conscience toward God but only to themselves, and so they could think of nothing but the happiest expedient for effecting His death. So read, the parable is a piece of severe prophetic satire. The second moral told the disciples to have faith; with it they could accomplish anything, without it nothing at all. They were to be the antithesis to the rulers, and exemplify not a faithlessness which the world overcomes, but the faith which overcomes the world. The two combined show the twofold attitude of Jesus, on the one hand to the men who were to erect the cross, on the other to the men who were to preach in His name to all nations. What is significant is the place and function which the parable assigns to Himself: to fail to receive Him is fundamental failure; to believe in Him is to be qualified to effect the removal of mountains.

B. The immediate sequent of the entry must also be noted. Jesus went straight to the temple, where, Mark significantly says, "He looked round upon all things," and, returning on the morrow, "He cast out all them that bought and sold in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money - changers, and the seats of them that sold doves." 2 This incident has been very variously judged: it has been regarded as an outbreak of passion, as a lawless act, as even an act of rebellion and revolution; as a desperate attempt to precipitate a conflict, and by a sort of surprise attack save Himself and defeat the priests and rulers. These seem to us shallow views. We could not feel as if Jesus became sinful simply because He was angry; nay, the more sinless we think Him to be the more do we conceive indignation and resentment as natural and even necessary to Him. There are acts and states that

3

1 xi. 11. 2 Ib. 15; Matt. xxi. 12.

3 Keim, Jesus of Nuzara, vol. v., pp. 118-23, for example, speaks about "His uncurbed anger," His passion for rule and revolution," and describes His action as the "Nothakt eines Untergehenden."

ought to provoke anger, and not to feel it would argue a singularly poor and obtuse moral nature, without any power of recoil from the offensive and reprehensible. And from what He saw in the temple Jesus did well to be angry, yet His anger was without passion. Matthew finely indicates this by two things, "the blind and the lame "— the two most timid classes-came to Him to be healed, and the children, who are ever sensitive to passion and instinctively shrink from hate, were attracted to Him and sang in His praise. The anger which was terrible to the guilty seemed tenderness to the innocent. And so the chief priests and scribes said, in suspicion and alarm, "Hearest Thou what these say?" But He justified the children thus: "Yea, did ye never read, Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise?" And His own action, how does He justify it? By comparing the ideal with the actual temple 1: the ideal was to be a House of Prayer for all nations, but the actual had been made a den of robbers, i.e., they had narrowed it, and had prostituted the pure house of God to their own sordid uses. And He claimed the right to raise up the fallen ideal-and as Messiah He could claim no less-and to open the door wide to the pure in heart, who could see God, but could not trade in the holy place.

He thus, in effect, said that as they had failed to understand prophecy, they had failed to realize worship. The counterpart of the dumb oracle was the defiled altar. And so He affirmed His right to govern the house of God, to declare invalid the authority of the men who claimed to stand in the Aaronic succession and to sit in Moses' seat, to abolish the old and institute a new order, to introduce the hour when the true worshipper was to "worship the Father in spirit and in truth." But in order to see the full meaning of the act, we must here introduce a dislocated

1 xxi. 14-16.

saying. At the trial two false witnesses appear and testify: "This man said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days," and the words were repeated by the mockers at the cross. The saying, which was truly told, but falsely interpreted, evidently belongs here, and means that He had conceived Himself as the spiritual reality of which the temple was the material counterpart. What it was in symbol He was in truth-the medium for the reconciliation of man and God. In Galilee His controversy had been with the Pharisees touching tradition and the law, here it was with the priests touching worship, and the temple; but the same idea lies behind both-His transcendence of the system which the Jew regarded as absolute and final: the Son of Man is greater than the temple," and the Lord of the Law; both are from Him, through Him, and for Him. In the background of His mind, regulating His speech and action, is the thought of the ideal temple, which was profaned in the profanation of the actual, and as the pure Sacrifice He purged the place where sacrifices were impurely offered.

II.

But it is still more in the teaching peculiar to the Jerusalem period that His idea is defined. It falls into two divisions, which we may call the exoteric and the esoteric.

A. In the exoteric, or outer, there is a new note; His words are graver, sterner, much concerned with His death, and the part in it the rulers were to play. Ideas and principles also appear, different from any He had expressed while He lived in Galilee. (i.) There is the parable of the husbandmen, who first beat and kill and stone the servants, and finally slay the son that they may seize on his inheritance. What is this but a picture of the scene which was

passing before His eyes and theirs? (i.) There is His interpretation of the stone which the builders rejected, but which yet became the chief stone of the corner.1 The builders are the rulers; He Himself is the stone, hastily set aside, but so terrible that it breaks whoever falls on it, and grinds to powder the man on whom it falls. No words could more clearly forecast their respective parts in the immediate future and in the subsequent history. (iii.) There is the parable of the Marriage Supper,2-full of the tragedy of the moment,-the bidden guests scornfully refusing to come, the servants spitefully entreated, even slain, but the slayers are themselves soon to be slain, and their city burned up, while the wedding is to be furnished with fitter guests. The meaning is obvious: He is the King's Son, now is the festival of the marriage, and the rulers, who in spite of their proud claims are yet only guests in the House, are rejected of God for the rejection of His Son. (iv.) There is the attitude of Jerusalem to Him and His to her. He has a marvellous vision 3; on the one hand the city is as it were personalized, and stands pictured as a colossal persecutor, inheritor of the guilt of all past martyrdoms, and so charged with all the righteous blood which has from the days of Abel been shed upon the earth; and on the other hand He stands as Maker and Leader of martyrs, a colossal Person in whose veins flows all the blood of all the righteous; and by whose will the new prophets are fitly to be sent to deliver their testimony and endure the cross; i.e. He conceives the hour to be at hand when acts are to be done which will epitomize and embody all the martyrdoms of all the holy who have ever lived. But He who sees Himself and His thus suffer at her hands, is the very One whose mission and passion it was to save and shelter her. (v.) In the most authentic and sublime of the Apocalyptic discourses He affirms a principle He has 1 Matt. xxi. 42-44. 2 Matt. xxii. 2-10. 3 Matt. xxiii. 34-39.

The

often implied but never expressed-the vicarious. good or ill of His people is His; they are one with Him and He with them. The smallest beneficence to the least of His brethren is done to Him; the good refused to them is denied to Him.1 And, we may add, this idea implies its converse if their sufferings are His, His are theirs; what He endures and what He achieves, man achieves and endures.

We can hardly misread the significance of these passages. They bear witness to this: that the moment when He foresees His death most clearly He conceives His person most highly, that He regards this death as a calamity to those who reject, an infinite good to those who accept, Him, that those who compass it participate in what may be termed a universal crime, which shall work their disaster while constituting His opportunity to effect everlasting good. The principle which explains these things is His complete identification with all the righteousness of time, or the unity in Him of the being of all the good who are hated of all the evil. B. But these are more or less external views, conditioned by the antithesis under which they are developed; for His more inward mind we must turn to His words to the disciples.

2

i. What this mind was is evident from the incident in the house of Simon, the leper. The conflict in the city and with the rulers is over; and He can speak to His own quietly and without controversy concerning the secret things of His own soul. As they sit at meat a woman, bearing an alabaster box of very precious ointment," steals softly up behind Him, and "pours it upon His head." What followed shows how little the disciples had learned, and how much of their old spirit still lived within them. "To what purpose is this waste?" is their indignant question, while their sordid feeling is disguised as concern for the poor. But 1 Matt. xxv. 35-40, 42- 15. 2 Matt. xxvi. 6-13; Mark xiv. 3-9.