Preparation for a Missionary Crusade—Continued

The preparation of the league of pity for its approaching journey was, as I have said, to be twofold — a training, first of exhortation, and secondly, of experience. The sermon on the mount had discharged the former office; the latter was still unfulfilled. Hitherto the sympathy of the band had moved within narrow lines. It had been essentially a home sympathy. They had begun in their native Galilee; their work had been bounded by their interest. It was not the design of Jesus that it should be thus bound. He meant this little band to be the light of the world. It was a far cry from Galilee to the world — from sympathy with men as comrades to sympathy

with man as man. Hitherto also, as we have seen, the specimens of suffering had been abnormal. They had been cases of speciality — the contact with disorganised minds and mysteriously afflicted bodies. It was essential that the sympathy of the band should not remain there. The taste of a thing specially pungent is apt to deaden the taste of everything else. So with man’s sympathy with things abnormal; it is apt to draw away the mind from needs universal. This was a thing to be counteracted, prevented; and He who had studied so deeply the nature of the human soul was of all others best qualified to do this. From our present point of view the interesting feature in this training by Jesus is not the cures but the diseases; it is in these we mark the transit from the particular to the universal, from men to Man. The first trace of the league’s contact with universal calamity occurred in a little village of Galilee called Nain. It was the contact with nothing abnormal, nothing exceptional. It was a meeting with the old old story — the tale of human bereavement. We feel that Jesus Himself was arrested by the spectacle. We feel that this is one of the cases in which He did not work a cure for the sake of teaching a lesson — not even for the sake of teaching a lesson to the league of pity; He healed the wound because He Himself was wounded by it. Yet it is possible that those of the band who were present might have received from this incident some touch of humanitarian impulse. What hindered such an impulse from completeness was perhaps just the intensity of the case. A funeral cortege on the way to the sepulchre; its burden, one cut down in the flower of youth; that youth the only son of one who was herself a widow; the signs of distress manifest in every countenance and audible in the sobs and tears of a multitude — these were the elements that lent tragedy to the scene. Probably some member of the league had friends among the mourners; the proximity of Nain to Nazareth makes this likely. In any case there were circumstances which made the incident seem an aggravation of the common lot of humanity, and which thus might tend te deaden the sense of universal participation. That sense of universal participation was reserved for the lesson of another bereavement which was to meet them as Christ’s earthly ministry drew near its close.

Meantime, something must be done to widen the circle of Christian sympathy. The disciples are about to step out beyond the threshold of their own environment. They are not at first to step out very far; yet they are to make a transition; and the transition step is the most difficult of all. Can anything be done to stimulate them? The sermon on the mount has been delivered, and its power has been educational; are there no educational deeds to follow and endorse the precepts of unselfishness?

Yes, Very close upon the sermon there come two singular episodes in the ministry of Jesus. There is no connection between them beyond a moral connection; the one occurs on the sea, the other on the land. If geography be the only link in the formation of the gospel narratives, then is the unity of the gospel simply that of a string. But if Jesus has set before Himself the education ef a league of pity, geography falls into the background. Sea and land become alike indifferent to us except as educational mediums; and the bond which connects the narratives is found to be a bond of the heart. It is in this latter light that I view the evangelical history. I follow the most approved order of tzme; but the change of place has for me little significance; and I seek to weave the events together rather by a mental than by a physical chain.

We will take up, then, the educational aspects of these two incidents. We will begin with the earlier — the storm on the Sea of Galilee. At first sight it seems a useless episode. It appears to contribute zothing to the mission of Jesus. Even the sting of the storm is in itself no contribution. It is something outside of humanity. It touches no disease of man’s body; it heals no moral unrest of the soul. We see a moment of danger followed by a moment of readjustment — a sensation of panic succeeded by an experience of calm. At the close of the process things are physically exactly where they were before, and we feel disposed to say, what on another occasion was said by the spectators of another scene, ‘To what purpose is this waste?’

But we are looking in a wrong direction for the effect of the storm. I believe that this storm occupies a distinct place in the educational system of the gospel, that it occupies this place not by accident, but by design. Its force was spent upon the sea; but, more than any other episode of the sacred narrative, it influenced the land. It formed a turning-point in the daily life of these disciples. Originating on the waters, it cleared a path for them on the dusty plain, and swept from their way many of those objects which had been a real barrier to their missionary progress,

It is my opinion that, of all the events of the gospel narrative, the one most analogous to the storm on the Sea of Galilee is that incident which looks most wmlike it — Jesus waiting by the well. I should say that what Samaria was to the human soul of /esus the Sea of Galilee was to the league of pity. You will remember the place we claimed for the well of Samaria in relation to the personal work of Christ. We saw that on His road to Galilee He was met by an experience of a peculiar kind; He was put in the attitude of a suppliant. The human part of Him, the part of Him which grew and developed, was made to begin at the ordinary foundation. We saw that human sympathy invariably originates in a sense of want, that we learn to give by having, ourselves, received. We found that Jesus in His passage to Galilee — the great sphere of human need, was made to drink at the ordinary source of the fountain. He passed through an experience of extreme prostration, and was content to accept human aid. Samaria was thus in more than a geographical sense His road to Galilee.

