"And, as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath
day."--ST. LUKE iv. 16.
"He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there He
prayed."--ST. MARK i. 35.
These two texts set before us our Saviour's habit in regard to public and
private spiritual exercise; and they suggest to us the question, What
have we, on our part, to say of these two elements in our own life? These
texts, we bear in mind, represent not something casual or intermittent in
the life of our Lord. They stand in the record of it as a typical,
essential, inseparable part of His habitual practice. What we have to
remember about them is that, whereas all men recognise in the life of
Jesus the one unique example in human history of a life which is morally
perfect and immaculate, if we were to take these out of it, the customary
share in all common worship, and the private, separate communing with
God, it would be an altogether different life--different in its attitude
towards the common life of ordinary men, and different in its own quality
and influence.
We might still admire--nay, we could not but admire--all the beauty of
moral qualities, the purity, the sympathy, the love and self-devotion of
it; but it would have lost its spiritual atmosphere. It would no longer
be for us the life of the Divine Son, recognising and ready to share in
all our attempts at worshipping the Father, however poor they may be, and
living through the separate life in daily communion with Him.
Here then is His practice, written for our guidance, given that we may be
stirred by it to aim upwards, inviting us to set our own practice side by
side with it, and see how it looks in such a juxtaposition. Let us
glance for a moment at each of these texts separately.
As regards the one which I have taken from St. Mark--"He went out, and
departed into a solitary place, and there He prayed"--we have only to
turn over the pages of this Gospel and note, as we go, the similar
allusions, and we feel that we have here what is in fact an incidental
glimpse into the habitual practice of His secret and separate life.
In this passage we read that He departed into a solitary place, and there
He prayed; in another by-and-by that He departed into a mountain to pray;
and then again that He spent the whole night in prayer; and we see all
this not in some crisis of His life, but as a part of that which
corresponds to the common daily round in your life or mine.
And the inference to be drawn, the lesson to be learnt from it, is, I
think, sufficiently obvious.
This secret separate devotional exercise of the soul was His habitual
spiritual food.
It was thus that He recruited His moral and spiritual forces, those
forces of the spiritual life which constitute at once the beauty, the
attraction, the power of His character, and His divine and awe-inspiring
separateness.
And as we read and consider, the thought must surely be pressed upon us
that if He needed these exercises, these secret and silent hours, what
shall we say of our own lives?
And what do we expect to make of our moral and spiritual character unless
we too are careful to cherish under all circumstances some such recurring
moments in our round of life and occupation, at which we retire into the
sanctuary of separate communion with God the Father?
You may take it as a moral certainty, proved by all experience, that
unless you hold to a fixed habit of thus bringing your life into the
secret and separate presence of God, in private prayer and thought, you
incur the risk of sinking to any levels that happen to be the ordinary
levels, and of drifting with any currents that happen to prevail.
If we turn now from this to the other text--that which refers to His
customary attendance on public prayer and at the common meeting--"He
went, as His custom was, into the synagogue"--the questions suggested are
very pertinent and practical.
Just consider the circumstances under which, as we are told here, "He
went, as His custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day." The
earlier part of the same chapter tells us of His fasting and temptation
in the wilderness, of the commencement of His public mission, and his
return to Nazareth. And, on His return, this is what we are told of
him--"He went, as his custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day."
Thus we see Him, fresh from the great crisis of His early manhood; the
long, protracted struggle of His soul in the lonely wilderness; the
subtle voices of manifold temptation; the hardly won victory and the
ministering angels; all this we must suppose to be still flashing across
His vision, as the scenes of any such crisis must always continue to
flash through the quivering and responsive organism of the soul.
If ever any man might have claimed to need no longer the customary
worship of common men, it was surely Jesus, as we see Him here on this
occasion, with the breath of His own heart-searching worship still upon
Him, and the light of new revelation burning in His thoughts.
Among all the significant and instructive parts of the Saviour's example
this is not the least instructive; that on this occasion, as on all
others, he went as a matter of regular custom into the synagogue on the
Sabbath day, thus putting the seal and stamp of His own practice for all
of us who believe in His name upon the duty of joining in habitual and
stated spiritual exercises.
Had the Lord's example been different in this respect, how easy it would
have seemed to set up a string of what we should have called sufficient
reasons.
The old-fashioned routine, it might have been said, of synagogue worship,
with its mechanical dulness and its mistaken interpretations of God's
word, its shallow and superficial and tedious traditional commentaries,
its formalism and vain repetitions; all this, whatever might have been
its value for the ordinary unenlightened Jew, how could it have been
necessary and what profit could there have been in it for the divinely
gifted Son of man?
So it might have been argued; so indeed it would seem men who consider
themselves enlightened sometimes argue in support of their own neglect of
the religious life.
But it may well make us more than doubtful as to the issue of any such
neglect, when we see the mind of Christ thus exemplified in His habitual
observance.
We all recognise His moral and spiritual superiority. Whether His spirit
has taken possession of our spirit or not, He stands out as our
undisputed guide to the practice of a good life.
In vision, in insight, in purity, in stainlessness, in all that we
reverence in human life and that good men strive to attain, we have no
model to set beside His example. All the more, then, this fact deserves
our notice, and calls us to follow Him, that we find Him, as His custom
was, in the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He was there Sabbath after
Sabbath listening to the provincial teacher, worshipping with the village
labourer, praying with the ignorant and the foolish, there as a matter of
life custom and for His soul's benefit.
I have said that it deserves our notice; but more than this--it should be
graven on the minds of the young, so that they may never lose the
impression of it, so that it go with them through all their years of
manhood, to preserve in them the devotional and reverent habit.
It is indeed good for all of us to think of Him there in that primitive
and unattractive house of God, listening to the rude Galilean accents,
and bowing His head in the habitual worship of that obscure community.
I do not think it is possible for us, unless we are quite indifferent
about our moral and spiritual condition--unless, that is, we have low
notions about our life, a low aim and a low standard--to be unaffected in
our practice by this example of the Lord. We can hardly believe that
those exercises of the spirit which were so fruitful in His life will
fail to bear their fruit in ours also.
What have we to say as we picture Him with all the great thoughts of His
new work swelling up in His soul, the divinely appointed teacher of new
wisdom and new faith, the bringer of new light among men, the voice of a
new world, and yet, being all this, at the same time, and as a means for
working out His mission more completely, a regular and devout worshipper
in a village house of prayer?
If it should ever happen to any of us that we come to fancy we do not
need such common prayer, or that because of defects in public worship we
do not profit by it, does not this example of the Saviour rise up and
rebuke us? Yes, you may rest assured, if that day ever comes to you,
that you are in danger of drifting away from the great saving tides of
the human spirit into some shallow or artificial stream of your own time
and generation. But, on the other hand, it is a happy thing for our life
if, growing up in the habitual use of time-honoured spiritual exercises,
we have truly learnt to know by our own experience, as by the example of
the Saviour set before us in the Gospel, that they are the support and
safeguard of all that is highest and purest and best in us, if only we
are careful to use them with sincerity and reverence.