therefore to that of the Syriac, how could his parents, knowing him as
they did from all that had been spoken before concerning him, from all
they had seen in him, from the ponderings in Mary's own heart, and from
the precious thoughts she and Joseph cherished concerning him, have
failed to understand him when he said that wherever he was, he must be
about his father's business? On the other hand, supposing them to know
and feel that he must be about his father's business, would that have
been reason sufficient, in view of the degree of spiritual development
to which they had attained, for the Lord's expecting them not to be
anxious about him when they had lost him? Thousands on thousands who
trust God for their friends in things spiritual, do not trust him for
them in regard of their mere health or material well-being. His parents
knew how prophets had always been treated in the land; or if they did
not think in that direction, there were many dangers to which a boy like
him would seem exposed, to rouse an anxiety that could be met only by a
faith equal to saying, 'Whatever has happened to him, death itself, it
can be no evil to one who is about his father's business;' and such a
faith I think the Lord could not yet have expected of them. That what
the world counts misfortune might befall him on his father's business,
would have been recognized by him, I think, as reason for their parental
anxiety--so long as they had not learned God--that he is what he is--the
thing the Lord had come to teach his father's men and women. His words
seem rather to imply that there was no need to be anxious about his
personal safety. Fear of some accident to him seems to have been the
cause of their trouble; and he did not mean, I think, that they ought
not to mind if he died doing his father's will, but that he was in no
danger as regarded accident or misfortune. This will appear more plainly
as we proceed. So much for the authorized version.
Let us now take the translation given us by the Revisers:--'Wist ye not
that I must be in my father's house?'
Are they authorized in translating the Greek thus? I know no
justification for it, but am not learned enough to say they have none.
That the Syriac has it so, is of little weight; seeing it is no original
Syriac, but retranslation. If he did say '_my father's house_', could he
have meant the temple and his parents not have known what he meant? And
why should he have taken it for granted they would know, or judge that
they ought to have known, that he was there? So little did the temple
suggest itself to them, that either it was the last place in which they
sought him, or they had been there before, and had _not_ found him. If
he meant that they might have known this without being told, why was it
that, even when he set the thing before them, they did not understand
him? I do not believe he meant the temple; I do not think he said or
meant '_in my fathers house'_.
What then makes those who give us this translation, prefer it to the
phrase in the authorized version, '_about my Father's business_'?
One or other of two causes--most likely both together: an ecclesiastical
fancy, and the mere fact that he was found in the temple. A mind
ecclesiastical will presume the temple the fittest, therefore most
likely place, for the Son of God to betake himself to, but such a mind
would not be the first to reflect that the temple was a place where the
Father was worshipped neither in spirit nor in truth--a place built by
one of the vilest rulers of this world, less fit than many another spot
for the special presence of him of whom the prophet bears witness: 'Thus
saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is
Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a
contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to
revive the heart of the contrite ones.' Jesus himself, with the same
breath in which once he called it his father's house, called it a den of
thieves. His expulsion from it of the buyers and sellers, was the first
waft of the fan with which he was come to purge his father's dominions.
Nothing could ever cleanse that house; his fanning rose to a tempest,
and swept it out of his father's world.
For the second possible cause of the change from _business_ to
_temple_--the mere fact that he was found in the temple, can hardly be a
reason for his expecting his parents to know that he was there; and if
it witnessed to some way of thought or habit of his with which they were
acquainted, it is, I repeat, difficult to see why the parents should
fail to perceive what the interpreters have found so easily. But the
parents looked for a larger meaning in the words of such a son--whose
meaning at the same time was too large for them to find.
When, according to the Greek, the Lord, on the occasion already alluded
to, says 'my father's house,' he says it plainly; he uses the word
_house_: here he does not.
Let us see what lies in the Greek to guide us to the thought in the mind
of the Lord when he thus reasoned with the apprehensions of his father
and mother. The Greek, taken literally, says, 'Wist ye not that I must
be in the----of my father?' The authorized version supplies _business_;
the revised, _house_. There is no noun in the Greek, and the article
'the' is in the plural. To translate it as literally as it can be
translated, making of it an English sentence, the saying stands, 'Wist
ye not that I must be in the things of my father?' The plural article
implies the English _things_; and the question is then, What _things_
does he mean? The word might mean _affairs_ or _business_; but why the
plural article should be contracted to mean _house_, _I_ do not know. In
a great wide sense, no doubt, the word _house_ might be used, as I am
about to show, but surely not as meaning the temple.
He was arguing for confidence in God on the part of his parents, not for
a knowledge of his whereabout. The same thing that made them anxious
concerning him, prevented them from understanding his words--lack,
namely, of faith in the Father. This, the one thing he came into the
world to teach men, those words were meant to teach his parents. They
are spirit and life, involving the one principle by which men shall
live. They hold the same core as his words to his disciples in the
storm, 'Oh ye of little faith!' Let us look more closely at them.
