If prayer may be heard for a man himself, it almost follows that it must be heard for others. It cannot fit the spirit of Christianity, whose essential expression is its founder’s sacrifice, that a man be heard only when he prays for himself. In the preceding group faith was required of the person healed; here it is required of the one who asks. This is no different principle. The patient’s faith was not essential to his bodily cure, though it favoured it; it was necessary to the higher, spiritual cure for which the Master chiefly brought about the lower. In both cases the demand for faith is for the sake of those who ask, whether for themselves or friends: a breath to blow the smoking flax into flame, a word to draw them closer to him. He cured many without such a demand, as his Father is ever curing without prayer, and cure itself will sometimes generate prayer and faith. So it was well that the cure of others should sometimes be granted to prayer.
Beyond this, there is a great fitness in the thing. Men are so bound together that no good comes to one without all sharing it: children suffer for the father, the father for the children, and they are blessed together. A spiritual good coming to a leader of the nation is one the whole people share. To increase the father’s faith may do more for the faith of the child healed at his prayer than anything done for the child himself. It enlarges one of the many channels of the divinest gifts, which flow to men at first chiefly through fellows nearer the Father than they, until they too speak to God face to face.
Every man, in his highest moments of spiritual vision and even his simplest sense of duty, turns lonely to the one Father, his own maker. He may painfully feel that the best beloved does not understand as he does, yet in his most isolated adoration he is nearer every beloved person than when eye meets eye or the poor dumb hand tries to tell the emotion within. The man who prays becomes, in proportion to the purity of his prayer, a spiritual power, a nerve from the divine brain, from which power goes forth anew upon his fellows. He redistributes the divine blessing, not by exercising his own will (the cesspool toward which all notions of priestly mediation sink) but as the self-forgetting, God-loving brother of his kind, who would be in the world as Christ was. When a man prays for wife, child, parent, sibling or friend, the connection between them is so close in God that the blessing begged may well flow to the end of the prayer. Such a man is, in his poor, far-off way, an advocate with the Father like Jesus Christ the Righteous. He takes his friend into the presence with him, or leaves him with only the veil between, and they touch through the veil.
The first instance of this kind occurred at Cana in Galilee, where the first miracle was wrought. It is the second miracle in St John’s record, and his alone; these two evidently attracted him especially, water turned into wine and a son restored to his father. God’s Fatherhood created fatherhood in man. What shall a father do who is given a son he cannot keep, the divine love in his heart cleaving to a vanishing child? What can this nobleman do but seek the man of whom such wondrous rumours have reached him?
Between Cana and Tiberias, from which the father came with his prayer, was about twenty miles.
“He is at the point of death,” said the father.
“Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe,” said Jesus.
“Sir, come down before my child dies.”
“Go your way; your son lives.”
If the nobleman understood the Lord’s remark at all, he was in no mood for principles, and respectfully protests at time spent in words when the need was urgent. Whatever the Lord meant, he pressed it no further, but sent him home with the assurance of the boy’s recovery, showing none of the signs or wonders he had spoken of. An unbelieving man, finding that all had happened naturally, would have slipped back into carelessness about a higher will. But when this man heard that the boy began to mend the very hour Jesus spoke, a fact easily dismissed as coincidence, he believed, and all his household with him. He was probably the real head of his house, the main source of its influences; if so, a man of faith, for where a man does not look up to the higher, the lower will hardly look up faithfully to him; a fit man to intercede for his son. It may be said they shared in the evidence, hardly a sign or wonder to them. True; but people are not ready to believe the best evidence unless predisposed toward it. If it be said, “They should have thought for themselves,” I answer that thinking with their head was no bad sign that they did. Much of what is called freedom of thought is mere self-assertion that persuades itself of a freedom it cannot have without an effort too painful for ignorance and self-indulgence; to assert one’s individuality is not necessarily to be free, and may come of absolute slavery.
