Search the world, and you would not have found a loftier or more sacred position for the Son of God to occupy than the pinnacle of the Temple. He stood there, lonely and unapproachable, silent and motionless, like a sculptured saint on the portal of some ancient cathedral--safe from reproach or irreverence, ready to receive the devotion of mankind. Here was the ecclesiastical Christ, Divine yet solitary, only to be met at church, or by leave of the priests; and so far elevated above us that we cannot see Him clearly, or tell Him of our needs, still less feel His touch. The Devil would have frustrated our salvation if he had been able thus to treat our Lord as a prisoner of the Temple, rigid, erect, and helpless. To turn the living Jesus into a pillar of stone has been in every age a favorite diabolical device. The saints themselves have so suffered, and millions who revere St. Francis as an image can tell you little of St. Francis as a man.
How long our Lord waited on that pinnacle we do not know, for the crowds below did not once raise their eyes to Him; indeed, the precise mischief with them was that they could not look upwards, but were of the earth, earthy, and had to see our Saviour face to face, if at all. Jesus did not shun publicity, He knew that, like the serpent in the wilderness, He must be " lifted up," and killed as if He were an accursed thing; but when He was so crucified, He was still near to the people whom He died to save, They could insult Him, hear what He said, speak to Him, offer Him vinegar to drink, and plunge a spear into His side. And as He climbed the Mountain of Transfiguration, He did not, like Moses, leave all His disciples behind, but took three of them with Him; and when He came to them amid the storm, He did not fly, like an angel, but walked on the water. It was a real storm and He really faced it. was just because He left the pinnacle of the Temple that His influence spread in so many directions. On the pinnacle, He could not move one inch,-He was as impotent to save as a Crucifix,--but on the highways of life He could walk about--southwards, to Jerusalem, the place of religion; eastwards, to Jericho, where dwelt the lapsed masses; northwards, to Capernaum--the Manchester of Gennesaret; westwards, to Tyre and Sidon, the colonies by the ocean. He was familiar with Cana, where people were interested in a wedding, and with Nain, where they were attending a funeral He visited Bethany, the village of home life, and thus was an example for all--that we should not speak of Him only in pulpit language, pompously, at with erudite phrases, keeping Him, as it were, to ourselves; nor display jealousy if commoner folk throng around Him and, in their own way, which may less ceremonious than ours, make Him their own.
The Way of Salvation
People are very slow to learn the wisdom of Jesus. Years later, there was one of His followers, St. Simeon Stylites, who still sought holiness on the top of a pillar. Others have tortured themselves with flagellation or the hair shirt, or have taken the Trappist vow of silence. In India there are thousands of fakirs who hope for God's kingdom in pain, extending their limb9 until they wither, or subjecting themselves to hooks and nails and glowing metal. Jesus did not shrink from agony. In the garden, His sweat was as the blood which was so soon to flow from the thorns on His forehead. But He did not regard pain as an equivalent of life. The man who cut himself with stones was, to Him, like the priests of Baal who cut themselves with knives, not a saint but a demoniac, and He preferred that he should sit, clothed and in his right mind.
It is true that He said, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off," and "if thine eye cause thee to stumble, pluck it out." Limbs are a peril except in so far as they serve the soul; and eyes are a snare, save as they let in the light. There is no salvation, as the Greeks thought, in athletics; no redemption in the beauty of muscle and tendon. On the other hand, our Lord had no need to lose either His hands or His eyes, since He constantly devoted them to His appointed service. It was with His hands that He blessed the children, broke the bread, raised the fallen, unstopped the ears of the deaf, and opened the eyes of the blind. And His own eye--what wonders of sympathy and helpfulness and indignation did they not accomplish! Those eyes looked on the rich young ruler and revealed the love of the Master; and on Peter, who went forth, broken yet redeemed, to weep bitterly. Our Lord reverenced all that His Father gave Him. He valued His Body and bore it with Him to the throne of God, there to render an account of it. It was the Creator's respect for the thing created. And, in Him, we also are delivered, on the one hand from the practice of persecuting the bodies of others, and, on the other hand, from the delusion that there is holiness in mutilating and torturing our own. What saves the body is not its beauty but the consecration of it. We gain life by giving it.
