(Joh 1:15-51)

The forty days, which had passed since Jesus had first come to him, must have been to the Baptist a time of soul-quickening, of unfolding understanding, and of ripened decision. We see it in his more emphasised testimony to the Christ; in his fuller comprehension of those prophecies which had formed the warrant and substance of his Mission; but specially in the yet more entire self-abnegation, which led him to take up a still lowlier position, and acquiescingly to realise that his task of heralding was ending, and that what remained was to point those nearest to him, and who had most deeply drunk of his spirit, to Him Who had come. And how could it be otherwise? On first meeting Jesus by the banks of Jordan, he had felt the seeming incongruity of baptizing One of Whom he had rather need to be baptized. Yet this, perhaps, because he had beheld himself by the Brightness of Christ, rather than looked at the Christ Himself. What he needed was not to be baptized, but to learn that it became the Christ to fulfil all righteousness. This was the first lesson. The next, and completing one, came when, after the Baptism, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended, and the Divine Voice of Testimony pointed to, and explained the promised sign. It told him, that the work, which he had begun in the obedience of faith, had reached the reality of fulfilment. The first was a lesson about the Kingdom; the second about the King. And then Jesus was parted from him, and led of the Spirit into the wilderness.

Forty days since then – with these events, this vision, those words ever present to his mind! It had been the mightiest impulse; nay, it must have been a direct call from above, which first brought John from his life-preparation of lonely communing with God to the task of preparing Israel for that which he knew was preparing for them. He had entered upon it, not only without illusions, but with such entire self-forgetfulness, as only deepest conviction of the reality of what he announced could have wrought. He knew those to whom he was to speak – the preoccupation, the spiritual dullness, the sins of the great mass; the hypocrisy, the unreality, the inward impenitence of their spiritual leaders; the perverseness of their direction; the hollowness and delusiveness of their confidence as being descended from Abraham. He saw only too clearly their real character, and knew the near end of it all; how the axe was laid to the barren tree, and how terribly the fan would sift the chaff from the wheat. And yet he preached and baptized; for, deepest in his heart was the conviction, that there was a Kingdom at hand, and a King coming. As we gather the elements of that conviction, we find them chiefly in the Book of Isaiah. His speech and its imagery, and, especially, the burden of his message, were taken from those prophecies. Indeed, his mind seems saturated with them; they must have formed his own religious training, and they were the preparation for his work. This gathering up of the Old Testament rays of light and glory into the burning-glass of Evangelic prophecy had set his soul on fire. No wonder that, recoiling equally from the externalism of the Pharisees, and the merely material purism of the Essenes, he preached quite another doctrine, of inward repentance and renewal of life.

One picture was most brightly reflected on those pages of Isaiah. It was that of the Anointed, Messiah, Christ, the Representative Israelite, the Priest, King, and Prophet, in Whom the institution and sacramental meaning of the Priesthood, and of Sacrifices, found their fulfilment. In his announcement of the Kingdom, in his call to inward repentance, even in his symbolic Baptism, that Great Personality always stood out before the mind of John, as the One all-overtopping and overshadowing Figure in the background. It was the Isaiah-picture of ‘the King in His beauty,’ the vision of ‘the land of far distances’  – to him a reality, of which Sadducee and Essene had no conception, and the Pharisee only the grossest misconception. This also explains how the greatest of those born of women was also the most humble, the most retiring, and self-forgetful. In a picture such as that which filled his whole vision, there was no room for self. By the side of such a Figure all else appeared in its real littleness, and, indeed, seemed at best but as shadows cast by its light. All the more would the bare suggestion on the part of the Jerusalem deputation, that he might be the Christ, seem like a blasphemy, from which, in utter self-abasement, he would seek shelter in the scarce-ventured claim to the meanest office which a slave could discharge. He was not Elijah. Even the fact that Jesus afterwards, in significant language, pointed to the possibility of his becoming such to Israel (Mat_11:14), proves that he claimed it not; not ‘that prophet;’ not even a prophet. He professed not visions, revelations, special messages. All else was absorbed in the great fact: he was only the voice of one that cried, ‘Prepare ye the way!’ Viewed especially in the light of those self-glorious times, this reads not like a fictitious account of a fictitious mission; nor was such the profession of an impostor, an associate in a plot, or an enthusiast. There was deep reality of all-engrossing conviction which underlay such self-denial of mission.

And all this must have ripened during the forty days of probably comparative solitude, only relieved by the presence of such ‘disciples’ as, learning the same hope, would gather around him. What he had seen and what he had heard threw him back upon what he had expected and believed. It not only fulfilled, it transfigured it. Not that, probably, he always maintained the same height which he then attained. It was not in the nature of things that it should be so. We often attain, at the outset of our climbing, a glimpse, afterwards hid from us in our laborious upward toil till the supreme height is reached. Mentally and spiritually we may attain almost at a bound results, too often lost to us till again secured by long reflection, or in the course of painful development. This in some measure explains the fulness of John’s testimony to the Christ as ‘the Lamb of God, Which taketh away the sin of the world,’ when at the beginning we find ourselves almost at the goal of New Testament teaching. It also explains that last strife of doubt and fear, when the weary wrestler laid himself down to find refreshment and strength in the shadow of those prophecies, which had first called him to the contest. But during those forty days, and in the first meetings with Jesus which followed, all lay bathed in the morning-light of that heavenly vision, and that Divine truth wakened in him the echoes of all those prophecies, which these thirty years had been the music of his soul.

And now, on the last of those forty days, simultaneously with the final great Temptation of Jesus, which must have summed up all that had preceded it in the previous days, came the hour of John’s temptation by the deputation from Jerusalem. Very gently it came to him, like the, tempered wind that fans the fire into flame, not like that keen, desolating storm-blast which swept over the Master. To John, as now to us, it was only the fellowship of His sufferings, which he bore in the shelter of that great Rock over which its intenseness had spent itself. Yet a very real temptation it was, this provoking to the assumption of successively lower grades of self-assertion, where only entire self-abnegation was the rightful feeling. Each suggestion of lower office (like the temptations of Christ) marked an increased measure of temptation, as the human in his mission was more and more closely neared. And greatest temptation it was when, after the first victory, came the not unnatural challenge of his authority for what he said and did. This was, of all others, the question which must at all times, from the beginning of his mission to the hour of his death, have pressed most closely upon him, since it touched not only his conscience, but the very ground of his mission, nay, of his life. That it was such temptation is evidenced by the fact that, in the hour of his greatest loneliness and depression, it formed his final contest, in which he temporarily paused, like Jacob in his Israel-struggle, though, like him, he failed not in it. For what was the meaning of that question which the disciples of John brought to Jesus: ‘Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for another?’ other than doubt of his own warrant and authority for what he had said and done? But in that first time of his trial at Bethabara he overcame – the first temptation by the humility of his intense sincerity, the second by the absolute simplicity of his own experimental conviction; the first by what he had seen, the second by what he had heard concerning the Christ at the banks of Jordan. And so, also, although perhaps ‘afar off,’ it must ever be to us in like temptation.

Yet, as we view it, and without needlessly imputing malice prepense to the Pharisaic deputation, their questions seemed but natural. After his previous emphatic disclaimer at the beginning of his preaching (Luk_3:15), of which they in Jerusalem could scarcely have been ignorant, the suggestion of his Messiahship – not indeed expressly made, but sufficiently implied to elicit what the language of John shows to have been the most energetic denial – could scarcely have been more than tentative. It was otherwise with their question whether he was ‘Elijah’? Yet, bearing in mind what we know of the Jewish expectations of Elijah, and how his appearance was always readily recognised, this also could scarcely have been meant in its full literality – but rather as ground for the further question after the goal and warrant of his mission. Hence also John’s disavowing of such claims is not satisfactorily accounted for by the common explanation, that he denied being Elijah in the sense of not being what the Jews expected of the Forerunner of the Messiah: the real, identical Elijah of the days of Ahab; or else, that he denied being such in the sense of the peculiar Jewish hopes attaching to his reappearance in the ‘last days.’ There is much deeper truth in the disclaimer of the Baptist. It was, indeed, true that, as foretold in the Angelic announcement, he was sent ‘in the spirit and power of Elias,’ that is, with the same object and; the same qualifications. Similarly, it is true what, in His mournful retrospect of the result of John’s mission, and in the prospect of His own end, the Saviour said of him, ‘Elias is indeed come,’ but ‘they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed.’ But on this very recognition and reception of him by the Jews depended his being to them Elijah – who should ‘turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just,’ and so ‘restore all things.’ Between the Elijah of Ahab’s reign, and him of Messianic times, lay the wide cleft of quite another dispensation. The ‘spirit and power of Elijah’ could ‘restore all things,’ because it was the dispensation of the Old Testament, in which the result was outward, and by outward means. But ‘the spirit and power’ of the Elijah of the New Testament, which was to accomplish the inward restoration through penitent reception of the Kingdom of God in its reality, could only accomplish that object if ‘they received it’ – if ‘they knew him.’ And as in his own view, and looking around and forward, so also in very fact the Baptist, though Divinely such, was not really Elijah to Israel – and this is the meaning of the words of Jesus: ‘And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.’

More natural still – indeed, almost quite truthful, seems the third question of the Pharisees, whether the Baptist was ‘that prophet.’ The reference here is undoubtedly to Deu_18:15, Deu_18:18. Not that the reappearance of Moses as lawgiver was expected. But as the prediction of the eighteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, especially when taken in connection with the promise of a ‘new covenant’ with a ‘new law’ written in the hearts of the people, implied a change in this respect, it was but natural that it should have been expected in Messianic days by the instrumentality of ‘that prophet.’ Even the various opinions broached in the Mishnah, as to what were to be the reformatory and legislative functions of Elijah, prove that such expectations were connected with the Forerunner of the Messiah.

But whatever views the Jewish embassy might have entertained concerning the abrogation, renewal, or renovation of the Law in Messianic times, the Baptist repelled the suggestion of his being ‘that prophet’ with the same energy as those of his being either the Christ or Elijah. And just as we notice, as the result of those forty days’ communing, yet deeper humility and self-abnegation on the part of the Baptist, so we also mark increased intensity and directness in the testimony which he now bears to the Christ before the Jerusalem deputies. ‘His eye is fixed on the Coming One.’ ‘He is as a voice not to be inquired about, but heard;’ and its clear and unmistakable, but deeply reverent utterance is: ‘The Coming One has come.’

The reward of his overcoming temptation – yet with it also the fitting for still fiercer conflict (which two, indeed, are always conjoined), was at hand. After His victorious contest with the Devil, Angels had come to minister to Jesus in body and soul. But better than Angels’ vision came to refresh and strengthen His faithful witness John. On the very day of the Baptist’s temptation Jesus had left the wilderness. On the morrow after it, ‘John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold, the Lamb of God, Which taketh away the sin of the world!’ We cannot doubt, that the thought here present to the mind of John was the description of ‘The Servant of Jehovah,’ as set forth in Isa_53:1-12. If all along the Baptist had been filled with Isaiah-thoughts of the Kingdom, surely in the forty days after he had seen the King, a new ‘morning’ must have risen upon them, and the halo of His glory shone around the well-remembered prophecy. It must always have been Messianically understood; it formed the groundwork of Messianic thought to the New Testament writers – nor did the Synagogue read it otherwise, till the necessities of controversy diverted its application, not indeed from the times, but from the Person of the Messiah. But we can understand how, during those forty days, this greatest height of Isaiah’s conception of the Messiah was the one outstanding fact before his view. And what he believed, that he spake, when again, and unexpectedly, he saw Jesus.

Yet, while regarding his words as an appeal to the prophecy of Isaiah, two other references must not be excluded from them: those to the Paschal Lamb, and to the Daily Sacrifice. These are, if not directly pointed to, yet implied. For the Paschal Lamb was, in a sense, the basis of all the sacrifices of the Old Testament, not only from its saving import to Israel, but as that which really made them ‘the Church,’ and people of God. Hence the institution of the Paschal Lamb was, so to speak, only enlarged and applied in the daily sacrifice of a Lamb, in which this twofold idea of redemption and fellowship was exhibited. Lastly, the prophecy of Isa_53:1-12 was but the complete realisation of these two ideas in the Messiah. Neither could the Paschal Lamb, with its completion in the Daily Sacrifice, be properly viewed without this prophecy of Isaiah, nor yet that prophecy properly understood without its reference to its two great types. And here one Jewish comment in regard to the Daily Sacrifice (not previously pointed out) is the more significant, that it dates from the very time of Jesus. The passage reads almost like a Christian interpretation of sacrifice. It explains how the morning and evening sacrifices were intended to atone, the one for the sins of the night, the other for those of the day, so as ever to leave Israel guiltless before God; and it expressly ascribes to them the efficacy of a Paraclete – that being the word used. Without further following this remarkable Rabbinic commentation, which stretches back its view of sacrifices to the Paschal Lamb, and, beyond it, to that offering of Isaac by Abraham which, in the Rabbinic view, was the substratum of all sacrifices, we turn again to its teaching about the Lamb of the Daily Sacrifice. Here we have the express statement, that both the school of Shammai and that of Hillel – the latter more fully – insisted on the symbolic import of this sacrifice in regard to the forgiveness of sin. ‘Kebhasim’ (the Hebrew word for ‘lambs’), explained the school of Shammai, ‘because, according to Mic_7:19, they suppress [in the A.V. ‘subdue’] our iniquities (the Hebrew word kaḇash meaning he who suppresseth).’ Still more strong is the statement of the school of Hillel, to the effect that the sacrificial lambs were termed keḇasim (from kaḇas, ‘to wash’), ‘because they wash away the sins of Israel.’ The quotation just made gains additional interest from the circumstance, that it occurs in a ‘meditation’ (if such it may be called) for the new moon of the Passover-month (Nisan). In view of such clear testimony from the time of Christ, less positiveness of assertion might, not unreasonably, be expected from those who declare that the sacrifices bore no reference to the forgiveness of sins, just as, in the face of the application made by the Baptist and other New Testament writers, more exegetical modesty seems called for on the part of those who deny the Messianic references in Isaiah.

If further proof were required that, when John pointed the bystanders to the Figure of Jesus walking towards them, with these words: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God,’ he meant more than His gentleness, meekness, and humility, it would be supplied by the qualifying explanation, ‘Which taketh away the sin of the world.’ We prefer rendering the expression ‘taketh away’ instead of ‘beareth,’ because it is in that sense that the LXX. uniformly use the Greek term. Of course, as we view it, the taking away presupposes the taking upon Himself of the sin of the world. But it is not necessary to suppose that the Baptist clearly understood that manner of His Saviourship, which only long afterwards, and reluctantly, came to the followers of the Lamb. That he understood the application of His ministry to the whole world, is only what might have been expected of one taught by Isaiah; and what, indeed, in one or another form, the Synagogue has always believed of the Messiah. What was distinctive in the words of the Baptist, seems his view of sin as a totality, rather than sins: implying the removal of that great barrier between God and man, and the triumph in that great contest indicated in Gen_3:15, which Israel after the flesh failed to perceive. Nor should we omit here to notice an undesigned evidence of the Hebraic origin of the fourth Gospel; for an Ephesian Gospel, dating from the close of the second century, would not have placed in its forefront, as the first public testimony of the Baptist (if, indeed, it would have introduced him at all), a quotation from Isaiah – still less a sacrificial reference.

The motives which brought Jesus back to Bethabara must remain in the indefiniteness in which Scripture has left them. So far as we know, there was no personal interview between Jesus and the Baptist. Jesus had then and there nothing further to say to the Baptist; and yet on the day following that on which John had, in such manner, pointed Him out to the bystanders, He was still there, only returning to Galilee the next day. Here, at least, a definite object becomes apparent. This was not merely the calling of His first disciples, but the necessary Sabbath rest; for, in this instance, the narrative supplies the means of ascertaining the days of the week on which each event took place. We have only to assume, that the marriage in Cana of Galilee was that of a maiden, not a widow. The great festivities which accompanied it were unlikely, according to Jewish ideas, in the case of a widow; in fact, the whole mise en scène of the marriage renders this most improbable. Besides, if it had been the marriage of a widow, this (as will immediately appear) would imply that Jesus had returned from the wilderness on a Saturday, which, as being the Jewish Sabbath, could not have been the case. For uniform custom fixed the marriage of a maiden on Wednesdays, that of a widow on Thursday. Counting backwards from the day of the marriage in Cana, we arrive at the following results. The interview between John and the Sanhedrin-deputation took place on a Thursday. ‘The next day,’ Friday Jesus returned from the wilderness of the Temptation, and John bore his first testimony to ‘the Lamb of God.’ The following day, when Jesus appeared a second time in view, and when the first two disciples joined Him, was the Saturday, or Jewish Sabbath. It was, therefore, only the following day, or Sunday, that Jesus returned to Galilee, calling others by the way. ‘And the third day’ after it – that is, on the Wednesday – was the marriage in Cana.

If we group around these days the recorded events of each, they almost seem to intensify in significance. The Friday of John’s first pointing to Jesus as the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world, recalls that other Friday, when the full import of that testimony appeared. The Sabbath of John’s last personal view and testimony to Christ is symbolic in its retrospect upon the old economy. It seems to close the ministry of John, and to open that of Jesus; it is the leave-taking of the nearest disciples of John from the old, their search after the new. And then on the first Sunday – the beginning of Christ’s active ministry, the call of the first disciples, the first preaching of Jesus.

As we picture it to ourselves: in the early morning of that Sabbath John stood, with the two of his disciples who most shared his thoughts and feelings. One of them we know to have been Andrew (Joh_1:40); the other, unnamed one, could have been no other than John himself, the beloved disciple. They had heard what their teacher had, on the previous day, said of Jesus. But then He seemed to them but as a passing Figure. To hear more of Him, as well as in deepest sympathy, these two had gathered to their Teacher on that Sabbath morning, while the other disciples of John were probably engaged with that, and with those, which formed the surroundings of an ordinary Jewish Sabbath. And now that Figure once more appeared in view. None with the Baptist but these two. He is not teaching now, but learning, as the intensity and penetration of his gaze calls from him the now worshipful repetition of what, on the previous day, he had explained and enforced. There was no leave-taking on the part of these two – perhaps they meant not to leave John. Only an irresistible impulse, a heavenly instinct, bade them follow His steps. It needed no direction of John, no call from Jesus. But as they went in modest silence, in the dawn of their rising faith, scarce conscious of the what and the why, He turned Him. It was not because He discerned it not, but just because He knew the real goal of their yet unconscious search, and would bring them to know what they sought, that He put too them the question, ‘What seek ye?’ which elicited a reply so simple, so real, as to carry its own evidence. He is still to them the Rabbi – the most honoured title they can find – yet marking still the strictly Jewish view, as well as their own standpoint of ‘What seek ye?’ They wish, yet scarcely dare, to say what was their object, and only put it in a form most modest, suggestive rather than expressive. There is strict correspondence to their view in the words of Jesus. Their very Hebraism of ‘Rabbi’ is met by the equally Hebraic ‘Come and see;’ their unspoken, but half-conscious longing by what the invitation implied (according to the most probable reading, ‘Come and ye shall see’).

It was but early morning – ten o’clock. What passed on that long Sabbath-day we know not save from what happened in its course. From it issued the two, not learners now but teachers, bearing what they had found to those nearest and dearest. The form of the narrative and its very words convey, that the two had gone, each to search for his brother-Andrew for Simon Peter, and John for James, though here already, at the outset of this history, the haste of energy characteristic of the sons of Jnh outdistanced the more quiet intenseness of John: ‘He (Andrew) first findeth his own brother. But Andrew and John equally brought the same announcement, still markedly Hebraic in its form, yet filled with the new wine, not only of conviction, but of joyous apprehension: ‘We have found the Messias.’ This, then, was the outcome to them of that day – He was the Messiah; and this the goal which their longing had reached, ‘We have found Him.’ Quite beyond what they had heard from the Baptist; nay, what only personal contact with Jesus can carry to any heart.

And still this day of first marvellous discovery had not closed. It almost seems, as if this ‘Come and see’ call of Jesus were emblematic, not merely of all that followed in His own ministry, but of the manner in which to all time the ‘What seek ye?’ of the soul is answered. It could scarcely have been but that Andrew had told Jesus of his brother, and even asked leave to bring him. The searching, penetrating glance of the Saviour now read in Peter’s inmost character his future call and work: ‘Thou art Simon, the son of John – thou shalt be called Cephas, which is interpreted (Grecianised) Peter.’

It must not, of course, be supposed that this represents all that had passed between Jesus and Peter, any more than that the recorded expression was all that Andrew and John had said of Jesus to their brothers. Of the interview between John and James his brother, the writer, with his usual self-reticence, forbears to speak. But we know its result; and, knowing it, can form some conception of what passed on that holy evening between the new-found Messiah and His first four disciples: of teaching manifestation on His part, and of satisfied heart-peace on theirs. As yet they were only followers, learners, not yet called to be Apostles, with all of entire renunciation of home, family, and other calling which this implied. This, in the course of proper development, remained for quite another period. Alike their knowledge and their faith for the present needed, and could only bear, the call to personal attachment.

It was Sunday morning, the first of Christ’s Mission-work, the first of His Preaching. He was purposing to return to Galilee. It was fitting He should do so: for the sake of His new disciples; for what He was to do in Galilee; for His own sake. The first Jerusalem-visit must be prepared for by them all; and He would not go there till the right time – for the Paschal Feast. It was probably a distance of about twenty miles from Bethabara to Cana. By the way, two other disciples were to be gained – this time not brought, but called, where, and in what precise circumstances, we know not. But the notice that Philip was a fellow-townsman of Andrew and Peter, seems to imply some instrumentality on their part. Similarly, we gather that, afterwards, Philip was somewhat in advance of the rest, when he found his acquaintance Nathanael, and engaged in conversation with him just as Jesus and the others came up. But here also we mark, as another characteristic trait of John, that he, and his brother with him, seem to have clung close to the Person of Christ, just as did Mary afterwards in the house of her brother. It was this intense exclusiveness of fellowship with Jesus which traced on his mind that fullest picture of the God-Man, which his narrative reflects.

The call to Philip from the lips of the Saviour met, we know not under what circumstances, immediate responsive obedience. Yet, though no special obstacles had to be overcome, and hence no special narrative was called for, it must have implied much of learning, to judge from what he did, and from what he said to Nathanael. There is something special about Nathanael’s conquest by Christ – rather implied, perhaps, than expressed – and of which the Lord’s words give significant hints. They seem to point to what had passed in His mind just before Philip found him. Alike the expression ‘an Israelite in truth, in whom is no guile’ – looking back on what changed the name of Jacob into Israel – and the evident reference to the full realisation of Jacob’s vision in Bethel, may be an indication that this very vision had engaged his thoughts. As the Synagogue understood the narrative, its application to the then state of Israel and the Messianic hope would most readily suggest itself. Putting aside all extravagances, the Synagogue thought, in connection with it of the rising power of the Gentiles, but concluded with the precious comfort of the assurance, in Jer_30:11, of Israel’s final restoration. Nathanael (Theodore, ‘the gift of God,’) had, as we often read of Rabbis, rested for prayer, meditation, or study, in the shadow of that wide-spreading tree so common in Palestine, the fig-tree. The approaching Passover-season, perhaps mingling with thoughts of John’s announcement by the banks of Jordan, would naturally suggest the great deliverance of Israel in ‘the age to come;’ all the more, perhaps, from the painful contrast in the present. Such a verse as that with which, in a well-known Rabbinic work, the meditation for the New Moon of Nisan, the Passover month, closes: ‘Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help’ would recur, and so lead back the mind to the suggestive symbol of Jacob’s vision, and its realisation in ‘the age to come.’

These are, of course, only suppositions; but it might well be that Philip had found him while still busy with such thoughts. Possibly their outcome, and that quite in accordance with Jewish belief at the time, may have been, that all that was needed to bring that happy ‘age to come’ was, that Jacob should become Israel in truth. In such case he would himself have been ripening for ‘the Kingdom’ that was at hand. It must have seemed a startling answer to his thoughts, this announcement, made with the freshness of new and joyous conviction: ‘We have found Him of Whom Moses in the Law, and the Prophets, did write.’ But this addition about the Man of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph, would appear a terrible anti-climax. It was so different from anything that he had associated either with the great hope of Israel, or with the Nazareth of his own neighbourhood, that his exclamation, without implying any special imputation on the little town which he knew so well, seems not only natural, but, psychologically, deeply true. There was but one answer to this – that which Philip made, which Jesus had made to Andrew and John, and which has ever since been the best answer to all Christian inquiry: ‘Come and see.’ And, despite the disappointment, there must have been such moving power in the answer which Philip’s sudden announcement had given to his unspoken thoughts, that he went with him. And now, as ever, when in such spirit we come, evidences irrefragable multiplied at every step. As he neared Jesus, he heard Him speak to the disciples words concerning him, which recalled, truly and actually, what had passed in his soul. But could it really be so, that Jesus knew it all? The question, intended to elicit it, brought such proof that he could not but burst into the immediate and full acknowledgment: ‘Thou art the Son of God,’ Who hast read my inmost being; ‘Thou art the King of Israel,’ Who dost meet its longing and hope. And is it not ever so, that the faith of the heart springs to the lips, as did the water from the riven rock at the touch of the God-gifted rod? It needs not long course of argumentation, nor intricate chain of evidences, welded link to link, when the secret thoughts of the heart are laid bare, and its inmost longings met. Then, as in a moment, it is day, and joyous voice of song greets its birth.

And yet that painful path of slower learning to enduring conviction must still be trodden, whether in the sufferings of the heart, or the struggle of the mind. This it is which seems implied in the half-sad question of the Master, yet with full view of the final triumph (‘thou shalt see greater things than these’), and of the true realisation in it of that glorious symbol of Jacob’s vision.

And so Nathanael, ‘the God-given’ – or, as we know him in after-history, Bartholomew, ‘the son of Telamyon’ – was added to the disciples. Such was on that first Sunday the small beginning of the great Church Catholic; these the tiny springs that swelled into the mighty river which, in its course, has enriched and fertilised the barrenness of the far-off lands of the Gentiles.

(Joh_2:1-12)

At the close of His Discourse to Nathanael – His first sermon – Jesus had made use of an expression which received its symbolic fulfilment in His first deed. His first testimony about Himself had been to call Himself the ‘Son of Man.’  We cannot but feel that this bore reference to the confession of Nathanael: ‘Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel.’ It is, as if He would have turned the disciples from thoughts of His being the Son of God and King of Israel to the voluntary humiliation of His Humanity, as being the necessary basis of His work, without knowledge of which that of His Divinity would have been a barren, speculative abstraction, and that of His Kingship a Jewish fleshly dream. But it was not only knowledge of His humiliation in His Humanity. For, as in the history of the Christ humiliation and glory are always connected, the one enwrapped in the other as the flower in the bud, so here also His humiliation as the Son of Man is the exaltation of humanity, the realisation of its ideal destiny as created in the likeness of God. It should never be forgotten, that such teaching of His exaltation and Kingship through humiliation and representation of humanity was needful. It was the teaching which was the outcome of the Temptation and of its victory, the very teaching of the whole Evangelic history. Any other real learning of Christ would, as we see it, have been impossible to the disciples – alike mentally, as regards foundation and progression, and spiritually. A Christ: God, King, and not primarily ‘the Son of Man,’ would not have been the Christ of Prophecy, nor the Christ of Humanity, nor the Christ of salvation, nor yet the Christ of sympathy, help, and example. A Christ, God and King, Who had suddenly risen like the fierce Eastern sun in midday brightness, would have blinded by his dazzling rays (as it did Saul on the way to Damascus), not risen ‘with kindly light’ to chase away darkness and mists, and with genial growing warmth to woo life and beauty into our barren world. And so, as ‘it became Him,’ for the carrying out of the work, ‘to make the Captain of Salvation perfect through sufferings,’ so it was needful for them that He should veil, even from their view who followed Him, the glory of His Divinity and the power of His Kingship, till they had learned all that the, designation ‘Son of Man’ implied, as placed below ‘Son of God’ and ‘King of Israel.’

This idea of the ‘Son of Man,’ although in its full and prophetic meaning seems to furnish the explanation of the miracle at the marriage of Cana. We are now entering on the Ministry of ‘The Son of Man,’ first and chiefly in its contrast to the preparatory call of the Baptist, with the asceticism symbolic of it. We behold Him now as freely mingling with humanity, sharing its joys and engagements, entering into its family life, sanctioning and hallowing all by His Presents and blessing; then as transforming the ‘water of legal purification’ into the wine of the new dispensation, and, more than this, the water of our felt want into the wine of His giving; and, lastly, as having absolute power as the ‘Son of Man,’ being also ‘the Son of God’ and ‘the King of Israel.’ Not that it is intended to convey, that it was the primary purpose of the miracle of Cana to exhibit the contrast between His own Ministry and the asceticism of the Baptist, although greater could scarcely be imagined than between the wilderness and the supply of wine at the marriage-feast. Rather, since this essential difference really existed, it naturally appeared at the very commencement of Christ’s Ministry. And so in regard to the other meaning, also, which this history carries to our minds.

