If we allow that prayer may in any case be heard for the man himself, it
almost follows that it must be heard for others. It cannot well be in
accordance with the spirit of Christianity, whose essential expression
lies in the sacrifice of its founder, that a man should be heard only
when he prays for himself. The fact that in cases of the preceding group
faith was required on the part of the person healed as essential to his
cure, represents no different principle from that which operates in the
cases of the present group. True, in these the condition is not faith on
the part of the person cured, but faith on the part of him who asks for
his cure. But the possession of faith by the patient was not in the
least essential, as far as the power of Jesus was concerned, to his
bodily cure, although no doubt favourable thereto; it was necessary
only to that spiritual healing, that higher cure, for the sake of
which chiefly the Master brought about the lower. In both cases, the
requisition of faith is for the sake of those who ask--whether for
themselves or for their friends, it matters not. It is a breath to blow
the smoking flax into a flame--a word to draw into closer contact with
himself. He cured many without such demand, as his Father is ever curing
without prayer. Cure itself shall sometimes generate prayer and faith.
Well, therefore, might the cure of others be sometimes granted to
prayer.
Beyond this, however, there is a great fitness in the thing. For so are
men bound together, that no good can come to one but all must share
in it. The children suffer for the father, the father suffers for the
children, and they are also blessed together. If a spiritual good
descend upon the heart of a leader of the nation, the whole people might
rejoice for themselves, for they must be partakers of the unspeakable
gift. To increase the faith of the father may be more for the faith of
the child, healed in answer to his prayer, than anything done for the
child himself. It is an enlarging of one of the many channels in which
the divinest gifts flow. For those gifts chiefly, at first, flow to men
through the hearts and souls of those of their fellows who are nearer
the Father than they, until at length they are thus brought themselves
to speak to God face to face.
Lonely as every man in his highest moments of spiritual vision, yea
in his simplest consciousness of duty, turns his face towards the one
Father, his own individual maker and necessity of his life; painfully
as he may then feel that the best beloved understands not as he
understands, feels not as he feels; he is yet, in his most isolated
adoration of the Father of his spirit, nearer every one of the beloved
than when eye meets eye, heart beats responsive to heart, and the poor
dumb hand seeks by varied pressure to tell the emotion within. Often
then the soul, with its many organs of utterance, feels itself but a
songless bird, whose broken twitter hardens into a cage around it; but
even with all those organs of utterance in full play, he is yet farther
from his fellow-man than when he is praying to the Father in a desert
place apart. The man who prays, in proportion to the purity of his
prayer, becomes a spiritual power, a nerve from the divine brain, yea,
perhaps a ganglion as we call it, whence power anew goes forth upon his
fellows. He is a redistributor, as it were, of the divine blessing; not
in the exercise of his own will--that is the cesspool towards which
all notions of priestly mediation naturally sink--but as the
self-forgetting, God-loving brother of his kind, who would be in the world
as Christ was in the world. When a man prays for his fellow-man, for wife
or child, mother or father, sister or brother or friend, the connection
between the two is so close in God, that the blessing begged may well
flow to the end of the prayer. Such a one then is, in his poor, far-off
way, an advocate with the Father, like his master, Jesus Christ, The
Righteous. He takes his friend into the presence with him, or if not
into the presence, he leaves him with but the veil between them, and
they touch through the veil.
The first instance we have in this kind, occurred at Cana, in the centre
of Galilee, where the first miracle was wrought. It is the second
miracle in St John's record, and is recorded by him only. Doubtless
these two had especially attracted his nature--the turning of water into
wine, and the restoration of a son to his father. The Fatherhood of God
created the fatherhood in man; God's love man's love. And what shall he
do to whom a son is given whom yet he cannot keep? The divine love in
his heart cleaves to the child, and the child is vanishing! What can
this nobleman do but seek the man of whom such wondrous rumours have
reached his ears?
Between Cana and Tiberias, from which came the father with his prayer,
was somewhere about twenty miles.
"He is at the point of death," said the father.
"Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe," said Jesus.
"Sir, come down ere my child die."
