Mark 9:5

AN IMPETUOUS ANSWER

‘And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here.’

Mark 9:5

Certainly, as far as we can judge, this is an instance in which silence would have been much better than words. It was childish to speak. For what he said was both ill-timed and ill-advised. There are many occasions in which silence is the truest wisdom and the best eloquence. This, for instance, was a case in point—‘for he wist not what to say; for they were sore afraid’; and when you are ‘afraid’ it is often best not to speak. The expression of the feeling will act back upon the feeling and increase it. There is great force at such times in the counsel: ‘Be still, and know that I am God!’

I. What is the moral?

(a) Outward things have very little to do with the inner life. They spring from different sources, and they run in separate channels. No external advantages will ever make a man wise, or good, or happy. You utterly mistake it, if you think that the heart can be so influenced from anything without. If you talk with saints, if you company with angels, if you wear heaven’s dress, if you saw God, it would not do it.

(b) The work is within. Only the Holy Ghost can make things heavenly. God will put contemptibleness upon human thought, and cross the hands of man’s expectation. The very men who were still men, and nothing but men, and merely children at the Transfiguration, were more than men after Pentecost. Then, their prisons and their miseries gave them an elevation, and a tone, and a joyous influence, which that wonderful mount utterly failed to give.

II. A change must pass over a man before he can go to heaven.—If St. Peter was what he was in the Transfiguration, what should you and I be at this moment in heaven? How inappropriate would be our words! how incapable our power! how discordant our sentiments! I have no doubt we should be afraid; we should be ashamed; we should make mistakes; we should speak foolishly; we should misuse our occasion—just like St. Peter. No wonder that there is so much teaching, and so much discipline; so much to empty, and so much to purify in life; seeing we want so much to make us capable of, and to adapt us for, the places whither we are going.

III. Take care lest you run into exactly St. Peter’s error.—He thought that it would certainly be ‘good’ to be in a place where, assuredly, it would have turned out very badly for him if he had continued. One of you has been leading for some time a very calm and meditative life. It has been almost like sitting at the feet of Jesus till it has grown into a pleasure, which amounts almost to a necessity to your feelings to be quiet. When, presently, a call comes for more active exercise, you shrink back from the contrast. You feel, ‘This calm so suits my soul—why should I go down again into that plain?’

Illustration

‘No doubt there was much in this saying which cannot be commended. It showed an ignorance of the purpose for which Jesus came into the world, to suffer and to die. It showed a forgetfulness of his brethren, who were not with him, and of the dark world which so much needed his Master’s presence. Above all, the proposal which he made at the same time to “build three tabernacles” for Moses, Elias, and Christ, showed a low view of his Master’s dignity, and implied that he did not know that a greater than Moses and Elias was there. In all these respects the Apostle’s exclamation is not to be praised, but to be blamed. But having said this, let us not fail to remark what joy and happiness this glorious vision conferred on this warm-hearted disciple. Let us see in his fervent cry, “It is good to be here,” what comfort and consolation the sight of glory can give to a true believer.’