The Apostleship
Peter selected to be an Apostle. His leading position among the twelve. the first field of mission-labour. The “rest a while.” The feeding of the multitudes.
“It is plainly evident that they taught Christianity by a Divine power, when such persons were able with such an uncontrolled success to subdue men to the obedience of His word; for that they had no eloquent tongues, no subtle and discursive head, none of the refined and rhetorical arts of Greece, to conquer the minds of men. I verily believe that the holy Jesus purposely made use of such preachers of His doctrine, that there might be no suspicion that they came instructed, with arts of sophistry, but that it might be clearly manifest to all the world that there was no crafty design in it, and that they had a Divine power going along with them, which was more efficacious than the greatest volubility of expression or ornaments of speech, or the artifices which were used in the Grecian compositions.” — Origen.
“He whose purpose it was, by the weak things of the world, to confound the strong, who meant to draw emperors to Himself by fishermen, and not fishermen by emperors, lest His Church should even seem to stand in the wisdom and power of men rather than of God — He saw in these unlearned fishermen of the Galilean Lake the fittest instruments for His work.” — Trench,
“No priest of the house of Levi, no warrior of the host of Jadah, ever burnt with more fervent zeal than did the fisherman of Galilee as he hung upon the words and looks of that unknown Teacher who appeared on the shores of his native lake.” — Stanley’s Sermons on the Apostolic Age
“I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son; but I was an herdman, and a gatherer of sycamore fruit,: and the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto mo, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel.” — Amos vii 14, 15.
Peter, as we have seen, llad for a considerable period been warmly attached to the person of Jesus, following His steps alike in Judea and Galilee, the witness of His mighty works, and the hearer of the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth. It had been a period of important training and discipline in the prospect of the holier relation he was about to hold to the Master. We shall afterwards find, when he came to be an apostle, that he was selected as one of a privileged three who were admitted to be the witnesses of the more sacred transactions of their Lord’s life. But even during the present preliminary season when he was no more than a disciple, we find him enjoying the same distinction. At the raising of Jairus’ daughter “following out the maxim of law, ‘that at the mouth of two or three witnesses everything is to be established,’ the Lord invested with a peculiar character for that end Peter and the sons of Zebedee: that such particulars of His ministry as, for good reasons, He wished to have concealed during His lifetime, might after His death be attested by a competent number of credible men, not limited to the very lowest amount of testimony barely allowed by law, yet not extended beyond what would be fully acknowledged on all hands to be sufficient.”1 As yet, though a devoted follower, Peter had been invested with no official character. But the time had arrived when it seemed meet to the great Founder of our religion to designate a certain number of His disciples, and Peter among these honoured few, to the office of the apostolate.
On a hill, somewhere bordering on the lake, our blessed Lord held a special night season of prayer preparatory to setting up “twelve pillars for the not yet consolidated yet already endangered Church.”2 Truly a night much to be remembered. Any of these wild and sequestered nooks immediately behind Bethsaida might answer the purpose of this midnight oratory or altar, where the great Intercessor, the Shepherd of souls, invoked a blessing on His chief under-shepherds. I remember, as I passed beneath and looked up among the groups of wild nabk dotting the sides of these glens, picturing them as likely spots for this and similar seasons of sacred retirement. From the specific mention, however, of “the hill” (not “a mountain,” as in our version) it has been supposed by some that referl Dr Candlishs Scripture Miscellanies, p. 258. * Ellicott
THE APOSTLESHIP.
ence is made on this occasion to the mountain of Hattin, with its bifurcated cone and green summit, which we recognised for the first time to the left of the now desolate plain, when crossing from Nazareth; but which afterwards mingled conspicuously in several views from the upper portion of the lake itself. From Bethsaida or Capernaum it would be approached by that wild gorge leading from “The land,” or u plain of Gennesaret,” to which I have previously alluded. And we may readily believe, when Jesus wished to evade the intrusion to which He would be more subject in the familiar hills around “His own city,” He would not unfrequently avail Himself of this sequestered dell and the solitude of its guardian mountain for these seasons of holy vigil, holding alike converse with the grandeur of Nature, and fellowship with His Divine Father. “There is something,” says Dr Farrar, “affecting beyond measure in the thought of these lonely hours; the absolute silence and stillness, broken by no sounds of human life, but only* by the hooting of the night jar, or the howl of the jackal; the stars of an Eastern heaven raining their large lustre out of the unfathomable depth; the figure of the Man of Sorrows kneeling upon the dewy grass, and gaining strength for His labours from the purer air, the more open heaven, of that intense and silent communing with His Father and His God.”” What magnificence of the ancient
1 We did not visit it partly owing to the want of time and partly to the great heat. It must, from the accounts of those who have, be eminently entitled to the appellation of picturesque. One traveller speaks of “the romantic glen of the little river,” and “the thickets in the bottom of the ravine, where monstrous boulders were lying, and whence the cliffs on either side rose, often quite perpendicularly, to the height of 6 JO or 700 feet.” — Syrian Shrines, p. 66. worship,” says another, u could surpass the solemnity of that sacred season, when Jesus, after passing the night in prayer on one of the hills which surround Capernaum, called His twelve apostles V* — Pressense, p. 357. Whether it were the one mountain ridge or the other, to which on this memorable evening He resorted, it was, at all events, the birthnight of the Christian ministry, that on which the mighty Pleader interceded not for His own disciples alone, but also for His faithful ambassadors in every age and place of the world: the “wise” who were hereafter to “shine as the bright- ’ ness of the firmament,” and, turning many to righteousness, u as the stars for ever and ever.”
