THE CRISIS IN GALILEE
“Many therefore of His disciples,
when they heard this, said, This is a hard saying;
who can hear it? But Jesus knowing in Himself
that His disciples murmured at this, said unto
them, Doth this cause you to stumble? What
then if ye should behold the Son of man ascending
where He was before? It is the spirit that
quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing:
the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit,
and are life. But there are some of you that
believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning
who they were that believed not, and who it was
that should betray Him. And He said, For this
cause have I said unto you, that no man can come
unto Me, except it be given unto him of the Father.
Upon this many of His disciples went back, and walked
no more with Him. Jesus said therefore unto
the twelve, Would ye also go away? Simon
Peter answered Him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou
hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed
and know that Thou art the Holy One of God.
Jesus answered them, Did not I choose you the
twelve, and one of you is a devil? Now He spake
of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he it
was that should betray Him, being one of the twelve.” JOHN
v-71.
The situation in which our Lord found
Himself at this stage of His career is full of pathos.
He began His ministry in Judaea, and His success there
seemed to be all that could be desired. But it
soon became apparent that the crowds who followed
Him misunderstood or wilfully ignored His purpose.
They resorted to Him chiefly, if not solely, for material
advantages and political ends. He was in danger
of being accounted the most skilful metropolitan physician;
or in the greater danger of being courted by politicians
as a likely popular leader, who might be used as a
revolutionary flag or party cry. He, therefore,
left Jerusalem at an early period in His ministry
and betook Himself to Galilee; and now, after some
months’ preaching and mingling with the people,
things have worked round in Galilee to precisely the
same point as they had reached in Judaea. Great
crowds are following Him to be healed and to be fed,
while the politically inclined have at last made a
distinct effort to make Him a king, to force Him into
a collision with the authorities. His proper
work is in danger of being lost sight of. He
finds it necessary to sift the crowds who follow Him.
And He does so by addressing them in terms which can
be acceptable only to truly spiritual men by
plainly assuring them that He was among them, not to
give them political privileges and the bread that perisheth,
but the bread that endureth. They found Him to
be what they would call an impracticable dreamer.
They profess to go away because they cannot understand
Him; but they understand Him well enough to see He
is not the person for their purposes. They seek
earth, and heaven is thrust upon them. They turn
away disappointed, and many walk no more with Him.
The great crowd melts away, and He is left with His
original following of twelve men. His months
of teaching and toil seem to have gone for nothing.
It might seem doubtful if even the twelve would be
faithful if any result of His work would
remain, if any would cordially and lovingly adhere
to Him.
One cannot, I think, view this situation
without perceiving how analogous it is in many respects
to the aspect of things in our own day. In all
ages of course this sifting of the followers of Christ
goes on. There are experiences common to all
times and places which test men’s attachment
to Christ. But in our own day exceptional causes
are producing a considerable diminution of the numbers
who follow Christ, or at least are altering considerably
the grounds on which they profess to follow Him.
When one views the defection of men of influence, of
thought, of learning, of earnest and devout spirit,
one cannot but wonder what is to be the end of this,
and how far it is to extend. One cannot but look
anxiously at those who seem to remain, and to say,
“Will ye also go away?” No doubt such
times of sifting are of eminent service in winnowing
out the true from the mistaken followers, and in summoning
all men to revise the reason of their attachment to
Christ. When we see men of serious mind and of
great attainments deliberately abandoning the Christian
position, we cannot but anxiously inquire whether we
are right in maintaining that position. When
the question comes to us, as in Providence it does,
“Will ye also go away?” we must have our
answer ready.
The answer of Peter clearly shows
what it was that bound the faithful few to Jesus;
and in his answer three reasons for faith may be discerned.
1. Jesus satisfied their deepest
spiritual wants. They had found in Him provision
for their whole nature, and had learned the truth of
His saying, “He that cometh to Me shall never
hunger, and He that believeth on Me shall never thirst.”
They could now say, “Thou hast the words of
eternal life.” His words made water into
wine, and five loaves into five thousand, but His
words did what was far more to their purpose, they
fed their spirit. His words brought them nearer
to God, promised them eternal life, and began it within
them. From the lips of Jesus had actually fallen
words which quickened within them a new life a
life which they recognised as eternal, as lifting
them up into another world. These words of His
had given them new thoughts about God and about righteousness,
they had stirred hopes and feelings of an altogether
new kind. And this spiritual life was more to
them than anything else. No doubt these men,
like their neighbours, had their faults, their private
ambitions, their hopes. Peter could not forget
that he had left all for his Master, and often thought
of his home, his plentiful table, his family, when
wandering about with Jesus. They all, probably,
had an expectation that their abandonment of their
occupations would not be wholly without compensation
in this life, and that prominent position and worldly
advantage awaited them. Still, when they discovered
that these were mistaken expectations, they did not
grumble nor go back, for such were not their chief
reasons for following Jesus. It was chiefly by
His appeal to their spiritual leanings that He attracted
them. It was rather for eternal life than for
present advantage they attached themselves to Him.
