'And Jesus said unto them, Is a candle brought to be put under a
bushel, or under a bed? and not to be set on a candlestick?'--Mark iv.
21.
The furniture of a very humble Eastern home is brought before us in
this saying. In the original, each of the nouns has the definite
article attached to it, and so suggests that in the house there was
but one of each article; one lamp, a flat saucer with a wick swimming
in oil; one measure for corn and the like; one bed, raised slightly,
but sufficiently to admit of a flat vessel being put under it without
danger, if for any reason it were desired to shade the light; and one
lampstand.
The saying appeals to common-sense. A man does not light a lamp and
then smother it. The act of lighting implies the purpose of
illumination, and, with everybody who acts logically, its sequel is to
put the lamp on a stand, where it may be visible. All is part of the
nightly routine of every Jewish household. Jesus had often watched it;
and, commonplace as it is, it had mirrored to Him large truths. If our
eyes were opened to the suggestions of common life, we should find in
them many parables and reminders of high matters.
Now this saying is a favourite and familiar one of our Lord, occurring
four times in the Gospels. It is interesting to notice that He, too,
like other teachers, had His favourite maxims, which He turned round
in all sorts of ways, and presented as reflecting light at different
angles and suggesting different thoughts. The four occurrences of the
saying are these. In my text, and in the parallel in Luke's Gospel, it
is appended to the Parable of the Sower, and forms the basis of the
exhortation, 'Take heed how ye hear.' In another place in Luke's
Gospel it is appended to our Lord's words about 'the sign of the
prophet Jonah,' which is explained to be the resurrection of Jesus
Christ, and it forms the basis of the exhortation to cultivate the
single eye which is receptive of the light. In the Sermon on the Mount
it is appended to the declaration that the disciples are the lights of
the world, and forms the basis of the exhortation, 'Let your light so
shine before men.' I have thought that it may be interesting and
instructive if in this sermon we throw together these three
applications of this one saying, and try to study the threefold
lessons which it yields, and the weighty duties which it enforces.
I. So, then, I have to ask you, first, to consider that we have a
lesson as to the apparent obscurities of revelation and of our duty
concerning them.
That is the connection in which the words occur in our text, and in
the other place in Luke's Gospel, to which I have referred. Our Lord
has just been speaking the Parable of the Sower. The disciples'
curiosity has been excited as to its significance. They ask Him for an
explanation, which He gives minutely point by point. Then he passes to
this general lesson of the purpose of the apparent veil which He had
cast round the truth, by throwing it into a parabolic form. In effect
He says: If I had meant to hide My teaching by the form into which I
cast it, I should have been acting as absurdly and as contradictorily
as a man would do who should light a lamp and immediately obscure it.'
True, there is the veil of parable, but the purpose of that relative
concealment is not hiding, but revelation. 'There is nothing covered
but that it should be made known.' The veil sharpens attention,
stimulates curiosity, quickens effort, and so becomes positively
subsidiary to the great purpose of revelation for which the parable is
spoken. The existence of this veil of sensuous representation carries
with it the obligation, 'Take heed how ye hear.'
Now all these thoughts have a far wider application than in reference
to our Lord's parables. And I may suggest one or two of the
considerations that flow from the wider reference of the words before
us.
'Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel, or under a bed and not
upon a candlestick?' There are no gratuitous and dark places in
anything that God says to us. His revelation is absolutely clear. We
may be sure of that if we consider the purpose for which He spoke at
all. True, there are dark places; true, there are great gaps; true, we
sometimes think, 'Oh! it would have been so easy for Him to have said
one word more; and the one word more would have been so infinitely
precious to bleeding hearts or wounded consciences or puzzled
understandings.' But 'is a candle brought to be set under a bushel?'
Do you think that if He took the trouble to light it He would
immediately smother it, or arbitrarily conceal anything that the very
fact of the revelation declares His intention to make known? His own
great word remains true, 'I have never spoken in secret, in a dark
place of the earth.' If there be, as there are, obscurities, there are
none there that would have been better away.
For the intention of all God's hiding--which hiding is an integral
part of his revealing--is not to conceal, but to reveal. Sometimes the
best way of making a thing known to men is to veil it in a measure, in
order that the very obscurity, like the morning mists which prophesy a
blazing sun in a clear sky by noonday, may demand search and quicken
curiosity and spur to effort. He is not a wise teacher who makes
things too easy. It is good that there should be difficulties; for
difficulties are like the veins of quartz in the soil, which may turn
the edge of the ploughshare or the spade, but prophesy that there is
gold there for the man who comes with fitting tools. Wherever, in the
broad land of God's word to us, there lie dark places, there are
assurances of future illumination. God's hiding is in order to
revelation, even as the prophet of old, when he was describing the
great Theophany which flashed in light from the one side of the heaven
to the other, exclaimed, 'There was the hiding of His power.'
