Verses 1-52
Chapter 10
10:1-12 Leaving there,
Jesus came into the hill-country of Judaea and to the district across
the Jordan, and once again crowds came together to him. As his custom
was, he again continued to teach them. Some Pharisees came to him and
asked him if it was lawful for a man to put away his wife. They asked
this question to test him. He asked them, "What commandment did Moses
lay down for you?" They answered, "Moses allowed a man to write a bill
of divorcement and then to put her away." Jesus said to them, "It was to
meet the hardness of your heart that he wrote this commandment for you.
From the beginning of creation male and female he created them. For
this cause a man will leave his father and his mother and will cleave to
his wife. And the two will become one flesh, so that they are no longer
two but one flesh. So then what God has joined together let not man
separate." In the house his disciples again asked him about this. He
said to them, "Whoever puts away his wife and marries another woman
commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and
marries another man, she commits adultery."
Jesus was pursuing his way south. He had left Galilee and had
come into Judaea. He had not yet entered Jerusalem, but step by step and
stage by stage he was approaching the final scene.
Certain Pharisees came with a question about divorce, by which
they hoped to test him. There may have been more than one motive behind
their question. Divorce was a burning question, a crux of rabbinic
discussion, and it may well be that they honestly wished for Jesus'
opinion on it. They may have wished to test his orthodoxy. It may well
be that Jesus had already had something to say on this matter. Matthew 5:31-32,
shows us Jesus speaking about marriage and re-marriage, and it may be
that these Pharisees had the hope that he might contradict himself and
entangle himself in his own words. It may be that they knew what he
would answer and wished to involve him in enmity with Herod who had in
fact divorced his wife and married another. It may well be that they
wished to hear Jesus contradict the law of Moses, as indeed he did, and
thereby to formulate a charge of heresy against him. One thing is
certain--the question they asked Jesus was no academic one of interest
only to the rabbinic schools. It was a question which dealt with one of
the acutest issues of the time.
In theory nothing could be higher than the Jewish ideal of
marriage. Chastity was held to be the greatest of all the virtues. "We
find that God is long-suffering to every sin except the sin of
unchastity." "Unchastity causes the glory of God to depart." "Every Jew
must surrender his life rather than commit idolatry, murder or
adultery." "The very altar sheds tears when a man divorces the wife of
his youth." The ideal was there but practice fell very far short.
The basic fact that vitiated the whole situation was that in
Jewish law a woman was regarded as a thing. She had no legal rights
whatever but was at the complete disposal of the male head of the
family. The result was that a man could divorce his wife on almost any
grounds, while there were very few on which a woman could seek divorce.
At best she could only ask her husband to divorce her. "A woman may be
divorced with or without her will, but a man only with his will." The
only grounds on which a woman could claim a divorce were if her husband
became a leper, if he engaged in a disgusting trade such as that of a
tanner, if he ravished a virgin, or if he falsely accused her of
prenuptial sin.
The law of Jewish divorce goes back to Deuteronomy 24:1.
That passage was the foundation of the whole matter. It runs thus:
"When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favour in
his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a
bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his
house."
At first the bill of divorcement was very simple. It read like
this: "Let this be from me thy writ of divorce and letter of dismissal
and deed of liberation, that thou mayest marry whatsoever man thou
wilt." In later days the bill became more elaborate: "On the ........
day, of the ........ week, of the ........ month, year ........ of the
world, according to the calculation in use in the town of .........
situated by the river ........ I, A.B., son of C.D., and by whatsoever
name I am called here, present this day ......... native of the town of
........ I acting of my free-will, and without any coercion, do
repudiate, send back, and put away thee E.F., daughter of G.H., and by
whatsoever name thou art called, and until this present time my wife. I
send thee away now E.F., daughter of G.H., so that thou art free and
thou canst at thy pleasure marry whom thou wilt and no one will hinder
thee. This is thy letter of divorce, act of repudiation, certificate of
separation, according to the law of Moses and of Israel." In New
Testament times this document took a skilled Rabbi to draw it up. It was
afterwards proved by a court of three rabbis, and then lodged with the
Sanhedrin. But the process of divorce remained on the whole exceedingly
easy, and at the entire discretion of the man.
But the real crux of the problem was the interpretation of the law as it is in Deuteronomy 24:1.
There it is laid down that a man can divorce his wife if he finds in
her some indecency. How was that phrase to be interpreted? There were in
this matter two schools of thought.
There was the school of Shammai. They interpreted the matter
with utter strictness. A matter of indecency was adultery and adultery
alone. Let a woman be as bad as Jezebel, unless she was guilty of
adultery there could be no divorce.
The other school was the school of Hillel. They interpreted that
crucial phrase as widely as possible. They said that it could mean if
the wife spoiled a dish of food, if she spun in the streets, if she
talked to a strange man, if she spoke disrespectfully of her husband's
relations in his hearing, if she was a brawling woman, (who was defined
as a woman whose voice could be heard in the next house). Rabbi Akiba
even went the length of saying that it meant if a man found a woman who
was fairer in his eyes than his wife was.
Human nature being as it is, it was the laxer view which
prevailed. The result was that divorce for the most trivial reasons, or
for no reason at all, was tragically common. To such a pass had things
come that, in the time of Jesus, women hesitated to marry at all because
marriage was so insecure. When Jesus spoke as he did he was speaking on
a subject which was a burning issue, and he was striking a blow for
women by seeking to restore marriage to the position it ought to have.
