'And the Pharisees went forth, and straightway took counsel with the
Herodlans against Him, how they might destroy Him. 7. But Jesus
withdrew Himself with His disciples to the sea: and a great multitude
from Galilee followed Him, and from Judæa 8. And from Jerusalem, and
from Idumæa beyond Jordan; and they about Tyre and Sidon, a great
multitude, when they had heard what great things He did, came unto
Him. 9. And He spake to His disciples, that a small ship should wait
on Him because of the multitude, lest they should throng Him. 10. For
he had healed many; insomuch that they pressed upon Him for to touch
Him, as many as had plagues. 11. And unclean spirits, when they saw
Him, fell down before Him, and cried, saying, Thou art the Son of God.
12. And He straitly charged them that they should not make Him known.
13. And He goeth up into a mountain, and calleth unto Him whom He
would: and they came unto Him. 14. And He ordained twelve, that they
should be with Him, and that He might send them forth to preach, 15.
And to have power to heal sicknesses, and to cast out devils: 16. And
Simon He surnamed Peter; 17. And James the son of Zebedee, and John
the brother of James; and He surnamed them Boanerges, which is, The
sons of thunder: 18. And Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and
Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphæus Thaddæus Simon the
Canaanite, 19. And Judas Iscariot, which also betrayed Him: and they
went into an house.'--Mark iii. 6-19.
A common object of hatred cements antagonists into strange alliance.
Hawks and kites join in assailing a dove. Pharisees and Herod's
partisans were antipodes; the latter must have parted with all their
patriotism and much of their religion, but both parties were ready to
sink their differences in order to get rid of Jesus, whom they
instinctively felt to threaten destruction to them both. Such
alliances of mutually repellent partisans against Christ's cause are
not out of date yet. Extremes join forces against what stands in the
middle between them.
Jesus withdrew from the danger which was preparing, not from selfish
desire to preserve life, but because His 'hour' was not yet come.
Discretion is sometimes the better part of valour. To avoid peril is
right, to fly from duty is not. There are times when Luther's 'Here I
stand; I can do nothing else; God help me! Amen,' must be our motto;
and there are times when the persecuted in one city are bound to flee
to another. We shall best learn to distinguish between these times by
keeping close to Jesus.
But side by side with official hatred, and in some measure the cause
of it, was a surging rush of popular enthusiasm. Pharisees took
offence at Christ's breaches of law in his Sabbath miracles. The crowd
gaped at the wonders, and grasped at the possibility of cures for
their afflicted. Neither party in the least saw below the surface.
Mark describes two 'multitudes'--one made up of Galileans who, he
accurately says, 'followed Him'; while the other 'came to Him' from
further afield. Note the geographical order in the list: the southern
country of Judea, and the capital; then the trans-Jordanic territories
beginning with Idumea in the south, and coming northward to Perea; and
then the north-west bordering lands of Tyre and Sidon. Thus three
parts of a circle round Galilee as centre are described. Observe,
also, how turbid and impure the full stream of popular enthusiasm was.
Christ's gracious, searching, illuminating words had no attraction for
the multitude. 'The great things He _did_' drew them with idle
curiosity or desire for bodily healing. Still more impure was the
motive which impelled the 'evil spirits' to approach Him, drawn by a
strange fascination to gaze on Him whom they knew to be their
conqueror, and hated as the Son of God. Terror and malice drove them
to His presence, and wrung from them acknowledgment of His supremacy.
What intenser pain can any hell have than the clear recognition of
Christ's character and power, coupled with fiercely obstinate and
utterly vain rebellion against Him?
Note, further, our Lord's recoil from the tumult. He had retired
before cunning plotters; He withdrew from gaping admirers, who did not
know what they were crowding to, nor cared for His best gifts. It was
no fastidious shrinking from low natures, nor any selfish wish for
repose, that made Him take refuge in the fisherman's little boat. But
His action teaches us a lesson that the best Christian work is
hindered rather than helped by the 'popularity' which dazzles many,
and is often mistaken for success. Christ's motive for seeking to
check rather than to stimulate such impure admiration, was that it
would certainly increase the rulers' antagonism, and might even excite
the attention of the Roman authorities, who had to keep a very sharp
outlook for agitations among their turbulent subjects. Therefore
Christ first took to the boat, and then withdrew into the hills above
the lake.
