The Miracle at the Gate Beautiful
“Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.” — Acts of the Apostles iii, 6.
This was one of the earliest miracles wrought by the apostles after the descent of supernatural gifts at the time of Pentecost. It was one of the most public in its character, and one of the most signal in its results. The actors were Peter and John — who seem to have been quite inseparable friends since the day on which Jesus sent them together to make ready for the Passover. Very different men were they m temper and disposition; but for that reason none the less intimate. The closest intimacies are often formed by those who agree in their aims, but differ very widely in their temperament and mental habits.
Hand in hand those warm-hearted brothers go up to the temple at the hour of prayer. The sun is sloping toward the west, and its slant rays kindle into a blaze of glory the great central doorway of Corinthian brass. This is
the “Gate Beautiful” — superior in costliness and splendor to the other eight entrances to the temple. Through its magnificent portal a crowd is always pressing at the ninth hour of the day. The rich worshippers pass in there, and some of them may be expected to be charitable. Therefore, a poor cripple — lame from the hour when his mother held him in her arms — chooses that as the best time and place for asking alms of the passing crowd. An old familiar object he is to the most of them. They have seen that thin, pale countenance, those eager eyes, and the shrivelled limb sticking out from under the ragged robe an hundred times. The have tossed their farthings into that open palm; probably wondering, as we do, where the street-beggars eat their scanty meals, and where their wretched frames find shelter through the night.
This unfortunate cripple hails all the passers-by with his monotonous appeal, and seeing Peter and John come up, he “asked to receive an alms.” Peter stops short, and fastens his eye on him. According to the closer rendering of the original he “looks right into him.” And in there, behind the extended palm of squalid beggary he recognizes a man a brother, a fellow-heir of immortality. “Now look on us,” says Peter to the mendicant. Expecting a gift, the cripple eagerly turns toward them. His hand is stretched out; his eyes are open,
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and his expectation aroused. The penniless apostle — richer in piety and spiritual power than in purse — exclaims in touching tones, “Silver and gold have I none; but what I have, give I to thee; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!’^ Mark the meaning of this combination. As the representative of Jesus the ‘’Saviour,” of Christ the “anointed High Priest,” and in the name of Him who was the despised ISTazarene, I command you to rise and walk! Taking the crouching form by the hand and lifting it up, the poor creature stands erect. His feet and ankle-bones suddenly grow strong. But he cannot stand still; he must try his new-found powers and he must give vent to his ecstasy of delight. With exultant leap and shout he breaks through the wondering crowd — pressing in toward the altar of that God whom he now approaches as a grateful worshixper. The people give way in astonishment. “Is not this the cripple who sat at the Gate Beautiful?” Yet here he is walking and leaping and praising God! Nor does he pour out his thanksgiving only toward heaven. He “holds Peter and John” also — clinging to them in grateful embrace as a rescued man from the yawning deep might throw himself with ecstasy and tears into the arms of his deliverer.
The crowd are filled with amazement and awe. Who are these two men? What power
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do they possess which has made this lame man to walk? Let us hear more about this strange miracle. And so with wondering minds and ojjen ears they throng about the two apostles who are richer in gifts of healing than in gifts of gold. A vast congregation is extemporized on the spot to listen to Peter’s extemporized discourse. Observe now the result. The poor cripple gets a hapiy restoration to soundness of limbs. Peter and John get the ears of the people. The people, in turn, get the precious and powerful message which Christ’s ambassador proclaims to them. Here is the lesson taught us by the miracle — a lesson of mutual Jielpfulness. A Christian apostle helps a lame beggar. The beggar restored to health helps his deliverer in his holy work of preaching his glorious gospel. Both are helpers and instructors to the assembled multitudes. The lesson taught by this miracle has many applications; and several pearls of truth may be strung on the thread of this beautiful story.
