Verses 1-45
Chapter 1
1:1-4 This is the
beginning of the story of how Jesus Christ, the Son of God, brought the
good news to men. There is a passage in Isaiah the prophet like
this--"Lo! I send my messenger before you and he will prepare your road
for you. He will be like a voice crying in the wilderness, 'Get ready
the road of the Lord. Make straight the path by which he will come'."
This came true when John the Baptizer emerged in the wilderness,
announcing a baptism which was the sign of a repentance through which a
man might find forgiveness for his sins.
Mark starts the story of Jesus a long way back. It did not
begin with Jesus' birth; it did not even begin with John the Baptizer in
the wilderness; it began with the dreams of the prophets long ago; that
is to say, it began long, long ago in the mind of God.
The Stoics were strong believers in the ordered plan of God.
"The things of God," said Marcus Aurelius, "are fun of foresight. All
things flow from heaven." There are things we may well learn here.
(i) It has been said that "the thoughts of youth are long, long
thoughts," and so are the thoughts of God. God is characteristically a
God who is working his purposes out. History is not a random
kaleidoscope of disconnected events; it is a process directed by the God
who sees the end in the beginning.
(ii) We are within that process, and because of that we can
either help or hinder it. In one sense it is as great an honour to help
in some great process as it is a privilege to see the ultimate goal.
Life would be very different if, instead of yearning for some distant
and at present unattainable goal, we did all that we could to bring that
goal nearer.
"In youth, because I could not be a singer,
I did not even try to write a song;
I set no little trees along the roadside,
Because I knew their growth would take so long.
But now from wisdom that the years have brought me,
I know that it may be a blessed thing
To plant a tree for someone else to water,
Or make a song for someone else to sing."
The goal will never be reached unless there are those who labour to make it possible.
The prophetic quotation which Mark uses is suggestive.
I send my messenger before you and he will prepare your road for you. This is from Malachi 3:1.
In its original context it is a threat. In Malachi's day the priests
were failing in their duty. The offerings were blemished and shoddy
second-bests; the service of the temple was a weariness to them. The
messenger was to cleanse and purify the worship of the temple before the
Anointed One of God emerged upon the earth. So then the coming of
Christ was a purification of life. And the world needed that
purification. Seneca called Rome "a cesspool of iniquity." Juvenal spoke
of her "as the filthy sewer into which flowed the abominable dregs of
every Syrian and Achaean stream." Wherever Christianity comes it brings
purification.
That happens to be capable of factual demonstration. Bruce
Barton tells how the first important journalistic assignment that fell
to him was to write a series of articles designed to expose Billy
Sunday, the evangelist. Three towns were chosen. "I talked to the
merchants," Bruce Barton writes, "and they told me that during the
meetings and afterward people walked up to the counter and paid bills
which were so old that they had long since been written off the books."
He went to visit the president of the chamber of commerce of a town that
Billy Sunday had visited three years before. "I am not a member of any
church," he said. "I never attend but I'll tell you one thing. If it was
proposed now to bring Billy Sunday to this town, and if we knew as much
about the results of his work in advance as we do now, and if the
churches would not raise the necessary funds to bring him, I could raise
the money in half a day from men who never go to church. He took eleven
thousand dollars out of here, but a circus comes here and takes out
that amount in one day and leaves nothing. He left a different moral
atmosphere." The exposure that Bruce Barton meant to write became a
tribute to the cleansing power of the Christian message.
When Billy Graham preached in Shreveport, Louisiana, liquor
sales dropped by 40 per cent and the sale of Bibles increased 300 per
cent. During a mission in Seattle, amongst the results there is stated
quite simply, "Several impending divorce actions were cancelled." In
Greensboro, North Carolina, the report was that "the entire social
structure of the city was affected."
One of the great stories of what Christianity can do came out of
the mutiny on the Bounty. The mutineers were put ashore on Pitcairn
Island. There were nine mutineers, six native men, ten native women and a
girl, fifteen years old. One of them succeeded in making crude alcohol.
A terrible situation ensued. They all died except Alexander Smith.
Smith chanced upon a Bible. He read it and he made up his mind to build
up a state with the natives of that island based directly on the Bible.
It was twenty years before an American sloop called at the island. They
found a completely Christian community. There was no gaol because there
was no crime. There was no hospital because there was no disease. There
was no asylum because there was no insanity. There was no illiteracy;
and nowhere in the world was human life and property so safe.
Christianity had cleansed that society.
Where Christ is allowed to come the antiseptic of the Christian
faith cleanses the moral poison of society and leaves it pure and clean.
John came announcing a baptism of repentance. The Jew was familiar with ritual washings. Leviticus 11:1-47; Leviticus 12:1-8; Leviticus 13:1-59; Leviticus 14:1-57; Leviticus 15:1-33
details them. "The Jew," said Tertullian, "washes himself every day
because every day he is defiled." Symbolic washing and purifying was
woven into the very fabric of Jewish ritual. A Gentile was necessarily
unclean for he had never kept any part of the Jewish law. Therefore,
when a Gentile became a proselyte, that is a convert to the Jewish
faith, he had to undergo three things. First, he had to undergo
circumcision, for that was the mark of the covenant people; second,
sacrifice had to be made for him, for he stood in need of atonement and
only blood could atone for sin; third, he had to undergo baptism, which
symbolized his cleansing from all the pollution of his past life.
Naturally, therefore, the baptism was not a mere sprinkling with water,
but a bath in which his whole body was bathed.
The Jew knew baptism; but the amazing thing about John's baptism
was that he, a Jew, was asking Jews to submit to that which only a
Gentile was supposed to need. John had made the tremendous discovery
that to be a Jew in the racial sense was not to be a member of God's
chosen people; a Jew might be in exactly the same position as a Gentile;
not the Jewish life, but the cleansed life belonged to God.
The baptism was accompanied by confession. In any return to God confession must be made to three different people.
(i) A man must make confession to himself. It is a part of human
nature that we shut our eyes to what we do not wish to see, and above
all to our own sins. Someone tells of a man's first step to grace. As he
was shaving one morning he looked at his face in the mirror and
suddenly said, "You dirty, little rat!" And from that day he began to be
a changed man.
No doubt when the prodigal son left home he thought himself a
fine and adventurous character. Before he took his first step back home
he had to take a good look at himself and say, "I will get up and go
home and say that I am an utter rotter." (Luke 15:17-18.)
There is no one in all the world harder to face than ourselves;
and the first step to repentance and to a right relationship to God is
to admit our sin to ourselves.
(ii) A man must make confession to those whom he has wronged. It
will not be much use saying to God that we are sorry until we say we
are sorry to those whom we have hurt and grieved. The human barriers
have to be removed before the divine barriers can go. In the East
African Church, a husband and wife were members of a group. One of them
came and made confession that there was a quarrel at home. The minister
at once said, "You should not have come and confessed that quarrel just
now; you should have made it up and then come and confessed it."
It can often be the case that confession to God is easier than
confession to men. But there can be no forgiveness without humiliation.
(iii) A man must make confession to God. The end of pride is the
beginning of forgiveness. It is when a man says, "I have sinned," that
God gets the chance to say, "I forgive." It is not the man who desires
to meet God on equal terms who will discover forgiveness, but the man
who kneels in humble contrition and whispers through his shame, "God be
merciful to me a sinner."
