According to the words of my text, the larger number of the miracles
of our Lord were wrought in these three places. 'Cities,' our Bible
calls them; two of them were little fishing villages, the third a
somewhat considerable town. Where are these miracles recorded? Not
in our gospels. As for Chorazin, we never hear its name except in
this verse, and in the parallel in Luke's Gospel; and all that He
did there is swallowed up in oblivion. As for Bethsaida, there are a
couple of miracles, probably, recorded as having been wrought there,
though there is some obscurity in reference to the locality of at
least one of them. As for Capernaum, there are several miracles
recorded as having been performed in that place, and several others
referred to as having been done there. But there is nothing in the
four gospels that would suggest the statement of the text.
Now the inference (which has nothing to do with my present subject,
but which I just note in passing) is,--how extremely fragmentary and
incomplete these four gospels avowedly are! They harvest for us a
few ears plucked in the great waving cornfield,--and all the others
withered and died where they grew. The light falls upon one or two
groups in the crowd of miserables whom He helped, the rest lie in
dim shadow. You have to think of dozens, I suppose I should not be
exaggerating if I were to say hundreds, of miracles unrecorded but
known, lying behind the specimens that we have in the gospels. 'Many
other things truly did Jesus, which are not written in this book.'
Our Lord takes these two little fishing villages, and He parallels
and contrasts them with the two great maritime cities of Tyre and
Sidon, and says that these insignificant places have far more light
than those had. Then He isolates Capernaum, a place of more
importance, and His own usual settled residence; and, in like
manner, He contrasts it with the long-buried Sodom, and proclaims
the superiority of the illumination which fell on the more modern
three. Why were they so superior? Because they had Moses? because
they had the prophets, the law, the temple, the priesthood? By no
means. Because they had _Him_. So He sets Himself forth as
being the highest and clearest of all the revelations that God has
made to the world, and asserts that in Him, in His character, in His
deeds, men ought to find motives that should bow them in penitence
before God; motives sweeter, tenderer, stronger than any that the
world knows besides. There is no such light of the knowledge of the
glory of God anywhere else as there is in the face of Jesus Christ.
And oh! brother; no thoughts of the nobleness of rectitude, and the
imperfection of one's own life, no thoughts of a divine justice and
a divine punishment, will bow a man in penitence like having once
caught a glimpse of the perfect sweetness and perfect beauty of the
perfect Humanity that is revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
But now, mark;--as Capernaum is to Sodom, so is Manchester to
Capernaum! I wonder if Jesus Christ were to come amongst us now,
whether He would not repeat in spirit the same lesson that is in my
text, and bid us contrast our greater illumination with the morning
twilight that dawned upon these men, and yet was light enough to
bring condemnation? Think,--these people of whom our Lord is
speaking here, and setting them high above Tyre and Sidon and Sodom,
knew nothing about His cross, death, resurrection, ascension. They
knew Him only as 'a dubious Name,' as a possible Divine Messenger
and a Miracle-worker; but all the sweetest and the deepest thoughts
about Him lay unrevealed. Whilst they stood but in the morning
twilight, you and I stand in the noonday blaze. _They_ might be
pardoned for doubting whether the light that shone from Him was
sunshine or candle, but men of this twentieth century, who have the
whole story of Christ, which is the gospel for the world, wrought
out through all the tragedy and pathos of His death, and triumph and
power of His resurrection, and who have, besides, the history of the
world and of the Church for nineteen centuries, are more
unpardonable unless they listen to Him with penitence and faith,
than were any of His contemporaries.
My brother, we stand in the very focus and fountain, as it were, of
the heavenly radiance. A whole Christ, a crucified Christ, a risen
Christ, an ascended Christ, a Christ who is the Lord of the Spirit,
a Christ who through the centuries is saving and blessing men, a
Christ who can point to nineteen hundred years and say, 'That is My
work, in so far as it is good and noble,'--this Christ shines with a
clearer evidence than the Miracle-worker of Capernaum and Bethsaida.
