The First Result of Samaria
And now Jesus is back in Nazareth — the home of His youth. He gives a curious reason for going back — ‘a prophet has no honour in his own country. One would have thought this a reason for keeping away. But consider where He had been in the interval — in the metropolis. He had stood in the centre of Jewish life, in the place where the ways met. His presence had made a mark; His influence had been felt in high quarters; He had received the imprimatur of the capital. Looking at the matter in this light, do you not see the force of His reason for going to Nazareth? We might put it into words like these: ‘I may go back mow to my own city, for I have no longer the atmosphere of my own city. As
long as I had no recognition elsewhere I had 101 no recognition there. But now I have been recognised by the metropolis. Jerusalem has seen me, listened to me. Little Nazareth will not refuse after that. It will not any more look upon me merely as the home prophet. It will receive me, not on the ground of being a countryman, but on the ground that I have transcended my country, that I have been impregnated with another air, that I have obtained my credentials from a higher city — the City of David.’
It is this feeling which prompts Jesus at last, though late, to preach in Nazareth. We should have expected it would have received His first sermon. Yet His human heart knew right well that those in whose vicinity a man has lived and grown are not the most receptive of his teaching. ‘He came unto His own, and His own received Him not,’ are words which bear, to my mind, the echo of unappreciated years. They tell of an influence rendered powerless by the familiarity of home, of a beauty shrouded by nearness, of a greatness hid by the constancy of daily contact, The men of Nazareth could not believe in the coming distinction of the name of Jesus. Did they not live in the same environment? Did they not walk the same streets with Him? Did they not pass Him in the market-place? Did they not know His mother and sisters perfectly? What should make /H/zm so far above ‘hem? Was it possible that two should be grinding at the same mill, and that the one should be lifted up while the other was left behind? If Jesus would speak to the men of Nazareth, the proximity must first be broken; it was expedient for them that He should go away. But, having gone away, having made the beginnings of a name, having caught the air of the metropolis, having washed out the reproach of living next door to His pupils, it was equally expedient that He should return. The postponed sermon to His own kindred could be preached by a voice from the capital. He felt, and rightly felt, that the Galilean multitude could only be addressed from a mountain; in the recognition by Judea that mountain was found.
But whatever Judea had done for the coming sermon, Samaria had done more. Judea had removed a prejudice; but Samaria had lifted a barrier. If Judea placed Him socially on the mountain, Samaria put Him spiritually on the plain. The weariness at the well was a deeper preparation for His sermon than the prestige acquired at the cleansing of the temple. The prestige gave Him an audience; the weariness gave Him a contact with the heart. Indeed, I think the coming sermon at Nazareth is the true sequel of Samaria. I should not like to have seen it placed earlier in the picture; it would have destroyed the fitness of things; it would have jarred on our sense of harmony. Standing where it does, it stands in the right place, the only place suited to it. It marks a stage in the human development of Jesus. It is not itself a development; it is the record that a development has taken place elsewhere. It reveals that something has occurred to unseal a well in the heart of Jesus, and it points back to that other well in Samaria where He first vividly experienced ‘the days of His flesh,’
The keynote of the sermon of Nazareth is human sympathy; it is struck at the beginning, it is maintained to the close. The discourse has at once a retrospective and a prospective value; it points back to Samaria, and it points forward to His coming ministry. It is therefore a distinctive landmark between His past and His future. It vindicates the well of Samaria; it indicates the lines on which He is to move through Galilee. Such a milestone in the march well merits a moment’s pause. Let us glance at one or two features of this remarkable sermon. There are no original heads in it; they are professedly borrowed from a Jewish prophet. The originality lies in the application of the words by Jesus to Himself; that is the real subject of discourse; that is the light in which it demands our attention. [ believe the Messianic convictions of Jesus came at first in intermittent flashes, such as those by which the sky often re-establishes itself after cloud and storm, and which still enclose cloud and storm between them. This sermon is one of these flashes — clear, piercing, illuminative; it shows the road behind; it reveals the way before: ‘ To-day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”’
Now, I should not have expected Jesus at this early stage to have selected ‘these as the signs of His coming kingdom. I say ‘at this early stage.’ I can understand very well how the deepening shadows should have brought out these special colours; I can understand how the death on Calvary should have given them a permanent glow. But to the eyes of them who trusted Him there was as yet no trace of shadow; to the Messianic hope of the age there was no place for death. It was to the heavens that men were looking for a sign of the Son of Man, They expected the first coming to have all the attributes which Christians now attach to the second; they looked for it ‘as the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west.’ Over against this lurid picture, what a homely scene breaks upon their view! Jesus sketches the ideal He had formed of His own glory, of His Father’s glory. Everything about the sketch is simple, unadorned, even rustic. The Prophet might well have appropriated it as descriptive of his own humble mission; but it must have seemed deneath Jesus. To preach the Gospel to the poor, to proclaim deliverance to the captive, to wish the world a good New Year, to comfort the broken-hearted, to heal such insignificant things as bruises of the spirit — this seemed an unpretentious programme. What had prompted Jesus to adopt it as His own? The cleansing of the temple appeared worthy of Him; what had intervened to make Him stoop from His sphere?
