In turning our thoughts toward various scenes of our Lord's life,
we are peculiarly affected with the human warmth and tenderness of
his personal friendships. The little association of his own peculiar
friends makes a picture that we need to study to understand him.
St. John touchingly says: "Now when the time was come that Jesus
should depart out of the world unto the Father, having loved his
own which were in the world he loved them unto the end." When we
think that all that we know of our Lord comes through these friends
of his--the witnesses and recorders of his life and death--we shall
feel more than ever what he has made them to us. Without them we
should have had no Jesus.
Our Lord, with all that he is to us, is represented to us through
the loving hearts and affectionate records of these his chosen
ones. It is amazing to think of, that our Lord never left to his
church one line written by his own hand, and that all his words come
to us transfused through the memories of his friends. How much to
us, then, were these friendships of Jesus--how dear to us, for all
eternity, these friends!
We are told that immediately after the resurrection there was an
associated church of one hundred and twenty, who are characterized
by Peter as "men that have companied with us all the time that the
Lord Jesus went in and out among us."
The account of how these friends were gathered to him becomes
deeply interesting. St. John relates how, one day, John the
Baptist saw Jesus walking by the Jordan in silent contemplation,
and pointed him out to his disciples: "Behold the Lamb of God."
And the two disciples heard him speak and followed Jesus. Then
Jesus turned and said, "What seek ye?" They said, "Master, where
dwellest thou?" He answered, "Come and see." They came and saw
where he dwelt, and abode with him that day. We learn from this
that some of the disciples were those whose spiritual nature had
been awakened by John the Baptist, and who, under his teaching,
were devoting themselves to a religious life. We see the power
of personal attraction possessed by our Lord, which drew these
simple, honest natures to himself. One of these men was Andrew,
the brother of Simon Peter, and he immediately carried the glad
tidings to his brother, "We have found the Messiah;" and he brought
him to Jesus. Thus, by a sort of divine attraction, one brother
and friend bringing another, the little band increased. Some were
more distinctly called by the Master. Matthew, the tax-gatherer,
sitting in his place of business, heard the words, "Follow me," and
immediately rose up, and left all and followed him. James and John
forsook their nets, in the midst of their day's labor, to follow
him. In time, a little band of twelve left all worldly callings and
home ties, to form a traveling mission family of which Jesus was the
head and father. Others, both men and women, at times traveled with
them and assisted their labors; but these twelve were the central
figures.
These twelve men Jesus took to nurture and educate as the expounders
of the Christian religion and the organizers of the church. St.
John, in poetic vision, sees the church as a golden city descending
from God out of heaven, having twelve foundations, and in them the
names of these twelve Apostles of the Lamb. This plan of choosing
honest, simple-hearted, devout men, and revealing himself to the
world through their human nature and divinely educated conceptions,
had in it something peculiar and original.
When we look at the selection made by Christ of these _own_ ones,
we see something widely different from all the usual methods of
earthly wisdom. They were neither the most cultured nor the most
influential of their times. The majority of them appear to have been
plain workingmen, from the same humble class in which our Lord was
born. But the Judæan peasant, under the system of religious training
and teaching given by Moses, was no stolid or vulgar character. He
inherited lofty and inspiring traditions, a ritual stimulating to
the spiritual and poetic nature, a system of ethical morality and of
tenderness to humanity in advance of the whole ancient world. A good
Jew was frequently a man of spiritualized and elevated devotion.
Supreme love to God and habitual love and charity to man were the
essentials of his religious ideal. The whole system of divine
training and discipline to which the Jewish race had been subjected
for hundreds of years had prepared a higher moral average to be
chosen from than could have been found in any other nation.
When Jesus began to preach, it was the best and purest men that
most deeply sympathized and were most attracted, and from them he
chose his intimate circle of followers--to train them as the future
Apostles of his religion.
