The Limitations of the First Ministry

Jesus has been preparing the league of pity for a great missionary journey. That missionary journey, although not the origin of Christianity, is the real beginning of the Christian ministry. It is the first aggressive movement on the part of the Church visible. Hitherto Jesus has acted alone; the Church has been merely a spectator. Now /esus, for a time, is to be the spectator, and the Church is to act alone.

Very interesting, therefore, promises to be the contemplation of this first ministerial movement. We are standing at the fountain of all Church life. We watch the play of the waters with more than average attention, We expect to find in the action of this

primitive ministry something which will stand sy as a guide for all future ministries, We look for great things from the fountaim. However impeded the stream may be in its course, whatever obstructions may accumulate as the waters pursue their way, we feel sure that the source, at least, will be free. We expect that the opening scene will be a scene of refreshingness, of bounding liberty, of gushing spontaneity. To drop the metaphor, we are convinced that this little band of disciples, issuing as they do from the primal seat of all Christian knowledge, will exhibit that superiority to later Churches which such a direct origin seems to imply.

Now, in this expectation it appears at first sight as if we were to be disappointed. As we listen to Jesus prescribing the boundaries of the first diocese our immediate impression is one of incongruity. There seems a disproportion between the means and the end Indeed, in studying the constitution of this first Christian ministry Iam impressed beyond everything else by the number of limitations imposed on it. Its restrictions seem greatly to predominate over its liberties. One feels at times as if a drag were being put on the wheels of sympathy lest it should run too quickly down the hill of human needs, That this conclusion is the reverse of the truth I know; but the fact remains that there is a suggestion of limit where we expected freedom. We shall best overcome the obstacle by facing it.

There seem to me to be four ministerial limits here laid down by Jesus — a limit to sphere, a limit to foresight, a limit to message, and a limit to courage. I shall look at each in turn. And first, there is at this stage a distinct limit to the apostolic sphere of action: ‘Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not; but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ This is the last thing we should expect. Is not Jesus conscious that His field is the world? Yes; He never from the beginning had any dubiety about that. Nothing in the whole gospel is to me more certain than that the interest of Jesus was from the very outset a universal interest. He may have grown in some experiences; He never grew in this. So early as His passage through Samaria He saw and declared that there was a worship which should survive both Jerusalem and Gerizim. So early as the sermon on the mount He calls His disciples, not ‘the light of Galilee,’ not ‘the light of Israel,’ not even ‘the light of Asia,’ but ‘the light of the world.’ And can we forget that it was precisely when announcing the downfall of Judaism that His own claim to universal empire became the loudest and the most unqualified, as if to prove that He had never built His hopes upon the perpetuity of the Jewish nation: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’

Why, then, this fencing of the new diocese, ‘Go not into the way of the Gentiles’? Is this the Being whom the fourth evangelist describes as ‘lighting every man that cometh into the world’? Is this the Man who thus describes Himself, ‘Other sheep I have which are not of this fold’? Is this the Personality who declares in the very face of the Mosaic ritual, ‘Many shall come from the east and from the west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of God’? How shall we account for the inconsistency? How shall we explain the fact that a soul so wide as that of Jesus should have been content to contract its range from the sweep of a boundless plain into the circuit of a tiny garden?

I answer, in the zzferest of the plain. He refused to send these men to the foreign field because He had a great sense of the claim of that field. The foreign mission required more training than the home mission. Remember the insular position of the Jew. It was the most insular of all positions — a solitude of mind. lf it had been merely a separation of languages, interpreters might have spanned the gulf. But it was a separation of thought, of culture, of the very mode of conceiving things. No interpreter can pass such a chasm as that; not even a gift of tongues could pass it. To bea missionary to the Gentiles, to be ‘

a missionary even to Gentilised Samaria, a man had to live abroad, to get acclimatised to forms of thought called heathen. The third evangelist declares that if there were any other way of becoming a foreign missionary it must be a supernatural way; he attributes this charge to Jesus: ‘Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high.” Even with his light from heaven, even with his culture from earth, Saul of Tarsus is not sent at once into his destined Gentile field; had it been a Jewish field, I am convinced his mission would have been immediate. I can see nothing but breadth and liberality in the limited diocese of the first league of pity.

