'He answereth him and saith, O faithless generation, how long shall I
be with you? how long shall I suffer you?'--Mark ix. 19.
There is a very evident, and, I think, intentional contrast between
the two scenes, of the Transfiguration, and of this healing of the
maniac boy. And in nothing is the contrast more marked than in the
demeanour of these enfeebled and unbelieving Apostles, as contrasted
with the rapture of devotion of the other three, and with the lowly
submission and faith of Moses and Elias. Perhaps, too, the difference
between the calm serenity of the mountain, and the hell-tortured
misery of the plain--between the converse with the sainted perfected
dead, and the converse with their unworthy successors--made Christ
feel more sharply and poignantly than He ordinarily did His disciples'
slowness of apprehension and want of faith. At any rate, it does
strike one as remarkable that the only occasion on which there came
from His lips anything that sounded like impatience and a momentary
flash of indignation was, when in sharpest contrast with 'This is my
beloved Son: hear Him,' He had to come down from the mountain to meet
the devil-possessed boy, the useless agony of the father, the sneering
faces of the scribes, and the impotence of the disciples. Looking on
all this, He turns to His followers--for it is to the Apostles that
the text is spoken, and not to the crowd outside--with this most
remarkable exclamation: 'O faithless generation! how long shall I be
with you? how long shall I suffer you?'
Now, I said that these words at first sight looked almost like a
momentary flash of indignation, as if for once a spot had come on His
pallid cheek--a spot of anger--but I do not think that we shall find
it so if we look a little more closely.
The first thing that seems to be in the words is not anger, indeed,
but a very distinct and very pathetic expression of Christ's infinite
pain, because of man's faithlessness. The element of personal sorrow
is most obvious here. It is not only that He is sad for their sakes
that they are so unreceptive, and He can do so little for them--I
shall have something to say about that presently--but that He feels
for Himself, just as we do in our poor humble measure, the chilling
effect of an atmosphere where there is no sympathy. All that ever the
teachers and guides and leaders of the world have in this respect had
to bear--all the misery of opening out their hearts in the frosty air
of unbelief and rejection--Christ endured. All that men have ever felt
of how hard it is to keep on working when not a soul understands them,
when not a single creature believes in them, when there is no one that
will accept their message, none that will give them credit for pure
motives--Jesus Christ had to feel, and that in an altogether singular
degree. There never was such a lonely soul on this earth as His, just
because there never was one so pure and loving. 'The little hills
rejoice _together_? as the Psalm says, 'on every side,' but the great
Alpine peak is alone there, away up amongst the cold and the snows.
Thus lived the solitary Christ, the uncomprehended Christ, the
unaccepted Christ. Let us see in this exclamation of His how humanly,
and yet how divinely, He felt the loneliness to which His love and
purity condemned Him.
The plain felt soul-chilling after the blessed communion of the
mountain. There was such a difference between Moses and Elias and the
voice that said, 'This is My beloved Son: hear Him,' and the disbelief
and slowness of spiritual apprehension of the people down below there,
that no wonder that for once the pain that He generally kept
absolutely down and silent, broke the bounds even of His restraint,
and shaped for itself this pathetic utterance: 'How long shall I be
with you? how long shall I suffer you?'
Dear friends, here is 'a little window through which we may see a
great matter' if we will only think of how all that solitude, and all
that sorrow of uncomprehended aims, was borne lovingly and patiently,
right away on to the very end, for every one of us. I know that there
are many of the aspects of Christ's life in which Christ's griefs tell
more on the popular apprehension; but I do not know that there is one
in which the title of 'The Man of Sorrows' is to all deeper thinking
more pathetically vindicated than in this--the solitude of the
uncomprehended and the unaccepted Christ and His pain at His
disciples' faithlessness.