Certain things are to be noted. Jesus quoted the Mosaic
regulation, and then he said that Moses laid that down only "to meet the
hardness of your hearts." That may mean one of two things. It may mean
that Moses laid it down because it was the best that could be expected
from people such as those for whom he was legislating. Or, it may mean
that Moses laid it down in order to try to control a situation which
even then was degenerating, that in fact it was not so much a permission
to divorce as it was in the beginning an attempt to control divorce, to
reduce it to some kind of law, and to make it more difficult.
In any event Jesus made it quite clear that he regarded Deuteronomy 24:1,
as being laid down for a definite situation and being in no sense
permanently binding. The authorities which he quoted went much further
back. For his authorities he went right back to the Creation story and
quoted Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24.
It was his view that in the very nature of things marriage was a
permanency which indissolubly united two people in such a way that the
bond could never be broken by any human laws and regulations. It was his
belief that in the very constitution of the universe marriage is meant
to be an absolute permanency and unity, and no Mosaic regulation dealing
with a temporary situation could alter that.
The difficulty is that in the parallel account in Matthew there
is a difference. In Mark, Jesus' prohibition of divorce and remarriage
is absolute. In Matthew 19:3-9,
he is shown as absolutely forbidding remarriage, but as permitting
divorce on one ground--adultery. Almost certainly the Matthew version is
correct, and it is indeed implied in Mark. It was Jewish law that
adultery did in fact compulsorily dissolve any marriage. And the truth
is that infidelity does in fact dissolve the bond of marriage. Once
adultery has been committed the unity is in any case destroyed and
divorce merely attests the fact.
The real essence of the passage is that Jesus insisted that the
loose sexual morality of his day must be mended. Those who sought
marriage only for pleasure must be reminded that marriage is also for
responsibility. Those who regarded marriage simply as a means of
gratifying their physical passions must be reminded that it was also a
spiritual unity. Jesus was building a rampart round the home.
10:13-16 They brought
little children to Jesus that he might touch them. But the disciples
rebuked them. When Jesus saw what they were doing he was vexed and said
to them, "Let the little children come to me, and don't try to stop them
for of such is the Kingdom of God. This is the truth I tell you,
whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child will not
enter into it." And he took them up in the crook of his arm and blessed
them and laid his hands upon them.
It was natural that Jewish mothers should wish their children
to be blessed by a great and distinguished Rabbi. Especially they
brought their children to such a person on their first birthday. It was
in this way that they brought the children to Jesus on this day.
We will fully understand the almost poignant beauty of this
passage only if we remember when it happened. Jesus was on the way to
the Cross--and he knew it. Its cruel shadow can never have been far from
his mind. It was at such a time that he had time for the children. Even
with such a tension in his mind as that he had time to take them in his
arms and he had the heart to smile into their faces and maybe to play
with them awhile.
The disciples were not boorish and ungracious men. They simply
wanted to protect Jesus. They did not quite know what was going on, but
they knew quite clearly that tragedy lay ahead and they could see the
tension under which Jesus laboured. They did not want him to be
bothered. They could not conceive that he could want the children about
him at such a time as that. But Jesus said, "Let the children come to
me."
Incidentally, this tells us a great deal about Jesus. It tells
us that he was the kind of person who cared for children and for whom
children cared. He could not have been a stern and gloomy and joyless
person. There must have been a kindly sunshine on him. He must have
smiled easily and laughed joyously. Somewhere George Macdonald says that
he does not believe in a man's Christianity if the children are never
to be found playing around his door. This little, precious incident
throws a flood of light on the human kind of person Jesus was.
"Of such," said Jesus "is the Kingdom of God." What is it about the child that Jesus liked and valued so much?
(i) There is the child's humility. There is the child who is an
exhibitionist, but such a child is rare and almost always the product of
misguided adult treatment. Ordinarily the child is embarrassed by
prominence and publicity. He has not yet learned to think in terms of
place and pride and prestige. He has not yet learned to discover the
importance of himself.
(ii) There is the child's obedience. True, a child is often
disobedient, but, paradox though it may seem, his natural instinct is to
obey. He has not yet learned the pride and the false independence which
separate a man from his fellow-men and from God.
(iii) There is the child's trust. That is seen in two things.
(a) It is seen in the child's acceptance of authority. There is a
time when he thinks his father knows everything and that his father is
always right. To our shame, he soon grows out of that. But instinctively
the child realizes his own ignorance and his own helplessness and
trusts the one who, as he thinks, knows.
(b) It is seen in the child's confidence in other people. He
does not expect any person to be bad. He will make friends with a
perfect stranger. A great man once said that the greatest compliment
ever paid him was when a little boy came up to him, a complete stranger,
and asked him to tie his shoelace. The child has not yet learned to
suspect the world. He still believes the best about others. Sometimes
that very trust leads him into danger for there are those who are
totally unworthy of it and who abuse it, but that trust is a lovely
thing.
(iv) The child has a short memory. He has not yet learned to
bear grudges and nourish bitterness. Even when he is unjustly
treated--and who among us is not sometimes unjust to his children?--he
forgets, and forgets so completely that he does not even need to
forgive.
Indeed, of such is the Kingdom of God.