'Why did you look for me? Did you not know that I must be among my
father's things?' What are we to understand by 'my father's things'?
The translation given in the authorized version is, I think, as to the
words themselves, a thoroughly justifiable one: 'I must be about my
father's business,' or 'my father's affairs'; I refuse it for no other
reason than that it does not fit the logic of the narrative, as does the
word _things_, which besides opens to us a door of large and joyous
prospect. Of course he was about his father's business, and they might
know it and yet be anxious about him, not having a perfect faith in that
father. But, as I have said already, it was not anxiety as to what might
befall him because of doing the will of the Father; he might well seem
to them as yet too young for danger from that source; it was but the
vague perils of life beyond their sight that appalled them; theirs was
just the uneasiness that possesses every parent whose child is missing;
and if they, like him, had trusted in their father, they would have
known what their son now meant when he said that he was in the midst of
his father's things--namely, that the very things from which they
dreaded evil accident, were his own home-surroundings; that he was not
doing the Father's business in a foreign country, but in the Father's
own house. Understood as meaning the world, or the universe, the phrase,
'my father's house,' would be a better translation than the authorized;
understood as meaning the poor, miserable, God-forsaken temple--no more
the house of God than a dead body is the house of a man--it is
immeasurably inferior.
It seems to me, I say, that the Lord meant to remind them, or rather to
make them feel, for they had not yet learned the fact, that he was never
away from home, could not be lost, as they had thought him; that he was
in his father's house all the time, where no hurt could come to him.
'The things' about him were the furniture and utensils of his home; he
knew them all and how to use them. 'I must be among my father's
belongings.' The world was his home because his father's house. He was
not a stranger who did not know his way about in it. He was no lost
child, but with his father all the time.
Here we find one main thing wherein the Lord differs from us: we are not
at home in this great universe, our father's house. We ought to be, and
one day we shall be, but we are not yet. This reveals Jesus more than
man, by revealing him more man than we. We are not complete men, we are
not anything near it, and are therefore out of harmony, more or less,
with everything in the house of our birth and habitation. Always
struggling to make our home in the world, we have not yet succeeded. We
are not at home in it, because we are not at home with the lord of the
house, the father of the family, not one with our elder brother who is
his right hand. It is only the son, the daughter, that abideth ever in
the house. When we are true children, if not the world, then the
universe will be our home, felt and known as such, the house we are
satisfied with, and would not change. Hence, until then, the hard
struggle, the constant strife we hold with _Nature_--as we call the
things of our father; a strife invaluable for our development, at the
same time manifesting us not yet men enough to be lords of the house
built for us to live in. We cannot govern or command in it as did the
Lord, because we are not at one with his father, therefore neither in
harmony with his things, nor rulers over them. Our best power in regard
to them is but to find out wonderful facts concerning them and their
relations, and turn these facts to our uses on systems of our own. For
we discover what we seem to discover, by working inward from without,
while he works outward from within; and we shall never understand the
world, until we see it in the direction in which he works making
it--namely from within outward. This of course we cannot do until we are
one with him. In the meantime, so much are both we and his things his,
that we can err concerning them only as he has made it possible for us
to err; we can wander only in the direction of the truth--if but to find
that we can find nothing.
Think for a moment how Jesus was at home among the things of his
father. It seems to me, I repeat, a spiritless explanation of his
words--that the temple was the place where naturally he was at home.
Does he make the least lamentation over the temple? It is Jerusalem he
weeps over--the men of Jerusalem, the killers, the stoners. What was his
place of prayer? Not the temple, but the mountain-top. Where does he
find symbols whereby to speak of what goes on in the mind and before the
face of his father in heaven? Not in the temple; not in its rites; not
on its altars; not in its holy of holies; he finds them in the world and
its lovely-lowly facts; on the roadside, in the field, in the vineyard,
in the garden, in the house; in the family, and the commonest of its
affairs--the lighting of the lamp, the leavening of the meal, the
neighbour's borrowing, the losing of the coin, the straying of the
sheep. Even in the unlovely facts also of the world which he turns to
holy use, such as the unjust judge, the false steward, the faithless
labourers, he ignores the temple. See how he drives the devils from the
souls and bodies of men, as we the wolves from our sheepfolds! how
before him the diseases, scaly and spotted, hurry and flee! The world
has for him no chamber of terror. He walks to the door of the sepulchre,
the sealed cellar of his father's house, and calls forth its four days
dead. He rebukes the mourners, he stays the funeral, and gives back the
departed children to their parents' arms. The roughest of its servants
do not make him wince; none of them are so arrogant as to disobey his
word; he falls asleep in the midst of the storm that threatens to
swallow his boat. Hear how, on that same occasion, he rebukes his
disciples! The children to tremble at a gust of wind in the house! God's
little ones afraid of a storm! Hear him tell the watery floor to be
still, and no longer toss his brothers! see the watery floor obey him
and grow still! See how the wandering creatures under it come at his
call! See him leave his mountain-closet, and go walking over its heaving
surface to the help of his men of little faith! See how the world's
water turns to wine! how its bread grows more bread at his word! See how
he goes from the house for a while, and returning with fresh power,
takes what shape he pleases, walks through its closed doors, and goes up
and down its invisible stairs!
