|
our Lord : lldvTei tiraatv rdv Hvpov tov t/c r^f IlaXaioTii/;)?, roi/ iiri tovtuv co(piaTi)v, oaovi
TeapaXapcjv xaraTiiTrroiraj npog Ttjv (reXfivifv koI to) 6(fida\iiO) 6ia!!Tpi(povTai Kai d pov TTijjmXa-
Hivovs Tu aro^a ojioii dviarriai koi d'rroTTinTTCi dpriovi etti fJLiadiO nCydXco diraXXd|aj roJv Scivoiv.
There is much beside this quoted in the passage, of interest.
t paiv€-at. If indeed this word has not reference to the stiffness and starkness,
the unnatural rigescence of the limbs in the accesses of the disorder. Compare 2 Kin.
jtiii. 4, LXX. Such would not indeed be the first, but might well be the secondary
meaning of the word, since that which is dried up loses its pliability, and the place
which the word occupies makes it most probable that the father is describing not the
general pining away of his son, but his symptoms when the paroxysm takes him. The
crsX/)i/ia^o//£i'o(, (in other Greek ctXrivtaKoi, acXriv6/3XriToi,) are mentioned once besides in
the New Testament, (Matt. iv. 24,) where they are distinguished from the iai/iovi-
^oficvot. The distinction, however, whatever it was, in the popular language would
continually disappear, and the father here saying of his son, ceXvid^crai, does but
express the fact, or rather the consequence, of his possession. Of course the word
originally, like /iavia, (from //rjir/) and lunaticus, arose from the wide-spread belief of
the evil influence of the moon (Ps. cxxi. 6,) on the human frame. (See Creuzer's
Symbolik, v. 2, p. 571.)
^'94 THE HEALING OF THE LUNATIC CHILD.
iind oft into the water." In St. Mark the father attributes these fits to
the direct agency of the evil spirit : " oflthncs it hath cast him into the
jire, and into the waters, to destroy him ;" yet such calamities might
equally be looked at as the natural consequences of his unhappy con-
dition.*
But when the father told the Lord of the ineffectual efforts which
the disciples had made for his relief, "/ sjjake to thy disciples that they
should cast him out, and they could not,'' he with a sorrowful indignation
exclaimed, " O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you ? how
long shall I suffer you?" And here we have two different applications
of these words. Some, as for instance Origen, apply them to the disci-
ples, and them alone ; they suppose that our Lord speaks thus, grieved
and indignant at the weakness of their faith, and that even so brief a
separation from him had shorn them of their strength, and left them
powerless against the kingdom of darkness ; and the after discourse
(Matt, xvii, 20) seems to make for such an application. Others, as
Chrysostoni, and generally the eurly interpreters, would pointedly ex-
clude the disciples from the rebuke j and they give it all to the surround-
ing multitude, and certainly the term ^'generation" seems to point to
them, though less personally, than as being specimens and representa-
tives of the whole Jewish people, the father himself coming singularly
forward as an example of the unbelieving temper of the whole genera-
tion to which he pertained, (Mark ix. 22,) aTid therefore being an especial
sharer in the condemnation. In St. Mark indeed it is primarily addressed
to him : " He answereth him, and saith, O faithless generation ;" yet the
language shows that the rebuke is intended to pass on to many more.
And indeed the most satisfactory explanation is that which reconciles
both these views; the disciples are not exclusively aimed at, nor chiefly,
but rather the multitude and the father : they, however, are included in
the rebuke; their unfaithfulness and unbelief had brought them, for the
* These extracts will abundantly justify what was said above of the symptoms of
this child's case being those of one taken with epilepsy. Caelius Aurelianus {Morb.
