; of the instant fears of those who were most his own ; of his own instant knowledge how far they were from understanding his words or him we see, as in a sudden gleam of light, the incredible effort of his life, after the first brief happiness of his gospel, not merely to follow his own destiny, but incessantly [ p. 125 ] to hold together his company of babes and sucklings. The vision of Jesus asleep in the stern of Simon’s boat is a vision of an unspeakably lonely man.
They came to land in the late evening. As Jesus went up out of the boat towards the mountain he was met by a raving and violent lunatic, who had been cast out of men’s society to fend for himself in an abandoned burial ground, where he shrieked night and day. All attempts to secure him had failed ; he broke the chains and rubbed the fetters through ; now he lived like a wild beast, roaming over the mountains and among the tombs, where was his lair.
This fearsome creature ran at Jesus in the twilight as he was going up from the shore to the mountain. Jesus, confident in his power over the demented soul, commanded the spirit of evil to leave him. The lunatic cowered at his feet. What words he actually cried with his great voice to Jesus we cannot tell, for Mark in his story has largely copied them from the words of the demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum; then it is probable they were really spoken, but afterwards Mark used the phrase, “What have I to do with [ p. 126 ] you, you Son of God?” as a formula. It was not even intended to represent actual speech, but to mark the peculiar and reciprocal understanding which existed between Jesus and the deranged. The Gerasene lunatic “recognized” him, and responded to the spiritual power which he possessed. But Mark gives more than the formula. The lunatic’s cry, “ Do not torture me!” as he cowered at Jesus’ feet, sounds actual, and assuredly his reply to Jesus’ question; “What is your name?” was not invented.
“My name is Legion, for we are many.”
But then darkness descends, which does not lift until we, like his countrymen, see the lunatic clothed and in his right mind. And then many days have evidently passed since Jesus’ first encounter with him. Perhaps the lunatic fled shrieking from the torture which he feared from Jesus, and by his mad running scared a herd of swine down a steep place into the lake. The story as it stands is a fragment beyond all certain restoration. We may conjecture that the lunatic fled away into the darkness on that evening, and Jesus journeyed on into the mountain. Perhaps Jesus sought him out again. Certainly he was healed and sane before [ p. 127 ] Jesus left the territory of Gerasa; and when Jesus next took boat for the Galilean shore, the man was waiting to beseech that he might go with him.
Of one of Jesus’ attempts, while he taught his disciples and prepared his apostles in the mountain, to re-enter Galilee, Mark gives a particular account.
He had been rowed to the Galilean shore, and crowds had begun to gather about him. Crowds hungry for healing meant danger to him. It was danger to venture away from the shore. But a man came to him with an appeal he could not resist. A president of the local synagogue, named Jairus, implored him to visit his little daughter, who was dying. Would Jesus not go and lay his hands upon her, and she would live?
Jairus had caught sight afar of Jesus on the shore, and rushed down to entreat him. He was. loath to go. But the appeal for a child overcame him. Taking Simon and James and John, he followed Jairus, amid a jostling and eager crowd.
Suddenly through the press Jesus was conscious of a touch from behind; no casual jostle, but a [ p. 128 ] touch with purpose, a living touch. He stopped dead and turned about in the crowd.
“Who touched my clothes?” he said.
His three friends remonstrated; it was absurd.
“You see the crowd pressing upon you. How can you ask who touched you?” Jesus paid no heed to them, but looked intently into the crowd. Someone had touched him.
In fear and trembling a poor woman came forward. She flung herself at his feet and stammered out her story: how she had suffered twelve years from a discharge of blood, what agonies she had endured under the doctors, how she had spent her all in paying them and was not a penny the better but rather the worse, how she had been told about Jesus and had said to herself, “If I can touch only his clothes I shall be cured ;” now, finally, she had followed in the crowd behind him and had gained her desire. The moment she touched him she had felt in her body that she was well.
Jesus listened; then he said:
“My daughter, your faith has healed you. Go away and be at peace; be cured of your trouble.”
While he was speaking to her there came messengers froin hpme to Jairus. They said to him; [ p. 129 ] “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Master further?”