At the same time it must be borne in mind, that marriage conveyed to the Jews much higher thoughts than merely those of festivity and merriment. The pious fasted before it, confessing their sins. It was regarded almost as a Sacrament. Entrance into the married state was thought to carry the forgiveness of sins.  It almost seems as if the relationship of Husband and Bride between Jehovah and His people, so frequently insisted upon, not only in the Bible, but in Rabbinic writings, had always been standing out in the background. Thus the bridal pair on the marriage-day symbolised the union of God with Israel. Hence, though it may in part have been national pride, which considered the birth of every Israelite as almost outweighing the rest of the world, it scarcely wholly accounts for the ardent insistance on marriage, from the first prayer at the circumcision of a child, onwards through the many and varied admonitions to the same effect. Similarly, it may have been the deep feeling of brotherhood in Israel, leading to sympathy with all that most touched the heart, which invested with such sacredness participation in the gladness of marriage, or the sadness of burial. To use the bold allegory of the times, God Himself had spoken the words of blessing over the cup at the union of our first parents, when Michael and Gabriel acted as groomsmen, and the Angelic choir sang the wedding hymn. So also He had shown the example of visiting the sick (in the case of Abraham), comforting the mourners (in that of Isaac), and burying the dead (in that of Moses). Every man who met it, was bound to rise and join the marriage procession, or the funeral march. It was specially related of King Agrippa that he had done this, and a curious Haggadah sets forth that, when Jezebel was eaten of dogs, her hands and feet were spared because, amidst all her wickedness, she had been wont to greet every marriage-procession by clapping of hands, and to accompany the mourners a certain distance on their way to the burying. And so we also read it, that, in the burying of the widow’s son of Nain, ‘much people of the city was with her.’

In such circumstances, we would naturally expect that all connected with marriage was planned with care, so as to bear the impress of sanctity, and also to wear the aspect of gladness. A special formality, that of ‘betrothal’ (Erusin qidushin), preceded the actual marriage by a period varying in length, but not exceeding a twelvemonth in the case of a maiden. At the betrothal, the bridegroom, personally or by deputy, handed to the bride a piece of money or a letter, it being expressly stated in each case that the man thereby espoused the woman. From the moment of betrothal both parties were regarded, and treated in law (as to inheritance, adultery, need of formal divorce), as if they had been actually married, except as regarded their living together. A legal document (the shitrē Erusin) fixed the dowry which each brought, the mutual obligations, and all other legal points. Generally a festive meal closed the ceremony of betrothal – but not in Galilee, where, habits being more simple and pure, that which sometimes ended in sin was avoided.

On the evening of the actual marriage (nisuin ḥaṯnuṯ), the bride was led from her paternal home to that of her husband. First came the merry sounds of music; then they who distributed among the people wine and oil, and nuts among the children; next the bride, covered with the bridal veil, her long hair flowing, surrounded by her companions, and led by ‘the friends of the bridegroom,’ and ‘the children of the bride-chamber.’ All around were in festive array; some carried torches, or lamps on poles; those nearest had myrtle-branches and chaplets of flowers. Every one rose to salute the procession, or join it; and it was deemed almost a religious duty to break into praise of the beauty, the modesty, or the virtues of the bride. Arrived at her new home, she was led to her husband. Some such formula as ‘Take her according to the Law of Moses and of Israel,’ would be spoken, and the bride and bridegroom crowned with garlands. Then a formal legal instrument, called the keṯubah, was signed, which set forth that the bridegroom undertook to work for her, to honour, keep, and care for her as is the manner of the men of Israel; that he promised to give his maiden-wife at least two hundred zuz  (or more it might be), and to increase her own dowry (which, in the case of a poor orphan, the authorities supplied) by at least one half, and that he also undertook to lay it out for her to the best advantage, all his own possessions being guarantee for it. Then, after the prescribed washing of hands and benediction, the marriage-supper began – the cup being filled, and the solemn prayer of bridal benediction spoken over it. And so the feast lasted – it might be more than one day – while each sought to contribute, sometimes coarsely, sometimes wisely, to the general enjoyment, till at last ‘the friends of the bridegroom’ led the bridal pair to the ḥeder and the ḥupah, or the bridal chamber and bed. Here it ought to be specially noticed, as a striking evidence that the writer of the fourth Gospel was not only a Hebrew, but intimately acquainted with the varying customs prevailing in Galilee and in Judaea, that at the marriage of Cana no ‘friend of the bridegroom,’ or ‘groomsman’ (shosheḇeyna), is mentioned, while he is referred to in Joh_3:29, where the words are spoken outside the boundaries of Galilee. For among the simpler and purer Galileans the practice of having ‘friends of the bridegroom,’ which must so often have led to gross impropriety, did not obtain, though all the invited guests bore the general name of ‘children of the bridechamber’ (benē ḥupah).

It was the marriage in Cana of Galilee. All connected with the account of it is strictly Jewish – the feast, the guests, the invitation of the stranger Rabbi, and its acceptance by Jesus. Any Jewish Rabbi would have gone, but how differently from Him would he have spoken and acted! Let us first think of the scenic details of the narrative. Strangely, we are not able to fix with certainty the site of the little town of Cana. But if we adopt the most probable identification of it with the modern pleasant village of kefr kena, a few miles north-east of Nazareth, on the road to the Lake of Galilee, we picture it to ourselves as on the slope of a hill, its houses rising terrace upon terrace, looking north and west over a large plain (that of Battauf), and south upon a valley, beyond which the hills rise that separate it from Mount Tabor and the plain of Jezreel. As we approach the little town through that smiling valley, we come upon a fountain of excellent water, around which the village gardens and orchards clustered, that produced in great abundance the best pomegranates in Palestine. Here was the home of Nathanael-Bartholomew, and it seems not unlikely, that with him Jesus had passed the time intervening between His arrival and ‘the marriage,’ to which His Mother had come – the omission of all mention of Joseph leading to the supposition, that he had died before that time. The inquiry, what had brought Jesus to Cana, seems almost worse than idle, remembering what had passed between Him and Nathanael, and what was to happen in the first ‘sign,’ which was to manifest His glory. It is needless to speculate, whether He had known beforehand of ‘the marriage.’ But we can understand the longing of the ‘Israelite indeed’ to have Him under his roof, though we can only imagine what the Heavenly Guest, would now teach him, and those others who accompanied Him. Nor is there any difficulty in understanding, that on His arrival He would hear of this ‘marriage,’ of the presence of His Mother in what seems to have been the house of a friend, if not a relative; that Jesus and His disciples would be bidden to the feast; and that He resolved not only to comply with the request, but to use it as a leave-taking from home and friends – similar, though also far other, than that of Elisha, when he entered on his mission. Yet it seems deeply significant, that the ‘true Israelite’ should have been honoured to be the first host of ‘Israel’s King.’

And truly a leave-taking it was for Christ from former friends and home – a leave-taking also from His past life. If one part of the narrative – that of His dealing with His Mother – has any special meaning, it is that of leave-taking, or rather of leaving home and family, just as with this first ‘sign’ He took leave of all the past. When he had returned from His first Temple-visit, it had been in the self-exinanition of voluntary humility: to ‘be subject to His Parents.’ That period was now ended, and a new one had begun – that of active consecration of the whole life to His ‘Father’s business.’ And what passed at the marriage-feast marks the beginning of this period. We stand on the threshold, over which we pass from the old to the new – to use a New Testament figure: to the marriage-supper of the Lamb.

Viewed in this light, what passed at the marriage in Cana seems like taking up the thread, where it had been dropped at the first manifestation of His Messianic consciousness. In the Temple at Jerusalem He had said in answer to the misapprehensive question of His Mother: ‘Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?’ and now when about to take in hand that ‘business,’ He tells her so again, and decisively, in reply to her misapprehensive suggestion. It is a truth which we must ever learn, and yet are ever slow to learn in our questionings and suggestings, alike as concerns His dealings with ourselves and His rule of His Church, that the highest and only true point of view is ‘the Father’s business,’ not our personal relationship to Christ. This thread, then, is taken up again at Cana in the circle of friends, as immediately afterwards in His public manifestation, in the purifying of the Temple. What He had first as a Child, on His first visit to the Temple, that He manifested forth when a Man, entering on His active work – negatively, in His reply to His Mother – positively, in the ‘sign’ He wrought. It all meant: ‘Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?’ And, positively and negatively, His first appearance in Jerusalem meant just the same. For, there is ever deepest unity and harmony in that truest Life, the Life of Life.

As we pass through the court of that house in Cana, and reach the covered gallery which opens on the various rooms – in this instance, particularly, on the great reception room – all is festively adorned. In the gallery the servants move about, and there the ‘water-pots’ are ranged, ‘after the manner of the Jews,’ for purification – for the washing not only of hands before and after eating, but also of the vessels used. How detailed Rabbinic ordinances were in these respects, will be shown in another connection. ‘Purification’ was one of the main points in Rabbinic sanctity. By far the largest and most elaborate of the six books into which the Mishnah is divided, is exclusively devoted to this subject (the ‘seder tohoroṯ,’ purifications). Not to speak of references in other parts of the Talmud, we have two special tractates to instruct us about the purification of ‘Hands’ (yadayim) and of ‘Vessels’(kelim). The latter is the most elaborate in all the Mishnah, and consists of not less than thirty chapters. Their perusal proves, alike the strict accuracy of the Evangelic narratives, and the justice of Christ’s denunciations of the unreality and gross hypocrisy of this elaborateness of ordinances. This the more so, when we recall that it was actually vaunted as a special qualification for a seat in the Sanhedrin, to be so acute and learned as to know how to prove clean creeping things (which were declared unclean by the Law). And the mass of the people would have regarded neglect of the ordinances of purification as betokening either gross ignorance, or daring impiety.

At any rate, such would not be exhibited on an occasion like the present; and outside the reception-room, as John with graphic minuteness of details relates, six of those stone pots, which we know from Rabbinic writings, were ranged. Here it may be well to add, as against objectors, that it is impossible to state with certainty the exact measure represented by the ‘two or three firkins apiece.’ For, although we know that the term metretes (A.V. ‘firkin’) was intended as an equivalent for the Hebrew ‘baṯ,’ yet three different kinds of ‘bath’ were at the time used in Palestine: the common Palestinian or ‘wilderness’ bath, that of Jerusalem, and that of Sepphoris. The common Palestinian ‘bath’ was equal to the Roman amphora, containing about 5¼ gallons, while the sep̱oris’bath’ corresponded to the Attic metretes, and would contain about 8½ gallons. In the former case, therefore, each of these pots might have held from 10½ to 15¾ gallons; in the latter, from 17 to 25½. Reasoning on the general ground that the so-called Sepphoris measurement was common in Galilee, the larger quantity seems the more likely, though by no means certain. It is almost like trifling on the threshold of such a history, and yet so many cavils have been raised, that we must here remind ourselves, that neither the size, nor the number of these vessels has anything extraordinary about it. For such an occasion the family would produce or borrow the largest and handsomest stone-vessels that could be procured; nor is it necessary to suppose that they were filled to the brim; nor should we forget that, from a Talmudic notice, it seems to have been the practice to set apart some of these vessels exclusively for the use of the bride and of the more distinguished guests, while the rest were used by the general company.

Entering the spacious, lofty dining-room, which would be brilliantly lighted with lamps and candlesticks, the guests are disposed round tables on couches, soft with cushions or covered with tapestry, or seated on chairs. The bridal blessing has been spoken, and the bridal cup emptied. The feast is proceeding – not the common meal, which was generally taken about even, according to the Rabbinic saying, that he who postponed it beyond that hour was as if he swallowed a stone – but a festive evening meal. If there had been disposition to those exhibitions of, or incitement to, indecorous and light merriment, such as even the more earnest Rabbis deprecated, surely the presence of Jesus would have restrained it. And now there must have been a painful pause, or something like it, when the Mother of Jesus whispered to Him that ‘the wine failed.’ There could, perhaps, be the less cause for reticence on this point towards her Son, not merely because this failure may have arisen from the accession of guests in the persons of Jesus and his disciples, for whom no provision had been originally made, but because the gift of wine or oil on such occasions was regarded a meritorious work of charity.

But all this still leaves the main incidents in the narrative untouched. How are we to understand the implied request of the Mother of Jesus? how His reply? and what was the meaning of the miracle? It seems scarcely possible to imagine that, remembering the miraculous circumstances connected with His Birth, and informed of what had passed at Jordan, she now anticipated, and by her suggestion wished to prompt, this as His Royal Messianic manifestation. With reverence be it said, such a beginning of Royalty and triumph would have been paltry: rather that of the Jewish miracle-monger than that of the Christ of the Gospels. Not so, if it was only ‘a sign,’ pointing to something beyond itself. Again, such anticipations on the part of Mary seem psychologically untrue – that is, untrue to her history. She could not, indeed, have ever forgotten the circumstances which had surrounded His Birth; but the deeper she ‘kept all these things in her heart,’ the more mysterious would they seem, as time passed in the dull round of the most simple and uneventful country-life, and in the discharge of every-day duties, without even the faintest appearance of anything beyond it. Only twelve years had passed since His Birth, and yet they had not understood His saying in the Temple! How much more difficult would it be after thirty years, when the Child had grown into Youth and Manhood, with still the same silence of Divine Voices around? It is difficult to believe in fierce sunshine on the afternoon of a long grey day. Although we have no absolute certainty of it, we have the strongest internal reasons for believing, that Jesus had done no miracles these thirty years in the home at Nazareth, but lived the life of quiet submission and obedient waiting. That was the then part of His Work. It may, indeed, have been that Mary knew of what had passed at Jordan; and that, when she saw Him returning with His first disciples, who, assuredly, would make no secret of their convictions – whatever these may have conveyed to outsiders – she felt that a new period in His Life had opened. But what was there in all this to suggest such a miracle? and if it had been suggested, why not ask for it in express terms, if it was to be the commencement, certainly in strangely incongruous circumstances, of a Royal manifestation?

On the other hand, there was one thing which she had learned, and one thing which she was to unlearn, after those thirty years of the Nazareth-Life. What she had learned – what she must have learned – was absolute confidence in Jesus. What she had to unlearn, was the natural, yet entirely mistaken, impression which His meekness, stillness, and long home-submission had wrought on her as to His relationship to the family. It was, as we find from her after-history, a very hard, very slow, and very painful thing to learn it; yet very needful, not only for her own sake, but because it was a lesson of absolute truth. And so when she told Him of the want that had arisen, it was simply in absolute confidence in her Son, probably without any conscious expectancy of a miracle on His part. Yet not without a touch of maternal self-consciousness, almost pride, that He, Whom she could trust to do anything that was needed, was her Son, Whom she could solicit in the friendly family whose guests they were – and if not for her sake, yet at her request. It was a true earth-view to take of their relationship; only, an earth-view which must now for ever cease: the outcome of His misunderstood meekness and weakness, and which yet, strangely enough, the Romish Church puts in the forefront as the most powerful plea for Jesus’ acting. But the fundamental mistake in what she attempted is just this, that she spake as His Mother, and placed that maternal relationship in connection with His Work. And therefore it was that as, on the first misunderstanding in the Temple, He had said: ‘Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’ so now: ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ With that ‘business’ earthly relationship, however tender, had no connection. With everything else it had, down to the utter self-forgetfulness of that tenderest commendation of her to John, in the bitterest agonies of the Cross; but not with this. No, not now, nor ever henceforth, with this. As in His first manifestation in the Temple, so in this the first manifestation of His glory, the finger that pointed to ‘His hour’ was not, and could not be, that of an earthly parent, but of His Father in Heaven. There was, in truth, a twofold relationship in that Life, of which none other but the Christ could have preserved the harmony.

This is one main point – we had almost called it the negative one; the other, and positive one, was the miracle itself. All else is but accidental and circumstantial. No one who either knows the use of the language, or remembers that, when commending her to John on the Cross, He used the same mode of expression, will imagine, that there was anything derogatory to her, or harsh on His part, in addressing her as ‘woman’ rather than ‘mother.’ But the language is to us significant of the teaching intended to be conveyed, and as the beginning of this further teaching: ‘Who is My mother? and My brethren? And He stretched forth His hand toward His disciples, and said, Behold My mother and My brethren!’

And Mary did not, and yet she did, understand Him, when she turned to the servants with the direction, implicitly to follow His behests. What happened is well known: how, in the excess of their zeal, they filled the water-pots to the brim – an accidental circumstance, yet useful, as much that seems accidental, to show that there could be neither delusion nor collusion; how, probably in the drawing of it, the water became best wine – ‘the conscious water saw its God, and blushed;’ then the coarse proverbial joke of what was probably the master of ceremonies and purveyor of the feast, intended, of course, not literally to apply to the present company, and yet in its accidentalness an evidence of the reality of the miracle; after which the narrative abruptly closes with a retrospective remark on the part of him who relates it. What the bridegroom said; whether what had been done became known to the guests, and, if so, what impression it wrought; how long Jesus remained; what His Mother felt – of this and much more that might be asked, Scripture, with that reverent reticence which we so often mark, in contrast to our shallow talkativeness, takes no further notice. And best that it should be so. John meant to tell us, what the Synoptists, who begin their account with the later Galilean ministry, have not recorded, of the first of His miracles as a ‘sign,’ pointing to the deeper and higher that was to be revealed, and of the first forth-manifesting of ‘His glory.’ That is all; and that object was attained. Witness the calm, grateful retrospect upon that first day of miracles, summed up in these simple but intensely conscious words: ‘And His disciples believed on Him.’

A sign it was, from whatever point we view its meaning, as previously indicated. For, like the diamond that shines with many colours, it has many meanings; none of them designed, in the coarse sense of the term, but all real, because the outcome of a real Divine Life and history. And a real miracle also, not only historically, but as viewed in its many meanings; the beginning of all others, which in a sense are but the unfolding of this first. A miracle it is, which cannot be explained, but is only enhanced by the almost incredible platitudes to which negative criticism has sunk in its commentation, for which there assuredly exists no legendary basis, either in Old Testament history, or in contemporary Jewish expectation; which cannot be sublimated into nineteenth-century idealism; least of all can be conceived as an after-thought of His disciples, invented by an Ephesian writer of the second century. But even the allegorical illustration of Augustine, who reminds us that in the grape the water of rain is ever changed into wine, is scarcely true, save as a bare illustration, and only lowers our view of the miracle. For miracle it is, and will ever remain; not, indeed, magic, nor arbitrary power, but power with a moral purpose, and that the highest. And we believe it, because this ‘sign’ is the first of all those miracles in which the Miracle of Miracles gave ‘a sign,’ and manifested forth His glory – the glory of His Person, the glory of His Purpose, and the glory of His Work.

(Joh_2:13-25)

It has been said that Mary understood, and yet did not understand Jesus. And of this there seems fresh evidence in the circumstance that, immediately after the marriage of Cana, she and the ‘brethren of Jesus’ went with Him, or followed Him, to Capernaum, which henceforth became ‘His own city,’ during His stay by the Lake of Galilee. The question, whether He had first returned to Nazareth, seems almost trifling. It may have been so, and it may be that His brothers had joined Him there, while His ‘sisters,’ being married, remained at Nazareth. For the departure of the family from Nazareth many reasons will, in the peculiar circumstances, suggest themselves. And yet one feels, that their following Jesus and His disciples to their new home had something to do with their understanding, and yet not understanding, of Him, which had been characteristic of Mary’s silent withdrawal after the reply she had received at the feast of Cana, and her significant direction to the servants, implicitly to do what He bade them. Equally in character is the willingness of Jesus to allow His family to join Him – not ashamed of their humbleness, as a Jewish Messiah might have been, nor impatient of their ignorance: tenderly near to them, in all that concerned the humanness of His feelings; sublimely far from them, in all connected with His Work and Mission.

It is almost a relief to turn from the long discussion (to which reference has already been made): whether those who bore that designation were His ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ in the real sense, or the children of Joseph by an earlier marriage, or else His cousins – and to leave it in the indefiniteness which rests upon it. But the observant reader will probably mark, in connection with this controversy, that it is, to say the least, strange that ‘brothers’ of Jesus should, without further explanation, have been introduced in the fourth Gospel, if it was an Ephesian production, if not a fiction of spiritualistic tendency; strange also, that the fourth Gospel alone should have recorded the removal to Capernaum of the ‘mother and brothers’ of Jesus, in company with Him. But this by the way, and in reference to recent controversies about the authorship of the fourth Gospel.

If we could only feel quite sure – and not merely deem it most probable – that the Tell Hûm of modern exploration marks the site of the ancient Capernaum, kep̱ar naḥum, or tanḥumin (the latter, perhaps, ‘village of consolation’), with what solemn interest would we wander over its ruins. We know it from New Testament history, and from the writings of Josephus. A rancorous notice and certain vile insinuations of the Rabbis, connecting it with ‘heresy,’ presumably that of Christianity, seem also to point to kep̱ar naḥum as the home of Jesus, where so many of His miracles were done. At the time it could have been of only recent origin, since its Synagogue had but lately been reared, through the friendly liberality of that true and faithful Centurion. But already its importance was such, that it had become the station of a garrison, and of one of the principal custom-houses. Its soft, sweet air, by the glorious Lake of Galilee, with snow-capped Hermon full in view in the North – from a distance, like Mount Blanc over the Lake of Geneva; the fertility of the country – notably of the plain of Gennesaret close by; and the merry babble, and fertilising proximity of a spring which, from its teeming with fish like that of the Nile, was popularly regarded as springing from the river of Egypt – this and more must have made Capernaum one of the most delightful places in these ‘Gardens of Princes,’ as the Rabbis interpreted the word ‘Gennesaret,’ by the ‘cither-shaped lake’ of that name. The town lay quite up on its north-western shore, only two miles from where the Jordan falls into the lake. As we wander over that field of ruins, about half a mile in length by a quarter in breadth, which in all probability mark the site of ancient Capernaum, we can scarcely realise it, that the desolateness all around has taken the place of the life and beauty of eighteen centuries ago. Yet the scene is the same, though the breath of judgment has long swept the freshness from its face, here lies in the unruffled stillness, or wildly surges, lashed by sudden storms, the deep blue lake, 600 or 700 feet below the level of the Mediterranean. We can look up and down its extent, about twelve miles, or across it, about six miles. Right over on the other side from where we stand – somewhere there, is the place where Jesus miraculously fed the five thousand. Over here came the little ship, its timbers still trembling, and its sides and deck wet with the spray of that awful night of storm, when He came to the weary rowers, and brought with Him calm. Up that beach they drew the boat. Here, close by the shore, stood the synagogue, built of white limestone on dark basalt foundation. North of it, up the gentle slopes, stretched the town. East and south is the lake, in almost continuous succession of lovely small bays, of which more than seventeen may be counted in six miles, and in one of which nestled Capernaum. All its houses are gone, scarce one stone left on the other: the good Centurion’s house, that of Matthew the publican, that of Simon Peter, the temporary home which first sheltered the Master and His loved ones. All are unrecognisable – a confused mass of ruins – save only that white Synagogue in which He taught. From its ruins we can still measure its dimensions, and trace its fallen pillars; nay, we discover over the lintel of its entrance the device of a pot of manna, which may have lent its form to His teaching there – a device different from that of the seven-branched candlestick, or that other most significant one of the Paschal Lamb, which seem to have been so frequent over the Synagogues in Galilee.

And this, then, is Capernaum – the first and the chief home of Jesus, when He had entered on His active work. But, on this occasion, He ‘continued there not many days.’ For, already, ‘the Jews’ Passover was at hand’ and He must needs keep that feast in Jerusalem. If our former computations are right – and, in the nature of things, it is impossible to be absolutely certain about exact dates – and John began his preaching in the autumn of the year 779 from the building of Rome, or in 26 of our present reckoning, while Jesus was baptized in the early winter following,  then this Passover must have taken place in the spring (about April) of the same year. The preparations for it had, indeed, commenced a month before. Not to speak of the needful domestic arrangements for the journey of pilgrims to Jerusalem, the whole land seemed in a state of preparation. A month before the feast (on the 15th Adar) bridges and roads were put in repair, and sepulchres whitened, to prevent accidental pollution to the pilgrims. Then, some would select this out of the three great annual feasts for the tithing of their flocks and herds, which, in such case, had to be done two weeks before the Passover; while others would fix on it as the time for going up to Jerusalem before the feast ‘to purify themselves’ – ‘that is, to undergo the prescribed purification in any case of Levitical defilement. But what must have appealed to every one in the land was the appearance of the ‘money-changers’ (shulḥanim), who opened their stalls in every country-town on the 15th of Adar (just a month before the feast). They were, no doubt, regularly accredited and duly authorised. For, all Jews and proselytes – women, slaves, and minors excepted – had to pay the annual Temple-tribute of half a shekel, according to the ‘sacred’ standard, equal to a common Galilean shekel (two denars), or about 1s. 2d. of our money. From this tax many of the priests – to the chagrin of the Rabbis – claimed exemption, on the ingenious plea that in Lev_6:23 (A.V.) every offering of a priest was ordered to be burnt, and not eaten; while from the Temple-tribute such offerings were paid for as the two wave loaves and the shewbread, which were afterwards eaten by priests. Hence, it was argued, their payment of Temple-tribute would have been incompatible with Lev_6:23!

But to return. This Temple-tribute had to be paid in exact half-shekels of the Sanctuary, or ordinary Galilean shekels. When it is remembered that, besides strictly Palestinian silver and especially copper coin, Persian, Tyrian, Syrian, Egyptian, Grecian, and Roman money circulated in the country, it will be understood what work these ‘money-changers’ must have had. From the 15th to the 25th Adar they had stalls in every country-town. On the latter date, which must therefore be considered as marking the first arrivals of festive pilgrims in the city, the stalls in the country were closed, and the money-changers henceforth sat within the precincts of the Temple. All who refused to pay the Temple-tribute (except priests) were liable to distraint of their goods. The ‘money-changers’ made a statutory fixed charge of a maah, or from 1½d to 2d, (or, according to others, of half a maah) on every half-shekel. This was called qolbon. But if a person tendered a sela (a four-denar piece, in value two half-shekels of the Sanctuary, or two Galilean shekels), he had to pay double qolbon: one for his half-shekel of tribute-money, the other for his change. Although not only priests, but all other non-obligatory officers, and those who paid for their poorer brethren, were exempted from the charge of qolbon, it must have brought in an immense revenue, since not only many native Palestinians might come without the statutory coin, but a vast number of foreign Jews presented themselves on such occasions in the Temple. Indeed, if we compute the annual Temple-tribute at about 75,000l., the bankers’ profits may have amounted to from 8,000l. to 9,000l., an immense sum in the circumstances of the country.

But even this does not represent all the facts of the case. We have already seen, that the ‘money-changers’ in the Temple gave change, when larger amounts than were equivalent to the Temple-tribute were proffered. It is a reasonable, nay, an almost necessary inference, that many of the foreign Jews arriving in Jerusalem would take the opportunity of changing at these tables their foreign money, and for this, of course, fresh charges would be made. For, there was a great deal to be bought within the Temple-area, needful for the feast (in the way of sacrifices and their adjuncts), or for purification, and it would be better to get the right money from the authorised changers, than have disputes with the dealers. We can picture to ourselves the scene around the table of an Eastern money-changer – the weighing of the coins, deductions for loss of weight, arguing, disputing, bargaining – and we can realise the terrible truthfulness of our Lord’s charge that they had made the Father’s House a mart and place of traffic. But even so, the business of the Temple money-changers would not be exhausted. Through their hands would pass the immense votive offerings of foreign Jews, or of proselytes, to the Temple; indeed, they probably transacted all business matters connected with the Sanctuary. It is difficult to realise the vast accumulation of wealth in the Temple-treasury. But some idea of it may be formed from the circumstance that, despite many previous spoliations, the value of the gold and silver which Crassus carried from a the Temple-treasury amounted to the enormous sum of about two and a half millions sterling. Whether or not these Temple money-changers may have transacted other banking business, given drafts, or cashed those from correspondents, received and lent money at interest – all which was common at the time – must remain undetermined.