But if the nobleman was a man of faith, why did our Lord say, “Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe”? I am not sure. It may have been a rebuke to those about him. If he was, as is said, a nobleman of Herod’s court and not a pure-bred Jew, the remark would carry what the Lord spoke more plainly in the next two cases, the Greek woman and the Roman centurion: “Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe; but this man—.” The words, though, were plainly addressed to the man. Even so, the Lord may have wanted to draw him out, a Gentile or doubtful Jew, to rebuke the disciples; but his love for his son stood in the way, which makes it unsatisfactory. I prefer another interpretation, since the first is found elsewhere and this one is universal and of special value to us, applying to men of science and men of superstition alike.
My impression is that our Lord, seeing the nobleman’s great faith, grounded on what he had heard of the Master, chiefly of his signs and wonders, required in this remark a higher faith still. It sounds to me like an expostulation. I would dare to imagine him speaking so:
“Why do you not pray to the Father? Why must you always see? The door of prayer has been open since God made man in his own image; why do you need signs and wonders? But I will do just what my Father would have done had you asked him. Only when I do it, it is a sign and a wonder that you may believe, and I wish you could believe without it. If you cannot believe for the word and the truth, believe for the work’s sake. Go your way; your son lives.”
I would not say that the Lord blamed him, or others in him, for needing signs and wonders. Rather, he spoke out of the fulness of his knowledge to awake in them some infant sense of what made up all his life, the presence of God, as the fingers of the light go searching in the dark mould for the sleeping seeds. The order of creation and the goings on of life flowed ceaselessly from the Father’s heart; why seek signs and wonders that differ from common things only in being uncommon? Uncommonness is not excellence, nor commonness inferiority. The sign and wonder is the lower thing, granted only for men’s hardness of heart. Yet if it could help them, they should have it, for it was not at variance with the holy laws of life but a less usual utterance of the same. “Go your way; your son lives.” The man, a noble man in this at least, obeyed, and found his obedience justify his faith.
But his son would have to work out his belief on different grounds from his father’s. In himself he could recognize only the resumption of the natural sway of life, and would not necessarily know that God was working in him. He would hear the story of his cure from his father, good evidence, but he had not seen the face of the Holy One as his father had. He must seek and find him. The fault of fathers is often to expect their finding to stand in place of their children’s seeking; but their testimony is ground only for the children’s search, not for their belief. That search is faith in the bud. No man can be sure till he has found for himself, and all a faithful nature need have is willingness to seek; he cannot even know what he wants until he finds it, having only a faint star to guide him eastward to the sunrise. Hopefully the father’s belief has in it what will satisfy the child’s need; but the child’s doubt of it is the father’s first ground for hoping the child, with new needs, will find the same well of life for himself. He believed the man had cured his son. “Yes,” the son might say, “but I must know more of him; if what I hear now is true, I must cast all at his feet. He cannot be a healer only; he must be the very Lord of Life, perhaps of the Universe.” His simple human presence contained what must have appeared reason to doubt this conclusion, especially to one who had not seen his divine countenance. But to one at length enlightened by the great Spirit, his humanity would hold the highest ground for believing in his divinity, for what it meant would come out ever loftier. How should the Lord who made the Universe show it, but as the Healer did? He could not make the universe over again in every man’s sight; the heart could not hold it. He must reveal himself as the curing God, who sets right what has gone wrong, and that could be done in each man’s sight. This man may be he, the Messiah, Immanuel, God with us.
We can imagine such further thoughts in the son, or perhaps in the father first, only he was so full of the answer to his prayer that he could not at once follow things to their grand conclusions.
In this case, as in the next two, the Lord heals from a distance. There were reasons: perhaps the need for an immediate answer, and probably its fitness to the faith of the supplicants. To heal thus, though less of a sign or wonder to the unbelieving, worked a finer power on those who came not for the sign but for the cure of the beloved; he who loves can believe what he who loves not cannot, and he who loves most can believe most. These cures were like the healing granted to prayer in all ages, which seems to come from the Unseen. God is not afar off, being closer to every man than his conscious being is to his unconscious being, but though there is no distance with God, it looks like it to men, and Jesus cured with the same appearances that attend God’s ordinary healing.
