_A SABBATH IN GALILEE._
We should naturally expect that our physician-Evangelist would have a
peculiar interest in Christ's connection with human suffering and
disease, and in this we are not mistaken.
It is almost a superfluous task to consider what our Gospels would have
been had there been no miracles of healing to record; but we may safely
say that such a blank would be inexplicable, if not impossible. Even had
prophecy been utterly silent on the subject, should we not look for the
Christ to signalize His advent and reign upon earth by manifestations of
His Divine power? A Man amongst men, human yet superhuman, how can He
manifest the Divinity that is within, except by the flashings forth of
His supernatural power? Speech, however eloquent, however true, could
not do this. There must be a background of deeds, visible credentials of
authority and power, or else the words are weak and vain--but the play
of a borealis in the sky, beautiful and bright indeed, but distant,
inoperative, and cold. If the prophets of old, who were but acolytes
swinging their lamps and singing their songs before the coming Christ,
were allowed to attest their commission by occasional enduements of
miraculous power, must not the Christ Himself prove His super-humanity
by fuller measures and exhibitions of the same power? And where can He
manifest this so well as in connection with the world's suffering, need,
and pain? Here is a background prepared, and all dark enough in sooth;
where can He write so well that men may read His messages of good-will,
love, and peace? Where can He put His sign manual, His Divine autograph,
better than on this firmament of human sorrow, disease, and woe? And so
the miracles of healing fall naturally into the story; they are the
natural and necessary accompaniments of the Divine life upon earth.
The first miracle that Jesus wrought was in the home at Cana; His first
miracle of healing was in the synagogue. He thus placed Himself in the
two pivotal centres of our earthly life; for that life, with its
heavenward and earthward aspects, revolves about the synagogue and the
home. He touches our human life alike on its temporal and its spiritual
side. To a nature like that of Jesus, which had an intense love for what
was real and true, and as intense a scorn for what was superficial and
unreal, it would seem as if a Hebrew synagogue would offer but few
attractions. True, it served as the visible symbol of religion; it was
the shrine where the Law and the Prophets spoke; what spiritual life
there was circled and eddied around its door; while its walls, pointing
to Jerusalem, kept the scattered populations in touch with the Temple,
that marbled dream of Hebraism; but in saying this we say nearly all.
The tides of worldliness and formality, which, sweeping through the
Temple gates, had left a scum of mire even upon the sacred courts,
chilling devotion and almost extinguishing faith, had swept over the
threshold of the synagogue. There the scribes had usurped Moses' seat,
exalting Tradition as a sort of essence of Scripture, and deadening the
majestic voices of the law in the jargon of their vain repetitions. But
Jesus does not absent Himself from the service of the synagogue because
the fires upon its altars are dulled and quenched by the down-draught of
the times. To Him it is the house of God, and if others see it not, He
sees a ladder of light, with ascending and descending angels. If others
hear but the voices of man, all broken and confused, He hears the
Diviner voice, still and small; He hears the music of the heavenly host,
throwing down their _Glorias_ upon earth. The pure in heart can find and
see God anywhere. He who worships truly carries his Holy of holies
within him. He who takes his own fire need never complain of the cold,
and with wood and fire all prepared, he can find or he can build an
altar upon any mount. Happy is the soul that has learned to lean upon
God, who can say, amid all the distractions and interventions of man,
"My soul, wait thou only upon God." To such a one, whose soul is athirst
for God, the Valley of Baca becomes a well, while the hot rock pours out
its streams of blessing. The art of worship avails nothing if the heart
of worship is gone; but if that remain, subtle attractions will ever
draw it to the place where "His name is recorded, and where His honour
dwelleth."
In his earlier chapters St. Luke is careful to light his Sabbath lamp,
telling that such and such miracles were wrought on that day, because
the Sabbath question was one on which Jesus soon came into collision
with the Pharisees. By their traditions, and the withs of dry and sharp
legalities, they had strangled the Sabbath, until life was well-nigh
extinct. They had made rigorous and exacting what God had made bright
and restful, fencing it around with negations, and burdening it with
penalties. Jesus broke the withs that bound her, let the freer air play
upon her face, and then led her back to the sweet liberties of her
earlier years. How He does it the sequel will show.