In that seclusion He summoned to Him a small nucleus, as it would
appear, by individual selection. These would be such of the
'multitude' as He had discerned to be humble souls who yearned for
deliverance from worse than outward diseases or bondage, and who
therefore waited for a Messiah who was more than a physician or a
patriot warrior. A personal call and a personal yielding make true
disciples. Happy we if our history can be summed up in 'He called them
unto Him, and they came.' But there was an election within the chosen
circle.
The choice of the Twelve marks an epoch in the development of Christ's
work, and was occasioned, at this point of time, by both the currents
which we find running so strong at this point in it. Precisely because
Pharisaic hatred was becoming so threatening, and popular enthusiasm
was opening opportunities which He singly could not utilise, He felt
His need both for companions and for messengers. Therefore He
surrounded Himself with that inner circle, and did it then, The
appointment of the Apostles has been treated by some as a masterpiece
of organisation, which largely contributed to the progress of
Christianity, and by others as an endowment of the Twelve with
supernatural powers which are transmitted on certain outward
conditions to their successors, and thereby give effect to sacraments,
and are the legitimate channels for grace. But if we take Mark's
statement of their function, our view will be much simpler. The number
of twelve distinctly alludes to the tribes of Israel, and implies that
the new community is to be the true people of God.
The Apostles were chosen for two ends, of which the former was
preparatory to the latter. The latter was the more important and
permanent, and hence gave the office its name. They were to be 'with
Christ,' and we may fairly suppose that He wished that companionship
for His own sake as well as for theirs. No doubt, the primary purpose
was their training for their being sent forth to preach. But no doubt,
also, the lonely Christ craved for companions, and was strengthened
and soothed by even the imperfect sympathy and unintelligent love of
these humble adherents. Who can fail to hear tones which reveal how
much He hungered for companions in His grateful acknowledgment, 'Ye
are they which have continued with Me in My temptations'? It still
remains true that we must be 'with Christ' much and long before we can
go forth as His messengers.
Note, too, that the miracle-working power comes last as least
important. Peter had understood his office better than some of his
alleged successors, when he made its qualification to be having been
with Jesus during His life, and its office to be that of being
witnesses of His resurrection (Acts i.).
The list of the Apostles presents many interesting points, at which we
can only glance. If compared with the lists in the other Gospels and
in Acts, it brings out clearly the division into three groups of four
persons each. The order in which the four are named varies within the
limits of each group; but none of the first four are ever in the lists
degraded to the second or third group, and none of these are ever
promoted beyond their own class. So there were apparently degrees
among the Twelve, depending, no doubt, on spiritual receptivity, each
man being as close to the Lord, and gifted with as much of the
sunshine of His love, as he was fit for.
Further, their places in relation to each other vary. The first four
are always first, and Peter is always at their head; but in Matthew
and Luke, the pairs of brothers are kept together, while, in Mark,
Andrew is parted from his brother Simon, and put last of the first
four. That place indicates the closer relation of the other three to
Jesus, of which several instances will occur to every one. But Mark
puts James before John, and his list evidently reflects the memory of
the original superiority of James as probably the elder. There was a
time when John was known as 'James's brother.' But the time came, as
Acts shows, when John took precedence, and was closely linked with
Peter as the two leaders. So the ties of kindred may be loosened, and
new bonds of fellowship created by similarity of relation to Jesus. In
His kingdom, the elder may fall behind the younger. Rank in it depends
on likeness to the king.
The surname of Boanerges, 'Sons of Thunder,' given to the brothers,
can scarcely be supposed to commemorate a characteristic prior to
discipleship. Christ does not perpetuate old faults in his servants'
new names. It must rather refer to excellences which were heightened
and hallowed in them by following Jesus. Probably, therefore, it
points to a certain majesty of utterance. Do we not hear the boom of
thunder-peals in the prologue to John's Gospel, perhaps the grandest
words ever written?