The next case is similar. It belongs to another of my classes, but as a case of possession there is little distinctive about it, while as the record of a mother’s devotion quickening in her a faith so rare and lovely that it delighted the heart of Jesus, it is one of the most beautiful of the healing stories.
The woman was a Greek, without the Jew’s training for belief in the Messiah; her notions of the healer must have been full of fancies from the legends of her race. Yet she had been trained to believe, for her mighty love for her child was the best power for developing the child-like in herself.
No woman can understand the possible depths of her own affection for her daughter. I say daughter, not child, because although love is the same everywhere, it is nowhere the same; a woman’s love for her daughter differs from a father’s love for his son as the woman differs from the man. It has a peculiar tenderness from the same womanly consciousness in both of undefendedness and modesty, a modesty here terribly tortured in the mother by the wild behaviour of the daughter under the unclean spirit. No misery could drive a woman more rightly to the Healer in agony of claim and prostrate entreaty. The divine nature of her motherhood drew her back to its source for help for one who shared in it, but in whom its waters were troubled and defiled.
She came crying to him. About him stood his disciples, proud of being Jews, who counted themselves the children and her kind the dogs. For their sakes this chosen Gentile must be pained a little further, sharing with her Saviour in the suffering for the redemption even of his chosen apostles. He must show them the divine nature in her, and so must try her sorely, but not for long.
“Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David,” she cried; “my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.”
But not a word came from the Healer. His disciples must speak first and supplicate for their Gentile sister; he would rouse their disapproval of their own exclusiveness by putting it on himself for a moment, so that they could see it apart from themselves.
Their hearts were moved for the woman.
“Send her away,” they said, meaning “Give her what she wants”; but, poor intercessors, they added a selfish reason: either to avoid seeming to acknowledge her claim on a level with a Jewess’s, making it what Puritans and priests call “an uncovenanted mercy,” or because they thought it would help overcome the Master’s scruples. Possibly both. “She crieth after us,” meaning “She is troublesome.” They would have him give as the ungenerous and unjust give to the importunate.
But no healing could be granted on such a ground, not even to an apostle’s prayer. The woman herself must give a better.
“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he said.
They understood the words wrongly. He did come for the Gentiles, and was training them to see what they were so slow to grasp, that he had other sheep not of this fold. Most of the troubles of his latest and perhaps greatest apostle came from Jewish Christians’ indignation that he preached the good news to Gentiles as if meant for them; they would have had Gentiles enter through the gates of Judaism.
What they at length understood by these words is expressed in St Mark’s further word: “Let the children first be filled.” They could not see that Jesus came to the Jews first as much for the Gentiles’ sake as for the Jews’. Whatever glorious exceptions there were among the Gentiles, and whatever the Jewish nation’s widespread refusal, he could not have been received among the Gentiles as among the Jews. Only in Judaea could the leaven work or the mustard seed take root; once up, it would become a great tree for the birds of the world to nest in. God did not choose the Jews first because he loved them more, but because he must begin somewhere; why, God himself knows, and perhaps has given us glimmerings.
Upheld by her God-given love, the woman would not yet turn away. Even such hard words could not repulse her.
She came now and fell at his feet. It is as the Master would have it: she presses nearer and insists more, for the devil has hold of her daughter.
“Lord, help me,” is her cry, for her daughter’s trouble is her own. The “Help me” is far more profound and pathetic than the most vivid description of the daughter’s sufferings.
But he answered and said,—
“It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Terrible words, more dreadful than any he ever spoke! Surely now she will depart in despair! But the Lord did not mean to speak his mind on Jew and Gentile: his church’s future and his Spirit’s teaching contradict it, and if he meant it he acted wrongly, throwing a child’s bread to a dog. He spoke as a Jew felt, so that the elect Jews about him might begin to understand that in him there is neither Jew nor Gentile, but all are brethren.
And he has gained his point. The spirit in the woman has been divinely goaded into utterance, and out come the glorious words of her love and faith, casting aside even insult, all for a daughter’s sake.
“Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
Or, as St Matthew gives it:
“True, Lord; yet the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
A retort quite Greek in its readiness, symmetry and point! But it was not the cleverness that pleased the Master; cleverness is cheap. It is the faith he praises, [Footnote 5: Far more precious than any show of intellect, even for the intellect. Her quick answer was her intellect sparkling in the glow of her affection. Love quickens the whole nature, and faith in God will do more for the intellect in the end than all the schools.] which was precious as rare: unspeakably precious even when it shall be the commonest thing in the universe, but precious now as the first fruits of a redeemed world, as coming from a Gentile, and more as coming from a human mother pleading for her daughter.
“O woman, great is your faith; let it be for you as you wish.”
Or, as St Mark gives it (we cannot afford to lose a varying word):
“For this saying, go your way; the devil is gone out of your daughter.” The loving mother has conquered the tormenting devil. She has called in the mighty aid of the original love, which flows new-creating through the channel of her love, “and her daughter was made whole from that very hour.”
Where, O disciples, are your children and your dogs now? Is not the wall of partition destroyed? No; you too must be made whole of a worse devil, personal and national pride, before you understand. But the day of the Lord is coming for you, though you cannot read the signs of its approach, and it must come upon you as a thief in the night.
For the woman, we may well leave her to her daughter’s embraces. They are enough for her now.
But endless more will follow, for God is exhaustless in giving where the human receiving holds out. God be praised that there are such embraces in the world, and mothers who are the salvation of their children!
We now complete a little family group with another foreigner, a Roman officer who begged the Lord for his servant. This captain was at Capernaum, where I presume he had heard of the nobleman’s son’s cure. The quality of his faith suggests he had heard much more of Jesus, enough to ponder for some time, for such humble confidence could hardly be, like Jonah’s gourd, the growth of a night. Instead of lording it over the subject Jews of Capernaum he had built them a synagogue, and his respect toward our Lord, as toward any human being and especially one of lower station, is one of the surest marks of a finely wrought moral temperament. Such a nature may be beautifully developed by a military training in which obedience and command go together; a thoughtful officer of a well-disciplined army would understand faith and its instant response in action more readily than anyone unfamiliar with organization. Hence the parallel he draws between his position and the Master’s, which so pleased the Lord by its simplicity. But humble as he was, I doubt that anything less than some spiritual perception of the nobility of Jesus’s character, of something beyond even the power of healing, could have produced such reverence and childlike confidence. No wonder the Lord was pleased; that must be what his Father loves.
According to St Luke, the Roman captain thought himself so unworthy of notice from the carpenter’s son (the people of Capernaum, “his own city,” knew his reputed parentage) that he got the Jewish elders to beg Jesus to come and heal his servant. They testified to his worth, naming what would count first with such men: that he loved their nation and had built them a synagogue. Little did they think how the Lord was about to honour him above their whole nation and its synagogues. He went with them at once.
But before they reached the house, the centurion had a fresh inroad of that divine disease, humility, [Footnote 6: In him it was almost morbid, one might say, were it not sister to such mighty faith.] and sent friends to say, “Lord, do not trouble yourself; I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, nor did I think myself worthy to come to you. But say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me: I say to one, Go, and he goes; to another, Come, and he comes; to my servant, Do this, and he does it.”
This man was a philosopher: he ascended from what he was used to, to what he was not. He acknowledges his own subjection and states his authority, and leaves our Lord to understand that he recognizes in him an authority beyond all, expecting the powers of nature to obey their Master as his soldiers and servants obey him. How grandly he must have believed in him!
Beyond suspicion of flattery, he avoids the face of the man whom in heart he worships. “A poor creature like me go and talk to him!” the Roman captain would exclaim. “No, I will worship from afar off.” And note that the Lord went no further; he turned at once. With Zacchaeus he would go home, if only to deliver him from the hopelessness of his self-contempt; here all was right, and the centurion needed only to go on, being in heart and soul nearer the Lord than any of the disciples who followed him. Surely one of the elders would carry him the Master’s words; God’s praise never falls wrong and never does anyone harm, and this would only deepen the humility and faith of the Roman. There is something very grand in the Lord’s turning away from the house of the man who had greater faith than any he had found in Israel; those were the words he spoke to his followers, and having turned to say them he did not turn again but went his way. St Luke does not represent the Master as uttering a word of cure (St Matthew says the centurion himself came to Jesus, and mentions no elders), but implies that he went away marvelling, while “they that were sent, returning to the house, found the servant whole that had been sick.” If anyone asks how Jesus could marvel, I answer that Jesus could do more things than we can well understand. That he marvelled at great faith shows he is not surprised at little, and so is able to make all needful, just and tender allowance.
