V. “WHEN THE EVEN WAS COME”, JESUS HEALS

Matth. 8:16.—“When the even was come, they brought unto him many that were possessed with devils; and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick.”

The undesignedness of many passages in the Gospels is overlooked in our familiar acquaintance with them. They have been so long the subject of our reading and of our reflection, that the evidence they furnish of their own veracity does not always present itself to us with that freshness which is necessary to give it its due effect. We often, no doubt, fill up an ellipsis and complete a meaning almost instinctively, without being aware how strongly the necessity for doing this, marks the absence of all caution, contrivance, and circumspection in the writers. For instance, why did they bring the sick and possessed to Jesus when the even was come? I turn to the parallel passages of St. Mark (1:21) and St. Luke (4:31), and find that the transaction in question took place on the Sabbath-day. I turn to another passage in St. Matthew (12:10), wholly independent, however, of the former, and find that there was a superstition amongst the Jews that it “was not lawful to heal on the Sabbath-day.”I put these together, and at once see the reason why no application for a cure was made to Jesus till the Sabbath was past, or in other words, till the even was come. But. St. Matthew, meanwhile, does not offer one syllable in explanation. He states the naked fact—that when the even was come, people were brought to be healed; and, for aught that appears to the contrary, it might have been any other day of the week. Suppose it had happened that St. Matthew’s Gospel had been the only one which had descended to us, the value of these few words, “when the even was come, ” would have been quite lost as an argument for the veracity of his story; for how could it have been conjectured that the thought which was influencing St. Matthew’s mind at the moment when they escaped him, was this, that these things were done on the evening of a Sabbath-day? There is no one circumstance in the previous narrative of the events of that day as given by this Evangelist, to point to such a conclusion. Jesus had entered into Capernaum—he had healed the centurion’s servant—he had healed Peter’s wife’s mother of a fever—how could it be known from any of these acts that the day was the Sabbath? Or suppose we had been in possession of the other three Evangelists, but that the Gospel of St. Matthew had just been discovered among the manuscripts at Milan, I ask whether such an argument as this would not have had much weight in establishing its authority?

I am not concerned about the perfect intelligibility of this passage in St. Matthew. Its meaning is obvious, and it would be a waste of words to offer what I have done, as commentary—all that I am anxious to do is to point out the undesignedness apparent in it, which is such, I think, as a writer of an imaginary narrative could not possibly have displayed.