XII

THE FRIENDSHIPS OF JESUS

In turning our thoughts toward various scenes of our Lord's life, we are peculiarly affected with the human warmth and tenderness of his personal friendships. The little association of his own peculiar friends makes a picture that we need to study to understand him.

St. John touchingly says: "Now when the time was come that Jesus should depart out of the world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world he loved them unto the end." When we think that all that we know of our Lord comes through these friends of his—the witnesses and recorders of his life and death—we shall feel more than ever what he has made them to us. Without them we should have had no Jesus.

Our Lord, with all that he is to us, is represented to us through the loving hearts and affectionate records of these his chosen ones. It is amazing to think of, that our Lord never left to his church one line written by his own hand, and that all his words come to us transfused through the memories of his friends. How much to us, then, were these friendships of Jesus—how dear to us, for all eternity, these friends!

We are told that immediately after the resurrection there was an associated church of one hundred and twenty, who are characterized by Peter as "men that have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us."

The account of how these friends were gathered to him becomes deeply interesting. St. John relates how, one day, John the Baptist saw Jesus walking by the Jordan in silent contemplation, and pointed him out to his disciples: "Behold the Lamb of God." And the two disciples heard him speak and followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned and said, "What seek ye?" They said, "Master, where dwellest thou?" He answered, "Come and see." They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day. We learn from this that some of the disciples were those whose spiritual nature had been awakened by John the Baptist, and who, under his teaching, were devoting themselves to a religious life. We see the power of personal attraction possessed by our Lord, which drew these simple, honest natures to himself. One of these men was Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, and he immediately carried the glad tidings to his brother, "We have found the Messiah;" and he brought him to Jesus. Thus, by a sort of divine attraction, one brother and friend bringing another, the little band increased. Some were more distinctly called by the Master. Matthew, the tax-gatherer, sitting in his place of business, heard the words, "Follow me," and immediately rose up, and left all and followed him. James and John forsook their nets, in the midst of their day's labor, to follow him. In time, a little band of twelve left all worldly callings and home ties, to form a traveling mission family of which Jesus was the head and father. Others, both men and women, at times traveled with them and assisted their labors; but these twelve were the central figures.

These twelve men Jesus took to nurture and educate as the expounders of the Christian religion and the organizers of the church. St. John, in poetic vision, sees the church as a golden city descending from God out of heaven, having twelve foundations, and in them the names of these twelve Apostles of the Lamb. This plan of choosing honest, simple-hearted, devout men, and revealing himself to the world through their human nature and divinely educated conceptions, had in it something peculiar and original.

When we look at the selection made by Christ of these own ones, we see something widely different from all the usual methods of earthly wisdom. They were neither the most cultured nor the most influential of their times. The majority of them appear to have been plain workingmen, from the same humble class in which our Lord was born. But the Judæan peasant, under the system of religious training and teaching given by Moses, was no stolid or vulgar character. He inherited lofty and inspiring traditions, a ritual stimulating to the spiritual and poetic nature, a system of ethical morality and of tenderness to humanity in advance of the whole ancient world. A good Jew was frequently a man of spiritualized and elevated devotion. Supreme love to God and habitual love and charity to man were the essentials of his religious ideal. The whole system of divine training and discipline to which the Jewish race had been subjected for hundreds of years had prepared a higher moral average to be chosen from than could have been found in any other nation.

When Jesus began to preach, it was the best and purest men that most deeply sympathized and were most attracted, and from them he chose his intimate circle of followers—to train them as the future Apostles of his religion.

The new dispensation that Jesus came to introduce was something as yet uncomprehended on earth. It was a heavenly ideal, and these men—simple, pure-hearted, and devout as they were—had no more conception of it than a deaf person has of music. It was a new manner of life, a new style of manhood, that was to constitute this kingdom of Heaven. It was no outward organization—no earthly glory. Man was to learn to live, not by force, not by ambition, not by pleasure, but by Love. Man was to become perfect in love as God is, so that loving and serving and suffering for others should become a fashion and habit in this world, where ruling and domineering and making others suffer had been the law. And Jesus took into his family twelve men to prepare them to be the Apostles of this idea. His mode was more that of a mother than a father. He strove to infuse Himself into them by an embracing, tender, brooding love; ardent, self-forgetful, delicate, refined. As we read the New Testament narrative of the walks and talks of Jesus with these chosen ones, their restings by the wayside, their family conversations at evening, when he sat with some little child on his knee, when he listened to their sayings, reproved their failings, settled their difficulties with one another, we can see no image by which to represent the Master but one of those loving, saintly mothers, who, in leading along their little flock, follow nearest in the footsteps of Jesus.

Jesus trusted more to personal love, in forming his church, than to any other force. The power of love in developing the intellect and exciting the faculties is marked, even on the inferior animals. The dog is changed by tender treatment and affectionate care; he becomes half human, and seems to struggle to rise out of the brute nature toward a beloved master. Rude human natures are correspondingly changed, and he who has great power of loving and exciting love may almost create anew whom he will.

Jesus, that guest from brighter worlds, brought to this earth the nobler ideas of love, the tenderness, the truth, the magnanimity, that are infinite in the All-Loving. What of God could be expressed and understood by man He was, and St. John says of his ethereal gentleness and sweetness of nature: "The light shined in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not."

