“Disciple” is the term consistently used in the four Gospels to mark the relationship existing between Christ and His followers. Jesus used it Himself in speaking of them, and they in speaking of each other. Neither did it pass out of use in the new days of Pentecostal power. It runs right through the Acts of the Apostles. It is interesting also to remember that it was on this wise that the angels thought and spoke of these men: the use of the word in the days of the Incarnation is linked to the use of the word in the Apostolic Age by the angelic message to the women, “Go, tell his disciples and Peter” (Mar_16:7).
It is somewhat remarkable that the word is not to be found in the Epistles. This is to be accounted for by the fact that the Epistles were addressed to Christians in their corporate capacity as churches, and so spoke of them as members of such, and as the “saints,” or separated ones of God. The term “disciple” marks an individual relationship; and though it has largely fallen out of use, it is of the utmost value still in marking the relationship existing between Christ and each single soul, and suggesting our consequent position in all the varied circumstances of everyday living.
Lads to be afterwards notable as Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Lord Dudley and Ward, who had as class-mates Henry Brougham, Francis Horner, Henry Cockburn, and Francis Jeffrey, were among the students then attending Edinburgh University. These men looked fondly back in their older years to those delightful days of plain living and high thinking in Edinburgh, where they studied under Playfair and Robison and Dalziel. But it was Dugald Stewart, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, whom they regarded as their master, as he set forth fine moral aims and ideals-especially when discussing the application of ethics to the principles of government and the conduct of citizens in political life. As Henry Cockburn listened in his boyhood to the persuasive eloquence, he felt his whole nature changed by his teacher: “his noble views unfolded in glorious sentences elevated me into a higher world.” Francis Horner was touched and moved to admiration; and it was the inculcating of high moral purpose on men and citizens which influenced young men who had a public career before them. As Sir James Mackintosh said, Dugald Stewart's disciples were his best works.1 [Note: H. G. Graham, Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century, 426.]
1. Why did Jesus attach disciples to Him? The answer may be given that it was partly for His own sake and partly for theirs and for what they could do in the spread of the gospel.
(1) What they could do for Him.-He was not, indeed, one who needed attendance and service; His personal wants were few, His life the simplest. But there were many things in which they would minister to Him and aid Him, sparing His strength, relieving His toil, and so helping on His work. In the ardour of His Divine zeal He was capable of forgetting the claims of the body, and they had sometimes to constrain Him, saying, “Master, eat.” If, after a day of labour and excitement, with heavy incessant demands upon Him, evening came and found Him spent and weary, He needed but to say, “Let us go over unto the other side,” and they did all the rest: they brought the boat to the nearest landing-place, and He stepped aboard and was their passenger. Some of them were skilful fishermen as well as faithful friends, and He might trust Himself to their hands. If the wind served they would run up the sail; if not, they rowed, taking turns with the oars; and it pleased them well if, wearied with His work, and soothed by the motion of the boat and the breeze upon the lake, He fell asleep, to wake only when the boat's keel grated upon the shingle at the place where He would be.
Nor was this the only kind of service they could render Him. From a very early period He had enemies, and feeling was often stirred to violence as He spoke. Again and again there were fierce fanatics in the crowds that thronged and pressed Him. Sometimes, it may be, a solitary teacher would not have been safe, where He, with His Twelve about Him, was left in peace. Christ Himself, we know, was absolutely fearless, and had an extraordinary power of quelling the rising storm in men's hearts as well as upon the lake. Still, for the sake of His work-that He might finish it, and deliver all His message-it may be that it was well for Him that He sat surrounded by these staunch friends when He spoke the words which “half concealed and half revealed” His tremendous claims, or when He hurled His denunciations at scribes and Pharisees. But probably such service was not the best of the help they gave Him. Just to be with Him, to make an atmosphere of sympathy about Him, to constitute a spiritual home into which He could retreat from the strife of tongues, and rest and recover Himself-perhaps this was the chief of all the service by which they helped Him then.
(2) What He could do for them.-What they might do for Him, however, does not explain the calling of the Twelve. For all the personal service they rendered Him, fewer would certainly have sufficed. It was much more for the sake of what He could do for them, and with a view to a great service of the future, that they were with Him. He was a Teacher: He traversed the land proclaiming to all men His gospel, and that Kingdom of which He was the King; these went with Him that they might hear all His truth. In place after place they listened while he taught. They heard the gospel in Galilee; they heard it, in different accents, in Samaria; they heard it in Judæa and in Jerusalem, and again the tone was new, for it was a many-sided gospel. They heard Him preach His Kingdom in various aspects: now it was a spiritual state, a community in which God's will is done; now it was a power which goes out in effort to get that will done, an influence which had come into the world, mixing with human affairs, permeating them, leavening them, charging them with its own Divine redeeming qualities; and now again it was the prize of life, man's chief good, his supreme treasure and reward. They heard all His teaching; they alone of all His hearers obtained a complete view of His truth.
