I have already, in the introductory Chapter, given my view of the
principles which guided our Lord in the exercise of His superhuman powers.
He is tempted to employ them when He saw they should not be employed, and
the Laws are drawn from His refusals. Consequently they all take the form
that, for such and such a purpose, or under such and such circumstances
these superhuman powers are not to be brought into action.
I will recapitulate the Laws before stated—
(1) Our Lord will not provide by miracle what could be provided by human
endeavour or human foresight. He Himself, as far as we can see, never
employs superhuman power or illumination to effect what could be arrived
at by human effort.
(2) Our Lord will not use His special powers to provide for His personal
wants or for those of His immediate followers.
(3) No miracle is to be worked merely for miracles’ sake, apart from an
end of benevolence or instruction.
(4) No miracle is to be worked to supplement human policy or force—as (for
instance) those of Joshua were.
(5) No miracle is to be worked which should be overwhelming in point of
awfulness so as to terrify men into acceptance, or which should be
unanswerably certain, leaving no loophole for unbelief.
Before going into particulars about these Laws there is something to be
said about the narrative of the Temptation itself, and the form in which
it has come down to us.
The incident of the Temptation is recorded in all the Gospels except that
of St John; but the account in St Mark’s Gospel relates only that our Lord
withdrew into the wilderness, and that He was there “forty days tempted of
Satan.” In the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke we find, with some small
variations to be noted presently, what is commonly known as the History of
the Temptations of our Lord.
The narratives, taken from the Revised Version, are as follows:
“Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be
tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty
nights, he afterward hungered. And the tempter came and said unto
him, If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become
bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live
by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth
of God. Then the devil taketh him into the holy city; and he set
him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou art
the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall
give his angels charge concerning thee: And on their hands they
shall bear thee up, Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone.
Jesus said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the
Lord thy God. Again, the devil taketh him unto an exceeding high
mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the
glory of them; and he said unto him, All these things will I give
thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto
him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship
the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil
leaveth him; and behold, angels came and ministered unto him.”(55)
“And straightway the Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness.
And he was in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan; and he
was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.”(56)
“And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and
was led by the Spirit in the wilderness during forty days, being
tempted of the devil. And he did eat nothing in those days: and
when they were completed, he hungered. And the devil said unto
him, If thou art the Son of God, command this stone that it become
bread. And Jesus answered unto him, It is written, Man shall not
live by bread alone. And he led him up; and shewed him all the
kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto
him, To thee will I give all this authority, and the glory of
them: for it hath been delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will
I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship before me, it shall all
be thine. And Jesus answered and said unto him, It is written,
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou
serve. And he led him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of
the temple, and said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast
thyself down from hence: for it is written, He shall give his
angels charge concerning thee, to guard thee: and, On their hands
they shall bear thee up, Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a
stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt
not tempt the Lord thy God. And when the devil had completed every
temptation, he departed from him for a season.”(57)
What we find in St Mark may have been generally known to our Lord’s
disciples from the earliest period of the ministry. But the account of the
Temptations themselves, which we find in St Matthew and St Luke, can only
have come from our Lord Himself. Assuming this to be the case, the passage
before us is singular in two respects.
First, Because the Evangelists have here, and here only, altered the form
of what our Lord delivered, and changed into a narration in the third
person what must, in the first instance, have been expressed in the first.
Secondly, Because this is the only instance in which our Lord breaks
through His reticence as to His own personal history on earth. Here and
here only does He give us a glimpse of what had befallen Him or of what
had passed within His breast.
St Matthew and St Luke differ as to the order of the second and third
Temptations. I have adopted that given by St Luke. According to my view,
our Lord in the one rejects the use of physical violence and in the other
that of moral compulsion. It is more after our Lord’s way to proceed from
what is concrete to what is abstract, than in the reverse order.
I feel strengthened in this view by some of the characteristics of the
Gospel of St Matthew, in the form in which it has come down to us. This
Evangelist has always _the Kingdom_ before his eyes. He would therefore be
inclined to account the rejection of “all the kingdoms of the world and
the glory of them” as the highest possible instance of the renunciation of
self; and as he accounted it the most severe of the temptations he would
naturally place it last. St Matthew moreover throughout his Gospel often
puts together the discourses of our Lord according to their
subject-matter, and not in the order in which they were spoken. He would
therefore have no scruple about changing the order of the account of the
Temptations which may have come before him as a detached document. On the
other hand we do not know of any bias of St Luke which should lead him to
prefer one order of events to another.
