iii. 21), but they either underrated the hostility of His foes or assumed

that He would protect Himself by His superhuman power; for that, possessing miraculous powers as they knew He did, He should hesitate, on an emergency, to exert them in self-defence was to them an idea too unreasonable to be entertained. The deep truth unconsciously uttered by His foes, “He saved others, Himself He cannot save,” was one which their minds were not constructed to contain. Our Lord foresaw that a public entry into Jerusalem would lead to commotion, and, as afterwards happened, might bring about His death. A man’s life, if he have a great matter in hand, is the more precious to him until this be done: so it was with our Lord. Until He had finished what was given Him to accomplish, He took such precautions for personal safety as a prudent man would. To have made light of danger, trusting to baffle it by superhuman means, would have spoiled the lesson and the moral of His life.

When the brethren spoke of His “going up to Jerusalem,” they thought of the journey in public as much as of the feast itself. Half Galilee would be upon the road, men would mix and converse freely on the way, and Jesus, they thought, would, by travelling thus, come in contact with a number of zealous men and increase His following largely. But herein lay one of the dangers which made our Lord shun this course. The people, proud of the great prophet from their own district, might have revived the project of making Him a King, and by a turbulent entry to Jerusalem have alarmed the Romans as well as the scribes. Again, the turmoil of this journey would have disturbed those processes of growth in the Apostles’ mind over which our Lord held watch; the feast of Tabernacles was, above all, a festival of joyousness, and the journey to it was made an occasion of pleasure and social union. For the Apostles to have joined the crowd would have been unfavourable for the germination of the solemn thoughts of which our Lord had dropped the seed on His way from the Mount to Capernaum. By going up privately in the middle of the Feast these dangers were avoided. There was no public arrival, no welcome. The Romans would know and care nothing about a new preacher who appeared in the Temple, and the priests, in face of the diversity of opinion about Jesus of Nazareth, would hesitate to lay hands upon Him. For the Apostles too, the journey through an unfriendly country would give plenty of occasion for turning over in their minds the strange words they had heard about the sufferings of the Christ, and the injunctions to “have salt in themselves.”

What gives this journey its great interest to me, with my particular purpose in view, is the refusal of hospitality to our Lord by the Samaritan villages, and the enquiry of James and John, whether they should not call down fire from heaven; wherein the “Sons of Thunder” justify their name.

“And it came to pass, when the days were well-nigh come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he were going to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we bid fire to come down from heaven, and consume them? But he turned, and rebuked them. And they went to another village.”(276)

“Some ancient authorities,” as we read in the margin of our Revised Version, “add, _and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of_.”

This is so exactly after our Lord’s manner, not only in the quality but in the _quantity_ of rebuke, that I have no doubt but that it is a genuine saying of Christ preserved by tradition whether it were originally in St Luke’s Gospel or not. It is like our Lord to drop a word indicating error and leave the real correction to grow up in the learner’s mind as though it was supplied by himself. He rarely dilates on what is blameworthy and never recurs to a failing that has been noticed at the time.

James and John, we must recollect, had just witnessed the Transfiguration, this helps to explain their mood of mind. They dwelt upon the recollection of this all the more because it was a secret possession of the three. The contrast of their Master’s inherent greatness and the humiliation to which He was subjected moved their indignation. The Lord of heaven was refused hospitality by a village in Samaria, and this not out of niggardliness—that would have moved the Apostles less—but from an old animosity about where men should worship. They, no doubt, regarded their “jealousy for the Lord God” as something commendable, and were surprised at our Lord’s rebuking them and telling them that they knew not what Spirit they were of. The fact was, that our Lord detected in this fierce proposal a further growth of that tendency to spiritual arrogance which had been indicated by their forbidding the man who followed not with them, and this seems to cause our Lord concern. He treats it as a spiritual affection which it would require care to remove. He does not inveigh against it, but His parables and the drift of His teaching militate against the propensity to exercise “Lordship” over men.

Our Lord subsequently takes occasion to exalt the blessing of forgiveness and to teach that overmuch must not be expected or demanded from men. He gives the parables of the Prodigal Son and of the unjust Steward, of which last I shall speak in the next chapter. Peter saw that when our Lord said, “Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching,” He had His eye upon the future rulers of His community.

“And Peter said, Lord, speakest thou this parable unto us, or even unto all? And the Lord said, Who then is the faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall set over his household, to give them their portion of food in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Of a truth I say unto you, that he will set him over all that he hath. But if that servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; and shall begin to beat the men-servants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken; the lord of that servant shall come in a day when he expecteth not, and in an hour when he knoweth not, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint his portion with the unfaithful.”(277)

There is a hint of possible priestly oppression in the mention of the ill-treatment of inferiors by those upper servants, who, forgetting that their master might at any moment return, deal with the possessions as their own.

