strate. They assume to be impartial investigators; to be ready to acknowledge Christ's divine commission upon the presentation of adequate evidence. "Master," they say, "we would see a sign from thee."* But no sign could convince them. It is the will, not the intellect, which needs to be changed. And Christ, refusing their request, declares that it is the Pharisees who have cast out the devil by the prince of devils, and that the Jewish nation, cleansed by their reformation of its idolatries, but inspired with no new life, is like a man from whom the single devil has been cast out only that seven devils may take his place, who make his last state worse than the first.f Thus, at length, war is openly declared between Jesus and the Pharisees-that war which, descending a legacy to his successors and to theirs, will only cease when Christ shall have perfectly purified his people of all pretense, stripped them of all disguises, and presented his Church faultless before the throne of his Father, without spot, or wrinkle, or blemish, or any such thing. CHAPTER XX. PARABLES AND PHILIPPICS. ENCEFORTH the teaching of Jesus undergoes a marked change. He more and more distinctly announces the radical principles of his kingdom. He foreshadows the necessity of conflict and of self-sacrifice in order to its establishment. To the simple enunciation of a gospel which is glad tidings of great joy to all people, he adds weighty denunciations of those who, having shut themselves out of the kingdom of God, will not suffer others either to go in.* He begins to use more evidently that fan which John described as being in his hand, and wherewith he would thoroughly purge his Church. This change in his teaching is seen alike in his addresses to the Pharisees, to his own disciples, and to the common people. Now, for the first time, he openly warns the people to beware of the corrupting influence of Pharisaism. Hypocrisy is the characteristic sin, as it is the greatest danger of corrupt and degenerate times. Against it he has already warned his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount. But now, before crowded audiences, he denounces the religious teachers of his day as hypocrites. He borrows the invectives of his forerunner; describes the Pharisees as a generation of vipers;§ compares them to a poisonous tree which can only produce poisonous fruits;|| their influence to leaven, secret, insidious, and therefore the more powerful. He points out the folly of their concealments by foreshadowing the judgment when + Matt. xv., 7. § Matt. xii., 34. * Luke, xi., 52. Matt. xii., 33. Luke iii., 17. ¶ Matt. xvi., 5-12; Mark viii., 13–21. S "there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; neither hid that shall not be known."* They are perpetually demanding some miraculous sign of his Messiahship. He exposes the false pretenses of this demand. They study the heavens for the signs of the weather. They know from clouds in the west that a shower is at hand; from the south winds that desert heats are coming. But they can not discern, because they will not study, the signs of the times. The very air is full of portents. Elias has come in John the Baptist, last of the prophets, forerunner of his Lord. The nation has listened with awe to his teachings. The Pharisees alone have rejected him whom they could not use. And now a greater than John the Baptist is in their midst. Least of the miracles which he has wrought are those on the blind, the deaf, the possessed, the sick, the dead. The whole nation, aroused from its lethargy at his words, as was the only son of the widowed mother, witness to the life-giving power of his doctrine. The worst, the wickedest, the abandoned, the very dregs of Galilee, have turned their backs upon their haunts of vice to welcome him who alone has ever warmed their hearts to love. A greater sign than gave authority to the teaching of Jonah, a greater glory than robed Solomon, characterizes the advent of him who is greater than the prophet or the king. Asserting this, Jesus warns them that the Queen of the South and the city of Nineveh, heathen though they were, will rise up in the day of judgment to condemn these hypocrites that recognize not their Lord, and refuse to acknowledge his royalty, to receive his love, or to heed his solemn warnings.