Another slight variation may be noticed. St Matthew tells us that He was
“led up of the Spirit _to be tempted_ of the devil.”(58) The words imply
that He was led up with a view to undergoing temptation. But in St Mark
and St Luke we have “being tempted” without any intimation of purpose.
Grave difficulties attach to the view that our Lord went into the desert
with the set purpose of seeking and confronting temptation. Moreover it is
of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares. If we
know that endeavours are about to be made to persuade us to a particular
course, we close our ears to all that pleads for it—being forewarned, we
are forearmed; so that, as regards these words, and indeed throughout the
passage, I place more confidence in the version of St Luke than in that of
St Matthew, or, to speak more accurately, that of his translator from
Hebrew.
The words “Get thee hence,” at the close of St Matthew’s relation of the
temptation on the mount, have been supposed to indicate the final
banishment of the Tempter, and therefore to shew that this temptation came
last. The force of the argument rests on our supposing, as no doubt the
author of St Matthew’s Gospel did, that the events here related formed
three distinct visible scenes, occurring in close succession, towards the
end of the forty days. Whereas I hold that we have here a representation
of our Lord’s inward conflicts, clothed by Him in a garb of outward
imagery, that they might be the better understood. If this view be taken,
the trials may have gone on simultaneously throughout the forty days, and
may have been so far like our own inward troubles that one harassing
perplexity may well have been most pressing at one moment and another at
the next. But if these struggles are represented by visible occurrences,
these occurrences must necessarily be related one after the other. The
words “Get thee hence” might refer not necessarily to a final banishment,
but only to the end of one assault. St Luke’s version is reconcileable
with the view that he understood our Lord to be speaking figuratively and
personifying the voices that tempted him.
It may be asked, “At what period of His ministry did our Lord give the
disciples the account of what passed in the desert?” We can only guess,
but the guess is worth making. We do not know whether the account which we
possess was contained in what critics call “the original document,” on
which the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark are supposed to be based. Its
omission by St Mark rather favours the supposition that it was not. It may
have been, in the first instance, put down in writing by one who heard the
recital from our Lord’s lips, and may have come into the hands of the
evangelists as a separate “parchment.”(59) This document might contain no
note of the time and place at which our Lord delivered the account—and, in
the absence of information on this point, the compiler of the gospel might
have made the alteration from the first person to the third, if it had not
been made before, and have inserted the account in the place belonging to
it in the order of events. I conjecture that the communication was made
near the end of the ministry, possibly after the feast of the
dedication,(60) at the time when
“He went away again beyond Jordan into the place where John was at
the first baptizing; and there he abode.”(61)
The place would recall what had happened after He had been “driven” from
that spot by the Spirit into the wilderness about two years before.
Other considerations also lead me to this conjecture.
It is strange that no allusion is ever made to so important a record: and
this would be far more strange if the knowledge had lain in the minds of
the Apostles all through the period of our Lord’s ministry, than if they
had only obtained it when the close was at hand. Moreover, the absence of
any account of the circumstances under which the relation was made
inclines me to think that this must have taken place at a time of which
our records are scanty; and there is no time in the sacred history of
which the narrative is less full than the period at which I place the
communication, viz., the early spring preceding the Passion of our Lord.
There is also this consideration of a different kind. In all education
there are two elements, that which is communicated by the teacher ready
made, and which the pupil has only to register, and that which the learner
elicits by turning over in his mind the matter which gives food for
thought. In our Lord’s teaching of the disciples the proportion of the
latter element to the former steadily increases from first to last. At
first, sayings are given them to remember; latterly, they receive
mysteries on which to meditate. In the Sermon on the Mount men are told
plainly what it was desirable for them to know; afterwards, the teaching
passes through parables and hard sayings up to the mysteries conveyed by
the Last Supper. The lessons of the Temptation have the form of the later
teaching of our Lord: they contain hard matters and only yield their fruit
by being long laid to heart.
Not only would the lessons of the Temptation have been more intelligible
to the Apostles towards the end of the ministry than at the beginning;
but, turning as they do on the use of superhuman powers, they would suit
the time when the Apostles were about to exercise similar powers
themselves.
Now comes the great question of all: In what sense is the narrative to be
taken?
Many writers accept it as literal history and suppose the Tempter to have
appeared in bodily form and to have conveyed our Lord, also in the body,
both to the mountain top and the pinnacle of the Temple. Others have
regarded it as a vision; and intermediate views have been adopted by many.