Chron., 1. 1, c. 4) : Alii [epileptici] publicis in locis cadendo fcedantur, adjunctis etiam
externis periculis, loci causS prsecipites dati, aut in flumina vel mare cadentes. And
Paulus .iEgineta, the last of the great physicians of the old world, describing epilepsy,
(1. 3, c. 13.) might almost seem to have borrowed his account from this history:
Morbus comitialis est convulsio totius corporis cum principalium actionum la;sione, . . .
fit hsec affectio maximd pueris, postea vero etiam in adoiescentibus et in vigore con-
sistentibus. Instante vero jam symptomate coilaptio ipsis derepente contigit et con-
vulsio, et quandoque nihil significans exclamatio {i^a'Kpvm Kpa^ci, Luke ix. 39). Prae-
cipuum vero ipsorum signum est oris spuma (/icra d(ppov, Luke ix. 39 ; cf. Lucian's
Fhilopspudes, c. 16.)
THE HEALING OF THE LUNATIC CHILD. 295
time, back to the level with their nation, and they must share with them
in a common reproach. " How long shall I he with you .?'"' are words
not so much of one longing to put off the coil of flesh,* as rather of
a master, complaining of the slowness and dulness of his scholars.
" Have I abode with you all this time, and have you profited so little by
my teaching ?" feeling, it may be, at the same time, that till, their task
was learned, he could not leave them, he must abide with them still. •j'
We may compare his words to Philip, " Have I been so long time with
you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?" (John xiv. 9.)
And now he says, " Bring him unto me." As the staff in Gehazi's
hand could not arouse the dead child, but the prophet himself must
come and take the work in hand, before ever a cure can be wrought, so
must it be now. Yet the first bringing of the child to Jesus causes
another of the fearful paroxysms of his disorder, so that " he fell on the
ground and wallowed, foaming.^' The kingdom of Satan in small and
in great is ever stirred into a fiercer activity by the coming near of the
kingdom of Christ. Satan has great wrath, when his time is short.:}:
But as the Lord on occasion of another difficult cure (Mark v. 9) began
a conversation with the sufferer himself, seeking thus to inspire him
with confidence, to bring back something of calmness to his soul, so
does he now with the representative of the sufferer, the father, it being
impossible, from his actual condition, to do it with himself: " How long
is it ago since this came unto him?'' But the father, answering indeed
the question, that it was "â– of a child," and for the stirring of more pity,
describing again the miserable perils in which these fits involved his
child, yet ill content that any thing should come before the healing, if a
healing were possible, having, too, present before his mind the recent
failure which the disciples had made, added, " If thou, if thou more than
these, canst do any thing, have co77ipassion on us, and helj) us." He says
•' W5," so. entirely is his own life knit up with his child's life: as the
Canaanitish woman, pleading for her daughter, had cried, ^' Have mercy
on me." (Matt. xv. 22.) Yet at the same time he reveals by that "if"
how he had come with no unquestioning faith in the power of the Lord
to aid, but was rendering the difficult cure more difficult still by his own
doubting and unbelief.
* Jerome {Comm. in Matth., in loc.) : Non quod taedio superatus sit, et mansuetus
ac mitis ; . . sed quod in similitudinem medici si segrotum videat contra sua praecepta
se gerere dicat: Usquequo accedam ad domum tuam, quousque artis perdam injuriam ;
me aliud jubente et te aliud perpetrante 1
t Bengel: Festinabat ad Patrem: nee tamen abitum se facere posse sciebat,
priusquam discipulos ad fidem perduxisset. Molesta erat tarditas eorum.
X Calvin : Quo propior affuiget Christi gratia, et efRcacius agit, eo impotentius furit
Satan.