Jesus overheard the words, and said to Jairus :
“Do not be afraid. Only have faith !”
Then he turned back everyone from following him, save Simon, James, and John. With these he went to Jairus’ house. He looked in upon the tumult, people weeping and wailing; then he entered.
“Why make this tumult?” he said, “Why weep? The child is not dead, only asleep.” They simply laughed.
He drove them all out of the house, and taking with him the father and mother of the child and his three friends, he entered the room where she lay. Then he took hold of her hand and said: “Talitha koum! (Little girl, rise up!)”
She rose up instantly and walked about.
Then he told them to give her something to eat, and charged them repeatedly to let no one know what had happened.
So Mark tells the story; its substantial truth is written upon it The child was not dead. But whether Jesus knew and asserted this, as Mark’s story suggests, before he had seen her, it is impossible [ p. 130 ] to say. Mark’s accuracy is not the accuracy of science. If he did, then it was because he knew the nature of her illness. We do not know what Jairus told him when he came to beseech his healing hand.
But this reflection does not imply that, if Mark’s accuracy had been the accuracy of science, the healing of the little girl would be simple to us. The spiritual power of Jesus is beyond the scope of modern science, for the simple reason that the conditions can never be repeated. Never again will a man appear who will combine so absolute a belief in his own immediate relation to a personal God with so calm and steady a scrutiny of mundane realities; never again will a man believe precisely as Jesus believed, in God and in himself. His was the faith that could remove mountains, but would not; not the faith that would remove mountains, but could not. It will not appear in the world again.
Therefore, we have no right to prescribe limits to the spiritual power of Jesus save those which he himself prescribed. He would work no sign, he said. That is to say that no act of his was such as would compel belief in his divine mission from [ p. 131 ] the skeptical Pharisees. That is our criterion in accepting or rejecting his miracles : it is the criterion which Jesus himself imposed. We reject “signs,” as he rejected them. But that he had powers of healing which it might tax our modern medicine to explain we need not doubt. But in his own day those powers, or his exercise of them, seemed not superhuman. When all the world had faith in spiritual healing, spiritual healing was plentiful ; where many still have faith in it, there even to-day spiritual healing is plentiful. In an age of healers, Jesus was, doubtless, a great healer. But his healings were not such as to impress the Pharisees with a sense of any divine power. Nor would Jesus himself have had it otherwise. He commanded Jairus again and again to be silent concerning what he had done to his little girl.
Then he made a hurried journey inland to his birthplace. What induced him to it we can only guess. But he deliberately took a risk. At this moment an inland journey in Galilee was full of danger; a journey to Nazareth rash in the extreme, for he knew that even his family had declared against him. Some overpowering nostalgia seems to have taken hold of him, a longing, at whatever [ p. 132 ] cost of danger, to see his home once more, and speak, if he could, to the hearts of his townsmen. It was the same longing as that which drew him, on his final journey to Jerusalem, dangerously to revisit his second home, Capernaum, which had likewise rejected him utterly.
Luke tells that Jesus entered the synagogue of Nazareth on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. The book of Isaiah was given to him, and he unrolled it and found the words :
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor;
He hath sent me to proclaim deliverance to captives,
And recovering of sight to the blind, To set free the oppressed.
To proclaim the year of favour of the Lord.
He rolled up the book and gave it to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon him. “To-day,” he said, “this scripture that you hear is fulfilled.” And he expounded the wonderful news. But his hearers would none of it. “Is not this the carpenter?” they said. “The son of Mary and the brother of James and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here among us?” And some one must have spoken [ p. 133 ] the familiar word, “He is mad.” For Jesus turned on them and said :
“Will you say to me: Doctor, cure yourself? Or, Do here what we have heard you did in Capernaum? I tell you, A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, and among his own kindred, 'and in his own home. Truly I tell you: There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was closed for three years and six months and a great famine was upon all the land, but to none of them was Elijah sent, but only to a widow woman of Zarephath in Sidon. And there were many lepers in Israel in the days of the prophet Elisha; yet none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”
It was not merely of his rejection by Nazareth that Jesus spoke, but of his rejection by Galilee. The hostility of the people of Nazareth was the more violent Luke says that they tried to kill him but it was typical of the hostility of the whole people of Galilee. The difference was that in Nazareth no single person was found to have faith in him, so that he could do no work of healing there, and he himself, for whom rejection was no new thing, was astonished at their unbelief.
