Part 3 (1/2)

VII. PRIVATE PRAYER, AND PUBLIC WORs.h.i.+P.

”And, as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.”--ST. LUKE iv. 16.

”He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there He prayed.”--ST. MARK i. 35.

These two texts set before us our Saviour's habit in regard to public and private spiritual exercise; and they suggest to us the question, What have we, on our part, to say of these two elements in our own life? These texts, we bear in mind, represent not something casual or intermittent in the life of our Lord. They stand in the record of it as a typical, essential, inseparable part of His habitual practice. What we have to remember about them is that, whereas all men recognise in the life of Jesus the one unique example in human history of a life which is morally perfect and immaculate, if we were to take these out of it, the customary share in all common wors.h.i.+p, and the private, separate communing with G.o.d, it would be an altogether different life--different in its att.i.tude towards the common life of ordinary men, and different in its own quality and influence.

We might still admire--nay, we could not but admire--all the beauty of moral qualities, the purity, the sympathy, the love and self-devotion of it; but it would have lost its spiritual atmosphere. It would no longer be for us the life of the Divine Son, recognising and ready to share in all our attempts at wors.h.i.+pping the Father, however poor they may be, and living through the separate life in daily communion with Him.

Here then is His practice, written for our guidance, given that we may be stirred by it to aim upwards, inviting us to set our own practice side by side with it, and see how it looks in such a juxtaposition. Let us glance for a moment at each of these texts separately.

As regards the one which I have taken from St. Mark--”He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there He prayed”--we have only to turn over the pages of this Gospel and note, as we go, the similar allusions, and we feel that we have here what is in fact an incidental glimpse into the habitual practice of His secret and separate life.

In this pa.s.sage we read that He departed into a solitary place, and there He prayed; in another by-and-by that He departed into a mountain to pray; and then again that He spent the whole night in prayer; and we see all this not in some crisis of His life, but as a part of that which corresponds to the common daily round in your life or mine.

And the inference to be drawn, the lesson to be learnt from it, is, I think, sufficiently obvious.

This secret separate devotional exercise of the soul was His habitual spiritual food.

It was thus that He recruited His moral and spiritual forces, those forces of the spiritual life which const.i.tute at once the beauty, the attraction, the power of His character, and His divine and awe-inspiring separateness.

And as we read and consider, the thought must surely be pressed upon us that if He needed these exercises, these secret and silent hours, what shall we say of our own lives?

And what do we expect to make of our moral and spiritual character unless we too are careful to cherish under all circ.u.mstances some such recurring moments in our round of life and occupation, at which we retire into the sanctuary of separate communion with G.o.d the Father?

You may take it as a moral certainty, proved by all experience, that unless you hold to a fixed habit of thus bringing your life into the secret and separate presence of G.o.d, in private prayer and thought, you incur the risk of sinking to any levels that happen to be the ordinary levels, and of drifting with any currents that happen to prevail.

If we turn now from this to the other text--that which refers to His customary attendance on public prayer and at the common meeting--”He went, as His custom was, into the synagogue”--the questions suggested are very pertinent and practical.

Just consider the circ.u.mstances under which, as we are told here, ”He went, as His custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.” The earlier part of the same chapter tells us of His fasting and temptation in the wilderness, of the commencement of His public mission, and his return to Nazareth. And, on His return, this is what we are told of him--”He went, as his custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.”

Thus we see Him, fresh from the great crisis of His early manhood; the long, protracted struggle of His soul in the lonely wilderness; the subtle voices of manifold temptation; the hardly won victory and the ministering angels; all this we must suppose to be still flas.h.i.+ng across His vision, as the scenes of any such crisis must always continue to flash through the quivering and responsive organism of the soul.

If ever any man might have claimed to need no longer the customary wors.h.i.+p of common men, it was surely Jesus, as we see Him here on this occasion, with the breath of His own heart-searching wors.h.i.+p still upon Him, and the light of new revelation burning in His thoughts.

Among all the significant and instructive parts of the Saviour's example this is not the least instructive; that on this occasion, as on all others, he went as a matter of regular custom into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, thus putting the seal and stamp of His own practice for all of us who believe in His name upon the duty of joining in habitual and stated spiritual exercises.

Had the Lord's example been different in this respect, how easy it would have seemed to set up a string of what we should have called sufficient reasons.

The old-fas.h.i.+oned routine, it might have been said, of synagogue wors.h.i.+p, with its mechanical dulness and its mistaken interpretations of G.o.d's word, its shallow and superficial and tedious traditional commentaries, its formalism and vain repet.i.tions; all this, whatever might have been its value for the ordinary unenlightened Jew, how could it have been necessary and what profit could there have been in it for the divinely gifted Son of man?

So it might have been argued; so indeed it would seem men who consider themselves enlightened sometimes argue in support of their own neglect of the religious life.

But it may well make us more than doubtful as to the issue of any such neglect, when we see the mind of Christ thus exemplified in His habitual observance.

We all recognise His moral and spiritual superiority. Whether His spirit has taken possession of our spirit or not, He stands out as our undisputed guide to the practice of a good life.