On one point fortunately we may be pretty confident. The substance of the
history came from our Lord. The most unfavourable critics allow this, from
the extreme difficulty of referring it to any other source. It cannot have
been introduced in order to make the Gospel fall in with Jewish notions of
the Messiah, for there are no traditions that the Messiah should be
tempted: and if the passage had been devised by men, the drift of it would
have been plainer, and the temptations would have been such as men would
feel might have come upon themselves. We have many accounts, in the
legends of the saints, of the sort of trials which present themselves to
the imagination of human writers; and they differ totally from these.
I have let fall already a few words shewing in what way I regard the
passage. I must now speak more fully on the subject.
It may be assumed that, in all our Lord’s dealings with His disciples, His
primary purpose was to do them good. He did not leave behind Him this
reference to His sojourn in the wilderness and its momentous results,
merely as materials for biographers. The trials which had beset Him would
soon beset them also in doing the work He destined for them; before He
left them He would therefore relate in what disguises the temptations had
appeared and how they had been repelled. Behind the Apostles, who formed
as it were the front rank of His audience, there stretched long files of
hearers,—all those to whom His words have since come. At the end of this
file we ourselves stand; and those among us who have special gifts, and
are tempted to use them for selfish ends, or for putting a yoke, physical
or mental, upon other men, may well take them to heart. My business
however now is with the Apostles. It was likely that our Lord would give
them some hint as to the principles on which superhuman power can be
safely employed: and it was certain that this lesson would be put by Him
in the form which would best convey it, and which would make the most
lasting impression. The _form_ then, as well as the matter of the lesson,
must be worth studying closely.
One reason why this passage has such a powerful interest for men is that
the history is a personal one. Our Lord riveted the most earnest attention
of His hearers by speaking to them of Himself; and something of the same
effect is felt by readers of the story now. We know how a teacher at once
enchains the interest of his class when, leaving things abstract, or what
he finds in books, he says, “Now I will tell you something that happened
to me;” and we can understand the eagerness with which the Apostles would
gather round our Lord, and can imagine how intently they would gaze upon
Him, when He told them that He, like them, had been tempted, that He too
had fought hard battles and that He would tell them what they were.
Another source of interest is that the story deals with inner struggles in
a figurative way—the voices are personified and the action is localised.
That Satan should have appeared in a bodily form is, to my mind, opposed
to the spirituality of all our Lord’s teaching. Such an appearance
presents endless difficulties, not only physical but moral. If our Lord
knew the tempter to be Satan, He was as I have said forearmed; if He did
not know him, this introduces other difficulties. He must at any rate have
been surprised at meeting a specious sophist in the wilderness. Milton
deals with the subject with great skill, from his point of view, in
_Paradise Regained_. Certain points he leaves unexplained, and those I
believe to be inexplicable. They are these. I cannot understand that our
Lord should suffer Satan to transport Him to the mountain top, or to the
pinnacle of the Temple, or that the Evil One should propose to Jesus to
fall down and worship him.
I can however readily comprehend that our Lord should represent under this
imagery and under these personifications what had passed within Himself.
He could not indeed bring the lesson home to His hearers in any other way.
To have represented mental emotions, to have spoken of the thoughts that
had passed through His mind, would have been wholly unsuited to His
hearers. We know how difficult it is to keep up an interest in a record of
inward struggles and experiences. Men want something to present to their
mind’s eye, and they soon weary of following an account of what has been
going on within a man’s heart, void of outward incident. A recital of what
had passed in our Lord’s mind would have taken no hold of men’s fancy and
would soon have faded from their thoughts. But the figure of Satan would
catch their eye, the appearance of contest would animate the hearers’
interest; while the survey of the realms of the earth, and the dizzy
station on the pinnacle of the Temple, would take possession of men’s
memories and minds.
The Apologue was to Orientals a favourite vehicle for conveying moral
lessons; and we have a familiar instance in English Literature of the
attraction of allegory. Would Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_ have possessed
itself, as it has done, of the hearts of whole sections of the British
race, if, shorn of its human characters and its scenery, it had only
analysed and depicted the inward conflicts, the mental vicissitudes and
religious difficulties of a sorely-tried Christian youth?
The use of the name Satan must be considered. This name, which means the
enemy, occurs in the Old Testament, in the book of Job and elsewhere but
not in the Pentateuch. The Jews we know had a dæmonology of their own. The
gods of the heathen they regarded as devils, of whom the Sidonian deity
Beelzebub was Prince. Our Lord never countenances these views. I believe
that He uses the word Satan in a _generic_ sense to personify evil
spiritual influences exercised upon earth.