It was Samaria; it was the waiting at the well. Nazareth is the sequel of those hours of weariness. In stepping from the well of Jacob He had stepped deeper into humanity — had become more ‘manifest in the flesh,’ Incarnation is not an act; it is a process; it goes from less to more. Samaria was a step of the incarnation of Jesus; it sent Him deeper down into that which was universal in human nature. The empire which was the converse of that scene in the wilderness began to glimmer before Him. It was a field harder to be conquered than any which Czsar had won — a field sown with tares, strewn with ruins, thick with unsightly swamps. He had learned its want by His own hunger, its weakness by His own need,
And what is that programme which Jesus here prescribes for His future? It is something altogether new — something which the Jewish Prophet had, indeed, recognised as God’s will, but which no nation and no faith had yet decreed as man’s practice. It is a series of rules for the survival of the wnfittest. It has been said that Christianity is a progressive religion; to me its distinctive feature is its regressiveness, It is the only religion which
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goes back to gather up the lost things — the things which have fallen by the way and have been left behind. Jesus claims as His own prerogative that He came ‘to seek and to save that which was /os?¢.’ His distinctive glory is regressiveness. He alone goes back to the forest of humanity to seek the children that had lost their way. China goes back; but it is not to seek wandered children: it is to prove a primeval glory. Judea sometimes goes back; but it is to seek, not the Garden of Gethsemane, but the Garden of Eden. All the rest are professedly pressing forward — Brahman, Buddhist, Parsee, Greek, Roman. All their messages are for strong souls — souls already on the road to Elysium, already on the road to Nirvana. Jesus alone has a message for the weak. Jesus alone retraces His steps into the already traversed forest. He treads a winepress in which He is unaccompanied by any professing saviour — the way of those who are ready to perish.
There is another feature in the programme which is well worth considering. The first desire of Jesus in relation to man must always have been his spzritual emancipation — ‘to preach deliverance to the captive and recovery of sight to the blind.” And yet, the first in order of importance is not to Him the first in order of time. I do not know that the Prophet attached any significance to the order of the clauses; I am quite sure /esus did, for He followed it in His ministrations. To Him the earliest of all missions is the healing of the broken heart. One would have thought the spiritual teaching would have taken the precedence in point of time. Jesus knew better. He knew that no spiritual teaching has any effect at a shut door. He knew that if the heart is depressed by its own bitterness the most precious thought will fail to move. How often has the finest sermon fallen flat on the ear because the spirit was broken! What isa broken spirit? It is what a broken limb is, what a broken wing is — a thing deprived of the power of motion. If the szzd cannot move, the chief workman is wanting. In vain you ‘preach deliverance to the captive and recovery of sight to the blind’; the broken heart could not lift itself into a level with the message. You must begin, not with a message, but with a fact. You must seek to bind the wound of the spirit, to heal the breakage of the heart. You must roll the stone from the door of the sepulchre if you would bring the Christ from within.
Accordingly, the method of Jesus is to start with the cure. He adopts it here in theory; He maintains it throughout in practice. Christianity is before all things a medical movement, It aims to reach the soul — but its first inquiries are about the health. Nowhere is it more modern than here. The systems of the past, as a rule, have been of the East Eastern. They have counselled the mutilating of the flesh; they have proclaimed the redemptive to be the opposite of the medical. Christianity is of the East but not Eastern. It has been ‘ transplanted into the West because it has the spirit of the West. It has recognised from the outset the doctrine which we claim as distinctively modern — the physical basis of life. It
has recognised the connection between soul and body. It has recognised that he who would bear a message to the soul must not ignore a preliminary condition — an inquiry into the physical constitution of the man. It has pointed to the fact that the evangelist has often failed simply because the physician has failed. It has anticipated the modern verdict that the schoolmaster is not enough, that the preacher is not enough, that the reformer is not enough — that a healing hand must first be laid on life’s bruises, and a healing voice must say, ‘ Arise and walk.’ Christianity has claimed as man’s method what the Psalmist accepted as God’s — that the first step in the restoring of the soul is to make it lie down in green pastures, to lead it beside quiet waters.
HOU who knowest what is in man, guide
me into the path of human charity. I
often begin at the wrong end. I bring the tract to the hungry, the sermon to the thirsty, the creed to the weary. I forget that the broken heart is a motionless heart, an irresponsive heart. Teach me the meaning of these words, ‘ Thou hast set my feet in a large room.’ Teach me the power of the environment. Teach me that the grapes of Eshcol have something to do with the march through the desert. Help me to remember the elevating power of fair surroundings. Enable me, before all things, to say, ‘Be of good cheer.’ Let me bring my message, Thy message, upon the wings of mercy. Let me learn the spiritual force of secular comfort. Reveal to me that the resurrection of the body has a part in the redemption of the soul. So shall I practise Thy gift of healing.