Verses 1-12
Chapter 66
Readers of the Outside
The Pharisees and the Sadducees had looked upon the whole demonstration of evidence applied by Jesus Christ in the course of his varied and exciting ministry, and were exactly in the same condition of unbelief and disguised or avowed hostility as before. No impression had been made upon them of a vital kind. They had been dazed and stunned by a succession of miracles, but had not been convinced. Allowing that great and wonderful cures had been performed, they were piously anxious that now some sign should be shown to them from heaven. You can understand the unctuousness with which they pronounced that sacred word. They would now change the field of proof: a token from heaven would be exactly after the temper of their pious and noble mind. They had observed the wonderful deeds which had been done, which were of a material and sensational kind, and which were adapted in a kind of broad manner to a certain low type of mind but they desired a sign from heaven. The earth had been enough, and now they, wrapping their religious cloaks closely around them, desired a sign from heaven. Pious, sweet-souled, godly men, who were alive on the heavenly side of their nature, and who would accept any hint or claim that came from the sky, in infinite preference to the cures of the leprous, the dumb, the deaf, the blind, and the maimed.
This is a common and holy trick in all corrupt Churches. Give them what you may, they always want miracles of another kind. Their hearts are determined in unbelief, therefore do their minds affect to find fault with the evidence, or if not to find direct fault with it, to suggest supplementary demonstration of a totally different kind, and the corrupt Church is never so near its total damnation as when it affects its most unctuous piety and' wants a sign from heaven.
We want sermons of another kind, when the devil is twisting his fingers further and further round us. We admire the sermons that are delivered, but we would see a sermon from heaven. Such people grant the intellect but they affect to pine for the feeling. They do not deny the genius but they desire more spirituality. They do not doubt that good has been done in certain cases and to a certain class of minds, but they desire to see good of another kind done. This is a stock temptation of the old serpent. He says, "What you have to eat is all very good, but you ought to ask for something if not better, yet different. You cannot deny that notable miracles have been done, and that wonderful doctrine has been propounded. Admit all that: appear ever to be generous in your concessions, but ask for something different, play the pious trick." Old serpent, cunning and yet his cunning ought now to be so transparent that we should mock it and reject it with bitter scorn.
How did Jesus Christ treat this pious inquiry, this high spiritualism of desire? The answer which he returned was itself a sign from heaven had they who received it but have understood its scope and its purport. It was a two edged sword no other man in all human history could have made that reply. Observe its moral discernment. "O ye hypocrites." Unhappily we have only the cold ink to represent that word: we miss the atmosphere of its utterance, the emphasis which carried it straight into the guilty heart. "O ye hypocrites." Was not their pious speech about heaven, was not their question simple and direct, is there any one word in it that could give reasonable offence did they not belong to the spiritual section of the Church, the sighing, crying and sky-desiring section of the great family of human students and religious inquirers? "O ye hypocrites," that was a sign from heaven, to know them through their disguises, to accost the devil when he wore an angel's livery, to take him with mocking familiarity by the face and call him devil, notwithstanding his clothes that was a sign from heaven.
In the case of Jesus Christ we must always judge the question by the answer which he returns. We do not say everything in words: the big lie is in the heart and not in the speech. Christ answers the question we want to ask, and not merely the inquiry which we actually put in words. Was not this penetration of character a sign from heaven? Was he ever much grander and nobler than when he faced the Pharisees and Sadducees and answered the question about heaven by a charge of personal and unmixed hypocrisy? Did this Man palter with his age, did this Man pay a high price for popularity? Was this the way to increase his fame and his comfort? Would it not have been better for him to have taken the Pharisees and Sadducees into some quiet and sacred place and shown them tricks from heaven? Mark the stern and invincible consistency of this Man: he will have no compromise with hypocrisy. He will not enter into partnership on forbidden terms and with forbidden people. This is the eternal miracle of truth: it pierces us, being sharper than any two-edged sword. This is the proof of its inspiration which the Bible always gives. Do not find its inspiration in its literary conscientiousness, in its mechanical consistency, in its artistic finish find whether it is inspired or not by its moral penetration, moral omniscience, moral authority. In any right reading of this Book we stand in a holy place, cut off from everything else, made solemn by an unspeakable quietness, so quiet that a whisper is as thunder, so holy that a sigh may pollute the awful sanctity. So come to the question of the inspiration of Christ, and the inspiration of the Scriptures. Understand what the Bible is in its moral tone and moral claim, and as it warns off all generations of vipers and broods of serpents, and will have nothing to do with hypocrites and masked men and visored faces, learn that it is the very judgment of God amongst men, no more to be trifled with than is fire.