And to you the word comes, 'If the mighty works which have been done
in _thee_, had been done in Bethsaida and Chorazin, they would
have remained until this day.'
There are many of you here saturated with the knowledge of the
gospel, who from childhood have heard it and heard it and heard it.
You have lived in the light all your days. Alas! 'If the light that
is' round 'thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!'
II. That brings me in the next place to notice the negligent
indifference to the Light in all its blaze.
The men of these three little fishing towns were not sinners above
all the Galileans of their day. Their crime was that they did
nothing. No persecution is recorded as having been raised against
Him by them; there were no angry antagonisms, no scornful words, no
violent opposition. They simply stolidly stood like some black rock
in the sunshine, and let the sunshine pour down upon them, and
remained grim and black as ever. That was all.
That is to say, the thing that brings down the severest rebuke is not
the angry antagonism of the men who are contending in half-darkness,
with a misunderstood and therefore disliked Christ, but the sleek,
passive apathy that is never touched deeper than its ears by the
message of God's word. It is not a difficult thing to incur this
condemnation. You have simply to do what some of you are doing, and
have been doing all your lives, as to Christianity, and that is--nothing!
You have simply to acquiesce politely and respectfully, as many of you
do, and say you are Christians; and there an end. You have simply to
take my words (as I fear so many of those that listen to them do) as
matters of course, the proper things to be said on a Sunday, and for me
to say, which may be very true in some vague, general way, but which
have no felt application to _you_. That is all you have to do.
It is quite enough. Negative vices will ruin a man, in mind, body, and
estate; and the negative sin of simple indifference avails to put a
barrier between you and Jesus Christ, through which none of His blessing
can filter. If a sailor does _not_ lash himself to something fixed,
the next sea that comes across the deck will do the rest. If a sick man
does _not_ take the medicine, by doing nothing he has committed
suicide. And simple passivity, that is to say (to translate it out
of Latin into good, honest English), doing nothing, is all that is
needed in order to part you from Christ and Christ from you. He
'upbraided the cities because they repented _not_.'
One can fancy some well-to-do and thoroughly respectable and
clean-living native of Capernaum saying, 'What! those foul beasts in
Sodom better off than I? Impossible!' Well, Jesus Christ says so
upon very intelligible grounds. The measure of light is the measure
of responsibility. That is one ground. And the not preferring Him is
the preferring of self and the world, and that is the sin of sins.
He will 'convince the world of sin because they believe not on Me.'
Now, one more point, viz. this gelatinous kind of indifference, as
of a disposition not stiff enough to take any impression, is found
most deeply seated, and hopeless, amongst--shall I venture?--amongst
people like _you_, who have been listening, listening, listening, until
your systems have become so habituated to this Christian preaching
that it does not produce the least effect. It all runs off you like
rain off waterproof. You have waterproofed your consciences and your
spiritual susceptibilities by long habit of listening and doing nothing.
And some of you have come to this point, that you positively rather
like the titillation and excitement, slight though it may be, which
is produced by coming in contact now and then with a good, wholesome,
rousing Christian appeal. Not that you ever intend to do anything,
but it is pleasant to see a man in earnest, and preaching as if he
believed what he was saying. And so perhaps some of you are feeling
here to-night.
Ah! my dear friends, it is possible for a man to live by the side of
Niagara until he cannot hear the cataract; and it is an awful thing
for men and women to live under the sound of Christian teaching
until it produces no more effect upon their wills and natures than
the ringing of the church bells, to which they pay no attention.
