[ p. 159 ]
SUDDENLY we hear of Jesus in the far north, in the territories of Tyre and Sidon. His descent into Galilee had failed. The Pharisees were vigilant, and for the first time in his reply to them we catch the note of anger and withering contempt for them, which was thenceforward constant in their encounters, and has branded them forever. They had thwarted him in his divine purpose. Scarcely had he appeared in Galilee than they had come out against him. He believed they had the civil power of Herod behind them, and they encouraged the belief.
He must have fled hurriedly. From what we can gather it seems that he made his way inland through Galilee. Mark speaks of his explanation of his word about defilement as given when they returned “to the house.” It is rash to press such a word, but it looks as though Jesus had returned [ p. 160 ] secretly to Capernaum, and a sudden alarm had prevented him from regaining the boat and his hiding-place on the other side. He left Galilee by land from the north, and made a long and circuitous journey, through Tyre and Sidon, then eastward, down through the cities of the Decapolis, back at last to the farther shore of the lake and his old hiding-place, where doubtless he had given the word to his followers to await him. Even in Tyre he chose to remain concealed.
Little is known of this great, flight, save its rough course, and the single incident of the casting out of the daemon from the daughter of the SyroPhoenician woman at Tyre. Matthew speaks of disciples being with Jesus ; Mark of none. Mark’s account, as everywhere, is the more original. Jesus was alone. The historical fact is important, yet not so precious as the indication that the story of the Syro-Phcenician woman was told to his disciples by Jesus himself on his return. For it is a strange little story.
He was lodging somewhere concealed in Tyre. No doubt he had a handful of followers there among the Jewish inhabitants. People from Tyre and Sidon had come out to hear him long ago. But [ p. 161 ] the Syro-Phoenician woman was not a Jewess ; she was a Syrian Greek. She heard about him, however, and came to ask him to cure her daughter of her daemon.
He said to her:
“Let the children first eat their fill. It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
She answered:
“Yes, Master. But the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
“For that reply,” said Jesus, “go your way: the daemon has left your daughter.”
She went home and found the child flung down upon the bed and the daemon gone from her.
What kind of malady the daemon personified, there is no telling. Nor is there any profit in inquiries for which there are no data; but it is easy, nay natural, to believe that such a man as Jesus had powers of spiritual healing, which were indeed spiritual, due to his conviction of the presence and power of God within him. And these powers, we conceive, it would tax modern medical science either to deny or to explain.
That is not greatly important What is important [ p. 162 ] is that Jesus must have told this story of himself. It was, he said, the woman’s reply that had wrung the cure from him. What was in the reply? Two things: pathos, and a quick wit, inseparably combined. Not to her wit alone, not to her pathetic humility, had he responded ; but to both in one. Because of her wit, her humility is not merely humble; because of her humility her wit is not merely witty. It is the jest that a nature in deadly earnest could not suppress, the speech of one who knew by instinct that she had a complete human being before her, to whom to appeal—a prophet, a great prophet, the greatest of all prophets—therefore a prophet with a sense of humor.
The phrase, “a sense of humor,” sounds crude and clumsy when spoken of Jesus. A sense of humor belongs to the old Adam, at his best ; and Jesus was a new man. His qualities were all new : his quickness of apprehension, his profound simplicity of speech, his astonishing power of revealing an abysm of meaning through a transparent phrase these appear before us in a combination so harmonious that we take them, as it were, for granted. They seem natural; and they are natural. Nothing is so new as a new naturalness, [ p. 163 ] none so difficult to apprehend. A new simplicity is the most baffling of all human achievements, and the most perdurable.
To those to whom Jesus is God it must inevitably be almost blasphemous to emphasise so signal a trait in Jesus as his humor. Yet to those for whom Jesus is wholly man, and the more divine for that, this humor of his is infinitely precious. The man of sorrows is the man who called Peter “the Rock,” and James and John “the Sons of Thunder” ; he was, before all else, like Shakespeare, a smiling man. To him his chief followers were ever so little absurd: absurdly lovable. Those two sons of Zebedee whom we see, in Luke, clamorous to call down fire upon a village that would not receive them ; obstreperous to demand for themselves to sit one on his right hand and one on his left in the Kingdom—what more perfect name for such spiritual children than “Sons of Thunder”? Jesus’ smile of humor was one with his love and his forgiveness ; it was one more acknowledgement of the divine particularity of the universe.
He did not, we imagine, meet with much humor in others in his earthly course. Humor has never been a Jewish virtue. The religion of the Pharisee, [ p. 164 ] great as it was, could never have had birth in a nation with a sense of humor ; it would have been killed by ridicule among a people which shared Jesus’ vision of the Pharisees straining out gnats and swallowing camels. That single phrase would have scotched Pharisaism in a laughterloving people ; and justly, for the humor is divine. It is God’s protest against those who would contort man from his authentic fashioning in God’s image. The true Shekinah is man, said Chrysostom. When universal laughter is the portion of those who would distort and defile it, the Kingdom of God will not be far from earth.
