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Expositions of Holy Scripture : St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII

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Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture : St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII

Author: Alexander Maclaren


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7351]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE : ST. MATTHEW CHAPS. IX TO XXVIII ***




Produced by Anne Folland, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team











EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.


ST. MATTHEW

_Chaps. IX to XXVIII_




EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.


ST. MATTHEW

_Chaps. IX to XVII_




CONTENTS

CHRIST'S ENCOURAGEMENTS (Matt. ix. 2)

SOUL-HEALING FIRST: BODY-HEALING SECOND (Matt. ix. 6)

THE CALL OF MATTHEW (Matt. ix. 9-17)

THE TOUCH OF FAITH AND THE TOUCH OF CHRIST (Matt. ix. 18-31)

A CHRISTLIKE JUDGMENT OF MEN (MATT. ix. 36)

THE OBSCURE APOSTLES (Matt. x. 5)

CHRIST'S CHARGE TO HIS HERALDS (Matt. x. 5-16)

THE WIDENED MISSION, ITS PERILS AND DEFENCES (Matt. x. 16-31)

LIKE TEACHER, LIKE SCHOLAR (Matt x. 24, 25)

THE KING'S CHARGE TO HIS AMBASSADORS (Matt. x. 32-42)

A LIFE LOST AND FOUND (Matt. x. 39)

THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM, AND THEIR REWARD (Matt. x. 41, 42)

JOHN'S DOUBTS OF JESUS, AND JESUS' PRAISE OF JOHN  (Matt. xi. 2-15)

THE FRIEND OF PUBLICANS AND SINNERS (Matt. xi. 19)

SODOM, CAPERNAUM, MANCHESTER (Matt. xi. 20)

CHRIST'S STRANGE THANKSGIVING (Matt. xi. 25)

THE REST GIVER (Matt. xi. 28, 29)

THE PHARISEES' SABBATH AND CHRIST'S (Matt. xii. 1-14)

AN ATTEMPT TO ACCOUNT FOR JESUS (Matt. xii. 24)

'MAKE THE TREE GOOD' (Matt. xii. 33)

'A GREATER THAN JONAS' (Matt. xii. 41)

'A GREATER THAN SOLOMON' (Matt. xii. 42)

FOUR SOWINGS AND ONE RIPENING (Matt. xiii. 1-9)

EARS AND NO EARS (Matt. xiii. 9)

'TO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN' (Matt. xiii. 12)

SEEING AND BLIND (Matt. xiii. 13)

MINGLED IN GROWTH, SEPARATED IN MATURITY (Matt. xiii. 24-30)

LEAVEN (Matt. xiii. 33)

TREASURE AND PEARL (Matt. xiii. 44-46)

THE MARTYRDOM OF JOHN (Matt. xiv. 1-12)

THE GRAVE OF THE DEAD JOHN AND THE GRAVE OF THE LIVING JESUS (Matt.
xiv. 12; xxviii. 8)

THE FOOD OF THE WORLD (Matt. xiv. 19, 20)

THE KING'S HIGHWAY (Matt. xiv. 22-36)

PETER ON THE WAVES (Matt. xiv. 28)

THB CRUMBS AND THE BREAD (Matt. xv. 21-31)

THE DIVINE CHRIST CONFESSED, THE SUFFERING CHRIST DENIED (Matt. xvi.
13-28)

CHRIST FORESEEING THE CROSS (Matt. xvi. 21)

THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY (Matt. xvii, 1-13)

THE SECRET OF POWER. (Matt. xvii. 19, 20)

THE COIN IN THE FISH'S MOUTH (Matt. xvii. 25, 26)




CHRIST'S ENCOURAGEMENTS


    'Son, be of good cheer.'--MATT. ix. 2.

This word of encouragement, which exhorts to both cheerfulness and
courage, is often upon Christ's lips. It is only once employed in
the Gospels by any other than He. If we throw together the various
instances in which He thus speaks, we may get a somewhat striking
view of the hindrances to such a temper of bold, buoyant cheerfulness
which the world presents, and of the means for securing it which
Christ provides.

But before I consider these individually, let me point you to this
thought, that such a disposition, facing the inevitable sorrows,
evils, and toilsome tasks of life with glad and courageous buoyancy,
is a Christian duty, and is a temper not merely to be longed for,
but consciously and definitely to be striven after.

We have a great deal more in our power, in the regulation of moods and
tempers and dispositions, than we often are willing to acknowledge to
ourselves. Our 'low' times--when we fret and are dull, and all things
seem wrapped in gloom, and we are ready to sit down and bewail ourselves,
like Job on his dunghill--are often quite as much the results of our
own imperfect Christianity as the response of our feelings to external
circumstances. It is by no means an unnecessary reminder for us, who
have heavy tasks set us, which often seem too heavy, and are surrounded,
as we all are, with crowding temptations to be bitter and melancholy
and sad, that Christ commands us to be, and therefore we ought to be,
'of good cheer.'

Another observation may be made as preliminary, and that is that
Jesus Christ never tells people to cheer up without giving them
reason to do so. We shall see presently that in all cases where the
words occur they are immediately followed by words or deeds of His
which hold forth something on which, if the hearer's faith lay hold,
darkness and gloom will fly like morning mists before the rising
sun. The world comes to us and says, in the midst of our sorrows and
our difficulties, 'Be of good cheer,' and says it in vain, and
generally only rubs salt into the sore by saying it. Jesus Christ
never thus vainly preaches the duty of encouraging ourselves without
giving us ample reasons for the cheerfulness which He enjoins.

With these two remarks to begin with--that we ought to make it a
part of our Christian discipline of ourselves to seek to cultivate a
continuous and equable temperament of calm, courageous good cheer;
and that Jesus Christ never commands such a temper without showing
cause for our obedience--let us turn for a few moments to the
various instances in which this expression falls from His lips.

I. Now the first of them is this of my text, and from it we learn
this truth, that Christ's first contribution to our temper of
equable, courageous cheerfulness is the assurance that all our sins
are forgiven.

'Son, be of good cheer,' said He to that poor palsied sufferer lying
there upon the little light bed in front of Him. He had been brought
to Christ to be cured of his palsy. Our Lord seems to offer him a
very irrelevant blessing when, instead of the healing of his limbs,
He offers him the forgiveness of his sins. That was possibly not
what he wanted most, certainly it was not what the friends who had
brought him wanted for him, but Jesus knew better than they what the
man suffered most from and most needed to have cured. They would
have said 'Palsy.' He said, 'Yes! but palsy that comes from sin.'
For, no doubt, the sick man's disease was 'a sin of flesh avenged in
kind,' and so Christ went to the fountain-head when He said, 'Thy
sins be forgiven thee.' He therein implied, not only that the man
was longing for something more than his four kindly but ignorant
bearers there knew, but also that the root of his disease was
extirpated when his sins were forgiven.

And so, in like manner, 'thus conscience doth make cowards of us
all.' There is nothing that so drapes a soul with darkness as either
the consciousness of unforgiven sin or the want of consciousness of
forgiven sin. There may be plenty of superficial cheerfulness. I
know that; and I know what the bitter wise man called it, 'the
crackling of thorns under the pot,' which, the more they crackle,
the faster they turn into powdery ash and lose all their warmth. For
stable, deep, lifelong, reliable courage and cheerfulness, there
must be thorough work made with the black spot in the heart, and the
black lines in the history. And unless our comforters can come to us
and say, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee,' they are only chattering
nonsense, and singing songs to a heavy heart which will make an
effervescence 'like vinegar on nitre,' when they say to us, 'Be of
good cheer.' How can I be glad if there lie coiled in my heart that
consciousness of alienation and disorder in my relations to God,
which all men carry with them, though they overlay it and try to
forget it? There is no basis for a peaceful gladness worthy of a man
except that which digs deep down into the very secrets of the heart,
and lays the first course of the building in the consciousness of
pardoned sin. 'Son, be of good cheer!' Lift up thy head. Face
smaller evils without discomposure, and with quietly throbbing
pulses, for the fountain of possible terrors and calamities is
stanched and stayed with, 'Thy sins are forgiven thee.'

Side by side with this first instance, illustrating the same general
thought, though from a somewhat different point of view, I may put
another of the instances in which the same phrase was soothingly on our
Lord's lips. 'Daughter,' said He to the poor woman with the issue of
blood, 'be of good cheer. Thy faith hath saved thee.' The consciousness
of a living union with God through Christ by faith, which results in
the present possession of a real, though it may be a partial, salvation,
is indispensable to the temper of equable cheerfulness of which I have
been speaking. Apart from that consciousness, you may have plenty of
excitement, but no lasting calm. The contrast between the drugged and
effervescent potion which the world gives as a cup of gladness, and the
pure tonic which Jesus Christ administers for the same purpose, is
infinite. He says to us, 'I forgive thy sins; by thy faith I save thee;
go in peace.' Then the burdened heart is freed from its oppression, and
the downcast face is lifted up, and all things around change, as when
the sunshine comes out on the wintry landscape, and the very snow
sparkles into diamonds. So much, then, for the first of the instances
of the use of this phrase.

II. We now take a second. Jesus Christ ministers to us cheerful
courage because He manifests Himself to us as a Companion in the
storm (Matt. xiv. 27).

The narrative is very familiar to us, so that I need not enlarge
upon it. You remember the scene--our Lord alone on the mountain in
prayer, the darkness coming down upon the little boat, the storm
rising as the darkness fell, the wind howling down the gorges of the
mountains round the landlocked lake, the crew 'toiling in rowing,
for the wind was contrary.' And then, all at once, out of the
mysterious obscurity beneath the shadow of the hills, Something is
seen moving, and it comes nearer; and the waves become solid beneath
that light and noiseless foot, as steadily nearer He comes. Jesus
Christ uses the billows as the pavement over which He approaches His
servants, and the storms which beat on us are His occasion for
drawing very near. Then they think Him a spirit, and cry out with
voices that were heard amidst the howling of the tempest, and struck
upon the ear of whomsoever told the Evangelist the story. They cry
out with a shriek of terror--because Jesus Christ is coming to them
in so strange a fashion! Have _we_ never shrieked and groaned,
and passionately wept aloud for the same reason; and mistaken the
Lord of love and consolation for some grisly spectre? When He comes
it is with the old word on His lips, 'Be of good cheer.'

'Tell us not to be frightened when we see something stalking across
the waves in the darkness!' 'It is I'; surely that is enough. The
Companion in the storm is the Calmer of the terror. He who recognises
Jesus Christ as drawing near to his heart over wild billows may well
'be of good cheer,' since the storm but brings his truest treasure
to him.

  'Well roars the storm to those who hear
   A deeper Voice across the storm.'

And He who, with unwetted foot, can tread on the wave, and with
quiet voice heard above the shriek of the blast can say, 'It is I,'
has the right to say, 'Be of good cheer,' and never says it in vain
to such as take Him into their lives however tempest-tossed, and
into their hearts however tremulous.

III. A third instance of the occurrence of this word of cheer
presents Jesus as ministering cheerful courage to us by reason of
His being victor in the strife with the world (John xvi. 33).

'In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I
have overcome the world.'

Of course 'the world' which He overcame is the whole aggregate of
things and persons considered as separated from God, and as being
the great Antagonist and counter power to a holy life of obedience
and filial devotion. At that last moment when, according to all
outward seeming and the estimate of things which sense would make,
He was utterly and hopelessly and all but ignominiously beaten, He
says, 'I have overcome the world.' What! Thou! within four-and-twenty
hours of Thy Cross? Is that victory? Yes! For he conquers the world
who uses all its opposition as well as its real good to help him,
absolutely and utterly, to do the will of God. And he is conquered
by the world who lets it, by its glozing sweetnesses and flatteries,
or by its knitted brows and frowning eyes and threatening hand,
hinder him from the path of perfect consecration and entire conformity
to the Father's will.

Christ has conquered. What does that matter to us? Why, it matters
this, that we may have the Spirit of Jesus Christ in our hearts to
make us also victorious in the same fight. And whosoever will lay
his weakness on that strong arm, and open his emptiness to receive
the fulness of that victorious Spirit for the very spirit of his
life, will be 'more than conqueror through Him that loved us,' and
can front all the evils, dangers, threatenings, temptations of the
world, its heaped sweets and its frowning antagonisms, with the calm
confidence that none of them are able to daunt him; and that the
Victor Lord will cover his head in the day of battle and deliver him
from every evil work. 'Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the
world, and play your parts like men in the good fight of faith; for
I am at your back, and will help you with Mine own strength.'

IV. The last instance that I point to of the use of this phrase is
one in which it was spoken by Christ's voice from heaven (Acts
xxiii. 11). It was the voice which was heard by the Apostle Paul
after he had been almost torn in pieces by the crowd in the Temple,
and had been bestowed for security, by the half-contemptuous
protection of the Roman governor, in the castle, and was looking
onward into a very doubtful future, not knowing how many hours'
purchase his life might be worth. That same night the Lord appeared
to him and said, 'Be of good cheer, Paul, for as thou hast testified
of Me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome.' That is
to say, 'No man can touch you until I let him, and nobody shall touch
you until you have done your work and spoken out your testimony.
Jerusalem is a little sphere; Rome is a great one. The tools to the
hand that can use them. The reward for work is more work, and work
in a larger sphere. So cheer up! for I have much for you to do yet.'

And the spirit of that encouragement may go with us all, breeding in
us the quiet confidence that no matter who may thwart or hinder, no
matter what dangers or evils may seem to ring us round, the Master
who bids us 'Be of good cheer' will give us a charmed life, and
nothing shall by any means hurt us until He says to us, 'Be of good
courage; for you have done your work; and now come and rest.' 'Wait
on the Lord. Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine
heart; wait, I say, on the Lord.'




SOUL-HEALING FIRST: BODY-HEALING SECOND


    'That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on
    earth to forgive sins (then saith He to the sick of the
    palsy), Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine
    house.'--MATT. ix. 6.

The great example of our Lord's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is
followed, in this and the preceding chapter, by a similar collection
of His works of healing. These are divided into three groups, each
consisting of three members. This miracle is the last of the second
triad, of which the other two members are the miraculous stilling
of the tempest and the casting out of the demons from the men in the
country of the Gergesenes.

One may discern a certain analogy in these three members of this
central group. In all of them our Lord appears as the peace-bringer.
But the spheres are different. The calm which was breathed over the
stormy lake is peace of a lower kind than that which filled the soul
of the demoniacs when the power that made discord within had been
cast out. Even that peace was lower in kind than that which brought
sweet repose in the assurance of pardon to this poor paralytic.
Forgiveness speaks of a loftier blessing than even the casting out
of demons. The manifestation of power and love steadily rises to a
climax.

The most important part of this story, then, is not the mere healing
of the disease, but the forgiveness of sins which accompanies it.
And the large teaching which our Lord gives as to the relation
between His miracles and His standing work, His ordinary work which
He has been doing all through the ages, which He is doing to-day,
which He is ready to do for you and me if we will let Him, towers
high above the mere miracle, which is honoured by being the signal
attestation of that work.

Therefore I would turn to this story now, not for the sake of
dealing with the mere miraculous event, but in order to draw the
important lessons from it which lie upon its very surface.

I. The first thought that is suggested here is that our deepest need
is forgiveness.

How strangely irrelevant and beside the mark, at first sight, seems
the answer which Christ gives to the eager zeal and earnestness of
the man and his bearers. Christ's word is 'Son,' or as the original
might more literally and even more tenderly be rendered, 'Child--be
of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.' That seemed far away from
their want. It _was_ far from their wish, but yet it was the
shortest road to its accomplishment. Christ here goes straight to
the heart of the necessity, when, passing by the disease for the
moment, He speaks the great word of pardon. The palsy was probably
the result of the sufferer's vice, and probably, too, he felt,
whatever may have been his friends' wishes for him, that he needed
forgiveness most. Such a conclusion as to his state of mind seems a
fair inference from our Lord's words to him, for Christ would never
have offered forgiveness to an impenitent or indifferent heart.

So we may learn that our chief and prime need is forgiveness. Amid
all our clamours and hungry needs, that is our deepest. Is not a
man's chief relation in this world his relation to God? Is not that
the most important thing about all of us? If that be wrong, will not
everything be wrong? If that be right, will not everything come right?
And is it not true that for you and me, and for all our fellows,
whatever be the surface diversities of character, civilisation,
culture, taste and the like, there is one deep experience common to
every human spirit, and that is the fact, and in some sense more or
less acutely the consciousness of the fact, that 'we have sinned,
and come short of the glory of God'?

There is the fontal source of all sorrow, for even to the most
superficial observation ninety per cent., at any rate, of man's
misery comes either from his own or from others' wrongdoing, and for
the rest, it is regarded in the eye of faith as being sorrow that is
needful because of sin, in order to discipline and to purify. But
here stands the fact, that king and clown, philosopher and fool, men
of culture and men of ignorance, all of us, through all the ages,
manifest the unity of our nature in this--I was going to say most
chiefly--that lapses from the path of rectitude, and indulgence in
habits, thoughts, feelings, and actions, which even our consciences
tell us are wrong, characterise us all.

Hence the profound wisdom of Christ and of His Gospel in that, when
it begins the task of healing, it does not peddle and potter on the
surface, but goes straight to the heart, with true instinct flies at
the head, like a wise physician pays little heed to secondary and
unimportant symptoms, but grapples with the disease, makes the tree
good, and leaves the good tree to make, as it will, the fruit good.

The first thing to do to heal men's misery, is to make them pure; and
the first step in the great method by which a man can be made pure,
is to assure him of a divine forgiveness for the past. So the sneers
that we often hear about Christian 'philanthropists taking tracts to
people when they want soup,' and the like, are excessively shallow
sneers, and indicate nothing more than this, that the critic has
superficially diagnosed the disease, and is wofully wrong about the
remedy. God forbid that I should say one word that would seem to
depreciate the value of other forms of beneficence, or to cast doubt
upon the purity of motives, or even to be lacking in admiration for the
enthusiasm that fills and guides many an earnest man and woman, working
amongst the squalid vice of our great cities and of our complex and
barbarous civilisation to-day. I would recognise all their work as
good and blessed; but, oh! dear brethren, it deals with the surface,
and you will have to go a great deal deeper down than æsthetic, or
intellectual, or economical, or political reformation and changes
reach, before you touch the real reason why men and women are
miserable in this world. And you will only effectually cure the
misery, but you certainly then will do it, when you begin where the
misery begins, and deal first with sin. The true 'saviour of society'
is the man that can go to his brother, and as a minister declaratory
of the divine heart can say--'Brother, be of good cheer; thy sins be
forgiven thee.' And then, after that, the palsy will go out of his
limbs, and a new nervous energy will come into them, and he will
rise, take up his bed, and walk.

II. Now, in the next place, notice, as coming out of this incident
before us, the thought that forgiveness is an exclusively divine
act.

There was, sitting by, with their jealous and therefore blind eyes,
a whole crowd of wise men and religious formalists of the first
water, collected together as a kind of ecclesiastical inquisition
and board of triers, as one of the other evangelists tells us, out
of every corner of the land. They had no care for the dewy pity that
was in Christ's looks, or for the nascent hope that began to swim up
into the poor, dim eye of the paralytic. But they had keen scent for
heresy, and so they fastened with true feline instinct upon the one
thing, 'This man speaketh blasphemies. Who can forgive sins but God
alone?'

Ah! if you want to get people blind as bats to the radiant beauty of
some lofty character, and insensible as rocks to the wants of a sad
humanity, commend me to your religious formalists, whose religion is
mainly a bundle of red tape tied round men's limbs to keep them from
getting at things that they would like. These are the people who
will be as hard as the nether millstones, and utterly blind to all
enthusiasm and to all goodness.

But yet these Pharisees are right; perfectly right. Forgiveness
_is_ an exclusively divine act. Of course. For sin has to do
with God only; vice has to do with the laws of morality; crime has
to do with the laws of the land. The same act may be vice, crime,
and sin. In the one aspect it has to do with myself, in the other
with my fellows, in the last with God. And so evil considered as sin
comes under God's control only, and only He against whom it has been
committed can forgive.

