The Fading of Christ's First Hope

The last glimpse we had of the Portrait of Jesus was in a light beginning to be overcast. He had crossed a transition line. In the very blaze of His fame He had met with His first real disappointment. I say ‘disappointment, not ‘reverse.’ The crowd had not deserted Him; He had fled from the crowd. He had found that He and they were seeking different things. His solitude was as yet only inward. The multitude were still on His side, but He felt that they were on His side by reason of a delusion. He perceived that He and they were using the phrase ’ kingdom of God ’ in a different sense, in an opposite sense. To them it meant purple, fine linen, faring sumptuously every day; to Him it was an influence from within, which would make even vile raiment beautiful.

VOL. II. A

I have already said that in my opinion the earliest hope of Jesus was that during His life on earth He might witness the establishment of a kingdom of righteousness; this hope I have called His first ideal. I have also expressed my view of the nature of this kingdom which glittered in the soul of Jesus. I should not call it an inward kingdom. It was rather a kingdom from within. It did contemplate an influence on the surface, or, rather, a series of influences in which different men were to exert on society different degrees of power. But then, these degrees of power were to be proportionate to the sacrificial spirit. The influence was not to interfere from the outside. The kingdom of Jesus demanded no smashing up of the Roman Empire, no drastic upheaval of existing orders. It was to be something which could enter the present dwelling without breaking the doors. It was to come silently, unobtrusively. It was to demand no extra space; it was to work, like the leaven, through existing spaces. Its entrance was to abolish nothing; it was to act by addition, not by subtraction. It was to add to the world as it then stood this new commandment, ‘Love one another.’

Such was the ideal that Jesus hoped to realise on earth while He should still be on earth. What a shock to this hope was the attitude of that crowd in the desert of Bethsaida! They clamoured for a social revolution; they proposed to make Him a king. They had been quite sincere in their communion with Jesus; they had been quite sincere in their communion with one another; but in both cases they had mistaken a part for the whole. Their error was not selfishness; they were quite willing to pass the physical bread as well as to appropriate it. Their error lay in supposing that the value of Christ’s mission was merely physical. Their reverence for Him was deep, but it was based on a false impression It rested on the belief that Christian salvation was first and foremost an external thing, and that the beginning and end of the mission of Jesus was to make a new division of the outward inheritance.

So far, it was only a little cloud. The multitude were as yet merely on the threshold; they could not be expected to have reached high spiritual views. But a greater blow was coming. Let us follow the stream of the narrative. From the crowd of mistaken friends in the desert of Bethsaida Jesus takes refuge in flight. He feels that the kingdom proposed by them is a travesty; He is alone in spirit and He longs to be alone in fact. He retires into the mountain recesses where the historian cannot follow Him. His thoughts must have been very sad. The narrative inadvertently reveals this. He has a sleepless night. When others are in the arms of slumber, in the watches of the dark hours He crosses the Sea of Galilee. He joins the band of original disciples — the members of the first league of pity, and those whom they had drawn around them. He comes into Capernaum — the city of His most brilliant triumphs — as if to restore His drooping spirit by a memory of the past. But the pertinacious crowd will not leave Him. They follow in His track; they trace Him to the synagogue of Capernaum; they surround Him there; the experience of the desert is repeated in the city. Jesus faces them with words of stern rebuke. He tells them He is not deceived by their homage. He tells them He is quite aware they are seeking Him for less than the highest gift He has to bestow. And then, passing from rebuke to exhortation, He delivers to them one of the most remarkable sermons on record. I should call it the third epoch-making sermon of His life. The first was at Nazareth; the second was on the summit of Hermon; this was in the synagogue of Capernaum.

It was a singular scene for a discourse like this. The subject of the sermon was the power of the internal. One would think the last place for such a theme would be a crowded assembly. But I often find Jesus choosing localities by contrast. The Sermon on the Mount consists of precepts which are only applicable to the plain; the sermon in the city of Capernaum consists of precepts which are only applicable to the mount. In the one,

Jesus stands above the world and tells men how to live below; in the other, Jesus stands in the midst of the world and tells men how to live above.

I think the scope of this latter sermon has been often misunderstood. It contains a mass of doctrine; but this is parenthetical, incidental. The main point is this, ‘heavenly bread is better than earthly bread; the things of the spirit are more valuable than the things of the flesh.’ Let me try for a moment to exhibit the sequence of the passage; it will be found in St. John vi. 22-65. Jesus says: ‘You have erred in your selection of diet. You have preferred the outward bread; the inward is more nourishing. If you want lasting happiness, you must be fed from within. Life’s outward privileges can only relieve symptoms; they do not cure the actual unrest. If you desire lasting happiness, everlasting happiness, happiness that will raise you up even at the day of extremity, you must get, not new privileges, but new life. I am come to give you this new life — this inner bread.’

But so materialised are that multitude that they mistake His meaning. The only notion they can form of inward bread is that of outward bread coming down from heaven. They interrupt the sermon — a fact which itself shows how heated they are. ‘Oh! ’ they cry, ’ we shall be delighted. You are speaking of the manna which Moses brought down from God — that manna which gave equal privileges to all. And you tell us you are going to renew that blessed shower. Will you not favour us with an instalment now? It would be a pledge, a sign, a foretaste of the glory to come.’ It was no sarcasm, it was no mockery; it was the utterance of a sober wish; and there lay its saddest feature. Mockery would have been a sin against the Son of Man; but this crudeness of the multitude was an inability to appreciate the Holy Ghost.