Very early in the morning (at daybreak, before the crowd from the towns and villages below had time to gather, and probably in accordance with His own directions) His disciples come to meet Him. Out of these unlearned Galileans He selected “twelve, whom also He named apostles those who were to become messengers, missionaries, evangelists — persons invested with a special commission to teach the new Gospel of the kingdom; gifted, moreover, with supernatural powers to attest their Divine appointment. As it is expressed in the words of consecration, “that they should be with Him, and that He might send them forth to preach and to have power to heal sickness, and to cast out devils” (Mark iii. 14, 15). Among these (shall we say chief among them) was Simon. We shall come by-and-by to examine particularly the irrational claims of the Church of Rome for what is called “the Primacy of St Peter,” in the sense of his being Vicar, or Ruler, in Christ’s stead, — taking the place of his Lord, subsequent to His ascension, as the Church’s divinely-appointed
THE APOSTLESHIP.
head. Leaving this question, however, for the present, it is nevertheless plain, that from his earliest call to the apostleship, Peter does assume the leading position among his associates. In every case, in the list of the apostles, his name stands first. Matthew specially assigns him this honourable distinction (x. 2), “The first, Simon, who is called Peter.” He is generally addressed by our Lord Himself as their representative and acknowledged leader; and as frequently replies as spokesman in the name of the others. “Thus, when our Lord had uttered a parable with a solemn call to watchfulness, it is Peter who asks for an application of the discourse: ‘Lord, speakest Thou this parable unto us, or even to all V At a later period, when Christ is speaking of forgiveness, it is Peter who propounds the moral problem: ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times V In reply to the enforcement of self-renunciation, Peter again speaks for the rest: * Lord, .we have left all and followed Thee.’ Even by the outside world he is tacitly accepted as the representative of the little company. In Capernaum it was to Peter that the collectors of the Temple dedrachma came: ‘Doth not your Master pay the tax % 9” 1 When the apostles are subsequently mentioned in their collective capacity, the phrase used is, “Peter and the rest of the apostles;” “Peter and the eleven.” Paul, when he went up to Jerusalem by Divine revelation, “took up his abode with Peter.” Add to all this; Peter’s entire life and history, with its lights and shadows, its ebbs and flows, seemed, more than any other, to render him a befitting living com-
1 The Apostle Peter, his Life and Letters, by Dr Green of Rawdon College, pp. 18, 19. A scholarly volume, whose only fault is it* brevity. mentary on the moral conflict which, in every case, has to be undergone before the natural man is subdued and the spiritual is made triumphant — the weakness of the one, and the strength, through God’s grace, of the other. His life, if we may so express it, was “The Pilgrim’s Progress” of the apostolic age, with its Sloughs of Despond, and its Doubting Castles, its encounters with Fearful, and Ready-to-Halt, and Despondency, but ending at last with complete victory over Apollyon, reaching the land Beulah, and having “an abundant entrance ministered “(as his own expression is), into the heavenly city. As it has been well said,” The weakness and the strength of our human love for Christ are both mercifully provided for in the character of the greatest of the twelve.“1 In the selection, we may add, not only of Peter, but of his colleagues, Jesus would manifest the sovereignty of His grace, and His independence of human instrumentality. The apostles are chosen, not from the magnates of Jerusalem, not from among phylacteried Pharisees, or learned doctors — the Hillels and Gamaliels of her schools; — but as, in a long preceding age, the God of Israel commissioned no lettered Rabbi of Samaria or Judea, but rather took as His accredited messenger, in the person of Elijah the prophet, a roving Bedouin from the Highlands of Palestine, without the prestige of rank, or birth, or lore, or pedigree; so now, far away from the corruption of the capital, He selects a fisherman, and gifts him supernatural ly to grapple with the powers of evil, and the hostility of the world. Emphatic testimony to the old prophetic utterance,” Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”” About to
