Colossians 4:10-11 Aristarchus my fellow prisoner salutes you, and Marcus, sister's son to Barnabas, (touching whom you received commandments… Who are of the circumcision. — These three men, the only three Jewish Christians in Rome who had the least sympathy with Paul and his work, give us in their isolation a vivid illustration of the antagonism which he had to face from that portion of the Early Church. The bulk of the Palistinian Jewish Christians held that the Gentiles must pass through Judaism on their road to Christianity, and as the champion of Gentile liberty Paul was worried and hindered by them all his life. They had next to no missionary zeal, but they followed him and made mischief wherever they could. If we can fancy some modern sect that sends out no missionaries of its own, but delights to come in where better men have forced a passage, and upset their work by preaching their own crotchets, we get precisely the thing which dogged St. Paul. There was evidently a considerable body of these men in Rome. They preached Christ of "envy and strife," and only these three were large-hearted enough to take their stand by his side. It was a brave thing to do. Only those who have lived in an atmosphere of misconstruc tion can understand what a cordial the clasp of a hand or the word of sympathy is. These men were like the old soldier who clapped Luther on the shoulder on his way to the Diet of Worms with "Little monk! little monk! you are about to make a nobler stand to-day than we in all our battles have ever done. If your cause is just, and you are sure of it, go forward in God's name, and fear nothing." But the best comfort Paul could have was help in his work. He did not go about the world whimpering for sympathy. He was much too strong a man for that. He wanted men to come down into the trench with him, and shovel and wheel there till they had made in the desert a highway for the King. This is what these men did, and so were a comfort to him. He uses a half medical term, which, perhaps, he had caught from the physician at his elbow, which we might perhaps parallel by saying they had been a cordial to him — like a refreshing draught to a weary man, or some whiff of pure air stealing into a close chamber and lifting the curls from some hot brow. The true cordial for a true worker is that others get into the traces and pull by his side. ( Parallel Verses KJV: Aristarchus my fellowprisoner saluteth you, and Marcus, sister's son to Barnabas, (touching whom ye received commandments: if he come unto you, receive him;) |
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