By George MacDonald
from THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD
Used with the permission of Johannesen Printing & Publishing.
www.johannesen.com
IF we allow that prayer may in any case be heard for the man
himself, it almost follows that it must be heard for others. It cannot
well be in accordance with the spirit of Christianity, whose essential
expression lies in the sacrifice of its founder, that a man should be heard
only when he prays for himself. The fact that in cases of the preceding
group faith was required on the part of the person healed as essential
to his cure, represents no different principle from that which operates
in the cases of the present group. True, in these the condition is not
faith on the part of the person cured, but faith on the part of him who
asks for his cure. But the possession of faith by the patient was not in
the least essential, as tar as the power of Jesus was concerned, to his
bodily cure, although no doubt favourable thereto; it was necessary only
to that spiritual healing, that higher cure, for the sake of which chiefly
the Master brought about the lower. In both cases, the requisition of faith
is for the sake of those who ask-whether for themselves or for their friends,
it matters not. It is a breath to blow the smoking flax into a flame-a
word to draw into closer contact with himself. He cured many without such
demand, as his Father is ever curing without prayer. Cure itself shall
sometimes generate prayer and faith. Well, therefore, might the cure of
others be sometimes granted to prayer.
Beyond this, however, there is a great fitness in the thing. For so
are men bound together, that no good can come to one but all must share
in it. The children suffer for the father, the father suffers for the children,
and they are also blessed together. If a spiritual good descend upon the
heart of a leader of the nation, the whole people might rejoice for themselves,
for they must be partakers of the unspeakable gift. To increase the faith
of the father may be more for the faith of the child, healed in answer
to his prayer, than anything done for the child himself. It is an enlarging
of one of the many channels in which the divinest gifts flow. For those
gifts chiefly, at first, flow to men through the hearts and souls of those
of their fellows who are nearer the Father than they, until at length they
are thus brought themselves to speak to God face to face.
Lonely as every man in his highest moments of spiritual vision, yea
in his simplest consciousness of duty, turns his face towards the one Father,
his own individual maker and necessity of his life; painfully as he may
then feel that the best beloved understands not as he understands, feels
not as he feels; he is yet, in his most isolated adoration of the Father
of his spirit, nearer every one of the beloved than when eye meets eye,
heart beats responsive to heart, and the poor dumb hand seeks by varied
pressure to tell the emotion within. Often then the soul, with its many
organs of utterance, feels itself but a songless bird, whose broken twitter
hardens into a cage around it; but even with all those organs of utterance
in full play, he is yet farther from his fellow-man than when he is praying
to the Father in a desert place apart. The man who prays, in proportion
to the purity of his prayer, becomes a spiritual power, a nerve from the
divine brain, yea, perhaps a ganglion as we call it, whence power anew
goes forth upon his fellows. He is a redistributor, as it were, of the
divine blessing; not in the exercise of his own will-that is the cesspool
towards which all notions of priestly mediation naturally sink-but as the
self-forgetting, God-loving brother of his kind, who would be in the world
as Christ was in the world. When a man prays for his fellow-man, for wife
or child, mother or father, sister or brother or friend, the connection
between the two is so close in God, that the blessing begged may well flow
to the end of the prayer. Such a one then is, in his poor, far-off way,
an advocate with the Father, like his master, Jesus Christ, The Righteous.
He takes his friend into the presence with him, or if not into the presence,
he leaves him with but the veil between them, and they touch through the
veil.
The first instance we have in this kind, occurred at Cana, in the centre
of Galilee, where the first miracle was wrought. It is the second miracle
in St John's record, and is recorded by him only. Doubtless these two had
especially attracted his nature-the turning of water into wine, and the
restoration of a son to his father. The Fatherhood of God created the fatherhood
in man; God's love man's love. And what shall he do to whom a son is given
whom yet he cannot keep? The divine love in his heart cleaves to the child,
and the child is vanishing! What can this nobleman do but seek the man
of whom such wondrous rumours have reached his ears?
