MACHINATIONS OF THE JEWS.

225

was but a superficial outline of all the heart-searching power with which His words had been to them like a sword of the Spirit, piercing even to the dividing of the joints and marrow. But to bad men nothing is so maddening as the exhibition of their own self-deception. So great was the hardly-concealed fury of the Jewish hierarchy, that they would gladly have seized Him that very hour. Fear restrained them, and He was suffered to retire unmolested to His quiet resting-place. But, either that night or early on the following morning, His enemies held another council-at this time they seem to have held them almost daily-to see if they could not make one more combined, systematic, overwhelming effort "to entangle Him in His talk," to convict Him of ignorance or of error, to shake His credit with the multitude, or embroil Him in dangerous relations towards the civil authority. We shall see in the following chapter the result of their machinations.

CHAPTER LI.

THE DAY OF TEMPTATIONS-THE LAST AND GREATEST DAY OF THE PUBLIC MINISTRY OF JESUS.

"And the door was shut."-MATT. XXV. 10.

On the following morning Jesus rose with His disciples to enter for the last time the Temple Courts. On their way they passed the solitary fig-tree, no longer gay with its false leafy garniture, but shrivelled, from the root upwards, in every bough. The quick eye of Peter was the first to notice it, and he exclaimed, "Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away." The disciples stopped to look at it, and to express their astonishment at the rapidity with which the denunciation had been fulfilled. What struck them most was the power of Jesus; the deeper meanings of His symbolic act they seem for the time to have missed; and, leaving these lessons to dawn upon them gradually, Jesus addressed the mood of their minds at the moment, and told them that if they would but have faith in God-faith which should enable them to offer up their prayers with perfect and unwavering confidence they should not only be able to perform such a wonder as that done to the fig-tree, but even "if they bade this mountain"-and as He spoke He may

have pointed either to Olivet or to Moriah-"to be removed, and cast into the sea, it should obey them." But, since in this one instance the power had been put forth to destroy, He added a very important warning. They were not to suppose that this emblematic act gave them any licence to wield the sacred powers which faith and prayer would bestow on them, for purposes of anger or vengeance; nay, no power was possible to the heart that knew not how to forgive, and the unforgiving heart could never be forgiven. The sword, and the famine, and the pestilence were to be no instruments for them to wield, nor were they even to dream of evoking against their enemies the fire of heaven or the "icy wind of death."1 The secret of successful prayer was faith; the road to faith in God lay through pardon of transgression; pardon was possible to them alone who were ready to pardon others.

He was scarcely seated in the Temple when the result of the machinations of His enemies on the previous evening showed itself in a new kind of strategy, involving one of the most perilous and deeply laid of all the schemes to entrap and ruin Him. The deadly nature of the plot appeared in the fact that, to carry it out, the Pharisees were united in ill-omened conjunction with the Herodians; so that two parties, usually ranked against each other in strong opposition, were now reconciled in a conspiracy for the ruin of their common enemy Devotees and sycophants-hierarchical scrupu

2

evoznom de inof...i bus+asikoak doork) " 99.botai o. L

1 Some suppose that a breath of the simoom had been the agent in withering the fig-tree.

Matt, xxii. 15-22, Mark xiil 13-17; Luke xx. 19-26. Not the first or last instance in history, in which priests have used politicians, even otherwise opposed to them, to crush a reformer whose zeal might be inimical to both" (Neander, p. 397, Bohn)Previously we only find

losity and political indifferentism-the school of theocratic zeal and the school of crafty expediency--were thus united to dismay and perplex Him. The Herodians occur but seldom in the Gospel narrative. Their very designation—a Latinised adjective1 applied to the Greekspeaking courtiers of an Edomite prince who, by Roman intervention, had become a Judæan king-showed at once their hybrid origin. Their existence had mainly a political significance, and they stood outside the current of religious life, except so far as their Hellenising tendencies and worldly interests led them to show an ostentatious disregard for the Mosaic law. They were, in fact, mere provincial courtiers; men who basked in the sunshine of a petty tyranny which, for their own personal ends, they were anxious to uphold. To strengthen the family of Herod by keeping it on good terms with Roman imperialism, and to effect this good understanding by repressing every distinctively Jewish aspiration

this was their highest aim. And in order to do this the Herodians in Mark iii. 6. They seem to be political descendants of the old Antiochians (2 Maéc. iv. 9). (See Salvador, Jésus Christ, i. 162.) Actually they were perhaps the Boethusim and their adherents, who had been allied to Herod the Great by marriage as well as by worldly interests. Herod the Great, when he fell in love with Mariamne, daughter of Simon, son of a certain Boethus of Alexandria, had made Simon High Priest by way of ennobling him. These Boethusim had held the high-priesthood for thirty-five years, and shared its influence with the family of Annas. In point of fact, the priestly party of this epoch seem all to have been moro or less Sadducees, and more or less Herodians. They had lost all hold on, and all care for, the people; and, though less openly shameless, were the lineal representatives of those bad pontiffs who, since the days of Jason and Menelaus, had tried to introduce "Greek fashions and heathenish manners" (2 Macc. iv. 13, 14).

1 But v. supr., Vol. 1., p. 442.

* Their attempt to represent Herod the Great as the Messiah (!) (Tert. Praescr. 45, "qui Christum Herodem esse dixerunt") was a thing of the past. The genuine Sanhedrin, urging the command of Deut. xvii. 15, had unanimously appealed against Herod.

HERODIANS AND PHARISEES.

223

they Græcised their Semitic names, adopted ethnic habits, frequented amphitheatres, familiarly accepted the symbols of heathen supremacy, even went so far as to obliterate, by such artificial means as they could, the distinctive and covenant symbol of Hebrew nationality. That the Pharisees should tolerate even the most temporary partnership with such men as these, whose very existence was a violent outrage on their most cherished prejudices, enables us to gauge more accurately the extreme virulence of hatred with which Jesus had inspired them. And that hatred was destined to become deadlier still. It was already at red-heat; the words and deeds of this day were to raise it to its whitest intensity of wrath.

The Herodians might come before Jesus without raising a suspicion of sinister motives; but the Pharisees, astutely anxious to put Him off His guard, did not come to Him in person. They sent some of their younger scholars, who (already adepts in hypocrisy) were to approach Him as though in all the guileless simplicity of an inquiring spirit. They evidently designed to raise the impression that a dispute had occurred between them and the Herodians, and that they desired to settle it by referring the decision of the question at issue to the final and higher authority of the Great Prophet. They came to Him circumspectly, deferentially, courteously. "Rabbi," they said to Him with flattering earnestness, "we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man; for thou regardest not the person of men." It was as though they would entreat

1 St. Luke (xx. 20) calls them ¿ykábeтoι, “liers in ambush.” Comp. Job xxxi. 9.