§ He rebukes, in caustic terms, that spirit of willfulness which led them to turn deaf ears alike to the Baptist's proclaiming of the law and his own heralding of the Gospel. He compares them to children at play in the market-place, who sit willful and sullen, refusing every call to join in the + Matt. xii., 38; Luke xi., 16; John ii., 18; vi., 30. § Matt. xii., 38-42; Luke xi., 16, 29–32. *Luke xii., 1-3. Luke xii., 54-56. games of their comrades. John came preaching the law, warning of judgment, inviting to sackcloth and ashes, to tears and fasting. The Pharisee declared he had a devil. Jesus himself came eating and drinking, and inviting to a life of liberty and a religion of joyfulness. They sneeringly said, "Behold a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners." They would neither dance when Christ piped, nor weep when John mourned. But the divine wisdom, which speaks in different tongues and employs different methods, now with seeming severity in John the Baptist, now with invincible love in Jesus, will be justified, Jesus says, by all the true children of God.* The days are full of violence. The blood of a Jew is naught to a Roman. In the crowd that gathers at Jerusalem on every great feast-day are always some turbulent spirits, impatient of Roman bondage, and not intelligent enough to see that their riotings only make the yoke sit heavier upon their necks. In the Temple a tumult has lately been raised, the soldiery have been called in, and the people have fallen unwilling sacrifices on their own altars. A tower, too, has recently fallen in Siloam, and killed eighteen, who were buried beneath its ruins. These events have made an impression on the public mind. Christ seizes them; he ordains them prophets. These scenes of violence, he says, are but the distant mutterings of the gathering storm. Nothing but genuine repentance can avert it. He sees, with prophetic vision, the dreadful scenes of carnage which, later, characterize the destruction of Jerusalem, when the Roman legions become Matt. xi., 16-19; Luke vii., 31-35. Such we understand to be the meaning of this passage, in spite of Alford (in loco) and Lange (Life of Christ, vol. iii., p. 111), who give a reverse interpretation, making it the Pharisees who have alternately invited John the Baptist and Christ to join their mimicry. But it is not against waywardness, nor even against hypocrisy, that Jesus is warning here, but against a sullen rejection not merely of John the Baptist and of Jesus, but of God, by whom both were sent, though in a different sense, and who thus, by opposite methods, endeavored, though unavailingly, to reclaim his people. † See Josephus, Antiq., xvii., 9, § 3; 10, § 2; Wars of the Jews, ii., 9, § 4. high-priests of cruelty and death; when the streams that flow from the Temple run in a ruddy torrent, swollen and red with the blood of the Jewish priests and the Jewish people; and when the falling walls of the sanctuary, which God no longer recognizes as his own, whelm thousands in its own destruction. With solemn mien, he points to these foreshadowings of that scene of carnage and death. "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish," he says-perish, that is, by the same sword of the Roman, and by the like crumbling wall.* He adds solemnity to this warning by a figure borrowed from one of the ancient prophets. He compares the Jewish nation to a householder's favorite fig-tree. It has enjoyed rare advantages. The law, the prophets, the Church of God, and his peculiar providences have been the portion of this favored people. But it has borne no fruit save in Pharisaic piety. Nay, because of it, the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles; and Jesus warns his audience that the object of divine culture is divine fruit, and that this barren nation will not be suffered long to cumber the ground. The patience of God, that waited a hundred and twenty years before the Deluge destroyed a sinful race; that listened with willing ear to Abraham's intercession for the cities of the plain; that bore long and suffered much with the Jews in past wanderings, is now well-nigh exhausted. Already the edict has gone forth, "Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?" an edict whose instant execution only the intercession of Christ has for a little longer stayed.§ He openly denounces the Pharisaic ceremonialism. The dry and dusty soil, the custom of traveling with unprotected feet, the habits of the table, each guest helping himself with his fingers from a common dish, render, in the Orient, constant ablutions necessary for cleanliness. Religious considerations *Luke xiii., 1-5. There is nothing to fix the date of the incidents here referred to. We follow Robinson in placing Christ's reference to it here. Townsend (New Test., p. 125), Milman (Hist. of Christianity, p. 105), and Andrews (Life of our Lord, p. 366) put it later. Rom. ii., 24. + Isa. v., 1-7. § Luke xiii., 6-9. |