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Chapter 11

His Ain Folk

We all like to be recognized and greeted and welcomed. It is this essentially human characteristic of ours that lends such infinite pathos to the opening and closing passages of the Fourth Gospel. ‘He came unto His own and His own received Him not’; or, as the Scottish version has it, apparently with Dr. Moffatt’s entire concurrence, ‘He cam’ unto His ain folk, and His ain folk didna ken Him’. So the Gospel opens, And the close? It is the same story over again. ‘When the morning was come, stood on the share; but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus.’ Once again, He cam’ unto His ain folk, and His ain folk didna ken Him!

It is the supreme tragedy of the New Testament record. Jesus, the Messiah, came to the Jews, who had been carefully prepared by patriarchs and prophets and priests for His coming, yet, notwithstanding the explicit instructions and vivid descriptions that they had received, they failed to recognize Him. And, failing to recognize Him, they scouted His claims, rejected His overtures, and finished up by crucifying Him. He turned to the Gentiles and, at their alien hands, received the welcome that His ain folk denied Him.

Somehow, the record reminds me of two stories, one from ancient and one from modern literature. Ulysses was summoned to the wars, and all the world knows of his adventures in Asia, Africa, and Europe during the twenty years that followed. At length, bent and broken and nearly blind, he returned, disguised as a beggar, to Ithica. Nobody recognized him: even his devoted shepherd, Eumaeus, found it difficult to believe that this was indeed his old master. But Argos, his faithful hound, despite his decrepitude and the decay of all his powers, pricked up his ears at the approach of Ulysses, wagged his tail furiously, and, his warm heart collapsing under the strain of so much excitement, he lowered his head upon his outstretched paws and died.

The other story is from Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality. When Henry Morton returned to Milnwood, the old laird, Colonel Morton, was dead, and, indeed, none of those who had once known him seemed still to survive. He was assured, however, that Ailie Wilson, the cross-grained and sharp-tongued old house-keeper, still lived and was actually mistress of Milnwood. He decided to call, and, on doing so, met with the kind of reception that his knowledge of the well-meaning but ill-tempered old virago had led him to expect. She did not of course, recognize him, but when she learned that her visitor had travelled in foreign parts, she drew him in, hoping against hope that he would have some news of the young laird whom she had for so many years lamented.

Letting her tongue run garrulously on, she described to Henry the death of the Colonel; and then:

‘While she was thus detailing the last moments of the old miser, Henry was pressing!’ engaged in duelling the assiduous curiosity of the dog, which, after much snuffing and examination, began capering and jumping upon him. At length, in the urgency of his impatience, Henry could not forbear exclaiming, in a tone of angry command, “Down, Elphin, down, sir!”

“Ye ken oor dog’s name,” exclaimed the old lady in amazement, “ye ken oor dog’s name, and it’s no a common ane! And the creature kens ye, too! … God guide us! … It’s my ain bairn!” So saying, the poor old woman threw herself around Henry’s neck, clung to him, kissed him as if he had been actually her child, and wept for very joy!’

Why has my mind turned to these two stories concerning dogs? Perhaps because that was precisely the epithet that the Jews were never tired of hurling at the Gentiles. They were dogs, loathsome pariahs, unclean curs that prowled around the city walls. And, in the fullness of time, Jesus came, not to the dogs, but to His ain folk. He came unto His own and His own received Him not; but the dogs-the Gentile dogs-crouched submissively and obediently at His feet.

I never read this pathetic record on the threshold of John’s Gospel without recalling a poignant memory of my own boyhood. My parents had gone for a holiday in Wales, and I had been sent to stay with some friends, who occupied a large house not far from home, Boy-like, I loved to poke about the place, wandering into the different rooms and seeing all that there was to be seen. But there was one room that I was forbidden to enter: its door was always closed. Nobody ever entered that room but my hostess. As a natural consequence, that room piqued my curiosity. I used to visit the room facing it and gaze wonderingly at that closed door. One day, as I was perched at the foot of a couch in that opposite room, the mysterious door softly opened and the mother of the household came out. She caught sight of me. I did not know, of course, that she had just left the bedside of a boy of exactly my own age who was terribly, terribly afflicted. But I suppose that the sudden vision of another boy, just the age of her own, and possessed of all his faculties, was too much for her. The contrast broke her down. She rushed across to the couch against which I was leaning, and, throwing herself full length upon it, wept as though her heart would break.

‘Oh, Sonny,’ she moaned, in an agony of grief. ‘Sonny, Sonny, Sonny! I’ve fed you and nursed you and cared for you and loved you all these years, and you’ve never even known me!’

Never, in all those years, one look of recognition, never a smile, never a word, never an understanding touch or hand-clasp or caress. That was the heartbreak!

It was His heartbreak. The people whom He had led by cloud and by flame: the people whom He had fed with manna out of the skies and satisfied with water out of the rock; the people to whom He had foretold His coming by dream, by oracle and seer—He cam’ unto His ain folk, and His ain folk didna ken him!

How are we to explain all this? By what means was this stupendous tragedy precipitated? Why did the Jews, so carefully instructed and prepared, fail to recognize their King? The answer is that they were the victims of four terrifying tyrannies.

The first was the tyranny of Caution. They were right in being cautious. Caution is a Jewish characteristic and, on the whole, a Jewish virtue. But caution can be carried to excess. The business man who allows caution to strangle enterprise fails lamentably. Nothing venture, nothing win. The army that remains within its trenches is lost. When the Son of God, fulfilling to the letter the prognostications of the prophets, had presented His credentials and performed His miracles, they should have thrown caution to the winds, and, by a magnificent enterprise of faith, should have acclaimed and crowned Him.