In the second quartet, Bartholomew is probably Nathanael; and, if so,
his conjunction with Philip is an interesting coincidence with John i.
45, which tells that Philip brought him to Jesus. All three Gospels
put the two names together, as if the two men had kept up their
association; but, in Acts, Thomas takes precedence of Bartholomew, as
if a closer spiritual relationship had by degrees sprung up between
Philip, the leader of the second group, and Thomas, which slackened
the old bond. Note that these two, who are coupled in Acts, are two of
the interlocutors in the final discourses in the upper room (John
xiv.). Mark, like Luke, puts Matthew before Thomas; but Matthew puts
himself last, and adds his designation of 'publican,'--a beautiful
example of humility.
The last group contains names which have given commentators trouble. I
am not called on to discuss the question of the identity of the James
who is one of its members. Thaddeus is by Luke called Judas, both in
his Gospel and in the Acts; and by Matthew, according to one reading,
Lebbaeus. Both names are probably surnames, the former being probably
derived from a word meaning _breast_, and the latter from one
signifying _heart_. They seem, therefore, to be nearly equivalent, and
may express large-heartedness.
Simon 'the Canaanite' (Auth. Ver.) is properly 'the Cananæan' (Rev.
Ver.). There was no alien in blood among the Twelve. The name is a
late Aramaic word meaning _zealot_. Hence Luke translates it for
Gentile readers. He was one of the fanatical sect who would not have
anything to do with Rome, and who played such a terrible part in the
final catastrophe of Israel. The baser elements were purged out of his
fiery enthusiasm when he became Christ's man. The hallowing and
curbing of earthly passion, the ennobling of enthusiasm, are achieved
when the pure flame of love to Christ burns up their dross.
Judas Iscariot closes the list, cold and venomous as a snake.
Enthusiasm in him there was none. The problem of his character is too
complex to be entered on here. But we may lay to heart the warning
that, if a man is not knit to Christ by heart's love and obedience,
the more he comes into contact with Jesus the more will he recoil from
Him, till at last he is borne away by a passion of detestation. Christ
is either a sure foundation or a stone of stumbling.
'HE IS BESIDE HIMSELF'
'And when His friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on Him:
for they said, He is beside Himself'--Mark iii. 21.
There had been great excitement in the little town of Capernaum in
consequence of Christ's teachings and miracles. It had been
intensified by His infractions of the Rabbinical Sabbath law, and by
His appointment of the twelve Apostles. The sacerdotal party in
Capernaum apparently communicated with Jerusalem, with the result of
bringing a deputation from the Sanhedrim to look into things, and see
what this new rabbi was about. A plot for His assassination was
secretly on foot. And at this juncture the incident of my text, which
we owe to Mark alone of the Evangelists, occurs. Christ's friends,
apparently the members of His own family--sad to say, as would appear
from the context, including His mother--came with a kindly design to
rescue their misguided kinsman from danger, and laying hands upon Him,
to carry Him off to some safe restraint in Nazareth, where He might
indulge His delusions without doing any harm to Himself. They wish to
excuse His eccentricities on the ground that He is not quite
responsible--scarcely Himself; and so to blunt the point of the more
hostile explanation of the Pharisees that He is in league with
Beelzebub.
Conceive of that! The Incarnate Wisdom shielded by friends from the
accusation that He is a demoniac by the apology that He is a lunatic!
What do you think of popular judgment?
But this half-pitying, half-contemptuous, and wholly benevolent excuse
for Jesus, though it be the words of friends, is like the words of His
enemies, in that it contains a distorted reflection of His true
character. And if we will think about it, I fancy that we may gather
from it some lessons not altogether unprofitable.
I. The first point, then, that I make, is just this--there was
something in the character of Jesus Christ which could be plausibly
explained to commonplace people as madness.
A well-known modern author has talked a great deal about 'the sweet
reasonableness of Jesus Christ.' His contemporaries called it simple
insanity; if they did not say 'He hath a devil,' as well as 'He is
mad.'