10:17-22 As Jesus was
going along the road, a man came running to him and threw himself at his
feet and asked him, "Good teacher, what am I to do to inherit eternal
life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? There is no one who
is good, except one--God. You know the commandments. You must not kin,
you must not commit adultery, you must not steal, you must not bear
false witness, you must not defraud anyone, you must honour your father
and mother." He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these from my
youth." When Jesus looked at him he loved him, and he said to him, "You
still lack one thing. Go, sell all that you have, and give it to the
poor and you will have treasure in heaven. And come! Follow me!" But he
was grieved at this saying, and he went away in sadness, for he had many
possessions.
Here is one of the most vivid stories in the gospels.
(i) We must note how the man came and how Jesus met him. He came
running. He flung himself at Jesus' feet. There is something amazing in
the sight of this rich, young aristocrat falling at the feet of the
penniless prophet from Nazareth, who was on the way to being an outlaw.
"Good teacher!" he began. And straight away Jesus answered back, "No
flattery! Don't call me good! Keep that word for God!" It looks almost
as if Jesus was trying to freeze him and to pour cold water on that
young enthusiasm.
There is a lesson here. It is clear that this man came to Jesus
in a moment of overflowing emotion. It is also clear that Jesus
exercised a personal fascination over him. Jesus did two things that
every evangelist and every preacher and every teacher ought to remember
and to copy.
First, he said in effect, "Stop and think! You are all wrought
up and palpitating with emotion! I don't want you swept to me by a
moment of emotion. Think calmly what you are doing." Jesus was not
freezing the man. He was telling him even at the very outset to count
the cost.
Second, he said in effect, "You cannot become a Christian by a
sentimental passion for me. you must look at God." Preaching and
teaching always mean the conveying of truth through personality, and
thereby lies the greatest danger of the greatest teachers. The danger is
that the pupil, the scholar, the young person may form a personal
attachment to the teacher or the preacher and think that it is an
attachment to God. The teacher and preacher must never point to himself.
He must always point to God. There is in all true teaching a certain
self-obliteration. True, we cannot keep personality and warm personal
loyalty out of it altogether, and we would not if we could. But the
matter must not stop there. The teacher and the preacher are in the last
analysis only finger-posts to God.
(ii) Never did any story so lay down the essential Christian
truth that respectability is not enough. Jesus quoted the commandments
which were the basis of the decent life. Without hesitation the man said
he had kept them all. Note one thing--with one exception they were all
negative commandments, and that one exception operated only in the
family circle. In effect the man was saying, "I never in my life did
anyone any harm." That was perfectly true. But the real question is,
"What good have you done?" And the question to this man was even more
pointed, "With all your possessions, with your wealth, with all that you
could give away, what positive good have you done to others? How much
have you gone out of your way to help and comfort and strengthen others
as you might have done?" Respectability, on the whole, consists in not
doing things; Christianity consists in doing things. That was precisely
where this man--like so many of us--fell down.
(iii) So Jesus confronted him with a challenge. In effect he
said, "Get out of this moral respectability. Stop looking at goodness as
consisting in not doing things. Take yourself and all that you have,
and spend everything on others. Then you will find true happiness in
time and in eternity." The man could not do it. He had great
possessions, which it had never entered his head to give away and when
it was suggested to him he could not. True, he had never stolen, and he
had never defrauded anyone--but neither had he ever been, nor could he
compel himself to be, positively and sacrificially generous.
It may be respectable never to take away from anyone. It is
Christian to give to someone. In reality Jesus was confronting this man
with a basic and essential question--"How much do you want real
Christianity? Do you want it enough to give your possessions away?" And
the man had to answer in effect, "I want it--but I don't want it as much
as all that."
Robert Louis Stevenson in The Master of Ballantrae draws a
picture of the master leaving the ancestral home of Durrisdeer for the
last time. Even he is sad. He is talking to the faithful family steward.
"Ah! M'Kellar," he said, "Do you think I have never a regret." "I do
not think," said M'Kellar, "that you could be so bad a man unless you
had all the machinery for being a good one." "Not all," said the master,
"not all. It is there you are in error. The malady of not wanting."
It was the malady of not wanting enough which meant tragedy for
the man who came running to Jesus. It is the malady from which most of
us suffer. We all want goodness, but so few of us want it enough to pay
the price.
Jesus, looking at him, loved him. There were many things in that look of Jesus.
(a) There was the appeal of love. Jesus was not angry with him.
He loved him too much for that. It was not the look of anger but the
appeal of love.
(b) There was the challenge to chivalry. It was a look which
sought to pull the man out of his comfortable, respectable, settled life
into the adventure of being a real Christian.
(c) It was the look of grief. And that grief was the sorest
grief of all--the grief of seeing a man deliberately choose not to be
what he might have been and had it in him to be.
Jesus looks at us with the appeal of love and with the challenge
to the knightliness of the Christian way. God grant that he may never
have to look at us with sorrow for a loved one who refuser to be what he
might have been and could have been.
10:23-27 Jesus looked
round and said to his disciples, "With what difficulty will those who
have money enter into the Kingdom of God!" His disciples were amazed at
his words. Jesus repeated, "Children, how difficult it is for those who
trust in money to enter into the Kingdom of God! It is easier for a
camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
Kingdom of God." They were exceedingly astonished. "Who then," they
said to him, "can be saved?" Jesus looked at them and said, "With man it
is impossible, but not with God. All things are possible with God."
