Verses 1-41
Chapter 4
4:1-2 Jesus began
again to teach by the lakeside. A very great crowd collected to hear
him, so great that he had to go on board a boat and sit in it on the
lake. The whole crowd was on the land facing the lake. He began to teach
them many things in parables, and in his teaching he began to say to
them, "Listen! Look! The sower went out to sow."
In this section we see Jesus making a new departure. He was no
longer teaching in the synagogue; he was teaching by the lakeside. He
had made the orthodox approach to the people; now he had to take unusual
methods.
We do well to note that Jesus was prepared to use new methods.
He was willing to take religious preaching and teaching out of its
conventional setting in the synagogue into the open air and among the
crowds of ordinary men and women. John Wesley was for many years a
faithful and orthodox servant of the Church of England. Down in Bristol
his friend George Whitefield was preaching to the miners, to as many as
twenty thousand of them at a time, in the open air; and his hearers were
being converted by the hundred. He sent for John Wesley. Wesley said,
"I love a commodious room, a soft cushion, a handsome pulpit." This
whole business of open air preaching rather offended him. He said
himself, "I could scarcely reconcile myself at first to this strange
way--having been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of every
point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the
saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church." But
Wesley saw that field preaching won souls and said, "I cannot argue
against a matter of fact."
There must have been many amongst the orthodox Jews who regarded
this new departure as stunting and sensationalism; but Jesus was wise
enough to know when new methods were necessary and adventurous enough to
use them. It would be well if his church was equally wise and equally
adventurous.
This new departure needed a new method; and the new method Jesus
chose was to speak to the people in parables. A parable is literally
something thrown beside something else; that is to say, it is basically a
comparison. It is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. Something
on earth is compared with something in heaven, that the heavenly truth
may be better grasped in light of the earthly illustration. Why did
Jesus choose this method? And why did it become so characteristic of him
that he is known forever as the master of the parable?
(i) First and foremost, Jesus chose the parabolic method simply
to make people listen. He was not now dealing with an assembly of people
in a synagogue who were more or less bound to remain there until the
end of the service. He was dealing with a crowd in the open air who were
quite free to walk away at any time. Therefore, the first essential was
to interest them. Unless their interest was aroused they would simply
drift away. Sir Philip Sidney speaks of the poet's secret: "With a tale
forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale that holdeth children from play
and old men from the chimney-corner." The surest way to awaken men's
interest is to tell them stories and Jesus knew that.
(ii) Further, when Jesus used the parabolic method he was using
something with which Jewish teachers and audiences were entirely
familiar. There are parables in the Old Testament of which the most
famous is the story of the one ewe lamb that Nathan told to David when
he had treacherously eliminated Uriah and taken possession of Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12:1-7).
The Rabbis habitually used parables in their teaching. It was said of
Rabbi Meir that he spoke one-third in legal decisions; one-third in
exposition; and one-third in parables.
Here are two examples of Rabbinic parables. The first is the
work of Rabbi Judah the Prince (e. A.D. 190). Antoninus, the Roman
Emperor, asked him how there could be punishment in the world beyond,
for since body and soul after their separation could not have committed
sin they could blame each other for the sins committed upon earth. The
Rabbi answered in a parable:
A certain king had a beautiful garden in which was excellent
fruit; and over it he appointed two watchmen, one blind and one
lame. The lame man said to the blind man, "I see exquisite
fruit in the garden. Carry me thither that I may get it and we
will eat it together." The blind man consented and both ate of
the fruit. After some days the Lord of the garden came and
asked the watchmen concerning the fruit. Then the lame man
said, "As I have no legs I could not go to it, so it is not my
fault." And the blind man said, "I could not even see it so it
is not my fault." What did the Lord of the garden do? He made
the blind man carry the lame and thus passed judgment on them
both. So God will replace the souls in their bodies and will
punish both together for their sins.
When Rabbi Chiyya's son Abin died at the early age of
twenty-eight, Rabbi Zera delivered the funeral oration, which he put in
the form of a parable:
A king had a vineyard for which he engaged many labourers,
one of whom was specially apt and skilful. What did the king
do? He took this labourer from his work, and walked through the
garden conversing with him. When the labourers came for their
hire in the evening the skilful labourer appeared among them
and received a full day's wages from the king. The other
labourers were very angry at this, and said, "We have toiled
the whole day, while this man has worked but two hours. Why
does the king give him the full hire even as unto us?" The king
said to them, "Why are you angry? Through his skill he has done
more in the two hours than you have done all day." So it is
with Rabbi Abin ben Chiyya. In the twenty-eight years of his
life he has learned more than others learn in a hundred years.
Hence he has fulfilled his life work, and is entitled to be
called to Paradise earlier than others from his work on earth;
nor will he miss aught of his reward.
When Jesus used the parabolic method of teaching, he was using a
method with which the Jews were familiar and which they could
understand.
(iii) Still further, when Jesus used the parabolic method of
teaching he was making the abstract idea concrete. Few people can grasp
abstract ideas. Most people think in pictures. We could talk about
beauty for long enough and no one would be any the wiser; but, if we can
point to a person and say, "That is a beautiful person," beauty becomes
clear. We could talk about goodness for long enough and fail to arrive
at a definition of it; but every one recognizes a good deed when he sees
one. There is a sense in which every word must become flesh; every idea
must be actualized in a person. When the New Testament talks about
faith it takes the example of Abraham so that the idea of faith becomes
flesh in the person of Abraham. Jesus was a wise teacher. He knew that
it was useless to expect simple minds to cope with abstract ideas; and
so he put the abstract ideas into concrete stories; he showed them in
action; he made them into persons, so that men might grasp and
understand them.
(iv) Lastly, the great virtue of the parable is that it compels a
man to think for himself. It does not do his thinking for him. It
compels him to make his own deduction and to discover the truth for
himself. The worst way to help a child is to do his work for him. It
does not help him at all to do his sums, write his essay, work out his
problems, compose his Latin prose. It does help greatly to give him the
necessary help to do it for himself. That is what Jesus was aiming at.
Truth has always a double impact when it is a personal discovery. Jesus
did not wish to save men the mental sweat of thinking; he wished to make
them think. He did not wish to make their minds lazy; he wished to make
them active. He did not wish to take the responsibility from them; he
wished to lay the responsibility on them. So he used the parabolic
method, not to do men's thinking for them, but to encourage them to do
their own thinking. He presented them with truth which, if they would
make the right effort in the right frame of mind, they could discover
for themselves, and therefore possess it in a way that made it really
and truly theirs.
4:3-9 "Listen! Look!
