The passage: Jesus went through all Galilee, teaching in the synagogues, preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing every kind of sickness and disease. His fame spread through Syria, and people brought Him all who were sick — those tormented by various diseases, those possessed by devils, the lunatic, and the paralysed — and He healed them.
This announcement in St. Matthew comes right after the call of the disciples. In St. Mark (chapter one, verses 21 to 35) you find the same events, with special attention to a man in a synagogue with an unclean spirit, who cried out, “Let us alone; what have we to do with Thee, Thou Jesus of Nazareth? I know Thee who Thou art, the Holy One of God”; then the cure of Simon’s wife’s mother of a fever, and the healing of many sick and the casting out of many devils. In St. Luke (chapter four, verses 16 to 44) there are the same constant references to cures, the same account of the unclean spirit in the synagogue and the cure of Simon’s wife’s mother, ending with the words, “Devils also came out of many, crying out and saying, Thou art Christ the Son of God.”
If you compare these passages carefully, nothing strikes me more than how closely the so-called miraculous part is blended with the preaching. St. Matthew: “He preached the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healed all manner of sickness.” St. Mark: “He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes; and there was in their synagogue a man having an unclean spirit”; and the people were amazed and asked, “What new doctrine is this? For with authority commandeth He the unclean spirits, and they do obey Him.” St. Luke repeats nearly the same words in nearly the same connection, and his fifth chapter, even more than the others, shows the link between the “doctrine,” the “word,” and these acts of “authority.”
Now suppose we take “preaching the Kingdom of God” literally, as I have taken it — suppose the actual King of the world was coming to claim His Kingdom, and He who by His word gave life to every creature was really come to show Himself and claim their homage. Then this connection is exactly what you would expect. You would not expect the Evangelists to say, as we tend to, that Christ delivered a beautiful discourse and then, to prove His commission, put forth strange new powers. You would expect them to say just what they do say: He declared His kingdom, and He healed the sick — using the powers He had always used, and declaring who it was from whom all healing had always come.
Other signs also show which view of Christ ruled the Evangelists’ minds. If they were writing the legend of a hero doing more extraordinary things than any man, the acts would be as outward and showy as possible. An ordinary physician works by reaching the hidden source of a disease to overcome its outward symptoms; the legendary miracle-worker acts by touches and charms on the visible ailment before him, and lets the world admire how fast it vanished. But suppose a writer describes One who has dominion over all the secret springs of human life, whose servant the physician has always been. Then you would not be surprised if he told you this Person spoke to something within the man and set that right first; that having given the blessing He did not want it made known; and that He treated the vanishing of outward symptoms merely as proof of a cure at the root. These are indeed the features of the Gospel narratives; everyone notices them. They are cited as signs of the writers’ simplicity and their freedom from any straining after display — but they are not, I think, dwelt on as marking the very purpose of the narratives.
Closely related are the frequent references to casting out devils. The Evangelists connect particular kinds of sickness with diabolical possession, yet somehow leave the impression that all sickness has this origin. At any rate they point to this exercise of power as the most characteristic of Christ, the one that explains all the rest. Commentators generally want to pass this over as a difficulty. Some say the Evangelists adapted themselves to Jewish speech; some say possession belonged to that age; some argue it has not been unknown in any age; some speak of the anthropomorphism and superstition natural in such writers. Those are plausible, high-sounding words, and I doubt those who use them freely have weighed their meaning. By anthropomorphism I mean conceiving the spiritual under a human shape — yet the Evangelists never give the devils a human shape. By superstition I mean putting above us what belongs below, or making our object of worship an object of fear — yet the Evangelists present the devils not as powers above but as powers working within, and present Christ not as teaching men to fear or worship them but as delivering men from them and teaching them to worship God. And if that is the aim of all these acts of power, they agree marvellously with the story that opens these Gospels as a preface to them: He who was proclaimed Son of God and endued with the Spirit of God was led by that Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. He warred with the root-spirit of disobedience that had claimed dominion over men; now He wars with every form in which that evil power works their harm. That power shows itself most directly in whatever affects man personally and morally, whether or not mixed with physical disease. The unclean spirit — the spirit of despair that drives a man among the tombs, makes him cry out and cut himself with stones and terrify his fellows, whom no chains can bind — is the most inward tyrant of all. Christ, by commanding him to come out of the man, proclaims that everything diseased or corrupt in body or mind is not from above but from beneath — not part of the original order of the universe, not from God, but from rebellion against God — and is therefore to be undone by the Holy One of God, the Son of God, who comes to establish the Kingdom of God.