The ruler who had refused the challenge of Jesus had walked
sorrowfully away, and, no doubt the eyes of Jesus and the company of the
apostles followed him until his figure receded into the distance. Then
Jesus turned and looked round his own men. "How very difficult it is,"
he said, "for a man who has money to enter into the Kingdom of God." The
word used for money is chremata (Greek #5536), which is defined by Aristotle as, "All those things of which the value is measured by coinage."
We may perhaps wonder why this saying so astonished the
disciples. Twice their amazement is stressed. The reason for their
amazement was that Jesus was turning accepted Jewish standards
completely upside down. Popular Jewish morality was simple. It believed
that prosperity was the sign of a good man. If a man was rich, God must
have honoured and blessed him. Wealth was proof of excellence of
character and of favour with God. The Psalmist sums it up, "I have been
young and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his
children begging bread." (Psalms 37:25.)
No wonder the disciples were surprised! They would have argued
that the more prosperous a man was the more certain he was of entry into
the Kingdom. So Jesus repeated his saying in a slightly different way
to make clearer what he meant. "How difficult it is," he said, "for
those who have put their trust in riches to enter the Kingdom."
No one ever saw the dangers of prosperity and of material things more clearly than Jesus did. What are these dangers?
(i) Material possessions tend to fix a man's heart to this
world. He has so large a stake in it, he has so great an interest in it,
that it is difficult for him to think beyond it, and it is specially
difficult for him to contemplate leaving it. Dr. Johnson was once shown
round a famous castle and its lovely grounds. After he had seen it all,
he turned to his friends and said, "These are the things that make it
difficult to die." The danger of possessions is that they fix a man's
thoughts and interests to this world.
(ii) If a man's main interest is in material possessions it
tends to make him think of everything in terms of price. A hill
shepherd's wife wrote a most interesting letter to a newspaper. Her
children had been brought up in the loneliness of the hills. They were
simple and unsophisticated. Then her husband got a position in a town
and the children were introduced to the town. They changed very
considerably--and they changed for the worse. The last paragraph of her
letter read--"Which is preferable for a child's upbringing--a lack of
worldliness, but with better manners and sincere and simple thoughts, or
worldliness and its present-day habit of knowing the price of
everything and the true value of nothing?"
If a man's main interest is in material things, he will think in
terms, of price and not in terms of value. He will think in terms of
what money can get. And he may well forget that there are values in this
world far beyond money, that there are things which have no price, and
that there are precious things that money cannot buy. It is fatal when a
man begins to think that everything worth having has a money price.
(iii) Jesus would have said that the possession of material things is two things.
(a) It is an acid test of a man. For a hundred men who can stand
adversity only one can stand prosperity. Prosperity can so very easily
make a man arrogant, proud, self-satisfied, worldly. It takes a really
big and good man to bear it worthily.
(b) It is a responsibility. A man will always be judged by two
standards how he got his possessions and how he uses them. The more he
has, the greater the responsibility that rests upon him. Will he use
what he has selfishly or generously? Will he use it as if he had
undisputed possession of it, or remembering that he holds it in
stewardship from God.
The reaction of the disciples was that, if what Jesus was saying
was true, to be saved at all was well-nigh impossible. Then Jesus
stated the whole doctrine of salvation in a nutshell. "If," he said,
"salvation depended on a man's own efforts it would be impossible for
anyone. But salvation is the gift of God and all things are possible to
him." The man who trusts in himself and in his possessions can never be
saved. The man who trusts in the saving power and the redeeming love of
God can enter freely into salvation. This is the thought that Jesus
stated. This is the thought that Paul wrote in letter after letter. And
this is the thought which is still for us the very foundation of the
Christian faith.
10:28-31 Peter began
to say to him, "Look now! We have left everything and have become your
followers." Jesus said, "This is the truth I tell you--there is no one
who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or
children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the good news who will
not get it back a hundred times over in this present time--homes and
brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands--with
persecutions, and in the world to come eternal life. But many who are
first will be last, and the last first."
Peter's mind had been working, and, characteristically, his
tongue could not stay still. He had just seen a man deliberately refuse
Jesus' "Follow me!" He had just heard Jesus say in effect that that man
by his action had shut himself out from the Kingdom of God. Peter could
not help drawing the contrast between that man and himself and his
friends. Just as the man had refused Jesus' "Follow me!" he and his
friends had accepted it, and Peter with that almost crude honesty of his
wanted to know what he and his friends were to get out of it. Jesus'
answer falls into three sections.
(i) He said that no man ever gave up anything for the sake of
himself and of his good news without getting it back a hundredfold. It
so happened that in the early Church that was literally true. A man's
Christianity might involve the loss of home and friends and loved ones,
but his entry into the Christian Church brought him into a far greater
and wider family than ever he had left, a family who were all
spiritually kin to him.
We see the thing actually happening in the life of Paul. No
doubt, when Paul became a Christian the door of his home slammed in his
face and his family disowned him. But equally without doubt there was
city upon city, town upon town, village upon village in Europe and in
Asia Minor where he could find a home waiting for him and a family in
Christ to welcome him. It is strange how he uses the very family terms.
In Romans 16:13, he tells how the mother of Rufus was as good as a mother to him. In Philemon 1:10 , he speaks of Onesimus as the son whom he had begotten in his bonds.