They found more of God in Him than elsewhere, and
listening to Him they found themselves better men than
before; and having experienced that His words were
“spirit and life” (ver. 63), they
could not now abandon Him though all the world did
so.
So is it always. When Christ
sifts His followers those remain who have spiritual
tastes and wants. The spiritual man, the man who
would rather be like God than be rich, whose efforts
after worldly advancement are not half as earnest
and sustained as His efforts after spiritual health;
the man, in short, who seeks first the kingdom of God
and His righteousness, and lets other things be added
or not to this prime requisite, cleaves to Christ
because there is that in Christ which satisfies his
tastes and gives him the life he chiefly desires.
There is in Christ a suitableness to the wants of
men who live in view of God and eternity, and who
seek to adjust themselves, not only to the world around
them so as to be comfortable and successful in it,
but also to the things unseen, to the permanent laws
which are to govern human beings and human affairs
throughout eternity. Such men find in Christ
that which enables them to adjust themselves to things
eternal. They find in Christ just that revelation
of God, and that reconcilement to Him, and that help
to abiding in Him, which they need. They cannot
imagine a time, they cannot picture to themselves a
state of society, in which the words and teaching
of Jesus would not be the safest guide and the highest
law. Life eternal, life for men as men, is taught
by Him; not professional life, not the life of a religious
rule that must pass away, not life for this world
only, but life eternal, life such as men everywhere
and always ought to live this is apprehended
by Him and explained by Him; and power and desire
to live it is quickened within men by His words.
Coming into His presence we recognise the assuredness
of perfect knowledge, the simplicity of perfect truth.
That which outrides all such critical times as the
disciples were now passing through is true spirituality
of mind. The man who is bent on nourishing his
spirit to life everlasting simply cannot dispense with
what he finds in Christ.
We need not then greatly fear for
our own faith if we are sure that we covet the words
of eternal life more than the path to worldly advantage.
Still less need we tremble for the faith of others
if we know that their tastes are spiritual, their
leanings Godward. Parents are naturally anxious
about their children’s faith, and fear it may
be endangered by the advances of science or by the
old props of faith being shaken. Such anxiety
is in great measure misdirected. Let parents see
to it that their children grow up with a preference
for purity, unselfishness, truth, unworldliness; let
parents set before their children an example of real
preference for things spiritual, and let them with
God’s aid cultivate in their children an appetite
for what is heavenly, a craving to live on terms with
God and with conscience; and this appetite will infallibly
lead them to Christ. Does Christ supply the wants
of our spirits? Can He show us the way to eternal
life? Have men found in Him all needed help to
godly living? Have the most spiritual and ardent
of men been precisely those who have most clearly
seen their need of Him, and who have found in Him
everything to satisfy and feed their own spiritual
ardour? Has He, that is to say, the words of eternal
life? Is He the Person to whom every man must
listen if he would find his way to God and a happy
eternity? Then, depend upon it, men will believe
in Christ in every generation, and none the less firmly
because their attention is called off from non-essential
and external evidences to the simple sufficiency of
Christ.
2. Peter was convinced not only
that Jesus had the words of eternal life, but that
no one else had. “To whom shall we go?”
Peter had not an exhaustive knowledge of all sources
of human wisdom; but speaking from his own experience
he affirmed his conviction that it was useless to
seek life eternal anywhere else than in Jesus.
And it seems equally hopeless still to look to any
other quarter for sufficient teaching, for words that
are “spirit and life.” Where but in
Christ do we find a God we can accept as God?
Where but in Him do we find that which can not only
encourage men striving after virtue, but also reclaim
the vicious? To put anyone alongside of Christ
as a revealer of God, as a pattern of virtue, as a
Saviour of men, is absurd. There is that in Him
which we recognise as not merely superior, but of
another kind. So that those who reject Him, or
set Him on a level with other teachers, have first
of all to reject the chief part of what His contemporaries
were struck with and reported, and to fashion a Christ
of their own.
And it should be observed that Christ
claims this exceptional homage from His people.
The “following” He requires is not a mere
acceptance of His teaching alongside of other teaching,
nor an acceptance of His teaching apart from Himself,
as if a man should listen to Him and go home and try
to practise what he has heard; but He requires men
to form a connection with Himself as their King and
Life, as that One who can alone give them strength
to obey Him. To call Him “the Teacher,”
as if this were His sole or chief title, is to mislead.