Readers of the New Testament know, that the noisy and incongruous business of an Eastern money-lender was not the only one carried on within the sacred Temple-enclosure. It was a great accommodation, that a person bringing a sacrifice might not only learn, but actually obtain, in the Temple from its officials what was required for the meat- and drink-offering. The prices were fixed by tariff every month, and on payment of the stated amount the offerer received one of four counterfoils, which respectively indicated, and, on handing it to the proper official, procured the prescribed complement of his sacrifice. The Priests and Levites in charge of this made up their accounts every evening, and these (though necessary) transactions must have left a considerable margin of profit to the treasury. This would soon lead to another kind of traffic. Offerers might, of course, bring their sacrificial animals with them, and we know that on the Mount of Olives there were four shops, specially for the sale of pigeons and other things requisite for sacrificial purposes.  But then, when an animal was brought, it had to be examined as to its Levitical fitness by persons regularly qualified and appointed. Disputes might here arise, due to the ignorance of the purchaser, or the greed of the examiner. A regularly qualified examiner was called mumḥeh (one approved), and how much labour was given to the acquisition of the requisite knowledge appears from the circumstance, that a certain teacher is said to have spent eighteen months with a farmer, to learn what faults in an animal were temporary, and which permanent.

Now, as we are informed that a certain mumḥeh of firstlings had been authorised to charge for his inspection from four to six Isar (1¼d. to about 2d.), according to the animal inspected, it is but reasonable to suppose that a similar fee may have been exacted for examining the ordinary sacrificial animals. But all trouble and difficulty would be avoided by a regular market within the Temple-enclosure, where sacrificial animals could be purchased, having presumably been duly inspected, and all fees paid before being offered for sale. It needs no comment to show how utterly the Temple would be profaned by such traffic, and to what scenes it might lead. From Jewish writings we know, that most improper transactions were carried on, to the taking undue advantage of the poor people who came to offer their sacrifices. Thus we read, that on one occasion the price of a couple of pigeons was run up to the enormous figure of a gold denar (a Roman gold denar, about 15s. 3d.), when, through the intervention of Simeon, the grandson of the great Hillel, it was brought down before night to a quarter of a silver denar, or about 2d. each. Since Simeon is represented as introducing his resolve to this effect with the adjuration, ‘by the Temple,’ it is not unfair to infer that these prices had ruled within the sacred enclosure. It was probably not merely controversial zeal for the peculiar teaching of his master Shammai, but a motive similar to that of Simeon, which on another occasion induced Baba ben Buta (well known as giving Herod the advice of rebuilding the Temple), when he found the Temple-court empty of sacrificial animals, through the greed of those who had ‘thus desolated the House of God,’ to bring in no less than three thousand sheep, so that the people might offer sacrifices. 

This leads up to another question, most important in this connection. The whole of this traffic – money-changing, selling of doves, and market for sheep and oxen – was in itself, and from its attendant circumstances, a terrible desecration; it was also liable to gross abuses. But was there about the time of Christ anything to make it specially obnoxious and unpopular? The priesthood must always have derived considerable profit from it – of course, not the ordinary priests, who came up in their ‘orders’ to minister in the Temple, but the permanent priestly officials, the resident leaders of the priesthood, and especially the High-Priestly family. This opens up a most interesting inquiry, closely connected, as we shall show, with Christ’s visit to the Temple at this Passover. But the materials here at our command are so disjointed, that, in attempting to put them together, we can only suggest what seems most probable, not state what is absolutely certain. What became of the profits of the money-changers, and who were the real owners of the Temple-market?

To the first of these questions the Jerusalem Talmud gives no less than five different answers, showing that there was no fixed rule as to the employment of these profits, or, at least, that it was no longer known at that time. Although four of these answers point to their use for the public service, yet that which seems most likely assigns the whole profits to the money-changers themselves. But in that case it can scarcely be doubted, that they had to pay a considerable rental or percentage to the leading Temple-officials. The profits from the sale of meat- and drink-offerings went to the Temple-treasury. But it can hardly be believed, that such was the case in regard to the Temple-market. On the other hand, there can be little doubt, that this market was what in Rabbinic writings is styled ‘the Bazaars of the sons of Annas’ (ḥanuyoṯ benē ḥanan), the sons of that High-Priest Annas, who is so infamous in New Testament history. When we read that the Sanhedrin, forty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, transferred its meeting-place from ‘the Hall of Hewn Stones’ (on the south side of the Court of the Priests, and therefore partly within the Sanctuary itself) to ‘the Bazaars,’ and then afterwards to the City, the inference is plain, that these Bazaars were those of the sons of Annas the High-Priest, and that they occupied part of the Temple-court; in short, that the Temple-market and the Bazaars of the sons of Annas are identical.

If this inference, which is in accordance with received Jewish opinion, be admitted, we gain much light as regards the purification of the Temple by Jesus, and the words which He spake on that occasion. For, our next position is that, from the unrighteousness of the traffic carried on in these Bazaars, and the greed of their owners, the ‘Temple-market’ was at the time most unpopular. This appears, not only from the conduct and words of the patriarch Simeon and of Baba ben Buta (as above quoted), but from the fact that popular indignation, three years before the destruction of Jerusalem, swept away the Bazaars of the family of Annas, and this, as expressly stated, on account of the sinful greed which characterised their dealings. And if any doubt should still linger in the mind, it would surely be removed by our Lord’s open denunciation of the Temple-market as ‘a den of robbers.’ Of the avarice and corruption of this infamous High-Priestly family, alike Josephus and the Rabbis give a most terrible picture. Josephus describes Annas (or Ananus), the son of the Annas of the New Testament, as ‘a great hoarder up of money,’ very rich, and as despoiling by open violence the common priests of their official revenues. The Talmud also records the curse which a distinguished Rabbi of Jerusalem (Abba Shaul) pronounced upon the High-Priestly families (including that of Annas), who were ‘themselves High-Priests, their sons treasurers (Gizbarin), their sons-in-law assistant-treasurers (Ammarkalin), while their servants beat the people with sticks.’ What a comment this passage offers on the bearing of Jesus, as He made a scourge to drive out the very servants who ‘beat the people with sticks,’ and upset their unholy traffic! It were easy to add from Rabbinic sources repulsive details of their luxuriousness, wastefulness, gluttony, and general dissoluteness. No wonder that, in the figurative language of the Talmud, the Temple is represented as crying out against them: ‘Go hence, ye sons of Eli, ye defile the Temple of Jehovah!’ These painful notices of the state of matters at that time help us better to understand what Christ did, and who they were that opposed His doing.

These Temple-Bazaars, the property, and one of the principal sources of income, of the family of Annas, were the scene of the purification of the Temple by Jesus; and in the private locale, attached to these very Bazaars, where the Sanhedrin held its meetings at the time, the final condemnation of Jesus may have been planned, if not actually pronounced. All this has its deep significance. But we can now also understand why, the Temple officials, to whom these Bazaars belonged, only challenged the authority of Christ in thus purging the Temple. The unpopularity of the whole traffic, if not their consciences, prevented their proceeding to actual violence. Lastly, we can also better perceive the significance, alike of Christ’s action, and of His reply to their challenge, spoken as it was close to the spot where He was so soon to be condemned by them. Nor do we any longer wonder that no resistance was offered by the people to the action of Jesus, and that even the remonstrances of the priests were not direct, but in the form of a perplexing question.

For it is in the direction just indicated, and in no other, that objections have been raised to the narrative of Christ’s first public act in Jerusalem: the purgation of the Temple. Commentators have sufficiently pointed out the differences between this and the purgation of the Temple at the close of His Ministry.  Indeed, on comparison, these are so obvious, that every reader can mark them. Nor does it seem difficult to understand, rather does it seem not only fitting, but almost logically necessary, that, if any such event had occurred, it should have taken place both at the beginning and at the close of His public ministry in the Temple. Nor yet is there anything either ‘abrupt’ or ‘tactless’ in such a commencement of his Ministry. It is not only profane, but unhistorical, to look for calculation and policy in the Life of Jesus. Had there been such, He would not have died on the Cross. And ‘abrupt’ it certainly was not. Jesus took up the thread where he had dropped it on His first recorded appearance in the Temple, when He had spoken His wonder, that those who knew Him should have been ignorant, that He must be about His Father’s business. He was now about His Father’s business, and, as we may so say, in the most elementary manner. To put an end to this desecration of His Father’s House, which, by a nefarious traffic, had been made a place of mart, nay, ‘a den or robbers,’ was, what all who knew His Mission must have felt, a most suitable and almost necessary beginning of His Messianic Work.

And many of those present must have known Jesus. The zeal of His early disciples, who, on their first recognition of Him, proclaimed the newfound Messiah, could not have given place to absolute silence. The many Galilean pilgrims in the Temple could not but have spread the tidings, and the report must soon have passed from one to the other in the Temple-courts, as He first entered their sacred enclosure. They would follow Him, and watch what He did. Nor were they disappointed. He inaugurated His Mission by fulfilling the prediction concerning Him Who was to be Israel’s refiner and purifier (Mal_3:1-3). Scarce had He entered the Temple-porch, and trod the Court of the Gentiles, than He drove thence what profanely defiled it. There was not a hand lifted, not a word spoken to arrest Him, as He made the scourge of small cords (even this not without significance) and with it drove out of the Temple both the sheep and the oxen; not a word said, nor a hand raised, as He poured into their receptacles the changers’ money, and overthrew their tables. His Presence awed them, His words awakened even their consciences; they knew, only too well, how true His denunciations were. And behind Him was gathered the wondering multitude, that could not but sympathise with such bold, right royal, and Messianic vindication of Temple sanctity from the nefarious traffic of a hated, corrupt, and avaricious Priesthood. It was a scene worth witnessing by any true Israelite, a protest and an act which, even among a less emotional people, would have gained Him respect, approbation, and admiration, and which, at any rate, secured his safety.

For when ‘the Jews,’ by which here, as in so many other places, we are to understand the rulers of the people – in this instance, the Temple officials – did gather courage to come forward, they ventured not to lay hands on Him. It was not yet the time for it. In presence of that multitude they would not then have dared it, even if policy had not dictated quietness within the Temple-enclosure, when the Roman garrison so close by, in Fort Antonia, kept jealous watch for the first appearance of a tumult. Still more strangely, they did not even reprove Him for what He had done, as if it had been wrong or improper. With infinite cunning, as appealing to the multitude, they only asked for ‘a sign’ which would warrant such assumption of authority. But this question of challenge marked two things: the essential opposition between the Jewish authorities and Jesus, and the manner in which they would carry on the contest, which was henceforth to be waged between Him and the rulers of the people. That first action of Jesus determined their mutual positions; and with and in that first conflict its end was already involved. The action of Jesus as against the rulers must develop into a life-opposition; their first step against Him must lead on to the last in His condemnation to the Cross.

And Jesus then and there knew it all, foresaw, or rather saw it all. His answer told it. It was – as all His teaching to those who seeing do not see, and hearing do not hear, whose understanding is darkened and heart hardened – in parabolic language, which only the after-event would make clear. As for ‘the sign,’ then and ever again sought by an ‘evil and adulterous generation’ – evil in their thoughts and ways and adulterous to the God of Israel – He had then, as afterwards, only one ‘sign’ to give: ‘Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ Thus He met their challenge for a sign by the challenge of a sign: Crucify Him, and He would rise again; let them suppress the Christ, He would triumph. A sign this which they understood not, but misunderstood, and by making it the ground of their false charge in His final trial, themselves unwittingly fulfilled.

And yet to all time this is the sign, and the only sign, which the Christ has given, which He still gives to every ‘evil and adulterous generation,’ to all sin-lovers and God-forsakers. They will destroy, so far as their power reaches, the Christ, crucify Him, give His words the lie, suppress, sweep away Christianity – and they shall not succeed: He shall triumph. As on that first Easter-day, so now and ever in history, He raises up the Temple, which they break down. This is the ‘sign,’ the evidence, the only ‘sign,’ which the Christ gives to His enemies; a sign which, as an historical fact, has been patent to all men, and seen by them; which might have been evidence, but being of the nature of miracle, not explicable by natural agencies, they have misunderstood, viewing ‘the Temple’ merely as a building, of which they fully know the architecture, manner, and time of construction, but of whose spiritual character and upbuilding they have no knowledge nor thought. And thus, as to that generation, so to all which have followed, this is still the ‘sign,’ if they understand it – the only sign, the Great Miracle, which, as they only calculate from the visible and to them ascertained, these ‘despisers behold, and wonder, and perish,’ for He worketh a work in their days, a work which they shall in no wise believe.

(Joh 3:1-21)

But there were those who beheld, and heard His words, and did in some measure understand them. Even before Jesus had spoken to the Temple-officials, His disciples, as silently they watched Him, saw an old Scripture-saying kindled into light by the halo of His glory. It was that of the suffering, self-forgetful, God-dedicated Servant of Jehovah, as His figure stood out against the Old Testament sky, realising in a hostile world only this, as the deepest element of His being and calling: entire inward and outward consecration to God, a burnt-offering, such as Isaac would have been. Within their minds sprang up unbidden, as when the light of the Urim and Thummim fell on the letters graven on the precious stones of the High-Priest’s breastplate, those words of old: The zeal of Thine house eateth me up.’ Thus, even in those days of their early learning, Jesus purging the Temple in view of a hostile rulership was the full realisation of that picture, which must be prophetic, since no mere man ever bore those lineaments: that of the ideal Nazarite, whom the zeal of God’s house was consuming. And then long afterwards, after His Passion and Death, after those dark days of loneliness and doubt, after the misty dawn of the first recognition – this word, which He had spoken to the rulers at the first, came to them, with all the convincing power of prediction fulfilled by fact, as an assured conviction, which in its strong grasp held not only the past, but the present, because the present is ever the fulfilment of the past: ‘When therefore He was risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this unto them; and they believed the Scripture, and the word which Jesus had said.’

Again, as we think of the meaning of His refusing ‘a sign’ to the rulers of Israel – or rather think of the only ‘sign’ which He did give them – we see nothing incompatible with it in the fact that, at the same feast, He did many ‘signs’ in sight of the people. For it was only the rulers who had entered on that conflict, of which, from the character and aims of the two parties engaged, the beginning involved the terrible end as its logical sequence. In presence of such a foe only one ‘sign’ could be given: that of reading their inmost hearts, and in them their real motives and final action, and again of setting forth His own final triumph – a predictive description, a ‘no sign’ that was, and is, a sign to all time. But neither challenge nor hostile demand for a sign had been addressed to Him by the people. Indeed even at the last, when incited by their rulers, and blindly following them, ‘they knew not what they did.’ And it was to them that Jesus now, on the morning of His Work, spoke by ‘signs.’

The Feast of the Passover commenced on the 15th Nisan, dating it, of course, from the preceding evening. But before that – before the slaying of the Paschal Lamb, on the afternoon of the 14th Nisan – the visitor to the Temple would mark some thing peculiar. On the evening of the 13th Nisan, with which the 14th, or ‘preparation-day,’ commenced, the head of each household would, with lighted candle and in solemn silence, search out all leaven in his house, prefacing his search with solemn thanksgiving and appeal to God, and closing it by an equally solemn declaration that he had accomplished it, so far as within his knowledge, and disavowing responsibility for what lay beyond it. And as the worshippers went to the Temple, they would see prominently exposed, on a bench in one of the porches, two desecrated cakes of some thankoffering, indicating that it was still lawful to eat of that which was leavened. At ten, or at latest eleven o’clock, one of those cakes was removed, and then they knew that it was no longer lawful to eat of it. At twelve o’clock the second cake was removed, and this was the signal for solemnly burning all the leaven that had been gathered. Was it on the eve of the 14th, when each head of a house sought for and put aside the leaven, or else as the people watched these two cakes, and then the removal of the last of them, which marked that all leaven was to be ‘purged out,’ that Jesus, in real fulfilment of its national meaning, ‘cleansed’ the Temple of its leaven?

We can only suggest the question. But the ‘cleansing of the Temple’ undoubtedly preceded the actual festive Paschal week. To those who were in Jerusalem it was a week such as had never been before, a week when ‘they saw the signs which He did,’ and when, stirred by a strange impulse, ‘they believed in His Name’ as the Messiah. ‘A milk-faith,’ as Luther pithily calls it, which fed on, and required for its sustenance, ‘signs.’ And like a vision it passed with the thing seen. Not a faith to which the sign was only the fingerposts but a faith of which the sign, not the thing signified, was the substance; a faith which dazzled the mental sight, but reached not down to the heart. And Jesus, Who with heart-searching glance saw what was in man, Who needed not any to tell Him, but with immediateness knew all, did not commit Himself to them. They were not like His first Galilean disciples, true of heart and in heart. The Messiah Whom these found, and He Whom those saw, met different conceptions. The faith of the Jerusalem sign-seers would not have compassed what the Galileans experienced; it would not have understood nor endured, had He committed Himself to them. And yet He did, in wondrous love, condescend and speak to them in the only language they could understand, in that of ‘signs.’ Nor was it all in vain.

Unrecorded as these miracles are – because the words they spoke were not recorded on many hearts – it was not only here and there, by this or that miracle, that their power was felt. Their grand general effect was, to make the more spiritually minded and thoughtful feel that Jesus was indeed ‘a teacher come from God.’ In thinking of the miracles of Jesus, and generally of the miraculous in the New Testament, we are too apt to overlook the principal consideration in the matter. We regard it from our present circumstances, not from those of the Jews and people of that time; we judge it from our standpoint, not from theirs. And yet the main gist of the matter lies here. We would not expect to be convinced of the truth of religion, nor converted to it, by outward miracles; we would not expect them at all. Not but that, if a notable miracle really did occur, its impression and effect would be overwhelming; although, unless a miracle submitted itself to the strictest scientific tests, when in the nature of things it would cease to be a miracle, it would scarcely find general credence. Hence, truth to say, the miraculous in the New Testament constitutes to modern thought not its strong, but its weak point; not its convincing evidence, but its point of attack and difficulty. Accordingly, treating of, or contemplating the miracles of the New Testament, it is always their moral, not their natural (or supra-natural), aspect which has its chief influence upon us. But what is this but to say that ours is modern, not ancient thought, and that the evidential power of Christ’s miracles has given place to the age and dispensation of the Holy Ghost? With us the process is the reverse of what it was with them of old. They approached the moral and spiritual through the miraculous; we the miraculous through the moral and spiritual. His Presence, that one grand Presence is, indeed, ever the same. But God always adapts His teaching to our learning; else it were not teaching at all, least of all Divine teaching. Only what carries it now to us is not the same as what carried it to them of old: it is no more the fingerpost of ‘signs,’ but the finger of the Spirit. To them the miraculous was the expected – that miraculous which to us also is so truly and Divinely miraculous, just because it applies to all time, since it carries to us the moral, as to them the physical, aspect of the miracle; in each case, Divine reality Divinely conveyed. It may therefore safely be asserted, that to the men of that time no teaching of the new faith would have been real without the evidence of miracles.

In those days, when the idea of the miraculous was, so to speak, fluid – passing from the natural into the supernatural – and men regarded all that was above their view-point of nature as supernatural, the idea of the miraculous would, by its constant recurrence, always and prominently suggest itself. Other teachers also, among the Jews at least claimed the power of doing miracles, and were popularly credited with them. But what an obvious contrast between theirs and the ‘signs’ which Jesus did! In thinking of this, it is necessary to remember, that the Talmud and the New Testament alike embody teaching Jewish in its form, and addressed to Jews, and – at least so far as regards the subject of miracles – at periods not far apart, and brought still nearer by the similar theological conservatism of the people. If, with this in our minds, we recall some of the absurd Rabbinic pretensions to miracles – such as the creation of a calf by two Rabbis every Sabbath eve for their Sabbath meal, or the repulsive, and in part blasphemous, account of a series of prodigies in testimony of the subtleties of some great Rabbi – we are almost overwhelmed by the evidential force of the contrast between them and the ‘signs’ which Jesus did. We seem to be in an entirely new world, and we can understand the conclusion at which every earnest and thoughtful mind must have arrived in witnessing them, that He was, indeed, ‘a Teacher from God.’

Such an observer was Nicodemus (naqdimon), one of the Pharisees and a member of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin. And, as we gather from his mode of expression, not he only, but others with him. From the Gospel-history we know him to have been cautious by nature and education and timid of character; yet, as in other cases, it was the greatest offence to his Jewish thinking, the Cross, which at last brought him to the light of decision, and the vigour of bold confession. And this in itself would show the real character of his inquiry, and the effect of what Jesus had first taught him. It is, at any rate, altogether rash to speak of the manner of his first approach to Christ as most commentators have done. We can scarcely realise the difficulties which he had to overcome. It must have been a mighty power of conviction, to break down prejudice so far as to lead this old Sanhedrist to acknowledge a Galilean, untrained in the Schools, as a Teacher come from God, and to repair to Him for direction on, perhaps, the most delicate and important point in Jewish theology. But, even so, we cannot wonder that he should have wished to shroud his first visit in the utmost possible secrecy. It was a most compromising step for a Sanhedrist to take. With that first bold purgation of the Temple a deadly feud between Jesus and the Jewish authorities had begun, of which the sequel could not be doubtful. It was involved in that first encounter in the Temple, and it needed not the experience and wisdom of an aged Sanhedrist to forecast the end.

Nevertheless, Nicodemus came. If this is evidence of his intense earnestness, so is the bearing of Jesus of His Divine Character, and of the truth of the narrative. As he was not depressed by the resistance of the authorities, nor by the ‘milk-faith’ of the multitude, so He was not elated by the possibility of making such a convert as a member of the great Sanhedrin. There is no excitement, no undue deference, nor eager politeness; no compromise, nor attempted persuasiveness; not even accommodation. Nor, on the other hand, is there assumed superiority, irony, or dogmatism. There is not even a reference to the miracles, the evidential power of which had wrought in His visitor the initial conviction, that He was a Teacher come from God. All is calm, earnest, dignified – if we may reverently say it – as became the God-Man in the humiliation of His personal teaching. To say that it is all un-Jewish were a mere truism: it is Divine. No fabricated narrative would have invented such a scene, nor so represented the actors in it.

Dangerous as it may be to indulge the imagination, we can almost picture the scene. The report of what passed reads, more than almost any other in the Gospels, like notes taken at the time by one who was present. We can almost put it again into the form of brief notes, by heading what each said in this manner, Nicodemus: – or, Jesus. They are only the outlines of the conversation, given, in each case, the really important gist, and leaving abrupt gaps between, as would be the manner in such notes. Yet quite sufficient to tell us all that is important for us to know. We can scarcely doubt that it was the narrator, John, who was the witness that took the notes. His own reflections upon it, or rather his after-look upon it, in the light of later facts, and under the teaching of the Holy Ghost, is described in the verses with which the writer follows his account of what had passed between Jesus and Nicodemus (Joh_3:16-21). In the same manner he winds up with similar reflections (Joh_3:31-36) the reported conversation between the Baptist and his disciples. In neither case are the verses to which we refer, part of what either Jesus or John said at the time, but what, in view of it, John says in name of, and to the Church of the New Testament.

But from Joh_19:27 we might infer that John had ‘a home’ in Jerusalem itself – which, considering the simplicity of living at the time, and the cost of houses, would not necessarily imply that he was rich – the scene about to be described would have taken place under the roof of him who has given us its record. In any case, the circumstances of life at the time are so well known, that we have no difficulty in realising the surroundings. It was night one of the nights in that Easter week so full of marvels. Perhaps we may be allowed to suppose that, as so often in analogous circumstances, the spring-wind, sweeping up the narrow streets of the City, had suggested the comparison,  which was so full of deepest teaching to Nicodemus. Up in the simply furnished Aliyah – the guest-chamber on the roof – the lamp was still burning, and the Heavenly Guest still busy with thought and words. There was no need for Nicodemus to pass through the house, for an outside stair led to the upper room. It was night, when Jewish superstition would keep men at home; a wild, gusty spring night, when loiterers would not be in the streets; and no one would see him as at that hour he ascended the outside steps that led up to the Aliyah. His errand was soon told: one sentence, that which admitted the Divine Teachership of Jesus, implied all the questions he could wish to ask. Nay, his very presence there spoke them. Or, if otherwise, the answer of Jesus spoke them. Throughout, Jesus never descended to the standpoint of Nicodemus, but rather sought to lift him to His own. It was all about ‘the Kingdom of God,’ so connected with that Teacher come from God, that Nicodemus would inquire.

And yet, though Christ never descended to the standpoint of Nicodemus, we must bear in mind what his views as a Jew would be, if we would understand the interview. Jesus took him straight to whence alone that ‘Kingdom’ could be seen. ‘Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’ It has been thought by commentators, that there is here an allusion to a Jewish mode of expression in regard to proselytes, who were viewed as ‘new-born.’ But in that case Nicodemus would have understood it, and answered differently – or, rather, not expressed his utter inability to understand it. It is, indeed, true that a Gentile on becoming a proselyte – though not, as has been suggested, an ordinary penitent – was likened to a child just born. It is also true, that persons in certain circumstances – the bridegroom on his marriage, the Chief of the Academy on his promotion, the king on his enthronement – were likened to those newly born. The expression, therefore, was not only common, but, so to speak, fluid; only, both it and what it implied must be rightly understood. In the first place, it was only a simile, and never meant to convey a real regeneration (‘as a child’). So far as proselytes were concerned, it meant that, having entered into a new relation to God, they also entered into new relationship to man, just as if they had at that moment been newly born. All the old relations had ceased – a man’s father, brother, mother, sister were no longer his nearest of kin: he was a new and another man. Then, secondly, it implied a new state, when all a man’s past was past, and his sins forgiven him as belonging to that past. It will now be perceived, how impossible it was for Nicodemus to understand the teaching of Jesus, and yet how all-important to him was that teaching. For, even if he could have imagined that Jesus pointed to repentance, as that which would give him the figurative standing of ‘born from above,’ or even ‘born anew,’ it would not have helped him. For, first, this second birth was only a simile. Secondly, according to the Jewish view, this second birth was the consequence of having taken upon oneself ‘the Kingdom;’ not, as Jesus put it, the cause and condition of it. The proselyte had taken upon himself ‘the Kingdom,’ and therefore he was that he must be born again in order to see the Kingdom of God. Lastly, it was ‘a birth from above’ to which reference was made. Judaism could understand a new relationship towards God and man, and even the forgiveness of sins. But it had no conception of a moral renovation, a spiritual birth, as the initial condition for reformation, far less as that for seeing the Kingdom of God. And it was because it had no idea of such ‘birth from above,’ of its reality or even possibility, that Judaism could not be the Kingdom of God.

Or, to take another view of it, for Divine truth is many-sided – perhaps some would say, to make ‘Western’ application of what was first spoken to the Jew – in one respect Nicodemus and Jesus had started from the same premises: The Kingdom of God. But how different were their conceptions of what constituted that Kingdom, and of what was its door of entrance! What Nicodemus had seen of Jesus had not only shaken the confidence which his former views on these subjects had engendered in him, but opened dim possibilities, the very suggestion of which filled him with uneasiness as to the past, and vague hopes as to the future. And so it ever is with us also, when, like Nicodemus, we first arrive at the conviction that Jesus is the Teacher come from God. What He teaches is so entirely different from what Nicodemus, or any of us could, from any other standpoint than that of Jesus, have learned or known concerning the Kingdom and entrance into it. The admission, however reached, of the Divine Mission of this Teacher, implies, unspoken, the grand question about the Kingdom. It is the opening of the door through which the Grand Presence will enter in. To such a man, as to us in like unspoken questioning, Jesus ever has but one thing to say: ‘Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’ The Kingdom is other, the entrance to it is other, than you know or think. That which is of the flesh is flesh. Man may rise to high possibilities – mental, even moral: self-development, self-improvement, self-restraint, submission to a grand idea or a higher law, refined moral egotism, aesthetic even moral altruism. But to see the Kingdom of God: to understand what means the absolute rule of God, the one high calling of our humanity, by which a man becomes a child of God – to perceive this, not as an improvement upon our present state, but as the submission of heart, mind, and life to Him as our Divine King, an existence which is, and which means, proclaiming unto the world the Kingship of God: this can only be learned from Christ, and needs even for its perception a kinship of spirit – for that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. To see it, needs the birth from above; to enter it, the double baptismal birth of what John’s Baptism had meant, and of what Christ’s Baptism was.

Accordingly, all this sounded quite strange and unintelligible to Nicodemus. He could understand how a man might become other, and so ultimately be other; but how a man could first be other in order to become other – more than that, needed to be ‘born from above,’ in order to ‘see the Kingdom of God’ – passed alike his experience and his Jewish learning. Only one possibility of being occurred to him: that given him in his natural disposition, or as a Jew would have put it, in his original innocency when he first entered the world. And this – so to express ourselves – he thought aloud. But there was another world of being than that of which Nicodemus thought. That world was the ‘Kingdom of God’ in its essential contrariety to the kingdom of this world, whether in the general sense of that expression, or even in the special Judaistic sense attaching to the ‘Kingdom’ of the Messiah. There was only one gate by which a man could pass into that Kingdom of God – for that which was of the flesh could ever be only fleshly. Here a man might strive, as did the Jews, by outward conformity to become, but he would never attain to being. But that ‘Kingdom’ was spiritual, and here a man must be in order to become. How was he to attain that new being? The Baptist had pointed it out in its negative aspect of repentance and putting away the old by his Baptism of water; and as regarded its positive aspect he had pointed to Him Who was to baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. This was the gate of being through which a man must enter into the Kingdom, which was of the Messiah, because it was of God and the Messiah was of God, and in that sense ‘the Teacher come from God’ – that is, being sent of God, He taught of God by bringing to God. This but a few who had gone to the Baptist had perceived, or indeed could perceive, because the Baptist could in his Baptism only convey the negative, not the positive, aspect of it. And it needed that positive aspect – the being born from above – in order to see the Kingdom of God. But as to the mystery of this being in order to become – hark! did he hear the sound of that wind as it swept past the Aliyah? He heard its voice; but he neither knew whence it came, nor whither it went. So was every one that was born of the Spirit. You heard the voice of the Spirit Who originated the new being, but the origination of that new being, or its further development into all that it might and would become, lay beyond man’s observation.