The new dispensation that Jesus came to introduce was something as
yet uncomprehended on earth. It was a heavenly ideal, and these
men--simple, pure-hearted, and devout as they were--had no more
conception of it than a deaf person has of music. It was a new
manner of life, a new style of manhood, that was to constitute
this kingdom of Heaven. It was no outward organization--no earthly
glory. Man was to learn to live, not by force, not by ambition,
not by pleasure, but by LOVE. Man was to become perfect in love
as God is, so that loving and serving and suffering for others
should become a fashion and habit in this world, where ruling and
domineering and making others suffer had been the law. And Jesus
took into his family twelve men to prepare them to be the Apostles
of this idea. His mode was more that of a mother than a father.
He strove to infuse Himself into them by an embracing, tender,
brooding love; ardent, self-forgetful, delicate, refined. As we
read the New Testament narrative of the walks and talks of Jesus
with these chosen ones, their restings by the wayside, their family
conversations at evening, when he sat with some little child on his
knee, when he listened to their sayings, reproved their failings,
settled their difficulties with one another, we can see no image
by which to represent the Master but one of those loving, saintly
mothers, who, in leading along their little flock, follow nearest in
the footsteps of Jesus.
Jesus trusted more to personal love, in forming his church, than to
any other force. The power of love in developing the intellect and
exciting the faculties is marked, even on the inferior animals. The
dog is changed by tender treatment and affectionate care; he becomes
half human, and seems to struggle to rise out of the brute nature
toward a beloved master. Rude human natures are correspondingly
changed, and he who has great power of loving and exciting love may
almost create anew whom he will.
Jesus, that guest from brighter worlds, brought to this earth the
nobler ideas of love, the tenderness, the truth, the magnanimity,
that are infinite in the All-Loving. What of God could be expressed
and understood by man He was, and St. John says of his ethereal
gentleness and sweetness of nature: "The light shined in the
darkness and the darkness comprehended it not."
The varieties of natural character in this family of Jesus were
such as to give most of the usual differences of human beings. The
Master's object was to unite them to each other by such a love that
they should move by a single impulse, as one human being, and that
what was lacking in one might be made up by what was abundant in
another. As He expressed it in his last prayer: "That they all may
be one, as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they also may
be one in us: that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me."
How diverse were the elements! Simon Peter, self-confident,
enthusiastic, prompt to speak and to decide. Thomas, slow and easily
disheartened; always deficient in hope, and inclined to look upon
the dark side, yet constant unto death in his affections. James and
John, young men of the better class, belonging to a rich family,
on terms of intimate acquaintance with the High Priest. Of these
brothers, John is the idealist and the poet of the little band,
but far from being the weak and effeminate character painters
and poets have generally conceived. James and John were surnamed
Boanerges--"sons of thunder." They were the ones who wanted to call
down fire on the village that refused to receive their Lord. It
was they who joined in the petition preferred by their mother for
the seat of honor in the future kingdom. Young, ardent, impetuous,
full of fire and of that susceptibility to ambition which belongs
to high-strung and vivid organizations, their ardor was like a
flame, that might scorch and burn as well as vivify. Then there
was Matthew, the prosaic, the exact matter-of-fact man, whose call
it was to write what critics have called the _bodily gospel_ of
our Lord's life, as it was that of John to present the inner heart
of Jesus. These few salient instances show the strong and marked
diversities of temperament and character which Jesus proposed to
unite into one whole, by an intense personal love which should melt
down all angles, and soften asperities, and weld and blend the most
discordant elements. It is the more remarkable that he undertook
this task with men in mature life, and who had already been settled
in several callings, and felt the strain of all those causes which
excite the individual self-love of man.
In guiding all these, we can but admire the perfect tolerance of
the Master toward the wants of each varying nature. Tolerance for
individual character is about the last Christian grace that comes
to flower in family or church. Much of the raspings, and gratings,
and complaints in family and church are from the habit of expecting
and exacting that people should be what they never were made to be.