296 THE HEALING OF THE LUNATIC CHILD.
Our Lord's answer is not without its difficulty, especially as it ap-
pears in tiie original, but the sense of it is plainly the following ; " That
' jf' of thine, that uncertainty whether this can be done or not, is to be
resolved by thee and not by me. There is a condition without which
this thy child cannot be healed ; but the fulfilling of the condition lies
with no otlier than thyself. The absence of faith on thy part, and not
any overmastering power in this malignant spirit, is that which straitens
me ; if this cure is hard, it is thou that renderest it so. Thou hast
said. If /can do any thing ; but the question is, ' If thou canst believe ;
this is the hinge upon which all must turn " — and then with a pause,
and no merely suspended sense as in our translation,* follow those fur-
ther words, " All tilings are possible to him that believeth.'^ So that faith
is here, as in all other cases, set as the condition of healing ; on other
occasions it is the faith of the person ; but here, that being impossible,
the father's is accepted instead ; even as the Syrophenician mother's in
the room of her daughter's. (Matt. xv. 22.) Thus the Lord appears.
in Olshausen's words, in some sort a uateun)? TrtWewj, helping the birth
of faith in that empty soul. And now, though with pain and with sore
travail, it has come to the birth, so that the father exclaims, " Lord, I
believe y" and then the little spark of faith which is enkindled in his
soul revealing to him the abysmal deeps of unbelief which are there,
he adds this further, " Help thou mine unbelief. "-\ For thus it is ever ;
only in the light of the actual presence of grace in the soul does any
man perceive the strength and prevalence of the opposing corruption.
Before he had no measure by which to measure his deficiency. Only
he who believes, guesses aught of the unbelief of his heart.
But now, when this condition of healing is no longer wanting on hit
part, the Lord, meeting and rewarding even the weak beginnings of his
faith, accomplishes the cure. We may observe, in Christ's address to
the foul spirit, the majestic " I charge thee ;" no longer one whom thou
mayest dare to disobey, against whom thou mayest venture to struggle;
but I, the Prince of the kingdom of light, " charge thee, come out of him.''
Nor is this all : he shall " enter no more into him.'' Christ bars his re-
turn ; he shall not take advantage of his long possession, presently to come
back (Matt. xii. 45,) and re-assert his dominion ; the cure shall be per-
fect and lasting. Most unwillingly the evil spirit departs, seeking to
* The words, I imagine, should be pointed thus: to, el ivvaaai -maTcvaaf tAvtu
fivvara tw nitTTeiovri, and Bengel enters rightly into the construction of the first clause,
explaining it thus: Hoc, si potes credere, res est ; hoc agitur. Calvin : Tu me rogas
ut subveniam quoad potero ; atqui inexhaustum virtutis fontem in me reperies, si modo
afferas satis amplam fidei mensuram.
t Augustine, Serm. 43, c. 6, 7
THE HEALING OF THE LUNATIC CHILD. 297
destroy that which he can no longer retain ; as Fuller, with wit which
is in season and out of season, expresses it, " like- an outgoing tenant
that cares not what mischief he does."* So fearful was this last parox-
ysm, so entirely had it exhausted all the powers of the child, " that he
was as one dead ; and many said, He is dead ; hut Jesus took him hy
the hand,'' and from that touch of the Lord of life there came into him
life anew : even as we often elsewhere find a reviving power to be
by the same channel conveyed. (Dan. x. 8, 9 ; Rev. i. 17; Matt. xvii.
6—8.)
Afterwards the disciples asked privately how it came to pass that
they were baffled in the attempts which they had made to accomplish
the cure, since they were not exceeding their commission, (Matt. x. 8,)
and had on former occasions found the devils subject to them ; and the
Lord tells them, because of their unbelief, because of their lack of that
to which, and to which only, all things are possible. They had made
but a languid use of the means for stirring up and strengthening faith ;
while yet, though their locks were shorn, they would go forth, as before,
against their enemies, being certain to be foiled whensoever they en-
countered, as they did here, an enemy of peculiar malignity ; for the
phrase " this kind " marks that tliere are orders of evil spirits, that as
there is a hierarchy of heaven, so is there an in inverted hierarchy of
hell. The same is intimated in the mention of the unclean spirit going
and taking " seven other spirits, more wicked than himself," (Matt. xii.