Jesus answers: ‘It is not the coming down from heaven that makes the difference; it is the nature of the descending object. Moses did not give you the kind of bread from heaven which / offer you. His manna, indeed, came from God — as everything else comes from God. But the gifts of the Father are not all equally durable; some are for an hour, others are for eternity. The manna which Moses gave you was from above, but it was only for the hour; it was meant for the periodic support of the old life. But the bread which / give you — which is also from above — has a ground of distinction based not on space but on time. It is not meant simply to sustain the old life. It is itself new life — “life more abundant.” Your fathers did eat the old manna and are dead; it could not keep them alive amid the tear and wear of the desert. But the bread which / offer you will be life-giving, strengthening. It will sustain your steps in weariness, it will keep your feet from falling, it will prevent your heart from sinking; it will raise you up even at the death hour.’

Such was the subject of the sermon. Its subject was its sting. That which startled the audience was not Christ’s declaration that He was the bread from heaven; it was His declaration that the bread from heaven was different from the physical manna. They felt like men who had asked a coin and had received a tract. What was this impalpable thing they were promised? Had anybody seen it? had any body weighed it? had anybody measured it? Did it add to the siset Did it intensify the strength? Did it increase the social position? Had it any mercantile value, any political value? If not, what was the use of it? what was the gain of it? So they asked with ever increasing murmurs. From time to time the sermon was interrupted. Then came a novel experience. On former occasions we are always told ‘He sent the multitude away’; here the multitude go away. Slowly but surely the house empties itself. One by one the listeners drop out of the synagogue. The multitude that had followed from the desert disperse. But that is not the deepest disappointment. If the secession had been confined to the converts of yesterday it could have been explained on the ground of their immaturity. But it was not confined to them. Amongst the deserters were converts of an to THE FADING OF

earlier day — men who had promised better things, ‘from that time forth many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him.’ Jesus felt as if His work was about to be torn up from the foundation. There is a whole world of despair in the question He addressed to the original Twelve, * Will ye also go away? ‘But what is the despair? Do you imagine it is the grief of a once popular preacher for the decline of his popularity? You must dismiss that from your mind now, henceforth, and for ever. You will never dismiss it from your mind unless you keep fast hold of the golden chain which binds the life of Jesus — His mission for the sake of the Father. I affirm that in the whole march up the dolorous way there is not one step of personal sorrow. This is distinctively the first step of that march; and it deserves to be registered. Jesus experiences a bitter disappointment. He feels that the world is less ripe for His kingdom than He had deemed. He feels that He will need to abandon His beautiful dream — the dream of remaining to establish a kingdom of God below.

It had been His life-dream, His love-dream. Not for His own glory had He cherished it, but for the glory of the Father. In the unrecorded days of youth He had felt a Divine passion — a passion to make the Father glad. There had come to Him the bold desire to compensate the heart of God. He had entered into sympathy with that heart; He had felt its throbbing; He had experienced its craving. Above all, He had experienced its unsatisfiedness. He had realised how little the world had responded to that heart, how little return it had given. He had felt dismayed, appalled. He had asked, ‘Can I do anything to atone — through myself, through others? ‘It was a bold question; and He had answered it yet more boldly. He had proposed to give His life to the Father to make up for a world’s neglect — to go wherever He should lead, to surrender His will from dawn to dark. And there had risen the fond hope that ere the earthly day was done He might see with earthly eyes the founding of a kingdom of righteousness.

And now that hope had faded. He had found that the world was not ready, nay, that His own disciples were not ready. I believe it was now that He first said to Himself — not for the last time, * I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished! ‘What does He mean by these words? That He is oppressed by the weight of His own surrender? Exactly the reverse. He means that He is oppressed by the hindrances to His surrender. Men will not come to Him, will not think with Him, will not see with Him. They refuse to behold the glory of that which He beholds — a kingdom whose steps of promotion are to be altar-stones and whose badge of dominion is to be the bearing of a cross. We speak of the humiliation of Jesus. He had humiliation; but it lay not where it is supposed to lie. It is supposed to lie in His sacrifice; it lay in the barrier to His sacrifice. Whatever impeded the offering up of His life to the Father, whatever interfered with the surrender of His human will — that was His humiliation, that was His straitenedness! I call this desertion at Capernaum the first step in the humiliation of Jesus. I call it so not because it exposed Him to the cross, but because it sought to divert Him from the cross. It put a wall between Him and His sacrificial work. It destroyed the first dream of His filial love — the hope that now and here He might raise a holy temple to the glory of the Father.

AND yet, Thou Divine Man, I am glad that Thou hast felt this experience of faded hope. I should like Thee to share all my experiences. It would pain me to feel that / had a phase of life which was foreign to Thee. I know what it is to have a withered hope; it is worse than a withered flower. The flower has had its day and has fulfilled its mission; but the day of the hope’s fulfilment has never come. / know what it is to see the fading of an ideal dream; there have been to me few deeper bereavements. Therefore I am glad that across even that river of trouble there is a bridge to Thee. I should have felt a great blank if there had been no communication here. They tell me Thou wert ’ tempted in all things.’ I bless the Father that the withered dream was one of Thy temptations, because it is one of mine. I bless Thee that it did not wither Thy heart, because it will help me to keep my heart green. My hope has been enlarged by the fading of Thy hope. It tells me that the moment of disappointment may be a Divine moment; it reminds me that the hour of retreat may be the advance of God. I shall gather the faded flowers from the garden of Thy withered dream.