The Sabbath morning finds Jesus repairing to the synagogue at Capernaum,
a sanctuary built by a Gentile centurion, and presided over by Jairus,
both of whom are yet to be brought into close personal relationship with
Christ. From the silence of the narrative we should infer that the
courtesy offered at Nazareth was not repeated at Capernaum--that of
being invited to read the lesson from the Book of the Prophets. But
whether so or not, He was allowed to address the congregation, a
privilege which was often accorded to any eminent stranger who might be
present. Of the subject of the discourse we know nothing. Possibly it
was suggested by some passing scene or incident, as the sculptured pot
of manna, in this same synagogue, called forth the remarkable address
about the earthly and the heavenly bread (John vi. 31). But if the
substance of the discourse is lost to us, its effect is not. It awoke
the same feeling of surprise at Capernaum as it had done before among
the more rustic minds of Nazareth. There, however, it was the
graciousness of His words, their mingled "sweetness and light," which so
caused them to wonder; here at Capernaum it was the "authority" with
which He spoke that so astonished them, so different from the speech of
the scribes, which, for the most part, was but an iteration of quibbles
and trivialities, with just as much of originality as the "old clo'"
cries of our modern streets. The speech of Jesus came as a breath from
the upper air; it was the intense language of One who possessed the
truth, and who was Himself possessed by the truth. He dealt in
principles, not platitudes; in eternal facts, and not in the fancies of
gossamer that tradition so delighted to spin. Others might speak with
the hesitancy of doubt; Jesus spoke in "verilys" and verities, the very
essences of truth. And so His word fell upon the ears of men with the
tones of an oracle; they felt themselves addressed by the unseen Deity
who was behind; they had not learned, as we have, that the Deity of
their oracle was within. No wonder that they are astonished at His
authority--an authority so perfectly free from any assumptions; they
will wonder still more when they find that demons, too, recognize this
authority, and obey it.
While Jesus was still speaking--the tense of the verb implies an
unfinished discourse--suddenly He was interrupted by a loud, wild shout:
"Ah, what have we to do with Thee, Thou Jesus of Nazareth? Art Thou come
to destroy us? I know Thee, who Thou art, the Holy One of God." It was
the cry of a man who, as our Evangelist expresses it, "had a spirit of
an unclean devil." The phrase is a singular one, in fact unique, and
savours a little of tautology; for St. Luke uses the words "spirit" and
"devil" as synonyms (ix. 39). Later in his Gospel he would simply have
said "he had an unclean devil;" why, then, does he here amplify the
phrase, and say he had "a spirit of an unclean devil"? We can, of
course, only conjecture, but might it not be because to the Gentile
mind--to which he is writing--the powers of evil were represented as
personifications, having a corporeal existence? And so in his first
reference to demoniacal possession he pauses to explain that these
demons are evil "spirits," with existences altogether separate from the
diseased humanity which temporarily they were allowed to inhabit and to
rule. Neither can we determine with certainty the meaning of the phrase
"an unclean devil," though probably it was so called because it drove
its victim to haunt unclean places, like the Gadarene, who had his
dwelling among the tombs.