What is forgiveness? The sweeping aside of penalties? the shutting
up of some more or less material hell? By no means: penalties are
often left; when sins are crimes they are generally left; when sins
are vices they are always left, thank God! But in so far as sin is
sin, considered as being the perversion and setting wrong of my
relation to Him, its consequences, which are its penalties, are
swept away by forgiveness; for forgiveness, in its essence and
deepest meaning, is neither more nor less than that the love of the
person against whom the wrong has been done shall flow out,
notwithstanding the wrong. Pardon is love rising above the ice-dam
which we have piled in its course, and pouring into our hearts.

When you fathers and mothers forgive your children, what does it
mean? Does it not mean that your love is neither deflected nor
embittered any more, by reason of their wrongdoing, but pours upon
them as of old? So God's forgiveness is at bottom--'Child! there is
nothing in my heart to thee, but pure and perfect love.' We fill the
sky with mists, through which the sun itself has to look like a red
ball of lurid fire. But it shines on the upper side of the mists all
the same, and all the time, and thins them away and scatters them
utterly, and shines forth in its own brightness on the rejoicing
heart. Pardon is God's love, unchecked and unembittered, granted to
the wrongdoer. And that is a divine act, and a divine act alone.
Pharisees and Scribes were perfectly right. No man can forgive sins
but God only.

And I might add, though it is somewhat aside from my direct purpose,
God _can_ forgive sin; which some people nowadays say is
impossible. The apparent impossibility arises only from shallow and
erroneous notions of what forgiveness is. God does not--it might be
too bold to say God cannot, if we believe in miracles--but as a
matter of fact, God does not, usually interfere to hinder men from
reaping, as regards this life, what they have sown. But as I say,
that is not forgiveness; and is there any reason conceivable why it
should be impossible for the divine love to pour down upon a sinful
man who has forsaken his sin, and is trusting in God's mercy in
Christ, just as if his sin was non-existent, in so far as it could
condition or interfere with the flow of the divine mercy?

And I may say, further, we need a definite divine assurance of pardon.
Ah! if you have ever been down into the cellars of your own hearts,
and seen the ugly things that coil there, you will know that a vague
trust in a vague God and a vague mercy is not enough to still the
conscience that has once been stung into action. My brothers, you
want neither priests nor ceremonies on the one hand, nor a mere
peradventure of 'Oh! God is merciful!' on the other, in order to deal
with that deepest need of your heart. Nothing but the King's own
sign-manual on the pardon makes it valid; and unless you and I can,
somehow or other, come to close grips with God, and get into actual
contact with Him, and hear, somehow, with infallible certitude, as
from His own lips, the assurance of forgiveness, there is not enough
for our needs.

III. So I come to say, in the next place, that the incident before
us teaches us that Jesus Christ claims and exercises this divine
prerogative of forgiveness.

Mark His answer to these cavillers. He admits their promises absolutely.
They said, 'No man can forgive sins but God only.' If Christ was only a
man, like us, standing in the same relation to the divine pardon that
other teachers, saints, and prophets have stood, and had nothing more
to do with it than simply, as I might do, to say to a troubled heart,
'My brother, be quite sure that God has forgiven you'; if Christ's
relation to the divine forgiveness was nothing more than ministerial
and declaratory, why, in the name, not of common sense only, but of
veracity, did He not turn round to these men and say so? He was bound,
by all the obligations of a religious teacher, to disclaim, as you or
I would have done under similar circumstances, the misapprehension of
His words: 'I use blasphemies? No! I am not speaking blasphemies. I
know that God only can forgive sins, and I am doing no more than
telling my poor brother here that his sins are forgiven by God.' But
that is not His answer at all. What He says in effect is--'Yes; you are
quite right. No man can forgive sins, but God only. _I_ forgive sins.
Whom think ye, then, that I, the Son of Man am? It is easy to say "Thy
sins be forgiven thee"--far easier to say that than to say "Take up thy
bed and walk," because one can verify and check the accomplishment of
the saying in the one case, and one cannot in the other. The sentences
are equally easy to pronounce, the things are equally difficult for a
_man_ to do, but the difference is that one of them can be verified
and the other of them cannot. I will do the visible impossibility, and
then I leave you to judge whether I can do the invisible one or not.'

Now, dear brethren, I have only one word to say about that, and it
is this. We are here brought sharp up to a fork in the road. I know
that it is not always a satisfactory way of arguing to compel a man
to take one horn or other of an alternative, but it is quite fair to
do go in the present case; and I would press it upon some of you
who, I think, urgently need to consider the dilemma. Either the
Pharisees were quite right, and Jesus Christ, the meek, the humble,
the Pattern of all lowly gentleness, the Teacher whom nineteen
centuries confess that they have not exhausted, was an audacious
blasphemer, or He was God manifest in the flesh. The whole context
forbids us to take these words, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee,' as
anything less than the voice of divine love wiping out the man's
transgressions; and if Jesus Christ pretended or presumed to do
that, there is no hypothesis that I know of which can save His
character for the reverence of man, but that which sees in Him God
revealed in manhood; the world's Judge, from whom the world may
receive divine forgiveness.

IV. Jesus Christ here brings visible facts into the witness-box as
the attesters of His invisible powers.

Of course the miracle was such a witness in a special way, inasmuch as
it and forgiveness were equally divine prerogatives and acts. I need
not dwell now upon what I have already observed in my introductory
remarks, that our Lord here teaches us the relative importance of the
attesting miracle and the thing attested, and regards the miracle as
subordinate to the higher and spiritual work of bringing pardon.

But we may widen out this into the thought that the subsidiary
effects of Christian faith in individuals, and of the less complete
Christian faith which is diffused over society, do stand as very
strong evidences of the reality of Christ's professions and claims
to exercise this invisible power of pardon. Or, to put it into a
concrete form, and to take an illustration which may need large
deductions.--Go into a Salvation Army meeting. Admit the extravagance,
the coarseness, and all the rest which we educated and superfine
Christians cannot stand. But when you have blown away the froth, is
there not something left in the cup which looks uncommonly like the
wine of the Kingdom? Are there not visible results of that, as of
every earnest effort to carry the message of forgiveness to men,
which create an immense presumption in favour of its reality and
divine origin? Men reclaimed, passions tamed, homes that were
pandemoniums made Bethels, houses of God. Wherever Christ's
forgiving power really comes into a heart, life is beautified, is
purified, is ennobled; and secondary and material benefits follow in
the train.

I claim all the difference between Christendom and Heathendom as
attestation of the reality of Christ's divine and atoning work. I
say, and I believe it to be a valid and a good argument as against
much of the doubt of this day, 'If you seek His monument, look
around.' His own answer to the question, 'Art thou He that should
come?' is valid still: 'Go and tell John the things that ye see and
hear'; the dead are raised, the deaf ears are opened; faculties that
lie dormant are quickened, and in a thousand ways the swift spirit
of life flows from Him and vitalises the dead masses of humanity.

Let any system of belief or of no belief do the like if it can. This
rod has budded at any rate, let the magicians do the same with their
enchantments.

Now, Christian men and women, 'ye are My witnesses,' saith the Lord.
The world takes its notions of Christianity, and its belief in the
power of Christianity, a great deal more from you than it does from
preachers and apologists. _You_ are the Bibles that most men
read. See to it that your lives represent worthily the redeeming and
the ennobling power of your Master.

And as for the rest of you, do not waste your time trying to purify
the stream twenty miles down from the fountainhead, but go to the
source. Do not believe, brother, that your palsy, or your fever,
your paralysis of will towards good, or the unwholesome ardour with
which you are impelled to wrong, and the consequent misery and
restlessness, can ever be healed until you go to Christ--the
forgiving Christ--and let Him lay His hand upon you; and from His
own sweet and infallible lips hear the word that shall come as a
charm through all your nature: 'Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.'
'Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened; then shall the lame man
leap as an hart';--then limitations, sorrows, miseries, will pass
away, and forgiveness will bear fruit in joy and power, in holiness,
health and peace.




THE CALL OF MATTHEW


    'And as Jesus passed forth from thence, He saw a man,
    named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and
    He saith unto him, Follow Me. And he arose, and
    followed Him. 10. And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at
    meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners
    came and sat down with Him and His disciples. 11. And
    when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto His disciples,
    Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?
    12. But when Jesus heard that, He said unto them, They
    that be whole need not a physician, but they that are
    sick. 13. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will
    have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to
    call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. 14. Then
    came to Him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we
    and the Pharisees fast oft, but Thy disciples fast not?
    15. And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the
    bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with
    them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall
    be taken from them, and then shall they fast. 16. No
    man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment,
    for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the
    garment, and the rent is made worse. 17. Neither do men
    put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break,
    and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but
    they put new wine into new bottles, and both are
    preserved.'--MATT. ix. 9-17.

All three evangelists connect the call of Matthew immediately with the
cure of the paralytic, and follow it with an account of Christ's answers
to sundry cavils from Pharisees and John's disciples. No doubt, the
spectacle of this new Teacher taking a publican into His circle of
disciples, and, not content with such an outrage on all proper patriotic
feeling, following it up with scandalous companionship with the sort
of people that a publican could get to accept his hospitality, sharpened
hatred and made suspicion prick its ears. Mark and Luke call the
publican Levi, he calls himself Matthew, the former being probably his
name before his discipleship, the latter, that by which he was known
thereafter. Possibly Jesus gave it him, as in the cases of Simon, and
perhaps Bartholomew. But, however acquired, it superseded the old one,
as the fact that it appears in the lists of the apostles in both the
other evangelists and in Acts, shows. Its use here may be a trace of
a touching desire to make sure that readers, who only knew him as
Matthew, should understand who this publican was. It is like the little
likenesses of themselves, in some corner of a background, that early
painters used to slip into a picture of Madonna and angels. There was
no vanity in the wish, for he says nothing about his sacrifices,
leaving it to Luke to tell that 'he left all,' but he _does_
crave that his brethren, who read, should know that it was he whom
Jesus honoured by His call.

The condensed narrative emphasises three things, (1) his occupation
with his ordinary business when that wonderful summons thrilled his
soul; (2) the curt authoritative command, and (3) the swift obedience.
As to the first, Capernaum was on a great trade route, and the
custom-house officers there would have their hands full. This one was
busy at his work, hateful and shameful as it was in Jewish eyes, and
into that sordid atmosphere, like a flash of light into a mephitic
cavern full of unclean creatures, came the transcendent mercy of
Jesus' summons. There is no region of life so foul, so mean, so
despicable in men's eyes, but that the quickening Voice will enter
there. We do not need to be in temples or about sacred tasks in order
to hear it. It summons us in, and sometimes from, our daily work. Well
for those who know whose Voice it is, and do not mistake it for some
Eli's!

No doubt this was not the first of Matthew's knowledge of Jesus.
Living in Capernaum, he would have had many opportunities of hearing
Him or of Him, and his heart and conscience may have been stirred.
As he sat in his 'tolbooth,' feeling contempt and hatred poured on
him, he, no doubt, had had longings to get nearer to the One whose
voice was gentle, and His looks, love. So the call would come to him
as the fulfilment of a dim hope, and it would be a joyful surprise
to know that Jesus wished to have him for a disciple as much as he
wished to have Jesus for a Teacher. The ring of fire and hate within
which he had been imprisoned was broken, and there was One who cared
to have him, and who would not shrink from his touch. In the light
of that assurance, the call became, not a summons to give anything
up, but an invitation to receive a better possession than all with
which he was called to part. And if we saw things as they are, would
it not always be so to us? 'Follow Me' does mean, Forsake earth and
self, but it means still more: Take what is more than all. It parts
from these because it unites to Jesus. Therefore it means gain, not
deprivation. And it condenses all rules for life into one, for to
follow Him is the sum of all duty, and yields the perfect pattern of
conduct and character, while it is also the secret of all blessedness,
and the talisman that assures a man of continual progress. They who
follow are near, and will reach, Him. Of course, if His servants
follow Him, it stands to reason that one day, 'where I am there shall
also My servants be.' So in that command lie a sufficient guide for
earth, and a sure guarantee for heaven.

'And he arose and followed Him.' That is the only thing that we are
told of Matthew. We hear no more of him, except that he made a feast
in his house on the occasion. No doubt he did his work as an apostle,
but oblivion has swallowed up all that. A happy fate to be known to all
the world for all time, only by this one thing, that he unconditionally,
immediately and joyfully obeyed Christ's call! He might have said: 'How
can I leave my work? I must make up my accounts, hand over my papers,
do a hundred things in order to wind up matters, and I must postpone
following till then.' But he sprang up at once. He would have abundant
opportunities to settle all details afterwards, but if he let this
opportunity of taking his place as a disciple pass, he might never
have another. There are some things that are best done gradually and
slowly, but obedience to Christ's call is not one of them. Prompt
obedience is the only safety. The psalmist knew the danger of delay
when he said: 'I made haste and delayed not, but made haste to keep Thy
commandments.'

Matthew does not tell us that _he_ made the feast, but Luke
does. It was the natural expression of his thankfulness and joy for
the new bond. His knowledge was small, but his love was great. How
could he honour Jesus enough? But he was a pariah in Capernaum, and
the only guests he could assemble were, like himself, outcasts from
'respectable society.' In popular estimation all publicans were
regarded without any more ado as 'sinners,' but probably that
designation is here applied to disreputable folks of various kinds
and degrees of shadiness, who gravitated to Matthew and his class,
because, like him, they were repulsed by every one else. Even
outcasts hunger for society, and manage to get a community of their
own, in which they find some glow of comradeship, and some defence
from hatred and contempt. Even lepers herd together and have their
own rules of intercourse.

But what a scandal in the eyes not only of Pharisees, but of all the
proper people in Capernaum, Jesus' going to such a gathering of
disreputables would be, we may estimate if we remember that they did
not know His reason, but thought that He went because He liked the
atmosphere and the company. 'Like draws to like' was the conclusion
suggested, in the absence of His own explanation. The Pharisee
conceived that his duty in regard to publicans and sinners was to keep
as far from them as he could, and his strait-laced self-righteousness
had never dreamed of going to them with an open heart, and trying to
win them to a better life. Many so-called followers of Jesus still
take that attitude. They gather up their skirts round them daintily,
and never think that it would be liker their Lord to sweep away the
mud than to pick their steps through it, caring mainly to keep their
own shoes clean.

The feast was probably spread in some courtyard or open space, to
which, as is the Eastern custom, uninvited spectators could have
access. It is quite in accordance with the usage of the times and
land that the Pharisees should have been onlookers, and should have
been able to talk to the disciples. No doubt their colloquy became
animated, and perhaps loud, so that it could easily attract Christ's
attention. He answered for Himself, and the tone of His reply is
friendly and explanatory, as if He recognised that the questioners
genuinely wished to know 'why' He was sitting in such company.

It discloses His motive, and thereby sweeps away all insinuations
that He consorted with sinners because their company was congenial.
It was precisely for the opposite reason, because He was so unlike
them. He came among these sinners as a physician; and who wonders at
_his_ being beside the sick? He does not spend his days by
their bedsides because he likes the atmosphere, but because it is
his business to make them well. Now, in that comparison, Jesus
pronounces no opinion on the correctness of the Pharisees' estimate
of themselves as 'righteous,' or of publicans as sinners, but simply
takes them on their own ground. But He does make a great claim for
Himself, and speaks out of His consciousness of power to heal men's
worst disease, sin. It is a tremendous assertion to make of oneself,
and its greatness is enhanced by the quiet way in which it is stated
as a thought familiar to Himself. What right had He to pose as the
physician for humanity, and how can such a claim be reconciled with
His being 'meek and lowly in heart'? If He Himself was one of the
sick and needed healing, how can He be the healer of the rest? If
being a sinful man, as we all are, He made such a claim, what becomes
of the reverence which is paid to Him as a great religious Teacher,
and where has His 'sweet reasonableness' vanished?

Jesus passes from explanation of His personal relation to the
publicans to adduce the broad principle which should shape the
Pharisees' relation to them, as it had shaped His. Hosea had said
long ago that God delighted more in 'mercy' than in 'sacrifice.'
Kindly helpfulness to men is better worship than exact performance
of any ritual. Sacrifice propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him,
and imitation is the perfection of divine service. Jesus here speaks
as all the prophets had spoken, and smites with a deadly stroke the
mechanical formalism which in every age stiffens religion into
ceremonies and neglects love towards God, expressed in mercy to men.
He lays bare the secret of His own life, and He thereby lays on His
followers the obligation of making it the moving impulse of theirs.

The great general truth is followed, as it has been preceded, by a
plain statement of Jesus' own conception of His mission in the
world. 'I came,' says He, hinting at the fact that He was before He
was born, and that His Incarnation was His voluntary act. True, He
was sent, and we speak of His mission, but also He 'came,' and we
speak of His advent. 'To repentance' is omitted by the best editors
as being brought over from Luke, where it is genuine. But it is a
correct gloss on the simple word 'call,' though 'repentance' is but
a small part of that to which He summons. He calls us to repent; He
calls us to Himself; He calls us to self-surrender; He calls us to
Eternal Life; He calls us to a better feast than Matthew had spread.
But we must recognise that we are sinners, or we shall never realise
that His invitation is for us, nor ever feel that we need a physician,
and have in Him, and in Him alone, the Physician whom we need.

The Pharisees objected to Jesus' feasting, and could scarcely in the
same breath find fault with Him for not fasting, but they put
forward some of John's disciples to bring that fresh objection.
Common hatred is a strong cement, and often holds opposites together
for a while. It was bad for John's followers that they should be
willing to say, 'We and the Pharisees.' They had travelled far from
the days when their master had called the same class a 'generation
of vipers'! Their keen desire to uphold the honour of their teacher,
whose light they saw paling before the younger Jesus, made them
hostile to Him, and, as is usually the case, the followers were more
partisan than the leader. Religious antagonism sometimes stoops to
very strange alliances. The two questions brought together in this
context are noticeably alike, and noticeably different. Both ask for
the reason of conduct which they do not go the length of impugning.
They seem to be desirous of enlightenment, they are really eager to
condemn. Both avoid seeming to call in question the acts of the
persons addressed, for the Pharisees interrogate the _disciples_ as
to the reason for _Jesus'_ conduct, while John's disciples ask
from _Jesus_ the reason of His disciples' conduct. In both, mock
respectfulness covers lively hatred.

Our Lord's first answer is as profound as it is beautiful, and
veils, while it reveals, a lofty claim for Himself and a solemn
foresight of His death, and lays down a great and fruitful principle
as to the relations between spiritual moods and outward acts of
religion. His speaking of Himself as 'the Bridegroom' would recall
to some of His questioners, and that with a touch of shame, John's
nobly humble acceptance of the subordinate place of the bridegroom's
friend and elevation of Jesus to that of the bridegroom. But it was
not merely a rebuking quotation from John's witness, but the
expression of His own unclouded and continual consciousness of what
He was to humanity, and of what humanity could find in Him, as well
as a sovereign appropriating to Himself of many prophetic strains.
What depth of love, what mysterious blending of spirit, what adoring,
lowly obedience, what perfection of protecting care, what rapture of
possession, what rest of heart in trust, what dower of riches are
dimly shadowed in that wonderful emblem, will never be known till
the hour of the marriage-supper of the Lamb, when 'His bride hath
made herself ready.' But across the light there flits a shadow. It
is but for a moment, and it meant little to the hearers, but it meant
much to Him. For He could not look forward to winning His bride
without seeing the grim Cross, and even athwart the brightness of
the days of companionship with His humble friends, came the darkness
on His soul, though not on theirs, of the violent end when He 'shall
be taken from them.' The hint fell apparently on deaf ears, but it
witnesses to the continual presence in the mind of Jesus of His
sufferings and death. The certainty that He must die was not forced
on Him by the failure of His efforts as His career unfolded itself.
It was no disappointment of bright earlier hopes, as is the case
with many a disillusionised reformer, who thought at the outset
that he had only to speak and all men would listen. It was the
clearly discerned goal from the first. 'The Son of Man came ... to
give His life a ransom.'