Now, if we try to throw ourselves back to the life of Jesus Christ, as
it was unfolded day by day, and think nothing about either what
preceded in the revelation of the Old Covenant, or what followed in
the history of Christianity, we shall not be so much at a loss to
account for such explanations of it as these of my text. Remember that
charges like these, in all various keys of contempt or of pity, or of
fierce hostility, have been cast against all innovators, against every
man that has broken a new path; against all teachers that have cut
themselves apart from tradition and encrusted formulas; against every
man that has waged war with the conventionalisms of society; against
all idealists who have dreamed dreams and seen visions; against every
man that has been touched with a lofty enthusiasm of any sort; and,
most of all, against all to whom God and their relations to Him, the
spiritual world and their relations to it, the future life and their
relations to that, have become dominant forces and motives in their
lives.
The short and easy way with which the world excuses itself from the
poignant lessons and rebukes which come from such lives is something
like that of my text, 'He is beside himself.' And the proof that he is
beside himself is that he does not act in the same fashion as these
incomparably wise people that make up the majority in every age. There
is nothing that commonplace men hate like anything fresh and original.
There is nothing that men of low aims are so utterly bewildered to
understand, and which so completely passes all the calculus of which
they are masters, as lofty self-abnegation. And wherever you get men
smitten with such, or with anything like it, you will find all the
low-aimed people gathering round them like bats round a torch in a
cavern, flapping their obscene wings and uttering their harsh croaks,
and only desiring to quench the light.
One of our cynical authors says that it is the mark of a genius that
all the dullards are against him. It is the mark of the man who dwells
with God that all the people whose portion is in this life with one
consent say, 'He is beside himself.'
And so the Leader of them all was served in His day; and that purest,
perfectest, noblest, loftiest, most utterly self-oblivious, and
God-and-man-devoted life that ever was lived upon earth, was disposed
of in this extremely simple method, so comforting to the complacency
of the critics--either 'He is beside Himself,' or 'He hath a devil.'
And yet, is not the saying a witness to the presence in that wondrous
and gentle career of an element entirely unlike what exists in the
most of mankind? Here was a new star in the heavens, and the law of
its orbit was manifestly different from that of all the rest. That is
what 'eccentric' means--that the life to which it applies does not
move round the same centre as do the other satellites, but has a path
of its own. Away out yonder somewhere, in the infinite depths, lay the
hidden point which drew it to itself and determined its magnificent
and overwhelmingly vast orbit. These men witness to Jesus Christ, even
by their half excuse, half reproach, that His was a life unique and
inexplicable by the ordinary motives which shape the little lives of
the masses of mankind. They witness to His entire neglect of ordinary
and low aims; to His complete absorption in lofty purposes, which to
His purblind would-be critics seem to be delusions and fond
imaginations that could never be realised. They witness to what His
disciples remembered had been written of Him, 'The zeal of Thy house
hath eaten Me up'; to His perfect devotion to man and to God. They
witness to His consciousness of a mission; and there is nothing that
men are so ready to resent as that. To tell a world, engrossed in self
and low aims, that one is sent from God to do His will, and to spread
it among men, is the sure way to have all the heavy artillery and the
lighter weapons of the world turned against one.
These characteristics of Jesus seem then to be plainly implied in that
allegation of insanity--lofty aims, absolute originality, utter
self-abnegation, the continual consciousness of communion with God,
devotion to the service of man, and the sense of being sent by God for
the salvation of the world. It was because of these that His friends
said, 'He is beside Himself.'
These men judged themselves by judging Jesus Christ. And all men do.
There are as many different estimates of a great man as there are
people to estimate, and hence the diversity of opinion about all the
characters that fill history and the galleries of the past. The eye
sees what it brings and no more. To discern the greatness of a great
man, or the goodness of a good one, is to possess, in lower measure,
some portion of that which we discern. Sympathy is the condition of
insight into character. And so our Lord said once, 'He that receiveth
a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward,'
because he is a dumb prophet himself, and has a lower power of the
same gift in him, which is eloquent on the prophet's lips.