Our Lord did not reprove Thomas for being a despondent doubter,
beset by caution even when he most longed to believe. He graciously
granted the extremest test which his hopeless nature required--he
suffered him to put his finger in the print of the nails and to
examine the wounded side; and there is but a tender shadow of a
reproof in what he said--"Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou
hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen and yet have
believed." In our day there are many disciples of Thomas, loving
doubters, who would give their hearts' blood to fully believe in
this risen Jesus; they would willingly put their hands in the print
of the nails; and for them the Master has a spiritual presence and
a convincing nearness, if they will but seek it. So, again, we
notice the tender indulgence with which the self-confident Peter is
listened to as he always interposes his opinion. We think we can
see the Master listening with a grave smile, as a mother to her
eldest and most self-confident boy. Sometimes he warmly commends,
and sometimes he bears down on him with a sharpness of rebuke which
would have annihilated a softer nature. When Peter officiously
counsels worldly expediency, and the avoidance of the sufferings
for which Jesus came, the reply is sharp as lightning: "Get thee
behind me, Satan; thou art an offence unto me; for thou savorest
not the things of God, but those that be of man." Yet we can see
that the Master knows his man, and knows just how hard to strike.
That eager, combative, self-confident nature not only can bear sharp
treatment, but must have it at times, or never come to anything. We
see Peter's self-asserting nature spring up after it, cheerful as
ever. He yields to the reproof; but he is Peter still, prompt with
his opinion at the next turn of affairs, and the Master would not
for the world have him anybody else but Peter.
We see also that it was a manner of the Master to deal with the
conscience of his children, and rebuke their faults without
exposing them to the censure of others. When he saw that the sin
of covetousness was growing upon Judas, leading to dishonesty, he
combated it by the most searching and stringent teaching. "Beware
of covetousness, for a man's life consisteth not in the things that
he possesseth;" this and other passages, which will be more fully
considered in another chapter, would seem to have been all warnings
to Judas, if he would but have listened.
So, too, his tenderness for John, whom tradition reports to have
been the youngest of the disciples, marked a delicate sense of
character. To lean on his bosom was not sought by Matthew or Thomas,
though both loved him supremely; it fell to the lot of John,--as in
a family flock, where one, the youngest and tenderest, is always
found silently near the mother; the others smile to see him always
there, and think it well. There are in St. John's narrative touches
of that silent accord between him and Jesus, that comprehension
without words, which comes between natures strung alike to sympathy.
To him Jesus commended his mother, as the nearest earthly substitute
for himself. Yet, after all, when for this one so dear, so accordant
with his own personal feelings, a request was made for station and
honor in the heavenly kingdom, he promptly refused. His personal
affection for his friends was to have no undue influence in that
realm of things which belonged to the purely divine disposal. "The
kingdom of heaven is _within_ you," he taught; and John's place in
the spiritual domain must depend upon John's own spirit.
There is one trait in the character of these chosen disciples of
Christ which is worth a special thought. They were not, as we
have seen, in any sense remarkable men intellectually, but they
had one preparation for the work for which Jesus chose them which
has not been a common one, either then or since. They were wholly
consecrated to God. It is not often we meet with men capable of
an entire self-surrender; these men were. They were so entirely
devoted to God that, when Jesus called on them to give up their
worldly callings and forsake all they had, to follow him, they
obeyed without a question or a hesitating moment. How many men
should we find in the church now that would do the same? Christ
proposed this test to one young ruler,--amiable, reverent, moral,
and religious,--and he "went away sad." He could do a great deal for
God, but he could not _give up_ ALL. Christ's disciples gave ALL
to him, and therefore he gave ALL to them. Therefore he gave them
to share his throne and his glory. The Apocalyptic vision showed
graven on the foundations of the golden city the names of the twelve
Apostles of the Lamb, those true-hearted men who were not only to be
the founders of his church on earth, but were, while he was yet in
the flesh, his daily companions, his friends, "his own."