The sower went out to sow. As he was sowing, some seed fell along the
roadside; and the birds came and devoured it. Some fell upon rocky
ground where it did not have much earth; and it sprang up immediately,
because it had no depth of earth, but, when the sun rose, it was
scorched, and it was withered away, because it had no root. Some fell
among thorns; and the thorns crowded in on it until they choked the life
out of it, and it did not yield any fruit. And some fen on good ground;
and, as it grew up and grew greater, it yielded fruit and bore as much
as thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold." And he said, "Who has
ears to hear, let him hear."
We leave the interpretation of this parable until we come to
the interpretation Mark gives us, and for the moment we consider it only
as a specimen of Jesus' parabolic teaching in action. The scene is the
lakeside; Jesus is sitting in the boat just off the shore. The shore
shelves gently down to the water's edge, and makes a natural
amphitheatre for the crowd. Even as he talks Jesus sees a sower busy
sowing seed in the fields beside the lake. "Look!" he said, "The sower
went out to sow." Herein is the whole essence of the parabolic method.
(i) Jesus started from the here and now to get to the there and
then. He started from a thing that was happening at that moment on earth
in order to lead men's thoughts to heaven; he started from something
which all men could see to get to the things that are invisible; he
started from something which all men knew to get to something which they
had never as yet realized. That was the very essence of Jesus'
teaching. He did not bewilder men by starting with things which were
strange and abstruse and involved; he started with the simplest things
that even a child could understand.
(ii) By so doing Jesus showed that he believed that there was a
real kinship between earth and heaven. Jesus would not have agreed that
"earth was a desert drear." He believed that in the ordinary, common,
everyday things of life men could see God. As William Temple put it:
"Jesus taught men to see the operation of God in the regular and the
normal--in the rising of the sun and the falling of the rain and the
growth of the plant." Long ago Paul had the same idea when he said that
the visible world is designed to make known the invisible things of God (Romans 1:20).
For Jesus this world was not a lost and evil place; it was the garment
of the living God. Sir Christopher Wren lies buried in St. Paul's
Cathedral, the great church that his own genius planned and built. On
his tombstone there is a simple Latin inscription which means, "If you
wish to see his monument, look around you." Jesus would have said, "If
you wish to see God, look around you." Jesus finds in the common things
of life a countless source of signs which lead men to God if they will
only read them aright.
(iii) The very essence of the parables is that they were
spontaneous, extempore and unrehearsed. Jesus looks round, seeking a
point of contact with the crowd. He sees the sower and on the spur of
the moment that sower becomes his text. The parables were not stories
wrought out in the quiet of a study; they were not carefully thought out
and polished and rehearsed. Their supreme greatness is that Jesus
composed these immortal short stories on the spur of the moment. They
were produced by the demand of the occasion and in the cut and thrust of
debate.
C. J. Cadoux said of the parables: "A parable is art harnessed
for service and conflict.... Here we find the reason why the parable is
so rare. It requires a considerable degree of art, but art exercised
under hard conditions. In the three typical parables of the Bible the
speaker takes his life in his hands. Jotham ( 9:8-15) spoke his parable of the trees to the men of Shechem and then fled for his life. Nathan (2 Samuel 12:1-7),
with the parable of the ewe-lamb, told an oriental despot of his sin.
Jesus in the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen used his own death
sentence as a weapon for his cause.... In its most characteristic use
the parable is a weapon of controversy, not shaped like a sonnet in
undisturbed concentration but improvised in conflict to meet the
unpremeditated situation. In its highest use it shows the sensitiveness
of the poet, the penetration, rapidity and resourcefulness of the
protagonist, and the courage that allows such a mind to work unimpeded
by the turmoil and danger of mortal conflict."
When we bear in mind that the parables of Jesus were flashed out extempore, their wonder is increased a hundredfold.
(iv) That brings us to a point we must always remember in our
attempts to interpret the parables. They were, in the first instance,
not meant to be read but to be heard. That is to say, in the first
instance, no one could sit down and study them phrase by phrase and word
by word. They were spoken not to be studied at length and at leisure,
but to produce an immediate impression and reaction. That is to say, the
parables must never be treated as allegories. In an allegory every part
and action and detail of the story has an inner significance. The
Pilgrim's Progress and the Faerie Queene are allegories; in them every
event and person and detail has a symbolic meaning. Clearly an allegory
is something to be read and studied and examined; but a parable is
something which was heard once and once only. Therefore what we must
look for in a parable is not a situation in which every detail stands
for something but a situation in which one great idea leaps out and
shines like a flash of lightning. It is always wrong to attempt to make
every detail of a parable mean something. It is always right to say:
"What one idea would flash into a man's mind when he heard this story
for the first time?"
4:10-12 When Jesus was
alone, his own circle of people, together with the Twelve, asked him
about the parables. He said to them, "To you there is given the
knowledge of the Kingdom of God which only the initiated can know. To
those who are outside, everything is expounded by means of parables, so
that they may indeed see and yet not perceive the meaning of things, and
may indeed hear and not understand, lest at any time they should turn
and be forgiven."
This has always been one of the most difficult passages in all
the gospels. The King James Version speaks of the mystery of the Kingdom
of God. This word mystery has in Greek a technical meaning; it does not
mean something which is complicated and mysterious in our sense of the
term. It means something which is quite unintelligible to the person who
has not been initiated into its meaning, but is perfectly plain to the
person who has been so initiated.
In New Testament times in the pagan world one of the great
features of popular religion was what were called the Mystery Religions.
These religions promised communion with and even identity with some
god, whereby all the terrors of life and of death would be taken away.
Nearly all these Mystery Religions were based on the story of some god
who had suffered and died and risen again; they were nearly all in the
nature of passion plays.
One of the most famous was called the Mystery of Isis. Osiris
was a wise and good king. Seth, his wicked brother, hated him and along
with seventy-two conspirators persuaded him to come to a banquet. There
he induced him to enter a cunningly made coffin which exactly fitted
him. When he was inside, the lid was snapped down and the coffin was
cast into the Nile. Isis, his faithful wife, after a long and weary
search, found the coffin and brought it home in mourning. When she was
absent the wicked Seth came again, stole away the body, cut it into
fourteen pieces and scattered them throughout all Egypt. Once again Isis
set out on her sad and weary search. In the end she discovered all the
pieces and by her magical powers put them together and restored Osiris
to life again; and from that time he became the immortal king of the
living and the dead.
What happened was this. The candidate underwent a long
preparation of purification and of fasting and of asceticism and of
instruction as to the inner meaning of the story. Then the dramatic
story with its grief and its sorrow and its resurrection and its
triumphal ending was played out as a passion play. Music and incense and
lighting and a splendid liturgy were all used to enhance the emotional
atmosphere. As the play was played out the worshipper felt himself one
with the god both in his sufferings and in his triumph. He passed
through death to immortality by union with the god. The point is that to
an uninitiated person the whole thing would have been meaningless; but
to the initiated the thing was full of meaning which he had been taught
to see.
