While obedience to our Lord developed the good in people, it seemed as if revolt against Him stimulated the evil. The Rabbis had listened to Him as a boy with kindly wonder, and all that we could say against them was that, in carelessness, they lost sight of Him. When next they encountered Him, carelessness had turned to disdain--what good thing, they asked, was to be expected of Nazareth? But, in a few brief months, disdain had become a murderous intent. The intent hardened into a plot. The plot was developed by espionage, and fomented by bribery. Its growth turned an Apostle into a traitor. Witnesses were suborned to commit perjury, and an accomplice was Barabbas, a convicted robber. Wagging their heads and taunting Him as He suffered, the Rabbis poisoned their zeal with cruelty, and their justice with revenge. They were men utterly corrupt, yet they suggested that His most blessed body, which saw no corruption, would defile the sacrifice of bulls and goats, which was a gross hypocrisy. When He lay in the tomb dead--imprisoned by a great stone, immovable with the forces of Nature, His resting-place sealed by the impress of human authority, and guarded by irresistible military power--even then His silence aroused their terror. Carelessness, disdain, murder, conspiracy, bribery, espionage, treachery, robbery, revenge, hypocrisy, terror--all these evil influences were concentrated against Him. Over them all, in His resurrection, He triumphed. On the authority of their own guard, they were told of that triumph; yet with this witness to the truth before them, they persisted in error; and in watching the drama, we learn by what unfathomable risks the best of us are surrounded when we see the Saviour yet do not love Him.
The way to God open
What challenged the issue were circumstances in themselves apparently accidental. When Jesus saw that people like the paralytic man or the woman who wept over His feet were truly repentant, He told them that their sins were forgiven, He sent them away free--with their guilt removed--and with His command to sin no more. The scribes murmured, realizing instantly what claim was implied. They knew that it belongs neither to popes nor priests, but to God alone, to grant absolution to men. They knew that only by Divine grace can men hope to cease from sin. And, to this extent, they were right. It is to our Father direct, without intermediary of any kind, that our Saviour bids us to pray for forgiveness and the strength to resist temptation. In the Parable of the Wicked Servant, the debt to man compares with the debt to God as one hundred pence compares with ten thousand talents. Only the King could cancel this infinite liability; and if Jesus be not the King, then it follows that He has no right to pardon. He could not, therefore, ease the consciences of men without exercising a Divine prerogative, and they who deny His Deity are left inevitably to face the conscience, unaided.
Indeed, the case goes further than this. In forgiving sin, as Son of Man, Jesus accepted an obligation to pay the penalty for sin; with Him there was no compounding with one's creditors. A bankrupt for money which perishes may be let off with so much in the pound; but a bankrupt in things eternal, which do not perish, cannot even forgive himself until par ment has been made of the uttermost farthing. Even the high priest, recording the last flash of that revelation which in the old days had shone from the stones of destiny, Urim and Thummim, and so fulfilling the ancient Hebraic divination, declared it expedient that one man should die for the people. It was thus not against some emotional benevolence that they murmured when they heard Him forgive sins. They were trampling underfoot the love that drew Him to the cross. They were accusing Him of issuing promissory notes which He had no intention of honoring.
Having denied His mastery over evil, they next rebelled against His lordship over the good. He Himself regarded the Sabbath as a Divine institution. So far from inaugurating a Continental Sunday, He attended the synagogue, and told His disciples to pray that their flight from danger be not in winter or on the Sabbath day, thereby indicating that the Sabbath is as needful to our welfare as the unalterable seasons or any other ordinance of the calendar. It was just because He so kept the Sabbath that He met at public worship the man with the withered hand. We should notice that they did not doubt His power to restore that limb--to restore it whole as the other. All that troubled them was the question whether He would do this on the Sabbath. What aroused their malice was not that the miracle was a delusion, but that it was a crime. On another occasion, when He told the impotent man to take up his bed and walk, their anger rose to madness, and then it was that they communed together what they might do to Him. The controversy was renewed when His disciples plucked the ears of corn and rubbed them in their hands, so, in a rabbinical sense, breaking the Sabbath by reaping and threshing and winnowing the grain.
