CHAPTER V

THE JEWISH YEAR AND THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH

"Thus saith the Lord, stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.”—Jer. vi. 16.

IN considering the Jewish Year as it affected the religious lives of the early Christians, it is important to remember that it was only part of a great system of what we call churchly ways and customs in which our Lord and His Apostles, and all the first converts, had been trained from childhood. They knew no other kind of religious life. Their buildings for worship, especially their Temple, had not been merely "meetinghouses," but sacred places, "houses of God" and "of prayer.' ."1 Their worship had not been left to individual taste or haphazard. It was liturgic, dignified, largely musical as rendered by trained and vested choristers, with well-known and accustomed prayers, and a set form and order of service both in Synagogue and Temple. They had been ministered to by a priesthood in three sacred orders, not appointed or instituted by the people, but ordained by the special command and authority of God, so that " no man " dare assume the office," take this honor unto himself," as the author of the epistle to the Hebrew Christians puts it, but must have the 2 Heb. v. 4.

1 S. Matt. xii. 4; S. John ii. 16.

lawful call of God in His appointed way. These priests and other ministers were accustomed also to wear an official vestment in their public ministrations.

To these customs and traditions our Lord as a true Israelite was supremely loyal. While He was open in His condemnation of hypocrisy and greed in the rulers of the Church, never once was He charged by His enemies with disloyalty to the priesthood itself. While He condemned freely the formalism of the Pharisees and their followers, He was never accused by them of despising or neglecting the Church's solemn worship or her festivals and fasts. He had been brought up in a godly home; admitted as a member of the Church when only eight days old; presented as an offering to God in His Temple when He was only six weeks old.1 When he was twelve years He was confirmed," as we might express it, and admitted to all the sacred privileges of the Church, her sacrifices and other ordinances. When thirty He submitted to a form of baptism, "the baptism of repentance," 2 which had no divine authority, but only the sanction of the later Church of Israel as an appropriate ordinance for receiving converts (proselytes) from heathenism and repentant Jews, the former of course receiving circumcision also.3 Even to the last day of His life He submitted Himself to all the lawful authority of the priesthood, in spite of the fact that it was the ruling members of this very priesthood who hounded Him to His death. Always and everywhere He was a true Israelite, faithful even in the "mint, anise, and cummin as well as in "the weightier matters of the

1 Lev. xii; S. Luke ii. 21-25.

2 S. Mark. i. 4.

'S. Luke ii. 41, 42; S. Matt. iii. 13-16.

♦ S. Luke v. 14; xvii. 14; S. Matt. xxiii. 2, 3.

law"; "in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless." 1

But it is perhaps in His loyalty to the ritual year of Israel that we have the most striking illustration of this feature of our Lord's life of "obedience." 2 As we see Him when a boy of twelve careful to observe the feast of the Passover; then sitting at the feet of the doctors in the Temple listening submissively to their teachings; then "subject" to His parents in Nazareth,3 so we find Him continuing to do even to the close at that last Passover which He glorified by His death and resurrection. Nor were the feasts of divine appointment the only ones which He honored. We find Him keeping at least one which had only the authority of the Church for its observance, the feast of the Dedication, which had been instituted by Judas Maccabeus 200 years before, to commemorate the restoration of the Temple and altar after their desecration by the heathen invaders.*

And the most remarkable thing in this connection is the fact that our Lord deliberately made choice of the two greatest feast days of the ancient Church with which to associate the chief events of His life, and of the life of His Church. Let us not forget that the time of His death was wholly in His own keeping. "No man taketh it from Me" He had said of His life; and again He asserted, My time is not yet full come.' And this chosen time and hour of His was the great feast of the Passover. When the day approached He prepared for it in the most exact and careful way. 6 On the very day, and probably at the very hour, when the lamb of the Passover should have been offered up for in their

1 S. Matt. xxiii. 23; S. Luke i. 6. S. Luke ii. 41 to end.

'S. John x. 18; vii. 8.

"5

2 Heb. v. 8.

4 S. John x. 22; 1 Macc. iv. 52-59.

6 S. Matt. xxvi. 18.

eagerness for His blood the priests seem to have neglected the proper time at this moment the true "Lamb slain [in intention] from the foundation of the world "1 was actually offered in sacrifice upon the cross.

And when we come to the next supreme event in our Lord's work for the world, the case is perhaps still more remarkable. During forty days the risen Lord remained on earth to instruct His Apostles how to set about the establishing of His Church, and to give them proofs of the reality of His resurrection.2 But why, after the forty days were ended, and He had ascended into heaven, did He oblige them to wait ten days longer as orphans,' "comfortless," without His visible presence, and also without the promised Comforter? To us as to them it seems at first incomprehensible that He should not have sent the Holy Ghost at once. But whatever other reason there may have been besides this trial of their faith and patience, the peculiar significance of His not sending the Holy Ghost until the feast of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after His resurrection, is beyond a question. Pentecost, coming as it did in the early summer, was doubtless chosen also for the very practical reason that travel by sea and land was then safer and easier, and vast numbers of worshippers from distant countries were then able to come to Jerusalem; "Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia," and all the other foreign Jews who are named by S. Luke in the second chapter of the Acts as being present there on the Church's birthday. Nevertheless it still remains a striking testimony to our Lord's valuation of the ritual year of Israel as an instrument of witness and of popular instruction, that it was not, as S. Luke expresses it, until "the day of Pentecost was 1 Rev. xiii. 8. 2 Acts. i. 3.

fully come" that the promised Paraclete came indeed with visible and audible signs to give life and power to the little anxious flock of "about one hundred and twenty" souls who on that day constituted the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ.

Our Lord had not told them at what particular time His promise of the Comforter should be fulfilled. They had asked Him when His great work of "restoration of the kingdom" should begin, but His only reply was that they must wait patiently in Jerusalem.2 Nevertheless they seem to have had some assurance that the day of the next great feast which commemorated the giving of the law from Sinai, and celebrated God's continual care of His people in the gathering of the firstfruits of the harvest, should be the time of His coming. For we are told that on that day they "were all with one accord in one place" in evident expectation.3

It was then in such an atmosphere, and with such examples before them, that the Apostles and first Christians were born and bred. Could it be possible, we may well ask, that, under the plea that henceforth the worship of God is to be "in spirit and in truth," they would cast aside as useless or worse all these sacred customs and traditions of their race and Church, so honored by their Lord Himself all His life long? That is the incredible thing which most of the sects of modern Protestantism would have us believe. Was there henceforth to be no sacred order of priesthood in the new Church as there had been in the old, though Christ had taken such pains to train and teach, not only twelve, but seventy men, choosing them and separating them from the multitude and especially commissioning the twelve in the most solemn way, to act for Him on earth unto 2 Acts. i. 4-8. Acts ii. I.

1 Acts. i. 15.