I. Society is a school of mutual help. This is according to the Divine ordinance. One of the designs of our Creator in putting His earthly children in close contact and into mutual dependence is that they may bear one another’s burdens, relieve each other’s necessities, ana contribufe to each other’s happiness. His ultimate purpose is to establish the Kingdom of God upon this earth, and mutual help is one of the means of its establishment. No human life can be utterly isohited; and only a fraction of manhood could ever be develoyed on a Crusoe’s solitary island. “None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.”
This principle of mutual help has a very striking relation to the life of the household. At the very outset of our existence, in earliest infancy, parental love becomes a real miniature, though a feeble one, of the Divine Providence. The sweet, sacred word “mother” means life, medicine, protection and about all things else to the dependent child. In good, x^^tient mother’s arms the little mendicant finds its “Gate Beautiful.” There is its garner of food — there its soft couch of repose — there its chest of cordials for hours of pain — there its playground of infant glee — there its harbor of refuge and stronghold of safety. God himself tyx)ifies His own tenderness wdien He says, “as one whom his mother comforteth so will I comfort you.”
And does the receiver of all these parental bounties yield nothing in return? Getting so much, does the little cherub (for the most ill-looking child is a cherub to the parent’s eye) give nothing in return? Tell me, ye avIio have held a budding immortality next to your throbbing bosom; has that little nursling nursed no deep and holy thoughts, no sweet ecstasies, and no unutterable emotions in your own breast? Thou lonely and meek-eyed mother, when through the long, long hours of absence from him who was at his daily toil or out upon the rocking deep, you grew sad and timid and lonesome — tell me, if you can, what a wealth of companionship you found in two little bright eyes, and the music of a merry tongue. And how brave you grew when you remembered that you were the guardian angel of that God-given treasure. When you began to teach the earliest lessons to your darling, did you not find that your child was educating you as rapidly as you were educating it? Have you learned no lessons of patience, as you bent over the crib where pain was moaning at the midnight hour — no lessons of self-control when you saw passion rising in that young breast- -no lesson of unselfish love when you were ready to sacrifice time, and ease, and strength and rest for that darling’s welfare? Ah, there are some of you here who have learned what God could nowhere else have taught you, when you swallowed down your tears over that little coffin, and hung (as in an awful dream) over that deep, deep grave that seemed to reach down into eternity! Thank God for children — living or dead, here or in heaven! A childless home is like a leafless, blossomless tree; the summer winds make no music through the boughs, and the summer sun ripens no fruit on the branches. A cradle is often a “gate beautiful” in life, where the soul receives some of its most precious gifts of healing; a gate through which the heart often finds its way up to the throne of God and out into the mysteries of the eternal world.
It is not only in the relation of parentage and childhood, but also in every other relation the family is a school of mutual help. Each member de^Dends on ever y other. To-day the robust father holds the “wee laddie” on his knee, or leads him up the stairway of that schoolroom in which he is to be taught his alphabet. There is a to-morrow coming by and by when the iisper of the ABC will be the master of a home of his own — with an infirm, gray-haired parent dozing away his sunset years in an armchair. Each helps the other when and where help is most needed. And every word and deed of unselfish love comes back in fifty-fold blessing on its author. For Grod puts feeble babes, and sweet, invalid daughters and infirm, bedridden grandparents into our families for this purpose (among others) that the strong may bear the burden of the weak, and in bearing them, may grow stronger themselves in Bible graces. Invalids and children have their uses for the well-grown and the vigorous. In every Christian family the scene at the Beautiful Gate of Jerusalem’s temple is rei)eated over and over again when the wise and the strong take the weaker by the
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II. This same principle of mutual helpfulness applies to the community, which ought to be, in many respects, an enlargement of the household. The law of sympathy and brotherly kindness which control a well-ordered family ought to control society. The community is composed of the strong and the weak, of health-imparting Peters and Johns, and of 13oor crippled brethren and sisters who can only sit beside life’s thoroughfares, and depend upon the aid of the healthy and the helpful. The present unequal distribution of wealth i:)uts the rich in the minority as to numbers; but of the floorer classes there is a certain class of shiftless idlers who can work, and have a chance to work, but will not. Such should be compelled to labor or starve. The falsely-called “charity” v»diich X3uts a premium on indolent imposters is a greater wrong to the receivers than to the bestowers. The air is full of controversies over social and labor problems. Christianity and the soundest political economy concur on these three points — viz: Employment and just wages for all who can labor and desire to labor; condign j)unishment for all who willfully refuse to labor; and wisely-directed charities for all the hopelessly crippled by age or bodily and mental infirmities.
