The passage: Peter tells Jesus that they have left everything to follow Him, and asks what they will get for it. Jesus replies that those who have followed Him will, in the regeneration when the Son of Man sits on His throne of glory, sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Everyone who has left home, family, or lands for His Name’s sake will receive a hundredfold and inherit everlasting life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.
The words about the regeneration and the Son of Man on His throne of glory are found only in St. Matthew, and I will look at them later.
The exact wording of Peter’s question, “What shall we have therefor?” also belongs only to St. Matthew, and this, I think, accounts for the differences in the rest of the passage. Much of the emphasis of Matthew’s story clearly falls on the last verse, which becomes the text of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. St. Mark does not give Peter’s demand the same selfish shape; he only says, “Lo, we have left all, and followed Thee.” But since Mark had used that phrase in his 8th chapter, where Peter objected to the prophecy of Christ’s humiliation and was sternly rebuked, I take it he meant nearly what the other Evangelists imply. So although Mark leaves out the parable, he still gives the words, “Many that are last shall be first, and the first last,” in the same pointed way. St. Luke gives only “Lo, we have left all, and followed Thee,” and omits “Many that are first shall be last.” Those words appear instead in Luke’s 13th chapter, in answer to the question whether few will be saved.
I could not fit these remarks in when speaking of the direct differences among the Evangelists. They help show how seemingly accidental omissions or additions, in accounts that are basically the same, bring out the meaning they share. From all four Evangelists there can be no doubt that our Lord meant to tell Peter that the blessing of those who truly left all for the Gospel could not be overstated: for them there were houses, lands, persecutions, friends, family, and everlasting life in store. But it is just as clear that while Peter was still asking “what shall we have therefor?” he himself had not left all. He was bargaining for wages, wanting to gain more than others by his sacrifices. At the end of the day, if that state of mind held, he would be angry when the great Householder gave those who he thought had worked less the same blessing as himself. So the lesson to the poor fishermen is essentially the same as the lesson to the rich ruler, and the two discourses cannot be separated. The disciples were still self-seekers as he was — in a measure, for no one can think they had followed Christ on a calculation. They were drawn after Him by a power, a love they could not resist; they clung to Him and lost themselves in Him, and so far they were already in seed what they later became. But the habit of mind belonging to their country, to the evil nature in every man, and fostered and almost embodied by pharisaic religion, still clung to them. Like the ruler, they still imagined that certain measurable sacrifices would secure a certain measurable happiness; the thinking of the marketplace had not left their view of eternal life. One great lesson comes from the way He answers them: the Divine teacher does not treat men’s mistakes by the rule the great human teacher follows — that a stick bent one way must be bent the other. Instead, with both the ruler and His own disciples, He goes all the way with them. He grants that eternal life is gained by sacrifice, and only shows them that the selfishness of their minds is what makes real sacrifice impossible.
The Going Up to Jerusalem
The passage: Going up to Jerusalem, Jesus took the twelve aside on the road and told them: we are going up to Jerusalem, where the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes; they will condemn Him to death, deliver Him to the Gentiles to be mocked, scourged, and crucified, and on the third day He will rise again.
I have already discussed two announcements of the Passion, especially the one after the Transfiguration. But the passage that comes right after the conversation with the ruler and with Peter is introduced in all three Evangelists so pointedly—small phrases in each show how deeply it marked the disciples—that we cannot treat it as mere repetition of what came before. Here is the passage, in which Jesus tells the twelve on the road that they are going up to Jerusalem, where the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and scribes, condemned to death, handed to the Gentiles to be mocked, scourged, and crucified, and will rise on the third day.
I want you to notice that each Evangelist puts the emphasis on the words, “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem.”
Our Lord had already spoken of His passion and resurrection in connection with His own character as the Son of God. But there is another way they must be seen: in connection with the holy city and the people who would reject Him. St. Luke, perhaps, shows us more clearly than the others how constantly this thought was in our Lord’s own mind. Yet the more carefully we study the other two as well, the more we find that they too regard the entry into Jerusalem as the crisis in the history of their nation, and therefore of all nations. They never lose sight, in their view of the great Deliverer, of an approaching judgment; they never forget that a baptism of the Holy Ghost is also to be a baptism of fire. We shall see how necessary this thought is when we come to the next step in the narrative.