But now Jesus is called to repeat His experience — not in Himself but in His followers, The members of the league of pity are to follow not only His example, but His lifestages, Hitherto they had encountered no personal experience analogous to that at the well of Samaria. They had not an adequate sense of human need, nor, so far as we know, had they as yet found anything to interrupt the optimistic vision of youth. Szch was no fit condition for a missionary journey — for a journey in which they were to be all alone. They must be made to feel the sense of solitude which is involved in responsibility, and the sense of need which is born from it. The optimistic vision of life must be broken; the false enthusiasm must be damped that a new enthusiasm may arise.

And the needed crisis came in the crossing of the lake. The crossing of the lake was no new occurrence. The water was their natural element; they had been born to it, they had been bred to it. It was but a five-miles’ passage, and it was as familiar to them as crossing the street. But it is in familiar things, not in strange things, that the crisis of life generally appears. These men had witnessed things out of their element, beyond their understanding. They had come into contact with demoniacs, lepers, sin-stricken paralytics; yet their crisis had not come, It was to meet them in the most unlikely spot of all, in their own field — the field of waters.

The waters were not the object of their voyage; they were seeking the land — the othey side. As so often happens, they were going for one purpose, God was letting them go for another. Jesus accompanies them. Very significant are the words in which this is indicated, ‘They took Him, even as He was, into the ship.’ I take this to mean that He was not in a condition for physical exertion — for rendering nautical help. One of His kuman hours was upon Him; He was weary with the burden of the day. Almost immediately after starting, nature asserted itself, and He slept. Suddenly, from the opposing hills a blast swept over the sea — a storm of unwonted violence; and the tiny craft began to show signs of yielding. It is not often that fishermen are afraid; but these men were. Perhaps their recent contact with the physical presence of the Master had been prejudicial to their natural boldness, They may have learned to lean too much, to act for themselves too little. Be this as it may, their fear was abject, pitiable. For the first time since they had joined the league they felt themselves weak in the very sphere where they used to be strong. It was not weakness in preaching, weakness in healing, weakness in converting. It was weakness in managing their native element — those waters from which they had derived their daily bread. With Jesus asleep in the ship, the ship of their common life had become itself rudderless, and there remained to them nothing but the cry of helplessness, ‘Lord, save us, we perish!’

Now, this cry was the real object of the voyage. It is the storm itself, not the stilling of the storm, that constitutes the significance of this narrative. The stilling of the storm, as we have said, left physical nature just where it was before. But the storm woke in the hearts of these men echoes that never died. It taught them their need — not as Galileans, not as Jews, not even as Christians, but as human creatures; and in so doing it gave them their earliest lesson in the earthly side of the Messiah’s mission — the sympathy of man with man. It was a sense of this gain that in a later hour prompted one of the leaders of the band to pray that none might receive the call to a post of glory until after he had ‘suffered a while.’ Said Jacob to the angel, ‘I will not let thee go except thou bless me’; and the blessing was the shrunk sinew. It is ever the first blessing of the missionary. Before I go forth to heal my brother-man, I must learn from my own heart the weakness at the heart of humanity.

HEREFORE, O Christ, I bless Thee

for the storm. I thank Thee for the moment of loneliness which I called the s/ees of Thy power. It seemed to me as if I had the waters all to myself, as if there were none to help me. In that hour my pride died, to rise no more; I felt how poor a thing I was without Zee. That was my shrunk sinew, that was my ministrant glory. My fetter became my wing. It is my conscious weakness that makes me Thy messenger to man. The hour which the sailors rejected has become the hour of blessing. I said, ‘Let us take ship and go to the other side’; midway I was met by a tempest; the voyage was never completed. Yet the incomplete voyage has been my farthest travel. No journey has given me so wide an experience. The wings of that storm have borne me into the heart of humanity. I have learned more from the tempest than from the haven. The shelter of the haven could bring me into contact with the few; but the waves of my troubled heart have laid me on the bosom of Man,