Nicodemus now understood in some measure what entrance into the Kingdom meant; but its how seemed only involved in greater mystery. That it was such a mystery, unthought and unimagined in Jewish theology, was a terribly sad manifestation of what the teaching in Israel was. Yet it had all been told them, as of personal knowledge, by the Baptist and by Jesus; nay, if they could only have received it, by the whole Old Testament. He wanted to know the how of these things before he believed them. He believed them not, though they passed on earth, because he knew not their how. How then could he believe that how, of which the agency was unseen and in heaven? To that spring of being no one could ascend but He that had come down from heaven, and Who, to bring to us that spring of being, had appeared as ‘the Son of Man,’ the Ideal Man, the embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven, and thus the only true Teacher come from God. Or did Nicodemus think of another Teacher – hitherto their only Teacher, Moses – whom Jewish tradition generally believed to have ascended into the very heavens, in order to bring the teaching unto them? Let the history of Moses, then, teach them! They thought they understood his teaching, but there was one symbol in his history before which tradition literally stood dumb. They had heard what Moses had taught them; they had seen ‘the earthly things’ of God in the Manna which had rained from heaven – and, in view and hearing of it all, they had not believed, but murmured and rebelled. Then came the judgment of the fiery serpents, and, in answer to repentant prayer, the symbol of new being, a life restored from death, as they looked on their no longer living but dead death lifted up before them. A symbol this, showing forth two elements: negatively, the putting away of the past in their dead death (the serpent no longer living, but a brazen serpent); and positively, in their look of faith and hope. Before this symbol, as has been said, tradition has stood dumb. It could only suggest one meaning, and draw from it one lesson. Both these were true, and yet both insufficient. The meaning which tradition attached to it was, that Israel lifted up their eyes, not merely to the serpent, but rather to their Father in heaven, and had regard to His mercy. This, as John afterwards shows (Joh_3:16), was a true interpretation; but it left wholly out of sight the Antitype, in gazing on Whom our hearts are uplifted to the love of God, Who gave His only-begotten Son, and we learn to know and love the Father in His Son. And the lesson which tradition drew from it was, that this symbol taught, the dead would live again; for, as it is argued, ‘behold, if God made it that, through the similitude of the serpent which brought death, the dying should be restored to life, how much more shall He, Who is Life, restore the dead to life.’ And here lies the true interpretation of what Jesus taught. If the uplifted serpent, as symbol, brought life to the believing look which was fixed upon the giving, pardoning love of God, then, in the truest sense, shall the uplifted Son of Man give true life to everyone that believeth, looking up in Him to the giving and forgiving love of God, which His Son came to bring, to declare, and to manifest. ‘For as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth should in Him have eternal life.’

With this final and highest teaching, which contains all that Nicodemus, or, indeed, the whole Church, could require or be able to know, He explained to him and to us the how of the new birth – alike the source and the flow of its spring. Ours it is now only to ‘believe,’ where we cannot further know, and, looking up to the Son of Man in His perfected work, to perceive, and to receive the gift of God’s love for our healing. In this reaching it is not the serpent and the Son of Man that are held side by side, though we cannot fail to see the symbolic reference of the one to the other, but the uplifting of the one and the other – the one by the sin, the other through the sin of the people: both on account of it – the forthgoing of God’s pardoning mercy, the look of faith, and the higher recognition of God’s love in it all.

And so the record of this interview abruptly closes. It tells all, but no more than the Church requires to know. Of Nicodemus we shall hear again in the sequel, not needlessly, nor yet to complete a biography, were it even that of Jesus; but as is necessary for the understanding of this History. What follows are not the words of Christ, but of John. In them, looking back many years afterwards in the light of completed events, the Apostle takes his stand, as becomes the circumstances, where Jesus had ended His teaching of Nicodemus – under the Cross. In the Gift, unutterable in its preciousness, he now sees the Giver and the Source of all. Then, following that teaching of Jesus backward, he sees how true it has proved concerning the world, that ‘that which is of the flesh is flesh;’ how true, also, concerning the Spirit-born, and what need there is to us of ‘this birth from above.’

But to all time, through the gusty light of our world’s early spring, flashes, as the lamp in that Aliyah through the darkened streets of silent Jerusalem, that light; sounds through its stillness, like the Voice of the Teacher come from God, this eternal Gospel-message to us and to all men: ‘God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’

(Joh_5:1-4)

We have no means of determining how long Jesus may have tarried in Jerusalem after the events recorded in the previous two chapters. The Evangelic narrative only marks an indefinite period of time, which, as we judge from internal probability, cannot have been protracted. From the city He retired with His disciples to ‘the country,’ which formed the province of Judaea. There He taught, and His disciples baptized.  From what had been so lately witnessed in Jerusalem, as well as from what must have been known as to the previous testimony of the Baptist concerning Him, the number of those who professed adhesion to the expected new Kingdom, and were consequently baptized, was as large, in that locality, as had submitted to the preaching and Baptism of John – perhaps even larger. An exaggerated report was carried to the Pharisaic authorities: ‘Jesus maketh and baptizeth more disciples than John.’ From which, at least, we infer, that the opposition of the leaders of the party to the Baptist was now settled, and that it extended to Jesus; and also, what careful watch they kept over the new movement.

But what seems at first sight strange is the twofold circumstance that, Jesus should for a time have established Himself in such apparently close proximity to the Baptist, and that on this occasion, and on this only, He should have allowed His disciples to administer the rite of Baptism. That the latter must not be confounded with Christian Baptism, which was only introduced after the Death of Christ, or, to speak more accurately, after the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, needs no special explanation. But our difficulties only increase, as we remember the essential difference between them, grounded on that between the Mission of John and the Teaching of Jesus. In the former, the Baptism of repentant preparation for the coming Kingdom had its deepest meaning; not so in presence of that Kingdom itself, and in the teaching of its King. But, even were it otherwise, the administration of the same rite by John and by the disciples of Jesus in apparently close proximity, seems not only unnecessary, but it might give rise to misconception on the part of enemies, and misunderstanding or jealousy on the part of weak disciples.

Such was actually the case when, on one occasion, a discussion arose ‘on the part of John’s disciples with a Jew,’ on the subject of purification. We know not the special point in dispute, nor does it seem of much importance, since such ‘questions’ would naturally suggest themselves to a caviller or opponent who encountered those who were administering Baptism. What really interests us is, that somehow this Jewish objector must have connected what he said with a reference to the Baptism of Jesus’ disciples. For, immediately afterwards, the disciples of John, in their sore zeal for the honour of their master, brought him tidings, in the language of doubt, if not of complaint, of what to them seemed interference with the work of the Baptist, and almost presumption on the part of Jesus. While fully alive to their grievous error, perhaps in proportion as we are so, we cannot but honour and sympathise with this loving care for their master. The toilsome mission of the great Ascetic was drawing to its close, and that without any tangible success so far as he was concerned. Yet, to souls susceptible of the higher, to see him would be to be arrested; to hear him, to be convinced; to know, would be to love and venerate him. Never before had such deep earnestness and reality been witnessed, such devotedness, such humility and self-abnegation, and all in that great cause which set every Jewish heart on fire. And then, in the High-day of his power, when all men had gathered around him and hung on his lips; when all wondered whether he would announce himself as the Christ, or, at least, as His Forerunner, or as one of the great Prophets; when a word from him would have kindled that multitude into a frenzy of enthusiasm – he had disclaimed everything for himself, and pointed to Another! But this ‘Coming One,’ to whom he had borne witness, had hitherto been quite other than their Master. And, as if this had not been enough, the multitudes, which had formerly come to John, now flocked around Jesus; nay, He had even usurped the one distinctive function still left to their master, humble as it was. It was evident that, hated and watched by the Pharisees; watched, also, by the ruthless jealousy of a Herod; overlooked, if not supplanted, by Jesus, the mission of their master was nearing its close. It had been a life and work of suffering and self-denial; it was about to end in loneliness and sorrow. They said nothing expressly to complain of Him to Whom John had borne witness, but they told of what He did, and how all men came to Him.

The answer which the Baptist made, may be said to mark the high point of his life and witness. Never before was he so tender, almost sad; never before more humble and self-denying, more earnest and faithful. The setting of his own life-sun was to be the rising of One infinitely more bright; the end of his Mission the beginning of another far higher. In the silence, which was now gathering around him, he heard but one Voice, that of the Bridegroom, and he rejoiced in it, though he must listen to it in stillness and loneliness. For it he had waited and worked. Not his own, but this had he sought. And now that it had come, he was content; more than content: his ‘joy was now fulfilled.’ ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ It was the right and good order. With these as his last words publicly spoken, this Aaron of the New Testament unrobed himself ere he lay down to die. Surely among those born of women there was not one greater than John.

That these were his last words, publicly spoken and recorded, may, however, explain to us why on this exceptional occasion Jesus sanctioned the administration by His disciples of the Baptism of John. It was not a retrogression from the position He had taken in Jerusalem, nor caused by the refusal of His Messianic claims in the Temple. There is no retrogression, only progression, in the Life of Jesus. And yet it was only on this occasion that the rite was administered under His sanction. But the circumstances were exceptional. It was John’s last testimony to Jesus, and it was preceded by this testimony of Jesus to John. Far divergent, almost opposite, as from the first their paths had been, this practical sanction on the part of Jesus of John’s Baptism, when the Baptist was about to be forsaken, betrayed, and murdered, was Christ’s highest testimony to him. Jesus adopted his Baptism, ere its waters for ever ceased to flow, and thus He blessed and consecrated them. He took up the work of His Forerunner, and continued it. The baptismal rite of John administered with the sanction of Jesus, was the highest witness that could be borne to it.

There is no necessity for supposing that John and the disciples of Jesus baptized at, or quite close to, the same place. On the contrary, such immediate juxtaposition seems, for obvious reasons, unlikely. Jesus was within the boundaries of the province of Judaea, while John baptized at Anon (the springs), near to Salim. The latter site has not been identified. But the oldest tradition, which places it a few miles to the south of Bethshean (Scythopolis), on the border of Samaria and Galilee, has this in its favour, that it locates the scene of John’s last public work close to the seat of Herod Antipas, into whose power the Baptist was so soon to be delivered. But already there, were causes at work to remove both Jesus and His Forerunner from their present spheres of activity. As regards Christ, we have the express statements, that the machinations of the Pharisaic party in Jerusalem led Him to withdraw into Galilee. And, as we gather from the notice of John, the Baptist was now involved in this hostility, as being so closely connected with Jesus. Indeed, we venture the suggestion that the imprisonment of the Baptist, although occasioned by His outspoken rebuke of Herod, was in great part due to the intrigues of the Pharisees. Of such a connection between them and Herod Antipas, we have direct evidence in a similar attempt to bring about the removal of Jesus from his territory. It would not have been difficult to rouse the suspicions of a nature so mean and jealous as that of Antipas, and this may explain the account of Josephus, who attributes the imprisonment and death of the Baptist simply to Herod’s suspicious fear of John’s unbounded influence with the people.

Leaving for the present the Baptist, we follow the footsteps of the Master. They are only traced by the disciple who best understood their direction, and who alone has left us a record of the beginning of Christ’s ministry. For Matthew and Mark expressly indicate the imprisonment of the Baptist as their starting-point, and, though Luke does not say this in so many words, he characteristically commences with Christ’s public Evangelic teaching in the Synagogues of Galilee. Yet the narrative of Matthew reads rather like a brief summary; that of Mark seems like a succession of rapid sketches; and even that of Luke though with deeper historic purpose than the others, outlines, rather than tells, the history. John alone does not profess to give a narrative at all in the ordinary sense; but he selects incidents which are characteristic as unfolding the meaning of that Life, and records discourses which open its inmost teaching; and he alone tells of that early Judaean ministry and the journey through Samaria, which preceded the Galilean work.

The shorter road from Judaea to Galilee led through Samaria; and this, if we may credit Josephus, was generally taken by the Galileans on their way to the capital. On the other hand, the Judaeans seem chiefly to have made a detour through Peraea, in order to avoid hostile and impure Samaria. It lay not within the scope of our Lord to extend His personal Ministry, especially at its commencement, beyond the boundaries of Israel, and the expression, ‘He must needs go through Samaria,’ can only refer to the advisability in the circumstances of taking the most direct road, or else to the wish of avoiding Peraea as the seat of Herod’s government. Such prejudices in regard to Samaria, as those which affected the ordinary Judaean devotee, would, of course, not influence the conduct of Jesus. But great as these undoubtedly were, they have been unduly exaggerated by modern writers. misled by one-sided quotations from Rabbinic works.

The Biblical history of that part of Palestine which bore the name of Samaria need not here be repeated. Before the final deportation of Israel by Shalmaneser, or rather Sargon, the ‘Samaria’ to which his operations extended must have considerably shrunk in dimensions, not only owing to previous conquests, but from the circumstance that the authority of the kings of Judah seems to have extended over a considerable portion of what once constituted the kingdom of Israel. Probably the Samaria of that time included little more than the city of that name, together with some adjoining towns and villages. It is of considerable interest to remember that the places, to which the inhabitants of Samaria were transported, have been identified with such clearness as to leave no reasonable doubt, that at least some of the descendants of the ten tribes, whether mixed or unmixed with Gentiles must be sought among what are now known as the Nestorian Christians. On the other hand, it is of no practical importance for our present purpose to ascertain the exact localities, whence the new ‘Samaritans’ were brought to take the place of the Israelitish exiles. Suffice it, that one of them, perhaps that which contributed the principal settlers, Cuṯah, furnished the name Cuṯim, by which the Jews afterwards persistently designated the Samaritans. It was intended as a term of reproach, to mark that they were of foreign race,  and to repudiate all connection between them and the Jews. Yet it is impossible to believe that, at least in later times, they did not contain a considerable admixture of Israelitish elements. It is difficult to suppose, that the original deportation was so complete as to leave behind no traces of the original Israelitish inhabitants. Their number would probably be swelled by fugitives from Assyria, and by Jewish settlers in the troublous times that followed. Afterwards, as we know, they were largely increased by apostates and rebels against the order of things established by Ezra and Nehemiah. Similarly, during the period of internal political and religious troubles, which marked the period to the accession of the Maccabees, the separation between Jews and Samaritans could scarcely have been generally observed, the more so that Alexander the Great placed them in close juxtaposition.

The first foreign colonists of Samaria brought their peculiar forms of idolatry with them. But the Providential judgments, by which they were visited, led to the introduction of a spurious Judaism, consisting of a mixture of their former superstitions with Jewish doctrines and rites. Although this state of matters resembled that which had obtained in the original kingdom of Israel, perhaps just because of this, Ezra and Nehemiah, when reconstructing the Jewish commonwealth, insisted on a strict separation between those who had returned from Babylon and the Samaritans, resisting equally their offers of co-operation and their attempts at hindrance. This embittered the national feeling of jealousy already existing, and led to that constant hostility between Jews and Samaritans which has continued to this day. The religious separation became final when (at a date which cannot be precisely fixed) the Samaritans built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim, and Manasseh, the brother of Jaddua, the Jewish High-Priest, having refused to annul his marriage with the daughter of Sanballat, was forced to flee, and became the High-Priest of the new Sanctuary. Henceforth, by impudent assertion and falsification of the text of the Pentateuch, Gerizim was declared the rightful centre of worship, and the doctrines and rites of the Samaritans exhibited a curious imitation and adaptation of those prevalent in Judaea.

We cannot here follow in detail the history of the Samaritans, nor explain the dogmas and practices peculiar to them. The latter would be the more difficult, because so many of their views were simply corruptions of those of the Jews, and because, from the want of an authenticated ancient literature, the origin and meaning of many of them have been forgotten. Sufficient, however, must be said to explain the mutual relations at the time when the Lord, sitting on Jacob’s well, first spake to the Samaritans of the better worship ‘in spirit and truth,’ and opened that well of living water which has never since ceased to flow.

The political history of the people can be told in a few sentences. Their Temple, to which reference has been made, was built, not in Samaria but at Shechem – probably on account of the position held by that city in the former history of Israel – and on Mount Gerizim, which in the Samaritan Pentateuch was substituted for Mount Ebal in Deu_27:4. It was Shechem also, with its sacred associations of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph which became the real capital of the Samaritans. The fate of the city of Samaria under the reign of Alexander is uncertain – one account speaking of the rebellion of the city, the murder of the Macedonian governor, the consequent destruction of Samaria, and the slaughter of part, and transportation of the rest, of its inhabitants to Shechem, while Josephus is silent on these events. When, after the death or Alexander, Palestine became the field of battle between the rulers of Egypt and Syria, Samaria suffered even more than other parts of the country. In 320 b.c. it passed from the rule of Syria to that of Egypt (Ptolemy Lagi). Six years later it again became Syrian (Antigonus). Only three years afterwards, Ptolemy reconquered and held it for a very short time. On his retreat, be destroyed the walls of Samaria and of other towns. In 301 it passed again by treaty into the hands of Ptolemy, out in 298 it was once more ravaged by the son of Antigonus. After that it enjoyed a season of quiet under Egyptian rule, till the reign of Antiochus (III.) the Great, when it again passed temporarily, and under his successor, Seleucus IV. (Philopator), permanently under Syrian dominion. In the troublous times of Antiochus IV. Epiphanes, the Samaritans escaped the fate of the Jews by repudiating all connection with Israel, and dedicating their temple to Jupiter. In the contest between Syria and the Maccabees which followed, the Samaritans, as might be expected, took the part of the former. In 130 b.c. John Hyrcanus destroyed the Temple on Mount Gerizim, which was never rebuilt. The city of Samaria was taken several years afterwards  by the sons of Hyrcanus (Antigonus and Aristobulus), after a year’s siege, and the successive defeat of Syrian and Egyptian armies of relief. Although the city was now not only destroyed, but actually laid under water to complete its ruin, it was rebuilt by Gabinius shortly before our era, and greatly enlarged and beautified by Herod, who called it Sebaste in honour of Augustus, to whom he reared a magnificent temple. Under Roman rule the city enjoyed great privileges – had even a Senate of its own. By one of those striking coincidences which mark the Rule of God in history, it was the accusation brought against him by that Samaritan Senate which led to the deposition of Pilate. By the side of Samaria, or Sebaste, we have already marked as perhaps more important, and as the religious capital, the ancient Shechem, which, in honour of the Imperial family of Rome, ultimately obtained the name of Flavia Neapolis, which has survived in the modern Nablus. It is interesting to notice that the Samaritans also had colonies, although not to the same extent as the Jews. Among them we may name those of Alexandria, Damascus, in Babylonia, and even some by the shores of the Red Sea.

Although not only in the New Testament, but in 1 Macc. 10:30, and in the writings of Josephus, Western Palestine is divided into the provinces of Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee, the Rabbis, whose ideas were shaped by the observances of Judaism, ignore this division. For them Palestine consisted only of Judaea, Peraea, and Galilee.· Samaria appears merely as a strip intervening between Judaea and Galilee, being ‘the land of the Cuthaeans.’ Nevertheless it was not regarded like heathen lands, but pronounced clean. Both the Mishnah and Josephus mark Anuath (כפּר עותנאי) as the southern boundary of Samaria (towards Judaea). Northward it extended to Ginaea (the ancient En-Gannim) on the south side of the plain of Jezreel on the east it was bounded by the Jordan; and on the west by the plain of Sharon, which was reckoned as belonging to Judaea. Thus it occupied the ancient territories of Manasseh and Ephraim, and extended about forty-eight miles (north and south) by forty (east and west). In aspect and climate it resembled Judaea, only that the scenery was more beautiful and the soil more fertile. The political enmity and religious separation between the Jews and Samaritans account for their mutual jealousy. On all public occasions the Samaritans took the part hostile to the Jews, while they seized every opportunity of injuring and insulting them. Thus, in the time of Antiochus III. they sold many Jews into slavery. Afterwards they sought to mislead the Jews at a distance, to whom the beginning of every month (so important in the Jewish festive arrangements) was intimated by beacon fires, by kindling spurious signals. We also read that they tried to desecrate the Temple on the eve of the Passover; and that they waylaid and killed pilgrims on their road to Jerusalem. The Jews retaliated by treating the Samaritans with every mark of contempt; by accusing them of falsehood, folly, and irreligion; and, what they felt most keenly, by disowning them as of the same race or religion, and this in the most offensive terms of assumed superiority and self-righteous fanaticism.

In view of these relations, we almost wonder at the candour and moderation occasionally displayed towards the Samaritans in Jewish writings. These statements are of practical importance in this history, since elaborate attempts have been made to show what articles of food the disciples of Jesus might have bought in Samaria, in ignorance that almost all would have been lawful. Our inquiry here is, however, somewhat complicated by the circumstance that in Rabbinic writings, as at present existing, the term Samaritans (Cuṯim ) has, to avoid the censorship of the press, been often purposely substituted for ‘Sadducees,’ or ‘heretics,’ i.e. Christians. Thus, when the Samaritans are charged with denying in their books that the Resurrection can be proved from the Pentateuch, the real reference is supposed to have been to Sadducean or Christian heretical writings. Indeed, the terms Samaritans, Sadducees, and heretics are used so interchangeably, that a careful inquiry is necessary, to show in each case which of them is really meant. Still more frequent is the use of the term ‘Samaritan’ (כותי) for ‘stranger’ (נכרי) the latter, and not strictly Samaritan descent being meant. The popular interchange of these terms casts light on the designation of the Samaritan as ‘a stranger’ by our Lord in Luk_17:18.

In general it may be said that, while on certain points Jewish opinion remained always the same, the judgment passed on the Samaritans, and especially as to intercourse with them, varied, according as they showed more or less active hostility towards the Jews. Thus the Son of Sirach would correctly express the feeling of contempt and dislike, when he characterised the Samaritans as ‘the foolish people’ which his ‘heart abhorred.’ The same sentiment appears in early Christian Pseudepigraphic and in Rabbinic writings. In the so-called ‘Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs’ (which probably dates from the beginning of the second century), ‘Sichem’ is the City of Fools, derided by all men. It was only natural, that Jews should be forbidden to respond by an Amen to the benediction of Samaritans, at any rate till they were sure it had been correctly spoken, since they were neither in practice nor in theory regarded as co-religionists.  Yet they were not treated as heathens, and their land, their springs, baths, houses, and roads were declared clean.

The question was discussed, whether or not they were to be considered ‘lion-proselytes’ (from fear of the lions), or as genuine converts; and, again, whether or not they were to be regarded as heathens. This, and the circumstance that different teachers at different times gave directly opposite replies to these questions, proves that there was no settled principle on the subject, but that opinions varied according to the national bearing of the Samaritans. Thus, we are expressly told, that at one time both their testimony and their religious orthodoxy were more credited than at others, and they are not treated as Gentiles, but placed on the same level as an ignorant Jew. A marked difference of opinion here prevails. The older tradition, as represented by Simon the son of Gamaliel, regards them as in every respect like Israelites; whilst later authority (Rabbi Jehuda the Holy) would have them considered and treated as heathens. Again, it is expressly stated in the Babylon Talmud, that the Samaritans observed the letter of the Pentateuch, while one authority adds, that in that which they observed they were more strict than the Jews themselves. Of this, indeed, there is evidence as regards several ordinances. On the other hand, later authorities again reproach them with falsification of the Pentateuch, charge them with worshipping a dove, and even when, on further inquiry, they absolve them from this accusation, ascribe their excessive veneration for Mount Gerizim to the circumstance that they worshipped the idols which Jacob had buried under the oak at Shechem. To the same hatred, caused by national persecution, we must impute such expressions as that he, whose hospitality receives a foreigner, has himself to blame if his children have to go into captivity.

The expression, ‘the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans,’ finds its exact counterpart in this: ‘May I never set eyes on a Samaritan;’ or else, ‘May I never be thrown into company with him!’ A Rabbi in Caesarea explains, as the cause of these changes of opinion, that formerly the Samaritans had been observant of the Law, which they no longer were; a statement repeated in another form to the effect, that their observance of it lasted as long as they were in their own cities. Matters proceeded so far, that they were entirely excluded from fellowship. The extreme limit of this direction, if, indeed, the statement applies to the Samaritans, is marked by the declaration, that to partake of their bread was like eating swine’s flesh. This is further improved upon in a later Rabbinic work, which gives a detailed story of how the Samaritans had conspired against Ezra and Nehemiah, and the ban been laid upon them, so that now not only was all intercourse with them forbidden, but their bread declared like swine’s flesh; proselytes were not to be received from them; nor would they have part in the Resurrection of the dead. But there is a great difference between all this extravagance and the opinions prevailing at the time of Jesus. Even in the Rabbinic tractate on the Samaritans it is admitted, that in most of their usages they resembled Israelites, and many rights and privileges are conceded to them, from which a heathen would have been excluded. They are to be ‘credited’ on many points; their meat is declared clean, if an Israelite had witnessed its killing, or a Samaritan ate of it; their bread and, under certain conditions, even their wine, are allowed; and the final prospect is held out of their reception into the Synagogue, when they shall have given up their faith in Mount Gerizim, and acknowledged Jerusalem and the Resurrection of the dead. But Jewish toleration went even further. At the time of Christ all their food was declared lawful. There could, therefore, be no difficulty as regarded the purchase of victuals on the part of the disciples of Jesus.

It has already been stated, that most of the peculiar doctrines of the Samaritans were derived from Jewish sources. As might be expected, their tendency was Sadducean rather than Pharisaic. Nevertheless, Samaritan ‘sages’ are referred to. But it is difficult to form any decided opinion about the doctrinal views of the sect, partly from the comparative lateness of their literature, and partly because the Rabbinist charges against them cannot be absolutely trusted. It seems at least doubtful, whether they really denied the Resurrection, as asserted by the Rabbis, from whom the Fathers have copied the charge. Certainly, they hold that doctrine at present. They strongly believed in the Unity of God; they held the doctrine of Angels and devils; they received the Pentateuch as of sole Divine authority; they regarded Mount Gerizim as the place chosen of God, maintaining that it alone had not been covered by the flood, as the Jews asserted of Mount Moriah; they were most strict and zealous in what of Biblical or traditional Law they received; and lastly, and most important of all they looked for the coming of a Messiah, in Whom the promise would be fulfilled, that the Lord God would raise up a Prophet from the midst of them, like unto Moses, in Whom his words were to be, and unto Whom they should hearken.  Thus, while, in some respects, access to them would be more difficult than to His own countrymen, yet in others Jesus would find there a soil better prepared for the Divine Seed, or, at least, less encumbered by the thistles and tares of traditionalism and Pharisaic bigotry.

(Joh 4:1-42)

There is not a district in ‘the Land of Promise’ which presents a scene more fair or rich than the plain of Samaria (the modern El Mukhna). As we stand on the summit of the ridge, on the way from Shiloh, the eye travels over the wide sweep, extending more than seven miles northward, till it rests on the twin heights of Gerizim and Ebal, which enclose the valley of Shechem. Following the straight olive-shaded road from the south, to where a spur of Gerizim, jutting southeast, forms the Vale of Shechem, we stand by that ‘Well of Jacob’ to which so many sacred memories attach. Here, in ‘the parcel of ground’ afterwards given to Joseph, which Jacob had bought from the people of the land, the patriarch had, at great labour and cost, sunk a well through the limestone rock. At present it is partially filled with rubbish and stones, but originally it must have gone down about 150 feet. As the whole district abounds in springs, the object of the patriarch must have been to avoid occasion of strife with the Amorite herdsmen around. That well marks the boundary of the Greet, Plain, or rather its extensions bear other names. To the left (westwards), between Gerizim (on the south) and Ebal (on the north), winds the valley of olive-clad Shechem, the modern Nablus, though that town is not in view from the Well of Sychar. Still higher up the same valley, the mud hovels of Sebastiyeh mark the site of ancient Samaria, the magnificent Sebaste of Herod. North of the entrance to the Vale of Shechem rises Mount Ebal, which also forms, so to speak, the western wall of the northern extension of the Plain of Samaria. Here it bears the name of El ’Askar, from Askar, the ancient Sychar, which nestles at the foot of Ebal, at a distance of about two miles from Shechem. Similarly, the eastern extension of the plain bears the name of the Valley of Shalem, from the hamlet of that name, which probably occupies the site of the ancient city before which Jacob pitched his tent on his return to Canaan.

