XVIII

THE SILENCE OF JESUS

In the history of our Lord's life nothing meets us more frequently than his power of reticence. It has been justly observed that the things that he did not say and do are as just a subject of admiration as the things that he said and did.

There is no more certain indication of inward strength than the power of silence. Hence the proverb that speech is silver and silence is golden. The Church of the middle ages had her treatises on "The Grace of Silence."

In the case of our Lord we have to remember first the thirty years of silence that preluded his ministry; thirty years in which he lived the life of a humble artisan in the obscure town of Nazareth. That he was during those years revolving all that higher wisdom which has since changed the whole current of human society there is little doubt. That his was a spirit from earliest life ardent and eager, possessed with the deepest enthusiasm, we learn from the one revealing flash in the incident recorded of his childhood, when he entered the school of the doctors in the temple and became so absorbed in hearing and asking questions that time, place, and kindred were all forgotten. Yet, eager as he was, he made no petulant objection to his mother's recall, but went down to Nazareth with his parents and was subject to them. This ardent soul retreated within itself, and gathered itself up in silence and obedience.

When, at the age of thirty, he rose in the synagogue of his native place and declared his great and beautiful mission it is quite evident that he took everybody by surprise. No former utterances, nothing in his previous life, had prepared his townsfolk for this. They said, "How knoweth this man letters? Is not this the carpenter?" What habitual silence and reticence is here indicated! For this was the same Jesus whose words, when he did speak, had that profound and penetrating power that stirred the hearts of men, and have gone on since stirring them as no other utterances ever did. But when he did speak his words were more mighty from the accumulated force of repression. They fell concentrated and sparkling like diamonds that had been slowly crystallizing in those years of silence; they were utterances for time and for eternity.

In like manner we see numerous indications that he withdrew from all that was popular and noisy and merely sensational with a deep and real distaste. So far as possible he wrought his miracles privately. He enjoined reticence and silence on his disciples. He said, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation." He pointed to the grain of mustard seed and the hidden leaven as types of its power.

In the same way we see him sometimes receiving in silence prayers for help which he intended to answer. When the Syro-Phœnician woman cried to him to heal her daughter, it is said "he answered her never a word;" yet healing was in his heart. His silence was the magnet to draw forth her desire, to intensify her faith and reveal to his disciples what there was in her.

So, too, when word was sent from the sisters of Bethany, "Lord, behold he whom thou lovest is sick," he received it in the same silence. It is said, "Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus; when he had heard, therefore, that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was." In those two days of apparent silent neglect, how many weary hours to the anxious friends watching for him who could help, and who yet did not come! But the silence and the wailing ended in a deeper joy at the last. The sorrow of one family was made the means of a record of the Saviour's tenderness and sympathy and his triumphant power over death, which is for all time and for every mourner. As he gave Lazarus back whole and uninjured from the grave, so he then and there promised to do for every one who believes in him: "He that believeth on me shall never die."

In the family of the Saviour was a false friend whose falseness was better known to the Master than perhaps to himself. He knew the falsity of Judas to his trust in the management of the family purse, yet he was silent. He sought the sympathy of no friend; he did not expose him to the others. From time to time he threw out general warnings that there was one among them that was untrue—warnings addressed to his conscience alone. But he changed in no degree his manner toward him; he did not withhold the kiss at meeting and parting, nor refuse to wash his feet with the others; and the traitor went out from the last meeting to finish his treachery, leaving his brethren ignorant of his intended crime. This loving, forbearing silence with an enemy—keeping him in his family, treating him with unchanging love yet with warning faithfulness, never uttering a word of complaint and parting at last in sorrow more than anger—was the practical comment left by Jesus on his own words: "Love your enemies, that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to shine on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." This, the last, the highest grade in the science of love, is one that few Christians even come within sight of. To bear an enemy near one's person, perfectly to understand his machinations, and yet feel only unchanging love and pity, carefully to guard his character, never to communicate to another the evil that we perceive, to go on in kindness as the sunshine goes on in nature—this is an attainment so seldom made that when made it is hard to be understood. If the example of Jesus is to be the rule by which our attainments are finally to be measured, who can stand in the judgment?

The silence of Jesus in his last trial before Herod and Pilate is no less full of sublime suggestion. We see him standing in a crowd of enemies clamorous, excited, eager, with false witnesses distorting his words, disagreeing with each other, agreeing only in one thing: the desire for his destruction. And Pilate says, "Answerest thou nothing? Behold how many things they witness against thee." It was the dead silence that more than anything else troubled and perplexed the Roman governor. After he has given up his victim to the brutalities of the soldiery, to the scourging and the crown of thorns, he sends for him again for a private examination. "Whence art thou? Speakest thou not to me? Knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee and power to release thee?" In all the brief replies of Jesus there is no effort to clear himself, no denial of the many things witnessed against him. In fact, from the few things that he did say on the way to the cross, it would seem that his soul abode calmly in that higher sphere of love in which he looked down with pity on the vulgar brutality that surrounded him. The poor ignorant populace shouting they knew not what, the wretched scribes and chief priests setting the seal of doom on their nation, the stolid Roman soldiers trained in professional hardness and cruelty—he looked down on them all with pity. "Daughters of Jerusalem," he said to the weeping women, "weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children." And a few moments later, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

We are told by the Apostles that this Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The silence of God in presence of so much that moves human passions is one of the most awful things for humanity to contemplate. But if Jesus is his image this silence is not wrathful or contemptuous, but full of pity and forgiveness.

The silence and the great darkness around the cross of Calvary were not the silence of gathering wrath and doom. God, the forgiving, was there, and the way was preparing for a new and unequaled era of forgiving mercy. The rejected Jesus was exalted to the right hand of God, not to fulfill a mission of wrath, but to "give repentance and remission of sins."