The whole subject of demonology has been called in question by certain
modern critics. They aver that it is simply an after-growth of Paganism,
the seeds of worn-out mythologies which had been blown over into the
Christian mind; and eliminating from them all that is supernatural, they
reduce the so-called "possessions" to the natural effects of purely
natural causes, physical and mental. It is confessedly a subject
difficult as it is mysterious; but we are not inclined, at the bidding
of rationalistic clamour, so to strike out the supernatural. Indeed, we
cannot, without impaling ourselves upon this dilemma, that Jesus,
knowingly or unknowingly, taught as the truth what was not true. That
Jesus lent the weight of His testimony to the popular belief is evident;
never once, in all His allusions, does He call it in question, nor hint
that He is speaking now only in an accommodated sense, borrowing the
accents of current speech. To Him the existence and presence of evil
spirits was just as patent and as solemn a fact as was the existence of
the arch-spirit, even Satan himself. And granting the existence of evil
spirits, who will show us the line of limitation, the "Hitherto, but no
farther," where their influence is stayed? Have we not seen, in
mesmerism, cases of real possession, where the weaker human will has
been completely overpowered by the stronger will? when the subject was
no longer himself, but his thoughts, words, and acts were those of
another? And are there not, in the experiences of all medical men, and
of ministers of religion, cases of depravity so utterly foul and
loathsome that they cannot be explained except by the Jewish taunt, "He
hath a devil"? According to the teaching of Scripture, the evil spirit
possessed the man in the entirety of his being, commanding his own
spirit, ruling both body and mind. Now it touched the tongue with a
certain glibness of speech, becoming a "spirit of divination," and now
it touched it with dumbness, putting upon the life the spell of an awful
silence. Not that the obscurity of the eclipse was always the same.
There were more lucid moments, the penumbras of brightness, when, for a
brief interval, the consciousness seemed to awake, and the human will
seemed struggling to assert itself; as is seen in the occasional dualism
of its speech, when the "I" emerges from the "we," only, however, to be
drawn back again, to have its identity swallowed up as before.
Such is the character who, leaving the graves of the dead for the abodes
of the living, now breaks through the ceremonial ban, and enters the
synagogue. Rushing wildly within--for we can scarcely suppose him to be
a quiet worshipper; the rules of the synagogue would not have allowed
that--and approaching Jesus, he abruptly breaks in upon the discourse of
Jesus with his cry of mingled fear and passion. Of the cry itself we
need not speak, except to notice its question and its confession. "Art
Thou come to destroy us?" he asks, as if, somehow, the secret of the
Redeemer's mission had been told to these powers of darkness. Did they
know that He had come to "destroy" the works of the devil, and
ultimately to destroy, with an everlasting destruction, him who had the
power of death, that is, the devil? Possibly they did, for, citizens of
two worlds, the visible and the invisible, should not their horizon be
wider than our own? At any rate, their knowledge, in some points, was in
advance of the nascent faith of the disciples. They knew and confessed
the Divinity of Christ's mission, and the Divinity of His Person,
crying, "I know Thee, who Thou art, the Holy One of God;" "Thou art the
Son of God" (iv. 41), when as yet the faith of the disciples was only a
nebula of mist, made up in part of unreal hopes and random guesses.
Indeed, we seldom find the demons yielding to the power of Christ, or to
the delegated power of His disciples, but they make their confession of
superior knowledge as if they possessed a more intimate acquaintance
with Christ. "Jesus I know, and Paul I know," said the demon, which the
sons of Sceva could not exorcise (Acts xix. 15), while now the demon of
Capernaum boasts, "I know Thee, who Thou art, the Holy One of God." Nor
was it a vain boast either, for our Evangelist asserts that Jesus did
not suffer the demons to speak, "because they knew that He was the
Christ" (ver. 41). They knew Jesus, but they feared and hated Him. In a
certain sense they believed, but their belief only caused them to
tremble, while it left them demons still. Just so is it now:--
"There are, too, who believe in hell and lie;
There are who waste their souls in working out
Life's problem, on these sands betwixt two tides,
And end, 'Now give us the beasts' part, in death.'"
Saving faith is thus more than a bare assent of the mind, more than some
cold belief, or vain repetition of a creed. A creed may be complete and
beautiful, but it is not the Christ; it is only the vesture the Christ
wears; and alas, there are many still who will chaffer about, and cast
lots for, a creed, who will go directly and crucify the Christ Himself!
The faith that saves, besides the assent of the mind, must have the
consent of the will and the surrender of the life. It is "with the
heart," and not only with the mind, man "believeth unto righteousness."