At ‘the Well of Jacob’ which, for our present purpose, may be regarded as the centre of the scene, several ancient Roman roads meet and part. That southward, to which reference has already been made, leads close by Shiloh to Jerusalem; that westward traverses the vale of Shechem; that northward brings us to the ancient Sychar, only about half a mile from ‘the Well.’ Eastward there are two ancient Roman roads: one winds south-east, till it merges in the main road; the, other strikes first due east, and then descends in a south-easterly direction through Wady Farâh, which debouches into the Jordan. We can trace it as it crosses the waters of that Wady, and we infer, that its immediate neighbourhood must have been the scene where Jesus had taught, and His disciples baptized. It is still in Judaea, and yet sufficiently removed from Jerusalem; and the Wady is so full of springs that one spot near it actually bears the name of ’Ainûn, ‘springs,’ like the ancient Aenon. But, from the spot which we have indicated, it is about twenty miles, across a somewhat difficult country to Jacob’s Well. It would be a long and toilsome day’s journey thither on a summer day, and we can understand how, at its end, Jesus would rest weary on the low parapet which enclosed the Well, while His disciples went to buy the necessary provisions in the neighbouring Sychar.

And it was, as we judge, the evening of a day in early summer, when Jesus, accompanied by the small band which formed His disciples, emerged into the rich Plain of Samaria. Far as the eye could sweep, ‘the fields’ were ‘already white unto the harvest.’ They had reached ‘the Well of Jacob.’ There Jesus waited, while the others went to Sychar on their work of ministry. Probably John remained with the Master. They would scarcely have left Him alone, especially in that place; and the whole narrative reads like that of one who had been present at what passed. More than any other, perhaps, in the Fourth Gospel, it bears the mark, not only of Judaean, but of contemporary authorship. It seems utterly incompatible with the modern theory of its Ephesian origin at the end of the second century. The location of the scene, not in Sebaste or Shechem, but at Sychar, which in the fourth century at least had so entirely ceased to be Samaritan, that it had become the home of some celebrated Rabbis; the intimate knowledge of Samaritan and Jewish relations, which at the time of Christ allowed the purchase of food, but would certainly not have conceded it two centuries later; even the introduction of such a statement as ‘Salvation is of the Jews,’ wholly inconsistent with the supposed scope of an Ephesian Gospel-these are only some of the facts which will occur to the student of that period, as bearing unsolicited testimony to the date and nationality of the writer.

Indeed, there is such minuteness of detail about the narrative and with it such charm of simplicity, affectionateness, reverence, and depth of spiritual insight, as to carry not only the conviction of its truthfulness, but almost instinctively to suggest to us ‘the beloved disciple’ as its witness. Already he had taken the place nearest to Jesus and saw and spake as none other of the disciples. Jesus weary, and resting while the disciples go to buy food, is not an Ephesian, but a truly Evangelic presentation of the Christ in His human weakness and want.

All around would awaken in the Divinely-attuned soul of the Divine Redeemer the thoughts which so soon afterwards found appropriate words and deeds. He is sitting by Jacob’s Well – the very well which the ancestor of Israel had digged, and left as a memorial of his first and symbolic possession of the land. Yet this was also the scene of Israel’s first rebellion against God’s order, against the Davidic line and the Temple. And now Christ is here, among those who are not of Israel, and who persecute it. Surely this, of all others, would be the place where the Son of David, cast out of Jerusalem and the Temple, would think of the breach, and of what alone could heal it. He is hungry, and those fields are white to the harvest; yet far more hungering for that spiritual harvest which is the food of His soul. Over against Him, sheer up 800 feet, rises Mount Gerizim, with the ruins of the Samaritan rival Temple on it; just as far behind Him, already overhung by the dark cloud of judgment, are that Temple and City which knew not the day of their visitation. The one inquiring woman, and she a Samaritan, and the few only partially comprehending and much misunderstanding disciples; their inward thinking that for the spiritual harvest it was but seed-time, and the reaping yet ‘four months distant,’ while in reality, as even their eyes might see if they but lifted them, the fields were white unto the harvest: all this, and much more, forms a unique background to the picture of this narrative.

To take another view of the varying lights on that picture: Jesus weary and thirsty by Jacob’s Well, and the water of life which was to spring from, and by that Well, with its unfailing supply and its unending refreshment! The spiritual in all this bears deepest symbolic analogy to the outward – yet with such contrasts also, as the woman giving to Christ the one, He to her the other; she unconsciously beginning to learn, He unintendingly (for He had not even entered Sychar) beginning to teach, and that, what He could not yet teach in Judaea, scarcely even to His own disciples; then the complete change in the woman, and the misapprehension and non-reception of the disciples – and over it all the weary form of the Man Jesus, opening as the Divine Christ the well of everlasting life, the God-Man satisfied with the meat of doing the Will, and finishing the Work, of Him that sent Him: such are some of the thoughts suggested by the scene.

And still others rise, as we think of the connection in the narrative of John of this with what preceded and with what follows. It almost seems as if that Gospel were constructed in cycles, each beginning, or at least connected, with Jerusalem, and leading up to a grand climax. Thus, the first cycle might be called that of purification: first, that of the Temple; then, inward purification by the Baptism from above; next, the symbolic Baptism of water; lastly, the real water of life given by Jesus; and the climax – Jesus the Restorer of life to them that believe. Similarly, the second cycle, beginning with the idea of water in its symbolic application to real worship and life from Jesus, would carry us a stage further; and so onward throughout the Gospel. Along with this we may note, as another peculiarity of the Fourth Gospel, that it seems arranged according to this definite plan of grouping together in each instance the work of Christ, as followed by the illustrative word of Christ. Thus the fourth would, both externally and internally, be the pre-eminently Judaean Gospel, characterised by cyclical order, illustrative conjunction of work and word, and progressively leading up to the grand climax of Christ’s last discourses, and finally of His Death and Resurrection, with the teaching that flows from the one and the other.

It was about six o’clock in the evening, when the travel-stained pilgrims reached that ‘parcel of ground’ which, according to ancient Jewish tradition, Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Here (as already stated) by the ‘Well of Jacob’ where the three roads – south, to Shechem, and to Sychar (Askar) – meet and part, Jesus sat down, while the disciples (probably with the exception of John) went on to the closely adjoining little town of Sychar to buy food. Even this latter circumstance marks that it was evening, since noon was not the time either for the sale of provisions, nor for their purchase by travellers. Once more it is when the true Humanity of Jesus is set before us, in the weakness of His hunger and weariness, that the glory of His Divine Personality suddenly shines through it. This time it was a poor, ignorant Samaritan woman, who came, not for any religious purpose-indeed, to whom religious thought, except within her own very narrow circle, was almost unintelligible – who became the occasion of it. She had come – like so many of us, who find the pearl in the field which we occupy in the business of everyday-life – on humble, ordinary duty and work. Men call it common; but there is nothing common and unclean that God has sanctified by making use of it, or which His Presence and teaching may transform into a vision ‘from heaven.

There was another well (the ’Ain ’Askar), on the east side of the little town, and much nearer to Sychar than ‘Jacob’s Well;’ and to it probably the women of Sychar generally resorted. It should also be borne in mind, that in those days such work no longer devolved, as in early times, on the matrons and maidens of fair degree, but on women in much humbler station. This Samaritaness may have chosen ‘Jacob’s Well,’ perhaps, because she had been at work in the fields close by; or else, because her abode was nearer in that direction – for the ancient Sychar may have extended southward; perhaps, because, if her character was what seems implied in Joh_4:18, the concourse of the more common women at the village-well of an evening might scarcely be a pleasant place of resort to one with her history. In any case, we may here mark those Providential leadings in our everyday life, to which we are so often almost as much spiritually indebted, as to grace itself; which, indeed; form part of the dispensation of grace. Perhaps we should note how, all unconsciously to her (as so often to us), poverty and sin sometimes bring to the well by which Jesus sits weary, when on His return from self-righteous Judaea.

But these are only symbols; the barest facts of the narrative are themselves sufficiently full of spiritual interest. Both to Jesus and to the woman, the meeting was unsought, Providential in the truest sense – God-brought. Reverently, so far as the Christ is concerned, we add, that both acted truly – according to what was in them. The request: ‘Give Me to drink,’ was natural on the part of the thirsty traveller, when the woman had come to draw water, and they who usually ministered to Him were away. Even if He had not spoken, the Samaritaness would have recognised the Jew by His appearance and dress, if, as seems likely, He wore the fringes on the border of His garment. His speech would, by its pronunciation, place His nationality beyond doubt. Any kindly address, conveying a request not absolutely necessary, would naturally surprise the woman for, as the Evangelist explanatively adds: ‘Jews have no dealings with Samaritans,’ or rather, as the expression implies, no needless, friendly, nor familiar intercourse with them – a statement true at all times. Besides, we must remember that this was an ignorant Samaritaness of the lower order. In the mind of such an one, two points would mainly stand out: that the Jews in their wicked pride would have no intercourse with them; and that Gerizim, not Jerusalem, as the Jews falsely asserted, was the place of rightful worship. It was, therefore, genuine surprise which expressed itself in the question: ‘How is it, Thou, being a Jew, of me askest to drink?’ It was the first lesson she learned, even before He taught her. Here was a Jew, not like ordinary Jews, not like what she had hitherto thought them: what was the cause of this difference?

Before we mark how the answer of Jesus met this very question, and so as to direct it to spiritual profit, another and more general reflection presses on our minds. Although Jesus may not have come to Sychar with the conscious purpose of that which ensued, yet, given the meeting with the Samaritan woman, what followed seems almost matter of necessity. For it is certain that the Christ, such as the Gospels describe Him, could not have been brought into contact with spiritual ignorance and want, any more than with physical distress, without offering it relief. It was, so to speak, a necessity, alike of His Mission and of His Nature (as the God-Man). In the language of another Gospel, ‘power went out from Him;’ and this, whether consciously sought, or unconsciously felt after in the stretching forth of the hands of the sightless or in the upward look of the speechless. The Incarnate Son of God could not but bring health and life amidst disease and death; the Saviour had come to seek and to save that which was lost.

And so it was, that the ‘How is it?’ of the Samaritan woman so soon, and so fully, found its answer. ‘How is it?’ In this, that He, Who had spoken to her, was not like what she thought and knew of the Jews. He was what Israel was intended to have become to mankind; what it was the final object of Israel to have been. In Him was God’s gift to mankind. Had she but known it, the present relation between them would have been reversed; the Well of Jacob would have been a symbol, yet but a symbol, of the living water, which she would have asked and He given. As always, the seen is to Christ the emblem of the unseen and spiritual; Nature, that in and through which, in manifold and divers colouring, He ever sees the supernatural, even as the light lies in varying hues on the mountain, or glows in changeful colouring on the edge of the horizon. A view this of all things existent, which Hellenism, even in its sublimest poetic conception of creation as the impress of heavenly archetypes, has only materialised and reserved. But to Jesus it all pointed upward, because the God of Nature was the God of Grace, the One Living and True God in Whom all matter and spirit lives, Whose world is one in design, workmanship, and purpose. And so nature was but the echo of God’s heard Voice, which ever, to all and in all, speaks the same, if there be but listening ears. And so He would have it speak to men in parables, that, to them who see, it might be the Jacob’s ladder leading from earth to heaven, while they, whose sight and hearing are bound in the sleep of heart-hardening, would see but not perceive, and hear but not understand.

It was with the ignorant woman of Sychar, as it had been with the learned ‘Master in Israel.’ As Nicodemus had seen, and yet not seen, so this Samaritaness. In the birth of which Jesus spoke, he had failed to apprehend the ‘from above’ and ‘of the Spirit;’ she now the thought suggested by the contrast between the cistern in the lime-rock and the well of living water. The ‘How can these things be?’ of Nicodemus finds its parallel in the bewilderment of the woman. Jesus had nothing wherewith to draw from the deep well. Whence, then, the ‘living water?’ To outward appearance there was a physical impossibility. This was one aspect of it. And yet, as Nicodemus’ question not only similarly pointed to a physical impossibility, but also indicated dim searching after higher meaning and spiritual reality, so that of the woman: ‘No! art Thou greater than our father Jacob?’ who, at such labour, had dug this well, finding no other means than this of supplying his own wants and those of his descendants. Nor did the answer of Jesus now differ in spirit from that which He had given to the Rabbi of Jerusalem, though it lacked the rebuke, designed to show how thoroughly the religious system, of which Nicodemus was a teacher, failed in its highest object. But to this woman His answer must be much simpler and plainer than to the Rabbi. And yet, if it be Divine teaching, it cannot be quite plain, but must contain that which will point upward, and lead to further inquiry. And so the Divine Teacher explained, not only the difference between ordinary water and that of which He had spoken, but in a manner to bring her to the threshold of still higher truth. It was not water like that of Jacob’s Well which He would give, but ‘living water.’ In the Old Testament a perennial spring had, in figurative language, been thus designated, in significant contrast to water accumulated in a cistern. But there was more than this: it was water which for ever quenched the thirst, by meeting all the inward wants of the soul; water also, which, in him who had drunk of it, became a well, not merely quenching the thirst on this side time, but ‘springing up into everlasting life.’ It was not only the meeting of wants felt, but a new life, and that not essentially different, but the same as that of the future, and merging in it.

The question has sometimes been asked, to what Jesus referred by that well of living water springing up into everlasting life. Of the various strange answers given, that, surely, is almost the worst, which would apply it to the doctrine of Jesus, supporting such explanation by a reference to Rabbinic sayings in which doctrine is compared to ‘water.’ This is one of those not unfrequent instances in which Rabbinic references mislead rather than lead, being insufficiently known, imperfectly understood, or misapplied. It is quite true, that in many passages the teaching of the Rabbis is compared to water, but never to a ‘well of water springing up.’ The difference is very great. For it is the boast of Rabbinism, that its disciples drink of the waters of their teachers; chief merit lies in receptiveness, not spontaneity, and higher praise cannot be given than that of being ‘a well-plastered cistern, which lets not out a drop of water,’ and in that sense to ‘a spring whose waters ever grow stronger.’ But this is quite the opposite of what our Lord teaches. For, it is only true of what man can give when we read this (in Ecclus. 24:21): ‘They that drink me shall yet be thirsty.’ More closely related to the words of Christ is it, when we read of a ‘fountain of wisdom;’ while, in the Targum on Cant. iv. 14, ‘the words of the Law’ are likened ‘unto a well of living waters.’ The same idea was carried perhaps even further, when, at the Feast of Tabernacles, amidst universal rejoicing, water from Siloam was poured from a golden pitcher on the altar, as emblem of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost. But the, saying of our Lord to the Samaritaness referred neither to His teaching, nor to the Holy Ghost, nor yet to faith, but to the gift of that new spiritual life in Him, of which faith is but the outcome.

If the humble, ignorant Samaritaness had formerly not seen, though she had imperfectly guessed, that there was a higher meaning in the words of Him Who spake to her, a like mixture of ill-apprehension and rising faith seems to underlie her request for this water, that she might ‘thirst no more, neither again come thither to draw. She now believes in the incredible; believes it, because of Him and in Him; believes, also, in a satisfaction through Him of outward wants, reaching up beyond this to the everlasting life. But all these elements are yet in strange confusion. Those who know how difficult it is to lodge any new idea in the mind of uneducated rustics in our own land, after all our advantages of civilising contact and education, will understand, how utterly at a loss this Samaritan country-woman must have been to grasp the meaning of Jesus. But He taught, not as we teach. And thus He reached her heart in that dimly conscious longing which she expressed, though her intellect was incapable of distinguishing the new truth.

Surely, it is a strange mistake to find in her words ‘a touch of irony,’ while, on the other hand, it seems an exaggeration to regard them simply as the cry of realised spiritual need. Though reluctantly, a somewhat similar conclusion is forced upon us with reference to the question of Jesus about the woman’s husband, her reply, and the Saviour’s rejoinder. It is difficult to suppose, that Christ asked the woman to call her husband with the primary object of awakening in her a sense of sin. This might follow, but the text gives no hint of it. Nor does anything in the bearing of the woman indicate any such effect; indeed, her reply and her after-reference to it rather imply the contrary. We do not even know for certain, whether the five previous husbands had died or divorced her, and, if the latter, with whom the blame lay, although not only the peculiar mode in which our Lord refers to it, but the present condition of the woman, seem to point to a sinful life in the past. In Judaea a course like hers would have been almost impossible; but we know too little of the social and moral condition of Samaria to judge of what might there be tolerated. On the other hand, we have abundant evidence that, when the Saviour so unexpectedly laid open to her a past, which He could only supernaturally have known, the conviction at once arose in her that He was a Prophet, just as in similar circumstances it had been forced upon Nathanael. But to be a Prophet meant to a Samaritan that He was the Messiah, since they acknowledged none other after Moses. Whether or not the Messiah was known by the present Samaritan designation of Him as ‘the Converter’ and ‘the Returner’ (Restorer?), is of comparatively small importance, though, if we felt certain of this, the influence of the new conviction on the mind of the woman would appear even more clearly. In any case it was an immense, almost immeasurable, advance, when this Samaritan recognised in the stranger Jew, Who had first awakened within her higher thoughts, and pointed her to spiritual and eternal realities, the Messiah, and this on the strength of evidence the most powerfully convincing to a mind like hers: that of telling her, suddenly and startlingly, what He could not have known, except through higher than human means of information.

It is another, and much more difficult question, why Jesus should have asked for the presence of her husband. The objection, that to do so, knowing the while that she had no husband, seems unworthy of our Lord, may, indeed, be answered by the consideration, that such ‘proving’ of those who were in His training was in accordance with His mode or teaching, leading upwards by a series of moral questions. But perhaps a more simple explanation may offer even a better reply. It seems, as if the answer of Joh_4:15 marked the utmost limit of the woman’s comprehension. We can scarcely form an adequate notion of the narrowness of such a mental horizon as hers. This also explains, at least from one aspect, the reason of His speaking to her about His own Messiahship, and the worship of the future, in words far more plain than He used to His own disciples. None but the plainest statements could she grasp; and it is not unnatural to suppose that, having reached the utmost limits of which she was capable, the Saviour now asked for her husband, in order that, through the introduction of another so near to her, the horizon might be enlarged. This is also substantially the view of some of the Fathers. But, if Christ was in earnest in asking for the presence of her husband, it surely cannot be irreverent to add, that at that moment the peculiar relationship between the man and the woman did not stand out before His mind. Nor is there anything strange in this. The man was, and was not, her husband. Nor can we be sure that, although unmarried, the relationship involved anything absolutely contrary to the law; and to all intents the man might be known as her husband. The woman’s answer at once drew the attention of the Christ to this aspect of her history, which immediately stood out fully before His Divine knowledge. At the same time her words seemed like a confession – perhaps we should say, a concession to the demands of her own conscience, rather than a confession. Here, then, was the required opportunity, both for carrying further truth to her mind, by proving to her that He Who spake to her was a Prophet, and at the same time for reaching her heart.

But whether or not this view of the history be taken, it is difficult to understand, how any sober interpreter could see in the five husbands of the woman either a symbolical, or a mythical, reference to the five deities whom the ancestors of the Samaritans worshipped, the spurious service of Jehovah representing the husband, yet no husband, of the woman. It is not worth while discussing this strange suggestion from any other than the mythical standpoint. Those who regard the incidents of the Gospel-narratives as myths, having their origin in Jewish ideas, are put to even greater straits by the whole of this narrative than they who regard this Gospel as of Ephesian authorship. We may put aside the general objections raised by Strauss, since none of his successors has ventured seriously to urge them. It is more important to notice, how signally the author of the mythical theory has failed in suggesting any historical basis for this ‘myth.’ To speak of meetings at the well, such as those with Rebekah or Zipporah, is as much beside the question as an appeal to Jewish expectancy of an omniscient Messiah. Out of these two elements almost any story might be constructed. Again, to say that this story of Jesus’ success among the Samaritans was invented, in order to vindicate the later activity of the Apostles among that people, is simply to beg the whole question. In these straits so distinguished a writer as Keim has hazarded the statement: ‘The meeting with the Samaritaness has, for every one who has eyes, only a symbolical meaning, by the side of which no historical fact exists.’ An assertion this, which is perhaps best refuted by being simply quoted. On the other hand of all the myths likely to enter into Jewish imagination, the most unlikely would be one representing the Christ in familiar converse with a woman, and she a Samaritan, offering to her a well of water springing into everlasting life, and setting before her a spiritual worship of which Jerusalem was not the centre. Where both the Ephesian and the mythical theory so signally fail, shall we not fall back upon the natural explanation, borne out by the simplicity and naturalness of the narrative – that the story here related is real and true? And, if so, shall we not all the more thankfully gather its lessons?

The conviction, sudden but firm, that He Who had laid open the past to her was really a Prophet, was already faith in Him; and so the goal had been attained – not, perhaps, faith in His Messiahship, about which she might have only very vague notions, but in Him. And faith in the Christ, not in anything about Him, but in Himself, has eternal life. Such faith also leads to further inquiry and knowledge. As it has been the traditional practice to detect irony in this or that saying of the woman, or else to impute to her spiritual feelings far in advance of her possible experience, so, on the other hand, has her inquiry about the place of proper worship, Jerusalem or Gerizim, been unduly depreciated. It is indeed too true that those, whose consciences are touched by a presentation of their sin, often seek to turn the conversation into another and quasi-religious channel. But of neither the one nor the other is there evidence in the present case. Similarly, it is also only too true, that their one point of difference is, to narrow-minded sectarians, their all-in-all of religion. But in this instance we feel that the woman has no after-thought, no covert purpose in what she asks. All her life, long she had heard that Gerizim was the mount of worship, the holy hill which the waters of the Flood had never covered, and that the Jews were in deadly error. But here was an undoubted Prophet, and He a Jew. Were they then in error about the right place of worship, and what was she to think, and to do? To apply with such a question to Jesus was already to find the right solution, even although the question itself might indicate a lower mental and religious standpoint. It reminds us of the inquiry which the heated Naaman put to Elisha about the Temple of Rimmon, and of his request for a mule’s burden of earth from the land of the True God, and for true worship.

Once more the Lord answers her question by leading her far beyond it – beyond all controversy: even on to the goal of all His teaching. So marvellously does He speak to the simple in heart. It is best here to sit at the feet of Jesus, and, realising the scene, to follow as His Finger points onwards and upwards. ‘There cometh an hour, when neither in this mountain, nor yet in Jerusalem, ye shall worship the Father.’ Words of sad warning, these; words of prophecy also, that already pointed to the higher solution in the worship of a common Father, which would be the worship neither of Jews nor of Samaritans, but of children. And yet there was truth in their present differences. ‘Ye worship ye know not what: we worship what we know, since salvation is from out the Jews. The Samaritan was aimless worship, because it wanted the goal of all the Old Testament institutions, that Messiah ‘Who was to be of the seed of David’ – for, of the Jews, ‘as concerning the flesh,’ was Christ to come. But only of present interest could such distinctions be; for an hour would come, nay, already was, when the true worshippers would ‘worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father also seeketh such for His worshippers. Spirit is God’ – and only worship in spirit and in truth could be acceptable to such a God.

Higher or more Christlike teaching than this could not be uttered. And she who heard, thus far understood it, that in the glorious picture, which was set before her, she saw the coming of the Kingdom of the Messiah. ‘I know that Messiah cometh. When He cometh, He will tell us all things.’ It was then that, according to the need of that untutored woman, He told her plainly what in Judaea, and even by His disciples, would have been carnally misinterpreted and misapplied: that He was the Messiah. So true is it, that ‘babes’ can receive what often must remain long hidden ‘from the wise and prudent.’

It was the crowning lesson of that day. Nothing more could be said; nothing more need be said. The disciples had returned from Sychar. That Jesus should converse with a woman, was so contrary to all Judaean notions of a Rabbi, that they wondered. Yet, in their reverence for Him, they dared not ask any questions. Meanwhile the woman, forgetful of her errand, and only conscious of that new well-spring of life which had risen within her, had left the unfilled water-pot by the Well, and hurried into ‘the City.’ They were strange tidings which she brought; the very mode of her announcement affording evidence of their truth: ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I have done. No – is this the Christ?’ We are led to infer, that these strange tidings soon gathered many around her; that they questioned, and, as they ascertained from her the indisputable fact of His superhuman knowledge, believed on Him, so far as the woman could set Him before them as object of faith. Under this impression ‘they went out of the City, and came on their way towards Him. 

Meantime the disciples had urged the Master to eat of the food which they had brought. But His Soul was otherwise engaged. Thoughts were present of the glorious future, of a universal worship of the Father by those whom He had taught, and of which He had just seen such unexpected earnest. These mingled with feelings of pain at the spiritual dulness of those by whom He was surrounded, who could see in that conversation with a Samaritan woman nothing but a strange innovation on Rabbinic custom and dignity, and now thought of nothing beyond the immediate errand on which they had gone to Sychar. Even His words of rebuke only made them wonder whether, unknown to them, some one had brought Him food. It was not the only, nor the last, instance of their dulness to spiritual realities.

Yet with Divine patience He bore with them: ‘My meat is that I may do the Will of Him that sent Me, and that I may accomplish (bring to a perfect end) His work.’ To the disciples that work appeared still in the far future. To them it seemed as yet little more than seed-time; the green blade was only sprouting; the harvest of such a Messianic Kingdom as they expected was still months distant. To correct their mistake, the Divine Teacher, as so often, and as best adapted to His hearers, chose His illustration from what was visible around. To show their meaning more clearly, we venture to reverse the order of the sentences which Jesus spoke: ‘Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes and look [observantly] at the fields, that they are white to the harvest. [But] do ye not say (viz. in your hearts) that there are yet four months, and the harvest cometh?’ The words will appear the more striking, if (with Professor Westcott) we bear in mind that, perhaps at that very moment, the Samaritans, coming to Him from Sychar, were appearing in sight.

But we also regard it as marking the time, when this conversation took place. Generally the words, ‘yet four months, and then cometh the harvest,’ are regarded either as a proverbial expression, or as indicating, that the Lord spake at the Well of Jacob four months before the harvest-time – that is, about the month of January, if the barley-harvest, or in February, if the wheat-harvest, was meant. The suggestion that it was a proverb may be dismissed, first, because there is not a trace of such a proverb, and then because, to give it even the scantiest meaning, it is necessary to supply: ‘Between seedtime and harvest there are four months,’ which is not true, since in Palestine about six months intervene between them. On the other hand, for reasons explained in another place, we conclude, that it could not have been January or February when Jesus was in Sychar. But why not reverse the common theory, and see in the second clause, introduced by the words, ‘Behold! lift up your eyes and observe,’ a mark of the time and circumstances; while the expression, ‘Do ye not say, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest, would be understood as parabolically spoken? Admittedly, one of the two clauses is a literal mark of time, and the other is spoken parabolically. But there is no reason why the second clause may not mark the time, while on independent grounds we must conclude, that Christ returned from Judaea to Galilee in the early summer.

Passing from this point, we notice how the Lord further unfolded His own lesson of present harvesting, and their inversion of what was sowing, and what reaping time. ‘Already’ he that reaped received wages, and gathered fruit unto eternal life (which is the real reward of the Great Reaper, the seeing of the travail of His soul), so that in this instance the sower rejoiced equally as the reaper. And, in this respect, the otherwise cynical proverb, that one was the sower, another the reaper of his sowing, found a true application. It was indeed so, that the servants of Christ were sent to reap what others had sown, and to enter into their labour. One had sowed, another would reap. And yet, as in this instance of the Samaritans, the sower would rejoice as well as the reaper; nay, both would rejoice together, in the gathered fruit unto eternal life. And so the sowing in tears is on the spiritual field often mingled with the harvest of gladness, and to the spiritual view both are really one. ‘Four months’ do not intervene between them; so that, although one may sow and another reap, yet the sower seeth that harvest for which the harvester gets wages, and rejoices with him in the fruit which is gathered into the eternal storehouse.

It was as Christ had said. The Samaritans, who believed ‘because of the word’ (speech) ‘of the woman [what she said] as she testified’ of the Christ, ‘when they came’ to that well, ‘asked Him to abide with them. And He abode there two days. And many more believed because of His own word (speech, discourse), and said unto the woman: No longer because of thy speaking do we believe. For we ourselves have heard, and know, that this is truly the Saviour of the world.

We know not what passed these two days. Apparently no miracles were wrought, but those of His Word only. It was the deepest and purest truth they learned, those simple men of simple faith, who had not learned of man, but listened to His Word only. The sower as well as the reaper rejoiced, and rejoiced together. Seed-time and harvest mingled, when for themselves they knew and confessed, that this was truly the Saviour of the world.