But our Lord here lays down a broad principle, which, if applied as it
was meant to be, would lift a heavy burden of outward observance off
the Christian consciousness. Fast when you are sad; feast when you are
glad. Let the disposition, the mood, the moment's circumstance, mould
your action. There is no virtue or sanctity in observances which do not
correspond to the inner self. What a charter of liberty is proclaimed
in these quiet words! What mountains of ceremonial unreality, oppressive
to the spirit, are cast into the sea by them! How different Christendom
would have been and would be to-day, if Christians had learned the
lesson of these words!

The two condensed parables or extended metaphors, which follow the
vindication of the disciples, carry the matter further, and lay down
a principle which is intended to cover not only the question in
hand, their non-observance of Jewish regulations as to fasting, but
the whole subject of the relations of the new word, which Jesus felt
that He brought, to the old system. The same consciousness of His
unique mission which prompted His use of the term 'bridegroom,'
shines through the two metaphors of the new cloth and the new wine.
He knows that He is about to bring a new garb to men, and to give
them new wine to drink, and He knows that what He brings is no mere
patch on a worn-out system, but a new fermenting force, which
demands fresh vehicles and modes of expression. The two metaphors
take up different aspects of one thought. To try to mend an old coat
with a bit of unshrunk cloth would only make a worse dissolution of
continuity, for as soon as a shower fell on it the patch would
shrink, and, in shrinking, pull the thin pieces of the old garment
adjoining it to itself. Judaism was already 'rent' and worn too thin
to be capable of repair. The only thing to be done was 'as a
vesture' to 'fold it up' and shape a new garment out of new cloth.
What was true as to the supremely new thing which He brought into
the world remains true, in less eminent degree, of the less acute
differences between the Old and the New, within Christianity itself.
There do come times when its externals become antiquated, worn thin
and torn, and when patching is useless. Christian men, like others,
constitutionally incline to conservatism or to progress, and the one
temperament needs to be warned against obstinately preserving old
clothes, and the other against eagerly insisting that they are past
mending.

But a patch and a worn garment do not wholly describe the relations
of the old and the new. Freshly made wine, still fermenting, and
old, stiff wine-skins which have lost their elasticity suggest
further thoughts. Now we have to do with containing vessel _versus_
contents, with a fermenting force _versus_ stiffened forms. To put
that into these will destroy both. For example, if the struggle of
the Judaisers in the early Church had succeeded, and Christianity
had become a Jewish sect, it would have dwindled to nothing, as the
Jewish-minded Christians did. The wine must have bottles. Every
great spiritual renovating force must embody itself in institutions.
Spiritual emotions must express themselves in acts of worship,
spiritual convictions must speak in a creed. But the containing
vessel must be congruous with, and still more, it must be created by,
the contained force, as there are creatures who frame their shells
to fit the convolutions of their bodies, and build them up from their
own substance. Forms are good, as long as they can stretch if need be;
when they are too stiff to expand, they restrict rather than contain
the wine, and if short-sighted obstinacy insists on keeping _it_ in
_them_, there will be a great spill and loss of much that is
precious.




THE TOUCH OF FAITH AND THE TOUCH OF CHRIST


    'While He spake these things unto them, behold, there
    came a certain ruler, and worshipped Him, saying, My
    daughter is even now dead: but come and lay Thy hand
    upon her, and she shall live. 19. And Jesus arose,
    and followed him, and so did His disciples. 20. And,
    behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of
    blood twelve years, came behind Him, and touched the
    hem of His garment: 21. For she said within herself,
    If I may but touch His garment, I shall be whole.
    22. But Jesus turned Him about, and when He saw her,
    He said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath
    made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from
    that hour. 23. And when Jesus came into the ruler's
    house, and saw the minstrels and the people making a
    noise. 24. He said unto them, Give place: for the maid
    is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed Him to
    scorn. 25. But when the people were put forth, He went
    in, and took her by the hand, and the maid arose.
    26. And the fame hereof went abroad into all that land.
    27. And when Jesus departed thence, two blind men
    followed Him, crying, and saying, Thou Son of David,
    have mercy on us. 28. And when He was come into the
    house, the blind men came to Him: and Jesus saith unto
    them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said
    unto Him, Yea, Lord. 29. Then touched He their eyes,
    saying, According to your faith be it unto you. 30. And
    their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them,
    saying, See that no man know it. 31. But they, when they
    were departed, spread abroad His fame in all that
    country.'--MATT. ix. 18-31.

The three miracles included in the present section belong to the
last group of this series. Those of the second group were all
effected by Christ's word. Those now to be considered are all
effected by touch. The first two are intertwined. The narrative of
the healing of the woman is embedded in the account of the raising
of Jairus's daughter.

Mark the impression of calm consciousness of power and leisurely
dignity produced by Christ's having time to pause, even on such an
errand, in order to heal, by the way, the other sufferer. The father
and the disciples would wonder at Him as He stayed His steps, and be
apt to feel that priceless moments were being lost; but He knows His
own resources, and can afford to let the child die while He heals
the woman. The one shall receive no harm by the delay, and the other
will be blessed. Our Lord is sitting at the feast which Matthew gave
on the occasion of his call, engaged in vindicating His sharing in
innocent festivity against the cavils of the Pharisees, when the
summons to the death-bed comes to Him from the lips of the father,
who breaks in on the banquet with his imploring cry. Matthew gives
the story much more summarily than the other evangelists, and does
not distinguish, as they do, between Jairus's first words, 'at the
point of death, and the message of her actual decease, which met
them on the way. The call of sorrow always reaches Christ's ear, and
the cry for help is never deemed by Him an interruption. So this
'man, gluttonous and a wine-bibber,' as these Pharisees thought Him,
willingly and at once leaves the house of feasting for that of
mourning. How near together, in this awful life of ours, the two
lie, and how thin the partition walls! Well for those whose feasts
do not bar them out from hearing the weeping next door.

As the crowd accompanies Jesus, His hasting love is, for a moment,
diverted by another sufferer. We never go on an errand of mercy but we
pass a hundred other sorrowing hearts, so close packed lie the griefs
of men. This woman is a poor shrinking creature, broken down by long
illness (which had lasted for the same length of time as the joyous
life of Jairus's child), made more timid by disappointed hopes of
cure, and depressed by poverty to which her many doctors had brought
her. She does not venture to stop this new Rabbi-physician, as He
goes with the church dignitary of the town to heal his daughter, but
lets Him pass before she can make up her mind to go near Him; and
then she comes creeping up behind the crowd, puts out her wasted,
trembling hand to the hem of His garment,--and she is whole.

The other evangelists give us a more extended account, but Matthew
throws into prominence, in his condensed narrative, the essential
points.

Notice her real but imperfect faith. There was unquestionable
confidence in Christ's power, and very genuine desire for healing.
But it was a very ignorant faith. She believes that her touch of the
garment will heal without Christ's will or knowledge, much more His
pitying love, having any part in it. She thinks that she may win her
desire furtively, and may carry it away, and He be none the wiser nor
the poorer for the stolen blessing. What utter, blank ignorance of His
character and way of working! What gross superstition! Yes, and withal
what a hunger of desire, what absolute assurance of confidence that
one finger-tip on His robe was enough! Therefore she had her desire,
and her Healer recognised her faith as true, though blended with much
ignorance of Him. Her error was very like that which many Christians
entertain with less excuse. To attach importance to external means of
grace, rites, ordinances, sacraments, outward connection with Christian
organisations, is the very same misconception in a slightly different
form. Such error is always near us; it is especially rife in countries
where there has long been a visible Church. It has received strange
new vigour to-day, partly by reaction from extreme rationalism, partly
by the growing cultivation of the aesthetic faculties. It is threatening
to corrupt the simplicity and spirituality of Christian worship, and
needs to be strenuously resisted. But the more we have to fight
against it, the more do we need to remember that, along with this
clinging to the hem of the garment instead of to the heart of its
Wearer, there may be a very real trust, which might shame some of
those who profess to hold a less sensuous form of faith. Many a poor
soul clasping a crucifix clings to the Cross. Many a devout heart
kneeling at mass sees through the incense-smoke the face of Christ.

This woman's faith was selfish. She wanted health; she did not care
much about the Healer. She would have been quite contented to have
had no more to do with Him, if she could only have stolen out of the
crowd cured. She would have had little gratitude to the unconscious
Giver of a stolen good. So, many a Christian life in its earlier
stages is more absorbed with its own deep misery and its desire for
deliverance, than with Him. Love comes after, born of the experience
of His love. But faith precedes love, and the predominant motive
impelling to faith at first is distinctly self-regard. That is all as
it should be. The most purely self-absorbed wish to escape from the
most rudely pictured hell is often the beginning of a true trust in
Christ, which, in due time, will be elevated into perfect consecration.
Some of our modern teachers, who are shocked at Christianity because
it lays the foundation of the most self-denying morality in such
'selfishness,' would be none the worse for going to school to this
story, and learning from it how a desire for nothing more than to
get rid of a painful disease, started a process which turned a life
into a peaceful, thankful surrender of the cured self to the love
and service of the mighty Healer.

Observe, next, how Christ answers the imperfect faith, and, by
answering, corrects and confirms it. Matthew omits Christ's question
as to who touched Him, the disciples' reply, and His renewed
asseveration that He was conscious of power having gone forth from
Him. All these belong to the loving method by which our Lord sought
to draw forth an open acknowledgment. Womanly diffidence, enfeebled
health, her special disease, all made the woman wish to hide herself.
She wanted to steal away unnoticed, as she hoped that she had come.
But Christ forces her to stand out before all the crowd, and there,
with all eyes upon her,--cold, cruel eyes, some of them--to conquer
her shame, and tell all the truth. Strange kindness that; strangely
contrasted with His ordinary desire to avoid notoriety, and with His
ordinary tender consideration for shrinking weakness! He did it for
her sake, not for His own. She is changed from timidity to courage.
At one moment she stretches out her wasted finger, a tremulous
invalid; at the next, she flings herself at His feet, a confessor.
He would have us testify for Him, because faith unavowed, like a
plant in the dark, is apt to become pale and sickly; but ere He bids
us own His name, He pours into our hearts, in answer to our secret
appeal, the health of His own life, and the blissful consciousness
of that great gift which makes the tongue of the dumb sing.

His words to her are full of tenderness. She receives the name of
'daughter.' Gently He encourages her timidity by that 'Be of good
cheer,' and then He sets right her error: 'Thy faith'--not thy
finger--'hath made thee whole.' There was no real connection between
the touch of the robe and healing; but the woman thought that there
was, and so Christ stooped to her childish thought, and allowed her
to prescribe the road which His mercy should take. But He would not
leave her with her error. The true means of contact between us and
Him is not our outward contact with external means of grace, but the
touch of our spirits by faith. Faith is nothing in itself, and heals
only because it brings us into union with His power, which is the
sole cause of our healing. Faith is the hand which receives the
blessing. It may be a wasted and tremulous hand, like that which
this woman laid lightly on His robe. But He feels its touch, though
a universe presses on Him, and He answers. Not the garment's hem,
but Christ's love, is the cause of our salvation. Not an outward
contact with it or with Him, but faith, is the condition on which
His life, which knows no disease, pours into our souls. The hand of
my faith lifted to Him will receive into its empty palm and clasping
fingers the special blessing for my special wants.

The other evangelists tell us that, at the moment of His words to
the woman, the messengers came bearing tidings of the child's death.
How Jairus must have grudged the pause! A word from Christ, like the
pressure of His hand, heartened him. Like a river turned from its
course for a space, to fill some empty reservoir, His love comes
back to its original direction. How abundant the power and mercy, to
which such a work as that just done was but a parenthesis! The
doleful music and the shrill shrieks of Eastern mourning, which met
them as they entered Jairus's house, disturbed the sanctity of the
hour, and were in strong contrast with the majestic calmness of
Jesus. Not amid venal lamentations and excited cries will He do His
work. He bids the noisy crowd forth with curt, almost stern, command,
and therein rebukes all such hollow and tumultuous scenes, in the
presence of the stillness of death, still more where faith in Him
has robbed it of its terror, in robbing it of its perpetuity. It is
strange that believing readers should have thought that our Lord meant
to say that the little girl was not really dead, but only in a swoon.
The scornful laughter of the flute-players and hired mourners
understood Him better. They knew that it was real death, as men
count death, and, as has often been the case, the laughter of His
foes has served to establish the truth. That was not worthy to be
called death from which the child was so soon and easily to be
awaked. But, besides this special application to the case in hand,
that great saying of our Lord's carries the blessed truth that,
since He has come, death is softened into sleep for all who love
Him. The euphemism is not peculiar to Christianity, but has a deeper
meaning on Christian lips than when Greeks or Romans spoke of the
eternal sleep. Others speak of death by any name rather than its
own, because they fear it so much. The Christian does so, because he
fears it so little,--and, as a matter of fact, the use of the word
death as meaning merely the separation of soul and body by the
physical act is exceptional in the New Testament. This name of
sleep, sanctioned thus by Christ, is the sweetest of all. It speaks
of the cessation of connection with the world of sense, and 'long
disquiet merged in rest.' It does not imply unconsciousness, for we
are not unconscious when we sleep, but only unaware of externals. It
holds the promise of waking when the sun comes. So it has driven out
the ugly old name. Our tears flow less bitterly when we think of our
dear ones as 'sleeping in Jesus.' Their bodies, like this little
child's, are dead, but _they_ are not. They rest, conscious of
their own blessedness and of Him 'in whom they live, and have their
being,' whether they 'move' or no.

Then comes the great deed. The crowd is shut out. For such a work
silence is befitting. The father and mother, with His foremost three
disciples, go with Him into the chamber. There is no effort, repeated
and gradually successful, as when Elisha raised the dead boy; no
praying, as when Peter raised Dorcas; only the touch of the hand in
which life throbbed in fulness, and, as the other narratives record,
two words, spoken strangely to, and yet more strangely heard by, the
dull, cold ear of death. Their echo lingered long with Peter, and
Mark gives us them in the original Aramaic. But Matthew passes them
by, as he seems here to have desired to emphasise the power of
Christ's touch. But touch or word, the real cause of the miracle
was simply His will; and whether He used media to help men's faith,
or said only 'I will,' mattered little. He varied His methods as the
circumstances of the recipients required, and in order that they and
we might learn that He was tied to none. These miracles of raising
the dead are three in number. Jairus's daughter is raised from her
bed, just having passed away; the widow's son at Nain from his bier,
having been for a little longer separated from his body; Lazarus
from the grave, having been dead four days. A few minutes, or days,
or four thousand years, are one to His power. These three are in
some sense the first-fruits of the great harvest; the stars that
shone out singly before all the heaven is in a blaze. For, though
they died again, and so left to Him the precedence in resurrection,
as in all besides, they are still prophetic of His power in the hour
when they 'that sleep in the dust' shall awake at His voice. Blessed
they who, like this little maiden, are awakened, not only by His
voice, but by His touch, and to find, as she did, their hand in His!

The third of these miracles, which Matthew seems to reckon as the
second in the group, because he treats the two former as so closely
connected as to be but one in numeration, need not detain us long.
It is found only in this Gospel. The first point to be observed in it
is the cry of these two blind men. There is something pathetic and
exquisitely natural in the two being together, as is also the case in
the similar miracle, at a later period, on the outskirts of Jericho.
Equal sorrows drive men together for such poor help and solace as
they can give each other. They have common experiences which isolate
them from others, and they creep close for warmth and companionship.
All the blind men in the Gospels have certain resemblances. One is
that they are all sturdily persevering, as perhaps was easier for
them because they could not see the impatience of the listeners, and
possibly because, in most cases, persistent begging was their trade,
and they were used to refusals. But a more important trait is their
recognition of Jesus as 'Son of David.' Blind as they are, they see
more than do the seeing. Thrown in upon themselves, they may have
been led to ponder the old words, and by their affliction been made
more ready to welcome One who, if He were Messiah, was coming with a
special blessing for them--'to open the blind eyes.' Men who deeply
desire a good are quick to listen to the promise of its accomplishment.
So these two followed Him along the road, loudly and perseveringly
calling out their profession of faith, and their entreaty for sight.

The next point is our Lord's treatment. He let them cry on, apparently
 unheeding. Had, then, the two miracles just done exhausted His stock
of power or of pity? Certainly His reason was, as it always was, their
good. We do not know why it was better for them to have to wait, and
continue their entreaty; but we may be quite sure that the reason for
all His delays is the same,--the larger blessing which comes with the
answer when it comes, and the large blessings which may be gathered
while we wait its coming. Christ's question to them, when at last
they have found their way even indoors, holds out more hope than they
had yet received. By it, Christ established a close relation with them,
and implied to them that He was willing to answer their cry. One can
fancy how the poor blind faces would light up with a flush of eager
expectation, and how swift would be the answer. The question is not
cold or inquisitorial. It is more than half a promise, and a powerful
aid to the faith which it requires.

There is something very beautiful and pathetic in the simple brevity
of the unhesitating answer, 'Yea, Lord.' Sincerity needs few words.
Faith can put an infinite deal of meaning into a monosyllable. Their
eagerness to reach the goal made their answer brief. But it was
enough. Again the hand which had clasped the maiden's palm is put
out and laid gently on the useless eyes, and the great word spoken,
'According to your faith be it unto you.' Their blindness made the
touch peculiarly fitting in their case, as bringing evidence of
sense to those who could not see the gracious pity of His looks. The
word spoken was, like that to the centurion, a declaration of the
power of faith, which determines the measure, and often the manner,
of His gifts to us. The containing vessel not only settles the
quantity of, but the shape assumed by, the water which is taken up
in it from the sea. Faith, which keeps inside of Christ's promises
(and what goes outside of them is not faith), decides how much of
Christ we shall have for our very own. He condescends to run the
molten gold of His mercies into the moulds which our faith prepares.

These two men, who had used their tongues so well in their persistent
cry for healing, went away to make a worse use of them in telling
everywhere of their cure. Jesus desired silence. Possibly He did
not wish His reputation as a mere worker of miracles to be spread
abroad. In all His earlier ministry He avoided publicity, singularly
contrasting therein with the evident desire to make Himself the
centre of observation which marks its close. He dreaded the smoky
flame of popular excitement. His message was to individuals, not to
crowds. It was a natural impulse to tell the benefits these two had
received; but truer gratitude and deeper faith would have made them
obey His lightest word, and have shut their mouths. We honour Christ
most, not by taking our way of honouring Him, but by absolute obedience.

The final miracle of the nine (or ten) marshalled in long procession
in chapters viii. and ix. is told with singular brevity. There is
nothing individual in our Lord's treatment of the sufferer, as there
was in the previous healing of the two blind men, and no details are
given of either the appeal to His pity or the method of His cure.
The dumb demoniac could lift no cry, nor exercise any faith, and all
the petitions and hopes of his bearers were expressed in the act of
bringing the sufferer thither, and silently setting him there before
these eyes of universal pity. It was enough. With Jesus, to see was
to compassionate, and to compassionate was to help. In the other
instances of casting out demons, the method is an authoritative
command, addressed not to the possessed, but to the alien personality
that has seized on him, and we conclude that such was the method
here. Jesus undoubtedly believed in demoniacal possession, if we can
at all rely on the Gospel narratives; and it may be humbly suggested
that there are dark depths in humanity, which had need to be fathomed
more completely, before any one is warranted in dogmatically
pronouncing that He was wrong in His diagnosis. There are ugly facts
which should give pause to those who are inclined to say--'There are
no demons, and if there were, they could not dominate a human
consciousness.'