That is the technical meaning of this Greek word musterion (Greek #3466).
When the New Testament talks of the mystery of the Kingdom, it does not
mean that the Kingdom is remote and abstruse and hard to understand;
but it does mean that it is quite unintelligible to the man who has not
given his heart to Jesus, and that only the man who has taken Jesus as
Master and Lord can understand what the Kingdom of God means.
The real difficulty of the passage lies in the section that
follows. If we take it at its face value it sounds as if Jesus taught in
parables deliberately to cloak his meaning, purposely to hide it from
ordinary men and women. Whatever else the passage originally meant it
cannot have meant that; for, if one thing is crystal clear, it is that
Jesus used parables not to cloak his meaning and to hide his truth but
to enable men to see it and to compel them to recognize it.
How then did this passage come to be in the form it is? It is a quotation from Isaiah 6:9-10.
From the beginning it worried people. It was worrying them more than
two hundred years before Jesus made use of it. The Hebrew literally runs
(the following two translations are by W.O.E. Oesterley):
And he said, Go, and say to this people, "Go on hearkening,
but understand not; go on looking, but perceive not." Make fat
the heart of this people, and its ears make heavy, and its eyes
besmear; lest it see with its eyes, and with its ears hear, and
its heart understand, so that it should be healed again.
It seems on the face of it that God is telling Isaiah that he
is to pursue a course deliberately designed to make the people fail to
understand.
In the third century B.C. the Hebrew scriptures were translated
into Greek, and the Greek version, the Septuagint, as it is called,
became one of the most influential books in the world, for it carried
the Old Testament everywhere Greek was spoken. The Septuagint
translators were worried at this strange passage and they translated it
differently:
And he said, Go and say to this people, "Ye shall hear indeed,
but ye shall not understand; and seeing, ye shall see, and not
perceive." For the heart of this people has become gross, and
with their ears they hear heavily, and their eyes they have
closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear
with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be
converted, and I should heal them.
The Greek version does not say that God intended that the
people should be so dull that they would not understand; it says that
they had made themselves so dull that they could not understand--which
is a very different thing. The explanation is that no man can translate
or set down in print a tone of voice. When Isaiah spoke he spoke half in
irony and half in despair and altogether in love. He was thinking, "God
sent me to bring his truth to this people; and for all the good I am
doing I might as well have been sent to shut their minds to it. I might
as well be speaking to a brick wall. You would think that God had shut
their minds to it."
So Jesus spoke his parables; he meant them to flash into men's
minds and to illuminate the truth of God. But in so many eyes he saw a
dull incomprehension. He saw so many people blinded by prejudice,
deafened by wishful thinking, too lazy to think. He turned to his
disciples and he said to them: "Do you remember what Isaiah once said?
He said that when he came with God's message to God's people Israel in
his day they were so dully ununderstanding that you would have thought
that God had shut instead of opening their minds; I feel like that
to-day." When Jesus said this, he did not say it in anger, or
irritation, or bitterness, or exasperation. He said it with the wistful
longing of frustrated love, the poignant sorrow of a man who had a
tremendous gift to give which people were too blind to take.
If we read this, hearing not a tone of bitter exasperation, but a
tone of regretful love, it will sound quite different. It will tell us
not of a God who deliberately blinded men and hid his truth, but of men
who were so dully uncomprehending that it seemed no use even for God to
try to penetrate the iron curtain of their lazy incomprehension. God
save us from hearing his truth like that!
4:13-20 "Don't you
understand this parable?" he said to them. "How then will you understand
all the parables? What the sower is sowing is the word. The kind of
people represented by the case in which the seed fell by the side of the
road, are those in whose case the word is sown, and whenever they hear
it, immediately Satan comes, and snatches away the word that was sown
into them. Just so, the kind of people represented by the case in which
the seed was sown on the rocky ground, are those, who, whenever they
hear the word, immediately gladly welcome it. They have no root in
themselves, but they are quite impermanent; and then, when trouble or
persecution happens because of the word, they immediately stumble and
collapse. Then there are the others who are represented by the case in
which the seed was sown among thorns. These are the people who hear the
word, but the anxieties of this world and the deceptive attraction of
wealth and the desires for other things enter into them and choke the
life out of the word, and it never gets a chance to bear fruit. The kind
of people who are represented by the case in which the seed fell on
good ground are such as hear the word and receive it and bring forth
fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold."
Every detail of this parable would be real to its hearers
because every detail came from everyday life. Four kinds of ground are
mentioned.
(i) There was the hard ground at the side of the road. The seed
might fall on this kind of ground in two ways. The fields in Palestine
were in the form of long, narrow strips; these strips were divided by
little grass paths, which were rights of way; the result was that they
became beaten as hard as stone by the feet of those who used them. As
the sower scattered his seed some might well fall there; and there it
had not a chance to grow.
But there was another way of sowing. Sometimes a sack of seed
was put on the back of an ass; a hole was cut in the corner of the sack;
and then the beast was led up and down as the seed flowed out.
Inevitably as the ass was brought along the road to the field some of
the seed fell on the road; and just as inevitably the birds swooped on
it and gobbled it up.
There are some people into whose hearts Christian truth can find
no entry. This is due to the hearer's lack of interest; and that lack
of interest comes from a failure to realize how important the Christian
decision is. Christianity fails to make an impact on so many people, not
because they are hostile to it, but because they are indifferent. They
think that it is irrelevant to life and that they can get on well enough
without it. That might be true if life was always an easy way where
there were neither tensions nor tears; but in fact there comes to every
man a time when he needs a power not his own. It is the tragedy of life
that so many discover that too late.
(ii) There was the rocky ground. This was not ground full of
stones; it was a narrow skin of earth over a shelf of limestone rock.
Much of Galilee was like that. In many fields the outcrop of the rock
through the shallow soil could be seen. Seed which fell there germinated
all right; but because the soil was so shallow and held so little
nourishment and moisture, the heat of the sun soon withered the
sprouting seed and it died.
It is always easier to begin a thing than to finish it. A
certain famous evangelist said: "We have learned that it takes about
five per cent. effort to win a man to Christ, and ninety-five per cent
to keep him in Christ and growing into maturity in the church." Many a
man begins the Christian way only to fall out by the wayside.
There are two troubles which cause this collapse. One is the
failure to think the thing out and to think it through, the failure to
realize what it means and what it costs before the start is made. The
other is the fact that there are thousands of people who are attracted
by Christianity but who never let it get beyond the surface of their
lives. The fact is that with Christianity it is a case of all or
nothing. A man is safe only when he has given himself in total
commitment to Christ:
"Is there a thing beneath the sun,
That strives with thee my heart to share?