So instead of dwelling on the other miracles as the only satisfactory proofs of His mission while trying to avoid the stories of casting out devils as awkward puzzles, we should, if we follow the Evangelists, look in these for the general law of all the miracles, since they explain the nature of His work and the purpose of His coming better than any others. Whatever else they omit or report differently, all three fix our attention on these and keep suggesting their relation to the rest. All three, with some difference of detail, report the cure of the man (or men) among the tombs as the most characteristic. All speak — St. Matthew more than once — of how the Pharisees explained the miracles: “He casteth out devils by the Prince of the devils.” All record His answer, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” All record the words, “all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven” — words which, even without St. Mark’s explanation that they said He had an unclean spirit, lead us to conclude that their sin lay not in denying Christ’s power but in calling good evil and evil good, a state of mind that hates the very character of God. All also attribute to Him these words, so baffling to anyone who sees His signs merely as startling portents: “If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? Therefore shall they be your judges.” In what sense could their sons be their judges? Was their power like His? If He was the true King of the world, all power ever exerted was His power, and He came to show from where such power came; so if His power was evil, then all power ever used by any Jewish physician to heal disease or madness was evil too.
Lastly, all the Evangelists connect faith in the person healed with most, if not all, of these acts of power. Now if the miracles were merely proofs of a divine mission, unconnected with its nature, you would expect the most overwhelming displays where the unbelief was most stubborn — as legends usually arrange it, with faith produced in the most reluctant by the spectacle. But if these signs were tokens of the presence of One who came to claim the human spirit and raise it out of bondage to other masters, then we see at once that there is something more kingly and mysterious in an act that calls the man himself into trust and hope than in one that merely rectifies his body or mind. Not only is the limb straightened and the bleeding stopped, but the person who wields the limb, through whose veins the blood flows, is called into life and health by the voice of the life-giver.
These remarks are not new; they are worth anything only as they order thoughts we all share. No reader of the Gospels has ever doubted that the graciousness of Christ’s miracles belongs to their very nature — a quality writers on evidence have laboured over more than was needed, for the heart takes such impressions more readily when they are not forced. The apparent exceptions — the cursing of the fig-tree, the destruction of the swine — have been explained with painful ingenuity, as if we needed convincing that a moral lesson meant to cure human beings may be got through the death of a tree or an animal. What I want is that we follow out the conviction such phrases imply, and admit that the Evangelists saw these miracles as ways in which the great Deliverer revealed Himself as Deliverer, actually breaking the fetters that bound human bodies as well as spirits. Seen this way, all the other miracles they record will be felt to have their own fitness in the divine economy, for later instruction as well as immediate, especially to free men from superstition. That the disciples should learn the winds and waves obeyed their Master, and the multitude feel that it was He who gave them bread, was as needful as feeling that He restored the powers of body and soul. The Jews needed such a lesson, being still prone to tremble before the powers of nature and to think man lives by bread alone and not by the word of God. But what a lesson too lay in store for the worshippers of Neptune, Ceres, and Æsculapius — what a witness that the powers they thought divided among different capricious gods were really gathered up in the one Lord and Friend of man!