But the effects of the miracle are emphasised more than itself. They
are two, neither of them what might or should have been. The dumb
man is not said to have used his recovered speech to thank his
deliverer, nor is there any sign that he clung to Him, either for
fear of being captured again or in passionate gratitude. It looks as
if he selfishly bore away his blessing and cared nothing for its
giver. That is very human, and we all are too often guilty of the
same sin. Nor was the effect on the multitudes much better, for they
were only struck with vulgar wonder, which had no moral quality in
it and led to nothing. They saw 'the miracle,' that is, the
wonderfulness of the act made some dint even on their minds, but
these were either too fluid to retain the impression, or too hard to
let it be deep, and so it soon filled up again. We have to think of
Christ's deeds as 'signs,' not only as 'wonders,' or they will do
little to draw us to Him. Wonder is a necessarily evanescent
emotion, which may indeed set something better stirring in us, but
is quite as likely to die barren.

The Pharisees did not wonder, and did look into the phenomenon with
sharp eyes; and in so far, they were in advance of the gaping
multitudes. They were much too superior persons to be astonished at
anything, and they had already settled on a formula which was
delightfully easy of application, and had the further advantage of
turning the miracles into evidences that the doer of them was a
child of the Devil. It appears to have been a well-worked formula
too, for it is found again in chap. xii. 24, and in Luke xi. 15, in
the account of another cure of a dumb demoniac. It is possible that
the incident now before us may be the same as this, but there is
nothing improbable in the occurrence of such a case twice, nor in
the repetition of what had become the commonplace of the Pharisaic
polemic. But what a piercing example that explanation is of the
blinding power of prejudice, determined to hold on to a foregone
conclusion, and not to see the sun at noon! Jesus in league with
'the prince of the devils'! And that was gravely said by religious
authorities! They saw the loveliness of His perfect life, His gentle
goodness, His self-forgetting love, His swift-springing pity, and
they set it all down to His commerce with the Evil One. He was so
good that He must be more than humanly bad.




A CHRISTLIKE JUDGMENT OF MEN


    'But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with
    compassion on them, because they fainted, and were
    scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.'
    --MATT. ix. 36.

In the course of our Lord's wandering life of teaching and healing,
there had naturally gathered around Him a large number of persons who
followed Him from place to place, and we have here cast into a symbol
the impression produced upon Him by their outward condition. That is
to say, He sees them lying there weary, and footsore, and travel-stained.
They have flung themselves down by the wayside. There is no leader or
guide, no Joshua or director to order their march; they are a worn-out,
tired, unregulated mob, and the sight smites upon His eye, and it
smites upon His heart. He says to Himself, if I may venture to put
words into His lips, 'There are a worse weariness, and a worse wandering,
and a worse anarchy, and a worse disorder afflicting men than that poor
mob of tired pedestrians shows.' Matthew, who was always fond of showing
the links and connections between the Old Testament and the New, casts
our Lord's impression of what He then saw into language borrowed from
the prophecy of Ezekiel (ch. xxxiv.), which tells of a flock that is
scattered in a dark and cloudy day, that is broken, and torn, and
driven away. I venture to see in the text three points: (1) Christ
teaching us how to look at men; (2) Christ teaching us how to feel at
such a sight; and (3) Christ teaching us what to do with the feeling.
'When He saw the multitude, He was moved with compassion, because they
fainted and were scattered abroad.' 'Then He said unto His disciples,
the harvest is plenteous, the labourers are few, pray ye the Lord of
the harvest to send forth labourers unto the harvest.' And then there
follows, 'And when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave
them power against unclean spirits to cast them out.' There are, then,
these three points;--just a word or two about each of them.

I. Here we have our Lord teaching us how to look at men.

The picture of my text is, of course, in its broad outlines, very
clear and intelligible, but there may be a little difficulty as to
the precise force of the language. The obscurity of it is in some
degree reflected in the margin of our Bibles; so, perhaps, you will
permit one word of an expository nature. The description of the
flock, 'Because they fainted and were scattered abroad,' is couched
in the original in a couple of words, one of which means properly
'torn' or 'fainting,' according as one or other of two readings of
the text is adopted, and the other means 'lying down.' Now, the
former of these gives a very pathetic picture if we apply it to the
individuals that made up the flock. We have then the image of the
poor sheep that has lost its way, struggling through briars and
thorns, getting out of them with its fleece all torn and hanging in
strips dangling at its heels, or of it as lacerated by the beasts of
the field to whom it is a prey. If we take the metaphor, as seems
more probably to be intended, as applying not so much to the
individuals as to the flock, then it comes to mean 'torn asunder,'
'thrown apart,' and gives us the notion of anarchic confusion into
which the flock comes if there be no shepherd to lead it. Then the
other word, which our Bible translates 'were scattered abroad,'
seems to mean more properly 'lying down,' and it gives the idea of
the poor, wearied creature, after all its struggles and wanderings,
utterly beaten and dejected, having lost its way, at its wits' end
and resourceless, flinging itself down there in despair, and panting
its timid life out anywhere where it finds itself. So it comes to be
a picture of the utter weariness and hopelessness of all men's
efforts apart from that Guide and Shepherd, who alone can lead them
in the way. And then both of these miserable states, the laceration
if you take the one explanation, the disintegration and casting
apart if you take the other, the weariness and exhaustion, are
traced to their source, they are 'as sheep having no shepherd.' He
has gone, and so all this comes. With this explanation we may take
the points of view that are thus suggested simply as they lie before
us.

First of all, notice how here, as always to Jesus Christ, the
outward was nothing, except as a symbol and manifestation of the
inward; how the thing that He saw in a man was not the external
accidents of circumstance or position, for His true, clear gaze and
His loving, wise heart went straight to the essence of the matter,
and dealt with the man not according to what he might happen to be
in the categories of earth, but to what he was in the categories of
heaven. All the same to Him whether it was some poor harlot, or a
rabbi; all the same to Him whether it was Pilate on the judgment-seat,
or the penitent thief hanging at His side. These gauds and shows were
nothing; sheer away He cut them all, and went down to the hidden heart
of the man, and He allocated and ranged them according to that.
Christian men and women, do you try to do the same thing, and to get
rid of all these superficial veils and curtains with which we drape
ourselves and attitudinise in the world, and to see men as Christ saw
them, both in regard to your judgment of them, and in regard to your
judgment of yourselves? 'I am a scholar and a wise man; a great thinker;
a rich merchant; a man of rising importance and influence.' Very well;
what does that matter? 'I am ignorant or a pauper'; be it so. Let us
get below all that. The one question worth asking and worth answering
is, 'How am I affected towards Him?' There are many temporary and
local principles of arrangement and order among men; but they will
all vanish some day, and there will be one regulating and arranging
principle, and it is this: 'Do I love God in Jesus Christ, or do I
not?' Oh! for myself, for yourself, and for all our outlook towards
others, let us not forget that the inmost, deepest, hidden man of the
heart is the man, and that all else is naught, and that its whole
character is absolutely determined by its relation to Jesus Christ.

But this is somewhat aside from my main purpose, which is rather
briefly to expand the various phases which, as I have already
suggested, are included in such an emblem. The first of them is
this: Try to think for yourselves of the condition of humanity as
apart from Christ--shepherdless. That old metaphor of a shepherd
which comes out of the Old Testament is there sometimes used to
indicate a prophet, and sometimes to indicate a king. I suppose we
may put both of these uses together, as far as our present purposes
are concerned; and this is what I want to insist upon. I dare say
some people here will think it is very old-fashioned, very narrow in
these broad and liberal days; but what I would say is this, that
unless Jesus Christ is both Guide and Teacher, we have neither guide
nor teacher but are shepherdless without Him. There are plenty of
rulers. There was no lack of other authority in the days of His
flesh. There were crowds of rabbis, guides, and directors. The life
of the nation was throttled by the authorities that had planted
themselves upon its back, and yet Christ saw that there were none of
those who were fit for the work, or afforded the adequate guidance.
And so it is, now and always. There have been hosts of men who have
sought to impose their authority upon an era. Where is there one
that has swayed passion, that has ruled hearts, that has impressed
his own image on the will, that has made obedience an honour, and
absolute, abject devotion to his command a very patent of nobility?
Here, and nowhere beside. Besides that Christ there is no ruler
amongst men who can come to them and say to his servant, 'Go,' and
he goeth, and to this man, 'Do this,' and he doeth it. Obedience to
any besides is treason against the dignity of our own nature;
disobedience to Him is both treason against our nature and blasphemy
against God. 'Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ, Thou art the
everlasting Son of the Father.' _There_ is the deepest reason
for His rule.

And as for 'teacher,' whom are we to put up beside Him? Is it to be
these dim figures of religious reformers that are gliding,
ghostlike, to their doom, being wrapped round and round about by
ever thicker and thicker folds of the inevitable oblivion that
swallows all that is human? Brethren, by common consent it is Christ
or nobody. Aaron dies upon Hor; Moses dies upon Pisgah; the
teachers, the leaders, the guides, the under-shepherds, pass away
one by one; and if this Christ be but a Man and a Teacher, He too
will pass away. Shall I be thought very blind to the signs of the
times if I say that I see no sign of His dominion being exhausted,
of His influence being diminished, of His guidance being capable of
being dispensed with? You may say, 'Oh, we do not want any teacher
or guide; we do not want a shepherd.' I am not going to enter upon
that question now at all, except just to say this, that the instincts
of humanity rise up in contradiction, as it seems to me, of that cold
and cheerless creed, and that we have this fact staring us in the
face, that men are made capable of a devotion and submission the
most passionate, the most absolute, the most mighty force in their
lives, to human guides and ensamples, and that it is all wasted unless
there be somewhere a Man, our Brother, who shall come to us and say,
'All that ever went before Me are thieves and robbers; I am the Good
Shepherd; follow Me, and ye shall not walk in darkness,' 'He saw the
multitudes as sheep having no shepherd.'

Still further, take that other phase of the metaphor which, as I
suggested, the text includes, namely, the idea of disintegration,
the rending apart of social ties and union, unless there be the
centre of unity in the shepherd of the flock. 'I will smite the
shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered,' says the old prophecy.
Of course, for what is there to hold them together unless it be
their guide and their director? So we are brought face to face with
this plain prosaic rendering of the metaphor--that but for the centre
of unity provided for mankind in the person and work of Jesus Christ,
there is no satisfaction of the deep hunger for unity and society
with which in that case God would have cursed mankind. For whilst
there are many other bonds most true, most blessed, God-given, and
mighty, such as that of the sacred unity of the family, and that of
the nation and many others of which we need not speak, yet all these
are constantly being disintegrated by the unresting waves of that
gnawing sea of selfishness, if I may so say, which, like the waters
upon our eastern coasts, eats and eats for ever at the base of the
cliffs, so that society in all its forms, whether it be built upon
identity of opinion, which is perhaps the shabbiest bond of all, or
whether it be built upon purposes of mutual action, which is a great
deal better, or whether it be built upon hatred of other people,
which is the modern form of patriotism, or whether it be built upon
the domestic affections, which are the purest and highest of all--all
the other bonds of society, such as creeds, schools, nations,
associations, leagues, families, denominations, all go sooner or
later. The base is eaten out of them, because every man that belongs
to them has in him that tyrannous, dominant self, which is ever
seeking to assert its own supremacy. Here is Babel, with its
half-finished tower, built on slime; and there is Pentecost, with
its great Spirit; here is the confusion, there is the unifying; here
the disintegration, there the power that draws them all together.
'They were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd,' and one
looks out over the world and sees great tracts of country and long
dismal generations of time, in which the very thought of unity and
charity and human bonds knitting men together has faded from the
consciousness of the race, and then one turns to blessed, sweet,
simple words that say, 'there shall be one flock and one shepherd,'
and 'I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.'
Drawing thus, He will draw them into the eternal, mighty bond of
union that shall never be broken, and is all the more precious and
all the more true because it is not a unity like the vulgar unities
that express themselves in external associations. You know, of
course or if you do not know it will be a good thing that you should
know, that that verse in John's Gospel which I have quoted has been
terribly mangled by a little slip of our translators. Christ said,
'Other sheep I must bring which are not of this fold,' the fold
being the external unity of the Jewish church--an enclosure made of
hurdles that you can stick in the ground. 'I shall bring them,' says
He, 'and there shall be one'--(not, as our Bible says, 'fold,'--but
something far better)--'there shall be one flock'; which becomes a
unity not by wattling round about it on the outside, but by a
shepherd standing in the middle. 'There shall be one flock and one
shepherd'--a unity which is neither the destruction of the variety of
the churches, nor the crushing of men, nationalities, and types of
character all down into one dead level beneath the heel of a conqueror,
but the unity which subsists in the many operations of the one Spirit,
and is expressed by all the forms of the one inspired grace.

Then passing by altogether the other idea which I said was only
doubtfully suggested by the words--namely, that of laceration and
wounding--let me say a word about the last of the aspects of
humanity when Christless, which is set forth in this text, and that
is, the dejected weariness arising from the fruitless wanderings
wherewith men are cursed. As a verse in the Book of Proverbs puts
it, 'The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, because
they know not how to go to the city.' Putting aside the metaphor,
the plain truth which it embodies is just this, that there is in all
men's souls a deep longing after peace and rest, after goodness and
beauty and truth, and that all the strenuous efforts to satisfy
these longings, either by social reforms or by individual culture
and discipline, are pathetically vain and profitless, because there
is none to guide them. The sheep go wandering in any direction, and
with no goal; and wherever one has jumped, a dozen others will go
after him, and so they are wearied out long before the day's journey
is ended, and they never reach the goal. Put that into less vivid,
and, therefore, as people generally suppose, more accurate,
language, and it is a statement of the universal law of human
history that, after any epoch of great aspirations and strong
excitement of the noblest parts of human nature, there has always
come a reaction of corruption and a collapse from weariness. What
did 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' end in? A guillotine. What do
all similar epochs end in, when they do not take the Christ to march
ahead of them? An utter disgust and disillusion, and a despair of
all progress. That is why wild revolutionists in their youth are
always obstinate Conservatives in their old age. The wandering sheep
are footsore, and they fling themselves down by the wayside. That is
why heathenism presents to us the aspect that it does. There is
nothing about it that seems to me more tragical than the weary
languor that besets it. Do you ever think of the depth of pathetic,
tragic meaning that there is in that verse in one of the Psalms,
'Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death'? There they
sit, because there is no hope in rising and moving. They would have
to grope if they arose, and so with folded hands they sit like the
Buddha, which one great section of heathenism has taken as being the
true emblem and ideal of the noblest life. Absolute passivity lays
hold upon them all--torpor, stagnation, no dream of advance or
progress. The sheep are dejected, despairing, anarchic, disintegrated,
lacerated, guideless, and shepherdless--away from Christ. So He
thought them. God give you and me grace, dear brethren, to see, as
Christ saw, the condition of humanity and our own apart from Him.

II. And now let me say a word in the next place as to the second
movement of His mind and heart here. He teaches us not only how to
think of men, but how that sight should touch us.

'He was moved with compassion on them when He saw the multitude'--with
the eye of a god, I was going to say, and the heart of a man. Pity
belongs to the idea of divinity; compassion belongs to the idea of
divinity incarnate; and the motion that passed across His heart is the
motion that I would seek may pass, with its sweet and healing breath,
across yours and mine. The right emotion for a Christian looking on
the Christless crowds is pity, not aversion; pity, not anger; pity, not
curiosity; pity, not indifference. How many of us walk the streets of
the towns in which our lot is cast, and never know one touch of that
emotion, when we look at these people here in England torn, and anarchic,
and wearied, and shepherdless, within sound of our psalm-singing in
our chapels? Why, on any Sunday there are thousands of men and women
standing about the streets who, we may be sure, have not seen the
inside of a church or a chapel since they were married, and that not
one in five hundred of all the good people that are going with their
prayer-books and hymn-books to church and chapel ever think anything
about them as they pass them by; and some of them, perhaps, if they
come to any especially disreputable one, will gather up their skirts
and keep on the safe side of the pavement, and there an end of it. But
Jesus Christ had no aversions. His white purity was a great deal nearer
to the blackness of the woman that was a sinner, than was the leprous
whiteness of the whited sepulchre of the self-righteous Pharisee. He
had neither aversion, nor anger, nor indifference.

And, if I might venture to touch upon another matter, compassion and
not curiosity is an especial lesson for the day to the more thoughtful
and cultivated amongst our congregations. I have just said that the
appropriate Christian feeling in contemplating the state of the sheep
without the Shepherd is compassion, not curiosity. That reminder is
particularly needful in view of the prominence to-day of investigations
into the new science of Comparative Religion. I speak with most
unfeigned respect of it and of its teachers, and gratefully hail the
wonderful light that it is casting upon ideas underlying the strange
and often savage and obscene rites of heathenism; but it has a side of
danger in it against which I would warn you all, especially young,
reading men and women. The time has not yet come when we can afford to
let such investigations be our principal occupation in the face of
heathenism. If idolatry was dead we could afford to do that, but it
is alive--the more's the pity; and it is not only a curious instance
of the workings of man's intelligence, and a great apocalypse of
earlier stages of society, but, besides that, it is a lie that is
deceiving and damning our brethren, and we have got to kill it first
and dissect it afterwards. So I say, do not only think of heathenism
in its various forms as a subject for speculation and analysis; as
much as you like of that, only do not let it drive out the other
thing, and after you have tried to understand it, then come back to
my text, 'He was moved with compassion.' And so pity, and neither
anger, nor aversion, nor curiosity, nor indifference is what I urge
as the Christian emotion.

III. Let us take this text as teaching us how Christ would have us
act, after such emotion built and based upon such a look.

It is perfectly legitimate, although it is by no means the highest
motive, to appeal to feeling as a stimulus to action. We have a
right to base our urging of Christian men and women to missionary
work either at home or abroad, upon the ground of the condition of
the men to whom the Gospel has to be carried. I know that if taken
alone it is a very inadequate motive. I believe that any failure
that may be manifest in the interest of Christian people in
missionary work is largely traceable to the blunder we have made in
dwelling on superficial motives more than we ought to have done, in
proportion to the degree in which we have dwelt on the deepest. We
have been gathering the surface-water instead of going right down to
the green sand, to which the artesian well must be sunk if the
stream is to come up without pumping or wasting. So I say that a
deeper reason than the sorrow and darkness of the heathen is--'the
love of Christ constraineth me'; but yet the first is a legitimate
one. Only remember this, that Bishop Butler taught us long ago, that
if you excite emotions which are intended to lead to action, and the
action does not follow, the excitation of the emotion without its
appropriate action makes the heart a great deal harder than it was
before. That is why it is playing with edged tools to speak so much
to our Christian audiences, as we sometimes hear done, about the
condition of the heathen as a stimulus to missionary work. If a man
does not respond and do something, some crust of callousness and
coldness comes over his own heart. You cannot indulge in the luxury
of emotion which you do not use to drive your spindles, without
doing yourselves harm. It is never intended to be blown off as waste
steam and allowed to vanish into the air. It is meant to be conserved
and guided, and to have something done with it. Therefore beware of
sentimental contemplation of the sad condition of the shepherdless
sheep which does not move you to do anything to help them.

One word more. Take my text as a guide to the form of action into
which we are to cast the emotions that should spring from this gaze
upon the world. I will only name three points. Christ opened His
mouth and spake to them, and taught them many things; Christ said to
His disciples, 'Pray ye the Lord of the harvest'; and Christ sent
out His apostles to preach the Kingdom. These three things in their
bearing upon us are--personal work, prayer, help to send forth
Christ's messengers. There is nothing like personal work for making
a man understand and feel the miseries of his fellows. Christian men
and women, it is your first business everywhere to proclaim the name
of Jesus Christ, and no prayers and no subscriptions absolve you
from that. In this army a man cannot buy himself off and send in a
substitute at the cost of an annual guinea. If Christ sent the
apostles, do you hold up the hands of the apostles' successors, and
so by God's grace you and I may help on the coming of that blessed
day when there shall be one flock and one Shepherd, and when 'the
Lamb that is in the midst of the throne'--for the Shepherd is
Himself a lamb--'shall feed them and lead them, and God shall wipe
away all tears from their eyes.'