The interruption brought the discourse of Jesus to an abrupt end, but it
served to point the discourse with further exclamations of surprise,
while it offered space for a new manifestation of Divine authority and
power. It did not in the least disconcert the Master, though it had
doubtless sent a thrill of excitement through the whole congregation. He
did not even rise from His seat (ver. 38), but retaining the teaching
posture, and not deigning a reply to the questions of the demon, He
rebuked the evil spirit, saying, "Hold thy peace, and come out of him,"
thus recognizing the dual will, and distinguishing between the possessor
and the possessed. The command was obeyed instantly and utterly; though,
as if to make one last supreme effort, he throws his victim down upon
the floor of the synagogue, like Samson Agonistes, pulling to the ground
the temple of his imprisonment. It was, however, a vain attempt, for he
did him "no hurt." The roaring lion had indeed been "muzzled"--which is
the primitive meaning of the verb rendered "Hold thy peace"--by the
omnipotent word of Jesus.
They were "astonished at His teaching" before, but how much more so now!
Then it was a convincing word; now it is a commanding word. They hear
the voice of Jesus, sweeping like suppressed thunder over the boundaries
of the invisible world, and commanding even devils, driving them forth,
just with one rebuke, from the temple of the human soul, as afterwards
He drove the traders from His Father's house with His whip of small
cords. No wonder that "amazement came upon all," or that they asked,
"What is this word? for with authority and power He commandeth the
unclean spirits, and they come out."
And so Jesus began His miracles of healing at the outmost marge of human
misery. With the finger of His love, with the touch of His omnipotence,
He swept the uttermost circle of our human need, writing on that far and
low horizon His wonderful name, "Mighty to save." And since none are
outcasts from His mercy save those who outcast themselves, why should we
limit "the Holy One of Israel"? why should we despair of any? Life and
hope should be coeval.
Immediately on retiring from the synagogue, Jesus passes out of
Capernaum, and along the shore to Bethsaida, and enters, together with
James and John, the house of Peter and Andrew (John i. 44). It is a
singular coincidence that the Apostle Peter, with whose name the Romish
Church takes such liberties, and who is himself the "Rock" on which they
rear their huge fabric of priestly assumptions, should be the only
Apostle of whose married life we read; for though John afterwards
possesses a "home," its only inmate besides, as far as the records show,
is the new "mother" he leads away from the cross. It is true we have not
the name of Peter's wife, but we find her shadow, as well as that of her
husband, thrown across the pages of the New Testament; cleaving to her
mother even while she follows another; ministering to Jesus, and for a
time finding Him a home; while later we see her sharing the privations
and the perils of her husband's wandering life (1 Cor. ix. 5). Verily,
Rome has drifted far from the "Rock" of her anchorage, the example of
her patron saint; and between the Vatican of the modern Pontiff and the
sweet domesticities of Bethsaida is a gulf of divergence which only a
powerful imagination can cross.
No sooner, however, has Jesus entered the house than He is told
how Peter's mother-in-law has been suddenly stricken down by a
violent fever, probably a local fever for which that lake-shore was
notorious, and which was bred from the malaria of the marsh. Our
physician-Evangelist does not stay to diagnose the malady, but he speaks
of it as "a great fever," thus giving us an idea of its virulence and
consequent danger. "And they besought Him for her;" not that He was at
all reluctant to grant their request, for the tense of the verb implies
that once asking was sufficient; but evidently there was the
"beseeching" look and tone of a mingled love and fear. Jesus responds
instantly; for can He come fresh from the healing of a stranger, to
allow a dread shadow to darken the home and the hearts of His own?
Seeking the sick chamber, He bends over the fever-stricken one, and
taking her hand in His (Mark i. 31), He speaks some word of command,
"rebuking the fever," as St. Luke expresses it. In a moment the fatal
fire is quenched, the throbbing heart regains its normal beat, a
delicious coolness takes the place of the burning heat, while the
fever-flush steals away to make place for the bloom of health. The cure
was perfect and instant. The lost strength returned, and "immediately
she arose and ministered unto them," preparing, doubtless, the evening
meal.