'He hides the purpose of His grace
To make it better known.'
And the end of all the concealments, and apparent and real
obscurities, that hang about His word, is that for many of them
patient and diligent attention and docile obedience should unfold them
here, and for the rest, 'the day shall declare them.' The lamp is the
light for the night-time, and it leaves many a corner in dark shadow;
but, when 'night's candles are burnt out, and day sits jocund on the
misty mountain-tops,' much will be plain that cannot be made plain
now.
Therefore, for us the lesson from this assurance that God will not
stultify Himself by giving to us a revelation that does not reveal,
is, 'Take heed how ye hear.' The effort will not be in vain. Patient
attention will ever be rewarded. The desire to learn will not be
frustrated. In this school truth lightly won is truth loosely held;
and only the attentive scholar is the receptive and retaining
disciple. A great man once said, and said, too, presumptuously and
proudly, that he had rather have the search after truth than truth.
But yet there is a sense in which the saying may be modifiedly
accepted; for, precious as is all the revelation of God, not the least
precious effect that it is meant to produce upon us is the
consciousness that in it there are unscaled heights above, and
unplumbed depths beneath, and untraversed spaces all around it; and
that for us that Word is like the pillar of cloud and fire that moved
before Israel, blends light and darkness with the single office of
guidance, and gleams ever before us to draw desires and feet after it.
The lamp is set upon a stand. 'Take heed how ye hear.'
II. Secondly, the saying, in another application on our Lord's lips,
gives us a lesson as to Himself and our attitude to Him.
I have already pointed out the other instance in Luke's Gospel in
which this saying occurs, in the 11th chapter, where it is brought
into immediate connection with our Lord's declaration that the sign to
be given to His generation was 'the sign of the prophet Jonah,' which
sign He explains as being reproduced in His own case in His
Resurrection. And then he adds the word of our text, and immediately
passes on to speak about the light in us which perceives the lamp, and
the need of cultivating the single eye.
So, then, we have, in the figure thus applied, the thought that the
earthly life of Jesus Christ necessarily implies a subsequent
elevation from which He shines down upon all the world. God lit that
lamp, and it is not going to be quenched in the darkness of the grave.
He is not going to stultify Himself by sending the Light of the World,
and then letting the endless shades of death muffle and obscure it.
But, just as the conclusion of the process which is begun in the
kindling of the light is setting it on high on the stand, that it may
beam over all the chamber, so the resurrection and ascension of Jesus
Christ, His exaltation to the supremacy from which He shall draw all
men unto Him, are the necessary and, if I may so say, the logical
result of the facts of His incarnation and death.
Then from this there follows what our Lord dwells upon at greater
length. Having declared that the beginning of His course involved the
completion of it in His exaltation to glory, He then goes on to say to
us, 'You have an organ that corresponds to Me. I am the kindled lamp;
you have the seeing eye.' 'If the eye were not sunlike,' says the
great German thinker, 'how could it see the sun?' If there were not in
me that which corresponds to Jesus Christ, He would be no Light of the
World, and no light to me. My reason, my affection, my conscience, my
will, the whole of my spiritual being, answer to Him, as the eye does
to the light, and for everything that is in Christ there is in
humanity something that is receptive of, and that needs, Him.
So, then, that being so, He being our light, just because He fits our
needs, answers our desires, satisfies our cravings, fills the clefts
of our hearts, and brings the response to all the questions of our
understandings--that being the case, if the lamp is lit and blazing on
the lampstand, and you and I have eyes to behold it, let us take heed
that we cultivate the single eye which apprehends Christ.
Concentration of purpose, simplicity and sincerity of aim, a heart
centred upon Him, a mind drawn to contemplate unfalteringly and
without distraction of crosslights His beauty, His supremacy, His
completeness, and a soul utterly devoted to Him--these are the
conditions to which that light will ever manifest itself, and illumine
the whole man. But if we come with divided hearts, with distracted
aims, giving Him fragments of ourselves, and seeking Him by spasms and
at intervals, and having a dozen other deities in our Pantheon, beside
the calm form of the Christ of Nazareth, what wonder is there that we
see in Him 'no beauty that we should desire Him'? 'Unite my heart to
fear Thy name.' Oh I if that were our prayer, and if the effort to
secure its answer were honestly the effort of our lives, all His
loveliness, His sweetness, His adaptation to our whole being, would
manifest themselves to us. The eye must be 'single,' directed to Him,
if the heart is to rejoice in His light.
