Verses 15-21
Chapter 61
Making Suggestions to Christ
One cannot but be struck by the infinite ludicrousness of the situation. It is sadly comical. Jesus Christ did not receive much help in the way of suggestion from his disciples; and when they had come forward for the purpose of making propositions I know not of any figures more strikingly grotesque and pitiable. We, however, have been in the same position with the disciples sometimes. In those hours when lucky ideas have occurred to us, and very bright suggestions have been welcomed as if they were angels from heaven, we have gone to supreme minds, to the great burning and leading intellects of the age, and have laid before them our neat little plans for meeting urgent circumstances, and to our humiliation and bitterness we have found that the suggestions which we considered startling in their originality were dismissed twenty years ago as sophisms that would not bear looking into, It is dangerous to meddle with some minds. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It is infinitely impertinent to make suggestions to Omniscience.
Look at the disciples. A happy idea has occurred to them, and their faces are flushed by its fire. They are benevolent men, they have been measuring the situation with their calculating eyes, they have seen the sun westering, they have felt the evening chill in the wind, and they have thought very kindly of the numerous people who were in the desert place, and as if their Master had been absorbed in contemplations supernal, having in them nothing of care for the present life, they go up and tell him what to do. They will be snubbed. I wonder what his answer will be: certainly it will turn their counsel upside down, whatever it be.
What was the proposition of the benevolent men? Surely they spoke one word for the multitude and twenty for themselves. It was evening, and they, perhaps, were getting tired, and they thought to hide their desire for rest under pitying sympathy for the weariness of other men. Now they take the case into their hands what will they do? Let us hear them. Perhaps they may speak revelations. "Send the multitudes away into the villages that they may buy themselves victuals." That is the world's benevolence, that is the conception of charity in many cases and in nearly all cases in the absence of the inspiration of the love of Christ. Pause awhile. Look at these benevolent men; admire their superlunar benevolence and kindness of heart. We are glad to hear them speak now and again: when they do speak they make history. They spake about the children, and said, "Send them away;" and Jesus said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me." Hear them speak about the multitudes, and they say, "Send them away." This O, hear it this is the grand suggestion of the servant: what will the command of the Master be? O, little moth, silly, silly moth, take care of the candle or thy wings will be scorched. Theological suggesters and preaching men, and persons who have theories to propound, take care lest the Master overhear you and account you the children of folly.
How much better to have gone to him and have left the case in his hands. It is always wise to trust Omniscience. It is a continual mistake to be making suggestions to Divine Providence. Remain where you are: Jesus knows when the sun is going down, and when your hunger becomes a distress. I will not leave the ground until he bid me go. In his presence I have no hunger, no pain, no weariness: I stand here till he says, "It is now time to arise and go hence." I pray you, with a beseeching of the heart, not to be making suggestions to Divine Providence, but to remain in your situations, houses, businesses, and present relations until he give the sign to go. Let us be thankful that we are not left to the devices of the disciples: let us gladden ourselves with the holy and inspiring thought that the Master still lives.
How will Jesus receive this suggestion? Deferentially? He never did receive a suggestion from the disciples with the slightest token of respect. Once one of them said to him, "This be far from thee, Lord," and he said, "Get thee behind me, Satan." Another time they said, "Take the children away," and he said, "Suffer the children to come." Now they say, "Send the multitude away, that they may buy victuals for themselves in the villages," and he says, "They need not depart give ye them to eat." How musical his voice sounds after their rough tones. Put the two expressions together, and see the infinite discrepancy. "Send the multitude away, that they may go into the villages and buy themselves victuals." It is not a suggestion, it is the rudest, vulgarest proposition that the lowest and coarsest minds could have made. Now hear the voice that holds in it all heaven's music "They need not depart." That was the revelation, and that is true of human life in all its points, aspects, bearings, and necessities.
You need not go out of the Church for anything that is really good for you. When will the Church arise to this conception of her responsibility, and to this realization of her unsearchable riches? The idea which presses itself upon us as a trouble is that people imagine the Church is a measurable quantity, set up for the purpose of dealing out a specific article. Is there bread in the Church? There is bread enough and to spare. Has the Church a music hall, a picture gallery does the Church afford opportunities for recreation, for intellectual culture, for social progress, for the consideration of ethical commerce? If the Church fail in these particulars it is because the Church has been misread, not because the Master occupies a solitary point and leaves the rest of his universe to be occupied by other persons.
