The First Contested Miracle

There are some incidents of life which are simply milestones; there are others which are the turning of a corner. The first indicate merely an advance on the old road; the second usher us into something new. I am now come to an incident in the life of Jesus which I have always regarded as marking a distinct transition in His history. So far as we have yet gone there has been no dispute as to His power; everything has conspired to re-echo that call which He heard within His soul. A league has gathered round Him drawn from those who had seen the lowly environment of His early years. The metropolis has given Him audience; the provinces have followed the metropolis, He has been more anxious to

have His words proclaimed than His wonders; but He has not succeeded in concealing His wonders. No one has questioned the genuineness of His cures. There has been a dispute as to whether He was right to heal on the Sabbath; but the reality of His healing power has hitherto been unassailed. We are about to mark the first instance in which it was assailed. First instances are very suggestive; they reveal the incipient germ. We shall look therefore with great interest to this beginning. We shall feel as if a key were put into our hands by which to open all the coming doors. Why did the Jews reject Jesus? is a question which can only be answered by looking to the dawn. To the dawn, then, let us go. Let us take the first case of scepticism which the gospel narrative reveals, We shall find it to be the germ-cell out of which has been woven the whole fabric of future opposition.

But first let us see what the incident is that marks the turning of the corner. The curtain which falls upon the leper on the highway rises within the private room of a house in Capernaum. It is an upper room and it is crowded,

There are representatives from all classes, drawn by the fame of Jesus — even from the scribes, Not only is the room full, but the approaches to it; the stairs are crowded; the street door is blocked. Four men make their way through the street bearing a litter on which is stretched a helpless paralytic. They direct their steps towards the house where Jesus is expounding, to His principles. They cannot get near the door. They try another approach, They mount on the roof, break open the light covering, and let down their burden with cords. Jesus looks upon the paralytic; but the thing which attracts Him is not the paralysis; it is precisely what the paralysis does not reveal, He sees that the outward impotence has been really the result of a mental distress preying on the nerves — the distress of a soul wrestling with the angel of conscience, Instead of putting His hand upon the body Jesus lays His touch upon the mind, ‘Son, be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee!’

And here the storm breaks — the first storm that ever arose over the reality of a miracle of

Jesus. What was the cause of this storm? It was not the sense of wonder; Jesus Himself declares that it would have been deemed more wonderful if He had said, ‘Take up your bed and walk. Human wonder is excited by that which meets the eye, and this did not meet the eye; it was a command uttered to the soul, and whose effect could only be known dy the soul, More conspicuous things had been done by Jesus, and the storm had not come. It woke not over the feast of Cana; it broke not over the pool of Bethesda; it rose not over the calm that followed the expulsion of the demons. Here was a work more silent than these, more hidden from the public view. The excitement it created cannot be explained by the power of the marvellous.

Nor can it be accounted for by the Messianic claims of Jesus. Put the question to a promiscuous assembly, ‘Why did the Jews reject the Son of Man?’ the general answer will be, ‘Because He claimed to be the Christ.’ And yet nothing is more certain than that this is not the explanation, About ten years ago, ina book on the spiritual development of St. Paul, I stated my conviction that Christianity never separated from Judaism on the ground of the Messianic claim of Jesus; and the same statement has with much more force and ability been recently made by Mr. Robert Anderson in his book, The Silence of God. How could the Jewish nation deem any man a heretic for aspiring to be the Messiah! If a scion of the modern race of Israel were to put forth to-day pretensions to be the long-promised hope of the nation, ¢#at would not make him a heretic to the Jew. If the Jew is to have a Messiah at all, that Messiah must begin as a mere claimant. Before he can be recognised he must aspire. It will be for the nation to examine his credentials. If the credentials are found inadequate, and if the man persists in his claim, he will ¢hen be a heretic, for that would be to falsify the prophetic ideal. But it is no falsification of the prophetic ideal simply to aspire to the Messianic office. Hundreds of Jews have done that; and in doing that, from the national point of view they have done no wrong. The announcement by a son of Israel that he had a personal call to be the guide of the nation was itself a perfectly legitimate act and one which did not involve the slightest suggestion of schism or rebellion.

When Jesus claimed to be the Christ He offended nobody. He broke no national tradition; He traversed no Jewish law. He put before His countrymen a legitimate subject for investigation. If His pretensions were inadequately supported it was for them to say so; but the pretensions themselves were no treason. When Jesus said to the Samaritans, ‘I am the Christ, He uttered no voice unfaithful to the creed of His fathers. When He wrought healing works in support of that claim He did nothing but what the religion demanded He should do. Howcame it that in this upper room of Capernaum there rose the first mutterings of that mighty storm which swelled ever louder and more loud until it culminated at last in the tempest roar, ‘ Crucify Him, crucify Him’?