i Alford. lay the foundation of the great Edifice, designed to shelter so many generations, He sought, as it were, in the midst of the masses of the people, the block of. virgin marble to be fashioned to His will.” 1 This Galilean boatman, along with a handful of uneducated men from the darkest of all the Palestine provinces, and, in a later year, a converted Jew from Tarsus, are to hurl Superstition from her throne, to silence her oracles, dem olish the temples and shrines of ages, and bring the whole Roman Empire, as by a magic touch, to own a crucified Saviour as its God and King. Truly “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty; and base things of the world, and things that are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in His presence.”2 “The Divine Spirit alone, who filled the Man Christ Jesus,” is the reflection of a gifted traveller, as he gazed on the scene of that “calling,” “could have transfigured commonplace fishermen and publicans into apostles, and made a commonplace lake a theatre of wonders.” 3
Peter’s history from this moment becomes intimately associated with that of his Divine Lord. He is to be a sharer in His earthly humiliation and its manifold accompaniments — fatiguing journeys under the hot sun by day; often no pillow save the turf of the hillside by night; no* curtains but the silver liuing of the olive tree, or canopy of heaven; no protection from the drenching dews save the long striped Abb&, crouching
1 PresseniMS, p. 257. * 1 Cor. i. 27, 28, 29.
s Dr Macleod’s Eastward.
under which the wandering Arab to this day sleeps amid the flocks outside his tent. The fasting and hunger spoken of by the well of Samaria, and the common bread by which, on that same occasion, hunger was appeased, were doubtless ofttimes the experienced privations in these self-denying journeyings. The comforts of the fisherman’s home, and the freedom of the fisherman’s life, would be unknown amid the friendless villages, and dusty roads, and overpowering summer heat of the valleys of Galilee and Samaria. “They were to take nothing with them — no scrip for food; no purse for money; no change of raiment; no travelling shoes (bfodfiftara.) in place of their ordinary palm-bark sandals; they were not even to procure a staff for the journey if they did not happen to possess one. ... On entering a town they were to go to any house in it where they had reason to hope that they would be welcome, and to salute it with the immemorial Shalomlakem, ‘Peace be to you,’ and if the children of peace were there the blessing would be effective, if not it would return on their own heads.” 1
Peter and the other eleven were sent forth, in the first instance, among the northern towns and villages to testify to Christ’s Messiahship, and to say to the cities of Galilee, as well as of J udah, “Behold your God!” The mission-field of labour was not yet, at least, among the way of the Gentiles, “but rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The conversion of the heathen world was to be reserved for a period subsequent to the Lord’s ascension, when the separating wall between Jew and Gentile was to be demolished, and in the demolition of which Peter, as we shall find, was
1 Dr Farrar, toI. 1. p. 863.
THE APOSTLESHTP.
destined to occupy a conspicuous place. The strong hereditary prejudices these Galileans still entertained against their Gentile neighbours were, as Neander remarks, “too strong to adapt themselves to their feelings, and to meet the controversies into which they would be inevitably led along with them. The way in which the two sons of Zebedee treated the Samaritans at a later period is a proof of this.” He whose standard-bearers they had become warns them of their trials in taking up the cross; assuring them, at the same time, that “losing their lives for His sake “they would afterwards” find them,” and that even the cup of cold water given to one of the “little ones “would not go unrecompensed.” Behold,” said He, in equipping Peter and his fellow-apostles, “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.” A tradition of the second century, quoted by Light foot, represents Peter as saying in reply to his Master, “But how then if the wulves should tear the lambs V To which his Lord rejoined, “Let not the lambs fear the wolves when the lambs are once dead; and do you fear not those who can kill you, and do nothing to you; but fear Him who, after you are dead, hath power over Soul and body to cast into hell-fire.” It was a gracious arrangement on the part of their Divine Master, and one that has been wisely followed in modern times in the case of several Christian missions (specially so in India), to send them in their evangelistic journeys, not singly, in dreary and unsympathetic loneliness, nor yet in a body, but in pairs — two and two. Andrew would most probably be the associate of his more impulsive brother; and it is pleasant to think that the boyish affection of the two, as they played together in infancy on the pebbly beach of
Betbsaida, was strengthened in the most eventful period of their lives; that having plied their nets together in early youth on the moonlit sea. they were now associated and united in their nobler calling as “Fishers of men.”
