By J.G. Bellet
At this place, what has been suggested as the fourth part of our Gospel begins. The Lord, having ended His more formal ministry in Galilee, begins His journey to Jerusalem. v. 51.
Our evangelist is the only one who notices the circumstances with which this journey opens. And there is something of his moral arrangement of incidents to be noticed here. As has been observed by another, commenting on this part of Luke, "this passage of history seems to come in here for the sake of its affinity with the text before (the Lord's rebuke of John for forbidding the man who followed not with them); for there, under colour of zeal for Christ, the disciples were for silencing and restraining separatists; here, under the same colour, they were for putting infidels to death; but, as for that, so also for this, Christ reprimanded them."
The moral order in our evangelist's narrative is, I believe, thus exhibited in this place of his Gospel. But it introduces a very peculiar path of the Lord.
The recent vision on the mount may have led to it; but whether that be so or not, we find our Lord here addressing Himself to His journey, in the consciousness of its leading Him to glory. The time had come, we read, when He was to be "received up"--words which express His ascension to glory. And He seems to act according to this consciousness, sending messengers before His face, as though it were to prepare for Him a way suited to this anticipated glory. The chariot of God would be in readiness to attend Him from Jerusalem upwards (Luke 24: 51); but it was now for the children of men to prepare His previous way from the place where He then was to that city. And He was thus, as it were, trying whether the world would own His claim to be cc received up," as afterwards He tried whether Israel would own His royal place in Zion. Luke 19: 28. But neither would the world know Him, nor Israel receive Him. The world was not ready for His claims, as is here expressed by the conduct of the Samaritan villagers. The earth did not care for His heavenly glory. "Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head," an infidel world was again, in the spirit of it, saying.
The disciples, who had, it may be, caught the tone of their Lord's mind on this striking occasion, look on Him as another Elijah travelling on to meet the chariot of Israel, and they move Mm to do what Elijah had done, by resenting this indignity of the Samaritan villagers, as of the captains and their fifties. But the way of the Son of man, for the present, must be different. He will pass to glory rather through sorrow of His own than through judgment of the world. He "will suffer thus far;" and therefore He here restrains this motion of His disciples, bows His head to this scorn of men by seeking another village, and that, too, not with preparation before His face, but as the rejected Christ of God.
In such a character, He accordingly resumes His journey. No sense of glory fills His soul, as it had done when He set out. The Samaritans had changed its current, and He goes on, consciously despised and rejected of men, who had now in full deliberation hid their faces from, and shut their doors upon, Him. And if, beloved, it be to the praise of grace in Paul, that he had learnt how to be abased and how to abound, how to be full and how to be hungry, do we not see all this to perfection in our blessed Master? He knew how one moment to act in the perfect sense of His fulness of glory, and the next to become the despised Son of man. He takes the place which the scornful villagers of Samaria give Him, without an effort or a murmur. Perfect Master, as well as gracious Deliverer!
And in this place of rejection we see certain ones brought into intercourse with Him, that we through them may have some good lessons read to our souls. Two of them are introduced in Matthew (Matt. 8), but not in the same moral connection as here.
The Lord speaks on each case in the full sense of His present place of rejection in the earth. The whole bearing of the instruction proceeds from that. It is the Lord's rejection that has given His saints a new place, new duties, and new attachments; and these are here brought out for our contemplation, that we may count the cost of being His. Nothing brings the saints into these new things. but the total rejection of their Lord by the world; but let the Lord be apprehended in His rejection, and then these things will be entered into by the soul at once. No "looking back," no knowing of man "after the flesh," by those who have gone forth to the Son of God without the camp; and it is only when we, in spirit, stand there with Him, that we understand Him rightly.
These holy and solemn lessons are read to our souls by our divine Teacher from His present place--"despised and rejected of men." He would still teach us, even through His own sorrows, that we might be kept in company with Himself and His thoughts, as we pass on from scene to scene across this evil world.*
*In answering the third of these persons, our Lord seems to refer to the call of Elisha, to which the recent mention of Elijah by His disciples may naturally have turned His mind. His little analogy and instruction taken from a ploughman, seems to have been suggested by Elisha's history. See 1 Kings 19: 21.
