The death of Christ--the supreme drama of history--was prophesied. Many nations in distress have yearned for a deliverer who would triumph. Isaiah, who predicted the coming of the one Redeerner, also announced that He would be despised and rejected. In those two words, chosen with the exquisite accuracy of Scripture, is summed up that hostility to our Lord which was at first latent and afterwards avowed. By his inspired prevision, the prophet foresaw, not only the splendor of the Messiah, but the depravity of men and women who would slay Him. Until people themselves are good, how can goodness be popular?
Not for one instant did Jesus misjudge the enmity of the Jews. Before the evil impulse had been disclosed, He declined to commit Himself to the chief priests at Jerusalem. He found more faith in Galilee, the region of duty, than in the Temple, consecrated to religion. Peter, the fisherman, was ready to fling himself openly at the Saviour's feet, whereas Nicodemus, the politician, came to Him by night, as if he must calculate consequences before publicly associating himself with a Teacher sent from God. Jesus believed not in night work but in day work. He suspected every deed of darkness. The cowardice of Nicodemus, the fruitless fishing of His disciples, the treachery of Judas, and the denials of Peter, were all of the night. It was when men slept that Satan sowed his tares. The night side of our cities was what He came to redeem. It was the night that He constantly attacked by prayer; they who dared not arrest Him in the day chose the night for their plot, and the triumph of His resurrection lay in this--that by it He conquered, not death alone, but darkness. When He saved men, He needed no shaded lamps, no soft music, no séance, no Delphic oracle. He exposed His gospel to the full light of day, He would have it proclaimed from the housetops. He was against a whispered creed; He had no use for learned and incomprehensible formulæ.
Nicodemus in Two Parts
To Nicodemus, the master in Israel, Jesus declared bluntly that he could not even see the Kingdom of God; he could not dimly appreciate the secret of happiness unless he be born again, born of the water of repentance and the spirit of consecration; unless he looked up to the Christ, not as a Teacher only, but as a Saviour, just as the Israelites, bitten of serpents, looked up to the ensign of sin expiated which Moses raised in the wilderness. All this glittering worship at Jerusalem was merely a mirage in the old and still untraversed desert, with its Sinai, it manna, its golden calf, and its poisonous reptiles. For Nicodemus, there could be no promised land--indeed, no Pisgah, from which he could see the promised land--unless he took his place humbly among the guilty and the perishing.
What Nicodemus answered, we only know by the sequel. When the Sanhedrin discussed the first attempt to arrest our Lord, suddenly this once-timid trimmer stood forth alone, and asked by what law any man is condemned unheard. "Art thou also of Galilee?" they cried. "Search and look, for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet." They were mistaken, for it was on a Galilean mountain that Elijah built his altar and called down fire thereon from heaven. It was over Zebulun and Naphtali that the Light was to shine. To this they were blinded by the bitter jealousy between Jerusalem and Galilee-between creed and conduct, between the scribes and the common people-which continues unto this day.
The love of Nicodemus for Christ, though still unconfessed, could be no longer concealed. And when, a year or two later, all had forsaken Jesus and fled, this man allied himself boldly with Joseph of Arimathea, and brought no less than one hundred pounds weight of spices for the burial of the Master; his gift suggesting that he did not believe in the hope of a resurrection, but was honoring a Friend, now defeated and discredited, and so taking his place on the losing side. Christ had made a man of him, had cured his cowardice and corrected his opportunism.
The attitude of the Jews was disclosed by their behavior towards John the Baptist. What our Lord said to Nicodemus was intimately reminiscent of John's words about "the generation of vipers"--of the serpents in the wilderness, and about the baptisms of water and fire. Yet although John came as a disinterested evangelist, confessing explicitly that he was not the Christ, the meaning of his message did not touch the conscience even of Nicodemus, let alone of the other rulers. When John was arrested by the king, there was no protest in Jerusalem, where his father had been for so many years an honored priest. When a foul murder followed the arrest, not a ripple of emotion was discernible in the Temple. The case is the more extraordinary because John stood for a simple moral issue on which Pharisees, and Sadducees, and Herodians, and Zealots were all agreed. No one defended adultery. For that offense they would have stoned alive a humble woman. Yet, when a princess committed the crime,--was taken, as they put it, in the very act,--and aggravated her guilt by assassination, they did not say one word. Jesus noted their silence, and held them responsible for the blood of the prophets, including the Baptist. Sometimes we think that His interpretation of the law was severe, but His censures, like His mercies, had this unusual quality--they applied equally to court and cottage. In all alike He detected sin, to all alike He offered mercy; and we may be sure that some of us, who before the War were more interested in the dance of Salome than in the hideous crime of which it was a part, would not have escaped His sorrowful condemnation. It was to Jesus, not to the chief priests, that John's bereaved disciples came for comfort and encouragement.