But how can the helpless poor help the rich and the well-provisioned? If they are unable to earn wages, are they not able to bestow any wages? I trow that they can; and the helpless poor may be as x)rofitable to the rich in spiritual benelits as the rich can possibly be to them in their bestowments of benevolence. If any of you doubt this, try a very simple experiment. Sally out from your comfortable hreside on a wintry night, well equiiped with a basket of provisions, a bundle of warm clothing and a Bible in your pocket — and direct your way to that obscure alley in which that sick bread-winner and his suffering family are hungering for food and still more for sympathy. It is a hard place to find. But the piercing cold has found it; poverty has found it; disease has found it; fevers or consumption have entered that rickety door already. Now unload your cargo of charity. Bring out the woolen jacket for that shivering lad; it warms him at once, but it sends a warmer glow also into your own heart when the lad floods you with his thanks. Now help that poor ghastly father to take the medicine you have brought him; slip your greenbacks into the hand of that pale wife and tell her what to do for that cough, which racks her wornout frame as the roaring night wind shakes their crazy attic. As you look around the wretched room, how ashamed you are that you ever utter complaints in your own well-funiished home. Here is return number tioo. You have learned a lesson of contentment. Now open your Bible, and read the fourteenth chapter of John to the listening group; and as you go down on your knees, how heartily you can thank the dear Father of all that in His heavenly house are “many mansions” where hungry want and pinching pain never come, and where He will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Before you leave, be sure to secure that lad and that bright-eyed girl for your Mission School; and when you meet them there on the next Sabbath, you find what wages God is paying you, “pressed down and running over into your bosom.” Have these poor dwellers in that attic paid you nothing back? Have they not made your heart the richer and your life the more Christ-like? Ah! that dismal garret has been to you a “gate beautiful,” where your soul has found gifts of healing, when your hands brought a welcome balm to breaking hearts. You have learned that Peter and John were not the only Christians who have helped themselves when they said to the crouching cripple, “in the name of Jesus rise up and walk!”
III. If the law of charity is a law of mutual helpfulness, so is the law of labor. The employer bestows wages; the employee bestows work. Neither one has the right to scrimp the other. There is throughout a mutual dependence and mutual aid; Avliat God hath joined together, let no plutocrat and no demagogue put asunder. For example: one of you importing merchants needs a ship, and you order it to be created. At your bidding the hardy woodman in the pine forest of Maine wields his ax, and the anvils are ringing in the forge, and the weaver is driving the sail-cloth and the cordage through his looms. Now that superb vessel — which to her sailing master is a fleet ocean-steed, to her browned tars is a rocking home, to the merchant is a floating warehouse, to the political economist is a part of the circulating library of finance, and to the Christian is one of the olive-bearing doves of peace — that magnificent craft is the joint product of many scores of heads and hands. When the builder built it he at the same time built up the weal of hundreds of his fellowmen. Each one helj)ed all the others.