What do you most need? I will find it for you in the Church. You need not depart from Christ, for whatever you want he has the key of the library, he keeps a great bread-house, he knows how he has made you, your love of art, your passion for music, your delights and your comforts, every one of them he is accountable for, as to their control and supply. Let me, therefore, protest against any theory that would narrow the Church and dwarf it into one amongst many, instead of making it many in one. I am aware that we have driven away so many people from the Church into the villages to buy victuals for themselves that we shall have a good deal to do to get back terms and phrases which ought never to have been divorced from the altar, and when they do come back they will be so distorted in image, and so vitiated in use, that for a long time some persons will protest against their being used within the walls of the sanctuary.
Where are our hosts of young people now? We have sent them into the villages to buy bread. Where those that were weak and faithless of heart, weak and trembling in soul, doubtful, troubled by infinite unrest of heart? We have sent them into the villages to buy bread. We were only too glad to get clear of them. Jesus never sent them away: as they were going he said, "You need not depart." The Church, therefore, must bestir herself to a realization of her true call of God. I want the Church to have many mansions. If you please, the mansions need not, so to speak, overlap one another, or encroach upon each other's position and special meaning but in my Father's house there should be many mansions, and no man should be allowed to go away because there is not enough for him at home. Build the Church ten times the size, stretch its hospitable roof over all things that can feed the best nature, and charm the noblest instincts and impulses of human nature, and do not narrow and impoverish and dwarf yourselves.
You are called upon, Christian Churches, to supply all the necessities of the world. We may have to alter old habits and modernize ancient methods and do a great many things that appear to be revolutionary, but I would write upon every church front, as an appeal to the whole public, these sacred words "Ye need not depart." Everything that man can need for his healthy instruction, edification, culture, and perfecting is within the boundaries of Christ's conception of his own Church. The time will come when we shall not need to modify any of the great grand words ever spoken by Jesus Christ. The mischief is that a cold age wants to drag down the reading to its own coldness. I say concerning this Book of marvels and most astounding miracles let every line stand. There are coming men who can read the Book in all its apocalyptic wondrousness of suggestion, colour, pomp, and music. We may not be able to read it; our ears are filled with unholy noises, our eyes are divided so that we cannot focalise our vision and fix it with intensity enough upon the object to see its real beauty, but in the coming time there are generations that will be able to read the Book in all its breadth, and we must not spoil it for their using. Fear not, the lion of the tribe of Judah hath power to open the Book, and in an infinitely less degree, but not wanting in healthy and noble suggestion, is it true that hearts are coming, brighter minds, nobler souls, who will be able to open the Book in its true sense and read it with all its magic and power and grandeur of suggestion.
Do not drag down the Book to your present coldness. Do not imagine that the Book is about to accommodate itself to the impoverishment which you have inflicted upon yourselves. The miracles stun us because we have lost the power of grasping them, but when materialism goes down and faith rises to its proper position the miracles will be easy reading to all believing souls. You must enlarge the idea of the Church.
"They need not depart give ye them to eat." You never know how much you have till you begin to give. The thing given with the right spirit grows in the giving. You will find after you have withdrawn some donation from your store, with a good motive and a right intent, that when you go back again to the store it will have returned, and in your secrecy you will say, "What mystery is this, when I have given the money? It was taken out to be given, but I must have forgotten to convey it." This is the ministry of the angels, to go to the secret drawer and put the money back, to watch your face when you return to count what you expected to be the diminished amount. We have proved this: we must not be accounted foolish men by those who have not entered into the same experience. If I were my own treasurer I should be poor in a month: I would not know what had been done with the money. But taking it always from him, in the act of giving it to him it grows in the giving.