It would be so of every Christian in the early days. When his
own family rejected him he entered into the wider family of Christ.
When Egerton Young first preached the gospel to the Red Indians
in Saskatchewan the idea of the fatherhood of God fascinated men who had
hitherto seen God only in the thunder and the lightning and the storm
blast. An old chief said to Egerton Young, "Did I hear you say to God
'Our Father'?" "I did," said Egerton Young. "God is your Father?" asked
the chief. "Yes," said Egerton Young. "And," went on the chief, "He is
also my Father?" "He certainly is," said Egerton Young. Suddenly the
chief's face lit up with a new radiance. His hand went out. "Then," he
said like a man making a dazzling discovery, "you and I are brothers."
A man may have to sacrifice ties that are very dear in order to
become a Christian, but when he does he becomes a member of a family and
a brotherhood as wide as earth and heaven.
(ii) Jesus added two things. First, he added the simple words
and persecutions. Straightaway these words remove the whole matter from
the world of quid pro quo. They take away the idea of a material reward
for a material sacrifice. They tell us of two things. They speak of the
utter honesty of Jesus. He never offered an easy way. He told men
straight that to be a Christian is a costly thing. Second, they tell us
that Jesus never used a bribe to make men follow him. He used a
challenge. It is as if he said, "Certainly you will get your reward, but
you will have to show yourself a big enough man and a gallant enough
adventurer to get it." The second thing that Jesus added was the idea of
the world to come. He never promised that within this world of space
and time there would be a kind of squaring up of the balance sheet and
settlement of accounts. He did not call men to win the rewards of time.
He called men to earn the blessings of eternity. God has not only this
world in which to repay.
(iii) Then Jesus added one warning epigram--"Many who are first
shall be last, and the last first." This was in reality a warning to
Peter. It may well be that by this time Peter was estimating his own
worth and his own reward and assessing them high. What Jesus was saying
was, "The final standard of judgment is with God. Many a man may stand
well in the judgment of the world, but the judgment of God may upset the
world's judgment. Still more many a man may stand well in his own
judgment, and find that God's evaluation of him is very different." It
is a warning against all pride. It is a warning that the ultimate
judgments belong to God who alone knows the motives of men's hearts. It
is a warning that the judgments of heaven may well upset the reputations
of earth.
10:32-34 They were on
the road, on their way up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of
them. They were in a state of astonished bewilderment, and, as they
followed him, they were afraid. Once again he took the Twelve to him,
and began to tell them what was going to happen to him. "Look you!" He
said, "We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed
over to the chief priests and experts in the law, and they will condemn
him to death, and they will hand him over to the Gentiles, and they will
make a jest of him, and they will spit on him, and they will scourge
him and they will kill him. And after three days he will rise again."
Here is a vivid picture, all the more vivid because of the
stark economy of words with which it is painted. Jesus and his men were
entering upon the last scene. Jesus had set his course definitely and
irrevocably to Jerusalem and the Cross. Mark marks the stages very
definitely. There had been the withdrawal to the north, to the territory
round Caesarea Phillipi. there had been the journey south, and the
brief halt in Galilee. There had been the way to Judaea and the time in
the hill-country and beyond Jordan. And now there is the final stage,
the road to Jerusalem.
This picture tells us something about Jesus.
(i) It tells us of the loneliness of Jesus. They were going
along the road and he was out ahead of them--alone. And they were so
amazed and bewildered, so conscious of the sense of impending tragedy,
that they were afraid to go up to him. There are certain decisions which
a man must take alone. Had Jesus tried to share this decision with the
Twelve their only contribution would have been to try to stop him. There
are certain things which a man must face alone. Matthew Arnold, in his
poem Isolation, speaks of,
"This truth--to prove and make thine own:
'Thou hast been, shalt be, art alone'."
There are certain decisions which must be taken and certain
roads that must be walked in the awful loneliness of a man's own soul.
And yet, in the deepest sense of all, even in these times a man is not
alone, for never is God nearer to him. Whittier writes of such a time,
"Nothing before, nothing behind.
The steps of faith
Fall on the seeming void, and find
The rock beneath."
Here we see the essential loneliness of Jesus, a loneliness that was comforted by God.
(ii) It tells us of the courage of Jesus. Three times Jesus
foretold the things that were to happen to him in Jerusalem, and as Mark
tells of these warnings, each time they grow grimmer and some further
detail of horror is included. At first (Mark 8:31) it is the bare announcement. At the second time the hint of betrayal is there (Mark 9:31).
And now at the third time the jesting, the mocking and the scourging
appear. It would seem as if the picture became ever clearer in the mind
of Jesus as he became more and more aware of the cost of redemption.
There are two kinds of courage. There is the courage which is a
kind of instinctive reaction, almost a reflex action, the courage of the
man confronted out of the blue with a crisis to which he instinctively
reacts with gallantry, scarcely having time to think. Many a man has
become a hero in the heat of the moment. There is also the courage of
the man who sees the grim thing approaching far ahead, who has plenty of
time to turn back, who could, if he chose, evade the issue, and who yet
goes on. There is no doubt which is the higher courage--this known
deliberate facing of the future. That is the courage Jesus showed. If no
higher verdict was possible, it would still be true to say of Jesus
that he ranks with the heroes of the world.
