'Now when John had heard in the prison the works of
Christ, he sent two of his disciples, 3. And said unto
Him, Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for
another? 4. Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and
shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:
5. The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk,
the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead
are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached
to them. 6. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be
offended in Me. 7. And as they departed, Jesus began
to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went
ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with
the wind? 8. But what went ye out for to see? A man
clothed in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft
clothing are in kings' houses. 9. But what went ye out
for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more
than a prophet. 10. For this is he, of whom it is
written. Behold, I send My messenger before Thy face,
which shall prepare Thy way before Thee. 11. Verily I
say unto you, Among them that are born of women there
hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist:
notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of
heaven is greater than he. 12. And from the days of
John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven
suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
13. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until
John--And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which
was for to come. 16. He that hath ears to hear, let
him hear.'--MATT. xi. 2-15.
This text falls into two parts: the first, from verses 2-6
inclusive, giving us the faltering faith of the great witness, and
Christ's gentle treatment of the waverer; the second, from verse 7
to the end, giving the witness of Christ to John, exuberant in
recognition, notwithstanding his momentary hesitation.
I. We do not believe that this message of John's was sent for the sake
of strengthening his disciples' faith in Jesus as Messiah, nor that it
was merely meant as a hint to Jesus to declare Himself. The question
is John's. The answer is sent to him: it is he who is to ponder the
things which the messengers saw, and to answer his own question
thereby. The note which the evangelist prefixes to his account
gives the key to the incident. John was 'in prison,' in that gloomy
fortress of Machaerus which Herod had rebuilt at once for 'a sinful
pleasure-house' and for an impregnable refuge, among the savage cliffs
of Moab. The halls of luxurious vice and the walls of defence are gone;
but the dungeons are there still, with the holes in the masonry into
which the bars were fixed to which the prisoners--John, perhaps, one of
them--were chained. No wonder that in the foul atmosphere of a dark
dungeon the spirit which had been so undaunted in the free air of the
desert began to flag; nor that even he who had seen the fluttering dove
descend on Christ's head, and had pointed to Him as the Lamb of God,
felt that 'all his mind was clouded with a doubt.' It would have been
wiser if commentators, instead of trying to save John's credit at the
cost of straining the narrative, had recognised the psychological truth
of the plain story of his wavering conviction and had learned its
lessons of self-distrust. There is only one Man with whom it was always
high-water; all others have ebbs and flows in their religious life, and
variations in their grasp of truth.
The narrative further gives the motive for John's embassy, in the
report which had reached him of 'the works of Christ.' We need only
recall John's earlier testimony to understand how these works would
not seem to him to fill up the role which he had anticipated for
Messiah. Where is the axe that was to be laid at the root of the
trees, or the fan that was to winnow out the chaff? Where is the
fiery spirit which he had foretold? This gentle Healer is not the
theocratic judge of his warning prophecies. He is tending and
nurturing, rather than felling, the barren trees. A nimbus of
merciful deeds, not of flashing 'wrath to come,' surrounds His head.
So John began to wonder if, after all, he had been premature in his
recognition. Perhaps this Jesus was but a precursor, as he himself
was, of the Messiah. Evidently he continues firm in the conviction
of Christ's being sent from God, and is ready to accept His answer
as conclusive; but, as evidently, he is puzzled by the contrariety
between Jesus' deeds and his own expectations. He asks, 'Art Thou
_He that cometh_'--a well-known name for Messiah--'or are we to
expect another?' where it should be noted that the word for
'another' means not merely a second, but a different kind of,
person, who should present the aspects of the Messiah as revealed in
prophecy, and as embodied in John's own preaching, which Jesus had
left unfulfilled.
We may well take to heart the lesson of the fluctuations possible to
the firmest faith, and pray to be enabled to hold fast that we have.
We may learn, too, the danger to right conceptions of Christ, of
separating the two elements of mercy and judgment in His character
and work. John was right in believing that the Christ must come to
judge. A Christ without the fan in His hand is a maimed Christ. John
was wrong in stumbling at the gentleness, just as many to-day, who
go to the opposite extreme, are wrong in stumbling at the judicial
side of His work. Both halves are needed to make the full-orbed
character. We have not to 'look for a different' Christ, but we have
to look for Him, coming the second time, the same Jesus, but now
with His axe in His pierced hands, to hew down trees which He has
patiently tended. Let John's profound sense of the need for a
judicial aspect in the Christ who is to meet the prophecies written
in men's hearts, as well as in Scripture, teach us how one-sided and
superficial are representations of His work which suppress or slur
over His future coming to judgment.