Christ's Prudence and Tact
Fully understanding the desperate and complex malady that cursed the people, our Lord touched the evil with tenderest prudence. He knew that Jerusalem was drifting into a delirium, unparalleled for ferocity; and millions, who never read a word of Josephus, have trembled at the few poignant sentences in which our Lord depicted Judea's coming doom. To save that city from itself, He devoted many months of His three years' ministry. Patient with prejudice, He postponed His mission to the Gentiles, lest the lost sheep of the house of Israel be thereby estranged. He veiled His Divinity, speaking of Himself constantly as the Son of Man, and strictly forbidding His Apostles to publish abroad His glory on the Mount, until He had suffered. As they had rejected John as a man, so it was as a Man that they first rejected Jesus. The Holy Babe was denied protection. The Boy had no patron. None saw the dignity of the Carpenter. The Preacher was sneered at as a Galilean. It was not the difficulty of a dogma, like His Divinity, that set them against Him. Neither they nor we have that excuse. In human affairs--as we call them--we are ever denying Him; we crucify not our Deity only, but our neighbor. In Christ, we slay not our Master alone, but our brother.
With gracious tact, our Lord avoided contention and threw Himself into the task of healing the sick, of which everybody could approve. With those who were ready to help Him, He freely shared His power, and He welcomed the co-operation of all who brought to Him the afflicted. Here was not only a personal salvation but a national policy, outlined with consummate wisdom. He taught the people to battle against more intimate enemies than Rome. But they were indifferent. There, under the shadow of the Temple,--like some squalid street within a stone's throw of a great cathedral,--lay festering multitudes of diseased persons. The scribes did not invite Him to the Pool of Bethesda. They did not perform one act that would have relieved or reduced that mass of suffering. He went there by Himself, single-handed, and no one begged Him to remain.
Some writers suggest that there was, after all, a shadow of excuse for those who hated the Redeemer, because they were, so to say, startled into resentment by His sudden claim to be Divine, and by the scorn of His denunciations. The theory is simple fiction. He approached the people as a Healer, not as a Judge; and with the instinct of a great Physician he avoided any word that would arouse fever where fever would be fatal. In this respect, He is an example to all who would spread His Gospel, to avoid controversy; to deal mercifully, not ruthlessly, with guilt; to set forth the truth in winsome fashion. It was after His rejection as Healer, not before, that He denounced the Jews. The sin that He denounced was this rejection--that they laid on others burdens which they would not bear themselves, and, refusing to enter the Kingdom themselves, shut the door for others likewise. His lament was, not that they resisted His warning voice, but that they would not be gathered, like chickens, under His wing, and so preserved from the desolations at hand.
Christ and Miracle
Matters were brought to an issue by an event as historic as the conversion of Martin Luther. There lay in Jerusalem a man born blind. On the Sabbath day, our Saviour saw him as He passed, and, in love, healed him. Asserting His personal authority over human vision, He made clay and anointed the man's eyes; and then, to evoke the man's faith, He uttered a command which had to be obeyed. As no garment of His remains, or fragment of His cross, or other relic, so He bade the man wash away that clay, showing that it was but clay. There was no transubstantiation, there was no miracle in the clay itself. What mattered was that the man went, washed, and came back seeing--a living example of Christ's salvation as an enlightenment of the mind.
The rulers were alarmed. Like other oppressors, they preferred an ignorant to an instructed people, and recognized that no liberty is so dangerous to the tyrant as liberty in Christ. Theirs was the cruel view that physical calamity is the fault of the sufferer, or of his parents; that health is not so much an evidence of God's goodness as of man's righteousness; and their only difficulty was to decide on whose shoulders they, as judges, were to lay the blame. To our Saviour, even congenital blindness may reveal the glory of the Father--the story of little Muriel, in John Halifax, Gentleman, is an illustration--and where others censured, He blessed. Hearing of His deed, they questioned the man's parents, who-though they had been so recently defended and consoled by the Saviour--did not stand by their son. The faith was already dividing households against themselves. The man himself held his ground, but for one reason only--he had personal experience. Beyond that experience he was at sea; for when they told him that Jesus was a sinner, he answered that he could not speak as to this one way or the other. One thing only he knew--"Whereas I was blind, now I see." Unable to shake his evidence, they cast him out, declaring that he was altogether born in sin--yet presumed to teach them!
With the battle rapidly broadening, Jesus, the Captain, who forgets no single soldier, found time to bind the wounds of His first casualty. The man was deserted by friends and cast out by the Church; who of us can say where his eyesight would have led him if, like Bartimæus, He had not seen our Lord as the Central Figure of the spreading landscape? Mere enlightenment was not enough--nor is it to-day. We need to add reverence to our knowledge, and worship to our discoveries. We need not only vision but a vision of the Redeemer.
This miracle raised momentous issues. Despite their pride of birth, the Jews themselves asked: "Are we also blind?" The answer was--yes, they were blind; but on the other hand this was not the blindness, though from birth, which Jesus so emphatically denounced. We all suffer from it. Some of us, to the end of our lives, see men as trees walking--mere automata, without a soul to be saved or feelings to be considered. What condemns us is not so much this natural blindness, but the fact that, knowing it, we yet say we see. It is not the original sin that is so troublesome--not in itself; what our Lord dealt with severely is the sin that "remaineth." It is because our deeds are evil that we prefer darkness to light. And the most terrible of all woes is reserved for those who, being blind themselves, come forward in their cruelty and pride, as guides unto others, so that the leader and his followers fall together into the ditch. To-day, there are many voices heard amid the chaos-men who in effect say, "I am he." Let him beware who renders counsel to an afflicted Christendom, except as he derives it from the Eternal Wisdom.