THE OBSCURE APOSTLES


    'These twelve Jesus sent forth.'--MATT. x. 5.

And half of 'these twelve' are never heard of as doing any work for
Christ. Peter and James and John we know; the other James and Judas
have possibly left us short letters; Matthew gives us a Gospel; and
of all the rest no trace is left. Some of them are never so much as
named again, except in the list at the beginning of the Acts of the
Apostles; and none of them except the three who 'seemed to be pillars'
appear to have been of much importance in the early diffusion of the
Gospel.

There are many instructive and interesting points in reference to
the Apostolate. The number of twelve, in obvious allusion to the
tribes of Israel, proclaims the eternal certainty of the divine
promises to His people, and the dignity of the New Testament Church
as their true heir. The ties of relationship which knit so many of
the apostles together, the order of the names varying, but within
certain limits, in the different catalogues, the uncultivated
provincial rudeness of most of them, would all afford material for
important reflections. But, perhaps, not the least important fact
about the Apostolate is that one to which we have referred, which
like the names of countries on the map, escapes notice because it is
'writ' so 'large'--namely, the small place which the apostles as a
body fill in the subsequent narrative, and the entire oblivion into
which so many of them pass from the moment of their appointment.

It is to that fact that we wish to turn attention now. It may
suggest some considerations worth pondering, and among other things,
may help to show the exaggeration of the functions of the office by
the opposite extremes of priests and rationalists. The one school
makes it the depository of exclusive supernatural powers; the other
regards it as a master-stroke of organisation, to which the early
rapid growth of Christianity was largely due. The facts seem to show
that it was neither.

I. The first thought which this peculiar and unexpected silence
suggests is of the True Worker in the Church's progress.

The way in which the New Testament drops these apostles is of a piece
with the whole tone of the Bible. Throughout, men are introduced into
its narratives and allowed to slip out with well-marked indifference.
Nowhere do we get more vivid, penetrating portraiture, but nowhere do
we see such carelessness about following the fortunes or completing the
biographies even of those who have filled the largest space in its pages.

Recall, for example, the way in which the New Testament deals with
'the very chiefest' apostles, the illustrious triad of Peter, James,
and John. The first escapes from prison; we see him hammering at
Mary's door in the grey of the morning, and after brief, eager talk
with his friends he vanishes to hide in 'another place,' and is no
more heard of, except for a moment in the great council, held in
Jerusalem, about the admission of Gentiles to the Church. The second
of the three is killed off in a parenthesis. The third is only seen
twice in the Book of the Acts, as a silent companion of Peter at a
miracle and before the Sanhedrim. Remember how Paul is left in his
own hired house, within sight of trial and sentence, and neither the
original writer of the book nor any later hand thought it worth
while to add three lines to tell the world what became of him. A
strange way to write history, and a most imperfect narrative, surely!
Yes, unless there be some peculiarity in the purpose of the book,
which explains this cold-blooded, inartistic, and tantalising habit
of letting men leap upon the stage as if they had dropped from the
clouds, and vanish from it as abruptly as if they had fallen through
a trap-door.

Such a peculiarity there is. One of the three to whom we have
referred has explained it in the words with which he closes his
gospel, words which might stand for the motto of the whole book,
'These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son of
God.' The true purpose is not to speak of men except in so far as
they 'bore witness to that light' and were illuminated for a moment
by contact with Him. From the beginning the true 'Hero' of the Bible
is God; its theme is His self-revelation culminating for evermore in
the Man Jesus. All other men interest the writers only as they are
subsidiary or antagonistic to that revelation. As long as that
breath blows through them they are music; else they are but common
reeds. Men are nothing except as instruments and organs of God. He
is all, and His whole fulness is in Jesus Christ. Christ is the sole
worker in the progress of His Church. That is the teaching of all
the New Testament. The thought is expressed in the deepest, simplest
form in His own unapproachable words, unfathomable as they are in
their depth of meaning, and inexhaustible in their power to
strengthen and to cheer: 'I am the vine, ye are the branches,
without Me ye can do nothing.' It shapes the whole treatment of the
history of the so-called 'Acts of the Apostles,' which by its very
first sentence proclaims itself to be the Acts of the ascended
Jesus, 'the former treatise' being declared to have had for its
subject 'all that Jesus _began_ to do and teach while on earth,
and this treatise being manifestly the continuance of the same
theme, and the record of the heavenly activity of the Lord. So the
thought runs through all the book: 'The help that is done on earth,
He does it all Himself.'

_So_ let us think of Him and of His relation to us as well as
to that early Church. His continuous energy is pouring down on us if
we will accept it. _In_ us, _for_ us, _by_ us He works. 'My Father worketh
hitherto, said He when here, 'and I work'; and now, exalted on high,
He has passed into that divine repose, which is at the same time the
most energetic divine activity. He is all in all to His people. He is
all their strength, wisdom, and righteousness. They are but the clouds
irradiated by the sun and bathed in its brightness; He is the light
which flames in their grey mist and turns it to a glory. They are but
the belts and cranks and wheels; He is the power. They are but the
channel, muddy and dry; He is the flashing life that fills it and makes
it a joy. They are the body; He is the soul dwelling in every part to
save it from corruption and give movement and warmth.

  'Thou art the organ, whose full breath is thunder;
   I am the keys, beneath thy fingers pressed.'

If this be true, how it should deliver us from all overestimate of
men, to which our human affections and our feeble faith tempt us so
sorely! There _is_ One man, and One man only, whose biography
is a 'Gospel, who owes nothing to circumstances, and who originates
the power which He wields; One who is a new beginning, and has
changed the whole current of human history, One to whom we are right
to bring offerings of the gold, and incense, and myrrh of our
hearts, and wills, and minds, which it is blasphemy and degradation
to lay at the feet of any others. We may utterly love, trust, and
obey Jesus Christ. We dare not do so to any other. The inscription
written over the whole book, that it may be transcribed on our whole
nature, is, 'No man any more save Jesus only.'

If this thought be true, what confidence it ought to give us as we
think of the tasks and fortunes of the Church! If we think only of the
difficulties and of the enormous work before us, so disproportioned
to our weak powers, we shall be disposed to agree with our enemies,
who talk as if Christianity was on the point of perishing, as they
have been doing ever since it began. But the outlook is wonderfully
different when we take Christ into the account. We are very apt to
leave Him out of the reckoning. But one man with Christ to back him is
always in the majority. He flings his sword clashing into one scale,
and it weighs down all that is in the other. The walls are very lofty
and strong, and the besiegers few and weak, badly armed, and quite
unfit for the assault; but if we lift our eyes high enough, we, too,
shall see a man with a drawn sword over against us, and our hearts
may leap up in assured confidence of victory as we recognise in Him
the Captain of the Lord's Host, who has already overcome, and will
make us valiant in fight and more than conquerors.

When conscious of our own weakness, and tempted to think of our task
as heavy, or when complacent in our own power, and tempted to regard
our task as easy, let us think of His ever-present work in and for His
people, till it braces us for all duty, and rebukes our easy-going
idleness. Surely from that thought of the active, ascended Christ may
come to many of His slothful followers the pleading question, as from
His own lips, 'Dost thou not care that thou hast left me to serve
alone?' Surely to us all it should bring inspiration and strength,
courage and confidence, deliverance from man, and elevation above the
reverence of blind impersonal forces. Surely we may all lay to heart
the grand lesson that union with Him is our only strength, and oblivion
of ourselves our highest wisdom. Surely he has best learned his true
place and the worth of Jesus Christ, who abides with unmoved humility
at His feet, and, like the lonely, lowly forerunner, puts away all
temptations to self-assertion while joyfully accepting it as the law
of his life to

  'Fade in the light of the planet he loves,
   To fade in his light and to die.'

Blessed is he who is glad to say,' He must increase, I must
decrease!'

II. This same silence of Scripture as to so many of the apostles may
be taken as suggesting what the real work of these delegated workers
was.

It certainly seems very strange that, if they were the possessors of
such extraordinary powers as the theory of Apostolic Succession
implies, we should hear so little of these in the narratives. The
silence of Scripture about them goes a long way to discredit such
ideas, while it is entirely accordant with a more modest view of the
apostolic office.

What was an apostle's function during the life of Christ? One of the
evangelists divides it into three portions: to be with Jesus; to
preach the kingdom; to cast out devils and to heal. There is nothing
in these offices peculiar to them. The seventy had miraculous powers
too, and some at least were our Lord's companions and preachers of
His kingdom who were simple disciples. What was an apostle's
function after the resurrection? Peter's words, on proposing the
election of a new apostle, lay down the duty as simply 'to bear
witness' of that resurrection. They were not supernatural channels
of mysterious grace, not lords over God's heritage, not even leaders
of the Church, but bearers of a testimony to the great historical
fact, on the acceptance of which all belief in an historical Christ
depended then and depends now. Each of the greater of the apostles
is penetrated with the same thought. Paul disclaims anything beside
in his 'Not I, but the grace of God in me.' Peter thrusts the
question at the staring crowd, 'Why look ye on us as though by
_our_ power or holiness _we_ had made this man to walk?' John, in his
calm way, tells his children at Ephesus, 'Ye need not that any man
teach you.'

Such an idea of the apostolic office is far more reasonable and
accordant with Scripture than a figment about unexampled powers and
authority in the Church. It accounts for the qualifications as
stated in the same address of Peter's, which merely secure the
validity of their testimony. The one thing that _must_ be found
in an apostle was that he should have been in familiar intercourse
with Christ during his earthly life, both before and after His
resurrection, in order that he might be able to say, 'I knew Him
well; I know that He died; I know that He rose again; I saw Him go
up to heaven.' For such a work there was no need for men of
commanding power. Plain, simple, honest men who had the requisite
eye-witness were sufficient. The guidance and the missionary work of
the Church need not necessarily be in their hands, and, in fact,
does not seem to have been. In harmony with this view of the office
and its requisites, we find that Paul rests the validity of his
apostolate on the fact that 'He was seen of me also,' and regards
that vision as his true appointment which left him not 'one whit
behind the very chiefest apostles.' Miraculous gifts indeed they
had, and miraculous gifts they imparted; but in both instances
others shared these powers with them. It was no apostle who laid his
hands on the blinded Saul in that house in Damascus and said,
'Receive the Holy Ghost.' An apostle stood by passive and wondering
when the Holy Ghost fell on Cornelius and his comrades. In reality
apostolic succession is absurd, because there is nothing to succeed
to, except what cannot be transmitted, personal knowledge of the
reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To establish that fact
as indubitable history is to lay the foundation of the Christian
Church, and the eleven plain men, who did that, need no
superstitious mist around them to magnify their greatness.

In so far as any succession to them or any devolution of their office
is possible, all Christian men inherit it, for to bear witness of the
living power of the risen Lord is still the office and honour of
every believing soul. It is still true that the sharpest weapon which
any man can wield for Christ is the simple adducing of his own personal
experience. 'That which we have seen and handled we declare' is still
the best form into which our preaching can be cast. And such a voice
every man and woman who has found the sweetness and the power of Christ
filling their own souls, is bound--rather let us say, is privileged--to
lift up. 'This honour have all the saints.' Christ is the true worker,
and all our work is but to proclaim Him, and what He has done and is
doing for ourselves and for all men.

III. We may gather, too, the lesson of how often faithful work is
unrecorded and forgotten.

No doubt those apostles who have no place in the history toiled
honestly and did their Lord's commands, and oblivion has swallowed
it all. Bartholomew and 'Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus,' and
the rest of them, have no place in the record, and their obscure
work is faded, faithful and good as certainly it was.

So it will be sooner or later with us all. For most of us, our
service has to be unnoticed and unknown, and the memory of our poor
work will live perhaps for a year or two in the hearts of some few
who loved us, but will fade wholly when they follow us into the
silent land. Well, be it so; we shall sleep none the less sweetly,
though none be talking about us over our heads. The world has a
short memory, and, as the years go on, the list that it has to
remember grows so crowded that it is harder and harder to find room
to write a new name on it, or to read the old. The letters on the
tombstones are soon erased by the feet that tramp across the
churchyard. All that matters very little. The notoriety of our work
is of no consequence. The earnestness and accuracy with which we
strike our blow is all-important; but it matters nothing how far it
echoes. It is not the heaven of heavens to be talked about, nor does
a man's life consist in the abundance of newspaper or other
paragraphs about him. 'The love of fame' is, no doubt, sometimes
found in 'minds' otherwise 'noble,' but in itself is very much the
reverse of noble. We shall do our work best, and be saved from much
festering anxiety which corrupts our purest service and fevers our
serenest thoughts, if we once fairly make up our minds to working
unnoticed and unknown, and determine that, whether our post be a
conspicuous or an obscure one, we shall fill it to the utmost of our
power--careless of praise or censure, because our judgment is with
our God; careless whether we are unknown or well known, because we
are known altogether to Him.

The magnitude of our work in men's eyes is as little important as
the noise of it. Christ gave all the apostles their tasks--to some
of them to found the Gentile churches, to some of them to leave to
all generations precious teaching, to some of them none of these
things. What then? Were the Peters and the Johns more highly
favoured than the others? Was their work greater in His sight? Not
so. To Him all service done from the same motive is the same, and
His measure of excellence is the quantity of love and spiritual
force in our deeds, not the width of the area over which they
spread. An estuary that goes wandering over miles of shallows may
have less water in it, and may creep more languidly, than the
torrent that thunders through some narrow gorge. The deeds that
stand highest on the records in heaven are not those which we
vulgarly call great. Many 'a cup of cold water only' will be found
to have been rated higher there than jewelled golden chalices
brimming with rare wines. God's treasures, where He keeps His
children's gifts, will be like many a mother's secret store of
relics of her children, full of things of no value, what the world
calls 'trash,' but precious in His eyes for the love's sake that was
in them.

All service which is done from the same motive and with the same
spirit is of the same worth in His eyes. It does not matter whether
you have the gospel in a penny Testament printed on thin paper with
black ink and done up in cloth, or in an illuminated missal glowing
in gold and colour, painted with loving care on fair parchment, and
bound in jewelled ivory. And so it matters little about the material
or the scale on which we express our devotion and our aspirations;
all depends on what we copy, not on the size of the canvas on which,
or on the material in which, we copy it. 'Small service is true
service while it lasts,' and the unnoticed insignificant servants
may do work every whit as good and noble as the most widely known,
to whom have been intrusted by Christ tasks that mould the ages.

IV. Finally, we may add that forgotten work is remembered, and
unrecorded names are recorded above.

The names of these almost anonymous apostles have no place in the
records of the advancement of the Church or of the development of
Christian doctrine. They drop out of the narrative after the list in
the first chapter of the Acts. But we do hear of them once more. In
that last vision of the great city which the seer beheld descending
from God, we read that in its 'foundations were the names of the
twelve apostles of the Lamb.' All were graven there--the inconspicuous
names carved on no record of earth, as well as the familiar ones cut
deep in the rock to be seen of all men for ever. At the least that
grand image may tell us that when the perfect state of the Church is
realised, the work which these men did when their testimony laid its
foundation, will be for ever associated with their names. Unrecorded
on earth, they are written in heaven.

The forgotten work and its workers are remembered by Christ. His
faithful heart and all-seeing eye keep them ever in view. The world,
and the Church whom these humble men helped, may forget, yet He will
not forget. From whatever muster-roll of benefactors and helpers
their names may be absent, they will be in His list. The Apostle
Paul, in his Epistle to the Philippians, has a saying in which his
delicate courtesy is beautifully conspicuous, where he half apologises
for not sending his greetings 'to others my fellow-workers' by name,
and reminds them that, however their names may be unwritten in his
letter, they have been inscribed by a mightier hand on a better page,
and 'are in the Lamb's book of life.' It matters very little from what
record ours may be absent so long as they are found there. Let us
rejoice that, though we may live obscure and die forgotten, we may
have our names written on the breastplate of our High Priest as He
stands in the Holy Place, the breastplate which lies close to His
heart of love, and is girded to His arm of power.

The forgotten and unrecorded work lives, too, in the great whole. The
fruit of our labour may perhaps not be separable from that of others,
any more than the sowers can go into the reaped harvest-field and
identify the gathered ears which have sprung from the seed that they
sowed, but it is there all the same; and whosoever may be unable to
pick out each man's share in the blessed total outcome, the Lord of
the harvest knows, and His accurate proportionment of individual
reward to individual service will not mar the companionship in the
general gladness, when 'he that soweth and he that reapeth shall
rejoice together.'

The forgotten work will live, too, in blessed results to the doers.
Whatever of recognition and honour we may miss here, we cannot be
robbed of the blessing to ourselves, in the perpetual influence on
our own character, of every piece of faithful even if imperfect
service. Habits are formed, emotions deepened, principles confirmed,
capacities enlarged by every deed done for Christ, and these make an
over-measure of reward here, and in their perfect form hereafter are
heaven. Nothing done for Him is ever wasted. 'Thou shalt find it
after many days.' We are all writing our lives' histories here, as
if with one of these 'manifold writers'--a black blank page beneath
the flimsy sheet on which we write, but presently the black page
will be taken away, and the writing will stand out plain on the page
behind that we did not see. Life is the filmy, unsubstantial page on
which our pen rests; the black page is death; and the page beneath
is that indelible transcript of our earthly actions, which we shall
find waiting for us to read, with shame and confusion of face, or
with humble joy, in another world.

Then let us do our work for Christ, not much careful whether it be
greater or smaller, obscure or conspicuous; assured that whoever
forgets us and it, He will remember, and however our names may be
unrecorded on earth, they will be written in heaven, and confessed
by Him before His Father and the holy angels.




CHRIST'S CHARGE TO HIS HERALDS


    'These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them,
    saying, do not into the way of the Gentiles, and into
    any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: 6. But go
    rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7. And
    as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at
    hand. 8. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the
    dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely
    give. 9. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in
    your purses, 10. Nor scrip for your journey, neither
    two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the
    workman is worthy of his meat. 11. And into whatsoever
    city or town ye shall enter, enquire who in it is
    worthy: and there abide till ye go thence. 12. And when
    ye come into an house, salute it. 13. And if the house
    be worthy, let your peace come upon it: but if it be
    not worthy, let your peace return to you. 14. And
    whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words,
    when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the
    dust of your feet. 15. Verily I say unto you, It shall
    be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in
    the day of judgment, than for that city. 16. Behold, I
    send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye
    therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.'
    --Matt. x. 5-16.

The letter of these instructions to the apostles has been abrogated
by Christ, both in reference to the scope of, and the equipment for,
their mission (Matt. xxviii. 19; Luke xxii. 36). The spirit of them
remains as the perpetual obligation of all Christian workers, and
every Christian should belong to that class. Some direct
evangelistic work ought to be done by every believer, and in doing
it he will find no better directory than this charge to the
apostles.

I. We have, first, the apostles' mission in its sphere and manner
(vs. 5-8). They are told where to go and what to do there. Mark that
the negative prohibition precedes the positive injunction, as if the
apostles were already so imbued with the spirit of universalism that
they would probably have overpassed the bounds which for the present
were needful. The restriction was transient. It continued in the
line of divine limitation of the sphere of Revelation which confined
itself to the Jew, in order that through him it might reach the
world. That method could not be abandoned till the Jew himself had
destroyed it by rejecting Christ. Jesus still clung to it. Even when
the commission was widened to 'all the world,' Paul went 'to the Jew
first,' till he too was taught by uniform failure that Israel was
fixed in unbelief.

How tenderly our Lord designates the nation as 'the lost sheep of
the house of Israel'! He is still influenced by that compassion
which the sight of the multitudes had moved in Him (chap. ix. 36).
Lost indeed, wandering with torn fleece, and lying panting, in
ignorance of their pasture and their Shepherd, they are yet 'sheep,'
and they belong to that chosen seed, sprung from so venerable
ancestors, and heirs of so glorious promises. Clear sight of, and
infinite pity for, men's miseries, must underlie all apostolic
effort.