Our Lord does not answer 'Yes' or 'No.' To do so might have stilled,
but would not have removed, John's misconception. A more thorough
cure is needed. So Christ attacks it in its roots by referring him
back for answer to the very deeds which had excited his doubt. In
doing so, He points to, or indeed, we may say, quotes, two prophetic
passages (Isa. xxxv. 5, 6; lxi. 1) which give the prophetic 'notes' of
Messiah. It is as if He had said, 'Have you forgotten that the very
prophets whose words have fed your hopes, and now seem to minister to
your doubts, have said this and this about the Messiah?' Further,
there is deep wisdom in sending John back again to think over the very
deeds at which he was stumbling. It is not Christ's work which is
wanting in conformity to the divine idea; it is John's conceptions of
that idea that need enlarging. What he wants is not so much to be told
that Jesus is the Christ, as to grow up to a truer, because more
comprehensive, notion of what the Christ is to be. A wide principle is
taught us here. The very points in Christ's work which may occasion
difficulty, will, when we stand at the right point of view, become
evidences of His claims. What were stumbling-blocks become
stepping-stones. Arguments against become proofs of, the truth when we
look at them with clearer eyes, and from the proper angle. Further, we
are taught here, that what Christ does is the best answer to the
question as to who He is. Still He is doing these works among us.
Darkened eyes are flooded with light by His touch, and see a new
world, because they gaze with faith on Him. Lame limbs are endowed
with strength, and can run in the way of His commandments, and walk
with unfainting perseverance the thorniest paths of duty and
self-sacrifice. Lepers are cleansed from the rotting leprosy of sin,
and their flesh comes again, 'as the flesh of a little child.' Deaf
ears hear the voice of the Son of God, and the dead who hear live.
Good news is preached to all the poor in spirit, and whosoever knows
himself to be in need of all things may claim all things as his own in
Christ. He who through the ages has been working such works, and works
them still, 'needs not to speak anything' to confirm His claims,
'neither is there salvation in any other.' We look for no second
Christ; but we look for that same Jesus to come the second time to be
the Judge of the world of which He is the Saviour.
The benediction on him who finds none occasion of stumbling in
Christ, is at once a beatitude and a warning. It rebukes in the
gentlest fashion John's temper, which found difficulty in even the
perfect personality of Jesus, and made that which should have been
the 'sure foundation' of his spirit a stone of stumbling. Our Lord's
consciousness of absolute perfection of moral character, and of
absolute perfectness in His office and work, is distinct in the
words. He knows that 'there is none occasion of stumbling in Him,'
and that whoever finds any, brings it or makes it. He knows and
warns us that all blessedness lies for us in recognising Him for
what He is--God's sure foundation of our hopes, our peace, our
thoughts, our lives. He knows that all woe and loss are involved in
stumbling on this stone, against which whosoever falls is broken,
and by which, when it begins to move, and falls on a man, he is
ground to powder, like the dust of the threshing-floor. What
tremendous arrogance of assertion! Who is he who can venture on such
words without blasphemy against God, and universal ridicule from
men?
II. The witness of Christ to John. Praise from Jesus is praise
indeed; and it is poured out here with no stinted hand on the
languishing prisoner whose doubts had just been brought to Him. Such
an eulogium at such a time is a wonderful instance of loving
forbearance with a true-hearted follower's weakness, and of a desire
which, in a man, we should call magnanimous, to shield John's
character from depreciation on account of his message. The world
praises a man to his face, and speaks of his faults behind his back.
Christ does the opposite. Not till the messengers were departing
does He begin to speak 'concerning John.' He lays bare the secret of
the Baptist's power, and allocates his place as greatest in one
epoch and as less than the least in another, with an authority more
than human, and on principles which set Himself high above all
comparison with men, whether the greatest or the least. The King
places His subjects, and Himself sits enthroned above them all.
First, Christ praises John's great personal character in the
dramatic and vivid questions which begin this section. He recalls
the scenes of popular enthusiasm when all Israel streamed out to the
desert preacher. A small man could not have made such an upheaval.
What drew the crowds? Just what will draw them; the qualities
without which, either possessed in reality or in popular estimation,
no man can be a power religiously. The first essential is heroic
firmness. It was not reeds swaying in the wind by Jordan's banks,
nor a poor feeble man like these, that the people flocked to listen
to. His emblem was not the reed, but 'an iron pillar.' His whole
career had been marked by decisiveness, constancy, courage. Nothing
can be done worth doing in the world without a wholesome obstinacy
and imperturbability, which keep a man true to his convictions and
his task, whatever winds blow in his teeth. The multitudes will not
flock to listen to a teacher who does not speak with the accent of
conviction, nor will truths feebly grasped touch the lips with fire.
The first requisite for a religious teacher is that he shall be sure
of his message and of himself. Athanasius has to 'stand against the
world' before the world accepts his teaching. 'Though there were as
many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the house-tops, go I
will,' said Luther. That is the temper for God's instruments.
The next requisite, which John also had, is manifest indifference to
material ease. Silken courtiers do not haunt the desert. Kings'
houses, and not either the wilderness or kings' dungeons, are the
sunny spots where they spread their plumage. If the gaunt ascetic,
with his girdle of camel's hair and his coarse fare, had been a
self-indulgent sybarite, his voice would never have shaken a nation.
The least breath of suspicion that a preacher is such a man ends his
power, and ought to end it; for self-indulgence and the love of
fleshly comforts eat the heart out of goodness, and make the eyes
too heavy to see visions. John was the same man then as they had
known him to be; therefore it was no impatience of the hardships of
his prison that had inspired his doubts.