When the Apostles returned safe after being sent through the cities, our
Lord regards this as an augury of their success in the great conflict and
says that He “beheld Satan fallen as lightning from Heaven.”(62) We have
clearly impersonation here. He says also “If Satan hath risen up against
himself and is divided,”(63) a supposition which excludes the idea of an
individual being, and agrees with the collective meaning I attribute to
the term. When St Peter rebukes our Lord for declaring before His
followers that He would be “rejected and killed and after three days rise
again,” our Lord says “Get thee behind me, Satan.” St Peter, by saying of
the suffering of which our Lord spake “this shall never be unto thee,”(64)
unwittingly had acted as the ally of those who would tempt our Lord from
yielding implicitly to His Father’s will, and our Lord therefore calls him
Satan. On the whole then I lean to the view that the communication, or
discourse of our Lord, which has been preserved in the form of the
narrative of the Temptation, was delivered by Him in the form of an
_apologue_ or species of parable, in which our Lord, after Eastern
fashion, introduced Satan as an embodiment of the powers of evil.
It must not be supposed that by giving up here the personality of the
tempter we are making an abatement of what is superhuman in the Gospel, in
order that, in virtue of having so done, we may hope to win this or that
section of doubters over to our side—the whole question of evil remains a
mystery, and in mystery there can be no degrees. It is of no use
endeavouring to make infinity a trifle less infinite.
Whether the word Satan be here used collectively or personally is
altogether a different question from the existence of intermediate
intelligences, and is quite an open one even for the most orthodox.
Temptation to turn stones into loaves.
I now come to the Temptations themselves. As these trials were mental, we
can only realise them by imagining what, consistently with our history,
_may_ have passed in our Lord’s mind. What _actually did_ so pass is of
course beyond our knowledge altogether. We are however justified in
supposing that, as our Lord was “tempted as man,” the thoughts and
feelings which actuated Him would be such as men might follow and more or
less understand.
It would appear that when God lays a work on a man He gives him a general
view of the end to be kept in sight, a vehement desire to accomplish it,
and a forefeeling of the capacity so to do. But He does not shew him how
he is to do it, He does not make the way clear so that he sees his course
before him and marks its several stages. If a man were so guided he would
not fulfil the conditions of human agency, there would be no room for his
own will to act, he would have no responsibility. He would move along a
pre-arranged path. God would, in effect, be doing all and he nothing, and
so it would come to much the same thing as if the work were done once for
all by God’s _fiat_, independently of human action—and this, as we have
already seen, is not God’s way of governing the world.
When St Paul takes his last journey to Jerusalem, the Spirit, he tells us,
“testifieth unto me in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions abide
me.” That he must go to Jerusalem he knew and to go he was resolved, but
what course of conduct he was to adopt or what the result was to be he did
not know at all; afterwards in like manner, he knew that he was to bear
witness at Rome, but he had no directions as to what he was to do. It was
left to him to act as seemed to him to be the best. This may give us a
help towards understanding how it may have been with our Lord, when the
mighty charge unto which He was born came home to His mind, and He felt,
rising in Him, the wondrous powers given to aid Him in carrying it out.
Our Lord when driven by the Spirit into the wilderness would take no
thought of food or shelter. The one thing He craved for was to be alone;
He must have solitude, and the wilderness provided that.
When He reflected, He could hardly help asking Himself whether this light
which had shone upon Him—this voice from Heaven,—were the resuscitation of
His Diviner life or only something in His own eyes and ears? A sure test
lay ready: when He had heard Himself hailed as the Son of God a conviction
had risen in Him that God would give effect to His commands. He had only
to try whether this was so and all doubts would be resolved. Perhaps the
whisper came “Try this experiment in a _very small matter first_.” Who
could think this apparent caution and prudence came from an ill quarter?
Spiritual evil always chooses a trifle, something from which it seems that
no harm can possibly come, to win its victim to the first false step. Our
Lord was hungry, and loaf-shaped stones were lying all about Him. Why not
turn a few actually into the loaves they looked like? In so doing, how
could He possibly be wrong?
However plausible the appeal of the Tempter, it was not entertained. We
can conceive that a whole array of objections would arise; some may have
been such as these—
This putting of God to trial by a test of my own choosing, that I may
determine whether I will believe His words or not: this implying that I
will admit His authority if He speaks in one way and not if He speaks in
another—Is this befitting one called to a work like this?
Then came another point—He was hungry. As St Mark says nothing about the
fasting it will be best not to assume that the fasting was part of our
Lord’s original purpose; but as, in the desert of Judea, food could not be
got without a journey of some miles, our Lord, whether designedly or not,
had put Himself out of the immediate reach of food. Should He remedy this
by using the mysterious power with which He felt He was invested? This
power was given Him to forward God’s Kingdom upon earth—should He use it
for Himself?