The work to be done is twofold--a glad truth is to be proclaimed,
gracious deeds of power are to be done. How blessed must be the kingdom,
the forerunners of which are miracles of healing and life-giving! If
the heralds can do these, what will not the King be able to do? If such
hues attend the dawn, how radiant will be the noontide! Note 'as ye
go,' indicating that they were travelling evangelists, and were to
speak as they went, and go when they had spoken. The road was to be
their pulpit, and each man they met their audience. What a different
world it would be if Christians carried their message with them _so_!

'Freely ye have received'; namely, in the first application of the
words, the message of the coming kingdom and the power to work
miracles. But the force of the injunction, as applied to us, is even
more soul-subduing, as our gift is greater, and the freedom of its
bestowal should evoke deeper gratitude. The deepest springs of the
heart's love are set flowing by the undeserved, unpurchased gift of
God, which contains in itself both the most tender and mighty motive
for self-forgetting labour, and the pattern for Christian service.
How can one who has received that gift keep it to himself? How can
he sell what he got for nothing? 'Freely give'--the precept forbids
the seeking of personal profit or advantage from preaching the
gospel, and so makes a sharp test of our motives; and it also
forbids clogging the gift with non-essential conditions, and so
makes a sharp test of our methods.

II. The prohibition to make gain out of the message, serves as a
transition to the directions as to equipment. The apostles were to
go as they stood; for the command is, '_Get_ you no gold,' etc.
It has been already noted that these prohibitions were abrogated by
Jesus in view of His departure, and the world-wide mission of the
Church. But the spirit of them is not abrogated. Note that the
descending value of the metals named makes an ascending stringency
in the prohibition. Not even copper money is to be taken. The
'wallet' was a leather satchel or bag, used by shepherds and others
to carry a little food; sustenance, then, was also to be left
uncared for. Dress, too, was to be limited to that in wear; no
change of inner robe nor a spare pair of shoes was to encumber them,
nor even a spare staff. If any of them had one in his hand, he was
to take it (Mark vi. 8). The command was meant to lift the apostles
above suspicion, to make them manifestly disinterested, to free them
from anxiety about earthly things, that their message might absorb
their thoughts and efforts, and to give room for the display of
Christ's power to provide. It had a promise wrapped in it. He who
forbade them to provide for themselves thereby pledged Himself to
take care of them. 'The labourer is worthy of his food.' They may be
sure of subsistence, and are not to wish for more.

All this has a distinct bearing on modern church arrangements. On
the one hand, it vindicates the right of those who preach the gospel
to live of the gospel, and sets any payments to them on the right
footing, as not being charity or generosity, but the discharge of a
debt. On the other hand, it enjoins on preachers and others who are
paid for service not to serve for pay, not to be covetous of large
remuneration, and to take care that no taint of greed for money
shall mar their work, but that their conduct may confirm their words
when they say with Paul, 'We seek not yours, but you.'

III. The conduct required from, and the reception met with by, the
messengers come next. Christ first enjoins discretion and
discrimination of character, so far as possible. The messenger of
the kingdom is not to be mixed up with disreputable people, lest the
message should suffer. The principle of his choice of a home is to
be, not position, comfort, or the like, but 'worthiness'; that is,
predisposition to receive the message. However poor the chamber in
the house of such, there is the apostle to settle himself. 'If ye
have judged me to be faithful, come into my house,' said Lydia. The
less Christ's messengers are at home with Christ's neglecters, the
calmer their own hearts, and the more potent their message. They
give the lie to it, if they voluntarily choose as their associates
those to whom their dearest convictions are idle. Christian charity
does not blind to distinctions of character. A little common sense
in reading these will save many a scandal, and much weakening of
influence.

Christian earnestness does not abolish courtesy. The message is not
to be blurted out in defiance of even conventional forms. Zeal for
the Lord is no excuse for rude abruptness. But the salutation of the
true apostle will deepen the meaning of such forms, and make the
conventional the real expression of real goodwill. No man should say
'Peace be unto you' so heartily as Christ's servant. The servant's
benediction will bring the Master's ratification; for Jesus says,
'_Let_ your peace come upon it,' as if commanding the good
which we can only wish. That will be so, if the requisite condition
is fulfilled. There must be soil for the seed to root in.

But no true wish for others' good--still more, no effort for it--is
ever void of blessed issue. If the peace does not rest on a house
into which jarring and sin forbid its entrance, it will not be
homeless, but come back, like the dove to the ark, and fold its
wings in the heart of the sender. The reflex influence of Christian
effort is precious, whatever its direct results are. How the Church
has been benefited by its missionary enterprises!

Jesus encouraged no illusions in His servants as to their success.
From the beginning they were led to expect that some would receive
and some would reject their words. In this rapid preparatory
mission, there was no time for long delay anywhere; but for us, it
is not wise to conclude that patient effort will fail because first
appeals have not succeeded. Much close communion with Jesus, not a
little self-suppression, and abundant practical wisdom, are needed
to determine the point at which further efforts are vain. No doubt,
there is often great waste of strength in trying to impress
unimpressible people, or to revive some moribund enterprise; but it
is a pardonable weakness to be reluctant to abandon a field. Still
it _is_ a weakness, and there come times when the only right
thing to do is to 'shake off the dust' of the messenger's feet in
token that all connection is ended, and that he is clear from the
blood of the rejecters. The awful doom of such is solemnly
introduced by 'Verily, I say unto you.' It rests on the plain
principle that the measure of light is the measure of criminality,
and hence the measure of punishment. The rejecters of Christ among
us are as much more guilty than 'that city' as its inhabitants were
than the men of Sodom.

The first section of this charge properly ends with verse 15, the
following verse being a transition to the second part. The Greek
puts strong emphasis on 'I.' It is He who sends among wolves,
therefore He will protect. A strange thing for a shepherd to do! A
strange encouragement for the apostles on the threshold of their
work! But the words would often come back to them when beset by the
pack with their white teeth gleaming, and their howls filling the
night. They are not promised that they will not be torn, but they
are assured that, even if they are, the Shepherd wills it, and will
not lose one of His flock.

What is the Christian defence? Prudence like the serpent's, but not
the serpent's craft or malice; harmlessness like the dove's, but not
without the other safeguard of 'wisdom.' The combination is a rare
one, and the surest way to possess it is to live so close to Jesus
that we shall be progressively changed into His likeness. Then our
prudence will never degenerate into cunning, nor our simplicity
become blindness to dangers. The Christian armour and arms are meek,
unconquerable patience, and Christ-likeness, To resist is to be
beaten; to endure unretaliating is to be victorious. 'Be not
overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.'




THE WIDENED MISSION, ITS PERILS AND DEFENCES


    'Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of
    wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless
    as doves. 17. But beware of men: for they will deliver
    you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in
    their synagogues; 18. And ye shall be brought before
    governors and kings for My sake, for a testimony
    against them and the Gentiles. 19. But when they
    deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall
    speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what
    ye shall speak. 20. For it is not ye that speak, but
    the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.
    21. And the brother shall deliver up the brother to
    death, and the father the child: and the children shall
    rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put
    to death. 22. And ye shall be hated of all men for My
    name's sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be
    saved. 23. But when they persecute you in this city,
    flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye
    shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the
    Son of Man be come. 24. The disciple is not above his
    master, nor the servant above his lord. 25. It is
    enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and
    the servant as his lord. If they have called the master
    of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call
    them of his household? 26. Fear them not therefore: for
    there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed;
    and hid, that shall not be known. 27. What I tell you
    in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear
    in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. 28. And
    fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to
    kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to
    destroy both soul and body in hell. 29. Are not two
    sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not
    fall on the ground without your Father. 30. But the
    very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31. Fear ye
    not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.'
    --MATT. x. 16-31.

We have already had two instances of Matthew's way of bringing
together sayings and incidents of a like kind without regard to
their original connection. The Sermon on the Mount and the series of
miracles in chapters viii. and ix. are groups, the elements of which
are for the most part found disconnected in Mark and Luke. This
charge to the twelve in chapter x. seems to present a third
instance, and to pass over in verse 16 to a wider mission than that
of the twelve during our Lord's lifetime, for it forebodes
persecution, whereas the preceding verses opened no darker prospect
than that of indifference or non-reception. The 'city' which, in
that stage of the gospel message, simply would 'not receive you nor
hear your words,' in this stage has worsened into one where 'they
persecute you,' and the persecutors are now 'kings' and 'Gentiles,'
as well as Jewish councils and synagogue-frequenters. The period
covered in these verses, too, reaches to the 'end,' the final
revelation of all hidden things.

Obviously, then, our Lord is looking down a far future, and giving a
charge to the dim crowd of His later disciples, whom His prescient
eye saw pressing behind the twelve in days to come. He had no dreams
of swift success, but realised the long, hard fight to which He was
summoning His disciples. And His frankness in telling them the worst
that they had to expect was as suggestive as was His freedom from
the rosy, groundless visions of at once capturing a world which
enthusiasts are apt to cherish, till hard experience shatters the
illusions. He knew the future in store for Himself, for His Gospel,
for His disciples. And He knew that dangers and death itself will
not appal a soul that is touched into heroic self-forgetfulness by
His love. 'Set down my name,' says the man in _Pilgrim's Progress_,
though he knew--may we not say, because he knew?--that the enemies
were outside waiting to fall on him.

A further difference between this and the preceding section is, that
there the stress was laid on the contents of the disciples' message,
but that here it is laid on their sufferings. Not so much by what
they say, as by how they endure, are they to testify. 'The noble
army of martyrs praise Thee,' and the primitive Church preached
Jesus most effectually by dying for Him.

The keynote is struck in verse 16, in which are to be noted the
'Behold,' which introduces something important and strange, and
calls for close attention; the majestic '_I_ send you,' which
moves to obedience whatever the issues, and pledges Him to defend
the poor men who are going on His errands and the pathetic picture
of the little flock huddled together, while the gleaming teeth of
the wolves gnash all round them. A strange theme to drape in a
metaphor! but does not the very metaphor help to lighten the
darkness of the picture, as well as speak of His calmness, while He
contemplates it? If the Shepherd sends His sheep into the midst of
wolves, surely He will come to their help, and surely any peril is
more courageously faced when they can say to themselves, 'He put us
here.' The sheep has no claws to wound with nor teeth to tear with,
but the defenceless Christian has a defence, and in his very
weaponlessness wields the sharpest two-edged sword. 'Force from
force must ever flow.' Resistance is a mistake. The victorious
antagonist of savage enmity is patient meekness. 'Sufferance is the
badge of all' true servants of Jesus. Wherever they have been
misguided enough to depart from Christ's law of endurance and to
give blow for blow, they have lost their cause in the long run, and
have hurt their own Christian life more than their enemies' bodies.
Guilelessness and harmlessness are their weapons. But 'be ye wise as
serpents' is equally imperative with 'guileless as doves.' Mark the
fine sanity of that injunction, which not only permits but enjoins
prudent self-preservation, so long as it does not stoop to crooked
policy, and is saved from that by dove-like guilelessness. A
difficult combination, but a possible one, and when realised, a
beautiful one!

The following verses (17-22) expand the preceding, and mingle in a
very remarkable way plain predictions of persecution to the death
and encouragements to front the worst. Jewish councils and
synagogues, Gentile governors and kings, will unite for once in
common hatred, than which there is no stronger bond. That is a grim
prospect to set before a handful of Galilean peasants, but two
little words turn its terror into joy; it is 'for My sake,' and that
is enough. Jesus trusted His humble friends, as He trusts all such
always, and believed that 'for My sake' was a talisman which would
sweeten the bitterest cup and would make cowards into heroes, and
send men and women to their deaths triumphant. And history has
proved that He did not trust them too much. 'For His sake'--is that
a charm for _us_, which makes the crooked straight and the
rough places plain, which nerves for suffering and impels to noble
acts, which moulds life and takes the sting and the terror out of
death? Nor is that the only encouragement given to the twelve, who
might well be appalled at the prospect of standing before Gentile
kings. Jesus seems to discern how they shrank as they listened, at
the thought of having to bear 'testimony' before exalted personages,
and, with beautiful adaptation to their weakness, He interjects a
great promise, which, for the first time, presents the divine Spirit
as dwelling in the disciples' spirits. The occasion of the dawning
of that great Christian thought is very noteworthy, and not less so
is the designation of the Spirit as 'of your Father,' with all the
implications of paternal care and love which that name carries.
Special crises bring special helps, and the martyrologies of all
ages and lands, from Stephen outside the city wall to the last
Chinese woman, have attested the faithfulness of the Promiser. How
often have some calm, simple words from some slave girl in Roman
cities, or some ignorant confessor before Inquisitors, been
manifestly touched with heavenly light and power, and silenced
sophistries and threats!

The solemn foretelling of persecution, broken for a moment, goes on
and becomes even more foreboding, for it speaks of dearest ones
turned to foes, and the sweet sanctities of family ties dissolved by
the solvent of the new Faith. There is no enemy like a brother
estranged, and it is tragically significant that it is in connection
with the rupture of family bonds that death is first mentioned as
the price that Christ's messengers would have to pay for
faithfulness to their message. But the prediction springs at a
bound, as it were, from the narrow circle of home to the widest
range, and does not fear to spread before the eyes of the twelve
that they will become the objects of hatred to the whole human race
if they are true to Christ's charge. The picture is dark enough, and
it has turned out to be a true forecast of facts. It suggests two
questions. What right had Jesus to send men out on such an errand,
and to bid them gladly die for Him? And what made these men gladly
take up the burden which He laid on them? He has the right to
dispose of us, because He is the Son of God who has died for us.
Otherwise He is not entitled to say to us, Do my bidding, even if it
leads you to death. His servants find their inspiration to absolute,
unconditional self-surrender in the Love that has died for them.
That which gives Him His right to dispose of us in life and death
gives us the disposition to yield ourselves wholly to Him, to be His
apostles according to our opportunities, and to say, 'Whether I live
or die, I am the Lord's.'

That thought of world-wide hatred is soothed by the recurrence of
the talisman, 'For My name's sake,' and by a moment's showing of a
fair prospect behind the gloom streaked with lightning in the
foreground. 'He that endureth to the end shall be saved.' The same
saying occurs in chapter xxiv. 13, in connection with the prediction
of the fall of Jerusalem, and in the same connection in Mark xiii.
13, in both of which places several other sayings which appear in
this charge to the apostles are found. It is impossible to settle
which is the original place for these, or whether they were twice
spoken. The latter supposition is very unfashionable at present, but
has perhaps more to say for itself than modern critics are willing
to allow. But Luke (xxi. 19) has a remarkable variation of the
saying, for his version of it is, 'In your patience, ye shall win
your souls.' His word 'patience' is a noun cognate with the verb
rendered in Matthew and Mark 'endureth,' and to 'win one's soul' is
obviously synonymous with being 'saved.' The saying cannot be
limited, in any of its forms, to a mere securing of earthly life,
for in this context it plainly includes those who have been
delivered to death by parents and brethren, but who by death have
won their lives, and have been, as Paul expected to be, thereby
'saved into His heavenly kingdom.' To the Christian, death is the
usher who introduces him into the presence-chamber of the King, and
he that loseth his life 'for My name's sake,' finds it glorified in,
and into, life eternal.

But willingness to endure the utmost is to be accompanied with
willingness to take all worthy means to escape it. There has been a
certain unwholesome craving for martyrdom generated in times of
persecution, which may appear noble but is very wasteful. The worst
use that you can put a man to is to burn him, and a living witness
may do more for Christ than a dead martyr. Christian heroism may be
shown in not being afraid to flee quite as much as in courting, or
passively awaiting, danger. And Christ's Name will be spread when
His lovers are hounded from one city to another, just as it was when
'they that were scattered abroad, went everywhere, preaching the
word.' When the brands are kicked apart by the heel of violence,
they kindle flames where they fall.

But the reason for this command to flee is perplexing. 'Ye shall not
have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.' Is
Jesus here reverting to the narrower immediate mission of the
apostles? What 'coming' is referred to? We have seen that the first
mission of the twelve was the theme of verses 5-15, and was there
pursued to its ultimate consequences of final judgment on rejecters,
whilst the wider horizon of a future mission opens out from verse 16
onwards. A renewed contraction of the horizon is extremely unlikely.
It would be as if 'a flower should shut and be a bud again.' The
recurrence in verse 23 of 'Verily I say unto you,' which has already
occurred in verse 15, closing the first section of the charge, makes
it probable that here too a section is completed, and that
probability is strengthened if it is observed that the same phrase
occurs, for a third time, in the last verse of the chapter, where
again the discourse soars to the height of contemplating the final
reward. The fact that the apostles met with no persecution on their
first mission, puts out of court the explanation of the words that
refers them to that mission, and takes the 'coming' to be Jesus' own
appearances in the places they had preceded Him as His heralds. The
difficult question as to what is the _terminus ad quem_ pointed
to here seems best solved by taking the 'coming of the Son of Man'
to be His judicial manifestation in the destruction of Jerusalem and
the consequent desolation of many of 'the cities of Israel,' whilst
at the same time, the nearer and smaller catastrophe is a prophecy
and symbol of the remoter and greater 'day of the Son of Man' at the
end of the days. The recognition of that aspect of the fall of
Jerusalem is forced on us by the eschatological parts of the
Gospels, which are a bewildering whirl without it. Here, however, it
is the crash of the fall itself which is in view, and the thought
conveyed is that there would be cities enough to serve for refuges,
and scope enough for evangelistic work, till the end of the Jewish
possession of the land.

In verses 26-31, 'fear not' is thrice spoken, and at each occurrence
is enforced by a reason. The first of these encouragements is the
assurance of the certain ultimate world-wide manifestation of hidden
things. That same dictum occurs in other connections, and with other
applications, but in the present context can only be taken as an
assurance that the Gospel message, little known as it thus far was,
was destined to fill all ears. Therefore the disciples were to be
fearless in doing their part in making it known, and so working in
alliance with the divine purpose. It is the same thing that is meant
by the 'covered' that 'shall be revealed,' the 'hidden' that 'shall
be known,' 'that which is spoken in darkness,' and 'that which is
whispered in the ear'; and all four designations refer to the word
which every Christian has it in charge to sound out. We note that
Jesus foresees a far wider range of publicity for His servants'
ministry than for His own, just as He afterwards declared that they
would do 'greater works' than His. He spoke to a handful of men in
an obscure corner of the world. His teaching was necessarily largely
confidential communication to the fit few. But the spark is going to
be a blaze, and the whisper to become a shout that fills the world.
Surely, then, we who are working in the line of direction of God's
working should let no fear make us dumb, but should ever hear and
obey the command: 'Lift up thy voice with strength, lift it up, be
not afraid.'

A second reason for fearlessness is the limitation of the enemy's
power to hurt, reinforced by the thought that, while the penalties
that man can inflict for faithfulness are only corporeal,
transitory, and incapable of harming the true self, the consequences
of unfaithfulness fling the whole man, body and soul, down to utter
ruin. There is a fear that makes cowards and apostates; there is a
fear which makes heroes and apostles. He who fears God, with the awe
that has no torment and is own sister to love, is afraid of nothing
and of no man. That holy and blessed fear drives out all other, as
fire draws the heat out of a burn. He that serves Christ is lord of
the world; he that fears God fronts the world, and is not afraid.