Here I cannot do better for my readers than give four lines dear to me, though probably unknown to most of them, written, I must say, for the sake of their loving catholicity, by an English Jesuit of the seventeenth century. They touch the very heart of the relation between Jesus and the centurion:
Thy humble faith and fear keeps Him aloof:
He'll be thy guest; because He may not be,
He'll come—into thy house? No, into thee.
As I said, we thus complete a kind of family group, for the true servant is one of the family: a father’s prayer for a son, a mother’s for a daughter, a master’s for a servant. Alas, the dearness of this last bond is not known now as once. No rooted institution was ever parted with without losing something good for a time, however necessary its destruction. I fear fewer free servants love their masters now than Roman bondsmen loved theirs, and few masters regard the bond with half the respect and tenderness many Romans did. Slavery is bad and of the devil, yet mutual jealousy and contempt are worse. But the time will come when a servant will serve for love as more than wages, and his master will honour him even to making him sit down to meat, and coming forth and serving him.
The next is the palsied man, graphically given by St Mark and St Luke, and with less circumstance by St Matthew, again at Capernaum, his own city. Pharisees and doctors of the law from every town, hearing of his arrival, had gathered to listen. There was no getting near him, so the sick man’s friends carried him to the roof, took off the tiles and let him down into the presence. “Jesus seeing their faith … said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, be of good cheer … Man, thy sins are forgiven thee.” All the narrators connect the forgiveness with the friends’ faith, which is very remarkable. The only other such instance is the woman in Simon’s house, of whom he showed first that her love was a sign her sins were already forgiven. What greater honour could he give their faith than to grant in their name, unasked, the one mighty boon? He looked into the man’s heart and probably saw, as with the man he cured by the pool of Bethesda and told to sin no more, that his own sins had brought this suffering on him. At any rate he saw that the assurance of forgiveness was what the man most needed, whether because his conscience was oppressed or because he must be brought to think more of the sin than the suffering; it was an awful rebuke, if he still required it, that the Lord should present forgiveness to one who came for healing. Nor did he follow it at once with the cure, but delayed a little, probably for the man’s sake and for the sake of those present, in whose hearts he would fix the lesson on divine forgiveness by bestowing it on the sick man. His words meant nothing unless they meant that God forgave the man. The scribes were right that none can forgive sins but God, in the full sense in which forgiveness is still needed by every human being even after all those he has injured have forgiven him.
“He is a blasphemer,” they said in their hearts. This was what he had expected.
“Why do you think evil in your hearts?” he said, that is, evil of me, that I am a blasphemer.
He would now show them he was no blasphemer: that he had the power to forgive, and that it was God’s will that he preach the remission of sins. How could he show it? Only by dismissing the consequence, the punishment of those sins, sealing the general truth in the individual case. He who could say to a man suffering the eternal law’s consequence of sin, “Be whole, well, strong; suffer no more,” must have the right to pronounce forgiveness; otherwise another than God cured with a word the man his Maker had afflicted, and God’s kingdom must be trembling to its fall, a stronger having reversed its decrees. Power does not give the right to pardon, but it may prove the right. “Which is easier—to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Rise up and walk?” If only God can do either, he who can do the one can do the other.
“That you may know that the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins—Arise, take up your bed, and go home.”
Up rose the man, took up what he had lain on, and went away, knowing in himself that his sins were forgiven, for he was able to glorify God. It seems against our Lord’s usual custom with the scribes and Pharisees to grant them such proof. But I think these men were better than most of their class, or in a better mood, for St Luke says the power of the Lord was present to heal them. To heal these learned doctors, he forgave the sins first and then cured the palsy; for their sakes he performed the miracle thus. And like priests, like people: where their leaders listened, the people broke open the roof to get the helpless into his presence.