Then the tempter might return to the assault. There are fluxes and
refluxes in human feeling; we are always afraid that we have gone too far
in one direction, or been too obstinate about our own point; it strikes us
that perhaps we have made more of it than it was worth, and then we listen
submissively to the other side.
Such a whisper as this may have come—"These powers are given you to enable
you to set up God’s Kingdom upon earth; for this you must win adherents.
These adherents must be maintained. Your opponents are supported by the
great ones of the earth; the God of Heaven has committed to you His powers
for the support of yours. This little incident of the loaves only points
the way to a much weightier matter; you _must_ use your special powers to
supply your own bodily wants in the coming contest,—why not begin with
using them for this purpose now?"
Here we have arrived at the gravest point of the debate—Were these powers
really to be used for His bodily wants or not? As the true conditions of
His work rose before Him, the principles grew clearer; He was to deliver
mankind as the Son of Man, He was to work as man, to suffer as man, that
suffering men might always look to Him, saying “He was one of us.” And how
could this be, if His lot was so unlike theirs that He met His own wants
by a word of command directly they arose? How could His followers own the
duty of labouring for their daily bread, if stones at a word were turned
into loaves for Him? How could He tell men not to think overmuch of the
meat that perisheth, if He had used Divine powers to provide it for
Himself as soon as He possessed them? If He were to be the stay of loving
human hearts, He must say to men, “As you live, I live: of all your ills
and troubles I claim my part.”
Our Lord’s answer points out a train of thought along which He may have
passed, until at length He reached a firm resolve and reduced the Tempter
to silence. It will not be irreverent to imagine what might, consistently
with what we learn, have been its nature.
Man wants no reminding that he lives by _bread_. There is no fear of his
not giving care enough to the needs of his body; but there is danger lest
he should think of nothing but these needs, and starve his soul and become
such that eternal life, without a body to care for, would only be a
condition of aimless weariness. He resolved therefore to keep His powers
apart for spiritual ends. He will work no miracle to shew that He _can_
work a miracle, or to assure either Himself or others that He is the Son
of God; neither will He use this power to provide what others win by toil,
or to preserve Himself or His followers from the common ills of human
life.
There are a few of our Lord’s Signs which might, at first sight, look as
if in them this principle were not observed. At the marriage of Cana in
Galilee, the Sign is worked as an act of kindness to save the host from
mortification arising from an accident.
I have mentioned, as regards the miracles of the loaves and fishes, that
on both occasions the supply which our Lord’s own company had with them
was sufficient for their immediate wants. The crowds, however, had, by
their rapt attention to our Lord, been detained away from their homes and
their supplies, and, if they had had to go a distance to buy bread, they
would have suffered from taking so long a journey fasting. The case was an
exceptional emergency parallel to that of illness, and our Lord meets it
by miraculous means.
The miraculous draughts of fishes benefited probably all who were partners
in the vessel, but they were not wrought to meet any necessity on the part
of our Lord. All night long they had taken nothing; this scarcity may have
been part of the lesson of the miracle, and the great draught is only a
bounteous compensation. This is a miracle of instruction, as I said in the
last chapter: it tells men that a turn comes at the moment when they are
about to give up, and that the faith which bears up long is rewarded.
Moreover, to recur to what I said in the last chapter, St Peter had been
told that he was to be henceforth a fisher of men; and when multitudes,
both of Jews and Gentiles, were gathered into the Church in Jerusalem he
must have thought of this as answering to the Sign.
The miracle of the stater in the fish’s mouth also requires notice. It is
not wrought to obtain the coin, but to keep before Peter’s mind that he as
well as his Master were the children and not the servants or tributaries
of God.
From St Peter’s answering without hesitation that his master would pay the
didrachm, it is clear that there was no difficulty about producing the
small sum. He does not speak to our Lord on the matter, but our Lord,
directly he enters the house, asks him, “What thinkest thou, Simon? the
kings of the earth, from whom do they receive toll or tribute? from their
sons, or from strangers?”(65)
This miracle, as we said in the last chapter, is one of instruction. The
payment according to the received view was the half-shekel that every
Israelite had to pay for providing victims for the Temple service. It gave
the idea of a tribute to God which stood in the way of the conception of
perfect sonship. It implied that Israelites alone had part or lot in the
worship of the living God. Our Lord would have St Peter regard God as the
Father of mankind and not only as the Lord and ruler of Israel. The whole
point of the lesson lies in the words “then are the children free.” These
words would be stamped on St Peter’s mind by the finding the stater in the
fish’s mouth; and they would recur to him and bring their proper lesson
with them when the right moment came. The circumstance is not in itself
necessarily miraculous, but it was rendered so in this case by our Lord’s
foreseeing that the coin would be found in the first fish that came.