The second was the tyranny of Orthodoxy. In his Life of Jesus Christ, Dr. Stalker shows that, at the time of the advent of Jesus, the Jewish nation had attained a degree of orthodoxy absolutely unprecedented in its history. For the first time it was entirely free of idolatry. The priestly orders and offices were universally recognized and honoured; the temple services and annual feasts were observed with the strictest regularity. But, in the process, faith had become stereotyped. It left no room for that new light which, as Oliver Cromwell used to say, is always breaking from the Word of God. Their very fidelity to encrusted tradition disqualified them for the reception of fresh revelations. The dead Past held their religious instincts in an icy grip. And, thus enslaved with golden chains, they failed to welcome their Lord.

The third was the tyranny of Language. They were masters of the letter, yet strangers to the spirit, of the prophecies. Robert Louis Stevenson used to tell of a beggar who often sought his company. This man could recite by the hour the noblest passages in English poetry; but he could not discuss it; his mind seemed a blank as to the poet’s meaning and message. He was charmed by the music and the rhythm and the cadence; he had no eyes for anything beneath the surface.

Dr. W. L. Watkinson tells of a student of his acquaintance who had an extraordinary genius for acquiring book-knowledge. Applying himself to botany, he could, whenever he heard of a rare flower that he had never seen, reel off a most accurate and exhaustive description of it; yet, if the actual flower were presented to him, he could never identify it.

That was the spiritual tragedy of the Jewish nation. The people mastered the prophets as Stevenson’s beggar mastered the poets: they learned of the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley as Dr. Watkinson’s student learned of his botanical specimens. But it was all a matter of words, words, words; language, language, language! As Jesus Himself told them, Ye search the Scriptures, thinking that in them you have eternal life; but they merely testify of Me; and ye will not come unto M e that ye might have life. The glass can never cool dry lips: it is the water in the glass. The plate can never satisfy the hunger of a ravenous man: it is the food upon the plate. The Scriptures can never save the soul: it is the Saviour revealed in the Scriptures. That was the truth to which Jewish eyes were blind.

The fourth was the tyranny of Detail. That was what Jesus meant when, in words of scathing and terrible condemnation, He cried: Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy and faith: these ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone.

I remember, many years ago, strolling among the tulip beds in Rosherville Gardens, Gravesend. I thought the flowers wonderful and admired first this blossom and then that one. The whole struck me as a dazzling riot of gorgeous colour. Passing on, I climbed to the top of a cliff, from which, although I could no longer make out the individual flowers, I could survey the general design of the lawn. And, to my astonishment, I discovered that the tulips, in their various hues, made up an elaborate pattern, amidst which the words god save the king flamed in letters of vivid scarlet across the entire bed.

When I was down among the flowers, I failed to notice this patriotic slogan. Like the Jews in their interpretation of the Scriptures, I was tyrannized by detail. I had to withdraw to a distance in order to decipher the general scheme woven into the pattern. The Jews were so close to the ritual of the Temple, so close to the passionate outpourings of the prophets, so close to the human personality of that pale Carpenter of Nazareth, that, seeing each fragment clearly, they missed the meaning of the whole. It is an oft-recurring disaster, I sometimes think that the dwellers in manses and parsonages and rectories are so near to sacred things that they are in danger of seeing only the things themselves and of forfeiting the vision of the spiritual realities behind those things. They admire the blossoms but miss the motto that blazes across the bed, It is so easy to be tyrannized by detail.

III

He came unto His own folk and they failed to recognize Him. It is the most ancient of tragedies: it is the most modern of tragedies. How can I right this cruel wrong? How can I open the eyes of those who are blind to His regal claims upon them?

In the early days of American history a drama was enacted that should never be forgotten. The animosity between the red men and the white men had reached such a pitch that no home was secure. The Indians struck down the trader in the wood and scalped without mercy the traveller on the trail. They prowled round the cabins of the husbandman on the frontier; their tomahawks were aimed alike at the labourer in the field and the child in the cradle. It was resolved to form a great yeoman army to sweep the forests, bring the redskins to their knees, and compel them to restore the hundreds of children whom they had stolen. Even the Quakers of Pennsylvania sent a strong contingent. The campaign ended in scenes which Bancroft describes as the loveliest ever witnessed in the western world. Beneath a bower erected on the green river bank, the great chiefs and warriors of the Senecas, the Delawares, and the Shawnees sued for peace and surrendered their captives. The reunion of the parents and children was indescribable in its intensity of emotion.

But, in the end, a situation emerged that taxed the ingenuity of the cleverest. For there remained parents whose children had been torn from their arms many years earlier and who, after so long an interval, were unable to identify their offspring. And there remained stalwart youths and lovely maidens who could not recognize their fathers and mothers. What was to be done? In this crisis, some genius suggested that each mother in turn should move among the unclaimed captives, singing softly the songs and lullabies with which she was wont to soothe her babes to sleep in the days of Auld lang syne. And, surely enough, as each woman moved through the listening throng, crooning those sweet melodies, some tall stripling or comely maiden would spring towards her, crying, ‘Mother, Mother!’ and rush into her arms.

Is it not conceivable that if, in the ears of men who have never yet recognized the Saviour, we pour afresh the deathless words that, in earlier days, they associated with the thought of Him—His God so loved world or His Verily, verily I say unto you, or His Come unto Me and I will give you rest—the heavenly music will work its sublime magic and the joyous reunion of the soul and its Saviour will be triumphantly effected?

-F.W. Boreham