The alternative, then, as Peter saw,
was Christ or nothing. And every day it is becoming
clearer that this is the alternative, that between
Christianity and the blankest Atheism there is no middle
place. Indeed we may say that between Christianity,
with its supernatural facts, and materialism, which
admits of no supernatural at all, and of nothing spiritual
and immortal, there is no logical standing-ground.
A man’s choice lies between these two either
Christ with His claims in all their fulness, or a
material universe working out its life under the impulse
of some inscrutable force. There are of course
men who are neither Christians nor materialists; but
that is because they have not yet found their intellectual
resting-place. As soon as they obey reason, they
will travel to one or other of these extremes, for
between the two is no logical standing-ground.
If there is a God, then there seems nothing incredible,
nothing even very surprising, in Christianity.
Christianity becomes merely the flower or fruit for
which the world exists, the element in the world’s
history which gives meaning and glory to the whole
of it: without Christianity and all it involves
the world lacks interest of the highest kind.
If a man finds he cannot admit the possibility of
such an interference in the world’s monotonous
way as the Incarnation implies, it is because there
is in his mind an Atheistic tendency, a tendency to
make the laws of the world more than the Creator;
to make the world itself God, the highest thing.
The Atheist’s position is thoroughgoing and
logical; and against the Atheist the man who professes
to believe in a Personal God and yet denies miracle
is helpless. And in point of fact Atheistic writers
are rapidly sweeping the field of all other antagonists,
and the intermediate positions between Christianity
and Atheism are becoming daily more untenable.
Any one then who is offended at the
supernatural in Christianity, and is disposed to turn
away and walk no more with Christ, should view the
alternative, and consider what it is with which he
must throw in his lot. To retain what is called
the spirit of Christ, and reject all that is miraculous
and above our present comprehension, is to commit oneself
to a path which naturally leads to disbelief in God.
We must choose between Christ as He stands in the
gospels, claiming to be Divine, rising from the dead
and now alive; and a world in which there is no God
manifest in the flesh or anywhere else, a world that
has come into being no one knows how or whence, and
that is running on no one knows whither, unguided
by any intelligence outside of itself, wholly governed
by laws which have grown out of some impersonal force
of which nobody can give any good account. Difficult
as it is to believe in Christ, it is surely still
more difficult to believe in the only alternative,
a world wholly material, in which matter rules and
spirit is a mere accident of no account. If there
are inexplicable things in the gospel, there are also
in us and around us facts wholly inexplicable on the
atheistic theory. If the Christian must be content
to wait for the solution of many mysteries, so certainly
must the materialist be content to leave unsolved
many of the most important problems of human life.
3. The third reason which Peter
assigns for the unalterable loyalty of the Twelve
is expressed in the words, “We have believed
and know that Thou art the Holy One of God.”
By this he probably meant that he and the rest had
come to be convinced that Jesus was the Christ, the
Messiah, the consecrated One, whom God had set apart
to this office. The same expression was used
by the demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum.
But although the idea of consecration to an office
rather than the idea of personal holiness is prominent
in the word, it may very well have been the personal
holiness of their Master which bore in upon the minds
of the disciples that He was indeed the Messiah.
By His life with them from day to day He revealed
God to them. They had seen Him in a great variety
of circumstances. They had seen His compassion
for every form of sorrow and misery, and His regardlessness
of self; they had marked His behaviour when offered
a crown and when threatened with the cross; they had
seen Him at table in gay company, and they had seen
Him fasting and in houses of mourning, in danger,
in vehement discussion, in retirement; and in all
circumstances and scenes they had found Him holy, so
holy that to turn from Him they felt would be to turn
from God.
The emphasis with which they affirm
their conviction is remarkable: “We have
believed and we know.” It is as if they
felt, We may be doubtful of much and ignorant of much,
but this at least we are sure of. We see men
leaving our company who are fit to instruct and guide
us in most matters, but they do not know our Lord
as we do. What they have said has disturbed our
minds and has caused us to revise our beliefs, but
we return to our old position, “We have believed
and we know.” It may be true that devils
have been cast out by the prince of the devils; we
do not know. But a stainless life is more miraculous
and Divine than the casting out of devils; it is more
unknown in the world, referrible to no freak of nature,
accomplished by no sleight of hand or jugglery, but
due only to the presence of God. Here we have
not the sign or evidence of the thing but the thing
itself, God not using man as an external agent for
operating upon the material world, but God present
in the man, living in his life, one with him.