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His journey to Nazareth had failed utterly. There was no place for him any more in Galilee. He returned to the mountain to set himself once more to the task of preparing his apostles: they must be able not only to proclaim the imminent coming of the Kingdom, but to show the nature of the change that must come to pass in them that should be received into it.
Perhaps to this moment, immediately before the sending out of the apostles, belong the opening words of the Sermon on the Mount, obviously spoken in private to his disciples, at a moment when persecution was likely to be their lot.
“Blessed are the poor, for the Kingdom of God is theirs :
“Blessed are those that sorrow, for they shall be comforted :
“Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth:
“Blessed are the hungry, for they shall be filled :
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy:
“Blessed are the pure in heart ? for they shall see Qod;
[ p. 135 ]
“Blessed are those who bring peace, for they shall be called God’s sons :
“Blessed are those who are driven out, for the Kingdom of God is theirs :
“Blessed are you when they revile you and drive you out and say all evil against you, falsely, because of me. Rejoice, rejoice exceedingly, knowing your reward is great with God. For so they drove out the prophets which were before you.
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt shall become tasteless, with what can it be made salt again? It is good for nothing but to be thrown away and trodden underfoot.
“You are the light of the world! A city on a mountain cannot be hidden.
“Let your light so shine out before men’s eyes, that they may see the good you do and give the glory to your Father!"
“A city on a mountain cannot be hidden.” Was not the city on the mountain the company of his followers grouped about him on the mountainside, who were to bear the message and the mystery of the Kingdom? Then he sent them forth. He gave them, says Mark, authority over unclean spirits : they were [ p. 136 ] not only his disciples, but his delegates. “He bade them take nothing for the road except only a staff, no bread, no wallet, no pence in their purses ; but to go shod with sandals, and not to put on two coats.” In that fresh and naive catalogue one seems to hear the very voice of Peter remembering the past.
There is an almost hopeless confusion concerning the actual words spoken by Jesus to the Twelve at their sending forth. The brief charge given by Mark is expanded by Matthew to a lengthy one, of which a considerable part evidently belongs to a quite other occasion, and was perhaps never spoken by Jesus at all. On the other hand, some portions of the charge recorded by Matthew seem to be distinctly primitive. According to Mark, Jesus said:
“ Wherever you enter into a house remain there until you leave that place ; and whatever place will not receive you, nor its people hear you, go out from thence and shake off the dust from beneath your feet as a witness against them.”
“And they went forth," says Mark, "and proclaimed that men should change their hearts, and [ p. 137 ] cast out many daemons, and anointed with oil many that were infirm and cured them.”
Obviously, the message which the Twelve were to proclaim was the same that Jesus himself had proclaimed when he came up out of the desert to Galilee: “The time is fulfilled: the Kingdom of God is at hand. Turn and be changed and believe in the good news.”
In the charge as given by Matthew, there is a greater urgency, and a more palpable sense of danger. The Twelve were not to go aside to the pagans, nor enter into a city of the Samaritans. They were sent forth as sheep among wolves; they must be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
The disciple is not above his Master, nor the slave above his Lord. It is enough for the disciple to become as his master, and the slave as his Lord. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call his servants?
“Be not afraid of them. What I tell you in the dark, that speak in the light. What you hear in your ear, proclaim from the housetops. And be not afraid of them that kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? Yet one of them does not fall to the ground [ p. 138 ] without your Father. But with you, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Be not afraid, then. You are far more worth than sparrows.
“He that receives you, receives me, and he that receives me, receives him that sent me. He that receives a prophet, because he is a prophet, shall receive a prophet’s reward, and he that receives a just man, because he is a just man, shall receive a just man’s reward. And whoever shall give one of you a drink of cold water, because he is a disciple, I say to you he shall not lose his reward.”