I said a little while ago that in this matter the “Sons of thunder” justified their name. If we had not this passage, critics would wonder how such a surname could have been chosen; St John, it is true, forbade the working of cures by one who “followed not with them,” still we regard him as the Apostle of Love, and in the Gospels we hear nothing of St James. This coincidence, though in a small matter, is worth noting. This incident preserved by St Luke shews that there was at the bottom of the natures of these two, loving though they were, a fund of impetuousness and wrath, and that they could break out into a storm of indignation, bearing out the name imposed. It is worth mentioning that this falls in with what we read in the Acts, viz. that when “Herod the king put forth his hands to afflict certain of the church” the first on whom he seized was “James the brother of John;”(278) this shews that James was a vehement, energetic character standing in the front, who to the political authorities was a marked man. For this was a political execution; if the priests had dealt with him for blasphemy he would have been stoned, not “slain with the sword.” Our Lord gathered round Him men of very various temperaments; it is not only one type of man, but those of all types, the impetuous as well as the gentle, for whom Christ finds place in the realm of action.

On arriving at Jerusalem, Jesus “went up into the Temple and taught.”(279) His discourse is addressed to the crowd; and as many visitors would come from the cities of Asia, the tone of it is necessarily very different from that of His sermons in Galilee. It is even possible, as many of the strangers had lost their Hebrew, that He spoke in Greek,(280) this would account for the disuse of parables, a form of speech which went with the Hebrew tongue. During all His stay, in or near Jerusalem, possibly of some weeks’ duration, broken by Mission journeys, we hear nothing of the disciples; all our Lord’s discourses are with “the Jews,” and in general with “the Pharisees.” (See St John, Chaps. vii. and viii.) The Apostles, or at least some of them, may have been absent on mission duties, for St Luke places the sending out of the seventy near this time.

The question may be asked, where during this time did our Lord reside? During the feast Jerusalem was thronged with strangers, it was a time when all were keeping holiday; every family left their house, and lived in a tent or booth decorated with vine branches and flowers. Jerusalem at any time, was not, as I have said in an earlier chapter,(281) favoured by our Lord as a residence for His disciples, and He is not likely to have suffered them to stay there long during the turmoil of the feast. At the beginning of the fragment concerning the woman taken in adultery we find a line which points to Bethany as the place where our Lord sojourned. This document, which I regard as genuinely historical, begins abruptly thus,(282) “And they went every man unto his own house, but Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.” It looks as if the writer was speaking of the breaking up of a gathering, towards nightfall. Bethany was just beyond the Mount of Olives, something more than two miles to the east of Jerusalem. It was there, St Luke tells us, that “A certain woman, Martha,” received our Lord—but, as far as appears, not any disciples—“into her house.” This was on some subsequent journey, but our Lord’s affection for Lazarus and his sisters may have arisen, or at least have grown up, during the weeks following this feast. Bethany would furnish for such of the Apostles as were with our Lord just the retreat desired.

At this point I shall cease to attempt to follow the order of time. We can indeed trace our Lord’s movements in St John’s Gospel, and we can find in St Luke’s account indications of journeys which may be made fairly well to correspond with these movements, but much uncertainty must attend the assigning of particular events or parables to their proper occasions.

St Luke in this part of his Gospel had lost, it would seem, the guidance of the original memoir which is supposed to have been the basis of the rest, but he was in possession of much valuable matter, a part of which was, very possibly, in the form of detached documents, which he does his best to arrange in order of time. We can understand that parables, such as those of Lazarus and the Prodigal Son, would be copied and circulated and handed from preacher to preacher, as would also incidents of particular interest, or discourses of our Lord. This part of St Luke’s Gospel seems drawn from such sources, and the connecting matter is sparingly supplied.

Nothing, then, will be gained by endeavouring to keep any longer to chronological order. Henceforth, therefore, I shall treat the points of interest as separate topics and, passing over all that does not immediately bear on the Schooling of the Apostles, I shall take the matters connected with it, about which I have something to say, and discuss them one by one.

NOTE.—The passage from St Luke, xii. 41, &c. (quoted at p. 367), contains the only mention of St Peter in all the Gospel narrative, between the going up to the Feast of Tabernacles (October) and the final journey to Jerusalem (April); although occasions occur in this interval, such as that when Thomas says: “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (St John xi. 16), when we should have expected that Peter would not be silent. In St John’s Gospel he is not named between Chaps. i. and xiii. The question arises, was Peter continuously in attendance on his Master during this last winter; or was he, during part of it, learning to feed his Master’s sheep by holding together the disciples at Capernaum? If when his Master was in Judæa, he only went backwards and forwards to him, this would account for the omission of the history of this half year in the Gospel of St Mark, for which Peter furnished the materials, and also for the brief mention of the Temptation; for I suppose our Lord to have given the fuller history of this to the disciples, when he was near the banks of the Jordan, after the Feast of the Dedication (St John x. 40). See p. 119. St Peter, who may not have been present, would probably limit his narrative to what he had himself seen, or heard from his Master’s lips.