Between Cana and Tiberias, from which came the father with his prayer,
was somewhere about twenty miles.
"He is at the point of death," said the father.
"Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe," said Jesus.
"Sir, come down ere my child die."
"Go thy way, thy son liveth."
If the nobleman might have understood the remark the Lord made, he
was in no mood for principles, and respectfully he expostulates with our
Lord for spending time in words when the need was so urgent. The sun of
his life was going down into the darkness. He might deserve reproof, but
even reproof has its season. "Sir, come down ere my child die." Whatever
the Lord meant by the words he urged it no farther. He sends him home with
the assurance of the boy's recovery, showing him none of the signs or wonders
of which he had spoken. Had the man been of unbelieving kind he would,
when he returned and found that all had occurred in the most natural fashion,
that neither here had there been sign or wonder, have gradually reverted
to his old carelessness as to a higher will and its ordering of things
below. But instead of this, when he heard that the boy began to get better
the very hour when Jesus spoke the word-a fact quite easy to set down as
a remarkable coincidence-he believed, and all his people with him. Probably
he was in ideal reality the head of his house, the main source of household
influences-if such, then a man of faith, for, where a man does not himself
look up to the higher, the lower will hardly look faithfully up to him-surely
a fit man to intercede for his son, with all his house ready to believe
with him. It may be said they too shared in the evidence-such as it was-not
much of a sign or wonder to them. True; but people are not ready to believe
the best evidence except they are predisposed in the direction of that
evidence. If it be said, "they should have thought for themselves," I answer-To
think with their head was no bad sign that they did think for themselves.
A great deal of what is called freedom of thought is merely the self-assertion
which would persuade itself of a freedom it would possess but cannot without
an effort too painful for ignorance and self-indulgence. The man would
feel free without being free. To assert one's individuality is not necessarily
to be free: it may indeed be but the outcome of absolute slavery.
But if this nobleman was a faithful man, whence our Lord's word, "Except
ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe"? I am not sure. It may have
been as a rebuke to those about him. This man-perhaps, as is said, a nobleman
of Herod's court-may not have been a pure-bred Jew, and hence our Lord's
remark would bear an import such as he uttered more plainly in the two
cases following, that of the Greek woman, and that of the Roman centurion:
"Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe; but this man-." With
this meaning I should probably have been content, were it not that the
words were plainly addressed to the man. I do not think this would destroy
the interpretation, for the Lord may have wished to draw the man out, and
make him, a Gentile or doubtful kind of Jew, rebuke the disciples; only
the man's love for his son stood in the way: he could think of nothing,
speak of nothing save his son; but it makes it unsatisfactory. And indeed
I prefer the following interpretation, because we have the other meaning
in other places; also because this is of universal application, and to
us of these days appears to me of special significance and value, applying
to the men of science on the one hand, and the men of superstition on the
other.
My impression is, that our Lord, seeing the great faith of the nobleman,
grounded on what he had heard of the Master from others, chiefly of his
signs and wonders, did in this remark require of him a higher faith still.
It sounds to me an expostulation with him. To express in the best way my
feeling concerning it, I would dare to imagine our Lord speaking in this
fashion:-
"Why did you not pray the Father? Why do you want always to see? The
door of prayer has been open since ever God made man in his own image:
why are signs and wonders necessary to your faith? But I will do just as
my Father would have done if you had asked him. Only when I do it, it is
a sign and a wonder that you may believe; and I wish you could believe
without it. But believe then for the very work's sake, if you cannot believe
for the word and the truth's sake. Go thy way, thy son liveth."