And the answer to that question comes clear

THE FIRST CONTESTED MIRACLE or

and ringing. It was because within that room Jesus first claimed a power which never had been conceded to the Christ — the forgiveness of sin. It was not His aspiration to Messiahship that inflamed His hearers; it was what He attributed to Messiahship. He had stepped over the lines of the Old Testament. He had asked for the Messiah what the sacred writings of His country had never dared to assign to him. He had asked for him a prerogative which the sons of Israel had attributed to God only — the power to pardon sin. No lawgiver, no prophet, no priest had assigned such a power to the coming Christ. The later Isaiah had come nearest to it. He had seen in the Messiah the expiation for human sin — the Holy One of God whose sacrificial life was to atone for the iniquities of the world, and whose revelation of human possibilities was to make intercession for the transgressors. But even at this nearest point there was a great gulf fixed between the claim of the later Isaiah and the claim put forth by Jesus. It was one thing to compensate the Father for the guilt of man; it was another thing to pardon that guilt. The former could only be efficacious if accomplished by the human; the latter was always held to be an act emanating from power Divine. It has been often said that Jesus proclaimed Himself to be more than the Messiah. I would rather say, He demanded for the Messiah more than seer Or prophet had ever conceded to his office — a power which from the depth of ages had been recognised by the Jewish race as not only superhuman but super-angelic, and as marking the distinctive boundary line between the creature and the Creator — the forgiveness of sin. This shows that the Portrait of Jesus did not, as some have thought, get its superhuman touches from the hand of Paul — not even from the hand of John. These touches are earlier. They belong to the most primitive records, the records most near to Judaism. Nothing in Paul’s Epistles, nothing in John’s Gospel could to the men of that day have implied more assertion on the part of Jesus than His claim in the house of Capernaum. No Englishman, no European can have any conception of what was involved to the Jew in a man’s professing to cancel the moral debts of the past. It was to him equivalent to what the aspiration to omnipotence would betous. To the Jew the greatest attribute of God was His moral attribute; his idea of eternity itself centred round the thought of holiness. To cancel moral debt was the greatest power in the universe because it was the power of holiness. When Jesus offered to cancel moral debt He professed to be in possession of an attribute which to the Jew had always been the one attribute that God had not shared with man. Man had a ray of God’s physical power, a beam of God’s wisdom, a flash of God’s will, an imitation of God’s providence; but he had not in himself one spark of God’s holiness. The man who said, ‘I am holy, must at once be convicted of blasphemy. He might say with impunity, ‘I am powerful,’ ‘I am wise, ‘I am resolute,’ ‘I am far-seeing.’ But should he say, ‘I am holy,’ he had laid his hand upon the sceptre of the Eternal and aspired to sit on a mightier throne

than David’s.
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I hold, then, that this incident is the beginning of distinctive Christianity — of Christianity as distinct from Judaism. Often have we heard the question asked, When did Christianity part from the parent stream? Men have fixed on various spots as marking the point of divergence between the Old Testament and the New, Some have seen it in the fall of Jerusalem. Some have found it in the protest against circumcision. Some have recognised it in the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Some have detected it in the outpouring of Pentecost. The writer of the Acts declares ‘the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.’ But all these things are mere manifestations; they lie on the surface; they themselves demand an origin. Men might be called Christians first at Antioch; but peculiarities are a long time in existence before they receive a name. The difference between the old and the new, whensoever it began, began in the heart of the old. The germs of the man begin while the age is still called boyhood; the germs of the Christian began while he was yet recognised as a Jew.

We want to know, not when the name of Christian was given, but when the distinctive fact of Christianity appeared. And I find the moment here — in Capernaum’s upper room. Not in the claim of Jesus to be the Christ do I hear the distinctive note of the new evangel. That was really a note of Judaism. It was a clarion blast of the Old Testament. It was a voice in no sense at variance with the voice of Moses and the Prophets. But the claim in the upper room of Capernaum was one which Moses had never heard, one which the Prophets had never known. It was the claim that the Messiah, whensoever he should come and whosoever he should be, should wear in a human heart the mightiest prerogative of the Almighty God — the power to cancel the moral debts of man. It was the assertion that the authority to pardon sin should be vested, not in an angel, not in an archangel, not in a cherub or seraph, but ina man, and should be vested there on the express ground of his perfect humanity — because he was to be the Sa of Man.

THANK Thee, O Christ, for this beginning

of Thy stream. I thank Thee that its issuing from the hills of God has been into the field of pardon. I thank Thee that its first ripple has been on the banks of mercy. I thank Thee that it has borne to man the one gift from the Father which other streams have denied him — the power to forgive. Men used to see that power only in the Father; 7hou hast claimed it for man. I thank Thee that Thou hast claimed it for man. May Jin some sense be a sharer in that power! It is the hardest thing in the world for my nature to share in. The power of pardon is the power of love; and love comes only from Thee — it is the stream that makes glad Zzy city. It is not because I am so human that I find it hard to forgive; it is because I am not human enough. There was none human enough but Thee; Thou alone hadst power to pardon, because Thou alone wert the Son of Man. It is not angelic power I need to make me like unto Thee; it is human power. To learn Thy pity I must come nearer to the heart of humanity, which is 7zy heart. Make me more human, O Christ, that I may receive more power to pardon. I pray often to be forgiven by Thy grace; teach me to forgive by Thy grace. Inspire me with a breath of Thy pardoning power. Draw me nearer to the fountains of human sympathy — 7~/y fountains. Bring me to the living waters where those who are cleansed become the cleansers. Guide me to the steps of that altar where those that have made their peace become the peacemakers. Lead me to that throne of judgment where those that have overcome the world arrive at human tenderness. I shall understand Thy power to pardon when I shall complete the experience of a man,