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A CURE ON THE SABBATH DAY.

CHAPTER XXI.

CURE OF THE INFIRM WOMAN ON THE SABBATH DAY-INDIGNATION OF THE JEWS-CHRIST DINES WITH THE PHARISEE-REPROVES THOSE WHO SEEK THE HIGHEST PLACE-PARABLE OF THE GREAT SUPPER-PARABLE OF THE LOST SHEEP-PARABLE OF THE LOST PIECE OF SILVER-PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON.

HERE was soon another opportunity for our Lord to correct the notions concerning the Sabbath which in his time were entertained. He was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath day, when he noticed the presence of a woman who was doubled up by a disease under which she had been suffering for eighteen years. He

called the afflicted creature before him, and when he laid his sacred hands upon her, her bent body became straight, and she glorified God. The ruler of the synagogue was filled with indignation by this act, which he regarded as a profanation of the holy day; and he said to the people: "There are six days on which men ought to work in them, therefore, come and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day." The severe answer of the benevolent Saviour rebuked him for thinking it a matter of small importance that the afflicted should be relieved one day sooner from their "Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the Sabbath day loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to the watering; and ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?" No one could answer this.

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sorrows.

Soon after, our Lord took occasion to compare the small beginnings and final extension of "the kingdom of God," meaning the church, to a grain of mustard seed, "which a man took and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree, and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it. He again compared it to leaven "which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened." These familiar comparisons, certain to be remembered, were prophetic in their purport, and would be called to mind with much interest, when the result had been realized when the seed became a great tree, and when the morsel had leavened the whole mass.

It was probably on the next Sabbath that Christ dined in the house of a Pharisee, and took notice of the manifest anxiety of the guests to secure the most honourable places. This is, at the present day, a matter of vast solicitude and importance among the Orientals, the rank and estimation of a man being determined by the place which he occupies. Among the Jews there were frequent disputes about seats at a banquet. Jesus, with the freedom which belonged to his character and office, reproved this practice, and declared the superior merits of those who feasted the afflicted and needy over those who bestowed their feasts only on those from whom they expected a corresponding return. He does not in this prohibit mutual hospitality among the rich; but he prefers the acts of kindness which are performed without the hope of reward. Some one on this remarked, "Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God," by which he probably intended to express the blessedness of those who should live in the kingdom which he believed the Messiah was to establish on the earth. To this Jesus replied in the striking parable of the Great Supper, showing that the event which they, in prospect, regarded as a period so full of blessing to themselves, would, when present, be exceedingly

PARABLE OF THE SUPPER.

neglected and despised. The parable describes a person as making a good supper to which a large number of friends were invited. When all things were ready, the servants were, according to custom, sent to call the persons previously invited. But they all excused themselves on one ground or another. One said he

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had bought (conditionally) a piece of ground, and must needs go and see it; and another, that he had bought five yoke of oxen, and must go and prove them. These excuses allude to a custom of proving articles during a treaty for their purchase. Another alleged that he had "married a wife, and therefore could not come." These excuses might be very good separately taken, and on their own merits; but agreement among all the guests to excuse themselves showed much disrespect for the host, and a disposition to undervalue him and the feast which he had provided. And thus he felt it; for he was wroth, and commanded his servants to bring in from the streets and highways the destitute, the afflicted, the

poor, and the miserable, that they might enjoy the feast which the invited guests had refused. The application of this parable is obvious, and must have been exceedingly galling to the auditors.

Not long after this, Christ, finding that he had incurred the sneers of the Pharisees, on account of the number of “publicans and sinners," who flocked to hear him, explained and justified his conduct in several striking parables. In the first, he describes a man possessing a flock of a hundred sheep, and when one of them has gone astray, proceeds in search of it, and when it was found, lays it on his shoulders (after a custom of the Jewish shepherds which is still common in the East), and returns home exulting more in the one sheep he had recovered than in the ninety and nine which he had not lost.

The next parable has the same scope. In it a woman possessed of ten pieces of silver loses one of them, and proceeds to light a candle, and sweeps the house, searching diligently till she has found it; and when it is found, rejoicing more in that one piece than in the possession of the nine which had not been lost.

The parable of the Prodigal Son, which next follows, has the same general purport with the others, teaching that God would have no one perish, but willingly receives those who repent of their sins, and grants them his forgiveness. In this beautiful parable, which has all the air of a fact from common life, and which might easily be such, our Lord represents a wealthy landholder having two sons. The younger of them, full of animal spirits, and impatient of the restraints of his father's house, obtains from him his share of the patrimony, and hastens away to a distant place, where he may take his fill of sensual pleasures without notice or control. Soon, all his ample means were wasted in riotous living, “and he began to be in want." At the same time a famine arose in the land; the gay companions of his pleasures departed from him, and he

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