The moral discernment of Christ's answer justified the judicial tone by which he mocked the hypocritical inquirers. "When it is evening, ye say it will be fair weather, for the sky is red, and in the morning it will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and lowering." They were weather-wise, and nothing more, they mistook the sky for heaven, and the weather for a revelation. This is the perpetual mistake of men who have no inward and spiritual life. The temptation of today is that men should study the barometer. Such study has attained almost the dignity of a science the barometer is now a Bible. Jesus Christ does not condemn this study of the weather, he says it makes a man foolish if he can only do so much and do no more. A man's knowledge may itself be an argument against him if it stops short of wisdom; if the light that is in a man be darkness, how great is that darkness! Jesus allows that they who questioned him could read the face of the sky, but he charges them with inability to discern the signs of the times.
What would you say about a man who knew all the letters of the alphabet, but could not put them into words? How would you estimate the claim of any man to wisdom who knew every word in the English language, and yet never could arrange those words into sentences? It looks as if a man were certainly learned when he knows instantly every letter of the alphabet what more can any man know? He can repeat the alphabet backwards, forwards, onwards from any given letter what more can be desired? Yet as there are those who know the letters but cannot shape them into words, so are there men who can count upon their fingers the great dogmas of Christianity but cannot run them into musical utterance, or mass them into grand practical argument, or translate them into noble and beneficent life. They are weather-wise, letter-wise, and nothing more. Herein is the great difficulty of all-expanding revelation, and all-broadening and ever-enlarging and enlightening ministries amongst men. We cannot get them to understand that it is one thing to know the letters of the alphabet and a totally different thing to run those letters into words and those words into ample and eloquent sentences.
Jesus allows a certain amount of knowledge on the part of his interrogators, and then he mocks them as being only learned in the weather, skilled in the clouds, but having no eye to read the writing of the heavens. When you look upon the clouds you do not look upon the sky, when you look upon the sky you do not see into heaven, when you read letters you do not form words, when you pick out individual words you do not construct tuneful and inspiring sentences. Stop not short in your education, but get away from the letter to the word, from the word to the sentence, from the sentence to the meaning, from the meaning to the music, from the music to the Musician God.
Jesus Christ's answer was more than a mockery, it was also a revelation of the great fact that we are surrounded by legible and visible providences in human affairs. "Can ye not discern the signs of the times?" We should not need miracles if we could rightly read events that seems to be the spiritual doctrine of Jesus Christ: he teaches us that we have a sign from heaven every day, and that we only need the seeing eye to behold its lustre and beauty. It is thus that the Son of God lays his claim upon our attention and confidence by the breadth and more nobleness of his teaching. Whilst we with blatant curiosity and affected piety are wanting new signs and new tokens from heaven, he says, "God is revealing himself in all the processes of the age. in all the developments of civilization: you should read these things more carefully, and you would not be pining and sighing for other proofs and demonstrations of the divine finger."
Facts are lamps by which we should see God. The rapid and startling combination of events surprising the crafty by new conjectures and appalling the strong by unreckoned energies, are signs of a power as beneficent as it is unlimited. Ye can discern the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the signs of the times? The little that we can do is mocked by the great which we cannot do or a more cheering view is that the little we can do should be the stimulus to our attempts to still loftier and nobler discoveries. Can ye not discern the signs of the times? is a challenge and not a rebuke. Christianity always calls us to an interpretation of the events that make up the history of our own day. Daily journalism should be daily preaching: men who keep diaries should know that they are writing revelations from heaven. John Wesley was wont to say that he read the newspapers to see how God was governing the world. When journalism is honest without being pious, real and healthy without being sentimental, it will show us every day in its broad sheet a thousand signs from heaven.