Ah! tear it thence, and reign alone,
The Lord of every motion there."
(iii) There was the ground that was full of thorns. The
Palestinian farmer was lazy. He cut off the top of the fibrous rooted
weeds; he even burned off the top; and the field might look clean; but
below the surface the roots were still there; and in due time the weeds
revived in all their strength. They grew with such rapidity and such
virulence that they choked the life out of the seed.
It is easy to pack life with such a multiplicity of interests
that there is no time left for Christ. As the poet said, the cares of
life can be like the clogging dust until "we forget because we must and
not because we will." The more complicated life becomes, the more
necessity there is to see that our priorities are right, for there are
so many things which seek to shoulder Christ from out the topmost niche.
(iv) There was the good, clean, deep soil in which the seed flourished.
If we are really to benefit by the Christian message the parable
tells us that we must do three things. (a) We must hear it; and we
cannot hear unless we listen. It is characteristic of so many of us that
we are so busy talking that we have no time to hear, so engaged in
arguing that we have no time to listen, so occupied in advancing our own
opinions that we have no time to attend to the opinions of Christ, so
much on the move that we have no time for the essential stillness.
(b) We must receive it. When we hear the Christian message we
must really take it into our minds. The human mind is an odd and
dangerous machine. We are so constructed, in the wise providence of
creation, that, whenever a foreign body threatens to enter the eye, the
eye automatically closes. That is an instinctive, reflex action.
Whenever the mind hears something that it does not want to hear it
automatically closes its door. There are times when truth can hurt; but
sometimes a distasteful drug or an unpleasant treatment must be accepted
if health is to be preserved. To shut the mind to truth we do not want
to hear is the straight road to disaster and to tragedy.
(c) We must put it into action. The yield in the parable was
thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. That is a large yield but the volcanic
soil of Galilee was famous for its crops. Christian truth must always
emerge in action. In the last analysis the Christian is challenged, not
to speculate, but to act.
All that is the meaning of this parable when we sit down and
study it at leisure. But it is quite impossible that all that would
flash upon men's minds as they heard it for the first time. What, then,
would be the one thing which flashed out on the crowd who heard it for
the first time beside the Sea of Galilee? Surely this--that, although
part of the seed never grew, the fact remained that at the end of the
day there was a splendid harvest. This is the parable to end despair. It
may seem that much of our effort achieves no result; it may seem that
much of our labour is wasted. That is how the disciples were feeling,
when they saw Jesus banished from the synagogue and regarded with
suspicion. In many places his message seemed to have failed, and they
were discouraged and down-hearted. But this parable said to them, and
says to us, "Patience! Do your work. Sow the seed. Leave the rest to
God. The harvest is sure."
4:21 This was one of
Jesus' sayings: "Surely a lamp is not brought in to be put under a peck
measure or under the bed? It is not brought in to be set upon a lamp
stand?"
Mark 4:21-25
are interesting because they show the problems that confronted the
writers of the gospels. These verses give us four different sayings of
Jesus. In Mark 4:21 there is the saying about the lamp. In Mark 4:22 there is the saying about the revealing of secret things. In Mark 4:24 there is the saying which lays it down that we shall receive back with the same measure as we have given. In Mark 4:25
there is the saying that to him who has still more will be given. In
Mark these verses come one after another in immediate succession. But Mark 4:21 is repeated in Matthew 5:15; Mark 4:22 is repeated in Matthew 10:26; Mark 4:24 is repeated in Matthew 7:2; and Mark 4:25 is repeated in Matthew 13:12 and also in Matthew 25:29.
The four consecutive verses in Mark are scattered all over Matthew. One
practical thing emerges for our study. We must not try to find any
connection between them. Clearly they are quite disconnected and we must
take them one by one.
How did it come about that these sayings of Jesus are given by
Mark one after another and scattered by Matthew all over his gospel? The
reason is just this. Jesus had a unique command of language. He could
say the most vivid and pithy things. He could say things that stuck in
the memory and refused to be forgotten. Further, he must have said many
of these things far more than once. He was moving from place to place
and from audience to audience; and he must have repeated much of his
teaching wherever he went. The consequence was that men remembered the
things that Jesus said--they were said with such vividness that they
could not be forgotten--but they forgot the occasion on which they were
said. The result was a great many of what one might call "orphan"
sayings of Jesus. A saying was embedded in men's minds and remembered
for ever, but the context and the occasion were forgotten. So then we
have to take these vivid sayings individually and examine them.
The first was that men do not light a lamp and put it under a
peck measure, which would be like putting a bowl on the top of it, nor
do they put it under a bed. A lamp is meant to be seen and to make men
able to see; and it is put in a place where it will be visible to all.
From this saying we may learn two things.
(i) Truth is meant to be seen; it is not meant to be concealed.
There may be times when it is dangerous to tell the truth; there may be
times when to tell the truth is the quickest way to persecution and to
trouble. But the true man and the true Christian will stand by the truth
in face of all.
When Luther decided to take up his stand against the Roman
Catholic Church he decided first of all to attack indulgences.
Indulgences were to all intents and purposes remissions of sins while a
man could buy from a priest at a price. He drew up ninety-five theses
against these indulgences. And what did he do with his ninety-five
theses? There was a church in Wittenberg called the Church of All
Saints. It was closely connected with the University; on its door
University notices were posted, and the subject of academic debates
displayed. There was no more public notice-board in the town. To that
door Luther affixed his theses. When did he do it? The day when the
largest congregation came to the church was All Saints' Day, the first
of November. It happened to be the anniversary of the founding of that
church and many services were held and crowds came. It was on All
Saints' Day that Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church
door. If he had been a prudent man he would not have drawn up his
ninety-five theses at all. If he had been a man with an eye on safety he
would never have nailed them to the church door. And, if he must nail
them to the door, with any thought of personal safety he would never
have chosen All Saints' Day to make his declaration. But Luther felt
that he had discovered the truth; and his one thought was to display the
truth and to align his life with it.
In every walk of life there are times when we know quite well
what the truth demands, what is the right thing to do, what a Christian
man ought to do. In every walk of life there are times when we fail to
do it, because it would be to court unpopularity and perhaps worse. We
ought to remember that the lamp of truth is something to be held aloft
and not concealed in the interests of a cowardly safety.
(ii) Our Christianity is meant to be seen. In the early church
sometimes to show one's Christianity meant death. The Roman Empire was
as-vast-as the world. In order to get some sort of binding unity into
that vast empire Emperor worship was started. The Emperor was the
embodiment of the state and he was worshipped as a god. On certain
stated days it was demanded that everyone should come and sacrifice to
the godhead of the Emperor. It was really a test of political loyalty.
