Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. MarkMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. Mark
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Mark -- Commentaries
May I add one more emotion which seems to me to be unmistakably
expressed by this rapid fusilade of questions? That is indignation.
Again I fall back upon plain words: 'He looked round about upon them
with anger, being grieved.' The two things were braided together in
His heart, and did not conflict with each other There were infinite
sorrow, infinite pity, and real displeasure. You must take all notions
of passion and of malignity, and of desire to do harm to the subject,
out of the conception of anger as applied to God or to Christ who is
the revelation of God. But it seems to me that it is a maimed Christ
that we put before the world unless we say that in the Love there lie
the possibilities of Wrath. 'Behold the Lion of the tribe of Judah,
and I beheld, and lo! a Lamb!' Wrath and gentleness are in Him
inseparably united, neither of them limiting nor making impossible the
other.
So here we have a self-revelation, as by one glimpse into a great
chamber, of the deep heart of Christ, the great Teacher, moved to
astonishment, grief, and indignation.
II. Now let me say a word about the slow scholars.
I have spoken of these questions as being rapid and repeated, and as a
rain of what we may almost call fiery interrogation. But they are by
no means tautology or useless and aimless repetition. If we look at
them closely, I think we shall see that they open out to us several
different sides and phases of the fault in His disciples that moves
these emotions.
There is, first, His scholars' stolid insensibility, which moves Him
to anger, to astonishment, and to grief. 'Are your hearts yet
hardened?' by which is meant, not hardened in the sense of being
suddenly and stiffly set in antagonism to Him, but simply in the sense
of being--may I use the word?--so pachydermatous, so thick-skinned,
that nothing can go through them. They showed it is a dull, stolid
insensibility, and it marks some of us professing Christians, on whom
promises and invitations and revelations of truth all fall with equal
ineffectiveness, and from whom they glide off with equal rapidity. You
may rain upon a black basalt rock to all eternity, and nothing will
grow upon it. All the drops will run down the polished sides, and a
quarter of an inch below the surface it will be as dry as it was
before the first drop fell. And here are we Christian ministers,
talk--talk--talking, week in and week out; and here is Christ, by His
providences and by His word, speaking far more loudly than any of us;
and it all falls with absolute impotence on hosts of people that call
themselves Christians. Ah! brethren, it is not only unbelievers who
have their hearts hardened. Orthodox professors are often guilty of
the same. If I might alter the metaphor, many of us have waterproofed
our minds, and the ingredients of the mixture by which we have
waterproofed them are our knowledge of 'the plan of salvation,' our
connection with a Christian community, our membership in a church, our
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