The passage: Why is it that you do not understand?
After feeding the four thousand with seven loaves and a few small fishes on the east side of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus crossed the lake and was met by certain Pharisees whose attitude drove him back to the boat and across again. On the way the disciples realized they had only a single loaf, probably bought by one of them while the Lord dealt with the Pharisees. Jesus, still occupied with the leaders’ antagonism and wanting to destroy their influence on his disciples, began to warn them, using a figure they had heard before, leaven as a hidden but pervading energy. Now he tells them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees. The disciples, their minds on their lack of provisions, thought of bread at once, concluded he spoke of leaven because it was missing, and perhaps imagined a warning about defilement from Pharisaical cookery: “It is because we have taken no bread!” A leaven like the Pharisees’ was already at work in their hearts; for the sign the Pharisees sought in mockery of unbelief, they themselves had had a few hours before, and had already forgotten all that made it valuable.
It is to the man who is trying to live, who obeys the Master’s word, that the word unfolds itself. Understanding the outside of things, we think we have them; but the Lord puts his things in suggestive shapes that give no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect and unfold themselves only to the conscience and heart as the new creation of reality advances in a man. For life, that is, action, is the only condition into which the light of the Living can penetrate; only life can assimilate life. See how the disciples here fooled themselves!
See how the Lord calls them to their senses. He does not tell them where they are wrong; he attacks the cause in themselves, always of infinitely more consequence than any mistake: the one is a live mistake, an untruth in the soul, the other a dead blunder born of it. So the connection between their blunder and his exhortation is not on the surface. Often he speaks not to the words but to the thought; here he speaks to the whole mode of thinking, the inward condition of the men.
He sets out to rouse in them a sense of their lack of confidence in God, the cause of their blunder. He reminds them of the two miracles of the loaves and the fragments left over; one was not a day behind them, and already they were doubting! He makes them go over the particulars, not to refresh their memories but to make their hearts dwell on them; for they had forgotten the central revelation, the eternal fact of God’s love and care. They knew the number of men, loaves, and baskets of fragments each time, but forgot the Love that had so broken the bread that its remnants twenty times outweighed its loaves.
Having questioned them like children and listened to the answers of children, he turns the light of their thoughts on themselves and demands, with an argument that overleaps its own logic’s links, “Why do you not understand?” Then they understood, and knew he did not speak of the leaven of bread but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. He who trusts can understand; he whose mind is at ease can discover a reason.
How otherwise than by quelling their anxiety could “How many baskets did you take up?” and “Why do you not understand?” have made them see he did not mean the leaven of bread? What had the bread miracles to do with it?
The lesson he would have had them learn from the miracle, the only lesson worthy of it, was that God cared for his children and could, did, and would provide for their needs. They had not learned it. The miracle’s love proved his mission better than its power: it was a throb of the Father’s heart. The ground of the Master’s upbraiding is not that they did not understand him but that they did not trust God, that after all they had seen they still troubled themselves about bread. Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us. The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in. Their design was to show what God is: not that Jesus was God but that his Father was, and was what Jesus showed, for no other kind of God could be worth believing in. The Son’s mission was to reveal his Father as he is, that men may know him and, knowing, trust him. It would be a small boon for God to forgive men and not give himself; less than God as he is cannot comfort men for the essential sorrow of their existence. Jesus came to give them God, who is eternal life.
Those miracles of feeding gave to their eyes, hands, and mouths the lesson his words gave their ears when he told them not to seek what they would eat or drink, since their Father knew their need, and to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things would be added. So little had they learned it that they remembered the loaves but forgot the Father, as men in their theology forget the very Theou logos. Forgetting, they were troubled about provision for the day, and the moment leaven was mentioned thought of bread. What else could he mean? The connection was plain! The miracle had set forth God’s heart toward them, the loving care without which he would not be God. Had they learned this lesson, their hearts would not have been so uneasy as to mistake his word; had they but said that, though they had one loaf, they had him who makes all the loaves, they would never have made their blunder.
The answer to the Lord’s reproach is plainly this: their minds were so full of care about the day’s bread that they could think of nothing else; the mere mention of leaven threw them floundering afresh in the bog of their unbelief. When he reminded them of what they had seen, and so of what God is and of the foolishness of their care, the moment their fear was taught to look up they began to see what his former words must have meant.
The disciples’ care was for the day, not the morrow; and morrow stands for any point of the future. The next moment is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care as a hundred years away; in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Only those claims of the morrow that must be prepared today belong to today’s duty; the moment that coincides with work to be done is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.