"Go thy way, thy son liveth."
If the nobleman might have understood the remark the Lord made, he was
in no mood for principles, and respectfully he expostulates with our
Lord for spending time in words when the need was so urgent. The sun of
his life was going down into the darkness. He might deserve reproof, but
even reproof has its season. "Sir, come down ere my child die." Whatever
the Lord meant by the words he urged it no farther. He sends him home
with the assurance of the boy's recovery, showing him none of the signs
or wonders of which he had spoken. Had the man been of unbelieving kind
he would, when he returned and found that all had occurred in the most
natural fashion, that neither here had there been sign or wonder, have
gradually reverted to his old carelessness as to a higher will and its
ordering of things below. But instead of this, when he heard that the
boy began to get better the very hour when Jesus spoke the word--a fact
quite easy to set down as a remarkable coincidence--he believed, and all
his people with him. Probably he was in ideal reality the head of his
house, the main source of household influences--if such, then a man of
faith, for, where a man does not himself look up to the higher, the
lower will hardly look faithfully up to him--surely a fit man to
intercede for his son, with all his house ready to believe with him. It
may be said they too shared in the evidence--such as it was--not much of
a sign or wonder to them. True; but people are not ready to believe
the best evidence except they are predisposed in the direction of that
evidence. If it be said, "they should have thought for themselves," I
answer--To think with their head was no bad sign that they did think for
themselves. A great deal of what is called freedom of thought is merely
the self-assertion which would persuade itself of a freedom it would
possess but cannot without an effort too painful for ignorance and
self-indulgence. The man would _feel_ free without being free. To assert
one's individuality is not necessarily to be free: it _may_ indeed be
but the outcome of absolute slavery.
But if this nobleman was a faithful man, whence our Lord's word, "Except
ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe"? I am not sure. It may
have been as a rebuke to those about him. This man--perhaps, as is said,
a nobleman of Herod's court--may not have been a pure-bred Jew, and
hence our Lord's remark would bear an import such as he uttered more
plainly in the two cases following, that of the Greek woman, and that
of the Roman centurion: "Except _ye_ see signs and wonders ye will not
believe; _but this man_--." With this meaning I should probably have
been content, were it not that the words were plainly addressed to the
man. I do not think this would destroy the interpretation, for the Lord
may have wished to draw the man out, and make him, a Gentile or doubtful
kind of Jew, rebuke the disciples; only the man's love for his son stood
in the way: he could think of nothing, speak of nothing save his son;
but it makes it unsatisfactory. And indeed I prefer the following
interpretation, because we have the other meaning in other places;
also because this is of universal application, and to us of these days
appears to me of special significance and value, applying to the men of
science on the one hand, and the men of superstition on the other.
My impression is, that our Lord, seeing the great faith of the nobleman,
grounded on what he had heard of the Master from others, chiefly of his
signs and wonders, did in this remark require of him a higher faith
still. It sounds to me an expostulation with him. To express in the best
way my feeling concerning it, I would dare to imagine our Lord speaking
in this fashion:--
"Why did you not pray the Father? Why do you want always to _see_? The
door of prayer has been open since ever God made man in his own image:
why are signs and wonders necessary to your faith? But I will do just as
my Father would have done if you had asked him. Only when I do it, it is
a sign and a wonder that you may believe; and I wish you could believe
without it. But believe then for the very work's sake, if you cannot
believe for the word and the truth's sake. Go thy way, thy son liveth."
I would not be understood to say that the Lord _blamed_ him, or others
in him, for needing signs and wonders: it was rather, I think, that the
Lord spoke out of the fulness of his knowledge to awake in them some
infant sense of what constituted all his life--the presence of God;
just as the fingers of the light go searching in the dark mould for the
sleeping seeds, to touch and awake them. The order of creation, the
goings on of life, were ceaselessly flowing from the very heart of the
Father: why should they seek signs and wonders differing from common
things only in being uncommon? In essence there was no difference.
Uncommonness is not excellence, even as commonness is not inferiority.
