Читать книгу Pastor Pastorum; Or, The Schooling of the Apostles by Our Lord - Henry Latham - Страница 10

Table of Contents

The Signs shew us, not only that the Kingdom is God's, but something also of the nature of that Kingdom as well.

Our Lord speaks of the power displayed in miracles as God's power working through Him. It is “by the finger of God” that He casts out devils and the man who is healed is bidden to tell his friends what God has done for him.32

[pg 085]

Christ nowhere claims the power as His own. It rests in God's hands; but it is granted to His prayer, because His will and God's are one.

Moreover the Signs set forth God's love and goodness to men, and thereby they tell us something of His nature. All the Signs worked by our Lord before the people at large, and all the works which the Twelve and the Seventy performed in their mission among the cities of Israel, were works of healing; with the exception of the two instances of the feeding of the multitudes, which also were works of Divine beneficence. There are other miracles of a different character, as we shall see presently, but those were witnessed either by the disciples only, or by a circle of private friends as at Cana of Galilee.

The men of Galilee had hitherto known the Lord as the God of Israel, who was especially concerned with the fortunes of their race and nation as a whole; but now they were told that He was the Father of every person in that nation, and was sent especially to the lost sheep among them. It was this declaration—that of the individual relation of each man to God, and of the preciousness of the very hairs of his head in God's eyes—that constituted, in great part, the comforting nature of the “good tidings of God.” The miracles wrought in connection with the preaching could not bring this point very prominently forward: but so far as the miracles bear on the point they are in accord with the teaching. [pg 086] They were worked, not upon masses of men at once, but on individuals, and our Lord addresses Himself personally to each particular sufferer, as though his case was considered by itself. I shall soon, for another purpose, notice two miracles recorded by St. Mark which afford good instances of our Lord's sympathetic insight into individual cases. He does not, on entering a village, ordain that all the lepers in it shall be cleansed, or all the palsied restored to the use of their limbs. He condescends to take each case by itself.

There is hardly a case of healing narrated in St. Mark, who, of all our authorities, gives the most detailed account, which does not shew traces of special attention on the part of our Lord to the spiritual and physical features of the particular case. We will take for an instance the cure of the sick of the palsy. The connection of what is spiritual with that which is physical is here very strongly marked. Our Lord begins by saying to the man “thy sins be forgiven thee.” It is possible that the man's condition may have been due to imprudence or something worse; the thought of this may have rankled in his mind and the mental trouble may have aggravated the physical infirmity: the great physician cures both together. His restoration seems to come with the sense of pardon, but he does not shew himself aware of his recovery, until our Lord bids him arise.

The shewing that the Divine power worked [pg 087] blessings on men one by one, contained in itself a lesson as to God's infinity; for a finite being would have been incapable of concerning himself for every unit of the world's population. Any supply of energy, short of an infinite one, would have been exhausted. Hence the notion of God's personal care for each soul is bound up with the conception of His infinity.

Christ does not begin with the abstract and say: “God is infinite and therefore He can find room in His heart to love men, every one;” but He begins with the concrete and says, “God does love you and every one else:” and He leaves it to men to arrive at the truth at the other end of the proposition: viz. that if God's strength is not lessened by drawing upon it, this can only be because there is no limit to it. From this infinity of God it also follows that the distinction between what we call great occasions and small ones—between occasions that we think would justify Divine interposition and those which would not—may not exist in God's eyes. In the presence of His infinity, the difference between great and small things may disappear; certainly His measure will be a very different one from ours.

This brings us to another point in the use of miracles to illustrate the ways of God's Kingdom: they exemplify the truth that God is no respecter of persons. Neither the persons on whom they are wrought, or before whom they are wrought, obtain [pg 088] this privilege by any merit or superiority. Men are not healed because they deserve it. As God sends rain on the just and unjust, so Christ cures the sick who come in His way, rich and poor alike—the son of the nobleman, and the blind beggar; for our Lord, worldly distinctions do not seem to exist. A man, as man, was of such transcendent value in the eyes of the Son of Man that, compared to this, little outer differences were but as the hills and dales of the earth, which scarcely roughen the surface of the globe when seen as a whole. Men, too, are not, except for very special purposes, picked out by Christ to witness the miracles; any more than they are in God's world to receive special mercies, or the lessons, or the afflictions of life. Those who were passing by saw the Signs, some profited and some did not: Herod and other great men would gladly have witnessed a miracle, but it was not granted them.

The Signs wrought by Christ harmonise with His teaching in another way: they never have the air of ostentatiously overriding and superseding Nature. His power, in its tranquil might, proceeded calmly along the homely track of every-day life; just as if it had always been present ruling quietly in its own domain, and might at any time have interposed without effort, if the Spiritual Order had needed it. A man is healed and an evil spirit is quelled by a word, and a multitude in the desert is supplied with food they do not know [pg 089] how—all proceeds in a calm continuous way. Fresh energy is given to natural powers, and effects are produced of vast magnitude and with astonishing rapidity; but these powers seem to work through the organs and along the channels which nature provides: to our Lord there is one primary source of all life and movement and light and force, and that is God, from Whom all His power comes. He does not call certain visible manifestations nature, and refer others to God, as though nature and God were different powers. The Signs, accordingly, are worked in such a way that it is hard to mark the particular point where what is called the supernatural comes into play—to say, in fact, when nature ends and God begins. The cures, so far as we can trace them, are effected by the renewal of vitality in a disordered organ; this vitality would seem to proceed from Christ; just as the power which set life going on earth proceeded from God.

“For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.”33

Here, of course, we pass beyond the realm of the forces we can measure, but this imparted force only restores the organs needed for the cure; the optic nerve is reinvigorated or the absorbent vessels are stimulated to abnormal action, and the eye becomes again efficient. The man is not enabled to see without an eye, as was claimed to be done by [pg 090] some workers of miracles in the middle ages; and there is no miracle in the Gospels like that mentioned in Paley's Evidences, where a man who had only one leg becomes possessed of two. Christ restores organs and withered limbs. He does not dispense with the proper organ or create new ones.

St. Mark gives us full particulars of two cures, of which we can in some degree trace the process.

“And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.”34

From this it appears that the eye was gradually restored, and our Lord's question shews that He did not expect an instantaneous cure. He speaks as a surgeon might who had performed an operation. He does not take it for granted that the man must have received his sight. He applies His hands, a second time and then the ill-defined dark objects which the man spoke of, become distinct.

The other case is that of one who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech.

“And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and [pg 091] saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.”35

The restoration of the disabled organs is clearly indicated here. I have referred to these two cases a few pages back. We now come to—