I need not do more than remind you of the blessed consequence which
our Lord represents as flowing from this union of the seeing heart and
the revealing light--viz., 'Thy whole body shall be full of light.' In
every eye that beholds the flame of the lamp there is a little
lamp-flame mirrored and manifested. And just as what we see makes its
image on the seeing organ of the body, so the Christ beheld is a
Christ embodied in us; and we, gazing upon Him, are 'changed into the
same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit.' Light
that remains without us does not illuminate; light that passes into us
is the light by which we see, and the Christ beheld is the Christ
ensphered in our hearts.
III. So, lastly, this great saying gives us a lesson as to the duties
of Christian men as lights in the world.
I pointed out that another instance of the occurrence of the saying is
in the Sermon on the Mount, where it is transferred from the
revelation of God in His written word, and in His Incarnate Word, to
the relation of Christian men to the world in which they dwell. I need
not remind you how frequently that same metaphor occurs in Scripture;
how in the early Jewish ritual the great seven-branched lampstand
which stood at first in the Tabernacle was the emblem of Israel's
office in the whole world, as it rayed out its light through the
curtains of the Tabernacle into the darkness of the desert. Nor need I
remind you how our Lord bare witness to His forerunner by the praise
that 'He was a burning and a shining light,' nor how He commanded His
disciples to have their 'loins girt and their lamps burning,' nor how
He spoke the Parable of the Ten Virgins with their lamps.
From all these there follows the same general thought that Christian
men, not so much by specific effort, nor by words, nor by definite
proclamation, as by the raying out from them in life and conduct of a
Christlike spirit, are set for the illumination of the world. The
bearing of our text in reference to that subject is just this--our
obligation as Christians to show forth the glories of Him who hath
'called us out of darkness into His marvellous light' is rested upon
His very purpose in drawing us to Himself, and receiving us into the
number of his people. If God in Christ, by communicating to us 'the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus
Christ,' has made us lights of the world, it is not done in order that
the light may be smothered incontinently, but His act of lighting
indicates His purpose of illumination. What are you a Christian for?
That you may go to Heaven? Certainly. That your sins may be forgiven?
No doubt. But is that the only end? Are you such a very great being as
that your happiness and well-being can legitimately be the ultimate
purpose of God's dealings with you? Are you so isolated from all
mankind as that any gift which He bestows on you is to be treated by
you as a morsel that you can take into your corner and devour, like a
grudging dog, by yourselves? By no means. 'God, who commanded the
light to shine out of darkness, hath shined into our hearts in order
that' we might impart the light to others. Or, as Shakespeare has it,
in words perhaps suggested by the Scripture metaphor,
'Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves.'
He gave you His Son that you may give the gospel to others, and you
stultify His purpose in your salvation unless you become ministers of
His grace and manifesters of His light.
Then take from this emblem, too, a homely suggestion as to the
hindrances that stand in the way of our fulfilling the Divine
intention in our salvation. It is, perhaps, a piece of fancy, but
still it may point a lesson. The lamp is not hid 'under a bushel,'
which is the emblem of commerce or business, and is meant for the
measurement of material wealth and sustenance, or 'under a bed'--the
place where people take their ease and repose. These two loves--the
undue love of the bushel and the corn that is in it, and the undue
love of the bed and the leisurely ease that you may enjoy there--are
large factors in preventing Christian men from fulfilling God's
purpose in their salvation.
Then take a hint as to the means by which such a purpose can be
fulfilled by Christian souls. They are suggested in the two of the
other uses of this emblem by our Lord Himself. The first is when He
said, 'Let your loins be girded'--they are not so, when you are in
bed--'and your lamps burning.' Your light will not shine in a naughty
world without your strenuous effort, and ungirt loins will very
shortly lead to extinguished lamps. The other means to this
manifestation of visible Christlikeness lies in that tragical story of
the foolish virgins who took no oil in their vessels. If light
expresses the outward Christian life, oil, in accordance with the
whole tenor of Scripture symbolism, expresses the inward gift of the
Divine Spirit. And where that gift is neglected, where it is not
earnestly sought and carefully treasured, there may be a kind of smoky
illuminations, which, in the dark, may pass for bright lights, but,
when the Lord comes, shudder into extinction, and, to the astonishment
of the witless five who carried them, are found to be 'going out.'
Brethren, only He who does not quench the smoking flax but tends it to
a flame, will help us to keep our lamps bright.
First of all, then, let us gaze upon the light in Him, until we become
'light in the Lord.' And then let us see to it that, by girt loins and
continual reception of the illuminating principle of the Divine
Spirit's oil, we fill our lamps with 'deeds of odorous light, and
hopes that breed not shame.' Then,
'When the Bridegroom, with his feastful friends,
Passes to bliss on the mid-hour of night,'
we shall have 'gained our entrance' among the 'virgins wise and pure.'