1:5-8 And the whole
country of Judea went out to him, and so did all the people of
Jerusalem, and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, while they
confessed their sins. John was clad in a garment of camel's hair, and
he had a leather girdle round his waist, and it was his custom to eat
locusts and wild honey. The burden of his proclamation was, "The one who
is stronger than I is coming after me. I am not fit to stoop down and
to loosen the strap of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but
he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
It is clear that the ministry of John was mightily effective,
for they flocked out to listen to him and to submit to his baptism. Why
was it that John made an impact such as this upon his nation?
(i) He was a man who lived his message. Not only his words, but
also his whole life was a protest. Three things about him marked the
reality of his protest against contemporary life.
(a) There was the place in which he stayed--the wilderness.
Between the centre of Judaea and the Dead Sea lies one of the most
terrible deserts in the world. It is a limestone desert; it looks warped
and twisted; it shimmers in the haze of the heat; the rock is hot and
blistering and sounds hollow to the feet as if there was some vast
furnace underneath; it moves out to the Dead Sea and then descends in
dreadful and unscalable precipices down to the shore. In the Old
Testament it is sometimes called Yeshiymown (Hebrew #3452),
which means The Devastation. John was no city-dweller. He was a man
from the desert and from its solitudes and its desolations. He was a man
who had given himself a chance to hear the voice of God.
(b) There were the clothes he wore a garment woven of camel's hair and a leather belt about his waist. So did Elijah (2 Kings 1:8).
To look at the man was to be reminded, not of the fashionable orators
of the day, but of the ancient prophets who lived close to the great
simplicities and avoided the soft and effeminate luxuries which kill the
soul.
(c) There was the food he ate--locusts and wild honey. It so
happens that both words are capable of two interpretations. The locusts
may be the animals for the law allowed them to be eaten (Leviticus 11:22-23);
but they may also be a kind of bean or nut, the carob, which was the
food of the poorest of the poor. The honey may be the honey the wild
bees make; or it may be a kind of sweet sap that distills from the bark
of certain trees. it does not matter what the words precisely mean. In
any event John's diet was of the simplest.
So John emerged. People had to listen to a man like that. It was
said of Carlyle that "he preached the gospel of silence in twenty
volumes." Many a man comes with a message which he himself denies. Many a
man with a comfortable bank account preaches about not laying up
treasures upon earth. Many a man extols the blessings of poverty from a
comfortable home. But in the case of John, the man was the message, and
because of that people listened.
(ii) His message was effective because he told people what in
their heart of hearts they knew and brought them what in the depths of
their souls they were waiting for.
(a) The Jews had a saying that "if Israel would only keep the
law of God perfectly for one day the Kingdom of God would come." When
John summoned men to repentance he was confronting them with a decision
that they knew in their heart of hearts they ought to make. Long ago
Plato said that education did not consist in telling people new things;
it consisted in extracting from their memories what they already knew.
No message is so effective as that which speaks to a man's own
conscience, and that message becomes well-nigh irresistible when it is
spoken by a man who obviously has the right to speak.
(b) The people of Israel were well aware that for three hundred
years the voice of prophecy had been silent. They were waiting for some
authentic word from God. And in John they heard it. In every walk of
life the expert is recognizable. A famous violinist tells us that no
sooner had Toscanini mounted the rostrum than the orchestra felt his
authority flowing over them. We recognize at once a doctor who has real
skill. We recognize at once a speaker who knows his subject. John had
come from God and to hear him was to know it.
(iii) His message was effective because he was completely
humble. His own verdict on himself was that he was not fit for the duty
of a slave. Sandals were composed simply of leather soles fastened to
the foot by straps passing through the toes. The roads were unsurfaced.
In dry weather they were dust heaps; in wet weather rivers of mud. To
remove the sandals was the work and office of a slave. John asked
nothing for himself but everything for the Christ whom he proclaimed.
The man's obvious self-forgottenness, his patent yieldedness, his
complete self-effacement, his utter lostness in his message compelled
people to listen.
(iv) His message was effective because he pointed to something
and someone beyond himself. He told men that his baptism drenched them
in water, but one was coming who would drench them in the Holy Spirit;
and while water could cleanse a man's body, the Holy Spirit could
cleanse his life and self and heart. Dr. G. J. Jeffrey had a favourite
illustration. When he was making a telephone call through the operator
and there was some delay, the operator would often say, "I'm trying to
connect you." Then, when the connection had been effected, the operator
faded out and left him in direct contact with the person to whom he
wished to speak.
John's one aim was not to occupy the centre of the stage
himself, but to try to connect men with the one who was greater and
stronger than he; and men listened to him because he pointed, not to
himself, but to the one whom all men need.
1:9-11 In those days
Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the
Jordan; and as soon as he came up out of the water he saw the heavens
being riven asunder and the Spirit coming down upon him, as a dove might
come down; and there came a voice from heaven, "You are my beloved Son;
I am well pleased with you."
To any thinking person the baptism of Jesus presents a problem.
John's baptism was a baptism of repentance, meant for those who were
sorry for their sins and who wished to express their determination to
have done with them. What had such a baptism to do with Jesus? Was he
not the sinless one, and was not such a baptism unnecessary and quite
irrelevant as far as he was concerned? For Jesus the baptism was four
things.
(i) It was the moment of decision. For thirty years he had
stayed in Nazareth. Faithfully he had done his day's work and discharged
his duties to his home. For long he must have been conscious that the
time for him to go out had to come. He must have waited for a sign. The
emergence of John was that sign. This, he saw, was the moment when he
had to launch out upon his task.
In every life there come moments of decision which may be
accepted or rejected. To accept them is to succeed; to reject them, or
to shirk them, is to fail. As Lowell had it:
"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide
In the strife of Truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or
blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right
And the choice goes by for ever 'twixt that darkness and that
light."
To every man there comes the unreturning decisive moment. As Shakespeare saw it:
"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their lives
Is bound in shallows and in miseries."
The undecided life is the wasted life, the frustrated life, the
discontented life, and often the tragic life. As John Oxenham saw it:
"To every man there openeth
A way and ways and a way;
The high soul treads the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low,
And in between on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro."
The drifting life can never be the happy life. Jesus knew when
John emerged that the moment of decision had come. Nazareth was peaceful
and home was sweet, but he answered the summons and the challenge of
God.
(ii) It was the moment of identification. It is true that Jesus
did not need to repent from sin; but here was a movement of the people
back to God; and with that Godward movement he was determined to
identify himself. A man might himself possess ease and comfort and
wealth and still identify himself with a movement to bring better things
to the downtrodden and the poor and the ill-housed and the over-worked
and the underpaid. The really great identification is when a man
identifies himself with a movement, not for his own sake, but for the
sake of others. In John Bunyan's dream, Christian came in his journeying
with Interpreter to the Palace which was heavily guarded and required a
battle to seek an entry. At the door there sat the man with the inkhorn
taking the names of those who would dare the assault. All were hanging
back, then Christian saw "a man of a very stout countenance come up to
the man that sat there to write, saying, 'Set down my name, sir'." When
great things are afoot the Christian is bound to say, "Set down my name,
sir," for that is what Jesus did when he came to be baptized.