And then do not let us forget that in this short sharp cry of
anguish--for it is that--there may be detected by the listening ear
not only the tone of personal hurt, but the tone of disappointed and
thwarted love. Because of their unbelief He knew that they could not
receive what He desired to give them. We find Him more than once in
His life, hemmed in, hindered, baulked of His purpose, thwarted, as I
may say, in His design, simply because there was no one with a heart
open to receive the rich treasure that He was ready to pour out. He
had to keep it locked up in His own spirit, else it would have been
wasted and spilled upon the ground. 'He could do no mighty works there
because of their unbelief'; and here He is standing in the midst of
the men that knew Him best, that understood Him most, that were
nearest to Him in sympathy; but even they were not ready for all this
wealth of affection, all this infinitude of blessing, with which His
heart is charged. They offered no place to put it. They shut up the
narrow cranny through which it might have come, and so He has to turn
from them, bearing it away unbestowed, like some man who goes out in
the morning with his seed-basket full, and finds the whole field where
he would fain have sown covered already with springing weeds or
encumbered with hard rock, and has to bring back the germs of possible
life to bless and fertilise some other soil. 'He that goeth forth
weeping, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with joy';
but He that comes back weeping, bearing the precious seed that He
found no field to sow in, knows a deeper sadness, which has in it no
prophecy of joy. It is wonderfully pathetic and beautiful, I think, to
see how Jesus Christ knew the pains of wounded love that cannot get
expressed because there is not heart to receive it.
Here I would remark, too, before I go to another point, that these two
elements--that of personal sorrow and that of disappointed love and
baulked purposes--continue still, and are represented as in some
measure felt by Him now. It was to disciples that He said, 'O
faithless generation!' He did not mean to charge them with the entire
absence of all confidence, but He did mean to declare that their poor,
feeble faith, such as it was, was not worth naming in comparison with
the abounding mass of their unbelief. There was one spark of light in
them, and there was also a great heap of green wood that had not
caught the flame and only smoked instead of blazing. And so He said to
them, 'O _faithless_ generation!'
Ay, and if He came down here amongst us now, and went through the
professing Christians in this land, to how many of us--regard being
had to the feebleness of our confidence and the strength of our
unbelief--He would have to say the same thing, 'O faithless
generation!'
The version of that clause in Matthew and Luke adds a significant
word,--'faithless and _perverse_ generation.' The addition carries a
grave lesson, as teaching us that the two characteristics are
inseparably united; that the want of faith is morally a crime and sin;
that unbelief is at once the most tragic manifestation of man's
perverse will, and also in its turn the source of still more obstinate
and wide-spreading evil. Blindness to His light and rejection of His
love, He treats as the very head and crown of sin. Like intertwining
snakes, the loathly heads are separate; but the slimy convolutions are
twisted indistinguishably together, and all unbelief has in it the
nature of perversity, as all perversity has in it the nature of
unbelief. 'He will convince the world of sin, because they believe not
on Me.'
May we venture to say, as we have already hinted, that all this pain
is in some mysterious way still inflicted on His loving heart? Can it
be that every time we are guilty of unbelieving, unsympathetic
rejection of His love, we send a pang of real pain and sorrow into the
heart of Christ? It is a strange, solemn thought. There are many
difficulties which start up, if we at all accept it. But still it does
appear as if we could scarcely believe in His perpetual manhood, or
think of His love as being in any real sense a human love, without
believing that He sorrows when we sin; and that we can grieve, and
wound, and cause to recoil upon itself, as it were, and close up that
loving and gracious Spirit that delights in being met with answering
love. If we may venture to take our love as in any measure analogous
to His--and unless we do, His love is to us a word without meaning--we
may believe that it is so. Do not we know that the purer our love, and
the more it has purified us, the more sensitive it becomes, even while
the less suspicious it becomes? Is not the purest, most unselfish,
highest love, that by which the least failure in response is felt most
painfully? Though there be no anger, and no change in the love, still
there is a pang where there is an inadequate perception, or an
unworthy reception, of it. And Scripture seems to countenance the
belief that Divine Love, too, may know something, in some mysterious
fashion, like that feeling, when it warns us, 'Grieve not the Holy
Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.' So
_we_ may venture to say, Grieve not the Christ of God, who redeems us;
and remember that we grieve Him most when we will not let Him pour His
love upon us, but turn a sullen, unresponsive unbelief towards His
pleading grace, as some glacier shuts out the sunshine from the
mountain-side with its thick-ribbed ice.