Some part of it indeed was reserved specially for them. When night fell, and the crowd of common hearers dispersed, they gathered round Him in some humble homo, and He taught them, and His thought grew ever more luminous and wonderful. As they journeyed from town to town, beguiling the tedium of the way, He taught them, and the bright flowers bloomed unnoticed by the wayside when; they passed, for they hung upon Him listening, and their hearts burned within them while He spoke. It was His will to entrust His truth to them, to make them the depositaries and stewards of it, that through them, by and by, it might be for all. Meanwhile they have to listen and learn, and store up in heart and mind His teachings; and in order that they may do so they must be with Him through all the days of His ministry.
And there is something else, of chiefest moment, yet unnamed. They were learning His truth. His mighty works were teaching them, but He Himself was greater than His words or His works; and as they lived with Him day by day they came to know Him, and His spirit penetrated them. That spirit showed itself not only in His public teachings, but sometimes more beautifully and impressively still in simple unconscious acts in the region of the private life, and always in the tone and character of their intercourse. Slowly, but surely, the disciples acquired His habits of thought, His point of view, His instinctive feeling. To the end the difference rather than the resemblance may strike us; nevertheless at the end the men are changed, the disciples are like their Master.
Christ is not merely a truth to be believed, but a way to be trodden, a life to be lived. We get to know Christ, as fellow-travellers, fellow-workers, fellow-soldiers get to know one another, by mingling their lives together. It is ever in what we know to be our best moods that we find ourselves most in sympathy with Christ; when we work more faithfully by the light of conscience. It is in what we know are our worst moods that the light of faith begins to grow dim: when we are disturbed, tempted, distracted, out of sympathy with our conscience.1 [Note: George Tyrrell, Oil and Wine.]
2. Whom did He choose? Was it the wise and learned? They would have tormented the simplicity of His teaching with endless commentaries, and wrought it into intellectual schemes, so that the shepherd on the hill and the slave in the city could not have understood it. Too well we know what the wisdom of the world in the brains of the priesthood has made of the words of Christ. If the work of theologians had been done at the beginning of Christianity, we should have had no simple Christianity at all.
Then did He choose the rich and those in high position? No, truly, that would not have been wise. For they would have weighted His goodness with the cares and deceitfulness of wealth, with the ambition and meanness of society. And what could rich men have done with a doctrine which bade them give away wealth, which told the business man to take no thought for the morrow, which said to the courtier, “There is only one King, and He is in heaven,” which told the man in society, “There is only one nobility, and the slave who carries your litter may have it as well as you”?
Did He choose the religious leaders? How could He? They would dissolve His charity, His mercy, and His tolerance, in the acid of their theological hatreds. They would cast His religion into a fixed form which would destroy its variety and flexibility so that it could not enter into the characters of diverse nations and become the universal gospel; they would subject it to their own ecclesiastical interests, and it would cease to be the interest of mankind.
Did He choose the politicians-those among the Jews who conspired against the Romans, or those who held to the Romans? Why should He? That would have made His gospel a gospel for the Jews only, and not for Greek and Roman and barbarian. To choose the politicians would have been to propagate His truth by political craft or by the sword. It was not the way of Christ to set up the Kingdom of God by the worship of the devil.
None of these He made His messengers. He chose the unlearned and the poor and the outcast of the theologians, and the unintercsted in politics, and the men and women of whom society knew nothing; the fisherman and the publican, the Pharisee who left the priestly ranks, the rich who left their riches, the Israelite without guile, the cottager, the sinner and the harlot who were contrite, but chiefly-for with those in His favourite haunts He most companioned-the fishermen of the Lake of Galilee.
All the world knows how in the fifth century a few fishermen driven from the mainland laid in reefs of mud and sand the foundation-stones of Venice. These heroic souls in deep desolation drove stakes and built their huts in the slime of the lagoon; then little by little a city of incomparable splendour rose out of the sea-a city of superb palaces, gorgeous temples, crowded marts, of museums, picture galleries, and libraries, of wonderful loveliness, power, and riches: the ideal shrine of poets and painters, of all worshippers of the perfect and Divine. So another handful of fishermen in great travail laid in the mud and misery of the old world the foundation-stones of the Church of Christ, the City of God, the spiritual Venice. It was built on the sea, established on the floods; it has been edified through ages of strife and conflict.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Supreme Conquest, 33.]