(iii) It was the moment of approval. No man lightly leaves his
home and sets out on an unknown way. He must be very sure that he is
right. Jesus had decided on his course of action, and now he was looking
for the seal of the approval of God. In the time of Jesus the Jews
spoke of what they called the Bath (Hebrew #1323) Qol (Hebrew #6963),
which means, the daughter of a voice. By this time they believed in a
series of heavens, in the highest of which sat God in the light to which
no man could approach. There were rare times when the heavens opened
and God spoke; but, to them, God was so distant that it was only the far
away echo of his voice that they heard. To Jesus the voice came
directly. As Mark tens the story, this was a personal experience which
Jesus had and not in any sense a demonstration to the crowd. The voice
did not say, "This is my beloved Son," as Matthew has it (Matthew 3:17).
It said, "Thou art my beloved Son," speaking direct to Jesus. At the
baptism Jesus submitted his decision to God and that decision was
unmistakably approved.
(iv) It was the moment of equipment. At that time the Holy
Spirit descended upon him. There is a certain symbolism here. The Spirit
descended as a dove might descend. The simile is not chosen by
accident. The dove is the symbol of gentleness. Both Matthew and Luke
tell us of the preaching of John. (Matthew 3:7-12; Luke 3:7-13.)
John's was a message of the axe laid to the root of the tree, of the
terrible sifting, of the consuming fire. It was a message of doom and
not of good news. But from the very beginning the picture of the Spirit
likened to a dove is a picture of gentleness. He will conquer, but the
conquest will be the conquest of love.
1:12-13 And
immediately the Spirit thrust him into the wilderness. He was in the
wilderness forty days, and all the time he was being tested by Satan.
The wild beasts were his companions, and the angels were helping him.
No sooner was the glory of the hour of the Baptism over than
there came the battle of the temptations. One thing stands out here in
such a vivid way that we cannot miss it. It was the Spirit who thrust
Jesus out into the wilderness for the testing time. The very Spirit who
came upon him at his baptism now drove him out for his test.
In this life it is impossible to escape the assault of
temptation; but one thing is sure--temptations are not sent to us to
make us fall; they are sent to strengthen the nerve and the sinew of our
minds and hearts and souls. They are not meant for our ruin, but for
our good. They are meant to be tests from which we emerge better
warriors and athletes of God.
Suppose a lad is a football player; suppose he is doing well in
the second team and showing real signs of promise, what will the team
manager do? He certainly will not send him out to play for the third
team in which he could walk through the game and never break sweat; he
will send him out to play for the first team where he will be tested as
he never was before and have the chance to prove himself. That is what
temptation is meant to do--to enable us to prove our manhood and to
emerge the stronger for the fight.
Forty days is a phrase which is not to be taken literally. It is
the regular Hebrew phrase for a considerable time. Moses was said to be
on the mountain with God for forty days (Exodus 24:18); it was for forty days that Elijah went in the strength of the meal the angel gave him (1 Kings 19:8).
Just as we use the phrase ten days or so, so the Hebrews used the
phrase forty days, not literally but simply to mean a fair length of
time.
It was Satan who tempted Jesus. The development of the conception of Satan is very interesting.
The word Satan in Hebrew simply means an adversary; and in the
Old Testament it is so used of ordinary human adversaries and opponents
again and again. The angel of the Lord is the satan who stands in
Balaam's way (Numbers 22:22); the Philistines fear that David may turn out to be their satan (1 Samuel 29:4); David regards Abishai as his satan (2 Samuel 19:22); Solomon declares that God has given him such peace and prosperity that he has no satan left to oppose him (1 Kings 5:4). The word began by meaning an adversary in the widest sense of the term.
But it takes a step on the downward path; it begins to mean one
who pleads a case against a person. It is in this sense that it is used
in the first chapter of Job. In that chapter Satan is no less than one
of the sons of God (Job 1:6); but his particular task was to consider men (Job 1:7)
and to search for some case that could be pleaded against them in the
presence of God. He was the accuser of men before God. The word is so
used in Job 2:2 and Zechariah 3:2. The task of Satan was to say everything that could be said against a man.
The other title of Satan is the Devil; the word devil comes from the Greek diabolos (Greek #1228),
which literally means a slanderer. It is a small step from the thought
of one who searches for everything that can be said against a man to the
thought of one who deliberately and maliciously slanders man in the
presence of God. But in the Old Testament Satan is still an emissary of
God and not yet the malignant, supreme enemy of God. He is the adversary
of man.
But now the word takes the last step on its downward course.
Through their captivity the Jews learned something of Persian thought.
Persian thought is based on the conception that in this universe there
are two powers, a power of the light and a power of the dark, Ormuzd and
Ahriman; the whole universe is a battle-ground between them and man
must choose his side in that cosmic conflict. In point of fact that is
precisely what life looks like and feels like. To put it in a word, in
this world there is God and Gods Adversary. It was almost inevitable
that Satan should come to be regarded as The Adversary par excellence.
That is what his name means; that is what he always was to man; Satan
becomes the essence of everything that is against God.
When we turn to the New Testament we find that it is the Devil or Satan who is behind human disease and suffering (Luke 13:16); it is Satan who seduces Judas (Luke 22:3); it is the devil whom we must fight (1 Peter 5:8-9; James 4:7); it is the devil whose power is being broken by the work of Christ (Luke 10:1-19); it is the devil who is destined for final destruction (Matthew 25:41). Satan is the power which is against God.
Here we have the whole essence of the Temptation story. Jesus
had to decide how he was to do his work. He was conscious of a
tremendous task and he was also conscious of tremendous powers. God was
saying to him, "Take my love to men; love them till you die for them;
conquer them by this unconquerable love even if you finish up upon a
cross." Satan was saying to Jesus, "Use your power to blast men;
obliterate your enemies; win the world by might and power and
bloodshed." God said to Jesus, "Set up a reign of love." Satan said to
Jesus, "Set up a dictatorship of force." Jesus had to choose that day
between the way of God and the way of the Adversary of God.
Mark's brief story of the Temptations finishes with two vivid touches.
(i) The beasts were his companions. In the desert there roamed
the leopard, the bear, the wild boar and the jackal. This is usually
taken to be a vivid detail that adds to the grim terror of the scene.
But perhaps it is not so. Perhaps this is a lovely thing, for perhaps it
means that the beasts were Jesus' friends. Amidst the dreams of the
golden age when the Messiah would come, the Jews dreamed of a day when
the enmity between man and the beasts would no longer exist. "I will
make for you a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the
birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground." (Hosea 2:18.)
"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with
the kid.... The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and
the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den; they shall not
hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain." (Isaiah 11:6-9.)
In later days St. Francis preached to the beasts; and it may be that
here we have a first foretaste of the loveliness when man and the beasts
shall be at peace. It may be that here we see a picture in which the
beasts recognized, before men did, their friend and their king.
(ii) The angels were helping him. There are ever the divine
reinforcements in the hour of trial. When Elisha and his servant were
shut up in Dothan with their enemies pressing in upon them and no
apparent way of escape, Elisha opened the young man's eyes and all
around he saw the horses and the chariots of fire which belonged to God.