“They marvelled and glorified God, who had given such power to men”—“saying, We never saw it on this fashion”—“They were filled with fear, saying, We have seen strange things today.”
And yet Capernaum had to be brought down to hell, and no man can tell the place where it stood.
Two more cases remain, both related by St Mark alone.
They brought him a man partially deaf and dumb. He led him aside from the people, to come into better relation with that individuality which, until melted from within, is so hard to touch. In every case the patient’s character and condition, patent only to the Healer, gave reason for individual treatment. Here, as with the blind, the closeness of contact is remarkable: “He put his fingers into his ears, he spit and touched his tongue.” Always with present disease there was bodily contact, with defects of the senses sometimes a closer kind, to generate assured faith in himself as healer. But there is one more remarkable particular, which as far as I remember would be alone in its kind but for a fuller development at the raising of Lazarus: “And looking up to heaven, he sighed.”
What did it mean? What first of all was it?
That look, was it not a look up to his own Father? That sigh, was it not an unspoken prayer for the man beside him? But did he need to look up as if God were in the sky, when God was in him, in fulness of presence, answering consciously as nothing else could? True, even all human language blended into one glorious speech to utter his love for his Father would end in the last inarticulate resource, the sigh, saying I cannot, but thou knowest, confessing defeat but claiming victory. But the Lord could talk with his Father evermore in the forms of which words are shadows, indeed without forms, in the thoughts that are the souls of forms. Why then look up and sigh? So that the man, whose faith was barely beginning, might believe that whatever cure came from the healer’s hand came from God’s. Jesus did not care to be believed in as the doer of the deed unless the deed were recognized as given him of the Father; if they saw only him and not the Father through him, little was gained. The look and the sigh expressed the unbreakable link binding both the Lord and the man to the Father of all. He would lift the man’s heart to the source of every gift; no cure would be a worthy gift without that, and might be an injury.
The last case is the blind man of Bethsaida, whom likewise he led apart, out of the town, touching his dull organs with spittle. Then comes a difference: the deaf man was cured at once, but when he laid his hands on the blind man, his sight was only half restored. Asked if he saw anything, he looked up and said, “I see the men: for like trees [Footnote 7: Could it be translated,”As well as (that is besides) trees, I see walkers about”?] I see them walking about.” He could tell they were men and not trees only by their motion. The Master laid his hands once more on his eyes, and when he looked up again he saw everyone clearly.
In thus graduating the process, our Lord, I think, drew out and enticed into strength the man’s feeble faith. He brooded over him with his holy presence of love and gave his faith time to grow; he cared more for his faith than his sight. He let him feel him doing it, that he might know and believe. This resembles the ordinary modes God takes in healing men.
These last miracles are especially full of symbolism and analogy. But I do not care to dwell on that in any of the miracles, for in this they are like all God’s other doings. Nature is brimful of symbolic and analogical parallels to the growth and changes of the highest nature in man. It could not be otherwise, for they issue from the same thought, and nature is made for man, an outer garment, or rather a living house for him. So the works of him who did the Father’s works must bear the same mark.
The one practical lesson of this group is nearer the human fact and need than any symbolic meaning, grand as that must be, and nearer the constitution of things, since what a man must do matters more than what he can only think, and any man can do right though he cannot tell a symbol from a sign. It is this: if ever there was a Man such as we read about here, then he who prays for his friends shall be heard of God. I do not say he shall have whatever he asks. God forbid. But he shall be heard. The man who does not see the good of that knows nothing of the good of prayer, and can, I fear, still only pray for himself even when he fancies he is praying for his friend. Often, when men suppose they are concerned for the well-beloved, they are only concerned about what they will do without them; let them pray for themselves instead, the truer prayer. All prayer is assuredly heard; what matter that it is answered only in the right time and way? The prayer argues a need, and that need will be supplied. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years. All who have prayed shall one day justify God and say, Your answer is beyond my prayer, as your thoughts and ways are beyond mine.