The Descent from the Mount of Olives
The passage: As Jesus and his disciples neared Jerusalem at Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, he sent two disciples to fetch an ass and her colt from a nearby village, telling them to say “the Lord hath need of them.” This fulfilled the prophet’s words: tell the daughter of Zion, your King comes to you, meek, riding on an ass and a colt. The disciples brought the animals, laid their clothes on them, and set Jesus there. A great crowd spread garments and branches in the road, crying “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” When he entered the city, all Jerusalem was stirred and asked who this was, and the crowd answered that it was Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee.
This story appears in John’s Gospel as well as in the first three; I set aside John’s reasons for including it. Everyone feels how important a place it holds in the synoptic Gospels, and everyone sees that it describes a royal entrance into David’s city — an entrance long prepared for, which even at the time the disciples, taking their cue from Jesus himself, regarded as the start of a series of great and solemn events. What this would bring him, why the man who had been only a prophet among Galilean fishermen should invite in his enemies’ capital the vengeance he seemed to expect, why, if he had to enter the city, he did not more carefully than ever avoid anything that might rouse the Roman Governor’s suspicion or hand the Pharisees a new pretext — all this the disciples might puzzle over in vain. But that this entry stood in close relation to that Kingdom of which all his parables had spoken and all his miracles had illustrated, they could not doubt. If he wanted them to think he was not a king, or a king only in some imaginary, figurative sense, why choose just this moment and this manner to leave an impression on their minds that later events could only deepen?
This is the sort of question we would naturally press on those who read the Gospels with full faith in their genuineness and inspiration, but treat them as the history of a Divine Teacher rather than of a Divine King. Those who take the Evangelists to be common men bound by their nation’s superstition into believing that Jesus meant to depose the Caesars and restore David’s line in Judea will of course seize on this passage as evidence. And they are entitled to whatever the most exact meaning of the words gives them; they may fairly demand that no vague, uncritical sense be put upon an event the writers clearly thought so important — the one they date their last and greatest period from. If, on close reading of these words from Matthew — the “Ebionite” Evangelist, the one said to retain, beneath all later editing and spiritualizing, the strongest marks of old Jewish materialism — anything is found inconsistent with the idea of a real, present kingdom, a kingdom that was the true fulfilment of David’s, yet, precisely because real, present, immediate, Davidic, and Jewish, therefore in the deepest sense spiritual, lying at the root of things, existing in One who from the first had upheld all things by the word of his power; if there is one phrase in Matthew that under the hardest examination clashes with the impression his whole preceding history has left on us — then I grant not only that this story of the descent from the Mount of Olives is itself perplexing, but that it throws all that comes before and after it into confusion.
But there is no such word. Everything here is royal, yet none of the trappings of royalty are present. He calls for the ass, and its owner feels it must be surrendered because the Lord needs it. The ass is the ordinary mount of the old judges, yet it is also the symbol of lowliness. He is greeted with palm branches and hosannas, but by a band of insignificant followers. Turn the story any way you like, take its general impression or its smallest details, and everything bears out the sense of a quiet, unseen power that makes itself felt but does not come with display, that claims the homage of human hearts as the highest tribute it can receive, before it shows those who refuse that homage what master they are surrendering to. This is exactly the teaching we have found in every passage we have studied in these Gospels. If there were a history made of such passages, set in Judea, every step tied to an approaching crisis in the land and its chief city, would we not expect this climax, and feel a gap in the story if it were missing? All Christendom has felt this — expressed in art and in books of devotion, by those meditating the Scriptures for their own good and by those reading them as records of the world’s history — that the meekest and lowliest of men entered Jerusalem to say, “I am your Ruler and Lord. Will you own me as such? If not, the stones of your city will cry out; the real, invisible bond that holds them together will be destroyed, and soon not one will be left upon another.” I point to this deeply rooted, many-voiced conviction as proof of my first claim: that I am not proposing a novel theory about these Gospels, but only drawing out the truth the conscience of modern Europe has implicitly recognized, and showing that it rests not on symbolic or mystical interpretation but is the only reading compatible with the plain sense of these books, the only one that explains how their parts connect. What has kept this belief from its full power, I think, is the want of a fuller, franker acknowledgment that Christ is the King of Men, and not merely the King of the particular portion of men allowed to bear his Name. Our selfishness has robbed him of more than half his glory, and threatens at last to deprive us of the blessing we have refused to share. But I am anticipating what is still to come.