(2 Kings 6:17.) Jesus was not left to fight his battle alone--and neither are we.
1:14-15 After John had
been committed to prison, Jesus came into Galilee, announcing the good
news about God, and saying, "The time that was appointed has come; and
the Kingdom of God is here. Repent and believe the good news."
There are in this summary of the message of Jesus three great, dominant words of the Christian faith.
(i) There is the good news. It was preeminently good news that
Jesus came to bring to men. If we follow the word euaggelion (Greek #2098), good news, gospel through the New Testament we can see at least something of its content.
(a) It is good news of truth (Galatians 2:5; Colossians 1:5). Until Jesus came, men could only guess and grope after God. "O that I knew where I might find him," cried Job (Job 23:3).
Marcus Aurelius said that the soul can see but dimly, and the word he
uses is the Greek word for seeing things through water. But with the
coming of Jesus men see clearly what God is like. No longer do they need
to guess and grope; they know.
(b) It is good news of hope (Colossians 1:23).
The ancient world was a pessimistic world. Seneca talked of "our
helplessness in necessary things." In their struggle for goodness men
were defeated. The coming of Jesus brings hope to the hopeless heart.
(c) It is good news of peace (Ephesians 6:15).
The penalty of being a man is to have a split personality. In human
nature the beast and the angel are strangely intermingled. It is told
that once Schopenhauer, the gloomy philosopher, was found wandering. He
was asked, "Who are you?" "I wish you could tell me," he answered.
Robert Burns said of himself, "My life reminded me of a ruined temple.
What strength, what proportion in some parts! What unsightly gaps, what
prostrate ruins in others!" Man's trouble has always been that he is
haunted both by sin and by goodness. The coming of Jesus unifies that
disintegrated personality into one. He finds victory over his warring
self by being conquered by Jesus Christ.
(d) It is good news of God's promise (Ephesians 3:6).
It is true to say that men had always thought rather of a God of
threats than a God of promises. All non-Christian religions think of a
demanding God; only Christianity tells of a God who is more ready to
give than we are to ask.
(e) It is good news of immortality (2 Timothy 1:10).
To the pagan, life was the road to death; man was characteristically a
dying man; but Jesus came with the good news that we are on the way to
life rather than death.
(f) It is good news of salvation (Ephesians 1:13).
That salvation is not merely a negative thing; it is also positive. It
is not simply liberation from penalty and escape from past sin; it is
the power to live life victoriously and to conquer sin. The message of
Jesus is good news indeed.
(ii) There is the word repent. Now repentance is not so easy as sometimes we think. The Greek word metanoia (Greek #3341)
literally means a change of mind. We are very apt to confuse two
things--sorrow for the consequences of sin and sorrow for sin. Many a
man is desperately sorry because of the mess that sin has got him into,
but he very well knows that, if he could be reasonably sure that he
could escape the consequences, he would do the same thing again. It is
not the sin that he hates; it is its consequences.
Real repentance means that a man has come, not only to be sorry
for the consequences of his sin, but to hate sin itself. Long ago that
wise old writer, Montaigne, wrote in his autobiography, "Children should
be taught to hate vice for its own texture, so that they will not only
avoid it in action, but abominate it in their hearts--that the very
thought of it may disgust them whatever form it takes." Repentance means
that the man who was in love with sin comes to hate sin because of its
exceeding sinfulness.
(iii) There is the word believe. "Believe," says Jesus, "in the
good news." To believe in the good news simply means to take Jesus at
his word, to believe that God is the kind of God that Jesus has told us
about, to believe that God so loves the world that he will make any
sacrifice to bring us back to himself, to believe that what sounds too
good to be true is really true.
1:16-20 While he was
walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, Simon's
brother, casting their nets into the sea, for they were fishermen. So
Jesus said to them, "Follow me! and I will make you fishers of men." And
immediately they left their nets and followed him. He went a little
farther and he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, who
were in their boat, mending their nets. Immediately he called them; and
they left their father Zebedee in the boat, with the hired servants,
and went away after him.
No sooner had Jesus taken his decision and decided his method
than he proceeded to build up his staff. A leader must begin somewhere.
He must get to himself a little band of kindred souls to whom he can
unburden his own heart and on whose hearts he may write his message. So
Mark here shows us Jesus literally laying the foundations of his Kingdom
and calling his first followers.
There were many fishermen in Galilee. Josephus, who, for a time,
was governor of Galilee, and who is the great historian of the Jews,
tells us that in his day three hundred and thirty fishing boats sailed
the waters of the lake. Ordinary people in Palestine seldom ate meat,
probably not more than once a week. Fish was their staple diet (Luke 11:11; Matthew 7:10; Mark 6:30-44; Luke 24:42).
Usually the fish was salt because there was no means of transporting
fresh fish. Fresh fish was one of the greatest of all delicacies in the
great cities like Rome. The very names of the towns on the lakeside show
how important the fishing business was. Bethsaida (Greek #966)
means House of Fish; Tarichaea means The Place of Salt Fish, and it was
there that the fish were preserved for export to Jerusalem and even to
Rome itself. The salt fish industry was big business in Galilee.
The fishermen used two kinds of nets, both of which are
mentioned or implied in the gospels. They used the net called the sagene
(Greek #4522).
This was a kind of seine- or trawl-net. It was let out from the end of
the boat and was so weighted that it stood, as it were, upright in the
water. The boat then moved forward, and, as it moved, the four corners
of the net were drawn together, so that the net became like a great bag
moving through the water and enclosing the fish. The other kind of net,
which Peter and Andrew were using here, was called the amphiblestron (Greek #293). It was a much smaller net. It was skilfully cast into the water by hand and was shaped rather like an umbrella.
It is naturally of the greatest interest to study the men whom Jesus picked out as his first followers.
(i) We must notice what they were. They were simple folk. They
did not come from the schools and the colleges; they were not drawn from
the ecclesiastics or the aristocracy; they were neither learned nor
wealthy. They were fishermen. That is to say, they were ordinary people.
No one ever believed in the ordinary man as Jesus did. Once George
Bernard Shaw said, "I have never had any feeling for the
working-classes, except a desire to abolish them, and replace them by
sensible people." In The Patrician John Galsworthy makes Miltoun, one of
the characters, say, "The mob! How I loathe it! I hate its mean
stupidity, I hate the sound of its voice, and the look on its face it's
so ugly, so little!" Once in a fit of temper Carlyle declared that there
were twenty-seven millions of people in England--mostly fools! Jesus
did not feel like that. Lincoln said, "God must love the common
people--he made so many of them." It was as if Jesus said, "Give me
twelve ordinary men and with them, if they will give themselves to me, I
will change the world." A man should never think so much of what he is
as of what Jesus Christ can make him.
(ii) We must notice what they were doing when Jesus called them.
They were doing their day's work, catching the fish and mending the
nets. It was so with many a prophet. "I am no prophet," said Amos, "nor a
prophet's son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees,
and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me,
'Go, prophesy to my people Israel'." (Amos 7:14-15.)
The call of God can come to a man, not only in the house of God, not
only in the secret place, but in the middle of the day's work. As
MacAndrew, Kipling's Scots engineer, had it:
"From coupler flange to spindle guide
I see thy hand, O God;
Predestination in the stride
Of yon connecting rod."