Publicans and Pharisees. The New and Old Garment
The passage: As Jesus went on, He saw a tax-gatherer named Matthew at his booth and said, “Follow me.” Matthew rose and followed. Later, as Jesus ate in the house, many tax-gatherers and sinners sat down with Him and His disciples. The Pharisees asked the disciples why their Master ate with such people. Jesus answered that the healthy do not need a doctor, but the sick do, and told them to learn what “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice” means, for He came to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance. Then John’s disciples asked why they and the Pharisees fasted often, but His disciples did not. Jesus replied that the wedding guests cannot mourn while the bridegroom is with them; but when the bridegroom is taken away, they will fast. He added that no one sews new cloth onto an old garment, for the patch tears away and makes the rip worse, and no one puts new wine into old wineskins, for the skins burst and both are lost; new wine goes into new skins, and both are kept.
All three Evangelists tell this story in nearly the same order, with Levi in two accounts where Matthew stands in the other. I may seem to be joining two passages that have no direct link. But I am trying to follow the Evangelists closely, and where all three keep the same order I assume they felt a connection in the parts of their story and wanted us to feel it. I think even their simplest readers have sensed this: that the question of John’s disciples grew naturally out of our Lord’s answer to the Pharisees, and that His comparisons of the new and old garments and the new and old wineskins were meant to explain a deep reason for the difference between His disciples and those of the Pharisees or of John.
I. In the call of Levi, or Matthew, we see the same power over the person’s will that appeared in the call of Andrew and Simon, James and John. The words are not those of a disciple attaching himself to a master out of preference; they plainly convey One speaking with authority—an authority the conscience and heart recognized, though nothing in His outward appearance supported it.
But Matthew is not a fisherman; he is a rich tax-gatherer. As soon as he obeys, he gathers men of his own class and invites his Master to eat with them. This class had more than a bad reputation: many of them must have been extortioners, and the general dislike of them must have thrown them among people who truly deserved the name of sinners. To imagine Matthew’s guests were merely people labelled sinners through Pharisaic prejudice is to twist the letter of the Gospel and, still more, to set aside its meaning. The Pharisees do not complain that our Lord showed kindness to wrongdoers, but that He mixed with them as friends, eating and drinking with them. Did not the Law justify their own avoidance of impurity? The Evangelist offers no direct answer to these questions. He overrules them all with the words, “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that be sick.” If he saw his Master as the King of Men, come to restore an order that had been broken; if he believed that the righteousness all the Law’s precepts pointed to dwelt in Him, and that He came to plant that righteousness in the hearts of those who had strayed furthest—then the proverb applied plainly and truly. In other words, if he felt that our Lord’s Kingdom was the kingdom over men that had lain beneath all legal rules, and that it asserted its power by fulfilling their purpose even when it seemed to set them aside, we can see how this story fits with all that has gone before. On any other view the Pharisees’ objection would seem unanswered.
If this explanation is right, then the difficulty raised by John’s disciples—though quite different from the Pharisees’—had a similar solution. John’s disciples might recall that their master had won a readier hearing from publicans and sinners than from scribes and Pharisees, and that he had called some who came to his baptism a “generation of vipers.” But was not his most obvious mark self-restraint, indifference to fleshly comforts? Would he not most wish his disciples to imitate that, even if it meant adopting the practices of the Pharisees? The new Teacher’s eating and drinking seemed directly opposed to this. It was not so much the company that startled them as that a Teacher of righteousness should go to feasts at all. Why should fasting not mark His followers as it marked earlier schools? The first answer is, “The bridegroom is with them”—a strange expression for the head of a school, quite outside the associations such a role suggests. Yet it was no new idea to those who had read the forty-fifth Psalm, who had heard of a King delighting in the beauty of his promised Bride, riding on for truth and meekness and righteousness, and of her leaving her father’s house to dwell with him. I do not now weigh the full force of these words. I only say that such language would inevitably make a Jew connect the one who used it of himself with ideas of royalty and divinity. His disciples could not fast because they had already reached the end fasting was meant to serve—the finding of the Lord and Ruler of their spirits. A time would come when they would feel deprived of Him, and then they would fast.