To various instructions which their Master gave them in prosecuting their work, “He proceeds with Diviue prescience to add warnings of dangers, difficulties, impeachments, imprisonments, and even death itself to which they should be exposed in after days and in other mission-fields for His sake; with counsel how to act, and promises to sustain and cheer, under such fiery trials, and in such fearful times. Christ having ’ made an end of commanding them, they went forth on their mission, and ‘He departed thence to teach and to preach in their cities, in the prosecution of His. Thus early did Christianity display itself as a religion not of benevolence merely, but of beneficence; not of charity only, but of charity organised and in action,” 1
We shall not venture to follow “the footsteps of Peter” during this memorable period of the Saviour’s ministry. To do so would only be to rehearse the most familiar incidents in the Gospel narratives. On the occasion of the miraculous feast south of Bethsaida Julias, we find, as an interesting reason given for this retirement from the busier western shores to the solitudes of Naphthali, that the twelve had just returned from their first missionary tour in the towns and villages of Galilee, the first-fruits and earnest of vaster enterprises throughout Judea and the world. Weak and exhausted with their incessant ministrations, their
Anderson’* Life of Christ, p. 824.
THE APOSTLESHIP.
Lord provides for them this season of needful rest. “Come ye also,” says He, “apart into a desert place, and rest a little.” It was a befitting opportunity too for communicating in private to their Divine Master the result of their preaching. “The apostles,” we read, “gathered themselves together unto Jesus, and told Him all things, both what they had done, and what they had taught” Another impelling reason may be added for this period of seclusion. The human heart of the great Master had been saddened and crushed as it had never been by any similar cause before, owing to the death, by foulest cruelty and intrigue, of “the friend of the Bridegroom,” His noble, self-denying, heroic servant, John the Baptist. This greatest of the prophets had been beheaded, in an act of cold-blooded atrocity, in the castle of Machaerus, on the shores of the Dead Sea. where he had for some time been languishing in captivity. No sooner had the axe of the executioner descended, and loving hands had interred the mutilated corpse, than the disciples of the murdered man hastened to communicate this sad intelligence to Jesus. As a par* taker of all the most refined feelings and sympathies of our nature, the Divine Saviour gladly sought even a few hours’ calm to let the tears of human affection How over His ’ loved and lost.’
We can even picture the scene in the plain of El-bal-Ihah, four miles east of Capernaum, where the toil-worn disciples went to pause for this “little while,” and get themselves recruited for fresh labours. We are not to understand by a “desert place 11 a region of dry, barren sand, such as we are in the habit of associating with the word. On the contrary, it was a spot fertile in itself, but it had not, like the land of Gennesaret, been brought under the cultivation of the husbandman. It remained in a state of nature — cattle browsed on its slopes, or under the shadow of its scattered groups of oak and terebinth. The first flush of spring was again robing both plain and mountain, the vines were showing their tender green, and the olive its brightest silver lining. The rush of the winter torrents was over; but the brooks and rivulets, not yet dried with summer suns, still sang their way through thickets of nabk and oleander to the Jordan and the lake. John specially notes the season, “The Passover, a feast of the Jews, was nigh.” From every northern outlet, the pilgrims for the feast were streaming down the Jordan valley, and the multitudes from the western cities and plain of Gennesaret (resolved at all risks to track the footsteps of Jesus and His apostles) follow along the northern strand, keeping the sail of their craft in view. Again, as confirmatory of the time, Mark (ever graphic and pictorial, writing with Peter’s memory as his guide, and thus always seizing, if I may so say, with a painter’s eye, some striking natural feature in the scene he delineates) afterwards represents the multitudes, in his description of the miracle, as seated on the “green grass” 1 Here the little vessel landed its crew. In that peaceful seclusion, the disciples — Peter doubtless the main spokesman — gave their Lord, amid the more sorrowful thoughts then crowding their memories, an