The man who lives in a world that is full of God cannot ever escape him.
(iii) We must notice how he called them. Jesus' summons was,
"Follow me!" It is not to be thought that on this day he stood before
them for the first time. No doubt they had stood in the crowd and
listened; no doubt they had stayed to talk long after the rest of the
crowd had drifted away. No doubt they already had felt the magic of his
presence and the magnetism of his eyes. Jesus did not say to them, "I
have a theological system which I would like you to investigate; I have
certain theories that I would like you to think over; I have an ethical
system I would like to discuss with you." He said, "Follow me!" It all
began with a personal reaction to himself; it all began with that tug on
the heart which begets the unshakeable loyalty. This is not to say that
there are none who think themselves into Christianity; but for most of
us following Christ is like falling in love. It has been said that "we
admire people for reasons; we love them without reasons." The thing
happens just because they are they and we are we. "I," said Jesus, "when
I am lifted up from the earth will draw all men to myself." (John 12:32.)
In by far the greatest number of cases a man follows Jesus Christ, not
because of anything that Jesus said but because of everything that Jesus
is.
(iv) Lastly we must note what Jesus offered them. He offered
them a task. He called them not to ease but to service. Someone has said
that what every man needs is "something in which he can invest his
life." So Jesus called his men, not to a comfortable ease and not to a
lethargic inactivity; he called them to a task in which they would have
to spend themselves and burn themselves up, and, in the end, die for his
sake and for the sake of their fellow men. He called them to a task
wherein they could win something for themselves only by giving their all
to him and to others.
1:21-22 So they came
into Capernaum; and immediately on the Sabbath day Jesus went into the
Synagogue and began to teach; and they were completely astonished at the
way he taught, for he taught them like one who had personal authority,
and not as the experts in the law did.
Mark's story unfolds in a series of logical and natural steps.
Jesus recognized in the emergence of John God's call to action. He was
baptized and received God's seal of approval and God's equipment for his
task. He was tested by the devil and chose the method he would use and
the way he would take. He chose his men that he might have a little
circle of kindred spirits and that he might write his message upon them.
And now he had to make a deliberate launching of his campaign. If a man
had a message from God to give, the natural place to which he would
turn would be the church where God's people met together. That is
precisely what Jesus did. He began his campaign in the synagogue.
There are certain basic differences between the synagogue and the church as we know it today.
(a) The synagogue was primarily a teaching institution. The
synagogue service consisted of only three things--prayer, the reading of
God's word, and the exposition of it. There was no music, no singing
and no sacrifice. It may be said that the Temple was the place of
worship and sacrifice; the synagogue was the place of teaching and
instruction. The synagogue was by far the more influential, for there
was only one Temple. But the law laid it down that wherever there were
ten Jewish families there must be a synagogue, and, therefore, wherever
there was a colony of Jews, there was a synagogue. If a man had a new
message to preach, the synagogue was the obvious place in which to
preach it.
(b) The synagogue provided an opportunity to deliver such a
message. The synagogue had certain officials. There was the Ruler of the
synagogue. He was responsible for the administration of the affairs of
the synagogue and for the arrangements for its services. There were the
distributors of alms. Daily a collection was taken in cash and in kind
from those who could afford to give. It was then distributed to the
poor; the very poorest were given food for fourteen meals per week.
There was the Chazzan. He is the man whom the King James Version
describes as the minister. He was responsible for the taking out and
storing away of the sacred rolls on which scripture was written; for the
cleaning of the synagogue; for the blowing of the blasts on the silver
trumpet which told people that the Sabbath had come; for the elementary
education of the children of the community. One thing the synagogue had
not and that was a permanent preacher or teacher. When the people met at
the synagogue service it was open to the Ruler to call on any competent
person to give the address and the exposition. There was no
professional ministry whatsoever. That is why Jesus was able to open his
campaign in the synagogues. The opposition had not yet stiffened into
hostility. He was known to be a man with a message; and for that very
reason the synagogue of every community provided him with a pulpit from
which to instruct and to appeal to men.
When Jesus did teach in the synagogue the whole method and
atmosphere of his teaching was like a new revelation. He did not teach
like the scribes, the experts in the law. Who were these scribes?
To the Jews the most sacred thing in the world was the Torah,
the Law. The core of the law is the Ten Commandments, but the Law was
taken to mean the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch,
as they are called. To the Jews this Law was completely divine. It had,
so they believed, been given direct by God to Moses. It was absolutely
holy and absolutely binding. They said, "He who says that the Torah is
not from God has not part in the future world." "He who says that Moses
wrote even one verse of his own knowledge is a denier and despiser of
the word of God."
If the Torah is so divine two things emerge. First, it must be
the supreme rule of faith and life; and second, it must contain
everything necessary to guide and to direct life. If that be so the
Torah demands two things. First, it must obviously be given the most
careful and meticulous study. Second, the Torah is expressed in great,
wide principles; but, if it contains direction and guidance for all
life, what is in it implicitly must be brought out. The great laws must
become rules and regulations--so their argument ran.
To give this study and to supply this development a class of
scholars arose. These were the Scribes, the experts in the law. The
title of the greatest of them was Rabbi. The scribes had three duties.
(i) They set themselves, out of the great moral principles of
the Torah, to extract rules and regulations for every possible situation
in life. Obviously this was a task that was endless. Jewish religion
began with the great moral laws; it ended with an infinity of rules and
regulations. It began as religion; it ended as legalism.
(ii) It was the task of the scribes to transmit and to teach
this law and its developments. These deduced and extracted rules and
regulations were never written down; they are known as the Oral Law.
Although never written down they were considered to be even more binding
than the written law. From generation to generation of scribes they
were taught and committed to memory. A good student had a memory which
was like "a well lined with lime which loses not one drop."
(iii) The scribes had the duty of giving judgment in individual
cases; and, in the nature of things, practically every individual case
must have produced a new law.
Wherein did Jesus' teaching differ so much from the teaching of
the Scribes? He taught with personal authority. No Scribe ever gave a
decision on his own. He would always begin, "There is a teaching
that..." and would then quote all his authorities. If he made a
statement he would buttress it with this, that and the next quotation
from the great legal masters of the past. The last thing he ever gave
was an independent judgment. How different was Jesus! When he spoke, he
spoke as if he needed no authority beyond himself. He spoke with utter
independence. He cited no authorities and quoted no experts. He spoke
with the finality of the voice of God. To the people it was like a
breeze from heaven to hear someone speak like that. The terrific,
positive certainty of Jesus was the very antithesis of the careful
quotations of the Scribes. The note of personal authority rang out--and
that is a note which captures the ear of every man.
1:23-28 There was in
the synagogue a man in the grip of an unclean spirit. Immediately he
broke into a shout. "What have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth?" he
said. "Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are you are The Holy
One of God." Jesus spoke sternly to him. "Be silent," he said, "and
come out of him." When the unclean spirit had convulsed the man and had
cried with a great cry it came out of him. They were all so astonished
that they kept asking each other, "What is this? This is a new kind of
teaching. He gives his orders with authority even to unclean spirits and
they obey him." And immediately the report about Jesus went out
everywhere over the whole surrounding district of Galilee.