The last reason for fearlessness touches a tender chord, and
discloses a gracious thought of God as Father, which softens the
tremendous preceding word: 'Who is able to destroy both soul and
body in hell.' Take both designations together, and let them work
together in producing the awe which makes us brave, and the filial
trust which makes us braver. A bird does not 'fall to the ground'
unless wounded, and if it falls it dies. Jesus had looked pityingly
on the great mystery, the woes of the creatures, and had stayed
Himself on the thought of the all-embracing working of God. The very
dying sparrow, with broken wing, had its place in that universal
care. God is 'immanent' in nature. The antithesis often drawn
between His universal care and His 'special providence' is
misleading. Providence is special because it is universal. That
which embraces everything must embrace each thing. But the immanent
God is 'your Father,' and because of that sonship, 'ye are of more
value than many sparrows.' There is an ascending order, and an
increasing closeness and tenderness of relation. 'A man is better
than a sheep,' and Christians, being God's children, may count on
getting closer into the Father's heart than the poor crippled bird
can, or than the godless man can. 'Your Father,' on the one hand,
can destroy soul and body, therefore fear Him; but, on the other, He
determines whether you shall 'fall to the ground' or soar above
dangers, therefore fear none but Him.




LIKE TEACHER, LIKE SCHOLAR


    'The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant
    above his lord. 26. It is enough for the disciple that
    he be as his master, and the servant as his lord.'
    --MATT. x. 24, 25.

These words were often on Christ's lips. Like other teachers, He too
had His favourite sayings, the light of which He was wont to flash
into many dark places. Such a saying, for instance, was, 'To him
that hath shall be given.' Such a saying is this of my text; and
probably several other of our Lord's utterances, which are repeated
more than once in different Gospels, and have too hastily been
sometimes assumed to have been introduced erroneously by the
evangelists, in varying connections.

This half-proverb occurs four times in the Gospels, and in three
very different connections, pointing to three different subjects.
Here, and once in John's Gospel, in the fifteenth chapter, it is
employed to enforce the lesson of the oneness of Christ and His
disciples in their relation to the world; and that His servants
cannot expect to be better off than the Master was. 'If they have
called Me Beelzebub they will not call you anything else.'

Then in Luke's Gospel (vi. 40) it is employed to illustrate the
principle that the scholar cannot expect to be wiser than his
master; that a blind teacher will have blind pupils, and that they
will both fall into the ditch. Of course, the scholar may get beyond
his master, but then he will get up and go away from the school, and
will not be his scholar any longer. As long as he is a scholar, the
best that can happen to him, and that will not often happen, is to
be on the level of his teacher.

Then in another place in John's Gospel (xiii. 16) the saying is
employed in reference to a different subject, viz. to teach the
meaning of the pathetic, symbolical foot-washing, and to enforce the
exhortation to imitate Jesus Christ, as generally in conduct, so
specially in His wondrous humility. 'The servant is not greater than
his lord.' 'I have left you an example that ye should do as I have
done to you.'

So if we put these three instances together we get a threefold
illustration of the relation between the disciple and the teacher,
in respect to wisdom, conduct, and reception by the world. And these
three, with their bearing on the relation between Christians and
Jesus Christ, open out large fields of duty and of privilege. The
very centre of Christianity is discipleship, and the very highest
hope, as well as the most imperative command which the Gospel brings
to men is, 'Be like Him whom you profess to have taken as your
Master. Be like Him here, and you shall be like Him hereafter.'

I. Likeness to the teacher in wisdom is the disciple's perfection.

'If the blind lead the blind both shall fall into the ditch.' 'The
disciple is not greater than his master.' 'It is enough for the
disciple that he be as his master.' If that be a true principle,
that the best that can happen to the scholar is to tread in his
teacher's footsteps, to see with his eyes, to absorb his wisdom, to
learn his truth, we may apply it in two opposite directions. First,
it teaches us the limitations, and the misery, and the folly of
taking men for our masters; and then, on the other hand, it teaches
us the large hope, the blessing, freedom, and joy of having Christ
for our Master.

Now, first, look at the principle as bearing upon the relation of
disciple and human teacher. All such teachers have their
limitations. Each man has his little circle of favourite ideas that
he is perpetually reiterating. In fact, it seems as if one truth was
about as much as one teacher could manage, and as if, whensoever God
had any great truth to give to the world, He had to take one man and
make him its sole apostle. So that teachers become mere fragments,
and to listen to them is to dwarf and narrow oneself.

The chances are that no scholar shall be on his master's level. The
eyes that see truth directly and for themselves in this world are
very few. Most men have to take truth at second-hand, and few indeed
are they who, like a perfect medium, receive even the fragmentary
truth that human lips can impart to them, and transmit it as pure as
they receive it. Disciples present exaggerations, caricatures,
misconceptions, the limitations of the master becoming even more
rigid in the pupil. Schools spring up which push the founder's
teaching to extremes, and draw conclusions from it which he never
dreamed of. Instead of a fresh voice, we have echoes, which, like
all echoes, give only a syllable or two out of a sentence. Teachers
can tell what they see, but they cannot give their followers eyes,
and so the followers can do little more than repeat what their
leader said he saw. They are like the little suckers that spring up
from the 'stool' of a cut-down tree, or like the kinglets among
whose feebler hands the great empire of an Alexander was divided at
his death.

It is a dwarfing thing to call any man master upon earth. And yet
men will give to a man the credence which they refuse to Christ. The
followers of some of the fashionable teachers of to-day--Comte,
Spencer, or others--protest, in the name of mental independence,
against accepting Christ as the absolute teacher of morals and
religion, and then go away and put a man in the very place which
they have denied to Him, and swallow down his _dicta_ whole.

Such facts show how heart and mind crave a teacher; how discipleship
is ingrained in our nature; how we all long for some one who shall
come to us authoritatively and say, 'Here is truth--believe it and
live on it.' And yet it is fatal to pin one's faith on any, and it
is miserable to have to change guides perpetually and to feel that
we have outgrown those whom we reverence, and that we can look down
on the height which once seemed to touch the stars--and, if we cut
ourselves loose from all men's teaching, the isolation is dreary,
and few of us are strong enough of arm, or clear enough of eye, to
force or find the path through the tangled jungles of error.

So take this thought, that the highest hope of a disciple is to be
like the master in wisdom, in its bearing on the relation between us
and Christ, and look how it then flashes up into blessedness and
beauty.

Such a teacher as we have in Him has no limitations, and it is safe
to follow Him absolutely and Him alone. All others have plainly
borne the impress of their age, or their nation, or their
idiosyncrasy, in some way or another; Christ Jesus is the only
teacher that the world has ever heard of, in whose teaching there is
no mark of the age or generation or set of circumstances in which it
originated. This water does not taste of any soil through which it
has passed, it has come straight down from Heaven, and is pure and
uncontaminated as the Heaven from which it has come. This teacher is
safe to listen to absolutely: there are no limitations there; you
never hear Him arguing; there is no sign about His words as if He
had ever dug out for Himself the wisdom that He is proclaiming, or
had ever seen it less distinctly than He sees it at the moment. The
great peculiarity of His teaching is that He does not reason, but
declares that His 'Verily! Verily!' is the confirmation of all His
message. His teaching is Himself; other men bring lessons about truth;
He says, 'I am the Truth.' Other teachers keep their personality in
the background; He clashes His down in the foreground. Other men say,
'Listen to what I tell you, never mind about me.' He says, 'This is
life eternal, that ye should believe on Me.' This Teacher has His
message level to all minds, high and low, wise and foolish, cultivated
and rude. This Teacher does not only impart wisdom by words as from
without, though He does that too, but He comes into men's spirits, and
communicates Himself, and so makes them wise. Other teachers fumble at
the outside, but 'in the hidden parts He makes me to know wisdom.' So
it is safe to take this Teacher absolutely, and to say, 'Thou art my
Master, Thy word is truth, and the opening of Thy lips to me is wisdom.'

In following Christ as our absolute Teacher, there is no sacrifice
of independence or freedom of mind, but listening to Him is the way
to secure these in their highest degree. We are set free from men,
we are growingly delivered from errors and misconceptions, in the
measure in which we keep close to Christ as our Master. The Lord is
that Teacher, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there, and there
only, is liberty; freedom from self, from the dominion of popular
opinion, from the coterie-speech of schools, from the imposing
authority of individuals, and from all that makes cowardly men say
as other people say, and fall in with the majority; and freedom from
our own prejudices and our own errors, which are cleared away when
we take Christ for our Master and cleave to Him.

His teaching can never cease until it has accomplished its purpose,
and not until we have gathered into our consciousness all the truth
that He has to give, and have received all the wisdom that He can
impart unto us as to God and Himself, does His teaching cease. Here
we may grow indefinitely in the knowledge of Christ, and in the
future we shall know even as we are known. His merciful teaching
will not come to a close till we have drunk in all His wisdom, and
till He has declared to us all which He has heard of the Father. He
will pass us from one form to another of His school, but in Heaven
we shall still be His scholars; 'Every one shall sit at Thy feet,
every one shall receive of Thy words.'

So, then, let us turn away from men, from rabbis and Sanhedrins,
from authorities and schools, from doctors and churches. Why resort
to cisterns when we may draw from the spring? Why listen to men when
we may hear Christ? He is, as Dante called the great Greek thinker,
'the Master of those who know.' Why should we look to the planets
when we can see the sun? 'Call no man master upon earth, for One is
your Master, and all ye are brethren.' And His merciful teaching
will never cease until 'everyone that is perfected shall be as his
Master.'

II. Now, turn to the second application of this principle. Likeness
to the Master in life is the law of a disciple's conduct.

That pathetic and wonderful story about the foot-washing in John's
Gospel is meant for a symbol. It is the presenting, in a picturesque
form, of the very heart and essence of Christ's Incarnation in its
motive and purpose. The solemn prelude with which the evangelist
introduces it lays bare our Lord's heart and His reason for His
action. 'Having loved His own, which were in the world, He loved
them to the end.' His motive, then, was love. Again, the exalted
consciousness which accompanied His self-abasement is made prominent
in the words, 'Knowing that the Father had given all things into His
hand, and that He was come from God and went to God.' And the
majestic deliberation and patient continuance in resolved humility
with which He goes down the successive steps of the descent, are
wonderfully given in the evangelist's record of how He 'riseth from
supper, and laid aside His garments and girded Himself, and poured
water into the basin.' It is a parable. Thus, in the consciousness
of His divine authority and dignity, and moved by His love to the
whole world, He laid aside the garments of His glory, and vested
Himself with the towel of His humanity, the servant's garb, and took
the water of His cleansing power, and came to wash the feet of all
who will let Him cleanse them from their soil. And then, having
reassumed His garments, He speaks from His throne to those who have
been cleansed by His humiliation and His sacrifice, 'Know ye what I
have done to you? The servant is not greater than his lord.'

That is to say, dear brethren, in this one incident, which is the
condensation, so to speak, of the whole spirit of His life, is the
law for our lives as well. We, too, are bound to that same love as
the main motive of all our actions; we, too, are bound to that same
stripping off of dignity and lowly equalising of ourselves with
those below us whom we would help, and we, too, are bound to make it
our main object, in our intercourse with men, not merely that we
should please nor enlighten them, nor succour their lower temporal
needs, but that we should cleanse them and make them pure with the
purity that Christ gives.

A Christian life all moved and animated by self-denuding love, and
which came amongst men to make them better and purer, and all the
influence of which tended in the direction of helping poor foul
hearts to get rid of their filth, how different it would be from our
lives! What a grim contrast much of our lives is to the Master's
example and command! Did you ever strip yourself of anything, my
brother, in order to make some poor, wretched creature a little
purer and liker the Saviour? Did you ever drop your dignity and go
down to the low levels in order to lift up the people that were
there? Do men see anything of that example, as reproduced in your
lives, of the Master that lays aside the garments of Heaven for the
vesture of earth, and dies upon the Cross in order that He might
make our poor hearts purer and liker His own?

But, hard as such imitation is, it is only one case of a general
principle. Discipleship is likeness to Jesus Christ in conduct.
There is no discipleship worth naming which does not, at least,
attempt that likeness. What is the use of a man saying that he is
the disciple of Incarnate Love if his whole life is incarnate
selfishness? What is the use of your calling yourselves Christians,
and saying that you are followers of Jesus Christ, when He came to
do God's will and delighted in it, and you come to do your own, and
never do God's will at all, or scarcely at all, and then reluctantly
and with many a murmur? What kind of a disciple is he, the habitual
tenor of whose life contradicts the life of his Master and disobeys
His commandments? And I am bound to say that that is the life of an
enormously large proportion of the professing disciples in this age
of conventional Christianity.

'The disciple shall be as his master.' Do you make it your effort to
be like Him? If so, then the saying is not only a law, but a
promise, for it assures us that our effort shall not fail but
progressively succeed, and lead on at last to our becoming what we
behold, and being conformed to Him whom we love, and like the Master
to whose wisdom we profess to listen. They whose earthly life is a
following of Christ, with faltering steps and afar off, shall have
for their heavenly blessedness, that they shall 'follow the Lamb
whithersoever He goeth.'

III. And now, lastly, likeness to the Master in relation to the
world is the fate that the disciple must put up with.

'If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much
more shall they call them of his household?' 'The disciple is not
above his master, nor the servant above his lord.' Our Lord
reiterated the statement in another place in John's Gospel,
reminding them that He had said it before.

If we are like Jesus Christ in conduct, and if we have received His
Word as the truth upon which we repose, depend upon it, in our
measure and in varying fashions, we shall have to bear the same kind
of treatment that He received from the world. The days of so-called
persecution are over in so-called Christian countries, but if you
are a disciple in the sense of believing all that Jesus Christ says,
and taking Him for your Teacher, the public opinion of this day will
have a great many things to say about you that will not be very
pleasant. You will be considered to be 'old-fashioned,' 'narrow,'
'behind the times,' etc. etc. etc. Look at the bitter spirit of
antagonism to an earnest and simple Christianity and adoption of
Christ as our authoritative Teacher which goes through much of our
high-class literature to-day. It is a very small matter as measured
with what Christian men used to have to bear; but it indicates the
set of things. We may make up our minds that if we are not contented
with the pared-down Christianity which the world allows to pass at
present, but insist upon coming to the New Testament for our beliefs
and practices, and avow--'I believe all that Jesus Christ says, and
I believe it because He says it, and I take Him as my model'; we
shall find out that the disciple has to be 'as his Master,' and that
the Pharisees and the Scribes of to-day stand in the same relation
to the followers as their predecessors did to the Leader. If you are
like your Master in conduct, you will be no more popular with the
world than He was. As long as Christianity will be quiet, and let
the world go its own gait, the world is very well contented to let
it alone, or even to say polite things to it. Why should the world
take the trouble of persecuting the kind of Christianity that so
many of us display? What is the difference between our Christianity
and their worldliness? The world is quite willing to come to church
on Sundays, and to call itself a Christian world, if only it may
live as it likes. And many professing Christians have precisely the
same idea. They attend to the externals of Christianity, and call
themselves Christians, but they bargain for its having very little
power over their lives. Why, then, should two sets of people who
have the same ideas and practices dislike each other? No reason at
all! But let Christian men live up to their profession, and above
all let them become aggressive, and try to attack the world's evil,
as they are bound to do; let them fight drunkenness, let them go
against the lust of great cities, let them preach peace in the face
of a nation howling for war, let them apply the golden rules of
Christianity to commerce and social relationships and the like, and
you will very soon hear a pretty shout that will tell you that the
disciple who is a disciple has to share the fate of the Master,
notwithstanding nineteen centuries of Christian teaching.

If you do not know what it is to find yourselves out of harmony with
the world, I am afraid it is because you have less of the Master's
spirit than you have of the world's. The world loves its own. If you
are not 'of the world, the world will hate you.' If it does not, it
must be because, in spite of your name, you belong to it.

But if we are like Him in our relation to the world, because we are
like Him in character, our very share in 'His reproach,' and our
sense of being 'aliens' here, bear the promise that we shall be like
Him in all worlds. His fortune is ours. 'The disciple shall be as
his master.' If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. No
cross, no crown;--if cross, then crown! The end of discipleship is
not reached until the Master's image and the Master's lot are
repeated in the scholar.

Take Christ for your sacrifice, trust to His blood, listen to His
teaching, walk in His footsteps, and you shall share His sovereignty
and sit on His throne. 'It is enough,'--ay! more than enough, and
nothing less than that is enough,--'for the disciple that he be
_as_'--and _with_--'his master.' 'I shall be satisfied when I awake in
Thy likeness.'





THE KING'S CHARGE TO HIS AMBASSADORS


    'Whosoever therefore shall confess Me before men, him
    will I confess also before My Father which is in heaven.
    33. But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I
    also deny before My Father which is in heaven. 34. Think
    not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to
    send peace, but a sword. 35. For I am come to set a man
    at variance against his father, and the daughter against
    her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother
    in law. 36. And man's foes shall be they of his own
    household. 37. He that loveth father or mother more than
    Me is not worthy of Me: and he that loveth son or
    daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. 38. And he
    that taketh not his cross, and followeth after Me, is
    not worthy of Me. 39. He that findeth his life shall
    lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall
    find it 40. He that receiveth you receiveth Me, and he
    that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me. 41. He
    that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall
    receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a
    righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall
    receive a righteous man's reward. 42. And whosoever
    shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup
    of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I
    say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.'
    --MATT. x. 32-42.

The first mission of the apostles, important as it was, was but a
short flight to try the young birds' wings. The larger portion of
this charge to them passes far beyond the immediate occasion, and
deals with the permanent relations of Christ's servants to the world
in which they live, for the purpose of bringing it into subjection
to its true King. These solemn closing words, which make our present
subject, contain the duty and blessedness of confessing Him, the vision
of the antagonisms which He excites, His demand for all-surrendering
following, and the rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers,
and therein receive Himself and His Father.

I. The duty and blessedness of confessing Him (vs. 32, 33). The
'therefore' is significant. It attaches the promise which follows to
the immediately preceding thoughts of a watchful, fatherly care,
extending like a great invisible hand over the true disciple.
Because each is thus guarded, each shall be preserved to receive the
honour of being confessed by Christ. No matter what may befall His
witnesses, the extremest disaster shall not rob them of their reward.
They may be flung down from the house-tops where they lift up their
bold voices, but He who does not let a sparrow fall to the ground
uncared for, will give His angels charge concerning them who are so
much more precious, and they shall be borne up on outstretched wings,
lest they be dashed on the pavement below. Thus preserved, they shall
all attain at last to their guerdon. Nothing can come between Christ's
servant and his crown. The tender providence of the Father, whose
mercy is over all His works, makes sure of that. The river of the
confessor's life may plunge underground, and be lost amid persecutions,
but it will emerge again into the brighter sunshine on the other side
of the mountains.

The confession which is to be thus rewarded, like the denial opposed
to it, is, of course, not merely a single utterance of the lip. So
far Judas Iscariot confessed Christ, and Peter denied Him. But it is
the habitual acknowledgment by lip and life, unwithdrawn to the end.
The context implies that the confession is maintained in the face of
opposition, and that the denial is a cowardly attempt to save one's
skin at the cost of treason to Jesus. The temptation does not come
in that sharpest form to us. Perhaps some cowards would be made
brave if it did. It is perhaps easier to face the gibbet and the
fire, and screw oneself up for once to a brief endurance, than to
resist the more specious blandishments of the world, especially when
it has been christened, and calls itself religious. The light laugh
of scorn, the silent pressure of the low average of Christian
character, the close associations in trade, literature, public and
domestic life which Christians have with non-Christians, make many a
man's tongue lie silent, to the sore detriment of his own religious
life. 'Ye have not yet resisted unto blood,' and find it hard to
fulfil the easier conflict to which you are called. The sun has more
power than the tempest to make the pilgrim drop his garment. But the
duty remains the same for all ages. Every man is bound to make the
deepest springs of his life visible, and to stand to his
convictions, whatever they be. If he do not, his convictions will
disappear like a piece of ice hid in a hot hand, which will melt and
trickle away. This obligation lies with infinitely increased weight
on Christ's servants; and the consequences of failing to discharge
it are more tragic in their cases, in the exact proportion of the
greater preciousness of their faith. Corn hoarded is sure to be
spoiled by weevils and rust. The bread of life hidden in our sacks
will certainly go mouldy.

