We all know this silent pressure of life upon life.  We have most of us, I suppose, experienced it either from our parents or from friends in later life; and we can through that experience of ours attempt the explanation of our Lord’s influence on the Apostles.  There were not only the hours of formal teaching—­they, in a way, were perhaps the less important from our present point of view.  We have more in mind the informal talks that would go on as they went from village to village in Galilee, or as they gathered about the door of some cottage in the evening or sat in the shelter of some grove during the noon-day heat.  It was just talk arising naturally out of the incidents of the day, but it was always talk guided by Jesus—­talk in which Jesus was constantly revealing Himself to them, impressing upon them His point of view, making plain his own judgment upon life.  And when we turn to His formal teaching we realise how revolutionary was His point of view in regard to life, how He swept aside the customary conventions by which they were accustomed to guide life, and substituted the radical principles that they have left on record in the Sermon on the Mount for the perplexity of a world yet far from understanding them.  Evidently the Apostles would find their accustomed values tossed aside and a wholly new set of values presented to them.

I suppose we find it difficult to appreciate how utterly revolutionary the Gospel teaching continually is, not because we have become accustomed to follow it, but because we have got used to hearing it and evacuating it of most of its meaning by clever glossing.  It was thus that the teaching classes in Jerusalem avoided the pressure of Old Testament ideals by a facile system of interpretation which made “void the Word of God by their traditions.”  Human nature has not altered; and we succeed by the same method in making the Gospel of none effect.  We are so well accustomed to do this that we lose the point and pungency of much of our Lord’s teaching.  But we know that the apostles did not.  We know that they presented that teaching in all its sharpness to would-be disciples.  It could not be otherwise with those who for three years had been in day by day intimacy with our Lord and had assimilated His point of view and his judgment on life.

One effect of their contact with our Lord in the days following the resurrection would be that whatever changes the passage to a new level of existence had wrought in Him, it had not changed either the tone of His teaching or the beauty and attractiveness of His Personality.  The concluding charges that were given them, the great commission of proclaiming the Kingdom with which they were now definitely endued, the powers which were committed to them in the great words:  “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.  Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:  Teaching them to