(Mat_4:12; Mar_1:14; Luk_4:14, Luk_4:15; Joh_4:43-54)

The brief harvest in Samaria was, as Jesus had indicated to His disciples, in another sense also the beginning of sowing-time, or at least that when the green blade first appeared above ground. It formed the introduction to that Galilean ministry, when ‘the Galileans received Him, having seen all the things that He did at Jerusalem at the Feast.’ Nay, in some respects, it was the real beginning of His Work also, which, viewed as separate and distinct, commenced when the Baptist was cast into prison. Accordingly, this circumstance is specially marked by Matthew, and by Mark, while Luke, as if to give greater emphasis to it, abruptly connects this beginning of Christ’s sole and separate Work with the history of the Temptation. All that intervened seems to him but introductory, that ‘beginning’ which might be summed up by the words, ‘in the power of the Spirit,’ with which he describes His return to Galilee. In accordance with this view, Christ is presented as taking up the message of His Forerunner, only with wider sweep, since, instead of adding to His announcement of the Kingdom of Heaven and call to repentance that to a Baptism of preparation, He called those who heard Him to ‘believe the Gospel’ which He brought them.

But here also, – as Eusebius had already noted – the Fourth Gospel, in its more comprehensive presentation of the Christ, as adding, not merely in the external succession of events, but in their internal connection, feature to feature in the portraiture of the Divine Redeemer, supplies the gap in the Synoptic narratives, which so often read only like brief historical summaries, with here and there special episodes or reports of teaching inserted. For John not only tells us of that early Ministry, which the Synoptists designedly pass over, but while, like them, referring to the captivity of John as the occasion of Christ’s withdrawal from the machinations of the Pharisaic party in Judaea, he joins this departure from Judaea with the return to Galilee by supplying, as connecting link, the brief stay in Samaria with its eventful results. John, also, alone supplies the first-recorded event of this Galilean ministry. We therefore follow his guidance, simply noting that the various stages of this Galilean residence should be grouped as follows: Cana, Nazareth, and Capernaum, with general itineration from that centre. The period occupied, by what is thus briefly indicated in the Gospels, was from early summer, say, the beginning of June, to the unnamed ‘feast of the Jews.’ If it is objected, that the events seem too few for a period of about three months, the obvious answer is, that, during most of this time, Jesus was in great measure unattended, since the call of the Apostles only took place after the ‘unnamed feast;’ that, indeed, they had probably returned to their homes and ordinary occupations when Jesus went to Nazareth, and that therefore, not having themselves been eye-witnesses of what had passed, they confined themselves to a general summary. At the same time, Luke expressly marks that Jesus taught in the various Synagogues of Galilee, and also that He made a longer stay in Capernaum.

When Jesus returned to Galilee, it was in circumstances entirely different from those under which He had left it. As He Himself said there had, perhaps naturally, been prejudices connected with the humbleness of His upbringing, and the familiarity engendered by knowledge of His home-surroundings. These were overcome, when the Galileans had witnessed at the feast in Jerusalem, what He had done. Accordingly, they were now prepared to receive Him with the reverent attention which His Word claimed. We may conjecture, that it was partially for reasons such as these that He first bent His steps to Cana. The miracle, which had there been wrought would still further prepare the people for His preaching. Besides, this was the home of Nathanael, who had probably followed Him to Jerusalem, and in whose house a gladsome homage of welcome would now await Him. It was here that the second recorded miracle of His Galilean ministry was wrought, with what effect upon the whole district, may be judged from the expectancies which the fame of it excited even in Nazareth, the city of His early upbringing.

It appears that the son of one of Herod Antipas’ officers, either civil or military, was sick, and at the point of death. When tidings reached the father that the Prophet, or more than Prophet, Whose fame had preceded Him to Galilee, had come to Cana, he resolved, in his despair of other means, to apply to Him for the cure of His child. Nothing can be gained for the spiritual interest of this or any other Biblical narrative, by exaggeration; but much is lost, when the historical demands of the case are overlooked. It is not from any disbelief in the supernatural agency at work, that we insist on the natural and rational sequence of events. And having done so, we can all the more clearly mark, by the side of the natural, the distinctively higher elements at work. Accordingly, we do not assume that this ‘court-officer’ was actuated by spiritual belief in the Son of God, when applying to Him for help. Rather would we go to almost the opposite extreme, and regard him as simply actuated by what, in the circumstances, might be the views of a devout Jew. Instances are recorded in the Talmud, which may here serve as our guide. Various cases are related in which those seriously ill, and even at the point of death, were restored by the prayers of celebrated Rabbis. One instance is specially illustrative. We read that, when the son of Rabban Gamaliel was dangerously ill, he sent two of his disciples to one Chanina ben Dosa to entreat his prayers for the restoration of his son. On this, Chanina is said to have gone up to the Aliyah (upper chamber) to pray. On his return, he assured the messengers that the young man was restored, grounding his confidence, not on the possession of any prophetic gift, but on the circumstance that he knew his request was answered from the freedom he had in prayer. The messengers noted down the hour, and on their arrival at the house of Gamaliel found, that at that very hour ‘the fever left him, and he asked for water.’ Thus far the Rabbinic story. Even supposing that it was either invented or coloured in imitation of the New Testament, it shows, at least, what a devout Jew might deem lawful to expect from a celebrated Rabbi, who was regarded as having power in prayer.

Having indicated the illustrated part of this story, we may now mark the contrast between it and the event in the Gospels. There restoration is not merely asked, but expected, and that, not in answer to prayer, but by Christ’s Personal presence. But the great and vital contrast lies, alike in what was thought of Him Who was instrumental in the cure – performed it – and in the moral effects which it wrought. The history just quoted from the Talmud is immediately followed by another of similar import, when a celebrated Rabbi accounts on this wise for his inability to do that in which Chanina had succeeded, that Chanina was like ‘a servant of the King,’ who went in and out familiarly, and so might beg favours; while he (the failing Rabbi) was ‘like a lord before the King,’ who would not be accorded mere favours, but discussed matters on a footing of equality. This profane representation of the relation between God and His servants, the utterly unspiritual view of prayer which it displays, and the daring self-exaltation of the Rabbi, surely mark sufficiently an absolute contrast in spirit between the Jewish view and that which underlies the Evangelic narrative.

Enough has been said to show, that the application to Jesus on the part of the ‘royal officer’ did not, in the peculiar circumstances, lie absolutely beyond the range of Jewish ideas. What the ‘court-officer’ exactly expected to be done, is a question secondary to that of his state of receptiveness, as it may be called, which was the moral condition alike of the outward help, and of the inward blessing which he received. One thing however, it is of importance to notice. We must not suppose, that when, to the request that Jesus would come down to Capernaum to perform the cure, the Master replied, that unless they saw signs and wonders they would not believe, He meant thereby to convey that his Jewish hearers, in opposition to the Samaritans, required ‘signs and wonders’ in order to believe. For the application of ‘the officer’ was itself an expression of faith, although imperfect. Besides, the cure, which was the object of the application, could not have been performed without a miracle. What the Saviour reproved was not the request for a miracle, which was necessary, but the urgent plea that He should come down to Capernaum for that purpose, which the father afterwards so earnestly repeated. That request argued ignorance of the real character of the Christ, as if He were either merely a Rabbi endowed with special power, or else a miracle-monger. What He intended to teach this man was, that He, Who had life in Himself, could restore life at a distance as easily as by His Presence; by the word of his Power as readily as by personal application. A lesson this of the deepest importance, as regarded the Person of Christ; a lesson, also, of the widest application to us and for all circumstances, temporal and spiritual. When the ‘court-officer’ had learned this lesson, he became ‘obedient unto the faith,’ and ‘went his way,’ presently to find his faith both crowned and perfected. And when both ‘he and his house’ had learned that lesson, they would never afterwards think of the Christ either as the Jews did, who simply witnessed His miracles, or unspiritually. It was the completion of that teaching which had first come to Nathanael, the first believer of Cana. So, also, is it when we have learned that lesson, that we come to know alike the meaning and the blessedness of believing in Jesus.

Indeed, so far as its moral import is concerned, the whole history turns upon this point. It also marks the fundamental difference between this and the somewhat similar history of the healing of the Centurion’s servant in Capernaum. Critics have noticed marked divergences in almost every detail of the two narratives, which some – both orthodox and negative interpreters – have so strangely represented as only different presentations of one and the same event. But, besides these marked differences of detail, there is also fundamental difference in the substance of the narratives, and in the spirit of the two applicants, which made the Saviour in the one instance reprove as the requirement of sight, which by itself could only produce a transitory faith, that which in the other He marvelled at as greatness of faith, for which He had in vain looked in Israel. The great point in the history of the ‘court-officer’ is Israel’s mistaken view of the Person and Work of the Christ. That in the narrative of the Centurion is the preparedness of a simple faith, unencumbered by Jewish realism, although the outcome of Jewish teaching. The carnal realism of the one, which looks for signs and wonders, is contrasted with the simplicity and straightforwardness of the other. Lastly, the point in the history of the Syro-Phoenician woman, which is sometimes confounded with it, is the intensity of the same faith which, despite discouragements, nay, seeming improbabilities, holds fast by the conviction which her spiritual instinct had grasped – that such an One as Jesus must be not only the Messiah of the Jews, but the Saviour of the world.

We may as well here complete our critical notices, at least as concerns those views which have of late been propounded. The extreme school of negative critics seems here involved in hopeless self-contradiction. For, if this narrative of a Jewish courtier is really only another recension of that of the heathen centurion, how comes it that the ‘Jewish’ Gospel of Matthew makes a Gentile, while the so-called ‘anti-Jewish,’ ‘Ephesian’ Gospel of John makes a Jew, the hero of the story? As signally does the ‘mythical’ theory break down. For, admittedly, there is no Rabbinic basis for the invention of such a story; and by far the ablest representative of the negative school has conclusively shown, that it could not have originated in an imitation of the Old Testament account of Naaman’s cure by Elisha the prophet. But, if Christ had really spoken those words to the courtier, as this critic seems to admit, there remains only, as he puts it, this ‘trilemma:’ either He could really work the miracle in question; or, He spoke as a mere fanatic; or else, He was simply a deceiver. It is a relief to find that the two last hypotheses are discarded. But, as negative criticism – may we not say, from the same spirit which Jesus reproved in the courtier – is unwilling to admit that Jesus really wrought this miracle, it is suggested in explanation of the cure, that the sick child, to whom the father had communicated his intended application to Jesus, had been in a state of expectancy which, when the courtier returned with the joyous assurance that the request was granted, issued in actual recovery. To this there is the obvious answer, that the explanation wants the first requirement – that of an historical basis. There is not a tittle of evidence that the child expected a cure; while, on the other hand, the narrative expressly states that he was cured before his father’s return. And, if the narrative may be altered at will to suit the necessities of a groundless hypothesis, it is difficult to see which, or whether any, part of it should be retained. It is not so that the origin of a faith, which has transformed the world, can be explained. But we have here another evidence of the fact, that objections which, when regarded as part of a connected system, seem so formidable to some, utterly break down, when each narrative is carefully examined in detail.

There are other circumstances in this history, which require at least passing consideration. Of these the principal are the time when the servants of the court-officer met him, on his return journey, with the joyful tidings that his son lived; and, connected with it, the time when ‘he began to do nicely;’  and, lastly, that when the ‘court-official’ applied to Jesus. The two latter events were evidently contemporaneous. The exact time indicated by the servants as the commencement of the improvement is, ‘Yesterday, at the seventh hour.’ Now, however the Jewish servants may originally have expressed themselves, it seems impossible to assume, that John intended any other than the Roman notation of the civil day, or that he meant any other hour than 7p.m. The opposite view, that it marks Jewish notation of time, or 1p.m., is beset by almost unsurmountable difficulties. For it must be borne in mind, that, as the distance between Capernaum and Cana is about twenty-five miles, it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the courtier, leaving his home that morning, not only to have reached Cana, but to have had the interview with Jesus by 1p.m. The difficulty is only increased, when we are asked to believe, that after such a journey the courtier had immediately set out on his return. But this is absolutely necessary for the theory, since a Jew would not have set out on such a journey after dusk. But farther, on the above supposition, the servants of the court official must have taken the road immediately, or very soon after, the improvement commenced. This is itself unlikely, and, indeed, counter-indicated by the terms of the conversation between the courtier and the servants, which imply that they had waited till they were sure that it was recovery, and not merely a temporary improvement. Again, on the theory combated, the servants, meeting the ‘courtier,’ as we must suppose, midway, if not near to Capernaum, would have said, ‘Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him,’ meaning thereby, that, as they spoke in the evening, when another Jewish day had begun, the fever had left him on the afternoon of the same day, although, according to Jewish reckoning, ‘yesterday,’ since 1p.m. would be reckoned as the previous day. But it may be safely affirmed, that no Jew would have so expressed himself. If, on the evening of a day, they had referred to what had taken place five, six hours previously, at 1p.m., they would have said: ‘At the seventh hour the fever left him;’ and not ‘Yesterday at the seventh hour.’

It is needless to follow the matter further. We can understand how, leaving Capernaum in the morning, the interview with Jesus and the simultaneous cure of the child would have taken place about seven o’clock of the evening. Its result was, not only the restoration of the child, but that, no longer requiring to see signs and wonders, ‘the man believed the word which Jesus had spoken unto him.’ In this joyous assurance, which needed no more ocular demonstration, he ‘went his way,’ either to the hospitable home of a friend, or to some near lodging-place on the way, to be next day met by the gladsome tidings, that it had been to him according to his faith. As already noted, the whole morale of the history lies in this very matter, and it marks the spiritual receptiveness of the courtier, which, in turn, was the moral condition of his desire being granted. Again, we learn how, by the very granting of his desire, the spiritual object of Christ in the teaching of the courtier was accomplished, how, under certain spiritual conditions in him and upon him, the temporal benefit accomplished its spiritual object. And in this also, as in other points which will occur to the devout reader, there are lessons of deepest teaching to us, and for all times and circumstances.

Whether this ‘royal officer’ was Chuza, Herod’s steward, whose wife, under the abiding impression of this miracle to her child, afterwards humbly, gratefully ministered to Jesus, must remain undetermined on this side time. Suffice it to mark the progress in the ‘royal officer’ from belief in the power of Jesus to faith in His word, and thence to absolute faith in Him, with its blessed expansive effect on that whole household. And so are we ever led faithfully and effectually, yet gently, by His benefits, upwards from the lower stage of belief by what we see Him do, to that higher faith which is absolute and unseeing trust, springing from experimental knowledge of what He is.

(Luk_4:16)

The stay in Cana, though we have no means of determining its length, was probably of only short duration. Perhaps the Sabbath of the same week already found Jesus in the Synagogue of Nazareth. We will not seek irreverently to lift the veil of sacred silence, which here, as elsewhere, the Gospel-narratives have laid over the Sanctuary of His inner Life. That silence is itself theopneustic, of Divine breathing and inspiration; it is more eloquent than any eloquence, a guarantee of the truthfulness of what is said. And against this silence, as the dark background, stands out as the Figure of Light the Person of the Christ. Yet, as we follow Jesus to the city of His Childhood and home of His humility, we can scarcely repress thoughts of what must have stirred His soul, as He once more entered the well-known valley, and beheld the scenes to each of which some early memory must have attached.

Only a few months since He had left Nazareth, but how much that was all-decisive to Him, to Israel, and to the world had passed! As the lengthening shadows of Friday’s sun closed around the quiet valley, He would hear the well-remembered double blast of the trumpet from the roof of the Synagogue-minister’s house, proclaiming the advent of the holy day. Once more it sounded through the still summer-air, to tell all, that work must be laid aside. Yet a third time it was heard, ere the ‘minister’ put it aside close by where he stood, not to profane the Sabbath by carrying it; for now the Sabbath had really commenced, and the festive Sabbath-lamp was lit.

Sabbath morn dawned, and early He repaired to that Synagogue where, as a Child, a Youth, a Man, He had so often worshipped in the humble retirement of His rank, sitting, not up there among the elders and the honoured, but far back. The old well-known faces were around Him, the old well-remembered words and services fell on His ear. How different they had always been to Him than to them, with whom He had thus mingled in common worship! And now He was again among them, truly a stranger among His own countrymen; this time, to be looked at, listened to, tested, tried, used or cast aside, as the case might be. It was the first time, so far as we know, that He taught in a Synagogue, and this Synagogue that of His own Nazareth.

It was, surely, a wondrously linked chain of circumstances, which bound the Synagogue to the Church. Such a result could never have been foreseen, as that, what really was the consequence of Israel’s dispersion, and, therefore, indirectly the punishment of their sin, should become the means of fulfilling Israel’s world-mission. Another instance this, of how Divine judgment always bears in its bosom larger mercy; another illustration how the dying of Israel is ever life to the world; another manifestation of that supernatural Rule of God, in which all is rule, that is, law and order, and all the supernatural, bringing to pass, in the orderly succession of events, what at the outset would have seemed, and really is, miraculous. For the Synagogue became the cradle of the Church. Without it, as indeed without Israel’s dispersion, the Church Universal would, humanely speaking, have been impossible, and the conversation of the Gentiles have required a succession of millennial miracles.

That Synagogues originated during, or in consequence of the Babylonish captivity, is admitted by all. The Old Testament contains no allusion to their existence, and the Rabbinic attempts to trace them even to Patriarchal times deserve, of course, no serious consideration. We can readily understand how during the long years of exile in Babylon, places and opportunities for common worship on Sabbaths and feast-days must have been felt almost a necessity. This would furnish, at least, the basis for the institution of the Synagogue. After the return to Palestine, and still more by ‘the dispersed abroad,’ such ‘meeting houses’ (batē khenesiyoṯ, domus congregationum, Synagogues) would become absolutely requisite. Here those who were ignorant even of the language of the Old Testament would have the Scriptures read and ‘targumed’ to them. It was but natural that prayers, and, lastly, addresses, should in course of time be added. Thus the regular Synagogue-service would gradually arise; first on Sabbaths and on feast- or fast-days, then on ordinary days, at the same hours as, and with a sort of internal correspondence to, the worship of the Temple. The services on Mondays and Thursdays were special, these being the ordinary market-days, when the country-people came into the towns, and would avail themselves of the opportunity for bringing any case that might require legal decision before the local Sanhedrin, which met in the Synagogue, and consisted of its authorities. Naturally, these two days would be utilised to afford the country-people, who lived far from the Synagogues, opportunities for worship; and the services on those days were of a somewhat more elaborate character. Accordingly, Monday and Thursday were called ‘the days of congregation’ or ‘Synagogue’ (yom hakenisah).

In another place it has been shown, how rapidly and generally the institution of Synagogues spread among the Jews of the Dispersion in all lands, and what important purposes they served. In Palestine they were scattered over the whole country, though it is only reasonable to suppose, that their number greatly increased after the destruction of the Temple, and this without crediting the Jewish legend as to their extraordinary number in certain cities, such as 480, or 460, in Jerusalem. In the capital, and probably in some other large cities, there were not only several Synagogues, but these arranged according to nationalities, and even crafts. At the same time it deserves notice, that even in so important a place as Capernaum there seems either not to have been a Synagogue, or that it was utterly insignificant, till the want was supplied by the pious Gentile centurion. This would seem to dispose of the question whether, as is generally assumed, a Jewish community in a place, if numbering ten heads of families, was obliged to build a Synagogue, and could enforce local taxation for the purpose. Such was undoubtedly the later Rabbinic ordinance, but there is no evidence that it obtained in Palestine, or in early times.

Generally, of course, a community would build its own Synagogue, or else depend on the charitable assistance of neighbours, or on private munificence. If this failed, they might meet for worship in a private dwelling, a sort of ‘Synagogue in the house.’ For, in early times the institution would be much more simple than at a later period. In this, as in other respects, we must remember that later Jewish arrangements afford no evidence of those which prevailed while the Temple stood, nor yet the ordinances of the chiefs of Babylonian Academies of the customs existing in Palestine, and, lastly, that the Rabbinic directions mark rather an ideal than the actual state of things. Thus – to mention an instance of some importance, because the error has been so often repeated as to be generally believed, and to have misled recent explorers in Palestine – there is no evidence that in Palestine Synagogues always required to be built in the highest situation in a town, or, at least, so as to overtop the other houses. To judge from a doubtful passage in the Talmud, this seems to have been the case in Persia, while a later notice appeals in support of it to Pro_8:2. But even where the Jews were most powerful and influential, the rule could not have been universally enforced, although later Rabbis lay it down as a principle. Hence, the inference, that the Galilean Synagogues lately excavated cannot date from an early period, because they are not in prominent positions, is erroneous.

But there were two rules observed, which seem to have been enforced from early times. One of these enjoined, that a Synagogue should not be erected in a place, unless it, contained ten batlanim, or men of leisure, who could devote their time to the Synagogue worship and administration. This was proved by the consideration, that common worship implied a congregation, which, according to Jewish Law, must consist of at least ten men. Another, and perhaps more important rule was as to the direction in which Synagogues were to be built, and which worshippers should occupy during prayer. Here two points must be kept in view: 1st. Prayer towards the east was condemned, on the ground of the false worship towards the east mentioned in Eze_8:16. 2ndly. The prevailing direction in Palestine was towards the west, as in the Temple. Thus, we read that the entrance into the Synagogue was by the east, as the entrance through the Beautiful Gate into the Sanctuary. This, however, may refer, not to the door, but to the passage (aisle) into the interior of the building. In other places, the advice is simply given to turn towards Jerusalem, in whatever direction it be. In general, however, it was considered that since the Shekhinah was everywhere in Palestine, direction was not of paramount importance.

If we combine these notices, and keep in view the general desire to conform to the Temple arrangements, the ruined Synagogues lately excavated in the north of Galilee seem, in a remarkable manner, to meet the Talmudic requirements. With the exception of one (at ’Irbid, which has its door to the east), they all have their entrances on the south. We conjecture that the worshippers, imitating in this the practice in the Temple, made a circuit, either completely to the north, or else entered at the middle of the eastern aisle, where, in the ground-plan of the Synagogue at Capernaum, which seems the most fully preserved ruin, two pillars in the colonnade are wanting. The so-called ‘Ark’ would be at the south end; the seats for the elders and honourable in front of it, facing the people, and with their back to the Ark. Here two pillars are wanting in the Synagogue at Capernaum. The lectern of the reader would be in the centre, close to where the entrance was into the double colonnade which formed the Synagogue, where, at present, a single pillar is marked in the plan of the Capernaum Synagogue; while the women’s gallery was at the north end, where two columns and pillars of peculiar shape, which may have supported the gallery, are traceable. For it is a mistake to suppose that the men and women sat in opposite aisles, separated by a low wall. Philo notices, indeed, this arrangement in connection with the Therapeutae; but there is no indication that the practice prevailed in the Synagogues, or in Palestine.

Plan of Synagogue at ‘Tell Hûm.’

We can now, with the help given by recent excavations, form a conception of these ancient Synagogues. The Synagogue is built of the stone of the country. On the lintels over the doors there are various ornamentations – a seven-branched candlestick, an open flower between two Paschal lambs, or vine-leaves with bunches of grapes, or, as at Capernaum, a pot of manna between representations of Aaron’s rod. Only glancing at the internal decorations of mouldings or cornice, we notice that the inside plan is generally that of two double colonnades, which seem to have formed the body of the Synagogue, the aisles east and west being probably used as passages. The intercolumnar distance is very small, never greater than 9½ feet. The ‘two corner columns at the northern end invariably have their two exterior faces square like pillars, and the two interior ones formed by half-engaged pillars.’ Here we suppose the women’s gallery to have risen. The flooring is formed of slabs of white limestone; the walls are solid (from 2 even to 7 feet in thickness), and well built of stones, rough in the exterior, but plastered in the interior. The Synagogue is furnished with sufficient windows to admit light. The roof is flat, the columns being sometimes connected by blocks of stone, on which massive rafters rest.

Entering by the door at the southern end, and making the circuit to the north, we take our position in front of the women’s gallery. These colonnades form the body of the Synagogue. At the south end, facing north, is a movable ‘Ark,’ containing the sacred rolls of the Law and the Prophets. It is called the Holy Chest or Ark, Aron haqqodesh (to call it simply ‘aron’ was sinful), but chiefly the teḇah, Ark. It was made movable, so that it might be carried out, as on public fasts. Steps generally led up to it (the darga or sap̱sel). In front hangs (this probably from an early period) the Vilon or curtain. But the Holy Lamp is never wanting, in imitation of the undying light in the Temple. Right before the Ark, and facing the people, are the seats of honour, for the rulers of the Synagogue and the honourable. The place for him who leads the devotion of the people is also in front of the Ark, either elevated, or else to mark humility, lowered. In the middle of the Synagogue (so generally) is the bima, or elevation, on which there is the luaḥ, or desk, from which the Law is read. This is also called the kurseya chair, or throne, or kisē, and pergulah. Those who are to read the Law will stand, while he who is to preach or deliver an address will sit. Beside them will be the meṯurgeman, either to interpret, or to repeat aloud, what is said.

As yet the Synagogue is empty, and we may therefore call to mind what we ought to think, and how to bear ourselves. To neglect attendance on its services would not only involve personal guilt, but bring punishment upon the whole district. Indeed, to be effectual, prayer must be offered in the Synagogue. At the same time, the more strict ordinances in regard to the Temple, such as, that we must not enter it carrying a staff, nor with shoes, nor even dust on the feet, nor with scrip or purse, do not apply to the Synagogue, as of comparatively inferior sanctity. However, the Synagogue must not be made a thoroughfare. We must not behave lightly in it. We may not joke, laugh, eat, talk, dress, nor resort there for shelter from sun or rain. Only Rabbis and their disciples, to whom so many things are lawful, and who, indeed, must look upon the Synagogue as if it were their own dwelling, may eat, drink, perhaps even sleep there. Under certain circumstances, also, the poor and strangers may be fed there. But, in general, the Synagogue must be regarded as consecrated to God. Even if a new one be built, care must be taken not to leave the old edifice till the other is finished. Money collected for the building may, in cases of necessity, be used for other purposes, but things dedicated for it are inalienable by sale. A Synagogue may be converted into an Academy, because the latter is regarded as more sacred, but not vice versa. Village Synagogues may be disposed of, under the direction of the local Sanhedrin, provided the locale be not afterwards used for incongruous purposes, such as public baths, a wash-house, a tannery, etc. But town Synagogues are inalienable, because strangers may have contributed to them; and, even if otherwise, they have a right to look for some place of worship. At the same time, we must bear in mind that this rule had its exceptions; notably that, at one time, the guild of coppersmiths in Jerusalem sold their Synagogue.

All this, irrespective of any Rabbinic legends, shows with what reverence these ‘houses of congregation’ were regarded. And now the weekly Sabbath, the pledge between Israel and God, had once more come. To meet it as a bride or queen, each house was adorned on the Friday evening. The Sabbath lamp was lighted; the festive garments put on; the table provided with the best which the family could afford; and the qidush, or benediction, spoken over the cup of wine, which, as always, was mixed with water. And as Sabbath morning broke, they hastened with quick steps to the Synagogue; for such was the Rabbinic rule in going, while it was prescribed to return with slow and lingering steps. Jewish punctiliousness defined every movement and attitude in prayer. If those rules were ever observed in their entirety, devotion must have been crushed under their weight. But we have evidence that, in the time of our Lord, and even later, there was much personal freedom left; for, not only was much in the services determined by the usage of each place, but the leader of the devotions might preface the regular service by free prayer, or insert such between certain parts of the liturgy.

We are now in the Nazareth Synagogue. The officials are all assembled. The lowest of these is the ḥazzan, or minister, who often acts also as schoolmaster. For this reason, and because the conduct of the services may frequently devolve upon him, great care is taken in his selection. He must be not only irreproachable, but, if possible, his family also. Humility, modesty, knowledge of the Scriptures, distinctness and correctness in pronunciation, simplicity and neatness in dress, and an absence of self-assertion, are qualities sought for, and which, in some measure, remind us of the higher qualifications insisted on by Paul in the choice of ecclesiastical officers. Then there are the elders (zeqenim), or rulers (ἄρχοντες), whose chief is the Archisynagogos, or rosh hakeneseṯ. These are the rulers (parnasim) or shepherds (ποιμένες). There can be no question (from the inscriptions on the Jewish tombstones in Rome), that the Archisynagogos  was chief among the rulers, and that, whether or not there was as in the community at Rome, and probably also among the dispersed in the West, besides him a sort of political chief of the elders, or Gerousiarch. All the rulers of the Synagogue were duly examined as to their knowledge, and ordained to the office. They formed the local Sanhedrin or tribunal. But their election depended on the choice of the congregation; and absence of pride, as also gentleness and humility, are mentioned as special qualifications. Sometimes the office was held by regular teachers.