The reward and punishment of confession and denial come to them not
as separate acts, but as each being the revelation of the spiritual
condition of the doers. Christ implies that a true disciple cannot
but be a confessor, and that therefore the denier must certainly be
one whom He has never known. Because, therefore, each act is
symptomatic of the doer, each receives the congruous and
correspondent reward. The confessor is confessed; the denier is
denied. What calm and assured consciousness of His place as Judge
underlies these words! His recognition is God's acceptance; His
denial is darkness and misery. The correspondence between the work
and the reward is beautifully brought out by the use of the same
word to express each. And yet what a difference between our
confession of Him and His of us! And what a hope is here for all who
have tremblingly, and in the consciousness of much unworthiness,
ventured to say that they were Christ's subjects, and He their King,
brother, and all! Their poor, feeble confession will be endorsed by
His. He will say, 'Yes, this man is mine, and I am his.' That will
be glory, honour, blessedness, life, heaven.

II. The vision of the discord which follows the coming of the King
of peace. It is not enough to interpret these words as meaning that
our Lord's purpose indeed was to bring peace, but that the result of
His coming was strife. The ultimate purpose is peace; but an
immediate purpose is conflict, as the only road to the peace. He is
first King of righteousness, and after that also King of peace. But,
if His kingdom be righteousness, purity, love, then unrighteousness,
filthiness, and selfishness will fight against it for their lives.
The ultimate purpose of Christ's coming is to transform the world
into the likeness of heaven; and all in the world which hates such
likeness is embattled against Him. He saw realities, and knew men's
hearts, and was under no illusion, such as many an ardent reformer
has cherished, that the fair form of truth need only be shown to
men, and they will take her to their hearts. Incessant struggle is
the law for the individual and for society till Christ's purpose for
both is realised.

That conflict ranges the dearest in opposite ranks. The gospel is
the great solvent. As when a substance is brought into contact with
some chemical compound, which has greater affinity for one of its
elements than the other element has, the old combination is
dissolved, and a new and more stable one is formed, so Christianity
analyses and destroys in order to synthesis and construction. In
verse 21 our Lord had foretold that brother should deliver up
brother to death. Here the severance is considered from the opposite
side. The persons who are 'set at variance' with their kindred are
here Christians. Perhaps it is fanciful to observe that they are all
junior members of families, as if the young would be more likely to
flock to the new light. But however that may be, the separation is
mutual, but the hate is all on one side. The 'man's foes' are of his
own household; but he is not their foe, though he be parted from
them.

III. Earthly love may be a worse foe to a true Christian than even
the enmity of the dearest; and that enmity may often be excited by
the Christian subordination of earthly to heavenly love. So our Lord
passes from the warnings of discord and hate to the danger of the
opposite--undue love.

He claims absolute supremacy in our hearts. He goes still farther,
and claims the surrender, not only of affections, but of self and
life to Him. What a strange claim this is! A Jewish peasant, dead
nineteen hundred years since, fronts the whole race of man, and
asserts His right to their love, which is strange, and to their
supreme love, which is stranger still. Why should we love Him at
all, if He were only a man, however pure and benevolent? We may
admire, as we do many another fair nature in the past; but is there
any possibility of evoking anything as warm as love to an unseen
person, who can have had no knowledge of or love to us? And why
should we love Him more than our dearest, from whom we have drawn,
or to whom we have given, life? What explanation or justification
does He give of this unexampled demand? Absolutely none. He seems to
think that its reasonableness needs no elucidation. Surely never did
teacher professing wisdom, modesty, and, still more, religion, put
forward such a claim of right; and surely never besides did any
succeed in persuading generations unborn to yield His demand, when
they heard it. The strangest thing in the world's history is that
to-day there are millions who do love Jesus Christ more than all
besides, and whose chief self-accusation is that they do not love
Him more. The strange, audacious claim is most reasonable, if we
believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for each of us, and
that each man and woman to the last of the generations had a
separate place in His divine human love when He died. It is meet to
love Him, if that be true; it is not, unless it be. The requirement
is as stringent as strange. If the two ever seem to conflict, the
earthly must give way. If the earthly be withdrawn, there must be
found sufficiency for comfort and peace in the heavenly. The lower
must not be permitted to hinder the flight of the heavenly to its
home. 'More than Me' is a rebuke to most of us. What a contrast
between the warmth of our earthly and the tepidity or coldness of
our heavenly love! How spontaneously our thoughts, when left free,
turn to the one; how hard we find it to keep them fixed on the
other! How sweet service is to the dear ones here; how reluctantly
it is given to Christ! How we long, when parted, to rejoin them; how
little we are drawn to the place where He is! We have all to confess
that we are 'not worthy of' Him; that we requite His love with
inadequate returns, and live lives which tax His love for its
highest exercise, the free forgiveness of sins against itself.
Compliance with that stringent law, and subordinating all earthly
love to His, is the true elevating and ennobling of the earthly. It
is promoted, not degraded, when it is made second, and is infinitely
sweeter and deeper then than when it was set in the place of
supremacy, where it had no right to be.

But Christ's demand is not only for the surrender of the heart, but
for the giving up of self, and, in a very profound sense, for the
surrender of life. How enigmatical that saying about taking up the
cross must have sounded to the disciples! They knew little about the
cross, as a punishment; they had not yet associated it in any way
with their Lord. This seems to have been the first occasion of His
mentioning it, and the allusion is so veiled as to be but partially
intelligible. But what was intelligible was bewildering. A strange
royal procession that, of the King with a cross on His shoulder, and
all His subjects behind Him with similar burdens! Through the ages
that procession has marched, and it marches still. Self-denial for
Christ's sake is 'the badge of all our tribe.' Observe that word
'take.' The cross must be willingly and by ourselves assumed. No
other can lay it on our shoulders. Observe that other word 'his.'
Each man has his own special form in which self-denial is needful
for him. We require pure eyes, and hearts kept in very close
communion with Jesus, to ascertain what our particular cross is. He
has them of many patterns, shapes, sizes, and materials. We can
always make sure of strength to carry the one which He means us to
carry, but not of strength to bear what is not ours.

IV. We have the rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers,
and therein receive Him and His Father. Our Lord first identifies
these twelve with Himself in a manner which must have sounded
strange to them then, but have heartened them for their work by the
consciousness of His mysterious oneness with them. The whole
doctrine of Christ's unity with His people lay in germ in these
words, though much more was needed, both of teaching and of
experience, before their depth of blessing and strengthening could
be apprehended. _We_ know that He dwells in His true subjects
by His Spirit, and that a most real union subsists between the head
and the members, of which the closest unions of earth are but faint
shadows, so as that not only those who receive His followers receive
Him, but, more wonderful still, His followers are received at the
last by God Himself as joined to Him, and portions of His very self,
and therefore 'accepted in the Beloved.' Our Lord adds to these
words the thought that, in like manner, to receive Him is to receive
the Father, and so implies that our relation to Him is in certain
real respects parallel with His relation to the Father. We too are
sent. He who sends abides with us, as the Son ever abode in God, and
God in Him. We are sent to be the brightness of Christ's glory, and
to manifest Him to men, as He was sent to reveal the Father.




A LIFE LOST AND FOUND
[Footnote: Preached after the funeral of Mr. F. W. Crossley.]


    'He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.'
    --MATT. x. 39.

My heart impels me to break this morning my usual rule of avoiding
personal references in the pulpit. Death has been busy in our own
congregation this last week, and yesterday we laid in the grave all
that was mortal of a man to whom Manchester owes more than it knows.
Mr. Crossley has been for thirty years my close and dear friend. He
was long a member of this church and congregation. I need not speak
of his utter unselfishness, of his lifelong consecration, of his
lavish generosity, of his unstinted work for God and man; but
thinking of him and of it, I have felt as if the words of my text
were the secret of his life, and as if he now understood the fulness
of the promise they contain: 'He that loseth his life for My sake
shall find it.' Now, looking at these words in the light of the
example so tenderly beloved by some of us, so sharply criticised by
many, but now so fully recognised as saintly by all, I ask you to
consider--

I. The stringent requirement for the Christian life that is here
made.

Now we shall very much impoverish the meaning and narrow the sweep
of these great and penetrating words, if we understand by 'losing
one's life' only the actual surrender of physical existence. It is
not only the martyr on whose bleeding brows the crown of life is
gently placed; it is not only the temples that have been torn by the
crown of thorns, that are soothed by that unfading wreath; but there
is a daily dying, which is continually required from all Christian
people, and is, perhaps, as hard as, or harder than, the brief and
bloody passage of martyrdom by which some enter into rest. For the
true losing of life is the slaying of self, and that has to be done
day by day, and not once for all, in some supreme act of surrender
at the end, or in some initial act of submission and yielding at the
beginning, of the Christian life. We ourselves have to take the
knife into our own hands and strike, and that not once, but ever,
right on through our whole career. For, by natural disposition, we
are all inclined to make our own selves to be our own centres, our
own aims, the objects of our trust, our own law; and if we do so, we
are dead whilst we live, and the death that brings life is when, day
by day, we 'crucify the old man with his affections and lusts.'
Crucifixion was no sudden death; it was an exquisitely painful one,
which made every nerve quiver and the whole frame thrill with
anguish; and that slow agony, in all its terribleness and
protractedness, is the image that is set before us as the true ideal
of every life that would not be a living death. The world is to be
crucified to me, and I to the world.

We have our centre in ourselves, and we need the centre to be
shifted, or we live in sin. If I might venture upon so violent an
image, the comets that career about the heavens need to be caught
and tamed, and bound to peaceful revolution round some central sun,
or else they are 'wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness
of darkness for ever.' So, brethren, the slaying of self by a
painful, protracted process, is the requirement of Christ.

But do not let us confine ourselves to generalities. What is meant?
This is meant--the absolute submission of the will to commandments
and providences, the making of that obstinate part of our nature
meek and obedient and plastic as the clay in the potter's hands. The
tanner takes a stiff hide, and soaks it in bitter waters, and
dresses it with sharp tools, and lubricates it with unguents, and
his work is not done till all the stiffness is out of it and it is
flexible. And we do not lose our lives in the lofty, noble sense,
until we can say--and verify the speech by our actions--'Not my will
but Thine be done.' They who thus submit, they who thus welcome into
their hearts, and enthrone upon the sovereign seat in their wills,
Christ and His will--these are they who have lost their lives. When
we can say, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,' then, and
only then, have we in the deepest sense of the words 'lost our
lives.'

The phrase means the suppression, and sometimes the excision, of
appetites, passions, desires, inclinations. It means the hallowing
of all aims; it means the devotion and the consecration of all
activities. It means the surrender and the stewardship of all
possessions. And only then, when we have done these things, shall we
have come to practical obedience to the initial requirement that
Christ makes from us all--to lose our lives for His sake.

I need not diverge here to point to that life from which my thoughts
have taken their start in this sermon. Surely if there was any one
characteristic in it more distinct and lovely than another, it was
that self was dead and that Christ lived. There may be sometimes a
call for the actual--which is the lesser--surrender of the bodily
life, in obedience to the call of duty. There have been Christian
men who have wrought themselves to death in the Master's service.
Perhaps he of whom I have been speaking was one of these. It may be
that, if he had done like so many of our wealthy men--had flung
himself into business and then collapsed into repose--he would have
been here to-day. Perhaps it would have been better if there had
been a less entire throwing of himself into arduous and clamant
duties. I am not going to enter on the ethics of that question. I do
not think there are many of this generation of Christians who are
likely to work themselves to death in Christ's cause; and perhaps,
after all, the old saying is a true one, 'Better to wear out than to
rust out.' But only this I will say: we honour the martyrs of
Science, of Commerce, of Empire, why should not we honour the
martyrs of Faith? And why should they be branded as imprudent
enthusiasts, if they make the same sacrifice which, when an explorer
or a soldier makes, his memory is honoured as heroic, and his cold
brows are crowned with laurels? Surely it is as wise to die for
Christ as for England. But be that as it may; the requirement, the
stringent requirement, of my text is not addressed to any spiritual
aristocracy, but is laid upon the consciences of all professing
Christians.

II. Observe the grounds of this requirement.

Did you ever think--or has the fact become so familiar to you that
it ceases to attract notice?--did you ever think what an
extraordinary position it is for the son of a carpenter in Nazareth
to plant Himself before the human race and say, 'You will be wise if
you die for My sake, and you will be doing nothing more than your
plain duty'? What business has He to assume such a position as that?
What warrants that autocratic and all-demanding tone from His lips?
'Who art Thou'--we may fancy people saying--'that Thou shouldst put
out a masterful hand and claim to take as Thine the life of my
heart?' Ah! brethren, there is but one answer: 'Who loved me, and
gave Himself for me.' The foolish, loving, impulsive apostle that
blurted out, before his time had come, 'I will lay down my life for
Thy sake,' was only premature; he was not mistaken. There needed
that His Lord should lay down His life for Peter's sake; and then He
had a right to turn to the apostle and say, 'Thou shalt follow Me
afterwards,' and 'lay down thy life for My sake.' The ground of
Christ's unique claim is Christ's solitary sacrifice. He who has
died for men, and He only, has the right to require the unconditional,
the absolute surrender of themselves, not only in the sacrifice of a
life that is submitted, but, if circumstances demand, in the sacrifice
of a death. The ground of the requirement is laid, first in the fact
of our Lord's divine nature, and second, in the fact that He who asks
my life has first of all given His.

But that same phrase, 'for My sake,' suggests--

III. The all-sufficient motive which makes such a loss of life
possible.

I suppose that there is nothing else that will wholly dethrone self
but the enthroning of Jesus Christ. That dominion is too deeply
rooted to be abolished by any enthusiasms, however noble they may
be, except the one that kindles its undying torch at the flame of
Christ's own love. God forbid that I should deny that wonderful and
lovely instances of self-oblivion may be found in hearts untouched
by the supreme love of Christ! But whilst I recognise all the beauty
of such, I, for my part, humbly venture to believe and assert that,
for the entire deliverance of a man from self-regard, the one
sufficient motive power is the reception into his opening heart of
the love of Jesus Christ.

Ah! brethren, you and I know how hard it is to escape from the
tyrannous dominion of self, and how the evil spirits that have taken
possession of us mock at all lesser charms than the name which
'devils fear and fly'; 'the Name that is above every name.' We have
tried other motives. We have sought to reprove our selfishness by
other considerations. Human love--which  itself is sometimes only
the love of self, seeking satisfaction from another--human love does
conquer it, but yet conquers it partially. The demons turn round
upon all other would-be exorcists, and say, 'Jesus we know ... but
who are ye?' It is only when the Ark is carried into the Temple that
Dagon falls prone before it. If you would drive self out of your
hearts--and if you do not it will slay you--if you would drive self
out, let Christ's love and sacrifice come in. And then, what no
brooms and brushes, no spades nor wheelbarrows, will ever do--namely,
cleanse out the filth that lodges there--the turning of the river in
will do, and float it all away. The one possibility for complete,
conclusive deliverance from the dominion and tyranny of Self is to
be found in the words 'For My sake.' Ah! brethren, I suppose there
are none of us so poor in earthly love, possessed or remembered, but
that we know the omnipotence of these words when whispered by beloved
lips, 'For My sake'; and Jesus Christ is saying them to us all.

IV. Lastly, notice the recompense of the stringent requirement.

'Shall find it,' and that finding, like the losing, has a twofold
reference and accomplishment: here and now, yonder and then.

Here and now, no man possesses himself till he has given himself to
Jesus Christ. Only then, when we put the reins into His hands, can we
coerce and guide the fiery steeds of passion and of impulse, And so
Scripture, in more than one place, uses a remarkable expression, when
it speaks of those that believe to the 'acquiring of their souls.'
You are not your own masters until you are Christ's servants; and
when you fancy yourselves to be most entirely your own masters, you
have promised yourselves liberty and have become the slave of
corruption. So if you would own yourselves, give yourselves away. And
such an one 'shall find' his life, here and now, in that all earthly
things will be sweeter and better. The altar sanctifies the gift.
When some pebble is plunged into a sunlit stream, the water brings
out the veined colourings of the stone that looked all dull and dim
when it was lying upon the bank. Fling your whole being, your wealth,
your activities, and everything, into that stream, and they will
flash in splendour else unknown. Did not my friend, of whom I have
been speaking, enjoy his wealth far more, when he poured it out like
water upon good causes, than if he had spent it in luxury and
self-indulgence? And shall we not find that everything is sweeter,
nobler, better, fuller of capacity to delight, if we give it all to
our Master? The stringent requirement of Christ is the perfection of
prudence. 'Who pleasure follows pleasure slays,' and who slays
pleasure finds a deeper and a holier delight. The keenest
epicureanism could devise no better means for sucking the last drop
of sweetness out of the clustering grapes of the gladnesses of
earth than to obey this stringent requirement, and so realise the
blessed promise, 'Whoso loseth his life for My sake shall find it.'
The selfish man is a roundabout fool. The self-devoted man, the
Christ-enthroning man, is the wise man.

And there will be the further finding hereafter, about which we
cannot speak. Only remember, how in a passage parallel with this of
my text, spoken when almost within sight of Calvary, our Lord laid
down not only the principle of His own life but the principle for
all His servants, when 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.' The solitary grain dropped into the furrow brings
forth a waving harvest. We may not, we need not, particularise, but
the life that is found at last is as the fruit an hundredfold of the
life that men called 'lost' and God called 'sown.'

'Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord; they rest from their
labours, and their works do follow them.'




THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM, AND THEIR REWARD


    'He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet
    shall receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth
    a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall
    receive a righteous man's reward. 42. And whosoever
    shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup
    of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I
    say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.'
    --MATT. x. 41, 42.

 There is nothing in these words to show whether they refer to the
present or to the future. We shall probably not go wrong if we
regard them as having reference to both. For all godliness has
'promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to
come,' and '_in_ keeping God's commandments,' as well as _for_
keeping them, 'there is great reward,' a reward realised in the
present, even although Death holds the keys of the treasure-house
in which the richest rewards are stored. No act of holy obedience
is here left without foretastes of joy, which, though they be but
'brooks by the way,' contain the same water of life which hereafter
swells to an ocean.

Some people tell us that it is defective morality in Christianity to
bribe men to be good by promising them Heaven, and that he who is
actuated by such a motive is selfish. Now that fantastic and
overstrained objection may be very simply answered by two
considerations: self-regard is not selfishness, and Christianity
does not propose the future reward as the motive for goodness. The
motive for goodness is love to Jesus Christ; and if ever there was a
man who did acts of Christian goodness only for the sake of what he
would get by them, the acts were not Christian goodness, because the
motive was wrong. But it is a piece of fastidiousness to forbid us
to reinforce the great Christian motive, which is love to Jesus
Christ, by the thought of the recompense of reward. It is a stimulus
and an encouragement of, not the motive for, goodness. This text
shows us that it is a subordinate motive, for it says that the
reception of a prophet, or of a righteous man, or of 'one of these
little ones,' which is rewardable, is the reception 'in the name of'
a prophet, a disciple, and so on, or, in other words, is the
recognising of the prophet, or the righteous man, or the disciple
for what he is, and because he is that, and not because of the
reward, receiving him with sympathy and solace and help.

So, with that explanation, let us look at these very remarkable
words of our text.

I. The first thing which I wish to observe in them is the three
classes of character which are dealt with--'prophet,' 'righteous
man,' 'these little ones.'

Now the question that I would suggest is this: Is there any meaning
in the order in which these are arranged? If so, what is it? Do we
begin at the bottom, or at the top? Have we to do with an ascending
or with a descending scale? Is the prophet thought to be greater
than the righteous man, or less? Is the righteous man thought to be
higher than the little one, or to be lower? The question is an
important one, and worth considering.

Now, at first sight, it certainly does look as if we had here to do
with a descending scale, as if we began at the top and went
downwards. A prophet, a man honoured with a distinct commission from
God to declare His will, is, in certain very obvious respects,
loftier than a man who is not so honoured, however pure and
righteous he may be. The dim and venerable figures, for insta

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