If Jesus' words had amazed the people in the synagogue, his
deeds left them thunderstruck. In the synagogue there was a man in the
grip of an unclean spirit. He created a disturbance and Jesus healed
him.
All through the gospels we keep meeting people who had unclean
spirits and who were possessed by demons or devils. What lies behind
this?
The Jews, and indeed the whole ancient world, believed strongly
in demons and devils. As Harnack put it, "The whole world and the
circumambient atmosphere were filled with devils; not merely idolatry,
but every phase and form of life was ruled by them. They sat on thrones,
they hovered around cradles. The earth was literally a hell."
Dr. A. Rendle Short cites a fact which shows the intensity with
which the ancient world believed in demons. In many ancient cemeteries
skulls were found which had been trepanned. That is to say, a hole had
been bored in the skull. In one cemetery, out of one hundred and twenty
skulls, six had been trepanned. With the limited surgical technique
available that was no small operation. Further, it was clear from the
bone growth that the trepanning had been done during life. It was also
clear that the hole in the skull was too small to be of any physical or
surgical value; and it is known that the removed disc of bone was often
worn as an amulet round the neck. The reason for the trepanning was to
allow the demon to escape from the body of the man. If primitive
surgeons were prepared to undertake that operation, and if men were
prepared to undergo it, the belief in demon-possession must have been
intensely real.
Where did these demons come from? There were three answers to
that question. (i) Some believed that they were as old as creation
itself. (ii) Some believed that they were the spirits of wicked men who
had died and were still carrying on their malignant work. (iii) Most
people connected the demons with the old story in Genesis 6:1-8 (compare 2 Peter 2:4-5).
The Jews elaborated the story in this way. There were two angels
who forsook God and came to this earth because they were attracted by
the beauty of mortal women. Their names were Assael and Shemachsai. One
of them returned to God; the other remained on earth and gratified his
lust; and the demons are the children that he begat and their children.
The collective word for demons is mazzikin, which means one who
does harm. So the demons were malignant beings intermediate between God
and man who were out to work men harm.
The demons, according to Jewish belief, could eat and drink and
beget children. They were terrifyingly numerous. There were, according
to some, seven and a half millions of them; every man had ten thousand
on his right hand and ten thousand on his left. They lived in unclean
places, such as tombs and spots where there was no cleansing water. They
lived in the desert where their howling could be heard--hence the
phrase a howling desert. They were specially dangerous to the lonely
traveller, to the woman in child-birth, to the bride and bridegroom, to
children who were out after dark, and to those who voyaged at night.
They were specially active in the midday heat and between sunset and
sunrise. There was a demon of blindness and a demon of leprosy and a
demon of heart-disease. They could transfer their malign gifts to men.
For instance, the evil eye which could turn good fortune into bad and in
which all believed was given to a man by the demons. They worked along
with certain animals--the serpent, the bull, the donkey and the
mosquito. The male demons were known as shedim, and the female as lilin,
after Lilith. The female demons had long hair and were the enemies of
children. That is why children had their guardian angels (Matthew 18:10).
It does not matter whether or not we believe in all this;
whether it is true or not is beside the point. The point is that the
people in New Testament times did. We still may use the phrase Poor
devil! That is a relic of the old belief. When a man believed himself to
be possessed he was "conscious of himself and also of another being who
constrains and controls him from within." That explains why the
demon-possessed in Palestine so often cried out when they met Jesus.
They knew that Jesus was believed by some at least to be the Messiah;
they knew that the reign of the Messiah was the end of the demons; and
the man who believed himself to be possessed spoke as a demon when he
came into the presence of Jesus.
There were many exorcists who claimed to be able to cast out
demons. So real was this belief that by A.D. 340 the Christian church
actually possessed an Order of Exorcists. But there was this
difference--the ordinary Jewish and pagan exorcist used elaborate
incantations and spells and magical rites. Jesus with one word of clear,
simple, brief authority exorcised the demon from a man. No one had ever
seen anything like this before. The power was not in the spell, the
formula, the incantation, the elaborate rite; the power was in Jesus and
men were astonished.
What are we to say to all this? Paul Tournier in A Doctor's Casebook
writes, "Doubtless there are many doctors who in their struggle against
disease have had, like me, the feeling that they were confronting, not
something passive, but a clever and resourceful enemy." Dr. Rendle Short
comes tentatively to the conclusion that "the happenings in this world,
in fact, and its moral disasters, its wars and wickedness, its physical
catastrophes, and its sicknesses, may be part of a great warfare due to
the interplay of forces such as we see in the book of Job, the malice
of the devil on one hand and the restraints imposed by God on the
other."
This is a subject on which we cannot dogmatize. We may take
three different positions. (i) We may relegate the whole matter of
demon-possession to the sphere of primitive thought and say that it was a
primitive way of accounting for things in the days before man knew any
more about men's bodies and men's minds. (ii) We may accept the fact of
demon-possession as being true in New Testament times and as being still
true today. (iii) If we accept the first position we have to explain
the attitude and actions of Jesus. Either he knew no more on this matter
than the people of his day, and that is a thing we can easily accept
for Jesus was not a scientist and did not come to teach science. Or he
knew perfectly well that he could never cure the man in trouble unless
he assumed the reality of the disease. It was real to the man and had to
be treated as such or it could never be cured. In the end we come to
the conclusion that there are some answers we do not know.
1:29-31 And
immediately, when they had come out of the synagogue, they went, along
with Peter and John, into the house of Simon and Andrew. Peter's
mother-in-law was in bed with an attack of fever. Immediately they spoke
to Jesus about her. He went up to her and took her by the hand and
raised her up, and the fever left her, and she attended to their needs.
In the synagogue Jesus had spoken and acted in the most amazing
way. The synagogue service ended and Jesus went with his friends to
Peter's house. According to Jewish custom the main Sabbath meal came
immediately after the synagogue service, at the sixth hour, that is at
12 o'clock midday. (The Jewish day began at 6 a.m. and the hours are
counted from then.) Jesus might well have claimed the right to rest
after the exciting and exhausting experience of the synagogue service;
but once again his power was appealed to and once again he spent himself
for others. This miracle tells us something about three people.
(i) It tells us something about Jesus. He did not require an
audience in order to exert his power; he was just as prepared to heal in
the little circle of a cottage as in the great crowd of a synagogue. He
was never too tired to help; the need of others took precedence over
his own desire for rest. But above all, we see here, as we saw in the
synagogue, the uniqueness of the methods of Jesus. There were many
exorcists in the time of Jesus, but they worked with elaborate
incantations, and formulae, and spells, and magical apparatus. In the
synagogue Jesus had spoken one authoritative sentence and the healing
was complete.
Here we have the same thing again. Peter's mother-in-law was
suffering from what the Talmud called "a burning fever." It was, and
still is, very prevalent in that particular part of Galilee. The Talmud
actually lays down the methods of dealing with it. A knife wholly made
of iron was tied by a braid of hair to a thorn bush. On successive days
there was repeated, first, Exodus 3:2-3; second, Exodus 3:4; and finally Exodus 3:5.
Then a certain magical formula was pronounced, and thus the cure was
supposed to be achieved. Jesus completely disregarded all the
paraphernalia of popular magic, and with a gesture and a word of unique
authority and power, he healed the woman.