To our Lord, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and the Son of Man--that is, Jesus, as our Brother--is Lord of the Sabbath. Each of us is responsible for arranging how best we can spend our leisure. When he was in need, David ate of the shewbread, reserved for the priests, showing that no symbol of God is so sacred as man created in His image; and that, ultimately, when the truth is, as it were, tested by the hunger that is unto death, the king is priest, and man becomes both priest and king. The stricken soldier lies upon the altar of a shell-scarred church, and hallows it; it would be the same if he were a stricken prince or a stricken prelate ; and we distinguish between the principle of the Sabbath and those scruples that, if pressed as the Jews pressed them, would derange our hospitals-- yes, our hospitals for the Jews themselves--and make of the Sabbath a day, not of rest, but of special pain and suffering. To the beast that had fallen into a pit, the Jews at once rendered help. Here, as in the Temple, they paid more attention to bulls and goats than to men and women. And it was not until Jesus spent a Sabbath in the tomb, resting therein after His work of redemption was finished, as His Father rested when the Creation was complete--it was not until then that man was delivered from his horrible pit, his miry clay.
Lord of the Sabbath
We have seen that, in forgiving sins, Jesus asserted His Deity. In His use of the Sabbath, that grave claim was also implied. "My Father," He said, when He discussed the matter, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." Idleness is no more a virtue on the seventh than on any other day, and there is no day, no hour of the day, when God's love is inactive. He is always busy--making the sun to shine, healing old wounds, ripening precious fruits, and granting life to every creature. In curing an impotent man, Jesus was continuing the intimate co-operation within the Triune Godhead which had been His since the world began. He was doing God's will on earth as God's will is done in heaven. And this was why they sought the more to kill Him, because He not only ruled the Sabbath, but justified His rule by making Himself, thereby, equal with God. Not for one instant did He surrender to their enmity His time and His opportunities. Until they bound His hands, He went on healing. The only Sabbath on which He lay silent and motionless was the Sabbath when He lay dead. And while, with Him thus slain, they had their triumph, from that moment their Sabbath disappeared. It was not on the Sabbath, or seventh day, but on the first day of the week that He rose again, His lordship vindicated. To change the calendar is for a private individual an almost impossible task; but the world now takes its week, not from Adam, not from Moses, not from the scribes, but from Jesus of Nazareth. Without legislation, without armies, without navies, He has established His claim to be Lord even of the Sabbath.
The Word was God
His Deity was thus no academic dogma, left to theologians. It interested everyone. The man born blind could not believe that he had received his sight from e. sinner; his Friend Unknown must have come from God. Once satisfied that Jesus who talked with him was this Son of God--that none else was He--his hesitation vanished, and he worshiped. The tempestuous debates in the Temple, like some violently oscillating compass, ranged ever around His Deity. If they " tempted " Him with questions about the tribute money, about divorce, and other perplexities, it was to find out whether He was really "Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." Nor could they avoid certain comparisons. Was He greater than Moses? Was He greater than David? Was He greater than Abraham? Even from that searching test He did not flinch. Standing there, with the Temple above Him, with the priests around Him, and with His mind surveying the long and momentous panorama of Israelitish destiny, He answered, in words that ring through all ages: "Before Abraham was, I am."
Against this they could not argue. They durst not even continue to ask Him questions. But they could and did take up stones to stone Him--fighting the physical in Him where the spiritual was beyond them; and if He went His way unharmed, it was to show them that, in conquering death, He could choose the manner of it. He could escape at will, and He could suffer at will. And in the end the death to which He did submit was the most awful conceivable for man.
As with the Sabbath, so with the Temple. On the one hand, He rid it of the money-changers; on the other hand, He announced its destruction. As God's throne, it belonged to God, and was sacred. Because it belonged to God, therefore, Jesus could cleanse it, dispose of it, rebuild it. And He has done so. The Temple, like the Sabbath, has, in fact, disappeared. A new Temple, like a new Sabbath, has, in fact, arisen. That Temple is His Body, of which those who love Him are members. His teaching about the Temple, which to the Jews seemed blasphemy, has become for us as nations a world-wide history, and for us as individuals an intimate personal experience. In three days, He did raise a Temple, not made with hands. This Temple now overshadows every other temple; and while the living stones of His Church are built securely around Him as Chief Corner Stone, of that golden Temple at Jerusalem where He uttered His prophecies, not one stone, however great, now rests upon another.
Have I made the issue plain, I wonder? It was plain enough to the Jews. When they considered His forgiveness, or His Sabbath, or His Temple--indeed, whatever subject they brought to His test--the result was the same. Above and beyond the matter in hand, however profound its importance, there rose a still larger truth; and that truth, looming now dimly, now clearly, through the mists of prejudice and anger and malice, was His Deity. We may forget it, evade it, deny it, question it; but, to us as to them, it ever returns unalterable, inaccessible, eternal in the heavens, yet spreading abroad over the homes and highways of men.