The sign, the wonder is, in fact, the lower thing, granted only because
of men's hardness of heart and slowness to believe--in itself of
inferior nature to God's chosen way. Yet, if signs and wonders could
help them, have them they should, for neither were they at variance
with the holy laws of life and faithfulness: they were but less usual
utterances of the same. "Go thy way: thy son liveth." The man, noble-man
certainly in this, obeyed, and found his obedience justify his faith.
But his son would have to work out his belief upon grounds differing
from those his father had. In himself he could but recognize the
resumption of the _natural_ sway of life. He would not necessarily know
that it was God working in him. For the cause of his cure, he would only
hear the story of it from his father--good evidence--but he himself had
not seen the face of the Holy One as his father had. In one sense or
another, he must seek and find him. Every generation must do its own
seeking and its own finding. The fault of the fathers often is that
they expect their finding to stand in place of their children's
seeking--expect the children to receive that which has satisfied the
need of their fathers upon their testimony; whereas rightly, their
testimony is not ground for their children's belief, only for their
children's search. That search is faith in the bud. No man can be sure
till he has found for himself. All that is required of the faithful
nature is a willingness to seek. He cannot even know the true nature of
the thing he wants until he has found it; he has but a dim notion of it,
a faint star to guide him eastward to the sunrise. Hopefully, the belief
of the father has the heart in it which will satisfy the need of the
child; but the doubt of this in the child, is the father's first ground
for hoping that the child with his new needs will find for himself the
same well of life--to draw from it with a new bucket, it may be, because
the old will hold water no longer: its staves may be good, but its hoops
are worn asunder; or, rather, it will be but a new rope it needs, which
he has to twist from the hemp growing in his own garden. The son who
was healed might have many questions to ask which the father could not
answer, had never thought of. He had heard of the miracle of Cana; he
had heard of many things done since: he believed that the man could cure
his son, and he had cured him. "Yes," the son might say, "but I must
know more of him; for, if what I hear now be true, I must cast all
at his feet. He cannot be a healer only; he must be the very Lord of
Life--it may be of the Universe." His simple human presence had in
it something against the supposition--contained in it what must
have _appeared_ reason for doubting this conclusion from his deeds,
especially to one who had not seen his divine countenance. But to one at
length enlightened of the great Spirit, his humanity would contain the
highest ground for believing in his divinity, for what it meant would
come out ever and ever loftier and grander. The Lord who had made the
Universe--how _should_ he show it but as the Healer did? He could not
make the universe over again in the eyes of every man. If he did, the
heart of the man could not hold the sight. He must reveal himself as the
curing God--the God who set things which had gone wrong, right again:
_that could_ be done in the eyes of each individual man. This man may be
he--the Messiah--Immanuel, God with-us.
We can imagine such the further thoughts of the son--possibly of the
father first--only he had been so full of the answer to his prayer, of
the cure of his son, that he could not all at once follow things towards
their grand conclusions.
In this case, as in the two which follow, the Lord heals from a
distance. I have not much to remark upon this. There were reasons for
it; one perhaps the necessity of an immediate answer to the prayer;
another probably lay in its fitness to the faith of the supplicants. For
to heal thus, although less of a sign or a wonder to the unbelieving,
had in it an element of finer power upon the faith of such as came not
for the sign or the wonder, but for the cure of the beloved; for he who
loves can believe what he who loves not cannot believe; and he who
loves most can believe most. In this respect, these cures were like the
healing granted to prayer in all ages--not that God is afar off, for
he is closer to every man than his own conscious being is to his
unconscious being--but that we receive the aid from the Unseen. Though
there be no distance with God, it looks like it to men; and when Jesus
cured thus, he cured with the same appearances which attended God's
ordinary healing.
The next case I take up is similar. It belongs to another of my classes,
but as a case of possession there is little distinctive about it, while
as the record of the devotion of a mother to her daughter--a devotion
quickening in her faith so rare and lovely as to delight the very heart
of Jesus with its humble intensity--it is one of the most beautiful of
all the stories of healing.