Upon our faith nothing is more influential
than the holiness of Christ. Nothing is more
certainly Divine. Nothing is more characteristic
of God not His power, not His wisdom, not
even His eternal Being. He who in his own person
and life represents to us the holiness of God is more
certainly superhuman than he who represents God’s
power. A power to work miracles has often been
delegated to men, but holiness cannot be so delegated.
It belongs to character, to the man’s self; it
is a thing of nature, of will, and of habit; a king
may give to his ambassador ample powers, he may fill
his hands with credentials, and load him with gifts
which shall be acceptable to the monarch to whom he
is sent, but he cannot give him a tact he does not
naturally possess, a courtesy he has not acquired
by dealing with other princes, nor the influence of
wise and magnanimous words, if these do not inherently
belong to the ambassador’s self. So the
holiness of Christ was even more convincing than His
power or His message. It was such a holiness as
caused the disciples to feel that He was not a mere
messenger. His holiness revealed Himself
as well as Him that sent Him; and the self that was
thus revealed they felt to be more than human.
When, therefore, their faith was tried by seeing the
multitudes abandon their Lord, they were thrown back
on their surest ground of confidence in Him; and that
surest ground was not the miracles which all had seen,
but the consecrated and perfect life which was known
to them.
To ourselves, then, I say, by the
circumstances of our time this question comes, “Will
ye also go away?” Will you be like the rest,
or will exceptional fidelity be found in you?
Is your attachment to Christ so based on personal
conviction, is it so truly the growth of your own
experience, and so little a mere echo of popular opinion,
that you say in your heart, “Though all men
should forsake Thee, yet will not I”? It
is difficult to resist the current of thought and opinion
that prevails around us; difficult to dispute or even
question the opinion of men who have been our teachers,
and who have first awakened our mind to see the majesty
of truth and the beauty of the universe; it is difficult
to choose our own way, and thus tacitly condemn the
choice and the way of men we know to be purer in life,
and in every essential respect better than ourselves.
And yet, perhaps, it is well that we are thus compelled
to make up our own mind, to examine the claims of Christ
for ourselves, and so follow Him with the resolution
that comes of personal conviction. It is this
our Lord desires. He does not compel nor hasten
our decision. He does not upbraid His followers
for their serious misunderstandings of His person.
He allows them to be familiar with Him even while labouring
under many misconceptions, because He knows that these
misconceptions will most surely pass away in His society
and by further acquaintance with Him. One thing
He insists upon, one thing He asks from us that
we follow Him. We may only have a vague impression
that He is quite different from all else we know;
we may be doubtful, as yet, in what sense some of
the highest titles are ascribed to Him; we may be quite
mistaken about the significance of certain important
parts of His life; we may disagree among ourselves
regarding the nature of His kingdom and regarding
the conditions of entrance into it; but, if we follow
Him, if we join our fortunes to His, and wish nothing
better than to be within the sound of His voice and
to do His bidding; if we truly love Him, and find
that He has taken a place in our life we cannot ever
give to another; if we are conscious that our future
lies His way, and that we must in heart abide with
Him, then all our slowness to understand is patiently
dealt with, all our underrating of His real dignity
is forgiven us, and we are led on in His company to
perfect conformity, perfect union, and perfect knowledge.
All that He desires, then, is, in
the first place, not something we cannot give, not
a belief in certain truths about which doubt may reasonably
be entertained, not an acknowledgment of facts that
are as yet beyond our vision; but, that we follow
Him, that we be in this world as He was in it.
Shall we, then, let Him pursue His way alone, shall
we do nothing to forward His purposes, shall we show
no sympathy, address no word to Him, and pretend not
to hear when He speaks to us? To drag ourselves
along murmuring, doubting, making difficulties, a mere
dead weight on our Leader, this is not to follow as
He desires to be followed. To take our own way
in the main, and only appear here and there on the
road He has taken; to be always trying to combine the
pursuit of our own private ends with the pursuance
of His ends, is not to follow. Had we seen these
men asking leave of absence two or three times a month
to go and look after the fishing, even though they
promised to overtake their Master somewhere on the
road, we should scarcely have recognised them as His
followers. Had we found them, on reaching a village
at night, leaving Him, and preferring to spend their
leisure with His enemies, we should have been inclined
to ask an explanation of conduct so inconsistent.
Yet is not our own following very much of this kind?
Is there not too little of the following that says,
“What is enough for the Lord is enough for me;
His aims are enough for me”? Is there not
too little of the following that springs from a frank
and genuine dealing with the Lord from day to day,
and from a conscientious desire to meet His will with
us, and satisfy His idea of how we should follow Him?
May we each have the peace and joy of the man who,
when this question, “Will ye also go away?”
comes to him, quickly and from the heart responds,
“I will never forsake Thee.”