45 ;) and at Ephes. vi. 12, there is probably a climax, St. Paul mounting
up from one degree of spiritual power and malignity to another. " This
kind," he says, " goeth not out hut by prayer and fasting.'' The faith
which shall be effectual against this must be a faith exercised in prayer,
that has not relaxed itself by an habitual compliance with the demands
of the lower nature, but often girt itself up to an austerer rule, to rigor
and self-denial.
But as the secret of all weakness is unbelief, so of all strength is
faith ; and this our Lord teaches them when he adds, " For verily I say
unto you. If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto
this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove ; and
* Gregory the Great {Moral., 1. 32, c. 19) : Ecce eum non discerpserat cum
tenebat, exiens discerpsit : quia nimirutn tunc pejus cogitationes mentis diianiat, cum
jam egressui divina virtute compulsus appropinquat. Et quern mutus possederat, cum
clamoribus deserebat : quia plerumque ciun possidet, minora tentamenta irrogat: ciim
vero de corde pellitur, acriori infestatione perturbat. Cf. Horn. 12 in Ezek., and H.
de Sto. Victore ; Dum puer ad Dominum accedit, eliditur: quia conversi ad Dominum
plerumque a dsemonio gravius pulsantur, ut vel ad vitia reducantur, vel dc sua ex-
pulsione se vindicet Diabolus.
20
298 THE HEALING OF THE LUNATIC CHILD.
nothing shall he impossible unto you." The image re-appears with
some modifications, Lul
these words of his Lord, 1 Cor. xiii. 2. Many explain "faith as a
grain of mustard seed " to mean lively faith, with allusion to the keen
and biting powers of that grain.* But it certainly is not upon this
side that the comparison is to be brought out ; rather, as Maldonatus
rightly remarks, it is the smallest faith, with a tacit contrast between a
grain of mustard seed, a very small thing, and a mountain, a very great.
That smallest shall be effectual to work on this largest. The least spi-
ritual power shall be potent for the overthrow of the mightiest powers
which are merely of this world.
* Augustine {Serm. 24G) : Modicum viiletur granuin sinapis ; nihil contemtibilius
adspectu, nihil fortius gusto. Quod quid est aliud, nisi maximus ardor et intima vis
fidei in ecclesia ?
XXVIII.
THE STATER IN THE FISH'S MOUTH.
Matt. xvii. 24—27.
This miracle finds a place only in the Gospel of St. Matthew, and a
nearer contemplation of its features will show why we might even be-
forehand have expected to meet it, if in one only, then in that which is
eminently the theocratic Gospel. But its significance has oftentimes
been wholly missed, and the entire transaction emptied of its higher
meaning, robbed too of all its deeper lessons, by the assumption that this
money which was demanded of Peter was a civil impost, a tribute
owing, like the penny of a later occasion, (Matt. xxii. 19,) to the Roman
emperor ; and the word " tribute "* used in our translation, rather up-
holds this error, and leads men's thoughts in the wrong direction, — and
to consider it this civil impost, instead of what it truly was, a theocratic
payment, due to the temple and the temple's God. And this error has
brought in with it and necessitated another : for, as the only means of
maintaining any appearance of an argument in our Lord's words, it has
been needful to understand the kingly dignity, the royal birth, on the
ground of which Christ here exempts himself from the payment, to be
his Davidical descent, and not, as it is indeed, his divine.
It is true that this erroneous interpretation has been maintained by
some, I may say by many expositors, ancient and modern, of high au-
thority ; yet rather, it would seem, in most cases, from not having the
true interpretation, which carries conviction with it, before them, than
from deliberately preferring the other. Thus Augustine adduces this
passage in connection with Rom. xiii. 1 — 7, " Let every soul be subject
to the higher powers .... Render, therefore, to all their dues, tribute
to whom tribute is due," — and finds in it a motive for a willing obedience
* In the original, to ii&pa-x^jia.