Jesus Going into the Temple
The last passage was one of the few places where the part of St. John’s Gospel before the passion agrees with the other three Evangelists; the passage that follows contains almost the only striking apparent disagreement. St. John seems to place the story of Jesus entering the Temple and driving out those who bought and sold there at the passover following His first miracle, while the other three all connect it with His final entry into Jerusalem. St. Matthew’s account matches theirs: Jesus went into the temple, drove out the buyers and sellers, overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those selling doves, and said that His house should be called a house of prayer, but they had made it a den of thieves. All three Evangelists show that this act made a strong impression on the chief priests, and all seem to link it with the question, “By what authority doest thou these things?” and the parable that arose from it. Matthew and Mark include the barren fig-tree — a miracle everyone has felt to be closely tied to the withering of the Jewish nation — while Luke, who had just described Jesus weeping over the city, puts the same meaning into words instead. But why should entering the temple and claiming a right to cleanse it strike the priests as such a bold assertion of authority? Why should the Evangelists connect it with deeds and words that pointed to a coming catastrophe? I believe the rest of the narrative explains these feelings. If riding into Jerusalem on an ass was a claim to the kingly honor He had seemed to refuse before, entering the temple was an equally significant claim to be the divine Son — a title His disciples had acknowledged but were as yet forbidden to proclaim. The first act gave evidence for the charge before Pilate; the second proved to the chief priest that the Sanhedrim must condemn Him as a blasphemer. To call the Temple His Father’s house, and claim the right to drive out its invaders because it was His Father’s house — was this not the clearest proof that He had committed the offence the law punished with stoning? So the parable I have already considered, earlier only as an example of parables in general, bears most directly on this very act: the Son had come to claim the fruits of the vineyard from the husbandmen, and the stone that was the foundation and corner-stone of the Temple had been brought in, so that it might be seen how the builders would treat it.
The Baptism of John
The passage: When Jesus came into the temple and was teaching, the chief priests and elders asked him by what authority he did these things, and who gave it to him. He said he would ask them one question, and if they answered it he would tell them: the baptism of John — was it from heaven or from men? They reasoned that if they said “from heaven,” he would ask why they had not believed John; but if they said “from men,” they feared the people, who all held John to be a prophet. So they said they could not tell, and Jesus said he would not tell them by what authority he acted either.
I must not pass over these words, common to all three Evangelists, that introduce the parable. Part of their value, as everyone has seen, lies in the general law they witness to: those who have not benefited from an earlier, preparatory stage make themselves unfit for a higher one. But we must not forget that it is the chief priests who are singled out here, set apart from — even in contrast with — the people at large; in Matthew’s Gospel, set in contrast even with the coarser part of the people, the publicans and harlots. So this passage should be compared with John’s words to the Scribes and Pharisees when they came out to his baptism: “Oh generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father; for God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.” That sentence exposes the whole sin of the Pharisees, both the height and the meanness of their ambition. They were proud of being Abraham’s children and thought that privilege could never be taken from them; they did not care to be God’s children. They preferred the lower honor kept to themselves over the higher honor shared with people they regarded as mere stones. So they were wrapped up in a religious atheism, content without any sense that they stood in a relation to God. John called them to repent of this sin, which proved they had forgotten the blessings of their own covenant. They were to turn from Abraham to the God of Abraham; not to glory in their strength or wisdom, but in knowing Him who executes righteousness and judgment on the earth. If they did that, He would reveal Himself to them: there was One among them who would baptize them with the Holy Ghost and with fire. The chief priests had not heeded that call, and so they could not know by what authority Christ did these things. They wanted to be rulers themselves in the temple, at the moment when its true Lord had suddenly come to refine and purify it. They did not know who He was, but they sensed that He was one they ought to obey; and so they said, “Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours.”