May we not throw the light of this narrative upon one of the questions
of the day? Men speak of the reign of law, and the drift of modern
scientific thought is against any interference--even Divine--with the
ordinary operations of physical law. As the visible universe is opened
up and explored the heavens are crowded back and back, until they seem
nothing but a golden mist, some distant dream. Nature's laws are seen to
be so uniform, so ruthlessly exact, that certain of those who should be
teachers of a higher faith are suggesting the impossibility of any
interference with their ordinary operations. "You do but waste your
breath," they say, "in asking for any immunities from Nature's
penalties, or for any deviation from her fixed rules. They are
invariable, inviolate. Be content rather to be conformed, mentally and
morally, to God's will." But is prayer to have so restricted an area? is
the physical world to be buried so deep in "law" that it shall give no
rest to prayer, not even for the sole of her foot? Entire conformity to
God's will is, indeed, the highest aim and privilege of life, and he who
prays the most seeks most for this; but has God no will in the world of
physics, in the realm of matter? Shall we push Him back to the narrow
ledge of a primal Genesis? or shall we leave Him chained to that
frontier coast, another Prometheus bound? It is well to respect and to
honour law, but Nature's laws are complex, manifold. They can form
combinations numberless, working different or opposite results. He who
searches for "the springs of life" will
"Reach the law within the law;"
and who can tell whether there is not a law of prayer and faith, thrown
by the Unseen Hand across all the warp of created things, binding "the
whole round earth" about "the feet of God"? Reason says, "It might be
so," and Scripture says, "It is so." Was Jesus angry when they told Him
of the fever-stricken, and they implored His intervention? Did He say,
"You mistake My mission. I must not interfere with the course of the
fever; it must have its range. If she lives, she lives; and if she dies,
she dies; and whether the one or the other, you must be patient, you
must be content"? But such were not the words of Jesus, with their
latent fatalism. He heard the prayer, and at once granted it, not by
annulling Nature's laws, nor even suspending them, but by introducing a
higher law. Even though the fever was the result of natural causes, and
though it probably might have been prevented, had they but drained the
marsh or planted it with the eucalyptus, yet this does not shut out all
interventions of Divine mercy. The Divine compassion makes some
allowance for our human ignorance, when it is not wilful, and for our
human impotence.
The fever "left her, and immediately she rose up and ministered unto
them." Yes, and there are fevers of the spirit as well as of the flesh,
when the heart is quick and flurried, the brain hot with anxious
thought, when the fret and jar of life seem eating our strength away,
and our disquiet spirit finds its rest broken by the pressure of some
fearful nightmare. And how soon does this soul-fever strike us down! how
it unfits us for our ministry of blessing, robbing us of the "heart at
leisure from itself," and filling the soul with sad, distressing fears,
until our life seems like the helpless, withered leaf, whirled and
tossed hither and thither by the wind! For the fever of the body there
may not always be relief, but for the fever of the spirit there is a
possible and a perfect cure. It is the touch of Jesus. A close personal
contact with the living and loving Christ will rebuke the fever of your
heart; it will give to your soul a quietness and restfulness that are
Divine; and with the touch of His omnipotence upon you, and with all the
elation of conscious strength, you too will arise into a nobler life, a
life which will find its supremest joy in ministering unto others, and
so ministering unto Him.
Such was the Sabbath in Galilee in which Jesus began His miracles of
healing. But if it saw the beginning of His miracles, it did not see
their end; for soon as the sun had set, and the Sabbath restraint was
over, "all that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto Him,
and He laid His hands on every one of them, and healed them." A
marvellous ending of a marvellous day! Jesus throws out by handfuls His
largesse of blessing, health, which is the highest wealth, showing that
there is no end to His power, as there is no limit to His love; that His
will is supreme over all forces and all laws; that He is, and ever will
be, the perfect Saviour, binding up the broken in heart, assuaging all
griefs, and healing all wounds!