300 THE STATER IN THE FISH'S MOUTH.
on the part of tlie faithful to the civil power ;* and Clement of Alexan-
dria draws from it the same lesson. Origen, too, supposes it a civil
payment ; and Jerome, also, throughout takes this wrong standing point
from which to explain this miracle ; so too, in modern times, Maklonatus,
who is aware of, but distinctly rejects, the correcter interpretation, —
being here, for once, at one with Calvin, the great object of his polemical
hatred. The last, however, upholds this view in a modified form, — he
supposes that the money claimed was indeed the temple dues, but yet
which now had been by the Romans alienated from its original destina-
tion, they compelling the Jews to pay it into the Roman treasury. f
This however, as will be seen, is historically incorrect, that alienation
not having taken place till a later time.:}:
The arguments for the other interpretation, both external and inter-
nal, are so prevailing, as hardly to leave a residue of doubt upon any
mind before which they are fairly brought. For, in the first place, this
didrachm was exactly the sum§ which we find mentioned Exod. xxx.
11 — 16, as the ransom of the soul, to be paid by every Israelite above
twenty years old, to the service and current expenses of the tabernacle,
or, as it afterwards would be, of the temple. || It is true that there it
* De Catechiz. Eud., c. 21 : Ipse Dominus ut nobis hujus sanae doctrinae praeberet
exemplum, pro capite hominis, quo erat indutus, tributum solvere non dedignatus est.
Clemens of Alex. {Pcedag., 1. 2. Potter's Ed., v. 1, p. 172) : Tdv ararripa roXi Tc\oJvais
(Jotif, TO Hataapns diroSovs r&i KaiVapi.
t Ita quasi alienati essent Judcei a Dei iniperio, profanis tyrannis solvebant sacrum
censum in Lege indicium.
I Add to these Wolf (CurtB, in loo ), who has the wrong interpretation ; and
Petitus (Crit Sac, 9, 2566) : Corn, a Lapide ; and only the other day, and after any
further mistake seemed impossible, Wieseler (Ckronol. Synapse, p. 265, sqq.) has
returned to the old error. The true meaning has been perfectly seized by Hilary
{Comm. in Matth , in loc.) by Ambrose {Ep. 7, ad Justum, c. 12), and in the main
by Chrysostom {In Matth., Horn. 54,) and Theophylact, who yet have gone astray
npon Num. iii. 40 — 51 ; and in later times by Cameron {Crit. Sac, in loc), by Freher
(Cn<. S'tfc, V. 9, p. 3633), by Hammond, who has altogether a true insight into the
matter, Grotius, Lightfoot, Bengel, Michaelis, and last of all by Olshausen, and Mr.
Greswell {Dissert., v. 2, p. 376).
§ It is true that in the Septuagint (E.xod. xxx. 13) it is ij^uo-u row itSpixfoi'- But
this arises from their expressing themselves, as naturally they would, according to the
Alexandrian drachm, which was twice the value of the Attic. (See Hammond, in loc.)
II The sum there named is a half shekel. Before the Babylonian exile, the shekel
was only a certain weight of silver, not a coined money ; in the time, however, of the
Maccabees, (1 Mace. xv. 6,) the Jews received the privilege, or won the right, from
the kings of Syria of coining their own money, and the shekels, half shekels, and
quarter shekels now found in the cabinets of collectors are to be referred to this period.