After a man had done so he got a certificate to say he had done so; and,
having got that certificate, he could go away and worship any god he
liked.
We still have many of these certificates. They run like this:
To those who have been put in charge of the sacrifices from
Inareus Akeus from the village of Theoxenis, together with his
children Alas and Hera, who stay in the village of Theadelpheia.
We sacrifice regularly to the gods and now in your presence, as
the regulations demand, we have sacrificed and poured our
libation and have tasted the offerings, and we ask you to give us
the required certificate. May you fare well.
Then there follows the attestation.
We, Serenas and Hermas, have witnessed your sacrificing.
All a Christian had to do was to go through that formal act,
receive the certificate, and he was safe. And the fact of history is
that thousands of Christians died rather than do so. They could have
concealed the fact that they were Christians with the greatest of ease;
they could have gone on being Christians, as it were, privately, with no
trouble at all. But to them their Christianity was something which had
to be attested and witnessed to in presence of all men. They were proud
that all should know where they stood. To such we owe our Christian
faith to-day.
It is often easier to keep quiet the fact that we belong to
Christ and his Church; but our Christianity should always be like the
lamp that can be seen of all men.
4:22-23 For there is
nothing secret that will not be brought into the open; nothing is done
that it should be hidden away, but that it should lie open for all to
see. If a man has ears to hear let him hear.
It was Jesus' certain conviction that the truth cannot ultimately be hidden. This saying applies in two directions.
(i) It applies to truth itself. There is something about the
truth which is indestructible. Men may refuse to face it; they may try
to suppress it; they may even try to obliterate it; they may refuse to
accept it but "great is the truth and in the end it will prevail."
In the early sixteenth century an astronomer called Copernicus
made the discovery that the earth is not the centre of the universe,
that in fact the earth goes round the sun and not the sun round the
earth. He was a cautious man and for thirty years he kept this discovery
to himself. Then in 1543, when death's breath was on him, he persuaded a
terrified printer to print his great work, Revolutions of Heavenly
Bodies. Soon Copernicus died but others inherited the storm.
In the early seventeenth century Galileo accepted the theory of
Copernicus and stated publicly his belief in it. In 1616 he was summoned
to the inquisition in Rome and his beliefs were condemned. Judgment was
passed. "The first proposition that the sun is the centre and does not
revolve about the earth, is foolish, absurd, false in theology, and
heretical because contrary to Holy Scripture.... The second proposition,
that the earth is not the centre, but revolves about the sun, is
absurd, false in philosophy, and from a theological point of view at
least, opposed to the true faith." Galileo gave in. It was easier to
conform than to die; and for years he remained silent.
A new pope came to the papal throne and Galileo thought that
Urban the Eighth was a man of wider sympathy and greater culture than
his predecessor, so once again he came out into the open with his
theory. He was mistaken in his hopes. This time he had to sign a
recantation or undergo torture. He signed. "I, Galileo, being in my
seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your
Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my
hands, abjure, curse and detest the error and the heresy of the movement
of the earth." His recantation saved him from death but not from
prison. And in the end he was even denied burial in the family tomb.
It was not only the Roman Catholic Church which tried to avoid
the truth. Luther wrote: "People gave ear to an upstart astrologer (he
meant Copernicus) who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the
heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon.... This fool wishes to
reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us
that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth."
But time goes on. You can threaten to torture a man for
discovering the truth; you can call him a fool and try to laugh him out
of court; but that does not alter the truth. "It lies not in your
power," said Andrew Melville, "to hang or exile the truth." Truth may be
attacked, delayed, suppressed, mocked at; but time brings in its
revenges and in the end truth prevails. A man must have a care that he
is not fighting against the truth.
(ii) It applies to ourselves and to our own life and conduct.
When a man does a wrong thing his first instinct is to hide. That is
what Adam and Eve did when they broke the commandment of God (Genesis 3:8).
But truth has a way of emerging. In the last analysis no man can hide
the truth from himself, and the man with a secret is never a happy man.
The web of deception is never a permanent concealment. And, when it
comes to ultimate things. no man can have any secrets from God. In the
end it is literally true that there is nothing which will not be
revealed in the presence of God. When we remember that, we are bound to
be filled with the desire to make life such that all men may look on it
and God survey it without shame to ourselves.
4:24 This was another
of Jesus' sayings: "Pay attention to what you hear! What you get depends
on what you give. What you give you will get back, only more so."
In life there is always a balance. A man's getting will be determined by his giving.
(i) This is true of study. The more study a man is prepared to
give to any subject, the more he will get from it. The ancient nation of
the Parthians would never give their young men a meal until they had
broken sweat. They had to work before they ate. All subjects of study
are like that. They give pleasure and satisfaction in proportion to the
effort that we are prepared to spend upon them. It is specially so in
regard to the study of the Bible. We may sometimes feel that there are
certain parts of the Bible with which we are out of sympathy; if we
study these parts they will often be the very parts which end by giving
us the richest harvest. A superficial study of a subject will often
leave us quite uninterested whereas a really intensive study will leave
us thrilled and fascinated.
(ii) It is true of worship. The more we bring to the worship of
God's house the more we will get from it. When we come to worship in the
house of God, there are three wrong ways in which we may come.
(a) We may come entirely to get. If we come in such a way the
likelihood is that we will criticize the organist and the choir and find
fault with the minister's preaching. We will regard the whole service
as a performance laid on for our special entertainment. We must come
prepared to give; we must remember that worship is a corporate act, and
that each of us can contribute something to it. If we ask, not, "What
can I get out of this service?" but, "What can I contribute to this
service?" we will in the end get far more out of it than if we simply
came to take.
(b) We may come without expectation. Our coming may be the
result of habit and routine. It may be simply part of the time-table
into which we have divided the week. But, after all, we should be coming
to meet God, and when we meet him anything may happen.
(c) We may come without preparation. It is so easy to leave for
the worship of God's house with no preparation of mind or heart at all
because often it is a rush to get there at all. But it would make all
the difference in the world, if, before we came, we were for a moment or
two still and quiet and companied with God in prayer. As the Jewish
Rabbis told their disciples: "They pray best together who first pray
alone."
(iii) It is true of personal relationships. One of the great
facts of life is that we see our reflection in other people. If we are
cross and irritable and bad-tempered, we will probably find other people
equally unpleasant. If we are critical and fault-finding, the chances
are that we will find other people the same. If we are suspicious and
distrustful, the likelihood is that others will be so to us. If we wish
others to love us, we must first love them. The man who would have
friends must show himself friendly. It was because Jesus believed in men
that men believed in him.