But the idea comes out more fully in the second part of the answer. No one has ever doubted that the old garment and old wineskins mean the institutions of the ancient order, and the new ones those Christ would establish. All have seen that our Lord meant, in some way, that it would be harmful merely to re-enact the old forms and customs until the substance and life beneath them had been revealed. But surely, unless His Kingdom was the everlasting Kingdom that all Jewish institutions had imperfectly displayed, these comparisons and the argument on them would not hold. He would be swapping new wineskins for old, not pressing out the wine to fill them. No more beautiful picture could be found of the claim that the Kingdom of God, once unfolded, would produce a clothing fitted to itself, and not merely keep the clothing it wore while still undeveloped. If that were not the Evangelists’ meaning, then they used illustrations of the plainest, most natural kind with a most artificial and unreal significance.
The Appointment of the Apostles
The passage: Jesus called his twelve disciples and gave them power to cast out unclean spirits and to heal every kind of sickness. Their names are listed. He sent these twelve out with instructions: do not go to the Gentiles or into any Samaritan city, but go to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, preach that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. Heal the sick, cleanse lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils; you received freely, so give freely. Carry no gold, silver, or brass, no bag, no second coat, no shoes, no staff — the workman deserves his food. When you enter a city or house, find who is worthy and stay there. Salute the house; if it is worthy, let your peace rest on it, and if not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not receive you or hear you, shake the dust off your feet as you leave.
This passage differs in a few details from the matching accounts in Mark and Luke. Both of them separate the calling of the Apostles from their being sent to work. Our Lord’s commands are far more detailed in Matthew chapter ten than in Mark chapter six or Luke chapter nine, and Luke assigns some of them instead to the seventy disciples. But the words I have quoted — except those about the Gentiles and Samaritans — appear in all three. I need not labor how much importance the Evangelists attach to this commission; everyone feels and admits it. It would waste time to prove that our Lord constantly speaks to His Apostles as heralds of a Kingdom, as men entrusted with spiritual powers, as the founders of a society, as men whose immediate task was to prepare the way for far higher tasks given them later. Someone will say this is exactly what we would expect — a list of directions written after the fact. The Evangelists wrote knowing what the Apostles had done, and so read back into this scene events they themselves may have seen or been told of. What I want to point out is simply that this narrative fits exactly with all that came before. John the Baptist came announcing a Kingdom was near; our Lord preached that the Kingdom of Heaven was near; the twelve were sent with the same message. The Kingdom John announced was plainly a Kingdom over the human spirit — he said the one coming after him would baptize with the Spirit. All the acts by which Christ testified of His Kingdom were acts of spiritual power, of dominion over spirits, and the same powers are said to be given to the Apostles for the same purpose. Everything in the Evangelists — their tone, their deliberate words and their accidental ones, where they agree and where they differ — shows a settled conviction that they are describing the acts of a Ruler: One who had ruled in the past and would give mightier proof of His rule to come, who had called out the twelve tribes as His national witnesses, and who was now preparing men to represent those tribes and carry their purpose to all the families of the earth. There is no wavering on this point, no lapse into some other idea; it is the assumption running through the whole narrative — never forced on us anywhere, yet felt everywhere.
The Sabbath-Day
The passage: Jesus walked through the cornfields on the sabbath, and His hungry disciples plucked and ate ears of corn. The Pharisees objected that this was unlawful on the sabbath. Jesus answered: had they not read how David, when hungry, ate the shewbread reserved for the priests? And that the priests in the temple work on the sabbath yet are blameless? Here, He said, is One greater than the temple. Had they understood the words “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice,” they would not have condemned the guiltless, for the Son of Man is Lord even of the sabbath. Later, seeing a man with a withered hand, they asked whether it was lawful to heal on the sabbath, hoping to accuse Him. He replied that any of them would lift a sheep out of a pit on the sabbath — and a man is worth more than a sheep — so it is lawful to do good on the sabbath.