Their lack of bread seems to have come not from neglect but from the suddenness of the re-embarkation; and had there been a want of foresight, the Lord did not come to reprove that but the primary evil of life without God, the root of all evils. Minor virtues, prudence among them, would thus almost be superseded. If a man forgets a thing, God will see to that; man is not lord of his memory or intellect. But he is lord of his will and action, and is to blame when, remembering a duty, he puts it off and so forgets it. If a man does the immediate duty of the moment, I suspect wonderfully little forethought will be needed; only that forethought is right which determines duty and passes into action. Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an archangel.
With the disciples as with the rich youth, it was Things that prevented the Lord from being understood. Because of possession the young man had no suspicion of the grandeur of the call with which Jesus honoured him; he thought himself hardly dealt with to be offered a patent of Heaven’s nobility, he was so very rich! His soul was crowded with the meanest idols, among which his spirit crept upon its knees, wasting on them the gazes that belonged to his fellows and his Master. The disciples had left all and followed the Lord; but neither had they got rid of Things. The paltry solitariness of a loaf was enough to hide the Lord from them. Surely if he had told them to go all day without food for his sake, they would not have minded! But they lost sight of God, as if he did not see or did not care.
In the former case it was the possession of wealth, in the latter the lack of more than a loaf, that made them incapable of receiving the Lord’s word: the evil principle was precisely the same. If it be Things that slay you, what matter whether things you have or things you have not? The youth did not trust God as having given; the disciples did not trust God as ready to give. We are like them when in any trouble we do not trust him. It is hard on God when his children will not let him give, when they carry themselves so that he must withhold his hand lest he harm them. To take no care that they acknowledge whence their help comes would leave them worshippers of idols, trusters in that which is not.
Distrust is atheism, and the barrier to all growth. Lord, we do not understand you because we do not trust your Father, who is whole-hearted to us as never yet was mother to her first-born! While we who are evil would die to give our children bread, we are not certain the only Good will give us anything we desire! The things of your world so crowd our hearts that there is no room for the things of your heart, which would raise ours above all fear and make us merry children in our Father’s house! How many a whisper of the watching Spirit we miss through brooding over a need not yet come! Tomorrow makes today’s whole head sick, its whole heart faint. You do not so, Lord; were you such as we, we would have good cause to be troubled! But you know it is difficult, with things pressing on every sense, to believe that where we can see no hand directing, a will nearer than any hand is moving them from within to fulfil his word! Help us to obey, to resist, to trust.
The care filling your mind at this moment, or waiting only till you lay the book aside to leap on you, that need which is no need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life.
“No; mine is a reasonable care, indeed an unavoidable one!”
“Is it something you have to do this very moment?”
“No.”
“Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something required of you this moment!”
“Nothing is required of me at this moment.”
“Yes, there is: the greatest thing that can be required of man.”
“Pray, what is it?”
“Trust in the living God. His will is your life.”
“He may not will that I have what I need!”
“Then you only think you need it. Is it a good thing?”
“Yes, it is a good thing.”
“Then why doubt you will have it?”
“Because God may choose to have me go without it.”
“Why should he?”
“I cannot tell.”
“Must it not be to give you something instead?”
“I want nothing instead.”
“I thought I was talking to a Christian!”
“I will consent to be called nothing else.”
“Do you not know, then, that when God denies a child of his anything he values, it is to give him something he values?”
“But if I do not want it?”
“You are none the less miserable for not having it. Instead of his great possessions the young man was to have the company of Jesus and treasure in heaven. When God refused to deliver a certain man from a sore evil, though he asked three times, he gave him instead his own graciousness, consoling him in person.”
“Ah, but that was St Paul!”
“True; what of that?”
“He was one by himself!”
“God deals with all his children after his own father-nature. No scripture is of private interpretation, even for a St Paul. It sets forth God’s way with man. If you are not willing that God should have his way with you, then in God’s name be miserable, until your misery drives you to the Father’s arms.”
“I do trust him in spiritual matters.”
“Everything is an affair of the spirit. If God has a way, it is the only way. Every little thing in which you would have your own way has a mission for your redemption; and he will treat you as a naughty child until you take your Father’s way for yours.”
There will be this difference between the rich who love their riches and the poor who hate their poverty: at death the heart of the one will still be crowded with things and their pleasures, the heart of the other relieved of their lack; the one has had his good things, the other his evil. But the rich man who held his things lightly, a channel and no cistern, ever forsaking his money, starts in the new world beside the man who accepted, not hated, his poverty. Each will say, “I am free!”