4:25 To him who already has still more will be given: and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
This may seem a hard saying; but the whole lesson of life is that it is inevitably and profoundly true.
(i) It is true of knowledge. The more a man knows the more he is
capable of knowing. A man cannot enter into the riches of Greek
literature before he has ploughed his way through Greek grammar. When he
has the basic grammar still more will be given to him. A man cannot
really get the best out of music until he learns something of the
structure of a symphony. But when he possesses that knowledge still more
and more loveliness will be given to him. It is equally true that
unless a man is consistently bent on the task of increasing his
knowledge such knowledge as he has will in the end be taken away from
him. Many a man in his youth had a working knowledge of French at school
and has now forgotten even the little that he knew because he made no
attempt to develop it.
The more knowledge a man has the more he can acquire. And, if he
is not always out to increase it, such knowledge as he has will soon
slip from his grasp. The Jewish teachers had an oddly expressive saying.
They said that the scholar should be treated like a young
heifer--because every day a little heavier burden should be laid upon
him. In knowledge we cannot stand still; we are gaining or losing it all
the time.
(ii) It is true of effort. The more physical strength a man has,
the more, within the limits of his body frame, he can acquire. The more
he trains his body, the more his body will be able to do. On the other
hand, if he allows his physical frame to grow slack and flabby and soft
he will end by losing even the fitness that he had. We would sometimes
do well to remember that our bodies belong to God as much as our souls.
Many a man has been hindered from doing the work he might do because he
has made himself physically unfit to do it.
(iii) It is so with any skill or craft. The more a man develops
the skill of his hand, or eye, or mind, the more he is able to develop
it. If he is content to drift along, never trying anything new, never
adopting any new technique, he remains stuck in the one job with no
progress. If he neglects his particular skill he will find in the end
that he has lost it altogether.
(iv) It is so with the ability to bear responsibility. The more
responsibility a man shoulders the more he can shoulder; the more
decisions he compels himself to take the better he is able to take them.
But if a man shirks his responsibilities, if he evades his decisions
and vacillates all the time, in the end he will become a flabby,
spineless creature totally unfitted for responsibility and totally
unable to come to any decision at all. Again and again in his parables
Jesus goes on the assumption that the reward of good work is still more
work to do. It is one of the essential laws of life, a law which a man
forgets at his peril, that the more he has won the more he can win, and
that, if he will not make the effort, he will lose even that which once
he had won.
4:26-29 He said to
them: "This is what the Kingdom of God is like. It is like what happens
when a man casts seed upon the earth. He sleeps and he wakes night and
day, and the seed sprouts and grows--and he does not know how it does
it. The earth produces fruit with help from no one, first the shoot,
then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. When the time allows it,
immediately he despatches the sickle, for the time to harvest has come."
This is the only parable which Mark alone relates to us. The
Kingdom of God really means the reign of God; it means the day when
God's will will be done as perfectly in earth as it is in heaven. That
is the goal of God for the whole universe. This parable is short but it
is filled with unmistakable truths.
(i) It tells us of the helplessness of man. The farmer does not
make the seed grow. In the last analysis he does not even understand how
it grows. It has the secret of life and of growth within itself. No man
has ever possessed the secret of life; no man has ever created anything
in the full sense of the term. Man can discover things; he can
rearrange them; he can develop them; but create them he cannot. We do
not create the Kingdom of God; the Kingdom is God's. It is true that we
can frustrate it and hinder it; or we can make a situation in the world
where it is given the opportunity to come more fully and more speedily.
But behind all things is God and the power and will of God.
(ii) It tells us something about the Kingdom. It is a notable
fact that Jesus so often uses illustrations from the growth of nature to
describe the coming of the Kingdom of God.
(a) Nature's growth is often imperceptible. If we see a plant
every day we cannot see its growth taking place. It is only when we see
it, and then see it again after an interval of time that we notice the
difference. It is so with the Kingdom. There is not the slightest doubt
that the Kingdom is on the way if we compare, not to-day with yesterday,
but this century with the century which went before.
When Elizabeth Fry went to Newgate Prison in 1817 she found in
the women's quarters three hundred women and numberless children crammed
into two small wards. They lived and cooked and ate and slept on the
floor. The only attendants were one old man and his son. They crowded,
half naked, almost like beasts, begging for money which they spent on
drink at a bar in the prison itself. She found there a boy of nine who
was waiting to be hanged for poking a stick through a window and
stealing paints valued at twopence. In 1853 the Weavers of Bolton were
striking for a pay of 7 1/2 d. a day; and the miners of Stafford were
striking for a pay of 2 shillings 6 d. per week.
Nowadays things like that are unthinkable. Why? Because the
Kingdom is on the way. The growth of the Kingdom may, like that of the
plant, be imperceptible from day to day; but over the years it is plain.
(b) Nature's growth is constant. Night and day, while man
sleeps, growth goes on. There is nothing spasmodic about God. The great
trouble about human effort and human goodness is that they are
spasmodic. One day we take one step forward; the next day we take two
steps back. But the work of God goes on quietly; unceasingly God unfolds
his plan.
"God is working his purpose out, as year succeeds to year:
God is working his purpose out, and the time is drawing near--
Nearer and nearer draws the time--the time that shall surely be,
When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the
waters cover the sea."
(c) Nature's growth is inevitable. There is nothing so powerful
as growth. A tree can split a concrete pavement with the power of its
growth. A weed can push its green head through an asphalt path. Nothing
can stop growth. It is so with the Kingdom. In spite of man's rebellion
and disobedience, God's work goes on; and nothing in the end can stop
the purposes of God.
(iii) It tells us that there is a consummation. There is a day
when the harvest comes. Inevitably when the harvest comes two things
happen--which are opposite sides of the same thing. The good fruit is
gathered in, and the weeds and the tares are destroyed. Harvest and
judgment go hand in hand. When we think of this coming day three things
are laid upon us.
(a) It is a summons to patience. We are creatures of the moment
and inevitably we think in terms of the moment. God has all eternity in
which to work. "A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when
it is past or as a watch in the night." (Psalms 90:4.)
Instead of our petulant, fretful, irritable human hastiness we should
cultivate in our souls the patience which has learned to wait on God.
(b) It is a summons to hope. We are living to-day in an
atmosphere of despair. People despair of the church; they despair of the
world; they look with shuddering dread on the future. "Man," said H. G.