The word that the Greek uses for authority in the previous passage is exousia (Greek #1849);
and exousia was defined as unique knowledge together with unique power;
that is precisely what Jesus possessed, and that is what he was
prepared to exercise in a cottage. Paul Tournier writes, "My patients
very often say to me, 'I admire the patience with which you listen to
everything I tell you.' It is not patience at all, but interest." A
miracle to Jesus was not a means of increasing his prestige; to help was
not a laborious and disagreeable duty; he helped instinctively, because
he was supremely interested in all who needed his help.
(ii) It tells us something about the disciples. They had not
known Jesus long, but already they had begun to take all their troubles
to him. Peter's mother-in-law was ill; the simple home was upset; and it
was for the disciples the most natural thing in the world to tell Jesus
all about it.
Paul Tournier tells how one of life's greatest discoveries came
to him. He used to visit an old Christian pastor who never let him go
without praying with him. He was struck by the extreme simplicity of the
old man's prayers. It seemed just a continuation of an intimate
conversation that the old saint was always carrying on with Jesus. Paul
Tournier goes on, "When I got back home I talked it over with my wife,
and together we asked God to give us also the close fellowship with
Jesus the old pastor had. Since then he has been the centre of my
devotion and my travelling companion. He takes pleasure in what I do
(compare Ecclesiastes 9:7),
and concerns himself with it. He is a friend with whom I can discuss
everything that happens in my life. He shares my joy and my pain, my
hopes and fears. He is there when a patient speaks to me from his heart,
listening to him with me and better than I can. And when the patient is
gone I can talk to him about it."
Therein there lies the very essence of the Christian life. As
the hymn has it, "Take it to the Lord in prayer." Thus early the
disciples had learned what became the habit of a lifetime--to take all
their troubles to Jesus and to ask his help for them.
(iii) It tells us something about Peter's wife's mother. No
sooner was she healed than she began to attend to their needs. She used
her recovered health for renewed service. A great Scottish family has
the motto "Saved to Serve." Jesus helps us that we may help others.
1:32-34 When evening
had come and when the sun had set, they kept bringing to him all those
who were ill and demon-possessed. The whole city had crowded together to
the door; and he healed many who were ill with various diseases and
cast out many demons; and he forbade the demons to speak because they
knew him.
The things that Jesus had done in Capernaum could not be
concealed. The emergence of so great a new power and authority was not
something which could be kept secret. So the evening found Peter's house
besieged with crowds seeking Jesus' healing touch. They waited until
evening because the law forbade the carrying of any burden through a
town on the Sabbath day (compare Jeremiah 17:24).
That would have been to work and work was forbidden. They had, of
course, no clocks or watches in those days; the Sabbath ran from 6 p.m.
to 6 p.m.; and the law was that the Sabbath was ended and the day had
finished when three stars came out in the sky. So the people of
Capernaum waited until the sun had set and the stars were out and then
they came, carrying their sick, to Jesus; and he healed them.
Three times we have seen Jesus healing people. First he healed
in the synagogue; second, he healed in the house of his friends; and now
he healed in the street. Jesus recognized the claim of everyone. It was
said of Dr. Johnson that to be in misfortune was to be assured of his
friendship and support. Wherever there was trouble Jesus was ready to
use his power. He selected neither the place nor the person; he realized
the universal claim of human need.
The people flocked to Jesus because they recognized in him a man
who could do things. There were plenty who could talk and expound and
lecture and preach; but here was one who dealt not only in words but
also in actions. It has been said that "if a man can make a better
mousetrap than his neighbours, the public will beat a path to his house
even if he lives in the middle of a wood." The person people want is the
effective person. Jesus could, and can, produce results.
But there is the beginning of tragedy here. The crowds came, but
they came because they wanted something out of Jesus. They did not come
because they loved him; they did not come because they had caught a
glimpse of some new vision; in the last analysis they wanted to use him.
That is what nearly everyone wants to do with God and his Son. For one
prayer that goes up to God in days of prosperity ten thousand go up in
time of adversity. Many a man who has never prayed when the sun was
shining begins to pray when the cold winds come.
Someone has said that many people regard religion as belonging
"to the ambulance corps and not to the firing-line of life." Religion to
them is a crisis affair. It is only when they have got life into a
mess, or when life deals them some knock-out blow that they begin to
remember God. We must all go to Jesus for he alone can give us the
things we need for life; but if that going and these gifts do not
produce in us an answering love and gratitude there is something
tragically wrong. God is not someone to be used in the day of
misfortune; he is someone to be loved and remembered every day of our
lives.
1:35-39 Very early,
when it was still night, Jesus rose and went out. He went away to a
deserted place and there he was praying. Simon and his friends tracked
him down and said to him, "They are all searching for you," Jesus said
to them, "Let us go somewhere else, to the nearby villages, that I may
proclaim the good news there too, for that is why I came forth." So he
went to their synagogues, all over Galilee, proclaiming the good news as
he went, and casting out demons.
Simply to read the record of the things that happened at
Capernaum is to see that Jesus was left with no time alone. Now Jesus
knew well that he could not live without God; that if he was going to be
forever giving out, he must be at least sometimes taking in; that if he
was going to spend himself for others, he must ever and again summon
spiritual reinforcements to his aid. He knew that he could not live
without prayer. In a little book entitled The Practice of Prayer, Dr. A.
D. Belden has some great definitions. "Prayer may be defined as the
appeal of the soul to God." Not to pray is to be guilty of the
incredible folly of ignoring "the possibility of adding God to our
resources." "In prayer we give the perfect mind of God an opportunity to
feed our mental powers." Jesus knew this; he knew that if he was to
meet men he must first meet God. If prayer was necessary for Jesus, how
much more must it be necessary for us?
Even there they sought him out. There was no way in which Jesus
could shut the door. Once Rose Macaulay, the novelist, said that all she
demanded from this life was "a room of her own." That is precisely what
Jesus never had. A great doctor has said that the duty of medicine is
"sometimes to heal, often to afford relief, and always to bring
consolation." That duty was always upon Jesus. It has been said that a
doctor's duty is "to help men to live and to die"--and men are always
living and dying. It is human nature to try to put up the barriers and
to have time and peace to oneself; that is what Jesus never did.
Conscious as he was of his own weariness and exhaustion, he was still
more conscious of the insistent cry of human need. So when they came for
him he rose from his knees to meet the challenge of his task. Prayer
will never do our work for us; what it will do is to strengthen us for
work which must be done.
Jesus set out on a preaching tour of the synagogues of Galilee.
In Mark this tour is dismissed in one verse, but it must have taken
weeks and even months to do it. As he went he preached and he healed.
There were three pairs of things which Jesus never separated.
(i) He never separated words and actions. He never thought that a
work was done when that work was stated; he never believed that his
duty was completed when he had exhorted men to God and to goodness.
Always the statement and the exhortation were put into action. Fosdick
somewhere tens of a student who bought the best possible books and the
best possible equipment and got a special study chair with a special
bookrest to make study easy, and then sat down in the chair--and went to
sleep. The man who deals in words with no actions to follow is very
like that.