The Temptation on the Mount.
Next comes a scene in which the Spirit of the World is represented as
pointing out all the glories of the empire of the inhabited earth, and
offering it to our Lord on the strange condition that He should fall down
and worship him. This represents, in plain and very forcible imagery, a
spiritual temptation to which those who have laboured to regenerate
mankind have fallen victims over and over again. Those who have most
nearly attained universal conquest, Mahomet, Zengis, Timour, and many
great political leaders as well, have begun with a genuine wish to
alleviate the ills of mankind, of whom eventually they became a scourge.
I believe that what our Lord sets before us here is the temptation to aim
at visible and comparatively immediate success, and to bring about our
ideal by using the arts of worldly policy; which were to be supported in
the case before us by superhuman power.
We can conceive a Tempter, such as the Satan of _Paradise Regained_,
saying as he does,
“Great acts require great means of enterprise,”
and urging worldly counsels such as these:—“You seek to set up a perfect
kingdom upon earth, to minimise evil by wise laws, and to make men love
God and serve God out of love. You want success and you want it soon, in
order that in your lifetime you may see your plans matured. For this,
first of all, you must have at your back not merely disciples who shall
listen and meditate, but men who can advance _a cause_. The uppermost
feeling of the people among whom you have come is the desire to be free
from Rome. They have drawn from the Scriptures a notion that a Messiah
will soon come and restore the kingdom to Israel. With this view, be it
right or wrong, you must fall in. You carry with you powers like those
wielded by the prophets of old. Proclaim yourself such a Messiah as men
expect. Strike to the ground the Roman eagles that are sent against you.
Offer to all who fall on your side a paradise of palpable enjoyments such
as they can understand. Shew yourself invulnerable, and be everywhere
foremost in the fight. Your superhuman power will balance the enormous
might of Rome. In order to win the empire of the world you must employ
policy as well as arms. You must excite enthusiasm. You must fascinate
crowds by eloquence and lead them to serve your purpose when they think
that you are serving theirs. When you have secured the empire, you can
inaugurate a golden reign and call on men to bless your Father who sent
you to their aid.”
If suggestions such as these had been made to our Lord by such a Tempter
as Milton imagines, we can see from the reply in our narrative how they
would have been met. This kingdom, our Lord would say, so gained might
indeed be mine but assuredly it will not be God’s; and my business is not
to work for myself but for Him. It was this utter absence of self, in our
Lord, which men could not comprehend; their common standards could not
measure Him—they are bewildered by this, and all but the higher sort are
put out of touch with Him.
The picture which our Lord leaves us of His struggle with the evil
suggestions of His insidious foe teaches us many lessons, but the clearest
of all are these—If we fight the world with its own weapons we soon put
our hands out for using any others than those. If we seek what the world
has to give we soon fall down and worship it, without having the least
intention of doing anything of the kind. But besides giving a lesson for
after ages, our Lord here indicates a particular resolve which shaped His
action upon earth. It was this,—He would not employ His superhuman powers
to force men to obey, or even to resist the violence which might be
offered Him. He would not use them to assist in setting up the outward
fabric of a Kingdom of God: and then, going a little further, He
determines not to set up by His own hand any outward fabric of such a
Kingdom at all. He was not to be an aspirant for worldly distinction—He
was not to be the _leader of a cause_—He was not to be the founder of a
school of philosophy or of any external form of religion at all. He came
to do a _Work_, The Central Work of the History of mankind. He declared
God, and declared Himself to be united to God, and that He would be with
men for ever until the end of the world. But all that has to do with
organisation, outward customs, effective sanctions, or the condensing of
doctrines into the formulæ of creeds, belongs to the human side of
religion, and men of different climes and ages must shape such matters for
themselves. He came, as I have said, only to kindle the fire and to set a
new force moving in the world. This Law,—that neither force nor worldly
policy should be used to carry out the Work of God,—governs all our Lord’s
acts. It need hardly be said that there is no miracle of our Lord’s
recounted in the canonical Scriptures in which violence is either done or
repelled. In the apocryphal Gospels we find endless legends of the
retribution which our Lord brought on those who injured Him, especially in
His boyish years.