The stories of the cornfields and the man with the withered hand appear in all three Evangelists. Each stresses these and other Pharisee complaints about Jesus neglecting the sabbath, and all present this as the first great provocation that led them to plot His destruction. Mark says this was when Jesus looked round on them with anger, grieved at their hard hearts. Luke returns to the theme repeatedly — in his fourth, thirteenth, and fourteenth chapters. Given how brief the Gospels are, it is striking how much room they give this subject, and how necessary they felt it was to showing what Jesus’ life was. But why should that be? The sabbath was one of the most memorable Jewish institutions. If the Pharisees observed it to extravagant excess, we might have expected a great teacher to warn also of the opposite danger, the laxity the Sadducees were probably prone to. This was not a mere tradition of the elders but a positive commandment, like honoring father and mother. Yet the whole weight of Jesus’ example and authority seems thrown onto the side of permission and toleration — the side we would think already heaviest.
“The Son of Man,” says Matthew, “is Lord also of the sabbath-day.” “The sabbath was made for man,” says Mark, “not man for the sabbath; therefore the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.” Luke repeats these last words, tying them directly to David eating the shewbread. Here the Evangelists themselves explain why they weigh these dialogues so heavily. He who had instituted the sabbath, and to whom it had borne witness, had come to claim His own dominion over it and to declare what He had meant by it. The Pharisees denied that lordship and set aside that meaning entirely. Their fault was not an error of excess but a fatal contradiction of the whole nature of this commandment, and of every commandment. They had no sense that the sabbath was made for man; so how could they feel the force of “Thou shalt rest, and thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, and the stranger that is within thy gates”? The Pharisee cared nothing for the servant or the stranger; he cared only for the day itself, stripped bare of all its life, and to it the servant and the stranger were to be sacrificed. How then could such men see the Son of Man — who came as King and Deliverer of servants and strangers — as Lord of this day? How could they welcome a Person come with such a purpose, when their whole spirit was fixed on the husk of the institution? I say the husk, not the letter, for they could not read the letter. The letter witnessed against them: it spoke of the relation between man and God, of God sharing man’s labor and man sharing God’s rest — the very truth they denied when they called Christ a blasphemer. All the hidden inhumanity and real atheism of the Pharisee lay wrapped up in his feelings about the sabbath. No wonder they plotted against Christ for the acts and words that exposed those feelings; no wonder the holiest anger was roused by men turning God’s commandment into a practical denial of Him. But all this profound morality, this assertion of the very principle the Pharisees were undermining, becomes meaningless if the Gospels are not what they claim to be: throughout, the history of a Son of God and a King of Men.
The Parables
Almost the whole of the thirteenth chapter of Matthew is given to our Lord’s parables. Many more appear in later chapters; Mark records only a few. Nothing so distinguishes Luke from the other two Evangelists as his choice of parables. Three are found in all three Gospels: the Sower, the Mustard-seed, and the Lord of the vineyard and the husbandmen.
I intend to examine each of these, together with as much of the surrounding text as all the Evangelists thought needed to explain them.
I. In every Gospel the Sower is treated as a specimen of this way of teaching, and its explanation is tied to the reason for speaking in parables. So it deserves close attention. From it we may learn whether our Lord’s teaching confirms or weakens the conclusion we drew from His baptism, temptation, miracles, and arguments with opponents. We may begin with His answer to the disciples’ question prompted by this parable, “Why speakest Thou unto them in parables?” — “Because unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but unto them it is not given.”