So the Twelve went forth, and Jesus remained behind in the mountain.
We may, we must believe that they had come nearer to the mystery of the Kingdom by being with him, than by hearing his words ; for the mystery of the Kingdom was to elude them to the last. On the very brink of his death they would be asking who was to be greatest.
Yet they had their excuse. Jesus himself surely believed that the Kingdom of God was at hand ; he expected the coming of a Messiah in the likeness of a Son of Man foretold by Daniel. His own work had been to make straight the way to this [ p. 139 ] great consummation. He himself was but the first reborn son of God, whose mission it was to proclaim that the new world was upon them, and that they could enter it only through that rebirth which was its mystery.
Jesus knew what the Kingdom was to be ; but in his own eyes he was but the forerunner stilh The ineffable Messiah, the Son of Man, would appear; the world in time would be no more : and the reborn sons of God would be gathered together. He was not that Messiah, he could not be; he was waiting for him. He had been stopped by the Pharisees and the Herodians from carrying on the mighty work of preparation, showing men how they could become the sons of God.
He had gone apart and hidden in the mountain. He had prepared his messengers to take his place. He had sent forth the Twelve—one for each of the tribes of Israel. Now, with the remainder of his closer followers, he remained on the mduntain and taught them and waited, for something to happen that did not happen the coming of the Son of Man.
What, while he waited, was Jesus to himself? [ p. 140 ] A son of God, the first-born son of God. That was certain ; that he knew. A prophet. That was certain; that he knew. Was he perchance Elijah, that was to come, and to restore all things, before the coming of the Son of Man? The Son of Man himself he surely was not. He had not yet even dreamed it, and if he had, the dream would have faded instantly at the thought that he, the carpenter of Nazareth, was no son of David’s line.
But the Son of Man did not come.
There came instead those disciples of John to whom he had so gently explained why his disciples did not fast. They had taken the news of him to their imprisoned master in Machaerus, and told him of Jesus’ words and doings. And John had sent them back with a message.
“Are you He that should come, or must we wait for another?”
With that question the seed of a great certainty was sown in Jesus’ heart Might he not, after all, be the One?
Yet how could he be the One? He was no son of David’s line; his had been no triumphant epiphany; he was simply a teacher and a prophet. [ p. 141 ] Nay more, he was outcast and fugitive, hiding in the mountains “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
The wonderful vision of Isaiah flooded his mind. Was the Coming One to come in triumph at all?
And, above all else, this stood firm and unshakable : he was God’s son. He had believed, he believed it still, that he was but the first of many; that all men might be God’s sons, by the same birthright as he. But it was hard for them. Something stood in the way even of his nearest disciples; they could not believe.
God’s only son ; God’s lonely son. What destiny was his? He looked up out of his silence at John’s men, standing before him. He said :
“Go and tell John what you hear and see.”
What was it they saw? A company of poor and outcast followers, listening. What was it they heard? The teaching of the mystery of the Kingdom of God.
For a moment Jesus saw it with their eyes and heard it with their ears. Then he said :
[ p. 142 ]
“Yes, and blessed is he that is not offended in me!”
John’s disciples went away. They had heard, they had seen, the mystery. How could they, who had been taught of the Coming One of Wrath, understand it? How could their master, who taught them, understand?
After many days, the apostles of Jesus returned to him ; they were glad at heart, for they too had been able to cast out evil spirits, by calling on their Master’s name.
“Master, even the evil spirits are subject to us, in your name. ”
He answered:
“I saw Satan fall, like a lightning flame, from the heavens.”
The power of evil was at an end, the Prince of Evil overthrown. By the pouring out of the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Evil was conquered. It was, as he had told the Pharisees, the sign that the Kingdom of God was upon them. But no sign for them that could not read it ; in itself nothing, but the witness of the Spirit of God to them that knew.
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“I have given you authority over every power of the Enemy, and nothing shall do you harm. But rejoice not in this, that evil spirits are subject to you ; but rejoice that your names are written in the Kingdom.”