(ii) He never separated soul and body. There have been types of
Christianity which spoke as if the body did not matter. But man is both
soul and body. And the task of Christianity is to redeem the whole man
and not just part of him. It is indeed blessedly true that a man may be
starving, living in a hovel, in distress and pain and yet have sweet
times with God; but that is no reason at all for leaving him in such a
case. Missions to primitive races do not only take the Bible; they take
education and medicine; they take the school and the hospital. It is
quite wrong to talk about the social gospel as if it were an extra, or
an option, or even a separate part of the Christian message. The
Christian message is one and it preaches and works for the good of a
man's body as well as the good of his soul.
(iii) Jesus never separated earth and heaven. There are those
who are so concerned with heaven that they forget all about earth and so
become impractical visionaries. There are those who are so concerned
with earth that they forget about heaven and limit good to material
good. The dream of Jesus was a time when God's will would be done in
earth as it is in heaven, (Matthew 6:10) and earth and heaven be one.
1:40-45 A leper came
to him, asking him to help him and kneeling before him. "If you are
willing to do so," he said, "you are able to cleanse me." Jesus was
moved with pity to the depths of his being. He stretched out his hand
and touched him. "I am willing," Jesus said, "be cleansed." Immediately
the leprosy left him and he was cleansed. Immediately Jesus sent him
away with a stern injunction. "See to it," he said to him, "that you
tell no man anything about this; but go and show yourself to the priest,
and bring the offering for cleansing which Moses laid down, so that you
may prove to them that you really are healed." He went away and began
to proclaim the story at length and to spread it all over. The result
was that it was not possible for Jesus to come openly into any town, but
he had to stay outside in the lonely places; and they kept coming to
him from all over.
In the New Testament there is no disease regarded with more
terror and pity than leprosy. When Jesus sent out the Twelve he
commanded them, "Heal the sick, cleanse lepers." (Matthew 18:8.)
The fate of the leper was truly hard. E. W. G. Masterman in his article
on leprosy in the Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, from which we
have drawn much of the information that follows, says, "No other disease
reduces a human being for so many years to so hideous a wreck." Let us
look first at the facts.
There are three kinds of leprosy. (i) There is nodular or
tubercular leprosy. It begins with an unaccountable lethargy and pains
in the joints. Then there appear on the body, especially on the back,
symmetrical discoloured patches. On them little nodules form, at first
pink, then turning brown. The skin is thickened. The nodules gather
specially in the folds of the cheek, the nose, the lips and the
forehead. The whole appearance of the face is changed till the man loses
his human appearance and looks, as the ancients said, like a lion or a
satyr. The nodules grow larger and larger; they ulcerate and from them
comes a foul discharge. The eye-brows fail out; the eyes become staring;
the voice becomes hoarse and the breath wheezes because of the
ulceration of the vocal chords. The hands and the feet also ulcerate.
Slowly the sufferer becomes a mass of ulcerated growths. The average
course of the disease is nine years, and it ends in mental decay, coma
and ultimately death. the sufferer becomes utterly repulsive both to
himself and to others.
(ii) There is anaesthetic leprosy. The initial stages are the
same; but the nerve trunks also are affected. The infected area loses
all sensation. This may happen without the sufferer knowing that it has
happened; and he may not realize that it has happened until he suffers
some burning or scalding and finds that there is no feeling whatsoever
where pain ought to be. As the disease develops the injury to the nerves
causes discoloured patches and blisters. The muscles waste away; the
tendons contract until the hands become like claws. There is always
disfigurement of the finger nails. There ensues chronic ulceration of
the feet and of the hands and then the progressive loss of fingers and
of toes, until in the end a whole hand or a whole foot may drop off. The
duration of the disease is anything from twenty to thirty years. It is a
kind of terrible progressive death of the body.
(iii) The third kind of leprosy is a type--the commonest of all--where nodular and anaesthetic leprosy are mixed.
That is leprosy proper, and there is no doubt that there were
many lepers like that in Palestine in the time of Jesus. From the
description in Leviticus 13:1-59
it is quite clear that in New Testament times the term leprosy was also
used to cover other skin diseases. It seems to have been used to
include psoriasis, a disease which covers the body with white scales,
and which would give rise to the phrase "a leper as white as snow." It
seems also to have included ring-worm which is still very common in the
East. The Hebrew word used in Leviticus for leprosy is tsara'ath (Hebrew #6883). Now Leviticus 13:47 speaks of a tsara'ath (Hebrew #6883) of garments, and a tsara'ath (Hebrew #6883) of houses is dealt with in Leviticus 14:33.
Such a blemish on a garment would be some kind of mould or fungus; and
on a house it would be some kind of dry-rot in the wood or destructive
lichen on the stone. The word tsara'ath (Hebrew #6883),
leprosy in Jewish thought, seems to have covered any kind of creeping
skin disease. Very naturally, with medical knowledge in an extremely
primitive state, diagnosis did not distinguish between the different
kinds of skin disease and included both the deadly and incurable and the
non-fatal and comparatively harmless under the one inclusive title.
Any such skin disease rendered the sufferer unclean. He was
banished from the fellowship of men; he must dwell alone outside the
camp; he must go with rent clothes, bared head, a covering upon his
upper lip, and as he went he must give warning of his polluted presence
with the cry, "Unclean, unclean!" We see the same thing in the Middle
Ages, which merely applied the Mosaic law. The priest, wearing his stole
and carrying a crucifix, led the leper into the church, and read the
burial service over him. The leper was a man who was already dead,
though still alive. He had to wear a black garment that all might
recognize and live in a leper- or lazar-house. He must not come into a
church service but while the service went on he might peer through the
leper "squint" cut in the walls. The leper had not only to bear the
physical pain of his disease; he had to bear the mental anguish and the
heart-break of being completely banished from human society and totally
shunned.
If ever a leper was cured--and real leprosy was incurable, so it
is some of the other skin diseases which must be referred to--he had to
undergo a complicated ceremony of restoration which is described in Leviticus 14:1-57
. He was examined by the priest. Two birds were taken and one was
killed over running water. In addition there was taken cedar, scarlet
and hyssop. These things and the living bird were dipped in the blood of
the dead bird and then the live bird was allowed to go free. The man
washed himself and his clothes and shaved himself. Seven days then
elapsed and he was re-examined. He had then to shave his hair, his head,
his eye-brows. Certain sacrifices were made--two male lambs without
blemish and one ewe lamb; three tenth deals of fine flour mingled with
oil and one log of oil. The amounts were less for the poor. The restored
sufferer was touched on the tip of the right ear, the right thumb and
the right great toe with blood and oil. He was given a final examination
and, if clear of the disease, he was snowed to go with a certificate
that he was clean.
Here is one of the most revealing pictures of Jesus.
(i) He did not drive away a man who had broken the law. The
leper had no right to have spoken to him at all, but Jesus met the
desperation of human need with an understanding compassion.
(ii) Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him. He touched
the man who was unclean. To Jesus he was not unclean; he was simply a
human soul in desperate need.
(iii) Having cleansed him, Jesus sent him to fulfil the
prescribed ritual. He fulfilled the human law and human righteousness.
He did not recklessly defy the conventions, but, when need be, submitted
to them.
Here we see compassion, power and wisdom all conjoined.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)