These words link the parables to the phrase we have met so often, “the kingdom,” which so far has kept a fixed meaning. But here for the first time the word “mysteries” is joined to “kingdom.” Joined how? Were the Apostles not to preach the kingdom of God? Was what their Master told them about it secret knowledge, meant only for themselves or for a circle of initiates they would gather? If so, the use of parables could not be squared with the rest of the record — and no charge of pretence or self-glorification laid on the Evangelists would ease that difficulty. Everywhere else they present their Master, in contrast to the learned Jewish doctors, as the Teacher of the poor and ignorant. Here they would be needlessly confessing that they had received special private instruction, which in the same breath they were foolishly making public. And the discourse itself makes this view still harder to hold. The interpretation of the Sower was plainly what they were to make their hearers know by every possible means. They were taught the obstacles that keep the Word from taking root and bearing fruit, precisely so they could warn others. He speaks in parables because the people cannot receive His lesson any other way. The thing is hidden from them, and His discourse tells why it is hidden, where the veil lies, and how and by whom it was drawn. The people’s own inner life was hidden from them because their hearts had grown gross and their ears dull. The hidden work going on within them was just what they could not perceive. The rule exercised over their own hearts could only be shown them through the outward things their eyes were used to — and even those they saw poorly, often not at all. It was a revelation to remind them of the secret processes by which seed becomes stalk, ear, and full corn. The natural world was almost as a landscape to a blind man’s eye; yet they could not be wholly unaware of facts they handled daily. They might be awakened to notice these, to see an order in the familiar works of nature and of man, and thence to discover an order and dominion nearer still to themselves, working always for their discipline and deliverance.
Those, on the other hand, who were groping, however confusedly, for the light that most concerned themselves — who cared less for the earth and its seeds than to be freed from their ignorance and made right and true within, hearts craving guidance, seeking a resting-place, children crying for a Father — these had an immediate hold on the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; to them it was given to know them. The others saw those mysteries only cast outward into the visible world.
Some such view of these words is, I think, the usual one. I do not want to offer anything new, but only to show how exactly it fits and carries out the idea of a Kingdom whose first and highest work is in man’s inner being, but which reaches into every part of his life, through society, and through the whole intellectual and living universe. Suppose the actual King of men had come to make plain the nature of His government — to show what rule He had been exercising over them and to what ends, how it was thwarted, and why they did not perceive it; and suppose that King of men were also King of nature, the Creator and Lord of the world in which man lives, who made that world especially for man, set him at its centre, and ordered it by laws that show themselves fully only as they bear on man’s character and acts — then we should see why the Sower is the key to all parables, why it sets forth a mystery of the kingdom of heaven and at the same time a mystery of the kingdom of earth, why it belongs to each man’s life and is closely bound to the history of the race.
That the Son of Man plants His word in a voluntary being who can stop it from having its natural effect — this is the plain doctrine of the parable. The matching fact in nature is that someone puts seed in ground whose qualities may make it barren. In both cases we are reminded that fruitfulness is the law and barrenness the anomaly, the result of some perversity — yet a perversity likely to appear, and needing a power beyond the human or natural subject to remove it. Each is meant to receive that power and submit to it; then its hidden capacities are unfolded, and in due season the results become visible. In both the processes are secret and orderly; in both the failure comes from the productive power not reaching deep enough; in both what finally appears on the surface looks quite unlike its cause. Hold these great landmarks of the discourse together in your mind, and you reach such a sense of the reality of the distinction and the resemblance between the two great spheres of our universe as no definition or philosophical scheme can give. And you feel at the same time that these spheres must be under a Person’s authority, that “Kingdom” applies to them literally, not by metaphor, and that no other word could replace it without being feeble and awkward.