Paying Tribute to Cæsar
The passage: The Pharisees plotted to trap Jesus in his words, sending their disciples with the Herodians. They flattered him as a truthful teacher who plays no favorites, then asked whether it is lawful to pay tribute to Cæsar. Jesus, seeing their wickedness, called them hypocrites and asked to see the coin. When they showed him a penny, he asked whose image and inscription it bore. They said Cæsar’s. He told them to give Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, and to God what is God’s.
The parallel accounts are in Mark 12 and Luke 20. The three Evangelists differ very little here. The largest difference is that Matthew puts the parable of the king’s marriage feast for his son between the parable of the husbandmen and the sending of the spies, while Mark and Luke trace the plot directly to the stung conscience and bitterness of the chief priests, who saw these words were aimed at them. If we look closely at that second parable, the difference is not weighty: it is close in spirit, purpose, and even form to the first, and could well have sharpened the rage the first had stirred. I need not dwell on the question about the tribute-money. Every reader sees that it touches Christ’s claim to be a king, and was meant to ruin His reputation with the people or to prepare a charge before the Roman Governor. Nor has anyone, so far as I know, suggested that Christ in His answer gave up or softened in the least the dignity He had claimed when He entered the city. My real complaint against the interpreters is this: they have taught readers to admire a kind of cleverness in Christ’s answer, as though it were an evasion — as though it did not carry the whole meaning of His earlier teaching into a fresh and striking application, and were not full of solemn rebuke to the Pharisees and Herodians and a deep lesson to the whole nation about the secret of its slavery. What deliverance did the Pharisees dream of? Freedom from paying tribute to Cæsar. And why did they mourn that so much? Because their hearts were enslaved to covetousness; they knew no more shameful bondage than what the publican’s presence signified, and no greater freedom than his being sent away. But whose image and inscription is on the coin? Cæsar’s — so why should it not go to him? And whose image are you made in? What inscription is written on your hearts? Give those to the invisible God, claim Him as your King, and your chains fall off; you are slaves no longer. So Christ did not merely say, “I am not come to disturb the rule of the Cæsars.” He showed why He was not come to disturb it, and why He could not truly free the nation by exempting them from tribute. He came to reveal the Kingdom of God to them, to tell them they were God’s servants, not Cæsar’s. In that way He came to accomplish everything the people expected of Him, had they only known what they expected; He came to undermine the tyranny of the Cæsars, the tyranny of the Pharisees, and every other tyranny in the world. Pharisees, Herodians, and Romans had reason to fear Him. He was far more truly dangerous to them, and they were beginning to see it, than all the agitators who had ever urged Israel to throw off its yoke.
The Sadducees and the Resurrection
The passage: That same day the Sadducees, who deny that there is a resurrection, came to Jesus with a case: Moses ruled that a man’s brother must marry his childless widow to raise offspring for him; seven brothers in turn married one woman and each died childless, and then she died too — so whose wife will she be at the resurrection? Jesus answered that they were wrong because they knew neither the Scriptures nor God’s power. In the resurrection people do not marry but are like the angels. And as for the resurrection, had they not read God’s own words, “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? He is not the God of the dead but of the living. The crowd who heard this were astonished at his teaching.