For the only air in which the soul can breathe and live is the present God and the spirits of the just: that is our heaven, our home. Cleansed of greed, jealousy, vanity, pride, possession, and all the forms of the evil self, we shall be God’s children in the fields of that heaven, none desiring to be before another or to cast him out; for ambition and hatred will then be seen to be one spirit. “What you have, I have; what you desire, I will; I give to myself ten times in giving once to you.” But let me be practical: you are ready to be miserable over trifles and do not believe God good enough to care for your care; I would reason with you to rid you of troubles that hide from you the thoughts of your God.
The things readiest to be done, those lying on the very table of a man’s mind, are in general the most neglected, even by the thoughtful. May a man become strong in righteousness without learning to speak the truth to his neighbour, or climb the last flight of the stair without setting foot on the lowest step? Truth is one: he who does it in the small thing is of the truth; he who postpones the small thing near him for the great thing farther off is not. Consider the parallels between ourselves and the disciples maundering over one loaf with the Bread of Life beside them. We too dull our understandings with trifles and waste heavenly time with hurry; to those who possess their souls in patience come the heavenly visions. When I trouble myself over a trifle, hunting the house for some little lost article not from need but from dislike of loss, or fretting over a borrowed book not returned while thousands on my shelves could give me treasure that neither moth, rust, nor thief touches, am I not like the disciples? Am I not a fool whenever loss troubles me more than recovery would gladden? God would have me wise and smile at the trifle; this losing of things is his mercy, teaching us to let them go. Or have I forgotten a thought that seemed a truth revealed to my heart? I keep trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till it is recovered, though it might be far more lost in a notebook I would never look into again. I forget that God cares about live truths, not things set down in a book or memory or embalmed in the joy of knowledge, but things that lift up the heart and are active in an active will. Had I faith in God, the maker of thought and memory, I would know that if it was a truth it must come again; it is in God, and so, like the dead, not beyond my reach: kept for me.
“These are foolish illustrations, not worth writing!”
If such things do not happen, mentioning them is foolish; if they do, he is foolish who treats them as if they did not. I choose them for their smallness, appealing to all who keep house about the size of trouble that suffices to hide the word and face of God.
With every haunting trouble, great or small, go to God and ask him, the God of your life, to deliver you, his child, from what is unlike him and antagonistic to your nature. If your trouble is such that you cannot appeal to him, the more need! Where one cannot go to God, something is specially wrong. If you let thought for tomorrow or next year distress you, if the chatter of the public peering purblind into the sanctuary of motive annoys you, or you greatly heed the judgment of men, capable or incapable, you open your windows to the mosquitoes of care, to drown with their buzzing the voice of the Eternal!
If you tell me that but for care the needful work of the world would be ill done, I ask, “What work is better done by the greedy or anxious than by the free, fearless soul? If the work is not God’s, care may help it, for its success is loss. Is he worthy the name of man who for fear of starvation does better work than for the joy that his labour is not in vain in the Lord? You are not likely to get rich that way, but you will not block the gate of heaven against yourself.”
Ambition in every shape has to do with Things, with outward advantages for the satisfaction of self-worship; it is the form of pride that usurps the place of aspiration. The sole ambition of God is to rise above oneself; all other is of the devil. Yet it is nursed in many a soul that thinks itself devout, filling it with petty cares and disappointments that shut out the glory of God. We must get rid of the love of men’s praise, the desire of fame, the pride that takes offence, the puffing-up of knowledge, and every other form of self-worship. We must be free. A man whom another enslaves may be free as God; but God will not enter, or sup with, a man who is a slave in himself, for he cannot be his friend; he will not eat in a lumber-room, though the lumber be thrones and crowns. Cannot, I say rather than will not: men full of things would not partake with God were he by them all day.
Nor will God force any door. He may send a tempest to burst doors and windows and shake the house to its foundations; but not so will he enter. The door must be opened by a willing hand before the foot of Love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest is an assault in the siege of love; the terror of God is the other side of his love, love outside the house that would be inside, that knows the house is no home, only a tent, until the Eternal dwells there. Things must be cast out to make room for their souls, the eternal truths which in things find shape and show.
But who is sufficient to cast them out? A man who attacks the army of bats and demon-snakes infesting the place of the Holy finds the task too great: the temple will not be cleansed by him, and the very dust he raises is full of corruptive forces. Let those who would do what they cannot remember, with hope, that he who knows all about our being once told a parable to the effect that people ought always to pray and not lose heart.