Neither do we ever find that our Lord so displays His signs or shapes His
conduct, as to win from the crowd material support for the work He is
carrying on. It was never more important for Him to win over the
enthusiasm of the people than when He taught in Jerusalem in the week of
the Passover: but no public miracle at all is then performed. It must have
seemed strange to the disciples that He did not confound Pilate on his
judgment seat, or Herod on his throne, but _we_ see that the whole meaning
of His coming would have been lost if He had. The disciples however are
not left at that time without some indication that His Divine power
remained unimpaired—the withering of the fig-tree, and the foretelling to
Peter that he should deny Him thrice, shewed them that Jesus was still the
Lord. When the Lord in the hands of His enemies turned and looked upon
Peter, how striking must have been the contrast between the Kingdoms of
the earth and of God!
There is one occasion where our Lord is urged to act in violation of this
principle. The sons of Zebedee ask whether they may not call down fire
from Heaven on those who would not receive them. “But He turned and
rebuked them.”(66)
Again, if He had come down from the cross when challenged to do so, this
principle would have been broken through. Those who said “He saved others,
Himself He cannot save,”(67) uttered a truth deeper than they dreamed of:
it was of the very essence of His mission that He should not use His
powers for Himself.
In connexion with this it may be noted that when St Peter is delivered
from the prison,(68) and St Paul and Silas at Philippi, these deliverances
are represented, not as being worked _by_ St Peter or St Paul, but as
being worked _for_ them by the Divine power, without any doing of theirs.
The Temptation on the Pinnacle of the Temple.
When the temptation to employ open force was repelled, a more insidious
one came in its stead. It was to use moral compulsion, and, by the public
display of a resistless manifestation, to make doubt and opposition
disappear.
Our Lord, as I believe, clothes this suggestion in imagery suited to His
hearers: He represents Himself as borne to the pinnacle of the Temple and
bidden to cast Himself down. Of this pinnacle an account is given by Dr
Edersheim: he considers it to have overlooked the Court of the Priests.
The following extracts are from his account:—
“In the next temptation Jesus stands on the watch-post which the
white-robed priest has just quitted. In the Priests’ Court below Him the
morning sacrifice has been offered.... Now let Him descend, Heaven-borne,
into the midst of priests and people. What shouts of acclamation would
greet His appearance! What homage of worship would be His!”(69)
This pinnacle, supposing my view to be correct, would offer a fitting
scene for the story of this trial, not only as being a giddy height, but
because also the spot was a public one, and a crowd of spectators would
witness the display. If our Lord had only been tempted to assure Himself
of His power by a miracle of adventurous rashness, any precipice would
have served as well. The essential force of the temptation lay in the
suggestion to prostrate men’s minds, and to subjugate their wills, by
performing before their eyes an appalling act, the superhuman nature of
which could not possibly be gainsaid.
When we leave the external imagery, and come to the gist of the lesson, we
find in it the truth which we have had before us over and over again.(70)
A man’s belief is not _his_ belief and will not be effective for moulding
his life unless his mind and his will have some part in the acceptance of
it; and if his own endeavours were to be on a sudden superseded by Divine
action, this would be inconsistent with that studious culture of man’s
distinctive freedom which runs through the conduct of the world. If will
and reason are to be dumbfounded by the interference of absolute power,
why should men possess them or care to put them to use? As a fact, God
_suggests_ but does not _compel_, and our Lord’s signs agree herewith.
They emphasise His lessons, and witness for God to those who have eyes for
Him—but men can reject the lesson, signs and all if they please.
Let us imagine the form the Tempter’s arguments might take in the mouth of
one like Milton’s Satan: “You wish,” he might suggest, “men to believe
that your power comes from on high. Leave them no room for doubt. People
about you look for a Sign from Heaven, such as Joshua worked in Ajalon,
and Isaiah displayed in the days of Hezekiah. Beelzebub, they think, may
work Signs on earth, but Heaven, they own, is God’s domain, and what is
written in the skies carries God’s hand and seal. Shew men these Signs for
which they ask, and display your wonders so as to strike men the most.
Cures and works of mercy, witnessed by a few score people, create but
little stir. Shew something that all Judea, or at least Jerusalem, can
behold _at once_;—great emotions take strongest hold among men in a mass:
display a comet or darken the sun; or, to begin with, stand on the
pinnacle of the Temple—there is a tradition that there the Messiah should
appear(71)—and in the presence of all the crowd hurl yourself into the
Priests’ Court below.”
To meet these thoughts suggested by the Tempter, there would rise in our
Lord’s mind a crowd of arguments: some of these I have already ventured to
imagine. If our Lord had displayed a Sign of overwhelming effect, and
bidden men deny it if they could, He would have paralysed intellectual
growth in mankind. Men had been gifted with faculties fitting them to
explore and to judge of spiritual things: if these were curtailed of room
for exercise, they would languish like limbs disused. Should He bar
investigation in one-half of reason’s realm? Should He so appal mankind,
as to enforce an involuntary acceptance of His claims? Would not this be
putting fresh fetters on those whom He was come on earth to set free?