All his life he was among his father's things, either in heaven or in
the world--not then only when they found him in the temple at Jerusalem.
He is still among his father's things, everywhere about in the world,
everywhere throughout the wide universe. Whatever he laid aside to come
to us, to whatever limitations, for our sake, he stooped his regal head,
he dealt with the things about him in such lordly, childlike manner as
made it clear they were not strange to him, but the things of his
father. He claimed none of them as his own, would not have had one of
them his except through his father. Only as his father's could he enjoy
them;--only as coming forth from the Father, and full of the Father's
thought and nature, had they to him any existence. That the things were
his fathers, made them precious things to him. He had no care for
having, as men count having. All his having was in the Father. I wonder
if he ever put anything in his pocket: I doubt if he had one. Did he
ever say, 'This is mine, not yours'? Did he not say, 'All things are
mine, therefore they are yours'? Oh for his liberty among the things of
the Father! Only by knowing them the things of our Father, can we escape
enslaving ourselves to them. Through the false, the infernal idea of
_having_, of _possessing_ them, we make them our tyrants, make the
relation between them and us an evil thing. The world was a blessed
place to Jesus, because everything in it was his father's. What pain
must it not have been to him, to see his brothers so vilely misuse the
Father's house by grasping, each for himself, at the family things! If
the knowledge that a spot in the landscape retains in it some pollution,
suffices to disturb our pleasure in the whole, how must it not have been
with him, how must it not be with him now, in regard to the
disfigurements and defilements caused by the greed of men, by their
haste to be rich, in his father's lovely house!
Whoever is able to understand Wordsworth, or Henry Vaughan, when either
speaks of the glorious insights of his childhood, will be able to
imagine a little how Jesus must, in his eternal childhood, regard the
world.
Hear what Wordsworth says:--
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Hear what Henry Vaughan says:--
Happy those early dayes, when I
Shin'd in my angell-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, celestiall thought;
When yet I had not walkt above
A mile or two, from my first love,
And looking back--at that short space--
Could see a glimpse of His bright-face;
When on some gilded cloud, or flowre
My gazing soul would dwell an houre,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinfull sound,
Or had the black art to dispence
A sev'rall sinne to ev'ry sence,
But felt through all this fleshly dresse
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.
O how I long to travell back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plaine,
Where first I left my glorious traine;
From whence th' inlightned spirit sees
That shady City of palme trees.
Whoever has thus gazed on flower or cloud; whoever can recall poorest
memory of the trail of glory that hung about his childhood, must have
some faint idea how his father's house and the things in it always
looked, and must still look to the Lord. With him there is no fading
into the light of common day. He has never lost his childhood, the very
essence of childhood being nearness to the Father and the outgoing of
his creative love; whence, with that insight of his eternal childhood of
which the insight of the little ones here is a fainter repetition, he
must see everything as the Father means it. The child sees things as the
Father means him to see them, as he thought of them when he uttered
them. For God is not only the father of the child, but of the childhood
that constitutes him a child, therefore the childness is of the divine
nature. The child may not indeed be capable of looking into the father's
method, but he can in a measure understand his work, has therefore free
entrance to his study and workshop both, and is welcome to find out what
he can, with fullest liberty to ask him questions. There are men too,
who, at their best, see, in their lower measure, things as they are--as
God sees them always. Jesus saw things just as his father saw them in
his creative imagination, when willing them out to the eyes of his
children. But if he could always see the things of his father even as
some men and more children see them at times, he might well feel
_almost_ at home among them. He could not cease to admire, cease to love
them. I say _love_, because the life in them, the presence of the
creative one, would ever be plain to him. In the Perfect, would
familiarity ever destroy wonder at things essentially wonderful because
essentially divine? To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the
childlike to the commonplace--the most undivine of all moods
intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not
wonderful to us.
Could we see things always as we have sometimes seen them--and as one
day we must always see them, only far better--should we ever know
dullness? Greatly as we might enjoy all forms of art, much as we might
learn through the eyes and thoughts of other men, should we fly to these
for deliverance from _ennui_, from any haunting discomfort? Should we
not just open our own child-eyes, look upon the things themselves, and
be consoled?