Our Lord next speaks of John's great office. He was a prophet. The
dim recognition that God spoke in His fiery words had drawn the
crowds, weary of teachers in whose endless jangle and jargon of
casuistry was no inspiration. The voice of a man who gets his
message at first-hand from God has a ring in it which even dull ears
detect as something genuine. Alas for the bewildering babble of
echoes and the paucity of voices to-day!
So far Jesus had been appealing to His hearers' knowledge; He now
goes on to add higher truth concerning John. He declares that he is
more than a prophet, because he is His messenger before His face;
that is, immediately preceding Himself. We cannot stay to comment on
the remarkable variation between the original form of the quotation
from Malachi and Christ's version of it, which, in its substitution
of 'thee' for 'me,' bears so forcibly on the divinity of Christ; but
we may mark the principle on which John's superiority to the whole
prophetic order is based. It is that nearness to Jesus makes
greatness. The closer the relation to Him, the higher the honour. In
that long procession the King comes last; and of 'them that go
before, crying, Hosanna to Him that cometh,' the order of precedence
is that the first are last, and that the highest is he who walks in
front of the Sovereign.
Next, we have the limitations of the forerunner and his relative
inferiority to the least in the kingdom of heaven. Another standard
of greatness is here from that of the world, which smiles at the
contrast between the uncultured preacher of repentance and the
mighty thinkers, poets, legislators, kingdom-makers, whom it enrols
among the great. In Christ's eyes greatness is nearness to Him, and
understanding of Him and His work. Neither natural faculty nor worth
is in question, but simply relation to the Kingdom and the King. He
who had only to preach of Him who should come after him, and had but
a partial apprehension of Christ and His work, stood on a lower
level than the least who has to look to a Christ who has come, and
has opened the gates of the kingdom to the humblest believer. The
truths which were hid from ages, and were but visible as in morning
twilight to John, are sunlit to us. The scholars in our Sunday-schools
know familiarly more than prophets and kings ever knew. We 'hold the
grey barbarian lower than the Christian child'; and not merely he, but
the wisest of the prophets, and the forerunner himself. The history of
the world is parted into two by the coming of Jesus Christ, as every
dictionary of dates tells, and the least of the greater is greater than
the greatest of the less. What a place, then, does Christ claim! Our
relation to Him determines greatness. To recognise Him is to be in the
Kingdom of Heaven. Union to Him brings us to fulfil the ideal of human
nature; and this is life, to know and trust Him, the King.
Our Lord adds a brief characterisation of the effect of John's
ministry. It was of mingled good and evil, and there is a tone of
sadness perceptible in the ambiguous words. John had aroused great
popular excitement, and had stirred multitudes to seek to enter the
Kingdom. So far was good. But had all the crowds understood what sort
of kingdom it was? Had they not too often dragged down the lofty
conception to their own vulgar level, and, with their dream of an
outward sovereignty, thought to gain it for their own by violence
instead of meekness, by arms and worldly force rather than by
submission? The earnestness was good, but Christ's sad insight saw
how much strange fire had mingled in the blaze, as if some earth-born
smoky flame should seek to blend with the pure sunlight. Such seems
the most natural interpretation of the words, but they are ambiguous,
and may possibly mean by 'the violent' those who had been roused to
genuine earnestness by the clarion voice which rang in the ears of
that slumbering generation.
Then follows the explanation of this new interest in the kingdom.
'All the prophets and the law prophesied until John.' The whole
period till his coming was one of preparation, and it all converged
on the epoch of the forerunner. The eagerness to flock into the
Kingdom which characterised his time would have been impossible in
the earlier days. He closes that order of things, standing, as it
were, on the isthmus between prophecy and fulfilment, belonging
properly to neither, but having affinities with both, and being the
transition from the one to the other. Then our Lord closes His words
concerning John with the distinct statement, which He expects His
hearers to have difficulty in receiving, probably from the
contradiction to it which John's present condition seemed to give,
that in him was fulfilled Malachi's prophecy of the sending of
'Elijah the prophet before ... day of the Lord.' The fiery Tishbite,
gaunt and grim, ascetic and solitary, who bearded Ahab, and flamed
across a corrupt age with a stern message of repentance or
destruction, was repeated in the lonely ascetic who had his Ahab in
Herod, and his Jezebel in Herodias, and like his prototype, knew no
fear, but flashed out the lightnings of his words on every sin. The
two men were brothers, and their voices answer each other across the
centuries. Christ crowns His witness to John while thus quoting the
last swansong of ancient prophecy, and thereby at once sets John on
a pinnacle of greatness, and advances a claim concerning Himself all
the more weighty, because He leaves it to be inferred. 'He that hath
ears to hear, let him hear'--this eulogium on the forerunner needs
to be reflected on ere all its bearings are seen. If John was Elias,
the day of the Lord was at hand, and 'the Sun of Righteousness' was
already above the horizon. Jesus' witness concerning John ends in
witness concerning Himself.