Another thought, which seems to me to be expressed in this wonderful
exclamation of our Lord's, is--that this faithlessness bound Christ to
earth, and kept Him here. As there is not anger, but only pain, so
there is also, I think, not exactly impatience, but a desire to
depart, coupled with the feeling that He cannot leave them till they
have grown stronger in faith. And that feeling is increased by the
experience of their utter helplessness and shameful discomfiture
during His brief absence They had shown that they were not fit to be
trusted alone. He had been away for a day up in the mountain there,
and though they did not build an altar to any golden calf, like their
ancestors, when their leader was absent, still when He comes back He
finds things all gone wrong because of the few hours of His absence.
What would they do if He were to go away from them altogether? They
would never be able to stand it at all. It is impossible that He
should leave them thus--raw, immature. The plant has not yet grown
sufficiently strong to take away the prop round which it climbed. 'How
long must I be with you?' says the loving Teacher, who is prepared
ungrudgingly to give His slow scholars as much time as they need to
learn their lesson. He is not impatient, but He desires to finish the
task; and yet He is ready to let the scholars' dulness determine the
duration of His stay. Surely that is wondrous and heart-touching love,
that Christ should let their slowness measure the time during which He
should linger here, and refrain from the glory which He desired. We do
not know all the reasons which determined the length of our Lord's
life upon earth, but this was one of them,--that He could not go away
until He had left these men strong enough to stand by themselves, and
to lay the foundations of the Church. Therefore He yielded to the plea
of their very faithlessness and backwardness, and with this wonderful
word of condescension and appeal bade them say for how many more days
He must abide in the plain, and turn His back on the glories that had
gleamed for a moment on the mountain of transfiguration.
In this connection, too, is it not striking to notice how long His
short life and ministry appeared to our Lord Himself? There is to me
something very pathetic in that question He addressed to one of His
Apostles near the end of His pilgrimage: 'Have I been so long time
with you, and yet hast thou not known Me?' It was not so very
long--three years, perhaps, at the outside--and much less, if we take
the shortest computation; and yet to Him it had been long. The days
had seemed to go tardily. He longed that the 'fire' which He came to
fling on earth were already 'kindled,' and the moments seemed to drop
so slowly from the urn of time. But neither the holy longing to
consummate His work by the mystery of His passion, to which more than
one of His words bear witness, nor the not less holy longing to be
glorified with 'the glory which He had with the Father before the
world was,' which we may reverently venture to suppose in Him, could
be satisfied till his slow scholars were wiser, and His feeble
followers stronger.
And then again, here we get a glimpse into the depth of Christ's
patient forbearance. We might read these other words of our text, 'How
long shall I suffer you?' with such an intonation as to make them
almost a threat that the limits of forbearance would soon be reached,
and that lie was not going to 'suffer them' much longer. Some
commentators speak of them as expressing 'holy indignation,' and I
quite believe that there is such a thing, and that on other occasions
it was plainly spoken in Christ's words. But I fail to catch the tone
of it here. To me this plaintive question has the very opposite of
indignation in its ring. It sounds rather like a pledge that as long
as they need forbearance they will get it; but, at the same time, a
question of 'how long' that is to be. It implies the inexhaustible
riches and resources of His patient mercy. And Oh, dear brethren! that
endless forbearance is the only refuge and ground of hope we have.
_His_ perfect charity 'is not soon angry; beareth all things,'
and 'never faileth.' To it we have all to make the appeal--
'Though I have most unthankful been
Of all that e'er Thy grace received;
Ten thousand times Thy goodness seen,
Ten thousand times Thy goodness grieved;
Yet, Lord, the chief of sinners spare.'
And, thank God! we do not make our appeal in vain.
There is rebuke in His question, but how tender a rebuke it is! He
rebukes without anger. He names the fault plainly. He shows distinctly
His sorrow, and does not hide the strain on His forbearance. That is
His way of cure for His servants' faithlessness. It was His way on
earth; it is His way in heaven. To us, too, comes the loving rebuke of
this question, 'How long shall I suffer you?'
Thank God that our answer may be cast into the words of His own
promise: 'I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy
times seven.' 'Bear with me till Thou hast perfected me; and then bear
me to Thyself, that I may be with Thee for ever, and grieve Thy love
no more.' So may it be, for 'with Him is plenteous redemption,' and
His forbearing 'mercy endureth for ever.'