These growing scarce, and not being coined any more, it became the custom to esti-
mate the temple dues as two drachms, (the iiSpaxitov here required,) a sum actually
THE STATER IN THE FISH'S MOUTH. 301
seems only to have been ordered to be paid on tlie occasions, which
most probably were rare, of the numbering of the people. But whether
from such having been the real intention of the divine Legislator, or
from a later custom which arose only after the Babylonian captivity, it
had grown into an annual payment. Some have thought they found
traces of it earlier, — and, indeed, there seem distinct notices of it, 2 Kin.
xii. 4; 2 Chron. xxiv. 5, 6, 9 ; and all the circumstances of what is
there described as the collection which "Moses the servant of God laid
upon Israel in the wilderness," seem to make for the supposition.* At
Nehemiah x. 32, the circumstance that it is a lliird part of a shekel, and
not a half, which they agree to pay, makes it more questionable, as they
would scarcely have ventured to alter the amount of a divinely insti-
tuted payment; yet the fact that it was yearly, and that it was expressly
for the service of the house of God, would lead us to think that it can
be no other payment which is meant ; and they may have found an ex-
cuse for the alteration in their present distress. Josephusf mentions that
it was an annual payment in his time ; and Philo, who tells us how consci-
entiously and ungrudgingly it was paid by the Jews of the Dispersion, as
well as by the Jews of Palestine, so that in almost every city there was
a sacred treasury for the collection of these dues, some of which came
from cities beyond the limits of the Roman empire ; and then at certain
times there were sacred messengers selected from among the worthiest
somewhat larger than the half shekel, as those that have compared together the
weights of the existing specimens of each have found ; thus Josephus {Antt., 1. 3, c. 8,
§2): 'O 61 o-uXof, v6ji.i(jfia 'K/3paiu>v S)v, 'Attikcl; ii^CTai ipa^fias liaaapa^. As the pro-
duce of the miracle was to pay for two persons, the sum required was four drachms, or
a whole shekel, and the arariip found in the mouth of the fish is just that sum. It
indeed often bore the name of rerpaSpaxiiOi. Jerome : Siclus autem, id est stater,
habet drachmas quatuor. It is almost needless to say that this stater is not the gold
coin that more accurately bears that name, which would have been equal not to four,
but to twenty, drachms ; but rather, as is said above, the silver, tetradrachm, which
in later times of Greece came to be called a stater. That other stater, equal to the
Persian daric, would have been worth something more than sixteen shillings of our
money, this three shillings and threepence. (See the Diet, of Gr. and Rom. Antt.
s. vv. Drachma and Stater, and Winer's Real WOrterluch, s. v. Sekel.) It is curious
that Theophylact should seem ignorant of what this stater is. Some think it, he says,
a precious stone which is found in Syria.
* So Dathe ; Michaelis {Mas. Recht, v. 3, p. 202,) questions or denies it.
t Antt.,\. 18, c. 9, § 1. The time appointed for the payment was between the
15th and 25th of the month Adar (March), that is, about the feast of the Passover.
Yet no secure chronological conclusions in regard to our Lord's ministry can be won
from this ; as, through his absence from Capernaum, the money might have been for
some time due. Indeed, in all probability, the feast of Tabernacles was now at
hand
302 THE STATER IN THE FISH'S MOUTH.
to bear the collected money to Jerusalem.* It was only alter the de-
struction of that city, that Vespasian caused this capitation tax to be
henceforward paid into the imperial treasury, instead of the treasury
of the temple, which now no longer existed.
The words of Josephus on this matter are as explicit as can be ; these
words I will quote, as the only argument produced against this scheme
is, that it was before the present time, and as early as Pompey, that
these moneys were diverted from their original destination, and made
payable to the Roman treasury. Of Vespasian he says,"|" " He imposed
a tribute on the Jews wheresoever they lived, requiring each to pay
yearly two drachms to the capital, as before they were wont to pay them
to the temple at Jerusalem." But of Pompey he merely says, that "he
made Jerusalem tributary to the Romans,":}: without any mention what-
ever of his laying hands on this tax, of which we have already seen
that abundant evidence exists that it continued long after his time to be
rendered to the temple. Not otherwise indeed could Titus, when he
was reproaching the Jews with the little provocation which they had for
their revolt, have reminded the revolters how the Romans had permit-
ted them to collect their own sacred imposts. §
We may observe again that it is not the publicans that are said to
come demanding this tribute, which would have been the natural appel-
|