Luke 4:24-27

FAITH AND GRACE

‘And He said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is acceptable in his own country. But of a truth I say unto you, There were many widows … and unto none of them was Elijah sent, but only to Zarephath.… And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.’

Luke 4:24 (R.V.)

Our Lord is thinking of those who never draw near—of those who will not press in. And the worst is that it is among His own peculiar people, in His own home, that this misadventure is at its height. It is those who should know Him best who call upon Him least. It is they to whom He has been familiar from childhood who are unable to make use of His compassion. Familiarity itself has blinded them; their privilege has proved their ruin. Elsewhere, in strange places, among outlying heathen, He wins recognition. He is honoured as a prophet everywhere, except among His own people and in His Father’s house.

I. A law of human experience.—He is only verifying a law of human experience. So He recalls as He turns back to those ancient Scriptures which are the record of man’s historical relationship to his God. There His own present experience in Galilee finds its parallel sure enough. Always it had been with others as it was now with Him. Always the prophet has had to face this cruel rebuff. Always those nearest have proved to be the farthest off. Always the privileged have missed what the outcasts have discovered.

II. This restraint set on the Divine compassions by human failure to evoke them, runs down very deep into the principle of the Incarnation. It is startling to us that God should accept such limitation. Yet we can see that the very fact that He accepts it is a measure of His respect for man. It is we who dishonour man by asking God to save him in spite of himself, regardless of his consent and desire. God will do no such thing. The man is not really saved until our Lord can pronounce, in that strong way of His, ‘Thy own faith hath saved thee.’

III. The whole problem of faith lies here.—The appeal to the faith of the man, to his personal co-operation, is the inner vital truth of Christianity. Yet all the problems so familiar to us in their perplexity start up at once. If the merciful action of God must wait upon faith, how terribly it is curtailed! And, then, this faith, that releases grace, and closes with the Divine offer—what is its character—its nature? Problems indeed! How can it be helped if once faith is pronounced essential? And that it is essential Christ Himself, in the simplest Gospel story, long before the theologians had got at it with their subtleties, perfectly plainly pronounced. ‘He could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief’; ‘Canst thou believe?’ ‘All things are possible to them that believe’; ‘He was astonished at their unbelief.’

IV.—The silence of Christ.—Is there anything more remarkable in the record of our Lord than His reticence—His silence? How seldom He will speak until He is questioned! He will only go where He is asked. Men must seek Him out and find Him: ‘Rabbi, come down, ere my child die.’ From the first hour it was so. He did nothing until somebody had discovered Him and appealed to Him. And with Him we know well that it was not through lack of pity or of power that He suffered Himself to be circumscribed, but solely in order to secure human faith, human co-operation—solely because He so valued man’s personal will that He would do, and could do, nothing without it. As with God in Christ then, so now. God’s redemptive action on earth is so broken, and uncertain, and obscure, and fragmentary, just because He is determined to have man as His fellow-worker. He will lay Himself alongside of man; He will put Himself in harness with man; He will keep pace with man; He will go only so far as He carries man with Him. And man is irregular, man is uncertain, man is fitful, man is obscure. Therefore God submits to fitfulness, to obscurity; therefore He is satisfied with jagged edges and incomplete achievements, and recoils, and disfigurements, and dishonour, and delays. If man will not believe, then God will do no mighty works.

Is not that the secret of all the trouble that is brought before you to-day?

—Rev. Canon Scott Holland.