Christ the Hero
As Jesus stood, unrecognized, on that dizzy eminence of the pinnacle, it seemed once more that He had failed. And there appeared to surge through His mind the accumulated discouragement of those thirty years--the neglect of Bethlehem--the oblivion of Egypt--the contempt of Jerusalem--and the obscurity of Nazareth. The Devil, mocking as he sought to seduce, repeated his "if"--if Thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down. Our Lord encountered every kind of danger. At birth, He was nearly murdered. He braved the wild beasts. He was a mountaineer. Twice was He threatened with drowning. In the Temple, the rioters tried to stone Him. At Nazareth, they would have thrown Him from a cliff. He did not fear the infection of fever, but visited Peter's mother-in-law and healed her. Ever ready to touch the leper, He risked even that most terrible of all Eastern contagions. When He knew that Judas would betray Him, He did not leave Jerusalem, but continued talking with His disciples, and joined with them in singing their evening hymn.
But He would not trifle with His life. He only touched the leper in order to heal, and only walked on the water in order to rescue. As He did not defy the Law of Moses, so He did not defy the law of gravity, which so wonderfully unites the material world by unseen yet universal attractions. But He made it clear. that if as Son of Man He was subject to these laws, as Son of God He was Master of them. As man, He quoted Moses, who said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth"; but as God, He added the Sermon on the Mount. As man, He did not fling Himself from the pinnacle of the Temple; but as God, He did tread the Sea of Galilee.
"Cast thyself down" sums up all the arts of sensationalism, whereby we advertise our religion, our politics, our arts, our social position. The preacher who depends on language, on epigram, on voice and gesture--who attracts admiration to himself and thinks of how it will strike the public--that man, that woman, is very near the peril of the pinnacle. This temptation was the ruin of Savonarola. The ordeal by fire, which is to prove God, is an impious perversion of the martyrdom by fire, which proves man.
Christ and Bravado
Imagine, if you can, what would have been the disaster to faith, if our Lord had flung Himself down among the people. Good men and women, anxious to follow Him, would have committed every extravagance, and the whole impulse of the Church would have been directed to the unusual in life, leaving untouched the average and regular claims of every day. On these terms, the few only could have become disciples. If the many had so believed and so acted, society would have been disorganized. Our Lord worked many miracles, and had a reason for so doing, which we will examine in due course; but His wonders were never inspired by bravado. He did not cast Himself down from the pinnacle. He did not allow Himself to cast down over the precipice of Nazareth. He did not gratify Herod's desire for a state performance of the healing power, either during His ministry, or at His trial. When He cleansed the leper, He told him strictly to say nothing about it, except to the priest When He raised the daughter of Jairus, He expelled all witnesses save the parents and three other& When He cured a deaf and dumb man, He took him aside, and so dealt with his malady. To us, a miracle arouses faith. To Him, a miracle rewarded faith. He could do no mighty work in His own country because of their unbelief after seeing Him at His bench; and the generation that sought after a sign was wicked and adulterous, since, in professing to worship God, it demanded a gratification of the eye.
The miracles that He achieved--amazing though they were--were less of miracles than those which, having that power, He refused to perform. It was true, as Satan said, that He could command the angels -twelve legions of them-who would have kept Him in all His ways, including Gethsemane. Neither on the pinnacle nor in the garden did He summon them. He won all His victories without the big battalions. He could have come down from the Cross and left the thieves impotently hanging there. But He refused the very narcotic that would have eased His sufferings, and in consciousness and sanity drained the dregs of what He had to undergo. His greatest miracle was not Power, but Love; and that Love was God.