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ST. MARK 71
immortal poetry in praise of that city where God dwelt, and towards which all nations should come. Athens may be the eye of Greece, illustrious in wisdom; Eome may be the synonym of Imperial and ecclesiastical power ; Mecca may speak of a prophet that conquered by the sword, and Benares of caste that rules as with a rod of iron millions of our race ; but Jerusalem is pre-eminent as the city of faith, the birth- place of a religion, whose very stones were dear to those that loved her. There, then, it might have seemed, Jesus would begin to exercise His ministry. There were rabbis to listen to Him, there were priests to support Him, there were scribes to report Him ; all round it seemed the fit soil for His work.
But nay, though He knew that a prophet must perish in Jerusalem, the ministry that was to be fruitful for all time must be exercised elsewhere. He would not throw His ministry, His soul, into the midst of conflict, while conflict would have soiled the serenity of His soul. He would not seek the men bound to fashion and form and place ; He would seek those that would gather round Him, ready to be made by His work. He did not need to nurse human sin ; left to itself it would breed passion, create jealousy, make the awful hour of His agony, the awful majesty of His cross. But He had to seek love, nurse it, and cultivate it, and gather it to His bosom, and bear it there. He wanted the silence that was nurture, He wanted the obscurity that was growth. He wanted the cloistered security of Nature, as it were, where His own loved people would learn to know and would learn to love Him, and be made fit to be preachers to all ages and models for all time. Though of humble birth, scorned by the proud of blood and culture, He had the supernal wisdom, and saw in the quiet of His own province the ministry that could be a well of truth and grace.
Ill Its General Topic.
"Preaching the gospel of God."
"The gospel of God" — this is the theme of all Christian preaching. The particular function for which St. Paul says he
72 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
is set apart is to preach the gospel of God — "separated," he says, in the beginning of the Epistle to the Eomans, " unto the gospel of God."
1. The Gospel. — "The fundamental passage for the use of this word (evajyiXtov)" say Sanday and Headlam in their edition of the Epistle to the Bomans, " appears to be Mark i. 14, 15." They do not doubt that our Lord Himself described by this term (or its Aramaic equivalent) His announcement of the arrival of the Messianic time. They do not think that the word is borrowed directly from the Septuagint, where it occurs in all only two, or at most three, times, although there may have been some influence from the use of the verb, which is especially frequent in second Isaiah and the Psalms in con- nection with the news of the Great Deliverance or Eestoration from the Captivity. The word evidently took a strong hold on the imagination of St. Paul in connection with his own call to missionary labours. He uses the noun sixty times in his Epistles, while it is used only twice in the rest of the New Testament apart from the Gospels and Acts.
2, The Gospel of God. — The Gospel is called the Gospel of Christ in Mark i. 1. Here it is the Gospel of God. The " of," says Swete, probably denotes the source : the Gospel which comes from God, the Gospel of which God (the Father) is the Author and Sender. Every account of the work of Christ, therefore, is false which places the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ in contrast to the justice of Almighty God. Christ comes with news, and good news, but He is sent from God with this good news. In this respect, as in every other, He and the Father are one.
IV.
Its Particular Contents.
Its particular contents are the fulness of the time, the nearness of the Kingdom, and the conditions of entrance into it — 'repentance and faith.
ST. MARK 73
i. The Fulness of the Time. "The time is fulfilled."
What is fulfilment ? The fruit is the fulfilment of the bloom, the meridian day is the fulfilment of the dawn. What we mean by the word as it is applied to Christ is, that there was something foreshadowed, and in Him that something was revealed ; that on the lip of time there was a whisper and a suggestion, of which Christ was the uttered word ; in the fulness of time " the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." ^
1. There was a threefold work of preparation for the coming of the Son of God carried forward in what was then called the civilised world, and each portion of it required the lapse of a certain time.
(1) First, the world was to be prepared politically for His work. In order to spread an idea or a creed, two instruments, if not strictly necessary, are at least desirable. Of these one is a common language, such as the French language was in Europe half a century ago, a language of civilisation, which shall be a means for expressing new thoughts and convictions without subjecting them to misrepresentation by the process of trans- lation. Another is a common social system, common laws, a common government.