(iii) It tells us of the personal magnetism of Jesus. It is
quite clear that by this time the disciples did not know what was going
on. They were sure that Jesus was the Messiah. They were equally sure
that he was going to die. To them these two facts did not make sense
when put together. They were completely bewildered, and yet they
followed To them everything was dark except one thing--they loved Jesus,
and, however much they wished to, they could not leave him. They had
learned something which is of the very essence of life and faith--they
loved so much that they were compelled to accept what they could not
understand.
10:35-40 James and
John, the sons of Zebedee, came to Jesus. "Teacher," they said, "we want
you to do for us whatever we ask you." "What do you want me to do for
you?" he said to them. They said to him, "Grant to us that, in your
glory, we may sit one on your right hand and one on your left." "You do
not know what you ask," Jesus said to them. "Can you drink the cup which
I am drinking? Or, can you go through the experience through which I am
going?" "We can," they said to him. Jesus said to them, "You will drink
the cup which I am drinking. You will go through the experience through
which I am going. But to sit on my right hand and on my left is not
mine to give you. That place belongs to those for whom it has been
prepared."
This is a very revealing story.
(i) It tells us something about Mark. Matthew retells this story (Matthew 20:20-23),
but in his version the request for the first places is made not by
James and John, but by their mother Salome. Matthew must have felt that
such a request was unworthy of an apostle, and, to save the reputation
of James and John, he attributed it to the natural ambition of their
mother. This story shows us the honesty of Mark. It is told that a court
painter painted the portrait of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was afflicted
with warts on the face. Thinking to please him, the painter omitted the
warts in the painting. When Cromwell saw it, he said, "Take it away!
and paint me warts and all!" Mark's aim is to show us the disciples,
warts and all. And Mark was right, because the Twelve were not a company
of saints. They were ordinary men. It was with people like ourselves
Jesus set out to change the world--and did it.
(ii) It tells us something about James and John.
(a) It tells us that they were ambitious. When the victory was
won and the triumph was complete, they aimed at being Jesus? chief
ministers of state. Maybe their ambition was kindled because more than
once Jesus had made them part of his inner circle, the chosen three.
Maybe they were a little better off than the others. Their father was
well enough off to employ hired servants (Mark 1:20),
and it may be that they rather snobbishly thought that their social
superiority entitled them to the first place. In any event they show
themselves as men in whose hearts there was ambition for the first place
in an earthly kingdom.
(b) It tells us that they had completely failed to understand
Jesus. The amazing thing is not the fact that this incident happened,
but the time at which it happened. It is the juxtaposition of Jesus'
most definite and detailed forecast of his death and this request that
is staggering. It shows, as nothing else could, how little they
understood what Jesus was saying to them. Words were powerless to rid
them of the idea of a Messiah of earthly power and glory. Only the Cross
could do that.
(c) But when we have said all that is to be said against James
and John, this story tells us one shining thing about them--bewildered
as they might be, they still believed in Jesus. It is amazing that they
could still connect glory with a Galilaean carpenter who had incurred
the enmity and the bitter opposition of the orthodox religious leaders
and who was apparently heading for a cross. There is amazing confidence
and amazing loyalty there. Misguided James and John might be but their
hearts were in the right place. They never doubted Jesus' ultimate
triumph.
(iii) It tells us something of Jesus' standard of greatness. The
Revised Standard Version gives a literally accurate reading of what
Jesus said--"Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be
baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?" Jesus uses two
Jewish metaphors here.
It was the custom at a royal banquet for the king to hand the
cup to his guests. The cup therefore became a metaphor for the life and
experience that God handed out to men. "My cup overflows," said the
Psalmist (Psalms 23:5),
when he spoke of a life and experience of happiness given to him by
God. "In the hand of the Lord there is a cup," said the Psalmist (Psalms 75:8),
when he was thinking of the fate in store for the wicked and the
disobedient. Isaiah, thinking of the disasters which had come upon the
people of Israel, describes them as having drunk "at the hand of the
Lord the cup of his wrath." (Isaiah 51:17.) The cup speaks of the experience allotted to men by God.
The other phrase which Jesus uses is actually misleading in the
literal English version. He speaks of the baptism with which he was
baptized. The Greek verb baptizein (Greek #907) means to dip. Its past participle (bebaptismenos, Greek #907)
means submerged, and it is regularly used of being submerged in any
experience. For instance, a spendthrift is said to be submerged in debt.
A drunk man is said to be submerged in drink. A grief-stricken person
is said to be submerged in sorrow. A lad before a cross-examining
teacher is said to be submerged in questions. The word is regularly used
for a ship that has been wrecked and submerged beneath the waves. The
metaphor is very closely related to a metaphor which the Psalmist often
uses. In Psalms 42:7 we read, "All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me." In Psalms 124:4
we read, "Then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would
have gone over us." The expression, as Jesus used it here, had nothing
to do with technical baptism. What he is saying is, "Can you bear to go
through the terrible experience which I have to go through? Can you face
being submerged in hatred and pain and death, as I have to be?" He was
telling these two disciples that without a cross there can never be a
crown. The standard of greatness in the Kingdom is the standard of the
Cross. It was true that in the days to come they did go through the
experience of their Master, for James was beheaded by Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:2),
and, though John was probably not martyred, he suffered much for
Christ. They accepted the challenge of their Master--even if they did so
blindly.
