CHAPTER
IV. THE YEAR OF OBSCURITY.
56. The records of this year which we possess are extremely meager, comprising
only two or three incidents, which may be here enumerated, especially
as they form a kind of program of His future work.
Rodin's famed sculpture of John the Baptist.
57. When He emerged from the wilderness after the forty days of temptation,
with His grasp of His future plan tightened by that awful struggle and
with the inspiration of His baptism still swelling His heart, He appeared
once more on the bank of the Jordan, and John pointed Him out as the great
Successor to himself of whom he had often spoken. He especially introduced
Him to some of the choicest of his own disciples, who immediately became
His followers. Probably the very first of these to whom He spoke was the
man who was afterwards to be His favorite disciple and to give to the
world the divinest portrait of His character and life. John the Evangelist--for
he it was--has left an account of this first meeting and the interview
that followed it, which retains in all its freshness the impression which
Christ's majesty and purity made on his receptive mind. The other young
men who attached themselves to Him at the same time were Andrew, Peter,
Philip and Nathanael. They had been prepared for their new Master by their
intercourse with the Baptist, and, although they did not at once give
up their employments and follow Him in the same way as they did at a later
period, they received impressions at their very first meeting which decided
their whole after-career. The Baptist's disciples do not seem to have
at once gone over in a body to Christ. But the best of them did so. Some
mischief-makers endeavored to excite envy in his mind by pointing out
how his influence was passing away to Another. But they little understood
that great man, whose chief greatness was his humility. He answered them
that it was his joy to decrease, while Christ increased, for it was Christ
who as the Bridegroom was to lead home the bride, while he was only the
bridegroom's friend, whose happiness consisted in seeing the crown of
festal joy placed on the head of another.
58. With His newly attached followers Jesus departed from the scene of
John's ministry, and went north to Cana in Galilee, to attend a marriage
to which He had been invited. Here He made the first display of the miraculous
powers with which He had been recently endowed, by turning water into
wine. It was a manifestation of His glory intended especially for His
new disciples, who, we are told, thenceforward believed on Him, which
means, no doubt, that they were fully convinced that He was the Messiah.
It was intended also to strike the key-note of His ministry as altogether
different from the Baptist's. John was an ascetic hermit, who fled from
the abodes of men and called his hearers out into the wilderness. But
Jesus had glad tidings to bring to men's hearths; He was to mingle in
their common life and produce a happy revolution in their circumstances,
which would be like the turning of the water of their life into wine.
59. Soon after this miracle He returned again to Judea to attend the
Passover, and gave a still more striking proof of the joyful and enthusiastic
mood in which He was then living, by purging the temple of the sellers
of animals and the money changers, who had introduced their traffic into
its courts. These persons were allowed to carry on their sacrilegious
trade under the pretence of accommodating strangers who came to worship
at Jerusalem, by selling to them the victims which they could not bring
from foreign countries, and supplying, in exchange for foreign money,
the Jewish coins in which alone they could pay their temple dues. But
what had been begun under the veil of a pious pretext had ended in gross
disturbance of the worship, and in elbowing the Gentile proselytes from
the place which God had allowed them in His house. Jesus had probably
often witnessed the disgraceful scene with indignation during His visits
to Jerusalem, and now, with the prophetic zeal of His baptism upon Him,
He broke out against it. The same look of irresistible purity and majesty
which had appalled John, when He sought baptism, prevented any resistance
on the part of the ignoble crew, and made the onlookers recognize the
lineaments of the prophets of ancient days, before whom kings and crowds
alike were wont to quail. It was the beginning of His reformatory work
against the religious abuses of the time.
60. He wrought other miracles during the feast, which must have excited
much talk among the pilgrims from every land who crowded the city. One
result of them was to bring to His lodging one night the venerable and
anxious inquirer to whom He delivered the marvelous discourse on the nature
of the new kingdom which He had come to found, and the grounds of admission
to it, which has been preserved to us in the third chapter of John. It
seemed a hopeful sign that one of the heads of the nation should approach
Him in a spirit so humble; but Nicodemus was the only one of them on whose
mind the first display of the Messiah's power in the capital produced
a deep and favorable impression.
61. Thus far we follow clearly the first steps of Jesus. But at this
point our information in regard to the first year of His ministry, after
commencing with such fullness, comes to a sudden stop, and for the next
eight months we learn nothing more about Him but that He was baptizing
in Judea--"although Jesus Himself baptized not, but His disciples--and
that He made and baptized more disciples than John."
62. What can be the meaning of such a blank? It is to be noted, too,
that it is only in the Fourth Gospel that we receive even the details
given above. The Synoptists omit the first year of the ministry altogether,
beginning their narrative with the ministry in Galilee, and merely indicating
in the most cursory way that there was a ministry in Judea before.
63. It is very difficult to explain all this. The most natural explanation
would perhaps be, that the incidents of this year were imperfectly known
at the time when the Gospels were composed. It would be quite natural
that the details of the period when Jesus had not yet attracted much public
attention should be less accurately remembered than those of the period
when He was by far the best known personage in the country. But, indeed,
the Synoptists all through take little notice of what happened in Judea,
till the close of His life draws nigh. It is to John we are indebted for
the connected narrative of His various visits to the south.
64. But John, at least, could scarcely have been ignorant of the incidents
of eight months. We shall perhaps be conducted to the explanation by attending
to the little-noticed fact, which John communicates, that for a time Jesus
took up the work of the Baptist. He baptized by the hands of His disciples,
and drew even larger crowds than John. Must not this mean that He was
convinced, by the small impression which His manifestation of Himself
at the Passover had made, that the nation was utterly unprepared for receiving
Him yet as the Messiah, and that what was needed was the extension of
the preparatory work of repentance and baptism, and accordingly, keeping
in the background His higher character, became for the time the colleague
of John? This view is confirmed by the fact, that it was upon John's imprisonment
at this year's end that He opened fully His Messianic career in Galilee.
65. A still deeper explanation of the silence of the Synoptists over
this period, and their scant notice of Christ's subsequent visits to Jerusalem,
has been suggested. Jesus came primarily to the Jewish nation, whose authoritative
representatives were to be found at Jerusalem. He was the Messiah promised
to their fathers, the Fulfiller of the nation's history. He had indeed
a far wider mission to the whole world, but He was to begin with the Jews,
and at Jerusalem. The nation, however, in its heads at Jerusalem, rejected
Him, and so He was compelled to found His world-wide community from a
different centre. This having become evident by the time the Gospels were
written, the Synoptists passed His activity at the headquarters of the
nation, as a work with merely negative results, in great measure by, and
concentrated attention on the period of His ministry when He was gathering
the company of believing souls that was to form the nucleus of the Christian
Church. However this may be, certainly at the close of the first year
of the ministry of Jesus there fell already over Judea and Jerusalem the
shadow of an awful coming event--the shadow of that most frightful of
all national crimes which the world has ever witnessed, the rejection
and crucifixion by the Jews of their Messiah.
Chapter 3
Cahpter 5 Part A
This text is from James Stalker's Life of Christ. New York, London, Edinburgh, etc.: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1909. Transcribed by David Ash. Used by permission of David Ash, 2 March 2005. David Ash, pastor of Shiloh
Baptist Church, has placed several worthwhile texts online. View his list here. Images are from the CHI archives.
