The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Sermons
And how can we stop to follow the apostle through all the wonderful
story? Yet just one thing we can not pass over--the awful hours of
crisis in Galilee. It came just when all looked brightest, when
the people were rushing round Him, and would have made Him a king.
They would have gone with Him to the death. But He--He threw it all
away to the winds. He hurried off the twelve in a body across the
lake, for they had caught the crowd's enthusiasm, and could not be
calmed. He scattered the crowd; He fled back Himself alone into the
dark hills, and on the morrow at Capernaum, He broke it all down by
a word which staggered the rising belief. It was a saying about His
body and His blood--a very hard saying. Not only were the Pharisees
furious, but His own followers were dumfounded. They could not bear
it, could not believe. They fell away, and walked no more with Jesus.
"And you, O disciple dearly loved, what of you and your brethren?"
"Most terrible, most bitter that hour, my children," the old man
answers. "We walked trembling, quaking, behind him. We were cowed
and disheartened, until he the Master felt himself the chill of our
dismay, and He turned to us and challenged our failing faith. 'Will
ye also go away?' Oh, the shame of being open to a charge of such
meanness! The very tenderness of the question and of the reproach
recalled and recovered us. We knew nothing. We could explain
nothing. Every clue was lost. The darkness was thickening over our
heads, our hearts were failing for fear, our souls were sinking in
the great water-floods, earth was falling from us; struggle, and
anguish, and doubt shook us with wild alarm; and yet, even so as
he turned his eyes upon us, the old unconquerable faith woke, and
stirred, and quickened; and with a rush, as of a mighty wind, it
lifted us; and out from Peter's lips broke the words which saved
us--the words which sealed us to Him forever: 'Will we go away? Nay,
Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life!' So
we spoke with burning hearts, and yet through and through us still
those strange eyes of His pierced. Deep below all our emotion He
penetrated. Quite calmly He weighed its worth; and in one of us even
then He detected a flaw which would widen and worsen. One of us,
He knew, hung back from echoing St. Peter's confession. One spirit
there was there that could not throw off its dismay, one dark spirit
in whom the hard saying was the seed of bitter and poisonous fruit.
'Have I not chosen you twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?' He
spoke of Judas Iscariot, who should betray him."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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