You do not know the despair that comes over us preachers time after
time, as we look down upon the faces of our congregations, and feel,
'What _shall_ I do to put a sharp enough point upon this truth
to get it into the heart of some man that has been sitting there as
long as I have been standing here, and is never a bit the better for
it?' Our most earnest preaching is like putting a red-hot iron into
a pond: the cold water puts it out and closes above it, and there is
no more heard nor seen of it. Our old Puritan forefathers used to
talk about 'gospel-hardened hearers.' I believe that there are
people listening to me now who have become so inured to Christian
preaching that, like artillery horses, they will not move a muscle
or quiver if a whole battery of cannon is fired off under their
noses. God knows I despair sometimes, many a time, when I think of
the hundreds of people to whom I speak, year after year, and how
there seems next to nothing in the world to come of it all.
III. Now lastly, notice here the rebuke of this negligence of the
light.
'He began to upbraid the cities.' But oh! we shall misunderstand Him
and His purpose if we think that that upbraiding was anything but
the sorrowful expression of His own loving heart, which warned of
what was coming in order that He might never need to send it.
'_Woe_ unto you; _woe_ unto you,' and His own lips quivered and His own
heart felt the woe, as He laid bare the sin and foreannounced the
retribution.
I do not feel that I dare dwell upon, or that it beseems me to say
much about, this solemn thought. Only, dear friends, I do desire, if
I could, to wake some of you to look realities for once in the face,
and to be sure of this, that retribution is proportioned to light,
and that the sin of sins is the rejection of Jesus Christ. Beneath
the broad folds of that 'more tolerable' there lie infinite degrees
of retribution. The same deed done by a group of men may be
indefinitely varied in its culpability, according to the motives and
the clearness of knowledge which accompany or prompt the doing of
it. And so, just because the life beyond is the accurate outcome and
issue of the whole character and conduct, estimated according to
motive and knowledge, therefore there must be differences infinitely
wide between the fate of the servant that knew his Lord's will, and
the servant that knew not.
Where do you think we gospel-drenched English men and women will
stand in that allocation of culpability? I do not presume to say
more, but I beseech you,--let no present controversies about the
duration and the possible termination of retribution in another
state, or the possible prolongation of a probation into another
state, blind you to the fact that however these questions be
settled, this is a truth, independent of them, but being forgotten
amidst the dust of controversy, that the next life is a life of
retribution, and that there you and I will give account of our
deeds, and chiefly of our attitude to Jesus.
And now let me say, in one word,--hoisting the danger-signal is the
work of kindness, and Jesus Christ was never more loving than when
from His lips there came these words, heavy with His own sorrow, and
stern with the prophecy of retribution. I know that Christian
teachers have often spoken of the solemn things beyond, in tones
much to be deplored, and which weaken the force of their message.
But surely, surely, if we believe in a judgment to come, and if we
believe that some of those that listen to us are in peril of it,
surely, surely, the plainest duty is that with tears in our voice
and pleading tenderness in our tone, seeing the sword coming, we
should give warning, and beseech men to flee for refuge to the hope
of the Gospel. The solemn words that we have been looking at now,
lead up to, and are intended to make more impressive and gracious,
the invitation with which this chapter ends: 'Come unto Me, all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'
Dear friends, we stand in the blaze of the light. Our familiarity
with Jesus Christ may be our ruin. We are tempted to pay no heed to
His words because we know them so well. Neglect of Christ on your
part will bring deeper woes on your head than the people of
Capernaum pulled down upon theirs. The brighter the sunshine, the
louder the thunder and the fiercer the lightning; the longer the
summer day, the longer the winter night; the closer the comet comes
to the sun, the further away it plunges, at the other extremity of
its orbit, into space and darkness. So I beseech you, listen as if
you had never heard it before, and listen as if your lives depended
upon it (as indeed they do) to that merciful invitation, 'Come unto
Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,' and then you will get
rest for your souls here, and at that day when Sodom and Capernaum
and Manchester--they and we--shall stand before His throne, you may
lift up your eyes, and be glad to see who it is that sits on the
tribunal, and that you learned to know and love the face of your
Saviour, before you saw Him enthroned as your Judge.