I have said that the revelation of the depths of our Lord's experience
here is unexampled. We can understand the mood of which it is the
utterance; the feeling of despair that sometimes comes over the most
patient instructor when he finds that all his efforts to hammer some
truth into, or to print some impression on, the brain or heart of man
or boy, have been foiled, and that years, it may be, of patient work
have scarcely left more traces on unretentive minds than remain on the
ocean of the passage through it of a keel.
Christ felt that; and I do not think we half enough realise how large
an element in the sorrows of the Man of Sorrows, and of the grief with
which He was acquainted, was His necessary association with people
who, He felt, did not in the least degree understand Him, however
truly, blindly, and almost animally, they might love Him. It was His
disciples' misconception that stung him most. If I might so say, He
_calculated_ upon being misunderstood by Pharisees and outsiders, but
that these followers who had been gathered round about Him all these
months, and had been the subjects of His sedulous toil, should blurt
out such words as these which precede the question of my text, cut
deep into that loving heart. It was not only the pain of being
misunderstood, but also the pain of feeling that the people who cared
most for Him did not understand Him, and were so hard to drag up to
the level where they could even catch a glimpse of His meaning, that
struck His heart with almost a kind of despair; and, as I said, made
Him pour out this rain of questions.
And what do the questions suggest? Not only emotion very unusual in
Him, yet truly human, and showing Him to be our Brother; but they
suggest three distinct types of emotion, all of them dashed with pain.
'Why reason ye? Having eyes, see ye not? Do ye not remember?' That
speaks of His astonishment. Do not start at the word, or suppose that
it in any degree contradicts the lofty beliefs that I suppose most of
us have with regard to the Deity of our Lord and Saviour. We find in
another place in the Gospels, not by inference as here, but in plain
words, the ascription to Him of wonder; 'He marvelled at their
unbelief.' And we read of a more blessed kind of surprise as having
once been His, when He wondered at the faith of the heathen centurion.
But here His astonishment is that after all these years of toil, and
of sympathy, and of discipleship, and of listening and trying to get
hold of His meaning, His disciples were so far away from any
understanding of what He was driving at. He had to learn by experience
the depths of men's stupidity and ignorance. And although He was the
Word of God made flesh, we recognise here the token of a true brother
in that He was capable not only of the physical feelings of weariness,
and hunger, and thirst, and pain, but that He, too, had that emotion
which only a limited understanding can have--the emotion of wonder.
And it was drawn out by His disciples' denseness and inertness.
Ah! dear friends, does He not wonder at us? One of the prophets says,
'Be astonished, O heavens!' And be sure of this, that the manhood of
Jesus Christ is not now so lifted up above what it was upon earth as
that that same sensation--twin-sister to yours and mine--of surprise,
does not sometimes visit Him when He looks down upon us; and has to
say to us--as, alas! He has to say--what He once said to one of the
Twelve, 'Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not
known me, Philip?' Is not the same question coming to us? Why is it
that we do not understand?
Wonder, then, is the first emotion that is expressed in this question.
There is another one: Pain. And there again I fall back not upon
inference, but upon plain words of another part of the Gospels. 'He
looked round upon them with anger, being _grieved_ at the hardness of
their hearts.' It seems daring to venture to say that the exalted and
glorified humanity of Jesus Christ to-day is, in any measure, capable
of feeling analogous to that; but it will not seem so daring if you
remember the solemn charge of one of the Apostles, 'Grieve not the
Holy Spirit of God.' It is Christ's disciples that pain Him most.
'They vexed His Holy Spirit, therefore He fought against them.'
Brethren, let us look into our own hearts and our own lives, and ask
ourselves if there is not something there that gives a pang even to
the heart of the glorified Master, and makes Him sigh deeply within
Himself?
May I add one more emotion which seems to me to be unmistakably
expressed by this rapid fusilade of questions? That is indignation.
Again I fall back upon plain words: 'He looked round about upon them
with anger, being grieved.' The two things were braided together in
His heart, and did not conflict with each other There were infinite
sorrow, infinite pity, and real displeasure. You must take all notions
of passion and of malignity, and of desire to do harm to the subject,
out of the conception of anger as applied to God or to Christ who is
the revelation of God. But it seems to me that it is a maimed Christ
that we put before the world unless we say that in the Love there lie
the possibilities of Wrath. 'Behold the Lion of the tribe of Judah,
and I beheld, and lo! a Lamb!' Wrath and gentleness are in Him
inseparably united, neither of them limiting nor making impossible the
other.
So here we have a self-revelation, as by one glimpse into a great
chamber, of the deep heart of Christ, the great Teacher, moved to
astonishment, grief, and indignation.