Some miracles of a stupendous character are worked by our Lord, no doubt:
such are the Transfiguration and the raising of Jairus’ daughter. But,
marvellous as these two manifestations were, they were not worked for the
mere wonder’s sake; men were not brought together to see them. The
wondrousness is an inevitable accompaniment of the declaration of God’s
Kingdom and the disclosing of His ways, but it is not the prime motive of
the act. There is no display, no appearance of effort. Expectation is not
awakened or the imagination aroused by the announcement of a coming
prodigy. Neither were these great works wrought to win proselytes: the few
who witness them are already convinced of their Master’s Divine power; it
is not so much a fuller assurance that they derive from them, as a deeper
insight into the ways of God. To the three apostles who already best
discerned God’s ways, God’s power is in these manifestations more fully
displayed; no others behold it. Here as everywhere, it is to those who
have that more is given.
This same Law governs the appearances of the risen Lord. He does not stand
forth in triumph and confound disbelief. He had only to shew Himself in
the temple and His enemies would have lain at His feet. But men were not
to be convinced against their will: all our accounts agree that it was to
His apostles only that our Lord appeared. St Peter says to Cornelius and
his friends:
“Him God raised up the third day, and gave him to be made
manifest, not to all the people, but unto witnesses that were
chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him
after he rose from the dead.”(72)
This limitation is very carefully maintained. Our Lord never appears _in
His own form_, when there is any chance of His being beheld by others than
disciples. In the garden, at the tomb, and on the way to Emmaus, He shews
Himself to disciples in a strange shape and is only made known to them for
a moment: He was not to be seen and recognised by any ordinary passer by.
His resurrection was not to be a subject of popular rumour or one for the
wonderment of the crowd. Some might say, with the man in the parable,
“Nay, but if one go to them from the dead,(73) they will repent,” but our
Lord is averse to sensational impressions: men had had the option of
believing or not, and they had made their choice. When however the
apostles are together in their upper chamber and the doors are shut, He
appears in His accustomed form, with the print of the nails upon His hands
and feet, for there was no need then for disguise.
The principle that room is to be left for man’s will to act in determining
his creed is observed not only in all the New Testament but throughout the
spiritual history of mankind. Towards the close of the third chapter I
have remarked on the analogy between an overwhelming manifestation, such
as a Sign from Heaven, and a rigorous demonstration that Christ’s
revelation is of God. Men have at times cried out both for one and the
other; but if what they demand had been given them, the higher knowledge
would have been discontinuous, with uncertainty on one side of a line and
absolute certainty on the other. There would have been rigid dykes, as of
granite, crossing the field of spiritual thought, which would have baulked
our progress.
The Laws which I have stated concerning Signs are steadily observed
throughout the canonical Scriptures, although the writers of the books
knew nothing of any such Laws. The Apocryphal Gospels on the other hand
violate these Laws at every turn. This opens out almost a new line of
argument on internal evidence. Is not the coincidence strange, supposing
that the writers allowed play to their fancies, that all the four
Evangelists should have uniformly refrained from introducing any miracle
worked merely for miracles’ sake; or anyone which served to minister to
the bodily wants of the worker; or which was employed either to enforce
submission or to punish hostility? Is it not also strange that neither in
the Gospels nor the Acts have we any instance of any public display of
power such as should awe the crowds into belief against their wills?
In this chapter I have considered the series of Temptations, with
reference to their bearing on the miracles. I have tried to shew that they
supply insight into our Lord’s way of solving the problem of introducing
the infinite element without causing the finite to disappear. But this is
only a student view; and the lesson which the church has always drawn from
them is of infinitely greater practical worth. The heads of this lesson
are: that the great prizes of life presented themselves to Jesus as they
do to us; that they glittered in His eyes as they do in ours; that they
offered themselves to His grasp as they sometimes do to ours, and were
deliberately renounced by Him as hollow, compared with the blessing of
knowing and doing the will of God. Without this record, could we have
conceived our Lord as being “Man of the substance of His mother born in
the world”? Might we not have looked on Jesus Christ as only a
manifestation of Deity, clad in outer human guise, but without human
affections; visible indeed to men’s eyes, but destitute of a pulse which
beats in unison with theirs? This error would have lodged Christianity in
mens’ heads instead of in their hearts and would have destroyed its
universality and force; and this error, the narrative of the
Temptation—whether we regard it as apologue or fact—is alike effectual to
dispel.