Not much humor, therefore, in his own folk was it Jesus’ lot to find : he found it in a Syro-Phoenician woman of Tyre. He was solitary and a fugitive, making a long and weary journey. On his return he told nothing of his woes that his disciples could remember only the story of the little dogs and the crumbs. “For that reply go your way: the daemon has left your daughter.”
From Tyre he went to Sidon, and thence by a, circuitous route, keeping remote from Galilee, to his old mountain retreat in the Decapolis. There he met his disciples again ; and it may be to the [ p. 165 ] vividness of their recollection of the meeting that we owe a curiously circumstantial account of his healing a deaf mute. Jesus took him apart privately and placed his fingers in the deaf mute’s ears ; then he spat and touched his tongue with the spittle; then, looking up into heaven, he groaned and said to the man “Ephphatha! (Open!) ” And immediately the impediments of the man’s ears and tongue were loosened, and he began to speak correctly. Once again Jesus charged the man to tell no one of his cure.
It is curious that this strangely realistic account of one of Jesus’ healings should be followed at a little distance by another of precisely the same kind—the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida. Those two accounts are unique in the Gospel narrative. One might explain their appearance [1] at this precise point in Mark’s story by supposing that among those gathered to meet Jesus on his return was a man with a much more exact and material vision than was possessed by the disciple who [ p. 166 ] supplied Mark with the main substance of his narrative. It is probable "enough. For on Jesus’ return, many were once more gathered round him ; and once again, on the eve of yet another attempt to enter Galilee, and carry on his work there, Jesus distributed a sacramental meal to thousands of fellow-sons of God and members of the Kingdom. Mark gives the number as four thousand, a thousand less than the five to whom Jesus had distributed the sacramental meal on the eve of his previous attempt to enter Galilee.
Perhaps we do wrong to press the figures ; yet it is difficult not to see in them evidence of a dwindling of Jesus’ following. Was the following of the Man who verily had not where to rest his head too hard for them? Was the coming of the Kingdom too long delayed?
Once more, we can but ask, what expectation had they? What expectation had Jesus? And the answer seems inevitable that they, and he, at this point of time, still waited for the coming of the Son of Man. For them this divine epiphany was one thing; for him another: he knew the change in the nature of man of which it was only the miraculous investiture; they did not. To his [ p. 167 ] knowledge, ultimate, eternal, unshakable, the refusal of an expected sign’was but the condition of a purer knowledge: he had misread God’s purpose in time, he had unwittingly taken over into his immediate certainty fragments of an old expectation. Now the last scales of error were fallen from his eyes : he knew the unspeakable truth. But to many of his followers he was only a prophet who had prophesied in vain.
Yet of five thousand, four thousand had remained. From four thousand he took his solemn departure, before he went once more to carry the wonderful news into Galilee. His nearer disciples rowed him once more across the lake, to some unknown place which Mark calls “the parts of Dalmanutha,” and Matthew Magadan or Magdala. It may be a corruption of the parts about Tiberias—the great Graeco-Jewish city on the lake, Herod’s capital of Galilee. The Pharisees were still on the alert, ready to receive him. They knew what had happened on the other side. The thousand that were his, and were his no longer, had not failed to spread the news abroad. There was exultation in the voices of the Pharisees:
[ p. 168 ]
“Shew us a sign from heaven!”
He groaned in spirit. It was the moment of outward defeat The triumphant Pharisees were before him, jeering at his impotence.
“Why does this generation ask for a sign? Verily I say to you, No sign shall be given to it!”
The truth : bitter to him to utter at this moment to his triumphant enemies, the victorious defenders of Galilee. Yet less than the truth, for the truth was yet unborn. They were to be given such a sign as the human mind had never dreamed.
“Get away from here,” said the Pharisees, “because Herod wants to kill you.” It was a lie ; but Jesus could not but believe it. He answered :
“Go, and say to that fox: ”Behold, I cast out daemons and do healings to-day and to-morrow, and the next day my work is done. Yet to-day and to-morrow and the next day I must journey on, for it is not permitted that a prophet should die outside Jerusalem."
Bitterly, wearily spoken, by one weary of a journey without rest, a labor without respite. He turned back to the boat and was rowed away.
His last attempt to enter his own country had [ p. 169 ] failed, the discredited prophet was rowed hurriedly away. There had been no time for his men even to buy bread ; they had but a single loaf in the boat with them. They told him so.
Bread? Bread?—“Man shall not live by bread alone.” His thoughts were otherwhere, brooding over his strange destiny.
“Bread we have no bread!” they told him again.
“Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees,” he answered, “and of Herod.”
Oh, these dark sayings! What did he mean? Was he blaming them for having no bread? They murmured apart among themselves.
“Why do you talk,” he said, wearily, “of having no bread? Do you not see? Do you not understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes, do you not see? Having ears, do you not hear?”
So they rowed to Bethsaida.
A different explanation is accepted by many modern scholars, namely that the feeding of four thousand and the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida is a “doublet” of the feeding of five thousand and the healing the deaf mute: i.e., two different accounts of the same incidents have been mistakenly included in Mark’s narrative. I do not find it completely convincing. ↩︎