The second limit is on the power of foresight: ‘Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves; for the workman is worthy of his meat. But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak; for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you,’ Should we not have expected something different here also? Is there not a great danger in a minister failing to measure his difficulties? Yes; but what Jesus wishes to guard against is, not the measuring of difficulties, but the measuring of difficulties in advance. Jesus wishes to limit excessive tendencies to look forward. And is He not right? Is there anything more hampering to a mind, especially to a clerical mind, than the perpetual presence of the future? Is this not itself the greatest limit to the powers of life? Is it not also an zztellectual mistake? I am told of a task which I shall have to perform a year hence. I measure my own capacities and find that if the task were now before me I could not do it. Is that a fair measurement? Because I cannot do it now, does it follow that I shall be unfit for it a year hence? Can I forget that, while the ¢as% will remain stationary, 7 shall always begrowing? The force with which I meet it in a year will not be the same force with which I should meet it to-day. I am tormenting myself by a false estimate. Where did Jesus learn this principle? From the experience of His own life. I remarked in a previous chapter that I considered Christ’s words, ‘Take no thought for to-morrow,’ to be autobiographical. I think there is also a ring of autobiography in the words, ‘The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.’ Such a lesson could only have been learned from the struggles of a human soul. - It is a lesson in the human, not in the Divine. He must have got it from experience. That soul which grew in human strength must have learned by the teaching of /zfe that the morrow takes thought for the things of itself, that as a man’s day is, so his strength shall be. Doubtless there were times in which, seen from afar, the difficulties on His path seemed insurmountable; but ever as He drew near there was revealed a hidden door. That was the truth which His life had taught Him; that was the truth which He wished inscribed on all other lives. Is it strange Q that He should desire it to be written on the portals of the house of God?

The third limit is that of message: ‘ Preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Is not this a bald message for a Church to give to the world? Is it one stage beyond that of the Baptist? Is not the Baptist’s fuller; did not he say, ‘ Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’? Yes; but Christ’s omission of the word ‘repent’ makes a new gospel. I have pointed out this in a previous chapter and in another connection, and I need not repeat it here. It is one thing to say, ‘The door is open; gather in all things that are beautiful’; it is another thing to say, ‘ The door is open; gather in the wz/e things and make them beautiful. The Baptist said the former; Jesus said the latter. To Jesus the sequel to the coming of the kingdom was expressed in the words, ‘ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils; freely ye have received, freely give. Apparently a mere reiteration of the Baptist’s gospel, this gospel of the primitive Church excels it by the whole height of the heavens. As far as east is distant from the west does the kingdom of Jesus outrun the kingdom of John. With John acceptance is conditioned on the amendment of life; with Jesus the amendment of life is conditioned on acceptance. The one says, ‘Let God arise and His enemies be scattered’; the other says, ‘ Let God arise and His enemies be redeemed.’

The fourth limit is the apparent limit to human courage, or, which is more remarkable, to the courage of the Church militant. There is prescribed a strange mixture of bravery and caution. On the one hand Jesus exhorts His disciples to fearlessness. He bids them remember the protective care of the Father over all creation. He bids them remember the special place of man in the scale of creation. He tells them that the greatest place in man is the place which they are defending — the region of the soul. He says the sense of their value ought to dispel their fear. But on the other hand there is something which sounds like a warning against this exuberance of courage. Amid such a display of confidence on the part of the Master one experiences somewhat of a shock to hear such words as these: ‘ When they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another,’ It is like water poured upon fire. No portrait but the Portrait of Christ could without detriment have withstood an incongruity like this. How, in spite of it, has this Portrait preserved its glory? We should have expected One who took up so courageous an attitude to have bidden His followers court martyrdom; He tells them to fee from death! Yet His renown for sacrificial heroism has suffered no decline. Why?

It is because Jesus Himself has taught the world a lesson which the world has elsewhere never learned — that in the sphere of religion it is more difficult to live than to die. ‘Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father’; to Jesus the sacrifice which involved most courage was not the surrender of the body, but the surrender of the will — the confession of His name in the land of the Zuvzmg. His ideal of martyrdom was to take up the cross and follow. It never occurred to -Him that in telling His disciples to flee from death He was granting them any relaxation. It never entered His mind that in bidding them live as long as they could He was lowering His standard of bravery. To Him the bravest thing, because the hardest thing, was to carry the cross. One of His disciples says of Him that ‘He bare our sins in His own body om 7¢o the tree’ — not merely ‘om the tree’ as our version has it; he means that the life was, with Him, itself the martyrdom. What else does Paul mean when he speaks of ‘bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus’? He proclaims the truth that the annals of Christian martyrdom are not confined to the hour of death, that there have been souls which have been courageous enough not to die, nay, courageous enough not to reveal their tears. There have been martyrs who have anointed the head and washed the face that they might appear unto men zof¢ to fast — who have covered their weeds with flowers and hid their sorrow under a smile; and these are the bravest of all.

EACH me, O Lord, to value my free cities — my unpersecuted cities. Teach me when one gate is shut to remember that another is open, Teach me the secret of not being crushed by calamity. I am too apt to sink in despair when a door is closed; help me to-flee to the mercy that remaineth. I can only bear my losses by remembering unstolen joys. If I keep my gaze on the flower that is withered I shall only have courage to daze, I want courage to live. Help me to look at the wmwithered flower. Lead me to the pastures that s¢z// are green, to the waters that still are quiet. Let me remember the things unfaded that mzght have been faded, the lights undimmed that might have been dim. Let me think of the treasures unspent, the hopes unbroken, the fountains unfailing. So shall I have courage to live, courage to bear. I shall survive every pain when I remember the ‘rest that remaineth.’