ANGER OF THE JEWS. 17 77 dom which they falsely asserted; they resented the promise of future spiritual freedom in lieu of the achievement of present national freedom. So Jesus showed them that they were still the slaves of sin, and in name only, not in reality, the children of Abraham, or the children of God. They were absorbed with pride when they thought of the purity of their ancestral origin, and the privilege of their exclusive monotheism;1 but He told them that in very truth they were, by spiritual affinity, the affinity of cruelty and falsehood, children of him who was a liar and a murderer from the beginning-children of the devil. That home-rebuke stung them to fury. They repaid it by calling Jesus a Samaritan, and a demoniac. Our Lord gently put the taunt aside, and once more held out to them the gracious promise that if they will but keep His sayings, they not only shall not die in their sins, but shall not see death. Their dull, blind hearts could not even imagine a spiritual meaning in His words. They could only charge Him with demoniac arrogance and insolence in making Himself greater than Abraham and the prophets, of whom they could 1 Alike the Bible and the Talmud abound in proofs of the intense national arrogance with which the Jews regarded their religion and their descent. 2 John viii. 44. Untruthfulness seems to have been in all ages a failing of the Jewish national character. "Listen to all, but believe no one-not even me," said Sapir to Dr. Frankl (Jews in the East, E. Tr., ii. 11). 3 I am aware that some make Jesus call the Jews not " children," but "brethren of the devil," translating Tоû TаTрòs Toû diaßóλov (ver. 44), of “the father of the devil," and rendering the end of verse 44 "he is a liar, and his father too;" but I do not understand this demonology. 4 John viii. 48, "Thou art a Samaritan" (what intense national hatred breathes in the words!), "and hast a demon." Similarly the Arabs attribute all madness to evil spirits (da1ovậs = Medjnoun enté). (Renan, Vie de Jésus, 272.) only think as dead.1 Jesus told them that in prophetic vision, perhaps too by spiritual intuition, in that other world, Abraham, who was not dead, but living, saw and rejoiced to see His day. Such an assertion appeared to them either senseless or blasphemous. "Abraham has been dead for seventeen centuries; Thou art not even fifty years old; how are we to understand such words as these?" Then very gently, but with great solemnity, and with that formula of asseveration which He only used when He announced His most solemn truths, the Saviour revealed to them His eternity, His Divine preexistence before He had entered the tabernacle of mortal flesh : "Verily, verily I say unto you, Before Abraham came into existence, I am."3 Then, with a burst of impetuous fury-one of those 1 Luke xvi. 22; Matt. xxii. 32. 2 In some valueless MSS. this is quite needlessly corrected into "forty." It is strange that modern writers like Gfrörer should have revived the mistaken inference of Irenæus from this verse that Jesus lived fifty years on earth. The belief that He died at the age of thirty-three may be regarded as nearly certain, and it cannot even be safely conjectured from this passage either that the sorrows of His lot had marred His visage, or that the deep seriousness of His expression made Him appear older than He was. It is obvious that the Jews are speaking generally, and in round numbers: Thou hast not yet reached even the full years of manhood, and hast Thou seen Abraham?" 3 John viii. 58, πρὶν ̓Αβραὰμ γενέσθαι, ἐγὼ εἰμι. There could be no more distinct assertion of His divine nature. I have pointed out elsewhere that those who deny this must either prove that He never spoke those words, or must believe that He-the most lowly and sinless and meek-hearted of men-was guilty of a colossal and almost phrenetic intoxication of vanity and arrogance. For the Jews, more intensely than any other nation which the world has ever known, recognised the infinite transcendence of God, and therefore for a Jew, being merely man, to claim Divinity, would not only be inconsistent with ordinary sense and virtue, but inconsistent with anything but sheer blasphemous insanity. See the Author's Hulsean Lectures, The Witness of History to Christ, p. 85. DEPARTURE OF JESUS. 79 paroxysms of sudden, uncontrollable, frantic rage to which this people has in all ages been liable upon any collision with its religious convictions-they took up stones to stone Him.1 But the very blindness of their rage made it more easy to elude them. His hour was not yet come. With perfect calmness He departed unhurt out of the Temple. 1 The unfinished state of the Temple buildings would supply them with huge stones close at hand. CHAPTER XLI. THE MAN BORN BLIND. "He from thick films shall purge the visual ray, EITHER on His way from the Temple, after this attempted assault, or on the next ensuing Sabbath,1 Jesus, as He passed by, saw a man blind from his birth, who, perhaps, announced his miserable condition as he sat begging by the roadside, and at the Temple gate.2 All the Jews were trained to regard special suffering. as the necessary and immediate consequence of special sin. Perhaps the disciples supposed that the words of our Lord to the paralytic whom He had healed at the Pool of Bethesda, as well as to the paralytic at Capernaum, might seem to sanction such an impression. They asked, therefore, how this man came to be born blind. Could it be in consequence of the sins of his parents? If not, was there any way of supposing that it could have been for his own? The supposition in It is impossible to decide between these alternatives. If it was on the same Sabbath, the extreme calmness of our Lord, immediately after circumstances of such intense excitement, would be very noticeable. In either case the narrative implies that the ebullition of homicidal fury against Him was transient. 2 John v. 14. A MISTAKEN QUESTION. 81 the former case seemed hard; in the latter, impossible.1 They were therefore perplexed. Into the unprofitable regions of such barren speculation our Lord refused to follow them, and He declined, as always, the tendency to infer and to sit in judgment upon the sins of others. Neither the man's sins, He told them, nor those of his parents, had caused that lifelong affliction; but now, by means of it, the works of God. should be made manifest. He, the Light of the world, must for a short time longer dispel its darkness. Then He spat on the ground, made clay with the spittle, and smearing it on the blind man's eyes, bade him " bade him "go wash in the Pool of Siloam."3 and was healed. The blind man went, washed, 1 Exod. xx. 5. We can hardly imagine that those simple-minded Galilæans were familiar with the doctrine of metempsychosis (Jos. Antt. xviii. 1, §3; B. J. ii. 8, § 14); or the Rabbinic fancy of ante-natal sin; or the Platonic and Alexandrian fancy of pre-existence; or the modern conception of proleptic punishment for sins anticipated by foreknowledge. 2 The Greek idiom does not here imply, as its literal English equivalent appears to do, that the man had been born blind solely in order that God's glory might be manifested in his healing. The va expresses a consequence, not a purpose-it has, technically speaking, a metabatic, not a telic force. This was pointed out long ago by Chrysostom and Theophylact, and Glassius in his valuable Philolog. Sacr., pp. 529, 530, gives many similar instances-e.g., Rom. iii. 4; v. 20; and comp. John xi. 4; xii. 40. It would, however, carry me too far if I attempted to enter into the subject further here. 66 3" Which,” adds St. John-or possibly a very ancient gloss-“ means Sent." It is found in all MSS., but not in the Persian and Syriac versions. The remark is rather allusive than etymological, and connects the name of the fountain with the name of the Messiah; but the possible grammatical accuracy of the reference seems now to be admitted. (See Neander, Life of Christ, p. 199; Ebrard, Gosp. Hist., p. 317; Hitzig, Isaiah, 97.) Justin Martyr (Dial. c. Tryph. 63, p. 81) refers to the Messiah as áróσTOλos, perhaps with a view to Isa. viii. 6. The fact that "the waters of Siloah that flow softly" were supposed, like those of other intermittent springs near Jerusalem, to have a healing power, would help the man's faith. Even Mohammedans say that "Zemzem and Siloah are the two fountains of Paradise." g |