In like manner, to discern what is in Christ is the test of whether
there is any of it in myself. And thus it is no mere arbitrary
appointment which suspends your salvation and mine on our answer to
this question, 'What think ye of Christ?' The answer will be--I was
going to say--the elixir of our whole moral and spiritual nature. It
will be the outcome of our inmost selves. This ploughshare turns up
the depths of the soil. That is eternally true which the grey-bearded
Simeon, the representative of the Old, said when he took the Infant in
his arms and looked down upon the unconscious, placid, smooth face.
'This Child is set for the rise and fall of many in Israel, that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.' Your answer to that question
discloses your whole spiritual condition and capacities. And so to
judge Christ is to be judged by Him; and what we think Him to be, that
we make Him to ourselves. The question which tests us is not merely,
'Whom do men say that I am?' It is easy to answer that; but this is
the all-important interrogation, 'Whom do _ye_ say that I am?' I pray
that we may each answer as he to whom it was first put answered it,
'Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel!'
II. Secondly, mark the similarity of the estimate which will be passed
by the world on all Christ's true followers.
The same elements exist to-day, the same intolerance of anything
higher than the low level, the same incapacity to comprehend simple
devotion and lofty aims, the same dislike of a man who comes and
rebukes by his silent presence the vices in which he takes no part.
And it is a great deal easier to say, 'Poor fool! enthusiastic
fanatic!' than it is to lay to heart the lesson that lies in such a
life.
The one thing, or at least the principal thing, which the Christianity
of this generation wants is a little more of this madness. It would be
a great deal better for us who call ourselves Christians if we had
earned and deserved the world's sneer, 'He is beside himself.' But our
modern Christianity, like an epicure's rare wines, is preferred iced.
And the last thing that anybody would think of suggesting in
connection with the demeanour--either the conduct or the words--of the
average Christian man of this day is that his religion had touched his
brain a little.
But, dear friends, go in Christ's footsteps and you will have the same
missiles flung at you. If a church or an individual has earned the
praise of the outside ring of godless people because its or his
religion is 'reasonable and moderate; and kept in its proper place;
and not allowed to interfere with social enjoyments, and political and
municipal corruptions,' and the like, then there is much reason to ask
whether that church or man is Christian after Christ's pattern. Oh, I
pray that there may come down on the professing Church of this
generation a baptism of the Spirit; and I am quite sure that when that
comes, the people that admire moderation and approve of religion, but
like it to be 'kept in its own place,' will be all ready to say, when
they hear the 'sons and the daughters prophesying, and the old men
seeing visions, and the young men dreaming dreams,' and the fiery
tongues uttering their praises of God, 'These men are full of new
wine!' Would we _were_ full of the new wine of the Spirit! Do you
think any one would say of your religion that you were 'beside
yourself,' because you made so much of it? They said it about your
Master, and if you were like Him it would be said, in one tone or
another, about you. We are all desperately afraid of enthusiasm
to-day. It seems to me that it is _the_ want of the Christian Church,
and that we are not enthusiastic because we don't half believe the
truths that we say are our creed.
One more word. Christian men and women have to make up their minds to
go on in the path of devotion, conformity to Christ's pattern,
self-sacrificing surrender, without minding one bit what is said about
them. Brethren, I do not think Christian people are in half as much
danger of dropping the standard of the Christian life by reason of the
sarcasms of the world, as they are by reason of the low tone of the
Church. Don't you take your ideas of what a reasonable Christian life
is from the men round you, howsoever they may profess to be Christ's
followers. And let us keep so near the Master that we may be able to
say, 'With me it is a very small matter to be judged of you, or of
man's judgment. He that judgeth me is the Lord.' Never mind, though
they say, 'Beside himself!' Never mind, though they say, 'Oh! utterly
extravagant and impracticable.' Better that than to be patted on the
back by a world that likes nothing so well as a Church with its teeth
drawn, and its claws cut; which may be made a plaything and an
ornament by the world. And that is what much of our modern
Christianity has come to be.