I was unable to visit this interesting spot, but Dr 8tanley, in his journey irith the Prince of Wales, gives the following account of it: — •’Here, through a level plain, almost a morass, entangled with thickets of oleander, which cluster round its tributary brooks, the Jordan passes into the lake under a group of five isolated palms. On the gentle hill which rises immediately at the back of the plain may be traced with sufficient accuracy the situation of the Northern Bethsaida and the scene of the incidents connected with it in the Gospel history. On the first slope of the rising ground account of their first crusade against the powers of evil. And yet what a picture, too, of the untiring energy of that faithful band; and above all, of Him whom they delighted to serve! If allowed to enjoy at all their needed season of repose, that season must have been brief indeed. Their boat had been retarded by head winds, and the eager multitude, ‘* with the ordinary contingent of sufferers in various need of healing,” had reached the straud before them, while the northern caravan of Passover pilgrims, as we have just noted, had swelled the usual throng. From one of these gentle slopes, or plateaux already indicated, Jesus sees the multitudes. The flocks browsing on the pastoral scenes around Him are carefully tended; but the great arid good Shepherd is “moved with compassion “towards the human crowd below, because they were * shepherdess.’ He prepares, therefore, to lead them to green pastures and still waters, and to” give them meat to eat which the world knows not of.” The spot on which the multitudes were congregated” was either one of the green table-lands visible from the hills on the western side, or, more probably, part of the rich plain at the mouth of the Jordan. In the parts of this plain not cultivated by the hand of man, would be found the ‘much green grass’ still fresh in the spring of the year, when this event occurred, before it had faded away in the summer sun; the tall grass which, broken down by the feet of
are the vestiges of the Tillage (Tell), supposed to mark the site of the old town On the second stage of the hill immediately above, is a broad green platform where, on the 4 much grass, the multitudes may have been invited to rest. On the third stajte, at the summit of the eminence, is a bare ridge, the desert place,’ the mountain to which our Lord may have retired by Himself alone,’ overlooking from end to end the whole lake.” — - Stanley’s Sermons. Prince qf Wales, pp. 195, lid. the thousands there gathered together, would make, as it were, ’ couches ’ for them to recline upon. Overhanging the plain was ’ the mountain * range of Golan, on whose heights * Jesus sat with His disciples ’ and saw the multitude coming to them, and to which, when the feast was over, He again retired.“1 “The apostles arranged them in companies of fifty and a hundred, and as they sat in these orderly groups upon the grass, the gay red, and blue, and yellow colours of the clothing, which the poorest Orientals wear, called up in the imagination of St Peter a multitude of flower-beds in some well-cultivated garden.... They reclined in parterres, is the picturesque expression of St Mark.”8 We need not particularly rehearse the well-known sequel. — how a little lad from one of the adjoining hamlets, had in his possession, probably for the purpose of sale among these holiday crowds, five barley loaves and two small fishes. The Divine Master of the feast took the scanty material that was to suffice for the wants of a gathering of “five thousand men, besides women and children.” Looking up to heaven for a blessing, He brake and divided the five loaves and two fishes, giving the same into the hands of the disciples for distribution. And yet, after the hunger of the long-fasting multitude was satisfied, twelve wicker baskets of fragments — more than the original store — were gathered by the disciples’ hands.
1 8inai and Palestine, p. 377
Dr Farrar, vol. i. p. 400. “The r/xurcal,” remarks Archbishop Trench, •’are the square garden plots in which herbs are grown. Our English * in ranks ’ does not reproduce the picture to the eye, giving rather the notion of continuous lines.... Perhaps ‘in groups’ would be as near as we could get to it in Engl.sb,”
THE APOSTLESHIP.
M No fiery wing is seen to glide,
No cakes ambrosial are supplied,
But one poor fisher’s rude and scanty store
Is all He asks (and more than needs)
Who men and angels daily feeds, And stills the wailing seabird on the hungry shore.”
“Memorable, indeed, was the scene of the miraculous feeding of this vast multitude; memorable for the display of the creative power of the Eternal Son that was then made before more than five thousand witnesses; memorable too for the strange coincidence, that on the eve when the Paschal lambs were being offered up in the Temple courts of Jerusalem, the Eternal Lamb of God was feeding His people in the wilderness with the bread which His own Divine hands had multiplied. w 1 The shadows of evening fell, as the multitude, devoutly impressed with the marvellous scene, wended their way homewards by the lake-side. Night doubtless must have overtaken many of them before they reached the plain of Gennesaret. But they were independent of the hour, for the full Passover moon lighted up their pathway. It lighted also the pathway of a solitary Figure ascending once more these familiar, silent hills for purposes of devotion; — alone, yet not alone, for His Father was with Him.
“The Paschal moon above
Seems like a saint to rove.
Left shining in the world with Christ alone:
Below, the lake’s still face
Sleeps sweetly in th’ embrace
Of mountains terraced high with mossy stone.
i Ellieott, p. 196
” Here we may sit and dream
Over the heavenly theme,
Till to our soul the former days return:
Till on the grassy bed,
Where thousands once He fed,
The world’s incarnate Maker we discern.”
The incident which followed is too closely bound up with Peter’s history to be dismissed without special description. It brings out forcibly alike the lights and the shadows of his composite character, and will form the subject of the next chapter.