[ p. 151 ]
IT HAD been a solemn meal of farewell, like the yet more solemn meal he was to share with his dwindled followers in Jerusalem. But the glorious epiphany of the Son of Man did not occur. The time was not yet. The five thousand disbanded. He told his disciples to row towards Bethsaida and went up into the mountain to pray.
He was about to make another attempt to proclaim the message in Galilee, and he needed the assurance that it was his Father’s will. He had sent his men to Bethsaida, the frontier town of Philip’s tetrarchy, whence he could in a moment pass into Galilee by land or by water. As they were rowing in the night, against a head wind and a heavy sea, they, or one of them, had a vision of Jesus walking towards them over the water and bidding them take heart. Which they did, and pulled on to Bethsaida.
[ p. 152 ]
There, it seems, he met them. He had had God’s blessing on his purpose, and gone round to the meeting-place by land. He went aboard and was rowed to Gennesaret in Galilee. There we may imagine him and his men camped on the shore, ready to take to their boats and row away.
The report of his reappearance, and of the crowds following him, reached the Pharisees. They had come down from Jerusalem. Whether they came post-haste again at the news of Jesus’ descent into Galilee, or whether they had remained there, after their league with the officials of Antipas had driven him into exile, as a kind of spiritual garrison to extirpate his influence and keep guard against a new invasion, there is no telling. This narrative, so far as the material details of Jesus’ brief ministry are concerned, purports to be no more than a credible imaginative construction from a mass of strictly irreconcilable data. But it seems more probable that the Pharisees and Scribes from Jerusalem remained in Galilee on the alert in anticipation of some such descent as Jesus was now making.
Whether they really had the civil power of Antipas on their side is more than doubtful. Probably [ p. 153 ] they could count on nothing more than the religious zeal of local officials. Away in Machaerus, Antipas had, at about this time, executed John the Baptist, it is true ; but he had acted unwillingly, under a sort of compulsion of honor. It was, indeed, under a sort of compulsion that he had arrested him. For John had openly proclaimed that his marriage with Herodias, the divorced wife of his stepbrother, Philip, was incestuous. But Antipas was afraid of the prophet, and was half inclined, for all his Greek culture, to believe in his terrible menace of the Wrath to Come. Perhaps he had the superstitious hope that by keeping John as a hostage he might shelter himself behind him from the dread blast of the great winnowing-fan. Antipas was a Hellenized Jew; his Greek skepticism was probably only skin-deep, so also, we may imagine, was his Jewish faith. He was the cosmopolitan “credulous Jew” of Horace’s satire, who could no longer believe anything and therefore believed everything.
He became the fascinated listener of the grim prophet in his prison. What he prophesied might be true. Why not? At all events, he would not take the risk of following Herodias’ persistent admonition, [ p. 154 ] and killing him. But at a birthday banquet to his chief officials, who were Graecized like himself, Herodias’ daughter, Salome, so delighted him and his guests by her dancing that he promised to give her whatever she asked. She was, of course, incredulous. But he confirmed his promise with a solemn oath : up to the half of his kingdom he would give her whatever she asked. She went out and said to her mother, “What shall I ask for?” Her mother replied, “The head of John the Baptist.” The girl returned and said to Antipas that she wanted him to give her the head of John the Baptist on a dish. The king was caught: before his Graecized company he dared not fail his solemn oath. He sent a soldier to bring the head. He brought it on a dish and gave it to the girl, who gave it to her mother.
It was natural that Herod’s superstitious and uneasy mind, receiving the news of Jesus’ doings in Galilee, should have immediately conceived the idea that Jesus was John the Baptist risen from the dead. If he had been reluctant to make an end of John, he would be doubly reluctant to attempt to make a second end of him. He would have liked to see him, no doubt to satisfy himself [ p. 155 ] whether he was or was not the resurrected John. But he was not anxious to arrest him, much less to find himself in a situation where the blood of yet another prophet might be upon his head. Herod’s reluctance in the affair was all the more reason why the Pharisees should not relax their vigilance. There are indications in Luke’s narrative that they were sedulous in spreading the false report that Herod had declared war on the new prophet. Mark speaks only of a league between the Pharisees and Herod’s officials. It seems probable that it was their report to Herod, asking for instructions, which reached him soon after John’s execution, and was the cause of his belief that Jesus was the resurrected John. They would have been told to go carefully in the matter; whatever reality there may have been in the report of concerted action against Jesus between Herod’s officials and the Pharisees, the Pharisees could no longer count on the help of the Herodians. That was news which they certainly would not have published abroad. Their business was to keep Jesus and his followers in the persuasion that Herod was against them. It was not difficult The execution of John must have led Jesus to expect the worst from [ p. 156 ] Herod. How was he to know that Herod suspected him to be a reincarnation of John, or that he had been reluctant to proceed to extremities against John, and would be infinitely more reluctant to proceed to extremities against himself?
Behind the Pharisees, for Jesus, was the incalculable authority of Herod. For him, they were in league together against him. Therefore in his descent upon Gennesaret in Galilee he remained with his disciples, encamped on the shore, within reach of the boats for instant flight. There the Pharisees from Jerusalem came out to meet him. The charge they made against him was obvious. His disciples were eating bread with unwashed hands. Naturally; they were taking a hurried meal in the enemy’s country. How were they to find time or means for ceremonial washing if they had desired it? But they were long past ceremony; they followed the new law of their Master.
“Why,” said the Pharisees to Jesus, “do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders, and eat bread with common hands?”
Jesus had neither cause nor need to spare them. Here was the enemy who had driven him from [ p. 157 ] his own country and his own people, who had worked disaster to his mission.
Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, you hypocrites! in the Book:
“This people honoureth me with their lips,
But their heart is far from me.
Their worship is a mockery,
An empty tradition.
You have let go God’s commandment, and taken hold of the ‘tradition’ of men. How beautifully you make null the commandment of God that you may keep your own ‘tradition.’ For Moses said, ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ ; and, 'Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death.* But you say: ‘If a man shall say to his father or his mother, “Whatever you might have had from me is a gift to God,” he must not do anything more for his father or mother’—hus making null the word of God by your ‘tradition’ which you have made. And many other things like this you also do."
He turned away from the Pharisees to the common folk standing by, and said :
“Hear me, all of you, and understand. There [ p. 158 ] is nothing outside a man which, entering into him, can make him unclean. It is the things which go out of him that make a man unclean.”
When he was alone again with his disciples they asked him what he meant by the saying. Fie replied :
“Are you also so without understanding? Do you not know that whatever enters a man from without cannot make him unclean, because it enters not into his heart, but into his belly, and goes out of him into the drain. But what conies forth from a man, that makes him unclean. For from within the hearts of men come forth evil speaking, harlotry, thievery, murder, adultery, covetousness, wickedness, treachery, lust, the evil eye, blasphemy, pride, and presumption. All these evil things come forth from within; and they make a man unclean.”