I would not be understood to say that the Lord blamed him, or others
in him, for needing signs and wonders: it was rather, I think, that the
Lord spoke out of the fulness of his knowledge to awake in them some infant
sense of what constituted all his life-the presence of God; just as the
fingers of the light go searching in the dark mould for the sleeping seeds,
to touch and awake them. The order of creation, the goings on of life,
were ceaselessly flowing from the very heart of the Father: why should
they seek signs and wonders differing from common things only in being
uncommon? In essence there was no difference. Uncommonness is not excellence,
even as commonness is not inferiority. The sign, the wonder is, in fact,
the lower thing, granted only because of men's hardness of heart and slowness
to believe-in itself of inferior nature to God's chosen way. Yet, if signs
and wonders could help them, have them they should, for neither were they
at variance with the holy laws of life and faithfulness: they were but
less usual utterances of the same. "Go thy way: thy son liveth." The man,
noble-man certainly in this, obeyed, and found his obedience justify his
faith.
But his son would have to work out his belief upon grounds differing
from those his father had. In himself he could but recognize the resumption
of the natural sway of life. He would not necessarily know that it was
God working in him. For the cause of his cure, he would only hear the story
of it from his father-good evidence-but he himself had not seen the face
of the Holy One as his father had. In one sense or another, he must seek
and find him. Every generation must do its own seeking and its own finding.
The fault of the fathers often is that they expect their finding to stand
in place of their children's seeking-expect the children to receive that
which has satisfied the need of their fathers upon their testimony; whereas
rightly, their testimony is not ground for their children's belief, only
for their children's search. That search is faith in the bud. No man can
be sure till he has found for himself. All that is required of the faithful
nature is a willingness to seek. He cannot even know the true nature of
the thing he wants until he has found it; he has but a dim notion of it,
a faint star to guide him eastward to the sunrise. Hopefully, the belief
of the father has the heart in it which will satisfy the need of the child;
but the doubt of this in the child, is the father's first ground for hoping
that the child with his new needs will find for himself the same well of
life-to draw from it with a new bucket, it may be, because the old will
hold water no longer: its staves may be good, but its hoops are worn asunder;
or, rather, it will be but a new rope it needs, which he has to twist from
the hemp growing in his own garden. The son who was healed might have many
questions to ask which the father could not answer, had never thought of.
He had heard of the miracle of Cana; he had heard of many things done since:
he believed that the man could cure his son, and he had cured him. "Yes,"
the son might say, "but I must know more of him; for, if what I hear now
be true, I must cast all at his feet. He cannot be a healer only; he must
be the very Lord of Life-it may be of the Universe." His simple human presence
had in it something against the supposition-contained in it what must have
appeared reason for doubting this conclusion from his deeds, especially
to one who had not seen his divine countenance. But to one at length enlightened
of the great Spirit, his humanity would contain the highest ground for
believing in his divinity, for what it meant would come out ever and ever
loftier and grander. The Lord who had made the Universe-how should he show
it but as the Healer did? He could not make the universe over again in
the eyes of every man. If he did, the heart of the man could not hold the
sight. He must reveal himself as the curing God-the God who set things
which had gone wrong, right again: that could be done in the eyes of each
individual man. This man may be he-the Messiah-Immanuel, God with-us.
We can imagine such the further thoughts of the son-possibly of the
father first-only he had been so full of the answer to his prayer, of the
cure of his son, that he could not all at once follow things towards their
grand conclusions.
In this case, as in the two which follow, the Lord heals from a distance.
I have not much to remark upon this. There were reasons for it; one perhaps
the necessity of an immediate answer to the prayer; another probably lay
in its fitness to the faith of the supplicants. For to heal thus, although
less of a sign or a wonder to the unbelieving, had in it an element of
finer power upon the faith of such as came not for the sign or the wonder,
but for the cure of the beloved; for he who loves can believe what he who
loves not cannot believe; and he who loves most can believe most. In this
respect, these cures were like the healing granted to prayer in all ages-not
that God is afar off, for he is closer to every man than his own conscious
being is to his unconscious being-but that we receive the aid from the
Unseen. Though there be no distance with God, it looks like it to men;
and when Jesus cured thus, he cured with the same appearances which attended
God's ordinary healing.
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