3. Two things alone were necessary to discipleship.
(1) Loyalty.-The bond of union was to be nothing less than a personal attachment. It was not to be the interest which a thinker feels in his thought or a reformer in his principles, but the devotion of a disciple for his Master. Jesus of Nazareth, not the Messiah of Jewish expectation, or the Christ of later dogma, still less the floating ideal of ages of Christian sentiment, but the historical Person whose life is recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, exercised authority and commanded obedience. He made loyalty to Him the sovereign principle of discipleship.
The soul of all religion, and especially of the Christian religion, is loyalty to a great personality who images to the imagination and reverence of the race that still greater personality, otherwise unrevealed, and without a name. It is allegiance to truth and goodness, not as these are formulated in abstract propositions and maxims, but as they are incarnated in a noble life. And so it may be said that Christianity has not begun for the individual or the community until both have given to its Founder a confidence and personal attachment they would be ashamed to limit, and equally ashamed not to confess before all the world. Nothing can take the place of this high-born fealty. It is the very life of the Christian faith, the inspiration to service and sacrifice without which men will never be induced to bear loss and suffering, grief and reproach, with resignation and heroism.
(2) Teachableness.-The loyalty of discipleship must precede understanding, and not understanding discipleship. No one would pretend, of course, that the closest companionship with our Lord in this life will completely solve the problems which human existence presents. In part it does actually solve them; for the rest, it enables us, as nothing else can do, to acquiesce in their being, for the time, insoluble. The Christian alone can rest content to see now “through a glass darkly,” because he alone can hope to see hereafter “face to face.” Yet even here the revelation given to those who persist in discipleship is wonderfully full. To them, in a very real sense, it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to others in parables. Intellectually, these others may he much superior to many of the disciples. They may take a real interest in religious questions. They may have studied the historical and moral evidence for Christianity with scrupulous care. They may have the language of theology in familiar use. And yet all this amounts to so many parables for them; the spiritual words they utter are but counters in a game of logic, they do not stand for glowing realities which penetrate every moment of life. And so these people are still dissatisfied. When this or that difficulty is fully explained, then, they declare, they will be only too glad to be disciples. Alas, they still regard understanding as the antecedent condition instead of the ultimate result of discipleship! Only to those who have sojourned at the Master's side is it given to know the mysteries.
Andrew's lesson began the very first day he spoke to Jesus. “I should like,” says Dr. J. D. Jones, “to have had some record of what took place in our Lord's humble lodging that night. When I think of our Saviour's wonderful conversation with Nicodemus, and His equally wonderful conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, I feel I would give worlds to have had a report of the conversation that took place between Jesus and these seeking souls that night. It would be a never-to-be-forgotten conversation, I know; and just as Paul used to look back to the great light on the way to Damascus as the supreme experience of his life, so Andrew and John used to date everything back to this their first conversation with Jesus. I do not know what He said; but as they listened to Him, their hearts-like that of John Wesley in the Moravian meeting-house-were strangely warmed, and before they left that night they had found their Messiah.”
More than two hundred years ago there was a young probationer in the Church of Scotland named Thomas Boston. He was about to preach before the parish of Simprin. In contemplation of the eventful visit he sat down to meditate and pray. “Reading in secret, my heart was touched with Mat_4:19 : ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.' My soul cried out for the accomplishing of that to me, and I was very desirous to know how I might follow Christ so as to be a fisher of men, and for my own instruction in that point I addressed myself to the consideration of it in that manner.” Out of that honest and serious consideration there came that quaint and spiritually profound and suggestive book, A Soliloquy on the Art of Man-Fishing. All through Thomas Boston's book one feels the fervent intensity of a spirit eager to know the mind of God in the great matter of fishing for souls. Without that passion our inquiry is worthless. “The all-important matter in fishing is to have the desire to learn.”1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Passion for Souls, 59.]
Of all the honours man may wear,
Of all his titles proudly stored,
No lowly palm this name shall bear,
“The first to follow Christ the Lord.”
Such name thou hast, who didst incline,
Fired with the great Forerunner's joy,
Homeward to track the steps divine,
And watch the Saviour's best employ.2 [Note: Dean Alford.]