The woman was a Greek, and had not had the training of the Jew for a
belief in the Messiah. Her misconceptions concerning the healer of whom
she had heard must have been full of fancies derived from the legends of
her race. But she had yet been trained to believe, for her mighty
love of her own child was the best power for the development of the
child-like in herself.
No woman can understand the possible depths of her own affection for her
daughter. I say _daughter_, not _child_, because although love is the
same everywhere, it is nowhere the same. No two loves of individuals in
the same correlation are the same. Much more the love of a woman for her
daughter differs from the love of a father for his son--differs as the
woman differs from the man. There is in it a peculiar tenderness from
the sense of the same womanly consciousness in both of undefendedness
and self-accountable modesty--a modesty, in this case, how terribly
tortured in the mother by the wild behaviour of the daughter under the
impulses of the unclean spirit! Surely if ever there was a misery to
drive a woman to the Healer in an agony of rightful claim and prostrate
entreaty, it was the misery of a mother whose daughter was thus
possessed. The divine nature of her motherhood, of her womanhood, drew
her back to its source to find help for one who shared in the same, but
in whom its waters were sorely troubled and grievously defiled.
She came crying to him. About him stood his disciples, proud of being
Jews. For their sakes this chosen Gentile must be pained a little
further, must bear with her Saviour her part of suffering for the
redemption even of his chosen apostles. They counted themselves the
children, and such as she the dogs. He must show them the divine nature
dwelling in her. For the sake of this revelation he must try her sorely,
but not for long.
"Have mercy on me," she cried, "O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter
is grievously vexed with a devil."
But not a word of reply came from the lips of the Healer. His disciples
must speak first. They must supplicate for their Gentile sister. He
would arouse in them the disapproval of their own exclusiveness, by
putting it on for a moment that they might see it apart from themselves.
Their hearts were moved for the woman.
"Send her away," they said, meaning, "Give her what she wants;" but
to move the heart of love to grant the prayer, they--poor
intercessors--added a selfish reason to justify the deed of goodness,
either that they would avoid being supposed to acknowledge her claim on
a level with that of a Jewess, and would make of it what both Puritans
and priests would call "an uncovenanted mercy," or that they actually
thought it would help to overcome the scruples of the Master. Possibly
it was both. "She crieth after us," they said--meaning, "She is
troublesome." They would have him give as the ungenerous and the unjust
give to the importunate.
But no healing could be granted on such a ground--not even to the prayer
of an apostle. The woman herself must give a better.
"I am not sent," he said, "but unto the lost sheep of the house of
Israel."
They understood the words falsely. We know that he did come for the
Gentiles, and he was training them to see what they were so slow to
understand, that he had other sheep which were not of this fold. He had
need to begin with them thus early. Most of the troubles of his latest,
perhaps greatest apostle, came from the indignation of Jewish Christians
that he preached the good news to the Gentiles as if it had been
originally meant for them. They would have had them enter into its
privileges by the gates of Judaism.
What they did at length understand by these words is expressed in the
additional word of our Lord given by St Mark: "Let the children first be
filled." But even this they could not understand until afterwards. They
could not see that it was for the sake of the Gentiles as much as the
Jews that Jesus came to the Jews first. For whatever glorious exceptions
there were amongst the Gentiles, surpassing even similar amongst the
Jews; and whatever the wide-spread refusal of the Jewish nation, he
_could_ not have been received amongst the Gentiles as amongst the Jews.
In Judæa alone could the leaven work; there alone could the mustard-seed
take fitting root. Once rooted and up, it would become a great tree, and
the birds of the world would nestle in its branches. It was not that God
loved the Jews more than the Gentiles that he chose them first, but that
he must begin somewhere: _why,_ God himself knows, and perhaps has given
us glimmerings.
Upheld by her God-given love, not yet would the woman turn away. Even
such hard words as these could not repulse her.
She came now and fell at his feet. It is as the Master would have it:
she presses only the nearer, she insists only the more; for the devil
has a hold of her daughter.
"Lord, help me," is her cry; for the trouble of her daughter is her own.
The "Help _me_" is far more profound and pathetic than the most vivid
blazon of the daughter's sufferings.