The voice which, at the Temptation, had whispered, “Use your superhuman power to lend material aid to your designs,” spoke in His brothers’ advice as it had done by Peter. They were not unconcerned for His safety, if they had foreseen danger they would have kept Him away from the Feast (St Mark iii. 21), but they either underrated the hostility of His foes or assumed that He would protect Himself by His superhuman power; for that, possessing miraculous powers as they knew He did, He should hesitate, on an emergency, to exert them in self-defence was to them an idea too unreasonable to be entertained. The deep truth unconsciously uttered by His foes, “He saved others, Himself He cannot save,” was one which their minds were not constructed to contain. Our Lord foresaw that a public entry into Jerusalem would lead to commotion, and, as afterwards happened, might bring about His death. A man’s life, if he have a great matter in hand, is the more precious to him until this be done: so it was with our Lord. Until He had finished what was given Him to accomplish, He took such precautions for personal safety as a prudent man would. To have made light of danger, trusting to baffle it by superhuman means, would have spoiled the lesson and the moral of His life. When the brethren spoke of His “going up to Jerusalem,” they thought of the journey in public as much as of the feast itself. Half Galilee would be upon the road, men would mix and converse freely on the way, and Jesus, they thought, would, by travelling thus, come in contact with a number of zealous men and increase His following largely. But herein lay one of the dangers which made our Lord shun this course. The people, proud of the great prophet from their own district, might have revived the project of making Him a King, and by a turbulent entry to Jerusalem have alarmed the Romans as well as the scribes. Again, the turmoil of this journey would have disturbed those processes of growth in the Apostles’ mind over which our Lord held watch; the feast of Tabernacles was, above all, a festival of joyousness, and the journey to it was made an occasion of pleasure and social union. For the Apostles to have joined the crowd would have been unfavourable for the germination of the solemn thoughts of which our Lord had dropped the seed on His way from the Mount to Capernaum. By going up privately in the middle of the Feast these dangers were avoided. There was no public arrival, no welcome. The Romans would know and care nothing about a new preacher who appeared in the Temple, and the priests, in face of the diversity of opinion about Jesus of Nazareth, would hesitate to lay hands upon Him. For the Apostles too, the journey through an unfriendly country would give plenty of occasion for turning over in their minds the strange words they had heard about the sufferings of the Christ, and the injunctions to “have salt in themselves.”