(iv) Jesus told them that the ultimate issue of things belonged
to God. The final assignment of destiny was his prerogative. Jesus never
usurped the place of God. His own whole life was one long act of
submission to his will and he knew that in the end that will was
supreme.
10:41-45 When the ten
heard about this, they began to be vexed about the action of James and
John. Jesus called them to him. "You are well aware," he said, "that
those who are esteemed good enough to rule over the Gentiles lord it
over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It is not
so amongst you, but, amongst you, whoever wishes to be great will be
your servant, and amongst you, whoever wishes to be first will be the
slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve,
and to give his life a ransom for many."
Inevitably the action of James and John aroused deep resentment
amongst the other ten. It seemed to them that they had tried to steal a
march and to take an unfair advantage. Immediately the old controversy
about who was to be greatest began to rage again.
This was a serious situation. The fellowship of the apostolic
band might well have been wrecked, had Jesus not taken immediate action.
He called them to him, and made quite clear the different standards of
greatness in his Kingdom and in the kingdoms of the world. In the
kingdoms of the world the standard of greatness was power. The test was:
How many people does a man control? How great an army of servants has
he at his beck and call? On how many people can he impose his will? Not
very much later than this, Galba was to sum up the heathen idea of
kingship and greatness when he said that now he was emperor he could do
what he liked and do it to anyone. In the Kingdom of Jesus the standard
was that of service. Greatness consisted, not in reducing other men to
one's service, but in reducing oneself to their service. The test was
not, What service can I extract?, but, What service can I give?
We tend to think this is an ideal state of affairs, but, in
point of fact, it is the soundest common sense. It is in fact the first
principle of ordinary everyday business life. Bruce Barton points out
that the basis on which a motor company will claim the patronage of
prospective customers is that they will crawl under your car oftener and
get themselves dirtier than any of their competitors. They are in other
words prepared to give more service. He points out that although the
ordinary clerk may go home at 5.30 p.m., the light will be seen burning
in the office of the chief executive long into the night. It is his
willingness to give the extra service that makes him head of the firm.
The basic trouble in the human situation is that men wish to do
as little as possible and to get as much as possible. It is only when
they are filled with the desire to put into life more than they take
out, that life for themselves and for others will be happy and
prosperous. Kipling has a poem called Mary's Son which is advice on the
spirit in which a man must work:
"If you stop to find out what your wages will be
And how they will clothe and feed you,
Willie, my son, don't you go to the Sea,
For the Sea will never need you.
"If you ask for the reason of every command,
And argue with people about you,
Willie, my son, don't you go on the Land,
For the Land will do better without you.
If you stop to consider the work that you've done
And to boast what your labour is worth, dear,
Angels may come for you, Willie, my son,
But you'll never be wanted on earth dear!"
The world needs people whose ideal is service--that is to say
it needs people who have realized what sound sense Jesus spoke.
To clinch his words Jesus pointed to his own example. With such
powers as he had, he could have arranged life entirely to suit himself,
but he had spent himself and all his powers in the service of others. He
had come, he said, to give his life a ransom for many. This is one of
the great phrases of the gospel, and yet it has been sadly mishandled
and maltreated. People have tried to erect a theory of the atonement on
what is a saying of love.
It was not long until people were asking to whom this ransom of
the life of Christ had been paid? Origen asked the question. "To whom
did he give his life a ransom for many? It was not to God. Was it not
then to the Evil One? For the devil was holding us fast until the ransom
should be given to him, even the life of Jesus, for he was deceived
with the idea that he could have dominion over it and did not see that
he could not bear the torture involved in retaining it." It is an odd
conception that the life of Jesus was paid as a ransom to the devil so
that he should release men from the bondage in which he held them, but
that the devil found that in demanding and accepting that ransom, he
had, so to speak, bitten off more than he could chew.
Gregory of Nyssa saw the flaw in that theory, namely that it
really puts the devil on an equality with God. It allows him to make a
bargain with God on equal terms. So Gregory of Nyssa conceived of the
extraordinary idea of a trick played by God. The devil was tricked by
the seeming weakness of the incarnation. He mistook Jesus for a mere
man. He tried to exert his authority over him and, by trying to do so,
lost it. Again it is an odd idea--that God should conquer the devil by a
trick.
Another two hundred years passed and Gregory the Great took up
the idea. He used a fantastic metaphor. The incarnation was a divine
stratagem to catch the great leviathan. The deity of Christ was the
hook, his flesh was the bait. When the bait was dangled before
Leviathan, the devil, he swallowed it, and tried to swallow the hook,
too, and so was overcome forever.
Finally Peter the Lombard brings this idea to its most grotesque
and repulsive. "The Cross," he said, "was a mouse-trap to catch the
devil, baited with the blood of Christ." All this simply shows what
happens when men take a lovely and precious picture and try to make a
cold theology out of it.
Suppose we say, "Sorrow is the price of love," we mean that love
cannot exist without the possibility of sorrow, but we never even think
of trying to explain to whom that price is paid. Suppose we say that
freedom can be obtained only at the price of blood, toil, tears and
sweat, we never think of investigating to whom that price is paid. This
saying of Jesus is a simple and pictorial way of saying that it cost the
life of Jesus to bring men back from their sin into the love of God. It
means that the cost of our salvation was the Cross of Christ. Beyond
that we cannot go, and beyond that we do not need to go. We know only
that something happened on the Cross which opened for us the way to God.