I said the Sower concerns the life of the race as well as the individual. If it is the history of the Divine Will working on human wills, it cannot be confined to particular experiences; the history of man must be in it. Still, I readily grant the common feeling that it bears less obviously on the movements and growth of human society than some other parables. The Mustard-seed I gladly admit is, as commonly said, a prophecy of the future unfolding of the Church as a whole. But note that the character of this unfolding is essentially the same as before. The mustard-tree was not the greatest or stateliest of trees; its size is not the point. The point is clearly the growth, first of a herb, then of a tree, out of the smallest of seeds. Underground processes are implied here too. The Apostles had already heard the Sower and taken in something of its spirit; they would apply its interpretation here as well, supposing that this seed, like the corn, was sown and watched by a Divine husbandman, planted in human spirits, and that these were somehow brought into such unity that they could be pictured as one great tree with many branches. I do not suppose elaborate reasoning went on in the minds of Galilean fishermen. The beauty of this teaching was that no such reasoning was needed: the natural image joined to their inner experience took its place. The Divine Teacher had already written His lessons on the visible world; He had only to open His disciples’ eyes to read them there. The one tree with its branches, and the birds lodging in them, though only an imperfect picture of spiritual unity and its diverse living forms, came far closer to that reality than any school discussions of unity could. The image showed that no artificial combination of persons and wills — like no combination of leaves and branches — could produce the oneness; it must have a root beneath the soil, an original unity as the ground of the diversity, not its result. So the Mustard-seed shows the kingdom of heaven under a new aspect, yet with the same essential mark: there is One who rules, in whom it consists, from whose secret life all its varied energies come.
Still, one element of the Gospel narratives seems missing from both these parables. The sower is said to be the Son of Man; the mustard-seed’s growth is a kingdom’s growth, implying a king. But is this Son of Man, this King of men, the Son of God? Can we say such a person is declared the source of all the agencies at work in human society and in nature? There is a third parable common to the three Evangelists, which each stresses strongly as the one that struck most directly at the consciences of the chief priests and scribes, which they felt was aimed at them, and which stirred them to seek revenge. A vineyard was let to husbandmen; the owner sent servant after servant to ask for the fruits; one was beaten, another stoned. Last he sent his son, thinking they would respect him. But the husbandmen said, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and seize his inheritance,” and they cast him out of the vineyard and killed him. When the owner comes, what will he do to them? They answer that he will destroy those wicked men and let the vineyard to others who will render the fruits in their seasons. Jesus then asks them whether they had never read, “The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner? this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.”
This passage, you will see, agrees strikingly with all we have already considered. (1) A Son comes after a succession of servants, yet it is plainly meant that the Son was before the servants. The first agent in all God’s works declared Himself last; the power to whom all the rest were subordinate, and from whom they came, was revealed. (2) He came, like those before Him, to seek the fruits of the vineyard — or, as our Lord interprets it, to see whether those entrusted with the kingdom of God were worthy of the trust. (3) The crowning act of rebellion sprang from wanting to claim the inheritance. The husbandmen would not acknowledge the Son because they would not acknowledge a Father. They wished to seize as their own what belonged to Him, which they could hold only as the son held it — by faith in Him, by renouncing themselves. (4) So this parable, like John’s preaching, like our Lord’s own preaching, His discourses, and His miracles, looks forward to a judgment near at hand, declaring that the axe is laid to the root of the tree, and that, bearing no good fruit, it will be hewn down and burned. The more we look into these parables — those found in the first three Gospels but not the fourth — the more the truth comes home that the Evangelists’ first aim was not to show us a human teacher with a set of maxims and examples, but to declare a King of men and a Son of God, who came to reveal the kingdom implied in the Jewish kingdom, and to overthrow the one by establishing the other.
Herod Hearing of Christ
The passage: At that time Herod the tetrarch heard of the reports about Jesus and told his servants: this is John the Baptist, risen from the dead, and that is why these mighty works are at work in him.
This announcement, with some variations, appears in all three of the first Evangelists; in the first two the story of John’s death is added to it. I bring it in because I do not want to pass over any passage the three share, even if it seems trivial. I do not think this one is trivial, especially when it is joined to a passage we shall meet shortly, and to some we shall look at later in the fourth Gospel. The question of the relation between our Lord and John the Baptist bears in a striking way on the history of early Christian opinions, and touches closely on our subject. I will say no more of it here, except this: Herod’s wish to connect Christ with John, or with some old Prophet, shows the restless fear that ran through his whole family—the fear that the teacher might turn out to be a king. They would happily let the people entertain any notion, even the loftiest, about a favorite teacher, so long as it spared them that dangerous alternative.