Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/696

66G JESUS Pharisaic spies from Jerusalem especially watched His Sabbath proceedings. Again and again their hatred was kindled on this point. Now they indignantly challenged the conduct of the hungry disciples for plucking ears of corn and rubbing them in their hands on the Sabbath day ; on another occasion they attacked Him for healing on the Sabbath day the man with the withered hand, and later on for healing the bowed woman, and the blind man at Jerusalem. On each of these occasions He exposed with irresistible demonstration their inconsistency and hypocrisy, but thereby only deepened their anger against Him. On other occasions He came into violent collision with their whole system of traditional ceremonialism by pouring con tempt on their superfluous and meaningless ablutions, by showing how comparatively meaningless was their scru pulosity about clean and unclean meats, and generally by denouncing the spirit which had led them to place the cumbrous pettinesses of their oral law above the word of God and the inmost spirit of all true religion. The rage of His Pharisaic opponents culminated on one day of open and final rapture between Himself and the spies of the Sanhedrin. Finding Him standing in silent prayer, the disciples had asked Him to teach them to pray, and in reply He had taught them " the Lord s prayer," and told them, in such accents as man had never heard before, about the fatherhood of God, and the consequent efficacy of prayer. Shortly afterwards He had wrought one of His most marvel lous curss upon a poor wretch who was at once blind, dumb, and mad. The Pharisees felt bound to check the astonished admiration which this act had onse more excited, and with impotent and stupid malignity had tried to teach their followers that He cast out devils by Beelzebub the prince of the devils. This blasphemous folly had drawn down upon their heads words of rebuke more intense and stern than they had ever heard. Such words, addressed to men accustomed to unbounded admiration as infallible teachers, aroused them to the deadliest hostility, and they soon found a weapon of annoyance and injury by demanding on every possible occasion that " sign from heaven " which Jesus always refused to give. Their exacerbation seems to have alarmed His mother and brethren into the third of their ill-timed interferences, which Jesus had once more to check by declaring that the day had now come on which human relationships were as nothing compared to the spiritual. The time for the mid-day meal had now arrived, and Jesus accepted, though it seems to have been given in no good spirit, the invitation of a Pharisee to break bread in his house. On entering He at once sat down at table, since it was but a brief and trivial meal, perhaps of bread and fruits, and the multitude were waiting outside to hear the word of God. Instantly He recognized that He was alone in the midst of enemies, and, moved to deep indignation by their hypocrisy and baseness, He delivered a terrible denunciation of the whole system and religion of the legalists and Pharisees. The feast broke up in confusion, and the guests began to surround Jesus with vehement, taunting, and threatening demonstrations. 1 Passing from amongst them He found the multitude actually treading on each other in their haste and eagerness, and perhaps it was to their pre sence that He owed His safety. He preached to them a sermon, characterized throughout by the deep emotions by which His spirit had been agitated, of which the main topic was the awful peril of hypocrisy and greed ; and then as though some solemn agony had passed over His spirit He warned them of the signs of the times, and of the awful consequences of rejecting His teaching. (4) With that day of conflict ended the second and darker stage of His work in Galilee. The remainder of His life 1 Luke xi. 53. was mainly passed in flight, in peril, and in concealment, only broken by brief occasional appearances in Galilee and Jerusalem. He departed from Capernaum, and went into the heathen region of Tyre and Sidon. But few particulars of this period are recorded. Somewhere in those regions He tested the strong faith of the Syro-Phoenician woman, and healed her demoniac daughter. From Tyre and Sidon He wandered southwards again, keeping mainly to the eastward and less inhabited region, only now and then healing a sufferer, but gradually attracting crowds once more. Somewhere on the Peraean side of the lake He fed the four thousand. After this period of wandering and absence He once more sailed to Magdala, but was met immediately by the ominous conjunction of Herodians and Pharisees with their hostile demand for a sign. Turning away from them, He uttered His last sad farewell and prophecy to the cities in which He had laboured, and once more journeyed northwards. During this journey they came near to Caesarea Philippi, and, after standing in silent prayer, He asked His disciples " Whom do men say that I the Son of man am 1 " The sorrowful confession had to be made that, though they recognized Him as a prophet, they had not recognized Him as the Messiah. Then came the momentous question, which was to test how much of His task was accomplished in the hearts of those apostles whose training had now for some time been His principal work, " But whom say ye that I am V Then it was that Peter won the immortal glory of giving that which has thenceforth been the answer of all the Christian world, " Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God." That answer is the inauguration, in human convictions, of Christianity and of Christendom ; and it was rewarded by the promise of the power of the keys, and the power to bind and loose, and the foundation of the Christian church upon a rock. Whatever may be the difficulties of the passage, we see that Jesus meant to confer on His church the teaching power of which the key was the symbol, the power of legislative action indicated by binding and loosing, and the prophetic insight on which depended the ability to absolve in God s name. But to obviate all delusions He at once revealed to them the dark abyss of suffering down which He had first to tread ; and, as though to prove how little claim His words gave to sacerdotal usurpations, He proceeded to rebuke in the sternest words the presumption of Peter, who ventured to set aside His predictions as to His coming sufferings and death. It was six days after this that He took the three most chosen apostles with Him up the snowy slopes of Hermon, where they witnessed the transfiguration, as though to strengthen their faith in the dark hours to corne. On descending the hill, He healed the demoniac boy whom the apostles had vainly tried to help, and built on this exorcism the lesson of faith which He was never weary of inculcating on His followers. Having now reached the northern limit of the Holy Land, He turned His footsteps southwards by the most secluded paths, omitting no opportunity to train the apostles, now teaching them humility by the example of a little child, and now warning them by significant parables of the need of self-sacrifice and of the spirit of forgiveness. (5) At the ensuing Feast of Tabernacles we find Him once more at Jerusalem, where He appeared suddenly in the temple. St John records His teachings, drawn from the various incidents of the feast, and also the divided opinions of the people, and the almost unanimous opposition of the ruling classes. This visit to the Holy City was marked by the incident of the woman taken in adultery, in which He showed such sovereign wisdom and tenderness, and by the Sabbatarian disputes which arose from the healing of the blind man. On one occasion Jesus had to leave the temple amid a burst of fury in which the Jews threatened