Wells, "who began in a eave behind a windbreak will end in the
disease-soaked ruins of a slum." Between the wars Sir Philip Gibbs wrote
a book in which he looked forward, thinking of the possibility of a war
of poison gas. He said something like this. "If I smell poison gas in
High Street, Kensington, I am not going to put on a gas-mask. I am going
to go out and breathe deeply of it, because I will know that the game
is up." So many people feel that for humanity the game is up. Now no man
can think like that and believe in God. If God is the God we believe
him to be there is no room for pessimism. There may be remorse, regret;
there may be penitence, contrition; there may be heart-searching, the
realization of failure and of sin; but there can never be despair.
"Workman of God! O lose not heart,
But learn what God is like,
And, in the darkest battle-field,
Thou shalt know where to strike.
"For right is right, since God is God,
And right the day must win:
To doubt would be disloyalty,
To falter would be sin."
(c) It is a summons to preparedness. If there comes the
consummation we must be ready for it. It is too late to prepare for it
when it is upon us. We have literally to prepare to meet our God.
If we live in patience which cannot be defeated, in hope which
cannot despair, and in preparation which ever sees life in the light of
eternity, we shall, by the grace of God, be ready for his consummation
when it comes.
4:30-32 He said: "How
shall we find something with which to compare the Kingdom of God, or
what picture will we use to represent it? It is like a grain of mustard
seed, which, when it is sown upon the ground, is the least of all the
seeds upon the earth. But, when it is sown, it springs up and it becomes
greater than all the herbs; and it sends out great branches so that the
birds of the heaven can find a lodging under its shade."
There are in this parable two pictures which every Jew would readily recognize.
First, in Palestine a grain of mustard seed stood proverbially
for the smallest possible thing. For instance, "faith as a grain of
mustard seed," means "the smallest conceivable amount of faith." This
mustard seed did in fact grow into something very like a tree. A
traveller in Palestine speaks of seeing a mustard plant which, in its
height, overtopped a horse and its rider. The birds were very fond of
the little black seeds of the tree and a cloud of birds over a mustard
plant was a common sight.
Second, in the Old Testament one of the commonest ways to
describe a great empire was to describe it as a tree, and the tributary
nations within it were said to be like birds finding shelter within the
shadow of its branches (Ezekiel 17:22 ff; Ezekiel 31:1 ff; Daniel 4:10; Daniel 4:21). The figure of a tree with birds in the branches therefore stands for a great empire and the nations who form part of it.
(i) This parable says, Never be daunted by small beginnings. It
may seem that at the moment we can produce only a very small effect; but
if that small effect is repeated and repeated it will become very
great. There is a scientific experiment to show the effect of dyes. A
large vessel of clear water is taken and a little phial of dye. Drop by
drop the dye is dropped into the clear water. At first it seems to have
no effect at all and the water does not seem to be coloured in the
least. Then quite suddenly the water begins to tinge with the colour;
bit by bit the colour deepens, until the whole vessel is coloured. It is
the repeated drops that produce the effect.
We often feel that for all that we can do, it is hardly worth
while starting a thing at all. But we must remember this--everything
must have a beginning. Nothing emerges full-grown. It is our duty to do
what we can; and the cumulative effect of all the small efforts can in
the end produce an amazing result.
(ii) This parable speaks of the empire of the church. The tree
and the birds, we have seen, stand for the great empire and for all the
nations who find shelter within it. The church began with an individual
and it is meant to end with the world. There are two directions in which
this is true.
(a) The church is an empire in which all kinds of opinions and
all kinds of theologies can find a place. We have a tendency to brand as
a heretic anyone who does not think as we do. John Wesley was the
greatest example of tolerance in the world. "We think," he said, "and we
let think." "I have no more right," he said, "to object to a man for
holding a different opinion from mine than I have to differ with a man
because he wears a wig and I wear my. own hair." Wesley had one
greeting, "Is thy heart as my heart? Then give me thy hand!" It is good
for a man to have the assurance that he is right, but that is no reason
why he should have the conviction that everyone else is wrong.
(b) The church is an empire in which all nations meet. Once a
new church was being built. One of its great features was to be a
stained glass window. The committee in charge searched for a subject for
the window and finally decided on the lines of the hymn,
"Around the throne of God in heaven
Thousands of children stand."
They employed a great artist to paint the picture from which
the window would be made. He began the work and fell in love with the
task. Finally he finished it. He went to bed and fell asleep but in the
night he seemed to hear a noise in his studio; he went into the studio
to investigate; and there he saw a stranger with a brush and a palette
in his hands working at his picture. "Stop!" he cried. "You'll ruin my
picture." "I think," said the stranger," "that you have ruined it
already." "How's that?" said the artist. "Well," said the stranger, "you
have many colours on your palette but you have used only one for the
faces of the children. Who told you that in heaven there were only
children whose faces were white?" "No one," said the artist. "I just
thought of it that way." "Look!" said the stranger. "I will make some of
their faces yellow, and some brown, and some black, and some red. They
are all there, for they have all answered my call" "Your call?" said the
artist. "Who are you?" The stranger smiled. "Once long ago I said, 'Let
the children come to me and don't stop them, for of such is the Kingdom
of Heaven'--and I'm still saying it." Then the artist realized that it
was the Master himself, and as he did so, he vanished from his sight.
The picture looked so much more wonderful now with its black and yellow
and red and brown children as well as white.
In the morning the artist awoke and rushed through to his
studio. His picture was just as he had left it; and he knew that it had
all been a dream. Although that very day the committee was coming to
examine the picture he seized his brushes and his paints, and began to
paint the children of every colour and of every race throughout all the
world. When the committee arrived they thought the picture very
beautiful and one whispered gently, "Why! It's God's family at home."
The church is the family of God; and that church which began in
Palestine, small as the mustard seed, has room in it for every nation in
the world. There are no barriers in the church of God. Man made
barriers and God in Christ tore them down.
4:33-34 It was with
many such parables that he kept speaking the word to them, suiting his
instruction to their ability to hear it. It was his custom not to speak
to them without a parable; and when they were by themselves, he unfolded
the meaning of everything to his own disciples.
Here we have a short but perfect definition of both the wise
teacher and the wise learner. Jesus suited his instruction to the
ability of those who were listening to him. That is the first essential
in wise teaching.
There are two dangers that the wise teacher must at all costs avoid.
(a) He must avoid all self-display. A teacher's duty is not to
draw attention to himself but to draw attention to his subject. A love
of self-display can make a man attempt to scintillate at the expense of
truth. It can make him think more of clever ways of saying a thing than
of the thing itself. Or, it can make him so desirous of displaying his
own erudition that he becomes so obscure and elaborate and involved that
the ordinary man cannot understand him at all. There is no virtue in
talking over the head of an audience. As someone said, "The fact that a
man shoots above the target only proves that he is a bad shot." A good
teacher must be in love with his subject and not in love with himself.