10:46-52 They went to
Jericho. As Jesus was passing through Jericho, on his way out of the
city--his disciples and a great crowd were with him--Bartimaeus, the son
of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard
that Jesus of Nazareth was there he began to shout. "Son of David!" he
cried, "Jesus! Have pity on me!" Many rebuked him and told him to be
quiet. But he shouted all the more, "Son of David! Have pity on me!"
Jesus came to a stop. "Call him here!" he said. They called the blind
man. "Courage!" they said to him. "Get up! He is calling you!" He threw
off his cloak and leapt up and came to Jesus. Jesus said to him, "What
do you want me to do for you?" The blind man said to him, "Master
teacher! My prayer is that I might see again." Jesus said to him, "Go!
Your faith has cured you." Immediately he saw again, and he followed him
upon the road.
For Jesus the end of the road was not far away. Jericho was
only about 15 miles from Jerusalem. We must try to visualize the scene.
The main road ran right through Jericho. Jesus was on his way to the
Passover. When a distinguished Rabbi or teacher was on such a journey it
was the custom that he was surrounded by a crowd of people, disciples
and learners, who listened to him as he discoursed while he walked. That
was one of the commonest ways of teaching.
It was the law that every male Jew over twelve years of age who
lived within 15 miles of Jerusalem must attend the Passover. It was
clearly impossible that such a law should be fulfilled and that everyone
should go. Those who were unable to go were in the habit of lining the
streets of towns and villages through which groups of Passover pilgrims
must pass to bid them godspeed on their way. So then the streets of
Jericho would be lined with people, and there would be even more than
usual, for there would be many eager and curious to catch a glimpse of
this audacious young Galilaean who had pitted himself against the
assembled might of orthodoxy.
Jericho had one special characteristic. There were attached to
the Temple over 20,000 priests and as many levites. Obviously they could
not all serve at the one time. They were therefore divided into
twenty-six courses which served in rotation. Very many of these priests
and levites resided in Jericho when they were not on actual temple duty.
There must have been many of them in the crowd that day. At the
Passover all were on duty for all were needed. It was one of the rare
occasions when all did serve. But many would not have started yet. They
would be doubly eager to see this rebel who was about to invade
Jerusalem. There would be many cold and bleak and hostile eyes in the
crowd that day, because it was clear that if Jesus was right, the whole
Temple worship was one vast irrelevancy.
At the northern gate sat a beggar, Bartimaeus by name. He heard
the tramp of feet. He asked what was happening and who was passing. He
was told that it was Jesus. There and then he set up an uproar to
attract Jesus' attention to him. To those listening to Jesus' teaching
as he walked the uproar was an offence. They tried to silence
Bartimaeus, but no one was going to take from him his chance to escape
from his world of darkness, and he cried with such violence and
importunity that the procession stopped, and he was brought to Jesus.
This is a most illuminating story. In it we can see many of the things which we might call the conditions of miracle.
(i) There is the sheer persistence of Bartimaeus. Nothing would
stop his clamour to come face to face with Jesus. He was utterly
determined to meet the one person whom he longed to confront with his
trouble. In the mind of Bartimaeus there was not just a nebulous,
wistful, sentimental wish to see Jesus. It was a desperate desire, and
it is that desperate desire that gets things done.
(ii) His response to the call of Jesus was immediate and eager,
so eager that he cast off his hindering cloak to run to Jesus the more
quickly. Many a man hears the call of Jesus, but says in effect, "Wait
until I have done this," or "Wait until I have finished that."
Bartimaeus came like a shot when Jesus called. Certain chances happen
only once. Bartimaeus instinctively knew that. Sometimes we have a wave
of longing to abandon some habit, to purify life of some wrong thing, to
give ourselves more completely to Jesus. So very often we do not act on
it on the moment--and the chance is gone, perhaps never to come back.
(iii) He knew precisely what he wanted--his sight. Too often our
admiration for Jesus is a vague attraction. When we go to the doctor we
want him to deal with some definite situation. When we go to the
dentist we do not ask him to extract any tooth, but the one that is
diseased. It should be so with us and Jesus. And that involves the one
thing that so few people wish to face--self-examination. When we go to
Jesus, if we are as desperately definite as Bartimaeus, things will
happen.
(iv) Bartimaeus had a quite inadequate conception of Jesus. Son
of David he insisted on calling him. Now that was a Messianic title, but
it has in it all the thought of a conquering Messiah, a king of David's
line who would lead Israel to national greatness. That was a very
inadequate idea of Jesus. But, in spite of that, Bartimaeus had faith,
and faith made up a hundredfold for the inadequacy of his theology. The
demand is not that we should fully understand Jesus. That, in any event,
we can never do. The demand is for faith. A wise writer has said, "We
must ask people to think, but we should not expect them to become
theologians before they are Christians." Christianity begins with a
personal reaction to Jesus, a reaction of love, feeling that here is the
one person who can meet our need. Even if we are never able to think
things out theologically, that response of the human heart is enough.
(v) In the end there is a precious touch. Bartimaeus may have
been a beggar by the wayside but he was a man of gratitude. Having
received his sight, he followed Jesus. He did not selfishly go on his
way when his need was met. He began with need, went on to gratitude, and
finished with loyalty--and that is a perfect summary of the stages of
discipleship.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)