If this be regarded as too commercial a view of the inter-dependence of employers and their employees to be preached from the pulpit, let me emphasize — a thoroughly Christian aspect of the question — which is too often overlooked. Every employer is far more dependent than he imagines on the moral and religious condition of those to whom he entrusts his business. Their spiritual interests are linked with his financial interests. Their integrity, their conscientious industry, their power to resist temptation, and their loyalty to God’s law, make them vastly more valuable to him. Is it no concern to you, my friend, whether your clerk spends his evenings in a theater or in a Young Men’s Christian Association? Is it ‘’none of your business” whether his companions are such as you may introduce to him, or only such as may waylay him at the street corners? Suppose that you should kindly introduce him to the public libraries and other institutions for the enrichment of his mind, and to the evening services of your church, where his soul may receive spiritual food, and to your own house, where he may be sheltered from temptation, and cured of his home-sickness — would there be no return of blessings on your own head? To every Christian merchant or banker or manufacturer, his place of business should be his parish, and his employees be regarded as the flock for whose spiritual welfare he is partially responsible. Although those who labor for you are not objects of charity like that poor mendicant at the ‘’gate beautiful,” yet if with the spirit of Christ you take them by the hand you may find that “the feet and ankle-bones” of their characters will “receive strength.”
ly. The principle under discussion has a most direct application to the Christian Church. The primal law of that church is to glorify God by the service and salvation of Hi§ earthly children. Peter and John went up to the temple on that afternoon to worship God; and on their way they encounter this poor cripple at the temple gate. Their Christian instincts move them to xpity the sufferer and then to heal him. Their Master had not entrusted them with a stewardship of silver and gold; but He committed to them the higher trust of a iower to restore the sick to health, and the dead to life. They simply did their duty when they extended a lifting hand to their j)itiable fellow-creature; and probably they had no expectation of the consequences that would follow the miracle. It may have been a happy surprise to them that their deed of love had arrested the popular eye, gained the popular ear, and prepared the popular heart to welcome Peter’s proclamation of Jesus Christ, in whose name the wondrous miracle had been wrought.
From this incident let Christ’s servants learn two important truths. The first is, that if they would win a hearing for their gospel message, they must begin by some word or deed of practical kindness to those whom they wish to convert. One Christ-like act is often worth a score of sermons. And when the key of kindness has unlocked the ears and heart, then the door is open for the most earnest, the most pungent, and the most soul convicting truth to enter, With what tremendous power did
Peter stand up to preach Christ Jesus that day — with the healed cripple by his side, as the trophy of his beneficence and the credential of his apostleshii. By that same key of kindness must the Church of Christ find their way to the most hardened heart around them. Every Christly deed brings an increment of power; and if the” Word of God is to grow mightily and prevail” in our day, it must be by the revival of the apostolic methods. Sinners may be drawn to Christ; they never can be driven.
The second lesson for us from this miracle, is that every child of sin, whom we may win to Jesus, becomes, from that time, a co-worker with us in advancing the kingdom and cause of our Master. The law of advance for that kingdom is growth, not conquest. The sinning and the suffering who throng the wayside of this world of ours — useless to themselves and to God — may, by the touch of Christianity, be transformed into living witnesses and workers for the truth. Come, oh thou flame of heavenly love, into our hearts, our tongues, and our hands! Then shall we see the crippled victims of sin around us, “walking and leaping and praising God!”
We have now gathered up a few of the lessons suggested by this simple, yet most sublime miracle; we have seen in it a beautiful illustration of mutual helpfulness. But as I close this discussion, another vision presents itself to our wondering and adoring eyes.
I seem to see the wretched, dying race of man, cripiled by sin and wasted by spiritual hunger, sitting by the gateway to a temple of heavenly purity which it is powerless of itself to enter. There sits depraved humanity, maimed, guilty, sin-sick, and perishing! One approaches, mighty to save. He comes with the kingliness of a God concealed in the lowly guise of the son of man. He halts. He pities. He stoops and sweetly says, “Look on me!”
Stretching forth a hand pierced with the crucifying nail, he lifts the wretched object to its feet, exclaiming, “Rise up and walk!” And as the grateful creature clings to its restorer it beholds through its tears of joy that he is none other than the Son of God! Oh, blessed and adorable Jesus, thy cross, thy cross is the “Gate Beautiful” of salvation through which a redeemed race may enter into the Temple not made with hands, eternal in the heavens!