If, as in Rome, there was an apparently unordained eldership (Gerousia), it had probably only the charge of outward affairs, and acted rather as a committee of management. Indeed, in foreign Synagogues, the rulers seem to have been chosen, sometimes for a specified period, at others for life. But, although it may be admitted that the Archisynagogos, or chief ruler of the Synagogue, was only the first among his equals, there can be no doubt that the virtual rule of the Synagogue devolved upon him. He would have the superintendence of Divine service, and, as this was not conducted by regular officials, he would in each case determine who were to be called up to read from the Law and the Prophets, who was to conduct the prayers, and act as sheliaḥ ṣibur, or messenger of the congregation, and who, if any, was to deliver an address. He would also see to it that nothing improper took place in the Synagogue, and that the prayers were properly conducted. In short, the supreme care, both of the services and of the building, would devolve upon him. To these regular officials we have to add those who officiated during the service, the sheliaḥ ṣibur, or delegate of the congregation – who, as its mouthpiece, conducted the devotions – the Interpreter or meṯurgeman, and those who were called on to read in the Law and the Prophets, or else to preach.

We are now in some measure prepared to follow the worship on that Sabbath in Nazareth. On His entrance into the Synagogue, or perhaps before that, the chief ruler would request Jesus to act for that Sabbath as the sheliaḥ ṣibur. For according to the Mishnah, the person who read in the Synagogue the portion from the Prophets, was also expected to conduct the devotions, at least in greater part. If this rule was enforced at that time, then Jesus would ascend the bima, and standing at the lectern, begin the service by two prayers, which in their most ancient form, as they probably obtained in the time of our Lord, were as follows: – 

 I. ‘Blessed be Thou, O Lord, King of the world, Who formest the light and createst the darkness, Who makest peace, and createst everything; Who, in mercy, givest light to the earth, and to those who dwell upon it, and in Thy goodness, day by day, and every day, renewest the works of creation. Blessed be the Lord our God for the glory of His handiworks, and for the light-giving lights which He has made for His praise. Selah. Blessed be the Lord our God, Who has formed the lights.’

II. ‘With great love hast Thou loved us, O Lord our God, and with much overflowing pity hast Thou pitied us, our Father and our King. For the sake of our fathers who trusted in Thee, and Thou taughtest them the statutes of life, have mercy upon us, and teach us. Enlighten our eyes in Thy Law; cause our hearts to cleave to Thy commandments; unite our hearts to love and fear Thy Name, and we shall not be put to shame, world without end. For Thou art a God Who preparest salvation, and us hast Thou chosen from among all nations and tongues, and hast in truth brought us near to Thy great Name – Selah – that we may lovingly praise Thee and Thy Unity. Blessed be the Lord, Who in love chose His people Israel.’

After this followed what may be designated as the Jewish Creed, called the shema, from the word ‘shema,’ or ‘hear,’ with which it begins. It consisted of three passages from the Pentateuch, so arranged, as the Mishnah notes, that the worshipper took upon himself first the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, and only after it the yoke of the commandments; and in the latter, again, first those that applied to night and day, and then those that applied to the day only. They were probably but later determinations, conceived in a spirit of hostility to what was regarded as the heresy of Christianity, which insisted that, as the first sentence in the shema, asserting the Unity of God, was the most important, special emphasis should be laid on certain words in it. The recitation of the shema was followed by this prayer: – 

‘True it is that Thou art Jehovah, our God, and the God of our fathers, our King, and the King of our fathers, our Saviour, and the Saviour of our fathers, our Creator, the Rock of our Salvation, our Help and our Deliverer. Thy Name is from everlasting, and there is no God beside Thee. A new song did they that were delivered sing to Thy Name by the sea-shore; together did all praise and own Thee King, and say, Jehovah shall reign, world without end. Blessed be the God Who saveth Israel.’

This prayer finished, he who officiated took his place before the Ark, and there repeated what formed the prayer in the strictest sense, or certain ‘Eulogies’ or Benedictions. These are eighteen, or rather nineteen, in number, and date from different periods. But as on Sabbaths only the three first and the three last of them, which are also those undoubtedly of greatest age, were repeated, and between them certain other prayers inserted, only these six, with which the series respectively began and ended, need here find a place. The first Benediction was said with bent body. It was as follows: – 

I. ‘Blessed be the Lord our God, and the God of our fathers, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; the Great, the Mighty, and the Terrible God, the Most High God, Who showeth mercy and kindness. Who createth all things, Who remembereth the gracious promises to the fathers, and bringeth a Saviour to their children’s children, for His own Name’s sake, in love. O King, Helper, Saviour, and Shield! Blessed art Thou, O Jehovah, the Shield of Abraham.’

II. ‘Thou O Lord, art mighty for ever; Thou. Who quickenest the dead, art mighty to save. In Thy mercy Thou preservest the living, Thou quickenest the dead; in Thine abundant pity Thou bearest up those who fall, and healest those who are diseased, and loosest those who are bound, and fulfillest Thy faithful word to those who sleep in the dust. Who is like unto Thee, Lord of strength, and who can be compared to Thee, Who killest and makest alive, and causest salvation to spring forth? And faithful art Thou to give life to the dead. Blessed art Thou, Jehovah, Who quickenest the dead.’

III. ‘Thou art Holy, and Thy name is Holy. Selah. Blessed art Thou Jehovah God, the Holy One.’

After this, such prayers were inserted as were suited to the day. And here it may be noticed that considerable latitude was allowed. For, although it was not lawful to insert any petition in the three first or the three last Eulogies, but only in the intermediate Benedictions, in practice this was certainly not observed. Thus, although, by the rubric, prayer for rain and dew was to be inserted up to the season of the Passover in the ninth Benediction, yet occasionally reference to this seems also to have been made in the second Benediction, as connected with the quickening of that which is dead. Nay, some Rabbis went so far as to recommend a brief summary of the eighteen Eulogies, while yet another (R. Eliezer) repudiated all fixed forms of prayer. But gradually, and especially after the insertion of the well-known prayer against the heretics or rather Christian converts (Eulogy XI.), the present order of the eighteen Eulogies (Amidah) seems to have been established. Both the Jerusalem and the Babylon Talmud contain much on this subject which is of very great interest.

Following the order of the service, we now come to the concluding Eulogies, which were as follows: – 

XVII. (XVI.) ‘Take gracious pleasure, O Jehovah our God, in Thy people Israel and in their prayers, and in love accept the burnt-offerings of Israel, and their prayers with Thy good pleasure, and may the services of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. And O that our eyes may see it, as Thou turnest in mercy to Zion. Blessed be Thou, O Jehovah, Who restoreth His Shekhinah to Zion.’

XVIII. (XVII.) In saying this Eulogy, which was simply one of thanks, it was ordered that all should bend down. It was as follows: – ‘We give praise to Thee, because Thou art He, Jehovah, our God, and the God of our fathers, for ever and ever. The Rock of our life, the Shield of our salvation, Thou art He, from generation to generation. We laud Thee, and declare Thy praise. For our lives which are bound up in Thine Hand, for our souls which are committed to Thee, and for Thy wonders which are with us every day and for Thy marvellous deeds and Thy goodnesses which are at all seasons, evening, and morning, and midday – Thou Gracious One, for Thy compassions never end, Thou Pitying One, for Thy mercies never cease, for ever do we put our trust in Thee. And for all this, blessed and exalted be Thy Name, our King, always, world without end. And all the living bless Thee – Selah – and praise Thy Name in truth, O God, our Salvation and our Help. Selah. Blessed art Thou, Jehovah. The Gracious One is Thy Name, and to Thee it is pleasant to give praise.’

After this the priests, if any were in the Synagogue, spoke the blessing, elevating their hands up to the shoulders (in the Temple above the head). This was called the lifting up of hands. In the Synagogue the priestly blessing was spoken in three sections, the people each time responding by an Amen. Lastly, in the Synagogue, the word ‘Adonai’ was substituted for Jehovah.  If no descendants of Aaron were present, the leader of the devotions repeated the usual priestly benediction. After the benediction followed the last Eulogy, which, in its abbreviated form (as presently used in the Evening Service), is as follows: – 

XIX. (XVIII.) ‘O bestow on Thy people Israel great peace for ever. For Thou art King, and Lord of all peace. And it is good in Thine eyes to bless Thy people Israel at all times and at every hour with Thy peace. Blessed art Thou, Jehovah, Who blesseth His people Israel with peace!’

It was the practice of leading Rabbis, probably dating from very early times, to add at the close of this Eulogy certain prayers of their own, either fixed or free, of which the Talmud gives specimens. From very early times also, the custom seems to have obtained that the descendants of Aaron, before pronouncing the blessing, put off their shoes. In the benediction the priests turned towards the people, while he who led the ordinary prayers stood with his back to the people, looking towards the Sanctuary. The superstition, that it was unlawful to look at the priests while they spoke the blessing, must be regarded as of later date. According to the Mishnah, they who pronounce the benediction must have no blemish on their hands, face, or feet, so as not to attract attention; but this presumably refers to those officiating in the Temple. It is a curious statement, that priests from certain cities in Galilee were not allowed to speak the words of blessing, because their pronounciation of the gutturals was misleading. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, moral blemishes, or even sin, did not disqualify a priest from pronouncing the benediction, since it was really God, and not man, Who gave the blessing. On the other hand, strict sobriety was insisted on on such occasions. Later Judaism used the priestly benediction as a means for counteracting the effects of evil dreams. The public prayers closed with an Amen, spoken by the congregation.

The liturgical part being thus completed, one of the most important, indeed, what had been the primary object of the Synagogue service, began. The ḥazzan, or minister, approached the Ark, and brought out a roll of the Law. It was taken from its case (tēq teqah), and unwound from those cloths (mitpaḥoṯ) which held it. The time had now come for the reading of portions from the Law and the Prophets. On the Sabbath, at least seven persons were called upon successively to read portions from the Law, none of them consisting of less than three verses. On the ‘days of congregation’ (Monday and Thursday), three persons were called up; on New Moon’s Day, and on the intermediate days of a festive week, four; on feast days, five; and on the Day of Atonement, six. No doubt, there was even in ancient times a lectionary, though certainly not that presently in use, which occupies exactly a year. On the contrary, the Palestinian lection many occupied three or, according to some, three and a half years, half a Sabbatic period. Accordingly, we find that the masorah divides the Pentateuch into 154 sections. In regard to the lectionary of three and a half years we read of 175 sections. It requires, however, to be borne in mind, that preparatory to, and on certain festive days, the ordinary reading was interrupted, and portions substituted which bore on the subject of the feast. Possibly, at different periods different cycles may have obtained – those for three and a half years, three years, and even for one year.  According to the Talmud, a descendant of Aaron was always called up first to the reading; then followed a Levite, and afterwards five ordinary Israelites. As this practice, as well as that of priestly benediction, has been continued in the Synagogue from father to son, it is possible still to know who are descendants of Aaron, and who Levites. The reading of the Law was both preceded and followed by brief Benedictions.

Upon the Law followed a section from the Prophets, the so-called hap̱tarah. The origin of this practice is not known, although it is one that must evidently have met a requirement on the part of the worshippers. Certain it is, that the present lectionary from the Prophets did not exist in early times: nor does it seem unlikely that the choice of the passage was left to the reader himself. At any rate, as regarded the ordinary Sabbath days, we are told that a reader might omit one or more verses, provided there was no break. As the Hebrew was not generally understood, the meṯurgeman, or Interpreter, stood by the side of the reader, and translated into the Aramaean verse by verse, and in the section from the Prophets, or hap̱tarah, after every three verses. But the meṯurgeman was not allowed to read his translation, lest it might popularly be regarded as authoritative. This may help us in some measure to understand the popular mode of Old Testament quotations in the New Testament. So long as the substance of the text was given correctly, the meṯurgeman might paraphrase for better popular understanding. Again, it is but natural to suppose, that the meṯurgeman would prepare himself for his work by such materials as he would find to hand, among which, of course, the translation of the LXX. would hold a prominent place. This may in part account alike for the employment of the LXX., and for its Targumic modifications, in the New Testament quotations.

The reading of the section from the Prophets (the hap̱tarah) was in olden times immediately followed by an address, discourse, or sermon (derashah), that is, where a Rabbi capable of giving such instruction, or a distinguished stranger, was present. Naturally the leader of the devotions (‘the delegate of the congregation’ in this matter, or sheliaḥ ṣibur), nor the meṯurgeman, nor yet the preacher, required ordination. That was reserved for the rule of the congregation, whether in legislation or administration, doctrine or discipline.

The only points required in the preacher were the necessary qualifications, both mental and moral. When a great Rabbi employed a meṯurgeman to explain to the people His sermon, he would, of course, select him for the purpose. Such an interpreter was also called Amora, or speaker. Perhaps the Rabbi would whisper to him his remarks, while he would repeat them aloud; or else he would only condescend to give hints, which the Amora would amplify; or he would speak in Hebrew, and the Amora translate it into Aramaean, Greek, Latin, or whatever the language of the people might be, for the sermon must reach the people in the vulgar tongue. The Amora would also, at the close of the sermon, answer questions or meet objections. If the preacher was a very great man, he would, perhaps, not condescend to communicate with the Amora directly, but employ one of his students as a middleman. This was also the practice when the preacher was in mourning for a very near relative – for so important was his office that it must not be interrupted, even by the sorrows or the religious obligations of ‘mourning.’

Indeed, Jewish tradition uses the most extravagant terms to extol the institution of preaching. To say that it glorified God, and brought men back, or at least nearer to Him, or that it quenched the soul’s thirst, was as nothing. The little city, weak and besieged, but delivered by the wise man in it, served as symbol of the benefit which the preacher conferred on his hearers. The Divine Spirit rested on him, and his office conferred as much merit on him as if he had offered both the blood and the fat upon the altar of burnt offering. No wonder that tradition traced the institution back to Moses, who had directed that, previous to, and on the various festivals, addresses, explanatory of their rites, and enforcing them, should be delivered to the people. The Targum Jonathan assumes the practice in the time of the Judges; the men of the Great Synagogue are, of course, credited with it, and Shemayah and Abhtalyon are expressly designated as ‘preachers.’ How general the practice was in the time of Jesus and His Apostles, the reader of the New Testament need not be told, and its witness is fully borne out by Josephus and Philo.

Both the Jerusalem and the Babylon Talmud assume it as so common, that in several passages ‘Sabbath-observance’ and the ‘Sabbath-sermon’ are identified. Long before Hillel we read of Rabbis preaching – in Greek or Latin – in the Jewish Synagogues of Rome, just as the Apostles preached in Greek in the Synagogues of the dispersed. That this practice, and the absolute liberty of teaching, subject to the authority of the ‘chief ruler of the Synagogue,’ formed important links in the Christianisation of the world, is another evidence of that wonder-working Rule of God, which brings about marvellous results through the orderly and natural succession of events – nay, orders these means with the view to their ultimate issue.

But this is not all. We have materials for drawing an accurate picture of the preacher, the congregation, and the sermon, as in those days. We are, of course, only speaking of the public addresses in the Synagogues on Sabbaths – not of those delivered at other times or in other places. Some great Rabbi, or famed preacher, or else a distinguished stranger, is known to be in the town. He would, of course, be asked by the ruler of the Synagogue to deliver a discourse. But who is a great preacher? We know that such a reputation was much coveted, and conferred on its possessor great distinction. The popular preacher was a power, and quite as much an object of popular homage and flattery as in our days. Many a learned Rabbi bitterly complained on finding his ponderous expositions neglected, while the multitude pushed and crowded into the neighbouring Synagogue to hear the declamations of some shallow popular Haggadist. And so it came, that many cultivated this branch of theology. When a popular preacher was expected, men crowded the area of the Synagogue, while women filled the gallery. On such occasions, there was the additional satisfaction of feeling that they had done something specially meritorious in running with quick steps, and crowding into the Synagogue. For, was it not to carry out the spirit of Hos_6:3; Hos_11:10 – at least, as Rabbinically understood? Even grave Rabbis joined in this ‘pursuit to know the Lord,’ and one of them comes to the somewhat caustic conclusion, that ‘the reward of a discourse is the haste.’ However, more unworthy motives sometimes influenced some of the audience, and a Talmudic passage traces the cause of many fasts to the meetings of the two sexes on such occasions.

The type of a popular preacher was not very different from what in our days would form his chief requisites. He ought to have a good figure, a pleasant expression, and melodious voice (his words ought to be ‘like those of the bride to the bridegroom’), fluency, speech ‘sweet as honey,’ ‘pleasant as milk and honey’ – ‘finely sifted like fine flour,’ a diction richly adorned, ‘like a bride on her wedding-day;’ and sufficient confidence in his own knowledge and self-assurance never to be disconcerted. Above all he must be conciliatory, and avoid being too personal. Moses had addressed Israel as rebellious and hard-hearted, and he was not allowed to bring them into the land of promise. Elijah had upbraided them with having broken the covenant, and Elisha was immediately appointed his successor. Even Isaiah had his lips touched with burning coals, because he spoke of dwelling among a people of sinful lips.  As for the mental qualifications of the preacher, he must know his Bible well. As a bride knows properly to make use of her twenty-four ornaments, so must the preacher of the twenty-four books of the Bible. He must carefully prepare his subject – he is ‘to hear himself’ before the people hear him. But whatever he may be or do, he must be attractive. In earlier times the sermon might have consisted of a simple exposition of some passages from Scripture, or book of Sirach, which later was treated and quoted by some of the Rabbis almost as if it had been canonical. But this, or the full discussion of a single text (קדה, to bore) would probably not be so attractive as the adaptation of a text to present circumstances, or even its modification and alteration for such purposes. There were scarcely bounds to the liberties taken by the preacher. He would divide a sentence, cut off one or two syllables from a word and join them to the next, so producing a different meaning, or giving a new interpretation to the text. Perhaps the strangest method was that of introducing Greek words and expressions into the Hebrew, and this not only to give a witty repartee, but in illustration of Scripture. Nay, many instances occur, in which a Hebrew word is, from the similarity of sound with the Greek, rendered as if it were actually Greek, and thus a new meaning is given to a passage.

If such licence was taken, it seems a comparatively small thing that a doctrine was derived from a word, a particle, or even a letter. But, as already stated, the great point was to attract the hearers. Parables, stories, allegories, witticisms, strange and foreign words, absurd legends, in short, anything that might startle an audience, was introduced. Sometimes a discourse was entirely Haggadic; at others, the Haggadah served to introduce the Halakhah. Sometimes the object of the preacher was purely homiletical; at others, he dealt chiefly with the explanation of Scripture, or of the rites and meaning of festivals. A favourite method was that which derived its name from the stringing together of pearls (ḥaraz), when a preacher, having quoted a passage or section from the Pentateuch, strung on to it another and like-sounding, or really similar, from the Prophets and the Hagiographia. Or else he would divide a sentence, generally under three heads, and connect with each of the clauses a separate doctrine, and then try to support it by Scripture. It is easy to imagine to what lengths such preachers might go in their misinterpretation and misrepresentations of the plain text of Holy Scripture. And yet a collection of short expositions (the pesiqta), which, though not dating from that period, may yet fairly be taken as giving a good idea of this method of exposition, contains not a little that is fresh, earnest useful, and devotional. It is interesting to know that, at the close of his address, the preacher very generally referred to the great Messianic hope of Israel. The services closed with a short prayer, or what we would term an ‘ascription.’

We can now picture to ourselves the Synagogue, its worship, and teaching. We can see the leader of the people’s devotions as (according to Talmudic direction) he first refuses, with mock-modesty, the honour conferred on him by the chief ruler; then, when urged, prepares to go; and when pressed a third time, goes up with slow and measured steps to the lectern, and then before the Ark. We can imagine how one after another, standing and facing the people, unrolls and holds in his hand a copy of the Law or of the Prophets, and reads from the Sacred Word, the meṯurgeman interpreting. Finally, we can picture it, how the preacher would sit down and begin his discourse, none interrupting him with questions till he had finished, when a succession of objections, answers, or inquiries might await the Amora, if the preacher had employed such help. And help it certainly was not in many cases, to judge by the depreciatory and caustic remarks, which not infrequently occur, as to the manners, tone, vanity, self-conceit, and silliness of the Amora   who as he stood beside the Rabbi, thought far more of attracting attention and applause to himself, then of benefiting his hearers. Hence some Rabbis would only employ special and trusted interpreters of their own, who were above fifty years of age. In short, so far as the sermon was concerned, the impression it produced must have been very similar to what we know the addresses of the monks in the Middle Ages to have wrought. All the better can we understand, even from the human aspect, how the teaching of Jesus, alike in its substance and form, in its manner and matter, differed from that of the scribes; how multitudes would hang entranced on His word; and how, everywhere and by all, its impression was felt to be overpowering.

But it is certainly not the human aspect alone which here claims our attention. The perplexed inquiry: ‘Whence hath this man this wisdom and this knowledge?’ must find another answer than the men of Nazareth could suggest, although to those in our days also who deny His Divine character, this must ever seem an unanswered and unanswerable question.

(Mat_4:13-17; Mar_1:14, Mar_1:15; Luk 4:15-32)

The visit to Nazareth was in many respects decisive. It presented by anticipation an epitome of the history of the Christ. He came to His own, and His own received Him not. The first time He taught in the Synagogue, as the first time He taught in the Temple, they cast Him out. On the one and the other occasion, they questioned His authority, and they asked for a ‘sign.’ In both instances, the power which they challenged was, indeed, claimed by Christ, but its display, in the manner which they expected, refused. The analogy seems to extend even farther – and if a misrepresentation of what Jesus had said when purifying the Temple formed the ground of the final false charge against Him, the taunt of the Nazarenes: ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ found an echo in the mocking cry, as He hung on the Cross: ‘He saved others, Himself He cannot save.’

It is difficult to understand how, either on historical grounds, or after study of the character of Christ, the idea could have arisen that Jesus had offered, or that He had claimed, to teach on that Sabbath in the Synagogue of Nazareth. Had He attempted what, alike in spirit and form, was so contrary to all Jewish notions, the whole character of the act would have been changed. As it was, the contrast with those by whom He was surrounded is almost as striking, as the part which He bore in the scene. We take it for granted, that what had so lately taken place in Cana, at only four miles’ distance, or, to speak more accurately, in Capernaum, had become known in Nazareth. It raised to the highest pitch of expectancy the interest and curiosity previously awakened by the reports, which the Galileans had brought from Jerusalem, and by the general fame which had spread about Jesus. They were now to test, whether their countryman would be equal to the occasion, and do in His own city what they had heard had been done for Capernaum. To any ordinary man the return to Nazareth in such circumstances must have been an ordeal. Not so to the Christ, Who, in utter self-forgetfulness, had only this one aim of life – to do the Will of Him that sent Him. And so His bearing that day in the Synagogue is itself evidence, that while in, He was not of, that time.

Realising the scene on such occasions, we mark the contrast. As there could be no un-Jewish forwardness on the part of Jesus, so, assuredly, would there be none of that mock-humility of reluctance to officiate, in which Rabbinism delighted. If, as in the circumstances seems likely, Jesus commenced the first part of the service, and then pronounced before the ‘Ark’ those Eulogies which were regarded as, in the strictest sense, the prayer (tep̱ilah), we can imagine – though we can scarcely realise – the reverent solemnity, which would seem to give a new meaning to each well-remembered sentence. And in His mouth it all had a new meaning. We cannot know what, if any, petitions He inserted, though we can imagine what their spirit would have been. And now, one by one, Priest, Levite, and, in succession, five Israelites, had read from the Law. There is no reason to disturb the almost traditional idea, that Jesus Himself read the concluding portion from the Prophets, or the so-called hap̱tarah. The whole narrative seems to imply this. Similarly, it is most likely that the hap̱tarah for that day was taken from the prophecies of Isaiah, and that it included the passage quoted by the Evangelist as read by the Lord Jesus. We know that the ‘rolls’ on which the Law was written were distinct from those of the Prophets; and every probability points to it, that those of the Prophets, at least the Greater, were also written on separate scrolls. In this instance we are expressly told, that the minister ‘delivered unto Him the book of the prophet Esaias,’ we doubt not, for the hap̱tarah, and that, ‘when He had unrolled the book,’ He ‘found’ the place from which the Evangelist makes quotation.

When unrolling, and holding the scroll, much more than the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah must have been within range of His eyes. On the other hand, it is quite certain that the verses quoted by the Evangelist could not have formed the whole hap̱tarah. According to traditional rule, the hap̱tarah ordinarily consisted of not less than twenty-one verses, though, if the passage was to be ‘targumed,’ or a sermon to follow, that number might be shortened to seven, five, or even three verses. Now the passage quoted by Luke consists really of only one verse (Isa_61:1), together with a clause from Isa_58:6, and the first clause of Isa_61:2. This could scarcely have the whole hap̱tarah. There are other reasons also against this supposition. No doubt Jesus read alike the hap̱tarah and the text of His discourse in Hebrew, and then ‘targumed’ or translated it: while Luke, as might be expected quotes (with but two trifling alterations) from the rendering of the LXX. But, on investigation, it appears that one clause is omitted from Isa_61:1. and that between the close of Isa_61:1 and the clause of Isa_61:2, which is added, a clause is inserted from the LXX. of Isa_58:6. This could scarcely have been done in reading the hap̱tarah. But if, as we suppose, the passages quoted formed the introductory text of Christ’s discourse, such quotation and combination were not only in accordance with Jewish customs but formed part of the favourite mode of teaching – the ḥaraz – or stringing, like pearls, passage to passage, illustrative of each other. In the present instance, the portion of the scroll which Jesus unrolled may have exhibited in close proximity the two passages which formed the introductory text (the so-called peṯiḥah). But this is of comparatively small interest, since both the omission of a clause from Isa_61:1, and the insertion of another adapted from Isa_58:6, were evidently intentional. It might be presumptuous to attempt stating the reasons which may have influenced the Saviour in this, and yet some of them will instinctively occur to every thoughtful reader.

It was, indeed, Divine ‘wisdom’ – ‘the Spirit of the Lord’ upon Him, which directed Jesus in the choice of such a text for His first Messianic Sermon. It struck the key-note to the whole of His Galilean ministry. The ancient Synagogue regarded Isa_61:1, Isa_61:2, as one of the three passages, in which mention of the Holy Ghost was connected with the promised redemption. In this view, the application which the passage received in the discourse of our Lord was peculiarly suitable. For the words in which Luke reports what followed the peṯiḥah, or introductory text, seem rather a summary, than either the introduction or part of the discourse of Christ. ‘This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.’ A summary this, which may well serve to guide in all preaching. As regards its form, it would be: so to present the teaching of Holy Scripture, as that it can be drawn together in the focus of one sentence; as regards its substance, that this be the one focus: all Scripture fulfilled by a present Christ. And this – in the Gospel which He bears to the poor, the release which He announces to the captives, the healing which He offers to those whom sin had blinded, and the freedom He brings to them who were bruised; and all as the trumpet-blast of God’s Jubilee into His world of misery, sin, and want! A year thus begun would be glorious indeed in the blessings it gave.

There was not a word in all this of what common Jewish expectancy would have connected with, nay, chiefly accentuated in an announcement of the Messianic redemption; not a word to raise carnal hopes, or flatter Jewish pride. Truly, it was the most un-Jewish discourse for a Jewish Messiah of those days, with which to open His Ministry. And yet such was the power of these ‘words of grace,’ that the hearers hung spell-bound upon them. Every eye was fastened on Him with hungry eagerness. For the time they forgot all else – Who it was that addressed them, even the strangeness of the message, so unspeakably in contrast to any preaching of Rabbi or Teacher that had been heard in that Synagogue. Indeed, one can scarcely conceive the impression which the Words of Christ must have produced, when promise and fulfilment, hope and reality, mingled, and wants of the heart, hitherto unrealised, were wakened, only to be more than satisfied. It was another sphere, another life. Truly, the anointing of the Holy Ghost was on the Preacher, from Whose lips dropped these ‘words of grace.’ And if such was the announcement of the Year of God’s Jubilee, what blessings must it bear in its bosom!

The discourse had been spoken, and the breathless silence with which, even according to Jewish custom, it had been listened to, gave place to the usual after-sermon hum of an Eastern Synagogue. On one point all were agreed: that they were marvellous words of grace, which had proceeded out of His mouth. And still the Preacher waited, with deep longing of soul, for some question, which would have marked the spiritual application of what He had spoken. Such deep longing of soul is kindred to, and passes into almost sternness, just because he who so longs is so intensely in earnest, in the conviction of the reality of his message. It was so with Jesus in Nazareth. They were indeed making application of the Sermon to the Preacher, but in quite different manner from that to which His discourse had pointed. It was not the fulfilment of the Scripture in him, but the circumstance, that such an one as the Son of Joseph, their village carpenter, should have spoken such words, that attracted their attention. Not, as we take it, in a malevolent spirit, but altogether unspiritually, as regarded the effect of Christ’s words, did one and another, here and there, express wonderment to his neighbour.