The varieties of natural character in this family of Jesus were such as to give most of the usual differences of human beings. The Master's object was to unite them to each other by such a love that they should move by a single impulse, as one human being, and that what was lacking in one might be made up by what was abundant in another. As He expressed it in his last prayer: "That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me."

How diverse were the elements! Simon Peter, self-confident, enthusiastic, prompt to speak and to decide. Thomas, slow and easily disheartened; always deficient in hope, and inclined to look upon the dark side, yet constant unto death in his affections. James and John, young men of the better class, belonging to a rich family, on terms of intimate acquaintance with the High Priest. Of these brothers, John is the idealist and the poet of the little band, but far from being the weak and effeminate character painters and poets have generally conceived. James and John were surnamed Boanerges—"sons of thunder." They were the ones who wanted to call down fire on the village that refused to receive their Lord. It was they who joined in the petition preferred by their mother for the seat of honor in the future kingdom. Young, ardent, impetuous, full of fire and of that susceptibility to ambition which belongs to high-strung and vivid organizations, their ardor was like a flame, that might scorch and burn as well as vivify. Then there was Matthew, the prosaic, the exact matter-of-fact man, whose call it was to write what critics have called the bodily gospel of our Lord's life, as it was that of John to present the inner heart of Jesus. These few salient instances show the strong and marked diversities of temperament and character which Jesus proposed to unite into one whole, by an intense personal love which should melt down all angles, and soften asperities, and weld and blend the most discordant elements. It is the more remarkable that he undertook this task with men in mature life, and who had already been settled in several callings, and felt the strain of all those causes which excite the individual self-love of man.

In guiding all these, we can but admire the perfect tolerance of the Master toward the wants of each varying nature. Tolerance for individual character is about the last Christian grace that comes to flower in family or church. Much of the raspings, and gratings, and complaints in family and church are from the habit of expecting and exacting that people should be what they never were made to be. Our Lord did not reprove Thomas for being a despondent doubter, beset by caution even when he most longed to believe. He graciously granted the extremest test which his hopeless nature required—he suffered him to put his finger in the print of the nails and to examine the wounded side; and there is but a tender shadow of a reproof in what he said—"Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed." In our day there are many disciples of Thomas, loving doubters, who would give their hearts' blood to fully believe in this risen Jesus; they would willingly put their hands in the print of the nails; and for them the Master has a spiritual presence and a convincing nearness, if they will but seek it. So, again, we notice the tender indulgence with which the self-confident Peter is listened to as he always interposes his opinion. We think we can see the Master listening with a grave smile, as a mother to her eldest and most self-confident boy. Sometimes he warmly commends, and sometimes he bears down on him with a sharpness of rebuke which would have annihilated a softer nature. When Peter officiously counsels worldly expediency, and the avoidance of the sufferings for which Jesus came, the reply is sharp as lightning: "Get thee behind me, Satan; thou art an offence unto me; for thou savorest not the things of God, but those that be of man." Yet we can see that the Master knows his man, and knows just how hard to strike. That eager, combative, self-confident nature not only can bear sharp treatment, but must have it at times, or never come to anything. We see Peter's self-asserting nature spring up after it, cheerful as ever. He yields to the reproof; but he is Peter still, prompt with his opinion at the next turn of affairs, and the Master would not for the world have him anybody else but Peter.

We see also that it was a manner of the Master to deal with the conscience of his children, and rebuke their faults without exposing them to the censure of others. When he saw that the sin of covetousness was growing upon Judas, leading to dishonesty, he combated it by the most searching and stringent teaching. "Beware of covetousness, for a man's life consisteth not in the things that he possesseth;" this and other passages, which will be more fully considered in another chapter, would seem to have been all warnings to Judas, if he would but have listened.

So, too, his tenderness for John, whom tradition reports to have been the youngest of the disciples, marked a delicate sense of character. To lean on his bosom was not sought by Matthew or Thomas, though both loved him supremely; it fell to the lot of John,—as in a family flock, where one, the youngest and tenderest, is always found silently near the mother; the others smile to see him always there, and think it well. There are in St. John's narrative touches of that silent accord between him and Jesus, that comprehension without words, which comes between natures strung alike to sympathy. To him Jesus commended his mother, as the nearest earthly substitute for himself. Yet, after all, when for this one so dear, so accordant with his own personal feelings, a request was made for station and honor in the heavenly kingdom, he promptly refused. His personal affection for his friends was to have no undue influence in that realm of things which belonged to the purely divine disposal. "The kingdom of heaven is within you," he taught; and John's place in the spiritual domain must depend upon John's own spirit.

There is one trait in the character of these chosen disciples of Christ which is worth a special thought. They were not, as we have seen, in any sense remarkable men intellectually, but they had one preparation for the work for which Jesus chose them which has not been a common one, either then or since. They were wholly consecrated to God. It is not often we meet with men capable of an entire self-surrender; these men were. They were so entirely devoted to God that, when Jesus called on them to give up their worldly callings and forsake all they had, to follow him, they obeyed without a question or a hesitating moment. How many men should we find in the church now that would do the same? Christ proposed this test to one young ruler,—amiable, reverent, moral, and religious,—and he "went away sad." He could do a great deal for God, but he could not give up ALL. Christ's disciples gave ALL to him, and therefore he gave ALL to them. Therefore he gave them to share his throne and his glory. The Apocalyptic vision showed graven on the foundations of the golden city the names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb, those true-hearted men who were not only to be the founders of his church on earth, but were, while he was yet in the flesh, his daily companions, his friends, "his own."