When our Lord spoke about the leaven, He plainly hinted that the opposing Jewish sects shared one habit of mind. It is not enough to say their common dislike of Him proved this deep likeness; it was certain that as their opposition unfolded, its inner nature would show itself. Here the Sadducees took up an argument that would normally have set them directly against the Pharisees — a case that must have furnished many a debate and many a jest when they refuted the other school. Yet our Lord found in it the very temper He had just exposed in the men who asked whether tribute should be paid to Cæsar. The idea of God as Lord of the heart, a spiritual Being related to His spiritual creature, was missing in the Pharisee and missing in the Sadducee alike. So neither could enter into the history of their forefathers. To the Pharisee, the old commonwealth of Israel, David’s kingdom, and the city rebuilt after the captivity were not really governed by an invisible Lord reigning over it age after age; they were only a nation set apart by certain religious privileges, entitled to look down on others. The Roman yoke galled them bitterly, but it never made them cry out for a real, divine government — only for one in which they would be supreme. The Sadducees had no more sense of a living God than this. They were not called atheists — even the fiercest Pharisee would probably not have named them so — but their belief was in a dead god, one who had laid down a law or moral maxims that men were now to keep by themselves, to regulate their own conduct. That this Being still stood, or ever had stood, in any actual relation to His creatures, that He could speak to them or they truly call on Him, they did not and could not believe. So they logically, honestly rejected the resurrection. It was a loss, no doubt, to be without even the shell of such a conviction — to have told themselves plainly, “Our life is bounded by this world; when appearances vanish, we vanish with them; the laws that govern us are only our circumstances; man has nothing in him but what time and space measure.” But the Pharisee really believed the same thing. His doctrine of a resurrection was merely the extension beyond the grave of all the low, selfish, worldly maxims that had ruled him this side of it. To this we may perhaps trace the mildness of the rebuke here — “You are wrong, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God” — compared with the sharper “Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?” of the earlier case. Yet the practical correction went deeper, and was simpler, than the one that distinguished what is owed to Cæsar from what is owed to God. “Have you not read that God says, I am the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Whatever you think of the prophets, you grant some worth to the plain records of Genesis, and the principle of the resurrection is there. Once believe in God as the same yesterday and today, the God of men from generation to generation, truly connected with them, ever alive — and you believe in their life. Then you are freed from the notions that misled you when you asked whose wife the woman would be, for you begin to see men in their higher relation to God, and so in higher relations to one another. Here is the ground of all the later teaching about the resurrection: laid in the deepest theology, yet in the earliest revelation of God. So both Sadducees and Pharisees were taught that to understand and believe in a resurrection they must find Someone in whom they could realize an actual relation to an actual, living Being. And so the question was set before them: whether their dislike of the idea of a Son of God was not the real inward ground of their dislike of the resurrection — and whether, without belief in a Son of God, a resurrection is anything but a dark and fearful vision of the world’s misery spread and prolonged.
What Think Ye of Christ?
The passage: While the Pharisees were together, Jesus asked them what they thought of the Christ — whose son is he? They said, the Son of David. He asked how David, speaking in the Spirit, could then call him Lord, saying, “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool.” If David calls him Lord, how is he his son? No one could answer him, and from that day no one dared ask him any more questions.
This question is given, with slight differences, in Mark 12 and in Luke 20. It is one of the few questions our Lord addressed directly to the people or the scribes without their having provoked it. It stands close to the passages we have lately considered, and all three Gospels place it shortly before the last Passover. Clearly the Evangelists thought that although it led to no obvious result, was short, went unanswered, and raised a difficulty our Lord did not himself solve, it still deserved a lasting and emphatic record. Did not every event they were recording contain this very question? Did not those events, seen alongside the whole past history of the nation and the whole future history of the human race, supply the answer? How can Christ be both the Son of David and the Lord of David — yet how can he fail to be either, if the Scriptures are true? This was the terrible paradox that tormented the Pharisee, a paradox in his own being as well as in the sacred Books, and he could find only one way to escape it. Eighteen centuries later it is still the question set before every Jew and every Christian, and Christians as well as Jews are inclined to be rid of it much as the Pharisee was. If there is to be a King, a Son of Man over men, must he not be the Son of God? If there is a Son of God, must he not be King over men? Could the Christ fulfil one character without fulfilling the other? The Crucifixion was man’s attempt to remove the difficulty; the Resurrection was God’s.