I have spoken of these questions as being rapid and repeated, and as a
rain of what we may almost call fiery interrogation. But they are by
no means tautology or useless and aimless repetition. If we look at
them closely, I think we shall see that they open out to us several
different sides and phases of the fault in His disciples that moves
these emotions.
There is, first, His scholars' stolid insensibility, which moves Him
to anger, to astonishment, and to grief. 'Are your hearts yet
hardened?' by which is meant, not hardened in the sense of being
suddenly and stiffly set in antagonism to Him, but simply in the sense
of being--may I use the word?--so pachydermatous, so thick-skinned,
that nothing can go through them. They showed it is a dull, stolid
insensibility, and it marks some of us professing Christians, on whom
promises and invitations and revelations of truth all fall with equal
ineffectiveness, and from whom they glide off with equal rapidity. You
may rain upon a black basalt rock to all eternity, and nothing will
grow upon it. All the drops will run down the polished sides, and a
quarter of an inch below the surface it will be as dry as it was
before the first drop fell. And here are we Christian ministers,
talk--talk--talking, week in and week out; and here is Christ, by His
providences and by His word, speaking far more loudly than any of us;
and it all falls with absolute impotence on hosts of people that call
themselves Christians. Ah! brethren, it is not only unbelievers who
have their hearts hardened. Orthodox professors are often guilty of
the same. If I might alter the metaphor, many of us have waterproofed
our minds, and the ingredients of the mixture by which we have
waterproofed them are our knowledge of 'the plan of salvation,' our
connection with a Christian community, our membership in a church, our
obedience to the formalisms of the devout life. All these have only
made a non-transmitting medium interposed between ourselves and the
concentrated electric energy that ever flashes from Jesus Christ. Our
hardened hearts, with their stolid insensibility, amaze our Master,
and no wonder that they do.
But that is not all. There is not only what I have ventured to call
stolid insensibility, but, as a result of it, there is the not using
the capacities that we have. 'Having eyes, see ye not? Having ears,
hear ye not?' We are not like children that cannot, but like careless,
untrained schoolboys that will not, learn. We have the capacity, and
it is our own fault that we are dunces in the school, and at the
bottom of the class. Use the power that you have, and 'unto him that
hath shall be given, and he shall have in abundance.' There are fishes
in the caverns of North America that have lived so long in the dark,
underground channels, that the present generation of them has no eyes.
We are doing our best to deprive ourselves of our capacities of
beholding by refusing to use them. 'Having eyes, see ye not?' Our
non-use of the powers we have amazes and grieves our Master.
Further, the reason why there are this stolid insensibility and this
non-use of capacity lies here: 'Ye reason about the bread.' The
absorption of our minds and efforts and time with material things,
that perish with the using, come in between us and our apprehension of
Christ's teaching. Ah! brethren, it is not only the rich man that is
swallowed up with the present world; the poor man may be so as really.
All of us, by reason of the absolute necessities of our lives, are in
danger of getting our hearts so filled and crowded with the things
that are 'seen and temporal' that we have no time, nor room, for the
things that are 'unseen and eternal.' I do not need to elaborate that
point. We all know that it is there that our danger, in various forms,
lies. If you in the bows of the ship are reasoning about bread, you
will misunderstand Christ in the stern warning against 'the leaven of
the Pharisees.'
The last suggestion from these questions is that the cure for all that
stolid insensibility, and its resulting misuse of capacity, and the
absorption in daily visible things, is remembrance of His and our
past--'Do ye not remember?' It was only that same morning, or the day
before at the furthest, that one of the miracles of feeding the
thousands had been performed. Christ wonders, as well He might, at the
short memories of the disciples who, with the baskets-full of
fragments scarcely eaten yet, could worry themselves because there was
only one loaf in the locker. 'Do ye not remember, when I broke the
loaves among the thousands, how many baskets took ye up? And they
said, seven. And He said, How is it that ye do not understand?' Yes,
Memory is the one wing and Hope the other, that lift our heaviness
from earth towards heaven. And any man who will bethink himself of
what Jesus Christ has been for him, did for him on earth, and has done
for him during his life, will not be so absorbed in worldly cares as
that he will have no eyes to see the things unseen and eternal; and
the hard, dead insensibility of his heart will melt into thankful
consecration, and so he will rise nearer and nearer to intelligent
apprehension of the lofty and deep things that the Incarnate Word says
to him. We are here in Christ's school, and it depends upon the place
in the class that we take here where we shall be put at what
schoolboys call the 'next remove.' If here we have indeed 'learned of
Him the truth as it is in Jesus,' we shall be put up into the top
classes yonder, and get larger and more blessed lessons in the
Father's house above.