Christianity therefore is a call to present day thinking. Venerable as it is with the colours of old time, it is yet modern in it? sympathy with human aspiration and its control over human motive and purpose. Not ancient history but modern activity comes within the claim and sovereignty of Christian faith. The Church must modernize itself, and for ever be the youngest as well as the oldest of human institutions.
Jesus Christ in closing, which he today practically does, the great series of miracles with which we have now become familiar, and in pointing to the signs of the times as God's revelations and tokens amongst us, takes his stand upon the broadest and most indestructible ground. This is a noble finish to the miracles. Again and again we shall see in further reading, a wonderful work here and there, but practically as to their massiveness and consecutiveness, the miracles are closed in this reading. Jesus Christ in retiring from a series of mighty works says, "If you want more miracles, more signs from heaven, look at events, study the history of your own time, from a religious standpoint survey the great march of civilization, the conflict of interests, the battle of truth against error, light against darkness, and he who reads the signs of the times aright will want no more miracles of the kind now closed, for his own life will be a wonder, every event upon earth will be an interposition from heaven."
This is healthy teaching, this is robust, masculine talk. The man who took this attitude was not afraid of his religion suffering from contact with material civilization and with public conflicts of all kinds. He was not only a God distant, infinite, impalpable and unnameable, but a Father in the household, watching all the family life, interposing in its succession of daily events and asserting himself with all the processes and developments of individual, social, and national life. This is a grand farewell. He is now about to be taken up from us into a loftier region of teaching, and before this intermediate ascension he says to us in broad noble speech, "Read the signs of the times, consider the events that are passing round about you, and you will have no further need for miracles and wonders of a kind to which you have now been long accustomed."
Let us learn then from Christ's answer that the events of the day are signs. The sign is always more than itself: the sign points to the thing signified. And let us also learn that these signs were meant to be studied. Jesus Christ would never refer us to unauthorized sources of thought and expression. God means his providences to be searched into, compared one with another, set in proper relation and succession. Have we the seeing eye? There is a shape in events; circumstances, occurrences, transactions are not unrelated stories, but they were meant to be put together to grow up into a holy temple unto the Lord, from the foundation to the loftiest pinnacle. Do not suppose that time is chaotic, look for the shape when you cannot see the shape, look for the shadow. Your affliction means something, your disappointments have a purpose, your successes have a divine meaning, your opportunities are doors opened by divine fingers. Fool is he who thinks that every event is but a laden vehicle that turns out its contents every night, and passes on to bring other contents and to throw them into the same shapeless heap.
Read the signs of your own life. Throw the memory of the heart back to the time when you were young, little, poor, unknown, misunderstood, misjudged, assailed, nearly ruined, often sick, sometimes friendless. How doors opened, how friends came, how unexpected voices broke in upon the solitude of your despair, how little gleams and glints of light stirred in upon the darkness of your dejection let the whole scene pass before your inner vision, and you will want no miracles of a sensational, external, and striking kind. You yourself will be the miracle, and unless a man feels himself to be a miracle, all written and historical miracles will be but so many stumbling-blocks to his faith. If we preach the miracles only along the line of merely intellectual enquiry, all nature will seem to be against us, great laws of continuity will assail our faith in every approach it makes towards the conclusion; but if we ourselves, being miracles, preach the consideration of Christ's wonderful works, they will seem to be part of himself, almost parts of ourselves, and we will know them by a masonry of the heart which has no words which can adequately express the subtlety of its penetration or the grasp of its power.
Though the written revelation has closed and no more ink can be added to God's Bible, living revelation is continual. Woe unto that man who takes his ink-horn and dips his pen, with the hope of adding anything to the Book to which God himself has added the grand Amen; but joy to that heart, a Sabbath every day, light upon light till the whole life burns with a sacred lustre, who sees God in Providence, reads him in daily events, hears his going in every click of the telegraph, sees him walking upon the waters, and watches him bringing chaos into order, tumult into peace and music.
A small event occurred afterward, a scene of blundering stupidity on the part of men who were nearest to him, and who ought to have heard the beating of his heart more clearly than others, but as we ourselves are making the same blunder every day, mistaking the letter for the spirit, the loaf for the doctrine, mixing up sacred and secular, and not able to distinguish the one from the other we had better not rebuke in terms too severe their stupidity, lest we inflict fatal wounds upon our own sagacity.
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