They had heard, and now they would fain have seen. But already the holy indignation of Him, Whom they only knew as Joseph’s son, was kindled. The turn of matters; their very admiration and expectation; their vulgar, unspiritual comments: it was all so entirely contrary to the Character, the Mission, and the Words of Jesus. No doubt they would next expect, that here in His own city, and all the more because it was such, He would do what they had heard had taken place in Capernaum. It was the world-old saying, as false, except to the ear, and as speciously popular as most such sayings: ‘Charity begins at home’ – or, according to the Jewish proverb, and in application to the special circumstances: ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ Whereas, if there is any meaning in truth and principle; if there was any meaning and reality in Christ’s Mission, and in the discourse He had just spoken, Charity does not begin at home; and ‘Physician, heal thyself’ is not of the Gospel for the poor, nor yet the preaching of God’s Jubilee, but that of the Devil, whose works Jesus had come to destroy. How could He, in His holy abhorrence and indignation, say this better than by again repeating, though now with different application, that sad experience, ‘No prophet is accepted in his own country,’ which He could have hoped was for ever behind Him; and by pointing to those two Old Testament instances of it, whose names and authority were most frequently on Jewish lips? Not they who were ‘their own,’ but they who were most receptive in faith – not Israel, but Gentiles, were those most markedly favoured in the ministry of Elijah and of Elisha.

As we read the report of Jesus’ words, we perceive only dimly that aspect of them which stirred the wrath of His hearers to the utmost, and yet we do understand it. That He should have turned so fully the light upon the Gentiles, and flung its large shadows upon them; that ‘Joseph’s Son’ should have taken up this position towards them; that He would make to them spiritual application unto death of His sermon, since they would not make it unto life: it stung them to the quick. Away He must out of His city; it could not bear His Presence any longer, not even on that holy Sabbath. Out they thrust Him from the Synagogue; forth they pressed Him out of the city; on they followed, and around they beset Him along the road by the brow of the hill on which the city is built – perhaps to that western angle, at present pointed out as the site. This, with the unspoken intention of crowding Him over the cliff, which there rises abruptly about forty feet out of the valley beneath. If we are correct in indicating the locality, the road here bifurcates, and we can conceive how Jesus, Who had hitherto, in the silence of sadness, allowed Himself almost mechanically to be pressed onwards by the surrounding crowd, now turned, and by that look of commanding majesty, the forthbreaking of His Divine Being, which ever and again wrought on those around miracles of subjection, constrained them to halt and give way before Him, while unharmed He passed through their midst. So did Israel of old pass through the cleft waves of the sea, which the wonder-working rod of Moses had converted into a wall of safety. Yet, although He parted from it in judgment, not thus could the Christ have finally and for ever left His own Nazareth.

Cast out of His own city, Jesus pursued His solitary way towards Capernaum. There, at least, devoted friends and believing disciples would welcome Him. There, also, a large draught of souls would fill the Gospel-net. Capernaum would be His Galilean home. Here He would, on the Sabbath-days, preach in that Synagogue, of which the good centurion was the builder, and Jairus the chief ruler. These names, and the memories connected with them, are a sufficient comment on the effect of His preaching: that ‘His word was with power.’ In Capernaum, also, was the now believing and devoted household of the court-officer, whose only son the Word of Christ, spoken at a distance, had restored to life. Here also, or in the immediate neighbourhood, was the home of His earliest and closest disciples, the brothers Simon and Andrew, and of James and John, the sons of Zebedee.

From the character of the narrative, and still more from the later call of these four, it would seem that, after the return of Jesus from Judaea into Galilee, His disciples had left Him, probably in Cana, and returned to their homes and ordinary avocations. They were not yet called to forsake all and follow Him – not merely to discipleship, but to fellowship and Apostolate. When He went from Cana to Nazareth, they returned to Capernaum. They knew He was near them. Presently He came; and now His Ministry was in their own Capernaum, or in its immediate neighbourhood.

For Capernaum was not the only place where He taught. Rather was it the centre for itinerancy through all that district, to preach in its Synagogues. Amidst such ministry of quiet ‘power,’ chiefly alone and unattended by His disciples, the summer passed. Truly, it was summer in the ancient land of Zebulun and Naphtali, in the Galilee of the Gentiles, when the glorious Light that had risen chased away the long winter’s darkness, and those who had been the first exiles in Assyrian bondage were the first brought back to Israel’s true liberty, and by Israel’s Messiah-King. To the writer of the first Gospel, as, long years afterwards, he looked back on this, the happy time when he had first seen the Light, till it had sprung up even to him ‘in the region and shadow of death,’ it must have been a time of peculiarly bright memories. How often, as he sat at the receipt of custom, must he have seen Jesus passing by; how often must he have heard His Words, some, perhaps, spoken to himself, but all falling like good seed into the field of his heart, and preparing him at once and joyously to obey the summons when it came: Follow Me! And not to him only, but to many more, would it be a glowing, growing time of heaven’s own summer.

There was a dim tradition in the Synagogue, that this prediction, ‘The people that walk in the darkness see a great light,’ referred to the new light, with which God would enlighten the eyes of those who had penetrated into the mysteries of Rabbinic lore, enabling them to perceive concerning ‘loosing and binding, concerning what was clean and what was unclean.’ Others regarded it as a promise to the early exiles, fulfilled when the great liberty came to them. To Levi-Matthew it seemed as if both interpretations had come true in those days of Christ’s first Galilean ministry. Nay, he saw them combined in a higher unity when to their eyes, enlightened by the great Light, came the now knowledge of what was bound and what loosed, what unclean and clean, though quite differently from what Judaism had declared it to them; and when, in that orient Sun, the promise of liberty to long-banished Israel was at last seen fulfilled. It was, indeed, the highest and only true fulfilment of that prediction of Isaiah, in a history where all was prophetic, every partial fulfilment only an unfolding and opening of the bud, and each symbolic of further unfolding till, in the fulness of time, the great Reality came, to which all that was prophetic in Israel’s history and predictions pointed. And so as, in the evening of his days, Levi-Matthew looked back to distant Galilee, the glow of the setting sun seemed once more to rest on that lake, as it lay bathed in its sheen of gold. It lit up that city, those shores, that custom-house; it spread far off, over those hills, and across the Jordan. Truly, and in the only true sense, had then the promise been fulfilled: ‘To them which sat in the region and shadow of death, light is sprung up.’

(John 5)

The shorter days of early autumn had come, and the country stood in all its luxurious wealth of beauty and fruitfulness, as Jesus passed from Galilee to what, in the absence of any certain evidence, we must still be content to call ‘the Unknown Feast’ in Jerusalem. Thus much, however, seems clear that it was either the ‘Feast of Wood-offering on the 15th of Abh (in August), when, amidst demonstrations of joy, willing (givers brought from all parts of the country the wood required for the service of the Altar; or else the ‘Feast of Trumpets’ on the 1st of Tishri (about the middle of September), which marked the beginning of the New (civil) Year. The journey of Christ to that Feast and its results are not mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels, because that Judaean ministry which, if the illustration be lawful, was the historical thread on which John strung his record of what the Word spake, lay, in great measure, beyond their historical standpoint. Besides, this and similar events belonged, indeed, to that grand Self-Manifestation of Christ, with the corresponding growth of opposition consequent upon it, which it was the object of the Fourth Gospel to set forth; but it led to no permanent results, and so was outside the scope of the more popular, pragmatic record, which the other Gospels had in view.

There may in this instance, however, have been other reasons also for their silence. It has already been indicated that, during the summer of Christ’s first Galilean, ministry, when Capernaum was His centre of action, the disciples had returned to their homes and usual avocations, while Jesus moved about chiefly alone and unattended. This explains the circumstance of a second call, even to His most intimate and closest followers. It also accords best with that gradual development in Christ’s activity, which commencing with the more private teaching of the new Preacher of Righteousness in the villages by the lake, or in the Synagogues, expanded into that publicity in which He at last appears, surrounded by His Apostles, attended by the loving ministry of those to whom He had brought healing of body or soul, and followed by a multitude which everywhere pressed around Him for teaching and help.

This more public activity commenced with the return of Jesus from ‘the Unknown Feast’ in Jerusalem. There He had, in answer to the challenge of the Jewish authorities, for the first time set forth His Messianic claims in all their fulness. And there, also, He had for the first time encountered that active persecution unto death, of which Golgotha was the logical outcome. This Feast, then, was the time of critical decision. Accordingly, as involving the separation from the old state and the commencement of a new condition of things, it was immediately followed by the call of His disciples to a new Apostleship. In this view, we can also better understand the briefness of the notices of His first Galilean ministry, and how, after Christ’s return from that Feast, His teaching became more full, and the display of His miraculous power more constant and public.

It seems only congruous, accordant with all the great decisive steps of Him in Whose footprints the disciples trod, only after He had marked them, as it were, with His Blood – that He should have gone up to that Feast alone and unattended. That such had been the case, has been inferred by some from this, that the narrative of the healing of the impotent man reads so Jewish, that the account of it appears to have been derived by John from a Jew at Jerusalem.  Others have come to the same conclusion from the meagreness of details about the event. But it seems implied in the narrative itself, and the marked and exceptional absence of any reference to disciples leads to the obvious conclusion, that they had not been with their Master.

But, if Jesus was alone and unattended at the Feast, the question arises, whence the report was derived of what He said in reply to the challenge of the Jews? Here the answer naturally suggests itself, that the Master Himself may, at some later period of His life – perhaps during His last stay in Jerusalem – have communicated to His disciples, or else to him who stood nearest to Him, the details of what had passed on the first occasion when the Jewish authorities had sought to extinguish His Messianic claims in His blood. If that communication was made when Jesus was about to be offered up, it would also account for what otherwise might seem a difficulty: the very developed form of expression in which His relation to the Father, and His own Office and Power, are presented. We can understand how, from the very first, all this should have been laid before the teachers of Israel. But in view of the organic development of Christ’s teaching, we could scarcely expect it to have been expressed in such very full terms, till near the close of His Ministry.

But we are anticipating. The narrative transports us at once to what, at the time, seems to have been a well-known locality in Jerusalem, though all attempts to identify it, or even to explain the name Bethesda, have hitherto failed. All we know is, that it was a pool enclosed within five porches, by the sheep-market, presumably close to the ‘Sheep-Gate.’ This, as seems most likely, opened from the busy northern suburb of markets, bazaars, and workshops, eastwards upon the road which led over the Mount of Olives and Bethany to Jericho. In that case, most probability would attach to the identification of the Pool Bethesda with a pool somewhat north of the so-called Birket Israîl. At present it is wholly filled with rubbish, but in the time of the Crusaders it seems to have borne the name of the Sheep-pond, and, it was thought, traces of the five porches could still be detected. Be this as it may, it certainly bore in the ‘Hebrew’ – or rather Aramaean – ‘tongue,’ the name beṯesda. No doubt this name was designative, though the common explanations – beṯ ḥisda (so most modern writers, and Watkins) ‘House of Mercy’ (?), beṯ Isteḇa (אִסְטְבָא Delitzsch), ‘House of Porches,’ and beṯ zeyṯa (Westcott) ‘House of the Olive’ – seem all unsatisfactory. More probability attaches to the rendering beṯ Asuṯa (Wuensche), or beṯ Asyaṯa, ‘House of Healing.’ But as this derivation offers linguistic difficulties, we would suggest that the second part of the name (Beth-Esda) was really a Greek word Aramaised. Here two different derivations suggest themselves. The root-word of Esda might either express to ‘become well’ – Beth ἱᾶσθαι – or something akin to the Rabbinic zit  (זיט =ζῆθι). In that case, the designation would agree with an ancient reading of the name, Bethzatha. Or else, the name Bethesda might combine, according to a not uncommon Rabbinic practice, the Hebrew Beth with some Aramaised form derived from the Greek word ζέω, ‘to boil’ or ‘bubble up’ (subst. ζέσις); in which case it would mean ‘the House of Bubbling-up,’ viz. water. Any of the three derivations just suggested would not only give an apt designation for the pool, but explain why John, contrary to his usual practice, does not give a Greek equivalent for a Hebrew term.

All this is, however, of very subordinate importance, compared with the marvellous facts of the narrative itself. In the five porches surrounding this pool lay ‘a great multitude of the impotent,’ in anxious hope of a miraculous cure. We can picture to ourselves the scene. The popular superstitious, which gave rise to what we would regard as a peculiarly painful exhibition of human misery of body and soul, is strictly true to the times and the people. Even now travellers describe a similar concourse of poor crippled sufferers, on their miserable pallets or on rugs, around the mineral springs near Tiberias, filling, in true Oriental fashion, the air with their lamentations. In the present instance there would be even more occasion for this than around any ordinary thermal spring. For the popular idea was, that an Angel descended into the water, causing it to bubble up, and that only he who first stepped into the pool would be cured. As thus only one person could obtain benefit, we may imagine the lamentations of the ‘many’ who would, perhaps, day by day, be disappointed in their hopes. This bubbling up of the water was, of course, due not to supernatural but to physical causes. Such intermittent springs are not uncommon, and to this day the so-called ‘Fountain of the Virgin’ in Jerusalem exhibits the phenomenon. It is scarcely necessary to say, that the Gospel-narrative does not ascribe this ‘troubling of the waters’ to Angelic agency, nor endorses the belief, that only the first who afterwards entered them, could be healed. This was evidently the belief of the impotent man, as of all the waiting multitude. But the words in Joh_5:4 of our Authorised Version, and perhaps, also, the last clause of Joh_5:3, are admittedly an interpolation.

In another part of this book it is explained at length, how Jewish belief at the time attached such agency to Angels, and how it localised (so to speak) special Angels in springs and rivers; and we shall have presently to show, what were the popular notions about miraculous cures. If, however, the belief about Bethesda arose merely from the mistaken ideas about the cause of this bubbling of the water, the question would naturally suggest itself, whether any such cases as those described had ever really occurred, and, if not, how such a superstition could have continued. But that such healing might actually occur in the circumstances, no one would be prepared to deny, who has read the accounts of pilgrimages to places of miraculous cure, or who considers the influence of a firm expectancy on the imagination, especially in diseases which have their origin in the nervous system. This view of the matter is confirmed, and Scripture still further vindicated from even the faintest appearance of endorsing the popular superstition, by the use of the article in the expression ‘a multitude of the impotent’ (πλῆθος τῶν ἀσθενούντων), which marks this impotence as used in the generic sense, while the special diseases, afterwards enumerated without the article, are ranged under it as instances of those who were thus impotent. Such use of the Greek term, as not applying to any one specific malady, is vindicated by a reference to Mat_8:17 and Mar_6:56, and by its employment by the physician Luke. It is, of course, not intended to imply, that the distempers to which this designation is given had all their origin in the nervous system; but we argue that, if the term ‘impotent’ was the general, of which the diseases mentioned in Joh_5:3 were the specific – in other words, that, if it was an ‘impotence,’ of which these were the various manifestations – it may indicate, that they all, so far as relieved, had one common source, and this, as we would suggest, in the nervous system.

With all reverence, we can in some measure understand, what feelings must have stirred the heart of Jesus, in view of this suffering, waiting ‘great multitude.’ Why, indeed, did He go into those five porches, since He had neither disease to cure, nor cry for help had come to Him from those who looked for relief to far other means? Not, surely, from curiosity. But as one longs to escape from the stifling atmosphere of a scene of worldly pomp, with its glitter and unreality, into the clearness of the evening-air, so our Lord may have longed to pass from the glitter and unreality of those who held rule the Temple, or who occupied the seat of Moses in their Academies, to what was the atmosphere of His Life on earth, His real Work, among that skittering, ignorant multitude, which, in its sorrow, raised a piteous, longing cry for help where it had been misdirected to seek it.

And thus we can here also perceive the deep internal connection between Christ’s miracle of hearing ‘the impotent man’ and the address of mingled sadness and severity, in which He afterwards set before the Masters in Israel the one truth fundamental in all things. We have only, so to speak, to reverse the formal order and succession of that discourse, to gain an insight into what prompted Jesus to go to Bethesda, and by His power to perform this healing. He had been in the Temple at the Feast; He had necessarily been in contact – it could not be otherwise, when in the Temple – with the great ones of Israel. What a stifling atmosphere there of glitter and unreality! What had He in common with those who ‘received glory one of another, and the glory which cometh from the One only God’ they sought not? How could such men believe? The first meaning, and the object of His Life and Work, was as entirely different from their aims and perceptions, as were the respective springs of their inner being. They clung and appealed to Moses; to Moses, whose successors they claimed to be, let them go! Their elaborate searching and sifting of the Law in hope that, by a subtle analysis of its every particle and letter, by inferences from, and a careful drawing of a prohibitive hedge around, its letter, they would possess themselves of eternal life, what did it all come to? Utterly self-deceived, and far from the truth in their elaborate attempts to outdo each other in local ingenuity, they would, while rejecting the Messiah sent from God, at last become the victims of a coarse Messianic impostor. And even in the present, what was it all? Only the letter – the outward! All the lessons of their past miraculous history had been utterly lost on them. What had there been of the merely outward in its miracles and revelations? It had been the witness of the Father; but this was the very element which, amidst their handling of the external form, they perceived not. Nay, not only the unheard Voice of the Father, but also the heard voice of the Prophets – a voice which they might have heard even in John the Baptist. They heard, but did not perceive it – just as, in increasing measure, Christ’s sayings and doings, and the Father and His testimony, were not perceived. And so all hastened on to the judgment of final unbelief, irretrievable loss, and self-caused condemnation. It was all utterly mistaken; utter, and, alas! guilty perversion, their elaborate trifling with the most sacred things, while around them were suffering, perishing men, stretching ‘lame hands’ into emptiness, and wailing out their mistaken hopes into the eternal silence.

While they were discussing the niceties of what constituted labour on a Sabbath, such as what infringed its sacred rest or what constituted a burden, multitudes of them who laboured and were heavy laden were left to perish in their ignorance. That was the Sabbath, and the God of the Sabbath of Pharisaism; this the rest, the enlightenment, the hope for them who laboured and were heavy laden, and who longed and knew not where to find the true Sabbatismos! Nay, if the Christ had not been the very opposite of all that Pharisaism sought, He would not have been the Orient Sun of the Eternal Sabbath. But the God Who ever worked in love, Whose rest was to give rest, Whose Sabbath to remove burdens, was His Father. He knew Him; He saw His working; He was in fellowship of love, of work, of power with Him. He had come to loose every yoke, to give life, to bring life, to be life – because He had life: life in its fullest sense. For, contact with Him, whatever it may be, gives life: to the diseased, health; to the spiritually dead, the life of the soul; to the dead in their graves, the life of resurrection. And all this was the meaning of Holy Scripture, when it pointed forward to the Lord’s Anointed; and all this was not merely His own, but the Father’s Will – the Mission which He had given Him, the Work which He had sent Him to do.

Translate this into deed, as all His teachings have been, are, and will be, and we have the miraculous cure of the impotent man, with its attendant circumstances. Or, conversely, translate that deed, with its attendant circumstances, into words, and we have the discourse of our Lord. Moreover, all this is fundamental to the highest understanding of our Lord’s history. And, therefore, we understand how, many years afterwards, the beloved disciple gave a place to this miracle, when, in the full ripeness of spiritual discernment, he chose for record in his Gospel from among those ‘many signs,’ which Jesus truly did, only five as typical, like the five porches of the great Bethesda of His help to the impotent, or like the five divisions into which the Psalter of praise was arranged. As he looked back, from the height where he stood at his journey’s end, to where the sun was setting in purple and golden glory far across the intervening landscape, amidst its varying scenes this must have stood out before his sight, as what might show to us that ‘Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we might have life through His Name.

And so, understanding from what He afterwards said to ‘the Jews’ what He thought and felt in going thither, we are better prepared to follow the Christ to Bethesda. Two pictures must have been here simultaneously present to His mind. On the one side, a multitude whose sufferings and false expectancies rose, like the wail of the starving for bread; and, on the other side, the neighbouring Temple, with its priesthood and teachers, who, in their self-seeking and the trifling of their religious externalism, neither understood, heard, nor would have cared for such a cry. If there was an Israel, Prince with God, and if there was a God of the Covenant, this must not, cannot be; and Christ goes to Bethesda as Israel’s Messiah, the Truth, and the Life. There was twofold suffering there, and it were difficult to know which would have stirred Him most: that of the body, or the mistaken earnestness which so trustfully looked for Heaven’s relief – yet within such narrow limits as the accident or good fortune of being first pushed into the Angel-troubled waters. But this was also a true picture of His people in their misery, and in their narrow notions of God and of the conditions of His blessing. And now Israel’s Messiah had at last come. What would we expect Him to have done? Surely not to preach controversial or reformatory doctrines; but to do, if it were in Him, and in doing to speak. And so in this also the Gospel-narrative proves itself true, by telling that He did, what alone would be true in a Messiah, the Son of God. It is, indeed, impossible to think of Incarnate Deity – and this, be it remembered, is the fundamental postulate of the Gospels – as brought into contact with misery, disease, and death without their being removed. That power went forth from Him always, everywhere, and to all, is absolutely necessary, if He was the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. And so the miracles, as we mistakenly term the result of the contact of God with man, of the Imanuel (God with us), are not only the golden ladder which leads up to the Miracle, God manifest in the flesh, but the steps by which He descends from His height to our lowliness.

The waters had not yet been ‘troubled,’ when He stood among that multitude of sufferers and their attendant friends. It was in those breathless moments of the intense suspense of expectancy, when every eye was fixed on the pool, that the eye of the Saviour searched for the most wretched object among them all. In him, as a typical case, could He best do and teach that for which He had come. This ‘impotent’ man, for thirty-eight years a hopeless sufferer, without attendant or friend among those whom misery – in this also the true outcome of sin – made so intensely selfish; and whose sickness was really the consequence of his sin, and not merely in the sense which the Jews attached to it – this now seemed the fittest object for power and grace. For, most marked in this history is the entire spontaneity of our Lord’s help. It is idle to speak either of faith or of receptiveness on the man’s part. The essence of the whole lies in the utter absence of both; in Christ’s raising, as it were, the dead, and calling the things that are not as though they were. This, the fundamental thought concerning His Mission and power as the Christ shines forth as the historical background in Christ’s subsequent, explanatory discourse. The ‘Wilt thou be made whole?’ with which Jesus drew the man’s attention to Himself, was only to probe and lay bare his misery. And then came the word of power, or rather the power spoken forth, which made him whole every whit. Away from this pool, in which there was no healing; away – for the Son of God had come to him with the outflowing of His power and pitying help, and he was made whole. Away with his bed, not, although it was the holy Sabbath, but just because it was the Sabbath of holy rest and holy delight!

In the general absorbedness of all around, no ear, but that to which it had been spoken, had heard what the Saviour had said. The waters had not been troubled, and the healing had been all unseen. Before the healed man, scarcely conscious of what had passed, had, with new-born vigour, gathered himself up and rolled together his coverlet to hasten after Him, Jesus had already withdrawn.  In that multitude, all thinking only of their own sorrows and wants, He had come and gone unobserved. But they all now knew and observed this miracle of healing, as they saw this unbefriended and most wretched of them all healed, without the troubling of waters or first immersion in them. Then there was really help in Israel, and help not limited to such external means! How could Christ have taught that multitude, nay, all Jerusalem and Jewry, all this, as well as all about Himself, but by what He did? And so we learn here also another aspect of miracles, as necessary for those who, weary of Rabbinic wrangling, could, in their felt impotence, only learn by what He did that which He would say.

We know it not, but we cannot believe that on that day, nor, perhaps, thenceforth on any other day, any man stepped for healing into the bubbling waters of Bethesda. Rather would they ask the healed man, Whose was the word that had brought him healing? But he knew Him not. Forth he stepped into God’s free air, a new man. It was truly the holy Sabbath within, as around him; but he thought not of the day, only of the rest and relief it had brought. It was the holy Sabbath, and he carried on it his bed. If he remembered that it was the Sabbath, on which it was unlawful to carry forth anything – a burden, he would not be conscious that it was a burden, or that he had any burden; but very conscious that He, Who had made him whole, had bidden him take up his bed and walk. These directions had been bound up with the very word (‘Rise’) in which his healing had come. That was enough for him. And in this lay the beginning and root of his inward healing. Here was simple trust, unquestioning obedience to the unseen, unknown, but real Saviour. For he believed Him, and therefore trusted in Him, that He must be right; and so, trusting without questioning, he obeyed.

The Jews saw him, as from Bethesda he carried home his ‘burden.’ Such as that he carried were their only burdens. Although the law of Sabbath-observance must have been made stricter in later Rabbinic development, when even the labour of moving the sick into the waters of Bethesda would have been unlawful, unless there had been present danger to life, yet, admittedly, this carrying of the bed was an infringement of the Sabbatic law, as interpreted by traditionalism. Most characteristically, it was this external infringement which they saw, and nothing else; it was the Person Who had commanded it Whom they would know, not Him Who had made whole the impotent man. Yet this is quite natural, and perhaps not so different from what we may still witness among ourselves.

It could not have been long after this – most likely, as soon as possible – that the healed man and his Healer met in the Temple. What He then said to him, completed the inward healing. On the ground of his having been healed, let him be whole. As he trusted and obeyed Jesus in the outward cure, so let him now inwardly and morally trust and obey. Here also this looking through the external to the internal, through the temporal to the spiritual and eternal, which is so characteristic of the after-discourse of Jesus, nay, of all His discourses and of His deeds, is most marked. The healed man now knew to Whom he owed faith, gratitude, and trust of obedience; and the consequences of this knowledge must have been incalculable. It would make him a disciple in the truest sense. And this was the only additional lesson which he, as each of us, must learn individually and personally: that the man healed by Christ stands in quite another position, as regards the morally right, from what he did before – not only before his healing, but even before his felt sickness, so that, if he were to go back to sin, or rather, as the original implies, continue to sin,’ a thing infinitely worse would come to him.

It seems an idle question, why the healed man told the Jews that it was Jesus. It was only natural that he should do so. Rather do we ask, How did he know that He Who had spoken to him was Jesus? Was it by the surrounding of keen-eyed, watchful Rabbis, or by the contradiction of sinners? Certain we are, that it was far better Jesus should have silently withdrawn from the porches of Bethesda to make it known in the Temple, Who it was that had done this miracle. Far more effectually could He so preach its lesson to those who had been in Bethesda, and to all Jewry.

And yet something further was required. He must speak it out in clear, open words, what was the hidden inward meaning of this miracle. As so often, it was the bitter hatred of His persecutors which gave Him the opportunity. The first forthbursting of His Messianic Mission and Character had come in that Temple, when He realised it as His Father’s House, and His Life as about His Father’s business. Again had these thoughts about His Father kindled within Him in that Temple, when, on the first occasion of His Messianic appearance there, He had sought to purge it, that it might be a House of Prayer. And now, once more in that House, it was the same consciousness about God as His Father, and His Life as the business of His Father, which furnished the answer to the angry invectives about His breach of the Sabbath-Law. The Father’s Sabbath was His; the Father worked hitherto and He worked; the Father’s work and His were the same; He was the Son of the Father. And in this He also taught, what the Jews had never understood, the true meaning of the Sabbath-Law, by emphasising that which was the fundamental thought of the Sabbath – ‘Wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it:’ not the rest of inactivity, but of blessing and hallowing.

Once more it was not His whole meaning, but only this one point, that He claimed to be equal with God, of which they took hold. As we understand it, the discourse beginning with Joh_5:19 is not a continuation of that which had been begun in Joh_5:17, but was delivered on another, though probably proximate occasion. By what He had said about the Father working hitherto and His working, He had silenced the multitude, who must have felt that God’s rest was truly that of beneficence, not of inactivity. But He had raised another question, that of His equality with God, and for this He was taken to task by the Masters in Israel. To them it was that He addressed that discourse which, so to speak, preached His miracle at the Pool of Bethesda. Into its details we cannot enter further than has already been done. Some of its reasonings can be clearly traced, as starting from certain fundamental positions, held in common alike by the Sanhedrists and by Christ. Others, such as probably in answer to unreported objections, we may guess at. This may also account for what may seem occasional abruptness of transitions.

But what most impresses us, is the majestic grandeur of Christ’s self-consciousness in presence of His enemies, and yet withal the tone of pitying sadness which pervades His discourse. The time of the judgment of silence had not yet come. And for the present the majesty of His bearing overawed them, even as it did His enemies to the end, and Christ could pass unharmed from among them. And so ended that day in Jerusalem. And this is all that is needful for us to know of His stay at the Unknown Feast. With this inward separation, and the gathering of hostile parties closes the first and begins the second, stage of Christ’s Ministry.