Let us hear those wonderful men talk again. And they say unto him, "We have here but five loaves and two fishes." Did they tell the truth? No. Did they distort the facts? No. Is it possible to state a fact and yet to keep back the truth? Perfectly possible, and done every day. Let us hear how much they had. Five loaves and two fishes and no more. Sure? What had the fools forgotten? What we forget in all our misreckoning. Give me the inventory of their property, will you; it will then read thus: "We have here but five loaves and two fishes, and God and Christ, and the Miracle worker and the Creator." What poor inventories we return. The stationer could give us paper enough for our inventories ten thousand times over. We give the material side only when we add up our riches; we put down the loaves and the fishes, and the water and the gold, and the silver and the stones but what about ideas, impulses, thoughts, purposes, burning desires, imperishable capacities? What about the immortality that stirs within us? With such omissions your inventory is not worth the paper it is written upon. When you reckon up your little stock to-night do not forget to add at the foot of the roll "and Christ, and Providence, and my Father in heaven," and you will lay down your weary head as a millionaire, multiplied by innumerable millions as to store and value.
Jesus said, "Bring them hither to me." He was not disturbed by the number, as the disciples were. In their hands the loaves would have been only five and the fishes would have been only two, but in Christ's hands the stock will be multiplied into a great feast. It is the same with everything we have. Let us take up our two talents to Christ we shall bring them back two hundred. Let us take up our resources to Christ, and we shall come back multiplied into an army that cannot lose a battle. This accounts for your non-success, my friends: you are using your little store without passing it through the all-multiplying fingers: if you were more religious you would be more successful.
Now this is a miracle which does not appeal to the imagination. Sometimes the rationalists have told us that the people upon whom the miracle was wrought were simply operated upon by a magnetic will, by a higher power of mind than their own, and they for the time being became the happy subjects of a kind of magnetic action. I imagine the bread had no imagination to be wrought upon: it would appear to me that the five loaves and the two fishes were not subjects for the operation of any magical art. Moreover, the whole story is so constructed as to make it sternly literal. "Jesus commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude." Jesus did not personally give the bread to the multitude he passed it, as he passes all his bread, through the medium of ministries and servants of his own appointing.
It was more than a mere miracle: it was a sacrament. He made a religious feast of it. He never did anything secularly, as we use that cold term his whole life was religious, his very breath was a prayer, the opening of his eyes was a revelation. He did nothing without his Father. We should have larger comforts if we had more religion in the using of them. Your unblest bread will soon be done. If you eat animally you will be choked, if you eat sacramentally you will have bread enough and to spare. Eat with contentment of heart, with a sense of gratitude and thankfulness to God, as the guest of God, and the host will see that you have enough. Do not spread an atheist's table that you may put upon it venison and wines of all fanned vineyards: you will only get up a glutton and a winebibber, flushed with a bad heat and satisfied but for an hour. On the poorest meal, on the simplest engagement of life, ask the heavenly blessing secretly or audibly, but mean it and sitting down to your little table, say, "I am here as God's guest: he asked me to sit here," and the feast will be a holy sacrament.
There are eternal meanings in this bread-giving. This is the miracle of the ages. It is the only miracle which all the evangelists have told, and there may be a purpose in this unanimity of record, for this is the miracle we must all partake of or we cannot live we must eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of God. "Except a man eat my flesh and drink my blood he hath no life in him." This is the true bread which cometh down from heaven, of which if a man eat he will hunger no more. Now we come with our little dwarfing expositions, and take all the sap, the juice, the wine out of this holy growth. We will ask little questions about transubstantiation, and we will set up little enigmas and miserable riddles which are unworthy of the Christian imagination, and our religious liberties and privileges. This is not a question of transubstantiation: the bread does not pass into any other body or substance: the wine is wine at the last as at the first, and no magic can change its nature. And yet as in the letter I feel the spirit, so in these elements of bread and wine my heart feels that it is feasting upon the living Lord. Do not ask for this gospel to be reduced to words: I ask you to enlarge your words to receive this gospel.
Have you eaten of the bread sent down from heaven have you drunk of the blood of the Son of God? If not, you have no life abiding in you. Lord, evermore give us this bread. This is the bread that endureth unto life everlasting. In my Father's house is bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger: I will arise and go to my Father, and I will say unto him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." Have you challenged him with a speech so eloquent in contrition? He will shake the heavens that he may reply to you with the enthusiasm of his whole house; his angels and his firstborn will consider it no humiliation to gather around you and clothe you and make you rich with all heaven's wealth.
Return, return, thou hungry wanderer in the wilderness: thou needest not depart: in thy Father's house are all mansions, and there is a resting-place even for thee.
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