Jesus, then, would have his parents understand that he was in his
father's world among his father's things, where was nothing to hurt him;
he knew them all, was in the secret of them all, could use and order
them as did his father. To this same I think all we humans are destined
to rise. Though so many of us now are ignorant what kind of home we
need, what a home we are capable of having, we too shall inherit the
earth with the Son eternal, doing with it as we would--willing with the
will of the Father. To such a home as we now inhabit, only perfected,
and perfectly beheld, we are travelling--never to reach it save by the
obedience that makes us the children, therefore the heirs of God. And,
thank God! there the father does not die that the children may inherit;
for, bliss of heaven! we inherit with the Father.
All the dangers of Jesus came from the priests, and the learned in the
traditional law, whom his parents had not yet begun to fear on his
behalf. They feared the dangers of the rugged way, the thieves and
robbers of the hill-road. For the scribes and the pharisees, the priests
and the rulers--they would be the first to acknowledge their Messiah,
their king! Little they imagined, when they found him where he ought to
have been safest had it been indeed his father's house, that there he
sat amid lions--the great doctors of the temple! He could rule all the
_things_ in his father's house, but not the men of religion, the men of
the temple, who called his father their Father. True, he might have
compelled them with a word, withered them by a glance, with a
finger-touch made them grovel at his feet; but such supremacy over his
brothers the Lord of life despised. He must rule them as his father
ruled himself; he would have them know themselves of the same family
with himself; have them at home among the things of God, caring for the
things he cared for, loving and hating as he and his father loved and
hated, ruling themselves by the essential laws of being. Because they
would not be such, he let them do to him as they would, that he might
get at their hearts by some unknown unguarded door in their diviner
part. 'I will be God among you; I will be myself to you.--You will not
have me? Then do to me as you will. The created shall have power over
him through whom they were created, that they may be compelled to know
him and his father. They shall look on him whom they have pierced.'
His parents found him in the temple; they never really found him until
he entered the true temple--their own adoring hearts. The temple that
knows not its builder, is no temple; in it dwells no divinity. But at
length he comes to his own, and his own receive him;--comes to them in
the might of his mission to preach good tidings to the poor, to heal the
broken-hearted, to preach deliverance, and sight, and liberty, and the
Lord's own good time.
_JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN._
And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his
custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up
for to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet
Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was
written, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me
to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the
brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of
sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach
the acceptable year of the Lord.' And he closed the book, and he gave it
again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were
in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them,
'This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.'--_Luke_ iv. 14-21.
The Lord's sermon upon the mount seems such an enlargement of these
words of the prophet as might, but for the refusal of the men of
Nazareth to listen to him, have followed his reading of them here
recorded. That, as given by the evangelist, they correspond to neither
of the differing originals of the English and Greek versions, ought to
be enough in itself to do away with the spiritually vulgar notion of the
verbal inspiration of the Scriptures.
The point at which the Lord stops in his reading, is suggestive: he
closes the book, leaving the words 'and the day of vengeance of our
God,' or, as in the Septuagint, 'the day of recompense,' unread: God's
vengeance is as holy a thing as his love, yea, is love, for God is love
and God is not vengeance; but, apparently, the Lord would not give the
word a place in his announcement of his mission: his hearers would not
recognize it as a form of the Father's love, but as vengeance on their
enemies, not vengeance on the selfishness of those who would not be
their brother's keeper.
He had not begun with Nazareth, neither with Galilee. 'A prophet has no
honour in his own country,' he said, and began to teach where it was
more likely he would be heard. It is true that he wrought his first
miracle in Cana, but that was at his mother's request, not of his own
intent, and he did not begin his teaching there. He went first to
Jerusalem, there cast out the buyers and sellers from the temple, and
did other notable things alluded to by St John; then went back to
Galilee, where, having seen the things he did in Jerusalem, his former
neighbours were now prepared to listen to him. Of these the Nazarenes,
to whom the sight of him was more familiar, retained the most prejudice
against him: he belonged to their very city! they had known him from a
child!--and low indeed are they in whom familiarity with the high and
true breeds contempt! they are judged already. Yet such was the fame of
the new prophet, that even they were willing to hear in the synagogue
what he had to say to them--thence to determine for themselves what
claim he had to an honourable reception. But the eye of their judgment
was not single, therefore was their body full of darkness. Should
Nazareth indeed prove, to their self-glorifying satisfaction, the city
of the great Prophet, they were more than ready to grasp at the renown
of having produced him: he was indeed the great Prophet, and within a
few minutes they would have slain him for the honour of Israel. In the
ignoble even the love of their country partakes largely of the ignoble.