The last of these duties we may extend and qualify. If the coming in of the Gentiles is here represented as bringing wealth to the Church, we cannot help remembering that the going out to the Gentiles, in order to bring them in, means for us the spending of our wealth on things other than the adornment of temples; and that, besides the heathen, there are poor and suffering ones for whom God asks men's gold, as He asked it in olden days for the temple, that He may be glorified. Take that last phrase:--_And_--with all that material wealth which has flowed in from Lebanon, from Midian, from Sheba--_I will make the place of My feet glorious_. When this singular name was first uttered it was limited to the dwelling-place of the Ark and Presence of God, visible only on Mount Zion. But when God became man, and did indeed tread with human feet this world of ours, what were then the _places of His feet_? Sometimes, it is true, the Temple, but only sometimes; far more often where the sick lay, and the bereaved were weeping,--the pool of Bethesda, the death-room of Jairus' daughter, the way to the centurion's sick servant, the city gateways where the beggars stood, the lanes where the village folk had gathered, against His coming, their deaf and dumb, their palsied and lunatic. These were _the places of His feet, who Himself bare our sicknesses and carried our infirmities_; and these are what He would seek our wealth to make glorious. They say that the reverence of men builds now no cathedrals as of old; nay, but the love of man, that Christ taught, builds far more of those refuges and houses of healing, scatters far more widely those medicines for the body, those instruments of teaching, those means of grace, in which God is as much glorified as in Jewish Temple or Christian Cathedral.
Nevertheless He, who set _the place of His feet_, which He would have us to glorify, among the poor and the sick, was He, who also did not for Himself refuse that alabaster box and that precious ointment, which might have been sold for much and given to the poor. The worship of God, if we read Scripture aright, ought to be more than merely grave and comely. There should be heartiness and lavishness about it,--profusion and brilliance. Not of material gifts alone or chiefly, gold incense or rare wood, but of human faculties, graces and feeling; of joy and music and the sense of beauty. Take this chapter. It is wonderful, not so much for the material wealth which it devotes to the service of God's house, and which is all that many eyes ever see in it, as for the glorious imagination and heart for the beautiful, the joy in light and space and splendour, the poetry and the music, which use those material things simply as the light uses the wick, or as music uses the lyre, to express and reveal itself. What a call this chapter is to let out the natural wonder and poetry of the heart, its feeling and music and exultation,--_all that is within us_, as the Psalmist says,--in the Service of God. Why do we not do so? The answer is very simple. Because, unlike this prophet, we do not realise how present and full our salvation is; because, unlike him, we do not realise that _our light has come_, and so we will not _arise and shine_.
II. THE GOSPEL (chs. lxi.-lxii.)
The speaker in ch. lxi. is not introduced by name. Therefore he may be the Prophet himself, or he may be the Servant. The present expositor, while feeling that the evidence is not conclusive against either of these, and that the uncertainty is as great as in ch. xlviii. 16,[280] inclines to think that there is, on the whole, less objection to its being the prophet who speaks than to its being the Servant. See the appended note. But it is not a very important question, which is intended, for the Servant was representative of prophecy; and if it be the prophet who speaks here, he also speaks with the conscience of the whole function and aim of the prophetic order. That Jesus Christ fulfilled this programme does not decide the question one way or the other; for a prophet so representative was as much the antetype and foreshadowing of Christ as the Servant himself was. On the whole, then, we must be content to feel about this passage, what we must have already felt about many others in our prophecy, that the writer is more anxious to place before us the whole range and ideal of the prophetic gift than to make clear in whom this ideal is realised; and for the rest Jesus of Nazareth so plainly fulfilled it, that it becomes, indeed, a very minor question to ask whom the writer may have intended as its first application.