(b) He must avoid a sense of superiority. True teaching does not
consist in telling people things. It consists in learning things
together. It was Plato's idea that teaching simply meant extracting from
people's minds and memories what they already knew. The teacher who
stands on a pedestal and talks down will never be successful. True
teaching consists in sharing and discovering truth together. It is a
joint exploration of the countries of the mind.
There are certain qualities which he who would teach must ever seek to acquire.
(a) The teacher must possess understanding. One of the great
difficulties of the expert is to understand why the non-expert finds a
thing so difficult to understand or to do. It is necessary for the
teacher to think with the learner's mind and to see with the learner's
eyes, before he can really explain and impart any kind of knowledge.
(b) The teacher must possess patience. The Jewish Rabbi Hillel
laid it down, "An irritable man cannot teach," and insisted that the
first essential of a teacher is that he must be even-tempered. the Jews
laid it down that if a teacher found that his scholars did not
understand a thing he must begin again without rancour and without
irritation and explain it all over again. That is precisely what Jesus
did all his life.
(c) The teacher must possess kindness. Jewish teaching
regulations forbade all excessive punishment. Especially they forbade
all punishment which would humiliate the scholar. The teacher's duty was
always to encourage, and never to discourage. Anna Buchan tells how her
old grandmother had a favourite phrase, "Never daunton youth." It is
easy for the teacher to use the lash of his tongue on the pupil with
the, limping mind; it is often a temptation to score a cheap triumph by
making such a pupil the target of such sarcasms and witticisms as will
make him a laughing-stock. The teacher who is kind will never do that.
This passage also shows us the wise learner. It gives us a
picture of an inner circle to whom Jesus could really and fully explain
things.
(a) The wise learner does not go away to forget. He goes away to
think over what he has heard. He chews it over until he has finally
digested it. Epictetus, the wise Stoic teacher, used to be grieved by
some of his pupils. He said that men ought to use the philosophy they
learned, not to talk about, but to live by. In a crude metaphor, he said
that sheep do not vomit up the grass in order to show the shepherd how
much they have eaten; they digest it and use it to produce wool and
milk. The wise scholar goes away, not to forget what he has learned, and
not to display what he has learned, but quietly to think it over until
he has discovered what it means for life and for living for him.
(b) Above all, the wise learner seeks the master's company.
After Jesus had spoken the crowds dispersed; but there was a little
company who lingered with him and did not want to leave him. It was to
them that he unfolded the meaning of everything. In the last analysis,
if a man is a really great teacher, it is not so much the man's teaching
that we wish to know, but the man himself. His message will always lie
not so much in what he says as in what he is. The man who wishes to
learn from Christ must company with Christ. If he does that he will win,
not only learning, but life itself.
4:35-41 When on that
day evening had come, he said to them, "Let us cross over to the other
side." So they left the crowds and took him, just as he was, in their
boat. And there were other boats with him. A great storm of wind got up
and the waves dashed upon the boat, so that the boat was on the point of
being swamped. And he was in the stern sleeping upon a pillow. They
woke him. "Teacher," they said, "don't you care that we are perishing?"
So, when he had been wakened, he spoke sternly to the wind and said to
the sea, "Be silent! Be muzzled!" and the wind sank to rest and there
was a great calm. He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you still
no faith?" And they were stricken with a great awe, and kept saying to
each other, "Who then can this be, because the wind and the sea obey
him?"
The Lake of Galilee was notorious for its storms. They came
literally out of the blue with shattering and terrifying suddenness. A
writer describes them like this: "It is not unusual to see terrible
squalls hurl themselves, even when the sky is perfectly clear, upon
these waters which are ordinarily so calm. The numerous ravines which to
the north-east and east debouch upon the upper part of the lake operate
as so many dangerous defiles in which the winds from the heights of
Hauran, the plateaux of Trachonitis, and the summit of Mount Hermon are
caught and compressed in such a way that, rushing with tremendous force
through a narrow space and then being suddenly released, they agitate
the little Lake of Gennesaret in the most frightful fashion." The
voyager across the lake was always liable to encounter just such sudden
storms as this.
Jesus was in the boat in the position in which any distinguished
guest would be conveyed. We are told that, "In these boats...the place
for any distinguished stranger is on the little seat placed at the
stern, where a carpet and cushion are arranged. The helmsman stands a
little farther forward on the deck, though near the stern, in order to
have a better look-out ahead."
It is interesting to note that the words Jesus addressed to the
wind and the waves are exactly the same as he addressed to the
demon-possessed man in Mark 1:25.
Just as an evil demon possessed that man, so the destructive power of
the storm was, so people in Palestine believed in those days, the evil
power of the demons at work in the realm of nature.
We do this story far less than justice if we merely take it in a
literalistic sense. If it describes no more than a physical miracle in
which an actual storm was stifled, it is very wonderful and it is
something at which we must marvel, but it is something which happened
once and cannot happen again. In that case it is quite external to us.
But if we read it in a symbolic sense it is far more valuable. When the
disciples realized the presence of Jesus with them the storm became a
calm. Once they knew he was there fearless peace entered their hearts.
To voyage with Jesus was to voyage in peace even in a storm. Now that is
universally true. It is not something which happened once; it is
something which still happens and which can happen for us. In the
presence of Jesus we can have peace even in the wildest storms of life.
(i) He gives us peace in the storm of sorrow. When sorrow comes
as come it must, he tells us of the glory of the life to come. He
changes the darkness of death into the sunshine of the thought of life
eternal. He tells us of the love of God. There is an old story of a
gardener who in his garden had a favourite flower which he loved much.
One day he came to the garden to find that flower gone. He was vexed and
angry and full of complaints. In the midst of his resentment he met the
master of the garden and hurled his complaints at him. "Hush!" said the
master, "I plucked it for myself." In the storm of sorrow Jesus tells
us that those we love have gone to be with God, and gives us the
certainty that we shall meet again those whom we have loved and lost
awhile.
(ii) He gives us peace when life's problems involve us in a
tempest of doubt and tension and uncertainty. There come times when we
do not know what to do; when we stand at some cross-roads in life and do
not know which way to take. If then we turn to Jesus and say to him,
"Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" the way will be clear. The real
tragedy is not that we do not know what to do; but that often we do not
humbly submit to Jesus' guidance. To ask his will and to submit to it is
the way to peace at such a time.
(iii) He gives us peace in the storms of anxiety. The chief
enemy of peace is worry, worry for ourselves, worry about the unknown
future, worry about those we love. But Jesus speaks to us of a Father
whose hand will never cause his child a needless tear and of a love
beyond which neither we nor those we love can ever drift. In the storm
of anxiety he brings us the peace of the love of God.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)